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

In front of Soule’s drug store his weekday cronies sat – the elder statesmen of the town – tilted back in hard-bottomed chairs, with their legs drawn up under them out of the tides of foot travel. But he passed them by, only nodding an answer to their choraled greeting, and went inside back behind the prescription case and sat down there alone, smoking his pipe soberly.

“Wonder what ails Judge Priest?” said Sergeant Jimmy Bagby. “He looks sort of dauncy and low in his mind, don’t he?”

“He certainly does,” some one agreed.

Half an hour later, when the sheriff came in looking for him, Judge Priest was still sitting alone behind the prescription case. With the sheriff was a middle-aged man, a stranger, in a wrinkled check suit and a somewhat soiled fancy vest. An upper pocket of this vest was bulged outward by such frank articles of personal use as a red celluloid toothbrush, carried bristle-end up, a rubber mustache-comb and a carpenter’s flat pencil. The stranger had a longish mustache, iron-gray at the roots and of a greenish, blue-black color elsewhere, and he walked with a perceptible limp. He had a way, it at once developed, of taking his comb out and running it through his mustache while in conversation, doing so without seeming to affect the flow or the volume of his language.

“Mornin’, Judge Priest,” said the sheriff. “This here gentleman wants to see you a minute about gittin’ out an attachment. I taken him first to the county judge’s office, but it seems like Judge Landis went up to Louisville last night, and the magistrates’ offices air closed – both of them, in fact; and so seein’ as this gentleman is in a kind of a hurry, I taken the liberty of bringin’ him round to you.”

Before the judge could open his mouth, he of the dyed mustache was breaking in.

“Yes, sirree,” he began briskly. “If you’re the judge here I want an attachment. I’ve got a good claim against Dan Silver, and blame me if I don’t push it. I’ll fix him – red-lighting me off my own privilege car!” He puffed up with rage and injury.

“What appears to be the main trouble?” asked the judge, studying this belligerent one from under his hatbrim.

“Well, it’s simple enough,” explained the man. “Stanton is my name – here’s my card – and I’m the fixer for this show – the legal adjuster, see? Or, anyhow, I was until last night. And I likewise am – or was – half partner with Dan Silver in the privilege car and in the speculative interests of this show – the flat joints and the rackets and all. You make me now, I guess? Well, last night, coming up here from the last stand, me and Silver fell out over the split-up, over dividing the day’s profits – you understand, the money is cut up two ways every night – and I ketched him trying to trim me. I called him down good and hard then, and blame if he didn’t have the nerve to call in that big boss razor-back of his, named Saginaw, and a couple more rousters, and red-light me right off my own privilege car! Now what do you know about that?”

“Only what you tell me,” replied Judge Priest calmly. “Might I ask you what is the process of red-lightin’ a person of your callin’ in life?”

“Chucking you off of a train without waiting for the train to stop, that’s what,” expounded the aggrieved Mr. Stanton. “It was pretty soft for me that I lit on the side of a dirt bank and we wasn’t moving very fast, else I’d a been killed. As ‘twas I about ruined a suit of clothes and scraped most of the meat off of one leg.” He indicated the denuded limb by raising it stiffly a couple of times and then felt for his comb. Use of it appeared to have a somewhat soothing effect upon his feelings, and he continued: “So I limped up to the next station, two of the longest miles in the world, and caught a freight coming through, and here I am. And now I want to file against him – the dirty, red-lighting dog!

“Why, he owes me money – plenty of it. Just like I told you, I’m the half owner of that privilege car, and besides he borrowed money off of me at the beginning of the season and never offered to pay it back. I’ve got his personal notes right here to prove it.” He felt for the documents and spread them, soiled and thumbed, upon the prescription shelf under the judge’s nose. “He’s sure got to settle with me before he gets out of this town. Don’t worry about me – I’ll put up cash bond to prove I’m on the level,” fishing out from his trousers pocket a bundle of bills with a rubber band on it. “Pretty lucky for me they didn’t know I had my bankroll with me last night!”

“I suppose the attachment may issue,” said the judge preparing to get up.

