Old Judge Priest

“If anybody moves an inch I’ll shoot.”

“That don’t go for me – I ain’t aimin’ to move,” murmured Josh Herron. Josh was scared all right, but he chuckled as he said it. “Now – boy – you!”

The gun barrels dipped to the right an instant, including the detached form of Babe Givens in their swing.

“Yas, suh, boss, yas!”

“You put all that money in this grip sack here at my feet.”

“W-w-which money, boss?”

“All the money that’s there on that table yonder – every cent of it.”

The little darky feared the man who paid him his wages, but there were things in this world he feared more – masked faces and shotguns, for example. His knees smote together and his teeth became as castanets which played in his jaws, as with rolling eyes and a skin like wet ashes he moved shudderingly to obey. Between the table and the valise he made two round trips, carrying the first time silver, the second time paper, and then, his task accomplished, he collapsed against the wall because his legs would no longer hold him up. For there was water in his knee joints and his feet were very cold.

Through this nobody spoke; only the eyes of the armed one watched vigilantly everywhere and the shotgun ranged the assemblage across its front and back again. Under his breath some one made moan, as the heaping double handful of green-and-yellow stuff was crumpled down into the open-mawed bag. It might have been Highpockets who moaned.

“Now then,” bade the robber, when the paper had gone to join the silver, “anybody here who’s lost his money to-night or any other night can come and get it back. But come one at a time – and come mighty slow and careful.”

Curiously enough only two came – the young freight conductor and the youth who was a clerk in the time-keeper’s office at the yards.

Shamefacedly the freight conductor stooped, flinching away from the gun muzzles which pointed almost in his right ear, and picked out certain bills.

“I lost an even hundred – more’n I can afford to lose,” he mumbled. “I’m takin’ just my own hundred.” He retired rearward after the manner of a crab.

The boy wore an apologetic air as he salvaged twenty-two dollars from the cache. After he had crawfished back to the table where the others were, none else offered to stir.

“Anybody else?” inquired the collector of loot.

“Well, I squandered a little coin here this evenin’, but I’m satisfied,” spoke Josh Herron, now grinning openly. “I’m gittin’ my money’s worth.” He glanced sidewise toward the suffering proprietor.

“All done?”

Nobody answered.

“Here, boy, come here then!”

Babe Givens came – upon his knees.

“Close that bag.”

Babe fumbled the rusted claps shut.

“Now, shove it up close to me along the floor.”

Babe, he shoved it.

“Now get back yonder where you were.”

I leave it to you whether Babe got back yonder.

The figure swooped downward briskly, and two fingers of the hand which gripped the forearm of the gun caught in the looped handles of the black bag and brought it up dangling and heavy laden.

And now the custodian of these delectable spoils was backing toward the door, but still with weapon poised and ready.

“Stay right where you are for five minutes,” was the final warning from behind the cambric mask. “Five minutes, remember! Anybody who tries to come down those steps before that five minutes is up is going to get shot.”

The door slammed. Through the closed door the crap-shooters, each in his place and all listening as intently as devout worshippers in a church, heard the swift footsteps dying away. Josh Herron brought down his arms and took two steps forward.

“Wait, Josh, the time limit ain’t up yit,” counselled a well-wisher.

“Oh, I ain’t goin’ nowheres jest yit – I’m very comfortable here,” said Josh. He stooped and seemed to pick up some small object from the bare planks.

Five minutes later – or perhaps six – a procession moving cautiously, silently and in single file passed down the creaky stairs. It was noted – and commented upon – that the owner of the raided place, heaviest loser and chief mourner though he was, tagged away back at the tail of the line. Only Babe Givens was behind him, and Babe was well behind him too. At the foot of the stairs the frontmost man projected his head forth into the night, an inch at a time, ready to jerk it back again. But to his inquiring vision Franklin Street under its gas lamps yawned as empty as a new made grave.

For some unuttered and indefinable reason practically all of the present company felt in a mood promptly to betake themselves home. On his homeward way Josh Herron travelled in the company of a sorely shaken grocery clerk, and between them they, going up the street, discussed the startling episode in which they had just figured.

“Lookin’ down that pair of barrels certainly made a true believer out of old Highpockets, didn’t it?” said the grocer’s clerk, when the event had been gone over verbally from its beginning to its end. “Did you happen to see, Josh, how slow he poked his old head out past them doorjambs even after Jasper Waller told him the coast was clear? Put me in mind of one of these here old snappin’-turtles comin’ out of his shell after a skeer. Well, I had a little touch of the buck-ager myself,” he confessed.

“It was sorter up to our long-laiged friend to be a little bit careful,” said Josh Herron. “Coupled up the way he is, one buckshot would be liable to go through his gizzard and his lights at the same time.”

A little later the grocery clerk spoke, in reference to a certain quite natural curiosity which seemingly lay at the top of his thoughts, since he had voiced it at least three times within the short space of one city block:

“I wonder who that there runty hold-up could ‘a’ been?”

“Yes, I wonder?” repeated Josh Herron in a peculiar voice.

“He certainly took a long chance, whoever he was – doin’ the whole job single handed,” continued the grocery clerk. “Well, I ain’t begrudgin’ him the eight dollars of mine that he packed off with him, seein’ as how he stripped old Highpockets as clean as a whistle. And he couldn’t ‘a’ been nothin’ but a half-grown boy neither, judgin’ from his build.”

“Boy – hell! Say, Oscar, are you as blind as the rest of that crowd?”’ asked Josh Herron, coming to a halt beneath a corner gas lamp. “Was you so skeered, too, you couldn’t see a thing that was right there before your eyes as plain as day?”

“What you talkin’ about?” demanded the other. “If it wasn’t a boy, what was it – a dwarf?”

“Oscar, kin you keep a secret?” asked Josh Herron, grinning happily. “Yes? Then look here.”

He opened his right hand. Across the palm of it lay a bent wire hairpin.

It is possible that Oscar, the grocer’s clerk, did know how to keep a secret. As to that I would not presume to speak. Conceding that he did, it is equally certain that some persons did not possess the same gift of reticence. By noon of the following day, practically all who had ears to hear with had heard in one guise or another the story of those midnight proceedings upstairs over the Blue Jug. It was inevitable that the editor of the Daily Evening News should hear it, too, which he did – from a dozen different sources and by a dozen differing versions. For publication at least the distressed Highpockets had nothing to say. All things being considered, this was but natural, as you will concede.

Naturally, also, none might be found in all the width and breadth of the municipality who would confess to having been an eye witness to the despoiling operations, because if you admitted so much it followed in the same breath you convicted yourself of being a frequenter of gaming establishments, and, moreover, of being one of a considerable number of large, strong men who had suffered themselves to be coerced by one diminutive bandit. So, lacking authoritative facts to go upon, and names of individuals with which to buttress his statements, Editor Tompkins, employing his best humorous vein, wrote and caused to be printed an account veiled and vague, but not so very heavily veiled at that and not so vague but that one who knew a thing or two might guess out the riddle of his tale.

Coincidentally, certain other things happened which might or might not bear a relationship to the main event. Old Mrs. Postelwaite received by mail, in an unmarked envelope and from an unknown donor, three hundred and odd dollars – no great fortune in itself, but a sum amply sufficient to pay off the mortgage on her small birdbox of a dwelling, and so save the place which she called home from foreclosure at the instigation of the Building & Loan Company. Since little Mrs. Shetler, who lived out on Wheelis Street, had no present source of income other than what she derived by taking subscription orders for literary works which nobody cared to read and few, except through a spirit of compassion for Mrs. Shetler, cared to buy, it seemed fair to assume that from like mysterious agencies she acquired the exact amount of her husband’s shortage, then owing to Kattersmith Brothers, his recent employers. This amount being duly turned over to that firm the fugitive was enabled to return from his hiding and, rehabilitated, to assume his former place in the community. For the first time in months little Mrs. Shetler wore a smile upon her face and carried her head erect when she went abroad. Seeing that smile you would have said yourself that it was worth every cent of the money.

The Widow Norfleet, seamstress, squared up her indebtedness with divers neighbourhood tradesmen, and paid up her back house rent, and after doing all this still had enough ready cash left to provide winter time garments for herself and a new suit for her threadbare son Eddie. Finally, Mrs. Matilda Weeks, who constituted in herself an unofficial but highly efficient local charity organisation, discovered on a certain morning when she awoke that, during the night, some kindly soul had shoved under her front door a plain Manila wrapper, containing merely a line of writing on a sheet of cheap, blue-ruled notepaper: “For the poor people,” and nearly three hundred dollars in bills – merely that, and nothing more. It was exactly in keeping with Mrs. Weeks’ own peculiar mode of philanthropy that she should accept this anonymous gift and make use of it without asking any questions whatsoever.

