Old Judge Priest

“But could you, sir – would you be willing to do that much for a stranger?” Stress of emotion made Emanuel’s voice husky.

“If you don’t believe I would do just that very thing, why, a dime’ll win you a trip to the Holy Land!” answered back the engaging Caruthers beamingly and enthusiastically.

Then his tone grew earnest: “Listen here, Moon: no man that I take a liking to is a stranger to me – not any more. And I’ve got to own up to it – I like you. You’re my kind of a man – frank, open, on the level; and yet not anybody’s easy mark either. I’ll bet you’re a pretty good hand at sizing up people offhand yourself. Oh, I knew you’d do, the minute I laid eyes on you.”

“Thank you; much obliged,” murmured Emanuel. To all intents he was overcome.

“Now, then,” continued his new-found friend warmly, “let me suggest this: You go ahead and look at the clarinet that this piking Louisville concern’s got for sale if you want to, but don’t buy. Just look – there’s no harm in that. But don’t invest.

“I’m on my way back to New York now to – to lay in my new lines for the trade. I’ll see old Izzy the first thing after I blow in and I’ll get the niftiest clarinet that ever played a tune – get it at actual cost, mind you! I’ll stick it down into one of my trunks and bring it back with me down this way.

“Let’s see” – he consulted a small memorandum book – “I ought to strike this territory again in about ten days or two weeks. We’ll make it two weeks, to be sure. Um – this is Wednesday. I’ll hit your town on Tuesday, the twenty-ninth – that’s two weeks from yesterday. I ought to get in from Memphis sometime during the afternoon. I’ll come to your bank to find you. You’re always there on Tuesdays, ain’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Emanuel. “Don’t you remember my telling you that on Tuesdays Herb Kivil always left early to play tennis and I closed up?”

“So you did,” confirmed Mr. Caruthers. “I’d forgotten your telling me that.”

“For that matter,” supplemented Emanuel, “I’m there every day till three anyhow, and sometimes later; so if – ”

“We’ll make it Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, to be sure,” said Mr. Caruthers with an air of finality.

“If you should want the money now – ” began Emanuel; and he started to haul out the little flat leather purse with the patent clasp wherein he carried his carefully saved cash assets.

With a large, generous gesture the other checked him.

“Hold on!” counselled Caruthers. “You needn’t be in such a hurry, old boy. I don’t even know what the thing is going to cost yet. Izzy’ll charge it to me on the books and then you can settle with me when I bring it to you, if that’s satisfactory.”

He stood up, carefully flicking some cigar ashes off the trailing ends of his four-in-hand tie, and glanced at a watch.

“Well, it’s nearly six o’clock. Time flies when a fellow is in good company, don’t it? We’ll be in Louisville in less than an hour, won’t we? – if we’re on time. I’ve got to quit you there; I’m going on to Cincy to-night. Tell you what – let’s slip into the diner and have a bite and a little nip of something together first – I want to see as much of you as I can. You take a little drink once in a while, don’t you?”

“I drink a glass of light beer occasionally,” admitted Emanuel.

Probably in his whole life he had consumed as much as five commercial quarts of that liquid, half a pint at a time.

“Fine business!” said Caruthers. “Beer happens to be my regular stand-by too. Come on, then.” And he led the way forward for the transported Emanuel.

They said at the bank and at the boarding house that Moon looked better for his week’s lay-off, none of them knowing, of course, what had come into the little man’s dun-coloured life.

On the twenty-eighth of the month he was so abstracted that Mr. Blair, desiring his presence for the moment in the president’s office, had to call him twice, a thing which so annoyed Mr. Blair that the second time he fairly shouted Emanuel’s name; and when Emanuel came hurrying into his presence inquired somewhat acidly whether Emanuel was suffering from any auricular affection. On the morning of the twenty-ninth Emanuel was in quite a little fever of anticipation. The morning passed; the noon or dinner hour arrived and passed.

It was one-thirty. The street drowsed in the early autumnal sunshine, and in front of his bookstore, in a tilted-back chair, old Mr. Wilcox for a spell slumbered audibly. There is a kind of dog – not so numerous since automobiles have come into such general and fatal use – that sought always the middle of the road as a suitable spot to take a nap in, arousing with a yelp when wheels or hoofs seemed directly over him and, having escaped annihilation by an eighth of an inch, moving over perhaps ten feet and lying down again in the perilous pathway of traffic. One of this breed slept now, undisturbed except by flies, at the corner of Front and Franklin. For the time being he was absolutely safe. Emanuel had been to his dinner and had returned. He was beginning to worry. About two-thirty, just after the cashier had taken his tennis racket and gone for the day, Emanuel answered a ring at the telephone.

Over the wire there came to him the well-remembered sound of the blithe Carutherian voice:

“That you, old man?” spake Mr. Caruthers jovially. “Well, I’m here, according to promise. Just got in from down the road.”

“Did – you – bring – it?” inquired Emanuel, almost tremulously.

“The clarinet? You bet your life I brought it – and she’s a bird too.”

“I’m ever so much obliged,” said Emanuel. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you – going to all that trouble on my account. Are you at the hotel? I’ll be over there just as soon as I can close up – I can’t leave here till three.”

“Stay right where you are,” bade his friend. “I’ll be over to see you inside of fifteen or twenty minutes.”

He was as good as his word. At ten minutes before three he walked in, the mould of city fashion in all his outward aspects; and when Emanuel had disposed of Mr. Herman Felsburg, who dropped in to ask what Felsburg Brothers’ balance was, and when Mr. Felsburg had gone, Caruthers’ right hand and Emanuel’s met in an affectionate clasp across the little shelf of the cashier’s window. Followed then an exchange of inquiries and assurances touching on the state of health and well-being of each gentleman.

“I’d like mightily to ask you inside,” said Emanuel next, anxious to extend all possible hospitalities; “but it’s strictly against the rules. Take a chair there, won’t you, and wait for me – I’ll be only a few minutes or so.”

Instead of taking one of the row of chairs that stood in the front of the old-fashioned bank, Mr. Caruthers paused before the wicket, firing metropolitan pleasantries across at the little man, who bustled about inside the railed-off inclosure, putting books and papers in their proper places.

“Everybody’s gone but me, as it happens,” he explained, proud to exhibit to Mr. Caruthers the extent and scope of his present responsibilities.

“Nobody on deck but you, eh?” said Caruthers, looking about him.

“Nobody but me,” answered back Emanuel; “and in about a minute and a half I’ll be through too.”

The cash was counted. He carried it into the depths of the ancient and cumbersome vault, which blocked off a section of the wall behind the cashier’s desk, and in their appointed niches bestowed, also, certain large ledgerlike tomes. He closed and locked the inner steel door and was in the act of swinging to the heavy outer door.

“Look here a minute!” came sharply from Mr. Caruthers.

It was like a command. Obeying involuntarily, Emanuel faced about. From under his coat, where it had been hidden against his left side, Mr. Caruthers, still standing at the wicket, was drawing forth something long and black and slim, and of a most exceeding shininess – something with silver trimmings on it and a bell mouth – a clarinet that was all a clarinet should be, and yet a half brother to a saxophone.

“I sort of thought you’d be wanting to get a flash at it right away,” said Mr. Caruthers, holding the magnificent instrument up in plain sight. “So I brought it along – for a surprise.”

With joy Emanuel Moon’s round eyes widened and moistened. After the fashion of a rabbit suddenly confronted with lettuce his lower face twitched. His overhanging upper lip quivered to wrap itself about that virgin mouthpiece, as his fingers itched to fondle that slender polished fountain of potential sweet melodies. And he forgot other things.

He came out from behind the counter and almost with reverence took the splendid thing from the smiling Mr. Caruthers. He did remember to lock the street door as they issued to the sidewalk; but from that juncture on, until he discovered himself with Caruthers in Caruthers’ room on the third floor of the hotel, diagonally across the street and down the block from the bank, and was testing the instrument with soft, tentative toots and finding to his extreme gratification that this clarinet bleated, not in sheeplike bleats, as his old one did, but rather mooed in a deep bass voice suggestive of cows, all that passed was to Mr. Moon but a confused blur of unalloyed joyousness.

Indeed, from that point thenceforward he was not quite sure of anything except that, over his protests, Mr. Caruthers declined to accept any reimbursement whatsoever for the cost of the new clarinet, he explaining that, thanks to the generosity of that kindly soul, Izzy Gottlieb, the requisite outlay had amounted to so trifling a sum as not to be worthy of the time required for further discussion; and that, following this, he played Annie Laurie all the way through, and essayed the first bars of The Last Rose of Summer, while Mr. Caruthers sat by listening and smoking, and seemingly gratified to the utmost at having been the means of bringing this pleasure to Mr. Moon.

If Mr. Caruthers was moved, in chance intervals, to ask certain questions touching upon the banking business, with particular reference to the methods employed in conducting and safeguarding the Commonwealth Bank, over the way, Emanuel doubtlessly answered him full and truthfully, even though his thoughts for the moment were otherwise engaged.

In less than no time at all – so it appeared to Emanuel – six o’clock arrived, which in our town used to mean the hour for hot supper, except on Sunday, when it meant the hour for cold supper; and Emanuel reluctantly got up to go. But Caruthers would not listen to any suggestions of their parting for yet a while. Exigencies of business would carry him on his lonesome way the next morning; he had just stopped over to see Emanuel, anyway, and naturally he wished to enjoy as much of his society as was possible during a sojourn so brief.

“Moon,” he ordered, “you stay right where you are. We’ll have something to eat together here. I’ll call a waiter and we’ll have it served up here in this room, so’s we can be sort of private and sociable, and afterward you can play your clarinet some more. How does that little programme strike you?”

It struck Emanuel agreeably hard. It was rarely that he dined out, and to dine under such circumstances as these, in the company of so fascinating and so kindly a gentleman as Mr. John P. Caruthers, of the North – well, his cup was simply overflowing, that’s all.

“I’d be glad to stay,” he said, “if you don’t think I’m imposing on your kindness. I was thinking of asking you to go to Mrs. Morrill’s with me for supper – if you would.”

“We can have a better time here,” said Caruthers. He stepped over to the wall telephone. “Have a cocktail first? No? Then neither will I. But a couple of bottles of beer won’t hurt us – will it?”

Emanuel was going to say a small glass of beer was as much as he ever imbibed at a sitting, but before he could frame the statement Caruthers was giving the order.

It was at the close of a most agreeable meal when Emanuel, following Mr. Caruthers’ invitation and example, had emptied his second glass of beer and was in the act of putting down the tumbler, that a sudden sensation of drowsiness assailed his senses. He bent back in his chair, shaking his head to clear it of the mounting dizziness, and started to say he believed he would step to the window for a breath of fresh air. But, because he felt so very comfortable, he changed his mind. His head lolled over on one side and his lids closed down on his heavy eyes. Thereafter a blank ensued.

When Emanuel awoke there was a flood of sunshine about him. For a moment he regarded an unfamiliar pattern of wall paper, the figures of which added to their unfamiliarity by running together curiously; he was in a strange bed, fully dressed, and as he moved his head on the rumpled pillow he realised that he had a splitting headache and that a nasty dryish taste was in his mouth. He remembered then where he was and what had happened, and sat up with a jerk, uttering a little remorseful moan.

The disordered room was empty. Caruthers was gone and Caruthers’ suit case was gone too. Something rustled, and a folded sheet of hotel note paper slid off the bed cover and fell upon the floor. With trembling fingers he reclaimed the paper, and, opening it, he read what was scrawled on it in pencil:

“Dear Old Scout: I’m sorry! I didn’t suppose one bottle of beer would put you down and out. When you took the count all of a sudden, I figured the best thing to do was to let you sleep it off; so I got you into the bed. You’ve been right there all night and nobody’s any the wiser for it except me. Sorry I couldn’t wait until you woke up, but I have to catch the up train; so I’ve paid my bill and I’m beating it as soon as I write this. Your clarinet is with you. Think of me sometimes when you tootle on it. I’ll let you hear from me one of these days.

“Yours in haste,

“J. P. C

“P. S. If I were you I’d stay off the beer in future.”

The up train? Why, that left at eight-forty-five! Surely it could not be that late! Emanuel got out his old silver watch, a legacy from a long-dead sire, and took one look at its two hands; and then in a quiver of haste, with no thought of breakfast or of his present state of unwashed untidiness, with no thought of anything except his precious clarinet, which he tucked under his coat, he let himself out of the door, leaving the key in the lock, and slipping through the deserted hallway he hastened down two flights of stairs; and taking a short cut that saved crossing the lobby, where inquisitive eyes might behold him in all his unkemptness and distress, he emerged from the side door of the Hotel Moderne.

Emanuel had proper cause to hurry. Never in all his years of service for the Commonwealth Bank had he failed to be on hand at eight o’clock to sort out the mail; and if his watch was to be believed here it was a quarter of nine! As he padded across the street on shaky legs a new apprehension that he had come away the day before without locking the combination of the vault smote him. Suppose – suppose something was wrong!

The street door of the Commonwealth stood open, and though the interior seemed deserted he realised, with a sinking of the heart, that someone had arrived before him. He darted inside, dropped the clarinet out of sight in a cuddy under his desk, and fairly threw himself at the vault.

The outer door was closed and locked, as it should be. Nevertheless, his hands shook so that he could hardly work the mechanism. Finally, the tumblers obeyed him, and he swung open the thick twin slabs, unlocked the inner door with the key which he carried along with other keys on his key ring – and then fetched a sigh of relief that was half a sob. Everything was as it should be – cash, paper money, books, files and securities. As he backed out of the vault the door of the president’s office opened and Mr. Blair stood there in the opening, confronting him with an accusing glare.

“Young man,” said Mr. Blair, “you’re late!”

“Yes, sir,” said Emanuel. “I’m very sorry, sir. I must have overslept.”

“So I judge!” Mr. Blair’s accents were ominous. “So I judge, young man – but where?”

“W-where?” Emanuel, burning with shame, stammered the word.

“Yes, sir; that’s what I said – where? Twenty minutes ago I telephoned to Mrs. Morrill’s to find out what was keeping you from your duties, and they told me you hadn’t been in all night – that your bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“Yes, sir; I slept out.”

“I gathered as much.” Mr. Blair’s long white chin whiskers quivered as Mr. Blair’s condemning eyes comprehended the shrinking figure before him from head to foot – the rumpled hair; the bloodshot eyes; the wrinkled clothes; the soiled collar; the skewed necktie; the fluttering hands. “Look here, young man; have you been drinking?”

“No, sir – yes, sir; that is, I – I had a little beer last night,” owned Emanuel miserably.

“A little beer, huh?”

Mr. Blair, being popularly reputed to keep a private quart flask in his coat closet and at intervals to refresh himself therefrom behind the cover of the closet door, had a righteous contempt for wantons who publicly plied themselves with potables, whether of a malt, a spirituous or a vinous nature.

“A little beer, huh?” He put tons of menace into the repetition of the words. “Forever and a day traipsing off on vacations seems to breed bad habits in you, Moon. Now, look here! This is the first time this ever happened – so far as I know. I am inclined to excuse it this once. But see to it that it doesn’t happen again – ever!”

“No, sir,” said Emanuel gratefully. “It won’t.”

And it did not.

So shaken was Emanuel as to his nerves that three whole nights elapsed before he felt equal to practicing on his new clarinet. After that, though, in all his spare moments at the boarding house he played assiduously.

For the purposes of this narrative the passage of the ensuing fortnight is of no consequence. It passed, and that brings us to a Friday afternoon in mid-October. On the Friday afternoon in question the paymaster of the Great Western Crosstie Company deposited in the Commonwealth Bank, for overnight safeguarding, the funds to meet his semimonthly pay roll due to contractors, subcontractors, tow-boat owners and extra labourers, the total amounting to a goodly sum.

Next morning, when Herb Kivil opened the vault, he took one look and uttered one strangled cry. As Emanuel straightened up from the mail he was sorting, and as Mr. Blair stepped in off the street, out from between the iron doors staggered Herb Kivil, white as a sheet and making funny sounds with his mouth. The vault was empty – stripped of cash on hand; stripped of the Great Western Company’s big deposit; stripped of every scrap of paper money; stripped of everything except the bank books and certain securities – in a word, stripped of between eighteen and nineteen thousand dollars, specie and currency. For the thief, whoever he might be, there was one thing to be said – he had an instinct for thoroughness in his make-up.

To say that the news, spreading with a most miraculous rapidity, made the town hum like a startled hive, is to state the case in the mildest of descriptive phrases. On the first alarm, the chief of police, accompanied by a good half of the day force, came at a dogtrot. Having severely questioned the frightened negro janitor, and examined all the doors and windows for those mysterious things known as clews, the chief gave it as his deliberate opinion that the robbery had been committed by some one who had means of access to the bank and its vault.

Inasmuch as there was about the place no evidence of forcible entry, and inasmuch as the face of the vault was not so much as scratched, and inasmuch, finally, as the combination was in perfect order, the population at large felt constrained to agree that Chief Henley had deduced aright. He took charge of the premises for the time being, Mr. Blair having already wired to a St. Louis detective agency beseeching the immediate presence and aid of an expert investigator.

It came out afterward that privily Mr. Blair suggested an immediate arrest, and gave to Henley the name of the person he desired to see taken into custody. But the chief, who was good-hearted – too good-hearted for his own good, some people thought – demurred. He stood in a deep and abiding awe of Mr. Blair. But he did not want to make any mistakes, he said. Anyhow, a big-city sleuth was due before night.. Would not Mr. Blair consent to wait until the detective had arrived and made his investigation? For his part, he would guarantee that the individual under suspicion did not get away. To his postponement of the decisive step Mr. Blair finally agreed.

On the afternoon train over the Short line the expert appeared, an inscrutable gentleman named Fogarty with a drooping red moustache and a brow heavily wrinkled. This Mr. Fogarty first conferred briefly with Mr. Blair and with Chief Henley. Then, accompanied by these two and trailed by a distracted group of directors of the bank, he made a careful survey of the premises from the cellar coal hole to the roof scuttle, uttering not a single word the while. His manner was portentous. Following this he asked for a word in private with the head of the rifled institution.

Leaving the others clustered in a group outside, he and Mr. Blair entered Mr. Blair’s office. Mr. Fogarty closed the door and faced Mr. Blair.

“This here,” said Mr. Fogarty, “was what we call an inside job. Somebody here in this town – somebody who knew all there was to know about your bank – done it. Now, who do you suspicion?”

Lowering his voice, Mr. Blair told him, adding that only a deep sense of his obligations to himself and to his bank inspired him now to detail certain significant circumstances that had come to his personal attention within the past three weeks – or, to be exact, on a certain Wednesday morning in the latter part of September.

In his earlier movements Mr. Fogarty might have been deliberate; but once he made up his mind to a definite course of conduct he acted promptly. He came out of Mr. Blair’s presence, walked straight up to Emanuel Moon, where Emanuel sat at his desk, and, putting his hand on Emanuel’s shrinking shoulder, uttered the words:

“Young man, you’re wanted! Put on your – ”

Then Mr. Fogarty silently turned and beckoned to Chief Henley, invoking the latter’s official co-operation and assistance.

Between the imported detective and the chief of police, Emanuel Moon, a silent, pitifully shrunken figure, walked round the corner to the City Hall, a crowd following along behind, and was locked up in a cell in the basement calaboose downstairs. Lingering about the hall after the suspect had been taken inside.

Divers citizens ventured the opinion that if the fellow wasn’t guilty he certainly looked it. Well, so far as that goes, if a face as pale as putty and downcast eyes brimming with a numbed misery betokened guilt Emanuel had not a leg left to stand on.

However, looks alone are not commonly accepted as competent testimony under our laws, and Emanuel did not abide for very long as a prisoner. The Grand Jury declined to indict him on such dubious proof as the bank people and Mr. Fogarty could offer for its consideration. Undoubtedly the Grand Jury was inspired in its refusal by the attitude the Commonwealth’s attorney maintained, an attitude in which the circuit judge concurred.

It was known that Mr. Blair went to Commonwealth’s Attorney Flournoy, practically demanding that Emanuel be held for trial, and, failing in that quarter, visited Judge Priest with the same object in view. But perversely the judge would not agree with Mr. Blair that the evidence in hand justified such a course; would not on any account concede that Emanuel Moon was the only person, really, who might properly be suspected.

On that head he was as one with Prosecutor Flournoy. They held – these two – that possession of a costly musical instrument, regarding which the present owner would admit nothing except that it was a gift from an unknown friend, coupled with that individual’s stubborn refusal to tell where he had spent a certain night and in whose company, did not constitute a fair presumption that he had made away with nearly nineteen thousand dollars.

“But look here, Judge Priest,” hotly argued Mr. Blair upon the occasion of his call upon His Honour, “it stands to reason Moon is the thief. Why, it couldn’t have been anybody else! And I want the facts brought out.”

“Whut facts have you got, Hiram?” asked the judge.