Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

“How about attachin’ the receipts in the ticket wagon?”

“I don’t know about that either,” said the sophisticated Stanton. “Dan Silver is one of the wisest guys in this business. He had to be a wise guy to slip one over on an old big-leaguer like yours truly, and that’s no sidewalk banter either. You might attach the wagon and put a constable or somebody inside of it, and then like as not Dan’d find some way to flimflam him and make his getaway with the kale intact. You gotter give it to Dan Silver there. I guess he’s a stupid guy – yes, stupid like a bear cat!” His tone of reluctant admiration indicated that this last was spoken satirically and that seriously he regarded a bear cat as probably the astutest hybrid of all species.

“Are all circuses conducted in this general fashion, suh?” inquired the old judge softly.

“No,” admitted Stanton, “they ain’t – the big ones ain’t anyway; but a lot of the small ones is. They gotter do it because a circus is always fair game for a sore rube. Once the tents come down a circus has got no friends.

“I tell you what,” he went on, struck amidships with a happy notion – “I tell you what you do. Lemme swear out an attachment against the band wagon and the band-wagon team, and you go serve it right away, sheriff. That’ll fix him, I guess.”

“How so?” put in the judge, still seeking information for his own enlightenment.

“Why, you see, if you tie up that band wagon Dan Silver can’t use it for parading. He ain’t got but just the one, and a circus parade without a band wagon will look pretty sick, I should say. It’ll look more like something else, a funeral, for example.” The pleased grafter grinned maliciously.

“It’s like this – the band wagon is the key to the whole works,” he went on. “It’s the first thing off the lot when the parade starts – the band-wagon driver is the only one that has the route. You cut the band wagon out and you’ve just naturally got that parade snarled up to hell and gone.”

Judge Priest got upon his feet and advanced upon the exultant stranger. He seemed more interested than at any time.

“Suh,” he asked, “let me see if I understand you properly. The band wagon is the guidin’ motive, as it were, of the entire parade – is that right?”

“You’ve got it,” Stanton assured him. “Even the stock is trained to follow the band wagon. They steer by the music up ahead. Cop the band wagon out and the rest of ‘em won’t know which way to go – that’s the rule where-ever there’s a road show traveling.”

“Ah hah,” said the judge reflectively, “I see.”

“But say, look here, judge,” said Stanton. “Begging your pardon and not trying to rush you nor nothing, but if you’re going to attach that band wagon of Dan Silver’s for me you gotter hurry. That parade is due to leave the lot in less’n half an hour from now.”

He was gratified to note that his warning appeared to grease the joints in the old judge’s legs. They all three went straightway to the sheriff’s office, which chanced to be only two doors away, and there the preliminaries necessary to legal seizures touching on a certain described and specified parade chariot, tableau car or band wagon were speedily completed. Stanton made oath to divers allegations and departed, assiduously combing himself and gloating openly over the anticipated discomfiture of his late partner. The sheriff lingered behind only a minute or two longer while Judge Priest in the privacy of a back room impressed upon him his instructions. Then he, too, departed, moving at his top walking gait westward out Jefferson Street. There was this that could be said for Sheriff Giles Birdsong – he was not gifted in conversation nor was he of a quick order of intellect, but he knew his duty and he obeyed orders literally when conveyed to him by a superior official. On occasion he had obeyed them so literally – where the warrant had said dead or alive, for example – that he brought in, feet first, a prisoner or so who manifested a spirited reluctance against being brought in any other way. And the instructions he had now were highly explicit on a certain head.

Close on Sheriff Birdsong’s hurrying heels the judge himself issued forth from the sheriff’s office. Hailing a slowly ambling public vehicle driven by a languid darky, he deposited his person therein and was driven away. Observing this from his place in front of the drug store, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby was moved to remark generally to the company: “You can’t tell me I wasn’t right a while ago about Judge Billy Priest. Look at him yonder now, puttin’ out for home in a hack, without waitin’ for the parade. There certainly is something wrong with the judge and you can’t tell me there ain’t.”

