Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries
Uncle Abner is a sturdy mountaineer who helps to solve the mysteries tragedies and crimes which occur in the Virginia mountains where he lives. There are eighteen short stories which have appeared in magazines at various times.
ps find the wall there, with the sun on it, and the yellow flowers in the grass. And now, may I go?"
It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.
Randolph got up and walked about the floor. He was a justice of the peace in a day when that office was filled only by the landed gentry, after the English fashion; and the obligations of the law were strong on him. If he should take liberties with the letter of it, how could the weak and the evil be made to hold it in respect? Here was this woman before him a confessed assassin. Could he let her go?
Abner sat unmoving by the hearth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his palm propping up his jaw, his face clouded in deep lines. Randolph was consumed with vanity and the weakness of ostentation, but he shouldered his duties for himself. Presently he stopped and looked at the woman, wan, faded like some prisoner of legend escaped out of
