Uncle Sam, Detective

by William Atherton DuPuy

A young mountaineer named Ed Hill maintained an active still high up in the mountains—a virgin still that had never known the desecration of a raid. Hill was high spirited and companionable, unlike most of his neighbors. His was the soul of a poet, a lover of the wilds, a patriot of the mountains. The flame of adventure, the love of danger, the belief in the individual rights of the mountaineer, made him a moving spirit among the men who battled the government.

Ed Hill told the fugitive the whole story of the killing of Tom Reynolds and the shooting of Sam Lunsford. He told of the determination to rid the mountains of Todd, the livery stable man, and to preserve for the men of the Cumberlands the right to do as they chose in their own retreats.

It seemed that of all the men of the mountains who made moonshine whisky, there were but four who were willing to go the limit of spilling the blood of their fellows in resisting the law. Hill was one of these and saw his acts as those of the man who fights for his country. Ty Jones, contrary to the suspicions of Sam Lunsford, always advised against violence. But Jones had a boy of eighteen, a heavy-faced, dull-witted lad, who was possessed of the desire to kill, to be known among his fellows as a bad man. This younger Jones it was who had aimed his father's sawed-off shotgun at Sam Lunsford as that hulking figure of a man swayed back and forth as he rocked the baby that suffered from colic. The patriot Hill, Will Jones the born murderer, a father and son by the name of Hinton, had been the murderers of Tom Reynolds. There were no others who would go so far as to kill to avenge their fancied grievances.

The summer was dragging to its close as the conversational special agent got his information together. The yellow was stealing into the trees of the hillsides when Billy Gard, he whose health had been broken behind the ribbon counter, came back to Tenney's for another few weeks in the open. He wandered into the woods and met the fugitive from the South Carolina jail. The jail bird and the ribbon counter clerk talked long together and when they parted the plans were laid for the nipping off of the men who would murder for their stills.

It was a week later and the quiet of after-midnight rested upon the little mountain town of Wheeler. In such towns there are no all-night industries, no street cars to drone through deserted thoroughfares, not even an arc light to sputter at street crossings. There is but the occasional stamping of a horse in its stall or the baying of a watch dog in answer to the howl of a wolf on the hillside. But murder was planned to take place that night in Wheeler and A. Spaulding Dowling knew all about it.

As the town slept four stealthy figures crept down the trail that cuts across the point of the Hunchback. Soft-footedly, rifles in hand, they passed down a side street beneath the dense shade of giant sycamores. It was but three blocks from the woods to Main street. Reaching this artery of the town, two of the men crouched in the shadow while two others crossed the street and went a block further, turning to the left. Each group then shifted itself a hundred feet to the left and paused again.

So stationed the four men found themselves in front and back of Todd's livery stable. The building itself sat back a little from the street. On the ground floor were the stalls for the horses and the sheds where the wagons were stored. Overhead were bins of corn and hay and a living room where Todd slept that he might always be near his teams. About the whole was a roomy barnyard enclosed by a high board fence. The gates to the outer enclosure were locked, but once past this wall a man would have the run of the whole place.

The mountaineers, two in front and two in the rear of the building, swung themselves to the top of the fence and leaped to the ground inside. Rifles at hip they started to close in on the building. Each party entered at opposite ends of the corridor down the middle through which a wagon might drive. Nothing interfered with their progress and no sound was heard except a sleeping horse occasionally changing feet on the board floor of his stall. Stealthily the four figures gathered in a cluster and turned up the steep stairway that led to the sleeping room of Todd. With every rifle ready for action they pushed open the door. The moon coming in at a window disclosed what seemed to be a sleeping form in the bed. Deliberately the four rifles came to bear upon it. There was a pause and then from the leader came the order:

"Fire!"