If the judge didn’t wait nearly everybody else did – waited with what patience and impatience they might through a period that was punctuated by a dozen false alarms, each marked with much craning of elderly necks and abortive rushes by younger enthusiasts to the middle of the street. After a while, though, from away up at the head of Jefferson Street there came down, borne along on the summer air, a faint anticipatory blare of brazen horns, heard at first only in broken snatches. Then, in a minute or two, the blaring resolved itself into a connected effort at melody, with drums throbbing away in it. Farmers grabbed at the bits of restive horses, that had their ears set sharply in one direction, and began uttering soothing and admonitory “whoas.” The stores erupted clerks and customers together. The awning poles on both sides of the street assumed the appearance of burdened grape trellises, bearing ripe black and white clusters of small boys. At last she was coming!

She was, for a fact. She came on until the thin runlet of ostensible music became a fan-faring, crashing cataract of pleasing and exhilarating sound, until through the dancing dust could be made out the arching, upcurved front of a splendid red-and-gold chariot. In front of it, like wallowing waves before the prow of a Viking ship, were the weaving broad backs of many white horses, and stretching behind it was a sinuous, colorful mass crowned with dancing, distant banner-things, and suggesting in glintings of gold and splashings of flame an oncoming argosy of glitter and gorgeousness.

She was coming all right! But was she? A sort of disappointed, surprised gasp passed along the crowded sidewalks, and boys began sliding down the awning poles and running like mad up the street. For instead of continuing straight on down Jefferson, as all circus parades had always done, the head of this one was seen now, after a momentary halt as of indecision, to turn short off and head into Clay. But why Clay Street – that was the question? Clay Street didn’t have ten houses on it, all told, and it ran up a steep hill and ended in an abandoned orchard just beyond the old Priest place. 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.

Yes, sir, that’s what she was doing. The band wagon, behind the oblique arc of its ten-horse team, was swinging into Clay Street, and the rest of the procession was following its leader and disappearing, wormlike, into a tunnel of overarching maples and silver-leaf poplars.

And so it moved, slowly and deliberately, after the fashion of circus parades, past some sparsely scattered cottages that were mainly closed and empty, seeing that their customary dwellers were even now downtown, until the head of it came to a particularly shabby little brown house that was not closed and was not empty. From a window here looked out a worn little woman and a little sick boy, he as pale as the pillow against which he was propped, and from here they saw it all – she through tears and he with eyes that burned with a dumb joy unutterable – from here these two beheld the unbelievable marvel of it. It was almost as though the whole unspeakable grandeur of it had been devised for those eyes alone – first the great grand frigate of a band wagon pitching and rolling as if in heavy seas, with artistes of a world-wide repute discoursing sweet strains from its decks, and drawn not by four or six, but by ten snow-white Arabian stallions with red pompons nodding above their proud heads – that is to say, they were snow-white except perhaps for a slight grayish dappling. And on behind this, tailing away and away, were knights and ladies on mettled, gayly caparisoned steeds, and golden pageant dens filled with ferocious rare beasts of the jungle, hungrily surveying the surging crowds – only, of course, there weren’t any crowds – and sun-bright tableau cars, with crystal mirrors cunningly inset in the scrolled carved work, so that the dancing surfaces caught the sunlight and threw it back into eyes already joyously dazzled; and sundry closed cages with beautiful historical paintings on their sides, suggesting by their very secrecy the presence of marvelous prisoned creatures; and yet another golden chariot with the Queen of Sheba and her whole glittering court traveling in imperial pomp atop of it.

