PAST: TENSE
What more fitting for this Bicentennial Year than a story from the pre-Revolutionary era of our nation? A story with a locked-room murder, a new and fresh McGuffin, a period background impeccably researched, a nice approximation of the rhythms of authentic colonial speech, and in Captain Cork, perhaps (unless we count one of James Fenimore Cooper’s characters) America’s earliest fictional sleuth. S. S. Rafferty is the pen name of an ebullient Irish-American transplanted from his native New England to the crumbling purlieus of New York City. He has been a professional publicist and a lifelong amateur historian whose specialty is those halcyon days when the United States did not stretch from sea to shining sea, but merely gleamed in the collective eye of thirteen lusty British colonies along our eastern seaboard. - J.G.
It was the first time in my remembrance that Captain Cork and I were abroad in these Colonies without it costing him money for expenses, food, and travel. Squire Norman Delaney had written several times, urging a visit to his “ranch,” as he called it, in the Rhode Island Colony.
Cork accepted Delaney’s bidding because he loves good food and a chance to talk to an expert in any field. The Squire was a jocose Irishman with a plump wife and seven brawny sons who operated the ranch. This gave the Squire the leisure he required for the gentlemanly arts, with time left over for such minor municipal duties as keeping the peace between the Indians beyond the tree line and the frontier farmers.
The last about Indian affairs reminds me that I have forgotten to mention Tunxis, which is not easy to do. Tunxis is a tamed Quinnipiac, whose main employment is to serve as the Captain’s shadow, even when the sun is not out. He goes everywhere with us. On the few occasions he has spoken to me, it has been in perfect English, but he is always jabbering away to Cork in aborigine. This usually leaves me in the dark about many matters, but I have learned to live with it. Just as I have learned to accept the fact that Tunxis will not sleep indoors at any time and that he takes a daily swim, even in mid-winter, which is a sight to shiver your liver. Needless to say, Tunxis was also a guest at Delaney’s ranch-an outdoor guest by choice.
It was our third evening of relaxation at the ranch. We had supped well on a delicious bear’s paw sauced in cranberries, and had settled in for a cozy October night’s conversation with pipes and bowl and glasses of usquebaugh, a Scotch-Irish corn liquor as potent as the Captain’s own concoction, Apple Knock. I sat back and listened to these two fertile minds run the gamut of politics, enterprise, soldiering, women, and finally, as with all stout hearts well warmed by liquor, of philosophy.
“It is well to talk of good and evil,” the Squire said, trickling the smoke from aside his clay stem, “but it’s another thing to control it. Take crime, for example. Much of it in these Colonies is undetectable. I wouldn’t hazard to guess how many culprits have committed foul deeds along this frontier and had them entered in life’s ledger as accidents—people lost on the trail or taken by Indians. What stands in the criminal’s way in these rude climes, I ask you, sir?”
“I do,” Cork said. And he said it without pride or prejudice. “If all of us do in theory, some of us must do in practice.”
I was thinking “practice and no profit” when Madame Delaney entered the parlour and announced a Mr. Goodman Stemple. It was prophetic that the discussion of the theory of crime should be interrupted by the reality of it. Stemple was a split rail of a man, made all the coarser by his buckskins and moccasins. But his back-country appearance was belied by his educated speech. Although he was obviously agitated, he had himself under control, and addressed himself to the Squire. His tone was cool, but his tale was horrifying.
“It’s a scalping, Squire, right in my own home—my own future son-in-law. There’s talk among the trappers and frontier folk about raising a punitive expedition against the Tedodas, and I’m afraid the talk is getting out of hand.”
I must say I admired Delaney’s ability to sustain a shock and to rebound from it in a logical state. Indian uprisings were considered a thing of the past in these parts, a dark, bloody thing long forgotten.
“Let’s have the details,” the Squire said, bidding Stemple to a chair. He first introduced the Captain and myself, and the flicker in the frontiersman’s eyes at Cork’s name was an unspoken awareness of my employer’s reputation.
As it turned out, Goodman Stemple was no light under a bushel in his own right. He was the owner of Stemple’s Redoubt, a prosperous trading post that serviced upcountry trappers and farmers in barter, or truck, as it is called.
Although the Redoubt flourished and Stemple’s family grew, his children were all female. Eight daughters and not one son. It was this dilemma that had led to the scalping.
Stemple’s eldest daughter, Faith, was, at 18, beyond average marrying age, but her father had steadfastly refused offers for her hand from local farmers and woodsmen. Since he was without a male heir and was likely to remain so, he wanted his affairs to pass to a son-in-law of some brainpower.
His wishes seemed hopeless, however, until the arrival of Donald Greenspawn, the son of a distant cousin who had settled and fared well in the Maryland Colony. Greenspawn brought with him a letter from his father, which explained in vague terms that the young man had gotten into a bit of trouble in the South, and that a new start in the North was advisable.
As Stemple saw it, one father’s misfortune was another’s gain, for Stemple planned to marry off Faith to the newcomer. The trader admitted to us that Greenspawn indeed had some faults. Like many of his kind, he was a dandy, with a superior attitude which did not sit well with Stemple’s customers, but Stemple felt that time would temper the situation.
In the two months that Greenspawn had been at the Redoubt, there had been several problems with the Tedoda tribe, whose medicine man, Shellon, had accused the Southerner of short-counting pelts. This Stemple ignored, since he too had had run-ins with Shellon from time to time.
With this background, the trader brought us to the night of the tragedy, which proved to be more mysterious than we first had suspected. Greenspawn had been killed and scalped in a closed room, and the only person who could have done it was Faith Stemple herself—or an Indian who could walk through walls. Either conclusion was patently ridiculous, but no other was in the offing.
Just two days before his death, Greenspawn had agreed to take Faith in marriage. As is the custom, a period of courtship was begun, which, of course, included bundling. Now I must interpolate here that bundling is often misunderstood at home in England. Lascivious minds might smirk at the idea of an unmarried couple sharing a bed, with only a wide wooden board between them. However, the custom is quite practical and innocent.
Since the couples are occupied at chores all day, there is left only nightfall for private conversation. Cabins on the frontier usually have only one fireplace, in the main room, and that is reserved for the parents. Small children are tucked into unheated attics, and the only place left for an affianced couple was an unheated side room. Thus, on these cold winter nights, it was logical to send Faith and Greenspawn to bundle, fully clothed and protected from temptation by the bundling board and by Providence.
On the eve of the tragedy, the trader went on, a certain Vicar Johnson was visiting the Stemples and was asked to spend the night before continuing his journey north. He accepted, and was bedded down in the main room on a pallet just outside the room where Faith and Greenspawn had bundled. The Vicar, it so happened, was stricken with gumboils, and, unable to sleep, spent the night reading a volume of Cotton Mather’s sermons by the light of the dying embers in the fireplace. This good man of the cloth could answer that no one entered or left the side room all night save Faith and Donald.
“And yet, by Moses, gentlemen, when my daughter woke, there was Donald Greenspawn dead in his side of the bed, his head stove in, and his scalp gone.” Stemple’s composure failed as he spoke, and Delaney quickly poured another usquebaugh and bid him to quaff it. “Thank you, sir,” he said, tossing it back to his gullet. “There he was, all bloody pated and covered with gold dust.”
“Gold dust!” Cork sprang from his chair.
“Yes, Captain, gold dust. All over his chest, the bed, and across the floor to the north wall. It was as if some spirit from the nether world had entered, done the foul deed, then left a trail of lucre behind him. It could only have been Indian magic, I swear. My little Faith would not harm a flea, much less scalp the man she was betrothed to.”
“Astounding, eh, Cork?” the Squire said, relighting his pipe. “What passes for astounding is often merely curious.”
“You parry in the adjectival, Captain. If it’s Indian trouble, I don’t like it.”
The comfortable appointments of the Delaney domicile were but a memory after twelve hours in the saddle. From long before sunup to almost dusk we had ridden through a panorama of this American country. We had left the beach and pushed inland, past well plotted farms and villages and beyond into rude woods pocked with oasis-like clearings where hearty tillers of soil had thrown down the gauntlet to Nature.
As our journey had progressed, the woods thickened, the trails thinned, and I bad the ominous feeling that I was riding closer and closer to the unknown. Finally, we broke through a cluster of elms to find ourselves in touch again with humankind. Ahead was the Redoubt, enclosed by a 12-foot-high stockade. Over its huge gate was a weather-worn, hand-painted sign that read:
STEMPLE’ S
GOODS AND WARES
FOR CASH OR TRUCK
THAT WILL ANSWER
Within the main enclosure was a large building and several smaller ones, all of log and mud-chinking construction. The large building, which served as Stemple’s home, was a one-and-a-half-story house with a sloped roof wing attached. The wing was windowless, and I assumed it was behind these solid walls where Donald Greenspawn had met his Maker.
As we rode into the enclosure of the stockade, we saw a cluster of thirty or forty men milling around one of the outbuildings which served as the trading post. They were woodsmen and farmers, all armed to the teeth with steel muskets and powder horns. The sight of Squire Delaney brought them forward as we dismounted.
“It was the militia you shoulda brung, Squire,” said one of them, a bearded man with a tomahawk at his belt. “Them Tedodas don’t need a talkin’ to, just a good lickin’.” His statement brought grunts of approval from the group.
“Let’s not get a lather up before we see what the trouble is, Delly Tremont, and that goes for the lot of you.” The Squire continued with his chiding which was proving to be a fine piece of diplomacy, when I noticed Cork disappear through the door of the main house. Withdrawing from the group as inconspicuously as I could, I followed him and entered what was the main room of the Stemple abode.
It was not unlike the rooms in other backwoods cabins. To the left there was a dining board, and to the right several chairs were scattered near the fire. Two women sat holding each other’s hands, while a man read to them from the Good Book. I had no trouble deducing that these were Goodwife Stemple, her daughter Faith, and the Vicar Johnson, although the latter startled me. I had expected a wizened old clergyman, infirm from gumboils, and yet here was a strikingly handsome youth no more than two or three years out of Divinity School. Goodwife Stemple’s head was bowed at the holy words, but Faith looked straight into the Vicar’s face, as if drawing warmth from his aesthetic countenance.
An open door to the far right led us into the murder chamber, where Cork became busy examining the body, and Tunxis prowled around on all fours, like a bloodhound.
The sight of Donald Greenspawn in death was not pleasant. But even had he been lying there alive and unwounded, I would have been taken aback.
Where Stemple had led us, or at least me, to believe that Greenspawn was a lad, such was not the case. Despite his disfiguration, I could see that he was a grown man in his late thirties. His body, now rigid in death, had in life been dissipated and flaccid.
While I stood mutely in the background, Cork directed his attention to the gold dust on the earthen floor. He fingered it for a few seconds and then said something to Tunxis in aborigine. The Indian nodded and left the room. I swear by heaven I am going to learn Indian talk one of these days and surprise the two of them. But Indian talk or not, I had some suspicions of my own.
“Perhaps we had better examine someone to see if he really has gumboils,” I said slyly to the Captain.
“Excellent idea, Oaks,” he responded. “Perhaps I could get the Vicar to sing us a psalm or two while you peek into his mouth.”
I knew he was jibbing me, but I let it pass. I thought at the moment that he was a bit ruffled that his own yeoman had so quickly come to the heart of the matter.
Cork left the bundling chamber and strode across the main room without stopping, until he was outside the house. And as always, I was right behind him.
The Squire’s early diplomacy was eroding into anger as he held off the verbal attacks of the countrymen. The mob quieted, however, as Cork walked into its midst. Most groups do, because a six-foot-six giant with a grandee’s barba and a plumed Cavalier’s hat always commands attention.
“Goodman Stemple,” he asked the trader in a loud voice, ‘‘who among these gathered here has ever asked for your daughter’s hand?”
There were groans and a giggle or two from the group. “Practically every man Jack of them, Captain. Jeb Howard there, and his brother Pete, Win Goulding and Tappins here. Just about everyone, even old Delly Tremont.” As Stemple pointed to the bearded man, hoots were heard from the rest. Tremont did not like it and gripped his musket as if to menace one and all.
“Seems to be you’re all turned mighty merry when we got murderin’ Injuns about,” he said.
“You are right, Mr. Tremont,” said the Captain. “This is no time for jollity. You look like a man who knows his way with the redman, Tremont.”
“He should,” Stemple said. “That’s how he got his name. Lived with the Delawares for five years, didn’t you, Delly? Best trapper in these parts.”
The bearded man relaxed a bit under the flattery and Cork went on, “The Delawares! Well, my compliments, sir. You learned a great deal along that great river’s banks, did you not? I’ll wager you are quite a fisherman, Tremont.”
It all happened so quickly that it still boggles my mind to reconstruct the scene. As Cork talked, I didn’t notice Tremont’s trigger finger, but as he swung to fire on the Captain, Tunxis’s knife smashed into Tremont’s chest, deflecting the muzzle blast to the ground. I later estimated that the Indian had hit his target from at least twenty feet away.
“Tremont’s method was obvious from the first,” Cork told us later that day as Goodwife Stemple served us a piping-hot corn pudding and generous cups of hard cider. “He was enraged at the thought of being spurned by Faith, and sought vengeance on Greenspawn.”
“But such an elaborate plan for a crude backwoodsman!”
“I don’t think it was a plan, Squire. It was luck and everyone’s ignorance that brought the Indian scalping into it. Tremont lurked about that night, and when all was quiet, he removed some of the dry mud chinking from between the logs of the north wall. It could easily be replaced and be dry by morning. Using an arrow attached to a tag line, he killed his victim as the Delawares catch fish, harpoon fashion.
“But when he tugged his line to retrieve the arrow from Greenspawn’s head, he found he had caught more than death. You see, a close examination of Greenspawn showed me that this vain man was somewhat bald, and wore a wig piece, as is fashionable on the Continent. When the arrow was retrieved, the wig came with it, hence, the look of a scalping.”
“And the gold dust, Captain?” Stemple asked.
“I suggest that you examine your strongbox, Stemple. I think you’ll find that your coins have been cleverly shaved since Greenspawn’s arrival. And what better place to hide his ill-gotten gains than in the lining of a wig nobody even suspected he wore.”