← catalogue

Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb · English · Gutenberg #44223 · 486,774 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

Author: Irvin S. Cobb


        
Release date: November 18, 2013 [eBook #44223]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44223

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BACK HOME: BEING THE NARRATIVE OF JUDGE PRIEST AND HIS PEOPLE ***

BACK HOME

BEING THE NARRATIVE OF JUDGE PRIEST AND HIS PEOPLE

By Irvin S. Cobb

New York, George H. Doran Company

1912




PREFACE

AFTER I came North to live it seemed to me, as probably it has seemed to
many Southern born men and women that the Southerner of fiction as met
with in the North was generally just that--fiction--and nothing else;
that in the main he was a figment of the drama and of the story book;
a type that had no just claim on existence and yet a type that was
currently accepted as a verity.

From well meaning persons who apparently wished to convey an implied
compliment for the southern part of this republic I was forever
hearing of “southern pride” and “hot southern blood” and “old southern
families,” these matters being mentioned always with a special emphasis
which seemed to betray a profound conviction on the part of the speakers
that there was a certain physical, tangible, measurable distinction
between, say, the pride of a Southerner and the blood-temperature of
a Southerner and the pride and blood heat of a man whose parents had
chosen some other part of the United States as a suitable place for him
to be born in. Had these persons spoken of things which I knew to be a
part and parcel of the Southerner's nature--such things for example as
his love for his own state and his honest veneration for the records
made by men of southern birth and southern blood in the Civil War--I
might have understood them. But seemingly they had never heard of those
matters.

I also discovered or thought I discovered that as a rule the Southerner
as seen on the stage or found between the covers of a book or a magazine
was drawn from a more or less imaginary top stratum of southern life, or
else from a bottom-most stratum--either he purported to be an elderly,
un-reconstructed, high-tempered gentleman of highly aristocratic
tendencies residing in a feudal state of shabby grandeur and proud
poverty on a plantation gone to seed; or he purported to be a pure
white of the poorest. With a few exceptions the playwright and the story
writers were not taking into account sundry millions of southern born
people who were neither venerable and fiery colonels with frayed wrist
bands and limp collars, nor yet were they snuffdipping, ginseng-digging
clay-eaters, but just such folk as allowing for certain temperamental
differences--created by climate and soil and tradition and by two other
main contributing causes: the ever-present race question and the still
living and vivid memories of the great war--might be found as numerously
in Iowa or Indiana or any other long-settled, typically American
commonwealth as in Tennessee or Georgia or Mississippi, having the same
aspirations, the same blood in their veins, the same impulses and being
prone under almost any conceivable condition to do the same thing in
much the same way.

Viewing my own state and my own people across the perspective of time
and distance I had the ambition to set down on paper, as faithfully as I
might, a representation of those people as I knew them. By this I do not
mean to declare that I sensed any audible and visible demand for such a
piece of writing; so far as I know there has been no such demand. It was
my own notion solely. I wanted, if I could to describe what I believed
to be an average southern community so that others might see it as I had
seen it. This book is the result of that desire.

For my material I draw upon the life of that community as I remembered
it. Most of the characters that figure in the events hereinafter
described were copies, to the best of my ability as a copyist, of real
models; and for some of the events themselves there was in the first
place a fairly substantial basis of fact.

Having such an aim I wrote what I conceived to be a series of pictures,
out of the life of a town in the western part of Kentucky; that part
of Kentucky which gave to the nation among others, Abraham Lincoln and
Jefferson Davis. These, pictures fell into the form of inter-related
stories, and as such were first printed in the _Saturday Evening Post._
They are now offered here as a whole.

LSC

New York, November 1912




I. WORDS AND MUSIC

WHEN Breck Tandy killed a man he made a number of mistakes. In the first
place, he killed the most popular man in Forked Deer County--the county
clerk, a man named Abner J. Rankin. In the second place, he killed him
with no witnesses present, so that it stood his word--and he a newcomer
and a stranger--against the mute, eloquent accusation of a riddled
dead man. And in the third place, he sent north of the Ohio River for a
lawyer to defend him.

On the first Monday in June--Court Monday--the town filled up early.
Before the field larks were out of the grass the farmers were tying
their teams to the gnawed hitch-racks along the square. By nine o'clock
the swapping ring below the wagonyard was swimming in red dust and
clamorous with the chaffer of the horse-traders. In front of a vacant
store the Ladies' Aid Society of Zion Baptist Church had a canvas sign
out, announcing that an elegant dinner would be served for twenty-five
cents from twelve to one, also ice cream and cake all day for fifteen
cents.

The narrow wooden sidewalks began to creak and chum under the tread of
many feet. A long-haired medicine doctor emerged from his frock-coat
like a locust coming out of its shell, pushed his high hat off his
forehead and ranged a guitar, sundry bottles of a potent mixture, his
tooth-pulling forceps, and a trick-handkerchief upon the narrow shelf
of his stand alongside the Drummers' Home Hotel. In front of the little
dingy tent of the Half Man and Half Horse a yellow negro sat on a
split-bottom chair limbering up for a hard day. This yellow negro was an
artist. He played a common twenty-cent mouth organ, using his left hand
to slide it back and forth across his spread lips. The other hand held a
pair of polished beef bones, such as end men wield, and about the wrist
was buckled a broad leather strap with three big sleigh-bells riveted
loosely to the leather, so that he could clap the bones and shake the
bells with the same motion. He was a whole orchestra in himself. He
could play on his mouth organ almost any tune you wanted, and with his
bones and his bells to help out he could creditably imitate a church
organ, a fife-and-drum corps, or, indeed, a full brass band. He had
his chair tilted back until his woolly head dented a draggled banner
depicting in five faded primary colon the physical attractions of the
Half Man and Half Horse--Marvel of the Century--and he tested his mouth
organ with short, mellow, tentative blasts as he waited until the Marvel
and the Marvel's manager finished a belated breakfast within and the
first ballyhoo could start. He was practicing the newest of the ragtime
airs to get that far South. The name of it was The Georgia Camp-Meeting.

The town marshal in his shirt sleeves, with a big silver shield pinned
to the breast of his unbuttoned blue waistcoat and a hickory stick with
a crook handle for added emblem of authority, stalked the town drunkard,
fair game at all seasons and especially on Court Monday. The town
gallant whirled back and forth the short hilly length of Main Street
in his new side-bar buggy. A clustering group of negroes made a thick,
black blob, like hiving bees, in front of a negro fishhouse, from
which came the smell and sounds of perch and channel cat frying on
spitting-hot skillets. High up on the squat cupola of the courthouse a
red-headed woodpecker clung, barred in crimson, white, and blue-black,
like a bit of living bunting, engaged in the hopeless task of trying to
drill through the tin sheathing. The rolling rattle of his beak's tattoo
came down sharply to the crowds below. Mourning doves called to one
another in the trees round the red-brick courthouse, and at ten o'clock,
when the sun was high and hot, the sheriff came out and, standing
between two hollow white pillars, rapped upon one of them with a stick
and called upon all witnesses and talesmen to come into court for the
trial of John Breckinridge Tandy, charged with murder in the first
degree, against the peace and dignity of the commonwealth of Tennessee
and the statutes made and provided.

But this ceremonial by the sheriff was for form rather than effect,
since the witnesses and the talesmen all sat in the circuit-court
chamber along with as many of the population of Forked Deer County as
could squeeze in there. Already the air of the crowded chamber was choky
with heat and rancid with smell. Men were perched precariously in' the
ledges of the windows. More men were ranged in rows along the plastered
walls, dunking their heels against the cracked wooden baseboards. The
two front rows of benches were full of women. For this was to be the big
case of the June term--a better show by long odds than the Half Man and
Half Horse.

Inside the low railing that divided the room and on the side nearer the
jury box were the forces of the defense. Under his skin the prisoner
showed a sallow paleness born of his three months in the county jail.
He was tall and dark and steady eyed, a young man, well under thirty.
He gave no heed to those who sat in packed rows behind him, wishing
him evil. He kept his head turned front, only bending it sometimes to
whisper with one of his lawyers or one of his witnesses. Frequently,
though, his hand went out in a protecting, reassuring way to touch his
wife's brown hair or to rest a moment on her small shoulder. She was
a plain, scared, shrinking little thing. The fingers of her thin hands
were plaited desperately together in her lap. Already she was trembling.
Once in a while she would raise her face, showing shallow brown eyes
dilated with fright, and then sink her head again like a quail trying to
hide. She looked pitiable and lonely.

The chief attorney for the defense was half turned from the small
counsel table where he might study the faces of the crowd. He was from
Middle Indiana, serving his second term in Congress. If his party held
control of the state he would go to the Senate after the next election.
He was an orator of parts and a pleader of almost a national reputation.
He had manly grace and he was a fine, upstanding figure of a man, and
before now he had wrung victories out of many difficult cases. But he
chilled to his finger-nails with apprehensions of disaster as he glanced
searchingly about the close-packed room.

Wherever he looked he saw no friendliness at all. He could feel the
hostility of that crowd as though it had substance and body.

It was a tangible thing; it was almost a physical thing. Why, you could
almost put your hand out and touch it. It was everywhere there.

And it focussed and was summed up in the person of Aunt Tilly Haslett,
rearing on the very front bench with her husband, Uncle Fayette, half
hidden behind her vast and over-flowing bulk. Aunt Tilly made public
opinion in Hyattsville. Indeed she was public opinion in that town. In
her it had its up-comings and its out-flowings. She held herself bolt
upright, filling out the front of her black bombazine basque until
the buttons down its front strained at their buttonholes. With wide,
deliberate strokes she fanned herself with a palm-leaf fan. The fan had
an edging of black tape sewed round it--black tape signifying in that
community age or mourning, or both. Her jaw was set like a steel latch,
and her little gray eyes behind her steel-bowed specs were leveled
with a baleful, condemning glare that included the strange lawyer, his
client, his client's wife, and all that was his client's.

Congressman Durham looked and knew that his presence was an affront to
Aunt Tilly and all those who sat with her; that his somewhat vivid tie,
his silken shirt, his low tan shoes, his new suit of gray flannels--a
masterpiece of the best tailor in Indianapolis--were as insults, added
up and piled on, to this suspendered, gingham-shirted constituency.
Better than ever he realized now the stark hopelessness of the task to
which his hands were set. And he dreaded what was coming almost as much
for himself as for the man he was hired to defend. But he was a trained
veteran of courtroom campaigns, and there was a jauntily assumed
confidence in his bearing as he swung himself about and made a brisk
show of conferring with the local attorney who was to aid him in the
choosing of the jurors and the questioning of the witnesses.

But it was real confidence and real jauntiness that radiated from the
other wing of the inclosure, where the prosecutor sat with the assembled
bar of Forked Deer County on his flanks, volunteers upon the favored
side, lending to it the moral support of weight and numbers. Rankin, the
dead man, having been a bachelor, State's Attorney Gilliam could bring
no lorn widow and children to mourn before the jurors' eyes and win
added sympathy for his cause. Lacking these most valued assets of a
murder trial he supplied their places with the sisters of the dead
man--two sparse-built elderly women in heavy black, with sweltering
thick veils down over their faces. When the proper time came he would
have them raise these veils and show their woeful faces, but now they
sat shrouded all in crepe, fit figures of desolation and sorrow. He
fussed about busily, fiddling the quill toothpick that hung perilously
in the corner of his mouth and evening up the edges of a pile of law
books with freckled calfskin covers. He was a lank, bony garfish of a
man, with a white goatee aggressively protruding from his lower lip. He
was a poor speaker but mighty as a cross-examiner, and he was serving
his first term and was a candidate for another. He wore the official
garbing of special and extraordinary occasions--long black coat and limp
white waistcoat and gray striped trousers, a trifle short in the legs.
He felt the importance of his place here almost visibly--his figure
swelled and expanded out his clothes.

“Look yonder at Tom Gilliam,” said Mr. Lukins, the grocer, in tones
of whispered admiration to his next-elbow neighbor, “jest prunin' and
honin' hisse'f to git at that there Tandy and his dude Yankee lawyer. If
he don't chaw both of 'em up together I'll be dad-burned.”

“You bet,” whispered back his neighbor--it was Aunt Tilly's oldest
son, Fayette, Junior--“it's like Maw says--time's come to teach them
murderin' Kintuckians they can't be a-comin' down here a-killin' up
people and not pay for it. I reckon, Mr. Lukins,” added Fayette, Junior,
with a wriggle of pleased anticipation, “we shore are goin' to see some
carryin's-on in this cotehouse today.”

Mr. Lukins' reply was lost to history because just then the judge
entered--an elderly, kindly-looking man--from his chambers in the rear,
with the circuit-court clerk right behind him bearing large leather-clad
books and sheaves of foolscap paper. Their coming made a bustle. Aunt
Tilly squared herself forward, scrooging Uncle Fayette yet farther into
the eclipse of her shapeless figure. The prisoner raised his head and
eyed his judge. His wife looked only at the interlaced, weaving fingers
in her lap.

The formalities of the opening of a term of court were mighty soon over;
there was everywhere manifest a haste to get at the big thing. The clerk
called the case of the Commonwealth versus Tandy. Both sides were ready.
Through the local lawyer, delegated for these smaller purposes, the
accused man pleaded not guilty. The clerk spun the jury wheel, which was
a painted wooden drum on a creaking wooden axle, and drew forth a slip
of paper with the name of a talesman written upon it and read aloud:

“Isom W. Tolliver.”

In an hour the jury was complete: two townsmen, a clerk and a telegraph
operator, and ten men from the country--farmers mainly and one
blacksmith and one horse-trader. Three of the panel who owned up frankly
to a fixed bias had been let go by consent of both sides. Three more
were sure they could give the defendant a fair trial, but those three
the local lawyer had challenged peremptorily. The others were accepted
as they came. The foreman was a brownskinned, sparrowhawk-looking old
man, with a smoldering brown eye. He had spare, knotted hands, like
talons, and the right one was marred and twisted, with a sprayed bluish
scar in the midst of the crippled knuckles like the mark of an old
gunshot wound. Juror No. 4 was a stodgy old man, a small planter
from the back part of the county, who fanned himself steadily with
a brown-varnished straw hat. No. 7 was even older, a white-whiskered
patriarch on crutches. The twelfth juryman was the oldest of the
twelve--he looked to be almost seventy, but he went into the box after
he had sworn that his sight and hearing and general health were good and
that he still could do his ten hours a day at his blacksmith shop. This
juryman chewed tobacco without pause. Twice after he took his seat at
the bade end of the double line he tried for a wooden cuspidor ten feet
away. Both were creditable attempts, but he missed each time. Seeing the
look of gathering distress in his eyes the sheriff brought the cuspidor
nearer, and thereafter No. 12 was content, chewing steadily like
some bearded contemplative ruminant and listening attentively to the
evidence, meanwhile scratching a very wiry head of whity-red hair with
a thumbnail that through some injury had taken on the appearance of a
very thick, very black Brazil nut. This scratching made a raspy, filing
sound that after a while got on Congressman Durham's nerves.

It was late in the afternoon when the prosecution rested its case and
court adjourned until the following morning. The state's attorney had
not had so very much evidence to offer, really--the testimony of one who
heard the single shot and ran in at Rankin's door to find Rankin upon
the floor, about dead, with a pistol, unfired, in his hand and Tandy
standing against the wall with a pistol, fired, in his; the constable to
whom Tandy surrendered; the physician who examined the body; the persons
who knew of the quarrel between Tandy and Rankin growing out of a
land deal into which they had gone partners--not much, but enough for
Gilliam's purposes. Once in the midst of examining a witness the
state's attorney, seemingly by accident, let his look fall upon the two
black-robed, silent figures at his side, and as though overcome by the
sudden realization of a great grief, he faltered and stopped dead and
sank down. It was an old trick, but well done, and a little humming
murmur like a breeze coming through treetops swept the audience.

Durham was sick in his soul as he came away.

In his mind there stood the picture of a little, scared woman's drawn,
drenched face. She had started crying before the last juror was chosen
and thereafter all day, at half-minute intervals, the big, hard sobs
racked her. As Durham came down the steps he had almost to shove his way
through a knot of natives outside the doors. They grudged him the path
they made for him, and as he showed them his back he heard a snicker and
some one said a thing that cut him where he was already bruised--in his
egotism. But he gave no heed to the words. What was the use?

At the Drummers' Home Hotel a darky waiter sustained a profound shock
when the imported lawyer declined the fried beefsteak with fried
potatoes and also the fried ham and eggs. Mastering his surprise the
waiter offered to try to get the Northern gentleman a fried pork chop
and some fried June apples, but Durham only wanted a glass of milk
for his supper. He drank it and smoked a cigar, and about dusk he went
upstairs to his room. There he found assembled the forlorn rank and
file of the defense, the local lawyer and three character
witnesses--prominent citizens from Tandy's home town who were to testify
to his good repute in the place where he was born and reared. These
would be the only witnesses, except Tandy himself, that Durham meant to
call. One of them was a bustling little man named Felsburg, a clothing
merchant, and one was Colonel Quigley, a banker and an ex-mayor, and
the third was a Judge Priest, who sat on a circuit-court bench back in
Kentucky. In contrast to his size, which was considerable, this Judge
Priest had a voice that was high and whiny. He also had the trick,
common to many men in politics in his part of the South, of being
purposely ungrammatical at times.

This mannerism led a lot of people into thinking that the judge must be
an uneducated man--until they heard him charging a jury or reading one
of his rulings. The judge had other peculiarities. In conversation he
nearly always called men younger than himself, son. He drank a little
bit too much sometimes; and nobody had ever beaten him for any office he
coveted. Durham didn't know what to make of this old judge--sometimes he
seemed simple-minded to the point of childishness almost.

The others were gathered about a table by a lighted kerosene lamp, but
the old judge sat at an open window with his low-quarter shoes off and
his white-socked feet propped against the ledge. He was industriously
stoking at a home-made corncob pipe. He pursed up his mouth, pulling at
the long cane stem of his pipe with little audible sucks. From the rocky
little street below the clatter of departing farm teams came up to him.
The Indian medicine doctor was taking down his big white umbrella and
packing up his regalia. The late canvas habitat of the Half Man and Half
Horse had been struck and was gone, leaving only the pole-holes in the
turf and a trodden space to show where it had stood. Court would go on
all week, but Court Monday was over and for another month the town would
doze along peacefully.

Durham slumped himself into a chair that screeched protestingly in all
its infirm joints. The heart was gone clean out of him.

“I don't understand these people at all,” he confessed. “We're beating
against a stone wall with our bare hands.”

“If it should be money now that you're needing, Mister Durham,” spoke up
Felsburg, “that boy Tandy's father was my very good friend when I first
walked into that town with a peddling pack on my back, and if it should
be money----?”

“It isn't money, Mr. Felsburg,” said Durham. “If I didn't get a cent
for my services I'd still fight this case out to the aid for the sake of
that game boy and that poor little mite of a wife of his. It isn't money
or the lack of it--it's the damned hate they've built up here against
the man. Why, you could cut it off in chunks--the prejudice that there
was in that courthouse today.”

“Son,” put in Judge Priest in his high, weedy voice, “I reckon maybe
you're right. I've been projectin' around cotehouses a good many years,
and I've taken notice that when a jury look at a prisoner all the time
and never look at his women folks it's a monstrous bad sign. And that's
the way it was all day today.”

“The judge will be fair--he always is,” said Hightower, the local
lawyer, “and of course Gilliam is only doing his duty. Those jurors are
as good solid men as you can find in this country anywhere. But they
can't help being prejudiced. Human nature's not strong enough to stand
out against the feeling that's grown up round here against Tandy since
he shot Ab Rankin.”

“Son,” said Judge Priest, still with his eyes on the darkening square
below, “about how many of them jurors would you say are old soldiers?”

“Four or five that I know of,” said Hightower--“and maybe more. It's
hard to find a man over fifty years old in this section that didn't see
active service in the Big War.”

“Ah, hah,” assented Judge Priest with a squeaky little grunt. “That
foreman now--he looked like he might of seen some fightin'?”

“Four years of it,” said Hightower. “He came out a captain in the
cavalry.”

“Ah, hah.” Judge Priest sucked at his pipe. “Herman,” he J wheezed
back over his shoulder to Felsburg, “did you notice a tall sort of
a saddle-colored darky playing a juice harp in front of that there
sideshow as we came along up? I reckon that nigger could play almost any
tune you'd a mind to hear him play?”

At a time like this Durham was distinctly not interested in the
versatilities of strange negroes in this corner of the world. He kept
silent, shrugging his shoulders petulantly.

“I wonder now is that nigger left town yet?” mused the old judge half to
himself.

“I saw him just a while ago going down toward the depot,” volunteered
Hightower. “There's a train out of here for Memphis at 8:50. It's about
twenty minutes of that now.”

“Ah, hah, jest about,” assented the judge. When the judge said “Ah,
hah!” like that it sounded like the striking of a fiddle-bow across a
fiddle's tautened E-string.

