The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

THE DOOMDORF MYSTERY by Melville Davisson Post

In Uncle Abner, Melville Davisson Post(1871-1930)created one of the great unforgettable early American detectives. The stories are set in Virginia in the early days of the nineteenth century where Abner is a severe but just upholder of the law. Post was by profession a lawyer, out of which came the idea for his stories about the unscrupulous legal genius Randolph Mason, in The Strange Cases of Randolph Mason (1896). Uncle Abner did not appear until 1911 with the stories collected as Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (1918). Abner had a near puritanical belief in divine justice, which is only too apparent in the following story, perhaps the most inventive of the whole series.

The pioneer was not the only man in the great mountains behind Virginia. Strange aliens drifted in after the Colonial wars. All foreign armies are sprinkled with a cockle of adventurers that take root and remain. They were with Braddock and La Salle, and they rode north out of Mexico after her many empires went to pieces.

I think Doomdorf crossed the seas with Iturbide when that ill-starred adventurer returned to be shot against a wall; but there was no Southern blood in him. He came from some European race remote and barbaric. The evidences were all about him. He was a huge figure of a man, with a black spade beard, broad, thick hands, and square, flat fingers.

He had found a wedge of land between the Crown’s grant to Daniel Davisson and a Washington survey. It was an uncovered triangle not worth the running of the lines; and so, no doubt, was left out, a sheer rock standing up out of the river for a base, and a peak of the mountain rising northward behind it for an apex.

Doomdorf squatted on the rock. He must have brought a belt of gold pieces when he took to his horse, for he hired old Robert Steuart’s slaves and built a stone house on the rock, and he brought the furnishings overland from a frigate in the Chesapeake; and then in the handfuls of earth, wherever a root would hold, he planted the mountain behind his house with peach trees. The gold gave out; but the devil is fertile in resources. Doomdorf built a log still and turned the first fruits of the garden into a hell-brew. The idle and the vicious came with their stone jugs, and violence and riot flowed out.

The government of Virginia was remote and its arm short and feeble; but the men who held the lands west of the mountains against the savages under grants from George, and after that held them against George himself, were efficient and expeditious. They had long patience, but when that failed they went up from their fields and drove the thing before them out of the land, like a scourge of God.

There came a day, then, when my Uncle Abner and Squire Randolph rode through the gap of the mountains to have the thing out with Doomdorf. The work of this brew, which had the odours of Eden and the impulses of the devil in it, could be borne no longer. The drunken Negroes had shot old Duncan’s cattle and burned his haystacks, and the land was on its feet.

They rode alone, but they were worth an army of little men. Randolph was vain and pompous and given over to extravagance of words, but he was a gentleman beneath it, and fear was an alien and a stranger to him. And Abner was the right hand of the land.

It was a day in early summer and the sun lay hot. They crossed through the broken spine of the mountains and trailed along the river in the shade of the great chestnut trees. The road was only a path and the horses went one before the other. It left the river when the rock began to rise and, making a detour through the grove of peach trees, reached the house on the mountain side. Randolph and Abner got down, unsaddled their horses and turned them out to graze, for their business with Doomdorf would not be over in an hour. Then they took a steep path that brought them out on the mountain side of the house.

A man sat on a big red-roan horse in the paved court before the door. He was a gaunt old man. He sat bare-headed, the palms of his hands resting on the pommel of his saddle, his chin sunk in his black stock, his face in retrospection, the wind moving gently his great shock of voluminous white hair. Under him the huge red horse stood with his legs spread out like a horse of stone.

There was no sound. The door to the house was closed; insects moved in the sun; a shadow crept out from the motionless figure, and swarms of yellow butterflies maneuvered like an army.

Abner and Randolph stopped. They knew the tragic figure – a circuit rider of the hills who preached the invective of Isaiah as though he were the mouthpiece of a militant and avenging overlord; as though the government of Virginia were the awful theocracy of the Book of Kings. The horse was dripping with sweat and the man bore the dust and the evidences of a journey on him.

“Bronson,” said Abner, “where is Doomdorf?”

The old man lifted his head and looked down at Abner over the pommel of the saddle.

“‘Surely,’” he said, “‘he covereth his feet in his summer chamber.’”

Abner went over and knocked on the closed door, and presently the white, frightened face of a woman looked out at him. She was a little, faded woman, with fair hair, a broad foreign face, but with the delicate evidences of gentle blood.

Abner repeated his question.

“Where is Doomdorf?”

“Oh, sir,” she answered with a queer lisping accent, “he went to lie down in his south room after his midday meal, as his custom is; and I went to the orchard to gather any fruit that might be ripened.” She hesitated and her voice lisped into a whisper: “He is not come out and I cannot wake him.”

The two men followed her through the hall and up the stairway to the door.

“It is always bolted,” she said, “when he goes to lie down.” And she knocked feebly with the tips of her fingers.

There was no answer and Randolph rattled the doorknob.

“Come out, Doomdorf!” he called in his big, bellowing voice.

There was only silence and the echoes of the words among the rafters. Then Randolph set his shoulder to the door and burst it open.

They went in. The room was flooded with sun from the tall south windows. Doomdorf lay on a couch in a little offset of the room, a great scarlet patch on his bosom and a pool of scarlet on the floor.

The woman stood for a moment staring; then she cried out:

“At last I have killed him!” And she ran like a frightened hare.

The two men closed the door and went over to the couch. Doomdorf had been shot to death. There was a great ragged hole in his waistcoat. They began to look about for the weapon with which the deed had been accomplished, and in a moment found it – a fowling piece lying in two dogwood forks against the wall. The gun had just been fired; there was a freshly exploded paper cap under the hammer.

There was little else in the room – a loom-woven rag carpet on the floor; wooden shutters flung back from the windows; a great oak table, and on it a big, round, glass water bottle, filled to its glass stopper with raw liquor from the still. The stuff was limpid and clear as spring water; and, but for its pungent odor, one would have taken it for God’s brew instead of Doomdorf’s. The sun lay on it and against the wall where hung the weapon that had ejected the dead man out of life.

“Abner,” said Randolf, “this is murder! The woman took that gun down from the wall and shot Doomdorf while he slept.”

Abner was standing by the table, his fingers round his chin.

“Randolph,” he replied, “what brought Bronson here?”

“The same outrages that brought us,” said Randolph. “The mad old circuit rider has been preaching a crusade against Doomdorf far and wide in the hills.”

Abner answered, without taking his fingers from about his chin:

“You think this woman killed Doomdorf? Well, let us go and ask Bronson who killed him.”

They closed the door, leaving the dead man on his couch, and went down into the court.

The old circuit rider had put away his horse and got an ax. He had taken off his coat and pushed his shirtsleeves up over his long elbows. He was on his way to the still to destroy the barrels of liquor. He stopped when the two men came out, and Abner called to him.

“Bronson,” he said, “who killed Doomdorf?”

“I killed him,” replied the old man, and went on toward the still.

Randolph swore under his breath. “By the Almighty,” he said, “everybody couldn’t kill him!”

“Who can tell how many had a hand in it?” replied Abner.

“Two have confessed!” cried Randolph. “Was there perhaps a third? Did you kill him, Abner? And I too? Man, the thing is impossible!”

“The impossible,” replied Abner, “looks here like the truth. Come with me, Randolph, and I will show you a thing more impossible than this.”

They returned through the house and up the stairs to the room. Abner closed the door behind them.

“Look at this bolt,” he said; “it is on the inside and not connected with the lock. How did the one who killed Doomdorf get into this room, since the door was bolted?”

“Through the windows,” replied Randolph.

There were but two windows, facing the south, through which the sun entered. Abner led Randolph to them.

“Look!” he said. “The wall of the house is plumb with the sheer face of the rock. It is a hundred feet to the river and the rock is as smooth as a sheet of glass. But that is not all. Look at these window frames; they are cemented into their casement with dust and they are bound along their edges with cobwebs. These windows have not been opened. How did the assassin enter?”

“The answer is evident,” said Randolph: “The one who killed Doomdorf hid in the room until he was asleep; then he shot him and went out.”

“The explanation is excellent but for one thing,” replied Abner: “How did the assassin bolt the door behind him on the inside of this room after he had gone out?”

Randolph flung out his arms with a hopeless gesture.

“Who knows?” he cried. “Maybe Doomdorf killed himself.”

Abner laughed.

“And after firing a handful of shot into his heart he got up and put the gun back carefully into the forks against the wall!”

“Well,” cried Randolph, “there is one open road out of this mystery. Bronson and this woman say they killed Doomdorf, and if they killed him they surely know how they did it. Let us go down and ask them.”

“In the law court,” replied Abner, “that procedure would be considered sound sense; but we are in God’s court and things are managed there in a somewhat stranger way. Before we go let us find out, if we can, at what hour it was that Doomdorf died.”

He went over and took a big silver watch out of the dead man’s pocket. It was broken by a shot and the hands lay at one hour after noon. He stood for a moment fingering his chin.

“At one o’clock,” he said. “Bronson, I think, was on the road to this place, and the woman was on the mountain among the peach trees.”

Randolph threw back his shoulders.

“Why waste time in a speculation about it, Abner?” he said. “We know who did this thing. Let us go and get the story of it out of their own mouths. Doomdorf died by the hands of either Bronson or this woman.”

“I could better believe it,” replied Abner, “but for the running of a certain awful law.”

“What law?” said Randolph. “Is it a statute of Virginia?”

“It is a statute,” replied Abner, “of an authority somewhat higher. Mark the language of it: ‘He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.’”

He came over and took Randolph by the arm.

“Must! Randolph, did you mark particularly the word ‘must’? It is a mandatory law. There is no room in it for the vicissitudes of chance or fortune. There is no way round that word. Thus, we reap what we sow and nothing else; thus, we receive what we give and nothing else. It is the weapon in our own hands that finally destroys us. You are looking at it now.” And he turned him about so that the table and the weapon and the dead man were before him. “ ‘He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.’ And now,” he said, “let us go and try the method of the law courts. Your faith is in the wisdom of their ways.”

They found the old circuit rider at work in the still, staving in Doomdorf’s liquor casks, splitting the oak heads with his ax.

“Bronson,” said Randolph, “how did you kill Doomdorf?”

The old man stopped and stood leaning on his ax.

“I killed him,” replied the old man, “as Elijah killed the captains of Ahaziah and their fifties. But not by the hand of any man did I pray the Lord God to destroy Doomdorf, but with fire from heaven to destroy him.”

He stood up and extended his arms.

“His hands were full of blood,” he said. “With his abomination from these groves of Baal he stirred up the people to contention, to strife and murder. The widow and the orphan cried to heaven against him. ‘I will surely hear their cry,’ is the promise written in the Book. The land was weary of him; and I prayed the Lord God to destroy him with fire from heaven, as he destroyed the Princes of Gomorrah in their palaces!”

Randolph made a gesture as of one who dismisses the impossible, but Abner’s face took on a deep, strange look.

“With fire from heaven!” he repeated slowly to himself. Then he asked a question. “A little while ago,” he said, “when we came, I asked you where Doomdorf was, and you answered me in the language of the third chapter of the Book of Judges. Why did you answer me like that, Bronson? – ‘Surely he covereth his feet in his summer chamber.’”

“The woman told me that he had not come down from the room where he had gone up to sleep,” replied the old man, “and that the door was locked. And then I knew that he was dead in his summer chamber like Eglon, King of Moab.”

He extended his arm toward the south.

“I came here from the Great Valley,” he said, “to cut down these groves of Baal and to empty out this abomination; but I did not know that the Lord had heard my prayer and visited His wrath on Doomdorf until I was come up into these mountains to his door. When the woman spoke I knew it.” And he went away to his horse, leaving the ax among the ruined barrels.

Randolph interrupted.

“Come, Abner,” he said; “this is wasted time. Bronson did not kill Doomdorf.”

Abner answered slowly in his deep, level voice:

“Do you realize, Randolph, how Doomdorf died?”

“Not by fire from heaven, at any rate,” said Randolph.

“Randolph,” replied Abner, “are you sure?”

“Abner,” cried Randolph, “you are pleased to jest, but I am in deadly earnest. A crime has been done here against the state. I am an officer of justice and I propose to discover the assassin if I can.”

He walked away toward the house and Abner followed, his hands behind him and his great shoulders thrown loosely forward, with a grim smile about his mouth.

“It is no use to talk with the mad old preacher,” Randolph went on. “Let him empty out the liquor and ride away. I won’t issue a warrant against him. Prayer may be a handy implement to do a murder with, Abner, but it is not a deadly weapon under the statutes of Virginia. Doomdorf was dead when old Bronson got here with his Scriptural jargon. This woman killed Doomdorf. I shall put her to an inquisition.”

“As you like,” replied Abner. “Your faith remains in the methods of the law courts.”

“Do you know of any better methods?” said Randolph.

“Perhaps,” replied Abner, “when you have finished.”

Night had entered the valley. The two men went into the house and set about preparing the corpse for burial. They got candles, and made a coffin, and put Doomdorf in it, and straightened out his limbs, and folded his arms across his shot-out heart. Then they set the coffin on benches in the hall.

They kindled a fire in the dining room and sat down before it, with the door open and the red firelight shining through on the dead man’s narrow, everlasting house. The woman had put some cold meat, a golden cheese and a loaf on the table. They did not see her, but they heard her moving about the house; and finally, on the gravel court outside, her step and the whinny of a horse. Then she came in, dressed as for a journey. Randolph sprang up.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“To the sea and a ship,” replied the woman. Then she indicated the hall with a gesture. “He is dead and I am free.”

There was a sudden illumination in her face. Randolph took a step toward her. His voice was big and harsh.

“Who killed Doomdorf?” he cried.

“I killed him,” replied the woman. “It was fair!”

“Fair!” echoed the justice. “What do you mean by that?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders and put out her hands with a foreign gesture.

“I remember an old, old man sitting against a sunny wall, and a little girl, and one who came and talked a long time with the old man, while the little girl plucked yellow flowers out of the grass and put them into her hair. Then finally the stranger gave the old man a gold chain and took the little girl away.” She flung out her hands. “Oh, it was fair to kill him!” She looked up with a queer, pathetic smile.

“The old man will be gone by now,” she said; “but I shall perhaps find the wall there, with the sun on it, and the yellow flowers in the grass. And now, may I go?”

It is a law of the story-teller’s art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.

Randolph got up and walked about the floor. He was a justice of the peace in a day when that office was filled only by the landed gentry, after the English fashion; and the obligations of the law were strong on him. If he should take liberties with the letter of it, how could the weak and the evil be made to hold it in respect? Here was this woman before him a confessed assassin. Could he let her go?

Abner sat unmoving by the hearth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his palm propping up his jaw, his face clouded in deep lines. Randolph was consumed with vanity and the weakness of ostentation, but he shouldered his duties for himself. Presently he stopped and looked at the woman, wan, faded like some prisoner of legend escaped out of fabled dungeons into the sun.

The firelight flickered past her to the box on the benches in the hall, and the vast, inscrutable justice of heaven entered and overcame him.

“Yes,” he said. “Go! There is no jury in Virginia that would hold a woman for shooting a beast like that.” And he thrust out his arm, with the fingers extended toward the dead man.

The woman made a little awkward curtsy.

“I thank you, sir.” Then she hesitated and lisped, “But I have not shoot him.”

“Not shoot him!” cried Randolph. “Why, the man’s heart is riddled!”

“Yes, sir,” she said simply, like a child. “I kill him, but have not shoot him.”

Randolph took two long strides toward the woman.

“Not shoot him!” he repeated. “How then, in the name of heaven, did you kill Doomdorf?” And his big voice filled the empty places of the room.

“I will show you, sir,” she said.

She turned and went away into the house. Presently she returned with something folded up in a linen towel. She put it on the table between the loaf of bread and the yellow cheese.

Randolph stood over the table, and the woman’s deft fingers undid the towel from round its deadly contents; and presently the thing lay there uncovered.

It was a little crude model of a human figure done in wax with a needle thrust through the bosom.

Randolph stood up with a great intake of the breath.

“Magic! By the eternal!”

“Yes, sir,” the woman explained, in her voice and manner of a child. “I have try to kill him many times – oh, very many times! – with witch words which I have remember; but always they fail. Then, at last, I make him in wax, and I put a needle through his heart; and I kill him very quickly.’

It was as clear as daylight, even to Randolph, that the woman was innocent. Her little harmless magic was the pathetic effort of a child to kill a dragon. He hesitated a moment before he spoke, and then he decided like the gentleman he was. If it helped the child to believe that her enchanted straw had slain the monster – well, he would let her believe it.

“And now, sir, may I go?”

Randolph looked at the woman in a sort of wonder.

“Are you not afraid,” he said, “of the night and the mountains, and the long road?”

“Oh no, sir,” she replied simply. “The good God will be everywhere now.”

It was an awful commentary on the dead man – that this strange half-child believed that all the evil in the world had gone out with him; that now that he was dead, the sunlight of heaven would fill every nook and corner.

It was not a faith that either of the two men wished to shatter, and they let her go. It would be daylight presently and the road through the mountains to the Chesapeake was open.

Randolph came back to the fireside after he had helped her into the saddle, and sat down. He tapped on the hearth for some time idly with the iron poker; and then finally he spoke.

“This is the strangest thing that ever happened,” he said. “Here’s a mad old preacher who thinks that he killed Doomdorf with fire from Heaven, like Elijah the Tishbite; and here is a simple child of a woman who thinks she killed him with a piece of magic of the Middle Ages – each as innocent of his death as I am. And, yet, by the eternal, the beast is dead!”

He drummed on the hearth with the poker, lifting it up and letting it drop through the hollow of his fingers.

“Somebody shot Doomdorf. But who? And how did he get into and out of that shut-up room? The assassin that killed Doomdorf must have gotten into the room to kill him. Now, how did he get in?” He spoke as to himself; but my uncle sitting across the hearth replied:

“Through the window.”

“Through the window!” echoed Randolph. “Why, man, you yourself showed me that the window had not been opened, and the precipice below it a fly could hardly climb. Do you tell me now that the window was opened?”

“No,” said Abner, “it was never opened.”

Randolph got on his feet.

“Abner,” he cried, “are you saying that the one who killed Doomdorf climbed the sheer wall and got in through a closed window, without disturbing the dust or the cobwebs on the window frame?”

My uncle looked Randolph in the face.

“The murderer of Doomdorf did even more,” he said. “That assassin not only climbed the face of that precipice and got in through the closed window, but he shot Doomdorf to death and got out again through the closed window without leaving a single track or trace behind, and without disturbing a grain of dust or a thread of a cobweb.”

Randolph swore a great oath.

“The thing is impossible!” he cried. “Men are not killed today in Virginia by black art or a curse of God.”

“By black art, no,” replied Abner; “but by the curse of God, yes. I think they are.”

Randolph drove his clenched right hand into the palm of his left.

“By the eternal!” he cried. “I would like to see the assassin who could do a murder like this, whether he be an imp from the pit or an angel out of Heaven.”

“Very well,” replied Abner, undisturbed. “When he comes back tomorrow I will show you the assassin who killed Doomdorf.”

When day broke they dug a grave and buried the dead man against the mountain among his peach trees. It was noon when that work was ended. Abner threw down his spade and looked up at the sun.

“Randolph,” he said, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. He is on the way here.”

And it was a strange ambush that he laid. When they were come again into the chamber where Doomdorf died he bolted the door; then he loaded the fowling piece and put it carefully back on its rack against the wall. After that he did another curious thing: He took the blood-stained coat, which they had stripped off the dead man when they had prepared his body for the earth, put a pillow in it and laid it on the couch precisely where Doomdorf had slept. And while he did these things Randolph stood in wonder and Abner talked:

“Look you, Randolph… We will trick the murderer… We will catch him in the act.”

Then he went over and took the puzzled justice by the arm.

“Watch!” he said. “The assassin is coming along the wall!”

But Randolph heard nothing, saw nothing. Only the sun entered. Abner’s hand tightened on his arm.

“It is here! Look!” And he pointed to the wall.

Randolph, following the extended finger, saw a tiny brilliant disk of light moving slowly up the wall toward the lock of the fowling piece. Abner’s hand became a vice and his voice rang as over metal.

“ ‘He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.’ It is the water bottle, full of Doomdorf’s liquid, focusing the sun… And look, Randolph, how Bronson’s prayer was answered!”

The tiny disk of light travelled on the plate of the lock.

“It is fire from heaven!”

The words rang above the roar of the fowling piece, and Randolph saw the dead man’s coat leap up on the couch, riddled by the shot. The gun, in its natural position on the rack, pointed to the couch standing at the end of the chamber, beyond the offset of the wall, and the focused sun had exploded the percussion cap.

Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended.

“It is a world,” he said, “filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!”

“It is a world,” replied Abner, “filled with the mysterious justice of God!”