Part 42

“And after that,” said my father, “what happened?”

The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter laugh.

“After that,” he answered, “we saw the real man in my brother David, as my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned thief and fugitive.”

At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness. The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face. My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech. But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.

“He has gone so far,” she said, “let him go on to the end. Let him omit no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say.”

Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He passed the girl and addressed my father.

“You will recall the details of that robbery,” he said in his complacent, piping voice. “My brother David had married a wife, like the guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow money.”

He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and across the hall.

“It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up in unmanageable anger. He damned me with reproaches, said I had stolen his inheritance, poisoned his father's mind against him and slipped into the house and lands. 'Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I was firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened.”

The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the table.

“There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room. It was an old piece with drawers below and glass doors above. These doors had not been opened for many years, for there was nothing on the shelves behind them--one could see that--except some rows of the little wooden boxes that indigo used to be sold in at the country stores.”

The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story precisely in relation.

“I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My brother David was a great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as he gesticulated by the hearth, his elbow crashed through the glass door of this secretary; the indigo boxes fell, burst open on the floor, and a hidden store of my father's money was revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!”

He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.

“I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at a distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother leaped on me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the heart, gathered up the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak the negroes found me on the floor, unconscious. Then you came, Pendleton. The negroes had washed up the litter from the hearth where the indigo about the coins in the boxes had been shaken out.”

My father interrupted:

“The negroes said the floor had been scrubbed when they found you.”

“They were drunk,” continued the hunchback with no concern. “And, does one hold a drunken negro to his fact? But you saw for yourself the wooden boxes, round, three inches high, with tin lids, and of a diameter to hold a stack of golden eagles, and you saw the indigo still sticking about the sides of these boxes where the coins had lain.”

“I did,” replied my father. “I observed it carefully, for I thought the gold pieces might turn up sometime, and the blue indigo stain might be on them when they first appeared.”

Dillworth leaned far back in his chair, his legs tangled under him, his eyes on my father, in reflection. Finally he spoke.

“You are far-sighted,” he said.

“Or God is,” replied my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.

The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.

“To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,” continued my father, “the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look, Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled edge you can scrape off the indigo!”

The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.

“The coins appear,” he said. “My brother David must be in Baltimore behind this suit.”

“He is not in Baltimore,” said my father.

“Perhaps you know where he is,” cried the hunchback, “since you speak with such authority.”