bethought himself of the good old days in Kentucky years agone. Ah, what
a fine chapter was added to the history of our native letters when Cobb
looked backward! Now, when he was but twenty-four years of age, he had
written a story, a horror tale of Reelfoot Lake, which he named
"Fishhead" and immediately forgot, but which he had brought on East with
him. On this he made some minor revisions and started it on its round of
the magazine editors. But Cobb didn't wait for the fate of "Fishhead";
and it's a good thing that he didn't! He wrote what he now regards as
his first fiction story, The Escape of Mr. Trimm; and _The Saturday
Evening Post_ accepted it so quickly, printing it in the issue for
November 27, 1909, that Cobb gleefully cashed the cheque and sent them
another shortly thereafter. The editor of _The Post_, George Horace
Lorimer, whom many competent judges considered the greatest editor in
the United States, realized that a new literary planet had swam into his
ken; and in 1911 he asked Cobb to become a staff contributor, which the
Kentuckian was delighted to do. All of his stories have appeared in that
publication, all save _Fishhead_, which Mr. Lorimer regarded as a bit
too strong medicine for his subscribers. Mr. Cobb's next big story in
_The Post_ was one that he has come to regard as the best thing he has
done hitherto, "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," which appeared in the
issue for January 21, 1911. This was a real horror tale, a "thriller,"
making one couple the name of Cobb with Poe, a comparison which has
gathered strength with the passing of the months. For _The Post_ Mr.
Cobb created Judge Priest, a character that has made him famous. He did
a group of tales about and around this leading citizen of a certain
Southern town--which town was none other than his own Paducah; and which
character was none other than old Judge Bishop, whom many Kentuckians
recall with pleasure. Cobb is a great realist and he has never had any
patience with the romanticists. He painted the old town and the old
judge and the judge's friends and enemies--if he had any--just as he
remembered them. The best of these yarns, perhaps, was "Words and
Music," printed in the issue for October 28, 1911; and when they were
collected the other day and published under the title of _Back Home_
(New York, 1912), that story, in which the old judge "rambles," was the
first of the ten tales the book contained. Some reviewers of this work
have rather loosely characterized it as a novel, and in a certain big
sense it is; but the sub-title is a better description: "the narrative
of Judge Priest and his people." The book is really a series of
pictures; and what Francis H. Underwood did so well in his Kentucky
novel, _Lord of Himself_, and what William C. Watts did much better in
his _Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement_, Irvin S. Cobb has done in a
manner superior to either of them in his _Back Home_. Judge Priest is a
worthy and welcome addition to the gallery of American heroes of prose
fiction, hung next to Bret Harte's highest heroes. Cohan and Harris have
acquired the dramatic rights of his book, and it is to be made into
play-form by Bayard Veiller, author of _Within the Law_, the great
"hit" of the 1912 New York season, in collaboration with the Kentuckian,
who once wrote of his original plays, which have already been listed:
"One was accidentally destroyed, one was lost, and one was loaned out
and never returned." Let us hope that none of these things may overtake
the present work; and that, when Thomas Wise struts across the boards in
the autumn of 1913 as Judge Priest he may receive a bigger "hand" than
he ever drew in _The Gentleman from Mississippi_.
Besides these tales of Judge Priest, Cobb wrote several detached
short-stories, and many humorous articles for _The Post_ during 1912.
The best of this humor appeared simultaneously with _Back Home_, in a
delightful little book, called _Cobb's Anatomy_ (New York, 1912). This
contained four essays on the following subjects: "Tummies," perhaps
the funniest thing he has done so far; "Teeth;" "Hair;" "Hands and
Feet." The only adverse criticism to make of the work was its length:
it was too short. Its sequel will appear in 1913 under the title of
_Cobb's Bill of Fare_, containing four humorous skits. Aside from his
Judge Priest yarns, which began in _The Post_ in the autumn of 1911
and ran throughout the year of 1912, and his humorous papers which
also appeared from time to time, Cobb wrote the greatest short-story
ever written by a Kentuckian (save that first book of stories by James
Lane Allen), entitled "The Belled Buzzard" (_The Post_, September 28,
1912). This, with "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," and "Fishhead,"
which is to be published in _The Cavalier_ for January 11, 1913, after
having been rejected by almost every reputable magazine in America,
form a trio of horror tales of such power as to compel comparison with
the best work of Edgar Poe, with the "shade" going to the Kentuckian
in many minds. All three of them, together with "The Escape of Mr.
Trimm"; "The Exit of Anse Dugmore," a Kentucky mountain yarn; and
four unpublished stories, called "Another of Those Cub Reporter
Stories"; "Smoke of Battle"; "To the Editor of the Sun;" and "Guilty
as Charged," will appear in book form in the autumn of 1913, entitled
_The Escape of Mr. Trimm_.
In summing up Cobb's work for the New York _Sun_, Robert H. Davis,
editor of the Munsey magazines, wrote: "Gelett Burgess, in a lecture
at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American
humorists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humorists
in the world, although Cobb is one of them.... Thus in Irvin Cobb we
find Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allan Poe at their best.... If
he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his." And
George Horace Lorimer holds that Cobb is "the biggest writing-man ever
born in Kentucky; and he's going to get better all the time." This is
certainly high praise, but that it voices the opinions of many people
is beyond all question. "The great 'find' of 1912" may be the
trade-mark of his future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Everybody's Magazine_ (April, 1911); _Hampton's
Magazine_ (October, 1911); _The American Magazine_ (November,
1912); _Who's Cobb and Why_, by R. H. Davis (New York, 1912, a
brochure).
THE BELLED BUZZARD[86]
[From _The Saturday Evening Post_ (Philadelphia, September 28, 1912)]
There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from
Big Niggerwool, which lay nearer the river. It was traversable only by
those who knew it well--an oblong stretch of yellow mud and yellower
water, measuring, maybe four miles its longest way and two miles
roughly at its widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp
oak, with edgings of cane-break and rank weeds; and in one place,
where a ridge crossed it from side to side, it was snaggled like an
old jaw with dead tree-trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth.
It was untenanted of living things--except, down below, there were
snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up
above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called
logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky
tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always
just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry
which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been
the voice of the swamp itself.
On one side Little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a
sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended
abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county
turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road, and thrust its
fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to
the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I
am speaking of it was midsummer, and from these canes and weeds and
waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering.
They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a
man's head.
Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had
stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weedstems
rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently
and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat,
but with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds
too large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the
chin he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled
like a turkey-gobbler.
He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs
absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a
respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words
and thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of
an old staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction
and was afraid of being found out.
He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the
swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first
up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of
satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet and, taken with an idea, he
stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass
wiped his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color
and texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B.
Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly
careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his
feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and,
crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and
went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward
his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill.
He felt perfectly natural--not like a man who had just taken a
fellowman's life--but natural and safe, and well satisfied with
himself and his morning's work. And he was safe--that was the main
thing--absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the
thing for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these
months. There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had
worked out as plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living
creature except himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at
the head of Little Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured
they should meet; none knew of the device by which the other man had
been lured deeper and deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the
gun was hidden. No one had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no
one had seen the squire emerge, three hours later, alone. The gun,
having served its purpose, was hidden again, in a place no mortal eye
would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his
shoulderblades, 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 to-day and gone to-morrow. 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 pretty good to
him--the small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and
flowerbeds 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 jibe
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 outthrustings 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 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, has 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 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
weed field to the country 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 began. "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 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 halfway 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 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
ordinary 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 Florida,
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 to-day--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. 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 it 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 church goer 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.
* * * * *
Kneedeep 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 logcock
clung lengthwise to a snag, watching him. Snake-doctors, 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.