Toward the Golden Age

by Ashley, Mike;

  “I can’t help it,” the latter was saying. “I’ve got to get a hose through one of these houses, and it might as well be yours.”

  Mr. Stedland had no desire to have a hose through his house, and thought he knew an argument which might pass the inconvenience on to his neighbour.

  “Just come up here a moment,” he said. “I want to speak to one of those firemen.”

  The fireman came clumping up the stairs in his heavy boots, a fine figure of a man in his glittering brass.

  “Sorry,” he said, “but I must get the hose—”

  “Wait a moment, my friend,” said Mr. Stedland with a smile. “I think you will understand me after a while. There are plenty of houses in this road, and a tenner goes a long way, eh? Come in.”

  He walked back into his room and the fireman followed and stood watching as he unlocked the safe. Then: “I didn’t think it would be so easy,” he said.

  Stedland swung round.

  “Put up your hands,” said the fireman, “and don’t make trouble, or you’re going out, Noah. I’d just as soon kill you as talk to you.”

  Then Noah Stedland saw that beneath the shade of the helmet the man’s face was covered with a black mask.

  “Who—who are you?” he asked hoarsely.

  “I’m one of the Four Just Men—greatly reviled and prematurely mourned. Death is my favourite panacea for all ills…”

  * * *

  At nine o’clock in the morning Mr. Noah Stedland still sat biting his nails, a cold uneaten breakfast spread on a table before him. To him came Mr. Jope wailing tidings of disaster, interrupted by Chief Inspector Holloway and a hefty subordinate who followed the servant into the room.

  “Coming for a little walk with me, Stedland?” asked the cheery inspector, and Stedland rose heavily.

  “What’s the charge?” he asked heavily.

  “Blackmail,” replied the officer. “We’ve got evidence enough to hang you—delivered by special messenger. You fixed that case against Storr too—naughty, naughty!”

  As Mr. Stedland put on his coat the inspector asked: “Who gave you away?”

  Mr. Stedland made no reply. Manfred’s last words before he vanished into the foggy street had been emphatic.

  “If he wanted to kill you, the man called Curtis would have killed you this afternoon when we played on your cunning; we could have killed you as easily as we set fire to the factory. And if you talk to the police of the Four Just Men, we will kill you, even though you be in Pentonville with a regiment of soldiers round you.”

  And somehow Mr. Stedland knew that his enemy spoke the truth. So he said nothing, neither there nor in the dock at the Old Bailey, and went to penal servitude without speaking.

  Naboth’s Vineyard

  Melville Davisson Post

  Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930), who is regarded as one of the best and most original writers of crime fiction of the early twentieth century, went one step further from the heroic villain when he created the character of the devious lawyer Randolph Mason. As a practising lawyer, Post knew the loopholes and weaknesses of the law—indeed his stories brought attention to these flaws and led to a number of reforms. His most notorious story was the first, “The Corpus Delecti,” in The Strange Scheme of Randolph Mason (1896) where Mason advises a client how to kill and dispose of his wife’s body in such a way that it can never be found. The way the law stood at that time, at least in New York State, an individual’s death had to be proved before a charge of murder could be made, and without a body, there could be no proof. The story became notorious a year later when in Chicago Adolph Luetgart disposed of his wife in much the same way. Unfortunately for Luetgart, the law in Illinois differed from New York, and he was convicted.

  The other early Randolph Mason stories all show how the lawyer helped his clients evade the law and it was not until the third volume, The Corrector of Destinies (1908), that Mason applied his talents to help victims against injustice, especially by banks and other big businesses. In all cases Post cited legal precedent to support his plot. Unfortunately, though it made his stories relevant at the time, they have become no more than footnotes in the history of crime fiction. Many have conjectured, though, that when Erle Stanley Gardner came to write his stories about the attorney Perry Mason, he did not have to look far for a surname.

