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THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM




[Illustration: NOBODY PAID ANY ATTENTION TO MR. TRIMM.--_Frontispiece_
(_Page 18._)]




THE ESCAPE
OF MR. TRIMM

_HIS PLIGHT AND OTHER PLIGHTS_

BY

IRVIN S. COBB

AUTHOR OF
OLD JUDGE PRIEST,
BACK HOME, ETC.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK




COPYRIGHT, 1910, 1911, 1912 AND 1913

BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1913

BY THE FRANK A. MUNSEY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1913

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


[Transcriber's Note: A List of Illustrations has been added.]




TO MY WIFE




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                          PAGE

     I.  THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM                      3

    II.  THE BELLED BUZZARD                          54

   III.  AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET              79

    IV.  ANOTHER OF THOSE CUB REPORTER STORIES       96

     V.  SMOKE OF BATTLE                            142

    VI.  THE EXIT OF ANNE DUGMORE                   179

   VII.  TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN                   202

  VIII.  FISHHEAD                                   244

    IX.  GUILTY AS CHARGED                          260




ILLUSTRATIONS


  NOBODY PAID ANY ATTENTION TO MR. TRIMM.                   Frontispiece

  "TWO LONG WING FEATHERS DRIFTED SLOWLY DOWN."             Facing page 70

  "I WAS THE ONE THAT SHOT HIM--WITH THIS THING HERE."      Facing Page 164

  HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS BUTT
    MADE A CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW.                      Facing Page 193




THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM




I

THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM


Mr. Trimm, recently president of the late Thirteenth National Bank, was
taking a trip which was different in a number of ways from any he had
ever taken. To begin with, he was used to parlor cars and Pullmans and
even luxurious private cars when he went anywhere; whereas now he rode
with a most mixed company in a dusty, smelly day coach. In the second
place, his traveling companion was not such a one as Mr. Trimm would
have chosen had the choice been left to him, being a stupid-looking
German-American with a drooping, yellow mustache. And in the third
place, Mr. Trimm's plump white hands were folded in his lap, held in a
close and enforced companionship by a new and shiny pair of Bean's
Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs. Mr. Trimm was on his way to the
Federal penitentiary to serve twelve years at hard labor for breaking,
one way or another, about all the laws that are presumed to govern
national banks.

       *       *       *       *       *

All the time Mr. Trimm was in the Tombs, fighting for a new trial, a
certain question had lain in his mind unasked and unanswered. Through
the seven months of his stay in the jail that question had been always
at the back part of his head, ticking away there like a little watch
that never needed winding. A dozen times a day it would pop into his
thoughts and then go away, only to come back again.

When Copley was taken to the penitentiary--Copley being the cashier who
got off with a lighter sentence because the judge and jury held him to
be no more than a blind accomplice in the wrecking of the Thirteenth
National--Mr. Trimm read closely every line that the papers carried
about Copley's departure. But none of them had seen fit to give the
young cashier more than a short and colorless paragraph. For Copley was
only a small figure in the big intrigue that had startled the country;
Copley didn't have the money to hire big lawyers to carry his appeal to
the higher courts for him; Copley's wife was keeping boarders; and as
for Copley himself, he had been wearing stripes several months now.

With Mr. Trimm it had been vastly different. From the very beginning he
had held the public eye. His bearing in court when the jury came in with
their judgment; his cold defiance when the judge, in pronouncing
sentence, mercilessly arraigned him and the system of finance for which
he stood; the manner of his life in the Tombs; his spectacular fight to
beat the verdict, had all been worth columns of newspaper space. If Mr.
Trimm had been a popular poisoner, or a society woman named as
co-respondent in a sensational divorce suit, the papers could not have
been more generous in their space allotments. And Mr. Trimm in his cell
had read all of it with smiling contempt, even to the semi-hysterical
outpourings of the lady special writers who called him The Iron Man of
Wall Street and undertook to analyze his emotions--and missed the mark
by a thousand miles or two.

Things had been smoothed as much as possible for him in the Tombs, for
money and the power of it will go far toward ironing out even the
corrugated routine of that big jail. He had a large cell to himself in
the airiest, brightest corridor. His meals were served by a caterer from
outside. Although he ate them without knife or fork, he soon learned
that a spoon and the fingers can accomplish a good deal when backed by a
good appetite, and Mr. Trimm's appetite was uniformly good. The warden
and his underlings had been models of official kindliness; the
newspapers had sent their brightest young men to interview him whenever
he felt like talking, which wasn't often; and surely his lawyers had
done all in his behalf that money--a great deal of money--could do.
Perhaps it was because of these things that Mr. Trimm had never been
able to bring himself to realize that he was the Hobart W. Trimm who had
been sentenced to the Federal prison; it seemed to him, somehow, that
he, personally, was merely a spectator standing to one side watching the
fight of another man to dodge the penitentiary.

However, he didn't fail to give the other man the advantage of every
chance that money would buy. This sense of aloofness to the whole thing
had persisted even when his personal lawyer came to him one night in the
early fall and told him that the court of last possible resort had
denied the last possible motion. Mr. Trimm cut the lawyer short with a
shake of his head as the other began saying something about the chances
of a pardon from the President. Mr. Trimm wasn't in the habit of letting
men deceive him with idle words. No President would pardon him, and he
knew it.

"Never mind that, Walling," he said steadily, when the lawyer offered to
come to see him again before he started for prison the next day. "If
you'll see that a drawing-room on the train is reserved for me--for us,
I mean--and all that sort of thing, I'll not detain you any further. I
have a good many things to do tonight. Good night."

"Such a man, such a man," said Walling to himself as he climbed into
his car; "all chilled steel and brains. And they are going to lock that
brain up for twelve years. It's a crime," said Walling, and shook his
head. Walling always said it was a crime when they sent a client of his
to prison. To his credit be it said, though, they sent very few of them
there. Walling made as high as fifty thousand a year at criminal law.
Some of it was very criminal law indeed. His specialty was picking holes
in the statutes faster than the legislature could make them and provide
them and putty them up with amendments. This was the first case he had
lost in a good long time.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Jerry, the turnkey, came for him in the morning Mr. Trimm had made
as careful a toilet as the limited means at his command permitted, and
he had eaten a hearty breakfast and was ready to go, all but putting on
his hat. Looking the picture of well-groomed, close-buttoned, iron-gray
middle age, Mr. Trimm followed the turnkey through the long corridor and
down the winding iron stairs to the warden's office. He gave no heed to
the curious eyes that followed him through the barred doors of many
cells; his feet rang briskly on the flags.

The warden, Hallam, was there in the private office with another man, a
tall, raw-boned man with a drooping, straw-colored mustache and the
unmistakable look about him of the police officer. Mr. Trimm knew
without being told that this was the man who would take him to prison.
The stranger was standing at a desk, signing some papers.

"Sit down, please, Mr. Trimm," said the warden with a nervous
cordiality. "Be through here in just one minute. This is Deputy Marshal
Meyers," he added.

Mr. Trimm started to tell this Mr. Meyers he was glad to meet him, but
caught himself and merely nodded. The man stared at him with neither
interest nor curiosity in his dull blue eyes. The warden moved over
toward the door.

"Mr. Trimm," he said, clearing his throat, "I took the liberty of
calling a cab to take you gents up to the Grand Central. It's out front
now. But there's a big crowd of reporters and photographers and a lot of
other people waiting, and if I was you I'd slip out the back way--one of
my men will open the yard gate for you--and jump aboard the subway down
at Worth Street. Then you'll miss those fellows."

"Thank you, Warden--very kind of you," said Mr. Trimm in that crisp,
businesslike way of his. He had been crisp and businesslike all his
life. He heard a door opening softly behind him, and when he turned to
look he saw the warden slipping out, furtively, in almost an embarrassed
fashion.

"Well," said Meyers, "all ready?"

"Yes," said Mr. Trimm, and he made as if to rise.

"Wait one minute," said Meyers.

He half turned his back on Mr. Trimm and fumbled at the side pocket of
his ill-hanging coat. Something inside of Mr. Trimm gave the least
little jump, and the question that had ticked away so busily all those
months began to buzz, buzz in his ears; but it was only a handkerchief
the man was getting out. Doubtless he was going to mop his face.

He didn't mop his face, though. He unrolled the handkerchief slowly, as
if it contained something immensely fragile and valuable, and then,
thrusting it back in his pocket, he faced Mr. Trimm. He was carrying in
his hands a pair of handcuffs that hung open-jawed. The jaws had little
notches in them, like teeth that could bite. The question that had
ticked in Mr. Trimm's head was answered at last--in the sight of these
steel things with their notched jaws.

Mr. Trimm stood up and, with a movement as near to hesitation as he had
ever been guilty of in his life, held out his hands, backs upward.

"I guess you're new at this kind of thing," said Meyers, grinning. "This
here way--one at a time."

He took hold of Mr. Trimm's right hand, turned it sideways and settled
one of the steel cuffs over the top of the wrist, flipping the notched
jaw up from beneath and pressing it in so that it locked automatically
with a brisk little click. Slipping the locked cuff back and forth on
Mr. Trimm's lower arm like a man adjusting a part of machinery, and then
bringing the left hand up to meet the right, he treated it the same way.
Then he stepped back.

Mr. Trimm hadn't meant to protest. The word came unbidden.

"This--this isn't necessary, is it?" he asked in a voice that was husky
and didn't seem to belong to him.

"Yep," said Meyers. "Standin' orders is play no favorites and take no
chances. But you won't find them things uncomfortable. Lightest pair
there was in the office, and I fixed 'em plenty loose."

For half a minute Mr. Trimm stood like a rooster hypnotized by a
chalkmark, his arms extended, his eyes set on his bonds. His hands had
fallen perhaps four inches apart, and in the space between his wrists a
little chain was stretched taut. In the mounting tumult that filled his
brain there sprang before Mr. Trimm's consciousness a phrase he had
heard or read somewhere, the title of a story or, perhaps, it was a
headline--The Grips of the Law. The Grips of the Law were upon Mr.
Trimm--he felt them now for the first time in these shiny wristlets and
this bit of chain that bound his wrists and filled his whole body with a
strange, sinking feeling that made him physically sick. A sudden sweat
beaded out on Mr. Trimm's face, turning it slick and wet.

He had a handkerchief, a fine linen handkerchief with a hemstitched
border and a monogram on it, in the upper breast pocket of his buttoned
coat. He tried to reach it. His hands went up, twisting awkwardly like
crab claws. The fingers of both plucked out the handkerchief. Holding it
so, Mr. Trimm mopped the sweat away. The links of the handcuffs fell in
upon one another and lengthened out again at each movement, filling the
room with a smart little sound.

He got the handkerchief stowed away with the same clumsiness. He raised
the manacled hands to his hat brim, gave it a downward pull that brought
it over his face and then, letting his short arms slide down upon his
plump stomach, he faced the man who had put the fetters upon him,
squaring his shoulders back. But it was hard, somehow, for him to square
his shoulders--perhaps because of his hands being drawn so closely
together. And his eyes would waver and fall upon his wrists. Mr. Trimm
had a feeling that the skin must be stretched very tight on his jawbones
and his forehead.

"Isn't there some way to hide these--these things?"

He began by blurting and ended by faltering it. His hands shuffled
together, one over, then under the other.

"Here's a way," said Meyers. "This'll help."

He bestirred himself, folding one of the chained hands upon the other,
tugging at the white linen cuffs and drawing the coat sleeves of his
prisoner down over the bonds as far as the chain would let them come.

"There's the notion," he said. "Just do that-a-way and them bracelets
won't hardly show a-tall. Ready? Let's be movin', then."

But handcuffs were never meant to be hidden. Merely a pair of steel
rings clamped to one's wrists and coupled together with a scrap of
chain, but they'll twist your arms and hamper the movements of your body
in a way to constantly catch the eye of the passer-by. When a man is
coming toward you, you can tell that he is handcuffed before you see the
cuffs.

Mr. Trimm was never able to recall afterward exactly how he got out of
the Tombs. He had a confused memory of a gate that was swung open by
some one whom Mr. Trimm saw only from the feet to the waist; then he and
his companion were out on Lafayette Street, speeding south toward the
subway entrance at Worth Street, two blocks below, with the marshal's
hand cupped under Mr. Trimm's right elbow and Mr. Trimm's plump legs
almost trotting in their haste. For a moment it looked as if the
warden's well-meant artifice would serve them.

But New York reporters are up to the tricks of people who want to evade
them. At the sight of them a sentry reporter on the corner shouted a
warning which was instantly caught up and passed on by another picket
stationed half-way down the block; and around the wall of the Tombs came
pelting a flying mob of newspaper photographers and reporters, with a
choice rabble behind them. Foot passengers took up the chase, not
knowing what it was about, but sensing a free show. Truckmen halted
their teams, jumped down from their wagon seats and joined in. A
man-chase is one of the pleasantest outdoor sports that a big city like
New York can offer its people.

Fairly running now, the manacled banker and the deputy marshal shot down
the winding steps into the subway a good ten yards ahead of the foremost
pursuers. But there was one delay, while Meyers skirmished with his free
hand in his trousers' pocket for a dime for the tickets, and another
before a northbound local rolled into the station. Shouted at, jeered
at, shoved this way and that, panting in gulping breaths, for he was
stout by nature and staled by lack of exercise, Mr. Trimm, with Meyers
clutching him by the arm, was fairly shot aboard one of the cars, at the
apex of a human wedge. The astonished guard sensed the situation as the
scrooging, shoving, noisy wave rolled across the platform toward the
doors which he had opened and, thrusting the officer and his prisoner
into the narrow platform space behind him, he tried to form with his
body a barrier against those who came jamming in.

It didn't do any good. He was brushed away, protesting and blustering.
The excitement spread through the train, and men, and even women, left
their seats, overflowing the aisles.

There is no crueler thing than a city crowd, all eyes and morbid
curiosity. But Mr. Trimm didn't see the staring eyes on that ride to the
Grand Central. What he saw was many shifting feet and a hedge of legs
shutting him in closely--those and the things on his wrists. What the
eyes of the crowd saw was a small, stout man who, for all his bulk,
seemed to have dried up inside his clothes so that they bagged on him
some places and bulged others, with his head tucked on his chest, his
hat over his face and his fingers straining to hold his coat sleeves
down over a pair of steel bracelets.

Mr. Trimm gave mental thanks to a Deity whose existence he thought he
had forgotten when the gate of the train-shed clanged behind him,
shutting out the mob that had come with them all the way. Cameras had
been shoved in his face like gun muzzles, reporters had scuttled
alongside him, dodging under Meyers' fending arm to shout questions in
his ears. He had neither spoken nor looked at them. The sweat still ran
down his face, so that when finally he raised his head in the
comparative quiet of the train-shed his skin was a curious gray under
the jail paleness like the color of wet wood ashes.

"My lawyer promised to arrange for a compartment--for some private place
on the train," he said to Meyers. "The conductor ought to know."

They were the first words he had uttered since he left the Tombs. Meyers
spoke to a jaunty Pullman conductor who stood alongside the car where
they had halted.

"No such reservation," said the conductor, running through his sheaf of
slips, with his eyes shifting from Mr. Trimm's face to Mr. Trimm's hands
and back again, as though he couldn't decide which was the more
interesting part of him; "must be some mistake. Or else it was for some
other train. Too late to change now--we pull out in three minutes."

"I reckon we better git on the smoker," said Meyers, "if there's room
there."

Mr. Trimm was steered back again the length of the train through a
double row of pop-eyed porters and staring trainmen. At the steps where
they stopped the instinct to stretch out one hand and swing himself up
by the rail operated automatically and his wrists got a nasty twist.
Meyers and a brakeman practically lifted him up the steps and Meyers
headed him into a car that was hazy with blue tobacco smoke. He was
confused in his gait, almost as if his lower limbs had been fettered,
too.

The car was full of shirt-sleeved men who stood up, craning their necks
and stumbling over each other in their desire to see him. These men came
out into the aisle, so that Meyers had to shove through them.

"This here'll do as well as any, I guess," said Meyers. He drew Mr.
Trimm past him into the seat nearer the window and sat down alongside
him on the side next the aisle, settling himself on the stuffy plush
seat and breathing deeply, like a man who had got through the hardest
part of a not easy job.

"Smoke?" he asked.

Mr. Trimm shook his head without raising it.

"Them cuffs feel plenty easy?" was the deputy's next question. He lifted
Mr. Trimm's hands as casually as if they had been his hands and not Mr.
Trimm's, and looked at them.

"Seem to be all right," he said as he let them fall back. "Don't pinch
none, I reckon?" There was no answer.

The deputy tugged a minute at his mustache, searching his arid mind. An
idea came to him. He drew a newspaper from his pocket, opened it out
flat and spread it over Mr. Trimm's lap so that it covered the chained
wrists. Almost instantly the train was in motion, moving through the
yards.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Be there in two hours more," volunteered Meyers. It was late afternoon.
They were sliding through woodlands with occasional openings which
showed meadows melting into wide, flat lands.

"Want a drink?" said the deputy, next. "No? Well, I guess I'll have a
drop myself. Travelin' fills a feller's throat full of dust." He got up,
lurching to the motion of the flying train, and started forward to the
water cooler behind the car door. He had gone perhaps two-thirds of the
way when Mr. Trimm felt a queer, grinding sensation beneath his feet; it
was exactly as though the train were trying to go forward and back at
the same time. Almost slowly, it seemed to him, the forward end of the
car slued out of its straight course, at the same time tilting up. There
was a grinding, roaring, grating sound, and before Mr. Trimm's eyes
Meyers vanished, tumbling forward out of sight as the car floor buckled
under his feet. Then, as everything--the train, the earth, the sky--all
fused together in a great spatter of white and black, Mr. Trimm, plucked
from his seat as though a giant hand had him by the collar, shot forward
through the air over the seatbacks, his chained hands aloft, clutching
wildly. He rolled out of a ragged opening where the smoker had broken in
two, flopped gently on the sloping side of the right-of-way and slid
easily to the bottom, where he lay quiet and still on his back in a bed
of weeds and wild grass, staring straight up.

How many minutes he lay there Mr. Trimm didn't know. It may have been
the shrieks of the victims or the glare from the fire that brought him
out of the daze. He wriggled his body to a sitting posture, got on his
feet, holding his head between his coupled hands, and gazed full-face
into the crowning railroad horror of the year.

There were numbers of the passengers who had escaped serious hurt, but
for the most part these persons seemed to have gone daft from terror and
shock. Some were running aimlessly up and down and some, a few, were
pecking feebly with improvised tools at the wreck, an indescribable
jumble of ruin, from which there issued cries of mortal agony, and from
which, at a point where two locomotives were lying on their sides,
jammed together like fighting bucks that had died with locked horns, a
tall flame already rippled and spread, sending up a pillar of black
smoke that rose straight, poisoning the clear blue of the sky. Nobody
paid any attention to Mr. Trimm as he stood swaying upon his feet. There
wasn't a scratch on him. His clothes were hardly rumpled, his hat was
still on his head. He stood a minute and then, moved by a sudden
impulse, he turned round and went running straight away from the
railroad at the best speed his pudgy legs could accomplish, with his
arms pumping up and down in front of him and his fingers interlaced. It
was a grotesque gait, almost like a rabbit hopping on its hindlegs.

Instantly, almost, the friendly woods growing down to the edge of the
fill swallowed him up. He dodged and doubled back and forth among the
tree trunks, his small, patent-leathered feet skipping nimbly over the
irregular turf, until he stopped for lack of wind in his lungs to carry
him another rod. When he had got his breath back Mr. Trimm leaned
against a tree and bent his head this way and that, listening. No sound
came to his ears except the sleepy calls of birds. As well as Mr. Trimm
might judge he had come far into the depths of a considerable woodland.
Already the shadows under the low limbs were growing thick and confused
as the hurried twilight of early September came on.

Mr. Trimm sat down on a natural cushion of thick green moss between two
roots of an oak. The place was clean and soft and sweet-scented. For
some little time he sat there motionless, in a sort of mental haze. Then
his round body slowly slid down flat upon the moss, his head lolled to
one side and, the reaction having come, Mr. Trimm's limbs all relaxed
and he went to sleep straightway.

After a while, when the woods were black and still, the half-grown moon
came up and, sifting through a chink in the canopy of leaves above,
shone down full on Mr. Trimm as he lay snoring gently with his mouth
open, and his hands rising and falling on his breast. The moonlight
struck upon the Little Giant handcuffs, making them look like
quicksilver.

Toward daylight it turned off sharp and cool. The dogwoods which had
been a solid color at nightfall now showed pink in one light and green
in another, like changeable silk, as the first level rays of the sun
came up over the rim of the earth and made long, golden lanes between
the tree trunks. Mr. Trimm opened his eyes slowly, hardly sensing for
the first moment or two how he came to be lying under a canopy of
leaves, and gaped, seeking to stretch his arms. At that he remembered
everything; he haunched his shoulders against the tree roots and
wriggled himself up to a sitting position where he stayed for a while,
letting his mind run over the sequence of events that had brought him
where he was and taking inventory of the situation.

Of escape he had no thought. The hue and cry must be out for him before
now; doubtless men were already searching for him. It would be better
for him to walk in and surrender than to be taken in the woods like an
animal escaped from a traveling menagerie. But the mere thought of
enduring again what he had already gone through--the thought of being
tagged by crowds and stared at, with his fetters on--filled him with a
nausea. Nothing that the Federal penitentiary might hold in store for
him could equal the black, blind shamefulness of yesterday; he knew
that. The thought of the new ignominy that faced him made Mr. Trimm
desperate. He had a desire to burrow into the thicket yonder and hide
his face and his chained hands.

But perhaps he could get the handcuffs off and so go to meet his captors
in some manner of dignity. Strange that the idea hadn't occurred to him
before! It seemed to Mr. Trimm that he desired to get his two hands
apart more than he had ever desired anything in his whole life before.

The hands had begun naturally to adjust themselves to their enforced
companionship, and it wasn't such a very hard matter, though it cost him
some painful wrenches and much twisting of the fingers, for Mr. Trimm to
get his coat unbuttoned and his eyeglasses in their small leather case
out of his upper waistcoat pocket. With the glasses on his nose he
subjected his bonds to a critical examination. Each rounded steel band
ran unbroken except for the smooth, almost jointless hinge and the small
lock which sat perched on the back of the wrist in a little rounded
excrescence like a steel wart. In the flat center of each lock was a
small keyhole and alongside of it a notched nub, the nub being sunk in a
minute depression. On the inner side, underneath, the cuffs slid into
themselves--two notches on each showing where the jaws might be
tightened to fit a smaller hand than his--and right over the large blue
veins in the middle of the wrists were swivel links, shackle-bolted to
the cuffs and connected by a flat, slightly larger middle link, giving
the hands a palm-to-palm play of not more than four or five inches. The
cuffs did not hurt--even after so many hours there was no actual
discomfort from them and the flesh beneath them was hardly reddened.

But it didn't take Mr. Trimm long to find out that they were not to be
got off. He tugged and pulled, trying with his fingers for a purchase.
All he did was to chafe his skin and make his wrists throb with pain.
The cuffs would go forward just so far, then the little humps of bone
above the hands would catch and hold them.

Mr. Trimm was not a man to waste time in the pursuit of the obviously
hopeless. Presently he stood up, shook himself and started off at a fair
gait through the woods. The sun was up now and the turf was all dappled
with lights and shadows, and about him much small, furtive wild life was
stirring. He stepped along briskly, a strange figure for that green
solitude, with his correct city garb and the glint of the steel at his
sleeve ends.

Presently he heard the long-drawn, quavering, banshee wail of a
locomotive. The sound came from almost behind him, in an opposite
direction from where he supposed the track to be. So he turned around
and went back the other way. He crossed a half-dried-up runlet and
climbed a small hill, neither of which he remembered having met in his
night from the wreck, and in a little while he came out upon the
railroad. To the north a little distance the rails ran round a curve. To
the south, where the diminishing rails running through the unbroken
woodland met in a long, shiny V, he could see a big smoke smudge against
the horizon. This smoke Mr. Trimm knew must come from the wreck--which
was still burning, evidently. As nearly as he could judge he had come
out of cover at least two miles above it. After a moment's consideration
he decided to go south toward the wreck. Soon he could distinguish small
dots like ants moving in and out about the black spot, and he knew these
dots must be men.

A whining, whirring sound came along the rails to him from behind. He
faced about just as a handcar shot out around the curve from the north,
moving with amazing rapidity under the strokes of four men at the pumps.
Other men, laborers to judge by their blue overalls, were sitting on the
edges of the car with their feet dangling. For the second time within
twelve hours impulse ruled Mr. Trimm, who wasn't given to impulses
normally. He made a jump off the right-of-way, and as the handcar
flashed by he watched its flight from the covert of a weed tangle.

But even as the handcar was passing him Mr. Trimm regretted his
hastiness. He must surrender himself sooner or later; why not to these
overalled laborers, since it was a thing that had to be done? He slid
out of hiding and came trotting back to the tracks. Already the handcar
was a hundred yards away, flitting into distance like some big,
wonderfully fast bug, the figures of the men at the pumps rising and
falling with a walking-beam regularity. As he stood watching them fade
away and minded to try hailing them, yet still hesitating against his
judgment, Mr. Trimm saw something white drop from the hands of one of
the blue-clad figures on the handcar, unfold into a newspaper and come
fluttering back along the tracks toward him. Just as he, starting
doggedly ahead, met it, the little ground breeze that had carried it
along died out and the paper dropped and flattened right in front of
him. The front page was uppermost and he knew it must be of that
morning's issue, for across the column tops ran the flaring headline:
"Twenty Dead in Frightful Collision."

Squatting on the cindered track, Mr. Trimm patted the crumpled sheet
flat with his hands. His eyes dropped from the first of the glaring
captions to the second, to the next--and then his heart gave a great
bound inside of him and, clutching up the newspaper to his breast, he
bounded off the tracks back into another thicket and huddled there with
the paper spread on the earth in front of him, reading by gulps while
the chain that linked wrist to wrist tinkled to the tremors running
through him. What he had seen first, in staring black-face type, was his
own name leading the list of known dead, and what he saw now, broken up
into choppy paragraphs and done in the nervous English of a trained
reporter throwing a great news story together to catch an edition, but
telling a clear enough story nevertheless, was a narrative in which his
name recurred again and again. The body of the United States deputy
marshal, Meyers, frightfully crushed, had been taken from the wreckage
of the smoker--so the double-leaded story ran--and near to Meyers
another body, with features burned beyond recognition, yet still
retaining certain distinguishing marks of measurement and contour, had
been found and identified as that of Hobart W. Trimm, the convicted
banker. The bodies of these two, with eighteen other mangled dead, had
been removed to a town called Westfield, from which town of Westfield
the account of the disaster had been telegraphed to the New York paper.
In another column farther along was more about Banker Trimm; facts about
his soiled, selfish, greedy, successful life, his great fortune, his
trial, and a statement that, lacking any close kin to claim his body,
his lawyers had been notified.

Mr. Trimm read the account through to the end, and as he read the sense
of dominant, masterful self-control came back to him in waves. He got
up, taking the paper with him, and went back into the deeper woods,
moving warily and watchfully. As he went his mind, trained to take hold
of problems and wring the essence out of them, was busy. Of the charred,
grisly thing in the improvised morgue at Westfield, wherever that might
be, Mr. Trimm took no heed nor wasted any pity. All his life he had used
live men to work his will, with no thought of what might come to them
afterward. The living had served him, why not the dead?

He had other things to think of than this dead proxy of his. He was as
good as free! There would be no hunt for him now; no alarm out, no
posses combing every scrap of cover for a famous criminal turned
fugitive. He had only to lie quiet a few days, somewhere, then get in
secret touch with Walling. Walling would do anything for money. And he
had the money--four millions and more, cannily saved from the crash that
had ruined so many others.

He would alter his personal appearance, change his name--he thought of
Duvall, which was his mother's name--and with Walling's aid he would get
out of the country and into some other country where a man might live
like a prince on four millions or the fractional part of it. He thought
of South America, of South Africa, of a private yacht swinging through
the little frequented islands of the South Seas. All that the law had
tried to take from him would be given back. Walling would work out the
details of the escape--and make it safe and sure--trust Walling for
those things. On one side was the prison, with its promise of twelve
grinding years sliced out of the very heart of his life; on the other,
freedom, ease, security, even power. Through Mr. Trimm's mind tumbled
thoughts of concessions, enterprises, privileges--the back corners of
the globe were full of possibilities for the right man. And between this
prospect and Mr. Trimm there stood nothing in the way, nothing but----

Mr. Trimm's eyes fell upon his bound hands. Snug-fitting, shiny steel
bands irked his wrists. The Grips of the Law were still upon him.

But only in a way of speaking. It was preposterous, unbelievable,
altogether out of the question that a man with four millions salted down
and stored away, a man who all his life had been used to grappling with
the big things and wrestling them down into submission, a man whose luck
had come to be a byword--and had not it held good even in this last
emergency?--would be balked by puny scraps of forged steel and a
trumpery lock or two. Why, these cuffs were no thicker than the gold
bands that Mr. Trimm had seen on the arms of overdressed women at the
opera. The chain that joined them was no larger and, probably, no
stronger than the chains which Mr. Trimm's chauffeur wrapped around the
tires of the touring car in winter to keep the wheels from skidding on
the slush. There would be a way, surely, for Mr. Trimm to free himself
from these things. There must be--that was all there was to it.

Mr. Trimm looked himself over. His clothes were not badly rumpled; his
patent-leather boots were scarcely scratched. Without the handcuffs he
could pass unnoticed anywhere. By night then he must be free of them and
on his way to some small inland city, to stay quiet there until the
guarded telegram that he would send in cipher had reached Walling. There
in the woods by himself Mr. Trimm no longer felt the ignominy of his
bonds; he felt only the temporary embarrassment of them and the need of
added precaution until he should have mastered them.

He was once more the unemotional man of affairs who had stood Wall
Street on its esteemed head and caught the golden streams that trickled
from its pockets. First making sure that he was in a well-screened
covert of the woods he set about exploring all his pockets. The coat
pockets were comparatively easy, now that he had got used to using two
hands where one had always served, but it cost him a lot of twisting of
his body and some pain to his mistreated wrist bones to bring forth the
contents of his trousers' pockets. The chain kinked time and again as he
groped with the undermost hand for the openings; his dumpy, pudgy form
writhed grotesquely. But finally he finished. The search produced four
cigars somewhat crumpled and frayed; some matches in a gun-metal case, a
silver cigar cutter, two five-dollar bills, a handful of silver chicken
feed, the leather case of the eyeglasses, a couple of quill toothpicks,
a gold watch with a dangling fob, a notebook and some papers. Mr. Trimm
ranged these things in a neat row upon a log, like a watchmaker setting
out his kit, and took swift inventory of them. Some he eliminated from
his design, stowing them back in the pockets easiest to reach. He kept
for present employment the match safe, the cigar cutter and the watch.

This place where he had halted would suit his present purpose well, he
decided. It was where an uprooted tree, fallen across an incurving bank,
made a snug little recess that was closed in on three sides. Spreading
the newspaper on the turf to save his knees from soiling, he knelt and
set to his task. For the time he felt neither hunger nor thirst. He had
found out during his earlier experiments that the nails of his little
fingers, which were trimmed to a point, could invade the keyholes in the
little steel warts on the backs of his wrists and touch the locks. The
mechanism had even twitched a little bit under the tickle of the nail
ends. So, having already smashed the gun-metal match safe under his
heel, Mr. Trimm selected a slender-pointed bit from among its fragments
and got to work, the left hand drawn up under the right, the fingers of
the right busy with the lock of the left, the chain tightening and
slackening with subdued clinking sounds at each movement.

Mr. Trimm didn't know much about picking a lock. He had got his money by
a higher form of burglary that did not require a knowledge of lock
picking. Nor as a boy had he been one to play at mechanics. He had let
other boys make the toy fluttermills and the wooden traps and the like,
and then he had traded for them. He was sorry now that he hadn't given
more heed to the mechanical side of things when he was growing up.

He worked with a deliberate slowness, steadily. Nevertheless, it was hot
work. The sun rose over the bank and shone on him through the limbs of
the uprooted tree. His hat was on the ground alongside of him. The sweat
ran down his face, streaking it and wilting his collar flat. The scrap
of gun metal kept slipping out of his wet fingers. Down would go the
chained hands to scrabble in the grass for it, and then the picking
would go on again. This happened a good many times. Birds, nervous with
the spirit that presages the fall migration, flew back and forth along
the creek, almost grazing Mr. Trimm sometimes. A rain crow wove a brown
thread in the green warp of the bushes above his head. A chattering red
squirrel sat up on a tree limb to scold him. At intervals, distantly,
came the cough of laboring trains, showing that the track must have been
cleared. There were times when Mr. Trimm thought he felt the lock
giving. These times he would work harder.

       *       *       *       *       *

Late in the afternoon Mr. Trimm lay back against the bank, panting. His
face was splotched with red, and the little hollows at the sides of his
forehead pulsed rapidly up and down like the bellies of scared tree
frogs. The bent outer case of the watch littered a bare patch on the
log; its mainspring had gone the way of the fragments of the gun-metal
match safe which were lying all about, each a worn-down, twisted wisp of
metal. The spring of the eyeglasses had been confiscated long ago and
the broken crystals powdered the earth where Mr. Trimm's toes had
scraped a smooth patch. The nails of the two little fingers were worn to
the quick and splintered down into the raw flesh. There were countless
tiny scratches and mars on the locks of the handcuffs, and the steel
wristbands were dulled with blood smears and pale-red tarnishes of new
rust; but otherwise they were as stanch and strong a pair of Bean's
Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs as you'd find in any hardware store
anywhere.

The devilish, stupid malignity of the damned things! With an acid oath
Mr. Trimm raised his hands and brought them down on the log violently.
There was a double click and the bonds tightened painfully, pressing the
chafed red skin white. Mr. Trimm snatched up his hands close to his
near-sighted eyes and looked. One of the little notches on the under
side of each cuff had disappeared. It was as if they were living things
that had turned and bitten him for the blow he gave them.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the time the sun went down there was a tingle of frost in the air.
Mr. Trimm didn't sleep much. Under the squeeze of the tightened fetters
his wrists throbbed steadily and racking cramps ran through his arms.
His stomach felt as though it were tied into knots. The water that he
drank from the branch only made his hunger sickness worse. His
undergarments, that had been wet with perspiration, clung to him
clammily. His middle-aged, tenderly-cared-for body called through every
pore for clean linen and soap and water and rest, as his empty insides
called for food.

After a while he became so chilled that the demand for warmth conquered
his instinct for caution. He felt about him in the darkness, gathering
scraps of dead wood, and, after breaking several of the matches that had
been in the gun-metal match safe, he managed to strike one and with its
tiny flame started a fire. He huddled almost over the fire, coughing
when the smoke blew into his face and twisting and pulling at his arms
in an effort to get relief from the everlasting cramps. It seemed to him
that if he could only get an inch or two more of play for his hands he
would be ever so much more comfortable. But he couldn't, of course.

He dozed, finally, sitting crosslegged with his head sunk between his
hunched shoulders. A pain in a new place woke him. The fire had burned
almost through the thin sole of his right shoe, and as he scrambled to
his feet and stamped, the clap of the hot leather flat against his
blistered foot almost made him cry out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Soon after sunrise a boy came riding a horse down a faintly traced
footpath along the creek, driving a cow with a bell on her neck ahead of
him. Mr. Trimm's ears caught the sound of the clanking bell before
either the cow or her herder was in sight, and he limped away, running,
skulking through the thick cover. A pendent loop of a wild grapevine,
swinging low, caught his hat and flipped it off his head; but Mr. Trimm,
imagining pursuit, did not stop to pick it up and went on bareheaded
until he had to stop from exhaustion. He saw some dark-red berries on a
shrub upon which he had trod, and, stooping, he plucked some of them
with his two hands and put three or four in his mouth experimentally.
Warned instantly by the acrid, burning taste, he spat the crushed
berries out and went on doggedly, following, according to his best
judgment, a course parallel to the railroad. It was characteristic of
him, a city-raised man, that he took no heed of distances nor of the
distinguishing marks of the timber.

