Old Judge Priest

With a lightning-fast dab of his whiskers he kissed the bride – he had a flashing intuition that this was required by the ritual – shoved the pair inside Doctor Grundy’s front hall, slammed the door behind them, snatched up Sergeant Bagby’s rusted rifle from where it leaned against Doctor Grundy’s porch post, and sprang forward in a posture combining defence and offense. All in a second or two Mr. Bloomfield did this.

Even so, his armed services were no longer required; for Sergeant Jimmy Bagby stepped nimbly out of his tub, picked it up in both hands and turned it neatly yet crashingly upside down upon the head of the bride’s step-parent – so that its contents, which had been cold and were still coolish, cascaded in swishing gallons down over his person, effectually chilling the last warlike impulse of his drenched and dripping bosom, and rendering him in one breath whipped, choked and tamed.

“With the compliments of the Southern Confederacy!” said Sergeant Bagby, so doing.

The shadows on the grass lay lank and attenuated when the folks came back from the Pastime Rink. Sergeant Bagby sat alone upon Doctor Grundy’s porch. There were puddles of spilt water on porch and step and the walk below, and a green foot-tub, now empty, stood on its side against the railings. The sergeant was drawing his white yam socks on over his water-bleached shanks.

“Well, suh, Jimmy,” said Judge Priest as he came up under the vines, “you certainly missed it this evenin’. That was the best speech Gen’l Tige Gracey ever made in his whole life. It certainly was a wonder and a jo-darter!”

“Whut was the subject, cumrud?” asked Sergeant Bagby.

“Fraternal Strife and Brotherly Love,” replied the judge. “He jest natchelly dug up the hatchet and then he reburied her ag’in – reburied her miles deep under Cherokee roses and magnolia blossoms. But how’s your feet? I reckon you’ve had a purty toler’ble lonesome time settin’ here, ain’t you?”

“I see – love and war! War and love,” commented the sergeant softly.

Before answering further, he raised his head and glanced over the top of the intervening hedge toward the house next door. From its open door issued confused sounds of which he alone knew the secret – it was Georgia trying to teach Indiana the words and music of the song entitled Old Virginny Never Tire!

“Oh, my feet are mighty nigh cured,” said he; “and I ain’t had such a terrible lonesome time as you might think fur either – cumrud.”

“That’s the second time you’ve called me that,” said Judge Priest suspiciously. “Whut does it mean?”

“Oh, that? That’s a fureign word I picked up to-day.” And Sergeant Bagby smiled gently. “It’s a pet name the Yankees use when they mean pardner!”

VI. ACCORDING TO THE CODE

THE most important thing about Quintus Q. Montjoy, Esquire, occurred a good many years before he was born. It was his grandfather.

In the natural course of things practically all of us have, or have had, grandfathers. The science of eugenics, which is comparatively new, and the rule of species, which is somewhat older, both teach us that without grandfathers there can be no grandchildren. But only one in a million is blessed even unto the third generation by having had such a grandfather as Quintus Q. Montjoy had. That, indeed, was a fragrant inheritance and by day and by night the legatee inhaled of its perfumes. I refer to his grandfather on his father’s side, the late Braxton Montjoy.

The grandfather on the maternal side must have been a person of abundant consequence too, else he would never have begat him a daughter worthy to be mated with the progeny of that other illustrious man; but of him you heard little or nothing. Being long deceased, his memory was eclipsed in the umbra of a more compelling personality. It would seem that in all things, in all that he did and said in this life, Braxton Montjoy was exactly what the proud grandsire of a justly proud grandscion should be. He was a gentleman of the Old School in case that conveys anything to your understanding; and a first family of Virginia. He was a captain of volunteers in the War of Eighteen-Twelve. He was a colonel in the Mexican war; that though was after he emigrated out over the Wilderness Trail to the newer and cruder commonwealth of Kentucky. He was one of the founders of our town and its first mayor in that far-distant time when it emerged from the muddied cocoon of a wood-landing on the river bank and became a corporation with a charter and a board of trustees and all. Later along, in the early fifties, he served our district in the upper branch of the State Legislature. In the Civil war he would undoubtedly have been a general – his descendant gainsaying as much – except for the unfortunate circumstance of his having passed away at an advanced age some years prior to the beginning of that direful conflict. Wherefore the descendant in question, being determined that his grandfather should not be cheated of his due military meed by death, conferred an honourary brevet upon him, anyway.

Nor was that all that might be said of this most magnificent of ancestors – by no means was it all. Ever and always was he a person of lofty ideals and mountainous principles. He never drank his dram in a groggery nor discussed the affairs of the day upon the public highway. Spurning such new-fangled and effetely-luxurious modes of transportation as carriages, he went horseback whenever he went, and wheresoever. In the summer time when the family made the annual pilgrimage back across the mountains to Old White Sulphur he rode the entire distance, both going and coming, upon a white stallion named Fairfax. To the day of his death he chewed his provender with his own teeth and looked upon the world-at-large through eyes, unlensed.

Yet he might have owned a hundred sets of teeth or five hundred pairs of spectacles, had he been so minded, for to him appertained eighty slaves and four thousand acres of the fattest farm lands to be found in the rich bottoms of our county. War and Lincoln’s Proclamation freed the slaves but the lands remained, intact and unmortgaged, to make easier the pathways of those favoured beings of his blood who might come after him. Finally, he was a duellist of a great and fearsome repute; an authority recognised and quoted, in the ceremonials of the code. In four historic meetings upon the field of honour he figured as a principal; and in at least three more as a second. Under his right shoulder blade, a cousin of President Thomas Jefferson carried to his grave a lump of lead which had been deposited there by this great man one fair fine morning in the Valley of Virginia, during the adjudication, with pistols, of a dispute which grew out of a difference of opinion touching upon the proper way of curing a Smithfield ham.

We did not know of these things at first hand. Only a few elderly inhabitants remembered Braxton Montjoy as he had appeared in the flesh. To the rest of our people he was a tradition, yet a living one, and this largely through virtue of the conversational activities of Quintus Q. Montjoy, the grandson aforesaid, aided and abetted by Mrs. Marcella Quistenbury.

I should be depriving an estimable lady of a share of the credit due her did I omit some passing mention of Mrs. Quistenbury from this narrative. She was one who specialised in genealogy. There is one such as she in every Southern town and in most New England ones. Give her but a single name, a lone and solitary distant kinsman to start off with, and for you she would create, out of the rich stores of her mind, an entire family tree, complete from its roots, deeply implanted in the soil of native aristocracy, to the uttermost tip of its far-spreading and ramifying branches. In the delicate matter of superior breeding she liberally accorded the Montjoy connection first place among the old families of our end of the state. So, too, with equal freedom, did the last of the Montjoys, which made it practically unanimous and left the honour of the lineage in competent hands.

For Quintus Q. – alas and alackaday – was the last of his glorious line. Having neither sisters nor brothers and being unmarried he abode alone beneath the ancestral roof tree. It was not exactly the ancestral roof tree, if you wish me to come right down to facts. The original homestead burned down long years before, but the present structure stood upon its site and was in all essential regards a faithful copy of its predecessor.

It might be said of our fellow-townsman – and it was – that he lived and breathed and had his being in the shadow of his grandfather. Among the ribald and the irreverent stories circulated was one to the effect that he talked of him in his sleep. He talked of him pretty assiduously when awake; there wasn’t any doubt of that. As you entered his home you were confronted in the main hall by a large oil portrait of an elderly gentleman of austere mien, wearing a swallow-fork coat and a neck muffler and with his hair brushed straight back from the forehead in a sweep, just as Andrew Jackson brushed his back. You were bound to notice this picture, the very first thing. If by any chance you didn’t notice it, Quintus Q. found a way of directing your attention to it. Then you observed the family resemblance.

Quintus Q., standing there alongside, held his hand on his hip after exactly the same fashion that his grandfather held his hand on his hip in the pictured pose. It was startling really – the reproduction of this trait by hereditary impulse. Quintus Q. thought there was something about the expression of the eyes, too.

If during the evening some one mentioned horses – and what assemblage of male Kentuckians ever bided together for any length of time without some one mentioning horses? – the host’s memory was instantly quickened in regard to the white stallion named Fairfax. Fairfax achieved immortality beyond other horses of his period through Quintus Q. Some went so far as to intimate that Mr. Montjoy made a habit of serving hams upon his table for a certain and especial purpose. You had but to refer in complimentary terms to the flavour of the curly shavings-thin slice which he had deposited upon your plate.

