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

of sound and then a broken thread of sound and then it died out altogether and once more there was silence in the court house of Forked Deer County.

      Strangely enough not one listener had come to the windows to look out. The interruption from without had seemed part and parcel of what went on within. None faced to the rear, every one faced to the front.

      There was Mr. Lukins now. As Mr. Lukins got upon his feet he said to himself in a tone of feeling that he be dad-fetched. But immediately changing his mind he stated that he would preferably be dad-blamed, and as he moved toward the bar rail one overhearing him might have gathered from remarks let fall that Mr. Lukins was going somewhere with the intention of being extensively dad-burned. But for all these threats Mr. Lukins didn’t go anywhere, except as near the railing as he could press.

      Nearly everybody else was standing up too. The state’s attorney was on his feet with the rest, seemingly for the purpose of making some protest.

      Had any one looked they might have seen that the ember in the smoldering eye of the old foreman had blazed up to a brown fire; that Juror No. 4, with utter disregard for expense, was biting segments out of the brim of his new brown-varnished straw hat; that No. 7 had dropped his crutches on the floor, and that no one, not even their owner, had heard them fall; that all the jurors were half out of their chairs. But no one saw these things, for at this moment there rose up Aunt Tilly Haslett, a dominant figure, her huge wide bade blocking the view of three or four immediately behind her.

      Uncle Fayette laid a timid detaining hand upon her and seemed to be saying something protestingly.

      “Turn loose of me, Fate Haslett!” she commanded. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourse’f, to be tryin’ to hold me back when you know how my only dear brother died a-followin’ after Gineral Nathan Bedford Forrest. Turn loose of me!”

      She flirted her great arm and Uncle Fayette spun flutteringly into the mass behind. The sheriff barred her way at the gate of the bar.

      “Mizz Haslett,” he implored, “please, Mizz Haslett – you must keep order in the cote.” Aunt Tilly halted in her onward move, head up high and elbows out, and through her specs, blazing like burning-glasses, she fixed on him a look that instantly charred that, unhappy official into a burning red ruin of his own self-importance.

      “Keep it yourse’f, High Sheriff Washington Nash, Esquire,” she bade him; “that’s whut you git paid good money for doin’. And git out of my way! I’m a-goin’ in there to that pore little lonesome thing settin’ there all by herself, and there ain’t nobody goin’ to hinder me neither!”

      The sheriff shrunk aside; perhaps it would be better to say he evaporated aside. And public opinion, reorganized and made over but still incarnate in Aunt Tilly Haslett, swept past the rail and settled like a billowing black cloud into a chair that the local attorney for the defense vacated just in time to save himself the inconvenience of having it snatched bodily from under him.

      “There, honey,” said Aunt Tilly crooningly as she gathered the forlorn little figure of the prisoner’s wife in her arms like a child and mothered her up to her ample bombazined bosom, “there now, honey, you jest cry on me.”

      Then Aunt Tilly looked up and her specs were all blurry and wet. But she waved her palmleaf fan as though it had been the baton of a marshal.

      “Now, Jedge,” she said, addressing the bench, “and you other gentlemen – you kin go ahead now.”

      The state’s attorney had meant evidently to make some sort of an objection, for he was upon his feet through all this scene. But he looked back before he spoke and what he saw kept him from speaking. I believe I stated earlier that he was a candidate for rejection. So he settled back down in his chair and stretched out his legs and buried his chin in the top of his limp white waistcoat in an attitude that he had once seen in a picture entitled, “Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Helena.”

      “You may resume, Judge Priest,” said the trial judge in a voice that was not entirely free from huskiness, although its owner had been clearing it steadily for some moments.

      “Thank you kindly, suh, but I was about through anyhow,” answered the witness with a bow, and for all his homeliness there was dignity and stateliness in it. “I merely wanted to say for the sake of completin’ the record, so to speak, that on the occasion referred to them Yankees did not cross that bridge.” With the air of tendering and receiving congratulations Mr. Lukins turned to his nearest neighbor and shook hands with him warmly.

      The witness got up somewhat stiffly, once more becoming a commonplace old man in a wrinkled black alpaca coat, and made his way back to his vacant place, now in the shadow of Aunt Tilly Haslett’s form. As he passed along the front of the jury-box the foreman’s crippled right hand came up in a sort of a clumsy salute, and the juror at the other end of the rear row – No. 12, the oldest juror – leaned forward as if to speak to him, but remembered in time where his present duty lay. The old judge kept on until he came to Durham’s side, and he whispered to him: “Son, they’ve quit lookin’ at him and they’re all a-lookin’ at her. Son, rest your case.” Durham came out of a maze.

      “Your Honor,” he said as he rose, “the defense rests.”

      The jury were out only six minutes. Mr. Lukins insisted that it was only five minutes and a half, and added that he’d be dad-rotted if it was a second longer than that.

      As the lately accused Tandy came out of the courthouse with his imported lawyer – Aunt Tilly bringing up the rear with his trembling, weeping, happy little wife – friendly hands were outstretched to clasp his and a whiskered old gentleman with a thumbnail like a Brazil nut grabbed at his arm.

      “Whichaway did Billy Priest go?” he demanded – “little old Fightin’ Billy – whar did he go to? Soon as he started in talkin’ I placed him. Whar is he?”

      Walking side by side, Tandy and Durham came down the steps into the soft June night, and Tandy took a long, deep breath into his lungs.

      “Mr. Durham,” he said, “I owe a great deal to you.”

      “How’s that?” said Durham.

      Just ahead of them, centered in a shaft of light from the window of the barroom of the Drummers’ Home Hotel, stood Judge Priest. The old judge had been drinking. The pink of his face was a trifle more pronounced, the high whine in his voice a trifle weedier, as he counted one by one certain pieces of silver into the wide-open palm of a saddle-colored negro.

      “How’s that?” said Durham. “I say I owe everything in the world to you,” repeated Tandy.

      “No,” said Durham, “what you owe me is the fee you agreed to pay me for defending you. There’s the man you’re looking for.”

      And he pointed to the old judge.

      II. THE COUNTY TROT

      SATURDAY was the last day of the county fair and the day of the County Trot. It was also Veterans’ Day, when the old soldiers were the guests of honor of the management, and likewise Ladies’ Day, which meant that all white females of whatever age were admitted free. So naturally, in view of all these things, the biggest day of fair week was Saturday.

      The fair grounds lay in a hickory flat a mile out of town, and the tall scaly barks grew so close to the fence that they poked their limbs over its top and shed down nuts upon the track. The fence had been whitewashed once, back in the days of its youth when Hector was a pup; but Hec was an old dog now and the rains of years had washed the fence to a misty gray, so that in the dusk the long, warped panels stood up in rows, palely luminous – like the highshouldered ghosts of a fence. And the rust had run down from the eaten-out nail-holes until each plank had two staring marks in its face – like rheumy, bleared eyes. The ancient grandstand was of wood too, and had lain outdoors in all weathers until its rheumatic rafters groaned and creaked when the wind blew.

      Back of the grandstand stood Floral Hall and Agricultural Hall. Except for their names and their flagstaffs you might have taken them for two rather hastily built and long-neglected bams. Up the track to the north were the rows of stables that were empty, odorous little cubicles for fifty-one weeks