Behind a log at the edge of a small clearing in the woods he halted some
little time, watching and listening. The clearing had grown up in sumacs
and weeds and small saplings and it seemed deserted; certainly it was
still. Near the center of it rose the sagging roof of what had been a
shack or a shed of some sort. Stooping cautiously, to keep his bare head
below the tops of the sumacs, Mr. Trimm made for the ruined shanty and
gained it safely. In the midst of the rotted, punky logs that had once
formed the walls he began scraping with his feet. Presently he uncovered
something. It was a broken-off harrow tooth, scaled like a long, red
fish with the crusted rust of years.

Mr. Trimm rested the lower rims of his handcuffs on the edge of an old,
broken watering trough, worked the pointed end of the rust-crusted
harrow tooth into the flat middle link of the chain as far as it would
go, and then with one hand on top of the other he pressed downward with
all his might. The pain in his wrists made him stop this at once. The
link had not sprung or given in the least, but the twisting pressure
had almost broken his wrist bones. He let the harrow tooth fall, knowing
that it would never serve as a lever to free him--which, indeed, he had
known all along--and sat on the side of the trough, rubbing his wrists
and thinking.

He had another idea. It came into his mind as a vague suggestion that
fire had certain effects upon certain metals. He kindled a fire of bits
of the rotted wood, and when the flames ran together and rose slender
and straight in a single red thread he thrust the chain into it, holding
his hands as far apart as possible in the attitude of a player about to
catch a bounced ball. But immediately the pain of that grew unendurable
too, and he leaped back, jerking his hands away. He had succeeded only
in blackening the steel and putting a big water blister on one of his
wrists right where the shackle bolt would press upon it.

Where he huddled down in the shelter of one of the fallen walls he
noticed, presently, a strand of rusted fence wire still held to
half-tottering posts by a pair of blackened staples; it was part of a
pen that had been used once for chickens or swine. Mr. Trimm tried the
wire with his fingers. It was firm and springy. Rocking and groaning
with the pain of it, he nevertheless began sliding the chain back and
forth, back and forth along the strand of wire.

Eventually the wire, weakened by age, snapped in two. A tiny shined
spot, hardly deep enough to be called a nick, in its tarnished, smudged
surface was all the mark that the chain showed.

Staggering a little and putting his feet down unsteadily, Mr. Trimm left
the clearing, heading as well as he could tell eastward, away from the
railroad. After a mile or two he came to a dusty wood road winding
downhill.

To the north of the clearing where Mr. Trimm had halted were a farm and
a group of farm buildings. To the southward a mile or so was a cluster
of dwellings set in the midst of more farm lands, with a shop or two and
a small white church with a green spire in the center. Along a road that
ran northward from the hamlet to the solitary farm a ten-year-old boy
came, carrying a covered tin pail. A young gray squirrel flirted across
the wagon ruts ahead of him and darted up a chestnut sapling. The boy
put the pail down at the side of the road and began looking for a stone
to throw at the squirrel.

Mr. Trimm slid out from behind a tree. A hemstitched handkerchief,
grimed and stained, was loosely twisted around his wrists, partly hiding
the handcuffs. He moved along with a queer, sliding gait, keeping as
much of his body as he could turned from the youngster. The ears of the
little chap caught the faint scuffle of feet and he spun around on his
bare heel.

"My boy, would you----" Mr. Trimm began.

The boy's round eyes widened at the apparition that was sidling toward
him in so strange a fashion, and then, taking fright, he dodged past Mr.
Trimm and ran back the way he had come, as fast as his slim brown legs
could take him. In half a minute he was out of sight round a bend.

Had the boy looked back he would have seen a still more curious
spectacle than the one that had frightened him. He would have seen a man
worth four million dollars down on his knees in the yellow dust, pawing
with chained hands at the tight-fitting lid of the tin pail, and then,
when he had got the lid off, drinking the fresh, warm milk which the
pail held with great, choking gulps, uttering little mewing, animal
sounds as he drank, while the white, creamy milk ran over his chin and
splashed down his breast in little, spurting streams.

But the boy didn't look back. He ran all the way home and told his
mother he had seen a wild man on the road to the village; and later,
when his father came in from the fields, he was soundly thrashed for
letting the sight of a tramp make him lose a good tin bucket and half a
gallon of milk worth six cents a quart.

       *       *       *       *       *

The rich, fresh milk put life into Mr. Trimm. He rested the better for
it during the early part of that night in a haw thicket. Only the
sharp, darting pains in his wrists kept rousing him to temporary
wakefulness. In one of those intervals of waking the plan that had been
sketchily forming in his mind from the time he had quit the clearing in
the woods took on a definite, fixed shape. But how was he with safety to
get the sort of aid he needed, and where?

Canvassing tentative plans in his head, he dozed off again.

       *       *       *       *       *

On a smooth patch of turf behind the blacksmith shop three yokels were
languidly pitching horseshoes--"quaits" they called them--at a stake
driven in the earth. Just beyond, the woods shredded out into a long,
yellow and green peninsula which stretched up almost to the back door of
the smithy, so that late of afternoons the slanting shadows of the
near-most trees fell on its roof of warped shingles. At the extreme end
of this point of woods Mr. Trimm was squatted behind a big boulder,
squinting warily through a thick-fringed curtain of ripened goldenrod
tops and sumacs, heavy-headed with their dark-red tapers. He had been
there more than an hour, cautiously waiting his chance to hail the
blacksmith, whose figure he could make out in the smoky interior of his
shop, passing back and forth in front of a smudgy forge fire and
rattling metal against metal in intermittent fits of professional
activity.

From where Mr. Trimm watched to where the horseshoe-pitching game went
on was not more than sixty feet. He could hear what the players said and
even see the little puffs of dust rise when one of them clapped his
hands together after a pitch. He judged by the signs of slackening
interest that they would be stopping soon and, he hoped, going clear
away.

But the smith loafed out of his shop and, after an exchange of bucolic
banter with the three of them, he took a hand in their game himself. He
wore no coat or waistcoat and, as he poised a horseshoe for his first
cast at the stake, Mr. Trimm saw, pinned flat against the broad strap of
his suspenders, a shiny, silvery-looking disk. Having pitched the shoe,
the smith moved over into the shade, so that he almost touched the clump
of undergrowth that half buried Mr. Trimm's protecting boulder. The
near-sighted eyes of the fugitive banker could make out then what the
flat, silvery disk was, and Mr. Trimm cowered low in his covert behind
the rock, holding his hands down between his knees, fearful that a gleam
from his burnished wristlets might strike through the screen of weed
growth and catch the inquiring eye of the smith. So he stayed, not
daring to move, until a dinner horn sounded somewhere in the cluster of
cottages beyond, and the smith, closing the doors of his shop, went away
with the three yokels.

Then Mr. Trimm, stooping low, stole back into the deep woods again. In
his extremity he was ready to risk making a bid for the hire of a
blacksmith's aid to rid himself of his bonds, but not a blacksmith who
wore a deputy sheriff's badge pinned to his suspenders.

       *       *       *       *       *

He caught himself scraping his wrists up and down again against the
rough, scrofulous trunk of a shellbark hickory. The irritation was
comforting to the swollen skin. The cuffs, which kept catching on the
bark and snagging small fragments of it loose, seemed to Mr. Trimm to
have been a part and parcel of him for a long time--almost as long a
time as he could remember. But the hands which they clasped so close
seemed like the hands of somebody else. There was a numbness about them
that made them feel as though they were a stranger's hands which never
had belonged to him. As he looked at them with a sort of vague curiosity
they seemed to swell and grow, these two strange, fettered hands, until
they measured yards across, while the steel bands shrunk to the thinness
of piano wire, cutting deeper and deeper into the flesh. Then the hands
in turn began to shrink down and the cuffs to grow up into great, thick
things as cumbersome as the couplings of a freight car. A voice that Mr.
Trimm dimly recognized as his own was saying something about four
million dollars over and over again.

Mr. Trimm roused up and shook his head angrily to clear it. He rubbed
his eyes free of the clouding delusion. It wouldn't do for him to be
getting light-headed.

       *       *       *       *       *

On a flat, shelving bluff, forty feet above a cut through which the
railroad ran at a point about five miles north of where the collision
had occurred, a tramp was busy, just before sundown, cooking something
in an old washboiler that perched precariously on a fire of wood coals.
This tramp was tall and spindle-legged, with reddish hair and a pale,
beardless, freckled face with no chin to it and not much forehead, so
that it ran out to a peak like the profile of some featherless,
unpleasant sort of fowl. The skirts of an old, ragged overcoat dangled
grotesquely about his spare shanks.

Desperate as his plight had become, Mr. Trimm felt the old sick shame at
the prospect of exposing himself to this knavish-looking vagabond whose
help he meant to buy with a bribe. It was the sight of a dainty wisp of
smoke from the wood fire curling upward through the cloudy, damp air
that had brought him limping cautiously across the right-of-way, to
climb the rocky shelf along the cut; but now he hesitated, shielded in
the shadows twenty yards away. It was a whiff of something savory in the
washboiler, borne to him on the still air and almost making him cry out
with eagerness, that drew him forth finally. At the sound of the
halting footsteps the tramp stopped stirring the mess in the washboiler
and glanced up apprehensively. As he took in the figure of the newcomer
his eyes narrowed and his pasty, nasty face spread in a grin of
comprehension.

"Well, well, well," he said, leering offensively, "welcome to our city,
little stranger."

Mr. Trimm came nearer, dragging his feet, for they were almost out of
the wrecks of his patent-leather shoes. His gaze shifted from the
tramp's face to the stuff on the fire, his nostrils wrinkling. Then
slowly: "I'm in trouble," he said, and held out his hands.

"Wot I'd call a mild way o' puttin' it," said the tramp coolly. "That
purticular kind o' joolry ain't gen'lly wore for pleasure."

His eyes took on a nervous squint and roved past Mr. Trimm's stooped
figure down the slope of the hillock.

"Say, pal, how fur ahead are you of yore keeper?" he demanded, his
manner changing.

"There is no one after me--no one that I know of," explained Mr. Trimm.
"I am quite alone--I am certain of it."

"Sure there ain't nobody lookin' fur you?" the other persisted
suspiciously.

"I tell you I am all alone," protested Mr. Trimm. "I want your help in
getting these--these things off and sending a message to a friend.
You'll be well paid, very well paid. I can pay you more money than you
ever had in your life, probably, for your help. I can promise----"

He broke off, for the tramp, as if reassured by his words, had stooped
again to his cooking and was stirring the bubbling contents of the
washboiler with a peeled stick. The smell of the stew, rising strongly,
filled Mr. Trimm with such a sharp and an aching hunger that he could
not speak for a moment. He mastered himself, but the effort left him
shaking and gulping.

"Go on, then, an' tell us somethin' about yourself," said the freckled
man. "Wot brings you roamin' round this here railroad cut with them
bracelets on?"

"I was in the wreck," obeyed Mr. Trimm. "The man with me--the
officer--was killed. I wasn't hurt and I got away into these woods. But
they think I'm dead too--my name was among the list of dead."

The other's peaky face lengthened in astonishment.

"Why, say," he began, "I read all about that there wreck--seen the list
myself--say, you can't be Trimm, the New York banker? Yes, you are! Wot
a streak of luck! Lemme look at you! Trimm, the swell financeer,
sportin' 'round with the darbies on him all nice an' snug an' reg'lar!
Mister Trimm--well, if this ain't rich!"

"My name is Trimm," said the starving banker miserably. "I've been
wandering about here a great many hours--several days, I think it must
be--and I need rest and food very much indeed. I don't--don't feel very
well," he added, his voice trailing off.

At this his self-control gave way again and he began to quake violently
as if with an ague. The smell of the cooking overcame him.

"You don't look so well an' that's a fact, Trimm," sneered the tramp,
resuming his malicious, mocking air. "But set down an' make yourself at
home, an' after a while, when this is done, we'll have a bite
together--you an' me. It'll be a reg'lar tea party fur jest us two."

He broke off to chuckle. His mirth made him appear even more repulsive
than before.

"But looky here, you wus sayin' somethin' about money," he said
suddenly. "Le's take a look at all this here money."

He came over to him and went through Mr. Trimm's pockets. Mr. Trimm said
nothing and stood quietly, making no resistance. The tramp finished a
workmanlike search of the banker's pockets. He looked at the result as
it lay in his grimy palm--a moist little wad of bills and some
chicken-feed change--and spat disgustedly with a nasty oath.

"Well, Trimm," he said, "fur a Wall Street guy seems to me you travel
purty light. About how much did you think you'd get done fur all this
pile of wealth?"

"You will be well paid," said Mr. Trimm, arguing hard; "my friend will
see to that. What I want you to do is to take the money you have there
in your hand and buy a cold chisel or a file--any tools that will cut
these things off me. And then you will send a telegram to a certain
gentleman in New York. And let me stay with you until we get an
answer--until he comes here. He will pay you well; I promise it."

He halted, his eyes and his mind again on the bubbling stuff in the
rusted washboiler. The freckled vagrant studied him through his
red-lidded eyes, kicking some loose embers back into the fire with his
toe.

"I've heard a lot about you one way an' another, Trimm," he said.
"'Tain't as if you wuz some pore down-an'-out devil tryin' to beat the
cops out of doin' his bit in stir. You're the way-up, high-an'-mighty
kind of crook. An' from wot I've read an' heard about you, you never
toted fair with nobody yet. There wuz that young feller, wot's his
name?--the cashier--him that wuz tried with you. He went along with you
in yore games an' done yore work fur you an' you let him go over the
road to the same place you're tryin' to dodge now. Besides," he added
cunningly, "you come here talkin' mighty big about money, yet I notice
you ain't carryin' much of it in yore clothes. All I've had to go by is
yore word. An' yore word ain't worth much, by all accounts."

"I tell you, man, that you'll profit richly," burst out Mr. Trimm, the
words falling over each other in his new panic. "You must help me; I've
endured too much--I've gone through too much to give up now." He pleaded
fast, his hands shaking in a quiver of fear and eagerness as he
stretched them out in entreaty and his linked chain shaking with them.
Promises, pledges, commands, orders, arguments poured from him. His
tormentor checked him with a gesture.

"You're wot I'd call a bird in the hand," he chuckled, hugging his slack
frame, "an' it ain't fur you to be givin' orders--it's fur me. An',
anyway, I guess we ain't a-goin' to be able to make a trade--leastwise
not on yore terms. But we'll do business all right, all right--anyhow, I
will."

"What do you mean?" panted Mr. Trimm, full of terror. "You'll help me?"

"I mean this," said the tramp slowly. He put his hands under his
loose-hanging overcoat and began to fumble at a leather strap about his
waist. "If I turn you over to the Government I know wot you'll be worth,
purty near, by guessin' at the reward; an' besides, it'll maybe help to
square me up fur one or two little matters. If I turn you loose I ain't
got nothin' only your word--an' I've got an idea how much faith I kin
put in that."

Mr. Trimm glanced about him wildly. There was no escape. He was fast in
a trap which he himself had sprung. The thought of being led to jail,
all foul of body and fettered as he was, by this filthy, smirking wretch
made him crazy. He stumbled backward with some insane idea of running
away.

"No hurry, no hurry a-tall," gloated the tramp, enjoying the torture of
this helpless captive who had walked into his hands. "I ain't goin' to
hurt you none--only make sure that you don't wander off an' hurt
yourself while I'm gone. Won't do to let you be damagin' yoreself;
you're valuable property. Trimm, now, I'll tell you wot we'll do! We'll
just back you up agin one of these trees an' then we'll jest slip this
here belt through yore elbows an' buckle it around behind at the back;
an' I kinder guess you'll stay right there till I go down yonder to that
station that I passed comin' up here an' see wot kind of a bargain I kin
strike up with the marshal. Come on, now," he threatened with a show of
bluster, reading the resolution that was mounting in Mr. Trimm's face.
"Come on peaceable, if you don't want to git hurt."

Of a sudden Mr. Trimm became the primitive man. He was filled with those
elemental emotions that make a man see in spatters of crimson. Gathering
strength from passion out of an exhausted frame, he sprang forward at
the tramp. He struck at him with his head, his shoulders, his knees, his
manacled wrists, all at once. Not really hurt by the puny assault, but
caught by surprise, the freckled man staggered back, clawing at the air,
tripped on the washboiler in the fire, and with a yell vanished below
the smooth edge of the cut.

Mr. Trimm stole forward and looked over the bluff. Half-way down the
cliff on an outcropping shelf of rock the man lay, face downward,
motionless. He seemed to have grown smaller and to have shrunk into his
clothes. One long, thin leg was bent up under the skirts of the overcoat
in a queer, twisted way, and the cloth of the trouser leg looked
flattened and empty. As Mr. Trimm peered down at him he saw a red stain
spreading on the rock under the still, silent figure's head.

Mr. Trimm turned to the washboiler. It lay on its side, empty, the last
of its recent contents sputtering out into the half-drowned fire. He
stared at this ruin a minute. Then without another look over the cliff
edge he stumbled slowly down the hill, muttering to himself as he went.
Just as he struck the level it began to rain, gently at first, then
hard, and despite the shelter of the full-leaved forest trees, he was
soon wet through to his skin and dripped water as he lurched along
without sense of direction or, indeed, without any active realization of
what he was doing.

       *       *       *       *       *

Late that night it was still raining--a cold, steady, autumnal downpour.
A huddled figure slowly climbed upon a low fence running about the
house-yard of the little farm where the boy lived who got thrashed for
losing a milkpail. On the wet top rail, precariously perching, the
figure slipped and sprawled forward in the miry yard. It got up,
painfully swaying on its feet. It was Mr. Trimm, looking for food. He
moved slowly toward the house, tottering with weakness and because of
the slick mud underfoot; peering near-sightedly this way and that
through the murk; starting at every sound and stopping often to listen.

The outlines of a lean-to kitchen at the back of the house were looming
dead ahead of him when from the corner of the cottage sprang a small
terrier. It made for Mr. Trimm, barking shrilly. He retreated backward,
kicking at the little dog and, to hold his balance, striking out with
short, dabby jerks of his fettered hands--they were such motions as the
terrier itself might make trying to walk on its hindlegs. Still backing
away, expecting every instant to feel the terrier's teeth in his flesh,
Mr. Trimm put one foot into a hotbed with a great clatter of the
breaking glass. He felt the sharp ends of shattered glass tearing and
cutting his shin as he jerked free. Recovering himself, he dealt the
terrier a lucky kick under the throat that sent it back, yowling, to
where it had come from, and then, as a door jerked open and a
half-dressed man jumped out into the darkness, Mr. Trimm half hobbled,
half fell out of sight behind the woodpile.

Back and forth along the lower edge of his yard the farmer hunted, with
the whimpering, cowed terrier to guide him, poking in dark corners with
the muzzle of his shotgun for the unseen intruder whose coming had
aroused the household. In a brushpile just over the fence to the east
Mr. Trimm lay on his face upon the wet earth, with the rain beating down
on him, sobbing with choking gulps that wrenched him cruelly, biting at
the bonds on his wrists until the sound of breaking teeth gritted in the
air. Finally, in the hopeless, helpless frenzy of his agony he beat his
arms up and down until the bracelets struck squarely on a flat stone and
the force of the blow sent the cuffs home to the last notch so that they
pressed harder and faster than ever upon the tortured wrist bones.

When he had wasted ten or fifteen minutes in a vain search the farmer
went shivering back indoors to dry out his wet shirt. But the groveling
figure in the brushpile lay for a long time where it was, only stirring
a little while the rain dripped steadily down on everything.

       *       *       *       *       *

The wreck was on a Tuesday evening. Early on the Saturday morning
following the chief of police, who was likewise the whole of the day
police force in the town of Westfield, nine miles from the place where
the collision occurred, heard a peculiar, strangely weak knocking at
the front door of his cottage, where he also had his office. The door
was a Dutch door, sawed through the middle, so that the top half might
be opened independently, leaving the lower panel fast. He swung this top
half back.

A face was framed in the opening--an indescribably dirty, unutterably
weary face, with matted white hair and a rime of whitish beard stubble
on the jaws. It was fallen in and sunken and it drooped on the chest of
its owner. The mouth, swollen and pulpy, as if from repeated hard blows,
hung agape, and between the purplish parted lips showed the stumps of
broken teeth. The eyes blinked weakly at the chief from under lids as
colorless as the eyelids of a corpse. The bare white head was filthy
with plastered mud and twigs, and dripping wet.

"Hello, there!" said the chief, startled at this apparition. "What do
you want?"

With a movement that told of straining effort the lolled head came up
off the chest. The thin, corded neck stiffened back, rising from a
dirty, collarless neckband. The Adam's apple bulged out prominently, as
big as a pigeon's egg.

"I have come," said the specter in a wheezing rasp of a voice which the
chief could hardly hear--"I have come to surrender myself. I am Hobart
W. Trimm."

"I guess you got another thing comin'," said the chief, who was by way
of being a neighborhood wag. "When last seen Hobart W. Trimm was only
fifty-two years old. Besides which, he's dead and buried. I guess maybe
you'd better think agin, grandpap, and see if you ain't Methus'lah or
the Wanderin' Jew."

"I am Hobart W. Trimm, the banker," whispered the stranger with a sort
of wan stubbornness.

"Go on and prove it," suggested the chief, more than willing to prolong
the enjoyment of the sensation. It wasn't often in Westfield that
wandering lunatics came a-calling.

"Got any way to prove it?" he repeated as the visitor stared at him.

"Yes," came the creaking, rusted hinge of a voice, "I have."

Slowly, with struggling attempts, he raised his hands into the chief's
sight. They were horribly swollen hands, red with the dried blood where
they were not black with the dried dirt; the fingers puffed up out of
shape; the nails broken; they were like the skinned paws of a bear. And
at the wrists, almost buried in the bloated folds of flesh, blackened,
rusted, battered, yet still strong and whole, was a tightly-locked pair
of Bean's Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs.

"Great God!" cried the chief, transfixed at the sight. He drew the bolt
and jerked open the lower half of the door.

"Come in," he said, "and lemme get them irons off of you--they must hurt
something terrible."

"They can wait," said Mr. Trimm very feebly, very slowly and very
humbly. "I have worn them a long, long while--I am used to them.
Wouldn't you please get me some food first?"




II

THE BELLED BUZZARD


There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big
Niggerwool, which lay across the river. It was traversable only by those
who knew it well--an oblong stretch of tawny mud and tawny water,
measuring maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its
widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings
of canebrake and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it
from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree
trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of
living things--except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and
a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that
the country people called logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming
crests and spiky tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag
to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering
a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might
well have been the voice of the swamp itself.

On one side little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a
sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended
abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county
turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road and thrust its fringe
of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good
farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am
speaking of it was mid-summer, and from these canes and weeds and
waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering.
They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a
man's head.

Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had
stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weed-stems
rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently
and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat, but
with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too
large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin
he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a
turkey gobbler.

He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs
absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a
respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and
thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old
staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was
afraid of being found out.

He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the
swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first
up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of
satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet, and, taken with an idea, he
stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped
his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and
texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B. Gathers
had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on
this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled
his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road,
he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding
sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half
a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill.

He felt perfectly natural--not like a man who had just taken a
fellowman's life--but natural and safe, and well satisfied with himself
and with his morning's work. And he was safe; that was the main
thing--absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the thing
for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these months.
There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had worked out as
plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living creature except
himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little
Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none
knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and
deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden. No one
had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no one had seen the squire
emerge, three hours later, alone.

The gun, having served its purpose, was hidden again, in a place no
mortal eye would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his
shoulder blades, the dead man was lying where he might lie undiscovered
for months or for years, or forever. His pedler's pack was buried in
the mud so deep that not even the probing crawfishes could find it. He
would never be missed probably. There was but the slightest likelihood
that inquiry would ever be made for him--let alone a search. He was a
stranger and a foreigner, the dead man was, whose comings and goings
made no great stir in the neighborhood, and whose failure to come again
would be taken as a matter of course--just one of those shiftless,
wandering Dagoes, here today and gone tomorrow. That was one of the best
things about it--these Dagoes never had any people in this country to
worry about them or look for them when they disappeared. And so it was
all over and done with, and nobody the wiser. The squire clapped his
hands together briskly with the air of a man dismissing a subject from
his mind for good, and mended his gait.

He felt no stabbings of conscience. On the contrary, a glow of
gratification filled him. His house was saved from scandal; his present
wife would philander no more--before his very eyes--with these young
Dagoes, who came from nobody knew where, with packs on their backs and
persuasive, wheedling tongues in their heads. At this thought the squire
raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked good to him--the
small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flower
beds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the
back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout.

At the fence he halted and turned about, carelessly and casually, and
looked back along the way he had come. Everything was as it should
be--the weedfield steaming in the heat; the empty road stretching along
the crooked ridge like a long gray snake sunning itself; and beyond it,
massing up, the dark, cloaking stretch of swamp. Everything was all
right, but----The squire's eyes, in their loose sacs of skin, narrowed
and squinted. Out of the blue arch away over yonder a small black dot
had resolved itself and was swinging to and fro, like a mote. A
buzzard--hey? Well, there were always buzzards about on a clear day like
this. Buzzards were nothing to worry about--almost any time you could
see one buzzard, or a dozen buzzards if you were a mind to look for
them.

But this particular buzzard now--wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool?
The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the
buzzards until this minute. Sometimes when cattle strayed the owners had
been known to follow the buzzards, knowing mighty well that if the
buzzards led the way to where the stray was, the stray would be past the
small salvage of hide and hoofs--but the owner's doubts would be set at
rest for good and all.

There was a grain of disquiet in this. The squire shook his head to
drive the thought away--yet it persisted, coming back like a midge
dancing before his face. Once at home, however, Squire Gathers deported
himself in a perfectly normal manner. With the satisfied proprietorial
eye of an elderly husband who has no rivals, he considered his young
wife, busied about her household duties. He sat in an easy-chair upon
his front gallery and read his yesterday's Courier-Journal which the
rural carrier had brought him; but he kept stepping out into the yard
to peer up into the sky and all about him. To the second Mrs. Gathers he
explained that he was looking for weather signs. A day as hot and still
as this one was a regular weather breeder; there ought to be rain before
night.

"Maybe so," she said; "but looking's not going to bring rain."

Nevertheless the squire continued to look. There was really nothing to
worry about; still at midday he did not eat much dinner, and before his
wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper
was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard--or, anyhow, he
judged it was the first one he had seen--was swinging back and forth in
great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp--closer and
closer--until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew
almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first
buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards. Were there four of
them? No; there were five--five in all.

Such is the way of the buzzard--that shifting black question mark which
punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse
lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a
black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. In broad
loops and swirls this dot swings round and round and round, coming a
little closer to earth at every turn and always with one particular spot
upon the earth for the axis of its wheel. Out of space also other moving
spots emerge and grow larger as they tack and jib and drop nearer,
coming in their leisurely buzzard way to the feast. There is no
haste--the feast will wait. If it is a dumb creature that has fallen
stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it
and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing,
with awkward out-thrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising
flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high
and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls that are too
tight--but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last
tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To
humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect--he hangs aloft longer;
but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, ever
chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big
charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard.

       *       *       *       *       *

The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in
years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving
distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire--not fear
exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind
of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think
about them any more; but he did--unceasingly.

By supper time there were seven of them.

       *       *       *       *       *

He slept light and slept badly. It was not the thought of that dead man
lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his
wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether.
Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked him drowsily what ailed
him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything?

Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering
him, he told her. It was a hot enough night--wasn't it? And when a man
got a little along in life he was apt to be a light sleeper--wasn't that
so? Well, then? She turned upon her side and slept again with her light,
purring snore. The squire lay awake, thinking hard and waiting for day
to come.

At the first faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the
gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there in his shirt in the half
light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck
opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing,
splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to
the south. Buzzards are early risers too. Presently, as the heavens
shimmered with the miracle of sunrise, he could make them out--six or
seven, or maybe eight.

An hour after breakfast the squire was on his way down through the
weedfield to the county road. He went half eagerly, half unwillingly. He
wanted to make sure about those buzzards. It might be that they were
aiming for the old pasture at the head of the swamp. There were sheep
grazing there--and it might be that a sheep had died. Buzzards were
notoriously fond of sheep, when dead. Or, if they were pointed for the
swamp, he must satisfy himself exactly what part of the swamp it was. He
was at the stake-and-rider fence when a mare came jogging down the road,
drawing a rig with a man in it. At sight of the squire in the field the
man pulled up.

"Hi, squire!" he saluted. "Goin' somewheres?"

"No; jest knockin' about," the squire said--"jest sorter lookin' the
place over."

"Hot agin--ain't it?" said the other.

The squire allowed that it was, for a fact, mighty hot. Commonplaces of
gossip followed this--county politics and a neighbor's wife sick of
breakbone fever down the road a piece. The subject of crops succeeded
inevitably. The squire spoke of the need of rain. Instantly he regretted
it, for the other man, who was by way of being a weather wiseacre,
cocked his head aloft to study the sky for any signs of clouds.

"Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said,
pointing upward with his whipstock.

"Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of
carelessness in his voice.

"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?"

"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin'
nothin', I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear
weather."

"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.

"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly.
"There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over on the
other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs."

"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be
feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along
towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the
mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.

He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire
turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated
himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet
there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards
flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made
people curious--made them ask questions.

He was half-way across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life,
above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his
ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to
one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a
thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery
ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk;
then the tonks all running together briskly.

A sheep bell or a cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from
overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly
from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left?
And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the
breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a
cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the
sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny.
He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on
four legs.

One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had
carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was
sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck,
the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He
could see the ragged black wings--a buzzard's wings are so often ragged
and uneven--and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet
folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too--an
undersized cowbell--that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled
incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about
the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye he was seeing him.

Once, years and years and years ago, some one trapped a buzzard, and
before freeing it clamped about its skinny neck a copper band with a
cowbell pendent from it. Since then the bird so ornamented has been seen
a hundred times--and heard oftener--over an area as wide as half the
continent. It has been reported, now in Kentucky, now in Texas, now in
North Carolina--now anywhere between the Ohio River and the Gulf.
Crossroads correspondents take their pens in hand to write to the
country papers that on such and such a date, at such a place, So-and-So
saw the Belled Buzzard. Always it is the Belled Buzzard, never a belled
buzzard. The Belled Buzzard is an institution.

There must be more than one of them. It seems hard to believe that one
bird, even a buzzard in his prime, and protected by law in every
Southern state and known to be a bird of great age, could live so long
and range so far and wear a clinking cowbell all the time! Probably
other jokers have emulated the original joker; probably if the truth
were known there have been a dozen such; but the country people will
have it that there is only one Belled Buzzard--a bird that bears a
charmed life and on his neck a never silent bell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Squire Gathers regarded it a most untoward thing that the Belled Buzzard
should have come just at this time. The movements of ordinary, unmarked
buzzards mainly concerned only those whose stock had strayed; but almost
anybody with time to spare might follow this rare and famous visitor,
this belled and feathered junkman of the sky. Supposing now that some
one followed it today--maybe followed it even to a certain thick clump
of cypress in the middle of Little Niggerwool!

But at this particular moment the Belled Buzzard was heading directly
away from that quarter. Could it be following him? Of course not! It was
just by chance that it flew along the course the squire was taking. But,
to make sure, he veered off sharply, away from the footpath into the
high weeds so that the startled grasshoppers sprayed up in front of him
in fan-like flights.

He was right; it was only a chance. The Belled Buzzard swung off too,
but in the opposite direction, with a sharp tonking of its bell, and,
flapping hard, was in a minute or two out of hearing and sight, past
the trees to the westward.

Again the squire skimped his dinner, and again he spent the long drowsy
afternoon upon his front gallery. In all the sky there were now no
buzzards visible, belled or unbelled--they had settled to earth
somewhere; and this served somewhat to soothe the squire's pestered
mind. This does not mean, though, that he was by any means easy in his
thoughts. Outwardly he was calm enough, with the ruminative judicial air
befitting the oldest justice of the peace in the county; but, within
him, a little something gnawed unceasingly at his nerves like one of
those small white worms that are to be found in seemingly sound nuts.
About once in so long a tiny spasm of the muscles would contract the
dewlap under his chin. The squire had never heard of that play, made
famous by a famous player, wherein the murdered victim was a pedler
too, and a clamoring bell the voice of unappeasable remorse in the
murderer's ear. As a strict churchgoer the squire had no use for players
or for play actors, and so was spared that added canker to his
conscience. It was bad enough as it was.

That night, as on the night before, the old man's sleep was broken and
fitful and disturbed by dreaming, in which he heard a metal clapper
striking against a brazen surface. This was one dream that came true.
Just after daybreak he heaved himself out of bed, with a flop of his
broad bare feet upon the floor, and stepped to the window and peered
out. Half seen in the pinkish light, the Belled Buzzard flapped directly
over his roof and flew due south, right toward the swamp--drawing a
direct line through the air between the slayer and the victim--or,
anyway, so it seemed to the watcher, grown suddenly tremulous.

       *       *       *       *       *

Knee deep in yellow swamp water the squire squatted, with his shotgun
cocked and loaded and ready, waiting to kill the bird that now typified
for him guilt and danger and an abiding great fear. Gnats plagued him
and about him frogs croaked. Almost overhead a log-cock clung lengthwise
to a snag, watching him. Snake doctors, limber, long insects with bronze
bodies and filmy wings, went back and forth like small living shuttles.
Other buzzards passed and repassed, but the squire waited, forgetting
the cramps in his elderly limbs and the discomfort of the water in his
shoes.

At length he heard the bell. It came nearer and nearer, and the Belled
Buzzard swung overhead not sixty feet up, its black bulk a fair target
against the blue. He aimed and fired, both barrels bellowing at once and
a fog of thick powder smoke enveloping him. Through the smoke he saw the
bird careen and its bell jangled furiously; then the buzzard righted
itself and was gone, fleeing so fast that the sound of its bell was
hushed almost instantly. Two long wing feathers drifted slowly down;
torn disks of gunwadding and shredded green scraps of leaves descended
about the squire in a little shower.

He cast his empty gun from him so that it fell in the water and
disappeared; and he hurried out of the swamp as fast as his shaky legs
would take him, splashing himself with mire and water to his eyebrows.
Mucked with mud, breathing in great gulps, trembling, a suspicious
figure to any eye, he burst through the weed curtain and staggered into
the open, his caution all gone and a vast desperation fairly choking
him--but the gray road was empty and the field beyond the road was
empty; and, except for him, the whole world seemed empty and silent.

As he crossed the field Squire Gathers composed himself. With plucked
handfuls of grass he cleansed himself of much of the swamp mire that
coated him over; but the little white worm that gnawed at his nerves had
become a cold snake that was coiled about his heart, squeezing it
tighter and tighter!

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration: "TWO LONG WING FEATHERS DRIFTED SLOWLY DOWN."--_Page 70._]

This episode of the attempt to kill the Belled Buzzard occurred in the
afternoon of the third day. In the forenoon of the fourth, the weather
being still hot, with cloudless skies and no air stirring, there was a
rattle of warped wheels in the squire's lane and a hail at his yard
fence. Coming out upon his gallery from the innermost darkened room of his
house, where he had been stretched upon a bed, the squire shaded his
eyes from the glare and saw the constable of his own magisterial
district sitting in a buggy at the gate waiting.

The old man went down the dirtpath slowly, almost reluctantly, with his
head twisted up side wise, listening, watching; but the constable sensed
nothing strange about the other's gait and posture; the constable was
full of the news he brought. He began to unload the burden of it without
preamble.

