The court-house bell ringing in the night! No hesitating stroke of
Schofields' Henry, no uncertain touch, was on the rope. A loud, wild,
hurried clamor pealing out to wake the country-side, a rapid _clang!
clang! clang!_ that struck clear in to the spine.
The court-house bell had tolled for the death of Morton, of Garfield, of
Hendricks; had rung joy-peals of peace after the war and after political
campaigns; but it had rung as it was ringing now only three times; once
when Hibbard's mill burned, once when Webb Landis killed Sep Bardlock
and intrenched himself in the lumber-yard and would not be taken till he
was shot through and through, and once when the Rouen accommodation was
wrecked within twenty yards of the station.
Why was the bell ringing now? Men and women, startled into wide
wakefulness, groped to windows--no red mist hung over town or country.
What was it? The bell rang on. Its loud alarm beat increasingly into
men's hearts and quickened their throbbing to the rapid measure of
its own. Vague forms loomed in the gloaming. A horse, wildly ridden,
splashed through the town. There were shouts; voices called hoarsely.
Lamps began to gleam in the windows. Half-clad people emerged from their
houses, men slapping their braces on their shoulders as they ran out of
doors. Questions were shouted into the dimness.
Then the news went over the town.
It was cried from yard to yard, from group to group, from gate to gate,
and reached the furthermost confines. Runners shouted it as they sped
by; boys panted it, breathless; women with loosened hair stumbled into
darkling chambers and faltered it out to new-wakened sleepers; pale
girls clutching wraps at their throats whispered it across fences; the
sick, tossing on their hard beds, heard it. The bell clamored it far and
near; it spread over the country-side; it flew over the wires to distant
cities. The White-Caps had got Mr. Harkless!
Lige Willetts had lost track of him out near Briscoes', it was said, and
had come in at midnight seeking him. He had found Parker, the “Herald”
foreman, and Ross Schofield, the typesetter, and Bud Tipworthy, the
devil, at work in the printing-room, but no sign of Harkless, there or
in the cottage. Together these had sought for him and had roused others,
who had inquired at every house where he might have gone for shelter,
and they had heard nothing. They had watched for his coming during the
slackening of the storm and he had not come, and there was nowhere he
could have gone. He was missing; only one thing could have happened.
They had roused up Warren Smith, the prosecutor, the missing editor's
most intimate friend in Carlow, and Homer, the sheriff, and Jared Wiley,
the deputy. William Todd had rung the alarm. The first thing to do was
to find him. After that there would be trouble--if not before. It looked
as if there would be trouble before. The men tramping up to the muddy
Square in their shirt-sleeves were bulgy about the right hips; and when
Homer Tibbs joined Lum Landis at the hotel corner, and Landis saw that
Homer was carrying a shot-gun, Landis went back for his. A hastily sworn
posse galloped out Main Street. Women and children ran into neighbors'
yards and began to cry. Day was coming; and, as the light grew, men
swore and savagely kicked at the palings of fences that they passed.
In the foreglow of dawn they gathered in the Square and listened to
Warren Smith, who made a speech from the court-house fence and warned
them to go slow. They answered him with angry shouts and hootings, but
he made his big voice heard, and bade them do nothing rash; no facts
were known, he said; it was far from certain that harm had been done,
and no one knew that the Six-Cross-Roads people had done it--even if
something had happened to Mr. Harkless. He declared that he spoke in
Harkless's name. Nothing could distress _him_ so much as for them to
defy the law, to take it out of the proper hands. Justice would be done.
“Yes it will!” shouted a man below him, brandishing the butt of a
raw-hide whip above his head. “And while you jaw on about it here, he
may be tied up like a dog in the woods, shot full of holes by the men
you never lifted a finger to hender, because you want their votes when
you run for circuit judge. What are we doin' _here_? What's the good of
listening to you?”
There was a yell at this, and those who heard the speaker would probably
have started for the Cross-Roads without further parley, had not a rumor
sprung up, which passed so rapidly from man to man that within five
minutes it was being turbulently discussed in every portion of the
crowd. The news came that the two shell-gamblers had wrenched a bar
out of a window under cover of the storm, had broken jail, and were
at large. Their threats of the day before were remembered now, with
convincing vividness. They had sworn repeatedly to Bardlock and to the
sheriff, and in the hearing of others, that they would “do” for the man
who took their money from them and had them arrested. The prosecuting
attorney, quickly perceiving the value of this complication in holding
back the mob that was already forming, called Homer from the crowd
and made him get up on the fence and confess that his prisoners had
escaped--at what time he did not know, probably toward the beginning of
the storm, when it was noisiest.