“Speaking of hams,” he would say – “speaking of hams, I am reminded of my grandfather, the old General – General Braxton Montjoy, you remember. The General fought one of his duels – he fought four, you know, and acted as second in three others – over a ham. Or perhaps I should say over the process of smoking a ham with hickory wood. His antagonist was no less a person than a cousin of President Thomas Jefferson. The General thought his veracity had been impugned and he, called the other gentleman out and shot him through the shoulder. Afterwards I believe they became great friends. Ah, sir, those were the good old days when a Southern gentleman had a proper jealousy of his honour. If one gentleman doubted another gentleman’s word there was no exchange of vulgar billingsgate, no unseemly brawling upon the street. The Code offered a remedy. One gentleman called the other gentleman out. Sometimes I wish that I might have lived in those good old days.”

Sometimes others wished that he might have, too, but I state that fact in parenthesis.

Then he would excuse himself and leave the table and enter the library for a moment, returning with a polished rosewood case borne reverently in his two hands and he would put the case down and dust it with a handkerchief and unlock it with a brass key which he carried upon his watch chain and from their bed of faded velveteen within, bring forth two old duelling pistols with long barrels, and carved scrolls on their butts and hammers that stood up high like the ears of a startled colt. And he would bid you to decipher for yourself the name of his grandfather inscribed upon the brass trigger guards. You were given to understand that in a day of big men, Braxton Montjoy towered as a giant amongst them.

Aside from following the profession of being a grandson, Quintus Q. had no regular business. There was a sign reading Real Estate and Loans upon the glass door of his one-room suite in the Planters’ Bank building, but he didn’t keep regular hours there. With the help of an agent, he looked after the collecting of the rents for his town property and the letting upon shares or leaseholds of his river-bottom farms; but otherwise you might say his chief occupation was that of being a sincere and conscientious descendant of a creditable forebear.

So much for the grandfather. So much, at this moment, for the grandson. Now we are going to get through the rind into the meat of our tale:

As may be recalled, State Senator Horace K. Maydew, of our town and county, being a leader of men and of issues, once upon a time hankered mightily to serve the district in Congress and in the moment that he could almost taste of triumph accomplished had the cup dashed from his lips through the instrumentality of one who, locally, was fancied as being rather better than a dabster at politics, himself. During the months which succeeded this defeat, the mortified Maydew nursed a sharpened grudge toward the enemy, keeping it barbed and fletched against the time when he might let fly with it. Presently an opportunity for reprisals befell. Maydew’s term as State Senator neared its close. For personal reasons, which he found good and sufficient, the incumbent did not offer as a candidate to succeed himself. But quite naturally, and perhaps quite properly, he desired to name his successor. Privily he began casting about him for a likely and a suitable candidate, which to the senator’s understanding meant one who would be biddable, tractable and docile. Before he had quite agreed with himself upon a choice, young Tobias Houser came out into the open as an aspirant for the Democratic nomination, and when he heard the news Senator Maydew re-honed his hate to a razor-edge. For young Tobe Houser, who had been a farmer-boy and then a country school teacher and who now had moved to town and gone into business, was something else besides: He was the nephew of Judge Priest, the only son of the judge’s dead sister. It was the judge’s money that had helped the young man through the State university. Undoubtedly – so Maydew read the signs of the times – it was the judge’s influence which now brought the youngster forth as an aspirant for public office. In the Houser candidacy Maydew saw, or thought he saw, another attack upon his fiefship on the party organisation and the party machinery.

On an evening of the same week in which Tobe Houser inserted his modestly-worded announcement card in the Daily Evening News, Senator Maydew called to conference – or to concurrence – two lieutenants who likewise had cause to be stalwart supporters of his policies. The meeting took place in the living room of the Maydew home. When the drinks had been sampled and the cigars had been lighted Senator Maydew came straight to the business in hand:

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I’ve got a candidate – a man none of us ever thought of before. How does the name of Quintus Q. Montjoy seem to strike you?”

Mr. Barnhill looked at Mr. Bonnin, and Mr. Bonnin looked back at Mr. Barnhill. Then both of them looked at Maydew.

“Montjoy, eh?” said Barnhill, doubtfully, seeming not to have heard aright.

“Quintus Q. Montjoy you said, didn’t you?” asked Bonnin as though there had been any number of Montjoys to choose from. He spoke without enthusiasm.

“Certainly,” answered Maydew briskly, “Quintus Q. Montjoy, Esquire. Any objections to him that you can think of, off-hand?”

“Well,” said Mr. Barnhill, who was large of person and slow of speech, “he ain’t never done anything.”

“If I’m any judge he never will do anything – much,” supplemented Mr. Bonnin, who was by way of being small and nervous.

“You’ve said it – both of you,” stated their leader, catching them up with a snap. “He never has done anything. That gives him a clean record to run on. He never will do anything – on his own hook, I mean. That’ll make him a safe, sound, reliable man to have representing this district up yonder at Frankfort. Last session they licked the Stickney warehouse bill for us. This season it’ll come up again for passage. I guarantee here and now that Quint Montjoy will vote right on that proposition and all other propositions that’ll come up. He’ll vote right because we’ll tell him how to vote. I know him from the skin out.”

“He’s so powerfully pompious and bumpious – so kind of cocksure and high-an’-mighty,” said Mr. Barnhill. “D’ye reckin, Hod, as how he’ll stand without hitchin’?”

“I’ll guarantee that, too,” said Senator Maydew, with his left eyelid flickering down over his left eye in the ghost of a wink. “He don’t know yet that he’s going to be our candidate. Nobody knows it yet but you and me. But when he finds out from us that he’s going to have a chance to rattle round in the same seat that his revered granddaddy once ornamented – well, just you watch him arise and shine. There’s another little thing that you’ve overlooked. He’s got money, – plenty of it; as much money as any man in this town has got. He’s not exactly what I’d call a profligate or a spendthrift. You may have noticed that except when he was spending it on himself he’s very easy to control in money matters. But when we touch a match to his ambition and it flares up, he’ll dig down deep and produce freely – or I miss my guess. For once we’ll have a campaign fund with some real money behind it.”

His tone changed and began to drip rancour:

“By Judas, I’ll put up some of my own money! This is one time when I’m not counting the cost. I’m going to beat that young lummox of a Houser, if it’s the last thing I do. I’m going to rub his nose in the mud. You two know without my telling you why I’d rather see Houser licked than any other man on earth – except one. And you know who that one is. We can’t get at Priest yet – that chance will come later. But we can get his precious nephew, and I’m the man that’s going to get him. And Quint Montjoy is the man I’m going to get him with.”

“Well, Hod, jest ez you say,” assented Mr. Barnhill dutifully. “I was only jest askin’, that’s all. You sort of tuck me off my feet at fust, but the way you put it now, it makes ever’thing look mighty promisin’. How about you, Wilbur?” and he turned to Mr. Bonnin.

“Oh, I’m agreeable,” chimed Mr. Bonnin. “Only don’t make any mistake about one thing – Houser’s got a-plenty friends. He’ll give us a fight all right. It won’t be any walkover.”

“I want it to be a fight, and I don’t want it to be a walk-over, either,” said Senator Maydew. “The licking we give him will be all the sweeter, then.”

He got up and started for the telephone on the wall.

“I’ll just call up and see if our man is at home. If he is, we’ll all three step over there right now and break the news to him, that the voice of the people has been lifted in an irresistible and clamorous demand for him to become their public servant at his own expense.” The Senator was in a good humour again. “And say, Hod, whilst I’m thinkin’ of it,” put in Mr. Barnhill sapiently, “ef he should be at home and ef we should go over there, tell him for Goddle Midey’s sake not to drag in that late lamentable grandpaw of his’n, more’n a million times durin’ the course of the campaign. It’s all right mebbe to appeal to the old famblies. I ain’t bearin’ ary grudge ag’inst old famblies, ‘though I ain’t never found the time to belong to one of ‘em myself. But there’s a right smart chance of middle-aged famblies and even a few toler’ble new famblies in this here community. And them’s the kind that does the large bulk of the votin’ in primary elections.”

