Author: Irvin S. Cobb
Date: 1910-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Social life and customs; Kentucky; Wit and Humor; Short Fiction
Description: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (23 June, 1876 – 11 March, 1944) was an American author, humorist, editor and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky who relocated to New York in 1904, living there for the remainder of his life, writing for the New York World, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and other newspapers and magazines. Cobb wrote more than 300 short stories and 60 books (most of these being collections of his stories and articles). Some of his works were adapted for film. * * * * Cobb is remembered best for his humorous stories of Kentucky. “Cobb created a South peopled with honorable citizens, ch
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Text is the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

Contents

~

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME

Preface
Words and Music
The County Trot
Five Hundred Dollars Reward
A Judgment Come to Daniel
Up Clay Street
When the Fighting Was Good
Stratagem and Spoils
The Mob from Massac
A Dogged Under Dog
Black and White
The Lord Provides
A Blending of the Parables
Judge Priest Comes Back
A Chapter from the Life of an Ant
Sergeant Jimmy Bagby’s Feet
According to the Code
Forrest’s Last Charge
Double-Barrelled Justice
A Beautiful Evening
Ex-Fightin’ Billy
Mr. Felsburg Gets Even
The Cure for Lonesomeness
Hark! From the Tombs
A Kiss for Kindness
Boys Will Be Boys
Quality Folks
Darkness
A Short Natural History
The Ravelin’ Wolf
Alas, the Poor Whiffletit!
The Cater-Cornered Sex
“—That Shall He also Reap”
The Darkest Closet

About This eBook

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 snuff-dipping, 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.

ISC

New York,
November 1912

Preface to Back Home (1912)

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, clunking 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 back 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 someone 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 end 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 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 clear-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, 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, 1839.”

“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 comin’ 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 of 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 comin’ 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 mornin’ 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 mouth 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 tune 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 you 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 courthouse 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, everyone 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 anyone 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 back 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 reëlection. 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.

The Saturday Evening Post, 28 Oct 1911
Back Home (1912)

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 high-shouldered 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 barns. 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 cloths 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 show pens 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 watermelons 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 newcomer, 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. Otterbuck, 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 coconuts 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 coconut 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 coconut 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 inches 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 feedshed. 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 hayrack. 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 throwed.”

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 anyone 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 cubby 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 ontil 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 ontil 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 clog 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 hind legs 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 lock 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 close 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 tree trunk. 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 clear 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 half-open 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.

The Saturday Evening Post, 09 Dec 1911
Back Home (1912)

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 smoldering animosities which manifested themselves at local elections and the like, until it flared up momentarily in the taking-off of old Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance, 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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-jons consigned to the dry towns up the river. There was a big sidewalk trade going on in fire crackers and rockets, the Christmas 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 Rance 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 cockleburrs 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 Rance’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 Rance 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 Rance’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 Rance 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, nickel-plated, single-action, with a black rubber handle, and slightly rusted upon the barrel.”

Old Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance, 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 mornin’ 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance 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 Rance Fleming had just let him be, all this turrible trouble wouldn’t a-come on us. But Rance Fleming he come back again and slapped Jimmy’s face, and Jimmy knowed then that sooner or later he’d have to kill Rance 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 smoldering 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 courthouse 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 calfskin 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 handcuffs. At the term of court before this, a negro cow thief had got away coming across the courthouse 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 anyone 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 courthouse 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.

The Saturday Evening Post, 19 Oct 1912
Back Home (1912)

A Judgment Come to Daniel

~

The side-wheel 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 side-wheeler 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 stern-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 Argus-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 someone 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 hanks of invisible yarn. 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, pear-shaped 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 back, 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 anyone 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 everybody standing up and whooping. All of a sudden Daniel the Mystic went down flat on his back, calling for help on someone 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.

The Saturday Evening Post, 11 Nov 1911
Back Home (1912)

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 have 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 close 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 someone. This someone, 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 mornin’, 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 mornin’,” 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 turrible 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 turrible 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 clown, 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. Peddlers 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 high-pitch 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 under them out of the tides of foot travel. But he passed them by, only nodding an answer to their choraled greeting, and went inside back behind the prescription case and sat down there alone, smoking his pipe soberly.

“Wonder what ails Judge Priest?” said Sergeant Jimmy Bagby. “He looks sort of dauncy and low in his mind, don’t he?”

“He certainly does,” someone agreed.

Half an hour later, when the sheriff came in looking for him, Judge Priest was still sitting alone behind the prescription case. With the sheriff was a middle-aged man, a stranger, in a wrinkled check suit and a somewhat soiled fancy vest. An upper pocket of this vest was bulged outward by such frank articles of personal use as a red celluloid toothbrush, carried bristle-end up, a rubber mustache-comb and a carpenter’s flat pencil. The stranger had a longish mustache, iron-gray at the roots and of a greenish, blue-black color elsewhere, and he walked with a perceptible limp. He had a way, it at once developed, of taking his comb out and running it through his mustache while in conversation, doing so without seeming to affect the flow or the volume of his language.

“Mornin’, Judge Priest,” said the sheriff. “This here gentleman wants to see you a minute about gittin’ out an attachment. I taken him first to the county judge’s office, but it seems like Judge Landis went up to Louisville last night, and the magistrates’ offices air closed – both of them, in fact; and so seein’ as this gentleman is in a kind of a hurry, I taken the liberty of bringin’ him round to you.”

Before the judge could open his mouth, he of the dyed mustache was breaking in.

“Yes, sirree,” he began briskly. “If you’re the judge here I want an attachment. I’ve got a good claim against Dan Silver, and blame me if I don’t push it. I’ll fix him – red-lighting me off my own privilege car!” He puffed up with rage and injury.

“What appears to be the main trouble?” asked the judge, studying this belligerent one from under his hatbrim.

“Well, it’s simple enough,” explained the man. “Stanton is my name – here’s my card – and I’m the fixer for this show – the legal adjuster, see? Or, anyhow, I was until last night. And I likewise am – or was – half partner with Dan Silver in the privilege car and in the speculative interests of this show – the flat joints and the rackets and all. You make me now, I guess? Well, last night, coming up here from the last stand, me and Silver fell out over the split-up, over dividing the day’s profits – you understand, the money is cut up two ways every night – and I ketched him trying to trim me. I called him down good and hard then, and blame if he didn’t have the nerve to call in that big boss razor-back of his, named Saginaw, and a couple more rousters, and red-light me right off my own privilege car! Now what do you know about that?”

“Only what you tell me,” replied Judge Priest calmly. “Might I ask you what is the process of red-lightin’ a person of your callin’ in life?”

“Chucking you off of a train without waiting for the train to stop, that’s what,” expounded the aggrieved Mr. Stanton. “It was pretty soft for me that I lit on the side of a dirt bank and we wasn’t moving very fast, else I’d a been killed. As ’twas I about ruined a suit of clothes and scraped most of the meat off of one leg.” He indicated the denuded limb by raising it stiffly a couple of times and then felt for his comb. Use of it appeared to have a somewhat soothing effect upon his feelings, and he continued: “So I limped up to the next station, two of the longest miles in the world, and caught a freight coming through, and here I am. And now I want to file against him – the dirty, red-lighting dog!

“Why, he owes me money – plenty of it. Just like I told you, I’m the half owner of that privilege car, and besides he borrowed money off of me at the beginning of the season and never offered to pay it back. I’ve got his personal notes right here to prove it.” He felt for the documents and spread them, soiled and thumbed, upon the prescription shelf under the judge’s nose. “He’s sure got to settle with me before he gets out of this town. Don’t worry about me – I’ll put up cash bond to prove I’m on the level,” fishing out from his trousers pocket a bundle of bills with a rubber band on it. “Pretty lucky for me they didn’t know I had my bankroll with me last night!”

“I suppose the attachment may issue,” said the judge preparing to get up.

“Fine,” said Stanton, with deep gratification in his bearing. “But here, wait a minute,” he warned. “Don’t make no mistake and try to attach the whole works, because if you do you’ll sure fall down on your face, judge. That’s all been provided for. The wagons and horses are all in Silver’s name and the cage animals are all in his wife’s name. And so when a hick constable or somebody comes round with an attachment, Dan says to him, ‘All right,’ he says, ‘go on and attach, but you can’t touch them animals,’ he says; and then friend wife flashes a bill of sale to show they are hers. The rube says ‘What’ll I do?’ and Silver says, ‘Why, let the animals out and take the wagons; but of course,’ he says, ‘you’re responsible for the lions and that pair of ferocious man-eating tigers and the rest of ’em. Go right ahead,’ he says, ‘and help yourself,’ ‘Yes,’ his wife says, ‘go ahead; but if you let any of my wild animals get away I’ll hold you liable, and also if you let any of ’em chew up anybody you’ll pay the damages and not me,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to be specially careful about Wallace the Ontamable,’ she says; ‘he’s et up two trainers already this season and crippled two-three more of the hands.’

“Well, if that don’t bluff the rube they take him round and give him a flash at Wallace. Wallace is old and feeble and he ain’t really much more dangerous than a kitten, but he looks rough; and Dan sidles up ’longside the wagon and touches a button that’s there to use during the ballyhoo, and then Wallace jumps up and down and roars a mile. D’ye make me there? Well, the floor of the cage is all iron strips, and when Dan touches that button it shoots about fifty volts of the real juice – electricity, you know – into Wallace’s feet and he acts ontamable. So of course that stumps the rube, and Dan like as not gets away with it without ever settling. Oh, it’s a foxy trick! And to think it was me myself that first put Silver on to it!” he added lamentingly, with a sidelong look at the sheriff to see how that official was taking the disclosure of these professional secrets. As well as one might judge by a glance the sheriff was taking it unmoved. He was cutting off a chew of tobacco from a black plug. Stowing the morsel in his jaw, he advanced an idea of his own:

“How about attachin’ the receipts in the ticket wagon?”

“I don’t know about that either,” said the sophisticated Stanton. “Dan Silver is one of the wisest guys in this business. He had to be a wise guy to slip one over on an old big-leaguer like yours truly, and that’s no sidewalk banter either. You might attach the wagon and put a constable or somebody inside of it, and then like as not Dan’d find some way to flimflam him and make his getaway with the kale intact. You gotter give it to Dan Silver there. I guess he’s a stupid guy – yes, stupid like a bear cat!” His tone of reluctant admiration indicated that this last was spoken satirically and that seriously he regarded a bear cat as probably the astutest hybrid of all species.

“Are all circuses conducted in this general fashion, suh?” inquired the old judge softly.

“No,” admitted Stanton, “they ain’t – the big ones ain’t anyway; but a lot of the small ones is. They gotter do it because a circus is always fair game for a sore rube. Once the tents come down a circus has got no friends.

“I tell you what,” he went on, struck amidships with a happy notion – “I tell you what you do. Lemme swear out an attachment against the band wagon and the band-wagon team, and you go serve it right away, sheriff. That’ll fix him, I guess.”

“How so?” put in the judge, still seeking information for his own enlightenment.

“Why, you see, if you tie up that band wagon Dan Silver can’t use it for parading. He ain’t got but just the one, and a circus parade without a band wagon will look pretty sick, I should say. It’ll look more like something else; a funeral, for example.” The pleased grafter grinned maliciously.

“It’s like this – the band wagon is the key to the whole works,” he went on. “It’s the first thing off the lot when the parade starts – the band-wagon driver is the only one that has the route. You cut the band wagon out and you’ve just naturally got that parade snarled up to hell and gone.”

Judge Priest got upon his feet and advanced upon the exultant stranger. He seemed more interested than at any time.

“Suh,” he asked, “let me see if I understand you properly. The band wagon is the guidin’ motive, as it were, of the entire parade – is that right?”

“You’ve got it,” Stanton assured him. “Even the stock is trained to follow the band wagon. They steer by the music up ahead. Cop the band wagon out and the rest of ’em won’t know which way to go – that’s the rule wherever there’s a road show traveling.”

“Ah hah,” said the judge reflectively, “I see.”

“But say, look here, judge,” said Stanton. “Begging your pardon and not trying to rush you nor nothing, but if you’re going to attach that band wagon of Dan Silver’s for me you gotter hurry. That parade is due to leave the lot in less’n half an hour from now.”

He was gratified to note that his warning appeared to grease the joints in the old judge’s legs. They all three went straightway to the sheriff’s office, which chanced to be only two doors away, and there the preliminaries necessary to legal seizures touching on a certain described and specified parade chariot, tableau car or band wagon were speedily completed. Stanton made oath to divers allegations and departed, assiduously combing himself and gloating openly over the anticipated discomfiture of his late partner. The sheriff lingered behind only a minute or two longer while Judge Priest in the privacy of a back room impressed upon him his instructions. Then he, too, departed, moving at his top walking gait westward out Jefferson Street. There was this that could be said for Sheriff Giles Birdsong – he was not gifted in conversation nor was he of a quick order of intellect, but he knew his duty and he obeyed orders literally when conveyed to him by a superior official. On occasion he had obeyed them so literally – where the warrant had said dead or alive, for example – that he brought in, feet first, a prisoner or so who manifested a spirited reluctance against being brought in any other way. And the instructions he had now were highly explicit on a certain head.

Close on Sheriff Birdsong’s hurrying heels the judge himself issued forth from the sheriff’s office. Hailing a slowly ambling public vehicle driven by a languid darky, he deposited his person therein and was driven away. Observing this from his place in front of the drug store, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby was moved to remark generally to the company: “You can’t tell me I wasn’t right a while ago about Judge Billy Priest. Look at him yonder now, puttin’ out for home in a hack, without waitin’ for the parade. There certainly is something wrong with the judge and you can’t tell me there ain’t.”

If the judge didn’t wait, nearly everybody else did – waited with what patience and impatience they might through a period that was punctuated by a dozen false alarms, each marked with much craning of elderly necks and abortive rushes by younger enthusiasts to the middle of the street. After a while, though, from away up at the head of Jefferson Street there came down, borne along on the summer air, a faint anticipatory blare of brazen horns, heard at first only in broken snatches. Then, in a minute or two, the blaring resolved itself into a connected effort at melody, with drums throbbing away in it. Farmers grabbed at the bits of restive horses, that had their ears set sharply in one direction, and began uttering soothing and admonitory “whoas.” The stores erupted clerks and customers together. The awning poles on both sides of the street assumed the appearance of burdened grape trellises, bearing ripe black and white clusters of small boys. At last she was coming!

She was, for a fact. She came on until the thin runlet of ostensible music became a fanfaring, crashing cataract of pleasing and exhilarating sound, until through the dancing dust could be made out the arching, upcurved front of a splendid red-and-gold chariot. In front of it, like wallowing waves before the prow of a Viking ship, were the weaving broad backs of many white horses, and stretching behind it was a sinuous, colorful mass crowned with dancing, distant banner-things, and suggesting in glintings of gold and splashings of flame an oncoming argosy of glitter and gorgeousness.

She was coming all right! But was she? A sort of disappointed, surprised gasp passed along the crowded sidewalks, and boys began sliding down the awning poles and running like mad up the street. For instead of continuing straight on down Jefferson, as all circus parades had always done, the head of this one was seen now, after a momentary halt as of indecision, to turn short off and head into Clay. But why Clay Street – that was the question? Clay Street didn’t have ten houses on it, all told, and it ran up a steep hill and ended in an abandoned orchard just beyond the old Priest place. Indeed the only way to get out of Clay Street, once you got into it, was by a distant lane that cut through to the paralleling street on the right. What would any circus parade in possession of its sane senses be doing going up Clay Street?

But that indeed was exactly what this parade was doing – with the added phenomena of Sheriff Giles Birdsong sitting vigilantly erect on the front seat of the band wagon, and a band-wagon driver taking orders for once from somebody besides his rightful boss – taking them protestingly and profanely, but nevertheless taking them.

Yes, sir, that’s what she was doing. The band wagon, behind the oblique arc of its ten-horse team, was swinging into Clay Street, and the rest of the procession was following its leader and disappearing, wormlike, into a tunnel of overarching maples and silver-leaf poplars.

And so it moved, slowly and deliberately, after the fashion of circus parades, past some sparsely scattered cottages that were mainly closed and empty, seeing that their customary dwellers were even now downtown, until the head of it came to a particularly shabby little brown house that was not closed and was not empty. From a window here looked out a worn little woman and a little sick boy, he as pale as the pillow against which he was propped, and from here they saw it all – she through tears and he with eyes that burned with a dumb joy unutterable – from here these two beheld the unbelievable marvel of it. It was almost as though the whole unspeakable grandeur of it had been devised for those eyes alone – first the great grand frigate of a band wagon pitching and rolling as if in heavy seas, with artistes of a world-wide repute discoursing sweet strains from its decks, and drawn not by four or six, but by ten snow-white Arabian stallions with red pompons nodding above their proud heads – that is to say, they were snow-white except perhaps for a slight grayish dappling. And on behind this, tailing away and away, were knights and ladies on mettled, gaily caparisoned steeds, and golden pageant dens filled with ferocious rare beasts of the jungle, hungrily surveying the surging crowds – only, of course, there weren’t any crowds – and sun-bright tableau cars, with crystal mirrors cunningly inset in the scrolled carved work, so that the dancing surfaces caught the sunlight and threw it back into eyes already joyously dazzled; and sundry closed cages with beautiful historical paintings on their sides, suggesting by their very secrecy the presence of marvelous prisoned creatures; and yet another golden chariot with the Queen of Sheba and her whole glittering court traveling in imperial pomp atop of it.

That wasn’t all – by no means was it all. There succeeded an open den containing the man-eating Bengal tigers, striped and lank, with the intrepid spangled shoulders of the trainer showing as he sat with his back against the bars, holding his terrible charges in dominion by the power of the human eye, so that for the time being they dared not eat anybody. And then followed a whole drove of trick ponies drawing the happy family in its wheeled home, and behind that in turn more cages, closed, and a fife-and-drum corps of old regimentals in blue and buff, playing “Yankee Doodle” with martial spirit, and next the Asiatic camel to be known by his one hump, and the genuine Bactrian dromedary to be known by his two, slouching by as though they didn’t care whether school kept or not, flirting their under lips up and down and showing profiles like Old Testament characters. And then came more knights and ladies and more horses and more heroes of history and romance, and a veritable herd of vast and pondrous pachyderm performers, or elephants – for while one pachyderm, however vast and pachydermic, might not make a herd, perhaps, or even two – yet surely three would, and here were no less than three, holding one another’s tails with their trunks, which was a droll conceit thought up by these intelligent creatures on the spur of the moment, no doubt, with the sole idea of giving added pleasure to a little sick boy.

That wasn’t all either. There was more of this unapproachable pageant yet winding by – including such wonders as the glass-walled apartment of the lady snake-charmer, with the lady snake-charmer sitting right there in imminent peril of her life amidst her loathsome, coiling and venomous pets; and also there was Judge Priest’s Jeff, hardly to be recognized in a red-and-yellow livery as he led the far-famed sacred ox of India; and then the funny old clown in his little blue wagon, shouting out “Whoa, January” to his mule and dodging back as January kicked up right in his face, and last of all – a crowning glory to all these other glories – the steam calliope, whistling and blasting and shrilling and steaming, fit to split itself wide open!

You and I, reader, looking on at this with gaze unglamoured by the eternal, fleeting spirit of youth, might have noted in the carping light of higher criticism that the oriental trappings had been but poor shoddy stuffs to begin with, and were now all torn and dingy and shedding their tarnished spangles; might have noted that the man-eating tigers seemed strangely bored with life, and that the venomous serpents draped upon the form of the lady snake-charmer were languid, not to say torpid, to a degree that gave the lady snake-charmer the appearance rather of a female suspender pedlar, carrying her wares hung over her shoulders. We might have observed further had we been so minded – as probably we should – that the Queen of Sheba bore somewhat a weatherbeaten look and held a quite common-appearing cotton umbrella with a bone handle over her regal head; that the East-Indian mahout of the elephant herd needed a shave, and that there were mud-stained overalls and brogan shoes showing plainly beneath the flowing robes of the Arabian camel-driver. We might even have guessed that the biggest tableau car was no more than a ticket wagon in thin disguise, and that the yapping which proceeded from the largest closed cage indicated the presence merely of a troupe of uneasy performing poodles.

But to the transported vision of the little sick boy in the little brown house there were no flaws in it anywhere – it was all too splendid for words, and so he spoke no words at all as it wound on by. The lurching shoulders of the elephants had gone over the hill beyond and on down, the sacred ox of India had passed ambling from sight, the glass establishment of the snake-charmer was passing, and January and the clown wagon and the steam calliope were right in front of the Hammersmith house, when something happened on ahead, and for a half minute or so there was a slowing-up and a closing-up and a halting of everything.

Although, of course, the rear guard didn’t know it for the time being, the halt was occasioned by the fact that when the band wagon reached the far end of Clay Street, with the orchard trees looming dead ahead, the sheriff, riding on the front seat of the band wagon, gave an order. The band-wagon driver instantly took up the slack of the reins that flowed through his fingers in layers, so that they stopped right in front of Judge Priest’s house, where Judge Priest stood leaning on his gate. The sheriff made a sort of saluting motion of his fingers against the brim of his black slouch hat.

“Accordin’ to orders, Your Honor,” he stated from his lofty perch.

At this there spoke up another man, the third and furthermost upon the wide seat of the band wagon, and this third man was no less a personage than Daniel P. Silver himself, and he was as near to bursting with bottled rage as any man could well be and still remain whole, and he was as hoarse as a frog from futile swearing.

“What in thunder does this mean—” he began, and then stopped short, being daunted by the face which Sheriff Giles Birdsong turned upon him.

“Look here, mister,” counseled the sheriff, “you art now in the presence of the presidin’ judge of the first judicial district of Kintucky, settin’ in chambers, or what amounts to the same thing, and you air liable to git yourself into contempt of cote any minute.”

Baffled, Silver started to swear again, but in a lower key.

“You better shut up your mouth,” said the sheriff with a shifting forward of his body to free his limbs for action, “and listen to whut His Honor has to say. You act like you was actually anxious to git yourself lamed up.”

“Sheriff,” said the judge, “obeyin’ your orders, you have, I observe, attached certain properties – to wit, a band wagon and team of horses – and still obeyin’ orders, have produced said articles before me for my inspection. You will continue in personal possession of same until said attachment is adjudicated, not allowin’ any person whatsoever to remove them from your custody. Do I make myself sufficiently plain?”

“Yes, suh, Your Honor,” said the sheriff. “You do.”

“In the meanwhile, pendin’ the termination of the litigation, if the recent possessor of this property desires to use it for exhibition or paradin’ purposes, you will permit him to do so, always within proper bounds,” went on the judge. “I would suggest that you could cut through that lane yonder in order to reach the business section of our city, if such should be the desire of the recent possessor.”

The heavy wheels of the band wagon began turning; the parade started moving on again. But in that precious half-minute’s halt something else had happened, only this happened in front of the little brown house halfway down Clay Street. The clown’s gaze was roving this way and that, as if looking for the crowd that should have been there and that was only just beginning to appear, breathless and panting, and his eyes fell upon a wasted, wizened little face looking straight out at him from a nest of bedclothes in a window not thirty feet away; and – be it remembered among that clown’s good deeds in the hereafter – he stood up and bowed, and stretched his painted, powdered face in a wide and gorgeous grin, just as another and a greater Grimaldi once did for just such another audience of a grieving mother and a dying child. Then he yelled “Whoa, January,” three separate times, and each time he poked January in his long-suffering flanks and each time January kicked up his small quick hoofs right alongside the clown’s floury ears.

The steam calliope man had an inspiration too. He was a person of no great refinement, the calliope man, and he worked a shell game for his main source of income and lived rough and lived hard, so it may not have been an inspiration after all, but merely the happy accident of chance. But whether it was or it wasn’t, he suddenly and without seeming reason switched from the tune he was playing and made his calliope sound out the first bars of the music which somebody once set to the sweetest childhood verses that Eugene Field ever wrote – the verses that begin:

The little toy dog is covered with dust,

But sturdy and stanch he stands;

And the little toy soldier is red with rust,

And his musket molds in his hands.

The parade resumed its march then and went on, tailing away through the dappled sunshine under the trees, and up over the hill and down the other side of it, but the clown looked back as he scalped the crest and waved one arm, in a baggy calico sleeve, with a sort of friendly goodby motion to somebody behind him; and as for the steam calliope man, he kept on playing the Little Boy Blue verses until he disappeared.

As a matter of fact, he was still playing them when he passed a wide-porched old white house almost at the end of the empty street, where a stout old man in a wrinkly white linen suit leaned across a gate and regarded the steam calliope man with a satisfied, almost a proprietorial air.

The Saturday Evening Post, 27 Apr 1912
Entitled “Ermine and Motley”
Back Home (1912)

When the Fighting Was Good

~

Mister Sheriff,” ordered the judge, “bring Pressley G. Harper to the bar.”

Judge Priest, as I may have set forth before, had two habits of speech – one purposely ungrammatical and thickly larded with the vernacular of the country crossroads – that was for his private walks and conversations, and for his campaignings; but the other was of good and proper and dignified English, and it he reserved for official acts and utterances. Whether upon the bench or off it, though, his voice had that high-pitched, fiddle-string note which carried far and clearly; and on this day, when he spoke, the sheriff roused up instantly from where he had been enjoying forty winks between the bewhittled arms of a tilted chair and bestirred himself.

He hurried out of a side door. A little, whispering, hunching stir went through the courtroom. Spectators reclining upon the benches, partly on their spines and partly on their shoulderblades, straightened and bent forward. Inside the rail, which set apart the legal goats from the civic sheep, a score of eyes were fixed speculatively upon the judge’s face, rising above the top of the tall, scarred desk where he sat; but his face gave no clew to his thoughts; and if the mind back of the beneficent, mild blue eyes was troubled, the eyes themselves looked out unvexed through the steel-bowed spectacles that rode low on the old judge’s nose.

There was a minute’s wait. The clerk handed up to the judge a sheaf of papers in blue wrappers. The judge shuffled through them until he found the one he wanted. It was the middle of the afternoon of a luscious spring day – the last day of the spring term of court. In at the open windows came spicy, moist smells of things sprouting and growing, and down across the courthouse square the big star-shaped flowers of the dogwood trees showed white and misty, like a new Milky Way against a billowy green firmament.

A minute only and then the sheriff reëntered. At his side came a man. This newcomer must have been close to seventy years – or sixty-five, anyway. He was long and lean, and he bore his height with a sort of alert and supple erectness, stepping high, with the seemingly awkward gait of the man trained at crossing furrows, yet bringing his feet down noiselessly, like a house-cat treading on dead leaves. The way he moved made you think of a deerstalker. Strength, tremendous strength, was shown in the outward swing of the long arms and the huge, knotty hands, and there was temper in the hot, brown eyes and in the thick, stiff crop of reddish-gray hair, rising like buckwheat stubble upon his scalp. He had high cheekbones and a long, shaven face, and his skin was tanned to a leathery red, like a well-smoked ham. Except for the colors of his hair and eyes, he might have passed for half Indian. Indeed, there was a tale in the county that his great-grandmother was a Shawnee squaw. He was more than six feet tall – he must have been six feet two.

With the sheriff alongside him he came to the bar – a sagged oaken railing – and stood there with his big hands cupped over it. He was newly shaved and dressed in what was evidently his best.

“Pressley G. Harper at the bar,” sang out the clerk methodically. Everybody was listening.

“Pressley G. Harper,” said the judge, “waiving the benefit of counsel and the right of trial by jury, you have this day pleaded guilty to an indictment charging you with felonious assault in that you did, on the twenty-first day of January last, shoot and wound with a firearm one Virgil Settle, a citizen of this county. Have you anything to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced upon you?”

Only eying him steadfastly, the confessed offender shook his head.

“It is the judgment of this court, then, that you be confined in the state penitentiary for the period of two years at hard labor.”

A babbling murmur ran over the room – for his sins old Press Harper was catching it at last. The prisoner’s hands gripped the oaken rail until his knuckles nails showed white, and it seemed that the tough wood fibers would be dented in; other than that he gave no sign, but took the blow braced and steady, like a game man facing a firing squad. The sheriff inched toward him; but the judge raised the hand that held the blue-wrappered paper as a sign that he had more to say.

“Pressley G. Harper,” said the judge, “probably this is not the time or the place for the court to say how deeply it regrets the necessity of inflicting this punishment upon you. This court has known you for many years – for a great many years. You might have been a worthy citizen. You have been of good repute for truthfulness and fair dealing among your neighbors; but you have been beset, all your life, with a temper that was your abiding curse, and when excited with liquor you have been a menace to the safety of your fellowman. Time and time again, within the recollection of this court, you have been involved in unseemly brawls, largely of your own making. That you were generally inflamed with drink, and that you afterward seemed genuinely penitent and made what amends you could, does not serve to excuse you in the eyes of the law. That you have never taken a human life outright is a happy accident of chance.

“Through the leniency of those appointed to administer the law you have until now escaped the proper and fitting consequences of your behavior; but, by this last wanton attack upon an inoffensive citizen, you have forfeited all claim upon the consideration of the designated authorities.”

He paused for a little, fumbling at the bow of his spectacles.

“In the natural course of human events you have probably but a few more years to live. It is to be regretted by all right-thinking men that you cannot go to your grave free from the stigma of a prison. And it is a blessing that you have no one closely related to you by ties of blood or marriage to share in your disgrace.” The old judge’s high voice grew husked and roughened here, he being himself both widowed and childless. “The judgment of the court stands – two years at hard labor.”

He made a sign that he was done. The sheriff edged up again and touched the sentenced man upon the arm. Without turning his head, Harper shook off the hand of authority with so violent a shrug that the sheriff dodged back, startled. Then for the first time the prisoner spoke.

“Judge, Your Honor,” he said quietly, “jest a minute ago you asked me if I had anything to say and I told you that I had not. I’ve changed my mind; I want to ask you something – I want to ask you a mighty big favor. No, I ain’t askin’ you to let me off – it ain’t that,” he went on more quickly, reading the look on the judge’s face. “I didn’t expect to come clear in this here case. I pleaded guilty because I was guilty and didn’t have no defense. My bein’ sorry for shootin’ Virge Settle the way I did don’t excuse me, as I know; but, Judge Priest, I’ll say jest this to you – I don’t want to be dragged off to that there penitentiary like a savage dumb beast. I don’t want to be took there by no sheriff. And what I want to ask you is this: Can’t I go there a free man, with free limbs? I promise you to go and to serve my time faithful – but I want to go by myself and give myself up like a man.”

Instantly visualized before the eyes of all who sat there was the picture which they knew must be in the prisoner’s mind – the same picture which all or nearly all of them had seen more than once, since it came to pass, spring and fall, after each term of court – a little procession filing through the street to the depot; at its head, puffed out with responsibility, the sheriff and one of his deputies – at its tail more deputies, and in between them the string of newly convicted felons, handcuffed in twos, with a long trace-chain looping back from one pair to the next pair, and so on, binding all fast together in a clanking double file – the whites in front and the negroes back of them, maintaining even in that shameful formation the division of race; the whites mainly marching with downcast heads and hurrying feet, clutching pitiably small bundles with their free hands – the negroes singing doggerel in chorus and defiantly jingling the links of their tether; some, the friendless ones, hatless and half naked, and barefooted after months of lying in jail – and all with the smell of the frowsy cells upon them. And, seeing this familiar picture spring up before them, it seemed all of a sudden a wrong thing and a very shameful thing that Press Harper, an old man and a member of a decent family, should march thus, with his wrists chained and the offscourings and scum of the county jail for company. All there knew him for a man of his word. If old Press Harper said he would go to the penitentiary and surrender himself they knew he would go and do it if he had to crawl there on his knees. And so now, having made his plea, he waited silently for the answer.

The old judge had half swung himself about in his chair and with his hand at his beard was looking out of the window.

“Mister Sheriff,” he said, without turning his head, “you may consider yourself relieved of the custody of the defendant at the bar. Mister Clerk, you may make out the commitment papers.” The clerk busied himself with certain ruled forms, filling in dotted lines with writing. The judge went on: “Despite the irregularity of the proceeding, this court is disposed to grant the request which the defendant has just made. Grievous though his shortcomings in other directions may have been, this court has never known the defendant to break his word. Does the defendant desire any time in which to arrange his personal affairs? If so how much time?”

“I would like to have until the day after tomorrow,” said Harper. “If I kin, I want to find a tenant for my farm.”

“Has the commonwealth’s attorney any objection to the granting of this delay?” inquired the judge, still with his head turned away.

“None, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor, half rising. And now the judge was facing the prisoner, looking him full in the eye.

“You will go free on your own recognizance, without bond, until the day after tomorrow,” he bade him. “You will then report yourself to the warden of the state penitentiary at Frankfort. The clerk of this court will hand you certain documents which you will surrender to the warden at the same time that you surrender yourself.”

The tall old man at the rail bowed his head to show he understood, but he gave no thanks for the favor vouchsafed him, nor did the other old man on the bench seem to expect any thanks. The clerk’s pen, racing across the ruled sheets, squeaked audibly.

“This consideration is granted, though, upon one condition,” said the judge, as though a new thought had just come to him. “And that is, that between this time and the time you begin serving your sentence you do not allow a drop of liquor to cross your lips. You promise that?”

“I promise that,” said Harper slowly and soberly, like a man taking a solemn oath.

No more was said. The clerk filled out the blanks – two of them – and Judge Priest signed them. The clerk took them back from him, folded them inside a long envelope; backed the envelope with certain writings, and handed it over the bar rail to Harper. There wasn’t a sound as he stowed it carefully into an inner pocket of his ill-fitting black coat; nor, except for the curiously light tread of his own steps, was there a sound as he, without a look side-wise, passed down the courtroom and out at the doorway.

“Mister Clerk,” bade Judge Priest, “adjourn the present term of this court.”

As the crowd filed noisily out, old Doctor Lake, who had been a spectator of all that happened, lingered behind and, with a nod and a gesture to the clerk, went round behind the jury-box and entered the door of the judge’s private chamber, without knocking. The lone occupant of the room stood by the low, open window, looking out over the green square. He was stuffing the fire-blackened bowl of his corncob pipe with its customary fuel; but his eyes were not on the task, or his fingers trembled – or something; for, though the pipe was already packed to overflowing, he still tamped more tobacco in, wasting the shreddy brown weed upon the floor.

“Come in, Lew, and take a chair and set down,” he said. Doctor Lake, however, instead of taking a chair and sitting down, crossed to the window and stood beside him, putting one hand on the judge’s arm.

“That was pretty hard on old Press, Billy,” said Doctor Lake.

Judge Priest was deeply sensitive of all outside criticism pertaining to his official conduct; his life off the bench was another matter. He stiffened under the touch.

“Lewis Lake,” he said – sharply for him – “I don’t permit even my best friends to discuss my judicial acts.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, Billy,” Doctor Lake made haste to explain. “I wasn’t thinking so much of what happened just now in the court yonder. I reckon old Press deserved it – he’s been running hog-wild round this town and this county too long already. Let him get that temper of his roused and a few drinks in him and he is a regular mad dog. Nobody can deny that. Of course I hate it – and I know you do too – to see one of the old company – one of the boys who marched out of here with us in ’61 – going to the pen. That’s only natural; but I’m not finding fault with your sending him there. What I was thinking of is that you’re sending him over the road day after tomorrow.”

“What of that?” asked the judge.

“Why, day after tomorrow is the day we’re starting for the annual reunion,” said Doctor Lake; “and, Billy, if Press goes on the noon train – which he probably will – he’ll be traveling right along with the rest of us – for a part of the way. Only he’ll get off at the Junction, and we – well, we’ll be going on through, the rest of us will, to the reunion That’s what I meant.”

“That’s so!” said the judge regretfully – “that’s so! I did forget all about the reunion startin’ then – I plum’ forgot it. I reckin it will be sort of awkward for all of us – and for Press in particular.” He paused, holding the unlighted and overflowing pipe in his hands absently, and then went on:

“Lewis, when a man holds an office such as mine is he has to do a lot of things he hates mightily to do. Now you take old Press Harper’s case. I reckin there never was a braver soldier anywhere than Press was. Do you remember Brice’s Crossroads?”

“Yes,” said the old doctor, his eyes suddenly afire. “Yes, Billy – and Vicksburg too.”

“Ah-hah!” went on the old judge – “and the second day’s fight at Chickamauga, when we lost so many out of the regiment, and Press came back out of the last charge, draggin’ little Gil Nicholas by the arms, and both of them purty nigh shot to pieces? Yes, suh; Press always was a fighter when there was any fightin’ to do – and the fightin’ was specially good in them days. The trouble with Press was he didn’t quit fightin’ when the rest of us did. Maybe it sort of got into his blood. It does do jest that sometimes, I judge.”

“Yes,” said Doctor Lake, “I suppose you’re right; but old Press is in a fair way to be cured now. A man with his temper ought never to touch whisky anyhow.”

“You’re right,” agreed the judge. “It’s a dangerous thing, licker is – and a curse to some people. I’d like to have a dram right this minute. Lew, I wish mightily you’d come on and go home with me tonight and take supper. I’ll send my nigger boy Jeff up to your house to tell your folks you won’t be there until late, and you walk on out to my place with me. I feel sort of played out and lonesome – I do so. Come on now. We’ll have a young chicken and a bait of hot waffles – I reckin that old nigger cook of mine does make the best waffles in the created world. After supper we’ll set a spell together and talk over them old times when we were in the army – and maybe we can kind of forget some of the things that’ve come up later.”

•     •     •     •     •

The noon accommodation would carry the delegation from Gideon K. Irons Camp over the branch line to the Junction, where it would connect with a special headed through for the reunion city. For the private use of the Camp the railroad company provided a car which the ladies of the town decorated on the night before with draped strips of red and white bunting down the sides, and little battle-flags nailed up over the two doors. The rush of the wind would soon whip away the little crossed flags from their tack fastenings and roll the bunting streamers up into the semblance of peppermint sticks; but the car, hitched to the tail end of the accommodation and surrounded by admiring groups of barelegged small boys, made a brave enough show when its intended passengers came marching down a good half hour ahead of leaving-time.

Considering the wide swath which death and the infirmities of age had been cutting in the ranks all these years, the Camp was sending a good representation – Judge Priest, the commandant; and Doctor Lake; and Major Joe Sam Covington; and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, who never missed a reunion; and Corporal Jake Smedley, the color-bearer, with the Camp’s flag furled on its staff and borne under his arm; and Captain Shelby Woodward – and four or five more. There was even one avowed private. Also, and not to be overlooked on any account, there was Uncle Zach Matthews, an ink-black, wrinkled person, with a shiny bald head polished like old rosewood, and a pair of warped legs bent outward like saddlebows. Personally Uncle Zach was of an open mind regarding the merits and the outcome of the Big War. As he himself often put it:

“Yas, suh – I ain’t got no set prejudices ary way. In de spring of ’61 I went out wid my own w’ite folks, as body-sarvant to my young marster, Cap’n Harry Matthews – and we suttinly did fight dem bluebellies up hill and down dale fer three endurin’ years or more; but in de campaignin’ round Nashville somewhars I got kind of disorganized and turn’t round someway; and, when I sorter comes to myself, lo and behole, ef I ain’t been captured by de Fed’rul army! So, rather’n have any fussin’ ’bout it, I j’ined in wid dem; and frum den on till de surrender I served on de other side – cookin’ fer one of their gin’els and doin’ odd jobs round de camp; but when ’twas all over I come on back home and settled down ag’in ’mongst my own folks, where I properly belonged. Den, yere a few years back, some of ’em turn’t in and done some testifyin’ fer me so’s I could git my pension. Doctor Lake, he says to me hisse’f, he says; ‘Zach, bein’ as de Yankee Gover’mint is a passin’ out dis yere money so free you might jess as well have a little chunk of it too!’ And he – him and Mistah Charley Reed and some others, they helped me wid my papers; and, of course, I been mighty grateful to all dem gen’l’men ever since.”

So Uncle Zach drew his pension check quarterly, and regularly once a year went to the reunion as general factotum of the Camp, coming home laden with badges and heavy with small change. He and Judge Priest’s Jeff, who was of the second generation of freedom, now furnished a touch of intense color relief, sitting together in one of the rearmost seats, guarding the piled-up personal baggage of the veterans.

Shortly before train-time carriages came, bringing young Mrs. McLaurin, little Rita Covington and Miss Minnie Lyon – the matron of honor, the sponsor, and the maid of honor respectively of the delegation. Other towns no larger would be sure to send a dozen or more sponsors and maids and matrons of honor; but the home Camp was proverbially moderate in this regard. As Captain Woodward had once said: “We are charmed and honored by the smiles of our womanhood, and we worship every lovely daughter of the South; but, at a reunion of veterans, somehow I do love to see a veteran interspersed here and there in among the fair sex.”

So now, as their special guests for this most auspicious occasion, they were taking along just these three – Rita Covington, a little eighteen-year-old beauty, and Minnie Lyon, a tall, fair, slender, pretty girl, and Mrs. McLaurin. The two girls were in white linen, with touches of red at throat and waist; but young Mrs. McLaurin, who was a bride of two years’ standing and plump and handsome, looked doubly handsome and perhaps a wee mite plumper than common in a tailor-made suit of mouse-gray, that was all tricked out with brass buttons and gold-braided cuffs, and a wide black belt, with a cavalry buckle. That the inspired tailor who built this costume had put the stars of a major-general on the collar and the stripes of a corporal on the sleeve was a matter of no consequence whatsoever. The color was right, the fit of the coat was unflawed by a single wrinkle fore or aft, and the brass buttons poured like molten gold down the front. Originally young Mrs. McLaurin had intended to reserve her military suit for a crowning sartorial stroke on the day of the big parade; but at the last moment pride of possession triumphed over the whisperings of discretion, and so here she was now, trig and triumphant – though, if it must be confessed, a trifle closely laced in. Yet she found an immediate reward in the florid compliments of the old men. She radiated her satisfaction visibly as Doctor Lake and Captain Woodward ushered her and her two charges aboard the car with a ceremonious, Ivanhoeish deference, which had come down with them from their day to this, like the scent of old lavender lingering in ancient cedar chests.

A further martial touch was given by the gray coats of the old men, by the big Camp badges and bronze crosses proudly displayed by all, and finally by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, who, true to a habit of forty years’ standing, was wearing the rent and faded jacket that he brought home from the war, and carrying on his shoulder the ancient rusted musket that had served him from Sumter to the fall of Richmond.

The last of the party was on the decorated coach, the last ordinary traveler had boarded the single day-coach and the conductor was signaling for the start, when an erect old man, who all during the flurry of departure had been standing silent and alone behind the protecting shadow of the far side of the station, came swiftly across the platform, stepping with a high, noiseless, deerstalker’s tread, and, just as the engine bleated its farewell and the wheels began to turn, swung himself on the forward car. At sight of two little crossed flags fluttering almost above his head he lifted his slouch hat in a sort of shamed salute; but he kept his face turned resolutely away from those other old men to the rear of him. He cramped his great length down into a vacant seat in the daycoach, and there he sat, gazing straight ahead at nothing, as the train drew out of the station, bearing him to his two years at hard labor and these one-time comrades of his to their jubilating at the annual reunion.

As for the train, it went winding its leisurely and devious way down the branch line toward the Junction, stopping now and then at small country stations. The air that poured in through the open windows was sweet and heavy with Maytime odors of blossoming and blooming. In the tobacco patches the adolescent plants stood up, fresh and velvet-green. Mating red birds darted through every trackside tangle of underbrush and wove threads of living flame back and forth over every sluggish, yellow creek; and sparrowhawks teetered above the clearings, hunting early grasshoppers. Once in a while there was a small cotton-patch.

It was warm – almost as warm as a summer day. The two girls fanned themselves with their handkerchiefs and constantly brushed cinders off their starched blouses. Mrs. McLaurin, buttoned in to her rounded throat, sat bolt-upright, the better to keep wrinkles from marring the flawless fit of her regimentals. She suffered like a Christian martyr of old, smiling with a sweet content – as those same Christian martyrs are said to have suffered and smiled. Judge Priest, sitting one seat to the rear of her, with Major Covington alongside him, napped lightly with his head against the hot red plush of the seat-back. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby found the time fitting and the audience receptive to his celebrated and more than familiar story of what on a certain history-making occasion he heard General Breckinridge say to General Buckner, and what General Buckner said to General Breckinridge in reply.

In an hour or so they began to draw out of the lowlands fructifying in the sunlight, and in among the craggy foothills. Here the knobs stood up, like the knuckle-bones of a great rough hand laid across the peaceful countryside. “Deadenings” flashed by, with the girdled, bleached tree-trunks rising, deformed and gaunt, above the young corn. The purplish pink of the redbud trees was thick in clumps on the hillsides. The train entered a cut with a steep fill running down on one side and a seamed cliff standing close up on the other. Small saplings grew out of the crannies in the rocks and swung their boughs downward so that the leaves almost brushed the dusty tops of the coaches sliding by beneath them.

Suddenly, midway of this cut, there came a grinding and sliding of the wheels – the cars began creaking in all their joints as though they would rack apart; and, with a jerk which wakened Judge Priest and shook the others in their seats, the train halted. From up ahead somewhere, heard dimly through the escape of the freed steam, came a confusion of shouted cries. Could they be nearing the Junction so soon? Mrs. McLaurin felt in a new handbag – of gray broadcloth with a gold clasp, to match her uniform – for a powder-rag. Then she shrank cowering back in her place, for leaping briskly up the car steps there appeared, framed in the open doorway just beyond her, an armed man – a short, broad man in a flannel shirt and ragged overalls, with a dirty white handkerchief bound closely over the bridge of his nose and shielding the lower part of his face. A long-barreled pistol was in his right hand and a pair of darting, evilly disposed eyes looked into her startled ones from under the brim of a broken hat.

“Hands up, everybody!” he called out, and swung his gun right and left from his hip, so that its muzzle seemed to point all ways at once. “Hands up, everybody – and keep ’em up!”

Behind this man, back to back with him, was the figure of another man, somewhat taller, holding similar armed dominion over the astounded occupants of the day-coach. This much, and this much only, in a flash of time was seen by Uncle Zach Matthews and Judge Priest’s Jeff, as, animated by a joint instantaneous impulse, they slid off their seat at the other end of the car and lay embraced on the floor, occupying a space you would not have believed could have contained one darky – let alone two. And it was seen more fully and at greater length by the gray veterans as their arms with one accord rose stiffly above the level of their heads; and also it was seen by the young matron, the sponsor and the maid of honor, as they huddled together, clinging to one another desperately for the poor comfort of close contact. Little Rita Covington, white and still, looked up with blazing gray eyes into the face of the short man with the pistol. She had the palms of both her hands pressed tightly against her ears. Rita was brave enough – but she hated the sound of firearms. Where she half knelt, half crouched, she was almost under the elbow of the intruder.

The whole thing was incredible – it was impossible! Train robberies had passed out of fashion years and years before. Here was this drowsing, quiet country lying just outside the windows, and the populous Junction only a handful of miles away; but, incredible or not, there stood the armed trampish menace in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder with an accomplice. And from outside and beyond there came added evidence to the unbelievable truth of it in the shape of hoarse, unintelligible commands rising above a mingling of pointless outcries and screams.

“Is this a joke, sir, or what?” demanded Major Covington, choking with an anger born of his own helplessness and the undignifiedness of his attitude.

“Old gent, if you think it’s a joke jest let me ketch you lowerin’ them arms of yourn,” answered back the yeggman. His words sounded husky, coming muffled through the handkerchief; but there was a grim threat in them, and for just a breathless instant the pistol-barrel stopped wavering and centered dead upon the major’s white-vested breast.

“Set right still, major,” counseled Judge Priest at his side, not taking his eyes off the muffled face. “He’s got the drop on us.”

“But to surrender without a blow – and we all old soldiers too!” lamented Major Covington, yet making no move to lower his arms.

“I know – but set still,” warned Judge Priest, his puckered glance taking toll sideways of his fellow travelers – all of them with chagrin, amazement and indignation writ large upon their faces, and all with arms up and palms opened outward like a calisthenic class of elderly gray beards frozen stiff and solid in the midst of some lung-expanding exercise. Any other time the picture would have been funny; but now it wasn’t. And the hold-up man was giving his further orders.

“This ain’t no joke and it ain’t no time for foolin’. I gotter work fast and you all gotter keep still, or somebody’ll git crippled up bad!”

With his free hand he pulled off his broken derby, revealing matted red hair, with a dirty bald spot in the front. He held the hat in front of him, crown down.

“I’m goin’ to pass through this car,” he announced, “and I want everybody to contribute freely. You gents will lower one hand at a time and git yore pokes and kettles – wallets and watches – out of yore clothes. And remember, no monkey business – no goin’ back to yore hip pockets – unless you wanter git bored with this!” he warned; and he followed up the warning with a nasty word which borrowed an added nastiness coming through his rag mask.

His glance flashed to the right, taking in the quivering figures of the two girls and the young woman. “Loidies will contribute too,” he added.

“Oh!” gasped Mrs. McLaurin miserably; and mechanically her right hand went across to protect the slender diamond bracelet on her left wrist; while tall Miss Lyon, crumpled and trembling, pressed herself still farther against the side of the car, and Rita Covington involuntarily clutched the front of her blouse, her fingers closing over the little chamois-skin bag that hung hidden there, suspended by a ribbon about her throat. Rita was an only daughter and a pampered one; her father was the wealthiest man in town and she owned handsomer jewels than an eighteen-year-old girl commonly possesses. The thief caught the meaning of those gestures and his red-rimmed eyes were greedy.

“You dog, you!” snorted old Doctor Lake; and he, like the major, sputtered in the impotence of his rage. “You’re not going to rob these ladies too?”

“I’m a-goin’ to rob these loidies too,” mimicked the thief. “And you, old gent, you’d better cut out the rough talk.” Without turning his head, and with his pistol making shifting fast plays to hold the car in subjection, he called back: “Slim, there’s richer pickin’ here than we expected. If you can leave them rubes come help me clean up.”

“Just a second,” was the answer from behind him, “till I git this bunch hypnotized good.”

“Now then,” called the red-haired man, swearing vilely to emphasize his meaning, “as I said before, cough up! Loidies first – you!” And he motioned with his pistol toward Mrs. McLaurin and poked his hat out at her. Her trembling fingers fumbled at the clasp of her bracelet a moment and the slim band fell flashing into the hat.

“You are no gentleman – so there!” quavered the unhappy lady, as a small, gemmed watch with a clasp, and a silver purse, followed the bracelet. Bessie Lyon shrank farther and farther away from him, with sobbing intakes of her breath. She was stricken mute and helpless with fear.

“Now then,” the red-haired man was addressing Rita, “you next. Them purties you’ve got hid there inside yore shirt – I’ll trouble you for them! Quick now!” he snarled, seeing that she hesitated. “Git ’em out!”

“I ca-n’t,” she faltered, and her cheeks reddened through their dead pallor; “my waist – buttons – behind. I can’t and I won’t.”

The thief shifted his derby hat from his left hand to his right, holding it fast with his little finger hooked under the brim, while the other fingers kept the cocked revolver poised and ready.

“I’ll help you,” he said; and as the girl tried to dodge away from him he shoved a stubby finger under the collar of her blouse and with a hard jerk ripped the lace away, leaving her white neck half bare. At her cry and the sound of the tearing lace her father forgot the threat of the gun barrel – forgot everything.

“You vile hound!” he panted. “Keep your filthy hand off of my daughter!” And up he came out of his seat. And old Judge Priest came with him, and both of them lunged forward over the seatback at the ruffian, three feet away.

So many things began to happen then, practically all simultaneously, that never were any of the active participants able to recall exactly just what did happen and the order of the happening. It stood out afterward, though, from a jumble of confused recollections, that young Mrs. McLaurin screamed and fainted; that Bessie Lyon fainted quietly without screaming; and that little Rita Covington neither fainted nor screamed, but snatched outward with a lightning quick slap of her hand at the fist of the thief which held the pistol, so that the bullet, exploding out of it with a jet of smoke, struck in the aisle instead of striking her father or Judge Priest. It was this bullet, the first and only one fired in the whole mix-up, that went slithering diagonally along the car floor, guttering out a hole like a worm-track in the wood and kicking up splinters right in the face of Uncle Zach Matthews and Judge Priest’s Jeff as they lay lapped in tight embrace, so that they instantly separated and rose, like a brace of flushed blackbirds, to the top of the seat in front. From that point of vantage, with eyes popped and showing white all the way round, they witnessed what followed in the attitude of quiveringly interested onlookers.

All in an instant they saw Major Covington and Judge Priest struggling awkwardly with the thief over the intervening seatback, pawing at him, trying to wrest his hot weapon away from him; saw Mrs. McLaurin’s head roll back inertly; saw the other hold-up man pivot about to come to his beleaguered partner’s aid; and saw, filling the doorway behind this second ruffian, the long shape of old man Press Harper, as he threw himself across the joined platforms upon their rear, noiseless as a snake and deadly as one, his lean old face set in a square shape of rage, his hot red hair erect on his head like a Shawnee’s scalplock, his gaunt, long arms upraised and arched over and his big hands spread like grapples. And in that same second the whole aisle seemed filled with gray-coated, gray-haired old men, falling over each other and impeding each other’s movements in their scrambling forward surge to take a hand in the fight.

To the end of their born days, those two watching darkies had a story to tell that never lost its savor for teller or for audience – a story of how a lank, masked thief was taken by surprise from behind; was choked, crushed, beaten into instant helplessness before he had a chance to aim and fire; then was plucked backward, lifted high in the arms of a man twice his age and flung sidelong, his limbs flying like a whirligig as he rolled twenty feet down the steep slope to the foot of the fill. But this much was only the start of what Uncle Zach and Judge Priest’s Jeff had to tell afterward.

For now, then, realizing that an attack was being made on his rear, the stockier thief broke Judge Priest’s fumbling grip upon his gun-hand and half swung himself about to shoot the unseen foe, whoever it might be; but, as he jammed its muzzle into the stomach of the newcomer and pressed the trigger, the left hand of old Harper closed down fast upon the lock of the revolver, so that the hammer, coming down, only pinched viciously into his horny thumb. Breast to breast they wrestled in that narrow space at the head of the aisle for possession of the weapon. The handkerchief mask had fallen away, showing brutal jaws covered with a red stubble, and loose lips snarled away from the short stained teeth. The beleaguered robber, young, stocky and stout, cursed and mouthed blasphemies; but the old man was silent except for his snorted breathing and his frame was distended and swollen with a terrible Berserker lust of battle.

While Major Covington and Judge Priest and the foremost of the others got in one another’s way and packed in a solid, heaving mass behind the pair, all shouting and all trying to help, but really not helping at all, the red ruffian, grunting with the fervor of the blow, drove his clenched fist into old Harper’s face, ripping the skin on the high Indian cheekbone. The old man dealt no blows in return, but his right hand found a grip in the folds of flesh at the tramp’s throat and the fingers closed down like iron clamps on his wind.

There is no telling how long a man of Harper’s age and past habits might have maintained the crushing strength of that hold, even though rage had given him the vigor of bygone youth; but the red-stubbled man, gurgling and wriggling to be free, began to die of suffocation before the grip weakened. To save himself he let go of the gunbutt, and the gun fell and bounced out of sight under a seat. Bearing down with both hands and all his might and weight upon Harper’s right wrist, he tore the other’s clasp off his throat and staggered back, drawing the breath with sobbing sounds back into his bursting lungs. He would have got away then if he could, and he turned as though to flee the length of the car and escape by the rear door.

The way was barred, by whooping, panting old men, hornet-hot. Everybody took a hand or tried to. The color-bearer shoved the staff of the flag between his legs and half tripped him, and as he regained his feet Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, jumping on a seat to get at him over the bobbing heads of his comrades, dealt him a glancing, clumsy blow on the shoulder with the muzzle of his old musket. Major Covington and Judge Priest were still right on him, bearing their not inconsiderable bulk down upon his shoulders.

He could have fought a path through these hampering forces. Wrestling and striking out, he half shoved, half threw them aside; but there was no evading the gaunt old man who bore down on him from the other direction. The look on the face of the old warlock daunted him. He yelled just once, a wordless howl of fear and desperation, and the yell was smothered back into his throat as Harper coiled down on him like a python, fettering with his long arms the shorter, thicker arms of the thief, crushing his ribs in, smothering him, killing him with a frightful tightening pressure. Locked fast in Harper’s embrace, he went down on his back underneath; and now – all this taking place much faster than it has taken me to write it or you to read it – the old man reared himself up. He put his booted foot squarely on the contorted face of the yeggman and twisted the heel brutally, like a man crushing a worm, and mashed the thief’s face to pulp. Then he seized him by the collar of his shirt, dragged him like so much carrion back the length of the car, the others making a way for him, and, with a last mighty heave, tossed him off the rear platform and stood watching him as he flopped and rolled slackly down the steep grade of the right-of-way to the gully at the bottom.

All this young Jeff and Uncle Zach witnessed, and at the last they began cheering. As they cheered there was a whistle of the air and the cars began to move – slowly at first, with hard jerks on the couplings; and then smoother and faster as the wheels took hold on the rails, and the track-joints began to click-clack in regular rhythm. And, as the train slid away, those forward who mustered up the hardihood to peer out of the windows saw one man – a red-haired, half-bald one – wriggling feebly at the foot of the cut, and another one struggling to his feet uncertainly, meanwhile holding his hands to his stunned head; and, still farther along, a third, who fled nimbly up the bank and into the undergrowth beyond, without a backward glance. Seemingly, all told, there had been only three men concerned in the abortive holdup.

Throughout its short length the train sizzled with excitement and rang with the cries of some to go on and of others to go back and make prisoners of the two crippled yeggs; but the conductor, like a wise conductor, signaled the engineer to make all speed ahead, being glad enough to have saved his train and his passengers whole. On his way through to take an inventory of possible damage and to ascertain the cause of things, he was delayed in the day-coach by the necessity of calming a hysterical country woman, so he missed the best part of what was beginning to start in the decorated rear coach.

There Mrs. McLaurin and tall Miss Lyon were emerging from their fainting fits, and little Rita Covington, now that the danger was over and past, wept in a protecting crook of her father’s arm. Judge Priest’s Jeff was salvaging a big revolver, with one chamber fired, from under a seat. Eight or nine old men were surrounding old Press Harper, all talking at once, and all striving to pat him on the back with clumsy, caressing slaps. And out on the rear platform, side by side, stood Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and Corporal Jake Smedley; the corporal was wildly waving his silk flag, now unfurled to show the blue St. Andrew’s cross, white-starred on a red background, waving it first up and down and then back and forth with all the strength of his arms, until the silk square popped and whistled in the air of the rushing train; the sergeant was going through the motions of loading and aiming and firing his ancient rusted musket. And at each imaginary discharge both of them, in a cracked duet, cheered for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy!

Just about then the locomotive started whistling for the Junction; outlying sheds and shanties, a section house and a water-tank or so began to flitter by. At the first blast of the whistle all the lingering fire of battle and victory faded out of Harper’s face and he sat down heavily in a seat, fumbling at the inner breast pocket of his coat. There was a bloody smear high up on his cheek and blood dripped from the ball of his split thumb.

“Boys, there’s some fight left in us yet,” exulted Captain Shelby Woodward, “and nobody knows it better than those two scoundrels back yonder! We all took a hand – we all did what we could; but it was you, Press – it was you that licked ’em both – single-handed! Boys,” he roared, glancing about him, “won’t this make a story for the reunion – and won’t everybody there be making a fuss over old Press!” He stopped then – remembering.

“I don’t go through with you,” said old Press, steadily enough. “I git off here. You fellers are goin’ on through – but I git off here to wait for the other train.”

“You don’t do no such of a thing!” broke in Judge Priest, his voice whanging like a bowstring. “Press Harper, you don’t do no such of a thing. You give me them papers!” he demanded almost roughly. “You’re goin’ right on through to the reunion with the rest of us – that’s where you’re goin’. You set right where you are in this car, and let little Rita Covington wipe that there blood off your face and tie up that thumb of yours. Why, Press, we jest naturally couldn’t get along without you at the reunion. Some of us are liable to celebrate a little too much and maybe git a mite overtaken, and we’ll be needin’ you to take care of us.

“You see, boys,” the old judge went on, with a hitch in his voice, addressing than generally, “Press here is under a pledge to me not to touch another drop of licker till he begins servin’ the sentence I imposed on him; and, boys, that means Press is goin’’ to be a temperance man for the balance of his days – if I know anything about the pardonin’ power and the feelin’s of the governor of this state!”

So, as the accommodation ran in to the Junction, where crowds were packed on the platform and pretty girls, dressed in white, with touches of red at throat and belt, waved handkerchiefs, and gimpy-legged old men in gray uniforms hobbled stiffly back and forth, and the local band blared out its own peculiar interpretation of My Old Kentucky Home, the tall old man with the gashed cheek sat in his seat, his face transfigured with a great light of joy and his throat muscles clicking with the sobs he was choking down, while little Rita Covington’s fingers dabbed caressingly at his wound with a handkerchief dipped in ice water and a dozen old veterans jostled one another to shake his hand. And they hit him on the back with comradely blows – and maybe they did a little crying themselves. But Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and Corporal Jacob Smedley took no part in this. Out on the rear platform they still stood, side by side, waving the flag and firing the unfirable musket harder and faster than ever; and, as one waved and the other loaded and fired, they cheered together:

“’Rah for Jefferson Davis, the Southern Confederacy – and Pressley G. Harper!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 15 Jun 1912
Back Home (1912)

Stratagem and Spoils

~

As the Daily Evening News, with pardonable enthusiasm, pointed out at the time, three events of practically national importance took place in town all in that one week. On Tuesday night at 9:37 there was a total eclipse of the moon, not generally visible throughout the United States; on Wednesday morning the Tri-State Steam and Hand Laundrymen’s Association began a two-days annual convention at St. Clair Hall; and on Saturday at high noon Eastern capital, in the person of J. Hayden Witherbee, arrived.

And the greatest of these was Witherbee. The eclipse of the moon took place on its appointed schedule and was witnessed through opera glasses and triangular fragments of windowpane that had been smudged with candlesmoke. The Tri-State Laundrymen came and heard reports, elected officers, had a banquet at the Richland House and departed to their several homes. But J. Hayden Witherbee stayed on, occupying the bridal chamber at the hotel – the one with the private bath attached; and so much interest and speculation did his presence create, and so much space did the Daily Evening News give in its valued columns to his comings and goings and his sayings and doings, that the name of J. Hayden Witherbee speedily became, as you might say, a household word throughout the breadth and length of the Daily Evening News’ circulation.

It seemed that J. Hayden Witherbee, sitting there in his lofty office building far away in Wall Street, New York, had had his keen eye upon the town for some time; and yet – such were the inscrutable methods of the man – the town hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t even suspected it. However, he had been watching its growth with the deepest interest; and when, by the count of the last United States census, it jumped from seventh in population in the state to fifth he could no longer restrain himself. He got aboard the first train and came right on. He had, it would appear, acted with such promptness because, in his own mind, he had already decided that the town would make an ideal terminal point for his proposed Tobacco & Cotton States Interurban Trolley line, which would in time link together with twin bonds of throbbing steel – the words are those of the reporter for the Daily Evening News – no less-than twenty-two growing towns, ranging southward from the river. Hence his presence, exuding from every pore, as it were, the very essences of power and influence and money. The paper said he was one of the biggest men in Wall Street, a man whose operations had been always conducted upon the largest scale.

This, within the space of three or four months, had been our second experience of physical contact with Eastern capital. The first one, though, had been in the nature of a disappointment. A man named Betts – Henry Betts – had come down from somewhere in the North and, for a lump sum, had bought outright the city gasworks. It was not such a big lump sum, because the gasworks had been built right after the war and had thereafter remained untouched by the stimulating hand of improvement. They consisted in the main of a crumbly little brick engine house, full of antiquated and self-willed machinery, and just below it, on the riverbank, a round and rusted gas tank, surrounded by sloping beds of coal cinders, through which at times sluggish rivulets of molten coal tar percolated like lava on the flanks of a toy volcano. The mains took in only the old part of town – not the new part; and the quality of illumination furnished was so flickery at all seasons and so given to freezing up in winter that many subscribers, including even the leading families, used coal-oil lamps in their bedchambers until the electric power house was built. A stock company of exceedingly conservative business men had owned the gasworks prior to the advent of Henry Betts, and the general manager of the plant had been Cassius Poindexter, a fellow townsman. Cash Poindexter was a man who, in his day, had tried his ’prentice hand at many things. At one time he traveled about in a democrat wagon, taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits from photographs and tintypes, and also for the frames to accompany the same.

At a more remote period he had been the authorized agent, on commission, for a lightning-rod company, selling rods with genuine guaranteed platinum tips; and rusty iron stringers, with forked tails, which still adhered to outlying farm buildings here and there in the county, testified to his activities in this regard. Again, Cash Poindexter had held the patent rights in four counties for an improved cream separator. In the early stages of the vogue for Belgian-hare culture in this country he was the first to import a family group of these interesting animals into our section. He had sold insurance of various sorts, including life, fire and cyclone; he was a notary public; he had tried real estate, and he had once enjoyed the distinction of having read lawbooks and works on medicine simultaneously. But in these, his later years, he had settled down more or less and had become general manager of the gasworks, which position also included the keeping of the books, the reading of meters and the making out and collecting of the monthly accounts. Nevertheless, he was understood to be working at spare moments on an invention that would make him independently wealthy for life. He was a tall, thin, sad man, with long, drooping aide whiskers; and he was continually combing back his side whiskers with both hands caressingly, and this gave him the appearance of a man parting a pair of string portières and getting ready to walk through them, but never doing so.

When this Mr. Betts came down from the North and bought the gasworks it was the general expectation that he would extensively overhaul and enlarge the plant; but he did nothing of the sort, seeming, on the contrary, to be amply satisfied with things as they were. He installed himself as general manager, retained Cash Poindexter as his assistant, and kept right on with the two Kettler boys as his engineers and the two darkies, Ed Greer and Lark Tilghman, as his firemen. He was a man who violated all traditions and ideals concerning how Northern capitalists ought to look. He neither wore a white piqué vest nor smoked long, black cigars; in fact, he didn’t smoke at all. He was a short, square, iron-gray person, with a sort of dead and fossilized eye. He looked as though he might have been rough-hewn originally from one of those soapstone clays which grow the harder with age and exposure. He had a hard, exact way of talking, and he wore a hard, exact suit of clothes which varied not, weekdays or Sundays, in texture or in cut.

In short, Mr. Henry Betts, the pioneer Eastern investor in those parts, was a profound disappointment as to personality and performances. Not so with J. Hayden Witherbee. From his Persian-lamb lapels to his patent-leather tips he was the physical embodiment of all the town had learned to expect of a visiting Wall Street capitalist. And he liked the town – that was plain. He spoke enthusiastically of the enterprise which animated it; he referred frequently and with praise to the awakening of the New South, and he was even moved to compliment publicly the cooking at the Richland House. It was felt that a stranger and a visitor could go no further.

Also, he moved fast, J. Hayden Witherbee did, showing the snap and push so characteristic of the ruling spirits of the great moneymarts of the East. Before he had been in town a week he had opened negotiations for the purchase outright of the new Light and Power Company, explaining frankly that if he could come to terms he intended making it a part of his projected interurban railway. Would the present owners care to sell at a fair valuation? – that was what Mr. Witherbee desired to know.

Would a drowning man grasp at a life-preserver? Would a famished colt welcome the return of its maternal parent at eventide? Would the present owners, carrying on their galled backs an unprofitable burden which local pride had forced upon them – would they sell? Here, as manna sent from Heaven by way of Wall Street, as you might say, was a man who would buy from them a property which had never paid and which might never pay; and who, besides, meant to do something noble and big for the town. Would they sell? Ask them something hard!

There was a series of conferences – if two conferences can be said to constitute a series – one in Mr. Witherbee’s room at the hotel, where cigars of an unknown name but an impressive bigness were passed round freely; and one in the office of the president of the Planters’ National Bank. Things went well and swimmingly from the first; Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee had a most clear and definite way of putting things; and yet, with all that, he was the embodiment of cordiality and courtesy. So charmed was Doctor Lake with his manner that he asked him, right in the midst of vital negotiations, if he were not of Southern descent; and when he confessed that his mother’s people had come from Virginia, Doctor Lake said he had felt it from the first moment they met, and insisted on shaking hands with Mr. Witherbee again.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Witherbee – this was said at the first meeting, the one in his room – “as I have already told you, I need this town as a terminal for my interurban road and I need your plant. I expect, of course, to enlarge it and to modernize it right up to the minute; but, so far as it goes, it is a very good plant and I want it. I suggest that you gentlemen, constituting the directors and the majority stockholders, get together between now and tomorrow – this evening, say – and put a price on the property. Tomorrow I will meet you again, here in this hotel or at any point you may select; and if the price you fix seems fair, and the papers prove satisfactory to my lawyers, I know of no reason why we cannot make a trade. Gentlemen, good day. Take another cigar all round before leaving.” They went apart and confabbed industriously – old Major Covington, who was the president of the Light and Power Company, Doctor Lake and Captain Woodward, the two heaviest stockholders, Colonel Courtney Cope, the attorney for the company and likewise a director, and sundry others. Between themselves, being meanwhile filled with sweet and soothing thoughts, they named a price that would let them out whole, with a margin of interest on the original venture, and yet one which, everything considered – the growing population, the new suburbs and all that – was a decent enough price. They expected to be hammered down a few thousand and were prepared to concede something; but it would seem that the big men of the East did not do business in that huckstering, cheese-trimming way. Time to them was evidently worth more than the money to be got by long chaffering over a proposition.

“Gentlemen,” J. Hayden Witherbee had said right off, “the figures seem reasonable and moderate. I think I will buy from you.” A warm glow visibly lit up the faces of those who sat with him. It was as though J. Hayden Witherbee was an open fireplace and threw off a pleasant heat.

“I will take over these properties,” repeated Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee; “but on one condition – I also want the ownership of your local gasworks.”

There was a little pause and the glow died down a trifle – just the merest trifle. “But, sir, we do not own those gasworks,” said the stately Major Covington.

“I know that,” said Mr. Witherbee; “but the point is – can’t you acquire them?”

“I suppose we might,” said the major; “but, Mr. Witherbee, that gasworks concern is worn out – our electric-light plant has nearly put it out of business.”

“I understand all that too,” Mr. Witherbee went on, “perfectly well. Gentlemen, where I come from we act quickly, but we look before we leap. During the past twenty-four hours I have examined into the franchise of those gasworks. I find that nearly forty years ago your common council issued to the original promoters and owners of the gas company a ninety-year charter, giving the use of any and all of your streets, not only for the laying of gas mains, but for practically all other purposes. It was an unwise thing to do, but it was done and it stands so today. Gentlemen, this is a growing community in the midst of a rich country. I violate no confidence in telling you that capital is looking this way. I am merely the forerunner – the first in the field. The Gatins crowd, in Chicago, has its eyes upon this territory, as I have reason to know. You are, of course, acquainted with the Gatins crowd?” he said in a tone of putting a question.

Major Covington, who made a point of never admitting that he didn’t know everything, nodded gravely and murmured the name over to himself as though he were trying to remember Gatins’ initials. The others sat silent, impressed more than ever with the wisdom of this stranger who had so many pertinent facts at his finger tips.

“Suppose now,” went on Mr. Witherbee – “suppose, now, that Ike Gratins and his crowd should come down here and find out what I have found out and should buy out that gas company. Why, gentlemen, under the terms of that old franchise, those people could actually lay tracks right through the streets of this little city of yours. They could parallel our lines – they could give us active opposition right here on the home ground. It might mean a hard fight. Therefore I need those gasworks. I may shut them up or I may run them – but I need them in my business.

“I have inquired into the ownership of this concern,” continued Mr. Witherbee before anyone could interrupt him, “and I find it was recently purchased outright by a gentleman from somewhere up my way named – named—” He snapped his fingers impatiently.

“Named Betts,” supplied Doctor Lake – “named Henry Betts.”

“Quite so,” Mr. Witherbee assented. “Thank you, doctor – Betts is the name. Now the fact that the whole property is vested in one man simplifies the matter – doesn’t it? Of course I would not care to go to this Mr. Betts in person. You understand that.” If they didn’t understand they let on they did, merely nodding and waiting for more light to be let in.

“Once let it be known that I was personally interested in a consolidation of your lighting plants, and this Mr. Betts, if I know anything about human nature, would advance his valuation far beyond its proper figure. Therefore I cannot afford to be known in the matter. You see that?”

They agreed that they saw.

“So I would suggest that all of you – or some of you – go and call upon Mr. Betts and endeavor to buy the gasworks from him outright. If you can get the plant for anything like its real value you may include the amount in the terms of the proposition you have today made me and I will take over all of the properties together.

“However, remember this, gentlemen – there is need of haste. Within forty-eight hours I should be in Memphis, where I am to confer with certain of my associates – Eastern men like myself, but who, unlike me, are keeping under cover – to confer with them concerning our rights-of-way through the cotton-raising country. I repeat, then, that there is pressing need for immediate action. May I offer you gentlemen fresh cigars?” and he reached for a well-stuffed, silver-mounted case of dull leather.

But they were already going – going in a body to see Mr. Henry Betts, late of somewhere up North. Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee’s haste, great though it might be, could be no greater than theirs. On their way down Market Street to the gashouse it was decided that, unless the exigencies of the situation demanded a chorus of argument, Major Covington should do the talking. Indeed it was Major Covington who suggested this. Talking, with financial subjects at the back of the talk, was one of the things at which the major fancied himself a success.

Mr. Betts sat in the clutter of his small, untidy office like an elderly and reserved gray rat in a paper nest behind a wainscoting. His feet, in square-toed congress gaiters, rested on the fender of a stove that was almost small enough to be an inkstand, and his shoulders were jammed back against a window-ledge. By merely turning his head he commanded a view of his entire property, with the engine house in the near distance and the round tun-like belly of the gas tank rising just beyond it. He was alone.

As it happened, he knew all of his callers, having met them in the way of business – which was the only way he ever met anybody. To each man entering he vouchsafed the same greeting – namely, “How-do?” – spoken without emotion and mechanically.

Major Covington had intended to shake hands with Mr. Betts, but something about Mr. Betts’ manner made him change his mind. He cleared his throat impressively; the major did nearly everything impressively.

“A fine day, sir,” said the major.

Mr. Betts turned his head slightly to the left and peered out through a smudged pane as if seeking visual confirmation of the statement before committing himself. A look seemed to satisfy him.

“It is,” he agreed, and waited, boring his company with his geologic gaze.

“Ahem!” sparred Major Covington – “think I will take a chair.”

As Mr. Betts said nothing to this, either one way or the other, the major took a chair, it being the only chair in sight, with the exception of the chair in which Mr. Betts was slumped down and from which Mr. Betts had not stirred. Doctor Lake perched himself upon a bookkeeper’s tall stool that wabbled precariously. Three other anxious local capitalists stood where they could find room, which was on the far side of the stove.

“Very seasonable weather indeed,” ventured the old major, still fencing for his start.

“So you remarked before, I believe,” said Mr. Betts dryly. “Did you wish to see me on business?”

Inwardly the major was remarking to himself how astonishing it was that one section of the country – to wit, the North – could produce men of such widely differing types as this man and the man whose delightful presence they had just quitted; could produce a gentleman like J. Hayden Witherbee, with whom it was a positive pleasure to discuss affairs of moment, and a dour, sour, flinty person like this Betts, who was lacking absolutely in the smaller refinements that should govern intercourse between gentlemen – and wasn’t willing to learn them either. Outwardly the major, visibly flustered, was saying: “Yes – in a measure. Yes, we came on a matter of business.” He pulled up somewhat lamely. Really the man’s attitude was almost forbidding. It verged on the sinister.

“What was the business?” pressed Mr. Betts in a colorless and entirely disinterested tone of voice.

“Well, sir,” said Major Covington stiffly, and his rising temper and his sense of discretion were now wrestling together inside of him – “well, sir, to be brief and to put it in as few words as possible, which from your manner and conversation I take to be your desire, I – we – my associates here and myself – have called in to say that we are interested naturally in the development of our little city and its resources and its industries; and with these objects in view we have felt, and, in fact, we have agreed among ourselves, that we would like to enter into negotiations with you, if possible, touching, so to speak, on the transfer to us of the property which you control here. Or, in other words, we—”

“Do you mean you want to buy these gasworks?”

“Yes,” confessed the major; “that – that is it. We would like to buy these gasworks.”

“Immediately!” blurted out Doctor Lake, teetering on his high perch. The major shot a chiding glance at his compatriot. Mr. Betts looked over the top of the stove at the major, and then beyond him at the doctor, and then beyond the doctor at the others. Then he looked out of the window again.

“They are not for sale,” he stated; and his voice indicated that he regarded the subject as being totally exhausted.

“Yes, quite so; I see,” said Major Covington suavely; “but if we could agree on a price now – a price that would be satisfactory to you – and to us—”

“We couldn’t agree on a price,” said Mr. Betts, apparently studying something in connection with the bulging side of the gas tank without, “because there isn’t any price to agree on. I bought these gasworks and I own them, and I am satisfied to go on owning them. Therefore they are not for sale. Did you have any other business with me?”

There was something almost insulting in the way this man rolled his r’s when he said “therefore.” Checking an inclination to speak on the part of Doctor Lake the major controlled himself with an effort and said:

“Nevertheless, we would appreciate it very much, sir, if you could and would go so far as to put a figure – any reasonable figure – on this property. We would like very much to get an expression from you – a suggestion – or – or – something of that general nature,” he tailed off.

“Very well,” said Mr. Betts, biting the words off short and square, “very well. I will What you want to know is my price for these gasworks?”

“Exactly so,” said the major, brightening up.

“Very well,” repeated Mr. Betts. “Sixty thousand.”

Doctor Lake gave such a violent start that he lost his hat out of his lap. Captain Woodward’s jaw dropped.

“Sixty thousand!” echoed Major Covington blankly. “Sixty thousand what?”

“Sixty thousand dollars,” said Mr. Betts, “in cash.”

Major Covington fairly sputtered surprise and chagrin.

“But, Mr. Betts, sir,” he protested, “I happen to know that less than four months ago you paid only about twenty-seven thousand dollars for this entire business!”

“Twenty-six thousand five hundred, to be exact,” corrected Mr. Betts.

“And since that time you have not added a dollar’s worth of improvement to it,” added the dismayed major.

“Not one cent – let alone a dollar,” assented this most remarkable man.

“But surely you don’t expect us to pay such a price as that?” pleaded the major.

“I do not,” said Mr. Betts.

“We couldn’t think of paying such a price as that.”

“I don’t expect you to,” said Mr. Betts. “I didn’t ask you to. As I said before, these gasworks are not for sale. They suit me just as they are. They are not on the market; but you insist that I shall name a price and I name it – sixty thousand in cash. Take it or leave it.”

Having concluded this, for him, unusually long speech, Mr. Betts brought his fingertips together with great mathematical exactness, matching each finger and each thumb against its fellow as though they were all parts of a sum in addition that he was doing. With his fingers added up to his satisfaction and the total found correct, he again turned his gaze out of the smudgy window. This time it was something on the extreme top of the gas tank which seemed to engage his attention. Cassius Poindexter opened the street door and started in; but at the sight of so much company he checked himself on the threshold, combed back his side whiskers nervously, bowed dumbly and withdrew, closing the door softly behind him.

“If we could only reach some reasonable basis of figuring now,” said the major, addressing Mr. Betts’ left ear and the back of Mr. Betts’ head – “say, forty thousand, now?” Mr. Betts squinted his Stone Age eyes the better to see out of the dirty window.

“Or even forty-five?” supplemented Doctor Lake, unable to hold in any longer. “Why, damn it, sir, forty-five thousand is a fabulous price to pay for this junkpile.”

“Sixty thousand – in cash!” The ultimatum seemed to issue from the rear of Mr. Betts’ collar.

Major Covington glanced about him, taking toll of the expressions of his associates. On their faces sorrowful capitulation was replacing chagrin. He nodded toward them and together they nodded back sadly.

“How much did you say you wanted down?” gulped the major weakly.

“All down,” announced Mr. Betts in a tone of finality; “all in cash. Those are my terms.”

“But it isn’t regular!” babbled Colonel Cope.

“It isn’t regular for a man to sell something he doesn’t want to sell either,” gulped Mr. Betts. “I bought for cash and I sell for cash. I never do business any other way.”

“How much time will you give us?” asked the major. The surrender was complete and unconditional.

“Until this time tomorrow,” said Mr. Betts; “then the deal is off.” Doctor Lake slid off his stool, or else he fell off. At any rate, he descended from it hurriedly. His face was very red.

“Well, of all the—” he began; but the major and the colonel had him by the arms and were dragging him outside. When they were gone – all of them – Mr. Betts indulged himself in the luxury of a still, small smile – a smile that curled his lips back just a trifle and died of frostbite before it reached his fossilized eyes.

“Gentlemen,” Mr. Witherbee was saying in his room at the Richland House ten minutes later, “the man has you at his mercy and apparently he knows it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had not already been in communication with the Gatins crowd. His attitude is suspicious. As I view it, it is most certainly suspicious. Gentlemen, I would advise you to close with him. He is asking a figure far in excess of the real value of the works – but what can you do?”

“And will you take the gasworks at sixty thousand?” inquired Major Covington hopefully.

“Ah, gentlemen,” said Mr. Witherbee, and his smile was sympathetic and all-embracing, “that, I think, is asking too much; but, in view of the circumstances, I will do this – I will take them at” – he paused to consider – “I will take them, gentlemen, at fifty thousand. In time I think I can make them worth that much to me; but fifty thousand is as far as I can go – positively. You stand to lose ten thousand on your deal for the gasworks, but I presume you will make that back and more on your sale to me of the light and power plant. Can’t I offer you fresh cigars, gentlemen?”

If for any reason a run had started on any one of the three local banks the next day there would have been the devil and all to pay, because there was mighty little ready money in any one of them. Their vaults had been scraped clean of currency; and that currency, in a compact bundle, was rapidly traveling eastward in the company of a smallish iron-gray man answering to the name of Betts. At about the same moment Mr. Witherbee, with the assistance of the darky porter of the Richland House, was packing his wardrobe into an ornate traveling kit. As he packed he explained to Doctor Lake and Major Covington:

“I am called to Memphis twenty-four hours sooner than I had expected. Tomorrow we close a deal there involving, I should say, half a million dollars. Let us see – this is Wednesday – isn’t it? I will return here on Friday morning. Meanwhile you may have the papers drawn by your attorney and ready for submission to my lawyer, Mr. Sharkey, who should arrive tomorrow from Cincinnati. If he finds them all shipshape, as I have every reason to expect he will find them, then, on Friday morning, gentlemen, we will sign up and I will pay the binder, amounting to – how much? – ninety thousand, I believe, was the figure we agreed upon. Quite so. Gentlemen, you will find a box of my favorite cigars on that bureau yonder. Help yourselves.”

•     •     •     •     •

No lawyer named Sharkey arrived from Cincinnati on Thursday; no J. Hayden Witherbee returned from Memphis on Friday, – nor was there word from him by wire or mail. The papers, drawn in Colonel Cope’s best legal style, all fringed and trimmed with whereases and wherefores, waited – and waited. Telegrams which Major Covington sent to Memphis remained unanswered; in fact, undelivered. Major Covington suddenly developed a cold and sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach. In his associates he discerned signs of the same chilling manifestation. It seemed to occur to all of them at once that nobody had asked J. Hayden Witherbee for his credentials or had inquired into his antecedents. Glamoured by the grandeur of his person, they had gone along with him – had gone along until now blindly. Saturday, hour by hour, darkling suspicion grew in each mind and reared itself like a totem pole adorned with snake-headed, hawk-clawed figments of dread. And on Saturday, for the first time in a solid week the Daily Evening News carried no front-page account of the latest doings and sayings of J. Hayden Witherbee.

Upon a distracted conference, taking place Saturday night in the directors’ room of the bank, intruded the sad figure of Cassius Poindexter, combing back his side whiskers like a man eternally on the point of parting a pair of lace curtains and never coming through them.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I’ve got something to say that I think you gentlemen oughter hear. If you thought those two – Witherbones, or whatever his name is, and my late employer, Henry Betts – if you all thought those two were strangers to one another you were mistaken – that’s all. Two weeks ago I saw a letter on Betts’ desk signed by this man Witherbee – if that’s his name. And Tuesday when Betts told me he was goin’ to sell out, I remembered it.”

The major was the first to get his voice back; and it was shaky with rage and – other emotions.

“You – you saw us all there Tuesday morning,” he shouted, “didn’t you? And when Betts told you he was going to sell and you remembered about Witherbee why didn’t you have sense enough to put two and two together?”

“I did have sense enough to put two and two together,” answered Cassius Poindexter in hurt tones. “That’s exactly what I did.”

“Then why in the name of Heaven didn’t you come to us – to me – and tell us?” demanded the major.

“Well, sirs,” said the intruder, “I was figurin’ on doin’ that very thing, but it sort of slipped out of my mind. You see, I’ve been thinkin’ right stiddy lately about an invention that I’m workin’ on at odd times – I’m perfectin’ a non-refillble bottle,” he explained – “and somehow or other this here other matter plum’ escaped me.”

The door closed upon the inventor. Stunned into silence, they sat mute for a long, ghastly half minute. Doctor Lake was the first to speak:

“If could afford it,” he said softly – “if at present I could afford it I’d put a dynamite bomb under that gashouse and blow it up! And I’d do it anyhow,” he went on, warming to his theme, “if I was only right certain of blowing up that idiot and his non-refillable bottle along with it!”

•     •     •     •     •

Malley, of the Sun, was doing the hotel run this night. He came up to the room clerk’s wicket at the desk of the Royal.

“Say, Mac,” he hailed, “what’s the prospect? So far, all I’ve got is one rubber magnate from South America – a haughty hidalgo with an Irish name and a New England accent, who was willing to slip me a half-column interview providing I’d run in the name of his company eight or nine times – him, and an Oklahoma Congressman, with the makings of a bun, and one of Sandusky, Ohio’s well-known and popular merchant princes, with a line of talk touching on the business revival in the Middle West. If that’s not slim pickings I don’t want a cent! Say, help an honest working lad out – can’t you?”

This appeal moved the room clerk.

“Let’s see now,” he said, and ran a highly polished fingernail down a long column of names. Halfway down the finger halted.

“Here’s copy for you, maybe,” he said. “The name is Priest – William Pitman Priest is the way he wrote it. He got in here this morning, an old-time Southerner; and already he’s got every coon bellhop round the place fighting for a chance to wait on him. He’s the real thing all right, I guess – looks it and talks it too. You ought to be able to have some fun with him.”

“Where’s he registered from?” asked Malley hopefully.

“From Kentucky – that’s all; just Kentucky, with no town given,” said Mac, grinning.

“There’re still a few of those old Southerners left that’ll register from a whole state at large. Why, there he goes now!” said the room clerk, and he pointed.

Across the lobby, making slow headway against weaving tides of darting, hurrying figures, was moving a stoutish and elderly form clad in a fashion that made it look doubly and trebly strange among those marble and onyx precincts. A soft black hat of undoubted age and much shapelessness was jammed down upon the head, and from beneath its wide brim at the rear escaped wisps of thin white hair that curled over the upturned coat collar. The face the hat shaded was round and pink, chubby almost, and ended in a white chin beard which, as Malley subsequently said in his story, flowed down its owner’s chest like a point-lace jabot. There was an ancient caped overcoat of a pattern that had been fashionable perhaps twenty years ago and would be fashionable again, no doubt, twenty years hence; there were gray trousers that had never been pressed apparently; and, to finish off with, there was a pair of box-toed, high-heeled boots of a kind now seen mostly in faded full-length photographs of gentlemen taken in the late seventies – boots with wrinkled tops that showed for four inches or more and shined clear up to the trouser-line with some sort of blacking that put a dull bluish iridescent blush upon the leather, almost like the colors on a dove’s breast feathers.

“Thanks for the tip, Mac,” said Malley, and he made off after the old man, who by now had turned and was maneuvering down the corridor toward where a revolving door turned unceasingly, like a wheel in a squirrel’s cage. “Oh, colonel!” called out Malley on a venture, jibing through the human currents and trying to overtake the stout, broad figure ahead of him. An exceedingly young, exceedingly important person, who looked as though he might be prominent in the national guard or on some governor’s staff, half rose from a leather lounge and glanced about inquiringly, but the old man in the cape and boots kept on.

“Major!” tried Malley vainly. “Major! Just a minute, please.” And then, “Judge! Oh, judge!” he called as a last resort, and at that his quarry swung about on his heels and stopped, eying him with whimsical, mild blue eyes under wrinkly lids.

“Son,” he said in a high, whiny voice which instantly appealed to Malley’s sense of the picturesque, “was it me that you’ve been yellin’ at?”

Malley answered, telling his name and his business. A moment later he was surprised to find himself shaking hands warmly with the older man.

“Malley, did you say?” the judge was inquiring almost eagerly. “Well, now, son, I’m glad to meet up with you. Malley is a fairly familiar name and a highly honored one down in our part of the country. There was a captain in Forrest’s command of your name – Captain Malley – a mighty gallant soldier and a splendid gentleman! You put me right sharply in mind of him too – seem to favor him considerable round the eyes. Are you closely related to the Southern branch of the family, suh?”

Malley caught himself wishing that he could say Yes. The old judge showed almost a personal disappointment when Malley confessed that none of his kinspeople, so far as he knew, ever resided south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

“No doubt a distant connection,” amended the judge, as though consoling both himself and Malley; “the family resemblance is there shorely.” He laid a pudgy pink hand on Malley’s arm. “You’ll pardon me for presumin’ on such short acquaintance, but down where I come from it is customary, when two gentlemen meet up together at about this hour of the evenin’” – it was then three o’clock P.M., Eastern time, as Malley noted – “it is customary for them to take a dram. Will you join me?”

Scenting his story, Malley fell into step by the old judge’s side; but at the door of the café the judge halted him.

“Son,” he said confidentially, “I like this tavern mightily – all but the grocery here. I must admit that I don’t much care for the bottled goods they’re carryin’ in stock. I sampled ’em and I didn’t enthuse over ’em. They are doubtless excellent for cookin’ purposes, but as beverages they sort of fall short.

“I wish you’d go up to my chamber with me and give me the benefit of your best judgment on a small vial of liquor I brought with me in my valise. It’s an eighteen-year-old sour mash, mellowed in the wood, and I feel that I can recommend it to your no doubt discriminatin’ palate. Will you give me the pleasure of your company, suh?”

As Malley, smiling to himself, went with the judge, it struck him with emphasis that, for a newly arrived transient, this old man seemed to have an astonishingly wide acquaintance among the house staff of the Hotel Royal. A page-boy, all buttons and self-importance, sidestepped them, smiling and ducking at the old judge’s nod; and the elevator attendant, a little, middle-aged Irishman, showed unalloyed pleasure when the judge, after blinking slightly and catching his breath as the car started upward with a dart like a scared swallow, inquired whether he’d had any more news yet of the little girl who was in the hospital. Plainly the old judge and the elevator man had already been exchanging domestic confidences.

Into his small room on the seventeenth floor Judge Priest ushered the reporter with the air of one dispensing the hospitalities of a private establishment to an honored guest, made him rest his hat and overcoat – “rest” was the word the judge used – and sit down in the easiest chair and make himself comfortable.

In response to a conversation which the judge had over the telephone with some young person of the feminine gender, whom he insisted on addressing as Miss Exchange, there presently came knocking at the door a grinning negro boy bearing the cracked ice, the lump sugar and the glasses the old judge had ordered. Him, the judge addressed direct.

“Look here,” asked the judge, looking up from where he was rummaging out a flat quart flask from the depths of an ancient and much-seamed valise, “ain’t you the same boy that I was talkin’ to this mornin’?”

“Yas, suh,” said the boy, snickering, “Horace.”

“Where you came from they didn’t call you Horace, did they?” inquired the old man.

“Naw, suh, that they didn’t,” admitted Horace, showing all his teeth except the extremely rearmost ones.

“What was it they called you – Smoke or Rabbit?”

“Ginger,” owned up Horace delightedly, and vanished, still snickering. Malley noticed that the coin which the old man had extracted from the depths of a deep pocket and tossed to the darky was a much smaller coin than guests in a big New York hotel customarily bestowed upon bellboys for such services as this; yet Horace had accepted it with every outward evidence of a deep and abiding satisfaction.

With infinite pains and a manner almost reverential, as though he were handling sacred vessels, the old judge compiled two dark reddish portions which he denominated toddies. Malley, sipping his, found it to be a most smooth and tasty mixture. And as he sipped, the old judge, smiling blandly, bestowed himself in a chair, which he widely overflowed, and balancing his own drink on the chair arm he crossed his booted feet and was ready, he said, to hear what his young friend might have to say.

As it turned out, Malley didn’t have much to say, except to put the questions by which a skilled reporter leads on the man he wants to talk. And the old judge was willing enough to talk. It was his first visit to New York; he had come reluctantly, at the behest of certain friends, upon business of a more or less private nature; he had taken a walk and a ride already; he had seen a stretch of Broadway and some of Fifth Avenue, and he was full of impressions and observations that tickled Malley clear down to the core of his reportorial soul.

So Malley, like the wise newspaper man he was, threw away his notes on the Brazilian rubber magnate and the merchant prince of Sandusky; and at dark he went back to the office and wrote the story of old Judge Priest, of Kentucky, for a full column and a quarter. Boss Clark, the night city editor, saw the humor value of the story before he had run through the first paragraph; and he played it up hard on the second page of the Sun, with a regular Sun head over it.

It was by way of being a dull time of news in New York. None of the wealthiest families was marrying or giving in marriage; more remarkable still, none of them was divorcing or giving in divorce. No subway scandal was emerging drippingly from the bowels of the earth; no aviator was descending abruptly from aloft with a dull and lethal thud. Malley’s story, with the personality of the old judge deftly set forward as a foil for his homely simplicity and small-town philosophy, arched across the purview of divers saddened city editors like a rainbow spanning a leadish sky. The craft, in the vernacular of the craft, saw the story and went to it. Inside of twenty-four hours Judge Priest, of Kentucky, was Broadway’s reigning favorite, for publicity purposes anyhow. The free advertising he got could not have been measured in dollars and cents if a prima donna had been getting it.

The judge kept open house all that next day in his room at the Hotel Royal, receiving regular and special members of various city staffs. Margaret Movine, the star lady writer of the Evening Journal, had a full-page interview, in which the judge, using the Southern accent as it is spoken in New York exclusively, was made to discuss, among other things, the suffragette movement, women smoking in public, Fifth Avenue, hobble skirts, Morgan’s raid, and the iniquity of putting sugar in corn bread. The dialect was the talented Miss Margaret Movine’s, but the thoughts and the words were the judge’s, faithfully set forth. The Times gave him a set of jingles on its editorial page and the Evening Mail followed up with a couple of humorous paragraphs; but it was the Sunday World that scored heaviest.

McCartwell, of the Sunday, went up and secured from the judge his own private recipe for mint juleps – a recipe which the judge said had been in his family for three generations – and he thought possibly longer, it having been brought over the mountains and through the Gap from Virginia by a grandsire who didn’t bring much of anything else of great value; and the World, printing this recipe and using it as a starter, conducted through its correspondents southward a telegraphic symposium of mint-julep recipes. Private John Allen, of Mississippi; Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas; Marse Henry Watterson and General Simon Bolivar Buckner, of Kentucky; Senator Bob Taylor, of Tennessee, and others, contributed. A dispute at once arose in the South concerning the relative merits of mint bruised and mint crushed. An old gentleman in Virginia wrote an indignant letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch – he said it should be bruised only – and a personal misunderstanding between two veteran members of the Pendennis Club, of Louisville, was with difficulty averted by bystanders. For the American, Tom Powers drew a cartoon showing the old judge, with a julep in his hand, marching through the Prohibition belt of the South, accompanied by a procession of jubilant Joys, while hordes of disconcerted Glooms fled ahead of them across the map.

In short, for the better part of a week Judge Priest was a celebrity, holding the limelight to the virtual exclusion of grand opera stars, favorite sons, white hopes, débutantes and contributing editors of the Outlook Magazine. And on the fourth day the judge, sitting in the privacy of his chamber and contemplating his sudden prominence, had an idea – and this idea was the answer to a question he had been asking himself many times since he left home. He spent half an hour and seventy cents telephoning to various newspaper offices. When finally he hung up the receiver and wriggled into his caped overcoat a benevolent smile illumined his broad, pink face. The smile still lingered there as he climbed into a cab at the curb and gave the driver a certain Wall Street address, which was the address of one J. Hayden Witherbee.

•     •     •     •     •

J. Hayden Witherbee, composing the firm of Witherbee & Company, bankers, had a cozy flytrap or office suite in one of the tallest and most ornate of the office buildings or spider-webs in the downtown financial district. This location was but a natural one, seeing that Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee’s interests were widely scattered and diversified, including as they did the formation and construction – on paper and with paper – of trolley lines; the floating of various enterprises, which floated the more easily by reason of the fact that water was their native element; and the sale of what are known in the West as holes in the ground and in the East as permanent mining investments. He rode to and from business in a splendid touring car trained to stop automatically at at least three cafés on the way up town of an evening; and he had in his employ a competent staff, including a grayish gentleman of a grim and stolid aspect, named Betts.

Being a man of affairs, and many of them, Mr. Witherbee had but small time for general newspaper reading, save and except only the market quotations, the baseball scores in season and the notices of new shows for tired business men, though keeping a weather eye ever out for stories touching on the pernicious activities of the Federal Grand Jury, with its indictments and summonses and warrants, and of the United States Post-Office Department, with its nasty habit of issuing fraud orders and tying up valuable personal mail. Nevertheless, on a certain wintry afternoon about two o’clock or half-past two, when his office boy brought to him a small card, engraved – no, not engraved; printed – smudgily printed with the name of William Pitman Priest and the general address of Kentucky, the sight of the card seemed to awaken within him certain amusing stories which had lately fallen under his attention in the printed columns; and, since he never overlooked any bets – even the small ones – he told the boy to show the gentleman in.

The reader, I take it, being already acquainted with the widely varying conversational characteristics of Judge Priest and Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, it would be but a waste of space and time for me to undertake to describe in detail the manner of their meeting on this occasion. Suffice it to say that the judge was shown into Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee’s private office; that he introduced himself, shook hands with Mr. Witherbee, and in response to an invitation took a seat; after which he complimented Mr. Witherbee upon the luxury and good taste of his surroundings, and remarked that it was seasonable weather, considering the Northern climate and the time of the year. And then, being requested to state the nature of his business, he told Mr. Witherbee he had called in the hope of interesting him in an industrial property located in the South. It was at this juncture that Mr. Witherbee pressed a large, dark cigar upon his visitor.

“Yes,” said Mr. Witherbee, “we have been operating somewhat extensively in the South of late, and we are always on the lookout for desirable properties of almost any character. Er – where is this particular property you speak of located and what is its nature?”

When Judge Priest named the town Mr. Witherbee gave a perceptible start, and when Judge Priest followed up this disclosure by stating that the property in question was a gasworks plant which he, holding power of attorney and full authority to act, desired to sell to Mr. Witherbee, complete with equipment, accounts, franchise and good will, Mr. Witherbee showed a degree of heat and excitement entirely out of keeping with the calmness and deliberation of Judge Priest’s remarks. He asked Judge Priest what he – the judge – took him – Witherbee – for anyhow? Judge Priest, still speaking slowly and choosing his words with care, then told him – and that only seemed to add to Mr. Witherbee’s state of warmth. However, Judge Priest drawled right on.

“Yes, suh,” he continued placidly, “accordin’ to the best of my knowledge and belief, you are in the business of buyin’ and sellin’ such things as gasworks, and so I’ve come to you to sell you this here one. You have personal knowledge of the plant, I believe, havin’ been on the ground recently.”

“Say,” demanded Mr. Witherbee with a forced grin – a grin that would have reminded you of a man drawing a knife – “say, what do you think you’re trying to slip over on me? I did go to your measly little one-horse town and I spent more than a week there; and I did look over your broken-down little old gashouse, and I concluded that I didn’t want it; and then I came away. That’s the kind of a man I am – when I’m through with a thing I’m through with it! Huh! What would I do with those gasworks if I bought ’em?”

“That, suh, is a most pertinent point,” said Judge Priest, “and I’m glad you brought it up early. In case, after buyin’ this property, you do not seem to care greatly for it, I am empowered to buy it back from you at a suitable figure. For example, I am willin’ to sell it to you for sixty thousand dollars; and then, providin’ you should want to sell it back to me, I stand prepared to take it off your hands at twenty-six thousand five hundred. I name those figures, suh, because those are the figures that were lately employed in connection with the proposition.”

“Blackmail – huh!” sneered Mr. Witherbee. “Cheap blackmail and nothing else. Well, I took you for a doddering old pappy guy; but you’re a bigger rube even than I thought. Now you get out of here before you get thrown out – see?”

“Now there you go, son – fixin’ to lose your temper already,” counseled the old judge reprovingly.

But Mr. Witherbee had already lost it – completely lost it. He jumped up from his desk as though contemplating acts of violence upon the limbs and body of the broad, stoutish old man sitting in front of him; but he sheered off. Though old Judge Priest’s lips kept right on smiling, his eyelids puckered down into a disconcerting little squint; and between them little menacing blue gleams flickered. Anyway, personal brawls, even in the sanctity of one’s office, were very bad form and sometimes led to that publicity which is so distasteful to one engaged in large private enterprises. Mr. Witherbee had known the truth of this when his name had been Watkins and when it had been the Bland Brothers’ Investment Company, Limited; and he knew it now when he was Witherbee & Company. So, as aforesaid, he sheered off. Retreating to his desk, he felt for a button. A buzzer whirred dimly in the wall like a rattlesnake’s tail. An office boy poked his head in instantly.

“Herman,” ordered Mr. Witherbee, trembling with his passion, “you go down to the superintendent’s office and tell him to send a special building officer here to me right away!”

The boy’s head vanished, and Mr. Witherbee swung back again on the judge, wagging a threatening forefinger at him.

“Do you know what I’m going to do?” he asked. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do – I’m going to have you chucked out of here bodily – that’s what!”

But he couldn’t keep the quaver out of the threat. Somehow he was developing a growing fear of this imperturbable old man.

“Now, son,” said Judge Priest, who hadn’t moved, “I wouldn’t do that if I was you. It might not be so healthy for you.”

“Oh, you needn’t be trying any of your cheap Southern gunplays round here,” warned Mr. Witherbee; but, in spite of his best efforts at control, his voice rose quivering at the suggestion.

“Bless your heart, son!” said the judge soothingly, “I wouldn’t think of usin’ a gun on you any more’n I’d think of takin’ a Winchester rifle to kill one of these here cockroaches! Son,” he said, rising now for the first time, “you come along here with me a minute – I want to show you something you ain’t seen yet.”

He walked to the door and opened it part way. Witherbee, wondering and apprehensive, followed him and looked over the old judge’s shoulder into the anteroom.

For J. Hayden Witherbee, one quick glance was enough. Four – no, five – five alert-looking young men, all plainly marked with the signs of a craft abhorrent to Mr. Witherbee, sat in a row of chairs beyond a railing; and beyond them was a sixth person, a young woman with a tiptilted nose and a pair of inquisitive, expectant gray eyes. Mr. Witherbee would have known them anywhere by their backs – jackals of the press, muckrakers, sworn enemies to Mr. Witherbee and all his kith and kind!

It was Mr. Witherbee who slammed the door shut, drawing Judge Priest back into the shelter of the closed room; and it was Mr. Witherbee who made inquiry, tremulously, almost humbly:

“What does this mean? What are these people doing there? What game is this?” He sputtered out the words, one question overlapping the next.

“Son,” said Judge Priest, “you seem flustered. Ca’m yourself. This is no game as I know of. These are merely friends of mine – representatives of the daily press of your city.”

“But how did they come to be here?”

“Oh!” said the judge. “Why, I telephoned ’em. I telephoned ’em that I was comin’ down here on a matter of business, and that maybe there might be a sort of an item for them if they’d come too. I’ve been makin’ what they call copy for them, and we’re all mighty sociable and friendly; and so they came right along. To tell you the truth, we all arrived practically together. You see, if I was sort of shoved out of here against my will and maybe mussed up a little, those boys and that there young lady there – her name Is Miss Margaret Movine – they’d be sure to put pieces in their papers about it; and if it should come out incidentally that the cause of the row was a certain gasworks transaction, in a certain town down in Kentucky, they’d probably print that too. Why, those young fellows would print anything, almost, if I wanted them to. You’d be surprised!

“Yes, suh, you’d be surprised to see how much they’d print for me,” he went on, tapping J. Hayden Witherbee upon his agitated chest with a blunt forefinger. “I’ll bet you they’d go into the full details.”

As Mr. Witherbee listened, Mr. Witherbee perspired freely. At this very moment there were certain transactions pending throughout the country – he had a telegram in his desk now from Betts, sent from a small town in Alabama – and newspaper publicity of an unpleasant and intimate nature might be fatal in the extreme. Mr. Witherbee had a mind trained to act quickly.

“Wait a minute!” he said, mopping his brow and wetting his lips, they being the only dry things about him. “Wait a minute, please. If we could settle this – this matter – just between ourselves, quietly – and peaceably – there wouldn’t be anything to print – would there?”

“As I understand the ethics of your Eastern journalism, there wouldn’t be anything to print,” said Judge Priest. “The price of them gasworks, accordin’ to the latest quotations, was sixty thousand – but liable to advance without notice.”

“And what – what did you say you’d buy ’em back at?”

“Twenty-six thousand five hundred was the last price,” said the judge, “but subject to further shrinkage almost any minute.”

“I’ll trade,” said Mr. Witherbee.

“Much obliged to you, son,” said Judge Priest gratefully, and he began fumbling in his breast pocket. “I’ve got the papers all made out.”

Mr. Witherbee regained his desk and reached for a checkbook just as the office boy poked his head in again.

“Special officer’s comin’ right away, sir,” he said.

“Tell him to go away and keep away,” snarled the flurried Mr. Witherbee; “and you keep that door shut – tight! Shall I make the check out to you?” he asked the judge.

“Well, now, I wouldn’t care to bother with checks,” said the judge. “All the recent transactions involvin’ this here gashouse property was by the medium of the common currency of the country, and I wouldn’t care to undertake on my own responsibility to interfere with a system that has worked heretofore with such satisfaction. I’ll take the difference in cash – if you don’t mind.”

“But I can’t raise that much cash now,” whined Witherbee. “I haven’t that much in my safe. I doubt if I could get it at my bank on such short notice.”

“I know of a larger sum bein’ gathered together in a much smaller community than this – oncet!” said the judge reminiscently. “I would suggest that you try.”

“I’ll try,” said Mr. Witherbee desperately. “I’ll send out for it – on second thought, I guess I can raise it.”

“I’ll wait,” said the judge; and he took his seat again, but immediately got up and started for the door. “I’ll ask the boys and Miss Margaret Movine to wait too,” he explained. “You see, I’m leavin’ for my home tomorrow and we’re all goin’ to have a little farewell blowout together tonight.”

•     •     •     •     •

Upon Malley, who in confidence had heard enough from the judge to put two and two together and guess something of the rest, there was beginning to dawn a conviction that behind Judge William Pitman Priest’s dovelike simplicity there lurked some part of the wisdom that has been commonly attributed to the serpent of old. His reporter’s instinct sensed out a good story in it, too, but his pleadings with the old judge to stay over for one more day, anyhow, were not altogether based on a professional foundation. They were in large part personal.

Judge Priest, caressing a certificate of deposit in a New York bank doing a large Southern business, insisted that he had to go. So Malley went with him to the ferry and together they stood on the deck of the ferryboat, saying good-by. For the twentieth time Malley was promising the old man that in the spring he would surely come to Kentucky and visit him. And at the time he meant it.

In front of them as they faced the shore loomed up the tall buildings, rising jaggedly like long dog teeth in Manhattan’s lower jaw. There were pennons of white steam curling from their eaves. The Judge’s puckered eyes took in the picture, from the crowded streets below to the wintry blue sky above, where mackerel-shaped white clouds drifted by, all aiming the same way, like a school of silver fish.

“Son,” he was saying, “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything more than this here little visit, and I’m beholden to you boys for a lot. It’s been pleasant and it’s been profitable, and I’m proud that I met up with all of you.”

“When will you be coming back, judge?” asked Malley.

“Well, that I don’t know,” admitted the old judge. “You see, son, I’m gettin’ on in years, considerably; and it’s sort of a hard trip from away down where I live plum’ up here to New York. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “this was the third time in my life that I started for this section of the country. The first time I started was with General Albert Sidney Johnston and a lot of others; but, owin’ to meetin’ up with your General Grant at a place called Pittsburg Landing by your people and Shiloh by ours, we sort of altered our plans. Later on I started again, bein’ then temporarily in the company of General John Morgan, of my own state; and that time we got as far as the southern part of the state of Ohio before we run into certain insurmountable obstacles; but this time I managed to git through. I was forty-odd years doin’ it – but I done it! And, son,” he called out as the ferryboat began to quiver and Malley stepped ashore, “I don’t mind tellin’ you in strict confidence that while the third Confederate invasion of the North was a long time gittin’ under way, it proved a most complete success in every particular when it did. Give my best regards to Miss Margaret Movine.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 06 Apr 1912
Back Home (1912)

The Mob from Massac

~

You might call it a tragedy – this thing that came to pass down in our country here a few years back. For that was exactly what it was – a tragedy, and in its way a big one. Yet at the time nobody thought of calling it by any name at all. It was just one of those shifts that are inevitably bound to occur in the local politics of a county or a district; and when it did come, and was through and over with, most people accepted it as a matter of course.

There were some, however, it left jarred and dazed and bewildered – yes, and helpless too; men too old to readjust their altered fortunes to their altered conditions even if they had the spirit to try, which they hadn’t. Take old Major J. Q. A. Pickett now. Attaching himself firmly to a certain spot at the far end of Sherrill’s bar, with one leg hooked up over the brass bar-rail – a leg providentially foreshortened by a Minie ball at Shiloh, as if for that very purpose – the major expeditiously drank himself to death in a little less than four years, which was an exceedingly short time for the job, seeing he had always been a most hale and hearty old person, though grown a bit gnarly and skewed with the coming on of age. The major had been county clerk ever since Reconstruction; he was a gentleman and a scholar and could quote Latin and Sir Walter Scott’s poetry by the running yard. Toward the last he quoted them with hiccups and a stutter.

Also there was Captain Andy J. Redcliffe, who was sheriff three terms handrunning and, before that, chief of police. Going out of office he went into the livery-stable business; but he didn’t seem to make much headway against the Farrell Brothers, who owned the other livery stable and were younger men and spry and alert to get trade. He spent a few months sitting at the front door of his yawning, half-empty stables, nursing a grudge against nearly everything and plaintively garrulous on the subject of the ingratitude of republics in general and this republic in particular; and presently he sickened of one of those mysterious diseases that seem to attack elderly men of a full habit of life and to rob them of their health without denuding them of their flesh. His fat sagged on his bones in unwholesome, bloated folds and he wallowed unsteadily when he walked. One morning one of his stable hands found him dead in his office, and the Gideon K. Irons Camp turned out and gave him a comrade’s funeral, with full military honors.

Also there were two or three others, including ex-County Treasurer Whitford, who shot himself through the head when a busy and conscientious successor found in his accounts a seeming shortage of four hundred and eighty dollars, which afterward turned out to be more a mistake in bookkeeping than anything else. Yet these men – all of them – might have seen what was coming had they watched. The storm that wrecked them was a long time making up – four years before it had threatened them.

There had grown up a younger generation of men who complained – and perhaps they had reason for the complaint – that they did nearly all the work of organizing and campaigning and furnished most of the votes to carry the elections, while a close combine of aging, fussy, autocratic old men held all the good county offices and fatted themselves on the spoils of county politics. These mutterings of discontent found shape in a sort of semi-organized revolt against the county ring, as the young fellows took to calling it, and for the county primary they made up a strong ticket among themselves – a ticket that included two smart young lawyers who could talk on their feet, and a popular young farmer for sheriff, and a live young harnessmaker as a representative of union labor, which was beginning to be a recognized force in the community with the coming of the two big tanneries. They made a hard fight of it, too, campaigning at every fork in the big road and every country store and blacksmith shop, and spouting arguments and oratory like so many inspired human spigots. Their elderly opponents took things easier. They rode about in top buggies and democrat wagons from barbecue to rally and from rally to schoolhouse meeting, steadfastly refusing the challenges of the younger men for a series of joint debates and contenting themselves with talking over old days with fading, grizzled men of their own generation. These elders, in turn, talked with their sons and sons-in-law and their nephews and neighbors; and so, when the primaries came, the young men’s ticket stood beaten – but not by any big margin. It was close enough to be very close.

“Well, they’ve licked us this time!” said Dabney Prentiss, who afterward went to Congress from the district and made a brilliant record there. Dabney Prentiss had been the younger element’s candidate for circuit-court judge against old Judge Priest. “They’ve licked us and the Lord only knows how they did it. Here we thought we had ’em out-organized, outgeneraled and outnumbered. All they did was to go out in the back districts and beat the bushes, and out crawled a lot of old men that everybody else thought were dead twenty years ago. I think they must hide under logs in the woods and only come out to vote. But, fellows” – he was addressing some of his companions in disappointment – “but, fellows, we can afford to wait and they can’t. The day is going to come when it’ll take something more than shaking an empty sleeve or waving a crippled old leg to carry an election in this county. Young men keep growing up all the time, but all that old men can do is to die off. Four years from now we’ll win sure!”

The four years went by, creakingly slow of passage to some and rolling fast to others; and in the summer of the fourth year another campaign started up and grew hot and hotter to match the weather, which was blazing hot. The August drought came, an arid and a blistering visitation. Except at dusk and at dawn the birds quit singing and hung about in the thick treetops, silent and nervous, with their bills agape and their throat feathers panting up and down. The roasting ears burned to death on the stalk and the wide fodder blades slowly cooked from sappy greenness to a brittle dead brown. The clods in the cornrows wore dry as powder and gave no nourishment for growing, ripening things. The dust powdered the blackberry vines until they lost their original color altogether, and at the roadside the medicinal mullein drooped its wilted long leaves, like lolling tongues that were all furred and roiled, as though the mullein suffered from the very fevers that its steeped juices are presumed to cure. At its full the moon shone hot and red, with two rings round it; and the two rings always used to mean water in our country – two rings for drinking water at the hotel, and for rainwater two rings round the moon – but week after week no rain fell and the face of the earth just seemed to dry up and blow away. Yet the campaign neither lost its edge nor abated any of its fervor by reason of the weather. Politics was the chief diversion and the main excitement in our county in those days – and still is.

One morning near the end of the month a dust-covered man on a sorely spent horse galloped in from Massac Creek, down in the far edge of the county; and when he had changed horses at Farrell Brothers’ and started back again there went with him the sheriff, both of his deputies and two of the town policemen, the sheriff taking with him in his buckboard a pair of preternaturally grave dogs of a reddish-brown aspect, with long, drooping ears, and long, sad, stupid faces and eyes like the chief mourners’ at a funeral. They were bloodhounds, imported at some cost from a kennel in Tennessee and reputed to be marvelously wise in the tracking down of criminals. By the time the posse was a mile away and headed for Massac a story had spread through the town that made men grit their teeth and sent certain armed and mounted volunteers hurrying out to join the manhunt.

Late that same afternoon a team of blown horses, wet as though they had wallowed in the river and drawing a top buggy, panted up to the little red-brick jail, which stood on the county square alongside the old wooden white courthouse, and halted there. Two men – a constable and a deputy sheriff – sat back under the overhanging top of the buggy, and between them something small was crushed, huddled down on the seat and almost hidden by their broad figures. They were both yellowed with the dust of a hard drive. It lay on their shoulders like powdered sulphur and was gummed to their eyelashes, so that when they batted their eyelids to clear their sight it gave them a grotesque, clownish look. They climbed laboriously out and stretched their limbs.

The constable hurried stiffly up the short gravel path to the jail and rapped on the door and called out something. The deputy sheriff reached in under the buggy top and hauled out a little negro, skinny and slight and seemingly not over eighteen years old. He hauled him out as though he was handling a sack of grits, and the negro came out like a sack of grits and fell upon his face on the pavement, almost between the buggy wheels. His wrists were held together by a pair of iron handcuffs heavy enough to fetter a bear, and for further precaution his legs had been hobbled with a plowline, and his arms were tied back with another length of the plowline that passed through his elbows and was knotted behind. The deputy stooped, took a grip on the rope across the prisoner’s back and heaved him up to his feet. He was ragged, barefooted and bareheaded and his face was covered with a streaky clayish-yellow caking, where the sweat had run down and wetted the dust layers. Through this muddy mask his pop-eyes stared with a dulled animal terror.

Thus yanked upright the little negro swayed on his feet, shrinking up his shoulders and lurching in his tethers. Then his glazed stare fell on the barred windows and the hooded door of the jail, and he realized where he had been brought and hurried toward it as toward a welcome haven, stretching his legs as far as the ropes sawing on his naked ankles would let him. Willing as he was, however, he collapsed altogether as he reached the door and lay on his face kinking and twisting up in his bonds like a stricken thing. The deputy and the constable dragged him up roughly, one lifting him by his arm bindings and the other by the ropes on his legs, and they pitched him in flat on the floor of the little jail office. He wriggled himself under a table and lay there, sniffling out his fear and relief. His tongue hung out of his mouth like the tongue of a tied calf, and he panted with choky, slobbering sounds.

The deputy sheriff and the constable left him lying and went to a water bucket in the corner and drank down brimming dippers, turn and turn about, as though their thirst was unslakable. It was Dink Bynum, the deputy jailer, who had admitted them and in the absence of his superior he was in charge solely. He waited until the two had lowered the water line in the cedar bucket by a matter of inches.

“Purty quick work, boys,” he said professionally, “if this is the right nigger.”

“I guess there ain’t much doubt about him bein’ the right one,” said the constable, whose name was Quarles. “Is there, Gus?” he added.

“No doubt at all in my mind,” said the deputy. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, which smeared the dust across his face in a sort of pattern.

“How’d you fellers come to git him?” asked Bynum.

“Well,” said the deputy, “we got out to the Hampton place about dinner time I reckin it was. Every man along the creek and every boy that was big enough to tote a gun was out scourin’ the woods and there wasn’t nobody round the place exceptin’ a passel of the womenfolks. Just over the fence where the nigger was s’posed to have crossed we found his old wool hat layin’ right where he’d run out from under it and we let the dogs smell of it, and inside of five minutes they’d picked up a trail and was openin’ out on it. It was monstrous hot going through them thick bottoms afoot, and me and Quarles here outrun the sheriff and the others. Four miles back of Florence Station, and not more’n a mile from the river, we found this nigger treed up a hackberry with the dogs bayin’ under him. I figure he’d been hidin’ out in the woods all night and was makin’ for the river, aimin’ to cross, when the dogs fetched up behind him and made him take to a tree.”

“Did you carry him back for the girl to see?”

“No,” said the deputy sheriff. “Me and Quarles we talked it over after we’d got him down and had him roped up. In the first place she wasn’t in no condition to take a look at him, and besides we knowed that them Massac people jest natchelly wouldn’t listen to nothin’ oncet they laid eyes on him. They’d ’a’ tore him apart bodily.”

The bound figure on the floor began moaning in a steady, dead monotone, with his lips against the planking.

“So, bein’ as me and Quarles wanted the credit for bringin’ him in, not to mention the reward,” went on the deputy, without a glance at the moaning negro, “we decided not to take no chances. I kept him out of sight until Quarles could go over to the river and borrow a rig, and we driv in with him by the lower road, acrost the iron bridge, without goin’ anywhere near Massac.”

“What does the nigger say for himself?” asked Bynum, greedy for all the details.

“Huh!” said the deputy. “He’s been too scared to say much of anything. Says he’d tramped up here from below the state line and was makin’ for Ballard County, lookin’ for a job of work. He’s a strange nigger all right. And he as good as admits he was right near the Hampton place yistiddy evenin’ at milkin’ time, when the girl was laywaid, and says he only run because the dogs took out after him and scared him. But here he is. We’ve done our duty and delivered him, and now if the boys out yonder on Massac want to come in and take him out, that’s their lookout and yourn, Dink.”

“I reckon you ain’t made no mistake,” said Bynum. Cursing softly under his breath he walked over and spurned the prisoner with his heavy foot. The negro writhed under the pressure like a crushed insect. The under jailer looked down at him with a curious tautening of his heavy features.

“The papers call ’em burly black brutes,” he said, “and I never seen one of ’em yit that was more’n twenty years old or run over a hundred and thirty pound.” He raised his voice: “Jim – oh, Jim!”

An inner door of sheet-iron opened with a suspicious instantaneousness, and in the opening appeared a black jail trusty, a confirmed chicken thief. He ducked his head in turn toward each of the white men, carefully keeping his uneasy gaze away from the little negro lying between the table legs in the corner.

“Yas, suh, boss – right here, suh,” said the trusty.

“Here, Jim” – the deputy jailer was opening his pocketknife and passing it over – “take and cut them ropes off that nigger’s arms and laigs.”

With a ludicrous alacrity the trusty obeyed.

“Now pull him up on his feet!” commanded Bynum. “I guess we might as well leave them cuffs on him – eh?” he said to the deputy sheriff. The deputy nodded. Bynum took down from a peg over the jailer’s desk a ring bearing many jingling keys of handwrought iron. “Bring him in here, Jim,” he bade the trusty.

He stepped through the inner door and the negro Jim followed him, steering the manacled little negro. Quarles, the constable, and the deputy sheriff tagged behind to see their catch properly caged. They went along a short corridor, filled with a stifling, baked heat and heavy with the smell of penned-up creatures. There were faces at the barred doors of the cells that lined one side of this corridor – all black or yellow faces except one white one; and from these cells came no sound at all as the three white men and the two negroes passed. Only the lone white prisoner spoke out.

“Who is he, Dink?” he called eagerly. “What’s he done?”

“Shut up!” ordered his keeper briefly, and that was the only answer he made. At the far end of the passage Bynum turned a key in a creaky lock and threw back the barred door of an inner cell, sheathed with iron and lacking a window. The trusty shoved in the little handcuffed negro, and the negro groveled on the wooden floor upon all fours. Bynum locked the door and the three white men tramped back through the silent corridor, followed by the sets of white eyes that stared out unwinkingly at them through the iron-latticed grills. It was significant that from the time of the arrival at the jail not one of the whites had laid his hands actually upon the prisoner. “Well, boys,” said Bynum to the others by way of a farewell, “there he is and there he’ll stay – unless them Massac Creek folks come and git him. You’ve done your sworn duty and I’ve done mine. I locked him up and I won’t be responsible for what happens now. I know this much – I ain’t goin’ to git myself crippled up savin’ that nigger. If a mob wants to come let ’em come on!”

No mob came from Massac that night or the next night either; and on the second day there was a big basket picnic and rally under a brush arbor at the Shady Grove schoolhouse – the biggest meeting of the whole campaign it was to be, with speaking, and the silver cornet band out from town to make music, and the oldest living Democrat in the county sitting on the platform, and all that. Braving the piled-on layers of heat that rode the parched country like witch-hags half the town went to Shady Grove. Nearly everybody went that could travel. All the morning wagons and buggies were clattering out of town, headed toward the west. And in the cooking dead calm of the mid-afternoon the mob from Massac came.

They came by roundabout ways, avoiding those main traveled roads over which the crowds were gathering in toward the common focus of the Shady Grove schoolhouse; and coming so, on horseback by twos and threes, and leaving their horses in a thicket half a mile out, they were able to reach the edge of the town unnoticed and unsuspected. The rest, their leader figured, would be easy. A mistake in judgment by the town fathers in an earlier day had put the public square near the northern boundary, and the town, instead of growing up to it, grew away from it in the opposite direction, so that the square stood well beyond the thickly settled district.

All things had worked out well for their purpose. The sheriff and the jailer, both candidates for re-nomination, were at Shady Grove, and the sheriff had all his deputies with him, electioneering for their own jobs and his. Legal Row, the little street of lawyers’ offices back of the square, might have been a by-road in old Pompeii for all the life that showed along its short and simmering length. No idlers lay under the water maples and the red oaks in the square. The jail baked in the sunlight, silent as a brick tomb, which indeed it somewhat resembled; and on the wide portico of the courthouse a loafer dog of remote hound antecedents alternately napped and roused to snap at the buzzing flies. The door of the clerk’s office stood agape and through the opening came musty, snuffy smells of old leather and dry-rotted deeds. The wide hallway that ran from end to end of the old building was empty and echoed like a cave to the frequent thump of the loafer dog’s leg joints upon the planking.

Indeed, the whole place had but a single occupant. In his office back of the circuit-court room Judge Priest was asleep, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his short, plump legs propped on a table and his pudgy hands locked across his stomach, which gently rose and fell with his breathing. His straw hat was on the table, and in a corner leaned his inevitable traveling companion in summer weather – a vast and cavernous umbrella of a pattern that is probably obsolete now, an unkempt old drab slattern of an umbrella with a cracked wooden handle and a crippled rib that dangled away from its fellows as though shamed by its afflicted state. The campaigning had been hard on the old judge. The Monday before, at a rally at Temple’s Mills, he had fainted, and this day he hadn’t felt equal to going to Shady Grove. Instead he had come to his office after dinner to write some letters and had fallen asleep. He slept on for an hour, a picture of pink and cherubic old age, with little headings of sweat popping out thickly on his high bald head and a gentle little snoring sound, of first a drone and then a whistle, pouring steadily from his pursed lips.

Outside a dry-fly rasped the brooding silence up and down with its fret-saw refrain. In the open spaces the little heat waves danced like so many stress marks, accenting the warmth and giving emphasis to it; and far down the street, which ran past the courthouse and the jail and melted into a country road so imperceptibly that none knew exactly where the street left off and the road began, there appeared a straggling, irregular company of men marching, their shapes more than half hid in a dust column of their own raising. The Massac men were coming.

I believe there is a popular conception to the effect that an oncoming mob invariably utters a certain indescribable, sinister, muttering sound that is peculiar to mobs. For all I know that may be true of some mobs, but certain it was that this mob gave vent to no such sounds. This mob came on steadily, making no more noise than any similar group of seventy-five or eighty men tramping over a dusty road might be expected to make.

For the most part they were silent and barren of speech. One youngish man kept repeating to himself a set phrase as he marched along. This phrase never varied in word or expression. It was: “Goin’ to git that nigger! Goin’ to git that nigger!” – that was all – said over and over again in a dull, steady monotone. By its constant reiteration he was working himself up, just as a rat-terrier may be worked up by constant hissed references to purely imaginary rats.

Their number was obscured by the dust their feet lifted. It was as if each man at every step crushed with his toe a puffball that discharged its powdery particles upward into his face. Some of them carried arms openly – shotguns and rifles. The others showed no weapons, but had them. It seemed that every fourth man, nearly, had coiled upon his arm or swung over his shoulder a rope taken from a plow or a well-bucket. They had enough rope to hang ten men or a dozen – yes, with stinting, to hang twenty. One man labored under the weight of a three-gallon can of coal-oil, so heavy that he had to shift it frequently from one tired arm to the other. In that weather the added burden made the sour sweat run down in streaks, furrowing the grime on his face. The Massac Creek blacksmith had a sledge-hammer over his shoulder and was in the front rank. Not one was masked or carried his face averted. Nearly all were grown men and not one was under twenty. A certain definite purpose showed in their gait. It showed, also, in the way they closed up and became a more compact formation as they came within sight of the trees fringing the square.

Down through the drowsing town edge they stepped, giving alarm only to the chickens that scratched languidly where scrub-oaks cast a skimpy shade across the road; but as they reached the town line they passed a clutter of negro cabins clustering about a little doggery. A negro woman stepped to a door and saw them. Distractedly, fluttering like a hen, she ran into the bare, grassless yard, setting up a hysterical outcry. A negro man came quickly from the cabin, clapped his hand over her mouth and dragged her back inside, slamming the door to behind him with a kick of his bare foot. Unseen hands shut the other cabin doors and the woman’s half-smothered cries came dimly through the clapboarded wall; but a slim black darky darted southward from the doggery, worming his way under a broken, snaggled fence and keeping the straggling line of houses and stables between him and the marchers. This fleeing figure was Jeff, Judge Priest’s negro bodyservant, who had a most amazing faculty for always being wherever things happened.

Jeff was short and slim and he could run fast. He ran fast now, snatching off his hat and carrying it in his hand – the surest of all signs that a negro is traveling at his top gait. A good eighth of a mile in advance of the mob, he shot in at the back door of the courthouse and flung himself into his employer’s room.

“Jedge! Jedge!” he panted tensely. “Jedge Priest, please, suh, wake up – the mobbers is comin’!”

Judge Priest came out of his nap with a jerk that uprighted him in his chair.

“What’s that, boy?”

“The w’ite folks is comin’ after that there little nigger over in the jail. I outrun ’em to git yere and tell you, suh.”

“Ah-hah!” said Judge Priest, which was what Judge Priest generally said first of all when something struck him forcibly. He reared himself up briskly and reached for his hat and umbrella.

“Which way are they comin’ from?” he asked as he made for the hall and the front door.

“Comin’ down the planin’-mill road into Jefferson Street,” explained Jeff, gasping out the words.

As the old judge, with Jeff in his wake, emerged from the shadows of the tall hallway into the blinding glare of the portico they met Dink Bynum, the deputy jailer, just diving in. Dink was shirtsleeved. His face was curiously checkered with red-and-white blotches. He cast a backward glance, bumped into the judge’s greater bulk and caromed off, snatching at the air to recover himself.

“Are you desertin’ your post, Dink?” demanded the judge.

“Jedge, there wasn’t no manner of use in my stayin’,” babbled Bynum. “I’m all alone and there’s a whole big crowd of ’em comin’ yonder. They’ll git that nigger anyhow – and he deserves it!” he burst out.

“Dink Bynum, where are the keys to that jail?” said Judge Priest, speaking unusually fast for him.

“I clean forgot ’em!” he quavered. “I left ’em hangin’ in the jail office.”

“And also I note you left the outside door of the jail standin’ wide open,” said the judge, glancing to the left. “Where’s your pistol?”

“In my pocket – in my pocket, here.”

“Git it out!”

“Jedge Priest, I wouldn’t dare make no resistance single-handed – I got a family – I—” faltered the unhappy deputy jailer.

The moving dust cloud, with legs and arms showing through its swirling front, was no more than a hundred yards away. You could make out details – hot, red, resolute faces; the glint of the sun on a gun barrel; the polished nose of the blacksmith’s sledge; the round curve of a greasy oilcan.

“Dink Bynum,” said Judge Priest, “git that gun out and give it to me – quick!”

“Jedge, listen to reason!” begged Bynum. “You’re candidate yourse’f. Sentiment is aginst that nigger – strong. You’ll hurt your own chances if you interfere.”

The judge didn’t answer. His eyes were on the dust cloud and his hand was extended. His pudgy fingers closed round the heavy handful of blued steel that Dink Bynum passed over and he shoved it out of sight. Laboring heavily down the steps he opened his umbrella and put it over his shoulder, and as he waddled down the short gravel path his shadow had the grotesque semblance of a big crawling land terrapin following him. One look Judge Priest sent over his shoulder. Dink Bynum and Jeff had both vanished. Except for the men from Massac there was no living being to be seen.

They didn’t see him, either, until they were right upon him. He came out across the narrow sidewalk of the square and halted directly in their path, with his right hand raised and his umbrella tilted far back, so that its shade cut across the top of his straw hat, making a distinct line.

“Boys,” he said familiarly, almost paternally – “Boys, I want to have a word with you.”

Most of the Massac men knew him – some of them knew him very well. They had served on juries under him; he had eaten Sunday dinners under their rooftrees. They stopped, the rear rows crowding up closer until they were a solid mass facing him. Beyond him they could see the outer door of the jail gaping hospitably and the sight gave an edge to their purpose that was like the gnawing of physical hunger. Above all things they were sharp-set to hurry forward the thing they had it in their minds to do.

“Boys,” said the judge, “most of you are friends of mine – and I want to tell you something. You mustn’t do the thing you’re purposin’ to do – you mustn’t do it!”

A snorted outburst, as of incredulity, came from the sweating clump of countrymen confronting him.

“The hell we mustn’t!” drawled one of them derisively, and a snicker started.

The snicker grew to a laugh – a laugh with a thread of grim menace in it, and a tinge of mounting man-hysteria. Even to these men, whose eyes were used to resting on ungainly and awkward old men, the figure of Judge Priest, standing in their way alone, had a grotesque emphasis. The judge’s broad stomach stuck far out in front and was balanced by the rearward bulge of his umbrella. His white chin-beard was streaked with tobacco stains. The legs of his white linen trousers were caught up on his shins and bagged dropsically at the knees. The righthand pocket of his black alpaca coat was sagged away down by some heavy unseen weight.

None of the men in the front rank joined in the snickering however; they only looked at the judge with a sort of respectful obstinacy.

There was nothing said for maybe twenty seconds.

“Jedge Priest,” said a spokesman, a tall, spare, bony man with a sandy drooping mustache and a nose that beaked over like a butcherbird’s bill – “Jedge Priest, we’ve come after a nigger boy that’s locked up in that jail yonder and we’re goin’ to have him! Speaking personally, most of us here know you and we all like you, suh; but I’ll have to ask you to stand aside and let us go ahead about our business.”

“Gentlemen,” said Judge Priest, without altering his tone, “the law of this state provides a proper——”

“The law provides – eh?” mimicked the man who had laughed first. “The law provides, does it?”

“——provides a fittin’ and an orderly way of attendin’ to these matters,” went on the judge. “In the absence of the other sworn officials of this county I represent in my own humble person the majesty of the law, and I say to you——”

“Jedge Priest,” cut in the beaky-nosed man, “you are an old man and you stand mighty high in this community – none higher. We don’t none of us want to do nothin’ or say nothin’ to you that mout be regretted afterward; but we air goin’ to have that nigger out of that jail and stretch his neck for him. He’s one nigger that’s lived too long already. You’d better step back!” he went on. “You’re just wastin’ your time and ourn.”

A growling assent to this sentiment ran through the mob. It was a growl that carried a snarl. There was a surging forward movement from the rear and a restless rustle of limbs.

“Wait a minute, boys!” said the leader. “Wait a minute. There’s no hurry – we’ll git him! Jedge Priest,” he went on, changing his tone to one of regardful admonition, “you’ve got a race on for reëlection and you’ll need every vote you kin git. I hope you ain’t goin’ to do nothin’ that’ll maybe hurt your chances among us Massac Creekers.”

“That’s the second time that’s been throwed up to me inside of five minutes,” said Judge Priest. “My chances for election have nothin’ to do with the matter now in hand – remember that!”

“All right – all right!” assented the other. “Then I’ll tell you somethin’ else. Us men have come in broad daylight, not hidin’ our faces from the noonday sun. We air open and aboveboard about this thing. Every able-bodied, self-respectin’ white man in our precinct is right here with me today. We’ve talked it over and we know what we air doin’. If you want to take down our names and prosecute us in the cotes you kin go ahead.”

Somebody else spoke up.

“I’d admire to see the jury in this county that would pop the law to any one of us for swingin’ up this nigger!” he said, chuckling at the naked folly of the notion.

“You’re right, my son,” said the judge, singling out the speaker with his aimed forefinger. “I ain’t tryin’ to scare grown men like you with such talk as that. I know how you feel. I can understand how you feel – every man with white blood in his veins knows just what your feelin’s are. I’m not trying to threaten you. I only want to reason with you and talk sense with you. This here boy ain’t been identified yet – remember that!”

“We know he’s guilty!” said the leader.

“I’ll admit that circumstances may be against him,” pleaded the judge, “but his guilt remains to be proved. You can’t hang any man – you can’t hang even this poor, miserable little darky – jest on suspicion.”

“The dogs trailed him, didn’t they?”

“A dog’s judgment is mighty nigh as poor as a man’s sometimes,” he answered back fighting hard for every shade of favor. “It’s my experience that a bloodhound is about the biggest fool dog there is. Now listen here to me, boys, a minute. That boy in the jail is goin’ to be tried just as soon as I can convene a special grand jury to indict him and a special term of court to try him, and if he’s guilty I promise you he’ll hang inside of thirty days.”

“And drag that pore little thing – my own first cousin – into a cotehouse to be shamed before a lot of these town people – no!” the voice of the leader rose high. “Cotes and juries may do for some cases, but not for this. That nigger is goin’ to die right now!”

He glanced back at his followers; they were ready – and more than ready. On his right a man had uncoiled a well-rope and was tying a slipknot in it. He tested the knot with both hands and his teeth, then spat to free his lips of the gritty dust and swung the rope out in long doubled coils to reeve the noose in it.

“Jedge Priest, for the last time, stand aside!” warned the beaky-nosed man. His voice carried the accent of finality and ultimate decision in it. “You’ve done wore our patience plum’ out. Boys, if you’re ready, come on!”

“One minute!” The judge’s shrill blare of command held them against their wills. He was lowering his umbrella. “One minute and one word more!”

Shuffling their impatient feet they watched him backing with a sort of ungainly alertness over from right to left, dragging the battered brass ferrule of his umbrella after him, so that it made a line from one curb of the narrow street to the other. Doing this his eyes never left their startled faces. At the far side he halted and stepped over so that they faced this line from one side and he from the other. The line lay between them, furrowed in the deep dust.

“Men,” he said, and his lifelong affectation of deliberately ungrammatical speech was all gone from him, “I have said to you all I can say. I will now kill the first man who puts his foot across that line!”

There was nothing Homeric, nothing heroic about it. Even the line he had made in the dust waggled, and was skewed and crooked like the trail of a blind worm. His old figure was still as grotesquely plump and misshapen as ever – the broken rib of his umbrella slanted askew like the crippled wing of a fat bat; but the pudgy hand that brought the big blue gun out of the right pocket of the alpaca coat and swung it out and up, muzzle lifted, was steady and sure. His thumb drew the hammer back and the double click broke on the amazed dumb silence that had fallen like two clangs upon an anvil. The wrinkles in his face all set into fixed, hard lines.

It was about six feet from them to where the line crossed the road. Heavily, slowly, diffidently, as though their feet were weighted with the leaden boots of a deep sea diver, yet pushed on by one common spirit, they moved a foot at a time right up to the line. And there they halted, their eyes shifting from him to the dustmark and back again, rubbing their shoulders up against one another and shuffling on their legs like cattle startled by a snake in the path.

The beaky-nosed man fumbled in the breast of his unbuttoned vest, loosening a revolver in a shoulder holster. A twenty-year-old boy, his face under its coating of dust as white as flour dough, made as if to push past him and break across the line; but the Massac blacksmith caught him and plucked him back. The leader, still fumbling inside his vest, addressed the judge hoarsely:

“I certainly don’t want to have to kill you Jedge Priest!” he said doggedly.

“I don’t want to have to kill anybody,” answered back Judge Priest; “but, as God is my judge, I’m going to kill the first one of you that crosses that line. If it was my own brother I’d kill him. I don’t know which one of you will kill me, but I know which one I’m going to kill – the first man across!”

They swayed their bodies from side to side – not forward but from side to side. They fingered their weapons, and some of them swore in a disappointed, irritated sort of way. This lasted perhaps half a minute, perhaps a whole minute – anyway it lasted for some such measurable period of time – before the crumbling crust of their resolution was broken through. The break came from the front and the center. Their leader, the lank, tall man with the down-tilted nose, was the first to give ground visibly. He turned about and without a word he began pushing a passage for himself through the scrouging pack of them. Breathing hard, like men who had run a hard race, they followed him, going away with scarcely a backward glance toward the man who – alone – had daunted them. They followed after their leader as mules follow after a bell-mare, wiping their grimy shirtsleeves across their sweaty, grimier faces and glancing toward each other with puzzled, questioning looks. One of them left a heavy can of coal-oil behind him upright in the middle of the road.

The old judge stood still until they were a hundred yards away. He uncocked the revolver and put the deadly thing back in his pocket. Mechanically he raised his umbrella, fumbling a little with the stubborn catch, and tilted it over his left shoulder; his turtlelike shadow sprang out again, but this time it was in front of him. Very slowly, like a man who was dead tired, he made his way back up the gravel path toward the courthouse. Jeff magically materialized himself out of nowhere, but of Dink Bynum there was no sign.

“Is them w’ite gen’l’men gone?” inquired Jeff, his eyes popping with the aftershock of what he had just witnessed – had witnessed from under the courthouse steps.

“Yes,” said the judge wearily, his shoulders drooping. “They’re gone.”

“Jedge, ain’t they liable to come back?”

“No; they won’t come back.”

“You kinder skeered ’em off, jedge!” An increasing admiration for his master percolated sweetly through Jeff’s remarks like dripping honey.

“No; I didn’t scare ’em off exactly,” answered the judge. “They are not the kind of men who can be scared off. I merely invoked the individual equation, if you know what that means?”

“Yas, suh – that’s whut I thought it wuz,” assented Jeff eagerly – the more eagerly because he had no idea what the judge meant.

“Jeff,” the old man said, “help me into my office and get me a dipper of drinkin’ water. I reckin maybe I’ve got a tech of the sun.” He tottered a little and groped outward with one hand.

Guided to the room, he sank inertly into his chair and feebly fought off the blackness that kept blanking his sight. Jeff fanned him with his hat.

“I guess maybe this here campaignin’ has been too much for me,” said the judge slowly. “It must be the weather. I reckin from now on, Jeff, I’ll have to set back sort of easy and let these young fellows run things.”

He sat there until the couching sun brought long, thin shadows and a false promise of coolness. Dink Bynum returned unobtrusively to his abandoned post of duty; the crowds began coming back from the Shady Grove schoolhouse; and Jeff found time to slip out and confiscate to private purposes a coal-oil can that still stood in the roadway. He knew of a market for such commodities. The telephone bell rang and the old judge, raising his sagged frame with an effort, went to the instrument and took down the receiver. Longdistance lines were beginning to creep out through the county and this was a call from Florence Station, seven miles away.

“That you, Jedge Priest?” said the voice over the wire. “This is Brack Rodgers. I’ve been tryin’ to raise the sheriff’s office, but they don’t seem to answer. Well, suh, they got the nigger what done that devilmint over at the Hampton place on Massac this evenin’. Yes, suh – about two hours ago. He was a nigger named Moore that worked on the adjoinin’ place to Hampton’s – a tobacco hand. Nobody suspected him until this mornin’, when some of the other darkies got to talkin’ round; and Buddy Quarles heared the talk and went after him. The nigger he fit back and Buddy had to shoot him a couple of times. Oh, yes, he died – died about an hour afterward; but before he died he owned up to ever’thing. I reckin, on the whole, he got off light by bein’ killed. Which, Jedge? – the nigger that’s there in the jail? No, suh; he didn’t have nothin’ a-tall to do with it – the other nigger said so while he was dyin’. I jedge it was what you mout call another case of mistaken identity on the part of them fool hounds.”

•     •     •     •     •

To be sure of getting the full party vote out and to save the cost of separate staffs of precinct officers, the committee ordained that the Democratic primaries should be held on the regular election day. The rains of November turned the dusts of August to high-edged ridges of sticky ooze. Election day came, wet and windy and bleak. Men cutting across the yellow-brown pastures, on their way to the polling places, scared up flocks of little grayish birds that tumbled through the air like wind-driven leaves and dropped again into the bushes with small tweaking sounds, like the slicing together of shears; and as if to help out this illusion, they showed in their tails barrings of white feathers which opened and closed like scissor-blades. The night came on; and it matched the day, being raw and gusty, with clouds like clotted whey whipping over and round a full moon that resembled a churn-dasher covered with yellow clabber. Then it started raining.

The returns – county, state and national – were received at the office of the Daily Evening News; by seven o’clock the place was packed. Candidates and prominent citizens were crowded inside the railing that marked off the business department and the editorial department; while outside the railing and stretching on outdoors, into the street, the male populace of the town herded together in an almost solid mass. Inside, the air was streaky with layers of tobacco smoke and rich with the various smells of a small printing shop on a damp night. Behind a glass partition, hallway back toward the end of the building, a small press was turning out the weekly edition, smacking its metal lips over the taste of the raw ink. Its rumbling clatter, with the slobbery sputter of the arclights in the ceiling overhead, made an accompaniment to the voices of the crowd. Election night was always the biggest night of the year in our town – bigger than Christmas Eve even.

The returns at large came by telegraph, but the returns of the primaries were sent in from the various precincts of town and county by telephone; or, in cases where there was no telephone, they were brought in by hard-riding messengers. At intervals, from the telegraph office two doors away, a boy would dash out and worm his way in through the eager multitude that packed and overflowed the narrow sidewalk; and through a wicket he would fling crumpled yellow tissue sheets at the editor of the paper. Then the editor would read out:

“Seventeen election districts in the Ninth Assembly District of New York City give Schwartz, for coroner—”

“Ah, shuckin’s! Fooled again!”

“St. Louis – At this hour – nine-thirty – the Republicans concede that the entire Democratic state ticket has won by substantial majorities—”

“Course it has! What did they expect Missouri to do?”

“Buffalo – Doran – for mayor, has been elected. The rest of the reform ticket is——”

“Oh, dad blame it! Henry, throw that stuff away and see if there ain’t some way to get something definite from Lang’s Store or Clark’s River on the race for state senator!”

“Yes, or for sheriff – that’s the kind of thing we’re all honin’ to know.”

The telephone bell rang.

“Here you are, Mr. Tompkins – complete returns from Gum Spring Precinct.”

“Now – quiet, boys, please, so we can all hear.”

It was on this night that there befell the tragedy I made mention of in the first paragraph of this chapter. The old County Ring was smashing up. One by one the veterans were going under. A stripling youth not two years out of the law school had beaten old Captain Daniel Boone Calkins for representative; and old Captain Calkins had been representative so many years he thought the job belonged to him. Not much longer was the race for sheriff in doubt, or the race for state senator. Younger men snatched both jobs away from the old men who held them.

In a far corner, behind a barricade of backs and shoulders, sat Major J. Q. A. Pickett, a spare and knotty old man, and Judge Priest, a chubby and rounded one. Of all the old men, the judge seemingly had run the strongest race, and Major Pickett, who had been county clerk for twenty years or better, had run close behind him; but as the tally grew nearer its completion the major’s chances faded to nothing at all and the judge’s grew dimmed and dimmer.

“What do you think, judge?” inquired Major Pickett for perhaps the twentieth time, dinging forlornly to a hope that was as good as gone already.

“I think, major, that you and me are about to be notified that our fellow citizens have returned us oncet more to private pursoots,” said the old judge, and there was a game smile on his face. For, so far back that he hated to remember how long it was, he had had his office – holding it as a trust of honor. He was too old actively to reënter the practice of law, and he had saved mighty little out of his salary as judge. He would be an idle man and a poor one – perhaps actually needy; and the look out of his eyes by no means matched the smile on his face.

“I can’t seem to understand it,” said the major, crushed. “Always before, the old boys could be depended upon to turn out for us.”

“Major,” said Judge Priest, letting his wrinkled old hand fall on the major’s sound leg, “did you ever stop to think that there ain’t so many of the old boys left any more? There used to be a hundred and seventy-five members of the camp in good standin’. How many are there now? And how many of the boys did we bury this past year?”

There was a yell from up front and a scrooging forward of bodies.

Editor Tompkins was calling off something. The returns from Clark’s River and from Lang’s Store had arrived together. He read out the figures. These two old men, sitting side by side, at the back, listened with hands cupped behind ears that were growing a bit faulty of hearing. They heard.

Major J. Q. A. Pickett got up very painfully and very slowly. He hooked his cane up under him and limped out unnoticed. That was the night when the major established his right of squatter sovereignty over that one particular spot at the far end of Billy Sherrill’s bar-rail.

Thus deserted, the judge sat alone for a minute. The bowl of his corncob pipe had lost its spark of life and he sucked absently at the cold, bitterish stem. Then he, too, got on his feet and made his way round the end of a cluttered-up writing desk into the middle of the room. It took an effort, but he bore himself proudly erect.

“Henry,” he called out to the editor, in his homely whine – “Henry, would you mind tellin’ me – jest for curiosity – how my race stands?”

“Judge,” said the editor, “by the latest count you are forty-eight votes behind Mr. Prentiss.”

“And how many more precincts are there to hear from, my son?”

“Just one – Massac!”

“Ah-hah! Massac!” said the old judge. “Well, gentlemen,” he went on, addressing the company generally, “I reckin I’ll be goin’ on home and turnin’ in. This is the latest I’ve been up at night in a good while. I won’t wait round no longer – I reckin everything is the same as settled. I wisht one of you boys would convey my congratulations to Mr. Prentiss and tell him for me that——”

There was a bustle at the door and a newcomer broke in through the press of men’s bodies. He was dripping with rain and spattered over the front with blobs of yellow mud. He was a tall man, with a drooping mustache and a nose that beaked at the tip like a butcher-bird’s mandible. With a moist splash he slammed a pair of wet saddlebags down on the narrow shelf at the wicket and, fishing with his fingers under one of the flaps, he produced a scrawled sheet of paper. The editor of the Daily Evening News grabbed it from him and smoothed it out and ran a pencil down the irregular, weaving column of figures.

“Complete returns on all the county races are now in,” he announced loudly, and every face turned toward him.

“The returns from Massac Precinct make no changes in any of the races——”

The cheering started in full volume; but the editor raised his hand and stilled it.

“——make no change in any of the races – except one.”

All sounds died and the crowd froze to silence.

“Massac Precinct has eighty-four registered Democratic votes,” went on Tompkins, prolonging the suspense. For a country editor, he had the dramatic instinct most highly developed.

“And of these eighty-four, all eighty-four voted.”

“Yes; go on! Go on, Henry!”

“And all eighty-four of ’em – every mother’s son of ’em – voted for the Honorable William Pitman Priest,” finished Tompkins. “Judge you win by——”

Really, that sentence was not finished until Editor Tompkins got his next day’s paper out. The old judge felt blindly for a chair, sat down and put his face in his two hands. Eight or ten old men pressed in toward him from all directions; and, huddling about him, they raised their several cracked and quavery voices in a yell that ripped its way up and through and above and beyond the mixed and indiscriminate whoopings of the crowd.

This yell, which is shrill and very penetrating, has been described in print technically as the Rebel yell.

The Saturday Evening Post, 10 Feb 1912
Back Home (1912)

A Dogged Under Dog

~

One or two nights a week my uncle used to take me with him when he went to spend the evening with old Judge Priest. There were pretty sure to be a half dozen or more gray heads there; and if it were good out-door weather, they would sit in a row on the wide low veranda, smoking their pipes and their cigars; and of these the cigars kept off the mosquitos even better than the pipes did, our country being notorious, then, as now, for the excellence of its domestic red liquor and the amazing potency of its domestic black cigars. Every little while, conceding the night to be hot, Judge Priest’s Jeff would come bringing a tray with drinks – toddies or else mint juleps, that were as fragrant as the perfumed fountains of a fairy tale and crowned with bristling sprays of the gracious herbage. And they would sit and smoke and talk, and I would perch on the top step of the porch, hugging my bare knees together and listening.

It was on just such a night as this that I heard the story of Singin’ Sandy Riggs, the Under Dog. I think it must have been in July – or maybe it was August. To the northward the sheet lightning played back and forth like a great winking lens, burning the day heat out of the air and from the dried up bed of the creek, a quarter of a mile away, came the notes of big bassooning bull frogs, baying at the night. Every now and then a black bird or a tree martin in the maple over head would have a bad dream and talk out in its sleep; and hundreds upon hundreds of birds roosting up there would rouse and utter querulous, drowsy bird-sounds, and bestir themselves until the whole top of the tree rustled and moved as though from a sudden breeze. In lulls of the talk, thin-shredded snatches of singing was borne to us from the little church beyond the old Enders orchard where the negroes were holding one of their frequent revivals.

It was worth any boy’s while to listen to the company that assembled on Judge Priest’s front porch. For one, Squire Rufus Buckley was pretty certain to be there. Possibly by reason of his holding a judicial office and possibly because he was of a conservative habit of mind, Squire Buckley was never known to give a direct answer to any question. For their own amusement, people used to try him. Catching him on a flawless morning, someone would remark in a tone of questioning that it was a fine day.

“Well now,” the Squire would say, “It tis and it taint. It’s clear now but you can’t never tell when it’ll cloud up.”

He owned a little grocery store out in the edge of town and had his magistrate’s office in a back room behind it. On a crowded Saturday when the country rigs were standing three deep outside and the two clerks were flying about measuring and weighing and counting up and drawing off, a waiting customer might be moved to say:

“Business pretty good, ain’t it Squire?”

“It’s good,” the Squire would say, licking off the corn-cob stopper of a molasses jug and driving it with a sticky plop into its appointed orifice, “And then agin it’s bad. Some things air sellin’ off very well and some things ain’t hardly sellin’ off a’tall.”

The Squire was no great shakes of a talker, but as a listener he was magnificent. He would sit silently hour after hour with his hands laced over his paunch, only occasionally spitting over the banisters with a strident tearing sound.

Nor was the assemblage complete without Captain Shelby Woodward. Captain Shelby Woodward’s specialty in conversation was the Big War. From him I first heard the story of how Lieutenant Gracey of the County Battery floated down the river on a saw log and single-handed, captured the Yankee gunboat and its sleepy-headed crew. From him I learned the why and wherefore of how our town, although located right on the border of North and South, came in ’61 to be called the Little Charleston, and from him also I got the tale of that lost legion of Illinois men, a full battalion of them, who, crossing out of their own State by stealth, were joyously welcomed into ours, and were mustered into the service and thereafter for four years fought their own kinspeople and neighbors – the only organized command, so Captain Shelby Woodward said, that came to the army from the outside. Frequently he used to tell about Miss Em. Garrett, who, when Grant came up from Cairo on his gunboats, alone remembered what all the rest of the frightened town forgot – that the silken flag which the women had made with loving hands, was still floating from its flag pole in front of the engine house; and she drove her old rock-away down to the engine house and made her little negro house boy shin up the pole and bring the flag down to her, he greatly fearing the shells from the gunboats that whistled past his head, but fearing much more his mistress, standing down below and looking up at his bare legs with her buggy whip.

“So then,” Captain Woodward would go on, “she put the flag under her dress and drove on home. But some Union sympathizer told on her when the troops landed and a crowd of them broke away and went out to her place and called on her to give it up. She was all alone except for the darkies, but she wasn’t scared, that old woman. They sassed her and she sassed ’em back, and they were swearing they’d burn the house down over her head, and she was daring ’em to do it, when an officer came up and drove ’em off. And afterwards when the warehouses and the churches and the Young Ladies’ Seminary were chuck full of sick and wounded, brought down from Donaldson and Shiloh, she turned in and nursed them all alike, not caring which side they’d fought on. And so, some of the very men that had threatened her, used to salute when she passed them on the street.

“And sir, she wore that flag under her skirts for four years, and she kept it always and when she died it was her shroud. You remember, Billy, – you were one of the pall bearers?” he would say, turning to Judge Priest.

And Judge Priest would say he remembered mighty well and the talk would go swinging back and forth, but generally back, being concerned mainly with people that were dead and things that were done years and years before I was born.

Major J. Q. A. Pickett was apt to be of the company, dapper and as jaunty as his game leg would let him be, always in black with a white tuberose in his buttonhole. The Major was a born boulevardier without a boulevard, a natural man about town without the right kind of a town to be about in, and a clubman by instinct, yet with no club except the awnings under Soule’s drug store, and the screening of dishrag vines and balsam apples on Priest’s front porch. Also in a far corner somewhere, little Mr. Herman Felsburg of Felsburg Brothers, our leading clothiers, might often be found. Mr. Felsburg’s twisted sentences used to tickle me. I was nearly grown before I learned, by chance, what Mr. Felsburg himself never mentioned – that he, a newly landed immigrant, enlisted at the first call and had fought in half a dozen hard battles before he properly knew the English for the commands of his captain. But my favorite story-teller of them all, was old Cap’n Jasper Lawson, and he was old – old even to these other old men, older by a full twenty years than the oldest of them, a patriarch of the early times, a Forty-niner, and a veteran of two wars and an Indian Campaign. For me he linked the faded past to the present and made it glow again in vivid colors. Wherever he was, was an Arabian Nights Entertainment for me.

He lives as a memory now in the town – his lean shaven jowl, and his high heeled boots and the crimson blanket that he wore winters, draped over his shoulders and held at the throat with a pin made of a big crusty nugget of virgin California gold. Wearing this blanket was no theatrical affectation of Cap’n Jasper’s – it was a part of him; he was raised in the days when men, white and red both, wore blankets for overcoats. He could remember when the Chickasaws still held our end of the State and General Jackson and Governor Shelby came down and bought it away from them and so gave to it its name of The Purchase. He could remember plenty of things like that – and what was better, could tell them so that you could see before your eyes the burnished backs of the naked bucks sitting in solemn conclave and those two old Indian fighters chaffering with them for their tribal lands. He was tall and sparse and straight like one of those old hillside pines, that I have seen since growing on the red clay slopes of the cotton country south of us; and he stayed so until he died, which was when he was away up in the nineties. It was Cap’n Jasper this night who told the story of Singin’ Sandy Biggs.

Somehow or other, the talk had flowed and eddied by winding ways to the subject of cowardice, and Judge Priest had said that every brave man was a coward and every coward was a brave man – it all depended on the time and the place – and this had moved Captain Shelby Woodward to repeat one of his staple chronicles – when the occasion suited he always told it. It concerned that epic last year of the Orphan Brigade – his brigade he always called it, as though he’d owned it.

“More than five thousand of us in that brigade of mine, when we went out in ’61,” he said, “and not quite twelve hundred of us left on that morning in May of ’64 when we marched out of Dalton – Joe Johnston’s rear guard, holding Sherman back. Holding him back? Hah, feeding ourselves to him; that was it, sir – just feeding ourselves to him a bite at a time, so as to give the rest of the army a chance for its life. And what does that man Shaler say – what does he say and prove it by the figures? One hundred and twenty solid days of fighting and marching and retreating – one hundred and forty days that were like a hot red slice carved out of hell – fighting every day and mighty near every hour, hanging on Sherman’s flanks and stinging at him like gadflies and being wiped out and swallowed in mouthfuls. A total, sir, of more than 1800 deadly, or disabling wounds for us in those hundred and twenty days, or more than a wound apiece if every man had been wounded, and there were less than fifty of the boys that weren’t wounded, at that. And in September, at the end of those hundred and twenty days, just 240 of us left out of what had been five thousand three years before – 240 out of what had been nearly twelve hundred in May – 240 out of a whole brigade, infantry, and artillery – but still fighting and still ready to keep right on fighting. Those are Shaler’s figures, and he was a Federal officer himself, and a most gallant gentleman. And it is true, sir – every word of it is true.

“Now was that bravery? Or was it just pure doggedness? And when you come right down to it, what is the difference between the two? This one thing I do know, though – if it was bravery we were no braver than the men who fought us and chased us and killed us off on that campaign to Atlanta and then on down to the Sea; and if it was doggedness, they’d have been just as dogged as we were with the conditions reversed – them losing and us winning. When you’re the underdog you just naturally have to fight – there’s nothing else for you to do – isn’t that true in your experience, Billy?”

“Yes,” said Judge Priest, “that’s true as Gospel Writ. After all, boys,” he added, “I reckin the bravest man that lives is the coward that wants to run and yit don’t do it. And anyway, when all’s said and done, the bravest fighters in every war have always been the women and not the men. I know ’twas so in that war of ours – the men could go and git what joy there was out of the fightin’; it was the women that stayed behind and suffered and waited and prayed. Boys, if you’ve all got a taste of your toddies left, s’posen we drink to our women before Jeff brings you your fresh glasses.”

They drank with those little clucking sipping sounds that old men make when they drink, and for a bit there was a silence. The shifting shuttle play of the lightning made stage effects in yellow and black against the back-drop of the sky. From the shadows of the dishrag vine where he sat in a hickory arm chair, his pipe bowl making a glowing red smudge in the darkness, old Cap’n Jasper Lawson spoke.

“Speaking of under dogs and things, I reckon none of you young fellows” – he chuckled a little down in his throat – “can remember when this wasn’t a gun-toting country down here? But I do.

“It was before your day, but I remember it. First off, there was the time when my daddy and the granddaddies of some of you gentlemen came out over the Wilderness trail with a squirrel rifle in one hand and an ax in the other, swapping shots with the Indians every step of the way. And that was the beginning of everything here. Then, years later on, the feuds started, up in the mountains – although I’m not denying but we had our share of them down here too – and some broken down aristocrats moved out from Virginia and Maryland and brought the Code and a few pairs of those old long barreled dueling pistols along with them, which was really the only baggage some of them had; and awhile after that the Big War came on; and so what with one thing and another, men took to toting guns regularly – a mighty bad habit too, and one which we’ve never been entirely cured of yet, as Billy’s next court docket will show, eh, Billy?”

Judge Priest made an inarticulate sound of regretful assent and Squire Buckley spat out into the darkness with a long-drawn syrupy swish.

“But in between, back in the twenties and the thirties, there was a period when gun toting wasn’t so highly popular. Maybe it was because pistols hadn’t got common yet and squirrel rifles were too heavy to tote around, and maybe it was because people were just tired of trouble. I won’t pretend to say exactly what the cause of it was, but so it was – men settled their differences with their fists and their feet – with their teeth too, sometimes. And if there were more gouged eyes and more teeth knocked out, there were fewer widows and not so many orphans either.

“I notice some of you younger fellows have taken here lately to calling this town a city, but when I first came here, it wasn’t even a town – just an overgrown wood landing, in the river bottom, with the shacks and houses stuck up on piles to keep ’em out of the river mud. There were still Indians a-plenty too – Chickasaws and Creeks and some Shawnees – and some white folks who were mighty near as ignorant as the Indians. Why it hadn’t been but a few years before – three or four at most, I reckon – since they’d tried to burn the widow woman Simmons as a witch. As boys, some of you must have heard tell of old Marm Simmons. Well, I can remember her and that’s better. She lived alone with an old black cat for company, and she was poor and friendless and sort of peculiar in her ways, and that started it. And one spring, when the high-water went down, the children got sickly and begun dying off of this here spotted fever. And somebody started the tale that old Marm Simmons was witching ’em to make ’em die – that she’d look at a child and then the child would take down sick and die. It was Salem, Massachusetts, moved up a couple of hundred years, but they believed it – some of them did. And one night a dozen men went to her cabin and dragged her out along with her cat – both of them spitting and yowling and scratching like blood sisters – and they had her flung up onto a burning brush pile and her apron strings had burnt in two when three or four men who were still sane came running up and broke in and kicked the fire apart and saved her. But her old cat went tearing off through the woods like a Jack-mer-lantern with his fur all afire.”

He paused a moment to suck deliberately at his pipe, and I sat and thought about old Marm Simmons and her blazing tom cat, and was glad clear down to my wriggling toes that I didn’t have to go home alone. In a minute or so Cap’n Jasper was droning on again:

“So you can tell by that, that this here city of yours was a pretty tolerable rough place In its infancy, and full of rough people as most all new settlements are. You’ve got to remember that this was the frontier in those days. But the roughest of them all, as I recollect, rougher even than the keel-boaters and the trappers and even the Indian traders – was Harve Allen. He set himself up to be the bully of this river country.

“Well, he was. He was more than six feet tall and built like a catamount, and all the whiskey he’d drunk – you could get a gallon then for what a dram’ll cost you now – hadn’t burnt him out yet. He fought seemingly just for the pure love of fighting. Come a muster or a barn raising or an election or anything, Harve Allen fought somebody – and licked him. Before he had been here a year he had beat up half the men in this settlement, and the other half were pretty careful to leave him alone, even those that weren’t afraid of him. He never used anything though except his fists, and his feet and his teeth – he never needed anything else. So far as was known, he’d never been licked in his whole life.

“You see, there was nobody to stop him. The sheriff lived away down at the other end of the county, and the county was five times as big as it is now. There were some town trustees – three of them – and they’d appointed a long, gangling, jimpy-jawed fellow named Catlett to be the first town constable, but even half grown boys laughed at Catlett, let alone Harve Allen. Harve would just look at Catlett sort of contemptously and Catlett would slide off backwards like a crawfish. And when Harve got a few drams aboard and began churning up his war medicine, Catlett would hurry right straight home, and be taken down sick in bed and stay there until Harve had eased himself, beating up people.

“So Harve Allen ran a wood yard for the river people and had things pretty much his own way. Mainly people gave him the whole road. There was a story out that he’d belonged to the Ford’s Ferry gang before they broke up the gang. That’s a yarn I’ll have to tell this boy here some of these days when I get the time – how they caught the gang hiding in Cave-In-Rock and shot some of them and drowned the rest, all but the two head devils – Big Harp and Little Harp who were brothers – and how they got back across the river in a dugout and were run down with dogs and killed too; and the men that killed them cut off their heads and salted them and packed them in a piggin of brine and sent the piggin by a man on horseback up to Frankfort to collect the reward. Yes, that’s what they did, and it makes a tale that ought to be written out sometime.”

That was old Cap’n Jasper’s way. His mind was laden like Aladdin’s sumter-mule, with treasures uncountable, and often he would drop some such glittering jewel as this and leave it and go on. I mind now how many times he started to tell me the full story of the two dissolute Virginians, nephews of one of the first Presidents, who in a fit of drunken temper killed their slave boy George, on the very night that the great Earthquake of 1811 came – and taking the agues and the crackings of the earth for a judgment of God upon their heads, went half mad with terror and ran to give themselves up. But I never did find out, and I don’t know yet what happened to them after that. Nor was I ever to hear from Cap’n Jasper the fuller and gory details of the timely taking-off of Big Harp and little Harp. He just gave me this one taste of the delightful horror of it and went on.

“Some of them said that Harve Allen had belonged to the Ford’s Ferry gang and that he’d got away when the others were trapped. For a fact he did come down the river right after the massacre at the cave, and maybe that was how the story started. But as for myself, I never believed that part of it at all. Spite of his meanness, Harve Allen wasn’t the murdering kind and it must have taken a mighty seasoned murderer to keep steady company with Big Harp and Little Harp.

“But he looked mean enough for anything – just the way he would look at a man won half his fights for him. It’s rising of sixty years since I saw him, but I can shut my eyes and the picture of him comes back to me plain as a painted portrait on a wall. I can see him now, rising of six feet-three, as I told you, and long-legged and raw-boned. He didn’t have any beard on his face – he’d pulled it out the same as the Indian bucks used to do, only they’d use mussel shells, and he used tweezers, but there were a few hairs left in his chin that were black and stiff and stood out like the bristles on a hog’s jowl. And his under lip lolled down as though it’d been sagged out of plumb by the weight of all the cuss-words that Harve had sworn in his time, and his eyes were as cold and mean as a catfish’s eyes. He used to wear an old deerskin hunting vest, and it was gormed and smeared with grease until it was as slick as an otter-slide; and most of the time he went barefoot. The bottoms of his feet were like horn.

“That was the way he looked the day he licked Singin’ Sandy the first time – and likewise the way he looked all the other times too, for the matter of that. But the first time was the day they hanged Tallow Dave, the half-breed, for killing the little Cartright girl. It was the first hanging we ever had in this country – the first legal hanging I mean – and from all over the county, up and down the river, and from away back in the oak barrens, the people came to see it. They came afoot and ahorseback, the men bringing their rifles and even old swords and old war hatchets with them, with the women and children riding on behind them. It made the biggest crowd that’d ever been here up to then. Away down by the willows stood the old white house that washed away in the rise of ’54, where old Madame La Farge, the old French woman, used to gamble with the steamboat captains, and up where the Market Square is now, was the jail, which was built of logs; and in between stretched a row of houses and cabins, mainly of logs too, all facing the river. There was a road in front, running along the top of the bank, and in summer it was knee deep in dust, fit to choke a horse, and in winter it was just one slough of mud that caked and balled on your feet until it would pull your shoes off. I’ve seen teams mired down many a time there, right where the Richland House is now. But on this day the mud was no more than shoe-throat deep, which nobody minded; and the whole river front was just crawling with people and horses.

“They brought Tallow Dave out of the jail with his arms tied back, and put him in a wagon, him sitting on his coffin, and drove him under a tree and noosed him round the neck, and then the wagon pulled out and left him swinging and kicking there with the people scrooging up so close to him they almost touched his legs. I was there where I could see it all, and that’s another thing in my life I’m never going to forget. It was pretty soon after they’d cut him down that Harve Allen ran across Singin’ Sandy. This Sandy Biggs was a little stumpy man with sandy hair and big gray eyes that would put you in mind of a couple of these here mossy agates, and he was as freckled as a turkey egg, in the face. He hadn’t been here very long and people had just begun calling him Singin’ Sandy on account of him going along always humming a little tune without any words to it and really not much tune, more like a big blue bottle fly droning than anything else. He lived in a little clearing that he’d made about three miles out, back of the Grundy Hill, where that new summer park, as they call it, stands now. But then it was all deep timber – oak barrens in the high ground and cypress slashes in the low – with a trail where the gravel road runs, and the timber was full of razor back hogs stropping themselves against the tree boles and up above there were squirrels as thick as these English sparrows are today. He had a cub of a boy that looked just like him, freckles and sandy head and all; and this boy – he was about fourteen, I reckon – had come in with him on this day of the Tallow Dave hanging.

“Well, some way or other, Singin’ Sandy gave offense to Harve Allen – which as I have told you, was no hard thing to do – bumped into him by accident maybe or didn’t get out of the road brisk enough to suit Harve. And Harve without a word, up and hauled off and smacked him down as flat as a flinder. He laid there on the ground a minute, sort of stunned, and then up he got and surprised everybody by making a rush for Harve. He mixed it with him but it was too one-sided to be much fun, even for those who’d had the same dose themselves and so enjoyed seeing Harve taking it out of somebody else’s hide. In a second Harve had him tripped and thrown and was down on him bashing in his face for him. At that, Singin’ Sandy’s cub of a boy ran in and tried to pull Harve off his dad, and Harve stopped pounding Sandy just long enough to rear up and fetch the cub a back handed lick with the broad of his hand that landed the chap ten feet away. The cub bounced right up and made as if to come back and try it again, but some men grabbed him and held him, not wanting to see such a little shaver hurt. The boy was sniveling too, but I took notice it wasn’t a scared snivel – it was a mad snivel, if you all know what I mean. They held him, a couple of them, until it was over.

“That wasn’t long – it was over in a minute or two. Harve Allen got up and stood off grinning, just as he always grinned when he’d mauled somebody to his own satisfaction, and two or three went up to Singin’ Sandy and upended him on his feet. Somebody fetched a gourd of water from the public well and sluiced it over his head and face. He was all blood where he wasn’t mud – streaked and sopped with it, and mud was caked in his hair thick, like yellow mortar, with the water dripping down off of it. He didn’t say a word at first. He got his breath back and wiped some of the blood out of his eyes and off his face onto his sleeve, and I handed him his old skin cap where it had fallen off his head. The cub broke loose and came running to him and he shook himself together and straightened up and looked round him. He looked at Harve Allen standing ten feet away grinning, and he said slow, just as slow and quiet:

“‘I’ll be back agin Mister, one month frum today. Wait fur me.

“That was all – just that ‘I’ll be back in a month’ and ‘wait fur me.’ And then as he turned around and went away, staggering a little on his pins, with his cub trotting alongside him, I’m blessed if he didn’t start up that little humming song of his; only it sounded pretty thick coming through a pair of lips that were battered up and one of them, the upper one, was split open on his front teeth.

“We didn’t then know what he’d meant, but we knew in a month. For that day month, on the hour pretty nigh, here came Singin’ Sandy tramping in by himself. Harve Allen was standing in front of a doggery that a man named Whitis ran – he died of the cholera I remember years and years after – and Singin’ Sandy walked right up to him and said: ‘Well, here I am’ and hit out at Harve with his fist. He hit out quick, like a cat striking, but he was short armed and under sized. He didn’t much more than come up to Harve’s shoulder and even if the lick had landed, it wouldn’t have dented Harve hardly. His intentions were good though, and he swung out quick and fast. But Harve was quicker still. Singin’ Sandy hit like a cat, but Harve could strike like a moccasin snake biting you. It was all over again almost before it started.

“Harve Allen bellowed once, like a bull, and downed him and jumped on him and stomped him in the chest with his knees and pounded and clouted him in the face until the little man stretched out on the ground still and quiet. Then, Harve climbed off of him and swaggered off. Even now, looking back on it all, it seems like a shameful thing to admit, but nobody dared touch a hand to Singin’ Sandy until Harve was plumb gone. As soon, though, as Harve was out of sight behind a cabin, some of them went to the little man and picked him up and worked over him until he came to. If his face had been dog’s meat before, it was calf’s liver now – just pounded out of shape. He couldn’t get but one eye open. I still remember how it looked. It looked like a piece of cold gray quartz – like the tip of one these here gray flint Indian darts. He held one hand to his side – two of his ribs were caved in, it turned out – and he braced himself against the wall of the doggery and looked around him. He was looking for Harve Allen.

“‘Tell him for me,’ he said slow and thick, ‘that I’ll be back agin in a month, the same as usual.’

“And then he went back out the road into the oak barrens, falling down and getting up and falling some more, but keeping right on. And by everything that’s holy, he was trying to sing as he went and making a bubbling noise through the blood that was in his throat.

“They all stood staring at him until he was away off amongst the trees, and then they recalled that that was what he had said before – that he’d be back in a month; and two or three of them went and hunted up Harve Allen and gave him the message. He swore and laughed that laugh of his, and looked hard at them and said:

“‘The runty varmint must love a beatin’ a sight better than some other folks I could name,’ and at that they sidled off, scenting trouble for themselves if Harve should happen to take it into his head that they’d sided with Singin’ Sandy.”

Cap’n Jasper stopped to taste of his toddy, and the other older men stirred slightly, impatient for him to go on. Sitting there on the top step of the porch, I hugged my knees in my arms and waited breathless, and Singin’ Sandy and Harve Allen visualized themselves for me there before my eyes. In the still I could hear the darkies singing their “Sweet Chariot” hymn at their little white church beyond the orchard. That was the fourth time that night they had sung that same song, and when they switched to “Old Ark A’Movin’” we would know that the mourners were beginning to “come through” and seek the mourners’ bench.

Cap’n Jasper cleared his throat briskly, as a man might rap with a gavel for attention and talked on:

“Well, so it went. So it went for five enduring months and each one of these fights was so much like the fight before it, that it’s not worth my while trying to describe ’em for you boys. Every month, on the day, here would come Singin’ Sandy Riggs, humming to himself. Once he came through the slush of a thaw, squattering along in the cold mud up to his knees, and once ’twas in a driving snow storm, but no matter what the weather was or how bad the road was, he came and was properly beaten, and went back home again still a-humming or trying to. Once Harve cut loose and crippled him up so he laid in a shack under the bank for two days before he could travel back to his little clearing on the Grundy Fork. It came mighty near being Kittie, Bar the Door with the little man that time. But he was tough as swamp hickory, and presently he was up and going, and the last thing he said as he limped away was fur somebody to give the word to Harve Allen that he’d be back that day month. I never have been able to decide yet in my own mind, whether he always made his trips a month apart because he had one of those orderly minds and believed in doing things regularly, or because he figured it would take him a month to get cured up from the last beating Harve gave him. But anyhow, so it was. He never hurt Harve to speak of, and he never failed to get pretty badly hurt himself. There was another thing – whilst they were fighting, he never made a sound, except to grunt and pant, but Harve would be cursing and swearing all the time.

“People took to waiting and watching for the day – Singin’ Sandy’s day, they began calling it. The word spread all up and down the river and into the back settlements, and folks would come from out of the barrens to see it. But nobody felt the call to interfere. Some were afraid of Harve Allen and some thought Singin’ Sandy would get his belly-full of beatings after awhile and quit. But on the morning of the day when Singin’ Sandy was due for the eighth time – if he kept his promise, which as I’m telling you he always had – Captain Braxton Montjoy, the militia captain, who’d fought in the war of 1812 and afterwards came to be the first mayor of this town, walked up to Harve Allen where he was lounging in front of one of the doggeries. I still remember his swallowfork coat and his white neckerchief and the little walking stick he was carrying. It was one of these little shiny black walking sticks made out of some kind of a limber wood, and it had a white handle on it, of ivory, carved like a woman’s leg. His pants were strapped down tight under his boots, just so. Captain Braxton Montjoy was fine old stock and he was the best dressed man between the mouth of the Cumberland and the Mississippi. And he wasn’t afraid of anything that wore hair or hide.

“‘Harvey Allen,’ he says, picking out his words, ‘Harvey Allen, I am of the opinion that you have been maltreating this man Riggs long enough.’

“Harve Allen was big enough to eat Captain Braxton Montjoy up in two bites, but he didn’t start biting. He twitched back his lips like a fice dog and blustered up.

“‘What is it to you?’ says Harve.

“‘It is a good deal to me and to every other man who believes in fair play,’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy. ‘I tell you that I want it stopped.’

“‘The man don’t walk in leather that kin dictate to me what I shall and shall not do,’ says Harve, trying to work himself up, ‘I’m a leetle the best two handed man that lives in these here settlemints, and the man that tries to walk my log had better be heeled for bear. I’m half hoss and half alligator and—’

“Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped up right close to him and began tapping Harve on the breast of his old deer skin vest with the handle of his little walking stick. At every word he tapped him.

“‘I do not care to hear the intimate details of your ancestry,’ he says. ‘Your family secrets do not concern me, Harvey Allen. What does concern me,’ he says, ‘is that you shall hereafter desist from maltreating a man half your size. Do I make my meaning sufficiently plain to your understanding, Harvey Allen?’

“At that Harve changed his tune. Actually it seemed like a whine came into his voice. It did, actually.

“‘Well, why don’t he keep away from me then?’ he says. ‘Why don’t he leave me be and not come round here every month pesterin’ fur a fresh beatin’? Why don’t he take his quittances and quit? There’s plenty other men I’d rather chaw up and spit out than this here Riggs – and some of ’em ain’t so fur away now,’ he says, scowling round him.

“Captain Braxton Montjoy started to say something more but just then somebody spoke behind him and he swung round and there was Singin’ Sandy, wet to the flanks where he’d waded through a spring branch.

“‘Excuse me, Esquire,’ he says to Captain Montjoy, ‘and I’m much obliged to you, but this here is a private matter that’s got to be settled between me and that man yonder – and it can’t be settled only jist one way.’

“‘Well sir, how long do you expect to keep this up, may I inquire?’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy, who never forgot his manners and never let anybody else forget them either.

“‘Ontil I lick him,’ says Singin’ Sandy, ‘ontil I lick him good and proper and make him yell ’nuff!’

“‘Why you little spindley, runty strippit, you ain’t never goin’ to be able to lick me,’ snorts out Harve over Captain Braxton Montjoy’s shoulder, and he cursed at Sandy. But I noticed he hadn’t rushed him as he usually did. Maybe, though, that was because of Captain Montjoy standing in the way.

“‘You ain’t never goin’ to be big enough or strong enough or man enough to lick me,’ says Harve.

“‘I ’low to keep on tryin’, says Singin’ Sandy. ‘And ef I don’t make out to do it, there’s my buddy growin’ up and comin’ along. And someday he’ll do it,’ he says, not boasting and not arguing, but cheerfully and confidently as though he was telling of a thing that was already the same as settled.

“Captain Braxton Montjoy reared away back on his high heels – he wore high heels to make him look taller, I reckon – and he looked straight at Singin’ Sandy standing there so little and insignificant and raggedy, and all gormed over with mud and wet with branch water, and smelling of the woods and the new ground. There was a purple mark still under one of Sandy’s eyes and a scabbed place on top of one of his ears where Harve Allen had pretty nigh torn it off the side of his head.

“‘By Godfrey,’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy, ‘by Godfrey, sir,’ and he began pulling off his glove which was dainty and elegant, like everything else about him. ‘Sir,’ he says to Singin’ Sandy, ‘I desire to shake your hand.’

“So they shook hands and Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped one side and bowed with ceremony to Singin’ Sandy, and Singin’ Sandy stepped in toward Harve Allen humming to himself.

“For this once, anyhow, Harve wasn’t for charging right into the mix-up at the first go-off. It almost seemed like he wanted to back away. But Singin’ Sandy lunged out and hit him in the face and stung him, and then Harve’s brute fighting instinct must have come back into his body, and he flailed out with both fists and staggered Singin’ Sandy back. Harve ran in on him and they locked and there was a whirl of bodies and down they went, in the dirt, with Harve on top as per usual. He licked Singin’ Sandy, but he didn’t lick him nigh as hard as he’d always done it up till then. When he got through, Singin’ Sandy could get up off the ground by himself and that was the first time he had been able to do so. He stood there a minute swaying a little on his legs and wiping the blood out of his eyes where it ran down from a little cut right in the edge of his hair. He spit and we saw that two of his front teeth were gone, broken short off up in the gums; and Singin’ Sandy felt with the tip of his tongue at the place where they’d been. ‘In a month,’ he says, and away he goes, singing his tuneless song.

“Well, I watched Harve Allen close that next month – and I think nearly all the other people did too. It was a strange thing too, but he went through the whole month without beating up anybody. Before that he’d never let a month pass without one fight anyhow. Yet he drank more whiskey than was common even with him. Once I ran up on him sitting on a drift log down in the willows by himself, seemingly studying over something in his mind.

“When the month was past and Singin’ Sandy’s day rolled round again for the ninth time, it was spring time, and the river was bankfull from the spring rise and yellow as paint with mud and full of drift and brush. Out from shore a piece, in the current, floating snags were going down, thick as harrow teeth, all pointing the same way like big black fish going to spawn. Early that morning, the river had bitten out a chunk of crumbly clay bank and took a cabin in along with it, and there was a hard job saving a couple of women and a whole shoal of young ones. For the time being that made everybody forget about Singin’ Sandy being due, and so nobody, I think, saw him coming. I know I didn’t see him at all until he stood on the river bank humming to himself.

“He stood there on the bank swelling himself out and humming his little song louder and clearer than ever he had before – and fifty yards out from shore in a dugout that belonged to somebody else, was Bully Harve Allen, fighting the current and dodging the drift logs as he paddled straight for the other side that was two miles and better away. He never looked back once; but Singin’ Sandy stood and watched him until he was no more than a moving spot on the face of those angry, roily waters. Singin’ Sandy lived out his life and died here – he’s got grandchildren scattered all over this county now, but from that day forth Harve Allen never showed his face in this country.”

Cap’n Jasper got up slowly, and shook himself, as a sign that his story was finished, and the others rose, shuffling stiffly. It was getting late – time to be getting home. The services in the darky church had ended and we could hear the unseen worshippers trooping by, still chanting snatches of their revival tunes.

“Well, boys, that’s all there is to tell of that tale,” said Cap’n Jasper, “all that I now remember anyhow. And now what would you say it was that made Harve Allen run away from the man he’d already licked eight times hand running. Would you call it cowardice?”

It was Squire Buckley, the noncommittal, who made answer.

“Well,” said Squire Buckley slowly, “p’raps I would – and then agin, on the other hand, p’raps I wouldn’t.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 03 Aug 1912
Back Home (1912)

Black and White

~

Overnight, it almost seems, a town will undergo radical and startling changes. The transition covers a period of years really, but to those who have lived in the midst of it, the realization comes sometimes with the abruptness of a physical shock; while the returning prodigal finds himself lost amongst surroundings which by rights should wear shapes as familiar as the back of his own hand. It is as though an elderly person of settled habits and a confirmed manner of life had suddenly fared forth in new and amazing apparel – as though he had swapped his crutch for a niblick and his clay pipe for a gold tipped cigarette.

It was so with our town. From the snoreful profundities of a Rip Van Winkle sleep it woke up one morning to find itself made over; whether for better or worse I will not presume to say, but nevertheless, made over. Before this the natural boundaries to the north had been a gravel bluff which chopped off sharply above a shallow flat sloping away to the willows and the river beyond. Now this saucer-expanse was dotted over with mounds of made ground rising like pimples in a sunken cheek; and spreading like a red brick rash across the face of it, was a tin roofed, flat-topped irritation of structures – a cotton mill, a brewery, and a small packing plant dominating a clutter of lesser industries. Above these on the edge of the hollow, the old warehouse still stood, but the warehouse had lost its character while keeping its outward shape. Fifty years it resounded to a skirmish fire clamor of many hammers as the negro hands knocked the hoops off the hogsheads and the auctioneer bellowed for his bids; where now, brisk young women, standing in rows, pasted labels and drove corks into bottles of Dr. Bozeman’s Infallible Cough Cure. Nothing remained to tell the past glories of the old days, except that, in wet weather, a faint smell of tobacco would steam out of the cracks in the floor; and on the rotted rafters over head, lettered in the sprawling chirography of some dead and gone shipping clerk, were the names and the dates and the times of record-breaking steamboat runs – Idlewild, Louisville to Memphis, so many hours and so many minutes; Pat Cleburne, Nashville to Paducah, so many hours and so many minutes.

Nobody ever entered up the records of steamboat runs any more; there weren’t any to be entered up. Where once wide side-wheelers and long, limber stern-wheelers had lain three deep at the wharf, was only a thin and unimpressive fleet of small-fry harbor tugs and a ferry or two, and shabby little steamers plying precariously in the short local trades. Along the bank ran the tracks of the railroad that had taken away the river business and the switch engines tooted derisively as if crowing over a vanquished and a vanished rival, while they shoved the box cars back and forth. Erecting themselves on high trestles like straddle bugs, three more railroads had come in across the bottoms to a common junction point, and still another was reliably reported to be on its way. Wherefore, the Daily Evening News frequently referred to itself as the Leading Paper of the Future Gateway of the New South. It also took the Associated Press dispatches and carried a column devoted to the activities of the Women’s Club, including suffrage and domestic science.

So it went. There was a Board of Trade with two hundred names of members, and half of them, at least, were new names, and the president was a spry newcomer from Ohio. A Republican mayor had actually been elected – and that, if you knew the early politics of our town, was the most revolutionary thing of all. Apartment houses – regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that – shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hackberries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. The churches had caught the spirit too; there were new churches to replace the old ones. Only that stronghold of the ultra conservatives, the Independent Presbyterian, stood fast on its original site, and even the Independent Presbyterian had felt the quickening finger of progress. Under its gray pillared front were set ornate stone steps, like new false teeth in the mouth of a stern old maid, and the new stained glass memorial windows at either side were as paste earrings for her ancient virginal ears. The spinster had traded her blue stockings for doctrinal half-hose of a livelier pattern, and these were the outward symbols of the change.

But there was one institution among us that remained as it was – Eighth of August, ’Mancipation Day, celebrated not only by all the black proportion of our population – thirty-six per cent by the last census – but by the darkies from all the lesser tributary towns for seventy-five miles around. It was not their own emancipation that they really celebrated; Lincoln’s Proclamation I believe was issued of a January morning, but January is no fit time for the holidaying of a race to whom heat means comfort and the more heat the greater the comfort. So away back, a selection had been made of the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Hayti or San Domingo or somewhere and indeed it was a most happy selection. By the Eighth of August the watermelons are at their juiciest and ripest, the frying size pullet of the spring has attained just the rightful proportions for filling one skillet all by itself, and the sun may be reliably counted upon to offer up a satisfactory temperature of anywhere from ninety in the shade to one hundred and two. Once it went to one hundred and four and a pleasant time was had by all.

Right after one Eighth the celebrants began laying by their savings against the coming of the next Eighth. It was Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July crowded into the compass of one day – a whole year of anticipation packed in and tamped down into twenty-four hours of joyous realization. There never were enough excursion trains to bring all those from a distance who wanted to come in for the Eighth. Some travelers, the luckier ones, rode in state on packed day coaches and the others, as often as not, came from clear down below the Tennessee line, on flat cars, shrieking with nervous joy as the engine jerked them around the sharp curves, they being meantime oblivious alike to the sun shining with midsummer fervor upon their unprotected heads, and the coal cinders, as big as buttons, that rained down in gritty showers. There was some consolation then in having a complexion that neither sun could tan nor cinders blacken.

For that one day out of the three hundred and sixty-five and a fourth, the town was a town of dark joy. The city authorities made special provision for the comfort and the accommodation of the invading swarms and the merchants wore pleased looks for days beforehand and for weeks afterward – to them one good Eighth of August was worth as much as six Court Mondays and a couple of circus days. White people kept indoors as closely as possible, not for fear of possible race clashes, because we didn’t have such things; but there wasn’t room, really, for anybody except the celebrants. The Eighth was one day when the average white family ate a cold snack for dinner and when family buggies went undrivered and family washing went unwashed.

On a certain Eighth of August which I have in mind, Judge Priest spent the simmering day alone in his empty house and in the evening when he came out of Clay Street into Jefferson, he revealed himself as the sole pedestrian of his color in sight. Darkies, though, were everywhere – town darkies with handkerchiefs tucked in at their necks in the vain hope of saving linen collars from the wilting-down process; cornfield darkies whose feet were cramped, cabin’d, cribb’d and confined, as the saying goes, inside of stiff new shoes and sore besides from much pelting over unwontedly hard footing; darkies perspiry and rumpled; darkies gorged and leg weary, but still bent on draining the cup of their yearly joy to its delectable dregs. Rivers of red pop had already flowed, Niagaras of lager beer and stick gin had been swallowed up, breast works of parched goobers had been shelled flat, and blade forests of five cent cigars had burned to the water’s edge; and yet here was the big night just getting fairly started. Full voiced bursts of laughter and yells of sheer delight assaulted the old Judge’s ears. Through the yellowish dusk one hired livery stable rig after another went streaking by, each containing an unbleached Romeo and his pastel-shaded Juliet.

A corner down town, where the two branches of the car lines fused into one, was the noisiest spot yet. Here Ben Boyd and Bud Dobson, acknowledged to be the two loudest mouthed darkies in town, contended as business rivals. Each wore over his shoulder the sash of eminence and bore on his breast the badge of much honor. Ben Boyd had a shade the stronger voice, perhaps, but Bud Dobson excelled in native eloquence. On opposite sidewalks they stood, sweating like brown stone china ice pitchers, wide mouthed as two bull-alligators.

“Come on, you niggers, dis way to de real show,” Ben Boyd would bellow unendingly, “Remember de grand free balloom ascension teks place at eight o’clock,” and Ben would wave his long arms like a flutter mill.

“Don’t pay no ’tention, friends, to dat cheap nigger,” Bud Dobson would vociferously plead, “an’ don’t furgit de grand fire works display at mah park! Ladies admitted free, widout charge! Dis is de only place to go! Tek de green car fur de grand annual outin’ an’ ball of de Sisters of the Mysterious Ten!”

Back it would come in a roar from across the way:

“Tek de red car – dat’s de one, dat’s de one, folks! Dis way fur de big gas balloom!” Both of them were lying – there was no balloon to go up, no intention of admitting anybody free to anything. The pair expanded their fictions, giving to their work the spontaneous brilliancy of the born romancer. Like straws caught in opposing cross currents, their victims were pulled two ways at once. A flustered group would succumb to Bud’s blandishments and he would shoo them aboard a green car. But the car had to be starting mighty quick, else Bud Dobson’s siren song would win them over and trailing after their leader, who was usually a woman, like blade sheep behind a bell wether they would pile off and stampede over to where the red car waited. Some changed their minds half a dozen times before they were finally borne away.

These were the country darkies, though – the town bred celebrants knew exactly where they were going and what they would do when they got there. They moved with the assured bearing of cosmopolitans, stirred and exhilarated by the clamor but not confused by it. Grand in white dresses, with pink sashes and green headgear, the Imperial Daughters of the Golden Star rolled by in a furniture van. The Judge thought he caught a chocolate-colored glimpse of Aunt Dilsey, his cook, enthroned on a front seat, as befitting the Senior Grand Potentate of the lodge; anyhow, he knew she must be up front there somewhere. If any cataclysm of Providence had descended upon that furniture van that night many a kitchen beside his would have mourned a biscuit maker par excellence. Sundry local aristocrats of the race – notably the leading town barber, a high school teacher and a shiny black undertaker in a shiny high hat – passed in an automobile, especially loaned for the occasion by a white friend and customer of the leading barber. It was the first time an automobile had figured in an Eighth of August outing; its occupants bore themselves accordingly.

Further along, in the center of the business district, the Judge had almost to shove a way for himself through crowds that were nine-tenths black. There was no actual disorder, but there was an atmosphere of unrestrained race exultation. You couldn’t put your hand on it, nor express it in words perhaps, but it was there surely. Turning out from the lit-up and swarming main thoroughfare into the quieter reaches of a side street, Judge Priest was put to it to avoid a collision with an onward rush of half grown youths, black, brown, and yellow. Whooping, they clattered on by him and never looked back to see who it was they had almost run over.

In this side street the Judge was able to make a better headway; the rutted sidewalk was almost untraveled and the small wholesale houses which mainly lined it, were untenanted and dark. Two-thirds of a block along, he came to a somewhat larger building where an open entry way framed the foot of a flight of stairs mounting up into a well of pitchy gloom. Looking up the stairs was like looking up to a sooty chimney, except that a chimney would have shown a dim opening at the top and this vista was walled in blankness and ended in blankness. Judge Priest turned in here and began climbing upward, feeling the way for his feet, cautiously.

Once upon a time, a good many years before this, Kamleiter’s Hall had been in the center of things municipal. Nearly all the lodges and societies had it then for their common meeting place; but when the new and imposing Fraternity Building was put up, with its elevator, and its six stories and its electric lights, and all, the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the rest moved their belongings up there. Gideon K. Irons Camp alone remained faithful. The members of the Camp had held their first meeting in Kamleiter’s Hall back in the days when they were just organizing and Kamleiter’s was just built. They had used its assembly room when there were two hundred and more members in good standing, and with the feeble persistency of old men who will cling to the shells of past things, after the pith of the substance is gone, they still used it.

So the Judge should have known those steps by the feel of them under his shoe soles, he had been climbing up and down them so long. Yet it seemed to him they had never before been so steep and so many and so hard to climb, certainly they had never been so dark. Before he reached the top he was helping himself along with the aid of a hand pressed against the plastered wall and he stopped twice to rest his legs and get his breath. He was panting hard when he came to the final landing on the third floor. He fumbled at a door until his fingers found the knob and turned it. He stood a moment, getting his bearings in the blackness. He scratched a match and by its flare located the rows of iron gas jets set in the wall, and he went from one to another, turning them on and touching the match flame to their stubbed rubber tips.

It was a long bare room papered in a mournful gray paper, that was paneled off with stripings of a dirty white. There were yellow, wooden chairs ranged in rows and all facing a small platform that had desks and chairs on it, and an old fashioned piano. On the wall, framed uniformly in square black wooden frames and draped over by strips of faded red and white bunting, were many enlarged photographs and crayon portraits of men either elderly or downright aged. Everything spoke of age and hard usage. There were places where gussets of the wall paper had pulled away from the paste and hung now in loose triangles like slatted jib sails.

In corners, up against the ceiling, cobwebs hung down in separate tendrils or else were netted up together in little gray hammocks to catch the dust. The place had been baking under a low roof all day and the air was curdled with smells of varnish and glue drawn from the chairs and the mold from old oil cloth, with a lingering savor of coal oil from somewhere below. The back end of the hall was in a gloom, and it only lifted its mask part-way even after the Judge had completed his round and lit all the jets and was reaching for his pocket handkerchief. Maybe it was the poor light with its flickery shadows and maybe it was the effect of the heat, but standing there mopping his forehead, the old Judge looked older than common. His plump figure seemed to have lost some of its rotundness and under his eyes the flesh was pouchy and sagged. Or at least, that was the impression which Ed Gafford got. Ed Gafford was the odd jobs man of Kamleiter’s Hall and he came now, and was profuse with apologies for his tardiness.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Judge Priest,” he began, “for bein’ a little late about gettin’ down here to light up and open up. You see, this bein’ the Eighth of August and it so hot and ever’thing, I sort of jumped at the conclusion that maybe there wouldn’t be none of your gentlemen show up here tonight.”

“Oh, I reckin there’ll be quite a lot of the boys comin’ along pretty soon, son,” said Judge Priest. “It’s a regular monthly meetin’, you know, and besides there’s a vacancy to be filled – we’ve got a color bearer to elect tonight. I should say there ought to be a purty fair crowd, considerin’. You better make a light on them stairs, – they’re as black as a pocket.”

“Right away, Judge,” said Gafford, and departed.

Left alone, the Judge sat down in the place of the presiding officer on the little platform. Laboriously he crossed one fat leg on the other, and looked out over the rows of empty wooden chairs, peopling them with the images of the men who wouldn’t sit in them ever again. The toll of the last few months had been a heavy one. The old Judge cast it up in his mind: There was old Colonel Horace Farrell, now, the Nestor of the county bar, to whom the women and men of his own State had never been just plain women and men, but always noble womanhood and chivalric manhood, and who thought in rounded periods and even upon his last sick bed had dealt in well measured phrases and sonorous metaphor in his farewell to his assembled children and grandchildren. The Colonel had excelled at memorial services and monument unveilings. He would be missed – there was no doubt about that.

Old Professor Lycurgus Reese was gone too; who was principal of the graded school for forty-odd years and was succeeded a mercifully short six months before his death by an abnormally intellectual and gifted young graduate of a normal college from somewhere up in Indiana, a man who never slurred his consonant r’s nor dropped his final g’s, a man who spoke of things as stimulating and forceful, and who had ideas about Boy Scout movements and Native Studies for the Young and all manner of new things, a remarkable man, truly, yet some had thought old Professor Reese might have been retained a little longer anyhow.

And Father Minor, who was a winged devil of Morgan’s cavalry by all accounts, but a most devoted shepherd of a struggling flock after he donned the cloth, and old Peter J. Galloway, the lame blacksmith, with his impartial Irish way of cursing all Republicans as Black Radicals – they were all gone. Yes, and a dozen others besides; but the latest to go was Corporal Jake Smedley, color bearer of the Camp from the time that there was a Camp.

The Judge had helped bury him a week before. There had been only eight of the members who turned out in the dust and heat of mid-summer for the funeral, just enough to form the customary complement of honorary pallbearers, but the eight had not walked to the cemetery alongside the hearse. Because of the weather, they had ridden in hacks. It was a new departure for the Camp to ride in hacks behind a dead comrade, and that had been the excuse – the weather. It came to Judge Priest, as he sat there now, that it would be much easier hereafter to name offhand those who were left, than to remember those who were gone. He flinched mentally, his mind shying away from the thought.

Ten minutes passed – fifteen. Judge Priest shuffled his feet and fumed a little. He hauled out an old silver watch, bulky as a turnip, with the flat silver key dangling from it by a black string and consulted its face. Then he heard steps on the stairs and he straightened himself in his chair and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby entered, alone. The Sergeant carried his coat over his arm and he patted himself affectionately on his left side and dragged his feet a little. As Commander of the Camp, the Judge greeted him with all due formality.

“Don’t know what’s comin’ over this here town,” complained the sergeant, when he had got his wind back. “Mob of these here crazy country niggers mighty near knocked me off the sidewalk into the gutter. Well, if they hadn’t been movin’ tolerable fast, I bet you I’d a lamed a couple of ’em,” he added, his imagination in retrospect magnifying the indignant swipe he made at unresisting space a good half minute after the collision occurred. The Sergeant soothed his ruffled feelings by a series of little wheezing grunts and addressed the chair with more composure:

“Seems like you and me are the first ones here, Judge.”

“Yes,” said the Judge soberly, “and I hope we ain’t the last ones too – that’s what I’m hopin’. What with the weather bein’ so warm and darkies thick everywhere” – he broke off short. “It’s purty near nine o’clock now.”

“You don’t say so?” said the Sergeant. “Then we shorely oughter be startin’ purty soon. Was a time when I could set up half the night and not feel it scarcely. But here lately I notice I like to turn in sort of early. I reckin it must be the weather affectin’ me.”

“That must be it,” assented the Judge, “I feel it myself – a little; but look here, Sergeant, we never yet started off a regular meetin’ without a little music. I reckin we might wait a little while on Herman to come and play Dixie for us. The audience will be small but appreciative, as the feller says.” A smile flickered across his face. “Herman manages to keep younger and spryer than a good many of the boys.”

“Yes, that’s so too,” said the Sergeant, “but jest yestiddy I heared he was fixin’ to turn over his business to his son and that nephew of his and retire.”

“That’s no sign he’s playin’ out,” challenged Judge Priest rather quickly, “no sign at all. I reckin Herman jest wants to knock round amongst his friends more.”

Sergeant Bagby nodded as if this theory was a perfectly satisfactory one to him. A little pause fell. The Sergeant reached backward to a remote and difficult hip pocket and after two unsuccessful efforts, he fished out what appeared to be a bit of warped planking.

“They’re tearing away the old Sanders place,” he confessed somewhat sheepishly, “and I stopped in by there as I come down and fetched away this here little piece of clapboard for a sort of keepsake. You recollect, Judge, that was where Forrest made his headquarters that day when we raided back into town here? Lawsy, what a surprise old Bedford did give them Yankees. But shucks, that was Bedford’s specialty – surprises.” He stopped and cocked his whity-gray head toward the door hopefully.

“Listen yonder, that must be Herman Felsburg comin’ up the steps now. Maybe Doctor Lake is with him. Weather or no weather, niggers or no niggers, it’s mighty hard to keep them two away from a regular meetin’ of the Camp.”

But the step outside was too light a step and too peart for Mr. Felsburg’s. It was Ed Gafford who shoved his head in.

“Judge Priest,” he stated, “you’re wanted on the telephone right away. They said they had to speak to you in person.”

The Sergeant waited, with what patience he could, while the Judge stumped down the long flights, and after a little, stumped back again. His legs were quivering under him and it was quite a bit before he quit blowing and panting. When he did speak, there was a reluctant tone in his voice.

“It’s from Herman’s house,” he said. “He won’t be with us tonight. He – he’s had a kind of a stroke – fell right smack on the floor as he was puttin’ on his hat to come down here. ’Twas his daughter had me on the telephone – the married one. They’re afraid it’s paralysis – seems like he can’t move one side and only mumbles, sort of tongue tied, she says, when he tried to talk. But I reckin it ain’t nowhere near as serious as they think for.”

“No suh,” agreed the Sergeant, “Herman’s good for twenty year yit. I bet you he jest et something that didn’t agree with him. He’ll be up and goin’ in a week – see if he ain’t. But say, that means Doctor Lake won’t be here neither, don’t it?”

“Well, that’s a funny thing,” said the old Judge, “I pointedly asked her what he said about Herman, and she mumbled something about Doctor Lake’s gittin’ on so in life that she hated to call him out on a hot night like this. So they called in somebody else. She said, though, they aimed to have Lake up the first thing in the mornin’ unless Herman is better by then.”

“Well, I’ll say this,” put in Sergeant Bagby, “she better not let him ketch her sayin’ he’s too old to be answerin’ a call after dark. Lew Lake’s got a temper, and he certainly would give that young woman a dressin’ down.”

The old Judge moved to his place on the platform and mounted it heavily. As he sat down, he gave a little grunting sigh. An old man’s tired sigh carries a lot of meaning sometimes; this one did.

“Jimmy,” he said, “if you will act as adjutant and take the desk, we’ll open without music, for this oncet. This is about the smallest turn-out we ever had for a regular meetin’, but we can go ahead, I reckin.”

Sergeant Bagby came forward and took a smaller desk off at the side of the platform. Adjusting his spectacles, just so, he tugged a warped drawer open and produced a flat book showing signs of long wear and much antiquity. A sheet of heavy paper had been pasted across the cover of this book, but with much use it had frayed away so that the word “Ledger” showed through in faded gilt letters. The Sergeant opened at a place where a row of names ran down the blue lined sheet and continued over upon the next page. Most of the names had dates set opposite them in fresher writing than the original entries. Only now and then was there a name with no date written after it. He cleared his throat to begin.

“I presume,” the Commander was saying, “that we might dispense with the roll call for tonight.”

“That’s agreeable to me,” said the acting adjutant, and he shut up the book.

“There is an election pendin’ to fill a vacancy, but in view of the small attendance present this evenin’—”

The Judge cut off his announcement to listen. Someone walking with the slow, uncertain gait of a very tired or a very feeble person was climbing up the stairs. The shuffling sound came on to the top and stopped, and an old negro man stood bareheaded in the door blinking his eyes at the light and winking his bushy white tufts of eyebrows up and down. The Judge shaded his own eyes the better to make out the newcomer.

“Why, it’s Uncle Ike Copeland,” he said heartily. “Come right in, Uncle Ike, and set down.”

“Yes, take a seat and make yourself comfortable,” added the Sergeant. In the tones of both the white men was a touch of kindly but none the less measurable condescension – that instinctive turn of inflection by which the difference held firmly to exist between the races was expressed and made plain, but in this case it was subtly warmed and tinctured with an essence of something else – an indefinable, evasive something that would probably not have been apparent in their greetings to a younger negro.

“Thanky, gen’l’men,” said the old man as he came in slowly. He was tall and thin, so thin that the stoop in his back seemed an inevitable inbending of a frame too long and too slight to support its burden. And he was very black. His skin must have been lustrous and shiny in his youth, but now was overlaid with a grayish aspect, like the mold upon withered fruit. His forehead, naturally high and narrow, was deeply indented at the temples and he had a long face with high cheek bones, and a well developed nose and thin lips. The face was Semitic in its suggestion rather than Ethiopian. The whites of his eyes showed a yellow tinge, but the brown pupils were blurred by a pronounced bluish cast. His clothes were old but spotlessly clean, and his shoes were slashed open along the toes and his bare feet showed through the slashed places. He made his way at a hobbling gait toward the back row of chairs.

“I’ll be plenty comfor’ble yere, suhs,” he said in a voice which sounded almost like an accentuated mimicry of Judge Priest’s high notes. He eased his fragile rack of bones down into a chair and dropped his old hat on the matting of the aisle beside him, seemingly oblivious to the somewhat puzzled glances of the two veterans.

“What’s the reason you ain’t out sashaying round on the Eighth with your own people?” asked the Judge. The old negro began a thin, hen-like chuckle, but his cackle ended midway in a snort of disgust.

“Naw suh,” he answered, “naw suh, not fur me. It ’pears lak most of de ole residenters dat I knowed is died off, and mo’ over I ain’t gittin’ so much pleasure projectin’ round ’mongst all dese brash young free issue niggers dat’s growed up round yere. They ain’t got no fitten respec’ fur dere elders and dat’s a fac’, boss. Jes’ now seen a passel of ’em ridin’ round in one of dese yere ortermobiles.” He put an ocean of surging contempt to the word: “Huh – ortermobiles!”

“And dis time dar warn’t no place on de flatform fur me at de festibul out in dat Fisher’s Gyarden as dey names it, do’ it taint nothin’ ’ceptin’ a grove of trees. Always befoah dis I set up on de very fust and fo’most row – yas suh, always befoah dis hit wuz de rule. But dis yeah dey tek and give my place to dat boyish young nigger preacher dat calls hisse’f de Rev’rund J. Fontleroy Jones. His name is Buddy Jones – tha’s whut it ’tis – and I ’members him when he warn’t nothin’ but jes’ de same ez de mud onder yore feet. Tha’s de one whut gits my place on de flatform, settin’ there in a broadcloth suit, wid a collar on him mighty nigh tall nuff to saw his nappy haid off, which it wouldn’t be no real loss to nobody ef it did.

“But I reckin I still is got my pride lef ef I ain’t got nothin’ else. My grandmaw, she wuz a full blood Affikin queen and I got de royal Congo blood in my veins. So I jes’ teks my foot in my hand and comes right on away and lef’ dat trashy nigger dar, spreadin’ hisse’f and puffin’ out his mouf lak one of dese yere ole tree frogs.” There was a forlorn complaint creeping into his words; but he cast it out and cackled his derision for the new generation, and all its works.

“Dey ain’t botherin’ me none, wid dere airs, dat dey ain’t. I kin git long widout ’em, and I wuz gwine on home ’bout my own business w’en I seen dese lights up yere, and I says to myse’f dat some of my own kind of w’ite folks is holdin’ fo’th and I’ll jess drap up dar and set a spell wid ’em, pervidin’ I’se welcome, which I knows full well I is.

“So you go right ahaid, boss, wid whutever it ’tis you’s fixin’ to do. I ’low to jes’ set yere and res’ my frame.”

“Course you are welcome,” said Judge Priest, “and we’ll be mighty glad to have you stay as long as you’re a mind to. We feel like you sort of belong here with us anyway, Uncle Ike, account of your record.”

The old negro grinned widely at the compliment, showing two or three yellowed snags planted in shrunken bluish gums. “Yas suh,” he assented briskly, “I reckin I do.” The heat which wilted down the white men and made their round old faces look almost peaked, appeared to have a briskening effect upon him. Now he got upon his feet. His lowliness was falling away, his sense of his own importance was coming back to him.

“I reckin I is got a sorter right to be yere, tho’ it warn’t becomin’ in me to mention it fust,” he said. “I been knowin’ some of you all gen’l’men since ’way back befoah de war days. I wonder would you all lak to hear ’bout me and whut I done in dem times?”

They nodded, in friendly fashion, but the speaker was already going on as though sure of the answer:

“I ’members monstrous well dat day w’en my young marster jined out wid de artillery and Ole Miss she send me ’long wid him to look after him, ’cause he warn’t nothin’ but jess a harum-scarum boy noway. Less see, boss – dat must be goin’ on thutty or forty yeah ago, ain’t it?”

It was more than thirty years or forty either, but neither of them was moved to correct him. Again their heads conveyed an assent, and Uncle Ike, satisfied, went ahead, warming to his theme:

“So I went ’long with him jess lak Ole Miss said. And purty soon, he git to be one of dese yere lieutenants, and he act mighty biggotty toward hisse’f wid dem straps sewed onto his cote collar, but I bound I keep him in order – I bound I do dat, suhs, ef I don’t do nothin’ else in dat whole war. I minds the time w’en we wuz in camp dat fust winter and yere one day he come ridin’ in out of de rain, jess drippin’ wet. Befoah ’em all I goes up to him and I says to him, I says, ‘Marse Willie, you git right down off’en dat hoss and come yere and lemme put some dry clothes on you. What Ole Miss gwine say to me ef I lets you set round here, ketchin; yore death?

“Some of dem y’other young gen’l’men laff den and he git red in de face and tell me to go ’way from dere and let him be. I says to him, I says, ‘I promised yore maw faithful to ’tend you and look after you and I pintedly does aim to do so.’ I says, ‘Marse Willie,’ I says, ‘I hope I ain’t gwine have to keep on tellin’ you to git down off’en dat hoss.’ Dem y’others laff louder’n ever den and he cuss and r’ar and call me a meddlin’ black raskil. But I tek notice he got down off’en dat hoss – I lay to dat.

“But I didn’t have to ’tend him long. Naw suh, not very long. He git killed de very fust big battle we wuz in, which wuz Shiloh. Dat battery shore suffer dat day. ’Long tow’rds evenin’ yere dey come fallin’ back, all scorified and burnt black wid de powder and I sees he ain’t wid ’em no more and I ax ’bout him and dey tells me de Battery done los’ two of its pieces and purty near all de hosses and dat young Marse Willie been killed right at de outset of de hard fightin’. I didn’t wait to hear no mo’n dat – dat wuz ’nuff fur me. I puts right out to find him.

“Gen’l’men, dat warn’t no fittin’ place to be prowlin’ ’bout in. Everywhahs you look you see daid men and crippled men. Some places dey is jess piled up; and de daid is beginnin’ to swell up already and de wounded is wrigglin’ round on de bare ground and some of ’em is beggin’ for water and some is beggin’ for somebody to come shoot ’em and put ’em out of dere miz’ry. And ever oncet in a wile you hear a hoss scream. It didn’t sound like no hoss tho’, it sound mo’ lak a pusson or one of dese yere catamounts screamin’.

“But I keep on goin’ on ’count of my bein’ under obligations to ’tend him and jess him alone. After while it begin to git good and dark and you could see lanterns bobbin’ round whar dere wuz search parties out, I reckin. And jess befo’ the last of de light fade ’way I come to de place whar de Battery wuz stationed in the aidge of a little saige-patch lak, and dar I find him – him and two y’others, right whar dey fell. Dey wuz all three layin’ in a row on dere backs jes’ lak somebody is done fix ’em dat way. His chist wuz tore up, but scusin’ de dust and dirt, dar warn’t no mark of vilence on his face a t’all.

“I knowed dey warn’t gwine put Ole Miss’s onliest dear son in no trench lak he wuz a daid hoss – naw suh, not wile I had my stren’th. I tek him up in my arms – I wuz mighty survig’rous dem times and he warn’t nothin’ but jes’ a boy, ez I told you – so I tek him up and tote him ’bout a hundred yards ’way whar dar’s a little grove of trees and de soil is sort of soft and loamy; and den and dere I dig his grave. I didn’t have no reg’lar tools to dig wid, but I uses a pinted stick and one of dese yere baynets and fast ez I loosen de earth I cast it out wid my hands. And ’long towo’ds daylight I gits it deep nuff and big nuff. So I fetch water frum a little branch and wash off his face and I wrop him in a blanket w’ich I pick up nearby and I compose his limbs and I bury him in de ground.”

His voice had swelled, taking on the long, swinging cadences by which his race voices its deeper emotions whether of joy or sorrow or religious exaltation. Its rise and fall had almost a hypnotizing effect upon the two old men who were his auditors. The tale he was telling was no new one to them. It had been written a score of times in the county papers; it had been repeated a hundred times at reunions and Memorial Day services. But they listened, canting their heads to catch every word as though it were a new-told thing and not a narrative made familiar by nearly fifty years of reiteration and elaboration.

“I put green branches on top of him and I bury him. And den w’en I’d done mark de place so I wouldn’t never miss it w’en I come back fur him, I jes’ teks my foot in my hand and I puts out fur home. I slip through de No’thern lines and I heads for ole Lyon County. I travels light and I travels fast and in two weeks I comes to it. It ain’t been but jes’ a little mo’n a year since we went ’way but Gar Almighty, gen’l’men, how dat war is done change ever’thing. My ole Miss is gone – she died de very day dat Marse Willie got killed, yas suh, dat very day she taken down sick and died – and her brother, ole Majah Machen is gone too – he’s ’way off down in Missippi somewhars refugeein’ wid his folks – and de rest of de niggers is all scattered ’bout ever’whars. De Fed’ruls is in charge and de whole place seem lak, is plum’ busted up and distracted.

“So I jedge dat I is free. Leas’wise, dar ain’t nobody fur me to repote myse’f to, an’ dar ain’t nobody to gimme no ordahs. So I starts in follerin’ at my trade – I is a waggin maker by trade as you gen’l’men knows – and I meks money and saves it up, a little bit at a time, and I bury it onder de dirt flo’ of my house.

“After ’while shore-nuff freedom she come and de war end, soon after dat, and den it seem lak all de niggers in de world come flockin’ in. Dey act jess ez scatter-brained as a drove of birds. It look lak freedom is affectin’ ’em in de haid. At fust dey don’t think ’bout settlin’ down – dey say de gover’mint is gwine give ’em all forty acres and a mule apiece – and dey jess natchelly obleeged to wait fur dat. But I ’low to my own se’f dat by de time de gover’mint gits ’round to Lyon County my mule is gwine be so old I’ll have to be doctorin’ him ’stid of plowin’ him. So I keeps right on, follerin’ my trade and savin’ a little yere and a little dar, ’till purty soon I had money nuff laid by fur whut I need it fur.”

There was a crude majesty in the old negro’s pose and in the gesturing of his long arms. It was easy to conceive that his granddam had been an African Chieftainess. The spell of his story-telling filled the bare hall. The comb of white that ran up his scalp stood erect like carded wool and his jaundiced eyeballs rolled in his head with the exultation of his bygone achievement. In different settings a priest of ancient Egypt might have made such a figure.

“I had money nuff fur whut I needs it fur,” he repeated sonorously, “and so I goes back to dat dere battle-field. I hires me a wite man and a waggin and two niggers to help and I goes dar and I digs up my young marster frum de place whar he been layin’ all dis time, and I puts him in de coffin and I bring him back on de railroad cyars, payin’ all de expenses, and actin’ as de chief mourner. And I buries him in de buryin’ ground at de home-place right ’longside his paw, which I knowed Ole Miss would a wanted it done jes’ dat way, ef she had been spared to live and nothin’ happened. W’en all dat is done I know den dat I is free in my own mind to come and to go; and I packs up my traps and my plunder and leave ole Lyon County and come down yere to dis town, whar I is been ever since.

“But frum dat day fo’th dey calls me a wite folks’ nigger, some of ’em does. Well, I reckin I is. De black folks is my people, but de wite folks is always been my frends, I know dat good and well. And it stands proven dis very night. De black people is de same ez cast me out, and dat fool Jones nigger he sets in my ’pinted place on de flatform,” – a lament came again into his chanting tone, and he took on the measured swing of an exhorter at an experience meeting – “Dey cast me out, but I come to my wite friends and dey mek me welcome.”

He broke off to shake his wool-crowned head from side to side. Then in altogether different voice he began an apology:

“Jedge, you and Mistah Bagby must please suh, s’cuse me fur ramblin’ on lak dis. I reckin I done took up nuff of yore time – I spects I better be gittin’ on towo’ds my own home.”

But he made no move to start, because the old Judge was speaking; and the worn look was gone from the Judge’s face, and the stress of some deep emotion made the muscles of his under jaws tighten beneath the dew-laps of loose flesh.

“Some who never struck a blow in battle, nevertheless served our Cause truly and faithfully,” he said, as though he were addressing an audience of numbers. “Some of the bravest soldiers we had never wore a uniform and their skins were of a different color from our skins. I move that our comrade Isaac Copeland here present be admitted to membership in this Camp. If this motion is regular and accordin’ to the rules of the organization, I make it. And if it ain’t regular – I make it jest the same!”

“I second that motion,” said Sergeant Jimmy Bagby instantly and belligerently, as though defying an unseen host to deny the propriety of the step.

“It is moved and seconded,” said Judge Priest formally, “that Isaac Copeland be made a member of this Camp. All in favor of that motion will signify by saying Aye!”

His own voice and the Sergeant’s answered as one voice with a shrill Aye.

“Contrary, no?” went on the Judge. “The Ayes have it and it is so ordered.”

It was now the Sergeant’s turn to have an inspiration. Up he came to his feet, sputtering in his eagerness.

“And now, suh, I nominate Veteran Isaac Copeland for the vacant place of color bearer of this Camp – and I move you furthermore that the nominations be closed.”

The Judge seconded the motion and again these two voted as one, the old negro sitting and listening, but saying nothing at all. Judge Priest got up from his chair and crossing to a glass cabinet at the back of the platform, he opened the door and drew forth a seven foot staff of polished wood with a length of particolored silk wadded about its upper part and bound round with a silken cord.

“Uncle Ike,” he said, reverently, “You are our color-sergeant now in good and proper standin’ – and here are your colors for you.”

The old negro came shuffling up. He took the flag in his hands. His bent back unkinked until he stood straight. His long fleshless fingers, knotted and gnarled and looking like fire-blackened faggots twitched at the silken square until its folds fell away and in the gas light it revealed itself, with its design of the starred St. Andrew’s cross and its tarnished gold fringe.

“I thanky suhs, kindly,” he said, addressing the two old white men, standing at stiff salute, “I suttinly does appreciate dis – and I’ll tell you why. Dey done drap me out of de Cullid Odd Fellers, count of my not bein’ able to meet de dues, and dis long time I been feared dat w’en my time come to go, I’d have to be buried by de co’pperation. But now I knows dat I’ll be laid away in de big stylish cemetary – wid music and de quality wite gen’l’men along and kerriges. And maybe dar’ll be a band. Ain’t dat so, gen’l’men – ain’t dar goin’ to be a band ’long too?”

They nodded. They were of the same generation, these two old white men and this lone old black man, and between them there was a perfect understanding. That the high honor they had visited upon him meant to their minds one thing and to his mind another thing was understandable too. So they nodded to him.

•     •     •     •     •

They came down the steep stairs, the Judge, and the Sergeant abreast in front, the new color bearer two steps behind them, and when they were outside on the street, the Judge fumbled in his pocket a moment, then slipped something shiny into the old negro’s harsh, horny palm, and the recipient pulled his old hat off and thanked him, there being dignity in the manner of making the gift and in the manner of receiving it, both.

The Judge and the Sergeant stood watching him as he shuffled away in the darkness, his loose slashed brogans clop-lopping up and down on his sockless feet. Probably they would have found it hard to explain why they stood so, but watch him they did until the old negro’s gaunt black shadow merged into the black distance. When he was quite gone from sight, they faced about the other way and soberly and silently, side by side, trudged away, two stoutish, warm, weary old men.

At the corner they parted. The Judge continued alone along Jefferson Street. A trolley car under charter for the Eighth whizzed by him, gay with electric lights. On the rear platform a string band played rag time of the newest and raggedest brand, and between the aisle and on the seats negro men and women were skylarking and yelling to friends and strangers along the sidewalk. The sawing bleat of the agonized bass fiddle cut through the onspeeding clamor, but the guitars could hardly be heard. A little further along, the old Judge had to skirt the curbing to find a clear way past a press of roystering darkies before a moving picture theatre where a horseshoe of incandescent glowed about a sign reading Colored People’s Night and a painted canvas banner made enthusiastic mention of the historic accuracies of a film dealing with The Battle of San Juan Hill, on exhibition within. The last of the rented livery rigs passed him, the lathered horse barely able to pluck a jog out of his stiff legs. Good natured smiling faces, brown, black, and yellow showed everywhere from under the brims of straw hats and above the neckbands of rumpled frocks of many colors. The Eighth of August still had its last hours to live and it was living them both high and fast.

When Judge Priest, proceeding steadily onward, came to where Clay Street was brooding, a dark narrow little thoroughfare, in the abundant covert of many trees, the tumult and the shouting were well dimmed in the distance behind him. He set his back to it all and turned into the by-street, an old tired man with lagging legs, and the shadows swallowed him up.

The Saturday Evening Post, 07 Sep 1912
Back Home (1912)

The Lord Provides

~

This story begins with Judge Priest sitting at his desk at his chambers at the old courthouse. I have a suspicion that it will end with him sitting there. As to that small detail I cannot at this time be quite positive. Man proposes, but facts will have their way.

If so be you have read divers earlier tales of my telling you already know the setting for the opening scene here. You are to picture first the big bare room, high-ceiled and square of shape, its plastering cracked and stained, its wall cases burdened with law books in splotched leather jerkins; and some of the books stand straight and upright, showing themselves to be confident of the rectitude of all statements made therein, and some slant over sideways against their fellows to the right or the left, as though craving confirmatory support for their contents.

Observe also the water bucket on the little shelf in the corner, with the gourd dipper hanging handily by; the art calendar, presented with the compliments of the Langstock Lumber Company, tacked against the door; the spittoon on the floor; the steel engraving of President Davis and his Cabinet facing you as you enter; the two wide windows opening upon the west side of the square; the woodwork, which is of white poplar, but grained by old Mr. Kane, our leading house, sign and portrait painter, into what he reckoned to be a plausible imitation of the fibrillar eccentricities of black walnut; and in the middle of all this, hunched down behind his desk like a rifleman in a pit, is Judge Priest, in a confusing muddle of broad, stooped shoulders, wrinkled garments and fat short legs.

Summertime would have revealed him clad in linen, or alpaca, or ample garments of homespun hemp, but this particular day, being a day in the latter part of October, Judge Priest’s limbs and body were clothed in woolen coverings. The first grate fire of the season burned in his grate. There was a local superstition current, to the effect that our courthouse was heated with steam. Years before, a bond issue to provide the requisite funds for this purpose had been voted after much public discussion pro and con. Thereafter, for a space, contractors and journeymen artisans made free of the building, to the great discomfort of certain families of resident rats, old settler rats really, that had come to look upon their cozy habitats behind the wainscoting as homes for life. Anon, iron pipes emerged at unexpected and jutting angles from the baseboards here and there, to coil in the corners or else to climb the walls, joint upon joint, and festoon themselves kinkily against the ceilings.

Physically the result was satisfying to the eye of the taxpayer; but if the main function of a heating plant be to provide heat, then the innovation might hardly be termed an unqualified success. Official dwellers of the premises maintained that the pipes never got really hot to the touch before along toward the Fourth of July, remaining so until September, when they began perceptibly to cool off again. Down in the cellar the darky janitor might feed the fire box until his spine cracked and the boilers seethed and simmered, but the steam somehow seemed to get lost in transit, manifesting itself on the floors above only in a metallic clanking and clacking, which had been known to seriously annoy lawyers in the act of offering argument to judge and jurors. When warmth was needed to dispel the chill in his own quarters, Judge Priest always had a fire kindled in the fireplace.

He had had one made and kindled that morning. All day the red coals had glowed between the chinks in the pot-bellied grate and the friendly flames had hummed up the flue, renewing neighborly acquaintance with last winter’s soot that made fringes on the blackened fire brick, so that now the room was in a glow. Little tiaras of sweat beaded out on the judge’s bald forehead as he labored over the papers in a certain case, and frequently he laid down his pen that he might use both hands, instead of his left only, to reach and rub remote portions of his person. Doing this, he stretched his arms until red strips showed below the ends of his wristbands. At a distance you would have said the judge was wearing coral bracelets.

The sunlight that had streamed in all afternoon through the two windows began to fade, and little shadows that stayed hidden through the day crawled under the door from the hall beyond and crept like timorous mice across the planking, ready to dart back the moment the gas was lit. Judge Priest strained to reach an especially itchy spot between his shoulder blades and addressed words to Jeff Poindexter, colored, his body servant and house boy.

“They ain’t so very purty to look at – red flannels ain’t,” said the judge. “But, Jeff, I’ve noticed this – they certainly are mighty lively company till you git used to ’em. I never am the least bit lonely fur the first few days after I put on my heavy underwear.”

There was no answer from Jeff except a deep, soft breath. He slept. At a customary hour he had come with Mittie May, the white mare, and the buggy to take Judge Priest home to supper, and had found the judge engaged beyond his normal quitting time. That, however, had not discommoded Jeff. Jeff always knew what to do with his spare moments. Jeff always had a way of spending the long winter evenings. He leaned now against a bookrack, with his elbow on the top shelf, napping lightly. Jeff preferred to sleep lying down or sitting down, but he could sleep upon his feet too – and frequently did.

Having, by brisk scratching movements, assuaged the irritation between his shoulder blades, the judge picked up his pen and shoved it across a sheet of legal cap that already was half covered with his fine, close writing. He never dictated his decisions, but always wrote them out by hand. The pen nib traveled along steadily for awhile. Eventually words in a typewritten petition that rested on the desk at his left caught the judge’s eye.

“Huh!” he grunted, and read the quoted phrase, “‘True Believers’ Afro-American Church of Zion, sometimes called—’” Without turning his head he again hailed his slumbering servitor: “Jeff, why do you’all call that there little church-house down by the river Possum Trot?”

Jeff roused and grunted, shaking his head clear of the lingering dregs of drowsiness.

“Suh?” he inquired. “Wuz you speakin’ to me, Jedge?”

“Yes, I was. Whut’s the reason amongst your people fur callin’ that little church down on the river front Possum Trot?”

Jeff chuckled an evasive chuckle before he made answer. For all the close relations that existed between him and his indulgent employer, Jeff had no intention of revealing any of the secrets of the highly secretive breed of humans to which he belonged. His is a race which, upon the surface of things, seems to invite the ridicule of an outer and a higher world, yet dreads that same ridicule above all things. Show me the white man who claims to know intimately the workings of his black servant’s mind, who professes to be able to tell anything of any negro’s lodge affiliations or social habits or private affairs, and I will show you a born liar.

Mightily well Jeff understood the how and the why and the wherefore of the derisive hate borne by the more orthodox creeds among his people for the strange new sect known as the True Believers. He could have traced out step by step, with circumstantial detail, the progress of the internal feud within the despised congregation that led to the upspringing of rival sets of claimants to the church property, and to the litigation that had thrown the whole tangled business into the courts for final adjudication. But except in company of his own choosing and his own color, wild horses could not have drawn that knowledge from Jeff, although it would have pained him to think any white person who had a claim upon his friendship suspected him of concealment of any detail whatsoever.

“He-he,” chuckled Jeff. “I reckin that’s jes’ nigger foolishness. Me, I don’ know no reason why they sh’d call a church by no sech a name as that. I ain’t never had no truck wid ’em ole True Believers, myse’f. I knows some calls ’em the Do-Righters, and some calls ’em the Possum Trotters.” His tone subtly altered to one of innocent bewilderment: “Whut you doin’, Jedge, pesterin’ yo’se’f wid sech low-down trash as them darkies is?”

Further discussion of the affairs of the strange faith that was divided against itself might have ensued but that an interruption came. Steps sounded in the long hallway that split the lower floor of the old courthouse lengthwise, and at a door – not Judge Priest’s own door but the door of the closed circuit-court chamber adjoining – a knocking sounded, at first gently, then louder and more insistent.

“See who ’tis out yonder, Jeff,” bade Judge Priest. “And ef it’s anybody wantin’ to see me I ain’t got time to see ’em without it’s somethin’ important. I aim to finish up this job before we go on home.”

He bent to his task again. But a sudden draft of air whisked certain loose sheets off his desk, carrying them toward the fireplace, and he swung about to find a woman in his doorway. She was a big, upstanding woman, overfleshed and overdressed, and upon her face she bore the sign of her profession as plainly and indubitably as though it had been branded there in scarlet letters.

The old man’s eyes narrowed as he recognized her. But up he got on the instant and bowed before her. No being created in the image of a woman ever had reason to complain that in her presence Judge Priest forgot his manners.

“Howdy do, ma’am,” he said ceremoniously. “Will you walk in? I’m sort of busy jest at present.”

“That’s what your nigger boy told me, outside,” she said; “but I came right on in anyway.”

“Ah-hah, so I observe,” stated Judge Priest dryly, but none the less politely; “mout I enquire the purpose of this here call?”

“Yes, sir; I’m a-goin’ to tell you what brought me here without wastin’ any more words than I can help,” said the woman. “No, thank you,’ Judge,” she went on as he motioned her toward a seat; “I guess I can say what I’ve got to say, standin’ up. But you set down, please, Judge.”

She advanced to the side of his desk as he settled back in his chair, and rested one broad flat hand upon the desk top. Three or four heavy, bejeweled bangles that were on her arm slipped down her gloved wrist with a clinking sound. Her voice was coarsened and flat; it was more like a man’s voice than a woman’s, and she spoke with a masculine directness.

“There was a girl died at my house early this mornin’,” she told him. “She died about a quarter past four o’clock. She had something like pneumonia. She hadn’t been sick but two days; she wasn’t very strong to start with anyhow. Viola St. Claire was the name she went by here. I don’t know what her real name was – she never told anybody what it was. She wasn’t much of a hand to talk about herself. She must have been nice people though, because she was always nice and ladylike, no matter what happened. From what I gathered off and on, she came here from some little town down near Memphis. I certainly liked that girl. She’d been with me nearly ten months. She wasn’t more than nineteen years old.

“Well, all day yestiddy she was out of her head with a high fever. But just before she died she come to and her mind cleared up. The doctor was gone – old Doctor Lake. He’d done all he could for her and he left for his home about midnight, leavin’ word that he was to be called if there was any change. Only there wasn’t time to call him; it all came so sudden.

“I was settin’ by her when she opened her eyes and whispered, sort of gaspin’, and called me by my name. Well, you could ’a’ knocked me down with a feather. From the time she started sinkin’ nobody thought she’d ever get her senses back. She called me, and I leaned over her and asked her what it was she wanted, and she told me. She knew she was dyin’. She told me she’d been raised right, which I knew already without her tellin’ me, and she said she’d been a Christian girl before she made her big mistake. And she told me she wanted to be buried like a Christian, from a regular church, with a sermon and flowers and music and all that. She made me promise that I’d see it was done just that way. She made me put my hand in her hand and promise her. She shut her eyes then, like she was satisfied, and in a minute or two after that she died, still holdin’ on tight to my hand. There wasn’t nobody else there – just me and her – and it was about a quarter past four o’clock in the mornin’.”

“Well, ma’am, I’m very sorry for that poor child. I am so,” said Judge Priest, and his tone showed he meant it; “yit still I don’t understand your purpose in comin’ to me, without you need money to bury her.” His hand went toward his flank, where he kept his wallet.

“Keep your hand out of your pocket, please, sir,” said the woman. “I ain’t callin’ on anybody for help in a money way. That’s all been attended to. I telephoned the undertaker the first thing this mornin’.

“It’s something else I wanted to speak with you about. Well, I didn’t hardly wait to get my breakfast down before I started off to keep my word to Viola. And I’ve been on the constant go ever since. I’ve rid miles on the street cars, and I’ve walked afoot until the bottoms of my feet both feel like boils right this minute, tryin’ to find somebody that was fitten to preach a sermon over that dead girl.

“First I made the rounds of the preachers of all the big churches. Doctor Cavendar was my first choice; from what I’ve heard said about him he’s a mighty good man. But he ain’t in town. His wife told me he’d gone off to district conference, whatever that is. So then I went to all the others, one by one. I even went ’way up on Alabama Street – to that there little mission church in the old Acme rink. The old man that runs the mission – I forget his name – he does a heap of work among poor people and down-and-out people, and I guess he might’ve said yes, only he’s right bad off himself. He’s sick in bed.”

She laughed mirthlessly.

“Oh, I went everywhere, I went to all of ’em. There was one or two acted like they was afraid I might soil their clothes if I got too close to ’em. They kept me standin’ in the doors of their studies so as they could talk back to me from a safe distance. Some of the others, though, asked me inside and treated me decent. But they every last one of ’em said no.”

“Do you mean to tell me that not a single minister in this whole city is willin’ to hold a service over that dead girl?” Judge Priest shrilled at her with vehement astonishment – and something else – in his voice.

“No, no, not that,” the woman made haste to explain. “There wasn’t a single one of ’em but said he’d come to my house and conduct the exercises. They was all willin’ enough to go to the grave too. But you see that wouldn’t do. I explained to ’em, until I almost lost my voice, that it had to be a funeral in a regular church, with flowers and music and all. That poor girl got it into her mind somehow, I think, that she’d have a better chance in the next world if she went out of this one like a Christian should ought to go. I explained all that to ’em, and from explainin’ I took to arguin’ with ’em, and then to pleadin’ and beggin’. I bemeaned myself before them preachers. I was actually ready to go down on my knees before ’em.

“Oh, I told ’em the full circumstances. I told ’em I just had to keep my promise. I’m afraid not to keep it. I’ve lived my own life in my own way and I guess I’ve got a lot of things to answer for. I ain’t worryin’ about that – now. But you don’t dare to break a promise that’s made to the dyin’. They come back and ha’nt you. I’ve always heard that and I know it’s true.

“One after another I told those preachers just exactly how it was, but still they all said no. Every one of ’em said his board of deacons or elders or trustees, or something like that, wouldn’t stand for openin’ up their church for Viola. I always thought a preacher could run his church to suit himself, but from what I’ve heard today I know now he takes his orders from somebody else. So finally, when I was about to give up, I thought about you and I come here as straight as I could walk.”

“But, ma’am,” he said, “I’m not a regular church member myself. I reckin I oughter be, but I ain’t. And I still fail to understand why you should think I could serve you, though I don’t mind tellin’ you I’d be mighty glad to ef I could.”

“I’ll tell you why. I never spoke to you but once before in my life, but I made up my mind then what kind of a man you was. Maybe you don’t remember it, Judge, but two years ago this comin’ December that there Law and Order League fixed up to run me out of this town. They didn’t succeed, but they did have me indicted by the Grand Jury, and I come up before you and pleaded guilty – they had the evidence on me all right. You fined me, you fined me the limit, and I guess if I hadn’t ’a’ had the money to pay the fine I’d ’a’ gone to jail. But the main point with me was that you treated me like a lady.

“I know what I am good and well, but I don’t like to have somebody always throwin’ it up to me. I’ve got feelin’s the same as anybody else has. You made that little deputy sheriff quit shovin’ me round and you called me Mizzis Cramp to my face, right out in court. I’ve been Old Mallie Cramp to everybody in this town so long I’d mighty near forgot I ever had a handle on my name, until you reminded me of it. You was polite to me and decent to me, and you acted like you was sorry to see a white woman fetched up in court, even if you didn’t say it right out. I ain’t forgot that. I ain’t ever goin’ to forget it. And awhile ago, when I was all beat out and discouraged, I said to myself that if there was one man left in this town who could maybe help me to keep my promise to that dead girl, Judge William Pitman Priest was the man. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, sorry fur you and sorry fur that dead child,” said Judge Priest slowly. “I wish I could help you. I wish I knew how to advise you. But I reckin those gentlemen were right in whut they said to you today. I reckin probably their elders would object to them openin’ up their churches, under the circumstances. And I’m mightily afraid I ain’t got any influence I could bring to bear in any quarter. Did you go to Father Minor? He’s a good friend of mine; we was soldiers together in the war – him and me. Mebbe—”

“I thought of him,” said the woman hopelessly; “but you see, Judge, Viola didn’t belong to his church. She was raised a Protestant, she told me so. I guess he couldn’t do nothin’.”

“Ah-hah, I see,” said the judge, and in his perplexity he bent his head and rubbed his broad expanse of pink bald brow fretfully, as though to stimulate thought within by friction without. His left hand fell into the litter of documents upon his desk. Absently his fingers shuffled them back and forth under his eyes. He straightened himself alertly.

“Was it stated – was it specified that a preacher must hold the funeral service over that dead girl?” he inquired.

The woman caught eagerly at the inflection that had come into his voice.

“No, sir,” she answered; “all she said was that it must be in a church and with some flowers and some music. But I never heard of anybody preachin’ a regular sermon without it was a regular preacher. Did you ever, Judge?” Doubt and renewed disappointment battered at her just-born hopes.

“I reckin mebbe there have been extraordinary occasions where an amateur stepped in and done the best he could,” said the judge. “Mebbe some folks here on earth couldn’t excuse sech presumption as that, but I reckin they’d understand how it was up yonder.”

He stood up, facing her, and spoke as one making a solemn promise:

“Ma’am, you needn’t worry yourself any longer. You kin go on back to your home. That dead child is goin’ to have whut she asked for. I give you my word on it.”

She strove to put a question, but he kept on: “I ain’t prepared to give you the full details yit. You see I don’t know myself jest exactly whut they’ll be. But inside of an hour from now I’ll be seein’ Jansen and he’ll notify you in regards to the hour and the place and the rest of it. Kin you rest satisfied with that?”

She nodded, trying to utter words and not succeeding. Emotion shook her gross shape until the big gold bands on her arms jangled together.

“So, ef you’ll kindly excuse me, I’ve got quite a number of things to do betwixt now and suppertime. I kind of figger I’m goin’ to be right busy.”

He stepped to the threshold and called out down the hallway, which by now was a long, dim tunnel of thickening shadows.

“Jeff, oh Jeff, where are you, boy?”

“Comin’, Jedge.”

The speaker emerged from the gloom that was only a few shades darker than himself.

“Jeff,” bade his master, “I want you to show this lady the way out – it’s black as pitch in that there hall. And, Jeff, listen here! When you’ve done that I want you to go and find the sheriff fur me. Ef he’s left his office – and I s’pose he has by now – you go on out to his house, or wherever he is, and find him and tell him I want to see him here right away.”

He swung his ponderous old body about and bowed with a homely courtesy:

“And now I bid you good night, ma’am.”

At the cross sill of the door she halted:

“Judge – about gettin’ somebody to carry the coffin in and out – did you think about that? She was such a little thing – she won’t be very heavy – but still, at that, I don’t know anybody – any men – that would be willin’——”

“Ma’am,” said Judge Priest gravely, “ef I was you I wouldn’t worry about who the pallbearers will be. I reckin the Lord will provide. I’ve took notice that He always does ef you’ll only meet Him halfway.”

For a fact the judge was a busy man during the hour which followed upon all this, the hour between twilight and night. Over the telephone he first called up M. Jansen, our leading undertaker; indeed at that time our only one, excusing the colored undertaker on Locust Street. He had converse at length with M. Jansen. Then he called up Doctor Lake, a most dependable person in sickness, and when you were in good health too. Then last of all he called up a certain widow who lived in those days, Mrs. Matilda Weeks by name; and this lady was what is commonly called, a character. In her case the title was just and justified. Of character she had more than almost anybody I ever knew.

Mrs. Weeks didn’t observe precedents. She made them. She cared so little for following after public opinion that public opinion usually followed after her – when it had recovered from the shock and reorganized itself. There were two sides to her tongue: for some a sharp and acid side, and then again for some a sweet and gentle side – and mainly these last were the weak and the erring and the shiftless, those underfoot and trodden down. Moving through this life in a calm, deliberative, determined way, always along paths of her making and her choosing, obeying only the beck of her own mind, doing good where she might, with a perfect disregard for what the truly good might think about it, Mrs. Weeks was daily guilty of acts that scandalized all proper people. But the improper ones worshipped the ground her feet touched as she walked. She was much like that disciple of Joppa named Tabitha, which by interpretation is called Dorcas, of whom it is written that she was full of good works and almsdeeds which she did. Yes, you might safely call Mrs. Weeks a character.

With her, back and forth across the telephone wire, Judge Priest had extended speech. Then he hung up the receiver and went home alone to a late and badly burnt supper. Aunt Dilsey Turner, the titular goddess of his kitchen, was a queen cook among cooks, but she could keep victuals hot without scorching them for just so long and no longer. She took pains to say as much, standing in the dining-room door with her knuckles on her hips. But the judge didn’t pay much attention to Aunt Dilsey’s vigorous remarks. He had other things on his mind.

Down our way this present generation has seen a good many conspicuous and prominent funerals. Until very recently we rather specialized in funerals. Before moving pictures sprang up so numerously funerals provided decorous and melancholy divertisement for many whose lives, otherwise, were rather aridly devoid of sources of inexpensive excitement. Among us were persons – old Mrs. Whitridge was a typical example – who hadn’t missed a funeral of any consequence for years and years back. Let someone else provide the remains, and they would assemble in such number as to furnish a gathering, satisfying in its size and solemn in its impressiveness. They took the run of funerals as they came. But there were some funerals which, having taken place, stood forth in the public estimation forever after as events to be remembered. They were mortuary milestones on the highway of community life.

For instance, those who were of suitable age to attend it are never going to forget the burial that the town gave lazy, loud-mouthed Lute Montjoy, he being the negro fireman on the ferryboat who jumped into the river that time, aiming to save the small child of a Hungarian immigrant family bound for somewhere up in the Cumberland on the steamer Goldenrod. The baby ran across the boiler deck and went overboard, and the mother screamed, and Lute saw what had happened and he jumped. He was a good swimmer all right, and in half a dozen strokes he reached the strangling mite in the water; but then the current caught him – the June rise was on – and sucked him downstream into the narrow, swirling place between the steamboat’s hull and the outside of the upper wharf boat, and he went under and stayed under.

Next morning when the dragnets caught and brought him up, one of his stiffened black arms still encircled the body of the white child, in a grip that could hardly be loosened. White and black, everybody turned out to bury Lute Montjoy. In the services at the church two of the leading clergymen assisted, turn and turn about; and at the graveside Colonel Horatio Farrell, dean of the local bar and the champion orator of seven counties, delivered an hour-long oration, calling Lute by such names as Lute, lying there cased in mahogany with silver trimmings, had never heard applied to him while he lived. Popular subscription provided the fund that paid for the stone to mark his grave and to perpetuate the memory of his deed. You can see the shaft to this day. It rises white and high among the trees in Elm Grove Cemetery, and the word Hero is cut deep in its marble face.

Then there was the funeral of old Mr. Simon Leatheritt, mightiest among local financiers. That, indeed, was a funeral to be cherished in the cranial memory casket of any person so favored by fortune as to have been present; a funeral that was felt to be a credit alike to deceased and to bereaved; a funeral that by its grandeur would surely have impressed the late and, in a manner of speaking, lamented Leatheritt, even though its cost would have panged him; in short, an epoch-making and an era-breeding funeral.

In the course of a long married career this was the widow’s first opportunity to cut loose and spend money without having to account for it by dollar, by dime and by cent to a higher authority, and she certainly did cut loose, sparing absolutely no pains in the effort to do her recent husband honor. At a cost calculated as running into three figures for that one item alone, she imported the prize male tenor of a St. Louis cathedral choir to enrich the proceedings with his glowing measures. This person, who was a person with eyes too large for a man and a mouth too small, rendered “Abide With Me” in a fashion so magnificent that the words were entirely indistinguishable and could not be followed on account of the genius’ fashion of singing them.

By express, floral offerings came from as far away as Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. One creation, sent on from a far distance, which displayed a stuffed white dove hovering, with the aid of wires, in the arc of a green trellis above a bank of white tuberoses, attracted much favorable comment. A subdued murmur of admiration, traveling onward from pew to pew, followed after it as the design was borne up the center aisle to the chancel rail. As for broken columns and flower pillows with appropriately regretful remarks let into them in purple immortelle letterings, and gates ajar – why, they were evident in a profusion almost past individual recording.

When the officiating minister, reading the burial service, got as far as “Dust to dust,” Ashby Corwin, who sat at the back of the church, bent over and whispered in the ear of his nearest neighbor: “Talk about your ruling passions! If that’s not old Uncle Sime all over – still grabbing for the dust!” As a rule, repetition of this sally about town was greeted with the deep hush of silent reproof. Our dead money-monarch’s memory was draped with the sanctity of wealth. Besides, Ash Corwin, as many promptly took pains to point out, was a person of no consequence whatsoever, financial or otherwise. Mrs. Whitridge’s viewpoint, as voiced by her in the months that followed, was the commoner one. This is Mrs. Whitridge speaking:

“I’ve been going to funerals steady ever since I was a child, I presume I’ve helped comfort more berefts by my presence and seen more dear departeds fittin’ly laid away than any person in this whole city. But if you’re asking me, I must say Mr. Leatheritt’s was the most fashionable funeral I ever saw, or ever hope to see. Everything that lavishness could do was done there, and all in such lovely taste, too! Why, it had style written all over it, especially the internment.”

Oh, we’ve had funerals and funerals down our way. But the funeral that took place on an October day that I have in mind still will be talked about long after Banker Leatheritt and the estate he reluctantly left behind him are but dim recollections. It came as a surprise to most people, for in the daily papers of that morning no customary black-bordered announcement had appeared. Others had heard of it by word of mouth. In dubious quarters, and in some quarters not quite so dubious, the news had traveled, although details in advance of the event were only to be guessed at. Anyhow, the reading and talking public knew this much: That a girl, calling herself Viola St. Claire and aged nineteen, had died. It was an accepted fact, naturally, that even the likes of her must be laid away after some fashion or other. If she were put under ground by stealth, clandestinely as it were, so much the better for the atmosphere of civic morality. That, I am sure, would have been disclosed as the opinion of a majority, had there been inquiry among those who were presumed to have and who admitted they had the best interests of the community at heart.

So you see a great many people were entirely unprepared against the coming of the pitiably short procession that at eleven o’clock, or thereabout, turned out of the little street running down back of the freight depot into Franklin Street, which was one of our main thoroughfares. First came the hearse, drawn by M. Jansen’s pair of dappled white horses and driven by M. Jansen himself, he wearing his official high hat and the span having black plumes in their head stalls, thus betokening a burial ceremony of the top cost. Likewise the hearse was M. Jansen’s best hearse – not his third best, nor yet his second best, but the splendid crystal-walled one that he ordered in the Eastern market after the relict of Banker Leatheritt settled the bill.

The coffin, showing through the glass sides, was of white cloth and it looked very small, almost like a coffin for a child. However, it may have looked so because there was little of its shape to be seen. It was covered and piled and banked up with flowers, and these flowers, strange to say, were not done into shapes of gates aswing; nor into shafts with their tops gone; nor into flat, stiff pillows of waxy-white tuberoses, pale and cold as the faces of the dead. These were such flowers as, in our kindly climate, grew out of doors until well on into November: late roses and early chrysanthemums, marigolds and gladioluses, and such. They lay there loosely, with their stems upon them, just as Mrs. Weeks had sheared them, denuding every plant and shrub and bush that grew in her garden, so a girl whom Mrs. Weeks had never seen might go to her grave with an abundance of the blossoms she had coveted about her.

Behind the hearse came a closed coach. We used to call them coaches when they figured in funerals, carriages when used for lodge turnouts, and plain hacks when they met the trains and boats. In the coach rode four women. The world at large had a way of calling them painted women; but this day their faces were not painted nor were they garishly clad. For the time they were merely women – neither painted women nor fallen women – but just women.

And that was nearly all, but not quite. At one side of the hearse, opposite the slowly turning front wheels, trudged Judge Priest, carrying in the crook of one bent arm a book. It wouldn’t be a law book, for they commonly are large books, bound in buff leather, and this book was small and flat and black in color. On the other side of the hearse, with head very erect and eyes fixed straight ahead and Sunday’s best coat buttoned tightly about his sparse frame, walked another old man, Doctor Lake.

And that was all. At least that was all at first. But as the procession – if you could call it that – swung into Franklin Street it passed by The Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant. In the doorway here lounged Perry Broadus, who drank. The night before had been a hard night upon Perry Broadus, whose nights always were hard, and it promised to be a hard day. He shivered at the touch of the clear, crisp air upon his flushed cheek and slanted for support against a handy doorpost of the Blue Jug. The hearse turned the corner, and he stared at it a moment and understood. He straightened his slouched shoulders, and the fog left his eyes and the fumes of staling alcohol quit his brain. He pulled off his hat, twisted his wreck of a necktie straight with a hand that shook and, cold sober, he ran out and caught step behind Judge Priest. Referring to pallbearers, Judge Priest had said the Lord would provide. But Perry Broadus provided himself.

I forget now who the next volunteer was, but I think possibly it was Sergeant Jimmy Bagby. Without waiting to analyze the emotions that possessed him in the first instant of realization, the sergeant went hurrying into the road to fall in, and never thereafter had cause to rue his impulse, his one regret being that he had no warning, else he would have slipped on his old, grey uniform coat that he reserved for high occasions. I know that Mr. Napoleon B. Crump, who was active in church and charities, broke away from two ladies who were discussing parish affairs with him upon the sidewalk in front of his wholesale grocery, and with never a word of apology to them slipped into line, with Doctor Lake for his file leader. A moment later, hearing footfalls at his back, Mr. Crump looked over his shoulder. Beck Giltner, a man whom Mr. Crump had twice tried to have driven out of town and whom he yet hoped to see driven out of town, was following, two paces behind him.

I know that Mr. Joe Plumm came, shirtsleeved, out of his cooper shop and sought a place with the others. I know that Major Fairleigh, who had been standing idly at the front window of his law office, emerged therefrom in such haste he forgot to bring his hat with him. Almost immediately the Major became aware that he was sandwiched in between the fat chief of the paid fire department and worthless Tip Murphy, who hadn’t been out of the penitentiary a month. I know that old Peter J. Galloway, the lame Irish blacksmith, wore his leather apron as he limped along, bobbing up on his good leg and down on his short bent one.

I know that Mr. Herman Felsburg brought with him four of the clerks of Felsburg Brothers’ Oak Hall Clothing Emporium. One of them left a customer behind, too, or possibly the customer also came. On second thought, I believe he did. I know that some men stood along the curbstones and stared and that other men, having first bared their heads, broke away to tail in at the end of the doubled lines of marching figures. And I know that of those who did this there were more than of those who merely stood and stared. The padding of shoe soles upon the gravel of the street became a steadily increasing, steadily rising thump-thump-thump; the rhythm of it rose above the creak and the clatter of the hearse wheels and the hoofs of the horses.

Lengthened and strengthened every few feet and every few yards by the addition of new recruits, the procession kept on. It trailed past shops and stores and jobbers’ houses. It traveled by the Y.M.C.A. and by Fraternity Hall. It threaded its way between rows of residences. It must have been two hundred strong when the hearse horses came abreast of that stately new edifice, with its fine memorial windows and its tall twin spires, which the darkies called the Big Rock Church. They didn’t stop here though. Neither did they stop at the old ivy-covered church farther along nor at the little red-brick church in the middle of the next block.

The procession kept on. Growing and still growing, it kept on. By now you might have counted in its ranks fit representatives of every grade and class, every cult and every creed to be found in the male population of our town. Old men and young men marched; bachelors and heads of families; rich men and poor; men who made public sentiment and men who defied it; strict churchgoers and avowed skeptics; men called good and men called bad. You might have ticked off almost any kind of man in that line. Possibly the Pharisees were missing and the Scribes were served only in the person of the editor of the Daily Evening News, who appeared well up toward the front of one of the files, with a forgotten cedar lead pencil riding in the crotch of his right ear. But assuredly the Publican was there, and the Sinner.

Heralded by the sound of its own thumping tread and leaving in its wake a stupefaction of astonishment, the procession kept straight on down Franklin Street, through the clear October sunshine and under the sentinel maples, which sifted down gentle showers of red and yellow leaves upon it. It kept on until it reached the very foot of the street. There it swung off at right angles into a dingy, ill-kempt little street that coursed crookedly along the water front, with poor houses rising upon one side and the raw mud banks of the river falling steeply away upon the other.

It followed this street until the head of it came opposite a little squat box-and-barn of a structure, built out of up-and-down planking; unpainted, too, with a slatted belfry, like an overgrown chicken coop, perched midway of the peak of its steeply pitched tin roof. Now this structure, as all knew who remembered the history of contemporary litigation as recorded in the local prints, was the True Believers’ Afro-American Church of Zion, sometimes termed in derision Possum Trot, being until recently the place of worship of that newest and most turbulent of local negro sects, but now closed on an injunction secured by one of the warring factions within its membership and temporarily lodged in the custody of the circuit court and in the hands of that court’s servant, the high sheriff, pending ultimate determination of the issue by his honor, the circuit judge. Technically it was still closed; legally and officially still in the firm grasp of Sheriff Giles Birdsong. Actually and physically it was at this moment open – wide open. The double doors were drawn back, the windows shone clean, and at the threshold of the swept and garnished interior stood Judge Priest’s Jeff, with his broom in his hand and his mop and bucket at his side. Jeff had concluded his share of the labors barely in time.

As M. Jansen steered his dappled span close up alongside the pavement and brought them to a standstill, Judge Priest looked back and with what he saw was well content. He knew that morbid curiosity might account for the presence of some among this multitude who had come following after him, but not for all, and perhaps not for very many. He nodded to himself with the air of one who is amply satisfied by the results of an accomplished experiment.

For the bearers of the dead he selected offhand the eight men who had marched nearest to him. As they lifted the coffin out from the hearse it befell that our most honored physician should have for his opposite our most consistent drunkard, and that Mr. Crump, who walked in straight and narrow paths, should rub elbows with Beck Giltner, whom upon any day in the year, save only this day, Mr. Crump would have rejoiced to see harried with hounds beyond the corporate limits.

Up the creaking steps and in between the lolling door-halves the chosen eight bore the dead girl, and right reverently they rested their burden on board trestles at the foot of the little box-pulpit, where shafts of sunshine, filtering through one of the small side windows, stencilled a checkered pattern of golden squares upon the white velvet box with its silver handles and its silver name plate. Behind the eight came others, bringing the flowers. It must have been years, I imagine, since the soiled hands of some of these had touched such gracious things as flowers, yet it was to transpire that none among them needed the help of any defter fingers. Upon the coffin and alongside it they laid down their arm loads, so that once more the narrow white box was almost covered under bloom and leaf; and then the yellow pencillings of sunlight made greater glory there than ever.

When the crowd was in and seated – all of it that could get in and get seated – a tall, white-haired woman in a plain black frock came silently and swiftly through a door at the back and sat herself down upon a red plush stool before a golden-oak melodeon. Stool and melodeon being both the property of the fractious True Believers, neglect and poor usage had wrought most grievously with the two of them. The stool stood shakily upon its infirm legs and within the melodeon the works were skewed and jangled. But Mrs. Matilda Weeks’ finger ends fell with such sanctifying gentleness upon the warped keys, and as she sang her sweet soprano rose so clearly and yet so softly, filling this place whose walls so often had resounded to the lusty hallelujahs of shouting black converts, that to those who listened now it seemed almost as though a Saint Cecelia had descended from on high to make this music. Mrs. Weeks sang a song that she had sung many a time before – for ailing paupers at the almshouse, for prisoners at the county jail, for the motley congregations that flocked to Sunday afternoon services in the little mission at the old Acme rink. And the name of the song was “Rock of Ages.”

She finished singing. Judge Priest got up from a front pew where he had been sitting and went and stood alongside the flower-piled coffin, with his back to the little yellow-pine pulpit and his prayer book in his hands, a homely, ungraceful figure, facing an assemblage that packed the darky meeting house until it could hold no more. In sight there were just five women: the good woman at the melodeon and four other women, dwellers beneath a sinful roof, who sat together upon what the pastor of the True Believers would have called the mourners’ bench. And all the rest were men. Men sat, row on row, in the pews; men stood in the single narrow aisle and against the walls round three sides of the building; and men appeared at the doorway and on beyond the doorway, upon the porch and the steps.

I deem it to have been characteristic of the old judge that he made no explanation for his presence before them and no apology for his assumption of a rôle so unusual. He opened his black-bound volume at a place where his plump forefinger had been thrust between the leaves to mark the place for him, and in his high, thin voice he read through the service for the dead, with its promise of the divine forgiveness. When he had reached the end of it he put the book aside, and spoke to them in the fair and grammatical English that usually he reserved for his utterances from the bench in open court:

“Our sister who lies here asked with almost her last conscious breath that at her funeral a sermon should be preached. Upon me, who never before attempted such an undertaking, devolves the privilege of speaking a few words above her. I had thought to take for my text the words: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’

“But I have changed my mind. I changed it only a little while ago. For I recalled that once on a time the Master said: ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.’ And I believe, in the scheme of everlasting mercy and everlasting pity, that before the eyes of our common Creator we are all of us as little children whose feet stumble in the dark. So I shall take that saying of the Savior for my text.”

Perhaps it would be unjust to those whose business is the preaching of sermons to call this a sermon. I, for one, never heard any other sermon in any other church that did not last longer than five minutes. And certainly Judge Priest, having made his beginning, did not speak for more than five minutes; the caressing fingers of the sunlight had not perceptibly shifted upon the flower-strewn coffin top when he finished what he had to say and stood with his head bowed. After that, except for a rustle of close-packed body and a clearing of men’s huskened throats, there was silence for a little time.

Then Judge Priest’s eyes looked about him and three pews away he saw Ashby Corwin. It may have been he remembered that as a young man Ashby Corwin had been destined for holy orders until another thing – some said it was a woman and some said it was whisky, and some said it was first the woman and then the whisky – came into his life and wrecked it so that until the end of his days Ashby Corwin trod the rocky downhill road of the profligate and the waster. Or it may have been the look he read upon the face of the other that moved Judge Priest to say:

“I will ask Mr. Corwin to pray.”

At that Ashby Corwin stood up in his place and threw back his prematurely whitened head, and he lifted his face that was all scarified with the blighting flames of dissipation, and he shut his eyes that long since had wearied of looking upon a trivial world, and Ashby Corwin prayed. There are prayers that seem to circle round and round in futile rings, going nowhere; and then again there are prayers that are like sparks struck off from the wheels of the prophet’s chariot of fire, coursing their way upward in spiritual splendor to blaze on the sills of the Judgment Seat. This prayer was one of those prayers.

After that Judge Priest bowed his head again and spoke the benediction.

•     •     •     •     •

It turns out that I was right a while back when I predicted this chapter of this book might end with Judge Priest sitting at his desk in his room at the old courthouse. On the morning of the day following the day of this funeral he sat there, putting the last words to his decision touching upon the merits of the existing controversy in the congregation of the True Believers’ Afro-American Church of Zion. The door opened and in walked Beck Giltner, saloon keeper, sure-thing gambler, handy-man-with-a-gun, and, according to the language of a resolution unanimously adopted at a mass meeting of the Law and Order League, force-for-evil.

Beck Giltner was dressed in his best. He wore his wide-brimmed, black soft hat, with its tall crown carefully dented in, north, east, south and west; his long black coat; his white turn-down collar; his white lawn tie; and in the bosom of his plaited shirt of fine white linen his big diamond pin, that was shaped like an inverted banjo. This was Beck Giltner’s attire for the street and for occasions of ceremony. Indoors it was the same, except that sometimes he took the coat off and turned back his shirt cuffs.

“Good mornin’, Beck,” said the judge. “Well?”

“Judge Priest,” said Giltner, “as a rule I don’t come to this courthouse except when I have to come. But today I’ve come to tell you something. You made a mistake yesterday!”

“A mistake, suh?” The judge’s tone was sharp and quick.

“Yes, suh, that’s what you did,” returned the tall gambler. “I don’t mean in regards to that funeral you held for that dead girl. You probably don’t care what I think one way or the other, but I want to tell you I was strong for that, all the way through. But you made a mistake just the same, Judge; you didn’t take up a collection.

“It had been a good many years since I was inside of a church, until I walked with you and the others to that little nigger meetin’-house yesterday – forty-odd years I reckon; not since I was a kid, anyway. But to the best of my early recollections they always took a collection for something or other every time I did go to church. And yesterday you overlooked that part altogether.

“So last night I took it on myself to get up a collection for you. I started it with a bill or so off my own roll. Then I passed the hat round at several places where you wouldn’t scarcely care to go yourself. And I didn’t run across a single fellow that failed to contribute. Some of ’em don’t move in the best society, and there’s some more of ’em that you’d only know of by reputation. But every last one of ’em put in something. There was one man that didn’t have only seven cents to his name – he put that in. So here it is – four hundred and seventy-five dollars and forty-two cents, accordin’ to my count.”

From one pocket he fetched forth a rumpled packet of paper money and from the other a small cloth sack, which gave off metallic clinking sounds. He put them down together on the desk in front of Judge Priest.

“I appreciate this, ef I am right in my assumption of the motives which actuated you and the purposes to which you natchelly assumed this here money would be applied,” said Judge Priest as the other man waited for his response. “But, son, I can’t take your money. It ain’t needed. Why, I wouldn’t know whut to do with it. There ain’t no out-standin’ bills connected with that there funeral. All the expense entailed was met – privately. So you see—”

“Wait just a minute before you say no!” interrupted Giltner. “Here’s my idea and it’s the idea of all the others that contributed: We-all want you to take this money and keep it – keep it in a safe, or in your pocket, or in the bank to your credit, or anywheres you please, but just keep it. And if any girl that’s gone wrong should die and not have any friends to help bury her, they can come to you and get the cash out of this fund to pay for puttin’ her away. And if any other girl should want to go back to her people and start in all over again and try to lead a better life, why you can advance her the railroad fare out of that money too. You see, Judge, we are aimin’ to make a kind of a trust fund out of it, with you as the trustee. And when the four seventy-five forty-two is all used up, if you’ll just let me know I’ll guarantee to rustle up a fresh bank roll so you’ll always have enough on hand to meet the demands. Now then, Judge, will you take it?”

Judge Priest took it. He stretched out and scooped in currency and coin sack, using therefor his left hand only. The right was engaged in reaching for Beck Giltner’s right hand, the purpose being to shake it.

The Saturday Evening Post, 09 Oct 1915
Old Judge Priest (1916)

A Blending of the Parables

~

Nearly every week – weather permitting – the old judge went to dinner somewhere. To a considerable extent he kept up his political fences going to dinners. Usually it was of a Sunday that he went.

By ten o’clock almost any fair Sunday morning – spring, summer or early fall – Judge Priest’s Jeff would have the venerable side-bar buggy washed down, and would be leading forth from her stall the ancient white lady-sheep, with the unmowed fetlocks and the intermittent mane, which the judge, from a spirit of prideful affection, and in the face of all visual testimony to the contrary, persisted in regarding as an authentic member of the equine kingdom.

Presently, in their proper combination and alignment, the trio would be stationed at the front gate, thus: Jeff in front, bracing the forward section of the mare-creature; and the buggy behind, its shafts performing a similar office for the other end of this unique quadruped. Down the graveled walk that led from the house, under the water maples and silver-leaf poplars, which arched over to make a shady green tunnel of it, the judge would come, immaculate but rumply in white linens. The judge’s linens had a way of getting themselves all rumpled even before he put them on. You might say they were born rumpled.

Beholding his waddlesome approach out of the tail of her eye, the white animal would whinny a dignified and conservative welcome. She knew her owner almost as well as he knew her. Then, while Jeff held her head – that is to say, held it up – the old man would heave his frame ponderously in and upward between the dished wheels and settle back into the deep nest of the buggy, with a wheeze to which the agonized rear springs wheezed back an anthem like refrain.

“All right, Jeff!” the judge would say, bestowing his cotton umbrella and his palm-leaf fan in their proper places, and working a pair of wrinkled buckskin gloves on over his chubby hands. “I won’t be back, I reckin, till goin’ on six o’clock this evenin’, and I probably won’t want nothin’ then fur supper except a cold snack. So if you and Aunt Dilsey both put out from the house fur the day be shore to leave the front-door key under the front-door mat, where I kin find it in case I should git back sooner’n I expect. And you be here in due time yourse’f, to unhitch. Hear me, boy?”

“Yas, suh,” Jeff would respond. “I hears you.”

“All right, then!” his employer would command as he gathered up the lines. “Let loose of Mittie May.”

Conforming with the accepted ritual of the occasion, Jeff would let loose of Mittie May and step ceremoniously yet briskly aside, as though fearing instant annihilation in the first resistless surge of a desperate, untamable beast. Judge Priest would slap the leathers down on Mittie May’s fat back; and Mittie May, sensing the master touch on those reins, would gather her four shaggy legs together with apparent intent of bursting into a mad gallop, and then, ungathering them, step out in her characteristic gentle amble, a gait she never varied under any circumstances. Away they would go, then, with the dust splashing up from under Mittie May’s flat and deliberative feet, and the loose rear curtain of the buggy flapping and slapping behind like a slatting sail.

Jeff would stand there watching them until they had faded away in the deeper dust where Clay Street merged, without abrupt transition, into a winding country road; and, knowing the judge was definitely on his way, Jeff would be on his way, too, but in a different direction. Of his own volition Jeff never fared countryward on Sundays. Green fields and running brooks laid no spell of allurement on his nimble fancy. He infinitely preferred metropolitan haunts and pastimes – such, for instance, as promenades along the broken sidewalks of the Plunkett’s Hill section and crap games behind the colored undertaker’s shop on Locust Street.

The judge’s way would be a pleasant way – a peaceful, easy way, marked only by small disputes at each crossroads junction, Mittie May desiring always to take the turn that would bring them back home by the shortest route, and the judge stubborn in his intention of pushing further on. The superior powers of human obstinacy having triumphed over four-legged instinct, they would proceed. Now they would clatter across a wooden bridge spanning a sluggish amber-colored stream, where that impertinent bird, the kingfisher, cackled derisive imitations of the sound given off by the warped axles of the buggy, and the yonkerpins – which Yankees, in their ignorance, have called water lilies – spread their wide green pads and their white-and-yellow cusps of bloom on the face of the creek water.

Now they would come to cornfields and tobacco patches that steamed in the sunshine, conceding the season to be summer; or else old, abandoned clearings, grown up rankly in shoe-make bushes and pawpaw and persimmon and sassafras. And the pungent scent of the wayside pennyroyal would rise like an incense, saluting their nostrils as they passed, and the grassy furrows of long-harvested grain crops were like the lines of graves on old battlegrounds.

Now they would come into the deep woods; and here the sunlight sifted down through the tree tops, making cathedral aisles among the trunks and dim green cloisters of the thickets; and in small open spaces the yellowing double prongs of the mullein stalks stood up stiff and straightly like two-tined altar candles. Then out of the woods again and along a stretch of blinding hot road, with little grey lizards racing on the decayed fence rails as outriders, and maybe a pair of those old red-head peckerwoods flickering on from snag to snag just ahead, keeping company with the judge, but never quite permitting him to catch up with them.

So, at length, after five miles, or maybe ten, he would come to his destination, which might be a red-brick house set among apple trees on a low hill, or a whitewashed double cabin of logs in a bare place down in the bottoms. Here, at their journey’s end, they would halt, with Mittie May heaving her rotund sides in and out in creditable simulation of a thoroughbred finishing a hard race; and Judge Priest would poke his head out from under the buggy hood and utter the customary hail of “Hello the house!” At that, nine times out of ten – from under the house and from round behind it – would boil a black-and-tan ground swell of flap-eared, bugle-voiced hound dogs, all tearing for the gate, with every apparent intention of devouring horse and harness, buggy and driver, without a moment’s delay. And behind them, in turn, a shirt-sleeved man would emerge from the shelter of the gallery and hurry down the path toward the fence, berating the belling pack at every step he took:

“You Sounder, you Ring, you Queen – consarn your mangy pelts! Go on back yonder where you belong! You Saucer – come on back here and behave yourse’f! I bet I take a chunk some of these days and knock your fool head off!”

As the living wave of dogs parted before his advance and his threats, and broke up and turned about and vanished with protesting yelps, the shirt-sleeved one, recognizing Mittie May and the shape of the buggy, would speak a greeting something after this fashion:

“Well, suh – ef it ain’t Jedge Priest! Jedge, suh, I certainly am proud to see you out this way. We was beginnin’ to think you’d furgot us – we was, fur a fact!”

Over his shoulder he would single out one of a cluster of children who magically appeared on the gallery steps, and bid Tennessee or Virgil or Dora-Virginia or Albert-Sidney, as the name of the chosen youngster might be, to run and tell their ma that Judge Priest had come to stay for dinner. For the judge never sent any advance notice of his intention to pay a Sunday visit; neither did he wait for a formal invitation. He just dropped in, being assured of a welcome under any rooftree, great or humble, in his entire judicial district.

Shortly thereafter the judge, having been welcomed in due state, and provision made for Mittie May’s stabling and sustenance, would be established on the gallery in the rocking-chair of honor, which was fetched out from the parlor for his better comfort. First, a brimming gourd of fresh spring water would be brought, that he might take the edge off his thirst and flush the dust out of his throat and moisten up his palate; and then would follow a certain elaborated rite in conjunction with sundry sprigs of young mint and some powdered sugar and outpourings of the red-brown contents of a wicker demijohn.

Very possibly a barefooted and embarrassed namesake would be propelled forward, by parental direction, to shake hands with the guest; for, except old Doctor Saunders, Judge Priest had more children named for him than anybody in our county. And very probably there would come to his ears from somewhere rearward the frenzied clamor of a mighty barnyard commotion – squawkings and cacklings and flutterings – closely followed by the poignant wails of a pair of doomed pullets, which grew fainter and fainter as the captives were borne to the sacrificial block behind the woodpile – certain signs, all these, that if fried chicken had not been included in the scope and plan of Sunday dinner, fried chicken would now be, most assuredly.

When dinner was over, small messengers would be sent up the road and down to spread the word; and various oldsters of the vicinity would leave their own places to foregather in the dooryard of the present host and pass the time of day with Judge Priest. Sooner or later, somehow, the talk would work backward to war times. Overhearing what passed to and fro, a stranger might have been pardoned for supposing that it was only the year before, or at most two years before, when the Yankees came through under Grant; while Forrest’s Raid was spoken of as though it had taken place within the current month.

Anchored among the ancients the old judge would sit, doing his share of the talking and more than his share of the listening; and late in the afternoon, when the official watermelon, all dripping and cool, had been brought forth from the springhouse, and the shadows were beginning to stretch themselves slantwise across the road, as though tired out completely by a hard day’s work in the broiling sun, he and Mittie May would jog back toward town, meeting many an acquaintance on the road, but rarely passing one. And the upshot would be that at the next Democratic primary the opposing candidate for circuit judge – if there was any opposing candidate – got powerfully few votes out of that neighborhood.

Such Sunday excursions as these and such a Sunday dinner as this typical one formed a regular part of Judge Priest’s weekly routine through at least nine months of the year. If unforeseen events conspired to rob him of his trip to the country he felt the week had not rightly rounded itself out; but once a year he attended a dinner beside which all other dinner occasions were, in his estimation, as nothing at all. With regard to this particular affair, he used to say it took him a week to get primed and ready for it, one whole night to properly enjoy it, and another week to recover from the effects of it. I am speaking now of the anniversary banquet of the survivors of Company B – first and foremost of the home companies – which was and still is held always on a given date and at a given place, respectively, to wit: The evening of the twelfth of May and the dining room of the Richland House.

Company B held the first of its annual dinners at the Richland House away back in ’66. That time sixty and more men – young men, mostly, in their mid-twenties and their early thirties – sat down together to meat and drink, and no less a personage than General Grider presided – that same Meriwether Grider who, going out in the first year of the war as company commander, came back after the Surrender, bringing with him the skeleton remnants of a battered and a shattered brigade.

General Meriwether Grider has been dead this many a year now. He gave his life for the women and the children when the Belle of the Bends burned up at Cottonwood Bar; and that horror befell so long ago that the present generation down our way knows it only as a thing of which those garrulous and tiresome creatures, the older inhabitants, are sometimes moved to speak. But the rules for the regulation and conduct of subsequent banquets which were adopted on that long-ago night, when the general sat at the head of the table, hold good, even though all else in our town has changed.

Of the ardent and youthful sixty-odd who dined with him then, a fading and aging and sorely diminished handful is left. Some in the restless boom days of the eighties moved away to other and brisker communities, and some have marched down the long, lone road that leads to a far country. Yet it abides as a bylaw and a precedent that only orthodox members of the original company shall have covers and places provided for them when anniversary night rolls round. The Richland House – always – must be the place of dining; this, too, in spite of the fact that the Richland House has been gnawed by the tooth of time into a shabby old shell, hardly worthy to be named in the same printed page with the smart Hotel Moderne – strictly European plan; rates, three dollars a day and upward – which now figures as our leading hotel.

Near the conclusion of the feast, when the cloth has been cleared of the dishes and only the glasses are left, the roll is called by the acting top-sergeant – cholera having taken off the real top-sergeant in ’75. Those who are present answer for themselves, and for those who are absent some other voice answers. And then at the very last, after the story-telling is done, they all stand and drink to Company B – its men, its memories, its most honorable record, and its most honorable dead.

They tell me that this last May just seven met on the evening of the twelfth to sit beneath the crossed battle-flags in the Richland House dining room, and that everything was over and done with long before eleven o’clock. But the annual dinner which I especially have in mind to describe here took place on a somewhat more remote twelfth of May, when Company B still might muster better than the strength of a corporal’s guard. If I remember correctly, eighteen grizzled survivors were known to be alive that year.

In saying that, though, I would not have you infer that there were no more than eighteen veterans in our town. Why, in those times there must have been two hundred easily. Gideon K. Irons Camp could turn out upward of a hundred members in good standing for any large public occasion; but you understand this was a dinner limited to Company B alone, which restriction barred out a lot of otherwise highly desirable individuals.

It barred out Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, for the sergeant had served with King’s Hellhounds; and Captain Shelby Woodward, who belonged to the Orphan Brigade, as you would have learned for yourself at first hand had you ever enjoyed as much as five minutes of uninterrupted conversation with the captain; and Mr. Wolfe Hawley, our leading grocer, who was a gunner in Lyon’s Battery – and many another it barred out. Indeed, Father Minor got in only by the skin of his teeth. True enough he was a Company B man at the beginning; but he transferred early to another branch of the service and for most of the four years he rode with Morgan’s men.

The committee in charge looked for a full attendance. It was felt that this would be one of the most successful dinners of them all. Certainly it would be by long odds the best advertised. It would seem that the Sunday editor of the Courier-Journal, while digging through his exchanges, came on a preliminary announcement in the columns of the Daily Evening News, which was our home paper; and, sensing a feature story in it, he sent one of his young men down from Louisville to spend two days among us, compiling facts, names and photographs. The young man did a page spread in the Sunday Courier-Journal, thereby unconsciously enriching many family scrapbooks in our town.

This was along toward the middle of April. Following it, one of the Eastern syndicates rewrote the piece and mailed it out to its constituent papers over the country. The Associated Press saw fit to notice it too; and after that the tale got into the boiler-plate shops – which means it got into practically all the smaller weeklies that use patent insides. It must have been a strictly non-newspaper-reading community of this nation which did not hear that spring about the group of old soldiers who for forty years without a break had held a dinner once a year with no outsiders present, and who were now, for the forty-first time, about to dine again.

Considering this publicity and all, the committee naturally counted on a fairly complete turnout. To be sure, Magistrate Matt Dallam, out in the country, could not hope to be present except in the spirit, he having been bedridden for years. Garnett Hinton, the youngest enlisted member of Company B, was in feeble health away off yonder in the Panhandle of Texas. It was not reasonable to expect him to make the long trip back home. On the tenth Mr. Napoleon B. Crump was called to Birmingham, Alabama, where a ne’er-do-well son-in-law had entangled himself in legal difficulties, arising out of a transaction involving a dubious check, with a yet more dubious signature on it. He might get back in time – and then again he might not.

On the other hand, Second Lieutenant Charley Garrett wrote up from his plantation down in Mississippi that he would attend if he had to walk – a mere pleasantry of speech, inasmuch as Lieutenant Garrett had money enough to charter for himself a whole railroad train should he feel so inclined. And, from his little farm in Mims County, Chickasaw Reeves sent word he would be there, too, no matter what happened. The boys could count on him, he promised.

Tallying up twenty-four hours or so ahead of the big night, the arrangements committee, consisting of Doctor Lake, Professor Lycurgus Reese and Mr. Herman Felsburg, made certain of fifteen diners, and possibly sixteen, and gave orders accordingly to the proprietor of the Richland House; but Mr. Nap Crump was detained in Birmingham longer than he had expected, and Judge Priest received from Lieutenant Charley Garrett a telegram reading as follows:

“May the Lord be with you! – because I can’t. Rheumatism in that game leg of mine, ——— ——— it!”

The excisions, it developed, were the work of the telegraph company.

Then, right on top of this, another disappointment piled itself – I have reference now to the sudden and painful indisposition of Chickasaw Reeves. Looking remarkably hale and hearty, considering his sixty-eight years, Mr. Reeves arrived in due season on the eleventh, dressed fit to kill in his Sunday best and a turndown celluloid collar and a pair of new shoes of most amazing squeakiness. After visiting, in turn, a considerable number of old friends and sharing, with such as them as were not bigoted, the customary and appropriate libations, he dropped into Sherill’s Bar at a late hour of the evening for a nightcap before retiring.

At once his fancy was drawn to a milk punch, the same being a pleasant compound to which he had been introduced an hour or so earlier. This milk punch seemed to call for another, and that one for still another. As the first deep sip of number three creamily saluted his palate, Mr. Reeves’ eyes, over the rim of the deep tumbler, fell on the free lunch displayed at the far end of the bar. He was moved to step down that way and investigate.

The milk punches probably would not have mattered – or the cubes of brick cheese, or the young onions, or the pretzels, or the pickled beets and pigs’ feet. Mr. Reeves’ seasoned and dependable gastric processes were amply competent to triumph over any such commonplace combination of food and drink. Undoubtedly his undoing was directly attributable to a considerable number of little slickery fish, belonging, I believe, to the pilchard family – that is to say, they are pilchards while yet they do swim and disport themselves hither and yon in their native element; but when caught and brined and spiced and oiled, and put in cans for the export trade, they take on a different name and become, commercially speaking, something else.

Mr. Reeves did not notice them at first. He had sampled one titbit and then another; finally his glance was arrested by a dish of these small, dainty appearing creatures. A tentative nibble at the lubricated tail of a sample specimen reassured him as to the gastronomic excellence of the novelty. He stayed right there until the dish was practically empty. Then, after one more milk punch, he bade the barkeeper good night and departed.

Not until three o’clock the following afternoon was Mr. Reeves able to receive any callers – except only Doctor Lake, whose visits until that hour had been in a professional rather than in a social capacity. Judge Priest, coming by invitation of the sufferer, found Mr. Reeves’ room at the hotel redolent with the atmospheres of bodily distress. On the bed of affliction by the window was stretched the form of Mr. Reeves. He was not exactly pale, but he was as pale as a person of Mr. Reeves’ habit of life could be and still retain the breath of life.

“Well, Chickasaw, old feller,” said Judge Priest, “how goes it? Feelin’ a little bit easier than you was, ain’t you?”

The invalid groaned emptily before answering in wan and wasted-away tone.

“Billy,” he said, “ef you could ’a’ saw me ’long ’bout half past two this mornin’, when she first come on me, you’d know better’n to ask sech a question as that. First, I wuz skeered I wuz goin’ to die. And then after a spell I wuz skeered I wusn’t. I reckin there ain’t nobody nowheres that ever had ez many diff’runt kinds of cramps ez me and lived to tell the tale.”

“That’s too bad,” commiserated the judge. “Was it somethin’ you et or somethin’ you drunk?”

“I reckin it wuz a kind of a mixture of both,” admitted Mr. Reeves. “Billy, did you ever make a habit of imbibin’ these here milk punches?”

“Well, not lately,” said Judge Priest.

“Well, suh,” stated Mr. Reeves, “you’d be surprised to know how tasty they kin make jest plain ordinary cow’s milk ef they take and put some good red licker and a little sugar in it, and shake it all up together, and then sift a little nutmaig seasonin’ onto it – you would so! But, after you’ve drunk maybe three-four, I claim you have to be sorter careful ’bout whut you put on top of ’em. I’ve found that much out.

“I reckin it serves me right, though. A country-jake like me oughter know better’n to come up here out of the sticks and try to gormandize hisse’f on all these here fancy town vittles. It’s all right, mebbe, fur you city folks; but my stomach ain’t never been educated up to it. Hereafter I’m a-goin’ to stick to hawg jowl and cawn pone, and things I know ’bout. You hear me – I’m done! I’ve been cured.

“And specially I’ve been cured in regards to these here little pizenous fishes that look somethin’ like sardeens, and yit they ain’t sardeens. I don’t know what they call ’em by name; but it certainly oughter be ag’inst the law to leave ’em settin’ round on a snack counter where folks kin git to ’em. Two or three of ’em would be dangerous, I claim – and I must ’a’ et purty nigh a whole school.”

Again Mr. Reeves moaned reminiscently.

“Well, from the way you feel now, does it look like you’re goin’ to be able to come to the blow-out tonight?” inquired Judge Priest. “That’s the main point. The boys are all countin’ on you, Chickasaw.”

“Billy,” bemoaned Mr. Reeves, “I hate it mightily; but even ef I wuz able to git up – which I ain’t – and git my clothes on and git down to the Richland House, I wouldn’t be no credit to yore party. From the way I feel now, I don’t never ag’in want to look vittles in the face so long ez I live. And, furthermore, ef they should happen to have a mess of them there little greasy minners on the table I know I’d be a disgrace to myse’f right then and there. No, Billy; I reckin I’d better stay right where I am.”

Thus it came to pass that, when the members of Company B sat down together in the decorated dining room of the Richland House at eight o’clock that evening, the chair provided for Mr. Chickasaw Reeves made a gap in the line. Judge Priest was installed in the place of honor, where Lieutenant Garrett, by virtue of being ranking surviving officer, would have enthroned himself had it not been for that game leg of his. From his seat at the head, the judge glanced down the table and decided in his own mind that, despite absentees, everything was very much as it should be. At every plate was a little flag showing, on a red background, a blue St. Andrew’s cross bearing thirteen stars. At every plate, also, was a tall and aromatic toddy. Cocktails figured not in the dinner plans of Company B; they never had and they never would.

At the far end from him was old Press Harper. Once it had been Judge Priest’s most painful duty to sentence Press Harper to serve two years at hard labor in the state prison. To be sure, circumstances, which have been detailed elsewhere, interfered to keep Press Harper from serving all or any part of his punishment; nevertheless, it was the judge who had sentenced him. Now, catching the judge’s eye, old Press waved his arm at him in a proud and fond greeting.

Father Minor beamingly faced Squire Futrell, whose Southern Methodism was of the most rigid and unbendable type. Professor Reese, principal of the grade school, touched elbows with Jake Smedley, color bearer of the Camp, who just could make out to write his own name. Peter J. Galloway, the lame blacksmith, who most emphatically was Irish, had a caressing arm over the stooped shoulder of Mr. Herman Felsburg, who most emphatically was not. Doctor Lake, his own pet crony in a town where everybody, big and little, was his crony in some degree, sat one seat removed from the judge, with the empty chair of the bedfast Chickasaw Reeves in between them, and so it went.

Even in the matter of the waiters an ancient and a hallowed sentiment ruled. Behind Judge Priest, and swollen as with a dropsy by pomp of pride and vanity, stood Uncle Zach Mathews, a rosewood-colored person, whose affection for the Cause that was lost had never been questioned – even though Uncle Zach, after confusing military experiences, emerged from the latter end of the conflict as cook for a mess of Union officers and now drew his regular quarterly pension from a generous Federal Government.

Flanking Uncle Zach, both with napkins draped over their arms, both awaiting the word from him to bring on the first course, were posted – on the right, Tobe Emery, General Grider’s one-time body servant; on the left, Uncle Ike Copeland, a fragile, venerable ex-human chattel, who might almost claim to have seen actual service for the Confederacy. No ordinary darkies might come to serve when Company B foregathered at the feast.

Uncle Zach, with large authority, had given the opening order, and at the side tables a pleasing clatter of china had arisen, when Squire Futrell put down his glass and rose, with a startled look on his face.

“Looky here, boys!” he exclaimed. “This won’t never do! Did you fellers know there wuz thirteen at the table?”

Sure enough, there were!

It has been claimed – perhaps not without color of plausibility – that Southerners are more superstitious than Northerners. Assuredly the Southerners of a generation that is almost gone now uniformly nursed their private beliefs in charms, omens, spells, hoodoos and portents. As babies many of them were nursed, as boys all of them were played with, by members of the most superstitious race – next to actors – on the face of creation. An actor of Ethiopian descent should by rights be the most superstitious creature that breathes the air of this planet, and doubtlessly is.

No one laughed at Squire Futrell’s alarm over his discovery. Possibly excusing Father Minor, it is probable that all present shared it with him. As for Uncle Zach Mathews and his two assistants, they froze with horror where they had halted, their loaded trays poised on their arms. But they did not freeze absolutely solid – they quivered slightly.

“Law-zee!” gasped Uncle Zach, with his eyeballs rolling. “Dinner can’t go no fur’der twell we gits somebody else in or meks somebody leave and go ’way – dat’s sartain shore! Whee! We kin all thank Our Maker dat dey ain’t been nary bite et yit.”

“Amen to dat, Brer Zach!” muttered Ike shakily; and dumbly Tobe Emery nodded, stricken beyond power of speech by the nearness of a barely averted catastrophe fraught with disaster, if not with death itself.

Involuntarily Judge Priest had shoved his chair back; most of the others had done the same thing. He got on his feet with alacrity.

“Boys,” he said, “the squire is right – there’s thirteen of us. Now whut d’ye reckin we’re goin’ to do ’bout that?”

The natural suggestion would be that they send at once for another person. Three or four offered it together, their voices rising in a babble. Names of individuals who would make congenial table mates were heard. Among others, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby was spoken of; likewise Colonel Cope and Captain Woodward. But Judge Priest shook his head.

“I can’t agree with you-all,” he set forth. “By the time we sent clean uptown and rousted one of them boys out, the vittles would all be cold.”

“Well, Billy,” demanded Doctor Lake, “what are you going to do, then? We can’t go ahead this way, can we? Of course I don’t believe in all this foolishness about signs myself; but—” he added— “but I must admit to a little personal prejudice against thirteen at the table.”

“Listen here, you boys!” said Judge Priest. “Ef we’re jest obliged and compelled to break a long-standin’ rule of this command – and it looks to me like that’s whut we’ve got to do – let’s foller after a precedent that was laid down a mighty long time ago. You-all remember – don’t you – how the Good Book tells about the Rich Man that give a feast oncet? And at the last minute the guests he’d invited didn’t show up at all – none of ’em. So then he sent out into the highways and byways and scraped together some hongry strangers; and by all accounts they had a purty successful time of it there. When in doubt I hold it’s a fairly safe plan to jest take a leaf out of them old Gospels and go by it. Let’s send out right here in the neighborhood and find somebody – no matter who ’tis, so long as he’s free, white and twenty-one – that looks like he could appreciate a meal of vittles, and present the compliments of Company B to him, and ast him will he come on in and jine with us.”

Maybe it was the old judge’s way of putting it, but the idea took unanimously. The manager of the Richland House, having been sent for, appeared in person almost immediately. To him the situation was outlined and the remedy for it that had been favored.

“By gum, gentlemen,” said their host, instantly inspired, “I believe I know where I can put my hand on the very candidate you’re looking for. There’s a kind of seedy-looking, lonely old fellow downstairs, from somewhere the other side of the Ohio River. He’s been registered since yes’day morning; seems like to me his name is Watts – something like that, anyhow. He don’t seem to have any friends or no business in particular; he’s just kind of hanging round. And he knows about this dinner too. He was talking to me about it a while ago, just before supper – said he’d read about it in a newspaper up in his country. He even asked me what the names of some of you gentlemen were. If you think he’ll do to fill in I’ll go right down and get him. He was sitting by himself in a corner of the lobby not two minutes ago. I judge he’s about the right age, too, if age is a consideration. He looks to be about the same age as most of you.”

There was no need for Judge Priest to put the question to a vote. It carried, so to speak, by acclamation. Bearing a verbal commission heartily to speak for the entire assemblage, Manager Ritter hurried out and in less than no time was back again, escorting the person he had described. Judge Priest met them at the door and was there introduced to the stranger, whose rather reluctant hand he warmly shook.

“He didn’t want to come at first,” explained Mr. Ritter; “said he didn’t belong up here with you-all; but when I told him the fix you was in he gave in and consented, and here he is.”

“You’re mighty welcome, suh,” said Judge Priest, still holding the other man’s hand. “And we’re turribly obliged to you fur comin’, and to Mr. Ritter fur astin’ you to come.”

With that, he drew their dragooned guest into the room and, standing beside him, made formal presentation to the expectant company.

“Gentlemen of Company B, allow me to make you acquainted with Mr. Watts, of the State of Illinoy, who has done us the great honor of agreein’ to make fourteen at the table, and to eat a bite with us at this here little dinner of ours.” A straggling outburst of greeting and approbation arose from twelve elderly throats. “Mr. Watts, suh, will you be so good as to take this cheer here, next to me?” resumed Judge Priest when the noise abated; and he completed the ceremonial by indicating the place of the absent Mr. Reeves.

What the stranger saw as he came slowly forward – if, indeed, he was able to see anything with distinctness by reason of the evident confusion that covered him – was a double row of kindly, cordial, curious faces of old men, all staring at him. Before the battery of their eyes he bowed his acknowledgments, but did not speak them; still without speaking, he slipped into the seat which Tobe Emery sprang forward to draw clear of the table for his easier admission to the group. What the others saw was a tall, stooped, awkward man of, say, sixty-five, with somber eyes, set deep in a whiskered face that had been burned a leathery red by wind and weather; a heavy-footed man, who wore a suit of store clothes – clothes of a homely cut and none too new, yet neat enough; such a man, one might guess at a glance, as would have little to say and would be chary about saying that little until sure of his footing and his audience. Judging by appearances and first impressions he did not promise to be what you might call exciting company, exactly; but he made fourteen at the table, and that was the main point, anyhow.

Now the dinner got under way with a swing and a clatter. For all the stitches and tucks that time had taken in their leg muscles, the three old negroes flitted about like flickery black shadows, bringing food to all and toddies to several, and just plain ice water to at least three of their white friends. Even Kentuckians have been known to be advocates of temperance. To learn how true a statement this is you must read, not the comic weeklies, but the official returns of local-option elections. Above the medley of commingling voices, some cracked and jangled with age, some still full and sonorous, and one at least as thin and piercing as the bleat of a reed flute – that would be Judge Priest’s voice, of course – sounded the rattling of dishes and glasses and plated silverware. Uncle Zach and his two aides may have been good waiters, but they were tolerably noisy ones.

Through it all the extra guest sat very quietly, eating little and drinking nothing. Sitting alongside him, Doctor Lake noticed that he fed himself with his right hand only; his left hand stayed in his lap, being hidden from sight beneath the table. Naturally this set afoot a train of mild professional surmise in the old doctor’s mind. The arm itself seemed sound enough; he vaguely wondered whether the Illinois man had a crippled hand or a deformed hand, or what. Judge Priest noticed it too, but subconsciously rather. At the beginning he tried to start a conversation with Watts, feeling it incumbent on him, as chief sponsor for the other’s presence, to cure him of his embarrassment if he could, and to make him feel more at home there among them; but his well-meant words appeared to fall on barren soil. The stranger answered in mumbled monosyllables, without once looking Judge Priest straight in the face. He kept his head half averted – a posture the judge ascribed to diffidence; but it was evident he missed nothing at all of the talk that ran up and down the long table and back and forth across it. Under his bushy brows his eyes shifted from face to face as this man or that had his say.

So presently the judge, feeling that he had complied with the requirements of hospitality, abandoned the effort to interest his silent neighbor, and very soon after forgot him altogether for the time being. Under the circumstances it was only to be expected of Judge Priest that he should forget incidental matters; for now, to all these lifelong friends of his, time was swinging backward on a greased hinge. The years that had lined these old faces and bent these old backs were dropping away; the memories of great and storied days were mounting to their brains like the fumes of strong wine, brightening their eyes and loosening their tongues.

From their eager lips dropped names of small country churches, tiny backwoods villages of the Southwest, trivial streams and geographically inconsequential mountains – names that once meant nothing to the world at large, but which, by reason of Americans having fought Americans there and Americans having died by the hundreds and the thousands there, are now printed in the school histories and memorized by the school children – Island Number 10 and Shiloh; Peachtree Creek and Stone River; Kenesaw Mountain and Brice’s Crossroads. They had been at these very places, or at most of them – these thirteen old men had. To them the names were more than names. Each one burned in their hearts as a living flame. All the talk, though, was not of battle and skirmish. It dealt with prisons, with hospitals, with camps and marches.

“By George, boys, will you ever forget the day we marched out of this town?” It was Doctor Lake speaking, and his tone was high and exultant. “Flags flying everywhere and our sweethearts crying and cheering us through their tears! And the old town band up front playing Girl I Left Behind Me and Johnnie’s Gone for a Soger! And we-all stepping along, feeling so high and mighty and stuck-up in our new uniforms! A little shy on tactics we were, and not enough muskets to go round; but all the boys wore new grey suits, I remember. Our mothers saw to that.”

“It was different, though, Lew, the day we came home again,” reminded someone else, speaking gently. “No flags flying then and nobody cheering, and no band to play! And half the women were in black – yes, more than half.”

“An’ dat’s de Gawd’s truth!” half-whispered black Tobe Emery, carried away for the moment.

“Well,” said Press Harper, “I know they run out of muskets ’fore they got round to me. I call to mind that I went off totin’ an ole flintlock that my paw had with him down in Mexico when he wuz campin’ on ole Santy Anny’s trail. And that wuz all I did have in the way of weepins, ’cept fur a great big bowie knife that a blacksmith out at Massac made fur me out of a rasp-file. I wuz mighty proud of that there bowie of mine till we got down yonder to Camp Boone and found a whole company, all with bigger knives than whut mine wus. Called themselves the Blood River Tigers, those boys did, ’cause they came frum up on Blood River, in Calloway.”

Squire Futrell took the floor – or the table, rather – for a moment:

“I recollec’ one Calloway County feller down at Camp Boone, when we fust got there, that didn’t even have a knife. He went round ’lowin’ as how he wuz goin’ to pick him out a likely Yank the fust fight we got into, and lick him with his bare hands ef he stood still and fit, or knock him down with a rock ef he broke and run – and then strip him of his outfit.”

“Why, I place that feller, jest ez plain ez if he wuz standin’ here now,” declared Mr. Harper. “I remember him sayin’ he could lick ary Yankee that ever lived with his bare hands.”

“I reckin mebbe he could, too – he wuz plenty long enough,” said the squire with a chuckle; “but the main obstacle wuz that the Yankees wouldn’t fight with their bare hands. They jest would insist on usin’ tools – the contrary rascals! Let’s see, now, whut wuz that Calloway County feller’s name? You remember him, Herman, don’t you? A tall, ganglin’ jimpy jawed, loose-laiged feller he wus – built like one of these here old blue creek cranes.”

Mr. Felsburg shook his head; but Press Harper broke in again:

“I’ve got him! The boys called him Lengthy fur short; but his real name wuz Washburn, same ez—”

He stopped short off there; and, twisting his head away from the disapproving faces, which on the instant had been turned full on him from all along the table, he went through the motion of spitting, as though to rid his mouth of an unsavory taste. A hot color climbed to Peter J. Galloway’s wrinkled cheeks and he growled under the overhang of his white moustache. Doctor Lake pursed up his lips, shaking his head slowly.

There was one black spot, and just one, on the records of Company B. And, living though he might still be, or dead, as probably he was, the name of one man was taboo when his one-time companions broke bread at their anniversary dinner. Indeed, they went farther than that: neither there nor elsewhere did they speak by name of him who had been their shame and their disgrace. It was a rule. With them it was as though that man had never lived.

Up to this point Mr. Herman Felsburg had had mighty little to say. For all he had lived three-fourths of his life in our town, his command of English remained faulty and broken, betraying by every other word his foreign birth; and his habit of mixing his metaphors was proverbial. He essayed few long speeches before mixed audiences; but now he threw himself into the breach, seeking to bridge over the awkward pause.

“Speaking of roll calls and things such as that,” began Mr. Felsburg, seeming to overlook the fact that until now no one had spoken of roll calls – “speaking of those kinds of things, maybe you will perhaps remember how it was along in the winter of ’64, when practically we were out of everything – clothes and shoes and blankets and money – ach, yes; money especially! – and how the orderly sergeant had no book or papers whatsoever, and so he used to make his report in the morning on a clean shingle, with a piece of lead pencil not so gross as that.” He indicated a short and stubby finger end.

“’Long ’bout then we could ’a’ kept all the rations we drew on a clean shingle too – eh, Herman?” wheezed Judge Priest. “And the shingle wouldn’t ’a’ been loaded down at that! My, my! Ever’ time I think of that winter of ’64 I find myse’f gittin’ hongry all over agin!” And the judge threw himself back in his chair and laughed his high, thin laugh.

Then, noting the others had not yet rallied back again to the point where the flow of reminiscences had been checked by Press Harper’s labial slip-up, he had an inspiration.

“Speakin’ of roll calls,” he said, unconsciously parroting Mr. Felsburg, “seems to me it’s ’bout time we had ours. The vittles end of this here dinner ’pears to be ’bout over. Zach” – throwing the suggestion across his shoulder – “you and your pardners’d better be fetchin’ on the coffee and the seegars, I reckin.” He faced front again, raising his voice: “Who’s callin’ the roll tonight?”

“I am,” answered Professor Reese; and at once he got on his feet, adjusted his spectacles just so, and drew from an inner breast pocket of his long frock coat a stained and frayed scroll, made of three sheets of tough parchment paper pasted end to end.

He cleared his throat; and, as though the sound had been a command, his fellow members bent forward, with faces composed to earnestness. None observed how the stranger acted; indeed, he had been quite out of the picture and as good as forgotten for the better part of an hour. Certainly nobody was interested in him at this moment when there impended what, to that little group, was a profoundly solemn, highly sentimental thing.

Again Professor Reese cleared his throat, then spoke the name that was written in faded letters at the top of the roll – the name of him who had been their first captain and, at the last, their brigade commander.

“Died the death of a hero in an effort to save others at Cottonwood Bar, June 28, 1871,” said Judge Priest; and he saluted, with his finger against his forehead.

One by one the old school-teacher called off the list of commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Squire Futrell, who had attained to the eminence of a second corporal’s place, was the only one who answered for himself. For each of the others, including Lieutenant Garrett – he of the game leg and the plantation in Mississippi – somebody else answered, giving the manner and, if he remembered it, the date of that man’s death. For, excepting Garrett, they were all dead.

The professor descended to the roster of enlisted men:

“Abner P. Ashbrook!”

“Died in Camp Chase as a prisoner of war.”

“G. W. Ayres!”

“Killed at Baker’s Creek.”

“R. M. Bigger!”

“Moved to Missouri after the war, was elected state senator, and died in ’89.”

“Reuben Brame!”

“Honorably discharged after being wounded at Corinth, and disappeared. Believed to be dead.”

“Robert Burnell!”

“Murdered by bushwhackers in East Tennessee on his way home after the Surrender.”

So it went down the long column of names. They were names, many of them, which once stood for something in that community but which would have fallen with an unfamiliar sound upon the ears of the oncoming generation – old family names of the old town. But the old families had died out or had scattered, as is the way with old families, and the names were only pronounced when Company B met or when some idler, dawdling about the cemetery, deciphered the lichen-grown lines on gray and crumbly grave-stones. Only once in a while did a voice respond, “Here!” But always the “Here!” was spoken clearly and loudly and at that, the remaining twelve would hoist their voices in a small cheer.

By common consent certain survivors spoke for certain departed members. For example, when the professor came to one name down among the L’s, Peter J. Galloway, who was an incorruptible and unshakable Roman of the party of Jefferson and Jackson, blared out: “Turn’t Republikin in ’96, and by the same token died that same year!” And when he reached the name of Adolph Ohlmann it was Mr. Felsburg’s place to tell of the honorable fate of his fellow Jew, who fell before Atlanta.

The reader read on and on until his voice took on a huskened note. He had heard “Here!” for the thirteenth time; he had come to the very bottomest lines of his roster. He called one more name – Vilas, it was – and then he rolled up his parchment and put it away.

“The records show that, first and last, Company B had one hundred and seventy-two members, all regularly sworn into the service of the Confederate States of America under our beloved President, Jefferson Davis,” stated Professor Reese sonorously. “Of those names, in accordance with the custom of this organization, I have just called one hundred and seventy-one. The roll call of Company B, of the Old Regiment of mounted infantry serving under General Nathan Bedford Forrest, is completed for the current year.” And down he sat.

As Judge Priest, with a little sigh, settled back in his chair, his glance fell on the face of the man next him. Perhaps the old judge’s eyes were not as good as once they had been. Perhaps the light was faulty. At any rate, he interpreted the look that was on the other’s face as a look of loneliness. Ordinarily the judge was a pretty good hand at reading faces too.

“Looky here, boys!” he called out, with such emphasis as to center general attention on the upper end of the table. “We oughter be ’shamed of ourselves – carryin’ on this way ’mongst ourselves and plum’ furgittin’ we had an outsider with us ez a special guest. Our new friend here is ’bout the proper age to have seen service in the war his own se’f – mebbe he did see some. Of all the states that fought ag’inst us, none of ’em turned out better soldiers than old Illinoy did. If my guess is right I move we hear frum Mr. Watts, frum Illinoy, on some of his own wartime experiences.” His hand dropped, with a heartening thump, on the shoulder of the stranger. “Come on, colonel! We’ve had a word from ever’body exceptin’ you. It’s your turn – ain’t it, boys?”

Before his question might be answered, Watts had straightened to his feet. He stood rigidly, his hands driven wrist-deep into his coat pockets; his weather-beaten face set in heavy, hard lines; his deep eyes fixed on a spot in the blank wall above their heads.

“You’re right – I was a soldier in the war between the States,” he said in a thickened, quick voice, which trembled just a little; “but I didn’t serve with the Illinois troops. I didn’t move to Illinois until after the war. My regiment was as good a regiment, though, and as game a regiment, as fought in that war on either side.”

Some six or eight broke generously into a brisk patter of handclapping at this, and from the exuberant Mr. Galloway came:

“Whirroo! That’s right – stick up for yer own side always! Go on, me boy; go on!”

The urging was unnecessary. Watts was going on as though he had not been interrupted, as though he had not heard the friendly applause, as though his was a tale which stood in most urgent need of the telling:

“I’m not saying much of my first year as a soldier. I wasn’t satisfied – well, I wasn’t happily placed; I’ll put it that way. I had hopes at the beginning of being an officer; and when the company election was held I lost out. Possibly I was too ambitious for my own good. I came to know that I was not popular with the rest of the company. My captain didn’t like me, either, I thought. Maybe I was morbid; maybe I was homesick. I know I was disappointed. You men have all been soldiers – you know how those things go. I did my duty after a fashion – I didn’t skulk or hang back from danger – but I didn’t do it cheerfully. I moped and I suppose I complained a lot.

“Well, finally I left that company and that regiment. I just quit. I didn’t quit under fire; but I quit – in the night. I think I must have been half crazy; I’d been brooding too much. In a day or two I realized that I couldn’t go back home – which was where I had started for – and I wouldn’t go over to the enemy. Badly as I had behaved, the idea of playing the outright traitor never entered my mind. I want you to know that. So I thought the thing over for a day or two. I had time for thinking it over – alone there in that swamp where I was hiding. I’ve never spoken of that shameful thing in my life since then – not until tonight. I tried not to think of it – but I always have – every day.

“Well, I came to a decision at last. I closed the book on my old self; I wiped out the past. I changed my name and made up a story to account for myself; but I thank God I didn’t change flags and I didn’t change sides. I was wearing that new name of mine when I came out of those woods, and under it I enlisted in a regiment that had been recruited in a state two hundred miles away from my own state. I served with it until the end of the war – as a private in the ranks.

“I’m not ashamed of the part I played those last three years. I’m proud of it! As God is my judge, I did my whole duty then. I was commended in general orders once; my name was mentioned in despatches to the War Department once. That time I was offered a commission; but I didn’t take it. I bear in my body the marks of three wounds. I’ve got a chunk of lead as big as your thumb in my shoulder. There’s a little scar up here in my scalp, under the hair, where a splinter from a shell gashed me. One of my legs is a little bit shorter than the other. In the very last fight I was in, a spent cannon ball came along and broke both the bones in that leg. I’ve got papers to prove that from ’62 to ’65 I did my best for my cause and my country. I’ve got them here with me now – I carry them with me in the daytime and I sleep at night with them under my pillow.”

With his right hand he fumbled in his breast pocket and brought out two time-yellowed slips of paper and held them high aloft, clenched and crumpled up in a quivering fist.

“One of these papers is my honorable discharge. The other is a letter that the old colonel of my regiment wrote to me with his own hand two months before he died.”

He halted and his eyes, burning like red coals under the thick brows, ranged the faces that looked up into his. His own face worked. When he spoke again he spoke as a prisoner at the bar might speak, making a last desperate appeal to the jury trying him for his life:

“You men have all been soldiers. I ask you this now, as a soldier standing among soldiers – I ask you if my record of three years of hard service and hard fighting can square me up for the one slip I made when I was hardly more than a boy in years? I ask you that?”

With one voice, then, the jury answered. Its verdict was acquittal – and not alone acquittal but vindication. Had you been listening outside you would have sworn that fifty men and not thirteen were yelling at the tops of their lungs, beating on the table with all the might in their arms.

The old man stood for a minute longer. Then suddenly all the rigidity seemed to go out of him. He fell into his chair and put his face in his two cupped hands. The papers he had brandished over his head slipped out of his fingers and dropped on the tablecloth. One of them – a flat, unfolded slip – settled just in front of Doctor Lake. Governed partly by an instinct operating automatically, partly to hide his own emotions, which had been roused to a considerable degree, Doctor Lake bent and spelled out the first few words. His head came up with a jerk of profound surprise and gratification.

“Why, this is signed by John B. Gordon himself!” he snorted. He twisted about, reaching out for Judge Priest. “Billy! Billy Priest! Why, look here! Why, this man’s no Yankee! Not by a dam’ sight he’s not! Why, he served with a Georgia regiment! Why——”

But Judge Priest never heard a word of what Doctor Lake was saying. His old blue eyes stared at the stranger’s left hand. On the back of that hand, standing out upon the corded tendons and the wrinkled brown skin, blazed a red spot, shaped like a dumb-bell, a birthmark of most unusual pattern.

Judge Priest stared and stared; and as he stared a memory that was nearly as old as he was crept out from beneath a neglected convolution in the back part of his brain, and grew and spread until it filled his amazed, startled, scarce-believing mind. So it was no wonder he did not hear Doctor Lake; no wonder he did not see black Tobe Emery stealing up behind him, with popped eyes likewise fixed on that red dumb-bell-shaped mark.

No; Judge Priest did not hear a word. As Doctor Lake faced about the other way to spread his wonderful discovery down the table and across it, the judge bent forward and touched the fourteenth guest on the shoulder very gently.

“Pardner,” he asked, apparently apropos of nothing that had happened since the dinner started – “Pardner, when was the first time you heard about this here meetin’ of Company B – the first time?”

Through the interlaced fingers of the other the answer came haltingly:

“I read about it – in a Chicago Sunday paper – three weeks ago.”

“But you knew before that there was a Company B down here in this town?”

Without raising his head or baring his face, the other nodded. Judge Priest overturned his coffee cup as he got to his feet, but took no heed of the resultant damage to the cloth on the table and the fronts of his white trouser legs.

“Boys,” he cried out so shrilly, so eagerly, so joyously, that they all jumped, “when you foller after Holy Writ you can’t never go fur wrong. You’re liable to breed a miracle. A while ago we took a lesson from the Parable of the Rich Man that give a dinner; and – lo and behold! – another parable and a better parable – yes, the sweetest parable of ’em all – has come to pass and been repeated here ’mongst us without our ever knowin’ it or even suspectin’ it. The Prodigal Son didn’t enjoy the advantage of havin’ a Chicago Sunday paper to read, but in due season he came back home – that other Prodigal did; and it stands written in the text that he was furgiven, and that a feast was made fur him in the house of his fathers.”

His tone changed to one of earnest demand: “Lycurgus Reese, finish the roll call of this company – finish it right now, this minute – the way it oughter be finished!”

“Why, Judge Priest,” said Professor Reese, still in the dark and filled with wonderment, “it is already finished!”

As though angered almost beyond control, the judge snapped back:

“It ain’t finished, neither. It ain’t been rightly finished from the very beginnin’ of these dinners. It ain’t finished till you call the very last name that’s on that list.”

“But, Judge——”

“But nothin’! You call that last name, Lycurgus Reese; and you be almighty quick about it!”

There was no need for the old professor, thus roughly bidden, to haul out his manuscript. He knew well enough the name, though wittingly it had not passed his lips for forty years or more. So he spoke it out:

“Sylvester B. Washburn!”

The man they had called Watts raised in his place and dropped his clenched hands to his sides, and threw off the stoop that was in his shoulders. He lifted his wetted eyes to the cracked, stained ceiling above. He peered past plaster and rafter and roof, and through a rift in the skies above he feasted his famished vision on a delectable land which others might not see. And then, beholding on his face that look of one who is confessed and shriven, purified and atoned for, the scales fell away from their own eyes and they marvelled – not that they knew him now, but that they had not known him before now. And for a moment or two there was not a sound to be heard.

“Sylvester B. Washburn!” repeated Professor Reese.

And the prodigal answered:

“Here!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 28 Aug 1915
Old Judge Priest (1916)

Judge Priest Comes Back

~

From time to time persons of an inquiring turn of mind have been moved audibly to speculate – I might even say to ponder – regarding the enigma underlying the continued presence in the halls of our National Congress of the Honorable Dabney Prentiss. All were as one in agreeing that he had a magnificent delivery, but in this same connection it has repeatedly been pointed out that he so rarely had anything to deliver. Some few among this puzzled contingent, knowing, as they did, the habits and customs of the people down in our country, could understand that in a corner of the land where the gift of tongue is still highly revered and the golden chimings of a full-jeweled throat are not yet entirely lost in the click of cash registers and the whir of looms, how the Honorable Dabney within his limitations might have been oratorically conspicuous and politically useful, not alone to himself but to others. But as a constructive statesman sent up to Washington, District of Columbia, and there engaged in shaping loose ends of legislation into the welded and the tempered law, they could not seem to see him at all. It was such a one, an editorial writer upon a metropolitan daily, who once referred to Representative Prentiss as The Human Voice. The title stuck, a fact patently testifying to its aptness. That which follows here in this chapter is an attempt to explain the mystery of this gentleman’s elevation to the high places which he recently adorned.

To go back to the very start of things we must first review briefly the case of old Mr. Lysander John Curd, even though he be but an incidental figure in the narrative. He was born to be incidental, I reckon, heredity, breeding and the chance of life all conspiring together to fit him for that inconsequential rôle. He was born to be a background. The one thing he ever did in all his span on earth to bring him for a moment into the front of the picture was that, having reached middle age, he took unto himself a young wife. But since he kept her only long enough to lose her, even this circumstance did not serve to focus the attention of the community upon his uncolored personality for any considerable period of time.

Considering him in all his aspects – as a volunteer soldier in the Great War, as a district schoolteacher, as a merchant in our town, as a bachelor of long standing, as a husband for a fleeting space, and as a grass widower for the rest of his days – I have gleaned that he never did anything ignoble or anything conspicuous. Indeed, I myself, who knew him as a half-grown boy may know a middle-aged man, find it hard after the lapse of years to describe him physically for you. I seem to recall that he was neither tall nor short, neither thick nor thin. He had the customary number of limbs and the customary number of features arranged in the customary way – I know that, of course. It strikes me that his eyes were mild and gentle, that he was, as the saying runs, soft-spoken and that his whiskers were straggly and thin, like young second growth in a new clearing; also that he wore his winter overcoat until the hot suns of springtime scorched it, and that he clung to his summer alpaca and his straw hat until the frosts of autumn came along and nipped them with the sweet-gum and the dogwood. That lets me out. Excusing these things, he abides merely as a blur in my memory.

On a certain morning of a certain year, the month being April, Judge Priest sat at his desk in his chamber, so-called, on the right-hand side of the long hall in the old courthouse, as you came in from the Jefferson Street door. He was shoulders deep down in his big chair, with both his plump legs outstretched and one crossed over the other, and he was reading a paper-bound volume dealing in the main with certain inspiring episodes in the spectacular life of a Western person known as Trigger Sam. On his way downtown from home that morning he had stopped by Wilcox & Powell’s bookstore and purchased this work at the price of five cents; it was the latest production of the facile pen of a popular and indefatigable author of an earlier day than this, the late Ned Buntline. In his hours of leisure and seclusion the judge dearly loved a good nickel library, especially one with a lot of shooting and some thrilling rescues in it. Now he was in the middle of one of the most exciting chapters when there came a mild rap at the outer door. Judge Priest slid the Trigger Sam book into a half-open drawer and called out:

“Come right on in, whoever ’tis.”

The door opened and old Mr. Lysander John Curd entered, in his overcoat, with his head upon his chest.

“Good morning, Judge Priest,” he said in his gentle halting drawl; “could I speak with you in private a minute? It’s sort of a personal matter and I wouldn’t care to have anybody maybe overhearing.”

“You most certainly could,” said Judge Priest. He glanced through into the adjoining room at the back, where Circuit Clerk Milam and Sheriff Giles Birdsong, heads together, were busy over the clerical details of the forthcoming term of circuit court. Arising laboriously from his comfortable place, he waddled across and kicked the open door between the two rooms shut with a thrust of a foot clad in a box-toed, low-quartered shoe. On his way back to his desk he brushed an accumulation of old papers out of a cane-bottomed chair. “Set down here, Lysandy,” he said in that high whiny voice of his, “and let’s hear whut’s on your mind. Nice weather, ain’t it?”

An eavesdropper trained, mayhap, in the psychology of tone and gesture might have divined from these small acts and this small utterance that Judge Priest had reasons for suspecting what was on his caller’s mind; as though this visit was not entirely unexpected, even though he had had no warning of it. There was in the judge’s words an intangible inflection of understanding, say, or sympathy; no, call it compassion – that would be nearer to it. The two old men – neither of them would ever see sixty-five again – lowered themselves into the two chairs and sat facing each other across the top of the judge’s piled and dusty desk. Through his steel-rimmed glasses the judge fixed a pair of kindly, but none-the-less keen, blue eyes on Mr. Lysander Curd’s sagged and slumped figure. There was despondency and there was embarrassment in all the drooping lines of that elderly frame. Judge Priest’s lips drew up tightly, and unconsciously he nodded – the brief nod that a surgeon might employ on privately confirming a private diagnosis.

The other did not detect these things – neither the puckering of the lips nor the small forward bend of the judge’s head. His own chin was in his collar and his own averted eyes were on the floor. One of his hands – a gnarly, rather withered hand it must have been – reached forth absently and fumbled at a week-old copy of the Daily Evening News that rested upon a corner of the desk. The twining fingers tore a little strip loose from the margin of a page and rolled it up into a tiny wad.

For perhaps half a minute there was nothing said. Then Judge Priest bent forward suddenly and touched the nearermost sleeve of Mr. Curd with a gentle little half-pat.

“Well, Lysandy?” he prompted.

“Well, Judge.” The words were the first the visitor had uttered since his opening speech, and they came from him reluctantly. “Well, sir, it would seem like I hardly know how to start. This is a mighty personal matter that I’ve come to see you in regards to – and it’s just a little bit hard to speak about it even to somebody that I’ve known most of my life, same as I’ve always known you. But things in my home have finally come to a head, and before the issue reaches you in an official capacity as the judge on the bench I sort of felt like it might help some – might make the whole thing pass off easier for all concerned – if I could have a few words with you privately, as a friend and as a former comrade in arms on the field of battle.”

“Yes, Lysandy, go ahead. I’m listenin’,” stated Judge Priest, as the other halted.

Old Mr. Curd raised his face and in his faded eyes there was at once a bewildered appeal and a fixed and definite resolution. He spoke on very slowly and carefully, choosing his words as he went, but without faltering:

“I don’t know as you know about it, Judge Priest – the chances are you naturally wouldn’t – but in a domestic way things haven’t been going very smoothly with me – with us, I should say – for quite a spell back. I reckon after all it’s a mistake on the part of a man after he’s reached middle age and got set in his ways to be taking a young wife, more especially if he can’t take care of her in the way she’s been used to, or anyhow in the way she’d like to be taken care of. I suppose it’s only human nature for a young woman to hanker after considerable many things that a man like me can’t always give her – jewelry and pretty things, and social life, and running round and seeing people, and such as that. And Luella – well, Luella really ain’t much more than a girl herself yet, is she?”

The question remained unanswered. It was plain, too, that Mr. Curd had expected no answer to it, for he went straight on:

“So I feel as if the blame for what’s happened is most of it mine. I reckon I was too old to be thinking about getting married in the first place. And I wasn’t very well off then either – not well enough off to have the money I should’ve had if I expected to make Luella contented. Still, all that part of it’s got nothing to do with the matter as it stands – I’m just telling it to you, Judge, as a friend.”

“I understand, Lysandy,” said Judge Priest almost in the tone which he might have used to an unhappy child. “This is all a strict confidence between us two and this is all the further it’ll ever go, so fur ez I’m concerned, without you authorize me to speak of it.”

He waited for what would come next. It came in slow, steady sentences, with the regularity of a statement painfully rehearsed beforehand: “Judge Priest, I’ve never been a believer in divorce as a general thing. It seemed to me there was too much of that sort of thing going on round this country. That’s always been my own private doctrine, more or less. But in my own case I’ve changed my mind. We’ve been talking it over back and forth and we’ve decided – Luella and me have – that under the circumstances a divorce is the best thing for both of us; in fact we’ve decided that it’s the only thing. I want that Luella should be happy and I think maybe I’ll feel easier in my own mind when it’s all over and done with and settled up according to the law. I’m aiming to do what’s best for both parties – and I want that Luella should be happy. I want that she should be free to live her own life in her own way without me hampering her. She’s young and she’s got her whole life before her – that’s what I’m thinking of.”

He paused and with his tongue he moistened his lips, which seemed dry.

“I don’t mind telling you I didn’t feel this way about it first-off. It was a pretty tolerably hard jolt to me – the way the proposition first came up. I’ve spent a good many sleepless nights thinking it over. At least I couldn’t sleep very much for thinking of it,” he amended with the literal impulse of a literal mind to state things exactly and without exaggeration. “And then finally I saw my way clear to come to this decision. And so—”

“Lysandy Curd,” broke in Judge Priest, “I don’t aim to give you any advice. In the first place, you ain’t asked fur it; and in the second place, even ef you had asked, I’d hesitate a monstrous long time before I’d undertake to advise any man about his own private family affairs. But I jest want to ask you one thing right here: It wasn’t you, was it, that first proposed the idea of this here divorce?”

“Well, no, Judge, I don’t believe ’twas,” confessed the old man whose misery-reddened eyes looked into Judge Priest’s from across the littered desk. “I can’t say as it was me that first suggested it. But that’s neither here nor there. The point I’m trying to get at is just this:

“The papers have all been drawn up and they’ll be bringing them in here sometime today to be filed – the lawyers in the case will, Bigger & Quigley. Naturally, with me and Luella agreeing as to everything, there’s not going to be any fight made in your court. And after it’s all over I’m aiming to sell out my feed store – it seems like I haven’t been able to make it pay these last few months, the same as it used to pay, and debts have sort of piled up on me some way. I reckon the fellow that said two could live as cheap as one didn’t figure on one of them being a young woman – pretty herself and wanting pretty things to wear and have round the house. But I shouldn’t say that – I’ve come to see how it’s mainly my fault, and I’m figuring on how to spare Luella in every way that it’s possible to spare her. So as I was saying, I’m figuring, when it’s all over, on selling out my interests here, such as they are, and going back to live on that little farm I own out yonder in the Lone Elm district. It’s got a mortgage on it that I put on it here some months back, but I judge I can lift that and get the place clear again, if I’m given a fair amount of time to do it in.

“And now that everything’s been made clear to you, I want to ask you, Judge, to do all in your power to make things as easy as you can for Luella. I’d a heap rather there wouldn’t be any fuss made over this case in the newspapers. It’s just a straight, simple divorce suit, and after all it’s just between me and my present wife, and it’s more our business than ’tis anybody else’s. So, seeing as the case is not going to be defended, I’d take it as a mighty big favor on your part if you’d shove it up on the docket for the coming term of court, starting next Monday, so as we could get it done and over with just as soon as possible. That’s my personal wish, and I know it’s Luella’s wish too. In fact she’s right anxious on that particular point. And here’s one more thing: I reckon that young Rawlings boy, that’s taken a job reporting news items for the Daily Evening News, will be round here in the course of the day, won’t he?”

“He likely will,” said Judge Priest; “he comes every day – purty near it. Why?”

“Well,” said Mr. Curd, “I don’t know him myself except by sight, and I don’t feel as if I was in a position to be asking him to do anything for me. But I thought, maybe, if you spoke to him yourself when he came, and put it on the grounds of a favor to you, maybe he’d not put any more than just a little short piece in the paper saying suit had been filed – Curd against Curd – for a plain divorce, or maybe he might leave it out of his paper altogether. I’d like to see Luella shielded from any newspaper talk. It’s not as if there was a scandal in it or a fight was going to be made.” He bent forward in his eagerness. “Do you reckon you could do that much for me, Judge Priest – for old times’ sake?”

“Ah-hah,” assented Judge Priest. “I reckin part of it kin be arranged anyway. I kin have Lishy Milam set the case forward on the docket at the head of the list of uncontested actions. And I’ll mention the matter to that there young Rawlings ef you want me to. Speaking personally, I should think jest a line or two ought to satisfy the readers of the Daily Evenin’ News. Of course him bein’ a reporter and all that, he’ll probably want to know whut the facts are ez set forth in your petition – whut allegations are made in—”

He stopped in mid-speech, seeing how the other had flinched at this last. Mr. Curd parted his lips to interrupt, but the old judge, having no wish to flick wounds already raw, hurried on:

“Don’t you worry, Lysandy, I’ll be glad to speak to young Rawlings. I jedge you’ve got no call to feel uneasy about whut’s goin’ to be said in print. You was sayin’ jest now that the papers would be filed sometime today?”

“They’ll be filed today sure.”

“And no defense is to be made?” continued Judge Priest, tallying off the points on his fingers. “And you’ve retained Bigger & Quigley to represent you – that’s right, ain’t it?”

“Hold on a minute, Judge,” Mr. Curd was shaking his whity-grey head in dissent. “I’ve taken up a lot of your valuable time already, and still it would seem like I haven’t succeeded in getting this affair all straight in your mind. Bigger & Quigley are not going to represent me. They’re going to represent Luella.”

He spoke as one stating an accepted and easily understood fact, yet at the words Judge Priest reared back as far as his chair would let him go and his ruddy cheeks swelled out with the breath of amazement.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he demanded, “that you ain’t the plaintiff here?”

“Why, Judge Priest,” answered Mr. Curd, “you didn’t think for a minute, did you, that I’d come into court seeking to blacken my wife’s good name? She’s been thoughtless, maybe, but I know she don’t mean any harm by it, and besides, look how young she is. It’s her, of course, that’s asking for this divorce – I thought you understood about that from the beginning.”

Still in his posture of astonishment, Judge Priest put another question and put it briskly: “Might it be proper fur me to ask on what grounds this lady is suin’ you fur a divorce?”

A wave of dull red ran up old Mr. Curd’s throat and flooded his shamed face to the hair line.

“On two grounds,” he said – “non-support and drunkenness.”

“Non-support?”

“Yes; I haven’t been able to take care of her lately as I should like to, on account of my business difficulties and all.”

“But look here at me, Lysandy Curd – you ain’t no drunkard. You never was one. Don’t tell me that!”

“Well, now, Judge Priest,” argued Mr. Curd, “you don’t know about my private habits, and even if I haven’t been drinking in public up to now, that’s no sign I’m not fixing to start in doing so. Besides which my keeping silent shows that I admit to everything, don’t it? Well, then?” He stood up. “Well, I reckon that’s all. I won’t be detaining you any longer. I’m much obliged to you, Judge, and I wish you good-day, sir.”

For once Judge Priest forgot his manners. He uttered not a syllable, but only stared through his spectacles in stunned and stricken silence while Mr. Curd passed out into the hallway, gently closing the door behind him. Then Judge Priest vented his emotions in a series of snorts.

In modern drama what is technically known as the stage aside has gone out of vogue; it is called old-fashioned. Had a latter-day playwright been there then, he would have resented the judge’s thoughtlessness in addressing empty space. Nevertheless that was exactly what the judge did.

“Under the strict letter of the law I ought to throw that case out of court, I s’pose. But I’m teetotally dam’ ef I do any sech thing!... That old man’s heart is broke now, and there ain’t no earthly reason that I kin think of why that she-devil should be allowed to tromp on the pieces. And that’s jest exactly whut she’ll do, shore ez shootin’, unless she’s let free mighty soon to go her own gait.... Their feet take hold on hell.... I’ll bet in the Kingdom there’ll be many a man that was called a simple-minded fool on this earth that’ll wear the biggest, shiniest halo old Peter kin find in stock.”

He reached for the Trigger Sam book, but put it back again in the drawer. He reached into a gaping side pocket of his coat for his corncob pipe, but forgot to charge the fire-blackened bowl from the tobacco cannister that stood handily upon his desk. Chewing hard upon the discolored cane stem of his pipe, he projected himself toward the back room and opened the door, to find Mr. Milam, the circuit clerk, and Mr. Birdsong, the sheriff, still engaged together in official duties there.

“Lishy,” he said from the doorway, “young Rawlings generally gits round here about two o’clock in the evenin’, don’t he?”

“Generally about two or two-thirty,” said Mr. Milam.

“I thought so. Well, today when he comes tell him, please, I want to see him a minute in my chambers.”

“What if you’re not here? Couldn’t I give him the message?”

“I’ll be here,” promised the judge. “And there’s one thing more: Bigger & Quigley will file a divorce petition today – Curd versus Curd is the title of the suit. Put it at the head of the list of undefended actions, please, Lishy, ez near the top of the docket ez you kin.”

“Curd? Is it the Lysander Curds, Judge?” asked Mr. Milam.

“You guessed right the very first pop – it’s the Lysandy Curds,” said Judge Priest grimly.

“Well, for one I’m not surprised,” said Mr. Milam. “If poor old Lysander hadn’t stayed blind for about two years after the rest of this town got its eyes wide open this suit would have been filed long before now.”

But Judge Priest didn’t hear him. He had closed the door.

Mr. Milam looked meaningly at Mr. Birdsong. Mr. Birdsong felt in his pocket for his plug and helped himself to a copious chew, meanwhile looking meaningly back at Mr. Milam. With the cud properly bestowed in his right jaw Mr. Birdsong gave vent to what for him was a speech of considerable length: “Jedge said Bigger & Quigley, didn’t he? Well, they’re a good smart team of lawyers, but ef I was in Lysander John Curd’s shoes I think I’d intrust my interests in this matter to a different firm than them.”

“Who’s that?” inquired Mr. Milam.

“It’s a Yankee firm up North,” answered Mr. Birdsong, masticating slowly. “One named Smith and the other’n named Wesson.”

It will be noted that our worthy sheriff fell plump into the same error over which Judge Priest’s feet had stumbled a few minutes earlier – he assumed offhand, Sheriff Birdsong did, that in this cause of Curd against Curd the husband was to play the rôle of the party aggrieved. Indeed, we may feel safe in assuming that at first blush almost anybody in our town would have been guilty of that same mistake. The real truth in this regard, coming out, as it very shortly did – before sunset of that day, in fact – gave the community a profound shock. From house to house, from street to street and from civic ward to civic ward the tale traveled, growing as it went. The Daily Evening News carried merely the barest of bare statements, coupled with the style of the action and the names of the attorneys for the plaintiff; but with spicy added details, pieced out from surmise and common rumor, the amazing tidings percolated across narrow roads and through the panels of partition fences with a rapidity which went far toward proving that the tongue is mightier than the printed line, or at least is speedier.

When you see a woman hasten forth from her house with eyes that burn and hear her hail her neighbor next door; when you see their two heads meet above the intervening pickets and observe that one is doing the talking and the other is doing the listening, sucking her breath in, gaspingly, at frequent intervals; and when on top of this you take note that, having presently parted company with the first, the second woman speeds hot-foot to call her neighbor upon the other side, all men may know by these things alone that a really delectable scandal has been loosed upon the air. Not once but many times this scene was enacted in our town that night, between the going-down of the sun and the coming-up of the moon. Also that magnificent adjunct of modern civilization, the telephone, helped out tremendously in spreading the word.

Hard upon the heels of the first jolting disclosure correlated incidents eventuated, and these, as the saying goes, supplied fuel to the flames. Just before supper-time old Mr. Lysander Curd went with dragging feet and downcast head to Mrs. Teenie Morrill’s boarding house, carrying in one hand a rusty valise, and from Mrs. Morrill he straightway engaged board and lodging for an indefinite period. And in the early dusk of the evening Mrs. Lysander Curd drove out in the smart top-phaeton that her husband had given her on her most recent birthday – she sitting very erect and handling the ribbons on her little spirited bay mare very prettily, and seemingly all oblivious to the hostile eyes which stared at her from sidewalks and porch fronts. About dark she halted at the corner of Clay and Contest, where a row of maples, new fledged with young leaves, made a thick shadow across the road.

Exactly there, as it so chanced, State Senator Horace K. Maydew happened to be loitering about, enjoying the cooling breezes of the spring night, and he lifted his somewhat bulky but athletic forty-year-old form into the phaeton alongside of the lady. In close conversation they were seen to drive out Contest and to turn into the Towhead Road; and – if we may believe what that willing witness, old Mrs. Whitridge, who lived at the corner of Clay and Contest, had to say upon the subject – it was ten minutes of eleven o’clock before they got back again to that corner. Mrs. Whitridge knew the exact hour, because she stayed up in her front room to watch, with one eye out of the bay window and the other on the mantel clock. To be sure, this had happened probably a hundred times before – this meeting of the pair in the shadows of the water maples, this riding in company over quiet country roads until all hours – but by reason of the day’s sensational developments it now took on an enhanced significance. Mrs. Whitridge could hardly wait until morning to call up, one by one, the members of her circle of intimate friends. I judge the telephone company never made much money off of Mrs. Whitridge even in ordinary times; she rented her telephone by the month and she used it by the hour.

As we are following the course of things with some regard for their chronological sequence, perhaps I should state here that on the next day but one the Lysander John Curd hay and feed store was closed on executions sworn out by a coterie of panic-stricken creditors. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that rats always leave a sinking ship. It has been my limited observation that, if they are commercial rats, they stay aboard and nibble more holes in the hull. However, that is neither here nor there.

In less than no time at all following this – in less than two weeks thereafter, to be exact – the coils which united Mr. Lysander Curd and Luella his wife in the bonds of matrimony were, by due process of the statutory law, unloosed and slackened off. Being free, the ex-husband promptly gathered together such meager belongings as he might call his own and betook himself to that little mortgage-covered farm of his out Lone Elm way. Being free also, the ex-wife with equal celerity became the bride of State Senator Horace K. Maydew, with a handy justice of the peace to officiate at the ceremony. It was characteristic of State Senator Maydew that he should move briskly in consummating this, the paramount romance of his life. For he was certainly an up-and-coming man.

There was no holding him down, it seemed. Undoubtedly he was a rising light, and the lady who now bore his name was bound and determined that she rise with him. She might have made one matrimonial mistake, but this time she had hitched her wagon to a star – a star which soared amain and cast its radiance afar. Soon she was driving her own car – and a seven-passenger car at that. They sent to Chicago for an architect to design their new home on Flournoy Boulevard and to Louisville for a decorator to decorate it. It wasn’t the largest house in town, but it was by long odds the smartest.

The Senator willed that she should have the best of everything, and she had it. For himself he likewise desired much. His was an uneasy ambition, which ate into him like a canker and gave him no peace. Indeed, peace was not of his craving. He watered his desire with the waters of self-appreciation and mulched it with constant energy, and behold it grew like the gourd and burgeoned like the bay. He had been mayor; at this time he was state senator; presently it was to transpire that he would admire to be more than that.

Always his handclasp had been ardent and clinging. Now the inner flames that burned its owner made it feverish to the touch. His smile was as warming as a grate fire and almost as wide. Shoulders were made for him to slap, and children had been created into the world to the end that he might inquire regarding their general health and well doing. Wherefore parents – and particularly young parents – were greatly drawn to him. If there was a lodge he joined it; if there was a church fair he went to it; if there was an oration to be made he made it. His figure broadened and took on a genial dignity. Likewise in the accumulation of worldly goods he waxed amazingly well. His manner was paternal where it was not fraternal. His eye, though, remained as before – a sharp, greedy, appraising eye. There is no alibi for a bad eye. Still, a lot of people never look as high as the eyes. They stop at the diamond in the scarfpin.

When a vacancy occurred in the district chairmanship it seemed quite in keeping with the trend of the political impulses of the times that Senator Maydew should slip into the hole. Always a clever organizer, he excelled his past record in building up and strengthening the district organization. It wasn’t long before he had his fences as they should be – hog-tight, horse-high and bull-strong.

Yet in the midst of manifold activities he found time to be an attentive and indulgent husband. If the new Mrs. Maydew did not enjoy the aloof society of those whom we fondly call down our way The Old Families, at least she had her fine new home, and her seven-passenger car, and her generous and loving husband. And she was content; you could tell that by her air and her expression at all times. Some thought there was just a trace of defiance in her bearing.

It was just about a year after her marriage to him that the Senator, in response to the demands of a host of friends and admirers – so ran the language of his column-long paid-for card in the Daily Evening News and other papers – announced himself as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for congressman. Considering conditions and everything, the occasion appeared to be propitious for such action on his part. The incumbent, old Major J. C. C. Guest, had been congressman a long, long time – entirely too long a time, some were beginning to say. He had never been a particularly exciting personage, even back yonder in those remote dim days of his entry into public life. At the beginning his principal asset and his heaviest claim upon the support of his fellow-citizens had been an empty trouser-leg.

In eighty-four, a cross-roads wag had said he didn’t believe Major Guest ever lost that leg in battle – it was his private opinion that the Maje wore it off running for office. At the time this quip was thought almost to border upon the sacrilegious, and nobody had laughed at it except the utterer thereof. But fully sixteen lagging years had dragged by since then; and for the old-soldier element, the times were out of joint. Maybe that was because there weren’t so very many of the old soldier element left. A mouse-colored sleeve without an arm inside of it, no longer had the appeal upon the popular fancy that once it had, and the same was true of the one-time sentimental and vote-catching combination of a pair of hickory crutches and an amputation at the hip joint.

Nevertheless, Major Guest was by no means ready to give up and quit. With those who considered him ripe for retirement he disagreed violently. As between resting on his laurels and dying in the harness he infinitely preferred the chafe of the leather to the questionable softness of the laurel-bed. So the campaign shaped itself to be a regular campaign. Except for these two – Maydew and Guest – there were no openly avowed candidates, though Dabney Prentiss, who dearly loved a flirtation with reluctant Destiny, was known to have his ear to the ground, ready to qualify as the dark horse in the event a deadlock should develop and a cry go forth for a compromise nominee. Possibly it was because Dabney Prentiss generally kept his ear to the ground that he had several times been most painfully trampled upon. From head to foot he was one big mental bruise.

Since he held the levers of the district machinery in the hollows of his two itching hands, Senator Maydew very naturally and very properly elected to direct his own canvass. Judge Priest, quitting the bench temporarily, came forth to act as manager for his friend, Major Guest. At this there was rejoicing in the camp of the clan of Maydew. To Maydew and his lieutenants it appeared that providence had dealt the good cards into their laps. Undeniably the judge was old and, moreover, he was avowedly old-fashioned. It stood to reason he would conduct the affairs of his candidate along old-fashioned lines. To be sure, he had his following; so much was admitted. Nobody could beat Judge Priest for his own job; at least nobody ever had. But controlling his own job and his own county was one thing. Engineering a district-wide canvass in behalf of an aging and uninspiring incumbent was another. And if over the bent shoulders of Major Guest they might strike a blow at Judge Priest, why, so much the better for Maydew now, and so much the worse for Priest hereafter. Thus to their own satisfaction the Maydew men figured it out.

