Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

In an hour or so they began to draw out of the lowlands fructifying in the sunlight, and in among the craggy foothills. Here the knobs stood up, like the knuckle-bones of a great rough hand laid across the peaceful countryside. “Deadenings” flashed by, with the girdled, bleached tree-trunks rising, deformed and gaunt, above the young corn. The purplish pink of the redbud trees was thick in clumps on the hillsides. The train entered a cut with a steep fill running down on one side and a seamed cliff standing close up on the other. Small saplings grew out of the crannies in the rocks and swung their boughs downward so that the leaves almost brushed the dusty tops of the coaches sliding by beneath them.

Suddenly, midway of this cut, there came a grinding and sliding of the wheels – the cars began creaking in all their joints as though they would rack apart; and, with a jerk which wakened Judge Priest and shook the others in their seats, the train halted. From up ahead somewhere, heard dimly through the escape of the freed steam, came a confusion of shouted cries. Could they be nearing the Junction so soon? Mrs. McLaurin felt in a new handbag – of gray broadcloth with a gold clasp, to match her uniform – for a powder-rag. Then she shrank cowering back in her place, for leaping briskly up the car steps there appeared, framed in the open doorway just beyond her, an armed man – a short, broad man in a flannel shirt and ragged overalls, with a dirty white handkerchief bound closely over the bridge of his nose and shielding the lower part of his face. A long-barreled pistol was in his right hand and a pair of darting, evilly disposed eyes looked into her startled ones from under the brim of a broken hat.

“Hands up, everybody!” he called out, and swung his gun right and left from his hip, so that its muzzle seemed to point all ways at once. “Hands up, everybody – and keep ‘em up!”

Behind this man, back to back with him, was the figure of another man, somewhat taller, holding similar armed dominion over the astounded occupants of the day-coach. This much, and this much only, in a flash of time was seen by Uncle Zach Matthews and Judge Priest’s Jeff, as, animated by a joint instantaneous impulse, they slid off their seat at the other end of the car and lay embraced on the floor, occupying a space you would not have believed could have contained one darky – let alone two. And it was seen more fully and at greater length by the gray veterans as their arms with one accord rose stiffly above the level of their heads; and also it was seen by the young matron, the sponsor and the maid of honor, as they huddled together, clinging to one another desperately for the poor comfort of close contact. Little Rita Covington, white and still, looked up with blazing gray eyes into the face of the short man with the pistol. She had the palms of both her hands pressed tightly against her ears. Rita was brave enough – but she hated the sound of firearms. Where she half knelt, half crouched, she was almost under the elbow of the intruder.

The whole thing was incredible – it was impossible! Train robberies had passed out of fashion years and years before. Here was this drowsing, quiet country lying just outside the windows, and the populous Junction only a handful of miles away; but, incredible or not, there stood the armed trampish menace in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder with an accomplice. And from outside and beyond there came added evidence to the unbelievable truth of it in the shape of hoarse, unintelligible commands rising above a mingling of pointless outcries and screams.

“Is this a joke, sir, or what?” demanded Major Covington, choking with an anger born of his own helplessness and the undignifiedness of his attitude.

“Old gent, if you think it’s a joke jest let me ketch you lowerin’ them arms of yourn,” answered back the yeggman. His words sounded husky, coming muffled through the handkerchief; but there was a grim threat in them, and for just a breathless instant the pistol-barrel stopped wavering and centered dead upon the major’s white-vested breast.

“Set right still, major,” counseled Judge Priest at his side, not firing his eyes off the muffled face. “He’s got the drop on us.”

“But to surrender without a blow – and we all old soldiers too!” lamented Major Covington, yet making no move to lower his arms.

“I know – but set still,” warned Judge Priest, his puckered glance taking toll sideways of his fellow travelers – all of them with chagrin, amazement and indignation writ large upon their faces, and all with arms up and palms opened outward like a calisthenic class of elderly gray beards frozen stiff and solid in the midst of some lung-expanding exercise. Any other time the picture would have been funny; but now it wasn’t. And the hold-up man was giving his further orders.

“This ain’t no joke and it ain’t no time for foolin’. I gotter work fast and you all gotter keep still, or somebody’ll git crippled up bad!”

With his free hand he pulled off his broken derby, revealing matted red hair, with a dirty bald spot in the front. He held the hat in front of him, crown down.

“I’m goin’ to pass through this car,” he announced, “and I want everybody to contribute freely. You gents will lower one hand at a time and git yore pokes and kettles – watches and wallets – out of yore clothes. And remember, no monkey business – no goin’ back to yore hip pockets – unless you wanter git bored with this!” he warned; and he followed up the warning with a nasty word which borrowed an added nastiness coming through his rag mask.

His glance flashed to the right, taking in the quivering figures of the two girls and the young woman. “Loidies will contribute too,” he added.

“Oh!” gasped Mrs. McLaurin miserably; and mechanically her right hand went across to protect the slender diamond bracelet on her left wrist; while tall Miss Lyon, crumpled and trembling, pressed herself still farther against the side of the car, and Rita Covington involuntarily clutched the front of her blouse, her fingers closing over the little chamois-skin bag that hung hidden there, suspended by a ribbon about her throat. Rita was an only daughter and a pampered one; her father was the wealthiest man in town and she owned handsomer jewels than an eighteen-year-old girl commonly possesses. The thief caught the meaning of those gestures and his red-rimmed eyes were greedy.

“You dog, you!” snorted old Doctor Lake; and he, like the major, sputtered in the impotence of his rage. “You’re not going to rob these ladies too?”

“I’m a-goin’ to rob these loidies too,” mimicked the thief. “And you, old gent, you’d better cut out the rough talk.” Without turning his head, and with his pistol making shifting fast plays to hold the car in subjection, he called back: “Slim, there’s richer pickin’ here than we expected. If you can leave them rubes come help me clean up.”

“Just a second,” was the answer from behind him, “till I git this bunch hypnotized good.”

“Now then,” called the red-haired man, swearing vilely to emphasize his meaning, “as I said before, cough up! Loidies first – you!” And he motioned with his pistol toward Mrs. McLaurin and poked his hat out at her. Her trembling fingers fumbled at the clasp of her bracelet a moment and the slim band fell flashing into the hat.

“You are no gentleman – so there!” quavered the unhappy lady, as a small, gemmed watch with a clasp, and a silver purse, followed the bracelet. Bessie Lyon shrank farther and farther away from him, with sobbing intakes of her breath. She was stricken mute and helpless with fear.

“Now then,” the red-haired man was addressing Rita, “you next. Them purties you’ve got hid there inside yore shirt – I’ll trouble you for them! Quick now!” he snarled, seeing that she hesitated. “Git ‘em out!”

“I ca-n’t,” she faltered, and her cheeks reddened through their dead pallor; “my waist – buttons – behind. I can’t and I won’t.”

The thief shifted his derby hat from his left hand to his right, holding it fast with his little finger hooked under the brim, while the other fingers kept the cocked revolver poised and ready.

“I’ll help you,” he said; and as the girl tried to dodge away from him he shoved a stubby finger under the collar of her blouse and with a hard jerk ripped the lace away, leaving her white neck half bare. At her cry and the sound of the tearing lace her father forgot the threat of the gunbarrel – forgot everything.

“You vile hound!” he panted. “Keep your filthy hand off of my daughter!” And up he came out of his seat. And old Judge Priest came with him, and both of them lunged forward over the seatback at the ruffian, three feet away.

So many things began to happen then, practically all simultaneously, that never were any of the active participants able to recall exactly just what did happen and the order of the happening. It stood out afterward, though, from a jumble of confused recollections, that young Mrs. McLaurin screamed and fainted; that Bessie Lyon fainted quietly without screaming; and that little Rita Covington neither fainted nor screamed, but snatched outward with a lightning quick slap of her hand at the fist of the thief which held the pistol, so that the bullet, exploding out of it with a jet of smoke, struck in the aisle instead of striking her father or Judge Priest. It was this bullet, the first and only one fired in the whole mix-up, that went slithering diagonally along the car floor, guttering out a hole like a worm-track in the wood and kicking up splinters right in the face of Unde Zach Matthews and Judge Priest’s Jeff as they lay lapped in tight embrace, so that they instantly separated and rose, like a brace of flushed blackbirds, to the top of the seat in front. From that point of vantage, with eyes popped and showing white all the way round, they witnessed what followed in the attitude of quiveringly interested onlookers.

All in an instant they saw Major Covington and Judge Priest struggling awkwardly with the thief over the intervening seatback, pawing at him, trying to wrest his hot weapon away from him; saw Mrs. McLaurin’s head roll back inertly; saw the other hold-up man pivot about to come to his bleaguered partner’s aid; and saw, filling the doorway behind this second ruffian, the long shape of old man Press Harper, as he threw himself across the joined platforms upon their rear, noiseless as a snake and deadly as one, his lean old face set in a square shape of rage, his hot red hair erect on his head like a Shawnee’s scalplock, his gaunt, long arms upraised and arched over and his big hands spread like grapples. And in that same second the whole aisle seemed filled with gray-coated, gray-haired old men, falling over each other and impeding each other’s movements in their scrambling forward surge to take a hand in the fight.

To the end of their born days those two watching darkies had a story to tell that never lost its savor for teller or for audience – a story of how a lank, masked thief was taken by surprise from behind; was choked, crushed, beaten into instant helplessness before he had a chance to aim and fire; then was plucked backward, lifted high in the arms of a man twice his age and flung sidelong, his limbs flying like a whirligig as he rolled twenty feet down the steep slope to the foot of the fill. But this much was only the start of what Uncle Zach and Judge Priest’s Jeff had to tell afterward.

For now, then, realizing that an attack was being made on his rear, the stockier thief broke Judge Priest’s fumbling grip upon his gun-hand and half swung himself about to shoot the unseen foe, whoever it might be; but, as he jammed its muzzle into the stomach of the newcomer and pressed the trigger, the left hand of old Harper closed down fast upon the lock of the revolver, so that the hammer, coming down, only pinched viciously into his horny thumb. Breast to breast they wrestled in that narrow space at the head of the aisle for possession of the weapon. The handkerchief mask had fallen away, showing brutal jaws covered with a red stubble, and loose lips snarled away from the short stained teeth. The beleaguered robber, young, stocky and stout, cursed and mouthed blasphemies; but the old man was silent except for his snorted breathing and his frame was distended and swollen with a terrible Berserker lust of battle.

While Major Covington and Judge Priest and the foremost of the others got in one another’s way and packed in a solid, heaving mass behind the pair, all shouting and all trying to help, but really not helping at all, the red ruffian, grunting with the fervor of the blow, drove his clenched fist into old Harper’s face, ripping the skin on the high Indian cheekbone. The old man dealt no blows in return, but his right hand found a grip in the folds of flesh at the tramp’s throat and the fingers closed down like iron clamps on his wind.

There is no telling how long a man of Harper’s age and past habits might have maintained the crushing strength of that hold, even though rage had given him the vigor of bygone youth; but the red-stubbled man, gurgling and wriggling to be free, began to die of suffocation before the grip weakened. To save himself he let go of the gunbutt, and the gun fell and bounced out of sight under a seat. Bearing down with both hands and all his might and weight upon Harper’s right wrist, he tore the other’s clasp off his throat and staggered back, drawing the breath with sobbing sounds back into his bursting lungs. He would have got away then if he could, and he turned as though to flee the length of the car and escape by the rear door.

The way was barred, by whooping, panting old men, hornet-hot. Everybody took a hand or tried to. The color-bearer shoved the staff of the flag between his legs and half tripped him, and as he regained his feet Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, jumping on a seat to get at him over the bobbing heads of his comrades, dealt him a glancing, clumsy blow on the shoulder with the muzzle of his old musket. Major Covington and Judge Priest were still right on him, bearing their not inconsiderable bulk down upon his shoulders.

He could have fought a path through these hampering forces. Wrestling and striking out, he half shoved, half threw them aside; but there was no evading the gaunt old man who bore down on him from the other direction. The look on the face of the old warlock daunted him. He yelled just once, a wordless howl of fear and desperation, and the yell was smothered back into his throat as Harper coiled down on him like a python, fettering with his long arms the shorter, thicker arms of the thief, crushing his ribs in, smothering him, killing him with a frightful tightening pressure. Locked fast in Harper’s embrace, he went down on his back underneath; and now – all this taking place much faster than it has taken me to write it or you to read it – the old man reared himself up. He put his booted foot squarely on the contorted face of the yeggman and twisted the heel brutally, like a man crushing a worm, and mashed the thief’s face to pulp. Then he seized him by the collar of his shirt, dragged him like so much carrion back the length of the car, the others making a way for him, and, with a last mighty heave, tossed him off the rear platform and stood watching him as he flopped and rolled slackly down the steep grade of the right-of-way to the gully at the bottom.

All this young Jeff and Uncle Zach witnessed, and at the last they began cheering. As they cheered there was a whistle of the air and the cars began to move – slowly at first, with hard jerks on the couplings; and then smoother and faster as the wheels took hold on the rails’, and the track-joints began to click-clack in regular rhythm. And, as the train slid away, those forward who mustered up the hardihood to peer out of the windows saw one man – a red-haired, half-bald one – wriggling feebly at the foot of the cut, and another one struggling to his feet uncertainly, meanwhile holding his hands to his stunned head; and, still farther along, a third, who fled nimbly up the bank and into the undergrowth beyond, without a backward glance. Seemingly, all told, there had been only three men concerned in the abortive holdup.

Throughout its short length the train sizzled with excitement and rang with the cries of some to go on and of others to go back and make prisoners of the two crippled yeggs; but the conductor, like a wise conductor, signaled the engineer to make all speed ahead, being glad enough to have saved his train and his passengers whole. On his way through to take an inventory of possible damage and to ascertain the cause of things, he was delayed in the day-coach by the necessity of calming a hysterical country woman, so he missed the best part of what was beginning to start in the decorated rear coach.

There Mrs. McLaurin and tall Miss Lyon were emerging from their fainting fits, and little Rita Covington, now that the danger was over and past, wept in a protecting crook of her father’s arm. Judge Priest’s Jeff was salvaging a big revolver, with one chamber fired, from under a seat. Eight or nine old men were surrounding old Press Harper, all talking at once, and all striving to pat him on the bade with clumsy, caressing slaps. And out on the rear platform, side by side, stood Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and Corporal Jake Smedley; the corporal was wildly waving his silk flag, now unfurled to show the blue St. Andrew’s cross, white-starred on a red background, waving it first up and down and then back and forth with all the strength of his arms, until the silk square popped and whistled in the air of the rushing train; the sergeant was going through the motions of loading and aiming and firing his ancient rusted musket. And at each imaginary discharge both of them, in a cracked duet, cheered for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy!

Just about then the locomotive started whistling for the Junction; outlying sheds and shanties, a section house and a water-tank or so began to flitter by. At the first blast of the whistle all the lingering fire of battle and victory faded out of Harper’s face and he sat down heavily in a seat, fumbling at the inner breast pocket of his coat. There was a bloody smear high up on his cheek and blood dripped from the ball of his split thumb.

“Boys, there’s some fight left in us yet,” exulted Captain Shelby Woodward, “and nobody knows it better than those two scoundrels back yonder! We all took a hand – we all did what we could; but it was you, Press – it was you that licked ‘em both – single-handed! Boys,” he roared, glancing about him, “won’t this make a story for the reunion – and won’t everybody there be making a fuss over old Press!” He stopped then – remembering.

“I don’t go through with you,” said old Press, steadily enough. “I git off here. You fellers are goin’ on through – but I git off here to wait for the other train.”

“You don’t do no such of a thing!” broke in Judge Priest, his voice whanging like a bowstring. “Press Harper, you don’t do no such of a thing. You give me them papers!” he demanded almost roughly. “You’re goin’ right on through to the reunion with the rest of us – that’s where you’re goin’. You set right where you are in this car, and let little Rita Covington wipe that there blood off your face and tie up that thumb of yours. Why, Press, we jest naturally couldn’t get along without you at the reunion. Some of us are liable to celebrate a little too much and maybe git a mite overtaken, and we’ll be needin’ you to take care of us.

“You see, boys,” the old judge went on, with a hitch in his voice, addressing than generally, “Press here is under a pledge to me not to touch another drop of licker till he begins servin’ the sentence I imposed on him; and, boys, that means Press is goin’’ to be a temperance man for the balance of his days – if I know anything about the pardonin’ power and the feelin’s of the governor of this state!”

So, as the accommodation ran in to the Junction, where crowds were packed on the platform and pretty girls, dressed in white, with touches of red at throat and belt, waved handkerchiefs, and gimpy-legged old men in gray uniforms hobbled stiffly back and forth, and the local band blared out its own peculiar interpretation of My Old Kentucky Home, the tall old man with the gashed cheek sat in his seat, his face transfigured with a great light of joy and his throat muscles clicking with the sobs he was choking down, while little Rita Covington’s fingers dabbed caressingly at his wound with a handkerchief dipped in ice water and a dozen old veterans jostled one another to shake his hand. And they hit him on the back with comradely blows – and maybe they did a little crying themselves. But Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and Corporal Jacob Smedley took no part in this. Out on the rear platform they still stood, side by side, waving the flag and firing the unfirable musket harder and faster than ever; and, as one waved and the other loaded and fired, they cheered together:

“‘Rah for Jefferson Davis, the Southern Confederacy – and Pressley G. Harper!”

VII. STRATAGEM AND SPOILS

AS THE Daily Evening News, with pardonable enthusiasm, pointed out at the time, three events of practically national importance took place in town all in that one week. On Tuesday night at 9:37 there was a total eclipse of the moon, not generally visible throughout the United States; on Wednesday morning the Tri-State Steam and Hand Laundrymen’s Association began a two-days annual convention at St. Clair Hall; and on Saturday at high noon Eastern capital, in the person of J. Hayden Witherbee, arrived.

And the greatest of these was Witherbee. The eclipse of the moon took place on its appointed schedule and was witnessed through opera glasses and triangular fragments of windowpane that had been smudged with candlesmoke. The Tri-State Laundrymen came and heard reports, elected officers, had a banquet at the Richland House and departed to their several homes. But J. Hayden Witherbee stayed on, occupying the bridal chamber at the hotel – the one with the private bath attached; and so much interest and speculation did his presence create, and so much space did the Daily Evening News give in its valued columns to his comings and goings and his sayings and doings, that the name of J. Hayden Witherbee speedily became, as you might say, a household word throughout the breadth and length of the Daily Evening News’ circulation.

It seemed that J. Hayden Witherbee, sitting there in his lofty office building far away in Wall Street, New York, had had his keen eye upon the town for some time; and yet – such were the inscrutable methods of the man – the town hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t even suspected it. However, he had been watching its growth with the deepest interest; and when, by the count of the last United States census, it jumped from seventh in population in the state to fifth he could no longer restrain himself. He got aboard the first train and came right on. He had, it would appear, acted with such promptness because, in his own mind, he had already decided that the town would make an ideal terminal point for his proposed Tobacco & Cotton States Interurban Trolley line, which would in time link together with twin bonds of throbbing steel – the words are those of the reporter for the Daily Evening News – no less-than twenty-two growing towns, ranging southward from the river. Hence his presence, exuding from every pore, as it were, the very essences of power and influence and money. The paper said he was one of the biggest men in Wall Street, a man whose operations had been always conducted upon the largest scale.

This, within the space of three or four months, had been our second experience of physical contact with Eastern capital. The first one, though, had been in the nature of a disappointment. A man named Betts – Henry Betts – had come down from somewhere in the North and, for a lump sum, had bought outright the city gasworks. It was not such a big lump sum, because the gasworks had been built right after the war and had thereafter remained untouched by the stimulating hand of improvement. They consisted in the main of a crumbly little brick engine house, full of antiquated and self-willed machinery, and just below it, on the riverbank, a round and rusted gas tank, surrounded by sloping beds of coal cinders, through which at times sluggish rivulets of molten coal tar percolated like lava on the flanks of a toy volcano. The mains took in only the old part of town – not the new part; and the quality of illumination furnished was so flickery at all seasons and so given to freezing up in winter that many subscribers, including even the leading families, used coal-oil lamps in their bedchambers until the electric power house was built. A stock company of exceedingly conservative business men had owned the gasworks prior to the advent of Henry Betts, and the general manager of the plant had been Cassius Poindexter, a fellow townsman. Cash Poindexter was a man who, in his day, had tried his ‘prentice hand at many things. At one time he traveled about in a democrat wagon, taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits from photographs and tintypes, and also for the frames to accompany the same.