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.
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.