Merchants of Menace Page 14

  “I’ll make it snappy,” said Martha Clarke briskly. “I did what I did the way I did it because, first, I had to make sure I could see Mr. Patch, Baroness Tchek, and Professor Shaw to­day. Second, because I may need a detective before I’m through… Third,” she added, almost absently, “because I’m pretty desperate.

  “My name is Martha Clarke. My father Tobias is a farmer. Our farm lies just south of Philadelphia, it was built by a Clarke in 1761, and it’s been in our family ever since. I won’t go gooey on you. We’re broke, and there’s a mortgage. Unless Papa and I can raise six thousand dollars in the next couple of weeks, we lose the old homestead.”

  Professor Shaw looked vague. But the Baroness said: “Deplorable, Miss Clarke. Now if I’m to run my auction this afternoon—”

  And James Ezekiel Patch grumbled: ’’If it’s money you want, young woman—”

  “Certainly it’s money I want. But I have something to sell.”

  “Ah!” said the Baroness.

  “Oh?” said the Professor.

  “Hm,” said the antiquarian.

  Mr. Queen said nothing, and Miss Porter zealously chewed the end of her pencil.

  “The other day, while I was cleaning out the attic, I found an old book.”

  “Well, now,” said Professor Shaw indulgently. “An old book, eh?”

  “It’s called The Diary of Simeon Clarke. Simeon Clarke was Papa’s great-great-great-something or other. His Diary was privately printed in 1792 in Philadelphia, Professor, by a second cousin of his, Jonathan, who was in the printing business there.”

  “Jonathan Clarke. The Diary of Simeon Clarke,” mumbled the cadaverous book collector. “I don’t believe I know either, Miss Clarke. Have you...?”

  Martha Clarke carefully unclasped a large Manila envelope and drew forth a single yellowed sheet of badly printed paper. “The title page was loose, so I brought it along.”

  Professor Shaw silently examined Miss Clarke’s exhibit, and Ellery got up to squint at it.

  “Of course,” said the Professor after a long scrutiny, in which he held the sheet up to the light, peered apparently at individual characters, and performed other mysterious rites, “mere age doesn’t connote rarity, nor does rarity of itself constitute value. And while this page looks genuine for the purported period, and is rare enough to be unknown to me, still...”

  “Suppose I told you,” said Miss Martha Clarke, “that the chief purpose of the Diary—which I have at home—is to tell the story of how George Washington visited Simeon Clarke’s farm in the winter of 1791—”

  “Clarke’s farm? 1791?” exclaimed James Ezekiel Patch. “Preposterous. There’s no record of—”

  “And of what George Washington buried there,” the farmer’s daughter concluded.

  By executive order, the Queen telephone was taken off its hook, the door was bolted, the shades were drawn, and the long interrogation began. By the middle of the afternoon, the unknown chapter in the life of the Father of His Country was fairly sketched.

  Early on an icy gray February morning in 1791, Farmer Clarke had looked up from the fence he was mending to ob­serve a splendid cortège galloping down on him from the direction of the City of Philadelphia. Outriders thundered in the van, followed by a considerable company of gentlemen on horse­back and several great coaches-and-six driven by liveried Negroes.

  To Simeon Clarke’s astonishment, the entire equipage stopped before his farmhouse. He began to run. He could hear the creak of springs and the snorting of sleek and sweating horses. Gentlemen and lackeys were leaping to the frozen ground, and by the time Simeon had reached the farmhouse, all were elbowing about the first coach, a magnificent affair bear­ing a coat of arms.

  Craning, the farmer saw within the coach a very large, great-nosed gentleman clad in a black velvet suit and a black cloak faced with gold; there was a cocked hat on his wigged head and a great sword in a white leather scabbard at his side. This personage was on one knee, leaning with an expression of considerable anxiety over a chubby lady of middle age, swathed in furs, who was half-sitting, half-lying on the upholstered seat, her eyes closed and her cheeks waxen under the rouge. Another gentleman, soberly attired, was stooping over the lady, his fingers on one pale wrist.

  “I fear,” he was saying with great gravity to the kneeling man, “that it would be imprudent to proceed another yard in this weather, Your Excellency. Lady Washington requires physicking and a warm bed immediately.”

  Lady Washington! Then the large, richly dressed gentleman was the President! Simeon Clarke pushed excitedly through the throng.

