Tubal Cain Sims still continued to harbor the theory that the juggler’s
unexplained and lingering stay in Etowah Cove betokened that he sought
immunity here from the consequences of crime, and that he was a
fugitive from justice. In no other way could he interpret those strange
words, “--But the one who lives--for his life!--his life!--his life!”
cried out from troubled dreams in the silence of the dark midnight.
Although this view had been shared by the lime-burners when first he
had sought to enlist their prejudice, for he would fain rid his house
of this ill-flavored association, of late their antagonism had flagged.
Only Peter Knowles seemed to abide by their earlier impression, but
Peter Knowles was now absorbed heart and soul in burning lime, as
the time for its use was drawing near. Sims began to understand the
luke-warmness of the others when he noted the interest of the young
man in his beautiful daughter: they deemed him now merely a lover.
This discovery had come but lately to Sims, for he was of a slow and
plodding intelligence, and hard upon it followed the revelations he had
overheard through the open door the previous evening. It was evidently
an occasion for haste. While he loitered, this stranger, encouraged by
the vicarious coquetry of Jane Ann Sims, might marry Euphemia; and when
the juggler should be haled to the bar of justice for his crimes, the
Cove would probably perceive in the dispensation only a judgment upon
her parents for having made an idol of their own flesh and blood.
He realized, as many another man has done, that in extreme crises,
involving risk, quondam friendships are but as broken reeds, and he was
leaning stoutly only upon his own fealty to his own best interests,
as he jogged along on his old brown mare, with her frisky colt at
her heels, down the red clay roads of the cove, and through rugged
mountain passes into still other coves, on his way to Colbury, the
county town. His heart burned hot within him against Jane Ann Sims
when he recalled her advice to the man to say nothing to him, the
head of the house and the father of the girl! She’d settle _him_!
Would she, indeed? And he relished with a grim zest, as a sort of
reparation, the fright she had suffered at the bare possibility of
an elopement. Then this recollection, reacting on his own heart, set
it all a-plunging, as he toiled on wearily in the hot sun, lest this
disaster might chance during his absence, and he found himself leaning
appealingly, forlornly, on the honor of the very man whom his mission
was to ruin if he could. It was he who had refused to dispense with the
father’s consent could it be obtained, and the perfidious Jane Ann
Sims had counseled otherwise; he who had taken note of hospitality and
courtesy,--much of which, in truth, had been mere seeming. More than
once it almost gave Sims pause to reflect to whom he was indebted for
any show of consideration. He had, however, but one daughter. This
plea, he felt, might serve to excuse unfounded suspicion, and make
righteous a breach of hospitality, and even justify cruelty. “One
darter!” he often said to himself as he went along, all unaware that if
he had had six his cares, his solicitude, his paternal affection, would
have been meted out six-fold, so elastic is the heart to the strain
upon its resources.
For this cause, despite his softened judgment toward the juggler,
he did not flinch when he reached Colbury, and made his way across
the “Square,” where every eye seemed to his anxious consciousness
fixed upon him, as if attributing to him some nefarious designs on
the liberty of an innocent man. But in reality the town folks of
Colbury were far too sophisticated in their own esteem to accord the
slightest note to an old codger from the mountains,--a region as remote
to the majority, save now and then for a glimpse of an awe-stricken
visitor from the backwoods, as the mythical island of Atlantis. For
such explorations into the world at large as the ambitious citizens
of Colbury adventured led them not into the scorned rural wilds
comprehensively known to them as “’way up in the Cove.”
Tubal Cain Sims had been here but twice before: once when there was
a political rally early after the war, and later as a witness for
the defense in a case of murder. The crowded, confused, jostling
political experience still thronged unintelligibly the retina of his
mind’s eye, but order and quiet distinguished the glimpse vouchsafed
him of the workings of justice. He had evolved a great respect for
judicial methods, and he felt something like a glow of pride to see
the court-house still standing so spacious and stately, as it seemed
to him, within its inclosures, the surrounding grass green and new,
and the oak boughs clustering above the columns of the porch. He was
not aware how long he stood and gazed at it, his eyes alight, his
cheek flushed. If the question had been raised, he would have known,
of course, that the Juggernaut car of justice had held steadily on its
inexorable way through all the years that had since intervened, and
that his individual lack of a use for it had not banished it from the
earth; but Tubal Cain was not a man of speculation, and it smote him
with a sort of gratified surprise to see the court-house on its stanch
stone foundations as it was in the days when he and it conserved so
intimate a relation. There were two or three lawyers on the steps or
passing in at the gate, but he eyed these members of the tribe askance.
The value which he placed on counsel was such confidence as he might
repose in a shooting-iron with a muzzle at both ends,--as liable to
go off in one direction as in the other; and thus it was that, with
a hitch of the reins, he reminded himself anew of his errand, and
took his way down the declivity of a straggling little street, where
presently the houses grew few and small, dwindling first to shabby
tumble-down old cottages, then to sundry dilapidated blacksmith shops,
beyond which stretched a rocky untenanted space, as if all habitation
shrunk from neighboring the little jail which stood alone between the
outer confines of the town and the creek.
Here also he came to a halt, looking at the surly building with
recognizing eyes. And to it too these years had not been vacant. All
the time of his absence, in the far-away liberties of the mountains,
with the unshackled wind and the free clouds and the spontaneous
growths of the earth out of its own untrammeled impulse, this grim
place had been making its record of constraints, and captives, and
limits, and locks, and longing bursting hearts, and baffled denied
eyes, and yearning covetings of freedom, the bitterness of which
perhaps no free creature can know. Surely, surely, these darkening
elements of the moral atmosphere had turned the bricks to their dingy
hue. The barred windows gave on vague black interiors. A cloud was in
the air above, with now and then a mutter of thunder, and the sullen
jail lay in a shadow, and the water ran black in the green-fringed
creek at the foot of the hill, while behind him at its summit, where
the street intersected the open square, the sunlight fell in such
golden suffusions that a clay-bank horse with his rider motionless
against the blue sky beyond might have seemed an equestrian statue in
bronze, commemorating the valiance of some bold cavalry leader. Tubal
Cain wondered to see the jail so still and solitary; and where could be
the man whom he had pictured sitting in all the luxury of possession on
the front doorsteps, smoking his pipe?
This man of his imagination was the sheriff of the county, who did not
avail himself of his privilege to appoint a jailer, but turned the keys
himself and dwelt in his stronghold. He was of an over-exacting cast
of mind. He could never believe a prisoner secure unless with his own
hands he had drawn the bolts. On account of the great vogue attained
by various crimes at this period, and the consequent overcrowding of
the prisons throughout the State, a considerable number of captured
moonshiners had been billeted on the Kildeer County jail while awaiting
trial in the Federal Court, and by reason of this addition to his
charge his vigilance was redoubled. In all the details of his office
he carried the traits of a precisian, and was in some sort a thorn in
the side of the more easy-going county officers with whom his official
duties brought him into contact. Even the judge in his high estate
on the bench was now and again nettled by the difficult questions of
punctilio with which this servant of the court could contrive to
invest some trifling matter, and was known to incline favorably to
the salutary theory of rotation in office,--barring, of course, the
judicial office. But the sheriff had three minie balls in him which he
had collected on various battlefields in the South; and although he had
fought on a side not altogether popular in this region, they counted
for him at the polls in successive elections, without the formalities
of statutory qualifications and with a wondrous power of reduplication
in the number of resulting votes. He was reputed of an extraordinary
valor on those hard-contested fields where he had found his bullets,
but there were advanced occasionally caviling criticisms of his record
on the score that, being incapable of originating a course of action,
it never occurred to him to run away when his command was ordered
to advance, and that his bravery was simply the fixed stolidity of
adhering to another man’s idea in default of any ideas of his own. In
proof of this it was cited that when he was among a guard detailed to
hold a gin-house full of cotton, and the enemy surprised the sentinel
and captured the building, he alone stood like a stock with his rifle
still at a serene “shoulder-arms,” where it was ordered to be, while
his comrades undertook a deploying evolution of their own invention at
a mad double-quick, without a word of command, showing the cleanest
of nimble heels across the country. But he was esteemed by these
depreciators a lucky fool, for since the war, having an affinity for
the office of sheriff, he had more than once been obliged to decline to
make the race, and lie off a term or two, because of the law which will
not permit the office to be held by the same person eight years without
an interval. His fad for being in the direct line of the enemy’s fire
had not resulted more disastrously than to give him some painful
hospital experience; the balls had come to stay, and apparently the
hard metal of his constitution served to assimilate them easily enough,
for he was hale and hearty, and bade fair to live to a green old age,
and they never made themselves heard of save at election times, when in
effect they stuffed the ballot-box.
Having voted for him so often, and with that immense estimate of the
value of a single ballot common to the backwoodsman little conversant
with the power of numbers, Tubal Cain Sims felt a possessory claim on
the sheriff as having made him such. He stood in dismay and doubt for a
moment, gazing at the stout closed door that opened, when it opened at
all, directly on the descending flight of steps, without any ceremonial
porch or other introduction to entrance; then, after the manner of
Etowah Cove, he lifted up his voice in a stentorian halloo and hailed
the grim and silent house.
The sound seemed a spell to waken it into life. The echo of his
shouts came back from the brick walls so promptly as to simulate two
imperative voices rather than acoustic mimicry. Sudden pale faces
showed at the bars, wearing the inquiring startled mien of alarm and
surprise. The rattle of a chain heralded the approach of a great
guard-dog dragging a block from around the corner. With his big
bull-like head lowered and his fangs showing between his elastic lips,
he stood fiercely surveying the stranger for a short time; then--and
Tubal Cain Sims could have more readily forgiven a frantic assault, for
he had his pistol in his hand--the sagacious brute sat down abruptly,
and continued to contemplate the visitor, but with a certain air of
non-committal curiosity, evidently realizing that his vocation was
not to deter people from getting into jail, but to prevent them from
getting out. The pallid faces at the windows were laughing, despite the
bars; and although nettled by the ridicule they expressed, Tubal Sims
made bold to lift up his voice again: “Hello, Enott! Enott Blake! Lemme
in! Lemme in, I say! Hello, Enott!”
The faces of the spectators were distended anew. At those windows where
there was more than one, they were turned toward each other for the
luxury of an exchange of winks and leers. When a face was alone it
grinned jocular satisfaction to itself, and one man, with a large red
and facetious countenance, now and again showed a lifted hand smiting
an unseen leg, in the extremity of solitary joy. The dog, with his big
head still lowered and his drooping lips a-quiver, gave a surly growl
of displeasure, when the colt, having somewhat recovered from the
fatigues of its long journey, began to frisk nimbly, and to curvet and
caracole; the mare turned her head anxiously about as she watched these
gyrations. Tubal Cain glared at the men at the windows. They had little
to laugh at, doubtless, but why should they so gratuitously laugh at
him? A tide of abashed mortification carried the blood to his head.
