"And now, sir, may I go?"
Randolph looked at the woman in a sort of wonder.
"Are you not afraid," he said, "of the night and the mountains, and the long road?"
"Oh no, sir," she replied simply. "The good God will be everywhere now."
It was an awful commentary on the dead man-that this strange half-child believed that all the evil in the world had gone out with him; that now that he was dead, the sunlight of heaven would fill every nook and corner.
It was not a faith that either of the two men wished to shatter, and they let her go. It would be daylight presently and the road through the mountains to the Chesapeake was open.
Randolph came back to the fireside after he had helped her into the saddle, and sat down. He tapped on the hearth for some time idly with the iron poker; and then finally he spoke.
"This is the strangest thing that ever happened," he said. "Here's a mad old preacher who thinks that he killed Doomdorf with fire from Heaven, like Elijah the Tishbite; and here is a simple child of a woman who thinks she killed him with a piece of magic of the Middle Ages-each as innocent of his death as I am. And yet, by the eternal, the beast is dead!"
He drummed on the hearth with the poker, lifting it up and letting it drop through the hollow of his fingers.
"Somebody shot Doomdorf. But who? And how did he get into and out of that shut-up room? The assassin that killed Doomdorf must have gotten into the room to kill him. Now, how did he get in?" He spoke as to himself; but my uncle sitting across the hearth replied: "Through the window."
"Through the window!" echoed Randolph. "Why, man, you yourself showed me that the window had not been opened, and the precipice below it a fly could hardly climb. Do you tell me now that the window was opened?"
"No," said Abner, "it was never opened."
Randolph got on his feet.
"Abner," he cried, "are you saying that the one who killed Doomdorf climbed the sheer wall and got in through a closed window, without disturbing the dust or the cobwebs on the window frame?"
My uncle looked Randolph in the face.
"The murderer of Doomdorf did even more," he said. "That assassin not only climbed the face of that precipice and got in through the closed window, but he shot Doomdorf to death and got out again through the closed window without leaving a single track or trace behind, and without disturbing a grain of dust or a thread of a cobweb."
Randolph swore a great oath.
"The thing is impossible!" he cried. "Men are not killed today in Virginia by black art or a curse of God."
"By black art, no," replied Abner; "but by the curse of God, yes. I think they are."
Randolph drove his clenched right hand into the palm of his left.
"By the eternal!" he cried. "I would like to see the assassin who could do a murder like this, whether he be an imp from the pit or an angel out of heaven."
"Very well," replied Abner, undisturbed. "When he comes back tomorrow I will show you the assassin who killed Doomdorf."
When day broke they dug a grave and buried the dead man against the mountain among his peach trees. It was noon when that work was ended. Abner threw down his spade and looked up at the sun.
"Randolph," he said, "let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. He is on the way here."
And it was a strange ambush that he laid. When they were come again into the chamber where Doomdorf died he bolted the door; then he loaded the fowling piece and put it carefully back on its rack against the wall. After that he did another curious thing: He took the bloodstained coat, which they had stripped off the dead man when they had prepared his body for the earth, put a pillow in it and laid it on the couch precisely where Doomdorf had slept. And while he did these things Randolph stood in wonder and Abner talked: "Look you, Randolph… We will trick the murderer… We will catch him in the act."
Then he went over and took the puzzled justice by the arm.
"Watch!" he said. "The assassin is coming along the wall!"
But Randolph heard nothing, saw nothing. Only the sun entered. Abner's hand tightened on his arm.
"It is here! Look!" And he pointed to the wall.
Randolph, following the extended finger, saw a tiny brilliant disk of light moving slowly up the wall toward the lock of the fowling piece. Abner's hand became a vise and his voice rang as over metal.
"'He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.' It is the water bottle, full of Doomdorf's liquor, focusing the sun… And look, Randolph, how Bronson's prayer was answered!"
The tiny disk of light travelled on the plate of the lock.
"It is fire from heaven!"
The words rang above the roar of the fowling piece, and Randolph saw the dead man's coat leap up on the couch, riddled by the shot. The gun, in its natural position on the rack, pointed to the couch standing at the end of the chamber, beyond the offset of the wall, and the focused sun had exploded the percussion cap.
Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended.
"It is a world," he said, "filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!"
"It is a world," replied Abner, "filled with the mysterious justice of God!"
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN (1846-1935)
Often referred to as the mother of detective fiction, Anna Katharine Green deserves her distinction. Her accomplishments included the establishment and refining of many of the conventions of the genre that we now take for granted, and-along with depicting a male police detective-the creation of two of the earliest women sleuths in fiction. A contemporary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this New Yorker produced both police procedurals and private-investigator fiction. The heart of Green's literary career, which provided the main support for her family, spanned two decades on each side of the turn of the century.
While Conan Doyle was developing the civilian sleuth, Green wrote one of the first authentic police procedurals, «The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer's Story,» in 1878. In this hugely successful first novel, she followed the work of New York City police detective Ebenezer Gryce. It might be noted that Gryce's reasoning is sometimes dubious. (For example, he clears a niece of suspicion when he sees lint from a cleaning cloth on the cylinder of the murder weapon. A woman, he declares, would fire a pistol but never clean it.)
«The Leavenworth Case» is said to be the first detective novel written by a woman under her own name. It is notable not only for the sleuth's reliance on reason to solve the case but also for pointing out the problems inherent in undue reliance on circumstantial evidence. The Yale Law School assigned it as required reading, and it sold a million copies in Green's day.
Gryce appeared in more than a dozen novels, often in the company of other series characters, including the sometimes rivalrous Caleb Sweetwater and the spinster-sleuth Amelia Butterworth. This last, a middle-age, upper-middle-class, middlebrow detective, is a prototype for Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple and other female amateur investigators of the golden age of detective fiction.
Violet Strange, who appears in «Missing: Page Thirteen,» is less staunch than Butterworth but more determined to make a paying career of the detective business. She pursues her work in order to pay for her widowed sister's voice lessons, an enterprise so frowned upon by their father that he has disowned Strange's sister. In order to avoid a similar fate, Strange keeps her sleuthing secret. An active social life provides her with entree into households where family wealth walks hand in hand with family secrets, where the atmosphere is Gothic, and where intuition guides her interpretation of evidence acquired through earnest-and sometimes courageous-resourcefulness. As do Green's novels, this tale illuminates social conventions oppressive to women.