We’ve had campaigns and campaigns and then more and yet other campaigns in our county. We had them every year – and we still do. Being what they were and true to their breeding the early settlers started running for office, almost before the Indians had cleared out of the young settlements. Politics is breath to the nostrils and strong meat to the bellies of grown men down our way. Found among us are persons who are office-seekers by instinct and office-holders by profession. Whole families, from one generation to another, from father to son and from that son to his son and his son’s son become candidates almost as soon as they have become voters. You expect it of them and are not disappointed. Indeed, this same is true of our whole state. Times change, party lines veer and snarl, new issues come up and flourish for awhile and then are cut down again to make room for newer crops of newer issues still, but the Breckinridges and Clays, the Hardins and Helms, the Breathitts and Trimbles, the Crittendons and Wickliffes, go on forever and ever asking the support of their fellow-Ken-tuckians at the polls and frequently are vouchsafed it. But always the winner has cause to know, after winning, that he had a fight.

As goes the state at large, so goes the district and the precinct and the ward. As I was saying just now, we have had warm campaigns before now; but rarely do I recall a campaign of which the early stages showed so feverishly high a temperature as this campaign between Quintus Q. Montjoy and young Tobias Houser for the Democratic nomination for State Senator. You see, beneath the surface of things, a woman’s personality ran in the undercurrents, roiling the waters and soiling the channel. Her name of course, was not spoken on the hustings or printed in the paper, but her influence was manifest, nevertheless.

There was one woman – and perhaps only one in all that community – who felt she had abundant cause to dislike Judge Priest and all that pertained to him by ties of blood, marriage, affection or a common interest. And this person was the present wife of the Hon. Horace K. Maydew, and by that same token the former wife of old Mr. Lysander John Curd. Every time she saw Congressman Dabney Prentiss passing by, grand and glorious in his longtailed coat and his broad black hat and his white tie, which is ever the mark of a statesman who is working at the trade, she harked back to that day when Judge Priest had obtruded his obstinate bulk between her husband and her husband’s dearest ambition; and she remembered that, except for him, she might now be Mrs. Congressman Maydew, going to White House receptions and giving dinners for senators and foreign diplomats and cabinet officers and such. And her thoughts grew bitter as aloes; and with rancour and rage the blood throbbed in her wrists until her bracelets hurt her. Being minded to have a part and a parcel in the undoing of the Priest plans, she meddled in this fight, giving to Mr. Montjoy the benefit of her counsel and her open, active advocacy.

Perhaps it was because he inclined a flattered ear to the lady’s admonitions rather than to her husband’s subtler chidings that Mr. Montjoy confirmed the astute Mr. Barnhill’s forebodings and refused to stand without hitching. He backed and he filled; he kicked over the traces and got tangled in the gears. He was, as it turned out, neither bridle-wise nor harness-broken. In short he was an amateur in politics, with an amateur’s faults. He took the stump early, which was all well and good, because in Red Gravel county if a candidate can’t talk to the voter, and won’t try, he might just as well fold up his tents like the Arab and take his doll rags and go on about his business, if he has any business. But against the guidance and the best judgment of the man who had led him forth as a candidate, he accepted a challenge from young Houser for a series of joint debates; and whilst Mr. Barnhill and Mr. Bonnin wagged their respective heads in silent disapproval, he repeatedly and persistently made proclamation in public places and with a loud voice, of the obligation which the community still owed his illustrious grandparent, the inference being that he had inherited the debt and expected to collect it at the polls.

It is likewise possible that Candidate Montjoy listened over-much to the well meant words of Mr. Calhoun Tabscott. This Mr. Calhoun Tabscott esteemed himself a master hand at things political. He should have been, at that. One time or another he had been on opposite sides of every political fence; other times he bestraddled it. He had been a Greenbacker, a Granger, and a Populist and once, almost but not quite, a Republican. Occasions were when, in rapid succession, he flirted with the Single Taxers, and then, with the coy reluctance of one who is half-converted, harkened to the blandishments of the Socialists. Had he been old enough he would have been either a Know-Nothing or a Whig – either or perhaps both. In 1896 he quit the Silver Democrats cold, they having obtusely refrained from sending him as a delegate to their national convention. Six weeks later he abandoned the Gold Democrats to their fate because they failed to nominate the right man for president. It was commonly believed he voted the straight Prohibition ticket that year – for spite.