THE SUNBEAM ON THE WALL
The sheriff was a mild-mannered man, whose head was shaped like the end
of a watermelon. His hair was close-cut and very thin at the top, due to
the fact that all the nourishing substances both inside and outside his
head, or any way appertaining thereto, went into the maintenance of the
sheriff's mustache, which was at least twice as large as Bill Frost's.
This, of course, was as it should have been, for even the poorest kind
of a sheriff is more than twice as important as the very best sort of
constable. In those days it was the custom for sheriffs in that part of
the country to train up these prodigious mustaches, perhaps in the
belief that such adornments lent them the appearance of competence and
valor, of which endowments nature had given them no other testimonial.
In any event it is known that many a two-inch sheriff took his stand
behind an eight-inch mustache, and walked boldly in the honor of his
constituents.
The sheriff of Shelbyville was a type of this class, both in mental
depth and facial adornment. He was exceedingly jealous of his power, and
it was his belief that too many liberties permitted a prisoner, and too
many favors shown, acted in contravention of the law's intent as
interpreted by the prosecuting attorney; namely, that a person under the
cloud of accusation should be treated as guilty until able to prove
himself innocent. Therefore the sheriff would not allow Joe Newbolt to
leave his cell to meet visitors after his arraignment.
The meeting between the prisoner and his mother in the office of the
jail was to be the last of that sort; all who came in future must see
him at the door of his cell. That was the rule laid down to Joe when he
parted from his mother and Colonel Price that day.
As a cell in a prison-house, perhaps Joe's place of confinement was
fairly comfortable. It was situated in the basement of the old
court-house, where there was at least light enough to contemplate one's
misery by, and sufficient air to set one longing for the fields. There
was but one other prisoner, a horse-thief, waiting for trial.
This loquacious fellow, who was lodged directly across the corridor,
took great pains to let Joe see the admiration and esteem in which he
held him on account of the distinguished charge under which he was
confined. He annoyed Joe to such extent that he asked the sheriff that
evening to shift them about if possible.
"Well, I'll move him if you say so, but I left him there because I
thought he'd be company for you," said the sheriff. "I don't mind
talkin' in this jail when there's no more than two in it."
"I don't want to talk," said Joe.
So the horse-thief was removed to the farther end of the corridor, where
he kept up a knocking on the bars of his cell during the early hours of
the night, and then turned off his diversion by imitating the sound of a
saw on steel, which he could do with his tongue against his teeth with
such realism as to bring the sheriff down in his nightshirt, with a
lantern in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
Joe's second night in jail passed very much like the first, when they
had brought him there all bewildered and dazed. There was a grated
window in the wall above his reach, through which he could see the
branches of an elm-tree, blowing bare of leaves; beyond that a bit of
sky. Joe sat on the edge of his cot that second night a long time after
the stars came out, gazing up at the bar-broken bit of sky, reviewing
the events leading up to his situation.
There was no resentment in him against the jury of his neighbors whose
finding had sent him to jail under the cloud of that terrible
accusation; he harbored no ill-feeling for the busy, prying little
coroner, who had questioned him so impertinently. There was one person
alone, in the whole world of men, to blame, and that was Curtis Morgan.
He could not have been far away on the day of the inquest; news of the
tragic outcome of Ollie's attempt to join him must have traveled to his
ears.
Yet he had not come forward to take the load of suspicion from Joe's
shoulders by confessing the treacherous thing that he had plotted. He
need not have revealed the complete story of his trespass upon the honor
of Isom Chase, thought Joe; he could have saved Ollie's name before the
neighbors; and yet relieved Joe of all suspicion. Now that Isom was
dead, he could have married her. But Morgan had not come. He was a
coward as well as a rascal. It was more than likely that, in fear of
being found out, he had fled away.
And suppose that he never came back; suppose that Ollie should not elect
to stand forth and explain the hidden part of that night's tragedy? She
could not be expected, within reason, to do this. Even the thought that
she might weaken and do so was abhorrent to Joe. It was not a woman's
part to make a sacrifice like that; the world did not expect it of her.
It rested with Morgan, the traitor to hospitality; Morgan, the
ingratiating scoundrel, to come forward and set him free. Morgan alone
could act honorably in that clouded case; but if he should elect to
remain hidden and silent, who would be left to answer but Joe Newbolt?
And should he reveal the thing that would bring him liberty? Was freedom
more precious than his honor, and the honor of a poor, shrinking,
deluded woman?
No. He was bound by a gentleman's obligation; self-assumed, self-appointed.
He could not tell.
But what a terrible situation, what an awful outlook for him in such
event! They hung men for murder on the jail-yard gallows, with a knot of
rope behind the left ear and a black cap over the face. And such a death
left a stain upon the name that nothing would purify. It was an
attainder upon generations unborn.
Joe walked his cell in the agony of his sudden and acute understanding
of the desperate length to which this thing might carry him. Hammer had
protested, with much show of certainty, that he would get him off
without much difficulty. But perhaps Hammer was counting on him to
reveal what he had kept to himself at the inquest. What should he do
about that in his relations with Hammer? Should he tell him about
Morgan, and have him set men on his track to drag him back and make him
tell the truth? Granting that they found him, who was there to make him
speak?
Could not Morgan and Ollie, to cover their own shame and blame, form a
pact of silence or denial and turn back his good intentions in the form
of condemnation upon his own head? How improbable and unworthy of belief
his tale, with its reservations and evasions, would sound to a jury with
Morgan and Ollie silent.
The fright of his situation made him feverish; he felt that he could
tear at the walls with his hands, and scream, and scream until his heart
would burst. He was unmanned there in the dark. He began to realize this
finally after his frenzy had thrown him into a fever. He gave over his
pacing of the little cell, and sat down again to reason and plan.
Hammer had made so much talk about the papers which he would get ready
that Joe had been considerably impressed. He saw now that it would
require something more than papers to make people understand that he had
a gentleman's reason, and not a thief's, for concealing what they had
pressed him to reveal.
There was a woman first, and that was about all that Joe could make of
the situation up to that time. She must be protected, even though
unworthy. None knew of that taint upon her but himself and the fugitive
author of it, but Joe could not bring himself to contemplate liberty
bought at the price of her public degradation. This conclusion refreshed
him, and dispelled the phantoms from his hot brain.
After the sounds of the town had fallen quiet, and the knocking of feet
on the pavement along his prison wall had ceased, Joe slept. He woke
steady, and himself again, long before he could see the sun, yellow on
the boughs of the elm-tree.
The sheriff furnished him a piece of comb, and he smoothed his hair by
guess, a desperate character, such as he was accounted by the officer,
not being allowed the luxury of a mirror. One might lick the quicksilver
from the back of a mirror, or open an artery with a fragment of it, or
even pound the glass and swallow it. Almost anything was nicer than
hanging, so the sheriff said.
Scant as the food had been at Isom's until his revolt had forced a
revision of the old man's lifelong standard, Joe felt that morning after
his second jail breakfast that he would have welcomed even a hog-jowl
and beans. The sheriff was allowed but forty cents a day for the
maintenance of each prisoner, and, counting out the twenty-five cents
profit which he felt as a politician in good standing to be his due, the
prisoners' picking was very lean indeed.
That morning Joe's breakfast had been corn-pone, cold, with no lubricant
to ease it down the lane. There had been a certain squeamish liquid in
addition, which gave off the smell of a burning straw-stack, served in a
large tin cup. Joe had not tasted it, but his nose had told him that it
was "wheat coffee," a brew which his mother had made sometimes in the
old days of their darkest adversity.
Joe knew from the experience of the previous day that there would be
nothing more offered to fortify the stomach until evening. The
horse-thief called up from his end of the jail, asking Joe how he liked
the fare.
Reserved as Joe was disposed to be toward him, he expressed himself
somewhat fully on the subject of the sheriff's cuisine. The horse-thief
suggested a petition to the county court or a letter to the sheriff's
political opponent. He said that his experience in jails had been that a
complaint on the food along about election time always brought good
results. Joe was not interested in the matter to that extent. He told
the fellow that he did not expect to be a permanent occupant of the
jail.
"You think you'll go down the river for a double-nine?" he asked.
"I don't know what you mean," said Joe.
"To the pen for life, kid; that's what I mean."
"I don't know," said Joe gloomily.
"Well, say, I tell you, if they give you the other," said the friendly
thief, lifting his naturally high voice to make it carry along the
echoing passage, "you'll git plenty to eat, and three times a day, too.
When they put a feller in the death-cell they pass in the finest chuck
in the land. You know, if a feller's got a smart lawyer he can keep up
that line of eatin' for maybe two or three years by appealin' his case
and dodges like that."
"I don't want to talk," said Joe.
"Oh, all right, kid," said the thief flippantly. Then he rattled his
grated door to draw Joe's attention.
"But, 'y God, kid, the day's comin' to you when you will want to talk,
and when you'd give the teeth out of your mouth, and nearly the eyes out
of your head, for the sound of a friendly human voice aimed at you. Let
'em take you off down the river to Jeff' City and put you behind them
tall walls once, where the best you hear's a cuss from a guard, and
where you march along with your hands on the shoulders of the man in
front of you; and another one behind you does the same to you, and their
eyes all down and their faces the color of corpses, and _then_ you'll
know!
"You'll hear them old fellers, them long-timers, whisperin' in the
night, talkin' to theirselves, and it'll sound to you like wind in the
grass. And you'll think of grass and trees and things like that on the
outside, and you'll feel like you want to ram your head ag'in' the wall
and yell. Maybe you'll do it--plenty of 'em does--and then they'll give
you the water-cure, they'll force it down you with a hose till you think
you'll bust. I tell you, kid, I _know_, 'y God! I've been there--but not
for no double-nine like they'll give you."
The man's voice seemed to be hanging and sounding yet in the corridor,
even after he was silent, his cruel picture standing in distorted fancy
before Joe's eyes. Joe wiped the sweat from his forehead, breathing
through his open mouth.
"Well, maybe they won't, though," said the fellow, resuming as if after
considering it, "maybe they'll give you the quick and painless, I don't
know."
Joe had been standing at his cell door, drawn to listen to the lecture
of his fellow prisoner, terrible, hopeless, as it sounded in his ears.
Now he sat on his bedside again, feeling that this was indeed a true
forecast of his own doom. The sun seemed already shut out from him in
the morning of his day, the prison silence settling, never to be broken
again in those shadows where shuffling men filed by, with eyes downcast
and faces gray, like the faces of the dead.
Life without liberty would be a barren field, he knew; but liberty
without honor would yield no sweeter fruit. And who was there in the
world of honorable men to respect a coward who had saved his own skin
from the fire by stripping a frail woman's back to the brand? A
gentleman couldn't do it, said Joe, at the end, coming back from his
sweating race with fear to the starting-place, a good deal cooled, not a
little ashamed.
Let them use him as they might; he would stand by his first position in
the matter. He would have to keep on lying, as he had begun; but it
would be repeating an honorable lie, and no man ever went to hell for
that.
The sun was coming through the high cell window, broadening its oblique
beam upon the wall. Looking up at it, Joe thought that it must be
mid-morning. Now that his panic was past, his stomach began to make a
gnawing and insistent demand for food. Many a heavy hour must march by,
thought he, before the sheriff came with his beggarly portion. He felt
that in case he should be called upon to endure imprisonment long he
must fall away to a skeleton and die.
In his end of the corridor the horse-thief was still, and Joe was glad
of it. No matter how earnestly he might come to desire the sound of a
human voice in time, he did not want to hear the horse-thief's then, nor
any other that prophesied such disquieting things.
There was a barred gate across the corridor at the foot of the stairs
which led up to the sheriff's office. Joe's heart jumped with the hope
that it was his mother coming when he heard the key in the lock and
voices at the grating.
"Right down there, to the right," the sheriff was directing. "When you
want to leave just come here and rattle the lock. I can't take no
chances bringin' such desperate fellers as him up to the office,
colonel. You can see that as well as me."
What Colonel Price replied Joe could not hear, for his low-modulated
voice of culture was like velvet beside a horse-blanket compared to the
sheriff's.
"I'm over on this side, colonel, sir," said Joe before he could see
him.
And then the colonel stepped into the light which came through the cell
window, bringing with him one who seemed as fair to Joe in that somber
place as the bright creatures who stood before Jacob in Bethel that
night he slept with his head upon a stone.
"This is my daughter," said Colonel Price. "We called in to kind of
cheer you up."
She offered Joe her hand between the bars; his went forward to meet it
gropingly, for it lacked the guidance of his eyes.
Joe was honey-bound, like an eager bee in the heart of some great golden
flower, tangled and leashed in a thousand strands of her hair. The lone
sunbeam of his prison had slipped beyond the lintel of his low door, as
if it had timed its coming to welcome her, and now it lay like a hand in
benediction above her brow.
Her hair was as brown as wild honey; a golden glint lay in it here and
there under the sun, like the honeycomb. A smile kindled in her brown
eyes as she looked at him, and ran out to the corners of them in little
crinkles, then moved slowly upon her lips. Her face was quick with the
eagerness of youth, and she was tall.
"I'm surely beholden to you, Miss Price, for this favor," said Joe,
lapsing into the Kentucky mode of speech, "and I'm ashamed to be caught
in such a place as this."
"You have nothing to be ashamed of," said she; "we know you are
innocent."
"Thank you kindly, Miss Price," said he with quaint, old courtesy that
came to him from some cavalier of Cromwell's day.
"I thought you'd better meet Alice," explained the colonel, "and get
acquainted with her, for young people have tastes in common that old
codgers like me have outgrown. She might see some way that I would
overlook to make you more comfortable here during the time you will be
obliged to wait."
"Yes, sir," said Joe, hearing the colonel's voice, but not making much
out of what he was saying.
He was thinking that out of the gloom of his late cogitations she had
come, like hope hastening to refute the argument of the horse-thief. His
case could not be so despairing with one like her believing in him. It
was a matter beyond a person such as a horse-thief, of course. One of a
finer nature could understand.
"Father spoke of some books," she ventured; "if you will----"
Her voice was checked suddenly by a sound which rose out of the farther
end of the corridor and made her start and clutch her father's arm. Joe
pressed his face against the bars and looked along at his fellow
prisoner, who was dragging his tin cup over the bars of his cell door
with rapid strokes.
When the thief saw that he had drawn the attention of the visitors, he
thrust his arm out and beckoned to the colonel. "Mister, I want to ask
you to do me a little turn of a favor," he begged in a voice new to Joe,
so full of anguish, so tremulous and weak. "I want you to carry out to
the world and put in the papers the last message of a dyin' man!"
"What's the matter with you, you poor wretch?" asked the colonel, moved
to pity.
"Don't pay any attention to him," advised Joe; "he's only acting up.
He's as strong as I am. I think he wants to beg from you."
The colonel turned away from him to resume his conference with Joe, and
the horse-thief once more rattled his cup across the bars.
"That noise is very annoying," said the colonel, turning to the man
tartly. "Stop it now, before I call the sheriff!"
"Friend, it's a starvin' man that's appealin' to you," said the
prisoner, "it's a man that ain't had a full meal in three weeks. Ask
that gentleman what we git here, let him tell you what this here sheriff
that's up for election agin serves to us poor fellers. Corn dodger for
breakfast, so cold you could keep fish on it, and as hard as the rocks
in this wall! That's what we git, and that's all we git. Ask your
friend."
"Is he telling the truth?" asked the colonel, looking curiously at Joe.
"I'm afraid he is, colonel, sir."
"I'll talk to him," said the colonel.
In a moment he was listening to the horse-thief's earnest relation of
the hardships which he had suffered in the Shelbyville jail, and Joe and
Alice were standing face to face, with less than a yard's space between
them, but a barrier there as insuperable as an alp.
He wanted to say something to cause her to speak again, for her low
voice was as wonderful to him as the sound of some strange instrument
moved to unexpected music by a touch in the dark. He saw her looking
down the corridor, and swiftly around her, as if afraid of what lay in
the shadows of the cells, afraid of the memories of old crimes which
they held, and the lingering recollection of the men they had
contained.
"He'll not do any harm, don't be afraid," said he.
"No, I'm not," she told him, drawing a little nearer, quite unconsciously,
he knew, as she spoke. "I was thinking how dreadful it must be here for
you, especially in the night. But it will not be for long," she cheered
him; "we know they'll soon set you free."
"I suppose a person would think a guilty man would suffer more here than
an innocent one," said he, "but I don't think that's so. That man down
there knows he's going to be sent to the penitentiary for stealing a
horse, but he sings."
She was looking at him, a little cloud of perplexity in her eyes, as if
there was something about him which she had not looked for and did not
quite understand. She blushed when Joe turned toward her, slowly, and
caught her eyes at their sounding.
He was thinking over a problem new to him, also--the difference in
women. There was Ollie, who marked a period in his life when he began to
understand these things, dimly. Ollie was not like this one in any
particular that he could discover as common between them. She was far
back in the past today, like a simple lesson, hard in its hour, but
conquered and put by. Here was one as far above Ollie as a star.
Miss Price began to speak of books, reaching out with a delicate
hesitancy, as if she feared that she might lead into waters too deep for
him to follow. He quickly relieved her of all danger of embarrassment on
that head by telling her of some books which he had not read, but wished
to read, holding to the bars as he talked, looking wistfully toward the
spot of sunlight which was now growing as slender as a golden cord
against the gray wall. His eyes came back to her face, to find that look
of growing wonder there, to see her quick blush mount and consume it in
her eyes like a flame.
"You've made more of the books that you've read than many of us with a
hundred times more," said she warmly. "I'll be ashamed to mention books
to you again."
"You oughtn't say that," said he, hanging his head in boyish confusion,
feeling that same sense of shyness and desire to hide as came over him
when his mother recounted his youthful campaign against the three books
on the Newbolt shelf.
"You remember what you get out of them," she nodded gravely, "I don't."
"My father used to say that was one advantage in having a few," said
he.
The colonel joined them then, the loud-spoken benediction of the
horse-thief following him. There was a flush of indignation in his face
and fire in his eyes.
"I'll expose the scoundrel; I'll show him that he can't rob both the
county and the helpless men that misfortune throws into his hands!" the
colonel declared.
He gave his hand to Joe in his ceremonious fashion.
"I've got some pressing business ahead of me with the sheriff," he said,
"and we'll be going along. But I'll manage to come over every few days
and bring what cheer I can to you, Joe."
"Don't put yourself out," said Joe; "but I'll be mighty glad to see you
any time."
"This is only a cloud in your life, boy; it will pass, and leave your
sky serene and bright," the colonel cheered.
"I'll see how many of the books that you've named we have," said Alice.
"I'm afraid we haven't them all."
"I'll appreciate anything at all," said Joe.
He looked after her as far as his eyes could follow, and then he
listened until her footsteps died, turning his head, checking his
breath, as if holding his very life poised to catch the fading music of
some exquisite strain.
When she was quite out of hearing, he sighed, and marked an imaginary
line upon the wall. Her head had reached to there, just on a level with
a certain bolt. He measured himself against it to see where it struck in
his own height. It was just a boy's trick. He blushed when he found
himself at it.
He sat on his bedside and took up the Book. The humor for reading seemed
to have passed away from him for then. But there was provender for
thought, new thought, splendid and bright-colored. He felt that he had
been associating, for the first time in his life, with his own kind. He
never had seen Alice Price before that day, for their lives had been
separated by all that divides the eminent from the lowly, the rich from
the poor, and seeing her had been a moving revelation. She had come into
his troubled life and soothed it, marking a day never to be forgotten.
He sat there thinking of her, the unopened book in his hand.
How different she was from Ollie, the wild rose clambering unkept beside
the hedge. She was so much more delicate in form and face than
Ollie--Ollie, who--There was a sense of sacrilege in the thought. He
must not name her with Ollie; he must not think of them in the measure
of comparison. Even such juxtaposition was defiling for Alice. Ollie,
the unclean!
Joe got up and walked his cell. How uncouth he was, thought he, his
trousers in his boot-tops, his coat spare upon his growing frame. He
regarded himself with a feeling of shame. Up to that time he never had
given his clothing any thought. As long as it covered him, it was
sufficient. But it was different after seeing Alice. Alice! What a
soothing name!
Joe never knew what Colonel Price said to the sheriff; but after the
little gleam of sun had faded out of his cell, and the gnawings of his
stomach had become painfully acute, his keeper came down with a basket
on his arm. He took from it a dinner of boiled cabbage and beef, such as
a healthy man might lean upon with confidence, and the horse-thief came
in for his share of it, also.
When the sheriff came to Joe's cell for the empty dishes, he seemed very
solicitous for his comfort and welfare.
"Need any more cover on your bed, or anything?"
No, Joe thought there was enough cover; and he did not recall in his
present satisfied state of stomach, that his cell lacked any other
comfort that the sheriff could supply.
"Well, if you want anything, all you've got to do is holler," said the
sheriff in a friendly way.
There is nothing equal to running for office to move the love of a man
for his fellows, or to mellow his heart to magnanimous deeds.
"Say," called the horse-thief in voice softened by the vapors of his
steaming dinner, "that friend of yours with the whiskers all over him is
ace-high over here in this end of the dump! And say, friend, they could
keep me here for life if they'd send purty girls like that one down here
to see me once in a while. You're in right, friend; you certainly air in
right!"
* * * * *
Colonel Price had kindled a fire in his library that night, for the
first chill of frost was in the air. He sat in meditative pose, the
newspaper spread wide and crumpling upon the floor beside him in his
listlessly swinging hand. The light of the blazing logs was laughing in
his glasses, and the soft gleam of the shaded lamp was on his hair.
Books by the hundred were there in the shelves about him. Old books,
brown in the dignity of age and service to generations of men; new
books, tucked among them in bright colors, like transient blooms in the
homely stability of garden soil. There was a long oak table, made of
native lumber and finished in its natural color, smoke-brown from age,
like the books; and there was Alice, like a nimble bee skimming the
sweets of flowers, flitting here and there in this scholar's sanctuary.
Colonel Price looked up out of his meditation and followed her with a
smile.
"Have you found them all?" he asked.
"I've found Milton and _The Lays of Ancient Rome_ and _Don Quixote_, but
I can't find the _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_," said she.
"Judge Maxwell has it," he nodded; "he carried it away more than a month
ago. It was the first time he ever met an English translation, he said.
I must get it from him; he has a remarkably short memory for borrowed
books."
Alice joined him in the laugh over the judge's shortcoming.
"He's a regular old dear!" she said.
"Ah, yes; if he was only forty years younger, Alice--if he was only
forty years younger!" the colonel sighed.
"I like him better the way he is," said she.
"Where did that boy ever hear tell of Marcus Aurelius?" he wondered.
"I don't know." She shook her head. "I don't understand him, he seems so
strange and deep. He's not like a boy. You'd think, from talking with
him, that he'd had university advantages."
"It's blood," said the colonel, with the proud swelling of a man who can
boast that precious endowment himself, "you can't keep it down. There's
no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of
birth; it's all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of
this European scum such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint
our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he's got blood
on only one side, at that.
"But the best in all the Newbolt generations that have gone before seem
to be concentrated in that boy. He'll come through this thing as bright
as a new bullet, and he'll make his mark in the world, too. Marcus
Aurelius. Well, bless my soul!"
"Is it good?" she asked, stacking the books which she had selected on
the table, standing with her hand on them, looking down at her smiling
father with serious face.
