By Irving S. Cobb
ONE behind the other, three short sections of a special came sliding into the yard sidings below the depot.
The cars clanked their drawheads together like manacles, as they were chivied and bullied and shoved about by a regular chain-gang boss of a switch engine. Some of the cars were ordinary box cars, just the plain galley slaves of commerce, but painted a uniform blue and provided with barred gratings; some were flat cars laden with huge wheeled burdens hooded under tarpaulins; and a few were sleeping cars that had been a bright yellow at the beginning of the season, with flaring red lettering down the sides, but now were faded to a shabby saffron.
It was just getting good broad day. The sleazy dun clouds that had been racked up along the east—like mill-ends left over from night’s remnant counter, as a poet might have said had there been a poet there to say it—were now torn asunder, and through the tear the sun showed out, blushing red at his own nakedness and pushing ahead of him long shadows that stretched on the earth the wrong way. There was a taste of earliness in the air, a sort of compounded taste of dew and dust and maybe a little malaria.
Early as it was, there was a whopping big delegation of small boys, white and black, on hand for a volunteer reception committee. The eyes of these boys were bright and expectant in contrast to the eyes of the yard hands, who looked half dead for sleep and yawned and shivered. The boys welcomed the show train at the depot and ran alongside its various sections. They were mainly barefooted, but they avoided splinters in the butts of the crossties and sharp clinkers in the cinder ballast of the roadbed with the instinctive agility of a race of primitives.
Almost before the first string of cars halted and while the clanking of the iron links still ran down its length like a code signal being repeated, a lot of mop-headed men in overalls appeared, crawling out from all sorts of unsuspected sleeping places aboard. Magically a six-team of big white Norman horses materialized, dragging empty traces behind them. They must have been harnessed up together beforehand in a stock car somewhere. A corrugated wooden runway appeared to sprout downward and outward from an open car door, and down it bumped a high, open wagon with a big sheet-iron cooking range mounted on it and one short length of stovepipe rising above like a stumpy fighting-top on an armored cruiser. As the wheels thumped against the solid earth a man in a dirty apron, who had been balancing himself in the wagon, touched a match to some fuel in his firebox. Instantly black smoke came out of the top of the stack and a stinging smell of burning wood trailed behind him, as the six-horse team hooked on and he and his moving kitchen went lurching and rolling across shallow gulleys and over a rutted common, right into the red eye of the upcoming sun.
Other wagons followed, loaded with blue stakes, with coils of ropes, with great rolls of earth-stained canvas, and each took the same route, with four or six horses to drag it and a born charioteer in a flannel shirt to drive it. The common destination was a stretch of flat land a quarter of a mile away from the track. Truck patches backed up against this site on one side and the outlying cottages of the town flanked it on the other, and it was bordered with frayed fringes of ragweed and niggerheads, and was dotted over with the dried-mud chimneys of crawfish. In the thin turf here a geometric pattern of iron laying-out pins now appeared to spring up simultaneously, with rag pennons of red and blue fluttering in the tops, and at once a crew of men set to work with an orderly confusion, only stopping now and then to bellow back the growing swarms of boys who hung eagerly on the flank of each new operation. True to the promise of its lithographed glories the circus was in our midst, rain or shine, for this day and date only.
If there is any of the boy spirit left in us circus day may be esteemed to bring it out. And considering his age and bulk and his calling, there was a good deal of the boy left in our circuit judge—so much boy, in fact, that he, an early riser of note in a town much given to early rising, was up and dressing this morning a good hour ahead of his usual time. As he dressed he kept going to the side window of his bedroom and looking out. Eventually he had his reward. Through a break in the silver-leaf poplars he saw a great circus wagon crossing his line of vision an eighth of a mile away. Its top and sides were masked in canvas, but he caught a flicker of red and gold as the sun glinted on its wheels, and he saw the four horses tugging it along, and the dipping figure of the driver up above. The sight gave the old judge a little thrill down inside of him.
