Old Judge Priest

It was nearly midnight. The half-burned hull of the barracks in the deserted bottom below the Old Fort still smoked a little, but it no longer blazed. Its late occupants – all save one – slept in the P. A. & O. V. roundhouse, half a mile away, under police and clerical protection; this one was in a cell in the county jail, safe and sound, and it is probable that he slept also. That linguistic prodigy, Master Tony Wolfe Tone Palassi, being excessively awearied, snored in soft, little-boy snores at his mother’s side; and over him she cried tears of pride and visited soft kisses on his flushed, upturned face. To the family of the Palassis much honour had accrued – not forgetting the Callahans. At eleven o’clock the local correspondent of the Courier-Journal and other city papers had called up to know where he might get copies of her son’s latest photograph for widespread publication abroad.

The rest of the town, generally speaking, was at this late hour of midnight, also abed; but in the windows of Doctor Lake’s office, on the second floor of the Planters’ Bank building, lights burned, and on the leather couch in Doctor Lake’s inner room a pudgy figure, which breathed heavily, was stretched at full length, its hands passively flat on its breast, its head done up in many windings of cotton batting and surgical bandages. Above this figure stood old Doctor Lake, holding in the open palm of his left hand a small, black, flattened object. The door leading to the outer office opened a foot and the woe-begone face and dripping eyes of Judge Priest appeared through the slit.

“Get out!” snapped Doctor Lake without turning his head.

“Lew, it’s me!” said Judge Priest in the whisper that any civilised being other than a physician or a trained nurse instinctively assumes in the presence of a certain dread visitation. “I jest natchelly couldn’t wait no longer – not another minute! I wouldn’t ‘a’ traded one hair off of Jimmy Bagby’s old grey head fur all the Beaver Yancys that ever was whelped. Lew, is there a chance?”

“Billy Priest,” said Doctor Lake severely, “the main trouble with you is that you’re so liable to go off half-cocked. Beaver Yancy’s not going to die – you couldn’t kill him with an ax. I don’t know how that story got round to-night. And Jim Bagby’s all right too, except he’s going to have one whale of a headache tomorrow. The bullet glanced round his skull and stopped under the scalp. Here ‘tis – I just got it out… Oh, Lord! Now look what you’ve done, bursting in here and blubbering all around the place!”

The swathed form on the couch sat up and cocked an eye out from beneath a low-drawn fold of cheesecloth.

“Is that you, Judge?” demanded Sergeant Bagby in his usual voice and in almost his usual manner.

“Yes, Jimmy; it’s me.”

Judge Priest projected himself across the room toward his friend. He didn’t run; he didn’t jump; he didn’t waddle – he projected himself.

“Yes, Jimmy, it’s me.”

“Are any of the other boys out there in the other room?”

“Yes, Jimmy; they’re all out there, waitin’.”

“Well, quit snifflin’ and call ‘em right in!” said Sergeant Bagby crisply. “I’ve been tryin’ fur years to git somebody to set still long enough fur me to tell ‘em that there story about Gin’ral John C. Breckenridge and Gin’ral Simon Bolivar Buckner; and it seems like somethin’ always comes up to interrupt me. This looks like my chance to finish it, fur oncet. Call them boys all in!”

VIII. DOUBLE-BARRELLED JUSTICE

A LONG and limber man leaned against a doorjamb of the Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant, inhaling the mild dear air of the autumnal day and, with the air of a man who amply is satisfied by the aspect of things, contemplating creation at large as it revealed itself along Franklin Street. In such posture he suggested more than anything else a pair of callipers endowed with reason. For this, our disesteemed fellow citizen of the good old days which are gone, was probably the shortest-waisted man in the known world. In my time I have seen other men who might be deemed to be excessively short waisted, but never one to equal in this unique regard Old King Highpockets. A short span less of torso, and a dime museum would have claimed him, sure.

You would think me a gross exaggerator did I attempt to tell you how high up his legs forked; suffice it to say that, as to his suspenders, they crossed the spine just below his back collar button. Wherefore, although born a Magee and baptised an Elmer, it was inevitable in this community that from the days of his youth onward he should have been called what they did call him. To his six feet five and a half inches of lank structural design he owed the more descriptive part of his customary title. The rest of it – the regal-sounding part of it – had been bestowed upon him in his ripened maturity after he achieved for himself local dominance in an unhallowed but a lucrative calling.

Sitting down the above-named seemed a person of no more than ordinary height, this being by reason of the architectural peculiarities just referred to. But standing up, as at the present moment, he reared head and gander neck above the run of humanity. From this personal eminence he now looked about him and below him as he took the gun. There was not a cloud in the general sky; none in his private and individual sky either. He had done well the night before and likewise the night before that; he expected to do as well or better the coming night. Upstairs over the Blue Jug King Highpockets took in gambling – both plain and fancy gambling.

There passed upon the opposite side of the street one Beck Giltner. With him the tall man in the doorway exchanged a distant and formal greeting expressed in short nods. Between these two no great amount of friendliness was lost. Professionally speaking they were opponents. Beck Giltner was by way of being in the card and dicing line himself, but he was known as a square gambler, meaning by that, to most of mankind he presented a plane surface of ostensible honesty and fair dealing, whereas within an initiated circle rumour had it that his rival of the Blue Jug was so crooked he threw a shadow like a brace and bit. Beck Giltner made it a rule of business to strip only those who could afford to lose their pecuniary peltries. Minors, drunkards, half-wits and chronic losers were barred from his tables. But all was fish – I use the word advisedly – all was fish that came to the net of Highpockets.

Beck Giltner passed upon his business. So did other and more reputable members of society. A short straggling procession of gentlemen went by, all headed westward, and each followed at a suitable interval by his negro “boy,” who might be anywhere between seventeen and seventy years of age. An hour or two later these travellers would return, bound for their offices downtown. Going back they would mainly travel in pairs, and their trailing black servitors would be burdened, front and back, with “samples” – sheafs of tobacco bound together and sealed with blobs of red sealing wax and tagged. For this was in the time before the Trust and the Night Riders had between them disrupted the trade down in the historic Black Patch, and the mode of marketing the weed by loose leaf was a thing as yet undreamed of. They would be prizing on the breaks in Key & Buckner’s long warehouse pretty soon. The official auctioneer had already reported himself, and to the ear for blocks round came distantly a sharp rifle-fire clatter as the warehouse hands knocked the hoops off the big hogsheads and the freed staves rattled down in windrows upon the uneven floor.

A locomotive whistled at the crossing two squares up the street, and the King smiled a little smile and rasped a lean and avaricious chin with a fabulously bony hand. He opined that locomotive would be drawing the monthly pay car which was due. The coming of the pay car meant many sportive railroad men – shopmen, yardmen, trainmen – abroad that evening with the good new money burning holes in the linings of their pockets.

Close by him, just behind him, a voice spoke his name – his proper name which he seldom heard – and the sound of it rubbed the smile off his face and turned it on the instant into a grim, long war-mask of a face.

“Mister Magee – Elmer – just a minute, please!”

Without shifting his body he turned his head and over the peak of one shoulder he regarded her dourly. She was a small woman and she was verging on middle age, and she was an exceedingly shabby little woman. Whatever of comeliness she might ever have had was now and forever gone from her. Hard years and the strain of them had ground the colour in and rubbed the plumpness out of her face, leaving in payment therefor deep lines and a loose skin-sac under the chin and hollows in the cheeks. The shapeless, sleazy black garments that she wore effectually concealed any remnant of grace that might yet abide in her body. Only her eyes testified she had ever been anything except a forlorn and drooping slattern. They were big bright black eyes.

This briefly was the aspect of the woman who stood alongside him, speaking his name. She had come up so quietly that he never heard her. But then her shoes were old and worn and had lasted long past the age when shoes will squeak.

He made no move to raise his hat. Slantwise across the high ridge of his twisted shoulder he looked at her long and contemptuously.

“Well,” he said at length, “back ag’in, huh? Well, whut is it now, huh?”

She put up a little work-gnarled hand to a tight skew of brown hair streaked thickly with grey. In the gesture was something essentially feminine – something pathetic too.

“I reckon you know already what it is, Elmer,” she said. “It’s about my boy – it’s about Eddie.”

“I told you before and I tell you ag’in I ain’t your boy’s guardeen,” he answered her.

“How comes you keep on pesterin’ me – I ain’t got that boy of yourn?”

“Yes, you have got him,” she said, her voice shaking and threatening to break. “You’ve got him body and soul. And I want him – me, his mother. I want you to give him back to me.”

His gaze lifted until he considered empty space a foot above her head. Slowly he reached an angular arm back under his right shoulder blade and fished about there until he had extracted from a hip pocket a long, black rectangle of navy chewing tobacco that was like a shingle newly dipped in creosote. It was a virgin plug – he bought a fresh one every morning and by night would make a ragged remnant of it. With the deliberation of a man who has plenty of time to spare, he set his stained front teeth in a corner of it and gnawed off a big scallop of the rank stuff. His tongue herded it back into his jaw, where it made a lump. He put the plug away. She stood silently through this, kneading her hands together, a most humble suppliant awaiting this monarch’s pleasure.

“You told me all that there foolishness the other time,” he said. “Ain’t you got no new song to sing this time? Ef you have I’ll listen, mebbe. Ef you ain’t I’ll tell you good-by.”

“Elmer,” she said, “what kind of a man are you? Haven’t you got any compassions at all? Why, Elmer, your pa and my pa were soldiers together in the same regiment. You and me were raised together right here in this town. We went to the same schoolhouse together as children – don’t you remember? You weren’t a mean boy then. Why, I used to think you was right good-hearted. For the sake of those old days won’t you do something about Eddie? It’s wrong and it’s sinful – what you’re doing to him and the rest of the young boys in this town.”

“Ef you think that why come to me?” he demanded. “Why not go to the police with your troubles?” He split his lips back, and a double row of discoloured snags that projected from the gums like little chisels showed between them.

“And have ‘em laugh in my face, same as you’re doing now? Have ‘em tell me to go and get the evidence? Oh, I know you’re safe enough there. I reckon you know who your friends are. You shut up when the Grand Jury meets; and once in a while when things get hot for you, like they did when that Law and Order League was so busy, you close up your place; and once in a while you go up to court and pay a fine and then you keep right on. But it’s not you that’s paying the fine – I know that mighty good and well. The money to pay it comes out of the pockets of poor women in this town – wives and mothers and sisters.

“Oh, there’s others besides me that are suffering this minute. There’s that poor, little, broken-hearted Mrs. Shetler, out there on Wheelis Street – the one whose husband had to run away because he fell short in his accounts with the brickyard. And there’s that poor, old Mrs. Postelwaite, that’s about to lose the home that she’s worked her fingers to the bone, mighty near, to help pay for, and she’ll be left without a roof over her head in her old age because her husband’s went and lost every cent he can get his hands on playing cards in your place, and so now they can’t meet their mortgage payments. And there’s plenty of others if the truth was only known. And oh, there’s me and my boy – the only boy I’ve got. Elmer Magee, how you can sleep nights I don’t see!” “I don’t,” he said. “I work nights.” His wit appealed to him, for he grinned again. “Say, listen here!” His mood had changed and he spat the next words out. “Ef you think I ain’t good company for that son of yourn, why don’t you make him stay away from me? I ain’t hankerin’ none fur his society.”

“I’ve tried to, Elmer – God knows I’ve tried to, time and time again. That’s why I’ve come back to you once more to ask you if you won’t help me. I’ve gone down on my knees alone and prayed for help and I’ve prayed with Eddie, too, and I’ve pleaded with him. He don’t run round town carousing like some boys his age do. He don’t drink and he’s not wild, except it just seems like he can’t leave gambling alone. Oh, he’s promised me and promised me he’d quit, but he’s weak – and he’s only a boy. I’ve kept track of his losings as well as I could, and I know that first and last he’s lost nearly two hundred dollars playing cards with you and your crowd. That may not be much to you, Elmer – I reckon you’re rich – but it’s a lot to a lone woman like me. It means bread and meat and house rent and clothes to go on my back – that’s what it means to me. My feet are mighty near out of these shoes I’ve got on, and right this minute there’s not a cent in the house. I don’t say you cheated him, but the money’s gone and you got it. And it’s ruining my boy. He’s only a boy – he won’t be twenty-one till the twelfth day of next April. If only you wouldn’t let him come inside your place he’d behave himself – I know he would.

“So you see, Elmer, you’re the only one that can make him go straight – that’s why I’ve come back to you this second time. I reckon he ain’t so much to blame. You know – yes, you’ve got reason to know better than anybody else – that his father before him couldn’t leave playing cards alone. I hoped I could raise Eddie different. As a little thing I used to tell him playing cards were the devil’s own playthings. But it seems like he can’t just help it. I reckon it’s in his blood.”

“Whut you need then is a blood purifier,” mocked the gamester. He pointed a long forefinger toward the drug store across the street. “You’d better go on over yonder to Hinkle’s and git him some. I see they’re advertisn’ a new brand in their window – a dollar a bottle and a cure guaranteed or else you gits your money back. Better invest!”

He showed her his back as he turned to enter the Blue Jug. Pausing halfway through the swinging doors he spoke again, and since he still looked over her head perhaps he did not see the look that had come into her eyes or mark how her hands were clenching and unclenching. Or if he did see these things perhaps he did not care.

“That’s all I’ve got to say to you,” he added, “exceptin’ this – I want this here to be the last time you come pesterin’ me on the street.”

“It will be,” she said slowly, and her voice was steady although her meagre frame shook. “It’s the last time I’m coming to you on the street, Elmer, for what’s mine by rights.”

“Then good-day to you.” He disappeared. She turned and went away, walking fast. Her name was Norfleet and she was a widow and alone in the world. Except for her son, who worked at Kattersmith Brothers’ brickyards as a helper for twelve dollars and a half a week, she had no kith or kin. She lived mainly by her needle, being a seamstress of sorts.

King Highpockets’ establishment was the nearest approach to a gilded gambling hell – to quote a phrase current – that we had. But certainly it was not gilded, although possibly by some it might have been likened to a hell. Under the friendly cover of darkness you ascended a steep flight of creaky wooden steps and when you had reached the first landing you knocked at a locked wooden door. The lock slid back and the door opened a cautious inch or two and a little grinning negro, whose name was Babe Givens, peeped out at you through the opening. If you were the right person, or if you looked as though you might be the right person, Babe Givens opened the door wider and made way for you to enter.

Entering then, you found yourself in a big room furnished most simply with two tables and some chairs and several spittoons upon the floor, and a portable rack for poker checks and a dumbwaiter in a corner – and that was all. There was no safe, the proprietor deeming it the part of safety to carry his cash capital on his person. There was no white-uniformed attendant to bring you wine, should you thirst, and turkey sandwiches, if you hungered while at play. I have read that such as these are provided in all properly conducted gambling hells in the great city, but King Highpockets ran a sure-thing shop, not a restaurant. Drinks, when desired, were paid for in advance, and came from the bar below on the shelf of the creaking dumbwaiter, after Babe Givens had called the order down a tin speaking tube. There were no rugs upon the floor, no pictures against the walls. Except for the decks of cards, opened fresh at each sitting, there was nothing new or bright about the place. The King might move his entire outfit in one two-horse wagon and put no great strain upon the team. He might lose it altogether and be out of pocket not more than seventy-five dollars. In him the utilitarian triumphed above the purely artistic; himself, he was not pretty to look upon.

Of the two tables, one ordinarily was for poker and the other was for craps. The King banked both games, and sometimes took a hand in the poker game if conditions seemed propitious. Whether he played though or whether he didn’t, he stood by always to lift a white chip out of each jackpot for a greedy and omnivorous kitty, whose mouth showed as a brassbound slot in the middle of the circular cover of dirty green baize. Trust him to minister to his kitty every pop. She was his pet and he loved her, and he never forgot her and her needs.

This night, though, the poker table lacked for tenants. The pay car had come and had dispensed of its delectable contents and had gone on south, and on this particular night most of the King’s guests were railroad men. Railroad men being proverbially fond of quick action and plenty of it, the crap table had been drawn out into the middle of the room and here all activities centred. Here, too, the King presided, making change as occasion demanded cards, opened fresh at each turn.

While he did this his assistant, an alert individual called Grimes – or Jay Bird Grimes, for short – kept track of the swift-travelling dice and of the betting, which like the dice moved from left to right, round and round and round again.

Jay Bird had need to keep both his eyes wide open, for present players and prospective players were ringed four deep about the table. The smoke of their cigars and their cigarettes went upward to add stratified richness to the thick blue clouds that crawled in layers against the ceiling, and the sweat of their brows ran down their faces to drip in drops upon the table as one after another they claimed the dotted cubes and shook, rattled and rolled ‘em, and snapped their finger in importunity, calling upon Big Dick or Phoebe Dice to come and to come right away. And then this one would fail to make his point and would lose his turn, and the overworked ivories would go into the snatching eager hand of that one who stood next him, and all the rest, waiting for their chance, would breathe hard, grunting in fancied imitation of negroes, and shouting out in a semi-hysterical fashion as the player passed or didn’t pass.

A young freight conductor laid down a ten-dollar bill and the King covered it with another. The freight conductor ran that ten up to one hundred and eighty dollars, ten or twenty at a dip, then shot the whole amount and lost it; then lost ninety more on top of that, and with a white face and a quite empty pay envelope, still held fast in a shaking left hand, fell back out of the hunched-in, scrouging circle. But he didn’t go away; he stayed to watch the others, envious of those who temporarily beat the game, dismally sympathetic, with an unspoken fellow feeling, for those who, like him, went broke. Josh Herron, the roundhouse foreman, dropped half his month’s wages before he decided that, since luck plainly was not with him, he had had about enough. A clerk from the timekeeper’s office shoved in, taking his place.

When he wasn’t answering knocks at the door Babe Givens circulated about the outskirts of the tightened group like a small, black rabbit dog about a brush pile harbouring hares, his eyes all china and his mouth all ivory. The sound of those small squared bones dashing together in their worn leather cup was music to his Afric ears. The white man in the first place stole this game from Babe’s race, you know.

Babe had to answer knocks a good many times. Newcomers kept on climbing the stair and knuckling the door.

“Game’s mighty full, genelmens – but they’s always room fur one mo’. Step right in and wait yo’ turn,” Babe would say, ushering in the latest arrival. Babe was almost as happy as if he had been shooting himself.

As I say, they kept coming. At length, a few minutes before midnight, when the pile of silver under the King’s hands had grown from a molehill to a mountain and the wadded paper money made a small shock of yellow-and-green fodder upon the green pasture of the table-top, came still another, and this one most strangely burdened. Very mousily indeed this eleventh-hour visitor ascended the steps, and first trying the doorknob, knocked with a fumbling knock against the pine panels.

Babe drew back the bolt and peered out into the darkness at the solitary figure dimly seen. “Game’s mighty full, genelmen,” he began the formula of greeting, “but you kin – ”

Babe began it but he never finished it. Some-. thing long and black, something slim and fearsome – yes, most fearsome – slid through the opening, and grazed his nose so that the little darky, stricken limp, fell back.

“Please, suh, boss,” he begged, “fur Gawd’s sake don’t shoot – don’t shoot!”

Babe started his prayer in a babble but he ended it with a shriek – a shriek so imploringly loud that all there, however intent they might be, were bound to hear and take notice. Over the heads of his patrons Highpockets looked, and he stiffened where he stood. They all looked; they all stiffened.

There was just cause. Inside the door opening was a masked figure levelling down a double-barrelled shotgun upon them. Lacking the mask and the shotgun, and lacking, too, a certain rigid and purposeful pose which was most clearly defined in all its lines, the figure would have lacked all menace, indeed would have seemed to the casual eye a most impotent and grotesque figure. For it was but little better than five feet in stature and not overly broad. It wore garments too loose for it by many inches. The sleeve ends covered the small hands to the finger ends, and the trousers wrinkled, accordion fashion, to the tips of the absurdly small toes. An old slouch hat threatened to slip all the way down over the wearer’s face. The mask was a flimsy thing of black cambric, but the eyeholes, strange to say, were neatly worked with buttonhole stitching. From beneath the hatbrim at the back a hank of longish hair escaped. On the floor, a yard or so before the apparition where it had been dropped, rested an ancient black handbag unlatched and agape.

I am not meaning to claim that at the first instant of looking the several astonished eyes of the gathering in King Highpockets’ place comprehended all these details; it was the general effect that they got; and it was that shotgun which mainly made the difference in their point of view. What they did note most clearly – every man of them – was that the two hammers of the gun stood erect, ready to drop, and that a slim trigger finger played nervously inside the trigger guard, and that the twin muzzles, shifting and wavering like a pair, of round hard eyes gazing every way at once, seemed to fix a threatening stare upon all of them and upon each of them. If the heavy gun shook a bit in the grip of its holder that but added to the common peril. Anyone there would have taken his dying oath that the thing aimed for his shrinking vitals and none other’s. “Hands up – up high! And keep ‘em up!” The command, given in a high-pitched key, was practically unnecessary. Automatically, as it were, all arms there had risen to full stretch, so that the clump of their motionless bodies was fronded at the top with open palms and tremulous outstretched fingers. But the arms of old King Highpockets rose above all the rest and his fingers shook the shakiest.