We had a feud once down in our country, not one of those sanguinary
feuds of the mountains involving a whole district and forcing constant
enlargements of hillside burying grounds, nor yet a feud handed down
as a deadly legacy from one generation to another until its origin is
forgotten and its legatees only know how they hate without knowing why,
but a shabby, small neighborhood vendetta affecting but two families
only, and those in a far corner of the county--the Flemings and the
Faxons.
Nevertheless, this feud, such as it was, persisted in a sluggish
intermittent kind of a way for twenty years or so. It started in a
dispute over a line boundary away back in War Times when a Faxon shot a
Fleming and was in turn shot by another Fleming; and it lasted until the
Faxons tired of fence-corner, briar-patch warfare and moved down into
Tennessee, all but one branch of them, who came into town and settled
there, leaving the Flemings dominant in the Gum Spring precinct. So the
feud ceased to be an institution after that and became a memory, living
only in certain smouldering animosities which manifested themselves
at local elections and the like, until it flared up momentarily in the
taking-off of old Ranee Fleming at the hands of young Jim Faxon; and
then it died, and died for good.
It is the manner of the taking-off of this one of the Flemings that
makes material for the story I am telling here. By all accounts it would
appear that the Faxons had been rather a weak-spined race who fought
mostly on the defensive and were lacking in that malignant persistency
that made old Ranee Fleming's name one to scare bad children with in the
unsettled days following the Surrender. I remember how we boys used to
watch him, half-fearsomely and half-admiringly, when he came to town
on a Court Monday or on a Saturday and swaggered about, unkempt and
mud-crusted and frequently half drunk. Late in the afternoon he would
mount unsteadily to the tilted seat of his spring wagon and go back home
to the Gum Spring country lashing at his team until they danced with
terror and splitting the big road wide open through the middle. And that
night at the places where the older men congregated there would be
tales to tell of those troubled mid-sixties when old Ranee had worn
the turn-coat of a guerilla, preying first on one side and then on the
other.
Now young Jim Faxon, last male survivor of his clan, and direct in the
line of the original fighting Faxons, was a different sort of person
altogether, a quiet, undersized, decent-spoken young chap who minded
well his own business, which was keeping a truck stand on the Market.
He lived with his aunt, old Miss Puss Whitley--certain women were still
called Miss in our town even though they had been married for
twenty years and widowed for as many more, as was the case in this
instance--and he was her main support and stand-by. It was common rumor
that when young Jim came of age and had a little money laid by on his
own account, he meant to marry the little Hardin girl--Emmy Hardin--and
this was a romance that nearly everybody in town knew about and favored
most heartily. She was his distant cousin and an orphan, and she lived
with Miss Puss too. Sometimes in good weather she would come in with him
and help out at the truck stand. She was a little quail-like creature,
quick in her movements and shy as a bunny, with pretty irregular
features and a skin so clear and white that when she blushed, which was
a hundred times a day, the color would drench her face to the temples
and make her prettier than ever. All of Jim's regular customers approved
his choice of a sweetheart and wished him mighty well. He was regarded
as about the pick of the thinned-out Faxon breed.
For the years that young Jim was growing up, his tribal enemy left him
alone. Perhaps old Ranee regarded the lank sapling of a boy as being
not worth even the attention of an insult. Probably in crowds they had
rubbed elbows a dozen times with no engendering of friction. But when
young Jim had passed his twentieth birthday and was almost a man
grown, then all without warning Ranee Fleming set to work, with malice
aforethought, to pick a quarrel with him. It was as deliberate and as
brutal as anything could be. Of a sudden, it seemed, the torrents of
long-submerged hate came spuming up from some deep back eddy in his
muddied, fuddled old mind, making an evil whirlpool of passion.
It was on a Saturday afternoon in November that old Ranee came, boiling
with his venom, to spew it out on the son of his dead and gone enemy.
It happened on the market, and if old Ranee aimed to add brim measure
to the humiliation of the boy, not in a year of choosing could he
have picked fitter time and place. The green grocer wasn't known then;
everybody went to market in person on week day mornings and particularly
everybody went of a Saturday afternoon. In the market square, town
aristocrat and town commoner met on the same footing, a market basket
over every arm, with this distinction only:--that ordinary folk toted
their loaded baskets back home and the well-to-do paid to have theirs
sent. There were at least twenty darkies who picked up a living by
packing market baskets home. They all had their regular patrons and
regarded them with jealous, proprietary eyes. You took a customer away
from a basket darky and you had him to fight.
