mortal eye would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his
shoulder blades, the dead man was lying where he might lie undiscovered
for months or for years, or forever. His pedler's pack was buried in
the mud so deep that not even the probing crawfishes could find it. He
would never be missed probably. There was but the slightest likelihood
that inquiry would ever be made for him--let alone a search. He was a
stranger and a foreigner, the dead man was, whose comings and goings
made no great stir in the neighborhood, and whose failure to come again
would be taken as a matter of course--just one of those shiftless,
wandering Dagoes, here today and gone tomorrow. That was one of the best
things about it--these Dagoes never had any people in this country to
worry about them or look for them when they disappeared. And so it was
all over and done with, and nobody the wiser. The squire clapped his
hands together briskly with the air of a man dismissing a subject from
his mind for good, and mended his gait.
He felt no stabbings of conscience. On the contrary, a glow of
gratification filled him. His house was saved from scandal; his present
wife would philander no more--before his very eyes--with these young
Dagoes, who came from nobody knew where, with packs on their backs and
persuasive, wheedling tongues in their heads. At this thought the squire
raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked good to him--the
small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flower
beds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the
back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout.
At the fence he halted and turned about, carelessly and casually, and
looked back along the way he had come. Everything was as it should
be--the weedfield steaming in the heat; the empty road stretching along
the crooked ridge like a long gray snake sunning itself; and beyond it,
massing up, the dark, cloaking stretch of swamp. Everything was all
right, but----The squire's eyes, in their loose sacs of skin, narrowed
and squinted. Out of the blue arch away over yonder a small black dot
had resolved itself and was swinging to and fro, like a mote. A
buzzard--hey? Well, there were always buzzards about on a clear day like
this. Buzzards were nothing to worry about--almost any time you could
see one buzzard, or a dozen buzzards if you were a mind to look for
them.
But this particular buzzard now--wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool?
The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the
buzzards until this minute. Sometimes when cattle strayed the owners had
been known to follow the buzzards, knowing mighty well that if the
buzzards led the way to where the stray was, the stray would be past the
small salvage of hide and hoofs--but the owner's doubts would be set at
rest for good and all.
There was a grain of disquiet in this. The squire shook his head to
drive the thought away--yet it persisted, coming back like a midge
dancing before his face. Once at home, however, Squire Gathers deported
himself in a perfectly normal manner. With the satisfied proprietorial
eye of an elderly husband who has no rivals, he considered his young
wife, busied about her household duties. He sat in an easy-chair upon
his front gallery and read his yesterday's Courier-Journal which the
rural carrier had brought him; but he kept stepping out into the yard
to peer up into the sky and all about him. To the second Mrs. Gathers he
explained that he was looking for weather signs. A day as hot and still
as this one was a regular weather breeder; there ought to be rain before
night.
"Maybe so," she said; "but looking's not going to bring rain."
Nevertheless the squire continued to look. There was really nothing to
worry about; still at midday he did not eat much dinner, and before his
wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper
was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard--or, anyhow, he
judged it was the first one he had seen--was swinging back and forth in
great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp--closer and
closer--until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew
almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first
buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards. Were there four of
them? No; there were five--five in all.
Such is the way of the buzzard--that shifting black question mark which
punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse
lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a
black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. In broad
loops and swirls this dot swings round and round and round, coming a
little closer to earth at every turn and always with one particular spot
upon the earth for the axis of its wheel. Out of space also other moving
spots emerge and grow larger as they tack and jib and drop nearer,
coming in their leisurely buzzard way to the feast. There is no
haste--the feast will wait. If it is a dumb creature that has fallen
stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it
and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing,
with awkward out-thrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising
flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high
and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls that are too
tight--but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last
tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To
humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect--he hangs aloft longer;
but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, ever
chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big
charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard.
* * * * *
The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in
years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving
distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire--not fear
exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind
of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think
about them any more; but he did--unceasingly.
By supper time there were seven of them.
* * * * *
He slept light and slept badly. It was not the thought of that dead man
lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his
wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether.
Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked him drowsily what ailed
him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything?
Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering
him, he told her. It was a hot enough night--wasn't it? And when a man
got a little along in life he was apt to be a light sleeper--wasn't that
so? Well, then? She turned upon her side and slept again with her light,
purring snore. The squire lay awake, thinking hard and waiting for day
to come.
At the first faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the
gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there in his shirt in the half
light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck
opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing,
splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to
the south. Buzzards are early risers too. Presently, as the heavens
shimmered with the miracle of sunrise, he could make them out--six or
seven, or maybe eight.
An hour after breakfast the squire was on his way down through the
weedfield to the county road. He went half eagerly, half unwillingly. He
wanted to make sure about those buzzards. It might be that they were
aiming for the old pasture at the head of the swamp. There were sheep
grazing there--and it might be that a sheep had died. Buzzards were
notoriously fond of sheep, when dead. Or, if they were pointed for the
swamp, he must satisfy himself exactly what part of the swamp it was. He
was at the stake-and-rider fence when a mare came jogging down the road,
drawing a rig with a man in it. At sight of the squire in the field the
man pulled up.
"Hi, squire!" he saluted. "Goin' somewheres?"
"No; jest knockin' about," the squire said--"jest sorter lookin' the
place over."
"Hot agin--ain't it?" said the other.
The squire allowed that it was, for a fact, mighty hot. Commonplaces of
gossip followed this--county politics and a neighbor's wife sick of
breakbone fever down the road a piece. The subject of crops succeeded
inevitably. The squire spoke of the need of rain. Instantly he regretted
it, for the other man, who was by way of being a weather wiseacre,
cocked his head aloft to study the sky for any signs of clouds.
"Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said,
pointing upward with his whipstock.
"Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of
carelessness in his voice.
"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?"
"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin'
nothin', I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear
weather."
"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.
"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly.
"There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over on the
other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs."
"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be
feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along
towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the
mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.
He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire
turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated
himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet
there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards
flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made
people curious--made them ask questions.
He was half-way across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life,
above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his
ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to
one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a
thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery
ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk;
then the tonks all running together briskly.
A sheep bell or a cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from
overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly
from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left?
And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the
breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a
cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the
sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny.
He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on
four legs.
One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had
carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was
sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck,
the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He
could see the ragged black wings--a buzzard's wings are so often ragged
and uneven--and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet
folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too--an
undersized cowbell--that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled
incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about
the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye he was seeing him.
Once, years and years and years ago, some one trapped a buzzard, and
before freeing it clamped about its skinny neck a copper band with a
cowbell pendent from it. Since then the bird so ornamented has been seen
a hundred times--and heard oftener--over an area as wide as half the
continent. It has been reported, now in Kentucky, now in Texas, now in
North Carolina--now anywhere between the Ohio River and the Gulf.
Crossroads correspondents take their pens in hand to write to the
country papers that on such and such a date, at such a place, So-and-So
saw the Belled Buzzard. Always it is the Belled Buzzard, never a belled
buzzard. The Belled Buzzard is an institution.
There must be more than one of them. It seems hard to believe that one
bird, even a buzzard in his prime, and protected by law in every
Southern state and known to be a bird of great age, could live so long
and range so far and wear a clinking cowbell all the time! Probably
other jokers have emulated the original joker; probably if the truth
were known there have been a dozen such; but the country people will
have it that there is only one Belled Buzzard--a bird that bears a
charmed life and on his neck a never silent bell.
* * * * *
Squire Gathers regarded it a most untoward thing that the Belled Buzzard
should have come just at this time. The movements of ordinary, unmarked
buzzards mainly concerned only those whose stock had strayed; but almost
anybody with time to spare might follow this rare and famous visitor,
this belled and feathered junkman of the sky. Supposing now that some
one followed it today--maybe followed it even to a certain thick clump
of cypress in the middle of Little Niggerwool!
But at this particular moment the Belled Buzzard was heading directly
away from that quarter. Could it be following him? Of course not! It was
just by chance that it flew along the course the squire was taking. But,
to make sure, he veered off sharply, away from the footpath into the
high weeds so that the startled grasshoppers sprayed up in front of him
in fan-like flights.
He was right; it was only a chance. The Belled Buzzard swung off too,
but in the opposite direction, with a sharp tonking of its bell, and,
flapping hard, was in a minute or two out of hearing and sight, past
the trees to the westward.
Again the squire skimped his dinner, and again he spent the long drowsy
afternoon upon his front gallery. In all the sky there were now no
buzzards visible, belled or unbelled--they had settled to earth
somewhere; and this served somewhat to soothe the squire's pestered
mind. This does not mean, though, that he was by any means easy in his
thoughts. Outwardly he was calm enough, with the ruminative judicial air
befitting the oldest justice of the peace in the county; but, within
him, a little something gnawed unceasingly at his nerves like one of
those small white worms that are to be found in seemingly sound nuts.
About once in so long a tiny spasm of the muscles would contract the
dewlap under his chin. The squire had never heard of that play, made
famous by a famous player, wherein the murdered victim was a pedler
too, and a clamoring bell the voice of unappeasable remorse in the
murderer's ear. As a strict churchgoer the squire had no use for players
or for play actors, and so was spared that added canker to his
conscience. It was bad enough as it was.
That night, as on the night before, the old man's sleep was broken and
fitful and disturbed by dreaming, in which he heard a metal clapper
striking against a brazen surface. This was one dream that came true.
Just after daybreak he heaved himself out of bed, with a flop of his
broad bare feet upon the floor, and stepped to the window and peered
out. Half seen in the pinkish light, the Belled Buzzard flapped directly
over his roof and flew due south, right toward the swamp--drawing a
direct line through the air between the slayer and the victim--or,
anyway, so it seemed to the watcher, grown suddenly tremulous.
* * * * *
Knee deep in yellow swamp water the squire squatted, with his shotgun
cocked and loaded and ready, waiting to kill the bird that now typified
for him guilt and danger and an abiding great fear. Gnats plagued him
and about him frogs croaked. Almost overhead a log-cock clung lengthwise
to a snag, watching him. Snake doctors, limber, long insects with bronze
bodies and filmy wings, went back and forth like small living shuttles.
Other buzzards passed and repassed, but the squire waited, forgetting
the cramps in his elderly limbs and the discomfort of the water in his
shoes.
At length he heard the bell. It came nearer and nearer, and the Belled
Buzzard swung overhead not sixty feet up, its black bulk a fair target
against the blue. He aimed and fired, both barrels bellowing at once and
a fog of thick powder smoke enveloping him. Through the smoke he saw the
bird careen and its bell jangled furiously; then the buzzard righted
itself and was gone, fleeing so fast that the sound of its bell was
hushed almost instantly. Two long wing feathers drifted slowly down;
torn disks of gunwadding and shredded green scraps of leaves descended
about the squire in a little shower.
He cast his empty gun from him so that it fell in the water and
disappeared; and he hurried out of the swamp as fast as his shaky legs
would take him, splashing himself with mire and water to his eyebrows.
Mucked with mud, breathing in great gulps, trembling, a suspicious
figure to any eye, he burst through the weed curtain and staggered into
the open, his caution all gone and a vast desperation fairly choking
him--but the gray road was empty and the field beyond the road was
empty; and, except for him, the whole world seemed empty and silent.
As he crossed the field Squire Gathers composed himself. With plucked
handfuls of grass he cleansed himself of much of the swamp mire that
coated him over; but the little white worm that gnawed at his nerves had
become a cold snake that was coiled about his heart, squeezing it
tighter and tighter!