His stanch self-respect had heretofore precluded the suspicion that
he was ever the object of ridicule, and now his pride revolted at his
plight; but since he could not get at his mockers and inflict condign
punishment, naught remained but to manfully persist in his course as
if they were not. He dismounted, threw the reins over a hitching-post,
advanced through the gate of the narrow yard, his pistol in his hand
for fear of the formidable dog, and ascended the steps with a resolute
tread. He dealt a resounding double-knock with the butt end of his
shooting-iron, crying as he did so upon Enott Blake as a “dad-burned
buzzard” to unlock the door or he would break it down. Suddenly it
opened, and by the force of his expectant blow he fell forward into the
hall; then it closed behind him with a bang that shook the house.
“What does this mean?” exclaimed an irate voice. “Jeemes, take his
weepon.”
And albeit Tubal Sims stoutly held on to it, a scientific crack on the
knuckles administered by a dapper light-haired young man caused the
stiff old fingers to relax and yield the pistol to the custody of the
law.
Tubal Sims confronted a tall, spare, vigorous man about fifty-five
years of age, with iron-gray hair worn with a certain straight lank
effect and parted far on the side, a florid complexion, and a bright
yellowish-gray eye which delivered the kind of glance popularly held
to resemble an eagle’s. His look was very intent as he gazed in the
twilight of the grimy hall at Tubal Cain Sims, who began to feel a
quiver at the lack of recognition it expressed. To be sure, Tubal Sims
knew that he had no acquaintance with the man, but somehow he had not
counted on this total unresponsiveness to his claim upon the officer.
“I hev voted fur you-uns fur sher’ff nine time out’n ten,” he said,
with the rancor of reproach for benefits conferred unworthily.
He stood with a very large majority of the enlightened citizens of
the county. Enott Blake had been but recently reëlected, but if his
canvass were to be made anew it is barely possible that he would have
fancied he might have weathered it without the support of this ancient
adherent. His office was of the sort which is not compatible with any
show of personal favor, and he resented the reminder of political
services as an imputation.
“Well, ye have got a sheriff that knows what attempted house-breaking
is,” he said severely. “And unless ye can show a good reason for tryin’
to break into that door, ye’ll find ye have got a sheriff that will
take a power o’ pains ye don’t break out again soon.”
Tubal Cain’s face, all wind-blown and red with the sun, and rugged with
hard grooved wrinkles, and nervous with the untoward complications of
achieving an audience with the man he had ridden so far to see, was
shattered from the congruity of his gravity into a sort of fragmentary
laughter out of keeping with the light of anxiety in his eyes.
“Did ye ever hear of a man tryin’ ter break inter a jail?” he demanded.
“I caught you doin’ it to the best of your ability,” returned the
literal-minded sheriff.
Tubal Cain would have felt as if he were dreaming had it not been for
sundry recollections of stories of the matter-of-fact tendencies of the
officer which were far from reassuring. He felt that he could hardly
have faced the situation had not the dapper round-visaged young deputy,
whose blond hair curled like a baby’s in tendrils on his red, freckled
forehead, glanced up at him with a jocose wink as he proceeded to draw
the cartridges from the mountaineer’s shooting-iron; the triumph of
capture was still in his eye, while he lounged carelessly over the
banisters of the staircase to evade the responsibility and labor of
standing upright.
“Own up, daddy,” he cavalierly admonished the elder. “Tell what you
were aimin’ to do. To rescue prisoners”--his superior snorted at the
very word--“or rob us of our vally’bles?” The sheriff turned upon the
deputy with a stare of inquiry as if wondering what these might be;
then, vaguely apprehending the banter, said severely:--
“Cuttin’ jokes about your bizness, Jeemes, so constant, makes me ’feard
it’s a leetle bit too confinin’ for such a gay bird as you. Bar-keepin’
in a saloon would fit your build better’n the sort o’ bar-keepin’ we do
here, I’m thinkin’.”
Enott Blake might be laughed at on occasion, but he had a trick of
making other men as serious as himself when he sought to play upon
their foibles. The blond deputy’s countenance showed that it had
another and deeper tinge of red in its capacity; he came to the
perpendicular suddenly as, without lifting his eyes, he continued to
revolve the cylinder of the pistol and to draw the cartridges seriatim.
He was but newly appointed, and zealous of the favor of his superior.
“I dunno how I could bear up, though,” he said, with apology in the
cadence of his voice, “if I didn’t crack a joke wunst in a while,
considering I’m just broke into harness.”
“That’s a fact,” admitted the martial elder, visibly and solemnly
placated. “Do you know what we were doin’ while you yelled, an’
capered, an’ cut up them monkey-shines in front of the jail?” he
demanded sternly, turning to Tubal Cain Sims. “We were cuttin’ a man
down that tried to hang himself.”
“Suicidin’,” put in the deputy, as if making a nice distinction between
this voluntary suspension and the legal execution.
“An’ we were bringin’ the man to himself agin.”
“He’s crazy, crazy as a loon,” interpolated the deputy in a mutter,
pulling the trigger and snapping the hammer of the empty weapon,
and sighting it unpleasantly down the hall, aiming alternately at
the sheriff and at Tubal Cain Sims, who could scarcely repress an
admonition, but for awe’s sake desisted.
“Or more likely, simulatin’ insanity,” said the sheriff; “it’s plumb
epidemic nowadays ’mongst the crim’nals.”
“Well, he come mighty nigh lightin’ out for a country where no vain
pretenses avail,” remarked the loquacious deputy, one eye closed, and
drawing a very fine line from the bridge of old Sims’s nose with the
empty pistol.
“This is a country where they don’t avail, either,” retorted the
sheriff, “not with any reasonable jury. And twelve men, though liable
to be fools, ain’t fools o’ the same pattern. That’s the main thing:
impanel a variety o’ fools, an’ the verdic’ is generally horse sense.
Now, sir,” turning on Tubal Cain Sims, who could feel his hat rising up
on his hair, “what do you want, anyhow?”
“Ter git out,--that’s all; ter git out o’ hyar!” exclaimed Tubal Sims,
sickened with a ghastly horror of the presentment of the scene they had
left, the walls that harbored it, the roof that sheltered it. Oh for
the free pure mountain air, the wild untrodden lengths of the mountain
wilderness, fresh with the sun and the dew, and the vigor of natural
growths, and the sweet scent of woodland ways! As he cast up his eyes
to the high window above the staircase he could have cried out aloud to
see the bars, and he gazed at the door in a desperation that started
the drops on his brow and brought the blood to his face, as if the
intensity of his emotion had been some strong physical effort.
“What did you get in here for, then?” demanded the sheriff. “Most folks
have to be fetched.”
Tubal Cain Sim’s heart failed him. Could it be possible that he had
ever designed a fate like this for the man who had slept under his
roof; who had eaten his bread; who had refused to maintain secrecy
against him; who considered him and his claims, when his own, his very
own, passed them by? He could not realize it. He refused to credit his
cherished scheme; he felt that if once away from the paralyzing sight
of the place, invention would rouse itself anew. Some other device
would serve to rid the Cove of the man, and to frustrate his elopement
with Euphemia. Tubal Sims was sure he could compass a new plan if once
more he were free in the clear and open air.
The eagle eye of the sheriff marked the alert turning of Sims’s head
toward the door. “What did you come here for, then?” he again demanded.
With hot eyes glancing hither and thither like a wild thing’s in a
trap, Tubal Sims replied, with the inspiration of the moment, “I wanted
ter view the man I hev voted fur so often an’ so constant.”
Now, the sheriff, like many other great men in their several places,
had his vanity, and it is not hard to convince one who has been
before the public eye that he fills that orb to the exclusion of any
less worthy object. That Tubal Cain Sims should have journeyed fully
thirty-five miles from the mountains to contemplate the resplendent
dignity of the sheriff in his oft-resumed incumbency seemed possibly no
disproportionate tribute to Enott Blake’s estimate of his own merits.
But this view, however flattering, was hardly compatible with the
lordly manner in which the old mountaineer had beaten upon the door of
the jail, and the imperative tones with which he had summoned forth the
servant of the public who owed his high estate to the suffrages of him
aided by the likes of him.
A wonderful change is wrought in the moral atmosphere of a man by
the event of an election. The candidate’s estate is vested by the
announcement of the result. He owns his office for the time, and he
breathes a free man. It is interesting to see how the muscles of his
metaphorical knees straighten out, for the day of genuflection is over.
Independence is reasserted in his eye; he bears himself as one who
conquers by the prowess of his own bow and spear; and men whom he would
fain conciliate last week need to search his eye for an expression
they can recognize. They will be treated no more to that mollifying
demonstration, the candidate’s smile.
The defeated aspirant’s once bland countenance, however, has assumed
all the contours of the cynic’s. A bitter sort of nonchalance with a
frequent forced laugh goes better combined with peanuts, if the place
is not too high in the official scale and the candidate of no great
social pretensions, since the hulls can be cast off with a flouting
gesture which aids the general implication that the constituency may
appropriately go hang, for all he cares. He is not hurt,--not he! He
made the race to oblige his friends and party, and he now and again
throws out intimations of a bigger piece of pie saving for him as a
reward for filling the breach. Meantime peanuts perforce suffice.
Enott Blake, through much place-holding, had become imbued with the
candidate’s antagonism to that assumption of all the power residing
in the voting masses common to the arrogant but impotent unit. He
was never elected by any one man, nor through any definitely exerted
political influence. He served the people, and incidentally his own
interest, and mighty glad they ought to be to get him, and this was
what he felt especially after elections. If ever in the course of a
canvass he had a qualm,--and it is said that the least imaginative
of men are capable of nightmare,--he had the satisfaction of calling
himself a fool thereafter, to think less of himself than people
thought of him, and of counting endearingly his minie balls. He was a
rare instance of a great personal popularity, and he had no mind to
abate his pretensions before the preposterous patronage of this old
mountaineer who possibly had not paid poll-tax for twenty years. He
could no more be said to possess an enlightened curiosity than the
hound trained to trail game could be accredited with an inquisitive
interest in the natural history of the subject of his quest. It was
only with a similar rudimentary instinct of the pursuit of prey that he
felt stirring an intention to wring from the intruder the real reason
for this strange entrance.
“No, no, my friend,” he said, with a kindling of his keen eye which
expressed a degree of ferocity, “you can’t come it that-a-way on me.
I’m a mighty fine man, I know, but folks ain’t got to sech a pass yet
as to break into jail for a glimpse of me. You don’t get out of that
door”--he nodded his head at it--“till you give me a reasonable reason
for your extraordinary conduc’.”
Tubal Cain Sims was silent. His hard old lips suddenly shut fast. His
eyes gleamed with a dogged light. He would not speak had he no will to
speak, and the officer should see which could hold out the longest at
this game. He remembered how often he had hearkened to the complaints
of the preternatural quality of his obstinacy with which Jane Ann
Sims had beguiled the conjugal way since, a quarter of a century ago,
they had left the doorstep of Parson Greenought’s house man and wife.
Surely, if it had time and again vanquished Jane Ann Sims, how could
the sheriff, a mere man, abide it? He had not, however, reckoned on
certain means of compulsion which were not within the power of the
doughty contestant for domestic supremacy.
