Old Judge Priest

His way took him to Soule’s Drug Store, the gathering place of his set in fair weather and in foul. He was almost there before he heard of the trouble. It was Dave Baum who brought the first word of it. Seeing him pass, Dave came running, bareheaded, out of his notions store.

“Judge Priest, did you know what’s just happened?” Dave was highly excited. “Why, Beaver Yancy’s been cut all to pieces with a dirk knife by one of those Dagos that was brought on here to work on the new extension – that’s what just happened! It happened just a little bit ago, down there where they’ve got those Dagos a-keepin’ ‘em. Beave, he must’ve said somethin; out of the way to him, and he just up with his dirk knife and cut Beave to ribbons.”

Really it required much less time for little Mr. Baum to make this statement than it has taken for me to transcribe it or for you to read it. In his haste he ran the syllables together. Dan Settle came up behind them in time to catch the last words and he pieced out the narrative:

“They toted poor old Beaver into Doctor Lake’s office – I just came from there – there’s a big crowd waitin’ to hear how he comes out. They don’t think he’s goin’ to live but a little while. They ain’t got the one that did the cuttin’ – yet. There’s quite a lot of feelin’ already.”

“That’s what the railroad gets for bringin’ all those foreigners down here.” Mr. Baum, who was born in Bavaria, spoke with bitterness. “Judge, what do you think ought to be done about this business?”

“Well, son,” said Judge Priest, “to begin with, ef I was you I’d run back inside of my store and put my hat on before I ketched a bad cold. And ef I was the chief of police of this city I’d find the accused party and lock him up good and tight. And ef I was everybody else I’d remain ez ca’m ez I could till I’d heared both sides of the case. There’s nearly always two sides to every case, and sometimes there’s likely to be three or four sides. I expect to impanel a new grand jury along in January and I wouldn’t be surprised ef they looked into the matter purty thoroughly. They ginerally do.

“It’s too bad, though, about Beaver Yancy!” added the judge; “I certainly trust he pulls through. Maybe he will – he’s powerful husky. There’s one consolation – he hasn’t got any family, has he?”

And, with that, Judge Priest left them and went on down the snow-piled street and turned in at Mr. Soule’s door. What with reading a Louisville paper and playing a long game of checkers with Squire Rountree behind the prescription case, and telephoning to the adjutant regarding that night’s meeting of Gideon K. Irons Camp, and at noontime eating a cove oyster stew which a darky brought him from Sherill’s short-order restaurant, two doors below, and doing one thing and another, he spent the biggest part of the day inside of Soule’s and so missed his chance to observe the growing and the mounting of popular indignation.

It would seem Beaver Yancy had more friends than any unprejudiced observer would have credited him with having. Mainly they were the type of friends who would not have lent him so much as fifty cents under any conceivable circumstance, but stood ready to shed human blood on his account. Likewise, as the day wore on, and the snow, under the melting influence of the sun, began to run off the eaves and turn to slush in the streets, a strong prejudice against the presence of alien day labourers developed with marvellous and sinister rapidity.

Yet, had those who cavilled but stopped long enough to take stock of things, they might have read this importation as merely one of the manifestations of the change that was coming over our neck of the woods – the same change that had been coming for years, and the same that inevitably would continue coming through years to follow.

Take for example, Legal Row – that short street of stubby little brick buildings where all the lawyers and some of the doctors had their offices. Summer after summer, through the long afternoons, the tenants had sat there in cane-bottomed chairs tilted back against the housefronts, swapping gossip and waiting for a dog fight or a watermelon cutting to break the monotony. But Legal Row was gone now and lawyers did not sit out on the sidewalks any more; it was not dignified. They were housed, most of them, on the upper floor levels of the sky-scraping Planters’ Bank building. Perhaps Easterners would not have rated it as a skyscraper; but in our country the skies are low and friendly skies, and a structure of eight stories, piled one on the other, with a fancy cornice to top off with, rears mightily high and imposing when about it, for contrast, are only two and three and four story buildings.