There is a new market house now on the site of the old one, a
pretentious affair of brick with concrete floors and screened window
openings and provision for steam heat in the winter; but then, and
for many years before that, the market was a decrepit shed-like thing,
closed in the middle and open at the ends, with a shingled roof that
sagged in on itself and had hollows in it like the sunken jaws of a
toothless old hag; and there were cracks in the side walls that you
could throw a dog through, almost. In the middle, under half-way
shelter, were the stalls of the butchers, which were handed down
from father to son so that one stall would remain in a family for
generations; and here one bought the beef steaks of the period--long
bib-shaped segments of pale red meat, cut miraculously long and
marvelously thin, almost like apron patterns. This thinness facilitated
the beating process--the cooks would pound them with tools devised for
that purpose--and then they were fried through and through and drenched
with a thick flour gravy. Such was the accustomed way of treating a beef
steak. Persons with good teeth could eat them so, and for the others the
brown flour gravy provided a sustenance. But the spring chickens were
marvels for plumpness and freshness and cheapness; and in the early
spring the smoked hog jowls hung in rows, fairly begging people to carry
them off and boil them with salad greens; and in the fall when the
hog killing season was at hand, the country sausage and the chines and
backbones and spare ribs made racks of richness upon the worn marble
slabs.
Up at the far end of the square beyond the shed eaves stood the public
scales, and around it hay growers and cord wood choppers and Old Man
Brimm, the official charcoal burner of the county, waited for trade
alongside their highpiled wagons. Next to them was the appointed place
of the fish hucksters, which was an odorous place, where channel cats
and river perch and lake crappies were piled on the benches, some still
alive and feebly flapping. The darkies were sure to be thickest here.
There was an unsung but none the less authentic affinity existing
between a fresh-caught catfish and an old negro man.
Down at the other end was the domain of the gardeners and the truck
patch people--an unwritten law as old as the market itself ordained
these apportionments of space--and here you might find in their seasons
all manner of edibles, wild and tame. The country boys and girls ranged
the woods and the fields for sellable things, to go along with the
product of orchard and garden and berry patch. In the spring, when herb
teas and home-brewed tonics were needed for the thinning of the blood,
there would be yellow-red sassafras root tied up in fragrant, pungent
bunches, all ready for steeping; and strings of fresh-shot robins for
pot-pies were displayed side by side with clumps of turnip-greens and
mustard greens. And in summer there would be all manner of wild berries
and heaps of the sickish-smelling May apples; and later, after the first
light frost, ripe pawpaws and baskets of wild fox grapes, like blue shoe
buttons; and then later on, scaly-bark hickory nuts and fresh-brewed
persimmon beer in kegs, and piggins and crocks of the real lye hominy,
with the big blue grains of the corn all asmoke like slaking lime, and
birds--which meant quail always--and rabbits, stretched out stark and
stiff, and the native red-skinned yams, and often possums, alive and
“suiting” in small wooden cages, or else dead and dressed, with the dark
kidney-fat coating their immodestly exposed interiors.
As I was saying, it was on a Saturday in November and getting along
toward Thanksgiving when old Ranee Fleming came to the market to shame
young Jim Faxon before the crowd. And when he came, you could tell
by his look and by the way he shouldered through the press of people
between the double rows of stands that all the soured animosities of his
nature had swelled to bursting under the yeasty ferment of an unstable,
hair-triggered temper.
The liquor he had drunk might have had something to do with it too. He
came up with a barely perceptible lurch in his gait and stopped at the
Faxon stall, which was the third from the lower end of the shed. With
his head down between his shoulders and his legs spraddled he began
staring into the face of young Jim.
Deadly offense can be carried just as well in a look as in the spoken
word, if you only know how to do it--and Ranee Fleming knew.
There was outright obscenity in his glower.
Instantly it seemed, everybody in that whole end of the market square
sensed what was impending. Sellers and buyers ceased trafficking and
faced all the same way. Those in the rear were standing on tiptoe the
better to see over the heads of those nearer to these two blood enemies.
Some climbed upon the wheel hubs of the wagons that were backed up in
rows alongside the open shed and balanced themselves there. The silence
grew electric and tingled with the feeling of a coming clash.
Young Jim wanted no trouble, that was plain enough to be seen. The first
darting realization that his tribal foe had forced a meeting on him
seemed to leave him dazed, and at a loss for the proper course to
follow. He bent his face away from the blasphemous insistent--glare of
the old man and made a poor pretense at straightening up his wares upon
the bench in front of him; but his hands trembled so he overturned a
little wooden measure that held a nickel's worth of dried lady-peas.
The little round peas rolled along a sunken place in the wood and
began spattering off in a steady stream, like buck-shot spilling from
a canister. A dark red flush came up the back of the boy's neck. He was
only twenty, anyhow, and those who looked on were sorry for him and
for his youth and helplessness and glad that little Emmy Hardin, his
sweetheart, wasn't there.
It was a long half minute that old Ranee, without speaking, stood there,
soaking his soul in the sight of a Faxon's discomfiture, and when he
spoke he grated the words as though he had grit in his mouth.
“Looky here you,” he ordered, and the boy, as though forced to obey by a
will stronger than his own, lifted his head and looked at him.
“Mister Fleming,” he answered, “what--what is it you want with
me--Mister Fleming?”
“Mister Fleming--Mister Fleming,” mimicked the older man, catching at
his words, “Mister Fleming, huh? Well, you know mighty good and well,
I reckin, whut it is I want with you. I want to see if you're as
white-livered as the rest of your low-flung, hound-dawg, chicken-hearted
breed used to be. And I reckin you are.
“Mister Fleming, huh? Well, from now on that's whut it better be and
don't you fail to call me by them entitlements either. The next time I
come by I reckin you better take off your hat to me too. Do you hear me,
plain, whut I'm a-sayin'? You--”
He called him the unforgivable, unatonable name--the fighting word, than
which, by the standards of that community and those people, no blow with
a clenched fist could be in one twentieth part so grievous an injury;
yes, it was worse than a hundred blows of a fist. So at that, the
onlookers gave back a little, making way for the expected rush and
grapple. But there was no forward rush by the younger man, no grapple
with the older.
Young Jim Faxon took it--he just stood and took it without a word or a
step. Old Ranee looked at him and laughed out his contempt in a derisive
chuckle and then he turned and slouched off, without looking back,
as though he disdained to watch for a rear attack from so puny and
spineless an enemy. It all started and happened and was over with in a
minute or less. The last of the spilt lady peas were still spattering
down upon the rough bricks of the market and running away and hiding
themselves in cracks. Young Jim, his head on his breast and his shamed
eyes looking down at nothing, was fumbling again with his wares and
Ranee Fleming's hunching shoulders were vanishing at the end of the
shed.
People talked about it that night and for days after. It was not a thing
to forget--a man near grown who lacked the sand to resent that insult.
A fist fight might have been forgotten, even a fist fight between these
two heritors of a feud instinct, but not this. Some of the younger
fellows didn't see, they said, how Jim Faxon could hold his head up
again and look people in the eye. And Jim didn't hold his head up--not
as high as he had held it before this happened. Broody-eyed and glum and
tight-lipped, he tended Miss Puss Whitley's truck patch and brought his
products to market every morning. He had always been quiet and sparing
of speech; now he was quiet to the point almost of dumbness.
A month and more went by, and old Ranee didn't ride in from Gum Spring,
and then the Christmas came. Christmas Day fell on a Monday so that the
Christmas itself properly started on the Saturday before. It was a warm
and a green Christmas as most of them are in that climate, mild enough
at midday for folks to sit on their front porches and just cold enough
at night to beard the grass with a silver-gray frost rime. Languid
looking house flies crawled out in the afternoons and cleaned their
gummy wings while they sunned themselves on the southern sides of
stables. The Christmas feeling was in the air. At the wharfboat lay the
Clyde, deep laden for her annual jug-trip, with thousands of bottles and
jugs and demi-johns consigned to the dry towns up the river. There was a
big sidewalk trade going on in fire crackers and rockets, the Christinas
and not the Fourth being the time for squibbing of crackers in the
South, the market, though, was the busiest place of all. It fairly
milled with people. Every huckster needed four hands, and still he
wouldn't have had enough.
Jimmy Faxon had little Emmy Hardin helping him through the hours when
the pressure was greatest and the customers came fastest. She kept
close to him, with little nestling motions, and yet there was something
protecting in her attitude, as though she would stand between him and
any danger, or any criticism. The looks she darted at him were fairly
caressing. Through the jam appeared Ranee Fleming, elbowing his way
roughly. His face above his straggly whiskers was red with temper and
with liquor. His cotton shirt was open at the throat so that his hairy
chest showed. His shapeless gray jeans trousers--gray originally but now
faded and stained to a mud color--were both beltless and suspenderless,
and were girthed tightly about his middle by the strap at the back. From
much ramming of his hands into the pockets, they were now crowded down
far upon his hips, showing an unwontedly long expanse of shirt; and this
gave to him an abnormally short-legged, long-waisted look.
A lot of those little fuzzy parasitic pods called beggar-lice were stuck
thick upon his bagged knees--so thick they formed irregular patterns in
grayish green. He wore no coat nor waistcoat, but an old mud-stiffened
overcoat was swung over his shoulders with the arms tied loosely around
his neck and the skirts dangling in folds behind him; and cuckleburrs
clung to a tear in the lining. He was a fit model of unclean and
unwholesome ferocity.
Before young Jim or little Emmy Hardin saw him, he was right up on them;
only the width of the bench separated him from them. He leaned across
it and called Jim that name again and slapped him in the face with a
wide-armed sweeping stroke of his open hand. The boy flinched back from
the coming blow so that only the ends of old Ranee's flailing fingers
touched his cheek, but the intent was there. Before the eyes of his
sweetheart, he had been slapped in the face. The girl gave a startled
choking gasp and tried to put her arms about young Jim. He shook her
off.
Well content with his work, old Ranee fell back, all the time watching
young Jim. People gave way for him involuntarily. When he was clear of
the shed he turned and made for one of the saloons that lined the square
on its western side. He had a choice of several such places; the whole
row was given over to saloons, barring only a couple of cheap john
clothing stores and a harness store, and two or three small dingy pawn
shops. Pistol stores these last were, in the vernacular of the darkies,
being so called because the owners always kept revolvers and spring-back
knives on display in the show windows, along with battered musical
instruments and cheap watches.
The spectators followed old Ranee's figure with their eyes until the
swinging doors of the nearest bar room closed behind him. When they
looked back again toward Stall No. 3 young Jim was gone too. He had
vanished silently; and Emmy Hardin was alone, with her face buried in
her arms and her arms stretched across the counter, weeping as though
she would never leave off.
From the next stall there came to her, comfortingly, a middle aged
market woman, a motherly figure in a gray shawl with puckered and broad
red hands. She lifted Emmy up and led her away, calling out to her
nearest neighbor to watch her stall and the Faxon stall until she got
back.
“There's liable to be trouble,” she added, speaking in a side whisper so
the sobbing girl wouldn't hear what she said.
“I reckin not,” said the man. “It looks to me like Jimmy Faxon is plumb
cowed down and 'feared of that there old bush whacker--it looks like he
ain't got the spirit of a rabbit left in him. But you take her on away
somewheres, Mizz Futrell--me and my boys will 'tend stand for both of
you, and you needn't worry.”
Under such merciful guardianship little Emmy Hardin was taken away and
so she was spared the sight of what was to follow.
Old Ranee stayed in the nearest saloon about long enough to take one
drink and then he came out and headed for the next saloon along the row.
To reach it he must pass one of the pawn-brokers' shops. He had just
passed it when a sort of smothered warning outcry went up from behind
him somewhere, and he swung round to look his finish square in the face.
Young Jim Faxon was stepping out of the pawn-broker's door. He was
crying so the tears streamed down his face. His right arm was down at
his side stiffly and the hand held clenched a weapon which the Daily
Evening News subsequently described as “a Brown & Rogers thirty-eight
calibre, nickle plated, single-action, with a black rubber handle, and
slightly rusted upon the barrel.”
Old Ranee made no move toward his own hip pocket. It came out at
the inquest that he was not carrying so much as a pen-knife. He half
crouched and began stumbling backward toward the front of the building
with his arms out and his hands making empty pawing clutches behind him
as though he were reaching for some solid support to hold him up in his
peril. But before he had gone three steps, young Jim brought the pistol
up and fired--just once.
Once was enough. If you had never before this seen a man shot, you would
have known instinctively that this one was mortally stricken. Some who
were near and looking right at him told afterward how the loose end of
one overcoat sleeve, dangling down on his breast, flipped up a little
at the shot. A slightly pained, querulous look came into his face and
he brought his arms round and folded them tightly across his stomach as
though taken with a sudden cramp. Then he walked, steadily enough, to
the edge of the sidewalk and half-squatted as though he meant to sit on
the curbing with his feet in the gutter. He was half way down when death
took him in his vitals. He pitched forward and outward upon his face
with his whiskers flattening in the street. Two men ran to him and
turned him over on his back. His face had faded already from its angry
red to a yellowish white, like old tallow. He breathed hard once or
twice and some thought they saw his eyelids bat once; then his chest
fell inward and stayed so, and he seemed to shrink up to less than his
proper length and bulk.
Young Jim stood still ten feet away looking at his handiwork. He had
stopped crying and he had dropped the pistol and was wiping both hands
flatly against the breast of his wool sweater as though to cleanse them
of something. Allard Jones, the market-master, who had police powers
and wore a blue coat and a German silver star to prove it, came plowing
through the ring of on-lookers, head tilt, and laid hands upon him.
Allard Jones fumbled in his pocket and produced a pair of steel nippers
and made as if to twine the chain round the boy's right wrist.
“You don't need to be putting those things on me, Mr. Jones,” said
his prisoner. “I'll go all right--I'll go with you. It's all over
now--everything's over!”
Part of the crowd stayed behind, forming a scrooging, shoving ring
around the spot in front of Benny Michelson's pawn shop where the body
of old Ranee lay face upward across the gutter with the stiffening legs
on the sidewalk, and the oddly foreshortened body out in the dust of the
road; and the rest followed Allard Jones and young Jim as they walked
side by side up Market Square to Court Street and along Court Street a
short block to the lock-up.
The sympathy of the community was with young Jim--and the law of the
land was dead against him on all counts. He had not fired in sudden heat
and passion; there had been time, as the statutes measured time, for due
deliberation. However great the provocation and by local standards the
provocation had been great enough and pressing hard to the breaking
point, he could not claim self-defense. Even though Fleming's purpose
had been, ultimately, to bring things to a violent issue, he was
retreating, actually, at the moment itself. As a bar to punishment for
homicide, the plea of temporary insanity had never yet been set up in
our courts. Jim Faxon was fast in the snarls of the law.
From the lock-up he went to the county jail, the charge, wilful
and premeditated murder. Dr. Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg and Major
Covington, all customers of the accused, and all persons of property,
stood ready to go bail for him in any sum namable, but murder was
not bailable. In time a grand jury buttressed the warrant with an
indictment--murder in the first degree, the indictment read--and young
Jim stayed in jail awaiting his trial when circuit court should open in
the spring.
Nobody, of course, believed that his jury would vote the extreme
penalty. The dead man's probable intentions and his past reputation,
taken with the prisoner's youth and good repute, would stand as bars
to that, no matter how the letter of the law might read; but it was
generally accepted that young Jim would be found guilty of manslaughter.
He might get four years for killing old Ranee, or six years or even
ten--this was a subject for frequent discussion. There was no way out of
it. People were sorrier than ever for Jim and for his aunt and for the
tacky, pretty little Hardin girl.
All through the short changeable winter, with its alternate days of snow
flurrying and sunshine, Emmy Hardin and Miss Puss Whitley, a crushed
forlorn pair, together minded the stall on the market, accepting
gratefully the silent sympathy that some offered them, and the awkward
words of good cheer from others. Miss Puss put a mortgage of five
hundred dollars on her little place out in the edge of town. With the
money she hired Dabney Prentiss, the most silvery tongued orator of all
the silver tongues at the county bar, to defend her nephew. And every
day, when market hours were over, in rain or snow or shine, the two
women would drive in their truck wagon up to the county jail to sit with
young Jim and to stay with him in his cell until dark.
Spring came earlier than common that year. The robins came back from the
Gulf in February on the tail of a wet warm thaw. The fruit trees bloomed
in March and by the beginning of April everything was a vivid green and
all the trees were clumped with new leaves. Court opened on the first
Monday.
On the Sunday night before the first Monday, Judge Priest sat on his
porch as the dusk came on, laving his spirits in the balm of the
young spring night. In the grass below the steps the bull-cricket that
wintered under Judge Priest's front steps was tuning his fairy-fiddle
at regular, half-minute intervals. Bull bats on the quest for incautious
gnats and midges were flickering overhead, showing white patches on
the tinder sides of their long wings. A flying squirrel, the only
night-rider of the whole squirrel tribe, flipped out of his hole in
a honey locust tree, and cocked his head high, and then he spread the
furry gray membranes along his sides and sailed in a graceful, downward
swoop to the butt of a silver leaf poplar, fifty feet away, where he
clung against the smooth bark so closely and so flatly he looked like a
little pelt stretched and nailed up there to dry.
The front gate clicked and creaked. The flying squirrel flipped around
to the safe side of his tree and fled upward to the shelter of the
branches, like a little gray shadow, and Judge Priest, looking down the
aisle of shady trees, saw two women coming up the walk toward him, their
feet crunching slowly on the gravel. He laid his pipe aside and pulled
chairs forward for his callers, whoever they might be. They were right
up to the steps before he made them out--Miss Puss Whitley and little
Emmy Hardin.
“Howdy do, ladies,” said the old Judge with his homely courtesy. “Howdy,
Miss Puss? Emmy, child, how are you? Come in and set down and rest
yourselves.”
But for these two, this was no time for the small civilities. The weight
of trouble at their hearts knocked for utterance at their lips. Or, at
least, it was so with the old aunt.
“Jedge Priest,” she began, with a desperate, driven eagerness, “we've
come here tonight to speak in private with you about my boy--about
Jimmy.”
In the darkness they could not see that the old Judge's plump figure was
stiffening.
“Did Mister Dabney Prentiss--did anyone, send you here to see me on this
business?” he asked, quickly.
“No, suh, nobody a'tall,” answered the old woman. “We jest came on our
own accord--we felt like as if we jest had to come and see you. Court
opens in the momin' and Jimmy's case, as you know, comes up the first
thing. And oh, Jedge Priest, we air in so much trouble, Emmy and me--and
you've got the name of bein' kind hearted to them that's borne down and
in distress--and so we come to you.”
He raised his hand, as though to break in on her, but the old woman
was not to be stopped. She was pouring out the grievous burden of her
lament:
“Jedge Priest, you knowed my husband when he was alive, and you've
knowed me these many years. And you know how it was in them old days
that's gone that the Flemings was forever and a day fightin' with my
people and forcin' trouble on 'em 'till finally they hunted 'em plum'
out of the county and out of the State, away from the places where they
was born and raised. And you know Jimmy too, and know what a hard time
he had growin' up, and how he's always stood by me and helped me out,
jest the same as if he was my own son. And I reckin you know about
him--and Emmy here.”
She broke off to wipe her eyes. Had it been a man who came on such an
errand the Judge would have sent him packing--he would have been at no
loss to put his exact meaning into exact language; for the Judge held
his place on the bench in a high and scriptural regard. But here, in the
presence of these two woeful figures, their faces drenched and steeped
with sorrow, he hesitated, trying to choose words that would not bruise
their wounds.
“Miss Puss,” he said very softly, almost as though he were speaking to a
child, “whatever my private feelin's may be towards you and yours, it
is not proper for me as the Judge upon the bench, to express them in
advance of the trial. It is my sworn duty to enforce the law, as it is
written and laid down in the books. And the law is merciful, and is just
to all.”
The old woman's angular, slatty figure straightened. In the falling
light her pinched and withered face showed, a white patch with deep
grayish creases in it, the color of snow in a quick thaw.
“The law!” she flared out, “the law, you say, Jedge. Well, you kin talk
mighty big about the law, but what kind of a law is that that lets a
fightin', swearin', drunken bully like Ranee Fleming plague a poor boy
and call him out of his name with vile words and shame him before this
child here, and yit not do nothin' to him for it? And what kind of a law
is it that'll send my boy up yonder to that there penitentiary and wreck
his life and Emmy's life and leave me here alone in my old age, ashamed
to lift my head amongst my neighbors ever again?”
“Madame,” said the Judge with all kindliness in his tone, “it's not for
me to discuss these matters with you, now. It's not even proper that I
should let you say these things to me.”
“Oh, but Jedge,” she said, “you must listen to me, please. You oughter
know the truth and there ain't no way for you to know it without I tell
it to you. Jimmy didn't want no quarrel with that man--it wasn't never
none of his choosin'. He tried not to bear no grudge for what had gone
before--he jest craved to be let alone and not be pestered. Why, when
Ranee Fleming cussed him that first time, last Fall, he come home to me
cryin' like his heart would break. He said he'd been insulted and that
he'd have to take it up and fight it out with Ranee Fleming; he felt
like he just had to. But we begged him on our bended knees mighty nigh,
me and Emmy did, not to do nothin' for our sakes--and for our sakes
he promised to let it go, and say nothin'. Even after that, if Ranee
Fleming had just let him be, all this turrible trouble wouldn't a-come
on us. But Ranee Fleming he come back again and slapped Jimmy's face,
and Jimmy knowed then that sooner or later he'd have to kill Ranee
Fleming or be killed his-self--there wasn't no other way out of it for
him.
“Jedge Priest, he's been the best prop a lone woman ever had to lean
on--he's been like a son to me. My own son couldn't a-been more
faithful or more lovin. I jest ask you to bear all these things in mind
tomorrow.”
“I will, Madame,” said the old Judge, rather huskily. “I promise you I
will. Your nephew shall have a fair trial and all his rights shall be
safe-guarded. But that is all I can say to you now.”
Emmy Hardin, who hadn't spoken at all, plucked her by the arm and sought
to lead her away. Shaking her head, the old woman turned away from the
steps.
“Jest one minute, please, Miss Puss,” said Judge Priest, “I'd like to
ask you a question, and I don't want you to think I'm pryin' into your
private and personal affairs; but is it true what I hear--that you've
mortgaged your home place to raise the money for this boy's defense?”