There was no visible communication between the older officer and the
deputy when the young man said appealingly, “Ye won’t need handcuffs,
Mr. Blake? Leastwise not till after we come from the jestice’s?”
“Handcuffs!” screeched Tubal Sims, as violently cast out from the
stronghold of his obstinate silence as if he had been hurtled thence
by a catapult. “Ye hev got no right to handcuff me! I kem hyar of my
own free will an’ accord. I ain’t no prisoner. Open that thar door,”
he continued, lowering his voice to a tone of command and turning
majestically to the sheriff. “Open that door, or I’ll hev the law of
ye.”
“Not till I have had the law of you,” replied the imperturbable
functionary. “But, Jeemes,”--he turned with a disaffected aside to his
young colleague,--“what d’ye go namin’ irons for? ’Tain’t polite to
talk ’bout ironin’ a man old enough to be your father.”
The deputy looked about in vague despair. He had but sought the effect
upon the imagination of the mention of shackles, and indeed his words
had potently affected the fancy of the only man in the room who
possessed that illusive pictorial faculty. The stanch old mountaineer
was all a-tremble. What would Jane Ann Sims think of this? He might
have known that this journeying abroad in secret and without her advice
would result disastrously! What indeed would Jane Ann Sims think of
this?
“Open that door!” he vociferated. “Ye hev got no right ter detain ME!”
“What for not?” demanded the sheriff sternly. “What d’ye call this
fix’n’?” He opposed to Tubal Cain Sims’s nose, with the trifling
intervenient space of an inch, his own pistol.
“Shootin’-iron!” sputtered Tubal, squinting fearfully at it.
“Worn in defiance o’ the law and to the terror o’ the people,” said the
sheriff frowningly. “I have got to be indicted myself or to arrest you
on that charge. And I reckon you know you ain’t got no right to carry
concealed weepons.”
“Ain’t got no right ter w’ar a shootin’-iron!” exclaimed Tubal Sims,
his eyes starting out of his head.
“Agin the law,” said the deputy airily.
“Agin the law!” echoed Tubal Sims, his back against the wall, and
his eyes turning first to one, then to the other of his companions.
“Lord! Lord! I never knowed afore how fur the flat-woods war abint
the mountings! How air ye goin’ ter pertec’ yerself agin yer neighbor
’thout no shootin’-iron?” he asked cogently.
“By the law,” said both officers in unison.
“Thar ain’t no law in the mountings, thank Gawd!” cried Tubal Sims.
“There is law here,” declared the sheriff, “and a plenty of it to go
round.”
“Thank Gawd!” echoed the pious deputy.
“Come, old man!” said the sheriff. “Come in here an’ set down, an’
sorter straighten out, an’ tell me what in hell ailed ye to come
bangin’ on the jail door with a weepon called a shootin’-iron till you
git yourself arrested for crim’nal offense. Surely, surely, you have
got _some_ reason in you.”
He flung open a door close at hand, and Tubal Cain Sims, his knees
trembling under him, so great was the nervous reaction in his
metamorphosis from the masterful accuser to the despairing accused,
was ushered into a room which seemed to him dark despite the glare of
sunlight that fell broadside half across the bare floor from two tall
windows,--a gaunt and haggard apartment suggestive of the intention of
the building of which it was a part. These windows were not grated,
but the fleckings of moving clouds barred the sunlight on the floor,
and the mutter of thunder came renewed to the ear. The dust lay thick
on the table in the centre of the room. A lounge covered with a
startlingly gay quilt was in one corner, where Tubal Cain presumed the
sheriff, in moments of fatigue which might be supposed to overpower
even his stiff military figure in the deep midnight, slept with one eye
open. A desk in the jamb by the fireplace held several bulky books, a
large inkstand, a bag of fine-cut tobacco, a coarse glass tumbler which
had nothing in it but a rank smell of a strong grade of corn whiskey,
and a pipe half full of dead ashes, which the sheriff had hastily
laid aside when summoned to the scene of the horrors perpetrated by a
forlorn human being in the desperation of the fear of still greater
horrors to come.
Tubal Cain Sims’s mind, unaccustomed to morbid influences, could
not detach itself from the idea. Despite his absorptions on his
own account, he followed as an independent train of thought futile
speculations as to where in the building this man might be,--close at
hand, and he felt a nervous thrill at the possible propinquity, or in
some remote cell and out of hearing; what had he guiltily done, or
was he falsely accused; had he been really resuscitated, or had the
potentialities of life merely flickered up like the spurious quickening
of a failing candle before the moment of extinction, and was he even
now, while the officers lingered here, dead again, and this time beyond
recall; or would he not, left to his own devices, once more attempt his
life? The old mountaineer could not forbear. He turned to the sheriff
with an excited eye.
“Ain’t ye ’feard he’ll hang hisself again?” he said huskily.
The officer stared. “Who?” he inquired, with knitted brow, as if he had
forgotten the occurrence absolutely; then with renewing recollection,
“You can bet your life he won’t.”
“Why not?” asked Sims, the clatter of his boots on the bare floor
silent as he stopped short.
The deputy gave a fleering laugh, ending in a “ki-yi” of the extremity
of derision. He had flung himself into a chair, and, with his elbows
on the table, looked up with a scornful grin at Tubal Cain Sims, who
seemed to entertain solicitude as to the capacities for management
and discipline of Enott Blake, famous as the veriest martinet of a
drill-sergeant years before he ever saw the inside of Kildeer County
jail.