“Well, boys,” he went on, “we've all got to do the best we can for
Breck Tandy, ain't we? Say, son”'--this was aimed at Durham--“I'd like
mightily for you to put me on the stand the last one tomorrow. You wait
until you're through with Herman and Colonel Quigley here, before
you call me. And if I should seem to ramble somewhat in giving my
testimony--why, son, you just let me ramble, will you? I know these
people down here better maybe than you do--and if I should seem inclined
to ramble, just let me go ahead and don't stop me, please?”

“Judge Priest,” said Durham tartly, “if you think it could possibly do
any good, ramble all you like.”

“Much obliged,” said the old judge, and he struggled into his
low-quarter shoes and stood up, dusting the tobacco fluff off himself.

“Herman have you got any loose change about you?”

Felsburg nodded and reached into his pocket. The judge made a
discriminating selection of silver and bills from the handful that the
merchant extended to him across the table.

“I'll take about ten dollars,” he said. “I didn't come down here with
more than enough to jest about buy my railroad ticket and pay my bill at
this here tavern, and I might want a sweetenin' dram or somethin'.”

He pouched his loan and crossed the room. “Boys,” he said, “I think I'll
be knockin' round a little before I turn in. Herman, I may stop by your
room a minute as I come back in. You boys better turn in early and git
yourselves a good night's sleep. We are all liable to be purty tolerable
busy tomorrow.”

After he was outside he put his head back in the door and said to
Durham:

“Remember, son, I may ramble.”

Durham nodded shortly, being somewhat put out by the vagaries of a mind
that could concern itself with trivial things on the imminent eve of a
crisis.

As the judge creaked ponderously along the hall and down the stairs
those he had left behind heard him whistling a tune to himself, making
false starts at the air and halting often to correct his meter. It was
an unknown tune to them all, but to Felsburg, the oldest of the four, it
brought a vague, unplaced memory.

The old judge was whistling when he reached the street. He stood there a
minute until he had mastered the time to his own satisfaction, and then,
still whistling, he shuffled along the uneven board pavement, which,
after rippling up and down like a broken-backed snake, dipped downward
to a little railroad station at the foot of the street.

In the morning nearly half the town--the white half--came to the trial,
and enough of the black half to put a dark hem, like a mourning border,
across the back width of the courtroom. Except that Main Street now
drowsed in the heat where yesterday it had buzzed, this day might have
been the day before. Again the resolute woodpecker drove his bloodied
head with unimpaired energy against the tin sheathing up above. It was
his third summer for that same cupola and the tin was pocked with little
dents for three feet up and down. The mourning doves still pitched their
lamenting note back and forth across the courthouse yard; and in the
dewberry patch at the bottom of Aunt Tilly Haslett's garden down by the
creek the meadow larks strutted in buff and yellow, with crescent-shaped
gorgets of black at their throats, like Old Continentals, sending their
dear-piped warning of “Laziness g'wine kill you!” in at the open windows
of the steamy, smelly courtroom.

The defense lost no time getting under headway. As his main witness
Durham called the prisoner to testify in his own behalf. Tandy gave his
version of the killing with a frankness and directness that would have
carried conviction to auditors more even-minded in their sympathies.
He had gone to Rankin's office in the hope of bringing on a peaceful
settlement of their quarrel. Rankin had flared up; had cursed him and
advanced on him, making threats. Both of them reached for their guns
then. Rankin's was the first out, but he fired first--that was all
there was to it. Gilliam shone at cross-examination; he went at Tandy
savagely, taking hold like a snapping turtle and hanging on like one.

He made Tandy admit over and over again that he carried a pistol
habitually. In a community where a third of the male adult population
went armed this admission was nevertheless taken as plain evidence of a
nature bloody-minded and desperate. It would have been just as bad for
Tandy if he said he armed himself especially for his visit to Rankin--to
these listeners that could have meant nothing else but a deliberate,
murderous intention. Either way Gilliam had him, and he sweated in his
eagerness to bring out the significance of the point. A sinister little
murmuring sound,4 vibrant with menace, went purring from bench to bench
when Tandy told about his pistol-carrying habit.

The cross-examination dragged along for hours. The recess for dinner
interrupted it; then it went on again, Gilliam worrying at Tandy,
goading at him, catching him up and twisting his words. Tandy would not
be shaken, but twice under the manhandling he lost his temper and lashed
back at Gilliam, which was precisely what Gilliam most desired. A flary
fiery man, prone to violent outbursts--that was the inference he could
draw from these blaze-ups.

It was getting on toward five o'clock before Gilliam finally let his
bedeviled enemy quit the witness-stand and go back to his place between
his wife and his lawyer. As for Durham, he had little more to offer. He
called on Mr. Felsburg, and Mr. Felsburg gave Tandy a good name as man
and boy in his home town. He called on Banker Quigley, who did the same
thing in different words. For these character witnesses State's Attorney
Gilliam had few questions. The case was as good as won now, he figured;
he could taste already his victory over the famous lawyer from up North,
and he was greedy to hurry it forward.

The hot round hub of a sun had wheeled low enough to dart its thin
red spokes in through the westerly windows when Durham called his last
witness. As Judge Priest settled himself solidly in the witness chair
with the deliberation of age and the heft of flesh, the leveled
rays caught him full and lit up his round pink face, with the short
white-bleached beard below it and the bald white-bleached forehead
above. Durham eyed him half doubtfully. He looked the image of a
scatter-witted old man, who would potter and philander round a long
time before he ever came to the point of anything. So he appeared to
the others there, too. But what Durham did not sense was that the
homely simplicity of the old man was of a piece with the picture of the
courtroom, that he would seem to these watching, hostile people one
of their own kind, and that they would give to him in all likelihood a
sympathy and understanding that had been denied the clothing merchant
and the broadclothed banker.

He wore a black alpaca coat that slanted upon him in deep, longitudinal
folds, and the front skirts of it were twisted and pulled downward until
they dangled in long, wrinkly black teats. His shapeless gray trousers
were short for him and fitted his pudgy legs closely. Below them dangled
a pair of stout ankles encased in white cotton socks and ending in
low-quarter black shoes. His shirt was clean but wrinkled countlessly
over his front. The gnawed and blackened end of a cane pipestem stood
out of his breast pocket, rising like a frosted weed stalk.

He settled himself back in the capacious oak chair, balanced upon his
knees a white straw hat with a string band round the crown and waited
for the question.

“What is your name?” asked Durham. “William Pitman Priest.”

Even the voice somehow seemed to fit the setting. Its high nasal note
had a sort of whimsical appeal to it.

“When and where were you born?”

“In Calloway County, Kintucky, July 27, 1889.”

“What is your profession or business?”

“I am an attorney-at-law.”

“What position if any do you hold in your native state?”

“I am presidin' judge of the first judicial district of the state of
Kintucky.”

“And have you been so long?”

“For the past sixteen years.”

“When were you admitted to the bar?”

“In 1860.”

“And you have ever since been engaged, I take it, either in the practice
of the law before the bar or in its administration from the bench?”

“Exceptin' for the four years from April, 1861, to June, 1866.”

Up until now Durham had been sparring, trying to fathom the probable
trend of the old judge's expected meanderings. But in the answer to the
last question he thought he caught the cue and, though none save those
two knew it, thereafter it was the witness who led and the questioner
who followed his lead blindly.

“And where were you during those four years?”

“I was engaged, suh, in takin' part in the war.”

“The War of the Rebellion?”

“No, suh,” the old man corrected him gently but with firmness, “the War
for the Southern Confederacy.”

There was a least bit of a stir at this. Aunt Tilly's tape-edged
palmleaf blade hovered a brief second in the wide regular arc of its
sweep and the foreman of the jury involuntarily ducked his head, as if
in affiance of an indubitable fact.

“Ahem!” said Durham, still feeling his way, although now he saw the path
more clearly. “And on which side were you engaged?”

“I was a private soldier in the Southern army,” the old judge answered
him, and as he spoke he straightened up. “Yes, suh,” he repeated, “for
four years I was a private soldier in the late Southern Confederacy.
Part of the time I was down here in this very country,” he went on as
though he had just recalled that part of it. “Why, in the summer of '64
I was right here in this town. And until yistiddy I hadn't been back
since.”

He turned to the trial judge and spoke to him with a tone and manner
half apologetic, half confidential.

“Your Honor,” he said, “I am a judge myself, occupyin' in my home state
a position very similar to the one which you fill here, and whilst I
realize, none better, that this ain't all accordin' to the rules of
evidence as laid down in the books, yet when I git to thinkin' about
them old soldierin' times I find I am inclined to sort of reminiscence
round a little. And I trust your Honor will pardon me if I should seem
to ramble slightly?”

His tone was more than apologetic and more than confidential. It was
winning. The judge upon the bench was a veteran himself. He looked
toward the prosecutor.

“Has the state's attorney any objection to this line of testimony?” he
asked, smiling a little.

Certainly Gilliam had no fear that this honest-appearing old man's
wanderings could damage a case already as good as won. He smiled back
indulgently and waved his arm with a gesture that was compounded of
equal parts of toleration and patience, with a top-dressing of contempt.
“I fail,” said Gilliam, “to see wherein the military history and
achievements of this worthy gentleman can possibly affect the issue of
the homicide of Abner J. Rankin. But,” he added magnanimously, “if the
defense chooses to encumber the record with matters so trifling and
irrelevant I surely will make no objection now or hereafter.”

“The witness may proceed,” said the judge. “Well, really, Your Honor, I
didn't have so very much to say,” confessed Judge Priest, “and I didn't
expect there'd be any to-do made over it. What I was trying to git at
was that cornin' down here to testify in this case sort of brought back
them old days to my mind. As I git along more in years--” he was looking
toward the jurors now--“I find that I live more and more in the past.”

As though he had put a question to them several of the jurors gravely
inclined their heads. The busy cud of Juror No. 12 moved just a trifle
slower in its travels from the right side of the jaw to the left and
back again. “Yes, suh,” he said musingly, “I got up early this mornin'
at the tavern where I'm stoppin' and took a walk through your thrivin'
little city.” This was rambling with a vengeance, thought the puzzled
Durham. “I walked down here to a bridge over a little creek and back
again. It reminded me mightily of that other time when I passed through
this town--in '64--just about this season of the year--and it was hot
early today just as it was that other time--and the dew was thick on the
grass, the same as 'twas then.”

He halted a moment.

“Of course your town didn't look the same this mornin' as it did that
other mornin'. It seemed like to me there are twicet as many houses here
now as there used to be--it's got to be quite a little city.”

Mr. Lukins, the grocer, nodded silent approval of this utterance, Mr.
Lukins having but newly completed and moved into a two-story brick store
building with a tin cornice and an outside staircase.

“Yes, suh, your town has grown mightily, but”--and the whiny, humorous
voice grew apologetic again--“but your roads are purty much the same as
they were in '64--hilly in places--and kind of rocky.”

Durham found himself sitting still, listening hard. Everybody else was
listening too. Suddenly it struck Durham, almost like a blow, that
this simple old man had somehow laid a sort of spell upon them all. The
flattening sunrays made a kind of pink glow about the old judge's face,
touching gently his bald head and his white whiskers. He droned on:

“I remember about those roads particularly well, because that time when
I marched through here in '64 my feet was about out ef my shoes and
them flints cut 'em up some. Some of the boys, I recollect, left bloody
prints in the dust behind 'em. But shucks--it wouldn't a-made no real
difference if we'd wore the bottoms plum off our feet! We'd a-kept on
goin'. We'd a-gone anywhere--or tried to--behind old Bedford Forrest.”

Aunt Tilly's palmleaf halted in air and the twelfth juror's faithful
quid froze in his cheek and stuck there like a small wen. Except for a
general hunching forward of shoulders and heads there was no movement
anywhere and no sound except the voice of the witness:

“Old Bedford Forrest hisself was leadin' us, and so naturally we just
went along with him, shoes or no shoes. There was a regiment of Northern
troops--Yankees--marchin' on this town that mornin', and it seemed the
word had traveled ahead of 'em that they was aimin' to burn it down.

“Probably it wasn't true. When we got to know them Yankees better
afterward we found out that there really wasn't no difference, to speak
of, between the run of us and the run of them. Probably it wasn't so
at all. But in them days the people was prone to believe 'most
anything--about Yankees--and the word was that they was cornin' across
country, a-burnin' and cuttin' and slashin,' and the people here thought
they was going to be burned out of house and home. So old
Bedford Forrest he marched all night with a battalion of us--four
companies--Kintuckians and Tennesseeans mostly, with a sprinklin' of
boys from Mississippi and Arkansas--some of us ridin' and some walkin'
afoot, like me--we didn't always have horses enough to go round that
last year. And somehow we got here before they did. It was a close race
though between us--them a-comin' down from the North and us a-comin'
up from the other way. We met 'em down there by that little branch just
below where your present railroad depot is. There wasn't no depot there
then, but the branch looks just the same now as it did then--and the
bridge too. I walked acros't it this momin' to see. Yes, suh, right
there was where we met 'em. And there was a right smart fight.

“Yes, suh, there was a right smart fight for about twenty minutes--or
maybe twenty-five--and then we had breakfast.”

He had been smiling gently as he went along. Now he broke into a throaty
little chuckle.

“Yes, suh, it all come back to me this mornin'--every little bit of
it--the breakfast and all. I didn't have much breakfast, though, as I
recall--none of us did--probably just corn pone and branch water to wash
it down with.”

And he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as though the taste of
the gritty cornmeal cakes was still there.

There was another little pause here; the witness seemed to be through.
Durham's crisp question cut the silence like a gash with a knife.

“Judge Priest, do you know the defendant at the bar, and if so, how well
do you know him?”

“I was just comin' to that,” he answered with simplicity, “and
I'm obliged to you for puttin' me back on the track. Oh, I know the
defendant at the bar mighty well--as well as anybody on earth ever did
know him, I reckin, unless 'twas his own maw and paw. I've known him,
in fact, from the time he was born--and a gentler, better-disposed boy
never grew up in our town. His nature seemed almost too sweet for a
boy--more like a girl's--but as a grown man he was always manly, and
honest, and fair--and not quarrelsome. Oh, yes, I know him. I knew his
father and his mother before him. It's a funny thing too--comin' up this
way--but I remember that his paw was marchin' right alongside of me the
day we came through here in '64. He was wounded, his paw was, right
at the edge of that little creek down yonder. He was wounded in the
shoulder--and he never did entirely git over it.”

Again he stopped dead short, and he lifted his hand and tugged at the
lobe of his right ear absently. Simultaneously Mr. Felsburg, who was
sitting close to a window beyond the jury box, was also seized with
nervousness, for he jerked out a handkerchief and with it mopped his
brow so vigorously that, to one standing outside, it might have seemed
that the handkerchief was actually being waved about as a signal.

Instantly then there broke upon the pause that still endured a sudden
burst of music, a rollicking, jingling air. It was only a twenty-cent
touth organ, three sleigh bells, and a pair of the rib bones of a
beef-cow being played all at once by a saddle-colored negro man but it
sounded for all the world like a fife-and-drum corps:

     If you want to have a good time,
     If you want to have a good time,
     If you want to have a good time,
     If you want to ketch the devil--
     Jine the cavalree!

To some who heard it now the time was strange; these were the younger
ones. But to those older men and those older women the first jubilant
bars rolled back the years like a scroll.

     If you want to have a good time,
     If yu want to have a good time,
     If you want to have a good time,
     If you want to ride with Bedford--
     Jine the cavalree!

The sound swelled and rippled and rose through the windows--the marching
song of the Southern trooper--Forrest's men, and Morgan's, and Jeb
Stuart's and Joe Wheeler's. It had in it the jingle of saber chains, the
creak of sweaty saddle-girths, the nimble clunk of hurrying hoofs. It
had in it the clanging memories of a cause and a time that would live
with these people as long as they lived and their children lived
and their children's children. It had in it the one sure call to the
emotions and the sentiments of these people.

And it rose and rose and then as the unseen minstrel went slouching down
Main Street, toward the depot and the creek it sank lower and became a
thin thread of sound and then a broken thread of sound and then it died
out altogether and once more there was silence in the court house of
Forked Deer County.

Strangely enough not one listener had come to the windows to look out.
The interruption from without had seemed part and parcel of what went on
within. None faced to the rear, every one faced to the front.

There was Mr. Lukins now. As Mr. Lukins got upon his feet he said to
himself in a tone of feeling that he be dad-fetched. But immediately
changing his mind he stated that he would preferably be dad-blamed, and
as he moved toward the bar rail one overhearing him might have gathered
from remarks let fall that Mr. Lukins was going somewhere with the
intention of being extensively dad-burned. But for all these threats Mr.
Lukins didn't go anywhere, except as near the railing as he could press.

Nearly everybody else was standing up too. The state's attorney was
on his feet with the rest, seemingly for the purpose of making some
protest.

Had any one looked they might have seen that the ember in the smoldering
eye of the old foreman had blazed up to a brown fire; that Juror No. 4,
with utter disregard for expense, was biting segments out of the brim of
his new brown-varnished straw hat; that No. 7 had dropped his crutches
on the floor, and that no one, not even their owner, had heard them
fall; that all the jurors were half out of their chairs. But no one saw
these things, for at this moment there rose up Aunt Tilly Haslett, a
dominant figure, her huge wide bade blocking the view of three or four
immediately behind her.

Uncle Fayette laid a timid detaining hand upon her and seemed to be
saying something protestingly.

“Turn loose of me, Fate Haslett!” she commanded. “Ain't you ashamed of
yourse'f, to be tryin' to hold me back when you know how my only dear
brother died a-followin' after Gineral Nathan Bedford Forrest. Turn
loose of me!”

She flirted her great arm and Uncle Fayette spun flutteringly into the
mass behind. The sheriff barred her way at the gate of the bar.

“Mizz Haslett,” he implored, “please, Mizz Haslett--you must keep order
in the cote.” Aunt Tilly halted in her onward move, head up high and
elbows out, and through her specs, blazing like burning-glasses, she
fixed on him a look that instantly charred that, unhappy official into a
burning red ruin of his own self-importance.

“Keep it yourse'f, High Sheriff Washington Nash, Esquire,” she bade him;
“that's whut you git paid good money for doin'. And git out of my way!
I'm a-goin' in there to that pore little lonesome thing settin' there
all by herself, and there ain't nobody goin' to hinder me neither!”

The sheriff shrunk aside; perhaps it would be better to say he
evaporated aside. And public opinion, reorganized and made over but
still incarnate in Aunt Tilly Haslett, swept past the rail and settled
like a billowing black cloud into a chair that the local attorney for
the defense vacated just in time to save himself the inconvenience of
having it snatched bodily from under him.

“There, honey,” said Aunt Tilly crooningly as she gathered the forlorn
little figure of the prisoner's wife in her arms like a child and
mothered her up to her ample bombazined bosom, “there now, honey, you
jest cry on me.”

Then Aunt Tilly looked up and her specs were all blurry and wet. But she
waved her palmleaf fan as though it had been the baton of a marshal.

“Now, Jedge,” she said, addressing the bench, “and you other
gentlemen--you kin go ahead now.”

The state's attorney had meant evidently to make some sort of an
objection, for he was upon his feet through all this scene. But he
looked back before he spoke and what he saw kept him from speaking. I
believe I stated earlier that he was a candidate for rejection. So he
settled back down in his chair and stretched out his legs and buried his
chin in the top of his limp white waistcoat in an attitude that he had
once seen in a picture entitled, “Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Helena.”

“You may resume, Judge Priest,” said the trial judge in a voice that was
not entirely free from huskiness, although its owner had been clearing
it steadily for some moments.

“Thank you kindly, suh, but I was about through anyhow,” answered the
witness with a bow, and for all his homeliness there was dignity and
stateliness in it. “I merely wanted to say for the sake of completin'
the record, so to speak, that on the occasion referred to them Yankees
did not cross that bridge.” With the air of tendering and receiving
congratulations Mr. Lukins turned to his nearest neighbor and shook
hands with him warmly.

The witness got up somewhat stiffly, once more becoming a commonplace
old man in a wrinkled black alpaca coat, and made his way back to his
vacant place, now in the shadow of Aunt Tilly Haslett's form. As he
passed along the front of the jury-box the foreman's crippled right hand
came up in a sort of a clumsy salute, and the juror at the other end of
the rear row--No. 12, the oldest juror--leaned forward as if to speak
to him, but remembered in time where his present duty lay. The old judge
kept on until he came to Durham's side, and he whispered to him: “Son,
they've quit lookin' at him and they're all a-lookin' at her. Son, rest
your case.” Durham came out of a maze.

“Your Honor,” he said as he rose, “the defense rests.”

The jury were out only six minutes. Mr. Lukins insisted that it was only
five minutes and a half, and added that he'd be dad-rotted if it was a
second longer than that.

As the lately accused Tandy came out of the courthouse with his imported
lawyer--Aunt Tilly bringing up the rear with his trembling, weeping,
happy little wife--friendly hands were outstretched to clasp his and a
whiskered old gentleman with a thumbnail like a Brazil nut grabbed at
his arm.