"I wouldn't say that it would be good for a young lady with forty beaus
and unable to choose among them, or for a frivolous young thing with
three dances a week----"
"Oh, never more than two at the very height of social dissipation in
Shelbyville!" she laughed.
He lifted a finger, imposing silence, and a laugh lurked in his eyes.
"No, I'd not say that such a light-headed creature would find much
fodder in the ruminations and speculations and wise conclusions of our
respected friend, Marcus," said he. "But a lad like Joe Newbolt, with a
pair of eyes in his head like a prophet, will get a great deal of good,
and even comfort, out of that book."
"We must get it from Judge Maxwell," said she conclusively.
"A strange lad, a strange lad," reflected the colonel.
"So tall and strong," said she. "Why, from the way his mother spoke of
him, I expected to see a little fellow with trousers up to his knees."
She sat at the table and began cutting the leaves of a new magazine.
Colonel Price lifted his paper, smoothed the crumples out of it,
adjusted the focus of his glasses, and resumed reading the county news.
They seemed contented and happy there, alone, with their fire in the
chimney. Fire itself is a companion. It is like youth in a room.
There was between them a feeling of comradeship and understanding which
seldom lives where youth stands on one hand, age on the other. Years ago
Alice's mother had gone beyond the storms and vexations of this life.
Those two remaining of the little family had drawn together, closing up
the space that her absence had made. There seemed no disparity of years,
and their affection and fidelity had come to be a community pride.
Alice was far from being the frivolous young thing that her father's
banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year
to year, to be certain, for it had been the regular fate of adolescent
male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever
since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the
affection; but it seemed to become a settled and permanent affliction in
others, threatening to incapacitate them from happiness, according to
their young view of it, and blast their ambitions in the face of the
world.
Every girl, to greater or less extent, has her courtiers of that kind.
Nature has arranged this sort of tribute for the little queen-bees of
humanity's hives. And so there were other girls in Shelbyville who had
their train of beaus, but there was none quite so popular or so much
desired as Alice Price.
Alice was considered the first beauty of the place. Added to this
primary desirability was the fact that, in the fine gradations of
pedigrees and the stringent exactions of blood which the patrician
families of Shelbyville drew, Colonel Price and his daughter were the
topmost plumes on the peacock of aristocracy. Other young ladies seemed
to make all haste to assuage the pangs of at least one young man by
marrying him, and to blunt the hopes of the rest by that decisive act.
Not so Alice Price. She was frank and friendly, as eager for the
laughter of life as any healthy young woman should be, but she gave the
young men kindly counsel when they became insistent or boresome, and
sent them away.
Shelbyville was founded by Kentuckians; some of the old State's best
families were represented there. A person's pedigree was his credentials
in the society of the slumbering little town, nestled away among the
blue hills of Missouri. It did not matter so much about one's past, for
blood will have its vagaries and outflingings of youthful spirit; and
even less what the future promised, just so there was blood to vouch for
him at the present.
Blood had not done a great deal for Shelbyville, no matter what its
excellencies in social and political life. The old town stood just about
as it was finished, sixty years and more before that time. Upstart
cities had sprung up not far away, throwing Shelbyville into hopeless
shadow. The entire energies of its pioneers seemed to have been expended
in its foundation, leaving them too much exhausted to transmit any of
their former fire and strength to their sons. It followed that the sons
of Shelbyville were not what their fathers had been.
Of course, there were exceptions where one of them rose once in a while
and made a streak across the state or national firmament. Some of them
were eminent in the grave professions; most of them were conductors of
street cars in Kansas City, the nearest metropolis. There was not room
in Shelbyville for all its sons to establish themselves at law, even if
they had all been equipped, and if a man could not be a lawyer or a
college professor, what was open to him, indeed, but conducting a
street-car? That was a placid life.
It is remarkable how Kentuckians can maintain the breed of their horses
through many generations, but so frequently fall short in the standard
of their sons. Kentuckians are only an instance. The same might be said
of kings.
Not understanding her exactions in the matter, nor her broader
requirements, Shelbyville could not make out why Alice Price remained
unmated. She was almost twenty, they said, which was coming very close
to the age-limit in Shelbyville. It was nothing unusual for girls to
marry there at seventeen, and become grandmothers at thirty-seven.
If she wanted better blood than she could find in Shelbyville, the old
gentlemen said, twisting their white old heads in argumentative
finality, she'd have to go to the nobility of Europe. Even then she'd be
running her chances, by Ned! They grew indignant when she refused to
have their sons. They took it up with the colonel, they remonstrated,
they went into pedigrees and offered to produce documents.
There was Shelley Bryant's father, a fine, straight-backed old gentleman
with beard as white as the plumage of a dove. His son was a small,
red-faced, sandy-haired, pale-eyed chap with spaces between his big
front teeth. He traded in horses, and sometimes made as much as fifteen
dollars on a Saturday. His magnitude of glory and manly dignity as
compared to his father's was about that of a tin pan to the sun.
When Alice refused Shelley, the old general--he had won the title in
war, unlike Colonel Price--went to the colonel and laid the matter off
with a good deal of emphasis and flourishing of his knotted black stick.
If a woman demanded blood, said the general, where could she aspire
above Shelley? And beyond blood, what was there to be considered when it
came to marrying and breeding up a race of men?
Champion that he was of blood and lineage, Colonel Price was nettled by
the old gentleman's presumptuous urging of his unlikely son's cause.
"I am of the opinion, sir," Colonel Price replied, with a good bit of
hauteur and heat, "that my daughter always has given, and always will
give, the preference to brains!"
General Bryant had not spoken to the colonel for two months after that,
and his son Shelley had proved his superiority by going off to Kansas
City and taking a job reading gas-meters.
Colonel Price went to the mantel and filled his pipe from the
tobacco-jar. He sat smoking for a little while, his paper on his knee.
"The lad's in deeper trouble, I'm afraid, than he understands," said he
at last, as if continuing his reflections aloud, "and it may take a
bigger heave to pull him out than any of us think right now."
"Oh, I hope not," said Alice, looking across at him suddenly, her eyes
wide open with concern. "I understood that this was just a preliminary
proceeding, a sort of formality to conform to the legal requirements,
and that he would be released when they brought him up before Judge
Maxwell. At least, that was the impression that he gave me of the case
himself."
"Joe is an unsophisticated and honest lad," said the colonel. "There is
something in the case that he refused to disclose or discuss before the
coroner's jury, they say. I don't know what it is, but it's in relation
to the quarrel between him and Isom Chase which preceded the tragedy. He
seems to raise a point of honor on it, or something. I heard them say
this afternoon that it was nothing but the fear that it would disclose
his motive for the crime. They say he was making off with old Chase's
money, but I don't believe that."
"They're wrong if they think that," said she, shaking her head
seriously, "he'd never do a thing like that."
"No, I don't believe he would. But they found a bag of money in the
room, old Chase had it clamped in the hook of his arm, they say."
"Well, I'm sure Joe Newbolt never had his hands on it, anyhow," said
she.
"That's right," approved the colonel, nodding in slow thoughtfulness;
"we must stand up for him, for his own sake as well as Peter's. He's
worthy."
"And he's innocent. Can't you see that, father?"
"As plain as daylight," the colonel said.
The colonel stretched out his legs toward the blaze, crossed his feet
and smoked in comfort.
"But I wonder what it can be that the boy's holding back?"
"He has a reason for it, whatever it is," she declared.
"That's as certain as taxes," said the colonel. "He's a remarkable boy,
considering the chances he's had--bound out like a nigger slave, and
beaten and starved, I'll warrant. A remark-able lad; very, very. Don't
you think so, Alice?"
"I think he is, indeed," said she.
A long silence.
A stick in the chimney burned in two, the heavy ends outside the dogs
dropped down, the red brands pointing upward. The colonel put his hand
to his beard and sat in meditation. The wind was rising. Now and then it
sounded like a groan in the chimney-top. Gray ashes formed, frost-like,
over the ardent coals. The silence between them held unbroken.
Both sat, thought-wandering, looking into the fire....