“Fine,” said Stanton, with deep gratification in his bearing. “But here, wait a minute,” he warned. “Don’t make no mistake and try to attach the whole works, because if you do you’ll sure fall down on your face, judge. That’s all been provided for. The wagons and horses are all in Silver’s name and the cage animals are all in his wife’s name. And so when a hick constable or somebody comes round with an attachment, Dan says to him, ‘All right,’ he says, ‘go on and attach, but you can’t touch them animals,’ he says; and then friend wife flashes a bill of sale to show they are hers. The rube says ‘What’ll I do?’ and Silver says, ‘Why, let the animals out and take the wagons; but of course,’ he says, ‘you’re responsible for the lions and that pair of ferocious man-eating tigers and the rest of ‘em. Go right ahead,’ he says, ‘and help yourself,’ ‘Yes,’ his wife says, ‘go ahead; but if you let any of my wild animals get away I’ll hold you liable, and also if you let any of ‘em chew up anybody you’ll pay the damages and not me,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to be specially careful about Wallace the Ontamable,’ she says; ‘he’s et up two trainers already this season and crippled two-three more of the hands.’

“Well, if that don’t bluff the rube they take him round and give him a flash at Wallace. Wallace is old and feeble and he ain’t really much more dangerous than a kitten, but he looks rough; and Dan sidles up ‘longside the wagon and touches a button that’s there to use during the ballyhoo, and then Wallace jumps up and down and roars a mile. D’ye make me there? Well, the floor of the cage is all iron strips, and when Dan touches that button it shoots about fifty volts of the real juice – electricity, you know – into Wallace’s feet and he acts ontamable. So of course that stumps the rube, and Dan like as not gets away with it without ever settling. Oh, it’s a foxy trick! And to think it was me myself that first put Silver on to it!” he added lamentingly, with a sidelong look at the sheriff to see how that official was taking the disclosure of these professional secrets. As well as one might judge by a glance the sheriff was taking it unmoved. He was cutting off a chew of tobacco from a black plug. Stowing the morsel in his jaw, he advanced an idea of his own:

“How about attachin’ the receipts in the ticket wagon?”

“I don’t know about that either,” said the sophisticated Stanton. “Dan Silver is one of the wisest guys in this business. He had to be a wise guy to slip one over on an old big-leaguer like yours truly, and that’s no sidewalk banter either. You might attach the wagon and put a constable or somebody inside of it, and then like as not Dan’d find some way to flimflam him and make his getaway with the kale intact. You gotter give it to Dan Silver there. I guess he’s a stupid guy – yes, stupid like a bear cat!” His tone of reluctant admiration indicated that this last was spoken satirically and that seriously he regarded a bear cat as probably the astutest hybrid of all species.

“Are all circuses conducted in this general fashion, suh?” inquired the old judge softly.

“No,” admitted Stanton, “they ain’t – the big ones ain’t anyway; but a lot of the small ones is. They gotter do it because a circus is always fair game for a sore rube. Once the tents come down a circus has got no friends.

“I tell you what,” he went on, struck amidships with a happy notion – “I tell you what you do. Lemme swear out an attachment against the band wagon and the band-wagon team, and you go serve it right away, sheriff. That’ll fix him, I guess.”

“How so?” put in the judge, still seeking information for his own enlightenment.

“Why, you see, if you tie up that band wagon Dan Silver can’t use it for parading. He ain’t got but just the one, and a circus parade without a band wagon will look pretty sick, I should say. It’ll look more like something else, a funeral, for example.” The pleased grafter grinned maliciously.

“It’s like this – the band wagon is the key to the whole works,” he went on. “It’s the first thing off the lot when the parade starts – the band-wagon driver is the only one that has the route. You cut the band wagon out and you’ve just naturally got that parade snarled up to hell and gone.”

Judge Priest got upon his feet and advanced upon the exultant stranger. He seemed more interested than at any time.

“Suh,” he asked, “let me see if I understand you properly. The band wagon is the guidin’ motive, as it were, of the entire parade – is that right?”

“You’ve got it,” Stanton assured him. “Even the stock is trained to follow the band wagon. They steer by the music up ahead. Cop the band wagon out and the rest of ‘em won’t know which way to go – that’s the rule where-ever there’s a road show traveling.”

“Ah hah,” said the judge reflectively, “I see.”

“But say, look here, judge,” said Stanton. “Begging your pardon and not trying to rush you nor nothing, but if you’re going to attach that band wagon of Dan Silver’s for me you gotter hurry. That parade is due to leave the lot in less’n half an hour from now.”

He was gratified to note that his warning appeared to grease the joints in the old judge’s legs. They all three went straightway to the sheriff’s office, which chanced to be only two doors away, and there the preliminaries necessary to legal seizures touching on a certain described and specified parade chariot, tableau car or band wagon were speedily completed. Stanton made oath to divers allegations and departed, assiduously combing himself and gloating openly over the anticipated discomfiture of his late partner. The sheriff lingered behind only a minute or two longer while Judge Priest in the privacy of a back room impressed upon him his instructions. Then he, too, departed, moving at his top walking gait westward out Jefferson Street. There was this that could be said for Sheriff Giles Birdsong – he was not gifted in conversation nor was he of a quick order of intellect, but he knew his duty and he obeyed orders literally when conveyed to him by a superior official. On occasion he had obeyed them so literally – where the warrant had said dead or alive, for example – that he brought in, feet first, a prisoner or so who manifested a spirited reluctance against being brought in any other way. And the instructions he had now were highly explicit on a certain head.

Close on Sheriff Birdsong’s hurrying heels the judge himself issued forth from the sheriff’s office. Hailing a slowly ambling public vehicle driven by a languid darky, he deposited his person therein and was driven away. Observing this from his place in front of the drug store, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby was moved to remark generally to the company: “You can’t tell me I wasn’t right a while ago about Judge Billy Priest. Look at him yonder now, puttin’ out for home in a hack, without waitin’ for the parade. There certainly is something wrong with the judge and you can’t tell me there ain’t.”

If the judge didn’t wait nearly everybody else did – waited with what patience and impatience they might through a period that was punctuated by a dozen false alarms, each marked with much craning of elderly necks and abortive rushes by younger enthusiasts to the middle of the street. After a while, though, from away up at the head of Jefferson Street there came down, borne along on the summer air, a faint anticipatory blare of brazen horns, heard at first only in broken snatches. Then, in a minute or two, the blaring resolved itself into a connected effort at melody, with drums throbbing away in it. Farmers grabbed at the bits of restive horses, that had their ears set sharply in one direction, and began uttering soothing and admonitory “whoas.” The stores erupted clerks and customers together. The awning poles on both sides of the street assumed the appearance of burdened grape trellises, bearing ripe black and white clusters of small boys. At last she was coming!

She was, for a fact. She came on until the thin runlet of ostensible music became a fan-faring, crashing cataract of pleasing and exhilarating sound, until through the dancing dust could be made out the arching, upcurved front of a splendid red-and-gold chariot. In front of it, like wallowing waves before the prow of a Viking ship, were the weaving broad backs of many white horses, and stretching behind it was a sinuous, colorful mass crowned with dancing, distant banner-things, and suggesting in glintings of gold and splashings of flame an oncoming argosy of glitter and gorgeousness.

She was coming all right! But was she? A sort of disappointed, surprised gasp passed along the crowded sidewalks, and boys began sliding down the awning poles and running like mad up the street. For instead of continuing straight on down Jefferson, as all circus parades had always done, the head of this one was seen now, after a momentary halt as of indecision, to turn short off and head into Clay. But why Clay Street – that was the question? Clay Street didn’t have ten houses on it, all told, and it ran up a steep hill and ended in an abandoned orchard just beyond the old Priest place. Indeed the only way to get out of Clay Street, once you got into it, was by a distant lane that cut through to the paralleling street on the right. What would any circus parade in possession of its sane senses be doing going up Clay Street?

But that indeed was exactly what this parade was doing – with the added phenomena of Sheriff Giles Birdsong sitting vigilantly erect on the front seat of the band wagon, and a band-wagon driver taking orders for once from somebody besides his rightful boss – taking them protestingly and profanely, but nevertheless taking them.

Yes, sir, that’s what she was doing. The band wagon, behind the oblique arc of its ten-horse team, was swinging into Clay Street, and the rest of the procession was following its leader and disappearing, wormlike, into a tunnel of overarching maples and silver-leaf poplars.

