101 Mystery Stories

83 First Man at the Funeral Dion Henderson

We were up in the Erickson north forty with my old dog, and the Sheriff had just missed the prettiest double on quail you ever saw when the jailer came panting and wheezing through the sedge.

“Sheriff,” he hollered. “There’s been a death.”

“Not here there ain’t, dang it,” the Sheriff said, blowing smoke out of the barrels of his double gun. “I shot under the left bird and I was a mile behind the right one.”

“No, no,” the jailer hollered, even though he was right close to us by then. “I mean there’s a man dead.”

The Sheriff looked relieved.

“Well,” he said. “The way I’m shooting today, I’m better off back in town hunting criminals.”

“Hold on a minute,” the jailer was getting red in the face again, not from running this time. “I’m trying to tell you there ain’t any criminals. It’s just that old man Pembroke got flung from his horse and killed.”

The Sheriff took off his hat.

“There goes the last man in Andrew Jackson County,” he said reverently, “to own a good singles dog.”

“Amen,” the jailer said. “Doc though you’d want to know right away.”

Being the game warden and something of a bird dog man myself, I had figured out by this time what they were talking about. There used to be a saying that you take a bird dog that was certain sure on hunting coveys of quail, and you catch his owner on the verge of starvation, you might buy that dog for money. But you take a dog that could mark down and find the scattered singles from a wild flushed covey, and the way you got that dog was to be first man at his owner’s funeral. Even then, the saying went, you might have to take on the support of seven minor children to get the dog away from the widow.

The Sheriff was safe enough there. Old man Pembroke didn’t have any widow, and no children. No anything, except a nephew who’d come down lately from the city. And that singles dog, of course. There hadn’t been much chance of anybody getting that dog before, because rich as he was, old man Pembroke would’ve been the last man in Jackson County to starve if famine hit.

“Let’s get back to town,” the Sheriff said.

We drove on in and stopped at Doc’s furniture store, which he was running when he wasn’t occupied with the undertaking business. Being the only undertaker around. Doc was the county coroner too, naturally.

“Poor feller,” Doc said, meaning old man Pembroke. “Probably put his horse over that log a hundred times. Probably got flung off twenty times out of the hundred, the way he rode. But this time he landed square on a rock and bashed in his head.”

“Right sad,” the Sheriff said. “You reckon I ought to go up and investigate, it being a violent death and all?”

“I reckoned you would,” Doc said, a mite tartly, “or I wouldn’t have been in such an all-fired hurry to tell you about it.”

“Well,” the Sheriff said. “It being about supper time now, and out of consideration for the feelings of the bereaved, I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

“If that nephew ain’t any more bereaved than he sounded when he called me,” Doc said, “there ain’t a whole lot to consider.”

“How’d he sound?”

“Rich,” Doc said. “How the heck do you think a man’d sound, his only relative setting about to die and leaving a million dollars, thereabouts, to you?”

“I’ll get over there in a day or so,” the Sheriff said.

“Young Pembroke sounded to me,” Doc said, “like a man who didn’t know a singles dog from a single tree, and what’s more didn’t aim to learn.”

“Tomorrow,” the Sheriff said firmly. “First thing. You want to come along,” he said to me, “in your official capacity as game warden?”

“Sure,” I said. “Seeing as how you’ve been hunting birds over my dogs for the last eight, ten years, I got quite an interest in seeing you get a dog of your own.”

We let it go at that. But next morning the Sheriff stopped for me and we went on up to the Pembroke place. The farmstead, where the tenant who cropped the place lived with his family, was right close to the road. Then you took the drive that wound up into the piney woods along the sedge fields and the buckwheat patches that old man Pembroke kept just for a shooting preserve. And presently you came to the old mansion, kind of tumbled down, and the stable for the riding horses, and the kennels. The tenant’s wife came up and gave the house a lick and a promise a couple of times a week, but old man Pembroke took care of the dogs himself.

Young Pembroke came out to meet us. There was another fellow, the one who came down from the city with him, kind of hanging around in the background. In my calling, you get to make pretty fast judgments, and I wouldn’t have trusted either one of them up a tree, especially up the same tree.

The Sheriff was talking about how it was all too bad, and young Pembroke said it certainly was, he felt real depressed, especially because he didn’t get to spend much time with his poor old uncle.

Out in the kennels the dogs heard us and started up a ruckus and I walked back there. The sheriff and young Pembroke followed along. I noticed all the water dishes were empty and when I could get a word in between them two soft-soaping one another, I asked whether the dogs had been fed.

