A timber cruiser from Louisville vanished in the hills of eastern Kentucky in October 1927, and the sheriff who found what happened to him chose to bury the truth, not the man responsible. Delford Cleave, a 41-year-old timber cruiser, was sent to the Sourwood Bench area in the second week of October 1927 to estimate timber for a lumber company based in Cincinnati. He arrived by train on a Sunday evening and took a room at a boarding house run by a widow named Verly Corass. Over supper, Cleave asked about the road up to the ridge and was warned twice, once by Corass and once by her cook, not to take a particular fork in the road.
Cleave dismissed the warning. He was seen the next morning by three people, including a farmer named Ozro Whipkey who watched from his porch as Cleave paused at the fork, studied his compass, and rode into a stand of poplar on a road that did not appear on any map. When Cleave did not contact his company by the expected Wednesday, officials wired the boarding house, then the sheriff. Sheriff Alger Muner read the wire and immediately remembered a history of disappearances in that hollow.
In 1908, a peddler named Baskam Whipkey vanished after heading up the fork. In 1919, a preacher named Ozra Van also disappeared on that road. Both cases had been closed with the explanation that the men got lost. Muner rode to the fork with a deputy named Rafe Cold Iron.
At the bottom of the fork, they found Cleave’s horse tied to a rail that looked newly built. Muner said someone wanted them to know the man went up on foot. On the trail, they found a wagon wheel identified as belonging to the missing peddler, then a man’s boot placed upright on a stump, then the smell of something old that had been fed for a long time. At just over two miles up, the road opened onto a small meadow with a garden, apple trees, and a low house dug into the hill.
Muner called out for the man who lived there, Ston Rundle, and when there was no answer, he entered. Inside, he found a ledger on the table with columns labeled name, date, and road. It contained 41 entries. The first, dated 1893, was written in an older hand and read Edmund Rundle.
The last entry was dated the previous Monday and named Delford Cleave. Between those names were peddlers, a woman with a black horse, a man with a red coat, and other entries that were descriptions rather than names. Rundle entered the house through the low doorway. He told Muner that he did not put the fork there.
He insisted the fork was there before he was born and before his father was born. He said people came up it because they thought it was the road, and that the county road went on up over. When Muner asked about Cleave, Rundle said that Cleave had been told and did not listen. Rundle said he kept what they left but did not take what they carried or wore.
He called it the arrangement. He said he had not touched a Christian man in his life, only kept the book. He warned that if he was taken down, somebody else would keep the arrangement, and the sheriff would not know who or where. Muner did not arrest him.
He took the ledger, a cruiser’s stick, a wedding band, a fountain pen, and a Bible with the preacher’s name inside, placed them in a canvas sack, and walked out. He ordered Cold Iron to do and say nothing. He told the deputy to write that Delford Cleave went into the ridge and did not come out. He said a widow in Louisville would get an envelope saying her husband was lost on a survey, and that was all she would get, because if she got more, Rundle would come down.
The official record simply stated Delford Cleave was presumed lost in the ridge. The case was closed. Muner kept the ledger and the items in a strong box in his own closet rather than entering them into evidence. Rundle remained on the bench.
In the spring of 1931, a whiskey runner named Wister Purdue vanished after taking the fork. Muner rode up alone, came down with Purdue’s truck, and closed the case with the same words: presumed lost in the ridge. In the autumn of 1937, a woman named Niola Trilby stopped at the boarding house, was told twice not to take the fork, and took it anyway. A deputy fetched her roadster.
She was signed off as presumed lost in the ridge. Muner retired in the spring of 1939 and died in 1941. His widow found the strong box three days after his funeral, wrote a note saying it should not be opened until she was also gone, and locked it away. When their son opened it in 1972, he read the ledger and took it to the state police.
By then, Rundle had been dead for eleven years. He died in the winter of 1961 at the age of 86, found on his cot by a hunter. He was given a Baptist burial in the churchyard down the road next to his mother. The sheriff of that time wrote a short report and did not describe the shelf of personal effects inside the house.
The house is gone now. The lumber company harvested the ridge in 1966, took the meadow, the apple trees, and the spring, and graded the bench flat. A logging road now runs across the top of it. The fork itself is still there.
It is not on state road maps, county road maps, or satellite maps, but the road remains passable on foot. The ledger sits in a box in a state police archive in Frankfort. Thirty-one of the 41 names in it have never been matched to any missing person’s report, largely because most are not names at all, only descriptions. The wedding band was matched to a man from Ohio who disappeared in 1924 while traveling to a coal purchasing meeting.
His widow was never told. The Bible was matched to the itinerant preacher whose congregation dissolved when he did not return. No one in his family was ever told what became of him. Rundle’s stone is small and gray and bears only his name and the years of his birth and death.
There is nobody left alive who visits it, and his mother’s stone beside it has been cracked by frost and never replaced.