  After Randolph Mason, Post created a character that was not only the moral opposite but was one of the first historical detectives in the field. This was Uncle Abner, a squire in pre-Civil War Virginia. Abner was a pillar of the community, a man of strong moral conviction (unlike Mason) and one determined to help the innocent. He was not a detective and did not seek out crimes, but believed it his duty to right wrongs. Although Post began writing the stories in 1911, they remained uncollected until Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries in 1918, and later stories were only published in book form after his death in The Methods of Uncle Abner (1974). I have chosen the following story because it is the only one to be set in a courtroom and combines Post’s legal experience with Abner’s moral rectitude.

  ONE hears a good deal about the sovereignty of the people in this republic; and many persons imagine it a sort of fiction, and wonder where it lies, who are the guardians of it, and how they would exercise it if the forms and agents of the law were removed. I am not one of those who speculate upon this mystery, for I have seen this primal ultimate authority naked at its work. And, having seen it, I know how mighty and how dread a thing it is. And I know where it lies, and who are the guardians of it, and how they exercise it when the need arises.

  There was a great crowd, for the whole country was in the courtroom. It was a notorious trial.

  Elihu Marsh had been shot down in his house. He had been found lying in a room, with a hole through his body that one could put his thumb in. He was an irascible old man, the last of his family, and so, lived alone. He had rich lands, but only a life estate in them, the remainder was to some foreign heirs. A girl from a neighboring farm came now and then to bake and put his house in order, and he kept a farm hand about the premises.

  Nothing had been disturbed in the house when the neighbors found Marsh; no robbery had been attempted, for the man’s money, a considerable sum, remained on him.

  There was not much mystery about the thing, because the farm hand had disappeared. This man was a stranger in the hills. He had come from over the mountains some months before, and gone to work for Marsh. He was a big blond man, young and good looking; of better blood, one would say, than the average laborer. He gave his name as Taylor, but he was not communicative, and little else about him was known.

  The country was raised, and this man was overtaken in the foothills of the mountains. He had his clothes tied into a bundle, and a long-barreled fowling-piece on his shoulder. The story he told was that he and Marsh had settled that morning, and he had left the house at noon, but that he had forgotten his gun and had gone back for it; had reached the house about four o’clock, gone into the kitchen, got his gun down from the dogwood forks over the chimney, and at once left the house. He had not seen Marsh, and did not know where he was.

  He admitted that this gun had been loaded with a single huge lead bullet. He had so loaded it to kill a dog that sometimes approached the house, but not close enough to be reached with a load of shot. He affected surprise when it was pointed out that the gun had been discharged. He said that he had not fired it, and had not, until then, noticed that it was empty. When asked why he had so suddenly determined to leave the country, he was silent.

  He was carried back and confined in the county jail, and now, he was on trial at the September term of the circuit court.

  The court sat early. Although the judge, Simon Kilrail, was a landowner and lived on his estate in the country some half dozen miles away, he rode to the courthouse in the morning, and home at night, with his legal papers in his saddle-pockets. It was only when the court sat that he was a lawyer. At other times he harvested his hay and grazed his cattle,
and tried to add to his lands like any other man in the hills, and he was as hard in a trade and as hungry for an acre as any.

  It was the sign and insignia of distinction in Virginia to own land. Mr. Jefferson had annulled the titles that George the Third had granted, and the land alone remained as a patent of nobility. The Judge wished to be one of these landed gentry, and he had gone a good way to accomplish it. But when the court convened he became a lawyer and sat upon the bench with no heart in him, and a cruel tongue like the English judges.

  I think everybody was at this trial. My Uncle Abner and the strange old doctor, Storm, sat on a bench near the center aisle of the court-room, and I sat behind them, for I was a half-grown lad, and permitted to witness the terrors and severities of the law.

  The prisoner was the center of interest. He sat with a stolid countenance like a man careless of the issues of life. But not everybody was concerned with him, for my Uncle Abner and Storm watched the girl who had been accustomed to bake for Marsh and red up his house.