That wasn’t all – by no means was it all. There succeeded an open den containing the man-eating Bengal tigers, striped and lank, with the intrepid spangled shoulders of the trainer showing as he sat with his back against the bars, holding his terrible charges in dominion by the power of the human eye, so that for the time being they dared not eat anybody. And then followed a whole drove of trick ponies drawing the happy family in its wheeled home, and behind that in turn more cages, closed, and a fife-and-drum corps of old regimentals in blue and buff, playing Yankee Doodle with martial spirit, and next the Asiatic camel to be known by his one hump, and the genuine Bactrian dromedary to be known by his two, slouching by as though they didn’t care whether school kept or not, flirting their under lips up and down and showing profiles like Old Testament characters. And then came more knights and ladies and more horses and more heroes of history and romance, and a veritable herd of vast and pondrous pachyderm performers, or elephants – for while one pachyderm, however vast and pachydermic, might not make a herd, perhaps, or even two yet surely three would, and here were no less than three, holding one another’s tails with their trunks, which was a droll conceit thought up by these intelligent creatures on the spur of the moment, no doubt, with the sole idea of giving added pleasure to a little sick boy.

That wasn’t all either. There was more of this unapproachable pageant yet winding by – including such wonders as the glass-walled apartment of the lady snake-charmer, with the lady snake-charmer sitting right there in imminent peril of her life amidst her loathsome, coiling and venomous pets; and also there was Judge Priest’s Jeff, hardly to be recognized in a red-and-yellow livery as he led the far-famed sacred ox of India; and then the funny old clown in his little blue wagon, shouting out “Whoa, January” to his mule and dodging back as January kicked up right in his face, and last of all – a crowning glory to all these other glories – the steam calliope, whistling and blasting and shrilling and steaming, fit to split itself wide open!

You and I, reader, looking on at this with gaze unglamoured by the eternal, fleeting spirit of youth, might have noted in the carping light of higher criticism that the oriental trappings had been but poor shoddy stuffs to begin with, and were now all torn and dingy and shedding their tarnished spangles; might have noted that the man-eating tigers seemed strangely bored with life, and that the venomous serpents draped upon the form of the lady snake-charmer were languid, not to say torpid, to a degree that gave the lady snake-charmer the appearance rather of a female suspender pedler, carrying her wares hung over her shoulders. We might have observed further had we been so minded – as probably we should – that the Queen of Sheba bore somewhat a weatherbeaten look and held a quite common-appearing cotton umbrella with a bone handle over her regal head; that the East-Indian mahout of the elephant herd needed a shave, and that there were mud-stained overalls and brogan shoes showing plainly beneath the flowing robes of the Arabian camel-driver. We might even have guessed that the biggest tableau car was no more than a ticket wagon in thin disguise, and that the yapping which proceeded from the largest closed cage indicated the presence merely of a troupe of uneasy performing poodles.

But to the transported vision of the little sick boy in the little brown house there were no flaws in it anywhere – it was all too splendid for words, and so he spoke no words at all as it wound on by. 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.

Although, of course, the rear guard didn’t know it for the time being, the halt was occasioned by the fact that when the band wagon reached the far end of Clay Street, with the orchard trees looming dead ahead, the sheriff, riding on the front seat of the band wagon, gave an order. The band-wagon driver instantly took up the slack of the reins that flowed through his fingers in layers, so that they stopped right in front of Judge Priest’s house, where Judge Priest stood leaning on his gate. The sheriff made a sort of saluting motion of his fingers against the brim of his black slouch hat.

“Accordin’ to orders, Your Honor,” he stated from his lofty perch.

At this there spoke up another man, the third and furthermost upon the wide seat of the band wagon, and this third man was no less a personage than Daniel P. Silver himself, and he was as near to bursting with bottled rage as any man could well be and still remain whole, and he was as hoarse as a frog from futile swearing.

“What in thunder does this mean – ” he began, and then stopped short, being daunted by the face which Sheriff Giles Birdsong turned upon him.

“Look here, mister,” counseled the sheriff, “you art now in the presence of the presidin’ judge of the first judicial district of Kintucky, settin’ in chambers, or what amounts to the same thing, and you air liable to git yourself into contempt of cote any minute.”

Baffled, Silver started to swear again, but in a lower key.

“You better shut up your mouth,” said the sheriff with a shifting forward of his body to free his limbs for action, “and listen to whut His Honor has to say. You act like you was actually anxious to git yourself lamed up.”

“Sheriff,” said the judge, “obeyin’ your orders you have, I observe, attached certain properties – to wit, a band wagon and team of horses – and still obeyin’ orders, have produced said articles before me for my inspection. You will continue in personal possession of same until said attachment is adjudicated, not allowin’ any person whatsoever to remove them from your custody. Do I make myself sufficiently plain?”

“Yes, suh, Your Honor,” said the sheriff. “You do.”

“In the meanwhile, pendin’ the termination of the litigation, if the recent possessor of this property desires to use it for exhibition or paradin’ purposes, you will permit him to do so, always within proper bounds,” went on the judge. “I would suggest that you could cut through that lane yonder in order to reach the business section of our city, if such should be the desire of the recent possessor.”

The heavy wheels of the band wagon began turning; the parade started moving on again. But in that precious half-minute’s halt something else had happened, only this happened in front of the little brown house halfway down Clay Street. The clown’s gaze was roving this way and that, as if looking for the crowd that should have been there and that was only just beginning to appear, breathless and panting, and his eyes fell upon a wasted, wizened little face looking straight out at him from a nest of bedclothes in a window not thirty feet away; and – be it remembered among that clown’s good deeds in the hereafter – he stood up and bowed, and stretched his painted, powdered face in a wide and gorgeous grin, just as another and a greater Grimaldi once did for just such another audience of a grieving mother and a dying child. Then he yelled “Whoa, January,” three separate times, and each time he poked January in his long-suffering flanks and each time January kicked up his small quick hoofs right alongside the clown’s floury ears.

The steam calliope man had an inspiration too. He was a person of no great refinement, the calliope man, and he worked a shell game for his main source of income and lived rough and lived hard, so it may not have been an inspiration after all, but merely the happy accident of chance. But whether it was or it wasn’t, he suddenly and without seeming reason switched from the tune he was playing and made his calliope sound out the first bars of the music which somebody once set to the sweetest childhood verses that Eugene Field ever wrote – the verses that begin:

 
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
 

The parade resumed its march then and went on, tailing away through the dappled sunshine under the trees, and up over the hill and down the other side of it, but the clown looked back as he scalped the crest and waved one arm, in a baggy calico sleeve, with a sort of friendly goodby motion to somebody behind him; and as for the steam calliope man, he kept on playing the little Boy Blue verses until he disappeared.

As a matter of fact, he was still playing them when he passed a wide-porched old white house almost at the end of the empty street, where a stout old man in a wrinkly white linen suit leaned across a gate and regarded the steam calliope man with a satisfied almost a proprietorial air.

VI. WHEN THE FIGHTING WAS GOOD

MISTER SHERIFF,” ordered the judge, “bring Pressley G. Harper to the bar.”

Judge Priest, as I may have set forth before, had two habits of speech – one purposely ungrammatical and thickly larded with the vernacular of the country crossroads – that was for his private walks and conversations, and for his campaignings; but the other was of good and proper and dignified English, and it he reserved for official acts and utterances. Whether upon the bench or off it, though, his voice had that high-pitched, fiddle-string note which carried far and clearly; and on this day, when he spoke, the sheriff roused up instantly from where he had been enjoying forty winks between the bewhittled arms of a tilted chair and bestirred himself. He hurried out of a side door. A little, whispering, hunching stir went through the courtroom. Spectators reclining upon the benches, partly on their spines and partly on their shoulderblades, straightened and bent forward. Inside the rail, which set apart the legal goats from the civic sheep, a score of eyes were fixed speculatively upon the judge’s face, rising above the top of the tall, scarred desk where he sat; but his face gave no dew to his thoughts; and if the mind back of the beneficent, mild blue eyes was troubled, the eyes themselves looked out unvexed through the steel-bowed spectacles that rode low on the old judge’s nose.

There was a minute’s wait. The clerk handed up to the judge a sheaf of papers in blue wrappers. The judge shuffled through them until he found the one he wanted. It was the middle of the afternoon of a luscious spring day – the last day of the spring term of court. In at the open windows came spicy, moist smells of things sprouting and growing, and down across the courthouse square the big star-shaped flowers of the dogwood trees showed white and misty, like a new Milky Way against a billowy green firmament.

A minute only and then the sheriff reëntered. At his side came a man. This newcomer must have been dose to seventy years – or sixty-five, anyway. He was long and lean, and he bore his height with a sort of alert and supple erectness, stepping high, with the seemingly awkward gait of the man trained at crossing furrows, yet bringing his feet down noiselessly, like a house-cat treading on dead leaves. The way he moved made you think of a deerstalker. Strength, tremendous strength, was shown in the outward swing of the long arms and the huge, knotty hands, and there was temper in the hot, brown eyes and in the thick, stiff crop of reddish-gray hair, rising like buckwheat stubble upon his scalp. He had high cheekbones and a long, shaven face, and his skin was tanned to a leathery red, like a well-smoked ham. Except for the colors of his hair and eyes, he might have passed for half Indian. Indeed, there was a tale in the county that his great-grandmother was a Shawnee squaw. He was more than six feet tall – he must have been six feet two.

With the sheriff alongside him he came to the bar – a sagged oaken railing – and stood there with his big hands cupped over it. He was newly shaved and dressed in what was evidently his best.

“Pressley G. Harper at the bar,” sang out the clerk methodically. Everybody was listen-ing.

“Pressley G. Harper,” said the judge, “waiving the benefit of counsel and the right of trial by jury, you have this day pleaded guilty to an indictment charging you with felonious assault in that you did, on the twenty-first day of January last, shoot and wound with a firearm one Virgil Settle, a citizen of this county. Have you anything to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced upon you?”

Only eying him steadfastly, the confessed offender shook his head.

“It is the judgment of this court, then, that you be confined in the state penitentiary for the period of two years at hard labor.”

A babbling murmur ran over the room – for his sins old Press Harper was catching it at last. The prisoner’s hands gripped the oaken rail until his knuckles nails showed white, and it seemed that the tough wood fibers would be dented in; other than that he gave no sign, but took the blow braced and steady, like a game man facing a firing squad. The sheriff inched toward him; but the judge raised the hand that held the blue-wrappered paper as a sign that he had more to say.

“Pressley G. Harper,” said the judge, “probably this is not the time or the place for the court to say how deeply it regrets the necessity of inflicting this punishment upon you. This court has known you for many years – for a great many years. You might have been a worthy citizen. You have been of good repute for truthfulness and fair dealing among your neighbors; but you have been beset, all your life, with a temper that was your abiding curse, and when excited with liquor you have been a menace to the safety of your fellowman. Time and time again, within the recollection of this court, you have been involved in unseemly brawls, largely of your own making. That you were generally inflamed with drink, and that you afterward seemed genuinely penitent and made what amends you could, does not serve to excuse you in the eyes of the law. That you have never taken a human life outright is a happy accident of chance.

“Through the leniency of those appointed to administer the law you have until now escaped the proper and fitting consequences of your behavior; but, by this last wanton attack upon an inoffensive citizen, you have forfeited all claim upon the consideration of the designated authorities.”

He paused for a little, fumbling at the bow of his spectacles.

“In the natural course of human events you have probably but a few more years to live. It is to be regretted by all right-thinking men that you cannot go to your grave free from the stigma of a prison. And it is a blessing that you have no one closely related to you by ties of blood or marriage to share in your disgrace.” The old judge’s high voice grew husked and roughened here, he being himself both widowed and childless. “The judgment of the court stands – two years at hard labor.”

He made a sign that he was done. The sheriff edged up again and touched the sentenced man upon the arm. Without turning his head, Harper shook off the hand of authority with so violent a shrug that the sheriff dodged back, startled. Then for the first time the prisoner spoke.

“Judge, Your Honor,” he said quietly, “jest a minute ago you asked me if I had anything to say and I told you that I had not. I’ve changed my mind; I want to ask you something – I want to ask you a mighty big favor. No, I ain’t askin’ you to let me off – it ain’t that,” he went on more quickly, reading the look on the judge’s face. “I didn’t expect to come clear in this here case. I pleaded guilty because I was guilty and didn’t have no defense. My bein’ sorry for shootin’ Virge Settle the way I did don’t excuse me, as I know; but, Judge Priest, I’ll say jest this to you – I don’t want to be dragged off to that there penitentiary like a savage dumb beast. I don’t want to be took there by no sheriff. And what I want to ask you is this: Can’t I go there a free man, with free limbs? I promise you to go and to serve my time faithful – but I want to go by myself and give myself up like a man.”

Instantly visualized before the eyes of all who sat there was the picture which they knew must be in the prisoner’s mind – the same picture which all or nearly all of them had seen more than once, since it came to pass, spring and fall, after each term of court – a little procession filing through the street to the depot; at its head, puffed out with responsibility, the sheriff and one of his deputies – at its tail more deputies, and in between them the string of newly convicted felons, handcuffed in twos, with a long trace-chain looping back from one pair to the next pair, and so on, binding all fast together in a clanking double file – the whites in front and the negroes back of them, maintaining even in that shameful formation the division of race; the whites mainly marching with downcast heads and hurrying feet, clutching pitiably small bundles with their free hands – the negroes singing doggerel in chorus and defiantly jingling the links of their tether; some, the friendless ones, hatless and half naked, and barefooted after months of lying in jail – and all with the smell of the frowsy cells upon them. And, seeing this familiar picture spring up before them, it seemed all of a sudden a wrong thing and a very shameful thing that Press Harper, an old man and a member of a decent family, should march thus, with his wrists chained and the offscourings and scum of the county jail for company. All there knew him for a man of his word. If old Press Harper said he would go to the penitentiary and surrender himself they knew he would go and do it if he had to crawl there on his knees. And so now, having made his plea, he waited silently for the answer.

The old judge had half swung himself about in his chair and with his hand at his beard was looking out of the window.

“Mister Sheriff,” he said, without turning his head, “you may consider yourself relieved of the custody of the defendant at the bar. Mister Clerk, you may make out the commitment papers.” The clerk busied himself with certain ruled forms, filling in dotted lines with writing. The judge went on: “Despite the irregularity of the proceeding, this court is disposed to grant the request which the defendant has just made. Grievous though his shortcomings in other directions may have been, this court has never known the defendant to break his word. Does the defendant desire any time in which to arrange his personal affairs? If so how much time?”

“I would like to have until the day after tomorrow,” said Harper. “If I kin I want to find a tenant for my farm.”

“Has the commonwealth’s attorney any objection to the granting of this delay?” inquired the judge, still with his head turned away.

“None, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor, half rising. And now the judge was facing the prisoner, looking him full in the eye.

“You will go free on your own recognizance, without bond, until the day after tomorrow,” he bade him. “You will then report yourself to the warden of the state penitentiary at Frankfort. The clerk of this court will hand you certain documents which you will surrender to the warden at the same time that you surrender yourself.”

The tall old man at the rail bowed his head to show he understood, but he gave no thanks for the favor vouchsafed him, nor did the other old man on the bench seem to expect any thanks. The clerk’s pen, racing across the ruled sheets, squeaked audibly.

“This consideration is granted, though, upon one condition,” said the judge, as though a new thought had just come to him. “And that is, that between this time and the time you begin serving your sentence you do not allow a drop of liquor to cross your lips. You promise that?”

“I promise that,” said Harper slowly and soberly, like a man taking a solemn oath.

No more was said. The clerk filled out the blanks – two of them – and Judge Priest signed them. The clerk took them back from him, folded them inside a long envelope; backed the envelope with certain writings, and handed it over the bar rail to Harper. There wasn’t a sound as he stowed it carefully into an inner pocket of his ill-fitting black coat; nor, except for the curiously light tread of his own steps, was there a sound as he, without a look side-wise, passed down the courtroom and out at the doorway.