And so it moved, slowly and deliberately, after the fashion of circus parades, past some sparsely scattered cottages that were mainly closed and empty, seeing that their customary dwellers were even now downtown, until the head of it came to a particularly shabby little brown house that was not closed and was not empty. From a window here looked out a worn little woman and a little sick boy, he as pale as the pillow against which he was propped, and from here they saw it all – she through tears and he with eyes that burned with a dumb joy unutterable – from here these two beheld the unbelievable marvel of it. It was almost as though the whole unspeakable grandeur of it had been devised for those eyes alone – first the great grand frigate of a band wagon pitching and rolling as if in heavy seas, with artistes of a world-wide repute discoursing sweet strains from its decks, and drawn not by four or six, but by ten snow-white Arabian stallions with red pompons nodding above their proud heads – that is to say, they were snow-white except perhaps for a slight grayish dappling. And on behind this, tailing away and away, were knights and ladies on mettled, gayly caparisoned steeds, and golden pageant dens filled with ferocious rare beasts of the jungle, hungrily surveying the surging crowds – only, of course, there weren’t any crowds – and sun-bright tableau cars, with crystal mirrors cunningly inset in the scrolled carved work, so that the dancing surfaces caught the sunlight and threw it back into eyes already joyously dazzled; and sundry closed cages with beautiful historical paintings on their sides, suggesting by their very secrecy the presence of marvelous prisoned creatures; and yet another golden chariot with the Queen of Sheba and her whole glittering court traveling in imperial pomp atop of it.

That wasn’t all – by no means was it all. There succeeded an open den containing the man-eating Bengal tigers, striped and lank, with the intrepid spangled shoulders of the trainer showing as he sat with his back against the bars, holding his terrible charges in dominion by the power of the human eye, so that for the time being they dared not eat anybody. And then followed a whole drove of trick ponies drawing the happy family in its wheeled home, and behind that in turn more cages, closed, and a fife-and-drum corps of old regimentals in blue and buff, playing Yankee Doodle with martial spirit, and next the Asiatic camel to be known by his one hump, and the genuine Bactrian dromedary to be known by his two, slouching by as though they didn’t care whether school kept or not, flirting their under lips up and down and showing profiles like Old Testament characters. And then came more knights and ladies and more horses and more heroes of history and romance, and a veritable herd of vast and pondrous pachyderm performers, or elephants – for while one pachyderm, however vast and pachydermic, might not make a herd, perhaps, or even two yet surely three would, and here were no less than three, holding one another’s tails with their trunks, which was a droll conceit thought up by these intelligent creatures on the spur of the moment, no doubt, with the sole idea of giving added pleasure to a little sick boy.

That wasn’t all either. There was more of this unapproachable pageant yet winding by – including such wonders as the glass-walled apartment of the lady snake-charmer, with the lady snake-charmer sitting right there in imminent peril of her life amidst her loathsome, coiling and venomous pets; and also there was Judge Priest’s Jeff, hardly to be recognized in a red-and-yellow livery as he led the far-famed sacred ox of India; and then the funny old clown in his little blue wagon, shouting out “Whoa, January” to his mule and dodging back as January kicked up right in his face, and last of all – a crowning glory to all these other glories – the steam calliope, whistling and blasting and shrilling and steaming, fit to split itself wide open!

You and I, reader, looking on at this with gaze unglamoured by the eternal, fleeting spirit of youth, might have noted in the carping light of higher criticism that the oriental trappings had been but poor shoddy stuffs to begin with, and were now all torn and dingy and shedding their tarnished spangles; might have noted that the man-eating tigers seemed strangely bored with life, and that the venomous serpents draped upon the form of the lady snake-charmer were languid, not to say torpid, to a degree that gave the lady snake-charmer the appearance rather of a female suspender pedler, carrying her wares hung over her shoulders. We might have observed further had we been so minded – as probably we should – that the Queen of Sheba bore somewhat a weatherbeaten look and held a quite common-appearing cotton umbrella with a bone handle over her regal head; that the East-Indian mahout of the elephant herd needed a shave, and that there were mud-stained overalls and brogan shoes showing plainly beneath the flowing robes of the Arabian camel-driver. We might even have guessed that the biggest tableau car was no more than a ticket wagon in thin disguise, and that the yapping which proceeded from the largest closed cage indicated the presence merely of a troupe of uneasy performing poodles.

But to the transported vision of the little sick boy in the little brown house there were no flaws in it anywhere – it was all too splendid for words, and so he spoke no words at all as it wound on by. The lurching shoulders of the elephants had gone over the hill beyond and on down, the sacred ox of India had passed ambling from sight, the glass establishment of the snake-charmer was passing, and January and the down wagon and the steam calliope were right in front of the Hammersmith house, when something happened on ahead, and for a half minute or so there was a slowing-up and a closing-up and a halting of everything.

Although, of course, the rear guard didn’t know it for the time being, the halt was occasioned by the fact that when the band wagon reached the far end of Clay Street, with the orchard trees looming dead ahead, the sheriff, riding on the front seat of the band wagon, gave an order. The band-wagon driver instantly took up the slack of the reins that flowed through his fingers in layers, so that they stopped right in front of Judge Priest’s house, where Judge Priest stood leaning on his gate. The sheriff made a sort of saluting motion of his fingers against the brim of his black slouch hat.

“Accordin’ to orders, Your Honor,” he stated from his lofty perch.

At this there spoke up another man, the third and furthermost upon the wide seat of the band wagon, and this third man was no less a personage than Daniel P. Silver himself, and he was as near to bursting with bottled rage as any man could well be and still remain whole, and he was as hoarse as a frog from futile swearing.

“What in thunder does this mean – ” he began, and then stopped short, being daunted by the face which Sheriff Giles Birdsong turned upon him.

“Look here, mister,” counseled the sheriff, “you art now in the presence of the presidin’ judge of the first judicial district of Kintucky, settin’ in chambers, or what amounts to the same thing, and you air liable to git yourself into contempt of cote any minute.”

Baffled, Silver started to swear again, but in a lower key.

“You better shut up your mouth,” said the sheriff with a shifting forward of his body to free his limbs for action, “and listen to whut His Honor has to say. You act like you was actually anxious to git yourself lamed up.”

“Sheriff,” said the judge, “obeyin’ your orders you have, I observe, attached certain properties – to wit, a band wagon and team of horses – and still obeyin’ orders, have produced said articles before me for my inspection. You will continue in personal possession of same until said attachment is adjudicated, not allowin’ any person whatsoever to remove them from your custody. Do I make myself sufficiently plain?”

“Yes, suh, Your Honor,” said the sheriff. “You do.”

“In the meanwhile, pendin’ the termination of the litigation, if the recent possessor of this property desires to use it for exhibition or paradin’ purposes, you will permit him to do so, always within proper bounds,” went on the judge. “I would suggest that you could cut through that lane yonder in order to reach the business section of our city, if such should be the desire of the recent possessor.”

The heavy wheels of the band wagon began turning; the parade started moving on again. But in that precious half-minute’s halt something else had happened, only this happened in front of the little brown house halfway down Clay Street. The clown’s gaze was roving this way and that, as if looking for the crowd that should have been there and that was only just beginning to appear, breathless and panting, and his eyes fell upon a wasted, wizened little face looking straight out at him from a nest of bedclothes in a window not thirty feet away; and – be it remembered among that clown’s good deeds in the hereafter – he stood up and bowed, and stretched his painted, powdered face in a wide and gorgeous grin, just as another and a greater Grimaldi once did for just such another audience of a grieving mother and a dying child. Then he yelled “Whoa, January,” three separate times, and each time he poked January in his long-suffering flanks and each time January kicked up his small quick hoofs right alongside the clown’s floury ears.

The steam calliope man had an inspiration too. He was a person of no great refinement, the calliope man, and he worked a shell game for his main source of income and lived rough and lived hard, so it may not have been an inspiration after all, but merely the happy accident of chance. But whether it was or it wasn’t, he suddenly and without seeming reason switched from the tune he was playing and made his calliope sound out the first bars of the music which somebody once set to the sweetest childhood verses that Eugene Field ever wrote – the verses that begin:

The little toy dog is covered with dust,But sturdy and stanch he stands;And the little toy soldier is red with rust,And his musket molds in his hands.

The parade resumed its march then and went on, tailing away through the dappled sunshine under the trees, and up over the hill and down the other side of it, but the clown looked back as he scalped the crest and waved one arm, in a baggy calico sleeve, with a sort of friendly goodby motion to somebody behind him; and as for the steam calliope man, he kept on playing the little Boy Blue verses until he disappeared.