Keep it yoursef, High Sheriff Washington Nash, Esquire, she bade him; thats whut you git paid good money for doin. And git out of my way! Im a-goin in there to that pore little lonesome thing settin there all by herself, and there aint nobody goin to hinder me neither!
The sheriff shrunk aside; perhaps it would be better to say he evaporated aside. And public opinion, reorganized and made over but still incarnate in Aunt Tilly Haslett, swept past the rail and settled like a billowing black cloud into a chair that the local attorney for the defense vacated just in time to save himself the inconvenience of having it snatched bodily from under him.
There, honey, said Aunt Tilly crooningly as she gathered the forlorn little figure of the prisoners wife in her arms like a child and mothered her up to her ample bombazined bosom, there now, honey, you jest cry on me.
Then Aunt Tilly looked up and her specs were all blurry and wet. But she waved her palmleaf fan as though it had been the baton of a marshal.
Now, Jedge, she said, addressing the bench, and you other gentlemen you kin go ahead now.
The states attorney had meant evidently to make some sort of an objection, for he was upon his feet through all this scene. But he looked back before he spoke and what he saw kept him from speaking. I believe I stated earlier that he was a candidate for rejection. So he settled back down in his chair and stretched out his legs and buried his chin in the top of his limp white waistcoat in an attitude that he had once seen in a picture entitled, Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Helena.
You may resume, Judge Priest, said the trial judge in a voice that was not entirely free from huskiness, although its owner had been clearing it steadily for some moments.
Thank you kindly, suh, but I was about through anyhow, answered the witness with a bow, and for all his homeliness there was dignity and stateliness in it. I merely wanted to say for the sake of completin the record, so to speak, that on the occasion referred to them Yankees did not cross that bridge. With the air of tendering and receiving congratulations Mr. Lukins turned to his nearest neighbor and shook hands with him warmly.
The witness got up somewhat stiffly, once more becoming a commonplace old man in a wrinkled black alpaca coat, and made his way back to his vacant place, now in the shadow of Aunt Tilly Hasletts form. As he passed along the front of the jury-box the foremans crippled right hand came up in a sort of a clumsy salute, and the juror at the other end of the rear row No. 12, the oldest juror leaned forward as if to speak to him, but remembered in time where his present duty lay. The old judge kept on until he came to Durhams side, and he whispered to him: Son, theyve quit lookin at him and theyre all a-lookin at her. Son, rest your case. Durham came out of a maze.
Your Honor, he said as he rose, the defense rests.
The jury were out only six minutes. Mr. Lukins insisted that it was only five minutes and a half, and added that hed be dad-rotted if it was a second longer than that.
As the lately accused Tandy came out of the courthouse with his imported lawyer Aunt Tilly bringing up the rear with his trembling, weeping, happy little wife friendly hands were outstretched to clasp his and a whiskered old gentleman with a thumbnail like a Brazil nut grabbed at his arm.
Whichaway did Billy Priest go? he demanded little old Fightin Billy whar did he go to? Soon as he started in talkin I placed him. Whar is he?
Walking side by side, Tandy and Durham came down the steps into the soft June night, and Tandy took a long, deep breath into his lungs.
Mr. Durham, he said, I owe a great deal to you.
Hows that? said Durham.
Just ahead of them, centered in a shaft of light from the window of the barroom of the Drummers Home Hotel, stood Judge Priest. The old judge had been drinking. The pink of his face was a trifle more pronounced, the high whine in his voice a trifle weedier, as he counted one by one certain pieces of silver into the wide-open palm of a saddle-colored negro.
Hows that? said Durham. I say I owe everything in the world to you, repeated Tandy.
No, said Durham, what you owe me is the fee you agreed to pay me for defending you. Theres the man youre looking for.
And he pointed to the old judge.
II. THE COUNTY TROT
SATURDAY was the last day of the county fair and the day of the County Trot. It was also Veterans Day, when the old soldiers were the guests of honor of the management, and likewise Ladies Day, which meant that all white females of whatever age were admitted free. So naturally, in view of all these things, the biggest day of fair week was Saturday.
The fair grounds lay in a hickory flat a mile out of town, and the tall scaly barks grew so close to the fence that they poked their limbs over its top and shed down nuts upon the track. The fence had been whitewashed once, back in the days of its youth when Hector was a pup; but Hec was an old dog now and the rains of years had washed the fence to a misty gray, so that in the dusk the long, warped panels stood up in rows, palely luminous like the highshouldered ghosts of a fence. And the rust had run down from the eaten-out nail-holes until each plank had two staring marks in its face like rheumy, bleared eyes. The ancient grandstand was of wood too, and had lain outdoors in all weathers until its rheumatic rafters groaned and creaked when the wind blew.