Kettler’s wagon yard, where the farmers used to bring their tobacco for overnight storage, and where they slept on hay beds in the back stalls, with homemade bedquilts wrapped round them, had been turned into a garage and smelled now of gasoline, oils and money transactions. A new brick market house stood on the site of the old wooden one. A Great White Way that was seven blocks long made the business district almost as bright as day after dark – almost, but not quite. There was talk of establishing a civic centre, with a regular plaza, and a fountain in the middle of the plaza. There was talk of trying the commission form of government. There was talk of adopting a town slogan; talk of an automobile club and of a country club. And now white labour, in place of black, worked on a construction job.

When, after many false alarms, the P. A. & O. V. got its Boaz Ridge Extension under way the contractors started with negro hands; but the gang bosses came from up North, whence the capital had likewise come, and they did not understand the negroes and the negroes did not understand them, and there was trouble from the go-off. If the bosses fraternised with the darkies the darkies loafed; if, taking the opposite tack, the bosses tried to drive the gangs under them with hard words the gangs grew sullen and insolent.

There was a middle ground, but the perplexed whites could not find it. A Southem-born overseer or a Southem-born steamboat mate could have harried the crews with loud profanity, with dire threats of mutilation and violent death, and they would have grinned back at him cheerfully and kept right on at their digging and their shovelling. But when a grading expert named Flaherty, from Chicago, Illinois, shook a freckled fist under the nose of one Dink Bailey, coloured, for whom, just the night before, he had bought drinks in a groggery, the aforesaid Dink Bailey tried to disarticulate him with a razor and made very fair headway toward the completion of the undertaking, considering he was so soon interrupted.

Having a time limit ever before their pestered eyes, it sorely irked the contractors that, whereas five hundred black, brown and yellow men might drop their tools Saturday night at six o’clock, a scant two hundred or so answered when the seven-o’clock whistle blew on Monday morning. The others came straggling back on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even on Thursday, depending on how long their wages held out.

“Whut I wants to go to work fur, Mist’ W’ite Man? I got ‘most two dollars lef.’ Come round to see me w’en all dat’s done spent and mebbe we kin talk bus’ness ‘en.”

The above statement, made by a truant grading hand to an inquiring grading boss, was typical of a fairly common point of view on the side of Labour. And this one, below, which sprang from the exasperated soul of a visiting contractor, was just as typical, for it was the cry of outraged Capital:

“It takes two white men, standing over every black man, to make the black man work – and then he won’t! I never was a Southern sympathiser before, but I am now – you bet!”

The camel’s back broke entirely at the end of the third week. It was a green paymaster from the Chicago offices who furnished the last straw. He tried to pay off with paper money. Since those early postbellum days, when the black brother, being newly freed from servitude and innocently devoid of the commercial instinct, thought the white man’s money, whether stamped on metal disks or printed on parchment rectangulars, was always good money, and so accepted much Confederate currency, to his sorrow at the time and to his subsequent enlightenment, he has nourished a deep suspicion of all cash except the kind that jingles; in fact, it is rarely that he will accept any other sort.

Give him the hard round silver and he is well-content. That is good money – money fit to buy things with. He knows it is, because it rattles in the pocket and it rings on the bar; but for him no greenbacks, if you please. So when this poor ignorant paymaster opened up his satchel and spread out his ones and his twos, his fives and his tens, his treasury certificates and his national bank notes, there was a riot.

Then the contractors just fired the whole outfit bodily; and they suspended operations, leaving the fills half-filled and the cuts half-dug until they could fetch new shifts of labourers from the North. They fetched them – a trainload of overalled Latins, and some of these were tall and swarthy men, and more were short, fair men; but all were capable of doing a full day’s work.

Speedily enough, the town lost its first curious interest in the newcomers. Indeed, there was about them nothing calculated to hold the public interest long. They played no guitars, wore no handkerchief headdresses, offered to kidnap no small children, and were in no respect a picturesque race of beings. They talked their own outlandish language, dined on their own mysterious messes, slept in their bunks in the long barracks the company knocked together for them in the hollow down by the Old Fort, hived their savings, dealt with their employers through a paid translator, and beautifully minded their own business, which was the putting through of the Boaz Ridge Extension. Sundays a few came clunking in their brogans to early mass in Father Minor’s church; the rest of the time they spent at the doing of their daily stint or in camp at their own peculiar devices.

Tony Palassi, who ran the biggest fruit stand in town, paid them one brief visit – and one only – and came away, spitting his disgust on the earth. It appeared that they were not his kind of people at all, these being but despised Sicilians and he by birth a haughty Roman, and by virtue of naturalisation processes a stalwart American; but everybody knew already, without being told, that there was a difference, and a big difference. A blind man could see it.

Tony, now, was a good fellow – one with sporting blood in his veins. Tony was a member of the Elks and of the Knights of Columbus. He owned and he drove one of the smartest trotting horses in the county. He played a brisk game of poker. Once a month he sent a barrel of apples or a bunch of bananas or a box of oranges, as a freewill offering, to the children out at the Home for the Friendless – in short, Tony belonged. Nobody ever thought of calling Tony a Dago, and nobody ever had – more than once; but these other fellows, plainly, were Dagos and to be regarded as such. For upward of a month now their presence in the community had meant little or nothing to the community, one way or the other, until one of them so far forgot himself as to carve up Beaver Yancy.

The railroad made a big mistake when it hired Northern bosses to handle black natives; it made another when it continued to retain Beaver Yancy, of our town, in its employ after the Sicilians came, he being a person long of the arm and short of the temper. Even so, things might have gone forward to a conclusion without misadventure had it not been that on the day before the snow fell the official padrone of the force, who was likewise the official interpreter, went North on some private business of his own, leaving his countrymen without an intermediary during his absence. It came to pass, therefore, that on the December morning when this account properly begins, Beaver Yancy found himself in sole command of a battalion whose tongue he did not speak and whose ways he did not know.

At starting time he ploughed his way through the drifts to the long plank shanty in the bottoms and threw open a door. Instead of being up and stirring, his charges lay in their bunks against the walls, all of them stretched out comfortably there, except a half dozen or so who brewed garlicky mixtures on the big stoves that stood at intervals in a row down the middle of the barracks. Employing the only language he knew, which was a profanely emphatic language, he ordered them to get up, get out and get to work. By shakes of the head, by words of smiling dissent and by gestures they made it plain to his understanding that for this one day at least they meant to do no labour in the open.

One more tolerant than Beaver Yancy, or perhaps one more skilled at translating signs, would have divined their reasons readily enough. They had come South expecting temperate weather. They did not like snow. They were not clad for exposure to snow. Their garments were thin and their shoes leaked. Therefore would they abide where they were until the snow had melted and the cold had moderated. Then they would work twice as hard to make up for this holiday.

The burly, big, overbearing man in the doorway was of a different frame of mind. In the absence of his superior officers and the padrone, his duty was to see that they pushed that job to a conclusion. He’d show ‘em! He would make an example of one and the others would heed the lesson. He laid violent grasp on a little man who appeared to be a leader of opinion among his fellows and, with a big, mittened hand in the neckband of the other’s shirt, dragged him, sputtering and expostulating, across the threshold and, with hard kicks of a heavy foot, heavily booted, propelled him out into the open.

The little man fell face forward into the snow. He bounced up like a chunk of new rubber. He had been wounded most grievously in his honour, bruised most painfully and ignominiously elsewhere. He jumped for the man who had mishandled him, his knifeblade licking out like a snake’s tongue. He jabbed three times, hard and quick – then fled back indoors; and for a while, until help came in the guise of two children of a shanty-boater’s family on their way to the railroad yards to pick up bits of coal, Beaver Yancy lay in the snow where he had dropped, bleeding like a stuck pig. He was not exactly cut to ribbons. First accounts had been exaggerated as first accounts so frequently are. But he had two holes in his right lung and one in the right side of his neck, and it was strongly presumptive that he would never again kick a Sicilian day labourer – or, for that matter, anybody else.

Judge Priest, speaking dispassionately from the aloof heights of the judicial temperament, had said it would be carrying out an excellent and timely idea if the chief of police found the knife-using individual and confined him in a place that was safe and sound; which, on being apprised of the occurrence, was exactly what the chief of police undertook to do. Accompanied by two dependable members of his day shift, he very promptly set out to make an arrest and an investigation; but serious obstacles confronted him.

To begin with, he had not the faintest notion of the criminal’s identity or the criminal’s appearance. The man he wanted was one among two hundred; but which one was he? Beaver Yancy, having been treated in Doctor Lake’s office, was now at the city hospital in no condition to tell the name of his assailant even had he known it, or to describe him either, seeing that loss of blood, pain, shock and drugs had put him beyond the power of coherent speech. Nevertheless, the chief felt it a duty incumbent on him to lose no time in visiting what the Daily Evening News, with a touch of originality, called “the scene of the crime.” This he did.

Everything was quiet on the flatlands below the Old Fort when he got there, an hour after the stabbing. Midway between the bluff that marked the rim of the hollow and the fringe of willows along the river, stood the long plank barracks of the imported hands. Smoke rose from the stovepipes that broke the expanse of its snow-covered roof; about one door was a maze of tracks and crosstracks; at a certain place, which was, say, seventy-five feet from the door, the snow was wallowed and flurried as though a heavy oxhide had been dragged across its surface; and right there a dark spot showed reddish brown against the white background.

However, no figures moved and no faces showed at the small windows as the chief and his men, having floundered down the hill, cautiously approached the silent building; and when he knocked on the door with the end of his hickory walking stick, and knocked and knocked again, meantime demanding admittance in the name of the law, no one answered his knock or his hail. Losing patience, he put his shoulder to the fastened door and, with a heave, broke it away from its hinges and its hasp, so that it fell inward.

Through the opening he took a look, then felt in his overcoat pocket for his gun, making ready to check a rush with revolver shots if needs be; but there was no rush. Within the place two hundred frightened, desperate men silently confronted him. Some who had pistols were wearing them now in plain sight. Others had knives and had produced them. All had picks and shovels – dangerous enough weapons at close quarters in the hands of men skilled in the use of them.

Had the big-hatted chief been wise in the ways of these men, he might peacefully have attained his object by opening his topcoat and showing his blue uniform, his brass buttons and his gold star; but naturally he did not think of that, and as he stood there before them, demanding of them, in a language they did not know, to surrender the guilty one, he was ulstered, like any civilian, from his throat to the tops of his rubber boots.

In him the foreigners, bewildered by the sudden turn in events, saw only a menacing enemy coming, with no outward show of authority about him, to threaten them. They went right on at their task of barricading the windows with strips of planking tom from their bunks. They had food and they had fuel, and they had arms. They would stand a siege, and if they were attacked they would fight back. In all they did, in all their movements, in their steadfast stare, he read their intent plainly enough.

Gabriel Henley was no coward, else he would not have been serving his second term as our chief of police; but likewise and furthermore he was no fool. He remembered just then that the town line ended at the bluff behind him. Technically, at least, the assault on Beaver Yancy had been committed outside his jurisdiction; constructively this job was not a job for the city, but for the county officials. He backed away, and as he retired sundry strong brown hands replaced the broken door and began making it fast with props and improvised bars. The chief left his two men behind to keep watch – an entirely unnecessary precaution, since none of the beleaguered two hundred, as it turned out, had the slightest intention of quitting his present shelter; and he hurried back uptown, pondering the situation as he went.

On his way to the sheriff’s office he stopped by Palassi’s fruit store. As the only man in town who could deal with Sicilians in their own tongue, Tony might help out tremendously; but Tony wasn’t in. Mrs. Palassi, née Callahan, regretted to inform him that Tony had departed for Memphis on the early train to see about certain delayed Christmas shipments of oranges and bananas. To the youth of our town oranges and bananas were almost as necessary as firecrackers in the proper celebration of the Christmas. And when he got to the courthouse the chief found the sheriff was not in town either.