  “Your Mightiness! Sir!” he cried. “I am Simeon Clarke. This is my farm. We have warm beds, Sarah and I!”

  The President considered Simeon briefly. “I thank you, Farmer Clarke. No, no, Dr. Craik. I shall assist Lady Washing­ton myself.”

  And George Washington carried Martha Washington into the little Pennsylvania farmhouse of Simeon and Sarah Clarke. An aide informed the Clarkes that President Washington had been on his way to Virginia to celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday in the privacy of Mount Vernon.

  Instead, he passed his birthday on the Clarke farm, for the physician insisted that the President’s lady could not be moved, even back to the nearby Capital, without risking complications. On His Excellency’s order, the entire incident was kept secret. “It would give needless alarm to the people,” he said. But he did not leave Martha’s bedside for three days and three nights. Presumably during those seventy-two hours, while his lady recovered from her indisposition, the President devoted some thought to his hosts, for on the fourth morning he sent black Christopher, his body servant, to summon the Clarkes.

  They found George Washington by the kitchen fire, shaven and pow­dered and in immaculate dress, his stem features composed. “I am told, Farmer Clarke, that you and your good wife refuse reimbursement for the livestock you have slaughtered in the accommodation of our large company.”

  “You’re my President, Sir,” said Simeon. “I wouldn’t take money.”

  “We—we wouldn’t take money, Your Worship,” stammered Sarah.

  “Nevertheless, Lady Washington and I would acknowledge your hospitality in some kind. If you give me leave, I shall plant with my own hands a grove of oak saplings behind your house. And beneath one of the saplings I propose to bury two of my personal possessions.” Washington’s eyes twinkled ever so slightly. “It is my birthday—I feel a venturesome spirit. Come, Farmer Clarke and Mistress Clarke, would you like that?”

  “What—what were they?” choked James Ezekiel Patch, the Washington collector. He was pale.

  Martha Clarke replied: “The sword at Washington’s side, in its white leather scabbard, and a silver coin the President car­ried in a secret pocket.”

  “Silver coin?” breathed Baroness Tchek, the rare coin dealer. “What kind of coin, Miss Clarke?”

  “The Diary calls it ‘a half disme,’ with an s,” replied Martha Clarke, frowning. “I guess that’s the way they spelled ‘dime’ in those days. The book’s full of queer spellings.”

  “A United States of America half disme?” asked the Baroness in a very odd way.

  “That’s what it says, Baroness.”

  “And this was in 1791?”

  “Yes.”

  The Baroness snorted, beginning to rise. “I thought your story was too impossibly romantic, young woman. The United States Mint didn’t begin to strike off half dismes until 1792!”

  “Half dismes or any other U.S. coinage, I believe,” said Ellery. “How come, Miss Clarke?”

  “It was an experimental coin,” said Miss Clarke coolly. ’The Diary isn’t clear as to whether it was the Mint which struck it off, or some private agency—maybe Washington himself didn’t tell Simeon—but the President did say to Simeon that the half disme in his pocket had been coined from silver he himself had furnished and had been presented to him as a keepsake.”

  “There’s a half disme with a story like that behind i
t in the possession of The American Numismatic Society,” muttered the Baroness, “but it’s definitely called one of the earliest coins struck off by the Mint It’s possible, I suppose, that in 1791, the preceding year, some specimen coins may have been struck off—”

  “Possible my foot,” said Miss Clarke. “It’s so. The Diary says so. I imagine President Washington was pretty interested in the coins to be issued by the new country he was head of.”

  “Miss Clarke, I—I want that half disme. I mean—I’d like to buy it from you,” said the Baroness.

  “And I,” said Mr. Patch carefully, “would like to ah…purchase Washington’s sword.”

  ’The Diary,” moaned Professor Shaw, “I’ll buy The Diary of Simeon Clarke from you, Miss Clarke!”

  “I’ll be happy to sell it to you, Professor Shaw—as I said, I found it in the attic and I have it locked up in a highboy in the parlor at home. But as for the other two, things…” Martha Clarke paused, and Ellery looked delighted. He thought he knew what was coming. “I’ll sell you the sword, Mr. Patch, and you the half disme, Baroness Tchek, provided—” and now Miss Clarke turned her clear eyes on Ellery, “—provided you, Mr. Queen, will be kind enough to find them.”

  And there was the farmhouse in the frosty Pennsylvania morning, set in the barren winter acres, and looking as bleak as only a little Revolutionary house with a mortgage on its head can look in the month of February.

  “There’s an apple orchard over there,” said Nikki as they got out of Ellery’s car, “But where’s the grove of oaks? I don’t see any!” And then she added, sweetly: “Do you, Ellery?”

  Ellery’s lips tightened. They tightened further when his solo on the front-door knocker brought no response.

  “Let’s go around,” he said briefly; and Nikki preceded him with cheerful step.

  Behind the house there was a barn; and beyond the barn there was comfort, at least for Ellery. For beyond the barn there were twelve ugly holes in the earth, and beside each hole lay either a freshly felled oak tree and its stump, or an ancient stump by itself, freshly uprooted. On one of the stumps sat an old man in earth-stained blue jeans, smoking a corncob pugnaciously.

  “Tobias Clarke?” asked Ellery.

  “Yump.”

  “I’m Ellery Queen. This is Miss Porter. Your daughter visited me in New York yesterday—”

  “Know all about it.”

  “May I ask where Martha is?’’

  “Station. Meetin’ them there other folks.” Tobias Clarke spat and looked away—at the holes. “Don’t know what ye’re all comin’ down here for. Wasn’t nothin’ under them oaks. Dug ’em all up t’other day. Trees that were standin’ and the stumps of the ones that’d fallen years back. Look at them holes. Hired hand and me dug down most to China. Washin’ton’s Grove, always been called. Now look at it. Firewood—for someone else, I guess.” There was iron bitterness in his tone. “We’re losin’ this farm, Mister, unless…” And Tobias Clarke stopped. “Well maybe we won’t,” he said. “There’s always that there book Martha found.”

  “Professor Shaw, the rare book collector, offered your daughter two thousand dollars for it if he’s satisfied with it, Mr. Clarke,” said Nikki.

  “So, she told me last night when she got back from New York,” said Tobias Clarke. “Two thousand—and we need six.” He grinned, and he spat again.

  “Well,” said Nikki sadly to Ellery, “that’s that.” She hoped he would immediately get into the car and drive back to New York—immediately.

  But Ellery showed no disposition to be sensible. “Perhaps, Mr. Clark, some trees died in the course of time and just disappeared, stumps, roots, and all. Martha—” Martha! “—said the Diary doesn’t mention the exact number Washington planted here.”

  “Look at them holes. Twelve of ’em, ain’t there? In a triangle. Man plants trees in a triangle, he plants trees in a tri­angle. Ye don’t see no place between holes big enough for another tree, do ye? Anyways, there was the same distance between all the trees. No, sir, Mister, twelve was all there was ever; and I looked under all twelve.”

  “What’s the extra tree doing in the center of the triangle? You haven’t uprooted that one, Mr. Clarke.”

  Tobias Clarke spat once more. “Don’t know much about trees, do ye? That’s a cherry saplin’ I set in myself six years ago. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with George Washington.”

  Nikki tittered.

  “If you’d sift the earth in those holes—”

  “I sifted it, Look, Mister, either somebody dug that stuff up a hundred years ago, or the whole yarn’s a Saturday night whopper. Which it most likely is. There’s Martha now with them other folks.” And Tobias Clarke added, spitting for the fourth time, “Don’t let me be keepin’ ye.”

  “It reveals Washington rather er...out of character,” said James Ezekiel Patch that evening.

  They were sitting about the fire in the parlor, as heavy with gloom as with Miss Clarke’s dinner; and that, at least in Miss Porter’s view, was heavy indeed. Baroness Tchek wore the expression of one who is trapped in a cave; there was no further train until morning, and she had not yet resigned herself to a night in a farmhouse bed. The better part of the day had been spent poring over The Diary of Simeon Clarke, searching for a clue to the buried Washingtonia. But there was no clue; the pertinent passage referred merely to “a Triangle of Oake Trees behinde the red Barn which His Excellency the President did plant with his own Hands, as he had promis’d me, and then did burie his Sworde and the Half Disme for his Pleasure in a Case of copper beneathe one of the Oakes, the which, he said (the Case), bad been fashion’d by Mr. Revere of Boston who is experimenting with this Mettle in his Furnasses.”

