The Mark of the Crutch

A Story of Circumstantial Evidence

by Mary Kyle Dallas

Old Adam Hardburn was always accounted very eccentric, but when he adopted Malone’s boy people thought that his eccentricity amounted to madness. The Malones were a bad lot, and this boy was not, as far as any one knew, better than any other of the family. Moreover, he had fallen from a tree which he was robbing of peaches in his youth, and crippled himself so that he must always walk with a crutch. What did old Adam want of him? But Adam cared nothing for criticism; he knew that no one ever pleased all the world yet, and when his friends prophesied that he would be sorry, he laughed in their faces. Old Malone was dead, two of the boys were in jail, one gone away upon a voyage. He had found Dan deserted in the miserable hut they had inhabited, friendless, with no one to help him to such work as he could do, and he had taken him home.

“There could not be a better boy,” old Adam said; and after Dan had been with him two years he was still so much of this opinion that he made a will in his favor. Dan Malone, the old ruffian’s lame boy, had come to be… Read More