Calendar of Crime

The Adventure of The President’s Half Disme

Those few curious men who have chosen to turn off the humdrum highway to hunt for their pleasure along the back trails expect—indeed, they look confidently forward to—many strange encounters; and it is the dull stalk which does not turn up at least a hippogriff. But it remained for Ellery Queen to experience the ultimate excitement. On one of his prowls he collided with a President of the United States.

This would have been joy enough if it had occurred as you might imagine: by chance, on a dark night, in some back street of Washington, D.C., with Secret Service men closing in on the delighted Mr. Queen to question his motives by way of his pockets while a large black bullet-proof limousine rushed up to spirit the President away. But mere imagination fails in this instance. What is required is the power of fancy, for the truth is fantastic. Ellery’s encounter with the President of the United States took place, not on a dark night, but in the unromantic light of several days (although the night played its role, too). Nor was it by chance: the meeting was arranged by a farmer’s daughter. And it was not in Washington, D.C., for this President presided over the affairs of the nation from a different city altogether. Not that the meeting took place in that city, either; it did not take place in a city at all, but on a farm some miles south of Philadelphia. Oddest of all, there was no limousine to spirit the Chief Executive away, for while the President was a man of great wealth, he was still too poor to possess an automobile and, what is more, not all the resources of his Government—indeed, not all the riches of the world—could have provided one for him.

There are even more curious facets to this jewel of paradox. This was an encounter in the purest sense, and yet, physically, it did not occur at all. The President in question was dead. And while there are those who would not blink at a rubbing of shoulders or a clasping of hands even though one of the parties was in his grave, and to such persons the thought might occur that the meeting took place on a psychic plane—alas, Ellery Queen is not of their company. He does not believe in ghosts, consequently he never encounters them. So he did not collide with the President’s shade, either.

And yet their meeting was as palpable as, say, the meeting between two chess masters, one in London and the other in New York, who never leave their respective armchairs and still play a game to a decision. It is even more wonderful than that, for while the chess players merely annihilate space, Ellery and the father of his country annihilated time—a century and a half of it.

In fine, this is the story of how Ellery Queen matched wits with George Washington.

Those who are finicky about their fashions complain that the arms of coincidence are too long; but in this case the Designer might say that He cut to measure. Or, to put it another way, an event often brews its own mood. Whatever the cause, the fact is The Adventure of the President’s Half Disme, which was to concern itself with the events surrounding President Washington’s fifty-ninth birthday, actually first engrossed Ellery on February the nineteenth and culminated three days later.

Ellery was in his study that morning of the nineteenth of February, wrestling with several reluctant victims of violence, none of them quite flesh and blood, since his novel was still in the planning stage. So he was annoyed when Nikki came in with a card.

“James Ezekiel Patch,” growled the great man; he was never in his best humor during the planning stage. “I don’t know any James Ezekiel Patch, Nikki. Toss the fellow out and get back to transcribing those notes on Possible Motives—”

“Why, Ellery,” said Nikki. “This isn’t like you at all.”

“What isn’t like me?”

“To renege on an appointment.”

“Appointment? Does this Patch character claim—?”

“He doesn’t merely claim it. He proves it.”

“Someone’s balmy,” snarled Mr. Queen; and he strode into the living room to contend with James Ezekiel Patch. This, he perceived as soon as James Ezekiel Patch rose from the Queen fireside chair, was likely to be a heroic project. Mr. Patch, notwithstanding his mild, even studious, eyes, seemed to rise indefinitely; he was a large, a very large, man.

“Now what’s all this, what’s all this?” demanded Ellery fiercely; for after all Nikki was there.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said the large man amiably. “What did you want with me, Mr. Queen?”

“What did I want with you! What did you want with me?”

“I find this very strange, Mr. Queen.”

“Now see here, Mr. Patch, I happen to be extremely busy this morning—”

“So am I.” Mr. Patch’s large thick neck was reddening and his tone was no longer amiable. Ellery took a cautious step backward as his visitor lumbered forward to thrust a slip of yellow paper under his nose. “Did you send me this wire, or didn’t you?”

Ellery considered it tactically expedient to take the telegram, although for strategic reasons he did so with a bellicose scowl.

“Well, sir?” thundered Mr. Patch. “Do you have something on Washington for me, or don’t you?”

“Washington?” said Ellery absently, studying the telegram.

“George Washington, Mr. Queen! I’m Patch the antiquarian. I collect Washington. I’m an authority on Washington. I have a large fortune and I spend it all on Washington! I’d never have wasted my time this morning if your name hadn’t been signed to this wire! This is my busiest week of the year. I have engagements to speak on Washington—”

“Desist, Mr. Patch,” said Ellery. “This is either a practical joke, or—”

“The Baroness Tchek,” announced Nikki clearly. “With another telegram.” And then she added: “And Professor John Cecil Shaw, ditto.”

The three telegrams were identical.

“Of course I didn’t send them,” said Ellery thoughtfully, regarding his three visitors. Baroness Tchek was a short powerful woman, resembling a dumpling with gray hair; an angry dumpling. Professor Shaw was lank and long-jawed, wearing a sack suit which hung in some places and failed in its purpose by inches at the extremities. Along with Mr. Patch, they constituted as deliciously queer a trio as had ever congregated in the Queen apartment. Their host suddenly determined not to let go of them. “On the other hand, someone obviously did, using my name...”

“Then there’s nothing more to be said,” snapped the Baroness, snapping her bag for emphasis.

“I should think there’s a great deal more to be said,” began Professor Shaw in a troubled way. “Wasting people’s time this way—”

“It’s not going to waste any more of my time,” growled the large Mr. Patch. “Washington’s Birthday only three days off—!”

“Exactly,” smiled Ellery. “Won’t you sit down? There’s more in this than meets the eye... Baroness Tchek, if I’m not mistaken, you’re the one who brought that fabulous collection of rare coins into the United States just before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia? You’re in the rare-coin business in New York now?”

“Unfortunately,” said the Baroness coldly, “one must eat.”

“And you, sir? I seem to know you.”

“Rare books,” said the Professor in the same troubled way.

“Of course. John Cecil Shaw, the rare-book collector. We’ve met at Mim’s and other places. I abandon my first theory. There’s a pattern here, distinctly unhumorous. An antiquarian, a coin dealer, and a collector of rare books—Nikki? Whom have you out there this time?”

“If this one collects anything,” muttered Nikki into her employer’s ear, “I’ll bet it has two legs and hair on its chest. A darned pretty girl—”

“Named Martha Clarke,” said a cool voice; and Ellery turned to find himself regarding one of the most satisfying sights in the world.

“Ah. I take it, Miss Clarke, you also received one of these wires signed with my name?”

“Oh, no,” said the pretty girl. “I’m the one who sent them.”

There was something about the comely Miss Clarke which inspired, if not confidence, at least an openness of mind. Perhaps it was the self-possessed manner in which she sat all of them, including Ellery, down in Ellery’s living room while she waited on the hearth-rug, like a conductor on the podium, for them to settle in their chairs. And it was the measure of Miss Clarke’s assurance that none of them was indignant, only curious.

“I’ll make it snappy,” said Martha Clarke briskly. “I did what I did the way I did it because, first, I had to make sure I could see Mr. Patch, Baroness Tchek, and Professor Shaw today. Second, because I may need a detective before I’m through... Third,” she added, almost absently, “because I’m pretty desperate.

“My name is Martha Clarke. My father Tobias is a farmer. Our farm lies just south of Philadelphia, it was built by a Clarke in 1761, and it’s been in our family ever since. I won’t go gooey on you. We’re broke and there’s a mortgage. Unless Papa and I can raise six thousand dollars in the next couple of weeks we lose the old homestead.”

Professor Shaw looked vague. But the Baroness said: “Deplorable, Miss Clarke. Now if I’m to run my auction this afternoon—”

And James Ezekiel Patch grumbled: “If it’s money you want, young woman—”

“Certainly it’s money I want. But I have something to sell.”

“Ah!” said the Baroness.

“Oh?” said the Professor.

“Hm,” said the antiquarian.

Mr. Queen said nothing, and Miss Porter jealously chewed the end of her pencil.

“The other day while I was cleaning out the attic, I found an old book.”

“Well, now,” said Professor Shaw indulgently. “An old book, eh?”

“It’s called The Diary of Simeon Clarke. Simeon Clarke was Papa’s great-great-great-something or other. His Diary was privately printed in 1792 in Philadelphia, Professor, by a second cousin of his, Jonathan, who was in the printing business there.”

“Jonathan Clarke. The Diary of Simeon Clarke,” mumbled the cadaverous book collector. “I don’t believe I know either, Miss Clarke. Have you...?”

Martha Clarke carefully unclasped a large Manila envelope and drew forth a single yellowed sheet of badly printed paper. “The title page was loose, so I brought it along.”

Professor Shaw silently examined Miss Clarke’s exhibit, and Ellery got up to squint at it. “Of course,” said the Professor after a long scrutiny, in which he held the sheet up to the light, peered apparently at individual characters, and performed other mysterious rites, “mere age doesn’t connote rarity, nor does rarity of itself constitute value. And while this page looks genuine for the purported period and is rare enough to be unknown to me, still...”

