Old Judge Priest

“Oh, I didn’t expect you to believe that right off,” stated Mr. Conklin, prolonging his climax. “The reason I didn’t clean her out then was because she was already cleaned out; somebody had beat me to it and got away with everything worth having in that little old box. It was considerable of a disappointment to me – and a shock too.”

“It shorely must’ve been,” agreed the judge, almost sympathetically. “Mout I ask ef you’ve got any gineral notion who it was that – that deprived you of the fruits of your industry and your patience?”

“I don’t have to have any general notion,” quoth Conklin et al., with bitterness creeping into his voice. “I know who it was – that is, I’m practically certain I know who it was. Because, while I was across the street in a doorway about half past one, waiting to make sure the neighbourhood was clear, I saw the gink I suspect come out of the bank and lock the door behind him, and go off up the street.

“I thought at the time it was funny – anybody being in that bank at that hour of the night; but mostly I was glad that I hadn’t walked in on him while he was there. So I just laid low and let him get away with the entire proceeds – which was my mistake. I guess under the circumstances he’d have been glad enough to divide up with me. I might even have induced him to hand over the whole bunch to me – though, as a rule, when it can be avoided I don’t believe in any strong-arm stuff. But, you see, I didn’t know then what I found out about half an hour later. So I just stood still where I was, like a boob, and let him fade away out of my life. Yep, Judge, I’m reasonably sure I saw the party that copped the big roll that night. And I presume I’m the only person alive that did see him copping it.”

“Would you mind describin’ him – ez nearly ez you kin?” asked Judge Priest; he seemed to have accepted the story as a truthful recital.

“I don’t need to,” answered the Solitary Kid. “You did that yourself just a little bit ago. If you’re going back home any time soon I suggest that you ask the old pappy-guy with the long white whiskers what he was doing coming out of his own bank at half past one o’clock on the morning of October the sixteenth, with a long overcoat on, and his hat pulled down over his eyes, and a heavy sackful of dough hid under his coat. I didn’t exactly see the sack, but he had it, all right – I’ll gamble on that. You needn’t tell him where you got your information, but just ask him.”

“Son,” averred Judge Priest, “I shorely will do that very thing; in fact, I came mighty nigh practically doin’ so several weeks ago when I didn’t know nigh ez much ez I do now – thanks to you and much obliged.”

But Judge Priest was spared the trouble – for the time being, at least. What transpired later in a legal way in his courtroom has nothing whatever to do with this narration. It is true that he left Atlanta without loss of time, heading homeward as straight and as speedily as the steam cars could bear him.

Even so, he arrived too late to carry out his promise to the Solitary Kid. For that very day, while he was on his way back, in a city several hundred miles distant – in the city of Chicago, to be precise – the police saw fit to raid an establishment called vulgarly a bucket shop; and finding among the papers and books, which they coincidentally seized, entries tending to show that our Mr. Hiram Blair had, during the preceding months, gone short on wheat to a disastrous extent, the police inconsiderately betrayed those records of a prolonged and unfortunate speculation to one of the Chicago afternoon papers, which in turn wired its local correspondent down our way to call upon the gentleman and ask him pointblank how about it.

But the correspondent, who happened also to be the city staff of the Daily Evening News, a young man by the name of Rawlings, was unsuccessful in his attempts to see Mr. Blair, either at his place of business in the bank or at his residence. From what he was able to glean, the reporter divined that Mr. Blair had gone out of town suddenly. Putting two and two together the young man promptly reached the conclusion that Mr. Blair might possibly have had also some word from Chicago. Developments, rapidly ensuing, proved the youth correct in his hypothesis.

Two days later Mr. Blair was halted by a person in civilian garb, but wearing a badge of authority under his coat, as Mr. Blair was about to cross the boundary line near Buffalo into the adjacent Dominion of Canada. Mr. Blair insisted at first that it was not him. In truth it did not look like him. Somewhere en route he had lost his distinguished chin whiskers and his commanding manner, acquiring in lieu of these a name which did not in the least resemble Hiram Blair.

Nevertheless, being peremptorily, forcibly and over his protests detained – in fact, locked up – he was presently constrained to make a complete statement, amounting to a confession. Indeed, Mr. Blair went so far in his disclosures that the Daily Evening News, in an extra issued at high noon, carried across its front page, in box-car letters, a headline reading: Fugitive, in Durance Vile, Tells All!

Old Judge Priest was passing Mrs. Teenie Morrill’s boarding house one night on his way home from Soule’s drug store, where he had spent the evening in the congenial company of Mr. Soule, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and Squire Roundtree. This was perhaps a week after his return from a flying trip to Atlanta, Georgia, the results of which, as the saying goes, still were locked within his breast.

As he came opposite Mrs. Morrill’s front gate a blast of harmonious sound, floating out into the night, saluted his ears. He looked upward. Behind a front window on the top floor, with his upper lip overlapping the mouthpiece of a handsome clarinet and his fingers flitting upon the polished shaft of the instrument, sat little Emanuel Moon, now, by virtue of appointment, Deputy Circuit Clerk Emanuel Moon, playing The Last Rose of Summer with the fervour inspired of a happy heart, a rehabilitated reputation, a lucrative and honourable employment in the public service, and a newly acquired mastery of the melodic intricacies of the air in question – four things calculated, you will allow, to make anyone blithe of the spirit.

The old judge halted and smiled up at the window. Then, as he moved onward, he uttered the very word – a small coincidence, this – which I chose for the opening text of this chapter out of the life and the times of our town.

“Poor little ant!” said Judge Priest to himself; and then, as an afterthought: “But a dag-gone clever little feller!”

V. SERGEANT JIMMY BAGBY’S FEET

SERGEANT JIMMY BAGBY sat on the front porch of the First Presbyterian parsonage with an arched framing of green vines above his head. His broad form reposed in a yet broader porch chair – his bare feet, in a foot-tub of cold water.

The sergeant wore his reunion regalia, consisting, in the main, of an ancient fatigue jacket with an absurdly high collar and an even more absurdly short and peaked tail. About his generous middle was girthed a venerable leather belt that snaffled at the front with a broad buckle of age-darkened brass and supported an old cartridge box, which perched jauntily upon a fold of the wearer’s plump hip like a birdbox on a crotch. Badges of resplendent new satin, striped in alternate bars of red and white, flowed down over his foreshortened bosom, partly obscuring the scraps of rotted and faded braid and the big round ball buttons of dulled brass, which adhered intermittently to the decayed front of his uniform coat. Against a veranda post leaned the sergeant’s rusted rifle, the same he had carried to the war and through the war and home again after the war, and now reserved for occasions of high state, such as the present one.

The sergeant’s trousers were turned high up on his shanks; his shoes reposed side by side alongside him on the floor, each with a white yarn sock crammed into and overflowing it. They were new shoes, but excessively dusty and seamed with young wrinkles; and they bore that look of total disrepute which anything new in leather always bears after its first wearing. With his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped loosely between his knees, Sergeant Bagby bent forward, looking first up the wide street and then down it. Looking this way he saw four old men, three of them dressed in grey and one in black, straggle limpingly across the road; and one of them carried at a droopy angle a flag upon which were white-scrolled letters to tell the world that here was Lyon’s Battery, or what might be left of it. Looking that way he saw a group of ten or fifteen grey heads riding through a cross street upon bay horses; and at a glance he knew them for a detachment of Forrest’s men, who always came mounted to reunions. Once they rode like centaurs; now, with one or two exceptions, they rode like sacks or racks. It depended on whether, with age, the rider had grown stout or stayed thin.

Having looked both ways, the sergeant addressed himself to a sight nearer home. He considered his feet. Viewed through sundry magnifying and misleading inches of water they seemed pinky white; but when, groaning gently, he lifted one foot clear it showed an angry chafed red upon toe and heel, with large blis-tery patches running across the instep. With a plop he lowered it back into the laving depths. Then, bending over sideways, he picked up one of his shoes, shaking the crumpled sock out of it and peering down its white-lined gullet to read the maker’s tag:

“Fall River, Mass.,” the sergeant spelled out the stamped letters – “Reliance Shoe Company, Fall River, Mass.”

He dropped the shoe and in tones of reluctant admiration addressed empty space:

“Well, now, ain’t them Yankees the persistent devils! Waitin’ forty-odd years fur a chance to cripple me up! But they done it!” Judge Priest turned in at the front gate and came up the yard walk. He was in white linens, severely and comfortably civilian in cut, but with a commandant’s badge upon his lapel and a short, bobby, black ostrich feather in the brim of his hat. He advanced slowly, with a slight outward skew to his short, round legs.

“Aha!” he said understandingly. “Whut did I tell you, Jimmy Bagby, about tryin’ to parade in new shoes? But no, you wouldn’t listen – you would be one of these here young dudes!”

“Judge,” pleaded the sergeant, “don’t rub it in! I’m about ruint – I’m ruint for life with these here feet of mine.”

Still at a somewhat stiff and straddle-legged gait, the judge mounted the porch, and after a quick appraisal of all the chairs in sight eased his frame into one that had a cushioned seat. A small involuntary moan escaped him. It was the sergeant’s time to gloat.

“I’m wearin’ my blisters on my feet,” he exulted, “and you’re wearin’ yourn – elsewhere. That’s whut you git at your age fur tryin’ to ride a strange horse in a strange town.”

“Jimmy,” protested the judge, “age ain’t got nothin’ a’tall to do with it; but that certainly was a mighty hard-rackin’ animal they conferred on me. I feel like I’ve been straddlin’ a hip roof durin’ an earthquake. How did you make out to git back here?”

“That last half mile or so I shore did think I was trampin’ along on red-hot ploughshears. If there’d been one more mile to walk I reckin I’d ‘a’ been listed amongst the wounded and missin’. I jest did about manage to hobble in. And Mizz Grundy fetched me this here piggin of cold water out on the porch, so’s I could favour my feet and watch the boys passin’ at the same time.”

Judge Priest undertook to cross one leg over the other, but uncrossed it again with a wince of sudden concern on his pink face.

“How do you aim, then, to git to the big doin’s this evenin’?” he asked, and shifted his position slightly where he sat.

“I ain’t aimin’ to git there,” said Sergeant Bagby. “I aim to stay right here and take my ease. Besides, ef I don’t git these feet of mine shrunk down some by milkin’ time, I’m shore goin’ to have to pull my pants off over my head this night.”

“Well, now, ain’t that too bad!” commiserated his friend and commander. “I wouldn’t miss hearin’ Gen’l Gracey’s speech fur a purty.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” the sergeant was prompt to tell him.. “You and Lew Lake and Hector Woodward and the other boys kin represent Gideon K. Irons Camp without me fur oncet anyway. And say, listen, Judge,” he added with malice aforethought, “you’d better borrow a goosehair cushion, or a feather tick, or somethin’ soft, to set on out yonder. Them plain pine benches are liable to make a purty hard roostin’ place, even fur an old seasoned cavalryman.”

Judge Priest’s retort, if he had one in stock, remained unbroached, because just then their hostess bustled out to announce dinner was on the table. It was to be an early dinner and a hurried one, because, of course, everybody wanted to start early, to be sure of getting good seats for the speaking. The sergeant ate his right where he was, his feet in his tub, like a Foot-washing Baptist.

There were servants aplenty within, but the younger Miss Grundy elected to serve him; a pretty girl, all in snowy white except for touches of red at her throat and her slender belted waist, and upon one wrist was a bracelet of black velvet with old soldiers’ buttons strung thickly upon it. On a tray, daintily tricked out, she brought the sergeant fried chicken and corn pudding and butter beans, and the like, with com pones hot-buttered in the kitchen; and finally a slice carved from the blushing red heart of the first home-grown watermelon of the season. Disdaining the false conventions of knife and fork the sergeant bit into this, full face.

Upon the tub bottom his inflamed toes overlapped and waggled in a gentle ecstasy; and between bites, while black seeds trickled from the corners of his lips, he related to the younger Miss Grundy the beginning of his story of that memorable passage of words upon a certain memorable occasion, between General John C. Breckinridge and General Simon Bolivar Buckner. The young lady had already heard this same beginning thrice, the sergeant having been a guest under the parental roof since noon of the day before, but, until interruption came, she listened with unabated interest and laughed at exactly the right places, whereupon the gratified narrator mentally catalogued her as about the smartest young lady, as well as the prettiest, he had met in a coon’s age.

All good things must have an end, however – even a watermelon dessert and the first part of a story by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby; and so a little later, rejecting all spoken and implied sympathy with a jaunty indifference that may have been slightly forced, the sergeant remained, like another Diogenes, in the company of his tub, while the rest of the household, including the grey-haired Reverend Doctor Grundy, his white-haired wife, Judge Priest and the two Misses Grundy, departed in a livery-stable carryall for a given point half a mile up the street, where a certain large skating rink stretched its open doors hospitably, so disguised in bunting and flags it hardly knew itself by its grand yet transient title of Reunion Colosseum. Following this desertion, there was for a while in all directions a pleasurable bustle to keep the foot-fast watcher bright as to eye and stirred as to pulse.

“Why, shuckins, there ain’t a chance fur me to git lonely,” he bade himself – “not with all this excitement goin’ on and these here hoofs of mine to keep me company!”

Crowds streamed by afoot, asaddle and awheel, all bound for a common destination. Every house within sight gave up its separate group of dwellers and guests; for during reunion week everybody takes in somebody. Under the threshing feet the winnowed dust mounted up in scrolls from the roadway, sifting down on the grass and powdering the chinaberry trees overhead. No less than eight brass bands passed within sight or hearing. And one of them played Maryland, My Maryland; and one of them played The Bonnie Blue Flag – but the other six played Dixie, as was fitting.

A mounted staff in uniform clattered grandly by, escorting the commanding general of some division or other, and an open carriage came along, overflowing with a dainty freightage of state sponsors and maids-of-honour. As it rolled grandly past behind its four white horses, a saucy girl on the back seat saw an old man sitting alone on the Grundy porch, with his feet in a tub, and she blew a kiss at him off the tips of her fingers; and Sergeant Bagby, half rising, waved back most gallantly, and God-blessed her and called her Honey!

Soon, though, the crowds thinned away. Where multitudes had been, only an occasional straggler was to be seen. The harried and fretted dust settled back. A locust in a tree began to exercise his talents in song, and against the green warp of the shrubbery on the lawn a little blue bobbin of an indigo bird went vividly back and forth. Lonesome? No, nothing like that; but the sergeant confessed to himself that possibly he was just a trifle drowsy. His head dropped forward on his badged chest, and as the cool wetness drew the fever out of his feet his toes, under water, curled up in comfort and content.

Asked about it afterward, Sergeant Bagby would have told you that he had no more than closed his eyelids for a wink or two. But the shadows had appreciably lengthened upon the grass before a voice, lifted in a hail, roused him up. Over the low hedge that separated the parsonage yard from the yard adjoining on the left a man was looking at him – a man somewhere near his own age, he judged, in an instantaneous appraisal.

“Cumrud,” said this person, “howdy-do?”

“Which?” inquired Sergeant Bagby.

“I said, Cumrud, howdy?” repeated the other.

“No,” said the sergeant; “my name is Bagby.”

“I taken it fur granted that you was to home all alone,” said the man beyond the hedge. “Be you?”

“At this time of speakin’,” said the sergeant, “there’s nobody at home exceptin’ me and a crop of blisters. Better come over,” he added hospitably.

“Well,” said the stranger, as though he had been considering the advisability of such a move for quite a period of time, “I mout.”

With no further urging he wriggled through a gap in the hedge and stood at the foot of the steps, revealing himself as a small, wiry, rust-coloured man. Anybody with an eye to see could tell that in his youth he must have been as redheaded, as a pochard drake. Despite abundant streakings of grey in his hair he was still redheaded, with plentiful whiskers to match, and on his nose a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and on his face and neck a close sowing of the biggest, intensest freckles Sergeant Bagby had ever beheld. They spangled his skin as with red asterisks, and the gnarled hand he extended in greeting as he mounted the porch looked as though in its time it had mixed at least one million bran mashes.

Achieving a somewhat wabbly standing posture in his keeler, the sergeant welcomed him in due form.

“I don’t live here myself,” he explained, “but I reckin you might say I’m in full charge, seein’ ez I crippled myself up this mornin’ and had to stay behind this evenin’. Come in and take a cheer and rest yourself.”

“Thanky!” said the freckly one. “I mout do that too.” He did. His voice had a nasal smack to it which struck the sergeant as being alien. “I didn’t ketch the name,” he said. “Mine’s Bloomfield – Christian name, Ezra H.”

“Mine’s Bagby,” stated the sergeant – “late of King’s Hell Hounds. You’ve probably heard of that command – purty nigh everybody in these parts has.”

“Veteran myself,” said Mr. Bloomfield briskly. “Served four years and two months. Enlisted at fust call for volunteers.”

“Started in kind of early myself,” said the sergeant, mechanically catching for the moment the other’s quality of quick, clipped speech. “But say, look here, pardner,” he added, resuming his own natural tone, “whut’s the reason you ain’t out yonder at that there Colosseum with all the other boys this evenin’?”

A whimsical squint brought the red eyelashes dose together.

“Well,” stated Mr. Bloomfield, rummaging with a deliberate hand in the remote inner fastnesses of his whiskers, “I couldn’t scursely say that I b’long out there.” Then he halted, as if there was no more to be said.

“You told me you served all the way through, didn’t you?” asked the sergeant, puzzled.

“So I told you and so I did,” said Mr. Bloomfield; “but I didn’t tell you which side it was I happened to be a-servin’ on. Twentieth Indiana Infantry – that’s my regiment, and a good smart one it was too.”

“Oh!” said Sergeant Bagby, slightly shocked by the suddenness of this enlightenment – “Oh! Well, set down anyway, Mr. Bloomfield. Excuse me – you’re already settin’, ain’t you?”

For a fraction of a minute they contemplated each other, Sergeant Bagby being slightly flustered and Mr. Bloomfield to all appearances perfectly calm. The sergeant cleared his throat, but it was the visitor who spoke:

“I’ve got a fust-rate memory for faces, and the like; and when I fust seen you settin’ here you had a kind of familiar cut to your jib someway. That’s one reason why I hailed you. I wonder now if we didn’t meet up with one another acrost the smoke back yonder in those former days? I’d take my oath I seen you somewheres.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” answered Sergeant Bagby. “All durin’ that war I was almost constantly somewheres.”

“Fust Bull Run – I wonder could it ‘a’ been there?” suggested Mr. Bloomfield.

“First Manassas, you mean,” corrected the sergeant gently, but none-the-less firmly. “Was you there or thereabout by any chance?” Mr. Bloomfield nodded. “Me too,” said Sergeant Bagby – “on detached service. Mebbe,” he added it softly – “mebbe ef you’d turn round I’d know you by your back.”

If the blow went home Mr. Bloomfield, like a Spartan of the Hoosiers, hid his wounds. Outwardly he gave no sign.

“P’raps so,” he assented mildly; then: “How ‘bout Gettysburg?”

The sergeant fell into the trap that was digged for him. The sergeant was proud of his services in the East.

“You bet your bottom dollar I was there!” he proclaimed – “all three days.”

“Then p’raps you’d better turn round too,” said Mr. Bloomfield in honeyed accents, “and mebbe it mout be I’d be able to reckernise you by the shape of your spinal colyum.”

Up rose Sergeant Bagby, his face puckering in a grin and his hand outstretched. High up his back his coat peaked out behind like the tail of a he-mallard.

“Pardner,” he announced, “I’m right glad I didn’t kill you when I had all them chances.”

“Cumrud,” replied Mr. Bloomfield, “on the whole and considerin’ of everything, I don’t regret now that I spared you.”

If Sergeant Bagby had but worn a Confederate goatee, which he didn’t, being smooth-shaved; and if he hadn’t been standing mid-shin-deep in a foot-tub; and if only Mr. Bloomfield’s left shirtsleeve, instead of being comfortably full of freckled arm, had been empty and pinned to the bosom of his waistcoat – they might have posed just as they stood then for the popular picture entitled North and South United which you will find on the outer cover of the Memorial Day edition of every well-conducted Sunday newspaper in the land. But that is ever the way with real life – it so often departs from its traditional aspects. After a bit the sergeant spoke.

“I was jest thinkin’,” he said dreamily.

“So was I,” assented Mr. Bloomfield. “I wonder now if it could be so that we both of us had our minds on the same pleasin’ subject?”

“I was jest thinkin’,” repeated the sergeant, “that merely because the Bloody Chasm is bridged over ain’t no fittin’ reason why it shouldn’t be slightly irrigated frum time to time.”

“My idee to a jot,” agreed Mr. Bloomfield heartily. “Seems as if the dust of conflict has been a-floatin’ round loose long enough to stand a little dampin’ down.”

“Ef only I was at home now,” continued Sergeant Bagby, “I’d be able to put my hand on somethin’ handy for moistenin’ purposes; but, seein’ as I’m a visitor here, I ain’t in no position to extend the hospitalities suitable to the occasion.”

“Sho, now! Don’t let that fret you,” soothed Mr. Bloomfield – “not with me livin’ next door.” He nimbly descended the steps, but halted at the bottom: “Cumrud, how do you take yours – straight or toddy?”

“Sugar and water don’t hurt none – in moderation,” replied the sergeant. “But look here, pardner, this here is a preacher’s front porch. We don’t want to be puttin’ any scandal on him.”