“You see,” cried the attorney, “there is nothing as yet of which we can
accuse the Cross-Roads. If our friend has been hurt, it is much more
likely that these crooks did it. They escaped in time to do it, and
we all know they were laying for him. You want to be mighty careful,
fellow-citizens. Homer is already in telegraphic communication with
every town around here, and we'll have those men before night. All
you've got to do is to control yourselves a little and go home quietly.”
He could see that his words (except those in reference to returning
home--no one was going home) made an impression. There rose a babble of
shouting and argument and swearing that grew continually louder, and
the faces the lawyer looked down on were creased with perplexity, and
shadowed with an anger that settled darker and darker.
Mr. Ephraim Watts, in spite of all confusion, clad as carefully as
upon the preceding day, deliberately climbed the fence and stood by the
lawyer and made a single steady gesture with his hand. He was listened
to at once, as his respect for the law was less notorious than his
irreverence for it, and he had been known in Carlow as a customarily
reckless man. They wanted illegal and desperate advice, and quieted down
to hear it. He spoke in his professionally calm voice.
“Gentlemen, it seems to me that Mr. Smith and Mr. Ribshaw” (nodding to
the man with the rawhide whip) “are both right. What good are we doing
here? What we want to know is what's happened to Mr. Harkless. It looks
just now like the shell-men might have done it. Let's find out what they
done. Scatter and hunt for him. 'Soon as anything is known for certain,
Hibbard's mill whistle will blow three times. Keep on looking till it
does. _Then_” he finished, with a barely perceptible scornful smile at
the attorney, “_then_ we can decide on what had ought to be done.”
Six-Cross-Roads lay dark and steaming in the sun that morning. The forge
was silent, the saloon locked up, the roadway deserted, even by the
pigs. The broken old buggy stood rotting in the mud without a
single lean, little old man or woman--such were the children of
the Cross-Roads--to play about it. The fields were empty, and the
rag-stuffed windows blank, under the baleful glance of the horsemen
who galloped by at intervals, muttering curses, not always confining
themselves to muttering them. Once, when the deputy sheriff rode
through alone, a tattered black hound, more wolf than dog, half-emerged,
growling, from beneath one of the tumble-down barns, and was jerked back
into the darkness by his tail, with a snarl fiercer than his own, while
a gun-barrel shone for a second as it swung for a stroke on the brute's
head. The hound did not yelp or whine when the blow fell. He shut his
eyes twice, and slunk sullenly back to his place.
The shanties might have received a volley or two from some of the
mounted bands, exasperated by futile searching, had not the escape of
Homer's prisoners made the guilt of the Cross-Roads appear doubtful in
the minds of many. As the morning waned, the advocates of the theory
that the gamblers had made away with Harkless grew in number. There came
a telegram from the Rouen chief of police that he had a clew to their
whereabouts; he thought they had succeeded in reaching Rouen, and it
began to be generally believed that they had escaped by the one-o'clock
freight, which had stopped to take on some empty cars at a side-track
a mile northwest of the town, across the fields from the Briscoe house.
Toward noon a party went out to examine the railroad embankment.
Men began to come back into the village for breakfast by twos and
threes, though many kept on searching the woods, not feeling the need of
food, or caring if they did. Every grove and clump of underbrush, every
thicket, was ransacked; the waters of the creek, shallow for the most
part, but swollen overnight, were dragged at every pool. Nothing was
found; there was not a sign.
The bar of the hotel was thronged all morning as the returning citizens
rapidly made their way thither, and those who had breakfasted and were
going out again paused for internal, as well as external, reinforcement.
The landlord, himself returned from a long hunt, set up his whiskey with
a lavish hand.
“He was the best man we had, boys,” said Landis, as he poured the
little glasses full. “We'd ort of sent him to the legislative halls of
Washington long ago. He'd of done us honor there; but we never thought
of doin' anything fer him; jest set 'round and let him build up the
town and give him empty thankyes. Drink hearty, gentlemen,” he finished,
gloomily, “I don't grudge no liquor to-day--except to Lige Willetts.”