"Mornin', Squire Gathers. There's been a dead man found in Little
Niggerwool--and you're wanted."

He did not notice that the squire was holding on with both hands to the
gate; but he did notice that the squire had a sick look out of his eyes
and a dead, pasty color in his face; and he noticed--but attached no
meaning to it--that when the squire spoke his voice seemed flat and
hollow.

"Wanted--fur--whut?" The squire forced the words out of his throat,
pumped them out fairly.

"Why, to hold the inquest," explained the constable. "The coroner's sick
abed, and he said you bein' the nearest jestice of the peace you should
serve."

"Oh," said the squire with more ease. "Well, where is it--the body?"

"They taken it to Bristow's place and put it in his stable for the
present. They brought it out over on that side and his place was the
nearest. If you'll hop in here with me, squire, I'll ride you right over
there now. There's enough men already gathered to make up a jury, I
reckin."

"I--I ain't well," demurred the squire. "I've been sleepin' porely these
last few nights. It's the heat," he added quickly.

"Well, suh, you don't look very brash, and that's a fact," said the
constable; "but this here job ain't goin' to keep you long. You see it's
in such shape--the body is--that there ain't no way of makin' out who
the feller was nor whut killed him. There ain't nobody reported missin'
in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown
person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we
kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away,
suh--if you'll go along now."

"I'll go," agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness.
"I'll go right now." He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his
wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed
into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into
a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips
demanding to be asked--the question the answer to which he yearned for
and yet dreaded.

"How did they come to find--it?"

"Well, suh, that's a funny thing," said the constable. "Early this
mornin' Bristow's oldest boy--that one they call Buddy--he heared a
cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as
you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin'
after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of
them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he
run acrost it--this body.

"But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard
with a cowbell on his neck--that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there
same old Belled Buzzard he's come back agin and is hangin' round. They
tell me he ain't been seen round here since the year of the yellow
fever--I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The
niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They
say--the niggers do--that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of
bad luck for somebody, shore!"

The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea hen. The
squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy, he harkened only to
those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even
so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the
far-away, faint tonk-tonk! They were about half-way to Bristow's place
then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before his
companion heard it too.

The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over
his shoulder.

"Well, by doctors!" he cried, "if there ain't the old scoundrel now,
right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day--he's got an old
cowbell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of
one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all
my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!"

Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the
buggy top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took
no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.

"Is he followin' us?" asked the squire in a curiously flat, weighted
voice.

"Which--him?" answered the constable, still stretching his neck. "No,
he's gone now--gone off to the left--jest a-zoomin', like he'd done
forgot somethin'."

And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To
get the inquest over and the body underground--those were the main
things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers
urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his
sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek
which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in
sight of Bristow's farm buildings.

The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields and was in other
respects much like the squire's own house except that it was smaller and
not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and
a lye hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it
instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings--a
barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib--was a little peach orchard, and
flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of
stock at this hour, with feedracks ranged in a row against the fence. A
two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted and wearing but a
single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these
feedracks.

To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking
their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves
were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a
man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a
corner. There were gaunt hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily.

Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the
buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the
squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and
ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of
them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it--if
they noted it at all--subconsciously.

For all his haste the squire, as was also remembered later, was almost
the last to enter the door; and before he did enter he halted and
searched the flawless sky as though for signs of rain. Then he hurried
on after the others, who clumped single file along a narrow little hall,
the bare, uncarpeted floor creaking loudly under their heavy farm shoes,
and entered a good-sized room that had in it, among other things, a
high-piled feather bed and a cottage organ--Bristow's best room, now to
be placed at the disposal of the law's representatives for the inquest.
The squire took the largest chair and drew it to the very center of the
room, in front of a fireplace, where the grate was banked with withering
asparagus ferns. The constable took his place formally at one side of
the presiding official. The others sat or stood about where they could
find room--all but six of them, whom the squire picked for his coroner's
jury, and who backed themselves against the wall.

The squire showed haste. He drove the preliminaries forward with a sort
of tremulous insistence. Bristow's wife brought a bucket of fresh
drinking water and a gourd, and almost before she was out of the room
and the door closed behind her the squire had sworn his jurors and was
calling the first witness, who it seemed likely would also be the only
witness--Bristow's oldest boy. The boy wriggled in confusion as he sat
on a cane-bottomed chair facing the old magistrate. All there, barring
one or two, had heard his story a dozen times already, but now it was to
be repeated under oath; and so they bent their heads, listening as
though it were a brand-new tale. All eyes were on him; none were
fastened on the squire as he, too, gravely bent his head,
listening--listening.

The witness began--but had no more than started when the squire gave a
great, screeching howl and sprang from his chair and staggered backward,
his eyes popped and the pouch under his chin quivering as though it had
a separate life all its own. Startled, the constable made toward him and
they struck together heavily and went down--both on their all
fours--right in front of the fireplace.

The constable scrambled free and got upon his feet, in a squat of
astonishment, with his head craned; but the squire stayed upon the
floor, face downward, his feet flopping among the rustling asparagus
greens--a picture of slavering animal fear. And now his gagging screech
resolved itself into articulate speech.

"I done it!" they made out his shrieked words. "I done it! I own up--I
killed him! He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into
Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look
fur it. I done it--oh, I done it--and I'll tell everything jest like it
happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy!
Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter--it's a-comin'
after me! Keep it away----" His voice gave out and he buried his head in
his hands and rolled upon the gaudy carpet.

And now they all heard what he had heard first--they heard the
tonk-tonk-tonk of a cowbell, coming near and nearer toward them along
the hallway without. It was as though the sound floated along. There was
no creak of footsteps upon the loose, bare boards--and the bell jangled
faster than it would dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to
the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chair legs.

The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and
naked except for a single garment, eyeing them with serious, rolling
eyes--and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but
solemnly tolling a small rusty cowbell he had found in the cowyard.




III

AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET


"See if he's still there, will you?" said the man listlessly, as if
knowing in advance what the answer would be.

The woman, who, like the man, was in her stocking feet, crossed the
room, closing the door with all softness behind her. She felt her way
silently through the darkness of a small hallway, putting first her ear
and then her eye to a tiny cranny in some thick curtains at a front
window.

She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streets
that is precisely like forty other New York side streets: two unbroken
lines of high-shouldered, narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses, rising
in abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow river
of roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channel
intermittently like scattered stepping stones; and on either side wide,
flat pavements, as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark and
left bare its shallow banks. Daylight would have shown most of the
houses boarded up, with diamond-shaped vents, like leering eyes, cut in
the painted planking of the windows and doors; but now it was night
time--eleven o'clock of a wet, hot, humid night of the late summer--and
the street was buttoned down its length in the double-breasted fashion
of a bandmaster's coat with twin rows of gas lamps evenly spaced. Under
each small circle of lighted space the dripping, black asphalt had a
slimy, slick look like the sides of a newly caught catfish. Elsewhere
the whole vista lay all in close shadow, black as a cave mouth under
every stoop front and blacker still in the hooded basement areas. Only,
half a mile to the eastward a dim, distant flicker showed where Broadway
ran, a broad, yellow streak down the spine of the city, and high above
the broken skyline of eaves and cornices there rolled in cloudy waves
the sullen red radiance, born of a million electrics and the flares from
gas tanks and chimneys, which is only to be seen on such nights as this,
giving to the heaven above New York that same color tone you find in an
artist's conception of Babylon falling or Rome burning.

From where the woman stood at the window she could make out the round,
white, mushroom top of a policeman's summer helmet as its wearer leaned
back, half sheltered under the narrow portico of the stoop just below
her; and she could see his uniform sleeve and his hand, covered with a
white cotton glove, come up, carrying a handkerchief, and mop the hidden
face under the helmet's brim. The squeak of his heavy shoes was plainly
audible to her also. While she stayed there, watching and listening, two
pedestrians--and only two--passed on her side of the street: a messenger
boy in a glistening rubber poncho going west and a man under an umbrella
going east. Each was hurrying along until he came just opposite her, and
then, as though controlled by the same set of strings, each stopped
short and looked up curiously at the blind, dark house and at the figure
lounging in the doorway, then hurried on without a word, leaving the
silent policeman fretfully mopping his moist face and tugging at the
wilted collar about his neck.

After a minute or two at her peephole behind the window curtains above,
the woman passed back through the door to the inner, middle room where
the man sat.

"Still there," she said lifelessly in the half whisper that she had come
to use almost altogether these last few days; "still there and sure to
stay there until another one just like him comes to take his place. What
else did you expect?"

The man only nodded absently and went on peeling an overripe peach,
striking out constantly, with the hand that held the knife, at the
flies. They were green flies--huge, shiny-backed, buzzing, persistent
vermin. There were a thousand of them; there seemed to be a million of
them. They filled the shut-in room with their vile humming; they swarmed
everywhere in the half light. They were thickest, though, in a corner at
the back, where there was a closed, white door. Here a great knot of
them, like an iridescent, shimmering jewel, was clustered about the
keyhole. They scrolled the white enameled panels with intricate,
shifting patterns, and in pairs and singly they promenaded busily on the
white porcelain knob, giving it the appearance of being alive and having
a motion of its own.

It was stiflingly hot and sticky in the room. The sweat rolled down the
man's face as he peeled his peach and pared some half-rotted spots out
of it. He protected it with a cupped palm as he bit into it. One huge
green fly flipped nimbly under the fending hand and lit on the peach.
With a savage little snarl of disgust and loathing the man shook the
clinging insect off and with the knife carved away the place where its
feet had touched the soft fruit. Then he went on munching, meanwhile
furtively watching the woman. She was on the opposite side of a small
center-table from him, with her face in her hands, shaking her head with
a little shuddering motion whenever one of the flies settled on her
close-cropped hair or brushed her bare neck.

He was a smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about him
even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a
weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a
twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of
focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier
than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than her
real height, seeing that she was dressed, like a half-grown boy, in a
soft-collared shirt open at the throat and a pair of loose trousers. She
had large but rather regular features, pouting lips, a clear brown skin
and full, prominent brown eyes; and one of them had a pronounced cast in
it--an imperfection already made familiar by picture and printed
description to sundry millions of newspaper readers. For this was Ella
Gilmorris, the woman in the case of the Gilmorris murder, about which
the continent of North America was now reading and talking. And the
little man with the twisted face, who sat across from her, gnawing a
peach stone clean, was the notorious "Doctor" Harris Devine, alias
Vanderburg, her accomplice, and worth more now to society in his present
untidy state than ever before at any one moment of his whole
discreditable life, since for his capture the people of the state of New
York stood willing to pay the sum of one thousand dollars, which tidy
reward one of the afternoon papers had increased by another thousand.

Everywhere detectives--amateurs and the kind who work for hire--were
seeking the pair who at this precise moment faced each other across a
little center-table in the last place any searcher would have suspected
or expected them to be--on the second floor of the house in which the
late Cassius Gilmorris had been killed. This, then, was the situation:
inside, these two fugitives, watchful, silent, their eyes red-rimmed for
lack of sleep, their nerves raw and tingling as though rasped with
files, each busy with certain private plans, each fighting off
constantly the touch of the nasty scavenger flies that flickered and
flitted iridescently about them; outside, in the steamy, hot drizzle,
with his back to the locked and double-locked door, a leg-weary
policeman, believing that he guarded a house all empty except for such
evidences as yet remained of the Gilmorris murder.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was one of those small, chancy things that so often disarrange the
best laid plots of murderers that had dished their hope of a clean
getaway and brought them back, at the last, to the starting point. If
the plumber's helper, who was sent to cure a bathtub of leaking in the
house next door, had not made a mistake and come to the wrong number;
and if they, in the haste of flight, had not left an area door
unfastened; and if this young plumbing apprentice, stumbling his way
upstairs on the hunt for the misbehaving drain, had not opened the white
enameled door and found inside there what he did find--if this small
sequence of incidents had not occurred as it did and when it did, or if
only it had been delayed another twenty-four hours, or even twelve,
everything might have turned out differently. But fate, to call it by
its fancy name--coincidence, to use its garden one--interfered, as it
usually does in cases such as this. And so here they were.

The man had been on his way to the steamship office to get the tickets
when an eruption of newsboys boiled out of Mail Street into Broadway,
with extras on their arms, all shouting out certain words that sent him
scurrying back in a panic to the small, obscure family hotel in the
lower thirties where the woman waited. From that moment it was she,
really, who took the initiative in all the efforts to break through the
doubled and tripled lines that the police machinery looped about the
five boroughs of the city.

At dark that evening "Mr. and Mrs. A. Thompson, of Jersey City," a quiet
couple who went closely muffled up, considering that it was August, and
carrying heavy valises, took quarters at a dingy furnished room house on
a miscalled avenue of Brooklyn not far from the Wall Street ferries and
overlooking the East River waterfront from its bleary back windows. Two
hours later a very different-looking pair issued quietly from a side
entrance of this place and vanished swiftly down toward the docks. The
thing was well devised and carried out well too; yet by morning the
detectives, already ranging and quartering the town as bird-dogs quarter
a brier-field, had caught up again and pieced together the broken ends
of the trail; and, thanks to them and the newspapers, a good many
thousand wide awake persons were on the lookout for a plump,
brown-skinned young woman with a cast in her right eye, wearing a boy's
disguise and accompanied by a slender little man carrying his head
slightly to one side, who when last seen wore smoked glasses and had his
face extensively bandaged, as though suffering from a toothache.

Then had followed days and nights of blind twisting and dodging and
hiding, with the hunt growing warmer behind them all the time. Through
this they were guided and at times aided by things printed in the very
papers that worked the hardest to run them down. Once they ventured as
far as the outer entrance of the great, new uptown terminal, and turned
away, too far gone and sick with fear to dare run the gauntlet of the
waiting room and the train-shed. Once--because they saw a made-up
Central Office man in every lounging long-shoreman, and were not so far
wrong either--they halted at the street end of one of the smaller piers
and from there watched a grimy little foreign boat that carried no
wireless masts and that might have taken them to any one of half a dozen
obscure banana ports of South America--watched her while she hiccoughed
out into midstream and straightened down the river for the open
bay--watched her out of sight and then fled again to their newest hiding
place in the lower East Side in a cold sweat, with the feeling that
every casual eye glance from every chance passer-by carried suspicion
and recognition in its flash, that every briskening footstep on the
pavement behind them meant pursuit.

Once in that tormented journey there was a sudden jingle of metal, like
rattling handcuffs, in the man's ear and a heavy hand fell detainingly
on his shoulder--and he squeaked like a caught shore-bird and shrunk
away from under the rough grips of a truckman who had yanked him clear
of a lurching truck horse tangled in its own traces. Then, finally, had
come a growing distrust for their latest landlord, a stolid Russian Jew
who read no papers and knew no English, and saw in his pale pair of
guests only an American lady and gentleman who kept much to their room
and paid well in advance for everything; and after that, in the hot
rainy night, the flight afoot across weary miles of soaking cross
streets and up through ill-lighted, shabby avenues to the one place of
refuge left open to them. They had learned from the newspapers, at once
a guide and a bane, a friend and a dogging enemy, that the place was
locked up, now that the police had got through searching it, and that
the coroner's people held the keys. And the woman knew of a faulty catch
on a rear cellar window, and so, in a fit of stark desperation bordering
on lunacy, back they ran, like a pair of spent foxes circling to a
burrow from which they have been smoked out.

Again it was the woman who picked for her companion the easiest path
through the inky-black alley, and with her own hands she pulled down
noiselessly the broken slats of the rotting wooden wall at the back of
the house. And then, soon, they were inside, with the reeking heat of
the boxed-up house and the knowledge that at any moment discovery might
come bursting in upon them--inside with their busy thoughts and the busy
green flies. How persistent the things were--shake them off a hundred
times and back they came buzzing! And where had they all come from?
There had been none of them about before, surely, and now their
maddening, everlasting droning filled the ear. And what nasty creatures
they were, forever cleaning their shiny wings and rubbing the ends of
their forelegs together with the loathsome suggestion of little
grave-diggers anointing their palms. To the woman, at least, these flies
almost made bearable the realization that, at best, this stopping point
could be only a temporary one, and that within a few hours a fresh start
must somehow be made, with fresh dangers to face at every turning.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was during this last hideous day of flight and terror that the thing
which had been growing in the back part of the brain of each of them
began to assume shape and a definite aspect. The man had the craftier
mind, but the woman had a woman's intuition, and she already had read
his thoughts while yet he had no clue to hers. For the primal instinct
of self-preservation, blazing up high, had burned away the bond of bogus
love that held them together while they were putting her drunkard of a
husband out of the way, and now there only remained to tie them fast
this partnership of a common guilt.

In these last few hours they had both come to know that together there
was no chance of ultimate escape; traveling together the very disparity
of their compared appearances marked them with a fatal and unmistakable
conspicuousness, as though they were daubed with red paint from the same
paint brush; staying together meant ruin--certain, sure. Now, then,
separated and going singly, there might be a thin strand of hope. Yet
the man felt that, parted a single hour from the woman, and she still
alive, his wofully small prospect would diminish and shrink to the
vanishing point--New York juries being most notoriously easy upon women
murderers who give themselves up and turn state's evidence; and, by the
same mistaken processes of judgment, notoriously hard upon their male
accomplices--half a dozen such instances had been playing in flashes
across his memory already.

Neither had so much as hinted at separating. The man didn't speak,
because of a certain idea that had worked itself all out hours before
within his side-flattened skull. The woman likewise had refrained from
putting in words the suggestion that had been uppermost in her brain
from the time they broke into the locked house. Some darting look of
quick, malignant suspicion from him, some inner warning sense, held her
mute at first; and later, as the newborn hate and dread of him grew and
mastered her and she began to canvass ways and means to a certain end,
she stayed mute still.

Whatever was to be done must be done quietly, without a struggle--the
least sound might arouse the policeman at the door below. One thing was
in her favor--she knew he was not armed; he had the contempt and the
fear of a tried and proved poisoner for cruder lethal tools.

It was characteristic also of the difference between these two that
Devine should have had his plan stage-set and put to motion long before
the woman dreamed of acting. It was all within his orderly scheme of the
thing proposed that he, a shrinking coward, should have set his squirrel
teeth hard and risked detection twice in that night: once to buy a
basket of overripe fruit from a dripping Italian at a sidewalk stand,
taking care to get some peaches--he just must have a peach, he had
explained to her; and once again when he entered a dark little store on
Second Avenue, where liquors were sold in their original packages, and
bought from a sleepy, stupid clerk two bottles of a cheap domestic
champagne--"to give us the strength for making a fresh start," he told
her glibly, as an excuse for taking this second risk. So, then, with the
third essential already resting at the bottom of an inner waistcoat
pocket, he was prepared; and he had been waiting for his opportunity
from the moment when they crept in through the basement window and felt
their way along, she resolutely leading, to the windowless, shrouded
middle room here on the second floor.

       *       *       *       *       *

How she hated him, feared him too! He could munch his peaches and uncork
his warm, cheap wine in this very room, with that bathroom just yonder
and these flies all about. From under her fingers, interlaced over her
forehead, her eyes roved past him, searching the littered room for the
twentieth time in the hour, looking, seeking--and suddenly they fell on
something--a crushed and rumpled hat of her own, a milliner's
masterpiece, laden with florid plumage, lying almost behind him on a
couch end where some prying detective had dropped it, with a big, round
black button shining dully from the midst of its damaged tulle crown.
She knew that button well. It was the imitation-jet head of a hatpin--a
steel hatpin--that was ten inches long and maybe longer.

She looked and looked at the round, dull knob, like a mystic held by a
hypnotist's crystal ball, and she began to breathe a little faster; she
could feel her resolution tighten within her like a turning screw.

Beneath her brows, heavy and thick for a woman's, her eyes flitted back
to the man. With the careful affectation of doing nothing at all, a
theatricalism that she detected instantly, but for which she could guess
no reason, he was cutting away at the damp, close-gnawed seed of the
peach, trying apparently to fashion some little trinket--a toy basket,
possibly--from it. His fingers moved deftly over its slick, wet surface.
He had already poured out some of the champagne. One of the pint bottles
stood empty, with the distorted button-headed cork lying beside it, and
in two glasses the yellow wine was fast going flat and dead in that
stifling heat. It still spat up a few little bubbles to the surface, as
though minute creatures were drowning in it down below. The man was
sweating more than ever, so that, under the single, low-turned gas jet,
his crooked face had a greasy shine to it. A church clock down in the
next block struck twelve slowly. The sleepless flies buzzed evilly.

"Look out again, won't you?" he said for perhaps the tenth time in two
hours. "There's a chance, you know, that he might be gone--just a bare
chance. And be sure you close the door into the hall behind you," he
added as if by an afterthought. "You left it ajar once--this light might
show through the window draperies."

At his bidding she rose more willingly than at any time before. To reach
the door she passed within a foot of the end of the couch, and watching
over her shoulder at his hunched-up back she paused there for the
smallest fraction of time. The damaged picture hat slid off on the floor
with a soft little thud, but he never turned around.

The instant, though, that the hall door closed behind her the man's
hands became briskly active. He fumbled in an inner pocket of his
unbuttoned waistcoat; then his right hand, holding a small cylindrical
vial of a colorless liquid, passed swiftly over one of the two glasses
of slaking champagne and hovered there a second. A few tiny globules
fell dimpling into the top of the yellow wine, then vanished; a heavy
reek, like the smell of crushed peach kernels, spread through the whole
room. In the same motion almost he recorked the little bottle, stowed it
out of sight, and with a quick, wrenching thrust that bent the small
blade of his penknife in its socket he split the peach seed in two
lengthwise and with his thumb-nail bruised the small brown kernel lying
snugly within. He dropped the knife and the halved seed and began
sipping at the undoctored glass of champagne, not forgetting even then
to wave his fingers above it to keep the winged green tormentors out.

The door at the front reopened and the woman came in. Her thoughts were
not upon smells, but instinctively she sniffed at the thick scent on the
poisoned air.

"I accidentally split this peach seed open," he said quickly, with an
elaborate explanatory air. "Stenches up the whole place, don't it? Come,
take that other glass of champagne--it will do you good to----"

Perhaps it was some subtle sixth sense that warned him; perhaps the
lightning-quick realization that she had moved right alongside him,
poised and set to strike. At any rate he started to fling up his
head--too late! The needle point of the jet-headed hatpin entered
exactly at the outer corner of his right eye and passed backward for
nearly its full length into his brain--smoothly, painlessly, swiftly. He
gave a little surprised gasp, almost like a sob, and lolled his head
back against the chair rest, like a man who has grown suddenly tired.
The hand that held the champagne glass relaxed naturally and the glass
turned over on its side with a small tinkling sound and spilled its thin
contents on the table.

It had been easier than she had thought it would be. She stepped back,
still holding the hatpin. She moved around from behind him, and then she
saw his face, half upturned, almost directly beneath the low light.
There was no blood, no sign even of the wound, but his jaw had dropped
down unpleasantly, showing the ends of his lower front teeth, and his
eyes stared up unwinkingly with a puzzled, almost a disappointed, look
in them. A green fly lit at the outer corner of his right eye; more
green flies were coming. And he didn't put up his hand to brush it away.
He let it stay--he let it stay there.

With her eyes still fixed on his face, the woman reached out, feeling
for her glass of the champagne. She felt that she needed it now, and at
a gulp she took a good half of it down her throat.

She put the glass down steadily enough on the table; but into her eyes
came the same puzzled, baffled look that his wore, and almost gently she
slipped down into the chair facing him.

Then her jaw lolled a little too, and some of the other flies came
buzzing toward her.




IV

ANOTHER OF THOSE CUB REPORTER STORIES


The first time I saw Major Putnam Stone I didn't see him first. To be
exact, I heard him first, and then I walked round the end of a
seven-foot partition and saw him.

I had just gone to work for the Evening Press. As I recall now it was my
second day, and I hadn't begun to feel at home there yet, and probably
was more sensitive to outside sights and noises than I would ever again
be in that place. Generally speaking, when a reporter settles down to
his knitting, which in his case is his writing, he becomes impervious to
all disturbances excepting those that occur inside his own brainpan. If
he couldn't, he wouldn't amount to shucks in his trade. Give him a good,
live-action story to write for an edition going to press in about nine
minutes, and the rattles and slams of half a dozen typewriting machines,
and the blattings of a pestered city editor, and the gabble of a couple
of copy boys at his elbow, and all the rest of it won't worry him. He
may not think he hears it, but he does, only instead of being
distracting it is stimulating. It's all a part of the mechanism of the
shop, helping him along unconsciously to speed and efficiency. I've
often thought that, when I was handling a good, bloody murder story,
say, it would tone up my style to have a phonograph about ten feet away
grinding out The Last Ravings of John McCullough. Anyway, I am sure it
wouldn't do any harm. A brass band playing a John Philip Sousa march
makes fine accompaniment to write copy to. I've done it before now,
covering parades and conventions, and I know.

But on this particular occasion I was, as I say, new to the job and
maybe a little nervous to boot, and as I sat there, trying to frame a
snappy opening paragraph for the interview I had just brought back with
me from one of the hotels, I became aware of a voice somewhere in the
immediate vicinity, a voice that didn't jibe in with my thoughts. At the
moment I stopped to listen it was saying: "As for me, sir, I have always
contended that the ultimate fate of the cause was due in great measure
to the death of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh on the evening of the
first day's fight. Now then, what would have been the final result if
Albert Sidney Johnston had lived? I ask you, gentlemen, what would have
been the final result if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived?"

Across the room from me I heard Devore give a hollow groan. His desk was
backed right up against the cross partition, and the partition was built
of thin pine boards and was like a sounding board in his ear. Devore was
city editor.

"Oh, thunder!" he said, half under his breath, "I'll be the goat! What
would have been the result if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived?" He
looked at me and gave a wink of serio-comic despair, and then he ran his
blue pencil up through his hair and left a blue streak like a scar on
his scalp. Devore was one of the few city editors I have ever seen who
used that tool which all of them are popularly supposed to handle so
murderously--a blue pencil. And as he had a habit, when he was flustered
or annoyed--and that was most of the time--of scratching his head with
the point end of it, his forehead under the hair roots was usually
streaked with purplish-blue tracings, like a fly-catcher's egg.

The voice, which had a deep and space-filling quality to it, continued
to come through and over the partition that divided off our cubby-hole
of a workroom--called a city room by courtesy--from the space where
certain other members of the staff had their desks. I got up from my
place and stepped over to where the thin wall ended in a doorway, being
minded to have a look at the speaker. The voice sounded as though it
must belong to a big man with a barrel-organ chest. I was surprised to
find that it didn't.

Its owner was sitting in a chair in the middle of a little space
cluttered up with discarded exchanges and galley proofs. He was rather a
small man, short but compact. He had his hat off and his hair, which was
thin but fine as silk floss, was combed back over his ears and sprayed
out behind in a sort of mane effect. It had been red hair once, but was
now so thickly streaked with white that it had become a faded brindle
color. I took notice of this first because his back was toward me; in a
second or two he turned his head sideways and I saw that he had exactly
the face to match the hair. It was a round, plump, elderly face, with a
short nose, delicately pink at the tip. The eyes were a pale blue, and
just under the lower lip, which protruded slightly, was a small gray-red
goatee, sticking straight out from a cleft in the chin like a dab of a
sandy sheep's wool. Also, as the speaker swung himself further round, I
took note of a shirt of plaited white linen billowing out over his chest
and ending at the top in a starchy yet rumply collar that rolled
majestically and Byronically clear up under his ears. Under the collar
was loosely knotted a black-silk tie such as sailors wear. His vest was
unbuttoned, all except the two lowermost buttons, and the sleeves of
his coat were turned back neatly off his wrists. This, though, could
not have been on account of the heat, because the weather wasn't very
hot yet. I learned later that, winter or summer, he always kept his coat
sleeves turned back and the upper buttons of his vest unfastened. His
hands were small and plump, and his feet were small too and daintily
shod in low, square-toed shoes. About the whole man there was an air
somehow of full-bloomed foppishness gone to tassel--as though having
been a dandy once, he was now merely neat and precise in his way of
dress.

He was talking along with the death of Albert Sidney Johnston for his
subject, not seeming to notice that his audience wasn't deeply
interested. He had, it seemed, a way of stating a proposition as a fact,
as an indisputable, everlasting, eternal fact, an immutable thing. It
became immutable through his way of stating it. Then he would frame it
in the form of a question and ask it. Then he would answer it himself
and go right ahead.

Boynton, the managing editor, was coiled up at his desk, wearing a look
of patient endurance on his face. Harty, the telegraph editor, was
trying to do his work--trying, I say, because the orator was booming
away like a bittern within three feet of him and Harty plainly was
pestered and fretful. Really the only person in sight who seemed
entertained was Sidley, the exchange editor, a young man with hair that
had turned white before its time and in his eye the devil-driven look of
a man who drinks hard, not because he wants to drink but because he
can't help drinking. Sidley, as I was to find out later, had less cause
to care for the old man than anybody about the shop, for he used to
disarrange Sidley's neatly piled exchanges, pawing through them for his
favorite papers. But Sidley could forget his own grievances in watchful
enjoyment of the dumb sufferings of Harty, whom he hated, as I came to
know, with the blind hate a dipsomaniac often has for any mild and
perfectly harmless individual.

As I stood there taking in the picture, the speaker, sensing a
stranger's presence, faced clear about and saw me. He nodded with a
grave courtesy, and then paused a moment as though expecting that one of
the others would introduce us. None of the others did introduce us
though, so he went ahead talking about Albert Sidney Johnston's death,
and I turned away. I stopped by Devore's desk.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"That," he said, with a kind of leashed and restrained ferocity in his
voice, "is Major Putnam P. Stone--and the P stands for Pest, which is
his middle name--late of the Southern Confederacy."

"Picturesque-looking old fellow, isn't he?" I said.

"Picturesque old nuisance," he said, and jabbed at his scalp with his
pencil as though he meant to puncture his skull. "Wait until you've been
here a few weeks and you'll have another name for him."

"Well, anyway, he's got a good carrying voice," I said, rather at a loss
to understand Devore's bitterness.

"Great," he mocked venomously; "you can hear it a mile. I hear it in my
sleep. So will you when you get to know him, the old bore!"

In due time I did get to know Major Stone well. He was dignified,
tiresome, conversational, gentle mannered and, I think, rather lonely.
By driblets, a scrap here and a scrap there, I learned something about
his private life. He came from the extreme eastern end of the state. He
belonged to an old family. His grandfather--or maybe it was his
great-grand-uncle--had been one of the first United States senators that
went to Washington after our state was admitted into the Union. He had
never married. He had no business or profession. From some property or
other he drew an income, small, but enough to keep him in a sort of
simple and genteel poverty. He belonged to the best club in town and the
most exclusive, the Shawnee Club, and he had served four years in the
Confederate army. That last was the one big thing in his life. To the
major's conceptions everything that happened before 1861 had been of a
preparatory nature, leading up to and paving the way for the main
event; and what had happened since 1865 was of no consequence, except in
so far as it reflected the effects of the Civil War.

Daily, as methodically as a milkwagon horse, he covered the same route.
First he sat in the reading room of the old Gaunt House, where by an
open fire in winter or by an open window in summer he discussed the
blunders of Braxton Bragg and similar congenial topics with a little
group of aging, fading, testy veterans. On his way to the Shawnee Club
he would come by the Evening Press office and stay an hour, or two
hours, or three hours, to go away finally with a couple of favored
exchanges tucked under his arm, and leave us with our ears still dinned
and tingling. Once in a while of a night, passing the Gaunt House on my
way to the boarding house where I lived--for four dollars a week--I
would see him through the windows, sometimes sitting alone, sometimes
with one of his cronies.

Round the office he sometimes bothered us and sometimes he interfered
with our work; but mainly all the men on the staff liked him, I think,
or at least we put up with him. In our home town each of us had known
somebody very much like him--there used to be at least one Major Stone
in every community in the South, although most of them are dead now, I
guess--so we all could understand him. When I say all I mean all but
Devore. The major's mere presence would poison Devore's whole day for
him. The major's blaring notes would cross-cut Devore's nerves as with a
dull and haggling saw. He--Devore I mean--disliked the major with a
dislike almost too deep for words. It had got to be an obsession with
him.

"You fellows that were born down here have to stand for him," he said
once, when the major had stumped out on his short legs after an
unusually long visit. "It's part of the penalty you pay for belonging in
this country. But I don't have to venerate him and fuss over him and
listen to him. I'm a Yankee, thank the Lord!" Devore came from Michigan
and had worked on papers in Cleveland and Detroit before he drifted
South. "Oh, we've got his counterpart up my way," he went on. "Up there
he'd be a pension-grabbing old kicker, ready to have a fit any time
anybody wearing a gray uniform got within ninety miles of him, and
writing red-hot letters of protest to the newspapers every time the
state authorities sent a captured battle flag back down South. Down here
he's a pompous, noisy old fraud, too proud to work for a living--or too
lazy--and too poor to count for anything in this world. The difference
is that up in my country we've squelched the breed--we got good and
tired of these professional Bloody Shirt wavers a good while ago; but
here you fuss over this man, and you'll sit round and pretend to listen
while he drools away about things that happened before any one of you
was born. Do you fellows know what I've found out about your Major
Putnam Stone? He's a life member of the Shawnee Club--a life member,
mind you! And here I've been living in this town over a year, and nobody
ever so much as invited me inside its front door!"

All of which was, perhaps, true, even though Devore had an unnecessarily
harsh way of stating the case; the part about the Shawnee Club was true,
at any rate, and I used to think it possibly had something to do with
Devore's feelings for Major Stone. Not that Devore gave open utterance
to his feelings to the major's face. To the major he was always silently
polite, with a little edging of ice on his politeness; he saved up his
spleen to spew it out behind the old fellow's back. Farther than that he
couldn't well afford to go anyhow. The Chief, owner of the paper and its
editor, was the major's friend. As for the major himself, he seemed
never to notice Devore's attitude. For a fact, I believe he actually
felt a sort of pity for Devore, seeing that Devore had been born in the
North. Not to have been born in the South was, from the major's way of
looking at the thing, a great and regrettable misfortune for which the
victim could not be held responsible, since the fault lay with his
parents and not with him. By way of a suitable return for this, Devore
spent many a spare moment thinking up grotesque yet wickedly
appropriate nicknames for the major. He called him Old First and Second
Manassas and Old Hardee's Tactics and Old Valley of Virginia. He called
him an old bluffer too.

He was wrong there, though, certainly. Though the major talked pretty
exclusively about the war, I took notice that he rarely talked about the
part he himself had played in it. Indeed, he rarely discussed anybody
below the rank of brigadier. The errors of Hood's campaign concerned him
more deeply than the personal performances of any individual. Campaigns
you might say were his specialty, campaigns and strategy. About such
things as these he could talk for hours--and he did.

I've known other men--plenty of them--not nearly so well educated as the
major, who could tell you tales of the war that would make you see
it--yes, and smell it too--the smoke of the campfires, the unutterable
fatigue of forced marches when the men, with their tongues lolling out
of their mouths like dogs, staggered along, panting like dogs; the
bloody prints of unshod feet on flinty, frozen clods; the shock and
fearful joy of the fighting; the shamed numbness of retreats; artillery
horses, their hides all blood-boltered and their tails clubbed and
clotted with mire, lying dead with stiff legs between overturned guns;
dead men piled in heaps and living men huddled in panics--all of it. But
when the major talked I saw only some serious-minded officers, in
whiskers of an obsolete cut and queer-looking shirt collars, poring over
maps round a table in a farmhouse parlor. When he chewed on the cud of
the vanished past it certainly was mighty dry chewing.