  She was a beauty of her type; dark haired and dark eyed like a gypsy, and with an April nature of storm and sun. She sat among the witnesses with a little handkerchief clutched in her hands. She was nervous to the point of hysteria, and I thought that was the reason the old doctor watched her. She would be taken with a gust of tears, and then throw up her head with a fine defiance; and she kneaded and knotted and worked the handkerchief in her fingers. It was a time of stress and many witnesses were unnerved, and I think I should not have noticed this girl but for the whispering of Storm and my Uncle Abner.

  The trial went forward, and it became certain that the prisoner would hang. His stubborn refusal to give any reason for his hurried departure had but one meaning, and the circumstantial evidence was conclusive. The motive, only, remained in doubt, and the Judge had charged on this with so many cases in point, and with so heavy a hand, that any virtue in it was removed. The Judge was hard against this man, and indeed there was little sympathy anywhere, for it was a foul killing—the victim an old man and no hot blood to excuse it.

  In all trials of great public interest, where the evidences of guilt overwhelmingly assemble against a prisoner, there comes a moment when all the people in the court-room, as one man, and without a sign of the common purpose, agree upon a verdict; there is no outward or visible evidence of this decision, but one feels it, and it is a moment of the tensest stress.

  The trial of Taylor had reached this point, and there lay a moment of deep silence, when this girl sitting among the witnesses suddenly burst into a very hysteria of tears. She stood up shaking with sobs, her voice choking in her throat, and the tears gushing through her fingers.

  What she said was not heard at the time by the audience in the courtroom, but it brought the Judge to his feet and the jury crowding about her, and it broke down the silence of the prisoner, and threw him into a perfect fury of denials. We could hear his voice rise above the confusion, and we could see him struggling to get to the girl and stop her. But what she said was presently known to everybody, for it was taken down and signed; and it put the case against Taylor, to use a lawyer’s term, out of court.

  The girl had killed Marsh herself. And this was the manner and the reason of it: She and Taylor were sweethearts and were to be married. But they had quarreled the night before Marsh’s death and the following morning Taylor had left the country. The point of the quarrel was some remark that Marsh had made to Taylor touching the girl’s reputation. She had come to the house in the afternoon, and finding her lover gone, and maddened at the sight of the one who had robbed her of him, had taken the gun down from the chimney and killed Marsh. She had then put the gun back into its place and left the house. This was about two o’clock in the afternoon, and about an hour before Taylor returned for his gun.

  There was a great veer of public feeling with a profound sense of having come at last upon the truth, for the story not only fitted to the circumstantial evidence against Taylor, but it fitted also to his story and it disclosed the motive for the killing. It explained, too, why he had refused to give the reason for his disappearance. That Taylor denied what the girl said and tried to stop her in her declaration, meant nothing except that the prisoner was a man, and would not have the woman he loved make such a sacrifice for him.

  I cannot give all the forms of legal procedure with which the closing hours of the court were taken up, but nothing happened to shake the girl’s confession. Whatever the law required was speedily got ready, and she was remanded to the care of the sheriff in order that she might come before the court in the morning.

  Taylor was not released, but was also held in custody, although the case against him seemed utterly broken down. The Judge refused to permit the prisoner’s counsel to take a verdict. He said that he would withdraw a juror and continue the case. But he seemed unwilling to release any clutch of the law until someone was punished for this crime.

  It was on our way, and we rode out with the Judge that night. He talked with Abner and Storm about the pastures and the price of cattle, but not about the trial, as I hoped he would do, except once only, and then it was to inquire why the prosecuting attorney had not called either of them as witnesses, since they were the first to find Marsh, and Storm had been among the doctors who examined him. And Storm had explained how he had mortally offended the prosecutor in his canvass, by his remark that only a gentleman should hold office. He did but quote Mr. Hamilton, Storm said, but the man had received it as a deadly insult, and thereby proved the truth of Mr. Hamilton’s expression, Storm added. And Abner said that as no circumstance about Marsh’s death was questioned, and others arriving about the same time had been called, the prosecutor doubtless considered further testimony unnecessary.

  The Judge nodded, and the conversation turned to other questions. At the gate, after the common formal courtesy of the country, the Judge asked us to ride in, and, to my astonishment, Abner and Storm accepted his invitation. I could see that the man was surprised, and I thought annoyed, but he took us into his library.

  I could not understand why Abner and Storm had stopped here, until I remembered how from the first they had been considering the girl, and it occurred to me that they thus sought the Judge in the hope of getting some word to him in her favor. A great sentiment had leaped up for this girl. She had made a staggering sacrifice, and with a headlong courage, and it was like these men to help her if they could.

  And it was to speak of the woman that they came, but not in her favor. And while Simon Kilrail listened, they told this extraordinary story: They had been of the opinion that Taylor was not guilty when the trial began, but they had suffered it to proceed in order to see what might develop. The reason was that there were certain circumstantial evidences, overlooked by the prosecutor, indicating the guilt of the woman and the innocence of Taylor. When Storm examined the body of Marsh he discovered that the man had been killed by poison, and was dead when the bullet was fired into his body. This meant that the shooting was a fabricated evidence to direct suspicion against Taylor. The woman had baked for Marsh on this morning, and the poison was in the bread which he had eaten at noon.

  Abner was going on to explain something further, when a servant entered and asked the Judge what time it was. The man had been greatly impressed, and he now sat in a profound reflection. He took his watch out of his pocket and held it in his hand, then he seemed to realize the question and replied that his watch had run down. Abner gave the hour, and said that perhaps his key would wind the watch. The Judge gave it to him, and he wound it and laid it on the table. Storm observed my Uncle with, what I thought, a curious interest, but the Judge paid no attention. He was deep in his reflection and oblivious to everything. Finally he roused himself and made his comment.

  “This clears the matter up,” he said. “The woman killed Marsh from the motive which she gave in her confession, and she created this false evidence against Taylor because he had abandoned her. She thereby avenged herself desperately in two
directions.… It would be like a woman to do this, and then regret it and confess.”

  He then asked my uncle if he had anything further to tell him, and although I was sure that Abner was going on to say something further when the servant entered, he replied now that he had not, and asked for the horses. The Judge went out to have the horses brought, and we remained in silence. My uncle was calm, as with some consuming idea, but Storm was as nervous as a cat. He was out of his chair when the door was closed, and hopping about the room looking at the law books standing on the shelves in their leather covers. Suddenly he stopped and plucked out a little volume. He whipped through it with his forefinger, smothered a great oath, and shot it into his pocket, then he crooked his finger to my uncle, and they talked together in a recess of the window until the Judge returned.

  We rode away. I was sure that they intended to say something to the Judge in the woman’s favor, for, guilty or not, it was a fine thing she had done to stand up and confess. But something in the interview had changed their purpose. Perhaps when they had heard the Judge’s comment they saw it would be of no use. They talked closely together as they rode, but they kept before me and I could not hear. It was of the woman they spoke, however, for I caught a fragment.

  “But where is the motive?” said Storm.

  And my uncle answered, “In the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Kings.”

  We were early at the county seat, and it was a good thing for us, because the court-room was crowded to the doors. My uncle had got a big record book out of the county clerk’s office as he came in, and I was glad of it, for he gave it to me to sit on, and it raised me up so I could see. Storm was there, too, and, in fact, every man of any standing in the county.

  The sheriff opened the court, the prisoners were brought in, and the Judge took his seat on the bench. He looked haggard like a man who had not slept, as, in fact, one could hardly have done who had so cruel a duty before him. Here was every human feeling pressing to save a woman, and the law to hang her. But for all his hag-ridden face, when he came to act, the man was adamant.