“Suppose I told you,” said Miss Martha Clarke, “that the chief purpose of the Diary — which I have at home—is to tell the story of how George Washington visited Simeon Clarke’s farm in the winter of 1791—”

“Clarke’s farm? 1791?” exclaimed James Ezekiel Patch. “Preposterous. There’s no record of—”

“And of what George Washington buried there,” the farmer’s daughter concluded.

By executive order, the Queen telephone was taken off its hook, the door was bolted, the shades were drawn, and the long interrogation began. By the middle of the afternoon, the unknown chapter in the life of the Father of His Country was fairly sketched.

Early on an icy gray February morning in 1791, Farmer Clarke had looked up from the fence he was mending to observe a splendid cortège galloping down on him from the direction of the City of Philadelphia. Outriders thundered in the van, followed by a considerable company of gentlemen on horseback and several great coaches-and-six driven by liveried Negroes. To Simeon Clarke’s astonishment, the entire equipage stopped before his farmhouse. He began to run. He could hear the creak of springs and the snorting of sleek and sweating horses. Gentlemen and lackeys were leaping to the frozen ground and, by the time Simeon had reached the farmhouse, all were elbowing about the first coach, a magnificent affair bearing a coat of arms. Craning, the farmer saw within the coach a very large, great-nosed gentleman clad in a black velvet suit and a black cloak faced with gold; there was a cocked hat on his wigged head and a great sword in a white leather scabbard at his side. This personage was on one knee, leaning with an expression of considerable anxiety over a chubby lady of middle age, swathed in furs, who was half-sitting, half-lying on the upholstered seat, her eyes closed and her cheeks waxen under the rouge. Another gentleman, soberly attired, was stooping over the lady, his fingers on one pale wrist.

“I fear,” he was saying with great gravity to the kneeling man, “that it would be imprudent to proceed another yard in this weather, Your Excellency. Lady Washington requires physicking and a warm bed immediately.”

Lady Washington! Then the large, richly dressed gentleman was the President! Simeon Clarke pushed excitedly through the throng.

“Your Mightiness! Sir!” he cried. “I am Simeon Clarke. This is my farm. We have warm beds, Sarah and I!”

The President considered Simeon briefly. “I thank you, Farmer Clarke. No, no, Dr. Craik. I shall assist Lady Washington myself.”

And George Washington carried Martha Washington into the little Pennsylvania farmhouse of Simeon and Sarah Clarke. An aide informed the Clarkes that President Washington had been on his way to Virginia to celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday in the privacy of Mount Vernon.

Instead, he passed his birthday on the Clarke farm, for the physician insisted that the President’s lady could not be moved, even back to the nearby Capital, without risking complications. On His Excellency’s order, the entire incident was kept secret. “It would give needless alarm to the people,” he said. But he did not leave Martha’s bedside for three days and three nights.

Presumably during those seventy-two hours, while his lady recovered from her indisposition, the President devoted some thought to his hosts, for on the fourth morning he sent black Christopher, his body servant, to summon the Clarkes. They found George Washington by the kitchen fire, shaven and powdered and in immaculate dress, his stern features composed.

“I am told, Farmer Clarke, that you and your good wife refuse reimbursement for the livestock you have slaughtered in the accommodation of our large company.”

“You’re my President, Sir,” said Simeon. “I wouldn’t take money.”

“We... we wouldn’t take money, Your Worship,” stammered Sarah.

“Nevertheless, Lady Washington and I would acknowledge your hospitality in some kind. If you give me leave, I shall plant with my own hands a grove of oak saplings behind your house. And beneath one of the saplings I propose to bury two of my personal possessions.” Washington’s eyes twinkled ever so slightly. “It is my birthday—I feel a venturesome spirit. Come, Farmer Clarke and Mistress Clarke, would you like that?”

“What... what were they?” choked James Ezekiel Patch, the Washington collector. He was pale.

Martha Clarke replied: “The sword at Washington’s side, in its white leather scabbard, and a silver coin the President carried in a secret pocket.”

“Silver coin?” breathed Baroness Tchek, the rare-coin dealer. “What kind of coin, Miss Clarke?”

“The Diary calls it ‘a half disme,’ with an s,” replied Martha Clarke, frowning. “I guess that’s the way they spelled dime in those days. The book’s full of queer spellings.”

“A United States of America half disme?” asked the Baroness in a very odd way.

“That’s what it says, Baroness.”

“And this was in 1791?”

“Yes.”

The Baroness snorted, beginning to rise. “I thought your story was too impossibly romantic, young woman. The United States Mint didn’t begin to strike off half dismes until 1792!”

“Half dismes or any other U. S. coinage, I believe,” said Ellery. “How come, Miss Clarke?”

“It was an experimental coin,” said Miss Clarke coolly. “The Diary isn’t clear as to whether it was the Mint which struck it off, or some private agency—maybe Washington himself didn’t tell Simeon—but the President did say to Simeon that the half disme in his pocket had been coined from silver he himself had furnished and had been presented to him as a keepsake.”

“There’s a half disme with a story like that behind it in the possession of The American Numismatic Society,” muttered the Baroness, “but it’s definitely called one of the earliest coins struck off by the Mint. It’s possible, I suppose, that in 1791, the preceding year, some specimen coins may have been struck off—”

“Possible my foot,” said Miss Clarke. “It’s so. The Diary says so. I imagine President Washington was pretty interested in the coins to be issued by the new country he was head of.”

“Miss Clarke, I... I want that half disme. I mean—I’d like to buy it from you,” said the Baroness.

“And I,” said Mr. Patch carefully, “would like to ah... purchase Washington’s sword.”

“The Diary,” moaned Professor Shaw. “I’ll buy The Diary of Simeon Clarke from you, Miss Clarke!”

“I’ll be happy to sell it to you, Professor Shaw—as I said, I found it in the attic and I have it locked up in a highboy in the parlor at home. But as for the other two things...” Martha Clarke paused, and Ellery looked delighted. He thought he knew what was coming. “I’ll sell you the sword, Mr. Patch, and you the half disme, Baroness Tchek, provided—” and now Miss Clarke turned her clear eyes on Ellery “—provided you, Mr. Queen, will be kind enough to find them.”

And there was the farmhouse in the frosty Pennsylvania morning, set in the barren winter acres, and looking as bleak as only a little Revolutionary house with a mortgage on its head can look in the month of February.

“There’s an apple orchard over there,” said Nikki as they got out of Ellery’s car. “But where’s the grove of oaks? I don’t see any!” And then she added, sweetly: “Do you, Ellery?”

Ellery’s lips tightened. They tightened further when his solo on the front-door knocker brought no response.

“Let’s go around,” he said briefly; and Nikki preceded him with cheerful step.

Behind the house there was a barn; and beyond the barn there was comfort, at least for Ellery. For beyond the barn there were twelve ugly holes in the earth, and beside each hole lay either a freshly felled oak tree and its stump, or an ancient stump by itself, freshly uprooted. On one of the stumps sat an old man in earth-stained blue jeans, smoking a corncob pugnaciously.

“Tobias Clarke?” asked Ellery.

“Yump.”

“I’m Ellery Queen. This is Miss Porter. Your daughter visited me in New York yesterday—”

“Know all about it.”

“May I ask where Martha is?”

“Station. Meetin’ them there other folks.” Tobias Clarke spat and looked away—at the holes. “Don’t know what ye’re all comin’ down here for. Wasn’t nothin’ under them oaks. Dug ’em all up t’other day. Trees that were standin’ and the stumps of the ones that’d fallen years back. Look at them holes. Hired hand and me dug down most to China. Washin’ton’s Grove, always been called. Now look at it. Firewood—for someone else, I guess.” There was iron bitterness in his tone. “We’re losin’ this farm, Mister, unless...” And Tobias Clarke stopped. “Well, maybe we won’t,” he said. “There’s always that there book Martha found.”

“Professor Shaw, the rare-book collector, offered your daughter two thousand dollars for it if he’s satisfied with it, Mr. Clarke,” said Nikki.

“So she told me last night when she got back from New York,” said Tobias Clarke. “Two thousand—and we need six.” He grinned, and he spat again.

“Well,” said Nikki sadly to Ellery, “that’s that.” She hoped Ellery would immediately get into the car and drive back to New York—immediately.

But Ellery showed no disposition to be sensible. “Perhaps, Mr. Clarke, some trees died in the course of time and just disappeared, stumps, roots, and all. Martha” — Martha! — “said the Diary doesn’t mention the exact number Washington planted here.”

“Look at them holes. Twelve of ’em, ain’t there? In a triangle. Man plants trees in a triangle, he plants trees in a triangle. Ye don’t see no place between holes big enough for another tree, do ye? Anyways, there was the same distance between all the trees. No, sir, Mister, twelve was all there was ever; and I looked under all twelve.”

“What’s the extra tree doing in the center of the triangle? You haven’t uprooted that one, Mr. Clarke.”

Tobias Clarke spat once more. “Don’t know much about trees, do ye? That’s a cherry saplin’ I set in myself six years ago. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with George Washington.”

Nikki tittered.

