Uncle Sam, Detective

by William Atherton DuPuy

For this special agent of the Department of Justice, mind you, was to take up a piece of work upon which local constables and sheriffs, United States marshals and revenue agents had failed. There was murder at one end of the road he was to travel and the gallows at the other. And Gard was a nondescript youngster who looked less than thirty, neither light nor dark, large nor small—inconspicuous, easily lost in a crowd. The careful observer might have noticed the breadth of brow and the wrinkles that come to the man who thinks, or the tenseness of his slim form that indicated physical fitness. For to be sure, these federal sleuths of the new school are mostly college men, lawyers, expert accountants, as was Gard; but youngsters in whom is to be found the love of a bit of adventure and the steel of a set determination.

And now this slip of a lad was going back into the Cumberlands where the whisky still whispers its secret to the mountaineer; where the revenue agent penetrates at his peril and the Long Tom speaks from the thickets; where the clansman sets what he considers his rights above the law of the land and stands ready to lay his life or that of any who oppose him on the altar he has built. Gard was after a community of moonshiners who had defied all local authority and thrown down the gauntlet to the Federal Government itself. He came alone with a little wicker grip.

"I am looking for a place to board," the special agent told Todd, the livery stable man at Wheeler, the mountain town at which he had stopped off. "I have been clerking in a store in Atlanta and got pretty well run down. The doctor said I ought to stay in the mountains for a month or two."

"How much can you pay?" asked Todd.

"I would like to get it as cheap as five dollars a week," said Gard.

"You can buy a farm up here for five dollars a week," said Todd.

"Well, I want good board where I can get lots of milk to drink and eggs and where I can tramp around and shoot squirrels. Do you know such a place?"

The liveryman was accustomed to driving summer boarders out to the few places where they might stay in the Cumberlands. He sketched these possibilities and told of the location of each. Gard already had the map of the country well in mind and selected the farm near Sam Lunsford's, he being the mountaineer whom the agent most wanted to cultivate.

Todd reviewed the situation as between the mountaineers and the Government as he drove his customer out to the Tenney farm where he was to ask to be put up.