There came a day, a few weeks after I went to work for the Evening
Press, when for once anyway the major didn't seem to have anything to
say. It was in the middle of a blistering, smothering hot forenoon in
early June, muggy and still and close, when a fellow breathing felt as
though he had his nose buried in layers of damp cotton waste. The city
room was a place fit to addle eggs, and from the composing room at the
back the stenches of melting metals and stale machine oils came rolling
in to us in nasty waves. With his face glistening through the trickling
sweat, the major came in about ten o'clock, fanning himself with his
hat, and when he spoke his greeting the booming note seemed all melted
and gone out of his voice. He went through the city room into the room
behind the partition, and passing through a minute later I saw him
sitting there with one of Sidley's exchanges unfolded across his knee,
but he wasn't reading it. Presently I saw him climbing laboriously up
the stairs to the second floor where the chief had his office. At
quitting time that afternoon I dropped into the place on the corner for
a beer, and I was drinking it, as close to an electric fan as I could
get, when Devore came in and made for where I was standing. I asked him
to have something.

"I'll take the same," he said to the man behind the bar, and then to me
with a kind of explosive snap: "By George, I'm in a good mind to resign
this rotten job!" That didn't startle me. I had been in the business
long enough to know that the average newspaper man is forever
threatening to resign. Most of them--to hear them talk--are always just
on the point of throwing up their jobs and buying a good-paying country
weekly somewhere and taking things easy for the rest of their lives, or
else they're going into magazine work. Only they hardly ever do it. So
Devore's threat didn't jar me much. I'd heard it too often.

"What's the trouble?" I asked. "Heat getting on your nerves?"

"No, it's not the heat," he said peevishly; "it's worse than the heat.
Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on
me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city
staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he
had--the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial
reverses--and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take
him on as a reporter--a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who
hasn't heard of anything worth while since Robert E. Lee surrendered!"

The pathos of the situation--if you could call it that--hit me with a
jolt; but it hadn't hit Devore, that was plain. He saw only the annoying
part of it.

"What's he going to do?" I asked--"assignments, or cover a route like
the district men?"

"Lord knows," said Devore. "Because the old bore knows a lot of big
people in this town and is friendly with all the old-timers in the
state, the chief has a wild delusion that he can pick up a lot of stuff
that an ordinary reporter wouldn't get. Rats!

"Come on, let's take another beer," he said, and then he added: "Well,
I'll just make you two predictions. He'll be a total loss as a
reporter--that's one prediction; and the other is that he'll have a hard
time buying his provender and his toddies over at the Shawnee Club on
the salary he'll draw down from the Evening Press."

Devore was not such a very great city editor, as I know now in the light
of fuller experience, but I must say that as a prophet he was fairly
accurate. The major did have a hard time living on his salary--it was
twelve a week, I learned--and as a reporter he certainly was not what
you would call a dazzling success. He came on for duty at eight the next
morning, the same as the rest of us, and sorry as I felt for him I had
to laugh. He had bought himself a leather-backed notebook as big as a
young ledger, just as a green kid just out of high school would have
done, and he had a long, new, shiny, freshly sharpened lead pencil
sticking out of the breast pocket of his coat. He tried to come in
smartly with a businesslike air, but it wouldn't have fooled a blind
man, because he was as nervous as a debutante. It struck me as one of
the funniest things--and one of the most pathetic--I had ever seen.

I'll say this for Devore--he tried out the major on nearly every kind of
job; and surely it wasn't Devore's fault that the major failed on every
single one of them. His first attempt was as typical a failure as any of
them. That first morning Devore assigned him to cover a wedding at high
noon, high noon being the phrase we always used for a wedding that took
place round twelve o'clock in the day. The daughter of one of the
wealthiest merchants in the town, and also one of our largest
advertisers, was going to be married to the first deputy cotillion
leader of the German Club, or something of that nature. Anyhow the groom
was what is known as prominent in society, and the chief wanted a spread
made of it. Devore sent the major out to cover the wedding, and when he
came back told him to write about half a column.

He wrote half a column before he mentioned the bride's name. He started
off with an eight-line quotation from Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake,
and then he went into a long, flowery dissertation on the sacred rite or
ceremony of matrimony, proving conclusively and beyond the peradventure
of a doubt that it was handed down to us from remote antiquity. And he
forgot altogether to tell the minister's name, and he got the groom's
middle initial wrong--he was the kind of groom who would make a fuss
over a wrong middle initial, too--and along toward the end of his story
he devoted about three closely-written pages to the military history of
the young woman's father. It seems that her parent had served with
distinction as colonel of a North Carolina regiment. And he wound up
with a fancy flourish and handed it in. I know all these details of his
story, because it fell to me to rewrite it.

Devore didn't say a word when the old major reverently laid that armload
of copy down in front of him. He just sat and waited in silence until
the major had gone out to get a bite to eat, and then he undertook to
edit it. But there wasn't any way to edit it, except to throw it away. I
suppose that kind of literature went very well indeed back along about
1850; I remember having read such accounts in the back files of old
weeklies, printed before the war. But we were getting out a live, snappy
paper. Devore tried to pattern the local side after the New York and
Chicago models. As yet we hadn't reached the point where we spoke of any
white woman without the prefix Mrs. or Miss before her name, but we were
up-to-date in a good many other particulars. Why, it was even against
the office rule to run "beauty and chivalry" into a story when
describing a mixed assemblage of men and women; and when a Southern
newspaper bars out that ancient and honorable standby among phrases it
is a sign that the old order has changed.

For ten minutes or so Devore, cursing softly to himself, cut and chopped
and gutted his way through the major's introduction, and between
slashing strokes made a war map of the Balkans in his scalp with his
blue pencil. Then he lost patience altogether.

"Here," he said to me, "you're not doing anything, are you? Well, take
this awful bunch of mushy slush and read it through, and then try to
make a decent half-column story out of it. And rush it over a page at a
time, will you? We've got to hustle to catch the three o'clock edition
with it."

Long before three o'clock the major was back in the shop, waiting for
the first run of papers to come off the press. Furtively I watched him
as he hunted through the sticky pages to find his first story. I guess
he had the budding pride of authorship in him, just as all the rest of
us have it in us. But he didn't find his story, he found mine. He didn't
say anything, but he looked crushed and forlorn as he got up and went
away. It was like him not to ask for any explanations, and it was like
Devore not to offer him any.

So it went. Even if he had grown up in the business I doubt whether
Major Putnam Stone would ever have made a newspaper man; and now he was
too far along in life to pick up even the rudiments of the trade. He
didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most
amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could
always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential
detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace
adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up
a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story
without a quotation from one of the poets. It never was a modern poet
either. Excepting for Sidney Lanier and Father Ryan, apparently he
hadn't heard of any poet worth while since Edgar Allan Poe died. And
everything that happened seemed to remind him--at great length--of
something else that had happened between 1861 and 1865. When it came to
lugging the Civil War into a tale, he was as bad as that character in
one of Dickens' novels who couldn't keep the head of King Charles the
First out of his literary productions. With that reared-back,
flat-heeled, stiff-spined gait of his, he would go rummaging round the
hotels and the Shawnee Club, meeting all sorts of people and hearing all
sorts of things that a real reporter would have snatched at like a
hungry dog snatching at a T-bone, and then he would remember that it
was the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Kenesaw Mountain, or
something, and, forgetting everything else, would come bulging and
bustling back to the office, all worked up over the prospect of writing
two or three columns about that. He just simply couldn't get the
viewpoint; yet I think he tried hard enough. I guess the man who said
you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks had particular reference to an
old war dog.

I remember mighty well one incident that illustrates the point I am
trying to make. We had a Sunday edition. We were rather vain of our
Sunday edition. It carried a colored comic supplement and a section full
of special features, and we all took a more or less righteous pride in
it and tried hard to make it alive and attractive. We didn't always
succeed, but we tried all right. One Saturday night we put the Sunday to
bed, and about one o'clock, when the last form was locked, three or four
of us dropped into Tony's place at the corner for a bite to eat and a
drink. We hadn't been there very long when in came the old major, and at
my invitation he joined us at one of Tony's little round tables at the
back of the place. As a general thing the major didn't patronize Tony's.
I had never heard him say so--probably he wouldn't have said it for fear
of hurting our feelings--but I somehow had gathered the impression that
the major believed a gentleman, if he drank at all, should drink at his
club. But it was long after midnight now and the Shawnee Club would be
closed. Ike Webb spoke up presently.

"It's a pity we couldn't dig up the governor tonight," he said.

The governor had come down from the state capital about noon, and all
the afternoon and during most of the evening Webb had been trying to
find him. There was a possibility of a big story in the governor if Webb
could have found him. The major, who had been sitting there stirring his
toddy in an absent-minded sort of way, spoke up casually: "I spent an
hour with the governor tonight--at my club. In fact, I supped with him
in one of the private dining rooms." We looked up, startled, but the
major went right along. "Young gentlemen, it may interest you to know
that every time I see our worthy governor I am struck more and more by
his resemblance to General Leonidas Polk, as that gallant soldier and
gentleman looked when I last saw him----"

Devore, who had been sitting next to the major, with his shoulder half
turned from the old man, swung round sharply and interrupted him.

"Major," he said, with a thin icy stream of sarcasm trickling through
his words, "did you and the governor by any remote chance discuss
anything so brutally new and fresh as the present political
complications in this state?"

"Oh, yes," said the major blandly. "We discussed them quite at some
length--or at least the governor did. Personally I do not take a great
interest in these matters, not so great an interest as I should,
perhaps, take. However, I did feel impelled to take issue with him on
one point. Our governor is an honest gentleman--more than that, he was a
brave soldier--but I fear he is mistaken in some of his attitudes. I
regard him as being badly advised. For example, he told me that no
longer ago than this afternoon he affixed his official signature to a
veto of Senator Stickney's measure in regard to the warehouses of our
state----"

As Devore jumped up he overturned the major's toddy right in the major's
lap. He didn't stop to beg pardon, though; in fact, none of us stopped.
But at the door I threw one glance backward over my shoulder. The major
was still sitting reared back in his chair, with his wasted toddy
seeping all down the front of his billowy shirt, viewing our vanishing
figures with amazement and a mild reproof in his eyes. In the one quick
glance that I took I translated his expression to mean something like
this:

"Good Heavens, is this any way for a party of gentlemen to break up!
This could never happen at a gentlemen's club."

It was a foot-race back to the office, and Devore, who had the start,
won by a short length. Luckily the distance was short, not quite half a
block, and the presses hadn't started yet. Working like the crew of a
sinking ship, we snatched the first page form back off the steam table
and pried it open and gouged a double handful of hot slugs out of the
last column--Devore blistered his fingers doing it. A couple of linotype
operators who were on the late trick threw together the stick or two of
copy that Webb and I scribbled off a line at a time. And while we were
doing this Devore framed a triple-deck, black-face head. So we missed
only one mail.

The first page had a ragged, sloppy look, but anyway we were saved from
being scooped to death on the most important story of the year. The
vetoing of the Stickney Bill vitally affected the tobacco interests, and
they were the biggest interests in the state, and half the people of the
state had been thinking about nothing else and talking about nothing
else for two months--ever since the extra session of the legislature
started. It was well for us too that we did save our faces, because the
opposition sheet had managed to find the governor--he was stopping for
the night at the house of a friend out in the suburbs--and over the
telephone at a late hour he had announced his decision to them. But by
Monday morning the major seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. I
think he had even forgiven Devore for spilling his toddy and not
stopping to apologize.

As for Devore, he didn't say a word to the major--what would have been
the use? To Devore's credit also I will say that he didn't run to the
chief, bearing complaints of the major's hopeless incompetency. He kept
his tongue between his teeth and his teeth locked; and that must have
been hard on Devore, for he was a flickery, high-tempered man, and
nervous as a cat besides. To my knowledge, the only time he ever broke
out was when we teetotally missed the Castleton divorce story. So far as
the major's part in it was concerned, it was the Stickney veto story all
over again, with variations. The Castletons were almost the richest
people in town, and socially they stood way up. That made the scandal
that had been brewing and steeping and simmering for months all the
bigger when finally it came to a boil. When young Buford Castleton got
his eyes open and became aware of what everybody else had known for a
year or more, and when the rival evening paper came out in its last
edition with the full particulars, we, over in the Evening Press shop,
were plastered with shame, for we didn't have a line of it.

A stranger dropping in just about that time would have been justified in
thinking there was a corpse laid out in the plant somewhere, and that
all the members of the city staff were sitting up with the remains. As
luck would have it, it wasn't a stranger that dropped in on our grand
lodge of sorrow. It was Major Putnam Stone, and as he entered the door
he caught the tag end of what one of us was saying.

"I gather," he said in that large round voice of his, "that you young
gentlemen are discussing the unhappy affair which, I note, is mentioned
with such signally poor taste in the columns of our sensational
contemporary. I may state that I knew of this contemplated divorce
action yesterday. Mr. Buford Castleton, Senior, was my informant."

"What!" Devore almost yelled it. He had the love of a true city editor
for his paper, and the love of a mother for her child or a miser for his
gold is no greater love than that, let me tell you. "You knew about this
thing here?" He beat with two fingers that danced like the prongs of a
tuning fork on the paper spread out in front of him. "You knew it
yesterday?"

"Certainly," said the major. "The elder Mr. Castleton bared the truly
distressing details to me at the Shawnee Club."

"In confidence though--he told you about it in confidence, didn't he,
major?" said Ike Webb, trying to save the old fellow.

But the major besottedly wouldn't be saved.

"Absolutely not," he said. "There were several of us present, at least
three other gentlemen whose names I cannot now recall. Mr. Castleton
made the disclosure as though he wished it to be known among his
friends and his son's friends. It was quite evident to all of us that he
was entirely out of sympathy with the lady who is his daughter-in-law."

Devore forced himself to be calm. It was almost as though he sat on
himself to hold himself down in his chair; but when he spoke his voice
ran up and down the scales quiveringly.

"Major," he said, "don't you think it would be a good idea if you would
admit that the Southern Confederacy was defeated, and turned your
attention to a few things that have occurred subsequently? Why didn't
you write this story? Why didn't you tell me, so that I could write it?
Why didn't----Oh, what's the use!"

The major straightened himself up.

"Sir," he said, "allow me to correct you in regard to a plain
misstatement of fact. Sir, the Southern Confederacy was never defeated.
It ceased to exist as a nation because we were exhausted--because our
devastated country was exhausted. Another thing, sir, I am employed upon
this paper, I gainsay you, as a reporter, not as a scandal monger. I
would be the last to give circulation in the public prints to another
gentleman's domestic unhappiness. I regard it as highly improper that a
gentleman's private affairs should be aired in a newspaper under any
circumstances."

And with that he bowed and turned on his heel and went out, leaving
Devore shaking all over with the superhuman task of trying to hold
himself in. About ten minutes later, when I came out bound for my
boarding house, the major was standing at the front door. He looped one
of his absurdly small fingers into one of my buttonholes.

"Our city editor means well, no doubt," he said, "but he doesn't
understand, he doesn't appreciate our conceptions of these matters. He
was born on the other side of the river, you know," he said as though
that explained everything. Then his tone changed and anxiety crept into
it. "Do you think that I went too far? Do you think I ought to return to
him and apologize to him for the somewhat hasty and abrupt manner of
speech I used just now?"

I told him no--I didn't know what might happen if he went back in there
then--and I persuaded him that Devore didn't expect any apology; and
with that he seemed better satisfied and walked off. As I stood there
watching him, his stiff old back growing smaller as he went away from
me, I didn't know which I blamed the more, Devore for his malignant,
cold disdain of the major, or the major for his blatant stupidity. And
right then and there, all of a sudden, there came to me an understanding
of a thing that had been puzzling me all these weeks. Often I had
wondered how the major had endured Devore's contempt. I had decided in
my own mind that he must be blind to it, else he would have shown
resentment. But now I knew the answer. The major wasn't blind, he was
afraid; as the saying goes, he was afraid of his job. He needed it; he
needed the little scrap of money it brought him every Saturday night.
That was it, I knew now.

Knowing it made me sorrier than ever for the old man. Dimly I began to
realize, I think, what his own mental attitude toward his position must
be. Here he was, a mere cub reporter--and a remarkably bad one, a proven
failure--skirmishing round for small, inconsequential items, running
errands really, at an age when most of the men he knew were getting
ready to retire from business. Yet he didn't dare quit. He didn't dare
even to rebel against the slights of the man over him, because he needed
that twelve dollars a week. It was all, no doubt, that stood between him
and actual want. His pride was bleeding to death internally. On top of
all that he was being forced into a readjustment of his whole scheme of
things, at a time of life when its ordered routine was almost as much a
part of him as his hands and feet. As I figured it, he had long before
adjusted his life to his income, cunningly fitting in certain small
luxuries and all the small comforts; and now this income was cut to a
third or a quarter perhaps of its former dimensions. It seemed a pretty
hard thing for the major. It was fierce.

Perhaps my vision was clouded by my sympathy, but I thought Major Stone
aged visibly that summer. Maybe you have noticed how it is with men who
have gone along, hale and stanch, until they reach a certain age. When
they do start to break they break fast. He lost some of his flesh and
most of his rosiness. The skin on his face loosened a little and became
a tallowy yellowish-red, somewhat like a winter-killed apple.

His wardrobe suffered. One day one of his short little shoes was split
across the top just back of the toe cap, and the next morning it was
patched. Pretty soon the other shoe followed suit--first a crack in the
leather, then a clumsy patch over the crack. He wore his black slouch
hat until it was as green in spots as a gage plum; and late in August he
supplanted it with one of those cheap, varnished brown-straw hats that
cost about thirty-five cents apiece and look it.

His linen must have been one of his small extravagances. Those
majestically collared garments with the tremendous plaited bosoms and
the hand worked eyelets, where the three big flat gold studs went in,
never came ready made from any shop. They must have been built to his
measure and his order. Now he wore them until there were gaped places
between the plaits where the fine, fragile linen had ripped lengthwise,
and the collars were frayed down and broken across and caved in limply.
Finally he gave them up too, and one morning came to work wearing a
flimsy, sleazy, negligee shirt. I reckon you know the kind of shirt I
mean--always it fits badly, and the sleeves are always short and the
bosom is skimpy, and the color design is like bad wall-paper. After his
old full-bosomed grandeur this shirt, with a ten-cent collar buttoned on
to it and overriding the neckband, and gaping away in the front so that
the major's throat showed, seemed to typify more than anything else the
days upon which he had fallen. About this time I thought his voice took
on a changed tone permanently. It was still hollow, but it no longer
rang.

A good many men similarly placed would have taken to drink, but Major
Putnam Stone plainly was never born to be a drunkard and hard times
couldn't make one of him. With a sort of gentle, stupid persistence he
hung fast to his poor job, blundering through some way, struggling
constantly to learn the first easy tricks of the trade--the a, b, c's of
it--and never succeeding. He still lugged the classical poets and the
war into every story he tried to write, and day after day Devore
maintained his policy of eloquent brutal silence, refusing dumbly to
accept the major's clumsy placating attempts to get upon a better
footing with him. After that once he had never attempted to scold the
old man, but he would watch the major pottering round the city room,
and he would chew on his under lip and viciously lance his scalp with
his pencil point.

Well, aside from the major, Devore had his troubles that summer. That
was the summer of the biggest, bitterest campaign that the state had
seen, so old-timers said, since Breckinridge ran against Douglas and
both of them against Lincoln. If you have ever lived in the South,
probably you know something of political fights that will divide a state
into two armed camps, getting hotter and hotter until old slumbering
animosities come crawling out into the open, like poison snakes from
under a rock, and new lively ones hatch from the shell every hour or so
in a multiplying adder brood.

This was like that, only worse. Stripped of a lot of embroidery in the
shape of side issues and local complications, it resolved itself in a
last-ditch, last-stand, back-to-the-wall fight of the old régime of the
party against the new. On one side were the oldsters, bearers of famous
names some of them, who had learned politics as a trade and followed it
as a profession. Almost to a man they were professional office holders,
professional handshakers, professional silver tongues. And against them
were pitted a greedy, hungry group of younger men, less showy perhaps in
their persons, less picturesque in their manner of speech, but filled
each one with a great yearning for office and power; and they brought to
the aid of their vaulting ambitions a new and a faultlessly running
machine. From the outset the Evening Press had championed the cause of
the old crowd--the state-house ring as the enemy called it, when they
didn't call it something worse. We championed it not as a Northern or an
Eastern paper might, in a sedate, half-hearted way, but fiercely and
wholly and blindly--so blindly that we could see nothing in our own
faction but what was good and high and pure, nothing in the other but
what was smutted with evil intent. In daily double-leaded editorial
columns the chief preached a Holy War, and in the local pages we fought
the foe tooth and nail, biting and gouging and clawing, and they gouged
and clawed back at us like catamounts. That was where the hard work fell
upon Devore. He had to keep half his scanty staff working on politics
while the other half tried to cover the run of the news.

If I live to be a thousand years old I am not going to forget the state
convention that began at two o'clock that muggy September afternoon at
Lyric Hall up on Washington Street in the old part of the town. Once
upon a time, twenty or thirty years before, Lyric Hall had been the
biggest theater in town. The stage was still there and the boxes, and at
the back there were miles--they seemed miles anyway--of ancient,
crumbling, dauby scenery stacked up and smelling of age and decay. Booth
and Barrett had played there, and Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence.
Now, having fallen from its high estate, it served altered
purposes--conventions were held at Lyric Hall and cheap masquerade balls
and the like.

The press tables that had been provided were not, strictly speaking,
press tables at all. They were ordinary unpainted kitchen tables, ranged
two on one side and two on the other side at the front of the stage,
close up to the old gas-tipped footlights; and when we came in by the
back way that afternoon and found our appointed places I was struck by
certain sinister facts. Usually women flocked to a state convention. By
rights there should have been ladies in the boxes and in the balcony.
Now there wasn't a woman in sight anywhere, only men, row after row of
them. And there wasn't any cheering, or mighty little of it. When I tell
you the band played Dixie all the way through with only a stray whoop
now and then, you will understand better the temper of that crowd.

The situation, you see, was like this: One side had carried the mountain
end of the state; the other had carried the lowlands. One side had swept
the city; that meant a solid block of more than a hundred delegates. The
other side had won the small towns and the inland counties. So it stood
lowlander against highlander, city man against country man, and the
bitter waters of those ancient feuds have their wellsprings back a
thousand years in history, they tell me. One side led slenderly on
instructed vote. The other side had enough contesting delegations on
hand to upset the result if these contestants or any considerable
proportion of them should be recognized in the preliminary organization.

One side held a majority of the delegates who sat upon the floor; the
other side had packed the balcony and the aisles and the corners with
its armed partizans. One side was in the saddle and determined; the
other afoot and grimly desperate. And it was our side, as I shall call
it, meaning by that the state-house ring, that for the moment had the
whiphand; and it was the other side, led in person by State Senator
Stickney, god of the new machine, that stood ready to wade hip deep
through trouble to unhorse us.

Just below me, stretching across the hall from side to side in favored
front places, sat the city delegates--Stickney men all of them. And as
my eye swept the curved double row of faces it seemed to me I saw there
every man in town with a reputation as a gun-fighter or a knife-fighter
or a fist-fighter; and every one of them wore, pinning his delegate's
badge to his breast, a Stickney button that was round and bright red,
like a clot of blood on his shirt front.

They made a contrast, these half-moon lines of blocky men, to the lank,
slouch-hatted, low-collared country delegates--farmers, school
teachers, country doctors and country lawyers--who filled the seats
behind them and on beyond them. To the one group politics was a business
in which there was money to be made and excitement to be had; to the
other group it was a passion, veritably a sacredly high and serious
thing, which they took as they did their religion, with a solemn,
intolerant, Calvinistic sincerity. There was one thing, though, they all
shared in common. Whether a man's coat was of black alpaca or striped
flannel, the right-hand pocket sagged under the weight of unseen
ironmongery; or if the coat pocket didn't sag there was a bulging clump
back under the skirts on the right hip. For all the heat, hardly a man
there was in his shirtsleeves; and it would have been funny to watch how
carefully this man or that eased himself down into his seat, favoring
his flanks against the pressure of his hardware--that is to say, it
would have been funny if it all hadn't been so deadly earnest.

You could fairly smell trouble cooking in that hall. In any corner
almost there were the potential makings of half a dozen prominent
funerals. There was scarce a man, I judged, but nursed a private grudge
against some other man; and then besides these there was the big issue
itself, which had split the state apart lengthwise as a butcher's
cleaver splits a joint. Looking out over that convention, you could
read danger spelled out everywhere, in everything, as plain as print.

I was where I could read it with particular and uncomfortable
distinctness, too, for I had the second place at the table that had been
assigned to the Evening Press crew. There were four of us in
all--Devore, who had elected to be in direct charge of the detail; Ike
Webb, our star man, who was to handle the main story; I who was to write
the running account--and, fourthly and lastly, Major Putnam Stone. The
major hadn't been included in the assignment originally, but little
Pinky Gilfoil had turned up sick that morning, and the chief decided the
major should come along with us in Gilfoil's place. The chief had a
deluded notion that the major could circulate on a roving commission and
pick up spicy scraps of gossip. But here, for this once anyway, was a
convention wherein there were no spicy bits of gossip to be picked
up--curse words, yes, and cold-chilled fighting words, but not
gossip--everything focused and was summed up in the one main point:
Should the majority rule the machine or should the machine rule the
majority? So the major sat there at the far inside corner of the table
doing nothing at all--Devore saw to that--and was rather in the way. For
the time I forgot all about him.

The clash wasn't long in coming. It came on the first roll call of the
counties. Later we found out that the Stickney forces had been
counting, all along, on throwing the convention into a disorder of such
proportions as to force an adjournment, trusting then to their
acknowledged superiority at organization to win some strong strategic
advantage in the intervening gap of time. Failing there they meant to
raise a cry of unfairness and walk out. That then was their
program--first the riot and then, as a last resort, the bolt. But they
had men in their ranks, high-tempered men who, like so many skittish
colts, wouldn't stand without hitching. The signals crossed and the
thunder cracked across that calm-before-the-storm situation before there
was proper color of excuse either for attack or for retreat.

It came with scarcely any warning at all. Old Judge Marcellus Barbee,
the state chairman, called the convention to order, he standing at a
little table in the center of the stage. Although counted as our man,
the judge was of such uncertain fiber as to render it doubtful whose man
he really was. He was a kindly, wind-blown old gentleman, who very much
against his will had been drawn unawares, as it were, into the middle of
this fight, and he was bewildered by it all--and not only bewildered but
unhappy and frightened. His gavel seemed to quaver its raps out
timorously.

A pastor of one of the churches, a reverend man with a bleak, worried
face, prayed the Good Lord that peace and good-will and wise counsel
might rule these deliberations, and then fled away as though fearing the
mocking echoes of his own Amen. Summoning his skulking voice out of his
lower throat, Judge Barbee bade the secretary of the state committee
call the counties. The secretary got as far as Blanton, the third county
alphabetically down the list. And Blanton was one of the contested
counties. So up rose two rival chairmen of delegations, each waving
aloft his credentials, each demanding the right to cast the vote of free
and sovereign Blanton, each shaking a clenched fist at the other. Up got
the rival delegations from Blanton. Up got everybody. Judge Barbee, with
a gesture, recognized the rights of the anti-Stickney delegation. Jeers
and yells broke out, spattering forth like a skirmish fire, then almost
instantly were merged into a vast, ominous roar. Chairs began to
overturn. Not twenty feet from me the clattering of the chairman's
gavel, as he vainly beat for order, sounded like the clicking of a
telegraph instrument in a cyclone.

I saw the sergeant-at-arms--who was our man too--start down the middle
aisle and saw him trip over a hostile leg and stumble and fall, and I
saw a big mountaineer drop right on top of him, pinning him flat to the
floor. I saw the musicians inside the orchestra rail, almost under my
feet, scuttling away in two directions like a divided covey of gorgeous
blue and red birds. I saw the snare drummer, a little round German, put
his foot through the skin roof of his own drum. I saw Judge Barbee
overturn the white china pitcher of ice water that sweated on the table
at his elbow, and as the cold stream of its contents spattered down the
legs of his trousers saw him staring downward, contemplating his
drenched limbs as though that mattered greatly.

All in a flash I saw these things, and in that same flash I saw, taking
shape and impulse, a groundswell of men, all wearing red buttons,
rolling toward the stage, with the picked bad men of the city wards for
its crest; and out of the tail of my eye I saw too, stealing out from
the rear of the stage, a small, compact wedge of men wearing those same
red buttons; and the prow of the wedge was Fighting Dave Dancy, the
official bad man of a bad county, a man who packed a gun on each hip and
carried a dirk knife down the back of his neck; a man who would shoot
you at the drop of a hat and provide the hat himself--or at least so it
was said of him.

And I realized that the enemy, coming by concerted agreement from front
and rear at once, had nipped those of us who were upon the stage as
between two closing walls, and I was exceedingly unhappy to be there. I
ducked my head low, waiting for the shooting to begin. Afterward we
figured it out that nobody fired the first shot because everybody knew
the first shot would mean a massacre, where likely enough a man would
kill more friends than foes.

What happened now in the space of the next few seconds I saw with
particular clarity of vision, because it happened right alongside me and
in part right over me. I recall in especial Mink Satterlee. Mink
Satterlee was one of the worst men in town, and he ran the worst saloon
and prevailed mightily in ward politics. He had been sitting just below
our table in the front row of seats. He was a big-bodied man,
fat-necked, but this day he showed himself quick on his feet as any
toe-dancer. Leading his own forces by a length, he vaulted the orchestra
rail and lit lightly where a scared oboe player had been squatted a
moment before; Mink breasted the gutterlike edging of the footlights and
leaped upward, teetering a moment in space. One of his hands grabbed out
for a purchase and closed on the leg of our table and jerked it almost
from under us.

At that Devore either lost his head or else indignation made him
reckless. Still half sitting, he kicked out at the wriggling bulk at his
feet, and the toe of his shoe took Mink Satterlee in his chest. It was a
puny enough kick; it didn't even shake Mink Satterlee loose from where
he clung. He gave a bellow and heaved himself up on the stage and,
before any of us could move, grabbed Devore by the throat with his left
hand and jammed him back, face upward, on the table until I thought
Devore's spine would crack. His right hand shot into his coat pocket,
then, quick as a snake, came out again, showing the fat fist armed with
a set of murderously heavy brass knucks, and he bent his arm in a
crooked sickle-like stroke, aiming for Devore's left temple. I've always
been satisfied--and so has Devore--that if the blow had landed true his
skull would have caved in like a puff-ball. Only it never landed.

Above me a shadow of something hung for the hundredth part of a second,
something white flashed over me and by me, moving downward whizzingly;
something cracked on something; and Mink Satterlee breathed a gentle
little grunt right in Devore's face and then relaxed and slid down on
the floor, lying half under the table and half in the tin trough where
the stubby gas jets of the footlights stood up, with his legs protruding
stiffly out over its edge toward his friends. Subconsciously I noted
that his socks were not mates, one of them being blue and one black;
also that his scalp had a crescent-shaped split place in it just between
and above his half-closed eyes. All this, though, couldn't have taken
one-fifth of the time it has required for me to tell it. It couldn't
have taken more than a brace of seconds, but even so it was time enough
for other things to happen; and I looked back again toward the center of
the stage just as Fighting Dave Dancy seized startled old Judge Barbee
by the middle from behind and flung him aside so roughly that the old
man spun round twice, clutching at nothing, and then sat down very hard,
yards away from where he started spinning.

Dancy stooped for the gavel, which had fallen from the judge's hand,
being minded, I think, to run the convention awhile in the interest of
his own crowd. But his greedy fingers never closed over its black-walnut
handle, because, facing him, he saw just then what made him freeze solid
where he was.

Out from behind the Evening Press table and through a scattering huddle
of newspaper reporters, stepping on the balls of his feet as lightly as
a puss-cat, emerged Major Putnam Stone. His sleeves were turned back off
his wrists and his vest flared open. His head was thrust forward so that
the tuft of goatee on his chin stuck straight out ahead of him like a
little burgee in a fair breeze. His face was all a clear, bright,
glowing pink; and in his right hand he held one of the longest cavalry
revolvers that ever was made, I reckon. It had a square-butted ivory
handle, and as I saw that ivory handle I knew what the white thing was
that had flashed by me only a moment before to fell Mink Satterlee so
expeditiously.

Writing this, I've been trying to think of the one word that would best
describe how Major Putnam Stone looked to me as he advanced on Dave
Dancy. I think now that the proper word is competent, for indeed the old
major did look most competent--the tremendous efficiency he radiated
filled him out and made him seem sundry sizes larger than he really was.
A great emergency acts upon different men as chemical processes act upon
different metals. Some it melts like lead, so that their resolution
softens and runs away from them; and some it hardens to tempered steel.
There was the old major now. Always before this he had seemed to me to
be but pot metal and putty, and here, poised, alert, ready--a
wire-drawn, hard-hammered Damascus blade of a man--all changed and
transformed and glorified, he was coming down on Dave Dancy, finger on
trigger, thumb on hammer, eye on target, dominating the whole scene.

Ten feet from him he halted and there was nobody between them. Somehow
everybody else halted too, some even giving back a little. Over the edge
of the stage a ring of staring faces, like a high-water mark, showed
where the onward rushing swell of the Stickney city delegates had
checked itself. Seemingly to all at once came the realization that the
destinies of the fight had by the chances of the fight been entrusted to
these two men--to Dancy and the major--and that between them the issue
would be settled one way or the other.

Still at a half crouch, Dancy's right hand began to steal back under the
skirt of his long black coat. At that the major flung up the muzzle of
his weapon so that it pointed skyward, and he braced his left arm at his
side in the attitude you have seen in the pictures of dueling scenes of
olden times.

"I am waiting, sir, for you to draw," said the major quite briskly. "I
will shoot it out with you to see whether right or might shall control
this convention." And his heels clicked together like castanets.

Dancy's right hand kept stealing farther and farther back. And then you
could mark by the change of his skin and by the look out of his eyes how
his courage was clabbering to whey inside him, making his face a milky,
curdled white, the color of a poorly stirred emulsion, and then he
quit--he quit cold--his hand came out again from under his coat tails
and it was an empty hand and wide open. It was from that moment on that
throughout our state Fighting Dave Dancy ceased to be Fighting Dave and
became instead Yaller Dave.

"Then, sir," said the major, "as you do not seem to care to shoot it out
with me, man to man, you and your friends will kindly withdraw from this
stage and allow the business of this convention to proceed in an orderly
manner."

And as Dave Dancy started to go somebody laughed. In another second we
were all laughing and the danger was over. When an American crowd
begins laughing the danger is always over.

       *       *       *       *       *

Newspaper men down in that town still talk about the story that Ike Webb
wrote for the last edition of the Evening Press that afternoon. It was a
great story, as Ike Webb told it--how, still sitting on the floor, old
Judge Barbee got his wits back and by word of mouth commissioned the
major a special sergeant-at-arms; how the major privily sent men to
close and lock and hold the doors so that the Stickney people couldn't
get out to bolt, even if they had now been of a mind to do so; how the
convention, catching the spirit of the moment, elected the major its
temporary chairman, and how even after that, for quite a spell, until
some of his friends bethought to remove him, Mink Satterlee slept
peacefully under our press table with his mismated legs bridged across
the tin trough of the footlights.

       *       *       *       *       *

In rapid succession a number of unusual events occurred in the Evening
Press shop the next morning. To begin with, the chief came down early.
He had a few words in private with Devore and went upstairs. When the
major came at eight as usual, Devore was waiting for him at the door of
the city room; and as they went upstairs together, side by side, I saw
Devore's arm steal timidly out and rest a moment on the major's
shoulder.

The major was the first to descend. Walking unusually erect, even for
him, he bustled into the telephone booth. Jessie, our operator, told us
afterward that he called up a haberdasher, and in a voice that boomed
like a bell ordered fourteen of those plaited-bosom shirts of his, the
same to be made up and delivered as soon as possible. Then he stalked
out. And in a minute or two more Devore came down looking happy and
unhappy and embarrassed and exalted, all of them at once. On his way to
his desk he halted midway of the floor.