* * * * *
[Illustration: "TWO LONG WING FEATHERS DRIFTED SLOWLY DOWN."--_Page 70._]
This episode of the attempt to kill the Belled Buzzard occurred in the
afternoon of the third day. In the forenoon of the fourth, the weather
being still hot, with cloudless skies and no air stirring, there was a
rattle of warped wheels in the squire's lane and a hail at his yard
fence. Coming out upon his gallery from the innermost darkened room of his
house, where he had been stretched upon a bed, the squire shaded his
eyes from the glare and saw the constable of his own magisterial
district sitting in a buggy at the gate waiting.
The old man went down the dirtpath slowly, almost reluctantly, with his
head twisted up side wise, listening, watching; but the constable sensed
nothing strange about the other's gait and posture; the constable was
full of the news he brought. He began to unload the burden of it without
preamble.
"Mornin', Squire Gathers. There's been a dead man found in Little
Niggerwool--and you're wanted."
He did not notice that the squire was holding on with both hands to the
gate; but he did notice that the squire had a sick look out of his eyes
and a dead, pasty color in his face; and he noticed--but attached no
meaning to it--that when the squire spoke his voice seemed flat and
hollow.
"Wanted--fur--whut?" The squire forced the words out of his throat,
pumped them out fairly.
"Why, to hold the inquest," explained the constable. "The coroner's sick
abed, and he said you bein' the nearest jestice of the peace you should
serve."
"Oh," said the squire with more ease. "Well, where is it--the body?"
"They taken it to Bristow's place and put it in his stable for the
present. They brought it out over on that side and his place was the
nearest. If you'll hop in here with me, squire, I'll ride you right over
there now. There's enough men already gathered to make up a jury, I
reckin."
"I--I ain't well," demurred the squire. "I've been sleepin' porely these
last few nights. It's the heat," he added quickly.
"Well, suh, you don't look very brash, and that's a fact," said the
constable; "but this here job ain't goin' to keep you long. You see it's
in such shape--the body is--that there ain't no way of makin' out who
the feller was nor whut killed him. There ain't nobody reported missin'
in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown
person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we
kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away,
suh--if you'll go along now."
"I'll go," agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness.
"I'll go right now." He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his
wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed
into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into
a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips
demanding to be asked--the question the answer to which he yearned for
and yet dreaded.
"How did they come to find--it?"
"Well, suh, that's a funny thing," said the constable. "Early this
mornin' Bristow's oldest boy--that one they call Buddy--he heared a
cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as
you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin'
after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of
them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he
run acrost it--this body.
"But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard
with a cowbell on his neck--that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there
same old Belled Buzzard he's come back agin and is hangin' round. They
tell me he ain't been seen round here since the year of the yellow
fever--I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The
niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They
say--the niggers do--that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of
bad luck for somebody, shore!"
The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea hen. The
squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy, he harkened only to
those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even
so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the
far-away, faint tonk-tonk! They were about half-way to Bristow's place
then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before his
companion heard it too.
The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over
his shoulder.
"Well, by doctors!" he cried, "if there ain't the old scoundrel now,
right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day--he's got an old
cowbell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of
one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all
my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!"
Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the
buggy top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took
no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.
"Is he followin' us?" asked the squire in a curiously flat, weighted
voice.
"Which--him?" answered the constable, still stretching his neck. "No,
he's gone now--gone off to the left--jest a-zoomin', like he'd done
forgot somethin'."
And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To
get the inquest over and the body underground--those were the main
things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers
urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his
sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek
which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in
sight of Bristow's farm buildings.
The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields and was in other
respects much like the squire's own house except that it was smaller and
not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and
a lye hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it
instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings--a
barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib--was a little peach orchard, and
flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of
stock at this hour, with feedracks ranged in a row against the fence. A
two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted and wearing but a
single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these
feedracks.
To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking
their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves
were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a
man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a
corner. There were gaunt hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily.