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When a Kentucky mountaineer goes to the penitentiary the chances are that he gets sore eyes from the white walls that enclose him, or quick consumption from the thick air that he breathes. It was entirely in accordance with the run of his luck that Anse Dugmore should get them both, the sore eyes first and then the consumption.
There is seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive kind of way, with absolutely no regard for costume or setting. Rarely is he a fine figure of a man.
Take Anse Dugmore now. He had a short-waisted, thin body and abnormally long, thin legs, like the shadow a man casts at sunup. He didn't have that steel-gray eye of which we so often read. His eyes weren't of any particular color, and he had a straggly mustache of sandy red and no chin worth mentioning; but he could shoot off a squirrel's head, or a man's, at the distance of a considerable number of yards.
Until he was past thirty he played merely an incidental part in the tribal war that had raged up and down Yellow Banks Creek and its principal tributary, the Pigeon Roost, since long before the Big War. He was getting out timber to be floated down the river on the spring rise when word came to him of an ambuscade that made him the head of his immediate clan and the upholder of his family's honor.
“Yore paw an' yore two brothers was laywaid this mawnin' comin' 'long Yaller Banks togither,” was the message brought by a breathless bearer of news. “The wimmenfolks air totin' 'em home now. Talt, he ain't dead yit.”
From a dry spot behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over the ridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eats up the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when he sat by a wood fire in a cabin of split boards and listened to his crippled-up father reciting the saga of thefeud, with the tally of this one killed and that one maimed; for this he had been schooled when he practised with rifle and revolver until, even as a boy, his aim had become as near an infallible thing as anything human gets to be; for this he had been schooled still more when he rode, armed and watchful, to church or court or election. Its coming found him ready.
Two days he ranged the ridges, watching his chance. The Tranthams were hard to find. They were barricaded in their log-walled strongholds, well guarded in anticipation of expected reprisals, and prepared in due season to come forth and prove by a dozen witnesses, or two dozen if so many should be needed to establish the alibi, that they had no hand in the massacre of the Dugmores.
But two days and nights of still-hunting, of patiently lying in wait behind brush fences, of noiseless, pussy-footed patrolling in likely places, brought the survivor of the decimated Dugmores his chance. He caught Pegleg Trantham riding down Red Bird Creek on a mare-mule. Pegleg was only a distant connection of the main strain of the enemy. It was probable that he had no part in the latest murdering; perhaps doubtful that he had any prior knowledge of the plot. But by his name and his blood-tie he was a Trantham, which was enough.
A writer of the Western school would have found little in this encounter that was reallyworth while to write about. Above the place of the meeting rose the flank of the mountain, scarred with washes and scantily clothed with stunted trees, so that in patches the soil showed through like the hide of a mangy hound. The creek was swollen by the April rains and ran bank-full through raw, red walls. Old Pegleg came cantering along with his rifle balanced on the sliding withers of his mare-mule, for he rode without a saddle. He was an oldish man and fat for a mountaineer. A ten-year-old nephew rode behind him, with his short arms encircling his uncle's paunch. The old man wore a dirty white shirt with a tabbed bosom; a single shiny white china button held the neckband together at the back. Below the button the shirt billowed open, showing his naked back. His wooden leg stuck straight out to the side, its worn brass tip carrying a blob of red mud, and his good leg dangled down straight, with the trousers hitched half-way up the bare shank and a soiled white-yarn sock falling down into the wrinkled and gaping top of an ancient congress gaiter.
From out of the woods came Anse Dugmore, bareheaded, crusted to his knees with dried mud and wet from the rain that had been dripping down since daybreak. A purpose showed in all the lines of his slouchy frame.
Pegleg jerked his rifle up, but he was hampered by the boy's arms about his middle and by his insecure perch upon the peaks of theslab-sided mule. The man afoot fired before the mounted enemy could swing his gunbarrel into line. The bullet ripped away the lower part of Pegleg's face and grazed the cheek of the crouching youngster behind him. The white-eyed nephew slid head first off the buck-jumping mule and instantly scuttled on all fours into the underbrush. The rifle dropped out of Trantham's hands and he lurched forward on the mule's neck, grabbing out with blind, groping motions. Dugmore stepped two paces forward to free his eyes of the smoke, which eddied back from his gunmuzzle into his face, and fired twice rapidly. The mule was bouncing up and down, sideways, in a mild panic. Pegleg rolled off her, as inert as a sack of grits, and lay face upward in the path, with his arms wide outspread on the mud. The mule galloped off in a restrained and dignified style until she was a hundred yards away, and then, having snorted the smells of burnt powder and fresh blood out of her nostrils, she fell to cropping the young leaves off the wayside bushes, mouthing the tender green shoots on her heavy iron bit contentedly.
For a long minute Anse Dugmore stood in the narrow footpath, listening. Then he slid three new shells into his rifle, and slipping down the bank he crossed the creek on a jam of driftwood and, avoiding the roads that followed the little watercourse, made over the shoulder of the mountain for his cabin, two miles downon the opposite side. When he was gone from sight the nephew of the dead Trantham rolled out of his hiding place and fled up the road, holding one hand to his wounded cheek and whimpering. Presently a gaunt, half-wild boar pig, with his spine arched like the mountains, came sniffing slowly down the hill, pausing frequently to cock his wedge-shaped head aloft and fix a hostile eye on two turkey buzzards that began to swing in narrowing circles over one particular spot on the bank of the creek.
The following day Anse sent word to the sheriff that he would be coming in to give himself up. It would not have been etiquette for the sheriff to come for him. He came in, well guarded on the way by certain of his clan, pleaded self-defense before a friendly county judge and was locked up in a one-cell log jail. His own cousin was the jailer and ministered to him kindly. He avoided passing the single barred window of the jail in the daytime or at night when there was a light behind him, and he expected to “come clear” shortly, as was customary.
But the Tranthams broke the rules of the game. The circuit judge lived half-way across the mountains in a county on the Virginia line; he was not an active partizan of either side in the feud. These Tranthams, disregarding all the ethics, went before this circuit judge and asked him for a change of venue, and got it,which was more; so that instead of being tried in Clayton County—and promptly acquitted—Anse Dugmore was taken to Woodbine County and there lodged in a shiny new brick jail. Things were in process of change in Woodbine. A spur of the railroad had nosed its way up from the lowlands and on through the Gap, and had made Loudon, the county-seat, a division terminal. Strangers from the North had come in, opening up the mountains to mines and sawmills and bringing with them many swarthy foreign laborers. A young man of large hopes and an Eastern college education had started a weekly newspaper and was talking big, in his editorial columns, of a new order of things. The foundation had even been laid for a graded school. Plainly Woodbine County was falling out of touch with the century-old traditions of her sisters to the north and west of her.
In due season, then, Anse Dugmore was brought up on a charge of homicide. The trial lasted less than a day. A jury of strangers heard the stories of Anse himself and of the dead Pegleg's white-eyed nephew. In the early afternoon they came back, a wooden toothpick in each mouth, from the new hotel where they had just had a most satisfying fifty-cent dinner at the expense of the commonwealth, and sentenced the defendant, Anderson Dugmore, to state prison at hard labor for the balance of his natural life.
The sheriff of Woodbine padlocked on Anse's ankles a set of leg irons that had been made by a mountain blacksmith out of log chains and led him to the new depot. It was Anse Dugmore's first ride on a railroad train; also it was the first ride on any train for Wyatt Trantham, head of the other clan, who, having been elected to the legislature while Anse lay in jail, had come over from Clayton, bound for the state capital, to draw his mileage and be a statesman.
It was not in the breed for the victorious Trantham to taunt his hobbled enemy or even to look his way, but he sat just across the aisle from the prisoner so that his ear might catch the jangle of the heavy irons when Dugmore moved in his seat. They all left the train together at the little blue-painted Frankfort station, Trantham turning off at the first crossroads to go where the round dome of the old capitol showed above the water-maple trees, and Dugmore clanking straight ahead, with a string of negroes and boys and the sheriff following along behind him. Under the shadow of a quarried-out hillside a gate opened in a high stone wall to admit him into life membership with a white-and-black-striped brotherhood of shame.
Four years there did the work for the gangling, silent mountaineer. One day, just before the Christmas holidays, the new governor of the state paid a visit to the prison. Only hisprivate secretary came with him. The warden showed them through the cell houses, the workshops, the dining hall and the walled yards. It was a Sunday afternoon; the white prisoners loafed in their stockade, the blacks in theirs. In a corner on the white side, where the thin and skimpy winter sunshine slanted over the stockade wall, Anse Dugmore was squatted; merely a rack of bones enclosed in a shapeless covering of black-and-white stripes. On his close-cropped head and over his cheekbones the skin was stretched so tight it seemed nearly ready to split. His eyes, glassy and bleared with pain, stared ahead of him with a sick man's fixed stare. Inside his convict's cotton shirt his chest was caved away almost to nothing, and from the collarless neckband his neck rose as bony as a plucked fowl's, with great, blue cords in it. Lacking a coverlet to pick, his fingers picked at the skin on his retreating chin.
As the governor stood in an arched doorway watching, the lengthening afternoon shadow edged along and covered the hunkered-down figure by the wall. Anse tottered to his feet, moved a few inches so that he might still be in the sunshine, and settled down again. This small exertion started a cough that threatened to tear him apart. He drew his hand across his mouth and a red stain came away on the knotty knuckles. The warden was a kindly enough man in the ordinary relations of life,but nine years as a tamer of man-beasts in a great stone cage had overlaid his sympathies with a thickening callus.
“One of our lifers that we won't have with us much longer,” he said casually, noting that the governor's eyes followed the sick convict. “When the con gets one of these hill billies he goes mighty fast.”
“A mountaineer, then?” said the governor. “What's his name?”
“Dugmore,” answered the warden; “sent from Clayton County. One of those Clayton County feud fighters.”
The governor nodded understandingly. “What sort of a record has he made here?”
“Oh, fair enough!” said the warden. “Those man-killers from the mountains generally make good prisoners. Funny thing about this fellow, though. All the time he's been here he never, so far as I know, had a message or a visitor or a line of writing from the outside. Nor wrote a letter out himself. Nor made friends with anybody, convict or guard.”
“Has he applied for a pardon?” asked the governor.
“Lord, no!” said the warden. “When he was well he just took what was coming to him, the same as he's taking it now. I can look up his record, though, if you'd care to see it, sir.”
“I believe I should,” said the governor quietly.
A spectacled young wife-murderer, whoworked in the prison office on the prison books, got down a book and looked through it until he came to a certain entry on a certain page. The warden was right—so far as the black marks of the prison discipline went, the friendless convict's record showed fair.
“I think,” said the young governor to the warden and his secretary when they had moved out of hearing of the convict bookkeeper—“I think I'll give that poor devil a pardon for a Christmas gift. It's no more than a mercy to let him die at home, if he has any home to go to.”
“I could have him brought in and let you tell him yourself, sir,” volunteered the warden.
“No, no,” said the governor quickly. “I don't want to hear that cough again. Nor look on such a wreck,” he added.
Two days before Christmas the warden sent to the hospital ward for No. 874. No. 874, that being Anse Dugmore, came shuffling in and kept himself upright by holding with one hand to the door jamb. The warden sat rotund and impressive, in a swivel chair, holding in his hands a folded-up, blue-backed document.
“Dugmore,” he said in his best official manner, “when His Excellency, Governor Woodford, was here on Sunday he took notice that your general health was not good. So, of his own accord, he has sent you an unconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is.”
The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on the warden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazed shallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.
“I said the governor has given you a pardon,” repeated the warden, staring hard at him.
“I heered you the fust time,” croaked the prisoner in his eaten-out voice. “When kin I go?”
“Is that all you've got to say?” demanded the warden, bristling up.
“I said, when kin I go?” repeated No. 874.
