Old Judge Priest

One overhearing might have gathered from the tenor of the sergeant’s remarks that, if King’s Hell Hounds had been given but the proper support in that campaign, the story of Sherman’s March to the Sea would have a vastly different ending from the one set forth in the schoolbooks and the histories. In conclusion, and by way of a diversion from the main topic, Sergeant Bagby was launching on a circumstantial recital of a certain never-to-be-forgotten passage of words between General Buckner and General Breckenridge on a certain momentous and historic occasion, when an interruption occurred, causing him to break off in the middle of his opening sentence.

Old Press Harper, from three miles out in the county, was sitting well back toward the rear of the little hall. It is possible that his attention wandered from the subject in hand. He chanced to glance over his shoulder and, through the frosted panes of a back window, he caught a suffused reflection. Instantly he was on his feet.

“Hey, boys!” called out Mr. Harper. “Somethin’s on fire – looky yander!”

He ran to the window. With his sleeve he rubbed a patch clear on the sweated pane and peered out. Others followed him. Sashes were hoist, and through each of the three window openings in the back wall protruded a cluster of heads – heads that were pinky-bald, grey-grizzled or cottony-white, as the case might be.

“You bet there’s a fire, and a good hot one! See them blazes shootin’ up.”

“Must be down by the Old Fort. D’ye reckin it could be the old plough factory bumin’ up?”

“Couldn’t be that far away, could it, Bony? Looks closer’n that to me.”

“Fires always seem closer than what they really are – that’s been my experience.”

“Listen, boys, for the engines – they ought to be startin’ now in a minute.”

They listened; but, though the fire bell in the City Hall tower, two blocks away, was sounding in measured beats, no clatter of hoofs, no clamour of fast-turning wheels, rose in the street below or in any neighbouring street. Only the red flare widened across the northern horizon, deepening and brightening, and shot through in its centre with lacings of flame.

“That’s funny! I don’t hear ‘em. Well, anyway, I’m a-goin’.”

“Me, too, Press.”

The windows were abandoned. There was a rush for the corner where overcoats had been swung on hooks and overshoes had been kicked back against the baseboard. Various elderly gentlemen began adjusting earmuffs and mufflers, and spearing with their arms at elusive sleeve openings. The meeting stood adjourned without having been adjourned.

“Coming, Billy?” inquired Mr. Nap. B. Crump in the act of hastily winding two yards of red knitted worsted about his throat.

“No; I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. “It’s a mighty bitter night fur folks to be driv’ out of their homes in this weather. I’m sorry fur ‘em, whoever they are – but I reckin I couldn’t do no good ef I went. You young fellers jest go ahead without me – I’m sort of gittin’ along too fur in years to be runnin’ to other people’s fires. I’ve got one of my own to go to – out there in my old settin’ room on Clay Street.”

He rose slowly from his chair and stepped round from behind the table, then halted, cant-ing his head to one side.

“Listen, boys! Ain’t that somebody runnin’ up the steps?”

It surely was. There was a thud of booted feet on the creaking boards. Somebody was coming three stairs at a jump. The door flew open and Circuit Clerk Elisha Milam staggered in, gasping for breath. They assailed him with questions.

“Hey, Lisha, where’s the fire?”

“It’s that construction camp down below town burning up,” he answered between pants. “How did it get started?”

“It didn’t get started – somebody started it. Gentlemen, there’s trouble beginning down yonder. Where’s Judge Priest?.. Oh, yes, there he is!”

He made for Judge Priest where the judge still stood on the little platform, and all the rest trailed behind him, scrouging up to form a close circle about those two, with hands stirruped behind faulty ears and necks craned forward to hear what Mr. Milam had to say. His story wasn’t long, the blurting way he told it, but it carried an abundant thrill. Acting apparently in concert with others, divers unknown persons, creeping up behind the barracks of the construction crew, had fired the building and fled safely away without being detected by its dwellers or by the half-frozen watchers of the police force on the hillock above. At least that was the presumption in Mr. Milam’s mind, based on what he had just heard.

The fire, spreading fast, had driven the Sicilians forth, and they were now massed under the bluff with their weapons. The police force – eight men, all told, constituted the night shift – hesitated to act, inasmuch as the site of the burning camp lay fifty yards over the town line, outside of town limits. The fire department was helpless. Notice had been served at both the engine houses, in the first moment of the alarm, that if the firemen unreeled so much as a single foot of hose it would be cut with knives – a vain threat, since all the water plugs were frozen up hard and fast anyhow. The sheriff and his only able-bodied deputy were in Hopkinsburg, eighty miles away; and an armed mob of hundreds was reported as being on the way from its rendezvous in the abandoned plough factory to attack the foreigners.

Mr. Milam, essentially a man of peace, had learned these things at first hand, or at second, and had hastened hotfoot to Kamleiter’s Hall for the one man to whom, in times of emergency, he always looked – his circuit-court judge. He didn’t know what Judge Priest could do or would do in the face of a situation so grave; but at least he had done his duty – he had borne the word. In a dozen hasty gulping sentences he told his tale and finished it; and then, by way of final punctuation, a chorus of exclamatory sounds – whistled, grunted and wheezed – rose from his auditors.

As for Judge Priest, he, for a space of seconds after Mr. Milam had concluded, said nothing at all. The rapping of his knuckled fist on the tabletop alongside him broke in sharply on the clamour. They faced him then and he faced them; and it is possible that, even in the excitement of the time, some among them marked how his plump jaws had socketed themselves into a hard, square-mortise shape, and how his tuft of white chin beard bristled out at them, and how his old blue eyes blazed into their eyes. And then Judge Priest made a speech to them – a short, quick speech, but the best speech, so his audience afterward agreed, that ever they heard him make.

“Boys,” he cried, lifting his high, shrill voice yet higher and yet shriller, “I’m about to put a motion to you and I want a vote on it purty dam’ quick! They’ve been sayin’ in this town that us old soldiers was gittin’ too old to take an active hand in the affairs of this community any longer; and at the last election, ez you all know, they tried fur to prove it by retirin’ most of the veterans that offered themselves ez candidates fur re-election back to private life.

“I ain’t sayin’ they wasn’t partly right neither; fur here we’ve been sittin’ this night, like a passel of old moo-cows, chewin’ the cud of things that happened forty-odd year’ ago, and never suspicionin’ nothin’ of what was goin’ on, whilst all round us men, carried away by passion and race prejudice, have been plottin’ to break the laws and shed blood and bring an everlastin’ disgrace on the reppitation fur peace and good order of this fair little city of ourn. But maybe it ain’t too late yit fur us to do our duty ez citizens and ez veterans. Oncet on a time – a mighty long while ago – we turned out to pertect our people ag’inst an armed invader. Let’s show ‘em we ain’t too old or too feeble to turn out oncet more to pertect them ag’inst themselves.”

He reared back, and visibly, before their eyes, his short fat figure seemed to lengthen by cubits.

“I move that Gideon K. Irons Camp of United Confederate Veterans, here assembled, march in a body right now to save – ef we can – these poor Eyetalians who are strangers in a strange and a hosstil land from bein’ mistreated, and to save – ef we can – our misguided fellow townsmen from sufferin’ the consequences of their own folly and their own foolishness. Do I hear a second to that motion?”

Did he hear a second to his motion? He heard twenty-five seconds to it, all heaved at him together, with all the blaring strength of twenty-five pairs of elderly lungs. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby forgot parliamentary usage.

“Will we go?” whooped Sergeant Bagby, waving his pudgy arms aloft so that his mittened hands described whizzing red circles in the air. “You betcher sweet life we’ll go! We’ll go through hell and high water – with’ you as our commandin’ officer, Billy Priest.”

“You betcher! That’s the ticket!” A whoop of approval went up.

“Well, then, ef that’s the way you feel about it – come on!” their leader bade them; and they rushed for the door, sweeping the circuit clerk aside. “No; wait jest a minute!” He singled out the jostled Mr. Milam. “Lishy, you’ve got the youngest, spriest legs of anybody here. Run on ahead – won’t you? – and find Father Minor. He’ll be at the priest house back of his church. Tell him to jine up with us as quick as ever the Lord’ll let him. We’ll head down Harrison Street.”

Mr. Milam vanished. With a wave of his arm, the judge comprehended those who remained.

“Nearly everybody here served one time or another under old Nathan Bedford Forrest. The rest would ‘a’ liked to. I reckin this here is goin’ to be the last raid and the last charge that Forrest’s Cavalry, mounted or dismounted, ever will make! Let’s do it regular – open up that there wardrobe-chist yonder, some of you, and git what’s inside!”

Hurried old hands fumbled at the catches of a weather-beaten oaken cabinet on the platform and plucked forth the treasured possessions of the Camp – the dented bugle; the drum; the slender, shiny, little fife; the silken flag, on its short polished staff.

“Fall in – by twos!” commanded Judge Priest. “Forward – march!”

Half a minute later the gasjets that lighted Kamleiter’s Hall lighted only emptiness – an empty chest in a corner; empty chairs, some overturned on their sides, some upright on their legs; an empty hall doorway opening on an empty patch of darkness; and one of Judge Priest’s flannel-lined galoshes, gaping emptily where it had been forgotten.

From the street below rose a measured thud of feet on the hard-packed snow. Forrest’s Cavalry was on the march!

With bent backs straightening to the call of a high, strong impulse; with gimpy, gnarled legs rising and falling in brisk unison; with heads held high and chests puffed out; with their leader in front of them and their flag going before them – Forrest’s Cavalry went forward. Once and once only the double line stopped as it traversed the town, lying snug and for the most part still under its blanketing, of snow.

As the little column of old men swung round the first corner below Kamleiter’s Hall, the lights coming through the windows of Tony Palassi’s fruit shop made bright yellow patches on the white path they trod.

“Halt!” ordered Judge Priest suddenly; and he quit his place in the lead and made for the doorway.

“If you’re looking for Tony to go along and translate you’re wasting time, Judge,” sang’ out Mr. Crump. “He’s out-of town.”

“Is he?” said Judge Priest. “Well, that’s too bad!”

As though to make sure, he peered in through the glassed upper half of the fruitshop door. Within might be seen Mrs. Delia Callahan Palassi, wife of the proprietor, putting the place to rights before locking it up for the night; and at her skirts tagged Master Antonio Wolfe Tone Palassi, aged seven, only son and sole heir of the same, a round-bellied, red-cheeked little Italian-Irish-American. The judge put his hand on the latch and jiggled it.

“I tell you Tony’s not there,” repeated Mr. Crump impatiently.

If the judge heard him he paid no heed. He went through that door, leaving his command outside, as one might go who knew exactly what he was about. Little Tony Wolfe Tone recognised an old friend and came, gurgling a welcome, to greet him. Most of the children in town knew Judge Priest intimately, but little Tony Wolfe Tone was a particular favourite of his; and by the same token he was a particular favourite of Tony’s.

Whatever Judge Priest said to Mrs. Palassi didn’t take long for the saying of it; yet it must have been an argument powerfully persuading and powerfully potent. It is possible – mind you, I don’t make the positive assertion, but it is possible – he reminded her that the blood of a race of fighting kings ran in her veins; for in less than no time at all, when Judge Priest reissued from the fruit shop, there rode pack-fashion on his back a little figure so well bundled up against the cold that only a pair of big brown Italian eyes and a small, tiptilted Irish nose showed themselves, to prove that Judge Priest’s burden was not a woolly Teddy-bear, but a veritable small boy. No; I’m wrong there. One other thing proved it – a woman standing in the doorway, wringing her apron in her hands, her face ablaze with mother love and mother pride and mother fear, watching the hurrying procession as it moved down the wintry street straight into the red glare on ahead.

The flimsy framework of resiny pine burned fast, considering that much snow had lain on the roof and much snow had melted and run down the sides all day, to freeze again with the coming of nighttime. One end of the barracks had fallen into a muddle of black-charred ruination. The fire ate its way along steadily, purring and crackling and spitting as its red teeth bit into the wetted boards. Above, the whole sky was aglare with its wavering red reflections. The outlines of the bowl-shaped flat stood forth distinctly revealed in the glow of that great wooden brazier, and the snow that covered the earth was channelled across with red streaks, like spilt blood.

Here, against the nearermost bank, the foreigners were clumped in a tight, compact black huddle, all scared, but not so badly scared that they would not fight. Yonder, across the snow, through the gap where a side street debouched at a gentle slope into the hollow, the mob advanced – men and half-grown boys – to the number of perhaps four hundred, coming to get the man who had stabbed Beaver Yancy and string him up on the spot – and maybe to get a few of his friends and string them up as an added warning to all Dagos. They came on and came on until a space of not more than seventy-five yards separated the mob and the mob’s prospective victims. From the advancing mass a growling of many voices rose. Rampant, unloosed mischief was in the sound.

Somebody who was drunk yelled out shrill profanity and then laughed a maudlin laugh. The group against the bank kept silent. Theirs was the silence of a grim and desperate resolution. Their only shelter had been fired over their heads; they were beleaguered and ringed about with enemies; they had nowhere to run for safety, even had they been minded to run. So they would fight. They made ready with their weapons of defence – such weapons as they had.

A man who appeared to hold some manner of leadership over the rest advanced a step from the front row of them. In his hand he held an old-fashioned cap-and-ball pistol at full cock. He raised his right arm and sighted along the levelled barrel at a spot midway between him and the oncoming crowd. Plainly he meant to fire when the first of his foes crossed an imaginary line. He squinted up his-eye, taking a careful aim; and he let his trigger finger slip gently inside the trigger guard – but he never fired.

On top of the hill, almost above his head, a bugle blared out. A fife and a drum cut in, playing something jiggy and brisk; and over the crest and down into the flat, two by two, marched a little column of old men, following after a small silken flag which flicked and whispered in the wind, and led by a short, round-bodied commander, who held by the hand a little briskly trotting figure of a child. Tony Wolfe Tone had grown too heavy for the judge to carry him all the way.

Out across the narrow space between the closing-in mob and the closed-in foreigners the marchers passed, their feet sinking ankle-deep into the crusted snow. Their leader gave a command; the music broke off and they spread out in single file, taking station, five feet apart from one another, so that between the two hostile groups a living hedge was interposed. And so they stood, with their hands down at their sides, some facing to the west, where the Italians were herded together, some facing toward the east, where the would-be lynchers, stricken with a great amazement, had come to a dead stand.

Judge Priest, still holding little Tony Wolfe Tone’s small mittened hand fast in his, spoke up, addressing the mob. His familiar figure was outlined against the burning barracks beyond him and behind him. His familiar whiny voice he lifted to so high a pitch that every man and boy there heard him.

“Feller citizens,” he stated, “this is part of Forrest’s Cavalry you see here. We done soldierin’ oncet and we’ve turned soldiers ag’in; but we ain’t armed – none of us. We’ve only got our bare hands. Ef you come on we can’t stop you with guns; but we ain’t agoin’ to budge, and ef you start shootin’ you’ll shorely git some of us. So ez a personal favour to me and these other gentlemen, I’d like to ast you jest to stand still where you are and not to shoot till after you see what we’re fixrin’ to try to do. That’s agreeable to you-all, ain’t it? You’ve got the whole night ahead of you – there’s no hurry, is there, boys?”

He did not wait for any answer from anyone. By name he knew a good half of them; by sight he knew the other half. And they all knew him; and they knew Tony Palassi’s boy; and they knew Father Minor, who stood at his right hand; and they knew the lame blacksmith and the little bench-legged Jewish merchant, and the rich banker and the poor carpenter, and the leading wholesaler, and all the other old men who stretched away from the judge in an uneven line, like fence posts for a fence that had not been built. They would not shoot yet; and, as though fully convinced in his own mind they would bide where they were until he was done, and relying completely on them to keep their unspoken promise, Judge Priest half-turned his back on the members of the mob and bent over little Tony.

“Little feller,” he said, “you ain’t skeered, are you?”

Tony looked up at his friend and shook his head stoutly. Tony was not scared. It was as good as play to Tony – all this was.

“That’s my sandy little pardner,” said Judge Priest; and he put his hands under Tony’s arms and heaved the child back up on his shoulders, and swung himself about so that he and Tony faced the huddle of silent figures in the shadow of the bank.

“You see all them men yonder, don’t you, boy?” he prompted. “Well, now you speak up ez loud ez you can, and you tell ‘em whut I’ve been tellin’ you to say all the way down the street ever since we left your mammy. You tell ‘em I’m the big judge of the big court. Tell ‘em there’s one man among ‘em who must come on and go with me. He’ll know and they’ll know which man I mean. Tell ‘em that man ain’t goin’ to be hurt ef he comes now. Tell ‘em that they ain’t none of ‘em goin’ to be hurt ef they all do what I say. Tell ‘em Father Minor is here to show ‘em to a safe, warm place where they kin spend the night. Kin you remember all that, sonny-boy? Then tell ‘em in Eyetalian – quick and loud.”

And Tony Wolfe Tone told them. Unmindful of the hundreds of eyes that were upon him, even forgetting for a minute to watch the fire – Tony opened wide his small mouth and in the tongue of his father’s people, richened perhaps by the sweet brogue of his mother’s land, and spiced here and there with a word or two of savoury good American slang, he gave the message a piping utterance.

They hearkened and they understood. This baby, this bambino, speaking to them in a polyglot tongue they, nevertheless, could make out – surely he did not lie to them! And the priest of their own faith, standing in the snow close by the child, would not betray them. They knew better than that. Perhaps to them the flag, the drum, the fife, the bugle, the faint semblance of military formation maintained by these volunteer rescuers who had appeared so opportunely, promising succour and security and a habitation for the night – perhaps all this symbolised to them organised authority and organised protection, just as Judge Priest, in a flash of inspiration back in Kamleiter’s Hall, had guessed that it might.

Their leader, the man who held the pistol, advanced a pace or two and called out something; and when Tony Wolfe, from his perch on the old judge’s shoulders, had answered back, the man, as though satisfied, turned and might be seen busily confabbing with certain of his mates who clustered about him, gesticulating.

“Whut did he say, boy?” asked Judge Priest, craning his neck to look up.

“He say, Mister Judge, they wants to talk it over,” replied Tony, craning his neck to look down.

“And whut did you say to him then?”

“I say to him: ‘Go to it, kiddo!’”

In the sheltering crotch of little Tony’s two plump bestraddling legs, which encircled his neck, the old judge chuckled to himself. A wave of laughter ran through the ranks of the halted mob – Tony’s voice had carried so far as that, and Tony’s mode of speech apparently had met with favour. Mob psychology, according to some students, is hard to fathom; according to others, easy.

From the midst of the knot of Sicilians a man stepped forth – not the tall man with the gun, but a little stumpy man who moved with a limp. Alone, he walked through the crispened snow until he came up to where the veterans stood, waiting and watching. The mob, all intently quiet once more, waited and watched too.

With a touch of the dramatic instinct that belongs to his race, he flung down a dirk knife at Judge Priest’s feet and held out both his hands in token of surrender. To the men who came there to take his life he gave no heed – not so much as a sidewise glance over his shoulder did he give them. He looked into the judge’s face and into the face of little Tony, and into the earnest face of the old priest alongside these two.

“Boys” – the judge lifted Tony down and, with a gesture, was invoking the attention of his townsmen – “boys, here’s the man who did the knifin’ this mornin’, givin’ himself up to my pertection – and yours. He’s goin’ along with me now to the county jail, to be locked up ez a prisoner. I’ve passed my word and the word of this whole town that he shan’t be teched nor molested whilst he’s on his way there, nor after he gits there. I know there ain’t a single one of you but stands ready to help me keep that promise. I’m right, ain’t I, boys?”

“Oh, hell, judge – you win!” sang out a member of the mob, afterward identified as one of Beaver Yancy’s close friends, in a humorously creditable imitation of the judge’s own earnest whine. And at that everybody laughed again and somebody started a cheer.

“I thought so,” replied the judge. “And now, boys, I’ve got an idea. I reckin, after trampin’ all the way down here in the snow, none of us want to tramp back home ag’in without doin’ somethin’ – we don’t feel like ez ef we want to waste the whole evenin’, do we? See that shack burnin’ down? Well, it’s railroad property; and we don’t want the railroad to suffer. Let’s put her out – let’s put her out with snowballs!” Illustrating his suggestion, he stooped, scooped up a double handful of snow, squeezed it into a pellet and awkwardly tossed it in the general direction of the blazing barracks. It flew wide of the mark and fell short of it; but his intention was good, that being conceded. Whooping joyously, four hundred men and half-grown boys, or thereabouts such a number, pouched their weapons and dug into the drifted whiteness.

“Hold on a minute – we’ll do it to soldier music!” shouted the judge, and he gave a signal. The drum beat then; and old Mr. Harrison Treese buried the fife in his white whiskers and ripped loose on the air the first bars of Yankee Doodle. The judge molded another snowball for himself.

“All set? Then, ready! – aim! – fire!”

Approximately two hundred snowballs battered and splashed the flaming red target. A great sizzling sound rose.

Just after this first volley the only gun-powder shot of the evening was fired. It came out afterward that as a man named Ike Bowers stooped over to gather up some snow his pistol, which he had forgotten to uncock, slipped out of his pocket and fell on a broken bit of planking. There was a darting needle of fire and a smart crack. The Sicilians wavered for a minute, swaying back and forth, then steadied themselves as Father Minor stepped in among them with his arms uplifted; but Sergeant Jimmy Bagby put his hand to his head in a puzzled sort of way, spun round, and laid himself down full length in the snow.