He had started at daylight for Hopkinsburg to deliver an insane woman at the state asylum there; one of his deputies had gone with him. There was a second deputy, to be sure; but he was an elderly man and a chronic rheumatic, who mainly handled the clerical affairs of the office – he never had tried to arrest anyone in his whole life, and he expressed doubt that the present opportunity was auspicious for an opening experiment in that direction.

Under the circumstances, with the padrone away, with Tony Palassi away, with the sheriff away, and with the refuge of the culprit under close watch, Chief of Police Henley decided just to sit down and wait – wait for developments; wait for guidance; perhaps wait for popular sentiment to crystallize and, in process of its crystallization, give him a hint as to the steps proper to be taken next. So he sat him down at his roll-top desk in the old City Hall, with his feet on the stove, and he waited.

Had our efficient chief divined the trend of opinion as it was to be expressed during the day by divers persons in divers parts of the town, it is possible he might have done something, though just what that something might have been, I for one confess I do not know – and I do not think the chief knew either. There was a passion of anger abroad. This anger was to rise and spread when word circulated – as it very shortly did – that those other Dagos were harbouring and protecting the particular Dago who had done the cutting.

Such being the case, did not that make them outlaws too – accessories after the fact, comalefactors? The question was asked a good many times in a good many places and generally the answer was the same. And how about letting these murderous, dirk-toting pauper labourers come pouring down from the slums of the great cities to take the bread right out of the mouths of poor, hard-working darkies? With the sudden hostility to the white stranger rose an equally sudden sympathy for the lot of the black neighbour whose place he had usurped. Besides, who ever saw one of the blamed Dagos spending a cent at a grocery, or a notions store, or a saloon – or anywhere? Money earned in the community ought to be spent in the community. What did the railroad mean by it anyway?

Toward the middle of the afternoon somebody told somebody else – who, in turn, told everybody he met – that poor old Beaver was sinking fast; the surgeons agreed that he could not live the night out. Despite the rutted snow underfoot and the chill temperature, now rapidly dropping again to the freezing point and below it, knots of men began to gather on the streets discussing one topic – and one only.

Standing at the Richland House corner and addressing an entirely congenial gathering of fifteen or so who had just emerged from the Richland House bar, wiping their mouths and their moustaches, a self-appointed spokesman ventured the suggestion that it had been a long time between lynchings. Maybe if people just turned in and mobbed a few of these bloodthirsty Dagos it would give the rest of them a little respect for law and order? What if they didn’t get the one that did the cutting? They could get a few of his friends, couldn’t they – and chase all the others out of the country, and out of the state? Well, then, what more could a fair-minded citizen ask? And if the police force could not or would not do its duty in the premises, was it not up to the people themselves to act? – or words to that general effect. In the act of going back inside for another round of drinks the audience agreed with the orator unanimously, and invited him to join them; which he did.

Serenely unaware of these things, Judge Priest spent his day at Soule’s Drug Store, beat Squire Roundtree at checkers, went trudging home at dusk for supper and, when supper was eaten, came trudging back downtown again, still hap-pily ignorant of the feeling that was in the icy air. Eight o’clock found him in the seat of honour on the platform at Kamleiter’s Hall, presiding over the regular semi-monthly meeting of Gideon K. Irons Camp.

Considering weather conditions, the judge, as commandant, felt a throb of pride at the size of the attendance. Twenty-two elderly gentlemen answered to their names when the adjutant, old Professor Reese, of the graded school, called the roll. Two or three more straggled in, bundled up out of all their proper proportions, in time to take part in the subsequent discussion of new business. Under that elastic heading the Camp agreed to co-operate with the Daughters in a campaign to raise funds for a monument to the memory of General Meriwether Grider, dead these many years; voted fifty dollars out of the Camp treasury for the relief of a dead comrade’s widow; and listened to a reminiscence of the retreat from Atlanta by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby.