Part 52 (1/2)

Of course, Sol had no knowledge of what was going forward at the county farm that very afternoon, even the very hour when Joe Newbolt was sweating blood on the witness stand, If he had known, it is not likely that he would have waited until morning to spread the tale abroad.

This is what it was.

Ollie's lawyer was there in consultation with Uncle John Owens regarding Isom's will. Consultation is the word, for it had come to that felicitous pa.s.s between them. Uncle John could communicate his thoughts freely to his fellow-beings again, and receive theirs intelligently.

All this had been wrought not by a miracle, but by the systematic preparation of the attorney, who was determined to sound the secret which lay locked in that silent mind. If Isom had a son when that will was made a generation back, Uncle John Owens was the man who knew it, and the only living man.

In pursuit of this mystery, the lawyer had caused to be printed many little strips of cardboard in the language of the blind. These covered all the ground that he desired to explore, from preliminaries to climax, with every pertinent question which his fertile mind could shape, and every answer which he felt was due to Uncle John to satisfy his curiosity and inform him fully of what had transpired.

The attorney had been waiting for Uncle John to become proficient enough in his new reading to proceed without difficulty. He had provided the patriarch with a large slate, which gave him comfortable room for his big characters. Several days before that which the lawyer had set for the exploration of the mystery of Isom Chase's heir, they had reached a perfect footing of understanding.

Uncle John was a new man. For several weeks he had been making great progress with the New Testament, printed in letters for the blind, which had come on the attorney's order speedily. It was an immense volume, as big as a barn-door, as Uncle John facetiously wrote on his slate, and when he read it he sat at the table littered over with his interlocked rings of wood, and his figures of beast and female angels or demons, which, not yet determined.

The sun had come out for him again, at the clouded end of his life. It reached him through the points of his fingers, and warmed him to the farthest spot, and its welcome was the greater because his night had been long and its rising late.

On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned of the death of Isom Chase.

The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been prepared.

After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:

”Did you ever witness Isom Chase's will?”

Uncle John took his slate and wrote:

”Yes.”

”When?”

”Thirty or forty years ago,” wrote Uncle John--what was a decade more or less to him? ”When he joined the Order.”

Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to hold intelligent communication once more.

More questioning brought out the information that it was a rule of the secret brotherhood which Isom had joined in those far days, for each candidate for initiation to make his will before the administration of the rites.

”What a st.u.r.dy old goat that must have been!” thought the lawyer.

”Do you remember to whom Isom left his property in that will?” read the pasteboard under the old man's hands.

Uncle John smiled, reminiscently, and nodded.

”To his son,” he wrote. ”Isom was the name.”

”Do you know when and where that son was born?”

Uncle John's smile was broader, and of purely humorous cast, as he bent over the slate and began to write carefully, in smaller hand than usual, as if he had a great deal to say.

”He never was born,” he wrote, ”not up to the time that I lost the world. Isom was a man of Belial all his days that I knew him. He was set on a son from his wedding day.

”The last time I saw him I joked him about that will, and told him he would have to change it. He said no, it would stand that way. He said he would get a son yet. Abraham was a hundred when Isaac was born, he reminded me. Did Isom get him?”