“I think, by all accounts, it must be tainted money,” said Mrs. Weeks, “but I don’t know any better way of making dirty money clean than by doing a little good with it.”

So she kept the donation intact against the coming of the Christmas, and then she devoted it to filling many Christmas dinner baskets and many Christmas stockings for the families of shanty-boaters, whose floating domiciles clustered like a flock of very disreputable water fowl down by the willows, below town, these shiftless river gypsies being included among Mrs. Weeks’ favourite wards.

Meanwhile, for upward of a week after the hold-up no steps of whatsoever nature were taken by the members of the police force. For the matter of that, no steps which might be called authoritative or in strict accordance with the statutes made and provided were ever taken by them or any one of them. But one evening the acting head of the department went forth upon a private mission. Our regular chief, Gabe Henley, was laid up that fall, bedfast with inflammatory rheumatism, and the fact of his being for the time an invalid may possibly help to explain a good deal, seeing that Gabe had the name for both honesty and earnestness in the discharge of his duties, even if he did fall some degrees short of the mental stature of an intellectual giant.

So it was the acting chief – he resigned shortly thereafter, as I recall – who took it upon himself to pay a sort of domiciliary visit to the three-room cottage where the Widow Norfleet lived with her son Eddie and took in sewing. He bore no warrant qualifying him for violent entry, search of the premises or seizure of the person, and perhaps that was why he made no effort to force his way within the little house; or maybe he desired only to put a few pointed questions to the head of the house. So while he stood at the locked front door, knocking until his knuckles stung him and his patience had become quite utterly exhausted, a woman let herself out at the back of the house and ran bareheaded through an alley which opened into Clay Street, Clay Street being the next street to the west. When she returned home again at the end of perhaps half an hour a peep through a hooded and shuttered front window revealed to her that the brass-buttoned caller had departed.

It was the next morning, to follow with chronological exactitude the sequence of this narrative, that our efficient young commonwealth’s attorney, Jerome G. Flournoy, let himself into the chambers of the circuit judge. Mr. Flournoy wore between his brows a little V of perplexity. But Judge Priest, whom he found sitting by a grate fire stoking away at his cob pipe, appeared to have not a single care concealed anywhere about his person. Certainly his forehead was free of those wrinkles which are presumed to denote troublesomeness of thought on the inside.

“Judge,” began Mr. Flournoy, without any prolonged preliminaries, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to take up that Blue Jug affair. And I do hate mightily to do it, seeing what the consequences are liable to be. So I thought I’d talk it over with you first, if you don’t mind.”

“Son,” whined Judge Priest, and to Mr. Flournoy it seemed that the phantom shadow of a wink rested for the twentieth part of a second on the old judge’s left eyelid, “speakin’ officially, it’s barely possible that I don’t know whut case you have reference to.”

“Well, unofficially then, you’re bound to have heard the talk that’s going round town,” said Mr. Flournoy. “Nobody’s talked of anything else much this past week, so far as I’ve been able to notice. Just between you and me, Judge, I made up my mind, right from the first, that unless it was crowded on me I wasn’t going to take cognisance of the thing at all. That’s the principal reason why I haven’t mentioned the subject in your presence before now. As a private citizen, it struck me that that short-waisted crook got exactly what was coming to him, especially as I never heard of bad money being put to better purposes. But aside from what he lost in cash – and I reckon he doesn’t think any more of a silver dollar than you do of both your legs – it made him the laughing stock of twenty thousand people, and more particularly after the true inside facts began to circulate.”

“Now that you mention it, son,” remarked Judge Priest blandly, “it strikes me that I did ketch the distant sound of gigglin’ here and there durin’ the past few days.”

“That’s just it – the giggling must’ve got under the scoundrel’s hide finally. I gather that at the beginning Magee made up his mind to keep his mouth shut and just take his medicine. But I figure him for the kind that can’t stand being laughed at very long – and his own gang have just naturally been laughing him to death all week. Anyhow, he came to my house today right after breakfast, and called on me as the commonwealth’s attorney to put the facts before the Grand Jury when it convenes next Monday for the fall term. He’s even willing to testify himself, he says. And he says he can prove what went with the money that he lost that night – or most of it – and what became of the rest of it.

“That’s not all, Judge, either. Right on top of that, when I got down to my office I found a letter from Mrs. Hetty Norfleet, saying she had nothing to conceal from the duly sworn officers of the law, and that she was perfectly willing to answer any charges that might be made against her, and that she would come to me and make a full statement any time I wanted her to come. Or substantially that,” amended Mr. Flournoy, with the lawyer’s instinct.

“Is that possible?” quoth the judge in tones of a mild surprise. With his thumb he tamped down the smoulder in his pipe. The job appeared to require care; certainly it required full half a minute of time. When next he spoke he had entirely departed from the main line of the topic in hand.

“I reckin, son, you never knowed little Gil Nickolas, did you? No, ‘taint in reason that you would. He died long before your time. Let’s see – he must’ve died way back yonder about eighteen-sixty-nine, or maybe ‘twas eighteen-seventy? He got hisself purty badly shot up at Chickamauga and never did entirely git over it. Well, sir, that there little Gil Nickolas wasn’t much bigger than a cake of lye soap after a hard day’; washin’, but let me tell you, he was a mighty gallant soldier of the late Southern Confederacy. I know he was because we both served together in old Company B – the first company that went out of this town after the fussin’ started. Yes, suh, he shorely was a spunky little raskil. |I reckin he belonged to a spunky outfit – I never knowed one of his breed yit that didn’t have more sand, when it come right down to cases, than you could load onto a hoss and waggin.” Again he paused to minister to the spark of life in his pipe bowl. “I recall one time, the first year of the war, me and Gil was out on a kind of a foragin’ trip together and – ”

“I beg your pardon, Judge Priest,” broke in Mr. Flournoy a trifle stiffly, “but I was speaking of the trouble Mrs. Hetty Norfleet’s gotten herself into.”

“I know you was,” assented Judge Priest, “and that’s whut put me in mind of little Gil Nickolas. He was her paw. I ain’t seen much of her here of recent years, but I reckin she’s had a purty toler’ble hard time of it. Her husband wasn’t much account ez I remember him in his lifetime.”

“She has had a hard time of it – mighty hard,” assented Mr. Flournoy, “and that’s one of the things that makes my job all the harder for me.”

“How so?” inquired Judge Priest. “Because,” expounded Mr. Flournoy, “now, I suppose, I’ve got to put her under arrest and bring her to trial. In a way of speaking Magee has got the law on his side. Certainly he’s got the right to call on me to act. On the surface of things the police are keeping out of it – I reckon we both know why – and so it’s being put up to me. Magee points out, very truly, that it’s a felony charge anyhow, and that even if his dear friend, the acting chief, should start the ball rolling, in the long run, sooner or later, the case would be bound to land in circuit court.”

“And whut then?” asked Judge Priest.

“Oh, nothing much,” said Mr. Flournoy bitterly, “nothing much, except that if that poor little woman confesses – and I judge by the tone of her letter she’s ready to do just that – anyway, everybody in town knows by now that she was the one that held up that joint of Magee’s at the point of a shotgun – why the jurors, under their oaths, are bound to bring in a verdict of guilty, no matter how they may feel about it personally. Magee has about reached the point where he’d risk a jail term for himself to see her sentenced to the penitentiary. Judge Priest, I’d almost rather resign my office than be the means of seeing that poor, little, plucky woman convicted for doing the thing she has done.”

“Wait a minute, son! Hold your hosses and wait a minute!” put in the judge. “Mebbe it won’t be absolutely necessary fur you to up and resign so abrupt. Your valuable services are needed round this courthouse.”

“What’s that you say, Judge?” asked the young prosecutor, straightening his body out of the despondent curve into which he had looped it.

“I says, wait a minute and don’t be so proneful to jump at conclusions,” repeated and amplified the older man. “You go and jump at a conclusion that-away and you’re liable to skeer the poor thing half to death. I’ve been lettin’ you purceed ahead because I wanted to git your views on this little matter before I stuck my own paddle into the kittle. But now let’s you and me see ef there ain’t another side to this here proposition.”

“I’m listening, your Honour,” said Flournoy, mystified but somehow cheered.