“I ain't begredgin' the money,” she protested. “It ain't the thought of
that, that brought me here tonight. I'd work my fingers to the bone
if 'twould help Jimmy any, and so would Emmy here. We'd both of us be
willin' and ready to go to the porehouse and live and die there if it
would do him any good.”
“I feel sure of that,” repeated the old Judge patiently, “but is it true
about this mortgage?”
“Yes, suh,” she answered, and then she began to cry again, “it's true,
but please don't even let Jimmy know. He thinks I had the money saved up
from the marketin' to hire Mr. Prentiss with, and I don't never want him
to know the truth. No matter how his case goes I don't never want him to
know.” They had moved off down the gravel walk perhaps twenty feet, when
suddenly the smouldering feud-hate stirred in the old woman's blood;
and it spread through her and made her meager frame quiver as if with an
ague. And now the words came from her with a hiss of feeling:
“Jedge Priest, that plague-taken scoundrel deserved killin'! He was
black hearted from the day he came into the world and black hearted he
went out of it. You don't remember, maybe--you was off soldierin' at the
time--when he was jayhawkin' back and forth along the State line here,
burnin' folks' houses down over their heads and mistreatin' the wimmin
and children of them that was away in the army. I tell you, durin' that
last year before you all got back home, there was soldiers out after
him--out with guns in their hands and orders to shoot him down on sight,
like a sheep-killin' dog. He didn't have no right to live!”
The girl got her quieted somehow; she was sobbing brokenly as they went
away. For a long five minutes after the gate clicked behind the forlorn
pair, Judge Priest stood on his porch in the attitude of one who had
been pulled up short by the stirring of a memory of a long forgotten
thing. After a bit he reached for his hat and closed the front door.
He waddled heavily down the steps and disappeared in the aisle of the
maples and silver leaf trees.
Half an hour later, clear over on the other side of town, two windows of
the old court house flashed up as rectangles of light, set into a block
of opaque blackness. Passers by idling homeward under the shade trees
of the Square, wondered why the lights should be burning in the Judge's
chambers. Had any one of them been moved to investigate the whys and
wherefores of this phenomenon he would have discovered the Judge at his
desk, with his steel bowed spectacles balanced precariously on the
tip of his pudgy nose and his round old face pulled into a pucker
of intenseness as he dug through one sheaf after another of musty,
snuffy-smelling documents. The broad top of the desk in front of him was
piled with windrows of these ancient papers, that were gray along their
creases with the pigeonhole dust of years, and seamy and buffed with
age. Set in the wall behind him was a vault and the door of the vault
was open, and within was a gap of emptiness on an upper shelf, which
showed where all these papers had come from; and for further proof that
they were matters of court record there was a litter of many crumbly
manila envelopes bearing inscriptions of faded ink, scattered about over
the desk top, and on the floor where they had fallen.
For a good long time the old Judge rummaged briskly, pawing into the
heaps in front of him and snorting briskly as the dust rose and tickled
his nostrils. Eventually he restored most of the papers to their proper
wrappers and replaced them in the vault, and then he began consulting
divers books out of his law library--ponderous volumes, bound in faded
calf skin with splotches of brown, like liverspots, on their covers. It
was nearly midnight before he finished. He got up creakily, and reaching
on tiptoe--an exertion which created a distinct hiatus of inches between
the bottom of his wrinkled vest and the waistband of his trousers--he
turned out the gas jets. Instantly the old courthouse, sitting among the
trees, became a solid black mass. He felt his way out into the hallway,
barking his shins on a chair, and grunting softly to himself.
When young Jim Faxon's case was called the next morning and the jailor
brought him in, Jim wore hand-cuffs. At the term of court before this, a
negro cow thief had got away coming across the court house yard and
the Judge had issued orders to the jailor to use all due precautions in
future. So the jailor, showing no favoritism, had seen fit to handcuff
young Jim. Moreover, he forgot to bring along the key to the irons and
while he was hurrying back to the jail to find it, young Jim had to wait
between his women folk, with his bonds still fast upon him. Emmy Hardin
bent forward and put her small hands over the steel, as though to hide
the shameful sight of it from the eyes of the crowd and she kept her
hands there until Jailor Watts came back and freed Jim. The little group
of three sitting in a row inside the rail, just back of Lawyer
Dabney Prentiss' erect and frock-coated back, were all silent and all
pale-faced, young Jim with the pallor of the jail and Emmy Hardin with
the whiteness of her grief and her terror, but the old aunt's face was
a streaky, grayish white, and the wrinkles in her face and in her thin,
corded neck looked inches deep.
Right away the case was called and both sides--defense and
commonwealth--announced as ready to proceed to trial. The audience
squared forward to watch the picking of the jurors, but there were never
to be any jurors picked for the trial of this particular case.
For Judge Priest had readied the point where he couldn't hold in any
longer. He cleared his throat and then he spoke, using the careful
English he always used on the bench--and never anywhere else.
“Before we proceed,” he began, and his tone told plainly enough that
what he meant to say now would be well worth the hearing, “before
we proceed, the court has something to say, which will have a direct
bearing upon the present issue.” He glanced about him silently,
commanding quiet. “The defendant at the bar stands charged with the
death of one Ransom Fleming and he is produced here to answer that
charge.”
From the desk he lifted a time-yellowed, legal-looking paper, folded
flat; he shucked it open with his thumb. “It appears, from the records,
that in the month of February and of the year 1865, the said Ransom
Fleming, now deceased, was a fugitive from justice, going at large and
charged with divers and sundry felonious acts, to wit, the crime of
arson and the crime of felonious assault with intent to kill, and the
crime of confederating with others not named, to destroy the property
of persons resident in the State of Kentucky. It appears further that a
disorganized condition of the civil government existed, the State being
overrun with stragglers and deserters from both armies then engaged in
civil war, and therefore, because of the inability or the failure of the
duly constituted authorities to bring to justice the person charged with
these lawless and criminal acts, the Governor of this State did offer a
reward of $500 for the apprehension of Ransom Fleming, dead or alive.”
Now, for sure, the crowd knew something pregnant with meaning for the
prisoner at the bar was coming--knew it without knowing yet what shape
it would assume. Heads came forward row by row and necks were craned
eagerly.
“I hold here in my hand an official copy of the proclamation issued by
the Governor of the State,” continued Judge Priest. “Under its terms
this reward was open to citizens and to officers of the law alike.
All law-abiding persons were in fact urged to join in ridding the
commonwealth of this man. He stood outside the pale of the law, without
claim upon or right to its protection.
“It would appear further,”--the old Judge's whiny voice was rising
now--“that this proclamation was never withdrawn, although with the
passage of years it may have been forgotten. Under a strict construction
of the law of the land and of the commonwealth, it may be held to have
remained in force up to and including the date of the death of the said
Ransom Fleming. It accordingly devolves upon this court, of its own
motion, to set aside the indictment against the defendant at the bar and
to declare him free--”
For the time being His Honor got no further than that. Even the
stupidest listener there knew now what had come to pass--knew that Judge
Priest had found the way to liberty for young Jim Faxon. Cheering broke
out--loud, exultant cheering and the stamping of many feet. Persons
outside, on the square and in the street, might have been excused for
thinking that a dignified and orderly session of court had suddenly
turned into a public rally--a ratification meeting. Most of those
actually present were too busy venting their own personal satisfaction
to notice that young Jim was holding his sweetheart and his aunt in his
arms; and there was too much noise going on round about them for any one
to hear the panted hallelujahs of joy and relief that poured from the
lips of the young woman and the old one.
The Judge pounded for order with his gavel, pounding long and hard,
before the uproar simmered down into a seething and boiling of confused,
excited murmurings.
“Mister Sheriff,” he ordered, with a seeming sternness which by no means
matched the look on his face, “keep order in this court! If any further
disorder occurs here you will arrest the offenders and arraign them for
contempt.”
The sheriff's bushy eyebrows expressed bewilderment. When it came to
arresting a whole court house full of people, even so vigilant and
earnest-minded an official as Sheriff Giles Bindsong hardly knew where
to start in. Nevertheless he made answer promptly.
“Yes, suh, Your Honor,” he promised, “I will.”
“As I was saying when this interruption occurred,” went on the Judge,
“it now devolves upon the court to discharge the defendant at the bar
from custody and to declare him entitled to the reward of $500 placed
upon the head of the late Ransom Fleming by the Governor of Kentucky in
the year 1865--” Young Jim Faxon with his arms still around the heaving
shoulders of the women, threw his head up:
“No Judge, please, sir, I couldn't touch that money--not that”--he
began, but Judge Priest halted him:
“The late defendant not being of legal age, the court rules that this
reward when collected may be turned over to his legal guardian. It may
be that she will find a good and proper use to which this sum of money
may be put.” This time, the cheering, if anything, was louder even
than it had been before; but when the puzzled sheriff looked around
for instructions regarding the proper course of procedure in such an
emergency, the judge on the bench was otherwise engaged. The judge on
the bench was exchanging handshakes of an openly congratulatory nature
with the members of the county bar headed by Attorney for the Defense,
Dabney Prentiss.