Free Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post Page A

on the table. It was a wonderful hand, like a live thing.
    â€œYou have eyes, monsieur, but the others are as blind men. Did they think that hand could have failed me? Cunning men have made machinery so accurate that you marvel at them; but there was never a machine with the accuracy of the human hand when it is trained as we train it. Monsieur, I could scratch a line on the door behind you with a needle, and with my eyes closed set a knife point into every twist and turn of it. Why, monsieur, there was a straw clinging to Blackford’s coat—a straw that had fallen on him as he passed some horse stall. I marked it as he came up through the crowd, and I split it with the knife.
    â€œAnd now, monsieur?”
    But my uncle stopped him. “Not yet,” he said. “I am concerned about the living and not the dead. If I had thought of the dead only, I should have spoken this day; but I have thought also of the living. What have you done for the child?”
    There came a great tenderness into the old man’s face.
    â€œI have brought it up in love,” he said, “and in honor, and I have got its inheritance for it.”
    He stopped and indicated the pack of letters.
    â€œI was about to burn these when you came in, monsieur, for they have served their purpose. I thought I might need to know Blackford’s hand and I set out to learn it. Not in a day, monsieur, nor a week, like your common forger, and with an untried hand—but in a year, and years—with a hand that obeys me, I went over and overevery letter of every word until I could write the man’s hand, not an imitation of it, monsieur, not that, but the very hand itself—the very hand that Blackford writes with his own fingers. And it was well, for I was able to get the child all that Blackford had, beyond his debts, by a letter that no man could know that Blackford did not write.”
    â€œI knew that he did not write it,” said Abner.
    The old man smiled.
    â€œYou jest, monsieur,” he said; “Blackford himself could not tell the writing from his own. I could not, nor can any living man.”
    â€œThat is true,” replied Abner; “the letter is in Blackford’s hand, as he would have written it with his own fingers. It is no imitation, as you say; it is the very writing of the man, and yet he did not write it, and when I saw it I knew that he did not.”
    The old man’s face was incredulous.
    â€œHow could you know that, monsieur?” he said.
    My uncle took the letter which my father had received out of his pocket and spread it out on the table.
    â€œI will tell you,” he said, “how I knew that Blackford did not write this letter, although it is in his very hand. When my brother Rufus showed me this letter, and I read it, I noticed that there were words misspelled in it. Well, that of itself was nothing for the deaf mute did not always spell correctly. It was the manner in which the words were misspelled. Under the old system, when a deaf mute was taught to write he was taught by the eye; consequently, he writes words as he remembers them to look, and not as he remembers them to sound. His mistakes, then, are mistakes of the eye and not of the ear. And in this he differs from every man who can hear; for the man who can hear, when he is uncertain about the spelling of a word, spells it as it sounds phonetically, using not a letter that looks like the correct one, but a letter that sounds like it—using ‘s’ for ‘c’ and ‘o’ for ‘u’—a thing no deaf mute would ever do in this world, because he does not know what letters sound like. Consequently, when I saw the words in this letter misspelled by sound—when I saw that the person who had written this letter remembered his word as a sound,and by the arrangement of the letters in it was endeavoring to indicate that sound—I knew he could hear.”
    The old man did not reply,