“Go!—you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!”
The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of his indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap, black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the inbred instinct of the hillsman he swungabout and headed for the little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the wondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.
“Damned savage!” he said to himself. “Didn't even say thank you. I'll bet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than a moccasin snake.”
Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes later by a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble passenger aboard the eastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping from weakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush day coach.
“Just a bundle of bones held together by a skin,” the brakeman was saying to the conductor, “and the smell of the pen all over him. Never said a word to me—just looked at me sort of dumb. Bound for plumb up at the far end of the division, accordin' to the way his ticket reads. I doubt if he lives to get there.”
The warden and the brakeman both were wrong. The freed man did live to get there. And it was an emotion which the warden had never suspected that held life in him all that afternoon and through the comfortless night in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy, self-sufficient little train went looping,like an overgrown measuring worm, up through the blue grass, around the outlying knobs of the foothills, on and on through the great riven chasm of the gateway into a bleak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two bad hemorrhages on the way, but he lived.
Under the full moon of a white and flawless night before Christmas, Shem Dugmore's squatty log cabin made a blot on the thin blanket of snow, and inside the one room of the cabin Shem Dugmore sat alone by the daubed-clay hearth, glooming. Hours passed and he hardly moved except to stir the red coals or kick back some ambitious ember of hickory that leaped out upon the uneven floor. Suddenly something heavy fell limply against the locked door, and instantly, all alertness, the shock-headed mountaineer was backed up against the farther wall, out of range of the two windows, with his weapons drawn, silent, ready for what might come. After a minute there was a feeble, faint pecking sound—half knock, half scratch—at the lower part of the door. It might have been a wornout dog or any spent wild creature, but no line of Shem Dugmore's figure relaxed, and under his thick, sandy brows his eyes, in the flickering light, had the greenish shine of an angry cat-animal's.
“Whut is it?” he called. “And whut do you want? Speak out peartly!”
illo_facing_p192He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that its butt made a crooked furrow in the snow.—Page 197.To List
The answer came through the thick planking thinly, in a sort of gasping whine that ended in a chattering cough; but even after Shem's ear caught the words, and even after he recognized the changed but still familiar cadence of the voice, he abated none of his caution. Carefully he unbolted the door, and, drawing it inch by inch slowly ajar, he reached out, exposing only his hand and arm, and drew bodily inside the shell of a man that was fallen, huddled up, against the log door jamb. He dropped the wooden crossbar back into its sockets before he looked a second time at the intruder, who had crawled across the floor and now lay before the wide mouth of the hearth in a choking spell. Shem Dugmore made no move until the fit was over and the sufferer lay quiet.
“How did you git out, Anse?” were the first words he spoke.
The consumptive rolled his head weakly from side to side and swallowed desperately. “Pardoned out—in writin'—yistiddy.”
“You air in purty bad shape,” said Shem.
“Yes,”—the words came very slowly—“my lungs give out on me—and my eyes. But—but I got here.”
“You come jist in time,” said his cousin; “this time tomorrer and you wouldn't a' never found me here. I'd 'a' been gone.”
“Gone!—gone whar?”
“Well,” said Shem slowly, “after you wassent away it seemed like them Tranthams got the upper hand complete. All of our side whut ain't dead—and that's powerful few—is moved off out of the mountings to Winchester, down in the settlemints. I'm 'bout the last, and I'm a-purposin' to slip out tomorrer night while the Tranthams is at their Christmas rackets—they'd layway me too ef——”
“But my wife—did she——”
“I thought maybe you'd heered tell about that whilst you was down yon,” said Shem in a dulled wonder. “The fall after you was took away yore woman she went over to the Tranthams. Yes, sir; she took up with the head devil of 'em all—old Wyatt Trantham hisself—and she went to live at his house up on the Yaller Banks.”
“Is she——Did she——”
The ex-convict was struggling to his knees. His groping skeletons of hands were right in the hot ashes. The heat cooked the moisture from his sodden garments in little films of vapor and filled the cabin with the reek of the prison dye.
“Did she—did she——”
“Oh, she's been dead quite a spell now,” stated Shem. “I would have s'posed you'd 'a' heered that, too, somewhars. She had a kind of a risin' in the breast.”
“But my young uns—little Anderson and—and Elviry?”
The sick man was clear up on his knees now,his long arms hanging and his eyes, behind their matted lids, fixed on Shem's impassive face. Could the warden have seen him now, and marked his attitude and his words, he would have known what it was that had brought this dying man back tohisown mountain valley with the breath of life still in him. A dumb, unuttered love for the two shock-headed babies he had left behind in the split-board cabin was the one big thing in Anse Dugmore's whole being—bigger even than his sense of allegiance to the feud.
“My young uns, Shem?”
“Wyatt Trantham took 'em and he kep' 'em—he's got 'em both now.”
“Does he—does he use 'em kindly?”
“I ain't never heered,” said Shem simply. “He never had no young uns of his own, and it mout be he uses 'em well. He's the high sheriff now.”
“I was countin' on gittin' to see 'em agin—an buyin 'em some little Chrismus fixin's,” the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his rasping whisper. “I reckon it ain't no use to—to be thinkin'—of that there now?”
“No 'arthly use at all,” said Shem, with brutal directness. “Ef you had the strength to git thar, the Tranthams would shoot you down like a fice dog.”
Anse nodded weakly. He sank down again on the floor, face to the boards, coughing hard. It was the droning voice of his cousin thatbrought him back from the borders of the coma he had been fighting off for hours.
For, to Shem, the best hater and the poorest fighter of all his cleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing man and roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowed white corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over him he told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmerciful war, ticking off on his blunt finger ends the grim totals of this one ambushed and that one killed in the open, overpowered and beaten under by weight of odds. He told such details as he knew of the theft of the young wife and the young ones, Elvira and little Anderson.
“Anse, did ary Trantham see you a-gittin' here tonight?”
“Nobody—that knowed me—seed me.”