“I reckin that fellow was right when he said a man is only as old as he feels,” said Judge Priest to himself. “And I’m glad court ain’t in session—I honestly am.” He opened his door and called down into the body of the silent house below: “Jeff! Oh, Jeff!”
“Yas, suh,” came up the prompt answer.
“Jeff, you go out yonder to the kitchen and tell Aunt Dilsey to hurry along my breakfast. I’ll be down right away.”
“Yas, suh,” said Jeff; “I’ll bring it right in, suh.”
Jeff was as anxious as the judge that the ceremony of breakfast might be speedily over; and, to tell the truth, so was Aunt Dilsey, who fluttered with impatience as she fried the judge’s matinal ham and dished up the hominy. Aunt Dilsey regularly patronized all circuses, but she specialized in sideshows. The sideshow got a dime of hers before the big show started and again after it ended. She could remember from year to year just how the sideshow banners looked and how many there were of them, and on the mantelpiece in her cabin was ranged a fly-blown row of freaks’ photographs purchased at the exceedingly reasonable rate of ten cents for cabinet sizes and twenty-five for the full length.
So there was no delay about serving the judge’s breakfast or about clearing the table afterward. For that one morning, anyhow, the breakfast dishes went unwashed. Even as the judge put on his straw hat and came out on the front porch, the back door was already discharging Jeff and Aunt Dilsey. By the time the judge had traversed the shady yard and unlatched the front gate, Jeff was halfway to the showground and mending his gait all the time. Less than five minutes later Jeff was being ordered, somewhat rudely, off the side of a boarded-up cage, upon which he had climbed with a view to ascertaining, by a peep through the barred air-vent under the driver’s seat, whether the mysterious creature inside looked as strange as it smelled; and less than five minutes after that, Jeff, having reached a working understanding with the custodian of the cage, who likewise happened to be in charge of certain ring stock, was convoying a string of trick ponies to the water-trough over by the planing mill. Aunt Dilsey, moving more slowly—yet guided, nevertheless, by a sure instinct—presently anchored herself at the precise spot where the sideshow tent would stand. Here several lodge sisters soon joined her. They formed a comfortable brown clump, stationary in the midst of many brisk; activities.
The judge stood at his gate a minute, lighting his corncob pipe. As he stood there a farm wagon clattered by, coming in from the country. Its bed was full of kitchen chairs and the kitchen chairs contained a family, including two pretty country girls in their teens, who were dressed in fluttering white with a plenitude of red and blue ribbons. The head of the family, driving, returned the judge’s waved greeting somewhat stiffly. It was plain that his person was chafed and his whole being put under restraint by the fell influences of a Sunday coat and the hard collar that was buttoned on to the neckband of his blue shirt.
His pipe being lighted, the judge headed leisurely in the same direction that the laden farm wagon had taken. Along Clay Street from the judge’s house to the main part of town, where the business houses and the stores centered, was a mile walk nearly, up a fairly steepish hill and down again, but shaded well all the way by water maples and silver-leaf trees. There weren’t more than eight houses or ten along Clay Street, and these, with the exception of the judge’s roomy, white-porched house standing aloof in its two acres of poorly kept lawn, were all little two-room frame houses, each in a small, bare inclosure of its own, with wide, weed-grown spaces between it and its next-door neighbors. These were the homes of those who in a city would haye been tenement dwellers. In front of them stretched narrow wooden sidewalks, dappled now with patches of shadow and of soft, warm sunshine.
Perhaps halfway along was a particularly shabby little brown house that pushed dose up to the street line. A straggly catalpa tree shaded its narrow porch. This was the home of Lemuel Hammersmith; and Hammersmith seems such a name as should by right belong to a masterful, upstanding man with something of Thor or Vulcan or Judas Maccabaeus in him—it appears to have that sound. But Lemuel Hammersmith was no such man. In a city he would have been lost altogether—swallowed up among a mass of more important, pushing folk. But in a town as small as ours he had distinction. He belonged to more secret orders than any man in town—he belonged to all there were. Their small mummeries and mysteries, conducted behind closed doors, had for him a lure that there was no resisting; he just had to join. As I now recall, he never rose to high rank in any one of them, never wore the impressive regalia and the weighty title of a supreme officer; but when a lodge brother died he nearly always served on the committee that drew up the resolutions of respect. In moments of half-timid expanding he had been known to boast mildly that his signature, appended to resolutions of respect, suitably engrossed and properly framed, hung on the parlor walls of more than a hundred homes. He was a small and inconsequential man and he led a small and inconsequential life, giving his days to clerking in Noble & Barry’s coal office for fifty dollars a month, and his nights to his lodge meetings and to drawing up resolutions of respect. In the latter direction he certainly had a gift; the underlying sympathy of his nature found its outlet there. And he had a pale, sickly wife and a paler, sicklier child.