“He was a good man,” said young William Todd, whose nose was red, not
from the whiskey. “I've about give up.”
Schofields' Henry drew his sleeve across his eyes. “He was the only man
in this whole city that didn't jab and nag at me when I done my best,”
he exclaimed, with an increasing break in his utterance. “Many a good
word I've had from him when nobody in town done nothin' but laugh an'
rile an' badger me about my--my bell.” And Schofields' Henry began to
cry openly.
“He was a great hand with the chuldern,” said one man. “Always have
something to say to 'em to make 'em laugh when he went by. 'Talk more to
them 'n he would to grown folks. Yes, sir.”
“They knowed _him_ all right,” added another. “I reckon all of us did,
little and big.”
“It's goin' to seem mighty empty around here,” said Ross Schofield.
“What's goin' to become o' the 'Herald' and the party in this district?
Where's the man to run either of 'em now. Like as not,” he concluded
desperately, “the election'll go against us in the fall.”
Dibb Zane choked over his four fingers. “We might's well bust up this
dab-dusted ole town ef he's gone.”
“I don't know what's come over that Cynthy Tipworthy,” said the
landlord. “She's waited table on him last two year, and her brother Bud
works at the 'Herald' office. She didn't say a word--only looked
and looked and looked--like a crazy woman; then her and Bud went off
together to hunt in the woods. They just tuck hold of each other's hands
like----”
“That ain't nothin',” Homer Tibbs broke in. “You'd ort to've saw old Miz
Hathaway, that widder woman next door to us, when she heard it. He had
helped her to git her pension; and she tuck on worse 'n' anything I ever
hear--lot worse 'n' when Hathaway died.”
“I reckon there ain't many crazier than them two Bowlders, father and
son,” said the postmaster, wiping the drops from his beard as he set his
glass on the bar. “They rid into town like a couple of wild Indians, the
old man beatin' that gray mare o' theirn till she was one big welt, and
he ain't natcherly no cruel man, either. I reckon Lige Willetts better
keep out of Hartley's way.”
“I keep out of no man's way,” cried a voice behind him. Turning, they
saw Lige standing on the threshold of the door that led to the street.
In his hand he held the bridle of the horse he had ridden across the
sidewalk, and that now stood panting, with lowered head, half through
the doorway, beside his master. Lige was hatless, splashed with mud
from head to foot; his jaw was set, his teeth ground together; his eyes
burned under red lids, and his hair lay tossed and damp on his brow. “I
keep out of no man's way,” he repeated, hoarsely.
“I heard you, Mr. Tibbs, but I've got too much to do, while you loaf
and gas and drink over Lum Landis's bar--I've got other business than
keeping out of Hartley Bowlder's way. I'm looking for John Harkless. He
was the best man we had in this ornery hole, and he was too good for us,
and so we've maybe let him get killed, and maybe I'm to blame. But I'm
going to find him, and if he's hurt--damn _me_! I'm going to have a hand
on the rope that lifts the men that did it, if I have to go to Rouen to
put it there! After that I'll answer for my fault, not before!”
He threw himself on his horse and was gone. Soon the room was emptied,
as the patrons of the bar returned to the search, and only Mr. Wilkerson
and the landlord remained, the bar being the professional office, so to
speak, of both.
Wilkerson had a chair in a corner, where he sat chanting a funeral march
in a sepulchral murmur, allowing a parenthetical _hic_ to punctuate the
dirge in place of the drum. Whenever a batch of newcomers entered,
he rose to drink with them; and, at such times, after pouring off his
liquor with a rich melancholy, shedding tears after every swallow, he
would make an exploring tour of the room on his way back to his corner,
stopping to look under each chair inquiringly and ejaculate: “Why, where
kin he be!” Then, shaking his head, he would observe sadly: “Fine
young man, he was, too; fine young man. Pore fellow! I reckon we hain't
a-goin' to git him.”
At eleven o'clock. Judge Briscoe dropped wearily from his horse at his
own gate, and said to a wan girl who came running down the walk to meet
him: “There is nothing, yet. I sent the telegram to your mother--to Mrs.
Sherwood.”
Helen turned away without answering. Her face was very white and looked
pinched about the mouth. She went back to where old Fisbee sat on the
porch, his white head held between his two hands; he was rocking himself
to and fro. She touched him gently, but he did not look up. She spoke to
him.
“There isn't anything--yet. He sent the telegram to mamma. I shall stay
with you, now, no matter what you say.” She sat beside him and put her
head down on his shoulder, and though for a moment he appeared not to
notice it, when Minnie came out on the porch, hearing her father at the
door, the old scholar had put his arm about the girl and was stroking
her fair hair softly.
Briscoe glanced at them, and raised a warning finger to his daughter,
and they went tiptoeing into the house, where the judge dropped heavily
upon a sofa with an asthmatic sigh; he was worn and tired. Minnie stood
before him with a look of pale inquiry, and he shook his head.
“No use to tell _them_; but I can't see any hope,” he answered her,
biting nervously at the end of a cigar. “I expect you better bring me
some coffee in here; I couldn't take another step to save me. I'm too
old to tear around the country horseback before breakfast, like I have
to-day.”
“Did you send her telegram?” Minnie asked, as he drank the coffee she
brought him. She had interpreted “coffee” liberally, and, with the
assistance of Mildy Upton (whose subdued nose was frankly red and who
shed tears on the raspberries), had prepared an appetizing table at his
elbow.
“Yes,” responded the judge, “and I'm glad she sent it. I talked
the other way yesterday, what little I said--it isn't any of our
business--but I don't think any too much of those people, somehow. She
thinks she belongs with Fisbee, and I guess she's right. That young
fellow must have got along with her pretty well, and I'm afraid when
she gives up she'll be pretty bad over it; but I guess we all will. It's
terribly sudden, somehow, though it's only what everybody half expected
would come; only we thought it would come from over yonder.” He nodded
toward the west. “But she's got to stay here with us. Boarding at Sol
Tibbs's with that old man won't do; and she's no girl to live in two
rooms. You fix it up with her--you make her stay.”
“She must,” answered his daughter as she knelt beside him and patted his
coat and handed him several things to eat at the same time. “Mr. Fisbee
will help me persuade her, now that she's bound to stay in spite of him
and the Sherwoods, too. I think she is perfectly grand to do it. I've
always thought she was grand--ever since she took me under her wing
at school when I was terribly 'country' and frightened; but she was so
sweet and kind she made me forget. She was the pet of the school, too,
always doing things for the other girls, for everybody; looking out for
people simply heads and heads bigger than herself, and so
recklessly generous and so funny about it; and always thoughtful
and--and--pleasant----”
Minnie was speaking sadly, mechanically; but suddenly she broke off with
a quick sob, sprang up and went to the window; then, turning, cried out:
“I don't believe it! He knew how to take care of himself too well. He'd
have got away from them.”
Her father shook his head. “Then why hasn't he turned up? He'd have gone
home after the storm if something bad wasn't the matter.”
“But nothing--nothing _that_ bad could have happened. They haven't
found--any--anything.”
“But why hasn't he come back, child?”
“Well, he's lying hurt somewhere, that's all.”
“Then why haven't they found him?”
“I don't care!” she cried, and choked with the words and tossed her
dishevelled hair from her temples; “it isn't true. Helen won't believe
it--why should I? It's only a few hours since he was right here in our
yard, talking to us all. I won't believe it till they've searched every
stick and stone of Six-Cross-Roads and found him.”
“It wasn't the Cross-Roads,” said the old gentleman, pushing the table
away and relaxing his limbs on the sofa. “They probably didn't have
anything to do with it. We thought they had at first, but everybody's
about come to believe it was those two devils that he had arrested
yesterday.”
“Not the Cross-Roads!” echoed Minnie, and she began to tremble
violently. “Haven't they been out there yet?”
“What use? They are out of it, and they can thank God they are!”
“They are not!” she cried excitedly. “They did it. It was the
White-Caps. We saw them, Helen and I.”
The judge got upon his feet with an oath. He had not sworn for years
until that morning. “What's this?” he said sharply.
“I ought to have told you before, but we were so frightened, and--and
you went off in such a rush after Mr. Wiley was here. I never dreamed
everybody wouldn't know it was the Cross-Roads; that they would _think_
of any one else. And I looked for the scarecrow as soon as it was light
and it was 'way off from where we saw them, and wasn't blown down at
all, and Helen saw them in the field besides--saw all of them----”
He interrupted her. “What do you mean? Try to tell me about it quietly,
child.” He laid his hand on her shoulder.
She told him breathlessly (while he grew more and more visibly perturbed
and uneasy, biting his cigar to pieces and groaning at intervals) what
she and Helen had seen in the storm. When she finished he took a few
quick turns about the room with his hands thrust deep in his coat
pockets, and then, charging her to repeat the story to no one, left the
house, and, forgetting his fatigue, rapidly crossed the fields to the
point where the bizarre figures of the night had shown themselves to the
two girls at the window.
The soft ground had been trampled by many feet. The boot-prints pointed
to the northeast. He traced them backward to the southwest through the
field, and saw where they had come from near the road, going northeast.
Then, returning, he climbed the fence and followed them northward
through the next field. From there, the next, beyond the road that was
a continuation of Main Street, stretched to the railroad embankment.
The track, raggedly defined in trampled loam and muddy furrow, bent in
a direction which indicated that its terminus might be the switch
where the empty cars had stood last night, waiting for the one-o'clock
freight. Though the fields had been trampled down in many places by
the searching parties, he felt sure of the direction taken by the
Cross-Roads men, and he perceived that the searchers had mistaken the
tracks he followed for those of earlier parties in the hunt. On the
embankment he saw a number of men, walking west and examining the ground
on each side, and a long line of people following them out from town. He
stopped. He held the fate of Six-Cross-Roads in his hand and he knew it.
He knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads,
and that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the
Cross-Roads would fight. If he had believed that the dissemination of
his knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the
men near him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive.
They would not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as
a prisoner; such a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also,
they were not that kind; they had been “looking for him” a long time,
and their one idea was to kill him.
And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe
believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched. Of one
thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and
whipped while yet alive. In spite of his easy manners and geniality,
there was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed
before the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads “White-Cap” could have been
laid upon him in chastisement. A great many good Americans of Carlow who
knew him well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an
untitled Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He
was the only man the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as
“Marse” since he came to Plattville, thirty years ago.
Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages,
in the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number
they had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of
the young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly
in a trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge
up in his breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more.
Though long retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all
his life a serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant
lawlessness that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the
people; their long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at
last and wipe out the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could
be held off over to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the
law could strike and the innocent and the hotheaded be spared from
suffering. He would wait; he would lay his information before the
sheriff; and Horner would go quietly with a strong posse, for he would
need a strong one. He began to retrace his steps.
The men on the embankment were walking slowly, bending far over, their
eyes fixed on the ground. Suddenly one of them stood erect and tossed
his arms in the air and shouted loudly. Other men ran to him, and
another far down the track repeated the shout and the gesture to another
far in his rear; this man took it up, and shouted and waved to a fourth
man, and so they passed the signal back to town. There came, almost
immediately three long, loud whistles from a mill near the station, and
the embankment grew black with people pouring out from town, while the
searchers came running from the fields and woods and underbrush on both
sides of the railway.
Briscoe paused for the last time; then he began to walk slowly toward
the embankment.
The track lay level and straight, not dimming in the middle distances,
the rails converging to points, both northwest and southeast, in
the clean-washed air, like examples of perspective in a child's
drawing-book. About seventy miles to the west and north lay Rouen; and,
in the same direction, nearly six miles from where the signal was
given, the track was crossed by a road leading directly south to
Six-Cross-Roads.
The embankment had been newly ballasted with sand. What had been
discovered was a broad brown stain on the south slope near the top.
There were smaller stains above and below; none beyond it to left or
right; and there were deep boot-prints in the sand. Men were examining
the place excitedly, talking and gesticulating. It was Lige Willetts who
had found it. His horse was tethered to a fence near by, at the end of
a lane through a cornfield. Jared Wiley, the deputy, was talking to a
group near the stain, explaining.
“You see them two must have knowed about the one-o'clock freight, and
that it was to stop here to take on the empty lumber cars. I don't know
how they knowed it, but they did. It was this way: when they dropped
from the window, they beat through the storm, straight for this
side-track. At the same time Mr. Harkless leaves Briscoes' goin'
west. It begins to rain. He cuts across to the railroad to have a sure
footing, and strikin' for the deepo for shelter--near place as any
except Briscoes' where he'd said good-night already and prob'ly don't
wish to go back, 'fear of givin' trouble or keepin' 'em up--anybody can
understand that. He comes along, and gets to where we are precisely at
the time _they_ do, them comin' from town, him strikin' for it. They run
right into each other. That's what happened. They re-_cog_-nized him and
raised up on him and let him have it. What they done it with, I don't
know; we took everything in that line off of 'em; prob'ly used railroad
iron; and what they done with him afterwards we don't know; but we will
by night. They'll sweat it out of 'em up at Rouen when they get 'em.”