“Whichaway did Billy Priest go?” he demanded--“little old Fightin'
Billy--whar did he go to? Soon as he started in talkin' I placed him.
Whar is he?”

Walking side by side, Tandy and Durham came down the steps into the soft
June night, and Tandy took a long, deep breath into his lungs.

“Mr. Durham,” he said, “I owe a great deal to you.”

“How's that?” said Durham.

Just ahead of them, centered in a shaft of light from the window of the
barroom of the Drummers' Home Hotel, stood Judge Priest. The old judge
had been drinking. The pink of his face was a trifle more pronounced,
the high whine in his voice a trifle weedier, as he counted one by one
certain pieces of silver into the wide-open palm of a saddle-colored
negro.

“How's that?” said Durham. “I say I owe everything in the world to you,”
 repeated Tandy.

“No,” said Durham, “what you owe me is the fee you agreed to pay me for
defending you. There's the man you're looking for.”

And he pointed to the old judge.




II. THE COUNTY TROT


SATURDAY was the last day of the county fair and the day of the County
Trot. It was also Veterans' Day, when the old soldiers were the guests
of honor of the management, and likewise Ladies' Day, which meant that
all white females of whatever age were admitted free. So naturally, in
view of all these things, the biggest day of fair week was Saturday.

The fair grounds lay in a hickory flat a mile out of town, and the tall
scaly barks grew so close to the fence that they poked their limbs
over its top and shed down nuts upon the track. The fence had been
whitewashed once, back in the days of its youth when Hector was a pup;
but Hec was an old dog now and the rains of years had washed the fence
to a misty gray, so that in the dusk the long, warped panels stood up
in rows, palely luminous--like the highshouldered ghosts of a fence. And
the rust had run down from the eaten-out nail-holes until each plank had
two staring marks in its face--like rheumy, bleared eyes. The ancient
grandstand was of wood too, and had lain outdoors in all weathers until
its rheumatic rafters groaned and creaked when the wind blew.

Back of the grandstand stood Floral Hall and Agricultural Hall. Except
for their names and their flagstaffs you might have taken them for two
rather hastily built and long-neglected bams. Up the track to the north
were the rows of stables that were empty, odorous little cubicles for
fifty-one weeks of the year, but now--for this one week--alive with
darky stable hands and horses; and all the good savors of woodfires,
clean hay, and turned-up turf were commingled there.

The fair had ideal weather for its windup. No frost had fallen yet, but
in the air there were signs and portents of its coming. The long yellow
leaves of the hickories had begun to curl up as if to hold the dying
warmth of the sap to the last; and once in a while an ash flamed red
like a signal fire to give warning for Indian summer, when all the woods
would blaze in warpaints before huddling down for the winter under their
tufted, ragged tawnies and browns--like buffalo robes on the shoulders
of chilled warriors. The first flights of the wild geese were going
over, their V's pointed to the Gulf; and that huckstering little bird of
the dead treetops, which the negroes call the sweet-potato bird--maybe
it's a pewee, with an acquired Southern accent--was calling his mythical
wares at the front door of every woodpecker's hole. The woods were
perfumy with ripening wild grapes and pawpaws, and from the orchards
came rich winy smells where the windfalls lay in heaps and cider mills
gushed under the trees; and on the roof of the smokehouse the pared,
sliced fruit was drying out yellow and leathery in the sun and
looking--a little way off--like countless ears all turned to listen for
the same thing.

Saturday, by sunup, the fair grounds were astir. Undershirted
concessionaries and privilege people emerged from their canvas sleeping
quarters to sniff at a the tantalizing smell that floated across to
them from certain narrow trenches dug in the ground. That smell, just
by itself, was one square meal and an incentive to another; for these
trenches were full of live red hickory coals; and above them, on
greenwood stakes that were stretched across, a shoat and a whole sheep,
and a rosary of young squirrels impaled in a string, had been all night
barbecuing. Uncle Isom Woolfolk was in charge here--mightily and solely
in charge--Uncle Isom Woolfolk, no less, official purveyor to the whole
county at fish fries or camp breakfasts, secretary of the Republican
County Committee, high in his church and his lodges and the best
barbecue cook in seven states. He bellowed frequent and contradictory
orders to two negro women of his household who were arranging clean
white clothes on board trestles; and constantly he went from shoat to
sheep and from sheep to squirrels, basting them with a rag wrapped about
a stick and dipped into a potent sauce of his own private making. Red
pepper and sweet vinegar were two of its main constituents, though, and
in turn he painted each carcass as daintily as an artist retouching
the miniature of his lady fair, so that under his hand the crackling
meatskins sizzled and smoked, and a yellowish glaze like a veneer spread
over their surfaces. His white chin-beard waggled with importance and
the artistic temperament.

Before Uncle Isom had his barbecue off the fire the crowds were pouring
in, coming from the town afoot, and in buggies and hacks, and from the
country in farm wagons that held families, from grandsire to baby in
arms, all riding in kitchen chairs, with bedquilt lap robes. At noon a
thin trickle of martial music came down the pike; and pretty soon then
the veterans, forty or fifty of them, marched in, two by two, some in
their reunion gray and some in their best Sunday blacks. At the head
of the limping line of old men was a fife-and-drum corps--two sons of
veterans at the drums and Corporal Harrison Treese, sometime bugler of
Terry's Cavalry, with his fife half buried in his whiskers, ripping
the high notes out of The Girl I Left Behind Me. Near the tail of the
procession was Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hellhounds. Back in
war times that organization had borne a more official and a less
sanguinary title; but you would never have guessed this, overhearing
Sergeant Jimmy Bagby's conversation.

The sergeant wore a little skirtless jacket, absurdly high-collared,
faded to all colors and falling to pieces with age. Three tarnished
buttons and a rag of rotted braid still dung to its front. Probably it
had fitted the sergeant well in the days when he was a slim and limber
young partisan ranger; but now the peaked little tail showed halfway
up his back where his suspenders forked, and his white-shirted paunch
jutted out in front like a big cotton pod bursting out of a gray-brown
boll. The sergeant wore his jacket on all occasions of high military and
civic state--that, and a gangrened leather cartridge-box bouncing up and
down on his plump hip--and over his shoulder the musket he had carried
to war and back home again, an ancient Springfield with a stock like a
log butt and a hammer like a mule's ear, its barrel merely a streak of
rust.

He walked side by side with his closest personal friend and
bitterest political foe, Major Ashcroft, late of the Ninth Michigan
Volunteers--walking so close to him that the button of the Loyal Legion
in the major's left-hand lapel almost touched the bronze Southern Cross
pinned high up on the right breast of the sergeant's flaring jacket.

From time to time the sergeant, addressing the comrades ahead of him,
would poke the major in the side and call out:

“Boys, I've took the first prisoner--this here pizen Yank is my meat!”

And the imperturbable major would invariably retort:

“Yes, and along about dark the prisoner will have to be loading you into
a hack and sending you home--the same as he always does.” Thereupon a
cackling laugh would run up the double line from its foot to its head.

The local band, up in its coop on the warped gray roof of the
grandstand, blared out Dixie, and the crowd cheered louder than ever
as the uneven column of old soldiers swung stiffly down the walkway
fronting the grandstand and halted at the word--and then, at another
word, disbanded and melted away into individuals and groups. Soon the
veterans, with their womenfolks, were scattered all over the grounds,
elbowing a way through the narrow aisles of Floral Hall to see the oil
paintings and the prize cakes and preserves, and the different patterns
of home-made rag quilts--Hen-and-Chickens and Lone Star and Log
Cabin--or crowding about the showpens where young calves lowed vainly
for parental attention and a Berkshire boar, so long of body and so vast
of bulk that he only needed to shed his legs to be a captive balloon,
was shoving his snout through a crack in his pen and begging for
goodies. And in Agricultural Hall were water-melons like green
boulders, and stalks of corn fourteen feet long, and saffron blades of
prize-winning tobacco, and families of chickens unhappily domiciled
in wooden coops. The bray of sideshow barkers, and the squeak of toy
balloons, and the barnyard sounds from the tied-up, penned-up farm
creatures, went up to the treetops in a medley that drove the birds
scurrying over the fence and into the quieter woods. And in every handy
spot under a tree basket dinners were spread, and family groups ate cold
fried chicken and lemon meringue pie, picnic fashion, upon the grass.

In the middle of this a cracked bugle sounded and there was a rush to
the grandstand. Almost instantly its rattling gray boards clamored under
the heels of a multitude. About the stall of the one lone bookmaker a
small crowd, made up altogether of men, eddied and swirled. There were
men in that group, strict church members, who would not touch a playing
card or a fiddle--playthings of the devil by the word of their strict
orthodoxy; who wouldn't let their children dance any dance except a
square dance or go to any parties except play parties, and some of them
had never seen the inside of a theater or a circus tent. But they came
each year to the county fair; and if they bet on the horses it was their
own private affair.

So, at the blare of that leaky bugle, Floral Hall and the cattlepens
were on the moment deserted and lonely. The Berkshire boar returned
to his wallow, and a young Jersey bullock, with a warm red coat and a
temper of the same shade, was left shaking his head and snorting angrily
as he tried vainly to dislodge a blue ribbon that was knotted about
one of his short, curving black horns. Had he been a second prizewinner
instead of a first, that ribbon would have been a red ribbon and there
is no telling what might have happened.

The first race was a half-mile dash for running horses. There were four
horses entered for it and three of the four jockeys wore regular jockey
outfits, with loose blouses and top boots and long-peaked caps; but the
fourth jockey was an imp-black stable boy, wearing a cotton shirt and
the ruins of an old pair of pants. The brimless wreck of a straw hat
was clamped down tight on his wool like a cup. He be-straddled a sweaty
little red gelding named Flitterfoot, and Flitterfoot was the only local
entry, and was an added starter, and a forlorn hope in the betting.

While these four running horses were dancing a fretful schottische
round at the half-mile post, and the starter, old man Thad Jacobson, was
bellowing at the riders and slashing a black-snake whip round the shins
of their impatient mounts, a slim black figure wormed a way under the
arms and past the short ribs of a few belated betters yet lingering
about the bookmaker's block. This intruder handled himself so deftly
and so nimbly as not to jostle by one hair's breadth the dignity of any
white gentleman there present, yet was steadily making progress all
the while and in ample time getting down a certain sum of money on
Flitterfoot to win at odds.

“Ain't that your nigger boy Jeff?” inquired Doctor Lake of Judge Priest,
as the new comer, still boring deftly, emerged from the group and with
a last muttered “Scuse me, boss--please, suh--scuse me!” darted away
toward the head of the stretch, where others of his race were draping
themselves over the top rail of the fence in black festoons.

“Yes, I suppose 'tis--probably,” said Judge Priest in that high singsong
of his. “That black scoundrel of mine is liable to be everywhere--except
when you want him, and then he's not anywhere. That must be Jeff, I
reckin.” And the old judge chuckled indulgently in appreciation of
Jeff's manifold talents.

During the parade of the veterans that day Judge Priest, as commandant
of the camp, had led the march just behind the fife and drums and just
ahead of the color-bearer carrying the silken flag; and all the way out
from town Jeff, his manservant, valet, and guardian, had marched a pace
to his right. Jeff's own private and personal convictions--convictions
which no white man would ever know by word of mouth from Jeff anyhow--

were not with the late cause which those elderly men in gray
represented. Jeff's political feelings, if any such he had, would
be sure to lean away from them; but it was a chance to march with
music--and Jeff had marched, his head up and his feet cutting scallops
and double-shuffles in the dust.

Judge Priest's Jeff was a small, jet-black person, swift in his gait and
wise in his generation. He kept his wool cropped close and made the part
in it with a razor. By some subtle art of his own he could fall heir to
somebody else's old clothes and, wearing them, make than look newer and
better than when they were new. Overcome by the specious wiles of Jeff
some white gentleman of his acquaintance would bestow upon him a garment
that seemed shabby to the point of open shame and a public scandal. Jeff
would retire for a season with a pressing iron and a bottle of cleansing
fluid, and presently that garment would come forth, having undergone
a glorious resurrection. Seeing it, then, the former proprietor would
repent his generosity and wonder what ever possessed him to part with
apparel so splendid.

For this special and gala occasion Jim wore a blue-serge coat that had
been given to him in consideration of certain acts of office-tending by
Attorney Clay Saunders. Attorney Clay Saunders weighed two hundred
and fifty pounds If he weighed an ounce, and Jeff would never see one
hundred and twenty-five; but the blue serge was draped upon Jeff's frame
with just the fashionable looseness. The sleeves, though a trifle long,
hung most beautifully. Jeff's trousers were of a light and pearly gray,
and had been the property originally of Mr. Otter-buck, cashier at the
bank, who was built long and rangy; whereas Jeff was distinctly short
and ducklike. Yet these same trousers, pressed now until you could have
peeled peaches with their creases and turned up at the bottoms to a
rakish and sporty length, looked as if they might have been specially
coopered to Jeff's legs by a skilled tailor.

This was Judge Priest's Jeff, whose feet would fit anybody's shoes and
whose head would fit anybody's hat. Having got his money safely down
on Flitterfoot to win, Jeff was presently choking a post far up the
homestretch. With a final crack of the starter's coiling blacksnake and
a mounting scroll of dust, the runners were off on their half-mile dash.
While the horses were still spattering through the dust on the far side
of the course from him Jeff began encouraging his choice by speech.

“Come on, you little red hoss!” he said in a low, confidential tone. “I
asks you lak a gen'leman to come on and win all that money fur me. Come
on, you little red hoss--you ain't half runnin'! little red hoss”--his
voice sank to a note of passionate pleading--“whut is detainin' you?”

Perhaps even that many years back, when it had just been discovered,
there was something to this new theory of thought transference. As if
Jeff's tense whispers were reaching to him across two hundred yards of
track and open field Flitterfoot opened up a gap between his lathered
flanks and the rest of them. The others, in a confused group, scrambled
and hinged out with their hoofs; but Flitterfoot turned into a long red
elastic rubber band, stretching himself out to twice his honest length
and then snapping back again to half. High up on his shoulder the ragged
black stable boy hung, with his knees under his chin and his shoulders
hunched as though squaring off to do a little flying himself. Twenty
long yards ahead of the nearest contender, Flitterfoot scooted over the
line a winner. Once across, he expeditiously bucked the crouching small
incumbrance off his withers and, with the bridle dangling, bounced
riderless back to his stable; while above the roar from the grandstand
rose the triumphant remark of Jeff: “Ain't he a regular runnin' and
a-jumpin' fool!”

The really important business of the day to most, however, centered
about the harness events, which was only natural, this being an end of
the state where they raised the standard breds as distinguished from the
section whence came the thoroughbreds. A running race might do for an
appetizer, like a toddy before dinner; but the big interest would focus
in the two-twenty pace and the free-for-all consolation, and finally
would culminate in the County Trot--open only to horses bred and owned
in the county and carrying with it a purse of two thousand dollars--big
money for that country--and a dented and tarnished silver trophy that
was nearly fifty years old, and valued accordingly.

After the half-mile dash and before the first heat of the two-twenty
pace there was a balloon ascension and parachute drop. Judge Priest's
Jeff was everywhere that things were happening. He did two men's part in
holding the bulging bag down to earth until the spangled aeronaut yelled
out for everybody to let go. When the man dropped, away over by the back
fence, Jeff was first on the spot to brush him off and to inquire in a
voice of respectful solicitude how he was feeling, now that he'd come
down. Up in the grandstand, Mrs. Major Joe Sam Covington, who was stout
and wore a cameo breastpin as big as a coffee saucer at her throat,
expressed to nobody in particular a desire for a glass of cool water;
and almost instantly, it seemed, Judge Priest's Jeff was at her side
bowing low and ceremoniously with a brimming dipper in one hand and an
itch for the coming tip in the other. When the veterans adjourned
back behind Floral Hall for a watermelon cutting, Jeff, grinning and
obsequious, arrived at exactly the properly timed moment to receive a
whole butt-end of red-hearted, green-rinded lusciousness for his own.
Taking the opportunity of a crowded minute about Uncle Isom Woolfolk's
barbecued meat stand he bought extensively, and paid for what he bought
with a lead half dollar that he had been saving for months against just
such a golden chance--a half dollar so palpably leaden that Uncle Isom,
discovering it half an hour later, was thrown into a state of intense
rage, followed by a period of settled melancholy, coupled with general
suspicion of all mankind. Most especially, though, Judge Priest's Jeff
concerned himself with the running of the County Trot, being minded to
turn his earlier winnings over and over again.

From the outset Jeff, like most of the fair crowd, had favored Van
Wallace's black mare, Minnie May, against the only other entry for the
race, Jackson Berry's big roan trotting stallion, Blandville Boy. The
judgment of the multitude stood up, too, for the first two heats of the
County Trot, alternating in between heats of the two-twenty pace and the
free-for-all, were won handily by the smooth-gaited mare. Blandville Boy
was feeling his oats and his grooming, and he broke badly each time, for
all the hobble harness of leather that was buckled over and under him.
Nearly everybody was now betting on Minnie May to take the third and the
decisive heat.

Waiting for it, the crowd spread over the grounds, leaving wide patches
of the grandstand empty. The sideshows and the medicine venders enjoyed
heavy patronage, and once more the stalled ox and the fatted pig were
surrounded by admiring groups. There was a thick jam about the crowning
artistic gem of Floral Hall--a crazy quilt with eight thousand different
pieces of silk in it, mainly of acutely jarring shades, so that the
whole was a thing calculated to blind the eye and benumb the mind.

The city marshal forcibly calmed down certain exhilarated young bucks
from the country--they would be sure to fire off their pistols and yell
into every dooryard as they tore home that night, careening in their
dusty buggies; but now they were made to restrain themselves. Bananas
and cocoanuts advanced steadily in price as the visible supply shrank.
There is a type of Southern countryman who, coming to town for a circus
day or a fair, first eats extensively of bananas--red bananas preferred;
and then, when the raw edge of his hunger is abated, he buys a cocoanut
and, after punching out one of its eyes and drinking the sweet milky
whey, cracks the shell apart and gorges on the white meat. By now the
grass was cumbered with many shattered cocoanut shells, like broken
shards; and banana peels, both red and yellow, lay wilted and limp
everywhere in the litter underfoot.

The steam Flyin' Jinny--it would be a carousel farther North--ground
unendingly, loaded to its gunwales with family groups. Crap games
started in remote spots and fights broke out. In a far shadow of the
fence behind the stables one darky with brass knuckles felled another,
then broke and ran. He scuttled over the fence like a fox squirrel, with
a bullet from a constable's big blue-barreled revolver spatting into the
paling six indies below him as he scaled the top and lit flying on
the other side. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, dragging his Springfield by
the barrel, began a long story touching on what he once heard General
Buckner say to General Breckinridge, went to sleep in the middle of it,
enjoyed a refreshing nap of twenty minutes, woke up with a start and
resumed the anecdote at the exact point where he left off--“An' 'en
General Breckinridge he says to General Buckner, he says, 'General--'”

But Judge Priest's Jeff disentangled himself from the center of things,
and took a quiet walk up toward the stables to see what might be seen
and to hear what might be heard, as befitting one who was speculating
heavily and needed all available information to guide him. What he saw
was Van Wallace, owner of the mare, and Jackson Berry, owner of the
studhorse, slipping furtively into an empty feed-shed. As they vanished
within Van Wallace looked about him cautiously, but Jeff had already
dived to shelter alongside the shed and was squatting on a pile of
stable scrapings, where a swarm of flies flickered above an empty pint
flask and watermelon rinds were curling up and drying in the sun like
old shoesoles. Jeff had seen something. Now he applied his ear to a
crack between the planks of the feedshed and heard something.

For two minutes the supposed rivals confabbed busily in the shelter of
a broken hay-'rack. Then, suddenly taking alarm without cause, they
both poked their heads out at the door and looked about them
searchingly--right and left. There wasn't time for Jeff to get away. He
only had a second's or two seconds' warning; but all the conspirators
saw as they issued forth from the scene of their intrigue was a small
darky in clothes much too large for him lying alongside the shed in
a sprawled huddle, with one loose sleeve over his face and one
black forefinger shoved like a snake's head down the neck of a flat
pocket-flask. Above this figure the flies were buzzing in a greedy
cloud.

“Just some nigger full of gin that fell down there to sleep it off,”
 said Van Wallace. And he would have gone on; but Berry, who was a tall
red-faced, horsy man--a blusterer on the surface and a born coward
inside--booted the sleeper in the ribs with his toe.

“Here, boy!” he commanded. “Wake up here!” And he nudged him again hard.

The negro only flinched from the kicks, then rolled farther over on his
side and mumbled through a snore.

“Couldn't hear it thunder,” said Berry reassured. “Well, let's get away
from here.”

“You bet!” said Van Wallace fervently. “No use takin' chances by bein'
caught talkin' together. Anyhow, they'll be ringing the startin' bell in
a minute or two.”

“Don't forget, now!” counseled Berry as Wallace started off, making by a
roundabout and devious way for his own stable, where Minnie May, hitched
to her sulky and with her legs bandaged, was being walked back and forth
by a stable boy.

