Page:Post - Uncle Abner (Appleton, 1918).djvu/315

Uncle Abner brand follow. Held upside down, the brand was below the wound."

A deepening wonder came into the old man's ironical face.

"How did the creature die, then, if I missed him?"

Abner took up the weapon on the arm of Randolph's chair.

"The dead man did not shoot in Mansfield's fantastic duel," he said. "Nevertheless this pistol has been fired. And observe there is a smeared blood-stain on the sharp edges of the barrel. I think I know what happened.

"The madman with his pistol, overwrought, struggled in the cabin yonder to make himself a 'sacrifice of blood' and so bring on this war. Someone resisted his mad act—some one who seized the barrel of the pistol and in this struggle also got a wounded hand. Who in that cabin had a wounded hand, Randolph?"

"By the living God!" cried the Justice of the Peace. "The woman who plaited thorns! It was a blind to cover her injured hand!"

Abner looked out across the great meadows at a tiny figure far off, fading into the twilight of the distant road that led toward the Ohio.

"To cover her injured hand," he echoed, "and also, perhaps, who knows, to symbolize the dead man's mission, as she knew he saw it! The heart of a woman is the deepest of all God's riddles!" 302