“Well, then!” The judge raised his right arm ready to emphasise each point he made with a wide swing of the hand which held the pipe. “Under the laws of this state gamblin’ in whatsoever form ain’t permitted, recognised, countenanced nor suffered. That’s so, ain’t it, son? To be shore, the laws as they read at present sometimes seem insufficient somehow to prevent the same, and I hope to see them corrected in that reguard, but the intent is plain enough that, in the eye of the law, public gamblin’ es sech does not go on anywhere within the confines of this commonwealth. You agree with me there, don’t you?”

“May it please the court, I agree with you there,” said Flournoy happily, beginning, he thought, to see the light breaking through.

“All right then – so fur so good. Now then, sech bein’ the situation, we may safely assume, I reckin, that within the purview and the written meanin’ of the statute, gamblin’ – common gamblin’ – don’t exist a-tall. It jest natchally ain’t.

“Understand me, I’m speaking accordin’ to a strict legal construction of the issue. And so, ef gamblin’ don’t exist there couldn’t ‘a’ been no gamblin’ goin’ on upstairs over the Blue Jug saloon and restauraw on the night in question. In fact, ef you carry the point out to its logical endin’ there couldn’t ‘a’ been no night in question neither. In any event, ef the person Magee could by any chance prove he was there, in the said place, on the said date, at the said time, it would appear that he was present fur the purpose of evadin’ and defyin’ the law, and so ef somebody ostensibly and apparently seemed to happen along and did by threat and duress deprive him of somethin’ of seemin’ value, he still wouldn’t have no standin’ in court because he couldn’t come with clean hands hisse’f to press the charge.

“But there ain’t no need to go into that phase and aspect of the proposition because we know now that, legally, he wasn’t even there. Not bein’ there, of course he wasn’t engaged in carryin’ on a game of chance. Not bein’ so engaged, it stands to reason he didn’t lose nothin’ of value. Ef he states otherwise we are bound to believe him to be a victim of a diseased and an overwrought mind. And so there, I take it, is the way it stands, so fur ez you are concerned, Mister Flournoy. You can’t ask a Grand Jury to return an indictment ag’inst a figment of the imagination, kin you? Why, boy, they’d laugh at you.”

“I certainly can’t, Judge,” agreed the young man blithely. “I don’t know how the venerable gentlemen composing the court of last resort in this state would look upon the issue if it were carried up to them on appeal, but for my purposes you’ve stated the law beautifully.” He was grinning broadly as he stood up and reached for his hat and his gloves. “I’m going now to break the blow to our long-legged friend.”

“Whilst you’re about it you mout tell him somethin’ else,” stated his superior. “In fact, you mout let the word seep round sort of promiscuous-like that I’m aimin’ to direct the special attention of the next Grand Jury to the official conduct of certain members of the police force of our fair little city. Ez regards the suppressin’ and the punishin’ of common gamblers, the law appears to be sort of loopholey at present; but mebbe ef we investigated the activities, or the lack of same, on the part of divers of our sworn peace officers, we mout be able to scotch the snake a little bit even ef we can’t kill it outright. Anyway, I’m willin’ to try the experiment. I reckin there’s quite a number would be interested in hearin’ them tidin’s ef you’re a mind to put ‘em into circulation. Personally, I’m impressed with the idea that our civic atmosphere needs clarifyin’ somewhut. All graftin’ is hateful but it seems to me the little cheap graftin’ that goes on sometimes in a small community is about the nastiest kind of graft there is. Don’t you agree with me there?”

“Judge Priest,” stated Mr. Flournoy from the threshold, “I’ve about made up my mind that I’m always going to agree with you.” Inside of two hours the commonwealth’s attorney returned from his errand, apparently much exalted of spirit.

“Say, Judge,” he proclaimed as he came through the door, “I imagine it won’t be necessary for you to take the steps you were mentioning a while ago.”

“No?”

“No, siree. Once I’d started it I judge the news must’ve spread pretty fast. Outside on the Square, as I was on my way back up here from downtown, Beck Giltner waylaid me to ask me to tell you for him that he was going to close down his game and try to make a living some other way. I’m no deep admirer of the life, works and character of Beck Giltner, but I’ll say this much for him – he keeps his promise once he’s made it. I’d take his word before I’d take the word of a lot of people who wouldn’t speak to him on the street.