“Don't you worry; I won't!” said Wallace; and Berry grinned joyously and
vanished in the opposite direction, behind the handy feedshed.

On the instant that both of them disappeared Judge Priest's Jeff rose to
his feet, magically changing from a drunken darky to an alert and flying
black Mercury. His feet hardly hit the high places as he streaked it for
the grandstand--looking for Judge Priest as hard as he could look.

Nearly there he ran into Captain Buck Owings. Captain Buck Owings was a
quiet, grayish man, who from time to time in the course of a busy life
as a steamboat pilot and master had had occasion to shoot at or into
divers persons. Captain Buck Owings had a magnificent capacity for
attending strictly to his own business and not allowing anybody else
to attend to it. He was commonly classified as dangerous when
irritated--and tolerably easy to irritate.

“Cap'n Buck! Cap'n Buck!” sputtered

Jeff, so excited that he stuttered. “P-please, suh, is you seen my
boss--Jedge Priest? I suttinly must see him right away. This here next
heat is goin' to be thro wed.”

It was rarely that Captain Buck Owings raised his voice above a low,
deliberate drawl. He raised it a trifle now.

“What's that, boy?” he demanded. “Who's goin' to throw this race?”

He caught up with Jeff and hurried along by him, Jeff explaining what he
knew in half a dozen panted sentences. As Captain Buck Owings' mind
took in the situation, Captain Buck Owings' gray eyes began to flicker a
little.

Nowhere in sight was there any one who looked like the judge. Indeed,
there were few persons at all to be seen on the scarred green turf
across which they sped and those few were hurrying to join the crowds
that packed thick upon the seats of the grandstand, and thicker along
the infield fence and the homestretch. Somewhere beyond, the stable bell
jangled. The little betting ring was empty almost and the lone bookmaker
was turning his blackboard down.

His customary luck served Jeff in this crisis, however. From beneath a
cuddy under the grandstand that bore a blue board lettered with the word
“Refreshments” appeared the large, slow-moving form of the old judge.
He was wiping his mouth with an enormous handkerchief as he headed
deliberately for the infield fence. His venerable and benevolent pink
face shone afar and Jeff literally flung himself at him.

“Oh, Jedge!” he yelled. “Oh, Jedge; please, suh, wait jes' a minute!”

In some respects Judge Priest might be said to resemble Kipling's East
Indian elephant. He was large as to bulk and conservative as to his
bodily movements; he never seemed to hurry, and yet when he set out to
arrive at a given place in a given time he would be there in due season.
He faced about and propelled himself toward the queerly matched pair
approaching him with such haste.

As they met, Captain Buck Owings began to speak and his voice was back
again at its level monotone, except that it had a little steaming sound
in it, as though Captain Buck Owings were beginning to seethe and simmer
gently somewhere down inside of himself.

“Judge Priest, suh,” said Captain Buck, “it looks like there'd be some
tall swindlin' done round here soon unless we can stop it. This boy of
yours heard something. Jeff tell the judge what you heard just now.” And
Jeff told, the words bubbling out of him in a stream:

“It's done all fixed up betwixt them w'ite gen'lemen. That there Mr.
Jackson Berry he's been tormentin' the stallion ontwell he break and
lose the fust two heats. Now, w'en the money is all on the mare, they
goin' to turn round and do it the other way. Over on the backstretch
that Mr. Van Wallace he's goin' to spite and tease Minnie May ontwell
she go all to pieces, so the stallion'll be jest natchelly bound to win;
an' 'en they'll split up the money amongst 'em!”

“Ah-hah!” said Judge Priest; “the infernal scoundrels!” Even in this
emergency his manner of speaking was almost deliberate; but he glanced
toward the bookmaker's block and made as if to go toward it.

“That there Yankee bookmaker gen'leman he's into it too,” added Jeff. “I
p'intedly heared 'em both mention his name.”

“I might speak a few words in a kind of a warnin' way to those two,”
 purred Captain Buck Owings. “I've got a right smart money adventured on
this trottin' race myself.” And he turned toward the track.

“Too late for that either, son,” said the old judge, pointing. “Look
yonder!”

A joyful rumble was beginning to thunder from the grandstand. The
constables had cleared the track, and from up beyond came the glint of
the flashing sulky-spokes as the two conspirators wheeled about to score
down and be off.

“Then I think maybe I'll have to attend to 'em personally after the
race,” said Captain Buck Owings in a resigned tone.

“Son,” counseled Judge Priest, “I'd hate mightily to see you brought up
for trial before me for shootin' a rascal--especially after the mischief
was done. I'd hate that mightily--I would so.”

“But, Judge,” protested Captain Buck Owings, “I may have to do it! It
oughter be done. Nearly everybody here has bet on Minnie May. It's plain
robbin' and stealin'!”

“That's so,” assented the judge as Jeff danced a dog of excitement just
behind him--“that's so. It's bad enough for those two to be robbin'
their own fellow-citizens; but it's mainly the shame on our county fair
I'm thinkin' of.” The old judge had been a director and a stockholder
of the County Jockey Club for twenty years or more. Until now its record
had been clean. “Tryin' to declare the result off afterward wouldn't
do much good. It would be the word of three white men against a
nigger--and nobody would believe the nigger,” added Captain Buck Owings,
finishing the sentence for him.

“And the scandal would remain jest the same,” bemoaned the old judge.
“Buck, my son, unless we could do something before the race it looks
like it's hopeless. Ah!”

The roar from the grandstand above their heads deepened, then broke up
into babblings and exclamations. The two trotters had swung past the
mark, but Minnie May had slipped a length ahead at the tape and the
judges had sent them back again. There would be a minute or two more of
grace anyhow. The eyes of all three followed the nodding heads of the
horses back up the stretch. Then Judge Priest, still watching, reached
out for Jeff and dragged him round in front of him, dangling in his grip
like a hooked black eel.

“Jeff, don't I see a gate up yonder in the track fence right at the
first turn?” he asked.

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff eagerly. “'Tain't locked neither. I come through
it myse'f today. It opens on to a little road whut leads out past the
stables to the big pike. I kin--”

The old judge dropped his wriggling servitor and had Captain Buck Owings
by the shoulder with one hand and was pointing with the other up the
track, and was speaking, explaining something or other in a voice
unusually brisk for him.

“See yonder, son!” he was saying. “The big oak on the inside--and the
gate is jest across from it!”

Comprehension lit up the steamboat captain's face, but the light went
out as he slapped his hand back to his hip pocket--and slapped it flat.

“I knew I'd forgot something!” he lamented, despairingly. “Needin' one
worse than I ever did in my whole life--and then I leave mine home in my
other pants!”

He shot the judge a look. The judge shook his head.

“Son,” he said, “the circuit judge of the first judicial district of
Kintucky don't tote such things.”

Captain Buck Owings raised a clenched fist to the blue sky above and
swore impotently. For the third time the grandstand crowd was starting
its roar. Judge Priest's head began to waggle with little sidewise
motions.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hell hounds, rambled with weaving
indirectness round the corner of the grandstand not twenty feet from
them. His gangrened cartridge-box was trying to climb up over his left
shoulder from behind, his eyes were heavy with a warm and comforting
drowsiness, and his Springfield's iron butt-plate was scurfing up the
dust a yard behind him as he hauled the musket along by the muzzle.

The judge saw him first; but, even as he spoke and pointed, Captain Buck
Owings caught the meaning and jumped. There was a swirl of arms and legs
as they struck, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, sorely shocked, staggered back
against the wall with a loud grunt of surprise and indignation.

Half a second later, side by side, Captain Buck Owings and Judge
Priest's Jeff sped northward across the earth, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby
staggered toward the only comforter near at hand, with his two empty
arms upraised. Filled with a great and sudden sense of loss he fell upon
Judge Priest's neck, almost bearing his commander down by the weight of
his grief.

“Carried her four years!” he exclaimed piteously; “four endurin' years,
Judge, and not a single dam' Yankee ever laid his hand on her! Carried
her ever since, and nobody ever dared to touch her! And now to lose her
this away!”

His voice, which had risen to a bleat, sank to a sob and he wept
unrestrainedly on the old judge's shoulder. It looked as though these
two old men were wrestling together, catch-as-catch-can.

The judge tried to shake his distressed friend off, but the sergeant
clung fast. Over the bent shoulders of the other the judge saw the
wheels flash by, going south, horses and drivers evened up. The “Go!”
 of the starting judge was instantly caught up by five hundred spectators
and swallowed in a crackling yell. Oblivious of all these things the
sergeant raised his sorrowing head and a melancholy satisfaction shone
through his tears.

“I lost her,” he said; “but, by gum, Judge, it took all four of 'em to
git her away from me, didn't it?”

None, perhaps, in all that crowd except old Judge Priest saw the two
fleeting figures speeding north. All other eyes there were turned to
the south, where the county's rival trotters swung round the first turn,
traveling together like teammates. None marked Captain Buck Owings as,
strangely cumbered, he scuttled across the track from the outer side
to the inner and dived like a rabbit under the fence at the head of
the homestretch, where a big oak tree with a three-foot bole cast its
lengthening shadows across the course. None marked Judge Priest's Jeff
coiling down like a black-snake behind an unlatched wooden gate almost
opposite where the tree stood.

None marked these things, because at this moment something direful
happened. Minnie May, the favorite, was breaking badly on the back
length. Almost up on her hindlegs she lunged out ahead of her with her
forefeet, like a boxer. That far away it looked to the grandstand crowds
as though Van Wallace had lost his head entirely. One instant he was
savagely lashing the mare along the flanks, the next he was pulling her
until he was stretched out flat on his back, with his head back between
the painted sulky wheels. And Blandville Boy, steady as a clock, was
drawing ahead and making a long gap between them.

Blandville Boy came on grandly--far ahead at the half; still farther
ahead nearing the three-quarters. All need for breaking her gait being
now over, crafty Van Wallace had steadied the mare and again she trotted
perfectly--trotted fast too; but the mischief was done and she was
hopelessly out of it, being sure to be beaten and lucky if she saved
being distanced.

The whole thing had worked beautifully, without a hitch. This thought
was singing high in Jackson Berry's mind as he steered the stud-horse
past the three-quarter post and saw just beyond the last turn the
straightaway of the homestretch, opening up empty and white ahead of
him. And then, seventy-five yards away, he beheld a most horrifying
apparition!

Against a big oak at the inner-track fence, sheltered from the view of
all behind, but in full sight of the turn, stood Captain Buck Owings,
drawing down on him with a huge and hideous firearm. How was Jackson
Berry, thus rudely jarred from pleasing prospects, to know that
Sergeant Jimmy Bagby's old Springfield musket hadn't been fired since
Appomattox--that its lode was a solid mass of corroded metal, its stock
worm-eaten walnut and its barrel choked up thick with forty years of
rust! All Jackson Berry knew was that the fearsome muzzle of an awful
weapon was following him as he moved down toward it and that behind the
tall mule's ear of a hammer and the brass guard of the trigger he saw
the cold, forbidding gray of Captain Buck Owings' face and the colder,
more forbidding, even grayer eye of Captain Buck Owings--a man known to
be dangerous when irritated--and tolerably easy to irritate!

Before that menacing aim and posture Jackson Berry's flesh turned to
wine jelly and quivered on his bones. His eyes bulged out on his cheeks
and his cheeks went white to match his eyes. Had it not been for the
stallion's stern between them, his knees would have knocked together.
Involuntarily he drew back on the reins, hauling in desperately until
Blandville Boy's jaws were pulled apart like the red painted mouth of
a hobby-horse and his forelegs sawed the air. The horse was fighting to
keep on to the nearing finish, but the man could feel the slugs of lead
in his flinching body.

And then--and then--fifty scant feet ahead of him and a scanter twenty
above where the armed madman stood--a wide gate flew open; and, as this
gap of salvation broke into the line of the encompassing fence, the
welcome clarion of Judge Priest's Jeff rose in a shriek: “This way out,
boss--this way out!”

It was a time for quick thinking; and to persons as totally, wholly
scared as Jackson Berry was, thinking comes wondrous easy. One
despairing half-glance he threw upon the goal just ahead of him and the
other half on that unwavering rifle-muzzle, now looming so dose that he
could catch the glint of its sights. Throwing himself far back in his
reeling sulky Jackson Berry gave a desperate yank on the lines that
lifted the sorely pestered stallion clear out of his stride, then sawed
on the right-hand rein until he swung the horse's head through the
opening, grazing one wheel against a gatepost--and was gone past the
whooping Jeff, lickety-split, down the dirt road, through the dust and
out on the big road toward town.

Jeff slammed the gate shut and vanished instantly. Captain Buck
Owings dropped his weapon into the long, rank grass and slid round the
treetrunk. And half a minute later Van Wallace, all discomfited and
puzzled, with all his fine hopes dished and dashed, sorely against his
own will jogged Minnie May a winner past a grandstand that recovered
from its dumb astonishment in ample time to rise and yell its approval
of the result.

*****

Judge Priest being a childless widower of many years' standing, his
household was administered for him by Jeff as general manager, and by
Aunt Dilsey Turner as kitchen goddess. Between them the old judge
fared well and they fared better. Aunt Dilsey was a master hand at a
cookstove; but she went home at night, no matter what the state of the
weather, wearing one of those long, wide capes--dolmans, I think they
used to call them--that hung dear down to the knees, hiding the wearer's
hands and whatsoever the hands might be carrying.

It was a fad of Aunt Dilsey's to bring one covered splint basket and one
close-mouthed tin bucket with her when she came to work in the morning,
and to take both of them away with her--under her dolman cape--at night;
and in her cabin on Plunkett's Hill she had a large family of her own
and two paying boarders, all of whom had the appearance of being well
nourished. If you, reader, are Southern-born, these seemingly trivial
details may convey a meaning to your understanding.

So Aunt Dilsey Turner looked after the judge's wants from the big old
kitchen that was detached from the rest of the rambling white house, and
Jeff had the run of his sideboard, his tobacco caddy, and his wardrobe.
The judge was kept comfortable and they were kept happy, each respecting
the other's property rights.

It was nine o'clock in the evening of the last day of the county fair.
The judge, mellowly comfortable in his shirtsleeves, reclined in a
big easy rocking-chair in his sitting room. There was a small fire of
hickory wood in the fireplace and the little flames bickered together
and the embers popped as they charred a dimmer red. The old judge was
smoking his homemade corncob pipe with the long cane stem, and sending
smoke wreaths aloft to shred away like cobweb skeins against the dingy
ceiling.

“Jeff!” he called to a black shadow fidgeting about in the background.

“Yas, suh, Jedge; right yere!”

“Jeff, if your discernin' taste in handmade sour-mash whisky has
permitted any of that last batch of liquor I bought to remain in the
demijohn, I wish you'd mix me up a little toddy.”

Jeff snickered and mixed the toddy, mixing it more hurriedly then
common, because he was anxious to be gone. It was Saturday night--a
night dedicated by long usage to his people; and in Jeff's pocket was
more ready money than his pocket had ever held before at any one time.
Moreover, in the interval between dusk and dark, Jeff's wardrobe had
been most grandly garnished. Above Mr. Clay Saunders' former blue serge
coat a crimson necktie burned like a beacon, and below the creased legs
of Mr. Otterbuck's late pearl-gray trousers now appeared a pair of
new patent-leather shoes with pointed toes turned up at the ends like
sleigh-runners and cloth uppers in the effective colors of the Douglas
plaid and rows of 24-point white pearl buttons.

Assuredly Jeff was anxious to be on his way. He placed the filled toddy
glass at the old judge's elbow and sought unostentatiously to withdraw
himself.

“Jeff!” said the judge.

“Yas, suh.”

“I believe Mr. Jackson Berry did not see fit to return to the fair
grounds this evenin' and protest the result of the third heat?”

“No, suh,” said Jeff; “frum whut I heared some of the w'ite folks
sayin', he driv right straight home and went to bed and had a sort of a
chill.”

“Ah-hah!” said the judge, sipping reflectively. Jeff fidgeted and drew
nearer a halfopen window, listening out into the maple-lined street. Two
blocks down the street he could hear the colored brass band playing in
front of the Colored Odd Fellows Hall for a “festibul.”

“Jeff,” said Judge Priest musingly, “violence or a show of violence is
always to be deplored.” Jeff had only a hazy idea of what the old
judge meant by that, but in all his professional life Jeff had never
intentionally disagreed in conversation with any white adult--let alone
a generous employer. So:

“Yas, suh,” assented Jeff promptly; “it suttinly is.”

“But there are times and places,” went on the old judge, “when it is
necessary.”

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff, catching the drift--“lak at a racetrack!”

“Ah-hah! Quite so,” said Judge Priest, nodding. “And, Jeff, did it ever
occur to you that there are better ways of killin' a cat than by chokin'
him with butter?”

“Indeed yas, suh,” said Jeff. “Sometimes you kin do it best with one of
these yere ole rusty Confedrit guns!”

At that precise moment, in a little house on the next street, Sergeant
Jimmy Bagby's family, having prevailed upon him to remove his shoes and
his cartridge-belt before retiring, were severally engaged in an
attempt to dissuade him from a firmly expressed purpose of taking his
Springfield musket to bed with him.




III. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD


We had a feud once down in our country, not one of those sanguinary
feuds of the mountains involving a whole district and forcing constant
enlargements of hillside burying grounds, nor yet a feud handed down
as a deadly legacy from one generation to another until its origin is
forgotten and its legatees only know how they hate without knowing why,
but a shabby, small neighborhood vendetta affecting but two families
only, and those in a far corner of the county--the Flemings and the
Faxons.

Nevertheless, this feud, such as it was, persisted in a sluggish
intermittent kind of a way for twenty years or so. It started in a
dispute over a line boundary away back in War Times when a Faxon shot a
Fleming and was in turn shot by another Fleming; and it lasted until the
Faxons tired of fence-corner, briar-patch warfare and moved down into
Tennessee, all but one branch of them, who came into town and settled
there, leaving the Flemings dominant in the Gum Spring precinct. So the
feud ceased to be an institution after that and became a memory, living
only in certain smouldering animosities which manifested themselves
at local elections and the like, until it flared up momentarily in the
taking-off of old Ranee Fleming at the hands of young Jim Faxon; and
then it died, and died for good.

It is the manner of the taking-off of this one of the Flemings that
makes material for the story I am telling here. By all accounts it would
appear that the Faxons had been rather a weak-spined race who fought
mostly on the defensive and were lacking in that malignant persistency
that made old Ranee Fleming's name one to scare bad children with in the
unsettled days following the Surrender. I remember how we boys used to
watch him, half-fearsomely and half-admiringly, when he came to town
on a Court Monday or on a Saturday and swaggered about, unkempt and
mud-crusted and frequently half drunk. Late in the afternoon he would
mount unsteadily to the tilted seat of his spring wagon and go back home
to the Gum Spring country lashing at his team until they danced with
terror and splitting the big road wide open through the middle. And that
night at the places where the older men congregated there would be
tales to tell of those troubled mid-sixties when old Ranee had worn
the turn-coat of a guerilla, preying first on one side and then on the
other.

Now young Jim Faxon, last male survivor of his clan, and direct in the
line of the original fighting Faxons, was a different sort of person
altogether, a quiet, undersized, decent-spoken young chap who minded
well his own business, which was keeping a truck stand on the Market.
He lived with his aunt, old Miss Puss Whitley--certain women were still
called Miss in our town even though they had been married for
twenty years and widowed for as many more, as was the case in this
instance--and he was her main support and stand-by. It was common rumor
that when young Jim came of age and had a little money laid by on his
own account, he meant to marry the little Hardin girl--Emmy Hardin--and
this was a romance that nearly everybody in town knew about and favored
most heartily. She was his distant cousin and an orphan, and she lived
with Miss Puss too. Sometimes in good weather she would come in with him
and help out at the truck stand. She was a little quail-like creature,
quick in her movements and shy as a bunny, with pretty irregular
features and a skin so clear and white that when she blushed, which was
a hundred times a day, the color would drench her face to the temples
and make her prettier than ever. All of Jim's regular customers approved
his choice of a sweetheart and wished him mighty well. He was regarded
as about the pick of the thinned-out Faxon breed.

For the years that young Jim was growing up, his tribal enemy left him
alone. Perhaps old Ranee regarded the lank sapling of a boy as being
not worth even the attention of an insult. Probably in crowds they had
rubbed elbows a dozen times with no engendering of friction. But when
young Jim had passed his twentieth birthday and was almost a man
grown, then all without warning Ranee Fleming set to work, with malice
aforethought, to pick a quarrel with him. It was as deliberate and as
brutal as anything could be. Of a sudden, it seemed, the torrents of
long-submerged hate came spuming up from some deep back eddy in his
muddied, fuddled old mind, making an evil whirlpool of passion.

It was on a Saturday afternoon in November that old Ranee came, boiling
with his venom, to spew it out on the son of his dead and gone enemy.
It happened on the market, and if old Ranee aimed to add brim measure
to the humiliation of the boy, not in a year of choosing could he
have picked fitter time and place. The green grocer wasn't known then;
everybody went to market in person on week day mornings and particularly
everybody went of a Saturday afternoon. In the market square, town
aristocrat and town commoner met on the same footing, a market basket
over every arm, with this distinction only:--that ordinary folk toted
their loaded baskets back home and the well-to-do paid to have theirs
sent. There were at least twenty darkies who picked up a living by
packing market baskets home. They all had their regular patrons and
regarded them with jealous, proprietary eyes. You took a customer away
from a basket darky and you had him to fight.

There is a new market house now on the site of the old one, a
pretentious affair of brick with concrete floors and screened window
openings and provision for steam heat in the winter; but then, and
for many years before that, the market was a decrepit shed-like thing,
closed in the middle and open at the ends, with a shingled roof that
sagged in on itself and had hollows in it like the sunken jaws of a
toothless old hag; and there were cracks in the side walls that you
could throw a dog through, almost. In the middle, under half-way
shelter, were the stalls of the butchers, which were handed down
from father to son so that one stall would remain in a family for
generations; and here one bought the beef steaks of the period--long
bib-shaped segments of pale red meat, cut miraculously long and
marvelously thin, almost like apron patterns. This thinness facilitated
the beating process--the cooks would pound them with tools devised for
that purpose--and then they were fried through and through and drenched
with a thick flour gravy. Such was the accustomed way of treating a beef
steak. Persons with good teeth could eat them so, and for the others the
brown flour gravy provided a sustenance. But the spring chickens were
marvels for plumpness and freshness and cheapness; and in the early
spring the smoked hog jowls hung in rows, fairly begging people to carry
them off and boil them with salad greens; and in the fall when the
hog killing season was at hand, the country sausage and the chines and
backbones and spare ribs made racks of richness upon the worn marble
slabs.

Up at the far end of the square beyond the shed eaves stood the public
scales, and around it hay growers and cord wood choppers and Old Man
Brimm, the official charcoal burner of the county, waited for trade
alongside their highpiled wagons. Next to them was the appointed place
of the fish hucksters, which was an odorous place, where channel cats
and river perch and lake crappies were piled on the benches, some still
alive and feebly flapping. The darkies were sure to be thickest here.
There was an unsung but none the less authentic affinity existing
between a fresh-caught catfish and an old negro man.

Down at the other end was the domain of the gardeners and the truck
patch people--an unwritten law as old as the market itself ordained
these apportionments of space--and here you might find in their seasons
all manner of edibles, wild and tame. The country boys and girls ranged
the woods and the fields for sellable things, to go along with the
product of orchard and garden and berry patch. In the spring, when herb
teas and home-brewed tonics were needed for the thinning of the blood,
there would be yellow-red sassafras root tied up in fragrant, pungent
bunches, all ready for steeping; and strings of fresh-shot robins for
pot-pies were displayed side by side with clumps of turnip-greens and
mustard greens. And in summer there would be all manner of wild berries
and heaps of the sickish-smelling May apples; and later, after the first
light frost, ripe pawpaws and baskets of wild fox grapes, like blue shoe
buttons; and then later on, scaly-bark hickory nuts and fresh-brewed
persimmon beer in kegs, and piggins and crocks of the real lye hominy,
with the big blue grains of the corn all asmoke like slaking lime, and
birds--which meant quail always--and rabbits, stretched out stark and
stiff, and the native red-skinned yams, and often possums, alive and
“suiting” in small wooden cages, or else dead and dressed, with the dark
kidney-fat coating their immodestly exposed interiors.

As I was saying, it was on a Saturday in November and getting along
toward Thanksgiving when old Ranee Fleming came to the market to shame
young Jim Faxon before the crowd. And when he came, you could tell
by his look and by the way he shouldered through the press of people
between the double rows of stands that all the soured animosities of his
nature had swelled to bursting under the yeasty ferment of an unstable,
hair-triggered temper.

The liquor he had drunk might have had something to do with it too. He
came up with a barely perceptible lurch in his gait and stopped at the
Faxon stall, which was the third from the lower end of the shed. With
his head down between his shoulders and his legs spraddled he began
staring into the face of young Jim.

Deadly offense can be carried just as well in a look as in the spoken
word, if you only know how to do it--and Ranee Fleming knew.

There was outright obscenity in his glower.

Instantly it seemed, everybody in that whole end of the market square
sensed what was impending. Sellers and buyers ceased trafficking and
faced all the same way. Those in the rear were standing on tiptoe the
better to see over the heads of those nearer to these two blood enemies.
Some climbed upon the wheel hubs of the wagons that were backed up in
rows alongside the open shed and balanced themselves there. The silence
grew electric and tingled with the feeling of a coming clash.

Young Jim wanted no trouble, that was plain enough to be seen. The first
darting realization that his tribal foe had forced a meeting on him
seemed to leave him dazed, and at a loss for the proper course to
follow. He bent his face away from the blasphemous insistent--glare of
the old man and made a poor pretense at straightening up his wares upon
the bench in front of him; but his hands trembled so he overturned a
little wooden measure that held a nickel's worth of dried lady-peas.
The little round peas rolled along a sunken place in the wood and
began spattering off in a steady stream, like buck-shot spilling from
a canister. A dark red flush came up the back of the boy's neck. He was
only twenty, anyhow, and those who looked on were sorry for him and
for his youth and helplessness and glad that little Emmy Hardin, his
sweetheart, wasn't there.

It was a long half minute that old Ranee, without speaking, stood there,
soaking his soul in the sight of a Faxon's discomfiture, and when he
spoke he grated the words as though he had grit in his mouth.

“Looky here you,” he ordered, and the boy, as though forced to obey by a
will stronger than his own, lifted his head and looked at him.

“Mister Fleming,” he answered, “what--what is it you want with
me--Mister Fleming?”

“Mister Fleming--Mister Fleming,” mimicked the older man, catching at
his words, “Mister Fleming, huh? Well, you know mighty good and well,
I reckin, whut it is I want with you. I want to see if you're as
white-livered as the rest of your low-flung, hound-dawg, chicken-hearted
breed used to be. And I reckin you are.

“Mister Fleming, huh? Well, from now on that's whut it better be and
don't you fail to call me by them entitlements either. The next time I
come by I reckin you better take off your hat to me too. Do you hear me,
plain, whut I'm a-sayin'? You--”

He called him the unforgivable, unatonable name--the fighting word, than
which, by the standards of that community and those people, no blow with
a clenched fist could be in one twentieth part so grievous an injury;
yes, it was worse than a hundred blows of a fist. So at that, the
onlookers gave back a little, making way for the expected rush and
grapple. But there was no forward rush by the younger man, no grapple
with the older.

Young Jim Faxon took it--he just stood and took it without a word or a
step. Old Ranee looked at him and laughed out his contempt in a derisive
chuckle and then he turned and slouched off, without looking back,
as though he disdained to watch for a rear attack from so puny and
spineless an enemy. It all started and happened and was over with in a
minute or less. The last of the spilt lady peas were still spattering
down upon the rough bricks of the market and running away and hiding
themselves in cracks. Young Jim, his head on his breast and his shamed
eyes looking down at nothing, was fumbling again with his wares and
Ranee Fleming's hunching shoulders were vanishing at the end of the
shed.

People talked about it that night and for days after. It was not a thing
to forget--a man near grown who lacked the sand to resent that insult.
A fist fight might have been forgotten, even a fist fight between these
two heritors of a feud instinct, but not this. Some of the younger
fellows didn't see, they said, how Jim Faxon could hold his head up
again and look people in the eye. And Jim didn't hold his head up--not
as high as he had held it before this happened. Broody-eyed and glum and
tight-lipped, he tended Miss Puss Whitley's truck patch and brought his
products to market every morning. He had always been quiet and sparing
of speech; now he was quiet to the point almost of dumbness.

A month and more went by, and old Ranee didn't ride in from Gum Spring,
and then the Christmas came. Christmas Day fell on a Monday so that the
Christmas itself properly started on the Saturday before. It was a warm
and a green Christmas as most of them are in that climate, mild enough
at midday for folks to sit on their front porches and just cold enough
at night to beard the grass with a silver-gray frost rime. Languid
looking house flies crawled out in the afternoons and cleaned their
gummy wings while they sunned themselves on the southern sides of
stables. The Christmas feeling was in the air. At the wharfboat lay the
Clyde, deep laden for her annual jug-trip, with thousands of bottles and
jugs and demi-johns consigned to the dry towns up the river. There was a
big sidewalk trade going on in fire crackers and rockets, the Christinas
and not the Fourth being the time for squibbing of crackers in the
South, the market, though, was the busiest place of all. It fairly
milled with people. Every huckster needed four hands, and still he
wouldn't have had enough.

Jimmy Faxon had little Emmy Hardin helping him through the hours when
the pressure was greatest and the customers came fastest. She kept
close to him, with little nestling motions, and yet there was something
protecting in her attitude, as though she would stand between him and
any danger, or any criticism. The looks she darted at him were fairly
caressing. Through the jam appeared Ranee Fleming, elbowing his way
roughly. His face above his straggly whiskers was red with temper and
with liquor. His cotton shirt was open at the throat so that his hairy
chest showed. His shapeless gray jeans trousers--gray originally but now
faded and stained to a mud color--were both beltless and suspenderless,
and were girthed tightly about his middle by the strap at the back. From
much ramming of his hands into the pockets, they were now crowded down
far upon his hips, showing an unwontedly long expanse of shirt; and this
gave to him an abnormally short-legged, long-waisted look.

A lot of those little fuzzy parasitic pods called beggar-lice were stuck
thick upon his bagged knees--so thick they formed irregular patterns in
grayish green. He wore no coat nor waistcoat, but an old mud-stiffened
overcoat was swung over his shoulders with the arms tied loosely around
his neck and the skirts dangling in folds behind him; and cuckleburrs
clung to a tear in the lining. He was a fit model of unclean and
unwholesome ferocity.

Before young Jim or little Emmy Hardin saw him, he was right up on them;
only the width of the bench separated him from them. He leaned across
it and called Jim that name again and slapped him in the face with a
wide-armed sweeping stroke of his open hand. The boy flinched back from
the coming blow so that only the ends of old Ranee's flailing fingers
touched his cheek, but the intent was there. Before the eyes of his
sweetheart, he had been slapped in the face. The girl gave a startled
choking gasp and tried to put her arms about young Jim. He shook her
off.

Well content with his work, old Ranee fell back, all the time watching
young Jim. People gave way for him involuntarily. When he was clear of
the shed he turned and made for one of the saloons that lined the square
on its western side. He had a choice of several such places; the whole
row was given over to saloons, barring only a couple of cheap john
clothing stores and a harness store, and two or three small dingy pawn
shops. Pistol stores these last were, in the vernacular of the darkies,
being so called because the owners always kept revolvers and spring-back
knives on display in the show windows, along with battered musical
instruments and cheap watches.

The spectators followed old Ranee's figure with their eyes until the
swinging doors of the nearest bar room closed behind him. When they
looked back again toward Stall No. 3 young Jim was gone too. He had
vanished silently; and Emmy Hardin was alone, with her face buried in
her arms and her arms stretched across the counter, weeping as though
she would never leave off.

From the next stall there came to her, comfortingly, a middle aged
market woman, a motherly figure in a gray shawl with puckered and broad
red hands. She lifted Emmy up and led her away, calling out to her
nearest neighbor to watch her stall and the Faxon stall until she got
back.

“There's liable to be trouble,” she added, speaking in a side whisper so
the sobbing girl wouldn't hear what she said.

“I reckin not,” said the man. “It looks to me like Jimmy Faxon is plumb
cowed down and 'feared of that there old bush whacker--it looks like he
ain't got the spirit of a rabbit left in him. But you take her on away
somewheres, Mizz Futrell--me and my boys will 'tend stand for both of
you, and you needn't worry.”

Under such merciful guardianship little Emmy Hardin was taken away and
so she was spared the sight of what was to follow.

Old Ranee stayed in the nearest saloon about long enough to take one
drink and then he came out and headed for the next saloon along the row.
To reach it he must pass one of the pawn-brokers' shops. He had just
passed it when a sort of smothered warning outcry went up from behind
him somewhere, and he swung round to look his finish square in the face.

Young Jim Faxon was stepping out of the pawn-broker's door. He was
crying so the tears streamed down his face. His right arm was down at
his side stiffly and the hand held clenched a weapon which the Daily
Evening News subsequently described as “a Brown & Rogers thirty-eight
calibre, nickle plated, single-action, with a black rubber handle, and
slightly rusted upon the barrel.”

Old Ranee made no move toward his own hip pocket. It came out at
the inquest that he was not carrying so much as a pen-knife. He half
crouched and began stumbling backward toward the front of the building
with his arms out and his hands making empty pawing clutches behind him
as though he were reaching for some solid support to hold him up in his
peril. But before he had gone three steps, young Jim brought the pistol
up and fired--just once.

Once was enough. If you had never before this seen a man shot, you would
have known instinctively that this one was mortally stricken. Some who
were near and looking right at him told afterward how the loose end of
one overcoat sleeve, dangling down on his breast, flipped up a little
at the shot. A slightly pained, querulous look came into his face and
he brought his arms round and folded them tightly across his stomach as
though taken with a sudden cramp. Then he walked, steadily enough, to
the edge of the sidewalk and half-squatted as though he meant to sit on
the curbing with his feet in the gutter. He was half way down when death
took him in his vitals. He pitched forward and outward upon his face
with his whiskers flattening in the street. Two men ran to him and
turned him over on his back. His face had faded already from its angry
red to a yellowish white, like old tallow. He breathed hard once or
twice and some thought they saw his eyelids bat once; then his chest
fell inward and stayed so, and he seemed to shrink up to less than his
proper length and bulk.

Young Jim stood still ten feet away looking at his handiwork. He had
stopped crying and he had dropped the pistol and was wiping both hands
flatly against the breast of his wool sweater as though to cleanse them
of something. Allard Jones, the market-master, who had police powers
and wore a blue coat and a German silver star to prove it, came plowing
through the ring of on-lookers, head tilt, and laid hands upon him.
Allard Jones fumbled in his pocket and produced a pair of steel nippers
and made as if to twine the chain round the boy's right wrist.

“You don't need to be putting those things on me, Mr. Jones,” said
his prisoner. “I'll go all right--I'll go with you. It's all over
now--everything's over!”

Part of the crowd stayed behind, forming a scrooging, shoving ring
around the spot in front of Benny Michelson's pawn shop where the body
of old Ranee lay face upward across the gutter with the stiffening legs
on the sidewalk, and the oddly foreshortened body out in the dust of the
road; and the rest followed Allard Jones and young Jim as they walked
side by side up Market Square to Court Street and along Court Street a
short block to the lock-up.

The sympathy of the community was with young Jim--and the law of the
land was dead against him on all counts. He had not fired in sudden heat
and passion; there had been time, as the statutes measured time, for due
deliberation. However great the provocation and by local standards the
provocation had been great enough and pressing hard to the breaking
point, he could not claim self-defense. Even though Fleming's purpose
had been, ultimately, to bring things to a violent issue, he was
retreating, actually, at the moment itself. As a bar to punishment for
homicide, the plea of temporary insanity had never yet been set up in
our courts. Jim Faxon was fast in the snarls of the law.

From the lock-up he went to the county jail, the charge, wilful
and premeditated murder. Dr. Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg and Major
Covington, all customers of the accused, and all persons of property,
stood ready to go bail for him in any sum namable, but murder was
not bailable. In time a grand jury buttressed the warrant with an
indictment--murder in the first degree, the indictment read--and young
Jim stayed in jail awaiting his trial when circuit court should open in
the spring.

Nobody, of course, believed that his jury would vote the extreme
penalty. The dead man's probable intentions and his past reputation,
taken with the prisoner's youth and good repute, would stand as bars
to that, no matter how the letter of the law might read; but it was
generally accepted that young Jim would be found guilty of manslaughter.
He might get four years for killing old Ranee, or six years or even
ten--this was a subject for frequent discussion. There was no way out of
it. People were sorrier than ever for Jim and for his aunt and for the
tacky, pretty little Hardin girl.

All through the short changeable winter, with its alternate days of snow
flurrying and sunshine, Emmy Hardin and Miss Puss Whitley, a crushed
forlorn pair, together minded the stall on the market, accepting
gratefully the silent sympathy that some offered them, and the awkward
words of good cheer from others. Miss Puss put a mortgage of five
hundred dollars on her little place out in the edge of town. With the
money she hired Dabney Prentiss, the most silvery tongued orator of all
the silver tongues at the county bar, to defend her nephew. And every
day, when market hours were over, in rain or snow or shine, the two
women would drive in their truck wagon up to the county jail to sit with
young Jim and to stay with him in his cell until dark.

Spring came earlier than common that year. The robins came back from the
Gulf in February on the tail of a wet warm thaw. The fruit trees bloomed
in March and by the beginning of April everything was a vivid green and
all the trees were clumped with new leaves. Court opened on the first
Monday.

On the Sunday night before the first Monday, Judge Priest sat on his
porch as the dusk came on, laving his spirits in the balm of the
young spring night. In the grass below the steps the bull-cricket that
wintered under Judge Priest's front steps was tuning his fairy-fiddle
at regular, half-minute intervals. Bull bats on the quest for incautious
gnats and midges were flickering overhead, showing white patches on
the tinder sides of their long wings. A flying squirrel, the only
night-rider of the whole squirrel tribe, flipped out of his hole in
a honey locust tree, and cocked his head high, and then he spread the
furry gray membranes along his sides and sailed in a graceful, downward
swoop to the butt of a silver leaf poplar, fifty feet away, where he
clung against the smooth bark so closely and so flatly he looked like a
little pelt stretched and nailed up there to dry.

The front gate clicked and creaked. The flying squirrel flipped around
to the safe side of his tree and fled upward to the shelter of the
branches, like a little gray shadow, and Judge Priest, looking down the
aisle of shady trees, saw two women coming up the walk toward him, their
feet crunching slowly on the gravel. He laid his pipe aside and pulled
chairs forward for his callers, whoever they might be. They were right
up to the steps before he made them out--Miss Puss Whitley and little
Emmy Hardin.

“Howdy do, ladies,” said the old Judge with his homely courtesy. “Howdy,
Miss Puss? Emmy, child, how are you? Come in and set down and rest
yourselves.”

But for these two, this was no time for the small civilities. The weight
of trouble at their hearts knocked for utterance at their lips. Or, at
least, it was so with the old aunt.

“Jedge Priest,” she began, with a desperate, driven eagerness, “we've
come here tonight to speak in private with you about my boy--about
Jimmy.”

In the darkness they could not see that the old Judge's plump figure was
stiffening.

“Did Mister Dabney Prentiss--did anyone, send you here to see me on this
business?” he asked, quickly.

“No, suh, nobody a'tall,” answered the old woman. “We jest came on our
own accord--we felt like as if we jest had to come and see you. Court
opens in the momin' and Jimmy's case, as you know, comes up the first
thing. And oh, Jedge Priest, we air in so much trouble, Emmy and me--and
you've got the name of bein' kind hearted to them that's borne down and
in distress--and so we come to you.”

He raised his hand, as though to break in on her, but the old woman
was not to be stopped. She was pouring out the grievous burden of her
lament:

“Jedge Priest, you knowed my husband when he was alive, and you've
knowed me these many years. And you know how it was in them old days
that's gone that the Flemings was forever and a day fightin' with my
people and forcin' trouble on 'em 'till finally they hunted 'em plum'
out of the county and out of the State, away from the places where they
was born and raised. And you know Jimmy too, and know what a hard time
he had growin' up, and how he's always stood by me and helped me out,
jest the same as if he was my own son. And I reckin you know about
him--and Emmy here.”

She broke off to wipe her eyes. Had it been a man who came on such an
errand the Judge would have sent him packing--he would have been at no
loss to put his exact meaning into exact language; for the Judge held
his place on the bench in a high and scriptural regard. But here, in the
presence of these two woeful figures, their faces drenched and steeped
with sorrow, he hesitated, trying to choose words that would not bruise
their wounds.

“Miss Puss,” he said very softly, almost as though he were speaking to a
child, “whatever my private feelin's may be towards you and yours, it
is not proper for me as the Judge upon the bench, to express them in
advance of the trial. It is my sworn duty to enforce the law, as it is
written and laid down in the books. And the law is merciful, and is just
to all.”

The old woman's angular, slatty figure straightened. In the falling
light her pinched and withered face showed, a white patch with deep
grayish creases in it, the color of snow in a quick thaw.

“The law!” she flared out, “the law, you say, Jedge. Well, you kin talk
mighty big about the law, but what kind of a law is that that lets a
fightin', swearin', drunken bully like Ranee Fleming plague a poor boy
and call him out of his name with vile words and shame him before this
child here, and yit not do nothin' to him for it? And what kind of a law
is it that'll send my boy up yonder to that there penitentiary and wreck
his life and Emmy's life and leave me here alone in my old age, ashamed
to lift my head amongst my neighbors ever again?”

“Madame,” said the Judge with all kindliness in his tone, “it's not for
me to discuss these matters with you, now. It's not even proper that I
should let you say these things to me.”

“Oh, but Jedge,” she said, “you must listen to me, please. You oughter
know the truth and there ain't no way for you to know it without I tell
it to you. Jimmy didn't want no quarrel with that man--it wasn't never
none of his choosin'. He tried not to bear no grudge for what had gone
before--he jest craved to be let alone and not be pestered. Why, when
Ranee Fleming cussed him that first time, last Fall, he come home to me
cryin' like his heart would break. He said he'd been insulted and that
he'd have to take it up and fight it out with Ranee Fleming; he felt
like he just had to. But we begged him on our bended knees mighty nigh,
me and Emmy did, not to do nothin' for our sakes--and for our sakes
he promised to let it go, and say nothin'. Even after that, if Ranee
Fleming had just let him be, all this turrible trouble wouldn't a-come
on us. But Ranee Fleming he come back again and slapped Jimmy's face,
and Jimmy knowed then that sooner or later he'd have to kill Ranee
Fleming or be killed his-self--there wasn't no other way out of it for
him.

“Jedge Priest, he's been the best prop a lone woman ever had to lean
on--he's been like a son to me. My own son couldn't a-been more
faithful or more lovin. I jest ask you to bear all these things in mind
tomorrow.”

“I will, Madame,” said the old Judge, rather huskily. “I promise you I
will. Your nephew shall have a fair trial and all his rights shall be
safe-guarded. But that is all I can say to you now.”

Emmy Hardin, who hadn't spoken at all, plucked her by the arm and sought
to lead her away. Shaking her head, the old woman turned away from the
steps.

“Jest one minute, please, Miss Puss,” said Judge Priest, “I'd like to
ask you a question, and I don't want you to think I'm pryin' into your
private and personal affairs; but is it true what I hear--that you've
mortgaged your home place to raise the money for this boy's defense?”

“I ain't begredgin' the money,” she protested. “It ain't the thought of
that, that brought me here tonight. I'd work my fingers to the bone
if 'twould help Jimmy any, and so would Emmy here. We'd both of us be
willin' and ready to go to the porehouse and live and die there if it
would do him any good.”

“I feel sure of that,” repeated the old Judge patiently, “but is it true
about this mortgage?”

“Yes, suh,” she answered, and then she began to cry again, “it's true,
but please don't even let Jimmy know. He thinks I had the money saved up
from the marketin' to hire Mr. Prentiss with, and I don't never want him
to know the truth. No matter how his case goes I don't never want him to
know.” They had moved off down the gravel walk perhaps twenty feet, when
suddenly the smouldering feud-hate stirred in the old woman's blood;
and it spread through her and made her meager frame quiver as if with an
ague. And now the words came from her with a hiss of feeling:

“Jedge Priest, that plague-taken scoundrel deserved killin'! He was
black hearted from the day he came into the world and black hearted he
went out of it. You don't remember, maybe--you was off soldierin' at the
time--when he was jayhawkin' back and forth along the State line here,
burnin' folks' houses down over their heads and mistreatin' the wimmin
and children of them that was away in the army. I tell you, durin' that
last year before you all got back home, there was soldiers out after
him--out with guns in their hands and orders to shoot him down on sight,
like a sheep-killin' dog. He didn't have no right to live!”

The girl got her quieted somehow; she was sobbing brokenly as they went
away. For a long five minutes after the gate clicked behind the forlorn
pair, Judge Priest stood on his porch in the attitude of one who had
been pulled up short by the stirring of a memory of a long forgotten
thing. After a bit he reached for his hat and closed the front door.
He waddled heavily down the steps and disappeared in the aisle of the
maples and silver leaf trees.

Half an hour later, clear over on the other side of town, two windows of
the old court house flashed up as rectangles of light, set into a block
of opaque blackness. Passers by idling homeward under the shade trees
of the Square, wondered why the lights should be burning in the Judge's
chambers. Had any one of them been moved to investigate the whys and
wherefores of this phenomenon he would have discovered the Judge at his
desk, with his steel bowed spectacles balanced precariously on the
tip of his pudgy nose and his round old face pulled into a pucker
of intenseness as he dug through one sheaf after another of musty,
snuffy-smelling documents. The broad top of the desk in front of him was
piled with windrows of these ancient papers, that were gray along their
creases with the pigeonhole dust of years, and seamy and buffed with
age. Set in the wall behind him was a vault and the door of the vault
was open, and within was a gap of emptiness on an upper shelf, which
showed where all these papers had come from; and for further proof that
they were matters of court record there was a litter of many crumbly
manila envelopes bearing inscriptions of faded ink, scattered about over
the desk top, and on the floor where they had fallen.

For a good long time the old Judge rummaged briskly, pawing into the
heaps in front of him and snorting briskly as the dust rose and tickled
his nostrils. Eventually he restored most of the papers to their proper
wrappers and replaced them in the vault, and then he began consulting
divers books out of his law library--ponderous volumes, bound in faded
calf skin with splotches of brown, like liverspots, on their covers. It
was nearly midnight before he finished. He got up creakily, and reaching
on tiptoe--an exertion which created a distinct hiatus of inches between
the bottom of his wrinkled vest and the waistband of his trousers--he
turned out the gas jets. Instantly the old courthouse, sitting among the
trees, became a solid black mass. He felt his way out into the hallway,
barking his shins on a chair, and grunting softly to himself.

When young Jim Faxon's case was called the next morning and the jailor
brought him in, Jim wore hand-cuffs. At the term of court before this, a
negro cow thief had got away coming across the court house yard and
the Judge had issued orders to the jailor to use all due precautions in
future. So the jailor, showing no favoritism, had seen fit to handcuff
young Jim. Moreover, he forgot to bring along the key to the irons and
while he was hurrying back to the jail to find it, young Jim had to wait
between his women folk, with his bonds still fast upon him. Emmy Hardin
bent forward and put her small hands over the steel, as though to hide
the shameful sight of it from the eyes of the crowd and she kept her
hands there until Jailor Watts came back and freed Jim. The little group
of three sitting in a row inside the rail, just back of Lawyer
Dabney Prentiss' erect and frock-coated back, were all silent and all
pale-faced, young Jim with the pallor of the jail and Emmy Hardin with
the whiteness of her grief and her terror, but the old aunt's face was
a streaky, grayish white, and the wrinkles in her face and in her thin,
corded neck looked inches deep.

Right away the case was called and both sides--defense and
commonwealth--announced as ready to proceed to trial. The audience
squared forward to watch the picking of the jurors, but there were never
to be any jurors picked for the trial of this particular case.

For Judge Priest had readied the point where he couldn't hold in any
longer. He cleared his throat and then he spoke, using the careful
English he always used on the bench--and never anywhere else.

“Before we proceed,” he began, and his tone told plainly enough that
what he meant to say now would be well worth the hearing, “before
we proceed, the court has something to say, which will have a direct
bearing upon the present issue.” He glanced about him silently,
commanding quiet. “The defendant at the bar stands charged with the
death of one Ransom Fleming and he is produced here to answer that
charge.”

From the desk he lifted a time-yellowed, legal-looking paper, folded
flat; he shucked it open with his thumb. “It appears, from the records,
that in the month of February and of the year 1865, the said Ransom
Fleming, now deceased, was a fugitive from justice, going at large and
charged with divers and sundry felonious acts, to wit, the crime of
arson and the crime of felonious assault with intent to kill, and the
crime of confederating with others not named, to destroy the property
of persons resident in the State of Kentucky. It appears further that a
disorganized condition of the civil government existed, the State being
overrun with stragglers and deserters from both armies then engaged in
civil war, and therefore, because of the inability or the failure of the
duly constituted authorities to bring to justice the person charged with
these lawless and criminal acts, the Governor of this State did offer a
reward of $500 for the apprehension of Ransom Fleming, dead or alive.”

Now, for sure, the crowd knew something pregnant with meaning for the
prisoner at the bar was coming--knew it without knowing yet what shape
it would assume. Heads came forward row by row and necks were craned
eagerly.

“I hold here in my hand an official copy of the proclamation issued by
the Governor of the State,” continued Judge Priest. “Under its terms
this reward was open to citizens and to officers of the law alike.
All law-abiding persons were in fact urged to join in ridding the
commonwealth of this man. He stood outside the pale of the law, without
claim upon or right to its protection.

“It would appear further,”--the old Judge's whiny voice was rising
now--“that this proclamation was never withdrawn, although with the
passage of years it may have been forgotten. Under a strict construction
of the law of the land and of the commonwealth, it may be held to have
remained in force up to and including the date of the death of the said
Ransom Fleming. It accordingly devolves upon this court, of its own
motion, to set aside the indictment against the defendant at the bar and
to declare him free--”

For the time being His Honor got no further than that. Even the
stupidest listener there knew now what had come to pass--knew that Judge
Priest had found the way to liberty for young Jim Faxon. Cheering broke
out--loud, exultant cheering and the stamping of many feet. Persons
outside, on the square and in the street, might have been excused for
thinking that a dignified and orderly session of court had suddenly
turned into a public rally--a ratification meeting. Most of those
actually present were too busy venting their own personal satisfaction
to notice that young Jim was holding his sweetheart and his aunt in his
arms; and there was too much noise going on round about them for any one
to hear the panted hallelujahs of joy and relief that poured from the
lips of the young woman and the old one.

The Judge pounded for order with his gavel, pounding long and hard,
before the uproar simmered down into a seething and boiling of confused,
excited murmurings.

“Mister Sheriff,” he ordered, with a seeming sternness which by no means
matched the look on his face, “keep order in this court! If any further
disorder occurs here you will arrest the offenders and arraign them for
contempt.”

The sheriff's bushy eyebrows expressed bewilderment. When it came to
arresting a whole court house full of people, even so vigilant and
earnest-minded an official as Sheriff Giles Bindsong hardly knew where
to start in. Nevertheless he made answer promptly.

“Yes, suh, Your Honor,” he promised, “I will.”

“As I was saying when this interruption occurred,” went on the Judge,
“it now devolves upon the court to discharge the defendant at the bar
from custody and to declare him entitled to the reward of $500 placed
upon the head of the late Ransom Fleming by the Governor of Kentucky in
the year 1865--” Young Jim Faxon with his arms still around the heaving
shoulders of the women, threw his head up:

“No Judge, please, sir, I couldn't touch that money--not that”--he
began, but Judge Priest halted him:

“The late defendant not being of legal age, the court rules that this
reward when collected may be turned over to his legal guardian. It may
be that she will find a good and proper use to which this sum of money
may be put.” This time, the cheering, if anything, was louder even
than it had been before; but when the puzzled sheriff looked around
for instructions regarding the proper course of procedure in such an
emergency, the judge on the bench was otherwise engaged. The judge on
the bench was exchanging handshakes of an openly congratulatory nature
with the members of the county bar headed by Attorney for the Defense,
Dabney Prentiss.




IV. A JUDGMENT COME TO DANIEL


THE sidewheel packet Belle of Memphis landed at the wharf, and the
personal manager of Daniel the Mystic came up the gravel levee with a
darky behind him toting his valises. That afternoon all of the regular
town hacks were in use for a Masonic funeral, or he could have ridden up
in solitary pomp. You felt on first seeing him that he was the kind of
person who would naturally prefer to ride.

He was a large man and, to look at, very impressive. On either lapel of
his coat he wore a splendid glittering golden emblem. One was a design
of a gold ax and the other was an Indian's head. His watch-charm was
made of two animal claws--a tiger's claws I know now they must have
been--jointed together at their butts by a broad gold band to form a
downward-dropping crescent. On the middle finger of his right hand was
a large solitaire ring, the stone being supported by golden eagles with
their wings interwoven. His vest was the most magnificent as to colors
and pattern that I ever saw. The only other vest that to my mind would
in any way compare with it I saw years later, worn by the advance agent
of a trained dog and pony show.

From our perch on the whittled railings of the boat-store porch we
viewed his advent into our town. Steamboats always brought us to
the river front if there was no business more pressing on hand, and
particularly the Belle of Memphis brought us, because she was a regular
sidewheeler with a double texas, and rising suns painted on her paddle
boxes, and a pair of enormous gilded buckhorns nailed over her pilot
house to show she held the speed record of the White Collar Line. A big,
red, sheet-iron spread-eagle was swung between her stacks, and the
tops of the stacks were painted red and cut into sharp points like
spearheads. She had a string band aboard that came out on the guards and
played Suwannee River when she was landing and Goodby, My Lover, Goodby
when she pulled out, and her head mate had the loudest swearing voice on
the river and, as everybody knew, would as soon kill you as look at you,
and maybe sooner.

The Belle was not to be compared with any of our little stem wheel local
packets. Even her two mud clerks, let alone her captain and her pilots,
wore uniforms; and she came all the way from Cincinnati and ran clean
through to New Orleans, clearing our wharf of the cotton and tobacco and
the sacked ginseng and peanuts and such commonplace things, and leaving
behind in their stead all manner of interesting objects in crates and
barrels. Once she brought a whole gipsy caravan--the Stanley family it
was called--men, women and children, dogs, horses, wagons and all, a
regular circus procession of them.

She was due Tuesdays, but generally didn't get in until Wednesdays, and
old Captain Rawlings would be the first to see her smoke coiling in a
hazy smudge over Livingston Point and say the Belle was coming. Captain
Rawlings had an uncanny knack of knowing all the boats by their smokes.
The news would spread, and by the time she passed the Lower Towhead and
was quartering across and running down past town, so she could turn and
land upstream, there would be a lot of pleasurable excitement on the
wharf. The black draymen standing erect on their two-wheeled craft,
like Roman chariot racers, would whirl their mules down the levee at a
perilous gallop, scattering the gravel every which way, and our leisure
class--boys and darkies--and a good many of the business men, would come
down to the foot of Main Street to see her land and watch the rousters
swarm off ahead of the bellowing mates and eat up the freight piles. One
trip she even had white rousters, which was an event to be remembered
and talked about afterward. They were grimy foreigners, who chattered
in an outlandish tongue instead of chanting at their work as regular
rousters did.

This time when the Belle of Memphis came and the personal manager of
Daniel the Mystic came up the levee, half a dozen of us were there
and saw him coming. We ran down the porch steps and trailed him at a
respectful distance, opinion being acutely divided among us as to what
he might be. He was associated with the great outer world of amusement
and entertainment; we knew that by the circumstances of his apparel
and his jewels and high hat and all, even if his whole bearing had not
advertised his calling as with banners. Therefore, we speculated freely
as we trailed him. He couldn't be the man who owned the Eugene Robinson
Floating Palace, because the Floating Palace had paid its annual visit
months before and by now must be away down past the Lower Bends in
the bayou country. Likewise, the man who came in advance of the circus
always arrived by rail with a yellow car full of circus bills and many
talented artists in white overalls. I remember I decided that he must
have something to do with a minstrel show--Beach & Bowers' maybe, or
Thatcher, Primrose & West's.

He turned into the Richland House, with the darky following him with his
valises and us following the darky; and after he had registered, old Mr.
Dudley Dunn, the clerk, let us look at the register. But two or three
grown men looked first; the coming of one who was so plainly a personage
had made some stir among the adult population. None there present,
though, could read the name the stranger had left upon the book. Old Mr.
Dunn, who was an expert at that sort of thing, couldn't decide himself
whether it was O. O. Driscoll or A. A. Davent. The man must have spent
years practicing to be able to produce a signature that would bother any
hotel clerk. I have subsequently ascertained that there are many abroad
gifted as he was--mainly traveling salesmen. But if you couldn't read
his name, all who ran might read the nature of his calling, for 'twas
there set forth in two colors--he had borrowed the red-ink bottle from
Mr. Dunn to help out the customary violet--and done in heavy shaded
letters--“Representing Daniel the Mystic”--with an ornamental flourish
of scrolls and feathery beaded lines following after. The whole took up
a good fourth of one of Mr. Dudley Dunn's blue-ruled pages.

Inside of an hour we were to know, too, who Daniel the Mystic might
be, for in the hotel office and in sundry store windows were big bills
showing a likeness of a man of magnificent mien, with long hair and his
face in his hand, or rather in the thumb and forefinger of his hand,
with the thumb under the chin and the finger running up alongside the
cheek. Underneath were lines to the effect that Daniel the Mystic,
Prince of Mesmerism and Seer of the Unseen, was Coming, Coming! Also
that night the Daily Evening News had a piece about him. He had rented
St. Clair Hall for two nights hand-running and would give a mysterious,
edifying and educational entertainment dealing with the wonders of
science and baffling human description. The preliminaries, one learned,
had been arranged by his affable and courteous personal representative
now in our midst, Mr. D. C. Davello--so old Mr. Dudley Dunn was wrong in
both of his guesses.

Next morning Daniel the Mystic was on hand, looking enough like his
pictured likeness to be recognized almost immediately. True, his
features were not quite so massive and majestic as we had been led to
expect, and he rather disappointed us by not carrying his face in his
hand, but he was tall and slim enough for all purposes and wore his hair
long and was dressed all in black. He had long, slender hands, and eyes
that, we agreed, could seem to look right through you and tell what you
were thinking about.

For one versed in the mysteries of the unseen he was fairly democratic
in his minglings with the people; and as for D. C. Davello, no one, not
even a candidate, could excel him in cordiality. Together they visited
the office of the Daily Evening News and also the office of our
other paper, the Weekly Argua-Eye, which was upstairs over Leaken's
job-printing shop. They walked through the market house and went to the
city hall to call on the mayor and the city marshal and invite them to
come to St. Clair Hall that night and bring their families with them,
free of charge. Skinny Collins, who was of their tagging juvenile
escort, at once began to put on airs before the rest. The city marshal
was his father.

About the middle of the afternoon they went into Felsburg Brothers Oak
Hall Clothing Emporium, steered by Van Wallace, who seemed to be showing
them round. We followed in behind, half a dozen or more of us, scuffling
our dusty bare feet on the splintery floor between the aisles of
racked-up coats. In the rear was Willie Richey, limping along on one toe
and one heel. Willie Richey always had at least one stone bruise in the
stone-bruise season, and sometimes two.

They went clear back to the end of the store where the office was and
the stove, but we, holding our distance, halted by the counter where
they kept the gift suspenders and neckties--Felsburg Brothers gave a
pair of suspenders or a necktie with every suit, the choice being left
to the customer and depending on whether in his nature the utilitarian
or the decorative instinct was in the ascendency. We halted there, all
eyes and ears and wriggling young bodies. The proprietors advanced
and some of the clerks, and Van Wallace introduced the visitors to Mr.
Herman Felsburg and to Mr. Ike Felsburg, his brother. Mr. Herman said,
“Pleased to meetcher,” with professional warmth, while Mr. Ike murmured,
“Didn't catch the name?” inquiringly, such being the invariable formula
of these two on greeting strangers. Cigars were passed round freely by
D. C. Davello. He must have carried a pocketful of cigars, for he had
more of them for some of the business men who came dropping in as if
by chance. All of a sudden Van Wallace, noting how the group had grown,
said it would be nice if the professor would show us what he could
do. D. C. Davello said it wasn't customary for Daniel the Mystic to
vulgarize his art by giving impromptu demonstrations, but perhaps he
would make an exception just for this once. He spoke to Daniel the
Mystic who was sitting silently in the Messrs. Felsburg's swivel
office-chair with his face in his hands--the poster likeness was
vindicated at last--and after a little arguing he got up and looked all
about him slowly and in silence. His eye fell on the little huddle of
small boys by the necktie counter and he said sharp and quick to Jack
Irons: “Come here, boy!”

I don't know yet how Jack Irons came to be of our company on that day;
mostly Jack didn't run with us. He was sickly. He had spells and was
laid up at home a good deal.

He couldn't even go barefooted in summer, because if he did his legs
would be broken out all over with dew poison in no time.

Jack Irons didn't belong to one of the prominent families either. He
lived in a little brown house on the street that went down by the old
Enders place. His mother was dead, and his sister worked in the county
clerk's office and always wore black alpaca sleeves buttoned up on her
forearms. His father was old Mr. Gid Irons that stayed in Scotter's
hardware store. He didn't own the store, he just clerked there. Winter
and summer he passed by our house four times a day, going to work in the
morning and coming back at night, coming to dinner at twelve o'clock
and going back at one. He was so regular that people used to say if the
whistle on Langstock's planing mill ever broke down they could still
set the clocks by old Mr. Gid Irons. Perhaps you have known men who
were universally called old while they were yet on the up-side of middle
life? Mr. Gid Irons was such a one as that.

I used to like to slip into Scotter's just to see him scooping tenpenny
nails and iron bolts out of open bins and kegs with his bare hands.
Digging his hands down into those rusty, scratchy things never seemed
to bother him, and it was fascinating to watch him and gave you little
flesh-crawling sensations. He was a silent, small man, short but very
erect, and when he walked he brought his heels down very hard first. The
skin of his face and of his hands and his hair and mustache were all
a sort of faded pinkish red, and he nearly always had iron rust on his
fingers, as though to advertise that his name was Irons.

By some boy intuition of my own I knew that he cut no wide swath in
the lazy field of town life. When the veterans met at the city hall and
organized their veterans' camp and named it the Gideon K. Irons Camp, it
never occurred to me that they could be offering that honor to our old
Mr. Gid Irons. I took it as a thing granted that there were some other
Gideon Irons somewhere, one with a K in his name, a general probably,
and no doubt a grand looking man on a white horse with a plume in his
hat and a sword dangling, like the steel engraving of Robert E. Lee in
our parlor. Whereas our Mr. Irons was shabby and poor; he didn't even
own the house he lived in.

This Jack Irons who was with us that day was his only son, and when
Daniel the Mystic looked at him and called him, Jack stepped out from
our midst and went toward him, his feet dragging a little and moving as
if some one had him by the shoulders leading him forward. His thin arms
dangled at his sides. He went on until he was close up to Daniel the
Mystic. The man threw up one hand and snapped out “Stop,” as though he
were teaching tricks to a dog, and Jack flinched and dodged. He stopped
though, with red spots coming and going in the cheeks as though under
the stoking of a blowpipe, and he breathed in sharp puffs that pulled
his nostrils almost shut. Standing so, he looked as poor and weak and
futile as a sprig of bleached celery, as a tow string, as a limp rag,
as anything helpless and spineless that you had a mind to think of. The
picture of him has hung in my mind ever since. Even now I recall how his
meager frame quivered as Daniel the Mystic stooped until his eyes were
on a level with Jack's eyes, and said something to Jack over and over
again in a half-whisper.

Suddenly his hands shot out and he began making slow stroking motions
downward before Jack's face, with his fingers outstretched as though he
were combing apart banks of invisible yam. Next with a quick motion he
rubbed Jack's eyelids closed, and massaged his temples with his thumbs,
and then stepped back.

There stood Jack Irons with his eyes shut, fast asleep. He was still on
his feet, bolt upright, but fast asleep--that was the marvel of it--with
his hands at his side and the flushed color all gone from his cheeks.
It scared us pretty badly, we boys. I think some of the grown men were a
little bit scared too. We were glad that none of us had been singled out
for this, and yet envious of Jack and his sudden elevation to prominence
and the center of things.

Daniel the Mystic seemed satisfied. He mopped drops of sweat off his
face. He forked two fingers and darted them like a snake's tongue at
Jack, and Jack, still asleep, obeyed them, as if he had been steel and
they the two horns of a magnetic horseshoe. He swayed back and forth,
and then Daniel the Mystic gave a sharp shove at the air with the palms
of both hands--and Jack fell backward as though he had been hit.

But he didn't fall as a boy would, doubling up and giving in. He fell
stiff, like a board, without a bend in him anywhere. Daniel the Mystic
leaped forward and caught him before he struck, and eased him down flat
on his back and folded his arms up across his breast, and that made him
look like dead.

More wonders were coming. Daniel the Mystic and D. C. Davello hauled two
wooden chairs up close together and placed them facing each other; then
lifting Jack, still rigid and frozen, they put his head on the seat of
one chair and his heels on the seat of the other and stepped back and
left him suspended there in a bridge. We voiced our astonishment in
an anthem of gasps and overlapping exclamations. Not one of us in that
town, boy or man, had ever seen a person in hypnotic catalepsy.

Before we had had time enough to take this marvel all in, Daniel
the Mystic put his foot on Jack and stepped right up on his stomach,
balancing himself and teetering gently above all our heads. He was tall
and must have been heavy; for Jack's body bent and swayed under the
weight, yet held it up in the fashion of a hickory springboard. Some
of the men jumped up then and seemed about to interfere. Old Mr. Herman
Felsburg's face was red and he sputtered, but before he could get the
words out Daniel the Mystic was saying soothingly:

“Be not alarmed, friends. The subject is in no danger. The subject feels
no pain and will suffer no injury.”

“Just the same, Mister, you get down off that little boy,” ordered Mr.
Felsburg. “And you please wake him up right away. I don't care much to
see things done like that in my store.”

“As you say,” said Daniel the Mystic easily, smiling all round him at
the ring of our startled faces. “I merely wished to give you a small
demonstration of my powers. And, believe me, the subject feels no pain
whatsoever.”

He stepped off of him, though, and Jack's body came up straight and
flat again. They lifted him off the chairs and straightened him up, and
Daniel the Mystic made one or two rapid passes in front of his face.
Jack opened his eyes and began to cry weakly. One of the clerks brought
him a drink, but he couldn't swallow it for sobbing, and only blubbered
up the water when Mr. Felsburg held the glass to his lips. Van Wallace,
who looked a little frightened and uneasy himself, gave two of the boys
a nickel apiece and told us we had better get Jack home.

Jack could walk all right, with one of us upon either side of him,
but he was crying too hard to answer the questions we put to him, we
desiring exceedingly to know how he felt and if he knew anything while
he was asleep. Just as we got him to his own gate he gasped out, “Oh,
fellows, I'm sick!” and collapsed bodily at our feet, hiccoughing and
moaning. His sister met us at the door as we lugged Jade in by his arms
and legs. Even at home she had her black alpaca sleeves buttoned up to
her elbows. I think she must have slept in them. We told her what had
happened, or tried to tell her, all of us talking at once, and she made
us lay Jack on a little rickety sofa in their parlor--there was a sewing
machine in there, too, I noticed--and as we were coming away we saw a
negro girl who worked for them running across the street to Tillman &
Son's grocery where there was a telephone that the whole neighborhood
used.

When I got home it was suppertime and the family were at the table.
My sister said somebody must be sick down past the old Enders place,
because she had seen Doctor Lake driving out that way as fast as his
horse would take him. But I listened with only half an ear, being
mentally engaged elsewhere. I was wondering how I was going to get my
berry-picking money out of a nailed-up cigar-box savings bank without
attracting too much attention on the part of other members of the
family. I had been saving up that money hoping to amass seventy-five
cents, which was the lowest cash price for Tom Birch's tame flying
squirrel, a pet thing that would stay in your pocket all day and not
bite you unless you tried to drag him out; but now I had a better
purpose in view for my accumulated funds. If it took the last cent I
meant to be in St. Clair Hall that night.

There was no balcony in St. Clair Hall, but only a sort of little
hanging coop up above where the darkies sat, and the fifteen-cent seats
were the two back rows of seats on the main floor. These were very handy
to the door but likely to be overly warm on cold nights, when the two
big, pearshaped stoves would be red hot, with the live coals showing
through the cracks in their bases like broad grins on the faces of
apoplectic twins. The cracked varnish upon the back of the seats would
boil and bubble visibly then and the scorching wood grow so hot you
couldn't touch your bare hand to it, and a fine, rich, turpentiny smell
would savor up the air.

Being the first of the boys to arrive I secured the coveted corner seat
from which you had a splendid view of the stage, only slightly obscured
by one large wooden post painted a pale sick blue. D. C. Davello was at
the door taking tickets, along with Sid Farrell, who ran

St. Clair Hall. It kept both of them pretty busy, because there were men
paying their way in whom I had never seen there at all except when the
Democrats had their rally just before election, or when the ladies were
holding memorial services on President Jefferson Davis' birthday--men
like old Judge Priest, and Major Joe Sam Covington, who owned the big
tan yard, and Captain Howell, the bookdealer, and Mr. Herman Felsburg,
and Doctor Lake, and a lot of others. Most of them took seats well down
in front, I supposing that the educational and scientific features of
the promised entertainment had drawn them together.

The curtain was cracked through in places and had a peephole in the
middle, with black smudges round it like a bruised eye. It had a
painting on it showing a street full of backwater clean up to the
houses, and some elegant ladies and gentlemen in fancy-dress costumes
coming down the stone steps of a large building like a county courthouse
and getting into a couple of funny-looking skiffs. I seem to have heard
somewhere that this represented a street scene in Venice, but up until
the time St. Clair Hall burned down I know that I considered it to be a
picture of some other, larger town than ours during a spring rise in the
river, the same as we had every March. All round the inundated district
were dirty white squares containing the lettered cards of business
houses--Doctor Cupps, the dentist, and Anspach, the Old-Established
Hatter--which never varied from year to year, even when an advertiser
died or went out of business. We boys knew these signs by heart.

But to pass the time of waiting we read them over and over again, until
the curtain rolled up disclosing the palace scene, with a double row of
chairs across the stage in half-moon formation, and down in front, where
the villains died at regular shows, a table with a water pitcher on it.
Daniel the Mystic came out of the wings and bowed, and there was a thin
splashing of hand-clapping, mostly from the rear seats, with Sid Farrell
and D. C. Davello furnishing lustier sounds of applause. First off
Daniel the Mystic made a short speech full of large, difficult words. We
boys wriggled during it, being anxious for action. We had it soon. D. C.
Davello mounted the stage and he and Daniel the Mystic brought into view
a thing they called a cabinet, but which looked to us like a box frame
with black calico curtains nailed on it. When they got this placed to
their satisfaction, Daniel the Mystic, smiling in a friendly way, asked
that a committee of local citizens kindly step up and see that no fraud
or deception was practiced in what was about to follow. I was surprised
to see Doctor Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg rise promptly at the
invitation and go up on the stage, where they watched closely while D.
C. Davello tied Daniel the Mystic's hands behind him with white ropes,
and then meshed him to a chair inside the cabinet with so many knottings
and snarlings of the twisted bonds that he looked like some long, black
creature helplessly caught in a net. This done, the two watchers slipped
into chairs at opposite ends of the half-moon formation. D. C. Davello
laid a tambourine, a banjo and a dinner bell on the bound man's knees
and whipped the calico draperies to. Instantly the bell rang, the banjo
was thrummed and the tambourine rattled giddily, and white hands flashed
above the shielding draperies. But when the manager cried out and jerked
the curtains back, there sat the Mystic one still a prisoner, tied up
all hard and fast. We applauded then like everything.

The manager unroped him and went back to his place by the door, and
after Daniel the Mystic had chafed his wrists where the red marks of
the cords showed he came down a sort of little wooden runway into the
audience, and standing in the aisle said something about now giving
a demonstration of something. I caught the words occultism and
spiritualism, both strangers to my understanding up to that time. He put
his hands across his eyes for a moment, with his head thrown bade, and
then he walked up the aisle four or five steps hesitating and faltering,
and finally halted right alongside of Mr. Morton Harrison, the wharf
master.

“I seem,” he said slowly, in a deep, solemn voice, “to see a dim shape
of a young man hovering here. I get the name of Claude--no, no, it
is Clyde. Clyde would tell you,” his voice sank lower and quavered
effectively--“Clyde says to tell you that he is very happy over
there--he says you must not worry about a certain matter that is now
worrying you for it will all turn out for the best--and you will be
happy. And now Clyde seems to be fading away. Clyde is gone!”

We didn't clap our hands at that--it would have been too much like
clapping hands at a funeral--because we knew it must be Clyde Harrison,
who had got drowned not two months before trying to save a little girl
that fell overboard off the wharfboat. Just a day or two before there
had been a piece in the paper telling about the public fund that was
being raised to put a monument over Clyde's grave.

So we couldn't applaud that, wonderful as it was, and we shivered in
a fearsome, wholly delightful anticipation and sat back and waited for
more spirits to come. But seemingly there weren't any more spirits about
just then, and after a little Daniel the Mystic returned to the stage
and announced that we would now have the crowning achievement of
the evening's entertainment--a scientific exhibition of the new and
awe-inspiring art of mesmerism in all its various branches.

“For this,” he stated impressively, “I desire the aid of volunteers from
the audience, promising them that I will do them no harm, but on the
contrary will do them much good. I want fellow townspeople of yours for
this--gentlemen in whom you all have confidence and respect. I insist
only upon one thing--that they shall be one and all total strangers to
me.”

He advanced to the tin trough of the flickering gas footlights and
smiled out over it at us.

“Who among you will come forward now? Come!”

Before any one else could move, two young fellows got up from seats in
different parts of the hall and went up the little runway. We had never
seen either of them before, which seemed a strange thing, for we boys
kept a sharp eye upon those who came and went. They were both of them
tall and terribly thin, with lank hair and listless eyes, and they moved
as though their hip joints were rusty and hurt them. But I have seen the
likes of them often since then--lying in a trance in a show window, with
the covers puckered close up under the drawn face. I have peered down a
wooden chute to see such a one slumbering in his coffin underground for
a twenty-four or forty-eight-hour test. But these were the first of the
tribe our town had encountered.

On their lagging heels followed two that I did know. One was the lumpish
youth who helped Riley Putnam put up showbills and the other was Buddy
Grogan, who worked in Sid Farrell's livery stable. Both of them were
grinning sheepishly and falling over their own feet. And following right
behind them in turn came a shabby little man who had iron rust on his
clothes, and walked all reared back, bringing his heels down hard with
thumps at every step. It was old Mr. Gid Irons. We gaped at him.

I had never seen Mr. Gid Irons at St. Clair Hall before, none of us had;
and in our limited capacities we were by way of being consistent patrons
of the drama. In a flash it came over me that Jack must have told his
father what a wonderful sensation it was to be put to sleep standing
up on your feet, and that his father had come to see for himself how
it felt. I judged that others besides us were surprised. There was a
burring little stir, and some of the audience got up and edged down
closer to the front.

Mr. Gid Irons went on up the little runway and took a seat near one end
of the half-moon of chairs. Where he sat the blowy glare of one of the
gas footlights flickered up in his face and we could see that it seemed
redder than common, and his eyes were drawn together so close that only
little slits of them showed under his red-gray, bushy eyebrows. But that
might have been the effect of the gaslight at his feet. You could
tell though that Daniel the Mystic was puzzled and perplexed, startled
almost, by the appearance of this middle-aged person among his
volunteers. He kept eyeing him furtively with a worried line between
his eyes as he made a round of the other four, shaking hands elaborately
with each and bending to find out the names. He came to Mr. Irons last.

“And what is the name of this friend?” he asked in his grand, deep
voice.

Mr. Irons didn't answer a word. He stood up, just so, and hauled off and
hit Daniel the Mystic in the face. Daniel the Mystic said “Ouch!” in a
loud, pained tone of voice, and fell backward over a chair and sat down
hard right in the middle of the stage. George Muller, the town wit,
declared afterward that he was looking right at Daniel the Mystic,
and that Daniel the Mystic sat down so hard it parted his hair in the
middle.

I heard somebody behind me make a choking outcry and turned to see D. C.
Davello just bursting in upon us, with shock and surprise spreading all
over his face. But just at that precise moment Fatty McManus, who was
the biggest man in town, jumped up with an awkward clatter of his feet
and stumbled and fell right into D. C. Davello, throwing his mighty arms
about him as he did so. Locked together they rolled backward out of the
door, and with a subconscious sense located somewhere in the back part
of my skull I heard them go bumping down the steep stairs. I think there
were ten distinct bumps.

David Pryor, one of our policemen, was sitting almost directly in front
of me. He had been a policeman only two or three months and was the
youngest of the three who policed the town at nights. When old Mr. Gid
Irons knocked Daniel the Mystic down David Pryor bounced out of his seat
and called out something and started to run toward them.

Old Judge Priest blocked his way on the instant, filling the whole of
the narrow aisle. “Son,” he said, “where you aimin' to go to?”

“Lemme by, Judge,” sputtered David Pryor; “there's a fight startin' up
yonder!”

Judge Priest didn't budge a visible inch, except to glance quickly
backward over his shoulder toward the stage.

“Son,” he asked, “it takes two, don't it, to make a fight?”

“Yes,” panted David Pryor, trying to get past him, “yes, but--”

“Well, son, if you'd take another look up there you'd see there's only
one person engaged in fightin' at this time. That's no fight--only a
merited chastisement.”

“A chesty which?” asked David Pryor, puzzled. He was young and new to
his job and full of the zeal of duty. But Judge Priest stood for law and
order embodied, and David Pryor wavered.

“David, my son,” said Judge Priest, “if you, a sworn officer of the law,
don't know what chastisement means you ought to. Set down by me here and
I'll try to explain its meanin's.” He took him by the arm and pulled the
bewildered young policeman down into a seat alongside his own and held
him there, though David was still protesting and struggling feebly to be
loose.

This I heard and saw out of a corner of my mind, the rest of me being
concentrated on what was going on up on the stage among the overturning
chairs and those scattering recruits in the cause of mesmerism. I saw
Daniel the Mystic scramble to his feet and skitter about. He was wildly,
furiously pained and bewildered. It must be painful in the extreme, and
bewildering too, to any man to be suddenly and emphatically smitten in
his good right eye by one who seemed all peace and elderly sedateness,
and to behold an audience, which though cold, perhaps, had been friendly
enough, arise in its entirety and most vociferously cheer the smiting.
How much more so, then, in the case of a Seer of the Unseen, who is
supposed to be able to discern such things ahead of their happening?

Daniel the Mystic looked this way and that, seeking a handy way of
escape, but both ways were barred to him. At one side of the stage was
Doctor Lake, aiming a walking stick at him like a spear; and at the
other side was Mr. Felsburg, with an umbrella for a weapon.

Old Mr. Gid Irons was frightfully quick. His hands shot out with hard,
fast dabbing motions like a cat striking at a rolling ball, and he
planted his fists wheresoever he aimed.

Daniel the Mystic's long arms flew and flailed wildly in air and his
mane of hair tossed. He threw his crossed hands across his face to save
it and Mr. Irons hit him in the stomach. He lowered his hands to his
vitals in an agonized clutch and Mr. Irons hit him in the jaw.

I know now in the light of a riper experience of such things that it was
most wonderfully fast work, and all of it happening much faster than the
time I have taken here to tell it, Mr. Gid Irons wading steadily in
and Daniel the Mystic flopping about and threshing and yelling--he
was beginning to yell--and the chairs flipping over on their backs and
every-, body standing up and whooping. All of a sudden Daniel the Mystic
went down flat on his back, calling for help on some one whose name I
will take oath was not D. C. Davello. It sounded more like Thompson.

Doctor Lake dropped his walking stick and ran out from the wings.

“It would be highly improper to strike a man when he's down,” he
counseled Mr. Irons as he grabbed Daniel the Mystic by the armpits and
heaved him up flappingly. “Allow me to help the gentleman to his feet.”

Mr. Irons hit him just once more, a straight jabbing center blow, and
knocked him clear into and under his black calico cabinet, so far in it
and under it that its curtains covered all but his legs, which continued
to flutter and waggle feebly.

“Get a couple-a chairs, Gideon.” This advice came from Mr. Herman
Felsburg who jumped up and down and directed an imaginary orchestra of
bass drummers with his umbrella for a baton--“Get a couple-a chairs and
stand on the son-of-a-gun's stomach. It does the subcheck no harm and
the subcheck feels no pain. As a favor to me, Gideon, I ask you, stand
on his stomach.”

But Mr. Irons was through. He turned about and came down the runway
and passed out, rearing back and jarring his heels down hard. If he had
spoken a single word the whole time I hadn't heard it. As I remarked
several times before he was a small man and so I am not trying to
explain the optical delusion of the moment. I am only trying to tell how
Mr. Gid Irons looked as he passed me. He looked seven feet tall.

It must have been just about this time that D. C. Davello worked his way
out from underneath the hippopotamously vast bulk of Fatty McManus and
started running back up the stairs. But before he reached the door the
city marshal, who had been standing downstairs all the time and strange
to say, hadn't, it would appear, heard any of the clamor, ran up behind
him and arrested him for loud talking and disorderly conduct. The city
marshal obtusely didn't look inside the door for visual evidences of any
trouble within; he would listen to no reason. He grabbed D. C. Davello
by the coat collar and pulled him back to the sidewalk and had him
halfway across Market Square to the lock-up before the captive could
make him understand what had really happened. Even then the official
displayed a dense and gummy stupidity, for he kept demanding further
details and made the other tell everything over to him at least twice.
This also took time, because D. C. Davello was excited and stammering
and the city marshal was constantly interrupting him. So that, by the
time he finally got the straight of things into his head and they got
back to St. Clair Hall, the lights were out and the stairs were dark and
the last of the audience was tailing away. The city marshal stopped, as
if taken with a clever idea, and looked at his watch and remarked to D.
C. Davello that he and his friend the Professor would just about have
time to catch the 10:50 accommodation for Louisville if they hurried;
which seemed strange advice to be giving, seeing that D. C. Davello
hadn't asked about trains at all.

Nevertheless he took it--the advice--which also necessitated taking the
train.

Even in so short a time the news seemed to have spread with most
mysterious speed, that Daniel the Mystic had canceled his second night's
engagement and would be leaving us on the 10:50. Quite a crowd went to
the depot to see him off. We boys tagged along, too, keeping pace with
Judge Priest and Doctor Lake and Major Joe Sam Covington and certain
other elderly residents, who, as they tramped along, maintained a sort
of irregular formation, walking two by two just as they did when the
Veterans' Camp turned out for a funeral or a reunion.

There must have been something wrong down the road that night with the
10:50. Usually she was anywhere from one to three hours late, but this
night she strangely came in on time. She was already whistling for the
crossing above Kattersmith's brickyard when we arrived, moving in force.
D. C. Davello saw us from afar and remembered some business that took
him briskly back behind the freight shed. But Daniel the Mystic sat on a
baggage truck with a handkerchief to his face, and seemed not to see any
of us coming until our advance guard filed up and flanked him.

“Well, suh,” said Judge Priest, “you had a signal honor paid you in this
community tonight.”

Daniel the Mystic raised his head. The light from a tin reflector lamp.
shone on his face and showed its abundant damages. You would hardly
have known Daniel the Mystic for the same person. His gorgeousness and
grandeur of person had fallen from him like a discarded garment, and his
nose dripped redly.

“I--had--what?” he answered, speaking somewhat thickly because of his
swollen lip.

“A mighty signal honor,” said Judge Priest, in his thin whine. “In
the presence of a representative gatherin' of our best people you were
licked by the most efficient and the quickest-actin' scout that ever
served in General John Morgan's entire cavalry command.”

But the reply of Daniel the Mystic, if he made one, was never heard of
living man, because at that moment the 10:50 accommodation came in and
her locomotive began exhausting.




V. UP CLAY STREET


ONE behind the other, three short sections of a special came sliding
into the yard sidings below the depot.

The cars clanked their drawheads together like manacles, as they were
chivied and bullied and shoved about by a regular chain-gang boss of a
switch engine. Some of the cars were ordinary box cars, just the plain
galley slaves of commerce, but painted a uniform blue and provided with
barred gratings; some were flat cars laden with huge wheeled burdens
hooded under tarpaulins; and a few were sleeping cars that had been a
bright yellow at the beginning of the season, with flaring red lettering
down the sides, but now were faded to a shabby saffron.

It was just getting good broad day. The sleazy dun clouds that had been
racked up along the east--like mill-ends left over from night's remnant
counter, as a poet might have said had there been a poet there to say
it--were now torn asunder, and through the tear the sun showed out,
blushing red at his own nakedness and pushing ahead of him long
shadows that stretched on the earth the wrong way. There was a taste
of earliness in the air, a sort of compounded taste of dew and dust and
maybe a little malaria.

Early as it was, there was a whopping big delegation of small boys,
white and black, on hand for a volunteer reception committee. The eyes
of these boys were bright and expectant in contrast to the eyes of the
yard hands, who looked half dead for sleep and yawned and shivered. The
boys welcomed the show train at the depot and ran alongside its various
sections. They were mainly barefooted, but they avoided splinters in the
butts of the crossties and sharp clinkers in the cinder ballast of the
roadbed with the instinctive agility of a race of primitives.

Almost before the first string of cars halted and while the clanking
of the iron links still ran down its length like a code signal being
repeated, a lot of mop-headed men in overalls appeared, crawling out
from all sorts of unsuspected sleeping places aboard. Magically a
six-team of big white Norman horses materialized, dragging empty traces
behind them. They must have been harnessed up together beforehand in
a stock car somewhere. A corrugated wooden runway appeared to sprout
downward and outward from an open car door, and down it bumped a high,
open wagon with a big sheet-iron cooking range mounted on it and one
short length of stovepipe rising above like a stumpy fighting-top on an
armored cruiser. As the wheels thumped against the solid earth a man in
a dirty apron, who had been balancing himself in the wagon, touched a
match to some fuel in his firebox. Instantly black smoke came out of
the top of the stack and a stinging smell of burning wood trailed behind
him, as the six-horse team hooked on and he and his moving kitchen went
lurching and rolling across shallow gulleys and over a rutted common,
right into the red eye of the upcoming sun.

Other wagons followed, loaded with blue stakes, with coils of ropes,
with great rolls of earth-stained canvas, and each took the same route,
with four or six horses to drag it and a born charioteer in a flannel
shirt to drive it. The common destination was a stretch of flat land a
quarter of a mile away from the track. Truck patches backed up against
this site on one side and the outlying cottages of the town flanked it
on the other, and it was bordered with frayed fringes of ragweed
and niggerheads, and was dotted over with the dried-mud chimneys of
crawfish. In the thin turf here a geometric pattern of iron laying-out
pins now appeared to spring up simultaneously, with rag pennons of red
and blue fluttering in the tops, and at once a crew of men set to work
with an orderly confusion, only stopping now and then to bellow back
the growing swarms of boys who hung eagerly on the flank of each new
operation. True to the promise of its lithographed glories the circus
was in our midst, rain or shine, for this day and date only.

If there is any of the boy spirit left in us circus day may be esteemed
to bring it out. And considering his age and bulk and his calling, there
was a good deal of the boy left in our circuit judge--so much boy, in
fact, that he, an early riser of note in a town much given to early
rising, was up and dressing this morning a good hour ahead of his usual
time. As he dressed he kept going to the side window of his bedroom
and looking out. Eventually he had his reward. Through a break in the
silver-leaf poplars he saw a great circus wagon crossing his line
of vision an eighth of a mile away. Its top and sides were masked in
canvas, but he caught a flicker of red and gold as the sun glinted on
its wheels, and he saw the four horses tugging it along, and the dipping
figure of the driver up above. The sight gave the old judge a little
thrill down inside of him.

“I reckin that fellow was right when he said a man is only as old as
he feels,” said Judge Priest to himself. “And I'm glad court ain't in
session--I honestly am.” He opened his door and called down into the
body of the silent house below: “Jeff! Oh, Jeff!”

“Yas, suh,” came up the prompt answer.

“Jeff, you go out yonder to the kitchen and tell Aunt Dilsey to hurry
along my breakfast. I'll be down right away.”

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff; “I'll bring it right in, suh.”

Jeff was as anxious as the judge that the ceremony of breakfast might be
speedily over; and, to tell the truth, so was Aunt Dilsey, who fluttered
with impatience as she fried the judge's matinal ham and dished up
the hominy. Aunt Dilsey regularly patronized all circuses, but she
specialized in sideshows. The sideshow got a dime of hers before the big
show started and again after it ended. She could remember from year to
year just how the sideshow banners looked and how many there were of
them, and on the mantelpiece in her cabin was ranged a fly-blown row of
freaks' photographs purchased at the exceedingly reasonable rate of ten
cents for cabinet sizes and twenty-five for the full length.

So there was no delay about serving the judge's breakfast or about
clearing the table afterward. For that one morning, anyhow, the
breakfast dishes went unwashed. Even as the judge put on his straw hat
and came out on the front porch, the back door was already discharging
Jeff and Aunt Dilsey. By the time the judge had traversed the shady yard
and unlatched the front gate, Jeff was halfway to the showground and
mending his gait all the time. Less than five minutes later Jeff was
being ordered, somewhat rudely, off the side of a boarded-up cage, upon
which he had climbed with a view to ascertaining, by a peep through the
barred air-vent under the driver's seat, whether the mysterious creature
inside looked as strange as it smelled; and less than five minutes after
that, Jeff, having reached a working understanding with the custodian of
the cage, who likewise happened to be in charge of certain ring stock,
was convoying a string of trick ponies to the water-trough over by the
planing mill. Aunt Dilsey, moving more slowly--yet guided, nevertheless,
by a sure instinct--presently anchored herself at the precise spot where
the sideshow tent would stand. Here several lodge sisters soon joined
her. They formed a comfortable brown clump, stationary in the midst of
many brisk; activities.

The judge stood at his gate a minute, lighting his corncob pipe. As he
stood there a farm wagon clattered by, coming in from the country.
Its bed was full of kitchen chairs and the kitchen chairs contained
a family, including two pretty country girls in their teens, who were
dressed in fluttering white with a plenitude of red and blue ribbons.
The head of the family, driving, returned the judge's waved greeting
somewhat stiffly. It was plain that his person was chafed and his whole
being put under restraint by the fell influences of a Sunday coat and
the hard collar that was buttoned on to the neckband of his blue shirt.

His pipe being lighted, the judge headed leisurely in the same direction
that the laden farm wagon had taken. Along Clay Street from the judge's
house to the main part of town, where the business houses and the stores
centered, was a mile walk nearly, up a fairly steepish hill and down
again, but shaded well all the way by water maples and silver-leaf
trees. There weren't more than eight houses or ten along Clay Street,
and these, with the exception of the judge's roomy, white-porched house
standing aloof in its two acres of poorly kept lawn, were all little
two-room frame houses, each in a small, bare inclosure of its own, with
wide, weed-grown spaces between it and its next-door neighbors. These
were the homes of those who in a city would haye been tenement dwellers.
In front of them stretched narrow wooden sidewalks, dappled now with
patches of shadow and of soft, warm sunshine.

Perhaps halfway along was a particularly shabby little brown house that
pushed dose up to the street line. A straggly catalpa tree shaded its
narrow porch. This was the home of Lemuel Hammersmith; and Hammersmith
seems such a name as should by right belong to a masterful, upstanding
man with something of Thor or Vulcan or Judas Maccabaeus in him--it
appears to have that sound. But Lemuel Hammersmith was no such man. In
a city he would have been lost altogether--swallowed up among a mass
of more important, pushing folk. But in a town as small as ours he had
distinction. He belonged to more secret orders than any man in town--he
belonged to all there were. Their small mummeries and mysteries,
conducted behind closed doors, had for him a lure that there was no
resisting; he just had to join. As I now recall, he never rose to high
rank in any one of them, never wore the impressive regalia and the
weighty title of a supreme officer; but when a lodge brother died he
nearly always served on the committee that drew up the resolutions of
respect. In moments of half-timid expanding he had been known to boast
mildly that his signature, appended to resolutions of respect, suitably
engrossed and properly framed, hung on the parlor walls of more than a
hundred homes. He was a small and inconsequential man and he led a small
and inconsequential life, giving his days to clerking in Noble & Barry's
coal office for fifty dollars a month, and his nights to his lodge
meetings and to drawing up resolutions of respect. In the latter
direction he certainly had a gift; the underlying sympathy of his nature
found its outlet there. And he had a pale, sickly wife and a paler,
sicklier child.

On this circus day he had been stationed in front of his house for a
good half hour, watching up the street for some one. This some one, as
it turned out, was Judge Priest. At sight of the old judge coming along,
Mr. Hammersmith went forward to meet him and fell in alongside, keeping
pace with him.

“Good momin', son,” said the old judge, who knew everybody that lived in
town. “How's the little feller this mornin'?”

“Judge, I'm sorry to say that Lemuel Junior ain't no better this
momin',” answered the little coal clerk with a hitching of his voice.
“We're afraid--his mother and me--that he ain't never goin' to be no
better. I've had Doctor Lake in again and he says there really ain't
anything we can do--he says it's just a matter of a little time now. Old
Aunt Hannah Holmes says he's got bone erysipelas, and that if we could
'a' got him away from here in time we might have saved him. But I don't
know--we done the best we could. I try to be reconciled. Lemuel Junior
he suffers so at times that it'll be a mercy, I reckin--but it's hard on
you, judge--it's tumble hard on you when it's your only child.”

“My son,” said the old judge, speaking slowly, “it's so hard that I
know nothin' I could say or do would be any comfort to you. But I'm
sorry--I'm mighty sorry for you all. I know what it is. I buried mine,
both of 'em, in one week's time, and that's thirty years and more ago;
but it still hurts mightily sometimes. I wish't there was something I
could do.”

“Well, there is,” said Hammersmith--“there is, judge, maybe. That's
why I've been standin' down here waitin' for you. You see, Lemmy he was
tumble sharp set on goin' to the circus today. He's been readin' the
circus bills that I'd bring home to him until he knew 'em off by heart.
He always did have a mighty bright mind for rememberin' things. We was
aimin' to take him to the show this evenin', bundled up in a bedquilt,
you know, and settin' off with him in a kind of a quiet place somewhere.
But he had a bad night and we just can't make out to do it--he's
too weak to stand it--and it was most breakin' his heart for a while;
but then he said if he could just see the parade he'd be satisfied.

“And, judge, that's the point--he's took it into his head that you can
fix it some way so he can see it. We tried to argue him out of it,
but you know how it is, tryin' to argue with a child as sick as Lemuel
Junior's been. He--he won't listen to nothin' we say.”

A great compassion shadowed the judge's face. His hand went out and
found the sloping shoulder of the father and patted it clumsily. He
didn't say anything. There didn't seem to be anything to say.

“So we just had to humor him along. His maw has had him at the front
window for an hour now, propped up on a pillow, waitin' for you to come
by. He wouldn't listen to nothin' else. And, judge--if you can humor him
at all--any way at all--do it, please--”

He broke off because they were almost in the shadow of the catalpa tree,
and now the judge's name was called out by a voice that was as thin and
elfin as though the throat that spoke it were strung with fine silver
wires.

“Oh, judge--oh, Mister Judge Priest!”

The judge stopped, and, putting his hands on the palings, looked across
them at the little sick boy. He saw a face that seemed to be all eyes
and mouth and bulging, blue-veined forehead--he was shockingly reminded
of a new-hatched sparrow--and the big eyes were feverishly alight with
the look that is seen only in the eyes of those who already have begun
to glimpse the great secret that lies beyond the ken of the rest of us.

“Why, hello, little feller,” said the judge, with a false heartiness.
“I'm sorry to see you laid up again.”

“Judge Priest, sir,” said the sick boy, panting with weak eagerness, “I
want to see the grand free street parade. I've been sick a right smart
while, and I can't go to the circus; but I do want mightily to see the
grand free street parade. And I want you, please, sir, to have 'em come
up by this house.”

There was a world of confidence in the plea. Unnoticed by the boy, his
mother, who had been fanning him, dropped the fan and put her apron
over her face and leaned against the window-jamb, sobbing silently. The
father, silent too, leaned against the fence, looking fixedly at nothing
and wiping his eyes with the butt of his hand. Yes, it is possible for
a man to wipe his eyes on his bare hand without seeming either grotesque
or vulgar--even when the man who does it is a little inconsequential
man--if his child is dying and his sight is blurred and his heart is fit
to burst inside of him. The judge bent across the fence, and his face
muscles were working but his voice held steady.

“Well, now, Lemmy,” he said, “I'd like to do it for you the best in the
world; but, you see, boy, I don't own this here circus--I don't even
know the gentleman that does own it.”

“His name is Silver,” supplied the sick child--“Daniel P. Silver, owner
of Silver's Mammoth United Railroad Shows, Roman Hippodrome and Noah's
Ark Menagerie--that's the man! I kin show you his picture on one of the
showbills my paw brought home to me, and then you kin go right and find
him.”

“I'm afraid it wouldn't do much good if I did know him, Lemmy,” said the
old judge very gently. “You see--”

“But ain't you the judge at the big cote-house?” demanded the child;
“and can't you put people in jail if they don't do what you tell 'em?
That's what my grandpop says. He's always tellin' me stories about how
you and him fought the Yankees, and he always votes for you too--my
grandpop talks like he thought you could do anything. And, judge,
please, sir, if you went to Mister Daniel P. Silver and told him that
you was the big judge--and told him there was a little sick boy livin'
right up the road a piece in a little brown house--don't you reckin he'd
do it? It ain't so very far out of the way if they go down Jefferson
Street--it's only a little ways Judge, you'll make 'em do it, won't
you--for me?”

“I'll try, boy, I'll shorely try to do what I can,” said the old judge;
“but if I can't make 'em do it you won't be disappointed, will you,
Lemmy?” He fumbled in his pocket. “Here's four bits for you--you tell
your daddy to buy you something with it. I know your maw and daddy
wouldn't want you to take money from strangers, but of course it's
different with old friends like you and me. Here, you take it. And
there's something else,” he went on. “I'll bet you there's one of those
dagoes or somebody like that downtown with a lot of these here big toy
rubber balloons--red and green and blue. You tell me which color you
like the best and I'll see that it's sent right up here to you--the
biggest balloon the man's got--”

“I don't want any balloon,” said the little voice fretfully, “and I
don't want any four bits. I want to see the grand free street parade,
and the herd of elephants, and the down, and the man-eatin' tigers, and
everything. I want that parade to come by this house.”

The judge looked hopelessly from the child to the mother and then to the
father--they both had their faces averted still--and back into the sick
child's face again. The four-bit piece lay shining on the porch floor
where it had fallen. The judge backed away, searching his mind for the
right words to say.

“Well, I'll do what I can, Lemmy,” he repeated, as though he could find
no other phrase--“I'll do what I can.”

The child rolled his head back against the pillow, satisfied. “Then
it'll be all right, sir,” he said with a joyful confidence. “My
grand-pop he said you could do 'most anything. You tell 'em, Mister
Judge Priest, that I'll be a-waitin' right here in this very window for
'em when they pass.”

Walking with his head down and his steps lagging, the old judge, turning
into the main thoroughfare, was almost run over by a mare that came
briskly along, drawing a light buggy with a tall man in it. The tall man
pulled up the mare just in time. His name was Settle.

“By gum, judge,” he said apologetically, “I came mighty near gettin' you
that time!”

“Hello, son,” said the judge absently; “which way are you headed?”

“Downtown, same as everybody else,” said Settle. “Jump in and I'll take
you right down, sir.”

“Much obliged,” assented the old judge, as he heaved himself heavily
up between the skewed wheels and settled himself so solidly at Settle's
left that the seat springs whined; “but I wish't, if you're not in too
big a hurry, that you'd drive me up by the showgrounds first.”

“Glad to,” said Settle, as he swung the mare round. “I just come from
there myself--been up lookin' at the stock. 'Tain't much. Goin' up to
look their stock over yourself, judge?” he asked, taking it for granted
that any man would naturally be interested in horseflesh, as indeed
would be a true guess so far as any man in that community was concerned.

“Stock?” said the judge. “No, I want to see the proprietor of this here
show. I won't keep you waitin' but a minute or two.”

“The proprietor!” echoed Settle, surprised. “What's a circuit judge
goin' to see a circus man for--is it something about their license?”

“No,” said the judge--“no, just some business--a little private business
matter I want to see him on.”

He offered no further explanation and Settle asked for none. At
the grounds the smaller tents were all up--there was quite a little
dirty-white encampment of them--and just as they drove up the roof
of the main tent rose to the tops of its center poles, bellying and
billowing like a stage sea in the second act of Monte Cristo. Along the
near edge of the common, negro men were rigging booths with planks for
counters and sheets for awnings, and negro women were unpacking the
wares that would presently be spread forth temptingly against the coming
of the show crowds--fried chicken and slabs of fried fish, and ham and
pies and fried apple turnovers. Leaving Settle checking the restive
mare, the old judge made his way across the sod, already scuffed
and dented by countless feet. A collarless, redfaced man, plainly a
functionary of some sort, hurried toward him, and the judge put himself
in this man's path.

“Are you connected with this institution, suh?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the man shortly, but slowing his gait.

“So I judged from your manner and deportment, suh,” said the judge. “I'm
lookin',” he went on, “for your proprietor.”

“Silver? He's over yonder by the cookhouse.”

“The which?” asked the judge.

“The cookhouse--the dining tent,” explained the other, pointing. “Right
round yonder beyond that second stake wagon--where you see smoke rising.
But he's likely to be pretty busy.”

Behind the second stake wagon the judge found a blocky, authoritative
man, with a brown derby hat tilted back on his head and heavy-lidded
eyes like a frog's, and knew him at once for the owner; but one look
at the face made the judge hesitate. He felt that his was a lost cause
already; and then the other opened his mouth and spoke, and Judge Priest
turned on his heel and came away. The judge was reasonably well seasoned
to sounds of ordinary profanity, but not to blasphemy that seemed to
loose an evil black smudge upon the clean air. He came back to the buggy
and climbed in.

“See your man?” asked Settle.

“Yes,” said the judge slowly, “I saw him.”

Especially downtown things had a holidaying look to them. Wall-eyed
teams of country horses were tethered to hitching-racks in the short
by-streets, flinching their flanks and setting themselves for abortive
stampedes later on. Pedlers of toy balloons circulated; a vender with
a fascinating line of patter sold to the same customers, in rapid
succession, odorous hamburger and flat slabs of a heat-resisting variety
of striped ice cream. At a main crossing, catercornered across from each
other, the highpitch man and his brother of the flat joint were at work,
one selling electric belts from the back of a buggy, the other down in
the dust manipulating a spindle game. The same group of shillabers were
constantly circulating from one faker to the other, and as constantly
investing. Even the clerks couldn't stay inside the stores--they kept
darting out and darting back in again. A group of darkies would find
a desirable point of observation along the sidewalk and hold it for a
minute or two, and then on a sudden unaccountable impulse would desert
it and go streaking off down the middle of the street to find another
that was in no way better. In front of the wagon yard country rigs were
parked three deep. Every small boy who wasn't at the showground was
swarming round underfoot somewhere, filled with a most delicious
nervousness that kept him moving. But Judge Priest, who would have joyed
in these things ordinarily, had an absent eye for it all. There was
another picture persisting in his mind, a picture with a little brown
house and a ragged catalpa tree for a background.

In front of Soule's drug store his weekday cronies sat--the elder
statesmen of the town--tilted back in hard-bottomed chairs, with their
legs drawn up un

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/44223