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An old man named Daniel Baker, living near
Lebanon, Iowa, was suspected by his neighbors of having murdered a
peddler who had obtained permission to pass the night at his house.
This was in 1853, when peddling was more common in the Western country
than it is now, and was attended with considerable danger. The peddler
with his pack traversed the country by all manner of lonely roads, and
was compelled to rely upon the country people for hospitality. This
brought him into relation with queer characters, some of whom were not
altogether scrupulous in their methods of making a living, murder
being an acceptable means to that end. It occasionally occurred that a
peddler with diminished pack and swollen purse would be traced to the
lonely dwelling of some rough character and never could be traced
beyond.
This
was so in the case of "old man Baker," as he was always called. (Such
names are given in the western "settlements" only to elderly persons who
are not esteemed; to the general disrepute of social unworth is affixed
the special reproach of age.) A peddler came to his house and none went
away--that is all that anybody knew.
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Seven years later the Rev. Mr. Cummings, a Baptist minister well known in
that part of the country, was driving by Baker's farm one night. It was
not very dark: there was a bit of moon somewhere above the light veil of
mist that lay along the earth. Mr. Cummings, who was at all times a
cheerful person, was whistling a tune, which he would occasionally
interrupt to speak a word of friendly encouragement to his horse. As he
came to a little bridge across a dry ravine he saw the figure of a man
standing upon it, clearly outlined against the gray background of a misty
forest. The man had something strapped on his back and carried a heavy
stick-- obviously an itinerant peddler. His attitude had in it a
suggestion of abstraction, like that of a sleepwalker. Mr. Cummings reined
in his horse when he arrived in front of him, gave him a pleasant
salutation and invited him to a seat in the vehicle--"if you are going my
way," he added. The man raised his head, looked him full in the face, but
neither answered nor made any further movement. The minister, with
good-natured persistence, repeated his invitation. At this the man threw
his right hand forward from his side and pointed downward as he stood on
the extreme edge of the bridge. Mr. Cummings looked past him, over into
the ravine, saw nothing unusual and withdrew his eyes to address the man
again. He had disappeared. The horse, which all this time had been
uncommonly restless, gave at the same moment a snort of terror and started
to run away. Before he had regained control of the animal the minister was
at the crest of the hill a hundred yards along. He looked back and saw the
figure again, at the same place and in the same attitude as when he had
first observed it. Then for the first time he was conscious of a sense of
the supernatural and drove home as rapidly as his willing horse would go.
On
arriving at home he related his adventure to his family, and early the
next morning, accompanied by two neighbors, John White Corwell and Abner
Raiser, returned to the spot. They found the body of old man Baker hanging
by the neck from one of the beams of the bridge, immediately beneath the
spot where the apparition had stood. A thick coating of dust, slightly
dampened by the mist, covered the floor of the bridge, but the only
footprints were those of Mr. Cummings' horse.
In taking down the body the men disturbed the
loose, friable earth of the slope below it, disclosing human bones already
nearly uncovered by the action of water and frost. They were identified as
those of the lost peddler. At the double inquest the coroner's jury found
that Daniel Baker died by his own hand while suffering from temporary
insanity, and that Samuel Morritz was murdered by some person or persons
to the jury unknown.
April, 2005
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