Young Pembroke looked kind of startled and said he didn’t know much about dogs, he’d forgotten all about it. So the Sheriff and I went to work, and I tell you a yardful of dogs can get middling hungry in a couple of days.

We got to a run where a big white and lemon pointer was, and the Sheriff whispered to me, “This one’s him, ain’t it?”

I looked at that dog, the big smooth moving fellow that still showed in his marking that Lady Ferris and Mr. Fishel’s dog were away back there in his pedigree, and I said, “It sure is.”

Young Pembroke came up and the big white and lemon dog bristled and then he did something that made me think I’d lost my hearing. He showed his teeth at young Pembroke and backed up and opened his mouth like he was going to holler, but it came out like this:

“—”

Just nothing — a bark that didn’t make any noise at all.

Young Pembroke backed up a little, and the dog went:

“—, —”

The Sheriff stood there with a funny expression on his face.

“Say,” he said. “Ain’t that the dog your uncle used to keep in the house?”

“Not that I know of,” young Pembroke said. “He’s been out here with the others for the few weeks I’ve been visiting.”

“That’s funny,” the Sheriff said. He scratched his head. We finished the dogs, then the Sheriff said to young Pembroke:

“Mind if we look over the scene where your uncle was killed? Just routine, but I got to make out a report.”

“Not at all,” young Pembroke said. “I’ll show you. but if you don’t mind, I’d rather not go down there. You know how it is.”

“I reckon,” the Sheriff said. “Say, before we do that I wonder if I could talk to you about buying this here dog. That’s what I really came for, to be honest with you.”

Young Pembroke looked at him and then laughed. The other fellow showed up from somewhere and he laughed too.

“Shucks, Sheriff,” young Pembroke said. “You can have him to recollect my uncle by, if you want. You can have all the dogs. I don’t know much about dogs.”

“Yuh,” the Sheriff said. “Well, that’s settled. Now, me and the game warden will just mosey on over to the scene of the dyin’.”

The long jump was just a little ways past the stables, the path showing it was a favorite ride for the old man. The jump was right at the edge of the woods and on the far side of it there was a low place gouged out from all the horses landing there through the years. It was partly churned up from hooves and partly in grass. There was no mistaking the rock that killed the old man, either. It was off to one side and there still was blood on it. The Sheriff turned it over with his toe, but only some grass was under it.

“I reckon that’s enough,” the Sheriff said. He looked kind of serious, so we didn’t talk much on the way back. He opened the kennel run and the big white and lemon dog came out, tail wagging a little. The Sheriff snapped a leash on him and we walked around to the front of the house. Young Pembroke and the other fellow were standing there beside their car. They came to meet us. When they were about twenty feet off, the white and lemon dog kind of bunched himself and opened his mouth and said, “—” and jumped straight for young Pembroke.

“That dog doesn’t like me,” young Pembroke said.

“Doesn’t surprise me none,” the Sheriff said. “You expect him to be in love with the fellers that beat his master to death?”

Young Pembroke said, “You’re kidding, Sheriff.”

“Wish I was,” the Sheriff said. “Sure wish I was. But when you lied to me about this dog being out in the kennels for a couple weeks, I figured you might have lied about some other things. The rock that killed your uncle, for instance. It wasn’t lying there longer’n yesterday — the grass is still green under it. May even be some fingerprints on it. I’ll bet you,” the Sheriff said, “there won’t even be any grass stains on your uncle’s clothes, down in Doc’s ice box.”

Young Pembroke had turned as white as his friend was.

He said, “How in blazes did you know about the dog?”

“Hoarse,” the Sheriff said. “Put a house dog out in a kennel, he’ll bark himself hoarse in twenty-four hours. Then for a couple days he won’t make a sound, but after that his voice comes back. Only then he don’t bark any more because he ain’t a house dog no longer, he’s a kennel dog. You must have rassled this here dog outside yesterday morning, because he was trying to stave you off the old man.”

The two of them started to run, going in opposite directions. The Sheriff took the leash in his left hand and unlimbered his .38. Young Pembroke was going to the left and the Sheriff hit him in the calf of the leg with the first shot. The other fellow went to the right and the Sheriff hit him in the hand with the second shot as he tried to get the keys into the car door. Then the Sheriff flipped open the cylinder of the revolver, blew smoke out of the barrel and looked at me.

“If you game wardens would let a man use a .38 on quail,” he said, “I’d be all right, even on them going-away doubles.”