Back of the grandstand stood Floral Hall and Agricultural Hall. Except for their names and their flagstaffs you might have taken them for two rather hastily built and long-neglected bams. Up the track to the north were the rows of stables that were empty, odorous little cubicles for fifty-one weeks of the year, but now for this one week alive with darky stable hands and horses; and all the good savors of woodfires, clean hay, and turned-up turf were commingled there.
The fair had ideal weather for its windup. No frost had fallen yet, but in the air there were signs and portents of its coming. The long yellow leaves of the hickories had begun to curl up as if to hold the dying warmth of the sap to the last; and once in a while an ash flamed red like a signal fire to give warning for Indian summer, when all the woods would blaze in warpaints before huddling down for the winter under their tufted, ragged tawnies and browns like buffalo robes on the shoulders of chilled warriors. The first flights of the wild geese were going over, their Vs pointed to the Gulf; and that huckstering little bird of the dead treetops, which the negroes call the sweet-potato bird maybe its a pewee, with an acquired Southern accent was calling his mythical wares at the front door of every woodpeckers hole. The woods were perfumy with ripening wild grapes and pawpaws, and from the orchards came rich winy smells where the windfalls lay in heaps and cider mills gushed under the trees; and on the roof of the smokehouse the pared, sliced fruit was drying out yellow and leathery in the sun and looking a little way off like countless ears all turned to listen for the same thing.
Saturday, by sunup, the fair grounds were astir. Undershirted concessionaries and privilege people emerged from their canvas sleeping quarters to sniff at a the tantalizing smell that floated across to them from certain narrow trenches dug in the ground. That smell, just by itself, was one square meal and an incentive to another; for these trenches were full of live red hickory coals; and above them, on greenwood stakes that were stretched across, a shoat and a whole sheep, and a rosary of young squirrels impaled in a string, had been all night barbecuing. Uncle Isom Woolfolk was in charge here mightily and solely in charge Uncle Isom Woolfolk, no less, official purveyor to the whole county at fish fries or camp breakfasts, secretary of the Republican County Committee, high in his church and his lodges and the best barbecue cook in seven states. He bellowed frequent and contradictory orders to two negro women of his household who were arranging clean white clothes on board trestles; and constantly he went from shoat to sheep and from sheep to squirrels, basting them with a rag wrapped about a stick and dipped into a potent sauce of his own private making. Red pepper and sweet vinegar were two of its main constituents, though, and in turn he painted each carcass as daintily as an artist retouching the miniature of his lady fair, so that under his hand the crackling meatskins sizzled and smoked, and a yellowish glaze like a veneer spread over their surfaces. His white chin-beard waggled with importance and the artistic temperament.
Before Uncle Isom had his barbecue off the fire the crowds were pouring in, coming from the town afoot, and in buggies and hacks, and from the country in farm wagons that held families, from grandsire to baby in arms, all riding in kitchen chairs, with bedquilt lap robes. At noon a thin trickle of martial music came down the pike; and pretty soon then the veterans, forty or fifty of them, marched in, two by two, some in their reunion gray and some in their best Sunday blacks. At the head of the limping line of old men was a fife-and-drum corps two sons of veterans at the drums and Corporal Harrison Treese, sometime bugler of Terrys Cavalry, with his fife half buried in his whiskers, ripping the high notes out of The Girl I Left Behind Me. Near the tail of the procession was Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of Kings Hellhounds. Back in war times that organization had borne a more official and a less sanguinary title; but you would never have guessed this, overhearing Sergeant Jimmy Bagbys conversation.
The sergeant wore a little skirtless jacket, absurdly high-collared, faded to all colors and falling to pieces with age. Three tarnished buttons and a rag of rotted braid still dung to its front. Probably it had fitted the sergeant well in the days when he was a slim and limber young partisan ranger; but now the peaked little tail showed halfway up his back where his suspenders forked, and his white-shirted paunch jutted out in front like a big cotton pod bursting out of a gray-brown boll. The sergeant wore his jacket on all occasions of high military and civic state that, and a gangrened leather cartridge-box bouncing up and down on his plump hip and over his shoulder the musket he had carried to war and back home again, an ancient Springfield with a stock like a log butt and a hammer like a mules ear, its barrel merely a streak of rust.
He walked side by side with his closest personal friend and bitterest political foe, Major Ashcroft, late of the Ninth Michigan Volunteers walking so close to him that the button of the Loyal Legion in the majors left-hand lapel almost touched the bronze Southern Cross pinned high up on the right breast of the sergeants flaring jacket.
From time to time the sergeant, addressing the comrades ahead of him, would poke the major in the side and call out:
Boys, Ive took the first prisoner this here pizen Yank is my meat!
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. Soon the veterans, with their womenfolks, were scattered all over the grounds, elbowing a way through the narrow aisles of Floral Hall to see the oil paintings and the prize cakes and preserves, and the different patterns of home-made rag quilts Hen-and-Chickens and Lone Star and Log Cabin or crowding about the showpens where young calves lowed vainly for parental attention and a Berkshire boar, so long of body and so vast of bulk that he only needed to shed his legs to be a captive balloon, was shoving his snout through a crack in his pen and begging for goodies. And in Agricultural Hall were water-melons like green boulders, and stalks of corn fourteen feet long, and saffron blades of prize-winning tobacco, and families of chickens unhappily domiciled in wooden coops. The bray of sideshow barkers, and the squeak of toy balloons, and the barnyard sounds from the tied-up, penned-up farm creatures, went up to the treetops in a medley that drove the birds scurrying over the fence and into the quieter woods. And in every handy spot under a tree basket dinners were spread, and family groups ate cold fried chicken and lemon meringue pie, picnic fashion, upon the grass.
In the middle of this a cracked bugle sounded and there was a rush to the grandstand. Almost instantly its rattling gray boards clamored under the heels of a multitude. About the stall of the one lone bookmaker a small crowd, made up altogether of men, eddied and swirled. There were men in that group, strict church members, who would not touch a playing card or a fiddle playthings of the devil by the word of their strict orthodoxy; who wouldnt let their children dance any dance except a square dance or go to any parties except play parties, and some of them had never seen the inside of a theater or a circus tent. But they came each year to the county fair; and if they bet on the horses it was their own private affair.
So, at the blare of that leaky bugle, Floral Hall and the cattlepens were on the moment deserted and lonely. The Berkshire boar returned to his wallow, and a young Jersey bullock, with a warm red coat and a temper of the same shade, was left shaking his head and snorting angrily as he tried vainly to dislodge a blue ribbon that was knotted about one of his short, curving black horns. Had he been a second prizewinner instead of a first, that ribbon would have been a red ribbon and there is no telling what might have happened.
The first race was a half-mile dash for running horses. There were four horses entered for it and three of the four jockeys wore regular jockey outfits, with loose blouses and top boots and long-peaked caps; but the fourth jockey was an imp-black stable boy, wearing a cotton shirt and the ruins of an old pair of pants. The brimless wreck of a straw hat was clamped down tight on his wool like a cup. He be-straddled a sweaty little red gelding named Flitterfoot, and Flitterfoot was the only local entry, and was an added starter, and a forlorn hope in the betting.
While these four running horses were dancing a fretful schottische round at the half-mile post, and the starter, old man Thad Jacobson, was bellowing at the riders and slashing a black-snake whip round the shins of their impatient mounts, a slim black figure wormed a way under the arms and past the short ribs of a few belated betters yet lingering about the bookmakers block. This intruder handled himself so deftly and so nimbly as not to jostle by one hairs breadth the dignity of any white gentleman there present, yet was steadily making progress all the while and in ample time getting down a certain sum of money on Flitterfoot to win at odds.
Aint that your nigger boy Jeff? inquired Doctor Lake of Judge Priest, as the new comer, still boring deftly, emerged from the group and with a last muttered Scuse me, boss please, suh scuse me! darted away toward the head of the stretch, where others of his race were draping themselves over the top rail of the fence in black festoons.
Yes, I suppose tis probably, said Judge Priest in that high singsong of his. That black scoundrel of mine is liable to be everywhere except when you want him, and then hes not anywhere. That must be Jeff, I reckin. And the old judge chuckled indulgently in appreciation of Jeffs manifold talents.
During the parade of the veterans that day Judge Priest, as commandant of the camp, had led the march just behind the fife and drums and just ahead of the color-bearer carrying the silken flag; and all the way out from town Jeff, his manservant, valet, and guardian, had marched a pace to his right. Jeffs own private and personal convictions convictions which no white man would ever know by word of mouth from Jeff anyhow
were not with the late cause which those elderly men in gray represented. Jeffs political feelings, if any such he had, would be sure to lean away from them; but it was a chance to march with music and Jeff had marched, his head up and his feet cutting scallops and double-shuffles in the dust.