“If you’d sift the earth in those holes—”

“I sifted it. Look, Mister, either somebody dug that stuff up a hundred years ago or the whole yarn’s a Saturday night whopper. Which it most likely is. There’s Martha now with them other folks.” And Tobias Clarke added, spitting for the fourth time: “Don’t let me be keepin’ ye.”

“It reveals Washington rather er... out of character,” said James Ezekiel Patch that evening. They were sitting about the fire in the parlor, as heavy with gloom as with Miss Clarke’s dinner; and that, at least in Miss Porter’s view, was heavy indeed. Baroness Tchek wore the expression of one who is trapped in a cave; there was no further train until morning, and she had not yet resigned herself to a night in a farmhouse bed. The better part of the day had been spent poring over The Diary of Simeon Clarke, searching for a clue to the buried Washingtonia. But there was no clue; the pertinent passage referred merely to “a Triangle of Oake Trees behinde the red Barn, which His Excellency the President did plant with his own Hands, as he had promis’d me, and then did burie his Sworde and the Half Disme for his Pleasure in a Case of copper beneathe one of the Oakes, the which, he said (the Case), had been fashion’d by Mr. Revere of Boston who is experimenting with this Mettle in his Furnasses.”

“How out of character, Mr. Patch?” asked Ellery. He had been staring into the fire for a long time, scarcely listening.

“Washington wasn’t given to romanticism,” said the large man dryly. “No folderol about him. I don’t know of anything in his life which prepares us for such a yarn as this. I’m beginning to think—”

“But Professor Shaw himself says the Diary is no forgery!” cried Martha Clarke.

“Oh, the book’s authentic enough.” Professor Shaw seemed unhappy. “But it may simply be a literary hoax, Miss Clarke. The woods are full of them. I’m afraid that unless the story is confirmed by the discovery of that copper case with its contents...”

“Oh, dear,” said Nikki impulsively; and for a moment she was sorry for Martha Clarke, she really was.

But Ellery said: “I believe it. Pennsylvania farmers in 1791 weren’t given to literary hoaxes, Professor Shaw. As for Washington, Mr. Patch—no man can be so rigidly consistent. And with his wife just recovering from an illness—on his own birthday...” And Ellery fell silent again.

Almost immediately he leaped from his chair. “Mr. Clarke!”

Tobias stirred from his dark corner. “What?”

“Did you ever hear your father, or grandfather—anyone in your family—talk of another barn behind the house?”

Martha stared at him. Then she cried: “Papa, that’s it! It was a different barn, in a different place, and the original Washington’s Grove was cut down, or died—”

“Nope,” said Tobias Clarke. “Never was but this one barn. Still got some of its original timbers. Ye can see the date burned into the crosstree — 1761.”

Nikki was up early. A steady hack-hack-hack borne on the frosty air woke her. She peered out of her back window, the coverlet up to her nose, to see Mr. Ellery Queen against the dawn, like a pioneer, wielding an ax powerfully.

Nikki dressed quickly, shivering, flung her mink-dyed muskrat over her shoulders, and ran downstairs, out of the house, and around it past the barn.

“Ellery! What do you think you’re doing? It’s practically the middle of the night!”

“Chopping,” said Ellery, chopping.

“There’s mountains of firewood stacked against the barn,” said Nikki. “Really, Ellery, I think this is carrying a flirtation too far.” Ellery did not reply. “And anyway, there’s something—something gruesome and indecent about chopping up trees George Washington planted. It’s vandalism.”

“Just a thought,” panted Ellery, pausing for a moment. “A hundred and fifty-odd years is a long time, Nikki. Lots of queer things could happen, even to a tree, in that time. For instance—”

“The copper case,” breathed Nikki, visibly. “The roots grew around it. It’s in one of these stumps!”

“Now you’re functioning,” said Ellery, and he raised the ax again.

He was still at it two hours later, when Martha Clarke announced breakfast.

At 11:30 A.M. Nikki returned from driving the Professor, the Baroness, and James Ezekiel Patch to the railroad station. She found Mr. Queen seated before the fire in the kitchen in his undershirt, while Martha Clarke caressed his naked right arm.

“Oh!” said Nikki faintly. “I beg your pardon.”

“Where you going, Nikki?” said Ellery irritably. “Come in. Martha’s rubbing liniment into my biceps.”

“He’s not very accustomed to chopping wood, is he?” asked Martha Clarke in a cheerful voice.

“Reduced those foul ‘oakes’ to splinters,” groaned Ellery. “Martha, ouch!”

“I should think you’d be satisfied now,” said Nikki coldly. “I suggest we imitate Patch, Shaw, and the Baroness, Ellery—there’s a 3:05. We can’t impose on Miss Clarke’s hospitality forever.”

To Nikki’s horror, Martha Clarke chose this moment to burst into tears.

“Martha!”

Nikki felt like leaping upon her and shaking the cool look back into her perfidious eyes.

“Here... here, now, Martha.” That’s right, thought Nikki contemptuously. Embrace her in front of me! “It’s those three rats. Running out that way! Don’t worry—I’ll find that sword and half disme for you yet.”

“You’ll never find them,” sobbed Martha, wetting Ellery’s undershirt. “Because they’re not here. They never were here. When you s-stop to think of it... burying that coin, his sword... if the story were true, he’d have given them to Simeon and Sarah...”

“Not necessarily, not necessarily,” said Ellery with a hateful haste. “The old boy had a sense of history, Martha. They all did in those days. They knew they were men of destiny and that the eyes of posterity were upon them. Burying ’em is just what Washington would have done!”

“Do you really th-think so?”

Oh... pfui.

“But even if he did bury them,” Martha sniffled, “it doesn’t stand to reason Simeon and Sarah would have let them stay buried. They’d have dug that copper box up like rabbits the minute G-George turned his back.”

“Two simple countryfolk?” cried Ellery. “Salt of the earth? The new American earth? Disregard the wishes of His Mightiness, George Washington, First President of the United States? Are you out of your mind? And anyway, what would Simeon do with a dress-sword?”

Beat it into a plowshare, thought Nikki spitefully — that’s what he’d do.

“And that half disme. How much could it have been worth in 1791? Martha, they’re here under your farm somewhere. You wait and see—”

“I wish I could b-believe it... Ellery.”

“Shucks, child. Now stop crying—”

From the door Miss Porter said stiffly: “You might put your shirt back on, Superman, before you catch pneumonia.”

Mr. Queen prowled about the Clarke acres for the remainder of that day, his nose at a low altitude. He spent some time in the barn. He devoted at least twenty minutes to each of the twelve holes in the earth. He reinspected the oaken wreckage of his axwork, like a paleontologist examining an ancient petrifaction for the impression of a dinosaur foot. He measured off the distance between the holes; and, for a moment, a faint tremor of emotion shook him. George Washington had been a surveyor in his youth; here was evidence that his passion for exactitude had not wearied with the years. As far as Ellery could make out, the twelve oaks had been set into the earth at exactly equal distances, in an equilaterial triangle.

It was at this point that Ellery had seated himself upon the seat of a cultivator behind the barn, wondering at his suddenly accelerated circulation. Little memories were knocking at the door. And as he opened to admit them, it was as if he were admitting a personality. It was, of course, at this time that the sense of personal conflict first obtruded. He had merely to shut his eyes in order to materialize a tall, large-featured man carefully pacing off the distances between twelve points—pacing them off in a sort of objective challenge to the unborn future. George Washington...

The man Washington had from the beginning possessed an affinity for numbers. It had remained with him all his life. To count things, not so much for the sake of the things, perhaps, as for the counting, had been of the utmost importance to him. As a boy in Mr. Williams’s school in Westmoreland, he excelled in arithmetic. Long division, subtraction, weights and measures—to calculate cords of wood and pecks of peas, pints and gallons and avoirdupois—young George delighted in these as other boys delighted in horseplay. As a man, he merely directed his passion into the channel of his possessions. Through his possessions he apparently satisfied his curious need for enumeration. He was not content simply to keep accounts of the acreage he owned, its yield, his slaves, his pounds and pence. Ellery recalled the extraordinary case of Washington and the seed. He once calculated the number of seeds in a pound troy weight of red clover. Not appeased by the statistics on red clover, Washington then went to work on a pound of timothy seed. His conclusions were: 71,000 and 298,000. His appetite unsatisfied, he thereupon fell upon the problem of New River grass. Here he tackled a calculation worthy of his prowess: his mathematical labors produced the great, pacifying figure of 844,800.

This man was so obsessed with numbers, Ellery thought, staring at the ruins of Washington’s Grove, that he counted the windows in each house of his Mount Vernon estate and the number of “Paynes” in each window of each house, and then triumphantly recorded the exact number of each in his own handwriting.

It was like a hunger, requiring periodic appeasement. In 1747, as a boy of fifteen, George Washington drew “A Plan of Major Law: Washingtons Turnip Field as Survey’d by me.” In 1786, at the age of fifty-four, General Washington, the most famous man in the world, occupied himself with determining the exact elevation of his piazza above the Potomac’s high-water mark. No doubt he experienced a warmer satisfaction thereafter for knowing that when he sat upon his piazza looking down upon the river he was sitting exactly 124 feet 10½ inches above it.

And in 1791, as President of the United States, Ellery mused, he was striding about right here, setting saplings into the ground, twelve of them in an equilateral triangle, and beneath one of them he buried a copper case containing his sword and the half disme coined from his own silver. Beneath one of them... But it was not beneath one of them. Or had it been? And had long ago been dug up by a Clarke? But the story had apparently died with Simeon and Sarah. On the other hand...

Ellery found himself irrationally reluctant to conclude the obvious. George Washington’s lifelong absorption with figures kept intruding. Twelve trees, equidistant, in an equilateral triangle.

“What is it?” he kept asking himself, almost angrily. “Why isn’t it satisfying me?”

And then, in the gathering dusk, a very odd explanation insinuated itself. Because it wouldn’t have satisfied him!

That’s silly, Ellery said to himself abruptly. It has all the earmarks of a satisfying experience. There is no more satisfying figure in all geometry than an equilateral triangle. It is closed, symmetrical, definite, a whole and balanced and finished thing.

But it wouldn’t have satisfied George Washington... for all its symmetry and perfection.

Then perhaps there is a symmetry and perfection beyond the cold beauty of figures?

At this point, Ellery began to question his own postulates... lost in the dark and to his time...

They found him at ten-thirty, crouched on the cultivator seat, numb and staring.

He permitted himself to be led into the house, he suffered Nikki to subject him to the indignity of having his shoes and socks stripped off and his frozen feet rubbed to life, he ate Martha Clarke’s dinner—all with a detachment and indifference which alarmed the girls and even made old Tobias look uneasy.

“If it’s going to have this effect on him,” began Martha, and then she said: “Ellery, give it up. Forget it.” But she had to shake him before he heard her.

He shook his head. “They’re there.”

“Where?” cried the girls simultaneously.

“In Washington’s Grove.”

“Ye found ’em?” croaked Tobias Clarke, half-rising.

“No.”

The Clarkes and Nikki exchanged glances.

“Then how can you be so certain they’re buried there, Ellery?” asked Nikki gently.

Ellery looked bewildered. “Darned if I know how I know,” he said, and he even laughed a little. “Maybe George Washington told me.” Then he stopped laughing and went into the firelit parlor and—pointedly—slid the doors shut.

At ten minutes past midnight Martha Clarke gave up the contest.

“Isn’t he ever going to come out of there?” she said, yawning.

“You never can tell what Ellery will do,” replied Nikki.

“Well, I can’t keep my eyes open another minute.”

“Funny,” said Nikki. “I’m not the least bit sleepy.”

“You city girls.”

“You country girls.”

They laughed. Then they stopped laughing, and for a moment there was no sound in the kitchen but the patient sentry-walk of the grandfather clock and the snores of Tobias assaulting the ceiling from above.

“Well,” said Martha. Then she said: “I just can’t. Are you staying up, Nikki?”

“For a little while. You go to bed, Martha.”

“Yes. Well. Good night.”

“Good night, Martha.”

At the door Martha turned suddenly: “Did he say George Washington told him?”

“Yes.”

Martha went rather quickly up the stairs.

Nikki waited fifteen minutes. Then she tiptoed to the foot of the stairs and listened. She heard Tobias snuffling and snorting as he turned over in his bed, and an uneasy moan from the direction of Martha’s bedroom, as if she were dreaming an unwholesome dream. Nikki set her jaw grimly and went to the parlor doors and slid them open.

Ellery was on his knees before the fire. His elbows were resting on the floor. His face was propped in his hands. In this attitude his posterior was considerably higher than his head.

“Ellery!”

“Huh?”

“Ellery, what on earth—?”

“Nikki. I thought you’d gone to bed long ago.” In the firelight his face was haggard.

“But what have you been doing? You look exhausted!”

“I am. I’ve been wrestling with a man who could bend a horseshoe with his naked hands. A very strong man. In more ways than one.”

“What are you talking about? Who?”

“George Washington. Go to bed, Nikki.”

“George... Washington?”

“Go to bed.”

“…Wrestling with him?”

“Trying to break through his defenses. Get into his mind. It’s not an easy mind to get into. He’s been dead such a long time—that makes the difference. The dead are stubborn, Nikki. Aren’t you going to bed?”

Nikki backed out shivering.

The house was icy.

It was even icier when an inhuman bellow accompanied by a thunder that shook the Revolutionary walls of her bedroom brought Nikki out of bed with a yelping leap.

But it was only Ellery.

He was somewhere up the hall, in the first glacial light of dawn, hammering on Martha Clarke’s door.

“Martha. Martha! Wake up, damn you, and tell me where I can find a book in this damned house! A biography of Washington—a history of the United States—an almanac... anything!”

The parlor fire had long since given up the ghost. Nikki and Martha in wrappers, and Tobias Clarke in an ancient bathrobe over his marbled long underwear, stood around shivering and bewildered as a disheveled, daemonic Ellery leafed eagerly through a 1921 edition of The Farmer’s Fact Book and Complete Compendium.

“Here it is!” The words shot out of his mouth like bullets, leaving puffs of smoke.

“What is it, Ellery?”

“What on earth are you looking for?”

“He’s loony, I tell ye!”

Ellery turned with a look of ineffable peace, closing the book.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“Vermont. The State of Vermont.”

“Vermont...?”

“Vermont?”

“Vermont. What in the crawlin’ creepers’s Vermont got to do with—?”

“Vermont,” said Ellery with a tired smile, “did not enter the Union until March fourth, 1791. So that proves it, don’t you see?”

“Proves what?” shrieked Nikki.

“Where George Washington buried his sword and half disme.”

“Because,” said Ellery in the rapidly lightening dawn behind the barn, “Vermont was the fourteenth State to do so. The fourteenth. Tobias, would you get me an ax, please?”

“An ax,” mumbled Tobias. He shuffled away, shaking his head.

“Come on, Ellery, I’m d-dying of c-cold!” chattered Nikki, dancing up and down before the cultivator.

“Ellery,” said Martha Clarke piteously, “I don’t understand any of this.”

“It’s very simple, Martha—oh, thank you, Tobias—as simple,” said Ellery, “as simple arithmetic. Numbers, my dears—numbers tell this remarkable story. Numbers and their influence on our first President who was, above all things, a number-man. That was my key. I merely had to discover the lock to fit it into. Vermont was the lock. And the door’s open.”

Nikki seated herself on the cultivator. You had to give Ellery his head in a situation like this; you couldn’t drive him for beans. Well, she thought grudgingly, seeing how pale and how tired-looking he was after a night’s wrestling with George Washington, he’s earned it.

“The number was wrong,” said Ellery solemnly, leaning on Tobias’s ax. “Twelve trees. Washington apparently planted twelve trees—Simeon Clarke’s Diary never did mention the number twelve, but the evidence seemed unquestionable—there were twelve oaks in an equilateral triangle, each one an equal distance from its neighbor.

“And yet... I felt that twelve oaks couldn’t be, perfect as the triangle was. Not if they were planted by George Washington. Not on February the twenty-second, New Style, in the year of our Lord 1791.

“Because on February the twenty-second, 1791 — in fact, until March the fourth, when Vermont entered the Union to swell its original number by one—there was another number in the United states so important, so revered, so much a part of the common speech and the common living—and dying—that it was more than a number; it was a solemn and sacred thing; almost not a number at all. It overshadowed other numbers like the still-unborn Paul Bunyan. It was memorialized on the new American flag in the number of its stars and the number of its stripes. It was a number of which George Washington was the standard-bearer!—the head and only recently the strong right arm of the new Republic which had been born out of the blood and muscle of its integers. It was a number which was in the hearts and minds and mouths of all Americans.

“No. If George Washington, who was not merely the living symbol of all this but carried with him that extraordinary compulsion toward numbers which characterized his whole temperament besides, had wished to plant a number of oak trees to commemorate a birthday visit in the year 1791... he would have, he could have, selected only one number out of all the mathematical trillions at his command — the number thirteen.”

The sun was looking over the edge of Pennsylvania at Washington’s Grove.

“George Washington planted thirteen trees here that day, and under one of them he buried Paul Revere’s copper case. Twelve of the trees he arranged in an equilateral triangle, and we know that the historic treasure was not under any of the twelve. Therefore he must have buried the case under the thirteenth—a thirteenth oak sapling which grew to oakhood and, some time during the past century and a half, withered and died and vanished, vanished so utterly that it left no trace, not even its roots.

“Where would Washington have planted that thirteenth oak? Because beneath the spot where it once stood—there lies the copper case containing his sword and the first coin to be struck off in the new United States.”

And Ellery glanced tenderly at the cherry sapling which Tobias Clarke had set into the earth in the middle of Washington’s Grove six years before.

“Washington the surveyor, the geometer, the man whose mind cried out for integral symmetries? Obviously, in only one place: In the center of the triangle. Any other place would be unthinkable.”

And Ellery hefted Tobias’s ax and strode toward the six-year-old tree. He raised the ax.

But suddenly he lowered it, and turned, and said in a rather startled way: “See here! Isn’t today...?”

“Washington’s Birthday,” said Nikki.

Ellery grinned and began to chop down the cherry tree.