“I reckon maybe some of us might help,” remarked Mr. Watts,
reflectively.
Jim Bardlock swore a violent oath. “That's the talk!” he shouted. “Ef I
ain't the first man of this crowd to set my foot in Roowun, an' first to
beat in that jail door, an' take 'em out an' hang 'em by the neck till
they're dead, dead, dead, I'm not Town Marshal of Plattville, County of
Carlow, State of Indiana, and the Lord have mercy on our souls!”
Tom Martin looked at the brown stain and quickly turned away; then he
went back slowly to the village. On the way he passed Warren Smith.
“Is it so?” asked the lawyer.
Martin answered with a dry throat. He looked out dimly over the sunlit
fields, and swallowed once or twice. “Yes, it's so. There's a good deal
of it there. Little more than a boy he was.” The old fellow passed his
seamy hand over his eyes without concealment. “Peter ain't very bright,
sometimes, it seems to me,” he added, brokenly; “overlook Bodeffer and
Fisbee and me and all of us old husks, and--and--” he gulped suddenly,
then finished--“and act the fool and take a boy that's the best we had.
I wish the Almighty would take Peter off the gate; he ain't fit fer it.”
When the attorney reached the spot where the crowd was thickest, way
was made for him. The old colored man, Xenophon, approached at the
same time, leaning on a hickory stick and bent very far over, one hand
resting on his hip as if to ease a rusty joint. The negro's age was
an incentive to fable; from his appearance he might have known the
prophets, and he wore that hoary look of unearthly wisdom many decades
of superstitious experience sometimes give to members of his race.
His face, so tortured with wrinkles that it might have been made of
innumerable black threads woven together, was a living mask of the
mystery of his blood. Harkless had once said that Uncle Xenophon had
visited heaven before Swedenborg and hell before Dante. To-day, as he
slowly limped over the ties, his eyes were bright and dry under the
solemn lids, and, though his heavy nostrils were unusually distended in
the effort for regular breathing, the deeply puckered lips beneath them
were set firmly.
He stopped and looked at the faces before him. When he spoke his voice
was gentle, and though the tremulousness of age harped on the vocal
strings, it was rigidly controlled. “Kin some kine gelmun,” he asked,
“please t'be so good ez t' show de ole main whuh de W'ite-Caips is done
shoot Marse Hawkliss?”
“Here was where it happened, Uncle Zen,” answered Wiley, leaning him
forward. “Here is the stain.”
Xenophon bent over the spot on the sand, making little odd noises in his
throat. Then he painfully resumed his former position. “Dass his blood,”
he said, in the same gentle, quavering tone. “Dass my bes' frien' whut
lay on de groun' whuh yo staind, gelmun.”
There was a pause, and no one spoke.
“Dass whuh day laid 'im an' dass whuh he lie,” the old negro continued.
“Dey shot 'im in de fiels. Dey ain' shot 'im hear-yondeh dey drugged
'im, but dis whuh he lie.” He bent over again, then knelt, groaningly,
and placed his hand on the stain, one would have said, as a man might
place his hand over a heart to see if it still beat. He was motionless,
with the air of hearkening.
“Marse, honey, is you gone?” He raised his voice as if calling, “Is you
gone, suh?--Marse?”
He looked up at the circle about him, and, still kneeling, not taking
his hand from the sand, seeming to wait for a sign, to listen for a
voice, he said: “Whafo' you gelmun think de good Lawd summon Marse
Hawkliss? Kaze he de mos' fittes'? You know dat man he ketch me in de
cole night, wintuh 'to' lais', stealin' 'is wood. You know whut he done
t'de ole thief? Tek an' bull' up big fiah een ole Zen' shainty; say,
'He'p yo'se'f an' welcome. Reckon you hongry, too, ain' you, Xenophon?'
Tek an' feed me. Tek an' tek keer o' me ev' since. Ah pump de baith full
in de mawin'; mek 'is bed; pull de weeds out'n of de front walk--dass
all. He tek me in. When Ah aisk 'im ain' he fraid keep ole thief he say,
jesso: 'Dass all my fault, Xenophon; ought look you up long 'go; ought
know long 'go you be cole dese baid nights. Reckon Ahm de thievenest one
us two, Xenophon, keepin' all dis wood stock' up when you got none,' he
say, jesso. Tek me in; say he _lahk_ a thief. Pay me sala'y. Feed me.
Dass de main whut de Caips gone shot lais' night.” He raised his head
sharply, and the mystery in his gloomy eyes intensified as they opened
wide and stared at the sky, unseeingly.
“Ise bawn wid a cawl!” he exclaimed, loudly. His twisted frame was
braced to an extreme tension. “Ise bawn wid a cawl! De blood anssuh!”
“It wasn't the Cross-Roads, Uncle Xenophon,” said Warren Smith, laying
his hand on the old man's shoulder.
Xenophon rose to his feet. He stretched a long, bony arm straight to the
west, where the Cross-Roads lay; stood rigid and silent, like a seer;
then spoke:
“De men whut shot Marse Hawkliss lies yondeh, hidin' f'um de light o'
day. An' _him_”--he swerved his whole rigid body till the arm pointed
northwest--“he lies yondeh. You won't find him heah. Dey fought 'im een
de fiel's an' dey druggen 'im heah. Dis whim dey lay 'im down. Ise bawn
wid a cawl!”
There were exclamations from the listeners, for Xenophon spoke as one
having authority. Suddenly he turned and pointed his outstretched hand
full at Judge Briscoe.
“An' dass de main,” he cried, “dass de main kin tell you Ah speak de
trufe.”
Before he was answered, Eph Watts looked at Briscoe keenly and then
turned to Lige Willetts and whispered: “Get on your horse, ride in, and
ring the court-house bell like the devil. Do as I say!”
Tears stood in the judge's eyes. “It is so,” he said, solemnly. “He
speaks the truth. I didn't mean to tell it to-day, but somehow--” He
paused. “The hounds!” he cried. “They deserve it! My daughter saw them
crossing the fields in the night--saw them climb the fence, hoods,
gowns, and all, a big crowd of them. She and the lady who is visiting
us saw them, saw them plainly. The lady saw them several times, clear as
day, by the flashes of lightning--the scoundrels were coming this way.
They must have been dragging him with them then. He couldn't have had a
show for his life amongst them. Do what you like--maybe they've got him
at the Cross-Roads. If there's a chance of it--dead or alive--bring him
back!”
A voice rang out above the clamor that followed the judge's speech.
“'Bring him back!' God could, maybe, but He won't. Who's travelling
my way? I go west!” Hartley Bowlder had ridden his sorrel up the
embankment, and the horse stood between the rails. There was an angry
roar from the crowd; the prosecutor pleaded and threatened unheeded; and
as for the deputy sheriff, he declared his intention of taking with him
all who wished to go as his posse. Eph Watts succeeded in making himself
heard above the tumult.
“The Square!” he shouted. “Start from the Square. We want everybody, and
we'll need them. We want every one in Carlow to be implicated in this
posse.”
“They will be!” shouted a farmer. “Don't you worry about that.”
“We want to get into some sort of shape,” cried Eph.
“Shape, hell!” said Hartley Bowlder.
There was a hiss and clang and rattle behind him, and a steam whistle
shrieked. The crowd divided, and Hartley's sorrel jumped just in time as
the westbound accommodation rushed through on its way to Rouen. From the
rear platform leaned the sheriff, Horner, waving his hands frantically
as he flew by, but no one understood--or cared--what he said, or, in the
general excitement, even wondered why he was leaving the scene of
his duty at such a time. When the train had dwindled to a dot and
disappeared, and the noise of its rush grew faint, the court-house bell
was heard ringing, and the mob was piling pell-mell into the village to
form on the Square. The judge stood alone on the embankment.
“That settles it,” he said aloud, gloomily, watching the last figures.
He took off his hat and pushed back the thick, white hair from his
forehead. “Nothing to do but wait. Might as well go home for that. Blast
it!” he exclaimed, impatiently. “I don't want to go there. It's too hard
on the little girl. If she hadn't come till next week she'd never have
known John Harkless.”