Page:The Post-Mortem Murder by Sinclair Lewis.djvu/17

Rh Williams of Kennuit whom Jason had often trounced. I wished that he had trounced him oftener and more roundly. The Reverend Abner had hurled Jason out of his church. AH this would naturally institute a feud between Jason and the Williamses. There might have been additional causes, perchance rivalry for a girl.

Well! The Reverend Peter Williams's letter to Edgerton was type-written. That modernity would indicate, in a village parson, a man not over forty years old. Was it not logical to guess that Peter Williams of Colorado was the grandson of Peter Williams of Kennuit, and that he had utilized information long possessed by the whole tribe of the Williamses to destroy his grandsire's enemy, Jason?

By dawn I was on a way-train; in the afternoon of the next day I was in Yancey, Colorado.

I found the Renewalist parsonage, residence of the Reverend Peter Williams, to be a small, dun-colored cottage on a hill-crest. I strode thither, vigorous with rage. I knocked. I faced a blank Teutonic maid. I demanded to see Mr. Williams.

I was admitted to his rustic study. I saw a man not of forty, as his letter had suggested, but astoundingly old, an ancient dominie, as sturdy as a bison, with a bursting immensity of white beard. He was sitting in a hollowed rocker by the stove.

"Well?" said he.

"Is this the Reverend Peter Williams?"

"It be."

"May I sit down?"

"You can."

I sat calmly in a small, mean chair. My rage was sated by perceiving that I had to deal not with any grandson of Jason's foe, but with the actual original Peter Williams himself! I was beholding one who had been honored by the fists of Jason Sanders. He was too precious a serpent not to draw him with cunning. Filially, I pursued:

"I was told—I once spent a summer on Cape Cod—"

"Who are you, young man?"

"Smith, William Smith. I am a—traveling salesman."

"Well, well, let's have it"

"I was told you came from the Cape—from Kennuit,"

"Who told ye?"

"Really, I can't seem for the moment to remember."

"Well, what of it?"

"I just wondered if you were n't the son of the Reverend Abner Williams who used to be pastor in Kennuit way back about 1840."

"I be. I am the son in the spirit of that man of holiness."

Cautiously, oh, so cautiously, simulating veneration, I hinted;

"Then you must have known this fellow I've been reading about; this Jason—what was it?—Sandwich?"

"Jason Sanders. Yes, sir, I knew him well, too well. A viler wretch never lived. A wine-bibber, a man of wrath, blind to the inner grace, he was all that I seek to destroy." Williams's voice loomed like a cathedral service. I hated him, yet I was impressed. I ventured:

"One thing I've often wondered. They say this Sanders fellow did n't really die in Greece. I wonder when and where he did die."

The old man was laughing; he was wrinkling his eyes at me; he was shaking.