Chapter 44

	There is one field beside this stream, Wherein no foot does fall, But yet it beareth in my dream A richer crop than all.
	HENRY THOREAU

The rain had stopped at last, and the sun was out, hot and bright. Tom came back from a trip to the Fulton Box Company in Boston with a load of crates for packing corn, five dozen to a crate. He was stacking them in the loft in the barn. John was helping him. “Boy,” said John, “I sure wish we still had some cider froze from last year. It sure is hot. Boy, I sure am thirsty.”

“We’ll try to make more this year than we did last,” promised Tom. “And we won’t wait for our apples, we’ll get some early drops down from Harvard.”

“Boy, if we just had a good hurricane, then we’d have plenty of drops.”

Tom stopped tossing crates and scowled at John. “Don’t you go tempting fate to destroy our apple crop again. Plenty of drops, plenty of cider, sure, but plenty of money down the drain, plenty of kids that don’t go to college.”

“Well, I love hurricanes anyway.”

“You just go in and wash your mouth out with soap. I’m going to get put the John Deere and harrow that corn stubble in across the way. You go tell Annie. She’s been wanting a ride.” Tom mopped his forehead and unbuttoned his shirt. A little later he was heading the tractor down the dirt road that led past the cider shed and into the cornfield. Beside the road there were daisies suspended in the delicate grass. The sun bore down, and he pulled his visor lower.

Annie straddled his lap and hung onto the big holes in the metal saddle. “What do you harrow the cornstalks in for, Daddy?” she wanted to know.

“What else would you suggest we do with them? We harrow them in and get the dirt turned over, then plant it to rye, and then the rye grows up pretty green before the first snow and gets a good root system and grows some more in the spring. Then we turn it under again. With $2500 a year for fertilizer you’ve got to get all the return from a field that you can.” Tom bounced up and down on the seat and went on grumbling. Running a farm in this day and age was no business for an honest man. Annie stopped listening. She leaned to one side and looked back to watch the big rusty plates of the harrow turn over the ground. One set of disks was curved one way and threw the dirt out, the other set was curved the other way and threw it back in. It was wonderful how nice and smooth and flat it left the ground after churning it up. The dry weedy dusty clods came up dark brown and clean.

Suddenly over the noise of the tractor there was a clatter and rattle as two of the disks jammed and scrabbled at something caught between them. Tom cursed and stopped the tractor. Annie hopped down and looked. She got excited and clapped her hands. “It’s not a rock,” she said. “It’s a gun, a big gun.”

“It’s just a stick,” said Tom, looking over his shoulder.

“No, Daddy, really, it is, it’s a big old gun.” Annie tugged at it, and hurt herself. She hopped around and flapped her hand. Tom sighed and got down to go and look. By gad, Annie was right. It was a gun, an old flintlock, all dirt and rust. Tom stood up and scratched his head. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Just imagine!” said Annie. “An old, old gun buried in our field like it says on the sign on the front of our house! And I saw it first! Can I have it? Please, Daddy?”

Tom bent down again, and began to disentangle the gun from the harrow. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid not. Unless I’m very much mistaken this gun is going to make Mr. Flower very, very happy.”

The gun did indeed make Mr. Flower very happy. It filled him with joy and delight. “Leave it lay!” he chirruped into the telephone. “We’ll send out the photographer and some lab men who’ll know how to clean it up. Holy horsecollar, now we’re getting somewhere!”

“It’s not the musket?” said Homer Kelly.

“You betcher sweet life it is.”

The harrow had scratched it badly, the metal parts were rusted and the wood was mildewed, but Homer recognized at once the lovely long lines of the old fowling piece Ernest Goss had handed around among his guests on the night of April 18th. Bernard Shrubsole cut notches in a couple of cardboard boxes and he and Jimmy lifted the gun into the boxes with the hooks on a pair of coathangers. Then they took it into Boston to the Department of Public Safety, and handed it over. When Mr. Campbell had worked on it, they carried it down to Lieutenant Morrissey in Ballistics. He was delighted with it. He shone a light down the barrel. “Look at that. See all that black? Wasn’t cleaned after the last firing. Didn’t you say Ernest Goss cleaned it after it was fired the night before?”

“We did,” said Homer. “And you’ll notice that the flint is missing.”

“This must be the murder weapon, all right. Here, let’s give her a try.” Lieutenant Morrissey had made some balls from Ernest Goss’s mold. He took one of them out of a drawer, along with a patch cut from a piece of linen, a can of black powder and an oilcan. “There was a backwoods rule about powder. You were supposed to put a ball in your hand and pour a cone of powder over it just enough to cover it, and that was the right charge. And then you pour it in, like this. You were supposed to use bear grease or something on the patch, but I guess 3-in-l is good enough.” He oiled the patch, set the gun stock on the floor, laid the patch across the muzzle with the ball on top of it and pressed it down a little way with his finger. Then he pulled out the ramrod mounted under the barrel and used it to push the ball and patch gently all the way down. “Okay, stand back, here she goes.” He held the long gun up to his shoulder and pointed it into a barrel filled with cotton wadding. There was a great noise, and two puffs of smoke emerged from the powder pan and the muzzle. Lieutenant Morrissey grinned. He set the gun down and groped in the wadding for the ball. Then he brought it up, squinted at it and beckoned them to the other side of the room where there was a comparison microscope. He placed the ball in a holder and put it under one side of the microscope, and stared into the eyepiece for a minute, adjusting the focus and the light. “Here,” he said to Homer noncommittally, “you look.”

Homer looked, and Jimmy looked. “Just a lot of miscellaneous scratches on both of them,” said Jimmy.

“I told you you wouldn’t be able to match up the gun and the ball. You have to have rifling to do that. But, heck, you must be pretty sure this is the gun anyhow, aren’t you? Goss owned a musket, his dying word was ‘musket,’ he was killed with a musket ball, the musket was missing afterwards and here’s a musket that was obviously hidden near his house. What more do you want? And to top it off, this one has a missing flint.”

“I wish that blasted Boy Scout had seen the thing,” said Jimmy. “Look at the size of it. He swore up and down he didn’t see it.”

Mr. Campbell came in then, shaking his head. “No prints. Not a chance. If there were any there to begin with, the wet ground obliterated them all.”

“So it could have been either Charley or Philip,” said Jimmy. “I suppose we could confront Charley with it and look grim as if the thing were crawling with prints and stuck all over with identifying bits of hair and microbes and so on, and see if he loosens up at all.”

“There’s one thing we can be sure of,” said Homer. “Whoever hid that gun in Tom’s field had a sense of history and a feeling for the fitness of things. Tom Hand planted corn in that field every year on April 19th because old Colonel Barrett did it back in 1775. The murderer knew that, and he knew about the muskets Colonel Barrett laid down in the furrows, to hide them from the British. But that could mean either Philip or Charley.”

“Or it could have been Teddy Staples,” said Jimmy.

“Or Tom Hand himself, or Mary Morgan.”

“If you’re going to get ridiculous,” said Jimmy sourly, “why don’t you throw in old Mrs. Bewley for good measure?”