"Gentlemen," he said huskily--"fellows, I mean--I've got an announcement
to make, or rather two announcements. One is this: Right here before you
fellows who heard most of them I want to take back all the mean things I
ever said about him--about Major Stone--and I want to say I'm sorry for
all the mean things I've done to him. I've tried to beg his pardon, but
he wouldn't listen--he wouldn't let me beg his pardon--he--he said
everything was all right. That's one announcement. Here's the other: The
major is going to have a new job with this paper. He's going to leave
the city staff. Hereafter he's going to be upstairs in the room next to
the chief. He's gone out now to pick out his own desk. He's going to
write specials for the Sunday--specials about the war. And he's going
to do it on a decent salary too."

I judge by my own feelings that we all wanted to cheer, but didn't
because we thought it might sound theatrical and foolish. Anyhow, I know
that was how I felt. So there was a little awkward pause.

"What's his new title going to be?" asked somebody then.

"The title is appropriate--I suggested it myself," said Devore. "Major
Stone is going to be war editor."




V

SMOKE OF BATTLE


This befell during the period that Major Putnam Stone, at the age of
sixty-two, held a job as cub reporter on the Evening Press and worked at
it until his supply of fine linen and the patience of City Editor
Wilbert Devore frazzled out practically together. The episode to which I
would here direct attention came to pass in the middle of a particularly
hot week in the middle of that particularly hot and grubby summer, at a
time when the major was still wearing the last limp survivor of his once
adequate stock of frill-bosomed, roll-collared shirts, and when Devore's
scanty stock of endurance had already worn perilously near the snapping
point.

As may be recalled, Major Stone lived a life of comparative leisure from
the day he came out of the Confederate army, a seasoned veteran, until
the day he joined the staff of the Evening Press, a rank beginner; and
of these two employments one lay a matter of four decades back in a
half-forgotten past, while the other was of pressing moment, having to
do with Major Stone's enjoyment of his daily bread and other elements of
nutrition regarded as essential to the sustenance of human life. In his
military career he might have been more or less of a success. Certainly
he must have acquitted himself with some measure of personal credit; the
rank he had attained in the service and the standing he had subsequently
enjoyed among his comrades abundantly testified to that.

As a reporter he was absolutely a total loss; for, as already set forth
in some detail, he was hopelessly old-fashioned in thought and
speech--hopelessly old-fashioned and pedantic in his style of writing;
and since his mind mainly concerned itself with retrospections upon the
things that happened between April, 1861, and May, 1865, he very
naturally--and very frequently--forgot that to a newspaper reporter
every day is a new day and a new beginning, and that yesterday always is
or always should be ancient history, let alone the time-tarnished
yesterdays of forty-odd years ago. Indeed I doubt whether the major ever
comprehended that first commandment of the prentice reporter's
catechism.

Devore, himself no grand and glittering success as a newspaper man,
nevertheless had mighty little use for the pottering, ponderous old
major. Devore did not believe that bricks could be made without straw.
He considered it a waste of time and raw material to try. Through that
summer he kept the major on the payroll solely because the chief so
willed it. But, though he might not discharge the major, at least he
could bait him--and bait him Devore did--not, mind you, with words, but
with a silent, sublimated contempt more bitter and more biting than any
words.

So there, on the occasion in question, the situation stood--the major
hanging on tooth and nail to his small job, because he needed most
desperately the twelve dollars a week it brought him; the city editor
regarding him and all his manifold reportorial sins of omission,
commission and remission with a corrosive, speechless venom; and the
rest of us in the city room divided in our sympathies as between those
two. We sympathized with Devore for having to carry so woful an
incompetent upon his small and overworked crew; we sympathized with the
kindly, gentle, tiresome old major for his bungling, vain attempts to
creditably cover the small and piddling assignments that came his way.

I remember the date mighty well--the third of July. For three days now
the Democratic party, in national convention assembled at Chicago, had
been in the throes of labor. It had been expected--in fact had been as
good as promised--that by ten o'clock that evening the deadlock would
melt before a sweetly gushing freshet of party harmony and the head of
the presidential ticket would be named, wherefore in the Evening Press
shop a late shift had stayed on duty to get out an extra. Back in the
press-room the press was dressed. A front page form was made up and
ready, all but the space where the name of the nominee would be inserted
when the flash came; and in the alley outside a picked squad of
newsboys, renowned for speed of the leg and carrying quality of the
voice, awaited their wares, meanwhile skylarking under the eye of a
circulation manager.

Besides, there was no telling when an arrest might be made in the
Bullard murder case--that just by itself would provide ample excuse for
an extra. Two days had passed and two nights since the killing of
Attorney-at-Law Rodney G. Bullard, and still the killing, to quote a
favorite line of the local descriptive writers, "remained shrouded in
impenetrable mystery." If the police force, now busily engaged in
running clues into theories and theories into the ground, should by any
blind chance of fortune be lucky enough to ascertain the identity and
lay hands upon the person of Bullard's assassin, the whole town,
regardless of the hour, would rise up out of bed to read the news of it.
It was the biggest crime story that town had known for ten years; one of
the biggest crime stories it had ever known.

In the end our waiting all went for nothing. There were no developments
at Central Station or elsewhere in the Bullard case, and at Chicago
there was no nomination. At nine-thirty a bulletin came over our leased
wire saying that Tammany, having been beaten before the Resolutions
Committee, was still battling on the floor for its candidate; so that
finally the convention had adjourned until morning, and now the
delegates were streaming out of the hall, too tired to cheer and almost
too tired to jeer--all of which was sad news to us, because it meant
that, instead of taking a holiday on the Fourth, we must work until noon
at least, and very likely until later. Down that way the Fourth was not
observed with quite the firecrackery and skyrockety enthusiasm that
marked its celebration in most of the states to the north of us;
nevertheless, a day off was a day off and we were deeply disgusted at
the turn affairs had taken. It was almost enough to make a fellow feel
friendly toward the Republicans.

Following the tension there was a snapback; a feeling of languor and
disappointment possessed us. Devore slammed down the lid of his desk and
departed, cursing the luck as he went. Harty, the telegraph editor, and
Wilbur, the telegraph operator, rolled down their shirtsleeves and,
taking their coats over their arms, departed in company for Tony's place
up at the corner, where cool beers were to be found and electric fans,
and a business men's lunch served at all hours.

That left in the city room four or five men. Sprawled upon battered
chairs and draped over battered desks, they inhaled the smells of rancid
greases that floated in to them from the back of the building; they
coddled their disappointment to keep it warm and they talked shop. When
it comes to talking shop in season and out of season, neither stock
actors nor hospital surgeons are worse offenders than newspaper
reporters--especially young newspaper reporters, as all these men were
except only Major Stone.

It was inevitable that the talk should turn upon the Bullard murder, and
that the failure of the police force to find the killer or even to find
a likely suspect should be the hinge for its turning. For the moment Ike
Webb had the floor, expounding his own pet theories. Ike was a good
talker--a mighty good reporter too, let me tell you. Across the room
from Ike, tilted back in a chair against the wall, sat the major,
looking shabby and a bit forlorn. For a month now shabbiness had been
seizing on the major, spreading over him like a mildew. It started first
with his shoes, which turned brown and then cracked across the toes, it
extended to his hat, which sagged in its brim and became a moldy green
in its crown, and now it had touched his coat lapels, his waistcoat
front, his collar--his rolling Lord Byron collar--and his sleeve ends.

The major's harmlessly pompous manner was all gone from him that night.
Of late his self-assurance had seemed to be fraying and frazzling away,
along with those old-timey, full-bosomed shirts of which he had in times
gone by been so tremendously proud. It was as though the passing of the
one marked the passing of the other--symbolic as you might say.
Formerly, too, the major had also excelled mightily in miscellaneous
conversation, dominating it by sheer weight of tediousness. Now he sat
silent while these youngsters with their unthatched lips--born, most of
them, after he reached middle age--babbled the jargon of their trade. He
considered a little ravelly strip along one of his cuffs solicitously.

Ike Webb was saying this--that the biggest thing in the whole created
world was a big scoop--an exclusive, world-beating, bottled-up scoop of
a scoop. Nothing that could possibly come into a reporter's life was
one-half so big and so glorious and satisfying. He warmed to his theme:

"Gee! fellows, but wouldn't it be great to get a scoop on a thing like
this Bullard murder! Just suppose now that one of us, all by himself,
found the person who did the shooting and got a full confession from
him, whoever he was; and got the gun that it was done with--got the
whole thing--and then turned it loose all over the front page before
that big stiff of a Chief Gotlieb down at Central Station knew a thing
about it. Beating the police to it would be the best part of that job.
That's the way they do things in New York. In New York it's the
newspapers that do the real work on big murder mysteries, and the police
take their tips from them. Why, some of the best detectives in New York
are reporters. Look what they did in that Guldensuppe case! Look at what
they've done in half a dozen other big cases! Down here we just follow
along, like sheep, behind a bunch of fat-necked cops, taking their
leavings. Up there a paper turns a man loose, with an unlimited expense
account and all the time he needs, and tells him to go to it. That's the
right way too!"

By that the others knew Ike Webb was thinking of what Vogel had told
him. Vogel was a gifted but admittedly erratic genius from the
metropolis who had come upon us as angels sometimes do--unawares--two
weeks before, with cinders in his ears and the grime of a dusty
right-of-way upon his collar. He had worked for the sheet two weeks and
then, on a Saturday night, had borrowed what sums of small change he
could and under cover of friendly night had moved on to parts unknown,
leaving us dazzled by the careless, somewhat patronizing brilliance of
his manner, and stuffed to our earlobes with tales of the splendid,
adventurous, bohemian lives that newspaper men in New York lived.

"Well, I know this," put in little Pinky Gilfoil, who was red-headed,
red-freckled and red-tempered: "I'd give my right leg to pull off that
Bullard story as a scoop. No, not my right leg--a reporter needs all the
legs he's got; but I'd give my right arm and throw in an eye for good
measure. It would be the making of a reporter in this town--he'd have
'em all eating out of his hand after that." He licked his lips. Even the
bare thought of the thing tasted pretty good to Pinky.

"Now you're whistling!" chimed Ike Webb. "The fellow who single-handed
got that tale would have a job on this paper as long as he lived. The
chief would just naturally have to hand him more money. In New York,
though, he'd get a big cash bonus besides, an award they call it up
there. I'd go anywhere and do anything and take any kind of a chance to
land that story as an exclusive--yes, or any other big story."

To all this the major, it appeared, had been listening, for now he spoke
up in a pretty fair imitation of his old impressive manner:

"But, young gentlemen--pardon me--do you seriously think--any of
you--that any honorarium, however large, should or could be sufficient
temptation to induce one in your--in our profession--to give utterance
in print to a matter that he had learned, let us say, in confidence?
And suppose also that by printing it he brought suffering or disgrace
upon innocent parties. Unless one felt that he was serving the best ends
of society--unless one, in short, were actuated by the highest of human
motives--could one afford to do such a thing? And, under any
circumstances, could one violate a trust--could one violate the common
obligation of a gentleman's rules of deportment----"

"Major," broke in Ike Webb earnestly, "the way I look at it, a reporter
can't afford too many of the luxuries you're mentioning. His duty, it
seems to me, is to his paper first and the rest of the world afterward.
His paper ought to be his mother and his father and all his family. If
he gets a big scoop--no matter how he gets it or where he gets it--he
ought to be able to figure out some way of getting it into print. It's
not alone what he owes his paper--it's what he owes himself. Personally
I wouldn't be interested for a minute in bringing the person that killed
Rod Bullard to justice--that's not the point. He was a pretty shady
person--Rod Bullard. By all accounts he got what was coming to him. It's
the story itself that I'd want."

"Say, listen here, major," put in Pinky Gilfoil, suddenly possessed of a
strengthening argument; "I reckon back yonder in the Civil War, when you
all got the smoke of battle in your noses, you didn't stop to consider
that you were about to make a large crop of widows and orphans and
cause suffering to a whole slue of innocent people that'd never done you
any harm! You didn't stop then, did you? I'll bet you didn't--you just
sailed in! It was your duty--the right thing to do--and you just went
and did it. 'War is hell!' Sherman said. Well, so is newspaper work
hell--in a way. And smelling out a big story ought to be the same to a
reporter that the smoke of battle is to a soldier. That's right--I'll
leave it to any fellow here if that ain't right!" he wound up,
forgetting in his enthusiasm to be grammatical.

It was an unfortunate simile to be making and Pinky should have known
better, for at Pinky's last words the old major's mild eye widened and,
expanding himself, he brought his chair legs down to the floor with a
thump.

"Ah, yes!" he said, and his voice took on still more of its old ringing
quality. "Speaking of battles, I am just reminded, young gentlemen, that
tomorrow is the anniversary of the fall of Vicksburg. Though
Northern-born, General Pemberton was a gallant officer--none of our own
Southern leaders was more gallant--but it has always seemed to me that
his defense of Vicksburg was marked by a series of the most lamentable
and disastrous mistakes. If you care to listen, I will explain further."
And he squared himself forward, with one short, plump hand raised, ready
to tick off his points against Pemberton upon his fingers.

By experience dearly bought at the expense of our ear-drums, the members
of the Evening Press staff knew what that meant; for as you already
know, the major's conversational specialty was the Civil War--it and its
campaigns. Describing it, he made even war a commonplace and a tiresome
topic. In his hands an account of the hardest fought battle became a
tremendously uninteresting thing. He weeded out all the thrills and in
their places planted hedges of dusty, deadly dry statistics. When the
major started on the war it was time to be going. One by one the
youngsters got up and slipped out. Presently the major, booming away
like a bell buoy, became aware that his audience had dwindled. Only Ike
Webb remained, and Ike was getting upon his feet and reaching for the
peg where his coat swung.

"I'm sorry to leave you right in the middle of your story, major; but,
honestly, I've got to be going," apologized Ike. "Good night, and don't
forget this, major"--Ike had halted at the door--"when a big story comes
your way freeze to it with both hands and slam it across the plate as a
scoop. Do that and you can give 'em all the laugh. Good night again--see
you in the morning, major!"

He grinned to himself as he turned away. The major was a mighty decent,
tender-hearted little old scout, a gentleman by birth and breeding,
even if he was down and out and dog-poor. It was a shame that Devore
kept him skittering round on little picayunish jobs--running errands,
that was really what it was. Still, at that, the old major was no
reporter and never would be. He wouldn't know a big story if he ran into
it on the big road--it would have to burst right in his face before he
recognized it. And even then the chances were that he wouldn't know what
to do with it. It was enough to make a fellow grin.

Deserted by the last of his youthful compatriots--which was what he
himself generally called them--the major lingered a moment in heavy
thought. He glanced about the cluttered city room, now suddenly grown
large and empty. This was the theater where his own little drama of
unfitness and failure and private mortification had been staged and
acted. It had run nearly a month now, and a month is a long run for a
small tragedy in a newspaper office or anywhere else. He shook his head.
He shook it as though he were trying to shake it clear of a job lot of
old-fashioned, antiquated ideals--as though he were trying to make room
for newer, more useful, more modern conceptions. Then he settled his
aged and infirm slouch hat more firmly upon his round-domed skull,
straightened his shoulders and stumped out.

At the second turning up the street from the office an observant
onlooker might have noticed a small, an almost imperceptible change in
the old man's bearing. There was not a sneaky bone in the major's
body--he walked as he thought and as he talked, in straight lines; but
before he turned the corner he glanced up and down the empty sidewalk in
a quick, furtive fashion, and after he had swung into the side street a
trifle of the steam seemed gone from his stiff-spined, hard-heeled gait.
It ceased to be a strut; it became a plod.

The street he had now entered was a badly lighted street, with long
stretches of murkiness between small patches of gas-lamped brilliance.
By day the houses that walled it would have showed themselves as shabby
and gone to seed--the sort of houses that second cousins move into after
first families have moved out. Two-thirds of the way along the block the
major turned in at a sagged gate. He traversed a short walk of seamed
and decrepit flagging, where tufts of rank grass sprouted between the
fractures in the limestone slabs, and mounted the front porch of a house
that had cheap boarding house written all over it.

When the major opened the front door the tepid smell that gushed out to
greet him was the smell of a cheap boarding house too, if you know what
I mean--a spilt-kerosene, boiled-cabbage, dust-in-the-corners smell.
Once upon a time the oilcloth upon the floor of the entry way had
exhibited a vivid and violent pattern of green octagons upon a red and
yellow background, but that had been in some far distant day of its
youth and freshness. Now it was worn to a scaly, crumbly color of
nothing at all, and it was frayed into fringes at the door and in places
scuffed clear through, so that the knot-holes of the naked planking
showed like staring eyes.

Standing just inside the hall, the major glanced down first at the floor
and then up to where in a pendent nub a pinprick of light like a captive
lightning-bug flickered up and down feebly as the air pumped through the
pipe; and out of his chest the major fetched a small sigh. It was a sigh
of resignation, but it had loneliness in it too. Well, it was a
come-down, after all these peaceful and congenial years spent among the
marble-columned, red-plushed glories of the old Gaunt House, to be
living in this place.

The major had been here now almost a month. Very quietly, almost
secretly, he had come hither when he found that by no amount of
stretching could his pay as a reporter on the Evening Press be made to
cover the cost of living as he had been accustomed to live prior to that
disastrous day when the major waked up in the morning to find that all
his inherited investments had vanished over night--and, vanishing so,
had taken with them the small but sufficient income that had always been
ample for his needs.

In that month the major had seen but one or two of his fellow lodgers,
slouching forms that passed him by in the gloom of the half-lighted
hallways or on the creaky stairs. His landlady he saw but once a
week--on Saturday, which was settlement day. She was a forlorn, gray
creature, half blind, and she felt her way about gropingly. By the droop
in her spine and by the corners of her lips, permanently puckered from
holding pins in her mouth, a close observer would have guessed that she
had been a seamstress before her eyes gave out on her and she took to
keeping lodgers. Of the character of the establishment the innocent old
major knew nothing; he knew that it was cheap and that it was on a quiet
by-street, and for his purposes that was sufficient.

He heaved another small sigh and passed slowly up the worn steps of the
stairwell until he came to the top of the house. His room was on the
attic floor, the middle room of the three that lined the bare hall on
one side. The door-knob was broken off; only its iron center remained.
His fingers slipped as he fumbled for a purchase upon the metal core;
but finally, after two attempts, he gripped it and it turned, admitting
him into the darkness of a stuffy interior. The major made haste to open
the one small window before he lit the single gas jet. Its guttery flare
exposed a bed, with a thin mattress and a skimpy cover, shoved close up
under the sloping wall; a sprained chair on its last legs; an old
horsehide trunk; a shaky washstand of cheap yellow pine, garnished forth
with an ewer and a basin; a limp, frayed towel; and a minute segment of
pale pink soap.

Major Stone was in the act of removing his coat when he became aware of
a certain sound, occurring at quick intervals. In the posture of a plump
and mature robin he cocked his head on one side to listen; and now he
remembered that he had heard the same sound the night before, and the
night before that. These times, though, he had heard it intermittently
and dimly, as he tossed about half awake and half asleep, trying to
accommodate his elderly bones to the irregularities of his hot and
uncomfortable bed. But now he heard it more plainly, and at once he
recognized it for what it was--the sound of a woman crying; a wrenching
succession of deep, racking gulps, and in between them little moaning,
panting breaths, as of utter exhaustion--a sound such as might be
distilled from the very dregs of a grief too great to be borne.

He looked about him, his eyes and ears searching for further explanation
of this. He had it. There was a door set in the cross-wall of his
room--a door bolted and nailed up. It had a transom over it and against
the dirty glass of the transom a light was reflected, and through the
door and the transom the sound came. The person in trouble, whoever it
might be, was in that next room--and that person was a woman and she was
in dire distress. There was a compelling note in her sobbing.

Undecided, Major Stone stood a minute rubbing his nose pensively with a
small forefinger; then the resolution to act fastened upon him. He
slipped his coat back on, smoothed down his thin mane of reddish gray
hair with his hands, stepped out into the hall and rapped delicately
with a knuckled finger upon the door of the next room. There was no
answer, so he rapped a little harder; and at that a sob checked itself
and broke off chokingly in the throat that uttered it. From within a
voice came. It was a shaken, tear-drained voice--flat and uncultivated.

"Who's there?" The major cleared his throat. "Is it a woman--or a man?"
demanded the unseen speaker without waiting for an answer to the first
question.

"It is a gentleman," began the major--"a gentleman who----"

"Come on in!" she bade him--"the door ain't latched."

And at that the major turned the knob and looked into a room that was
practically a counterpart of his own, except that, instead of a trunk, a
cheap imitation-leather suitcase stood upright on the floor, its sides
bulging and strained from over-packing. Upon the bed, fully dressed,
was stretched a woman--or, rather, a girl. Her head was just rising from
the crumpled pillow and her eyes, red-rimmed and widely distended,
stared full into his.

What she saw, as she sat up, was a short, elderly man with a solicitous,
gentle face; the coat sleeves were turned back off his wrists and his
linen shirt jutted out between the unfastened upper buttons and
buttonholes of his waistcoat. What the major saw was a girl of perhaps
twenty or maybe twenty-two--in her present state it was hard to
guess--with hunched-in shoulders and dyed, stringy hair falling in a
streaky disarray down over her face like unraveled hemp.

It was her face that told her story. Upon the drawn cheeks and the
drooped, woful lips there was no dabbing of cosmetics now; the
professional smile, painted, pitiable and betraying, was lacking from
the characterless mouth, yet the major--sweet-minded, clean-living old
man though he was--knew at a glance what manner of woman he had found
here in this lodging house. It was the face of a woman who never
intentionally does any evil and yet rarely gets a chance to do any
good--a weak, indecisive, commonplace face; and every line in it was a
line of least resistance.

That then was what these two saw in each other as they stared a moment
across the intervening space. It was the girl who took the initiative.

"Are you one of the police?" Then instantly on the heels of the query:
"No; I know better'n that--you ain't no police!"

Her voice was unmusical, vulgar and husky from much weeping. Magically,
though, she had checked her sobbing to an occasional hard gulp that
clicked down in her throat.

"No, ma'am," said Major Stone, with a grave and respectful courtesy, "I
am not connected with the police department. I am a professional
man--associated at this time with the practice of journalism. I have the
apartment or chamber adjoining yours and, accidentally overhearing a
member of the opposite sex in seeming distress, I took it upon myself to
offer any assistance that might lie within my power. If I am intruding I
will withdraw."

"No," she said; "it ain't no intrusion. I wisht, please, sir, you'd come
in jest a minute anyway. I feel like I jest got to talk to somebody a
minute. I'm sorry, though, if I disturbed you by my cryin'--but I jest
couldn't help it. Last night and the night before--that was the first
night I come here--I cried all night purty near; but I kept my head in
the bedclothes. But tonight, after it got dark up here and me layin'
here all alone, I felt as if I couldn't stand it no longer. Honest, I
like to died! Right this minute I'm almost plum' distracted."

The major advanced a step.

"I assure you I deeply regret to learn of your unhappiness," he said.
"If you desire it I will be only too glad to summon our worthy landlady,
Miss--Miss----" he paused.

"Miss La Mode," she said, divining--"Blanche La Mode--that's my name. I
come from Indianapolis, Indiana. But please, mister, don't call that
there woman. I don't want to see her. For a while I didn't think I
wanted to see nobody, and yit I've known all along, from the very first,
that sooner or later I'd jest naturally have to talk to somebody. I knew
I'd jest have to!" she repeated with a kind of weak intensity. "And it
might jest as well be you as anybody, I guess."

She sat up on the side of the bed, dangling her feet, and subconsciously
the major took in fuller details of her attire--the cheap white slippers
with rickety, worn-down high heels; the sleazy stockings; the
over-decorated skirt of shabby blue cloth; the soiled and rumpled waist
of coarse lace, gaping away from the scrawny neck, where the fastenings
had pulled awry. Looped about her throat and dangling down on her flat
breast, where they heaved up and down with her breathing, was a double
string of pearls that would have been worth ten thousand dollars had
they been genuine pearls. A hand which was big-knuckled and thin held a
small, moist wad of handkerchief. About her there was something
unmistakably bucolic, and yet she was town-branded, too, flesh and
soul. Major Stone bowed with the ceremonious detail that was a part of
him.

"My name, ma'am, is Stone--Major Putnam Stone, at your service," he told
her.

"Yes, sir," she said, seeming not to catch either his name or his title.
"Well, mister, I'm goin' to tell you something that'll maybe surprise
you. I ain't goin' to ast you not to tell anybody, 'cause I guess you
will anyhow, sooner or later; and it don't make much difference if you
do. But seems's if I can't hold in no longer. I guess maybe I'll feel
easier in my own mind when I git it all told. Shet that door--jest close
it--the lock is broke--and set down in that chair, please, sir."

The major closed the latchless door and took the one tottery chair. The
girl remained where she was, on the side of her bed, her slippered feet
dangling, her eyes fixed on a spot where there was a three-cornered
break in the dirty-gray plastering.

"You know about Rodney G. Bullard, the lawyer, don't you?--about him
bein' found shot day before yistiddy evenin' in the mouth of that
alley?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "Though I was not personally acquainted with the
man himself, I am familiar with the circumstances you mention."

"Well," she said, with a sort of jerk behind each word, "it was me that
done it!"

"I beg your pardon," he said, half doubting whether he had heard
aright, "but what was it you said you did?"

"Shot him!" she answered--"I was the one that shot him--with this thing
here." She reached one hand under the pillow and drew out a
short-barreled, stubby revolver and extended it to him. Mechanically he
took it, and thereafter for a space he held it in his hands. The girl
went straight on, pouring out her sentences with a driven, desperate
eagerness.

"I didn't mean to do it, though--God knows I didn't mean to do it! He
treated me mighty sorry--it was lowdown and mean all the way through,
the way he done me--but I didn't mean him no real harm. I was only
aimin' to skeer him into doin' the right thing by me. It was
accidental-like--it really was, mister! In all my life I ain't never
intentionally done nobody any harm. And yit it seems like somebody's
forever and a day imposin' on me!" She quavered with the puny passion of
her protest against the world that had bruised and beaten her as with
rods.

Shocked, stunned, the major sat in a daze, making little clucking sounds
in his throat. For once in his conversational life he couldn't think of
the right words to say. He fumbled the short pistol in his hands.

[Illustration: "I WAS THE ONE THAT SHOT HIM--WITH THIS THING HERE."
--_Page 164._]

"I'm goin' to tell you the whole story, jest like it was," she went on
in her flat drone; and the words she spoke seemed to come to him from a
long way off. "That there Rodney Bullard he tricked me somethin'
shameful. He come to the town where I was livin' to make a speech in a
political race, and we got acquainted and he made up to me. I was
workin' in a hotel there--one of the dinin' room help. That was two
years ago this comin' September. Well, the next day, when he left, he
got me to come 'long with him. He said he'd look after me. I liked him
some then and he talked mighty big about what he was goin' to do for me;
so I come with him. He told me that I could be his----" She hesitated.

"His amanuensis, perhaps," suggested the old man.

"Which?" she said. "No; it wasn't that way--he didn't say nothin' about
marryin' me and I didn't expect him to. He told me that I should be his
girl--that was all; but he didn't keep his word--no, sir; right from the
very first he broke his word to me! It wasn't more'n a month after I got
here before he quit comin' to see me at all. Well, after that I stayed a
spell longer at the house where I was livin' and then I went to another
house--Vic Magner's. You know who she is, I reckin?"

The major half nodded, half shook his head.

"By reputation only I know the person in question," he answered a bit
stiffly.

"Well," she went on, "there ain't so much more to tell. I've been sick
lately--I had a right hard spell. I ain't got my strength all back yit.
I was laid up three weeks, and last Monday, when I was up and jest
barely able to crawl round, Vic Magner, she come to me and told me that
I'd have to git out unless I could git somebody to stand good for my
board. I owed her for three weeks already and I didn't have but nine
dollars to my name. I offered her that, but she said she wanted it all
or nothin'. I think she wanted to git shet of me anyway. Mister, I was
mighty weak and discouraged--I was so! I didn't know what to do.

"I hadn't seen Rod Bullard for goin' on more than a year, but he was the
only one I could think of; so I slipped out of the house and went acrost
the street to a grocery store where there was a pay station, and I
called him up on the telephone and ast him to help me out a little. It
wasn't no more than right that he should, was it, seein' as he was
responsible for my comin' here? Besides, if it hadn't been for him in
the first place I wouldn't never 'a' got into all that trouble. I talked
with him over the telephone at his office and he said he'd do somethin'
for me. He said he'd send me some money that evenin' or else he'd bring
it round himself. But he didn't do neither one. And Vic Magner, she kept
on doggin' after me for her board money.

"I telephoned him again the next mornin'; but before I could say more'n
two words to him he got mad and told me to quit botherin' him, and he
rung off. That was day before yistiddy. When I got back to the house Vic
Magner come to me, and I couldn't give her no satisfaction. So about six
o'clock in the evenin' she made me pack up and git out. I didn't have
nowheres to go and only eight dollars and ninety cents left--I'd spent a
dime telephoning so, before I got out I took and wrote Rod Bullard a
note, and when I got outside I give a little nigger boy fifteen cents to
take it to him. I told him in the note I was out in the street, without
nowheres to go, and that if he didn't meet me that night and do
somethin' for me I'd jest have to come to his office. I said for him to
meet me at eight o'clock at the mouth of Grayson Street Alley. That give
me two hours to wait. I walked round and round, packin' my baggage.

"Then I come by a pawnstore and seen a lot of pistols in the window, and
I went in and I bought one for two dollars and a half. The pawnstore man
he throwed in the shells. But I wasn't aimin' to hurt Rod Bullard--jest
to skeer him. I was thinkin' some of killin' myself too. Then I walked
round some more till I was plum' wore out.

"When eight o'clock come I was waitin' where I said, and purty soon he
come along. As soon as he saw me standin' there in the shadder he bulged
up to me. He was mighty mad. He called me out of my name and said I
didn't have no claims on him--a whole lot more like that--and said he
didn't purpose to be bothered with me phonin' him and writin' him notes
and callin' on him for money. I said somethin' back, and then he made
like he was goin' to hit me with his fist. I'd had that pistol in my
hand all the time, holdin' it behind my skirt. And I pulled it and I
pointed it like I was goin' to shoot--jest to skeer him, though, and
make him do the right thing by me. I jest simply pointed it at
him--that's all. I didn't have no idea it would go off without you
pulled the hammer back first!

"Then it happened! It went off right in my hand. And he said to me: 'Now
you've done it!'--jest like that. He walked away from me about ten feet,
and started to lean up against a tree, and then he fell down right smack
on his face. And I grabbed up my baggage and run away. I wasn't sorry
about him. I ain't been sorry about him a minute since--ain't that
funny? But I was awful skeered!"

Rocking her body back and forth from the hips, she put her hands up to
her face. Major Stone stared at her, his mind in a twisting eddy of
confused thoughts. Perhaps it was the clearest possible betrayal of his
utter unfitness for his new vocation in life that not until that very
moment when the girl had halted her narrative did it come to him--and it
came then with a sudden jolt--that here he had one of those monumental
news stories for which young Gilfoil or young Webb would be willing to
barter his right arm and throw in an eye for good measure. It was a
scoop, as those young fellows had called it--an exclusive confession of
a big crime--a thing that would mean much to any paper and to any
reporter who brought it to his paper. It would transform a failure into
a conspicuous success. It would put more money into a pay envelope. And
he had it all! Sheer luck had brought it to him and flung it into his
lap.

Nor was he under any actual pledge of secrecy. This girl had told it to
him freely, of her own volition. It was not in the nature of her to keep
her secret. She had told it to him, a stranger; she would tell it to
other strangers--or else somebody would betray her. And surely this
sickly, slack-twisted little wanton would be better off inside the
strong arm of the law than outside it? No jury of Southern men would
convict her of murder--the thought was incredible. She would be kindly
dealt with. In one illuminating flash the major divined that these would
have been the inevitable conclusions of any one of those ambitious young
men at the office. He bent forward.

"What did you do then, ma'am?" he asked.

"I didn't know what to do," she said, dropping her hands into her lap.
"I run till I couldn't run no more, and then I walked and walked and
walked. I reckin I must 'a' walked ten miles. And then, when I was jest
about to drop, I come past this house. There was a light burnin' on the
porch and I could make out to read the sign on the door, and it said
Lodgers Taken.

"So I walked in and rung the bell, and when the woman came I said I'd
jest got here from the country and wanted a room. She charged me two
dollars a week, in advance; and I paid her two dollars down--and she
showed me the way up here.

"I've been here ever since, except twice when I slipped out to buy me
somethin' to eat at a grocery store and to git some newspapers. At first
I figgered the police would be a-comin' after me; but they didn't--there
wasn't nobody at all seen the shootin', I reckin. And I was skeered Vic
Magner might tell on me; but I guess she didn't want to run no risk of
gittin' in trouble herself--that Captain Brennan, of the Second
Precinct, he's been threatenin' to run her out of town the first good
chance he got. And there wasn't none of the other girls there that
knowed I ever knew Rod Bullard. So, you see, I ain't been arrested yit.

"Layin' here yistiddy all day, with nothin' to do but think and cry, I
made up my mind I'd kill myself. I tried to do it. I took that there
pistol out and I put it up to my head and I said to myself that all I
had to do was jest to pull on that trigger thing and it wouldn't hurt
me but a secont--and maybe not that long. But I couldn't do it,
mister--I jest couldn't do it at all. It seemed like I wanted to die,
and yit I wanted to live too. All my life I've been jest that way--first
thinkin' about doin' one thing and then another, and hardly ever doin'
either one of 'em.

"Here on this bed tonight I got to thinkin' if I could jest tell
somebody about it that maybe after that I'd feel easier in my mind. And
right that very minute you come and knocked on the door, and I knowed it
was a sign--I knowed you was the one for me to tell it to. And so I've
done it, and already I think I feel a little bit easier in my mind. And
so that's all, mister. But I wisht please you'd take that pistol away
with you when you go--I don't never want to see it again as long as I
live."

She paused, huddling herself in a heap upon the bed. The major's short
arm made a gesture toward the cheap suitcase.

"I observe," he said, "that your portmanteau is packed as if for a
journey. Were you thinking of leaving, may I ask?"

"My which?" she said. "Oh, you mean my baggage! Yes; I ain't never
unpacked it since I come here. I was aimin' to go back to my home--I got
a stepsister livin' there and she might take me in--only after payin'
for this room I ain't got quite enough money to take me there; and now I
don't know as I want to go, either. If I kin git my strength back I
might stay on here--I kind of like city life. Or I might go up to
Cincinnati. A girl that I used to know here is livin' there now and she
wrote to me a couple of times, and I know her address--it was backed on
the envelope. Still, I ain't sure--my plans ain't all made yit.
Sometimes I think I'll give myself up, but most generally I think I
won't. I've got to do somethin' purty soon though, one way or another,
because I ain't got but a little over three dollars left out of what I
had."

She sank her head in the pillow wearily, with her face turned away from
him. The major stood up. Into his side coat pocket he slipped the
revolver that had snuffed out the late and unsavory Rodney Bullard's
light of life, and from his trousers pocket he slowly drew forth his
supply of ready money. He had three silver dollars, one quarter, one
dime, and a nickel--three-forty in all. Contemplating the disks of metal
in the palm of his hand, he did a quick sum in mental arithmetic. This
was Thursday night now. Saturday afternoon at two he would draw a pay
envelope containing twelve dollars. Meantime he must eat. Well, if he
stinted himself closely a dollar might be stretched to bridge the gap
until Saturday. The major had learned a good deal about the noble art of
stinting these last few weeks.