“Old Wyatt Trantham, he rid into Manchester this evenin' 'bout fo' o'clock—I seed him passin' over the ridge,” went on Shem. “He'll be ridin' back 'long Pigeon Roost some time before mawnin'. He done you a heap o' dirt, Anse.”
The prostrate man was listening hard.
“Anse, I got yore old rifle right here in the house. Ef you could git up thar on the mounting, somewhar's alongside the Pigeon Roost trail, you could git him shore. He'll be full of licker comin' back.”
And now a seeming marvel was coming topass, for the caved-in trunk was rising on the pipestem legs and the shaking fingers were outstretched, reaching for something.
Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifle and began reloading it afresh from a box of shells.
A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted “dead'ning”—Anse Dugmore was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that its butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail of a crippled snake. He fell and got up, and fell and rose again. He coughed and up the ridge a ranging dog-fox barked back an answer to his cough.
From out of the slitted door Shem watched him until the scrub oaks at the edge of the clearing swallowed him up. Then Shem fastened himself in and made ready to start his flight to the lowlands that very night.
Just below the forks of Pigeon Roost Creek the trail that followed its banks widened into a track wide enough for wagon wheels. On one side lay the diminished creek, now filmed over with a glaze of young ice. On the other the mountain rose steeply. Fifteen feet up the bluff side a fallen dead tree projected its rotted, broken roots, like snaggled teeth, from the clayey bank. Behind this tree's trunk, in the snow and half-frozen, half-melted yellowmire, Anse Dugmore was stretched on his face. The barrel of the rifle barely showed itself through the interlacing root ends. It pointed downward and northward toward the broad, moonlit place in the road. Its stock was pressed tightly against Anse Dugmore's fallen-in cheek; the trigger finger of his right hand, fleshless as a joint of cane, was crooked about the trigger guard. A thin stream of blood ran from his mouth and dribbled down his chin and coagulated in a sticky smear upon the gun stock. His lungs, what was left of them, were draining away.
He lay without motion, saving up the last ounce of his life. The cold had crawled up his legs to his hips; he was dead already from the waist down. He no longer coughed, only gasped thickly. He knew that he was about gone; but he knew, too, that he would last, clear-minded and clear-eyed, until High Sheriff Wyatt Trantham came. His brain would last—and his trigger finger.
Then he heard him coming. Up the trail sounded the muffled music of a pacer's hoofs single-footing through the snow, and after that, almost instantly Trantham rode out into sight and loomed larger and larger as he drew steadily near the open place under the bank. He was wavering in the saddle. He drew nearer and nearer, and as he came out on the wide patch of moonlit snow, he pulled the single-footer down to a walk and halted him andbegan fumbling in the right-hand side of the saddlebags that draped his horse's shoulder.
Up in its covert the rifle barrel moved an inch or two, then steadied and stopped, the bone-sight at its tip resting full on the broad of the drunken rider's breast. The boney finger moved inward from the trigger guard and closed ever so gently about the touchy, hair-filed trigger—then waited.
For the uncertain hand of Trantham, every movement showing plain in the crystal, hard, white moon, was slowly bringing from under the flap of the right-side saddlebag something that was round and smooth and shone with a yellowish glassy light, like a fat flask filled with spirits. And Anse Dugmore waited, being minded now to shoot him as he put the bottle to his lips, and so cheat Trantham of his last drink on earth, as Trantham had cheated him of his liberty and his babies—as Trantham had cheated those babies of the Christmas fixings which the state's five dollars might have bought.
He waited, waited——
This was not the first time the high sheriff had stopped that night on his homeward ride from the tiny county seat, as his befuddlement proclaimed; but halting there in the open, just past the forks of the Pigeon Roost, he was moved by a new idea. He fumbled in the right-hand flap of his saddlebags andbrought out a toy drum, round and smooth, with shiny yellow sides. A cheap china doll with painted black ringlets and painted blue eyes followed the drum, and then a torn paper bag, from which small pieces of cheap red-and-green dyed candy sifted out between the sheriff's fumbling fingers and fell into the snow.
Thirty feet away, in the dead leaves matted under the roots of an uptorn dead tree, something moved—something moved; and then there was a sound like a long, deep, gurgling sigh, and another sound like some heavy, lengthy object settling itself down flat upon the snow and the leaves.
The first faint rustle cleared Trantham's brain of the liquor fumes. He jammed the toys and the candy back into the saddlebags and jerked his horse sidewise into the protecting shadow of the bluff, reaching at the same time to the shoulder holster buckled about his body under the unbuttoned overcoat. For a long minute he listened keenly, the drawn pistol in his hand. There was nothing to hear except his own breathing and the breathing of his horse.
“Sho! Some old hawg turnin' over in her bed,” he said to the horse, and holstering the pistol he went racking on down Pigeon Roost Creek, with Christmas for Elviry and little Anderson in his saddlebags.
When they found Anse Dugmore in his ambush another snow had fallen on his backand he was slightly more of a skeleton than ever; but the bony finger was still crooked about the trigger, the rusted hammer was back at full cock and there was a dried brownish stain on the gun stock. So, from these facts, his finders were moved to conclude that the freed convict must have bled to death from his lungs before the sheriff ever passed, which they held to be a good thing all round and a lucky thing for the sheriff.
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There was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that used to bother strangers in our town until they got used to it. It started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up interminably—so it seemed to them—a monotonous, jarring thump-thump, thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a steamy hot halo of their own goodness, these aliens knew what it was that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt amply recompensed for the lost hours of their beauty sleep.
In these degenerate latter days I believe there is a machine that accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and crushing, which no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take the poetry out ofthe operation. Old Judge Priest, our circuit judge, and the reigning black deity of his kitchen, Aunt Dilsey Turner, would have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived and her good right arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round disks and delicately pink each one with a fork—and then, if you were listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an iron lip.
On a certain Sunday I have in mind, Judge Priest woke with the first premonitory thud from the kitchen, and he was up and dressed in his white linens and out upon the wide front porch while the summer day was young and unblemished. The sun was not up good yet. It made a red glow, like a barn afire, through the treetops looking eastward. Lie-abed blackbirds were still talking over family matters in the maples that clustered round the house, and in the back yard Judge Priest's big redrooster hoarsely circulated gossip in regard to a certain little brown hen, first crowing out the news loudly and then listening, with his head on one side, while the rooster in the next yard took it up and repeated it to a rooster living farther down the road, as is the custom among male scandalizers the world over. Upon the lawn the little gossamer hammocks that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were spangled with dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering rosary and the center of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket. Likewise each web was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees were shedding down their podded product so thickly that across open spaces the slanting lines of the drifting fiber looked like snow. It would be hot enough after a while, but now the whole world was sweet and fresh and washed clean.
It impressed Judge Priest so. He lowered his bulk into a rustic chair made of hickory withes that gave to his weight, and put his thoughts upon breakfast and the goodness of the day; but presently, as he sat there, he saw something that set a frown between his faded blue eyes.
He saw, coming down Clay Street, upon the opposite side, an old man—a very feeble old man—who was tall and thin and dressed in somber black. The man was lame—he dragged one leg along with the hitching gait of the paralytic. Traveling with painful slowness,he came on until he reached the corner above. Then automatically he turned at right angles and left the narrow wooden sidewalk and crossed the dusty road. He passed Judge Priest's, looking neither to the right nor the left, and so kept on until he reached the corner below. Still following an invisible path in the deep-furrowed dust, he crossed again to the other side. Just as he got there his halt leg seemed to give out altogether and for a minute or two he stood holding himself up by a fumbling grip upon the slats of a tree box before he went laboriously on, a figure of pain and weakness in the early sunshine that was now beginning to slant across his path and dapple his back with checkerings of shadow and light.
This maneuver was inexplicable—a stranger would have puzzled to make it out. The shade was as plentiful upon one side of Clay Street as upon the other; each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as its brother over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in honeysuckles and balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement line on the opposite side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest's roomy and rambling old home, had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window. And surely to this lone pedestrian every added step must have been an added labor. A stranger would never have understood it; but Judge Priest understood it—hehad seen that same thing repeated countless times in the years that stretched behind him. Always it had distressed him inwardly, but on this particular morning it distressed him more than ever. The toiling grim figure in black had seemed so feeble and so tottery and old.
Well, Judge Priest was not exactly what you would call young. With an effort he heaved himself up out of the depths of his hickory chair and stood at the edge of his porch, polishing a pink bald dome of forehead as though trying to make up his mind to something. Jefferson Poindexter, resplendent in starchy white jacket and white apron, came to the door.
“Breakfus' served, suh!” he said, giving to an announcement touching on food that glamour of grandeur of which his race alone enjoys the splendid secret.
“Hey?” asked the judge absently.
“Breakfus'—hit's on the table waitin', suh,” stated Jeff. “Mizz Polks sent over her houseboy with a dish of fresh razberries fur yore breakfus'; and she say to tell you, with her and Mistah Polkses' compliments, they is fresh picked out of her garden—specially fur you.”
The lady and gentleman to whom Jeff had reference were named Polk, but in speaking of white persons for whom he had a high regard Jeff always, wherever possible within the limitationsof our speech, tacked on that final s. It was in the nature of a delicate verbal compliment, implying that the person referred to was worthy of enlargement and pluralization.
Alone in the cool, high-ceiled, white-walled dining room, Judge Priest ate his breakfast mechanically. The raspberries were pink beads of sweetness; the young fried chicken was a poem in delicate and flaky browns; the spoon bread could not have been any better if it had tried; and the beaten biscuits were as light as snowflakes and as ready to melt on the tongue; but Judge Priest spoke hardly a word all through the meal. Jeff, going out to the kitchen for the last course, said to Aunt Dilsey:
“Ole boss-man seem lak he's got somethin' on his mind worryin' him this mawnin'.”
When Jeff returned, with a turn of crisp waffles in one hand and a pitcher of cane sirup in the other, he stared in surprise, for the dining room was empty and he could hear his employer creaking down the hall. Jeff just naturally hated to see good hot waffles going to waste. He ate them himself, standing up; and they gave him a zest for his regular breakfast, which followed in due course of time.
From the old walnut hatrack, with its white-tipped knobs that stood just inside the front door, Judge Priest picked up a palmleaf fan; and he held the fan slantwise as a shield for his eyes and his bare head against the sun's glare as he went down the porch steps andpassed out of his own yard, traversed the empty street and strove with the stubborn gate latch of the little house that faced his own. It was a poor-looking little house, and its poorness had extended to its surroundings—as if poverty was a contagion that spread. In Judge Priest's yard, now, the grass, though uncared for, yet grew thick and lush; but here, in this small yard, there were bare, shiny spots of earth showing through the grass—as though the soil itself was out at elbows and the nap worn off its green-velvet coat; but the vines about the porch were thick enough for an ambuscade and from behind their green screen came a voice in hospitable recognition.
“Is that you, judge? Well sir, I'm glad to see you! Come right in; take a seat and sit down and rest yourself.”
The speaker showed himself in the arched opening of the vine barrier—an old man—not quite so old, perhaps, as the judge. He was in his shirtsleeves. There was a patch upon one of the sleeves. His shoes had been newly shined, but the job was poorly done; the leather showed a dulled black upon the toes and a weathered yellow at the sides and heels. As he spoke his voice ran up and down—the voice of a deaf person who cannot hear his own words clearly, so that he pitches them in a false key. For added proof of this affliction he held a lean and slightly tremulous hand cupped behind his ear.
The other hand he extended in greeting as the old judge mounted the step of the low porch. The visitor took one of two creaky wooden rockers that stood in the narrow space behind the balsam vines, and for a minute or two he sat without speech, fanning himself. Evidently these neighborly calls between these two old men were not uncommon; they could enjoy the communion of silence together without embarrassment.
The town clocks struck—first the one on the city hall struck eight times sedately; and then, farther away, the one on the county courthouse. This one struck five times slowly, hesitated a moment, struck eleven times with great vigor, hesitated again, struck once with a big, final boom, and was through. No amount of repairing could cure the courthouse clock of this peculiarity. It kept the time, but kept it according to a private way of its own. Immediately after it ceased the bell on the Catholic church, first and earliest of the Sunday bells, began tolling briskly. Judge Priest waited until its clamoring had died away.
“Goin' to be good and hot after while,” he said, raising his voice.
“What say?”
“I say it's goin' to be mighty warm a little later on in the day,” repeated Judge Priest.
“Yes, suh; I reckon you're right there,” assented the host. “Just a minute ago, before you came over, I was telling Liddie she'd findit middlin' close in church this morning. She's going, though—runaway horses wouldn't keep her away from church! I'm not going myself—seems as though I'm getting more and more out of the church habit here lately.”
Judge Priest's eyes squinted in whimsical appreciation of this admission. He remembered that the other man, during the lifetime of his second wife, had been a regular attendant at services—going twice on Sundays and to Wednesday night prayer meetings too; but the second wife had been dead going on four years now—or was it five? Time sped so!
The deaf man spoke on:
“So I just thought I'd sit here and try to keep cool and wait for that Ledbetter boy to come round with the Sunday paper. Did you read last Sunday's paper, judge? Colonel Watterson certainly had a mighty fine piece on those Northern money devils. It's round here somewhere—I cut it out to keep it. I'd like to have you read it and pass your opinion on it. These young fellows do pretty well, but there's none of them can write like the colonel, in my judgment.”
Judge Priest appeared not to have heard him.
“Ed Tilghman,” he said abruptly in his high, fine voice, that seemed absurdly out of place, coming from his round frame, “you and me have lived neighbors together a good while, haven't we? We've been right acros't the street from one another all this time. It kind ofjolts me sometimes when I git to thinkin' how many years it's really been; because we're gittin' along right smartly in years—all us old fellows are. Ten years from now, say, there won't be so many of us left.” He glanced sidewise at the lean, firm profile of his friend. “You're younger than some of us; but, even so, you ain't exactly what I'd call a young man yourself.”
Avoiding the direct, questioning gaze that his companion turned on him at this, the judge reached forward and touched a ripe balsam apple that dangled in front of him. Instantly it split, showing the gummed red seeds clinging to the inner walls of the sensitive pod.
“I'm listening to you, judge,” said the deaf man.
For a moment the old judge waited. There was about him almost an air of embarrassment. Still considering the ruin of the balsam apple, he spoke, and it was with a sort of hurried anxiety, as though he feared he might be checked before he could say what he had to say.
“Ed,” he said, “I was settin' on my porch a while ago waitin' for breakfast, and your brother came by.” He shot a quick, apprehensive glance at his silent auditor. Except for a tautened flickering of the muscles about the mouth, there was no sign that the other had heard him. “Your brother Abner came by,” repeated the judge, “and I set over there on my porch and watched him pass. Ed,Abner's gittin' mighty feeble! He jest about kin drag himself along—he's had another stroke lately, they tell me. He had to hold on to that there treebox down yonder, steadyin' himself after he crossed back over to this side. Lord knows what he was doin' draggin' down-town on a Sunday mornin'—force of habit, I reckin. Anyway he certainly did look older and more poorly than ever I saw him before. He's a failin' man if I'm any judge. Do you hear me plain?” he asked.
“I hear you,” said his neighbor in a curiously flat voice. It was Tilghman's turn to avoid the glances of his friend. He stared straight ahead of him through a rift in the vines.
“Well, then,” went on Judge Priest, “here's what I've got to say to you, Ed Tilghman. You know as well as I do that I've never pried into your private affairs, and it goes mightily against the grain for me to be doin' so now; but, Ed, when I think of how old we're all gittin' to be, and when the Camp meets and I see you settin' there side by side almost, and yet never seemin' to see each other—and this mornin' when I saw Abner pass, lookin' so gaunt and sick—and it sech a sweet, ca'm mornin' too, and everything so quiet and peaceful——” He broke off and started anew. “I don't seem to know exactly how to put my thoughts into words—and puttin' things into words is supposed to be my trade too. Anyway I couldn't go to Abner. He's not my neighborand you are; and besides, you're the youngest of the two. So—so I came over here to you. Ed, I'd like mightily to take some word from you to your brother Abner. I'd like to do it the best in the world! Can't I go to him with a message from you—today? Tomorrow might be too late!”
He laid one of his pudgy hands on the bony knee of the deaf man; but the hand slipped away as Tilghman stood up.
“Judge Priest,” said Tilghman, looking down at him, “I've listened to what you've had to say; and I didn't stop you, because you are my friend and I know you mean well by it. Besides, you're my guest, under my own roof.” He stumped back and forth in the narrow confines of the porch. Otherwise he gave no sign of any emotion that might be astir within him, his face being still set and his voice flat. “What's between me and my—what's between me and that man you just named always will be between us. He's satisfied to let things go on as they are. I'm satisfied to let them go on. It's in our breed, I guess. Words—just words—wouldn't help mend this thing. The reason for it would be there just the same, and neither one of us is going to be able to forget that so long as we both live. I'd just as soon you never brought this—this subject up again. If you went to him I presume he'd tell you the same thing. Let it be, Judge Priest—it's past mending. We two have gone onthis way for fifty years nearly. We'll keep on going on so. I appreciate your kindness, Judge Priest; but let it be—let it be!”
There was finality miles deep and fixed as basalt in his tone. He checked his walk and called in at a shuttered window.
“Liddie,” he said in his natural up-and-down voice, “before you put off for church, couldn't you mix up a couple of lemonades or something? Judge Priest is out here on the porch with me.”
“No,” said Judge Priest, getting slowly up, “I've got to be gittin' back before the sun's up too high. If I don't see you again meanwhile be shore to come to the next regular meetin' of the Camp—on Friday night,” he added.
“I'll be there,” said Tilghman. “And I'll try to find that piece of Colonel Watterson's and send it over to you. I'd like mightily for you to read it.”
He stood at the opening in the vines, with one slightly palsied hand fumbling at a loose tendril as the judge passed down the short yard-walk and out at the gate. Then he went back to his chair and sat down again. All those little muscles in his jowls were jumping.
Clay Street was no longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there groups of children—the little girls in prim and starchy white, the little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and all of them were moving towarda common center—Sunday school. Twice again that day would the street show life—a little later when grown-ups went their way to church, and again just after the noonday dinner, when young people and servants, carrying trays and dishes under napkins, would cross and recross from one house to another. The Sunday interchange of special dainties between neighbors amounted in our town to a ceremonial and a rite; but after that, until the cool of the evening, the town would simmer in quiet, while everybody took Sunday naps.
With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as though trying to fend off something disagreeable—a memory, perhaps, or it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats and midges about, for by now—even so soon—the dew was dried. The leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides up like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out.
In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall,having for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter, in whose gray and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by babies and grandbabies.
There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who was forever starting somewhere and never going there—because, as sure as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank had failed on him, or a horse had kicked him in the head—or maybe it was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be his volunteer pallbearers.
There was Mr. H. Jackman—Brother Jackman to all the town—who had been our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that word, which is at once the sweetest and bitterest word in our tongue; for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad, would go through the market to take his pick of what was there,and to the Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new garments when his old ones wore shabby—and yet never paid a cent for anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to take him for a retired banker—that's a fact!
And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man—had killed him in fair fight and had been acquitted—and yet walked quiet back streets at all hours, a gray, silent shadow, and never slept except with a bright light burning in his room.
The tragedy of Mr. Edward Tilghman, though, and of Captain Abner G. Tilghman, his elder brother, was both a tragedy and a mystery—the biggest tragedy and the deepest mystery our town had ever known or ever would know probably. All that anybody knew for certain was that for upward of fifty years neither of them had spoken to the other, nor by deed or look had given heed to the other. As boys, back in sixty-one, they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the other's shoulder, they had stood up with a hundred others to be sworn into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on the morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older brother her silk scarf off her shoulders to wear for a sash. Both the brothers had liked her; but by this publicact she made it plain which of them was her choice.
Then the company had marched off to the camp on the Tennessee border, where the new troops were drilling; and as they marched some watchers wept and others cheered—but the cheering predominated, for it was to be only a sort of picnic anyhow—so everybody agreed. As the orators—who mainly stayed behind—had pointed out, the Northern people would not fight. And even if they should fight could not one Southerner whip four Yankees? Certainly he could; any fool knew that much. In a month or two months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again, covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then—this by common report and understanding—Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman would be married, with a big church wedding.
The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic. And when it was over, after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had become as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit speaking to each other then and there, and to any man's knowledge they never spoke again.They served the war out, Abner rising just before the end to a captaincy, Edward serving always as a private in the ranks. In a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard, hopeless days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back with the limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they were all boys still—but in experience, men, and in suffering, grandsires.
Two months after they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to Edward, the younger brother. Within a year she died, and after a decent period of mourning Edward married a second time—only to be widowed again after many years. His second wife bore him children and they died—all except one, a daughter, who grew up and married badly; and after her mother's death she came back to live with her deaf father and minister to him. As for Captain Abner Tilghman, he never married—never, so far as the watching eyes of the town might tell, looked with favor upon another woman. And he never spoke to his brother or to any of his brother's family—or his brother to him.
With years the wall of silence they had builded up between them turned to ice and the ice to stone. They lived on the same street, but never did Edward enter Captain Abner's bank, never did Captain Abner pass Edward's house—always he crossed over to the opposite side. They belonged to the same Veterans'Camp—indeed there was only the one for them to belong to; they voted the same ticket—straight Democratic; and in the same church, the old Independent Presbyterian, they worshiped the same God by the same creed, the older brother being an elder and the younger a plain member—and yet never crossed looks.
The town had come to accept this dumb and bitter feud as unchangeable and eternal; in time people ceased even to wonder what its cause had been, and in all the long years only one man had tried, before now, to heal it up. When old Doctor Henrickson died, a young and ardent clergyman, fresh from the Virginia theological school, came out to take the vacant pulpit; and he, being filled with a high sense of his holy calling, thought it shameful that such a thing should be in the congregation. He went to see Captain Tilghman about it. He never went but that once. Afterward it came out that Captain Tilghman had threatened to walk out of church and never darken its doors again if the minister ever dared to mention his brother's name in his presence. So the young minister sorrowed, but obeyed, for the captain was rich and a generous giver to the church.
And he had grown richer with the years, and as he grew richer his brother grew poorer—another man owned the drug store where Edward Tilghman had failed. They had grown from young to middle-aged men and frommiddle-aged men to old, infirm men; and first the grace of youth and then the solidness of maturity had gone out of them and the gnarliness of age had come upon them; one was halt of step and the other was dull of ear; and the town through half a century of schooling had accustomed itself to the situation and took it as a matter of course. So it was and so it always would be—a tragedy and a mystery. It had not been of any use when the minister interfered and it was of no use now. Judge Priest, with the gesture of a man who is beaten, dropped the fan on the porch floor, went into his darkened sitting room, stretched himself wearily on a creaking horsehide sofa and called out to Jeff to make him a mild toddy—one with plenty of ice in it.
On this same Sunday—or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same Sunday—at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest's town, Corporal Jacob Speck, late of Sigel's command, sat at the kitchen window of the combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with a bowllike an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal's blue Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon a comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were very much elsewhere.
Reared back there at seeming ease, the corporal none the less was not happy in his mind. It was not that he so much minded being left at home to mind the youngest baby while the rest of the family spent the afternoon amid the Teutonic splendors of Smeltzer's Harlem River Casino, with its acres of gravel walks and its whitewashed tree trunks, its straggly flower beds and its high-collared beers. He was used to that sort of thing. Since a plague of multiplying infirmities of the body had driven him out of his job in the tax office, the corporal had not done much except nurse the babies that occurred in the Speck-Engel establishment with such unerring regularity. Sometimes, it is true, he did slip down to the corner for maybe zwei glasses of beer and a game of pinocle; but then, likely as not, there would come inopportunely a towheaded descendant to tell him Mommer needed him back at the flat right away to mind the baby while she went marketing or to the movies.
He could endure that—he had to. What riled Corporal Jacob Speck on this warm and sunny Sunday was a realization that he was not doing his share at making the history ofthe period. The week before had befallen the fiftieth anniversary of the marching away of his old regiment to the front; there had been articles in the daily papers about it. Also, in patriotic commemoration of the great event there had been a parade of the wrinkled survivors—ninety-odd of them—following their tattered and faded battle flag down Fifth Avenue past apathetic crowds, nine-tenths of whom had been born since the war—in foreign lands mainly; and at least half, if one might judge by their looks, did not know what the parading was all about, and did not particularly care either.
The corporal had not participated in the march of the veterans; he had not even attended the banquet that followed it. True, the youngest grandchild was at the moment cutting one of her largest jaw teeth and so had required, for the time, an extraordinary and special amount of minding; but the young lady's dental difficulty was not the sole reason for his absence. Three weeks earlier the corporal had taken part in Decoration Day, and certainly one parade a month was ample strain upon a pair of legs such as he owned. He had returned home with his game leg behaving more gamely then usual and with his sound one full of new and painful kinks. Also, in honor of the occasion he had committed the error of wearing a pair of stiff and inflexible new shoes; wherefore he had worn his carpet slippers ever since.
Missing the fiftieth anniversary was not the main point with the corporal—that was merely the fortune of war, to be accepted with fortitude and with no more than a proper and natural amount of grumbling by one who had been a good soldier and was now a good citizen; but for days before the event, and daily ever since, divers members of the old regiment had been writing pieces to the papers—the German papers and the English-printing papers too—long pieces, telling of the trip to Washington, and then on into Virginia and Tennessee, speaking of this campaign and that and this battle and that. And because there was just now a passing wave of interest in Civil War matters, the papers had printed these contributions, thereby reflecting much glory on the writers thereof. But Corporal Speck, reading these things, had marveled deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for his own recollection of these stirring and epochal events differed most widely from the reminiscent narration of each misguided chronicler.
It was, indeed, a shameful thing that the most important occurrences of the whole war should be so shockingly mangled and mishandled in the retelling. They were so grievously wrong, those other veterans, and he was so absolutely right. He was always right in these matters. Only the night before, during a merciful respite from his nursing duties, hehad, in Otto Wittenpen's back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall stein with some bitterness of certain especially grievous misstatements of plain fact on the part of certain faulty-minded comrades. In reply Otto had said, in a rather sneering tone the corporal thought:
“Say, then, Jacob, why don't you yourself write a piece to the paper telling about this regiment of yours—the way it was?”
“I will. Tomorrow I will do so without fail,” he had said, the ambition of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he had been—yes, none better—and a good citizen, and in his day a capable and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his own story. That morning, when the youngest grandchild slept and his daughter and his daughter's husband and the brood of his older grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words would not come—or, at least, after the first line or two they would not come.
The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on his two good legs—both good legs then—to fight for the country whose language he could not yet speakwas there in bright and living colors; but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as you might say from the clear sky, a great idea—an idea so magnificent that he almost dropped the youngest Miss Engel off his lap at the splendid shock of it.
With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the sudden jostle the young lady slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmost and smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel apartment.
The bed, whereon of nights Corporal Speck reposed with a bucking bronco of an eight-year-old grandson for a bedmate, was jammed close against the plastering, under the onesmall window set diagonally in a jog in the wall, and opening out upon an airshaft, like a chimney. Time had been when the corporal had a room and a bed all his own; that was before the family began to grow so fast in its second generation and while he still held a place of lucrative employment at the tax office.
As he got down upon his knees beside the bed the old man uttered a little groan of discomfort. He felt about in the space underneath and drew out a small tin trunk, rusted on its corners and dented in its sides. He made a laborious selection of keys from a key-ring he got out of his pocket, unlocked the trunk and lifted out a heavy top tray. The tray contained, among other things, such treasures as his naturalization papers, his pension papers, a photograph of his dead wife, and a small bethumbed passbook of the East Side Germania Savings Bank. Underneath was a black fatigue hat with a gold cord round its crown, a neatly folded blue uniform coat, with the G. A. R. bronze showing in its uppermost lapel, and below that, in turn, the suit of neat black the corporal wore on high state occasions and would one day wear to be buried in. Pawing and digging, he worked his hands to the very bottom, and then, with a little grunt, he heaved out the thing he wanted—the one trophy, except a stiffened kneecap and an honorable record, this old man had brought home from the South. It was acaptured Confederate knapsack, flattened and flabby. Its leather was dry-rotted with age and the brass C. S. A. on the outer flap was gangrened and sunken in; the flap curled up stiffly, like an old shoe sole.
The crooked old fingers undid a buckle fastening and from the musty and odorous interior of the knapsack withdrew a letter, in a queer-looking yellowed envelope, with a queer-looking stamp upon the upper right-hand corner and a faint superscription upon its face. The three sheets of paper he slid out of the envelope were too old even to rustle, but the close writing upon them in a brownish, faded ink was still plainly to be made out.
Corporal Speck replaced the knapsack in its place at the very bottom, put the tray back in its place, closed the trunk and locked it and shoved it under the bed. The trunk resisted slightly and he lost one carpet slipper and considerable breath in the struggle. Limping back to the kitchen and seeing that little Miss Engel still slumbered, he eased his frame into a chair and composed himself to literary composition, not in the least disturbed by the shouts of roistering sidewalk comedians that filtered up to him from down below in front of the house, or by the distant clatter of intermittent traffic over the cobbly spine of Second Avenue, half a block away. For some time he wrote, with a most scratchy pen; and this is what he wrote: