Irvin S. Cobb

“ As if Jeff's tense whispers were reaching to him across two hundred yards of track and open field Flitterfoot opened up a gap between his lathered flanks and the rest of them. The others, in a confused group, scrambled and hinged out with their hoofs; but Flitterfoot turned into a long red elastic rubber band, stretching himself out to twice his honest length and then snapping back again to half. High up on his shoulder the ragged black stable boy hung, with his knees under his chin and his shoulders hunched as though squaring off to do a little flying himself. ”

“ For J. Hayden Witherbee, one quick glance was enough. Four—no, five—five alert-looking young men, all plainly marked with the signs of a craft abhorrent to Mr. Witherbee, sat in a row of chairs beyond a railing; and beyond them was a sixth person, a young woman with a tiptilted nose and a pair of inquisitive, expectant gray eyes. Mr. Witherbee would have known them anywhere by their backs—jackals of the press, muckrakers, sworn enemies to Mr. Witherbee and all his kith and kind!
It was Mr. Witherbee who slammed the door shut, drawing Judge Priest back into the shelter of the closed room ”

“ And the imperturbable major would invariably retort:
“Yes, and along about dark the prisoner will have to be loading you into a hack and sending you home—the same as he always does.” Thereupon a cackling laugh would run up the double line from its foot to its head.
The local band, up in its coop on the warped gray roof of the grandstand, blared out Dixie, and the crowd cheered louder than ever as the uneven column of old soldiers swung stiffly down the walkway fronting the grandstand and halted at the word—and then, at another word, disbanded and melted away into individuals and groups. ”

“ The snicker grew to a laugh—a laugh with a thread of grim menace in it, and a tinge of mounting man-hysteria. Even to these men, whose eyes were used to resting on ungainly and awkward old men, the figure of Judge Priest, standing in their way alone, had a grotesque emphasis. The judge's broad stomach stuck far out in front and was balanced by the rearward bulge of his umbrella. His white chin-beard was streaked with tobacco stains. The legs of his white linen trousers were caught up on his shins and bagged dropsically at the knees. ”

“ The two girls fanned themselves with their handkerchiefs and constantly brushed cinders off their starched blouses. Mrs. Mc-Laurin, buttoned in to her rounded throat, sat bolt-upright, the better to keep wrinkles from marring the flawless fit of her regimentals. She suffered like a Christian martyr of old, smiling with a sweet content—as those same Christian martyrs are said to have suffered and smiled. Judge Priest, sitting one seat to the rear of her, with Major Covington alongside him, napped lightly with his head against the hot red plush of the seat-back. ”

“ All other eyes there were turned to the south, where the county's rival trotters swung round the first turn, traveling together like teammates. None marked Captain Buck Owings as, strangely cumbered, he scuttled across the track from the outer side to the inner and dived like a rabbit under the fence at the head of the homestretch, where a big oak tree with a three-foot bole cast its lengthening shadows across the course. None marked Judge Priest's Jeff coiling down like a black-snake behind an unlatched wooden gate almost opposite where the tree stood. ”

“ Young Jim, his head on his breast and his shamed eyes looking down at nothing, was fumbling again with his wares and Ranee Fleming's hunching shoulders were vanishing at the end of the shed.
People talked about it that night and for days after. It was not a thing to forget—a man near grown who lacked the sand to resent that insult. A fist fight might have been forgotten, even a fist fight between these two heritors of a feud instinct, but not this. Some of the younger fellows didn't see, they said, how Jim Faxon could hold his head up again and look people in the eye. ”

“ While Major Covington and Judge Priest and the foremost of the others got in one another's way and packed in a solid, heaving mass behind the pair, all shouting and all trying to help, but really not helping at all, the red ruffian, grunting with the fervor of the blow, drove his clenched fist into old Harper's face, ripping the skin on the high Indian cheekbone. The old man dealt no blows in return, but his right hand found a grip in the folds of flesh at the tramp's throat and the fingers closed down like iron clamps on his wind. ”

“ None of the men in the front rank joined in the snickering however; they only looked at the judge with a sort of respectful obstinacy.
There was nothing said for maybe twenty seconds.
“Jedge Priest,” said a spokesman, a tall, spare, bony man with a sandy drooping mustache and a nose that beaked over like a butcherbird's bill—“Jedge Priest, we've come after a nigger boy that's locked up in that jail yonder and we're goin' to have him! Speaking personally, most of us here know you and we all like you, suh; but I'll have to ask you to stand aside and let us go ahead about our business.” ”

“ An exceedingly young, exceedingly important person, who looked as though he might be prominent in the national guard or on some governor's staff, half rose from a leather lounge and glanced about inquiringly, but the old man in the cape and boots kept on.
“Major!” tried Malley vainly. “Major! Just a minute, please.” And then, “Judge! Oh, judge!” he called as a last resort, and at that his quarry swung about on his heels and stopped, eying him with whimsical, mild blue eyes under wrinkly lids. ”

“ And then—and then—fifty scant feet ahead of him and a scanter twenty above where the armed madman stood—a wide gate flew open; and, as this gap of salvation broke into the line of the encompassing fence, the welcome clarion of Judge Priest's Jeff rose in a shriek: “This way out, boss—this way out!”
It was a time for quick thinking; and to persons as totally, wholly scared as Jackson Berry was, thinking comes wondrous easy. ”

“ For now, then, realizing that an attack was being made on his rear, the stockier thief broke Judge Priest's fumbling grip upon his gun-hand and half swung himself about to shoot the unseen foe, whoever it might be; but, as he jammed its muzzle into the stomach of the newcomer and pressed the trigger, the left hand of old Harper closed down fast upon the lock of the revolver, so that the hammer, coming down, only pinched viciously into his horny thumb. Breast to breast they wrestled in that narrow space at the head of the aisle for possession of the weapon. ”

“ His straw hat was on the table, and in a corner leaned his inevitable traveling companion in summer weather—a vast and cavernous umbrella of a pattern that is probably obsolete now, an unkempt old drab slattern of an umbrella with a cracked wooden handle and a crippled rib that dangled away from its fellows as though shamed by its afflicted state. The campaigning had been hard on the old judge. The Monday before, at a rally at Temple's Mills, he had fainted, and this day he hadn't felt equal to going to Shady Grove. ”

“ The way was barred, by whooping, panting old men, hornet-hot. Everybody took a hand or tried to. The color-bearer shoved the staff of the flag between his legs and half tripped him, and as he regained his feet Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, jumping on a seat to get at him over the bobbing heads of his comrades, dealt him a glancing, clumsy blow on the shoulder with the muzzle of his old musket. Major Covington and Judge Priest were still right on him, bearing their not inconsiderable bulk down upon his shoulders. ”

“ When the month was past and Singin' Sandy's day rolled round again for the ninth time, it was spring time, and the river was bankfull from the spring rise and yellow as paint with mud and full of drift and brush. Out from shore a piece, in the current, floating snags were going down, thick as harrow teeth, all pointing the same way like big black fish going to spawn. Early that morning, the river had bitten out a chunk of crumbly clay bank and took a cabin in along with it, and there was a hard job saving a couple of women and a whole shoal of young ones. ”

“ The flying squirrel flipped around to the safe side of his tree and fled upward to the shelter of the branches, like a little gray shadow, and Judge Priest, looking down the aisle of shady trees, saw two women coming up the walk toward him, their feet crunching slowly on the gravel. He laid his pipe aside and pulled chairs forward for his callers, whoever they might be. They were right up to the steps before he made them out—Miss Puss Whitley and little Emmy Hardin. ”

“ The lurching shoulders of the elephants had gone over the hill beyond and on down, the sacred ox of India had passed ambling from sight, the glass establishment of the snake-charmer was passing, and January and the down wagon and the steam calliope were right in front of the Hammersmith house, when something happened on ahead, and for a half minute or so there was a slowing-up and a closing-up and a halting of everything. ”

“ Indeed the only way to get out of Clay Street, once you got into it, was by a distant lane that cut through to the paralleling street on the right. What would any circus parade in possession of its sane senses be doing going up Clay Street?
But that indeed was exactly what this parade was doing—with the added phenomena of Sheriff Giles Birdsong sitting vigilantly erect on the front seat of the band wagon, and a band-wagon driver taking orders for once from somebody besides his rightful boss—taking them protestingly and profanely, but nevertheless taking them. ”

“ In the open spaces the little heat waves danced like so many stress marks, accenting the warmth and giving emphasis to it; and far down the street, which ran past the courthouse and the jail and melted into a country road so imperceptibly that none knew exactly where the street left off and the road began, there appeared a straggling, irregular company of men marching, their shapes more than half hid in a dust column of their own raising. The Massac men were coming. ”

“ McLaurin felt in a new handbag—of gray broadcloth with a gold clasp, to match her uniform—for a powder-rag. Then she shrank cowering back in her place, for leaping briskly up the car steps there appeared, framed in the open doorway just beyond her, an armed man—a short, broad man in a flannel shirt and ragged overalls, with a dirty white handkerchief bound closely over the bridge of his nose and shielding the lower part of his face. A long-barreled pistol was in his right hand and a pair of darting, evilly disposed eyes looked into her startled ones from under the brim of a broken hat. ”

“ Captain Braxton Montjoy reared away back on his high heels—he wore high heels to make him look taller, I reckon—and he looked straight at Singin' Sandy standing there so little and insignificant and raggedy, and all gormed over with mud and wet with branch water, and smelling of the woods and the new ground. There was a purple mark still under one of Sandy's eyes and a scabbed place on top of one of his ears where Harve Allen had pretty nigh torn it off the side of his head. ”

“ There never were enough excursion trains to bring all those from a distance who wanted to come in for the Eighth. Some, travelers, the luckier ones, rode in state on packed day coaches and the others, as often as not, came from clear down below the Tennessee line, on flat cars, shrieking with nervous joy as the engine jerked them around the sharp curves, they being meantime oblivious alike to the sun shining with midsummer fervor upon their unprotected heads, and the coal cinders, as big as buttons, that rained down in gritty showers. ”

“ Judge Priest's Jeff was a small, jet-black person, swift in his gait and wise in his generation. He kept his wool cropped close and made the part in it with a razor. By some subtle art of his own he could fall heir to somebody else's old clothes and, wearing them, make than look newer and better than when they were new. Overcome by the specious wiles of Jeff some white gentleman of his acquaintance would bestow upon him a garment that seemed shabby to the point of open shame and a public scandal. ”

“ If there is any of the boy spirit left in us circus day may be esteemed to bring it out. And considering his age and bulk and his calling, there was a good deal of the boy left in our circuit judge—so much boy, in fact, that he, an early riser of note in a town much given to early rising, was up and dressing this morning a good hour ahead of his usual time. As he dressed he kept going to the side window of his bedroom and looking out. Eventually he had his reward. Through a break in the silver-leaf poplars he saw a great circus wagon crossing his line of vision an eighth of a mile away. ”

“ Above Mr. Clay Saunders' former blue serge coat a crimson necktie burned like a beacon, and below the creased legs of Mr. Otterbuck's late pearl-gray trousers now appeared a pair of new patent-leather shoes with pointed toes turned up at the ends like sleigh-runners and cloth uppers in the effective colors of the Douglas plaid and rows of 24-point white pearl buttons.
Assuredly Jeff was anxious to be on his way. He placed the filled toddy glass at the old judge's elbow and sought unostentatiously to withdraw himself. ”

“ Unseen hands shut the other cabin doors and the woman's half-smothered cries came dimly through the clapboarded wall; but a slim black darky darted southward from the doggery, worming his way under a broken, snaggled fence and keeping the straggling line of houses and stables between him and the marchers. This fleeing figure was Jeff, Judge Priest's negro bodyservant, who had a most amazing faculty for always being wherever things happened. ”