Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 56, No. 2. Whole No. 321, August 1970

Ponsonby and the Dying Words by Alan K. Young[5]

Professor Amos Ponsonby of Briarwood College is now a series detective. In this, his newest case — a literary dying message — Professor Ponsonby draws on his academic background and ivied (and ivory-towered) knowledge to rescue his godson, Public Defender Paul Anders, from “ignominious defeat” But Professor Ponsonby does not solve the case alone — he would be the first to admit it: he enlists the aid of a distinguished panel of well-known and famous American literary figures — including Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May Alcott), Edward Emerson (the son of Ralph Waldo Emerson), William Ellery Channing, and, last but most decidedly not least, Henry David Thoreau…

The county attorney cast a final glance at his notes and then dropped them casually on the prosecution table.

In the back row of the crowded courtroom Professor Ponsonby shifted nervously. Here it comes, he thought — the testimony that was almost certain to send Samuel Greatheart to prison for murder. The two preceding witnesses had doubtlesss told much the same tale as Sergeant Means would now tell, but they had been amateurs. Here was the expert, the trained observer; here was the man who would take Samuel Greatheart’s scalp for society.

From his seat on the aisle, Ponsonby could see the young defendant’s profile — the broad Shoshone forehead, the stern Shoshone nose, the jet-black hair and the black eyes that never once during the trial had looked anywhere but into the eyes of his accusers, or those of the twelve men and women who soon would judge him. Beside him Public Defender Paul Anders slouched in his chair, defeat written in every sagging line.

Poor Paul, thought Ponsonby — saddled with an all-but-defenseless case in his first appearance as Public Defender. For how could he hope to persuade the jury to close its ears to the murdered man’s last words?

The County Attorney approached the balding, red-faced man on the witness stand. “Will you tell the court your name and title, please?”

“Detective Sergeant Alfred Means, Briarwood Police.”

“And will you tell us, please, Sergeant, where you spent the evening of April fourth last, and what you were doing at the time?”

“Yes, sir. I spent that evening at the bedside of the late Professor Nicholas Twining in Briarwood Hospital. I was there to get a statement from him in case he regained consciousness.”

“And did Professor Twining regain consciousness while you were present?”

“Yes, sir, he did. For just a minute or two before he died.”

“Now, Sergeant, the court has already heard the testimony of Nurse Mary Gebhorn and Hospital Orderly Horace Cayther as to what they heard Professor Twining say that evening in response to your questions. I now intend to take you over the same ground, but first let me ask you this: during that evening or since, have you discussed Professor Twining’s last words with Miss Gebhorn or Mr. Cayther, or been informed by them or by anyone else for what they thought they heard Twining say?”

“No, sir, I have not.”

“So that any common ground between your testimony and theirs must stem entirely from your having shared the experience of being present at Professor Twining’s deathbed?”

“Yes, sir.”

The County Attorney cast a satisfied glance at the jury. “Now, Sergeant, please tell us exactly what occurred in that hospital room from the time Professor Twining regained consciousness until the moment he died.”

“Well, as soon as we realized he was conscious — it was the orderly who first noticed his eyes were open — both the nurse and I started talking at once. That was my fault; I was excited — I’d been in that room off and on for three days without ever seeing the color of his eyes — and I started identifying myself while she was still asking him how he felt. But then we saw that he was trying to say something, so we both shut up and he said something like one at a time.”

“ ‘Something like’ is rather vague, Sergeant. Could you be more specific?”

“No, sir, I don’t think I can. Professor Twining sounded very groggy and was breathing real hard — he had to take a deep breath after almost every word — and sometimes he made a sound that might’ve been a word or it just might’ve been a rattle in his throat. But I think he said — very haltingly, you understand — one — at — a — time.”

Ponsonby’s thoughts returned to the testimony of the two previous witnesses. Nurse Gebhorn had been under the impression that there had been at least one other word in that mumbled phrase, but she hadn’t been able to swear to it; Horace Cayther had missed the remark altogether, having stepped outside to send for the resident physician.

“What happened next?” the County Attorney asked.

Sergeant Means ran a chubby finger around the inside of his rapidly wilting collar. “Well, sir, at that point I said to the nurse, ‘Let me go first, please, Miss,’ and then I said to the deceased, ‘Professor Twining, I’m Detective Sergeant Means of the Briarwood Police. Can you tell me who it was that hit you?’ ”

“And did Twining reply to that?”

“Yes, sir, although not very satisfactorily from my point of view. He said — still very groggy, you understand — I did not, and then a couple words that I just couldn’t make out, and then the word we, and then he said what could have been another word or maybe a groan, or maybe he was just gasping for air. But then he said, real clear this time, the word quarreled. And then he took a deep breath — at least I think it was a breath — and he said the name Ann.”

“In other words, Sergeant, he could very well have been trying to gasp out the statement, ‘We quarreled over Ann’?”

“Your Honor, I object!” Paul Anders was instantly on his feet, his chubby face glowing with indignation.

But the judge needed no prompting. “Mr. Franks, you know better than that! Objection sustained. Clerk, strike that last question from the record. And the jury is hereby instructed to disregard any words other than those which the witness testifies to having heard the deceased speak, or to believing he heard the deceased speak.”

The County Attorney bowed almost imperceptibly, as though fearful of cracking his paper-thin veneer of contrition.

“Blasted hypocrite!” muttered Ponsonby. The deliberate transgression, he knew, had been a telling point for the prosecution. Nurse Gebhorn had testified that Professor Twining had mumbled and and then let his sentence die, and the orderly had been quite certain that the word had been either ant or aunt. But since Professor Twining’s only daughter was named Ann, the sergeant’s testimony would undoubtedly strike the jury as representing the most likely interpretation.

And what was worse, all three witnesses had now testified to having heard those deadly words — we and quarreled.

“All right, Sergeant,” the County Attorney continued, “let’s take it from where the deceased uttered what you, a trained observer, understood to be the name Ann. What happened next?”

“Well, sir, then there was a long period of silence — so long that if Professor Twining’s eyes hadn’t been open and moving I’d have thought he’d passed out again. And I was getting nervous, so I said, hoping to sort of stimulate him, ‘Was it Luther Cobb who hit you?’ ”

“And did he reply to that?”

“Yes, sir, he sure did. All this time he’d been lying there with a kind of dopey look on his face, but when I asked him if it was Luther Cobb that hit him he looked right at us, very deliberate like, and he said real clear: That’s a fallacy. That’s not right.”

“I see. He denied that it was Luther Cobb who’d struck him. What happened next?”

“He shut his eyes again, and I got to thinking what the Chief would say if I found out who didn’t hit him instead of who did, so I asked again, ‘Professor Twining, who was it that did this to you?’ And that’s when he said it.”

The County Attorney stood quietly for several moments, letting the irresistible magnet of whetted curiosity rivet the jury’s attention to his next question. Only when the tension in the room was almost palpable did he ask, “What did he say, Sergeant?”

“Well, sir, Professor Twining opened his eyes again, still looking right at me, and he said, Actually, it was— But then his voice sort of trailed off again, and he turned his eyes toward the ceiling, sort of puzzled like, as though he saw something up there that he couldn’t quite make out, and then he said a word I didn’t quite get, but I think it was noose—”

A wave of laughter swept the courtroom, momentarily easing the tension. Ponsonby chuckled with the others as he recalled the testimony of the previous witnesses: young Horace Cayther, who was known to all Briarwood as an ardent hunter, had been certain the dying man had mumbled the word moose, while Nurse Gebhorn had distinctly heard it as juice.

The judge gaveled for silence. The laughter died, the tension snapped back into place.

“And then?” prompted the County Attorney.

Sergeant Means took a deep breath, as though he were exhausted by the weight of what he was about to speak. “Then Professor Twining looked right at me again, and he said, clear as a bell, Indian. Then he just closed his eyes and stopped breathing.”

The County Attorney turned slowly to face the jury; he remained facing them as he framed his final question. “Let me make quite certain that we all understood you correctly, Sergeant. When you asked Professor Twining, ‘Who was it that did this to you?’, he replied, Actually, it was, and then a word you aren’t entirely sure of but which could have been noose, and then, clear as a bell, the word Indian. And having said that, he died. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. Your witness, Mr. Anders.”

So there it was, thought Ponsonby: that inescapable, seemingly unchallengeable word Indian, testified to now by three solid, reliable witnesses. Of course Nurse Gebhorn thought the dying man had said Indians, making it plural, and perhaps the defense could do something with that.

But do what? he asked himself sarcastically — suggest to the jury that the entire Shoshone nation had attacked Nicholas Twining? No, if there were any way Paul could save his client, it lay in finding some logical explanation for Nicholas Twining’s last, devastatingly incriminating word. Which was exactly what Ponsonby had been trying to do ever since Paul first told him of the deathbed accusation against Samuel Greatheart, and so far Ponsonby hadn’t come close to finding such an explanation.

Or had he? As he watched the Public Defender rise to begin his gallant but futile cross-examination, Ponsonby let his thoughts drift back to the morning several months before when Paul had first shown him the transcript of Sergeant Means’s preliminary testimony. Hadn’t there been a moment that morning when he’d sensed that there was an explanation lurking just over the horizon of his memory if only he could reach out and pull it into the daylight?

It had, he remembered, been a lovely April morning in his sunlit study on Spring Street…

Ponsonby had laid down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and peered at his housekeeper over the rim of his spectacles. “Mrs. Garvey?”

Mrs. Garvey had sighed and straightened up from her task of watering the potted ferns in the broad bay window. She had known what was coming — the Professor frequently used her as a sounding board for his latest “scribblings,” as she thought of them, even though they often dealt with subjects whose very existence was a profound revelation to her. “Yes, love?” she asked resignedly.

“Tell me how this sounds to you — it’s a commemorative passage on Professor Twining which I’ve been asked to prepare for the Faculty Minutes.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Garvey, brightening. Here was something more to her liking — a real-life murder that had bestirred their quiet college community as no other event in thirty years, a topic far more satisfying than those bloodless, bodiless scandals — “the unwarranted prostitution of our mother tongue” — that the Professor was always going on about in letters to the Briarwood newspaper.

Adjusting his spectacles more firmly on his nose, Ponsonby returned his attention to the passage.

“ ‘Nicholas Albert Twining,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘Roylston Professor of English at Briarwood College, died April fourth in his fifty-first year. For twenty-two years Professor Twining was an inspired and inspiring teacher, a productive scholar and a warm and generous friend to an ever-widening circle of students and colleagues. An expert in Nineteenth Century American literature, particularly the Transcendentalists, he so leavened wisdom with wit as to make himself loved as well as respected by all who took his courses. His scholarly legacy includes four books, at least one of which, Sunlight on Walden Pond, deservedly earned him national acclaim. At the time of his death he was working on a Life of Thoreau to which he had devoted four years of energy, and enthusiasm beyond measure.

“ ‘Although loathe at any time to part with this blithe and ebullient spirit, we yet may find comfort in the fact that he has left us at a time of year when a reawakening world can remind us, in the words of that Concord rebel whom Nicholas Twining knew so well and admired so much, that our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.’ ”

Professor Ponsonby lowered the paper and peered expectantly at his housekeeper.

“Oh, that is nice,” said Mrs. Garvey enthusiastically. “That’s just lovely. And I do so like that part about the blades in eternity. But I wonder now” — she paused, frowning — “shouldn’t you say a little something about the black-hearted devil what struck him down?”

“Good heavens, woman!” huffed Ponsonby. “This is a commemorative minute, not a news story of Professor Twining’s murder!”

“Maybe so, love, but I don’t see why that scoundrel Luther Cobb shouldn’t be given his comeuppance in commemorable minutes same as anyplace else.”

Ponsonby had started to reply, thought better of it, and subsided into an indignant silence, struck dumb once again by Mrs. Garvey’s matter-of-fact approach to life. He was not surprised that his Housekeeper should be seizing every opportunity to voice a self-satisfied “I-told-you-so”; she had often predicted a bad end for Luther Cobb, the drunkard, bully, and tavern brawler who had long been Briarwood’s leading ne’er-do-well. What was unsettling was that she should be so obviously pleased that the poor brute had proved at last to be a murderer as well. Or presumably so, since he had not yet been formally charged with the crime.

At the time Ponsonby had known only what all Briarwood knew about the murder of his former colleague. Professor Twining had been struck down in the library of his home on College Avenue shortly after eight o’clock on the previous Thursday evening. His assailant had used a cast-iron bookend as a weapon, then wiped it clean of fingerprints, and tossed it down beside the body before fleeing out the back door.

Professor Twining’s 19-year-old daughter Ann, who kept house for her widower father, had been upstairs at the time, displaying the fruits of a recent shopping spree to a friend. Hearing the commotion downstairs, the friend had happened to glance out a window just in time to see the assailant plunge off the back porch and disappear into the shrubbery, but all she had been certain of in the dusk was that he was a big man — a description which fitted six-foot-four, two-hundred-odd pound Luther Cobb to a T.

The girls had rushed downstairs to find Professor Twining unconscious from a blow on the head, and so he had remained after surgery, until Sunday evening when he had died. But on Monday morning the rumor had raced like wildfire through Briarwood that he had regained consciousness at the last, long enough to identify his killer.

And had he named Luther Cobb, Ponsonby wondered? To one who was a faithful subscriber to both the Briarwood newspaper and Mrs. Garvey’s grapevine, it seemed almost certain that he had. Not only had Cobb been seen in the Twining neighborhood on the night of the attack, but when picked up for questioning the next day he had been found to have $300 in his pocket — the precise sum which Professor Twining had withdrawn from his bank the previous morning.

At first Cobb had claimed he’d won the money in a crap game, but later, when confronted with the fact that his fingerprints had been found in the Twining library, he reluctantly admitted his presence there on the evening of the crime, insisting, however, that Professor Twining had hired him to repair his garage roof and given him a cash advance to buy the needed materials. Insisting, too, that he had left Twining alive and well.

“Garage roof, my Aunt Minnie!” said Mrs. Garvey suddenly, as though she had been reading Ponsonby’s thoughts. She had abandoned the watering can in favor of a feather duster which she now waved indignantly at her employer. “Nobody in his right mind would hire that rumpot to fix anything, let alone give him three hundred dollars.”

“It’s quite possible,” observed Ponsonby, “that Professor Twining was unaware of Luther Cobb’s reputation. Nicholas lived in a rarefied academic atmosphere, and had little contact with such mundane phenomena as small-town gossip.” Ponsonby smiled, remembering his eccentric friend. “Yes, Nicholas definitely stepped to the music of a different drummer.”

“Ah, so he was a veteran, too, poor man.” Mrs. Garvey had returned to her housewifely attack and was busily flicking the dust from a bust of Alexander Pope. “I wonder if maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned that in your commemorable minute? I know my Billy, God rest his soul, was as proud as Punch of his part in the war.”

Ponsonby glared at his housekeeper’s back. “My dear woman, I was merely alluding to an oft-quoted passage from Thoreau’s Walden. I was not implying that Professor Twining had served in the war.”

“No? Was he 4-F, then? Well, I guess you wouldn’t want to mention that.”

Ponsonby’s already ruddy complexion turned a shade ruddier. “I haven’t the slightest notion, Madam, whether or not Professor Twining ever served in the armed forces, nor do I think, in so far as my faculty minute is concerned, that it matters at all.”

“Of course it doesn’t, love, and don’t you fret about it. We’re all the same at the gate of Heaven, soldier and civilian alike.”

“Confound it, woman!” sputtered Ponsonby. “I didn’t — I was only — it doesn’t—” Only the timely peal of the doorbell saved Mrs. Garvey from one of the spirited denunciations to which the Professor occasionally subjected her, and which she good-naturedly assigned to a “sour stomach.”

The man whom Mrs. Garvey ushered into the study a few moments later was in his late twenties, short and stocky, with dark curly hair and a round, almost adolescent face that to Ponsonby seemed strangely denuded without its usual grin.

“Here’s Mr. Anders come to have morning coffee with us,” said Mrs. Garvey. “Isn’t that nice, now?”

Ponsonby regarded his godson with concern. “Well, Paul,” he said when the young man had dropped into a chair by the hearth and Mrs. Garvey had bustled off to the kitchen, “to judge by appearances you do propose to write an ode to dejection.”

“I beg your pardon, Uncle Amos?”

“Nothing, my boy. I’ve just been writing a brief memorial to Professor Twining, and Henry David Thoreau is on my mind.”

“Thoreau? I thought that was Coleridge.”

“The Ode, yes, but I was thinking of Thoreau’s one-sentence preamble to Walden. It goes: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. I don’t believe America has produced another writer who can match Thoreau’s ability to compose sentences that stick in the mind.”

“You mean like The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?”

“My personal favorite has always been Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Ponsonby smiled; it was good to see his godson grinning again. “But tell me, Paul, why was Briarwood’s newly appointed Public Defender looking so glum this morning?”

“Because he’s about to go down to ignominious defeat in his first appearance as Public Defender, that’s why.”

“Oh? And who might the public be in this case?”

“Do you know Samuel Greatheart?”

“Ann Twining’s fiancé? I’ve met him once or twice. And of course I’ve seen him play — a fine fullback. But what trouble can he possibly be in?”

“He was arrested this morning for the murder of Professor Twining.”

Ponsonby stared at his godson. “Samuel Greatheart? But I thought Luther Cobb—?”

“So did the police, until a minute or so before Professor Twining died, when he regained consciousness long enough to identify his murderer.”

“Do you mean he actually identified Samuel Greatheart?”

“Not by name, but he came close enough to satisfy the County Attorney.” Paul pulled a paper from his inside coat pocket. “Here’s a copy of the preliminary deposition made by the detective who was present when Professor Twining died. And I’m told there are two witnesses who can corroborate this, give or take a word here or there.”

Ponsonby had taken the deposition and read it through, frowning over the same incriminating words he was to hear uttered aloud three months later in the County Courthouse (“very slow and halting,” the detective had explained): One — at — a time… I-did-not… we… quarrelled... Ann. That’s-a-fallacy; that’s-not-right… Actually it was noose... Indian.

At last he lowered the paper to his lap. “But Nicholas certainly knew the young man’s name. If it was Samuel Greatheart whom he meant, why didn’t he come right out and say so?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ll bet that the County Attorney is going to introduce medical testimony to the effect that a man who’s had a bad concussion can sometimes remember most of what happened to him and still forget the commonest details — even his own name sometimes.”

“But surely Samuel isn’t the only Indian in Briarwood?”

“There are seventeen American Indians and two Indians from India. But even though Ann Twining refuses to believe Sam’s guilty, she admits he’s the only one of them her father had any contact with — the only Indian he ever even knew, she thinks. So when the police heard that, they started checking and everything just seemed to fall into place.”

“What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

“Well, motive for one. Sam and Ann wanted to get married and they admit Professor Twining was dead-set against it. Apparently he didn’t want his daughter marrying an Indian, especially one who has nothing in the world but a football scholarship and the shirt on his back.”

“Poppycock! In some ways Nicholas Twining was a very old-fashioned man and he may have thought Ann too young to marry, but he was no bigot. I’ll stake my life that Samuel Greatheart’s being an Indian had nothing to do with Nicholas’ opposition to the match.”

“Maybe not, Uncle Amos, but Sam himself admits to having had a couple of blazing rows with him about it, and anyone who’s seen him play football knows he’s got an unholy temper. I also understand the County Attorney can produce a witness who’ll testify to having heard Professor Twining refer to Sam as ‘that damned Indian,’ so apparently there was no love lost on his side, either.”

“Nonsense! When we’re vexed with someone we all choose the readiest handle for our whip. In my mind I refer to Mrs. Garvey as ‘that damned woman’ twenty’ times a week, but I certainly don’t intend it as a serious indictment of either her or her sex.”

Paul grinned. “I didn’t think you two ever quarreled.”

“Oh, we have our—” Ponsonby stiffened. “What was that?”

“I said I thought everything was always sweetness and light between you two.” Paul regarded his godfather quizzically. “Why? Did I say something wrong?”

“No. No, it’s just that for a moment there—” Ponsonby hesitated, frowning uncertainly; then he dismissed the interruption with a wave of his hand. “But tell me, what else do they have against Samuel Greatheart?”

“Well, there’s opportunity. Sam says he was in his room from seven o’clock on that evening studying for a physics exam, but even though there are one hundred and fifty other boys in that dorm and Sam knows most of them, he can’t produce a single witness to his being there. On top of which he failed that exam the next day, even though physics is a subject he generally does well in. Of course he blames it on his being upset over his row with Professor Twining.”

“As understandably he would be.”

“Yes, but wouldn’t it be even more understandable if he’d almost killed a man the night before?”

Ponsonby regarded his godson speculatively. “Tell me, Paul, you sound as though you think he’s guilty. Do you?”

Paul Anders leaned forward in his chair, propping his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what to think, Uncle Amos. I want to believe him, and when I talked with him this morning he sounded so darned sincere I couldn’t help but believe him. But then I walked out of that cell and came right up against a deathbed confession. Some detective says, ‘Who did it?’ and Professor Twining says Indian, and it’s the last thing he ever does say. How can I explain that to a jury even if I do believe Sam myself? What sort of defense can I possibly hope to offer?”

“Well, I would certainly look into the whereabouts of those other nineteen Indians. And I would certainly throw Luther Cobb at the jury as a far more likely candidate for murder. And when you consider all the evidence against Cobb — a man with a history of violence, whose fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, who turned up the next day with the victim’s money in his pocket, then lied about how he’d come by it.”

Paul shook his head disconsolately. “That’s all just circumstantial evidence, Uncle Amos. It couldn’t stand up against a deathbed identification.”

Ponsonby snorted. “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Paul grinned. “Say, that’s good. Do you mind if I use it sometime?”

“If you do, be sure to credit our friend Thoreau. That’s another of his gems — from his Journal, I believe.”

Ponsonby realized with a start that the courtroom crowd was stirring, stretching, getting to its feet. “What’s happening?” he asked of no one in particular.

“Recess until ten o’clock tomorrow,” said a man beside him.

Ponsonby glanced at the front of the room. The judge and jury had gone and Paul was seated again at the defense table in a brow-to-brow huddle with his client. “Damn it all!” he thought. “I’ve been woolgathering all through the lad’s cross-examination.”

“Well, you didn’t miss much,” his godson assured him an hour later on Ponsonby’s front porch, cool drinks in hand and the aroma of Mrs. Garvey’s dinner preparations wafting faintly through the screen door.

“Then you couldn’t shake the sergeant’s testimony?” Ponsonby asked.

“No more than I was able to shake the nurse and the orderly. Oh, I got the sergeant to repeat how halting Professor Twining’s delivery was that night, and how hard it was to tell whether he was mumbling words or just gasping for breath. And I managed to emphasize what the sergeant kept calling his ‘dopey expression’ — you know, as though the Professor’s mind had really been somewhere else.

“But that won’t be enough to save Sam. All the County Attorney has to do is point out to the jury what a monstrous coincidence it would be, if Professor Twining was really just mumbling delirious nonsense, that out of the half million words in the English language he just happened to hit on Indian as the last one he ever spoke. And if he wasn’t just mumbling deliriously, what was he more likely trying to say than ‘it was that Indian who hit me and someone ought to make a noose and string him up’ — or something like that.”

“Nonsense! Nicholas would never have been that bloodthirsty. And as for coincidence, if Samuel Greatheart is innocent, then there has to be a coincidence of some sort involved. There virtually always is in a miscarriage of justice — look at those poor devils who’ve gone to prison because they just happened to look like someone else and been unable to account for their whereabouts when that someone else was committing a crime. What are the odds against that occurring? And yet it has, and all too often.

“But I don’t think the coincidence here lies in that last word, Paul; doubtless Nicholas had some reason for saying it, even if we never know what it was. No, I think the coincidence here is that out of sixteen hundred Briarwood students, it just happened to be one of our nineteen Indians who was courting Ann Twining. If Samuel Greatheart were an Oriental or a Caucasian he wouldn’t even be on trial, but he happens to be a Shoshone, and so he is about to be condemned by one unfortunate word.”

“But a last word, Uncle Amos. Maybe you don’t realize the weight a dying man’s words carry with a jury, but it’s far beyond their normal significance, believe me. It’s about as though a jury considers a dying man to be half an angel already, and more or less speaking from two worlds at once.”

“Oh, I recognize the fascination that deathbed utterances hold for the liv—” Ponsonby froze. Suddenly he shouted, “Not two worlds!”

Paul almost dropped his drink. “What the devil—?”

“Not ‘two worlds,’ Paul, but ‘one world’! That’s what Nicholas was trying to say! It has to be, don’t you see? Because the rest of it — I did not and we and quarreled — they all fit so perfectly! My God, what a ninny I’ve been! Going around for months with that young man’s salvation staring me in the face and if it hadn’t been for your chance remark just now I might have overlooked it altogether!”

Both men were on their feet, Ponsonby heading for the door, Paul close on his heels.

“Uncle Amos, what the devil are you talking about?”

“The fact that Nicholas Twining wasn’t replying to those people at his bedside, my boy.” Ponsonby spoke over his shoulder as he led the way into his study. “His thoughts were a century away, dwelling on a man whom he had loved all his life and virtually lived with for the last four years of it. Have you ever written a book, Paul, one that demands exhaustive research? Do you have any idea how completely such a task can consume your every waking thought when you’re deeply involved in it? And, ninny that I am, Ann Twining even mentioned to me one time that her father had just started work on the final chapter of his Life of Thoreau the day he was attacked. And that’s the chapter, don’t you see, that most likely was to tell of Thoreau’s death?”

“Thoreau? Then you mean—?”

“I mean that Nicholas Twining was thinking about Henry David Thoreau! And what more natural than that a man who probably sensed he was dying should let his last thoughts drift back to the dying words of a man whom he had admired in life above all others?”

Ponsonby selected a thick volume from one of his crowded shelves and began hastily thumbing through it. “This is a more popular than a scholarly biography, but all the more reason they should be here. That’s what’s so blasted annoying — I know I’ve read them a hundred times, my boy; they’re both well-known literary anecdotes, two deathbed sallies as memorable in their way as anything Thoreau ever wrote, and — yes, here’s one of them.” And Ponsonby read aloud:

“Shortly before the end, the fiery anti-slavery orator, Parker Pillsbury, visited the sick room and remarked to his dying friend, ‘You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.’ But Thoreau’s characteristic sense of humor had not deserted him, and he replied dryly: ‘One world at a time.’

“Don’t you remember, Paul? — Nurse Gebhorn thought that Nicholas had mumbled some other word in that sentence and not just been gasping for breath. And of course she was right; he was trying to say, One world at a time.

“But I don’t see what that has to do with a… a hanging Indian!”

“And the other anecdote ought to be here, too,” continued Ponsonby. “Yes, here it is.” And again he read aloud:

“As death drew near, his pious Aunt Louisa, a devout Calvinist, asked him if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau’s reply Stands as a fitting epitaph for this questing, rebellious man who had lived all his forty-four years in ‘the infinite expectation of the dawn.’ Said he: ‘I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.’ ”

Ponsonby closed the book with a snap and beamed triumphantly at his godson. “Don’t you see? — it wasn’t Ann that Nicholas was mumbling, as the sergeant testified, nor was it and, as Nurse Gebhorn thought. It was Aunt — I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt — and the orderly was right all along.”

Paul spoke quietly, spacing his words deliberately, as though he were a teacher trying to get through to a retarded child: “But what does all that have to do with a noose and an Indian?”

“Why, it ought to be obvious, my boy. Don’t you recall Nicholas’ next remark? It was, That’s a fallacy; that’s not right. In other words, those two remarks, although both have been presented as Thoreau’s dying words, are not his last words. Which words—”

“Had something to do with a noose and an Indian?”

“Perhaps.”

“That would be great, Uncle Amos! Go on!”

“Go on?”

“Yes. Read me the part about the hanging Indian, for Pete’s sake!”

Ponsonby calmly returned the book to its place on the shelf. “There’s nothing here about that, my boy — what I read was the closing paragraph of this particular biography. As a matter of fact, I don’t recall ever having read a remark about hanging an Indian.”

Paul Anders stared at his godfather. “Do you mean to say you don’t actually know that Thoreau’s last words were something about a noose and an Indian? That you’ve led me on like this, building up my hopes, without really remembering anything of the sort?”

“The fact that I don’t recall having read it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t so, my boy. American literature has never been my specialty. Now I can tell you that William Cowper died asking, ‘What does it signify?’ and that Robert Burns passed away muttering, ‘That damned rascal, Matthew Penn!’ and that the last words spoken by Lord Chesterfield were ‘Give Dayrolles a chair,’ because I happen to have done extensive biographical research on those gentlemen. But I’m familiar with only the broad facts of Thoreau’s life.”

“But great Scott, Uncle Amos, I can’t go before that jury and argue that Professor Twining was obviously thinking about Thoreau’s last words, and since they weren’t this and they weren’t that, they must have been something about hanging an Indian. I’d be laughed out of court!”

“Tut, tut, my boy, don’t carry on so. You ought to know by now that the true measure of an education is not what you can remember, but how adept you are at finding things out. And since Nicholas Twining had obviously learned from some source what Thoreau’s last words actually were, I suggest we start our search in his library. Mrs. Garvey!”

Ponsonby turned to his housekeeper just as she appeared in the doorway to announce dinner. “Put the dinner back in the oven, my good woman, and then phone Ann Twining to say that Paul and I are on our way over. Tell her we’re on the trail of information which may clear her fiancé” — Ponsonby noted the gathering storm on Mrs. Garvey’s brow—” and almost certainly lead to the ultimate incarceration of that black-hearted scoundrel, Luther Cobb!”

“It’s no use, Uncle Amos,” said Paul two hours later. “We’ve been through these books three times, and there’s nothing in any of them about Thoreau’s wanting to hang an Indian — or not wanting to hang one, which would seem more likely from some of the things we’ve read.”

Paul and Ann were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Twining library, surrounded by books on Thoreau, while Ponsonby perched atop his late colleague’s shelf-ladder, scanning the upper shelves for any book they might have overlooked.

Their search had uncovered many facts about Thoreau’s last year of life. They had learned that ten months before his death he had traveled to Minnesota and there for the first time had visited a frontier Indian village; they discovered that in his final weeks he had been working steadily on the manuscript-account of several earlier journeys to the Maine woods, where Indian guides had been among his close companions; they learned that in his last days, in spite of an illness which all knew must soon prove fatal, he had visited many friends and spoken often about his admiration for the Indian people and his indignation at the way the nation had treated them.

They had found the origin of the One world at a time anecdote in the voluminous Journals of Bronson Alcott, and had come upon the source of the I didn’t know we’d quarreled in a slim volume by Edward Emerson, entitled Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend.

But they had found no reference to a noose and an Indian.

“It’s no use,” repeated Paul disconsolately. “We’ve been hunting for something that just doesn’t exist.”

“Nonsense! Consider what we’ve already established about those other two deathbed quotations. Now Bronson Alcott — that would be Louisa May Alcott’s father — and Edward Emerson — Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son — were both personal friends of Thoreau’s, so there’s little doubt that Thoreau did make the remarks they attributed to him. But you will notice that neither account purports to be setting down Thoreau’s last words, nor even to be reporting an incident from the day of his death.”

“Which doesn’t prove anything about what his last words really were.”

“Perhaps not, but—” Ponsonby paused, frowning. “Ann, are you quite certain that we’ve checked all your father’s books on Thoreau? What about the source materials he was actually working with the day he was attacked? Were there no books on his desk or perhaps scattered about this room?”

“There might have been,” said Ann, whose mounting disappointment during the search had been even more evident than Paul’s. “I remember putting some things in a cardboark box and pushing it — yes, there it is.”

Scrambling to her feet, Ann crossed the room and pulled a carton from under her father’s desk. She placed it on the desk, opened it, and lifted out a small pile of books and papers.

The top item was a slim brown volume; Ann glanced at the cover. “Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist,” she read aloud, “by William Ellery Channing.” She handed it to Ponsonby atop his ladder perch. “Who was he?”

“A close friend of Thoreau’s. A fellow poet and fellow maverick who might well have asked Thoreau’s mother or sister to describe his good friend’s final — ahh!”

Ponsonby’s half sigh, half exclamation acted like a magnet on the attention of his companions, but not until he had spent several long tense minutes in silent reading did he finally end their suspense.

“Here we are, children,” he said at last. “Your father had even marked the place, Ann — the book fell open to it in my hand. It’s Channing’s report of Thoreau’s last few moments of life, and the lines we’ve been searching for are these:

“The last sentence he incompletely spoke contained but two distinct words: moose and Indians, showing how fixed in his mind was that relation. Then the world he had so long sung and delighted in faded tranquilly away from his eyes and hearing, till on that beautiful spring morning of May 6th, 1862, it closed on him.”

Long after he had finished reading, the echo of Ponsonby’s voice seemed to linger in the air of the hushed library. At last Paul broke the silence.

“Moose,” he said softly.

“Indians,” whispered Ann.

Gently, Ponsonby closed the book.