  “How out of character, Mr. Patch?” asked Ellery. He bad been staring into the fire for a long time, scarcely listening.

  “Washington wasn’t given to romanticism,” said the large man dryly. “No folderol about him. I don’t know of anything in his life which prepares us for such a yarn as this. I’m begin­ning to think—”

  “But Professor Shaw himself says the Diary is no forgery!” cried Martha Clarke.

  “Oh, the book’s authentic enough.” Professor Shaw seemed unhappy. “But it may simply be a literary hoax, Miss Clarke. The woods are full of them. I’m afraid that unless the story is confirmed by the discovery of that copper case with its con­tents…”

  “Oh, dear,” said Nikki impulsively; and for a moment she was sorry for Martha Clarke, she really was.

  But Ellery said: “I believe it. Pennsylvania farmers in 1791 weren’t given to literary hoaxes, Professor Shaw. As for Washington, Mr. Patch—no man can be so rigidly consistent. And with his wife just recovering from an illness—on his own birth­day...” And Ellery fell silent again.

  Almost immediately he leaped from his chair. “Mr. Clarke!”

  Tobias stirred from his dark corner. “What?”

  “Did you ever hear your father, or grandfather—anyone in your family—talk of another barn behind the house?’’

  Martha stared at him. Then she cried: “Papa, that’s it! It was a different barn, in a different place, and the original Wash­ington’s Grove was cut down, or died—”

  “Nope,” said Tobias Clarke. “Never was but this one barn. Still got some of its original timbers. Ye can see the date burned into the crosstree—1761.”

  Nikki was up early. A steady hack-hack-hack borne on the frosty air woke her. She peered out of her back window, the coverlet up to her nose, to see Mr. Ellery Queen against the dawn, like a pioneer, wielding an ax powerfully.

  Nikki dressed quickly, shivering, flung her mink-dyed musk­rat over her shoulders, and ran downstairs, out of the house, and around it past the barn.

  “Ellery! What do you think you’re doing? It’s practically the middle of the night!”

  “Chopping,” said Ellery, chopping.

  “There’s mountains of firewood stacked against the barn,” said Nikki. “Really, Ellery, I think this i
s carrying a flirtation too far.” Ellery did not reply. “And anyway, there’s something—something gruesome and indecent about chopping up trees George Washington planted. It’s vandalism.”

  “Just a thought,” panted Ellery, pausing for a moment. “A hundred and fifty-odd years is a long time, Nikki. Lots of queer things could happen, even to a tree, in that time. For in­stance—”

  “The copper case,” breathed Nikki, visibly. “The roots grew around it. It’s in one of these stumps!”

  “Now you’re functioning,” said Ellery, and he raised the ax again.

  He was still at it two hours later, when Martha Clarke announced breakfast.

  At 11:30 a.m., Nikki returned from driving the Professor, the Baroness, and James Ezekiel Patch to the railroad station. She found Mr. Queen seated before the fire in the kitchen in his undershirt, while Martha Clarke caressed his naked right arm.

  “Oh!” said Nikki faintly. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Where you going, Nikki?” said Ellery irritably. “Come in. Martha’s rubbing liniment into my biceps.”

  “He’s not very accustomed to chopping wood, is he?” asked Martha Clarke in a cheerful voice.

  “Reduced those foul ‘oakes’ to splinters,” groaned Ellery. “Martha, ouch!”

  “I should think you’d be satisfied now,” said Nikki coldly. “I suggest we imitate Patch, Shaw, and the Baroness, Ellery—there’s a 3:05. We can’t impose on Miss Clarke’s hospitality forever.”

  To Nikki’s horror, Martha Clarke chose this moment to burst into tears.

  “Martha!”

  Nikki felt like leaping upon her and shaking the cool look back into her perfidious eyes.

  “Here—here, now, Martha.”

  That’s right, thought Nikki contemptuously. Embrace her in front of me! “It’s those three rats. Running out that way! Don’t worry—I’ll find that sword and half disme for you yet.”

  “You’ll never find them,” sobbed Martha, wetting Ellery’s undershirt. “Because they’re not here. They never were here. When you s-stop to think of it...burying that coin, his sword…if the story were true, he’d have given them to Simeon and Sarah…”