On this circus day he had been stationed in front of his house for a good half hour, watching up the street for some one. This some one, as it turned out, was Judge Priest. At sight of the old judge coming along, Mr. Hammersmith went forward to meet him and fell in alongside, keeping pace with him.
“Good momin’, son,” said the old judge, who knew everybody that lived in town. “How’s the little feller this mornin’?”
“Judge, I’m sorry to say that Lemuel Junior ain’t no better this momin’,” answered the little coal clerk with a hitching of his voice. “We’re afraid—his mother and me—that he ain’t never goin’ to be no better. I’ve had Doctor Lake in again and he says there really ain’t anything we can do—he says it’s just a matter of a little time now. Old Aunt Hannah Holmes says he’s got bone erysipelas, and that if we could ‘a’ got him away from here in time we might have saved him. But I don’t know—we done the best we could. I try to be reconciled. Lemuel Junior he suffers so at times that it’ll be a mercy, I reckin—but it’s hard on you, judge—it’s tumble hard on you when it’s your only child.”
“My son,” said the old judge, speaking slowly, “it’s so hard that I know nothin’ I could say or do would be any comfort to you. But I’m sorry—I’m mighty sorry for you all. I know what it is. I buried mine, both of ‘em, in one week’s time, and that’s thirty years and more ago; but it still hurts mightily sometimes. I wish’t there was something I could do.”
“Well, there is,” said Hammersmith—“there is, judge, maybe. That’s why I’ve been standin’ down here waitin’ for you. You see, Lemmy he was tumble sharp set on goin’ to the circus today. He’s been readin’ the circus bills that I’d bring home to him until he knew ‘em off by heart. He always did have a mighty bright mind for rememberin’ things. We was aimin’ to take him to the show this evenin’, bundled up in a bedquilt, you know, and settin’ off with him in a kind of a quiet place somewhere. But he had a bad night and we just can’t make out to do it—he’s too weak to stand it—and it was most breakin’ his heart for a while; but then he said if he could just see the parade he’d be satisfied.
“And, judge, that’s the point—he’s took it into his head that you can fix it some way so he can see it. We tried to argue him out of it, but you know how it is, tryin’ to argue with a child as sick as Lemuel Junior’s been. He—he won’t listen to nothin’ we say.”
A great compassion shadowed the judge’s face. His hand went out and found the sloping shoulder of the father and patted it clumsily. He didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
“So we just had to humor him along. His maw has had him at the front window for an hour now, propped up on a pillow, waitin’ for you to come by. He wouldn’t listen to nothin’ else. And, judge—if you can humor him at all—any way at all—do it, please—”
He broke off because they were almost in the shadow of the catalpa tree, and now the judge’s name was called out by a voice that was as thin and elfin as though the throat that spoke it were strung with fine silver wires.
“Oh, judge—oh, Mister Judge Priest!”
The judge stopped, and, putting his hands on the palings, looked across them at the little sick boy. He saw a face that seemed to be all eyes and mouth and bulging, blue-veined forehead—he was shockingly reminded of a new-hatched sparrow—and the big eyes were feverishly alight with the look that is seen only in the eyes of those who already have begun to glimpse the great secret that lies beyond the ken of the rest of us.
“Why, hello, little feller,” said the judge, with a false heartiness. “I’m sorry to see you laid up again.”
“Judge Priest, sir,” said the sick boy, panting with weak eagerness, “I want to see the grand free street parade. I’ve been sick a right smart while, and I can’t go to the circus; but I do want mightily to see the grand free street parade. And I want you, please, sir, to have ‘em come up by this house.”
There was a world of confidence in the plea. Unnoticed by the boy, his mother, who had been fanning him, dropped the fan and put her apron over her face and leaned against the window-jamb, sobbing silently. The father, silent too, leaned against the fence, looking fixedly at nothing and wiping his eyes with the butt of his hand. Yes, it is possible for a man to wipe his eyes on his bare hand without seeming either grotesque or vulgar—even when the man who does it is a little inconsequential man—if his child is dying and his sight is blurred and his heart is fit to burst inside of him. The judge bent across the fence, and his face muscles were working but his voice held steady.
“Well, now, Lemmy,” he said, “I’d like to do it for you the best in the world; but, you see, boy, I don’t own this here circus—I don’t even know the gentleman that does own it.”
“His name is Silver,” supplied the sick child—“Daniel P. Silver, owner of Silver’s Mammoth United Railroad Shows, Roman Hippodrome and Noah’s Ark Menagerie—that’s the man! I kin show you his picture on one of the showbills my paw brought home to me, and then you kin go right and find him.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t do much good if I did know him, Lemmy,” said the old judge very gently. “You see—”
“But ain’t you the judge at the big cote-house?” demanded the child; “and can’t you put people in jail if they don’t do what you tell ‘em? That’s what my grandpop says. He’s always tellin’ me stories about how you and him fought the Yankees, and he always votes for you too—my grandpop talks like he thought you could do anything. And, judge, please, sir, if you went to Mister Daniel P. Silver and told him that you was the big judge—and told him there was a little sick boy livin’ right up the road a piece in a little brown house—don’t you reckin he’d do it? It ain’t so very far out of the way if they go down Jefferson Street—it’s only a little ways Judge, you’ll make ‘em do it, won’t you—for me?”
“I’ll try, boy, I’ll shorely try to do what I can,” said the old judge; “but if I can’t make ‘em do it you won’t be disappointed, will you, Lemmy?” He fumbled in his pocket. “Here’s four bits for you—you tell your daddy to buy you something with it. I know your maw and daddy wouldn’t want you to take money from strangers, but of course it’s different with old friends like you and me. Here, you take it. And there’s something else,” he went on. “I’ll bet you there’s one of those dagoes or somebody like that downtown with a lot of these here big toy rubber balloons—red and green and blue. You tell me which color you like the best and I’ll see that it’s sent right up here to you—the biggest balloon the man’s got—”
“I don’t want any balloon,” said the little voice fretfully, “and I don’t want any four bits. I want to see the grand free street parade, and the herd of elephants, and the down, and the man-eatin’ tigers, and everything. I want that parade to come by this house.”
The judge looked hopelessly from the child to the mother and then to the father—they both had their faces averted still—and back into the sick child’s face again. The four-bit piece lay shining on the porch floor where it had fallen. The judge backed away, searching his mind for the right words to say.
“Well, I’ll do what I can, Lemmy,” he repeated, as though he could find no other phrase—“I’ll do what I can.”
The child rolled his head back against the pillow, satisfied. “Then it’ll be all right, sir,” he said with a joyful confidence. “My grand-pop he said you could do ‘most anything. You tell ‘em, Mister Judge Priest, that I’ll be a-waitin’ right here in this very window for ‘em when they pass.”
Walking with his head down and his steps lagging, the old judge, turning into the main thoroughfare, was almost run over by a mare that came briskly along, drawing a light buggy with a tall man in it. The tall man pulled up the mare just in time. His name was Settle.
“By gum, judge,” he said apologetically, “I came mighty near gettin’ you that time!”
“Hello, son,” said the judge absently; “which way are you headed?”
“Downtown, same as everybody else,” said Settle. “Jump in and I’ll take you right down, sir.”
“Much obliged,” assented the old judge, as he heaved himself heavily up between the skewed wheels and settled himself so solidly at Settle’s left that the seat springs whined; “but I wish’t, if you’re not in too big a hurry, that you’d drive me up by the showgrounds first.”
“Glad to,” said Settle, as he swung the mare round. “I just come from there myself—been up lookin’ at the stock. ‘Tain’t much. Goin’ up to look their stock over yourself, judge?” he asked, taking it for granted that any man would naturally be interested in horseflesh, as indeed would be a true guess so far as any man in that community was concerned.
“Stock?” said the judge. “No, I want to see the proprietor of this here show. I won’t keep you waitin’ but a minute or two.”
“The proprietor!” echoed Settle, surprised. “What’s a circuit judge goin’ to see a circus man for—is it something about their license?”
“No,” said the judge—“no, just some business—a little private business matter I want to see him on.”
He offered no further explanation and Settle asked for none. At the grounds the smaller tents were all up—there was quite a little dirty-white encampment of them—and just as they drove up the roof of the main tent rose to the tops of its center poles, bellying and billowing like a stage sea in the second act of Monte Cristo. Along the near edge of the common, negro men were rigging booths with planks for counters and sheets for awnings, and negro women were unpacking the wares that would presently be spread forth temptingly against the coming of the show crowds—fried chicken and slabs of fried fish, and ham and pies and fried apple turnovers. Leaving Settle checking the restive mare, the old judge made his way across the sod, already scuffed and dented by countless feet. A collarless, redfaced man, plainly a functionary of some sort, hurried toward him, and the judge put himself in this man’s path.
“Are you connected with this institution, suh?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the man shortly, but slowing his gait.
“So I judged from your manner and deportment, suh,” said the judge. “I’m lookin’,” he went on, “for your proprietor.”
“Silver? He’s over yonder by the cookhouse.”
“The which?” asked the judge.
“The cookhouse—the dining tent,” explained the other, pointing. “Right round yonder beyond that second stake wagon—where you see smoke rising. But he’s likely to be pretty busy.”
Behind the second stake wagon the judge found a blocky, authoritative man, with a brown derby hat tilted back on his head and heavy-lidded eyes like a frog’s, and knew him at once for the owner; but one look at the face made the judge hesitate. He felt that his was a lost cause already; and then the other opened his mouth and spoke, and Judge Priest turned on his heel and came away. The judge was reasonably well seasoned to sounds of ordinary profanity, but not to blasphemy that seemed to loose an evil black smudge upon the clean air. He came back to the buggy and climbed in.
“See your man?” asked Settle.
“Yes,” said the judge slowly, “I saw him.”
Especially downtown things had a holidaying look to them. Wall-eyed teams of country horses were tethered to hitching-racks in the short by-streets, flinching their flanks and setting themselves for abortive stampedes later on. Pedlers of toy balloons circulated; a vender with a fascinating line of patter sold to the same customers, in rapid succession, odorous hamburger and flat slabs of a heat-resisting variety of striped ice cream. At a main crossing, catercornered across from each other, the highpitch man and his brother of the flat joint were at work, one selling electric belts from the back of a buggy, the other down in the dust manipulating a spindle game. The same group of shillabers were constantly circulating from one faker to the other, and as constantly investing. Even the clerks couldn’t stay inside the stores—they kept darting out and darting back in again. A group of darkies would find a desirable point of observation along the sidewalk and hold it for a minute or two, and then on a sudden unaccountable impulse would desert it and go streaking off down the middle of the street to find another that was in no way better. In front of the wagon yard country rigs were parked three deep. Every small boy who wasn’t at the showground was swarming round underfoot somewhere, filled with a most delicious nervousness that kept him moving. But Judge Priest, who would have joyed in these things ordinarily, had an absent eye for it all. There was another picture persisting in his mind, a picture with a little brown house and a ragged catalpa tree for a background.
In front of Soule’s drug store his weekday cronies sat—the elder statesmen of the town—tilted back in hard-bottomed chairs, with their legs drawn up 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,” some one 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 where-ever 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 fan-faring, 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, gayly 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 pedler, 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 down 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.