This absurd officiousness, however, met with more leniency from the
sheriff. Whether it was that, from his steady diet of commendation, his
vanity could afford to dispense with such poor crumbs as Tubal Cain
Sims might have it in his power to offer, or whether he was desirous of
the emollient effects of indulgence to loosen his visitor’s tongue, he
apparently took no heed of this breach of the proprieties.
“He’s all right now. You needn’t have no anxiety ’bout him,” he said,
as if it were a matter of course to be brought to book in this way.
“He can’t hurt himself nor any one else now,” echoed the deputy, taking
his cue.
Sims turned from one to the other inquiringly.
“Got him in a cage,” said the sheriff grimly.
For one moment Tubal Cain Sims silently cursed his curiosity that
had elicited this fact for his knowledge and provision for future
nightmares. It was of the order of things that sets the natural
impulses of humanity and sympathy adverse to all the necessities of law
and justice. He stared at the two officers, as if they were monsters.
Perhaps only his weapon, empty in the deputy’s pistol-pocket,
persuaded his apparent acquiescence.
“Good Lord!” he gasped, “that’s powerful tur’ble,--powerful tur’ble!”
The sheriff was no mind-reader. He deemed that the allusion applied to
the unjudicial hanging.
“Not so very,” he said, seating himself in a splint-bottomed chair, and
elevating his boots to the topmost bar of the rusty, fireless grate.
“’Tain’t nigh so bad as havin’ ’em fire the jail,” he added gloomily.
“They have played that joke on me five times. All this part o’ the
buildin’ is new. Burnt spang down the last time we had a fire.”
“Take a chair, sir, take a chair,” said the conformable deputy,
perceiving that politeness had come to be the order of the day.
Tubal Sims, almost paralyzed by the number and character of the new
impressions crowded upon his unaccustomed old brain, still stood
staring from one to the other, his sunburned, grooved, lank-jawed face
showing a sharp contrast with his shock of tow hair, which, having
been yellow and growing partially gray, seemed to have reverted to the
lighter tint that it had affected when he came into the world. His
hat was perched on the back of his head, and now and then he reached
up to readjust it there; some subtle connection surely exists between
the hat of a man and his brain, some obscure ganglion, for never does
embarrassment beset his intellect but the solicitous hand travels
straight to the outer integument. His creased boots moved slowly
forward with the jeans-clothed continuations above them. He doubtfully
seized on the back of a chair, and, still gazing from one to the other
of his companions, deposited himself with exaggerated caution on the
stanch wooden seat as if he half expected it to collapse beneath him.
“Now,” said the sheriff smoothly, “you are a sensible man, I know, an’
I wish you well.”
“How ’bout that thar pistol?” said Tubal Cain Sims, instantly presuming
upon this expression of amity.
“I didn’t make that law,” said Enott Blake testily. “But I’m here to
enforce it, and you’ll find that I know my duty an’ will do it.”
Tubal Sims relapsed into his friendless despair. And once more the
deputy essayed a new device.
He turned his round, red, freckled, good-natured face full upon the
visitor across the table, and, pushing back his black hat from the
blond tendrils that overhung his forehead like an overgrown infant’s,
he said, fixing a grave blue eye upon Tubal Sims, “You came here to
tell us about some crime you’ve s’picioned.”
The sheriff plucked up his faculties as if an inspiration had smitten
him. “You were going to give us the names an’ fac’s as far as you knew
or they had developed,” he followed hard on the heels of the pioneering
deputy.
“You caved after you got here, ’cause you wished the man no harm, and
the sight o’ the jail sorter staggered you,” pursued the subordinate.
“But you had some personal motive,” interjected the sheriff, suddenly
solicitous for the verisimilitude of the sketch of the interior
workings of Tubal Cain’s astounded intellect. “It has to be a mighty
plain, open case, with no s’picion ’bout it, when information ain’t got
some _personal_ motive,--justifiable, maybe, and without direct malice,
but _personal_ motive.”
Tubal Cain Sims’s head turned from one to the other with a pivotal
action which was less suggestive of muscles than of machinery. His
eyes were starting from beneath his shaggy, overhanging eyebrows. His
lower jaw had dropped. Thus dangled before him, his own identity was
as recognizable to him as to their divination. If he had had time
to think, there might have seemed something uncanny in this facile
meddling with the secrets of his inner consciousness, hardly so plain
to his own prognosis as in their exposition, but moment by moment he
was hurried on.
“Your personal motive in giving this information,” continued the
deputy, “is because you are afraid of the man.”
“Not for myse’f,” blurted out Tubal Sims. “Before Gawd, I’ll swear, not
for myse’f.” He was all unaware of an impending disclosure of the facts
that he had resolved to hide, since the horrors of the jail, the true,
visible presentment of the abstract idea of imprisonment, had burst
upon his shuddering realization. He had forgotten his caution. His
obstinate reticence relaxed. All the manhood within him roused to the
alarm of the possibility that these officers should impute to him fear
of any man for his own sake. He lifted a trembling, stiffened old hand
with a deprecatory gesture. “Jes’ one--jes’ one darter!” He lowered his
voice in expostulation.
“One daughter!” echoed the sheriff in surprise.
“Gittin’ interestin’,” murmured the flippant deputy.
“An’ this hyar man wants ter marry her, an’ she is willin’ ter marry
him, an’--an’ he spoke of runnin’ away.” Tubal Cain Sims brought this
enormity out with a sudden dilation of the eyes irresistible to the
impudent deputy.
“Powerful painful to the survivors!” he snorted in a choking chuckle,
“but not even a misdemeanor agin the law o’ the land.”
The sheriff’s countenance changed. Not that he apprehended any cause
for mirth, for it might be safely said that he had not laughed at a
joke for the past six years, and it would have been a matter of some
interest to know how he appraised the cachinnation habitually going on
all around about him, and which he was temperamentally debarred from
sharing. His face merely took on a perplexed and keenly inquisitive
expression as he bent his brow as to a worthy mystery.
“You know a man can’t be arrested for runnin’ away with a young woman
an’ marryin’ her,” he expostulated. “You ain’t such a fool as to think
you can take the law to him to prevent that.”
There are few people in this world who do not arrogate to themselves
special mental supremacy. Folly is like unto the jewel in the forehead
of the toad in that the creature thus endowed is unaware of its
possession. Tubal Cain Sims had perceived subacutely the acumen of both
the officers, and was emulous of demonstrating his own intellectual
gifts. The word “fool” is a lash that stings, and, smarting, he
protested:--
“The law would purvent it mighty quick by not waitin’ fur him, ef he
hed commit crimes.”
“What’d he ever do?” demanded the sheriff incredulously. And the deputy
sat very still and silent.
Now, the peculiarity of being literal-minded has special reference to
exoteric phenomena introduced for mental contemplation, but is easily
coexistent with the evolution of an esoteric train of ideas, the
complication of which is nullified by familiarity incident to their
production. The sheriff was a plain man, a serious-minded man, who
could not see a joke when it was before his nose; so literal-minded a
man that because he never perceived the latent scheme of another, he
himself was never suspected of scheming.
“What’d he ever do?” he repeated, and it did not occur to Tubal Cain
Sims that he had not yet mentioned the juggler’s name, nor so much as
suggested his own or the locality whence he came.
“I ain’t keerin’ ter know _whut_ he done!” he asseverated, led on by
the non-compliant look of the other. “I _know_ he done _somewhut_; an’
Phemie ain’t goin’ ter be ’lowed ter marry no evil-doer an’ crim’nal
agin the law.”
The pause that ensued was unbroken, while the thunder rolled anew, and
the dashing of the water of the surly black creek at the foot of the
hill came to their ears. The sunshine on the floor faded out suddenly
and all at once, and the murky gray light was devoid of any lingering
shimmer. If the deputy breathed, he did not hear the heaving of his own
chest, so still he was.
The sheriff, having allowed in vain a goodly margin for continuance,
went on abruptly: “That’s the way you fellows, with no sense of the
obligations of the law, carry on. You have got no information to give.
You have got some personal motive, an’ that’s the way to get an officer
into trouble,--false arrests an’ charges of stirrin’ up of strife an’
such like,--an’ it’s personal motive always. I’ll bet this man o’ yourn
ain’t committed no crime,” and he turned his calm gray eyes on Tubal
Cain Sims, seated in the midst of his consciousness of a fool errand to
the great county town. Mortified pride surged to his face in a scarlet
flood, and vehement argument rose to his lips.
“Why can’t he sleep quiet nights in his bed, then?” he retorted. “Why
do he holler out so pitiful, fit ter split yer heart, in his sleep.
‘What can I do? For his life!--his life!--his life! Oh, what can I
do--for his life!--his life!--his life’?”
The wind came surging against the windows with a sudden burst of fury,
and the sashes rattled. As the gust passed to the different angles of
the house, the sound of other shaking casements came from the rooms
above and across the hall, dulled with the distance, till a single
remote vibration of glass and wood told that even in the furthest cells
the inmates of this drear place might share the gloomy influences of
the storm, though fair weather meant little to them, and naught the
sweet o’ the year. A yellow flash, swift and sinister, illumined the
dull, gray room, that reverted instantly into gloom, and, as if the
lightning were resolved into rain, the windows received a fusillade of
hurtling drops, and then their dusty, cobwebbed panes were streaked
with coursing rivulets mingling together here and there as they ran.
The sheriff sat silently awaiting further disclosures, his eyes on the
window, his guarded thoughts elsewhere. “The same words every night?”
he asked at last.
“The same words every night,” repeated Tubal Cain reluctantly, as if
making an admission.
“Oh, you can’t arrest a man for talking in his sleep,” put in the
deputy, with the air of flouting the whole revelation as a triviality;
and he yawned with much verisimilitude, showing a very red mouth inside
and two rows of stanch white teeth. “I ain’t sech a fool ez that,
Mr. Dep’ty,” snarled Tubal Sims raucously; “but puttin’ sech ez that
tergether with a pale face an’ blue circles round the eyes, in the
mornin’, o’ the stronges’, finest-built, heartiest young rooster I ever
seen in my life,--he could fling you or the sher’ff from hyar clean
acrost that creek,--an’ layin’ on the ruver-bank day arter day fishin’
with no bait on his hook”--
“What’d he catch?” queried the deputy, affecting anxious eagerness.
“All he expected, I reckon,” retorted Sims. “A-layin’ thar, with his
hat over his eyes, day arter day; an’ his eyes looked ez tormented
ez--ez a deer I shot wunst ez couldn’t git up ter run an’ couldn’t
hurry up an’ die in time, an’ jes’ laid thar an’ watched me an’ the
dogs come up. An’ this man’s eyes looked jes’ like that deer’s,--an’ I
never let the dogs worry him, but jes’ whipped out my knife an’ cut his
throat.”
The deputy’s eyes widened with pretended horror. He snatched a pair
of handcuffs from the drawer at the side of the table, and, rising,
exclaimed dramatically, “You say, in cold blood, you whipped out your
knife and cut the man’s throat!”
“Ye think ye air powerful smart, Mr. Dep’ty,” sneered Sims, out of
countenance, nevertheless. “But thar ain’t much credit in baitin’
an’ tormentin’ a man old enough ter be yer father,” remembering the
sheriff’s rebuke on this score, and imputing to him a veneration for
the aged.
“Yes, stop that monkeyin’, Jeemes,” Blake solemnly admonished his
junior. Then, after silently eying the rain still turbulently dashing
against the windows, he said reflectively, “Don’t ye think, Mr.--Mr.--I
disremember your name?”
“Sims,--Tubal Cain Sims,” replied the owner of that appellation.
“Oh yes; Mr. Sims. Don’t you think the feller’s jest a leetle lazy?
There’s no law against laziness, though it needs legislation, being a
deal more like the tap-root of evil than what money is,--though I don’t
set up my views against the Good Book.”
“’Pears like ’twarn’t laziness, which may be a sin, but makes men fat,
an’ ez long ez the pot holds out ter bile, happy. This man warn’t happy
nor fat, an’ he looked like the devils hed thar home with him.”
“Where did he come from, and what’s his name?”
“He ’lowed, one day, from Happy Valley, but he didn’t know whar Happy
Valley war. An’ he talks like a town man, an’ reads a power, an’ tells
tales ez Phemie say air out o’ books; an’ he gin a show”--
“A show?” the sheriff interrupted.
“A juggling show,” pursued Tubal Sims, in higher feather since they
no longer dissimulated their absorption in these details. “He calls
hisse’f a juggler, though his name is John Leonard.”
“What’s he live on?” demanded the sheriff.
“The money he made at his show. He ’lowed ter gin more shows, but the
church folks gin it out ez he war in league with Satan, an’ threatened
ter dump him in the ruver, so he quit jugglin’.”
The deputy with difficulty repressed a guffaw, but asked, with a keen
curiosity, “Was it a pretty good show?”
“Ye never seen nuthin’ like it in yer life. He jes’”--
“What sort of lookin’ man is he?” interrupted the sheriff. He cast a
glance at the deputy, who unobtrusively began to busy himself with pen,
ink, and paper, and was presently scribbling briskly as Tubal Cain Sims
sought to describe the stranger.
“He looks some like a mountain feller now,” he said. “He paid my wife
ter make him some clothes; but shucks!” his eye kindling with the glow
of discursive reminiscence, “the clothes he kem thar in war a sight
fur the jay-birds,--leetle pants ez kem down no furder’n that, an’
long stockin’s like a gal’s, an’ no mo’ ’shamed of ’em ’n I am o’ my
coat-collar; a striped black-an’-red coat he hed on, an’ long, p’inted
reddish shoes.” He paused to laugh, while a glance of fiery excitement
and significance shot from the eyes of one officer into those of the
other.
Far better than Tubal Sims they knew how to place the wearer of this
sophisticated costume. For although their bailiwick was the compass
of the county, their official duties carried them occasionally to
neighboring cities and their suburbs; and while rolling so rapidly was
not conducive to gathering moss for personal embellishment, it afforded
opportunity for observation not altogether thrown away. This man was
out of place,--a wanderer, evidently; but whether a fugitive from
justice remained to be proved.
And while Tubal Cain Sims talked convulsively on, hardly realizing
whither his reminiscences led, the expert penman was quietly noting
down all the personal traits of poor Lucien Royce,--his height, his
weight, his size, the color of his hair and eyes, the quality of
his complexion, the method of his enunciation, and the polish of
his manner,--all in the due and accepted form of advertisement for
criminals, minus the alluring sum offered for their apprehension by the
governor of the State.
Tubal Cain Sims did not note the cessation of the scraping of the pen,
but the sheriff did, and it was within a few moments that he said,
“Well, Mr. Sims, this offers no ground for arrestin’ the man. But I’ll
give you a piece of advice,--don’t let him know of your errand here,
or he’ll take French leave of you and take the girl with him. I can’t
arrest him for you”--
“Courtin’ ’s the inalienable right of man, and, in leap year, of woman
too,” sputtered the deputy, with his pen in his mouth and his laugh
crowding it.
“But,” continued the sheriff, “as I have some business up that way, I
may come over soon an’ look after him, myself. Say nothin’, though,
about that, or you’ll lose your daughter,--just one daughter.”
“One darter,” echoed Tubal Sims, his eyes absorbed and docile as he
followed the crafty officer’s speech.
“Say nothin’ to nobody, and I’ll see you before long.” Then suddenly
leaving the subject, with a briskening style he turned to the deputy.
“Jeemes, take Mr. Sims before a magistrate,--Squair Purdy, I’d
recommend,--on a charge of carrying weepons with the intent o’ goin’
armed. Let him know, though, Mr. Sims, ’twas in ignorance of the law,
and a-travelin’. Remind him that the code says the statute is to be
liberally construed. And remember that Jeemes can’t swear that old army
pistol was _concealed_ on _no account_. _I_ don’t b’lieve Jeemes kin
make out a case agin ye. Squair Purdy is mighty lenient.”
“Ain’t you-uns goin’?” quavered Mr. Sims, distrusting the tender
mercies of the facetious Jeemes.
“No, sir,” replied the sheriff, now far away in the contemplation of
other matters. “Jeemes, go to the telephone and ring up the cap’n in
Knoxville. I want to speak to him.”
It only seemed a great babbling of a little bell in the grim twilight
of the hall of the jail as the deputy piloted Tubal Cain Sims out of
the door which had so obdurately closed on him. And how should his
ignorance conceive that within three minutes the chief of police in
Knoxville was listening to the description of poor Lucien Royce, given
by the sheriff of Kildeer County, and trying for his life to reconcile
its dissimilarities with the physical traits of various missing
malefactors sadly wanted by the police in divers localities?