Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury

last juror was chosen and thereafter all day, at half-minute intervals, the big, hard sobs racked her. As Durham came down the steps he had almost to shove his way through a knot of natives outside the doors. They grudged him the path they made for him, and as he showed them his back he heard a snicker and some one said a thing that cut him where he was already bruised – in his egotism. But he gave no heed to the words. What was the use?

      At the Drummers’ Home Hotel a darky waiter sustained a profound shock when the imported lawyer declined the fried beefsteak with fried potatoes and also the fried ham and eggs. Mastering his surprise the waiter offered to try to get the Northern gentleman a fried pork chop and some fried June apples, but Durham only wanted a glass of milk for his supper. He drank it and smoked a cigar, and about dusk he went upstairs to his room. There he found assembled the forlorn rank and file of the defense, the local lawyer and three character witnesses – prominent citizens from Tandy’s home town who were to testify to his good repute in the place where he was born and reared. These would be the only witnesses, except Tandy himself, that Durham meant to call. One of them was a bustling little man named Felsburg, a clothing merchant, and one was Colonel Quigley, a banker and an ex-mayor, and the third was a Judge Priest, who sat on a circuit-court bench back in Kentucky. In contrast to his size, which was considerable, this Judge Priest had a voice that was high and whiny. He also had the trick, common to many men in politics in his part of the South, of being purposely ungrammatical at times.

      This mannerism led a lot of people into thinking that the judge must be an uneducated man – until they heard him charging a jury or reading one of his rulings. The judge had other peculiarities. In conversation he nearly always called men younger than himself, son. He drank a little bit too much sometimes; and nobody had ever beaten him for any office he coveted. Durham didn’t know what to make of this old judge – sometimes he seemed simple-minded to the point of childishness almost.

      The others were gathered about a table by a lighted kerosene lamp, but the old judge sat at an open window with his low-quarter shoes off and his white-socked feet propped against the ledge. He was industriously stoking at a home-made corncob pipe. He pursed up his mouth, pulling at the long cane stem of his pipe with little audible sucks. From the rocky little street below the clatter of departing farm teams came up to him. The Indian medicine doctor was taking down his big white umbrella and packing up his regalia. The late canvas habitat of the Half Man and Half Horse had been struck and was gone, leaving only the pole-holes in the turf and a trodden space to show where it had stood. Court would go on all week, but Court Monday was over and for another month the town would doze along peacefully.

      Durham slumped himself into a chair that screeched protestingly in all its infirm joints. The heart was gone clean out of him.

      “I don’t understand these people at all,” he confessed. “We’re beating against a stone wall with our bare hands.”

      “If it should be money now that you’re needing, Mister Durham,” spoke up Felsburg, “that boy Tandy’s father was my very good friend when I first walked into that town with a peddling pack on my back, and if it should be money – ?”

      “It isn’t money, Mr. Felsburg,” said Durham. “If I didn’t get a cent for my services I’d still fight this case out to the aid for the sake of that game boy and that poor little mite of a wife of his. It isn’t money or the lack of it – it’s the damned hate they’ve built up here against the man. Why, you could cut it off in chunks – the prejudice that there was in that courthouse today.”

      “Son,” put in Judge Priest in his high, weedy voice, “I reckon maybe you’re right. I’ve been projectin’ around cotehouses a good many years, and I’ve taken notice that when a jury look at a prisoner all the time and never look at his women folks it’s a monstrous bad sign. And that’s the way it was all day today.”

      “The judge will be fair – he always is,” said Hightower, the local lawyer, “and of course Gilliam is only doing his duty. Those jurors are as good solid men as you can find in this country anywhere. But they can’t help being prejudiced. Human nature’s not strong enough to stand out against the feeling that’s grown up round here against Tandy since he shot Ab Rankin.”

      “Son,” said Judge Priest, still with his eyes on the darkening square below, “about how many of them jurors would you say are old soldiers?”

      “Four or five that I know of,” said Hightower – “and maybe more. It’s hard to find a man over fifty years old in this section that didn’t see active service in the Big War.”

      “Ah, hah,” assented Judge Priest with a squeaky little grunt. “That foreman now – he looked like he might of seen some fightin’?”

      “Four years of it,” said Hightower. “He came out a captain in the cavalry.”

      “Ah, hah.” Judge Priest sucked at his pipe. “Herman,” he J wheezed back over his shoulder to Felsburg, “did you notice a tall sort of a saddle-colored darky playing a juice harp in front of that there sideshow as we came along up? I reckon that nigger could play almost any tune you’d a mind to hear him play?”

      At a time like this Durham was distinctly not interested in the versatilities of strange negroes in this corner of the world. He kept silent, shrugging his shoulders petulantly.

      “I wonder now is that nigger left town yet?” mused the old judge half to himself.

      “I saw him just a while ago going down toward the depot,” volunteered Hightower. “There’s a train out of here for Memphis at 8:50. It’s about twenty minutes of that now.”

      “Ah, hah, jest about,” assented the judge. When the judge said “Ah, hah!” like that it sounded like the striking of a fiddle-bow across a fiddle’s tautened E-string.

      “Well, boys,” he went on, “we’ve all got to do the best we can for Breck Tandy, ain’t we? Say, son”’ – this was aimed at Durham – “I’d like mightily for you to put me on the stand the last one tomorrow. You wait until you’re through with Herman and Colonel Quigley here, before you call me. And if I should seem to ramble somewhat in giving my testimony – why, son, you just let me ramble, will you? I know these people down here better maybe than you do – and if I should seem inclined to ramble, just let me go ahead and don’t stop me, please?”

      “Judge Priest,” said Durham tartly, “if you think it could possibly do any good, ramble all you like.”

      “Much obliged,” said the old judge, and he struggled into his low-quarter shoes and stood up, dusting the tobacco fluff off himself.

      “Herman have you got any loose change about you?”

      Felsburg nodded and reached into his pocket. The judge made a discriminating selection of silver and bills from the handful that the merchant extended to him across the table.

      “I’ll take about ten dollars,” he said. “I didn’t come down here with more than enough to jest about buy my railroad ticket and pay my bill at this here tavern, and I might want a sweetenin’ dram or somethin’.”

      He pouched his loan and crossed the room. “Boys,” he said, “I think I’ll be knockin’ round a little before I turn in. Herman, I may stop by your room a minute as I come back in. You boys better turn in early and git yourselves a good night’s sleep. We are all liable to be purty tolerable busy tomorrow.”

      After he was outside he put his head back in the door and said to Durham:

      “Remember, son, I may ramble.”

      Durham nodded shortly, being somewhat put out by the vagaries of a mind that could concern itself with trivial things on the imminent eve of a crisis.

      As the judge creaked ponderously along the hall and down the stairs those he had left behind heard him whistling a tune to himself, making false starts at the air and halting often to correct his meter. It was an unknown tune to them all, but to Felsburg, the oldest of the four, it brought a vague, unplaced memory.

      The old judge was whistling when he reached the street. He stood there a minute until he had mastered the time to his own satisfaction, and then, still whistling,