The campaign went forward briskly and not without some passing show of bitterness. In a measure, Judge Priest justified the predictions of the other side by employing certain timehallowed expedients for enlisting the votes of his fellow Democrats for Major Guest. He appealed, as it were, to the musty traditions of a still mustier past. He sent the Major over the district to make speeches. He organized school-house rallies and brush-arbor ratifications. He himself was mighty in argument and opulent in the use of homely oratory.

Very different was the way of State Senator Maydew. The speeches that he made were few as to number and brief as to their length, but they were not bad speeches. He was a ready and a frequent purchaser of newspaper space; and he shook hands and slapped shoulders and inquired after babies without cessation. But most of all he kept both of his eyes and all of his ten nimble fingers upon the machine, triggering it and thimbling it and pulling at secret wires by day and by night. It was, perhaps, a tribute to his talents in this direction that the method that he inaugurated was beginning to be called Maydewism – by the opposition, of course – before the canvass was a month old. In an unusually vociferous outburst of indignation at a meeting in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows’ hall at Settleville, Major Guest referred to it as “the fell blight of Maydewism.” When a physician discovers a new and especially malignant disease, his school of practice compliments him by naming the malady after him; when a political leader develops a political system of his own, his opponents, although actuated by different motives, do the same thing, which may be taken as an absolute sign that the person in question has made some sincere enemies at least. But if Maydew made enemies he made friends too; at any rate he made followers. As the campaign drew near to its crackling finish it was plain that he would carry most of the towns; Major Guest’s strength apparently was in the country – among the farmers and the dwellers in small villages.

County conventions to name delegates to the district conventions which, in turn, would name the congressional nominee were held simultaneously in the nine counties composing the district at two P.M. of the first Tuesday after the first Monday in August. A week before, Senator Maydew, having cannily provided that his successor should be a man after his own heart, resigned as district chairman. Although he had thrown overboard most of the party precedents, it seemed to him hardly ethical that he should call to order and conduct the preliminary proceedings of the body that he counted upon to nominate him as its standard bearer – standard bearer being the somewhat ornamental phrase customarily used among us on these occasions. He was entirely confident of the final outcome. The cheering reports of his aides in the field made him feel quite sure that the main convention would take but one ballot. They allowed, one and all, it would be a walk-over.

Howsoever, these optimists, as it developed, had reckoned without one factor: they had reckoned without a certain undercurrent of disfavor for Maydew which, though it remained for the most part inarticulate during the campaign, was to manifest itself in the county conventions. Personalities, strictly speaking, had not been imported into the fight. Neither candidate had seen fit to attack the private life of his opponent, but at the last moment there came to the surface an unexpected and, in the main, a silent antagonism against the Senator which could hardly be accounted for on the ground of any act of his official and public career.

So, late in the afternoon of the first Tuesday after the first Monday, when the smoke cleared away and the shouting and the tumult died, the complete returns showed that of the nine counties, totalling one hundred and twenty delegate votes, Maydew had four counties and fifty-seven votes. Guest had carried four counties also, with fifty-one votes, while Bryce County, the lowermost county of the district, had failed to instruct its twelve delegates for either Maydew or Guest, which, to anybody who knew anything at all about politics, was proof positive that in the main convention Bryce County would hold the balance of power. It wouldn’t be a walkover; that much was certain, anyhow. Maydew’s jaunty smile lost some of its jauntiness, and anxious puckers made little seams at the corners of those greedy eyes of his, when the news from Bryce County came. As for Judge Priest, he displayed every outward sign of being well content as he ran over the completed figures. Bryce was an old-fashioned county, mainly populated by a people who clung to old-fashioned notions. Old soldiers were notably thick in Bryce, too. There was a good chance yet for his man. It all depended on those twelve votes of Bryce County.

To Marshallville, second largest town in the district, befell the honor that year of having the district convention held in its hospitable midst; and, as the Daily Evening News smartly phrased it, to Marshallville on a Thursday All Roads Ran. In accordance with the rote of fifty years it had been ordained that the convention should meet in the Marshallville courthouse, but in the week previous a fire of mysterious origin destroyed a large segment of the shingled roof of that historic structure. A darky was on trial for hog stealing upon the day of the fire, and it may have been that sparks from the fiery oratory of the prosecuting attorney, as he pleaded with the jury for a conviction, went upward and lodged among the rafters. As to that I am not in a position to say. I only know this explanation for the catastrophe was advanced by divers ribald-minded individuals who attended the trial.

In this emergency the local committee on arrangements secured for the convention the use of the new Marshallville opera house, which was the pride of Marshallville – a compact but ornate structure having on its first floor no less than one hundred and fifty of those regular theatre chairs magnificently upholstered in hot red plush, and above, at the back, a balcony, and to crown all, two orthodox stage boxes of stucco, liberally embossed with gold paint, which clung, like gilded mud-daubers’ nests, at either side of the proscenium arch, overhanging the stage below.

In one of these boxes, as the delegates gathered that very warm August afternoon, a lady sat in solitary state. To the delegates were assigned the plush-enveloped grandeurs of the main floor. The spectators, including a large number of the male citizens of Marshallville with a sprinkling of their women-folk, packed the balcony to the stifling point, but this lady had a whole box to herself. She seemed fairly well pleased with herself as she sat there. Certainly she had no cause to complain of a lack of public interest in her and her costume. To begin with, there was a much beplumed hat, indubitably a thing of great cost and of augmented size, which effectively shaded and set off her plump face. No such hat had been seen in Marshallville before that day.

The gown she wore was likewise of a fashion new to the dazzled gaze of her more plainly habited sisters in the balcony. I believe in the favored land where they originated they call them princesse gowns. Be its name what it may, this garment ran in long, well-nigh unwrinkled lines from the throat of its wearer to her ankles.

It was of some clinging white stuff, modelled seemingly with an intent to expose rather than to hide the curves of the rounded figure which it covered. It was close at the neck, snug at the bust, snugger still at the hips, and from there it flowed on tightly yet smoothly to where it ended, above a pair of high-heeled, big-buckled slippers of an amazing shininess. The uninitiated might well have marvelled how the lady ever got in her gown unless she had been melted and poured into it; but there was no mystery concerning the manner in which she had fastened it, once she was inside of it, for, when she turned away from the audience, a wondrously decorative finishing touch was to be seen: straight down the middle of her back coursed a close row of big, shiny black jet buttons, and when she shifted her shoulders these buttons undulated glisteningly along the line of her spinal column. The effect was snaky but striking.

The lady, plainly, was not exactly displeased with herself. Even a rear view of her revealed this. There was assurance in the poise of her head; assuredly there was a beaming as of confidence in her eyes. Indeed, she had reasons other than the satisfaction inspired by the possession of a modish and becoming garb for feeling happy. Things promised to go well with her and what was hers that afternoon. Perhaps I should have stated sooner that the lady in question was Mrs. Senator Maydew, present to witness and to glorify the triumph of her distinguished husband.

For a fact, triumph did seem near at hand now – nearer than it had been any time these past forty-eight hours. A quarter of an hour earlier an exultant messenger had come from her husband to bring to her most splendid and auspicious tidings. Luck had swung his way, and no mistake about it: of the doubtful delegates from Bryce County only two had arrived. The other ten had not arrived. Moreover there was no apparent possibility that they would arrive before the following day, and by then, if the Senator’s new-born scheme succeeded, it would be all over but the shouting. A Heaven-sent freshet in Little River was the cause. Sitting there now in her stage box, Mrs. Senator Maydew silently blessed the name of Little River.

Ordinarily Little River is a stream not calculated to attract the attention of historians or geographers – a torpid, saffron-colored thread of water meandering between flat yellow banks, and owing its chief distinction to the fact that it cuts off three-quarters of Bryce County from the remaining quarter and from the adjoining counties on the north. But it has its moods and its passions. It is temperamental, that river. Suddenly and enormously swollen by torrential summer rains in the hills where it has its rise, it went, the night before, on a rampage, over-flooding its banks, washing away fences and doing all manner of minor damage in the low grounds.

At dawn the big bridge which spanned the river at the gravel road had gone out, and at breakfast time Ferris’ Ford, a safe enough crossing place in times of low water, was fifteen feet deep under a hissing brown flood. Two of Bryce County’s delegates, who chanced to live in the upper corner of the county, had driven through hub-deep mud to the junction and there caught the train for Marshallville; but their ten compatriots were even now somewhere on the far bank, cut off absolutely from all prospect of attending the convention until the roiled and angry waters should subside.

Senator Maydew, always fertile in expedient, meant to ride to victory, as it were, on the providential high tide in Little River. Immediately on hearing what had happened, he divined how the mishap of the washed-out bridge and the flooded ford might be made to serve his ends and better his fortunes. He was keeping the plan secret for the moment; for it was a very precious plan. And this, in effect, was the word that his emissary brought to his wife just before the convention met. He could not bring it himself; custom forbade that a candidate show himself upon the floor in the early stages, but she was told to wait and watch for what would presently ensue, and meanwhile be of good cheer. Which, verily, she was.

She did not have so very long to wait. The convention assembled on the hour – a block of ten vacant seats in the second aisle showing where the missing ten of Bryce should have been – and was called to order by the new district chairman. Up rose Judge Priest from his place in the middle of the house, flanking the center aisle, and addressed the chair. He had just learned, he stated, that a considerable quota of the number of duly chosen delegates had not yet reached Marshallville. It appeared that the elements were in conspiracy against the extreme lower end of the district. In justice to the sovereign voters of the sovereign County of Bryce he moved that a recess of twenty-four hours be taken. The situation which had arisen was unforeseen and extraordinary, and time should be granted for considering it in all its aspects. And so on and so forth for five minutes or more, in Judge Priest’s best ungrammatical style. The chairman, who, as will be recalled, was Maydew’s man, ruled the motion out of order.

I shall pass over as briefly as possible the proceedings of the next half hour. To go fully into those details would be to burden this narrative with technicalities and tiresomeness. For our purposes it is sufficient, I think, to say that the Maydew machine, operating after the fashion of a well-lubricated, well-steered and high-powered steam roller, ran over all obstacles with the utmost despatch. These painful crunching operations began early and continued briskly.

On the first roll call of the counties, as the County of Bryce – second on our list after Bland – was reached, one of those two lone delegates from the upper side of Little River stood up and, holding aloft his own credentials and the credentials of his team-mate, demanded the right to cast the votes of the whole Bryce County delegation – twelve in all.

The district chairman, acting with a promptness that bespoke priming beforehand for just such a contingency, held that the matter should be referred to the committee on credentials. As floor leader and spokesman for the Guest faction, old Judge Priest appealed from the ruling of the chair. A vote was taken. The chairman was sustained by fifty-seven to fifty-one, the two indignant delegates from Bryce not being permitted, under a ruling from the chair, to cast any votes whatsoever, seeing as their own status in the convention was the question at issue. Disorder ensued; in the absence of a sergeant-at-arms the services of volunteer peacemakers were required to separate a Maydew delegate from Bland County and a Guest delegate from Mims County.

Dripping with perspiration, his broad old face one big pinky-red flare, his nasal whine rising to heights of incredible whininess under the stress of his earnestness, the judge led the fight for the minority. The steam roller went out of its way to flatten him. Not once, but twice and thrice it jounced over him, each time leaving him figuratively squashed but entirely undismayed. He was fighting a losing but a valiant fight for time.

A committee on resolutions was named and went forth to an ante-room to draw up a platform. Nobody cared much about that. A set of resolutions pointing with pride to everything that was Democratic and viewing with alarm everything even remotely Republican in aspect would be presently forthcoming, as was customary. It was the committee on credentials upon which everything depended. Being chosen, it likewise retired, returning in a miraculously short space of time with its completed report.

And this, in brief, was what the majority of the committee on credentials – all reliable Maydew men – had to report:

There being no contests, it was recommended that the sitting delegates from the eight counties fully represented upon the floor be recognized as properly accredited delegates. But in respect to the ninth county, namely Bryce, an unprecedented situation had arisen. Two of Bryce’s delegates were present, bearing credentials properly attested by their county chairman; unfortunately ten others were absent, through no fault of their own or of the convention. As a majority of the credentials committee viewed the matter, it would be a manifest injustice to deprive these two delegates of their right to take a hand in the deliberations; on the other hand, the committee held it to be equally unfair that those two should be permitted to cast the ballots of their ten associates, inasmuch as they could have no way of knowing what the personal preferences of the absentees might be. However, to meet the peculiar condition the committee now made the following recommendation, to wit as follows: That the secretary of the convention be instructed to prepare an alphabetical list of such delegates as were present in person, and that only such delegates as answered to their own names upon roll call – and no others whatsoever – be permitted to vote upon any question or questions subsequently arising in this convention. Respectfully submitted.

For a period of time to be measured by split seconds there was silence. Then a whirlwind of sound whipped round and round that packed little martin-box of an opera house and, spiraling upward, threatened the integrity of its tin roof. Senator Maydew had delivered his king-stroke, and the purport of it stood clearly betrayed to the understanding of all. With Bryce’s voting strength reduced from twelve votes to two, and with all possibility of voting by proxy removed, the senator was bound to win the nomination on the first ballot. The Maydew men foresaw the inevitable result, once the recommendation of the committee had prevailed, and they reared up in their places and threw their hats aloft and yelled. The Guest forces saw it, and they howled their disapprobation until they were hoarse.

The tumult stilled down to a ground breeze of mutterings as Judge Priest got upon his feet. To him in this dire emergency, the Guest forces, now neck-deep in the last ditch, looked hopefully for a counter-fire that might yet save them from the defeat looming so imminent. There and then, for once in his life the judge failed to justify the hopes and the faith of his followers. He seemed strangely unable to find language in which effectively to combat the proposition before the house. He floundered about, making no headway, pushing no points home. He practically admitted he knew of nothing in party usage or in parliamentary law that might serve as a bar to the adoption of the proposed rule. He proposed to vote against it, he said, but in the event that it be adopted he now moved that immediately thereafter the convention take an adjournment, thus giving the secretary time and opportunity in which to prepare the alphabetical list. With that he broke off suddenly and quit and sat down; and then the heart went out of the collective body of the Guest adherents and they quit, too, waiting in sullen, bewildered, disappointed silence for the inevitable.

After this it was felt that any further opposition to the Maydew program would be but perfunctory opposition. The majority report of the committee on credentials was adopted by fifty-seven to fifty-three, the two Bryce delegates voting in the negative, as was to be expected. Even so, Maydew had a lead of four votes, which was not very many – but enough. To the accompaniment of a few scattering and spiritless Nays the convention took a recess of one hour. This meant a mighty busy hour for the secretary, but Maydew, from his temporary abiding place in the wings, sent orders to his floor managers to permit no more than an hour’s delay at most. He was famishing for the taste of his accomplished triumph. Besides, there was no trusting so mercurial a stream as Little River. It might go down with the same rapidity that had marked its coming up. So an hour it was.

The delegates flowed out of the Marshallville opera house into the public square of Marshallville, and half of them, or a little more than half, were openly, jubilant; and half of them, or a little less than half, were downcast, wearing the look upon their faces of men who were licked and who knew it, good and well. Moving along through the crowded aisle, a despondent delegate from Mims, a distant kinsman of Major Guest, found himself touching shoulders with Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, who was a delegate from our own county.

The Mims County man, with a contemptuous flirt of his thumb, indicated the broad back of Judge Priest as the judge ambled deliberately along toward the door.

“I knowed it,” he said in the tones of bitter recapitulation; “I knowed it frum the start and I told ’em so; but no, they wouldn’t listen to me. I knowed old Priest yonder was too old to be tryin’ to run a campaign ag’inst a smart feller like Maydew, dern his slick hide! When the real test come, whut did your Jedge Priest do? Why, he jest natchelly curled up and laid flat down – that’s whut he done. I reckin they’ll listen to me next time.”

For once in his life, and once only, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby teetered just the least bit in his unquestioning allegiance to his life-long friend.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head; “I don’t know. You might be right in what you say, and then ag’in you might be wrong. It shore did look like he slipped a little, awhile ago, but you can’t jest always tell whut’s on Jedge Priest’s mind,” he added, pluckily renewing his loyalty.

The Mims County man grunted his disgust. “Don’t be foolin’ yourself,” he stated morosely. “You take it frum me – when old men start goin’ they don’t never come back. And your old Jedge is plumb gone. A baby could ’a’ seen that frum the way he acted jest now.”

The object of this criticism plowed his slow way outdoors, all the while shaking his head with the air of one who has abandoned hope. In the street he gently but firmly disengaged himself from those who would have speech with him, and with obvious gloom in his manner made a way across the square to the Mansard House, where he and Major Guest had adjoining rooms on the second floor. His gait briskened, though, as soon as he had passed through the lobby of the Mansard House and was hidden from the eyes of friend and enemy alike.

From the privacy of his room he sent out for certain men. With Cap’n Buck Owings, a small, greyish, resolute gentleman, and with Sheriff Giles Birdsong, a large, reddish, equally resolute gentleman, he was closeted perhaps ten minutes. They went away saying nothing to anyone, for the gift of silence was an attribute that these two shared in common. Then the judge had brief audience with Major Guest, who emerged from the conference a crushed and diminished figure. Finally he asked to speak with Sergeant Bagby. The sergeant found him sitting in his shirt-sleeves, with his feet on a window ledge, looking out into the square and gently agitating a palm-leaf fan.

“Jimmy,” he said, “I want you to run an errand fur me. Will you go find Dabney Prentiss – I seen him down there on the street a minute ago – and tell him I say to git a speech ready?”

“Whut kind of a speech?” inquired Sergeant Bagby.

“Jimmy Bagby,” reproved Judge Priest, “ain’t you knowed Dab Prentiss long enough to know that you don’t have to tell him whut kind of a speech he’s to make? He’s got all kinds of speeches in stock at all times. I’ll confide this much to you though – it’ll be the kind of a speech that he would ’specially prefer to make. Jest tell him I say be ready to speak out and utter a few burnin’ words when the proper time comes, ef it does come, which I certainly hope and trust it may.”

Not greatly informed in his mind by this somewhat cryptic explanation, the Sergeant withdrew, and Judge Priest, getting up on his feet, actually began humming a little wordless, tuneless tune which was a favorite of his. However, a thought of the melancholy interview that he had just had with Major Guest must have recurred to him almost immediately, for when he appeared in the open a bit later on his return to the opera house his head was bent and his form was shrunken and his gait was slow. He seemed a man weighed down with vain repinings and vainer regrets.

It would appear that the secretary in the interim had completed his appointed task, for no sooner had the convention reassembled than the chairman mounted to the stage and took his place alongside a small table behind the footlights and announced that nominations would now be in order; which statement was a cue for Attorney-at-Law Augustus Tate, of the County of Emmett, to get gracefully upon his feet and toss back his imposing sable mane and address the assemblage.

Attorney Tate was an orator of parts, as he now proceeded to prove beyond the slightest peradventure of a doubt. He was known as the Black Eagle of Emmett, for it had been said of him that he had an eye like that noble bird, the eagle. He had a chin like one, too; but that, of course, had no bearing upon his talents as displayed upon the stump, on the platform and in the forum, and in truth only a few malicious detractors had ever felt called upon to direct attention to the fact. In flowing and sonorous periods he placed in nomination the name of the Honorable Horace K. Maydew, concluding in a burst of verbal pin wheels and metaphorical skyrockets, whereat there was a great display of enthusiasm from floor and balcony.

When quiet had been restored Judge Priest got slowly up from where he sat and took an action which was not entirely unexpected, inasmuch as rumors of it had been in active circulation for half an hour or more. In twenty words he withdrew the name of the Honorable J. C. C. Guest as a candidate before the convention.

Only a rustle of bodies succeeded this announcement – that and an exhalation of breath from a few delegations, which attained to the volume of a deep joint sigh.

The chairman glanced over the house with a brightening eye. It was almost time to begin the jubilation. As a matter of fact several ardent souls among the Maydewites could hardly hold themselves in until the few remaining formalities had been complied with. They poised themselves upon the edges of their chairs, with throats tuned to lead in the yelling.

“Are there any other nominations?” asked the chairman, turning this way and that. He asked it as a matter of form merely. “If not, the nominations will be closed and the secretary will—”

“Mister Cheerman, one minute, ef you please.”

The interrupting voice was the high-piped voice of Judge Priest, and the chairman straightened on his heels to find Judge Priest still upon his feet.

“The chair recognizes Judge Priest again,” said the chairman blandly. He assumed the judge meant to accept his beating gracefully and, in the interest of party harmony, to move the nomination of Maydew by acclamation. On his part that would have been a fair enough presumption, but the first utterances that came now from the old judge jerked open the eyes and gaped the mouth of the presiding officer. However, he was not alone there; nearly everybody was stunned.

“It was my painful duty a minute ago to withdraw the candidate that I had been privileged to foller in this campaign,” said Judge Priest in his weedy notes. “It is now my pleasure to offer in his stead the name of another man as a suitable and a fittin’ representative of this district in the National Halls of Congress.” He glanced about him as though enjoying the surprised hush that had fallen upon the place, and for just a fraction of a second his eyes focused upon the lone occupant of the right-hand stage box, almost above his head. Then he went on, deliberately prolonging his syllables:

“The man whom I would nominate has never so fur as I know been active in politics. So fur as I know he has never aspired to or sought fur public office at the hands of his feller-citizens; in fact, he does not now seek this office. In presentin’ his name for your consideration I am doin’ so solely upon my own responsibility and without consultin’ anyone on this earth.

“My present candidate is not an orator. He is not a mixer or an organizer. I am constrained to admit that, measured by the standards of commerce, he is not even a successful man. He is poor in this world’s goods. He is leadin’ at this moment a life of retirement upon a little barren hillside farm, where the gulleys furrow his tobacco patch and the sassafras sprouts are takin’ his cornfield, and the shadder of a mortgage rests heavy upon his lonely roof tree.

“But he is an honest man and a God-fearin’ man. Ez a soldier under the stars and bars he done his duty to the sorrowful end. Ez a citizen he has never wilfully harmed his feller-man. He never invaded the sanctity of any man’s home, and he never brought sorrow to any hearthstone. Ef he has his faults – and who amongst us is without them? – he has been the sole sufferer by them. I believe it has been charged that he drank some, but I never seen him under the influence of licker, and I don’t believe anybody else ever did either.

“I nominate——” His voice took on the shrillness of a fife and his right fist, pudgy and clenched, came up at arm’s length above his head – “I nominate – and on that nomination, in accordance with a rule but newly framed by this body, I call here and now fur an alphabetical roll call of each and every delegate – I offer as a candidate fur Congress ag’inst the Honorable Horace K. Maydew the name of my friend, my neighbor and my former comrade, Lysandy John Curd, of the voting precinct of Lone Ellum and the County of Red Gravel.”

There was no applause. Not a ripple of approbation went up, nor a ripple of hostility either. But a gasp went up – a mighty gasp, deep and sincere and tremendously significant.

Of those upon the stage it was the chairman, I think, who got his wits back first. He was naturally quick-witted, else his sponsor would never have chosen him for chairman. In a mute plea for guidance he turned his head toward the wing of the stage where he knew that sponsor should be, and abruptly, at a distance from him to be measured by inches rather than by feet, his gaze encountered the hypnotizing stare of Cap’n Buck Owings, who had magically materialized from nowhere in particular and was now at his elbow.

“Stay right where you are,” counselled Cap’n Buck in a half whisper. “We’ve had plenty of these here recesses – these proceedin’s are goin’ right on.”

Daunted and bewildered, the chairman hesitated, his gavel trembling in his temporarily palsied hand. In that same moment Sheriff Giles Birdsong had got upon the stage, too; only he deemed his proper place to be directly alongside the desk of the secretary, and into the startled ear of the secretary he now spoke.

“Start your roll call, buddy,” was what Mr. Birdsong said, saying it softly, in lullaby tones, yet imparting a profound meaning to his crooning and gentle accents. “And be shore to call off the names in alphabetical order – don’t fur-git that part!”

Inward voices of prudence dictated the value of prompt obedience in the brain of that secretary. Quaveringly he called the first name on the list of the first county, and the county was Bland and the name was Homer H. Agnew.

Down in the Bland County delegation, seated directly in front of the stage, an old man stood up – the Rev. Homer H. Agnew, an itinerant Baptist preacher.

“My county convention,” he explained, “instructed us for Maydew. But under the law of this convention I vote now as an individual. As between the two candidates presented I can vote only one way. I vote for Curd.”

Having voted, he remained standing. There were no cheers and no hisses. Everybody waited. In a silence so heavy that it hurt, they waited. And the secretary was constrained to call the second name on the Bland County list: “Patrick J. Burke!”

Now Patrick J. Burke, as one might guess from his name, belonged to a race that has been called sentimental and emotional. Likewise he was a communicant of a faith which long ago set its face like a flint against the practice of divorce.

“I vote for Curd,” said Patrick J. Burke, and likewise he stood up, a belligerent, defiant, stumpy, red-haired man.

“Rufus Burnett!”

This was the first convention Rufus Burnett had ever attended in an official capacity. In order that she might see how well he acquitted himself, he had brought his wife with him and put her in the balcony. We may figure Mrs. Burnett as a strong-minded lady, for before he answered to his name Mr. Burnett, as though seeking higher guidance, cocked a pestered eye aloft to where the lady sat, and she, saying nothing, merely pointed a finger toward the spot where old Judge Priest was stationed. Rufus knew.

“Curd,” he said clearly and distinctly. Somebody yelled then, and other voices took up the yell.

There were eleven names on the Bland County list. The secretary had reached the eighth and had heard eight voices speak the same word, when an interruption occurred – perhaps I should say two interruptions occurred.

The Black Eagle of Emmett darted out from the wings, bounded over the footlights and split a path for himself to the seat of Judge Priest. For once he forgot to be oratorical. “We’ll quit, Judge,” he panted, “we’re ready to quit. Maydew will withdraw – I’ve just come from him. He can’t stand for this to go on; he’ll withdraw if you’ll take Curd’s name down too. Any compromise candidate will do. Only, for heaven’s sake, withdraw Curd before this goes any farther!”

“All right, son,” said Judge Priest, raising his voice to be heard, for by now the secretary had called the ninth name and the cheering was increasing in volume; “that suits me first rate. But you withdraw your man first, and then I’ll tell you who the nominee of this here convention is goin’ to be.”

Turning, he put a hand upon Sergeant Bagby’s arm and shook him until the sergeant broke a whoop in two and hearkened.

“Jimmy,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle, “step down the aisle, will you, and tell Dabney Prentiss to uncork himse’f and git his speech of acceptance all ready. He don’t know it yit, but he’s goin’ to move up to Washington, D. C., after the next general election.”

Just as the sergeant started on his mission the other interruption occurred. A lady fainted. She was conspicuously established in the stage box on the right-hand side, and under the circumstances and with so many harshly appraisive eyes fixed upon her there was really nothing else for her to do, as a lady, except faint. She slipped out of her chair and fell backward upon the floor. It must have been a genuine faint, for certainly no person who was even partly conscious, let alone a tenderly nurtured lady, could have endured to lie flat upon the hard planks, as this lady did, with all those big, knobby jet buttons grinding right into her spine.

Although I may have wandered far from the main path and taken the patient reader into devious byways, I feel I have accomplished what I set out to do in the beginning: I have explained how Dabney Prentiss came to be our representative in the Lower House of the National Congress. The task is done, yet I feel that I should not conclude the chapter until I have repeated a short passage of words between Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and that delegate from Mims County who was a distant kinsman of Major Guest. It happened just after the convention, having finished its work, had adjourned, and while the delegates and the spectators were emerging from the Marshallville opera house.

All jubilant and excited now, the Mims County man came charging up and slapped Sergeant Bagby upon the shoulder.

“Well, suh.” he clarioned, “the old Jedge did come back, didn’t he?”

“Buddy,” said Sergeant Bagby, “you was wrong before and you’re wrong ag’in. He didn’t have to come back, because he ain’t never been gone nowheres.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 07 Aug 1915
Old Judge Priest (1916)

A Chapter from the Life of an Ant

~

Someone said once – the rest of us subsequently repeating it on occasion – that this world is but an ant hill, populated by many millions of ants, which run about aimlessly or aimfully as the case may be. All of which is true enough. Seek you out some lofty eminence, such as the top floor of a skyscraper or the top of a hill, and from it, looking down, consider a crowded city street at noon time or a county fairground on the day of the grand balloon ascension. Inevitably the simile will recur to the contemplative mind.

The trouble, though, with the original coiner of the comparison was that he did not go far enough. He should have said the world was populated by ants – and by anteaters. For so surely as we find ants, there, too, do we find the anteaters. You behold the ants bustling about, making themselves leaner trying to make themselves fatter; terrifically busied with their small affairs; hiving up sustenance against the hard winter; gnawing, digging and delving; climbing, crawling, building and breeding – in short, deporting themselves with that energy, that restless industry which so stirred the admiration of the Prophet of old that, on his heavenward pilgrimage, he tarried long enough to tell the sluggard – name of the sluggard not given in the chronicles – to go to the ant and consider of her.

The anteater for the moment may not actually be in sight, but be assured he is waiting. He is waiting around the corner until the ant has propagated in numbers amounting to an excess; or, in other words, until the class that is born every second, singly – and sometimes as twins – has grown plentiful enough to furnish a feasting. Forth he comes then, gobbling up Brer Ant, along with his fullness and his richness, his heirs and his assigns, his substance and his stock in trade.

To make the illustration concrete, we might say that were there no ants there would be no Wall Street; and by the same token were there no anteaters there would be no Wall Street either. Without anteaters the ants would multiply and replenish the earth beyond computation. Without ants the anteaters would have to live upon each other – which would be bad for them but better for the rest of creation. War is the greatest of the anteaters – it feeds upon the bodies of the ants. Kings upon their thrones, devisers of false doctrines, crooked politicians, grafters, con men, card sharks, thimbleriggers – all these are anteaters battening on the substance of simple-hearted, earnest-minded ants. The ant believes what you tell him; the greedsome anteater thrives upon this credulity. Roughly, then, for purposes of classification, one may divide the world at large into two groups – in this larger group here the ants, in that smaller group there the anteaters.

So much, for purposes of argument, being conceded, we may safely figure Emanuel Moon as belonging in the category of the ants, pure and simple – reasonably pure and undeniably simple. However, at the time whereof I write I doubt whether it had ever occurred to anyone to liken him to an ant. His mother had called him Mannie, his employers called him plain Moon, and to practically everybody else he was just little Mr. Moon, who worked in the Commonwealth Bank. He had started there, in the bank, as office boy; by dint of years of untiring fidelity to the interests of that institution he had worked up to the place of assistant cashier, salary seventy-five dollars a month. Privately he nursed an ambition to become, in time, cashier, with a cashier’s full powers. It might be added that in this desire he stood practically alone.

Emanuel Moon was a little man, rising of thirty-five, who believed that the Whale swallowed Jonah, that if you swore a certain form of oath you were certain of hell-fire, and that Mr. Hiram Blair, president of the Commonwealth Bank, hung the Big Dipper. If the Bible had put it the other way round he would have believed as sincerely that it was Jonah who swallowed the Whale. He had a wistful, bashful little smile, an air of being perpetually busy, and a round, mild eye the color of a boiled oyster. He also had a most gentle manner and the long, prehensile upper lip that is found only in the South American tapir and the confirmed clarinet player. Emanuel Moon had one besetting sin, and only one – he just would play the clarinet.

On an average of three nights a week he withdrew himself from the company assembled about the base-burner stove in the parlor if it were winter, or upon the front porch of Mrs. Teenie Morrill’s boarding house if it were seasonable weather, and went up to his room on the third floor and played the clarinet. Some said he played it and some that he merely played at it. He knew “Annie Laurie” off by heart and for a term of years had been satisfied in that knowledge. Now he was learning another air – “The Last Rose of Summer.”

He prosecuted his musical education on what he called his off evenings. Wednesday night he went to prayer meeting and Sunday night to the regular church service. Tuesday night he always spent at his lodge; and perhaps once in a fortnight he called upon Miss Katie Rouser, who taught in the High School and for whom he was believed to entertain sentiments that did him credit, even though he had never found words in which to voice them.

At the lodge he served on the committees which did the hard work; that, as a general proposition, meant also the thankless work. If things went well someone else took the credit; if they went ill Emanuel and his co-laborers shared the blame. The conditions had always been so – when he was a small boy and when he was a youth, growing up. In his adolescence, if there was a picnic in contemplation or a straw ride or a barn dance, Mannie had been graciously permitted by common consent of all concerned to arrange with the livery-stable man for the teams, to hire the colored string band, to bargain with the owner of the picnic grounds or the barn, to see to ice for the ice-water barrel and lemons for the lemonade bucket.

While he thus busied himself the other youths made dates for the occasion with all the desirable girls. Hence it was that on the festal date Emanuel went partnerless to the party; and this was just as well, too, seeing that right up until the time of starting he would be completely occupied with last-moment details, and, after that, what with apologizing for any slip-ups that might have occurred, and being scolded and ordered about on errands and called upon to explain this or that, would have small time to play the squire to any young person of the opposite sex, even had there been one convenient.

It was so at the bank, where he did more work than anybody and got less pay than anybody. It was so, as I have just stated, at the lodge. In a word, Emanuel had no faculty as an executive, but an enormous capacity for executing. The earth is full of him. Whereever five or more are gathered together there is present at least one of the Emanuel Moons of this world.

•     •     •     •     •

It had been a hot, long summer, even for a climate where the summers are always long and nearly always hot; and at the fag end of it Emanuel inclined strongly toward a desire for a short rest. Diffidently he managed to voice his mood and his need to Mr. Blair. That worthy gentleman had but just returned home, a giant refreshed, after a month spent in the North Carolina mountains. He felt so fit, so fine, so robust, he took it as a personal grievance that any about him should not likewise be feeling fit. He cut Emanuel off pretty short. Vacations, he intimated, were for those whose years and whose services in behalf of humanity entitled them to vacations; young men who expected to get along in business had best rid their thoughts of all such pampered hankerings.

Emanuel took the rebuke in good grace, as was his way; but that evening at the supper table he created some excitement among his fellow boarders by quietly and unostentatiously fainting, face forward, into a saucer of pear preserves that was mostly juice. He was removed to his room and put to bed, and attended by Doctor Lake. The next morning he was not able to go to the bank. On being apprised of the situation Mr. Blair very thoughtfully abated of his previous resolution and sent Emanuel word that he might have a week or even ten days off – at his own expense – wherein to recuperate.

Some thirty-six hours later, therefore, Emanuel might have been found on board the fast train bound for Louisville, looking a trifle pulled down and shaky, but filled with a great yearning. In Louisville, at a certain establishment doing a large mail-order business, was to be had for thirty-eight dollars, list price, fifteen and five off for cash, a clarinet that was to his present infirm and leaky clarinet as minted gold is to pot metal.

To be sure, this delectable instrument might be purchased, sight unseen, but with privilege of examination, through the handy medium of the parcel post; the house handling it was in all respects reliable and lived up to the printed promise of the catalogue, but to Emanuel half the pride and pleasure of becoming its proprietor lay in going into the place and asking to see such and such a clarinet, and fingering it and testing its tone, and finally putting down the money and carrying it off with him under his arm. He meant, first of all, to buy his new clarinet; for the rest his plans were hazy. He might stay on in Louisville a few days or he might go elsewhere. He might even return home and spend the remainder of his vacation perfecting himself in his still faulty rendition of The Last Rose of Summer.

For an hour or so after boarding the train he viewed the passing scenery as it revealed itself through the day-coach window and speculated regarding the personalities of his fellow passengers. After that hour or so he began to nod. Presently he slumbered, with his head bobbing against the seat-back and one arm dangling in the aisle. A sense of being touched half roused him; a moment later he opened his eyes with the feeling that he had lost his hat or was about to lose it. Alongside him stood a well-dressed man of, say, thirty-eight or forty, who regarded him cordially and who held between the long, slender fingers of his right hand a little rectangle of blue cardboard, having punch marks in it.

“Excuse me, friend,” said this man, “but didn’t this fall out of your hat? I picked it up here on the floor alongside you.”

“I reckon maybe it did,” said Emanuel, removing his hat and noticing that the customary decoration conferred by the conductor was absent from its band. “I’m certainly much obliged to you, sir.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the stranger. “Better stick it in good and tight this time. They might try to collect a second fare from you if you couldn’t show your credentials. Remember, don’t you, the story about the calf that ate up his express tag and what the old nigger man said about it?”

The stranger’s accent stamped him as a Northerner; his manner revealed him indubitably as a man of the world – withal it was a genial manner. He bestowed a suitcase alongside in the aisle and slipped into the seat facing Emanuel. Emanuel vaguely felt flattered. It had promised to be rather a lonely journey.

“You don’t mind my sitting here a bit, do you?” added the man after he was seated.

“Not at all – glad to have you,” said Emanuel, meaning it. “Nice weather – if it wasn’t so warm,” he continued, making conversation.

It started with the weather; but you know how talk runs along. At the end of perhaps ten minutes it had somehow worked around to amusements – checkers and chess and cards.

“Speaking of cards now,” said the stranger, “I like a little game once in a while myself. Helps the time to pass away when nothing else will. Fact is, I usually carry a deck along with me just for that purpose. Fact is, I’ve got a new deck with me now, I think.” He fumbled in the breast pocket of his light flannel coat and glanced about him. “Tell you what – suppose we play a few hands of poker – show-down, you know – for ten cents a corner, say, or a quarter? We could use my suitcase for a card table by resting it on our knees between us.” He reached out into the aisle.

“I’m much obliged,” said Emanuel with an indefinable sense of pain at having to decline so friendly an invitation; “but, to tell you the truth, I make it a point never to touch cards at all. It wouldn’t do – in my position. You see, I’m in a bank at home.”

With newly quickened alertness the stranger’s eyes narrowed. He put the cards back into his pocket and straightened up attentively. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I see. Well, that being the case, I don’t blame you.” Plainly he had not been hurt by Emanuel’s refusal to join in so innocent a pastime as dealing show-down hands at ten cents a side. On the contrary he warmed visibly. “A young man in a bank can’t be too careful – especially if it’s a small town, where everybody knows everybody else’s business. You let a young fellow that works in a bank in a small town, or even a medium-sized town, play a few hands of poker and, first thing you know, it’s all over the place that he’s gambling and they’ve got an expert on his books. Let’s see now – where was it you said you lived?” Emanuel told him.

“Well, now, that’s a funny thing! I used to know a man in your town. Let’s see – what was his name? Parker? Parsons?” He paused. Emanuel shook his head.

“Perkins? Perkins? Could it have been Perkins?” essayed the other tentatively, his eyes fixed keenly on the ingenuous countenance of his opposite; and then, as Emanuel’s head nodded forward affirmatively: “Why, that’s the name – Perkins,” proclaimed the stranger with a little smile of triumph.

“Probably J. W. Perkins,” said Emanuel. “Mr. J. W. Perkins is our leading hardware merchant. He banks with us; I see him every day – pretty near it.”

“No; not J. W. Perkins,” instantly confessed his companion. “That’s the name all right enough, but not the initials. Didn’t this Mr. Perkins have a brother, or a cousin or something, who died?”

“Oh, I know who you mean, now,” said Emanuel, glad to be able to help with the identification. “Alfred Perkins – he died two years ago this coming October.”

“How old was he?” The Northerner had the air about him of being determined to make sure.

“About fifty, I judge – maybe fifty-two or three.”

“And didn’t they use to call him Al for short?”

“Yes; nearly everybody did – Mr. Al Perkins.”

“That’s the party,” agreed the other. “Al Perkins! I knew him well. Strange, now, that I can’t think where it was I met him – I move round so much in my business, being on the road as a traveling man, it’s hard keeping track of people; but I know we spent a week or two together somewhere or other. Speaking of names, mine is Caruthers – John P. Caruthers. Sorry I haven’t got a card with me – I ran out of cards yesterday.”

“Mine,” said our townsman, “is Emanuel Moon.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Moon,” said Mr. Caruthers as he sought Emanuel’s right hand and shook it heartily.

“Very glad indeed. You don’t meet many people of your name – Oh, by Jove, that’s another funny thing!”

“What?” said Emanuel.

“Why,” said Mr. Caruthers, “I used to have a pal – a good friend – with your name; Robert Moon it was. He lived in Detroit, Michigan. Fine fellow, Bob was. I wonder could old Bob Moon have been your cousin?”

“No,” said Emanuel almost regretfully; “I’m afraid not. All my people live South, so far as I know.”

“Well, anyhow, you’d enjoy knowing old Bob,” went on the companionable Mr. Caruthers. “Have a smoke?”

He produced both cigars and cigarettes. Emanuel said he never smoked, so Mr. Caruthers lighted a cigar.

Up to this point the conversation had been more or less general. Now, somehow, it took a rather personal and direct trend. Mr. Caruthers proved to be an excellent listener, although he asked quite a number of leading questions as they went along. He evinced a kindly curiosity regarding Emanuel’s connection with the bank. He was interested in banks, it seemed; his uncle, now deceased, had been, he said, a very prominent banker in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Emanuel had a rôle that was new to him; a pleasing rôle though. Nearly always in company he had to play audience; now he held the center of the stage, with another listening to what he might say, and, what was more, listening with every sign of, deep attention. He spoke at length, Emanuel did, of the bank, its size, its resources, its liabilities, its physical appearance and its personnel, leading off with its president and scaling down to its black janitor. He referred to Mr. Blair’s crustiness of manner toward persons of lesser authority, which manner, he hastened to explain, was quite all right if you only understood Mr. Blair’s little ways.

He mentioned in passing that Herb Kivil, the cashier, was addicted to tennis, and that on Tuesdays and Fridays, when Herb left early to play tennis, he, Moon, closed up the vault and took over certain other duties which ordinarily fell to Herb. From the bank he progressed by natural stages to Mrs. Morrill’s boarding house and from there to his own individual tastes and likings. In this connection it was inevitable that the subject of clarinet playing should obtrude. Continuing along this strain Emanuel felt moved to disclose his principal object in journeying to Louisville at this particular time.

“There’s a store there that carries a clarinet that I’m sort of interested in,” he stated – but got no farther, for here Mr. Caruthers broke in on him.

“Well, sir, it’s a mighty little world after all,” he exclaimed. “First you drop your punch check out of your hat and I come along and pick it up, and I sit down here and we get acquainted. Then I find out that I used to know a man in your town – Abner Perkins.”

“Alfred,” corrected Mr. Moon gently.

“Sure – Alfred Perkins. That’s what I meant to say but my tongue slipped. Then you tell me your name, and it turns out I’ve got a good friend that, if he’s not your own cousin, ought to be on account of the name being the same. One coincidence right after another! And then, on top of all that, you tell me you want to buy a new clarinet. And that’s the most curious part of it all, because—— Say, Moon, you must have heard of Galling & Moore, of Boston, New York, and Paris, France.”

“I can’t say as I ever did. I don’t seem to place them,” admitted Emanuel.

“If you’re interested in a clarinet you ought to know about them, because Gatling & Moore are just the biggest wholesale dealers in musical instruments in the United States; that’s all – just the whole United States. And I – the same fellow that’s sitting right here facing you – I travel this territory for Gatling & Moore. Didn’t I say this was a small world?”

A small world indeed – and a cozily comfortable one as well, seeing that by its very compactness one was thrown into contact with so pleasing a personality as this Mr. John Caruthers betrayed. This was the thought that exhilarated Mr. Emanuel Moon as he answered:

“You sell clarinets? Then you can tell me exactly what I ought to pay—”

“No; don’t get me wrong,” Mr. Caruthers hastened to explain. “I said I traveled for Gatling & Moore. You see, they sell everything, nearly – musical instruments is just one of their lines. I handle – er – sporting goods – playing cards, poker chips, guns, pistols, athletic supplies; all like that, you understand. That’s my branch of the business; musical goods is another branch.

“But what I was going to suggest was this: Izzy Gottlieb, who’s the head of the musical department in the New York office, is one of the best friends I’ve got on this earth. If I was to walk in and say to Izzy – yes, even if I was to write in to him and tell him I had a friend who was figuring on buying a clarinet – I know exactly what old Izzy would do. Izzy would just naturally turn the whole shop upside down until he found the niftiest little old clarinet there was in stock, and as a favor to me he’d let us have it at just exactly cost. That’s what good old Izzy would do in a blooming minute. Altogether it ought to come to about half what you’d pay for the identical same article out of a retail place down in this country.”

“But could you, sir – would you be willing to do that much for a stranger?” Stress of emotion made Emanuel’s voice husky.

“If you don’t believe I would do just that very thing, why, a dime’ll win you a trip to the Holy Land!” answered back the engaging Caruthers beamingly and enthusiastically.

Then his tone grew earnest: “Listen here, Moon: no man that I take a liking to is a stranger to me – not any more. And I’ve got to own up to it – I like you. You’re my kind of a man – frank, open, on the level; and yet not anybody’s easy mark either. I’ll bet you’re a pretty good hand at sizing up people offhand yourself. Oh, I knew you’d do, the minute I laid eyes on you.”

“Thank you; much obliged,” murmured Emanuel. To all intents he was overcome.

“Now, then,” continued his new-found friend warmly, “let me suggest this: You go ahead and look at the clarinet that this piking Louisville concern’s got for sale if you want to, but don’t buy. Just look – there’s no harm in that. But don’t invest.

“I’m on my way back to New York now to – to lay in my new lines for the trade. I’ll see old Izzy the first thing after I blow in and I’ll get the niftiest clarinet that ever played a tune – get it at actual cost, mind you! I’ll stick it down into one of my trunks and bring it back with me down this way.

“Let’s see” – he consulted a small memorandum book – “I ought to strike this territory again in about ten days or two weeks. We’ll make it two weeks, to be sure. Um – this is Wednesday. I’ll hit your town on Tuesday, the twenty-ninth – that’s two weeks from yesterday. I ought to get in from Memphis sometime during the afternoon. I’ll come to your bank to find you. You’re always there on Tuesdays, ain’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Emanuel. “Don’t you remember my telling you that on Tuesdays Herb Kivil always left early to play tennis and I closed up?”

“So you did,” confirmed Mr. Caruthers. “I’d forgotten your telling me that.”

“For that matter,” supplemented Emanuel, “I’m there every day till three anyhow, and sometimes later; so if—”

“We’ll make it Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, to be sure,” said Mr. Caruthers with an air of finality.

“If you should want the money now—” began Emanuel; and he started to haul out the little flat leather purse with the patent clasp wherein he carried his carefully saved cash assets.

With a large, generous gesture the other checked him.

“Hold on!” counselled Caruthers. “You needn’t be in such a hurry, old boy. I don’t even know what the thing is going to cost yet. Izzy’ll charge it to me on the books and then you can settle with me when I bring it to you, if that’s satisfactory.”

He stood up, carefully flicking some cigar ashes off the trailing ends of his four-in-hand tie, and glanced at a watch.

“Well, it’s nearly six o’clock. Time flies when a fellow is in good company, don’t it? We’ll be in Louisville in less than an hour, won’t we? – if we’re on time. I’ve got to quit you there; I’m going on to Cincy tonight. Tell you what – let’s slip into the diner and have a bite and a little nip of something together first – I want to see as much of you as I can. You take a little drink once in a while, don’t you?”

“I drink a glass of light beer occasionally,” admitted Emanuel.

Probably in his whole life he had consumed as much as five commercial quarts of that liquid, half a pint at a time.

“Fine business!” said Caruthers. “Beer happens to be my regular stand-by too. Come on, then.” And he led the way forward for the transported Emanuel.

•     •     •     •     •

They said at the bank and at the boarding house that Moon looked better for his week’s lay-off, none of them knowing, of course, what had come into the little man’s dun-colored life.

On the twenty-eighth of the month he was so abstracted that Mr. Blair, desiring his presence for the moment in the president’s office, had to call him twice, a thing which so annoyed Mr. Blair that the second time he fairly shouted Emanuel’s name; and when Emanuel came hurrying into his presence inquired somewhat acidly whether Emanuel was suffering from any auricular affection. On the morning of the twenty-ninth Emanuel was in quite a little fever of anticipation. The morning passed; the noon or dinner hour arrived and passed.

It was one-thirty. The street drowsed in the early autumnal sunshine, and in front of his bookstore, in a tilted-back chair, old Mr. Wilcox for a spell slumbered audibly. There is a kind of dog – not so numerous since automobiles have come into such general and fatal use – that sought always the middle of the road as a suitable spot to take a nap in, arousing with a yelp when wheels or hoofs seemed directly over him and, having escaped annihilation by an eighth of an inch, moving over perhaps ten feet and lying down again in the perilous pathway of traffic. One of this breed slept now, undisturbed except by flies, at the corner of Front and Franklin. For the time being he was absolutely safe. Emanuel had been to his dinner and had returned. He was beginning to worry. About two-thirty, just after the cashier had taken his tennis racket and gone for the day, Emanuel answered a ring at the telephone.

Over the wire there came to him the well-remembered sound of the blithe Carutherian voice:

“That you, old man?” spake Mr. Caruthers jovially. “Well, I’m here, according to promise. Just got in from down the road.”

“Did – you – bring – it?” inquired Emanuel, almost tremulously.

“The clarinet? You bet your life I brought it – and she’s a bird too.”

“I’m ever so much obliged,” said Emanuel. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you – going to all that trouble on my account. Are you at the hotel? I’ll be over there just as soon as I can close up – I can’t leave here till three.”

“Stay right where you are,” bade his friend. “I’ll be over to see you inside of fifteen or twenty minutes.”

He was as good as his word. At ten minutes before three he walked in, the mold of city fashion in all his outward aspects; and when Emanuel had disposed of Mr. Herman Felsburg, who dropped in to ask what Felsburg Brothers’ balance was, and when Mr. Felsburg had gone, Caruthers’ right hand and Emanuel’s met in an affectionate clasp across the little shelf of the cashier’s window. Followed then an exchange of inquiries and assurances touching on the state of health and well-being of each gentleman.

“I’d like mightily to ask you inside,” said Emanuel next, anxious to extend all possible hospitalities; “but it’s strictly against the rules. Take a chair there, won’t you, and wait for me – I’ll be only a few minutes or so.”

Instead of taking one of the row of chairs that stood in the front of the old-fashioned bank, Mr. Caruthers paused before the wicket, firing metropolitan pleasantries across at the little man, who bustled about inside the railed-off inclosure, putting books and papers in their proper places.

“Everybody’s gone but me, as it happens,” he explained, proud to exhibit to Mr. Caruthers the extent and scope of his present responsibilities.

“Nobody on deck but you, eh?” said Caruthers, looking about him.

“Nobody but me,” answered back Emanuel; “and in about a minute and a half I’ll be through too.”

The cash was counted. He carried it into the depths of the ancient and cumbersome vault, which blocked off a section of the wall behind the cashier’s desk, and in their appointed niches bestowed, also, certain large ledgerlike tomes. He closed and locked the inner steel door and was in the act of swinging to the heavy outer door.

“Look here a minute!” came sharply from Mr. Caruthers.

It was like a command. Obeying involuntarily, Emanuel faced about. From under his coat, where it had been hidden against his left side, Mr. Caruthers, still standing at the wicket, was drawing forth something long and black and slim, and of a most exceeding shininess – something with silver trimmings on it and a bell mouth – a clarinet that was all a clarinet should be, and yet a half brother to a saxophone.

“I sort of thought you’d be wanting to get a flash at it right away,” said Mr. Caruthers, holding the magnificent instrument up in plain sight. “So I brought it along – for a surprise.”

With joy Emanuel Moon’s round eyes widened and moistened. After the fashion of a rabbit suddenly confronted with lettuce his lower face twitched. His overhanging upper lip quivered to wrap itself about that virgin mouthpiece, as his fingers itched to fondle that slender polished fountain of potential sweet melodies. And he forgot other things.

He came out from behind the counter and almost with reverence took the splendid thing from the smiling Mr. Caruthers. He did remember to lock the street door as they issued to the sidewalk; but from that juncture on, until he discovered himself with Caruthers in Caruthers’ room on the third floor of the hotel, diagonally across the street and down the block from the bank, and was testing the instrument with soft, tentative toots and finding to his extreme gratification that this clarinet bleated, not in sheeplike bleats, as his old one did, but rather mooed in a deep bass voice suggestive of cows, all that passed was to Mr. Moon but a confused blur of unalloyed joyousness.

Indeed, from that point thenceforward he was not quite sure of anything except that, over his protests, Mr. Caruthers declined to accept any reimbursement whatsoever for the cost of the new clarinet, he explaining that, thanks to the generosity of that kindly soul, Izzy Gottlieb, the requisite outlay had amounted to so trifling a sum as not to be worthy of the time required for further discussion; and that, following this, he played “Annie Laurie” all the way through, and essayed the first bars of “The Last Rose of Summer,” while Mr. Caruthers sat by listening and smoking, and seemingly gratified to the utmost at having been the means of bringing this pleasure to Mr. Moon.

If Mr. Caruthers was moved, in chance intervals, to ask certain questions touching upon the banking business, with particular reference to the methods employed in conducting and safeguarding the Commonwealth Bank, over the way, Emanuel doubtlessly answered him full and truthfully, even though his thoughts for the moment were otherwise engaged.

In less than no time at all – so it appeared to Emanuel – six o’clock arrived, which in our town used to mean the hour for hot supper, except on Sunday, when it meant the hour for cold supper; and Emanuel reluctantly got up to go. But Caruthers would not listen to any suggestions of their parting for yet a while. Exigencies of business would carry him on his lonesome way the next morning; he had just stopped over to see Emanuel, anyway, and naturally he wished to enjoy as much of his society as was possible during a sojourn so brief.

“Moon,” he ordered, “you stay right where you are. We’ll have something to eat together here. I’ll call a waiter and we’ll have it served up here in this room, so’s we can be sort of private and sociable, and afterward you can play your clarinet some more. How does that little program strike you?”

It struck Emanuel agreeably hard. It was rarely that he dined out, and to dine under such circumstances as these, in the company of so fascinating and so kindly a gentleman as Mr. John P. Caruthers, of the North – well, his cup was simply overflowing, that’s all.

“I’d be glad to stay,” he said, “if you don’t think I’m imposing on your kindness. I was thinking of asking you to go to Mrs. Morrill’s with me for supper – if you would.”

“We can have a better time here,” said Caruthers. He stepped over to the wall telephone. “Have a cocktail first? No? Then neither will I. But a couple of bottles of beer won’t hurt us – will it?”

Emanuel was going to say a small glass of beer was as much as he ever imbibed at a sitting, but before he could frame the statement Caruthers was giving the order.

It was at the close of a most agreeable meal when Emanuel, following Mr. Caruthers’ invitation and example, had emptied his second glass of beer and was in the act of putting down the tumbler, that a sudden sensation of drowsiness assailed his senses. He bent back in his chair, shaking his head to clear it of the mounting dizziness, and started to say he believed he would step to the window for a breath of fresh air. But, because he felt so very comfortable, he changed his mind. His head lolled over on one side and his lids closed down on his heavy eyes. Thereafter a blank ensued.

When Emanuel awoke there was a flood of sunshine about him. For a moment he regarded an unfamiliar pattern of wall paper, the figures of which added to their unfamiliarity by running together curiously; he was in a strange bed, fully dressed, and as he moved his head on the rumpled pillow he realized that he had a splitting headache and that a nasty dryish taste was in his mouth. He remembered then where he was and what had happened, and sat up with a jerk, uttering a little remorseful moan.

The disordered room was empty. Caruthers was gone and Caruthers’ suitcase was gone too. Something rustled, and a folded sheet of hotel note paper slid off the bed cover and fell upon the floor. With trembling fingers he reclaimed the paper, and, opening it, he read what was scrawled on it in pencil:

“Dear Old Scout: I’m sorry! I didn’t suppose one bottle of beer would put you down and out. When you took the count all of a sudden, I figured the best thing to do was to let you sleep it off; so I got you into the bed. You’ve been right there all night and nobody’s any the wiser for it except me. Sorry I couldn’t wait until you woke up, but I have to catch the up train; so I’ve paid my bill and I’m beating it as soon as I write this. Your clarinet is with you. Think of me sometimes when you tootle on it. I’ll let you hear from me one of these days.

“Yours in haste,

“J. P. C.

“P.S. If I were you I’d stay off the beer in future.”

The up train? Why, that left at eight-forty-five! Surely it could not be that late! Emanuel got out his old silver watch, a legacy from a long-dead sire, and took one look at its two hands; and then in a quiver of haste, with no thought of breakfast or of his present state of unwashed untidiness, with no thought of anything except his precious clarinet, which he tucked under his coat, he let himself out of the door, leaving the key in the lock, and slipping through the deserted hallway he hastened down two flights of stairs; and taking a short cut that saved crossing the lobby, where inquisitive eyes might behold him in all his unkemptness and distress, he emerged from the side door of the Hotel Moderne.

Emanuel had proper cause to hurry. Never in all his years of service for the Commonwealth Bank had he failed to be on hand at eight o’clock to sort out the mail; and if his watch was to be believed here it was a quarter of nine! As he padded across the street on shaky legs, a new apprehension that he had come away the day before without locking the combination of the vault smote him. Suppose – suppose something was wrong!

The street door of the Commonwealth stood open, and though the interior seemed deserted he realized, with a sinking of the heart, that someone had arrived before him. He darted inside, dropped the clarinet out of sight in a cubby under his desk, and fairly threw himself at the vault.

The outer door was closed and locked, as it should be. Nevertheless, his hands shook so that he could hardly work the mechanism. Finally, the tumblers obeyed him, and he swung open the thick twin slabs, unlocked the inner door with the key which he carried along with other keys on his key ring – and then fetched a sigh of relief that was half a sob. Everything was as it should be – cash, paper money, books, files and securities. As he backed out of the vault the door of the president’s office opened and Mr. Blair stood there in the opening, confronting him with an accusing glare.

“Young man,” said Mr. Blair, “you’re late!”

“Yes, sir,” said Emanuel. “I’m very sorry, sir. I must have overslept.”

“So I judge!” Mr. Blair’s accents were ominous. “So I judge, young man – but where?”

“W-where?” Emanuel, burning with shame, stammered the word.

“Yes, sir; that’s what I said – where? Twenty minutes ago I telephoned to Mrs. Morrill’s to find out what was keeping you from your duties, and they told me you hadn’t been in all night – that your bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“Yes, sir; I slept out.”

“I gathered as much.” Mr. Blair’s long white chin whiskers quivered as Mr. Blair’s condemning eyes comprehended the shrinking figure before him from head to foot – the rumpled hair; the bloodshot eyes; the wrinkled clothes; the soiled collar; the skewed necktie; the fluttering hands. “Look here, young man; have you been drinking?”

“No, sir – yes, sir; that is, I – I had a little beer last night,” owned Emanuel miserably.

“A little beer, huh?”

Mr. Blair, being popularly reputed to keep a private quart flask in his coat closet and at intervals to refresh himself therefrom behind the cover of the closet door, had a righteous contempt for wantons who publicly plied themselves with potables, whether of a malt, a spirituous, or a vinous nature.

“A little beer, huh?” He put tons of menace into the repetition of the words. “Forever and a day traipsing off on vacations seems to breed bad habits in you, Moon. Now, look here! This is the first time this ever happened – so far as I know. I am inclined to excuse it this once. But see to it that it doesn’t happen again – ever!”

“No, sir,” said Emanuel gratefully. “It won’t.”

And it did not.

So shaken was Emanuel as to his nerves that three whole nights elapsed before he felt equal to practicing on his new clarinet. After that, though, in all his spare moments at the boarding house he played assiduously.

For the purposes of this narrative the passage of the ensuing fortnight is of no consequence. It passed, and that brings us to a Friday afternoon in mid-October. On the Friday afternoon in question the paymaster of the Great Western Crosstie Company deposited in the Commonwealth Bank, for overnight safeguarding, the funds to meet his semimonthly pay roll due to contractors, subcontractors, tow-boat owners and extra laborers, the total amounting to a goodly sum.

Next morning, when Herb Kivil opened the vault, he took one look and uttered one strangled cry. As Emanuel straightened up from the mail he was sorting, and as Mr. Blair stepped in off the street, out from between the iron doors staggered Herb Kivil, white as a sheet and making funny sounds with his mouth. The vault was empty – stripped of cash on hand; stripped of the Great Western Company’s big deposit; stripped of every scrap of paper money; stripped of everything except the bank books and certain securities – in a word, stripped of between eighteen and nineteen thousand dollars, specie and currency. For the thief, whoever he might be, there was one thing to be said – he had an instinct for thoroughness in his make-up.

To say that the news, spreading with a most miraculous rapidity, made the town hum like a startled hive, is to state the case in the mildest of descriptive phrases. On the first alarm, the chief of police, accompanied by a good half of the day force, came at a dogtrot. Having severely questioned the frightened negro janitor, and examined all the doors and windows for those mysterious things known as clews, the chief gave it as his deliberate opinion that the robbery had been committed by someone who had means of access to the bank and its vault.

Inasmuch as there was about the place no evidence of forcible entry, and inasmuch as the face of the vault was not so much as scratched, and inasmuch, finally, as the combination was in perfect order, the population at large felt constrained to agree that Chief Henley had deduced aright. He took charge of the premises for the time being, Mr. Blair having already wired to a St. Louis detective agency beseeching the immediate presence and aid of an expert investigator.

It came out afterward that privily Mr. Blair suggested an immediate arrest, and gave to Henley the name of the person he desired to see taken into custody. But the chief, who was good-hearted – too good-hearted for his own good, some people thought – demurred. He stood in a deep and abiding awe of Mr. Blair. But he did not want to make any mistakes, he said. Anyhow, a big-city sleuth was due before night. Would not Mr. Blair consent to wait until the detective had arrived and made his investigation? For his part, he would guarantee that the individual under suspicion did not get away. To his postponement of the decisive step Mr. Blair finally agreed.

On the afternoon train over the Short line the expert appeared, an inscrutable gentleman named Fogarty with a drooping red moustache and a brow heavily wrinkled. This Mr. Fogarty first conferred briefly with Mr. Blair and with Chief Henley. Then, accompanied by these two and trailed by a distracted group of directors of the bank, he made a careful survey of the premises from the cellar coal hole to the roof scuttle, uttering not a single word the while. His manner was portentous. Following this he asked for a word in private with the head of the rifled institution.

Leaving the others clustered in a group outside, he and Mr. Blair entered Mr. Blair’s office. Mr. Fogarty closed the door and faced Mr. Blair.

“This here,” said Mr. Fogarty, “was what we call an inside job. Somebody here in this town – somebody who knew all there was to know about your bank – done it. Now, who do you suspicion?”

Lowering his voice, Mr. Blair told him, adding that only a deep sense of his obligations to himself and to his bank inspired him now to detail certain significant circumstances that had come to his personal attention within the past three weeks – or, to be exact, on a certain Wednesday morning in the latter part of September.

In his earlier movements Mr. Fogarty might have been deliberate; but once he made up his mind to a definite course of conduct he acted promptly. He came out of Mr. Blair’s presence, walked straight up to Emanuel Moon, where Emanuel sat at his desk, and, putting his hand on Emanuel’s shrinking shoulder, uttered the words:

“Young man, you’re wanted! Put on your hat.”

Then Mr. Fogarty silently turned and beckoned to Chief Henley, invoking the latter’s official cooperation and assistance.

Between the imported detective and the chief of police, Emanuel Moon, a silent, pitifully shrunken figure, walked round the corner to the City Hall, a crowd following along behind, and was locked up in a cell in the basement calaboose downstairs. Lingering about the hall after the suspect had been taken inside, divers citizens ventured the opinion that if the fellow wasn’t guilty he certainly looked it. Well, so far as that goes, if a face as pale as putty and downcast eyes brimming with a numbed misery betokened guilt, Emanuel had not a leg left to stand on.

However, looks alone are not commonly accepted as competent testimony under our laws, and Emanuel did not abide for very long as a prisoner. The Grand Jury declined to indict him on such dubious proof as the bank people and Mr. Fogarty could offer for its consideration. Undoubtedly the Grand Jury was inspired in its refusal by the attitude the Commonwealth’s attorney maintained, an attitude in which the circuit judge concurred.

It was known that Mr. Blair went to Commonwealth’s Attorney Flournoy, practically demanding that Emanuel be held for trial, and, failing in that quarter, visited Judge Priest with the same object in view. But perversely the judge would not agree with Mr. Blair that the evidence in hand justified such a course; would not on any account concede that Emanuel Moon was the only person, really, who might properly be suspected.

On that head he was as one with Prosecutor Flournoy. They held – these two – that possession of a costly musical instrument, regarding which the present owner would admit nothing except that it was a gift from an unknown friend, coupled with that individual’s stubborn refusal to tell where he had spent a certain night and in whose company, did not constitute a fair presumption that he had made away with nearly nineteen thousand dollars.

“But look here, Judge Priest,” hotly argued Mr. Blair upon the occasion of his call upon His Honor, “it stands to reason Moon is the thief. Why, it couldn’t have been anybody else! And I want the facts brought out.”

“Whut facts have you got, Hiram?” asked the judge.

“Moon knew the combination of the safe, didn’t he? He carried the keys for the inside door of the safe, didn’t he? And a key to the door of the building, too, didn’t he?”

“Hiram,” countered Judge Priest, looking Mr. Blair straight in the eye, “ef you expect the authorities to go ahead on that kind of evidence I reckin we’d have to lock you up too.”

Mr. Blair started as though a physical blow had been aimed at his head.

“Why – why—— What do you mean by that, Judge?” he demanded, gripping the arms of his chair until his knuckles showed white through the skin.

“You carry the keys of the bank yourself, don’t you? And you know the combination of the safe, don’t you? And so does Herbie Kivil.”

“Do you mean to insinuate——”

“Hiram, I don’t mean to insinuate nothin’. Insinuations don’t make the best of evidence in court, though I will admit they sometimes count for a good deal outside of court. No, Hiram; I reckin you and your detective friend from St. Louis will have to dig up somethin’ besides your personal beliefs before you kin expect the Grand Jury of this county to lay a charge aginst a man who’s always enjoyed a fair standin’ in this here community. That’s all I’ve got to say to you on the subject.”

Taking the hint, Mr. Blair, red-faced and agitated, took his departure. After he was gone Judge Priest remained immersed in reflection for several hours.

So Emanuel went free. But he might almost as well have stayed in jail, for the smell of it seemed to cling to his garments – garments that grew shabbier as the weeks passed, for naturally he did not go back to the bank and just as naturally no one cared to offer employment to one who had been accused by his late employer of a crime. He fell behind with his board at Mrs. Morrill’s. He walked the streets with drooping shoulders and face averted, shunning people and shunned by them. And, though he kept to his room in the evening, he no longer played on his clarinet. And the looting of the Commonwealth Bank’s vault continued, as the Daily Evening News more than once remarked, to be “shrouded in impenetrable mystery.”

One evening at dusk, as Judge Priest was going home alone from the courthouse, on a back street he came face to face with Emanuel.

The younger man would have passed by him without speaking, but the old man thrust his broad shape directly in the little man’s course.

“Son,” he said, putting a hand on the other’s arm, “I want to have a little talk with you – ez a friend. Jest you furgit all about me bein’ a judge. I wisht, ef you ain’t got anythin’ else to do, you’d come up to my house tonight after you’ve had your supper. Will you, son?”

Emanuel, his eyes filling up, said he would come, and he did; and in the judge’s old sitting-room they spent half an hour together. Father Minor always said that when it came to hearing confessions the only opposition he had in town came from a non-professional, meaning by that Judge Priest. It was one of Father Minor’s little jokes.

“And now, Judge Priest,” said Emanuel, at the latter end of the talk, “you know everything – why I wouldn’t tell ’em how I got my new clarinet and where I spent that night. If I had to die for it I wouldn’t bring suspicion on an innocent party. I haven’t told anybody but you – you are the only one that knows.”

“You’re shore this here friend of yourn – Caruthers – is an innocent party?” suggested the judge.

“Why, Judge, he’s bound to be – he’s just naturally bound to be. If he’d been a thief he’d have robbed the bank that night when I was asleep in his room at the hotel. I had the keys to the bank on me and he knew it.”

“Then why didn’t you come out and say so.”

“Because, as I just told you, it would be bringing suspicion on an innocent party. He holds a responsible position with that big New York firm I was telling you about and it might have got him into trouble. Besides” – and Emanuel hung his head – “besides, I hated so to have people know that I was ever under the influence of liquor. I’m a church member, Judge, as you know. I never drank – to excess – before that night, and I don’t ever aim to touch another drop as long as I live. I’d almost as lief be called a drunkard as a thief. They’re calling me a thief – I don’t aim to have them calling me the other thing too.”

Judge Priest cloaked an involuntary smile behind a pudgy hand.

“Well, Emanuel,” he said, “jest to be on the safe side, did it ever occur to you to make inquiry amongst the merchants here as to whether a traveling gent named Caruthers sold goods to any of ’em?”

“No, Judge; I never thought of that.”

“Did you look up Gatling & Moore – I believe that’s the name – in Bradstreet’s or Dun’s to see ef there was sech a firm?”

“Judge, I never thought of that either.”

“Son,” said the old man, “it sorter looks to me like you ain’t been doin’ much thinkin’ lately.” Then his tone changed and became warmly consoling. “But I reckin ef I was the trouble you’re in I wouldn’t do much thinkin’ neither. Son, you kin rest easy in your mind – I ain’t a-goin’ to betray your confidences. But ef you don’t mind I aim to do a little inquirin’ round on my own account. This here robbery interests me powerfully, someway. I’ve been frettin’ a heap about it lately.

“And – oh, yes – there’s another thing that I was purty nigh furgittin’,” continued Judge Priest. “I ain’t purposin’ to pry into your personal affairs – but tell me, son, how are you off fur ready money these days?”

“Judge, to tell you the truth, I’m just about out of money,” confessed Emanuel desperately. “I owe Mrs. Morrill for three weeks’ board now. I hate to keep putting her off – her being a widow lady and dependent for her living on what she takes in. I’d pack up and go somewhere else – to some other town – and try to get work, only I can’t bear to go away with this cloud hanging over my good name. It would look like I was running away; and anyway I guess the tale would follow me.”

The judge dug into his right-hand trousers pocket. He exhumed a small wad of bills and began counting them off.

“Son,” he said, “I know you won’t mind my makin’ you a temporary loan to help you along till things git brighter with you. By the way, how would you like to go to work in the circuit clerk’s office?”

“Me, Judge! Me?” Fresh-kindled hope blazed an instant in Emanuel Moon’s voice; then the spark died.

“I reckon nobody would hire me,” he finished despondently.

“Don’t you be so shore. ’Lishy Milam come to me only yistiddy sayin’ he needed a reliable and experienced man to help him with his books, and askin’ me ef I could suggest anybody. He ain’t had a capable deputy sense little Clint Coombs died on him. I sort of figger that ef he gave you a job on my say-so it’d go a mighty long way toward convincin’ this town that we both regarded you ez an honest citizen. I’ll speak to ’Lishy Milam the very first thing in the mornin’ – ef you’re agreeable to the notion.”

“Judge,” exclaimed Emanuel, up on his feet, “I can’t thank you – I can’t tell you what this means—”

“Son, don’t try,” bade the old judge. “Anyhow, that ain’t whut I want to hear frum you now. Set down there agin and tell me all you kin remember about this here friend of yourn – Caruthers; where you met up with him and whut he said and how he said it, and the way he looked and walked and talked. And how much beer you drunk up that night and how much he drunk up, and how you felt when you woke up, and whut Hiram Blair said to you when you showed up at the bank – the whole thing all over agin from start to finish. I’m interested in this here Mr. Caruthers. It strikes me he must ’a’ been a mighty likely feller.”

When Emanuel Moon walked out of Judge Priest’s front door that night he was pumped dry. Also, for the first time in weeks, he walked with head erect and gaze straightforward.

In the morning, true to his promise, Judge Priest made recommendations to Circuit Clerk Milam. This done, he left the courthouse and, going down Legal Row, dropped in at the law office of Fairleigh & Fairleigh, to find young Jere Fairleigh, junior member of the firm, sitting by the grate fire in the front room.

“Jere,” asked Judge Priest, directly the young man had made him welcome, “whutever become of them three post-office robbers that hired you to defend ’em – still over in the Marshallville jail, ain’t they?”

“Two of them are,” said young Fairleigh. “The one they call the Waco Baby got out on bail and skipped. But the other two – Frisco Slim and Montreal Red – are in jail over there awaiting trial at the next term of United States Court.”

Judge Priest smiled softly.

“Young man,” he said, “it certainly looks to me like you’re climbin’ mighty fast in your chosen profession. All your clients ’pear to have prominent cities named after ’em. Tell me,” he went on, “whut kind of persons are the two that are still lingerin’ in Marshallville?”

“Well,” said the young lawyer, “there’s a world of difference between ’em. Frisco is the glum, morose kind; but Montreal Red – his real name is Mooney, he tells me, though he’s got half a dozen other names – he’s certainly a wise individual. Just associating with him in my capacity as his counsel has been a liberal education to me in the ways of the underworld. I firmly believe he knows every professional crook in the country.”

“Aha! I see,” said Judge Priest. “I figger Mister Montreal is the party I want to meet. I’m thinkin’ of runnin’ down to Marshallville on business right after dinner today. I reckin you wouldn’t mind – in strict confidence – givin’ me a little note of introduction to your client, tellin’ him I seek his advice on a private matter, and sayin’ that I kin be trusted?”

“I’ll be mighty glad to,” said Fairleigh, Junior, reaching across his desk for pen and paper. “I’ll write it right now. Turning detective, Judge?”

“Well, son,” conceded Judge Priest, “you mout call it that and not make sech an awful big mistake.”

“Sort of a Sherlock Holmes, eh?”

The judge made a gesture of modest disclaimer.

“No; I reckin Sherlock would be out of my class. By all accounts Sherlock knowed purty nigh ever’thing wuth knowin’. If he’d struck two different trails, both seemin’ly p’intin’ in the same direction, he’d know right off which one of ’em to take. That’s where he’d be one pawpaw above my tallest persimmon. Sometimes I git to thinkin’ I’m a poor purblind old idiot that can’t see a thing when it’s shoved right up under my nose. No; I ain’t aspirin’ none to qualify ez a Sherlock. I’m only endeavoring’ to walk ez an humble disciple in the hallowed footsteps of Old Cap Collier.”

“What do you know about Old Cap Collier?” demanded Fairleigh, astonished. “I thought I was the only grown man in town that still read nickel libraries – on the sly.”

“Boy,” said Judge Priest, “you and me have got a secret bond between us. Wasn’t that there last one that come out a jim-dandy? – the one called Old Cap Collier and the Great Diamond Robbery.

“It was so,” stated Fairleigh. “I read it last night in bed.”

•     •     •     •     •

Three o’clock of that same day disclosed Judge Priest perched on the side of a bunk in a cell in the Marshallville jail, close up alongside a blocky person of unkempt appearance whom we, for convenience, may call Montreal Red, more especially as this happens to be the title to which he commonly answered within the fraternity of which he was a distinguished member.

They made a picture sitting there together – the old man, nursing his soft black hat between his hands, with the half light bringing out in relief his bald round skull, his chubby pink face and his tuft of white beard; the captive yeggman in his shirt sleeves, with no collar on and no shoes on, holding Mr. Fairleigh’s note in his hand and, with the look upon his face of one who feels a just pride in his professional knowledge, hearkening while the Judge minutely described for him a certain individual. Before the Judge was done, Montreal Red interrupted him.

“Sufficiency, bo,” he said lightly; “you’ve said enough. I know the gun you’re talkin’ about without you goin’ any farther – it’s Shang Conklin, the Solitary Kid.”

“But this here gentleman went by the name of Caruthers!” demurred the Judge.

“Wot else did you figure he’d be doin’?” countered Montreal Red. “He might ’a’ called himself Crowley, or Lord Copeleigh, or half a dozen other things. He might ’a’ called himself the King of Bavaria – yes, and got away with it, too, because he’s there with the swell front and the education. The Solitary Kid’s got a different monniker for every day in the week and two for Sundays. It couldn’t be nobody else but him; you’ve called the turn on him same as if you’d mugged him for the Gallery.”

“You know him personally, then?” asked Judge Priest.

“Who don’t know him?” said Montreal Red. “Everybody that knows anybody knows Solitary. And I’ll tell you why! You take ’most any ordinary gun and he’s got just one regular line – he’s a stick-up, or he’s a moll buzzer, or a peterman, or a con man; or he belongs to the hard-boiled people, the same as me. But Shang he doubles in brass; it’s B. and O. for him. Bein’ there with the front, he’s worked the wire; and before that he worked the bat. Knowin’ all there is to know about the pasteboard papes, he’d done deep-sea fishin’ in his time – playin’ for rich guys on the big liners, you know.

“And when it comes to openin’ boxes – bo, since old Jimmy Hope quit the game and sneezed in, I guess Shang Conklin’s the wisest boxman that ever unbuttoned a combination crib with his bare hands. He’s sure the real McCoy there – not no common yegg, you understand, with a steel drill and a gat in his kicks and a rubber bottle full of soup tied under his coat; but doin’ the real fancy stuff, with nothin’ to help him but the old ten fingers and the educated ear. And he never works with a mob neither. Any time you make Shang he’ll be playin’ the lone hand – providin’ his own nut and goin’ south with all the clean-up. No splittin’ with anybody for Shang – it’s against his business principles. That’s why he’s labeled the Solitary Kid.”

Most of this was as pure Greek to Judge Priest, who, I may say, knew no Greek, pure or otherwise. Suddenly aware of the bewilderment revealed in the countenance of his interviewer, Montreal Red checked up and took a new track.

“Say, bo, you ain’t makin’ me, are you? Well, then, maybe I’d better spiel it out slow. Know wot a peterman is?”

The judge shook his head.

“Well, you know wot a box is, don’t you?”

“I’m skeered that I don’t, though I believe I’m beginnin’ to git a faint idea,” said Judge Priest.

As though deploring such ignorance Montreal Red shook his flame-colored head.

“I’ll frame it for you different – in sucker language,” he said.

And accordingly he did, most painstakingly.

“Now then,” he said at the end of five minutes of laborious translation, “do you get me?”

“I git you,” said Judge Priest. “And I’m mighty much obliged. Now, then, ef it ain’t too much trouble, I’d like to git in touch with this here Mister Conklin, et cetery. Do you, by any chance, know his present whereabouts?”

Before replying to this the Montreal Red communed with himself for a brief space.

“Old-timer,” he said finally, “if I thought you was playin’ in with the dicks I’d see you in Belgium before I tipped you off to anything. But this here mouthpiece of mine” – he indicated the note from young Mr. Fairleigh – “says you’re on the level. I judge he wouldn’t take my good fall-money and then cross me this way. I take it you ain’t tryin’ to slip one over on Shang? All right, then; I’ll tell you where he is – he’s in Atlanta, Georgia.”

“And whut is his address there?” pursued Judge Priest.

“The Federal prison – that’s all,” said Montreal Red. He smiled softly. “If I don’t beat this little case of mine I’m liable to meet him down there along toward spring, or maybe even sooner. The bulls nailed him at Chattanooga, Tennessee, about a month ago for a little national-bank job, and right quick he taken a plea and got off with a short bit in Uncle Sammy’s big house. I was readin’ about it in the papers. You wouldn’t have no trouble findin’ him at Atlanta – he’ll be in to callers for the next five years.”

“Bein’ an amateur Old Cap Collier certainly calls fur a lot of travelin’ round,” murmured Judge Priest, half to himself, and he sighed a small sigh of resignation as he arose.

“Wot’s that? I don’t make you?” asked Montreal Red.

“Nothin’,” said Judge Priest; “nothin’ a-tall. I was jest thinkin’ out loud; it’s a sort of failin’ of mine ez I git older. You said, didn’t you, that these here sleepin’ potions which you was mentionin’ a minute ago are mostly administered in beer?”

“Mostly in beer,” said Montreal Red. “The little old knock-out seems to work best in the lather stuff. I don’t know why, but it does.

“It’s like this: You take the beer——”

“Oh, I wasn’t figgerin’ on usin’ it myself,” explained Judge Priest hastily. “Much obliged to you all the same, young man.”

•     •     •     •     •

A night in a sleeping car brought Judge Priest to Atlanta. A ride in a trolley car brought him to the warden’s office of a large reformatory institution beyond the suburbs of that progressive city. A ten-minute chat with the warden and the display of divers credentials brought him the privilege of an interview, in private, with a person who, having so many names to pick from, was yet at this time designated by a simple number. Even in convict garb, which is cut on chastely plain lines and which rarely fits perfectly the form of its wearer, this gentleman continued somehow to bespeak the accomplished metropolitan in his physical outlines and in his demeanor as well, maintaining himself, as you might say, jauntily.

In the first few moments of his meeting with Judge Priest there was about him a bearing of reserve – almost of outright suspicion. But half a dozen explanatory sentences from the judge served speedily to establish an atmosphere of mutual understanding. I believe I stated earlier in my tale that Judge Priest had a little knack for winning people’s confidences. Perhaps I should also explain that at a suitable time in the introductory stages of the conversation he produced a line in the characteristic handwriting of Mr. Montreal Red. Being thereby still further enlightened as to the disinterestedness of the venerable stranger’s motives, the Solitary Kid proved frankness itself. Preliminarily, though, he listened intently while Judge Priest recited in full a story that had mainly to do with the existing plight of Emanuel Moon.

“Now then, suh,” said Judge Priest at the conclusion of his narrative, “I’ve laid all the cyards that I hold on the table right in front of you. Ef I’m correct in my guess that you’re the party of the second part in this here transaction. I don’t need to go on, because you know a sight more about the rest of it than whut I do. The way I figger it, a decent, honest little man is in serious trouble, mainly on your account. Ef you’re so minded I calculate that you kin help him without hurtin’ yourself any. Now then, presumin’ sech to be the case, is there anythin’ you’d like to say to me – ez his friend?”

Conklin, alias Caruthers, alias Crowley, and so on, put a question of his own now:

“You say the president of that bank is the one that tried to fasten this job on Moon, eh? Well, then, before we go any further, suppose you tell me what that president looks like?”

Judge Priest sketched a quick word picture of Mr. Hiram Blair – accurate and fair, therefore not particularly complimentary.

“That’s enough,” said the convict grimly; “that’ll do. Why, the long-whiskered old dog! Now then, Judge – you said you were a judge, didn’t you? – I’m going to spill a funny yarn for you. Never mind what my reasons for coming through are. Maybe I want to get even with somebody that handed me a large disappointment. Maybe I don’t want to see that little Moon suffer for something he didn’t do. Figure it out for yourself afterward, but first listen to me.”

“I’m listenin’, son,” said Judge Priest.

“Good!” said Conklin, lowering his voice cautiously, though he knew already they were alone in the warden’s room.

“Up to a certain point you’ve got the thing figured out just as it came off. That day on the train going into Louisville I started to take the little man at cards. I was going to deal him the big mitt and then clean him for what he had; but when he told me he worked in a bank – a nice, fat little country bank – I switched the play, of course. I saw thousands of dollars where I’d seen lunch money before. Inside of an hour I knew everything there was to know about that bank – what he knew and what I could figure from what he told me. All I had to do was to turn the spigot once in a while and let him run on. And then, when he began to spill his cravings for a new clarinet, I almost laughed in his face. The whole thing looked like a pipe.

“The dope was working lovely when I hit that town of yours two weeks later. At the right minute I flashed the clarinet on him and made him forget to throw the combination of the vault. So far, so good. Then, when I got him where I wanted him – over in my room – I slipped the drops into his beer; not enough to hurt him but enough to start him pounding his ear right away. That was easy too – so easy I almost hated to do it.

“Then I waited until about two o’clock in the morning, him lying there all the time on my bed, dead to the world. So I took his keys off him and dropped across the street without being seen by anybody – the main street of your town is nice and quiet after midnight – I’ll say that much for it anyway – and walked into the bank the same as if I owned it – in fact, I did own it – and made myself at home. I opened up the vault and went through it, with a pocket flash to furnish light; and then after a little I locked her up again, good and tight, leaving everything just like I’d found it, and went back to the hotel and put the keys in the little man’s pocket, and laid down alongside of him and took a nap myself. D’ye see my drift?”

“I reckin I don’t altogether understand – yit,” said Judge Priest.

“You naturally wouldn’t,” said Conklin with the air of a teacher instructing an attentive but very ignorant pupil. “Here’s what happened: When I took a good look at the inside door of that vault and tried the tumblers of the outside door I knew I could open her any time I wanted to – in five minutes or less. Besides, I wouldn’t need the keys any more, seeing as I could make impressions of ’em in wax, which I did as soon as I got back inside of my room at the hotel. So I was sure of having duplicates whenever I needed ’em.”

“I’m feared that I’m still in the dark,” said Judge Priest. “You see it’s only here right recently that I took up your callin’ in life – ez a study.”

“Well, figure it out for yourself,” said Conklin. “If I made my clean-up and my getaway that night it was a cinch that they’d connect up Moon with his strange friend from New York; even a hick bull would be wise enough to do that. And inside of twenty-four hours they’d be combing the country for a guy answering to my general plans and specifications. At the beginning I was willing to take that chance; but after I had a look at that combination I switched my play. Besides, there wasn’t enough coin in the box that night to suit me. I always play for the big dough when I can, and I remembered what the little man told me about that lumber company – you know the one I mean: that big crosstie concern – depositing its pay roll every other Friday night. So why wouldn’t I hold off?”

“I begin to see,” said Judge Priest. “You’re makin’ me see a number of things that’ve been pesterin’ me fur three-four days now.”

“Wait till you get the final kick,” promised the convict. “That’ll open your eyes some, I guess. Well, I skinned out next morning and I went elsewhere – never mind where, but it wasn’t far away. Then on the night of the fifteenth – the third Friday in the month – I came back again, traveling incog., as they say on the other side of the duck pond; and about two o’clock in the morning I paid another call to your little old Commonwealth Bank and opened up the vault – outside door and inside door – in four minutes by my watch, without putting a mark on her. That’s my specialty – nice, clean jobs, without damaging the box or making any litter for the janitor to sweep up in the morning. But I didn’t clean her out that time either.”

“Ahem!” said Judge Priest doubtfully. “You didn’t?”

“Oh, I didn’t expect you to believe that right off,” stated Mr. Conklin, prolonging his climax. “The reason I didn’t clean her out then was because she was already cleaned out; somebody had beat me to it and got away with everything worth having in that little old box. It was considerable of a disappointment to me – and a shock too.”

“It shorely must’ve been,” agreed the judge, almost sympathetically. “Mout I ask ef you’ve got any gineral notion who it was that – that deprived you of the fruits of your industry and your patience?”

“I don’t have to have any general notion,” quoth Conklin et al., with bitterness creeping into his voice. “I know who it was – that is, I’m practically certain I know who it was. Because, while I was across the street in a doorway about half past one, waiting to make sure the neighborhood was clear, I saw the gink I suspect come out of the bank and lock the door behind him, and go off up the street.

“I thought at the time it was funny – anybody being in that bank at that hour of the night; but mostly I was glad that I hadn’t walked in on him while he was there. So I just laid low and let him get away with the entire proceeds – which was my mistake. I guess under the circumstances he’d have been glad enough to divide up with me. I might even have induced him to hand over the whole bunch to me – though, as a rule, when it can be avoided I don’t believe in any strong-arm stuff. But, you see, I didn’t know then what I found out about half an hour later. So I just stood still where I was, like a boob, and let him fade away out of my life. Yep, Judge, I’m reasonably sure I saw the party that copped the big roll that night. And I presume I’m the only person alive that did see him copping it.”

“Would you mind describin’ him – ez nearly ez you kin?” asked Judge Priest; he seemed to have accepted the story as a truthful recital.

“I don’t need to,” answered the Solitary Kid. “You did that yourself just a little bit ago. If you’re going back home any time soon I suggest that you ask the old pappy-guy with the long white whiskers what he was doing coming out of his own bank at half past one o’clock on the morning of October the sixteenth, with a long overcoat on, and his hat pulled down over his eyes, and a heavy sackful of dough hid under his coat. I didn’t exactly see the sack, but he had it, all right – I’ll gamble on that. You needn’t tell him where you got your information, but just ask him.”

“Son,” averred Judge Priest, “I shorely will do that very thing; in fact, I came mighty nigh practically doin’ so several weeks ago when I didn’t know nigh ez much ez I do now – thanks to you and much obliged.”

•     •     •     •     •

But Judge Priest was spared the trouble – for the time being, at least. What transpired later in a legal way in his courtroom has nothing whatever to do with this narration. It is true that he left Atlanta without loss of time, heading homeward as straight and as speedily as the steam cars could bear him.

Even so, he arrived too late to carry out his promise to the Solitary Kid. For that very day, while he was on his way back, in a city several hundred miles distant – in the city of Chicago, to be precise – the police saw fit to raid an establishment called vulgarly a bucket shop; and finding among the papers and books, which they coincidentally seized, entries tending to show that our Mr. Hiram Blair had, during the preceding months, gone short on wheat to a disastrous extent, the police inconsiderately betrayed those records of a prolonged and unfortunate speculation to one of the Chicago afternoon papers, which in turn wired its local correspondent down our way to call upon the gentleman and ask him point blank how about it.

But the correspondent, who happened also to be the city staff of the Daily Evening News, a young man by the name of Rawlings, was unsuccessful in his attempts to see Mr. Blair, either at his place of business in the bank or at his residence. From what he was able to glean, the reporter divined that Mr. Blair had gone out of town suddenly. Putting two and two together the young man promptly reached the conclusion that Mr. Blair might possibly have had also some word from Chicago. Developments, rapidly ensuing, proved the youth correct in his hypothesis.

Two days later Mr. Blair was halted by a person in civilian garb, but wearing a badge of authority under his coat, as Mr. Blair was about to cross the boundary line near Buffalo into the adjacent Dominion of Canada. Mr. Blair insisted at first that it was not him. In truth it did not look like him. Somewhere en route he had lost his distinguished chin whiskers and his commanding manner, acquiring in lieu of these a name which did not in the least resemble Hiram Blair.

Nevertheless, being peremptorily, forcibly and over his protests detained – in fact, locked up – he was presently constrained to make a complete statement, amounting to a confession. Indeed, Mr. Blair went so far in his disclosures that the Daily Evening News, in an extra issued at high noon, carried across its front page, in box-car letters, a headline reading: Fugitive, in Durance Vile, Tells All!

Old Judge Priest was passing Mrs. Teenie Morrill’s boarding house one night on his way home from Soule’s drug store, where he had spent the evening in the congenial company of Mr. Soule, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, and Squire Roundtree. This was perhaps a week after his return from a flying trip to Atlanta, Georgia, the results of which, as the saying goes, still were locked within his breast.

As he came opposite Mrs. Morrill’s front gate a blast of harmonious sound, floating out into the night, saluted his ears. He looked upward. Behind a front window on the top floor, with his upper lip overlapping the mouthpiece of a handsome clarinet and his fingers flitting upon the polished shaft of the instrument, sat little Emanuel Moon, now, by virtue of appointment, Deputy Circuit Clerk Emanuel Moon, playing “The Last Rose of Summer” with the fervor inspired of a happy heart, a rehabilitated reputation, a lucrative and honorable employment in the public service, and a newly acquired mastery of the melodic intricacies of the air in question – four things calculated, you will allow, to make anyone blithe of the spirit.

The old judge halted and smiled up at the window. Then, as he moved onward, he uttered the very word – a small coincidence, this – which I chose for the opening text of this chapter out of the life and the times of our town.

“Poor little ant!” said Judge Priest to himself; and then, as an afterthought: “But a dag-gone clever little feller!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 11 Mar 1916
Old Judge Priest (1916)

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby’s Feet

~

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby sat on the front porch of the First Presbyterian parsonage with an arched framing of green vines above his head. His broad form reposed in a yet broader porch chair – his bare feet, in a foot-tub of cold water.

The sergeant wore his reunion regalia, consisting, in the main, of an ancient fatigue jacket with an absurdly high collar and an even more absurdly short and peaked tail. About his generous middle was girthed a venerable leather belt that snaffled at the front with a broad buckle of age-darkened brass and supported an old cartridge box, which perched jauntily upon a fold of the wearer’s plump hip like a birdbox on a crotch. Badges of resplendent new satin, striped in alternate bars of red and white, flowed down over his foreshortened bosom, partly obscuring the scraps of rotted and faded braid and the big round ball buttons of dulled brass, which adhered intermittently to the decayed front of his uniform coat. Against a veranda post leaned the sergeant’s rusted rifle, the same he had carried to the war and through the war and home again after the war, and now reserved for occasions of high state, such as the present one.

The sergeant’s trousers were turned high up on his shanks; his shoes reposed side by side alongside him on the floor, each with a white yarn sock crammed into and overflowing it. They were new shoes, but excessively dusty and seamed with young wrinkles; and they bore that look of total disrepute which anything new in leather always bears after its first wearing. With his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped loosely between his knees, Sergeant Bagby bent forward, looking first up the wide street and then down it. Looking this way he saw four old men, three of them dressed in grey and one in black, straggle limpingly across the road; and one of them carried at a droopy angle a flag upon which were white-scrolled letters to tell the world that here was Lyon’s Battery, or what might be left of it. Looking that way he saw a group of ten or fifteen grey heads riding through a cross street upon bay horses; and at a glance he knew them for a detachment of Forrest’s men, who always came mounted to reunions. Once they rode like centaurs; now, with one or two exceptions, they rode like sacks or racks. It depended on whether, with age, the rider had grown stout or stayed thin.

Having looked both ways, the sergeant addressed himself to a sight nearer home. He considered his feet. Viewed through sundry magnifying and misleading inches of water they seemed pinky white; but when, groaning gently, he lifted one foot clear it showed an angry chafed red upon toe and heel, with large blistery patches running across the instep. With a plop he lowered it back into the laving depths. Then, bending over sideways, he picked up one of his shoes, shaking the crumpled sock out of it and peering down its white-lined gullet to read the maker’s tag:

“Fall River, Mass.,” the sergeant spelled out the stamped letters – “Reliance Shoe Company, Fall River, Mass.”

He dropped the shoe and in tones of reluctant admiration addressed empty space:

“Well, now, ain’t them Yankees the persistent devils! Waitin’ forty-odd years fur a chance to cripple me up! But they done it!”

Judge Priest turned in at the front gate and came up the yard walk. He was in white linens, severely and comfortably civilian in cut, but with a commandant’s badge upon his lapel and a short, bobby, black ostrich feather in the brim of his hat. He advanced slowly, with a slight outward skew to his short, round legs.

“Aha!” he said understandingly. “Whut did I tell you, Jimmy Bagby, about tryin’ to parade in new shoes? But no, you wouldn’t listen – you would be one of these here young dudes!”

“Judge,” pleaded the sergeant, “don’t rub it in! I’m about ruint – I’m ruint for life with these here feet of mine.”

Still at a somewhat stiff and straddle-legged gait, the judge mounted the porch, and after a quick appraisal of all the chairs in sight eased his frame into one that had a cushioned seat. A small involuntary moan escaped him. It was the sergeant’s time to gloat.

“I’m wearin’ my blisters on my feet,” he exulted, “and you’re wearin’ yourn – elsewhere. That’s whut you git at your age fur tryin’ to ride a strange horse in a strange town.”

“Jimmy,” protested the judge, “age ain’t got nothin’ a’tall to do with it; but that certainly was a mighty hard-rackin’ animal they conferred on me. I feel like I’ve been straddlin’ a hip roof durin’ an earthquake. How did you make out to git back here?”

“That last half mile or so I shore did think I was trampin’ along on red-hot plowshears. If there’d been one more mile to walk I reckin I’d ’a’ been listed amongst the wounded and missin’. I jest did about manage to hobble in. And Mizz Grundy fetched me this here piggin of cold water out on the porch, so’s I could favor my feet and watch the boys passin’ at the same time.”

Judge Priest undertook to cross one leg over the other, but uncrossed it again with a wince of sudden concern on his pink face.

“How do you aim, then, to git to the big doin’s this evenin’?” he asked, and shifted his position slightly where he sat.

“I ain’t aimin’ to git there,” said Sergeant Bagby. “I aim to stay right here and take my ease. Besides, ef I don’t git these feet of mine shrunk down some by milkin’ time, I’m shore goin’ to have to pull my pants off over my head this night.”

“Well, now, ain’t that too bad!” commiserated his friend and commander. “I wouldn’t miss hearin’ Gen’l Gracey’s speech fur a purty.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” the sergeant was prompt to tell him. “You and Lew Lake and Hector Woodward and the other boys kin represent Gideon K. Irons Camp without me fur oncet anyway. And say, listen, Judge,” he added with malice aforethought, “you’d better borrow a goosehair cushion, or a feather tick, or somethin’ soft, to set on out yonder. Them plain pine benches are liable to make a purty hard roostin’ place, even fur an old seasoned cavalryman.”

Judge Priest’s retort, if he had one in stock, remained unbroached, because just then their hostess bustled out to announce dinner was on the table. It was to be an early dinner and a hurried one, because, of course, everybody wanted to start early, to be sure of getting good seats for the speaking. The sergeant ate his right where he was, his feet in his tub, like a Foot-washing Baptist.

There were servants aplenty within, but the younger Miss Grundy elected to serve him; a pretty girl, all in snowy white except for touches of red at her throat and her slender belted waist, and upon one wrist was a bracelet of black velvet with old soldiers’ buttons strung thickly upon it. On a tray, daintily tricked out, she brought the sergeant fried chicken and corn pudding and butter beans, and the like, with corn pones hot-buttered in the kitchen; and finally a slice carved from the blushing red heart of the first home-grown watermelon of the season. Disdaining the false conventions of knife and fork the sergeant bit into this, full face.

Upon the tub bottom his inflamed toes overlapped and waggled in a gentle ecstasy; and between bites, while black seeds trickled from the corners of his lips, he related to the younger Miss Grundy the beginning of his story of that memorable passage of words upon a certain memorable occasion, between General John C. Breckinridge and General Simon Bolivar Buckner. The young lady had already heard this same beginning thrice, the sergeant having been a guest under the parental roof since noon of the day before, but, until interruption came, she listened with unabated interest and laughed at exactly the right places, whereupon the gratified narrator mentally catalogued her as about the smartest young lady, as well as the prettiest, he had met in a coon’s age.

All good things must have an end, however – even a watermelon dessert and the first part of a story by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby; and so a little later, rejecting all spoken and implied sympathy with a jaunty indifference that may have been slightly forced, the sergeant remained, like another Diogenes, in the company of his tub, while the rest of the household, including the grey-haired Reverend Doctor Grundy, his white-haired wife, Judge Priest and the two Misses Grundy, departed in a livery-stable carryall for a given point half a mile up the street, where a certain large skating rink stretched its open doors hospitably, so disguised in bunting and flags it hardly knew itself by its grand yet transient title of Reunion Colosseum. Following this desertion, there was for a while in all directions a pleasurable bustle to keep the foot-fast watcher bright as to eye and stirred as to pulse.

“Why, shuckins, there ain’t a chance fur me to git lonely,” he bade himself – “not with all this excitement goin’ on and these here hoofs of mine to keep me company!”

Crowds streamed by afoot, asaddle and awheel, all bound for a common destination. Every house within sight gave up its separate group of dwellers and guests; for during reunion week everybody takes in somebody. Under the threshing feet the winnowed dust mounted up in scrolls from the roadway, sifting down on the grass and powdering the chinaberry trees overhead. No less than eight brass bands passed within sight or hearing. And one of them played “Maryland, My Maryland;” and one of them played “The Bonnie Blue Flag” – but the other six played “Dixie,” as was fitting.

A mounted staff in uniform clattered grandly by, escorting the commanding general of some division or other, and an open carriage came along, overflowing with a dainty freightage of state sponsors and maids-of-honor. As it rolled grandly past behind its four white horses, a saucy girl on the back seat saw an old man sitting alone on the Grundy porch, with his feet in a tub, and she blew a kiss at him off the tips of her fingers; and Sergeant Bagby, half rising, waved back most gallantly, and God-blessed her and called her Honey!

Soon, though, the crowds thinned away. Where multitudes had been, only an occasional straggler was to be seen. The harried and fretted dust settled back. A locust in a tree began to exercise his talents in song, and against the green warp of the shrubbery on the lawn a little blue bobbin of an indigo bird went vividly back and forth. Lonesome? No, nothing like that; but the sergeant confessed to himself that possibly he was just a trifle drowsy. His head dropped forward on his badged chest, and as the cool wetness drew the fever out of his feet, his toes, under water, curled up in comfort and content.

Asked about it afterward, Sergeant Bagby would have told you that he had no more than closed his eyelids for a wink or two. But the shadows had appreciably lengthened upon the grass before a voice, lifted in a hail, roused him up. Over the low hedge that separated the parsonage yard from the yard adjoining on the left a man was looking at him – a man somewhere near his own age, he judged, in an instantaneous appraisal.

“Cumrud,” said this person, “howdy-do?”

“Which?” inquired Sergeant Bagby.

“I said, Cumrud, howdy?” repeated the other.

“No,” said the sergeant; “my name is Bagby.”

“I taken it fur granted that you was to home all alone,” said the man beyond the hedge. “Be you?”

“At this time of speakin’,” said the sergeant, “there’s nobody at home exceptin’ me and a crop of blisters. Better come over,” he added hospitably.

“Well,” said the stranger, as though he had been considering the advisability of such a move for quite a period of time, “I mout.”

With no further urging he wriggled through a gap in the hedge and stood at the foot of the steps, revealing himself as a small, wiry, rust-colored man. Anybody with an eye to see could tell that in his youth he must have been as redheaded as a pochard drake. Despite abundant streakings of grey in his hair he was still redheaded, with plentiful whiskers to match, and on his nose a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and on his face and neck a close sowing of the biggest, intensest freckles Sergeant Bagby had ever beheld. They spangled his skin as with red asterisks, and the gnarled hand he extended in greeting as he mounted the porch looked as though in its time it had mixed at least one million bran mashes.

Achieving a somewhat wabbly standing posture in his keeler, the sergeant welcomed him in due form.

“I don’t live here myself,” he explained, “but I reckin you might say I’m in full charge, seein’ ez I crippled myself up this mornin’ and had to stay behind this evenin’. Come in and take a cheer and rest yourself.”

“Thanky!” said the freckly one. “I mout do that too.” He did. His voice had a nasal smack to it which struck the sergeant as being alien. “I didn’t ketch the name,” he said. “Mine’s Bloomfield – Christian name, Ezra H.”

“Mine’s Bagby,” stated the sergeant – “late of King’s Hell Hounds. You’ve probably heard of that command – purty nigh everybody in these parts has.”

“Veteran myself,” said Mr. Bloomfield briskly. “Served four years and two months. Enlisted at fust call for volunteers.”

“Started in kind of early myself,” said the sergeant, mechanically catching for the moment the other’s quality of quick, clipped speech. “But say, look here, pardner,” he added, resuming his own natural tone, “whut’s the reason you ain’t out yonder at that there Colosseum with all the other boys this evenin’?”

A whimsical squint brought the red eyelashes close together.

“Well,” stated Mr. Bloomfield, rummaging with a deliberate hand in the remote inner fastnesses of his whiskers, “I couldn’t scursely say that I b’long out there.” Then he halted, as if there was no more to be said.

“You told me you served all the way through, didn’t you?” asked the sergeant, puzzled.

“So I told you and so I did,” said Mr. Bloomfield; “but I didn’t tell you which side it was I happened to be a-servin’ on. Twentieth Indiana Infantry – that’s my regiment, and a good smart one it was too.”

“Oh!” said Sergeant Bagby, slightly shocked by the suddenness of this enlightenment – “Oh! Well, set down anyway, Mr. Bloomfield. Excuse me – you’re already settin’, ain’t you?”

For a fraction of a minute they contemplated each other, Sergeant Bagby being slightly flustered and Mr. Bloomfield to all appearances perfectly calm. The sergeant cleared his throat, but it was the visitor who spoke:

“I’ve got a fust-rate memory for faces, and the like; and when I fust seen you settin’ here you had a kind of familiar cut to your jib someway. That’s one reason why I hailed you. I wonder now if we didn’t meet up with one another acrost the smoke back yonder in those former days? I’d take my oath I seen you somewheres.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” answered Sergeant Bagby. “All durin’ that war I was almost constantly somewheres.”

“Fust Bull Run – I wonder could it ’a’ been there?” suggested Mr. Bloomfield.

“First Manassas, you mean,” corrected the sergeant gently, but none-the-less firmly. “Was you there or thereabout by any chance?” Mr. Bloomfield nodded. “Me too,” said Sergeant Bagby – “on detached service. Mebbe,” he added it softly – “mebbe ef you’d turn round I’d know you by your back.”

If the blow went home Mr. Bloomfield, like a Spartan of the Hoosiers, hid his wounds. Outwardly he gave no sign.

“P’raps so,” he assented mildly; then: “How ’bout Gettysburg?”

The sergeant fell into the trap that was digged for him. The sergeant was proud of his services in the East.

“You bet your bottom dollar I was there!” he proclaimed – “all three days.”

“Then p’raps you’d better turn round too,” said Mr. Bloomfield in honeyed accents, “and mebbe it mout be I’d be able to reckernise you by the shape of your spinal colyum.”

Up rose Sergeant Bagby, his face puckering in a grin and his hand outstretched. High up his back his coat peaked out behind like the tail of a he-mallard.

“Pardner,” he announced, “I’m right glad I didn’t kill you when I had all them chances.”

“Cumrud,” replied Mr. Bloomfield, “on the whole and considerin’ of everything, I don’t regret now that I spared you.”

If Sergeant Bagby had but worn a Confederate goatee, which he didn’t, being smooth-shaved; and if he hadn’t been standing mid-shin-deep in a foot-tub; and if only Mr. Bloomfield’s left shirtsleeve, instead of being comfortably full of freckled arm, had been empty and pinned to the bosom of his waistcoat – they might have posed just as they stood then for the popular picture entitled North and South United which you will find on the outer cover of the Memorial Day edition of every well-conducted Sunday newspaper in the land. But that is ever the way with real life – it so often departs from its traditional aspects. After a bit the sergeant spoke.

“I was jest thinkin’,” he said dreamily.

“So was I,” assented Mr. Bloomfield. “I wonder now if it could be so that we both of us had our minds on the same pleasin’ subject?”

“I was jest thinkin’,” repeated the sergeant, “that merely because the Bloody Chasm is bridged over ain’t no fittin’ reason why it shouldn’t be slightly irrigated frum time to time.”

“My idee to a jot,” agreed Mr. Bloomfield heartily. “Seems as if the dust of conflict has been a-floatin’ round loose long enough to stand a little dampin’ down.”

“Ef only I was at home now,” continued Sergeant Bagby, “I’d be able to put my hand on somethin’ handy for moistenin’ purposes; but, seein’ as I’m a visitor here, I ain’t in no position to extend the hospitalities suitable to the occasion.”

“Sho, now! Don’t let that fret you,” soothed Mr. Bloomfield – “not with me livin’ next door.” He nimbly descended the steps, but halted at the bottom: “Cumrud, how do you take yours – straight or toddy?”

“Sugar and water don’t hurt none – in moderation,” replied the sergeant. “But look here, pardner, this here is a preacher’s front porch. We don’t want to be puttin’ any scandal on him.”

“I’d already figured that out too,” said the provident Mr. Bloomfield. “I’ll bring her over in a couple of chiny teacups.”

The smile which, starting from the center, spread over the sergeant’s face like ripples over a pond had not entirely faded away when in a miraculously short time Mr. Bloomfield returned, a precious votive offering poised accurately in either hand. “Bagby,” he said, “that’s somethin’ extry prime in the line of York-state rye!”

“Is it?” said the sergeant. “Well, I reckin the sugar comes frum Newerleans and that oughter take the curse off. Bloomfield, here’s lookin’ toward you!”

“Same to you, Bagby!”

China clicked pleasantly on china as teacup bottom touched teacup brim, this sound being succeeded instantly by a series of soft sipping sounds. Sitting thus, his eyes beaming softly over the bulge of his upturned cup and his lips drawing in the last lingering drops of sirupy sweetness, the sergeant became aware of a man clumping noisily along the sidewalk – an old man in a collarless hickory shirt, with a mouse-grey coat dangling over one arm and mouse-grey trousers upheld by home-made braces. He was a tail, sparse, sinewy old man, slightly withered, yet erect, of a build to remind one of a blasted pine; his brow was very stormy and he talked to himself as he walked. His voice but not his words came to the sergeant in a rolling, thundery mutter.

“Hey, pardner!” called Sergeant Bagby, holding his emptied cup breast-high. “Goin’ somewheres or jest travelin’ round?”

The passer-by halted and regarded him gloomily over the low palings of the Reverend Doctor Grundy’s fence.

“Well,” he made slow answer, “I don’t know ez it’s anybody’s business; but, since you ast me, I ain’t headin’ fur no place in particular – I’m tryin’ to walk a mad off.”

“Come right on in here then,” advised the sergeant, “we’ve got the cure fur that complaint.” He glanced sideways toward his companion. “Bloomfield, this here love feast looks mighty like she might grow a little. Do you reckin you’ve got another one of them teacups over at your place, right where you could put your hands on it easy?”

“That’s a chore which won’t be no trouble whatsoever,” agreed Mr. Bloomfield; and he made as if to go on the errand, but stopped at the porch edge just inside the vines as the lone pedestrian, having opened the gate, came slowly toward them. The newcomer put his feet down hard on the bricks; slashes of angry color like red flares burned under the skin over his high and narrow cheekbones.

“Gabe Ezell – Cherokee Rifles,” he said abruptly as he mounted the steps; “that’s my name and my command.”

“I’m Sergeant Bagby, of King’s Hell Hounds, and monstrous glad to make your acquaintance,” vouchsafed, for his part, the sergeant. “This gentleman here is my friend, Major Bloomfield. Take a cheer and set down, pardner, and rest your face and hands a spell. You look like you might be a little bit put out about something?”

The stranger uttered a grunt that might mean anything at all or nothing at all. He lowered himself into a chair and tugged at the collarless band of his shirt as though it choked him. The sergeant, pleasingly warmed to the core of his being, was not to be daunted. He put another question:

“Whut’s the reason you ain’t out to the speakin’? I’m sort of lamed up myse’f – made the fatal mistake of tryin’ to break in a pair of Dam-Yankee shoes on a couple of Southern-Rights feet. I’m purty well reconciled, I reckin; but my feet appear to be still unreconstructed, frum what I kin gather.” Chuckling, he glanced downward at the stubborn members. “But there don’t seem to be nothin’ wrong with you – without it’s your feelin’s.”

“I was figgerin’ some on goin’ out there,” began the tall old man, “but I couldn’t git there on time – I’ve been at the calaboose.” He finished the confession in a sort of defiant blurt.

“You don’t say so!” said the sergeant wonderingly, and commiseratingly too; and from where he stood on the top step the newly brevetted major evidenced his sympathy in a series of deprecatory clucks. The third man glared from one to the other of them.

“Oh, I ain’t ashamed of it none,” he went on stormily. “Ef I had it to do over agin I’d do it agin the very same way. I may not be so young ez I was oncet, but anybody that insults the late Southern Confederacy to my face is breedin’ trouble for hisse’f – I don’t care ef he’s as big as a mountain!”

From the depths of the foot-tub came small splashing sounds, and little wavelets rose over its sides and plopped upon the porch floor.

“I reckin sech a thing as that might pester me a little bit my own se’f,” stated the sergeant softly. “Yes, suh; you might safely venture that under them circumstances I would become kind of irritated myse’f. Who done it?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Ezell, “and let you boys be the jedges of whether I done the right thing. After the parade was through with this mornin’ me and some of the other boys from down my way was knockin’ round. I got separated from the rest of ’em someway and down yond’ on that main street – I’m a stranger in this town and I don’t rightly recall its name, but it’s the main street, whar all them stores is – well, anyway, down there I come past whar one of these here movin’-picture to-dos was located. It had a lot of war pictures stuck up out in front of it and a big sign that said on it: At the Cannon’s Mouth! So, not havin’ nothin’ else to do, I paid my ten cents to a young lady at the door and went on in. They gimme a seat right down in frontlike, and purty soon after that they started throwin’ them pictures on a big white sheet – a screen, I think they calls it.

“Well, suhs, at the fust go-off it was purty good. I got consider’bly interested – I did so. There was a house come on the sheet that looked powerful like several places that I knows of down in Middle Georgia, whar I come frum; and there was several young ladies dressed up like they used to dress up back in the old days when we was all young fellows together. Right off, though, one of the young ladies – the purtiest one of the lot and the spryest-actin’ – she fell in love with a Yankee officer. That jarred me up a little; yet, after all, it mout ’a’ happened and, besides, he wasn’t sech a bad young fellow – fur a Yankee. He saved the young lady’s brother when the brother come home frum the army to see his sick baby and was about to be ketched fur a spy. Yes, suhs; I’ve got to admit that there Yankee behaved very decently in the matter.

“Well, purty soon after the lovin’ part was over they come to the fightin’ part, and a string band began to play war pieces. I must say I got right smartly worked up ’long about there. Them fellows that was dressed up ez soldiers looked too tony and slick to be real natchel – there didn’t seem to be nary one of ’em wearin’ a shirt that needed searchin’, the way it was when we-all was out soldierin’ – but ef you’d shet your eyes ’bout halfway you could mighty nigh imagine it was the real thing agin. A battery of our boys went into action on the aidge of a plowed field and you could see the smoke bustin’ out of the muzzles of the pieces, and you could hear the pieces go off, kerboom! – I don’t know how they worked that part of it, but they did; and ’way over yond’ in a piece of woods you could see the Yankees jest a-droppin’. I seem to recollect standin’ up long about there and givin’ a yell or two myself; but in a minute or so a whole lot more Yankees come chargin’ out of the timber, and they begin to drive our boys back.

“That didn’t seem right to me – that didn’t seem no way to have it. I reckin, though, I might ’a’ stood that, only in less’n no time a-tall our boys was throwin’ away their guns and some of ’em was runnin’ away, and some of ’em was throwin’ up their hands and surrenderin’! And the Yankees was chargin’ in amongst ’em, a-cuttin’ and slashin’ and shootin’, and takin’ prisoners right and left. It was a scandalous thing – and a lie besides! It couldn’t never ’a’ happened noway.”

His voice, deep and grumbling before, became sharply edged with mounting emotion. Mr. Bloomfield looked away to avoid exposing a happy grin, new-born among his whiskers. It was Sergeant Bagby who spoke, the intention on his part being to soothe rather than to inflame.

“Pardner,” he said, “you’ve got to remember it wasn’t nothin’ but jest play-actin’ – jest hired hands makin’ believe that it was so.”

“I don’t care none ef it was,” snapped Mr. Ezell. “And, besides, whut’s that got to do with it – with the principle of the thing? It was a deliberate insult flung right in the face of the late Southern Confederacy – that and nothin’ short of it. Well, I stood it jest as long as I natchelly could – and that wasn’t very long, neither, lemme tell you, gentlemen.”

“Then whut?” inquired Sergeant Bagby, bending forward in his seat.

“Then I up with my cheer and chunked it right through their dad-burned, lyin’ sheet – that’s whut I done! I busted a big hole in her right whar there was a smart-alecky Yankee colonel sailin’ acrost on a horse. I says: ‘Here’s a few reinforcements frum the free state of Georgia!’ And I let him have it with the cheer, kerblim! That there battle broke up right then and there. And that’s how I come to go to the calaboose.”

Mr. Bloomfield, now rigidly erect, and with no grin on his face, opened his lips to say something; but Sergeant Bagby beat him to it.

“Pardner,” he asked incredulously, “did they lock you up jest fur doin’ that?”

“No,” said the heated Mr. Ezell, “they didn’t really lock me up a-tall. But the secont I throwed that cheer there was a lot of yellin’ and scrabblin’ round, and the lights went up, and the string band quit playin’ its piece and here come a-runnin’ an uppidy-lookin’ man – he was the one that run the show, I take it – bleatin’ out somethin’ about me havin’ broke up his show and him wantin’ damages. He made the mistake of grabbin’ holt of me and callin’ me a name that I don’t purpose to have nobody usin’ on me. He wanted damages. Well, right there he got ’em!”

He raised a bony fist, on which the knuckles were all barked and raw, and gazed at it fondly, as though these were most honorable scars.

“So then, after that, a couple of them other show people they drug him away frum whar he was layin’ on the floor a-yellin’,” he went on, “and a town policeman come in and taken me off to the calaboose in a hack, with a crowd followin’ ’long behind. But when we got there the gentleman that was runnin’ the place – he wore blue clothes and I jedge from his costume and deportment he must ’a’ been the town marshal – he listened to whut we-all had to say, and he taken a look at that there showman’s busted jaw and sort of grinned to hisse’f; then he said that, seein’ as all us old soldiers had the freedom of the city for the time bein’, he ’lowed he’d let the whole matter drop right whar it was providin’ I’d give him my solemn promise not to go projectin’ round no more movin’-picture places endurin’ of my stay in their midst. Well, ef they’re all like the one I seen today it’s goin’ to be a powerful easy promise fur me to keep – I know that! But that’s how I come to miss the doin’s this evenin’ – I missed my dinner too – and that’s how I come to be walkin’ way out here all by myse’f.”

In the pause that followed Mr. Bloomfield saw his chance. Mr. Bloomfield’s voice had a crackling tone in it, like fire running through broom-sedge.

“Lookyhere, my friend!” he demanded crisply. “Ain’t you been kind of flyin’ in the face of history as well as the movin’-picture industry? Seems to me I recall that you pleg-taked [plague-taken] Rebs got a blamed good lickin’ about ever’ once in so often, or even more frequently than that. If my memory serves me right it seems to me you did indeed!”

Mr. Ezell swung in his chair and the spots in his cheeks spread until his whole face burned a brick-dust red.’ Sergeant Jimmy Bagby threw himself into the breach. Figuratively speaking, he had both arms full of heartsease and rosemary.

“In regards to the major here” – he indicated Mr. Bloomfield with a gracious gesture of amity – “I furgot to tell you that he taken a rather prominent part – on the other side frum us.”

As Mr. Ezell’s choler rose his brows came down and lowered.

“Huh!” said Mr. Ezell with deadly slowness. “Whut’s a Yankee doin’ down here in this country?”

“Doin’ fairly well,” answered Mr. Bloomfield. “F’r instance, he’s payin’ taxes on that there house next door.” He flirted his whiskered chin over his left shoulder. “F’r instance, also, he’s runnin’ the leadin’ tannery and saddle-works of this city, employin’ sixteen hands regular. Also, he was elected a justice of the peace a week ago last We’nesday by his fellow citizens, regardless of politics or religion – thanky for askin’!

“Also,” he went on, his freckles now standing out beautifully against a mounting pink background – “Also and furthermore, he remembers distinctly having been present on a number of occasions when he helped to lick you Seceshers good and proper. And if you think, my friend, that I’m goin’ to abate one jot or tittle from that statement you’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, I tell you!”

Now behold in the rôle of peacemaker Sergeant Jimmy Bagby rising grandly erect to his full height, but keeping his feet and ankles in the foot-tub.

“Say, listen here, Major,” he pleaded, “ef you kin kindly see your way clear to abatin’ a few jots on behalf of Indiana I’ll bet you I kin induce Georgia to throw off every blamed tittle he’s got in stock. And then ef Indiana kin dig up another of them delightful teacups of his’n I believe I kin guarantee that Kintucky and Georgia will join him in pourin’ a small but nourishin’ libation upon the altar of friendship, not to mention the thresholds of a reunited country. Ain’t I got the right notion, boys? Of course I have! And then, as soon as we-all git settled down agin comfortable I’m goin’ to tell you two boys something mighty interestin’ that come up oncet when I was on hand and heared the whole thing. Did I mention to you before that I belonged to King’s Hell Hounds?”

Diplomacy surely lost an able advocate in the spring of 1865 when Sergeant Bagby laid down the sword to take up retail groceries. As soothing oil upon roiled waters his words fell; they fell even as sweet unguents upon raw wounds. And, besides, just then Mr. Ezell caught a whiff of a most delectable and appealing aroma as the sergeant, on concluding his remarks with a broad-armed gesture, swished his teacup directly under Mr. Ezell’s nose.

Probably not more than ten or twelve minutes had pleasantly elapsed – it usually took the sergeant twenty to tell in all its wealth of detail the story of what General Breckinridge said to General Buckner, and what General Buckner said in reply to General Breckinridge, and he was nowhere near the delectable climax yet – when an interruption came. Into the ken of these three old men, seated in a row upon the parsonage porch, there came up the street a pair whose gait and general air of flurriment and haste instantly caught and held their attention. Side by side sped a young woman and a young man – a girl and a boy rather, for she looked to be not more than eighteen or, say, nineteen, and he at the most not more than twenty-one or so. Here they came, getting nearer, half-running, panting hard, the girl with her hands to her breast, and both of them casting quick, darting glances backward over their shoulders as though fearing pursuit.

“Well,” said Mr. Bloomfield, “all the excitement appears to be happenin’ round here this afternoon. I wonder now what ails them two young people?” He squinted through his glasses at the nearing couple. “Why, the gal is that pore little Sally Fannie Gibson that lives over here on the next street. Do tell now!”

He rose; so, a moment later, did his companions, for the youth had jerked Doctor Grundy’s gate open and both of them were scudding up the walk toward them. Doubtless because of their agitation the approaching two seemed to notice nothing unusual in the fact that these three elderly men, rising at their coming, should each be holding in his right hand a large china teacup, and that one, the central figure of the three, and the largest of bulk, should be planted ankle-deep and better in a small green tub, rising from it at an interested angle, like some new kind of plump, round, potted plant.

“Oh! Oh!” gasped the girl; she clung to the lowermost post of the step-rail. “Where is Doctor Grundy, please? We must see Doctor Grundy right away – right this minute!”

“We want him to marry us!” exclaimed the youth, blurting it out.

“We’ve got the license,” the girl said. “Harvey’s got it in his pocket.”

“And here it is!” said the youth, producing the document and holding it outspread in a shaking hand. It appeared crumpled, but valid.

It was but proper that Sergeant Bagby, in his capacity as host pro tem, should do the necessary explaining.

“Well now, young lady and young gentleman,” he said, “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you – monstrous sorry – but, to tell you the truth, the Reverend Doctor Grundy ain’t here; in fact, we ain’t lookin’ fur him back fur quite some time yit.”

“He is reunionisin’ at the Pastime Skating Rink,” volunteered Mr. Bloomfield. “You’ll have to wait a while, Sally Fannie.”

“Oh,” cried the girl, “we can’t wait – we just can’t wait! We were counting on him. And now – Oh, what shall we do, Harvey?”

Shrinking up against the railing she wrung her hands. The sergeant observed that she was a pretty little thing – small and shabby, but undeniably pretty, even in her present state of fright. There were tears in her eyes. The boy was trembling.

“You’d both better come in and take a cheer and ca’m yourselves,” said the sergeant. “Let’s talk it over and see whut we-all kin do.”

“I tell you we can’t wait!” gulped the girl, beginning to sob in earnest. “My stepfather is liable to come any minute! I’m as ’fraid as death of him. He’s found out about the license – he’s looking for us now to stop us. Oh, Harvey! Harvey! And this was our only chance!” She turned to her sweetheart and he put both his arms round her protectingly.

“I know that stepfather of yours,” put in Mr. Bloomfield, in a tone which indicated that he did not know much about him that was good or wholesome. “What’s his main objection to you and this young fellow gittin’ married? Ain’t you both of age?”

“Yes, we are – both of us; but he don’t want me to marry at all,” burst from the girl. “He just wants me to stay at home and slave and slave and slave! And he don’t like Harvey – he hates him! Harvey hasn’t been living here very long, and he pretends he don’t know anything about Har-rr-r-vey.”

She stretched the last word out in a pitiful, long-drawn quaver.

“He don’t like Harvey, eh?” repeated Mr. Bloomfield. “Well, that’s one thing in Harvey’s favor anyway. Young man,” he demanded briskly, “kin you support a wife?”

“Yes, sir,” spoke up Harvey; “I can. I’ve got a good job and I’m making good pay – I’m in the engineering crew that came down from Chicago last month to survey the new short line over to Knoxville.”

“Oh, what are we wasting all this time for?” broke in the desperate Sally Fannie. “Don’t you-all know – didn’t I tell you that he’s right close behind us? And he’ll kill Harvey! I know he will – and then I’ll die too! Oh, don’t be standing there talking! Tell us what to do, somebody – or show us where to hide!”

Mr. Bloomfield’s dappled hand waggled his brindled whiskers agitatedly. Mr. Ezell tugged at his hickory neckband; very possibly his thoughts were upon that similar situation of a Northern wooer and a Southern maid as depicted in the lately interrupted film drama entitled At the Cannon’s Mouth. Like a tethered pachyderm, Sergeant Bagby swayed his form upon his stationary underpinning.

“Little gal, I most certainly do wisht there was something I could do!” began Mr. Bloomfield, the spirit of romance all aglow within his elderly and doubtless freckled bosom.

“Well, there is, Major!” shouted the sergeant suddenly. “Shore as gun’s iron, there’s somethin’ you kin do! Didn’t you tell us boys not half an hour ago you was a jestice of the peace?”

“Yes, I did!”

“Then marry ’em yourself!” It wasn’t a request – it was a command, whoopingly, triumphantly given.

“Cumrud,” said Mr. Bloomfield, “I hadn’t thought of it – why, so I could!”

“Oh, could you?” Sally Fannie’s head came up and her cry had hope in it now. “And would you do it – right quick?”

Unexpected stage fright overwhelmed Mr. Bloomfield.

“I’ve took the oath of office, tubbe sure – but I ain’t never performed no marriage ceremony – I don’t even remember how it starts,” he confessed.

“Think it up as you go ’long,” advised Sergeant Bagby.

“Whutever you say is bindin’ on all parties concerned – I know that much law.” It was the first time since the runaways arrived that Mr. Ezell had broken silence, but his words had potency and pith.

“But there has got to be witnesses – two witnesses,” parried Mr. Bloomfield, still filled with the buck-ague qualms of the amateur.

“Whut’s the matter with me and him fur witnesses?” cried Sergeant Bagby, pointing toward Mr. Ezell. He wrestled a thin gold band off over a stubborn fingerjoint. “Here’s even a weddin’ ring!”

The boy, who had been peering down the silent street, with a tremulous hand cupped over his anxious eyes, gave a little gasp of despair and plucked at the girl’s sleeve. She turned – and saw then what he had already seen.

“Oh, it’s too late! It’s too late!” she quavered, cowering down. “There he comes yonder!”

“’Tain’t no sech of a thing!” snapped Sergeant Bagby, actively in command of the situation. “You two young ones come right up here on this porch and git behind me and take hands. Indiana, perceed with your ceremony! Georgia and Kintucky, stand guard!” With big spread-eagle gestures he shepherded the elopers into the shelter of his own wide bulk.

A man with a red, passionate face and mean, squinty eyes, who ran along the nearer sidewalk, looking this way and that, saw indistinctly through the vines the pair he sought, and, clearing the low fence at a bound, he came tearing across the grassplot, his heels tearing deep gouges in the turf. His voice gurgled hoarsely in his throat as he tried to utter – all at once – commands and protests, threats and curses.

From somewhere behind Sergeant Bagby’s broad back came the last feebly technical objection of the officiating functionary:

“But, cumruds, somebody’s got to give the bride away!”

“I give the bride away, dad-gum you!” blared Sergeant Bagby at the top of his vocal register. “King’s Hell Hounds give the bride away!”

Thus, over his shoulder, did Sergeant Bagby give the bride away; and then he faced front, with chest expanded and the light of battle in his eyes.

Vociferating, blasphemous, furious, Sally Fannie’s tyrant charged the steps and then recoiled at their foot. A lean, sinewy old man in a hickory shirt barred his way, and just beyond this barrier a stout old man with his feet in a foot-tub loomed both large and formidable. For the moment baffled, he gave voice to vain and profane foolishness.

“Stop them two!” he yelled, his rage making him almost inarticulate. “She ain’t of age – and even ef she is I ain’t agoin’ to have this!”

“Say, ain’t you got no politeness a’tall!” inquired Mr. Ezell, of Georgia. “Don’t you see you’re interruptin’ the holy rites of matrimony – carryin’ on thataway?”

“That’s whut I aim to do, blame you!” howled the other, now sensing for the first time the full import of the situation. “I’ll matrimony her, the little ———” He spat out the foulest word our language yields for fouler tongues to use. “That ain’t all – I’ll cut the heart out of the man that interferes!”

Driving his right hand into his right trousers pocket he cleared the three lower steps at a bound and teetered upon his toes on the very edge of the fourth one.

In the act of making his hand into a fist Mr. Ezell discovered he could not do so by reason of his fingers being twined in the handle of a large, extra-heavy ironstone-china teacup. So he did the next best thing – he threw the cup with all his might, which was considerable. At close range this missile took the enemy squarely in the chest and staggered him back. And as he staggered back, clutching to regain his balance, Mr. Bloomfield, standing somewhat in the rear and improvising as fast as his tongue could wag, uttered the concluding, fast-binding words: “Therefore I pernounce you man and wife; and, whatever you do, don’t never let nobody come betwixt you, asunderin’ you apart!”

With a lightning-fast dab of his whiskers he kissed the bride – he had a flashing intuition that this was required by the ritual – shoved the pair inside Doctor Grundy’s front hall, slammed the door behind them, snatched up Sergeant Bagby’s rusted rifle from where it leaned against Doctor Grundy’s porch post, and sprang forward in a posture combining defense and offense. All in a second or two Mr. Bloomfield did this.

Even so, his armed services were no longer required; for Sergeant Jimmy Bagby stepped nimbly out of his tub, picked it up in both hands and turned it neatly yet crashingly upside down upon the head of the bride’s step-parent – so that its contents, which had been cold and were still coolish, cascaded in swishing gallons down over his person, effectually chilling the last warlike impulse of his drenched and dripping bosom, and rendering him in one breath whipped, choked and tamed.

“With the compliments of the Southern Confederacy!” said Sergeant Bagby, so doing.

•     •     •     •     •

The shadows on the grass lay lank and attenuated when the folks came back from the Pastime Rink. Sergeant Bagby sat alone upon Doctor Grundy’s porch. There were puddles of spilt water on porch and step and the walk below, and a green foot-tub, now empty, stood on its side against the railings. The sergeant was drawing his white yarn socks on over his water-bleached shanks.

“Well, suh, Jimmy,” said Judge Priest as he came up under the vines, “you certainly missed it this evenin’. That was the best speech Gen’l Tige Gracey ever made in his whole life. It certainly was a wonder and a jo-darter!”

“Whut was the subject, cumrud?” asked Sergeant Bagby.

“Fraternal Strife and Brotherly Love,” replied the judge. “He jest natchelly dug up the hatchet and then he reburied her ag’in – reburied her miles deep under Cherokee roses and magnolia blossoms. But how’s your feet? I reckon you’ve had a purty toler’ble lonesome time settin’ here, ain’t you?”

“I see – love and war! War and love,” commented the sergeant softly.

Before answering further, he raised his head and glanced over the top of the intervening hedge toward the house next door. From its open door issued confused sounds of which he alone knew the secret – it was Georgia trying to teach Indiana the words and music of the song entitled “Old Virginny Never Tire!”

“Oh, my feet are mighty nigh cured,” said he; “and I ain’t had such a terrible lonesome time as you might think fur either – cumrud.”

“That’s the second time you’ve called me that,” said Judge Priest suspiciously. “Whut does it mean?”

“Oh, that? That’s a furreign word I picked up today.” And Sergeant Bagby smiled gently. “It’s a pet name the Yankees use when they mean pardner!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 04 Oct 1913
Old Judge Priest (1916)

According to the Code

~

The most important thing about Quintus Q. Montjoy, Esquire, occurred a good many years before he was born. It was his grandfather.

In the natural course of things practically all of us have, or have had, grandfathers. The science of eugenics, which is comparatively new, and the rule of species, which is somewhat older, both teach us that without grandfathers there can be no grandchildren. But only one in a million is blessed even unto the third generation by having had such a grandfather as Quintus Q. Montjoy had. That, indeed, was a fragrant inheritance, and by day and by night the legatee inhaled of its perfumes. I refer to his grandfather on his father’s side, the late Braxton Montjoy.

The grandfather on the maternal side must have been a person of abundant consequence too, else he would never have begat him a daughter worthy to be mated with the progeny of that other illustrious man; but of him you heard little or nothing. Being long deceased, his memory was eclipsed in the umbra of a more compelling personality. It would seem that in all things, in all that he did and said in this life, Braxton Montjoy was exactly what the proud grandsire of a justly proud grandscion should be. He was a gentleman of the Old School, in case that conveys anything to your understanding; and a first family of Virginia. He was a captain of volunteers in the War of Eighteen-Twelve. He was a colonel in the Mexican war; that though was after he emigrated out over the Wilderness Trail to the newer and cruder commonwealth of Kentucky. He was one of the founders of our town and its first mayor in that far-distant time when it emerged from the muddied cocoon of a wood-landing on the river bank and became a corporation with a charter and a board of trustees and all. Later along, in the early fifties, he served our district in the upper branch of the State Legislature. In the Civil war he would undoubtedly have been a general – his descendant gainsaying as much – except for the unfortunate circumstance of his having passed away at an advanced age some years prior to the beginning of that direful conflict. Wherefore the descendant in question, being determined that his grandfather should not be cheated of his due military meed by death, conferred an honorary brevet upon him, anyway.

Nor was that all that might be said of this most magnificent of ancestors – by no means was it all. Ever and always was he a person of lofty ideals and mountainous principles. He never drank his dram in a groggery nor discussed the affairs of the day upon the public highway. Spurning such new-fangled and effetely-luxurious modes of transportation as carriages, he went horseback whenever he went, and wheresoever. In the summer time when the family made the annual pilgrimage back across the mountains to Old White Sulphur he rode the entire distance, both going and coming, upon a white stallion named Fairfax. To the day of his death he chewed his provender with his own teeth and looked upon the world-at-large through eyes unlensed.

Yet he might have owned a hundred sets of teeth or five hundred pairs of spectacles, had he been so minded, for to him appertained eighty slaves and four thousand acres of the fattest farm lands to be found in the rich bottoms of our county. War and Lincoln’s Proclamation freed the slaves but the lands remained, intact and unmortgaged, to make easier the pathways of those favored beings of his blood who might come after him. Finally, he was a duelist of a great and fearsome repute; an authority recognized and quoted, in the ceremonials of the code. In four historic meetings upon the field of honor he figured as a principal; and in at least three more as a second. Under his right shoulder blade, a cousin of President Thomas Jefferson carried to his grave a lump of lead which had been deposited there by this great man one fair fine morning in the Valley of Virginia, during the adjudication, with pistols, of a dispute which grew out of a difference of opinion touching upon the proper way of curing a Smithfield ham.

We did not know of these things at first hand. Only a few elderly inhabitants remembered Braxton Montjoy as he had appeared in the flesh. To the rest of our people he was a tradition, yet a living one, and this largely through virtue of the conversational activities of Quintus Q. Montjoy, the grandson aforesaid, aided and abetted by Mrs. Marcella Quistenbury.

I should be depriving an estimable lady of a share of the credit due her did I omit some passing mention of Mrs. Quistenbury from this narrative. She was one who specialized in genealogy. There is one such as she in every Southern town and in most New England ones. Give her but a single name, a lone and solitary distant kinsman to start off with, and for you she would create, out of the rich stores of her mind, an entire family tree, complete from its roots, deeply implanted in the soil of native aristocracy, to the uttermost tip of its far-spreading and ramifying branches. In the delicate matter of superior breeding she liberally accorded the Montjoy connection first place among the old families of our end of the state. So, too, with equal freedom, did the last of the Montjoys, which made it practically unanimous and left the honor of the lineage in competent hands.

For Quintus Q. – alas and alackaday – was the last of his glorious line. Having neither sisters nor brothers and being unmarried he abode alone beneath the ancestral roof tree. It was not exactly the ancestral roof tree, if you wish me to come right down to facts. The original homestead burned down long years before, but the present structure stood upon its site and was in all essential regards a faithful copy of its predecessor.

It might be said of our fellow-townsman – and it was – that he lived and breathed and had his being in the shadow of his grandfather. Among the ribald and the irreverent stories circulated was one to the effect that he talked of him in his sleep. He talked of him pretty assiduously when awake; there wasn’t any doubt of that. As you entered his home you were confronted in the main hall by a large oil portrait of an elderly gentleman of austere mien, wearing a swallow-fork coat and a neck muffler and with his hair brushed straight back from the forehead in a sweep, just as Andrew Jackson brushed his back. You were bound to notice this picture, the very first thing. If by any chance you didn’t notice it, Quintus Q. found a way of directing your attention to it. Then you observed the family resemblance.

Quintus Q., standing there alongside, held his hand on his hip after exactly the same fashion that his grandfather held his hand on his hip in the pictured pose. It was startling really – the reproduction of this trait by hereditary impulse. Quintus Q. thought there was something about the expression of the eyes, too.

If during the evening someone mentioned horses – and what assemblage of male Kentuckians ever bided together for any length of time without someone mentioning horses? – the host’s memory was instantly quickened in regard to the white stallion named Fairfax. Fairfax achieved immortality beyond other horses of his period through Quintus Q. Some went so far as to intimate that Mr. Montjoy made a habit of serving hams upon his table for a certain and especial purpose. You had but to refer in complimentary terms to the flavor of the curly shavings-thin slice which he had deposited upon your plate.

“Speaking of hams,” he would say – “speaking of hams, I am reminded of my grandfather, the old General – General Braxton Montjoy, you remember. The General fought one of his duels – he fought four, you know, and acted as second in three others – over a ham. Or perhaps I should say over the process of smoking a ham with hickory wood. His antagonist was no less a person than a cousin of President Thomas Jefferson. The General thought his veracity had been impugned and he, called the other gentleman out and shot him through the shoulder. Afterwards I believe they became great friends. Ah, sir, those were the good old days when a Southern gentleman had a proper jealousy of his honor. If one gentleman doubted another gentleman’s word there was no exchange of vulgar billingsgate, no unseemly brawling upon the street. The Code offered a remedy. One gentleman called the other gentleman out. Sometimes I wish that I might have lived in those good old days.”

Sometimes others wished that he might have, too, but I state that fact in parenthesis.

Then he would excuse himself and leave the table and enter the library for a moment, returning with a polished rosewood case borne reverently in his two hands and he would put the case down and dust it with a handkerchief and unlock it with a brass key which he carried upon his watch chain and from their bed of faded velveteen within, bring forth two old dueling pistols with long barrels, and carved scrolls on their butts and hammers that stood up high like the ears of a startled colt. And he would bid you to decipher for yourself the name of his grandfather inscribed upon the brass trigger guards. You were given to understand that in a day of big men, Braxton Montjoy towered as a giant amongst them.

Aside from following the profession of being a grandson, Quintus Q. had no regular business. There was a sign reading Real Estate and Loans upon the glass door of his one-room suite in the Planters’ Bank building, but he didn’t keep regular hours there. With the help of an agent, he looked after the collecting of the rents for his town property and the letting upon shares or leaseholds of his river-bottom farms; but otherwise you might say his chief occupation was that of being a sincere and conscientious descendant of a creditable forebear.

So much for the grandfather. So much, at this moment, for the grandson. Now we are going to get through the rind into the meat of our tale:

As may be recalled, State Senator Horace K. Maydew, of our town and county, being a leader of men and of issues, once upon a time hankered mightily to serve the district in Congress and in the moment that he could almost taste of triumph accomplished had the cup dashed from his lips through the instrumentality of one who, locally, was fancied as being rather better than a dabster at politics, himself. During the months which succeeded this defeat, the mortified Maydew nursed a sharpened grudge toward the enemy, keeping it barbed and fletched against the time when he might let fly with it. Presently an opportunity for reprisals befell. Maydew’s term as State Senator neared its close. For personal reasons, which he found good and sufficient, the incumbent did not offer as a candidate to succeed himself. But quite naturally, and perhaps quite properly, he desired to name his successor. Privily he began casting about him for a likely and a suitable candidate, which to the senator’s understanding meant one who would be biddable, tractable and docile. Before he had quite agreed with himself upon a choice, young Tobias Houser came out into the open as an aspirant for the Democratic nomination, and when he heard the news Senator Maydew re-honed his hate to a razor-edge. For young Tobe Houser, who had been a farmer-boy and then a country school teacher and who now had moved to town and gone into business, was something else besides: He was the nephew of Judge Priest, the only son of the judge’s dead sister. It was the judge’s money that had helped the young man through the State university. Undoubtedly – so Maydew read the signs of the times – it was the judge’s influence which now brought the youngster forth as an aspirant for public office. In the Houser candidacy Maydew saw, or thought he saw, another attack upon his fiefship on the party organization and the party machinery.

On an evening of the same week in which Tobe Houser inserted his modestly-worded announcement card in the Daily Evening News, Senator Maydew called to conference – or to concurrence – two lieutenants who likewise had cause to be stalwart supporters of his policies. The meeting took place in the living room of the Maydew home. When the drinks had been sampled and the cigars had been lighted Senator Maydew came straight to the business in hand:

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I’ve got a candidate – a man none of us ever thought of before. How does the name of Quintus Q. Montjoy seem to strike you?”

Mr. Barnhill looked at Mr. Bonnin, and Mr. Bonnin looked back at Mr. Barnhill. Then both of them looked at Maydew.

“Montjoy, eh?” said Barnhill, doubtfully, seeming not to have heard aright.

“Quintus Q. Montjoy you said, didn’t you?” asked Bonnin as though there had been any number of Montjoys to choose from. He spoke without enthusiasm.

“Certainly,” answered Maydew briskly, “Quintus Q. Montjoy, Esquire. Any objections to him that you can think of, off-hand?”

“Well,” said Mr. Barnhill, who was large of person and slow of speech, “he ain’t never done anything.”

“If I’m any judge he never will do anything – much,” supplemented Mr. Bonnin, who was by way of being small and nervous.

“You’ve said it – both of you,” stated their leader, catching them up with a snap. “He never has done anything. That gives him a clean record to run on. He never will do anything – on his own hook, I mean. That’ll make him a safe, sound, reliable man to have representing this district up yonder at Frankfort. Last session they licked the Stickney warehouse bill for us. This season it’ll come up again for passage. I guarantee here and now that Quint Montjoy will vote right on that proposition and all other propositions that’ll come up. He’ll vote right because we’ll tell him how to vote. I know him from the skin out.”

“He’s so powerfully pompious and bumpious – so kind of cocksure and high-an’-mighty,” said Mr. Barnhill. “D’ye reckin, Hod, as how he’ll stand without hitchin’?”

“I’ll guarantee that, too,” said Senator Maydew, with his left eyelid flickering down over his left eye in the ghost of a wink. “He don’t know yet that he’s going to be our candidate. Nobody knows it yet but you and me. But when he finds out from us that he’s going to have a chance to rattle round in the same seat that his revered granddaddy once ornamented – well, just you watch him arise and shine. There’s another little thing that you’ve overlooked. He’s got money, – plenty of it; as much money as any man in this town has got. He’s not exactly what I’d call a profligate or a spendthrift. You may have noticed that except when he was spending it on himself he’s very easy to control in money matters. But when we touch a match to his ambition and it flares up, he’ll dig down deep and produce freely – or I miss my guess. For once we’ll have a campaign fund with some real money behind it.”

His tone changed and began to drip rancor:

“By Judas, I’ll put up some of my own money! This is one time when I’m not counting the cost. I’m going to beat that young lummox of a Houser, if it’s the last thing I do. I’m going to rub his nose in the mud. You two know without my telling you why I’d rather see Houser licked than any other man on earth – except one. And you know who that one is. We can’t get at Priest yet – that chance will come later. But we can get his precious nephew, and I’m the man that’s going to get him. And Quint Montjoy is the man I’m going to get him with.”

“Well, Hod, jest ez you say,” assented Mr. Barnhill dutifully. “I was only jest askin’, that’s all. You sort of tuck me off my feet at fust, but the way you put it now, it makes ever’thing look mighty promisin’. How about you, Wilbur?” and he turned to Mr. Bonnin.

“Oh, I’m agreeable,” chimed Mr. Bonnin. “Only don’t make any mistake about one thing – Houser’s got a-plenty friends. He’ll give us a fight all right. It won’t be any walkover.”

“I want it to be a fight, and I don’t want it to be a walk-over, either,” said Senator Maydew. “The licking we give him will be all the sweeter, then.”

He got up and started for the telephone on the wall.

“I’ll just call up and see if our man is at home. If he is, we’ll all three step over there right now and break the news to him, that the voice of the people has been lifted in an irresistible and clamorous demand for him to become their public servant at his own expense.”

The Senator was in a good humor again.

“And say, Hod, whilst I’m thinkin’ of it,” put in Mr. Barnhill sapiently, “ef he should be at home and ef we should go over there, tell him for Goddle Midey’s sake not to drag in that late lamentable grandpaw of his’n, more’n a million times durin’ the course of the campaign. It’s all right mebbe to appeal to the old famblies. I ain’t bearin’ ary grudge ag’inst old famblies, ’though I ain’t never found the time to belong to one of ’em myself. But there’s a right smart chance of middle-aged famblies and even a few toler’ble new famblies in this here community. And them’s the kind that does the large bulk of the votin’ in primary elections.”

•     •     •     •     •

We’ve had campaigns and campaigns and then more and yet other campaigns in our county. We had them every year – and we still do. Being what they were and true to their breeding the early settlers started running for office, almost before the Indians had cleared out of the young settlements. Politics is breath to the nostrils and strong meat to the bellies of grown men down our way. Found among us are persons who are office-seekers by instinct and office-holders by profession. Whole families, from one generation to another, from father to son and from that son to his son and his son’s son become candidates almost as soon as they have become voters. You expect it of them and are not disappointed. Indeed, this same is true of our whole state. Times change, party lines veer and snarl, new issues come up and flourish for awhile and then are cut down again to make room for newer crops of newer issues still, but the Breckinridges and Clays, the Hardins and Helms, the Breathitts and Trimbles, the Crittendons and Wickliffes, go on forever and ever asking the support of their fellow-Kentuckians at the polls and frequently are vouchsafed it. But always the winner has cause to know, after winning, that he had a fight.

As goes the state at large, so goes the district and the precinct and the ward. As I was saying just now, we have had warm campaigns before now; but rarely do I recall a campaign of which the early stages showed so feverishly high a temperature as this campaign between Quintus Q. Montjoy and young Tobias Houser for the Democratic nomination for State Senator. You see, beneath the surface of things, a woman’s personality ran in the undercurrents, roiling the waters and soiling the channel. Her name of course, was not spoken on the hustings or printed in the paper, but her influence was manifest, nevertheless.

There was one woman – and perhaps only one in all that community – who felt she had abundant cause to dislike Judge Priest and all that pertained to him by ties of blood, marriage, affection or a common interest. And this person was the present wife of the Hon. Horace K. Maydew, and by that same token the former wife of old Mr. Lysander John Curd. Every time she saw Congressman Dabney Prentiss passing by, grand and glorious in his longtailed coat and his broad black hat and his white tie, which is ever the mark of a statesman who is working at the trade, she harked back to that day when Judge Priest had obtruded his obstinate bulk between her husband and her husband’s dearest ambition; and she remembered that, except for him, she might now be Mrs. Congressman Maydew, going to White House receptions and giving dinners for senators and foreign diplomats and cabinet officers and such. And her thoughts grew bitter as aloes; and with rancor and rage the blood throbbed in her wrists until her bracelets hurt her. Being minded to have a part and a parcel in the undoing of the Priest plans, she meddled in this fight, giving to Mr. Montjoy the benefit of her counsel and her open, active advocacy.

Perhaps it was because he inclined a flattered ear to the lady’s admonitions rather than to her husband’s subtler chidings that Mr. Montjoy confirmed the astute Mr. Barnhill’s forebodings and refused to stand without hitching. He backed and he filled; he kicked over the traces and got tangled in the gears. He was, as it turned out, neither bridle-wise nor harness-broken. In short he was an amateur in politics, with an amateur’s faults. He took the stump early, which was all well and good, because in Red Gravel county if a candidate can’t talk to the voter, and won’t try, he might just as well fold up his tents like the Arab and take his doll rags and go on about his business, if he has any business. But against the guidance and the best judgment of the man who had led him forth as a candidate, he accepted a challenge from young Houser for a series of joint debates; and whilst Mr. Barnhill and Mr. Bonnin wagged their respective heads in silent disapproval, he repeatedly and persistently made proclamation in public places and with a loud voice, of the obligation which the community still owed his illustrious grandparent, the inference being that he had inherited the debt and expected to collect it at the polls.

It is likewise possible that Candidate Montjoy listened over-much to the well meant words of Mr. Calhoun Tabscott. This Mr. Calhoun Tabscott esteemed himself a master hand at things political. He should have been, at that. One time or another he had been on opposite sides of every political fence; other times he bestraddled it. He had been a Greenbacker, a Granger, and a Populist and once, almost but not quite, a Republican. Occasions were when, in rapid succession, he flirted with the Single Taxers, and then, with the coy reluctance of one who is half-converted, harkened to the blandishments of the Socialists. Had he been old enough he would have been either a Know-Nothing or a Whig – either or perhaps both. In 1896 he quit the Silver Democrats cold, they having obtusely refrained from sending him as a delegate to their national convention. Six weeks later he abandoned the Gold Democrats to their fate because they failed to nominate the right man for president. It was commonly believed he voted the straight Prohibition ticket that year – for spite.

In the matter of his religious convictions, Mr. Tabscott displayed the same elasticity and liberality of choice. In the rival fields of theology he had ranged far, grazing lightly as he went. When the Cumberland Presbyterians put chime bells in their spire, thereby interfering with his Sunday morning’s rest, for he lived just across the street, he took his letter out of the church and thereafter for a period teetered on the verge of agnosticism, even going so far as to buy the works of Voltaire, Paine and Ingersol combined and complete in six large volumes. He worshipped a spell with the Episcopalians and once during a space of months, the Baptists had hopes of him. Rumor had it that he finally went over to the Methodists, because old Mr. Leatheritt, of the Traders National Bank, who was a Baptist, called one of his loans.

Now, having been twice with Judge Priest in his races for the Circuit Judgeship and twice against him, Mr. Tabscott espoused the Montjoy candidacy and sat in Mr. Montjoy’s amen corner, which, indeed, was altogether natural and consistent, since the Tabscotts, as an old family, dated back almost as far and soared almost as high as the Montjoys. There had been a Tabscott who nearly fought a duel himself, once. He sent the challenge and the preliminaries were arranged but at the eleventh hour, a magnanimous impulse triumphed over his lust for blood, and for the sake of his adversary’s wife and helpless children, he decided to spare him. Mr. Tabscott felt that as between him and Mr. Montjoy a sentimental bond existed. Mr. Montjoy felt it, too; and they confabbed much together regarding ways, means, and measures; somewhat to the annoyance of Senator Maydew who held fast to the principle that if a master have but one man, the man should have but one master.

The first of the joint debates took place, following a barbecue, at Gum Spring School-house in the northenmost corner of the county and the second took place three days later at the Old Market House in town, a large crowd attending. Acrimony tinctured Mr. Montjoy’s utterances from the outset. Recrimination seemed his forte – that and the claims of honorable antiquity as expressed in the person of its posterity upon a grateful and remembering constituency. He bore heavily upon the fact – or rather the allegation – that Judge Priest was the head and the front of an office-holding oligarchy, who thought they owned the county and the county offices, who took what spoils of office and patronage they coveted for themselves, and sought to parcel the remainder out among their henchmen and their relatives. This political tyranny, this nepotism, must end, he said, and he, Quintus Q. Montjoy, was the instrument chosen and ordained to end it. “Nominate Montjoy and break up the County ring,” was the slogan he carried on his printed card. Therein, in especial, might be divined the undermining and capable hand of Senator Maydew. But when at the second meeting between the candidates Mr. Montjoy went still further and touched directly upon alleged personal failings of Judge Priest, one who knew the inner workings of the speaker’s mind might have hazarded a guess that here a certain lady’s suggestions, privately conveyed, found deliverance in the spoken word.

The issue being thus, by premeditated intent of one of the two gentlemen most interested, so clearly and so acutely defined, the electors took sides promptly, becoming not merely partisans but militant and aggressive partisans. Indeed, citizens who seldom concerned themselves in fights within the party, but were mainly content to vote the straight party ticket after the fighting was over, came out into the open and declared themselves. Perhaps the most typical exemplar of this conservative class, now turning radical, was offered in the person of Mr. Herman Felsburg. Until this time Mr. Felsburg had held to the view that needless interference in primary elections jibed but poorly with the purveying of clothing to the masses. Former patrons who differed with one politically were apt to go a-buying elsewhere. No matter what your own leanings might be, Mr. Felsburg, facing you across a showcase or a counter, without ever committing himself absolutely, nevertheless managed to convey the impression that, barring that showcase or that counter, there was nothing between him and you, the customer – that in all things you twain were as one and would so continue. Such had been his attitude until now.

When Mr. Montjoy speared at Judge Priest, Judge Priest remained outwardly quite calm and indifferent, but not so Mr. Felsburg. If he did not take the stump in defense of his old friend at least he frequented its base, in and out of business hours, and in the fervor of his championship he chopped his English finer and twisted his metaphors worse than ever he had done before, which was saying a good deal.

One afternoon, when he returned to the store, after a two-hours’ absence spent in sidewalk argument down by the Square, his brother, Mr. Ike Felsburg, who was associated in the firm, ventured to remonstrate with him, concerning his activities in the curbstone forum, putting the objections on the grounds of commercial expediency. At that he struck an attitude remotely suggestive of a plump and elderly Israelitish Ajax defying the lightning.

“Listen here, you Ike,” he stated. “Thirty years I have been building up this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, and also hats, caps and gents’ furnishings goods. You – you can run around with your lodge meetings and your benevolence societies, and all this time I work here, sweating like rats in a trap, and never is a word said by me to you, vicer or verser. I ask you as brother to brother, ain’t that so, or ain’t it? It is,” continued Mr. Herman, answering his own question.

“But, Hermy,” interjected Mr. Ike, put on the defensive by the turn which the argument had taken, “but, Hermy, all what I have said to you is that maybe somebody who likes Montjoy would get mad at you for your words and take their custom up the street.”

“Let ’em!” proclaimed Mr. Herman with a defiant gesture which almost upset a glass case containing elastic garters and rubber armbands, “let ’em. Anybody which would be a sucker enough to vote for Montjoy against a fine young fellow like this here Houser would also be a sucker enough to let Strauss, Coleman & Levy sell him strictly guaranteed all-wool suitings made out of cotton shoddy, and I wouldn’t want his custom under any circumstances whatsoever!”

“But, Hermy!” The protest was growing weaker.

“You wait,” shouted Mr. Herman. “You have had your say, and now I would have mine, if you please. I would prefer to get one little word in sideways, if you will be so good. You have just now seen me coming in out of the hot sun hoarse as a tiger from trying to convince a few idiots which they never had any more sense than a dog’s hind leg and never will have any, neither. And so you stand there – my own brother – and tell me I am going too far. Going too far? Believe me, Mister Ike Felsburg, I ain’t started yet.”

He swung on his heel and glared into the depths of his establishment. “Adolph,” he commanded, “come here!” Adolph came, he being head salesman in the clothing department, while Mr. Ike quivered in dumb apprehension, dreading the worst and not knowing what dire form it would assume.

“Adolph,” said Mr. Herman with a baleful side-glance at his offending kinsman. “Today we are forming here the Oak Hall and Tobias J. Houser Campaign and Marching Club, made up of proprietors, clerks, other employees and well wishers of this here store, of which club I am the president therefrom and you are the secretary. So you will please open up a list right away and tell all the boys they are already members in good standing.”

“Well, now, Mr. Herman,” said Adolph, “I’ve always been good friends with Quintus Q. Montjoy and besides which, we are neighbors. No longer ago than only day before yesterday I practically as good as promised him my vote. I thought if you was coming out for Houser, some of us here in the store should be the other way and so——”

Mr. Herman Felsburg stilled him with a look and removed his hat in order to speak with greater emphasis.

“Adolph Dreifus,” he said with a deadly solemnity, “you been here in this store a good many years. I would assume you like your job here pretty well. I would consider that you have always been well treated here. Am I right, or am I wrong? I am right! I would assume you would prefer to continue here as before. Yes? No? Yes! You remember the time you wrote with a piece of chalk white marks on the floor so that that poor nearsighted Leopold Meyer, who is now dead and gone, would think it was scraps of paper and go round all day trying to pick those chalk marks up? With my own eyes I saw you do so and I said nothing. You remember the time you induced me to buy for our trade that order of strictly non-selling Ascot neckties because your own cousin from Cincinnati was the salesman handling the line which, from that day to this, we are still carrying those dam’ Ascot ties in stock? Did I say anything to you then?

“No! Not a word did I say. All those things is years past and I have never spoken with you regarding them until today. But now, Adolph, I must say I am ashamed for you that you should pick on that poor Leopold Meyer, who was blind like a barn-door. I am ashamed for you that you should boost up that cousin of yours from Cincinnati and his bum lines. If I should get more ashamed for you than what already I now am, there is no telling what I should do. Adolph, you will please be so good as to remember that all persons that work in this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium are for Tobe Houser for State Senator and no one else, whatsoever. Otherwise, pretty soon, I am afraid there will be some new faces selling garments around here. Do I make myself plain? I do!

“My brother – the junior partner here” – he dwelt heavily upon the word junior, making of it a most disqualifying adjective – “he also thinks in this matter the same way as I do. If you don’t believe me, ask him for yourself. There he stands like a dumb engraved image – ask him.”

And Mr. Ike, making craven surrender, raised both hands in token of his capitulation and weakly murmured, “Yes.”

•     •     •     •     •

The third of the joint debates, which, as it turned out, was to be the last one of the series, began according to schedule and announcement at the boat store corner in the presence of an assemblage mustering up in the hundreds. In fact the Daily Evening News reporter, in the introductory paragraph of his account, referred to it, I believe, as “a sea of upturned faces.” Mr. Montjoy led off first. He had his say, for the better part of an hour, speaking with much fluency from a small board platform that was built up against the side of the old boat store and occasionally, with a fretful shake of his head, raising his voice so it might be heard above the rumbling objurgations of the first mate of the Cumberland Queen who, thirty yards down the old gravel levee, was urging his black rousters to greater speed as they rolled the last of a consignment of tobacco hogsheads across the lower wharf boat and aboard the Queen’s boiler deck. Mr. Montjoy concluded with a neat verbal flourish and sat down, mopping his moistened brow with a square of fine cambric. Mr. Montjoy never permitted himself to sweat, and in public, at least, he perspired but seldom; but there were times when he did diffuse a perceptible glow.

His rival arose to answer him. He started off – Houser did – by stating that he was not running on his family record for this office. He was running on his own record, such as it was. Briefly, but vigorously, he defended his uncle; a thing he had done before. Continuing, he would say Mr. Montjoy had accused him of being young. He wished to plead guilty to that charge. If it were a defect, to be counted against him, time would probably cure him of it and he thought the Senate Chamber at Frankfort, this state, provided a very suitable spot for the aging process. (Laughter and applause.) He had a rather whimsical drawl and a straightforward, commonplace manner of delivery.

He continued, and I quote:

“Some of you may have heard somewhere – casually – that my opponent had a grandfather. Stories to that general effect have been in circulation for quite some little time in this vicinity. I gather from various avenues of information that my opponent is not exactly ashamed of his grandfather. I don’t blame him for that. A person without many prospects so far as the future is concerned is not to be blamed for dwelling rather heavily upon the past. But, fellow citizens, doesn’t it strike you that in this campaign we are having altogether too much grandfather and not enough grandson? (Renewed laughter from the Houser adherents and Mr. Montjoy’s face turning a violent red.) It strikes me that the stock is sort of petering out. It strikes me that the whale has bred a minnow.

“And so, in light of these things, I want to make this proposition here and now: I want every man in this county whose grandfather owned eighty slaves and four thousand acres of bottom lands to vote for Mr. Montjoy. And all I ask for myself is that every man whose grandfather didn’t own eighty slaves and four thousand acres, should cast his vote for me.” (A voice, “My grandpop never owned nary nigger, Toby, – I reckin you git my vote without a struggle, boy.”)

Along this strain Mr. Houser continued some minutes. It was a line he had not taken in either of his previous arguments with his opponent. He branched away from it to tell what he meant to do for the people of the district in the event of his nomination and election but presently he came back again to the other theme, while Judge Priest grinned up at him from his place in the edge of the crowd and Mr. Montjoy fidgeted and fumed and wriggled as though the chair upon which he sat had been the top of a moderately hot stove. From these and from yet other signs it might have been noted that Mr. Montjoy, under the nagging semihumorous goadings of young Houser, was rapidly losing his temper, which, by our awkward Anglo-Saxon mode of speech, is but another way of saying he was not losing his temper at all but, instead, finding out that he had one.

The Cumberland Queen blew her whistle for departure and as the roar died away Mr. Houser might be heard in the act of finishing a sentence touching with gentle irony upon the topic which seemed so to irk and irritate Mr. Montjoy. He never finished it.

Up, from his chair, sprang Mr. Montjoy, and shook a knotted fist beneath Mr. Houser’s nose.

“How dare you?” he demanded. “How dare you indulge in your cheap sarcasm – your low scurrilities – regarding one of the grandest men the Southland ever produced?”

His voice turned falsetto and soared to a slate-pencilly screech:

“I repeat it, sir – how dare you – you underbred ignoramus – you who never knew what it was to have a noble grandfather! Nobody knows who your grandfather was. I doubt whether anybody knows who your father——”

Perhaps it was what Mr. Montjoy appeared to be on the point of asserting. Perhaps it was that his knuckles, as he brandished his fist in Mr. Houser’s face, grazed Mr. Houser’s cheek.

Mr. Houser stretched forth a solid arm and gripped a handful of sinewy fingers in the lapels of Mr. Montjoy’s coat. He didn’t strike Mr. Montjoy, but he took him and he shook him – oh, how he shook him. He shook him up and down, and back and forth and to and fro and forward and rearward; shook him until his collar came undone and his nose glasses flew off into space; shook him until his hair came down in his eyes and his teeth rattled in his jaw; shook him into limp, breathless, voiceless helplessness, and then holding him, dangling and flopping for a moment, slapped him once very gently, almost as a mother might slap an erring child of exceedingly tender years; and dropped the limp form, and stepped over it and climbed down off the platform into the midst of the excited crowd. The third of the series of the joint debates was ended; also the series itself.

Judge Priest instantly shoved forward, his size and his impetuosity clearing the path for him through a press of lesser and less determined bodies. He thrust a firm hand into the crook of his nephew’s arm and led him off up the street clear of those who might have sought either to compliment or to reprehend the young man. As they went away linked together thus, it was observed that the judge wore upon his broad face a look of sore distress and it was overheard that he grievously lamented the most regrettable occurrence which had just transpired and that openly he reproached young Houser for his elemental response to the verbal attacks of Mr. Montjoy and, in view of the profound physical and spiritual shock to Mr. Montjoy’s well-known pride and dignity, that he expressed a deep concern for the possible outcome. Upon this last head, he was particularly and shrilly emphatic.

In such a fashion, with the nephew striving vainly to speak in his own defense and with the uncle as constantly interrupting to reprimand him and to warn him of the peril he had brought upon his head, and all in so loud a voice as to be clearly audible to any persons hovering nearby, the pair continued upon their journey until they reached Soule’s Drug Store. There, with a final sorrowful nod of the judge’s head and a final shake of his admonishing forefinger, they parted. The younger man departed, presumably for his home to meditate upon his foolhardy conduct and the older went inside the store and retired to Mr. Soule’s little box of an office at the rear, hard by the prescription case. Carefully closing the door after him to insure privacy, he remained there for upwards of an hour, engaged undoubtedly in melancholy reflections touching upon the outbreak of his most culpable kinsman and upon the conceivable consequences. He must have done some writing, too, for when at length he emerged he was holding in one hand a sealed envelope. Summoning to him Logan Baker, Mr. Soule’s colored errand boy, he entrusted the note to Logan, along with a quarter of a dollar for messenger hire, and sent the black boy away. From this circumstance several persons who chanced to be in Soule’s, hypothesized that very probably the judge had taken it upon himself to write Mr. Montjoy a note of apology in the name of his nephew and of himself. However, this upon the part of the onlookers was but a supposition. They merely were engaged in the old practice, so hallowed among bystanders, of putting two and two together, by such process sometimes attaining a total of four, and sometimes not.

As regards, on the other hand, Quintus Q. Montjoy, he retained no distinct recollection of the passage homeward, following his mishandling by Tobias J. Houser. For the time a seething confusion ruled his being. Mingled emotions of chagrin, rage and shame – but most of all rage – boiled in his brain until the top of his skull threatened to come right off. Since he was a schoolboy until now, none had laid so much as an impious finger upon him. For the first time in his life he felt the warm strong desire to shed human blood, to see it spatter and pour forth in red streams. The spirit of his grandfather waked and walked within him; anyway it is but fair to assume that it did so.

Somebody must have re-buttoned Mr. Montjoy’s collar for him and readjusted his necktie. Somebody else of equally uncertain identity must have salvaged his glasses and restored them to their customary place on the bridge of his slender nose. True, he preserved no memory of these details. But when, half an hour after the encounter, a hired hack deposited him at his yard gate and when Mr. Barnhill, who it would appear dimly and almost as a figment from a troubled dream, accompanied him on the ride, had dismounted and had volunteered to help him alight from the vehicle, meanwhile offering words intended to be sympathetic, Mr. Montjoy found collar, necktie and glasses all properly bestowed.

Within the sanctified and solitary precincts of his library, beneath the grim, limned eyes of his ancestor, Mr. Montjoy re-attained a measure of outward calm and of consecutive thought; coincidently with these a tremendous resolution began to harden inside of him. Presently as he walked the floor, alternately clenching and unclenching his hands, the telephone bell sounded. Answering the call, he heard coming across the line the familiar voice of one, who, in the temporary absence of her husband from the city, now undertook to offer advice. It would seem that Mrs. Maydew had but heard of the brutal assault perpetrated upon her friend; she was properly indignant and more than properly desirous that a just vengeance be exacted. It would seem in this connection she had certain vigorous suggestions to offer. And finally it would seem she had just seen the evening paper and desired to know whether Mr. Montjoy had seen his copy?

Mr. Montjoy had not. After a short interchange of views, when, from intensity of feeling, the lady fairly made the wire sibilate and sing as her words sped over it, she rang off and Mr. Montjoy summoned his butler. His was the only roof in town which harbored a butler beneath it. Other families had male servants – of color – who performed duties similar to those performed by Mr. Montjoy’s man but they didn’t call these functionaries butlers and Mr. Montjoy did. He sent the butler out into the yard to get the paper, which a boy had flung over the fence palings in a twisted wisp. And when the butler brought it to him he opened, to read, not the Daily Evening News highly impartial account of the affair at the boat store corner – that could come later – but to read first off a card signed Veritas which was printed at the bottom of the second column of the second inside page, immediately following the editorial comment of the day. It was this card to which young Mrs. Maydew had particularly directed his attention.

He bent his head and he read. The individual who chose to hide behind the nom de plume of Veritas wrote briefly and to the point. At the outset he confessed himself as one who harbored old-fashioned ideals. Therefore he abhorred the personal altercations which in these latter and degenerate days so often marred the course of public discussions between gentlemen entertaining opposite views upon public problems or private matters. And still more did he deplore the common street brawls, not unmarked by the use of lethal weapons and sometimes by tragically fatal results to one or the other of the parties engaged, which had been known before now to eventuate from the giving and taking of the offensive word, or blow. Hardly need the writer add that he had in mind the unfortunate affray of even date in a certain populous quarter of our city. Without mentioning names, he, Veritas, took that deplorable occurrence for his present text. It had inspired him to utter these words of protest against the vulgarity, the coarseness and the crassness of the methods employed for the appeasing of individual and personal wrongs. How much more dignified, how much more in keeping with the traditions of the soil, and the very history of this proud old commonwealth, was the system formerly in vogue among gentlemen for the adjudication of their private misunderstandings! Truly enough the law no longer sanctioned the employment of the code duello; indeed for the matter of that, the law of the land had never openly sanctioned it; but once upon a time a jealous regard for his own outraged honor had been deemed sufficient to lift a Southern gentleman to extremes above the mere written letter of the statutes. “O tempora, O mores! Oh, for the good old days!” And then came the signature.

Barely had Mr. Montjoy concluded the reading and the re-reading of this, when Mr. Calhoun Tabscott was announced and promptly entered to proffer his hand and something more, besides. Mr. Tabscott carried with him a copy of the Daily Evening News opened at the inside page. His nostrils expanded with emotion, his form shook with it.

In ten words these two – Mr. Montjoy as the person aggrieved and Mr. Tabscott as his next friend – found themselves in perfect accord as to the course which now should be pursued. At once then, Montjoy sat down at his mahogany writing desk and Mr. Tabscott sat down behind him where he could look over the other’s shoulder and together they engaged in the labors of literary composition.

But just before he seated himself Mr. Montjoy pointed a quivering finger at the desk and, in a voice which shook with restrained determination, he said impressively, in fact, dramatically:

“Calhoun Tabscott, that desk belonged to my grandfather, the old General. He used it all his life – in Virginia first and then out here. At this moment, Calhoun Tabscott, I can almost feel him hovering above me, waiting to guide my pen.”

And Mr. Tabscott said he felt that way about it, himself.

•     •     •     •     •

In spare moments at home Judge Priest was addicted to the game of croquet. He played it persistently and very badly. In his side yard under his dining-room window rusted wickets stood in the ordained geometric pattern between painted goal posts, and in a box under a rustic bench in the little tottery summerhouse beneath the largest of the judge’s silver-leaf poplar trees were kept the balls and the mallets – which latter instruments the judge insisted on calling mauls. And here, in this open space, he might be found on many a fine afternoon congenially employed, with some neighborhood crony or a chance caller for his antagonist. Often, of mornings, when he had a half hour or so of leisure, he practiced shots alone.

On the morning which immediately followed the day of the broken-off joint debate at the boat-store corner, he was so engaged. He had his ball in excellent alignment and fair distance of the center wickets, and was stooping to deliver the stroke when he became aware of his nephew approaching him hurriedly across the wide lawn.

“Uncle Billy,” began that straightforward young man, “something has happened, and I’ve come to you with it right off.”

“Son,” said the judge, straightening up reluctantly, “something happens purty nigh every day. Whut’s on your mind this mornin’?”

“Well, suh, I was eating breakfast a little bit ago, when that Cal Tabscott came to the front door. He sent word he wouldn’t come in, so I went out to the door to see what it was he wanted. He was standing there stiff and formal as a ramrod, all dressed up in his Sunday clothes, and wearing a pair of gloves, too – this weather! And he bowed without a word and handed me a letter and when I opened it it was a challenge from Quint Montjoy – a challenge to fight a duel with him, me to name the weapons, the time and the place! That’s what I’ve got to tell you.”

His uncle’s eyes opened innocently wide. “Boy, you don’t tell me?” he said. “And whut did you do then?”

“Well, suh, I came within an ace of just hauling off and mashing that blamed idiot in the mouth – coming to my door with a challenge for a duel! But I remembered what you told me yesterday about keeping my temper and I didn’t do it. Then I started to tear up that fool note and throw the pieces in his face.”

“You didn’t do that neither, did you?” demanded the judge quickly, with alarm in his voice. “You kept it?”

“I didn’t do that either and I kept the note,” replied the younger man, answering both questions at once. “I shut the door in Tabscott’s face and left him on the doorstep and then I went and put on my hat and came right on over here to see you. Here’s the note – I brought it along with me.”

His uncle took from him the single sheet of note paper and adjusted his specs. He gazed admiringly for a moment at the embossed family crest at the top and read its contents through slowly.

“Ah hah,” he said; “seems to be regular in every respect, don’t it? – polite, too. To the best of my remembrances I never seen one of these challenges before, but I should judge this here one is got up strictly accordin’ to the Code. Son, our ancestors certainly were the great hands for goin’ accordin’ to the codes, weren’t they? If it wasn’t one Code, it was another, with, them old fellers. Quintus Q. Montjoy writes a nice hand, don’t he?”

With great care, he folded the note along its original crease, handling it as though it had been a fragile document of immense value and meanwhile humming a little tuneless tune abstractedly. Still humming, he put the paper in an ancient letter wallet, wrapped a leather string about the wallet, and returned wallet and string to the breast pocket of his black seersucker coat.

“Son,” he said when all this had been accomplished, “I reckin you done the right thing in comin’ straight to me. I must compliment you.”

“Yes, suh, much obliged,” said young Houser, “but, Uncle Billy, what would you advise my doing now?” He rubbed his forehead in perplexity.

“Why, nothin’ – nothin’ a’tall,” bade his uncle, as though surprised at any suggestion of uncertainty upon the nephew’s part. “You ain’t got a thing to do, but jest to go on back home and finish up your breakfast. It ain’t wise to start the day on an empty stomach, ever. After that, ef I was you, I would put in the remainder of the day remainin’ perfectly ca’m and collected and whilst so engaged I wouldn’t say nothin’ to nobody about havin’ received a challenge to fight a duel.” He regripped his mallet. “Son, watch me make this shot.” He stopped and squinted along the imaginary line from his ball to the wicket.

“But, Uncle Billy, I——”

“Son, please don’t interrupt me ag’in. Jimmy Bagby is comin’ over this evenin’ to play off a tie match with me, and I aim to be in shape fur him when he does come. Now run along on back home like I told you to and keep your mouth shet.”

The judge whacked his ball and made an effective shot – or rather an effective miss – and Tobe Houser betook himself away wagging his puzzled head in a vain effort to fathom the enigma of his relative’s cryptic behavior.

Approximately thirty-six hours passed without public developments which might be construed as relating to the matter chiefly in hand and then – in the early afternoon – young Houser returned to the house of his uncle, this time, finding its owner stretched out for his after-dinner nap upon an old and squashy leather couch in the big old-timey sitting-room. The judge wasn’t quite asleep yet. He roused as his nephew entered.

“Uncle Billy,” began young Houser, without preamble, “you told me yesterday not to do anything and I’ve obeyed your orders although I didn’t understand what you were driving at, exactly, but now I must do something if I aim to keep my self-respect or to stay in this race – either one, or both. Unless I take up the dare he’s laid down in front of me, Montjoy’s going to brand me on the stump as a coward. Yes, suh, that’s his intention – Oh, it came to me straight. It seems Mrs. Horace K. Maydew told old Mrs. Whitridge this morning in strict confidence and Mrs. Whitridge just took her foot in hand and put out to tell Aunt Puss Lockfoot and Aunt Puss didn’t lose any time getting through the alley gate into my back yard to tell my wife.

“Yes, suh, if I keep silent and don’t take any notice of his challenge, Montjoy’s going to get up before this whole town at a mass meeting and denounce me as a coward, – he’s going to say I’m willing enough to take advantage of being younger and stronger than he is to attack him with my bare hands, but that I’m afraid to back up my act where it puts my hide in danger. I know mighty good and well who’s behind him, egging him on – I can see her finger in it plain enough. She hopes to see me humiliated and she hopes to see your chances hurt in your next race. She aims to strike at you through me and ruin us both, if she can.

“But, Uncle Billy, all that being so, doesn’t alter the situation so far as I’m concerned. The man doesn’t live that can stand up and brand me as a sneaking quitting coward and not have to answer for it. One way or another, it will come to a pass where there’s bound to be shooting. I’ve just got to do something and do it quick.”

“Well, son,” said Judge Priest, still flat on his back, “I sort of figgered it out that things might be takin’ some sech a turn as this. I’ve heard a few of the rumors that’re beginnin’ to creep round, myse’f. I reckin, after all, you will have to answer Mister Montjoy. In fact, I taken the trouble this mornin’ to wrop up your answer and have it all ready to be sent over to Mister Montjoy’s place of residence by the hands of my boy Jeff.”

“You wrapped it up?” queried Houser, bewildered again.

“That’s whut I said – I wropped it up,” answered the judge. He heaved himself upright and crossed the room to his old writing table that stood alongside one of the low front windows and from the desk took up a large squarish object, securely tied up in white paper with an address written upon one of its flat surfaces.

“Jeff!” he called, “oh, you Jeff.”

“Why, Uncle Billy, that looks like a book to me,” said Mr. Houser. Assuredly, this was a most mystified young man.

“It ain’t no box of sugar kisses – you kin be shore of that much, anyway,” stated that inscrutable uncle of his. “You’re still willin’, ain’t you, son, to set quiet and be guided by me in this matter?”

“Yes, suh, I am. That is, I’m perfectly willing to take your advice up to a certain point but——”

“Then set right still and do so,” commanded Judge Priest. “I’m goin; to take you into my confidences jest as soon as I see how my way of doin’ the thing works out. We oughter git some definite results before dark this evenin’. And listen here, son, a minute – when all’s said and done even Quintus Q. Montjoy, Esquire, ain’t no more of a stickler for follering after the Code than whut I am. I’m jest ez full of time-hallowed precedents ez he is – and maybe even more so.”

“Callin’ me, Jedge?” The speaker was Jefferson Poindexter, who appeared at the door leading into the hall.

“Yes, I was – been callin’ you fur a half hour – more or less,” stated his master. “Jeff, you take this here parcel over to Mister Quintus Q. Montjoy’s and present it with the compliments of Mister Houser. You needn’t wait fur an answer – jest come on back. I reckin there won’t be no answer fur some little time.” He turned again to his nephew with the air of a man who, having disposed of all immediate and pressing business affairs, is bent now upon pleasurable relaxation.

“Son, ef you ain’t got nothin’ better to do this evenin’ I wish’t you’d stay here and keep score fur the tournament. Playing crokay, I licked the pants off’en that poor old Jimmy Bagby yistiddy, and now he wants to git even.” The judge spoke vaingloriously. “He’s skeered to tackle me again single-handed, I reckin. So him and Father Tom Minor are coinin’ over here to play me and Herman Felsburg a match game fur the crokay champeenship of Clay Street and adjacent thoroughfares. They oughter be here almost any minute now – I was jest layin’ here, waitin’ fur ’em and sort of souplin’ up my muscles.”

•     •     •     •     •

Playing magnificently as partners, Father Minor and Sergeant Bagby achieved a signal victory – score three to one – over the Felsburg-Priest team. The players, with the official referee who maintained a somewhat abstracted, not to say a pestered, air, were sitting in the little summer house, cooling off after the ardors of the sport. Jeff Poindexter had been dispatched indoors, to the dining-room sideboard, to mix and fetch the customary refreshments. The editor of the Daily Evening News, who was by way also of being chief newsgatherer of that dependable and popular journal, came up the street from the corner below and halted outside the fence.

“Howdy, gentlemen!” over the paling he greeted them generally. “I’ve got some news for you-all. I came out of my way, going back to the office, to tell you.” He singled out the judge from the group. “Oh, you Veritas” he called, jovially.

“Sh-h-h, Henry, don’t be a-callin’ me that,” spoke up Judge Priest with a warning glance about him and a heavy wink at the editor. “Somebody that’s not in the family might hear you and git a false and a misleadin’ notion about the presidin; circuit judge of this district. Whut’s your news?”

“Well,” said Mr. Tompkins, “it’s sort of unprofessional to be revealing the facts before they’re put in type but I reckon it’s no great breach of ethics to tell a secret to an occasional contributor of signed communications—” he indicated Judge Priest, archly – “and the contributor’s close friends and relatives. Anyhow, you’d all know it anyhow as soon as the paper comes out. Quintus Q. Montjoy is withdrawing from the race for State Senator.”

“What?” several voices spoke the word in chorus, only Sergeant Bagby pronounced it Whut and Mr. Felsburg sounded the W with the sound of V as in Vocal.

“Montjoy quits. I’ve got his card of withdrawal right here in my pocket now. Tobe, allow me to congratulate you on your prospect of getting the nomination without any opposition at the polls.”

“Quits, does he?” echoed Judge Priest. “Well, do you boys know, I ain’t surprised. I’ve been lookin’ fur him to do somethin’ of that nature fur the last two hours. I wonder whut delayed him?” He addressed the query to space.

“He gives some reasons – maybe, yes?” asked Mr. Felsburg, releasing Mr. Houser’s hand which he had been shaking with an explosive warmth.

“Oh, yes,” said Editor Tompkins, “I suppose he felt as if he had to do that. The principal reason he gives is that he finds he cannot spare the time from his business interests for making an extended canvass – and also his repugnance to engaging further in a controversy with a man who so far forgets himself as to resort to physical violence in the course of a joint debate upon the issues of the day. That’s a nice little farewell side-slap at you, Houser.

“But I gleaned from what I picked up after I got over to Montjoy’s in answer to his telephone message asking me to call that there may have been other reasons which are not set forth in his card of withdrawal,” continued Mr. Tompkins. “In fact, about the time I got over there – to his house – Hod Maydew arrived in a free state of perspiration and excitement – Hod’s been up in Louisville on business, you know, and didn’t get in until the two-thirty train came – and I rather gathered from what he said a little bit ago to Quintus Q., in the privacy of the dining room while I was waiting in the library, that he was considerably put out about something. His voice sounded peeved – especially when he was calling Montjoy’s attention to the fact that even if he should win the race now, he wouldn’t be able to take the oath of office. Anyhow, I think that’s what he was saying.

“Say, Judge, just for curiosity’s sake now and strictly between ourselves – just what was the message, or whatever it was, that you sent over to Montjoy’s right after dinner? I overheard something about that too.”

“Oh, that?” said the judge, as all eyes turned in his direction. “That was jest a spare copy of the Code that I happened to have ’round the house – with a page in it marked and turned down.”

“The Code – what Code?” Mr. Tompkins pressed the point like the alert collector of news that he was.

“The Code and the Statutes – with the accent on the Code,” answered the old judge, simply. “Although, speakin’ pussonally, I pay more attention to the Statutes than some folks do. In fact it would seem like some persons who are reasonably well informed on most subjects – ancestors fur instance – ain’t never took the time to peruse them old Statutes of ourn with the care they should give to ’em ef they’re aimin’ to engage in the job of bein’ a statesman.” He faced his nephew. “Tobe, my son, this oughter be a great lesson to you – it’s a work that’ll bear consid’able study frum time to time. I’m afeared you ain’t ez well posted on the subject ez you should be. Well, this is a mighty good time to begin. You kin take your first lesson right now.”

He stooped and lifted the lid of the croquet box, beneath the bench upon which they had been sitting, and fetched forth a large, heavy volume, bound in splotchy law calf. “I put my other copy here jest a little while ago, thinkin’ somebody might be interested later on in its contents,” he explained as he ran through the leaves until he came to a certain page. Upon that page, with a blunt forefinger, he indicated a certain paragraph as he handed the tome over to his nephew.

“There, Tobe,” he ordered, “you’ve got a good strong voice. Read this here section – aloud.”

So then, while the others listened, with slowly widening grins of comprehension upon their several faces, and while Judge Priest stood alongside, smiling softly, young Tobe read. And what he read was this:

“Oath to be taken by all officers – Form of Members of the General Assembly and all officers, before they enter upon the execution of the duties of their respective offices, and all members of the bar, before they enter upon the practice of their profession, shall take the following oath or affirmation: I do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth, and be faithful and true to the Commonwealth of Kentucky so long as I continue a citizen thereof, and that I will faithfully execute, to the best of my ability, the office of —————————— according to law; and I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that since the adoption of the present Constitution, I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this State, nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God.”

Having read it aloud, young Houser now reread it silently to himself. He was rather a slow-thinking and direct-minded person. Perhaps time was needed for the full force and effect of the subject-matter to soak into him. It was Mr. Tompkins who spoke next.

“Judge Priest,” he said, “what do you suppose those two fellows over yonder at Montjoy’s are thinking about you right now?”

“Henry,” said Judge Priest, “fur thinkin’ whut they do about me, I reckin both of them boys could be churched.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 15 Jan 1916
Old Judge Priest (1916)

Forrest’s Last Charge

~

Toward morning, after a spell of unusually even-tempered and moderate weather, it blew up cold, snowed hard for two or three hours, and turned off to be clear and freezing. The sun, coming up at seven-thirty-five, according to his curtailed December schedule, peeped out on a universe that was clothed all in white, whereas when he retired the night before in his west bedroom he left it wearing a motley of faded yellows and seasoned greens. Swinging in the east as a pale coppery disk, he blinked his astonishment through a ragged grey veil of the last of the storm clouds.

Others beside the sun were taken by surprise. It was the first snowfall of the year and a good, hard, heavy one. Down our way, some winters, we had hardly any snows at all; then, again, some winters we had a plenty; but scarcely ever did we have them before Christmas. This one came as a profound and an annoying visitation, taking the community at large unawares and unprepared, and making a great nuisance of itself from the start. Practically without exception, doorstep hydrants had tight colds in the head that morning. On being treated with lavings of hot water they dripped catarrhally from their cast-iron noses for a little while and then developed the added symptoms of icicles.

Cooks were hours late coming to cook breakfast, and when they did come uttered despairing moans to find range boilers frozen up and kitchen taps utterly unresponsive to first-aid measures. At some houses it was nearly eight o’clock before the milkman got round, with wooden runners under his milk wagon in place of wheels and rosaries of rusted sleigh bells on the necks of his smoking team. Last year’s rubber boots came out of the closet and any old year’s toy sled came out of the attic.

The old negro man who did whitewashing in the spring, picked blackberries for his summertime living, and in the fall peddled corn-shuck doormats and scaly-bark hickory nuts, made the circuit of his regular patrons, equipped with a shovel over his shoulder and his venerable feet done up in burlaps, to shovel footpaths for a price. Where the wind piled the snow in little drifts he left a wake behind him as though a baby elephant had floundered through there.

In the back yard Sir Rooster squawked his loud disgust as his naked legs sank shank-deep into the feathery mass. His harem, a row of still and huddled shapes on the roosts, clamped their chilled toes all the tighter to their perch and stared out through the chicken-house door at a transformed and unfamiliar world. With them – except for their eyes – rigor mortis seemed far advanced. Small boys, rabbit dogs, plumbers and the few persons in town who owned sleighs rejoiced. Housewives, house cats and thin-blooded old ladies and gentlemen were acutely miserable – and showed it.

There were tramps about in numbers. It took a sudden cold snap, with snow accompaniments such as this one, to fetch the tramps forth from their sleeping places near the tracks, and make the citizen realize how many of these southbound soldiers of misfortune the town harbored on any given date between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s. Judge Priest did not know it – and probably would not have much cared if he had known it – but on the right-hand-side post of his front gate, just below the wooden letter box, was scratched the talismanic sign which, to an initiated nation-wide brotherhood, signified that here, at this place, was to be had free and abundant provender, with no stove wood to chop afterward and no heavy buckets of coal to pack in.

Wherefore and hence, throughout the rising hour and well on into the forenoon, a succession of ragged and shivering travelers tracked a straggling path up his walk and round to the back door, coming, with noses a frostbitten red and hands a frostbitten blue, to beg for sustenance. It was part and parcel of the judge’s creed of hospitality to turn no stranger away from his door unfed.

“Jedge!” Aunt Dilsey Turner bulged into the old sitting room, where her master sat with his feet close to the grate toasting his shoesoles. “Jedge, they’s ’nother one of ’em miz’ble wuthless w’ite trash out yere axin’ fur vittles. Tha’s de fo’th one inside er hour. Whut you reckin I best do wid ’im?”

“Well, Aunt Dilsey,” the old man answered, “ef vittles is what he asts fur, I believe, under the circumstances, I’d give him some.”

“Whar we goin’ git vittles fur ’im?” she demanded.

“Wasn’t there anything left over frum breakfast?” He risked the inquiry mildly – almost timidly.

“Breakfus’!” She sniffed her contempt for masculine ignorance. “Breakfus’? How long does you think one li’l’ batch of breakfus’ is goin’ last round yere? I ain’t never tek much fur myse’f – jes’ swallers a mossil of hot coffee to stay my stomach, but you’s suttinly a mighty stiddy feeder; and ez fur ’at nigger Jeff of yourn – huh! – he acks lak he wuz holler cl’ar down to his insteps. Ef dat nigger had de right name, de name would be Famine! ’Sides, ain’t I done tole you they’s been three of dem trafflin’, no-’count vagroms here already dis mawnin’, a-eatin’ us plum’ out of house and home? Naw, suh; dey ain’t nary grain of breakfus’ lef’ – de platters is done lick’ clean!”

“Well, Aunt Dilsey, ez a special favor to me, I’d be mighty much obliged to you ef you’d cook up a little somethin’ fur the pore feller.”

“Po’ feller! Po’, you sez? Jedge, dat ole tramp out yonder at my kitchen do’ is mighty nigh ez fat ez whut you is. Still, you’s de cap’n. Ef you sez feed ’im, feed ’im I does. Only don’t you come round blamin’ me w’en we-all lands in de po’house – tha’s all I asts you.”

And out the black tyrant flounced, leaving the judge grinning to himself. Aunt Dilsey’s bark was worse than her bite and there was no record of her having bitten anybody. Nevertheless, in order to make sure that no breakfast applicant departed hungry, he lingered on past his usual time for starting the day’s work. It was cozily warm in his sitting room. Court was not in session either, having adjourned over for the holidays. It was getting well on toward ten o’clock when, with Jeff Poindexter’s aid, he struggled into his ancient caped overcoat and buckled his huge red-lined galoshes on over his shoes, and started downtown.

Midway of the next block a snowball sailed out and over from behind a hedge fence and knocked his old black slouch hat half off his head. Showing surprising agility for one of his years and bulk, he ran down the fleeing sharpshooter who had fired on him; and, while with one hand he held the struggling youngster fast, with the other he vigorously washed his captive’s face in loose snow until the captive bawled for mercy. Then the judge gave him a dime to console him for his punishment and went on his way with a pleasant tingling in his blood and a ruby tip on his already well-ruddied nose.

His way took him to Soule’s Drug Store, the gathering place of his set in fair weather and in foul. He was almost there before he heard of the trouble. It was Dave Baum who brought the first word of it. Seeing him pass, Dave came running, bareheaded, out of his notions store.

“Judge Priest, did you know what’s just happened?” Dave was highly excited. “Why, Beaver Yancy’s been cut all to pieces with a dirk knife by one of those Dagos that was brought on here to work on the new extension – that’s what just happened! It happened just a little bit ago, down there where they’ve got those Dagos a-keepin’ ’em. Beave, he must’ve said somethin’ out of the way to him, and he just up with his dirk knife and cut Beave to ribbons.”

Really it required much less time for little Mr. Baum to make this statement than it has taken for me to transcribe it or for you to read it. In his haste he ran the syllables together. Dan Settle came up behind them in time to catch the last words and he pieced out the narrative:

“They toted poor old Beaver into Doctor Lake’s office – I just came from there – there’s a big crowd waitin’ to hear how he comes out. They don’t think he’s goin’ to live but a little while. They ain’t got the one that did the cuttin’ – yet. There’s quite a lot of feelin’ already.”

“That’s what the railroad gets for bringin’ all those foreigners down here.” Mr. Baum, who was born in Bavaria, spoke with bitterness. “Judge, what do you think ought to be done about this business?”

“Well, son,” said Judge Priest, “to begin with, ef I was you I’d run back inside of my store and put my hat on before I ketched a bad cold. And ef I was the chief of police of this city I’d find the accused party and lock him up good and tight. And ef I was everybody else I’d remain ez ca’m ez I could till I’d heared both sides of the case. There’s nearly always two sides to every case, and sometimes there’s likely to be three or four sides. I expect to impanel a new grand jury along in January and I wouldn’t be surprised ef they looked into the matter purty thoroughly. They ginerally do.

“It’s too bad, though, about Beaver Yancy!” added the judge; “I certainly trust he pulls through. Maybe he will – he’s powerful husky. There’s one consolation – he hasn’t got any family, has he?”

And, with that, Judge Priest left them and went on down the snow-piled street and turned in at Mr. Soule’s door. What with reading a Louisville paper and playing a long game of checkers with Squire Rountree behind the prescription case, and telephoning to the adjutant regarding that night’s meeting of Gideon K. Irons Camp, and at noontime eating a cove oyster stew which a darky brought him from Sherill’s short-order restaurant, two doors below, and doing one thing and another, he spent the biggest part of the day inside of Soule’s and so missed his chance to observe the growing and the mounting of popular indignation.

It would seem Beaver Yancy had more friends than any unprejudiced observer would have credited him with having. Mainly they were the type of friends who would not have lent him so much as fifty cents under any conceivable circumstance, but stood ready to shed human blood on his account. Likewise, as the day wore on, and the snow, under the melting influence of the sun, began to run off the eaves and turn to slush in the streets, a strong prejudice against the presence of alien day laborers developed with marvelous and sinister rapidity.

Yet, had those who cavilled but stopped long enough to take stock of things, they might have read this importation as merely one of the manifestations of the change that was coming over our neck of the woods – the same change that had been coming for years, and the same that inevitably would continue coming through years to follow.

Take for example, Legal Row – that short street of stubby little brick buildings where all the lawyers and some of the doctors had their offices. Summer after summer, through the long afternoons, the tenants had sat there in cane-bottomed chairs tilted back against the housefronts, swapping gossip and waiting for a dog fight or a watermelon cutting to break the monotony. But Legal Row was gone now and lawyers did not sit out on the sidewalks any more; it was not dignified. They were housed, most of them, on the upper floor levels of the sky-scraping Planters’ Bank building. Perhaps Easterners would not have rated it as a skyscraper; but in our country the skies are low and friendly skies, and a structure of eight stories, piled one on the other, with a fancy cornice to top off with, rears mightily high and imposing when about it, for contrast, are only two and three and four story buildings.

Kettler’s wagon yard, where the farmers used to bring their tobacco for overnight storage, and where they slept on hay beds in the back stalls, with homemade bedquilts wrapped round them, had been turned into a garage and smelled now of gasoline, oils, and money transactions. A new brick market house stood on the site of the old wooden one. A Great White Way that was seven blocks long made the business district almost as bright as day after dark – almost, but not quite. There was talk of establishing a civic center, with a regular plaza, and a fountain in the middle of the plaza. There was talk of trying the commission form of government. There was talk of adopting a town slogan; talk of an automobile club and of a country club. And now white labor, in place of black, worked on a construction job.

When, after many false alarms, the P. A. & O. V. [railroad] got its Boaz Ridge Extension under way, the contractors started with negro hands; but the gang bosses came from up North, whence the capital had likewise come, and they did not understand the negroes and the negroes did not understand them, and there was trouble from the go-off. If the bosses fraternized with the darkies, the darkies loafed; if, taking the opposite tack, the bosses tried to drive the gangs under them with hard words, the gangs grew sullen and insolent.

There was a middle ground, but the perplexed whites could not find it. A Southem-born overseer or a Southem-born steamboat mate could have harried the crews with loud profanity, with dire threats of mutilation and violent death, and they would have grinned back at him cheerfully and kept right on at their digging and their shovelling. But when a grading expert named Flaherty, from Chicago, Illinois, shook a freckled fist under the nose of one Dink Bailey, colored, for whom, just the night before, he had bought drinks in a groggery, the aforesaid Dink Bailey tried to disarticulate him with a razor and made very fair headway toward the completion of the undertaking, considering he was so soon interrupted.

Having a time limit ever before their pestered eyes, it sorely irked the contractors that, whereas five hundred black, brown and yellow men might drop their tools Saturday night at six o’clock, a scant two hundred or so answered when the seven-o’clock whistle blew on Monday morning. The others came straggling back on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even on Thursday, depending on how long their wages held out.

“Whut I wants to go to work fur, Mist’ W’ite Man? I got ’most two dollars lef.’ Come round to see me w’en all dat’s done spent and mebbe we kin talk bus’ness ’en.”

The above statement, made by a truant grading hand to an inquiring grading boss, was typical of a fairly common point of view on the side of Labor. And this one, below, which sprang from the exasperated soul of a visiting contractor, was just as typical, for it was the cry of outraged Capital:

“It takes two white men, standing over every black man, to make the black man work – and then he won’t! I never was a Southern sympathizer before, but I am now – you bet!”

The camel’s back broke entirely at the end of the third week. It was a green paymaster from the Chicago offices who furnished the last straw. He tried to pay off with paper money. Since those early post-bellum days, when the black brother, being newly freed from servitude and innocently devoid of the commercial instinct, thought the white man’s money, whether stamped on metal disks or printed on parchment rectangulars, was always good money, and so accepted much Confederate currency, to his sorrow at the time and to his subsequent enlightenment, he has nourished a deep suspicion of all cash except the kind that jingles; in fact, it is rarely that he will accept any other sort.

Give him the hard round silver and he is well-content. That is good money – money fit to buy things with. He knows it is, because it rattles in the pocket and it rings on the bar; but for him no greenbacks, if you please. So when this poor ignorant paymaster opened up his satchel and spread out his ones and his twos, his fives and his tens, his treasury certificates and his national bank notes, there was a riot.

Then the contractors just fired the whole outfit bodily; and they suspended operations, leaving the fills half-filled and the cuts half-dug until they could fetch new shifts of laborers from the North. They fetched them – a trainload of overalled Latins, and some of these were tall and swarthy men, and more were short, fair men; but all were capable of doing a full day’s work.

Speedily enough, the town lost its first curious interest in the newcomers. Indeed, there was about them nothing calculated to hold the public interest long. They played no guitars, wore no handkerchief headdresses, offered to kidnap no small children, and were in no respect a picturesque race of beings. They talked their own outlandish language, dined on their own mysterious messes, slept in their bunks in the long barracks the company knocked together for them in the hollow down by the Old Fort, hived their savings, dealt with their employers through a paid translator, and beautifully minded their own business, which was the putting through of the Boaz Ridge Extension. Sundays a few came clunking in their brogans to early mass in Father Minor’s church; the rest of the time they spent at the doing of their daily stint or in camp at their own peculiar devices.

Tony Palassi, who ran the biggest fruit stand in town, paid them one brief visit – and one only – and came away, spitting his disgust on the earth. It appeared that they were not his kind of people at all, these being but despised Sicilians and he by birth a haughty Roman, and by virtue of naturalization processes a stalwart American; but everybody knew already, without being told, that there was a difference, and a big difference. A blind man could see it.

Tony, now, was a good fellow – one with sporting blood in his veins. Tony was a member of the Elks and of the Knights of Columbus. He owned and he drove one of the smartest trotting horses in the county. He played a brisk game of poker. Once a month he sent a barrel of apples or a bunch of bananas or a box of oranges, as a freewill offering, to the children out at the Home for the Friendless – in short, Tony belonged. Nobody ever thought of calling Tony a Dago, and nobody ever had – more than once; but these other fellows, plainly, were Dagos and to be regarded as such. For upward of a month now their presence in the community had meant little or nothing to the community, one way or the other, until one of them so far forgot himself as to carve up Beaver Yancy.

The railroad made a big mistake when it hired Northern bosses to handle black natives; it made another when it continued to retain Beaver Yancy, of our town, in its employ after the Sicilians came, he being a person long of the arm and short of the temper. Even so, things might have gone forward to a conclusion without misadventure had it not been that on the day before the snow fell the official padrone of the force, who was likewise the official interpreter, went North on some private business of his own, leaving his countrymen without an intermediary during his absence. It came to pass, therefore, that on the December morning when this account properly begins, Beaver Yancy found himself in sole command of a battalion whose tongue he did not speak and whose ways he did not know.

At starting time he plowed his way through the drifts to the long plank shanty in the bottoms and threw open a door. Instead of being up and stirring, his charges lay in their bunks against the walls, all of them stretched out comfortably there, except a half dozen or so who brewed garlicky mixtures on the big stoves that stood at intervals in a row down the middle of the barracks. Employing the only language he knew, which was a profanely emphatic language, he ordered them to get up, get out and get to work. By shakes of the head, by words of smiling dissent and by gestures they made it plain to his understanding that for this one day at least they meant to do no labor in the open.

One more tolerant than Beaver Yancy, or perhaps one more skilled at translating signs, would have divined their reasons readily enough. They had come South expecting temperate weather. They did not like snow. They were not clad for exposure to snow. Their garments were thin and their shoes leaked. Therefore would they abide where they were until the snow had melted and the cold had moderated. Then they would work twice as hard to make up for this holiday.

The burly, big, overbearing man in the doorway was of a different frame of mind. In the absence of his superior officers and the padrone, his duty was to see that they pushed that job to a conclusion. He’d show ’em! He would make an example of one and the others would heed the lesson. He laid violent grasp on a little man who appeared to be a leader of opinion among his fellows and, with a big, mittened hand in the neckband of the other’s shirt, dragged him, sputtering and expostulating, across the threshold and, with hard kicks of a heavy foot, heavily booted, propelled him out into the open.

The little man fell face forward into the snow. He bounced up like a chunk of new rubber. He had been wounded most grievously in his honor, bruised most painfully and ignominiously elsewhere. He jumped for the man who had mishandled him, his knifeblade licking out like a snake’s tongue. He jabbed three times, hard and quick – then fled back indoors; and for a while, until help came in the guise of two children of a shanty-boater’s family on their way to the railroad yards to pick up bits of coal, Beaver Yancy lay in the snow where he had dropped, bleeding like a stuck pig. He was not exactly cut to ribbons. First accounts had been exaggerated as first accounts so frequently are. But he had two holes in his right lung and one in the right side of his neck, and it was strongly presumptive that he would never again kick a Sicilian day laborer – or, for that matter, anybody else.

Judge Priest, speaking dispassionately from the aloof heights of the judicial temperament, had said it would be carrying out an excellent and timely idea if the chief of police found the knife-using individual and confined him in a place that was safe and sound; which, on being apprised of the occurrence, was exactly what the chief of police undertook to do. Accompanied by two dependable members of his day shift, he very promptly set out to make an arrest and an investigation; but serious obstacles confronted him.

To begin with, he had not the faintest notion of the criminal’s identity or the criminal’s appearance. The man he wanted was one among two hundred; but which one was he? Beaver Yancy, having been treated in Doctor Lake’s office, was now at the city hospital in no condition to tell the name of his assailant even had he known it, or to describe him either, seeing that loss of blood, pain, shock and drugs had put him beyond the power of coherent speech. Nevertheless, the chief felt it a duty incumbent on him to lose no time in visiting what the Daily Evening News, with a touch of originality, called “the scene of the crime.” This he did.

Everything was quiet on the flatlands below the Old Fort when he got there, an hour after the stabbing. Midway between the bluff that marked the rim of the hollow and the fringe of willows along the river, stood the long plank barracks of the imported hands. Smoke rose from the stovepipes that broke the expanse of its snow-covered roof; about one door was a maze of tracks and crosstracks; at a certain place, which was, say, seventy-five feet from the door, the snow was wallowed and flurried as though a heavy oxhide had been dragged across its surface; and right there a dark spot showed reddish brown against the white background.

However, no figures moved and no faces showed at the small windows as the chief and his men, having floundered down the hill, cautiously approached the silent building; and when he knocked on the door with the end of his hickory walking stick, and knocked and knocked again, meantime demanding admittance in the name of the law, no one answered his knock or his hail. Losing patience, he put his shoulder to the fastened door and, with a heave, broke it away from its hinges and its hasp, so that it fell inward.

Through the opening he took a look, then felt in his overcoat pocket for his gun, making ready to check a rush with revolver shots if needs be; but there was no rush. Within the place two hundred frightened, desperate men silently confronted him. Some who had pistols were wearing them now in plain sight. Others had knives and had produced them. All had picks and shovels – dangerous enough weapons at close quarters in the hands of men skilled in the use of them.

Had the big-hatted chief been wise in the ways of these men, he might peacefully have attained his object by opening his topcoat and showing his blue uniform, his brass buttons and his gold star; but naturally he did not think of that, and as he stood there before them, demanding of them, in a language they did not know, to surrender the guilty one, he was ulstered, like any civilian, from his throat to the tops of his rubber boots.

In him the foreigners, bewildered by the sudden turn in events, saw only a menacing enemy coming, with no outward show of authority about him, to threaten them. They went right on at their task of barricading the windows with strips of planking torn from their bunks. They had food and they had fuel, and they had arms. They would stand a siege, and if they were attacked they would fight back. In all they did, in all their movements, in their steadfast stare, he read their intent plainly enough.

Gabriel Henley was no coward, else he would not have been serving his second term as our chief of police; but likewise and furthermore he was no fool. He remembered just then that the town line ended at the bluff behind him. Technically, at least, the assault on Beaver Yancy had been committed outside his jurisdiction; constructively this job was not a job for the city, but for the county officials. He backed away, and as he retired sundry strong brown hands replaced the broken door and began making it fast with props and improvised bars. The chief left his two men behind to keep watch – an entirely unnecessary precaution, since none of the beleaguered two hundred, as it turned out, had the slightest intention of quitting his present shelter; and he hurried back uptown, pondering the situation as he went.

On his way to the sheriff’s office he stopped by Palassi’s fruit store. As the only man in town who could deal with Sicilians in their own tongue, Tony might help out tremendously; but Tony wasn’t in. Mrs. Palassi, née Callahan, regretted to inform him that Tony had departed for Memphis on the early train to see about certain delayed Christmas shipments of oranges and bananas. To the youth of our town, oranges and bananas were almost as necessary as firecrackers in the proper celebration of the Christmas. And when he got to the courthouse the chief found the sheriff was not in town either.

He had started at daylight for Hopkinsburg to deliver an insane woman at the state asylum there; one of his deputies had gone with him. There was a second deputy, to be sure; but he was an elderly man and a chronic rheumatic, who mainly handled the clerical affairs of the office – he never had tried to arrest anyone in his whole life, and he expressed doubt that the present opportunity was auspicious for an opening experiment in that direction.

Under the circumstances, with the padrone away, with Tony Palassi away, with the sheriff away, and with the refuge of the culprit under close watch, Chief of Police Henley decided just to sit down and wait – wait for developments; wait for guidance; perhaps wait for popular sentiment to crystallize and, in process of its crystallization, give him a hint as to the steps proper to be taken next. So he sat him down at his roll-top desk in the old City Hall, with his feet on the stove, and he waited.

Had our efficient chief divined the trend of opinion as it was to be expressed during the day by divers persons in divers parts of the town, it is possible he might have done something, though just what that something might have been, I for one confess I do not know – and I do not think the chief knew either. There was a passion of anger abroad. This anger was to rise and spread when word circulated – as it very shortly did – that those other Dagos were harboring and protecting the particular Dago who had done the cutting.

Such being the case, did not that make them outlaws too – accessories after the fact, co-malefactors? The question was asked a good many times in a good many places and generally the answer was the same. And how about letting these murderous, dirk-toting pauper laborers come pouring down from the slums of the great cities to take the bread right out of the mouths of poor, hard-working darkies? With the sudden hostility to the white stranger rose an equally sudden sympathy for the lot of the black neighbor whose place he had usurped. Besides, who ever saw one of the blamed Dagos spending a cent at a grocery, or a notions store, or a saloon – or anywhere? Money earned in the community ought to be spent in the community. What did the railroad mean by it anyway?

Toward the middle of the afternoon somebody told somebody else – who, in turn, told everybody he met – that poor old Beaver was sinking fast; the surgeons agreed that he could not live the night out. Despite the rutted snow underfoot and the chill temperature, now rapidly dropping again to the freezing point and below it, knots of men began to gather on the streets discussing one topic – and one only.

Standing at the Richland House corner and addressing an entirely congenial gathering of fifteen or so who had just emerged from the Richland House bar, wiping their mouths and their moustaches, a self-appointed spokesman ventured the suggestion that it had been a long time between lynchings. Maybe if people just turned in and mobbed a few of these bloodthirsty Dagos, it would give the rest of them a little respect for law and order? What if they didn’t get the one that did the cutting? They could get a few of his friends, couldn’t they – and chase all the others out of the country, and out of the state? Well, then, what more could a fair-minded citizen ask? And if the police force could not or would not do its duty in the premises, was it not up to the people themselves to act? – or words to that general effect. In the act of going back inside for another round of drinks the audience agreed with the orator unanimously, and invited him to join them; which he did.

Serenely unaware of these things, Judge Priest spent his day at Soule’s Drug Store, beat Squire Roundtree at checkers, went trudging home at dusk for supper and, when supper was eaten, came trudging back downtown again, still happily ignorant of the feeling that was in the icy air. Eight o’clock found him in the seat of honor on the platform at Kamleiter’s Hall, presiding over the regular semi-monthly meeting of Gideon K. Irons Camp.

Considering weather conditions, the judge, as commandant, felt a throb of pride at the size of the attendance. Twenty-two elderly gentlemen answered to their names when the adjutant, old Professor Reese, of the graded school, called the roll. Two or three more straggled in, bundled up out of all their proper proportions, in time to take part in the subsequent discussion of new business. Under that elastic heading the Camp agreed to cooperate with the Daughters in a campaign to raise funds for a monument to the memory of General Meriwether Grider, dead these many years; voted fifty dollars out of the Camp treasury for the relief of a dead comrade’s widow; and listened to a reminiscence of the retreat from Atlanta by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby.

One overhearing might have gathered from the tenor of the sergeant’s remarks that, if King’s Hell Hounds had been given but the proper support in that campaign, the story of Sherman’s March to the Sea would have a vastly different ending from the one set forth in the schoolbooks and the histories. In conclusion, and by way of a diversion from the main topic, Sergeant Bagby was launching on a circumstantial recital of a certain never-to-be-forgotten passage of words between General Buckner and General Breckenridge on a certain momentous and historic occasion, when an interruption occurred, causing him to break off in the middle of his opening sentence.

Old Press Harper, from three miles out in the county, was sitting well back toward the rear of the little hall. It is possible that his attention wandered from the subject in hand. He chanced to glance over his shoulder and, through the frosted panes of a back window, he caught a suffused reflection. Instantly he was on his feet.

“Hey, boys!” called out Mr. Harper. “Somethin’s on fire – looky yander!”

He ran to the window. With his sleeve he rubbed a patch clear on the sweated pane and peered out. Others followed him. Sashes were hoist, and through each of the three window openings in the back wall protruded a cluster of heads – heads that were pinky-bald, grey-grizzled or cottony-white, as the case might be.

“You bet there’s a fire, and a good hot one! See them blazes shootin’ up.”

“Must be down by the Old Fort. D’ye reckin it could be the old plow factory burnin’ up?”

“Couldn’t be that far away, could it, Bony? Looks closer’n that to me.”

“Fires always seem closer than what they really are – that’s been my experience.”

“Listen, boys, for the engines – they ought to be startin’ now in a minute.”

They listened; but, though the fire bell in the City Hall tower, two blocks away, was sounding in measured beats, no clatter of hoofs, no clamor of fast-turning wheels, rose in the street below or in any neighboring street. Only the red flare widened across the northern horizon, deepening and brightening, and shot through in its center with lacings of flame.

“That’s funny! I don’t hear ’em. Well, anyway, I’m a-goin’.”

“Me, too, Press.”

The windows were abandoned. There was a rush for the corner where overcoats had been swung on hooks and overshoes had been kicked back against the baseboard. Various elderly gentlemen began adjusting earmuffs and mufflers, and spearing with their arms at elusive sleeve openings. The meeting stood adjourned without having been adjourned.

“Coming, Billy?” inquired Mr. Nap. B. Crump in the act of hastily winding two yards of red knitted worsted about his throat.

“No; I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. “It’s a mighty bitter night fur folks to be driv’ out of their homes in this weather. I’m sorry fur ’em, whoever they are – but I reckin I couldn’t do no good ef I went. You young fellers jest go ahead without me – I’m sort of gittin’ along too fur in years to be runnin’ to other people’s fires. I’ve got one of my own to go to – out there in my old settin’ room on Clay Street.”

He rose slowly from his chair and stepped round from behind the table, then halted, canting his head to one side.

“Listen, boys! Ain’t that somebody runnin’ up the steps?”

It surely was. There was a thud of booted feet on the creaking boards. Somebody was coming three stairs at a jump. The door flew open and Circuit Clerk Elisha Milam staggered in, gasping for breath. They assailed him with questions.

“Hey, Lisha, where’s the fire?”

“It’s that construction camp down below town burning up,” he answered between pants. “How did it get started?”

“It didn’t get started – somebody started it. Gentlemen, there’s trouble beginning down yonder. Where’s Judge Priest?... Oh, yes, there he is!”

He made for Judge Priest where the judge still stood on the little platform, and all the rest trailed behind him, scrouging up to form a close circle about those two, with hands stirruped behind faulty ears and necks craned forward to hear what Mr. Milam had to say. His story wasn’t long, the blurting way he told it, but it carried an abundant thrill. Acting apparently in concert with others, divers unknown persons, creeping up behind the barracks of the construction crew, had fired the building and fled safely away without being detected by its dwellers or by the half-frozen watchers of the police force on the hillock above. At least that was the presumption in Mr. Milam’s mind, based on what he had just heard.

The fire, spreading fast, had driven the Sicilians forth, and they were now massed under the bluff with their weapons. The police force – eight men, all told, constituted the night shift – hesitated to act, inasmuch as the site of the burning camp lay fifty yards over the town line, outside of town limits. The fire department was helpless. Notice had been served at both the engine houses, in the first moment of the alarm, that if the firemen unreeled so much as a single foot of hose it would be cut with knives – a vain threat, since all the water plugs were frozen up hard and fast anyhow. The sheriff and his only able-bodied deputy were in Hopkinsburg, eighty miles away; and an armed mob of hundreds was reported as being on the way from its rendezvous in the abandoned plow factory to attack the foreigners.

Mr. Milam, essentially a man of peace, had learned these things at first hand, or at second, and had hastened hotfoot to Kamleiter’s Hall for the one man to whom, in times of emergency, he always looked – his circuit-court judge. He didn’t know what Judge Priest could do or would do in the face of a situation so grave; but at least he had done his duty – he had borne the word. In a dozen hasty gulping sentences he told his tale and finished it; and then, by way of final punctuation, a chorus of exclamatory sounds – whistled, grunted and wheezed – rose from his auditors.

As for Judge Priest, he, for a space of seconds after Mr. Milam had concluded, said nothing at all. The rapping of his knuckled fist on the tabletop alongside him broke in sharply on the clamor. They faced him then and he faced them; and it is possible that, even in the excitement of the time, some among them marked how his plump jaws had socketed themselves into a hard, square-mortise shape, and how his tuft of white chin beard bristled out at them, and how his old blue eyes blazed into their eyes. And then Judge Priest made a speech to them – a short, quick speech, but the best speech, so his audience afterward agreed, that ever they heard him make.

“Boys,” he cried, lifting his high, shrill voice yet higher and yet shriller, “I’m about to put a motion to you and I want a vote on it purty dam’ quick! They’ve been sayin’ in this town that us old soldiers was gittin’ too old to take an active hand in the affairs of this community any longer; and at the last election, ez you all know, they tried fur to prove it by retirin’ most of the veterans that offered themselves ez candidates fur reëlection back to private life.

“I ain’t sayin’ they wasn’t partly right neither; fur here we’ve been sittin’ this night, like a passel of old moo-cows, chewin’ the cud of things that happened forty-odd year’ ago, and never suspicionin’ nothin’ of what was goin’ on, whilst all round us men, carried away by passion and race prejudice, have been plottin’ to break the laws and shed blood and bring an everlastin’ disgrace on the reppitation fur peace and good order of this fair little city of ourn. But maybe it ain’t too late yit fur us to do our duty ez citizens and ez veterans. Oncet on a time – a mighty long while ago – we turned out to pertect our people ag’inst an armed invader. Let’s show ’em we ain’t too old or too feeble to turn out oncet more to pertect them ag’inst themselves.”

He reared back, and visibly, before their eyes, his short fat figure seemed to lengthen by cubits.

“I move that Gideon K. Irons Camp of United Confederate Veterans, here assembled, march in a body right now to save – ef we can – these poor Eyetalians who are strangers in a strange and a hosstil land from bein’ mistreated, and to save – ef we can – our misguided fellow townsmen from sufferin’ the consequences of their own folly and their own foolishness. Do I hear a second to that motion?”

Did he hear a second to his motion? He heard twenty-five seconds to it, all heaved at him together, with all the blaring strength of twenty-five pairs of elderly lungs. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby forgot parliamentary usage.

“Will we go?” whooped Sergeant Bagby, waving his pudgy arms aloft so that his mittened hands described whizzing red circles in the air. “You betcher sweet life we’ll go! We’ll go through hell and high water – with’ you as our commandin’ officer, Billy Priest.”

“You betcher! That’s the ticket!” A whoop of approval went up.

“Well, then, ef that’s the way you feel about it – come on!” their leader bade them; and they rushed for the door, sweeping the circuit clerk aside. “No; wait jest a minute!” He singled out the jostled Mr. Milam. “Lishy, you’ve got the youngest, spriest legs of anybody here. Run on ahead – won’t you? – and find Father Minor. He’ll be at the priest house back of his church. Tell him to jine up with us as quick as ever the Lord’ll let him. We’ll head down Harrison Street.”

Mr. Milam vanished. With a wave of his arm, the judge comprehended those who remained.

“Nearly everybody here served one time or another under old Nathan Bedford Forrest. The rest would ’a’ liked to. I reckin this here is goin’ to be the last raid and the last charge that Forrest’s Cavalry, mounted or dismounted, ever will make! Let’s do it regular – open up that there wardrobe-chist yonder, some of you, and git what’s inside!”

Hurried old hands fumbled at the catches of a weather-beaten oaken cabinet on the platform and plucked forth the treasured possessions of the Camp – the dented bugle; the drum; the slender, shiny, little fife; the silken flag, on its short polished staff.

“Fall in – by twos!” commanded Judge Priest. “Forward – march!”

Half a minute later the gasjets that lighted Kamleiter’s Hall lighted only emptiness – an empty chest in a corner; empty chairs, some overturned on their sides, some upright on their legs; an empty hall doorway opening on an empty patch of darkness; and one of Judge Priest’s flannel-lined galoshes, gaping emptily where it had been forgotten.

From the street below rose a measured thud of feet on the hard-packed snow. Forrest’s Cavalry was on the march!

With bent backs straightening to the call of a high, strong impulse; with gimpy, gnarled legs rising and falling in brisk unison; with heads held high and chests puffed out; with their leader in front of them and their flag going before them – Forrest’s Cavalry went forward. Once and once only the double line stopped as it traversed the town, lying snug and for the most part still under its blanketing, of snow.

As the little column of old men swung round the first corner below Kamleiter’s Hall, the lights coming through the windows of Tony Palassi’s fruit shop made bright yellow patches on the white path they trod.

“Halt!” ordered Judge Priest suddenly; and he quit his place in the lead and made for the doorway.

“If you’re looking for Tony to go along and translate you’re wasting time, Judge,” sang out Mr. Crump. “He’s out-of town.”

“Is he?” said Judge Priest. “Well, that’s too bad!”

As though to make sure, he peered in through the glassed upper half of the fruit-shop door. Within might be seen Mrs. Delia Callahan Palassi, wife of the proprietor, putting the place to rights before locking it up for the night; and at her skirts tagged Master Antonio Wolfe Tone Palassi, aged seven, only son and sole heir of the same, a round-bellied, red-cheeked little Italian-Irish-American. The judge put his hand on the latch and jiggled it.

“I tell you Tony’s not there,” repeated Mr. Crump impatiently.

If the judge heard him he paid no heed. He went through that door, leaving his command outside, as one might go who knew exactly what he was about. Little Tony Wolfe Tone recognized an old friend and came, gurgling a welcome, to greet him. Most of the children in town knew Judge Priest intimately, but little Tony Wolfe Tone was a particular favorite of his; and by the same token he was a particular favorite of Tony’s.

Whatever Judge Priest said to Mrs. Palassi didn’t take long for the saying of it; yet it must have been an argument powerfully persuading and powerfully potent. It is possible – mind you, I don’t make the positive assertion, but it is possible – he reminded her that the blood of a race of fighting kings ran in her veins; for in less than no time at all, when Judge Priest reissued from the fruit shop, there rode pack-fashion on his back a little figure so well bundled up against the cold that only a pair of big brown Italian eyes and a small, tiptilted Irish nose showed themselves, to prove that Judge Priest’s burden was not a woolly Teddy-bear, but a veritable small boy. No; I’m wrong there. One other thing proved it – a woman standing in the doorway, wringing her apron in her hands, her face ablaze with mother love and mother pride and mother fear, watching the hurrying procession as it moved down the wintry street straight into the red glare on ahead.

•     •     •     •     •

The flimsy framework of resiny pine burned fast, considering that much snow had lain on the roof and much snow had melted and run down the sides all day, to freeze again with the coming of nighttime. One end of the barracks had fallen into a muddle of black-charred ruination. The fire ate its way along steadily, purring and crackling and spitting as its red teeth bit into the wetted boards. Above, the whole sky was aglare with its wavering red reflections. The outlines of the bowl-shaped flat stood forth distinctly revealed in the glow of that great wooden brazier, and the snow that covered the earth was channelled across with red streaks, like spilt blood.

Here, against the nearermost bank, the foreigners were clumped in a tight, compact black huddle, all scared, but not so badly scared that they would not fight. Yonder, across the snow, through the gap where a side street debouched at a gentle slope into the hollow, the mob advanced – men and half-grown boys – to the number of perhaps four hundred, coming to get the man who had stabbed Beaver Yancy and string him up on the spot – and maybe to get a few of his friends and string them up as an added warning to all Dagos. They came on and came on until a space of not more than seventy-five yards separated the mob and the mob’s prospective victims. From the advancing mass a growling of many voices rose. Rampant, unloosed mischief was in the sound.

Somebody who was drunk yelled out shrill profanity and then laughed a maudlin laugh. The group against the bank kept silent. Theirs was the silence of a grim and desperate resolution. Their only shelter had been fired over their heads; they were beleaguered and ringed about with enemies; they had nowhere to run for safety, even had they been minded to run. So they would fight. They made ready with their weapons of defense – such weapons as they had.

A man who appeared to hold some manner of leadership over the rest advanced a step from the front row of them. In his hand he held an old-fashioned cap-and-ball pistol at full cock. He raised his right arm and sighted along the levelled barrel at a spot midway between him and the oncoming crowd. Plainly he meant to fire when the first of his foes crossed an imaginary line. He squinted up his eye, taking a careful aim; and he let his trigger finger slip gently inside the trigger guard – but he never fired.

On top of the hill, almost above his head, a bugle blared out. A fife and a drum cut in, playing something jiggy and brisk; and over the crest and down into the flat, two by two, marched a little column of old men, following after a small silken flag which flicked and whispered in the wind, and led by a short, round-bodied commander, who held by the hand a little briskly trotting figure of a child. Tony Wolfe Tone had grown too heavy for the judge to carry him all the way.

Out across the narrow space between the closing-in mob and the closed-in foreigners the marchers passed, their feet sinking ankle-deep into the crusted snow. Their leader gave a command; the music broke off and they spread out in single file, taking station, five feet apart from one another, so that between the two hostile groups a living hedge was interposed. And so they stood, with their hands down at their sides, some facing to the west, where the Italians were herded together, some facing toward the east, where the would-be lynchers, stricken with a great amazement, had come to a dead stand.

Judge Priest, still holding little Tony Wolfe Tone’s small mittened hand fast in his, spoke up, addressing the mob. His familiar figure was outlined against the burning barracks beyond him and behind him. His familiar whiny voice he lifted to so high a pitch that every man and boy there heard him.

“Feller citizens,” he stated, “this is part of Forrest’s Cavalry you see here. We done soldierin’ oncet and we’ve turned soldiers ag’in; but we ain’t armed – none of us. We’ve only got our bare hands. Ef you come on we can’t stop you with guns; but we ain’t agoin’ to budge, and ef you start shootin’ you’ll shorely git some of us. So ez a personal favor to me and these other gentlemen, I’d like to ast you jest to stand still where you are and not to shoot till after you see what we’re fixin’ to try to do. That’s agreeable to you-all, ain’t it? You’ve got the whole night ahead of you – there’s no hurry, is there, boys?”

He did not wait for any answer from anyone. By name he knew a good half of them; by sight he knew the other half. And they all knew him; and they knew Tony Palassi’s boy; and they knew Father Minor, who stood at his right hand; and they knew the lame blacksmith and the little bench-legged Jewish merchant, and the rich banker and the poor carpenter, and the leading wholesaler, and all the other old men who stretched away from the judge in an uneven line, like fence posts for a fence that had not been built. They would not shoot yet; and, as though fully convinced in his own mind they would bide where they were until he was done, and relying completely on them to keep their unspoken promise, Judge Priest half-turned his back on the members of the mob and bent over little Tony.

“Little feller,” he said, “you ain’t skeered, are you?”

Tony looked up at his friend and shook his head stoutly. Tony was not scared. It was as good as play to Tony – all this was.

“That’s my sandy little pardner,” said Judge Priest; and he put his hands under Tony’s arms and heaved the child back up on his shoulders, and swung himself about so that he and Tony faced the huddle of silent figures in the shadow of the bank.

“You see all them men yonder, don’t you, boy?” he prompted. “Well, now you speak up ez loud ez you can, and you tell ’em whut I’ve been tellin’ you to say all the way down the street ever since we left your mammy. You tell ’em I’m the big judge of the big court. Tell ’em there’s one man among ’em who must come on and go with me. He’ll know and they’ll know which man I mean. Tell ’em that man ain’t goin’ to be hurt ef he comes now. Tell ’em that they ain’t none of ’em goin’ to be hurt ef they all do what I say. Tell ’em Father Minor is here to show ’em to a safe, warm place where they kin spend the night. Kin you remember all that, sonny-boy? Then tell ’em in Eyetalian – quick and loud.”

And Tony Wolfe Tone told them. Unmindful of the hundreds of eyes that were upon him, even forgetting for a minute to watch the fire – Tony opened wide his small mouth and in the tongue of his father’s people, richened perhaps by the sweet brogue of his mother’s land, and spiced here and there with a word or two of savory good American slang, he gave the message a piping utterance.

They hearkened and they understood. This baby, this bambino, speaking to them in a polyglot tongue they, nevertheless, could make out – surely he did not lie to them! And the priest of their own faith, standing in the snow close by the child, would not betray them. They knew better than that. Perhaps to them the flag, the drum, the fife, the bugle, the faint semblance of military formation maintained by these volunteer rescuers who had appeared so opportunely, promising succor and security and a habitation for the night – perhaps all this symbolized to them organized authority and organized protection, just as Judge Priest, in a flash of inspiration back in Kamleiter’s Hall, had guessed that it might.

Their leader, the man who held the pistol, advanced a pace or two and called out something; and when Tony Wolfe, from his perch on the old judge’s shoulders, had answered back, the man, as though satisfied, turned and might be seen busily confabbing with certain of his mates who clustered about him, gesticulating.

“Whut did he say, boy?” asked Judge Priest, craning his neck to look up.

“He say, Mister Judge, they wants to talk it over,” replied Tony, craning his neck to look down.

“And whut did you say to him then?”

“I say to him: ‘Go to it, kiddo!’”

In the sheltering crotch of little Tony’s two plump bestraddling legs, which encircled his neck, the old judge chuckled to himself. A wave of laughter ran through the ranks of the halted mob – Tony’s voice had carried so far as that, and Tony’s mode of speech apparently had met with favor. Mob psychology, according to some students, is hard to fathom; according to others, easy.

From the midst of the knot of Sicilians a man stepped forth – not the tall man with the gun, but a little stumpy man who moved with a limp. Alone, he walked through the crispened snow until he came up to where the veterans stood, waiting and watching. The mob, all intently quiet once more, waited and watched too.

With a touch of the dramatic instinct that belongs to his race, he flung down a dirk knife at Judge Priest’s feet and held out both his hands in token of surrender. To the men who came there to take his life he gave no heed – not so much as a sidewise glance over his shoulder did he give them. He looked into the judge’s face and into the face of little Tony, and into the earnest face of the old priest alongside these two.

“Boys” – the judge lifted Tony down and, with a gesture, was invoking the attention of his townsmen – “boys, here’s the man who did the knifin’ this mornin’, givin’ himself up to my pertection – and yours. He’s goin’ along with me now to the county jail, to be locked up ez a prisoner. I’ve passed my word and the word of this whole town that he shan’t be teched nor molested whilst he’s on his way there, nor after he gits there. I know there ain’t a single one of you but stands ready to help me keep that promise. I’m right, ain’t I, boys?”

“Oh, hell, judge – you win!” sang out a member of the mob, afterward identified as one of Beaver Yancy’s close friends, in a humorously creditable imitation of the judge’s own earnest whine. And at that everybody laughed again and somebody started a cheer.

“I thought so,” replied the judge. “And now, boys, I’ve got an idea. I reckin, after trampin’ all the way down here in the snow, none of us want to tramp back home ag’in without doin’ somethin’ – we don’t feel like ez ef we want to waste the whole evenin’, do we? See that shack burnin’ down? Well, it’s railroad property; and we don’t want the railroad to suffer. Let’s put her out – let’s put her out with snowballs!” Illustrating his suggestion, he stooped, scooped up a double handful of snow, squeezed it into a pellet and awkwardly tossed it in the general direction of the blazing barracks. It flew wide of the mark and fell short of it; but his intention was good, that being conceded. Whooping joyously, four hundred men and half-grown boys, or thereabouts such a number, pouched their weapons and dug into the drifted whiteness.

“Hold on a minute – we’ll do it to soldier music!” shouted the judge, and he gave a signal. The drum beat then; and old Mr. Harrison Treese buried the fife in his white whiskers and ripped loose on the air the first bars of “Yankee Doodle.” The judge molded another snowball for himself.

“All set? Then, ready! – aim! – fire!”

Approximately two hundred snowballs battered and splashed the flaming red target. A great sizzling sound rose.

Just after this first volley the only gun-powder shot of the evening was fired. It came out afterward that as a man named Ike Bowers stooped over to gather up some snow his pistol, which he had forgotten to uncock, slipped out of his pocket and fell on a broken bit of planking. There was a darting needle of fire and a smart crack. The Sicilians wavered for a minute, swaying back and forth, then steadied themselves as Father Minor stepped in among them with his arms uplifted; but Sergeant Jimmy Bagby put his hand to his head in a puzzled sort of way, spun round, and laid himself down full length in the snow.

•     •     •     •     •

It was nearly midnight. The half-burned hull of the barracks in the deserted bottom below the Old Fort still smoked a little, but it no longer blazed. Its late occupants – all save one – slept in the P. A. & O. V. roundhouse, half a mile away, under police and clerical protection; this one was in a cell in the county jail, safe and sound, and it is probable that he slept also. That linguistic prodigy, Master Tony Wolfe Tone Palassi, being excessively a-wearied, snored in soft, little-boy snores at his mother’s side; and over him she cried tears of pride and visited soft kisses on his flushed, upturned face. To the family of the Palassis much honor had accrued – not forgetting the Callahans. At eleven o’clock the local correspondent of the Courier-Journal and other city papers had called up to know where he might get copies of her son’s latest photograph for widespread publication abroad.

The rest of the town, generally speaking, was at this late hour of midnight, also abed; but in the windows of Doctor Lake’s office, on the second floor of the Planters’ Bank building, lights burned, and on the leather couch in Doctor Lake’s inner room a pudgy figure, which breathed heavily, was stretched at full length, its hands passively flat on its breast, its head done up in many windings of cotton batting and surgical bandages. Above this figure stood old Doctor Lake, holding in the open palm of his left hand a small, black, flattened object. The door leading to the outer office opened a foot and the woe-begone face and dripping eyes of Judge Priest appeared through the slit.

“Get out!” snapped Doctor Lake without turning his head.

“Lew, it’s me!” said Judge Priest in the whisper that any civilized being other than a physician or a trained nurse instinctively assumes in the presence of a certain dread visitation. “I jest natchelly couldn’t wait no longer – not another minute! I wouldn’t ’a’ traded one hair off of Jimmy Bagby’s old grey head fur all the Beaver Yancys that ever was whelped. Lew, is there a chance?”

“Billy Priest,” said Doctor Lake severely, “the main trouble with you is that you’re so liable to go off half-cocked. Beaver Yancy’s not going to die – you couldn’t kill him with an ax. I don’t know how that story got round tonight. And Jim Bagby’s all right too, except he’s going to have one whale of a headache tomorrow. The bullet glanced round his skull and stopped under the scalp. Here ’tis – I just got it out.... Oh, Lord! Now look what you’ve done, bursting in here and blubbering all around the place!”

The swathed form on the couch sat up and cocked an eye out from beneath a low-drawn fold of cheesecloth.

“Is that you, Judge?” demanded Sergeant Bagby in his usual voice and in almost his usual manner.

“Yes, Jimmy; it’s me.”

Judge Priest projected himself across the room toward his friend. He didn’t run; he didn’t jump; he didn’t waddle – he projected himself.

“Yes, Jimmy, it’s me.”

“Are any of the other boys out there in the other room?”

“Yes, Jimmy; they’re all out there, waitin’.”

“Well, quit snifflin’ and call ’em right in!” said Sergeant Bagby crisply. “I’ve been tryin’ fur years to git somebody to set still long enough fur me to tell ’em that there story about Gin’ral John C. Breckenridge and Gin’ral Simon Bolivar Buckner; and it seems like somethin’ always comes up to interrupt me. This looks like my chance to finish it, fur oncet. Call them boys all in!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 13 Nov 1915
Old Judge Priest (1916)

Double-Barrelled Justice

~

A long and limber man leaned against a doorjamb of the Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant, inhaling the mild clear air of the autumnal day and, with the air of a man who amply is satisfied by the aspect of things, contemplating creation at large as it revealed itself along Franklin Street. In such posture he suggested more than anything else a pair of callipers endowed with reason. For this, our disesteemed fellow citizen of the good old days which are gone, was probably the shortest-waisted man in the known world. In my time I have seen other men who might be deemed to be excessively short waisted, but never one to equal in this unique regard Old King Highpockets. A short span less of torso, and a dime museum would have claimed him, sure.

You would think me a gross exaggerator did I attempt to tell you how high up his legs forked; suffice it to say that, as to his suspenders, they crossed the spine just below his back collar button. Wherefore, although born a Magee and baptized an Elmer, it was inevitable in this community that from the days of his youth onward he should have been called what they did call him. To his six feet five and a half inches of lank structural design he owed the more descriptive part of his customary title. The rest of it – the regal-sounding part of it – had been bestowed upon him in his ripened maturity after he achieved for himself local dominance in an unhallowed but a lucrative calling.

Sitting down the above-named seemed a person of no more than ordinary height, this being by reason of the architectural peculiarities just referred to. But standing up, as at the present moment, he reared head and gander neck above the run of humanity. From this personal eminence he now looked about him and below him as he took the gun. There was not a cloud in the general sky; none in his private and individual sky either. He had done well the night before and likewise the night before that; he expected to do as well or better the coming night. Upstairs over the Blue Jug, King Highpockets took in gambling – both plain and fancy gambling.

There passed upon the opposite side of the street one Beck Giltner. With him the tall man in the doorway exchanged a distant and formal greeting expressed in short nods. Between these two no great amount of friendliness was lost. Professionally speaking they were opponents. Beck Giltner was by way of being in the card and dicing line himself, but he was known as a square gambler, meaning by that, to most of mankind he presented a plane surface of ostensible honesty and fair dealing, whereas within an initiated circle, rumor had it that his rival of the Blue Jug was so crooked he threw a shadow like a brace and bit. Beck Giltner made it a rule of business to strip only those who could afford to lose their pecuniary peltries. Minors, drunkards, half-wits and chronic losers were barred from his tables. But all was fish – I use the word advisedly – all was fish that came to the net of Highpockets.

Beck Giltner passed upon his business. So did other and more reputable members of society. A short straggling procession of gentlemen went by, all headed westward, and each followed at a suitable interval by his negro “boy,” who might be anywhere between seventeen and seventy years of age. An hour or two later these travelers would return, bound for their offices downtown. Going back they would mainly travel in pairs, and their trailing black servitors would be burdened, front and back, with “samples” – sheafs of tobacco bound together and sealed with blobs of red sealing wax and tagged. For this was in the time before the Trust and the Night Riders had between them disrupted the trade down in the historic Black Patch, and the mode of marketing the weed by loose leaf was a thing as yet undreamed of. They would be prizing on the breaks in Key & Buckner’s long warehouse pretty soon. The official auctioneer had already reported himself, and to the ear for blocks round came distantly a sharp rifle-fire clatter as the warehouse hands knocked the hoops off the big hogsheads and the freed staves rattled down in windrows upon the uneven floor.

A locomotive whistled at the crossing two squares up the street, and the King smiled a little smile and rasped a lean and avaricious chin with a fabulously bony hand. He opined that locomotive would be drawing the monthly pay car which was due. The coming of the pay car meant many sportive railroad men – shopmen, yardmen, trainmen – abroad that evening with the good new money burning holes in the linings of their pockets.

Close by him, just behind him, a voice spoke his name – his proper name which he seldom heard – and the sound of it rubbed the smile off his face and turned it on the instant into a grim, long war-mask of a face.

“Mister Magee – Elmer – just a minute, please!”

Without shifting his body he turned his head and over the peak of one shoulder he regarded her dourly. She was a small woman and she was verging on middle age, and she was an exceedingly shabby little woman. Whatever of comeliness she might ever have had was now and forever gone from her. Hard years and the strain of them had ground the color in and rubbed the plumpness out of her face, leaving in payment therefor deep lines and a loose skin-sac under the chin and hollows in the cheeks. The shapeless, sleazy black garments that she wore effectually concealed any remnant of grace that might yet abide in her body. Only her eyes testified she had ever been anything except a forlorn and drooping slattern. They were big bright black eyes.

This briefly was the aspect of the woman who stood alongside him, speaking his name. She had come up so quietly that he never heard her. But then her shoes were old and worn and had lasted long past the age when shoes will squeak.

He made no move to raise his hat. Slantwise across the high ridge of his twisted shoulder he looked at her long and contemptuously.

“Well,” he said at length, “back ag’in, huh? Well, whut is it now, huh?”

She put up a little work-gnarled hand to a tight skew of brown hair streaked thickly with grey. In the gesture was something essentially feminine – something pathetic too.

“I reckon you know already what it is, Elmer,” she said. “It’s about my boy – it’s about Eddie.”

“I told you before and I tell you ag’in I ain’t your boy’s guardeen,” he answered her. “How comes you keep on pesterin’ me – I ain’t got that boy of yourn?”

“Yes, you have got him,” she said, her voice shaking and threatening to break. “You’ve got him body and soul. And I want him – me, his mother. I want you to give him back to me.”

His gaze lifted until he considered empty space a foot above her head. Slowly he reached an angular arm back under his right shoulder blade and fished about there until he had extracted from a hip pocket a long, black rectangle of navy chewing tobacco that was like a shingle newly dipped in creosote. It was a virgin plug – he bought a fresh one every morning and by night would make a ragged remnant of it. With the deliberation of a man who has plenty of time to spare, he set his stained front teeth in a corner of it and gnawed off a big scallop of the rank stuff. His tongue herded it back into his jaw, where it made a lump. He put the plug away. She stood silently through this, kneading her hands together, a most humble suppliant awaiting this monarch’s pleasure.

“You told me all that there foolishness the other time,” he said. “Ain’t you got no new song to sing this time? Ef you have I’ll listen, mebbe. Ef you ain’t I’ll tell you good-by.”

“Elmer,” she said, “what kind of a man are you? Haven’t you got any compassions at all? Why, Elmer, your pa and my pa were soldiers together in the same regiment. You and me were raised together right here in this town. We went to the same schoolhouse together as children – don’t you remember? You weren’t a mean boy then. Why, I used to think you was right good-hearted. For the sake of those old days won’t you do something about Eddie? It’s wrong and it’s sinful – what you’re doing to him and the rest of the young boys in this town.”

“Ef you think that why come to me?” he demanded. “Why not go to the police with your troubles?” He split his lips back, and a double row of discolored snags that projected from the gums like little chisels showed between them.

“And have ’em laugh in my face, same as you’re doing now? Have ’em tell me to go and get the evidence? Oh, I know you’re safe enough there. I reckon you know who your friends are. You shut up when the Grand Jury meets; and once in a while when things get hot for you, like they did when that Law and Order League was so busy, you close up your place; and once in a while you go up to court and pay a fine and then you keep right on. But it’s not you that’s paying the fine – I know that mighty good and well. The money to pay it comes out of the pockets of poor women in this town – wives and mothers and sisters.

“Oh, there’s others besides me that are suffering this minute. There’s that poor, little, broken-hearted Mrs. Shetler, out there on Wheelis Street – the one whose husband had to run away because he fell short in his accounts with the brickyard. And there’s that poor, old Mrs. Postelwaite, that’s about to lose the home that she’s worked her fingers to the bone, mighty near, to help pay for, and she’ll be left without a roof over her head in her old age because her husband’s went and lost every cent he can get his hands on playing cards in your place, and so now they can’t meet their mortgage payments. And there’s plenty of others if the truth was only known. And oh, there’s me and my boy – the only boy I’ve got. Elmer Magee, how you can sleep nights I don’t see!”

“I don’t,” he said. “I work nights.” His wit appealed to him, for he grinned again. “Say, listen here!” His mood had changed and he spat the next words out. “Ef you think I ain’t good company for that son of yourn, why don’t you make him stay away from me? I ain’t hankerin’ none fur his society.”

“I’ve tried to, Elmer – God knows I’ve tried to, time and time again. That’s why I’ve come back to you once more to ask you if you won’t help me. I’ve gone down on my knees alone and prayed for help and I’ve prayed with Eddie, too, and I’ve pleaded with him. He don’t run round town carousing like some boys his age do. He don’t drink and he’s not wild, except it just seems like he can’t leave gambling alone. Oh, he’s promised me and promised me he’d quit, but he’s weak – and he’s only a boy. I’ve kept track of his losings as well as I could, and I know that first and last he’s lost nearly two hundred dollars playing cards with you and your crowd. That may not be much to you, Elmer – I reckon you’re rich – but it’s a lot to a lone woman like me. It means bread and meat and house rent and clothes to go on my back – that’s what it means to me. My feet are mighty near out of these shoes I’ve got on, and right this minute there’s not a cent in the house. I don’t say you cheated him, but the money’s gone and you got it. And it’s ruining my boy. He’s only a boy – he won’t be twenty-one till the twelfth day of next April. If only you wouldn’t let him come inside your place he’d behave himself – I know he would.

“So you see, Elmer, you’re the only one that can make him go straight – that’s why I’ve come back to you this second time. I reckon he ain’t so much to blame. You know – yes, you’ve got reason to know better than anybody else – that his father before him couldn’t leave playing cards alone. I hoped I could raise Eddie different. As a little thing I used to tell him playing cards were the devil’s own playthings. But it seems like he can’t just help it. I reckon it’s in his blood.”

“Whut you need then is a blood purifier,” mocked the gamester. He pointed a long forefinger toward the drug store across the street. “You’d better go on over yonder to Hinkle’s and git him some. I see they’re advertisn’ a new brand in their window – a dollar a bottle and a cure guaranteed or else you gits your money back. Better invest!”

He showed her his back as he turned to enter the Blue Jug. Pausing halfway through the swinging doors he spoke again, and since he still looked over her head perhaps he did not see the look that had come into her eyes or mark how her hands were clenching and unclenching. Or if he did see these things, perhaps he did not care.

“That’s all I’ve got to say to you,” he added, “exceptin’ this – I want this here to be the last time you come pesterin’ me on the street.”

“It will be,” she said slowly, and her voice was steady although her meager frame shook. “It’s the last time I’m coming to you on the street, Elmer, for what’s mine by rights.”

“Then good-day to you.” He disappeared. She turned and went away, walking fast. Her name was Norfleet and she was a widow and alone in the world. Except for her son, who worked at Kattersmith Brothers’ brickyards as a helper for twelve dollars and a half a week, she had no kith or kin. She lived mainly by her needle, being a seamstress of sorts.

•     •     •     •     •

King Highpockets’ establishment was the nearest approach to a gilded gambling hell – to quote a phrase current – that we had. But certainly it was not gilded, although possibly by some it might have been likened to a hell. Under the friendly cover of darkness you ascended a steep flight of creaky wooden steps and when you had reached the first landing you knocked at a locked wooden door. The lock slid back and the door opened a cautious inch or two and a little grinning negro, whose name was Babe Givens, peeped out at you through the opening. If you were the right person, or if you looked as though you might be the right person, Babe Givens opened the door wider and made way for you to enter.

Entering then, you found yourself in a big room furnished most simply with two tables and some chairs and several spittoons upon the floor, and a portable rack for poker checks and a dumbwaiter in a corner – and that was all. There was no safe, the proprietor deeming it the part of safety to carry his cash capital on his person. There was no white-uniformed attendant to bring you wine, should you thirst, and turkey sandwiches, if you hungered while at play. I have read that such as these are provided in all properly conducted gambling hells in the great city, but King Highpockets ran a sure-thing shop, not a restaurant. Drinks, when desired, were paid for in advance, and came from the bar below on the shelf of the creaking dumbwaiter, after Babe Givens had called the order down a tin speaking tube. There were no rugs upon the floor, no pictures against the walls. Except for the decks of cards, opened fresh at each sitting, there was nothing new or bright about the place. The King might move his entire outfit in one two-horse wagon and put no great strain upon the team. He might lose it altogether and be out of pocket not more than seventy-five dollars. In him the utilitarian triumphed above the purely artistic; himself, he was not pretty to look upon.

Of the two tables, one ordinarily was for poker and the other was for craps. The King banked both games, and sometimes took a hand in the poker game if conditions seemed propitious. Whether he played, though, or whether he didn’t, he stood by always to lift a white chip out of each jackpot for a greedy and omnivorous kitty, whose mouth showed as a brassbound slot in the middle of the circular cover of dirty green baize. Trust him to minister to his kitty every pop. She was his pet and he loved her, and he never forgot her and her needs.

This night, though, the poker table lacked for tenants. The pay car had come and had dispensed of its delectable contents and had gone on south, and on this particular night most of the King’s guests were railroad men. Railroad men being proverbially fond of quick action and plenty of it, the crap table had been drawn out into the middle of the room and here all activities centered. Here, too, the King presided, making change as occasion demanded from a mound of specie and a sheaf of currency in front of him, for all transactions were cash transactions and no chips used. While he did this his assistant, an alert individual called Grimes – or Jay Bird Grimes, for short – kept track of the swift-traveling dice and of the betting, which like the dice moved from left to right, round and round and round again.

Jay Bird had need to keep both his eyes wide open, for present players and prospective players were ringed four deep about the table. The smoke of their cigars and their cigarettes went upward to add stratified richness to the thick blue clouds that crawled in layers against the ceiling, and the sweat of their brows ran down their faces to drip in drops upon the table as one after another they claimed the dotted cubes and shook, rattled and rolled ’em, and snapped their fingers in importunity, calling upon Big Dick or Phoebe Dice to come and to come right away. And then this one would fail to make his point and would lose his turn, and the overworked ivories would go into the snatching eager hand of that one who stood next him, and all the rest, waiting for their chance, would breathe hard, grunting in fancied imitation of negroes, and shouting out in a semi-hysterical fashion as the player passed or didn’t pass.

A young freight conductor laid down a ten-dollar bill and the King covered it with another. The freight conductor ran that ten up to one hundred and eighty dollars, ten or twenty at a dip, then shot the whole amount and lost it; then lost ninety more on top of that, and with a white face and a quite empty pay envelope, still held fast in a shaking left hand, fell back out of the hunched-in, scrouging circle. But he didn’t go away; he stayed to watch the others, envious of those who temporarily beat the game, dismally sympathetic, with an unspoken fellow feeling, for those who, like him, went broke. Josh Herron, the roundhouse foreman, dropped half his month’s wages before he decided that, since luck plainly was not with him, he had had about enough. A clerk from the timekeeper’s office shoved in, taking his place.

When he wasn’t answering knocks at the door Babe Givens circulated about the outskirts of the tightened group like a small, black rabbit dog about a brush pile harboring hares, his eyes all china and his mouth all ivory. The sound of those small squared bones dashing together in their worn leather cup was music to his Afric ears. The white man, in the first place, stole this game from Babe’s race, you know.

Babe had to answer knocks a good many times. Newcomers kept on climbing the stair and knuckling the door.

“Game’s mighty full, genelmens – but they’s always room fur one mo’. Step right in and wait yo’ turn,” Babe would say, ushering in the latest arrival. Babe was almost as happy as if he had been shooting himself.

As I say, they kept coming. At length, a few minutes before midnight, when the pile of silver under the King’s hands had grown from a molehill to a mountain and the wadded paper money made a small shock of yellow-and-green fodder upon the green pasture of the table-top, came still another, and this one most strangely burdened. Very mousily indeed this eleventh-hour visitor ascended the steps, and first trying the doorknob, knocked with a fumbling knock against the pine panels.

Babe drew back the bolt and peered out into the darkness at the solitary figure dimly seen. “Game’s mighty full, genelmen,” he began the formula of greeting, “but you kin——”

Babe began it but he never finished it. Something long and black, something slim and fearsome – yes, most fearsome – slid through the opening, and grazed his nose so that the little darky, stricken limp, fell back.

“Please, suh, boss,” he begged, “fur Gawd’s sake don’t shoot – don’t shoot!”

Babe started his prayer in a babble but he ended it with a shriek – a shriek so imploringly loud that all there, however intent they might be, were bound to hear and take notice. Over the heads of his patrons Highpockets looked, and he stiffened where he stood. They all looked; they all stiffened.

There was just cause. Inside the door opening was a masked figure levelling down a double-barrelled shotgun upon them. Lacking the mask and the shotgun, and lacking, too, a certain rigid and purposeful pose which was most clearly defined in all its lines, the figure would have lacked all menace, indeed would have seemed to the casual eye a most impotent and grotesque figure. For it was but little better than five feet in stature and not overly broad. It wore garments too loose for it by many inches. The sleeve ends covered the small hands to the finger ends, and the trousers wrinkled, accordion fashion, to the tips of the absurdly small toes. An old slouch hat threatened to slip all the way down over the wearer’s face. The mask was a flimsy thing of black cambric, but the eyeholes, strange to say, were neatly worked with buttonhole stitching. From beneath the hatbrim at the back a hank of longish hair escaped. On the floor, a yard or so before the apparition where it had been dropped, rested an ancient black handbag unlatched and agape.

I am not meaning to claim that at the first instant of looking the several astonished eyes of the gathering in King Highpockets’ place comprehended all these details; it was the general effect that they got; and it was that shotgun which mainly made the difference in their point of view. What they did note most clearly – every man of them – was that the two hammers of the gun stood erect, ready to drop, and that a slim trigger finger played nervously inside the trigger guard, and that the twin muzzles, shifting and wavering like a pair of round hard eyes gazing every way at once, seemed to fix a threatening stare upon all of them and upon each of them. If the heavy gun shook a bit in the grip of its holder that but added to the common peril. Anyone there would have taken his dying oath that the thing aimed for his shrinking vitals and none other’s.

“Hands up – up high! And keep ’em up!”

The command, given in a high-pitched key, was practically unnecessary. Automatically, as it were, all arms there had risen to full stretch, so that the clump of their motionless bodies was fronded at the top with open palms and tremulous outstretched fingers. But the arms of old King Highpockets rose above all the rest and his fingers shook the shakiest.

“If anybody moves an inch I’ll shoot.”

“That don’t go for me – I ain’t aimin’ to move,” murmured Josh Herron. Josh was scared all right, but he chuckled as he said it.

“Now – boy – you!”

The gun barrels dipped to the right an instant, including the detached form of Babe Givens in their swing.

“Yas, suh, boss, yas!”

“You put all that money in this grip sack here at my feet.”

“W-w-which money, boss?”

“All the money that’s there on that table yonder – every cent of it.”

The little darky feared the man who paid him his wages, but there were things in this world he feared more – masked faces and shotguns, for example. His knees smote together and his teeth became as castanets which played in his jaws, as with rolling eyes and a skin like wet ashes he moved shudderingly to obey. Between the table and the valise he made two round trips, carrying the first time silver, the second time paper, and then, his task accomplished, he collapsed against the wall because his legs would no longer hold him up. For there was water in his knee joints and his feet were very cold.

Through this nobody spoke; only the eyes of the armed one watched vigilantly everywhere and the shotgun ranged the assemblage across its front and back again. Under his breath someone made moan, as the heaping double handful of green-and-yellow stuff was crumpled down into the open-mawed bag. It might have been Highpockets who moaned.

“Now then,” bade the robber, when the paper had gone to join the silver, “anybody here who’s lost his money tonight or any other night can come and get it back. But come one at a time – and come mighty slow and careful.”

Curiously enough only two came – the young freight conductor and the youth who was a clerk in the time-keeper’s office at the yards.

Shamefacedly the freight conductor stooped, flinching away from the gun muzzles which pointed almost in his right ear, and picked out certain bills.

“I lost an even hundred – more’n I can afford to lose,” he mumbled. “I’m takin’ just my own hundred.” He retired rearward after the manner of a crab.

The boy wore an apologetic air as he salvaged twenty-two dollars from the cache. After he had crawfished back to the table where the others were, none else offered to stir.

“Anybody else?” inquired the collector of loot.

“Well, I squandered a little coin here this evenin’, but I’m satisfied,” spoke Josh Herron, now grinning openly. “I’m gittin’ my money’s worth.” He glanced sidewise toward the suffering proprietor.

“All done?”

Nobody answered.

“Here, boy, come here then!”

Babe Givens came – upon his knees.

“Close that bag.”

Babe fumbled the rusted claps shut.

“Now, shove it up close to me along the floor.”

Babe, he shoved it.

“Now get back yonder where you were.”

I leave it to you whether Babe got back yonder.

The figure swooped downward briskly, and two fingers of the hand which gripped the forearm of the gun caught in the looped handles of the black bag and brought it up dangling and heavy laden.

And now the custodian of these delectable spoils was backing toward the door, but still with weapon poised and ready.

“Stay right where you are for five minutes,” was the final warning from behind the cambric mask. “Five minutes, remember! Anybody who tries to come down those steps before that five minutes is up is going to get shot.”

The door slammed. Through the closed door the crap-shooters, each in his place and all listening as intently as devout worshippers in a church, heard the swift footsteps dying away. Josh Herron brought down his arms and took two steps forward.

“Wait, Josh, the time limit ain’t up yit,” counselled a well-wisher.

“Oh, I ain’t goin’ nowheres jest yit – I’m very comfortable here,” said Josh. He stooped and seemed to pick up some small object from the bare planks.

Five minutes later – or perhaps six – a procession moving cautiously, silently and in single file passed down the creaky stairs. It was noted – and commented upon – that the owner of the raided place, heaviest loser and chief mourner though he was, tagged away back at the tail of the line. Only Babe Givens was behind him, and Babe was well behind him too. At the foot of the stairs the frontmost man projected his head forth into the night, an inch at a time, ready to jerk it back again. But to his inquiring vision Franklin Street under its gas lamps yawned as empty as a new made grave.

For some unuttered and indefinable reason practically all of the present company felt in a mood promptly to betake themselves home. On his homeward way Josh Herron traveled in the company of a sorely shaken grocery clerk, and between them they, going up the street, discussed the startling episode in which they had just figured.

“Lookin’ down that pair of barrels certainly made a true believer out of old Highpockets, didn’t it?” said the grocer’s clerk, when the event had been gone over verbally from its beginning to its end. “Did you happen to see, Josh, how slow he poked his old head out past them doorjambs even after Jasper Waller told him the coast was clear? Put me in mind of one of these here old snappin’-turtles comin’ out of his shell after a skeer. Well, I had a little touch of the buck-ague myself,” he confessed.

“It was sorter up to our long-laiged friend to be a little bit careful,” said Josh Herron. “Coupled up the way he is, one buckshot would be liable to go through his gizzard and his lights at the same time.”

A little later the grocery clerk spoke, in reference to a certain quite natural curiosity which seemingly lay at the top of his thoughts, since he had voiced it at least three times within the short space of one city block:

“I wonder who that there runty hold-up could ’a’ been?”

“Yes, I wonder?” repeated Josh Herron in a peculiar voice.

“He certainly took a long chance, whoever he was – doin’ the whole job single handed,” continued the grocery clerk. “Well, I ain’t begrudgin’ him the eight dollars of mine that he packed off with him, seein’ as how he stripped old Highpockets as clean as a whistle. And he couldn’t ’a’ been nothin’ but a half-grown boy neither, judgin’ from his build.”

“Boy – hell! Say, Oscar, are you as blind as the rest of that crowd?”’ asked Josh Herron, coming to a halt beneath a corner gas lamp. “Was you so skeered, too, you couldn’t see a thing that was right there before your eyes as plain as day?”

“What you talkin’ about?” demanded the other. “If it wasn’t a boy, what was it – a dwarf?”

“Oscar, kin you keep a secret?” asked Josh Herron, grinning happily. “Yes? Then look here.”

He opened his right hand. Across the palm of it lay a bent wire hairpin.

It is possible that Oscar, the grocer’s clerk, did know how to keep a secret. As to that I would not presume to speak. Conceding that he did, it is equally certain that some persons did not possess the same gift of reticence. By noon of the following day, practically all who had ears to hear with had heard in one guise or another the story of those midnight proceedings upstairs over the Blue Jug. It was inevitable that the editor of the Daily Evening News should hear it, too, which he did – from a dozen different sources and by a dozen differing versions. For publication at least the distressed Highpockets had nothing to say. All things being considered, this was but natural, as you will concede.

Naturally, also, none might be found in all the width and breadth of the municipality who would confess to having been an eye witness to the despoiling operations, because if you admitted so much it followed in the same breath you convicted yourself of being a frequenter of gaming establishments, and, moreover, of being one of a considerable number of large, strong men who had suffered themselves to be coerced by one diminutive bandit. So, lacking authoritative facts to go upon, and names of individuals with which to buttress his statements, Editor Tompkins, employing his best humorous vein, wrote and caused to be printed an account veiled and vague, but not so very heavily veiled, at that, and not so vague but that one who knew a thing or two might guess out the riddle of his tale.

Coincidentally, certain other things happened which might or might not bear a relationship to the main event. Old Mrs. Postelwaite received by mail, in an unmarked envelope and from an unknown donor, three hundred and odd dollars – no great fortune in itself, but a sum amply sufficient to pay off the mortgage on her small birdbox of a dwelling, and so save the place which she called home from foreclosure at the instigation of the Building & Loan Company. Since little Mrs. Shetler, who lived out on Wheelis Street, had no present source of income other than what she derived by taking subscription orders for literary works which nobody cared to read and few, except through a spirit of compassion for Mrs. Shetler, cared to buy, it seemed fair to assume that from like mysterious agencies she acquired the exact amount of her husband’s shortage, then owing to Kattersmith Brothers, his recent employers. This amount being duly turned over to that firm the fugitive was enabled to return from his hiding and, rehabilitated, to assume his former place in the community. For the first time in months little Mrs. Shetler wore a smile upon her face and carried her head erect when she went abroad. Seeing that smile you would have said yourself that it was worth every cent of the money.

The Widow Norfleet, seamstress, squared up her indebtedness with divers neighborhood tradesmen, and paid up her back house rent, and after doing all this still had enough ready cash left to provide winter time garments for herself and a new suit for her threadbare son Eddie. Finally, Mrs. Matilda Weeks, who constituted in herself an unofficial but highly efficient local charity organization, discovered on a certain morning when she awoke that, during the night, some kindly soul had shoved under her front door a plain Manila wrapper, containing merely a line of writing on a sheet of cheap, blue-ruled notepaper: “For the poor people,” and nearly three hundred dollars in bills – merely that, and nothing more. It was exactly in keeping with Mrs. Weeks’ own peculiar mode of philanthropy that she should accept this anonymous gift and make use of it without asking any questions whatsoever.

“I think, by all accounts, it must be tainted money,” said Mrs. Weeks, “but I don’t know any better way of making dirty money clean than by doing a little good with it.”

So she kept the donation intact against the coming of the Christmas, and then she devoted it to filling many Christmas dinner baskets and many Christmas stockings for the families of shanty-boaters, whose floating domiciles clustered like a flock of very disreputable water fowl down by the willows below town, these shiftless river gypsies being included among Mrs. Weeks’ favorite wards.

Meanwhile, for upward of a week after the hold-up, no steps of whatsoever nature were taken by the members of the police force. For the matter of that, no steps which might be called authoritative or in strict accordance with the statutes made and provided were ever taken by them or any one of them. But one evening the acting head of the department went forth upon a private mission. Our regular chief, Gabe Henley, was laid up that fall, bedfast with inflammatory rheumatism, and the fact of his being for the time an invalid may possibly help to explain a good deal, seeing that Gabe had the name for both honesty and earnestness in the discharge of his duties, even if he did fall some degrees short of the mental stature of an intellectual giant.

So it was the acting chief – he resigned shortly thereafter, as I recall – who took it upon himself to pay a sort of domiciliary visit to the three-room cottage where the Widow Norfleet lived with her son Eddie and took in sewing. He bore no warrant qualifying him for violent entry, search of the premises or seizure of the person, and perhaps that was why he made no effort to force his way within the little house; or maybe he desired only to put a few pointed questions to the head of the house. So while he stood at the locked front door, knocking until his knuckles stung him and his patience had become quite utterly exhausted, a woman let herself out at the back of the house and ran bareheaded through an alley which opened into Clay Street, Clay Street being the next street to the west. When she returned home again at the end of perhaps half an hour a peep through a hooded and shuttered front window revealed to her that the brass-buttoned caller had departed.

It was the next morning, to follow with chronological exactitude the sequence of this narrative, that our efficient young commonwealth’s attorney, Jerome G. Flournoy, let himself into the chambers of the circuit judge. Mr. Flournoy wore between his brows a little V of perplexity. But Judge Priest, whom he found sitting by a grate fire stoking away at his cob pipe, appeared to have not a single care concealed anywhere about his person. Certainly his forehead was free of those wrinkles which are presumed to denote troublesomeness of thought on the inside.

“Judge,” began Mr. Flournoy, without any prolonged preliminaries, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to take up that Blue Jug affair. And I do hate mightily to do it, seeing what the consequences are liable to be. So I thought I’d talk it over with you first, if you don’t mind.”

“Son,” whined Judge Priest, and to Mr. Flournoy it seemed that the phantom shadow of a wink rested for the twentieth part of a second on the old judge’s left eyelid, “speakin’ officially, it’s barely possible that I don’t know whut case you have reference to.”

“Well, unofficially then, you’re bound to have heard the talk that’s going round town,” said Mr. Flournoy. “Nobody’s talked of anything else much this past week, so far as I’ve been able to notice. Just between you and me, Judge, I made up my mind, right from the first, that unless it was crowded on me I wasn’t going to take cognizance of the thing at all. That’s the principal reason why I haven’t mentioned the subject in your presence before now. As a private citizen, it struck me that that short-waisted crook got exactly what was coming to him, especially as I never heard of bad money being put to better purposes. But aside from what he lost in cash – and I reckon he doesn’t think any more of a silver dollar than you do of both your legs – it made him the laughing stock of twenty thousand people, and more particularly after the true inside facts began to circulate.”

“Now that you mention it, son,” remarked Judge Priest blandly, “it strikes me that I did ketch the distant sound of gigglin’ here and there durin’ the past few days.”

“That’s just it – the giggling must’ve got under the scoundrel’s hide finally. I gather that at the beginning Magee made up his mind to keep his mouth shut and just take his medicine. But I figure him for the kind that can’t stand being laughed at very long – and his own gang have just naturally been laughing him to death all week. Anyhow, he came to my house today right after breakfast, and called on me as the commonwealth’s attorney to put the facts before the Grand Jury when it convenes next Monday for the fall term. He’s even willing to testify himself, he says. And he says he can prove what went with the money that he lost that night – or most of it – and what became of the rest of it.

“That’s not all, Judge, either. Right on top of that, when I got down to my office I found a letter from Mrs. Hetty Norfleet, saying she had nothing to conceal from the duly sworn officers of the law, and that she was perfectly willing to answer any charges that might be made against her, and that she would come to me and make a full statement any time I wanted her to come. Or substantially that,” amended Mr. Flournoy, with the lawyer’s instinct.

“Is that possible?” quoth the judge in tones of a mild surprise. With his thumb he tamped down the smolder in his pipe. The job appeared to require care; certainly it required full half a minute of time. When next he spoke he had entirely departed from the main line of the topic in hand.

“I reckin, son, you never knowed little Gil Nickolas, did you? No, ’taint in reason that you would. He died long before your time. Let’s see – he must’ve died way back yonder about eighteen-sixty-nine, or maybe ’twas eighteen-seventy? He got hisself purty badly shot up at Chickamauga and never did entirely git over it. Well, sir, that there little Gil Nickolas wasn’t much bigger than a cake of lye soap after a hard day’s washin’, but let me tell you, he was a mighty gallant soldier of the late Southern Confederacy. I know he was because we both served together in old Company B – the first company that went out of this town after the fussin’ started. Yes, suh, he shorely was a spunky little raskil. I reckin he belonged to a spunky outfit – I never knowed one of his breed yit that didn’t have more sand, when it come right down to cases, than you could load onto a hoss and waggin.” Again he paused to minister to the spark of life in his pipe bowl. “I recall one time, the first year of the war, me and Gil was out on a kind of a foragin’ trip together and——”

“I beg your pardon, Judge Priest,” broke in Mr. Flournoy a trifle stiffly, “but I was speaking of the trouble Mrs. Hetty Norfleet’s gotten herself into.”

“I know you was,” assented Judge Priest, “and that’s whut put me in mind of little Gil Nickolas. He was her paw. I ain’t seen much of her here of recent years, but I reckin she’s had a purty toler’ble hard time of it. Her husband wasn’t much account ez I remember him in his lifetime.”

“She has had a hard time of it – mighty hard,” assented Mr. Flournoy, “and that’s one of the things that makes my job all the harder for me.”

“How so?” inquired Judge Priest.

“Because,” expounded Mr. Flournoy, “now, I suppose, I’ve got to put her under arrest and bring her to trial. In a way of speaking Magee has got the law on his side. Certainly he’s got the right to call on me to act. On the surface of things the police are keeping out of it – I reckon we both know why – and so it’s being put up to me. Magee points out, very truly, that it’s a felony charge anyhow, and that even if his dear friend, the acting chief, should start the ball rolling, in the long run, sooner or later, the case would be bound to land in circuit court.”

“And whut then?” asked Judge Priest.

“Oh, nothing much,” said Mr. Flournoy bitterly, “nothing much, except that if that poor little woman confesses – and I judge by the tone of her letter she’s ready to do just that – anyway, everybody in town knows by now that she was the one that held up that joint of Magee’s at the point of a shotgun – why the jurors, under their oaths, are bound to bring in a verdict of guilty, no matter how they may feel about it personally. Magee has about reached the point where he’d risk a jail term for himself to see her sentenced to the penitentiary. Judge Priest, I’d almost rather resign my office than be the means of seeing that poor, little, plucky woman convicted for doing the thing she has done.”

“Wait a minute, son! Hold your hosses and wait a minute!” put in the judge. “Mebbe it won’t be absolutely necessary fur you to up and resign so abrupt. Your valuable services are needed round this courthouse.”

“What’s that you say, Judge?” asked the young prosecutor, straightening his body out of the despondent curve into which he had looped it.

“I says, wait a minute and don’t be so proneful to jump at conclusions,” repeated and amplified the older man. “You go and jump at a conclusion that-away and you’re liable to skeer the poor thing half to death. I’ve been lettin’ you purceed ahead because I wanted to git your views on this little matter before I stuck my own paddle into the kittle. But now let’s you and me see ef there ain’t another side to this here proposition.”

“I’m listening, your Honor,” said Flournoy, mystified but somehow cheered.

“Well, then!” The judge raised his right arm ready to emphasize each point he made with a wide swing of the hand which held the pipe. “Under the laws of this state, gamblin’ in whatsoever form ain’t permitted, recognized, countenanced nor suffered. That’s so, ain’t it, son? To be shore, the laws as they read at present sometimes seem insufficient somehow to prevent the same, and I hope to see them corrected in that regard, but the intent is plain enough that, in the eye of the law, public gamblin’ es sech does not go on anywhere within the confines of this commonwealth. You agree with me there, don’t you?”

“May it please the court, I agree with you there,” said Flournoy happily, beginning, he thought, to see the light breaking through.

“All right then – so fur so good. Now then, sech bein’ the situation, we may safely assume, I reckin, that within the purview and the written meanin’ of the statute, gamblin’ – common gamblin’ – don’t exist a-tall. It jest natchelly ain’t. Understand me, I’m speaking accordin’ to a strict legal construction of the issue. And so, ef gamblin’ don’t exist there couldn’t ’a’ been no gamblin’ goin’ on upstairs over the Blue Jug saloon and restauraw on the night in question. In fact, ef you carry the point out to its logical endin’ there couldn’t ’a’ been no night in question neither. In any event, ef the person Magee could by any chance prove he was there, in the said place, on the said date, at the said time, it would appear that he was present fur the purpose of evadin’ and defyin’ the law, and so ef somebody ostensibly and apparently seemed to happen along and did by threat and duress deprive him of somethin’ of seemin’ value, he still wouldn’t have no standin’ in court because he couldn’t come with clean hands hisse’f to press the charge.

“But there ain’t no need to go into that phase and aspect of the proposition because we know now that, legally, he wasn’t even there. Not bein’ there, of course he wasn’t engaged in carryin’ on a game of chance. Not bein’ so engaged, it stands to reason he didn’t lose nothin’ of value. Ef he states otherwise we are bound to believe him to be a victim of a diseased and an overwrought mind. And so there, I take it, is the way it stands, so fur ez you are concerned, Mister Flournoy. You can’t ask a Grand Jury to return an indictment ag’inst a figment of the imagination, kin you? Why, boy, they’d laugh at you.”

“I certainly can’t, Judge,” agreed the young man blithely. “I don’t know how the venerable gentlemen composing the court of last resort in this state would look upon the issue if it were carried up to them on appeal, but for my purposes you’ve stated the law beautifully.” He was grinning broadly as he stood up and reached for his hat and his gloves. “I’m going now to break the blow to our long-legged friend.”

“Whilst you’re about it you mout tell him somethin’ else,” stated his superior. “In fact, you mout let the word seep round sort of promiscuous-like that I’m aimin’ to direct the special attention of the next Grand Jury to the official conduct of certain members of the police force of our fair little city. Ez regards the suppressin’ and the punishin’ of common gamblers, the law appears to be sort of loopholey at present; but mebbe ef we investigated the activities, or the lack of same, on the part of divers of our sworn peace officers, we mout be able to scotch the snake a little bit even ef we can’t kill it outright. Anyway, I’m willin’ to try the experiment. I reckin there’s quite a number would be interested in hearin’ them tidin’s ef you’re a mind to put ’em into circulation. Personally, I’m impressed with the idea that our civic atmosphere needs clarifyin’ somewhut. All graftin’ is hateful but it seems to me the little cheap graftin’ that goes on sometimes in a small community is about the nastiest kind of graft there is. Don’t you agree with me there?”

“Judge Priest,” stated Mr. Flournoy from the threshold, “I’ve about made up my mind that I’m always going to agree with you.”

Inside of two hours the commonwealth’s attorney returned from his errand, apparently much exalted of spirit.

“Say, Judge,” he proclaimed as he came through the door, “I imagine it won’t be necessary for you to take the steps you were mentioning a while ago.”

“No?”

“No, siree. Once I’d started it I judge the news must’ve spread pretty fast. Outside on the Square, as I was on my way back up here from downtown, Beck Giltner waylaid me to ask me to tell you for him that he was going to close down his game and try to make a living some other way. I’m no deep admirer of the life, works and character of Beck Giltner, but I’ll say this much for him – he keeps his promise once he’s made it. I’d take his word before I’d take the word of a lot of people who wouldn’t speak to him on the street.

“And we’re going to lose our uncrowned king. Yes, sir, Highpockets the First is preparing to leave us flat. After hearing what I had to tell him, he said in a passionate sort of way that a man might as well quit a community where he can’t get justice. I gather that he’s figuring on pulling his freight for some more populous spot where he can enjoy a wider field of endeavor and escape the vulgar snickers of the multitude. He spoke of Chicago.”

“Ah, hah!” said Judge Priest; and then after a little pause: “Well, Jerome, my son, ef I have to give up any member of this here community I reckin Mister Highpockets Elmer Magee, Esquire, is probably the one I kin spare the easiest. When is he aimin’ to go from us?”

“Right away, I think, from what he said.”

“Well,” went on Judge Priest, “ef so be you should happen to run acros’t him ag’in before he takes his departure from amongst us, you mout – in strict confidence, of course – tell him somethin’ else. He mout care to ponder on it while he is on his way elsewhere. That there old scattergun, which he looked down the barrels of it the other night, wasn’t loaded.”

“Wasn’t loaded? Whee!” chortled Mr. Flournoy. “Well, of all the good jokes——”

He caught himself: “Say, Judge, how did you know it wasn’t loaded?”

“Why, she told me, son – the Widder Norfleet told me so last night. You see she come runnin’ over the back way from her house to my place – I glean somethin’ had happened which made her think the time had arrived to put herself in touch with sech of the authorities ez she felt she could trust – and she detailed the whole circumstances to me. ’Twas me suggested to her that she’d better write you that there letter. In fact, you mout say I sort of dictated its gin’ral tenor. I told her that you ez the prosecutor was the one that’d be most interested in hearin’ any formal statement she mout care to make, and so——”

Mr. Flournoy slumped down into a handy chair and ran some fingers through his hair.

“Then part of the joke is on me too,” he owned.

“I wouldn’t go so fur ez to say that,” spake Judge Priest soothingly. “Frum where I’m settin’ it looks to me like the joke is mainly on quite a number of people.”

“And the shotgun wasn’t loaded?” Seemingly Mr. Flournoy found it hard to credit his own ears.

“It didn’t have nary charge in ary barrel,” reaffirmed the old man. “That little woman had the spunk to go up there all alone by herse’f and bluff a whole roomful of grown men, but she didn’t dare to load up her old fusee – said she didn’t know how, in the first place, and, in the second place, she was skeered it mout go off and hurt somebody. Jerome, ain’t that fur all the world jest like a woman?”

The Saturday Evening Post, 08 Apr 1916
Old Judge Priest (1916)

A Beautiful Evening

~

There was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that used to bother strangers until they got used to it. It started usually along about half past five or six o’clock and it kept up interminably – so it seemed to them – a monotonous, jarring thump-thump, thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a steamy hot halo of their own goodness, the aliens knew what it was that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt amply recompensed for those lost hours of beauty sleep.

In these degenerate days I believe there is a machine that accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and crushing, which no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take the poetry out of the operation. Judge Priest, and the reigning black deity of his kitchen, would have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived and her good right arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge’s Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor’s modelling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round disks and delicately pink each one with a fork – and then, if you were listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an iron lip.

On a Sunday morning I have in mind, Judge Priest woke with the first premonitory thud from the kitchen, and he was up and dressed in his white linens and out upon the wide front porch while the summer day was young and unblemished. The sun was not up good yet. It made a red glow, like a barn afire, through the treetops looking eastward. Lie-abed blackbirds were still talking over family matters in the maples that clustered round the house, and in the back yard Judge Priest’s big red rooster hoarsely circulated gossip in regard to a certain little brown hen, first crowing out the news loudly and then listening, with his head on one side, while the rooster in the next yard took it up and repeated it to a rooster living farther along, as is the custom among male scandalizers the world over. Upon the lawn the little gossamer hammocks that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were spangled with dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering rosary and the center of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket. Likewise each web was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees were shedding down their podded product so thickly that across open spaces the slanting lines of drifting fiber looked like snow. It would be hot enough after a while, but now the whole world was sweet and fresh and washed clean.

It impressed Judge Priest so. He lowered his bulk into a rustic chair made of hickory withes that gave to his weight, and put his thoughts upon breakfast and the goodness of the day; but presently, as he sat there, he saw something that set a frown between his eyes.

He saw, coming down Clay Street, upon the opposite side, an old man – a very feeble old man – who was tall and thin and dressed in somber black. The man was lame – he dragged one leg along with the hitching gait of the paralytic. Traveling with painful slowness, he came on until he reached the corner above. Then automatically he turned at right angles and left the narrow wooden sidewalk and crossed the dusty road. He passed Judge Priest’s, looking neither to the right nor the left, and so kept on until he reached the corner below. Still following an invisible path in the deep-furrowed dust, he crossed again to the far side. Just as he got there his halt leg seemed to give out altogether and for a minute or two he stood holding himself up by a fumbling grip upon the slats of a tree box before he went laboriously on, a figure of pain and weakness in the early sunshine that was now beginning to slant across his path and dapple his back with checkerings of shadow and light.

This maneuver was inexplicable – a stranger would have puzzled to make it out. The shade was as plentiful upon one side of Clay Street as upon the other; each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as its brother over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in honeysuckles and balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement line on the opposite side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest’s roomy, rambling old home, had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window. And surely to this lone pedestrian every added step must have been an added labor. A stranger would never have understood it; but Judge Priest understood it – he had seen that same thing repeated countless times in the years that stretched behind him. Always it had distressed him inwardly, but on this particular morning it distressed him more than ever. The toiling grim figure in black had seemed so feeble and so tottery and old.

Well, Judge Priest was not exactly what you would call young. With an effort he heaved himself up out of the depths of his hickory chair and stood at the edge of his porch, polishing a pink dome of forehead as though trying to make up his mind to something. Jefferson Poindexter, resplendent in starchy white jacket and white apron, came to the door.

“Breakfus’ served, suh!” he said, giving to an announcement touching on food that glamour of grandeur of which his race alone enjoys the splendid secret.

“Hey?” asked the judge absently.

“Breakfus’ – hit’s on the table waitin’, suh,” stated Jeff. “Mizz Polks sent over her house-boy with a dish of fresh razberries fur yore breakfus’; and she say to tell you, with her and Mistah Polkses’ compliments, they is fresh picked out of her garden – specially fur you.”

The lady and gentleman to whom Jeff had reference were named Polk, but in speaking of white persons for whom he had a high regard Jeff always, wherever possible within the limitations of our speech, tacked on that final s. It was in the nature of a delicate verbal compliment, implying that the person referred to was worthy of enlargement and pluralization.

Alone in the cool, high-ceiled, white-walled dining room, Judge Priest ate his breakfast mechanically. The raspberries were pink beads of sweetness; the young fried chicken a poem in delicate and flaky browns; the spoon bread could not have been any better if it had tried; and the beaten biscuits were as light as snowflakes and as ready to melt on the tongue; as symmetrical too as poker-chips, and like poker-chips, subject to a sudden disappearance from in front of one; but Judge Priest spoke hardly a word all through the meal. Jeff, going out to the kitchen for the last course, said to Aunt Dilsey:

“Ole boss-man seem lak he’s got somethin’ on his mind worryin’ him this mawnin’.”

When Jeff returned, with a turn of crisp waffles in one hand and a pitcher of cane sirup in the other, he stared in surprise, for the dining room was empty and he could hear his employer creaking down the hall. Jeff just naturally hated to see good hot waffles going to waste. He ate them himself, standing up; and they gave him a zest for his regular breakfast, which followed in due course of time.

From the old walnut hat rack, with its white-tipped knobs that stood just inside the front door, the judge picked up a palmleaf fan; and he held the fan slantwise as a shield for his eyes and his bare head against the sun’s glare as he went down the porch steps and passed out of his own yard, traversed the empty street and strove with the stubborn gate latch of the little house that faced his own. It was a poor-looking little house, and its poorness had extended to its surroundings – as if poverty was a contagion that spread. In Judge Priest’s yard, now, the grass, though uncared for, yet grew thick and lush; but here, in this small yard, there were bare, shiny spots of earth showing through the’ grass – as though the soil itself was out at elbows and the nap worn off its green-velvet coat; but the vines about the porch were thick enough for an ambuscade and from behind their green screen came a voice in hospitable recognition.

“Is that you, Judge? Well, suh, I’m glad to see you! Come right in; take a seat and sit down and rest yourself.”

The speaker showed himself in the arched opening of the vine barrier – an old man – not quite so old, perhaps, as the judge. He was in his shirtsleeves. There was a patch upon one of the sleeves. His shoes had been newly shined, but the job was poorly done; the leather showed a dulled black upon the toes and a weathered yellow at the sides and heels. As he spoke his voice ran up and down – the voice of a deaf person who cannot hear his own words clearly, so that he pitches them in a false key. For added proof of this affliction he held a lean and slightly tremulous hand cupped behind his ear.

The other hand he extended in greeting as the old judge mounted the step of the low porch.

The visitor took one of two creaky wooden rockers that stood in the narrow space behind the balsam vines, and for a minute or two he sat without speech, fanning himself. Evidently these neighborly calls between these two old men were not uncommon; they could enjoy the communion of silence together without embarrassment.

The town clocks struck – first the one on the city hall struck eight times sedately, and then, farther away, the one on the county courthouse. This one struck five times slowly, hesitated a moment, struck eleven times with great vigor, hesitated again, struck once with a big, final boom, and was through. No amount of repairing could cure the courthouse clock of this peculiarity. It kept the time, but kept it according to a private way of its own. Immediately after it ceased the bell on the Catholic church, first and earliest of the Sunday bells, began tolling briskly. Judge Priest waited until its clamoring had died away.

“Goin’ to be good and hot after ’while,” he said, raising his voice.

“What say?”

“I say it’s goin’ to be mighty warm a little later on in the day,” repeated Judge Priest.

“Yes, suh; I reckon you’re right there,” assented the host. “Just a minute ago, before you came over, I was telling Liddie she’d find it middlin’ close in church this morning. She’s going, though – runaway horses wouldn’t keep her away from church! I’m not going myself – seems as though I’m getting more and more out of the church habit here lately.”

Judge Priest’s eyes squinted in whimsical appreciation of this admission. He remembered that the other man, during the lifetime of his second wife, had been a regular attendant at services – going twice on Sundays and to Wednesday night prayer meetings too; but the second wife had been dead going on four years now – or was it five? Time sped so!

The deaf man spoke on:

“So I just thought I’d sit here and try to keep cool and wait for that little Ledbetter boy to come round with the Sunday paper. Did you read last Sunday’s paper, Judge? Colonel Watterson certainly had a mighty fine piece on those Northern money devils. It’s round here somewhere – I cut it out to keep it. I’d like to have you read it and pass your opinion on it. These young fellows do pretty well, but there’s none of them can write like the colonel, in my judgment.”

Judge Priest appeared not to have heard him. “Ed Tilghman,” he said abruptly in his high, fine voice, that seemed absurdly out of place, coming from his round frame, “you and me have lived neighbors together a good while, ain’t we? We’ve been right acros’t the street frum one another all this time. It kind of jolts me sometimes when I git to thinkin’ how many years it’s really been; because we’re gittin’ along right smartly in years – all us old fellows are. Ten years frum now, say, there won’t be so many of us left.” He glanced side-wise at the lean, firm profile of his friend. “You’re younger than some of us; but, even so, you ain’t exactly whut I’d call a young man yourse’f.”

Avoiding the direct questioning gaze that his companion turned on him at this, the judge reached forward and touched a ripe balsam apple that dangled in front of him. Instantly it split, showing the gummed red seeds clinging to the inner walls of the sensitive pod.

“I’m listening to you, Judge,” said the deaf man.

For a moment the old judge waited. There was about him almost an air of diffidence. Still considering the ruin of the balsam apple, he spoke, and it was with a sort of hurried anxiety, as though he feared he might be checked before he said what he had to say:

“Ed, I was settin’ on my porch a while ago waitin’ fur breakfast, and your brother came by.” He shot a quick, apprehensive glance at his silent auditor. Except for a tautened flickering of the muscles about the mouth, there was no sign that the other had heard him. “Your brother Abner came by,” repeated the judge, “and I set over yonder on my porch and watched him pass. Ed, Abner’s gittin’ mighty feeble! He jest about kin drag himself along – he’s had another stroke lately, they tell me. He had to hold on to that there treebox down yonder, stiddyin’ himself after he cross’t back over to this side. Lord knows what he was doin’ draggin’ downtown on a Sunday mornin’ – force of habit, I reckin. Anyway he certainly did look older and more poorly than ever I saw him before. He’s a failin’ man ef I’m any judge. Do you hear me plain?” he asked.

“I hear you,” said his neighbor in a curiously flat voice. It was Tilghman’s turn to avoid the glances of his friend. He stared straight ahead of him through a rift in the vines.

“Well, then,” went on Judge Priest, “here’s whut I’ve got to say to you, Ed Tilghman. You know as well as I do that I’ve never pried into your private affairs, and it goes mightily ag’inst the grain fur me to be doin’ so now; but, Ed, when I think of how old we’re all gittin’ to be, and when the Camp meets and I see you settin’ there side by side almost, and yit never seemin’ to see each other – and this mornin’ when I saw Abner pass, lookin’ so gaunted and sick – and it sech a sweet, ca’m mornin’ too, and everythin’ so quiet and peaceful——” He broke off and started anew. “I don’t seem to know exactly how to put my thoughts into words – and puttin’ things into words is supposed to be my trade, too. Anyway I couldn’t go to Abner. He’s not my neighbor and you are; and besides, you’re the youngest of the two. So – so I came over here to you. Ed, I’d like mightily to take some word frum you to your brother Abner. I’d like to do it the best in the world! Can’t I go to him with a message frum you – today? Tomorrow might be too late!”

He laid one of his pudgy hands on the bony knee of the deaf man; but the hand slipped away as Tilghman stood up.

“Judge Priest,” said Tilghman, looking down at him, “I’ve listened to what you’ve had to say; and I didn’t stop you, because you are my friend and I know you mean well by it. Besides, you’re my guest, under my own roof.”

He stumped back and forth in the narrow confines of the porch. Otherwise he gave no sign of any emotion that might be astir within him, his face being still set and his voice flat. “What’s between me and my – what’s between me and that man you just named always will be between us. He’s satisfied to let things go on as they are. I’m satisfied to let them go on. It’s in our breed, I guess. Words – just words – wouldn’t help mend this thing. The reason for it would be there just the same, and neither one of us is going to be able to forget that so long as we both live. I’d just as lief you never brought this— this subject up again. If you went to him I presume he’d tell you the same thing. Let it be, Judge Priest – it’s past mending. We two have gone on this way for fifty years nearly. We’ll keep on going on so. I appreciate your kindness, Judge Priest; but let it be – let it be!”

There was finality miles deep and fixed as basalt in his tone. He checked his walk and called in at a shuttered window.

“Liddie,” he said in his natural up-and-down voice, “before you put off for church, couldn’t you mix up a couple of lemonades or something? Judge Priest is out here on the porch with me.”

“No,” said Judge Priest, getting slowly up, “I’ve got to be gittin’ back before the sun’s up too high. Ef I don’t see you ag’in meanwhile be shore to come to the next regular meetin’ of the Camp – on Friday night,” he added.

“I’ll be there,” said Tilghman. “And I’ll try to find that piece of Colonel Watterson’s and send it over to you. I’d like mightily for you to read it.”

He stood at the opening in the vines, with one slightly palsied hand fumbling at a loose tendril as the judge passed down the short yard-walk and out at the gate. Then he went back to his chair and sat down again. All the little muscles in his jowls were jumping.

Clay Street was no longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there groups of children – the little girls in prim and starchy white, the little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and all of them moving toward a common center – Sunday school. Twice again that day would the street show life – a little later when grown-ups went their way to church, and again just after the noonday dinner, when young people and servants, carrying trays and dishes under napkins, would cross and re-cross from one house to another. The Sunday interchange of special dainties between neighbors amounted to a ceremonial; but after that, until the cool of the evening, the town would simmer in quiet, while everybody took a Sunday nap.

With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as though trying to fend off something disagreeable – a memory, perhaps, or it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats and midges about, for by now – even so soon – the dew was dried. The leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides up like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out.

In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall, having for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter, in whose grey and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by babies and grand-babies.

There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who was forever starting somewhere and never going there – because, so sure as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank had failed on him, or a colt had kicked him in the head – or maybe it was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be his volunteer pallbearers.

There was Mr. H. Jackman – Brother Jackman to all the town – who had been our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that word, which is at once the sweetest and the bitterest word in our tongue; for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad, would go through the market to take his pick of what was there, and to the Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new garments when his old ones wore shabby – and yet never paid a cent for anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to take him for a retired banker – that’s a fact!

And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man – killed him in fair fight and was acquitted – and yet walked quiet back streets at all hours, a grey, silent shadow, and never slept except with a bright light burning in his room.

The tragedy of Mr. Edward Tilghman, though, and of Captain Abner G. Tilghman, his elder brother, was both a tragedy and a mystery – the biggest tragedy and the deepest mystery the town had ever known or ever would know, probably. All that anybody knew for certain was that for upward of fifty years neither of them had spoken to the other, nor by deed or look had given heed to the other. As boys, back in sixty-one, they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the other’s shoulder, they had stood up with more than a hundred others to be sworn into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on the morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older brother her silk scarf off her shoulders to wear for a sash. Both the brothers had liked her; but by this public act she made it plain which of them was her choice.

Then the company had marched off to the camp below the Tennessee border, where the new troops were drilling; and as they marched some watchers wept and others cheered – but the cheering predominated, for it was to be only a sort of picnic anyhow – so everybody agreed. As the orators – who mainly stayed behind – pointed out, the Northern people would not fight. And even if they should fight could not one Southerner whip four Yankees? Certainly he could; any fool knew that much. In a month or two months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again, covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then – this by common report and understanding – Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman would be married, with a big church wedding.

The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic. And when it was over, after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had become as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit speaking to each other then and there, and to any man’s knowledge they never spoke again. They served the war out, Abner rising just before the end to a captaincy, Edward serving always as a private in the ranks. In a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard, hopeless days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back with the limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they were all boys still – but in experience, men, and in suffering, grandsires.

Two months after they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to Edward, the younger brother. Within a year she died, and after a decent period of mourning Edward married a second time – only to be widowed again after many years. His second wife bore him children and they died – all except one, a daughter, who grew up and married badly; and after her mother’s death she came back to live with her deaf father and to minister to him. As for Captain Abner Tilghman, he never married – never, so far as the watching eyes of the town might tell, looked with favor upon any woman. And he never spoke to his brother or to any of his brother’s family – or his brother to him.

With years the wall of silence they had builded up between them turned to ice and the ice to stone. They lived on the same street, but never did Edward enter Captain Abner’s bank, never did Captain Abner pass Edward’s house – always he crossed over to the opposite side. They belonged to the same Veterans’ Camp – indeed there was only the one for them to belong to; they voted the same ticket – straight Democratic; and in the same church, the old Independent Presbyterian, they worshipped the same God by the same creed, the older brother being an elder and the younger a plain member – and yet never crossed looks.

The town had come to accept this dumb and bitter feud as unchangeable and eternal; in time people ceased even to wonder what its cause had been, and in all the long years only one man had tried, before now, to heal it up. When old Doctor Henrickson died, a young and earnest clergyman, fresh from a Virginia theological school, came out to take the vacant pulpit; and he, being filled with a high sense of his holy calling, thought it shameful that such a thing should be in the congregation. He went to see Captain Tilghman about it. He never went but once. Afterward it came out that Captain Tilghman had threatened to walk out of church and never darken its doors again if the minister ever dared to mention his brother’s name in his presence. So the young minister sorrowed, but obeyed, for the captain was rich and a generous giver to the church.

And he had grown richer with the years, and as he grew richer his brother grew poorer – another man owned the drug store where Edward Tilghman had failed. They had grown from young to middle-aged men and from middle-aged men to old, infirm men; and first the grace of youth and then the solidness of maturity had gone out of them and the gnarliness of age had come upon them; one was halt of step and the other was dull of ear; and the town through half a century of schooling had accustomed itself to the situation and took it as a matter of course. So it was and so it always would be – a tragedy and a mystery. It had not been of any use when the minister interfered; it was of no use now. Judge Priest, with the gesture of a man who is beaten, dropped the fan on the porch floor, went into his darkened sitting room, stretched himself wearily on a creaking horsehide sofa and called out to Jeff to make him a mild toddy – one with plenty of ice in it.

•     •     •     •     •

On this same Sunday – or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same Sunday – at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest’s town, Corporal Jacob Speck, late of Sigel’s command, sat at the kitchen window of the combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with a bowl like an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal’s blue Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon a comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were elsewhere.

Reared back there at seeming ease, the corporal none the less was distracted in his mind. It was not that he so much minded being left at home to mind the youngest baby while the rest of the family spent the afternoon amid the Teutonic splendors of Smeltzer’s Harlem River Casino, with its acres of gravel walks and its whitewashed tree trunks, its straggly flower beds and its high-collared beers. He was used to that sort of thing. Since a plague of multiplying infirmities of the body had driven him out of his job in the tax office, the corporal had not done much except nurse the babies that occurred in the Speck-Engel establishment with such unerring regularity. Sometimes, it is true, he did slip down to the corner for maybe zwei glasses of beer and a game of pinochle; but then, likely as not, there would come inopportunely a towheaded descendant to tell him Mommer needed him back at the flat right away to mind the baby while she went marketing or to the movies.

He could endure that – he had to. What riled Corporal Jacob Speck on this warm and sunny Sunday was a realization that he was not doing his share at making the history of the period. The week before had befallen the fiftieth anniversary of the marching away of his old regiment to the front; there had been articles in the papers about it. Also, in patriotic commemoration of the great event there had been a parade of the wrinkled survivors – ninety-odd of them – following their tattered, faded battle flag down Fifth Avenue past apathetic crowds, nine-tenths of whom had been born since the war – in foreign lands mainly; and at least half, if one might judge by their looks, did not know what the parading was all about, and did not particularly care either.

The corporal had not participated in the march of the veterans; he had not even attended the banquet that followed it. True, his youngest grandchild was at the moment cutting one of her largest jaw teeth and so had required, for the time, an extraordinary and special amount of minding; but the young lady’s dental difficulty was not the sole reason for his absence. Three weeks earlier the corporal had taken part in Decoration Day, and certainly one parade a month was ample strain upon underpinning such as he owned. He had returned home with his game leg behaving more gamely then usual and his sound one full of new and painful kinks. Also, in honor of the occasion, he had committed the error of wearing a pair of stiff new shoes; wherefore he had favored carpet slippers ever since.

Missing the fiftieth anniversary was not the main point with the corporal – that was merely the fortune of war, to be accepted with fortitude and with no more than a proper and natural amount of grumbling by one who had been a good soldier and was now a good citizen; but for days before the event, and daily ever since, divers members of the old regiment had been writing pieces to the papers – the German papers and the English-printing papers too – long pieces, telling of the trip to Washington, and then on into Virginia and across to Tennessee, speaking of this campaign and that and this battle and that. And because there was just now a passing wave of interest in Civil War matters, the papers had printed these contributions, thereby reflecting much glory on the writers thereof. But Corporal Speck, reading these things, had marvelled deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for his own recollection of these events differed most widely from the reminiscent narration of each misguided chronicler.

It was, indeed, a shameful thing that the most important occurrences of the whole war should be so shockingly mangled and mishandled in the retelling. They were so grievously wrong, those other veterans, and he was so absolutely right. He was always right in these matters. Only the night before, during a merciful respite from nursing duties, he had, in Otto Wittenpen’s back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall stein with some bitterness regarding certain especially grievous misstatements of plain fact on the part of faulty-minded comrades. In reply Otto had said, in a rather sneering tone the corporal thought:

“Say, then, Jacob, why don’t you yourself write a piece to the paper telling about this regiment of yours – the way it was?”

“I will. Tomorrow I will do so without fail,” he had said, the ambition of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he had been – ja, none better – and a good citizen, and in his day a capable and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his own story. That morning, when the youngest grandbaby slept and his daughter and his daughter’s husband and the brood of his older grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words would not come – or, at least, after the first line or two they would not come.

The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on his two good legs – both good legs then – to fight for the country whose language he could not yet speak were there in bright and living colors; but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as you might say from the clear sky, a great idea – an idea so magnificent that he almost dropped little Miss Engel off his lap at the splendid shock of it.

With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the jostle the young lady slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmost and smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel apartment.

The bed, whereon of nights Corporal Speck reposed with a bucking bronco of an eight-year-old grandson for a bedmate, was jammed close against the plastering, under the one small window set diagonally in a jog in the wall, and opening out upon an airshaft, like a chimney. Time had been when the corporal had a room and a bed all his own; that was before the family began to grow so fast in its second generation and he still held a place of lucrative employment at the tax office.

As he got down upon his knees beside the bed the old man uttered a little groan of discomfort. He felt about in the space underneath and drew out a small tin trunk, rusted on its corners and dented in its sides. He made a laborious selection of keys from a key-ring he got out of his pocket, unlocked the trunk and lifted out a heavy top tray. The tray contained, among other things, such treasures as his naturalization papers, his pension papers, a photograph of his dead wife, and a small bethumbed passbook of the East Side Germania Savings Bank. Underneath was a black fatigue hat with a gold cord round its crown, a neatly folded blue uniform coat, with the G.A.R. bronze showing in its uppermost lapel, and below that, in turn, the suit of neat black the corporal wore on high state occasions and would one day wear to be buried in. Pawing and digging, he worked his hands to the very bottom, and then, with a little grunt, he heaved out the thing he wanted – the one trophy, except a stiffened kneecap and an honorable record, this old man brought home from the South. It was a captured Confederate knapsack, flattened and flabby. Its leather was dry-rotted with age and the brass C.S.A. on the outer flap was gangrened and sunken in; the flap curled up stiffly, like an old shoe sole.

The crooked old fingers undid a buckle fastening and from the musty and odorous interior of the knapsack withdrew a letter, in a queer-looking yellowed envelope, with a queer-looking stamp upon the upper right-hand corner and a faint superscription upon its face. The three sheets of paper he slid out of the envelope were too old even to rustle, but the close writing upon them in a brownish, faded ink was still plainly to be made out.

Corporal Speck replaced the knapsack in its place at the very bottom, put the tray back in its place, closed the trunk and locked it and shoved it under the bed. The trunk resisted slightly and he lost one carpet slipper and considerable breath in the struggle. Limping back to the kitchen and seeing little Miss Engel still slumbered, he eased his frame into a chair and composed himself to literary composition, not in the least disturbed by the shouts of roistering sidewalk comedians that filtered up to him from down below in front of the house, or by the distant clatter of intermittent traffic over the cobbly spine of Second Avenue, half a block away. For some time he wrote, with a most scratchy pen; and this is what he wrote:

“To the Editor of the ‘Sun,’ City,

“Dear Sir: The undersigned would state that he served two years and nine months – until wounded in action – in the Fighting Two Hundred and Tenth New York Infantry, and has been much interested to see what other comrades wrote for the papers regarding same in connection with the Rebellion War of North and South respectively. I would state that during the battle of Chickamauga I was for a while lying near by to a Confederate soldier – name unknown – who was dying on account of a wound in the chest. By his request I gave him a drink of water from my canteen, he dying shortly thereafter. Being myself wounded – right knee shattered by a Minie ball – I was removed to a field hospital; but before doing so I brought away this man’s knapsack for a keepsake of the occasion. Some years later I found in said knapsack a letter, which previous to then was overlooked by me. I inclose herewith a copy of said letter, which it may be interesting for reading purposes by surviving comrades.

“Respectfully yours,

“Jacob Speck,

“Late Corporal L Company
“Fighting Two Hundred and Tenth New York, U.S.A.”

With deliberation and squeaky emphasis the pen progressed slowly across the paper, while the corporal, with his left hand, held flat the dead man’s ancient letter before him, intent on copying it. Hard words puzzled him and long words daunted him, and he was making a long job of it when there were steps in the hall without. Entered breezily Miss Hortense Engel, the eldest of all the multiplying Engels, pretty beyond question and every inch American, having the gift of wearing Lower Sixth Avenue’s stock designs in a way to make them seem Upper Fifth Avenue’s imported models. Miss Engel’s face was pleasantly flushed; she had just parted lingeringly from her steady company, Mr. Lawrence J. McLaughlin, plumber’s helper, in the lower hallway, which is the trysting place and courting place of tenement-dwelling sweethearts, and now she had come to make ready the family’s cold Sunday night tea. At sight of her the corporal had another inspiration – his second within the hour. His brow smoothed and he fetched a sigh of relief.

“’Lo, grosspops!” she said. “How’s every little thing? The kiddo all right?”

She unpinned a Sunday hat that was plumed like a hearse and slipped on a long apron that covered her from high collar to hobble hem.

“Girl,” said her grandfather, “would you make tomorrow for me at the office a copy of this letter on the typewriter machine?”

He spoke in German and she answered in New-Yorkese, while her nimble fingers wrestled with the task of back-buttoning her apron.

“Sure thing! It won’t take hardly a minute to rattle that off. Funny-looking old thing!” she went on, taking up the creased and faded original. “Who wrote it? And whatcher goin’ to do with it, grosspops?”

“That,” he told her, “is mine own business! It is for you, please, to make the copy and bring both to me tomorrow, the letter and also the copy.”

So on Monday morning, when the rush of taking dictation at the offices of the Great American Hosiery Company, in Broome Street, was well abated, the competent Miss Hortense copied the letter, and that same evening her grandfather mailed it to the Sun, accompanied by his own introduction. The Sun straightway printed it without change and – what was still better – with the sender’s name spelled out in capital letters; and that night, at the place down by the corner, Corporal Jacob Speck was a prophet not without honor in his own country. Much honor, in fact, accrued.

You may remember that, upon a memorable occasion, Judge Priest went on a trip to New York and while there had dealings with a Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, a promoter of gas and other hot-air propositions; and that during the course of his stay in the metropolis he made the acquaintance of one Malley, a Sun reporter. This had happened some years back, but Malley was still on the staff of the Sun. It happened also that, going through the paper to clip out and measure up his space, Malley came upon the corporal’s contribution. Glancing over it idly, he caught the name, twice or thrice repeated, of the town where Judge Priest lived. So he bundled together a couple of copies and sent them South with a short letter; and therefore it came about in due season, through the good offices of the United States Post-office Department, these enclosures reached the judge on a showery Friday afternoon as he loafed upon his wide front porch, waiting for his supper.

First, he read Malley’s letter and was glad to hear from Malley. With a quickened interest he ran a plump thumb under the wrappings of the two close-rolled papers, opened out one of them at page ten and read the opening statement of Corporal Jacob Speck, for whom instantly the judge conceived a long-distance fondness. Next he came to the letter that Miss Hortense Engel had so accurately transcribed, and at the very first words of it he sat up straighter, with a surprised and gratified little grunt; for he had known them both – the writer of that letter and its recipient. One still lived in his memory as a red-haired girl with a pert, malicious face, and the other as a stripling youth in a ragged grey uniform. And he had known most of those whose names studded the printed lines so thickly. Indeed, some of them he still knew – only now they were old men and old women – faded, wrinkled bucks and belles of a far-distant day.

As he read the first words it came back to the judge, almost with the jolting emphasis of a new and fresh sensation, that in the days of his own youth he had not liked the girl who wrote that letter nor the man who received it. But she was dead this many and many a year – why, she must have died soon after she wrote this very letter – the date proved that – and he, the man, had fallen at Chickamauga, taking his death in front like a soldier; and surely that settled everything and made all things right! But the letter – that was the main thing. His old blue eyes skipped nimbly behind the glasses that saddled the tip of his short pink nose, and the old judge read it – just such a letter as he himself had received many a time; just such a wartime letter as uncounted thousands of soldiers North and South received from their sweethearts and read and reread by the light of flickering campfires and carried afterward in their knapsacks through weary miles of marching.

It was crammed with the small-town gossip of a small town that was but little more than a memory now – telling how, because he would not volunteer, a hapless youth had been waylaid by a dozen high-spirited girls and overpowered, and dressed in a woman’s skirt and a woman’s poke bonnet, so that he left town with his shame between two suns; how, since the Yankees had come, sundry faithless females were friendly – actually friendly, this being underscored – with the more personable of the young Yankee officers; how half the town was in mourning for a son or brother dead or wounded; how a new and sweetly sentimental song, called “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” was being much sung at the time – and had it reached the army yet? – how old Mrs. Hobbs had been exiled to Canada for seditious acts and language and had departed northward between two files of bluecoats, reviling the Yankees with an unbitted tongue at every step; how So-and-So had died or married or gone refugeeing below the enemy’s line into safely Southern territory; how this thing had happened and that thing had not.

The old judge read on and on, catching gladly at names that kindled a tenderly warm glow of half-forgotten memories in his soul, until he came to the last paragraph of all; and then, as he comprehended the intent of it in all its barbed and venomed malice, he stood suddenly erect, with the outspread paper shaking in his hard grip. For now, coming back to him by so strange a way across fifty years of silence and misunderstanding, he read there the answer to the town’s oldest, biggest tragedy and knew what it was that all this time had festered, like buried thorns, in the flesh of those two men, his comrades and friends. He dropped the paper, and up and down the wide, empty porch he stumped on his short legs, shaking with the shock of revelation and with indignation and with pity for the blind and bitter uselessness of it all.

“Ah, hah!” he said to himself over and over again understandingly. “Ah, hah!” And then: “Next to a mean man, a mean woman is the meanest thing in this whole created world, I reckin. I ain’t shore but whut she’s the meanest of the two. And to think of what them two did between ’em – she writin’ that hellish black lyin’ tale to ’Lonzo Pike and he puttin’ off hotfoot to Abner Tilghman to poison his mind with it and set him like a flint ag’inst his own flesh and blood! And wasn’t it jest like Lon Pike to go and git himself killed the next day after he got that there letter! And wasn’t it jest like her to up and die before the truth could be brought home to her! And wasn’t it like them two stubborn, set, contrary, closemouthed Tilghman boys to go ’long through all these years, without neither one of ’em ever offerin’ to make or take an explanation!” His tone changed. “Oh, ain’t it been a pitiful thing! And all so useless! But – oh, thank the Lord – it ain’t too late to mend it part way anyhow! Thank God, it ain’t too late fur that!”

Exulting now, he caught up the paper he had dropped, and with it crumpled in his pudgy fist was half-way down the gravel walk, bound for the little cottage snuggled in its vine ambush across Clay Street, before a better and a bigger inspiration caught up with him and halted him midway of an onward stride.

Was not this the second Friday in the month? It certainly was. And would not the Camp be meeting tonight in regular semimonthly session at Kamleiter’s Hall? It certainly would. For just a moment Judge Priest considered the proposition. He slapped his linen-clad flank gleefully, and his round old face, which had been knotted with resolution, broke up into a wrinkly, ample smile; he spun on his heel and hurried back into the house and to the telephone in the hall. For half an hour, more or less, Judge Priest was busy at that telephone, calling in a high, excited voice, first for one number and then for another. While he did this his supper grew cold on the table, and in the dining room Jeff, the white-clad, fidgeted and out in the kitchen Aunt Dilsey, the turbaned, fumed – but, at Kamleiter’s Hall that night at eight, Judge Priest’s industry was in abundant fulness rewarded.

Once upon a time Gideon K. Irons Camp claimed a full two hundred members, but that had been when it was first organized. Now there were in good standing less than twenty. Of these twenty, fifteen sat on the hard wooden chairs when Judge Priest rapped with his metal spectacle case for order, and that fifteen meant all who could travel out at nights. Doctor Lake was there, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, the faithful and inevitable. It was the biggest turnout the Camp had had in a year.

Far over on one side, cramped down in a chair, was Captain Abner Tilghman, feeble and worn-looking. His buggy horse stood hitched by the curb downstairs. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby had gone to his house for him and on the plea of business of vital moment had made him come with him. Almost directly across the middle aisle on the other side sat Mr. Edward Tilghman. Nobody had to go for him. He always came to a regular meeting of the Camp, even though he heard the proceedings only in broken bits.

The adjutant called the roll and those present answered, each one to his name; and mainly the voices sounded bent and sagged, like the bodies of their owners. But a keen onlooker might have noticed a sort of tremulous, joyous impatience, which filled all save two of these old, grey men, pushing the preliminaries forward with uncommon speed. They fidgeted in their places.

Presently Judge Priest cleared his throat of a persistent huskiness and stood up.

“Before we purceed to the regular routine,” he piped, “I desire to present a certain matter to a couple of our members.” He came down off the little platform, where the flags were draped, with a step that was almost light, and into Captain Abner Tilghman’s hand he put a copy of a city paper, turned and folded at a certain place, where a column of printed matter was scored about with heavy pencil bracketings. “Cap’n,” he said, “ez a personal favor to me, suh, would you please read this here article? – the one that’s marked” – he pointed with his finger – “not aloud – read it to yourself, please.”

It was characteristic of the paralytic to say nothing. Without a word he adjusted his glasses and without a word he began to read. So instantly intent was he that he did not see what followed next – and that was Judge Priest crossing over to Mr. Edward Tilghman’s side with another copy of the same paper in his hand.

“Ed,” he bade him, “read this here article, won’t you? Read it clear through to the end – it mout interest you mebbe.” The deaf man looked up at him wonderingly, but took the paper in his slightly palsied hand and bent his head close above the printed sheet.

Judge Priest stood in the middle aisle, making no move to go back to his own place. He watched the two silent readers. All the others watched them too. They read on, making slow progress, for the light was poor and their eyes were poor. And the watchers could hardly contain themselves; they could hardly wait. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby kept bobbing up and down like a pudgy jack-in-the-box that is slightly stiff in its joints. A small, restrained rustle of bodies accompanied the rustle of the folded newspapers held in shaky hands.

Unconscious of all scrutiny, the brothers read on. Perhaps because he had started first – perhaps because his glasses were the more expensive and presumably therefore the more helpful – Captain Abner Tilghman came to the concluding paragraph first. He read it through – and then Judge Priest turned his head away, for a moment almost regretting he had chosen so public a place for this thing.

He looked back again in time to see Captain Abner getting upon his feet. Dragging his dead leg behind him, the paralytic crossed the bare floor to where his brother’s grey head was bent to his task. And at his side he halted, making no sound or sign, but only waiting. He waited there, trembling all over, until the sitter came to the end of the column and read what was there – and lifted a face all glorified with a perfect understanding.

“Eddie!” said the older man – “Eddie!” He uttered a name of boyhood affection that none there had heard uttered for fifty years nearly; and it was as though a stone had been rolled away from a tomb – as though out of the grave of a dead past a voice had risen resurrected. “Eddie!” he said a third time, pleadingly, abjectly, humbly, craving for forgiveness.

“Brother Abner!” said the other man. “Oh, Brother Abner!” he said – and that was all he did say – all he had need to say, for he was on his feet now, reaching out with wide-spread, shaking arms.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby tried to start a yell, but could not make it come out of his throat – only a clicking, squeaking kind of sound came. Considered as a yell it was a miserable failure.

Side by side, each with his inner arm tight gripped about the other, the brothers, bareheaded, turned their backs upon their friends and went away. Slowly they passed out through the doorway into the darkness of the stair landing, and the members of the Gideon K. Irons Camp were all up on their feet.

“Mind that top step, Abner!” they heard the younger man say. “Wait! I’ll help you down.” And that was all except a scuffling sound of uncertainly placed feet, growing fainter and fainter as the two brothers passed down the long stairs of Kamleiter’s Hall and out into the night together – that was all, unless you would care to take cognizance of a subdued little chorus such as might be produced by twelve or thirteen elderly men snuffling in a large bare room. As commandant of the Camp it was fitting, perhaps, that Judge Priest should speak first.

“The trouble with this here Camp is jest this,” he said: “it’s got a lot of sniffln’ old fools in it that don’t know no better than to bust out cryin’ when they oughter be happy!” And then, as if to prove how deeply he felt the shame of such weakness on the part of others, Judge Priest blew his nose with great violence, and for a space of minutes industriously mopped at his indignant eyes with an enormous pocket handkerchief.

•     •     •     •     •

In accordance with a rule, Jeff Poindexter waited up for his employer. Jeff expected him by nine-thirty at the latest; but it was actually getting along toward ten-thirty before Jeff, who had been dozing lightly in the dim-lit hall, oblivious to the fanged attentions of some large mosquitoes, roused as he heard the sound of a rambling but familiar step clunking along the wooden sidewalk of Clay Street. The latch on the front gate clicked, and as Jeff poked his nose out of the front door he heard, down the aisle of trees that bordered the gravel walk, the voice of his master uplifted in solitary song.

In the matter of song the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference what the words might be or the theme – he sang every song and all songs to a fine, thin, tuneless little air of his own. At this moment Judge Priest, as Jeff gathered, showed a wide range of selection. One second he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all the way from Pike, and the next, stating, for the benefit of all who might care to hear these details, that they – presumably certain horses – were bound to run all night – bound to run all day; so you could bet on the bobtailed nag and he’d bet on the bay. Nearer to the porch steps it boastingly transpired that somebody had jumped aboard the telegraf and steered her by the triggers, whereat the lightnin’ flew and ’lectrified and killed ten thousand niggers! But even so general a catastrophe could not weigh down the singer’s spirits. As he put a fumbling foot upon the lowermost step of the porch, he threw his head far back and shrilly issued the following blanket invitation to ladies resident in a faraway district:

“Oh, Bowery gals, won’t you come out tonight?

Won’t you come out tonight?

Oh, Bowery gals, won’t you come out tonight,

And dance by the light of the moon?

I danced with a gal with a hole in her stockin’;

And her heel it kep’ a-rockin’ – kep’ a-rockin’!

She was the purtiest gal in the room!”

Jeff pulled the front door wide open. The song stopped and Judge Priest stood in the opening, teetering a little on his heels. His face was all a blushing pink glow – pinker even than common.

“Evenin’, Jedge!” greeted Jeff. “You’re late, suh!”

“Jeff,” said Judge Priest slowly, “it’s a beautiful evenin’.”

Amazed, Jeff stared at him. As a matter of fact, the drizzle of the afternoon had changed, soon after dark, to a steady downpour. The judge’s limpened hat brim dripped raindrops and his shoulders were sopping wet, but Jeff had yet to knowingly and wilfully contradict a prominent white citizen.

“Yas, suh!” he said, half affirmatively, half questioningly. “Is it?”

“It is so!” said Judge Priest. “Every star in the sky shines like a diamond! Jeff, it’s the most beautiful evenin’ I ever remember!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 25 Oct 1913
Entitled “To the Editor of the Sun.”
Old Judge Priest (1916)
Also published in the collection
The Escape of Mr. Trimm (1913)

Ex-Fightin’ Billy

~

To me and to those of my generation, Judge Priest was always Judge Priest. So he was also to most of the people of our town and our county and our judicial district. A few men of his own age – mainly men who had served with him in the Big War – called him Billy, right to his face, and yet a few others, men of greater age than these, spoke of him and to him as William, giving to the name that benignant and most paternal air which an octogenarian may employ in referring to one who is ten or fifteen years his junior.

I was a fairly sizable young person before ever I found out that once upon a time among his intimates the Judge had worn yet another title. Information upon this subject was imparted to me one summery afternoon by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby as we two perched in company upon the porch of the old boat-store.

I don’t know what mission brought Sergeant Bagby three blocks down Franklin Street from his retail grocery establishment, unless it was that sometimes the boat-store porch was cool while the rest of the town baked. That is to say, it was cool by comparison. Little wanton breezes that strayed across the river paid fluttering visits there before they struck inland to perish miserably of heat prostration.

For the moment the Sergeant and I had the little wooden balcony to ourselves, nearly everybody else within sight and hearing having gone down the levee personally to enjoy the small excitement of seeing the stern-wheel packet Emily Foster land after successfully completing one of her regular triweekly round trips to Clarksburg and way landings.

At the blast of the Emily Foster’s whistles as she rounded to and put her nose upstream preparatory to sliding in alongside the wharf, divers colored persons of the leisure class had roused from where they napped in the shady lee of freight piles and lined up on the outer gunwales of the wharf-boat ready to catch and make fast the head-line when it should be tossed across the intervening patch of water into their volunteer hands.

Two town hacks and two town drays had coursed down the steep graveled incline, with the draymen standing erect upon the jouncing springless beds of their drays as was their way. In the matter of maintaining a balance over rough going and around abrupt turns, no chariot racers of old could have taught them anything. Only Sergeant Bagby and I, of all in the immediate vicinity, had remained where we were. The Sergeant was not of what you could exactly call a restless nature, and I, for the moment, must have been overcome by one of those fits of languor which occasionally descend upon the adolescent manling. We two bided where we sat.

With a tinkle of her engine bells, a calling out of orders and objurgations in the professionally hoarse, professionally profane voice of her head mate and a racking, asthmatic coughing and sighing and pounding from her exhaust pipes, the Emily Foster had found her berth; and now her late passengers came streaming up the slant of the hill – a lanky timberman or two, a commercial traveler – most patently a commercial traveler – a dressy person who looked as though he might be an advance agent for some amusement enterprise, and a family of movers, burdened with babies and bundles and accompanied by the inevitable hound dog. The commercial traveler and the suspected advance agent patronized the hacks – fare twenty-five cents anywhere inside the corporate limits – but the rest entered into the city afoot and sweating. At the very tail of the procession appeared our circuit judge, he being closely convoyed by his black house-boy, Jeff Poindexter, who packed the master’s bulging and ancient valise with one hand and bore a small collection of law books under his other arm.

Looking much like a high-land terrapin beneath the shelter of his venerable cotton umbrella, Judge Priest toiled up the hot slant. Observed from above, only his legs were visible for the moment. We knew him, though, by his legs – and also by Jeff and the umbrella. Alongside the eastern wall of the boat-store, nearmost of all buildings to the water-front, he halted in its welcome shadows to blow and to mop his streaming face with a vast square of handkerchief, and, while so engaged, glanced upward and beheld his friend, the Sergeant, beaming down upon him across the whittled banister rail.

“Hello, Jimmy!” he called in his high whine.

“Hello, yourself!” answered the Sergeant. “Been somewheres or jest traveling round?”

“Been somewheres,” vouchsafed the newly returned; “been up at Livingstonport all week, settin’ as special judge in place of Judge Given. He’s laid up in bed with a tech of summer complaint and I went up to git his docket cleaned up fur him. He’s better now, but still puny.”

“You got back ag’in in time to light right spang in the middle of a warm spell,” said Sergeant Bagby.

“Well,” stated Judge Priest, “it ain’t been exactly whut you’d call chilly up the river, neither. The present thaw appears to be gineral throughout this section of the country.” He waved a plump arm in farewell and slowly departed from view beyond the side wail of the boat-store.

“Looks like Judge Priest manages to take on a little more flesh every year he lives,” said the Sergeant, who was himself no lightweight, addressing the remark in my direction. “You wouldn’t scursely think it to see him waddlin’ ’long, a totin’ all that meat on his bones; but oncet upon a time he was mighty near ez slim ez his own ramrod and was commonly known ez little Fightin’ Billy. You wouldn’t, now, would you?”

The question I disregarded. It was the disclosure he had bared which appealed to my imagination and fired my curiosity. I said: “Mr. Bagby, I never knew anybody ever called Judge Priest that?”

“No, you natchelly wouldn’t,” said the Sergeant – “not onless you’d mebbe overheared some of us old fellers talkin’ amongst ourselves sometimes, with no outsiders present. It wouldn’t hardly be proper, ever’thing considered, to be referrin’ in public to the presidin’ judge of the first judicial district of the State of Kintucky by sech a name ez that. Besides which, he ain’t little any more. And then, there’s still another reason.”

“How did they ever come to call him that in the first place?” I asked.

“Well, young man, it makes quite a tale,” said the Sergeant. With an effort he hauled out his big silver watch, looked at its face, and then wedged it back into a hidden recess under one of the overlapping creases of his waistband.

“He acquired that there title at Shiloh, in the State of Tennessee, and by his own request he parted from it some three years and four months later on the banks of the Rio Grande River, in the Republic of Mexico, I bein’ present in pusson on both occasions. But ef you’ve got time to listen I reckin I’ve got jest about the time to tell it to you.”

“Yes, sir – if you please.” With eagerness, I hitched my cane-bottomed chair along the porch floor to be nearer him. And then as he seemed not to have heard my assent, I undertook to prompt him. “Er – what were you and Judge Priest doing down in Mexico, Mr. Bagby?”

“Tryin’ to git out of the United States of America fur one thing.” A little grin, almost a shamefaced grin, I thought, broke his round moist face up into fat wrinkles. He puckered his eyes in thought, looking out across the languid tawny river toward the green towhead in midstream and the cottonwoods on the far bank, a mile and more away. “But I don’t marvel much that you never heared the full circumstances before. Our bein’ down in Mexico together that time is a fact we never advertised ’round for common consumption – neither one of us.”

He withdrew his squinted gaze from the hot vista of shores and water and swung his body about to face me, thereafter punctuating his narrative with a blunted forefinger.

“My command was King’s Hell Hounds. There ought to be a book written some of these days about whut all King’s Hell Hounds done endurin’ of the unpleasantness – it’d make mighty excitin’ readin’. But Billy and a right smart chance of the other boys frum this place, they served throughout with Company B of the Old Regiment of mounted infantry. Most of the time frum sixty-one to sixty-five I wasn’t throwed with ’em, but jest before the end came we were all consolidated – whut there was remainin’ of us – under General Nathan Bedford Forrest down in Mississippi. Fur weeks and months before that, we knowed it was a hopeless fight we were wagin’, but somehow we jest kept on. I reckin we’d sort of got into the fightin’ habit. Fellers do, you know, sometimes, when the circumstances are favorable, ez in this case.

“Well, here one mornin’ in April, came the word frum Virginia that Richmond had fallen, and right on top of that, that Marse Robert had had to surrender. They said, too, that Sherman had Johnston penned off somewheres down in the Carolinas, we didn’t know exactly where, and that Johnston would have to give up before many days passed. In fact, he had already give up a week before we finally heared about it. So then accordin’ to our best information and belief, that made us the last body of organized Confederates on the east bank of the Mississippi River. That’s a thing I was always mighty proud of. I’m proud of it yit.

“All through them last few weeks the army was dwindlin’ away and dwindlin’ away. Every mornin’ at roll-call there’d be a few more absentees. Don’t git me wrong – I wouldn’t call them boys deserters. They’d stuck that long, doin’ their duty like men, but they knowed good and well – in fact we all knowed – ’twas only a question of time till even Forrest would have to quit before overpowerin’ odds and we’d be called on to lay down the arms we’d toted fur so long. Their families needed ’em, so they jest quit without sayin’ anything about it to anybody and went on back to their homes. This was specially true of some that lived in that district.

“But with the boys frum up this way it was different. In a way of speakin’, we didn’t have no homes to go back to. Our State had been in Northern hands almost frum the beginnin’ and some of us had prices on our heads right that very minute on account of bein’ branded ez guerrillas. Which was a lie. But folks didn’t always stop to sift out the truth then. They were prone to shoot you first and go into the merits of the case afterward. Anyway, betwixt us and home there was a toler’ble thick hedge of Yankee soldiers – in fact several thick hedges. You know they called one of our brigades the Orphan Brigade. And there were good reasons fur callin’ it so – more ways than one.

“I ain’t never goin’ to furgit the night of the fifth of May. Somehow the tidin’s got round amongst the boys that the next mornin’ the order to surrender was goin’ to be issued. The Yankee cavalry general, Wilson – and he was a good peart fighter, too – had us completely blocked off to the North and the East, but the road to the Southwest was still open ef anybody cared to foller it. So that night some of us held a little kind of a meetin’ – about sixty of us – mainly Kintuckians, but with a sprinklin’ frum other States, too.

“Ez I remember, there wasn’t a contrary voice raised when ’twas suggested we should try to make it acrost the big river and j’ine in under Kirby Smith, who still had whut was left of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi.

“Billy Priest made the principal speech. ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘South Carolina may a-started this here war, but Kintucky has undertook the contract to close it out. Somewheres out yonder in Texas they tell me there’s yit a consid’ble stretch of unconquered Confederate territory. Speakin’ fur myself I don’t believe I’m ever goin’ to be able to live comfortable an’ reconciled under any other flag than the flag we’ve fit to uphold. Let’s us-all go see ef we can’t find the place where our flag still floats.’

“So we all said we’d go. Then the question ariz of namin’ a leader. There was one man that had been a captain and a couple more that had been lieutenants, but, practically unanimously, we elected little Billy Priest. Even ef he was only jest a private in the ranks we all knowed it wasn’t fur lack of chances to go higher. After Shiloh, he’d refused a commission and ag’in after Hartsville. So, in lessen no time a-tall, that was settled, too.

“Bright and early next day we started, takin’ our guns and our hosses with us. They were our hosses anyway; mainly we’d borrowed ’em off Yankees, or anyways, off Yankee sympathizers on our last raid Northward and so that made ’em our pussonal property, the way we figgered it out. ’Tennyrate we didn’t stop to argue the matter with nobody whutsoever. We jest packed up and we put out – and we had almighty little to pack up, lemme tell you.

“Ez we rid off we sung a song that was beginnin’ to be right fashionable that spring purty near every place below Mason and Dixon’s line; and all over the camp the rest of the boys took it up and made them old woodlands jest ring with it. It was a kind of a farewell to us. The fust verse was likewise the chorus and it run something like this:

Oh, I’m a good old rebel, that’s jest whut I am;

And fur this land of freedom I do not give a dam’,

I’m glad I fit ag’in her, I only wish’t we’d won,

And I don’t ax your pardon fur anything I’ve done.

“And so on and so forth. There were several more verses all expressin’ much the same trend of thought, and all entirely in accordance with our own feelin’s fur the time bein’.

“Well, boy, I reckin there ain’t no use wastin’ time describin’ the early stages of that there pilgrimage. We went ridin’ along livin’ on the land and doin’ the best we could. We were young fellers, all of us, and it was springtime in Dixie – you know whut that means – and in spite of everything, some of the springtime got into our hearts, too, and drove part of the bitterness out. The country was all scarified with the tracks of war, but nature was doin’ her level best to cover up the traces of whut man had done. People along our route had mighty slim pickin’s fur themselves, but the sight of an old grey jacket was still mighty dear to most of ’em and they divided whut little they had with us and wish’t they had more to give us. We didn’t need much at that – a few meals of vittles fur the men and a little fodder fur our hosses and we’d be satisfied. We’d reduced slow starvation to an exact science long before that. Every man in the outfit was hard ez nails and slim ez a blue racer.

“Whut Northern forces there was East of the river we dodged. In fact we didn’t have occasion to pull our shootin’-irons but oncet, and that was after we’d cros’t over into Louisiana. There wasn’t any organized military force to regulate things and in the back districts civil government had mighty near vanished altogether. People had went back to fust principles – wild, reckless fust principles they were, too. One day an old woman warned us there was a gang of bushwhackers operatin’ down the road a piece in the direction we were headin’ – a mixed crowd of deserters frum both sides, she said, who’d jined in with some of the local bad characters and were preyin’ on the country, harryin’ the defenseless, and terrorizin’ women and children and raisin’ hob ginerally. She advised us that we’d better give ’em a wide berth.

“But Billy Priest he throwed out scouts and located the gang, and jest before sunrise next mornin’ we dropped in on ’em, takin’ ’em by surprise in the camp they’d rigged up in a live-oak thicket in the midst of a stretch of cypress slashes.

“And when the excitement died down ag’in, quite a number of them bushwhackers had quit whackin’ permanently and the rest of ’em were tearin’ off through the wet woods wonderin’, between jumps, whut had hit ’em. Ez fur our command, we accumulated a considerable passel of plunder and supplies and a number of purty fair hosses, and went on our way rejoicin’. We hadn’t lost a man, and only one man wounded.

“When we hit the Texas border, news was waitin’ fur us. They told us ef we aimed to ketch up with the last remainders of the army we’d have to hurry, because Smith and Shelby, with whut was left of his Missoury outfit, and Sterlin’ Price and Hindman with some of his Arkansaw boys and a right smart sprinklin’ of Texans had already pulled up stakes and were headed fur old Mexico, where the natives were in the enjoyable midst of one of their regular revolutions.

“With the French crowd and part of the Mexicans to help him, the Emperor Maximilian was tryin’ to hang onto his onsteady and topplin’ throne, whilst the Republikins or Liberals, as they called themselves, were tryin’ with might and main to shove him off of it. Ef a feller jest natchelly honed fur an opportunity to indulge a fancy fur active hostilities, Mexico seemed to offer a very promisin’ field of endeavor.

“It didn’t take us long to make up our minds whut course we’d follow. Billy Priest put the motion. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says, ‘it would seem the Southern Confederacy is bent and determined on gittin’ clear out frum under the shadder of the Yankee government. It has been moved and seconded that we foller after her no matter where she goes. All in favor of that motion will respond by sayin’ Aye – contrary-wise, No. The Ayes seem to have it and the Ayes do have it and it is so ordered, unanimously. By fours! Forward, march!’

“That happened in the town of Corsicana in the early summer-time of the year. So we went along acrost the old Lone Star State, headin’ mighty nigh due West, passin’ through Waco and Austin and San Antonio, and bein’ treated mighty kindly by the people wheresoever we passed. And ez we went, one of the boys that had poetic leanin’s, he made up a new verse to our song. Let’s see, son, ef I kin remember it now after all these years.”

The Sergeant thought a bit and then lifting his voice in a quavery cadence favored me with the following gem:

I won’t be reconstructed; I’m better now than them;

And fur a carpet-bagger I don’t give a dam;

So I’m off fur the frontier, fast ez I kin go,

I’ll purpare me a weepon and head fur Mexico.

“It was the middle of July and warm enough to satisfy the demands of the most exactin’ when we reached the Rio Grande, to find out Shelby’s force had done crossed over after buryin’ their battle-flag in the middle of the river, wrapped up in a rock to hold it down. On one side was cactus and greasewood and a waste of sandy land, that was already back in the Union or mighty soon would be. On the other side was more cactus and more grease-wood and more sandy loam, but in a different country. So, after spendin’ a few pleasant hours at the town of Eagle Pass, we turn’t our backs to one country and cros’t over to the other, alookin’ fur the Confederacy wherever she might be. I figgered it out I was tellin’ the United States of America good-by furever. I seem to remember that quite a number of us kept peerin’ back over our shoulders toward the Texas shore. They tell me the feller that wrote ‘Home Sweet Home’ didn’t have any home to go to but he writ the song jest the same. Nobody didn’t say nothin’, though, about weakenin’ or turnin’ back.

“Very soon after we hit Mexican soil we run into one of the armies – a Liberal army, this one was, of about twelve hundred men, and its name suited it to a T. The officers were liberal about givin’ orders and the men were equally liberal about makin’ up their minds whether or not they’d obey. Also, ez we very quickly discovered, the entire kit and caboodle of ’em were very liberal with regards to other folks’ property and other folks’ lives. We’d acquired a few careless ideas of our own concernin’ the acquirin’ of contraband plunder durin’ the years immediately precedin’, but some of the things we seen almost ez soon ez we’d been welcomed into the hospitable but smelly midst of that there Liberal army, proved to us that alongside these fellers we were merely whut you might call amatoors in the confiscatin’ line.

“I wish’t I had the words to describe the outfit so ez you could see it the way I kin see it this minute. This purticular army was made up of about twelve hundred head, includin’ common soldiers. I never saw generals runnin’ so many to the acre before in my life. The Confederacy hadn’t been exactly destitute in that respect but – shuckins! – down here you bumped into a brigadier every ten feet. There was a considerable sprinklin’ of colonels and majors and sech, too; and here and there a lonesome private. Ef you seen a dark brown scarycrow wearin’ fur a uniform about enough rags to pad a crutch with, with a big sorry straw hat on his head and his feet tied up in bull hides with his bare toes peepin’ coyly out, and ef he was totin’ a flint lock rifle, the chances were he’d be a common soldier. But ef in addition to the rest of his regalia he had a pair of epaulettes sewed onto his shoulders you mout safely assume you were in the presence of a general or something of that nature. I ain’t exaggeratin’ – much. I’m only tryin’ to make you git the picture of it in your mind.

“Well, they received us very kindly and furnished us with rations, sech ez they were – mostly peppers and beans and a kind of batter-cake that’s much in favor in them parts, made out of corn pounded up fine and mixed with water and baked ag’inst a hot rock. Ef a man didn’t keer fur the peppers, he could fall back on the beans, thus insurin’ him a change of diet, and the corn batter-cakes were certainly right good-tastin’.

“Some few of our dark-complected friends kin make a stagger at speakin’ English, so frum one of ’em Billy inquires where is the Confederacy? They explains that it has moved on further South but tells us that first General Shelby sold ’em the artillery he’d fetched with him that fur to keep it frum fallin’ into the Yankees’ hands. Sure enough there’re the guns – four brass field-pieces. Two of ’em are twelve-pounders and the other two are fourteen-pounders. The Mexicans are very proud of their artillery and appear to set much store by it.

“Well, that evenin’ their commandin’ general comes over to where we’ve made camp, accompanied by his coffee-colored staff, and through an interpreter he suggests the advisability of our j’inin’ in with them, he promisin’ good pay and offerin’ to make us all high-up officers. He seems right anxious to have us enlist with his glorious forces right away. In a little while it leaks out why he’s so generous with his promises and so wishful to see us enrolled beneath his noble banner. He’s expectin’ a call inside of the next forty-eight hours frum the Imperials that’re reported to be movin’ up frum the South, nearly two thousand strong, with the intention of givin’ him battle.

“Billy Priest, speakin’ fur all of us, says he’ll give him an answer later. So the commandin’ general conceals his disappointment the best he kin and retires on back to his own headquarters, leavin’ us to discuss the proposition amongst ourselves. Some of the boys favor throwin’ in with the Liberals right away, bein’ hongry fur a fight, I reckin, or else sort of dazzled by the idea of becomin’ colonels and majors overnight. But Billy suggests that mebbe we’d better jest sort of hang ’round and observe the conduct and deportment of these here possible feller warriors of our’n whilst they’re under hostile fire. ‘Speakin’ pussonally,’ he says, ‘I must admit I ain’t greatly attracted to them ez they present themselves to the purview of my gaze in their ca’mmer hours. Before committin’ ourselves, s’posen we stand by and take a few notes on how they behave themselves in the presence of an enemy. Then, there’ll be abundant time to decide whether we want to stay a while with these fellers or go long about our business of lookin’ fur the Southern Confederacy.’

“That sounded like good argument, so we let Billy have his way about it, and we settled down to wait. We didn’t have long to wait. The next day about dinner-time, here come the Imperial army, advancin’ in line of battle. The Liberals moved out acrost the desert to meet ’em and we-all mounted and taken up a position on a little rise close at hand, to observe the purceedin’s.

“Havin’ had consider’ble experience in sech affairs, I must say I don’t believe I ever witnessed such a dissa’pintin’ battle ez that one turn’t out to be. The prevailin’ notion on both sides seemed to be that the opposin’ forces should march bravely toward one another ontil they got almost within long range and then fur both gangs to halt ez though by simultaneous impulse, and fire at will, with nearly everybody shootin’ high and wide and furious. When this had continued till it become mutually boresome, one side would charge with loud cheers, a-shootin’ ez it advanced, but prudently slowin’ down and finally haltin’ before it got close enough to inflict much damage upon the foe or to suffer much damage either. Havin’ accomplished this, the advancin’ forces would fall back in good order and then it was time fur the other side to charge. I must say this in justice to all concerned – there was a general inclination to obey the rules ez laid down fur the prosecution of the kind of warfare they waged. Ez a usual thing, I s’pose it would be customary fur the battle to continue ez described until the shades of night descended and then each army would return to its own base, claimin’ the victory. But on this occasion something in the nature of a surprise occurred that wasn’t down on the books a-tall.

“Right down under the little rise where us fellers sat waitin’, stood them four guns that the Liberals bought off of Shelby. Ef brass cannons have feelin’s – and I don’t know no reason why they shouldn’t have – them cannons must have felt like something was radically wrong. The crews were loadin’ and firin’ and swabbin’ and loadin’ and firin’ ag’in – all jest ez busy ez beavers. But they plum’ overlooked one triflin’ detail which the military experts have always regarded ez bein’ more or less essential to successful artillery operations. They forgot to aim in the general direction at the enemy. They done a plentiful lot of cheerin’, them gun crews did, and they burnt up a heap of powder and they raised a powerful racket and hullabaloo, but so fur ez visible results went they mout jest ez well have been bombardin’ the clear blue sky of heaven.

“Well, fur quite a spell we stayed up there on the brow of the hill, watchin’ that there engagement. Only you couldn’t properly call it an engagement – by rights it wasn’t nothin’ but a long distance flirtation. Now several of our boys had served one time or another with the guns. There was one little feller named Vince Hawley, out of Lyon’s Battery, that had been one of the crack gunners of the Western Army. He held in ez long ez he could and then he sings out:

“‘Boys, do you know whut’s ailin’ them pore mistreated little field-pieces down yonder? Well, I’ll tell you. They’re Confederate guns, born, bred, and baptized; and they’re cravin’ fur Confederate hands to pet ’em. It mout be this’ll be the last chance a Southern soldier will ever git to fire a Southern gun. Who’ll go ’long with me fur one farewell sashay with our own cannons?’

“In another minute eight or ten of our command were pilin’ off their horses and tearin’ down that little hill behind Vince Hawley and bustin’ in amongst the Mexies and laying violent but affectionate hands on one of the twelve-pounders. Right off, the natives perceived whut our fellers wanted to do and they fell back and gave ’em elbow-room. Honest, son, it seemed like that field-piece recognized her own kind of folks, even ’way off there on the aidge of a Mexican desert, and strove to respond to their wishes. The boys throwed a charge into her and Hawley sighted her and then – kerboom – off she went!

“Off the Imperial forces went, too. The charge landed right in amongst their front ranks ez they were advancin’ – it happened to be their turn to charge – takin’ ’em absolutely by surprise. There was a profound scatteration and then spontaneous-like the enemy seemed to come to a realization of the fact that the other side had broke all the rules and was actually tryin’ to do ’em a real damage. With one accord they turned tail and started in the general direction of the Isthmus of Panama. Ef they kept up the rate of travel at which they started, they arrived there inside of a week, too – or mebbe even sooner. I s’pose it depended largely on whether their feet held out.

“Hawley and his gang run the gun forward to the crest of a little swale ready to give the retreatin’ forces another treatment in case they should rally and re-form, but a second dose wasn’t needed. Howsomever, before the squad came back, they scouted acrost the field to see whut execution their lone charge had done. Near to where the shell had busted they gathered up six skeered soldiers – fellers that had dropped down, skeered but unhurt, when the smash come and had been layin’ there in a hollow in the ground, fearin’ the worst and hopin’ fur the best. So they brung ’em back in with ’em and turned ’em over to the Liberals ez prisoners of war.

“The rest of us were canterin’ down on the flat by now. We arrived in time to observe that some of the victorious Liberals were engaged in lashin’ the prisoners’ elbows together with ropes, behind their backs, and that whut looked like a firin’ squad was linin’ up conveniently clos’t by. Billy Priest went and located a feller that could interpret after a fashion and inquired whut was the idea. The interpreter feller explained that the idea was to line them six prisoners up and shoot ’em to death.

“‘Boys,’ says Billy, turnin’ to us, ‘I’m afeared we’ll have to interfere with the contemplated festivalities. Our friends are too gently-inclined durin’ the hostilities and too blame’ bloodthirsty afterward to suit me. Let us bid an adieu to ’em and purceed upon our way. But first,’ he says, ‘let us break into the picture long enough to save those six poor devils standin’ over there in a row, all tied up like beef-critters fur the butcher.’

“So we rid in betwixt the condemned and the firin’ squad and by various devices such ez drawin’ our carbines and our six-shooters, we made plain our purpose. At that a wave of disappointment run right through the whole army. You could see it travelin’ frum face to face under the dirt that was on said faces. Even the prisoners seemed a trifle put-out and downcasted. Later we found out why. But nobody offered to raise a hand ag’inst us.

“‘All right then,’ says Billy Priest, ‘so fur so good. And now I think we’d better be resumin’ our journey, takin’ our captives with us. I’ve got a presentiment,’ he says, ‘that they’d probably enjoy better health travelin’ along with us than they would stayin’ on with these here Liberals.’

“‘How about them four field-pieces?’ says one of the boys, speakin’ up. ‘There’s plenty of hosses to haul ’em. Hadn’t we better take them along with us, too? They’ll git awful lonesome bein’ left in such scurvy company – poor little things!’

“‘No,’ says Billy, ‘I reckin that wouldn’t be right. The prisoners are our’n by right of capture, but the guns ain’t. These fellers bought ’em off Shelby’s brigade and they’re entitled to keep ’em. But before we depart,’ he says, ‘it mout not be a bad idea to tinker with ’em a little with a view to sort of puttin’ ’em out of commission fur the time bein’. Our late hosts mout take a notion to turn ’em on us, ez we are goin’ away frum ’em and there’s a bare chance,’ he says, ‘that they might hit some of us – by accident.’

“So we tinkered with the guns and then we moved out in hollow formation with the six prisoners marchin’ along in the middle and not a soul undertakin’ to halt us ez we went. On the whole them Liberals seemed right pleased to get shet of us. But when we’d gone along fur a mile or so, one of the Mexicans flopped down on his knees and begin to jabber. And then the other five follered suit and jabbered with him. After ’while it dawned on us that they were beggin’ us to kill ’em quick and not torture ’em, they thinkin’ we’d only saved ’em frum bein’ shot in order to do something much more painful to ’em at our leisure. So then four or five of the boys dropped down off their mounts and untied ’em and faced ’em about so the open country was in front of ’em and give ’em a friendly kick or two frum behind ez a notice to ’em to be on their way. They lit out into the scrub and were gone the same ez ef they’d been so many Molly Cottontails.

“Fur upward of a week then, we moved along, headin’ mighty nigh due South. Considerin’ that the country was supposed to be in the midst of civil war we saw powerful few evidences of it ez we rode through. Life fur the humble Mexican appeared to be waggin’ along about ez usual, but was nothin’ to brag about, at that. We seen him plowin’ amongst the prevalent desolation with a forked piece of wood, one fork bein’ hitched to a yoke of oxen and the other fork bein’ shod with a little strip of rusty iron. We seen him languidly gatherin’ his wheat, him goin’ ahead and pullin’ it up out of the ground, roots and all and pilin’ it in puny heaps, and then the women comin’ along behind him and tyin’ it in little bunches with strings. Another place we seen him and his women folks threshin’ grain by beatin’ it with sticks and dependin’ on the wind to help ’em winnow the wheat from the chaff jest ez it is written ’twas done in the Bible days. We seen him in his hours of ease, fightin’ his chicken-cock against some other feller’s game-bird, and gamblin’ and scratchin’ his flea-bites and the more we seen of him the less we seemed to keer fur him. He mout of been all right in his way, but he wasn’t our kind of folks; I reckin that was it.

“And he repaid the compliment by not appearin’ to keer very deeply fur us strangers neither, but the women seemed to take to us, mightily. They’d come out to us frum their little dried mud cabins bringin’ us beans and them flat batter-cakes of their’n and even sometimes milk and butter. Also they gave us roughage fur our hosses and wouldn’t take pay fur none of it, indicatin’ by signs that it was all a free gift. Whut between the grazin’ they got and the dried fodder the women gave us, our hosses took on flesh and weren’t sech ga’nted crowbaits ez they had been.

“Seven days of traversin’ that miser’ble land and then, son, we ran smack into the Imperial scouts and found we’d arrived within less ’en a day’s march of the city of Monterey. Purty soon out come a detachment of cavalry to meet us and inquire into our business and a most Godforsaken lookin’ bunch they were, but with ’em they had half a dozen Confederates – Missoury boys, all of ’em exceptin’ one, him bein’ frum Louisiana; and these here Missoury fellers told us some news. It seemed that after Shelby and Price and Hindman got to Monterey their little army had split in two, most of its members headin’ off toward the City of Mexico with no purticular object in view so fur ez anybody knowed but jest filled with a restless cravin’ to stay in the saddle and keep movin’, and the rest strikin’ Westward toward the Pacific Coast.

“But about two hundred of ’em had stayed behind and enlisted at Monterey, havin’ been given a bounty of six hundred dollars apiece and a promise of one hundred dollars a month in pay ef they’d fight fur Maximilian. The delegation that had rode out to meet us now were part and parcel of that two hundred. They seemed tickled to death to see us and they bragged about the money they were gittin’, but ef you watched ’em kind of clos’t you could tell, mighty easy, they weren’t exactly overjoyed and carried away with enthusiasm over their present jobs. They told us in confidence that the French officers in their army were fine soldiers and done the best they could with the material they had, but that the rank and file were small potatoes and few in the hill. In fact, we gathered frum remarks let fall here and there that after servin’ ez a Confederate fur a period of years and fightin’ ag’inst husky fellers frum Indiana or Kansas or Michigan or somewheres up that way, bein’ a soldier of fortune with the Imperials and fightin’ ag’inst the Liberals was, comparatively speakin’, a mighty tame pursuit – that you’d probably live longer so doin’, but you wouldn’t have anywheres near the excitement. On top of all that, though, they extended a cordial invitation to us to go on back to Monterey with ’em and enlist under the Maximilian government.

“Some of our outfit seemed to sort of lean toward the proposition and some to sort of lean ag’inst it, without exactly statin’ their reasons why and wherefore. But amongst us all there wasn’t a man but whut relied mighty implicit on Billy Priest’s judgment, and besides which, you’ve got to remember, son, that discipline had come to be a sort of an ingrained habit with us. We’d got used to lookin’ to our leaders to show us the way and give us our orders and then we’d try to obey ’em, spite of hell and high water. That’s the way it had been with us for four long years and that’s the way it still was with us. So under the circumstances, with sentiment divided ez it was, we-all waited to see how Billy Priest felt, because ez I jest told you, we imposed a heap of confidence in his views on purty near any subject you mout mention. The final say-so bein’ put up to him, he studied a little and then he said to the Missoury boys that hearin’ frum them about the Confederacy havin’ split up into pieces had injected a new and a different aspect into the case and in his belief it was a thing that needed thinkin’ over and mebbe sleepin’ on. Accordin’ly, ef it was all the same to them, he’d like to wait till next mornin’ before comin’ to a definite decision and he believed that in this his associates would concur with him. That was agreeable to the fellers that had brung us the invitation, or ef it wasn’t they let on like it was anyhow, and so we left the matter standin’ where it was without further argument on their part.

“They told us good-by and expressed the hope that they’d see us next day in Monterey and then they rid on back to headquarters to report progress on the part of the committee on new members and to ask further time, I s’pose. Ez fur us, we went into camp right where we was.

“Most of us suspicioned that after we’d fed the hosses and et our supper Billy would call a sort of caucus and git the sense of the meetin’, but he didn’t take no steps in that direction and of course nobody else felt qualified to do so. After a while the fires we’d lit to cook our victuals on begin to die down low and the boys started to turn in. There wasn’t much talkin’ or singin’, or skylarkin’ round, but a whole heap of thinkin’ was goin’ on – you could feel it in the air. I was layin’ there on the ground under my old ragged blankets with my saddle fur a pillow and the sky fur my bed canopy, but I didn’t drop right off like I usually done. I was busy ponderin’ over in my mind quite a number of things. I remember how gash’ly and on-earthly them old cactus plants looked, loomin’ up all ’round me there in the darkness and how strange the stars looked, a-shinin’ overhead. They didn’t seem like the same stars we’d been used to sleepin’ under before we come on down here into Mexico. Even the new moon had a different look, ez though it was another moon frum the one that had furnished light fur us to go possum-huntin’ by when we were striplin’ boys growin’ up. This here one was a lonesome, strange, furreign-lookin’ moon, ef you git my meanin’? Anyhow it seemed so to me.

“Somebody spoke my name right alongside of me, and I turn’t over and raised up my head and there was Billy Priest hunkered down. He had a little scrap of dried greasewood in his hand and he was scratchin’ with it in the dirt in a kind of an absent-minded way.

“‘You ain’t asleep yet, Jimmy?’ he says to me.

“‘No,’ I says, ‘I’ve been layin’ here, studyin’.’

“‘That so?’ he says. ‘Whut about in particular?’

“‘Oh nothin’ in particular,’ I says, ‘jest studyin’.’

“He don’t say anything more fur a minute; jest keepin’ on makin’ little marks in the dirt with the end of his stick. Then he says to me: “‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘I’ve been doin’ right smart thinkin’ myself.’

“‘Have you?’ I says.

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I have. I’ve been thinkin’ that whilst peppers make quite spicy eatin’ and beans are claimed to be very nourishin’ articles of food, still when taken to excess they’re liable to pall on the palate, sooner or later.’

“‘They certainly are,’ I says.

“‘Let’s see,’ he says. ‘This is the last week in July, ain’t it? Back in God’s country, the first of the home-grown watermelons oughter be comin’ in about now, oughten they? And in about another week from now they’ll be pickin’ those great big stripedy rattlesnake melons that grow in the river bottoms down below town, won’t they?’

“‘Yes,’ I says, ‘they will, ef the season ain’t been rainy and set ’em back.’

“‘Let us hope it ain’t,’ he says, and I could hear his stick scratchin’ in the grit of that desert land, makin’ a scrabblin’ itchy kind of sound.

“‘Jimmy Bagby,’ he says, ‘any man’s liable to make a mistake sometimes, but that don’t necessarily stamp him ez a fool onlessen he sticks to it too long after he’s found out it is a mistake.’

“‘Billy,’ I says, ‘I can’t take issue with you there.’”

“‘F’r instance now,’ he says, ‘you take a remark which I let fall some weeks back touchin’ on flags. Well I’ve been thinkin’ that remark over, Jimmy, and I’ve about come to the conclusion that ef a man has to give up the flag he fought under and can’t have it no longer, he mout in time come to be equally comfortable in the shadder of the flag he was born under. He might even come to love ’em both, mighty sincerely – lovin’ one fur whut it meant to him oncet and fur all the traditions and all the memories it stands fur, and lovin’ the other fur whut it may mean to him now and whut it’s liable to mean to his children and their children.’

“‘But Billy,’ I says, ‘when all is said and done, we fit in defense of a constitutional principle.’

“‘You bet we did,’ he says; ‘but it’s mostly all been said and it’s practically all been done. I figger it out this way, Jimmy. Regardless of the merits of a given case, ef a man fights fur whut he thinks is right, so fur ez he pussonally is concerned, he fights fur whut is right. I ain’t expectin’ it to happen yit awhile, but I’m willin’ to bet you something that in the days ahead both sides will come to feel jest that way about it too.’

“‘Do you think so, Billy?’ I says.

“‘Jimmy,’ he say, ‘I don’t only think so – I jest natchelly knows so. I feel it in my bones.’

“‘Then I persume you must be correct,’ I says.

“He waits a minute and then he says: ‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘I don’t believe I’d ever make a success ez one of these here passenger-pigeons. Now, a passenger-pigeon ain’t got no regular native land of his own. He loves one country part of the time and another country part of the time, dividin’ his seasons betwixt ’em. Now with me I’m afraid it’s different.’

“‘Billy,’ I says, ‘I’ve about re’ch the conclusion that I wasn’t cut out to be a passenger-pigeon, neither.’

“He waits a minute, me holdin’ back fur him to speak and wonderin’ whut his next subject is goin’ to be. Bill Priest always was a master one to ramble in his conversations. After a while he speaks, very pensive:

“‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘ef a man was to git up on a hoss, say tomorrow mornin’ and ride along right stiddy he’d jest about git home by hog-killin’ time, wouldn’t he?’

“‘Jest about,’ I says, ‘ef nothin’ serious happened to delay him on the way.’

“‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘the spare ribs and the chitterlin’s would jest about be ripe when he arrove back.’

“I didn’t make no answer to that – my mouth was waterin’ so I couldn’t speak. Besides there didn’t seem to be nothin’ to say.

“‘The fall revivals ought to be startin’ up about then, too,’ he says, ‘old folks gittin’ religion all over ag’in and the mourners’ bench overflowin’, and off in the back pews and in the dark corners young folks flirtin’ with one another and holdin’ hands under cover of the hymn-books. But all the girls we left behind us have probably got new beaux by now, don’t you reckin?’

“‘Yes, Billy,’ I says, ‘I reckin they have and I don’t know ez I could blame ’em much neither, whut with us streakin’ ’way off down here like a passel of idiots.’

“He gits up and throws away his stick.

“‘Well, Jimmy,’ he says, ‘I’m powerful glad to find out we agree on so many topics. Well, good night,’ he says.

“‘Good night,’ I says, and then I rolled over and went right off to sleep. But before I dropped off I ketched a peep of Billy Priest, squattin’ down alongside one of the other boys, and doubtless fixin’ to read that other feller’s thoughts like a book the same ez he’d jest been readin’ mine.

“Well, son, the next mornin’ at sun-up we were all up, too. We had our breakfast, sech ez it was, and broke camp and mounted and started off with Billy Priest ridin’ at the head of the column and me stickin’ clos’t beside him. I didn’t know fur sure whut was on the mind of anybody else in that there cavalcade of gentlemen rangers, but I was mighty certain about whut I aimed to do. I aimed to stick with Billy Priest; that’s whut. Strange to say, nobody ast any questions about whut we were goin’ to do with regards to them Imperalists waitin’ there fur us in Monterey. You never saw such a silent lot of troopers in your life. There wasn’t no singin’ nor laughin’ and mighty little talkin’. But fur half an hour or so there was some good, stiddy lopin’.

“Presently one of the boys pulled out of line and spurred up alongside of our chief.

“’S’cuse me, commander,’ he says, ‘but it begins to look to me like we were back-trackin’ on our own trail.’

“Billy looks at him, grinnin’ a little through his whiskers. We all had whiskers on our faces, or the startin’s of ’em.

“‘Bless my soul, I believe you’re right!’ says Billy. ‘Why, you’ve got the makin’s of a scout in you.’

“‘But look here,’ says the other feller, still sort of puzzled-like, ‘that means we’re headin’ due North, don’t it?’

“‘It means I’m headin’ North,’ says Billy, and at that he quit grinnin’. ‘But you, nor no one else in this troop don’t have to foller along onlessen you’re minded so to do. Every man here is a free agent and his own boss. And ef anybody is dissatisfied with the route I’m takin’ and favors some other, I’d like fur him to come out now and say so. It won’t take me more’n thirty seconds to resign my leadership.’

“‘Oh, that’s all right,’ says the other feller, ‘I was merely astin’ the question, that’s all. I ain’t dissatisfied. I voted fur you ez commander fur the entire campaign – not fur jest part of it. I was fur you when we elected you, and I’m fur you yit.’

“And with that he wheeled and racked along back to his place. Purty soon Billy looked over his shoulder along the column and an idea struck him. Not fur behind him Tom Moss was joggin’ along with his old battered banjo swung acrost his back. Havin’ toted that there banjo of his’n all through the war he’d likewise brought it along with him into Mexico. He had a mighty pleasin’ voice, too, and the way he could sing and play that song about him bein’ a good old rebel and not carin’ a dam’ made you feel that he didn’t care a dam’, neither. Billy beckoned to him and Tom rid up alongside and Billy whispered something in his ear. Tom’s face all lit up then and he on-slung his banjo frum over his shoulder and throwed one laig over his saddle-bow and hit the strings a couple of licks and reared his head back and in another second he was singin’ at the top of his voice. But this time he wasn’t singin’ the song about bein’ a good old rebel. He was singin’ the one that begins:

‘The sun shines bright on my Old Kintucky Home;

’Tis Summer, the darkies are gay,

The corn tops are ripe and the medders are in bloom,

And the birds make music all the day.’

“In another minute everybody else was singin’, too – singin’ and gallopin’. Son, you never in your whole life seen so many hairy, ragged, rusty fellers on hoss-back a-tearin’ along through the dust of a strange land, actin’ like they were all in a powerful hurry to git somewheres and skeered the gates would be shut before they arrived. Boy, listen: the homesickness jest popped out through my pores like perspiration.

“It taken us all of seven days to git frum the border acros’t that long stretch of waste to within a day’s ride of the city of Monterey. It only taken us four and a half to git back ag’in to the border, the natives standin’ by to watch us as we tore on past ’em. The sun was still several hours high on the evenin’ of the fifth day when we come in sight of the Rio Grande River; and I don’t ever seem to recall a stretch of muddy yaller water that looked so grateful to my eyes ez that one looked.

“We come canterin’ down to the water’s edge, all of us bein’ plum’ jaded and mighty travel-worn. And there, right over yond’ on the fur bank we could see the peaky tops of some army tents standin’ in rows and we heared the notes of a bugle, soundin’ mighty sweet and clear in that still air. And it dawned on us that by a strange coincidence whut wouldn’t be liable to happen oncet in a dozen years had happened in our purticular case – that the United States Government, ez represented by a detachment of its military forces, had moved down to the line at a point almost opposite to the place where we aimed to cross back over.

“I ain’t sure yit whut it was – it mout a-been the first sight of the foeman he’d fit ag’inst so long that riled him or it mout a-been merely a sort of sneakin’ desire to make out like he purposed to hold off to the very last and then be won over by sweet blandishments – but jest ez we reached the river, a big feller hailin’ frum down in Bland County rid up in front of Billy Priest and he says he wants to ast him a question.

“‘Fire away,’ says Billy.

“‘Bill Priest,’ says the Bland County feller, ‘I take it to be your intention to go back into the oncet free but now conquered state of Texas?’

“‘Well, pardner,’ says Billy in that whiny way of his’n, ‘you certainly are a slow one when it comes to pickin’ up current gossip ez it flits to and fro about the neighborhood. Why do you s’pose we’ve all been ridin’ hell-fur-leather in this direction endurin’ of the past few days onlessen it was with that identical notion in mind?’

“‘Never mind that now,’ says the other feller. ‘Circumstances alter cases. Don’t you see that there camp over yonder is a camp of Yankee soldiers?’

“‘Ef my suspicions are correct that’s jest whut it is,’ says Billy very politely. ‘Whut of it?’

“‘Well,’ says the other feller, ‘did it ever occur to you that ef we cross here them Yankees will call on us to lay down the arms which we’ve toted so long? Did it ever occur to you that mebbe they’d even expect us to take their dam’ oath of allegiance?’

“‘Yes,’ says Billy Priest, ‘sence you bring up the subject, it had occurred to me that they mout do jest that. And likewise it has also occurred to me that when them formalities are concluded they mout extend the hospitalities of the occasion by invitin’ us to set down with them to a meal of real human vittles. Why,’ he says, ‘I ain’t tasted a cup of genuwyne coffee in so long that——!’

“The other feller breaks in on him before Billy can git done with whut he’s sayin’.

“‘And you,’ he says, sort of sneerful and insinuatin’, ‘you, here only some three or four months back was a ring-leader and a head-devil in formin’ this here expedition. You was goin’ round makin’ your brags that you’d be the last one to surrender – you! And we’ve been callin’ you Fightin’ Billy! Fightin’ Billy? Hell’s fire!’

“Billy rammed his heels in his hoss’s flanks and shoved over, only reinin’ up when he was touchin’ laigs with the Bland County feller. A shiny little blue light come into his eyes and the veins in his neck all swelled out.

“‘My esteemed friend and feller-country-man,’ says Billy, speakin’ plenty slow and plenty polite, ‘ef any gentleman present is inclined to make a pussonal matter of it, I’ll undertake to endeavor to prove up my right to that there title right here and now. But ef not, I wish to state fur the benefit of all concerned that frum this minute I ain’t figgerin’ on wearin’ the nickname any longer. Frum where I set it looks to me like this is a mighty fitten and appropriate time to go out of the fightin’ business and resume the placid and pleasant ways of peace. Frum now on, to friends ez well ez to strangers, I’m goin’ to be jest plain William Pitman Priest, Esquire, attorney and counsellor-at-law. I ast you all to kindly bear it in mind. And furthermore speakin’ solely and exclusively fur the said William Pitman Priest, I will state it is my intention of gittin’ acrost this here river in time to eat my supper on the soil of my own country. Ef anybody here feels like goin’ along with me I’ll be glad of his company. Ef not, I’ll bid all you good comrades an affectionate farewell and jest jog along over all by my lonesome self.’

“But, of course, when he said that last he was jest funnin’ – talkin’ to hear hisself talk. He knowed good and well we would all go with him. And we did. And ez fur ez I know none of us ever had cause to regret takin’ the step.

“By hurryin’, we did git back home before hog-killin’ time. And then after a spell, when we’d had our disabilities removed, some of us like Billy Priest started runnin’ fur office and bein’ elected with reasonable regularity and some of us, like me, went into business. We lived through bayonet rule and reconstruction and carpet-baggery, and we lived to see all them evils die out and a better feelin’ and a better understandin’ come in. We’ve been livin’ ever since, sech of us ez are still survivin’. I’ve done consider’ble livin’ myself. I’ve lived to see North and South united. I’ve even lived to see my own daughter married to the son of a Northern soldier, with the full consent of the families on both sides. And so that’s how it happens I’ve got a grandson that’s part Yankee and part Confederate in his breedin’. I reckin there ain’t nobody that’s ez plum’ foolish ez I am about that there little, curly-headed sassy tike, without it’s his grandfather on the other side, old Major Ashcroft. We differ radically on politics, the Major bein’ a besotted and hopeless black Republikin; and try ez I will I ain’t never been able to cure him of a delusion of his’n that the Ninth Michigan could a-helt its own ag’inst King’s Hell Hounds ef ever they’d met up on the field of battle; but in other respects he’s a fairly intelligent man; and he certainly does coincide with me that betwixt us we’ve got the smartest four-year-old youngster fur a grandchild that ever was born. There’s hope fur a nation that kin produce sech children ez that one, ef I do say it myself.”

He stood up and shook himself.

“In fact, son,” concluded Sergeant Bagby, “you mout safely say that, takin’ one thing with another, this country is turnin’ out to be quite a success.”

The Pictorial Review, Jun 1917
Those Times and These (1917)

Mr. Felsburg Gets Even

~

Of all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit that Mr. Herman Felsburg’s pair were the most humorous legs. When it came to legs – funny legs – the palm was his without a struggle. Casting up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent, pigeon-toed.

I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg’s legs first acquired for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in brighter and more vivid colors than many a more important thing which occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.

I feel it to be so in my case. By virtue of a certain magic I see a small, inquisitive boy sitting on the top step of the wide front porch of an old white house; and as he sits he hugs his bare knees within the circle of his arms and listens with two wide-open ears to the talk that shuttles back and forth among three or four old men who are taking their comfort in easy-chairs behind a thick screen of dishrag and morning glory and balsam-apple vines.

I am that small boy who listens; and, as the picture forms and frames itself in my mind, one of the men is apt to be my uncle. He was not my uncle by blood ties or marriage, but through adoption only, as was the custom down our way in those days and, to a certain degree, is still the custom; and, besides, I was his namesake.

I know now, when by comparison I subject the scene to analysis, that they were not such very old men – then. They are old enough now – such of them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men; but when I re-create the vision out of the back of my head I invest them with an incredible antiquity and a vasty wisdom, because, as I said just now, I am looking at them with the eyes of a small boy again. Also, it seems to me, the season always is summer – late afternoon or early evening of a hot, lazy summer day.

It was right there, perched upon the top step of Judge Priest’s front porch, that I heard, piece by piece, the unwritten history of our town – its tragedies and its farces, its homely romances and its homely epics. There I heard the story of Singin’ Sandy Riggs, who, like Coligny, finally won by being repeatedly whipped; and his fist feud with Harve Allen, the bully; and the story of old Marm Perry, the Witch. I don’t suppose she was a witch really; but she owned a black cat and she had a droopy lid, which hung down over one red eye, and she lived a friendless life.

And so when the babies in the settlement began to sicken and die of the spotted fever somebody advanced the very plausible suggestion that Marm Perry had laid a spell upon the children, and nearly everybody else believed it. A man whose child fell ill of the plague in the very hour when Marm Perry had spoken to the little thing took a silver dollar and melted it down and made a silver bullet of it – because, of course, witches were immune to slugs of lead – and on the night after the day when they buried his baby he slipped up to Marm Perry’s cabin and fired through the window at her as she sat, with her black cat in her lap, mouthing her empty gums over her supper. The bullet missed her – and he was a good shot, too, that man was. Practically all the men who lived in those days on the spot where our town was to stand were good shots. They had to be – or else go hungry frequently.

When the news of this spread they knew for certain that only by fire could the evil charm be broken and the conjure-woman be destroyed. So one night soon after that a party of men broke into Marm Perry’s cabin and made prisoners of her and her cat. They muffled her head in a bedquilt and they thrust the cat into a bag, both of them yowling and kicking; and they carried them to a place on the bluff above Island Creek, a mile or so from the young settlement, and there they kindled a great fire of brush; and when the flames had taken good hold of the wood they threw Marm Perry and her cat into the blaze and stood back to see them burn. Mind you, this didn’t happen at Salem, Massachusetts, in or about the year 1692. It happened less than a century ago near a small river landing on what was then the southwestern frontier of these United States.

There were certain men, though – leaders of opinion and action in the rough young community – who did not altogether hold with the theory that the evil eye was killing off the babies. Somehow they learned what was afoot and they followed, hotspeed, on the trail of the volunteer executioners. As the tale has stood through nearly a hundred years of telling, they arrived barely in time. When they broke through the ring of witch burners and snatched Marm Perry off the pyre, her apron strings had burned in two. As for the cat, it burst through the bag and ran off through the woods, with its fur all ablaze, and was never seen again. I remember how I used to dream that story over and over again. Always in my dreams it reached its climax when that living firebrand went tearing off into the thickets. Somehow, to me, the unsalvaged cat took on more importance than its rescued owner.

There were times, too, when I chanced to be the only caller upon Judge Priest’s front porch, and these are the times which in retrospect seem to me to have been the finest of all. I used to slip away from home alone, along toward suppertime, and pay the Judge a visit. Many and many a day, sitting there on that porch step, I watched the birds going to bed. His big front yard was a great place for the birds. In the deep grass, all summer long and all day long, the cock partridge would be directing the attention of a mythical Bob White to the fact that his peaches were ripe and overripe. If spared by boys and house cats until the hunting season began he would captain a covey. Now he was chiefly concerned with a family. Years later I found that his dictionary name was American quail; but to us then he was a partridge, and in our town we still know him by no other title.

Forgetting all about the dogs and the guns of the autumn before, he would even invade Judge Priest’s chicken lot to pick up titbits overlooked by the dull-eyed resident flock; and toward twilight, growing bolder still, he would whistle and whistle from the tall white gate post of the front fence, while his trim brown helpmate clucked lullabies to her speckled brood in the rank tangle back of the quince bushes.

When the redbirds called it a day and knocked off, the mockingbirds took up the job and on clear moonlight nights sang all night in the honey locusts. Just before sunset yellow-hammers would be flickering about, tremendously occupied with things forgotten until then; and the chimney swifts that nested in Judge Priest’s chimney would go whooshing up and down the sooty flue, making haunted-house noises in the old sitting room below.

Sprawled in his favorite porch chair, the Judge would talk and I would listen. Sometimes, the situation being reversed, I would talk and he listen. Under the spell of his sympathetic understanding I would be moved to do what that most sensitive and secretive of creatures – a small boy – rarely does do: I would bestow my confidences upon him. And if he felt like laughing – at least, he never laughed. And if he felt that the disclosures called for a lecture he rarely did that, either; but if he did the admonition was so cleverly sugar-coated by his way of framing it that I took it down without tasting it.

As I see the vision now, it was at the close of a mighty warm day, when the sun went down as a red-hot ball and all the west was copper-plated with promise of more heat tomorrow, when Mr. Herman Felsburg passed. I don’t know what errand was taking him up Clay Street that evening – he lived clear over on the other side of town. But, anyway, he passed; and as he headed into the sunset glow I was inspired by a boy’s instinctive appreciation of the ludicrous to speak of the peculiar conformation of Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I don’t recall now just what it was I said, but I do recall, as clearly as though it happened yesterday, the look that came into Judge Priest’s chubby round face.

“Aha!” he said; and from the way he said it I knew he was displeased with me. He didn’t scold me, though – only he peered at me over his glasses until I felt my repentant soul shrivelling smaller and smaller inside of me; and then after a bit he said: “Aha! Well, son, I reckin mebbe you’re right. Old Man Herman has got a funny-lookin’ pair of laigs, ain’t he? They do look kinder like a set of hames that ain’t been treated kindly, don’t they? Whut was it you said they favored – horse collars, wasn’t it?” I tucked a regretful head down between my hunched shoulders, making no reply. After another little pause he went on:

“Well, sonny, ef you should be spared to grow up to be a man, and there should be a war comin’ along, and you should git drawed into it someway, jest you remember this: Ef your laigs take you into ez many tight places and into ez many hard-fit fights as I’ve saw them little crookedy laigs takin’ that little man, you won’t have no call to feel ashamed of ’em – not even ef yours should be so twisted you’d have to walk backward in order to go furward.”

At hearing this my astonishment was so great I forgot my remorse of a minute before. I took it for granted that off yonder, in those far-away days, most of the older men in our town had seen service on one side or the other in the Big War – mainly on the Southern side. But somehow it never occurred to me that Mr. Herman Felsburg might also have been a soldier. As far back as I recalled he had been in the clothing business. Boylike, I assumed he had always been in the clothing business. So——

“Was Mr. Felsburg in the war?” I asked.

“He most suttinly was,” answered Judge Priest.

“As a regular sure-nuff soldier!” I asked, still in doubt.

“Ez a reg’lar sure-nuff soldier.”

I considered for a moment.

“Why, he’s Jewish, ain’t he, Judge?” I asked next.

“So fur as my best information and belief go, he’s practically exclusively all Jewish,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle.

“But I didn’t think Jewish gentlemen ever did any fighting, Judge?”

I imagine that bewilderment was in my tone, for my juvenile education was undergoing enlargement by leaps and bounds.

“Didn’t you?” he said. “Well, boy, you go to Sunday school, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, sir – every Sunday – nearly.”

“Well, didn’t you ever hear tell at Sunday school of a little feller named David that taken a rock-sling and killed a big giant named Goliath?”

“Yes, sir; but——”

“Well, that there little feller David was a Jew.”

“I know, sir; but – but that was so long ago!”

“It was quite a spell back, and that’s a fact,” agreed Judge Priest. “Even so, I reckin human nature continues to keep right on bein’ human nature. You’ll be findin’ that out, son, when you git a little further along in years. They learnt you about Samson, too, didn’t they – at that there Sunday school?”

I am quite sure I must have shown enthusiasm along here. At that period Samson was, with me, a favorite character in history. By reason of his recorded performances he held rank in my estimation with Israel Putnam and General N. B. Forrest.

“Aha!” continued the Judge. “Old Man Samson was right smart of a fighter, takin’ one thing with another, wasn’t he? Remember hearin’ about that time when he taken the jawbone of an ass and killed up I don’t know how many of them old Philistines?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And then that other time when they cut off his hair short and put him in jail, and after it grew out again he pulled the temple right smack down and killed everybody!”

“It strikes me I did hear somebody speakin’ of that circumstance too. I expect it must have created a right smart talk round the neighborhood.”

I can hear the old Judge saying this, and I can see – across the years – the quizzical little wrinkles bunching at the corners of his eyes.

He sat a minute looking down at me and smiling.

“Samson was much of a man – and he was a Jew.”

“Was he?” I was shocked in a new place.

“That’s jest exactly what he was. And there was a man oncet named Judas – not the Judas you’ve heared about, but a feller with the full name of Judas Maccabaeus; and he was such a pert hand at fightin’ they called him the Hammer of the Jews. Judgin’ by whut I’ve been able to glean about him, his enemies felt jest as well satisfied ef they could hear, before the hostilities started, that Judas was laid up sick in bed somewheres. It taken considerable of a load off their minds, ez you might say.

“But – jest as you was sayin’, son, about David – it’s been a good while since them parties flourished. When we look back on it, it stretches all the way frum here to B. C.; and that’s a good long stretch, and a lot of things have been happenin’ meantime. But I sometimes git to thinkin’ that mebbe little Herman Felsburg has got some of that old-time Jew fightin’ blood in his veins. Anyhow, he belongs to the same breed. No, sirree, sonny; it don’t always pay to judge a man by his laigs. You kin do that with regards to a frog or a grasshopper, or even sometimes with a chicken; but not with a man. It ain’t the shape of ’em that counts – it’s where they’ll take you in time of trouble.”

He cocked his head down at me – I saying nothing at all. There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say; so I maintained silence and he spoke on:

“You jest bear that in mind next time you feel moved to talk about laigs. And ef it should happen to be Mister Felsburg’s laigs that you’re takin’ fur your text, remember this whut I’m tellin’ you now: They may be crooked; but, son, there ain’t no gamer pair of laigs nowheres in this world. I’ve seen ’em carryin’ him into battle when, all the time, my knees was knockin’ together, the same ez one of these here end men in a minstrel show knocks his bones together. His laigs may ’a’ trembled a little bit too – I ain’t sayin’ they didn’t – but they kept right on promenadin’ him up to where the trouble was; and that’s the main p’int with a set of shanks. You jest remember that.”

Being sufficiently humbled, I said I would remember it.

“There’s still another thing about Herman Felsburg’s laigs that most people round here don’t know, neither,” added Judge Priest when I had made my pledge: “All up and down the back sides of his calves, and clear down on his shins, there’s a whole passel of little red marks. There’s so many of them little scars that they look jest like lacework on his skin.”

“Did he get them in the war?” I inquired eagerly, scenting a story.

“No; he got them before the war came along,” said Judge Priest. “Some of these times, sonny, when you’re a little bit older, I’ll tell you a tale about them scars on Mr. Felsburg’s laigs. There ain’t many besides me that knows it.”

“Couldn’t I hear it now?” I asked.

“I reckin you ain’t a suitable age to understand – y it,” said Judge Priest. “I reckin we’d better wait a few years. But I won’t forgit – I’ll tell you when the time’s ripe. Anyhow, there’s somethin’ else afoot now – somethin’ that ought to interest a hongry boy.”

I became aware of his house servant – Jeff Poindexter – standing in the hall doorway, waiting until his master concluded whatever he might be saying in order to make an important announcement.

“All right, Jeff!” said Judge Priest. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then, turning to me: “Son-boy, hadn’t you better stay here fur supper with me? I expect there’s vittles enough fur two. Come on – I’ll make Jeff run over to your house and tell your mother I kept you to supper with me.”

After that memorable supper with Judge Priest – all the meals I ever took as his guest were memorable events and still are – ensues a lapse, to be measured by years, before I heard the second chapter of what might be called the tale of Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I heard it one evening in the Judge’s sitting room.

A squeak had come into my voice, and there was a suspicion of down – a mere trace, as the chemists say – on my upper lip. I was in the second week of proud incumbency of my first regular job. I had gone to work on the Daily Evening News – the cubbiest of cub reporters, green as a young gourd, but proud as Potiphar over my new job and my new responsibilities. This time it was professional duty rather than the social instinct that took me to the old Judge’s house.

I had been charged by my editor to get from him divers litigatious facts relating to a decision he had that day rendered in the circuit court where he presided. The information having been vouchsafed, the talk took a various trend. Somewhere in the course of it Mr. Felsburg’s name came up and my memory ran back like a spark along a tarred string to that other day when he had promised to relate to me an episode connected with certain small scars on those two bandy legs of our leading clothing merchant.

The present occasion seemed fitting for hearing this long-delayed narrative. I reminded my host of his olden promise; and between puffs at his corncob pipe he told me the thing which I retell here and now, except that, for purposes of convenience, I have translated the actual wording of it out of Judge Priest’s vernacular into my own.

So doing, it devolves upon me, first off, to introduce into the main theme a character not heretofore mentioned – a man named Thomas Albritton, a farmer in our country, and at one period a prosperous one. He lived, while he lived – for he has been dead a good while now – six miles from town, on the Massac Creek Road. He lived there all his days. His father before him had cleared the timber off the land and built the two-room log house of squared logs, with the open “gallery” between. With additions, the house grew in time to be a rambling, roomy structure, but from first to last it kept its identity; and even after the last of the old tenants died off or moved off, and new tenants moved in, it was still known as the Albritton place. For all I know to the contrary, it yet goes by that name.

From pioneer days on until this Thomas Albritton became heir to the farm and head of the family, the Albrittons had been a forehanded breed – people with a name for thrift. In fact, I had it that night from the old Judge that, for a good many years after he grew up, this Thomas Albritton enjoyed his due share of affluence. He raised as good a grade of tobacco and as many bushels of corn to the acre as anybody in the Massac Bottoms raised; and, so far as ready money went, he was better off than most of his neighbors.

Perhaps, though, he was not so provident as his sire had been; or perhaps, in a financial way, he had in his latter years more than his share of bad luck. Anyhow, after a while he began to go downhill financially, which is another way of saying he got into debt. Piece by piece he sold off strips of the fertile creek lands his father had cleared. There came a day when he owned only the house, standing in its grove of honey locusts, and the twenty acres surrounding it; and the title to those remaining possessions was lapped and overlapped by mortgages.

It is the rule of this merry little planet of ours that some must go up while others go down. Otherwise there would be no room at the top for those who climb. Mr. Herman Felsburg was one who steadily went up. When first I knew him he was rated among the wealthy men of our town. By local standards of those days he was rich – very rich. To me, then, it seemed that always he must have been rich. But here Judge Priest undeceived me.

When Mr. Felsburg, after four years of honorable service as a private soldier in the army of the late Southern Confederacy, came back with the straggling handful that was left of Company B to the place where he had enlisted, he owned of this world’s goods just the rags he stood in, plus a canny brain, a provident and saving instinct, and a natural aptitude for barter and trade.

Somewhere, somehow, he scraped together a meager capital of a few dollars, and with this he opened a tiny cheap-John shop down on Market Square, where he sold gimcracks to darkies and poor whites. He prospered – it was inevitable that he should prosper. He took unto himself a wife of his own people; and between periods of bearing him children she helped him to save. He brought his younger brother, Ike, over from the old country and made Ike a full partner with him in his growing business.

Long before those of my own generation were born the little store down on Market Square was a reminiscence. Two blocks uptown, on the busiest corner in town, stood Felsburg Brothers’ Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, then, as now, the largest and the most enterprising merchandising establishment in our end of the state. If you could not find it at Felsburg Brothers’ you simply could not find it anywhere – that was all. It was more than a store; it was an institution, like the courthouse and the county-fair grounds.

The multitudinous affairs of the industry he had founded did not engage the energies of the busy little man with the funny legs to the exclusion of other things. As the saying goes, he branched out. He didn’t speculate – he was too conservative for that; but where there seemed a chance to invest an honest dollar with a reasonable degree of certainty of getting back, say, a dollar-ten in due time, he invested. Some people called it luck, which is what some people always call it when it turns out so; but, whether it was luck or just foresight, whatsoever he touched seemed bound to flourish and beget dividends.

Eventually, as befitting one who had risen to be a commanding figure in the commercial affairs of the community, Mr. Felsburg became an active factor in its financial affairs. As a stockholder, the Commonwealth Bank welcomed him to its hospitable midst. Soon it saw its way clear to making him a director and vice president. There was promise of profit in the use of his name. Printed on the letterheads, it gave added solidity and added substantiality to the bank’s roster. People liked him too. Behind his short round back they might gibe at the shape of his legs, and laugh at his ways of butchering up the English language and twisting up the metaphors with which he besprinkled his everyday walk and conversation; but, all the same, they liked him.

So, in his orbit Mr. Herman Felsburg went up and up to the very peaks of prominence; and while he did this, that other man I have mentioned – Thomas Albritton – went down and down until he descended to the very bottom of things.

In the fullness of time the lines of these two crossed, for it was at the Commonwealth Bank that Albritton negotiated the first and, later, the second of his loans upon his homestead. Indeed, it was Mr. Felsburg who both times insisted that Albritton be permitted to borrow, even though, when the matter of making the second mortgage came up, another director, who specialized in county property, pointed out that, to begin with, Albritton wasn’t doing very well; and that, in the second place, the amount of his indebtedness already was as much and very possibly more than as much as the farm would bring at forced sale.

Even though the bank bought it in to protect itself – and in his gloomy mind’s eye this director foresaw such a contingency – it might mean a cash loss; but Mr. Felsburg stood pat; and, against the judgment of his associates, he had his way about it. Subsequently, when Mr. Felsburg himself offered to relieve the bank of all possibility of an ultimate deficit by buying Albritton’s paper, the rest of the board felt relieved. Practically by acclamation he was permitted to do so.

Of this, however, the borrower knew nothing at all, Mr. Felsburg having made it a condition that his purchase should be a private transaction. So far as the borrower’s knowledge went, he owed principal and interest to the bank. There was no reason why Albritton should suspect that Mr. Herman Felsburg took any interest, selfish or otherwise, in his affairs, or that Mr. Felsburg entertained covetous designs upon his possessions. Mr. Felsburg wasn’t a money lender. He was a clothing merchant. And Albritton wasn’t a business man – his present condition, stripped as he was of most of his inheritance, and with the remaining portion heavily encumbered, gave ample proof of that.

Besides, the two men scarcely knew each other. Albritton was an occasional customer at the Oak Hall. But, for the matter of that, so was nearly everybody else in Red Gravel County; and when he came in to make a purchase it was never the senior member of the firm but always one of the clerks who served him. At such times Mr. Felsburg, from the back part of the store, would watch Mr. Albritton steadily. He never approached him, never offered to speak to him; but he watched him.

One day, not so very long after the date when Mr. Felsburg privately took over the mortgages on the Albritton place, Albritton drove in with a load of tobacco for the Buckner & Keys Warehouse; and, leaving his team and loaded wagon outside, he went into the Oak Hall to buy something. Adolph Dreifus, one of the salesmen, waited on him as he often had before.

The owners of the establishment were at the moment engaged in conference in the rear of the store. Mr. Ike Felsburg was urging, with all the eloquence at his command, the advisability of adding a line of trunks and suitcases to the stock – a venture which he personally strongly favored – when he became aware that his brother was not heeding what he had to say. Instead of heeding, Mr. Herman was peering along a vista of counters and garment racks to where Adolph Dreifus stood on one side of a show case and Tom Albritton stood on the other. There was a queer expression on Mr. Felsburg’s face. His eyes were squinted and his tongue licked at his lower lip.

“Hermy,” said the younger man, irritated that his brother’s attention should go wandering afar while a subject of such importance was under discussion, “Hermy, would you please be so good as to listen to me what I am saying to you?”

There was no answer. Mr. Herman continued to stare straight ahead. Mr. Ike raised his voice impatiently:

“Hermy!”

The older man turned on him with such suddenness that Mr. Ike almost slipped off the stool upon which he was perched.

“What’s the idea – yelling in my ear like a graven image?” demanded Mr. Herman angrily. “Do you think maybe I am deef or something?”

“But, Hermy,” complained Mr. Ike, “you ain’t listening at all. Twice now I have to call you; in fact, three times.”

“Is that so?” said Mr. Herman with elaborate sarcasm. “I suppose you think I got nothing whatever at all to do except I should listen to you? If I should spend all my time listening to you where would this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium be? I should like to ask you that. Gabble, gabble, gabble all day long – that is you! Me, I don’t talk so much; but I do some thinking.”

“But this is important, what I am trying to tell you, Hermy. Why should you be watching yonder, with a look on your face like as if you would like to bite somebody? Adolph Dreifus ain’t so dumb in the head but what he could sell a pair of suspenders or something without your glaring at him every move what he makes.”

“Did I say I was looking at Adolph Dreifus?” asked Mr. Herman truculently.

“Well, then, if you ain’t looking at Adolph, why should you look so hard at that Albritton fellow? He don’t owe us any money, so far as I know. For what he gets he pays cash, else we positively wouldn’t let him have the goods. I’ve seen you acting like this before, Hermy. Every time that Albritton comes in this place you drop whatever you are doing and hang round and hang round, watching him. I noticed it before; and I should like to ask——”

“Mister Ikey Felsburg,” said Mr. Herman slowly, “if you could mind your own business I should possibly be able to mind mine. Remember this, if you please – I look at who I please. You are too nosey and you talk too damn much with your mouth! I am older than what you are; and I tell you this – a talking jaw gathers no moss. Also, I would like to know, do my eyes belong to me or do they maybe belong to you, and you have just loaned ’em to me for a temporary accommodation?”

“But, Hermy——”

“Ike, shut up!”

And Mr. Ike, warned by the tone in his brother’s voice, shut up.

One afternoon, perhaps six months after this passage between the two partners, Mr. Herman crossed the street from the Oak Hall to the Commonwealth Bank to make a deposit.

Through his wicket window Herb Kivil, the cashier, spoke to him, lowering his voice: “Oh, Mr. Felsburg; you remember that Albritton matter you were speaking to me about week before last?”

Mr. Felsburg nodded.

“Well, the last interest payment is more than a month overdue now; and, on top of that, Albritton still owes the payment that was due three months before that. There’s not a chance in the world of his being able to pay up. He practically admitted as much when he was in here last, asking for more time. So I’ve followed your instructions in the matter.”

“That’s a good boy, Herby – a very good boy,” said Mr. Felsburg, seemingly much gratified. “You wrote him, then, like I told you?”

“Yes, sir; I wrote him. Yesterday I served notice on him by mail that we would have to go ahead and foreclose right away. So this morning he called me up by telephone from out in the country and asked us to hold off, please, until he could come in here and talk the thing over again.”

“Does he think maybe he can pay his just debts with talk?” inquired Mr. Felsburg.

“Well, if he does I’ll mighty soon undeceive him,” said Kivil. “And yet I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor devil – he’s had an awful run of luck, by all accounts. But here’s the thing I mainly wanted to speak to you about: You see, he still thinks the bank holds these mortgages. He doesn’t know you bought ’em from the bank; and what I wanted to ask you was this: Do you want me to tell him the truth when he comes in, or would you rather I waited and let him find it out for himself when the foreclosure goes through and the sheriff takes possession?”

“Don’t do neither one,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “You should call him up right away and tell him to come in to see about it tomorrow at ten o’clock. And then, Herby, when he does come in, you should tell him he should step over to the Oak Hall and see me in my office. That’s all what you should tell him. I got reasons of my own why I should prefer to break the news to him myself. Understand, Herby?”

“I understand, Mr. Felsburg,” said Mr. Kivil. “The minute he steps in here – before he’s had time to open up the subject – I’m to send him over to see you. Is that right?”

“That’s exactly right, Herby.” And, with pleased puckers at the corners of his eyes, Mr. Felsburg turned away and went stumping out.

Physically Mr. Felsburg didn’t in the least suggest a cat, and yet, after he was gone, Cashier Kivil found himself likening Mr. Felsburg to a cat with long claws – a cat that would play a long time with a captive mouse before killing it. He turned to his assistant, Emanuel Moon.

“What’s bred in the bone is bound to show sooner or later,” said Herb Kivil sagely. “I never thought of it before – but I guess there must be a mighty mean streak in Mr. Felsburg somewheres. I know this much: I’d hate mightily to owe him any money. Did you see that look on his face? He looked like a regular little old Shylock. I’ll bet you he takes his pound of flesh every pop – with an extra half pound or so thrown in for good measure.”

Long before ten o’clock the following morning Mr. Felsburg sat waiting in his little cubicle of a private office on the mezzanine floor at the back of the Oak Hall. He kept taking out his watch and looking at it. About ten minutes past the hour one of the clerks climbed the stairs to tell him that Mr. Thomas Albritton, from out in the Massac Creek neighborhood, was below, asking to see him.

“All right,” said Mr. Felsburg; “you should send him up here to me right away. Tell him I said, please, he should step this way.”

Presently, the clunk of heavy feet sounding on the steps, Mr. Felsburg reared himself back in his chair at his desk with an expectant, eager look on his face. In the doorway at the top of the stairs appeared the man for whom he waited – a middle-aged man with slumped shoulders, in worn, soiled garments, and in every line of his harassed face expressing the fact that here stood a failure, mutely craving the pardon of the world for being a failure. The yellow dust of country roads was thick, like powdered sulphur, in the wrinkles of his shoes and the creases of his shabby old coat. He had his hat in his hand.

“Good mornin’, Mr. Felsburg,” he said.

“Morning!”

Mr. Felsburg returned the greeting with a sharp and businesslike brevity. He did not invite the caller to seat himself. In the small room there was but one chair – the one that held Mr. Felsburg’s short form. So, during the early part of the scene that followed, Albritton continued to stand, while Mr. Felsburg enjoyed the advantage of being seated and at his ease where, without stirring, he might, from beneath his lowered brows, look the other up and down.

“I’ve just come from over at the Commonwealth Bank,” said Albritton, fumbling his hat. “I came in to see about getting an extension on my loans, and Mr. Kivil, over there, said I was to come on over here and talk to you first. He said you wanted to see me ’bout something – if I understood him right.”

Mr. Felsburg nodded in affirmation of this, but made no other reply. Albritton, having halted for a moment, went on again:

“I suppose you want to talk to me about my affairs, you being a director of the bank?”

“And also, furthermore, vice president,” supplemented Mr. Felsburg.

“Yes, suh. Just so. And that’s what made me suppose—”

Mr. Felsburg raised a fat, short hand upon which the biggest, whitest diamond in Red Gravel County glittered.

“You should not talk with me as an officer of that bank – if you will be so good, please,” he stated. “You should talk with me now as an individual.”

“An individual? I’m afraid I don’t understand you, suh.”

“Pretty soon you will, Mr. Albritton. This is an individual matter – just between you and me; because I, and not the bank, am the party what holds these here mortgages on your place.”

“You hold ’em?”

“Sure! I bought both those mortgages off the bank quite some time ago. I own those mortgages – and not anybody else whatsoever.”

“But I thought—”

“You don’t need to think. You need only that you should listen at what I am telling you now. It is me – Herman Felsburg, Esquire, of the Oak Hall Clothing Emporium – to which you owe this money, principal and likewise interest. So we will talk together, man to man, if you please, Mr. Albritton. Do I make myself plain? I do.”

The debtor dropped to his side the hand with which he had been rubbing a perplexed forehead. A little gleam, as of hope reawakening, came into his eyes.

“Well, suh,” he said, “you sort of take me by surprise – I didn’t have any idea that was the state of the case at all. Then, all along, the bank has just been representing you in the matter?”

“As my agent – yes,” said the little merchant.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not sorry to hear it,” said Albritton. “A bank has got its rules, I reckin, and has to live up to ’em. But, dealing with you, suh, as an individual, is another thing altogether. Anyhow, I’m hoping so, Mr. Felsburg.”

“How you make that out?”

Mr. Felsburg’s tone was so sharply staccato that Albritton’s face fell a little.

“Well, suh, I’m hoping that maybe you can see your way clear not to foreclose on me just yet a while. I’d hate mightily to lose my home – I would so! I was born there, Mr. Felsburg. And I’ve got a sickly wife and a whole houseful of children. I don’t know where I’d turn to get another roof over their heads if I was driven off my place. I know I owe you the money and by law you’re entitled to it; but I certainly would appreciate the favor if you’d give me a little more time.”

“So? And was there any other little favor you’d like to ask from me, Mr. Albritton?” inquired Mr. Felsburg with impressive politeness.

Perhaps the other missed the note in the speaker’s voice; or perhaps he was merely desperate. A drowning man does not pick and choose the straws at which he grasps.

“Yes, suh; since you bring up the subject yourself, there is something else, Mr. Felsburg. If you can see your way clear to giving me a little time, and, on top of that, if you could loan me, say, four hundred dollars more to help carry me over until fall, I believe I can pay you back everything and start clean and clear again.”

“So-o-o!”

Mr. Felsburg turned himself in his chair, showing his back to his visitor, and, taking up a pen, bent over his desk and for a minute wrote briskly, as though to record notes of the proposition. Then he swung back again, facing Albritton.

“Let me see if I get you right, Mr. Albritton,” he said, speaking slowly and prolonging the suspense. “Already you owe me money; and now, instead of paying up what you owe, you should like to borrow yet some more money, eh? What security should you expect to give, Mr. Albritton?”

“Only my word and my promise, Mr. Felsburg,” pleaded Albritton. “You don’t know me very well; but if you’ll inquire round you’ll find out I’ve got the name for being an honest man, even if I have had a power of hard luck these last few years. I ain’t a drinking man, Mr. Felsburg, and I’m a hard worker. If there was somebody I knew better than I know you I’d go to him; but there ain’t anybody. I’m right at the end of my rope – I ain’t got anywhere to turn.

“I’m confident, if you’ll give me a little help, Mr. Felsburg, I can make out to get a new start. But if I’m put off my place now I’ll lose the crop I’ve put in – lose all my time and my labor too. It looks like tobacco is going to fetch a better price this fall than it’s fetched for three or four years back, and the young plants I’ve put in are coming up mighty promising. But I need money to carry me over until I can get my tobacco cured and marketed. Don’t you see how it is with me, Mr. Felsburg? Just a little temporary accommodation from you and I’m certain—”

“Business is business, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, cutting in on him. “And all my life I have been a business man. Is it good business, I should like to ask you, that I should loan you yet more money when already you owe me money which you cannot pay? Huh, Mr. Albritton?”

“Maybe it ain’t good business; but, just as one human being to another—”

“Oh! So now you put it that way? Well, suit yourself. We talk, then, as two human beings, eh? We make this a personal matter, eh? Good! That also is how I should prefer it should be. Listen to me for one little minute, Mr. Albritton. I am going to speak with you about a small matter which happened quite a long while ago. Do you perhaps remember something which happened in the spring of the year eighteen hundred and sixty – the year before the war broke out?”

“Why, yes,” said Albritton after a moment of puzzled thought. “That was the year my father died and left me the place; the same year that I got married too. I wasn’t but just twenty-two years old then. But I don’t get your drift, Mr. Felsburg. What’s the year eighteen-sixty got to do with you and me?”

“I’m coming to that pretty soon,” said Mr. Felsburg. He sat up straight now, his eyes a-shine and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “Do you perhaps remember something else which also happened in that year, Mr. Albritton?”

“I can’t say as I do,” confessed the puzzled countryman.

“Then, if you’ll be so good as to listen, Mr. Albritton, I should be pleased to tell you. Maybe I have got a better memory than what your memory is. Also, maybe I have got something on me to remember it by. Now you listen to me!

“There was a hot day in the springtime of that year, when you sat on the porch of your house out there in the country, and a little young Jew-boy pedlar came up your lane from the road, with a pack on his back; and he opened the gate of your horse lot, in the front of your house, and he came through that gate.

“And you was sitting there on your porch, just like I am telling you; and you yelled to him that he should get out – that you did not want to buy nothing from him. Well, maybe he was new in this country and could not understand all what you meant. Or maybe it was that he was very tired and hot, and that he only wanted to ask you to let him sit down and take his heavy pack off his back, and drink some cool water out of your well, and maybe rest a little while there. And maybe, too, he had not sold anything at all that day and hoped that if he showed you what he had you would perhaps change your mind and buy something from him – just a little something, so that his whole day would not be wasted.

“So he came through that gate of your horse lot and he kept on coming. And then you cursed at him, and you told him again he should get out. But he kept coming. And then you called your dogs. And two dogs came – big, mean dogs – out from under your house.

“And when he saw the dogs come from under the house, that young Jew boy he turned round and he tried to run away and save himself. But the pack on his back was heavy, and he was already so very tired, like I am telling you, from walking in the sun all day. And so he could not run fast. And the dogs they soon caught him, and they bit him many times in the legs; and then he was more worse scared than before and the biting hurt him very much, and he cried out.

“But you stood there on your porch; and you clapped your two hands together and you laughed to hear that poor little pedlar boy cry out. And your dogs chased him away down the lane, and they bit him still more in his legs. Maybe perhaps you thought a poor Jew would not have feelings the same as you? Maybe perhaps you thought he would not bleed when those sharp teeth bit him in his legs? So you clapped your hands and you laughed to see him run and to hear him yell out that way. Do you remember all that, Mr. Albritton?”

He stood up now, shaking all over; and his eyes glittered to match the diamond on his quivering hand. They glittered like two little hard bright stones.

Under the tan the face of the man at whom he glared turned a dull brick-dust red. Albritton put up a hand to one burning cheek; and as he made answer the words came from him haltingly, self-accusingly:

“I don’t remember it, Mr. Felsburg; but if you say it’s true – why, I reckin it must ’a’ happened just the way you tell it. It was a low-down, cruel, mean thing to do; and if it was me I’m sorry for it – even now, after all these years. I wasn’t much more than a boy, though; and—”

“You were a grown man, Mr. Albritton; anyhow, you were older than the little pedlar boy that your dogs bit. You say you are sorry now; but you forgot about it, didn’t you?

“I didn’t forget about it, Mr. Albritton! All these years I have not forgotten it. All these years I have been waiting for this day to make you sorry. All these years I have been waiting for this day to get even with you. I was that little Jew boy, Mr. Albritton. In my legs I have now the red marks from your dogs’ teeth. And so now you come here and you stand here before me” – he raised his chubby clenched fists and shook them – “and you— you— you— ask me that I should do you favors!”

“Mr. Felsburg,” said Albritton – and his figure drooped as though he would prostrate himself before the triumphant little man – “I ain’t saying this because I hope to get any help from you in a money way – I know there’s no chance of that now – I’m saying it because I mean it from the bottom of my soul. I’m sorry. If I thought you’d believe me I’d be willing to go down on my knees and take my Bible oath that I’m sorry.”

“You should save yourself the trouble, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, calmer now. “In the part of your Bible which I believe in it says ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ Mr. Albritton.”

“All right!” said Albritton. “You’ve had your say – you’re even with me.”

He turned from the gloating figure of the other and started to go. From the chair in which he had reseated himself, Felsburg, a picture of vengeance gratified and sated, watched him, saying nothing until the bankrupt had descended the first step of the stairs and the second. Then he spoke.

“You wait!” he ordered in the tone of a master. “I am not yet done.”

“What’s the use?” said Albritton; but he faced about, humbled and crushed. “There ain’t anything you could say or do that would make me feel any worse.”

“Come back!” bade Felsburg; and, like a man whipped, the other came back to the doorway.

“You’re even with me, I tell you,” he said from the threshold. “What’s the use of piling it on?”

Mr. Felsburg did not answer in words. He reached behind him to his desk, wadded up something in his fingers, and, once more rising, he advanced, with his figure distended, on Albritton. Albritton flinched, then straightened himself.

“Hit me if you want to,” he said brokenly. “I won’t hit back if you do. I deserve it.”

“Yes, I will hit you,” said Felsburg. “With this I will hit you.”

Into Albritton’s right hand he thrust a crumpled slip of paper. At the wadded paper Albritton stared numbly.

“I don’t know what you are driving at,” he said; “but, if this is a notice of foreclosure, I don’t need any notice.”

“Look at it – close,” bade Felsburg.

And Albritton, obeying, looked; and his face turned from red to white and then to red again.

“Now you see what it is,” said Felsburg. “It is my check for four hundred dollars. I loan it to you – without security; and today I fix up those mortgages for you. Mr. Albritton, I am even with you. All the days from now on that you live in your house I am getting even with you – more and more every day what passes. And now, please, go away.”

He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers:

“I ask you again – please go away!”

•     •     •     •     •

When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale.

“But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what made him give that man the money?”

The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly.

“Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin mebbe when you’re a little older the answer’ll come to you.”

And sure enough, when I was a little older it did.

The Saturday Evening Post, 09 Sep 1916
Those Times and These (1917)

The Cure for Lonesomeness

~

They were on their way back from Father Minor’s funeral. Going to the graveyard the horses had ambled slowly; coming home they trotted along briskly so that from under their feet the gravel grit sprang up, to blow out behind in little squills and pennons of yellow dust. The black plumes in the headstalls of the white span that drew the empty hearse nodded briskly. It was only their color which kept those plumes from being downright cheerful. Also, en route to the cemetery, the pallbearers, both honorary and active, had marched in double file at the head of the procession. Now, returning, they rode in carriages especially provided for them.

The first carriage – that is to say, the first one following the hearse – held four passengers: firstly, the widowed sister of the dead man, from up state somewhere; secondly and thirdly, two strange priests who had come over from Hopkinsburg to conduct the services; finally and fourthly, the late Father Minor’s housekeeper, a lean and elderly spinster whose devoutness made her dour; indeed, a person whom piety beset almost as a physical affliction. Seeing her any time at all, the observer went away filled with the belief that in her particular case the more certain this woman might be of blessedness hereafter, the more miserable she would feel in the meantime. Now, as her grief-drawn face and reddened eyes looked forth from the carriage window upon the familiar panorama of Buckner Street, all about her bespoke the profound conviction that this world, already lost in sin, was doubly lost since Father Minor had gone to take his reward.

In the second carriage rode four of the honorary pallbearers, and each of them was a veteran, as the dead priest had been: Circuit Judge Priest, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, Doctor Lake, and Mr. Peter J. Galloway, our leading blacksmith and horseshoer. Of these four Mr. Galloway was the only one who worshipped according to the faith the dead man had preached. But all of them were members in good standing of the Gideon K. Irons Camp.

As though to match the changed gait of the undertaker’s horses, the spirits of these old men were uplifted into a sort of tempered cheerfulness. So often it is that way after the mourners come away from the grave. All that kindly hands might do for him who was departed out of this life had been done. The spade had shaped up and smoothed down the clods which covered him; the flowers had been piled upon the sexton’s mounded handiwork until the raw brown earth was almost hidden. Probably already the hot morning sun was wilting the blossoms. By tomorrow morning the petals would be falling – a drifting testimony to the mortality of all living things.

On the way out these four had said mighty little to one another, but in their present mood they spoke freely of their departed comrade – his sayings, his looks, little ways that he had, stories of his early life before he took holy orders, when he rode hard and fought hard, and very possibly swore hard, as a trooper in Morgan’s cavalry.

“It was a fine grand big turnout they gave him this day,” said Mr. Galloway with a tincture of melancholy pride in his voice. “Almost as many Protestants as Catholics there.”

“Herman Felsburg sent the biggest floral design there was,” said Doctor Lake. “I saw his name on the card.”

“That’s the way Father Tom would have liked it to be, I reckin,” said Judge Priest from his corner of the carriage. “After all, boys, the best test of a man ain’t so much the amount of cash he’s left in the bank, but how many’ll turn out to pay him their respects when they put him away.”

“Still, at that,” said the sergeant, “I taken notice of several absentees – from the Camp, I mean. I didn’t see Jake Smedley nowheres around at the church, or at the graveyard neither.”

“Jake’s got right porely,” explained Judge Priest. “He’s been lookin’ kind of ga’nted anyhow, lately. I’m feared Jake is beginnin’ to break.”

“Oh, I reckin tain’t ez bad ez all that,” said the sergeant. “You’ll see Jake comin’ round all right ez soon ez the weather turns off cool ag’in. Us old boys may be gittin’ along in years, but we’re a purty husky crew yit. It’s a powerful hard job to kill one of us off. I’m sixty-seven myself, but most of the time I feel ez peart and skittish ez a colt.” He spoke for the moment vaingloriously; then his tone altered: “I’m luckier, though, than some – in the matter of general health. Take Abner Tilghman now, for instance. Sence he had that second stroke Abner jest kin make out to crawl about. He wasn’t there today with us neither.”

“Boys,” said Doctor Lake, “I hope it’s no reflection on my professional abilities, but it seems to me I’ve been losing a lot of my patients here recently. I’m afraid Ab Tilghman is going to be the next one to make a gap in the ranks. Just between us, he’s in mighty bad shape. Did it ever occur to any of you to count up and see how many members of the Camp we’ve buried this past year, starting in last January with old Professor Reese and winding up today with Father Minor?”

None of them answered him in words. Only Judge Priest gave a little stubborn shake of his head, as though to ward away an unpleasant thought. Tact inspired Sergeant Bagby to direct the conversation into a different channel.

“I reckin Mrs. Herman Felsburg won’t know whut to do now with that extry fish she always fries of a Friday,” said the sergeant.

“That’s right too, Jimmy,” said Mr. Galloway. “Well, God bless her anyway for a fine lady!”

Had you, reader, enjoyed the advantage of living in our town and of knowing its customs, you would have understood at once what this last reference meant. You see, the Felsburgs, in their fine home, lived diagonally across the street from the little priest house behind the Catholic church. Mrs. Felsburg was distinguished for being a rigid adherent to the ritualistic laws of her people. Away from home her husband and her sons might choose whatever fare suited their several palates, but beneath her roof and at the table where she presided they found none of the forbidden foods.

On Fridays she cooked with her own hands the fish for the cold Shabbath supper and, having cooked them, she set them aside to cool. But always the finest, crispest fish of all, while still hot, was spread upon one of Mrs. Felsburg’s best company plates and covered over with one of Mrs. Felsburg’s fine white napkins, and then a servant would run across the street with it, from Mrs. Felsburg’s side gate to the front door of the priest house, and hand it in to the dour-faced housekeeper with Mrs. Felsburg’s compliments. And so that night, at his main meal of the day, Father Minor would dine on prime river perch or fresh lake crappie, fried in olive oil by an orthodox Jewess. Year in and year out this thing had happened once a week regularly. Probably it would not happen again. Father Minor’s successor, whoever he might be, might not understand. Mr. Galloway nodded abstractedly, and for a little bit nothing was said.

The carriage bearing them twisted out of the procession, leaving a gap in it, and stopped in front of Doctor Lake’s red-brick residence. The old doctor climbed down stiffly and, leaning heavily on his cane, went up the walk to his house. Next Mr. Galloway was dropped at his shabby little house, snug in its ambuscade behind a bushwhacker’s paradise of lilac bushes; and pretty soon after that it was Sergeant Bagby’s turn to get out. As the carriage slowed up for the third stop Judge Priest laid a demurring hand upon his companion’s arm.

“Come on out to my place, this evenin’, Jimmy,” he said, “and have a bite of supper with me. There won’t be nobody there but jest you and me, and after supper we kin set a spell and talk over old times.”

The sergeant shook his whity-grey head in regretful dissent.

“I wish’t I could, Judge,” he said, “but it can’t be done – not tonight.”

“Better come on!” The judge’s tone was pleading. “I sort of figger that there old nigger cook of mine has killed a young chicken. And she kin mix up a batch of waffle batter in less’n no time a-tall.”

“Not tonight, Billy; some night soon I’ll come, shore. But tonight my wife is figurin’ on company, and ef I don’t show up there’ll be hell to pay and no pitch hot.”

“Listen, Jimmy; listen to me.” The judge spoke fast, for the sergeant was out of the carriage by now. “I’ve got a quart of special licker that Lieutenant Governor Bosworth sent me frum Lexington. Thirty-two years old, Jimmy – handmade and run through a gum log. Copper nor iron ain’t never teched it. And when you pour a dram of it out into a glass it beads up same ez ef it had soapsuds down in the bottom of it – it does fur a fact. There ain’t been but two drinks drunk out of that quart.”

“Judge, please quit teasin’ me!” Like unto a peppercorn, ground between the millstones of duty and desire, the sergeant backed reluctantly away from between the carriage wheels. “You know yourse’f how wimmin folks are. It’s the new Campbellite preacher that’s comin’ tonight, and there won’t be a drop to drink on the table exceptin’ maybe lemonade or ice tea. But I’ve jest natchelly got to be on hand and, whut’s more, I’ve got to be on my best behavior too. Dern that new preacher! Why couldn’t he a-picked out some other night than this one?”

“Jimmy, listen——”

But the sergeant had turned and was fleeing to sanctuary, beyond reach of the tempter’s tongue.

So for the last eighth-mile of the ride, until the black driver halted his team at the Priest place out on Clay Street, the judge rode alone. Laboriously he crawled out from beneath the overhang of the carriage top, handed up two bits as a parting gift to the darky on the seat, and waddled across the sidewalk.

The latch on the gate was broken. It had been broken for weeks. The old man slammed the gate to with a passionate jerk. The infirm latch clicked weakly, then slipped out of the iron nick and the gate sagged open – an invitation to anybody’s wandering livestock to come right on in and feast upon the shrubs, which from lack of pruning had become thick, irregular little jungles. Clumps of rank grass, like green scalp-locks, were sprouting in the walk, and when the master had mounted the creaking steps he saw where two porch planks had warped apart, leaving a gap between them. In and out of the space ran big black ants. The house needed painting, too, he noticed; in places where the rain water had dribbled out of a rust-hole in the tin gutter overhead, the grain of the clapboarding showed through its white coating. Mentally the judge promised himself that he would take a couple of days off sometime soon and call in workmen and have the whole shebang tidied and fixed up. Once a place began to run down it seemed to break out with neglect all over, as with a rash.

Halfway through his supper that evening the judge, who had been strangely silent in the early part of the meal, addressed his house boy, Jeff Poindexter, in the accents of a marked disapproval.

“Look here, Jeff,” he demanded, “have I got to tell you ag’in about mendin’ the ketch on that front gate?”

“Yas, suh – I means no, suh,” Jeff corrected himself quickly. “Ise aimin’ to do it fust thing in de mawnin’, suh,” added Jeff glibly, repeating a false pledge for perhaps the dozenth time within a month. “I got so many things to do round yere, Jedge, dat sometimes hit seems lak I can’t think whut nary one of ’em is.”

“Huh!” snorted his employer crossly. Then he went on warningly: “Some of these days there’s goin’ to be a sudden change in this house ef things ain’t attended to better – whole place goin’ to rack and ruin like it is.”

Wriggling uneasily Jeff found a pretext for withdrawing himself, the situation having become embarrassing. It wasn’t often that the judge gave way to temper. Not that Jeff feared the covert threat of discharge. If anybody quit it wouldn’t be Jeff, as Jeff well knew. Usually Jeff had an excuse ready for any accusation of shortcomings on his part; thinking them up was his regular specialty. But this particular moment did not seem a propitious one for offering excuses. Jeff noiselessly evaporated out of sight and hearing.

In silence the master hurried through the meal, eating it with what for him was unusual speed. He was beset with an urge to be out of the big high-ceiled dining room. Looking about it he told himself it wasn’t a dining room at all – just a bare barracks, full of emptiness and mighty little else.

After supper he sat on the porch, while the long twilight gloomed into dusk and the dusk into night. He was half-minded to walk downtown in the hope of finding congenial company at Soule’s drug store, the favored loafing place of his dwindling set of cronies. But he changed his mind. Since Mr. Soule, growing infirm, had taken a younger man for a partner, the drug store was changed. Its old-time air of hospitality and comfort had somehow altered.

The judge smoked on, rocking back and forth in his chair. The bull bats, which had been dodging about in the air as long as the daylight lasted, were gone now, and their shy cousin, the whippoorwill, began calling from down in the old Enders orchard at the far end of the street. Two or three times there came to Judge Priest’s ears the sound of footsteps clunking along the plank sidewalk on his side of the road, and at that he sat erect, hoping each time the gate hinges would whine a warning of callers dropping in to bear him company. But the unseen pedestrians passed on without turning in. The whippoorwill moved up close to Judge Priest’s side fence. A little night wind that had something on its mind began with a mournful whispering sound to swish through the top of the big cedar alongside the porch.

The judge stood it until nearly half-past nine o’clock. Even under the most favorable circumstances a whippoorwill and a remorseful night wind, telling its troubles to an evergreen tree, do not make what one would call exhilarating company. He closed and locked the front door, turned out the single gas light which burned in the hall and went up the stairs. In its main design the house was Colonial – Southern Colonial. But his bedroom was in an ell, above a side porch overlooking the croquet ground, and this ell was adorned with plank curlicues under its gables, and a square, ugly, useless little balcony, like a misplaced wooden moustache, adhered to its most prominent elevation on the side facing the front. The judge frequently said that, as nearly as he could figure it out, the extension belonged to the Rutherford B. Hayes period of American architecture.

Except for him the house was empty. Aunt Dilsey didn’t stay on the place at night and Jeff’s sleeping quarters were over the stable at the back. As Judge Priest felt his way through the upper hall and made a light in his bedchamber, the house was giving off those little creaking, complaining sounds from its joints that an old tired house always gives off when it is lonely for a fuller measure of human occupancy.

His own room, revealed now in its homely contour and its still homelier furnishings, was neat enough, with Jeff’s ideas of neatness, but all about it indubitably betrayed the fact that only male hands cared for it. The tall black-walnut bureau lacked a cover for its top; the mantel was littered with cigar boxes and old law reports; the dead asparagus ferns, banked in the grate, were faded to a musty yellow; and some of the fronds had fallen out across the hearth so that remotely the fireplace suggested the mouth of a big cow choking on an overly large bite of dried hay. In places the matting on the floor was frayed almost through.

Just from the careless skew of the coverlid and the set of the pillows against the white bolster, you would have known at a glance that a man had made up the bed that morning.

Barring one picture the walls were bare. This lone picture hung in a space between the two front windows, right where the occupant of the room, if so minded, might look at it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. Beyond any doubt a lover of the truly refined in art would have looked at it with a shudder, for it was one of those crayon portraits – a crayon portrait done in the most crayonsome and grewsome style of a self-taught artist working by the day rather than by the piece. Plainly it had been enlarged, as the trade term goes, from a photograph; the enlarger thereof had been lavish with his black leads; that, too, was self-evident. The original photographer had done his worst with the subject; the retoucher had gone him one better.

It was a likeness – you might call it a likeness – of a woman dressed in the abominable style of the late seventies – with heavy bangs down in her eyes, and a tight-fitting basque with enormous sleeves, and long pendent eardrops in her ears. The artist, whoever he was, had striven masterfully to rob the likeness of all expression. There alone his craftsmanship had failed him. For even he had not altogether taken away from the face a certain suggestion of old-fashioned wistfulness and sweetness. In all other regards, though, he had had his reckless way with it. The eyes were black and staring, the lines of the figure stiff and artificial, and the background for the head was a pastel nightmare.

For so long had Judge Priest been wifeless and childless that many of the younger generation in our town knew nothing of the tragedy in this old man’s life – which was that the same diphtheria epidemic that took both his babies in one week’s time had widowed him too. We knew he loved other people’s children; some of us never suspected that once upon a time he had had children of his own to love. Except in his memory no images of the dead babies endured, and this crayon portrait was the sole sentimental reminder left to him of his married life. And so, to him, it was a perfect and a matchless thing. He wouldn’t have traded it for all the canvases of all the old masters in all the art galleries in this round big world.

This night, before he undressed, he went over and stood in front of it and looked at it for a while. There was dust in the grooves of the heavy tarnished gilt frame. From the top bureau drawer he took a big silk handkerchief and carefully he wiped the dust away. Then, before he put the handkerchief back in its place, he straightened the thing upon the nail which held it, and gave the glass front an awkward little caress with his pudgy old hand.

“It’s been a long, long time, honey, since you went away and left me,” he said slowly, in the voice of one addressing a hearer very near at hand; “but I still miss you and the babies powerfully. And sometimes it’s sorter lonesome here without you.”

A little later, when the light had been turned out, a noise like a long, deep sigh sounded out in the darkness. That, though, might have been the wheeze of the afflicted bedsprings as the old judge let his weight down in the bed.

An hour passed and there was another small sound there – a muffled nibbling sound. Behind the wainscoting, between bedroom and bathroom, a young, adventuresome rat gnawed at a box of matches which he had found on the floor in the hall and had dragged to his nest in the wall. From within the box a strangely tantalizing aroma escaped; the rat, being deluded thereby into the belief that phosphorus might be an edible dainty, was minded to sample the contents. Presently his teeth met through the cover of the box. There was a sharp flaring pop, followed by a swift succession of other pops, and the rat gave a jump and departed elsewhere in great haste, with a hot bad smell in his snout and his adolescent whiskers quite entirely singed away.

•     •     •     •     •

The Confederates, in ragged uniforms of butternut jeans, were squatted in a clump of pawpaw bushes on the edge of a stretch of plowed ground. From the woods on the far side of the field Yankee skirmishers were shooting toward them. A shell from the batteries must have fallen nearby and set fire to the dried leaves and the fallen brush, for the smoke kept blowing in a fellow’s face, choking him and making him cough. Captain Tip Meldrum, the commander of Company B, was just behind the men, giving the order to fire back. High Private Billy Priest aimed his musket at the thickets where the Yankees were hidden and pulled the trigger, but the cap on the nipple of his piece was defective or something, and the charge wouldn’t explode. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” yelled Captain Tip Meldrum over and over again, and then he yanked out his own horse-pistol and emptied it into the hostile timber. But Private Priest’s gun still balked. He flung it down – and found himself sitting up in bed, gasping.

•     •     •     •     •

The dream hadn’t been altogether a dream at that. For there was indeed smoke in the judge’s eyes and his nostrils – plenty of it. A revolver was cracking out its shots somewhere near at hand; somebody outside his window was shrieking “Fire!” at the top of a good strong voice. In the distance other voices were taking up the cry.

In an earlier day, when a fire started in town, the man who discovered it drew his pistol if he were on the highway, or snatched it up if he chanced to be at home, and pointing its barrel at the sky emptied it into the air as fast as the cylinder would turn. The man next door followed suit and so on until volleys were rattling all over the neighborhood. Thus were the townspeople aroused and, along with the townspeople, the members of the volunteer fire department. Now we had a paid department and a regular electric-alarm system, predicated on boxes and gongs and wires and things; but in outlying districts the pistol-shooting fashion of spreading the word still prevailed to a considerable extent, and more especially did it prevail at nighttime. So it didn’t take the late dreamer longer than the shake of a sheep’s tail to separate what was fancy from what was reality.

As Judge Priest, yet half asleep but waking up mighty fast, shoved his stout legs into his trousers and tucked the tails of his nightshirt down inside the waistband, he decided it must be his barn and not his house that was afire. The smoke which filled the room seemed to be eddying in through the side window, from across the end of the ell structure. He thought of his old white mare, Mittie May, fast in her stall under the hay loft, and of Jeff, who was one of the soundest sleepers in the world, in his room right alongside the mow. There was need for him to move, and move fast. He must awaken Jeff first, and then get Mittie May out of danger. Barefooted, he felt his way across the room and along the hall and down the stairs, mending his gait as he went. And then, as he jerked the front door open and stumbled out upon the porch, he came into violent collision with Ed Tilghman, Junior, who lived across the street, and who had just bounded up the porch steps with the idea of hammering on the front-door panels. Tilghman was a young man and the judge an old one; it was inevitable the judge should suffer the more painful consequences of the sudden impact of their two bodies together. He went down sideways with a great hard thump, his forehead striking against a sharp corner of the door jamb. He was senseless, and a little stream of blood was beginning to trickle down his face as Tilghman dragged him down off the porch into the yard and stretched him on his back in the grass, and then ran to fetch water.

In that same minute the big bell in the tower of fire headquarters, half a mile away, began sounding in measured beats, and a small hungry-looking tongue of flame licked up across the sill and flickered for a moment through the smoke which was pouring forth out of the bathroom window and rolling across the flat top of the extension. The smoke gushed out still thicker, smothering down the red pennon, but in a second or two it showed again, and this time it brought with it two more like it. The bathroom window became a frame for a cloudy pink glare, and the purring note of the fire became a brisk and healthy crackle as it ate through the seasoned clapboards of the outer wall.

All of a sudden, so it seemed, the yard and the street were full of people. Promptly there began to happen most of the things that do happen at a fire. As for instance: Mr. Milus Miles, who arrived among the very first and who had a commandingly loud voice, mounted a rustic bench alongside the croquet ground and called for volunteers to form a bucket brigade. That his recruits would have no buckets to pass after they had enrolled themselves for service was with Mr. Miles a minor consideration. It was the spirit of the thing, the forethought, the responsibility, the aptitude for leadership in a work of succor – all these inspired him.

Mr. Ulysses Rice, who lived in the next street, climbed the side fence – under the circumstances it somehow to him seemed a more resolute thing to scale the fence than to enter by the gate in the regular way – and ran across the yard, inspired with a neighborly and commendable desire to save something right away. He put his toe in a croquet wicket and fell headlong. This was to be expected of Mr. Rice. He had a perfect genius for getting into accidents. All Nature was ever in a conspiracy with all the inanimate objects in the world to do him bodily hurt. If he went skiff riding and fell overboard, as he customarily did, it was not because he had rocked the boat. The boat rocked itself. He was the only man in town who had ever succeeded in gashing his throat with a safety razor.

He now disentangled his foot from the wicket and scrambled up and, still actuated by the best motives imaginable, he dashed toward the back of the Priest homestead, being minded to seek entrance by a rear door. But a wire clothesline, swinging at exactly the right height to catch him just under the nose, did catch him just under the nose and almost sawed the tip of that useful organ off Mr. Rice’s agonized face. Coincidentally, citizens of various ages and assorted sizes ran into the house and dragged out the furnishings of the lower floor, bestowing their salvage right where other citizens might fall over it. Through all the joints between the shingles the roof of the ell leaked smoke, until it resembled a sloped bed of slaking lime. This fire was rapidly getting to be a regular fire.

With a great clattering the department came tearing up the street. Dropping down from their perches on the running boards of the wagons, certain of its members began unreeling the hose, then ran back with it to couple it to the nearest fire hydrant, nearly two blocks away down Clay Street. Others brought a ladder and reared it against the side of the house, with its uppermost rounds projecting above the low eaves. While many hands steadied the ladder in place, Captain Bud Gorman of Station No. 1 – there was also a Station No. 2, but Bud skippered Station No. 1 – mounted it and, with an axe, started chopping a hole in the roof at a point where there seemed as yet to be no immediate peril. Under his strokes the shingles flew in showers. It was evident that if the flames should spread to this immediate area Captain Bud Gorman would have a rough but practicable flue ready for their egress into the open air, against the moment when they had burst through the ceiling and the rafters below.

More people and yet more kept coming. The rubber piping, which perversely had kinked and twisted as it came off the spinning drum of hose reel No. 1, was fairly straight now, and from his station just inside the gate the fire chief bellowed the command down the line to turn ’er on! They turned her on, but somewhere in the coupled sections of hose a stricture had developed. All that happened was that from the brass snout of the nozzle a languid gush of yellow water arose in a fan shape to an elevation of perhaps fifteen feet, thence descending in a cascade, not upon the particular spot at which the nozzle was aimed, but full upon the ill-starred Mr. Rice as he tugged to uproot a wooden support of the little grape arbor which flanked the house on the endangered side. Somewhat disfigured by the clothesline but still resolute to lend a helping hand somewhere, Mr. Rice had but a moment before becoming possessed of an ambition to remove the grape vines, trellis and all, to a place of safety. His reward for this kindly attempt was a sudden soaking.

As though the hiss of the water had aroused him, Judge Priest sat up in the grass, where he had been lying during these tumultuous and crowded five minutes. He was still half dazed. As his eyesight cleared, he saw that the bathroom was as good as gone and that his bedroom was about to go. Someone helped him to his unsteady feet and kept him upright. He shook himself free from the supporting grasp of the person who held him, and advanced toward the porch steps, wavering a little on his legs as he went.

Then, before anybody sensed what he meant to do, before anybody could make a move to stop him, he had mounted the steps and was at the front door.

Out of the door, bumping into him, backed a coughing, gasping squad, their noses smarting and their eyes streaming from the acrid reek, towing after them the big horsehair sofa which was the principal piece of furniture in the judge’s sitting room. The sofa had lost two of its casters in transit, and it took all their strength to drag it over the lintel.

“It’s no use, Judge Priest,” panted one of these workers, recognizing him; “we’ve got pretty nearly everything out that was downstairs and you couldn’t get upstairs now if you tried.”

Then seeing that the owner meant to disregard the warning, this man threw out an arm forcibly to detain the other. But for all his age and size, the judge was wieldy enough when he chose to be. With an agile twist of his body he dodged past, and as the man, astounded and horrified, glared across the threshold he saw Judge Priest running down the murky hall and, with head bent and his mouth and nose buried in the crook of one elbow, starting up the stairs into the thickest and blackest of the smoke. To this man’s credit, be it said, he made a valiant effort to overtake the old man. The pursuer darted in behind him, but at the foot of the steps fell back, daunted and unable to breathe. He staggered out again into the open, gagging with the smoke that was in his throat and down in his lungs.

“He’s gone in there!” he shouted, pointing behind him. “He’s gone right in there! He’s gone upstairs!”

“Who is it? Who’s gone in there?” twenty voices demanded together.

“The judge – just a second ago! I tried to stop him – he got by me! He ain’t got a chance!” Even as he spoke the words, a draft of fire came roaring through the crater in the roof which Captain Bud Gorman’s axe had dug for its free passage. An outcry – half gasp, half groan – went up from those who knew what had happened. They ran round in rings wasting precious time.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, half dressed, trotted across the lawn. He had just arrived. He grabbed young Ed Tilghman by the arm.

“How’d she start, boy?” demanded the sergeant. “Where’s the judge? Did they git everything out?”

“Everything out – hell!” answered Tilghman, sobbing in his distress. “The old judge is in there. He got a lick on the head and it must have made him crazy. He just ran back in there and went upstairs. He’ll never make it – and nobody can get him out. He’ll smother to death sure!”

Down on his knees dropped Sergeant Bagby and shut his eyes, and for the first, last and only time in his life he prayed aloud in public.

“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “fur God’s sake git Billy Priest out of there! Oh, Lord, that’s all I’ll ever ask You – fur God’s sake git Billy Priest out of there! Ez a favor to me, Lord, please, Suh, git Billy Priest out of there!” From many throats at once a yell arose – a yell so shrill and loud that it overtopped all lesser sounds; a yell so loud that the sergeant ceased from his praying to look. Through the smoke, and over the sloping peak of the roof from the rear, came a slim, dark shape on its all-fours. Treading the pitch of the gable as swiftly and surefootedly as a cat, it scuttled forward to the front edge of the housetop, swung downward at arms’ length from the eaves, and dropped on a narrow ledge of tin-covered surface where the small ornamental balcony, which was like a misplaced wooden moustache, projected from the face of the building at the level of the second floor, then instantly dived headfirst in at that window of the judge’s bedchamber which was farthest from the corner next the bathroom.

For a silent minute – a minute which seemed a year – those below stared upward, with starting eyes and lumps in their throats. Then, all together, they swallowed their several throat lumps and united in an exultant joyous yell, which made that other yell they had uttered a little before seem by comparison puny and cheap. Through the smoke which bulged from the balcony window and out upon the balcony itself popped the agile black figure. Bracing itself, it hauled across the window ledge a bulky inert form. It wrestled its helpless burden over and eased it down the flat, tiny railed-in perch just as a fire ladder, manned by many eager hands, came straightening up from below, with Captain Bud Gorman of Station No. 1 climbing it, two rungs at a jump, before it had ceased to waver in the air.

Volunteers swarmed up the ladder behind Bud Gorman, forming a living chain from the earth to the balcony. First they passed down the judge, breathing and whole but unconscious, with his nightshirt torn off his back and his bare right arm still clenched round a picture of some sort in a heavy gilt frame. His grip on it did not relax until they had carried him well back from the burning house, and for the second time that night had stretched him out upon the grass.

The judge being safe, the men on the ladder made room for Jeff Poindexter to descend under his own motive power, all of them cheering mightily. Just as Jeff reached solid ground the stoppage in the hose unstopped itself of its own accord and from the brazen gullet of the nozzle there sprang up, like a silver sword, a straight, hard stream of water which lanced into the heart of the fire, turning its exultant song from a crackle to a croon and then to a resentful hiss.

In that same instant Sergeant Bagby found himself, for the first time since he escaped from the kindly tyranny of a black mammy – nearly sixty years before – in close and ardent embrace with a member of the African race.

“Jeff,” clarioned the sergeant, hugging the blistered rescuer yet closer to him and beating him on the back with hearty thumps – “Jeff, God bless your black hide, how did you come to think of it?”

“Well, suh, Mr. Bagby,” wheezed Jeff, “hit wuz lak dis: I didn’t wake up w’en she fust started. I got so much on my mind to do daytimes ’at I sleeps mighty sound w’en I does sleep. Presen’ly, tho’, I did wake up, an’ I got my pants on, an’ I come runnin’ acrost de lot frum de stable, an’ I got heah jes’ in time to hear ’em all yellin’ out dat de jedge is done went back into de house. I sees there ain’t no chancet of goin’ in after him de way he’s done went, but jes’ about that time I remembers dat air little po’ch up yonder on de front of de house w’ich it seem lak ever’body else had done furgot all ’bout hit bein’ there a-tall. So I runs round to de back right quick, an’ I clim’ up de lattice-work by de kitchen, an’ I comes out along over de roof, an’ I drap down on de little po’ch, an’ after that, I reckin, you seen de rest of it fur yo’se’f, suh – all but whut happen after I gits inside dat window.”

“What did happen?” From the ring of men who hedged in the sergeant and Jeff five or six asked the same question at once. Before an all-white audience Jeff visibly expanded himself.

“W’y, nothin’ a-tall happen,” he said, “’ceptin’ that I found de ole boss-man right where I figgered I’d find him – in his own room at de foot of his baid. He’d done fell down dere on de flo’, right after he grabbed dat air picture offen de wall. Yas, suh, that’s perzackly where I finds him!”

“But, Jeff, how could you breathe up there?” Still in the sergeant’s cordial grasp, Jeff made direct answer:

“Gen’l’mens, I didn’t! Fur de time bein’ I jes’ natchelly abandoned breathin’!”

Again that night Judge Priest had a dream – only this time the dream lacked continuity and sequence and was but a jumble of things – and he emerged from it with his thoughts all in confusion. In his first drowsy moment of consciousness he had a sensation of having taken a long journey along a dark rough road. For a little he lay wondering where he was, piecing together his impressions and trying to bridge the intervening gaps.

Then the light got better and he made out the anxious face of Doctor Lake looking down at him and, just over Doctor Lake’s shoulder, the face of Sergeant Bagby. He opened his mouth then and spoke.

“Well, there’s one thing certain shore,” said the judge: “this ain’t heaven! Because ef ’twas, there wouldn’t be a chance of you and Jimmy Bagby bein’ here with me.”

Whereupon, for no apparent reason on earth that Judge Priest could fathom, Doctor Lake, with a huskily affectionate intonation, called him by many profane and improper names; and Sergeant Bagby, wiping his eyes with one hand, made his other hand up into a fist and shook it in Judge Priest’s face, meanwhile emotionally denouncing him as several qualified varieties of an old idiot.

Under this treatment the fogginess quit Judge Priest’s brain, and he became aware of the presence of a considerable number of persons about him, including the two Edward Tilghmans – Senior and Junior – and the two Tilghman girls; and Jeff Poindexter, wearing about half as many garments as Jeff customarily wore, and with a slightly blistered appearance as to his face and shoulders; and Mr. Ulysses Rice, with a badly skinned nose and badly drenched shoulders; and divers others of his acquaintances. Indeed, he was quite surrounded by neighbors and friends. Also by degrees it became apparent to him that he was stretched upon a strange bed in a strange room – at least he did not recall ever having been in this room before – and that he had a bandage across the baldest part of his head, and that he felt tired all over his body.

“Well, I got out, didn’t I?” he inquired after a minute or two.

“Got out – thunder!” vociferated the sergeant with what the judge regarded as a most unnecessary violence of voice and manner. “Ef this here black boy of yourn hadn’t a-risked his own life, climbin’ down over the roof and goin’ in through a front window and draggin’ you out of that fire – the same ez ef you was a sack of shorts – you’d a-been a goner, shore. Ain’t you ’shamed of yourself, scarin’ everybody half to death that-a-way?”

“Oh, it was Jeff, was it?” said the old judge, disregarding Sergeant Bagby’s indignant interrogation. He looked steadfastly at his grinning servitor and, when he spoke again, there was a different intonation in his voice.

“Much obliged to you, Jeff.” That was all he said. It was the way he said it.

“You is more’n welcome, thanky, suh,” answered Jeff; “it warn’t scursely no trouble a-tall, suh – ’cep’in’ dem ole shingles on dat roof suttin’y wuz warm to de te’ch.”

“Did – did Jeff succeed in savin’ anything else besides me?” The judge put the question as though half fearing what the answer might be.

“Ef you mean this – why, here ’tis, safe and sound,” said Sergeant Bagby, and he moved aside so that Judge Priest might see, leaning against the footboard of the bed, a certain crayon portrait. “The glass ain’t cracked even and the frame ain’t dented. You three come out of there practically together – Jeff a-hangin’ onto you and you a-hangin’ onto your picture. So if that’s whut you went chargin’ back in there fur, I hope you’re satisfied!”

“I’m satisfied,” said the judge softly. Then after a bit he cleared his throat and ventured another query:

“That old house of mine – I s’pose she’s all burnt up by now?”

“Don’t you ever believe it,” said the sergeant. “That there house of yourn ’pears to be purty nigh ez contrary and set in its ways ez whut you are. It won’t burn up, no matter how good a chance you give it. Jest about the time Jeff here drug you out on that little balcony outside your window, the water works begun to work, and after that they had her under control in less’n no time. She must be about out by now.”

“Your bathroom’s a total loss and the extension on that side is pretty badly scorched up, but the rest of the place, excusing damage by the water and the smoke, is hardly damaged,” added the younger Tilghman. “You’ll be able to move back in, inside of a month, judge.”

“And in the meantime you’re going to stay right here, Judge Priest, and make my house your home,” announced Mr. Tilghman, Senior. “It’s mighty plain, but such as it is you’re welcome to it, judge. We’ll do our level best to make you comfortable. Only I’m afraid you’ll miss the things you’ve been used to having round you.”

“Oh, I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. His glance traveled slowly from the crayon portrait at the foot of the bed to Jeff Poindexter’s chocolate-colored face and back again to the portrait. “I’ve got mighty near everything I need to make me happy.”

“What I meant was that maybe you’d be kind of lonesome away from your own house,” Mr. Tilghman said.

“No, I don’t believe so,” answered the old man, smiling a little. “You see, I taken the cure for lonesomeness tonight. You mout call it the smoke cure.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 04 Nov 1916
Those Times and These (1917)

Hark! From the Tombs

~

From all the windows of Colored Odd Fellows’ Hall, on the upper floor of the two-story building at the corner of Oak and Tennessee Streets, streamed Jacob’s ladders of radiance, which slanted outward and downward into the wet night. Along with these crossbarred shafts of lights, sounds as of singing and jubilation percolated through the blurry panes. It was not yet eleven o’clock, the date being December thirty-first; but the New Year’s watch service, held under the auspices of Castle Camp, Number 1008, Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the Universe, had been going on quite some time and was going stronger every minute.

Odd Fellows’ Hall had been especially engaged and partially decorated for this occasion. Already it was nearly filled; but between now and midnight it would be fuller, and at a still later time would doubtlessly attain the superlatively impossible by being fuller than fullest.

From all directions, out of the darkness, came belated members of the officiating fraternity, protecting their regalias under umbrellas, and accompanied by wives and families if married, or by lady and other friends if otherwise. With his sword clanking impressively at his flank and his beplumed helmet nodding grandly as he walked, each Supreme King of the Universe bore himself with an austere and solemn mien, as befitting the rôle he played – of host to the multitude – and the uniform that adorned his form.

Later, after the young year had appropriately been ushered in, when the refreshments were being served, he might unbend somewhat. But not now. Now every Supreme King was what he was, wearing his dignity as a becoming and suitable garment. This attitude of the affiliated brethren affected by contagion those who came with them as their guests. There was a stateliness and a formality in the greetings which passed between this one and that one as the groups converged into the doorway, set in the middle front of the building, and by pairs and by squads ascended the stairs.

“Good evenin’, Sist’ Fontleroy. I trusts things is goin’ toler’ble well wid you, ma’am?”

“Satisfactory, Br’er Grider – thank de good Lawd! How’s all at yore own place of residence?”

“Git th’ough de C’ris’mus all right, Mizz Hillman?”

“Yas, suh; ’bout de same ez whut I always does, Mist’ Duiguid.”

“Well, ole yeah’s purty nigh gone frum us, Elder; ain’t it de truth?”

“Most doubtless is. An’ now yere come ’nother! We don’t git no younger, sister, does we?”

“Dat we don’t, sholy!”

The ceremonial reserve of the moment would make the jollifying all the sweeter after the clocks struck and the whistles began to blow.

There was one late arrival, though, who came along alone, wearing a downcast countenance and an air of abstraction, and speaking to none who encountered him on the way or at the portal. This one was Jeff Poindexter; but a vastly different Jeff from the customary Jeff. Usually he moved with a jaunty gait, his elbows out and his head canted back; and on the slightest provocation his feet cut scallops and double-shuffles and pigeonwings against the earth. Now his heels scraped and his toes dragged; and the gladsome raiment that covered his person gave him no joy, but only an added sense of resentment against the prevalent scheme of mundane existence.

An unseen weight bowed his shoulders down, and beneath the wide lapels of an almost white waistcoat his heart was like unto a chunk of tombstone in his bosom. For the current light of his eyes, Miss Ophelia Stubblefield, had accepted the company of a new and most formidable rival for this festive occasion. Wherefore an embodiment of sorrow walked hand in hand with Jeff.

After this blow descended all the taste of delectable anticipation in his mouth had turned to gall and to wormwood. Of what use now the costume he had been at such pains to accumulate from kindly white gentlemen, for whom Jeff in spare moments did odd jobs of valeting – the long, shiny frock coat here; the only slightly spotted grey-blue trousers there; the almost clean brown derby hat in another quarter; the winged collar and the puff necktie in yet a fourth? Of what value to him would be the looks of envy and admiration sure to be bestowed upon the pair of new, shiny and excessively painful patent-leather shoes, specially acquired and specially treasured for this event?

He had bought those shoes, with an utter disregard for expense, before he dreamed that another would bring Ophelia to the watch party. With her at his side, his soul would have risen exultant and triumphant above the discomfort of cramped-up toes and pinched-in heels. Now, at each dragging step, he was aware that his feet hurt him. Indeed, for Jeff there was at that moment no balm to be found throughout all Gilead, and in his ointment dead flies abounded thickly.

It added to his unhappiness that the lady might and doubtlessly would rest under a misapprehension regarding his failure to invite her to share with him the pleasures of the night. He had not asked her to be his company; had not even broached the subject to her. For this seeming neglect there had been a good and sufficient reason – one hundred and ninety pounds of a chocolate-colored reason. Seven days before, on Christmas Eve, Jeff had been currying Mittie May, the white mare of Judge Priest, in the stable back of the Priest place, when he heard somebody whistle in the alley behind the stable and then heard his name called. He had stepped outside to find one Smooth Crumbaugh leaning upon the alley gate.

“Hello, Smoothy!” Jeff had hailed with a smart and prompt cordiality.

It was not that he felt any deep warmth of feeling for Smooth, but that it was prudent to counterfeit the same. All in Smooth’s circle deported themselves toward Smooth with a profound regard and, if Smooth seemed out of sorts, displayed almost an affection for him, whether they felt it or not. ’Twere safer thus.

With characteristic brusqueness, Smooth entirely disregarded the greeting.

“Come yere to me, little nigger!” he said out of one corner of his lips, at the same time fixing a lowering stare upon Jeff. Then, as Jeff still stood, filled with sudden misgivings: “Come yere quick w’en I speaks! Want me to come on in dat yard after you?”

Jeff was conscious of no act of wrongdoing toward Smooth Crumbaugh. With Jeff, discretion was not only the greater part of fighting valor but practically was all of it. Nevertheless, he was glad, as he obeyed the summons and, with a placating smile fixed upon his face, drew nearer the paling, that he stood on the sanctuary ground of a circuit judge’s premises, and that a fence intervened between him and his truculent caller.

“Comin’ right along,” he said with an affected gaiety.

Just the same, he didn’t go quite up to the gate. He made his stand three or four feet inside of it, ready to jump backward or sidewise should the necessity arise.

“I’se feared I didn’t heah you call de fus time,” stated Jeff ingratiatingly. “I wuzn’t studyin’ about nobody wantin’ me – been wipin’ off our ole mare. ’Sides, I thought you wuz down in Alabam’, workin’ on de ole P. and A. Road.”

“Num’mine dat!” said Smooth. “Jes’ lis’en to whut I got to say.”

The hostile glare of his eye bored straight into Jeff, making him chilly in his most important organs. Smooth was part basilisk, but mainly hyena, with a touch of the man-eating tiger in his composition. “Little nigger,” he continued grimly, “I come th’ough dis lane on puppus’ to tell you somethin’ fur de good of yore health.”

“I’s lis’enin’,” said Jeff, most politely.

“Heed me clost,” bade Smooth; “heed me clost, an’ mebbe you mout live longer. Who wuz you at de Fust Ward Cullid Baptis’ Church wid last Sunday night? Dat’s de fust question.”

“Who – me?”

“Yas; you!”

“Why, lemme see, now,” said Jeff, dissembling. “Seem lak, ez well ez I reckerleck, I set in de same pew wid quite a number of folkses durin’ de service.”

“I ain’t axin’ you who you set wid. I’s axin’ you who you went wid?”

“Oh!” said Jeff, as though enlightened as to the real object of the inquiry, and still sparring for time. “You means who did I go dere wid, Smoothy? Well——”

“Wuz it dat Stubblefield gal, or wuzn’t it? Answer me, yas or no!”

The tone of the questioner became more ominous, more threatening, with each passing moment.

“Yas – yas, Smoothy.” He giggled uneasily. “Uh-huh! Dat’s who ’twuz.”

“Well, see dat it don’t happen ag’in.”

“Huh?”

“You heared whut I said!”

“But I—— But she——”

“See dat it don’t happen nary time ag’in.”

“But— but——”

“Say, whut you mean, interrup’in’ me whilst I’s speakin’ wid you fur yore own good? Shut up dat trap-face of your’n an’ lis’en to me, whut I’m sayin’: Frum dis hour on, you stay plum’ away frum dat gal. Understan’?”

“Honest, Smoothy, I didn’t know you wuz cravin’ to be prankin’ round wid Ophelia!”

Jeff spoke with sincerity, from the heart out. In truth, he hadn’t known, else his sleep of nights might have been less sound.

“Dat bein’ de case, you better keep yore yeahs open to heah de news, else you won’t have no yeahs. Git me mad an’ I’s liable to snatch ’em right offen de sides of your haid an’ feed ’em to you. I’s tuck a lay-off fur de C’ris’mus. An’ endurin’ de week I spects to spend de mos’ part of my time enjoyin’ dat gal’s society. I aims to be wid her tonight an’ tomorrow night an’ de nex’ night, an’ ever’ other night twell I goes back down de road. I aims to tek her to de C’ris’mus tree doin’s at de church on Friday night, an’ to de festibul at de church on Sad’day night, an’ to de watch party up at de Odd Fellers’ Hall on New Yeah’s Eve. Is dat clear to you?”

“Suttinly is, seein’ ez it’s you,” assented Jeff, trying to hide his disappointment under a smile. “Course, Smoothy, ef you craves a young lady’s company fur a week or so, I don’t know nobody dat’s mo’ entitled to it’n whut you is. Jes’ a word frum you is plenty fur me. You done told me how you feels; dat’s ample.”

“No, ’tain’t!” growled Smooth. “I got somethin’ mo’ to tell you. Frum now on, all de time I’s in dis town I don’t want to heah of you speakin’ wid dat gal, or telephonin’ to her, or writin’ her ary note, or sendin’ ary message to her house. Ef you do I’s gwine find out ’bout it; an’ den I’s gwine lay fur you an’ strip a whole lot of dark meat offen you wid a razor or somethin’. I won’t leave nothin’ of you but jes’ a framework. Now den, it’s up to you! Does you want to go round fur de rest of yore days lookin’ lak a scaffoldin’, or doesn’t you?”

“Smoothy,” protested Jeff, “I ain’t got no quarrel wid you. I ain’t aimin’ to git in no rookus wid nobody a-tall – let alone ’tis you. But s’posen’” – he added this desperately – “s’posen’ now I should happen to meet up wid her on de street. Fur politeness’ sake I’s natchelly ’bleeged to speak wid her, ain’t I – even ef ’tain’t nothin’ more’n jes’ passin’ de time of day?”

“Is dat so?” said Smooth in mock surprise. “Well, suit yo’se’f; suit yo’se’f. Only, de words you speaks wid her better be yore farewell message to de world. Ef anythin’ happen to you now, sech ez a fun’el, hit’s yore own fault – you done had yore warnin’ frum headquarters. I ain’t got no mo’ time to be wastin’ on a puny little scrap of nigger sech ez you is. I’s on my way now. But jes’ remember whut I been tellin’ you an’ govern yo’se’f ’cordin’ly.”

And with that the bully turned away, leaving poor Jeff to most discomforting reflections amid the ruins of his suddenly blasted romance.

The full scope of his rival’s design stood so clearly revealed that it left to its victim no loophole of escape whatsoever. Not only was he to be debarred, by the instinct of self-preservation, from seeking the presence of Ophelia during the most joyous and the most socially crowded week of the entire year; not only were all his pleasant dreams dashed and smashed, but, furthermore, he might not even make excuses to her for what would appear in her eyes as an abrupt and unreasonable cessation of sentimental interest on his part, save and except it be done at dire peril to his corporeal well-being and his physical intactness.

Above all things, Jeff Poindexter coveted to stay in one piece. And Smooth Crumbaugh was one who nearly always kept his word – especially when that word involved threats against any who stood between him and his personal ambitions.

Jeff, watching the broad retreating back of Smooth, as Smooth swaggered out of the alley, fetched little moans of acute despair. To him remained but one poor morsel of consolation – no outsider had been a witness to his interview with the bad man. Unless the bad man bragged round, none need know how abject had been Jeff’s capitulation.

•     •     •     •     •

Solitary, melancholy, a prey to conflicting emotions, Jeff Poindexter climbed the stairs leading up to Odd Fellows’ Hall, at the heels of a family group of celebrants. Until the last minute he hadn’t meant to come; but something drew him hither, even as the moth to the flame is drawn. He paid his fifty cents to the Most High Grand Outer Guardian, who was stationed at the door in the capacity of ticket taker and cash collector, and entered in, to find sitting-down space pretty much all occupied and standing room rapidly being preempted – especially round the walls and at the back of the long assembly room.

Outside, the air was muggy with the clinging dampness of a rainy, mild winter’s night; a weak foretaste of the heightened mugginess’ within. Nearly always, in our part of the South, the first real cold snap came with the New Year; but, as yet, there were no signs of its approach. Inside, thanks to a big potbellied stove, choked with hot coals, and to the added circumstance of all the windows being closed, the temperature was somewhere up round eighty; which was as it should be. When the colored race sets itself to enjoy itself, it desires warmth, and plenty of it.

This crowd was hot and therefore happy. Trickles of perspiration, coursing downward, streaked the rice powder upon the cheeks of many mezzotint damosels, and made to glisten the faces of the chrome-shaded gallants who squired them.

On the platform at the far end of the hall, beneath crossed flags, sat the principal officiating dignitaries, three in number – first, the Imperial Grand Potentate of the lodge, holder of an office corresponding to president elsewhere, but invested with rather more grandeur than commonly appertains to a presidency; then the second in command, known formally as First Vice Imperial Grand Potentate; and thirdly, the Reverend Potiphar Grasty, pastor of First Ward Church.

Facing these three and, in turn, faced by them, sat on the front seats the Supreme Kings, temporarily detached from their kinspeople and well-wishers, who, with the populace generally, filled the serried rows of chairs and benches behind the uniformed ranks.

At the rear, near the main entrance, in a cleared space, stood two long trestles bearing the refreshments, of which, at a suitable moment, all and sundry would be invited to partake. The feast plainly would be a rich and abundant one, including, as it did, such items as cream puffs, ham sandwiches, frankfurters, bananas, and soda pop of the three more popular varieties – lemon, sarsaparilla and strawberry – in seemingly unlimited quantities.

Sister Eldora Menifee, by title Queen Bee of the Ladies’ Royal Auxiliary of the Supreme Kings, had charge of the collation, its arrangement and its decorations. She hovered about her handiwork, a mighty, black mountain, vigilant to frown away any who might undertake any clandestine poaching. The display of napery and table linen was most ample; and why not? Didn’t Sister Menifee do the washing for the biggest white folks’ boarding house in town?

With an eye filmed and morose, Jeff Poindexter, pausing at the rear, comprehended this festive scene. Then, as his gaze ran to and fro, he saw that which he dreaded to see and yet sought to behold. He saw Smooth Crumbaugh sitting with Ophelia on the right side of the hall, well up toward the front. Their backs were to him; their heads inclined sidewise toward a common center.

The loose fold of flesh in Smooth’s bull neck pouched down over his glistening collar as he slanted one shoulder to whisper sweet somethings in Ophelia’s ear. They must have been sweet somethings, and witty withal; for at once the lady gave vent to a clear soprano giggle. Her mirthful outburst rose above the babble of voices and, floating backward, pierced Jeff Poindexter’s bosom as with darts and javelins; and jealousy, meantime, like the Spartan boy’s fox, gnawed at his inwards.

The sight and the sound, taken together, made Jeff Poindexter desperate almost to the point of outright recklessness – almost, but not quite. He noted the fortuitous circumstance of a vacant chair directly behind the pair he watched. Surely now Smooth Crumbaugh would start no disturbance here. Surely – so Jeff reasoned it – time, place, occasion and the present company, all would operate and cooperate to curb Smooth’s chronic belligerency.

If only for a fleeting period, Jeff longed to venture within conversational distance of Ophelia; to bask for a spell in one of her brilliant smiles; to prove to her by covert looks, if not by whispered words, that there were no ill feelings; to give her an opportunity for visual appreciation of his housings; and, most of all, subtly to convey the suggestion that it was bodily indisposition which had caused him to absent himself from her presence throughout the Christmas. Under cover of his hand he rehearsed a deep cough, and simultaneously began to inch his way along an aisle toward the coveted seat in the adjacent rear of the couple.

The program proper was well under way; it had begun auspiciously and it promised much. There had been a prayer and a welcoming address by the Imperial Grand Potentate, and now there was singing. Starting shortly, the annual memorial service for any member or members who had departed this life during the preceding twelve months would follow; this lasting until five minutes before midnight. Then all the lights would be turned out, and the gathering would sit in darkness, singing some lugubriously appropriate song as a vocal valedictory for the passing year until the first stroke of midnight, when the lights would flash on again. Thereafter would follow the strictly social phases of the watch party.

Almost until the last it had seemed that the memorial exercises would have to be foregone for lack of material to work on. But at the eleventh hour, as it were, Red Hoss Shackleford, who always heretofore had been a disappointment to everybody, had greatly obliged, and, at the same time, disproved the oft-repeated assertion that one born for hanging can never be drowned, by falling overboard off the tugboat Giles C. Jordan.

This tragedy had occurred at a late hour of the evening of December twenty-sixth, when the Giles C. Jordan was forty miles up Tennessee River on a crosstie-towing venture, and while Red Hoss Shackleford, who had shipped aboard her as cook and general roustabout, was yet overcome by the potent elements of his Christmas celebration, self-administered internally in liquid form.

At least such were the tidings borne by the captain and surviving crew upon their return to port on the twenty-ninth instant. Whereupon the Supreme Kings had seized upon the opportunity thus vouchsafed as a free gift of a frequently inscrutable Providence.

To be sure, the late Shackleford was not exactly a member in good standing. Two years before, in a fine fervor of enthusiasm induced by the splendor of the uniforms worn at the funeral turnout of a departed brother, Red Hoss had joined the lodge. He had fallen behind in his dues, and, to all intents and purposes, had been expunged from the rolls. Red Hoss generally was in arrears, anyhow, except for those obligations he owed the county chain gang. Those were debts he always paid – if they could catch him.

None the less, certain points were waived by acclamation, following the receipt of the news of his taking-off. It was agreed that one Red Hoss Shackleford dead at such time was worth ten Red Hoss Shacklefords living. His memory was to be perpetuated, thereby lending to the program precisely that touch of seriousness which was needed to round it out and make of it a thing complete and adequate.

To add to the effect, his sole surviving relative, a half sister, by name Sister Rosalie Shackleford, had a prominent place at the front, flanking the low platform. It was conceivable, everything considered, that her loss had been no great one; nevertheless, with a fine theatric instinct for the unities and the verities, she now deported herself as one utterly devastated by a grief almost too great to be borne. There was no mistake about it – when this sister mourned, she mourned!

With her prevalent dark complexion enhanced by enshrouding ells of black crape, she half lay, half sat in a slumped attitude betokening utter and complete despondency, and at timely intervals uttered low moans and sobs. Two friends attended her in a ministering capacity. One fanned her assiduously. The other, who was of ample girth, provided commodious and billowy accommodations for her supine form when she slipped back after swooning dead away. It was expected of Sister Rosalie that she should faint occasionally and be revived; and so she did.

The ritualistic features of the night had been disposed of and the singing was in full swing as Jeff Poindexter edged along, pussyfooting like a house cat, toward the point he sought. Eventually he arrived there unobserved by the quarry he stalked.

Up to this point fortune had favored him; none had pre-empted the one vacant chair, half concealed from general view as it had been by the adjacent bulk of a very fleshy black woman. With a whispered apology to her for intruding, Jeff wormed his way in alongside. He let himself softly down into the seat and began to cough the gentle cough of a quasi-invalid now on the road to recovery.

Together, it would seem, the pair in front of him sensed his presence so near them. With one accord they swung their heads.

“Evenin’, Miss Stubblefield. Evenin’, Smoothy,” said Jeff, smiling wanly, as a convalescent naturally would. “Seein’ ez how dis yere cheer wuz onuccupied, I jes’ taken it so’s to be out of de draf’. I ain’t been so well dis week – had a little tech of pneumonia, I think ’twuz; an’ so—”

Ophelia’s surprised murmur of sympathy was cut short. Smooth Crumbaugh distorted his gingerbread-colored countenance into a hideous war mask. He turned in his place, thrusting his face forward. “Git up outen dat seat!” he ordered in a low, forceful grumble.

“But de seat ain’t taken, Smoothy,” protested Jeff weakly. “I ’lowed I’d set yere jes’ fur a minute or two, account of de draf’.”

“Git up outen dat cheer!” repeated Smooth Crumbaugh in a louder tone.

His shoulders began to hunch and his hands to curl up into fists. Ophelia’s rising agitation was tempered perhaps by the realization of the fact that for her favor two persons, both well known and prominent in their respective spheres of activity, were about to have words – possibly to exchange threats, or even blows. To be the storm center of such a sensation is not always entirely unpleasant, especially if one be young and personable. She spoke now in a voice clearly audible to several about her.

“Please, suhs, gen’lemen, both of you be nice an’ quiet!” she implored. “I trusts there ain’t goin’ be no trouble ’cause of me.”

“’Tain’t goin’ be no trouble, gal,” stated Smooth, as Jeff sat dumb with apprehension. “’Tain’t goin’ be nothin’ but a pleasure to me to haul off an’ knock dis little nigger naiked.” He addressed Jeff: “Git up outen dat cheer, lak I tells you! Start travelin’, an’ keep on travelin’. Git plum’ out of dis yere buildin’!” Daunted to the very taproots of his being, Jeff nevertheless strove to save his face. He made pretense that his cough prevented the utterance of a defiant rejoinder as he rose and backed out into the aisle and worked his way toward the rear, with Smooth Crumbaugh’s glower following after him. Perhaps the excellence of his acting may have deceived some, but in his own soul Jeff suffered amain.

Far back, hard by the refreshment stand, he wriggled himself in behind an intervening frieze of standees. His judgment warned him that he should heed Smooth Crumbaugh’s wishes and entirely betake himself hence; but his crushed and bruised spirit revolted against a surrender so abject and so utter. He told himself he had given up his chair because he did not care to be sitting down, anyway. Even so, this was a free country and he would stay a while longer if he wanted to stay. Only, he meant to keep yards of space and plenty of bystanders between him and Smooth Crumbaugh. He would be self-effacive, but not absolutely absent.

With an ear dulled by chagrin, he hearkened as the Reverend Grasty rose and opened his discourse touching on the life and works of the late Red Hoss Shackleford. The speaker’s very first words made it clear to all that he had come to bury Caesar – not to praise him. Really, the only complimentary thing which might truthfully be said of Red Hoss was that always he had a good appetite. At once the Reverend Grasty manifested that he meant to adopt no weak and temporizing course in his discussion of the subject in hand. Forthrightly he launched into a stirring recital of the shortcomings of the deceased; and out of his topic’s sins, cut off in the midst of his impenitence, he builded a vivid lesson to warn the living.

If one might judge by her behavior, the lorn half sister resented not the attitude and the language of the orator. She forgot to faint and she sat erect. Presently she was chanting an accompaniment to his shouted illustrations.

“Oh, my pore lost brother, sunken in de cold waters.” She quavered in a fine camp-meeting tremolo. “Oh, my pore onworthy brother, whut we gwine do ’bout you now?”

Fervently deep amens began to arise from other quarters, punctuating the laments of Sister Rosalie and the louder outpourings of the Reverend Grasty. The memorial service was turning out to be the high point of the watch party.

In spite of personal distractions, Jeff was carried away by the dramatic intensity of the scene. Forgetting momentarily his own trouble, he shoved forward, the better to see and hear. A menacing growl in his off ear brought him back to earth with a jolt. It was the dread voice of Smooth Crumbaugh, speaking from a distance not of yards but of inches. And now, as Jeff turned his head, Smooth’s outjutted underlip was almost brushing the tip of his nose.

“Thought I tole you to git plum’ outen dis hall!” quoth Smooth; and his voice, more than before, was freighted with the menace of dire catastrophe, imminent and impending.

Jeff didn’t dare reply in regular words. He muttered unintelligible sounds beneath his breath, seeking the while to draw away.

“Quit mumblin’!” ordered Smooth. “You’s liable to mumble up somethin’ I don’t keer to heah, an’ den I’ll tek an’ jes’ natchelly mek a set of nigger shoestrings outen you. B’lieve I’ll do hit anyway – right now!”

One of his hands – the left one – closed entwiningly in Jeff’s coat collar. His right stole back toward his hip pocket – the pocket wherein Smooth was reputed to carry his razor. Jeff felt dark wings fanning his clammy brow.

“Speak up an’ say whut you got to say whilst you is got de breath to say hit,” said the bad man.

“I – I wuz jes’ fixin’ to go, Smoothy,” his voice squeaked.

“Naw, you wuzn’t. Ain’t I been watchin’ you, hangin’ round back yere whar you thought I couldn’t see you. Now den——”

A uniformed and helmeted form bulged in between them, breaking Smooth’s hold on Jeff. The disturbance had drawn the Most High Grand Outer Guardian away from his post at the door.

“Yere! Dat’ll be ’bout all!” stated this functionary in a voice of authority. “Go on outside, you two, ef you wants to argify wid one nurr. Dis ain’t no place to be ’sputin’.” He gave a violent start of surprise and his voice trailed off to nothingness. Until now he had not recognized Jeff’s adversary.

“Who you talkin’ to, Mistah Monkey Clothes?”

Smooth swung on the officer, ready in his present state of feeling to carve up one or a dozen. An ingratiating smile split the nervous countenance of the Most High Grand Outer Guardian. Than to be flirting with disaster nothing was farther from his desires.

“Scuse me, Mistah Crumbaugh. I didn’t know ’twuz you. I begs yore pardon!” he stated hastily. “Please, ef you don’t mind, I’ll settle dis matter fur you.”

He swung round on Jeff, who was making himself smaller by the second.

“Whut you mean,” he demanded, “pervokin’ Mistah Crumbaugh twell he’s jes’ about to lose his temper? Ef yore presence yere irritates him, w’y don’t you go on ’way, lak a gen’leman?... Lis’en to dat! Don’t you see you’s ’bout to break up de program?” From the rows of seats nearest them came indignant Sh-h-hs! Jeff’s popped eyes, glaring about him, read in all visible looks only intense disapproval of him. It was not healthy to hold Smooth Crumbaugh responsible for the interruption; but poor Jeff stood in quite a different attitude with the assemblage.

He shrank away, pawing out behind him with both hands for the door. Partly mollified, but still growling, Smooth started to return to his seat, all in his way making a clear path for him. Jeff vanished through the opening like a scared chipmunk.

The Reverend Grasty had not been discommoded by the disturbance in the rear. He was getting louder every minute. So was Sister Shackleford.

Outside on the landing, Jeff breathed again and paused to master a trembling tendency as regards his legs, at the same time telling himself he had not wanted to stay through their old watch party anyhow. It was a lie; but he kept on telling it to himself over and over again until he almost believed it. With a bitter smile, reflective of the intense bitterness in his heart, he looked backward at the blank panels of the door and reflected that, barring one fascinating exception, he didn’t have a real friend in all that multitude.

Why, if they really wanted to put somebody out, hadn’t they clubbed in and put that tough Smooth Crumbaugh out? Why hadn’t twenty-five or thirty of them formed a volunteer committee on good order and removed Smooth by force? He would have been glad to enroll as a member of that committee – as the thirtieth member and in an advisory capacity purely.

Oh, well, what was the use of hanging round a place where true gentility was neither recognized nor appreciated? These here Supreme Kings couldn’t possibly last much longer, anyway – running things the way they did. He might as well go on about his business. Reluctantly, making compromise with his outraged dignity at every step, and rent between a hankering to linger on and a conviction that if he did linger a most evil thing surely would befall him, Jeff limped in his creaking new shoes down the empty stairs, descending yard by yard into a Slough of Despond.

At the foot of the steps he stopped again, fumbling in his pockets. The jangled state of his nerves demanded the sooth of nicotine. From one pocket he exhumed nearly half of a cigar and from the other a box of matches. He inserted the cigar between his lips and undertook to strike a light. These were a new kind of matches – long, thick ones, with big white-and-black heads. Judge Priest had brought home a supply of them the day before, and Jeff, attracted vaguely by their novelty of appearance and their augmented size, had been moved to borrow a box of them off the dining-room sideboard without mentioning the matter to anyone.

The misanthrope drew one of the big matches down the plastered side of the entryway. It sputtered and snapped under the friction of the stroke, but declined to burst into flame. Jeff cast it away and tried another, with no different result, except that the stick part snapped off short. Either the prevalent dampness had adversely affected them or they were defective and untrustworthy by reason of some flaw in their manufacture. But he noted that both matches had left queer luminous streaks upon the dingy wall.

Morbidly reflecting that in this night of his bad luck he was to be denied even the small solace of a smoke, Jeff absently fingered a third match between his fingers, plucking at its bulbous tip with a thumb nail. Instantly the effect of this was such as mildly to startle him; for at once on his finger ends appeared a strange spectral glow, as though he had been fondling some new and especially well-illuminated breed of lightning bug in his naked hand.

At any other time, almost, this phenomenon, so simply accomplished, would have set Jeff’s nimble fancy at work devising experimental means of entertainment to be derived therefrom; but now and here, in his existent frame of thought, the discovery gave him no pleasure whatsoever.

He pouched cigar butt and matches, and stepped forth from the stair passage into the drizzle. Out of the darkness a figure reeled unsteadily. It bumped into him with such violence as to drive him back into the doorway, and then caromed off, rocking on its heels to regain its balance. Jeff made out that the awk-ward one was a person of his own color and sex.

“Whut’s ailin’ you, man?” he demanded irritably. “Ain’t a whole sidewalk wide ’nuff fur you, widout you tryin’ to knock folkses down?”

“Huh?”

The wavering pedestrian exhaled a thick grunt, which brought with it an aroma of stick gin. He tottered forward again, throwing out his clutching hands for some support.

“Go on ’way frum me!”

Jeff flung out an arm to fend the other off; but the gesture froze solid while yet his elbow was crooked, and Jeff cowered back, transfixed and limber with terror, too scared to run, too weak to cry out.

For there, centered in the dim half-light that streamed down from above, swaying on his legs and dripping moisture, as befitting one who had but lately met a watery end, stood the mortal remains of the late unlamented – whom even now they were most unkindly commemorating upstairs – Red Hoss Shackleford, deceased. There was no doubt about it. Red Hoss’ embodied spirit, with the restless malignity of a soul accursed, had come back to attend its own memorial service!

Jeff’s jaws opened and refused to close. His throat locked on a howl, and that howl emerged as a thin, faint wheeze. The filling inside his knee joints turned to a marrowy jelly. His scalp crawled on his skull.

The ghost grabbed him in a fumbling embrace; and even as Jeff, in an intensified spasm of terror, wrestled to be free of that awful clutch, he realized that this ghost was entirely too solid for a regular ghost. Besides, there was that smell of gin. Ghosts did not drink – or did they? He found his voice – part of it.

“Shacky, ain’t you daid?” he pleaded in croaking accents. “Fur Gawd’s sake, tell me de truth – ain’t you sho-’nuff daid?”

“Who say I’m daid?” demanded Red Hoss with maudlin truculence. Then instantly his tone became plaintive: “How come ever’whars I goes tonight dey axes me is I daid? Does I look daid? Does I act daid?”

“Wait a minute, Shacky – lemme think.” And now Jeff, well recovered, was holding the ex-apparition upright. “You sorter taken me by s’prise; but lemme think.”

Already, as his self-possession came back to him, the germ of a splendid, dazzling idea took root and sprouted in his brain.

Still supporting the burden of the miraculously restored Red Hoss, he glanced over his shoulder up the hallway. There was no one visible; none other shared this marvelous secret with him. As quickly as might be, he guided the uncertain form of Red Hoss away from the doorway and round the corner into the black shadows at the side of the building, where rain dripped on them from the eaves above.

That made no difference. Red Hoss was wet through, and in this moment any slight damage from dampness to his own vanities of wardrobe meant nothing at all to Jeff. He propped Red Hoss against the brick wall and steadied him there. And when he spoke, he spoke low; but, also, he spoke fast. Time was a precious commodity right now.

“Red Hoss,” he said, “I’s yore friend, ez you knows full well. Now tell me: How come you didn’t git drownded in de river?”

“Me? Huh! Dey ain’t nary river ever been dug deep ’nuff to drownd me in,” Red Hoss was replying with drunken boastfulness. “Here’s de way ’twuz: Come de night after C’ris’mus, I finds myse’f a little bit overtuck wid licker. So I lays down on de b’iler deck of dat dere tugboat, takin’ a little nap. I reckin I must ’a’ roll over in my sleep, ’ca’se all of a sudden I ’scovers myse’f in de middle of dat ole Tennessee River; an’ dat tugboat, she’s agoin’ ’long upstream same ez ef de w’ite folks is sayin’ to deyse’ves: ‘Well, one nigger mo’ or less don’t make no diff’ence in good times lak dese.’

“I treads water an’ I yells; but she keep right on movin’. So den I jes’ swims an’ swims, an’ swims some mo’; an’ dat river suttinly is cold to my skin. After a spell I lands ashore whar dey’s some thick-kinder woods; an’ I walks back an’ fo’th th’oo dem woods, tryin’ to keep frum freezin’ to death.

“Long ’bout daylight I comes to a tie camp whar two w’ite men is got a gang of niggers gittin’ out crossties, an’ I yells an’ knocks on de do’ of de shack twell I rousts ’em all up. Dey lemme in; an’ dey ax me a whole passel of fool questions ’bout whar’bouts is I come frum, an’ whut is I doin’ dar, an’ dey kindle up a big fire an’ I dries myse’f out; an’ den bimeby dey feeds me a meal of vittles. W’en I gits ready to start frum dar, ’long about de middle of de day, one of de w’ite men gives me six bits to pay my way back yere on de railroad.

“But jes’ after I leaves de camp to walk to de railroad, w’ich is eight miles ’way, I runs into a bunch of de hands, hid out in de woods a little piece, shootin’ craps; an’ I stops. So presently my six bits is gone. So den I goes on to de railroad afoot; an’, not havin’ no money nor nothin’, I has to beat my way home. I rides on de brake beams a spell, an’ den de brakeman he spies me; an’ he th’ows me off; and de las’ eighteen miles I has to walk all de way – an’ hit a-rainin’!”

“W’en did you git yere? I means w’en did you hit town?”

“’Bout a hour ago – or mebbe ’twuz a hour an’ a half.”

With usage, Red Hoss’ powers for coherent speech were improving.

“So, fust off, I goes down to de river whar dat tugboat is tied up to see whut chance dey is, dat time of night, of my drawin’ whut money is coinin’ to me. But de cabin is all dark an’ ’tain’t nobody aboard her ’cep’in’ de nigger night watchman; an’ he’s settin’ down back in de ingine room, sound asleep. I walks back to whar he is an’ I says to him, I says: ‘Hello, nigger!’ – jes’ lak dat. An’ he open his eyes an’ gimme jes’ one look; an’ den he give out one yell, an’ den he ain’t dere no mo’. I kin heah his footsteps goin’ up de levee, scatterin’ gravels lak a ole hen scratching but dat nigger is plum’ gone. He act lak he seen a ha’nt, or somethin’.

“So den, de nex’ thing I does, I goes up de wharf to de house whar my ha’f sister, Rosalie – you knows dat ’ooman? – does cookin’ fur a w’ite fambly; an’ I goes round de house an’ knocks at de kitchen do’, but ’tain’t nobody answers. I keeps on knockin’, an’ after a spell de boss of de house, a w’ite man, name of Futrell, he come out on de back po’ch in his night-clo’es, wid a lamp in his hand, an’ he suttinly do act ’stonished to see me standin’ dar; an’ he ax me p’intedly ain’t I drownded; an’ I tells him No, suh; suttinly I ain’t drownded! An’ I ax him whar is Rosalie. An’ he say, ef she ain’t in her cabin in de yard, he reckon she must ’a’ come on up yere to dis yere hall fur some kind of nigger doin’s. Dat’s de fust I knows ’bout her livin’ on de Futrell place.

“So I goes out to de cabin in de yard; but she done gone, leavin’ de do’ unlocked an’ on de jar. So I goes in an’ meks a light an’ looks ’bout me; an’ I finds sixty cents under a mat on de washstand, w’ich on my way yere I spends dat sixty cents fur gin at de Bleedin’ Heart Saloon, ’ca’se I’s wet to de skin, ez you kin see fur yo’se’f. An’ so den I meks my way to dis hall, ’ca’se I p’intedly does aim to drag dat dere ’ooman out an’ ax her whut put it into her fool haid to go all round town tellin’ folkses I’s drownded w’en she know, her ownse’f, dey ain’t nary river ever been dug deep ’nuff to drownd me in.”

His voice became complaining now, rather than indignant:

“Fur de las’ ha’f hour, mo’ or less, I been tryin’ to git up dem stepses. But seem lak dem stepses is a heap mo’ steeper’n whut dey used to be. Whut mek ’em steepen dem stepses fur, Jeff?”

A sudden drowsiness overcame the narrator and he sought to slump down against the wall. But Jeff upheld him, against his will; and a minute later Jeff’s words had roused him out of his gin-born daze:

“Lis’en to me, Red Hoss; lis’en! I jes’ come down frum up dere. I come away; ’ca’se I’s yore friend, an’ I jes’ natchelly couldn’t bear to set dere no longer an’ heah ’em scandalize you de way dey’s doin’.”

“Scandalize me! Who’s scandalizin’ me?”

“Ever’body is; but specially de pastor of de Fust Ward Church – yas, suh; he’s de main scandalizer. An’ dat sister of your’n, she’s settin’ there harkin’ to him, same ez ef he wuz tellin’ her some good news.”

“Lemme go! Lemme go! I lay I’ll learn dem niggers to be ’stroyin’ my good name behine my back!”

The victim of calumny, all wide-awake now, wrestled to be free of the detaining hands. After a little, though, he suffered his form to relax and his struggles to abate as Jeff poured agreeable advice upon him.

“Wait a minute, Shacky – jes’ wait a minute! I got a better scheme ’n whut dat one is. ’Sides, you couldn’t git past de do’ – whole place up dere is jest jammed an’ blocked off wid people. Come on now wid me. We’ll go in by de back way, whar de stepses ain’t so steep ez dey is round yere in front. You an’ me’ll go up dat way, tippytoe, so ez not to mek no noise; and we’ll wait in dat little hall behine de flatform – you knows de hall I means – de one whar dey perpares de candidates fur ’nitiation?”

Red Hoss nodded.

“I knows it full well. Been dere oncet. And den whut?” he inquired.

“Den we’ll wait twell dey turns de lights out; dey’s aimin’ to turn ’em out in a mighty few minutes to welcome in de New Yeah in de darkness. An’ jes’ w’en dey does dat I’ll open de do’, an’ you step out on de flatform an’ say: ‘Heah I is!’ At dat I’ll switch on de lights right quick; an’ den – don’t you see? – you’ll be standin’ right dere in full view, up on de flatform, whar you kin tell dat preacher whut you thinks of him.”

“I ain’t ’lowin’ to tell him nothin’ – I ’low to jes’ haul off an’ bust him one, an’ peel his nappy haid fur him!” avowed Red Hoss.

“Suit yo’se’f about dat,” conceded Jeff; “but how do de res’ of de plan seem to strike you?”

“You’s my friend – seem lak you’s de onlies’ friend whut I got lef in de world,” stated Red Hoss. “An’ so I does lak you says – up to a suttin point; but frum den on I’s gwine cut loose an’ be rough. Come on, Jeff! Show me de way! Dat’s all I axes you – jes’ show me de way!”

“Hole still a minute – we got time yit to spare,” counselled Jeff; on top of his first inspiration a second one had burgeoned forth. “Fust off, lemme wipe de rain an’ de cinders offen you – yore face is powerful dirty.”

Obediently Red Hoss offered his features for renovation. From his pocket Jeff hauled out a handkerchief; hauled something else out, too – only Red Hoss didn’t see that. He made pretense of wrapping a forefinger in the handkerchief; but it was not a finger tip that carefully encircled both of Red Hoss’ blinking eyes, pressing firmly against the moist black flesh, and then outlined his nose and passed in rings round his mouth, above the upper lip and below the lower one.

“Hole up!” protested Red Hoss. “You’s rubbin’ too hard. Yore fingernail hurts me.”

“Stay still!” urged Jeff. “I’s ’most th’ough.” Craftily, with a fresh match, he touched the outer and the inner corners of Red Hoss’ eyes and the lobes of his ears; and then he drew off, almost appalled himself by the ghastliness of his own handicraft, as revealed in the dark.

“Come along, Red Hoss. An’ don’t furgit whut you’s goin’ to say w’en I opens de hall do’ fur you.”

“Ain’t furgittin’ nothin’,” promised Red Hoss.

Their two figures, closely interwoven – one steering and supporting; the other being steered and being supported – passed in the murk round the back corner of Odd Fellows’ Hall, to bring up at the foot of a flight of rough wooden stairs, built on against the wall for added protection and as an added means of exit from the upper floor in case of fire, fight or flight. Here the hardest part of Jeff’s job began. He had to boost Red Hoss up, step by step.

•     •     •     •     •

Above, the most successful watch party ever conducted under the auspices of the Supreme Kings of the Universe had progressed almost to its apogee. It was now six minutes before the hour when, according to no less an authority than the late Bard of Avon, churchyards yawn and graves give up their sheeted dead. The principal orator, with his high collar quite wilted down and his face, behind his spectacles, slick and shiny with sweat, reached his conclusion, following a burst of eloquence so powerful that his hearers almost could hear the Tophet fires crackling beneath their tingling feet.

“An’ now, my dearly beloved sistern an’ brethern,” he proclaimed, in a short peroration to his longer one – “an’ now I commands you to think on the fix this pore transgressor must be in at this very minute, cut off ez he wuz in the midst of his sins an’ his shortcomin’ses. Think on yore own sins an’ yore own shortcomin’ses. Think, an’ think hard! Think, an’ think copious!”

His voice swung downward to the more subdued cadence of the semiconversational tone: “The hour of midnight is ’most at hand. In acco’dance wid the program I shell now turn off the lights, an’ this gatherin’ will set in the solemn communion of darkness fur five minutes, till the New Yeah comes.”

He stepped three paces backward and turned a plug set in the wall close to the door jam. All over the hall the bulbs winked out. Nothing was to be seen, and for a few seconds nothing was heard except the sound of the minister’s shuffling movements as he felt his way back to his place at the front of the platform, and, below him, in the body of the hall, the nervous rustle of many swaying bodies and of twice as many scuffling feet.

On the far side of the closed rear door crouched Jeff, breathless from his recent exertions, panting whispered admonitions in the ear of his co-conspirator. Red Hoss was impatient to lunge forward. He wanted to surge in right now. But Jeff held fast to him. Jeff could sense a psychological moment, even if he could not pronounce one.

“Wait jes’ one secont mo’ – please, Red Hoss!” he entreated. “Wait twell I opens dis yere do’ fur you. Den you bulge right in an’ speak up de words ‘Here I is!’ loud an’ clear. You won’t furgit dat part, will you?”

“’On’t furgit nothin’!” muttered Red Hoss. “Jes’ watch my smoke – dat’s all!”

With his ear against a thin panel, Jeff listened; listened – and smiled. Through the barrier he heard the preacher’s voice saying:

“All present will now unite in singin’ the hymn w’ich begins: Hark! From the Tombs a Doleful Soun’!”

Softly, oh, so softly, Jeff’s fingers turned the doorknob; gently, very gently, he drew the door itself half open; with the whispered admonition “Now, boy, now!” he swiftly but silently propelled Red Hoss, face forward, through the opening.

The Reverend Grasty stood waiting for the first words of the hymn to uprise from below him in a mighty swing. But from that unseen gathering down in front a very different sound came – a sound that was part a gasp of stupefaction, part a groan of abject distress. For the rest saw what the minister, as yet, did not see, by reason of his back being to the wall, where-as they faced it. They saw, floating against a background of black nothingness, a face limned in wavering pulsing lines of a most ghastly witch fire – nose and brow and chin and ears, wide mouth and glaring eyes, all wreathed about by that unearthly graveyard glow.

In that same flash of space Jeff Poindexter’s hand had found the switch, set in the wall hard by the door casing, and had flipped the lights on. And now before them they beheld the form of the late Red Hoss Shackleford, his face seamed with livid greyish streaks, his garments all a-drip, his arms outspread, his eyes like balls of flame, and his lips agleam with a palish blush, as though he had hither come direct from feasting on the hot coals of Perdition, without stopping to wipe his mouth. And then he opened that fearsome scupper of a mouth, and in a voice thickened and muddy – the proper voice for one who had lain for days in river ooze – he spoke the words:

“Here I is!” That was all he said. But that was enough.

It is believed that the Reverend Grasty was the first to move. Naturally he would be among the first, anyhow, he being the nearest of all to the risen form of the dead. He spread himself like an eagle and soared away from there; and when he lit, he lit a-running. Indeed, so high did he jump and so far outward that, though he started with a handicap, few there were who beat him in the race to the door.

Smooth Crumbaugh was one who beat him. Smooth feared neither man nor beast nor devil; but ha’nts were something else! He took a flying start, spuming the floor as he rose up over chairs and their recent occupants. Without checking speed, he clove a path straight through the center of Sister Eldora Menifee’s refreshment department; and on the stairway, going down, he passed the Most High Grand Outer Guardian as though the Most High Grand Outer Guardian had been standing still.

It was after he struck the sidewalk, though, and felt the solid bricks beneath his winged feet, that Smooth really started to move along. For some ten furlongs he had strong competition, but he was leading by several lengths when he crossed Yazoo Street, eight blocks away, with the field tailing out behind him for a matter of half a mile or so.

I might add that Sister Rosalie Shackleford, hampered though she was by skirts and the trappings of woe, nevertheless finished inside the money herself.

•     •     •     •     •

Jefferson Poindexter, calm, smiling and debonair, picked his way daintily among overthrown chairs and through a litter of hats, helmets, umbrellas and swords across the hall to Ophelia, who, helpless with shock, was plastered, prone and flat on the floor, close up against the side wall, where Smooth had flung her as he launched himself in flight.

Right gallantly Jeff raised her to her feet and supported her; and right mainfully she clung to him, inclosing herself, all distracted and aquiver, within the circle of his comforting arms. Already they were almost alone and within a space of moments would be entirely so, except for one fat auntie, lying in a dead faint under the wrecked snack stand.

Also there still remained Red Hoss Shackleford, who wavered to and fro upon the platform, with a hand to his bewildered brow, trying foggily to figure out just how he had been thwarted of his just retribution upon the persons of those vanished arch-detractors of him. He had had his revenge – had it sugar-sweet and brimming over – only he didn’t know it yet.

“Oh, Jeffy,” gasped Ophelia, “wuzn’t you skeered too?”

“Who – me?” proclaimed Jeff. “Me skeered of a wet nigger, full of stick gin? Fair lady, mebbe I don’t keer so much fur gittin’ my clothes all mussed up fightin’ wid bully niggers, but I ain’t never run frum no ghostes yit; an’ I don’t never aim to, neither – not ’thout waitin’ round long ’nuff to find out fust w’ether hit’s a real ghost or not. Dat’s me!”

“Oh, Jeffy, you suttinly is de bravest man I knows!” she answered back in muffled tones, with her head on his white waistcoat.

At this moment precisely the town clock sounded the first stroke of twelve, and all the steam whistles in town let go, blasting out shrilly; and all the giant firecrackers in town began bursting in loud acclaim of the New Year. But what the triumphant, proud, conquering Jeff heard was his Ophelia, speaking to him soul to soul.

The Saturday Evening Post, 14 Apr 1917
Those Times and These (1917)

A Kiss for Kindness

~

As will be recalled, it was from the lips of His Honor, Judge Priest, that I heard the story relating to those little scars upon the legs of Mr. Herman Felsburg. It was from the same source that I gleaned certain details concerning the manner of Mr. Felsburg’s enlistment and services as a private soldier in the Army of the Confederate States of America; and it is these facts that make up the narrative I would now relate. As Judge Priest gave them to me, with occasional interruptions by old Doctor Lake, so now do I propose giving them to you.

This tale I heard at a rally in the midst of one of the [William Jennings] Bryan campaigns, back in those good days before the automobile and the attached cuff came in, while Bryan campaigns were still fashionable in the nation. It could not have been the third Bryan campaign, and I am pretty sure it was not the first one; so it must have been the second one. On second thought, I am certain it was the second one – when the candidate’s hair was still almost as long in front as behind.

By reason of the free-silver split four years earlier, and bitter dissensions within the party organization subsequently, our state had fallen into the doubtful column; wherefore, campaigns took on even a more hectic and feverish aspect than before. Of course there was no doubt about our own district. Whatever might betide, she was safe and sound – a Democratic Rock of Ages. “Solid as Gibraltar!” John C. Breckinridge called her once; and, taking the name, a Gibraltar she remained forever after, piling up a plurality on which the faithful might mount and stand, even as on a watch-tower of the outer battlements, to observe the struggle for those debatable counties to the eastward and the northward of us. It was not a question whether she would give a majority for the ticket, but a question of how big a majority she would give. Come to think about it, that was not much of a question, either. We had sincere voters and competent compilers of election returns down our way then; and still have, for that matter.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, it was to be remembered that, four years before, the bulk of the state’s votes in the Electoral College, for the first time in history, had been recorded for a Republican nominee; and so, with a possibility of a recurrence of this catastrophe staring us in the face, the rally that was held on that fine Indian summery day at Cold Springs, five miles out from town on the road to Maxon’s Mills, assumed a scope and an importance beyond the rallies of earlier and less uncertain times. It was felt that by precept and deed the Stalwarts should set an example for all wavering brethren above the river. So there was a parade through town in the morning and burgoo [stew] and a barbecue in the woods at noon, and in the afternoon a feast of oratory, with Congressman Dabney Prentiss to preside and a United States Senator from down across the line in Tennessee to deliver the principal address. There was forethought in the shaping of the program thus: those who came to feast would remain to hear.

Time waits on no man, but has an accommodating way of checking up occasionally, while the seed pod of reminiscence sprouts beneath the warm, rich humus of a fellow’s memory; and, because time does do just this, I yet can visualise, with sufficient clarity for my present purposes, some of the things which happened that day. Again is my blood quickened by sweet strains of music as Dean’s Brass Band swings up Franklin Street, leading the procession of the forenoon.

Without serious mental strain I re-create the picture of the prominent guests riding in open carriages with members of the reception committee and, behind them, the Young Men’s Democratic Marching Club going afoot, four hundred strong.

I see a big four-horse wagon, used ordinarily for such prosaic purpose as moving household goods, but now with bunting and flags converted into a tableau car, and bearing pretty girls, badged and labeled with the names of the several states of the Union. And the prettiest, stateliest girl of all stands for Kentucky. At her side is a little dark girl who represents the Philippines, and accordingly she wears upon her wrists a dangling doubled loop of ironmongery. This hardware is very new and very shiny, and its links jangle effectively as the pageant moves onward, thereby causing the captive sister to smile a gratified smile not altogether in keeping with the lorn state of servitude here typified by these trace-chain manacles of hers.

It seems a long time – doesn’t it? – since Expansion was a cardinal issue and Imperialism a war cry, and we were deeply concerning ourselves with the fate and future of the little brown brother, and warmly debating among ourselves whether we should continue to hold him as a more or less unwilling ward of the nation or turn him and his islands loose to fend for themselves. But really, when we cast up the tally of the intervening years, it isn’t so very long ago after all. It is as though this might have happened yesterday, isn’t it?

So it is with me – abiding as one of those yesterdays that stand out from the ruck and run of yesterdays. Perhaps that is why I can almost taste the dust which is winnowed up from beneath the hoofs of the teams and the turning wheels as the crowds stream off out the gravel turnpike, bound for Cold Springs. Nearly everybody of consequence, politically or socially, joins in that hurrying pilgrimage. Like palmers of old, Judge Priest and Commonwealth’s Attorney Flournoy and Sheriff Giles Birdsong and all our district and county and city officials attend, to attest by their presence the faith that is in them. I attend, too; but in the capacity of scribe. I go to report the doings for the Daily Evening News. I am the principal reporter and, by the same token, one-half of the local staff of that dependable journal, the remaining half being its editor in chief.

Time in its flight continuing to turn backward, we are now at Cold Springs. Mint-master Jack Frost has been busy there these last few nights, so that the leaves of the hickories are changing from summer’s long green to swatches of the crisp yellow-backed currency of October. On the snake fence, which separates the flanks of the woodland from the cleared lands beyond, the trumpet vine and the creeper blaze in clumps so red that one almost wonders the dried rails do not catch fire too.

The smells of fall are in the air – of corn in the shock; of bruised winesaps dropping, dead ripe, from the orchard trees; of fox grapes turning purple in the vine canopies away up in the tops of the trees. From the fringes of the grove come the sounds of the stamping of horses’ feet and the restless swishing of horses’ tails. Off in quiet places a hundred flat flasks have been uncorked; in each thicket rendezvous fore-thoughted citizens are extending the hospitalities of the occasion to such as forgot to freight their hip pockets before journeying hither. There have been two fights and one runaway.

And now it is noon time; and now it is half an hour past it, and the county committee, with the aid of the only known Republicans present – all these latter being of African descent and all, or nearly all, camp cooks of high repute in Red Gravel County – is about to play host to the multitude.

In retrospect I smell the burgoo a-cooking, and sympathetically my mouth waters. Do you know burgoo? If not your education has been sadly neglected – most woefully neglected. It is a glorified gumbo, made in copper caldrons over open fires; and it contains red meats and white meats, and ducks and chickens, and young squirrels, and squabs, and all the fresh green vegetables in season. And into it with prodigal black hands the cooks put plenty of tomatoes for color and potatoes for body and red peppers for seasoning and onions for flavor. And all these having stewed together for hours and hours, they merge anon into a harmonious and fragrant whole. So now the product is dipped up in ladles and bestowed upon the assemblage in tin cups, to be drunk after a fashion said to have been approved of by Old Hickory Jackson himself. A Jeffersonian simplicity likewise governs the serving out of the barbecued meats, following afterward. You eat with the tools Nature has given you, and the back of your hand is your napkin. And when everybody is as full of victuals as a good Democrat should be – which is another way of saying so full he cannot hold another bite or another sup – the band plays and the speaking starts on a plank platform under a brush arbor, with the audience sitting or standing – but mostly sitting – on a fragrant thick matting of faded wild grasses and fallen red and yellow leaves.

The program of events having progressed to this point, I found my professional duties over for the day. The two principal speeches were already in type at the Daily Evening News office, advance copies having been furnished by Congressman Prentiss and the visiting Senator from Tennessee, the authors of the same. By special messenger I had transmitted brief dispatches touching on the complete and unqualified success of the burgoo, the barbecue, the two fist fights, and the runaway.

Returning from the fringes of the woodland, after confiding my scribbled advices to our courier, my way led me under the shoulder of the bluff above Cold Springs. There, right where the water came seeping out through the bank of tawny gravel, I came upon a picture which is one of the pictures that have endured in reasonably vivid colors on the background of my mind.

The bole of an uptorn gum tree spanned a half-moon depression at the verge of the spring. Upon the butt end of the log, where an upended snag of root made a natural rest for his broad back, was perched Judge Priest. His plump legs hugged the rounded trunk. In one hand he held a pint flask and in the other a tin cup, which lately must have contained burgoo. A short distance down the tree from him sat old Doctor Lake, without any bottle, but with the twin to Judge Priest’s tin cup poised accurately upon one of his bony knees.

Behind these two, snugly screening them in, was a wall of green and yellow grape leaves. Through the vines the sunlight filtered in, to make a mellow flood about them. Through the leaves, also, came distantly the sound of the present speaker’s voice and, at frequent intervals, cheering. There was to be heard a gentle tinkling of cracked ice. A persuasive odor of corn distillations perfumed the languid air. All through the glade nuts were dropping from the hickories, with sharp little reports. It was a picture, all right enough!

My feet made rustlings in the leaves. Judge Priest squinted over his glasses to see who the intruder upon their woodland privacy might be.

“Why, howdy, son!” he hailed. “How’s everything with you?”

He didn’t offer to share his store of refreshment with me. I never knew him to give a very young man a drink or to accept a drink from such a one. Doctor Lake raised his cup to stir its contents and nodded in my direction over it.

“The big speech of the day has just got started good, gentlemen,” I said. “Didn’t you-all know it?”

“Yes; we knowed it,” answered the old Judge; “in fact, we heared the beginnin’ of it. That’s one reason why me and Lew Lake come on away. The other reason was that Lew run acrost a little patch of late mint down here by the spring. So we slipped off frum the crowd and come on down here to sort of take things nice and easy till it gits time to be startin’ back toward the city.”

“Why, I thought he was a mighty fine speaker, from what I heard right after Mr. Prentiss introduced him,” I said.

“He’s all of that,” assented the old Judge; “he’s a regular Cicero – seems to know this here oratory business frum who laid the rail. He don’t never jest plain ast somebody to do somethin’. He adjures ’em by the altars of their Sunny Southland, and he beseeches ’em by the memories of their sires; but he don’t ast ’em. And I took notice, durin’ the few minutes I lingered on – spellbound, ez you mout say, by the witchery of his voice – that when he gits holt of a good long word it ain’t a word no more. He runs her as a serial and every syllable is a separate chapter.

“Oh, no; I ain’t got a word to say ag’inst the distinguished gentleman’s style of delivery. I only wisht I had his gift of melodious expression. I reckin ef I did, I’d talk in public part of the day and sing the rest of the time. But the p’int is, son, that me and Lew Lake have heared consid’able of that particular brand of oratory in our day, and after a little spell of listenin’ we decided betwixt ourselves that we favored the quiet of the sylvan dell to the heat and dust of the forum. So here we are, ez you behold us.

“One speech mere or less won’t make much difference in the gineral results, noways, I reckin. Down here in the pennyrile country we’ll all vote the regular ticket the same ez we always do; and the Republikans will vote their ticket, bein’ the stubborn unreasonable creatures that they are; and then our boys’ll hold back the returns to see how many Democrat votes are needed, and up in the mountains the Republikans will hold them back to see how many Republikan votes are needed – and that’ll be the whole upshot of it, onless the corrupt scoundrels should succeed in outcounting the party of the people.

“Of course there’s a great crisis hoverin’ over our country at present. There’s a crisis hoverin’ every four years, regular – to hear the orators tell it. But I’ve took notice that, after the votin’ is over, the crisis always goes back in its hole to stay till the next presidential election, and the country remains reasonably safe, no matter which side gits in; though I admit it’s purty hard to convince the feller who’s already got a government job, or hopes to git one, that the whole nation won’t plumb go to thunder onless his crowd wins.”

“Still, Billy,” put in Doctor Lake, “there was a time when all these high-sounding phrases about duty and patriotism meant more to us than they do now – back in the spring and summer of Sixty-one – eh?”

Behind the Judge’s spectacle lenses sparks of reminiscence burned in his faded blue eyes. He lifted his cup ceremoniously and Doctor Lake lifted his, and I knew they were drinking to the memory of olden days.

“Now you’re shoutin’!” Judge Priest assented. “Say, Lew, do you call to mind them speeches Hector Dallas used to utter ’way back yonder, when Sumter was bein’ fired on and the Yankee Government was callin’ fur troops to put down the Rebellion, ez they seen fit to term it? Heck Dallas was our champion homegrown orator in those times,” he vouchsafed in an aside for my better enlightenment. “Somethin’ about that young feller yonder, that’s speakin’ so brilliantly and so fluently now, puts me right smartly in mind of him. Heck was plenty copious with language himself. When it come to burnin’ words he was jest the same ez one of these here volcanoes. Remember, don’t you, Lew, how willin’ Heck was to bleed and die fur his native land?”

“But he didn’t,” stated Doctor Lake grimly.

“Well – since you mention it – not to any noticeable extent,” said Judge Priest. “Leastwise, any bleedin’ that he done was done internally, frum the strain of utterin’ all them fiery remarks.” Again he included me with a gesture. “You see, son, Heck didn’t go off to the war with the rest of us. Nearly everybody else did – this town was purty near emptied of young fellers of a suitable courtin’ age after we’d gone down to Camp Boone to begin drillin’. But Hecky didn’t go.

“Ez I recollect, he felt called upon to put out first fur Richmond to give President Davis and the Cabinet the benefit of his advice or somethin’; and aimed to join us later. But he didn’t – somehow, somethin’ always kept interferin’ with his ambition to bleed and die, until after a while it seemed like he jest got discouraged and quit tryin’. When we got back home, four years later – sech ez was left of us – Heck had done been entirely reconstructed and was fixin’ to run fur office on the Black Radical ticket.”

“The cat had to jump mighty brisk to beat Hector,” said Doctor Lake; “or else, when she landed on the other side, she’d find him already there, warming a place for her. I’ve known a good many like Hector – and some of them prospered fairly well – while they lasted.”

“Well, the spring of Sixty-one was a stirrin’ period, and I reckin oratory helped along right smartly at the start,” said Judge Priest; “though, to be sure, later on it came to pass that the boys who could go hongry and ragged, and still keep on fightin’ the Yankees, were the ones that really counted.

“Take Meriwether Grider now: He went in as our company commander and he come out with the marks of a brigadier on his coat collar; but I’ll bet you a ginger cookie Meriwether Grider never said a hundred words on a stretch in his life without he was cussin’ out some feller fur not doin’ his duty. Meriwether certainly learned to cuss mighty well fur a man whose early trainin’ had been so turribly neglected in that respect.”

“Recall how Meriwether Grider behaved the night we organized Company B?” inquired Doctor Lake.

“Jest the same ez ef it was yistiddy!” assented Judge Priest.

He half turned his chubby body so as to face me. By now I was sitting on the log between them. I had scented a story and I craved mightily to hear it, though I never dreamed that someday I should be writing it out.

“You see, boy, it was like this: Upstate the sentiment was purty evenly divided betwixt stayin’ in the Union and goin’ out of it; but down here, in Red Gravel County, practically everybody was set one way – so much one way that they took to callin’ our town Little Charleston, and spoke of this here Congressional District as the South Carolina of the West. Ez state after state went out, the feelin’ got warmer and warmer; but the leaders of public opinion, all except Heck Dallas, counselled holdin’ off till the legislature could act. Heck, he was for crossin’ over into Illinois some nice pleasant dark night and killin’ off the Abolitionists, though at that time of speakin’ there weren’t many more Abolitionists livin’ on that side of the river than there were on this. That was merely Heck’s way of expressin’ his convictions.

“In spite of his desires, we kept on waitin’. But when word come from Frankfort that the legislature, by a mighty clost vote, had voted down the Secession Ordinance and had declared fur armed neutrality – which was in the nature of a joke, seein’ ez everybody in the state who was old enough to tote a fusee was already armed and couldn’t be a neutral – why, down in this neck of the woods we didn’t wait no longer.

“Out of the front window of his printin’ office old Colonel Noble h’isted the first Confederate flag seen in these parts; and that night, at the old market house, there was the biggest mass meetin’ that ever had been held in this here town up to then. A few young fellers had already slid down acrost the border into Tennessee to enlist, and a few more were already over in Virginia, wearin’ the grey; but everybody else that was anybody was there.

“Right away Heck took the platform. They’d ’a’ had to lock it up somewheres to keep him frum takin’ it. He was up on one of them market benches, wavin’ his arms and spoutin’ about the mudsills and the nigger lovers, and jest darin’ the accursed invader to put one heel upon the sacred soil of the grand old Commonwealth – not both his heels, but ary one of ’em – when all of a sudden Meriwether Grider leaned over and kissed his wife – he hadn’t been married but a little more’n a year and they had a baby about three weeks old at home. And then he stepped forward and climbed up on the bench and sort of shoved Heck to one side, and called out that there’d been enough talk, and that it was about time for action; and said, ef somebody had a piece of paper handy, he’d like mightily to put his name down as a volunteer fur the Southern Army. And in another second every woman there was cheerin’ with one side of her mouth and cryin’ with the other.

“And Colonel Noble had fetched his flag up and was wavin’ it with both hands; and old Doctor Hendrickson, the Presbyterian preacher, had made a prayer – a heap shorter one than whut he ginerally made – and had yanked a little pocket Testament out frum under his coattails fur the boys to take the oath on. And in less’n no time Heck Dallas was back down in the crowd, in considerable danger of being trampled to death in the rush of young fellers to git up there and sign their names to the roll.”

Doctor Lake slid off the log and stood up, with his black hat crumpled in one gnarled old hand. In the emotion of the moment he forgot his grammar: “You remember, Billy – don’t you? – how you and me and Peter J. Galloway and little Gil Nicholas went up together to sign?”

“I ain’t exactly liable to furgit it, ever,” said Judge Priest. “That was the night I jest natchelly walked off and left my little law office flat on its back. I’d been advertisin’ myself to practise law fur about a year, but whut I’d mainly practised up to that time was economy – that and checkers and old sledge [card game], to help pass away the time. No, suh; I didn’t leave no clients behind me, clamoring’ fur my professional services. Clients were something I’d heared a lot of talk about, but hadn’t met face to face. All I had to do when I quit was jest to put out the fire and shut the door, and come on away.”

“And the last one of all to sign that night was Herman Felsburg,” stated Doctor Lake, as though desirous of rounding out a recital.

“Yes – that’s right too, Lew,” agreed the old Judge. “Herman was the very last one. I remember how some of the crowd begun snickerin’ when he come stumpin’ up on them crooketty little laigs of hisn; but the snickerin’ died out when Meriwether Grider grabbed Herman’s hand and shook it, and Doctor Hendrickson held out the Book fur him to swear on it to be true and faithful to the cause of the Southern Confederacy. A person don’t snicker so very well that’s got a lump in his throat at the moment.

“You see, son, Herman was a kind of town joke them days,” stated Judge Priest, again digressing for my benefit. “There weren’t many furreign-born people in this section back yonder in Sixty-one. Ef a feller come along that was frum Greece or Italy or Spain, or somewheres else down that way, we jest called him a Dago, dry-so – and let it go at that. But ef he hailed from Germany or Holland or Russia, or anywhere in Northern Europe, he was a Dutchman to us.

“There were just two exceptions to the rule: An Irishman was an Irishman, of course; and a Jew was a Jew. We had a few Irish families in town, like the Galloways and the Hallorans; and there was one Jewish family livin’ here – the Liebers; but they’d all been born in this country and didn’t speak nothin’ but English, and, exceptin’ that old man Lieber used to close up his hide-and-pelt store of a Sad’day, instid of Sunday, it never occurred to anybody that the Liebers practised a different religion frum the run of folks.

“Herman had been here about a year, off and on. He didn’t seem to know nobody, and he didn’t have any friends. He wasn’t more’n nineteen years old – or maybe twenty; and he was shy and awkward and homely. He used to go out through the county with a pack on his back, sellin’ gimcracks to country people. He could make change all right – I reckin he jest natchelly inherited that ez a gift – and he was smart enough at drivin’ a bargain; but somehow it seemed like he jest couldn’t learn to talk English, or to understand it, neither, exceptin’ when the subject was business. Understand, that was thirty-odd years back; but sometimes, even now, when old Herman gits excited, you’d think, to hear him, that he didn’t know much English yit. His language matches the shape of his laigs then.”

I nodded understanding, Mr. Felsburg’s conversational eccentricities being a constant fount of material for the town humorists of my own generation. The Judge went on: “Well, anyway, he signed up that night, along with all the rest of us. And after that, fur a few days, so many things was happenin’ that I sort of forgot about him; and I reckin nearly everybody else did too. It seemed like the whole town sort of went crazy fur a spell, whut with the first company, which was our company, electin’ its officers, and the County Battery formin’, and a troop of cavalry organizin’, and the older men enrollin’ fur home defense, and a lot of big-mouth fellers standin’ round on street corners ’lowin as how it was goin’ to be only a ninety-day picnic, anyway, and that any Southern man could whip five Yankees – and so forth and so on.

“And then we’d go home at night and find our mothers and sisters settin’ round a coal-oil lamp, makin’ our new grey uniforms, and sewin’ a tear in with every stitch. And every feller’s sweetheart was makin’ him a silk sash to wear round his waist. I could git a sash round my waist then, but I s’pose if I felt called on to wear one now I’d have to hire old man Dillon, the mattress maker, to make one fur me out of a roll of bedtickin.” And the speaker glanced downward toward the bulge of his girth.

“My mother kept telling me that it would kill her for me to go – and that she’d kill me if I didn’t go,” interpolated Doctor Lake.

“I reckin no set of men on this earth ever went out to fight with the right sort of spirit in ’em onless their womenfolk stood behind ’em, biddin’ ’em to go,” said the old Judge. “That’s the way it was with us, anyway – I know that much. Well then, right on top of everything else, along come the big ball they gave us at the Richland House the night before we left fur Camp Boone to be mustered in, regular fashion. There wasn’t any absentees there that night – not a single solitary one. They’d ’a’ had to tie me hand and foot to keep me frum comin’ there to show off my new grey suit and my red-striped sash and all my brass buttons.

“Fur oncet, social lines didn’t count. That night the best families mixed with all the other families that was mebbe jest as good, but didn’t know it. Peter Galloway’s old daddy drove a dray down on the levee and his mother took in washin’, but before the ball broke up I seen old Mrs. Galloway with both her arms round Mrs. Governor Trimble, and Mrs. Governor Trimble had her arms round Mrs. Galloway, and both of ’em cryin’ together, the way women like to do. The Trimbles were sending three sons; but old Mrs. Galloway was givin’ up Peter, and he was all the boy she had.

“We danced till purty near sunup, stoppin’ only oncet, and then jest long enough fur ’em to present Captain Meriwether Grider with his new gold-mounted sword. You remember, Lew, we buried that sword in the same coffin with him fifteen years later?

“About four o’clock in the mornin’, when the first of the daylight was beginnin’ to leak in at the winders, the nigger string band in the corner struck up Home, Sweet Home! We took partners, but that was one dance which never was finished.

“All of a sudden that sassy little red-headed Janie Thornbury stopped dead-still out in the middle of the floor, and she flung both arms round the neck of Garrett Hinton, that she was engaged to marry, but didn’t – on account of her marryin’ somebody else while Garry was off soldierin’ – and, before everybody, she kissed him right smack on the mouth!

“And then, in less’n no time at all, every feller in the company had his arms round his sweetheart or his sister, or mebbe his mother, and kisses were goin’ off all over that old ball room like paper bags a-bustin’. I fergit now who ’twas I kissed; but, to the best of my recollection, I jest browsed round and done quite a passel of promiscuous kissin’.”

“I’ll never forget the one I kissed!” broke in Doctor Lake. “With the exception of the ensuing four years, I’ve been kissing the same girl ever since. She hefts a little more than she did then – those times you could mighty near lock a gold bracelet round her waist, and many’s the time I spanned it with my two hands – and she’s considerably older; but her kisses still taste mighty sweet to me!”

“Go ’way, Lew Lake!” protested Judge Priest gallantly. “Miss Mamie Ellen is jest ez young ez ever she was; and she’s sweeter, too, because there’s more of her to be sweet. I drink to her!”

Two tin cups rose in swinging circles; and I knew these old men were toasting a certain matron of my acquaintance who weighed two hundred and fifty if she weighed a pound, and had white hair and sizable grandchildren.

“And so then” – Judge Priest was resuming his narration – “and so then, after a spell, the epidemic of kissin’ began to sorter die down, though I reckin some of the boys would ’a’ been willin’ to keep it up plumb till breakfast time. I mind how I was standin’ off to one side, fixin’ to make my farewells to Miss Sally Machen, when out of the tail of my off eye I seen little Herman Felsburg, over on the other side of the ballroom, lookin’ powerful forlorn and lonesome and neglected.

“Doubtless he’d been there all night, without a soul to dance with him, even ef he’d knowed how, or a soul to speak with him, even ef he could have understood whut they said to’ him. Doubtless he wasn’t exactly whut you’d call happy. Jest about then Miss Sally Machen must ’a’ seen him too; and the same thought that had jest come to me must ’a’ come to her too. “‘It’s a shame!’ she said – jest like that – under her voice. And in another minute she was walkin’ acrost the floor toward Herman.

“I remember jest how she looked. Why, ef I was an artist I could draw a picture of her right now! She was the handsomest girl in town, and the proudest and the stateliest – tall and slender and dark, with great big black eyes, and a skin like one of these here magnolia buds – and she was well off in her own name; and she belonged to a leadin’ family. Four or five boys were beauin’ her, and it was a question which one of ’em she’d marry. Sometimes, Lew, I think they don’t raise very many girls like Miss Sally Machen any more.

“Well, she kept right on goin’ till she came to where Herman was scrooged up ag’inst the wall. She didn’t say a word to him, but she took him by the hand and led him right out into the middle of the floor, where everybody could see; and then she put those white arms of hers round his neck, with the gold bracelets on her wrists jinglin’, and she bent down to him – she had to bend down, bein’ a whole head taller than whut he was – and she kissed him on the lips; not a sweetheartin’ kiss, but the way his own mother might ’a’ kissed him good-bye, ef he’d had a mother and she’d been there.

“Some few started in to laugh, but stopped off short; and some started to cheer, but didn’t do that, neither. We-all jest stood and watched them two. Herman’s face turn’t ez red ez blood; and he looked up at her sideways and started to smile that funny little smile of hisn – he had one front tooth missin’, and that made it funnier still. But then his face got serious, and frum clear halfway acrost the hall I could see his eyes were wet. He backed off frum her and bowed purty near to the ground before her. And frum the way he done it I knowed he was somethin’ more than jest a little, strange Jew pedlar in a strange land. You have to have the makin’s of a gentleman in you to bow like that. You mout learn it in time, with diligent practice, but it comes a sight easier ef you’re born with it in you.”

From his flat flask the old Judge toned up the contents of their julep cups. Then, with pauses, during which he took delicate but prolonged sips, he spoke on in the rambling, contemplative fashion that was as much a part of him as his trick of ungrammatical speech or his high bald forehead was, or his wagging white chin-beard:

“Well, purty soon after that we were all down yonder at old Camp Boone, and chiefly engaged, in our leisure hours – which we had blamed few leisure hours, at that – in figurin’ out the difference between talkin’ about soldierin’ and braggin’ about it, and actually doin’ of it. There wasn’t no more dancin’ of quadrilles with purty girls then. We done our grand right-and-left with knapsacks on our backs and blisters on our feet. Many and many a feller that had signed up to be a hero made the distressin’ discovery what he’d really j’ined on to.

“All this time little old Herman was doin’ his share like a major. Long before he could make out the words of command, he’d picked up the manual of arms, jest frum watchin’ the others in the same awkward squad with him. He was peart enough that-a-way. Where he was slow was learnin’ how to talk’ so ez you could make out whut he was aimin’ to say. It seemed like that was the only slow thing about him.

“Natchelly the boys poked a heap of fun at him. They kept prankin’ with him constantly. But he taken it all in good part and grinned back at ’em, and never seemed to lose his holt on his temper. You jest couldn’t help likin’ him – only he did cut such funny monkeyshines with the Queen’s English when he tried to talk!

“Because he was so good-natured, some of the boys took it into their heads, I reckin, that he didn’t have no real grit; or mebbe they thought he wasn’t spunky because he was a Jew. That’s a delusion which a good many suffer frum that don’t know his race.

“I remember one night, about three weeks or a month after we went into camp, Herman was put on post. The sergeant mighty near lost his mind, and did lose his disposition, drillin’ the countersign and the password into Herman’s skull. So a couple of boys out of the Calloway County company – they called themselves the Blood River Tigers, and were a purty wild and devilish lot of young colts ginerally – they took it into their heads that after it got good and dark they’d slip down to the lines and sneak up on Herman, unbeknownst to him, and give him a good skeer, and mebbe take his piece away from him – sort of play hoss with him, ginerally. So, ’long about ’leven o’clock they set out to do so.”

He paused and looked at Doctor Lake, grinning. I couldn’t hold in.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, nothin’ much,” said Judge Priest – “exceptin’ that presently there was a loud report and consider’ble many loud cries; and when the corporal of the guard got there with a squad, one of them Calloway County boys was layin’ on the ground with a hole through his right shoulder, and the other was layin’ alongside of him right smartly clubbed up with the butt end of a rifle. And Herman was standin’ over ’em, jabberin’ in German – he’d forgot whut little English he knowed. But you could tell frum the way he carried on that he was jest double-dog darin’ ’em to move an inch. I don’t believe in my whole life I ever seen two fellers that looked so out of the notion of playin’ practical jokes as them two Blood River Tigers did. They were plumb sick of Herman, too – you could tell that frum a mere glance at ’em ez we toted ’em in and sent for the surgeon to patch ’em up.

“So, after that, the desire to prank with Private Felsburg when he was on duty sort of languished away. Then, when Herman took down sick with camp measles, and laid there day after day in the hospital tent under an old ragged bedquilt, mighty sick, but never complainin’ – only jest grinnin’ his gratitude when anybody done a kind turn fur him – we knowed he was gritty in more ways than one. And there wasn’t a man in Company B but whut would have fit any feller that ever tried ag’in to impose on him.

“He was sick a good while. He was up and round ag’in, though, in time to do his sheer in the first fight we were in – which was at Belmont, over acrost the Mississippi River frum Columbus – in the fall o’ that year. I seem to recall that, ez we went into action and got into fire, a strange pair of laigs took to tremblin’ mightily inside the pair of pants I was wearin’ at the time; and most of my vital organs moved up into my throat and interfered some with my breathin’.

“In fact I made a number of very interestin’ discoveries in the openin’ stages of that there fight. One was that I wasn’t never goin’ to be entirely reconciled to the idea of bein’ killed on the field of battle; and another was that, though I loved my native land and would die fur her if necessary – only hopin’ it wouldn’t be necessary to go so fur ez all that – still, ef I lived to git out of this particular war I wasn’t goin’ to love another native land ez long ez I lived.”

“Shucks, William!” snorted Doctor Lake. “Try that on somebody else, but don’t try to come such stuff on me. Why, I was right alongside of you when we went into that charge, and you never faltered!”

“Lew,” stated Judge Priest, “you might ez well know the truth. I’ve been waitin’ fur nearly forty years to make this confession. The fact of the matter was, I was so skeered I didn’t dare to stop goin’ ahead. I knowed ef ever I did slow up, and give myself a chance to think, I’d never quit runnin’ the other way until I was out in the Gulf of Mexico, swimmin’.

“And yit another thing I found out that day was that the feller back home who told me one Southerner could whip five Yankees, single-handed, made a triflin’ error in his calculations; or else the Yankees he had in mind when he uttered the said remark was a different breed frum the bunch we tackled that day in the backskirts of the thrivin’ little community of Belmont, Missoury. But the most important thing of all the things I discovered was about Herman Felsburg – only that come later.

“In the early stages of that little battle the Federals sort of shoved us back a few pegs; but about three o’clock in the evenin’ the tide swung the other way, and shortly thereafter their commandin’ general remembered some pressin’ business back in Cairo, Illinois, that needed attendin’ to right away, and he started back there to do so, takin’ whut was left of his army along with him. So we claimed it ez a victory for us, which it was.

“Along toward dusk, when the fightin’ had died down, our company was layin’ alongside a country road jest outside the town, purty well tuckered out, and cut up some. We were all tellin’ each other how brave we’d been, when along down the road toward us come a file of prisoners, under guard, lookin’ mighty forlorn and low-sperrited. They was the first prisoners any of us had ever seen; so we jumped up from where we was stretched out and crowded up round ’em, pokin’ fun at ’em. The guards halted ’em to let ’em rest and we had a good chance to exchange the compliments of the season with ’em. Eight in the front rank of the blue-bellies was one big furreign-lookin’ feller, with no hat on, and a head of light yaller hair. He ripped out somethin’ in German – a cuss word, I take it. Doubtless he was tellin’ us to go plum’ to hell. Well, suh, at that, Herman jumped like he’d been stung by one of these here yaller jackets. I reckin he was homesick, anyway, fur the sound of his own language.

“He walked over and begun jabberin’ in Dutch with the big sandy-haired Yank, and the Yank jabbered back; and they talked together mighty industrious until the prisoners moved on – about fifteen minutes, I should say, offhanded. And ez we went back to lay down ag’in I took notice that Herman had the funniest look on his face that ever I seen on almost any human face. And he kept scratchin’ his head, like there was somethin’ on his mind, troublin’ him, that he jest simply couldn’t make out noway. But he didn’t say nothin’ to nobody then – jest kept on scratchin’ and studyin’.

“In fact, he held in till nearly ten o’clock that night. We made camp right there on the edge of the battleground. I was fixin’ to turn in when Herman got up frum where he’d been squattin’, over by a log fire, lookin’ in the flames; and he come over to me and teched me on the shoulder.“‘Pilly Briest,’ he says in that curious way of hisn, ‘I should like to speak mit you. Please, you gecomin’ mit me.’

“So I got up and follered him. He led me off into a little thicket-like and we set down side by side on a log, same ez we three are settin’ here now. There was a full moon that night, ridin’ high, and no clouds in the sky; and even there in the shadders everythin’ was purty nigh ez bright ez day.

“‘Well, old hoss,’ I says, ‘whut seems to be on your mind?’

“I ain’t goin’ to try very hard to imitate his accent – you-all kin imagine it fur yourselves. And he says to me ‘he’s feared he’s made a big mistake.’

“‘Whut kind of a mistake?’ I says.

“‘Ven I j’ined dis army,’ he says – or words to that effect.

“‘How so?’ I says.

“And then he starts in to tell me, talkin’ ez fast ez his tongue kin wag, and makin’ gestures with both his hands, like a boy tryin’ to learn to swim dog-fashion. And after a little, by piecin’ together ez much of his talk ez I kin ketch, I begin to make out whut he’s drivin’ at; and the shock is so great I come mighty near fallin’ right smack off that log backward.

“Here’s the way the thing stands with him: That night at the old market house, when the company is bein’ formed, he happens along and sees a crowd, and drops in to find out, ef he kin, whut’s afoot. Presently he makes out that there’s a war startin’ up ag’inst somebody or other, and, sence he’s made up his mind he’s goin’ to live in America always and make it his country, he decides it’s his bounden duty to fight fur his country. So he jest up and signs, along with the rest of us.

“Of course from that time on he hears a lot of talk about the Yankee invader and the Northern vandal; but he figgers it that the enemy comes frum somewhere ’way up North – Canada or Greenland, or the Arctic regions, or the North Pole, or some of them other furreign districts up in that gineral vicinity. And not fur a minute – not till he talked with the big Dutch prisoner that day – had it ever dawned on him fur a single minute that a Yankee mout possibly be an American, too.

“When he stops I sets and looks at him a minute, takin’ it all in; and he looks back. Finally I says:

“‘And so you went and enlisted, thinkin’ you was goin’ to fight fur the United States of America, and you’re jest findin’ out now that all these weeks you’ve been organizin’ yourself to fight ag’inst her? Is that it?’

“And he says, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ And I says: ‘Well, I wisht I might be dam’!’ And he says, well, he wishes he might be dam’ too, or in substance expresses sech a sentiment. And fur another spell we two merely continues to set there lookin’ one another in the face.

“After a little I asts him whut he’s aimin’ to do about it; and he says he ain’t decided yit in his own mind. And then I says:

“‘Well, Herman, it’s purty tough on you, anyway you take it. I don’t rightly know all the rules o’ this here war business yit, myself; but I reckin ef it was made clear to the higher authorities that you was sort of drug into this affair under false pretenses, ez it were, why, mebbe they mout muster you out and give you an honorable discharge – providin’, of course, you pledged yourself not to take up arms fur the other side, which, in a way of speakin’, would make you a deserter. We-all know you ain’t no coward, and we’ll all testify to it ef our testimony is needed. I reckon the rest of the boys’ll understand your position in the matter; in fact, I’ll undertake to make ’em understand.’

“He asts me then: ‘Whut iss false pretenses?’”

And I explains to him the best I kin; and he thinks that p’int over fur a minute or two. Then he looks up at me sideways frum under the brim of his cap, and I kin see by the moonlight he’s blushin’ ez red ez a beet, and grinnin’ that shy little snaggle-teethed grin of hisn.

“‘Pilly,’ he says, ‘mebbe so you remember dot young lady vot put her arms round me dot night – de von vot gif to me a kiss fur kindness? She iss on de Deexie side – yes? – no?’

“And I says to him: ‘You kin bet your sweet life she is!’”

“‘All right!’ he says. ‘I am much lonesome dot night – and she kiss me! All right, den. I fights fur her! I sticks mit Deexie!’ And when he says that he makes a salute, and I notice he’s quit grinnin’.”

“And did he stick?” I asked.

Before he answered, the old Judge drained his tin cup to the bottom.

“Did he stick? Huh! Four long hard bitter years he stuck – that’s all! Boy, you mout not think it, to see old Herman waddlin’ acrost that Oak Hall Clothin’ Store to sell some young buck from the country a pair of twenty-five-cent galluses or a celluloid collar; but I’m here to tell you he’s one of the stickin’est white men that ever drawed the breath of life. Lew Lake, here, will tell you the same thing. Mebbe it’s because he is sech a good sticker that he’s one of the wealthiest men in this county today. I only wisht I had to spend on sweetenin’ drams whut he lays by every year. But I don’t begrudge it to him.”

•     •     •     •     •

Through the grove ran an especially loud outburst of cheering, and on top of it we heard the scuffling of many yeomen feet. Judge Priest slid off the log and stood up and stretched his pudgy legs.

“That must mean the speakin’s over and the rally’s breakin’ up,” he said. “Come along, son, and ride on back to town with us in my old buggy. I reckin there’s room fur you to scrooge in between me and Doctor Lake, ef you’ll make yourself small.”

The October sun, slanting low, made long stippled lanes between the tree trunks, so that we waded waist-deep in a golden haze as we made for the place where Judge Priest’s Mittie May was tethered to a sapling. The old white mare recognized her master from afar, and whinnied a greeting to him, and I was moved to ask another question. To me that tale stood uncompleted:

“Judge, what ever became of that young lady who kissed him that night at the Richland House?”

“Oh, her? She died a long, long time ago – before you was born. Her folks lost their money on account of the war, and she married a feller that wasn’t much account; they moved out to Arkansaw and the marriage turned out bad, and she died when her first baby was born. There ain’t none of her family livin’ here now – they’ve purty much all died out too. But they shipped her body back here, and she’s buried out in Ellum Grove Cemetery, in the old Machen lot.

“Some of these days, when you are out there in the cemetery foolin’ round, with nothin’ much else to do, you look for her grave – you kin find it. Bein’ a Christian woman, she had a Christian burial and she’s restin’ in a Christian buryin’ ground; but, in strict confidence, I’ll tell you this much more while we’re on the subject: It wasn’t no Christian that privately paid the bill fur the tombstone that marks the place where she’s sleepin’. I wonder ef you could figger out who it was that did pay fur it? I’ll give you two guesses.

“And say, listen, sonny: your first guess will be the right one.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 07 Apr 1917
Those Times and These (1917)

Boys Will Be Boys

~

When Judge Priest, on this particular morning, came puffing into his chambers at the courthouse, looking, with his broad beam and in his costume of flappy, loose white ducks, a good deal like an old-fashioned full-rigger with all sails set, his black shadow, Jeff Poindexter, had already finished the job of putting the quarters to rights for the day. The cedar water bucket had been properly replenished; the upper flange of a fifteen-cent chunk of ice protruded above the rim of the bucket; and alongside, on the appointed nail, hung the gourd dipper that the master always used. The floor had been swept, except, of course, in the corners and underneath things; there were evidences, in streaky scrolls of fine grit particles upon various flat surfaces, that a dusting brush had been more or less sparingly employed. A spray of trumpet flowers, plucked from the vine that grew outside the window, had been draped over the framed steel engraving of President Davis and his Cabinet upon the wall; and on the top of the big square desk in the middle of the room, where a small section of cleared green-blotter space formed an oasis in a dry and arid desert of cluttered law journals and dusty documents, the morning’s mail rested in a little heap.

Having placed his old cotton umbrella in a corner, having removed his coat and hung it upon a peg behind the hall door, and having seen to it that a palm-leaf fan was in arm’s reach should he require it, the Judge, in his billowy white shirt, sat down at his desk and gave his attention to his letters. There was an invitation from the Hylan B. Gracey Camp of Confederate Veterans of Eddyburg, asking him to deliver the chief oration at the annual reunion, to be held at Mineral Springs on the twelfth day of the following month; an official notice from the clerk of the Court of Appeals concerning the affirmation of a judgment that had been handed down by Judge Priest at the preceding term of his own court; a bill for five pounds of a special brand of smoking tobacco; a notice of a lodge meeting – altogether quite a sizable batch of mail.

At the bottom of the pile he came upon a long envelope addressed to him by his title, instead of by his name, and bearing on its upper right-hand corner several foreign-looking stamps; they were British stamps, he saw, on closer examination.

To the best of his recollection it had been a good long time since Judge Priest had had a communication by post from overseas. He adjusted his steel-bowed spectacles, ripped the wrapper with care and shook out the contents. There appeared to be several inclosures; in fact, there were several – a sheaf of printed forms, a document with seals attached, and a letter that covered two sheets of paper with typewritten lines. To the letter the recipient gave consideration first. Before he reached the end of the opening paragraph he uttered a profound grunt of surprise; his reading of the rest was frequently punctuated by small exclamations, his face meantime puckering up in interested lines. At the conclusion, when he came to the signature, he indulged himself in a soft low whistle. He read the letter all through again, and after that he examined the forms and the document which had accompanied it.

Chuckling under his breath, he wriggled himself free from the snug embrace of his chair arms and waddled out of his own office and down the long bare empty hall to the office of Sheriff Giles Birdsong. Within, that competent functionary, Deputy Sheriff Breck Quarles, sat at ease in his shirt sleeves, engaged, with the smaller blade of his pocketknife, in performing upon his fingernails an operation that combined the fine deftness of the manicure with the less delicate art of the farrier. At the sight of the Judge in the open doorway he hastily withdrew from a tabletop, where they rested, a pair of long thin legs, and rose.

“Mornin’, Breck,” said Judge Priest to the other’s salutation. “No, thank you, son, I won’t come in; but I’ve got a little job fur you. I wisht, ef you ain’t too busy, that you’d step down the street and see ef you can’t find Peep O’Day fur me and fetch him back here with you. It won’t take you long, will it?”

“No, suh – not very.” Mr. Quarles reached for his hat and snuggled his shoulder holster back inside his unbuttoned waistcoat. “He’ll most likely be down round Gafford’s stable. Whut’s Old Peep been doin’, Judge – gettin’ himself in contempt of court or somethin’?” He grinned, asking the question with the air of one making a little joke.

“No,” vouchsafed the Judge; “he ain’t done nothin’. But he’s about to have somethin’ of a highly onusual nature done to him. You jest tell him I’m wishful to see him right away – that’ll be sufficient, I reckin.”

Without making further explanation, Judge Priest returned to his chambers and for the third time read the letter from foreign parts. Court was not in session, and the hour was early and the weather was hot; nobody interrupted him. Perhaps fifteen minutes passed. Mr. Quarles poked his head in at the door.

“I found him, suh,” the deputy stated. “He’s outside here in the hall.”

“Much obliged to you, son,” said Judge Priest. “Send him on in, will you, please?”

The head was withdrawn; its owner lingered out of sight of His Honor, but within earshot. It was hard to figure the presiding judge of the First Judicial District of the state of Kentucky as having business with Peep O’Day; and, though Mr. Quarles was no eavesdropper, still he felt a pardonable curiosity in whatsoever might transpire. As he feigned an absorbed interest in a tax notice, which was pasted on a blackboard just outside the office door, there entered the presence of the Judge a man who seemingly was but a few years younger than the Judge himself – a man who looked to be somewhere between sixty-five and seventy. There is a look that you may have seen in the eyes of ownerless but well-intentioned dogs – dogs that, expecting kicks as their daily portion, are humbly grateful for kind words and stray bones; dogs that are fairly yearning to be adopted by somebody – by anybody – being prepared to give to such a benefactor a most faithful doglike devotion in return.

This look, which is fairly common among masterless and homeless dogs, is rare among humans; still, once in a while you do find it there too. The man who now timidly shuffled himself across the threshold of Judge Priest’s office had such a look out of his eyes. He had a long, simple face, partly inclosed in grey whiskers. Four dollars would have been a sufficient price to pay for the garments he stood in, including the wrecked hat he held in his hands and the broken, misshaped shoes on his feet. A purchaser who gave more than four dollars for the whole in its present state of decrepitude would have been but a poor hand at bargaining.

The man who wore this outfit coughed in an embarrassed fashion and halted, fumbling his ruinous hat in his hands.

“Howdy do?” said Judge Priest heartily. “Come in!”

The other diffidently advanced himself a yard or two.

“Excuse me, suh,” he said apologetically; “but this here Breck Quarles he come after me and he said ez how you wanted to see me. ’Twas him ez brung me here, suh.”

Faintly underlying the drawl of the speaker was just a suspicion – a mere trace, as you might say – of a labial softness that belongs solely and exclusively to the children, and in a diminishing degree to the grandchildren, of native-born sons and daughters of a certain small green isle in the sea. It was not so much a suggestion of a brogue as it was the suggestion of the ghost of a brogue; a brogue almost extinguished, almost obliterated, and yet persisting through the generations – South of Ireland struggling beneath south of Mason and Dixon’s Line.

“Yes,” said the Judge; “that’s right. I do want to see you.” The tone was one that he might employ in addressing a bashful child. “Set down there and make yourself at home.”

The newcomer obeyed to the extent of perching himself on the extreme forward edge of a chair. His feet shuffled uneasily where they were drawn up against the cross rung of the chair.

The Judge reared well back, studying his visitor over the tops of his glasses with rather a quizzical look. In one hand he balanced the large envelope which had come to him that morning.

“Seems to me I heared somewheres, years back, that your regular Christian name was Paul – is that right?” he asked.

“Shorely is, suh,” assented the ragged man, surprised and plainly grateful that one holding a supremely high position in the community should vouchsafe to remember a fact relating to so inconsequent an atom as himself. “But I ain’t heared it fur so long I come mighty nigh furgittin’ it sometimes, myself. You see, Judge Priest, when I wasn’t nothin’ but jest a shaver folks started in to callin’ me Peep – on account of my last name bein’ O’Day, I reckin. They been callin’ me so ever since. Fust off, ’twas Little Peep, and then jest plain Peep; and now it’s got to be Old Peep. But my real entitled name is Paul, jest like you said, Judge – Paul Felix O’Day.”

“Uh-huh! And wasn’t your father’s name Philip and your mother’s name Katherine Dwyer O’Day?”

“To the best of my recollection that’s partly so, too, suh. They both of ’em up and died when I was a baby, long before I could remember anything a-tall. But they always told me my paw’s name was Phil, or Philip. Only my maw’s name wasn’t Kath – Kath – wasn’t whut you jest now called it, Judge. It was plain Kate.”

“Kate or Katherine – it makes no great difference,” explained Judge Priest. “I reckin the record is straight this fur. And now think hard and see ef you kin ever remember hearin’ of an uncle named Daniel O’Day – your father’s brother.”

The answer was a shake of the tousled head.

“I don’t know nothin’ about my people. I only jest know they come over from some place with a funny name in the Old Country before I was born. The onliest kin I ever had over here was that there no-’count triflin’ nephew of mine – Perce Dwyer – him that uster hang round this town. I reckin you call him to mind, Judge?”

The old Judge nodded before continuing:

“All the same, I reckin there ain’t no manner of doubt but whut you had an uncle of the name of Daniel. All the evidences would seem to p’int that way. Accordin’ to the proofs, this here Uncle Daniel of yours lived in a little town called Kilmare, in Ireland.” He glanced at one of the papers that lay on his desktop; then added in a casual tone: “Tell me, Peep, whut are you doin’ now fur a livin’?”

The object of this examination grinned a faint grin of extenuation.

“Well, suh, I’m knockin’ about, doin’ the best I kin – which ain’t much. I help out round Gafford’s liver’ stable, and Pete Gafford he lets me sleep in a little room behind the feed room, and his wife she gives me my vittles. Oncet in a while I git a chancet to do odd jobs fur folks round town – cuttin’ weeds and splittin’ stove wood and packin’ in coal, and sech ez that.”

“Not much money in it, is there?”

“No, suh; not much. Folks is more prone to offer me old clothes than they are to pay me in cash. Still, I manage to git along. I don’t live very fancy; but, then, I don’t starve, and that’s more’n some kin say.”

“Peep, whut was the most money you ever had in your life – at one time?”

Peep scratched with a freckled hand at his thatch of faded whitish hair to stimulate recollection.

“I reckin not more’n six bits at any one time, suh. Seems like I’ve sorter got the knack of livin’ without money.”

“Well, Peep, sech bein’ the case, whut would you say ef I was to tell you that you’re a rich man?”

The answer came slowly.

“I reckin, suh, ef it didn’t sound disrespectful, I’d say you was prankin’ with me – makin’ fun of me, suh.”

Judge Priest bent forward in his chair.

“I’m not prankin’ with you. It’s my pleasant duty to inform you that at this moment you are the rightful owner of eight thousand pounds.”

“Pounds of whut, Judge?” The tone expressed a heavy incredulity.

“Why, pounds in money.”

Outside, in the hall, with one ear held conveniently near the crack in the door, Deputy Sheriff Quarles gave a violent start; and then, at once, was torn between a desire to stay and hear more and an urge to hurry forth and spread the unbelievable tidings. After the briefest of struggles the latter inclination won; this news was too marvellously good to keep; surely a harbinger and a herald was needed to spread it broadcast.

Mr. Quarles tiptoed rapidly down the hall. When he reached the sidewalk the volunteer bearer of a miraculous tale fairly ran. As for the man who sat facing the Judge, he merely stared in a dull bewilderment.

“Judge,” he said at length, “eight thousand pounds of money oughter make a powerful big pile, oughten it?”

“It wouldn’t weigh quite that much ef you put it on the scales,” explained His Honor painstakingly. “I mean pounds sterlin’ – English money. Near ez I kin figger offhand, it comes in our money to somewheres between thirty-five and forty thousand dollars – nearer forty than thirty-five. And it’s all yours, Peep – every red cent of it.”

“Excuse me, suh, and not meanin’ to contradict you, or nothin’ like that; but I reckin there must be some mistake. Why, Judge, I don’t scursely know anybody that’s ez wealthy ez all that, let alone anybody that’d give me sech a lot of money.”

“Listen, Peep: This here letter I’m holdin’ in my hand came to me by today’s mail – jest a little spell ago. It’s frum Ireland – frum the town of Kilmare, where your people came frum. It was sent to me by a firm of barristers in that town – lawyers we’d call ’em. In this letter they ask me to find you and to tell you whut’s happened. It seems, frum whut they write, that your uncle, by name Daniel O’Day, died not very long ago without issue – that is to say, without leavin’ any children of his own, and without makin’ any will.

“It appears he had eight thousand pounds saved up. Ever since he died those lawyers and some other folks over there in Ireland have been tryin’ to find out who that money should go to. They learnt in some way that your father and your mother settled in this town a mighty long time ago, and that they died here and left one son, which is you. All the rest of the family over there in Ireland have already died out, it seems; that natchelly makes you the next of kin and the heir at law, which means that all your uncle’s money comes direct to you.

“So, Peep, you’re a wealthy man in your own name. That’s the news I had to tell you. Allow me to congratulate you on your good fortune.”

The beneficiary rose to his feet, seeming not to see the hand the old Judge had extended across the desktop toward him. On his face, of a sudden, was a queer, eager look. It was as though he foresaw the coming true of long-cherished and heretofore unattainable visions.

“Have you got it here, suh?”

He glanced about him as though expecting to see a bulky bundle. Judge Priest smiled.

“Oh, no; they didn’t send it along with the letter – that wouldn’t be regular. There’s quite a lot of things to be done fust. There’ll be some proofs to be got up and sworn to before a man called a British consul; and likely there’ll be a lot of papers that you’ll have to sign; and then all the papers and the proofs and things will be sent acrost the ocean. And, after some fees are paid out over there – why, then you’ll git your inheritance.”

The rapt look faded from the strained face, leaving it downcast. “I’m afeared, then, I won’t be able to claim that there money,” he said forlornly.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how to sign my own name. Raised the way I was, I never got no book learnin’. I can’t neither read nor write.”

Compassion shadowed the Judge’s chubby face; and compassion was in his voice as he made answer:

“You don’t need to worry about that part of it. You can make your mark – just a cross mark on the paper, with witnesses present – like this.”

He took up a pen, dipped it in the ink-well and illustrated his meaning.

“Yes, suh; I’m glad it kin be done thataway. I always wisht I knowed how to read big print and spell my own name out. I ast a feller oncet to write my name out fur me in plain letters on a piece of paper. I was aimin’ to learn to copy it off; but I showed it to one of the hands at the liver’ stable and he busted out laughin’. And then I come to find out this here feller had tricked me fur to make game of me. He hadn’t wrote my name out a-tall – he’d wrote some dirty words instid. So after that I give up tryin’ to educate myself. That was several years back and I ain’t tried sence. Now I reckin I’m too old to learn.... I wonder, suh – I wonder ef it’ll be very long before that there money gits here and I begin to have the spendin’ of it?”

“Makin’ plans already?”

“Yes, suh,” O’Day answered truthfully; “I am.” He was silent for a moment, his eyes on the floor; then timidly he advanced the thought that had come to him: “I reckin, suh, it wouldn’t be no more’n fair and proper ef I divided my money with you to pay you back fur all this trouble you’re fixin’ to take on my account. Would – would half of it be enough? The other half oughter last me fur whut uses I’ll make of it.”

“I know you mean well and I’m much obliged to you fur your offer,” stated Judge Priest, smiling a little; “but it wouldn’t be fittin’ or proper fur me to tech a cent of your money. There’ll be some court dues and some lawyers’ fees, and sech, to pay over there in Ireland; but after that’s settled up everything comes direct to you. It’s goin’ to be a pleasure to me to help you arrange these here details that you don’t understand – a pleasure and not a burden.”

He considered the figure before him.

“Now here’s another thing, Peep: I judge it’s hardly fittin’ fur a man of substance to go on livin’ the way you’ve had to live durin’ your life. Ef you don’t mind my offerin’ you a little advice I would suggest that you go right down to Felsburg Brothers when you leave here and git yourself fitted out with some suitable clothin’. And you’d better go to Max Biederman’s, too, and order a better pair of shoes fur yourself than them you’ve got on. Tell ’em I sent you and that I guarantee the payment of your bills. Though I reckin that’ll hardly be necessary – when the news of your good luck gits noised round, I misdoubt whether there’s any firm in our entire city that wouldn’t be glad to have you on their books fur a stiddy customer.

“And, also, ef I was you I’d arrange to git me regular board and lodgin’s somewheres round town. You see, Peep, comin’ into a property entails consider’ble many responsibilities right frum the start.”

“Yes, suh,” assented the legatee obediently. “I’ll do jest ez you say, Judge Priest, about the clothes and the shoes, and all that; but – but, ef you don’t mind, I’d like to go on livin’ at Gafford’s. Pete Gafford’s been mighty good to me – him and his wife both; and I wouldn’t like fur ’em to think I was gittin’ stuck up jest because I’ve had this here streak of luck come to me. Mebbe, seein’ ez how things has changed with me, they’d be willin’ to take me in fur a table boarder at their house; but I shorely would hate to give up livin’ in that there little room behind the feed room at the liver’ stable. I don’t know ez I could ever find any place that would seem ez homelike to me ez whut it is.”

“Suit yourself about that,” said Judge Priest heartily. “I don’t know but whut you’ve got the proper notion about it after all.”

“Yes, suh. Them Gaffords have been purty nigh the only real true friends I ever had that I could count on.” He hesitated a moment. “I reckin – I reckin, suh, it’ll be a right smart while, won’t it, before that money gits here frum all the way acrost the ocean?”

“Why, yes; I imagine it will. Was you figurin’ on investin’ a little of it now?”

“Yes, suh; I was.”

“About how much did you think of spendin’ fur a beginnin’?”

O’Day squinted his eyes, his lips moving in silent calculation.

“Well, suh,” he said at length, “I could use ez much ez a silver dollar. But, of course, sence——”

“That sounds kind of moderate to me,” broke in Judge Priest. He shoved a pudgy hand into a pocket of his white trousers. “I reckin this detail kin be arranged. Here, Peep” – he extended his hand – “here’s your dollar.” Then, as the other drew back, stammering a refusal, he hastily added: “No, no, no; go ahead and take it – it’s yours. I’m jest advancin’ it to you out of whut’ll be comin’ to you shortly.

“I’ll tell you whut: Until sech time ez you are in position to draw on your own funds you jest drap in here to see me when you’re in need of cash, and I’ll try to let you have whut you require – in reason. I’ll keep a proper reckinin’ of whut you git and you kin pay me back ez soon ez your inheritance is put into your hands.

“One thing more,” he added as the heir, having thanked him, was making his grateful adieu at the threshold: “Now that you’re wealthy, or about to be so, I kind of imagine quite a passel of fellers will suddenly discover themselves strangely and affectionately drawed toward you. You’re liable to find out you’ve always had more true and devoted friends in this community than whut you ever imagined to be the case before.

“Now friendship is a mighty fine thing, takin’ it by and large; but it kin be overdone. It’s barely possible that some of this here new crop of your well-wishers and admirers will be makin’ little business propositions to you – desirin’ to have you go partners with ’em in business, or to sell you desirable pieces of real estate; or even to let you loan ’em various sums of money. I wouldn’t be surprised but whut a number of sech chances will be comin’ your way durin’ the next few days, and frum then on. Ef sech should be the case I would suggest to you that, before committin’ yourself to anybody or anything, you tell ’em that I’m sort of actin’ as your unofficial adviser in money matters, and that they should come to me and outline their little schemes in person. Do you git my general drift?”

“Yes, suh,” said Peep. “I won’t furgit; and thank you ag’in, Judge, specially fur lettin’ me have this dollar ahead of time.”

He shambled out with the coin in his hand; and on his face was again the look of one who sees before him the immediate fulfillment of a delectable dream.

With lines of sympathy and amusement crisscrossing at the outer corners of his eyelids, Judge Priest, rising and stepping to his door, watched the retreating figure of the town’s newest and strangest capitalist disappear down the wide front steps of the courthouse.

Presently he went back to his chair and sat down, tugging at his short chin beard.

“I wonder, now,” said he, meditatively addressing the emptiness of the room, “I wonder whut a man sixty-odd-year old is goin’ to do with the fust whole dollar he ever had in his life!”

It was characteristic of our circuit judge that he should have voiced his curiosity aloud. Talking to himself when he was alone was one of his habits. Also, it was characteristic of him that he had refrained from betraying his inquisitiveness to his late caller. Similar motives of delicacy had kept him from following the other man to watch the sequence.

However, at secondhand, the details very shortly reached him. They were brought by no less a person than Deputy Sheriff Quarles, who, some twenty minutes or possibly half an hour later, obtruded himself upon Judge Priest’s presence.

“Judge,” began Mr. Quarles, “you’d never in the world guess whut Old Peep O’Day done with the first piece of money he got his hands on out of that there forty thousand pounds of silver dollars he’s come into frum his uncle’s estate.”

The old man slanted a keen glance in Mr. Quarles’ direction.

“Tell me, son,” he asked softly, “how did you come to hear the glad tidin’s so promptly?”

“Me?” said Mr. Quarles innocently. “Why, Judge Priest, the word is all over this part of town by this time. Why, I reckin twenty-five or fifty people must ’a’ been watchin’ Old Peep to see how he was goin’ to act when he come out of this courthouse.”

“Well, well, well!” murmured the Judge blandly. “Good news travels almost ez fast sometimes ez whut bad news does – don’t it, now? Well, son, I give up the riddle. Tell me jest whut our elderly friend did do with the first installment of his inheritance.”

“Well, suh, he turned south here at the gate and went down the street, a-lookin’ neither to the right nor the left. He looked to me like a man in a trance, almost. He keeps right on through Legal Row till he comes to Franklin Street, and then he goes up Franklin to B. Weil & Son’s confectionary store; and there he turns in. I happened to be followin’ ’long behind him, with a few others – with several others, in fact – and we-all sort of slowed up in passin’ and looked in at the door; and that’s how I come to be in a position to see whut happened.

“Old Peep, he marches in jest like I’m tellin’ it to you, suh; and Mr. B. Weil comes to wait on him, and he starts in buyin’. He buys hisself a five-cent bag of gumdrops; and a five-cent bag of jelly beans; and a ten-cent bag of mixed candies – kisses and candy mottoes, and sech ez them, you know; and a sack of fresh roasted peanuts – a big sack, it was, fifteen-cent size; and two prize boxes; and some gingersnaps – ten cents’ worth; and a coconut; and half a dozen red bananas; and half a dozen more of the plain yaller ones. Altogether I figger he spent a even dollar; in fact, I seen him hand Mr. Weil a dollar, and I didn’t see him gittin’ no change back out of it.

“Then he comes on out of the store, with all these things stuck in his pockets and stacked up in his arms till he looks sort of like some new kind of a summertime Santy Klaws; and he sets down on a goods box at the edge of the pavement, with his feet in the gutter, and starts in eatin’ all them things.

“First, he takes a bite off a yaller banana and then off a red banana, and then a mouthful of peanuts; and then maybe some mixed candies – not sayin’ a word to nobody, but jest natchelly eatin’ his fool head off. A young chap that’s clerkin’ in Bagby’s grocery, next door, steps up to him and speaks to him, meanin’, I suppose, to ast him is it true he’s wealthy. And Old Peep says to him, ‘Please don’t come botherin’ me now, sonny – I’m busy ketchin’ up,’ he says; and keeps right on a-munchin’ and a-chewin’ like all possessed.

“That ain’t all of it, neither, Judge – not by a long shot it ain’t! Purty soon Old Peep looks round him at the little crowd that’s gathered. He didn’t seem to pay no heed to the grown-up people standin’ there; but he sees a couple of boys about ten years old in the crowd, and he beckons to them to come to him, and he makes room fur them alongside him on the box and divides up his knick-knacks with them.

“When I left there to come on back here he had no less’n six kids squatted round him, includin’ one little nigger boy; and between ’em all they’d jest finished up the last of the bananas and peanuts and the candy and the gingersnaps, and was fixin’ to take turns drinkin’ the milk out of the coconut. I s’pose they’ve got it all cracked out of the shell and et up by now – the coconut, I mean. Judge, you oughter stepped down into Franklin Street and taken a look at the picture whilst there was still time. You never seen sech a funny sight in all your days, I’ll bet!”

“I reckin ’twould be too late to be startin’ now,” said Judge Priest. “I’m right sorry I missed it.... Busy ketchin’ up, huh? Yes; I reckin he is.... Tell me, son, whut did you make out of the way Peep O’Day acted?”

“Why, suh,” stated Mr. Quarles, “to my mind, Judge, there ain’t no manner of doubt but whut prosperity has went to his head and turned it. He acted to me like a plum’ distracted idiot. A grown man with forty thousand pounds of solid money settin’ on the side of a gutter eatin’ jimcracks with a passel of dirty little boys! Kin you figure it out any other way, Judge – except that his mind is gone?”

“I don’t set myself up to be a specialist in mental disorders, son,” said Judge Priest softly; “but, sence you ask me the question, I should say, speakin’ offhand, that it looks to me more ez ef the heart was the organ that was mainly affected. And possibly” – he added this last with a dry little smile – “and possibly, by now, the stomach also.”

•     •     •     •     •

Whether or not Mr. Quarles was correct in his psychopathic diagnosis, he certainly had been right when he told Judge Priest that the word was already all over the business district. It had spread fast and was still spreading; it spread to beat the wireless, traveling as it did by that mouth-to-ear method of communication which is so amazingly swift and generally as tremendously incorrect. Persons who could not credit the tale at all, nevertheless lost no time in giving to it a yet wider circulation; so that, as though borne on the wind, it moved in every direction, like ripples on a pond; and with each time of retelling the size of the legacy grew.

The Daily Evening News, appearing on the streets at 5 P.M., confirmed the tale; though by its account the fortune was reduced to a sum far below the gorgeously exaggerated estimates of most of the earlier narrators. Between breakfast and supper-time Peep O’Day’s position in the common estimation of his fellow citizens underwent a radical and revolutionary change. He ceased – automatically, as it were – to be a town character; he became, by universal consent, a town notable, whose every act and every word would thereafter be subjected to close scrutiny and closer analysis.

The next morning the nation at large had opportunity to know of the great good fortune that had befallen Paul Felix O’Day, for the story had been wired to the city papers by the local correspondents of the same; and the press associations had picked up a stickful of the story and sped it broadcast over leased wires. Many who until that day had never heard of the fortunate man, or, indeed, of the place where he lived, at once manifested a concern in his well-being.

Certain firms of investment brokers in New York and Chicago promptly added a new name to what vulgarly they called their “sucker” lists. Dealers in mining stocks, in oil stocks, in all kinds of attractive stocks, showed interest; in circular form samples of the most optimistic and alluring literature the world has ever known were consigned to the post, addressed to Mr. P. F. O’Day, such-and-such a town, such-and-such a state, care of general delivery.

Various lonesome ladies in various lonesome places lost no time in sitting themselves down and inditing congratulatory letters; object matrimony. Some of these were single ladies; others had been widowed, either by death or request. Various other persons of both sexes, residing here, there and elsewhere in our country, suddenly remembered that they, too, were descended from the O’Days of Ireland, and wrote on forthwith to claim proud and fond relationship with the particular O’Day who had come into money.

It was a remarkable circumstance, which instantly developed, that one man should have so many distant cousins scattered over the Union, and a thing equally noteworthy that practically all these kinspeople, through no fault of their own, should at the present moment be in such straitened circumstances and in such dire need of temporary assistance of a financial nature. Ticker and printer’s ink, operating in conjunction, certainly did their work mighty well; even so, several days were to elapse before the news reached one who, of all those who read it, had most cause to feel a profound personal sensation in the intelligence.

This delay, however, was nowise to be blamed upon the tardiness of the newspapers; it was occasioned by the fact that the person referred to was for the moment well out of touch with the active currents of world affairs, he being confined in a workhouse at Evansville, Indiana.

As soon as he had rallied from the shock this individual set about making plans to put himself in direct touch with the inheritor. He had ample time in which to frame and shape his campaign, inasmuch as there remained for him yet to serve nearly eight long and painfully tedious weeks of a three-months’ vagrancy sentence. Unlike most of those now manifesting their interest, he did not write a letter; but he dreamed dreams that made him forget the annoyances of a ball and chain fast on his ankle and piles of stubborn stones to be cracked up into fine bits with a heavy hammer.

We are getting ahead of our narrative, though – days ahead of it. The chronological sequence of events properly dates from the morning following the morning when Peep O’Day, having been abruptly translated from the masses of the penniless to the classes of the wealthy, had forthwith embarked upon the gastronomic orgy so graphically detailed by Deputy Sheriff Quarles.

On that next day more eyes probably than had been trained in Peep O’Day’s direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had regarded his existence – if indeed they gave it a thought – as one of the utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere neighborly good will, or perchance were inspired by impulses of selfishness, the old man exhibited a mien of aloofness and embarrassment.

This diffidence or this suspicion – or this whatever it was – protected him from those who might entertain covetous and ulterior designs upon his inheritance even better than though he had been brusque and rude; while those who sought to question him regarding his plans for the future drew from him only mumbled and evasive replies, which left them as deeply in the dark as they had been before. Altogether, in his intercourse with adults he appeared shy and very ill at ease.

It was noted, though, that early in the forenoon he attached to him perhaps half a dozen urchins, of whom the oldest could scarcely have been more than twelve or thirteen years of age; and that these youngsters remained his companions throughout the day. Likewise the events of that day were such as to confirm a majority of the observers in practically the same belief that had been voiced by Mr. Quarles – namely, that whatever scanty brains Peep O’Day might have ever had were now completely ruined by the stroke of luck that had befallen him.

In fairness to all – to O’Day and to the town critics who sat in judgment upon his behavior – it should be stated that his conduct at the very outset was not entirely devoid of evidences of sanity. With his troupe of ragged juveniles trailing behind him, he first visited Felsburg Brothers’ Emporium to exchange his old and disreputable costume for a wardrobe that, in accordance with Judge Priest’s recommendation, he had ordered on the afternoon previous, and which had since been undergoing certain necessary alterations.

With his meager frame incased in new black woolens, and wearing, as an incongruous added touch, the most brilliant of neckties, a necktie of the shade of a pomegranate blossom, he presently issued from Felsburg Brothers’ and entered M. Biederman’s shoe store, two doors below. Here Mr. Biederman fitted him with shoes, and in addition noted down a further order, which the purchaser did not give until after he had conferred earnestly with the members of his youthful entourage.

Those watching this scene from a distance saw – and perhaps marvelled at the sight – that already, between these small boys, on the one part, and this old man, on the other, a perfect understanding appeared to have been established.

After leaving Biederman’s, and tagged by his small escorts, O’Day went straight to the courthouse and, upon knocking at the door, was admitted to Judge Priest’s private chambers, the boys meantime waiting outside in the hall. When he came forth he showed them something he held in his hand and told them something; whereupon all of them burst into excited and joyous whoops.

It was at that point that O’Day, by the common verdict of most grown-up onlookers, began to betray the vagaries of a disordered intellect. Not that his reason had not been under suspicion already, as a result of his freakish excess in the matter of B. Weil & Son’s wares on the preceding day; but the relapse that now followed, as nearly everybody agreed, was even more pronounced, even more symptomatic than the earlier attack of aberration.

In brief, this was what happened: To begin with, Mr. Virgil Overall, who dealt in lands and houses and sold insurance of all the commoner varieties on the side, had stalked O’Day to this point and was lying in wait for him as he came out of the courthouse into the Public Square, being anxious to describe to him some especially desirable bargains, in both improved and unimproved realty; also, Mr. Overall was prepared to book him for life, accident and health policies on the spot.

So pleased was Mr. Overall at having distanced his professional rivals in the hunt that he dribbled at the mouth. But the warmth of his disappointment and indignation dried up the salivary founts instantly when the prospective patron declined to listen to him at all and, breaking free from Mr. Overall’s detaining clasp, hurried on into Legal Row, with his small convoys trotting along ahead and alongside him.

At the door of the Blue Goose Saloon and Short Order Restaurant, its proprietor, by name Link Iserman, was lurking, as it were, in ambush. He hailed the approaching O’Day most cordially; he inquired in a warm voice regarding O’Day’s health; and then, with a rare burst of generosity, he invited, nay urged, O’Day to step inside and have something on the house – wines, ales, liquors or cigars; it was all one to Mr. Iserman. The other merely shook his head and, without a word of thanks for the offer, passed on as though bent upon an important mission.

Mark how the proofs were accumulating: The man had disdained the company of men of approximately his own age or thereabout; he had refused an opportunity to partake of refreshment suitable to his years; and now he stepped into the Bon Ton toy store and bought for cash – most inconceivable of acquisitions! – a little wagon that was painted bright red and bore on its sides, in curlicued letters, the name Comet.

His next stop was made at Bishop & Bryan’s grocery, where, with the aid of his youthful compatriots, he first discriminatingly selected, and then purchased on credit, and finally loaded into the wagon, such purchases as a dozen bottles of soda pop, assorted flavors; cheese, crackers – soda and animal; sponge cakes with weather-proof pink icing on them; fruits of the season; cove oysters; a bottle of pepper sauce; and a quantity of the extra large sized bright green cucumber pickles known to the trade as the Fancy Jumbo Brand, Prime Selected.

Presently the astounding spectacle was presented of two small boys, with string bridles on their arms, drawing the wagon through our town and out of it into the country, with Peep O’Day in the rôle of teamster walking alongside the laden wagon. He was holding the lines in his hands and shouting orders at his team, who showed a colty inclination to shy at objects, to kick up their heels without provocation, and at intervals to try to run away. Eight or ten small boys – for by now the troupe had grown in number and in volume of noise – trailed along, keeping step with their elderly patron and advising him shrilly regarding the management of his refractory span.

As it turned out, the destination of this preposterous procession was Bradshaw’s Grove, where the entire party spent the day picnicking in the woods and, as reported by several reliable witnesses, playing games. It was not so strange that holidaying boys should play games; the amazing feature of the performance was that Peep O’Day, a man old enough to be grandfather to any of them, played with them, being by turns an Indian chief, a robber baron, and the driver of a stagecoach attacked by Wild Western desperadoes.

When he returned to town at dusk, drawing his little red wagon behind him, his new suit was rumpled into many wrinkles and marked by dust and grass stains; his flame-colored tie was twisted under one ear; his new straw hat was mashed quite out of shape; and in his eyes was a light that sundry citizens, on meeting him, could only interpret to be a spark struck from inner fires of madness.

Days that came after this, on through the midsummer, were, with variations, but repetitions of the day I have just described. Each morning Peep O’Day would go to either the courthouse or Judge Priest’s home to turn over to the Judge the unopened mail which had been delivered to him at Gafford’s stables; then he would secure from the Judge a loan of money against his inheritance. Generally the amount of his daily borrowing was a dollar; rarely was it so much as two dollars; and only once was it more than two dollars.

By nightfall the sum would have been expended upon perfectly useless and absolutely childish devices. It might be that he would buy toy pistols and paper caps for himself and his following of urchins; or that his whim would lead him to expend all the money in tin flutes. In one case the group he so incongruously headed would be for that one day a gang of make-believe banditti; in another, they would constitute themselves a fife-and-drum corps – with barreltops for the drums – and would march through the streets, where scandalized adults stood in their tracks to watch them go by, they all the while making weird sounds, which with them passed for music.

Or again, the available cash resources would be invested in provender; and then there would be an outing in the woods. Under Peep O’Day’s captaincy his chosen band of youngsters picked dewberries; they went swimming together in Guthrie’s Gravel Pit, out by the old Fair Grounds, where his spare naked shanks contrasted strongly with their plump freckled legs as all of them splashed through the shallows, making for deep water. Under his leadership they stole watermelons from Mr. Dick Bell’s patch, afterward eating their spoils in thickets of grapevines along the banks of Perkins’ Creek.

It was felt that mental befuddlement and mortal folly could reach no greater heights – or no lower depths – than on a certain hour of a certain day, along toward the end of August, when O’Day came forth from his quarters in Gafford’s stables, wearing a pair of boots that M. Biederman’s establishment had turned out to his order and his measure – not such boots as a sensible man might be expected to wear, but boots that were exaggerated and monstrous counterfeits of the red-topped, scroll-fronted, brass-toed, stub-heeled, squeaky-soled bootees that small boys of an earlier generation possessed.

Very proudly and seemingly unconscious of or, at least, oblivious to the derisive remarks that the appearance of these new belongings drew from many persons, the owner went clumping about in them, with the rumply legs of his trousers tucked down in them, and ballooning up and out over the tops in folds which overlapped from his knee joints halfway down his attenuated calves.

As Deputy Sheriff Quarles said, the combination was a sight fit to make a horse laugh. It may be that small boys have a lesser sense of humor than horses have, for certainly the boys who were the old man’s invariable shadows did not laugh at him, or at his boots either.

Between the whiskered senior and his small comrades there existed a freemasonry that made them all sense a thing beyond the ken of most of their elders. Perhaps this was because the elders, being blind in their superior wisdom, saw neither this thing nor the communion that flourished. They saw only the farcical joke. But His Honor, Judge Priest, to cite a conspicuous exception, seemed not to see the lamentable comedy of it.

Indeed, it seemed to some almost as if Judge Priest were aiding and abetting the befogged O’Day in his demented enterprises, his peculiar excursions and his weird purchases. If he did not actually encourage him in these constant exhibitions of witlessness, certainly there were no evidences available to show that he sought to dissuade O’Day from his strange course.

At the end of a fortnight one citizen, in whom patience had ceased to be a virtue and to whose nature long-continued silence on any public topic was intolerable, felt it his duty to speak to the Judge upon the subject. This gentleman – his name was S. P. Escott – held, with others, that, for the good name of the community, steps should be taken to abate the infantile, futile activities of the besotted legatee.

Afterward Mr. Escott, giving a partial account of the conversation with Judge Priest to certain of his friends, showed unfeigned annoyance at the outcome.

“I claim that old man’s not fittin’ to be runnin’ a court any longer,” he stated bitterly. “He’s too old and peevish – that’s whut ails him! Fur one, I’m certainly not never goin’ to vote fur him again. Why, it’s gettin’ to be ez much ez a man’s life is worth to stop that there spiteful old crank on the street and put a civil question to him – that’s whut’s the matter!”

“What happened, S. P.?” inquired someone.

“Why, here’s whut happened!” exclaimed the aggrieved Mr. Escott. “I hadn’t any more than started in to tell him the whole town was talkin’ about the way that daffy Old Peep O’Day was carryin’ on, and that somethin’ had oughter be done about it, and didn’t he think it was beholdin’ on him ez circuit judge to do somethin’ right away, sech ez havin’ O’Day tuck up and tried fur a lunatic, and that I fur one was ready and willin’ to testify to the crazy things I’d seen done with my own eyes – when he cut in on me and jest ez good ez told me to my own face that ef I’d quit tendin’ to other people’s business I’d mebbe have more business of my own to tend to.

“Think of that, gentlemen! A circuit judge bemeanin’ a citizen and a taxpayer” – he checked himself slightly – “anyhow, a citizen, thataway! It shows he can’t be rational his own self. Personally I claim Old Priest is failin’ mentally – he must be! And ef anybody kin be found to run against him at the next election you gentlemen jest watch and see who gits my vote!”

Having uttered this threat with deep and significant emphasis Mr. Escott, still muttering, turned and entered the front gate of his boarding house. It was not exactly his boarding house; his wife ran it. But Mr. Escott lived there and voted from there.

But the apogee of Peep O’Day’s carnival of weird vagaries of deportment came at the end of two months – two months in which each day the man furnished cumulative and piled-up material for derisive and jocular comment on the part of a very considerable proportion of his fellow townsmen.

Three occurrences of a widely dissimilar nature, yet all closely interrelated to the main issue, marked the climax of the man’s new rôle in his new career. The first of these was the arrival of his legacy; the second was a one-ring circus; and the third and last was a nephew.

In the form of certain bills of exchange the estate left by the late Daniel O’Day, of the town of Kilmare, in the island of Ireland, was on a certain afternoon delivered over into Judge Priest’s hands, and by him, in turn, handed to the rightful owner, after which sundry indebtednesses, representing the total of the old Judge’s day-to-day cash advances to O’Day, were liquidated.

The ceremony of deducting this sum took place at the Planters’ Bank, whither the two had journeyed in company from the courthouse. Having, with the aid of the paying teller, instructed O’Day in the technical details requisite to the drawing of personal checks, Judge Priest went home and had his bag packed, and left for Reelfoot Lake to spend a week fishing. As a consequence he missed the remaining two events, following immediately thereafter.

The circus was no great shakes of a circus; no grand, glittering, gorgeous, glorious pageant of education and entertainment, traveling on its own special trains; no vast tented city of world’s wonders and world’s champions, heralded for weeks and weeks in advance of its coming by dead walls emblazoned with the finest examples of the lithographer’s art, and by half-page advertisements in the Daily Evening News. On the contrary, it was a shabby little wagon show, which, coming overland on short notice, rolled into town under horse power, and set up its ragged and dusty canvases on the vacant lot across from Yeiser’s drug store.

Compared with the street parade of any of its great and famous rivals, the street parade of this circus was a meager and disappointing thing. Why, there was only one elephant, a dwarfish and debilitated-looking creature, worn mangy and slick on its various angles, like the cover of an old-fashioned haircloth trunk; and obviously most of the closed cages were weather-beaten stake wagons in disguise. Nevertheless, there was a sizable turnout of people for the afternoon performance. After all, a circus was a circus.

Moreover, this particular circus was marked at the afternoon performance by happenings of a nature most decidedly unusual. At one o’clock the doors were opened: at one-ten the eyes of the proprietor were made glad and his heart was uplifted within him by the sight of a strange procession, drawing nearer and nearer across the scuffed turf of the common, and heading in the direction of the red ticket wagon.

At the head of the procession marched Peep O’Day – only, of course, the proprietor didn’t know it was Peep O’Day – a queer figure in his rumpled black clothes and his red-topped brass-toed boots, and with one hand holding fast to the string of a captive toy balloon. Behind him, in an uneven jostling formation, followed many small boys and some small girls. A census of the ranks would have developed that here were included practically all the juvenile white population who otherwise, through a lack of funds, would have been denied the opportunity to patronize this circus or, in fact, any circus.

Each member of the joyous company was likewise the bearer of a toy balloon – red, yellow, blue, green or purple, as the case might be. Over the line of heads the taut rubbery globes rode on their tethers, nodding and twisting like so many big iridescent bubbles; and half a block away, at the edge of the lot, a balloon vender, whose entire stock had been disposed of in one splendid transaction, now stood, empty-handed but full-pocketed, marvelling at the stroke of luck that enabled him to take an afternoon off and rest his voice.

Out of a seemingly bottomless exchequer Peep O’Day bought tickets of admission for all. But this was only the beginning. Once inside the tent he procured accommodations in the reserved-seat section for himself and those who accompanied him. From such superior points of vantage the whole crew of them witnessed the performance, from the thrilling grand entry, with spangled ladies and gentlemen riding two by two on broad-backed steeds, to the tumbling bout introducing the full strength of the company, which came at the end.

They munched fresh-roasted peanuts and balls of sugar-coated pop corn, slightly rancid, until they munched no longer with zest but merely mechanically. They drank pink lemonade to an extent that threatened absolute depletion of the fluid contents of both barrels in the refreshment stand out in the menagerie tent. They whooped their unbridled approval when the wild Indian chief, after shooting down a stuffed coon with a bow and arrow from somewhere up near the top of the center pole while balancing himself jauntily erect upon the haunches of a coursing white charger, suddenly flung off his feathered headdress, his wig and his fringed leather garments, and revealed himself in pink fleshings as the principal bareback rider.

They screamed in a chorus of delight when the funny old clown, who had been forcibly deprived of three tin flutes in rapid succession, now produced yet a fourth from the seemingly inexhaustible depths of his baggy white pants – a flute with a string and a bent pin affixed to it – and, secretly hooking the pin in the tail of the cross ringmaster’s coat, was thereafter enabled to toot sharp shrill blasts at frequent intervals, much to the chagrin of the ringmaster, who seemed utterly unable to discover the whereabouts of the instrument dangling behind him.

But no one among them whooped louder or laughed longer than their elderly and bewhiskered friend, who sat among them, paying the bills. As his guests they stayed for the concert; and, following this, they patronized the side show in a body. They had been almost the first upon the scene; assuredly they were the last of the audience to quit it.

Indeed, before they trailed their confrère away from the spot the sun was nearly down; and at scores of supper tables all over town the tale of poor old Peep O’Day’s latest exhibition of freakishness was being retailed, with elaborations, to interested auditors. Estimates of the sum probably expended by him in this crowning extravagance ranged well up into the hundreds of dollars.

As for the object of these speculations, he was destined not to eat any supper at all that night. Something happened that so upset him as to make him forget the meal altogether. It began to happen when he reached the modest home of P. Gafford, adjoining the Gafford stables, on Locust Street, and found sitting on the lowermost step of the porch a young man of untidy and unshaven aspect, who hailed him affectionately as Uncle Paul, and who showed deep annoyance and acute distress upon being rebuffed with chill words.

It is possible that the strain of serving a three-months’ sentence, on the technical charge of vagrancy, in a workhouse somewhere in Indiana, had affected the young man’s nerves. His ankle bones still ached where the ball and chain had been hitched; on his palms the blisters induced by the uncongenial use of a sledge hammer on a rock pile had hardly as yet turned to calluses. So it is only fair to presume that his nervous system felt the stress of his recent confining experiences.

Almost tearfully he pleaded with Peep O’Day to remember the ties of blood that bound them; repeatedly he pointed out that he was the only known kinsman of the other in all the world, and, therefore, had more reason than any other living being to expect kindness and generosity at his uncle’s hands. He spoke socialistically of the advisability of an equal division; failing to make any impression here he mentioned the subject of a loan – at first hopefully, but finally despairingly.

When he was done Peep O’Day, in a perfectly colorless and unsympathetic voice, bade him good-by – not good night but good-by! And, going inside the house, he closed the door behind him, leaving his newly returned relative outside and quite alone.

At this the young man uttered violent language; but, since there was nobody present to hear him, it is likely he found small satisfaction in his profanity, rich though it may have been in metaphor and variety. So presently he betook himself off, going straight to the office in Legal Row of H. B. Sublette, attorney at law.

From the circumstance that he found Mr. Sublette in, though it was long past that gentleman’s office hours, and, moreover, found Mr. Sublette waiting in an expectant and attentive attitude, it might have been adduced by one skilled in the trick of putting two and two together that the pair of them had reached a prior understanding sometime during the day; and that the visit of the young man to the Gafford home and his speeches there had all been parts of a scheme planned out at a prior conference.

Be this as it may, as soon as Mr. Sublette had heard his caller’s version of the meeting upon the porch he lost no time in taking certain legal steps. That very night, on behalf of his client, denominated in the documents as Percival Dwyer, Esquire, he prepared a petition addressed to the circuit judge of the district, setting forth that, inasmuch as Paul Felix O’Day had by divers acts shown himself to be of unsound mind, now, therefore, came his nephew and next of kin praying that a committee or curator be appointed to take over the estate of the said Paul Felix O’Day, and administer the same in accordance with the orders of the court until such time as the said Paul Felix O’Day should recover his reason, or should pass from this life, and so forth and so on; not to mention whereases in great number and aforesaids abounding throughout the text in the utmost profusion.

On the following morning the papers were filed with Circuit Clerk Milam. That vigilant barrister, Mr. Sublette, brought them in person to the courthouse before nine o’clock, he having the interests of his client at heart and perhaps also visions of a large contingent fee in his mind. No retainer had been paid. The state of Mr. Dwyer’s finances – or, rather, the absence of any finances – had precluded the performance of that customary detail; but to Mr. Sublette’s experienced mind the prospects of future increment seemed large.

Accordingly he was all for prompt action. Formally he said he wished to go on record as demanding for his principal a speedy hearing of the issue, with a view to preventing the defendant named in the pleadings from dissipating any more of the estate lately bequeathed to him and now fully in his possession – or words to that effect.

Mr. Milam felt justified in getting into communication with Judge Priest over the long-distance phone; and the Judge, cutting short his vacation and leaving uncaught vast numbers of bass and perch in Reelfoot Lake, came home, arriving late that night.

Next morning, having issued divers orders in connection with the impending litigation, he sent a messenger to find Peep O’Day and to direct O’Day to come to the courthouse for a personal interview.

Shortly thereafter a scene that had occurred some two months earlier, with His Honor’s private chamber for a setting, was substantially duplicated: There was the same cast of two, the same stage properties, the same atmosphere of untidy tidiness. And, as before, the dialogue was in Judge Priest’s hands. He led and his fellow character followed his leads.

“Peep,” he was saying, “you understand, don’t you, that this here fragrant nephew of yours that’s turned up from nowheres in particular is fixin’ to git ready to try to prove that you are feeble-minded? And, on top of that, that he’s goin’ to ask that a committee be app’inted fur you – in other words, that somebody or other shall be named by the court, meanin’ me, to take charge of your property and control the spendin’ of it frum now on?”

“Yes, suh,” stated O’Day. “Pete Gafford he set down with me and made hit all clear to me, yestiddy evenin’, after they’d done served the papers on me.”

“All right, then. Now I’m goin’ to fix the hearin’ fur tomorrow mornin’ at ten. The other side is askin’ fur a quick decision; and I rather figger they’re entitled to it. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Whutever you say, Judge.”

“Well, have you retained a lawyer to represent your interests in court? That’s the main question that I sent fur you to ast you.”

“Do I need a lawyer, Judge?”

“Well, there have been times when I regarded lawyers ez bein’ superfluous,” stated Judge Priest dryly. “Still, in most cases litigants do have ’em round when the case is bein’ heard.”

“I don’t know ez I need any lawyer to he’p me say whut I’ve got to say,” said O’Day. “Judge, you ain’t never ast me no questions about the way I’ve been carryin’ on sence I come into this here money; but I reckin mebbe this is ez good a time ez any to tell you jest why I’ve been actin’ the way I’ve done. You see, suh——”

“Hold on!” broke in Judge Priest. “Up till now, ez my friend, it would ’a’ been perfectly proper fur you to give me your confidences ef you were minded so to do; but now I reckin you’d better not. You see, I’m the judge that’s got to decide whether you are a responsible person – whether you’re mentally capable of handlin’ your own financial affairs, or whether you ain’t. So you’d better wait and make your statement in your own behalf to me whilst I’m settin’ on the bench. I’ll see that you git an opportunity to do so and I’ll listen to it; and I’ll give it all the consideration it’s deservin’ of.

“And, on second thought, p’raps it would only be a waste of time and money fur you to go hirin’ a lawyer specially to represent you. Under the law it’s my duty, in sech a case ez this here one is, to app’int a member of the bar to serve durin’ the proceedin’s ez your guardian ad litem.

“You don’t need to be startled,” he added as O’Day flinched at the sound in his ears of these strange and fearsome words. “A guardian ad litem is simply a lawyer that tends to your affairs till the case is settled one way or the other. Ef you had a dozen lawyers I’d have to app’int him jest the same. So you don’t need to worry about that part of it.

“That’s all. You kin go now ef you want to. Only, ef I was you, I wouldn’t draw out any more money frum the bank ’twixt now and the time when I make my decision.”

•     •     •     •     •

All things considered, it was an unusual assemblage that Judge Priest regarded over the top rims of his glasses as he sat facing it in his broad armchair, with the flat top of the bench intervening between him and the gathering. Not often, even in the case of exciting murder trials, had the old courtroom held a larger crowd; certainly never had it held so many boys. Boys, and boys exclusively, filled the back rows of benches downstairs. More boys packed the narrow shelf-like balcony that spanned the chamber across its far end – mainly small boys, barefooted, sunburned, freckled-faced, shock-headed boys. And, for boys, they were strangely silent and strangely attentive.

The petitioner sat with his counsel, Mr. Sublette. The petitioner had been newly shaved, and from some mysterious source had been equipped with a neat wardrobe. Plainly he was endeavoring to wear a look of virtue, which was a difficult undertaking, as you would understand had you known the petitioner.

The defending party to the action was seated across the room, touching elbows with old Colonel Farrell, dean of the local bar and its most florid orator.

“The court will designate Col. Horatio Farrell as guardian ad litem for the defendant during these proceedings,” Judge Priest had stated a few minutes earlier, using the formal and grammatical language he reserved exclusively for his courtroom.

At once old Colonel Farrell had hitched his chair up alongside O’Day; had asked him several questions in a tone inaudible to those about them; had listened to the whispered answers of O’Day; and then had nodded his huge curly white dome of a head, as though amply satisfied with the responses.

Let us skip the preliminaries. True, they seemed to interest the audience; here, though, they would be tedious reading. Likewise, in touching upon the opening and outlining address of Attorney-at-Law Sublette let us, for the sake of time and space, be very much briefer than Mr. Sublette was. For our present purposes, I deem it sufficient to say that in all his professional career Mr. Sublette was never more eloquent, never more forceful, never more vehement in his allegations, and never more convinced – as he himself stated, not once but repeatedly – of his ability to prove the facts he alleged by competent and unbiased testimony. These facts, he pointed out, were common knowledge in the community; nevertheless, he stood prepared to buttress them with the evidence of reputable witnesses, given under oath.

Mr. Sublette, having unwound at length, now wound up. He sat down, perspiring freely and through the perspiration radiating confidence in his contentions, confidence in the result and, most of all, unbounded confidence in Mr. Sublette.

Now Colonel Farrell was standing up to address the court. Under the cloak of a theatrical presence and a large orotund manner, and behind a Ciceronian command of sonorous language, the colonel carried concealed a shrewd old brain. It was as though a skilled marksman lurked in ambush amid a tangle of luxuriant foliage. In this particular instance, moreover, it is barely possible that the colonel was acting on a cue, privily conveyed to him before the court opened.

“May it please Your Honor,” he began, “I have just conferred with the defendant here; and, acting in the capacity of his guardian ad litem, I have advised him to waive an opening address by counsel. Indeed, the defendant has no counsel. Furthermore, the defendant, also acting upon my advice, will present no witnesses in his own behalf. But, with Your Honor’s permission, the defendant will now make a personal statement; and thereafter he will rest content, leaving the final arbitrament of the issue to Your Honor’s discretion.”

“I object!” exclaimed Mr. Sublette briskly.

“On what grounds does the learned counsel object?” inquired Judge Priest.

“On the grounds that, since the mental competence of this man is concerned – since it is our contention that he is patently and plainly a victim of senility, an individual prematurely in his dotage – any utterances by him will be of no value whatsoever in aiding the conscience and intelligence of the court to arrive at a fair and just conclusion regarding the defendant’s mental condition.”

Mr. Sublette excelled in the use of big words; there was no doubt about that.

“The objection is overruled,” said Judge Priest. He nodded in the direction of O’Day and Colonel Farrell. “The court will hear the defendant. He is not to be interrupted while making his statement. The defendant may proceed.”

Without further urging, O’Day stood up, a tall, slab-sided rack of a man, with his long arms dangling at his sides, half facing Judge Priest and half facing his nephew and his nephew’s lawyer. Without hesitation he began to speak. And this was what he said:

“There’s mebbe some here ez knows about how I was raised and fetched up. My paw and my maw died when I was jest only a baby; so I was brung up out here at the old county porehouse ez a pauper. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have to work for my board and keep, and work hard. While other boys was goin’ to school and playin’ hooky, and goin’ in washin’ in the creek, and playin’ games, and all sech ez that, I had to work. I never done no playin’ round in my whole life – not till here jest recently, anyway.

“But I always craved to play round some. I didn’t never say nothin’ about it to nobody after I growed up, ’cause I figgered it out they wouldn’t understand and mebbe’d laugh at me; but all these years, ever sence I left that there porehouse, I’ve had a hankerin’ here inside of me” – he lifted one hand and touched his breast – “I’ve had a hankerin’ to be a boy and to do all the things a boy does; to do the things I was chiselled out of doin’ whilst I was of a suitable age to be doin’ ’em. I call to mind that I uster dream in my sleep about doin’ ’em; but the dream never come true – not till jest here lately. It didn’t have no chancet to come true – not till then.

“So, when this money come to me so sudden and unbeknownstlike I said to myself that I was goin’ to make that there dream come true; and I started out fur to do it. And I done it! And I reckin that’s the cause of my bein’ here today, accused of bein’ feeble-minded. But, even so, I don’t regret it none. Ef it was all to do over ag’in I’d do it jest the very same way.

“Why, I never knowed whut it was, till here two months or so ago, to have my fill of bananas and candy and gingersnaps, and all sech knickknacks ez them. All my life I’ve been cravin’ secretly to own a pair of red-topped boots with brass toes on ’em, like I used to see other boys wearin’ in the wintertime when I was out yonder at that porehouse wearin’ an old pair of somebody else’s cast-off shoes – mebbe a man’s shoes, with rags wropped round my feet to keep the snow frum comin’ through the cracks in ’em, and to keep ’em frum slippin’ right spang off my feet. I got three toes frostbit oncet durin’ a cold spell, wearin’ them kind of shoes. But here the other week I found myself able to buy me some red-top boots with brass toes on ’em. So I had ’em made to order and I’m wearin’ ’em now. I wear ’em reg’lar even ef it is summertime. I take a heap of pleasure out of ’em. And, also, all my life long I’ve been wantin’ to go to a circus. But not till three days ago I didn’t never git no chancet to go to one.

“That gentleman yonder – Mister Sublette – he ’lowed jest now that I was leadin’ a lot of little boys in this here town into bad habits. He said that I was learnin’ ’em nobody knowed whut devilment. And he spoke of my havin’ egged ’em on to steal watermelons frum Mister Bell’s watermelon patch out here three miles frum town, on the Marshallville gravel road. You-all heared whut he jest now said about that.

“I don’t mean no offense and I beg his pardon fur contradictin’ him right out before everybody here in the big courthouse; but, mister, you’re wrong. I don’t lead these here boys astray that I’ve been runnin’ round with. They’re mighty nice clean boys, all of ’em. Some of ’em are mighty near ez pore ez whut I uster be; but there ain’t no real harm in any of ’em. We git along together fine – me and them. And, without no preachin’, nor nothin’ like that, I’ve done my best these weeks we’ve been frolickin’ and projectin’ round together to keep ’em frum growin’ up to do mean things.

“I use chawin’ tobacco myself; but I’ve tole ’em, I don’t know how many times, that ef they chaw it’ll stunt ’em in their growth. And I’ve got several of ’em that was smokin’ cigarettes on the sly to promise me they’d quit. So I don’t figger ez I’ve done them boys any real harm by goin’ round with ’em. And I believe ef you was to ast ’em they’d all tell you the same, suh.

“Now about them watermelons: Sence this gentleman has brung them watermelons up, I’m goin’ to tell you-all the truth about that too.”

He cast a quick, furtive look, almost a guilty look, over his shoulder toward the rear of the courtroom before he went on:

“Them watermelons wasn’t really stole at all. I seen Mister Dick Bell beforehand and arranged with him to pay him in full fur whutever damage mout be done. But, you see, I knowed watermelons tasted sweeter to a boy ef he thought he’d hooked ’em out of a patch; so I never let on to my little pardners yonder that I’d the same ez paid Mister Bell in advance fur the melons we took out of his patch and et in the woods. They’ve all been thinkin’ up till now that we really hooked them watermelons. But ef that was wrong I’m sorry fur it.

“Mister Sublette, you jest now said that I was fritterin’ away my property on vain foolishment. Them was the words you used – ‘fritterin’’ and ‘vain foolishment.’ Mebbe you’re right, suh, about the fritterin’ part; but ef spendin’ money in a certain way gives a man ez much pleasure ez it’s give me these last two months, and ef the money is his’n by rights, I figger it can’t be so very foolish; though it may ’pear so to some.

“Excusin’ these here clothes I’ve got on and these here boots, which ain’t paid fur yet, but are charged up to me on Felsburg Brothers’ books and Mister M. Biederman’s books, I didn’t spend only a dollar a day, or mebbe two dollars, and once three dollars in a single day out of whut was comin’ to me. The Judge here, he let me have that out of his own pocket; and I paid him back. And that was all I did spend till here three days ago when that there circus come to town. I reckin I did spend a right smart then.

“My money had come frum the old country only the day before; so I went to the bank and they writ out one of them pieces of paper which is called a check, and I signed it – with my mark; and they give me the money I wanted – an even two hundred dollars. And part of that there money I used to pay fur circus tickets fur all the little boys and little girls I could find in this town that couldn’t ’a’ got to the circus no other way. Some of ’em are settin’ back there behind you-all now – some of the boys, I mean; I don’t see none of the little girls.

“There was several of ’em told me at the time they hadn’t never seen a circus – not in their whole lives! Fur that matter, I hadn’t, neither; but I didn’t want no pore child in this town to grow up to be ez old ez I am without havin’ been to at least one circus. So I taken ’em all in and paid all the bills; and when night come there wasn’t but ’bout nine dollars left out of the whole two hundred that I’d started out with in the mornin’. But I don’t begredge spendin’ it. It looks to me like it was money well invested. They all seemed to enjoy it; and I know I done so.

“There may be bigger circuses’n whut that one was; but I don’t see how a circus could ’a’ been any better than this here one I’m tellin’ about, ef it was ten times ez big. I don’t regret the investment and I don’t aim to lie about it now. Mister Sublette, I’d do the same thing over ag’in ef the chance should come, lawsuit or no lawsuit. Ef you should win this here case mebbe I wouldn’t have no second chance.

“Ef some gentleman is app’inted ez a committee to handle my money it’s likely he wouldn’t look at the thing the same way I do; and it’s likely he wouldn’t let me have so much money all in one lump to spend takin’ a passel of little shavers that ain’t no kin to me to the circus and to the side show, besides lettin’ ’em stay fur the grand concert or after-show, and all. But I done it once; and I’ve got it to remember about and think about in my own mind ez long ez I live.

“I’m ’bout finished now. There’s jest one thing more I’d like to say, and that is this: Mister Sublette he said a minute ago that I was in my second childhood. Meanin’ no offense, suh, but you was wrong there too. The way I look at it, a man can’t be in his second childhood without he’s had his first childhood; and I was cheated plum’ out of mine. I’m more’n sixty years old, ez near ez I kin figger; but I’m tryin’ to be a boy before it’s too late.”

He paused a moment and looked round him.

“The way I look at it, Judge Priest, suh, and you-all, every man that grows up, no matter how old he may git to be, is entitled to ’a’ been a boy oncet in his lifetime. I – I reckin that’s all.”

He sat down and dropped his eyes upon the floor, as though ashamed that his temerity should have carried him so far. There was a strange little hush filling the courtroom. It was Judge Priest who broke it.

“The court,” he said, “has by the words just spoken by this man been sufficiently advised as to the sanity of the man himself. The court cares to hear nothing more from either side on this subject. The petition is dismissed.”

Very probably these last words may have been as so much Greek to the juvenile members of the audience; possibly, though, they were made aware of the meaning of them by the look upon the face of Nephew Percival Dwyer and the look upon the face of Nephew Percival Dwyer’s attorney. At any rate, His Honor hardly had uttered the last syllable of his decision before, from the rear of the courtroom and from the gallery above, there arose a shrill, vehement, sincere sound of yelling – exultant, triumphant and deafening. It continued for upward of a minute before the small disturbers remembered where they were and reduced themselves to a state of comparative quiet.

For reasons best known to himself, Judge Priest, who ordinarily stickled for order and decorum in his courtroom, made no effort to quell the outburst or to have it quelled – not even when a considerable number of the adults present joined in it, having first cleared their throats of a slight huskiness that had come upon them, severally and generally.

Presently the Judge rapped for quiet – and got it. It was apparent that he had more to say; and all there hearkened to hear what it might be.

“I have just this to add,” quoth His Honor: “It is the official judgment of this court that the late defendant, being entirely sane, is competent to manage his own affairs after his preferences.

“And it is the private opinion of this court that not only is the late defendant sane but that he is the sanest man in this entire jurisdiction. Mister Clerk, court stands adjourned.”

Coming down the three short steps from the raised platform of the bench, Judge Priest beckoned to Sheriff Giles Birdsong, who, at the tail of the departing crowd, was shepherding its last exuberant members through the doorway.

“Giles,” said Judge Priest in an undertone, when the worthy sheriff had drawn near, “the circuit clerk tells me there’s an indictment fur malicious mischief ag’in this here Perce Dwyer knockin’ round amongst the records somewheres – an indictment the grand jury returned several sessions back, but which was never pressed, owin’ to the sudden departure frum our midst of the person in question.

“I wonder ef it would be too much trouble fur you to sort of drap a hint in the ear of the young man or his lawyer that the said indictment is apt to be revived, and that the said Dwyer is liable to be tuck into custody by you and lodged in the county jail sometime during the ensuin’ forty-eight hours – without he should see his way clear durin’ the meantime to get clean out of this city, county and state! Would it?”

“Trouble? No, suh! It won’t be no trouble to me,” said Mr. Birdsong promptly. “Why, it’ll be more of a pleasure, Judge.”

And so it was.

Except for one small added and purely incidental circumstance, our narrative is ended. That same afternoon Judge Priest sat on the front porch of his old white house out on Clay Street, waiting for Jeff Poindexter to summon him to supper. Peep O’Day opened the front gate and came up the graveled walk between the twin rows of silver-leaf poplars. The Judge, rising to greet his visitor, met him at the top step.

“Come in,” bade the Judge heartily, “and set down a spell and rest your face and hands.”

“No, suh; much obliged, but I ain’t got only a minute to stay,” said O’Day. “I jest come out here, suh, to thank you fur whut you done today on my account in the big courthouse, and – and to make you a little kind of a present.”

“It’s all right to thank me,” said Judge Priest; “but I couldn’t accept any reward fur renderin’ a decision in accordance with the plain facts.”

“’Tain’t no gift of money, or nothin’ like that,” O’Day hastened to explain. “Really, suh, it don’t amount to nothin’ at all, scursely. But a little while ago I happened to be in Mr. B. Weil & Son’s store, doin’ a little tradin’, and I run acrost a new kind of knickknack, which it seemed like to me it was about the best thing I ever tasted in my whole life. So, on the chancet, suh, that you might have a sweet tooth, too, I taken the liberty of bringin’ you a sack of ’em and— and— and here they are, suh; three flavors – strawberry, lemon and vanilly.”

Suddenly overcome with confusion, he dislodged a large-sized paper bag from his side coat pocket and thrust it into Judge Priest’s hands; then, backing away, he turned and clumped down the graveled path in great and embarrassed haste.

Judge Priest opened the bag and peered down into it. It contained a sticky, sugary dozen of flattened confections, each molded round a short length of wooden splinter. These sirupy articles, which have since come into quite general use, are known, I believe, as all-day suckers.

When Judge Priest looked up again, Peep O’Day was outside the gate, clumping down the uneven sidewalk of Clay Street with long strides of his booted legs. Half a dozen small boys, who, it was evident, had remained hidden during the ceremony of presentation, now mysteriously appeared and were accompanying the departing donor, half trotting to keep up with him.

The Saturday Evening Post, 20 Oct 1917
From Place to Place (1920)

Quality Folks

~

In our town formerly there were any number of negro children named for Caucasian friends of their parents. Some bore for their names the names of old masters of the slavery time, masters who had been kindly and gracious and whose memories thereby were affectionately perpetuated; these were mainly of a generation now growing into middle age. Others – I am speaking still of the namesakes, not of the original bearers of the names – had been christened with intent to do honor to indulgent and well-remembered employers of post-bellum days. Thus it might befall, for example, that Wadsworth Junius Courtney, Esquire, would be a prominent advocate practicing at the local bar and that Wadsworth Junius Courtney Jones, of color, would be his janitor and sweep out his office for him. Yet others had been named after white children – and soon after – for the reason that the white children had been given first names having a fine, full, sonorous sound or else a fascinatingly novel sound.

Of these last there were instances amounting in the aggregate to a small host.

I seem to remember, for example, that once a pink girl-mite came into the world by way of a bedroom in a large white house on Tilghman Avenue and was at the baptismal font sentenced for life to bear the Christian name of Rowena Hildegarde.

Or is Rowena Hildegarde a Christian name?

At any rate, within twelve months’ time, there were to be found in more crowded and less affluent quarters of our thriving little city four more Rowena Hildegardes, of tender years, or rather, tender months – two black ones, one chrome-yellow one, and one sepia-brown one.

But so far as the available records show there was but one white child in our town who bore for its name, bestowed upon it with due knowledge of the fact and with deliberate intent, the name of a person of undoubted African descent. However, at this stage to reveal the circumstances governing this phenomenon would be to run ahead of our tale and to precipitate its climax before the groundwork were laid for its premise. Most stories should start at the beginning. This one must.

•     •     •     •     •

From round the left-hand corner of the house came with a sudden blare the sound of melody – words and music – growing steadily louder as the unseen singer drew nearer. The music was a lusty, deep-volumed camp-meeting air, with long-drawn quavers and cadences in it. The words were as follows:

Had a lovin’ mother,

Been climbin’ up de hill so long;

She been hopin’ git to heaben in due time

Befo’ dem heaben do’s close!

And then the chorus, voicing first a passionate entreaty, then rising in the final bars to a great exultant shout:

Den chain dat lion down, Good Lawd!

Den chain dat lion down!

Oh, please!

Good Lawd, done chained dat lion down!

Done chained dat deadly lion down!

Glor-e-e-e!

The singer, still singing, issued into view, limping slightly – a wizened woman, coal-black and old, with a white cloth bound about her head, turban fashion, and a man’s battered straw hat resting jauntily upon the knotted kerchief. Her calico frock was voluminous, unshapely and starch-clean. Her under lip was shoved forward as though permanently twisted into a spout-shape by the task of holding something against the gums of her lower front teeth, and from one side of her mouth protruded a bit of wood with the slivered bark on it. One versed in the science of forestry might have recognized the little stub of switch as a peach-tree switch; one bred of the soil would have known its purpose. Neither puckered-out lip nor peach-tree twig seemed to interfere in the least with her singing. She flung the song out past them – over the lip, round the twig.

With her head thrown away back, her hands resting on her bony hips, and her feet clunking inside a pair of boys’ shoes too large for her, she crossed the lawn at an angle. In all things about her – in her gait, despite its limp, in her pose, her figure – there was something masterful, something dominating, something tremendously proud. Considering her sparseness of bulk she had a most astoundingly big strong voice, and in the voice as in the strut was arrogant pride.

She crossed the yard and let herself out of a side gate opening upon an empty side street and went out of sight and ultimately out of hearing down the side street in the hot sunshine of the late afternoon. But before she was out of hearing she had made it plain that not only a loving mother and a loving father, but likewise a loving brother and a loving sister, a loving nephew and a loving uncle, a loving grandmother and divers other loving relatives – had all been engaged in the hill-climbing pilgrimage along a lion-guarded path.

The hush that succeeded her departure was a profound hush; indeed, by comparison with the clamorous outburst that had gone before it seemed almost ghastly. Not even the shrieks of the caucusing blue jays that might now be heard in the oak trees upon the lawn, where they were holding one of their excited powwows, served to destroy the illusion that a dead quiet had descended upon a spot lately racked by loud sounds. The well-dressed young man who had been listening with the air of one intent on catching and memorizing the air, settled back in the hammock in which he was stretched behind the thick screen of vines that covered the wide front porch of the house.

“The estimable Aunt Charlotte appears to be in excellent voice and spirits today,” he said with a wry smile. “I don’t know that I ever heard her when her top notes carried farther than they did just now.”

The slender black-haired girl who sat alongside him in a porch chair winced.

“It’s perfectly awful – I know it,” she lamented. “I suppose if Mildred and I have asked her once not to carry on like that here at the front of the house we’ve asked her a hundred times. It’s bad enough to have her whooping like a wild Indian in the kitchen. But it never seems to do any good.”

“Why don’t you try getting rid of her altogether as a remedy?” suggested the young man.

“Get rid of Aunt Sharley! Why, Harvey – why, Mr. Winslow, I mean – we couldn’t do that! Why, Aunt Sharley has always been in our family! Why, she’s just like one of us – just like our own flesh and blood! Why, she used to belong to my Grandmother Helm before the war——”

“I see,” he said dryly, breaking in on her. “She used to belong to your grandmother, and now you belong to her. The plan of ownership has merely been reversed, that’s all. Tell me, Miss Emmy Lou, how does it feel to be a human chattel, with no prospect of emancipation?” Then catching the hurt look on her flushed face he dropped his raillery and hastened to make amends. “Well, never mind. You’re the sweetest slave girl I ever met – I guess you’re the sweetest one that ever lived. Besides, she’s gone – probably won’t be back for half an hour or so. Don’t hitch your chair away from me – I’ve got something very important that I want to tell you – in confidence. It concerns you – and somebody else. It concerns me and somebody else – and yet only two persons are concerned in it.”

He was wrong about the time, however, truthful as he may have been in asserting his desire to deal confidentially with important topics. Inside of ten minutes, which to him seemed no more than a minute, seeing that he was in love and time always speeds fast for a lover with his sweetheart, the old black woman came hurrying back up the side street, and turned in at the side gate and retraversed the lawn to the back of the old house, giving the vine-screened porch a swift searching look as she hobbled past its corner.

Her curiosity, if so this scrutiny was to be interpreted, carried her further. In a minute or two she suddenly poked her head out through the open front door. She had removed her damaged straw headgear, but still wore her kerchief. Hastily and guiltily the young man released his hold upon a slim white hand which somehow had found its way inside his own. The sharp eyes of the old negress snapped. She gave a grunt as she withdrew her head. It was speedily to develop, though, that she had not entirely betaken herself away. Almost immediately there came to the ears of the couple the creak-creak of a rocking-chair just inside the hall, but out of view from their end of the porch.

“Make the old beldam go away, won’t you?” whispered the man.

“I’ll try,” she whispered back rather nervously. Then, raising her voice, she called out in slightly strained, somewhat artificial voice, which to the understanding of the annoyed young man in the hammock appeared to have almost a suggestion of apprehension in it:

“Is— is that you, Aunt Sharley?”

The answer was little more than a grunt.

“Well, Aunt Sharley, hadn’t you better be seeing about supper?”

“Num’mine ’bout supper. Ise tendin’ to de supper. Ise bound de supper’ll be ready ’fo’ you two chillens is ready fur to eat it.”

Within, the chair continued to creak steadily.

The girl spread out her hands with a gesture of helplessness.

“You see how it is,” she explained under her breath. “Auntie is so set in her ways!”

“And she’s so set in that rocking-chair too,” he retorted grimly. Saying what he said next, he continued to whisper, but in his whisper was a suggestion of the proprietorial tone. Also for the first time in his life he addressed her without the prefix of Miss before her name. This affair plainly was progressing rapidly, despite the handicaps of a withered black duenna in the immediate offing.

“Emmy Lou,” he said, “please try again. Go in there yourself and speak to her. Be firm with her – for once. Make her get away from that door. She makes me nervous. Don’t be afraid of the old nuisance. This is your house, isn’t it – yours and your sister’s? Well, then, I thought Southerners knew how to handle darkies. If you can handle this one, suppose you give me a small proof of the fact – right now!”

Reluctantly, as though knowing beforehand what the outcome would be, Emmy Lou stood up, revealing herself as a straight dainty figure in white. She entered the door. Outside in the hammock Harvey strained his ears to hear the dialogue. His sweetheart’s voice came to him only in a series of murmurs, but for him there was no difficulty about distinguishing the replies, for the replies were pitched in a strident, belligerent key which carried almost to the yard fence. From them he was able to guess with the utmost accuracy just what arguments against the presence of the negress the girl was making. This, then, was what he heard:

“... Now, Mizz Emmy Lou, you mout jes’ ez well hush up an’ save yore breath. You knows an’ I knows, even ef he don’t know it, dat ’tain’t proper fur no young man to be cotein’ a young lady right out on a front po’ch widout no chaperoner bein’ clost by. Quality folks don’t do sech ez dat. Dat’s why I taken my feet in my hand an’ come hurryin’ back yere f’um dat grocery sto’ where I’d done went to git a bottle of lemon extractors. I seen yore sister settin’ in dat Mistah B. Weil’s candy sto’, drinkin’ ice-cream sody wid a passel of young folks, an’ by dat I realize’ I’d done lef’ you ’lone in dis house wid a young man dat’s a stranger yere, an’ so I come right back. And yere I is, honey, and yere I stays.... Whut’s dat you sayin’? De gen’l’man objec’s? He do, do he?” The far-carrying voice rose shrilly and scornfully. “Well, let him! Dat’s his privilege. Jes’ let him keep on objectin’ long ez he’s a mind to. ’Tain’t gwine ’fluence me none.... I don’t keer none ef he do heah me. Mebbe it mout do him some good ef he do heah me. Hit’ll do him good, too, ef he heed me, I lay to dat. Mebbe he ain’t been raised de way we is down yere. Ef so, dat’s his misfortune.” The voice changed. “Whut would yore pore daid mother say ef she knowed I wuz neglectin’ my plain duty to you two lone chillen? Think I gwine run ary chancet of havin’ you two gals talked about by all de low-down pore w’ite trash scandalizers in dis town? Well, I ain’t, an’ dat’s flat. No, sir-ree, honey! You mout jes’ ez well run ’long back out dere on dat front po’ch, ’ca’se I’m tellin’ you I ain’t gwine stir nary inch f’um whar I is twell yore sister git back yere.”

Beaten and discomfited, with one hand up to a burning cheek, Emmy Lou returned to her young man. On his face was a queer smile.

“Did – did you hear what she said?” she asked, bending over him.

“Not being deaf I couldn’t well help hearing. I imagine the people next door heard it, too, and are no doubt now enjoying the joke of it.”

“Oh, I know she’s impossible,” admitted Emmy Lou, repeating her lament of a little while before, but taking care even in her mortification to keep her voice discreetly down. “There’s no use trying to do anything with her. We’ve tried and tried and tried, but she just will have her way. She doesn’t seem to understand that we’ve grown up – Mildred and I. She still wants to boss us just as she did when we were children. And she grows more crotchety and more exacting every day.”

“And I – poor benighted Yank that I am – came down here filled with a great and burning sympathy for the down-trodden African.” Harvey said this as though speaking to himself.

The girl forgot her annoyance in her instinct to come to the defense of her black mentor.

“Oh, but she has been like a mother to us! After mamma died I don’t know what we should have done – two girls left alone in this old house – if it hadn’t been for Aunt Sharley. She petted us, she protected us, she nursed us when we were sick. Why, Harvey, she couldn’t have been more loyal or more devoted or more self-sacrificing than she has been through all these years while we were growing up. I know she loves us with every drop of blood in her veins. I know she’d work her fingers to the bone for us – that she’d die in her tracks fighting for us. We try to remember the debt of gratitude we owe her now that she’s getting old and fussy and unreasonable and all crippled with rheumatism.”

She paused, and then, womanlike, she added a qualifying clause: “But I must admit she’s terribly aggravating at times. It’s almost unbearable to have her playing the noisy old tyrant day in and day out. I get awfully out of patience with her.”

Over on Franklin Street the town clock struck.

“Six o’clock,” said Harvey. Reluctantly he stirred and sat up in the hammock and reached for his hat.

“I could be induced, you know, if sufficiently pressed, to stay on for supper,” he hinted. For one Northern born, young Mr. Harvey Winslow was fast learning the hospitable customs of the town of his recent adoption.

“I’d love to have you stay,” stated Emmy Lou, “but— but—” – she glanced over her shoulder toward the open door – “but I’m afraid of Auntie. She might say she wasn’t prepared to entertain a visitor – ‘not fixed fur company’ is the way she would put it. You see, she regards you as a person of great importance. That’s why she’s putting on so many airs now. If it was one of the home boys that I’ve known always that was here with me she wouldn’t mind it a bit. But with you it’s different, and she’s on her dignity – riding her high horse. You aren’t very much disappointed, are you? Besides, you’re coming to supper tomorrow night. She’ll fuss over you then, I know, and be on tiptoe to see that everything is just exactly right. I think Auntie likes you.”

“Curious way she has of showing it then,” said Harvey. “I guess I still have a good deal to learn about the quaint and interesting tribal customs of this country. Even so, my education is progressing by leaps and bounds – I can see that.”

After further remarks delivered in a confidential undertone, the purport of which is none of our business, young Mr. Winslow took his departure from the Dabney homestead. Simultaneously the vigilant warder abandoned her post in the front hall and returned to her special domain at the back of the house. Left alone, the girl sat on the porch with her troubled face cupped in her hands and a furrow of perplexity spoiling her smooth white brow. Presently the gate latch clicked and her sister, a year and a half her junior, came up the walk. With half an eye anyone would have known them for sisters. They looked alike, which is another way of saying both of them were pretty and slim and quick in their movements.

“Hello, sis,” said Mildred by way of greeting. She dropped into a chair, smoothing down the front of her white middy blouse and fanning her flushed face with the broad ends of her sailor tie. Then observing her sister’s despondent attitude: “What are you in the dumps about? Has that new beau of yours turned out a disappointment? Or what?”

In a passionate little burst Emmy Lou’s simmering indignation boiled up and overflowed.

“Oh, it’s Aunt Sharley again! Honestly, Mil, she was absolutely unbearable this evening. It was bad enough to have her go stalking across the lawn with that old snuff stick of hers stuck in the corner of her mouth, and singing that terrible song of hers at the very top of her lungs and wearing that scandalous old straw hat stuck up on her topknot – that was bad enough, goodness knows! I don’t know what sort of people Har – Mr. Winslow thinks we must be! But that was only the beginning.”

Followed a recapitulation of the greater grievance against the absent offender. Before Emmy Lou was done baring the burden of her complaint Mildred’s lips had tightened in angered sympathy.

“It must have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em,” she said with a characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her recital. “You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time. Don’t you think you’re the only one she picks on. Why, don’t you remember, Em, how just here only the other day she jumped on me because I went on the moonlight excursion aboard the Sophie K. Foster with Sidney Baumann? – told me right to my face I ought to be spanked and put to bed for daring to run round with ‘codfish aristocracy’ – the very words she used. What right has she, I want to know, to be criticizing Sidney Baumann’s people? I’m sure he’s as nice a boy as there is in this whole town; seems to me he deserves all the more credit for working his way up among the old families the way he has. I don’t care if his father was a nobody in this town when he first came here.

“Quality folks – quality folks! She’s always preaching about our being quality folks and about it being wrong for us to demean ourselves by going with anybody who isn’t quality folks until I’m sick and tired of the words. She has quality folks on the brain! Does she think we are still babies? You’re nearly twenty-three and I’m past twenty-one. We have our own lives to live. Why should we be so——”

She broke off at the sound of a limping footstep in the hall.

“Supper’s ready,” announced Aunt Sharley briefly. “You chillen come right in an’ eat it whilst it’s hot.”

Strangely quiet, the two sisters followed the old negress back to the dining room. Aunt Sharley, who had prepared the meal, now waited upon them. She was glumly silent herself, but occasionally she broke, or rather she punctuated, the silence with little sniffs of displeasure. Only once did she speak, and this was at the end of the supper, when she had served them with blackberries and cream.

“Seem lak de cat done got ever’body’s tongue round dis place tonight!” she snapped, addressing the blank wall above the older girl’s head. “Well, ’tain’t no use fur nobody to be poutin’ an’ sullin’. ’Tain’t gwine do ’em no good. ’Tain’t gwine budge me nary hair’s brea’th frum whut I considers to be my plain duty. Ef folkses don’t lak it so much de wuss fur dem, present company not excepted. Dat’s my say an’ I done said it!”

And out of the room she marched with her head held defiantly high.

That night there were callers. At the Dabney home there nearly always were callers of an evening, for the two sisters were by way of being what small-town society writers call reigning belles. Once, when they had first returned from finishing school the year before, a neighboring lady, meeting Aunt Sharley on the street, had been moved to ask whether the girls had many beaus, and Aunt Sharley, with a boastful flirt of her under lip which made her side face look something like the profile of a withered but vainglorious dromedary, had answered back:

“Beaus? Huh! Dem chillens is got beaus frum ever’ state!” Which was a slight overstretching of the real facts, but a perfectly pardonable and proper exaggeration in Aunt Charlotte’s estimation. At home she might make herself a common scold, might be pestiferously officious and more than pestiferously noisy. Abroad her worshipful pride in, and her affection for, the pair she had reared shone through her old black face as though a lamp of many candle power burned within her. She might chide them at will, and she did, holding this to be her prerogative and her right, but whosoever spoke slightingly of either of them in her presence, be the speaker black or white, had Aunt Charlotte to fight right there on the spot; she was as ready with her fists and her teeth to assert the right of her white wards to immunity from criticism as she was with her tongue lashings.

These things were all taken into consideration when Emmy Lou and Mildred came that night to balance the account for and against the old woman – so many, many deeds of thoughtfulness, of kindness, of tenderness on the credit side; so many flagrant faults, so many shortcomings of temper and behavior on the debit page. The last caller had gone. Aunt Sharley, after making the rounds of the house to see to door boltings and window latchings, had hobbled upstairs to her own sleeping quarters over the kitchen wing, and in the elder sister’s room, with the lights turned low, the two of them sat in their nightgowns on the side of Emmy Lou’s bed and tried the case of Spinster Charlotte Helm, colored, in the scales of their own youthful judgments. Without exactly being able to express the situation in words, both realized that a condition which verged upon the intolerable was fast approaching its climax.

Along with the impatience of youth and the thought of many grievances they had within them a natural instinct for fairness; a legacy perhaps from a father who had been just and a mother who had been mercifully kind and gentle. First one would play the part of devil’s advocate, the while the other defended the accused, and then at the remembrance of someone of a long record of things done or said by Aunt Sharley those attitudes would be reversed.

There were times when both condemned the defendant, their hair braids bobbing in emphasis of the intensity of their feelings; times when together they conjured up recollections of the everlasting debt that they owed her for her manifold goodnesses, her countless sacrifices on behalf of them. The average Northerner, of whatsoever social status, would have been hard put to it either to comprehend the true inwardness of the relationship that existed between these girls of one race and this old woman of another or to figure how there could be but one outcome. The average Southerner would have been able at once to sense the sentiments and the prejudices underlying the dilemma that now confronted the orphaned pair, and to sympathize with them, and with the old negress too.

To begin with, there were the fine things to be said for Aunt Charlotte; the arguments in her behalf – a splendid long golden list of them stretching back to their babyhood and beyond, binding them with ties stronger almost than blood ties to this faithful, loving, cantankerous, crotchety old soul. Aunt Charlotte had been born in servitude, the possession of their mother’s mother. She had been their mother’s handmaiden before their mother’s marriage. Afterward she had been their own nurse, cradling them in babyhood on her black breast, spoiling them, training them, ruling them, overruling them, too, coddling them when they were good, nursing them when they were ailing, scolding them and punishing them when they misbehaved.

After their father’s death, their mother, then an invalid, had advised as frequently with Aunt Sharley regarding the rearing of the two daughters as with the guardians who had been named in her husband’s will – and with as satisfactory results. Before his death their father had urged his wife to counsel with Aunt Sharley in all domestic emergencies. Dying, he had signified his affectionate regard for the black woman by leaving her a little cottage with its two acres of domain near the railroad tracks. Regardless though of the fact that she was now a landed proprietor and thereby exalted before the eyes of her own race, Aunt Sharley had elected to go right on living beneath the Dabney roof. In the latter years of Mrs. Dabney’s life she had been to all intents a co-partner in the running of the house, and after that sweet lady’s death she had been its manager in all regards. In the simple economies of the house she had indeed been all things for these past few years – housekeeper, cook, housemaid, even seamstress, for in addition to being a poetess with a cook-stove she was a wizard with a needle.

As they looked back now, casting up the tally of the remembered years, neither Emmy Lou nor Mildred could recall an event in all their lives in which the half-savage, half-childish, altogether shrewd and competent negress had not figured after some fashion or other: as foster parent, as unofficial but none the less capable guardian, as confidante, as overseer, as dictator, as tirewoman who never tired of well-doing, as arbiter of big things and little – all these rôles, and more, too, she had played to them, not once, but a thousand times.

It was Aunt Sharley who had dressed them for their first real party – not a play-party, as the saying went down our way, but a regular dancing party, corresponding to a début in some more ostentatious and less favored communities. It was Aunt Sharley who had skimped and scrimped to make the available funds cover the necessary expenses of the little household in those two or three lean years succeeding their mother’s death, when dubious investments, which afterward turned out to be good ones, had chiseled a good half off their income from the estate. It was Aunt Sharley who, when the question of going away to boarding school rose, had joined by invitation in the conference on ways and means with the girls’ guardians, Judge Priest and Doctor Lake, and had cast her vote and her voice in favor of the same old-fashioned seminary that their mother in her girlhood had attended. The sisters themselves had rather favored an Eastern establishment as being more fashionable and smarter, but the old woman stood fast in her advocacy of the other school. What had been good enough for her beloved mistress was good enough for her mistress’ daughters, she insisted; and, anyhow, hadn’t the quality folks always gone there? Promptly Doctor Lake and Judge Priest sided with her; and so she had her way about this important matter, as she had it about pretty much everything else.

It was Aunt Sharley who had indignantly and jealously vetoed the suggestion that a mulatto sewing woman, famed locally for her skill, should be hired to assist in preparing the wardrobes that Emmy Lou and Mildred must take with them. It was Aunt Sharley who, when her day’s duties were over, had sat up night after night until all hours, straining her eyes as she plied needle and scissors, basting and hemming until she herself was satisfied that her chillen’s clothes would be as ample and as ornate as the clothes which any two girls at the boarding school possibly could be expected to have. It was Aunt Sharley who packed their trunks for them, who kissed them good-by at the station, all three of them being in tears, and who, when the train had vanished down the tracks to the southward, had gone back to the empty house, there to abide until they came home to her again. They had promised to write to her every week – and they had, too, except when they were too busy or when they forgot it. Finally, it was Aunt Sharley who never let them forget that their grandfather had been a governor of the state, that their father had been a colonel in the Confederacy, and that they were qualified “to hole up they haids wid de fines’ in de land.”

When they came to this phase of the recapitulation there sprang into the minds of both of them a recollection of that time years and years in the past when Aunt Sharley, accompanying them on a Sunday-school picnic in the capacity of nursemaid, had marred the festivities by violently snatching Mildred out of a circle playing King Willyum was King James’ Son just as the child was about to be kissed by a knickerbockered admirer who failed to measure up to Aunt Sharley’s jealous requirements touching on quality folks; and, following this, had engaged in a fight with the disappointed little boy’s colored attendant, who resented this slur upon the social standing of her small charge. Aunt Sharley had come off victor in the bout, but the picnic had been spoiled for at least three youngsters. So much for Aunt Sharley’s virtues – for her loyalty, her devotion, her unremitting faithfulness, her championship of their destinies, her stewardship over all their affairs. Now to turn the shield round and consider its darker side:

Aunt Sharley was hardly a fit candidate for canonization yet. Either it was too early for that – or it was too late. She was unreasonable, she was crotchety, she was contentious, she was incredibly intolerant of the opinions of others, and she was incredibly hardheaded. She had always been masterful and arrogant; now more and more each day she was becoming a shrew and a tyrant and a wrangler. She was frightfully noisy; she clarioned her hallelujah hymns at the top of her voice, regardless of what company might be in the house. She dipped snuff openly before friends of the girls and new acquaintances alike. She refused point-blank to wear a cap and apron when serving meals. She was forever quarreling with the neighbors’ servants, with delivery boys, with marketmen and storekeepers. By sheer obstinacy she defeated all their plans for hiring a second servant, declaring that if they dared bring another darky on the place she would take pleasure in scalding the interloper with a kettle of boiling water. She sat in self-imposed judgment upon their admirers, ruthlessly rejecting those courtiers who did not measure up to her arbitrary standards for appraising the local aristocracy; and toward such of the young squires as fell under the ban of her disfavor she deported herself in such fashion as to leave in their minds no doubt whatsoever regarding her hostility. In public she praised her wards; in private she alternately scolded and petted them. She was getting more feeble, now that age and infirmities were coming upon her, wherefore the house showed the lack of proper care. They were afraid of her, though they loved her with all their hearts and knew she loved them to the exclusion of every living person; they were apprehensive always of her frequent and unrestrained outbreaks of temper. She shamed them and she humiliated them and she curbed them in perfectly natural impulses – impulses that to them seemed perfectly proper also.

Small enough were these faults when set up alongside the tally of her goodnesses; moreover, neither of the two rebels against her authority was lacking in gratitude. But it is the small things that are most annoying usually, and, besides, the faults of the old woman were things now of daily occurrence and recurrence, which chafed their nerves and fretted them, whereas the passage of time was lessening the sentimental value of her earlier labors and sacrifices in their behalf.

And here was another thing: While they had been getting older Aunt Sharley had been getting old; they had grown up, overnight, as it were, and she could not be made to comprehend the fact. In their case the eternal conflict between youth and crabbed age was merely being repeated – with the addition in this particular instance of unusual complications.

For an hour or more the perplexed pair threshed away, striving to winnow the chaff from the pure grain in Aunt Sharley’s nature, and the upshot was that Emmy Lou had a headache and Mildred had a little spell of crying, and they agreed that never had there been such a paradox of part saint and part sinner, part black ogre and part black angel, as their Auntie was, created into a troubled world, and that something should be done to remedy the evil, provided it could be done without grievously hurting the old woman’s feelings; but just what this something which should be done might be neither of them could decide, and so they went to bed and to sleep.

And the next day was another day exactly similar in its petty annoyances to the day before.

But a day was to come before the summer ended when a way out was found. The person who found the way out – or thought he did – was Mr. Harvey Winslow, the hero or villain of the hammock episode previously described in this narrative. He did not venture, though, to suggest a definite course of action until after a certain moonlit, fragrant night, when two happy young people agreed that thereafter these twain should be one.

Mildred knew already what was impending in the romance of Emmy Lou. So perhaps did Aunt Sharley. Her rheumatism had not affected her eyesight and she had all her faculties. All the same, it was to Aunt Sharley that Emmy Lou went next morning to tell of the choice she had made. There was no one whose consent had actually to be obtained. Both the girls were of age; as their own master they enjoyed the use and control of their cosy little inheritance. Except for an aunt who lived in New Orleans and some cousins scattered over the West, they were without kindred. The Dabneys had been an old family, but not a large one. Nevertheless, in obedience to a feeling that told her Aunt Sharley should be the first, next only to her sister, to share with her the happiness that had come into her life, Emmy Lou sought out the old woman before breakfast time.

Seemingly Aunt Sharley approved. For if at the moment she mumbled out a complaint about chillens too young to know their own minds being prone to fly off with the first young w’ite gen’l’man that came along frum nobody knowed whar, still there was nothing begrudged or forced about the vocal jubilations with which she made the house ring during the succeeding week. At prayer meeting on Wednesday night at Zion Colored Baptist Church and at lodge meeting on Friday night she bore herself with an air of triumphant haughtiness which sorely irked her fellow members. It was agreed privily that Sis’ Charlotte Helm got mo’ and mo’ bigotty, and not alone that, but mo’ and mo’ uppety, ever’ day she lived.

If young Mr. Winslow had been, indirectly, the cause for her prideful deportment before her own color, it was likewise Mr. Winslow who shortly was to be the instrument for humbling her into the dust. Now this same Mr. Winslow, it should be stated, was a masterful young man. Only an abiding sense of humor kept him sometimes from being domineering. Along with divers other qualities it had taken masterfulness for him at twenty-nine to be superintendent of our street-railway system, now owned and operated by Northern capitalists. Likewise it had taken masterfulness for him to distance the field of Emmy Lou’s local admirers within the space of five short months after he procured his transfer to our town from another town where his company likewise had traction interests. He showed the same trait in the stand he presently took with regard to the future status of Aunt Sharley in the household of which he was to become a member and of which he meant to be the head.

For moral support – which she very seriously felt she needed – Emmy Lou took her sister with her on the afternoon when she invaded the kitchen to break the news to Aunt Sharley. The girls came upon the old woman in one of her busiest moments. She was elbows deep in a white mass which in due time would become a batch of the hot biscuits of perfection. “Auntie,” began Emmy Lou in a voice which she tried to make matter-of-fact, “we’ve – I’ve something I want to say to you.”

“Ise lissenin’, chile,” stated the old woman shortly.

“It’s this way, Auntie: We think – I mean we’re afraid that you’re getting along so in life – getting so old that we——”

“Who say Ise gittin’ ole?” demanded Aunt Sharley, and she jerked her hands out of the dough she was kneading.

“We both think so – I mean we all think so,” corrected Emmy Lou.

“Who do you mean by we all? Does you mean dat young Mistah Winslow, Esquire, late of de North?” Her blazing eyes darted from the face of one sister to the face of the other, reading their looks. “Uh-huh!” she snorted. “I mout ’a’ knowed he’d be de ver’ one to come puttin’ sech notions ez dem in you chillens’ haids. Well, ma’am, an’ whut, pray, do he want?” Her words fairly dripped with sarcasm.

“He thinks – in fact we all three do – that because you are getting along in years – you know you are, Auntie – and because your rheumatism bothers you so much at times that – that – well, perhaps that we should make a change in the running of the house. So – so——” She hesitated, then broke off altogether, anxious though she was to make an end to what she foresaw must be a painful scene for all three of them. Poor Emmy Lou was finding this job which she had nerved herself to carry through a desperately hard job. And Aunt Sharley’s attitude was not making it any easier for her either.

“‘So’ whut?” snapped Aunt Sharley; then answered herself: “An’ so de wind blow frum dat quarter, do hit? De young gen’l’man ain’t j’ined de fambly yit an’ already he’s settin’ hisse’f to run it. All right den. Go on, chile – quit mumblin’ up yore words an’ please go on an’ tell me whut you got to say! But ef you’s fixin’ to bring up de subjec’ of my lettin’ ary one of dese yere young flighty-haided, flibbertigibbeted, free-issue nigger gals come to work on dis place, you mout ez well save yore breath now an’ yereafter, ’ca’se so long ez Ise able to drag one foot behine t’other I p’intedly does aim to manage dis yere kitchen.”

“It isn’t that – exactly,” blurted out Emmy Lou. “You see, Auntie,” she went on desperately, “we’ve decided, Harvey and I, that after our marriage we’ll live here. We couldn’t leave Mildred alone, and until she gets married this is going to be home for us all. And so we’re afraid – with one more coming into the household and everything – that the added work is going to be too heavy for you to undertake. So we’ve decided that – that perhaps it would be better all round if you – if we – if you——”

“Go on, chile; say it, whutever it is.”

“——that perhaps it would be better if you left here altogether and went to live in that nice little house that papa left you in his will.”

Perhaps they did not see the stricken look that came into the eyes of the old negress or else she hid the look behind the fit of rage that instantly possessed her. Perhaps they mistook the grey pallor that overspread the old face, turning it to an ashen color, for the hue of temper.

“Do it all mean, den, dat after all dese yeahs you’s tryin’ to git shet of me – tryin’ to t’row me aside lak an’ ole worn-out broom? Well, I ain’t gwine go!” Her voice soared shrilly to match the heights of her tantrum.

“Your wages will go on just the same – Harvey insists on that as much as we do,” Emmy Lou essayed. “Don’t you see, Auntie, that your life will be easier? You will have your own little home and your own little garden. You can come to see us – come every day if you want to. We’ll come to see you. Things between us will go on almost exactly the same as they do now. You know how much we love you – Mildred and I. You know we are trying to think of your comfort, don’t you?”

“Of course you do, Aunt Sharley,” Mildred put in. “It isn’t as if you were going clear out of our lives or we out of yours. You’ll be ever so much happier.”

“Well, I jes’ ain’t gwine go nary step.” The defiant voice had become a passionate shriek. “Think Ise gwine leave yere an’ go live in dat little house down dere by dem noisy tracks whar all dem odds an’ ends of pore w’ite trash lives – dem scourin’s an’ sweepin’s whut come yere to wuk in de new cotton mill! Think Ise gwine be corntent to wuk in a gyarden whilst I knows Ise needed right yere to run dis place de way which it should be run! Think Ise gwine set quiet whilst Ise pulled up by de roots an’ transported ’way frum de house whar Ise spend purty nigh de whole of my endurin’ life! Well, I won’t go – I won’t never go! I won’t go – ’ca’se I jes’ can’t!” And then, to the intense distress of the girls, Aunt Sharley slumped into a chair, threw her floury hands over her face and with the big tears trickling out between her fingers she moaned over and over again between her gulping breaths:

“Oh, dat I should live to see de day w’en my own chillens wants to drive me away frum ’em! Oh, dat I should live to see dis day!”

Neither of them had ever seen Aunt Sharley weep like this – shaken as she was with great sobs, her head bowed almost to her knees, her bared arms quivering in a very palsy. They tried to comfort her, tried to put their arms about her, both of them crying too. At the touch of their arms stealing about her hunched shoulders she straightened, showing a spark of the spirit with which they were more familiar. She wrenched her body free of them and pointed a tremulous finger at the door. The two sisters stole out, feeling terribly guilty and thoroughly miserable.

It was not the Aunt Sharley they knew who waited upon them that dusk at supper. Rather it was her ghost – a ghost with a black mask of tragedy for a face, with eyes swollen and reddened, with lips which shook in occasional spasms of pain, though their owner strove to keep them firm. With their own faces tear-streaked and with lumps in their throats the girls kept their heads averted, as though they had been caught doing something very wrong, and made poor pretense of eating the dishes that the old woman placed before them. Such glances as they stole at her were sidelong covert glances, but they marked plainly enough how her shoulders drooped and how she dragged herself about the table.

Within a space of time to be measured by hours and almost by minutes she seemed to have aged years.

It was a mute meal and a most unhappy one for the sisters. More than once Aunt Sharley seemed on the point of saying something, but she, too, held her tongue until they had risen up from their places. From within the passageway leading to the rear porch she spoke then across the threshold of the door at the back end of the dining room.

“You, nur nobody else, can’t turn me out of dis house,” she warned them, and in her words was the dead weight of finality. “An’ ef you does, I ain’t gwine leave de premises. Ise gwine camp right dere on de sidewalk an’ dere I means to stay twell de policemens teks me up fur a vagrom. De shame of it won’t be no greater fur me ’n ’tis fur you. Dat’s all!” And with that she was gone before they could answer, if indeed they had any answer to make.

It was the next day that the Daily Evening News announced the engagement and the date of the marriage, which would follow within four weeks. Congratulations in number were bestowed upon Emmy Lou; they came by telephone and in letters from former schoolmates, but mainly they came by word of mouth from townspeople who trooped in to say the things which people always say on such occasions – such things, for example, as that young Mr. Winslow should count himself a lucky man and that Emmy Lou would make a lovely bride; that he should be the proudest young man in the Union and she the happiest girl in the state, and all the rest of it. Under this outpouring of kindly words from kindly folk the recipient was radiant enough to all appearances, which was a tribute to her powers as an actress. Beneath the streams of her happiness coursed somber undercurrents of distress and perplexity, roiling the waters of her joy and her pride.

For nearly a week, with no outsider becoming privy to the facts, she endured a situation which daily was marked by harassing experiences and which hourly became more intolerable. Then, in despair, seeing no way out at all, she went to a certain old white house out on Clay Street to confide in one to whom many another had turned, seeking counsel in the time of trouble. She went to see Judge William Pitman Priest, and she went alone, telling no one, not even Mildred, of the errand upon which she was bound.

The wide front porch was empty where the old Judge spent most of his leisure hours when the weather suited, and knowing as she did the custom of the house, and being, for a fact, almost as much at home beneath its roof as beneath her own, Emmy Lou, without knocking, walked into the hall and turning to the right entered the big sitting room. Its lone occupant sat up with a jerk, wiping the drowsiness out of his eyes with the back of his hand. He had been taking a cat nap on his ancient sofa; his long white back hair was tousled up comically behind his bald pink brow.

“Why, hello, honey!” he said heartily, rising to his feet and bowing with a quaint ceremonial gesture that contrasted with and yet somehow matched the homeliness of his greeting. “You slipped in so quiet on them dainty little feet of yours I never heared you comin’ a-tall.” He took her small hands in his broad pudgy ones, holding her off at arm’s length. “And don’t you look purty! Mighty nigh any woman looks cool and sweet when she’s got on white fixin’s, but when a girl like you puts ’em on – well, child, there ain’t no use talkin’, you shorely are a sight to cure sore eyes. And you git to favor your sweet mother more and more every day you live. I can’t pay you no higher compliment than that. Set down in that cheer yonder, where I kin look at you whilst we visit.”

“I’d rather sit here by you, sir, on the sofa, if you don’t mind,” she said.

“Suit yourself, honey.”

She settled herself upon the sofa and he let his bulky frame down alongside her, taking one of her hands into his. Her free hand played with one of the big buttons on the front of her starched linen skirt and she looked, not at him, but at the shining disk of pearl, as he said:

“Well, Emmy Lou, whut brings you ’way out here to my house in the heat of the day?”

She turned her face full upon him then and he saw the brooding in her eyes and gave her hand a sympathetic little squeeze.

“Judge,” she told him, “you went to so much trouble on my account and Mildred’s when we were still minors that I hate to come now worrying you with my affairs. But somehow I felt that you were the one for me to turn to.”

“Emmy Lou,” he said very gravely, “your father was one of the best men that ever lived and one of the best friends ever I had on this earth. And no dearer woman than your mother ever drawed the breath of life. It was a mighty proud day fur me and fur Lew Lake when he named us two as the guardians of his children, and it was a pleasure to both of us to help look to your interests after he was took from us. Why, when your mother went too, I’d a’ liked the best in the world to have adopted you two children outright.” He chuckled a soft little chuckle. “I reckin I would have made the effort, too, only it seemed like that old nigger woman of yours appeared to have prior rights in the matter, and knowin’ her disposition I was kind of skeered to advance the suggestion.’”

“It was about Aunt Sharley that I came to see you today, Judge Priest.”

“That so? I had a visit from her here the other day.”

“What other day?” she asked, startled.

“Oh, it must have been a matter of three weeks ago – fully. Shall I tell you whut she come to see me about? You’ll laugh when you hear it. It tickled me right smartly at the time. She wanted to know what I knew about this here young Mr. Winslow – yes, that was it. She said all the visible signs p’inted to a serious affair ’twixt you two young people, and she said before it went any further she wanted to know ef he was the kind of a young man to be gittin’ hisself engaged to a member of the Dabney family, and she wanted to know ef his folks were the real quality folks and not this here codfish aristocracy: That was the very term she used – ‘codfish aristocracy.’ Well, I was able to reasshore her. You see, honey, I’d took it on myself to do a little inquirin’ round about Mr. Winslow on my own responsibility – not that I wanted to be pryin’ into your business and not because I aimed to be tryin’ to come between you and the young man ef I wasn’t altogether satisfied with the accounts I got of him, but because I loved you and wanted to make sure in my own mind that Tom Dabney’s child wasn’t makin’ the wrong choice. You understand, don’t you? You see, ez fur back ez a month and a half ago, or mebbe even further back than that, I was kind of given to understand that you and this young man were gittin’ deeply interested in each other.”

“Why, how could you?” inquired Emmy Lou. “We weren’t even engaged then. Who could have circulated such a report about us?”

“The very first time I seen you two young folks walkin’ up Franklin Street together you both were circulatin’ it,” he said, chuckling again. “You may not ’a’ knowed it, but you were. I may be gittin’ old, but my eyesight ain’t entirely failed up on me yit – I could read the signs when I was still half a block away frum you. It was right after that that I started my own little private investigation. So you see I was qualified to reasshore Aunt Sharley. I told her all the available information on the subject proved the young gentleman in question was not only a mighty clever, up-standin’, manly young feller, but that where he hailed from he belonged to the quality folks, which really was the p’int she seemed most anxious about. That’s whut I told her, and I was monstrous glad to be able to tell her. A stranger might have thought it was pure impudence on her part, but of course we both know, you and me, whut was in the back part of her old kinky head. And when I’d got done tellin’ her she went down the street from here with her head throwed away back, singin’ till you could ’a’ heard her half a mile off, I reckin.”

“I never guessed it. She never told me she’d been to see you. And you didn’t tell me, either, when you came the other night to wish me joy, Judge.”

“I kind of figgered she wanted the matter treated confidential,” explained Judge Priest. “So I respected whut I took to be her wishes in the matter. But wasn’t it fur all the world jest like that old black woman?”

“Yes, it was just like her,” agreed Emmy Lou, her face shadowed with deepening distress. “And because it was just like her and because I know now better than ever before how much she really loves me, those things make it all the harder to tell you what I came here to tell you – make it all the harder for me to decide what I should do and to ask your advice before I do decide.”

“Oh, I reckin it can’t be so serious ez all that,” said Judge Priest comfortingly. “Betwixt us we oughter be able to find a way out of the difficulty, whutever it is. S’pose, honey, you start in at the beginnin’ and give me all the facts in the matter that’s worryin’ you.”

She started then and, though her voice broke several times, she kept on until she came to the end of her tragic little recital. To Emmy Lou it was very tragic indeed.

“So you see, Judge Priest, just how it is,” she stated at the conclusion. “From both sides I am catching the brunt of the whole thing. Aunt Sharley won’t budge an inch from the attitude she’s taken, and neither will Harvey budge an inch. He says she must go; she tells me every day she won’t go. This has been going on for a week now and I’m almost distracted. At what should be the happiest time in a girl’s life I’m being made terribly unhappy. Why, it breaks my heart every time I look at her. I know how much we owe her – I know I can never hope to repay her for all she has done for me and my sister.

“But oh, Judge, I do want to be the right kind of wife to Harvey. All my life long I mean to obey him and to look up to him; I don’t want to begin now by disobeying him – by going counter to his wishes. And I can understand his position too. To him she’s just an unreasonable, meddlesome, officious, contrary old negro woman who would insist on running the household of which he should be the head. She would, too.

“It isn’t that he feels unkindly toward her – he’s too good and too generous for that. Why, it was Harvey who suggested that wages should go on just the same after she leaves us – he has even offered to double them if it will make her any better satisfied with the move. I’m sure, though, it can’t be the question of money that figures with her. She never tells anyone about her own private affairs, but after all these years she must have a nice little sum saved up. I can’t remember when she spent anything on herself – she was always so thrifty about money. At least she was careful about our expenditures, and of course she must have been about her own. So it can’t be that. Harvey puts it down to plain stubbornness. He says after the first wrench of the separation is over she ought to be happier, when she’s taking things easy in her own little house, than she is now, trying to do all the work in our house. He says he wants several servants in our home – a butler, and a maid to wait on me and Mildred, and a housemaid and a cook. He says we can’t have them if we keep Aunt Sharley. And we can’t, either – she’d drive them off the place. No darky could get along with her a week. Oh, I just don’t know what to do!”

“And whut does Aunt Sharley say?” asked the Judge.

“I told you. Sometimes she says she won’t go and sometimes she says she can’t go. But she won’t tell why she can’t – just keeps on declaring up and down that she can’t. She makes a different excuse or she gives a different reason every morning; she seems to spend her nights thinking them up. Sometimes I think she is keeping something back from me – that she isn’t telling me the real cause for her refusal to accept the situation and make the best of it. You know how secretive our colored people can be sometimes.”

“All the time, you mean,” amended the old man. “Northerners never seem to be able to git it through their heads that a darky kin be loud-mouthed and close-mouthed at the same time. Now you take that black boy Jeff of mine. Jeff knows more about me – my habits, my likes and my dislikes, my private business and my private thoughts and all – than I know myself. And I know jest egsactly ez much about his real self – whut he thinks and whut he does behind my back – ez he wants me to know, no more and no less. I judge it’s much the same way with your Aunt Sharley, and with all the rest of their race too. We understand how to live with ’em, but that ain’t sayin’ we understand how they live.”

He looked steadfastly at his late ward.

“Honey, when you come to cast up the account you do owe a lot to that old nigger woman, don’t you? – you and your sister both. Mebbe you owe even more than you think you do. There ain’t many left like her in this new generation of darkies that’s growed up – she belongs to a species that’s mighty nigh extinct, ez you might say. Us Southern people are powerfully given, some of us, to tellin’ whut we’ve done fur the black race – and we have done a lot, I’ll admit – but sometimes I think we’re prone to furgit some of the things they’ve done fur us. Hold on, honey,” he added hastily, seeing that she was about to speak in her own defense. “I ain’t takin’ issue with you aginst you nor yit aginst the young man you’re fixin’ to marry. After all, you’ve got your own lives to live. I was jest sort of studyin’ out loud – not offerin’ an argument in opposition.”

Still looking straight at her he asked a question:

“Tell me one thing, Emmy Lou, jest to satisfy my curiosity and before we go any further with this here bothersome affair that’s makin’ you unhappy. It seems like to me I heared somewheres that you first met this young man of yours whilst you and little Mildred were off at Knollwood Seminary finishin’ your educations. Is that so or ain’t it?”

“Yes, sir, that’s true,” she answered. “You see, when we first went to Knollwood, Harvey had just been sent South to take a place in the office of the trolley road at Knollwood.

“His people were interested in the line; he was assistant to the general manager then. I met him there. And he – he was interested in me, I suppose, and afterward, when he had worked his way up and had been promoted to the superintendency, his company bought our line in, too, and he induced them to transfer him here – I mean to say he was transferred here. So that’s how it all happened.”

“I see,” he said musingly. “You met him down there and he got interested – ‘interested’ was the word you used, wasn’t it, honey? – and then after a spell when you had left there he followed you here – or rather it jest so happened by a coincidence that he was sent here. Well, I don’t know ez I blame him – for being interested, I mean. It strikes me that in addition to bein’ an enterprisin’ young man he’s also got excellent taste and fine discrimination. He ought to go quite a ways in the world – whut with coincidences favorin’ him and everything.”

The whimsical note died out of his voice. His tone became serious.

“Child,” he said gently, “whut would you say – and whut’s even more important, whut would you do – ef I was to tell you that ef it hadn’t a-been fur old Aunt Sharley this great thing that’s come into your life probably never would have come into it? What ef I was to tell you that if it hadn’t a-been fur her you never would have knowed Mr. Harvey Winslow in the first place – and natchelly wouldn’t be engaged to marry him now?”

“Why, Judge Priest, how could that be?” Her widened eyes betokened a blank incredulity.

“Emmy Lou,” he answered slowly, “in tellin’ you whut I’m about to tell you I’m breakin’ a solemn pledge, and that’s a thing I ain’t much given to doin’. But this time I figger the circumstances justify me. Now listen: You remember, don’t you, that in the first year or two following after the time your mother left us, the estate was sort of snarled up? Well, it was worse snarled up than you two children had any idea of. Two or three of the heaviest investments your father made in the later years of his life weren’t turnin’ out very well. The taxes on ’em amounted to mighty nigh ez much ez whut the income frum ’em did. We didn’t aim to pester you two girls with all the details, so we sort of kept ’em to ourselves and done the best we could. You lived simple and there was enough to take care of you and to keep up your home, and we knowed we could depend on Aunt Sharley to manage careful. Really, she knowed more about the true condition of things than you did. Still, even so, you no doubt got an inklin’ sometimes of how things stood with regards to your finances.”

She nodded, saying nothing, and he went on:

“Well, jest about that time, one day in the early part of the summer I had a visit frum Aunt Sharley. She come to me in my office down at the courthouse, and I sent Jeff to fetch Lew Lake, and we both set down there together with that old nigger woman, and she told us whut she had to say. She told us that you children had growed up with the idea that you’d go off to boardin’ school somewheres after you were done with our local schools, and that you were beginnin’ to talk about goin’ and that it was high time fur you to be gittin’ ready to go, and, in brief, she wanted to know whut about it? We told her jest how things stood – that under the terms of your father’s will practically everything you owned was entailed – held in trust by us – until both of the heirs had come of age. We told her that, with your consent or without it, we didn’t have the power to sell off any part of the estate, and so, that bein’ the case, the necessary money to send you off to school jest natchelly couldn’t be provided noways, and that, since there was jest barely enough money comin’ in to run the home and, by stintin’, to care fur you and Mildred, any outside and special expense comin’ on top of the regular expenses couldn’t possibly be considered – or, in other words, that you two couldn’t hope to go to boardin’ school.

“I reckin you kin guess fur yourself whut that old woman done then. She flared up and showed all her teeth. She said that the quality always sent their daughters off to boardin’ school to give ’em the final polish that made fine ladies of ’em. She said her Ole Miss – meanin’ your grandmother – had gone to Knollwood and that your mother had gone there, and that you two girls were goin’ there, too, whether or no. We tried to explain to her that some of the finest young ladies in the land and some of the best-born ones never had the advantages of a college education, but she said she didn’t keer whut people somewheres else might do – that the daughters of her kind of quality folks went to college and that you two were goin’, so that all through your lives you could hold up your heads with the finest in the land. You never seen anybody so set and determined about a thing ez that old woman was. We tried explainin’ to her and we tried arguin’ with her, and Lew Lake tried losin’ his temper with her, him bein’ somewhat hot-headed, but nothin’ we could say seemed to have any effect on her at all. She jest set there with her old skinny arms folded on her breast like a major-general, and that old under lip of hers stuck out and her neck bowed, sayin’ over and over agin that you girls were goin’ to that boardin’ school same ez the Dabneys and the Helms had always done. So finally we throwed up our hands and told her we were at the end of our rope and she’d kindly have to show us the way to bring it all about.

“And then she up and showed us. You remember the night me and Lew Lake come up to your house to talk over the matter of your college education and I told you to call Aunt Sharley into the conference – you remember that, don’t you? And you remember she come out strong in favor of Knollwood and that after a while we seemed to give in? Well, child, I’ve got a little confession to make to you now along with a bigger one later on: That was all a little piece of by-play that had been planned out in advance. We knowed beforehand that Aunt Sharley was goin’ to favor Knollwood and that we were goin’ to fall into line with her notions about it at the end. She’d already licked us to a standstill there in my office, and we were jest tryin’ to save our faces.

“So you went to college and you both stayed there two full years. And I mout ez well tell you right now that the principal reason why you had so many purty fixin’s to wear whilst you was away and why you had ez much pin money to spend ez any other two girls there was because that old woman lived on less’n it would take, seemin’ly, to keep a bird alive, savin’ every cent she could scrape up, and bringin’ it to me to be sent on to you ez part of your allowance.”

“But I don’t understand yet,” cried out Emmy Lou. “Why, Judge, Aunt Sharley just can write her own name. We had to print out the words in the letters we wrote her so that she could read them. I don’t understand how the poor good old ignorant soul could figure out where the money which paid for our schooling could be found when both you and Doctor Lake——”

“I’m comin’ to that part now,” he told her. “Honey, you were right when you guessed that Aunt Sharley has been holdin’ somethin’ back frum you durin’ this past week; but she’s been tellin’ you the truth too – in a way of speakin’. She ain’t got any money saved up – or at least ef she’s got any at all it ain’t ez much ez you imagine. Whut she’s got laid by kin only represent the savin’s of four or five years, not of a whole lifetime. And when she said to you that she couldn’t leave you to go to live in that little house that your father left her in his will she wasn’t speakin’ a lie. She can’t go there to live because it ain’t hers – she don’t own it any more. Over five years ago she sold it outright, and she took the price she got fur it and to that price she added whut she’d saved up ez the fruits of a life-time of toil spent in your service and the service of your people before you, and that was the money – her money, every cent of it – which paid fur your two years at college. Now you know.”

For a long half minute she stared at him, her face whitening and the great tears beginning to run down her cheeks. They ran faster and faster. She gave a great sob and then she threw her arms about the old Judge’s neck and buried her face on his shoulder.

“Oh, I never dreamed it! I never dreamed it! I never had a suspicion! And I’ve been so cruel to her, so heartless! Oh, Judge Priest, why did you and Doctor Lake ever let her do it? Why did you let her make that sacrifice?”

He patted her shoulder gently.

“Well, honey, we did try at first to discourage her from the notion, but we mighty soon seen it wasn’t any use to try, and a little later on, comin’ to think it over, we decided mebbe we didn’t want to try any more. There’re some impulses in this world too noble to be interfered with or hampered or thwarted, and some sacrifices so fine that none of us should try to spoil ’em by settin’ up ourselves and our own wills in the road. That’s how I felt. That’s how Lew Lake felt. That’s how we both felt. And anyhow she kept p’intin’ out that she wouldn’ never need that there little house, because so long ez she lived she’d have a home with you two girls. That’s whut she said, anyway.”

“But why weren’t we allowed to know before now? Why didn’t we know – Mildred and I – ten days ago, so that she might have been spared the cruel thing I’ve done? Why didn’t she come out and tell us when we went to her and I told her she must get off the place? Why didn’t you tell me, Judge, before now – why didn’t you give me a hint before now?”

“Honey, I couldn’t. I was under a solemn promise not to tell – a promise that I’ve jest now broken. On the whole I think I’m glad I did break it.... Lemme see ef I kin remember in her own words whut she said to us? ‘Gen’l’mens,’ she says, ‘dem chillens is of de quality an’ entitled to hole up they haids wid de fines’ in de land. I don’t want never to have dem demeaned by lettin’ dem know or by lettin’ ary other pusson know dat an old black nigger woman furnished de money to help mek fine young ladies of ’em. So long ez I live,’ she says, ‘dey ain’t never to heah it frum my lips an’ you must both gimme yore word dat dey don’t never heah it frum yourn. W’en I dies, an’ not befo’ den, dey may know de truth. De day dey lays me in de coffin you kin tell ’em both de secret – but not befo’!’ she says.

“So you see, child, we were under a pledge, and till today I’ve kept that pledge. Nobody knows about the sale of that little piece of property except Aunt Sharley and Lew Lake and me and the man who bought it and the man who recorded the deed that I drew up. Even the man who bought it never learned the real name of the previous owner, and the matter of the recordin’ was never made public. Whut’s the good of my bein’ the circuit judge of this district without I’ve got influence enough with the county clerk to see that a small real-estate transaction kin be kept frum pryin’ eyes? So you see only five people knowed anything a-tall about that sale, and only three of them knowed the true facts, and now I’ve told you, and so that makes four that are sharin’ the secret.... Don’t carry on so, honey. ’Tain’t ez ef you’d done somethin’ that couldn’t be mended. You’ve got all your life to make it up to her. And besides, you were in ignorance until jest now.... Now, Emmy Lou, I ain’t goin’ to advise you; but I certainly would like to hear frum your own lips whut you do aim to do?”

She raised her head and through the brimming tears her eyes shone like twin stars.

“What am I going to do?” she echoed. “Judge, you just said nobody knew except four of us. Well, everybody is going to know – everybody in this town is going to know, because I’m going to tell them. I’ll be a prouder and a happier girl when they do know, all of them, than I’ve ever been in my whole life. And I warn you that neither you nor Aunt Sharley nor any other person alive can keep me from telling them. I’m going to glory in telling the world the story of it.”

“Lord bless your spunky little soul, honey, I ain’t goin’ to try to hender you frum tellin’,” said Judge Priest. “Anyhow, I expect to be kept busy durin’ the next few days keepin’ out of that old nigger woman’s way.... So that’s the very first thing you aim to do?”

“No, it isn’t, either,” she exclaimed, catching the drift of his meaning. “That is going to be the second thing I do. But the first thing I am going to do is to go straight back home as fast as I can walk and get down on my knees before Aunt Sharley and beg her forgiveness for being so unjust and so unkind.”

“Oh, I reckin that won’t hardly be necessary,” said Judge Priest. “I kind of figger that ef you’ll jest have a little cryin’ bee with her that’ll answer every purpose. Jest put your young arms round her old neck and cry a spell with her. It’s been my observation that, black or white, cryin’ together seems to bring a heap of comfort to the members of your sex.”

“I think perhaps I shall try that,” she agreed, smiling in spite of herself; and her smile was like sunshine in the midst of a shower. “I’ll begin by kissing her right smack on the mouth – like this.” And she kissed the Judge squarely on his.

“Judge Priest,” she stated, “this town is due for more than one surprise. Do you know who’s going to be the matron of honor at my wedding three weeks from now? I’ll give you just one guess.”

He glanced up at her quizzically.

“Whut do you s’pose the young man is goin’ to have to say about that?” he asked.

“If he doesn’t like it he can find some other girl to marry him,” she said.

“Oh, I kind of imagine he’ll listen to reason – especially comin’ frum you,” said Judge Priest. “He will ef he’s the kind of young man that’s worthy to marry Tom Dabney’s daughter.”

•     •     •     •     •

It is possible that some of the bridegroom’s kinspeople, coming down from the North for the wedding, were shocked to find a wizened, coal-black woman, who was lame of one leg, not only taking part in the ceremony, filling a place next in importance to that of the contracting pair and the maid of honor, but apparently in active and undisputed charge of the principal details. However, being well-bred persons, they did not betray their astonishment by word, look or deed. Perhaps they figured it as one of the customs of the country that an old shrill-voiced negress, smelling of snuff and black silk, should play so prominent a rôle in the event itself and in the reception that followed.

However, all that is ancient history now. What I have to add is a commingling of past local history and present local history. As I said at the outset, there were formerly any number of black children in our town who bore the names of white friends and white patrons, but to my knowledge there was never but one white child named for a black person. The child thus distinguished was a girl child, the first-born of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Winslow. Her full name was Charlotte Helm Winslow, but nearly everybody called her Little Sharley. She is still called so, I believe, though growing now into quite a sizable young person.

The Saturday Evening Post, 24 Nov 1917
From Place to Place (1920)

Darkness

~

There was a house in this town where always by night lights burned. In one of its rooms many lights burned; in each of the other rooms at least one light. It stood on Clay Street, on a treeless plot among flower beds, a small dull-looking house; and when late on dark nights all the other houses on Clay Street were solid blockings lifting from the lesser blackness of their background, the lights in this house patterned its windows with squares of brilliancy so that it suggested a grid set on edge before hot flames. Once a newcomer to the town, a transient guest at Mrs. Otterbuck’s boarding house, spoke about it to old Squire Jonas, who lived next door to where the lights blazed of nights, and the answer he got makes a fitting enough beginning for this account.

This stranger came along Clay Street one morning, and Squire Jonas, who was leaning over his gate contemplating the world as it passed in review, nodded to him and remarked that it was a fine morning; and the stranger was emboldened to stop and pass the time of day, as the saying goes.

“I’m here going over the books of the Bernheimer Distilling Company,” he said when they had spoken of this and that, “and, you know, when a chartered accountant gets on a job he’s supposed to keep right at it until he’s done. Well, my work keeps me busy till pretty late. And the last three nights, passing that place yonder adjoining yours, I’ve noticed she was all lit up like as if for a wedding or a christening or a party or something. But I didn’t see anybody going in or coming out, or hear anybody stirring in there, and it struck me as blamed curious. Last night – or this morning, rather, I should say – it must have been close on to half-past two o’clock when I passed by, and there she was, all as quiet as the tomb and still the lights going from top to bottom. So I got to wondering to myself. Tell me, sir, is there somebody sick over there next door?”

“Yes, suh,” stated the squire, “I figure you might say there is somebody sick there. He’s been sick a powerful long time too. But it’s not his body that’s sick; it’s his soul.”

“I don’t know as I get you, sir,” said the other man in a puzzled sort of way.

“Son,” stated the squire, “I reckin you’ve been hearin’ ’em, haven’t you, singin’ this here new song that’s goin’ ’round about, ‘I’m Afraid to Go Home in the Dark’? Well, probably the man who wrote that there song never was down here in these parts in his life; probably he just made the idea of it up out of his own head. But he might ’a’ had the case of my neighbor in his mind when he done so. Only his song is kind of comical and this case here is about the most uncomic one you’d be likely to run acrost. The man who lives here alongside of me is not only afraid to go home in the dark but he’s actually feared to stay in the dark after he gets home. Once he killed a man and he come clear of the killin’ all right enough, but seems like he ain’t never got over it; and the sayin’ in this town is that he’s studied it out that ef ever he gets in the dark, either by himself or in company, he’ll see the face of that there man he killed. So that’s why, son, you’ve been seein’ them lights a-blazin’. I’ve been seein’ ’em myself fur goin’ on twenty year or more, I reckin ’tis by now, and I’ve got used to ’em. But I ain’t never got over wonderin’ whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him, when by rights things should be dark. But I ain’t ever asted him, and whut’s more, I never will. He ain’t the kind you could go to him astin’ him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He’s whut you might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole.”

In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town mysteries and its town eccentrics – its freaks, if one wished to put the matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.

There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets crossed, he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web. There was old Daddy Hannah, the black root-and-yarb doctor, who could throw spells and weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave no tracks which a dog will nose after or a witch follow, or a ha’nt. Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him. But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time, town characters abounded freely. But Mr. Dudley Stackpole was more than a town character. He was that, it is true, but he was something else besides; something which tabbed him a mortal set apart from his fellow mortals. He was the town’s chief figure of tragedy.

If you had ever seen him once you could shut your eyes and see him over again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger’s gaze. With him, physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man, very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him, but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither in his youth nor when age came to him was his hair white. But for so far back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at a distance dead lichens.

The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down, too, and burned them slowly and stooped over the smoldering mass and inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such relief from asthma as this hornet’s-nest treatment. But it remained for this man to find a third use for such a thing. He brought it into the office of Gafford’s wagon yard, where some other men were sitting about the fire, and he held it up before them and he said:

“Who does this here hornet’s nest put you fellers in mind of – this gray color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin’ back and forth and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now – it’s somebody you all know.”

And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he said:

“Why, ain’t it got percisely the same color and the same look about it as Mr. Dudley Stackpole’s face? Why, it’s a perfect imitation of him! That’s whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it bouncin’ on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the flats.”

“By gum, if you ain’t right!” exclaimed one of the audience. “Say, come to think about it, I wonder if spendin’ all his nights with bright lights burnin’ round him is whut’s give that old man that gray color he’s got, the same as this wasp’s nest has got it, and all them puckery lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin’ him! Well, they tell me he’s toler’ble well fixed in this world’s goods, but poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn’t trade places with him fur any amount of money. I’ve got my peace of mind if I ain’t got anything else to speak of. Say, you’d ’a’ thought in all these years a man would get over broodin’ over havin’ killed another feller, and specially havin’ killed him in fair fight. Let’s see, now, whut was the name of the feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin’s? I actually disremember. I’ve heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if I’ve heard it oncet.”

For a fact, the memory of the man slain so long before only endured because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and nighttime assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its climactic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer – and his fashion of living afterwards – which made warp and woof for the fabric of the tragedy.

With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid. One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the two Tatums – Harve and Jess – for an account long overdue, and won judgment in the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair. Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other. By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.

Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late 80’s when the two Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o’clock of that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile away to Stackpole Brothers’ gristmill above the big riffle in Cache Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit enough – the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two, but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business and keeping bachelor’s hall, as the phrase goes, in the living room of the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.

Now the younger Stackpole was known for a law-abiding and a well-disposed man, which reputation stood him in stead subsequently; but also he was no coward. He might crave peace, but he would not flee from trouble moving toward him. He would not advance a step to meet it, neither would he give back a step to avoid it. If it occurred to him to hurry in to the county seat and have his enemies put under bonds to keep the peace he pushed the thought from him. This, in those days, was not the popular course for one threatened with violence by another; nor, generally speaking, was it regarded exactly as the manly one to follow. So he bided that day where he was. Moreover, it was not of record that he told anyone at all of what impended. He knew little of the use of firearms, but there was a loaded pistol in the cash drawer of the mill office. He put it in a pocket of his coat and through the afternoon he waited, outwardly quiet and composed, for the appointed hour when single-handed he would defend his honor and his brother’s against the unequal odds of a brace of bullies, both of them quick on the trigger, both smart and clever in the handling of weapons.

But if Stackpole told no one, someone else told someone. Probably the messenger of the Tatums talked. He currently was reputed to have a leaky tongue to go with his jimberjaws; a born trouble maker, doubtless, else he would not have loaned his service to such employment in the first place. Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened, other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least, was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o’clock came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.

One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid down behind the trees of Eden’s swamp lot; the heat waves of a blistering hot day still dancing their devil’s dance down the road like wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and, half sheltered within the lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim, still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his adversaries.

But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device, cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear. In a canvas-covered wagon – moving wagons, we used to call them in Red Gravel County – they left their house half an hour or so before the time set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which met the pike south of Foster’s store; and then very slowly they rode up the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.

Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to a standstill just beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from under the overhanging hood of the wagon and, sheltered behind it, draw a revolver and cock it, all the while peeping out, searching the front and the nearer side of the gristmill with his eager eyes. She saw Harve Tatum, the elder brother, set the wheel chock and wrap the lines about the sheathed whipstock, and then as he swung off the seat catch a boot heel on the rim of the wagon box and fall to the road with a jar which knocked him cold, for he was a gross and heavy man and struck squarely on his head. With popped eyes she saw Jess throw up his pistol and fire once from his ambush behind the wagon, and then – the startled team having snatched the wagon from before him – saw him advance into the open toward the mill, shooting again as he advanced.

All now in the same breath and in a jumble of shock and terror she saw Dudley Stackpole emerge into full sight, and standing clear a pace from his doorway return the fire; saw the thudding frantic hoofs of the nigh horse spurn Harve Tatum’s body aside – the kick broke his right leg, it turned out – saw Jess Tatum suddenly halt and stagger back as though jerked by an unseen hand; saw him drop his weapon and straighten again, and with both hands clutched to his throat run forward, head thrown back and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled scream – it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus – and saw him fall on his face, twitching and heaving, not thirty feet from where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more firing.

As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even seven, she thought. After the opening shot they rang together in almost a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum’s gun and two in Stackpole’s seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the coroner that night and to the coroner’s jurors next day that five shots had been fired.

On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon, Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man frozen stiff.

Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin and scrooged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade, were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground. Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.

While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he was, and the main instigator and central figure of sundry violent encounters in the past, should have failed to hit the mark at which he fired with his first shot or with his second or with his third; and the second, a still greater wonder, was that Dudley Stackpole, who perhaps never in his life had had for a target a living thing, should have sped a bullet so squarely into the heart of his victim at twenty yards or more. The first phenomenon might perhaps be explained, they agreed, on the hypothesis that the mishap to his brother coming at the very moment of the fight’s beginning, unnerved Jess and threw him out of stride, so to speak. But the second was not in anywise to be explained excepting on the theory of sheer chance. The fact remained that it was so, and the fact remained that it was strange.

By form of law Dudley Stackpole spent two days under arrest; but this was a form, a legal fiction only. Actually he was at liberty from the time he reached the courthouse that night, riding in the sheriff’s buggy with the sheriff and carrying poised on his knees a lighted lantern. Afterwards it was to be recalled that when, alongside the sheriff, he came out of his mill technically a prisoner he carried in his hand this lantern, all trimmed of wick and burning, and that he held fast to it through the six-mile ride to town. Afterwards, too, the circumstance was to be coupled with multiplying circumstances to establish a state of facts; but at the moment, in the excited state of mind of those present, it passed unremarked and almost unnoticed. And he still held it in his hand when, having been released under nominal bond and attended by certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county building to his home on Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of deductive reasoning.

Already it was a foregone conclusion that the finding at the coroner’s inquest, to be held the next day, would absolve him; foregone, also, that no prosecutor would press for his arraignment on charges and that no grand jury would indict. So, soon all the evidence in hand was conclusively on his side. He had been forced into a fight not of his own choosing; an effort, which had failed, had been made to take him unfairly from behind; he had fired in self-defense after having first been fired upon; save for a quirk of fate operating in his favor, he should have faced odds of two deadly antagonists instead of facing one. What else then than his prompt and honorable discharge? And to top all, the popular verdict was that the killing off of Jess Tatum was so much good riddance of so much sorry rubbish; a pity, though, Harve had escaped his just deserts.

Helpless for the time being, and in the estimation of his fellows even more thoroughly discredited than he had been before, Harve Tatum here vanishes out of our recital. So, too, does Jeffrey Stackpole, heretofore mentioned once by name, for within a week he was dead of the same heart attack which had kept him out of the fight at Cache Creek. The rest of the narrative largely appertains to the one conspicuous survivor, this Dudley Stackpole already described.

Tradition ever afterwards had it that on the night of the killing he slept – if he slept at all – in the full-lighted room of a house which was all aglare with lights from cellar to roof line. From its every opening the house blazed as for a celebration. At the first, so the tale of it ran, people were of two different minds to account for this. This one rather thought Stackpole feared punitive reprisals under cover of night by vengeful kinsmen of the Tatums, they being, root and branch, sprout and limb, a belligerent and an ill-conditioned breed. That one suggested that maybe he took this method of letting all and sundry know he felt no regret for having gunned the life out of a dangerous brawler; that perhaps thereby he sought to advertise his satisfaction at the outcome of that day’s affair. But this latter theory was not to be credited. For so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that act might have been – why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! The repute and the prior conduct of the man robbed the suggestion of all plausibility. And then soon, when night after night the lights still flared in his house, and when on top of this evidence accumulated to confirm a belief already crystallizing in the public mind, the town came to sense the truth, which was that Mr. Dudley Stackpole now feared the dark as a timid child might fear it. It was not authentically chronicled that he confessed his fears to any living creature. But his fellow townsmen knew the state of his mind as though he had shouted of it from the housetops. They had heard, most of them, of such cases before. They agreed among themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and shocking and hideous. And they were right. He did so fear, and he feared mightily, constantly and unendingly.

That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in mid-afternoon sometimes, of stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun’s sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not look.

There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of her own color, whose members in time communicated what she told to their white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a crude carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets and abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and how privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric lights, although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for final touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and oil lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that though the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out, there still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house which harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread which lived within its owner’s bosom. An orthodox haunted house should by rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was, differed from the orthodox conception. It was tenanted and it shone with lights.

The man’s abiding obsession – if we may call his besetment thus – changed in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother’s death; and then with all possible dispatch he sold it, its fixtures, contents and goodwill, for what the property would fetch at quick sale, and he gave up business. He had sufficient to stay him in his needs. The Stackpoles had the name of being a canny and a provident family, living quietly and saving of their substance. The homestead where he lived, which his father before him had built, was free of debt. He had funds in the bank and money out at interest. He had not been one to make close friends. Now those who had counted themselves his friends became rather his distant acquaintances, among whom he neither received nor bestowed confidences.

In the broader hours of daylight his ways were such as any man of reserved and diffident ways, having no fixed employment, might follow in a smallish community. He sat upon his porch and read in books. He worked in his flower beds. With flowers he had a cunning touch, almost like a woman’s. He loved them, and they responded to his love and bloomed and bore for him. He walked downtown to the business district, always alone, a shy and unimpressive figure, and sat brooding and aloof in one of the tilted-back cane chairs under the portico of the old Richland House, facing the river. He took long solitary walks on side streets and byways; but it was noted that, reaching the farther outskirts, he invariably turned back. In all those dragging years it is doubtful if once he set foot past the corporate limits into the open country. Dun-hued, unobtrusive, withdrawn, he aged slowly, almost imperceptibly. Men and women of his own generation used to say that save for the wrinkles ever multiplying in close cross-hatchings about his puckered eyes, and save for the enhancing of that dead gray pallor – the wasp’s-nest overcasting of his skin – he still looked to them exactly as he had looked when he was a much younger man.

It was not so much the appearance or the customary demeanor of the recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight. The one was commonplace enough – I mean his appearance – and his conduct, unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from him, an unhealthy and unnatural mental effluvium that served so indelibly to fix the bodily image of him in the brainpans of casual and uninformed passers-by. The brand of Cain was not on his brow. By every local standard of human morality it did not belong there. But built up of morbid elements within his own conscience, it looked out from his eyes and breathed out from his person.

So year by year, until the tally of the years rolled up to more than thirty, he went his lone unhappy way. He was in the life of the town, to an extent, but not of it. Always, though, it was the daylit life of the town which knew him. Excepting once only. Of this exceptional instance a story was so often repeated that in time it became permanently embalmed in the unwritten history of the place.

On a summer’s afternoon, sultry and close, the heavens suddenly went all black, and quick gusts smote the earth with threats of a great windstorm. The sun vanished magically; a close thick gloaming fell out of the clouds. It was as though nightfall had descended hours before its ordained time. At the city power house the city electrician turned on the street lights. As the first great fat drops of rain fell, splashing in the dust like veritable clots, citizens scurrying indoors and citizens seeing to flapping awnings and slamming window blinds halted where they were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point midway of the block – or square, to give it its local name – then go slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of one acutely slanted zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could, within the circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the methods of artificial illumination at his command – with incandescent bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with the tallow dip’s slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene’s wick three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire Jonas’ wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on the lights – all of them.

That once was all, though – the only time he found the dark taking him unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than thirty. Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be published broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in accordance with the signatory’s wishes, was done.

With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the Daily Evening News, as with Editor Tompkins’ introductory paragraphs preceding it, we need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the way down the first column and ran as follows:

“How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the big-riffle crossing was this way” – it is the dying Bledsoe, of course, who is being quoted. “The man they sent to the mill with the message did a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden’s Swamp road soon after dinnertime. Now I had always got along fine with both of the Stackpoles, and had only friendly feelings toward them; but maybe there’s some people still alive back there in that county who can remember what the reason was why I should naturally hate and despise both the Tatums, and especially this Jess Tatum, him being if anything the more low-down one of the two, although the youngest. At this late day I don’t aim to drag the name of anyone else into this, especially a woman’s name, and her now dead and gone and in her grave; but I will just say that if ever a man had a just cause for craving to see Jess Tatum stretched out in his blood it was me. At the same time I will state that it was not good judgment for a man who expected to go on living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but I will state that I used my best judgment.

“Therefore and accordingly, no sooner did I hear the news about the dare which the Tatums had sent to the Stackpoles than I said to myself that it looked like here was my fitting chance to even up my grudge with Jess Tatum and yet at the same time not run the prospect of being known to be mixed up in the matter and maybe getting arrested, or waylaid afterwards by members of the Tatum family or things of such a nature. Likewise I figured that with a general amount of shooting going on, as seemed likely to be the case, one shot more or less would not be noticed, especially as I aimed to keep out of sight at all times and do my work from under safe cover, which it all of it turned out practically exactly as I had expected. So I took a rifle which I owned and which I was a good shot with and I privately went down through the bottoms and came out on the creek bank in the deep cut right behind Stackpole Brothers’ gristmill. I should say offhand this was then about three o’clock in the evening. I was ahead of time, but I wished to be there and get everything fixed up the way I had mapped it out in my mind, without being hurried or rushed.

“The back door of the mill was not locked, and I got in without being seen, and I went upstairs to the loft over the mill and I went to a window just above the front door, which was where they hoisted up grain when brought in wagons, and I propped the wooden shutter of the window open a little ways. But I only propped it open about two or three inches; just enough for me to see out of it up the road good. And I made me a kind of pallet out of meal sacks and I laid down there and I waited. I knew the mill had shut down for the week, and I didn’t figure on any of the hands being round the mill or anybody finding out I was up there. So I waited, not hearing anybody stirring about downstairs at all, until just about three minutes past six, when all of a sudden came the first shot.

“What threw me off was expecting the Tatums to come afoot from up the road, but when they did come it was in a wagon from down the main Blandsville pike clear round in the other direction. So at this first shot I swung and peeped out and I seen Harve Tatum down in the dust seemingly right under the wheels of his wagon, and I seen Jess Tatum jump out from behind the wagon and shoot, and I seen Dudley Stackpole come out of the mill door right directly under me and start shooting back at him. There was no sign of his brother Jeffrey. I did not know then that Jeffrey was home sick in bed.

“Being thrown off the way I had been, it took me maybe one or two seconds to draw myself around and get the barrel of my rifle swung round to where I wanted it, and while I was doing this the shooting was going on. All in a flash it had come to me that it would be fairer than ever for me to take part in this thing, because in the first place the Tatums would be two against one if Harve should get back upon his feet and get into the fight; and in the second place Dudley Stackpole didn’t know the first thing about shooting a pistol. Why, all in that same second, while I was righting myself and getting the bead onto Jess Tatum’s breast, I seen his first shot – Stackpole’s, I mean – kick up the dust not twenty feet in front of him and less than halfway to where Tatum was. I was as cool as I am now, and I seen this quite plain.

“So with that, just as Stackpole fired wild again, I let Jess Tatum have it right through the chest, and as I did so I knew from the way he acted that he was done and through. He let loose of his pistol and acted like he was going to fall, and then he sort of rallied up and did a strange thing. He ran straight on ahead toward the mill, with his neck craned back and him running on tiptoe; and he ran this way quite a little ways before he dropped flat, face down. Somebody else, seeing him do that, might have thought he had the idea to tear into Dudley Stackpole with his bare hands, but I had done enough shooting at wild game in my time to know that he was acting like a partridge sometimes does, or a wild duck when it is shot through the heart or in the head; only in such a case a bird flies straight up in the air. Towering is what you call it when done by a partridge. I do not know what you would call it when done by a man.

“So then I closed the window shutter and I waited for quite a little while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum; and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to anything on account of it, I felt that there was no need for me to worry, and I did not – not worry then nor later. But for some time past I had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement before I do so.

“But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum’s body after he was dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it. Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would throw a different-sized bullet. But they never thought to do so.”

Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: “You mean to say that no autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?”

Answer by Bledsoe: “If you mean by performing an autopsy that they probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to everybody such a plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had killed him.”

Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: “I take it that you are making this confession of your own free will and in order to clear the name of an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?”

Answer: “In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man, and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole’s account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement.”

And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a brief summary in Editor Tompkins’ best style – which was a very dramatic and moving style indeed – of the circumstances, as recalled by old residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the Daily Evening News in congratulating him upon the lifting of this cloud from his life.

“I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe’s confession,” said Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum after the paper was on the streets that evening. “If I had such a power I’d have this Frenchman Balzac backed clear off the boards when it came to describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you – I’ve been in this business all my life, and I’ve seen lots of things, but I never saw anything that was the beat of this thing.

“Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set of galley proofs pulled and I stuck ’em in my pocket and I put out for the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn’t want to trust either of the reporters with this job. They’re both good, smart, likely boys; but, at that, they’re only boys, and I didn’t know how they’d go at this thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.

“He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: ‘You’ll pardon me, Mr. Stackpole, but I’ve come to ask you a question and then to show you something. Did you,’ I says, ‘ever know a man named A. Hamilton Bledsoe?’

“He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house without answering me. I suppose it’d been so long since he had anybody calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter memories – not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing, being always with him, anyway – may have jolted him pretty hard. But if he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He turned round and came back.

“‘Yes,’ he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him against his will, ‘I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where’ – he checked himself up, here – ‘he lived,’ he says, ‘in this county at one time. I knew him then.’

“‘That being so,’ I says, ‘I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you to read these galley proofs,’ and I handed them over and he read them through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he’d spoken a volume he couldn’t have told me any clearer what was passing through his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in a flash, you’ll find you can’t describe it afterwards, but you’re never going to forget it. And another thing you’ll find is that there is nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing that you want to say.

“I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I’d gone out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy piece out of him – what we call in this business heart-interest stuff. All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, ‘No, sir; but I thank you – from the bottom of my heart I thank you.’ And then he shook hands with me – shook hands with me like a man who’d forgotten almost how ’twas done – and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him, and I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned into a resurrection.”

Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but he hadn’t. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following hard upon a dénouement which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite headlining phrases: “Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery.”

•     •     •     •     •

Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to a spirit’s resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony – a life had been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe’s words. None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.

As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of his mind long-buried desires went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life. He was getting old. The good news had come late, but not too late. That day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.

And that very day he did; at least he tried. He put on his hat and he took his cane in his hand and as he started down the street he sought to put smartness and springiness into his gait. If the attempt was a sorry failure, he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the failure. He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless and mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as he came down the porch steps he looked about him, not dully, with sick and uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely things.

Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the universe at large, as was the squire’s daily custom. He called out a good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the squire with a gesture which he endeavored to make natural. His aging muscles, staled by thirty-odd years of lack of practice at such tricks, merely made it jerky and forced. Still, the friendly design was there, plainly to be divined; and the neighborly tone of his voice. But the squire, ordinarily the most courteous of persons, and certainly one of the most talkative, did not return the salutation. Astonishment congealed his faculties, tied his tongue and paralyzed his biceps. He stared dumbly a moment, and then, having regained coherent powers, he jammed his brown-varnished straw hat firmly upon his ancient poll and went scrambling up his gravel walk as fast as two rheumatic underpinnings would take him, and on into his house like a man bearing incredible and unbelievable tidings.

Mr. Stackpole opened his gate and passed out and started down the sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew – an elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel’s jewelry store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a stiff nod of recognition. Now, coming up behind the other, Mr. Stackpole bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless something, confusedly: he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the narrow pavement. Mr. Stackpole was minded to fall into step alongside the Swiss, but the latter would not have it so. He stumbled along for a few yards, mute and plainly terribly embarrassed at finding himself in this unexpected company, and then with a muttered sound which might be interpreted as an apology or an explanation, or as a token of profound surprise on his part, or as combination of them all, he turned abruptly off into a grassed side lane which ran up into the old Enders orchard and ended nowhere at all in particular. Once his back was turned to Mr. Stackpole, he blessed himself fervently. On his face was the look of one who would fend off what is evil and supernatural.

Mr. Stackpole continued on his way. On a vacant lot at Franklin and Clay Streets four small boys were playing one-eyed-cat. Switching his cane at the weed tops with strokes which he strove to make casual, he stopped to watch them, a half smile of approbation on his face. Pose and expression showed that he desired their approval for his approval of their skill. They stopped, too, when they saw him – stopped short. With one accord they ceased their play, staring at him. Nervously the batsman withdrew to the farther side of the common, dragging his bat behind him. The three others followed, casting furtive looks backward over their shoulders. Under a tree at the back of the lot they conferred together, all the while shooting quick diffident glances toward where he stood. It was plain something had put a blight upon their spirits; also, even at this distance, they radiated a sort of inarticulate suspicion – a suspicion of which plainly he was the object.

For long years Mr. Stackpole’s faculties for observation of the motives and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read aright Squire Jonas’ stupefaction, the watchmaker’s ludicrous alarm. He now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered mien – cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness – had thrown upon the spirits of the ball players. Well, he could understand it all. The alteration in him, coming without prior warning, had startled them, frightened them, really. Well, that might have been expected. The way had not been paved properly for the transformation. It would be different when the Daily Evening News came out. He would go back home – he would wait. When they had read what was in the paper people would not avoid him or flee from him. They would be coming into his house to wish him well, to reëstablish old relations with him. Why, it would be almost like holding a reception. He would be to those of his own age as a friend of their youth, returning after a long absence to his people, with the dour stranger who had lived in his house while he was away now driven out and gone forever.

He turned about and he went back home and he waited. But for a while nothing happened, except that in the middle of the afternoon Aunt Kassie unaccountably disappeared. She was gone when he left his seat on the front porch and went back to the kitchen to give her some instruction touching on supper. At dinnertime, entering his dining room, he had, without conscious intent whistled the bars of an old air, and at that she had dropped a plate of hot egg bread and vanished into the pantry, leaving the split fragments upon the floor. Nor had she returned. He had made his meal unattended. Now, while he looked for her, she was hurrying down the alley, bound for the home of her preacher. She felt the need of his holy counsels and the reading of scriptural passages. She was used to queerness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden, why that would be a different matter altogether. So, presently, she was confiding to her spiritual adviser.

Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for what was to be. Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street was almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of pedestrian travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward from work. He had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.

Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have heard the news. He knew that they had heard it – all of them – knew it by the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened curiosity.

Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have ceased thus abruptly to be a town character – that they somehow felt a subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the rôle he for so long had worn?

He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it came to him, registering emphatically.

As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him – that was only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for his case – a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.

Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so, though, things must be different when the minds of people had readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.

And his nights – surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul in a silent paean of thanksgiving.

Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of all these years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective. No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching, aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely worse – the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring, that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever. Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This night he would sleep – sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping, friendly, comforting dark.

Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime hour came. He forgot that he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o’clock he quitted the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.

Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goosenecked iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which controlled the battery of electric lights roundabout, and with a long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.

The paeaned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again on his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness – that blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life – had come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers, gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.

That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil. He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.

For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves, punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the one thing nor the other.

Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes a time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and the mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified victim of his own imagination – he knew it too. The hint of it had that day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this nighttime thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was but one way out of the coil – and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly ringed about by the obscene and indecent circlet of his lights which kept away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide’s soul was passing.

The Saturday Evening Post, 20 Aug 1921
Sundry Accounts (1922)

A Short Natural History

~

If ever a person might be said to have dedicated his being to the pursuit of leisure, that selfsame was Red Hoss Shackleford, of color, and highly so. He was one who specialized in the deft and fine high art of doing nothing at all. With him leisure was at once a calling to be followed regularly and an ideal to be fostered. But also he loved to eat, and he had a fancy for wearing gladsome gearings, and these cravings occasionally interfered with the practice of his favorite vocation. In order that he might enjoy long periods of manual inactivity it devolved upon him at intervals to devote his reluctant energies to gainful labor. When driven to it by necessity, which is said to be the mother of invention and which certainly is the full sister to appetite, Red Hoss worked. He just naturally had to – sometimes.

You see, in the matter of being maintained vicariously he was less fortunately circumstanced than so many of his fellows in our town were, and still are. He had no ministering parent doing cookery for the white folks, and by night, in accordance with a time-hallowed custom with which no sane housekeeper dared meddle, bringing home under a dolman cape loaded tin buckets and filled wicker baskets. Ginger Dismukes, now – to cite a conspicuous example – was one thus favored by the indulgent fates.

Aunt Ca’line Dismukes, mother of the above, was as honest as the day was long; but when the evening of that day came, such trifles, say, as part of a ham or a few left-over slices of cake fell to her as a legitimate if unadvertised salvage. Every time the quality in the big house had white meat for their dinner, Ginger, down the alley, enjoyed drumsticks and warmed-up stuffing for his late supper. He might be like the tapeworm in that he rarely knew in advance what he would have to eat, but still, like the tapeworm, he gratefully absorbed what was put before him and asked no questions of the benefactor. Without prior effort on his part he was fed even as the Prophet Elijah was fed by the ravens of old. This simile would acquire added strength if you’d ever seen Aunt Ca’line, her complexion being a crow’s-wing sable.

Red Hoss had no dependable helpmate, such as Luther Maydew had, with a neatly lettered sign in her front window: Going-Out Washing Taken in Here. Luther’s wife was Luther’s only visible means of support, yet Luther waxed fat and shiny and larded the earth when he walked abroad. Neither had Red Hoss an indulgent and generous patron such as Judge Priest’s Jeff – Jeff Poindexter – boasted in the person of his master. Neither was he gifted in the manipulation of the freckled bones as the late Smooth Crumbaugh had been; nor yet possessed he the skill of shadow boxing as that semiprofessional pugilist, Con Lake, possessed it. Con could lick any shadow that ever lived, and the punching bag that could stand up before his onslaughts was not manufactured yet; wherefore he figured in exhibition bouts and boxing benefits, and between these lived soft and easy. He enjoyed no such sinecure as fell to the lot of Uncle Zack Matthews, who waited on the white gentlemen’s poker game at the Richland House, thereby harvesting many tips and whose otherwise nimble mind became a perfect blank twice a year when he was summoned before the grand jury.

Red Hoss did, indeed, have a sister, but the relations between them were strained since the day when Red Hoss’ funeral obsequies had been inopportunely interrupted by the sudden advent among the mourners of the supposedly deceased, returning drippingly from the river which presumably had engulfed him. His unexpected and embarrassing reappearance had practically spoiled the service for his chief relative. She never had forgiven Red Hoss for his failure to stay dead, and he long since had ceased to look for free pone bread and poke chops in that quarter.

So when he had need to eat, or when his wardrobe required replenishing, he worked at odd jobs; but not oftener. Ordinarily speaking, his heart was not in it at all. But at the time when this narrative begins his heart was in it. One speaks figuratively here in order likewise to speak literally. A romantic enterprise carried on by Red Hoss Shackleford through a period of months promised now a delectable climax. As between him and one Melissa Grider an engagement to join themselves together in the bonds of matrimony had been arranged.

Before he fell under Melissa’s spell Red Hoss had been regarded as one of the confirmed bachelors of the Plunkett’s Hill younger set. He had never noticeably favored marriage and giving in marriage – especially giving himself in marriage. It may have been – indeed the forked tongue of gossip so had it – that the fervor of Red Hoss’ courting, when once he did turn suitor, had been influenced by the fortuitous fact that Melissa ran as chambermaid on the steamboat Jessie B. The fact outstanding, though, was that Red Hoss, having ardently wooed, seemed now about to win.

But Melissa, that comely and comfortable person, remained practical even when most loving. The grandeur of Red Hoss’ dress-up clothes may have entranced her, and certainly his conversational brilliancy was altogether in his favor, but beyond the glamour of the present, Melissa had the vision to appraise the possibilities of the future. Before finally committing herself to the hymeneal venture she required it of her swain that he produce and place in her capable hands for safe-keeping, first, the money required to purchase the license; second, the amount of the fee for the officiating clergyman; and third, cash sufficient to pay the expenses of a joint wedding journey to St. Louis and return. It was specified that the traveling must be conducted on a mutual basis, which would require round-trip tickets for both of them. Melissa, before now, had heard of these one-sided bridal tours. If Red Hoss went anywhere to celebrate being married she meant to go along with him.

Altogether, under these headings, a computed aggregate of at least eighty dollars was needed. With his eyes set then on this financial goal, Red Hoss sought service in the marts of trade. Perhaps the unwonted eagerness he displayed in this regard may have been quickened by the prospect that the irksomeness of employment before marriage would be made up to him after the event in a vacation more prolonged than any his free spirit had ever known. Still, that part of it is none of our affair. For our purposes it is sufficient to record that the campaign for funds had progressed to a point where practically fifty per cent of the total specified by his prudent inamorata already had been earned, collected and, in accordance with the compact, intrusted to the custodianship of one who was at once fiancée and trustee.

On a fine autumnal day Red Hoss made a beginning at the task of amassing the remaining half of the prenuptial sinking fund by accepting an assignment to deliver a milch cow, newly purchased by Mr. Dick Bell, to Mr. Bell’s dairy farm three miles from town on the Blandsville Road. This was a form of toil all the more agreeable to Red Hoss – that is to say, if any form of toil whatsoever could be deemed agreeable to him – since cows when traveling from place to place are accustomed to move languidly. By reason of this common sharing of an antipathy against undue haste, it was late afternoon before the herder and the herded reached the latter’s future place of residence; and it was almost dusk when Red Hoss, returning alone, came along past Lone Oak Cemetery. Just ahead of him, from out of the weed tangle hedging a gap in the cemetery fence, a half-grown rabbit hopped abroad. The cottontail rambled a few yards down the road, then erected itself on its rear quarters and with adolescent foolhardiness contemplated the scenery. In his hand Red Hoss still carried the long hickory stick with which he had guided the steps of Mr. Bell’s new cow. He flung his staff at the inviting mark now presented to him. Whirling in its flight, it caught its target squarely across the neck, and the rabbit died so quickly it did not have time to squeak, and barely time to kick.

Now it is known of all men that luck of two widely different kinds resides in the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit. There is bad luck in it for the rabbit itself, seeing that the circumstance of its having a left hind foot, to begin with, renders life for that rabbit more perilous even than is the life of a commonplace rabbit. But there is abiding good luck in it for the human who falls heir to the foot after the original possessor has passed away. To insure the maximum of fair fortune for the legatee, the rabbit while in the act of jumping over a sunken grave in the dark of the moon should be killed with a crooked stick which a dead man has carried; but since there is no known record of a colored person hanging round sunken graves in the dark of the moon, the left hind foot of an authentic graveyard rabbit slain under any circumstances is a charm of rare preciousness.

With murky twilight impending, it was not for Red Hoss Shackleford to linger for long in the vicinity of a burying ground. Already, in the gloaming, the white fence palings gleamed spectrally and the shadows were thickening in the honeysuckle jungles beyond them. Nor was it for him to think of eating the flesh of a graveyard rabbit, even though it be plump and youthful, as this one was.

Graveyard rabbits, when indubitably known to be such, decorate no Afro-American skillet. Destiny has called them higher than frying pans.

Almost before the victim of his aim had twitched its valedictory twitch he was upon it. In his hand, ready for use, was his razor; not his shaving razor, but the razor he carried for social purposes. He bent down, and with the blade made swift slashes right and left at a limber ankle joint, then rose again and was briskly upon his homeward way, leaving behind him the maimed carcass, a rumpled little heap, lying in the dust. A dozen times before he reached his boarding house he fingered the furry talisman where it rested in the bottom of his hip pocket, and each touching of it conveyed to him added confidences in propitious auguries.

Surely enough, on the very next day but one, events seemed organizing themselves with a view to justifying his anticipations. As a consequence of the illness of Tom Montjoy he was offered and accepted what promised to be for the time being a lucrative position as Tom Montjoy’s substitute on the back end of one of Fowler & Givens’ ice wagons. The Eighteenth Amendment was not as yet an accomplished fact, though the dread menace of it hung over that commonwealth which had within its confines the largest total number of distilleries and bonded warehouses to be found in any state of this union. Observing no hope of legislative relief, sundry local saloon keepers had failed to renew their licenses as these expired. But for every saloon which closed its doors it seemed there was a soda fountain set up to fizz and to spout; and the books of Fowler & Givens showed the name of a new customer to replace each vanished old one. So trade ran its even course, and Red Hoss was retained temporarily to understudy, as it were, the invalid Montjoy.

In an afternoon lull following the earlier rush of deliveries, Mr. Ham Givens came out to where Tallow Dick Evans, Bill Tilghman and Red Hoss reclined at ease in the lee of the ice factory’s blank north wall and bade Red Hoss hook up one of the mules to the light single wagon and carry three of the hundred-pound blocks out to Biederman’s ex-corner saloon, now Biederman’s soft-drink and ice-cream emporium, at Ninth and Washington.

“Better let him take Blue Wing,” said Mr. Givens, addressing Bill Tilghman, who by virtue of priority of service and a natural affinity for draft stock was stable boss for the firm.

It was Bill Tilghman who once had delivered himself of the sage remark that “A mule an’ a nigger is ’zackly alike – ’specially de mule.”

“Can’t tek Blue Wing, Mist’ Givens,” answered Bill. “She done went up to Mist’ Gallowayses’ blacksmith shop to git herse’f some new shoes.”

This pluralization of a familiar name was evidence on Bill Tilghman’s part of the estimation in which he held our leading farrier, Mr. P. J. Galloway.

“All right, take one of the other mules then. But get a hustle on,” ordered Mr. Givens as he reëntered his office.

“Dat bein’ de case, I reckin I’ll tek dat white Frank mule,” said Red Hoss. “’Tain’t no use of him standin’ in de stall eatin’ his ole fool haid off jes’ ’cause Tom Montjoy is laid up.”

“Boy,” said Bill Tilghman, “lissen! You ’cept a word of frien’ship an’ warnin’ f’um somebody dat’s been kicked by more mules ’en whut you ever seen in yore whole life, an’ you let dat Frank mule stay right whar he is. You kin have yore choice of de Maud mule or de Maggie mule or Friday or January Thaw; but my edvice to you is, jes’ leave dat Frank mule be an’ don’t pester him none.”

“How come?” demanded Red Hoss. “I reckin I got de strength to drive ary mule dey is.”

“I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t,” stated Bill Tilghman. “A born ijiot could drive dat mule, so I jedge you mout mek out to qualify. ’Tain’t de drivin’ of him – hit’s de hitchin’ up of him which I speaks of.”

Tallow Dick put in, “Hit’s dis way wid dat Frank: In his early chilehood somebody muster done somethin’ painful to dat mule’s haid, an’ it seem lak it lef’ one ondurin’ scar in his mind. Anyway, f’um dat day hencefor’ard he ain’t let nobody a-tall, let alone hit’s a plum’ stranger to him lak you is, go prankin’ round his haid. Ef you think a mule’s back end is his dangersome end you jes’ try to walk up to ole Frank face to face, ez nigger to mule, an’ try to hang de mule jewelry over his years. Da’s all, jes’ try it! Tom Montjoy is de onliest one which kin slip de bit in dat mule’s mouf, an’ de way he do it is to go into de nex’ stall an’ keep speakin’ soothin’ words to him, an’ put de bridle on him f’um behinehand of his shoulder lak. But when Tom Montjoy ain’t wukkin’, de Frank mule he ain’t wukkin’ neither any. Yessuh, Tom Montjoy is de sole one which dat Frank mule gives his confidences to, sech as dey is.”

Red Hoss snorted his contempt for his warning.

“Huh, de trouble wid dat mule is he’s pampered! You niggers done pamper him twell he think he owns dese whole ice-factory premises. Whut he need fur whut ails him is somebody which ain’t skeered of him. Me, I aims to go ’crost to dat stable barn over yonder ’crost de street an’ walk right in de same stall wid dat Frank same ez whut I would wid ary other mule, an’ ef he mek jes’ one pass at me I’m gwine up wid my fistes an’ give him somethin’ to brood over.”

Bill Tilghman looked at Tallow Dick, looking at him sorrowfully, as though haunted by forebodings of an impending tragedy, and shook his head slowly from side to side. Tallow Dick returned the glance in kind, and then both of them gazed steadfastly at the vainglorious new hand.

“Son, boy,” inquired old Bill softly, “whut is de name of yore mos’ favorite hymn?”

“Whut my favorite hymn got to do wid it?”

“Oh, nothin’, only I wuz jes’ studyin’. Settin’ yere, I got to thinkin’ dat mebbe dey wuz some purticular tune you might lak sung at de grave.”

“An’ whilst you’s tellin’ Unc’ Bill dat much, you mout also tell us whar ’bouts in dis town you lives at?” added Tallow Dick.

“You knows good an’ well whar I lives at,” snapped Red Hoss.

“I thought mebbe you mout ’a’ moved,” said Tallow Dick mildly. “’Twouldn’t never do fur me an’ Bill yere to be totin’ de remains to de wrong address. Been my experience dat nothin’ ain’t mo’ onwelcome at a strange house ’en a daid nigger, especially one dat’s about six feet two inches long an’ all mussed up wid fresh mule tracks.”

“Huh! You two ole fools is jes’ talkin’ to hear yo’se’fs talk,” quoth Red Hoss. “All I axes you to do is jes’ set quiet yere, an’ in ’bout six minutes f’um now you’ll see me leadin’ a tamed-down white mule wid de britchin’ all on him outen through dem stable barn do’s.”

“All right, honey, have it yo’ own way. Ef you won’t hearken an’ you won’t heed, go ahaid!” stated Uncle Bill, with a wave of his hand. “You ain’t too young to die, even ef you is too ole to learn. Only I trust an’ prays dat you won’t be blamin’ nobody but yo’se’f ’bout this time day after tomor’ evenin’ w’en de sexton of Mount Zion Cullud Cemetery starts pattin’ you in de face wid a spade.”

“Unc’ Bill, you said a moufful den,” added Tallow Dick. “De way I looks at it, dey ain’t no use handin’ out sense to a nigger ef he ain’t got no place to put it. ’Sides, dese things offen-times turns out fur de best; orphants leaves de fewest mourners. Good-by, Red Hoss, an’ kindly give my regards to any frien’s of mine dat you meets up wid on ’yother side of Jordan.”

With another derisive grunt, Red Hoss rose from where he had been resting, angled to the opposite side of the street and disappeared within the stable. For perhaps ninety seconds after he was gone the remaining two sat in an attitude of silent waiting. Their air was that of a pair of black seers who likewise happen to be fatalists, and who having conscientiously discharged a duty of prophecy now await with calmness the fulfillment of what had been foretold. Then they heard, over there where Red Hoss had vanished, a curious muffled outcry. As they subsequently described it, this sound was neither shriek nor moan, neither oath nor prayer. They united in the declaration that it was more in the nature of a strangled squeak, as though a very large rat had suddenly been trodden beneath an even larger foot. However, for all its strangeness, they rightfully interpreted it to be an appeal for succor. Together they rose and ran across Water Street and into the stable.

The Frank mule had snapped his tether and, freed, was backing himself out into the open. If a mule might be said to pick his teeth, here was a mule doing that very thing. Crumpled under the manger of the stall he just had quitted was a huddled shape. The rescuers drew it forth, and in the clear upon the earthen stable floor they stretched it. It was recognizable as the form of Red Hoss Shackleford.

Red Hoss seemed numbed rather than unconscious. Afterward Bill Tilghman in recounting the affair claimed that Red Hoss, when discovered, was practically nude clear down to his shoes, which being of the variety known as congress gaiters had elastic uppers to hug the ankles. This snugness of fit, he thought, undoubtedly explained why they had stayed on when all the rest of the victim’s costume came off. In his version, Tallow Dick averred he took advantage of the circumstance of Red Hoss’ being almost totally undressed to tally up bruise marks as counter-distinguished from tooth marks, and found one of the former for every two sets of the latter. From this disparity in the count, and lacking other evidence, he was bound to conclude that considerable butting had been done before the biting started.

However, these conclusions were to be arrived at later. For the moment the older men busied themselves with fanning Red Hoss and with sluicing a bucket of water over him. His first intelligible words upon partially reviving seemed at the moment of their utterance to have no direct bearing upon that which had just occurred. It was what he said next which, in the minds of the hearers, established the proper connection.

“White folks suttinly is curious.” Such was his opening remark, following the water application. “An’ also, dey suttinly do git up some mouty curious laws.” He paused a moment as though in a still slightly dazed contemplation of the statutory idiosyncrasies of the Caucasian, and then added the key words: “F’rinstance, now, dey got a law dat you got to keep lions an’ tigers in a cage. Yassuh, da’s de law. Can’t no circus go ’bout de country widout de lions an’ de tigers an’ de highyenas is lock’ up hard an’ fas’ in a cage.” Querulously his voice rose in a tone of wondering complaintfulness: “An’ yit dey delibert’ly lets a man-eatin’ mule go ramblin’ round loose, wid nothin’ on him but a rope halter.”

Across the prostrate form of the speaker Bill Tilghman eyed Tallow Dick in the reminiscent manner of one striving to recall the exact words of a certain quotation and murmured, “De trouble wid dat Frank mule is dat he’s pampered.”

“Br’er Tilghman,” answered back Tallow Dick solemnly, “you done said it – de mule is been pampered!”

The sufferer stirred and blinked and sat up dizzily.

“Uh-huh,” he assented. “An’ jes’ ez soon ez I gits some of my strength back ag’in, an’ some mo’ clothes on, I’m gwine tek de longes’, sharpes’ pitchfork dey is in dis yere stable an’ I’m gwine pamper dat devilish mule wid it fur ’bout three-quarters of an hour stiddy.”

But he didn’t. If he really cherished any such disciplinary designs he abandoned them next morning at sunup, when, limping slightly, he propped open the stable doors preparatory to invading its interior. The white demon, which appeared to have the facility of snapping his bonds whenever so inclined, came sliding out of the darkness toward him, a malignant and menacing apparition, with a glow of animosity in two deep-set eyes and with a pair of prehensile lips curled back to display more teeth than by rights an alligator should have. It was immediately evident to Red Hoss that in the Frank mule’s mind a deep-seated aversion for him had been engendered. He had the feeling that potential ill health lurked in that neighborhood; that death and destruction, riding on a pale mule, might canter up at any moment. Personally, he decided to let bygones be bygones. He dropped the grudge as he tumbled backward through the stable doors and slammed them behind him. That same day he went to Mr. Ham Givens and announced his intention of immediately breaking off his present associations with the firm.

“Me, I is done quit foolin’ wid ole ice waggins,” he announced airily after Mr. Givens had given him his time. “Hit seems lak my gift is fur machinery.”

“A pusson which wuz keerful wouldn’t trust you wid a shoe buttoner – dat’s how high I regards yore gift fur machinery,” commented Bill Tilghman acidly. Red Hoss chose to ignore the slur. Anyhow, at the moment he could put his tongue to no appropriate sentence of counter repartee. He continued as though there had been no interruption:

“Yassuh, de nex’ time you two pore ole foot-an’-mouth teamsters sees me I’ll come tearin’ by yere settin’ up on de boiler deck of a taxiscab. You better step lively to git out of de way fur me den.”

“I ’lows to do so,” assented Bill. “I ain’t aimin’ to git shot wid no stray bullets.”

“How come stray bullets?”

“Anytime I sees you runnin’ a taxiscab I’ll know by dat sign alone dat de sheriff an’ de man which owns de taxiscab will be right behine you – da’s whut I means.”

“Don’t pay no ’tention to Unc’ Bill,” put in Tallow Dick. “Whar you aim to git dis yere taxiscab, Red Hoss?”

“Mist’ Lee Farrell he’s done start up a regular taxiscab line,” expounded Red Hoss. “He’s lookin’ fur some smart, spry cullid men ez drivers. Dat natchelly bars you two out, but it lets me in. Mist’ Lee Farrell he teach you de trade fust, an’ den he gives you three dollars a day, an’ you keeps all de tips you teks in. So it’s so long and fare you well to you mule lovers, ’ca’se Ise on my way to pick myse’f out my taxiscab.”

“Be sure to pick yo’se’f out one which ain’t been pampered,” was Bill Tilghman’s parting shot.

“Nummine dat part,” retorted Red Hoss. “You jes’ remember dis after I’m gone: Mules’ niggers an’ niggers’ mules is ’bout to go out of style in dis man’s town.”

In a way of speaking, Red Hoss in his final taunt had the rights of it. Lumbering drays no longer runneled with their broad iron tires the red-graveled flanks of the levee leading down to the wharf boats. They had given way almost altogether to bulksome motor trucks. Closed hacks still found places in funeral processions, but black chaser craft, gasoline driven and snorting furiously, met all incoming trains and sped to all outgoing ones. Betimes, beholding as it were the handwriting on the wall, that enterprising liveryman, Mr. Lee Farrell, had set up a garage and a service station on the site of his demolished stable, and now was the fleet commander of a whole squadron of these tin-armored destroyers.

Under his tutelage Red Hoss proved a reasonably apt pupil. At the end of an apprenticeship covering a fortnight he matriculated into a regular driver, with a badge and a cap to prove it and a place on the night shift. Red Hoss felt impressive, and bore himself accordingly. He began taking sharp turns on two wheels. He took one such turn too many. On Friday night of his first week as a graduate chauffeur he steered his car headlong into a smash-up from which she emerged with a dished front wheel and a permanent marcel wave in one fender. As he nursed the cripple back to the garage Red Hoss exercised an imagination which never yet had failed him, and fabricated an explanation so plausibly shaped and phrased as to absolve him of all blameful responsibility for the mishap.

Mr. Farrell listened to and accepted this account of the accident with no more than a passing exhibition of natural irritation; but next morning when Attorney Sublette called, accompanied by an irate client with a claim for damages sustained to a market wagon, and bringing with him also the testimony of at least two disinterested eye-witnesses to prove upon whose shoulders the fault must rest, Mr. Farrell somewhat lost his customary air of sustained calm. Cursing softly under his breath, he settled on the spot with a cash compromise; and then calling the offender to his presence, he used strong and bitter words.

“Look here, boy,” he proclaimed, “I’ve let you off this time with a cussing, but next time anything happens to a car that you are driving you’ve got to come clean with me. It ain’t to be expected that a lot of crazy darkies can go sky-hooting round this town driving pot-metal omnibuses for me without one of them getting in a smash-up about every so often, and I’m carrying accident insurance and liability insurance to cover my risks; but next time you get into a jam I want you to come through with the absolute facts in the case, so’s I’ll know where I stand and how to protect myself in court or out of it. I don’t care two bits whose fault it is – your fault or some other lunatic’s fault. The truth is what I want – the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. And He’ll need to help you if I catch you lying again! Get me?”

“Boss,” said Red Hoss fervently, “I gits you.”

Two nights later the greater disaster befell. It was a thick, drizzly, muggy night, when the foreground of one’s perspective was blurred by the murk and when there just naturally was not any background at all. Down by the Richland House a strange white man wearing a hand-colored mustache and a tiger-claw watch charm hailed Red Hoss. This person desired to be carried entirely out of town, to the south yards of the P. T. & A. Railroad, where Powers Brothers’ Carnival Company was detraining from its cars with intent to pitch camp in the suburb of Mechanicsville hard by and furnish the chief attractions for a three days’ street fair to be given under the auspices of the Mechanicsville lodge of Knights of Damon.

After they had quit the paved streets, Red Hoss drove a bumpy course diagonally across many switch spurs, and obeying instructions from his fare brought safely up alongside a red-painted sleeping car which formed the head end of the show train where it stood on a siding. But starting back he decided to skirt alongside the track, where he hoped the going might be easier. As he backed round and started off, directly in front of him he made out through the encompassing mists the dim flare of a gasoline torch, and he heard a voice uplifted in pleading:

“Come on, Lena! Come on, Baby Doll! Come on out of that, you Queenie!”

Seemingly an unseen white man was urging certain of his lady friends to quit some mysterious inner retreat and join him where he stood; all of which, as Red Hoss figured it, was none of his affair. Had he known more he might have moved more slowly; indeed might have stopped moving altogether. But – I ask you – how was Red Hoss to know that the chief bull handler for Powers Brothers was engaged in superintending the unloading of his large living charges from their traveling accommodations in the bull car?

There were three of these bulls, all of them being of the gentler sex. Perhaps it might be well to explain here that the word “bull,” in the language of the white tops, means elephant. To a showman all cow elephants are bulls just as in a mid-Victorian day, more refined than this one, all authentic bulls were, to cultured people, cows.

Obeying the insistent request of their master, forth now and down a wooden runway filed the members of Powers Brothers’ World Famous Troupe of Ponderous Pachydermic Performers. First came Lena, then Baby Doll and last of all the mighty Queenie; and in this order they lumberingly proceeded, upon huge but silent feet, to follow him alongside the cindered right of way, feeling their way through the fog.

Now it is a fact well established in natural history – and in this instance was to prove a lamentable one – that elephants, unlike lightning bugs, carry no tail lamps. Of a sudden Red Hoss was aware of a vast, indefinite, mouse-colored bulk looming directly in the path before him. He braked hard and tried to swing out, but he was too close upon the obstacle to avoid a collision.

With a loud metallic smack the bow of the swerving taxicab, coming up from the rear, treacherously smote the mastodonic Queenie right where her wrinkles were thickest. Her knees bent forward, and involuntarily she squatted. She squatted, as one might say, on all points south. Simultaneously there was an agonized squeal from Queenie and a crunching sound from behind and somewhat under her, and the tragic deed was done. The radiator of Red Hoss’ car looked something like a concertina which had seen hard usage and something like a folded-in crush hat, but very little, if any, like a radiator.

At seven o’clock next morning, when Mr. Farrell arrived at his establishment, his stricken gaze fastened upon a new car of his which had become to all intents and purposes practically two-thirds of a car. The remnant stood at the curbing, where his service car, having towed it in, had left it as though the night foreman had been unwilling to give so complete a ruin storage space within the garage. Alongside the wreckage was Red Hoss, endeavoring more or less unsuccessfully to make himself small and inconspicuous. Upon him menacingly advanced his employer.

“The second time in forty-eight hours for you, eh?” said Mr. Farrell. “Well, boy, you do work fast! Come on now, and give me the cold facts. How did the whole front end of this car come to get mashed off?”

Tone and mien alike were threatening. Red Hoss realized there was no time for extended preliminary remarks. From him the truth came trippingly on the tongue.

“Boss, man, I ain’t aimin’ to tell you no lies dis time. I comes clean.”

“Come clean and come fast.”

“A elephint set down on it.”

“What!”

“I sez, suh, a elephint set down on it.”

In moments of stress, when tempted beyond his powers of self-control, Mr. Farrell was accustomed to punctuate physically, as it were, the spoken word. What he said – all he said – before emotion choked him was: “Why – you – you—” What he did was this: His right arm crooked upward like a question mark; it straightened downward like an exclamation point; his fist made a period, or, as the term goes, a full stop, on the point of Red Hoss Shackleford’s jaw. What Red Hoss saw resembled this:

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Only they were all printed flashingly in bright primary colors, reds and greens predominating.

As the last gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding. One was that the truth which often is stranger than fiction may also on occasion be a more dangerous commodity to handle. Another was that abruptly he had severed all business connections with Mr. Lee Farrell’s industry. His resignation had been accepted on the spot, and the spot was the bulge of his left jaw.

Somewhat dazed, filled with an inarticulate but none the less sincere conviction that there was neither right nor justice left in a misshapen world, Red Hoss got up and went away from there. He deemed it the part of prudence to go utterly and swiftly away from there. It seemed probable that at any moment Mr. Farrell might emerge from his inner office, whither, as might be noted through an open window, he had retired to pour cold water on his bruised knuckles, and get violent again. The language he was using so indicated.

Presently Red Hoss, with one side of his face slightly swollen and a curious taste in his mouth, might have been seen boarding a Locust Street car southbound. He was on his way to Mechanicsville. In the back part of his brain lurked vaguely a project to seek out the man who owned those elephants and plead for some fashion of redress for painful injuries innocently sustained. Perhaps the show gentleman might incline a charitable ear upon hearing Red Hoss’ story. Just how the sufferer would go about the formality of presenting himself to the consideration of the visiting dignitary he did not yet know. It was all nebulous and cloudy; a contingency to be shaped by circumstances as they might develop. Really, sympathy was the balm Red Hoss craved most.

He quit the car when the car quit him – at the end of the line where the iron bridge across Island Creek marked the boundary between the municipality and its principal suburb. Even at this hour Mechanicsville’s broadest highway abounded in fascinating sights and alluring zoölogical aromas. The carnival formally would not open till the afternoon, but by Powers Brothers’ crews things already had been prepared against the coming of that time. In all available open spaces, such as vacant lots abutting upon the sidewalks and the junctions of cross streets, booths and tents and canvas-walled arenas had been set up. Boys of assorted sizes and colors hung in expectant clumps about marquees and show fronts. Also a numerous assemblage of adults of the resident leisure class, a majority of these being members of Red Hoss’ own race, moved back and forth through the line of fairings, inspired by the prospect of seeing something interesting without having to pay for it.

Red Hoss forgot temporarily the more-or-less indefinite purpose which had brought him hither. He joined a cluster of watchful persons who hopefully had collected before the scrolled and ornamented wooden entrance of a tarpaulin structure larger than any of the rest. From beneath the red-and-gold portico of this edifice there issued a blocky man in a checkered suit, with a hard hat draped precariously over one ear and with a magnificent jewel gleaming out of the bosom of a collarless shirt. All things about this man stamped him as one having authority over the housed mysteries roundabout. Visibly he rayed that aura of proprietorship common to some monarchs and to practically all owners of traveling caravansaries. Seeing him, Red Hoss promptly detached himself from the group he had just joined, and advanced, having it in mind to seek speech with this superior-appearing personage. The white man beat him to it.

“Say, boy, that’s right, keep a-coming,” he called. His experienced eye appraised Red Hoss’ muscular proportions. “Do you want a job?”

“Whut kinder job, boss?”

“Best job you ever had in your life,” declared the white man. “You get fourteen a week and cakes. Get me? Fourteen dollars just as regular as Saturday night comes, and your scoffing free – all the chow you can eat thrown in. Then you hear the band play absolutely free of charge, and you see the big show six times a day without having to pay for it, and you travel round and see the country. Don’t that sound good to you? Oh, yes, there’s one thing else!” He dangled a yet more alluring temptation. “And you wear a red coat with brass buttons on it and a cap with a plume in it.”

“Sho’ does sound good,” said Red Hoss, warming. “Whut else I got to do, cunnel?”

“Oh, just odd jobs round this pitch here – this animal show.”

“Hole on, please, boss! I don’t have no truck wid elephints, does I?”

“Nope. The elephants are down the line in a separate outfit of their own. You work with this show – clean out the cages and little things like that. Don’t get worried,” he added quickly, interpreting aright a look of sudden concern upon Red Hoss’ face. “You don’t have to go inside the cages to clean ’em out. You stay outside and do it with a long-handled tool. I had a good man on this job, but he quit on me unexpectedly night before last.”

The speaker failed to explain that the recent incumbent had quit thus abruptly as a result of having a forearm clawed by a lady leopard named Violet.

“’Bout how long is dis yere job liable to last?” inquired Red Hoss. “You see, cunnel, Ise ’spectin’ to have some right important private business in dis town ’fore so very long.”

“Then this is the very job you want. After we leave here tomorrow night we strike down across the state line and play three more stands, and then we wind up with a week in Memphis. We close up the season there and go into winter quarters, and you come on back home. What’s your name?”

“My full entitled name is Roscoe Conklin’ Shackleford, but ’count of my havin’ a kinder brightish complexion dey mos’ gin’rally calls me Red Hoss. I reckin mebbe dey’s Injun blood flowin’ in me.”

“All right, Red Hoss, let it flow. You just come on with me and I’ll show you what you’ll have to do. My name is Powers – Captain Powers.”

Proudly sensing that already he was an envied figure in the eyes of the group behind him, Red Hoss followed the commanding Powers back through a canvas-sided marquee into a circular two-poled tent. There were no seats. The middle spaces were empty. Against the side walls were ranged four cages. One housed a pair of black bears of a rather weather-beaten and travel-worn aspect. Next to the bears, the lady leopard, Violet, through the bars contemplated space, meanwhile wearing that air of intense boredom peculiar to most caged animals. A painted inscription above the front of the third cage identified its occupant as none other than The Educated Ostrich; the Bird That Thinks.

Red Hoss’ conductor indicated these possessions with a lordly wave of his arm, then led the way to the fourth cage. It was the largest cage of all; it was painted a bright and passionate red. It had gilded scrollings on it. Upon the ornamented façade which crossed its front from side to side a lettered legend ran. Red Hoss spelled out the pronouncement:

Chieftain, King of Feline Acrobats! The Largest Black-maned Nubian Lion in Captivity! Danger!

The face of the cage was boarded halfway up, but above the top line of the planked cross panel Red Hoss could make out in the foreground of the dimmed interior a great tawny shape, and at the back, in one corner, an orderly clutter of objects painted a uniform circus blue. There was a barrel or two, an enormous wooden ball, a collapsible fold-up seesaw and other impedimenta of a trained-animal act. Red Hoss had heard that the lion was a noble brute – in short, was the king of beasts. He now was prepared to swear it had a noble smell. Beneath the cage a white man in overalls slumbered audibly upon a tarpaulin folded into a pallet.

“There’s the man you take your orders from if you join us,” explained Powers, flirting a thumb toward the sleeper. “Name of Riley, he is. But you draw your pay from me.” With his arm he described a circle. “And here’s the stock you help take care of. The only one you need to be careful about is that leopard over yonder. She gets a little peevish once in a while. Well, I would sort of keep an eye on the ostrich here alongside you too. The old bird’s liable to cut loose when you ain’t looking and kick the taste out of your mouth. You give them both their distances. But those bears behind you is just the same as a pair of puppies, and old Chieftain here – well, he looks pretty fierce and he acts sort of fierce too when he’s called on for it, but it’s just acting with him; he’s trained to it. Off watch, he’s just as gentle as an overgrown kitten. Riley handles him and works him, and all you’ve got to do when Riley is putting him through his stunts is to stand outside here and hand him things he wants in through the bars. Well, is it a go? Going to take the job?”

“Boss,” said Red Hoss, “you speaks late – I done already tooken it.”

“Good!” said Powers. “That’s the way I love to do business – short and sweet. You hang round for an hour or two and sort of get acquainted with things until Riley has his nap out. When he wakes up, if I ain’t back by that time, you tell him you’re the new helper, and he’ll wise you up.”

“Yas suh,” said Red Hoss. “But say, boss, ’scuse me, but did I understand you to mention dat eatin’ was in de contract?”

“Sure! Hungry already?”

“Well, suh, you see I mos’ gin’rally starts de day off wid breakfust, an’ to tell you de truth I ain’t had nary grain of breakfust yit!”

“Got the breakfast habit, eh? Well, come on with me to the cook house and I’ll see if there ain’t something left over.”

Despite the nature of his calling as a tamer of ferocious denizens of the tropic jungle, Mr. Riley, upon wakening, proved to be a person of a fairly amiable disposition. He made it snappy but not unduly burdensome as he initiated Red Hoss into the rudimentary phases of the new employment. As the forenoon wore on the conviction became fixed in Red Hoss’ mind that for an overlord he had a white man who would be apt to listen to reason touching on any proposition promising personal profits with no personal risks.

Sharp upon this diagnosis of his new master’s character, a magnificent idea, descending without warning like a bolt from the blue, struck Red Hoss on top of his head and bored in through his skull and took prompt root in his entranced and dazzled brain. It was a gorgeous conception; one which promised opulent returns for comparatively minor exertions. To carry it out, though, required cooperation, and in Riley he saw with a divining glance – or thought he saw – the hope of that cooperation.

In paving the way for confidential relations he put to Riley certain leading questions artfully disguised, and at the beginning seemingly artlessly presented. By the very nature of Riley’s answers he was further assured of the safety of the ground on which he trod, whereupon Red Hoss cautiously broached the project, going on to amplify it in glowing colors the while Riley hearkened attentively.

It was a sheer pleasure to outline a proposition to a white gentleman who received it so agreeably. Fifteen minutes after the first tentative overtures had been thrown out feeler-wise, Red Hoss found that he and Riley were in complete accord on all salient points. Indeed they already were as partners jointly committed to a joint undertaking.

After the third and last afternoon performance, in which Red Hoss, wearing a proud mien and a somewhat spotty uniform coat, had acquitted himself in all regards creditably, Riley gave him a leave of absence of two hours, ostensibly for the purpose of quitting his boarding house and collecting his traveling wardrobe. As a matter of fact, these details really required but a few minutes, and it had been privily agreed between them that the rest of the time should be devoted by Red Hoss to setting in motion the actual preliminaries of their scheme.

This involved a personal call upon Mr. Moe Rosen, who conducted a hide, pelt, rag, junk, empty-bottle and old-iron emporium on lower Court Street, just off the Market Square. September’s hurried twilight had descended upon the town when the scouting conspirator tapped for admission at the alley entrance to the back room of Mr. Rosen’s establishment, where the owner sat amid a variegated assortment of choicer specimens culled from his collected wares. Mr. Rosen needed no sign above his door to inform the passing public of the nature of his business. When the wind was right you could stand two blocks away and know it without being told. Here at Mr. Rosen’s side door Red Hoss smacked his nostrils appreciatively. Even to one newly come from a wild-animal show, and even when smelled through a brick wall, Mr. Rosen’s place had a graphic and striking atmosphere which was all its own.

As one well acquainted with the undercurrents of community life, Red Hoss shared, with many others, the knowledge that Mr. Rosen, while ostensibly engaged in one industry, carried on another as a sort of clandestine by-product. Now this side line, though surreptitiously conducted and perilous in certain of its aspects, was believed by the initiated to be really more lucrative than his legitimatized and avowed calling. Mr. Rosen was by way of being – by a roundabout way of being – what technically is known as a bootlegger. He bootlegged upon a larger scale than do most of those pursuing this precarious avocation.

It was stated in an earlier paragraph that national prohibition had not yet come to pass. But already local option held the adjoining commonwealth of Tennessee in a firm and arid grasp; wherefore Mr. Rosen’s private dealings largely had to do with discreet clients thirstily residing below the state line. It was common rumor in certain quarters that lately this traffic had suffered a most disastrous interruption. Tennessee revenue agents suddenly had evinced an unfriendly curiosity touching on vehicular movements from the Kentucky side.

A considerable chunk of Mr. Rosen’s profits for the current year had been irretrievably swallowed up when a squad of these suspicious excisemen laid their detaining hands upon a sizable order of case stuff which – disguised and broadly labeled as crated household goods – was traveling southward by nightfall in a truck, heading toward a destination in a district which that truck was destined never to reach.

Bottle by bottle the aromatic contents of the packages had been poured into the wayside ditch to be sucked up by an unappreciative if porous soil. The truck itself had been confiscated. Its driver barely had escaped, to return homeward afoot across country bearing dire tidings to his employer, who was reported, upon hearing the lamentable news, literally to have scrambled the air with disconsolate flappings of his hands, meanwhile uttering shrill cries of grief.

Moreover, as though to top this stroke of ill luck, further activities in the direction of his most profitable market practically had been brought to a standstill by reason of enhanced vigilance on the part of the Tennessee authorities along the main highroads running north and south. Between supply and demand, or perhaps one should say between purveyor and consumer, the boundary mark dividing the sister commonwealths stretched its dead line like a narrow river of despair. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the sorely pestered Mr. Rosen should be at this time a prey to care so carking as to border on forthright melancholia. Never a particularly cheerful person, at Red Hoss’ soft knock upon his outer door he raised a countenance completely clothed in moroseness where not clothed in whiskers and grunted briefly – a sound which might or might not be taken as an invitation to enter. Nor was his greeting, following upon the caller’s soft-footed entrance, calculated to promote cordial intercourse.

“What you want, nigger?” he demanded, breaking in on Red Hoss’ politely phrased greeting. Then without waiting for a reply, “Well, whatever it is, you don’t get it. Get out!”

Nevertheless, Red Hoss came right on in. Carefully he closed the door behind him, shutting himself in with Mr. Rosen and privacy and a symposium of strong, rich smells.

“’Scuse me, Mist’ Rosen,” he said, “fur bre’kin’ in on you lak dis, but I got a little sumpin’ to say to you in mos’ strictes’ confidence. Seems lak to me I heard tell lately dat you’d had a little trouble wid some white folkses down de line. Co’se dat ain’t none o’ my business. I jes’ mentioned it so’s you’d understan’ whut it is I wants to talk wid you about.”

He drew up an elbow length away from Mr. Rosen and sank his voice to an intimate half whisper.

“Mist’ Rosen, le’s you an’ me do a little s’posin’. Le’s s’posen’ you has a bar’l of vinegar or molasses or sumpin’ which you wants delivered to a frien’ in Memphis, Tennessee. Seems lak I has heared somewhars dat you already is got a frien’ or two in Memphis, Tennessee? All right den! S’posin’, den, dat you wrote to your frien’ dat dis yere bar’l would be comin’ along to him inside of a week or ten days f’um now wid me in de full charge of it. S’posin’, den, on top o’ dat I could guarantee you to deliver dat bar’l to your frien’ widout nobody botherin’ dat bar’l on de way, and widout nobody ’spectin’ whut wuz in dat bar’l, an’ widout nobody axin’ no hard questions about dat bar’l. S’posin’ all dem things, ef you please, suh, an’ den I axes you dis question: How much would dat favor be wuth to you in cash money?”

As a careful business man, Mr. Rosen very properly pressed for further particulars before in any way committing himself in the matter of the amount of remuneration to be paid for the accommodation proposed. At this evidence of interest on the other’s part Red Hoss grinned in happy optimism.

“Mist’ Rosen, ’twon’t hardly be no trouble a-tall,” he stated. “In de fust place, you teks a pot o’ blue paint an’ you paints dat bar’l blue f’um head to foot. De bluer dat bar’l is de more safer she’ll be. An’ to mek sure dat de color will be right yere’s a sample fur you to go by.”

With that, Red Hoss produced from a hip pocket a sliver of plank painted on both sides in the cerulean hue universally favored by circus folk for covering seat boards, tent poles and such paraphernalia of a portable caravansary as is subject to rough treatment and frequent handling. At this the shock of surprise was such as almost to lift Mr. Rosen up on top of the cluttered desk which separated him from his visitor. It did lift him halfway out of his chair.

“Nigger,” he declared incredulously, “you talk foolishness! A mile away those dam Tennessee constables would be able to see a plain barrel which ain’t got no paint on it at all, and now you tell me I should paint a barrel so blue as the sky, and yet it should get through from here to Memphis. Are you crazy in the head or something, or do you maybe think I am?”

“Nummine dat,” went on Red Hoss. “You do lak I tells you, an’ you paints de bar’l right away so de paint’ll git good an’ dry ’twixt now an’ We’n’sday night. Come We’n’sday night, you loads dat blue bar’l in a waggin an’ covers it up an’ you fetches it to me at de back do’ of de main wild animal tent of dat carnival show which is now gwine on up yere in Mechanicsville. Don’t go to de tent whar de elephints is. Go to de tent whar de educated ostrich is. Dar you’ll fin’ me. I done tuk a job as de fust chief ’sistant wild-animal trainer, an’ right dar I’ll be waitin’. So den you turns de bar’l over to me an’ you goes on back home an’ you furgits all ’bout it. Den in ’bout two weeks mo’ when I gits back yere I brings you a piece o’ writin’ f’um de gen’elman in Memphis sayin’ dat de bar’l has been delivered to him in good awder, an’ den you pays me de rest o’ de money dat’s comin’ to me.” He had a canny second thought. “Mebbe,” he added, “mebbe it would be better for all concern’ ef you wrote to yore frien’ in Memphis to hand me over de rest of de money when I delivers de bar’l. Yassuh, I reckins dat would be de best.”

“The rest of what money?” demanded Mr. Rosen sharply. “I ain’t said nothing about giving no money to nobody. What do you mean – money?”

“I mean de rest of de money which’ll be comin’ to me ez my share,” explained Red Hoss patiently. “De white man dat’s goin’ to he’p me wid dis yere job, he ’sists p’intedly dat he must have his share paid down cash in advance ’count of him not bein’ able to come back yere an’ collek it fur hisse’f, an’ likewise ’count of him not keerin’ to have no truck wid de gen’elman at de other end of de line. De way he put it, he wants all of his’n ’fore he starts. But me, Ise willin’ to wait fur de bes’ part of mine anyhow. So dat’s how it stands, Mist’ Rosen, an’ ’scusin’ you an’ me an’ dis yere white man an’ your frien’ in Memphis, dey ain’t nary pusson gwine know nothin’ ’bout it a-tall, ’ceptin’ mebbe hit’s de lion. An’ ez fur dat, w’y de lion don’t count noways, ’count of him not talkin’ no language ’ceptin’ ’tis his own language.”

“The lion?” echoed Mr. Rosen blankly. “What lion? First you tell me blue barrel and then you tell me lion.”

“I means Chieftain – de larges’ black-mangy Nubbin lion in captivation,” stated Red Hoss grandly, quoting from memory his own recollection of an inscription he but lately had read for the first time. “Mist’ Rosen, ’twixt you an’ me, I reckins dey ain’t no revenue officer in de whole state of Tennessee which is gwine go projeckin’ round a lion cage lookin’ fur evidence.”

Disclosing the crux of his plot, his voice took on a jubilant tone. “Mist’ Rosen, please, suh, lissen to me whut Ise revealin’ to you. Dat blue bar’l of yourn is gwine ride f’um yere plum’ to Memphis, Tennessee, in a cage wid a lion ez big ez ary two lions got ary right to be! An’ now den, Mist’ Rosen, le’s you an’ me talk ’bout de money part of it; ’cause when all is said an’ done, dat’s de principalest part, ain’t it?”

•     •     •     •     •

The town of Wyattsville was, as the saying goes, all agog. Indeed, as the editor of the Wyattsville Tri-Weekly Statesman most aptly phrased it in the introductory sentence of a first-page, full-column article in his latest issue: “This week all roads run to Wyattsville.”

The occasion for all this pleasurable excitement wast the annual fair and races of the Forked Deer County Jockey Club, and superimposed upon that the street carnival conducted under the patronage and for the benefit of Wyattsville Herd Number 1002 of the Beneficent and Patriotic Order of American Bison. Each day would be a gala day replete with thrills and abounding in incident; in the forenoons grand free exhibitions upon the streets, also judgings and awards of prizes in various classes, such as farm products, livestock, poultry, needlework, pickles, preserves and art objects; in the afternoons, on the half-mile track out at the fair grounds, trotting, pacing and running events; in the evenings the carnival spirit running high and free, with opportunities for innocent mirth, merriment and entertainment afforded upon every hand.

This was Monday night, the opening night. The initial performance of the three on the nightly schedule of Powers Brothers’ Trained Wild Animal Arena approached now its climax, the hour approximately being eight-forty-five. The ballyhoo upon the elevated platform without had been completed. Hard upon this an audience of townspeople and visitors which taxed the standing capacity of the tented enterprise had flowed in, after first complying with the necessary financial details at the ticket booth. The Educated Ostrich, the Bird That Thinks, had performed to the apparent satisfaction of all, though it might as well be confessed that if one might judge by the intelligent creature’s expression, the things it thought while going through its paces scarcely would be printable. Violet, the lady leopard, had obliged by yowling in a spirited and spitty manner when stirred up with a broom handle. The two bears had given a complete if somewhat lackadaisical rendition of their act. And now the gentlemanly orator in charge, who, after his ballyhoos, doubled as master of ceremonies and announcer of events, directed the attention of the patrons to the largest cage of the four.

As was customary, the culminating feature of the program had been invested with several touches of skillful stage management, the purpose being to enhance the thrills provided and send the audience forth pleased and enthusiastic. In high boots and a tiger-skin tunic, Mr. Riley, armed with an iron bar held in one hand and a revolver loaded with blank cartridges in the other, stood poised and prepared to leap into the den at the ostensible peril of his life and put his ferocious charge through a repertoire of startling feats. His eye was set, his face determined; his lower jaw moved slowly. This steel-hearted man was chewing tobacco to hide any concern he might feel.

Red Hoss Shackleford, resplendent in his official trappings, made an elaborate ceremonial of undoing the pins and bolts which upheld the wooden panels across the front elevation of the cage. The announcer took advantage of the pause thus artfully contrived to urge upon the spectators the advisability of standing well back from the guard ropes. Every precaution had been taken, he informed them, every possible safeguard provided, but for their own sakes it were well to be on the prudent side in case the dauntless trainer should lose control over his dangerous pupil. This warning had its usual effect. With a forward rush everyone instantly pressed as closely as possible into the zone of supposed menace.

Here a curious psychological fact obtrudes. In each gathering of this character is at least one parent, generally a father, who habitually conveys his offsprings of tender years to places where they will be acutely uncomfortable, and by preference more especially to spots where there is a strong likelihood that they may meet with a sudden and violent end. Wyattsville numbered at least one such citizen within her enrolled midst. He was here now, jammed up against the creaking rope, holding fast with either clutch to a small and a sorely frightened child who wept.

Red Hoss finished with the iron catches. Behind the shielding falsework he heard and felt the rustle and the heave of a great sinewy body threshing about in a confined space. He turned his head toward the announcer, awaiting the ordained signal.

“Are you all ready?” clarioned that person. “Then go!”

With a clatter and crash down came the wooden frontage. It was a part of the mechanics intrusted to the docile and intelligent Chieftain that so soon as the woodwork had dropped he, counterfeiting an unappeasable bloodthirstiness, should fling himself headlong against the straining bars, uttering hair-raising roars. This also was the cue for Riley to wriggle nimbly through a door set in the end of the cage and slam the door behind him; then to outface the great beast and by threats, with bar and pistol both extended, to force him backward step by step, still snarling but seemingly daunted, round and round the cage. Finally, when through the demonstrated power of the human eye Chieftain had been sufficiently cowed, Riley would begin the stirring entertainment for which all this had been a spectacular overture. Such was the preliminary formula, but for once in his hitherto blameless life Chieftain failed to sustain his rôle.

He did not dash at his prison bars as though to rend them from their sockets; he did not growl in an amazingly deep bass, as per inculcated schooling; he did not bare the yellow fang nor yet unsheathe the cruel claw. With apparent difficulty, rising on his all fours from where he was crouched in the rear left-hand corner of his den, Chieftain advanced down stage with what might properly be called a rolling gait. Against the iron uprights he lurched, literally; then, as though grateful for their support, remained fixed there at a slanted angle for a brief space.

A faunal naturalist, versed in the ways of lions, would promptly have taken cognizance of the fact that Chieftain, upon his face, wore an expression unnatural for lions to wear. It was an expression which might be classified as dreamily good-natured. His eyes drooped heavily, his lips were wreathed in a jovial feline smile. Transfixed as he was by a shock of astonishment and chagrin, Riley under his breath snapped a word of command.

In subconscious obedience to his master’s voice, Chieftain slowly straightened himself, came to an about face, and with his massive head canted far to one side and all a-droop as though its weight had become to him suddenly burdensome, and his legs spraddled widely apart to hold him upright, he benignantly contemplated the sea of expectant and eager faces that stretched before him. Slowly he lifted a broad forefoot and with its padded undersurface made a fumbling gesture which might have been interpreted as an attempt on his part to wipe his nose.

The effort proved too much for him. Lacking one important prop, he lost his balance, toppled over and fell heavily upon his side. The fall jolted his mouth widely ajar, and from the depths of his great throat was emitted an immense but unmistakable hiccup – a hiccup deep, sincere and sustained, having a high muzzle velocity and humidly freighted with an aroma as of a hundred hot mince pies.

From the spellbound crowd rose a concerted gasp of surprise. Chieftain heeded it not. With the indubitable air of just recalling a pleasant but novel experience, and filled with a newborn desire to renew the sensation, he groggily regained his feet and reeled back to the corner from whence he had come. Here, with the other properties of his act, a slickly painted blue barrel stood upended. Applying his nose to a spot at the base of it, he lapped greedily at a darkish aromatic liquid which, as the entranced watchers now were aware, oozed forth in a stream upon the cage floor through a cranny treacherously opened between two sprung staves. And all the while he tongued up the escaping runlet of fluid he purred and rumbled joyously and his tawny sides heaved and little tremors of pure ecstasy ran lengthwise through him to expire diminishingly in lesser wriggles at the tufted tip of his gently flapping tail.

Then all at once understanding descended upon the audience, and from them together rose a tremendous whoop. A joyous whoop it was, yet tinged with a feather edging of jealous regret on the part of certain adult whoopers there. They had paid their quarters, these worthy folk, to see a lion perform certain tricks and antics; and lo, they had been vouchsafed the infinitely more unique spectacle of a lion with a jag on! It was a boon such as comes but once in many lifetimes, this opportunity to behold majestic Leo, converted into a confirmed inebriate by his first indulgence in strong and forbidden waters, returning to his tippling.

To some perhaps in this land of ours the scene would have served to point a moral and provide a text – a lamentable picture of the evils of intemperance as exemplified in its effects upon a mere unreasoning dumb brute. But in this assemblage were few or none holding the higher view. Unthoughtedly they yelled their appreciation, yelling all the louder when Chieftain, having copiously refreshed himself, upreared upon his hind legs, with both his forepaws winnowing the perfumed air, and after executing several steps of a patently impromptu dance movement, tumbled with a happy, intoxicated gurgle flat upon his back and lapsed into a coma of total insensibility.

But there was one among them who did not cheer. This one was a square-jawed person who, shoving and scrooging, cleft a passage through the applauding multitude, and slipped deftly under the ropes and laid a detaining grasp upon the peltry-clad shoulder of the astonished Riley. With his free hand he flipped back the lapel of his coat to display a badge of authority pinned on the breast of his waistcoat.

“What’s the main idea?” His tone was rough. “Who’s the chief booze smuggler of this outfit? How’d that barrel yonder come to be traveling across country with a soused lion?”

“You can search me!” lied Riley glibly. “So help me, Mike, all I know is that that barrel was slipped over on me by a big nigger that joined out with us up here in Kentucky a week ago! I told him to get me a barrel, meaning to teach the lion a new trick, and he stuck that one in there. But I hadn’t never got round to using it yet, and I didn’t know it was loaded – I’ll swear to that!”

Cast in another environment, Mr. Riley might have made a good actor. Even here, in an embarrassing situation calling for lines spoken ad lib. and without prior rehearsals, he had what the critics term sincerity. His fine dissembling deceived the revenue man.

“Well, that being the case, where is this here nigger, then?” demanded the officer.

Riley looked about him.

“I don’t see him,” he said. “He was right alongside just a moment ago too. I guess he’s gone.”

This, in a sense, was the truth, and in still another sense an exaggeration. Red Hoss was not exactly gone, but he certainly was going. A man on horseback might have overtaken him, but with the handicap of Red Hoss’ flying start against the pursuing forces no number of men afoot possibly could hope to do so.

At the end of the second mile, and still going strong, the fugitive bethought him to part with his red coat. He already had run out from under his uniform cap, but a red coat with a double row of brass buttons and brass-topped epaulettes on it flashing next morning across a bland autumnal landscape would be calculated to attract undesired attention. So without slackening speed he took it off and cast it behind him into the darkness. Figuratively speaking, he breathed easier when he crossed the state line at or about five A.M. As a matter of fact, though, he was breathing harder. Some hours elapsed before he caught up with his panting.

Traveling in his shirt sleeves, he reached home too late for the wedding. Still, considering everything, he hardly would have cared to attend anyhow. Either he would have felt embarrassed to be present or else the couple would, or perhaps all three. On such occasions nothing is more superfluous than an extra bridegroom. The wedding in question was the one uniting Melissa Grider and Homer Holmes. It was generally unexpected – in fact, sudden.

The marriage took place on a Wednesday at high noon in the office of Justice of the Peace Dycus. Red Hoss arrived the same afternoon, shortly after the departure of the happy pair for Cairo, Illinois, on a honeymoon tour. All along, Melissa had had her heart set on going to St. Louis; but after the license had been paid for and the magistrate had been remunerated there remained but thirty-four dollars of the fund she had been safeguarding, dollar by dollar, as her other, or regular, fiancé earned it. So she and Homer compromised on Cairo, and by their forethought in taking advantage of a popular excursion rate they had, on their return, enough cash left over to buy a hanging lamp with which to start up housekeeping.

Late that evening, while Red Hoss still wrestled mentally with the confusing problem of being engaged to a girl who just had been married to another, a disquieting thought came abruptly to him, jolting him like a blow. Looking back on events, he was reminded that the sequence of painful misadventures which had befallen him recently dated, all and sundry, from that time when he was coming back down the Blandsville Road after delivering Mr. Dick Bell’s new cow and acquired a fresh hind foot of a graveyard rabbit. He had been religiously toting that presumably infallible charm against disaster ever since – and yet just see what had happened to him! Surely here was a situation calling for interpretive treatment by one having the higher authority. In the person of the venerable Daddy Hannah – root, herb and conjure doctor – he found such a one.

Before going into consultation the patriarch forethoughtedly collected a fee of seventy-five cents from Red Hoss. At the outset he demanded two dollars, but accepted the six bits, because that happened to be all the money the client had. This formality concluded, he required it of Red Hoss that he recount in their proper chronological order those various strokes of ill fortune which lately had plagued him; after which Daddy Hannah asked to see the talisman which coincidentally had been in the victim’s ownership from beginning to culmination of the enumerated catastrophes. He took it in his wrinkled hand and studied it, sides, top and bottom, the while Red Hoss detailed the exact circumstances attending the death of the bunny. Then slowly the ancient delivered his findings.

“In de fust an’ fo’mos’ place,” stated Daddy Hannah, “dis yere warn’t no reg’lar graveyard rabbit to start off wid. See dis li’l’ teeny black spot on de und’neath part? Well, dat’s a sho’ sign of a witch rabbit. A witch rabbit he hang round a buryin’ ground, but he don’t go inside of one – naw, suh, not never nur nary. He ain’t dare to. He stay outside an’ frolic wid de ha’nts w’en dey comes fo’th, but da’s all. De onliest thing which dey is to do when you kills a witch rabbit is to cut off de haid f’um de body an’ bury de haid on de north side of a log, an’ den bury de body on de south side so’s dey can’t jine together ag’in an’ resume witchin’. So you havin’ failed to do so, ’tain’t no wonder you been havin’ sech a powerful sorry time.” He started to return the foot to its owner, but snatched it back.

“Hole on yere a minute, boy! Lemme tek’ nuther look at dat thing.” He took it, then burst forth with a volley of derisive chuckling. “Huh, huh, well ef dat ain’t de beatenes’ part of it all!” wheezed Daddy Hannah. “Red Hoss, you sho’ muster been in one big hurry to git away f’um dat spot whar you kilt your rabbit and ketched your charm. Looky yere at dis yere shank j’int! Don’t you see nothin’ curious about de side of de leg whar de hock sticks out? Well den, cullid boy, ef you don’t, all I got to say is you mus’ be total blind ez well ez monst’ous ignunt. Dis ain’t no lef’ hind foot of no rabbit.”

“Whut is it den?”

“It’s de right hind foot, dat’s whut ’tis!” He tossed it away contemptuously.

After a long minute Red Hoss, standing at Daddy Hannah’s doorstep with his hands rammed deep in pockets, which were both empty, spoke in tones of profound bitterness. He addressed his remarks to space, but Daddy Hannah couldn’t help overhearing.

“Fust off, I gits fooled by de right laig of de wrong rabbit. Den a man-eatin’ mule come a-browsin’ on me an’ gnaw a suit of close right offen my back. Den I runs into a elephint in a fog an’ busts one of Mist’ Lee Farrell’s taxiscabs fur him an’ he busts my jaw fur me. Den I gits tuk advantage of by a fool lion dat can’t chamber his licker lak a gen’l’man, in consequence of which I loses me a fancy job an’ a chunk of money. Den Melissa, she up an’ – well, suh, I merely wishes to say dat f’um now on, so fur ez I is concerned, natchel history is a utter failure.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 09 Oct 1920
Sundry Accounts (1922)

The Ravelin’ Wolf

~

When the draft came to our town, as it came to all towns, it enmeshed Jeff Poindexter, who to look at him might be any age between twenty-one and forty-one. Jeff had a complexion admirably adapted for hiding the wear and tear of carking years and as for those telltale wrinkles which betray care he had none, seeing that care rarely abode with him for longer than twenty-four hours on a stretch. Did worry knock at the front door Jeff had a way of excusing himself out of the back window. But this dread thing they called a draft was a worry which just opened the door and walked right in – and outside the window stood a jealous Government, all organized to start a rookus if anybody so much as stepped sideways.

Jeff had no ambition to engage in the jar and crash of actual combat; neither did the idea of serving in a labor battalion overseas appeal to one of his habits. The uniform had its lure, to be sure, but the responsibilities presaged by the putting on of the uniform beguiled him not a whipstitch. Anyhow, his ways were the ways of peace. As a diplomat he had indubitable gifts; as a warrior he felt that he would be out of his proper element. So when answering a summons which was not to be disregarded Jeff appeared before the draft board he was not noticeably happy.

“Unmarried, eh?” inquired his chief inquisitor.

“Yas, suh – I means, naw, suh,” stated Jeff. “I ain’t never been much of a hand fur marryin’ round.”

He forced an ingratiating smile. The smile fell as seed on barren soil – fell and died there.

“Mother and father? Either one or both of them living?”

Never had Jeff looked more the orphan than as he stood there confessing himself one. He fumbled his hat in his hands.

“No dependents at all then, I take it?”

“Yas, suh, dey shorely is,” answered Jeff smartly, hope rekindling within him.

“Well, who is it that you help support – if it’s anybody?”

“Hit’s Jedge Priest – tha’s who. Jedge, he jes’ natchelly couldn’t git ’long noways ’thout me lookin’ after him, suh. The older he git the more it seem lak he leans heavy on me.”

“Well, Judge Priest may have to lean on himself for a while. Uncle Sam needs every able-bodied man he can get these times and you look to be as strong as a mule. Here, take this card and go on through that door yonder to the second room down the hall and let Doctor Dismukes look you over.”

Jeff cheered up slightly. He knew Doctor Dismukes – knew him mighty well. In Doctor Dismukes’ hands he would be in the hands of a friend. Beyond question the doctor would understand the situation as this strange and most unsympathetic white man undoubtedly did not.

But Doctor Dismukes, all snap and smartness, went over him as though he had never seen him before in all his life. If Jeff had been a horse for sale and the doctor a professional horse coper, scarcely could the examination have been carried forward with a more businesslike dispatch.

“Jeff,” said the doctor when he had finished and the other was rearranging his wardrobe, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being so healthy. Take your teeth now – your teeth are splendid. I only wish I had a set like ’em.”

“Is dey?” said Jeff despondently, for the first time in his life regretting his unblemished ivory.

“They certainly are. You wouldn’t need a gun, not with those teeth you wouldn’t – you could just naturally bite a German in two.”

Jeff shivered. The very suggestion was abhorrent to his nature.

“Please suh, don’t – don’t talk lak that,” he entreated. “I ain’t cravin’ to bite nobody a-tall, ’specially ’tis Germans. Live an’ let live – tha’s my sayin’.”

“Yep,” went on the doctor, prolonging the agony for the victim, “your teeth are perfect and your lungs are sound, your heart action is splendid and I know something about your appetite myself, having seen you eat. Black boy, listen to me! In every respect you are absolutely qualified physically to make a regular man-eating bearcat of a soldier” – he paused – “in every respect excepting one – no, two.”

If a drowning man clutching for a straw might be imagined as coincidentally asking a question, it is highly probable he would ask it in the tone now used by Jeff.

“Meanin’ – meanin’ w’ich, suh?”

“I mean your feet. You’ve got flat feet, Jeff – you’ve got the flattest feet I ever saw. I don’t understand it either. So far as I’ve been able to observe you’ve spent the greater part of your life sitting down. Somebody must have hit you on the head with an ax when you were standing on a plowshare and broke your arches down.”

It was an old joke, but it fitted the present case, and Jeff, not to be outdone in politeness, laughed louder at it than its maker did. Indeed Jeff felt he had reason to laugh; a great load was lifting from his soul.

“Jeff,” went on the doctor, “deeply though it may grieve both of us, it nevertheless is my painful duty to inform you that you have two perfectly good exemptions from military service – a right one and a left one. Now grab your hat and get out of here.”

“Boss,” cried Jeff, “Ise gone. Exemptions, tek me away frum yere!”

So while many others went away to fight or to learn how to fight, as the case might be, Jeff stayed behind and did his bit by remaining steadfastly cheerful. Never before, sartorially speaking, had he cut so splendid a figure as now when such numbers of young white gentlemen of his acquaintance were putting aside civilian garb to put on khaki. Jeff had one of those adaptable figures. The garments to which he fell heir might never have fitted their original owner, but always they would fit Jeff. Gorgeous in slightly worn but carefully refurbished raiment, he figured in the wartime activities of the colored population and in ostensibly helpful capacities figured in some of the activities of the white folks too.

Going among his own set his frequent companion was that straw-colored light of his social hours, Ophelia Stubblefield. It helped to reconcile Jeff to the rigors of the period of enforced rationing as he reflected that the same issues and causes which made lump sugar a rarity and fat meat a scarcity had rid him of his more dangerous competition in the quarter where his affections centered. Particularly on one account did he feel reconciled. A spirit of the most soothful resignation filled him when he gave thought to the moral certainty that the most formidable and fearsome of his rivals, that bloody-minded bravo, Smooth Crumbaugh, would daunt him never again with threats of articular dismemberment with a new-honed razor. For Smooth Crumbaugh was gone and gone for good. First the draft had carried him away and then the pneumonia had carried him off. War had its compensations after all.

Wearing Ophelia upon one arm and wearing in the crook of the other a high hat which once had been the property of a young man now bossing an infantry battalion in the muddiest part of France, Jeff appeared prominently in the Armistice celebration at the First Ward Colored Baptist Church. Still so accoutered – Ophelia on his one hand and the high hat held in proper salute against his breast – he served upon the official reception committee headed by the Rev. Potiphar Grasty and by Prof. Rutherford B. H. Champers, principal of the Colored High School, which greeted the first returning squad of service men of color.

Home-comers who had been clear across the ocean brought back with them almost unbelievable but none the less fascinating accounts of life and customs in foreign parts. The tales these traveled ones had to tell were eagerly listened to and as eagerly passed along, dowered at each time of retelling with prodigal enlargements and amplifications the most generous.

A ferment of discontent began to stir under the surface of things; a sort of inarticulate rebellion against existing conditions, which presently manifested itself in small irritations at various points of contact with the white race. It was nothing tangible as yet, nothing upon which one might put a hand or cap with a word of comprehensive description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older states lying below Mason and Dixon’s Line. For in each such community there are two separate and distinct worlds – a black one and a white one – interrelated by necessities of civic coordination and in an economic sense measurably dependent one upon the other, and yet in many other aspects as far apart as the North Pole is from the South.

Regarding what the white world is feeling and thinking and saying, the lesser black world that is set down within it is nearly always better informed than is the other and larger group touching on new movements and growing sentiments amongst the darker-skinned factors. Into the white man’s house, serving in this or that domestic capacity, goes the negro as an observant witness to the moods and emotions of his or her employer and bringing away an understanding of the family complexities and the current trend of opinion as it shapes itself beneath that roof.

But the white man, generally speaking, views the negro’s private life only from the outside, and if he be a Southern-born white man, wise in his generation, seeks to look no further, for surface garrulity and surface exuberance do not deceive him, but serve only to make him realize all the more clearly that he is dealing with members of what at heart is one of the most secretive and sensitive of all the breeds of men. But since this started out to be the chronicle of an episode largely relating to Jeff Poindexter and one other and not a psychological study of actions and reactions as between the two most numerous races in this republic, it is perhaps as well that we should get on with our narrative.

If the leaven of unrest, vague and formless as it was at the outset, properly might be said to date from the time of the return of divers black veterans, it took on shape and substance after the advent of one Dr. J. Talbott Duvall, an individual engaging in manner, and in language, dress and deportment fascinating beyond degree; likewise an organizer by profession and a charmer of the opposite sex by reason of qualifications both natural and acquired.

A doctor he was, as witness the handle to his name, and yet a doctor of any known variety he was not. Confessedly he was no doctor of medicine, though his speech dripped gorgeous ear-filling Latin words which sounded as though they might be the names of difficult and sinister diseases; nor was he doctor of divinity, though speedily he proved himself to be at home in pulpits. He was not a horse doctor or a corn doctor or a conjure doctor or a root-and-herb doctor or a healer by faith or the laying on of hands. His title, it seemed, was his by virtue of a degree conferred upon him by a college – a white man’s college – somewhere in the North. His accent was that of a traveled cosmopolite superimposed upon the speech of a place away off somewhere called the West Indies. He had money and he spent it; he had a wardrobe of distinction and he wore it; he had a gift for argumentation and he exercised it; he had a way with the ladies and he used it. His coming had created a social furor; his subsequent ministrations amounted to what for lack of a better word is commonly called a sensation.

If there were those who from motives, let us say, of envy looked with the jaundiced eye of disfavor upon his mounting popularity and his constantly widening scope of influence they mainly kept their own counsel or at least refrained from voicing their private prejudices in public places. One gets fewer bumps traveling with the crowd than against it.

Even so bold a spirit and customarily so outspoken a speaker as Aunt Dilsey Turner, Judge Priest’s black cook of many years’ incumbency, saw fit somewhat to dissemble on the occasion of a call paid by Sister Eldora Menifee, who came dressed to kill and inspired by the zeal of the new convert to win yet other converts. Entering by way of the alley gate one fine forenoon, Sister Eldora found Aunt Dilsey sitting in the kitchen doorway hulling out a mess of late green peas newly picked from the house garden.

“Sist’ Turner,” began the visitor, “I hopes I ain’t disturbin’ you by runnin’ in on you this mawnin’.”

“Honey,” said Aunt Dilsey, “you’re jes’ ez welcome ez day is frum night. Lemme fetch you a cheer out yere on the gallery.” And she made as if to heave her vast comfortable bulk upright.

“No’m, set right where you is,” begged Sister Menifee. “I ain’t got only jes’ a few minutes to stay. Things is mighty pressin’ with me. I got quite a number of my lady frien’s to see today an’ you happens to be the fust one on de list.”

“Is tha’ so?” inquired Aunt Dilsey. Her tone was cordiality itself, but one less carried away by the enthusiasm of the mission which had brought her than Sister Eldora Menifee was might have caught a latent gleam of hostility in the elder woman’s eye. “Well, go on, Ise lis’enin’.”

“Well, Sist’ Turner, ef you’s heared ’bout de work I been doin’ lately I reckin mebbe you kin guess whut brung me to yore do’. I is solicitin’ you fur yore fellership ez a reg’lar member of de ladies’ auxiliary of de new s’ciety w’ich Doct’ J. Talbott Duvall is got up.”

“Meanin’ perzactly w’ich s’ciety? Dis yere Doct’ Duvall ’pears to be so busy gittin’ up fust one thing an’ then ’nother seems lak I ain’t been able to keep track of his doin’s, ’count of my bein’ so slow gittin’ round on my feet by reason of de rheumatism.”

“Meanin’ de Shinin’ Star Cullid Uplift and Progress League – dat’s de principalest activity in w’ich he’s now engaged. De dues is one dollar down on ’nitiation an’ twenty cents a week an’—”

“Wait jes’ one minute, Sist’ Menifee, ef you please. ’Fore we gits any furder ’long answer me dis one question Ise fixin’ to ast you – do dis yere new lodge perpose to fune’lize de daid?”

“We ain’t tuck up dat point yit; doubtless we’ll come to de plans fur dat part later. Fur de time bein’ de work is jes’ to form de ladies’ auxiliary an’ git de main objec’s set fo’th.”

“Lis’en, chile. Me, I don’t aim never so long as I lives an’ keeps my reason to jine no lodge w’ich don’t start out fust thing by fune’lizin’ de daid. Ise thinkin’ now of de case of dat pore shif’less Sist’ Clarabelle Hardin dat used to live out yere on Plunkett’s Hill. She up an’ jined one of dese newfandangle’ lodges w’ich didn’t have nothin’ to it but a fancy name an’ a fancy strange nigger man runnin’ it, an’ right on top of dat she up an’ died ’thout a cent to her back. An’ you know whut happen den? Well, I’m gwine tell you. Dat pore chile laid round de house daid fur gwine on three days an’ den she jes’ natchelly had to git out to de cemetery de bes’ way she could. Not fur me, honey, not fur me. Dey got to have de money in de bank waitin’ an’ ready to bury de fus’ member dat passes frum dis life before dey gits a cent of mine.”

“But dis yere lodge is gwine have a more ’portant puppose ’en jes’ to fune’lize de daid,” protested Sister Eldora. “We aims to do somethin’ fur de livin’ whilst yet dey’s still alive. Curious you ain’t tuck notice of de signs of de times ez dey’s been expounded ’mongst de people by Doct’ Duvall. He sho’ kin ’splain things in a way to mek you a true believer.” The advocate of the new order of things sank her voice to a discreet half whisper. “Sist’ Turner, we aims at gittin’ mo’ of de rights dat’s due us. We aims to see dat de pore an’ de lowly an’ de downtrodden-on is purtected in dey rights. We aims—”

“Num’mine whut you aims at – de question is, is you gwine be able hit whar you aims? An’ lemme tell you somethin’ more, Sist’ Eldora Menifee. I ain’t needin’ no ladies’ auxiliary to tell me whut my rights is. Neither I ain’t needin’ to pay out no twenty cents a week to find out neither. W’en it comes to dat, all de ladies’ auxiliary w’ich I needs is jes’ me, myse’f. I knows good an’ well whut my rights is already an’ Ise gwine have ’em, too, or somebody’ll sho’ git busted plum’ wide open. Mind you, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ ’ginst dis new man nur ’ginst dem w’ich chooses to follow ’long after his teachin’s. Ise jes’ sayin’ dat so fur ez my jinin’ in wid dis yere lodge is concern’ you’s wastin’ yore breath. Better pass along, honey, to de nex’ one on dat list of your’n, ’thout you’s a mind to stay yere an’ watch me dish up Jedge Priest’s vittles fur ’im.”

“Mebbe if Doct’ Duvall wuz to come hisse’f an’ mek manifest to you de high pupposes—” began Sister Eldora. But Aunt Dilsey cut her off short.

“Wouldn’t mek no diffe’nce ef he come eighty times a day an’ twice ez offen on Sunday. Anyway, I reckins my day fur jinin’ things is done over.”

There was a dead weight of finality in her words. She rose heavily. As Sister Menifee departed Aunt Dilsey became aware of the presence of Jeff Poindexter. He was emerging from behind the door.

“Been hidin’ inside dat kitchen lis’enin’, I s’pose?” demanded Aunt Dilsey.

“Couldn’t help frum hearin’,” admitted Jeff. It was evident that he was not deeply grieved over the failure of Sister Menifee to make headway against Aunt Dilsey’s opposition. “At the last you suttinly give dat woman her marchin’ orders, didn’t you, Aunt Dilsey?”

“An’ sech wuz my intention frum de start off,” she confided. “Minute she come th’ough dat back gate yonder I knowed whut she wuz comin’ fur an’ I wuz set an’ ready wid de words waitin’ on de tip of my tongue.”

“Me, I don’t fancy dat Duvall neither,” stated Jeff. “I ain’t been sayin’ much ’bout him one way or ’nother but I been doin’ a heap o’ steddyin’.”

“Yas, I knows all ’bout dat too,” snapped Aunt Dilsey. “I got eyes in my haid. You los’ yore taste fur dis yere big-talkin’, fine-lookin’ man jes ez soon ez he started sparkin’ round dat tore-down limb of a ’Phelia Stubblefield. Whut ails you is you is jealous; hadn’t been fur dat I lay you’d be runnin’ round wid yore tongue hangin’ out suckin’ in ever’thing he sez ez de gospil truth same ez a lot of dese other weak-minded ones is doin’. Oh, I know you, boy, frum ze ground up! An’ furthermo’ I knows dis Doct’ Duvall likewise also, even ef I ain’t never seen him but oncet or twicet sence fust he come yere to dis town all dress’ up lak a persidin’ elder. I don’t lak his looks an’ I don’t lak his ways, jedgin’ by whut I hears of ’em frum dis one an’ dat one, an’ most in special I don’t lak his color. He ain’t clear brown lak whut I is, an’ he ain’t muddy black lak whut you is, neither he ain’t high yaller lak some is. To me he looks most of all lak de ground side of a nickel wahtermelon. An’ in all de goin’ on sixty-two yeahs of my life I ain’t never seen no pusson callin’ theyselves Affikins dat had dat kind of a sickly greenish-yaller-whitish complexion but whut trouble come pourin’ frum ’em sooner or later, an’ most gin’rally sooner, lak manna pourin’ from de gourd of de Prophet Jonah. Dat man is a ravelin’ wolf, ef ever I seen one.”

“Whut kind of a wolf did you say, Aunt Dilsey?” asked Jeff.

“Consult de Scriptures an’ you won’t be so ignunt,” she answered crushingly. “Consult de Scriptures an’ you’ll read whar de ravelin’ wolf come down on de fold, an’ whut he done to de fold after he’d done come down on it wuz more’n aplenty. An’ now, boy, you git on out of my kitchen an’ go on ’bout yore business – ef you’s got any business, w’ich I doubts. I ain’t got no mo’ time to waste on you den whut I is on dat flighty-haided Eldora Menifee, a-traipsin’ round frum one back do’ to ’nother with her talk ’bout ladies’ auxiliaries an’ gittin’ yo rights fur a dollah down an’ twenty cents a week.”

Jeff faded away. It was comforting in a way to find Aunt Dilsey on his side, even though her manner rather indicated she resented the fact that he was on hers. A few evenings later he found out something else. He was made to know that in another and entirely unsuspected quarter the endeavors of the diligently crusading and organizing Duvall person had roused more than a passing curiosity.

One evening, supper being over, Judge Priest lingered on in his low-ceiled dining room smoking his corncob pipe while Jeff cleared away the supper dishes. It was the same high-voiced deliberately ungrammatical Judge Priest that the kindly reader may recall – somewhat older than at last accounts, somewhat slower in his step – but then he never had been given to fast movements – and perhaps just a trifle balder.

“Wuz dey anythin’ else you wanted, jedge, ’fore I locks up the back of the house an’ lights out?” Jeff inquired when the table had been reset for breakfast.

“Yes, I think mebbe there wuz,” drawled the old man. He hesitated a moment almost as though at a loss for a proper phrasing of the thing he meant to say next. Then: “Jeff, what’s come over your race in this town here lately?”

“Meanin’ w’ich, suh?” countered Jeff. “Me, I ain’t notice nothin’ out of the way – nothin’ particular.”

“Haven’t you? Well, I think I have. Jeff, I don’t want to be put in the position of pryin’ into the private and the personal affairs of other folks, regardless of color. I have to do enough of that sort of thing in my official capacity when I’m settin’ in judgment up at the big cote house. But unless I can get some confidential information frum you I don’t know where else I’m likely to git it, and at the same time I sort of feel as ef I should try to get hold of it somewheres or other ef it’s humanly possible.”

“Yas, suh.”

“Now heretofore in this community the two races – white and black – have got along purty tolerably well together. We managed to put up with your shortcomings and you managed to put up with ours, which at times may have been considerable of a strain on both sides. Still we’ve done it. But it seems to me here of late there’s been a kind of an undercurrent of discontent stirrin’ amongst your people – and no logical reason fur it either, so fur as I kin see. Yet there it is.

“There wuz that rumpus two-three weeks ago down in Market Square. A little more and that affair could have growed into a first-class race riot. And here last Saturday night followed that mix-up out by the Union Depot when Policeman Gip Futtrell got all carved up and two darkies got purty extensively shot. And night before last the trouble that occurred on that Belt Line car out in Hollandville; that looked mighty threatenin’, too, fur a while. And in between all these more serious things a lot of little unpleasantnesses keep croppin’ up – always takin’ the form of friction between whites and blacks.

“One of these here occurrences might be what you’d call an accident and two of them in rapid succession a coincidence, but it looks to me like now it’s gittin’ to be a habit. It’s leadin’ to bad blood and what’s worse it’s leadin’ to a lot of spilt blood and our city gittin’ a bad name and all that.

“And I know the respectable black folks in this town don’t want that to happen any more than the respectable white people do.

“Now then, Jeff, whut’s at the bottom of all this – I mean on your side of the color line? Who’s stirrin’ up old grudges and kindlin’ new ones? I’ve sort of got my own private suspicions, but I’d like to see ef your ideas run along with mine. Got any suggestions as to the underlying causes of this ill feelin’ that’s sprung up so lately and without any good reason for it either so fur ez I kin see?”

Now ordinarily Jeff would have held firmly to the doctrine that white folks should tend to their business and let black folks tend to theirs. For all his loyalty to his master, a certain race consciousness in him would have bade him keep hands off and tongue locked. But here a strong personal prejudice operated to steer Jeff away from what otherwise would have been his customary course.

“Jedge,” he said, drawing a pace or two nearer his employer, “did you ever hear tell of a pale-yaller party w’ich calls hisse’f Doct’ J. Talbott Duvall dat come yere a few weeks ago?”

“Ah, hah!” said the judge as though satisfied of the correctness of a prior conclusion. “I thought possibly my mind might be on the right track. Yes, I’ve heard of him and I’ve seen him. Whut of him?”

“Jedge, I trusts you won’t tell nobody else whut I’m tellin’ you, but dat’s sho’ de one dat’s at the bottom of the whole mess. He’s the one dat’s plantin’ the pizen. Me, I ain’t had no truck wid him myse’f, but dat ain’t sayin’ I don’t know whut he’s doin’, ca’se I do. He calls hisse’f a organizer.”

“Ah, hah! And whut is he organizin’?”

“Trouble, jedge. Dat’s whut – trouble fur a lot of folks. Jedge, fo’ we goes any further lemme ast you a coupler questions, please, suh. Is it true dat over dere in some of dem Youropean countries black folks is jes’ the same ez white folks, ef not more so?”

Choosing his words, the old man elucidated his understanding of the social order as it prevailed in certain geographical divisions and subdivisions of the continent of Europe.

“Yas, suh, thanky, suh,” said Jeff when the judge had finished. “I reckin mebbe one main trouble over dere is, jedge, dat dem folks ain’t been raised de way you an’ me is.”

“Jeff,” said the judge, “I’m inclined to think probably you’re right.”

“Yas, suh. Now den, jedge, here’s one mo’ thing. Is it true dat in all dem furrin countries – Russia an’ Germany an’ Bombay an’ all – dat the po’ people, w’ite or black or whutever dey color is, is fixin’ to rise up in they might an’ tek the money an’ de gover’mint an’ de fine houses an’ the cream of ever’thing away frum dem dat’s had it all ’long?”

Again the judge expounded at length, touching both upon upheavals abroad and on discords nearer home. Next it was Jeff’s turn to make disclosures having a purely local application and he made them. Listening intently, Judge Priest puckered his bald brow into furrows of perplexity.

“Jeff,” he said finally, “I’m much obliged to you fur tellin’ me all this. It backs up what I’d sort of figgered out all by myself. The whole world appears to be engaged in standin’ on its esteemed head at this writin’. I reckin when old Mister Kaiser turned loose the war he didn’t stop to think that mebbe the war was only one of a whole crop of evils he wuz lettin’ out of his box of tricks. Or mebbe he didn’t care – bein’ the kind of a person he wuz. And I’m prone to believe also that when the Germans stopped fightin’ us with guns they begun fightin’ us with other weapons almost as dangersome to our peace of mind and future well-bein’. Different parts of this country are in quite a swivet – agitators preachin’ bad doctrine – some of ’em drawin’ pay from secret enemies across the sea fur preachin’ it, too, I figger – and a lot of highly disagreeable disturbances croppin’ up here and there. But I was hopin’ that mebbe our little corner of the world wouldn’t be pestered. But now it looks ez ef we weren’t goin’ to escape our share of the trouble.”

“Jedge,” asked Jeff, “ain’t they some way dis Duvall pusson could be fetched up in cote? I suttinly would admire to see dat yaller man wearin’ a striped suit of clothes.”

“Well, Jeff,” said the judge, “I doubt either the legality or the propriety of such a step, ef you get what I mean. From whut you tell me I don’t see where he’s really broken any laws. He’s got a right to come here and organize his societies and lodges and things so long as he don’t actually come out in the open and preach violence. He’s got a perfect right under the law to organize this here new drill company you speak about. I sometimes think that ef all the young men in this country had been required to do a little more drillin’ in years gone by we’d be feelin’ somewhat safer today. Anyway, it’s a mighty great mistake sometimes to make a martyr out of a rascal. Puttin’ him in jail, unless you’re absolutely certain that a jail is where he properly belongs, gives him a chance to raise the cry of persecution and gives his followers an excuse to cut loose and smash up things. You git my drift, don’t you?”

“Yas, suh, think I do. Well den, suh, ef I wuz runnin’ dis town seems to me I’d git a crowd of strong-minded gen’elmen together some evenin’ in the dark of the moon an’ let ’em call on dis yere slick-haided half-strainer an’ invite him to tek his foot in his hand an’ marvil further. Ef one of ’em wuz totin’ a rope in his hand sorter keerless lak it might help. Ropes is powerful influential. An’ the sight of tar an’ feathers meks a mighty strong argument, too, Ise heared tell.”

“Jeff,” said the judge, “I’m astonished that you’d even suggest sech a thing! Mob law is worse even than no law at all. Besides,” he added – and now there was a small twinkle in his eye to offset to a degree the severity in his tones – “besides, the feller that was bein’ called on by the committee might decline to take the hint and then purty soon you might have another self-made martyr on your hands. But ef he ran away on his own hook now – ef something came up that made him go of his own accord and go fast and cut a sort of a cheap figure in the eyes of his deluded followers whilst he was goin’ – that’d be a different thing altogether. Start a crowd of folks, white or black or brown, to laughin’ at a feller and they’ll quit believin’ in him. Worshipin’ a false god and laughin’ at him at the same time never has been successfully done yit.”

He sucked his pipe. “Jeff,” he resumed, “what do you know, ef anything, about the past career and movements of this here J. Talbott Et Cetery?”

Jeff knew a good deal – at second hand. Didn’t the object of his deepest aversions persist in almost nightly calls upon the object of his deepest affections? Paying such calls, didn’t the enemy spend hours – hours upon hours doubtless – pouring into Ophelia’s ear accounts of his recent triumphs as an uplifter in other towns and other states? Didn’t the fascinated and flattered Ophelia in turn recount these tales to one whose opportunities for traveling and seeing the great world had been more circumscribed? Had not Jeff writhed in jealous misery the while he heard the annals of a rival’s successes? So Jeff made prompt answer.

“Yas, suh, I suttinly does. Ise heared a right smart ’bout dis yere Duvall’s past life frum – frum somebody. ’Cordin’ to the way he norrates it, he wuz in Nashville, Tennessee ’fore he come yere; an’ ’fore dat in Mobile, Alabama; an’ ’fore dat in Little Rock, Arkansaw. Seem lak w’en he ain’t organizin’ or speechifyin’ he ain’t got nothin’ better to do den run round amongst young cullid gals braggin’ ’bout the places he’s been an’ the things he done whilst in ’em.”

Jeff spoke with an enhanced bitterness.

“I see. Then I take it ef he spends so much time in seekin’ out female society that he’s not a married man?”

“So he say – so he say! But, Jedge Priest, ef ever I looked on the spittin’-image of a natchel-born marryin’ nigger, dat ver’ same Duvall is de one.”

Judge Priest seemed not to have heard this last. He sat for a bit apparently studying the tips of his square-toed, low-quarter shoes.

“Jeff,” he said when he had given his feet a long half minute of seeming consideration, “I would like to know some facts about the previous life and general history of the individual we’ve been discussin’ – I really would. In fact my curiosity is sech that I might even be willin’ to spend a little money out of my own pocket, ef needs be, in order to find out. So I was jest wonderin’ whether you wouldn’t like to take a little trip, with all expenses paid, and tour round through some of our sister states and make a few private inquiries. It occurs to me that everything considered you might make a better job of it as an amateur investigator than a regular professional detective of a different color might. Do you know where by any chance you could git hold of a good photograph of this here individual – I mean without lettin’ him know anything about it?”

“Yas, suh, dat I does,” stated Jeff briskly.

The conference between master and man lasted perhaps fifteen minutes longer before Jeff was dismissed for the night. Mainly it dealt with ways, means and purposes. Upon the heels of it, within forty-eight hours two events – seemingly nowise related or bearing one upon the other – occurred. An ornately framed photograph lately bestowed as a gift and treasured as a trophy of sentimental value mysteriously vanished from the mantelpiece of the front room of Ophelia Stubblefield’s pa’s house; and Jefferson Poindexter, carrying a new and very shiny suitcase, unostentatiously left town late at night on a southbound train.

Darktown in Nashville knew him for a brief space as a visiting nobleman with money in all his pockets and apparently nothing of importance to do except to spend it in divertisements suitable to the social instincts of a capitalist of leisure. In Mobile at the Elite Colored Beauty Parlors for the first time in his life he tendered his fingernails for ministrations at the hands of a dashing chocolate-ice-cream-colored manicurist and spent the remainder of that same afternoon in a sunny spot, glistening pleasantly.

If in both these cities and likewise in Little Rock, which next he favored with his presence, he made himself known to brothers of his particular lodge – the Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the Universe has a large and a widely distributed membership – and if under the sacred pledge of secrecy which only may be broken on pain of mutilation and death by torture he – with the aid of these fraternal allies of his – conducted certain discreet inquiries, why, that was his own private business. Assuredly, so far as surface indications counted, he appeared to have no business other than pleasurable pursuits. From Little Rock he turned his face southeastward, landing at Macon, Georgia, where he lingered on for upward of a week, breaking his visit only by a day’s side trip to a smaller town south of Macon. Altogether Jeff was an absentee from his favorite haunts back home for the greater part of a month.

He reached town on a Monday. Betimes Tuesday morning, inspired outwardly by the zeal of one just won over from skepticism to the immediate advisability of following a sapient course, he sought opportunity to become a member in good standing of the Shining Star Colored Uplift and Progress League, a simple ceremony and a brief, since it involved merely the signing of one’s name on Dotted Line A of a printed form card and the paying of a dollar into the hand of Dr. J. Talbott Duvall. On Tuesday evening the league met in stated session at Hillman’s Hall on Yazoo Street and Jeff was early on hand, visibly enthusiastic and professedly ready to do all within his power to further the aims and intents of the organization. As a brand snatched from the burning he was elevated before the eyes of the assemblage so that all might see him and mark his mien of newborn fervor, for Doctor Duvall, following his custom, called to places upon the platform the proselytes enrolled since the previous meeting, to the end that older members might observe the physical proof of a steady and a healthful growth.

So there sat Jefferson in the very front row of wooden chairs, where all might behold him and he might behold all and sundry. About him were his recent fellow converts. Almost directly behind him was a door giving upon a side entrance; there was another door serving similar purposes upon the opposite side of the stage. Beyond him to the left in the center of the stage were grouped the honorary officers of the league, flanking and supporting their chief.

Being an honorary officer carried with it, as the title might imply, honor and prominence second only to that enjoyed by the president-organizer, but it entailed no great weight of responsibility, since practically all the actual work of the league had from the very outset been generously assumed by Doctor Duvall. It was he who cared for the funds, he who handled disbursements, he who conducted the proceedings, he who made the principal addresses on meeting nights, he who between meetings labored without cessation to spread educational propaganda. That he found time for all these purposeful endeavors and yet crowded in such frequent opportunity for mingling socially among the lambs of his flock – notably the ewe lambs – was but evidence, accumulating daily, of his genius for leadership and direction.

This night the session opened with a prayer – by Doctor Duvall; an eloquent and a moving prayer indeed, its sonorous periods set off and adorned with noble big words and quotations in foreign tongues. The prayer would be followed, it had been announced, by the reading of the minutes of the previous session, after which Doctor Duvall would speak at length with particular reference to things lately accomplished and the even more important things in contemplation for the near future.

Standing for the prayer, Jeff could look out over what a master of words before now has fitly described as a sea of upturned faces – faces black, brown and yellow. Had he been minded to give thought to details he might have noted how at every polysyllabic outburst from the inspired invocationist old Uncle Ike Fauntleroy, himself accounted a powerful hand at wrestling with sinners in prayer, was visibly jolted by admiration; might, if he had had a head for figures, have kept count of the hearty amens with which Sister Eldora Menifee punctuated each pause when Doctor Duvall was taking a fresh breath; might have cast a side glance upon Ophelia Stubblefield in a new and most becoming hat with ostrich plumage grandly surmounting it. But under the hand which he held reverently cupped over his brow Jeff’s eyes were fixed upon a certain focal point, – to wit, the door of the main entrance at the length of the hall from him. It was as though Jeff waited for something or somebody he was expecting.

Nor did he have so very long to wait. The prayer was done and well done. In its wake, so to speak, there spouted up from every side veritable geysers of hallelujahs and amens. The honorary secretary, Brother Lemuel Diuguid, smelling grandly of expensive hair ointments – Brother Diuguid being by calling a head barber – stood up to read the minutes of the preceding regular session, and having read them sat down again. A friendly and flattering bustle of anticipation filled the body of the hall as Doctor Duvall rose and moved one pace forward and – raising a hand for silence – began to speak. But he had no more than begun, had progressed no farther than part way of his first smoothly launched sentence, when he was made to break off by an unseemly interruption at the rear. The honorary grand inner guard on duty at the far street door, after a brief and unsuccessful struggle with unseen forces, was observed to be shoved violently aside from his post. Bursting in together there entered two strangers – a tall yellow woman and a short black man, and both of them of a most grim and determined aspect. He moved fast, this man, but even so his companion moved faster still. She was three paces ahead of him when, bulging impetuously past those who sprang into the center aisle as though to halt her onward rush – all others present being likewise up on their feet – she came to a halt near the middle of the hall and, glaring about her defiantly, just double-dog-dared any present to lay so much as the weight of one detaining finger upon her. There was something about her calculated to daunt the most willing of volunteer opponents, and so while those at a safe distance demanded the ejection of the intruders, those nearer her hesitated.

“Th’ow me out?” she whooped, echoing the words of outraged and startled members of the Shining Star. “I’d lak to see de one dat’s gwine try it! An’ ’fo’ anybody talk ’bout th’owin’ out lettum heah me whilst I sez my say!”

Towering until she seemed to increase in stature by inches, she aimed a long and bony finger dead ahead.

“Ax dat slinky yaller man up yonder on dat flatfo’m ef he gwine give de order to th’ow me out!” she clarioned in a voice which rose to a compelling shriek. “But fust off ax him whut he meant – marryin’ me in Mobile, Alabama, an’ den runnin’ ’way frum his lawful wedded wife under cover of de night! Ax him – dat’s all, ax him!”

“An’ ax him one thing mo’!” It was the voice of her short companion rising above the tumult. “Ax him whut he done wid de funds of de s’ciety he ’stablished at Little Rock, Arkansaw, all of w’ich he absconded wid dis last spring!”

As though the same set of muscles controlled every neck the heads of all swung about, their eyes following where the accusers pointed, their ears twitching for the expected blast of denial and denunciation which would wither these mad and scandalous detractors in their tracks.

Alas and alackaday! With his splendid figure suddenly all diminished and shrunken, with distress writ large and plain upon his features, the popular idol was step by step flinching backward from the edge of the platform – was step by step inching, edging toward the side door in the right-hand wall.

And in this same instant the stunned assemblage realized that Jeff Poindexter, by nimble maneuvering, had thrust himself between the retreating figure and the exit, and Jeff was crying out: “Not dis way out, Doct’ Duvall. Not dis way! The one you married down below Macon is waitin’ fur you behin’ dis do’!”

The doctor stopped in midflight and swung about and his eye fell upon the right-hand door and he moved a yard or two in that direction; but no more than a yard or two, for again Jeff spoke in warning, halting him short:

“Not dat way neither! The one frum dat other town whar you uster live is waitin’ outside dat do’ – wid a pistil! Seems lak you’s entirely s’rounded by wives dis evenin’!”

To the verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists’ age-old riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled over flat and her hands, clutching as she went down, closed, but on empty and unresisting air. Literally he hurdled over the stocky form of the little black man behind her, but as the other flitted by him the fists of the stranger knotted firmly into the skirts of its wearer’s long black frock coat and held on. There was a rending, tearing sound and as the back breadth of the garment ripped bodily away from the waistband there flew forth from the capsized tail pockets a veritable cloudburst of currency – floating, fluttering green and yellow bills and with them pattering showers of dollars and halves and dimes and quarters and nickels.

That canny instinct which had led the fugitive apostle of the uplift to hide the collected funds of the league upon his person rather than trust to banks and strong boxes was to prove his ruination financially but his salvation physically. While those who had believed in him, now forgetting all else, scrambled for the scattered money – their money – he fled out of the unguarded door and was instantly gone into the shielding night – a sorry shape in a bob-tailed garment.

At a somewhat later hour Judge Priest in his living room was receiving from Jefferson Poindexter a much lengthier and more elaborated account of the main occurrences of the evening at Hillman’s Hall than has here been presented. Speaking as he did in the dual rôle of spectator and of an actuating force in the events of that crowded and exciting night, Jeff spared no details. He had come to the big scene of his narrative when his master interrupted him:

“Hold on a minute, Jeff! I don’t know ez I get the straight of it all yit. I rather gathered frum whut you told me yesterday when you landed back home and made your report that you’d only been able to dig up one certain-sure wife of this feller’s – the one that came along with you and that little Arkansaw darky. You didn’t say anything then about bein’ able to prove he wuz a bigamist.”

“Huh, jedge, I didn’t have to prove it! Dat man wuz more’n jes’ a plain bigamist. He sho’ wuz a trigamist, an’ ef the full truth wuz knowed I ’spects he wuz a quadrupler at the very least. He proved it hisself – way he act’ w’en the big ’splosion come.”

“But the two women you told him were waitin’ behind those side doors for him – how about them?”

“Law, jedge, dey wuzn’t dere – neither one of ’em wuzn’t. Jes’ lak I told you yistiddy, I couldn’t find only jest one woman dat nigger’d married an’ run off frum, an’ her I fetched ’long wid me. But lak I also told you, I got kind of traces of one dat uster live below Macon but w’ich is now vanished, an’ ever’whar else I went whar he’d lived befo’ he come yere de signs wuz manifold dat he wuz a natchel-born marryin’ fool, jes’ lak I ’spicioned fust time ever I see him. So w’en he started fur dat fust do’ I taken a chancet on him an’ w’en I seen how he cringed an’ ducked back I taken another chancet on him, an’ the subsequent evidences offers testimony dat both times I reckined right. Jedge, the late Doct’ Duvall muster married some powerful rough-actin’ gals in his time ef he thought the Mobile one wuz the gentlest out of three. Well, anyway, suh, the ravelin’ wolf is gone frum us, an’ fur one I ain’t ’spectin’ him back never no mo’. An’ I reckin dat’s the main pint wid you an’ me both.”

“The ravelin’ whut?”

“Dat’s whut Aunt Dilsey called him oncet, speechifyin’ to me ’bout him – the ravelin’ wolf. Only he suttinly did look he wuz comin’ unraveled mighty fast the last I seen of him.”

The Saturday Evening Post, 21 Feb 1920
Sundry Accounts (1922)

Alas, the Poor Whiffletit!

~

Over Jefferson Poindexter’s usually buoyant spirits a fabric of gloom, black, thick, and heavy, was spread like a burying-pall. His thoughts were the color of twelve o’clock at night at the bottom of a coal-mine and it the dark of the moon. Moroseness crowned his brow; sorrow berode his soul, and on his under lip the bull-bat, that eccentric bird which has to sit lengthwise of the limb, might have perched with room to spare. You couldn’t see the ointment for the flies, and Gilead had gone out of the balm business. There was a reason. The reason was Ophelia Stubblefield.

On an upturned watering-piggin alongside Mittie May’s stall in the stable back of the house, Jeff sat and just naturally gloomed. To this retreat he had been harried against his will. Out of her domain, which was the kitchen, Aunt Dilsey had driven him with words barbed and bitter.

“Tek yo’se’f on ’way f’um yere, black boy!” Such had been her command. “Me, I’s plum’ distracted an’ wore out jes’ f’um lookin’ at you settin’ ’round sullin’ lak a ole possum. Ef Satan fine some labor still fur idle hands to do, same ez de Holy Word say he do, he suttinly must be stedyin’ ’bout openin’ up a branch employmint agency fur cullid only, ’specially on yore account. You ain’t de Grand President of de Order of de Folded Laigs, tho’ you shorely does ack lak it. You’s s’posed to be doin’ somethin’ fur yore keep an’ wages. H’ist yo’se’f an’ move.”

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’!” Jeff protested spiritlessly.

“Dat you ain’t!” agreed Aunt Dilsey. “An’ whut you better do is better do somethin’ – tha’s my edvices to you. S’posin’ ole boss-man came back yere to dis kitchen an’ ketch you ’cumberin’ de earth de way you is. You knows, well ez I does, w’ite folks suttinly does hate to see a strappin’ nigger settin’ ’round doin’ nothin’.”

“Boss-man ain’t yere,” said Jeff. “He’s up at the cote-house. Mos’ doubtless jes’ about right now he’s sendin’ some flippy cullid woman to the big jail fur six months fur talkin’ too much ’bout whut don’t concern her.”

“Is tha’ so?” she countered. “Well, ef he should come back home he’ll find one of de most fragrant cases of vagromcy he ever run acrost right yere ’pon his own household premises. Boy, is you goin’ move, lak I patiently is warned you, or ain’t you? Git on out yander to de stable an’ confide yo’ sorrows to de Jedge’s old mare. Mebbe she mout be able to endure you, but you p’intedly gives me de fidgits. Git – befo’ I starts findin’ out ef dat flat haid of yourn fits up smooth ag’inst de back side of a skillit.”

Nervously she fingered the handle of her largest frying-pan. Jeff knew the danger-signals. Too deeply sunken in melancholy to venture any further retorts, he withdrew himself, seeking sanctuary in the lee of Mittie May. He squatted upon the capsized keeler, automatically balancing himself as it wabbled under him on its one projecting handle, and, with his eyes fixed on nothing, gave himself over unreservedly to a consuming canker. For all that unhappiness calked his ears as with pledgets of cotton wool, there presently percolated to his aloof understanding the consciousness that somebody was speaking on the other side of the high board fence which marked the dividing line between Judge Priest’s place and the Enders’ place next door. Listlessly he identified the voice as the property of the young gentleman from up North who was staying with his kinsfolk, the Enders family. This was a gentleman already deeply admired by Jeff at long distance for the sprightliness of his wardrobe and for his gay and gallus ways. Against his will – for he craved to be quite alone with his griefs and no distracting influences creeping in – Jeff listened. Listening, he heard language of such splendor as literally to force him to rise up and approach the fence and apply his eye to a convenient cranny between two whitewashed boards.

Under an Injun-cigar tree which grew in the Enders’ back yard the fascinating visitor out of Northern parts was stretched in a hammock, between draws on a cigarette discoursing grandiloquently to a half-incredulous but wholly delighted audience of three. His three small nephews were hunkered on the earth beside him, their grinning faces upturned to his the while he dealt first with this and then with that variety of curious fauna which, he alleged, were to be encountered in the wilds of a strange place called the State of Rhode Island, where, it seemed, he had spent the greater part of an adventurous and crowded youth.

“Well,” he was saying now, beginning, as it were, a new chapter, “if you think the sulfur-crested parabola is a funny bird you should hear about the great flannel-throated golosh, or arctic bird of the polar seas, which is a creature so rare that nobody ever saw one, although Dr. Cook, the imminent ex-explorer, made an exhaustive study of its habits and peculiarities and told the King of Denmark about them, afterward amplifying his remarks on the subject in the lecture which he delivered in this, his native land, under the auspices of the International School of Poor Fish. By the way, I’m sure the Doctor must have visited this town on his tour. Only yesterday, I think it was, I saw an illuminated sign down on Franklin Street which surely was used originally to advertise his lecture. It was a sign which said, ‘Cook With Gas!’ But speaking of fish, I am reminded of the fur-bearing whiffletit; only some authorities say the whiffletit is not a fish at all, but a subspecies of the wampus family. Now, the wampus—”

“Say, tell us about the whiffletit next,” begged one wriggling youngster, plainly allured by the sound of the name.

“With pleasure,” said the speaker. “The whiffletit is found only in streams running in a south-northerly direction. This is because the whiffletit, being a sensitive creature with poor vision, insists on having the light falling over its left shoulder at all times. A creek, river, inlet, or estuary which has a wide mouth and a narrow head, such as a professional after-dinner speaker has, is a favorite haunt for the whiffletit. To the naturalist it is a constant source of joy. It always swims backward upstream, to keep the water out of its eyes, and it has only one fin, which grows just under its chin, so that the whiffletit can fan itself in warm weather, thus keeping cool, calm, and collected. Most marvelous thing of all about this marvelous creature is its diet. For the whiffletit, my dear young friends, lives exclusively on imported Brie cheese.

“Did I say exclusively? Ah, there I fell into error. It has been known to nibble at a chiropodist’s finger, but it prefers imported Brie cheese, aged in the wood. The mode employed in catching it is very interesting, and I shall now describe it to you. Selecting a body of water wherein the whiffletit resides, you enter a round-bottomed boat and row out to the middle of it. Then you take a square timber, and, driving it into the water, withdraw it very swiftly so as to leave a square hole in the water. Care should be taken to use a perfectly square timber because the whiffletit being, as I forgot to tell you, shaped like a brick, cannot move up and down a round hole without barking its shins, much to the discomfort of the pretty creature.

“Pray follow me closely now, for at this juncture we come to the most important phase of the undertaking. You bait the edges of the hole with the cheese cut in small cubes and quietly await results. Nor do you have long to wait. Far down below in his watery retreat the whiffletit catches the alluring aroma of the cheese. He swims to the surface and devours it to the last crumb. But alas for the greedy whiffletit! Instantly the cheese swells him up so that he cannot change gears nor retreat back down the hole, and as he circles about, flapping helplessly, you lean over the side of the boat and laugh him to death! And such, my young friends, such is the fate of the whiffletit.”

“’Scuse me, suh.”

The amateur aspirant for the robe of Munchausen paused from lighting a fresh cigarette and lifted his eyes, and was aware of an anthracite-colored face risen, like some new kind of crayoned full moon, above the white skyline of the side fence.

“’Scuse me, suh, fur interruptin’,” repeated the voice belonging to the apparition, “but I couldn’t he’p frum overhearin’ whut you wuz tellin’ the boys yere. An’ I got sort of interested myse’f.”

“It’s Judge Priest’s Jeff, Uncle Dwight,” explained the oldest nephew. “Jeff makes us fluttermills out of corn-stalks, and he learned us – taught us, I mean – to call a brickbat an alley-apple, and he can make his ears wiggle just like a rabbit and everything. Don’t you, Jeff? – I mean, can’t you, Jeff?”

“Ah, I see,” said the fabulist with a wink aside for Jeff’s benefit. “I am indeed delighted to make the acquaintance of one thus gifted, even under the present informal circumstances. In what way, if any, may I be of service to you, Judge Priest’s Jeff?”

“That air thing you named the whiffletit – near ez I made out you said, boss, that fust you tolled him up to whar you wanted him wid cheese an’ ’en you jest natchelly laffed him to death?”

“Such are the correct facts accurately repeated, Judge Priest’s Jeff,” gravely assented this affable faunalist.

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff. “D’ye s’pose now, boss, it would he’p any ef they wuz a whole passel of folks to do the laffin’ ’stid of jes’ one?”

“Beyond the peradventure of a doubt. Concerted action on the part of many, guffawing merrily in chorus, assuredly would hasten the death of the ill-starred victim, if you get what I mean, Judge Priest’s most estimable Jeff?”

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff. “Thanky, suh.” He did not exactly smile his thanks, but the mask of his melancholy crinkled round the edges and raised slightly. One who knew Jeff, and more particularly one who had been cognizant of his depressed state during the past fortnight, would have said that a heartening thought suddenly had come to him, lightening and lifting in ever so small a degree the funereal mantlings. He made as though to withdraw from sight. A gesture from the visiting naturalist detained him.

“One moment,” said Uncle Dwight. “Might I, a comparative stranger, be pardoned for inquiring into the motives underlying the interest you have evinced in my perhaps poorly expressed but veracious narration?”

The wraith of Jeff’s grin took on flesh visibly. It was a pleasure – even to one beset by grievous perplexities – it was a pleasure to hear such noble big words fall thus trippingly from human lips. His answer, tho, was in a measure evasive, not to say cryptic.

“I wuz jes’ stedyin’, tha’s all, suh,” he fenced. He ducked from view, then bobbed his head up again.

“’Scuse me, suh, but they is one mo’ thing I craves to ast you.”

“Proceed, I pray you. Our aim is to please and instruct.”

“Well, suh, I jes’ wanted to ast you ef you ever run acrost one of these yere whiffletits w’ich played on the jazzin’-valve?”

“Prithee?”

“Naw, suh, not the prith – prith – whut you jes’ said. I mentioned the jazzin’-valve – whut some folks calls the saxophone. D’ye reckin they mout’ ’a’ been a whiffletit oncet ’at played on one?”

“Oh, the saxophone! Well, as to that I could not with certainty speak. But, mark you, the whiffletit is a creature of infinite resources – versatile, abounding in quaint conceits and whimsies, and, having withal a wide repertoire. Sometimes its repertoire is twice as wide as it is, thus producing a peculiar effect when the whiffletit is viewed from behind. On second thought, I have no doubt that in the privacy of its subterranean fireside the whiffletit wiles away the tedium of the long winter evenings by playing on the saxophone.”

“Come on over, Jeff, and Uncle Dwight will tell us some more,” urged the hospitable oldest nephew.

But Jeff had vanished. He wished to be alone for the working out of a project as yet vague and formless, but having a most definite object to be attained. Stimulated by hope new-born, he was now a sort of twelfth carbon-copy of the regular Jeff – faint, perhaps, and blurry, but recognizable. Through the clouds which encompassed him the faint promise of a rift was apparent.

By rights one would have said that Jeff had no excuse for hiding in a shadowed hinterland at all. The world might have been excused for its failure to plumb the underlying causes which roiled the waters of his soul. Seemingly the currents of life ran for him in agreeable channels. He had an indulgent employer whose clothes fitted Jeff. Indeed, anybody’s clothes fitted Jeff. He had one of those figures which seem to give and take. He was well nourished, gifted conversationally, of a nimble wit, resourceful, apt. Moreover, home-grown watermelons were ripe. The Eighth of August, celebrated in these parts by the race as Emancipation Day, impended. The big revival – the biggest and most tremendously successful revival in his people’s local history – was in full swing at the Twelfth Ward tabernacle, affording thrill and entertainment every week-night and thrice on Sundays.

There never had been such a revival; probably there never would be another such. Justifiably, the pastor of Emmanuel Chapel took credit to himself that he had planted the seed which at this present time so gloriously yielded harvest. Theretofore his chief claim to public attention had rested upon the sound of the name he wore. He had been born a Shine and christened a Rufus. But to him the name of Rufus Shine had seemed lacking in impressiveness and euphony for use by one about entering the ministry. Thanks to the ingenuity of a white friend who was addicted to puns and plays upon words, the defect had been cured. As the Rev. A. Risen Shine he bore a name which fitted its bearer and its bearer’s calling – at once it was a slogan and a testimony, a trade-mark and a watch-cry.

Proudly now he walked the earth, broadcasting the favor of his smile on every side. For it had been he who divined that the times were ripe for the importation of that greatest of all exhorting evangelists of his denomination, the famous Sin Killer Wickliffe, of Nashville, Tenn. His had been the zeal which inspired the congregation to form committees on ways and means, on place and time, on finance; his, mainly, the energy behind the campaign for subscriptions which filled the war-chest. As resident pastor, chief promotor, and general manager of the project, he had headed the delegation which personally waited upon the great man at his home and extended the invitation. Almost immediately, upon learning that the amount of his customary guaranty already had been raised and deposited in bank, the Rev. Wickliffe felt that he had a call to come and labor, and he obeyed it. He brought with him his entire organization – his private secretary, his treasurer, his musical director. For, mind you, the Sin Killer had borrowed a page from the book of certain distinguished revivalists of a paler skin-pigmentation than his. As the saying goes among the sinful, he saw his Caucasian brethren and went them one better. His musical director was not only an instrumentalist but a composer as well. He adapted, he wrote, he originated, he improvised, he interpolated, he orchestrated, he played. As one inspired, this genius played the saxophone.

Now, in the world at large the saxophone has its friends and its foes. Its detractors agree that the late Emperor Nero was a maligned man; cruel, perhaps, in some of his aspects, but not so cruel as has been made out in the case against him. It was a fiddle he played while Rome burned – it might have been a saxophone. But to the melody-loving heart of the black race in our land the mooing tones of this long-waisted, dark-complected horn carry messages as of great joy. It had remained, though, for the resourceful Rev. Wickliffe to prove that it might be made to fill a nobler and a higher destiny than setting the feet of the young men to dancing and the daughters to treading the syncopated pathways of the ungodly. Discerning this by a sort of higher intuition, he had thrown himself into the undertaking of luring the most expert saxophone performer of his acquaintance away from the flaunting tents of the transgressor and herding him into the fold of the safely regenerate. He succeeded. He saved Cephus Fringe, plucking him up as a brand from the burning, to re-mold him into a living torch fitted to light the way for others.

Of Cephus it might be said, paraphrasing the lines about little dog Rover, that when he was saved he was saved all over. Being redeemed, he straightway disbanded his orchestra. He tore up his calling-card reading:

PROFESSOR CEPHUS FRINGE ESQUIRE
The Anglo-Saxophone King

Address: Care Champey’s Barber-Shop

SOLE PROPRIETOR
FRINGE’S ALL-STAR TROUPE

He enlisted under the militant banners and on the personal staff of the Sin Killer. Amply then was the prior design of his new commander justified. For if it was the eloquence, the magnetism, the compelling force of the revivalist which brought the penitents shouting down the tan-bark trail to the mourner’s bench, it was the harmonious croonings of Prof. Fringe as he conducted the introductory program – now rendering as a solo his celebrated original composition, “The Satan Blues,” now leading the special choir – which psychologically paved the way for the greater scene to follow after. There was distress in the devil’s glebe-lands when this pair struck their proper stride – first the Fringian outpourings harmoniously exalting the spirits of the assemblage and then the exhorters tying his hands to the Gospel plow and driving down into the populous valleys of sin, there to furrow and harrow, to sow and tend, to garner and glean.

The team had struck its stride early at the protracted meeting so competently fostered by the resident pastor of Emmanuel Chapel, the Rev. A. Risen Shine. To himself, as already stated, the latter took prideful credit for results achieved and results promised. Well he might. Already hundreds of converts had come halleluiahing through; hundreds more teetered and swayed, back and forth, between doubt and conviction, ready at a touch to fall like the ripe and sickled grain in the lap of the husbandman. Wavering brethren had been fortified and were made stalwart again. Confirmed backsliders rubbed their wayward feet in the resin of faith and were boosted up the treacherous skids of their temptation and over the citadel walls to bask among the chosen in a Jericho City of repentance. Proselytes from other and hostile creeds trooped over with hosannas and loud outcries of rejoicing. Even the place where, each evening, the triumph of the preceding evening was repeated and amplified seemed appropriate for such scenes. For the Twelfth Ward tabernacle had not always been a tabernacle; it had been a tobacco-warehouse – but it was converted. And its present chief ornament, next only to the Sin Killer himself – indeed, its chiefest ornament of all in the estimation of impressionable younger unmarried female members – was Prof. Cephus Fringe.

At thought of him and of this, Jeff Poindexter, re-perched on his wabbly piggin, wove his furrowed brow into a closer and more intricate pattern of cordial dislike. For if the main reason of his unhappiness was Ophelia Stubblefield, the secondary reason and principal contributory cause was this same Cephus Fringe. Ophelia’s favorite letter may not have been F, but it should have been. She was fair, fickle, fawn-toned, flirty, flighty, and frequently false. Jeff cast back in his mind. He certainly had had his troubles since he became permanently engaged to Ophelia. For instance, there had been her affair with that ferocious razor-wielder Smooth Crumbaugh. In this matter the fortuitous return from the dead of Red Hoss Shackleford, as skilfully engineered by Jeff, had broken up Red Hoss’s own memorial services, had also operated to scare Smooth Crumbaugh clean out of Colored Odd Fellows’ Hall and leave the fainting Ophelia in the rescuing arms of Jeff. But there had been half a dozen other affairs, each of such intensity as temporarily to undermine Jeff’s peace of mind. Between spells of infatuations for attractive strangers, she accepted Jeff’s devotions. The trouble was, though, that life, with Ophelia, seemed to be just one infatuation after another. And now, to cap all, she had suffered herself, nay, offered herself, to fall thrall to the dashing personality and the varied accomplishments of this Fringe person. It was this entanglement which for two weeks past had made Jeff, her official ’tween-times fiancé, a prey to carking cares and dark forebodings.

Hourly and daily the situation, from Jeff’s point of view, had grown more desperate as Ophelia’s passion for the fascinating sojourner grew. He had even lost his relish for victuals which, with Jeff, was indeed a serious sign. In long periods of self-imposed solitude he had devised and discarded as hopeless various schemes for bringing discomfiture upon his latest and most dangerous rival. For a while he had thought somehow, somewhere, to rake up proofs of the interloper’s former wild and reckless life. But of what avail to do that?

By his own frank avowal the Professor had had a spangled past; had been an adventurer and a wanton, a wandering minstrel bard; had even been in jail. This background of admitted transgressions, now that he was so completely reformed and reclaimed, merely made him an all-the-more attractive figure in the eyes of those to whom he offered confession. Again, Jeff had trifled with a vague design of taunting Fringe into a quarrel and beating him up something scandalous. To this end he tentatively had approached our leading exponent of the art of self-defense and our most dependable sporting authority, one Mr. Jerry Ditto.

Mr. Ditto had grown out of a clerkship at Gus Neihiem’s cigar-store into the realm of fistiana. As a shadow-boxer he excelled; as a bag-puncher also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy, owner of Purdy’s Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the nom de puge of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds, but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious interest in the proceedings.

He retired from the ring after this with a permanent lump on the point of his jaw and a profound conviction that the Lord had made a mistake and drowned the wrong crowd that time at the Red Sea. He fitted up a gymnasium in the old plow factory and gave instructions in sparring to the youth of the town. Naturally, his patronage was all-white, but he offered to take Jeff on for a few strictly private lessons at night provided Jeff would promise not to tell anybody about it. But at last the prospective client drew back. His ways were the ways of peace and diplomacy. Why depart from them? And, anyhow, this Cephus Fringe was so dog-goned sinewy-looking. Playing a saxophone ought to give a man wind and endurance. If not knocked cold in the first onslaught he might become seriously antagonized toward Jeff.

But now, in the sportive fablings of the young white gentleman from up North who was visiting the Enders family, he had found a clue to what he sought. The difficult point, though, was to evolve the plan for the plot nebulously floating about in his brain; for while he envisaged the delectable outcome, the scheme of procedure was as yet entirely without form and substance. It was as though he looked through a tunnel under a hill. At the far end he beheld the sunlight, but all this side of it was utter darkness. Seeking to pluck inspiration out of the air, his roving eye fell upon the dappled rump of Mittie May as she stood in her stall placidly munching provender, and with that, bang! inspiration hit him spang between the eyes.

To look on her, ruminative, ewe-like, fringed of fetlock and deliberate in her customary amblings, you would never have reckoned Mittie May to be a mare with a past. But such was the case. Her youth had been spent in travel over the continent with a tented caravan; in short, a circus. Her broad flat top-side, her dependable gait, her amiable disposition, her color – white with darkish half-moons on shoulder and flank – all these admirably had fitted her for the ring. When, long years before, Hooper’s wagon-shows came to grief in our town, Mittie May had been seized by Farrell Brothers to satisfy an unpaid hay-bill.

Through her sobering maturer years she had passed from one set of hands to another, until finally, in her declining days, she found asylum in the affectionate ownership of Judge Priest, with Jeff to curry her fat sides and no more arduous labor to perform than occasionally to draw the Judge about from place to place in his ancient shovel-topped buggy. About her now there was naught to suggest the prancing rosin-back she once had been; the very look of her eye conjured up images of simple pastoral scenes – green meadows and purling brooks.

But let a certain signal be sounded and on top of that let a certain air be played and Mittie May, instantly losing that air she had of a venerable and dignified sheep, became a Mittie May transformed; a Mittie May reverted to another and more feverish time; a Mittie May stirred by olden memories to nightmarish performances. By chance once Jeff had happened upon her secret, and now, all in one illuminating flash, recalling the conditions governing this discovery, he gave vent to a low anticipatory chuckle. It was the first chuckle he had uttered in a fortnight, and this one was edged with a sinister portent. He had his idea now. He had at hand the agency for bringing the scheme to fruition. But yet there remained much of preliminary detail to be worked out. His plan still was like a fine-toothed comb which has seen hard usage in a wiry thatch – there were wide gaps between its prongs.

Jeff gave himself over to sustained thought. He made calculations calendar-wise. This was the first day of August; the eighth, therefore, was but seven short days removed. This plot of his seemed to resemble a number of things. It was like a piece of pottery, too. First the plastic clay must be assembled, then the vessel itself turned from it; finally the completed product must be given time to harden before it would be ready for use. He must move fast but warily.

To begin with, now, he must create a setting of plausibility for the rôle he meant, in certain quarters, to essay; must dress the character, as it were, in its correct housings and provide just the right touches of local color. Ready at hand was Aunt Dilsey; he would make her, unwittingly so far as she kenned, a supporting member of the cast. She would never know it, but she would play an accessory part, small but important, in his prologue.

Five minutes later she lifted her eyebrows in surprise. As he reinserted himself halfway across the portals of the realm where she queened it, his recent moroseness was quite gone from him. About him now was the suggestion, subtly conveyed, that here stood one who, after profound cogitation, had found out what ailed him and, by the finding out, was filled with a gentle, chastened satisfaction. He seated himself on the kitchen door-step, facing outward so that comparative safety might be attained with a single flying leap did her uncertain temper, flaring up suddenly, lead her to acts of hostility before he succeeded in winning her over. He uttered a long-drawn sigh, then sat a minute in silence. In silence, too – a suspicious, menacing silence – she glared at him.

“Aunt Dilsey,” he ventured, speaking over his shoulder, with his face averted from her, “mebbe you been noticin’ yere lately I seemed kind of downcasted an’ shiftless, lak ez ef I had a mood on me?”

“Has I noticed it?” she repeated – “huh!” The punctuating grunt was non-committal. It might mean nothing; it might mean anything.

He cleared his throat and went on,

“An’, mebbe – I ain’t sayin’ you actually is; I’s sayin’ it with a mebbe – mebbe you been marvelin’ in yore mind whut it wuz w’ich pestered me an’ made me ack so kind of no-’count?”

“I ain’t needin’ to marvel,” she stated coldly. “I knows. Laziness! Jes’ pyure summer-time nigger laziness, wid a rich streak of meanness th’owed in.”

“Nome, you is wrong,” he corrected her gently. “You is wrong there. ’Ca’se likewise an’ furthermo’ I also is been off my feed – ain’t that a sign to you?”

“Sign of a tapeworm, I ’spects.”

“Don’t say that, please, Ma’am,” he humbly pleaded. “You speakin’ in sich a way meks me ’most discouraged to confide in you whut I aims to confide in you. I’m tellin’ it to you the fust one, too. ’Tain’t nary ’nother soul heared it. Aunt Dilsey, I’s grateful to you in my heart, honest I is, fur runnin’ me ’way frum yore presence yere jes’ a little w’ile ago. You never knowed it at the time – I didn’t s’picion it also neither – but you done me a favor. ’Ca’se settin’ out yonder in the stable all alone and ponderin’ deep, all of a sudden somethin’ jes’ come right over me an’ I knowed whut’s been the matter wid me lately. Aunt Dilsey, I’s felt the quickenin’ tech.”

“Better fur you ef somebody made you feel de quickenin’ buggy-whup.”

He disregarded the brutal suggestion.

“Yessum, I’s felt the quickenin’ tech. Ez you doubtless full well knows, I ain’t been ’tendin’ much ’pon the big revival. But even so – even an’ evermo’ so – the influence frum it done stretch fo’th its hand an’ reach me. I ain’t sayin’ I’s plum’ won over yit, but ’way down deep insides of me I’s stirred – yessum, tha’s the word – stirred. I ain’t sayin’ the spirit of grace is actually th’owed me, but I feel prone to say I thinks it’s fixin’ to rassle wid me. I ain’t sayin’ I stands convicted, but I aims to be a searcher fur the truth; I aims to stop, look, an’ lissen. I ain’t sayin’—” He broke off, the floods of his imagery dammed by the skeptical eye which swept him; then made a lame conclusion, “Tha’s whut I sez, Ma’am, to you in strict confidences.”

“Den lemme say somethin’ to you. You figgers it’s salvation you needs, huh? I figgers it’s vermifuge. Oh, I knows you, boy – I knows you f’um de grass-roots up. Still an’ wid all dat, ef you should crave to mend yo’ ways – an’ de Heavens above knows dey kin stand a heap of mendin’! – I ain’t gwine be de one to hender you.”

Against her better judgment her tone was softening. For she gave her allegiance unrestrainedly to the doctrine preached at Emmanuel Chapel. She was one of its stanch pillows. Indeed, it might be said of her that she was one of its plumpest bolsters; and Jeff, although admittedly of no religious persuasion, had grown up in the shadow of a differing creed. The winning over of the black ram of another fold would be a greater victory than the reclamation of any wandering sheep who had been reared as a true believer.

“Well, boy,” she went on, in this new mood, “let us hope an’ pray dat in yore case dey’s yit hope. De ways of de Almighty is pas’ findin’ out. Fur do not de Scriptures say dey’s room fur both man an’ beast? – de maid servant an’ de man servant, de ox an’ de ass, dey all may enter in? So dey mout be a skimsy, bare chancet fur sech even ez you is. One thing shore – ef dey’s ary grain of contritefulness in yore soul, trust de Sin Killer to fetch it fo’th to de light of day. He’s de ole fambly doctor w’en it come to dat kind of sickness. You go to dat tabernickle tonight an’ you keep on goin’ an’ le’s see whut come to pass.... Jeffy, dey’s a little mossil of cold peach cobbler lef over f’um dinner yistiddy settin’ up yonder amongst de shelfs of my cu’board!”

“Nome, thank you,” said Jeff. “The emotions w’ich is in me seems lak they ain’t left me no room fur nothin’ else. Seems lak I can’t git my mind on vittles yit. But I shore aims to be at the tabernickle tonight, Aunt Dilsey – I means, Sist’ Dilsey. You jes’ watch me. Tha’s all I asts of you now – jes’ watch me!”

Head down and shoulders hunched, in the manner of one harkening to inner voices, Jeff betook himself around the corner of the back porch. Once out of her sight, though, he flung from him his mien of absorption. The overture had been rendered; there remained much to be done before the curtain rose. The languorous shade invited one to tarry and rest, but Jeff breasted the sunshine, going hither and yon upon his errands. Back of a cabin on Plunket’s Hill he had private conference with one Gumbo Rollins, by profession a carnival concessionaire and purveyor of amusements in a small way. No cash actually changed hands, but on Jeff’s part there was a promise of moneys to be paid in the event of certain as-yet-problematical contingencies.

Next he sought for and, at the Bleeding Heart restaurant, found a limber individual named Tecumseh Sherman Glass, called Cump for short. This Tecumseh Sherman Glass was a person of two trades and one outstanding trait. By day a short-order cook, by night he played in ’Gustus Hillman’s Colored String Band. It is to be marked down in the reader’s memory that the instrument he played was the saxophone; also that he was heavily impregnated with that form of professional jealousy which lurks in the souls of so many artistes; likewise that he was a member in fair standing of the Rev. A. Risen Shine’s congregation, and, finally, that he was a born meddler in other folks’ affairs. These facts all should be borne in mind; they have their value.

With Tecumseh Sherman Glass, Jeff spent some time in a confidential exchange of words. Here, again, the matter of a subsequent financial reward, to be paid by the party of the first part, meaning Jeff, to the party of the second part, meaning Cump, following the satisfactory outcome of sundry developments, was arranged. Would there were space to tell how cunningly, how craftily Jeff, in the subtleties marking this interview, played upon three chords in the other’s being – the chord of vengeful envy, the chord of malice, the chord of avarice. There is not space.

Four o’clock found the plotter entering the parlor of what once had been the establishment of T. Marshall, undertaker, now the Elite Colored Funeral Home, Marshall & Kivil, proprietors. These transformations had dated from the time Percy C. Kivil (Tuskegee ’18) entered the firm. Here was no plain undertaker. Here was an expert and a graduate mortician, with diploma to prove it; also one gifted of the pen. Two inscriptions done in flowing type hung on the wall. One of these inscriptions read:

Oh, Death, where is thy sting

When we officiates?

Embalming done attentively

At standard pre-war rates.

And the other:

Blest be the tie that binds!

Tho death thy form may shake.

Call in a brother of thy race

And let him undertake!

At a desk between these two decorative objects and half shadowed by the bright-green fronds of a large artificial palm, sat Aesop Loving, son-in-law of the senior partner. From his parent-by-marriage Aesop had borrowed desk-room for the carrying on of the multitudinous business relating to the general management of one of the celebrations projected in honor, and on account of, the Eighth of August. He might appear to be absorbed in important details, as he now did. But inside of him he was not happy and Jeff knew the reasons; the reasons were common rumor. This year there was to be more than one celebration; there were to be two; and the opposition, organizing secretly and stealing a march on that usually wide-awake person, Aesop, had rented Belt Line Park, thus forcing Aesop’s crowd to make a poor second choice of the old show-grounds, a treeless common away out near the end of Tennessee Street. On top of this and in an unexpected quarter, even more formidable competition was foreshadowed. A scant eighth of a mile distant from the show-lot and on the same thoroughfare stood the Twelfth Ward tabernacle, and here services would be held both afternoon and evening of the Eighth. The Rev. Wickliffe had so announced, and the Rev. Shine had backed him in the decision.

It was inevitable, with this surpassing magnet of popular interest so near at hand, that for every truant convert who might halt to taste of the pleasures provided by Aesop Loving and his associate promoters, half a dozen possible patrons would pass on by and beyond, drawn away by the compelling power of the Sin Killer’s eloquence. Representations had been made to the revivalist that, with propriety, he might suspend his ministry for the great day. His answer was the declaration that on the Eighth he would preach not merely once, but twice.

By him and his there would be no temporizing with the powers of evil, however insidiously cloaked. Would not dancing be included in the entertainments planned by these self-seeking laymen who now approached him? Would not there be idle sports and vain pastimes calculated to entice the hearts of the populace away from consideration of the welfare of their own souls? Admittedly there would be drinking of soft drinks. And into the advertised softness some hardness assuredly would slip. You could not fool the Sin Killer. Having taken a firm stand, his rectitude presently moved him to further steps. On his behalf it was stated that he, personally, would lead the elect in triumphant procession out Tennessee Street to the tabernacle between the afternoon preaching and the evening. As an army with banners, the saved, the sober, and the seeking would march past, thus attesting their fealty to the cause which moved them. He defied all earthly forces to lure a single one from the ranks.

And, after the preaching, under his auspices, there would be a mighty cutting of watermelons for those deemed to be qualified to participate therein. By the strict tenets of the Rev. Wickliffe’s theology it seemed that watermelons were almost the only luscious things of this carnal world not held to be potentially or openly sinful. Small wonder then that Jeff, jauntily entering the Elite Funeral Home, read traces of an ill-concealed distress writ plain upon the face of Aesop Loving.

“Well, Brother Lovin’, you shore does look lak you’d hung yore harp ’pon the willer-tree an’ wuz fixin’ to tek in sorrow fur a livin’,” he said in greeting. “Cheer yo’se’f up; ’tain’t nothin’ so worse but whut it mout be worser.”

“Easy fur you to say so, Brother Poindexter; harder fur me to do so,” stated Aesop. “Gallivantin’ ’round the way you is, you ain’t got no idea of the aggervations w’ich keeps comin’ up in connection wid an occasion sech ez this one, an’ mo’ ’specially the aggervations w’ich pussonally afflicts the director-general of the same, w’ich I is him.”

“I been hearin’ somethings myse’f,” said Jeff. “Word is come to me, fur one thing, that this yere smart-ellicky gang out at the Belt Line Park is aimin’ to try to cut some of the groun’ frum under yore feet. I regrets to hear it.”

“’Tain’t them so much,” said Aesop. “We couldn’t ’spect to go ’long havin’ a nomopoly furever. Sooner or late they wuz bound to be opposition arisin’ up. ’Tain’t them so much, although I will say it wuz a low-flung trick to tek an’ rent that park right out frum under our noses ’thout givin’ us no warnin’ so’s we mout go an’ rent it fu’st. No, hit’s the action of that Emmanuel Chapel bunch w’ich gives me the mos’ deepest concern. Seems lak ev’ry time that Rev’n’ Sin Killer open his mouth I kin feel cold cash crawlin’ right out of my pocket. Mind you, Brother Poindexter, I ain’t got a word to say ag’in religion. I’s strong fur it on Sundays, ez you well knows, but dog-gone religion w’en it come interferin’ wid a pusson’s chancet to pick up a little spare change fur hisse’f on a week-day!”

“Spoke lak a true business man, Brother Lovin’,” said Jeff. “Still, I reckin you’s mebbe countin’ the spoilt eggs ’fore they’s all laid. The way I sees it, you’ll do fairly well, nevertheless an’ to the contrary notwithstandin’. Le’s see. Ain’t you goin’ to have the dancin’-pavilion goin’ all day?”

“Yas, but—”

“Ain’t you goin’ to have money rollin’ in frum all the snack-stands an’ frum the fried-fish privilege an’ frum the cane rackits an’ frum the knock-the-babies-down an’ all?”

“Tubbe shore, but—”

“Ain’t you due to pick up a right smart frum the kitty of the private crap game an’ the chuck-a-luck layout?”

“Natchelly. But—”

“Hole on; I ain’t th’ough yit. Seems lak to me you ain’t properly counted up yore blessin’s a-tall. Ain’t the near-beer—” he sank his voice discreetly, although there was no one to overhear “ain’t the near-beer an’ the still nearer beer goin’ fetch you in a right peart lil’ income? I’ll say they is. An’ ain’t you goin’ do mighty well on yore own account out of yore share of the commission frum Gumbo Rollinses’ Flyin’ Jinny?”

“Hole on, hole on! How come Gumbo Rollins?”

“W’y tha’s all fixed,” stated Jeff. “Gumbo he’ll be out there ’fore sunup on the ’p’inted day wid his ole Flyin’ Jinny an’ his ole grind-organ an’—”

“Tain’t nothin’ fixed,” demurred the astonished and indignant Aesop. “’Tain’t nothin’ fixed ’thout I fixes it. Ain’t I had pestermints ’nuff las’ yeah settlin’ up, or tryin’ to, wid that Rollins? Ain’t I told him then that never ag’in would I—”

“Oh, tha’s settled,” announced Jeff soothingly.

“Who settled it?”

“Me.”

“You?”

“Yas, me – out of pyure frien’ship fur you. Lissen, Brother Lovin’, an’ give due heed. I comes to you d’rect frum Gumbo Rollins. He’s done seen the error of the way he acked tow’ds you that time. He’s cravin’ that all the grudges of the bygone past shall be disremembered. Here’s whut he’s goin’ to do: He’s goin’ give yore organization the reg’lar cut, an’ ’pon top of that he’s goin’ hand you, pussonally an’ private, a special extra five pur cent, on all he teks in; that comes ez a free-will offerin’ to you. He’s goin’ ’bandon his plan to run ez a independint attraction on the Eighth down back of the market-house. He’s goin’ be wid you heart an’ soul an’ Flyin’ Jinny. All he asts, through me, is that he kin have the right to set her up on the purtic’lar spot w’ich he’s got in mind out there on them show-ground lots. An’ finally an’ furthermo’ he’s done commission me to hand you ten dollars, unbeknownst to anybody, jes’ to prove to you that his heart’s in the right place an’ that he’s wishful fur to do the square thing.” He felt in his pockets, producing a crumpled bill. “An’ here ’tis!”

Aesop pouched the currency on the flank where he carried his personal funds before his commercial instinct inspired him to seek out the motives actuating the volunteer peacemaker. Experience had taught him to beware of Greeks bearing gifts – not of the gifts particularly, but of the Greeks.

“Well,” he said, “ef Gumbo Rollins aims to be honest an’ open an’ abovebode wid us, w’y that puts a diff’unt face on it. But so fur ez I heared tell, you an’ Gumbo Rollins ain’t been so thick ez all this up till now. I’s wonderin’ whut does you ’spect to git out of the little transaction fur yo’se’f? ’Ca’se I gives you warnin’ right yere an’ now that ef you’s hopin’ to git a split out of me you mout jes’ ez well stop dreamin’ ary sech a delusion an’ become undelirious ag’in.”

“Stop, Brother Lovin’,” broke in Jeff in the tone of one aggrieved at being unjustly accused. “Has I asted you fur anything? Then wait till I does so.”

“All right,” agreed Aesop. “I’ll wait till you does so an’ w’en you does so I’ll say no, same ez I’s already sayin’ it to you in advance. Say, boy, you must have yore reasons fur the int’rust you is displayin’ in dis matter.”

“Whutever ’tis ’taint got nothin’ to do wid lurin’ no money out of yore possession,” said Jeff. His voice changed to one of deep gravity. “Brother Lovin’, look yere at me.”

He glanced about him, making doubly sure they were alone. He advanced one step and came to a halt; he made his figure rigid and gave first the grand hailing-sign of the Afro-American Society of Supreme Kings of the Universe, then the private signal of distress which invokes succor and support, and he wound up by uttering the cabalistic words which bind a fellow Supreme King in the vows of eternal secrecy on pain of having his heart cut out of his bosom and burned and the ashes scattered to the four winds. For his part, Aesop Loving arose and, obeying the ritual, made the proper responses. In a solemn silence they exchanged the symbolic grip which is reserved only for occasions of emergency and stress and which unites brother to brother in bonds stronger than steel. A moment later Aesop Loving was alone.

It was not Jeff, the intriguer, who had colleagued with Gumbo Rollins and conspired with Cump Glass, who came in the evening to the Twelfth Ward tabernacle and sought a seat on a bench well up toward the front where he could be fairly conspicuous and yet not too conspicuous; neither was it the persuasive person who had dangled the bait of private profit before the beguiled eyes of Aesop Loving. Rather was it the serious, self-searching, introspective Jeff, who earlier that day had besought counsel and comfort of Aunt Dilsey Turner. He came alone, walking with head bowed as walks one who is wrapped in his own thoughts. He arrived betimes; he remained silent and apart, inwardly communing, one would have said, while the audience rustled in.

So engrossed was he that he seemed to have no eyes even for Ophelia, who perched high aloft, the brightest flower in the hanging garden of color that banked the tiers of the choir division terracing up behind the platform. She, in turn, had no eyes for any there save Prof. Cephus Fringe, who, it should be added, had one eye for Ophelia and the other for his own person. Even by those prejudiced in his favor it was not to be denied that the Professor was, as one might say, passionately addicted to himself. When, with Cephus Fringe accompanying and directing, the opening hymn was offered, Ophelia, lifting high her soprano voice, sang directly at, to, and for him. From the front this plainly was to be observed; in fact was the subject of whispered comment among some of Jeff’s neighbors.

As though he heard them not nor saw the byplay, he gave no sign which might be interpreted as denoting annoyance or chagrin. There was only a friendly and whole-souled approval in his look when, following the song, Prof. Fringe rendered – I believe this is the customary phrase – rendered as a solo on his saxophone one of the compositions bearing his name as author. There was rapt attention and naught else in his pose and on his face the while the Rev. Wickliffe, swinging his scythe of righteousness, mowed for a solid hour in Satan’s weedy back yard, so that the penitents fell in a broad swath.

From her place hard by, Aunt Dilsey vigilantly watched Jeff and was, in spite of herself, convinced of his sincerity. She marked how, at the close of the meeting, he passed slowly, almost reluctantly out, stopping more than once and looking rearward as though half inclined to turn back and join the ranks of those who clustered still at the foot of the pulpit, completely and utterly won over. She was moved to direct the notice of certain of the sistren and brethren to his behavior as conspicuous proof of the compelling fervor of the Sin Killer. Swiftly the word spread that Jeff Poindexter magically had ceased to be a horrible example and was betraying evidences that he might yet become what insurance agents call a prospect.

As though to justify this hope Jeff attended Tuesday night; his presence attesting him a well-wisher, his deportment an added testimony that he deeply had been stirred by the outpoured words of the revivalist. Before the service got under way he seized upon an opportunity to be introduced to the Rev. Wickliffe. Many were spectators to the meeting between them, and speculation ran higher upon the possibility that before the week ended he would be enrolled among the avowedly convicted. Again on Wednesday night he was on hand, an attentive and earnest listener.

Prior to the preliminary exercise of song on this night, the Rev. Wickliffe outlined the amplified plans for the great moral jubilation on the evening of the Eighth and invited suggestions from the assemblage to the end that naught be overlooked which might add to its splendors. At this invitation, almost as though he had been awaiting some such favorable opening, there stood up promptly Tecumseh Sherman Glass, and Tecumseh made a certain motion which on being put to the vote of the house carried unanimously amid sounds of a general approval. Some applauded, no doubt, because of the popularity of the idea embodied in the motion and some perhaps because the brother, in offering it, was deemed to have displayed a most generous, a most becoming, and a totally unexpected spirit of magnanimity toward a fellow professional occupying a place which Cump Glass or any other saxophonist might well envy him.

If at this Jeff’s heart gave a joyous jump inside of him, his face remained a mask to hide his real feelings. If, privily, by day he labored to gather up all the loose ends of his shaping design, publicly by night he patronized the tabernacle. He was present on Thursday night and on Friday and on Saturday, and three times on Sunday he was present, maintaining still his outward bearing of interest and sympathy. He was like a tree which bends before the compelling blast yet refuses for a little while longer to topple headlong. This brings us up to Monday, the Glorious Eighth.

With the morning of that day or with its nooning or with its afternooning we need have no concern, replete though they were in variety of entertainment and abounding in pleasurable incident. For us the interest chiefly centers in the early evening and especially in that part of the evening falling between seven o’clock and forty minutes past seven. At seven, prompt on the clock’s stroke and as guaranteed in the announcements, the parade fathered by the Rev. Wickliffe, started from the corner of Tennessee and Front Streets, down by the river, and wended, as the saying goes, its way due westward into the sunset’s painted afterglow.

This was a parade! A great man had sired it; a tried organizer had fostered it; proved executives had worked out the problems of its divisions and its groupings. At its head, suitably mounted upon a white steed, rode a grand marshal who was more than a grand marshal. For in his one person this dignitary combined two parts: not only was he the grand marshal with a broad sash draped diagonally across his torso to prove it, but likewise he was the official trumpeter. At intervals he raised his horn to his lips and sounded forth inspiring notes. That his horn was neither a trumpet nor yet a bugle but a long, goose-necked thing might be regarded as merely a detail. Only one who was overly technical would have noted the circumstance at all. Behind him, sixteen abreast, appeared the special tabernacle choristers with large fluttering badges of royal purple. They came on magnificently, filling the street from curb-line to curb-line, and the sound of their singing was as a great wind gathering. The second one on the left, counting from the end, in the front row, was Ophelia Stubblefield, tawny and splendid as a lithesome tiger-lily. She wore white with long white kid gloves and a beflowered hat which represented the hoarded total of six weeks’ wages. You would have said it was worth the money. Anybody would.

In the second section rode the Rev. Wickliffe and the Rev. Shine; they were in a touring-car with its top flattened back. You might say they composed the second section. Carriages and automobiles rolling along immediately behind them bore the members of the official board of Emmanuel Chapel in sets of fours, and the chief financial contributors to the revival which this night would reach its climax. Flanking the carriages and following after them marched the living garnerings of the campaign – the converts to date, a veritable Gideon’s Band of them, in number amounting to a host, and all afoot as befitting the palmer and the pilgrim. Established members of the congregation, in hired hacks, in jitneys, in rented and privately owned equipages, and also afoot came next.

Voluntarily aligned representatives of the colored population at large formed the tail of the column. Of these last there surely were hundreds. Hundreds more, in holiday dress now somewhat rumpled after a day of pleasure-seeking and pleasure-finding, lined the sidewalks to see this spectacle. Nowhere along the straightaway of the line of march did the pavements lack for onlookers, but nearing the end of the route, and especially where the wide vacant spaces of the Tennessee Street common had been preëmpted by the festal enterprises of Director General Aesop Loving and his confrères, the press became thicker and ever thicker. Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass. They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the tabernacle looming against the sunset’s dying fires an eighth of a mile on beyond.

It is necessary here and now that, taking our eyes from this scene, we hark back to the Wednesday evening preceding. It will be recalled that on this evening a certain motion was made and by acclamation adopted. The maker of the motion, as we know, was Tecumseh Sherman Glass; its beneficiary, as the reader shrewdly may have divined, was Cephus Fringe. Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse – a temporary eclipse – but to an artiste none the less distasteful – in the shadow of the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it.

Be these conjectures as they may be, it is not to be gainsaid that the suggestion embodied in Cump Glass’s motion was to Prof. Fringe highly agreeable, insuring, as it did, a fair measure of prominence for him without infringing upon his chief’s distinctions. He showed his approbation. I believe I already have intimated that Prof. Fringe was not exactly prejudiced against himself. Any lingering aversions he may have entertained in this quarter had long since been overcome. Nevertheless a fresh doubt, arising from fresh causes, assailed him as the first flush of satisfaction abated within him.

This new-born uneasiness betrayed itself in his voice and his manner when, at the conclusion of the night’s services, he encountered Cump Glass in the middle aisle. The meeting was not entirely by chance; if the truth is to be known, Cump had maneuvered to bring it about. The act was his; a greater mind than his, though, had sponsored the act. And Cump Glass, rightly interpreting the look upon Prof. Fringe’s large, plump face, guilefully set himself to play upon the emotional nature of the other. With a gracious wave of his hand he checked the Professor’s expression of thanks.

“Don’t mention it,” he said generously, “don’t mention it. It teks a purformer to understand another purformer’s feelin’s. So I therefo’ teken it ’pon myse’f to nomernate you fur the gran’ marshal and also ez the proper one to sound the buglin’ blasts endurin’ of the turnout. Seems lak somebody else would ’a’ had the sense to do so, but w’en they wuzn’t nobody w’ich did so, I steps in. But right soon afterwards I gits to stedyin’ ’bout the hoss you’ll be ridin’, an’ it’s been worryin’ me quite some little – the question of the hoss.”

“I been thinkin’ concernin’ of ’at very same thing,” confessed Cephus Fringe.

“Is that possible?” exclaimed Cump Glass with well-simulated surprise. “Well, suh, smart minds shorely runs in the same grooves, ez the sayin’ goes. Yas, suh, settin’ yonder after I made that motion, I sez to myse’f, I sez, ‘Glass, you done started this thing an’ you must see it th’ough. ’Twon’t never do in this world fur the gran’ marshal to be stuck up ’pon the top side of a skittish, skeery liver’-stable hoss that’ll mebbe start cuttin’ up right in the smack middle of things and distrac’ the gran’ marshal’s mind frum his business.’ I seen that happen mo’ times ’en oncet, wid painful results. I s’pose, tho, you kin ride mighty nigh ary hoss they is, can’t you, Purfessor?”

“Well, I could do so oncet,” stated Cephus in the manner of one who formerly had followed rough-riding for a calling, “but leadin’ a public life fur so long, lak I has, I ain’t had much time fur private pleasures. ’Sides w’ich, ef I’m goin’ sound the notes I’ll be needin’ both hands free fur my instermint.”

“Puzzactly the same thought w’ich came to me, jes’ lak I’m tellin’ it to you,” agreed Cump. “It teks a musician to think of things w’ich an ordinary pusson wouldn’t never dream of. So, fur the las’ hour or so I been castin’ about in my mind an’ jes’ a minute ago the idee come to me. I feels shore I kin arrange wid a frien’ of mine to he’p us out. I s’pose you is acquainted with this yere Jeffy Poindexter?”

“I has met him,” said Cephus with chill creeping into his tones. “An’ I has observed him present yere the last two-three nights. But I ain’t aimin’ to ax no favors frum him.”

“You ain’t needin’ to,” said Cump. “I’ll ’tend to that myse’f. Besides, Purfessor, you is sizin’ up Jeffy Poindexter wrong. He’s went an’ ’sperienced a change of heart in his feelin’s tow’ds whut’s goin’ on yere. Furthermo’” – and here he favored his flattered listener with a confidential and a meaning wink – “he got sense ’nuff, Jeffy has, to know w’en he’s crowded plum’ out of the runnin’ by somebody w’ich is mo’ swiftly gaited ’en whut he is, an’ natchelly he crave to stand in well wid a winner. Naw, suh, that Jeffy, he’d be most highly overjoyed to haul off an’ lend a helpin’ hand, ef by so doin’ he mout put you onder a favor to him.”

Cephus sniffed, half disarmed but wavering.

“Wharin’ could he he’p out? He ain’t ownin’ no private string of ridin’-hosses so fur ez I’ve took note of.”

“The w’ite man he wuks fur is got one an’ Jeffy gits the borrowin’ use of her – it’s a mare – w’enever he want to, ez I knows frum whut he tells me an’ frum whut I seen. Purfessor, that mare is jes’ natchelly ordained an’ cut out fur peradin’ – broad ez a feather-tick, gentle ez the onborn lamb, an’ mouty nigh pyure white – perzactly the right color fur a gran’ marshal’s hoss. Crowds ain’t goin’ pester that lady-mare none. Music ain’t goin’ disturb her none whutsoever, neither.”

“Whut’s her reg’lar gait?”

“Her reg’lar gait is standin’ still. But w’en she’s travelin’ at her bestest speed she uses the cemetery walk. See that mare goin’ pas’ you w’en she’s in a hurry an’ you say to yo’se’f, you say, ‘Yere you is, bound fur de buryin’-groun’, but how come you got separated frum the hearse?’ Purfessor, that mare’s entitled Christian name is Mittie May. Did you ever hear of ary thing on fo’ laigs, ur two, w’ich answered to the name of Mittie May that wuz tricky?”

“Better be mouty sure,” said the cautious Cephus, concerned for the safety and dignity of the creature which he held most dear of all on this earth. “’Member, I’ll be needin’ both hands free – ’twon’t be no time fur me to go jerkin’ on the reins w’en my saxophone is requirin’ to be played.”

“You’s right there,” agreed Cump. “’Twouldn’t never do, neither, fur you to slip off an’ mebbe git yo’se’f crippled up. Whar would this yere pertracted meetin’ be then? Lemme think. Ah, hah! I got it – the notion jes’ come to me. Purfessor, listen yere.” He placed his lips close to the other’s ear and spoke perhaps fifty words in a confidential whisper. In token of approval and acquiescence the Professor warmly clasped the right hand of this forethoughted Glass.

After such a manner was Cephus Fringe, all unwittingly, thrust into the pit which had been digged for him.

At the point where the narrative was broken into for the interpolation of the episode now set forth, the head of the parade, as will be remembered, was just coming abreast of the old show-grounds. Now, the head of the parade was Cephus Fringe, and none other. One glance at him, upon a white steed, all glorious in high hat and frock coat and with that wide crimson sash dividing his torso in two parts, would have proved that to the most ignorant. As for his palfrey, she ambled along as though Eighth of August celebrations and a saxophone blaring between her drooping ears, and jubilating crowds and all that singing behind her, and all these carnival barkers shouting alongside her, had been her daily portion since first she was foaled into the world. The compound word lady-like would be the word fittest to describe her.

Not twenty feet from her, close up to where the abutting common met the straggling brick pavement, stood the battered Flyin’ Jinny of Gumbo Rollins. It was nearermost to the street-line of all the attractions provided by Aesop Loving and his associates. Here, on the site which he had chosen, was Gumbo Rollins himself, competently in charge. At the precise moment when Mittie May and her proud rider had reached a point just opposite him, Gumbo Rollins elected to set his device in motion and with it the steam-organ which was part and parcel of the thing’s organism. Really he might have waited a bit.

Lured by the prospect of beholding something for nothing, most of his consistent patrons temporarily had deserted him to flock out into the roadway and witness the passing by of the Sin Killer’s cohorts. Two infatuated lovers, country darkies, sat with arms entwined in a rickety wooden chariot. Here and there a pickaninny clung to the back of a spotted wooden pony or a striped wooden zebra. These, for the moment, were his only customers; nevertheless Gumbo Jones Rollins swung a lever and started the machinery. The merry-go-round moved with a shriek of steam; the wheezy organ began spouting forth the introductory bars of a rollicking galop, a tune so old that its very name had been forgotten, although the air of it lived anonymously.

As though she had been bee-stung, Mittie May flung up her head. She arched her neck and pranced with all four of her feet. She spun about, scattering those of the pedestrian classes who hemmed her so closely in. Unmindful of a sudden anxious command from her rider, she swung her foreparts this way and that. She was looking for it. It must be directly hereabouts somewhere. In those ancient days of her youthful vagabondage it had always been close at hand when that tune – her own tune – was played.

Then above the heads of the crowd she saw it – a scuffed circlet of earth measuring exactly fifty-two feet across and marking the location where the middle ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger’s Mighty United Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer’s third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one lone blasted tree from the exact middle of a circular island of this sawdust; there should have been a ringmaster and at least two clowns and an orderly clutter of paraphernalia. Nevertheless there before her was the middle ring. And the music had started. And Mittie May answered the cue which had lived in her brain for fifteen long years and more, just as always she answered it, or sought to, when that tune smote her eardrums.

The startled spectators gave backward and to either side in scrambling retreat as she lunged forward, cleaving a passage for herself to the proper spot of entrance. She whisked in. Around the ring she sped, her hoofs drumming against the flanks of the ring-back, her barrel slanting far over in obedience to the laws of centripetal force, her tail rippling out behind her like a homebound pennon in a fair breeze – around and around and yet again and then some more.

To be sure there were irregularities in the procedure. Upon her back, springily erect, there should have been a jaunty equestrian swinging a gay pink leg in air and anon uttering the traditional Hoop-la. Instead there was a heavy bulk which embraced her neck with two strong arms, which wallowed about on her spinal column, which continually cried out entreaties, threats, commands, even profanities. Yet with Mittie May, as with most of us, habit was stronger than all else. She knew her duty as of old. She did it. Accommodating her gait to the quickening measures of the music, she stretched her legs, passing out of a rolling gallop into a hard run. Yet one more thing, or rather the lack of it, perplexed her. Attendants should be bringing forth knockdown fence-panels for her to leap over and hoops of paper for her rider to leap through. Never mind; out of her imagination she would supply these missing details when the proper moment came. She’d hurdle the hurdles which weren’t there. Meanwhile she knew what to do – around and around and around, right willingly, right blithely went Mittie May.

And, with her, around and around went also Prof. Cephus Fringe, but not willingly and by no means blithely. He shed his high hat and with it all lingering essences of his dignity. One of Mittie May’s feet squashed down on the high hat and it folded up like a condensed time-card. He lost the last vestige of his vanishing authority when he lost his saxophone. The Professor did not understate the case when he had intimated that he was somewhat out of practice at equestrian exercises. Stark terror convulsed his frame; instinct of self-preservation made him careless of the language he used. Indeed, a good deal of the language he used was bounced right out of him.

Haply perhaps for him – and surely nothing else that happened was for him haply circumstanced – most of the naughty words reached no ears save those of Mittie May. There were sounds which drowned them – sounds which began with a fluttered outcry of alarm, which progressed to a great gasp of astonishment, which swelled and rippled into a titter, which grew into a vast rocking roar of unrestrained joyousness. Children shrieked, old women cackled, old men wheezed, adults guffawed, strong men rolled upon the earth in uncontrollable outbursts of thunderous mirth. As though stricken in all his members, Gumbo Rollins fell alongside his whirling Flyin’ Jinny, but failed not, even in that excess of his mounting hysteria, to see to it that the steam-driven organ continued to grind out the one tune of its repertoire. The members of the choir forgot that their mission was to sing. They were too busy laughing to sing. And high and clear above the chorus of their glad outcry rose the soprano gurglings of Ophelia Stubblefield as she leaned for support up against somebody.

You ask, Why did not Prof. Cephus Fringe fall off of Mittie May? He tried to. At first he sought only to stay on; then after a bit he sought to get off; he couldn’t. The cause for his staying on was revealed when Mittie May took the first of those mental hazards of hers. As she rose grandly into space to clear the imagined top-rail of the imagined panel and with hind heels drawn well in under her, descended and continued on her circling way, a keen-eyed spectator, all bent double though he was, alongside the ring, and beating himself in the short ribs, caught a flashing glimpse of a strong but narrow strap which bound the rider’s ankles to the saddle-girth and which, through the ordered march of the parade, had been safely hidden from view behind the ornament housings of the broad Spanish stirrups. Cump Glass had done his fiendish work well; those straps strained, but they held.

“Name of Glory!” shouted out the observer. “He done tie hisse’f on! He done tie hisse’f——” Overcome, he choked.

With a great sweeping, swooping heave Mittie May made the last leap. And then at the precise second when the music stopped, the leathern thongs parted, and as the burden on her tumbled off and lay struggling in the dust, Mittie May swerved from the ring and, magically and instantaneously becoming once more Judge Priest’s staidly respectable old buggy-mare, stood waiting for Jeff Poindexter to come and lead her out of all this shrieking, whooping jam of folks back to her stable. And Jeff came. He had been there all the time. It was against his supporting frame that Ophelia had slanted limply the while she laughed.

•     •     •     •     •

Here the curtain is lowered for two seconds to denote the passage of two days. At its rise Jeff Poindexter and Gumbo Rollins are discovered sitting side by side on the back step of a cabin in the Plunket’s Hill neighborhood.

“An’ so they ain’t nobody seen him sence?” It is Jeff who is speaking.

“So they tells me,” answers Gumbo. “Ain’t nary soul seen hair nur hide of him frum the moment he riz out ’en that ring an’ tuk his foot in his hand an’ marviled further. Yas, suh, the pertracted meetin’ will have to worry ’long the best way it kin ’thout its champion purty man. Well, sometimes it seems lak these things turns out fur the bes’. It suttin’ly would damage his lacinated feelin’s still mo’ ef he wuz yere an’ heared folks all over town callin’ him the Jazzed-up Circus Rider.”

“I got a better name fur him ’en that,” says Jeff, “Whiffletit.”

“W’ich?” asks Gumbo.

Seemingly Jeff has not heard his friend’s question. In an undertone, and as though seeking to recall the words of a given formula, he communes with himself, “Fust you baits him wid the cheese. An’ ’en w’en he nibble the cheese, he git all swelled up an’ ’en whilst he’s flappin’ helpless you leans over the side of the boat an jes’ natchelly laffs him to death.”

“Whut-all is you mumblin’?” demands Gumbo Rollins, puzzled by these seemingly unrelated and irrelevant mouthings. “Is you crazy?”

“Yas,” concurs Jeff, “crazy lak the king of the weazels.”

Pictorial Review, Mar 1922
Sundry Accounts (1922)

The Cater-Cornered Sex

~

They had a saying down our way in the old days that Judge Priest administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside of it. Perhaps they were right. Certainly he had a way of seeking short cuts through thickets of legal verbiage to the rights of things, the which often gave acute sorrow to the souls of those members of the bar who venerated the very ink in which the statutory act had been printed and worshiped manfully before the graven images of precedent. But elsewise, generally speaking, it appeared to give satisfaction. Nobody ever beat the judge in any of his races for reëlection, and after a while they just naturally quit trying.

Nor did it seem to distress him deeply when the grave and learned lords of the highest tribunal of the commonwealth saw fit, as they sometimes did, to quarrel with a decision of his which, according to their lights, ran counter to the authorities and the traditions revered by these august gentlemen.

“Ah-hah!” he would say in his high penny-flute voice when such a thing happened. “I see where the honorable court of appeals has disagreed with me agin. Well, they’ve still got quite a piece to go yit before they ketch up with the number of times I’ve disagreed with them.”

But he never said such a thing in open court. Such utterances he reserved for his cronies and confidants. Once he was under the dented tin dome where he sat for so many years, he became so firm a stickler for the forms and the dignities that practically a sacerdotal air was imparted to the proceedings. As you might say, he was almost high church in his adherence to the ritualisms. Lawyers coming before him did not practice the law in their shirt sleeves. They might do this when appearing on certain neighbor circuits, but not here. They did not smoke while court was in session, or sit reared back in their chairs with their feet up on the counsel tables and on the bar railings. Of course when not actually engaged in addressing the court one might chew tobacco in moderation, it being an indisputable fact that such was conducive to lubrication of the mental processes and a sedative for the nerves besides; but the act of chewing must be discreetly and inaudibly carried on, and he who in the heat of argument or under the stress of cross-questioning a perverse witness failed to patronize the cuspidors which dotted the floor at suitable intervals stood in peril of a stern admonishment for the first offense and a fine for the second.

Off the bench our judge was the homeliest and simplest of men. On the bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe. And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding, his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much use anyway for the consonant “r.” As William Pitman Priest, Esq., citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king’s English as though he had but small personal regard for the king or his English either.

Similarly he always showed respect, outwardly at least, for the written letter of the statute as written and cited. But when it seemed to him that justice tempered with mercy stood in danger of being choked in a lawyer’s loop of red tape he sheared through the entanglements with a promptitude which appealed more strongly, perhaps, to the lay mind than to the professional. And if, from the bench, he might not succor the deserving litigant or the penitent offender without violation to the given principles of the law, which, aiming ever for the greater good to the greater number, threatened present disaster for one deserving, he very often privily would busy himself in the matter. This, then, was why they had that saying about him.

It largely was in a private capacity that Judge Priest figured in the various phases relating to the Millsap case, with which now we are about to deal. The beginning of this was the ending of Felix Millsap, but from its start to its finish he alone held the secrets of all its aspects. The best people in town, those who made up the old families, knew the daughter of this Felix Millsap; the people whose families were not so old perhaps, but by way of compensation more likely to be large ones, the common people, as the word goes, knew the father. The best people commiserated decorously with the daughter when her father was abruptly taken from this life; the others wondered what was going to become of his widow. For, you see, the daughter moved in very different circles from the one in which her parents moved. Their lines did not touch. But Judge Priest had the advantage on his side of moving at will in both circles. Indeed he moved in all circles without serious impairment to his social position in the community at large.

Briefly, the case of her who had been Eleanor Millsap was the case of a child who, diligently climbing out of the environment of her childhood, has attained to heights where her parents may never hope to come, a common enough case here in flux and fluid America, and one which some will applaud and some will deplore, depending on how they view such matters; a daughter proclaiming by her attitude that she is ashamed of the sources of her origin; a father and a mother visibly proud of their offspring’s successful rise, yet uncomplainingly accepting the rôles to which she has assigned them – there you have this small family tragedy in forty words or less.

When the Millsaps moved to our town their baby was in her second summer. With the passage of years the father and the mother came, as suitably mated couples often do, to look rather like each other. But then, probably there never had been a time when they, either in temperament or port, had appeared greatly unlike, seeing that both the pair were colorless, prosaic folk. So for Nature to mold them into a common pattern was merely a detail of time and patience. But their little Eleanor betrayed no resemblance to either in figure or face or personality. It was in this instance as though hereditary traits had been thwarted; as though two sober barnyard fowl had mated to bear a golden pheasant. They were secluded, shy, unimaginative; she was vivid and sprightly, with dash to her, and audacity.

They lived in one of those small gloomy houses whose shutters always are closed and whose fronts always are blank; a house where the business of living seems to be carried on surreptitiously, almost by stealth. She, from the time she could walk alone, was actively abroad, a bright splash of color in the small oblong of shabby front yard. The father, Felix Millsap, was an odd-jobs woodworker. He made his living by undertakings too trivial for a contracting carpenter and joiner to bid on and too complicated for an amateur to attempt. The mother, Martha by name, took in plain sewing to help out. She had about her the air of the needle drudge, with shoulders bowed in and the pricked, scored fingers of a seamstress, and a permanent pucker at one corner of her mouth from holding pins there. The daughter showed trim, slender limbs and a bodily grace and a piquant face which generations of breeding and wealth so very often fail to fashion.

When she graduated as the valedictorian of her class in the high school she cut a far better figure in the frock her mother had made for her than did any there on the stage at St. Clair Hall; she had a trick of wearing simple garments which gave them distinction. Already she had half a dozen sweethearts. Boys were drawn to her; girls she repelled rather. Girls found her too self-centered, too intent on attaining her own aims to give much heed to companionships. They called her selfish. Well, if selfishness is another name for a constant, bounding ambition to get on and up in the world Eleanor Millsap was selfish. But for the boys she had a tremendous attraction. They admired her quick, cruel wit, her energy, her good looks. She met her sweethearts on the street, at the soda fountain, in that trysting place for juvenile sweetheartings, the far corner of the post-office corridor.

She never invited any of these youthful squires of hers to her house; they kept rendezvous with her at the corner below and they parted from her at the gate. They somehow gathered, without being told it in so many words, that she was ashamed of the poverty of her home, and, boylike, they felt a dumb sympathy for her that she should be denied what so many girls had. But for all her sidewalk flirtations, she kept herself aloof from any touch of scandal; the very openness of her gaddings protected her from that. Besides, she seemed instinctively to know that if she meant to make the best possible bargain for herself in life she must keep herself unblemished – must give of her charms but not give too freely. Town gossips might call her a forward piece, as they did; jealousy among girls of her own age might have it that she was flip and fresh; but no one, with truth, might brand her as fast.

Having graduated with honors, she learned stenography – learned it thoroughly and well, as was her way with whatever she undertook – and presently found a place as secretary to Dallam Wybrant, the leading merchandise broker of the three in town. Now Dallam Wybrant was youngish and newly widowed – bereft but rallying fast from the grief of losing a wife who had been his senior by several years. Knowing people – persons who could look through a grindstone as far as the next one, and maybe farther – smiled with meaning when they considered the prospect. A good-looking, shrewd girl, always smart and trig and crisp, always with an eye open for the main chance, sitting hour by hour and day by day in the same office with a lonely, impressionable, conceited man – well, there was but one answer to it. But one answer to it there was. Nobody was very much surprised, although probably some mothers with marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and there were married.

As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an assured social position and wealth – as our town measured wealth – in his own name, she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on living, all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street; the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she, mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves. They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose – and she did not choose.

One evening – it might have been about a year and a half after the marriage of his daughter – Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight. It had been a hot day, and where he had been toiling on a roof shed which required reshingling, the sun had blazed down upon him until it sucked his strength out of him, leaving him limp and draggy. He walked with his head down, indifferent in his sweated weariness to things about him. All the same, the motorman on the Belt Line car swinging out of Yazoo Street into Commercial should have sounded his gong for the turning. Therein lay his contributory negligence. Also, disinterested witnesses subsequently agreed that he took the curve at high speed. It was one of these witnesses who saw what was about to happen and cried out a vain warning even as the motorman ground on his brakes in a belated effort to avoid the inevitable. Felix Millsap was dead when they got him out from under the forward trucks. The doctors said he must have died instantly; probably he never knew what hit him.

In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence. But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the burial. It was explained by the minister and by the undertaker to those who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And she had written her mother a nice letter; the clergyman made this point plain to such as spoke to him regarding the absence of Mrs. Wybrant. He had seen the letter; that is to say, he had seen the envelope containing it. What the clergyman did not know was that to the letter the daughter had added a paragraph, underscored, suggesting the name of a leading firm of lawyers as suitable and competent to defend their interests – her mother’s and her own – in an action for damages against the street-car company.

However, as it developed, there was no need for the pressing of suit. The street-railway company, tacitly confessing fault on the part of one of its employees, preferred to compromise out of hand and so avoid the costs of litigation and the vexations of a trial. The sum paid in settlement was by order of the circuit court lodged in the hands of a special administrator, as temporary custodian of the estate of the late Felix Millsap, by him to be handed over to the heirs at law. So far as the special administrator was concerned, this would end his duties in the premises, seeing that other than this sum there was no property to be divided.

The little house at the foot of Yazoo Street belonged to the widow. It had been deeded to her at the time of its purchase years and years before, and she had been a co-partner in the undertaking of paying off the mortgage upon it by dribs and bitlets which represented hard work and the strictest economy. Naturally her husband had made no will. Probably it had never occurred to him that he would have any property to bequeath to anyone. But by virtue of his having died under a street car rather than in his bed he was worth more dead than ever, living, he had dreamed of being worth. He was worth eight thousand dollars in cash. So, as it turned out, he had left something other than a name for sober reliability and a reputation for paying his debts. And no doubt, in that bourne to which his spirit had been translated out of a battered body, his spirit rejoiced that the manner of his taking off had been as it was.

But if the special administrator rested content in the thought that his share in the transaction practically would end with but few added details, his superior, the chief judicial officer of the district, felt called upon to take certain steps on his own initiative solely, and without consulting any person regarding the advisability of his action. It was characteristic of Judge Priest that he should move promptly in the matter. To a greater degree it also was characteristic of him that, setting out for a visit to one of no social account whatsoever, he should garb himself with more care than he might have shown had he been going to see one of those mighty ones who sit in the high places. In a suit of rumply but spotless white linen, and carrying in one hand his best tape-edged palm-leaf fan, he rather suggested a plump old mandarin as, on that same evening of the day when the street-railway company effected settlement, he knocked at the front door of the cottage of the Widow Millsap.

She was in and she was alone. She was one of those women who always are in and nearly always are alone. Immediately, then, they sat in her front room, which was her best room. Her sewing machine was there, and her biggest oil lamp and her few small sticks of company furniture, her few scraps of parlor ornamentation; a bad picture or two, gaudily framed; china vases on a mantel-shelf; two golden-oak rockers, wearing on their slick and shiny frontlets the brand of an installment-house Cain who murdered beauty and yet failed in his designings to achieve comfort. It was as hot as a Dutch oven, that little box of a room inclosed within its thin-planked walls. It was not a place where one would care to linger longer than one had to. Judge Priest came swiftly to the heart of the business which had sent him thither.

“Ma’am,” he was saying, “this is a kind of a pussonal matter that’s brought me down here this hot night, and with your consent I’ll git right to the point of it. Ordinarily I’m a poor hand at diggin’ into the business of other people. But seein’ that I knowed your late lamented husband both ez a worthy citizen and ez an honest, hard-workin’ man, and seein’ that in my official capacity it has been incumbent upon me to issue certain orders in connection with your rights and claims arisin’ out of his ontimely death, I have felt emboldened to interest myself, privately, in your case – and that’s why I’m here now.

“Today at the cotehouse, when the settlement wuz formally agreed to by the legal representatives of both sides, an idea come to me. And that idea is this: Now there’s eight thousand dollars due the heirs, you bein’ one and your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bein’ the other. Half of eight thousand dollars wouldn’t be so very much to help take keer of a person, no matter how keerful they wuz; but eight thousand dollars, put out at interest, would provide a livin’ in a way fur one who lived simply, and more especially in the case of one who owned their own home and had it free from debt, ez I understand is the situation with regards to you.

“On the other hand, your daughter is well fixed. Her husband is a rich man, ez measured by the standards of our people. It’s probable that she’ll always be well and amply provided fur. Moreover, she’s young, and you, ma’am, will someday come to the time when you won’t be able to go on workin’ with your hands ez you now do.

“So things bein’ thus and so, it seems to me that ef the suggestion was made to your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, that she should waive her claim to her share of them eight thousand dollars and sign over her rights to you, thereby inshorin’ you frum the fear of actual want in your declinin’ years; and her, ez I have jest been statin’, not needin’ the money – well, it seems to me that she would jest naturally jump at the notion. So if you would go to her yourself with the suggestion, or git somebody in whose good sense and judgment you’ve got due confidence to go to her and her husband and lay the facts before them, I, fur one, knowin’ a little somethin’ of human nature, feel morally sure of the outcome. Why, I expect she’d welcome the idea; maybe she’s already thinkin’ of the same thing and wonderin’ how, legally, it kin be done. And that, ma’am, is what brings me here to your residence tonight. And I trust you will appreciate the motive which has prompted me and furgive me if I, who’s almost a stranger to you, seem to have meddled in your affairs without warrant or justification.”

He reared back in his chair, a plump hand upon either knee.

Through this the widow had not spoken, or offered to speak. Now that he had finished, she answered him from the half shadow in which she sat on the farther side of the sewing machine upon which the lamp burned. There was no bitterness, he thought, in her words; merely a sense of resignation to and acceptance of a state of things not of her own contriving, and not, conceivably, to be of her own undoing.

“Judge,” she said, “perhaps you know by hearsay at least that since my daughter’s marriage she has lived apart from us. Neither my husband nor I ever set foot in the house where she lives. It was her wish” – she caught herself here, and he, sensing that she was equivocating, nevertheless inwardly approved of the deceit – “I mean to say that it was not my wish to go among her friends, who are not my friends, or to embarrass her in any way. I am proud that in marrying she has done so well for herself. In thinking of her happiness I shall always try to find happiness for myself.

“But, judge, you must know this too: She did not come to the – the funeral. Well, there was a cause for that; she had a reason. But – but she had not been here for months before that. She – oh, you might as well hear it if you are to understand – she has never once been here since she married!

“And so, Judge Priest, I cannot go to her until I am sent for – not under any circumstances nor for any purpose. If she has her pride, I in my poor small way have my pride, too, my self-respect. When she needs me – if ever she does – I’ll go to her wherever she may be if I have to crawl there on my hands and knees. What has gone before will all be forgotten. But don’t you see, sir? – I can’t go until she sends for me. And so, Judge Priest, while I thank you with all my heart for your thoughtfulness and your kindness, and while I’d be glad, too, if Ellie saw fit or could be made to see that it would be a fine thing to give me this money in the way you have suggested, I say to you again that I cannot be the one to go to her. I will not even write to her on the subject. That, with me, is final.”

“But, ma’am,” he said, “ef somebody else went – some friend of yours and of hers – how about it then?”

She shook her head.

“Her friends – now – are not my friends. My friends are not hers any more; most of them never were her friends. Besides, the idea did not originate with me. Either the proposition must come from her direct or it must be presented to her by some third party. And I can think of no third party of my choosing that she would care to hear. No, Judge Priest, I have nobody to send.”

“All right then,” he stated, “since I set this here ball in motion I’ll keep it rollin’. Ma’am, I’ll take it on myself to speak to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant in your behalf.”

“But, Judge Priest,” she protested, “I couldn’t ask you to do that for me – I couldn’t!”

“Ma’am, you ain’t asked me and you don’t need to ask me. I’m askin’ myself – I’m doin’ this on my own hook, and ef you’ll excuse me I’ll start at it right away. When there’s a thing which needs to be done ez bad ez this thing needs to be done, there oughtn’t to be no time lost.” He stood up and looked about him for his hat. “Ma’am, I confidently expect to be back here inside of half an hour, or an hour at most, with some good news fur you.”

To one who had traveled about more and seen the homes of wealthy folk – to a professional decorator, say, or an expert in furnishing values – the drawing-room into which Judge Priest presently was being ushered might have seemed overdone, overly cluttered up with drapery and adornment. But to Judge Priest’s eye the room was all that a rich man’s best room should be. The thick stucco walls cut out the heat of the night; an electric fan whirred upon him as he sat in a deep chair of puffed red damask. A mulatto girl in neat uniform – this uniform itself an astonishing innovation – had answered his ring at the door and had ushered him into this wonderful parlor and had taken his name and had gone up the broad stairs with the word that he desired to see the lady of the house for a few minutes upon important business. He had asked first for Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant; but Mr. Wybrant, it seemed, was out of town; Mrs. Wybrant, then, would do. The maid, having delivered the message, had returned to say her mistress would be down presently and the caller was to wait, please. Waiting, he had had opportunity to contrast the present settings with those he had just quitted. Perhaps the contrast between them appeared all the greater by reason of the freshness of his recollection of the physical surroundings at the scene of his first visit of that evening.

She came down soon, wearing a loose, frilly, wrapperlike garment which hid her figure. Approaching maternity had not softened her face, had not given to it the glorified Madonna look. Rather it had drawn her features to haggardness and put in her eyes a look of sharpened apprehension as though dread of the nearing ordeal of suffering and danger overrode the hope which, along with the new life, was quick within her. She greeted Judge Priest with a matter-of-fact directness. Her expression plainly enough told him she was at a loss to account for his coming.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said in her rather metallic fashion of speaking, “that Dallam isn’t here. But he was called to St. Louis this morning on business. I hope you will pardon my receiving you in negligée. I’m not seeing much company at present. The maid, though, said the business was imperative.”

“Yes, ma’am, it is,” answered Judge Priest, rather ceremoniously for him, “and I am grateful to you fur lettin’ me see you and I don’t aim to detain you very long. I kin tell you in a few words whut it is that has brought me.”

He was as good as his promise – he did tell her in a few words. Outlining his suggestion, he used much the same language which he had used once already that night. He did not tell her, though, he had come to her direct from her mother. He did not tell her he had been to her mother at all. It might have been inferred that his present hearer was the first to hear that which now he set forth.

“Well, ma’am,” he concluded, “that’s the condition ez I view it. And if you likewise see your way clear to view it ez I do the whole thing kin be accomplished with the scratch of a pen. And you’ll have the satisfaction of knowin’ that through your act your mother will be well provided fur fur the rest of her life.” He added a final argument, being moved thereto perhaps by the fact that she had heard him without change of expression and with no glance which might be interpreted as approval for his plan. “I take it, ma’am, that you do not need the money involved. You never will need it, the chances are. You are rich, fur this town – your husband is, anyway.”

She replied then, and to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though, might be said for her – she sought no roundabout course. She did not quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or apologies for her position.

“I decline to do it,” she said. “I do not feel that I have the right to do it. I understand the motives which may have actuated you to interest yourself in this affair, but I tell you very frankly that I have no intention of surrendering my legal rights in the slightest degree. You say I do not need the money, but in the very same breath you go on to say the chances are that I shall never need it. So there you yourself practically admit there is a chance that someday I might need it. Besides, I do not rate my husband a rich man, though you may do so. He is well-to-do, nothing more. And his business is uncertain – all business is. He might lose every cent he has tomorrow in some bad investment or some poor speculation.

“There is still another reason I think of: I have nothing – absolutely nothing – in my own name. It irks me to ask my husband, generous though he is, for every cent I use, to have to account to him for my personal expenditures. Before I married him I earned my own living and I paid my own way and learned to love the feeling of independence, the feeling of having a little money that was all my own. My share of this inheritance will provide me with a private fund, a fund upon which I may draw at will, or which I may put away for a possible rainy day, just as I choose.”

“But ma’am,” he blurted, knowing full well he was beaten, yet inspired by a desperate, forlorn hope that some added plea from him might break through the shell of this steel-surfaced selfishness – “but, ma’am, do you stop to realize that it’s your own mother who’d benefit by this sacrifice on your part? Do you stop to consider that if there’s one person in all this world who’s entitled—”

“Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you,” she said crisply, her tone icy and sharp, “but the one person who is entitled to most consideration at my hands has not actually come into the world yet. It is of that person that I must think. I had not meant to speak of this, but your insistence forces me to it. As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a mother myself. If my baby lives – and my baby is going to live – that money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money; she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. So much for my mother. As a mother myself it will be my duty, as I see it, to safeguard the future of my own child, and I mean to do it, regardless of everything else. That is all I have to say about it – that is, if I have made myself sufficiently plain to you, Judge Priest.”

“Madam,” said he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench, “you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to be added by either one of us. Madam, I have the pleasure to bid you good night.”

He clamped his floppy straw hat firmly down upon his head – a thing the old judge in all his life never before had done in the presence of a woman of his race – and he turned the broad of his back upon her; and if a man whose natural gait was a waddle could be said to stride, then be it stated that Judge Priest strode out of that room and out of that house. Had he looked back before he reached the door he would have seen that she sat in her chair, huddled in her silken garments, on her face a half smile of tolerant contempt for his choler and in her eye a light playing like winter sunlight on frozen water; would have seen that about her there was no suggestion whatsoever that she was ruffled or upset or in the least regretful of the course she had elected to follow. But Judge Priest did not look back. He was too busy striding.

Perhaps it was the heat or perhaps it was inability long to maintain a gait so forced, but the volunteer emissary ceased to stride long before he had traversed the three-quarters of a mile – and yet, when one came to think it over, a span as wide as a continent – which lay between the restricted, not to say exclusive, head of Chickasaw Drive and the shabby, not to say miscellaneous, foot of Yazoo Street. It was a very wilted, very lag-footed, very droopy old gentleman who, come another half hour or less, let himself drop with an audible thump into a golden-oak rocker alongside the Widow Millsap’s sewing machine.

“Ma’am,” he had confessed, without preamble, as he entered her house, she holding the door open for his passage, “I come back to you licked. Your daughter absolutely declines even to consider the proposition I put before her. As a plenipotentiary extraordinary I admit I’m a teetotal failure. I return to you empty-handed – and licked.”

To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them, she asked quietly, almost listlessly, “My daughter saw you then?”

“She did, ma’am, she did. And she refused point-blank!”

“I am sorry, Judge Priest – sorry that you should have been put to so much trouble needlessly,” she said, still holding her voice at that emotionless level. “I am sorry, sir, for your sake; but it is no more than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I should have known better than to send you.”

He snorted.

“Ma’am, when a little while ago, settin’ right here, I told you I thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened tonight is brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin’ so, but I kin not fathom the workin’s of a mind that would – that would—” He floundered for words in his indignation. “It is not natural, this here thing I have just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could—”

“Judge Priest,” she said steadily, “it is not my own flesh and blood that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and blood could never treat me so.”

He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.

“I mean to say just this,” she went on: “Ellie is not my own child. She has not a drop of my blood or my husband’s blood in her. Judge Priest, I am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town excepting me – now that my husband is gone – has ever known. We never had any children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a young woman whose husband had deserted her – had run away with another woman, leaving her without a cent, in failing health and with a six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

“Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn’t have much – we never have had much all through our lives – but what we had we divided with her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and died.

“Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother died – that was when Ellie was about eighteen months old – we brought her with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had been her mother’s name – Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected – she has never for one moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have served us so. And tonight I know better than ever before, and it lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.

“Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all that she may ever do. That’s motherhood, I suppose.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said slowly, “I reckin you’re right – that’s motherhood.” He tugged at his tab of white chin whisker, and his puckered old eyes behind their glasses were shadowed with a deep compassion. Then with a jerk he sat erect.

“I take it that you adopted the child legally?” he said, seeking to make his tone casual.

“We took her just as I told you,” she answered. “We always treated her as though she had been ours. She never knew any difference.”

“Yes, ma’am, quite so. You’ve made that clear enough. But by law, before you left Maryland, you gave her your name, I suppose? You went through the legal form of law of adoptin’ her, didn’t you?”

“No, sir, we didn’t do that. It didn’t seem necessary – it never occurred to us to do it. Her mother was dead and her father was gone nobody knew where. He had abandoned her, had shown he didn’t care what might become of her. And her mother on her deathbed had given her to me. Wasn’t that sufficient?”

Apparently he had not heard her question. Instead of answering it he put one of his own:

“Do you reckin now, ma’am, by any chance that there are any people still livin’ back there in that town of Calais – old neighbors of yours, or kinfolks maybe – who’d remember the circumstances in regard to your havin’ took this baby in the manner which you have described?”

“Yes, sir; two at least that I know of are still living. One is my half sister. I haven’t seen her in twenty-odd years, but I hear from her regularly. And another is a man who boarded with us at the time. He was young then and very poor, but he has become well-to-do since. He lives in Baltimore now; is prominent there in politics. Occasionally I see his name in the paper. He has been to Congress and he ran for senator once. And there may be still others if I could think of them.”

“Never mind the others; the two you’ve named will be sufficient. Whut did you say their names were, ma’am?”

She told him. He repeated them after her as though striving to fix them in his memory.

“Ah-hah,” he said. “Ma’am, have you got some writin’ material handy? Any blank paper will do – and a pen and ink?”

From a little stand in a corner she brought him what he required, and wonderingly but in silence watched him as he put down perhaps a dozen close-written lines. She bided until he had concluded his task and read through the script, making a change here and there. Then all at once some confused sense of realization of his new purpose came to her. She stood up and took a step forward and laid one apprehensive hand upon the paper as though to stay him.

“Judge Priest,” she said, “what have you written down here? And what do you mean to do with what you have written?”

“Whut I have written here is a short statement – a memorandum, really, of whut you have been tellin’ me, ma’am,” he explained. “I’ll have it written out more fully in the form of an affidavit, and then tomorrow I want you to sign it either here or at my office in the presence of witnesses.”

“But is it necessary?” she demurred. “I’m ignorant of the law, and you spoke just now of my failure to adopt Ellie by law. But if at this late date I must do it, can’t it be done privately, in secret, so that neither Ellie nor anyone else will ever know?”

“Ellie will have to know, I reckin,” he stated grimly, “and other folks will know too. But this here paper has nothin’ to do with any sech proceedin’ ez you imagine. It’s too late now fur you legally to adopt Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, even though any person should suggest sech a thing, and I, fur my part, don’t see how any right-thinkin’ person could or would do so. She’s a free agent, of full age, and she’s a married woman. No, ma’am, she has no legal claim on you and to my way of thinkin’ she has no moral claim on you neither. She’s not your child, a fact which I’m shore kin mighty easy be proved ef anyone should feel inclined to doubt your word. She ain’t your legal heir. She ain’t got a leg – excuse me, ma’am – she ain’t got a prop to stand on. I thought Ellie had us licked. Instid it would seem that we’ve got Ellie licked.”

He broke off, checked in his exultant flight by the look upon her face. Her fingers turned inward, the blunted nails scratching at the sheet of paper as though she would tear it from him.

“No, no, no!” she cried. “I won’t do that! I can’t do that! You mustn’t ask me to do that, judge!”

“But, ma’am, don’t you git my meanin’ yit? Don’t you realize that not a penny of this eight thousand dollars belongs to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant? That she has no claim upon any part of it? That it’s all yours and that you’re goin’ to have it all for yourself – every last red cent of it – jest ez soon ez the proof kin be filed and the order made by me in court?”

“I’m not thinking of that,” she declared. “It’s Ellie I think of. Her happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you, I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this. You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you tonight. I won’t sign any affidavit. I won’t sign anything. I won’t do anything to humiliate her. Don’t you see, Judge Priest – oh, don’t you see? She feels shame already because she thinks she was humbly born. She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she really was born – knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother died a pauper and was buried in a potter’s field; that the name she has borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a thousand times no. She doesn’t know. Through me she shall never know. I would die to spare her suffering – die to spare her humiliation or disgrace. Before God’s eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who tells you no, not that, not that!”

He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black, yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the beauties of this mortal world.

“Ma’am,” he said, “your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you say. My lawyer’s sense tells me that you are wrong – foolishly, blindly wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and that no mother’s son has got the right to question you or try to persuade you to do anything different. Ma’am, I’d count it an honor to be able to call myself your friend.”

Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part, he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her hand – a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might once have been and corded with big blue veins and stained and shriveled and needle scarred. And he took her hand in his fat, pudgy, awkward one, and then he did this thing which never before in all his days he had done, this thing which never before he had dreamed of doing. Really, there is no accounting for it at all unless we figure that somewhere far back in Judge Priest’s ancestry there were Celtic gallants, versed in the small sweet tricks of gallantry. He bent his head and he kissed her hand with a grace for which a Tom Moore or a Raleigh might have envied him.

•     •     •     •     •

Let us now for a briefened space cast up in a preliminary way the tally on behalf of the whimsical devils of circumstance and the part they are to play in the culminating and concluding periods of this narrative. On the noon train of the day following the night when that occurred which has been set forth in the foregoing pages, Judge Priest, in the company of Doctor Lake and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King’s Hell Hounds, C.S.A., departs for Reelfoot Lake upon his annual fishing trip. In the afternoon Jeff Poindexter, the judge’s body servant, going through his master’s wardrobe seeking articles suitable for his own adornment in the master’s absence, is pained to discern stripings of spilled ink down the legs of a pair of otherwise unmarred white trousers, and, having no intention that garments which will one day come into his permanent possession shall be thus disfigured and sullied, promptly bundles them up and bears them to the cleansing, pressing and repairing establishment of one Hyman Pedaloski. The coat which matches the trousers goes along too. Upon the underside of one of its sleeves there is a big ink blob. Include in the equation this emigré, Hyman Pedaloski, newly landed from Courland and knowing as yet but little of English, whether written or spoken, yet destined to advance by progressive stages until a day comes when we proudly shall hail him as our most fashionable merchant prince – Hy Clay Pedaloski, the Square Deal Clothier, Also Hats, Caps & Leather Goods. Include as a factor Hyman by all means, for lacking him our chain of chancy coincidence would lack a most vital link.

At Reelfoot Lake many black bass, bronze-backed and big-mouthed, meet the happy fate which all true anglers wish for them; and the white perch do bite with a whole-souled enthusiasm only equaled by the whole-souled enthusiasm with which also the mosquitoes bite. This brings us to the end of the week and to the fifth day of the expedition, with Judge Priest at rest at the close of a satisfactory day’s sports, exhaling scents of the oil of pennyroyal. Sitting there under a tent fly, all sun-blistered and skeeter-stung, all tired out but most content, he picks up a two-day-old copy of the Daily Evening News which the darky boatman has just brought over to camp from the post office at Walnut Log, and he opens it at the department headed Local Laconics, and halfway down the first column his eye falls upon a paragraph at sight of which he gives so deep a snort that Doctor Lake swings about from where he is shaving before a hand mirror hung on a tree limb and wants to know whether the judge has happened upon disagreeable tidings. What the judge has read is a small item in this wise, namely:

Born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, at their palatial mansion on Chickasaw Drive, in the new Beechmont Park Realty Development tract, an infant daughter, their first-born. Mother and child both doing well; the proud papa reported this morning as being practically out of danger and is expected to be entirely recovered shortly, as Dock Boyd, the attending medico, says he has brought three hundred babies into the world and never lost a father yet. Ye editor extends heartiest congrats. Dal, it looks like the cigars were on you!

The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment. Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she ’uz a powerful masterful-lookin’ Yankee-talkin’ lady, all dressed up lak she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s’ciety lodge, which is Jeff’s way of summing up his impressions of the first professional trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.

It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom, bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went out and closed the door behind her.

From the pillows there looked up at him a face that was paler than when he had last seen it, a face still drawn from pangs of agony recently endured, but a face transfigured and radiant. The Madonna look was in it now. Outside, the dusk of an August evening was thickening; and inside, the curtains were half drawn and the electrics not yet turned on, but even so, in that half light, the judge could mark the change here revealed to him. He could sense, too, that the change was more spiritual than physical, and he could feel his animosity for this woman softening into something distantly akin to sympathy. At her left side, harbored in the crook of her elbow, lay a cuddling bundle; a tiny head, all red and bare, as though offering to Judge Priest’s own bald, pinkish pate the sincere flattery of imitation, was exposed; and the tip of a very small ear, curled and crinkled like a sea shell. You take the combination of a young mother cradling her first-born within the hollow of her arm and you have the combination which has tautened the heartstrings of man since the first man child came from the womb. The old man made a silent obeisance of reverence; then waited for her to speak and expose the purpose behind this totally unexpected summons.

“Judge Priest,” she said, “I have been lying here all day hoping you would come before night. I have been wishing for you to come ever since I came out from under the ether. Thank you for coming.”

“Ma’am, I started fur here ez soon ez I got your word,” he said. “In whut way kin I be of service to you? I’m at your command.”

She slid her free hand beneath the pillow on which her head rested and brought forth a crinkled sheet of paper and held it out to him.

“Didn’t you write this?” she asked.

He took it and looked at it, and a great astonishment and a great chagrin screwed his eyes and slackened his lower jaw.

“Yes, ma’am,” he admitted, “I wrote it. But it wuzn’t meant fur you to see. It wuzn’t meant fur anybody a-tall to see – ever. And I’m wonderin’, ma’am, and waitin’ fur you to tell me how come it to reach you.”

“I’ll tell you,” she answered. “But first, before we get to that, would you mind telling me how you came to write it, and when, and all? I think I can guess. I think I have already pieced the thing together for myself. Women can’t reason much, you know; but they have intuition.” She smiled a little at this conceit. “And I want to know if my deductions and my conclusions are correct.”

“Well, ma’am,” he said, “ez I wuz sayin’, no human eye wuz to have read this here. But since you have read it, I feel it’s my bounden duty, in common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though in doin’ so I’m breakin’ a solemn pledge.”

So he told her – the how and the why and the where and the when of it; details of which the reader is aware.

“I thought I wasn’t very far wrong, and I wasn’t,” she said when he had finished his confession. She was quiet for a minute, her eyes fixed on the farther wall. Then: “Judge Priest, unwittingly, it seems, you have been the god of the machine. I wonder if you’d be willing to continue to serve?”

“Ef it lies within my powers to do so – yessum, and gladly.”

“It does lie within your power. I want you to have the necessary papers drawn up which will signalize my giving over to my mother my share of that money which the railway paid two weeks ago, and then if you will send them to me I will sign them. I want this done at once, please – as soon as possible.”

“Ma’am,” he said, “it shall be as you desire; but ef it’s all the same to you, I’d like to write out that there paper with my own hand. I kin think of no act of mine, official or private, in my whole lifetime which would give me more honest pleasure. I’ll do so before I leave this house.” He did not tell her that by the letter of the law she would be giving away what by law was not hers to give. He would do nothing to spoil for her the sweet savor of her surrender. Instead he put a question: “It would appear that you have changed your mind about this here matter since I seen you last?”

“It was changed for me,” she said. “This paper helped to change it for me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been altered. I’ve been lying here today with her beside me, thinking things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I did – although until I read that paper I didn’t know it – beholden to the goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real mother. Wouldn’t she owe to that other woman more than she could have owed to me, her own mother, had I been spared to rear her? I think so – no, I know it is so. Every instinct of motherhood in me tells me it is so.”

“Lady,” he answered, “to a mere man, woman always will be an everlastin’ puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint way, the depths of mother love. It’s ez though he looked through a break in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you ain’t told me yit how you come to be in possession of this here sheet of note paper.”

“Oh, that’s right! I had forgotten,” she answered. “Try to think now, judge – when my mother refused to let you go farther with your plan that night at her house, what did you do with the paper?”

“I shoved it out of sight quick ez ever I could. I recall that much anyway.”

“Did you by any chance put it in your pocket?”

“Well, by Nathan Bedford Forrest!” he exclaimed. “I believe that’s purzackly the very identical thing I did do. And bein’ a careless old fool, I left it there instid of tearin’ it up or burnin’ it, and then I went on home and plum’ furgot it wuz still there – not that I now regret havin’ done so, seein’ whut tonight’s outcome is.”

“And did your servant, after you were gone, send the suit you had worn that night downtown to be cleaned or repaired? Or do you know about that?”

“I suspicion that he done that very thing,” he said, a light beginning to break in upon him. “Jeff is purty particular about keepin’ my clothes in fust-rate order. He aims fur them to be in good condition when he decides it’s time to confiscate ’em away frum me and start in wearin’ ’em himself. Yessum, my Jeff’s mighty funny that way. And now, come to think of it, I do seem to reckerlect that I spilt a lot of ink on ’em that same night.”

“Well, then, the mystery is no mystery at all,” she said. “On that very same day – the day your darky sent your clothes to the cleaner’s – I had two of Dallam’s suits sent down to be pressed. That little man at the tailor shop – Pedaloski – found this paper crumpled up in your pocket and took it out and then later forgot where he had found it. So, as I understand, he tried to read it, seeking for a clue to its ownership. He can’t read much English, you know, so probably he has had no idea then or thereafter of the meaning of it; but he did know enough English to make out the name of Wybrant. Look at it and you’ll see my name occurs twice in it, but your name does not occur at all. So don’t you see what happened – what he did? Thinking the paper must have come from one of my husband’s pockets, he smoothed it out as well as he could and folded it up and pinned it to the sleeve of Dallam’s blue serge and sent it here. My maid found it when she was undoing the bundle before hanging up the clothes in Dallam’s closet, and she brought it to me, thinking, I suppose, it was a bill from the cleaner’s shop, and I read it. Simple enough explanation, isn’t it, when you know the facts?”

“Simple,” he agreed, “and yit at the same time sort of wonderful too. And whut did you do when you read it?”

“I was stunned at first. I tried at first not to believe it. But I couldn’t deceive myself. Something inside of me told me that it was true – every word of it. I suppose it was the woman in me that told me. And somehow I knew that you had written it, although really that part was not so very hard a thing to figure out, considering everything. And somehow – I can’t tell you why though – I was morally sure that after you had written it some other person had forbidden your making use of it in any way, and instinctively – anyhow, I suppose you might say it was by instinct – I knew that it had reached me, of all persons, by accident and not by design.

“I tried to reach you – you were gone away. But I did reach that funny little man Pedaloski by telephone, and found out from him why he had pinned the paper on Dallam’s coat. I did not tell my husband about it. He doesn’t know yet. I don’t think I shall ever tell him. For two days, judge, I wrestled with the problem of whether I should send for my mother and tell her that now I knew the thing which all her life she had guarded from me. Finally I decided to wait and see you first, and try to find out from you the exact circumstances under which the paper was written, and the reason why, after writing it, you crumpled it up and hid it away.

“And then – and then my baby came, and since she came my scheme of life seems all made over. And oh, Judge Priest” – she reached forth a white, weak hand and caught at his – “I have you and my baby and – yes, that little man to thank that my eyes have been opened and that my heart has melted in me and that my soul has been purged from a terrible selfish deed of cruelty and ingratitude. And one thing more I want you to know: I’m not really sorry that I was born as I was. I’m glad, because – well, I’m just glad, that’s all. And I suppose that, too, is the woman in me.”

One given to sonorous and orotund phrases would doubtless have coined a most splendid speech here. But all the old judge, gently patting her hand, said was:

“Well, now, ma’am, that’s powerful fine – the way it’s all turned out. And I’m glad I had a blunderin’ hand in it to help bring it about. I shorely am, ma’am. I’d like to keep on havin’ a hand in it. I wonder now ef you wouldn’t like fur me to be the one to go right now and fetch your mother here to you?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“Thank you, judge, that’s not necessary. She’s here now. She was here when the baby came. I sent for her. She’s in her room right down the hall; it’ll be her room always from now on. I expect she’s sewing on things for the baby; we can’t make her stop it. She’s terribly jealous of Miss McAlpin – that’s the trained nurse Dallam brought back with him from St. Louis – but Miss McAlpin will be going soon, and then she’ll be in sole charge. She doesn’t know, Judge Priest, that what she told to you I now know. She never shall know if I can prevent it, and I know you’ll help me guard our secret from her.”

“I reckin you may safely count on me there, ma’am,” he promised. “I’ve frequently been told by disinterested parties that I snore purty loud sometimes, but I don’t believe anybody yit caught me talkin’ in my sleep. And now I expect you’re sort of tired out. So ef you’ll excuse me I’ll jest slip downstairs, and before I go, do that there little piece of writin’ we spoke about a while ago.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see my baby before you go?” she asked. Her left hand felt for the white folds which half swaddled the tiny sleeper. “Judge Priest, let me introduce you to little Miss Martha Millsap Wybrant, named for her grandmammy.”

“Pleased to meet you, young lady,” said he, bowing low and elaborately. “At your early age, honey, it’s easier fur a man, to understand you than ever it will be agin after you start growin’ up. Pleased indeed to meet you.”

•     •     •     •     •

If memory serves him aright, this chronicler of sundry small happenings in the life and times of the Honorable William Pitman Priest has more than once heretofore commented upon the fact that among our circuit judge’s idiosyncrasies was his trick, when deeply moved, of talking to himself. This night as he went slowly homeward through the soft and velvety cool of the summer darkness he freely indulged himself in this habit. Oddly enough, he punctuated his periods, as it were, with lamp-posts. When he reached a street light he would speak musingly to himself, then fall silent until he had trudged along to the next light. Something after this fashion:

Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Exall Boulevard:

“Well, sir, the older I git the more convinced I am that jest about the time a man decides he knows a little something about human nature it’s a shore sign he don’t know nothin’ a-tall about it, ’specially human nature ez it applies to the female of the species. Now, f’rinstance, you take this here present instance: A woman turns aginst the woman she thinks is her own mother. Then she finds out the other woman ain’t her own mother a-tall, and she swings right back round agin and – well, it’s got me stumped. Now ef in her place it had ’a’ been a man. But a woman – oh, shuckin’s, whut’s the use?”

Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Sycamore Avenue:

“Still, of course we’ve got to figger the baby as a prime factor enterin’ into the case and helpin’ to straighten things out. Spry little trick fur three days old, goin’ on four, wuzn’t she? Ought to be purty, too, when she gits herself some hair and a few teeth and plumps out so’s she taken up the slack of them million wrinkles, more or less, that she’s got now. Babies, now – great institutions anyway you take ’em.”

Corner of Sycamore Avenue, turning into Clay Street:

“And still, dog-gone it, you’ll find folks in this world so blind that they’ll tell you destiny or fate, or whutever you want to call it, jest goes along doin’ things by haphazard without no workin’ plans and no fixed designs. But me, I’m different – me. I regard the scheme of creation ez a hell of a success. Look at this affair fur a minute. I go meddlin’ along like an officious, absent-minded idiot, which I am, and jest when it looks like nothin’ is goin’ to result frum my interference but fresh heartaches fur one of the noblest souls that ever lived on this here footstool, why the firm of Providence, Pedaloski and Poindexter steps in, and bang, there you are! It wouldn’t happen agin probably in a thousand years, but it shore happened this oncet, I’ll tell the world. Let’s see, now, how does that there line in the hymn book run? – ‘moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.’ Ain’t it the truth?”

Last street lamp on Clay Street before you come to Judge Priest’s house:

“And they call ’em the opposite sex! I claim the feller that fust coined that there line wuz a powerful conservative pusson. Opposite? Huh! Listen here to me: They’re so dad-gum opposite they’re plum’ cater-cornered!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 24 Sep 1921
Sundry Accounts (1922)

“—That Shall He also Reap”

~

There was no manner of doubt about it; the old town had changed, and mightily changed, in these four years. It had changed both in spirit and in the flesh. It was not so much the strange faces topping strange bodies which I saw on every side of me, nor yet the strange names of sign boards over store fronts, nor even the new and therefore strange buildings which had risen up here and there, that kept driving consciousness of the outstanding fact into my brain, stroke by stroke, like the tapping of a persistent hammer. Rather, it was the altered look, the profanely altered look of familiar objects; that and, more than that, the altered mien of familiar individuals.

There were two men of my acquaintance, though, who had not altered by so much as a peppercorn; or, if they had, my eye could not appraise it. Yet these two were two who had attained to what Shakspere’s Jaques called his last scene of all, and by the laws which govern mortal change should have been gnawed by time’s tooth more deeply than most. On second thought, perhaps Judge Priest was a trifle more fumbly in his gait than when I saw him last before this. And possibly Dr. Lew Lake’s sparse frame had shrunken by the breadth of ever so narrow a whipstitch. But on this first night of my return, as I sat with this pair who were almost the last that were left of my father’s closer friends, I told myself that they miraculously had endured on, untouched in mien or fashion of speech, whilst all others about them either had gone ahead or had slipped back. It gave me a comforting sensation as though, passing down a stream in freshet, I happened upon a brace of seamed but solid and dependable old buttresses uprearing as the sole remaining props of a structure shifted by the flood from its former foundations and transmogrified out of its former likeness.

We sat, the three of us and no more, upon Judge Priest’s front porch, where the moonlight, sifting through the screen of dishrag vines, made a pattern of black Spanish lace on white brocade; and Jeff Poindexter, the judge’s auxiliary shadow, who was very dark and very silent, as a shadow should be, brought us soothing mixtures in tall glasses. And the talk ran this way and that, one thing bringing up another, as it does, until I saw my way clear to steer it into a channel of my own choosing, the intent on my part being to draw from them the completed tale of a matter to which that afternoon they had given me most alluring hints.

I had begun my visit on a day of history. It was the day of the dedication of the new hospital. I had known of course there was a new hospital toward. In letters from home through months past I had been advised of its building. In the Daily Evening News I read where the editor, with pardonable pride, pointed out that this was to be the largest institution of the sort ever erected in any city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants south of Mason and Dixon’s Line. What I had not known until after arriving that morning – or if I had known had forgotten it – was the whereabouts of its site.

To me, living these latter years a thousand and odd miles away, the commons below the old barracks continued still to wear the look it had worn for me in my boyhood. Re-creating it mentally I saw that there should be a small gravelly bluff dropping abruptly away from the built-up line of Yazoo Street, thence a flattened terrain pocked with crawfish holes and at its farther edge fringed with a whiskerline of straggly willows where the face of the earth dipped its retreating chin in the river; and to carry the simile of a face still on, two red-edged gravel pits for the rheumy eyes, and, for its nose, one upthrust spindle of ruined brickwork set right in the middle of the space.

But when I came that afternoon to the verge of the hollow facing the river I found my immediate view blocked by the majestic bulk of the Humphrey Bray Memorial Hospital, standing all complete now and ready for service. Directly in front of me it reared the fine white stone and red brick formalities of its main part, and, to right and left, spread-eagled its wings across a wide strip of manmade fill, with terraces rippling grandly down to smoothened stretches of what now was naked soil but soon would be green lawn, and leading from where I stood up to its broad steps, a double row of lopped saplings – no more than switches today, but someday, Lord granting it, they would be bushy-topped maples beneath which convalescents might sit enshaded to take the river breeze.

The exercises of dedication began at three o’clock, and when they began I was there, one of a multitude. There was a speech by that modern Demosthenes, ex-Congressman Dabney Prentiss, as attorney for the estate of the deceased donor, he turning the completed hospital over to the county for its usages forevermore; and then a speech by the county judge, this being a sweated and nervous gentleman who was no Demosthenes – or, if he was, was one who had forgotten to spit out his pebble; he, for his part, accepting the gift on behalf of the county and in turn transferring it to the keeping of the local medical profession; and of course there were prayers – invocation and benediction – by reverend men who took the Almighty into their confidence and explained to Him at length and in detail the intent of all that here took place. Also there was music by Dean’s band. And finally, there was a crowd of thousands standing in the warm spring sunshine to see and to hear all this, and afterwards to tour the building. Chance and the pressure of human bodies had thrust me into the company of Judge Priest and Doctor Lake; they had anchored themselves against the drifting human tides in the middle of Yazoo Street after they came down from the temporary platform whereon the oratorical phases of the ceremonies had been staged; and for more reasons than one I was glad these agencies had so luckily wrought. The crowds were shredding away from our immediate vicinity when the old judge aimed the brass ferrule of his slatted and venerable cotton umbrella where, directly above the entrance doors, at the level of the second-floor windows, there gaped a niche in the wall, empty now but beyond peradventure designed to contain bronze or stone.

“See that there little recess up yonder?” he said, reducing his normal high-pitched whine to a discreet undertone. “I understand they’re aimin’ to stick a statue or a bust of old man Humphrey up there. It seems like the sculpture man up North didn’t quite git it done in time fur today. Well, suhs, it makes me laugh inside of myself to think of a stone figger of him gazin’ happily down on a charity provided and paid fur with money of his savin’ – it most certainly does, me knowin’ him like I did. Still, when they git it derricked up there I s’pose that’ll make a finished job of the whole thing in the eyes of the populace at large. But not in my eyes – no, suh-ree.” He chuckled a meaningful little chuckle into his wisp of white chin whisker. “Ef justice should be done where justice is due there’d be a figger of a mighty different-lookin’ person from the late onlamented set there in that vacant jog, eh, Lew?”

And at that Doctor Lake had nodded his fine old head in brisk assent.

“You hit the nail square on the head then, Billy. Now. by rights the statue that should be planted there would be one cut out of black marble instead of out of white – a statue of a lowering old nigger woman with her underlip stuck out like the fender on a street car, and her hands of her hips. Something like that would be the proper ticket.”

I noted that he, too, spoke somewhat under his breath and into his beard, as though mindful not to take any third person into his confidence. So, naturally, by what they had said and by the way they said it, my curiosity was quickened to the point where I made so bold as to ask them for an explanation of these most cryptic comments of theirs.

“You drop round to my place tonight after you’ve had supper at your mother’s,” the old judge said. “Lew here, ’ll be there and we’ll set a spell and mebbe we’ll tell you the real meanin’s of what we’ve jest been hintin’ at. You might git the groundwork fur one of them pieces you write out of it. Purty near time the yarn was told in its true colors anyway, seein’ that all actually concerned are dead and gone – ain’t I right, Lew?”

•     •     •     •     •

The time was that same night, and the place, as has been stated, was the front porch of the old white house on Clay Street. It was quiet there, a most restful spot. About once in so often the grackles roosting in the twin cedars at the foot of the steps stirred and gabbled sleepily, and about once in not quite so often a screech owl with an uneasy conscience made wailing confession of his sins somewhere down in the old Enders orchard. A car passed and sounded like a dozen cars.

“Well, son,” said Judge Priest, “I reckin you’ve happened on the only two persons left in this world that’re qualified to give you the real inside facts about this here matter. Yes, suh, you might say you’ve come direct to headquarters.” From the patch of darkness where he took his ease, his voice came as a voice out of a void, and the fire in his pipe bowl was one little red star set in the black of a lonely firmament. “Had I better start the yarn off, Lew, or will you do it?”

“You go ahead, Billy,” said the old physician, from where he sat. “You go ahead and do the main log raising. I’ll provide some of the chinking when it’s necessary.”

“All right, then,” agreed the judge. “Well, son, I figger you ain’t been livin’ up North amongst the Yankees so long but whut you still kin recall old man Humphrey Bray ez he looked twenty-odd years ago when you wuz a boy growin’ up around here? And of course you recall Miss Cordelia, his old-maid daughter?”

I uttered sounds to indicate that I remembered.

“Well, suhs, Hump Bray always wuz a puzzle to me, more or less. He wouldn’t strike you offhand ez bein’ specially smart. He’d be more apt to strike you ez bein’ sort of dull and slow-witted. But he had the sense to make money and the sense to keep it after he made it – both qualities which the good Lord in His wisdom hez seen fit to deny me, fur one. Such bein’ the case with me, personally, p’raps it’s jealousy which prompts me to disparage his gifts in these directions; still, even so, I wouldn’t exactly call it brains. Ef you ask me I’d call it a sort of an instinct – this here money-makin’ faculty of his. Some men air towards a hidden dollar like one of these here little black-and-tan terriers is towards a rat. There’s a rat, we’ll say, layin’ snug and quiet behind a baseboard. You and me would pass there a hundred times and never suspect that he wuz round. But along comes your terrier and he takes one sniff at a crack and starts diggin’ Mister Rat out. And ef he can’t git him by diggin’ he’ll camp right there until the rat ventures forth, and then nail him and have his life’s blood. Well, there’s aplenty men organized the same way, only their game is dollars and not rats. They’ve just natchelly got the nose fur it. They kin smell out a hidden dollar where the run of us wouldn’t even think to look fur it, and on top of that they’ve got the patience and the persistency to hang round until they’ve got their everlovin’ fingers twined about it in a grip which only death kin loosen. I jedge a good many of these here multimillionaires that you hear so much about these times are built on them lines. I wouldn’t say myself that it’s the happiest way to live, or the best way; but I do say this – it seems to satisfy them which follows after it ez a regular callin’.

“It certainly satisfied Humphrey Bray. I kin recall like it wuz yistiddy when he moved over here frum Mims County. It was right after the Big War. It wuz a poor time fur this country and he had the look about him of bein’ a poor man frum a poor district. You’d say, to look at him, that everything he’d ever tackled had failed up on him. Well, right there is where he’d deceive you. He deceived everybody here fur quite a spell. He opened up a rusty, smelly little den which he called an office, in one of them old ramshackle houses down on Front Street, which they afterward tore down to make room fur the new ice factory, and he started in to dealin’ in lands and mortgages and loanin’ little dabs of money at high interest and the like. Even though he could shave a note right down to the quick, people couldn’t figger how he was earnin’ any more than his keep. They used to wonder how him and his wife got along – that is, they did at first. He never seemed to be doin’ much business and whut business he did do wuz in dribs – a few dollars put out on security here, and a few put out there. All day you’d see him coiled up behind his old desk fiddlin’ with a set of books and mebbe frum breakfast time till dark not a single soul to darken his doors.

“Well, he went along that way fur years. He had a child born to him – one child, her that you afterwards knew as Miss Cordelia – and about the time she wuz born he moved out to the old Grundy place three miles frum town. That is to say it wuz three miles frum town then, but whut with all these real-estate developments, the whole neighborhood is built up mighty near solid now. Takin’ over the old Grundy place didn’t stamp him in the public mind as bein’ prosperous. It wuz purty badly run down and goin’ to seed and dry rot; and besides it wuz ginerally known that he’d took it over on a foreclosure fur practically nothin’.

“And then one mornin’ people had a fresh cause to wonder about Humphrey Bray. Because they woke up all of a sudden to the realization that he wuz about the second-richest man in this county and in a fair way to be the richest, too, ef he kept his health and stayed in his right mind. The Planters’ Bank took him in as a director and purty soon made him a vice president. He wuz a powerful good hand to have round when it came to votin’ No on a proposition to loan somebody more money than the collateral seemed to justify. Every bank big or little needs somebody like him on its board. From money tradin’ on a small scale he branched out hither and yon till before long there wuz hardly a goin’ concern in town but whut he had a busy probin’ finger in it somewheres. But down yonder on Front Street he still kept his little old dollar trap baited and set, and he still went on livin’ in a kind of a nibblin’ frugal way. He just about did keep the old Grundy place weather-tight and that wuz all. A mile away you could hear its clapboards callin’ fur a fresh coat of paint. You probably won’t recall this part, son, him havin’ passed on to his reward, whutever it wuz, when you wuz still a shaver in knee britches, but behind his back people used to call him Kangaroo Bray. It wuzn’t that he looked like a kangaroo; he’d put you more in mind of a little old gray weather-beaten rabbit. But natural history records that the kangaroo is born with a pocket. But they didn’t call him that to his face, you betcher. A man who’s got half a million laid by and is in a fair way to run it up to a million is commonly treated with respect by one and all. You kin hear his respectability rustlin’ in his wallet ez he passes you by.

“Well, in the fullness of time his wife died, not causin’ much more excitement in dyin’ than whut she had in livin’, which wuz practically no excitement at all, and then one day he hauled off and died too. He didn’t come home to supper in the evenin’, and when Miss Cordelia got worried and sent a darky in frum the place to look fur him they found his old hoss and buggy hitched outside his office and him inside bunched up in a chair with a handkerchief over his face and his lap littered with promissory notes and other precious documents. He’d left a will, and by it he’d left everything he owned to his daughter. Not a cent went to poor people on whose necessities he’d been tradin’ all these years, nor not a two-bit piece to good works – but all to her. Outside of the directors in the bank not a great many people went to his funeral. But practically everybody heartily indorsed the idea of it, eh, Lew?”

Down in his throat Doctor Lake made rumbling assent. “I don’t seem to remember a more popular movement,” he said.

“I want to be fair, though,” went on Judge Priest. “He had one sincere mourner, anyway – his daughter. He’d left her alone in the world, sure enough; with all her money she cut a mighty lonesome, mighty pitiful figure. Them that envied her fur all her dollars didn’t furgit to be sorry fur her, too, I reckin; because if ever there wuz a woman ordained and brought into the world to be an old maid she wuz the one. Why, she had that there onmistakable old-maid look about her before she wuz out of short dresses – primmish and precise and always displayin’ a kind of a skeered nervousness, ef you git whut I mean. And ez she grew older the signs of it grew more pronounced, seemed like, with every month that rolled over her head. There’s one kind of old maid everybody in a community loves – because she loves every body and everything, I jedge, and, bein’ denied wifehood and motherhood on her own account, goes round motherin’ up stray ash cats and lost dogs and other people’s neglected babies. And there’s another kind of old maid that don’t seem to fit in anywheres, but air shy and awkward and always on the outside of whut’s goin’ on. And I reckin there ain’t no more mournful lot fur any human bein’ to fill than that is – specially in a town about the size, say, of this one, where everybody knows who and whut you are. But, shuckin’s, son, whut’s the use of my drivelin’ on about Miss Cordelia Bray, when you saw her every day of your life, purty near it, up till the time you went away frum here to live? You kin picture her jest ez well ez I kin.”

I did get the picture clearly enough. Across the eye of my mind it came walking in out of the darkness – that small, shrinking, flat-chested shape, dressed always in garments which seemed to have been devised for some other woman to wear, that shy, bleak face, those pale, yearning eyes, of the town’s chief heiress. The completed image as I had last seen it was most amply conjured up. But it had taken the old judge’s words to give me adequate understanding of this woman, who might have had everything which money will buy, and yet through all the days she walked this world utterly lacked for those gifts which money cannot buy – physical comeliness, grace, warmth, high spirit, personality, the art of making friends, the joys of loving and being loved in return. Oh, yes, I could see her.

“Let’s see, now, where wuz I?” went on Judge Priest when Jeff, obeying a wheezed command, had done his duty by the drained toddy glasses. “Oh, yes! Well, suhs, fur all the money she had now at her command, Miss Cordelia Bray went on livin’ purty much ez she had lived whilst her paw wuz alive. She did fix up the old Grundy homestead with paint and a new roof and one thing and another, and she had the fences mended, and planted flowers round the house where before there’d been a regular jungle of weeds and briers, but she didn’t put on any special amount of style, otherwise. Fur one thing, she didn’t clutter the place up with servants – jest kept right on with Aunt Jurdina and Uncle Silas, them two faithful old darkies that had been workin’ fur the Bray family since away back before she wuz born. But in a quiet kind of a way she done a right smart fur charity and fur her church, which that, I’m bound, wuz one trait she hadn’t inherited frum her paw. With old Humphrey it wuz a case of charity beginnin’ at home and stayin’ right there too. It never got a chance to stray off the premises whilst he held the purse strings. And he’d never been much of a hand fur churchgoin’, neither, and certainly he’d never qualified at church givin’. ’Lowin’ him his dues, we’ve got to admit that he differed frum some of these here confirmed money grabbers – he never tried to hide his greedy little soul under the mask of religion. But Miss Cordelia took after her mother, I jedge. Anyhow, she wuz mighty faithful to her church and mighty generous to it, too, oncet she got the control of her estate.

“Well, the years went rollin’ by. Lawsy, but how they do roll by on a feller! And here, all of a sudden, seemed like, Miss Cordelia wuz an old maid in real downright earnest, same ez she’d always been one in spirit – her hair turnin’ gray and her face gettin’ lined and wrinkled before her time. Yit down in her soul I’m certain shore she never had got entirely reconciled and used to bein’ an old maid. Somehow, there wuz a look out of her eyes that told you she wuz starvin’ fur a little genuine affection in her life. Every woman is entitled to at least one romance and she’d never had hers and she wuz rebellious, I take it, at the trick that had been played on her. Ez I recall, she’d never had any beaux sparkin’ round her when she wuz a little trick growin’ up; she didn’t even have anybody to come a-courtin’ after she come into her fortune, and that wuz a curious thing, and yit, after all, not such a curious thing neither when you think it over. Ef jest oncet some stranger had a-tried to flirt with her on the street I jedge it would a-been a sweet boon to her. She probably woulda ducked her head and run like a deer, but at any rate she could have nursed the belief always afterwards that fur one precious little minute a man had been drawn to her. But nothin like that came to pass. And then, here three years ago this comin’ summer the romance she’d been waitin’ fur all her days came into her life – and a pretty sorry sort of a romance it turned out to be too.”

“I’ll say it was,” put in Doctor Lake, and I knew the doctor had been absorbing the slang of the newer generation. “I’ll tell the world.”

“Not jest yit,” said Judge Priest dryly. “Let’s tell this boy here about it first, and then sort of let nature take its course. Here’s the way it started: One day a gentleman freely advertisin’ himself to be named Christopher Columbus Gaffney and by profession to be a free-lance journalist, whutever that may be, hit this town. He let on to hail frum the city of Chicago, but it’s my private opinion that a crack in the earth opened up somewheres and he crawled out frum a damp moldy hole underground. Take notice, son, frum now on, he’s the official villain of the piece. ‘Enter the villain!’ ez they say on, the stage; only, nearly every stage villain ever I seen was long and limber and dark-complected with coal-black hair turnin’ white around the temples, thus denotin a dissipated past. Whereas this party wuz short and fat and kind of roly-poly, with a little bitsy pursed-up mouth and a pair of little sharp eyes; and he wuz pink ez a baby in the face, and instid of black hair he hadn’t scarcely no hair at all to speak of, and whut he did have wuz a sort of rusty-red that sprayed out in a fringe around his scalp, with a slick bald spot in the center.”

“Like a secondhand halo on a counterfeit saint,” stated Doctor Lake. “Don’t forget, Billy, to describe his smile while you’re on the subject.”

“I won’t,” said Judge Priest. “I wuz jest comin’ to that. The smile wuz one of Christopher Columbus Gaffney Esquire’s chief distinctions. It wuz, ez you might say, a chronic failin’ with him – smilin’ wuz. I don’t know whether he took it off when he went to sleep at night, but he always wore it daytimes. You’ve heard, ain’t you, of the look on the face of the cat that had jest et up the canary? Well, imagine the set, expectant hungry look on the face of the cat that’s prowlin’ round fixin’ to eat the canary ez soon ez he locates it, and is smilin’ fur practice in advance of the happy event, and you’ll git a fairly accurate likeness of our friend frum the shores of Lake Michigan. And one or the other of those little fat freckly hands of his wuz for ever and eternally playin’ at the corners of his mouth where the smile started frum.”

“Show me a man that can’t keep his fingers away from his mouth and I’ll show you a man that’s striving to hide greediness or cruelty or both,” interrupted Doctor Lake. “If ever I ran across an unwholesome-looking object – why, even his fat wasn’t good honest fat! You could wipe it off with a rough towel, almost. Excuse me, Billy, for breaking in on you, but when I think of that Gaffney I get red-headed myself – the conniving, colleaguing, despicable, little fat – fat porpoise!”

“You must pardon this old gentleman fur his strong statements,” explained Judge Priest, addressing me with playful gravity. I could almost hear his eyes twinkling. “His private feelin’s air involved, ez you’ll be learnin’ a little bit further on, and likewise he’s been wounded in his professional pride. Now me, I aim to be milder and more conservative in my choice of words. In passin’ I’ll merely risk the assertion that in my deliberate judgment the said Gaffney got included in the human family by mistake in the first place.

“Well, be that ez it may, the main p’int wuz that here he wuz, landed in our midst without bein’ invited, and givin’ every outward indication of settlin’ down and remainin’ fur quite a spell. He gave it out that he wuz compilin’ data fur a history of the lower Ohio River Valley, but the work didn’t seem to be pressin’ and he filled in his spare time writin’ locals and pieces fur the mornin’ paper. But he made it clear to everybody that he wuzn’t jest an ordinary reporter or a mere newspaperman. No, suh, he wuzn’t anything so mere ez that – he wuz a journalist. I jedge he wuz too. If bein’ a journalist implies the use of stylish language he had his credentials right with him at all times. F’r instance, he never admitted that anybody had been buried after a funeral service; invariably deceased wuz ‘suitably interred following the solemnization of impressive obsequies.’ It wuz him that introduced us to ‘high noon’ too. Before that we’d only had two kinds of noon around here – twelve o’clock and dinner-time. In private he talked like he wrote – flowery and yit majestic and overpowerin’. And no matter whut the weather might be, he always wore a fancy vest – frequently white, but sometimes stripett or ring speckled, and generally more or less soiled. I don’t think he owned but one suit of clothes to his back when his native Chicago reluctantly surrendered him over to us, but he had a vest for every occasion. I used to say to myself, times when he’d come pompousin’ into my court room pickin’ up items, that out of the depths of Christian charity I might find it in my heart to forgive him everything else if only it hadn’t a’ been fur them dog-gone vests. Funny, son, ain’t it, how you’ll tote a special grudge against some little thing about a feller’s wardrobe, specially if you haven’t been closely drawn to the feller himself?”

“Get along, Billy, can’t you? I, for one, have got to be getting home sometime tonight.” Doctor Lake was taking vengeance for that sideswipe of a minute or two before. “You’ve painted the man’s portrait – and rambled all over creation doing it. The next thing is for you to tell about his getting acquainted with Miss Cordelia Bray.”

“Ef you know how and when and where he first met up with her s’pose you tell it,” countered Judge Priest. “All I know is that all at oncet word got noised round that our new literary light wuz attendin’ the Old First Church – attendin’ it regular, not only Sundays but prayer-meetin’ nights ez well – which natchelly made talk, him bein’ a person who didn’t look like he’d be frequentin’ a church house without he had private motives fur so doin’. And on the heels of that came the startlin’ news that he wuz actually keepin’ company with Miss Cordelia Bray. Nobody seemed to know how it started; but there was the amazin’ fact to speak fur itself. Just think of it: This visitin’ nobleman, direct frum the great city, payin’ respectful but seemin’ly devoted attentions to the richest woman in town, and her, till then, at least, belongin’ to the permanently onmarried class, ez you might say – well you could jest feel the community rock and sway under the tidin’s. He escorted her home one We’n’sday night – a dozen pairs of eager eyes watchin’ ’em when he joined her at the church door comin’ out, and a great gross of clackin’ tongues busy next mornin’ retailin’ it frum Island Creek to the Big Gulley. He set alongside of her at services the followin’ Sunday mornin’ – the first time in many a long day that the Bray family pew had had more’n one occupant and ’twuz him found the place fur her in the hymn book whilst the whole place rustled with suppressed excitement, and the Reverend Doctor Brower purty near lost the thread of his discourse, ef any such there wuz.

“He trailed in with her that evenin’ fur the night preachin’, her flustered and smilin’ and lookin’ skeered and self-conscious and yit proud and blushin’ – yes, suh, actually blushin’ – fully thirty reliable witnesses saw the blush and reported it promptly – and him squirin’ her jest ez courty and gallant ez ef he’d been five or six Sir Walter Raleighs rolled into one and then stomped down to about five foot seven. You had to say one thing fur him, anyway – oncet he got his campaign planned out he moved fast. Stonewall Jackson nor old Bedford Forrest never moved to the attack no prompter than whut he did – and that’s about ez high a compliment ez you kin pay to speed and strategy. Ain’t it, Lew? In side of three weeks it leaked out that they wuz engaged. By a conservative estimate I’d say fully one thousand individuals were helpin’ it leak.”

“Huh!” From Doctor Lake came a deep-chested grunt. “A pity that somebody didn’t have the gumption to go to that poor, deluded, flattered little old spinster and warn her that all the low-flung scoundrel was after was her money!”

“The trouble wuz that them that had gumption enough to do so had too much gumption to do so,” said Judge Priest, coining his epigram without, I think, meaning to do it. “Regardless of your own private convictions you can’t go, on your own hook, meddlin’ in the intimate affairs of a woman old enough to be a grandmother and commonly reckined to be smart enough to handle three-quarters of a million dollars in cash and real estate. It ain’t bein’ done. And, even now, rememberin’ whut the lamentable outcome wuz and all that, I’m prone to admit I think she wuz entitled to her pitiful little hour of happiness and triumph without let or hindrance. She wuz havin’ her romance at last, even ef she wuzn’t to have it fur very long. I’d not been the one to try to snatch it away frum her after her waitin’ so long fur it, and neither would you, Lew Lake, fur all your indignant snortin’s jest now.

“No, suh, you done like everybody else – took your feelin’s out in talk. I didn’t know a city the size of this here one could produce such a noble output of talk on short notice. It wuz proof of our hidden resources. Who knew anything about the gentleman’s past? Everybody asked it, nobody answered it, but nearly everybody was inclined to hope the worst. Whut on earth could she be thinkin’ of – trustin’ herself and all that wealth to a stranger? And jest look at the difference in their ages! There wuz no need, though, fur this last suggestion – the lookin’ wuz already bein’ conducted on a general scale. He might pass fur forty, or even fur thirty-five in a poor light amongst near-sighted people. But she’d never see her fiftieth birthday ag’in without she peered backward over her shoulder. In a big town, whut with paint and hairdressin’ and youngish clothes, she might fool a few, but not here, where she wuz born and brought up. We had amongst us too many official historians with good memories – mainly of the gentler sex. ‘Let’s see, now – she was puttin her hair up the year my nephew Harry fell out of the cherry tree and broke his right arm in two places, and he was going on nine then, because he was eighteen when the Spanish-American War broke out, because I remember how set he was on enlisting and how his mother carried on – yes, she’s fifty-one if she’s a day.’”

I had to laugh. The old judge’s mimicry of Mrs. Puss Whitley, our most efficient and painstaking gossip, was a little bit of perfection. He sipped back into his own purposely ungrammatical fashion of speech:

“Yes, suhs, there wuz indeed consider’ble talk. There were people who swore they’d go to that weddin’ ef they had to git up out of a sickbed to do it and crawl there on their hands and knees. But here’s where a large number of our citizens suffered a most grievous blow. Because them two slipped off down to Dyersburg and wuz married without anybody knowin’ anything about it in advance. There wuz a feelin’ that an unfair advantage had been took on the populace at large. And then, as though to arouse popular disappointment to a still higher pitch, they went off on a honeymoon and wuz gone all of two months.”

“Aren’t you overlooking one important detail?” suggested Doctor Lake.

“No, I ain’t; I’m jest gittin’ to that. Here’s whut Doctor Lake means, son: Before they eloped thataway they entered into whut us lawyers call a prenuptial arrangement. Unbeknownst to anybody they went down to Dabney Prentiss’ office and had Dabney Prentiss draw up their wills fur them. On the face of it, ef you didn’t know the respective circumstances of the contractin’ pair, you’d a-said ’twuz a fair deal. Ef he died first everything he owned went to her. Ef she died first everything she owned went to him, with the excecution of a few private bequests here and there; but in the event of her outlivin’ him and dyin’ without issue, the bulk of her estate wuz to be devoted to erectin’ and maintainin’ a public hospital ez a memorial to her father. I’m inclined to think this here last provision – fur the hospital – wuz the only part of her last will and testament that Miss Cordelia had any actual hand in dictatin’. Probably it soothed away any lingerin’ suspicions she might have had that her adorin’ lover wuz nursin’ mercenary motives in the back part of his head, when he fell in so prompt with her notion of doin’ somethin’ on a big scale to redeem her daddy’s reputation in this community. I kin almost see him settin’ alongside her on a sofa out yonder at the old Grundy lace holdin’ her withered, flutterin’ little hand in his and agreein’ with her that the idea of the Humphrey Bray Memorial Hospital wuz a perfectly splendid idea and an ever-lastin’ credit to her.

“But the kernel in the nut wuz that she had to outlive him to carry out her ambition. Doubtless it never occurred to her that ef he died first about all she’d inherit would be mebbe a pair of moss-agate cuff buttons and his collection of fancy vests; whereas, on the other hand, ef she wuz the first to pass away he’d come into one of the biggest fortunes in this end of the state of Kintucky. Bein’ swept off her feet the way she plainly wuz, she doubtless couldn’t see any selfish motive lurkin’ behind his little proposition. It must a-been his proposition; we kin lay bets on that. And it wasn’t Dabney Prentiss’ place to point out to her that the thing didn’t perzackly track square. Ez an attorney it wuz his place to make the papers legal and shipshape and keep his mouth shut. Anyway, him bein’ a lawyer, I figger that all the time he wuz settin’ at his desk draftin’ them two interestin’ documents he wuz renderin’ to the prospective bridegroom the tribute of a sneakin’ and begrudged admiration fur his financial sagacity. Leavin’ out any discussion ez to his soul, it’s not to be denied that this here Christopher Columbus Gaffney had a good business head on his shoulders.”

“And a heart as black as the underneath side of a skillet,” interjected Doctor Lake.

“Figgerin’ out the state of a party’s vital organs is part of Doctor Lake’s trade,” remarked Judge Priest blandly, as though speaking for my benefit solely; “so I reckin us two better not quarrel with his diagnosisin’ this case, but jest go ahead with our yarn.

“Two months the happy pair wuz off in Eastern parts on their bridal tour. And they wuz, indeed, a happy pair when they got back, ef ever I seen one. The distinguished husband wuz happy in the possession of a most ornate and picturesque wardrobe which he’d amassed in the great marts of fashion whilst on his travels, and happy in havin’ onlimited cash money in his pocket, and in his plans fur remodelin’ the old Grundy place and makin’ it over into whut he called a country estate, and fur buyin’ himself a high-powered touring car right away, and fur first one thing and then another. ’Twould appear he’d returned to us with quite an elaborate spendin’ campaign already mapped out.

“And his lady wuz happy in her proud estate of wifehood – so happy she couldn’t see a single flaw in him anywhere; and that only goes to show true love is not only blind but frequently half-witted, also, seein’ that here she wuz, visitin’ her idolatrous worship upon a hero who, to the observant eye, appeared to be made up of probably the most conspicuous and outstandin’ collection of flaws that’s been consolidated together in one package during the entire Christian Era. But to her he wuz jest absolute perfection. She showed it by the way she looked at him, by the way she spoke to him and about him, by every breath she drawed and every step she took. She couldn’t see yit – in time, of course, she would, but so fur she couldn’t whut immediately wuz painfully apparent to every well-wisher she had, which wuz that even this soon he wuz speakin’ of her behind her back with the early beginnin’s of a sneer, not more’n half tryin’ to hide his contempt fur her lack of good looks and her gawkiness and her poor, distressful attempts to make herself purtified and youthful in the new clothes she’d brought home with her. She didn’t know that already he wuz braggin’, ez he spent her dollars over Link Seever’s bar and in Andy Hooker’s crap game, how easy it wuz to git onlimited funds out of her. He’d established his connections with Andy’s layout before he’d been back two weeks; but she didn’t know it. It wuz the mercy of God she never did know.

“It may have been a fool’s paradise she lived in fur the little time she wuz to live, but I’m mighty glad for her sake that she had it, and that disillusionment didn’t come to spile it fur her during them last three months or so before she had her stroke.”

He gave a little wheezy sigh. He scratched his match to relight his pipe and for a moment or two his old face, pink and wrinkled and compassionate, showed in flashes as the little suck of flame flared up, then down.

“Well, Lew,” he said, “it’s your turn to piece out the tale. Try not to be too technical fur the understandin’s of us laymen.”

“Billy just mentioned a stroke,” said Doctor Lake. “It came without warning, so far as anyone ever knew – came on her one night as she was getting ready for bed. Bilateral hemiplegia, it was; probably with cerebral tumorous complications; a typical case; you’d call it complete paralysis. It was complete, too – not partial as the first attack frequently is. Arms, legs, body, face were all involved, all stilled and deadened in an hour. Only her eyes lived. It was the expression of her eyes that proved she still had consciousness. She couldn’t speak, of course; couldn’t move. She was merely a living spirit imprisoned in a dead body. She wasn’t even so lucky as that other paralytic, that character in Les Miserables, who talked with his eyelids while his frozen tongue lay behind his frozen lips.

“There was no chance for her, naturally – that is to say, no chance for her betterment. There was really nothing medical science could do except provide for proper nourishment and proper nursing and be on the guard against bed sores. Even so, there was a possibility that she might linger on for months – might even last in that state for years.

“And he knew it – that dog of a husband of hers knew it – and didn’t want this to be. He wanted her to die, and die quickly. He tried to mask his feelings, but the role was one his master, the devil, never meant for him to play. Behind his transparent efforts to appear grief-stricken, behind his faked and futile display of a sudden and devastating grief, behind his loud lamentations, what really was in his heart showed plainly enough for any reasonably acute observer to see. It showed in the look out of his greedy, cowardly little pig eyes, it showed in the way his hand – with big rings on it now; rings of her buying – played around his mouth. Most of all it showed in the questions he kept asking the medical men who’d been called in, and the nurse who’d been put on the case.

“Why, gentlemen, you could read his mind as plainly as though he had bared it to you in a sworn and signed affidavit. No doubt he’d calculated, in the natural course of things, to outlive her. His expectations of doing that were good; he had the advantage of ten or fifteen years’ difference in age on his side. But he had reconciled himself to the prospect of a long endurance test of putting up with life with her and with life in this town for years perhaps. His current recompense while she lived would be the spending of what he could get out of her, and in the end his reward would be a fortune that would be his to do with as he pleased. But that meant patience, it meant a waiting game. By his standards it meant dullness and being bored and annoyed and irked by her presence. And now, then, she had been stricken down; was already the same as a dead woman. Why couldn’t she have the decency to die then and leave him free – free to go on back where he came from and squander his legacy in what way he chose? No need for him to utter the thought aloud; he uttered it all the louder for keeping it locked in his brain. Merely as a study in degeneracy it’s interesting to observe the workings of that sort of mentality. That is to say, it would be interesting if it weren’t so nauseating; if only the observer could bury his natural instincts to destroy such a worm in the psychological aspects of the case.

“If wishes could kill she’d have died a hundred times a day, I’ll warrant you. From his perverted standpoint the situation was decidedly aggravating, I’ll admit. Between him and his capital prize there stood only a faint flickering spark to be snuffed out – but the trouble was he didn’t have the courage to snuff it out by his own deliberate act. He had the impulses, all right, but he lacked the nerve which a murderer has. At least, that’s the way I appraised his qualifications. As a matter of personal taste, I believe, on the whole, I’d have a higher respect for a man willing to commit murder to gain his object than for the one who thinks murder and dreams murder and craves murder, yet can’t force his craven hands to tackle the job.

“He lacked something else besides the nerve, too – he lacked the opportunity. And here’s where the old woman, Aunt Jurdina, that Judge Priest mentioned a while back, comes into the picture. That old creature – and a rough-talking, high tempered old piece she was too – had been a fixture of the Bray household for nearly fifty years or more, I guess. She was one of the old-fashioned, faithful type that are pretty nearly extinct these days. She’d nursed Miss Cordelia as a baby; she’d mothered her on up through her childhood. And if there was one person on this earth who loved her with an unselfish, unquestioning love it was this selfsame old Aunt Jurdina. There was a trained nurse in attendance, as I said just now; a competent one, too, but really she wasn’t needed. Nobody knew just when that old black woman slept; there was hardly a minute, day or night, from the time the patient was stricken down, when she didn’t seem to be at the bedside studying her mistress’ face out of those brooding, sullen, bloodshot eyes of hers; tending her, feeding her, sometimes singing to her – singing one of those curious, crooning, wordless songs that these old-time darkies favor – but more often just crouched there by the bed, silent and watchful. Watchfulness! That’s the word that sums up her attitude. Whatever it was she had at the back of her head – dread or suspicion or fear – she showed it only by that vigilant posture of hers. She never voiced it in words. But let anybody at all even one of the doctors or the nurse – come near the bedside, and old Jurdina never took her hostile gaze off of them, whoever it was. Small chance for Gaffney to work any mischief with that old terror on guard, even if he’d had the will to screw himself up to the sticking point!

“Well, this sort of thing went on for two weeks or more, with the sick woman lying there like a statue, with the old negress forever standing ward over her, with Gaffney eternally hang-dogging about, hoping and fearing and – as it turned out – scheming. One morning when his plans had ripened, he showed his hand. He wasn’t satisfied with the treatment his poor dear wife was getting; that’s what he came out and said. The intimation plainly was that he doubted the ability and the skill of resident physicians to handle the case. I think he used the words ‘country doctors.’ He had decided – he, mind you, this cheap little adventurer – he had decided to call in an eminent specialist of his acquaintance from Chicago, a certain Doctor Champion, who had achieved wonderful results in the treatment of paralysis by an electrical method of his own devising. In fact, he had already wired to Doctor Champion and had an answer back. Doctor Champion would arrive by the evening train, bringing his own expert nurse with him. He had said, though, in his telegram that he must have absolutely a free and in his handling of the invalid; by all accounts Doctor Champion stood for no interference by lesser men of the profession – the patient must be turned over entirely to this miracle man. And so, would the local practitioners kindly be prepared to step down and out when Doctor Champion arrived? Or words to that general effect.

“Well, the local practitioners didn’t wait for night and Doctor Champion to come. They just reached for their hats and got right out then and there.”

“You mean they quit the case knowing, or thinking they knew, what was in that man’s mind?” I asked.

“What was there for them to do?” he answered grimly. “There’s such a thing as professional etiquette in our calling, and in any calling there should be such a thing as self-respect. What else? The woman’s husband, her legal next of kin and the head of the house, as good as invited them to step out from under its roof. They might think what they pleased of his private motives, but by every recognized law he had the final say-so. Just consider for a moment how well fortified in his position he was. Even if the outcome was fatal to his wife he could plead solicitude, zeal, husbandly affection. And if it came to a showdown, wouldn’t the world have to accept his decision as an honest one? Private opinion based on surmise, on suspicion, on personal prejudice and personal dislike, is one thing; evidence fit for a jury is another, as you’ll agree. Besides, these home doctors knew one thing for certain – they knew that, come hell or high water, Gaffney would never get rid of old Jurdina by any method short of killing her outright. She’d stick right there on the job; they could rest assured of that. Anyhow, she was as good a nurse as you’d ask for, even if she couldn’t read or write her own name. And in the last analysis, nursing was really all that the patient needed; practically all, for the time being, anyone could give her. So they packed up their little kits and they got out and left the field to the great man from Chicago.

“He rolled in at six that evening with his cabinet of tricks and his beautiful life-size sidewhiskers and his own nurse and all– and a fine large picture of a charlatan and a poser he was; hiding monumental ignorance under a nice thick covering of dignity and assurance. Or at least that’s what I decided in my own mind the only time I ever saw him and talked with him, which was several days later. Gaffney was waiting for him at the train and hurried him out to the house, and in half an hour after they got there he had his conjuring box all rigged up and was in sole charge.

“Afterwards certain people here learned certain things about him. I rather took it on myself to make a few private inquiries. Probably it was none of my business, but I had a curiosity and I took steps to gratify it. The man had always been a sort of hanger-on at the ragged edges of the profession; not exactly disreputable, you understand, and yet, measured by the ethics, not exactly reputable, either. Years back he’d advertised to reduce ruptures without an operation, guaranteeing a cure or your money back – you know the sort. When that line petered out on him he set up as a cancer specialist, and more recently he’d switched again and was professing to cure pretty nearly everything, but especially palsy and epilepsy and paralysis, by some sort of electrical penny peep-show. These, briefly, appeared to have been the highlights in his career. He was, I figure, just an ignorant, greedy pretender, trading on the credulity of the hopelessly afflicted and the hopelessly crippled. Mind you, though, I don’t say, even so, that he was a conscious criminal. There was no record of his ever having been accused outright of malpractice or anything of that nature. Indeed, I’m inclined to think that he had his moments of sincerity, when he really and honestly believed he was doing good – he was probably ignorant enough even to have confidence in himself. And certainly outright murder was not his specialty.”

“But I gathered that you rather inferred Gaffney brought him down here with the idea of making an actual co-conspirator of him?” I said.

“Then you gathered wrong. That wasn’t my meaning at all. Here’s how I reason it out: I imagine that Gaffney must have known him long before this. They’d naturally be drawn to each other if ever they’d met, each being in his particular field a sort of shabby adventurer. You know the saying: ‘Birds of a feather——’ And Gaffney had a sort of low animal cunning, as I’ve tried to make you see. No doubt he had read through Champion’s pretensions; no doubt he’d figured him out to be an impostor of sorts at the least. Well, with an incompetent and a bungler on the job, wasn’t there a pretty fair prospect that the stricken woman, already as good as dead, might be got out of the world sooner than would be the case if responsible men were in attendance? Her life hung by a thread. If this faker, with his hocus-pocus, should unwittingly snap the thread in short order, who could show even a color of deliberate intent on the part of either one of them? Or maybe it was that Gaffney wanted no potentially hostile witnesses about – that is, assuming he was contemplating actual violence himself. Still, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume, for the sake of argument, that he depended on stupidity and quackery and perhaps unintentional neglect to do the trick.”

“But how about this old black woman?” I asked. “Surely you wouldn’t call her a friendly witness? Why didn’t he get rid of her when he was getting rid of the others?”

“Remember this, son,” said Doctor Lake: “Gaffney was a Northerner. He didn’t know her race. He’d be likely to figure that all this show of electrical mummery and all those high-sounding long words which Champion used would deceive her into accepting him as a great man who might be able to save the patient. I’m not saying she mightn’t have been deceived either, if only her apprehensions hadn’t been sharpened by her love for her mistress – and other things she’d noticed. And, in any event, he couldn’t shelve her without a pitched battle, no matter how much he might want to do it. Ethics meant nothing to her. She was her own code of ethics and, as I told you just now, yoked oxen couldn’t have dragged her away from her post. So he just let her stay; he had to, that’s all.

“Never mind about that, though, for the moment. I’ll get along to the next real development. The very next afternoon after Champion appeared on the scene Gaffney himself was taken ill with gripes in his abdomen – suddenly and violently and painfully ill. His eminent friend, the imported specialist, said it was an attack of acute nervous indigestion brought on by distress over his wife’s condition, and gave him a treatment – an electrical treatment, I suppose – and put him to bed. Nervous indigestion – bah! Any six months’ medical student should have known better.

“For a whole night and well on into the next day he lay there suffering the agonies of the damned – and only this pet faker of his to attend him. He must have had a premonition – people very often do when they’re like that. Oh, I guess he knew – he must have known; he could feel Nemesis taking hold of his vitals. We can imagine his sensations; he was no fool. By his own trick and device he’d delivered himself into the perilous keeping of a man that he knew was an ignoramus and a charlatan. I can almost see him – writhing and tearing at the bedclothes when the pains gripped him, and between spasms tortured by thoughts of the fix he’d got into. He’d dug a deep pit for another – and had fallen to the bottom of it himself.

“And on that second day of his illness getting worse all the time, he—— But here, Billy, you take up the story from now on. The final chapter is yours by rights anyway.

And the old judge took it up: “It wuz the next day, ez Lew sez, about four o’clock in the evenin’, that he managed to git up out of bed – he wuz in a room on the top floor of the house – and drag himself through the hall and git down the stairs. How he done it, in the fix he wuz in, is a marvel. Mebbe desperation and skeer give him an onnatchel strength. Anyhow, he didn’t have to come all the way down the stairs – he crawled part way and rolled the rest. Layin’ there at the foot of the steps moanin’ and whimperin’, wuz where old Jurdina found him. “It happened she wuz alone fur the time bein’, settin’ alongside Miss Cordelia in the big bedroom on the main floor, and she heared him when he tumbled, and then she heared his groans and she went out in the hall to investigate, and there he wuz. She went up to him and stood over him, with her hands on her bony old hip joints, lookin’ down at him and not no more compassion in her face than whut you’d expect to find in one of these here African idols.

“‘Whut you want?’ she sez to him.

“‘You,’ he managed to gasp; ‘I want you.’

“‘Whut you want wid me?’

“‘I want you to help me,’ he sez. ‘I tried to get to the telephone,’ he sez, ‘but I fell–I couldn’t make it. But you’ll do.’

“‘Do whut?’

“‘Get me a doctor, he sez. ‘I must have a doctor right away!’

“‘Whut’s de matter wid dis yere high toney doctor you done fotch on f’m de Nawth?’ she sez. ‘Ain’t he right yere on de premises handy to yo’ beck an’ call?’

“‘But I want some other doctor,’ he sez, pleadin’ hard. ‘I want one of the doctors that we had here last week – both of them if they’ll come. I tell you I need help.’

“‘You done turn dem doctors off,’ she sez.

“‘But I want ’em called back in,’ he sez and by now he’s cryin’ in a kind of a weak whisperin’, pantin’ way. ‘I’m awfully sick,’ he sez. “I tell you I’m a terribly sick man There’s something frightfully wrong with my side here.’

“‘An how’ bout my Li’l Miss?’ she sez. ‘Ain’t she turr’ble bad off too? Ef dat Chicago man is fitten to ’tend her all alone by hisse’f how come he ain’t fitten to ’tend you? Tell me dat.’

“‘But I’m sick in a different way,’ he sez; ‘you don’t understand. Oh, for God sake,’ he sez, ‘don’t stand there tormenting me with questions! Do something to help me!’

“‘Oh, yas, I does un’erstand,’she sez, and with that she stoops down alongside him so that her blazin’ eyes air glarin’ right into his, and her words come frum her hissin’ hot. ‘Oh, yas, I does un’erstand, Mister Mealy-mouf Man. I un’erstood frum de fust minute ever you set foot inside dat frunt door yonder, five months ago. You could fool my Li’l Miss – you could fool other folkses. But not me! An’ I un’erstands now. An’ it’s high time you un’erstood me. Lissen: You done med de nest – you gwine lie in it. Whut’s good ’nuff fur my Li’l Miss is good ’nuff fur you. Whut she’s got to tek, you teks too. Whut she gits, you git; only ef I’m ary jedge, you gits yourn fust an’ you gits it quick.’

“She wuz readin’ him his death warrant and he knew it, and he tried to shove her away from him and git up. She shoved him back.

“‘Lay still an’ lissen to me,’ she sez. ‘You know whut I’m gwine do? I’m gwine tek you in dese two arms of mine an’ I’m gwine tote you back up dem steps an’ put you in yo’ baid in dat room w’ich you jes’ left, an’ dar you gwine stay, effen I has to stand at de do’ an’ bar de way. An’ ef I cain’t be dere on guard, my husband Silas, he’ll be dere in my place, an’ ef he stirs f’um dere, ur lets you stir, I’ll skin him alive, an’ he knows it. Try to git to de telefome – jes’ try,’ she sez, tauntin’ him. ‘Try to yell fur help outen de winder effen you wants to – ’tain’t nobody gwine heah you an’ ’tain’t nobody gwine heed you; dey’s ten acres of ground round dis place, an’ yo’ voice is departin’ f’um you mouty fast.’

“It must have been jest about then that he fainted away, because the only sound he made ez she heaved him up and drug him back upstairs wuz by his feet bumpin’ on the steps. And frum then on it seems he wuz never more than half conscious; plumb out of his head when he wuzn’t layin’ in a stupor-like. I reckin her words had been enough to drive him out of his wits anyway, weak ez he wuz. She wuz enough to drive him out of ’em. I bet you the original Jezebel couldn’t a-been a more furious sight or a more dauntin’ one than whut she wuz ez she squatted down there by him in that old dark hall, spittin’ out the sentence that spelled his doom fur him. “

“It was his finish, then?” I asked.

“It wuz his finish,” answered Judge Priest soberly.

“How soon after that did he die?” I pressed.

“Oh, not right away; not till the next night. But I’ll let Lew supply you the details of his finish. It’s more properly his job.”

“Might have been my job, you mean,” said Doctor Lake crisply. “I got there in a hurry about dusk of the following evening, answering to an emergency call. One look at him and I realized there was nothing I could do – acute appendicitis of the fulminating type. He was moribund by then, and past helping. He must have been sinking fast all through that day and he was just about gone. No use to try doing any thing, and I knew it. Still, a man hates to quit. I had ’em rig up a kitchen table and I laid out my instruments, but he flickered out while I was getting ready to etherize him.

“Taken in time, he could have been saved, and would have been. Organically he was sound, and he was strong, too – he proved how strong he was by lasting as long as he did with all that poison spreading inside of him. A prompt operation at the outset, or even an operation twenty-four or thirty-six hours earlier, before his appendix burst, and he’d have been alive today. I’m certain of that. But he isn’t – thanks to that old black woman. “

“Did she finally relent? Was it she who sent for you?” I asked.

“She relent? Not a chance! It was the eminent Doctor Champion himself who sent for me, most urgently. The man got frightened. Even he could see – when it was too late – that Gaffney was dying. And anyhow, I suppose he had a trace of a conscience concealed somewhere inside of him – rudimentary, perhaps, but still, a trace. So he called me up and begged me to come. I could tell by his voice over the telephone that he was in a blue funk of panic. It was neither human nor professional for me to refuse to go. So I went, and I stayed on, as it happened. Because he got out – gathered up his batteries and dynamos and things, and took his nurse with him and pulled out. He’d had one patient die on his hands; it was plain to be seen he didn’t want another doing the same thing. So the late Mr. Gaffney was buried next morning in the Bray family lot out at Elm Grove Cemetery, and just two weeks later his wife followed him there.

“And now you know all the whys and wherefores of that fine big memorial hospital you saw dedicated today. And it’s time I was getting along home to bed. We’ve been palavering away here too long as it is. ” He rose up from his chair.

“There’s just one point that still isn’t clear in my mind,” I said. “I can understand, Doctor Lake, why you knew at first-hand the things you’ve been telling me – you must have been one of the two physicians that had Miss Cordelia’s case at the start; that’s plain enough. But, Judge Priest, I don’t quite see how you came to know part of what you’ve been telling me. For instance now, take your description of the scene between Gaffney and old Aunt Jurdina, after he fell down the stairs and she——”

“Oh, that?” said the judge. “Why, she told me about it. “

“She?”

“Yes, shorely – old Jurdina told me. Where else could I ’a’ got the straight of it but frum her? You see, son, fur some reason or other, there’s quite a passel of people in this town who come to me frum time to time when I’m not settin’ on the bench, and tell me things that ain’t exactly in the line of my judicial duties. It’s got to be a kind of a habit with some of ’em round here. I don’t know why it is, but such is the case. Moreover, in this instance, I’d knowed old Jurdina fur goin’ on fully fifty years, I reckin, and then besides, right soon after her mistress died she’d come to me instid of goin’ to a practicin’ lawyer, ez she should, to ask me some questions about her legacy. By the terms of the will she and old Silas come in fur a nice little sheer of money and a comfortable house to live in. So I jedge she felt that she wuz entitled to bestow her confidences on me; and here about ten months ago, when she come to die herself, she sent a messenger to me sayin’ that she had something mighty important to say to me fur the peace of her soul and would I please come right away. So when court had adjourned that evenin’ I went out there to the little cottage on Harrison Street where she lived. And after they’d propped her up on a pillow and when, at her request, I’d shooed all the other darkies out of the room, she told me this thing about her farewell dealin’s with the late Gaffney, in jest about the words I’ve used in tryin’ to tell it to you. You might call it a deathbed confession, because that’s practically whut it wuz.

“But don’t misunderstand me and go away frum here thinkin’ that she had any regrets fur the part she’d played in the matter. No, suh, not that old woman! There wuzn’t a regret in her system. Right up to the last breath she drawed, she gloried in it. It’s hard sometimes, even fur us that’ve lived all our lives amongst these black folks, to fathom the workin’s of their minds, but ez a matter of fact I’m inclined to think it wuz a sort of pride that made her send fur me when she realized she wuz about due to pass away. And pride is no kin to remorse. You see, son, she really believed she’d killed Gaffney. Mebbe she had, too – Lew, here, seems to think she contributed to the result, jedgin’ by his remark of a minute or so ago – but that wuzn’t the sense in which she meant it. She thought she’d had a direct hand in his takin’ off. And I figger she didn’t want to go without intrustin’ her precious secret to somebody who’d carry on the memory of it. So she picked on me. Yes, suh, she wuz firmly convinced, that old woman, that she’d been directly responsible fur his death, and ef I’m pressed I’ll have to admit I didn’t try to tell her no better either. Appendicitis didn’t mean a thing to her to her – it wuz merely an effect and not a cause. No, her firm conviction wuz that she’d had him put to death by hoodoo.”

There was a scuffling of feet behind me and I became aware of Jeff Poindexter. Listening to the two old men, I had altogether forgotten that Jeff was still present. He stepped nimbly backward and fumbled at the jamb of the front door. An electric bulb set in the porch ceiling flashed on, flooding the spot where we sat with radiance.

“Who turned on that there light?” demanded Judge Priest querulously.

“Me, suh— I done it,” said Jeff, and it struck me there was a quick and nervous quaver in his voice. “Hit seemed lak, wid de moon goin’ down, ’twould— ’twould— er—be gittin’ kinder dark out yere fur you gen’l’men.”

“Well, turn it off again,” said his master. “Whut you want to do – draw all the mosquitoes in the county?” Jeff obeyed, but I observed that he was now withdrawn well inside the door. There was a small light in the hall.

Judge Priest went on as though he had not noted this byplay: “Yes, suhs, that wuz it – she thought she’d done it by havin’ him witched to death. Propped up there in her bed, ashy gray and breathin’ so loud she sounded like a leaky bellows, she told me about it. It seemed whilst Gaffney wuz plottin’ agin her mistress she’d been plottin’ agin him. She hated him with an onquenchable hate to begin with. Then after Miss Cordelia wuz stricken down, she’d read his true feelin’s the same ez Doctor Lake and Doctor Boyd, his associate on the case, had read ’em. So she put off to old Daddy Hannah. You’ll remember him – the old nigger conjure doctor that used to live out yonder in that darky settlement on Plunkett’s Hill. She found him in his cabin and she told him – not namin’ any names though – that she aimed to put a deadly spell on a deadly enemy. So he told her, she said, to manage to git holt of a lock of hair out of the candidate’s head some way or other and fetch it there to him. Which she did. She bided her chance and she slipped into Gaffney’s room when he wuzn’t there and she collected some little red wisps out of a fine-tooth comb he used, and taken’ em back to old Daddy Hannah. And he said some conjure words over that wad of hair and then he tied it up in a little piece of blue cotton rag along with a white rooster feather that had been dipped in blood, and a dried frog’s leg, and one thing and another, and he told her, she said, to take it back home with her and bore an auger hole in a growin’ tree close to where her enemy lived and stick the charm in the hole and seal it up with a plug. He told her that inside of a month the tree would wither and die and the man that’d owned the hair would die along with it. He charged her twenty dollars fur his professional services, she payin’ it gladly and regardin’ it ez reasonable at the price.

“So she went home and she followed after his instructions. She stuck the rag in a hole she made in a big sycamore standin’ in the yard close up to the main house, and then she settled back, waitin’ fur results. She didn’t have long to wait. So fur ez Gaffney wuz concerned, she and Daddy Hannah wuz ten days ahead of their schedule. Fur Gaffney wuz dead and buried in jest twenty-one days; she kept close track. Of course it wuz jest a coincidence, but nobody could have convinced her of that. And she died happy in the belief that she’d sent him where he’s gone to.

“Curious thing, there wuz another coincidence, too – an even more strikin’ and remarkable one,” added Judge Priest musingly, and, although I could not see his face, a whimsical undernote in his voice told me that for sufficient reasons he was now departing from the strict truth and drawing on his fancy. “I asked her about the sycamore tree and, believe it or not, she gave me her solemn, dyin’ word that frum the very hour he sickened, the leaves on that tree begun to fade and wither, and that——”

He was interrupted by a scurry of quick retreating footsteps behind him; then we heard the sound of a door slamming somewhere at the back of the house; and by these things we knew that Jeff Poindexter, for once forgetting his manners and the proprieties of the occasion, had summarily and suddenly quit the company.

The Saturday Evening Post, 15 Jul 1922

The Darkest Closet

~

Reelfoot Lake is the largest fresh-water lake south of the Ohio River. It is the weirdest and the strangest, the most mysterious and the most sinister. Also, it’s the newest. It was created by the great earthquakes of 1811.

There was one shock that shifted the course of the Mississippi River, and that must have been some shift. There came a second which practically made over the Madrid Bend country of west Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. Then there was a third which crumpled down and depressed an area roughly sixty-five miles in length and an average width of about seventy miles. The same shock split a fissure through to the Mississippi, so that for three days the Mississippi ran north through the funnel, to fill up that gaping hollow and overflow the sunken lands bordering it. In Reelfoot there are stretches where on still, cloudless days a man in a boat, peering downward into the saffron depths, can see the slime-festooned upper boughs of drowned trees still standing and staunch after more than a century.

There are other places, deeper still, and by local belief these spots mark the mouths of subterranean tunnels and passages by which the great carrion-loving gars and catfish may go out to the river and back again, regardless of water levels above.

Before now, bloody things and tragic things have come to pass here, and it was here, a few years back, that there came to pass a tragedy which is the cause and the excuse for this story’s being written, the story, in fine, of a certain elderly Kentuckian’s first appearance as an amateur detective. Considerably more than a decade later he would take on the same calling, temporarily, but this prior business signalized his dedicatory performance in the role.

Properly, the story begins, not by the pumpkin-colored waters of Reelfoot nor upon its reedy margins, but somewhat father north of that grim theater, under the roof of the ancient town where for so long Circuit Judge William Pitman Priest reigned as a benevolent despot over a generally satisfied constituency.

It was one of those flawless, cool-warm days of early October when the Southern summer is putting on flaunting colors. The busy sweet gum, which reared almost against the north wall of the old courthouse, was shaking a cosmetic bough, all purple and scarlet and weathered green, in at the nearmost raised window, as Judge Priest came and stood on the threshold of his private chamber opening off the courtroom proper.

Here was where, for going on forty years now, he had presided over Circuit Court. But this afternoon County Court was in session. County Judge Dyke being ill, Major Randolf Pitman was sitting in his stead by temporary appointment. Major Pitman was one of the younger members of the home bar, a veteran of World War I, one stiffened arm attesting that his had been active service. He likewise was Judge Priest’s nephew, in whom the old man was well pleased.

Perhaps a desire to see how his kinsman would acquit himself in the judicial capacity had drawn the uncle to the doorway flanking the bench. Certainly it could not have been any deep regard for the barrister in the case that had brought him hither. Of all the lawyers in town the Honorable Horace Maydew, former state senator, was the only one not on friendly terms with Judge Priest.

This ambitious gentleman was seated between his two clients, one a pretty, slender girl in her later teens, and the other a plumpish woman who, you would have said offhand, was in the early forties; and both of them were dressed in all-black. The right hand of the woman was clumped in surgical bandages. Mr. Maydew stood up now and cleared his throat. He had a fine sonorous voice to match his majestic presence.

“May it please Your Honor,” he said, “under ordinary conditions this proceeding would mean merely the presenting of an uncontested will for probate. But, because of certain prior history in connection with it, I have felt it my bounden duty, as the legal representative of these heirs-at-law, to crave the indulgence of this court whilst I rehearse briefly the admitted facts and file certain sworn and attested statements pertaining to same. I shall endeavor to be brief.”

But he didn’t in the least suggest a man who intended to be brief. He went on: “As is known to all within the sound of my voice, the Carmichaels at one time formed a large and influential connection in this county; but of late years there remained but one resident member of that sturdy stock, namely, Elijah Carmichael, living at the family homestead three miles from this city on the Concord turnpike. Almost two months ago, on August twenty-first, he peacefully expired at the age of seventy-four. The estate, under the law, descended in equal parts to his surviving next of kin, of whom there proved to be but two – namely, his much younger half-brother, Caleb Carmichael, Esquire, and his niece, Miss Juliet Blair, the only child of decedent’s deceased half-sister.

“No difficulty was experienced in finding the junior heir. She is here today.” With a sweeping gesture he indicated the girl in his shadow. “But some days passed before the executors succeeded in discovering the whereabouts of the other legal legatee.

“He left here with his parents ai the age of eleven years and never once thereafter returned. We trace his career intermittently. We know that as a very young man he studied surgery at a medical college in the city of Philadelphia, but – ahem – never completed his professional education. Thereafter we hear of him under his stage name of Carey Carr, as connected with carnivals, with vaudeville entertainment, with other forms of amusement – in short, a strolling player. It would also appear that some twelve years ago he contracted a matrimonial alliance with a Miss Martha Swopes, originally of Keokuk, Iowa.

“Being at length traced to the city of Houston, Texas, he was informed of the demise of his half-brother and of his own good fortune. Immediately, as he wrote, he made plans for returning here. In that same letter he announced that he would be accompanied by his wife. Needless to add, I refer to this lady who sits at my right.

“Four weeks ago the couple started on their trip hither in their own car. Shortly after leaving Memphis, Tennessee, the husband recalled that their route would take them almost past Reelfoot Lake. Accordingly, he suggested they detour a short distance in order that he might show his wife the scene of his joyous boyhood experiences. His spouse acquiescing, they left the main highway and followed a side road until they reached a gloomy depth known as the Big Hole.

“Our travelers had halted their car upon the low bluff immediately adjacent to this spot and, by the testimony of the survivor, were standing side by side upon the edge contemplating the somber prospect, when, without warning, the husband staggered, presumably from a cerebral stroke or sudden spasm of faintness, and in the same breath fell forward and was precipated headfirst into the murky waters below.

“For some time – just how long a time she herself does not recall – his desolated companion remained upon the scene vainly hoping against hope for signs of him. At length, filled with grief and horror, she quit that grim vista, seeking help. In the natural distress of such a moment she accidentally slammed the car door, badly mangling her right thumb, but she drove as best she could to the nearest human habitation some miles away and there gave the alarm. Being assured that days or even weeks must elapse before the remains were borne to the surface, she hurried on to this city.

“At once then it developed that on the eve of their simple wedding twelve years previously, Caleb Carmichael and the then Martha Swopes had entered into certain prenuptial arrangements. Two life insurance policies were taken out, whereby either party was insured for the sum of five thousand dollars in favor of the other. Likewise each wrote a will identical in its provisions, under the terms of which, in the event of the signer’s death, the survivor would become the sole possessor of all property the decedent might then possess.

“The baring of these facts created new and unexpected factors. Instead of arriving here as a prospective future resident, this lady now appears as her late husband’s chosen inheritor and beneficiary, and therefore entitled to that one-half interest in an estate which, had he lived a few days longer, would have been awarded him as a co-heir of his half-brother, Elijah.”

Here, for a short but dramatic space, Mr. Maydew paused. Before resuming, he glanced downward at the funereal shape at his side. The widow’s somewhat narrow face, with its rather wide but shapely mouth, its deep-set eyes, its firm yet not angular chin, remained a serious, almost austere mask. Only by a fumbling with her right hand at the button fastenings of the light, crepe-like coat which she wore over a black silk blouse did she betray any suggestion of inner stress.

From his post at the doorway where he fronted the room, Judge Priest gave an involuntary start – a little start which no one there heeded – and, behind his glasses, his faded blue eyes began squinting hard at something, some motion, some shape, which for him all of a sudden had become overwhelmingly absorbing.

“Meanwhile,” resumed the orator, “watch was being maintained at the place of Mr. Caleb Carmichael’s untimely taking-off. Eleven days elapsed after that sad event before the body was – ahem – by natural forces projected from its watery entombment. Because of the elements and the inevitable processes of decay and – hum, ahem – other causes, the remains had undergone changes melancholy to contemplate.

“Fortunately, however, for our purposes a proper and complete identity was readily established. Not only did the body correspond in general size to the living form of the deceased; not only did the garments still adhering to it answer to the description given by disinterested witnesses at various points as being those worn on his journey northward; but absolutely indisputable proof was found – a removable plate or bridge intended for wear in the lower rear jaw and consisting mainly of three false teeth, which was immediately recognized by its original designer, Dr. P. J. Hooks, of Vicksburg, Mississippi, as being the same which some years ago he made for Caleb Carmichael.

“On such an array of incontrovertible evidence a coroner’s jury returned a verdict in accordance with the obvious facts; and, furthermore, the representative of the insurance company, here present, promptly waived any further investigation, and so reported to his home office, with the result that only this morning the widow received a certified check for the full amount of the policy in force on her husband’s life at the time of his demise.

“Without further ado, then, the corpse was brought to our fair city and reverently interred in the family vault of the Carmichael family at Elm Grove Cemetery.

“My narrative being practically at an end, I therefore would move the court as follows: First, that the last will and testament of the late Caleb Carmichael be admitted to probate. Second, that the public administrator be instructed to take the necessary steps for a prompt and equitable distribution of the estate of the late Elijah Carmichael to my clients, Mrs. Martha Swopes Carmichael and Miss Juliet Blair. Third, since the junior heir still lacks some three months of attaining her majority, and being in the eyes of the law yet an infant, I move that for the brief space of the interim a guardian for her shall be appointed by this honorable court.

“As a preliminary to such recommendation I now offer for the official transcript sundry documents.”

He fumbled in a leather manuscript case and produced quite a sheaf of folded, official-looking papers, together with some cardboard oblongs.

“Among other things, I have here,” he said, “a true copy of the birth certificate of Martha Swopes, born at Denver, Colorado, June 18, 1884, together with an attested copy of the marriage license issued to the said Martha Swopes and Caleb Carmichael. I also have here an affidavit recently given by Dr. P. J. Hooks, the previously mentioned dentist of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and with it a transcript of the proceedings of the coroner’s jury lately sitting at the nearby city of Fulvin in this state. And finally, I have here the original of the aforesaid will of the late Caleb Carmichael, a will done in the testator’s handwriting and without the signatures of witnesses, but admissible to probate under our Kentucky statutes, since the body of the text and the signature have been identified as his handwriting by the widow, and likewise by comparison with these several accompanying manuscripts – notes, memoranda, et cetera – done in longhand by him, which were found among his personal effects.”

Making the items into a compact bundle, Mr. Maydew handed them to the county clerk, who in turn deposited them on the desk before the acting county judge.

“Counsel would appear to have been diligent in behalf of his clients,” stated His Honor. “There remains, I take it, only the detail of naming for Miss Juliet Blair a suitable guardian to protect and conserve her interests, and therefore—”

The sentence was never finished. From his immediate left there came a choked, gurgling outcry. Major Pitman swung about in his chair.

Judge Priest was swaying in the doorway, his face swollen and convulsed. As half a dozen men sprang toward him, he collapsed face downward on the floor.

They carried him back into his private quarters and laid him on a sofa, and County Court adjourned, with the business before it unfinished. Meanwhile the sufferer had recovered his senses. Somebody naturally had suggested running for a physician. At that the invalid seemed to rally, and in a faint, piping voice spoke out:

“Git Lew Lake,” he wheezed. “He looked after me a while back when I had one of these here swoundin’ spells.” In a lower tone he whispered to his nephew, “And say, son, have somebody telephone out to my house fur Jeff Poindexter, and shoo everybody out of here.”

His lids drooped wearily and he lay like one sorely spent as presently Dr. Lake entered, hiding his worriment beneath a manner that was gruff.

“He just went down as though lightning had struck him,” began Major Pitman. “It’s the first I knew of it, but he says you attended him once before when he had a similar attack.”

“He’s a liar, then,” snorted the old physician. “Billy Priest,” he demanded, “what are you up to now, scaring everybody around here half to death?”

Behind him, Major Pitman goggled in astonishment. The invalid was favoring both of them with a slow, crafty wink.

“Uncle Billy, are you all right?” he cried.

“No, I ain’t,” answered his uncle. “In addition to bein’ somewhut shook up, I got an awful hard crack on my elbow ag’inst that hard floor.” He lifted his head, then dropped it again. “Air you shore that door is closed? Well, lock it, and pull down both winder curtains yonder. I’m about to set up.”

His famous temper bursting out through all his visible pores, Dr. Lake glowered down at his friend. “You fraud, what’s the meaning of this infernal play-acting?”

“Lew,” confessed the malingerer, “I couldn’t think of ary other way of breakin’ off the proceedin’s without creatin’ apprehension in certain quarters.” He turned his look upon Major Pitman. “About one more minute, son, and you’d have admitted that there will to probate, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, of course – but why——?”

“Well, ez it is, we’ve got an excuse fur a few days’ delay, and ef it should turn out I’m wrong, then the order kin be signed and there’s no damage done.”

“But what was it you saw or heard that nobody else there could see or hear?” asked the major.

“I ain’t absolutely shore I did see anything. You’ll have to put your trust in me and lend me some aid, both of you.”

“We’ll help. But what is it you think you sensed? Fraud-collusion?”

“I ain’t mentioned nary one of those harsh terms. I’ll give you a hint: Don’t it seem likely to you that possibly too much’s been took for granted in this here matter?”

“But the insurance investigator looked into everything, remember, and he professed to be entirely satisfied.”

“Even so, ef nobody objects, I’ll keep broodin’, off and on.... Listen, son, did it ever occur to you that nobody ain’t seen fit to probe very deep into the widow’s standin’? Whut I’m tryin’ to git at is that the only existin’ identification of her is the one which she herself offers.”

“How about the certified copy of her birth certificate? Surely you don’t think that could be a forgery?”

“I do not. I take it that it’s the genuwine article, even though it mout ’a’ passed into the hands of, let’s say, an imposter. But it dates back forty-odd years.”

“Well, then, the marriage license and the two wills – hers and his?”

“Both twelve years old. Whut about sence then?”

“Why, the two photographs.”

“Whut two photographs?”

“The two in the file that Maydew tendered a few minutes ago.”

“Oh! Fetch ’em in, then, and let’s have a look. Better fetch the whole batch in whilst you’re about it.”

The old man carefully studied the cabinet-sized prints which Major Pitman handed him. He turned them, reading the printed inscriptions on the backs. His scrutiny over. Judge Priest grunted: “Humph! These air indubitably likenesses of the widow. Kinder dressy, not to say stylish in former days, wuzn’t she? Plenty of long hair, too, judgin’ by the way it’s piled up.”

“Plenty of long hair yet, unless it’s a wig she wears.”

“I hardly think it’s a wig. I studied her right close’t, today. I’d guess offhand that all there mess of hair is growin’ out of her own scalp.... Say, son, how did these pictures come to be offered, anyway?”

“I might make a few inquiries, but whether she did or not, Maydew approved of it. He said the girl, Juliet Blair, received them in a letter from her aunt-in-law right after word had reached the Caleb Carmichaels down in Texas that Caleb’s half-brother was dead and had left him a pile.”

“So the girl got them before the drowndin’?”

“Weeks before! The lady said in the letter she looked forward to meeting her little niece by marriage, and in advance wanted to have her see how she looked. So that would seem to dispose of any doubt as to her being what she says she is.”

“Seems so. Son, by any chance is that there letter also in Maydew’s handy little budget?”

As Major Pitman searched, his senior absent-mindedly slid the two photographs into a breast pocket of his coat.

“I don’t find it,” said Pitman. “Well, Uncle Billy, are you satisfied that this thing was a false alarm on your part?”

“On the contrary, son, the possible complicatedness of it ’pears to me to be pilin’ up thicker’n ever.”

“Well, suh, in that case I’m agreeable to doing whatever you want done.”

“Here’s what I want both of you to do: Randy, I want you to put all these here papers in a secure safe place of keepin’ and leave em there whilst you’re away.”

“Away? Where? And why?”

“Away lookin’ after your pore old stricken uncle. And right there is where you come into the picture, Lew Lake. It’ll be your job to give it out that owin’ to my sudden illness, you’ve ordered me to leave fur a few day’s complete rest at Hot Springs, Arkansaw.”

“Ah, indeed!” His old comrade’s note was sarcastic. “So I’m to perjure myself—”

“You air! Better fix it fur tomorrow mornin’ early – the southbound Cannonball out of here. Because tonight at my house I aim to have a confab with little Julie Blair. I’m lookin’ to you, boy, to see to it that she gits in and out of my place without anybody bein’ the wiser.”

“I’ll try. How long will we be gone? “

“Not very long, I hope. We’ll start off like we wuz headin’ fur Hot Springs, but I reckon we won’t ever git there.”

“But won’t Hod Maydew raise Cain about my going away without acting on his application to probate?”

“Let him sweat. Kin he hold it ag’inst you that in the hurry of gittin’ off with your venerable and infirm relative you plumb forgot to pass on this motion?”

“But suppose he goes to Judge Dyke out at his house and asks for an order?”

“Poor old Dyke ain’t in shape to do any supersedin’. Word I got today is he’s out of his head and sinkin’ fast. Besides, even ef he did rally, how could they probate a will that’s locked up in the old wall-safe of mine yonder, and me the only man who knows the combination?”

“Oh, I see.”

“Glad you’re beginnin’ to – Who’s that hammerin’ at the door? Must be Jeff. Let him in, but not anybody else. Oh, Randy—” his tone was casual – “how long after them there Germans winged you did it take you to git used to bein’ left-handed?”

“I’m not used to it yet. I’m still awkward when it comes to wrestling with things like shirt studs.” The major glanced down at his permanently skewed arm.

“Ah, hah.... Well, I s’pose it would take time.” He addressed Dr. Lake: “Say, Lew, how air you on autopsies?”

“I’ve performed plenty of them in my time, if that’s what you mean.”

“And whut about little jobs of secret grave-robbin’?”

From the old physician the hot words popped like popcorn: “First, by gum, you ask me to risk my professional reputation by lying. And now you suggest that I begin flirting with the penitentiary—”

“Wait a minute.” It was the youngest man breaking in now: “Uncle Billy, what’s to hinder you from giving an order for the exhumation of that body?”

“And if I wuz wrong, would Hod Maydew ever git through snickerin’? Think I’d want to be the laughin’ stock of the whole district because I’d went off half-cocked?” Judge Priest stood up. “Randy, you better support me on one side and, Jeff, you git on the other. And don’t furgit, anybody, that you-all air easin’ along a feebled-up wreck of a human shell.”

His feet dragging, his hands fumbling weakly, and his head lolling, the invalid traveled down the courthouse steps and on to the rusty car awaiting him at the curbstone. Spectators scattered to spread the latest bulletin: Judge Priest must be awful bad off; he certainly looked it.

He still looked it that evening as he sat, all bundled up, in the front room of his old house out on Clay Street, for his interview with the girl, Juliet Blair. Now here. Judge Priest decided, was a girl not especially bright but sweet and biddable ... if anything, just a little bit too biddable.

“Was there – is there anything wrong, suh?” she was saying.

“Whut ever made you think that, honey?” he countered.

“Well, Major Pitman slipping me in by the back way. And both of you telling me not to say anything to anybody.”

“Oh, that! Well, I’ll tell you about that: Your lawyer, Horace Maydew, Esquire, ain’t so very friendly towards me. You see, child, I knowed your folks frum who laid the rail. I reckin it wuz largely my fault I didn’t keep better track of you after most of your family died off.”

“Thank you, suh.” She had gracious, simple manners. “Well, you couldn’t blame yourself. I haven’t lived here since I was a little girl.”

“So I gethered. Whut’ve you been doin’ with yourself?”

“I grew up at Farmdale, out in Bland County, and after Mamma died I managed to finish high school, and then I started clerking in a general store there. I quit when my uncle died and left me this money. I hardly knew him, even.”

“Hardly anybody knew him much, without it wuz those two decrepit old servants out on the home place, and one of them deef and dumb besides. You ain’t stayin’ out there, by any chance?”

“Oh, no, suh! I’m at Mrs. Broderick’s boarding house down on Franklin Street.”

“Tell me, have you seen very much of this aunt-in-law sence she arrived?”

“Not so very much. She’s sort of – sort of standoffish. She never offers to kiss me – just shakes hands.”

“I’d gamble there’s somebody else would hanker to kiss a purty little trick like you?”

She flushed, and he knew the shot had registered. She hastened to get back on a less intimate track: “She’s nice, though. She wrote me an awfully friendly letter before she started for here on the trip that turned out so terribly.”

“Is that so? I s’pose you’ve still got it?”

“No, suh. Almost as soon as we’d met she asked me to give it back to her, along with two pictures of her that she’d sent me at the same time. She said something about it maybe being needed for evidence – something like that. And only yesterday she told me she must have mislaid the letter or lost it, or something.”

“Remember anything particular about the writin’?”

“Well, I do remember the letters didn’t slant the regular way.”

“Sort of backhanded, eh?”

“No, not leaning, exactly – just more straight-up-and-down.”

“Well, nearly all of us have our own special little tricks when it comes to takin’ pen in hand. And so you’re gettin’ along fust-rate with this new relative of yours?”

“Just fine, what little I see of her. She stays to herself a lot. But she’s mighty considerate – generous, too. Why, Judge Priest, almost the first thing she said to me was that just as soon as this estate was settled up she wanted to take me around the world with her.”

“Travel’s a great thing.... But look here, whut’s that sweetheart of yours goin’ to say to your traipsin’ off like that?”

“Oh, you mean Tom Ackers? I guess I’ll know how to handle him.”

“I reckin you will. I seem to recall frum my own youth that most good-lookin’ young girls ’pear to come by the gift naturally. Say, look here, honey, want to do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“Well, then, promise you won’t make any plans about goin’ away anywhere until we’ve had a chance to thresh it all out together. I’m leavin’ here early in the mornin’, but I don’t aim to be gone very long; so, till I git back, after that, the bargain stands, eh?”

“Yes, suh, and thank you for your interest. I hope you come back feeling ever so much better.”

“Honey,” he said with sincerity, “I’ve got a premonition that practically ez soon ez I git away, I’m goin’ to start feelin’ and actin’ a heap stronger. Seein’ you has holpen me a lot.”

Judge Priest proved himself a true prophet. For, while he still swayed like a dizzy pachyderm as Major Pitman and Jeff Poindexter eased him aboard the southbound flier in the before-sunup gloom of that next morning, he regained a measure of his customary spryness almost immediately after he got off two hours later at a junction town which straddled the state line. Major Pitman stayed aboard. He went on to New Orleans and changed cars there for Houston.

Since the judge was known to people nearly everywhere in that end of the state, he made himself shrinking and inconspicuous in the shadow of a freight shed until Jeff, having gone up the street, presently came back with a hired livery rig.

For most of the forenoon the convalescent and Jeff jogged through the gloriously tinted woods. Before noon, they stopped at a double log cabin, where the old man was immediately in confab with a bewhiskered lowlander. This person’s tongue was as nimble as his bodily movements were slow.

“Yas, suh,” he stated. “That day of the drowndin’, I see this here couple lumber past here. I wuz settin’ yonder, and I noticed they had a terrible big load of plunder with ’em.”

“About whut time of day wuz that?”

“I kin fix it mighty nigh to the minute. Uncle Gippy Saunders, that drives the free delivery route, wuz just comin’ in sight, and, rain or shine, he’s due past here at two-twelve.... Well, I jest set here, and about four-fifteen their car came humpin’ back.”

“Whut makes you sure it wuz around four o’clock?”

“I got you ag’in there, suh. My chillen wuz jest climbin’ over the yard fence, comin’ from school; and school lets out at four and it takes ’em a skimpy quarter of an hour to git home, cuttin’ acrost lots.... So the car come along – jest the woman in it now – and she stopped right about where you air now, and yelled out kind of shrill. One end of one thumb wuz mashed mighty nigh to a pulp, seemed like. She says she’s lookin’ fur help on account of her husband gittin’ hisse’f drownded.”

“Jest a second: How fur is the lake frum here?”

“Not more’n two long miles – mebbe a quarter further on to the Big Hole.”

“About how long would it take the average car to drive frum here to there and back ag’in to here?”

“Thirty minutes at the most.”

“Did she mention how soon it wuz after they got to the lake before the drownin’ took place?”

“Right away, she said. So right off I ast her whut she’d been doin’ all the meantime, and she said she wuz so upset and excited she couldn’t rightly say. Well, she’d cammed down considerable by the time she got back here with the sorry news. I’ll say that fur the lady.”

“Quite so. And whut did you do?”

“Well, fust off I set my biggest boy and my least one on mules and sent ’em to git fellers started draggin’ the Big Hole. And then I climbed in ’longside her and showed her the way to old Doc Townsend’s. And I left her there, and when I got back it wuz comin’ on dark.”

“So you didn’t see her after that?”

“Not a minute frum that hour to this.” To the languid speaker came an idea: “Say, mister, whut-all interest have you got in this here matter?”

“I’m a lawyer by profession,” explained Judge Priest.

“I see. I heard tell there wuz a heap of money involved. Say, that there pair shore traveled with a big store of bag and baggin’, ez the feller sez. Besides bundles and gripsacks and two kinds of little squeezed-in trunks, hitched on the runnin’ boards, the whole back end of that kivered car wuz loaded halfway to the roof. I remember a couple of these here leather boxes like you’d carry brass-band horns in, and cramped in down at the bottom-like wuz about the biggest one of these here bull-fiddle cases ever I seen in my life.”

“You didn’t handle this bass-fiddle case – shiftin’ the load, say?”

“No, suh. Why, all lamed up like she wuz and all bloody, and her havin’ jest lost a husband, she even stopped long enough to lock up that there car before we went into Doc Townsend’s.”

“It’s been long years since I wuz down at that Big Hole of yours,” Judge Priest said, making his tone casual. “But, ez I recall, the ridge makes out to a kind of edge and then drops off steep and there’s heavy undergrowth except just below the bluff? I don’t suppose anybody studied the tracks at the spot where it happened – tire marks and footprints and sich?”

“Why would they? The whole place wuz all trompled down by the time I got there next mornin’.”

•     •     •     •     •

Dr. Townsend wore on his vest lapel the little button of the United Confederate Veterans. Judge Priest owned such a button, too, and took occasion so to state, introducing himself. Yes, Dr. Townsend had dressed the widow’s wound. The bone was not seriously injured; some flesh and a lot of skin missing. “It ought to be healed up by now,” he went on, “unless there was infection or the patient’s blood was in poor shape.”

“Well, much obliged and I reckin I’d better be on my way,” said Judge Priest.

Back again late that night at the railroad, Judge Priest did some telephoning to Major Pitman, en route, and to Dr. Lake at the latter’s residence. Here he parted from Jeff. He caught one train and was on his way farther south, and Jeff caught another going in the opposite direction. Next morning the home town was excited to hear that after years of intimate association as master and man, Judge Priest and Jeff had severed relationship.

“Naw, suhs, they wuzn’t to say no hard feelin’s,” Jeff explained. “In fact, jest before we severed ourselves frum one ’nuther, the old Boss Man gimme a note of utmost recommendation to Mister Attorney Floyd Fairleigh, an’ I’m done already gone to work fur him at his country residence out here on the Lone Oak road.... Naw, suhs, no complaint on neither side. I reckins you mout say both of us at once’t jest seemed to lose our taste fur one ’nurr.”

•     •     •     •     •

At Vicksburg on the following forenoon Judge Priest called upon that Dr. Hooks who once upon a time had made a removable bridge for the lower right jaw of one Caleb Carmichael. He had a drawing in his files of the bridgework.

The Judge’s next stop was across the big river over at the thriving Louisiana city of Monroe. Here he visited the establishment of a photographer named Newton who, it seemed, had succeeded another photographer named Hunt, now deceased. It was the facsimile signature of this defunct Mr. Hunt that was printed on these two photographs which Judge Priest had pilfered from the exhibits tendered in evidence.

“Naturally I wouldn’t recall this female,” said Mr. Newton. “I didn’t take over the shop until after Hunt died. But this is his work: I’d recognize it anywhere. Let me look through Hunt’s old accounts.

“Here you are,” he said at length. “The books show sittings on June eleventh, eleven years back, and delivery of three dozen printed pictures four days later, billed at theatrical rates. They were billed to Carey Carr, care of the Lily DeWitt Carnival Company. Oh, yes, and here’s records of two reorders mailed to other points – one to Spokane, Washington, and the other to Gallipolis, Ohio. Who was this Carey Carr?”

“His stage name wuz Carr. His right name wuz Caleb Carmichael,” explained Judge Priest.

He reclaimed the photographs and went away. Still mulling things over. Judge Priest strolled aimlessly, and presently he came to, standing on the shore of the Ouachita River, which runs through Monroe, and he looked down and saw a large craft, part barge and part steamer, which, with floating flags and brilliant lettering on its flanks, proclaimed itself as the Rice &: Pease Aquatic Palace.

“Now, by gum, why didn’t I think of that before!” exclaimed Judge Priest.

With a sort of ponderous alacrity he labored down the bank and entered the gay marquee which arched a hospitable gangplank. Judge Priest picked out a tall, spry person who unmistakably had about him the executive manner, and who proved to be cordial.

“The name is Rice,” he stated, speaking past the slant of a tremendous cigar. “Better known amongst friends and well-wishers as Lengthy Bill Rice. How can I serve you?”

“I’m not absolutely sure you can,” said Judge Priest, who had thought it expedient to drop the vernacular which ordinarily he employed. “I just wanted to ask you a few leading questions. I take it, then, that you are widely acquainted in this field – that is, with individuals?”

“Listen, old timer, there are more guys in this racket owing me borrowed money than the census enumerator ever meets. Come on in inside and set down.”

The pair of them spent half an hour together, very pleasantly, and, on the older man’s side, not entirely without profit. At any rate, he decided progress had been made along a previously undeveloped ore-streak. That night he wired an advertisement to a weekly magazine published in Cincinnati and devoted to amusement in all its branches, for insertion in its next issue. Then, feeling better content with prospects than he had since arriving in Monroe, he overflowed a berth on a railroad train bound for New Orleans.

•     •     •     •     •

In his new job, and right from the outset, Jeff Poindexter appeared to have an abundance of leisure. His very first afternoon of service under Mr. Floyd Fairleigh he went rabbit hunting. His route took him across the fields stretching from the Fairleigh place towards a road a half a mile or so to the southward.

Perhaps an hour later he halted at a party line of barbed wire which marked a neighboring ownership. Two dead bunnies swung by their tethered hind legs from a convenient trouser button. He had emerged from the heavy covert almost directly behind the gaunt old homestead where the late Elijah Carmichael had lived out his solitary days and where now his half-brother’s widow was domiciled. Somewhat nearer to him were the dependencies – an old but stout brick smokehouse, a springhouse, obviously abandoned; a mule barn, a stable, a cowshed, now serving as a garage; and, back of the inner yard fence, one log cabin, the lone survivor of what, once upon an ante-bellum time, had been a whole row of slave quarters.

From the shelter of a clump of sassafras bushes, Jeff studied what lay before him. The “big house” was tightly shuttered. Just beyond the cabin a very old, very feeble colored man was slashing at a log of firewood. A large, tawny dog was lying at the edge of the chopping place.

Quite slowly, Jeff slipped between two of the rusted strands. Instantly the dog was up and coming at him.

Jeff neither retreated nor threatened. He stood in his tracks, making small soothing, clucking sounds. Puzzled by these tactics, the dog hesitated, slowed down. Moving very deliberately, Jeff produced from a vest pocket a bit of paring from a horse’s hoof. He dropped this odorous offering by his foot and the dog mouthed at it, licked the morsel enthusiastically. Next Jeff sat down on a handy stump, got out his knife, and deliberately skinned and beheaded one of his rabbits, then dismembered the cadaver and fed the gobbets of hot meat to the dog. He took his time about it. When the last delectable chunk had vanished, the dog was nuzzling Jeff’s hand, making low rumblings in his chest, getting the smell of Jeff’s garments in his nostrils.

The dog trailing at his heels, Jeff dawdled across the lot. When at length the ancient darky saw him, Jeff smiled and by signs made clear his intent. He took the ax from those uncertain hands and made the chips fly, the dog looking on approvingly. Presently a Negro woman came forth from the kitchen wing. At sight of Jeff she stopped abruptly.

“Whut you doin’ yere, boy?”

“Miz Hester Morgan, ain’t it?” Jeff removed his cap.

“Ef ’tis, den whut?”

“Wellum, I works at Mist’ Fairleigh’s on the next place adjoinin’. So I jest dropped by to say howdy.”

“Huh! We ain’t havin’ no truck wid neighbors.”

“Yessum, but I’m same ez home folks. Many’s the time I hear my mammy mention you – Libby Poindexter, she wuz.”

“I knowed Sist’ Poindexter. Dat any reason why I got to know you?”

“No’m, not widout you’d keer to, ven’able lady. But I wuz jist thinkin’ to myself ’at mebbe you-all might accept this yere molly har’ w’ich I kilt it a few minutes ago, ez a free-will offerin’, sort of.”

“Lemme look.” Her practiced fingers dug into the yielding tissues. “Feel lak he all kidney-fatted, don’t he?” she said. Her tone was mollified.

“Lemme clean him fur you. Aunt Hester. Fust, tho’, lemme git a few mo’ sticks of stove-wood laid by.”

“That ain’t a bad idea, neither,” she said. “Suttin’ly is a heap of logs needed ’round yere someway.... Well, Br’er Poindexter, when you gits th’ough, better come on in our house an’ set a spell.”

It was good and dark when Jeff went home across lots. He had asked no definite questions, had been most casual, had betrayed no unseemly curiosity. Yet he knew more about the ways of that house under its present regime and about the new mistress of it than another investigator could have gleaned in a month of Sundays. He knew what went on in and about the old Carmichael place by day. He didn’t know – yet – what went on in and about it by night, because it would appear that when Aunt Hester and the deaf-mute retired they retired for keeps and for sleeping purposes.

Best of all, Jeff knew that thereafter he could invade these premises at any hour and be assured of a hospitable reception by Aunt Hester’s dog.

•     •     •     •     •

There was a nipping edge on the October air and the young moon that rode in the pale sky looked cold and crumbly. It was getting on toward midnight, moreover – the dread hour when graveyards are, on the best authority, said to yawn.

Jeff Poindexter shivered and bit hard with his underjaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He was stretched out, face downward, on the sloped roof of a latticed side porch at one corner of the old Carmichael homestead. He was looking into the bedroom of the solitary tenant of that house, a room at the eastern end of the building on the second floor. Through the slats of a wooden blind he watched the figure within. Dressed in a house wrapper, it sat at a dressing table not ten feet from him.

While he watched, the occupant stripped from her wounded hand the bandages which encased it, revealing to him a wound which looked very raw and angry. From a medicinal-looking tube she squeezed a little wormlike ribbon of some pasty material and anointed the injured thumb, then re-wrapped it with a new strip of gauze and slipped on a rubber thumb guard.

This done, she combed out her hair, strand by strand, until it hung in a thick, dark mane upon her shoulders, and then doused it from a tall, slender bottle which to Jeff suggested barber-shop tonics.

At length she was done with these purely personal services. She gathered together the articles she had been using and restored them to a leather toilet case. Then she fastened the toilet kit, using a small key.

Now she got up and passed out of Jeff’s limited range of vision. Almost immediately, though, she came back into sight. Carrying an old-fashioned lantern, unlit, she passed through a door.

Instantly Jeff was back-scuffling over the eaves of that porch. His toes found purchase in the latticework and very quickly he was on the earth – so quickly, in fact, that when the woman’s form emerged from a rear doorway, downstairs, Jeff was already crouched behind a jog in the kitchen wall not twenty feet distant.

She crossed the dooryard. At the woodpile she gathered up an armload of fireplace lengths, and then she went directly into the squat old smokehouse. Jeff, harkening, heard a dimmed wooden clatter which he took to mean the smokehouse had been barred from within.

At once, through the customary draft vents up under the overhang of the gabled roof, there showed dimmed patches of light, to prove that the occupant had set the wick of her lantern to burning, and then wisps of smoke began oozing out of those chinks.

Stealthily, step by step, Jeff executed a flanking advance upon that smokehouse. At the back of it a second-growth oak tree almost touched it. Jeff silently hoisted himself until he was poised in the main crotch. At that elevation, a line of orifices, like so many minute portholes, were only slightly above the level of his eyes. Since he could not turn his gaze downward, there would be nothing to see except blackened rafters. But, by craning his neck and standing tiptoe, he could sniff in. This he did, drawing his head back before the escaping smoke rifts made him cough.

With watering eyes and a gasping throat he repeated the motion. Already those inquisitive nostrils of his had recorded the first smell to gush forth – the honest smell of dry hickory ablaze. But presently with it was mingled an acrid, varnishy taint which stung his nose membranes. He softly snorted out this evil fume and, with his face turned aside, waited until the volume of it had lessened.

Well, one thing was certain. The lady must be fairly suffocated by now. Any minute now she would have to come out for breath. But before he departed Jeff took one more whiff.

He turned cold and rigid, and the flesh crawled on the nape of his neck. Was an overcharged imagination playing tricks on him or did he catch a different and an identifiable reek? ... It wasn’t imagination. The new odor grew heavier, more definite, more unmistakably what it was.

Jeff slid down to solid, friendly ground and streaked away from there.

•     •     •     •     •

Uncle and nephew sat over Creole coffee in a restaurant on the French side of Canal Street.

“Well, that’s that. Uncle Billy. By all accounts, the pair of them kept closely under cover all the four months they were in Houston – lived behind closed doors in a rented bungalow on a back street. I couldn’t find anybody in the vicinity who’d so much as seen Carmichael. A few neighbors did catch semi-occasional glimpses of the wife – vaguely described as being rather tall for a woman, not too stout, not too thin, quietly dressed, and with no particularly distinguishing marks.

“But, as I was just telling you, I think I found out why they were lying so low – or, rather, why he was. About a month after these two landed in town, the police department out at Seattle asked the police department of Houston to locate, if possible, one Caleb Carmichael, beter known as Carey Carr, and sometimes known, it would seem, as Dr. Cicero Carter, which is an alias we never knew about before, eh? So I had a discreet talk with the Houston chief of detectives – mighty fine, intelligent fellow. He said he notified Seattle he had the party in question spotted, and what about it? The answer back was that in case of certain contingencies Seattle might want an arrest made, but that until further notice nothing was to be done at the Texas end, except to keep a weather eye on the man. The next thing the Houston authorities knew the couple had pulled out, bag and baggage.”

“And also with at least two tootin’ horns and seemin’ly about the most majestic bull-fiddle case on record,” supplemented Judge Priest.

“Well, anyway,” went on Major Pitman, “inside of a week later, or some such matter, the local papers printed a press dispatch saying that Caleb Carmichael, while on his way to his former home in Kentucky, had been accidentally drowned. Just to be on the safe side and show they weren’t overlooking any bets, the Houston force wired Seattle, and in reply promptly received word that the police out there had also read the same dispatch and, the person being dead, that the incident was closed. I took down the name of the Seattle chief in case you’d care to communicate with him.”

“I think, son, I’ve got a better notion than that. That time I wuz out in Denver, Colorado, attendin’ the Bar Association meetin’, I met up with a powerfully clever lawyer from Seattle – he stands high out there. I’ll send him one of these here night lettergrams, askin’ him to make a few inquiries in the proper quarter and lemme know the results ez soon ez possible.”

“Well, suh, what’s the next move?”

“Well, you better go ahead and light a shuck fur God’s country. Ef Hod Maydew should git impatient to have that there will probated, you can’t do nothin’ because your absent-minded old uncle went away sick, leavin’ the will locked up in his safe, and nobody except him knows the combination. That’ll give us a leeway of ez many days ez we’ll probably need – and mebbe we won’t need many more unless I should have to take a quick trip in the general direction of the South Atlantic seaboard.”

At that Major Pitman’s eyebrows rose so high they almost merged with his scalp line. Judge Priest chuckled.

“Sort of jolted you, didn’t I, boy? Well, detective work seems to call fur more travelin’ than I figgered on. But I’ll say one thing fur it: You come in contact with some mighty prominent and influential people. F’rinstance, now, I bet you never knew anything a-tall about the career and achievements of Mr. Lengthy Bill Rice, a mighty genteel gentleman, even ef he does talk a curious kind of lingo. And I’ll bet you further that ontil now the lifework of Mr. A. A. Slupsky, better known to countless thousands as Appetite Albert, has been to you like a sealed book. I wuz entertained by the first-named celebrity up at Monroe in this state, and am indebted to him fur several helpful suggestions.”

“Helpful in connection with what?” demanded the amazed major.

“Why, helpful in connection with findin’ the present earthly whereabouts, ef any sich there be, of the venerable and almost equally distinguished Mr. Appetite Albert. Here’s the way I’m fixin’ to go about it.”

From a capacious side pocket he extracted a folded copy of a bulky periodical.

“This,” he expounded, “is called the Three-Sheet. They call it the trouper’s Bible. Well, the grand special souvenir fall-openings edition, due to be on all news-stands everywhere tomorrow, will contain an advertisement requesting that if same comes to the attention of Mr. Appetite Albert or anybody else who might know his present earthly habitation, ef any, a great favor will be conferred by telegraphin’ collect to Lemuel K. Jones, care Room 874, Hotel Beauregard, this city.”

“But who in thunder is Lemuel K. Jones?”

“Oh, that’ll be me. I always did think Lemuel wuz a stylish name.”

“Quite so!” said the nephew with irony. “You make everything just as clear as mud. And when you find Mr. Appetite Albert, what then?”

“Why, then I’ll either crave leave to call on him or, in case he’s passed away, git permission to examine his amassed collection of rare printed matter. He wuz the outstandin’ pitchman of his day, specializin’ mainly in slum and physic. But he wuz equally eminent in two other departments. He could swallow anything he fancied in any given quantity, and his other hold on immortal fame wuz based on these proud but truthful boasts of his: First, that durin’ half a century and more he had met everybody that had ever figured in the entertainment world; and furthermore it seemed that, havin’ once met sich parties or even heard of ’em, he rarely ever forgot the facts; but, ef he did, could refresh his memory frum a monumental assortment of showbills, pictures, press notices, clippin’s, obituary notices, programs, et cetera, et cetera, which he gathered up ez he went along and sorted away in a sort of filin’ system of his own.”

“At last I begin to get a little gleam,” said Major Pitman. “Through this notable personage you hope to trace the professional life of somebody, presumably Caleb Carmichael and his wife, Martha Swopes Carmichael – is that it?”

“Purcisely that. So you see why I’ve got to hang around here long enough for Lemuel K. Jones to git some results from his advertisin’ campaign. Say, Ranny, you’ve jest about got time to ketch the flier fur home, ef you hurry.”

•     •     •     •     •

Those times, long-distance telephoning was more of an undertaking than afterwards it became, but, once Major Pitman was on the right trail, he very promptly succeeded in getting through to his truant kinsman. From the city of Richmond, Virginia, no less, there came over the wire a familiar treble saying: “Well, son, how’s tricks?”

“Not so good. Hod Maydew kept pestering me about that will business. Day before yesterday, to prove how helpless I was, I took him into your chambers over at the courthouse and showed him that old iron safe of yours. He gave the knobs a turn and she opened out like a split watermelon. Uncle Billy, it had been unlocked all this time!”

“I had a fretful feelin’ that I furgot something,” lamented the old man. “Well, that’s too bad. But it mout be wuss.”

“It is worse, a whole lot worse. You know what he did?”

“Whut?”

“Did just what you’d expect a resourceful chap like Maydew would do: Put out for County Judge Dyke’s house; he’d rallied a little and was semiconscious. And the poor old dying chap signed the necessary orders, admitting that will to probate and, on top of that, named the widow as the guardian of the girl.”

“Whew! When did you say all this happened?”

“I didn’t say. But it was Monday afternoon.”

“And this is Wednesday. Why——?”

“I’ve been trying to locate you, but you left a twisting trail – and no forwarding addresses to speak of. Anyhow, they’re moving fast, that outfit. I understand the estate is pratically divided up. And only a little while ago I heard that the homestead, which belongs to the two of them jointly, has been put on the market for a quick sale.”

“Well, I hate to leave here right this minute, but I’d better finish up my recuperatin’ at home. I can’t hardly git there, though, before early day after tomorrow mornin’. You git aholt of Lew Lake right away and tell him to go ahead with a certain clandestine undertakin’ – tonight, ef it ain’t too late, or anyhow not later than tomorrow night. And say, son, has any answer come yit to that wire of mine to Seattle?”

“A fat envelope arrived this evening – special delivery and marked ‘Special and urgent.’ Shall I open it?”

“No, hold it till I git there.”

“How have you fared with your hunt for – -what’s his name? – the gentleman with the appetite and the scrapbooks?”

“Jest so-so. He’s gone to a better world than Virginia, even. I’m goin’ through his cluttered and unindexed earthly assets at the place where he passed on frum. It’s no easy task. Any private communications frum Jeff?”

“Not a breath. I’m in touch with him, but even if he had anything to tell he wouldn’t tell it to anybody except you.”

“I reckin that’s true. Well, I better be seein’ about train connections at Louisville, dadgum it!”

On the second morning thereafter, Major Pitman got up before the stars blinked out to greet his errant uncle. At the station Jeff Poindexter was lurking discreetly in some dark shadows. He revealed himself, handed his former employer a smallish parcel, and in the shelter of the major’s car made a whispered brief report, then expeditiously vanished across the tracks. Major Pitman had with him the letter postmarked Seattle. For the moment the old man pocketed it.

“What’s the latest tidin’s?” he demanded as they headed for Clay Street.

“Well, Dr. Lake pulled off that surreptitious job of grave-robbing late last night – early this morning, rather. Sheriff Birdsong cooperated, just as you arranged for before you left here. Dr. Lake telephoned that he’d be at your house at eight o’clock to let you know the results.”

“That ain’t so long to wait. And gives us time to git some needed nourishment down inside ourselves.”

“How about the Richmond business?”

“Havin’ to pull out so sudden left things kind of snarled up. I found some scattered bits of fairly informative printed matter. But there’s one break in the chain, and that’s whut I’m still hopin’ may turn up. Ef it should come to light I’m to expect a wire right off, givin’ full purticulars, regardless of expense....”

The pair were still at the table when Dr. Lake stumped in. “Anybody liable to hear us?” he asked.

“Excusin’ us, there’s nobody on the place exceptin’ Aunt Dilsey, and she’s out in the kitchen,” stated his host.

“All right, then, pour me a cup of coffee. Major.... Well, there was no need for anything resembling a regular autopsy. I did what there was to be done right there in the vault by flashlight, and then we resealed the box and came away.”

“Well?” Judge Priest’s voice was higher-pitched than usual.

“Billy Priest,” went on Dr. Lake, “I don’t know whose body is in that coffin, but I’ll swear it’s not the body of the party whose name is engraved on the coffin plate.”

Major Pitman whistled.

Dr. Lake said, “The face was mauled up past recognition, and the hands are mutilated, too, and the scalp. But that wasn’t due to decomposition while the body was under water. It must have been done beforehand – done deliberately, I’d say.”

“How about the teeth?”

“Just coming to that. While there was a gap in the lower jaw where three teeth had been pulled out, I’m dead sure those teeth were drawn after death. In short, gentleman, I’m ready to risk my professional reputation that this body cannot be the body of Caleb Carmichael for the simple reason that it’s a substituted body which had been subjected to chemical preservatives long before it was dumped in that lake. Well, what’s next?”

Judge Priest got ponderously up. “The next thing,” he said, “is fur you two gentlemen to give me your best opinions on a few little bits of physical evidence.”

In the living-room the old judge first invited the attention of his colleagues to certain time-yellowed clippings, including in his budget a creased play-program and some rumpled lithographs.

“Kind of keep track of the dates on the margins of these,” he said, passing them out, one by one. “They’re s’posed to run consecutively, up to the p’int where they end.”

When this had been done, he said, “Next we’ve got this here very illuminatin’ communication frum my friend. Judge Frobisher out in Seattle. I’ll read it aloud.”

His reading was punctuated by appreciative grunts from Dr. Lake and once from Major Pitman an exclamation.

“And now, boys, we come to the contributions of a most competent individual and one that I’m shorely proud of,” continued Judge Priest. He removed the loosened wrappings on the parcel which Jeff Poindexter had bestowed upon him at the station. His blunt fingers plucked forth a partly unreeled length of ordinary surgical gauze. It was slightly stained with some greasy substance and by its spiraling betrayed that it had lately served as a bandage.

“Lew,” he said, “look at this, please, and take a few sniffs, and then give us your expert opinion ez to its character and the uses to which it’s been put?”

“One sniff is ample,” stated Dr. Lake, “and one glance is sufficient. The way it’s still kinked up shows it was recently snugly wrapped around some small member – a finger or possibly a big toe.”

“How about a thumb?” prompted Judge Priest.

“Or a thumb!” agreed Dr. Lake, and slapped his knee understandingly.

“And the stuff that wuz smeared on it – would that be good to cure up a sore thumb?”

“I should say not! That’s phenolate; it would delay the normal healing processes. But why——?”

“Never mind the whys and wherefores. Let’s pass along to Exhibit B.”

Gently he fished out and passed to his crony a tiny wisp of hairs, curling a little at their lower tips and of an average length of about eighteen inches.

“That’s easy,” said Dr. Lake. “What we’ve got here is a few combings from a human scalp. The length would indicate they grew on a woman’s head. They’re lighter at the roots than anywhere else. That shows dye had been used to turn a naturally sandy color into a very dark brown. I can guess where they came from, too.”

“And your fust guess will be the right one,” assented Judge Priest. “Out of the head of the Widder Carmichael.”

“Then why all this pother about a stand of topknot? It may be foolish – and vain – for a woman to dye her hair, but I never heard it was any crime.”

“No crime, but mebbe it wuzn’t so foolish, neither. And here’s some little souvenirs fur you to scrutinize.”

For their inspection he tendered three minute and irregular splinters of thin wood. In turn his companions fingered these fragments, rubbed them, bent them, smelled them; then, after conferring briefly, nodded to each other.

“We’re agreed here, Uncle Billy.” The major was spokesman. “It’s fairly simple. These are scraps of a very light but strong wood, possibly used as a casing of some sort, possibly as a veneer that was stretched over a heavier framework. Originally they were painted black and shellacked. Recently an effort was made to destroy them by burning, or else they were burned accidentally.”

“Checks with my diagnosis,” confirmed Dr. Lake. “There’s traces of the polish still adhering to this one. And here’s a crumb of glue – old glue, at that. All of which being conceded, what about it?”

“Hold your bosses! Before we git through I think that even without a chemical analysis it kin be demonstrated that these here specimens air overlooked salvage frum an article which fust wuz busted into scrap and then the wreckage burnt up piecemeal – in short, a bull-fiddle case of augmented purportions.”

“But look here. Uncle Billy,” protested Major Pitman, “aren’t these bass-fiddle cases usually made of some light, stout composition, to save weight and all?”

“Nowadays, yes. But former years they made ’em of wood.”

“Where’d these specimens come from? Or is that one of your secrets, too?”

“You’d have to know to understand some other disclosures that’ll follow. They came off the earthen floor of the smokehouse out on the Carmichael place. To git ’em Jeff Poindexter had to pick a padlock. Once’t he wuz inside, he gathered up a lot of fresh wood ashes and dead embers and some old dirt, and sifted it all out keerfully and got these here results.”

Judge Priest lowered himself into a rustic rocker and, with maddening deliberation, relit his corncob pipe.

“Now, then,” he said, between puffs, “let’s go back to beginnin’s: Lew, you’ll bear me out when I say that, jedgin’ by whut word trickled back here frum time to time, after he’d left here ez a youngster, Caleb Carmichael must’ve been a bad egg all along. At Philadelphia, where he studied medicine, he got mixed up in some kind of funny business and left there without ever gittin’ his degree.

“Well, after bein’ kicked out of college he takes up play-actin’ and music and sich. Then there comes a kind of gap in his theatrical record. Shortly after, though, ez we kin figger by that letter from our informant, Judge Frobisher, out in Seattle, he branched out to include fortune-tellin’ and spiritualism: and, under the name of ‘Doctor’ Cicero Carter, also doin’ a little malpractice on the side.

“In the course of his ramblin’s he marries Martha Swopes, of Keokuk, loway.

“Now, we begin to git definite track of him ag’in. Four months ago, at Seattle, he branched out frum his other dubious callin’s fur long enough to perform an illegal operation on a young girl. She dies under his hands on the operatin’ table. Because the girl’s folks want to protect her good name, the thing’s hushed up, someway. But he skips out and heads fur Texas. I reckin he’s more or less disguised, but, to be on the safe side, he goes to usin’ his right name once more. Well, back in Seattle, talk starts. So the police there trace Carmichael. They locate him in his snug little retreat at Houston and, ez a precaution, ask the Houston authorities to sort of keep an eye on him.

“Then all of a sudden he gits word that his half-brother, Elijah, has passed on up here in this county and left him a right sizable chunk of ready cash and some other odds and ends of property. With money in his possession, that Seattle family air liable, not only to tie up his share of the estate and sue him fur causin’ their child’s death, but likewise press a criminal charge and have him extradited out there fur trial.

“Well, there he is! Whut good is all that legacy goin’ to do him ef he loses it in a damage suit and, on top of that, gits stuck into prison in the State of Washington fur mebbe a long term? There’s one way out, though. There’s that there will he wrote years and years before, leavin’ everything he owned to his wife. Ef he’s declared legally dead the money is still on tap, because his wife gits it.

“So he gits busy. Whilst he’s pretendin’ to be settlin’ up his affairs in Houston, he’s really stirrin’ his stumps to set a clever scheme in motion. Frum somebody he buys the preserved body of some poor pauper answerin’ roughly to his own gin’ral plans and specifications. So he smuggles that body into his house. And he pries the jaws open and he pulls three teeth out of the lower jaw on the right-hand side, and he slips into the gap his own bridgework. Lackin’ all else, and with only a superficial examination of the mouth, which is whut he’s countin’ on, he’s provided about the best identification that anybody could ast fur.

“Here’s where the bull-fiddle case comes into the picture. Let’s say it’s a memento of his old barnstormin’ days that he’s hung on to fur all these years. He gits rid of the fiddle that’s in it, and into that case, by main strength, he jams that friendless unknown’s body. And he loads it into his car, and him and his wife start out drivin’ through to Kintucky.

“So they come skyhootin’ acrost country with that cased-up corpse ridin’ behind ’em. Just after they cross the state line from Tennessee into this state they turn off the main road, and he drops over to the most lonesome corner in that lonesome upper tip of Reelfoot; to the Big Hole, where all them curious eddies air.

“Well, no sooner do they git there than things start happenin’. He drags the body out of the fiddle case. He messes up the face so it’ll be unrecognizable. He dresses it up in the clothes he’s been wearin’ apurpose all durin’ the trip – clothes that hotel clerks and camp-ground people and service-station people along the line have seen him wearin’. He dumps the camouflaged body into the Big Hole, where he’s reasonably shore those strange underwater currents will hold it fur a few days anyhow before it comes to the surface. He dresses himself up in clothes that, with any kind of luck, will keep him frum bein’ recognized ez the individual he really is. And, right then and there, Caleb Carmichael, alias Carey Carr, alias Dr. Cicero Carter, vanishes out of the scene.

“Now let’s take up the widder’s end of it. Him havin’ faded frum mortal view, she takes the center of the stage. With her mashed thumb bleedin’ all over her, she comes bustin’ out of those bottums, spreadin’ the alarm. She gits her wound patched up and then drives on through here alone, to take possession of the old home place. Ez a bereft woman, she stays in seclusion there till the dissectin’-room body is recovered and identified ez her late husband’s remains, and then she sets out to prove up her right to inherit his sheer in the estate.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Dr. Lake fervently. “The next step’s clearly enough indicated, eh?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Judge Priest.

“Then what are you going to do?” demanded his friend.

“Jest set a spell, and mebbe in the meantime try to gather up a few little odds and ends that seem to be flappin’ loose.”

“But, man alive, if your sequence of theories will stand the test – and I can’t see a flaw in it anywhere – there has been deliberate collusion to bolster up a crooked conspiracy.”

“Concedin’ you’re right, whut would you advise doing?”

“What is there to do except grab the woman forthwith? Stick her in jail. Keep her there till she’s ready to confess where her husband’s hidden away. Then indict ’em both. Send ’em both to the penitentiary. Good riddance to bad rubbish!”

“Jest a minute. Lew. Admittin’ there’s been a heap of provable and self-evident skulduggery practiced in this here affair, even so, that’s a perfectly good will that wuz offered fur probate – and probated – by the bereft lady’s lawyer, wuzn’t it? Ef he’s alive he’s still entitled to his fifty per cent in his half-brother’s estate, ain’t he? I’d trust Hod Maydew to git him and her both out of sich a mess with nothin’ lost exceptin’ a couple of reputations and mebbe a few tail-feathers fur attorney’s fees. Ef, on the other hand, a human bein’ has been deliberately made away with—”

“But you just now said – !” Dr. Lake straightened himself with a sudden jerk. “By heavens, Billy Priest, are you intimating there’s been foul play?”

“Don’t go jumpin’ at hasty conclusions. For the moment let’s all remain ca’m, cool, and collected.”

“But if you think what you seem to be thinking, if you’ve got suspicions of a killing at the back of your mind, there certainly are steps to be taken.”

“There certainly air. I kin think of three steps already. The first step is fur you to put a tight clamp on them waggin’ jaws of yours and go start your mornin’ round amongst your patients, ef any such survivin’ unfortunates there be. And the second step is fur you, Ranny, to pick your time fur it some time today and find litle Juliet Blair and toll her here, unbeknown to anybody else, fur a little chat. And the third step is fur me to set right where I am and hope and pray I’ll be hearin’ frum Richmond betwixt now and dark. It’ll be word frum there that ought to be the key to unlock the darkest closet yit.”

•     •     •     •     •

It was getting on toward one-thirty o’clock in the afternoon when Major Pitman, a deepening concern on his face, burst in on Judge Priest who, seeing that look, sat up abruptly. “Where’s the girl?” he demanded sharply.

“She’s gone, and the woman with her!”

“Where?”

“That’s what I’m not dead sure of yet. But, wherever it is, they’re both well on their way.”

Judge Priest was on his feet now, mopping at his slick forehead. “While we sat here clackin’ away like three old guinea hens!” he shrilled. “Go on, go on!” he ordered. “Tell me whutall you know.”

“I should have gone to Mrs. Broderick’s boarding house as soon as I left here this morning, but you said there was no rush, so I put in a few licks at my office first. About an hour ago my secretary came back from having a snack and told me that over at the soda fountain she’d just heard a curious rumor from her sister, who works at the bank – something that had to do with Juliet Blair and Mrs. Carmichael.

“Inside of three minutes I was in the private office of the bank, giving Walter Ricketts a quick third-degree. He said that about two-forty-five o’clock day before yesterday afternoon, the two of them came in there together, and the woman withdrew her share of the money on deposit to her account, and then, in her capacity as guardian, authorized the withdrawal of the girl’s half of the funds – roughly, a total of $18,200. Well, he tried to tell them how risky it was for two females to be carrying around that much money in cash, especially as they’d already told him they expected to leave almost immediately on an extensive sea voyage. He argued, but she stood firm. He had to scrape his vaults pretty scarce of big bills to make up a sum of that size. But he did it, and they left, after instructing him to say nothing outside the bank about the transaction.”

“Wuz Hod Maydew in on this monkey business?”

“No. He left last Monday night for Louisville and he’s not back yet. Well, the next thing I did was to try to reach you by telephone, and I couldn’t get this number. Uncle Billy, did you call anybody, say, about three-quarters of an hour ago?” he demanded accusingly.

“Yep; I had an exchange of words with the sheriff’s office. Got something fur the sheriff to do – mebbe!”

“And you left the receiver off the hook. Look yonder.” He pointed toward his uncle’s cluttered flat-topped desk.

“I git more furgitful every day I live,” confessed the culprit.

“Since I couldn’t raise you, I dusted right on out Franklin Street to Mrs. Broderick’s. About noon the day before yesterday the girl came to her, so excited she could hardly speak, and told her she’d been up in her room packing and was going to go. At first she wouldn’t say where she was going-said she’d pledged herself to tell nobody of the plan. But Mrs. Broderick managed to worm it out of her that she and her aunt-in-law had suddenly decided to start on a voyage around the world. They were slipping away now unexpectedly because there was somebody temporarily out of town who knew about the plan and might, if they delayed their departure until that somebody got back, try to put obstacles in the girl’s path. Do you think that could be Hod Maydew?”

“I happen to be the party referred to,” stated Judge Priest. “Go ahead.”

“There’s not much more. Before she pulled out, still fluttering like an egg beater, the little chucklehead told Mrs. Broderick, as a dead secret, that they were going to drive in a hired car to Wycksberg that evening and catch the Chicago-New Orleans southbound flyer as it passed through there at seven-ten o’clock at night; and that some time yesterday, out of New Orleans, they would sail for South American ports. Well, they caught the train all right. I confirmed that at Farrell Brothers’ garage on my way out here, saw the fellow who drove ’em down. As they got aboard, the woman slipped him five dollars as a bribe to keep quiet.... Oh, yes, the girl told Mrs. Broderick the name of the ship – the Southland Star.”

“So!” Judge Priest’s wheezy drawl was quite gone. He spoke snappily: “Ef the train wuz on time, they got to New Orleans considerably more’n twenty-four hours ago, givin’ them better’n a full day’s start on us, doggone it! Jump to that telephone, son, and make central raise New Orleans.”

Already Major Pitman was joggling the black rubber horn on its hook. “Who’ll I get – the police?” He flung the question over his humped shoulder.

“Yes! No – I’ve got it!” The judge began snatching a litter of contents out of his pockets. “Got it here somewhere – name of one of the fellers I shot snipes with last week at that there Delta Club. Collector of the port there, or somethin’. Here ’tis.” Judge Priest was thrusting a rumpled calling card into his nephew’s hand. “Tell him I say to locate a ship called the Southland Star. Ef by one chance’t in a hundred she ain’t sailed or ain’t out of the mouth of the river yit, ast him to detain her somehow, someway. Ef she has got away let him find out her fust port of call and how many passengers she carried – there’s bound to be records – and, ef possible, the gineral descriptions of those passengers. Oh, yes – and whether the ship’s got radio aboard. Tell him to report right back to us here. Tell that telephone girl to keep the line open. Wait, wait” – these next words seemed to be pumped out of him almost against his will – “Tell him – and tell her too – it mout even be a matter of life and death!”

He lumbered to and fro, rather like a caged hippo in a pet of impatience; then, with remarkable agility, he spun about as the telephone bell rang.

“If it’s the man we’re after, that’s what I’d call service,” said Major Pitman and glued his ear to the receiver.

It was the man he was after.

•     •     •     •     •

There passed forty of the longest minutes in the records of the present Christian era. For the major there was nothing to do except wait, and hold the wire and let the tolls mount up. When the other end of the wire came to life again he jumped as though he had been bee-stung. Next thing, Major Pitman was listening and answering back, and, in between, flinging over his shoulder to the palpitant Judge Priest condensed snatches of the news coming through – like this:

“Southland Star, independently owned, Captain Nicholson, master. Carries mostly cargo but has accommodations for a few passengers.... Cleared for Rio in Brazil at noon yesterday.... Reliable information is that she carried only two passengers, a woman and a girl.... No wireless equipment.... The collector says only a few minutes before casting off the skipper had his papers altered for a stop at Galveston to pick up a special freight consignment.... Ship ought to be there some time tomorrow, probably in the forenoon.... New Orleans officers glad to cooperate through the port authorities there.... Well, Uncle Billy, how about it?”

“Tell him I’m sending a thousand thanks and my best regards, and I’ll be seein’ him inside of a day or two, proba’ly. Tell him he needn’t pester about Galveston, though. Tell him I aim to be there in the mornin’ myself and handle the thing pussonally.”

Having relayed the final message. Major Pitman turned a bewildered countenance upon his elder. “But, Uncle Billy, the trains can’t possibly git anybody from here to Galveston by tomorrow morning.”

“There’s sich things ez aeroplanes, ain’t there?”

“But who’s going to fly us?”

“How about that there old army friend of yours, that Cap’n Duke Cubeman, that dropped out of the skies not three weeks ago to see you and give you a spin in that big, new amphibian machine that he’s pilotin’ all over this southern country fur the oil people up in Louieville? Git back on that long-distance line.”

The younger man told central who it was that he wanted to reach this time. An afterthought came to him: “Uncle Billy, Duke’s got room for four in that big machine, besides him and his partner, Spence. You could take the sheriff along with us.”

“Tell your friend there’ll be jest the two of us. Whilst we’re gone the sheriff’s goin’ to be burglarizin’ an occupied house and a locked-up smokehouse, and, on top of that, doin’ about the most thorough job of rummagin’ and diggin’ and probin’ and soundin’ that he ever tackled yit.... Lawsy! I do wisht we could hear frum Richmond before we git away.”

The words trailed off as he lumbered out the hall door and made for the front porch, to peer into the afternoon sunshine that gilded the empty reaches of Clay Street. Then, on cue, as theatrically as a belated entrance in a scene in a melodrama, a messenger boy pedaled up that golden path on a bicycle and bounced off at the gate and came trotting toward him. Halfway down the walk Judge Priest met him, and fairly tore an envelope out of the lad’s hand, shucked it open, glanced hurriedly at the two pages of typewritten flimsy it had contained, and lunged for indoors.

Judge Priest shot into the living-room as Major Pitman straightened up from the desk with a hand cupped across the transmitter disk and said, “Duke’s on the wire. He can be here in less than two hours. But he thinks he should give those oil people some reason for taking the plane.”

Judge Priest’s squeaky voice clarioned like notes from a cracked bugle: “Tell him there’s been one cold-blooded murder. Tell him we ain’t so much concerned with the murder that’s been committed ez with the other that’s bein’ contemplated right this very minute. Then ring off, and look at this here.”

The major told his friend, and rang off, and jumped up and snatched at the typed pages and read them through.

“Gosh!” he said, almost whispering it. “Your missing clue at last – the thing that unravels everything. ...” Major Pitman was still speaking in that stricken half-whisper. “Uncle Billy, are you sure we’ll get there in time?”

“Reasonably shore – that’s all. I’m bankin’ that common prudence will stay those deadly hands till we kin lock a set of handcuffs on ’em.”

•     •     •     •     •

Trim-looking and smart for a tramp steamer, the Southland Star came inching up toward the harbor, and a tiny tug chugged down Galveston Bay to meet her before she landed. The tug carried a government flag. At a tooted signal the steamer slowed down, until she barely held headway.

As the smaller craft drew nearer. Judge Priest, balanced on spraddling legs in the tug’s bow, murmured under his breath, “Thank the Good Lawd! The girl’s at the stern yonder – jest came up on the top deck.”

As they edged under her flank, the ship, drifting gently now, let down a landing ladder with broad rungs. Despite age and bulk. Judge Priest was the first to go up the side. Major Pitman following him, and then the Galveston chief of detectives and one of his men.

As Judge Priest’s red face showed above the guardrail, the girl’s eyes widened. Giving a little smothered cry, she ran forward, and threw herself against the old man’s broad and panting breast.

“Oh, Judge, I’m so glad to see you!” she cried.

“Young woman,” he wheezed sternly, “you went and broke your solemn promise to me.”

“I know I did. But – but she nagged me into it. Oh, Judge Priest, there’s something wrong – I can feel it. And I’m frightened.”

“Jest where is this here tourin’ companion of yours?” he asked.

“Downstairs – I mean, down below, in her cabin, right next to mine.”

“And the money you took with you?”

“She has it – hers and mine, too. We were going to get – what do you call ’em? – letters of credit at New Orleans, but she said there wasn’t time to stop—”

“You better wait right here, honey, with my nephew,” he told her. “Me and these here two gentlemen have got some business with your – your travelin’ mate.”

The captain of the Southland Star had been in conference meanwhile with the officers. His face set gravely at what they told him, but he said nothing until they were done.

“This way,” he said, leading the way.

The port officer stayed behind. The remaining four went down a companionway. They came to a metal door and the master of the vessel tapped on it with his knuckles.

“Who is it?” asked a voice from within.

“Captain Nicholson,” he said.

“I’m not dressed for company; I’m doing my hair.”

“Sorry,” he called back, “but I must ask you to let me in.”

“Come in, then.”

The occupant of the roomy but plainly furnished cabin was sitting before a small dresser at the foot of the bunk; electric bulbs furnished illumination. The figure was black-clad; the heavy dark hair was loosened and flowing down about the shoulders. A heavy coating of white powder was upon the anxious face. At sight of strangers shouldering in behind the skipper, the form stiffened.

“What do you want?”

It was the chief of detectives who answered. “We want you,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

“What for?” The voice was gulping, choking, shaken, held under partial control by painful effort.

“We want you for murder, committed in Hickson County, Kentucky, on the twenty-fourth day of August.”

There was a false note of incredulity, a cracked and futile effort at derision, in the words that fell slowly and forcedly from the stiffening, red-painted lips: “Are you actually accusing me of the murder of my husband?”

“No!” The retort came in a shrill piping from an unseen speaker beyond the threshold. “But we air accusin’ you, Caleb Carmichael, of the murder of your wife.”

In a frenzy of desperation the trapped killer leaped headlong at them, and went right between the startled captain and the chief, by a twist of the body eluded the clumsy, clutching hands of the second policeman, and would have been through the doorway except for a large bulk thrusting forward to block the flight. There was a thump of colliding bodies, a grunt from one, a hoarsely shouted oath and a blow from the other, a grappling, and the pair of them went down. Judge Priest somehow managed to be on top.

He stayed on top, indulging in curious billowing motions of his frame, until the officers could reach in beneath and pin the wrists of the one who was being crushed and lock the steel cuffs on.

•     •     •     •     •

One of Judge Priest’s pudgy hands kept going up gently to caress a knobby bruise on his cheek where the murderer’s fist had targeted its single chance blow. With Major Pitman he was speeding by motor across the coastal plains of southeastern Texas. Juliet Blair was already aboard a train bound for her home and her sweetheart. That blood kinsman of hers lay in the Galveston jail, and would continue to lie there until officers arrived with requisition papers for his return to Kentucky and a prompt trial. The old judge was doing most of the talking:

“When Lew Lake reads the big tidin’s in tonight’s Evenin News, then he’ll know whut it wuz kept confusin’ the true path. Think of it, Ranny, ’twuz only yistiddy mornin’ when us three sat there in my house speculatin’ on this and that, and only yistiddy evenin’ when I got that long telegram from Richmond that made the scales drop away frum my bewildered and befuddled old eyes! Considerin’ whut’s happened sense, it seems like about two weeks must have passed, instid of a space of twenty-odd hours. Boy, we been movin’ fast!”

“So fast and so furiously,” said the major, “that for me there are still points needing to be amplified – clarified, rather. Do you mind?”

“Mind doin’ a little recapitulatin’? I should say not. When a job’s finally done up all shipshape, it’s only human nature fur a feller to crave to brag.

“F’rinstance now, take that suspiciously long delay at Reel-foot Lake, and the letter to the girl that wuz confiscated and destroyed, and the mashed thumb that wouldn’t heal up, and, most of all, the bull-fiddle case. Those things alone should ’a’ been enough to head me down the main track. But no, I kept lettin’ that long hair and those false teeth and, biggest puzzle of all, those two photographs – I kept lettin’ them steer me off on a blind sidin’. Yit all along I had the feelin’ that when we got to the bottom of the matter of those photographs we’d see the whole thing jest unrollin’ like a scroll. And the moment we got word of the finding of that obscure paragraph out of that country paper in Louisiana, it certainly did!

“Here’s how I rebuilt the sequence: Hardly has he been doin’ these female impersonations any time a-tall, but long enough to have at least two poses photographed in costume, when he gits a rich idea, and he says to himself, whut’s the use of his wastin’ this here new gift of his fur a cheap salary in a cheap travelin’ show, when he kin utilize it where it’ll guarantee an easier livin’ and real dividends; like at fake spiritualistic séances, when he kin go into a seemin’ trance ez a man, and five minutes later come slidin’ out of the cabinet ez the embodied spirit of some poor dupe’s dead mother or wife or daughter. So he leaves his hair long and hides it under a wig, and only sheds the wig when he’s materializin’ ez a woman.

“So, after all those intervenin’ years, there he is, with that long hair fur his hole-card and a couple of copies of those old photographs ez aces up his sleeve when the word reaches him that he’s come in fur a fat windfall.

“Fust, then, he decides ef he’s goin’ to have liberty and peace to enjoy his inheritance, he’s got to disappear altogether and forever more ez Caleb Carmichael and thereafter be somebody else. And – and this is the real crux – ef his wife simultaneously disappears, he kin start bein’ her and, ez his own heir, claim the estate and laugh in secret at those damages-hongry folks out in Seattle. All right, then. Let’s assume that, ez a beginnin’ step in his scheme, he induces his wife to write that affectionate letter to Juliet Blair. By the way, I’m pretty sure she wuz left-handed, Mrs. Martha Swopes Carmichael wuz. Suspectin’ nothin’, the deluded woman writes the letter. She gives it to him, unsealed, to be mailed. He takes out of it the authentic pictures of herself that she included and fur them substitutes the two misleadin’ photographs of himself in his female make-up. Unbeknownst to her, he’s got possession, someway, of a preserved dissectin’-room subject. At the same time, he lays in, fur future reference, a supply of some standard emba’min’ fluid. Durin’ one of her temporary absences he smuggles this cadaver that he’s bought into the house and wedges it into his big fiddle case. And when he’s packin’ their car fur the trip to Kintucky, he puts the loaded case in the back of the car under a jag of stuff where neither she nor anybody else will have occasion to shift it. He hides the emba’min’ fluid somewhere’s else in the cargo,

“So off they start. All along he’s had the Big Hole at the top of Reelfoot picked ez the spot where she’s to die.

“Once’t they’re in that empty wilderness, he kills her. Workin’ fast, he strips her body and strips down himself. He lugs the third passenger – the dead pauper – out of the overgrown fiddle case. He dresses the corpse of the stranger in the clothes he’s just took off, and heaves it into the water to be drawed under. He dresses himself in the clothes he’s stripped off his wife – and he does away with the wig he’s been wearin’. He shakes down his long dyed hair, then puts it up on his head in coils, woman-fashion, and there, excusin’ the marks left by the intervenin’ years, stands the spittin’ image of the original of the photographs already sent on to the Blair girl. Next thing, the doubled-up body of the dead woman has been jammed into the emptied fiddle case, and the fiddle case is back where it wuz before, underneath a couple of hundredweight of luggage. Even though he’s worked so fast, he’s been at this hellish business fur considerable more than an hour. He’s got to hurry. Then, possibly ez an afterthought – he sticks the tip of his right thumb in the frame of the car door and mashes it good and hard. Now, any seemin’ discrepancy in any writin’ that the seemin’ widder does kin be explained away on the ground that with a thumb crippled and a hand swathed in bandages a signature would natchelly differ from whut it’s like ordinarily. So, till everything’s settled up, the hurt mustn’t be let to heal. That’s why, between visits to a doctor, he keeps applyin’ that smelly stuff that makes the wound angry, then washin’ it off and restorin’ the doctor’s wrappings before the next office call – the same stuff that wuz on the gauze Jeff Poindexter pilfered and that Lew Lake identified fur us yistiddy.

“Well, let’s go back to Reelfoot: The ‘widder’ spreads the word of the drownin’ and gits that damaged thumb fixed up temporarily, and drives on through, straight fur the safest refuge in the world – the place where he was born and spent his early boyhood, and where he’s familiar with every inch, indoors and out. Nobody’s there but two old servants.

“On arrivin’ at his birthplace, he drags the fiddle case inside, single-handed. I got it frum Jeff, who got it frum the two servants, that he wouldn’t let ’em help with the unloadin’. Let somebody try to lift that varnished box and find how heavy ’twuz and ’twould be enough to set even a couple of old servants to thinkin’. So, bein’ accepted by the pair of ’em fur whut seemin’ly he is, he gits busy in that empty house.

“Down in the cellar he dissects the cadaver of his victim and, under cover of night, packs the dismembered fragments outdoors and, piece by piece, burns ’em to ashes. He may ’a’ used acids, too – he’d know about acids. Gittin’ shet of the bull-fiddle case is a triflin’ task in comparison with the main job. It’s powerful hard fur a feller to utterly destroy every recognizable trace of an adult human body. Ef our sheriff’s bunch find in that cellar or that smokehouse whut they’re probably lookin’ fur right this minute, it’ll jest about purvide the last piece of evidence that’s needed to speed our man to the scaffold.

“Here’s the completed edifice: Ez soon ez the will’s probated and the estate’s divided and conditions air auspicious, he’ll take the girl off on that sea voyage. Some dark night the girl falls overboard – that’ll be his story. And who’s to doubt it? Landin’ in foreign parts, he tells a plausible enough tale to the authorities and the American consul. Ef there’s no fuss raised back home, he waits around fur long enough to collect at long distance the proceeds frum the sale of whutever odds and ends may be left out of the estate of old Elijah. Ef a fuss is raised he charges it to profit and loss. Down there in some remote Latin-American country the Widder Carmichael vanishes and, instead, a strange gent with a new name goes on his way rejoicin’ and packin’ a gratifyin’ small fortune in his jeans.”

“I judge you’re pretty tired, suh,” said his junior. “But, Uncle Billy, there’s one thing I’ve absolutely got to know: What was it that day in the courthouse that set you on the scent in the first place?”

“Oh, that? That’s simple enough now that we’ve got all the rest added up fur the Doomsday book. Ef you want to know whut fust ketched my eye and started my imagination workin’, it wuz the way he handled his hands a couple of times whilst Hod Maydew wuz elocutin’. You see, son, he wuz wearin’ a woman’s mournin’ regalia. And whilst he’d doubtless worn sich riggin’s plenty of times before in pursuance of his crooked doin’s, nevertheless, he’d gone dressed ez a man a thousand hours, say, fur every hour that he’d gone dressed ez a woman. So he’d taken to fumblin’ with the woman’s jacket he wuz wearin’, and that wuz when I dimly sensed somethin’ wuz radically wrong.”

“Just what do you mean, suh?”

“Well, a woman’s clothes button frum right to left. So, when he got nervous and started buttonin’ and then un-buttonin’ his coat, me standin’ there idly watchin’ him, he went through the mechanism of tryin’ to accomplish these two processes, not by the use of his left hand, which is a woman’s way, but with his right hand – the hand a man natchelly would use – even though in this case ’twuz made clumsy and awkward frum bein’ all done up in bandages.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” Major Pitman exploded.

“I’m plenty ashamed, myself, fur bein’ so stupid,” said his uncle.

“My guess is the people back in our bailiwick don’t share that opinion,” declared Major Pitman. “By now they’re singing your praises all over town.”

“Ef credit is to go where credit is properly due, they’d better save out quite a jag fur Jeff Poindexter,” stated the judge. “There’s no tellin’ how many years it took off of Jeff’s life, him prowling about, and finally into a house where, frum whut I’d told him, he could figger that, by a remote possibility, a murdered dead body had been carved up....”

“I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket that I’m going to slip him,” said the major. “I’ve got a suit of clothes I’d like to give him, too, if I weren’t twice his size.”

“Son, don’t you worry none on that score. You’ll be surprised to note how much better that there suit’ll look on Jeff than it ever did on you. The clothes don’t have to fit Jeff. Jeff jest natchelly fits the clothes.”

Judge Priest Turns Detective (1936)
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Feb 1951

About this eBook

My Old Kentucky Home

A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES
BY
Irvin S. Cobb
(1876–1944)

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (23 June, 1876 – 11 March, 1944) was an American author, humorist, editor and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky who relocated to New York in 1904, living there for the remainder of his life, writing for the New York World, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and other newspapers and magazines. Cobb wrote more than 300 short stories and 60 books (most of these being collections of his stories and articles). Some of his works were adapted for film.

Cobb is remembered best for his humorous stories of Kentucky. “Cobb created a South peopled with honorable citizens, charming eccentrics, and loyal, subservient blacks; but at their best the Judge Priest stories are dramatic and compelling, using a wealth of precisely rendered detail to evoke a powerful mood.” [Contemporary review, incorrectly attributed to Joel Chandler Harris.—ecm]

(—Wikipedia)

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These stories are set in Kentucky, from the 1880’s to the 1910’s. Dialogue is rendered in the Southern vernacular, and, as might be expected, conversation is sometimes about the American Civil War. But more often, we eavesdrop on the daily life of a country town. Cobb runs the emotional gamut — from comedy to drama to pathos to tragedy and back again — and entertains all along the way. (Caveat: text contains racially derogatory terms.)

This compilation is comprised of the stories of Back Home (1912) and Old Judge Priest (1916), in toto; with additional tales taken from Those Times and These (1917), From Place to Place (1920), Sundry Accounts (1922), The Saturday Evening Post magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, July 2017, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The contents of this book were first published 1911 ~ 1922. Text is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life + 70” or less, and in the USA.

Text was obtained from gutenberg.org, archive.org, and hathitrust. OCR and transcription errors were corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted; American spelling restored (as in initial magazine publication); some spelling and punctuation revised to provide consistency. Cover design by ECM.

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