On the coverlet alongside the girl he softly piled two of the silver
dollars and the forty cents in change. Then, after a momentary
hesitation, he put down the third silver dollar, gathered up the forty
cents, slid it gently into his pocket and started for the door, the
loose planks creaking under his tread. At the threshold he halted.

"Good night, Miss La Mode," he said. "I trust your night's repose may be
restful and refreshing to you, ma'am."

She lifted her face from the pillow and spoke, without turning to look
at him.

"Mister," she said, "I've told you the whole truth about that thing and
I ain't goin' to lie to you about anythin' else. I didn't come from
Indianapolis, Indiana, like I told you. My home is in Swainboro', this
state--a little town. You might know where it is? And my real name ain't
La Mode, neither. I taken it out of a book--the La Mode part--and I
always did think Blanche was an awful sweet name for a girl. But my real
name is Gussie Stammer. Good night, mister. I'm much obliged to you fer
listenin', and I ain't goin' to disturb you no more with my cryin' if I
kin help it."

As the major gently closed her door behind him he heard her give a long,
sleepy sigh, like a tired child. Back in his own room he glanced about
him, meanwhile feeling himself over for writing material. He found in
his pockets a pencil and a couple of old letters, whereas he knew he
needed a big sheaf of copy paper for the story he had to write. Anyway,
there was no place here to do an extended piece of writing--no desk and
no comfortable chair. The office would be a much better place.

The office was only a matter of two or three blocks away. The negro
watchman would be there; he stayed on duty all night. Using the corner
of his washstand for a desk, the major set down his notes--names,
places, details, dates--upon the backs of his two letters. This done, he
settled his ancient hat on his head, picked up his cane, and in another
minute was tiptoeing down the stairs and out the front doorway. Once
outside, his tread took on the brisk emphasis of one set upon an
important task and in a hurry to do it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ten minutes later Major Stone sat at his desk in the empty city room of
the Evening Press. Except for Henry, the old black night watchman, there
was no other person in the building anywhere. Just over his head an
incandescent bulb blazed, bringing out in strong relief the major's
intent old face, mullioned with crisscross lines. A cedar pencil, newly
sharpened, was in his fingers; under his right hand was a block of clean
copy paper. His notes lay in front of him, the little stubnosed pistol
serving as a paper weight to hold the two wrinkled envelopes flat.
Through the loop of the trigger guard the words, Gussie Stammer, alias
Blanche La Mode, showed. Everything was ready.

The major hesitated, though. He readjusted his paper and fidgeted his
pencil. He scratched his head and pulled at the little tuft of goatee
under his lower lip. Like many a more experienced author, Major Stone
was having trouble getting under way. He had his own ideas about a
fitting introductory paragraph. Coming along, he had thought up a full
sonorous one, with a biblical injunction touching on the wages of sin
embodied in it; but, on the other hand, there was to be borne in mind
the daily-dinned injunction of Devore that every important news item
should begin with a sentence in which the whole story was summed up.
Finally Major Stone made a beginning. He covered nearly a sheet of
paper.

Then, becoming suddenly dissatisfied with it, he tore up what he had
written and started all over again, only to repeat the same operation.
Two salty drops rolled down his face and fell upon the paper, and
instantly little twin blistered blobs like tearmarks appeared on its
clear surface. They were not tears, though--they were drops of sweat
wrung from the major's brow by the pains of creation. Again he poised
his pencil and again he halted it in the air--he needed inspiration. His
gaze rested absently upon the pistol; absently he picked it up and began
examining it.

It was a cheap, rusted, second-hand thing, poorly made, but no doubt
deadly enough at close range. He unbreeched it and spun the cylinder
with his thumb and spilled the contents into his palm--four loaded
shells, suety and slick with grease, and one that had been recently
fired; and it was discolored and flattened a trifle. Each of the four
loaded shells had a small cap like a little round staring eye set in the
exact center of its flanged butt-end, but the eye of the fifth shell was
punched in. He turned the empty weapon in his hands, steadying its
mechanism, and as he did so a scent of burnt powder, stale and dead,
came to him out of the fouled muzzle. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed
at it.

It had been many a long day since the major had had that smell in his
nostrils--many a long, long day. But there had been a time when it was
familiar enough to him. Even now it brought the clamoring memories of
that far distant time back to him, fresh and vivid. It stimulated his
imagination, quickening his mind with big thoughts. It recalled those
four years when he had fought for a principle, and had kept on fighting
even when the substance of the thing he fought for was gone and there
remained but the empty husks. It recalled those last few hopeless months
when the forlorn hope had become indeed a lost cause; when the forty
cents he now carried in his pocket would have seemed a fortune; when the
sorry house where he lodged now would have seemed a palace; when,
without prospect or hope of reward or victory, he had piled risk upon
risk, had piled sacrifice upon sacrifice, and through it all had borne
it all without whimper or complaint--fighting the good fight like a
soldier, keeping the faith like a gentleman. It was the Smoke of Battle!

The major had his inspiration now, right enough. He knew just what he
would write; knew just how he would write it. He laid down the pistol
and the shells and squared off and straightway began writing. For two
hours nearly he wrote away steadily, rarely changing or erasing a word,
stopping only to repoint the lead of his pencil. Methodically as a
machine he covered sheet after sheet with his fine old-fashioned script.
Never for one instant did he hesitate or falter.

Just before one o'clock he finished. The completed manuscript, each page
of the twenty-odd pages properly numbered, lay in a neat pile before
him. He scooped up the pistol shells and stored them in an inner breast
pocket of his coat; then he opened a drawer, slipped the emptied
revolver well back under a riffle of papers and clippings and closed the
drawer and locked it. His notes he tore into squares, and those squares
into smaller squares--and so on until the fragments would tear no finer,
but fluttered out between his fingers in a small white shower like stage
snow.

He shoved his completed narrative back under the roll-top of Devore's
desk, where the city editor would see it the very first thing when he
came to work; and as he straightened up with a little grunt of
satisfaction and stretched his arms out the last of his fine-linen
shirts, with a rending sound, ripped down the plaited front, from
collarband almost to waistline.

He eyed the ruined bosom with a regretful stare, plucking at the gaping
tear with his graphite-dusted fingers and shaking his head mournfully.
Yet as he stepped out into the street, bound for his lodgings, he jarred
his heels down upon the sidewalk with the brisk, snapping gait of a man
who has tackled a hard job and has done it well, and is satisfied with
the way he has done it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Under a large black head the major's story was printed in the Fourth of
July edition of the Evening Press. It ran full two columns and lapped
over into a third column. It was an exhaustive--and exhausting--account
of the Fall of Vicksburg.




VI

THE EXIT OF ANSE DUGMORE


When a Kentucky mountaineer goes to the penitentiary the chances are
that he gets sore eyes from the white walls that enclose him, or quick
consumption from the thick air that he breathes. It was entirely in
accordance with the run of his luck that Anse Dugmore should get them
both, the sore eyes first and then the consumption.

There is seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the
mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the
delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction
has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted
accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally
deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive
kind of way, with absolutely no regard for costume or setting. Rarely is
he a fine figure of a man.

Take Anse Dugmore now. He had a short-waisted, thin body and abnormally
long, thin legs, like the shadow a man casts at sunup. He didn't have
that steel-gray eye of which we so often read. His eyes weren't of any
particular color, and he had a straggly mustache of sandy red and no
chin worth mentioning; but he could shoot off a squirrel's head, or a
man's, at the distance of a considerable number of yards.

Until he was past thirty he played merely an incidental part in the
tribal war that had raged up and down Yellow Banks Creek and its
principal tributary, the Pigeon Roost, since long before the Big War. He
was getting out timber to be floated down the river on the spring rise
when word came to him of an ambuscade that made him the head of his
immediate clan and the upholder of his family's honor.

"Yore paw an' yore two brothers was laywaid this mawnin' comin' 'long
Yaller Banks togither," was the message brought by a breathless bearer
of news. "The wimmenfolks air totin' 'em home now. Talt, he ain't dead
yit."

From a dry spot behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over the
ridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eats
up the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when he
sat by a wood fire in a cabin of split boards and listened to his
crippled-up father reciting the saga of the feud, with the tally of
this one killed and that one maimed; for this he had been schooled when
he practised with rifle and revolver until, even as a boy, his aim had
become as near an infallible thing as anything human gets to be; for
this he had been schooled still more when he rode, armed and watchful,
to church or court or election. Its coming found him ready.

Two days he ranged the ridges, watching his chance. The Tranthams were
hard to find. They were barricaded in their log-walled strongholds, well
guarded in anticipation of expected reprisals, and prepared in due
season to come forth and prove by a dozen witnesses, or two dozen if so
many should be needed to establish the alibi, that they had no hand in
the massacre of the Dugmores.

But two days and nights of still-hunting, of patiently lying in wait
behind brush fences, of noiseless, pussy-footed patrolling in likely
places, brought the survivor of the decimated Dugmores his chance. He
caught Pegleg Trantham riding down Red Bird Creek on a mare-mule. Pegleg
was only a distant connection of the main strain of the enemy. It was
probable that he had no part in the latest murdering; perhaps doubtful
that he had any prior knowledge of the plot. But by his name and his
blood-tie he was a Trantham, which was enough.

A writer of the Western school would have found little in this encounter
that was really worth while to write about. Above the place of the
meeting rose the flank of the mountain, scarred with washes and scantily
clothed with stunted trees, so that in patches the soil showed through
like the hide of a mangy hound. The creek was swollen by the April rains
and ran bank-full through raw, red walls. Old Pegleg came cantering
along with his rifle balanced on the sliding withers of his mare-mule,
for he rode without a saddle. He was an oldish man and fat for a
mountaineer. A ten-year-old nephew rode behind him, with his short arms
encircling his uncle's paunch. The old man wore a dirty white shirt with
a tabbed bosom; a single shiny white china button held the neckband
together at the back. Below the button the shirt billowed open, showing
his naked back. His wooden leg stuck straight out to the side, its worn
brass tip carrying a blob of red mud, and his good leg dangled down
straight, with the trousers hitched half-way up the bare shank and a
soiled white-yarn sock falling down into the wrinkled and gaping top of
an ancient congress gaiter.

From out of the woods came Anse Dugmore, bareheaded, crusted to his
knees with dried mud and wet from the rain that had been dripping down
since daybreak. A purpose showed in all the lines of his slouchy frame.

Pegleg jerked his rifle up, but he was hampered by the boy's arms about
his middle and by his insecure perch upon the peaks of the slab-sided
mule. The man afoot fired before the mounted enemy could swing his
gunbarrel into line. The bullet ripped away the lower part of Pegleg's
face and grazed the cheek of the crouching youngster behind him. The
white-eyed nephew slid head first off the buck-jumping mule and
instantly scuttled on all fours into the underbrush. The rifle dropped
out of Trantham's hands and he lurched forward on the mule's neck,
grabbing out with blind, groping motions. Dugmore stepped two paces
forward to free his eyes of the smoke, which eddied back from his
gunmuzzle into his face, and fired twice rapidly. The mule was bouncing
up and down, sideways, in a mild panic. Pegleg rolled off her, as inert
as a sack of grits, and lay face upward in the path, with his arms wide
outspread on the mud. The mule galloped off in a restrained and
dignified style until she was a hundred yards away, and then, having
snorted the smells of burnt powder and fresh blood out of her nostrils,
she fell to cropping the young leaves off the wayside bushes, mouthing
the tender green shoots on her heavy iron bit contentedly.

For a long minute Anse Dugmore stood in the narrow footpath, listening.
Then he slid three new shells into his rifle, and slipping down the bank
he crossed the creek on a jam of driftwood and, avoiding the roads that
followed the little watercourse, made over the shoulder of the mountain
for his cabin, two miles down on the opposite side. When he was gone
from sight the nephew of the dead Trantham rolled out of his hiding
place and fled up the road, holding one hand to his wounded cheek and
whimpering. Presently a gaunt, half-wild boar pig, with his spine arched
like the mountains, came sniffing slowly down the hill, pausing
frequently to cock his wedge-shaped head aloft and fix a hostile eye on
two turkey buzzards that began to swing in narrowing circles over one
particular spot on the bank of the creek.

The following day Anse sent word to the sheriff that he would be coming
in to give himself up. It would not have been etiquette for the sheriff
to come for him. He came in, well guarded on the way by certain of his
clan, pleaded self-defense before a friendly county judge and was locked
up in a one-cell log jail. His own cousin was the jailer and ministered
to him kindly. He avoided passing the single barred window of the jail
in the daytime or at night when there was a light behind him, and he
expected to "come clear" shortly, as was customary.

But the Tranthams broke the rules of the game. The circuit judge lived
half-way across the mountains in a county on the Virginia line; he was
not an active partizan of either side in the feud. These Tranthams,
disregarding all the ethics, went before this circuit judge and asked
him for a change of venue, and got it, which was more; so that instead
of being tried in Clayton County--and promptly acquitted--Anse Dugmore
was taken to Woodbine County and there lodged in a shiny new brick jail.
Things were in process of change in Woodbine. A spur of the railroad had
nosed its way up from the lowlands and on through the Gap, and had made
Loudon, the county-seat, a division terminal. Strangers from the North
had come in, opening up the mountains to mines and sawmills and bringing
with them many swarthy foreign laborers. A young man of large hopes and
an Eastern college education had started a weekly newspaper and was
talking big, in his editorial columns, of a new order of things. The
foundation had even been laid for a graded school. Plainly Woodbine
County was falling out of touch with the century-old traditions of her
sisters to the north and west of her.

In due season, then, Anse Dugmore was brought up on a charge of
homicide. The trial lasted less than a day. A jury of strangers heard
the stories of Anse himself and of the dead Pegleg's white-eyed nephew.
In the early afternoon they came back, a wooden toothpick in each mouth,
from the new hotel where they had just had a most satisfying fifty-cent
dinner at the expense of the commonwealth, and sentenced the defendant,
Anderson Dugmore, to state prison at hard labor for the balance of his
natural life.

The sheriff of Woodbine padlocked on Anse's ankles a set of leg irons
that had been made by a mountain blacksmith out of log chains and led
him to the new depot. It was Anse Dugmore's first ride on a railroad
train; also it was the first ride on any train for Wyatt Trantham, head
of the other clan, who, having been elected to the legislature while
Anse lay in jail, had come over from Clayton, bound for the state
capital, to draw his mileage and be a statesman.

It was not in the breed for the victorious Trantham to taunt his hobbled
enemy or even to look his way, but he sat just across the aisle from the
prisoner so that his ear might catch the jangle of the heavy irons when
Dugmore moved in his seat. They all left the train together at the
little blue-painted Frankfort station, Trantham turning off at the first
crossroads to go where the round dome of the old capitol showed above
the water-maple trees, and Dugmore clanking straight ahead, with a
string of negroes and boys and the sheriff following along behind
him. Under the shadow of a quarried-out hillside a gate opened
in a high stone wall to admit him into life membership with a
white-and-black-striped brotherhood of shame.

Four years there did the work for the gangling, silent mountaineer. One
day, just before the Christmas holidays, the new governor of the state
paid a visit to the prison. Only his private secretary came with him.
The warden showed them through the cell houses, the workshops, the
dining hall and the walled yards. It was a Sunday afternoon; the white
prisoners loafed in their stockade, the blacks in theirs. In a corner on
the white side, where the thin and skimpy winter sunshine slanted over
the stockade wall, Anse Dugmore was squatted; merely a rack of bones
enclosed in a shapeless covering of black-and-white stripes. On his
close-cropped head and over his cheekbones the skin was stretched so
tight it seemed nearly ready to split. His eyes, glassy and bleared with
pain, stared ahead of him with a sick man's fixed stare. Inside his
convict's cotton shirt his chest was caved away almost to nothing, and
from the collarless neckband his neck rose as bony as a plucked fowl's,
with great, blue cords in it. Lacking a coverlet to pick, his fingers
picked at the skin on his retreating chin.

As the governor stood in an arched doorway watching, the lengthening
afternoon shadow edged along and covered the hunkered-down figure by the
wall. Anse tottered to his feet, moved a few inches so that he might
still be in the sunshine, and settled down again. This small exertion
started a cough that threatened to tear him apart. He drew his hand
across his mouth and a red stain came away on the knotty knuckles. The
warden was a kindly enough man in the ordinary relations of life, but
nine years as a tamer of man-beasts in a great stone cage had overlaid
his sympathies with a thickening callus.

"One of our lifers that we won't have with us much longer," he said
casually, noting that the governor's eyes followed the sick convict.
"When the con gets one of these hill billies he goes mighty fast."

"A mountaineer, then?" said the governor. "What's his name?"

"Dugmore," answered the warden; "sent from Clayton County. One of those
Clayton County feud fighters."

The governor nodded understandingly. "What sort of a record has he made
here?"

"Oh, fair enough!" said the warden. "Those man-killers from the
mountains generally make good prisoners. Funny thing about this fellow,
though. All the time he's been here he never, so far as I know, had a
message or a visitor or a line of writing from the outside. Nor wrote a
letter out himself. Nor made friends with anybody, convict or guard."

"Has he applied for a pardon?" asked the governor.

"Lord, no!" said the warden. "When he was well he just took what was
coming to him, the same as he's taking it now. I can look up his record,
though, if you'd care to see it, sir."

"I believe I should," said the governor quietly.

A spectacled young wife-murderer, who worked in the prison office on
the prison books, got down a book and looked through it until he came to
a certain entry on a certain page. The warden was right--so far as the
black marks of the prison discipline went, the friendless convict's
record showed fair.

"I think," said the young governor to the warden and his secretary when
they had moved out of hearing of the convict bookkeeper--"I think I'll
give that poor devil a pardon for a Christmas gift. It's no more than a
mercy to let him die at home, if he has any home to go to."

"I could have him brought in and let you tell him yourself, sir,"
volunteered the warden.

"No, no," said the governor quickly. "I don't want to hear that cough
again. Nor look on such a wreck," he added.

Two days before Christmas the warden sent to the hospital ward for No.
874. No. 874, that being Anse Dugmore, came shuffling in and kept
himself upright by holding with one hand to the door jamb. The warden
sat rotund and impressive, in a swivel chair, holding in his hands a
folded-up, blue-backed document.

"Dugmore," he said in his best official manner, "when His Excellency,
Governor Woodford, was here on Sunday he took notice that your general
health was not good. So, of his own accord, he has sent you an
unconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is."

The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on the
warden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazed
shallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.

"I said the governor has given you a pardon," repeated the warden,
staring hard at him.

"I heered you the fust time," croaked the prisoner in his eaten-out
voice. "When kin I go?"

"Is that all you've got to say?" demanded the warden, bristling up.

"I said, when kin I go?" repeated No. 874.

"Go!--you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!"

The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of his
indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he
shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him
crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a
negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him
put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap,
black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy
warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five
dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took
them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate
that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the
inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the
little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went
slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and
sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the
wondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.

"Damned savage!" he said to himself. "Didn't even say thank you. I'll
bet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than a
moccasin snake."

Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes later
by a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble passenger aboard the
eastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping from
weakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush day
coach.

"Just a bundle of bones held together by a skin," the brakeman was
saying to the conductor, "and the smell of the pen all over him. Never
said a word to me--just looked at me sort of dumb. Bound for plumb up at
the far end of the division, accordin' to the way his ticket reads. I
doubt if he lives to get there."

The warden and the brakeman both were wrong. The freed man did live to
get there. And it was an emotion which the warden had never suspected
that held life in him all that afternoon and through the comfortless
night in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy,
self-sufficient little train went looping, like an overgrown measuring
worm, up through the blue grass, around the outlying knobs of the
foothills, on and on through the great riven chasm of the gateway into a
bleak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two bad
hemorrhages on the way, but he lived.

       *       *       *       *       *

Under the full moon of a white and flawless night before Christmas, Shem
Dugmore's squatty log cabin made a blot on the thin blanket of snow, and
inside the one room of the cabin Shem Dugmore sat alone by the
daubed-clay hearth, glooming. Hours passed and he hardly moved except to
stir the red coals or kick back some ambitious ember of hickory that
leaped out upon the uneven floor. Suddenly something heavy fell limply
against the locked door, and instantly, all alertness, the shock-headed
mountaineer was backed up against the farther wall, out of range of the
two windows, with his weapons drawn, silent, ready for what might come.
After a minute there was a feeble, faint pecking sound--half knock, half
scratch--at the lower part of the door. It might have been a wornout dog
or any spent wild creature, but no line of Shem Dugmore's figure
relaxed, and under his thick, sandy brows his eyes, in the flickering
light, had the greenish shine of an angry cat-animal's.

"Whut is it?" he called. "And whut do you want? Speak out peartly!"

[Illustration: HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS BUTT MADE
A CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW.--_Page 197._]

The answer came through the thick planking thinly, in a sort of gasping
whine that ended in a chattering cough; but even after Shem's ear caught
the words, and even after he recognized the changed but still familiar
cadence of the voice, he abated none of his caution. Carefully he
unbolted the door, and, drawing it inch by inch slowly ajar, he reached
out, exposing only his hand and arm, and drew bodily inside the shell of
a man that was fallen, huddled up, against the log door jamb. He dropped
the wooden crossbar back into its sockets before he looked a second time
at the intruder, who had crawled across the floor and now lay before the
wide mouth of the hearth in a choking spell. Shem Dugmore made no move
until the fit was over and the sufferer lay quiet.

"How did you git out, Anse?" were the first words he spoke.

The consumptive rolled his head weakly from side to side and swallowed
desperately. "Pardoned out--in writin'--yistiddy."

"You air in purty bad shape," said Shem.

"Yes,"--the words came very slowly--"my lungs give out on me--and my
eyes. But--but I got here."

"You come jist in time," said his cousin; "this time tomorrer and you
wouldn't a' never found me here. I'd 'a' been gone."

"Gone!--gone whar?"

"Well," said Shem slowly, "after you was sent away it seemed like them
Tranthams got the upper hand complete. All of our side whut ain't
dead--and that's powerful few--is moved off out of the mountings to
Winchester, down in the settlemints. I'm 'bout the last, and I'm
a-purposin' to slip out tomorrer night while the Tranthams is at their
Christmas rackets--they'd layway me too ef----"

"But my wife--did she----"

"I thought maybe you'd heered tell about that whilst you was down yon,"
said Shem in a dulled wonder. "The fall after you was took away yore
woman she went over to the Tranthams. Yes, sir; she took up with the
head devil of 'em all--old Wyatt Trantham hisself--and she went to live
at his house up on the Yaller Banks."

"Is she----Did she----"

The ex-convict was struggling to his knees. His groping skeletons of
hands were right in the hot ashes. The heat cooked the moisture from his
sodden garments in little films of vapor and filled the cabin with the
reek of the prison dye.

"Did she--did she----"

"Oh, she's been dead quite a spell now," stated Shem. "I would have
s'posed you'd 'a' heered that, too, somewhars. She had a kind of a
risin' in the breast."

"But my young uns--little Anderson and--and Elviry?"

The sick man was clear up on his knees now, his long arms hanging and
his eyes, behind their matted lids, fixed on Shem's impassive face.
Could the warden have seen him now, and marked his attitude and his
words, he would have known what it was that had brought this dying man
back to _his_ own mountain valley with the breath of life still in him.
A dumb, unuttered love for the two shock-headed babies he had left
behind in the split-board cabin was the one big thing in Anse Dugmore's
whole being--bigger even than his sense of allegiance to the feud.

"My young uns, Shem?"

"Wyatt Trantham took 'em and he kep' 'em--he's got 'em both now."

"Does he--does he use 'em kindly?"

"I ain't never heered," said Shem simply. "He never had no young uns of
his own, and it mout be he uses 'em well. He's the high sheriff now."

"I was countin' on gittin' to see 'em agin--an buyin 'em some little
Chrismus fixin's," the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his
rasping whisper. "I reckon it ain't no use to--to be thinkin'--of that
there now?"

"No 'arthly use at all," said Shem, with brutal directness. "Ef you had
the strength to git thar, the Tranthams would shoot you down like a fice
dog."

Anse nodded weakly. He sank down again on the floor, face to the boards,
coughing hard. It was the droning voice of his cousin that brought him
back from the borders of the coma he had been fighting off for hours.

For, to Shem, the best hater and the poorest fighter of all his
cleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing man
and roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowed
white corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over him
he told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmerciful
war, ticking off on his blunt finger ends the grim totals of this one
ambushed and that one killed in the open, overpowered and beaten under
by weight of odds. He told such details as he knew of the theft of the
young wife and the young ones, Elvira and little Anderson.

"Anse, did ary Trantham see you a-gittin' here tonight?"

"Nobody--that knowed me--seed me."

"Old Wyatt Trantham, he rid into Manchester this evenin' 'bout fo'
o'clock--I seed him passin' over the ridge," went on Shem. "He'll be
ridin' back 'long Pigeon Roost some time before mawnin'. He done you a
heap o' dirt, Anse."

The prostrate man was listening hard.

"Anse, I got yore old rifle right here in the house. Ef you could git up
thar on the mounting, somewhar's alongside the Pigeon Roost trail, you
could git him shore. He'll be full of licker comin' back."

And now a seeming marvel was coming to pass, for the caved-in trunk was
rising on the pipestem legs and the shaking fingers were outstretched,
reaching for something.

Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifle
and began reloading it afresh from a box of shells.

       *       *       *       *       *

A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted "dead'ning"--Anse
Dugmore was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that
its butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail of
a crippled snake. He fell and got up, and fell and rose again. He
coughed and up the ridge a ranging dog-fox barked back an answer to his
cough.

From out of the slitted door Shem watched him until the scrub oaks at
the edge of the clearing swallowed him up. Then Shem fastened himself in
and made ready to start his flight to the lowlands that very night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Just below the forks of Pigeon Roost Creek the trail that followed its
banks widened into a track wide enough for wagon wheels. On one side lay
the diminished creek, now filmed over with a glaze of young ice. On the
other the mountain rose steeply. Fifteen feet up the bluff side a fallen
dead tree projected its rotted, broken roots, like snaggled teeth, from
the clayey bank. Behind this tree's trunk, in the snow and half-frozen,
half-melted yellow mire, Anse Dugmore was stretched on his face. The
barrel of the rifle barely showed itself through the interlacing root
ends. It pointed downward and northward toward the broad, moonlit place
in the road. Its stock was pressed tightly against Anse Dugmore's
fallen-in cheek; the trigger finger of his right hand, fleshless as a
joint of cane, was crooked about the trigger guard. A thin stream of
blood ran from his mouth and dribbled down his chin and coagulated in a
sticky smear upon the gun stock. His lungs, what was left of them, were
draining away.

He lay without motion, saving up the last ounce of his life. The cold
had crawled up his legs to his hips; he was dead already from the waist
down. He no longer coughed, only gasped thickly. He knew that he was
about gone; but he knew, too, that he would last, clear-minded and
clear-eyed, until High Sheriff Wyatt Trantham came. His brain would
last--and his trigger finger.

Then he heard him coming. Up the trail sounded the muffled music of a
pacer's hoofs single-footing through the snow, and after that, almost
instantly Trantham rode out into sight and loomed larger and larger as
he drew steadily near the open place under the bank. He was wavering in
the saddle. He drew nearer and nearer, and as he came out on the wide
patch of moonlit snow, he pulled the single-footer down to a walk and
halted him and began fumbling in the right-hand side of the saddlebags
that draped his horse's shoulder.

Up in its covert the rifle barrel moved an inch or two, then steadied
and stopped, the bone-sight at its tip resting full on the broad of the
drunken rider's breast. The boney finger moved inward from the trigger
guard and closed ever so gently about the touchy, hair-filed
trigger--then waited.

For the uncertain hand of Trantham, every movement showing plain in the
crystal, hard, white moon, was slowly bringing from under the flap of
the right-side saddlebag something that was round and smooth and shone
with a yellowish glassy light, like a fat flask filled with spirits. And
Anse Dugmore waited, being minded now to shoot him as he put the bottle
to his lips, and so cheat Trantham of his last drink on earth, as
Trantham had cheated him of his liberty and his babies--as Trantham had
cheated those babies of the Christmas fixings which the state's five
dollars might have bought.

He waited, waited----

       *       *       *       *       *

This was not the first time the high sheriff had stopped that night on
his homeward ride from the tiny county seat, as his befuddlement
proclaimed; but halting there in the open, just past the forks of the
Pigeon Roost, he was moved by a new idea. He fumbled in the right-hand
flap of his saddlebags and brought out a toy drum, round and smooth,
with shiny yellow sides. A cheap china doll with painted black ringlets
and painted blue eyes followed the drum, and then a torn paper bag, from
which small pieces of cheap red-and-green dyed candy sifted out between
the sheriff's fumbling fingers and fell into the snow.

Thirty feet away, in the dead leaves matted under the roots of an uptorn
dead tree, something moved--something moved; and then there was a sound
like a long, deep, gurgling sigh, and another sound like some heavy,
lengthy object settling itself down flat upon the snow and the leaves.

The first faint rustle cleared Trantham's brain of the liquor fumes. He
jammed the toys and the candy back into the saddlebags and jerked his
horse sidewise into the protecting shadow of the bluff, reaching at the
same time to the shoulder holster buckled about his body under the
unbuttoned overcoat. For a long minute he listened keenly, the drawn
pistol in his hand. There was nothing to hear except his own breathing
and the breathing of his horse.

"Sho! Some old hawg turnin' over in her bed," he said to the horse, and
holstering the pistol he went racking on down Pigeon Roost Creek, with
Christmas for Elviry and little Anderson in his saddlebags.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they found Anse Dugmore in his ambush another snow had fallen on
his back and he was slightly more of a skeleton than ever; but the bony
finger was still crooked about the trigger, the rusted hammer was back
at full cock and there was a dried brownish stain on the gun stock. So,
from these facts, his finders were moved to conclude that the freed
convict must have bled to death from his lungs before the sheriff ever
passed, which they held to be a good thing all round and a lucky thing
for the sheriff.




VII

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN


There was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that
used to bother strangers in our town until they got used to it. It
started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up
interminably--so it seemed to them--a monotonous, jarring thump-thump,
thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at
breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a
steamy hot halo of their own goodness, these aliens knew what it was
that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt
amply recompensed for the lost hours of their beauty sleep.

In these degenerate latter days I believe there is a machine that
accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and
crushing, which no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take
the poetry out of the operation. Old Judge Priest, our circuit judge,
and the reigning black deity of his kitchen, Aunt Dilsey Turner, would
have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived and her good right
arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the
judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or
a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled
wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as
plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of
tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread
and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then,
with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round
disks and delicately pink each one with a fork--and then, if you were
listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an
iron lip.

On a certain Sunday I have in mind, Judge Priest woke with the first
premonitory thud from the kitchen, and he was up and dressed in his
white linens and out upon the wide front porch while the summer day was
young and unblemished. The sun was not up good yet. It made a red glow,
like a barn afire, through the treetops looking eastward. Lie-abed
blackbirds were still talking over family matters in the maples that
clustered round the house, and in the back yard Judge Priest's big red
rooster hoarsely circulated gossip in regard to a certain little brown
hen, first crowing out the news loudly and then listening, with his head
on one side, while the rooster in the next yard took it up and repeated
it to a rooster living farther down the road, as is the custom among
male scandalizers the world over. Upon the lawn the little gossamer
hammocks that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were
spangled with dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering
rosary and the center of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket.
Likewise each web was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees
were shedding down their podded product so thickly that across open
spaces the slanting lines of the drifting fiber looked like snow. It
would be hot enough after a while, but now the whole world was sweet and
fresh and washed clean.

It impressed Judge Priest so. He lowered his bulk into a rustic chair
made of hickory withes that gave to his weight, and put his thoughts
upon breakfast and the goodness of the day; but presently, as he sat
there, he saw something that set a frown between his faded blue eyes.

He saw, coming down Clay Street, upon the opposite side, an old man--a
very feeble old man--who was tall and thin and dressed in somber black.
The man was lame--he dragged one leg along with the hitching gait of the
paralytic. Traveling with painful slowness, he came on until he reached
the corner above. Then automatically he turned at right angles and left
the narrow wooden sidewalk and crossed the dusty road. He passed Judge
Priest's, looking neither to the right nor the left, and so kept on
until he reached the corner below. Still following an invisible path in
the deep-furrowed dust, he crossed again to the other side. Just as he
got there his halt leg seemed to give out altogether and for a minute or
two he stood holding himself up by a fumbling grip upon the slats of a
tree box before he went laboriously on, a figure of pain and weakness in
the early sunshine that was now beginning to slant across his path and
dapple his back with checkerings of shadow and light.

This maneuver was inexplicable--a stranger would have puzzled to make it
out. The shade was as plentiful upon one side of Clay Street as upon the
other; each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as its brother
over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in honeysuckles and
balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement line on the opposite
side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest's roomy and rambling old home,
had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window. And surely to this
lone pedestrian every added step must have been an added labor. A
stranger would never have understood it; but Judge Priest understood
it--he had seen that same thing repeated countless times in the years
that stretched behind him. Always it had distressed him inwardly, but on
this particular morning it distressed him more than ever. The toiling
grim figure in black had seemed so feeble and so tottery and old.

Well, Judge Priest was not exactly what you would call young. With an
effort he heaved himself up out of the depths of his hickory chair and
stood at the edge of his porch, polishing a pink bald dome of forehead
as though trying to make up his mind to something. Jefferson Poindexter,
resplendent in starchy white jacket and white apron, came to the door.

"Breakfus' served, suh!" he said, giving to an announcement touching on
food that glamour of grandeur of which his race alone enjoys the
splendid secret.

"Hey?" asked the judge absently.

"Breakfus'--hit's on the table waitin', suh," stated Jeff. "Mizz Polks
sent over her houseboy with a dish of fresh razberries fur yore
breakfus'; and she say to tell you, with her and Mistah Polkses'
compliments, they is fresh picked out of her garden--specially fur you."

The lady and gentleman to whom Jeff had reference were named Polk, but
in speaking of white persons for whom he had a high regard Jeff always,
wherever possible within the limitations of our speech, tacked on that
final s. It was in the nature of a delicate verbal compliment, implying
that the person referred to was worthy of enlargement and pluralization.

Alone in the cool, high-ceiled, white-walled dining room, Judge Priest
ate his breakfast mechanically. The raspberries were pink beads of
sweetness; the young fried chicken was a poem in delicate and flaky
browns; the spoon bread could not have been any better if it had tried;
and the beaten biscuits were as light as snowflakes and as ready to melt
on the tongue; but Judge Priest spoke hardly a word all through the
meal. Jeff, going out to the kitchen for the last course, said to Aunt
Dilsey:

"Ole boss-man seem lak he's got somethin' on his mind worryin' him this
mawnin'."

When Jeff returned, with a turn of crisp waffles in one hand and a
pitcher of cane sirup in the other, he stared in surprise, for the
dining room was empty and he could hear his employer creaking down the
hall. Jeff just naturally hated to see good hot waffles going to waste.
He ate them himself, standing up; and they gave him a zest for his
regular breakfast, which followed in due course of time.

From the old walnut hatrack, with its white-tipped knobs that stood just
inside the front door, Judge Priest picked up a palmleaf fan; and he
held the fan slantwise as a shield for his eyes and his bare head
against the sun's glare as he went down the porch steps and passed out
of his own yard, traversed the empty street and strove with the stubborn
gate latch of the little house that faced his own. It was a poor-looking
little house, and its poorness had extended to its surroundings--as if
poverty was a contagion that spread. In Judge Priest's yard, now, the
grass, though uncared for, yet grew thick and lush; but here, in this
small yard, there were bare, shiny spots of earth showing through the
grass--as though the soil itself was out at elbows and the nap worn off
its green-velvet coat; but the vines about the porch were thick enough
for an ambuscade and from behind their green screen came a voice in
hospitable recognition.

"Is that you, judge? Well sir, I'm glad to see you! Come right in; take
a seat and sit down and rest yourself."

The speaker showed himself in the arched opening of the vine barrier--an
old man--not quite so old, perhaps, as the judge. He was in his
shirtsleeves. There was a patch upon one of the sleeves. His shoes had
been newly shined, but the job was poorly done; the leather showed a
dulled black upon the toes and a weathered yellow at the sides and
heels. As he spoke his voice ran up and down--the voice of a deaf person
who cannot hear his own words clearly, so that he pitches them in a
false key. For added proof of this affliction he held a lean and
slightly tremulous hand cupped behind his ear.

The other hand he extended in greeting as the old judge mounted the step
of the low porch. The visitor took one of two creaky wooden rockers that
stood in the narrow space behind the balsam vines, and for a minute or
two he sat without speech, fanning himself. Evidently these neighborly
calls between these two old men were not uncommon; they could enjoy the
communion of silence together without embarrassment.

The town clocks struck--first the one on the city hall struck eight
times sedately; and then, farther away, the one on the county
courthouse. This one struck five times slowly, hesitated a moment,
struck eleven times with great vigor, hesitated again, struck once with
a big, final boom, and was through. No amount of repairing could cure
the courthouse clock of this peculiarity. It kept the time, but kept it
according to a private way of its own. Immediately after it ceased the
bell on the Catholic church, first and earliest of the Sunday bells,
began tolling briskly. Judge Priest waited until its clamoring had died
away.

"Goin' to be good and hot after while," he said, raising his voice.

"What say?"

"I say it's goin' to be mighty warm a little later on in the day,"
repeated Judge Priest.

"Yes, suh; I reckon you're right there," assented the host. "Just a
minute ago, before you came over, I was telling Liddie she'd find it
middlin' close in church this morning. She's going, though--runaway
horses wouldn't keep her away from church! I'm not going myself--seems
as though I'm getting more and more out of the church habit here
lately."

Judge Priest's eyes squinted in whimsical appreciation of this
admission. He remembered that the other man, during the lifetime of his
second wife, had been a regular attendant at services--going twice on
Sundays and to Wednesday night prayer meetings too; but the second wife
had been dead going on four years now--or was it five? Time sped so!

The deaf man spoke on:

"So I just thought I'd sit here and try to keep cool and wait for that
Ledbetter boy to come round with the Sunday paper. Did you read last
Sunday's paper, judge? Colonel Watterson certainly had a mighty fine
piece on those Northern money devils. It's round here somewhere--I cut
it out to keep it. I'd like to have you read it and pass your opinion on
it. These young fellows do pretty well, but there's none of them can
write like the colonel, in my judgment."

Judge Priest appeared not to have heard him.

"Ed Tilghman," he said abruptly in his high, fine voice, that seemed
absurdly out of place, coming from his round frame, "you and me have
lived neighbors together a good while, haven't we? We've been right
acros't the street from one another all this time. It kind of jolts me
sometimes when I git to thinkin' how many years it's really been;
because we're gittin' along right smartly in years--all us old fellows
are. Ten years from now, say, there won't be so many of us left." He
glanced sidewise at the lean, firm profile of his friend. "You're
younger than some of us; but, even so, you ain't exactly what I'd call a
young man yourself."

Avoiding the direct, questioning gaze that his companion turned on him
at this, the judge reached forward and touched a ripe balsam apple that
dangled in front of him. Instantly it split, showing the gummed red
seeds clinging to the inner walls of the sensitive pod.

"I'm listening to you, judge," said the deaf man.

For a moment the old judge waited. There was about him almost an air of
embarrassment. Still considering the ruin of the balsam apple, he spoke,
and it was with a sort of hurried anxiety, as though he feared he might
be checked before he could say what he had to say.

"Ed," he said, "I was settin' on my porch a while ago waitin' for
breakfast, and your brother came by." He shot a quick, apprehensive
glance at his silent auditor. Except for a tautened flickering of the
muscles about the mouth, there was no sign that the other had heard him.
"Your brother Abner came by," repeated the judge, "and I set over there
on my porch and watched him pass. Ed, Abner's gittin' mighty feeble! He
jest about kin drag himself along--he's had another stroke lately, they
tell me. He had to hold on to that there treebox down yonder, steadyin'
himself after he crossed back over to this side. Lord knows what he was
doin' draggin' down-town on a Sunday mornin'--force of habit, I reckin.
Anyway he certainly did look older and more poorly than ever I saw him
before. He's a failin' man if I'm any judge. Do you hear me plain?" he
asked.

"I hear you," said his neighbor in a curiously flat voice. It was
Tilghman's turn to avoid the glances of his friend. He stared straight
ahead of him through a rift in the vines.

"Well, then," went on Judge Priest, "here's what I've got to say to you,
Ed Tilghman. You know as well as I do that I've never pried into your
private affairs, and it goes mightily against the grain for me to be
doin' so now; but, Ed, when I think of how old we're all gittin' to be,
and when the Camp meets and I see you settin' there side by side almost,
and yet never seemin' to see each other--and this mornin' when I saw
Abner pass, lookin' so gaunt and sick--and it sech a sweet, ca'm mornin'
too, and everything so quiet and peaceful----" He broke off and started
anew. "I don't seem to know exactly how to put my thoughts into
words--and puttin' things into words is supposed to be my trade too.
Anyway I couldn't go to Abner. He's not my neighbor and you are; and
besides, you're the youngest of the two. So--so I came over here to you.
Ed, I'd like mightily to take some word from you to your brother Abner.
I'd like to do it the best in the world! Can't I go to him with a
message from you--today? Tomorrow might be too late!"

He laid one of his pudgy hands on the bony knee of the deaf man; but the
hand slipped away as Tilghman stood up.

"Judge Priest," said Tilghman, looking down at him, "I've listened to
what you've had to say; and I didn't stop you, because you are my friend
and I know you mean well by it. Besides, you're my guest, under my own
roof." He stumped back and forth in the narrow confines of the porch.
Otherwise he gave no sign of any emotion that might be astir within him,
his face being still set and his voice flat. "What's between me and
my--what's between me and that man you just named always will be between
us. He's satisfied to let things go on as they are. I'm satisfied to let
them go on. It's in our breed, I guess. Words--just words--wouldn't help
mend this thing. The reason for it would be there just the same, and
neither one of us is going to be able to forget that so long as we both
live. I'd just as soon you never brought this--this subject up again. If
you went to him I presume he'd tell you the same thing. Let it be, Judge
Priest--it's past mending. We two have gone on this way for fifty years
nearly. We'll keep on going on so. I appreciate your kindness, Judge
Priest; but let it be--let it be!"

There was finality miles deep and fixed as basalt in his tone. He
checked his walk and called in at a shuttered window.

"Liddie," he said in his natural up-and-down voice, "before you put off
for church, couldn't you mix up a couple of lemonades or something?
Judge Priest is out here on the porch with me."

"No," said Judge Priest, getting slowly up, "I've got to be gittin' back
before the sun's up too high. If I don't see you again meanwhile be
shore to come to the next regular meetin' of the Camp--on Friday night,"
he added.

"I'll be there," said Tilghman. "And I'll try to find that piece of
Colonel Watterson's and send it over to you. I'd like mightily for you
to read it."

He stood at the opening in the vines, with one slightly palsied hand
fumbling at a loose tendril as the judge passed down the short yard-walk
and out at the gate. Then he went back to his chair and sat down again.
All those little muscles in his jowls were jumping.

Clay Street was no longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from
beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there
groups of children--the little girls in prim and starchy white, the
little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and
all of them were moving toward a common center--Sunday school. Twice
again that day would the street show life--a little later when grown-ups
went their way to church, and again just after the noonday dinner, when
young people and servants, carrying trays and dishes under napkins,
would cross and recross from one house to another. The Sunday
interchange of special dainties between neighbors amounted in our town
to a ceremonial and a rite; but after that, until the cool of the
evening, the town would simmer in quiet, while everybody took Sunday
naps.

With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as
though trying to fend off something disagreeable--a memory, perhaps, or
it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats
and midges about, for by now--even so soon--the dew was dried. The
leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides up
like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the
Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure
enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out.

In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the
small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the
Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of
his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing
an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall, having
for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter,
in whose gray and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties
took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by
babies and grandbabies.

There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who
was forever starting somewhere and never going there--because, as sure
as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his
mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank
had failed on him, or a horse had kicked him in the head--or maybe it
was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he
went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys
who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but
when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be
his volunteer pallbearers.

There was Mr. H. Jackman--Brother Jackman to all the town--who had been
our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his
affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when
he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that
word, which is at once the sweetest and bitterest word in our tongue;
for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad, would
go through the market to take his pick of what was there, and to the
Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new
garments when his old ones wore shabby--and yet never paid a cent for
anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him
to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to
take him for a retired banker--that's a fact!

And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man--had killed him
in fair fight and had been acquitted--and yet walked quiet back streets
at all hours, a gray, silent shadow, and never slept except with a
bright light burning in his room.

The tragedy of Mr. Edward Tilghman, though, and of Captain Abner G.
Tilghman, his elder brother, was both a tragedy and a mystery--the
biggest tragedy and the deepest mystery our town had ever known or ever
would know probably. All that anybody knew for certain was that for
upward of fifty years neither of them had spoken to the other, nor by
deed or look had given heed to the other. As boys, back in sixty-one,
they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the
other's shoulder, they had stood up with a hundred others to be sworn
into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on the
morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older
brother her silk scarf off her shoulders to wear for a sash. Both the
brothers had liked her; but by this public act she made it plain which
of them was her choice.

Then the company had marched off to the camp on the Tennessee border,
where the new troops were drilling; and as they marched some watchers
wept and others cheered--but the cheering predominated, for it was to be
only a sort of picnic anyhow--so everybody agreed. As the orators--who
mainly stayed behind--had pointed out, the Northern people would not
fight. And even if they should fight could not one Southerner whip four
Yankees? Certainly he could; any fool knew that much. In a month or two
months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again,
covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then--this by common
report and understanding--Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman
would be married, with a big church wedding.

The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day
picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic. And when it was over,
after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman
did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the
other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had become
as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit
speaking to each other then and there, and to any man's knowledge they
never spoke again. They served the war out, Abner rising just before
the end to a captaincy, Edward serving always as a private in the ranks.
In a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard,
hopeless days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back
with the limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they
were all boys still--but in experience, men, and in suffering,
grandsires.

Two months after they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to
Edward, the younger brother. Within a year she died, and after a decent
period of mourning Edward married a second time--only to be widowed
again after many years. His second wife bore him children and they
died--all except one, a daughter, who grew up and married badly; and
after her mother's death she came back to live with her deaf father and
minister to him. As for Captain Abner Tilghman, he never married--never,
so far as the watching eyes of the town might tell, looked with favor
upon another woman. And he never spoke to his brother or to any of his
brother's family--or his brother to him.

With years the wall of silence they had builded up between them turned
to ice and the ice to stone. They lived on the same street, but never
did Edward enter Captain Abner's bank, never did Captain Abner pass
Edward's house--always he crossed over to the opposite side. They
belonged to the same Veterans' Camp--indeed there was only the one for
them to belong to; they voted the same ticket--straight Democratic; and
in the same church, the old Independent Presbyterian, they worshiped the
same God by the same creed, the older brother being an elder and the
younger a plain member--and yet never crossed looks.

The town had come to accept this dumb and bitter feud as unchangeable
and eternal; in time people ceased even to wonder what its cause had
been, and in all the long years only one man had tried, before now, to
heal it up. When old Doctor Henrickson died, a young and ardent
clergyman, fresh from the Virginia theological school, came out to take
the vacant pulpit; and he, being filled with a high sense of his holy
calling, thought it shameful that such a thing should be in the
congregation. He went to see Captain Tilghman about it. He never went
but that once. Afterward it came out that Captain Tilghman had
threatened to walk out of church and never darken its doors again if the
minister ever dared to mention his brother's name in his presence. So
the young minister sorrowed, but obeyed, for the captain was rich and a
generous giver to the church.

And he had grown richer with the years, and as he grew richer his
brother grew poorer--another man owned the drug store where Edward
Tilghman had failed. They had grown from young to middle-aged men and
from middle-aged men to old, infirm men; and first the grace of youth
and then the solidness of maturity had gone out of them and the
gnarliness of age had come upon them; one was halt of step and the other
was dull of ear; and the town through half a century of schooling had
accustomed itself to the situation and took it as a matter of course. So
it was and so it always would be--a tragedy and a mystery. It had not
been of any use when the minister interfered and it was of no use now.
Judge Priest, with the gesture of a man who is beaten, dropped the fan
on the porch floor, went into his darkened sitting room, stretched
himself wearily on a creaking horsehide sofa and called out to Jeff to
make him a mild toddy--one with plenty of ice in it.

       *       *       *       *       *

On this same Sunday--or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same
Sunday--at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles
in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest's town, Corporal Jacob
Speck, late of Sigel's command, sat at the kitchen window of the
combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the
Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender
feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the
angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a
half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with a
bowl like an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal's blue
Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon a
comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and
clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were very much
elsewhere.

Reared back there at seeming ease, the corporal none the less was not
happy in his mind. It was not that he so much minded being left at home
to mind the youngest baby while the rest of the family spent the
afternoon amid the Teutonic splendors of Smeltzer's Harlem River Casino,
with its acres of gravel walks and its whitewashed tree trunks, its
straggly flower beds and its high-collared beers. He was used to that
sort of thing. Since a plague of multiplying infirmities of the body
had driven him out of his job in the tax office, the corporal had not
done much except nurse the babies that occurred in the Speck-Engel
establishment with such unerring regularity. Sometimes, it is true, he
did slip down to the corner for maybe zwei glasses of beer and a game of
pinocle; but then, likely as not, there would come inopportunely a
towheaded descendant to tell him Mommer needed him back at the flat
right away to mind the baby while she went marketing or to the movies.

He could endure that--he had to. What riled Corporal Jacob Speck on this
warm and sunny Sunday was a realization that he was not doing his share
at making the history of the period. The week before had befallen the
fiftieth anniversary of the marching away of his old regiment to the
front; there had been articles in the daily papers about it. Also, in
patriotic commemoration of the great event there had been a parade of
the wrinkled survivors--ninety-odd of them--following their tattered and
faded battle flag down Fifth Avenue past apathetic crowds, nine-tenths
of whom had been born since the war--in foreign lands mainly; and at
least half, if one might judge by their looks, did not know what the
parading was all about, and did not particularly care either.

The corporal had not participated in the march of the veterans; he had
not even attended the banquet that followed it. True, the youngest
grandchild was at the moment cutting one of her largest jaw teeth and so
had required, for the time, an extraordinary and special amount of
minding; but the young lady's dental difficulty was not the sole reason
for his absence. Three weeks earlier the corporal had taken part in
Decoration Day, and certainly one parade a month was ample strain upon a
pair of legs such as he owned. He had returned home with his game leg
behaving more gamely then usual and with his sound one full of new and
painful kinks. Also, in honor of the occasion he had committed the error
of wearing a pair of stiff and inflexible new shoes; wherefore he had
worn his carpet slippers ever since.

Missing the fiftieth anniversary was not the main point with the
corporal--that was merely the fortune of war, to be accepted with
fortitude and with no more than a proper and natural amount of grumbling
by one who had been a good soldier and was now a good citizen; but for
days before the event, and daily ever since, divers members of the old
regiment had been writing pieces to the papers--the German papers and
the English-printing papers too--long pieces, telling of the trip to
Washington, and then on into Virginia and Tennessee, speaking of this
campaign and that and this battle and that. And because there was just
now a passing wave of interest in Civil War matters, the papers had
printed these contributions, thereby reflecting much glory on the
writers thereof. But Corporal Speck, reading these things, had marveled
deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for his
own recollection of these stirring and epochal events differed most
widely from the reminiscent narration of each misguided chronicler.

It was, indeed, a shameful thing that the most important occurrences of
the whole war should be so shockingly mangled and mishandled in the
retelling. They were so grievously wrong, those other veterans, and he
was so absolutely right. He was always right in these matters. Only the
night before, during a merciful respite from his nursing duties, he
had, in Otto Wittenpen's back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall
stein with some bitterness of certain especially grievous misstatements
of plain fact on the part of certain faulty-minded comrades. In reply
Otto had said, in a rather sneering tone the corporal thought:

"Say, then, Jacob, why don't you yourself write a piece to the paper
telling about this regiment of yours--the way it was?"

"I will. Tomorrow I will do so without fail," he had said, the ambition
of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at
the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried
and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he
had been--yes, none better--and a good citizen, and in his day a capable
and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his
own story. That morning, when the youngest grandchild slept and his
daughter and his daughter's husband and the brood of his older
grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he
sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words
would not come--or, at least, after the first line or two they would not
come.

The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on
his two good legs--both good legs then--to fight for the country whose
language he could not yet speak was there in bright and living colors;
but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In
the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified
to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded
over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right
then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as
you might say from the clear sky, a great idea--an idea so magnificent
that he almost dropped the youngest Miss Engel off his lap at the
splendid shock of it.

With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle
of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the sudden jostle the young lady
slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very
carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and
down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that
stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal
steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which
was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmost and
smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel
apartment.

The bed, whereon of nights Corporal Speck reposed with a bucking bronco
of an eight-year-old grandson for a bedmate, was jammed close against
the plastering, under the one small window set diagonally in a jog in
the wall, and opening out upon an airshaft, like a chimney. Time had
been when the corporal had a room and a bed all his own; that was before
the family began to grow so fast in its second generation and while he
still held a place of lucrative employment at the tax office.

As he got down upon his knees beside the bed the old man uttered a
little groan of discomfort. He felt about in the space underneath and
drew out a small tin trunk, rusted on its corners and dented in its
sides. He made a laborious selection of keys from a key-ring he got out
of his pocket, unlocked the trunk and lifted out a heavy top tray. The
tray contained, among other things, such treasures as his naturalization
papers, his pension papers, a photograph of his dead wife, and a small
bethumbed passbook of the East Side Germania Savings Bank. Underneath
was a black fatigue hat with a gold cord round its crown, a neatly
folded blue uniform coat, with the G. A. R. bronze showing in its
uppermost lapel, and below that, in turn, the suit of neat black the
corporal wore on high state occasions and would one day wear to be
buried in. Pawing and digging, he worked his hands to the very bottom,
and then, with a little grunt, he heaved out the thing he wanted--the
one trophy, except a stiffened kneecap and an honorable record, this old
man had brought home from the South. It was a captured Confederate
knapsack, flattened and flabby. Its leather was dry-rotted with age and
the brass C. S. A. on the outer flap was gangrened and sunken in; the
flap curled up stiffly, like an old shoe sole.

The crooked old fingers undid a buckle fastening and from the musty and
odorous interior of the knapsack withdrew a letter, in a queer-looking
yellowed envelope, with a queer-looking stamp upon the upper right-hand
corner and a faint superscription upon its face. The three sheets of
paper he slid out of the envelope were too old even to rustle, but the
close writing upon them in a brownish, faded ink was still plainly to be
made out.

Corporal Speck replaced the knapsack in its place at the very bottom,
put the tray back in its place, closed the trunk and locked it and
shoved it under the bed. The trunk resisted slightly and he lost one
carpet slipper and considerable breath in the struggle. Limping back to
the kitchen and seeing that little Miss Engel still slumbered, he eased
his frame into a chair and composed himself to literary composition, not
in the least disturbed by the shouts of roistering sidewalk comedians
that filtered up to him from down below in front of the house, or by the
distant clatter of intermittent traffic over the cobbly spine of Second
Avenue, half a block away. For some time he wrote, with a most scratchy
pen; and this is what he wrote:

     "TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN, CITY.

     "_Dear Sir:_ The undersigned would state that he served two years
     and nine months--until wounded in action--in the Fighting Two
     Hundred and Tenth New York Infantry, and has been much interested
     to see what other comrades wrote for the papers regarding same in
     connection with the Rebellion War of North and South respectively.
     I would state that during the battle of Chickamauga I was for a
     while lying near by to a Confederate soldier--name unknown--who
     was dying on account of a wound in the chest. By his request I
     gave him a drink of water from my canteen, he dying shortly
     thereafter. Being myself wounded--right knee shattered by a
     Minie ball--I was removed to a field hospital; but before doing
     so I brought away this man's knapsack for a keepsake of the
     occasion. Some years later I found in said knapsack a letter,
     which previous to then was overlooked by me. I inclose herewith a
     copy of said letter, which it may be interesting for reading
     purposes by surviving comrades.

     "Respectfully yours,

              "JACOB SPECK,

     "Late Corporal L Company,

     "Fighting Two Hundred and Tenth New York, U. S. A."

With deliberation and squeaky emphasis the pen progressed slowly across
the paper, while the corporal, with his left hand, held flat the dead
man's ancient letter before him, intent on copying it. Hard words
puzzled him and long words daunted him, and he was making a long job of
it when there were steps in the hall without. There entered breezily
Miss Hortense Engel, who was the oldest of all the multiplying Engels,
pretty beyond question and every inch American, having the gift of
wearing Lower Sixth Avenue stock designs in a way to make them seem
Upper Fifth Avenue models. Miss Engel's face was pleasantly flushed; she
had just parted lingeringly from her steady company, whose name was Mr.
Lawrence J. McLaughlin, in the lower hallway, which is the trysting
place and courting place of tenement-dwelling sweethearts, and now she
had come to make ready the family's cold Sunday night tea. At sight of
her the corporal had another inspiration--his second within the hour.
His brow smoothed and he fetched a sigh of relief.

"'Lo, grosspops!" she said. "How's every little thing? The kiddo all
right?"

She unpinned a Sunday hat that was plumed like a hearse and slipped on
a long apron that covered her from Robespierre bib to hobble hem.

"Girl," said her grandfather, "would you make tomorrow for me at the
office a copy of this letter on the typewriter machine?"

He spoke in German and she answered in New-Yorkese, while her nimble
fingers wrestled with the task of back-buttoning her apron.

"Sure thing! It won't take hardly a minute to rattle that off.
Funny-looking old thing!" she went on, taking up the creased and faded
original. "Who wrote it? And whatcher goin' to do with it, grosspops?"

"That," he told her, "is mine own business! It is for you, please, to
make the copy and bring both to me tomorrow, the letter and also the
copy."

So on Monday morning, when the rush of taking dictation at the office of
the Great American Hosiery Company, in Broome Street, was well abated,
the competent Miss Hortense copied the letter, and that same evening her
grandfather mailed it to the Sun, accompanied by his own introduction.
The Sun straightway printed it without change and--what was still
better--with the sender's name spelled out in capital letters; and that
night, at the place down by the corner, Corporal Jacob Speck was a
prophet not without honor in his own country--much honor, in fact,
accrued.

If you have read certain other stories of mine you may remember that,
upon a memorable occasion, Judge William Pitman Priest made a trip to
New York and while there had dealings with a Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, a
promoter of gas and other hot-air propositions; and that during the
course of his stay in the metropolis he made the acquaintance of one
Malley, a Sun reporter. This had happened some years back, but Malley
was still on the staff of the Sun. It happened also that, going through
the paper to clip out and measure up his own space, Malley came upon the
corporal's contribution. Glancing over it idly, he caught the name,
twice or thrice repeated, of the town where Judge Priest lived. So he
bundled together a couple of copies and sent them South with a short
letter; and therefore it came about in due season, through the good
offices of the United States Post-office Department, that these
enclosures reached the judge on a showery afternoon as he loafed upon
his wide front porch, waiting for his supper.

First, he read Malley's letter and was glad to hear from Malley. With a
quickened interest he ran a plump thumb under the wrappings of the two
close-rolled papers, opened out one of them at page ten and read the
opening statement of Corporal Jacob Speck, for whom instantly the judge
conceived a long-distance fondness. Next he came to the letter that Miss
Hortense Engel had so accurately transcribed, and at the very first
words of it he sat up straighter, with a surprised and gratified little
grunt; for he had known them both--the writer of that letter and its
recipient. One still lived in his memory as a red-haired girl with a
pert, malicious face, and the other as a stripling youth in a ragged
gray uniform. And he had known most of those whose names studded the
printed lines so thickly. Indeed, some of them he still knew--only now
they were old men and old women--faded, wrinkled bucks and belles of a
far-distant day.

As he read the first words it came back to the judge, almost with the
jolting emphasis of a new and fresh sensation, that in the days of his
own youth he had never liked the girl who wrote that letter or the man
who received it. But she was dead this many and many a year--why, she
must have died soon after she wrote this very letter--the date proved
that--and he, the man, had fallen at Chickamauga, taking his death in
front like a soldier; and surely that settled everything and made all
things right! But the letter--that was the main thing. His old blue eyes
skipped nimbly behind the glasses that saddled the tip of his plump pink
nose, and the old judge read it--just such a letter as he himself had
received many a time; just such a wartime letter as uncounted thousands
of soldiers North and South received from their sweethearts and read and
reread by the light of flickering campfires and carried afterward in
their knapsacks through weary miles of marching.

It was crammed with the small-town gossip of a small town that was but
little more than a memory now--telling how, because he would not
volunteer, a hapless youth had been waylaid by a dozen high-spirited
girls and overpowered, and dressed in a woman's shawl and a woman's
poke bonnet, so that he left town with his shame between two suns;
how, since the Yankees had come, sundry faithless females were
friendly--actually friendly, this being underscored--with the more
personable of the young Yankee officers; how half the town was in
mourning for a son or brother dead or wounded; how a new and sweetly
sentimental song, called Rosalie, the Prairie Flower, was being much
sung at the time--and had it reached the army yet? how old Mrs. Hobbs
had been exiled to Canada for seditious acts and language and had
departed northward between two files of bluecoats, reviling the Yankees
with an unbitted tongue at every step; how So-and-So had died or married
or gone refugeeing below the enemy's line into safely Southern
territory; how this thing had happened and that thing had not.

The old judge read on and on, catching gladly at names that kindled a
tenderly warm glow of half-forgotten memories in his soul, until he came
to the last paragraph of all; and then, as he comprehended the intent of
it in all its barbed and venomed malice, he stood suddenly erect, with
the outspread paper shaking in his hard grip. For now, coming back to
him by so strange a way across fifty years of silence and
misunderstanding, he read there the answer to the town's oldest, biggest
tragedy and knew what it was that all this time had festered, like
buried thorns, in the flesh of those two men, his comrades and friends.
He dropped the paper, and up and down the wide, empty porch he stumped
on his short stout legs, shaking with the shock of revelation and with
indignation and pity for the blind and bitter uselessness of it all.

"Ah hah!" he said to himself over and over again understandingly. "Ah
hah!" And then: "Next to a mean man, a mean woman is the meanest thing
in this whole created world, I reckin. I ain't sure but what she's the
meanest of the two. And to think of what them two did between 'em--she
writin' that hellish black lyin' tale to 'Lonzo Pike and he puttin' off
hotfoot to Abner Tilghman to poison his mind with it and set him like a
flint against his own flesh and blood! And wasn't it jest like Lon Pike
to go and git himself killed the next day after he got that there
letter! And wasn't it jest like her to up and die before the truth could
be brought home to her! And wasn't it like them two stubborn, set,
contrary, close-mouthed Tilghman boys to go 'long through all these
years, without neither one of 'em ever offerin' to make or take an
explanation!" His tone changed. "Oh, ain't it been a pitiful thing! And
all so useless! But--oh, thank the Lord--it ain't too late to mend it
part way anyhow! Thank God, it ain't too late for that!"

Exulting now, he caught up the paper he had dropped, and with it
crumpled in his pudgy fist was half-way down the gravel walk, bound for
the little cottage snuggled in its vine ambush across Clay Street before
a better and a bigger inspiration caught up with him and halted him
midway of an onward stride.

Was not this the second Friday in the month? It certainly was. And would
not the Camp be meeting tonight in regular semimonthly session at
Kamleiter's Hall? It certainly would. For just a moment Judge Priest
considered the proposition. He slapped his linen clad flank gleefully,
and his round old face, which had been knotted with resolution, broke up
into a wrinkly, ample smile; he spun on his heel and hurried back into
the house and to the telephone in the hall. For half an hour, more or
less, Judge Priest was busy at that telephone, calling in a high,
excited voice, first for one number and then for another. While he did
this his supper grew cold on the table, and in the dining room Jeff, the
white-clad, fidgeted and out in the kitchen Aunt Dilsey, the turbaned,
fumed--but, at Kamleiter's Hall that night at eight, Judge Priest's
industry was in abundant fulness rewarded.

Once upon a time Gideon K. Irons Camp claimed a full two hundred
members, but that had been when it was first organized. Now there were
in good standing less than twenty. Of these twenty, fifteen sat on the
hard wooden chairs when Judge Priest rapped with his metal spectacle
case for order, and that fifteen meant all who could travel out at
nights. Doctor Lake was there, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, the faithful
and inevitable. It was the biggest turnout the Camp had had in a year.

Far over on one side, cramped down in a chair, was Captain Abner
Tilghman, feeble and worn-looking. His buggy horse stood hitched by the
curb downstairs. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby had gone to his house for him and
on the plea of business of vital moment had made him come with him.
Almost directly across the middle aisle on the other side sat Mr. Edward
Tilghman. Nobody had to go for him. He always came to a regular meeting
of the Camp, even though he heard the proceedings only in broken bits.

The adjutant called the roll and those present answered, each one to his
name; and mainly the voices sounded bent and sagged, like the bodies of
their owners. A keen onlooker might have noticed a sort of tremulous,
joyous impatience, which filled all save two of these old, gray men,
pushing the preliminaries forward with uncommon speed. They fidgeted in
their places.

Presently Judge Priest cleared his throat of a persistent huskiness and
stood up.

"Before we proceed to the regular routine," he piped, "I desire to
present a certain matter to a couple of our members." He came down off
the little platform, where the flags were draped, with a step that was
almost light, and into Captain Abner Tilghman's hand he put a copy of a
city paper, turned and folded at a certain place, where a column of
printed matter was scored about with heavy pencil bracketings. "Cap'n,"
he said, "as a personal favor to me, suh, would you please read this
here article?--the one that's marked"--he pointed with his finger--"not
aloud--read it to yourself, please."

It was characteristic of the paralytic to say nothing. Without a word he
adjusted his glasses and without a word he began to read. So instantly
intent was he that he did not see what followed next--and that was Judge
Priest crossing over to Mr. Edward Tilghman's side with another copy of
a paper in his hand.

"Ed," he bade him, "read this here article, won't you? Read it clear
through to the end--it might interest you maybe." The deaf man looked up
at him wonderingly, but took the paper in his slightly palsied hand and
bent his head close above the printed sheet.

Judge Priest stood in the middle aisle, making no move to go back to his
own place. He watched the two silent readers. All the others watched
them too. They read on, making slow progress, for the light was poor and
their eyes were poor. And the watchers could hardly contain themselves;
they could hardly wait. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby kept bobbing up and down
like a pudgy jack-in-the-box that is slightly stiff in its joints. A
small, restrained rustle of bodies accompanied the rustle of the folded
newspapers held in shaky hands.

Unconscious of all scrutiny, the brothers read on. Perhaps because he
had started first--perhaps because his glasses were the more expensive
and presumably therefore the more helpful--Captain Abner Tilghman came
to the concluding paragraph first. He read it through--and then Judge
Priest turned his head away, for a moment almost regretting he had
chosen so public a place for this thing.

He looked back again in time to see Captain Abner getting upon his feet.
Dragging his dead leg behind him, the paralytic crossed the bare floor
to where his brother's gray head was bent to his task. And at his side
he halted, making no sound or sign, but only waiting. He waited there,
trembling all over, until the sitter came to the end of the column and
read what was there--and lifted a face all glorified with a perfect
understanding.

"Eddie!" said the older man--"Eddie!" He uttered a name of boyhood
affection that none there had heard uttered for fifty years nearly; and
it was as though a stone had been rolled away from a tomb--as though out
of the grave of a dead past a voice had been resurrected. "Eddie!" he
said a third time, pleadingly, abjectly, humbly, craving for
forgiveness.

"Brother Abner!" said the other man. "Oh, Brother Abner!" he said--and
that was all he did say--all he had need to say, for he was on his feet
now, reaching out with wide-spread, shaking arms.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby tried to start a cheer, but could not make it come
out of his throat--only a clicking, squeaking kind of sound came. As a
cheer it was a miserable failure.

Side by side, each with his inner arm tight gripped about the other, the
brothers, bareheaded, turned their backs upon their friends and went
away. Slowly they passed out through the doorway into the darkness of
the stair landing, and the members of the Gideon K. Irons Camp were all
up on their feet.

"Mind that top step, Abner!" they heard the younger man say. "Wait! I'll
help you down."

That was all that was heard, except a scuffling sound of uncertainly
placed feet, growing fainter and fainter as the two brothers passed down
the long stairs of Kamleiter's Hall and out into the night--that was
all, unless you would care to take cognizance of a subdued little chorus
such as might be produced by twelve or thirteen elderly men snuffling in
a large bare room. As commandant of the Camp it was fitting, perhaps,
that Judge Priest should speak first.

"The trouble with this here Camp is jest this," he said: "it's got a lot
of snifflin' old fools in it that don't know no better than to bust out
cryin' when they oughter be happy!" And then, as if to show how deeply
he felt the shame of such weakness on the part of others, Judge Priest
blew his nose with great violence, and for a space of minutes
industriously mopped at his indignant eyes with an enormous pocket
handkerchief.

       *       *       *       *       *

In accordance with a rule, Jeff Poindexter waited up for his employer.
Jeff expected him by nine-thirty at the latest; but it was actually
getting along toward ten-thirty before Jeff, who had been dozing lightly
in the dim-lit hall, oblivious to the fanged attentions of some large
mosquitoes, roused suddenly as he heard the sound of a rambling but
familiar step clunking along the wooden sidewalk of Clay Street. The
latch on the front gate clicked, and as Jeff poked his nose out of the
front door he heard, down the aisle of trees that bordered the gravel
walk, the voice of his master uplifted in solitary song.

In the matter of song the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference
what the words might be or the theme--he sang every song and all songs
to a fine, high, tuneless little tune of his own. At this moment Judge
Priest, as Jeff gathered, was showing a wide range of selection. One
second he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all
the way from Pike, and the next he was stating, for the benefit of all
who might care to hear these details, that they--presumably certain
horses--were bound to run all night--bound to run all day; so you could
bet on the bobtailed nag and he'd bet on the bay. Nearer to the porch
steps it boastingly transpired that somebody had jumped aboard the
telegraf and steered her by the triggers, whereat the lightnin' flew and
'lectrified and killed ten thousand niggers! But even so general a
catastrophe could not weigh down the singer's spirits. As he put a
fumbling foot upon the lowermost step of the porch, he threw his head
far back and shrilly issued the following blanket invitation to ladies
resident in a far-away district:

    _Oh, Bowery gals, won't you come out tonight?
    Won't you come out tonight?
    Oh, Bowery gals, won't you come out tonight,
    And dance by the light of the moon?
    I danced with a gal with a hole in her stockin';
    And her heel it kep' a-rockin'--kep' a-rockin'!
    She was the purtiest gal in the room!_

Jeff pulled the front door wide open. The song stopped and Judge Priest
stood in the opening, teetering a little on his heels. His face was all
a blushing pinky glow.

"Evenin', jedge!" greeted Jeff. "You're late, suh!"

"Jeff," said Judge Priest slowly, "it's a beautiful evenin'."

Amazed, Jeff stared at him. As a matter of fact, the drizzle of the
afternoon had changed, soon after dark, to a steady downpour. The
judge's limpened hat brim dripped raindrops and his shoulders were
sopping wet, but Jeff had yet to knowingly and wilfully contradict a
prominent white citizen.

"Yas, suh!" he said, half affirmatively, half questioningly. "Is it?"

"It is so!" said Judge Priest. "Every star in the sky shines like a
diamond! Jeff, it's the most beautiful evenin' I ever remember!"




VIII

FISHHEAD


It goes past the powers of my pen to try to describe Reelfoot Lake for
you so that you, reading this, will get the picture of it in your mind
as I have it in mine. For Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that I
know anything about. It is an afterthought of Creation.

The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun for
thousands of years--for millions of years for all I know--before
Reelfoot came to be. It's the newest big thing in nature on this
hemisphere probably, for it was formed by the great earthquake of 1811,
just a little more than a hundred years ago. That earthquake of 1811
surely altered the face of the earth on the then far frontier of this
country. It changed the course of rivers, it converted hills into what
are now the sunk lands of three states, and it turned the solid ground
to jelly and made it roll in waves like the sea. And in the midst of
the retching of the land and the vomiting of the waters it depressed to
varying depths a section of the earth crust sixty miles long, taking it
down--trees, hills, hollows and all; and a crack broke through to the
Mississippi River so that for three days the river ran up stream,
filling the hole.

The result was the largest lake south of the Ohio, lying mostly in
Tennessee, but extending up across what is now the Kentucky line, and
taking its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splay,
reeled foot of a cornfield negro. Niggerwool Swamp, not so far away, may
have got its name from the same man who christened Reelfoot; at least so
it sounds.

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it is
bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress trees that went
down when the earth sank still stand upright, so that if the sun shines
from the right quarter and the water is less muddy than common, a man
peering face downward into its depths sees, or thinks he sees, down
below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers,
all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green
lake slime. In still other places the lake is shallow for long
stretches, no deeper than breast deep to a man, but dangerous because of
the weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's limbs.
Its banks are mainly mud, its waters are muddied too, being a rich
coffee color in the spring and a copperish yellow in the summer, and the
trees along its shore are mud colored clear up to their lower limbs
after the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunks
with a thick, scrofulous-looking coat.

There are stretches of unbroken woodland around it and slashes where the
cypress knees rise countlessly like headstones and footstones for the
dead snags that rot in the soft ooze. There are deadenings with the
lowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached,
fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb.
There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog-spawn
clings like patches of white mucus among the weed stalks and at night
the turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly round, white eggs
with tough, rubbery shells in the sand. There are bayous leading off to
nowhere and sloughs that wind aimlessly, like great, blind worms, to
finally join the big river that rolls its semi-liquid torrents a few
miles to the westward.

So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in the
winter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the
woods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo gnats by the million and
the billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing,
and in the fall ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the
first frost brings--gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red of
dogwood and ash and purple-black of sweet-gum.

But the Reelfoot country has its uses. It is the best game and fish
country, natural or artificial, that is left in the South today. In
their appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in, and even
semi-tropical birds, like the brown pelican and the Florida snake-bird,
have been known to come there to nest. Pigs, gone back to wildness,
range the ridges, each razor-backed drove captained by a gaunt, savage,
slab-sided old boar. By night the bull frogs, inconceivably big and
tremendously vocal, bellow under the banks.

It is a wonderful place for fish--bass and crappie and perch and the
snouted buffalo fish. How these edible sorts live to spawn and how their
spawn in turn live to spawn again is a marvel, seeing how many of the
big fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger than
anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny
plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists
say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the
Reptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of
freshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting
out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places
with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into the
water. On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny days
in groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, with
their little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselessly
off at the first sound of oars grating in the row-locks.

But the biggest of them all are the catfish. These are monstrous
creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot--scaleless, slick things, with
corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers
dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feet
long they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and they
have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist and
strong enough to break any hook save the strongest and greedy enough to
eat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the horny jaws can master.
Oh, but they are wicked things, and they tell wicked tales of them down
there. They call them man-eaters and compare them, in certain of their
habits, to sharks.

Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn
fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one
place, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of a
negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and
the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of
the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously
marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable
embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man--a short, stocky,
sinewy body--but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish
as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. His
skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a
forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were
small and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they were
set wide apart in his head and they were unwinking and staring, like a
fish's eyes. His nose was no more than a pair of tiny slits in the
middle of the yellow mask. His mouth was the worst of all. It was the
awful mouth of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide,
stretching from side to side. Also when Fishhead became a man grown his
likeness to a fish increased, for the hair upon his face grew out into
two tightly kinked, slender pendants that drooped down either side of
the mouth like the beards of a fish.

If he had any other name than Fishhead, none excepting he knew it. As
Fishhead he was known and as Fishhead he answered. Because he knew the
waters and the woods of Reelfoot better than any other man there, he was
valued as a guide by the city men who came every year to hunt or fish;
but there were few such jobs that Fishhead would take. Mainly he kept
to himself, tending his corn patch, netting the lake, trapping a little
and in season pot hunting for the city markets. His neighbors,
ague-bitten whites and malaria-proof negroes alike, left him to himself.
Indeed for the most part they had a superstitious fear of him. So he
lived alone, with no kith nor kin, nor even a friend, shunning his kind
and shunned by them.

His cabin stood just below the state line, where Mud Slough runs into
the lake. It was a shack of logs, the only human habitation for four
miles up or down. Behind it the thick timber came shouldering right up
to the edge of Fishhead's small truck patch, enclosing it in thick shade
except when the sun stood just overhead. He cooked his food in a
primitive fashion, outdoors, over a hole in the soggy earth or upon the
rusted red ruin of an old cook stove, and he drank the saffron water of
the lake out of a dipper made of a gourd, faring and fending for
himself, a master hand at skiff and net, competent with duck gun and
fish spear, yet a creature of affliction and loneliness, part savage,
almost amphibious, set apart from his fellows, silent and suspicious.

In front of his cabin jutted out a long fallen cottonwood trunk, lying
half in and half out of the water, its top side burnt by the sun and
worn by the friction of Fishhead's bare feet until it showed countless
patterns of tiny scrolled lines, its under side black and rotted and
lapped at unceasingly by little waves like tiny licking tongues. Its
farther end reached deep water. And it was a part of Fishhead, for no
matter how far his fishing and trapping might take him in the daytime,
sunset would find him back there, his boat drawn up on the bank and he
on the outer end of this log. From a distance men had seen him there
many times, sometimes squatted, motionless as the big turtles that would
crawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and vigilant
like a creek crane, his misshapen yellow form outlined against the
yellow sun, the yellow water, the yellow banks--all of them yellow
together.

If the Reelfooters shunned Fishhead by day they feared him by night and
avoided him as a plague, dreading even the chance of a casual meeting.
For there were ugly stories about Fishhead--stories which all the
negroes and some of the whites believed. They said that a cry which had
been heard just before dusk and just after, skittering across the
darkened waters, was his calling cry to the big cats, and at his bidding
they came trooping in, and that in their company he swam in the lake on
moonlight nights, sporting with them, diving with them, even feeding
with them on what manner of unclean things they fed. The cry had been
heard many times, that much was certain, and it was certain also that
the big fish were noticeably thick at the mouth of Fishhead's slough.
No native Reelfooter, white or black, would willingly wet a leg or an
arm there.

Here Fishhead had lived and here he was going to die. The Baxters were
going to kill him, and this day in mid-summer was to be the time of the
killing. The two Baxters--Jake and Joel--were coming in their dugout to
do it. This murder had been a long time in the making. The Baxters had
to brew their hate over a slow fire for months before it reached the
pitch of action. They were poor whites, poor in everything--repute and
worldly goods and standing--a pair of fever-ridden squatters who lived
on whisky and tobacco when they could get it, and on fish and cornbread
when they couldn't.

The feud itself was of months' standing. Meeting Fishhead one day in the
spring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log,
and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with a
bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him,
wantonly and without proof, of running their trot-line and stripping it
of the hooked catch--an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers and
the shanty boaters of the South. Seeing that he bore this accusation in
silence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then to
slap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating of
their lives--bloodying their noses and bruising their lips with hard
blows against their front teeth, and finally leaving them, mauled and
prone, in the dirt. Moreover, in the onlookers a sense of the
everlasting fitness of things had triumphed over race prejudice and
allowed them--two freeborn, sovereign whites--to be licked by a nigger.

Therefore, they were going to get the nigger. The whole thing had been
planned out amply. They were going to kill him on his log at sundown.
There would be no witnesses to see it, no retribution to follow after
it. The very ease of the undertaking made them forget even their inborn
fear of the place of Fishhead's habitation.

For more than an hour now they had been coming from their shack across a
deeply indented arm of the lake. Their dugout, fashioned by fire and adz
and draw-knife from the bole of a gum tree, moved through the water as
noiselessly as a swimming mallard, leaving behind it a long, wavy trail
on the stilled waters. Jake, the better oarsman sat flat in the stern of
the round-bottomed craft, paddling with quick, splashless strokes. Joel,
the better shot, was squatted forward. There was a heavy, rusted duck
gun between his knees.

Though their spying upon the victim had made them certain sure he would
not be about the shore for hours, a doubled sense of caution led them to
hug closely the weedy banks. They slid along the shore like shadows,
moving so swiftly and in such silence that the watchful mud turtles
barely turned their snaky heads as they passed. So, a full hour before
the time, they came slipping around the mouth of the slough and made for
a natural ambuscade which the mixed breed had left within a stone's jerk
of his cabin to his own undoing.

Where the slough's flow joined deeper water a partly uprooted tree was
stretched, prone from shore, at the top still thick and green with
leaves that drew nourishment from the earth in which the half-uncovered
roots yet held, and twined about with an exuberance of trumpet vines and
wild fox-grapes. All about was a huddle of drift--last year's
cornstalks, shreddy strips of bark, chunks of rotted weed, all the
riffle and dunnage of a quiet eddy. Straight into this green clump
glided the dugout and swung, broadside on, against the protecting trunk
of the tree, hidden from the inner side by the intervening curtains of
rank growth, just as the Baxters had intended it should be hidden, when
days before in their scouting they marked this masked place of waiting
and included it, then and there, in the scope of their plans.

There had been no hitch or mishap. No one had been abroad in the late
afternoon to mark their movements--and in a little while Fishhead ought
to be due. Jake's woodman's eye followed the downward swing of the sun
speculatively. The shadows, thrown shoreward, lengthened and slithered
on the small ripples. The small noises of the day died out; the small
noises of the coming night began to multiply. The green-bodied flies
went away and big mosquitoes, with speckled gray legs, came to take the
places of the flies. The sleepy lake sucked at the mud banks with small
mouthing sounds as though it found the taste of the raw mud agreeable. A
monster crawfish, big as a chicken lobster, crawled out of the top of
his dried mud chimney and perched himself there, an armored sentinel on
the watchtower. Bull bats began to flitter back and forth above the tops
of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle
off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen
with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it
moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's.
Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact
little swarm of midges hung, holding to a sort of kite-shaped formation.

A little more time passed and Fishhead came out of the woods at the
back, walking swiftly, with a sack over his shoulder. For a few seconds
his deformities showed in the clearing, then the black inside of the
cabin swallowed him up. By now the sun was almost down. Only the red nub
of it showed above the timber line across the lake, and the shadows lay
inland a long way. Out beyond, the big cats were stirring, and the great
smacking sounds as their twisting bodies leaped clear and fell back in
the water came shoreward in a chorus.

But the two brothers in their green covert gave heed to nothing except
the one thing upon which their hearts were set and their nerves tensed.
Joel gently shoved his gun-barrels across the log, cuddling the stock to
his shoulder and slipping two fingers caressingly back and forth upon
the triggers. Jake held the narrow dugout steady by a grip upon a
fox-grape tendril.

A little wait and then the finish came. Fishhead emerged from the cabin
door and came down the narrow footpath to the water and out upon the
water on his log. He was barefooted and bareheaded, his cotton shirt
open down the front to show his yellow neck and breast, his dungaree
trousers held about his waist by a twisted tow string. His broad splay
feet, with the prehensile toes outspread, gripped the polished curve of
the log as he moved along its swaying, dipping surface until he came to
its outer end and stood there erect, his chest filling, his chinless
face lifted up and something of mastership and dominion in his poise.
And then--his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed--the
round, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleams of Joel's eyes,
aimed at him through the green tracery.

In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured by
seconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his head
still higher and opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and out
across the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry. And in his cry
was the laugh of a loon, and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bay
of a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too,
was a farewell and a defiance and an appeal. The heavy roar of the duck
gun came.

At twenty yards the double charge tore the throat out of him. He came
down, face forward, upon the log and clung there, his trunk twisting
distortedly, his legs twitching and kicking like the legs of a speared
frog, his shoulders hunching and lifting spasmodically as the life ran
out of him all in one swift coursing flow. His head canted up between
the heaving shoulders, his eyes looked full on the staring face of his
murderer, and then the blood came out of his mouth and Fishhead, in
death still as much fish as man, slid flopping, head first, off the end
of the log and sank, face downward, slowly, his limbs all extended out.
One after another a string of big bubbles came up to burst in the middle
of a widening reddish stain on the coffee-colored water.

The brothers watched this, held by the horror of the thing they had
done, and the cranky dugout, tipped far over by the recoil of the gun,
took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a sudden
stroke from below upon its careening bottom and it went over and they
were in the lake. But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of the
uprooted tree only five. Joel, still holding fast to his hot gun, made
for the log, gaining it with one stroke. He threw his free arm over it
and clung there, treading water, as he shook his eyes free. Something
gripped him--some great, sinewy, unseen thing gripped him fast by the
thigh, crushing down on his flesh.

He uttered no cry, but his eyes popped out and his mouth set in a square
shape of agony, and his fingers gripped into the bark of the tree like
grapples. He was pulled down and down, by steady jerks, not rapidly but
steadily, so steadily, and as he went his fingernails tore four little
white strips in the tree bark. His mouth went under, next his popping
eyes, then his erect hair, and finally his clawing, clutching hand, and
that was the end of him.

Jake's fate was harder still, for he lived longer--long enough to see
Joel's finish. He saw it through the water that ran down his face, and
with a great surge of his whole body he literally flung himself across
the log and jerked his legs up high into the air to save them. He flung
himself too far, though, for his face and chest hit the water on the far
side. And out of this water rose the head of a great fish, with the
lake slime of years on its flat, black head, its whiskers bristling, its
corpsy eyes alight. Its horny jaws closed and clamped in the front of
Jake's flannel shirt. His hand struck out wildly and was speared on a
poisoned fin, and unlike Joel, he went from sight with a great yell and
a whirling and a churning of the water that made the cornstalks circle
on the edges of a small whirlpool.

But the whirlpool soon thinned away into widening rings of ripples and
the cornstalks quit circling and became still again, and only the
multiplying night noises sounded about the mouth of the slough.

       *       *       *       *       *

The bodies of all three came ashore on the same day near the same place.
Except for the gaping gunshot wound where the neck met the chest,
Fishhead's body was unmarked. But the bodies of the two Baxters were so
marred and mauled that the Reelfooters buried them together on the bank
without ever knowing which might be Jake's and which might be Joel's.




IX

GUILTY AS CHARGED


The Jew, I take it, is essentially temperamental, whereas the Irishman
is by nature sentimental; so that in the long run both of them may reach
the same results by varying mental routes. This, however, has nothing to
do with the story I am telling here, except inferentially.

It was trial day at headquarters. To be exact, it was the tail end of
trial day at headquarters. The mills of the police gods, which grind not
so slowly but ofttimes exceeding fine, were about done with their
grinding; and as the last of the grist came through the hopper, the last
of the afternoon sunlight came sifting in through the windows at the
west, thin and pale as skim milk. One after another the culprits,
patrolmen mainly, had been arraigned on charges preferred by a superior
officer, who was usually a lieutenant or a captain, but once in a while
an inspector, full-breasted and gold-banded, like a fat blue bumblebee.
In due turn each offender had made his defense; those who were lying
about it did their lying, as a rule, glibly and easily and with a
certain bogus frankness very pleasing to see. Contrary to a general
opinion, the Father of Lies is often quite good to his children. But
those who were telling the truth were frequently shamefaced and mumbling
of speech, making poor impressions.

In due turn, also, each man had been convicted or had been acquitted,
yet all--the proven innocent and the adjudged guilty alike--had
undergone punishment, since they all had to sit and listen to lectures
on police discipline and police manners from the trial deputy. It was
perhaps as well for the peace and good order of the community that the
public did not attend these séances. Those classes now that are the most
thoroughly and most personally governed--the pushcart pedlers, with the
permanent cringing droops in their alien backs; the sinful small boys,
who play baseball in the streets against the statutes made and provided;
the broken old wrecks, who ambush the prosperous passer-by in the
shadows of dark corners, begging for money with which to keep body and
soul together--it was just as well perhaps that none of them was
admitted there to see these large, firm, stern men in uniform wriggling
on the punishment chair, fumbling at their buttons, explaining, whining,
even begging for mercy under the lashing flail of Third Deputy
Commissioner Donohue's sleety judgments.

"The only time old Donny warms up is when he's got a grudge against
you," a wit of headquarters--Larry Magee by name--had said once as he
came forth from the ordeal, brushing imaginary hailstones off his
shoulders. "It's always snowing hard in his soul!"

Unlike most icy-tempered men, though, Third Deputy Commissioner Donohue
was addicted to speech. Dearly he loved to hear the sound of his own
voice. Give to Donohue a congenial topic, such as some one's official or
personal shortcomings, and a congenial audience, and he excelled
mightily in saw-edged oratory, rolling his r's until the tortured
consonants fairly lay on their backs and begged for mercy.

This, however, would have to be said for Deputy Commissioner Donohue--he
was a hard one to fool. Himself a grayed ex-private of the force, who
had climbed from the ranks step by step through slow and devious stages,
he was coldly aware of every trick and device of the delinquent
policeman. A new and particularly ingenious subterfuge, one that tasted
of the fresh paint, might win his begrudged admiration--his gray flints
of eyes would strike off sparks of grim appreciation; but then, nearly
always, as though to discourage originality even in lying, he would
plaster on the penalty--and the lecture--twice as thick. Wherefore,
because of all these things, the newspaper men at headquarters viewed
this elderly disciplinarian with mixed professional emotions. Presiding
over a trial day, he made abundant copy for them, which was very good;
but if the case were an important one he often prolonged it until they
missed getting the result into their final editions, which, if you know
anything about final editions, was very, very bad.

It was so on this particular afternoon. Here it was nearly dusk. The
windows toward the east showed merely as opaque patches set against a
wall of thickening gloom, and the third deputy commissioner had started
in at two-thirty and was not done yet. Sparse and bony, he crouched
forward on the edge of his chair, with his lean head drawn down between
his leaner shoulders and his stiff stubble of hair erect on his scalp,
and he looked, perching there, like a broody but vigilant old crested
cormorant upon a barren rock.

Except for one lone figure of misery, the anxious bench below him was by
now empty. Most of the witnesses were gone and most of the spectators,
and all the newspaper men but two. He whetted a lean and crooked
forefinger like a talon on the edge of the docket book, turned the page
and called the last case, being the case of Patrolman James J. Rogan.
Patrolman Rogan was a short horse and soon curried. For being on such
and such a day, at such and such an hour, off his post, where he
belonged, and in a saloon where he did not belong, sitting down, with
his blouse unfastened and his belt unbuckled; and for having no better
excuse, or no worse one, than the ancient tale of a sudden attack of
faintness causing him to make his way into the nearest place where he
might recover himself--that it happened to be a family liquor store was,
he protested, a sheer accident--Patrolman Rogan was required to pay five
days' pay and, moreover, to listen to divers remarks in which he heard
himself likened to several things, none of them of a complimentary
character.

Properly crushed and shrunken, the culprit departed thence with his
uniform bagged and wrinkling upon his diminished form, and the third
deputy commissioner, well pleased, on the whole, with his day's hunting,
prepared to adjourn. The two lone reporters got up and made for the
door, intending to telephone in to their two shops the grand total and
final summary of old Donohue's bag of game.

They were at the door, in a little press of departing witnesses and late
defendants, when behind them a word in Donohue's hard-rolled official
accents made them halt and turn round. The veteran had picked up from
his desk a sheet of paper and was squinting up his hedgy, thick eyebrows
in an effort to read what was written there.

"Wan more case to be heard," he announced. "Keep order there, you men at
the door! The case of Lieutenant Isidore Weil"--he grated the name out
lingeringly--"charged with--with----" He broke off, peering about him
for some one to scold. "Couldn't you be makin' a light here, some of
you! I can't see to make out these here charges and specifications."

Some one bestirred himself and many lights popped on, chasing the
shadows back into the far corners. Outside in the hall a policeman doing
duty as a bailiff called the name of Lieutenant Isidore Weil, thrice
repeated.

"Gee! Have they landed that slick kike at last?" said La Farge, the
older of the reporters, half to himself. "Say, you know, that tickles
me! I've been looking this long time for something like this to be
coming off." Like most old headquarters reporters, La Farge had his
deep-seated prejudices. To judge by his present expression, this was a
very deep-seated one, amounting, you might say, to a constitutional
infirmity with La Farge.

"Who's Weil and what's he done?" inquired Rogers. Rogers was a young
reporter.

"I don't know yet--the charge must be newly filed, I guess," said La
Farge, answering the last question first. "But I hope they nail him! I
don't like him--never did. He's too fresh. He's too smart--one of those
self-educated East Side Yiddishers, you know. Used to be a court
interpreter down at Essex Market--knows about steen languages. And
he--here he comes now."

Weil passed them, going into the trial room--a short, squarely built man
with oily black hair above a dark, round face. Instantly you knew him
for one of the effusive Semitic type; every angle and turn of his
outward aspect testified frankly of his breed and his sort. And at sight
of him entering you could almost see the gorge of Deputy Commissioner
Donohue's race antagonism rising inside of him. His gray hackles
stiffened and his thick-set eyebrows bristled outward like bits of
frosted privet. Again he began whetting his forefinger on the leather
back of the closed docket book. It was generally a bad sign for somebody
when Donohue whetted his forefinger like that, and La Farge would have
delighted to note it. But La Farge's appraising eyes were upon the
accused.

"Listen!" he said under his breath to Rogers. "I think they must have
the goods on Mister Wisenheimer at last. Usually he's the cockiest person
round this building. Now take a look at him."

Indeed, there was a visible air of self-abasement about Lieutenant Weil
as he crossed the wide chamber. It was a thing hard to define in words;
yet undeniably there was a diffidence and a reluctance manifest in him,
as though a sense of guilt wrestled with the man's natural conceit and
assurance.

"Rogers," said La Farge, "let's hustle out and 'phone in what we've got
and then come back right away. If this fellow's going to get the harpoon
stuck into him I want to be on hand when he starts bleeding."

Only a few of the dwindled crowd turned back to hear the beginning of
the case, whatever it might be, against the Jew. The rest scattered
through the corridors, heading mainly for the exits, so that the two
newspaper men had company as they hurried toward the main door, making
for their offices across the street. When they came back the long cross
halls were almost deserted; it had taken them a little longer to finish
the job of telephoning than they had figured. At the door of the trial
room stood one bulky blue figure. It was the acting bailiff.

"How far along have they got?" asked La Farge as the policeman made way
for them to pass in.

"Captain Meagher is the first witness," said the policeman. "He's the
one that's makin' the charge."

"What is the charge?" put in Rogers.

"At this distance I couldn't make out--Cap Meagher, he mumbles so,"
confessed the doorkeeper. "Somethin' about misuse of police property, I
take it to be."

"Aha!" gloated La Farge in his gratification. "Come on, Rogers--I don't
want to miss any of this."

It was plain, however, that they had missed something; for, to judge by
his attitude, Captain Meagher was quite through with his testimony. He
still sat in the witness chair alongside the deputy commissioner's desk;
but he was silent and he stared vacantly at vacancy. Captain Meagher was
known in the department as a man incredibly honest and unbelievably
dull. He had no more imagination than one of his own reports. He had a
long, sad face, like a tired workhorse's, and heavy black eyebrows that
curved high in the middle and arched downward at each end--circumflexes
accenting the incurable stupidity of his expression. His black mustache
drooped the same way, too, in the design of an inverted magnet. Larry
Magee had coined one of his best whimsies on the subject of the shape of
the captain's mustache.

"No wonder," he said, "old Meagher never has any luck--he wears his
horseshoe upside down on his face!"

Just as the two reporters, re-entering, took their seats the trial
deputy spoke.

"Is that all, Captain Meagher?" he asked sonorously.

"That's all," said Meagher.

"I note," went on Donohue, glancing about him, "that the accused does
not appear to be represented by counsel."

A man on trial at headquarters has the right to hire a lawyer to defend
him.

"No, sir," spoke up Weil briskly. "I've got no lawyer, commissioner."
His speech was the elaborated and painfully emphasized English of the
self-taught East Sider. It carried in it just the bare suggestion of the
racial lisp, and it made an acute contrast to the menacing Hibernian
purr of Donohue's heavier voice. "I kind of thought I'd conduct my own
case myself."

Donohue merely grunted.

"Do you desire, Lieutenant Weil, for to ask Captain Meagher any
questions?" he demanded.

Weil shook his oily head of hair.

"No, sir. I wouldn't wish to ask the captain anything."

"Are there any other witnesses?" inquired Donohue next.

There was no answer. Plainly there were no other witnesses.

"Lieutenant Weil, do you desire for to say something in your own
behalf?" queried the deputy commissioner.

"I think I'd like to," answered Weil.

He stood to be sworn, took the chair Meagher vacated and sat facing the
room, appearing--so La Farge thought--more shamefaced and abashed than
ever.

"Now, then," commanded Donohue impressively, "what statement, if any,
have you to make, Lieutenant Weil, touchin' on this here charge
preferred by your superior officer?"

Weil cleared his throat. Rogers figured that this bespoke embarrassment;
but, to the biased understanding of the hostile La Farge, there was
something falsely theatrical even in the way Weil cleared his throat.

"Once a grandstander always a grandstander!" he muttered derisively.

"What did you say?" whispered Rogers.

"Nothing," replied La Farge--"just thinking out loud. Listen to what
Foxy Issy has to say for himself."

"Well, sir, commissioner," began the accused, "this here thing happens
last Thursday, just as Captain Meagher is telling you." He had slipped
already into the policeman's trick of detailing a past event in the
present tense.

"It's late in the afternoon--round five o'clock I guess--and I'm
downstairs in the Detective Bureau alone."

"Alone, you say?" broke in Donohue, emphasizing the word as though the
admission scored a point against the man on trial.

"Yes, sir, I'm alone. It happens that everybody else is out and I'm in
temporary charge, as you might say. It's getting along toward dark when
Patrolman Morgan, who's on duty out in the hall, comes in and says to me
there's a woman outside who can't talk English and he can't make out
what she wants. So I tells him to bring her in. She comes in. Right
away I see she's a Ginney--an Italian," he corrected himself hurriedly.
"She's got a child with her--a little boy about two years old."

"Describe this here woman!" ordered Donohue, who loved to drag in
details at a trial, not so much for the sake of the details themselves
as to show his skill as a cross-examiner.

"Well, sir," complied Weil, "I should say she's about twenty-five years
old. It's hard to tell about those Italian women, but I should say she's
about twenty-five--or maybe twenty-six. She's got no figure at all and
she's dressed poor. But she's got a pretty face--big brown eyes and----"

"That will do," interrupted the deputy commissioner--"that will do for
that. I take it you're not qualifyin' here for a beauty expert,
Lieutenant Weil!" he added with elaborate sarcasm.

"You asked me about her looks, sir," parried Weil defensively, "and I'm
just trying to tell you."

"Proceed! Proceed!" bade Donohue, rumbling his consonants.

"Yes, sir. Well, in regard to this woman: She's talking so fast I can't
figure out at first what she's trying to tell me. It's Italian she's
talking--or I should say the kind of Italian they talk in parts of
Sicily. After a little I begin to see what she's driving at. It seems
she's the wife of one Antonio Terranova and her name is Maria
Terranova. And after I get her straightened out and going slow she tells
me her story."

"Is this here story got a bearin' on the charges pendin'?"

"I think it has. Yes, sir; it helps to explain what happens. As near as
I can make out she comes from some small town down round Messina
somewhere, and the way she tells it to me, her husband leaves there not
long after they're married and comes over here to New York to get work,
and when he gets enough money saved up ahead he's going to send back for
her. That's near about three years ago. So she stays behind waiting for
him, and in about four months after he leaves the baby is born--the same
baby that she brings in here to headquarters with her last Thursday. She
says neither one of them thinks it'll be long before he can save up
money for her passage, but it seems like he has the bad luck. He's sick
for a while after he lands, and then when he gets a job in a
construction gang the padrone takes the most of what he makes. And just
about the time he gets a little saved up some other Ginney--Italian--in
the construction camp steals it off of him.

"So he's up against it, and after a while he gets desperate. So he joins
in with a Black Hander gang--amateurs operating up in the Bronx--and the
very first trick he helps turn he does well by it. His share is near
about a hundred dollars, and he sends her the best part of it to bring
her and the baby over. She don't know at the time, though, how he raises
all this money--so she tells me. And I think, at that, she's telling the
truth--she ain't got sense enough to lie, I think. Anyway it sounds
truthful to me--the way she tells it to me here last Thursday night."

"Proceed!" prompted Donohue testily.

"So she takes this here money and buys herself a steerage ticket and
comes over here with the baby. That, as near as I can figure out, is
about three months ago. She's not seen this husband of hers for going on
three years--of course the baby's never seen him. And she figures he'll
be at the dock to meet her. But he's not there. But his cousin is
there--another Italian from the same town. He gets her through Ellis
Island somehow and he takes her up to where he's living--up in the
Bronx--and tells her the reason her husband ain't there to meet her. The
reason is, he's at Sing Sing, doing four years.

"It seems that after he's sent her this passage money the husband gets
to thinking Black Handing is a pretty soft way to make a living,
especially compared to day laboring, and he tries to raise a stake
single-handed. He writes a Black Hand letter to an Italian grocer he
knows has got money laid by, only the grocer is foxy and goes to the
Tremont Avenue Station and shows the letter. They rig up a plant and
this here Antonio Terranova walks into it. He's caught with the marked
bills on him. So just the week before she lands he takes a plea in
General Sessions and the judge gives him four years. When she gets to
where she's telling me that part of it she starts crying.

"Well, anyway, that's the situation--him up there at Sing Sing doing his
four years and her down here in New York with the kid on her hands. And
she don't ever see him again, either, because in about three or four
weeks--something like that--he's working with a gang in the rock quarry
across the river, where they're building the new cell house, and a chunk
of slate falls down and kills him and two others."

"Right here and now," interrupted the third deputy commissioner, "I want
to know what's all this here stuff got to do with these here charges and
specifications?"

"Just a minute, please. I'm coming to that right away, commissioner,"
protested the accused lieutenant with a sort of glib nervous agility;
yet for all of his promising, he paused for a little bit before he
continued. And this pause, brief enough as it was, gave the listening La
Farge time to discover, with a small inward jar of surprise, that
somehow, some way, he was beginning to lose some of his acrid antagonism
for Weil; that, by mental processes which as yet he could not exactly
resolve into their proper constituents, it was beginning to dribble
away from him. And realization came to him, almost with a shock, that
the man on the stand was telling the truth. Truth or not, though, the
narrative thus far had been commonplace enough--people at headquarters
hear the like of it often; and as a seasoned police reporter La Farge's
emotions by now should be coated over with a calloused shell inches deep
and hard as horn. Trying with half his mind to figure out what it was
that had quickened these emotions, he listened all the harder as Weil
went on.

"So this here big chunk of rock or slate or whatever it was falls on him
and the two others and kills them. Not knowing where to send the body,
they bury it up there at Sing Sing, and she never sees him again, living
or dead. But here just a few days ago it seems she picks up, from
overhearing some of the other Italians talking, that we've got such a
thing as a Rogues' Gallery down here at headquarters and that her
husband's picture is liable to be in it. So that's why she's here. She's
found her way here somehow and she asks me won't I"--he caught
himself--"won't the police please give her her husband's picture out of
the gallery."

"And for why did she want that?" rumbled Donohue.

"That's what I asks her myself. It seems she's got no shame about it at
all. She tells me she wants to hang on to it until she can get the
money to have it enlarged into a big picture, and then she's going to
keep it--till the bambino--that's Italian for baby, commissioner, you
know--till the baby grows up, so he can see what his dead father looked
like."

Now of a sudden La Farge knew--or thought he knew--why his interest had
stirred in him a minute before. Instinctively his reporter's sixth sense
had scented a good news story before the real point of the story had
come out, even. A curious little silence had fallen on the half-lighted,
almost empty big room. Only the voice of Weil broke this silence:

"Of course, commissioner, I tries to explain to her what the
circumstances are. I tells her that, in the first place, on account of
the mayor's orders about cutting down the gallery having gone into
effect, it's an even bet her husband's picture ain't there anyhow--that
it's most likely been destroyed; and in the second place, even if it is
there, I tells her I've got no right to be giving it to her without an
order from somebody higher up. But either she can't understand or she
won't. I guess my being in uniform makes her think I'm running the whole
department, and she won't seem to listen to what I says.

"She cries and she carries on worse than ever, and begs and begs me to
give it to her. I guess you know how excitable those Italian women can
be, especially when they are Sicilians. Anyhow, commissioner, after a
lot of that sort of thing I tells her to wait where she is for a minute.
I leaves her and I goes across into the Bertillon room, where the
pictures are, and I looks up this here Antonio Terranova. I forget his
number now and I don't know how it is he comes to be overlooked when
we're cleaning out the gallery; but he's there all right, full face and
side view, with his gallery number in big white figures on his chest.
And, commissioner, he's a pretty tolerable tough-looking Ginney." The
witness checked an inclination to grin. "I takes a slant at his picture,
and I can't make up my own mind which way he'll look the worst enlarged
into a crayon portrait--full face or side view. I can still hear her
crying outside the door. She's crying harder than ever.

"I puts the picture back, and I goes out to where she is and tries to
argue with her. It's no use. She goes down on her knees and holds the
baby up, and tells me it ain't for her sake she's asking this--it's for
the bambino. And she calls on a lot of Italian saints that I never even
heard the names of some of them before--and so on, like that. It's
pretty tough.

"She's such a stupid, ignorant thing you can't help from feeling sorry
for her--nobody could." He hesitated a moment as though seeking for
words of explanation and extenuation that were not in his regular
vocabulary. "I got kids of my own, commissioner," he said suddenly, and
stopped dead short for a moment. "I'm no Italian, but I got kids of my
own!" he repeated, as though the fact constituted a defense.

"Well, well--what happened then?" The deputy commissioner's frosty voice
seemed to have frozen so hard it had a crack in it. And now then the
Semitic face of Weil twisted into a grin that was more than
shamefaced--it was downright sheepish.

"Why, then," he said, "when I comes back out of the Bertillon room the
second time she goes back down on her knees again and she says to me--of
course she ain't expected to know what my religion is--maybe that
explains it, commissioner--she says to me that all her life--every
morning and every night--she's going to pray to the Blessed Virgin for
me. That's what she says anyway. So I just lets it go at that."

He halted as though he were through.

"Then do I understand that, without an order from any superior
authority, you gave this here woman certain property belonging to the
Police Department?" Old Donohue's voice was gruffer than common, even.
He whetted his talon forefinger on the desk top.

"Yes, sir," owned up the Jew. "There's nobody there but just us two. And
I don't know how Captain Meagher comes to find the picture is gone and
that it was me took it--but it's true, commissioner. She goes away
kissing it and holding it to the breast of her clothes--that Rogues'
Gallery picture! Yes, sir; I gives it to her."

The third deputy commissioner's gold-banded right arm was shoved out,
with all the lean fingers upon the hand at the far end of it widely
extended. He spoke, and something in his throat--a hard lump
perhaps--husked his brogue and made his r's roll out like dice.

"Lieutenant Weil," he said, "I congratulate you! You're guilty!"





End of Project Gutenberg's The Escape of Mr. Trimm, by Irvin S. Cobb