By Irving S. Cobb
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 than 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 midaftemoon 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 renomination, 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 byroad 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 alter 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 conin’ 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. There’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 dustcloud, 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 gunbarrel; 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 dustcloud 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. His 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 I 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 devil-mint 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 chum-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 onc’t 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..
