The Under Dog / Smith, Francis Hopkinson, 1838-1915

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Title: The Underdog

Author: F. Hopkinson Smith

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[Illustration: During the trip he sat in the far corner of the car.]

THE UNDER DOG

BY

F. HOPKINSON SMITH

ILLUSTRATED

1903



_To my Readers_:

In the strife of life some men lose place through physical weakness or
lost opportunities or impaired abilities; struggle on as they may, they
must always be the Under Dog in the fight.

Others are misjudged--often by their fellows; sometimes by the law. If
you are one of the fellows, you pass the man with a nod. If you are the
law, you crush out his life with a sentence.

Still others lose place from being misunderstood; from being out of
touch with their surroundings; out of reach of those who, if they knew,
would help; men with hearts chilled by neglect, whose smouldering
coals--coals deep hidden in their nature--need only the warm breath of
some other man's sympathy to be fanned back into life.

Once in a while there can be met another kind, one whose poverty or
uncouthness makes us shun him at sight; and yet one, if we did but know
it, with a joyous melody in his heart, ofttimes in tune with our own
harmonies. This kind is rare, and when found adds another ripple to our
scanty stock of laughter.

These Under Dogs--grave and gay--have always appealed to me. Their
stories are printed here in the hope that they may also appeal to you.

F.H.S.

NEW YORK.

CONTENTS

_No Respecter of Persons
  I. The Crime of Samanthy North
  II. Bud Tilden, Mail-Thief
  III. "Eleven Months and Ten Days"
Cap'n Bob of the Screamer
A Procession of Umbrellas
"Doc" Shipman's Fee
Plain Fin--Paper-Hanger
Long Jim
Compartment Number Four--Cologne to Paris
Sammy
Marny's Shadow
Muffles--The Bar-Keep
His Last Cent_


ILLUSTRATIONS

_During the trip he sat in the far corner of the car

"I threw him in the bushes and got the letter"

"I git so tired, so tired; please let me go"

I saw the point of a tiny shoe

Everybody was excited and everybody was mad

I hardly knew him, he was so changed_



NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS


I

THE CRIME OF SAMANTHY NORTH

I have been requested to tell this story, and exactly as it happened.
The moral any man may draw for himself. I only want to ask my readers
the question I have been asking myself ever since I saw the girl: Why
should such things be among us?

       *       *       *       *       *

Marny's studio is over the Art Club.

He was at work on a picture of a canon with some Sioux Indians in the
foreground, while I sat beside him, watching the play of his
masterly brush.

Dear old Aunt Chloe, in white apron and red bandanna, her round black
face dimpled with smiles, was busying herself about the room,
straightening the rugs, puffing up the cushions of the divan, pushing
back the easels to get at the burnt ends of abandoned cigarettes, doing
her best, indeed, to bring some kind of domestic order out of Marny's
Bohemian chaos.

Now and then she interpolated her efforts with such remarks as:

"No, doan' move. De Colonel"--her sobriquet for Marny--"doan' keer whar
he drap his seegars. But doan' you move, honey"--sobriquet for me. "I
kin git 'em." Or "Clar to goodness, you pillows look like a passel o'
hogs done tromple ye, yo're dat mussed." Critical remarks like these
last were given in a low tone, and, although addressed to the offending
articles themselves, accompanied by sundry cuffs of her big hand, were
really intended to convey Aunt Chloe's private opinion of the habits of
her master and his friends.

The talk had drifted from men of the old frontier to border scouts, and
then to the Kentucky mountaineers, whom Marny knows as thoroughly as he
does the red men.

"They are a great race, these mountaineers," he said to me, as he tossed
the end of another cigarette on Aunt Chloe's now clean-swept floor.
Marny spoke in crisp, detached sentences between the pats of his brush.
"Big, strong, whalebone-and-steel kind of fellows; rather fight than
eat. Quick as lightning with a gun; dead shots. Built just like our
border men. See that scout astride of his horse?"--and he pointed with
his mahl-stick to a sketch on the wall behind him--"looks like the real
thing, don't he? Well, I painted him from an up-country moonshiner.
Found him one morning across the river, leaning up against a telegraph
pole, dead broke. Been arrested on a false charge of making whiskey
without a license, and had just been discharged from the jail. Hadn't
money enough to cross the bridge, and was half-starved. So I braced him
up a little, and brought him here and painted him."

We all know with what heartiness Marny can "brace." It doubtless took
three cups of coffee, half a ham, and a loaf of bread to get him on his
feet, Marny watching him with the utmost satisfaction until the process
was complete.

"You ought to look these fellows over; they're worth it. Savage lot,
some of 'em. Remind me of the people who live about the foothills of the
Balkans. Mountaineers are the same the world over, anyway. But you don't
want to hunt for these Kentuckians in their own homes unless you send
word you are coming, or you may run up against the end of a rifle before
you know it. I don't blame them." Marny leaned back in his chair and
turned toward me. "The Government is always hunting them as if they were
wild beasts, instead of treating them as human beings. They can't
understand why they shouldn't get the best prices they can for their
corn. They work hard enough to get it to grow. Their theory is that the
Illinois farmer feeds the corn to his hogs and sells the product as
pork, while the mountaineer feeds it to his still and sells the product
to his neighbors as whiskey. That a lot of Congressmen who never hoed a
row of corn in their lives, nor ran a furrow, or knew what it was to
starve on the proceeds, should make laws sending a man to jail because
he wants to supply his friends with liquor, is what riles them, and I
don't blame them for that, either."

I arose from my chair and examined the sketch of the starving
mountaineer. It was a careful study of a man with clear-cut features,
slim and of wiry build, and was painted with that mastery of detail
which distinguishes Marny's work over that of every other figure-painter
of his time.

The painter squeezed a tube of white on his palette, relit his
cigarette, fumbled over his sheaf of brushes and continued:

"The first of every month--just about now, by the way--they bring twenty
or thirty of these poor devils down from the mountains and lock them up
in Covington jail. They pass Aunt Chloe's house. Oh, Aunt Chloe!"--and
he turned to the old woman--"did you see any of those 'wild people' the
last two or three days?--that's what she calls 'em," and he laughed.

"Dat I did, Colonel--hull drove on 'em. 'Nough to make a body sick to
see 'em. Two on 'em was chained together. Dat ain't no way to treat
people, if dey is ornery. I wouldn't treat a dog dat way."

Aunt Chloe, sole dependence of the Art Club below-stairs: day or night
nurse--every student in the place knows the touch of her hand when his
head splits with fever or his bones ache with cold; provider of buttons,
suspender loops and buckles; go-between in most secret and confidential
affairs; mail-carrier--the dainty note wrapped up in her handkerchief so
as not to "spile it!"--no, _she_ wouldn't treat a dog that way, nor
anything else that lives and breathes or has feeling, human or brute.

"If there's a new 'drove' of them, as Aunt Chloe says," remarked Marny,
tossing aside his brushes, "let's take a look at them. They are worth
your study. You may never have another chance."

This was why it happened that within the hour Marny and I crossed the
bridge and left his studio and the city behind us.

The river below was alive with boats, the clouds of steam from their
funnels wreathed about the spans. Street-cars blocked the roadway;
tugging horses, sweating under the lash of their drivers' whips,
strained under heavy loads. The air was heavy with coal-smoke. Through
the gloom of the haze, close to the opposite bank, rose a grim, square
building of granite and brick, its grimy windows blinking through iron
bars. Behind these, shut out from summer clouds and winter snows, bereft
of air and sunshine, deaf to the song of happy birds and the low hum of
wandering bees, languished the outcast and the innocent, the vicious and
the cruel. Hells like these are the infernos civilization builds in
which to hide its mistakes.

Marny turned toward me as we reached the prison. "Keep close," he
whispered. "I know the Warden and can get in without a permit," and he
mounted the steps and entered a big door opening into a cold, bare hall
with a sanded floor. To the right of the hall swung another door
labelled "Chief of Police." Behind this door was a high railing closed
with a wooden gate. Over this scowled an officer in uniform.

"My friend Sergeant Cram," said Marny, as he introduced us. The officer
and I shook hands. The hand was thick and hard, the knotted knuckles
leaving an unpleasant impression behind them as they fell from
my fingers.

A second door immediately behind this one was now reached, the Sergeant
acting as guide. This door was of solid wood, with a square panel cut
from its centre, the opening barred like a birdcage. Peering through
these bars was the face of another attendant. This third door, at a
mumbled word from the Sergeant, was opened wide enough to admit us into
a room in which half a dozen deputies were seated at cards. In the
opposite wall hung a fourth door, of steel and heavily barred, through
which, level with the eyes, was cut a peep-hole concealed by a swinging
steel disk.

The Sergeant moved rapidly across the room, pushed aside the disk and
brought to view the nose and eyes of a prison guard.

As our guide shot back a bolt, a click like the cocking of a gun sounded
through the room, followed by the jangle of a huge iron ring strung with
keys. Selecting one from the number, he pushed it into the key-hole and
threw his weight against the door. At its touch the mass of steel swung
inward noiselessly as the door of a bank-vault. With the swinging of the
door there reached us the hot, stuffy smell of unwashed bodies under
steam-heat--the unmistakable odor that one sometimes meets in a
court-room.

Marny and I stepped inside. The Sergeant closed the slab of steel,
locking us inside, and then, nodding to us through the peep-hole,
returned to his post in the office.

We stood now on the rim of the crater, looking straight into the
inferno. By means of the dull light that struggled through the grimy,
grated windows, I discovered that we were in a corridor having an iron
floor that sprang up and down under our feet. This was flanked by a line
of steel cages--huge beast-dens really--reaching to the ceiling. In each
of these cages was a small, double-barred gate.

These dens were filled with men and boys; some with faces thrust through
the bars, some with hands and arms stretched out as if for air; one hung
half-way up the bars, clinging with hands and feet apart, as if to get
a better hold and better view. I had seen dens like these before: the
man-eating Bengal tiger at the London Zoo lives in one of them.

The Warden, who was standing immediately behind the attendant, stepped
forward and shook Marny's hand. I discharged my obligations with a nod.
I had never been in a place like this before, and the horror of its
surroundings overcame me. I misjudged the Warden, no doubt. That this
man might have a wife who loved him and little children who clung to his
neck, and that underneath his hard, forbidding exterior a heart could
beat with any tenderness, never occurred to me. As I looked him over
with a half-shrinking glance, I became aware of a slash indenting his
pock-marked cheek that might have been made by a sabre cut--was,
probably, for it takes a brave man to be a warden; a massive head set on
big shoulders; a square chin, the jaw hinged like a burglar's jimmy; and
two keen, restless, elephant eyes.

But it was his right ear that absorbed my attention--or rather, what was
left of his right ear. Only the point of it stuck up; the rest was
clipped as clean as a rat-terrier's. Some fight to a finish, I thought;
some quick upper-cut of the razor of a frenzied negro writhing under the
viselike grasp of this man-gorilla with arms and hands of steel; or some
sudden whirl of a stiletto, perhaps, which had missed his heart and
taken his ear. I did not ask then, and I do not know now. It was a badge
of courage, whatever it was--a badge which thrilled and horrified me. As
I looked at the terrible mutilation, I could but recall the hideous
fascination that overcame Josiane, the heroine of Hugo's great novel,
"The Man Who Laughs," when she first caught sight of Gwynplaine's
mouth--slit from ear to ear by the Comprachicos. The outrage on the
Warden was not so grotesque, but the effect was the same.

I moved along the corridor and stood before the beasts. One, an old man
in a long white beard, leathery, sun-tanned face and hooked nose,
clasped the bars with both hands, gazing at us intently. I recognized
his kind the moment I looked at him. He was like my Jonathan Gordon, my
old fisherman who lived up in the Franconia Notch. His coarse, homespun
clothes, dyed brown with walnut-shells, slouch hat crowning his shock of
gray hair, and hickory shirt open at the throat, only heightened the
resemblance; especially the hat canted over one eye. Why he wore the hat
in such a place I could not understand, unless to be ready for departure
when his summons came.

There were eight other beasts besides this old man in the same cage, one
a boy of twenty, who leaned against the iron wall with his hands in his
pockets, his eyes following my every movement. I noticed a new blue
patch on one of his knees, which his mother, doubtless, had sewn with
her own hands, her big-rimmed spectacles on her nose, the tallow dip
lighting the log cabin. I recognized the touch. And the boy. I used to
go swimming with one just like him, forty years ago, in an old
swimming-hole in the back pasture, and hunt for honey that the
bumblebees had stored under the bank.

The old man with the beard and the canting hat looked into my eyes
keenly, but he did not speak. He had nothing to say, perhaps. Something
human had moved before him, that was all; something that could come and
go at its pleasure and break the monotony of endless hours.

"How long have you been here?" I asked, lowering my voice and stepping
closer to the bars.

Somehow I did not want the others to hear. It was almost as though I
were talking to Jonathan--my dear Jonathan--and he behind bars!

"Eleven months and three days. Reckon I be the oldest"--and he looked
about him as if for confirmation. "Yes, reckon I be."

"What for?"

"Sellin'."

The answer came without the slightest hesitation and without the
slightest trace in his voice of anything that betokened either sorrow
for his act or shame for the crime.

"Eleven months and three days of this!" I repeated to myself.
Instinctively my mind went back to all I had done, seen, and enjoyed in
these eleven months and three days. Certain individual incidents more
delightful than others stood out clear and distinct: that day under the
trees at Cookham, the Thames slipping past, the white-sailed clouds
above my tent of leaves; a morning at Dort, when Peter and I watched the
Dutch luggers anchor off the quay, and the big storm came up; a night
beyond San Giorgio, when Luigi steered the gondola in mid-air over a sea
of mirrored stars and beneath a million incandescent lamps.

I passed on to the next cage, Marny watching me but saying nothing. The
scout was in this one, the "type" in Marny's sketch. There were three of
them--tall, hickory-sapling sort of young fellows, with straight legs,
flat stomachs, and thin necks, like that of a race-horse. One had the
look of an eagle, with his beak-nose and deep-set, uncowed eyes. Another
wore his yellow hair long on his neck, Custer-fashion. The third sat on
the iron floor, his knees level with his chin, his head in his hand. He
had a sweetheart, perhaps, who loved him, or an old mother who was
wringing her hands at home. This one, I learned afterward, had come with
the last batch and was not yet accustomed to his surroundings; the
others had been awaiting trial for months. All of them wore homespun
clothes--not the ready-made clothes sold at the stores, but those that
some woman at home had cut, basted, and sewn.

Marny asked them what they were up for. Their answers differed slightly
from that of the old man, but the crime and its penalty were the same.

"Makin'," they severally replied.

There was no lowering of the eyelids when they confessed; no hangdog
look about the mouth. They would do it again when they got out, and they
intended to, only they would shoot the quicker next time. The earth was
theirs and the fulness thereof, that part of it which they owned. Their
grandfathers before them had turned their corn into whiskey and no man
had said nay, and so would they. Not the corn that they had stolen, but
the corn that they had ploughed and shucked. It was their corn, not the
Government's. Men who live in the wilderness, and feed and clothe
themselves on the things they raise with their own hands, have no
fine-spun theories about the laws that provide revenue for a Government
they never saw, don't want to see, and couldn't understand if they did.

Marny and I stood before the grating, looking each man over separately.
Strange to say, the artistic possibilities of my visit faded out of my
mind. The picturesqueness of their attire, the browns and grays
accentuated here and there by a dash of red around a hat-band or
shirt-collar--all material for my own or my friend's brush--made not
the slightest impression upon me. It was the close smell, the dim,
horrible light, the quick gleam of a pair of eyes looking out from under
shocks of matted hair--the eyes of a panther watching his prey; the dull
stare of some boyish face with all hope crushed out of it; these were
the things that possessed me.

As I stood there absorbed in the terrors before me, I was startled by
the click of the catch and the clink of keys, followed by the noiseless
swing of the steel door as it closed again.

I turned and looked down the corridor.

Into the gloom of this inferno, this foul-smelling cavern, this
assemblage of beasts, stepped a girl of twenty. A baby wrapped about
with a coarse shawl lay in her arms.

She passed me with eyes averted, and stood before the gate of the last
steel cage--the woman's end of the prison--the turnkey following slowly.
Cries of "Howdy, gal! What did ye git?" wore hurled after her, but she
made no answer. The ominous sound of drawn bolts and the click of a key,
and the girl and baby were inside the bars of the cage. These bars,
foreshortened from where I stood, looked like a row of gun-barrels in an
armory rack.

"That girl a prisoner?" I asked the Warden.

I didn't believe it. I knew, of course, that it couldn't be. I instantly
divined that she had come to comfort some brother or father, or lover,
perhaps, and had brought the baby with her because there was no place to
leave it at home. I only asked the question of the Warden so he could
deny it, and deny it, too, with some show of feeling--this man with the
sliced ear and the gorilla hands.

"Yes, she's been here some time. Judge suspended sentence a while ago.
She's gone after her things."

There was no joy over her release in his tones, nor pity for her
condition.

He spoke exactly, it seemed to me, as he would have done had he been in
charge of the iron-barred gate of the Colosseum two thousand years ago.
All that had saved the girl then from the jaws of his hungriest lion was
the twist of Nero's thumb. All that saved her now was the nod of the
Judge's head--both had the giving of life and death.

A thin mist swam before my eyes, and a great lump started from my heart
and stuck fast in my throat, but I did not answer him; it would have
done no good--might have enraged him, in fact. I walked straight to the
gate through which she had entered and peered in. I could see between
the gun-barrels now.

It was like the other cages, with barred walls and sheet-iron floors.
Built in one corner of the far end was a strong box of steel, six feet
by four by the height of the ceiling, fitted with a low door. This box
was lined with a row of bunks, one above the other. From one was thrust
a small foot covered with a stocking and part of a skirt; some woman
prisoner was ill, perhaps. Against the wall of this main cage sat two
negro women; one, I learned afterward, had stabbed a man the week
before; the other was charged with theft. The older--the murderess--came
forward when she caught sight of me, thrust out her hands between the
bars, and begged for tobacco.

In the corner of the same cage was another steel box. I saw the stooping
figure of the young girl come out of it as a dog comes out of a kennel.
She walked toward the centre of the cage--she still had the baby in her
arms--laid the child on the sheet-iron floor, where the light from the
grimy windows fell the clearer, and returned to the steel box. The child
wore but one garment--a short red-flannel shirt that held the stomach
tight and left the shrivelled legs and arms bare. It lay flat on its
back, its eyes gazing up at the ceiling, its pinched face in high light
against the dull background. Now and then it would fight the air with
its little fists or kick its toes above its head.

The girl took from the kennel a broken paper box and, returning with it,
knelt beside the child and began arranging its wardrobe, the two
negresses watching her listlessly. Not much of a wardrobe--only a
ragged shawl, some socks, a worsted cap, a pair of tiny shoes, and a
Canton-flannel wrapper, once white. This last had little arms and a
short waist. The skirt was long enough to tuck around her baby's feet
when she carried it.

I steadied myself by one of the musket-barrels, watched her while she
folded the few pitiful garments, waited until she had guided the
shrunken arms into the sleeves of the soiled wrapper and had buttoned it
over the baby's chest. Then, when the lump in my throat was about to
stop my breathing, I said:

"Will you come here, please, to the grating? I want to speak to you."

She raised her head slowly, looked at me in a tired, hopeless way, laid
her baby back on the sheet-iron floor, and walked toward me. As she came
into the glow of the overhead light, I saw that she was even younger
than I had first supposed--nearer seventeen than twenty--a girl with
something of the curious look of a young heifer in a face drawn and
lined but with anxiety. Parted over a low forehead, and tucked behind
her ears, streamed two braids of straight yellow hair in two unkempt
strands over her shoulders. Across her bosom and about her slender
figure was hooked a yellow-brown dress made in one piece. The hooks and
eyes showed wherever the strain came, disclosing the coarse chemise and
the brown of the neck beneath. This strain, the strain of an
ill-fitting garment, accentuated all the clearer, in the wrinkles about
the shoulders and around the hips, the fulness of her delicately
modelled lines; quite as would a jacket buttoned over the Milo. On the
third finger of one hand was a flat silver ring, such as is sold by the
country peddlers.

She stood quite close to the bars, patiently awaiting my next question.
She had obeyed my summons like a dog who remembered a former discipline.
No curiosity, not the slightest interest; nothing but blind obedience.
The tightened grasp of these four walls had taught her this.

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

I had to begin in some way.

"From Pineyville." The voice was that of a child, with a hard, dry note
in it.

"How old is the baby?"

"Three months and ten days." She had counted the child's age. She had
thought enough for that.

"How far is Pineyville?"

"I doan' know. It took mos' all night to git here." There was no change
in the listless monotone.

"Are you going out now?"

"Yes, soon's I kin git ready."

"How are you going to get home?"

"Walk, I reckon." There was no complaint in her tone, no sudden
exhibition of any suffering. She was only stating facts.

"Have you no money?"

"No." Same bald statement, and in the same hopeless tone. She had not
moved--not even to look at the child.

"What's the fare?"

"Six dollars and sixty-five cents." This was stated with great
exactness. It was the amount of this appalling sum that had, no doubt,
crushed out her last ray of hope.

"Did you sell any whiskey?"

"Yes, I tol' the Judge so." Still no break in her voice. It was only
another statement.

"Oh! you kept a saloon?"

"No."

"How did you sell it, then?"

"Jest out of a kag--in a cup."

"Had you ever sold any before?"

"No."

"Why did you sell it, then?"

She had been looking into my face all this time, one thin, begrimed
hand--the one with the ring on it--tight around the steel bar of the
gate that divided us. With the question, her eyes dropped until they
seemed to rest on this hand. The answer came slowly:

"The baby come, and the store wouldn't chalk nothin' for us no more."
Then she added, quickly, as if in defence of the humiliating position,
"Our corn-crib was sot afire last fall and we got behind."

For a brief instant she leaned heavily against the bars as if for
support, then her eyes sought her child. I waited until she had
reassured herself of its safety, and continued my questions, my
finger-nails sinking deeper all the time into the palms of my hands.

"Did you make the whiskey?"

"No, it was Martin Young's whiskey. My husband works for him. Martin
sent the kag down one day, and I sold it to the men. I give the money
all to Martin 'cept the dollar he was to gimme for sellin' it."

"How came you to be arrested?"

"One o' the men tol' on me 'cause I wouldn't trust him. Martin tol' me
not to let 'em have it 'thout they paid."

"How long have you been here?"

"Three months next Tuesday."

"That baby only two weeks old when they arrested you?" My blood ran hot
and cold, and my collar seemed five sizes too small, but I still held on
to myself.

"Yes." The answer was given in the same monotonous, listless voice--not
a trace of indignation over the outrage. Women with suckling babies had
no rights that anybody was bound to respect--not up in Pineyville;
certainly not the gentlemen with brass shields under the lapels of
their coats and Uncle Sam's commissions in their pockets. It was the
law of the land--why find fault with it?

I leaned closer so that I could touch her hand if need be.

"What's your name?"

"Samanthy North."

"What's your husband's name?"

"His name's North." There was a trace of surprise now in the general
monotone Then she added, as if to leave no doubt in my mind,
"Leslie North."

"Where is he?" I determined now to round up every fact.

"He's home. We've got another child, and he's takin' care of it till I
git back. He'd be to the railroad for me if he knowed I was coming; but
I couldn't tell him when to start 'cause I didn't know how long
they'd keep me."

"Is your home near the railroad?"

"No, it's thirty-six miles furder."

"How will you get from the railroad?"

"Ain't no way 'cept walkin'."

I had it now, the whole damnable, pitiful story, every fact clear-cut to
the bone. I could see it all: the look of terror when the deputy woke
her from her sleep and laid his hand upon her; the parting with the
other child; the fright of the helpless husband; the midnight ride, she
hardly able to stand, the pitiful scrap of her own flesh and blood
tight in her arms; the procession to the jail, the men in front chained
together, she bringing up the rear, walking beside the last guard; the
first horrible night in jail, the walls falling upon her, the darkness
overwhelming her, the puny infant resting on her breast; the staring,
brutal faces when the dawn came, followed by the coarse jest. No wonder
that she hung limp and hopeless to the bars of her cage, all the spring
and buoyancy, all the youth and lightness, crushed out of her.

I put my hand through the bars and laid it on her wrist.

"No, you won't walk; not if I can help it." This outburst got past the
lump slowly, one word at a time, each syllable exploding hot like balls
from a Roman candle. "You get your things together quick as you can, and
wait here until I come back," and I turned abruptly and motioned to the
turnkey to open the gate.

In the office of the Chief of Police outside I found Marny talking to
Sergeant Cram. He was waiting until I finished. It was all an old story
with Marny--every month a new batch came to Covington jail.

"What about that girl, Sergeant--the one with the baby?" I demanded, in
a tone that made them both turn quickly.

"Oh, she's all right. She told the Judge a straight story this morning,
and he let her go on 'spended sentence. They tried to make her plead
'Not guilty,' but she wouldn't lie about it, she said. She can go when
she gets ready. What are you drivin' at? Are you goin' to put up for
her?"--and a curious look overspread his face.

"I'm going to get her a ticket and give her some money to get home.
Locking up a seventeen-year-old girl, two hundred miles from home, in a
den like that, with a baby two weeks old, may be justice, but I call it
brutality! Our Government can pay its expenses without that kind of
revenue." The whole bundle of Roman candles was popping now.
Inconsequent, wholly illogical, utterly indefensible explosions. But
only my heart was working.

The Sergeant looked at Marny, relaxed the scowl about his eyebrows, and
smiled; such "softies" seemed rare to him.

"Well, if you're stuck on her--and I'm damned if I don't believe you
are--let me give you a piece of advice. Don't give her no money till she
gets on the train, and whatever you do, don't leave her here over night.
There's a gang around here"--and he jerked his thumb in the direction of
the door--"that might--" and he winked knowingly.

"You don't mean--" A cold chill suddenly developed near the roots of my
hair and trickled to my spine.

"Well, she's too good-lookin' to be wanderin' round huntin' for a
boardin'-house. You see her on the train, that's all. Starts at eight
to-night. That's the one they all go by--those who git out and can raise
the money. She ought to leave now, 'cordin' to the regulations, but as
long as you're a friend of Mr. Marny's I'll keep her here in the office
till I go home at seven o'clock. Then you'd better have someone to look
after her. No, you needn't go back and see her"--this in answer to a
movement I made toward the prison door. "I'll fix everything. Mr. Marny
knows me."

I thanked the Sergeant, and we started for the air outside--something we
could breathe, something with a sky overhead and the dear earth
underfoot, something the sun warmed and the free wind cooled.

Only one thing troubled me now. I could not take the girl to the train
myself, neither could Marny, for I had promised to lecture that same
night for the Art Club at eight o'clock, and Marny was to introduce me.
The railroad station was three miles away.

"I've got it!" cried Marny, when we touched the sidewalk, elbowing our
way among the crowd of loafers who always swarm about a place of this
kind. (He was as much absorbed in the girl's future, when he heard her
story, as I was.) "Aunt Chloe lives within two blocks of us--let's hunt
her up. She ought to be at home by this time."

The old woman was just entering her street door when she heard Marny's
voice, her basket on her arm, a rabbit-skin tippet about her neck.

"Dat I will, honey," she answered, positively, when the case was laid
before her. "_Dat I will_; 'deed an' double I will."

She stepped into the house, left her basket, joined us again on the
sidewalk, and walked with us back to the Sheriff's office.

"All right," said the Sergeant, when we brought her in. "Yes, I know the
old woman; the gal will be ready for her when she comes, but I guess I'd
better send one of my men along with 'em both far as the depot. Ain't no
use takin' no chances."

The dear old woman followed us again until we found a clerk in a branch
ticket-office, who picked out a long green slip from a library of
tickets, punched it with the greatest care with a pair of steel nippers,
and slipped it into an official envelope labelled: "K.C. Pineyville,
Ky. 8 P.M."

With this tightly grasped in her wrinkled brown hand, together with
another package of Marny's many times in excess of the stage fare of
thirty-six miles and which she slipped into her capacious bosom, Aunt
Chloe "made her manners" with the slightest dip of a courtesy and left
us with the remark:

"Sha'n't nothin' tech her, honey; gwinter stick right close to her till
de steam-cars git to movin', I'll be over early in de mawnin' an' let ye
know. Doan' worry, honey; ain't nothin' gwinter happen to her arter I
gits my han's on her."

When I came down to breakfast, Aunt Chloe was waiting for me in the
hall. She looked like the old woman in the fairy-tale in her short black
dress that came to her shoe-tops, snow-white apron and headkerchief,
covered by a close-fitting nun-like hood--only the edge of the
handkerchief showed--making her seem the old black saint that she was.
It not being one of her cleaning-days, she had "kind o' spruced herself
up a li'l mite," she said. She carried her basket, covered now with a
white starched napkin instead of the red-and-yellow bandanna of
work-days. No one ever knew what this basket contained. "Her luncheon,"
some of the art-students said; but if it did, no one had ever seen her
eat it. "Someone else's luncheon," Marny added; "some sick body whom she
looks after. There are dozens of them."

"Larrovers fur meddlins," Aunt Chloe invariably answered those whose
curiosity got the better of their discretion--an explanation which only
deepened the mystery, no one being able to translate it.

"She's safe, honey!" Aunt Chloe cried, when she caught sight of me. "I
toted de baby, an' she toted de box. Po' li'l chinkapin! Mos' break a
body's heart to see it! 'Clar to goodness, dat chile's leg warn't
bigger'n a drumstick picked to de bone. De man de Sheriff sent wid us
didn't go no furder dan de gate, an' when he lef us dey all sneaked in
an' did dere bes' ter git her from me. Wuss-lookin' harum-scarums you
ever see. Kep' a-tellin' her de ticket was good for ten days an' dey'd
go wid her back to town; an' dat if she'd stay dey'd take her 'cross de
ribber to see de city. I seed she wanted ter git home to her husban',
an' she tol' 'em so. Den dey tried to make her believe he was comin' for
her, an' dey pestered her so an' got her so mixed up wid deir lies dat I
was feared she was gwine to give in, arter all. She warn't nothin' but a
po' weak thing noways. Den I riz up an' tol' 'em dat I'd call a
pleeceman an' take dat ticket from her an' de money I gin her beside, if
she didn't stay on dat car. I didn't give her de 'velope; I had dat in
my han' to show de conductor when he come, so he could see whar she was
ter git off. Here it is"--and she handed me the ticket-seller's
envelope. "Warn't nothin' else saved me but _dat_. When dey see'd it,
dey knowed den somebody was a-lookin' arter her an' dey give in. Po'
critter! I reckon she's purty nigh home by dis time!"

The story is told. It is all true, every sickening detail. Other stories
just like it, some of them infinitely more pitiful, can be written daily
by anyone who will peer into the cages of Covington jail. There is
nothing to be done; nothing _can_ be done.

It is the law of the land--the just, holy, beneficent law, which is no
respecter of persons.



II


BUD TILDEN, MAIL-THIEF

"That's Bud Tilden, the worst of the bunch," said the jail Warden--the
warden with the sliced ear and the gorilla hands. "Reminds me of a
cat'mount I tried to tame once, only he's twice as ugly."

As he spoke, he pointed to a prisoner in a slouch hat clinging half-way
up the steel bars of his cage, his head thrust through as far as his
cheeks would permit, his legs spread apart like the letter A.

"What's he here for?" I asked.

"Bobbin' the U-nited States mail."

"Where?"

"Up in the Kentucky mountains, back o' Bug Holler. Laid for the carrier
one night, held him up with a gun, pulled him off his horse, slashed the
bottom out o' the mail-bag with his knife, took what letters he wanted,
and lit off in the woods, cool as a chunk o' ice. Oh! I tell ye, he's no
sardine; you kin see that without my tellin' ye. They'll railroad
him, sure."

"When was he arrested?"

"Last month--come down in the November batch. The dep'ties had a circus
'fore they got the irons on him. Caught him in a clearin' 'bout two
miles back o' the Holler. He was up in a corn-crib with a Winchester
when they opened on him. Nobody was hurted, but they would a-been if
they'd showed the top o' their heads, for he's strong as a bull and kin
scalp a squirrel at fifty yards. They never would a-got him if they
hadn't waited till dark and smoked him out, so one on 'em told me."
He spoke as if the prisoner had been a rattlesnake or a
sheep-stealing wolf.

The mail-thief evidently overheard, for he dropped, with a cat-like
movement, to the steel floor and stood looking at us through the bars
from under his knit eyebrows, his eyes watching our every movement.

There was no question about his strength. As he stood in the glare of
the overhead light I could trace the muscles through his rough
homespun--for he was a mountaineer, pure and simple, and not a city-bred
thief in ready-made clothes. I saw that the bulging muscles of his
calves had driven the wrinkles of his butternut trousers close up under
the knee-joint and that those of his thighs had rounded out the coarse
cloth from the knee to the hip. The spread of his shoulders had
performed a like service for his shirt, which was stretched out of shape
over the chest and back. This was crossed by but one suspender, and was
open at the throat--a tree-trunk of a throat, with all the cords
supporting the head firmly planted in the shoulders. The arms were long
and had the curved movement of the tentacles of a devil-fish. The hands
were big and bony, the fingers knotted together with knuckles of iron.
He wore no collar nor any coat; nor did he bring one with him, so the
Warden said.

I had begun my inventory at his feet as he stood gazing sullenly at us,
his great red hands tightly clasped around the bars. When in my
inspection I passed from his open collar up his tree-trunk of a throat
to his chin, and then to his face, half-shaded by a big slouch hat,
which rested on his flaring ears, and at last looked into his eyes, a
slight shock of surprise went through me. I had been examining this wild
beast with my judgment already warped by the Warden; that's why I began
at his feet and worked up. If I had started in on an unknown subject,
prepared to rely entirely upon my own judgment, I would have begun at
his eyes and worked down. My shock of surprise was the result of this
upward process of inspection. An awakening of this kind, the awakening
to an injustice done a man we have half-understood, often comes after
years of such prejudice and misunderstanding. With me this awakening
came with my first glimpse of his eyes.

There was nothing of the Warden's estimate in these eyes; nothing of
cruelty nor deceit nor greed. Those I looked into were a light blue--a
washed-out china blue; eyes that shone out of a good heart rather than
out of a bad brain; not very deep eyes; not very expressive eyes; dull,
perhaps, but kindly. The features were none the less attractive; the
mouth was large, well-shaped, and filled with big white teeth, not one
missing; the nose straight, with wide, well-turned nostrils; the brow
low, but not cunning nor revengeful; the chin strong and well-modelled,
the cheeks full and of good color. A boy of twenty I should have
said--perhaps twenty-five; abnormally strong, a big animal with small
brain-power, perfect digestion, and with every function of his body
working like a clock. Photograph his head and come upon it suddenly in a
collection of others, and you would have said: "A big country bumpkin
who ploughs all day and milks the cows at night." He might be the
bloodthirsty ruffian, the human wild beast, the Warden had described,
but he certainly did not look it. I would like to have had just such a
man on any one of my gangs with old Captain Joe over him. He would have
fought the sea with the best of them and made the work of the surf-men
twice as easy if he had taken a hand at the watch-tackles.

I turned to the Warden again. My own summing up differed materially from
his estimate, but I did not thrust mine upon him. He had had, of course,
a much wider experience among criminals--I, in fact, had had none at
all--and could not be deceived by outward appearances.

"You say they are going to try him to-day?" I asked.

"Yes, at two o'clock. Nearly that now," and he glanced at his watch.
"All the witnesses are down, I hear. They claim there's something else
mixed up in it besides robbing the mail, but I don't remember what. So
many of these cases comin' and goin' all the time! His old father was in
to see him yesterday, and a girl. Some o' the men said she was his
sweetheart, but he don't look like that kind. You oughter seen his
father, though. Greatest jay you ever see. Looked like a
fly-up-the-creek. Girl warn't much better lookin'. They make 'em out o'
brick-clay and ham fat up in them mountains. Ain't human, half on 'em.
Better go over and see the trial."

I waited in the Warden's office until the deputies came for the
prisoner. When they had formed in line on the sidewalk I followed behind
the posse, crossing the street with them to the Court-house. The
prisoner walked ahead, handcuffed to a deputy who was a head shorter
than he and half his size. A second officer walked behind; I kept close
to this rear deputy and could see every movement he made. I noticed that
his fingers never left his hip pocket and that his eye never wavered
from the slouch hat on the prisoner's head. He evidently intended to
take no chances with a man who could have made mince-meat of both of
them had his hands been free.

We parted at the main entrance, the prisoner, with head erect and a
certain fearless, uncowed look on his boyish face, preceding the
deputies down a short flight of stone steps, closely followed by
the officer.

The trial, I could see, had evidently excited unusual interest. When I
mounted the main flight to the corridor opening into the trial chamber
and entered the great hallway, it was crowded with mountaineers--wild,
shaggy, unkempt-looking fellows, most of them. All were dressed in the
garb of their locality: coarse, rawhide shoes, deerskin waistcoats,
rough, butternut-dyed trousers and coats, and a coon-skin or army slouch
hat worn over one eye. Many of them had their saddle-bags with them.
There being no benches, those who were not standing were squatting on
their haunches, their shoulders against the bare wall. Others were
huddled close to the radiators. The smell of escaping steam from these
radiators, mingling with the fumes of tobacco and the effluvia from so
many closely packed human bodies, made the air stifling.

I edged my way through the crowd and pushed through the court-room door.
The Judge was just taking his seat--a dull, heavy-looking man with a
bald head, a pair of flabby, clean-shaven cheeks, and two small eyes
that looked from under white eyebrows. Half-way up his forehead rested a
pair of gold spectacles. The jury had evidently been out for luncheon,
for they were picking their teeth and settling themselves comfortably in
their chairs.

The court-room--a new one--outraged, as usual, in its construction every
known law of proportion, the ceiling being twice too high for the walls,
and the big, uncurtained windows (they were all on one side) letting in
a glare of light that made silhouettes of every object seen against it.
Only by the closest attention could one hear or see in a room like this.

The seating of the Judge was the signal for the admission of the crowd
in the corridor, who filed in through the door, some forgetting to
remove their hats, others passing the doorkeeper in a defiant way. Each
man, as soon as his eyes became accustomed to the glare from the
windows, looked furtively toward the prisoners' box. Bud Tilden was
already in his seat between the two deputies, his hands unshackled, his
blue eyes searching the Judge's face, his big slouch hat on the floor at
his feet. What was yet in store for him would drop from the lips of
this face.

The crier of the court, a young negro, made his announcements.

I found a seat between the prisoner and the bench, so that I could hear
and see the better. The Government prosecutor occupied a seat at a table
to my right, between me and the three staring Gothic windows. When he
rose from his chair his body came in silhouette against their light.
With his goat-beard, beak-nose, heavy eyebrows, long, black hair
resting on the back of his coat-collar, bent body, loose-jointed arms,
his coat-tails swaying about his thin legs, he looked (I did not see him
in any other light) like a hungry buzzard flapping his wings before
taking flight.

He opened the case with a statement of facts. He would prove, he said,
that this mountain-ruffian was the terror of the neighborhood, in which
life was none too safe; that although this was the first time he had
been arrested, there were many other crimes which could be laid at his
door, had his neighbors not been afraid to inform upon him.

Warming up to the subject, flapping his arms aloft like a pair of wings,
he recounted, with some dramatic fervor, what he called the "lonely ride
of the tried servant of the Government over the rude passes of the
mountains," recounting the risks which these faithful men ran; then he
referred to the sanctity of the United States mails, reminding the jury
and the audience--particularly the audience--of the chaos which would
ensue if these sacred mail-bags were tampered with; "the stricken,
tear-stained face of the mother," for instance, who had been waiting for
days and weeks for news of her dying son, or "the anxious merchant
brought to ruin for want of a remittance which was to tide him over some
financial distress," neither of them knowing that at that very moment
some highwayman like the prisoner "was fattening off the result of his
theft." This last was uttered with a slapping of both hands on his
thighs, his coat-tails swaying in unison. He then went on in a graver
tone to recount the heavy penalties the Government imposed for
violations of the laws made to protect this service and its agents, and
wound up by assuring the jury of his entire confidence in their
intelligence and integrity, knowing, as he did, how just would be their
verdict, irrespective of the sympathy they might feel for one who had
preferred "the hidden walks of crime to the broad open highway of an
honest life." Altering his tone again and speaking in measured accents,
he admitted that, although the Government's witnesses had not been able
to identify the prisoner by his face, he having concealed himself in the
bushes while the rifling of the pouch was in progress, yet so full a
view was gotten of his enormous back and shoulders as to leave no doubt
in his mind that the prisoner before them had committed the assault,
since it would not be possible to find two such men, even in the
mountains of Kentucky. As his first witness he would call the
mail-carrier.

Bud had sat perfectly stolid during the harangue. Once he reached down
with one long arm and scratched his bare ankle with his forefinger, his
eyes, with the gentle light in them that had first attracted me,
glancing aimlessly about the room; then he settled back again in his
chair, its back creaking to the strain of his shoulders. Whenever he
looked at the speaker, which was seldom, a slight curl, expressing more
contempt than anxiety, crept along his lips. He was, no doubt, comparing
his own muscles to those of the buzzard and wondering what he would do
to him if he ever caught him out alone. Men of enormous strength
generally measure the abilities of others by their own standards.

"Mr. Bowditch will take the chair!" cried the prosecutor.

At the summons, a thin, wizen-faced, stubbly-bearded man of fifty, his
shirt-front stained with tobacco-juice, rose from his seat and took the
stand. The struggle for possession of the bag must have been a brief
one, for he was but a dwarf compared to the prisoner. In a low,
constrained voice--the awful hush of the court-room had evidently
impressed him--and in plain, simple words, in strong contrast to the
flowery opening of the prosecutor, he recounted the facts as he knew
them. He told of the sudden command to halt; of the attack in the rear
and the quick jerking of the mail-bags from beneath his saddle,
upsetting him into the road; of the disappearance of the robber in the
bushes, his head and shoulders only outlined against the dim light of
the stars; of the flight of the robber, and of his finding the bag a few
yards away from the place of assault with the bottom cut. None of the
letters was found opened; which ones were missing tie couldn't say. Of
one thing he was sure--none were left behind by him on the ground, when
he refilled the bag.

The bag, with a slash in the bottom as big as its mouth, was then passed
around the jury-box, each juror in his inspection of the cut seeming to
be more interested in the way in which the bag was manufactured (some of
them, I should judge, had never examined one before) than in the way in
which it was mutilated. The bag was then put in evidence and hung over
the back of a chair, mouth down, the gash in its bottom in full view of
the jury. This gash, from where I sat, looked like one inflicted on an
old-fashioned rubber football by a high kicker.

Hank Halliday, in a deerskin waistcoat and dust-stained slouch hat,
which he crumpled up in his hand and held under his chin, was the
next witness.

In a jerky, strained voice he told of his mailing a letter, from a
village within a short distance of Bug Hollow, to a girl friend of his
on the afternoon of the night of the robbery. He swore positively that
this letter was in this same mail-bag, because he had handed it to the
carrier himself before he got on his horse, and added, with equal
positiveness, that it had never reached its destination. The value or
purpose of this last testimony, the non-receipt of the letter, was not
clear to me, except upon the theory that the charge of robbery might
fail if it could be proved by the defence that no letter was missing.

Bud fastened his eyes on Halliday and smiled as he made this last
statement about the undelivered letter, the first smile I had seen
across his face, but gave no other sign indicating that Halliday's
testimony affected his chances in any way.

Then followed the usual bad-character witnesses--both friends of
Halliday, I could see; two this time--one charging Bud with all the
crimes in the decalogue, and the other, under the lead of the
prosecutor, launching forth into an account of a turkey-shoot in which
Bud had wrongfully claimed the turkey--an account which was at last cut
short by the Judge in the midst of its most interesting part, as having
no particular bearing on the case.

Up to this time no one had appeared for the accused, nor had any
objection been made to any part of the testimony except by the Judge.
Neither had any one of the prosecutor's witnesses been asked a single
question in rebuttal.

With the resting of the Government's case a dead silence fell upon the
room.

The Judge waited a few moments, the tap of his lead-pencil sounding
through the stillness, and then asked if the attorney for the defence
was ready.

No one answered. Again the Judge put the question, this time with some
impatience.

Then he addressed the prisoner.

"Is your lawyer present?"

Bud bent forward in his chair, put his hands on his knees, and answered
slowly, without a tremor in his voice:

"I ain't got none. One come yisterday to the jail, but he didn't like
what I tol' him and he ain't showed up since."

A spectator sitting by the door, between an old man and a young girl,
both evidently from the mountains, rose to his feet and walked briskly
to the open space before the Judge. He had sharp, restless eyes, wore
gloves, and carried a silk hat in one hand.

"In the absence of the prisoner's counsel, your Honor," he said, "I am
willing to go on with this case. I was here when it opened and have
heard all the testimony. I have also conferred with some of the
witnesses for the defence."

"Did I not appoint counsel in this case yesterday?" said the Judge,
turning to the clerk.

There was a hurried conference between the two, the Judge listening
wearily, cupping his ear with his hand and the clerk rising on his toes
so that he could reach his Honor's hearing the easier.

"It seems," said the Judge, resuming his position, and addressing the
room at large, "that the counsel already appointed has been called out
of town on urgent business. If the prisoner has no objection, and if
you, sir--" looking straight at the would-be attorney--"have heard all
the testimony so far offered, the Court sees no objection to your
acting in his place."

The deputy on the right side of the prisoner leaned over, whispered
something to Tilden, who stared at the Judge and shook his head. It was
evident that Bud had no objection to this nor to anything else, for that
matter. Of all the men in the room he seemed the least interested.

I turned in my seat and touched the arm of my neighbor.

"Who is that man who wants to go on with the case?"

"Oh, that's Bill Cartwright, one of the cheap, shyster lawyers always
hanging around here looking for a job. His boast is he never lost a
suit. Guess the other fellow skipped because he thought he had a better
scoop somewhere else. These poor devils from the mountains never have
any money to pay a lawyer. Court appoints 'em."

With the appointment of the prisoner's attorney the crowd in the
court-room craned their necks in closer attention, one man standing on
his chair for a better view until a deputy ordered him down. They knew
what the charge was. It was the defence they all wanted to hear. That
had been the topic of conversation around the tavern stoves of Bug
Hollow for months past.

Cartwright began by asking that the mail-carrier be recalled. The little
man again took the stand.

The methods of these police-court lawyers always interest me. They are
gamblers in evidence, most of them. They take their chances as the cases
go on; some of them know the jury--one or two is enough; some are
learned in the law--more learned, often, than the prosecutor, who is a
Government appointee with political backers, and now and then one of
them knows the Judge, who is also a political appointee and occasionally
has his party to care for. All are valuable in an election, and a few of
them are honest. This one, my neighbor told me, had held office as a
police justice and was a leader in his district.

Cartwright drew his gloves carefully from his hands, laid his silk hat
on a chair, dropped into it a package of legal papers tied with a red
string, and, adjusting his glasses, fixed his eyes on the mail-carrier.
The expression on his face was bland and seductive.

"At what hour do you say the attempted robbery took place, Mr.
Bowditch?"

"About eleven o'clock."

"Did you have a watch?"

"No."

"How do you know, then?" The question was asked in a mild way as if he
intended to help the carrier's memory.

"I don't know exactly; it may have been half-past ten or eleven."

"You, of course, saw the man's face?"

"No."

"Then you heard him speak?" Same tone as if trying his best to encourage
the witness in his statements.

"No." This was said with some positiveness. The mail-carrier evidently
intended to tell the truth.

Cartwright turned quickly with a snarl like that of a dog suddenly
goaded into a fight.

"How can you swear, then, that the prisoner made the assault?"

The little man changed color and stammered out in excuse:

"He was as big as him, anyway, and there ain't no other like him nowhere
in them parts."

"Oh, he was as _big_ as him, was he?" This retort came with undisguised
contempt. "And there are no others like him, eh? Do you know _everybody_
in Bell County, Mr. Bowditch?"

The mail-carrier did not answer.

Cartwright waited until the discomfiture of the witness could be felt by
the jury, dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and, looking over the
room, beckoned to an old man seated by a girl--the same couple he had
been talking to before his appointment by the Court--and said in a
loud voice:

"Will Mr. Perkins Tilden take-the stand?"

At the mention of his father's name, Bud, who had maintained throughout
his indifferent attitude, straightened himself erect in his chair with
so quick a movement that the deputy edged a foot nearer and
instinctively slid his hand to his hip-pocket.

A lean, cadaverous, painfully thin old man in answer to his name rose to
his feet and edged his way through the crowd to the witness-chair. He
was an inch taller than his son, though only half his weight, and was
dressed in a suit of cheap cloth of the fashion of long ago, the coat
too small for him, even for his shrunken shoulders, and the sleeves
reaching only to his wrists. As he took his seat, drawing in his long
legs toward his chair, his knee-bones, under the strain, seemed to be on
the point of coming through his trousers. His shoulders were bowed, the
incurve of his thin stomach following the line of his back. As he
settled back in his chair he passed his hand nervously over his mouth,
as if his lips were dry.

Cartwright's manner to this witness was the manner of a lackey who hangs
on every syllable that falls from his master's lips.

"At what time, Mr. Tilden, did your son Bud reach your house on the
night of the robbery?"

The old man cleared his throat and said, as if weighing each word:

"At ten minutes past ten o'clock."

"How do you fix the time?"

"I had just wound the clock when Bud come in."

"How, Mr. Tilden, how far is it to the cross-roads where the
mail-carrier says he was robbed?"

"About a mile and a half from my place."

"And how long would it take an able-bodied man to walk it?"

"'Bout fifteen minutes."

"Not more?"

"No, sir."

The Government's attorney had no questions to ask, and said so with a
certain assumed nonchalance.

Cartwright bowed smilingly, dismissed Bud's father with a satisfied
gesture of the hand, looked over the court-room with the air of a man
who was unable at the moment to find what he wanted, and in a low voice
called: "Jennetta Mooro!"

The girl, who sat within three feet of Cartwright, having followed the
old man almost to the witness-stand, rose timidly, drew her shawl closer
about her shoulders, and took the seat vacated by Bud's father. She had
that half-fed look in her face which one sometimes finds in the women of
the mountain-districts. She was frightened and very pale. As she pushed
her poke-bonnet back from her ears her unkempt brown hair fell about
her neck.

But Tilden, at mention of her name, half-started from his chair and
would have risen to his feet had not the officer laid his hand upon him.

He seemed on the point of making some protest which the action of the
officer alone restrained.

Cartwright, after the oath had been administered, began in a voice so
low that the jury stretched their necks to listen:

"Miss Moore, do you know the prisoner?"

"Yes, sir, I know Bud." She had one end of the shawl between her fingers
and was twisting it aimlessly. Every eye in the room was fastened
upon her.

"How long have you known him?"

There was a pause, and then she said in a faint voice:

"Ever since he and me growed up."

"Ever since you and he grew up, eh?" This repetition was in a loud
voice, so that any juryman dull of hearing might catch it. "Was he at
your house on the night of the robbery?"

"Yes, sir."

"At what time?"

"'Bout ten o'clock." This was again repeated.

"How long did he stay?"

"Not more'n ten minutes."

"Where did he go then?"

"He said he was goin' home."

"How far is it to his home from your house?"

"'Bout ten minutes' walk."

"That will do, Miss Moore," said Cartwright, and took his seat.

The Government prosecutor, who had sat with shoulders hunched up, his
wings pulled in, rose to his feet with the aid of a chair-back,
stretched his long arms above his head, and then, lowering one hand
level with the girl's face, said, as he thrust one sharp, skinny finger
toward her:

"Did anybody else come to see you the next night after the robbery?"

There was a pause, during which Cartwright busied himself with his
papers. One of his methods was never to seem interested in the
cross-examination of any one of his witnesses.

The girl's face flushed, and she began to fumble the shawl nervously
with her fingers.

"Yes, Hank Halliday," she murmured, in a low voice.

"Mr. Halliday, who has testified here?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did he want?"

"He wanted to know if I'd got a letter he'd writ me day before. And I
tol' him I hadn't. Then he 'lowed he'd a-brought it to me himself if
he'd knowed Bud was goin' to turn thief and hold up the mail-man. I
hadn't heard nothin' 'bout it and nobody else had till he began to talk.
I opened the door then and tol' him to walk out; that I wouldn't hear
nobody speak that way 'bout Bud Tilden. That was 'fore they'd
'rested Bud."

"Have you got that letter now?"

"No, sir."

"Did you ever get it?"

"No, sir."

"Did you ever see it?"

"No, and I don't think it was ever writ."

"But he _has_ written you letters before?"

"He used to; he don't now."

"That will do."

The girl took her place again behind the old man.

Cartwright rose to his feet with great dignity, walked to the chair on
which rested his hat, took from it the package of papers to serve as an
orator's roll--he did not open it, and they evidently had no bearing on
the case--and addressed the Judge, the package held aloft in his hand:

"Your Honor, there's not been a particle of evidence so far produced in
this court to convict this man of this crime. I have not conferred with
him, and therefore do not know what answers he has to make to this
infamous charge. I am convinced, however, that his own statement under
oath will clear up at once any doubt remaining in the minds of this
honorable jury of his innocence."

This was said with a certain ill-concealed triumph in his voice. I saw
now why he had taken the case, and saw, too, the drift of his
defence--everything thus far pointed to the old hackneyed plea of an
alibi. He had evidently determined on this course of action when he sat
listening to the stories Bud's father and the girl had told him as he
sat beside them on the bench near the door. Their testimony, taken in
connection with the uncertain testimony of the Government's principal
witness, the mail-carrier, as to the exact time of the assault, together
with the prisoner's testimony stoutly denying the crime, would insure
either an acquittal or a disagreement. The first would result in his
fees being paid by the court, the second would add to this amount
whatever Bud's friends could scrape together to induce him to go on with
the second trial. In either case his masterly defence was good for an
additional number of clients and perhaps--of votes. It is humiliating to
think that any successor of Choate, Webster, or Evarts should earn his
bread in this way, but it is true all the same.

"The prisoner will take the stand!" cried Cartwright, in a firm voice.

As the words left his mouth, the noise of shuffling feet and the
shifting of positions for a bettor view of the prisoner became so loud
that the Judge rapped for order, the clerk repeating it with the end of
his ruler.

Bud lifted himself to his feet slowly (his being called was evidently as
much of a surprise to him as it was to the crowded room), looked about
him carelessly, his glance resting first on the girl's face and then on
the deputy beside him. He stepped clumsily down from the raised platform
and shouldered his way to the witness-chair. The prosecuting attorney
had evidently been amazed at the flank movement of his opponent, for he
moved his position so he could look squarely in Bud's face. As the
prisoner sank into his seat, the room became hushed in silence.

Bud kissed the book mechanically, hooked his feet together and, clasping
his big hands across his waist-line, settled his great body between the
arms of the chair, with his chin resting on his shirt-front. Cartwright,
in his most impressive manner, stepped a foot closer to Bud's chair.

"Mr. Tilden, you have heard the testimony of the mail-carrier; now be
good enough to tell the jury where you were on the night of the
robbery--how many miles from this _mail-sack_?" and he waved his hand
contemptuously toward the bag. It was probably the first time in all his
life that Bud had heard any man dignify his personality with any
such title.

In recognition of the compliment, Bud raised his chin slightly and fixed
his eyes more intently on his questioner. Up to this time he had not
taken the slightest notice of him.

"'Bout as close's I could git to it--'bout three feet, I should
say--maybe less."

Cartwright gave a slight start and bit his lip. Evidently the prisoner
had misunderstood him. The silence continued.

"I don't mean _here_, Mr. Tilden;" and he pointed to the bag. "I mean
the night of the so-called robbery."

"That's what I said; 'bout as close's I could git."

"Well, did you rob the mail?" This was asked uneasily, but with a
half-concealed laugh in his voice as if the joke would appear in
a minute.

"No."

"No, of course not." The tone of relief was apparent.

"Well, do you know anything about the cutting of the bag?"

"Yes."

"Who did it?"

"Me."

"_You?"_ The surprise was now an angry one.

"Yes, me."

At this unexpected reply the Judge pushed his glasses high up on his
forehead with a quick motion and leaned over his bench, his eyes on the
prisoner. The jury looked at each other with amazement; such scenes were
rare in their experience. The prosecuting attorney smiled grimly.
Cartwright looked as if someone had struck him a sudden blow in
the face.

"What for?" he stammered. It was evidently the only question left for
him to ask. All his self-control was gone now, his face livid, an angry
look in his eyes. That any man with State's prison yawning before him
could make such a fool of himself seemed to astound him.

Bud turned slowly and, pointing his finger at Halliday, said between
his closed teeth:

"Ask Hank Halliday; he knows."

The buzzard sprang to his feet. There was the scent of carrion in the
air now; I saw it in his eyes.

"We don't want to ask Mr. Halliday; we want to ask you. Mr. Halliday is
not on trial, and we want the truth if you can tell it."

The irregularity of the proceeding was unnoticed in the tense
excitement.

Bud looked at him as a big mastiff looks at a snarling cur with a look
more of pity than contempt. Then he said slowly, accentuating each word:

"Keep yer shirt on. You'll git the truth--git the whole of it. Git what
you ain't lookin' for. There ain't no liars up in our mountains 'cept
them skunks in Gov'ment pay you fellers send up to us, and things like
Hank Halliday. He's wuss nor any skunk. A skunk's a varmint that don't
stink tell ye meddle with him, but Hank Halliday stinks all the time.
He's one o' them fellers that goes 'round with books in their pockets
with picters in 'em that no girl oughter see and no white man oughter
read. He gits 'em down to Louisville. There ain't a man in Pondville
won't tell ye it's true. He shoved one in my outside pocket over to
Pondville when I warn't lookin', the day 'fore I held up this man
Bowditch, and went and told the fellers 'round the tavern that I had
it. They come and pulled it out and had the laugh on me, and then he
began to talk and said he'd write to Jennetta and send her one o' the
picters by mail and tell her he'd got it out o' my coat, and he did. Sam
Kellers seen Halliday with the letter and told me after Bowditch had got
it in his bag. I laid for Bowditch at Pondville Corners, but he got past
somehow, and I struck in behind Bill Somers's mill, and crossed the
mountain and caught up with him as he was ridin' through the piece o'
woods near the clearin'. I didn't know but he'd try to shoot, and I
didn't want to hurt him, so I crep' up behind and threw him in the
bushes, cut a hole in the bag, and got the letter. That's the only one I
wanted and that's the only one I took. I didn't rob no mail, but I
warn't goin' to hev an honest, decent girl like Jennetta git that
letter, and there warn't no other way."

The stillness that followed was broken only by the Judge's voice.

"What became of that letter?"

"I got it. Want to see it?"

"Yes."

Bud felt in his pockets as if looking for something, and then, with an
expression as if he had suddenly remembered, remarked:

"No, I ain't got none. They stole my knife when they 'rested me." Then
facing the courtroom, he added: "Somebody lend me a knife, and pass me
my hat over there 'longside them sheriffs."

[Illustration: "I threw him in the bushes and got the letter."]

The court-crier took the hat from one of the deputies, and the clerk, in
answer to a nod of assent from the Judge, passed Bud an ink-eraser with
a steel blade in one end.

The audience now had the appearance of one watching a juggler perform a
trick. Bud grasped the hat in one hand, turned back the brim, inserted
the point of the knife between the hat lining and the hat itself and
drew out a yellow envelope stained with dirt and perspiration.

"Here it is. I ain't opened it, and what's more, they didn't find it
when they searched me;" and he looked again toward the deputies.

The Judge leaned forward in his seat and said:

"Hand me the letter."

The letter was passed up by the court-crier, every eye following it. His
Honor examined the envelope, and, beckoning to Halliday, said:

"Is this your letter?"

Halliday stepped to the side of the Judge, fingered the letter closely,
and said: "Looks like my writin'."

"Open it and see."

Halliday broke the seal with his thumb-nail, and took out half a sheet
of note-paper closely written on one side, wrapped about a small
picture-card.

"Yes, it's my letter;" and he glanced sheepishly around the room and
hung his head, his face scarlet.

The Judge leaned back in his chair, raised his hand impressively, and
said gravely:

"This case is adjourned until ten o'clock tomorrow."

Two days later I again met the Warden as he was entering the main door
of the jail. He had been over to the Court-house, he said, helping the
deputy along with a new "batch of moonshiners."

"What became of Bud Tilden?" I asked.

"Oh, he got it in the neck for robbin' the mails, just's I told you he
would. Peached on himself like a d---- fool and give everything dead
away. He left for Kansas this morning. Judge give him twenty years."

He is still in the lock-step at Leavenworth prison. He has kept it up
now for two years. His hair is short, his figure bent, his step
sluggish. The law is slowly making an animal of him--that wise,
righteous law which is no respecter of persons.



III


"ELEVEN MONTHS AND TEN DAYS"

It was a feeble old man of seventy-two this time who sat facing the
jury, an old man with bent back, scant gray hair, and wistful,
pleading eyes.

He had been arrested in the mountains of Kentucky and had been brought
to Covington for trial, chained to another outlaw, one of those
"moonshiners" who rob the great distilleries of part of their profits
and the richest and most humane Government on earth of part of
its revenue.

For eleven months and ten days he had been penned up in one of the steel
cages of Covington jail.

I recognized him the moment I saw him.

He was the old fellow who spoke to me from between the bars of his den
on my visit the week before to the inferno--the day I found Samanthy
North and her baby--and who told me then he was charged with "sellin'"
and that he "reckoned" he was the oldest of all the prisoners about him.
He had on the same suit of coarse, homespun clothes--the trousers hiked
up toward one shoulder from the strain of a single suspender; the
waistcoat held by one button; the shirt open at the neck, showing the
wrinkled throat, wrinkled as an old saddle-bag, and brown, hairy chest.

Pie still carried his big slouch hat, dust-begrimed and frayed at the
edges. It hung over one knee now, a red cotton handkerchief tucked under
its brim. He was superstitious about it, no doubt; he would wear it when
he walked out a free man, and wanted it always within reach. Hooked in
its band was a trout-fly, a red ibis, some souvenir, perhaps, of the
cool woods that he loved, and which brought back to him the clearer the
happy, careless days which might never be his again.

The trout-fly settled all doubts in my mind as to his origin and his
identity. He was not a "moonshiner"; he was my old trout fisherman,
Jonathan Gordon, come back to life, even to his streaming, unkempt
beard, leathery skin, thin, peaked nose, and deep, searching eyes. That
the daisies which Jonathan loved were at that very moment blooming over
his grave up in his New Hampshire hills, and had been for years back,
made no difference to me. I could not be mistaken. The feeble old man
sitting within ten feet of me, fidgeting about in his chair, the glare
of the big windows flooding his face with light, his long legs tucked
under him, his bony hands clasped together, the scanty gray hair adrift
over his forehead, his slouch hat hooked over his knee, was my own
Jonathan come back to life. His dog, George, too, was somewhere within
reach, and so were his fishing-pole and creel, with its leather
shoulder-band polished like a razor-strop. You who read this never saw
Jonathan, perhaps, but you can easily carry his picture in your mind by
remembering some one of the other old fellows you used to see on Sunday
mornings hitching their horses to the fence outside of the country
church, or sauntering through the woods with a fish-pole over their
shoulders and a creel by their sides, or with their heads together on
the porch of some cross-roads store, bartering eggs and butter for
cotton cloth and brown sugar. All these simple-minded, open-aired,
out-of-doors old fellows, with the bark on them, are very much alike.

The only difference between the two men lay in the expression of the two
faces. Jonathan always looked straight at you when he talked, so that
you could fathom his eyes as you would fathom a deep pool that mirrored
the stars. This old man's eyes wavered from one to another, lighting
first on the jury, then on the buzzard of a District Attorney, and then
on the Judge, with whom rested the freedom which meant life or which
meant imprisonment: at his age--death. This wavering look was the look
of a dog who had been an outcast for weeks, or who had been shut up with
a chain about his throat; one who had received only kicks and cuffs for
pats of tenderness--a cringing, pleading look ready to crouch beneath
some fresh cruelty.

This look, as the trial went on and the buzzard of an attorney flapped
out his denunciations, deepened to an expression of abject fear. In
trying to answer the questions hurled at him, he would stroke his
parched throat mechanically with his long fingers as if to help the
syllables free themselves. In listening to the witnesses he would curve
his body forward, one skinny hand cupped behind his ear, his jaw
dropping slowly, revealing the white line of the lips above the
straggling beard. Now and then as he searched the eyes of the jury there
would flash out from his own the same baffled, anxious look that comes
into dear old Joe Jefferson's face when he stops half-way up the
mountain and peers anxiously into the eyes of the gnomes who have stolen
out of the darkness and are grouping themselves silently about him--a
look expressing one moment his desire to please and the next his anxiety
to escape.

There was no doubt about the old man's crime, not the slightest. It had
been only the tweedledum and tweedledee of the law that had saved him
the first time. They would not serve him now. The evidence was too
conclusive, the facts too plain. The "deadwood," as such evidence is
called by the initiated, lay in heaps--more than enough to send him to
State prison for the balance of his natural life. The buzzard of a
District Attorney who had first scented out his body with an indictment,
and who all these eleven months and ten days had sat with folded wings
and hunched-up shoulders, waiting for his final meal--I had begun to
dislike him in the Bud Tilden trial, but I hated him now (a foolish,
illogical prejudice, for he was only doing his duty as he saw it)--had
full control of all the "deadwood"; had it with him, in fact. There were
not only some teaspoonfuls of the identical whiskey which this
law-breaker had sold, all in an eight-ounce vial properly corked and
labelled, but there was also the identical silver dime which had been
paid for it. One of the jury was smelling this whiskey when I entered
the court-room; another was fingering the dime. It was a good dime, and
bore the stamp of the best and greatest nation on the earth. On one side
was the head of the Goddess of Liberty and on the other was the wreath
of plenty: some stalks of corn and the bursting heads of wheat, with one
or two ivy leaves twisted together, suggesting honor and glory and
achievement. The "deadwood"--the evidence--was all right. All that
remained was for the buzzard to flap his wings once or twice in a
speech; then the jury would hold a short consultation, a few words would
follow from the presiding Judge, and the carcass would be ready for the
official undertaker, the prison Warden.

How wonderful the system, how mighty the results!

One is often filled with admiration and astonishment at the perfect
working of this mighty engine, the law. Properly adjusted, it rests on
the bedplate of equal rights to all men; is set in motion by the hot
breath of the people--superheated often by popular clamor; is kept safe
by the valve of a grand jury; is governed in its speed by the wise and
prudent Judge, and regulated in its output by a jury of twelve men.

Sometimes in the application of its force this machine, being man-made,
like all machines, and thus without a soul, gets out of order, loosens a
cog or bolt perhaps, throwing the mechanism "out of gear," as it is
called. When this happens, the engine resting on its bed-plate still
keeps its foundation, but some lesser part, the loom or lathe or
driving-wheel, which is another way of saying the arrest, the trial or
the conviction, goes awry. Sometimes the power-belt is purposely thrown
off, the machinery stopped, and a consultation takes place, resulting in
a disagreement or a new trial. When the machine is started again, it is
started more carefully, with the first experience remembered. Sometimes
the rightful material--the criminal, or the material from which the
criminal is made--to feed this loom or lathe or driving-wheel, is
replaced by some unsuitable material like the girl whose hair became
entangled in a flying-belt and whose body was snatched up and whirled
mercilessly about. Only then is the engine working on its bed-plate
brought to a standstill. The steam of the boiler, the breath of the
people, keeps up, but it is withheld from the engine until the mistake
can be rectified and the girl rescued. The law of mercy, the divine law,
now asserts itself. This law, being the law of God, is higher than the
law of man. Some of those who believe in the man-law and who stand over
the mangled body of the victim, or who sit beside her bed, bringing her
slowly back to life, affirm that the girl was careless and deserved her
fate. Others, who believe in the God-law, maintain that the engine is
run not to kill but to protect, not to maim but to educate, and that the
fault lies in the wrong application of the force, not in the
force itself.

So it was with this old man. Eleven months and ten days before this day
of his second trial (eleven months and three days when I first saw him),
a flying-belt set in motion up in his own mountain-home had caught and
crushed him. To-day he was still in the maw of the machinery, his
courage gone, his spirit broken, his heart torn. The group about his
body, not being a sympathetic group, were insisting that the engine
could do no wrong; that the victim was not a victim at all, but lawful
material to be ground up. This theory was sustained by the District
Attorney. Every day he must have fresh materials. The engine must run.
The machinery must be fed.

And his record?

Ah, how often is this so in the law!--his record must be kept good.

       *       *       *       *       *

After the whiskey had been held up to the light and the dime fingered,
the old man's attorney--a young lawyer from the old man's own town, a
smooth-faced young fellow who had the gentle look of a hospital nurse
and who was doing his best to bring the broken body back to life and
freedom--put the victim on the stand.

"Tell the jury exactly how it all happened," he said, "and in your own
way, just as you told it to me."

"I'll try, sir; I'll do my best." It was Rip's voice, only fainter. He
tugged at his collar as if to breathe the easier, cleared his throat and
began again. "I ain't never been in a place like this but once before,
and I hope you'll forgive me if I make any mistakes," and he looked
about the room, a flickering, half-burnt-out smile trembling on
his lips.

"Well, I got a piece of land 'bout two miles back of my place that
belongs to my wife, and I ain't never fenced it in, for I ain't never
had no time somehow to cut the timber to do it, she's been so sickly
lately. 'Bout a year ago I was goin' 'long toward Hi Stephens's mill
a-lookin' for muskrats when I heard some feller's axe a-workin' away,
and I says to Hi, 'Hi, ain't that choppin' goin' on on the wife's land?'
and he said it was, and that Luke Shanders and his boys had been
drawin' out cross-ties for the new railroad; thought I knowed it.

"Well, I kep' 'long up and come on Luke jes's he was throwin' the las'
stick onto his wagon. He kinder started when he see me, jumped on and
begin to drive off. I says to him, 'Luke,' I says, 'I ain't got no
objection to you havin' a load of wood; there's plenty of it; but it
don't seem right for you to take it 'thout askin', 'specially since the
wife's kind o' peaked and it's her land and not yourn.' He hauled the
team back on their hind legs, and he says:

"'When I see fit to ask you or your old woman's leave to cut timber on
my own land, I will. Me and Lawyer Fillmore has been a-lookin' into them
deeds, and this timber is mine;' and he driv off.

"I come along home and studied 'bout it a bit, and me and the wife
talked it over. We didn't want to make no fuss, but we knowed he was
alyin', but that ain't no unusual thing for Luke Shanders.

"Well, the nex' mornin' I got into Pondville 'bout eight o'clock and set
a-waitin' till Lawyer Fillmore come in. He looked kind o' shamefaced
when he see me, and I says, 'What's this Luke Shanders's been a-tellin'
me 'bout your sayin' my wife's timberland is hisn?'

"Then he began 'splainin' that the 'riginal lines was drawed wrong and
that old man Shanders's land, Luke's father, run to the brook and took
in all the white oak on the wife's lot and----"

The buzzard sprang to his feet and shrieked out:

"Your Honor, I object to this rigmarole. Tell the jury right away"--and
he faced the prisoner--"what you know about this glass of whiskey. Get
right down to the facts; we're not cutting cross-ties in this court."

The old man caught his breath, placed his fingers suddenly to his lips
as if to choke back the forbidden words, and, in an apologetic
voice, murmured:

"I'm gettin' there's fast's I kin, sir, 'deed I am; I ain't hidin'
nothin'."

He wasn't. Anyone could see it in his face.

"Better let him go on in his own way," remarked the Judge,
indifferently. His Honor was looking over some papers, and the
monotonous tones of the witness diverted attention. Most of the jury,
too, had already lost interest in the story. One of the younger members
had settled himself in his chair, thrust his hands into his pockets,
stretched out his legs, and had shut his eyes as if to take a nap.
Nothing so far had implicated either the whiskey or the dime; when it
did he would wake up.

The old man turned a grateful glance toward the Judge, leaned forward in
his chair, and with bent head looked about him on the floor as if trying
to pick up the lost end of his story. The young attorney, in an
encouraging tone, helped him find it with a question:

"When did you next see Mr. Fillmore and Luke Shanders?"

"When the trial come off," answered the old man, raising his head again.
"Course we couldn't lose the land. 'Twarn't worth much till the new
railroad come through; then the oak come handy for cross-ties. That's
what set Fillmore and Luke Shanders onto it.

"When the case was tried, the Judge seed they couldn't bring no 'riginal
deed 'cept one showin' that Luke Shanders and Fillmore was partners in
the steal, and the Judge 'lowed they'd have to pay for the timber they
cut and hauled away.

"They went round then a-sayin' they'd get even, though wife and I 'lowed
we'd take anything reasonable for what hurt they done us. And that went
on till one day 'bout a year ago Luke come into my place and said he and
Lawyer Fillmore would he over the next day; that they was tired o'
fightin', and that if I was willin' to settle they was.

"One o' the new Gov'ment dep'ties was sittin' in my room at the time. He
was goin' 'long up to town-court, he said, and had jest drapped in to
pass the time o' day. There he is sittin' over there," and he pointed to
his captor.

"I hadn't never seen him before, though I know a good many of 'em, but
he showed me his badge, and I knowed who he was.

"The nex' mornin' Lawyer Fillmore and Luke stopped outside and hollered
for me to come out. I wanted 'em to come in. Wife had baked some biscuit
and we was determined to be sociable-like, now that they was willin' to
do what was fair, and I 'lowed they must drive up and git out. They said
that that's what they come for, only that they had to go a piece down
the road, and they'd be back agin in a half-hour with the money.

"Then Luke Shanders 'lowed he was cold, and asked if I had a drap o'
whiskey."

At mention of the all-important word a visible stir took place in the
court-room. The young man with the closed eyes opened them and sat up in
his chair. The jury ceased whispering to one another; the Judge pushed
his spectacles back on his forehead and moved his papers aside; the
buzzard stretched his long neck an inch farther out of his shirt-collar
and lowered his head in attention. The spigot, which up to this time had
run only "emptyings," was now giving out the clear juice of the
wine-vat. Each man bent his tin cup of an ear to catch it. The old man
noticed the movement and looked about him anxiously, as if dreading
another rebuff. He started to speak, cleared his throat, pulled
nervously at his beard for a moment, glancing furtively about the room,
and in a lower tone repeated the words:

"Asked if I had a drap o' whiskey. Well, I always take a dram when I
want it, and I had some prime stuff my son Ned had sent me over from
Frankfort, so I went hack and poured out 'bout four fingers in a glass,
and took it out to him.

"After he drunk it he handed me back the glass and driv off, sayin' he'd
be round later. I took the glass into the house agin and sot it
'longside the bottle on the mantel, and when I turned round there sot
the Gov'ment dep'ty. He'd come in, wife said, while I was talkin' with
Luke in the road. When he see the glass he asked if I had a license, and
I told him I didn't sell no liquor, and he asked me what that was, and I
told him it was whiskey, and then he got the bottle and took a smell of
it, and then he held up the glass and turned it upside down and out
drapped a ten-cent piece. Then he 'rested me!"

The jury was all attention now; the several exhibits were coming into
view. One fat, red-faced juror, who had a dyed mustache and looked like
a sporting man, would have laughed outright had not the Judge checked
him with a stern look.

"You didn't put the dime there, did you?" the young attorney asked, in a
tone that implied a negative answer.

"No, sir; I don't take no money for what I give a man." This came with a
slight touch of indignation.

"Do you know who put it there?"

"Well, there warn't nobody but Luke Shanders could 'a' done it, 'cause
nobody had the glass but him. I heard since that it was all a put-up
job, that they had swore I kep' a roadside, and they had sot the dep'ty
onto me; but I don't like to think men kin be so mean, and I ain't
a-sayin' it now. If they knew what I've suffered for what they done to
me, they couldn't help but feel sorry for me if they're human."

He stopped and passed his hands wearily over his forehead. The jury sat
still, their eyes riveted on the speaker. Even the red-faced man was
listening now.

For an instant there was a pause. Then the old man reached forward in
his seat, his elbows on his knees, his hands held out as if in appeal,
and in a low, pleading tone addressed the jury. Strange to say, neither
the buzzard nor the Judge interrupted the unusual proceeding:

"Men, I hope you will let me go home now; won't you, please? I ain't
never been 'customed all my life to bein' shut up, and it comes purty
hard, not bein' so young as I was. I ain't findin' no fault, but it
don't seem to me I ever done anythin' to deserve all that's come to me
lately. I got 'long best way I could over there"--and he pointed in
the direction of the steel cages--"till las' week, when Sam Jelliff come
down to see his boy and told me the wife was took sick bad, worse than
she's been yet. She ain't used to bein' alone; you'd know that if you
could see her. The neighbors is purty good to her, I hear, but nobody
don't understand her like me, she and me bein' so long together--mos'
fifty years now. You'll let me go home, won't you, men? I git so tired,
so tired; please let me go."

[Illustration: "I git so tired, so tired; please let me go."]

The buzzard was on his feet now, his arms sawing the air, his strident
voice filling the courtroom.

He pleaded for the machine--for the safety of the community, for the
majesty of the law. He demanded instant conviction for this trickster,
this Fagin among men, this hoary-headed old scoundrel who had insulted
the intelligence of twelve of the most upright men he had ever seen in a
jury-box, insulted them with a tale that even a child would laugh at.
When at last he folded his wings, hunched up his shoulders and sat down,
and the echoes of his harsh voice had died away, it seemed to me that I
could hear vibrating through the room, as one hears the murmur of a
brook after a storm, the tender tones of the old man pleading as if
for his life.

The jury had listened to the buzzard's harangue, with their eyes, not
with their ears. Down in their hearts there still rang the piteous
words. The man-made machine was breaking down; its mechanism out of
"gear"; the law that governed it defective. The God-law, the law of
mercy, was being set in motion.

The voice of the Judge trembled a little as he delivered his charge, as
if somehow a stray tear had clogged the passage from his heart to his
lips. In low, earnest tones that every man strained his ear to catch, he
reviewed the testimony of the witnesses, those I had not heard; took up
the uncontradicted statement of the Deputy Marshal as evidenced by the
exhibits before them; passed to the motive behind the alleged
conspiracy; dwelt for a moment on the age and long confinement of the
accused, and ended with the remark that if they believed his story to be
an explanation of the facts, they must acquit him.

They never left their seats. Even the red-faced man voted out of turn in
his eagerness. The God-law had triumphed! The old man was free.

The throng in the court-room rose and made their way to the doors, the
old man going first, escorted by an officer to see him safely outside.
The Judge disappeared through a door; the clerk lifted the lid of his
desk and stowed beneath it the greasy, ragged Bible, stained with the
lies of a thousand lips. The buzzard crammed his hat over his eyes,
turned, and without a word to anyone, stalked out of the room.

I mingled with the motley throng, my ears alert for any spoken opinions.
I had seen the flying-belt thrown from the machine and the stoppage of
the engine. I wanted now to learn something of the hot breath of the
people who had set it in motion eleven months and ten days before.

"Reckon he'll cut a blue streak for home now," muttered a court-lounger,
buttoning up his coat; "that is, if he's got one. You'll never catch him
sellin' any more moonshine."

"Been me, I'd soaked him," blurted out a corner-loafer. "If you can't
convict one of these clay-eaters when you've got him dead to rights,
ain't no use havin' no justice."

"I thought Tom [the buzzard] would land him," said a stout,
gray-whiskered lawyer who was gathering up his papers. "First case Tom's
lost this week. Goes pretty hard with him, you know, when he loses
a case."

"It would have been an outrage, sir, if he had won it," broke in a
stranger. "The arrest of an old man like that on such a charge, and his
confinement for nearly a year in a hole like that one across the street,
is a disgrace. Something is rotten in the way the laws are administered
in the mountains of Kentucky, or outrages like this couldn't occur."

"He wouldn't thank you, sir, for interfering," remarked a bystander.
"Being shut up isn't to him what it is to you and me. He's been taken
care of for a year, hasn't he? Warmed and fed, and got his three meals a
day. That's a blamed sight more than he gets at home. They're only
half-human, these mountaineers, anyway. Don't worry; he's all right."

"You've struck it first time," retorted the Deputy Marshal who had
smelled the whiskey, found the dime, and slipped the handcuffs on the
old man's withered wrists. "Go slow, will you?" and he faced the
stranger. "We got to do our duty, ain't we? That's the law, and there
ain't no way gittin' round it. And if we make mistakes, what of it?
We've got to make mistakes sometimes, or we wouldn't catch half of 'em.
The old skeesiks ought to be glad to git free. See?"

Suddenly there came to my mind the realization of the days that were to
follow and all that they would bring to him of shame. I thought of the
cold glance of his neighbors, the frightened stare of the children ready
to run at the approach of the old jail-bird, the coarse familiarity of
the tavern lounger. Then the cruelty of it all rose before me. Who would
recompense him for the indignities he had suffered--the deadly chill of
the steel clamps; the long days of suspense; the bitterness of the first
disagreement; the foul air of the inferno, made doubly foul by close
crowding of filthy bodies, inexpressibly horrible to one who had
breathed all his life the cool, pure air of the open with only the big
clean trees for his comrades?

And if at last his neighbors should take pity upon him and drive out the
men who had wrecked his old age, and he should wander once more up the
brook with his rod over his shoulder, the faithful dog at his heels, and
a line of the old song still alive in his heart, what about those eleven
months and ten days of which the man-law had robbed him?

O mighty machine! O benign, munificent law! Law of a people who boast of
mercy and truth and equal rights and justice to all. Law of a land with
rivers of gold and mountains of silver, the sum of its wealth astounding
the world.

What's to be done about it?

Nothing.

Better drag a dozen helpless Samanthy Norths from their homes, their
suckling babes in their arms, and any number of gray-haired old men from
their cabins, than waive one jot or tittle of so just a code; and
lose--the tax on whiskey.



CAP'N BOB OF THE SCREAMER

Captain Bob Brandt dropped in to-day, looking brown and ruddy, and
filling my office with, a breeze and freshness that seemed to have
followed him all the way in from the sea.

"Just in, Captain?" I cried, springing to my feet, my fingers closing
round his--no more welcome visitor than Captain Bob ever pushes open my
office door.

"Yes--Teutonic."

"Where did you pick her up--Fire Island?"

"No; 'bout hundred miles off Montauk."

Captain Bob has been a Sandy Hook pilot for some years back.

"How was the weather?" I had a chair ready for him now and was lifting
the lid of my desk in search of a box of cigars.

"Pretty dirty. Nasty swell on, and so thick you could hack holes in it.
Come pretty nigh missin' her"--and the Captain opened his big
storm-coat, hooked his cloth cap with its ear-tabs on one prong of the
back of one office-chair, stretched his length in another, and, bending
forward, reached out his long, brawny arm for the cigar I was extending
toward him.

I have described this sea-dog before--as a younger sea-dog--twenty
years younger, in fact, he was in my employ then--he and his sloop
Screamer. Every big foundation stone that Caleb set in Shark Ledge
Light--the one off Keyport harbor--can tell you about them both.

In those light-house days this Captain Bob was "a tall, straight,
blue-eyed young fellow of twenty-two, with a face like an open book--one
of those perfectly simple, absolutely fearless, alert men found so often
on the New England coast, with legs and arms of steel, body of hickory,
and hands of whalebone; cabin boy at twelve, common sailor at sixteen,
first mate at twenty, and full captain the year he voted."

He is precisely the same kind of man to-day, plus twenty years of
experience. The figure is still the figure of his youth, the hickory a
little better seasoned, perhaps, and the steel and whalebone a little
harder, but they have lost none of their spring and vitality. The ratio
of promotion has also been kept up. That he should now rank as the most
expert pilot on the station was quite to be expected. He could have
filled as well a commander's place on the bridge, had he chosen to work
along those lines.

And the modesty of the man!

Nothing that he has done, or can still do, has ever stretched his hat
measure or swelled any part of his thinking apparatus. The old pilot-cap
is still number seven, and the sensible head beneath it number seven,
too. It could be number eight, or nine, or even ten, if it had expanded
in proportion to the heroic quality of many of his deeds. During the
light-house days, for instance, when some sudden, shift of wind would
churn the long rollers into bobbles and then into frenzied seas that
smothered the Ledge in white suds, if a life-boat was to be launched in
the boiling surf, the last man to jump aboard, after a mighty push with
his long hindmost leg, was sure to be this same bundle of whalebone and
hickory. And should this boat, a few minutes later, go whirling along in
the "Race," bottom side up, with every worker safe astride her keel,
principally because of Captain Bob's coolness and skill in hauling them
out of the water, again the last man to crawl beside the rescued crew
would be this same long-legged, long armed skipper.

Or should a guy-rope snap with a sound like a pistol-shot, and a great
stone swung to a boom and weighing tons should begin running amuck
through piles of cement, machinery, and men, and some one of the working
gang, seeing the danger, should, with the quickness and sureness of a
mountain-goat, spring straight for the stone, clutching the end of the
guy and bounding off again, twisting the bight round some improvised
snubbing-post thus checking its mad career, you would not have had to
ask his name twice.

"Cap'n Bob stopped it, sir," was sure to have been the proffered reply.

So, too, in his present occupation of pilot. It was only a few years ago
that I stood on the deck of an incoming steamer, straining my eyes
across a heaving sea, the horizon lost in the dull haze of countless
froth-caps; we had slowed for a pilot, so the word came down the deck.
Suddenly, against the murky sky-line, with mainsail double-reefed and
jib close-hauled, loomed a light craft plunging bows under at every
lurch. Then a chip the size of your hand broke away from the frail
vessel, and a big wave lying around for such prey, sprang upon it with
wide-open mouth. The tiny bit dodged and slipped out of sight into a
mighty ravine, then mounted high in air, upborne in the teeth of another
great monster, and again was lost to view. Soon the chip became a bit of
driftwood manned by two toy men working two toy oars like mad and
bearing at one end a yellow dot.

Then the first officer walked down the deck to where I stood, followed
by a huddle of seamen who began unrolling a rope ladder.

"You're right," I heard an officer answer a passenger. "It's no fit
weather to take a pilot. Captain wouldn't have stopped for any other
boat but No. 11. But those fellows out there don't know what
weather is."

The bit of driftwood now developed into a yawl. The yellow dot broadened
and lengthened to the semblance of a man standing erect and unbuttoning
his oil-skins as he looked straight at the steamer rolling port-holes
under, the rope ladder flopping against her side. Then came a quick
twist of the oars, a sudden lull as the yawl shot within a boat's length
of the rope ladder, and with the spring of a cat the man in oil-skins
landed with both feet on its lower rung, and the next instant he was
over the steamer's rail and on her deck beside me.

I thought I knew that spring, even before I saw his face or got hold of
his hand.

It was Captain Bob.

As I look at him now, sitting in my office-chair, the smoke of the cigar
curling about his bronzed, weather-tanned face, my eye taking in his
slim waist, slender thighs, and long, sinewy arms and hands that have
served him so well all his life, I can hardly believe that twenty years
have passed over his head since we worked together on Shark Ledge. But
for the marks chalked on his temples by the Old Man with the Hour-glass
and the few tally-scores of hard work crossing the corners of his mouth
and eyes, he has the same external appearance as in the old days. Even
these indexes of advancing years are lost when he throws his head up and
laughs one of his spontaneous, ringing laughs that fills my office full
of sunshine, illumining it for hours after he has gone.

"This pilotin' 's pretty rough sometimes," Captain Bob continued between
the puffs of smoke, "but it ain't nothin' to the old days. When I look
back on it all, seems to me as if we was out o' our heads most o' the
time. I didn't know it then, but 'twas true all the same. Think now o'
layin' the Screamer broadside on that stone pile at Shark Ledge,
unloadin' them stone with nothin' but a couple o' spar buoys to keep 'er
off. Wonder I didn't leave 'er bones there. Would if I hadn't knowed
every stick o' timber in 'er and jest what she could stagger under."

"But she was a good sea-boat," I interpolated. "The Screamer was always
the pride of the work."

"None better. You'd a-thought so if you'd been with us that night off
Hatteras; we layin' to, hatches battened down. I never see it blow wuss.
It came out o' the nor'west 'bout dark, and 'fore mornin' I tell ye it
was a-humpin' things. We started with a pretty decent set o' sails, new
eyelets rove in and new clew lines, but, Lord love ye, we hadn't taken
old Hatteras into consideration. Bill Nevins, my engineer, and a
landsman who was to work the h'istin' engine, looked kind 'er peaked
when what was left of the jib come rattlin' down on his fo'c's'le hatch,
but I says to him, 'the Screamer's all right, Billy, so she don't strike
nothin' and so long's we can keep the water out 'er. Can't sink 'er any
more'n an empty five-gallon ker'sene can with the cork in. We'll lay
'round here till mornin' and then set a signal. Something'll come along
pretty soon.' Sure 'nough, 'long come a coaler bound for Charleston.
She see us a-wallowin' in the trough and our mast thrashin' for all it
was worth.

"'What d'ye want?' the skipper says, when he got within hail.

"'Some sail-needles and a ball o' twine,' I hollered back; 'we got
everything else.' You should just a-heard him cuss--" and one of Captain
Bob's laughs rang through the room. "Them's two things I'd
forgot--didn't think o' them in fact till the mainsheet give 'way.

"Well, he chucked 'em aboard with another cuss. I hadn't no money to pay
no salvage. All we wanted was them needles and a little elbow-grease and
gumption. So we started in, and 'fore night, she still a-thrashin', I'd
fixed up the sails, patched the eyelets with a pair o' boot-legs, and
was off again."

"What were you doing off Hatteras, Captain Bob?" I asked. I was leading
him on, professing ignorance of minor details, so that I could again
enjoy the delight of hearing him tell it.

"Oh, that was another one o' them crazy jobs I used to take when I
didn't know no better. Why, I guess you remember 'bout that wreckin' job
off Hamilton, Bermuda?"

He was settled in his chair now, his legs crossed, his head down between
his shoulders.

"You see, after I quit work on the 'ledge,' I was put to 't for a job,
and there come along a feller by the name of Lamson--the agent of an
insurance company, who wanted me to go to Bermuda and git up some
forty-two pieces o' white I-talian marble that had been wrecked three
years before off the harbor of Hamilton. They ran from three to
twenty-one tons each, he said. So off I started with the Screamer. He
didn't say, though, that the wreck lay on a coral reef eight miles from
land, or I'd stayed to home in New Bedford.

"When I got to where the wreck lay you couldn't see a thing 'bove water.
So I got into an old divin' dress we had aboard--one we used on the
Ledge--oiled up the pump and went down to look her over, and by Jimmy
Criminy, not a scrap o' that wreck was left 'cept the rusty iron work
and that part o' the bottom plankin' of the vessel that lay under the
stones! Everything else was eaten up with the worms! Funniest-lookin'
place you ever see. The water was just as clear as air, and I could see
every one o' them stone plain as daylight--looked like so many big lumps
o' white sugar scattered 'round--and they _were_ big! One of 'em weighed
twenty-one tons, and none on 'em weighed less'n five. Of course I knew
how big they were 'fore I started, and I'd fitted up the Screamer
special to h'ist 'em, but I didn't know I'd have to handle 'em twice;
once from where they laid on that coral reef in twenty-eight feet o'
water and then unload 'em on the Navy Yard dock, above Hamilton, and
then pick 'em up agin, load 'em 'board the Screamer, and unload 'em
once more 'board a Boston brig they'd sent down for 'em--one o' them
high-waisted things 'bout sixteen feet from the water-line to the rail.
That was the wust part of it."

Captain Bob stopped, felt in his pocket for a match, found it empty,
rose from his chair, picked one from a match-safe on my desk, lighted
his cigar, and resumed his seat again. I have found it wisest to let him
have his own way in times like these. If I interrupt the flow of his
talk it may stop for the day, and I lose the best part of the enjoyment
of having him with me.

"Pretty decent chaps, them Englishmen"--puff-puff--the volume of smoke
was all right once more. "One Monday morning I ran out of the Navy Yard
dock within sight of the wreck. I had been layin' up over Sunday to get
out of the way of a norther, when I luffed a little too soon, and bang
went my bowsprit and scraped off about three feet of red paint from the
end of the dock. One of the watchmen was on the string-piece, and saw
the whole thing. 'Come ashore,' he says, 'and go and see the Admiral;
you can't scrape no paint off this dock with _my_ permission.'

"Well, I waited four hours for his nibs. When he come to his office
quarters he was 'bout up to my arms, red as a can-buoy, and white hair
stickin' up straight as a shoe-brush on his head. He looked cross enough
to bite a tenpenny nail in two.

"'Ran into the dock, did ye--ran into Her Majesty's dock, and ye had
room enough to turn a fleet in! Do you think we paint these docks for
the fun of havin' you lubbers scrape it off? You'll pay for paintin' it
over, sir--that's what you'll do, or I'll libel your boat, and send a
file of marines down and tie her up,' and away he went up the dock to
his office again.

"'Gosh!' I said to myself. 'Guess I'm in a fix,' The boys stood around
and heard every word, and I tell ye it warn't no joke. As to money,
there warn't a ten-dollar bill in the crew. I'd spent every cent I could
rake and scrape to fit the Screamer out, and the boys were workin' on
shares, and nobody was to get any money until the last stone--that big
twenty-one-ton feller--was 'board the brig. Then I could go to the
agents in Hamilton and draw two-thirds of my contract. That
twenty-one-ton chunk, I forgot to tell ye, I had picked up the day
before, and it was then aboard the Screamer, and we was on our way down
to Hamilton, where the brig lay, when her nose scraped off the
Admiral's paint.

"It did look kind o' nasty for us, and no mistake. One day more, and
we'd 'a' been through and had our money.

"'Go up and see him,' said the watchman. 'He gits cool sometimes as
sudden as he gits hot.' So Bill Nevins, my engineer, who was workin' the
h'ister, and I went up. The old feller was sittin' on the piazza in a
big rattan chair.

"'Come aboard,' he hollered, soon's he see Bill and me a-standin' in
the garden-path with our hats off, lookin' like two jailbirds about to
be sentenced. Well, we got up on the porch, and he looked us all
over, and said:

"'Have you got that money with you?' 'No,' I said, 'I haven't,' and I
ups and tells him just how we was fixed, and how we had worked, and how
short we was of grub and clothes and money, and then I said, 'an' now I
come to tell ye that I hit the dock fair and square, and it was all my
fault, and that I'll pay whatever you say is right when I put this stone
'board and get my pay.'

"He looked me all over--I tell you I was pretty ragged; nothin' but a
shirt and pants on, and they was almighty tore up, especially where most
everybody wants to be covered--and Bill was no better. We'd 'bout used
up our clo'es so that sail-needles nor nothin' else wouldn't a-done us
no good, and we had no time nor no spare cash to go ashore and
get others.

"While I was a-talkin', the old feller's eyes was a-borin' into
mine--then he roared out, 'No, sir; you won't!--you won't pay one d--d
shillin', sir. You'll go back to your work, and if there's anything you
want in the way of grub or supplies send here for it and you shall have
it. Good-day.' I tell ye he was a rum one."

"Was that the last time you saw him?" I asked.

"Not much. When we got 'longside the brig the next day, her Cap'n see
that twenty-one-ton stone settin' up on the deck of the Screamer,
lookin' like a big white church, and he got so scared he went ashore and
started a yarn that we couldn't lift that stone sixteen feet in the air,
and over her rail and down into the hold, and that we'd smash his brig,
and it got to the Admiral's ears, and down come two English engineers,
in cork helmets and white jackets and gold buttons, spic' an' span as if
they'd stepped out of the chart-room of a yacht. One was a colonel and
the other was a major. They were both just back from India, and
natty-lookin' chaps as you ever saw. And clear stuff all the way
through--you could tell that before they opened their mouths.

"I was on the deck of the Screamer, overhaulin' the fall, surrounded by
most of the crew, gettin' ready to h'ist the stone, when I first saw
'em. They and the Cap'n were away up above me, leanin' over the rail,
lookin' at the stone church that some o' the boys was puttin' the chains
'round. Bill Nevins was down in the fo'c's'le, firin' up, with the
safety-valve set at 125 pounds. He had half a keg o' rosin and a can o'
kerosene to help out with in case we wanted a few pounds extry in the
middle of the tea-party. Pretty soon I heard one of 'em holler:

"'Ahoy! Is the Captain aboard?'

"'He is,' I said, steppin' out. 'Who wants him?'

"'Colonel Throckmorton,' he says, 'and Major Severn.'

"'Come aboard, gentlemen,' I says.

"So down they come, the Colonel first, one foot at a time touchin' the
ladder, the Major following. When he reached the deck and wheeled around
to look at me you just ought to have seen his face.

"'Are you the Captain?' he says, and he looked me over 'bout as the
admiral had done.

"'I be,' I said, 'Captain Robert Brandt, of Pigeon Cove, Cape Ann,
master and owner of the sloop Screamer, at your service'--I kep' front
side to him. 'What can I do for you?'

"'Well, Captain,' he began, 'perhaps it is none of our business, but the
Captain of the brig here,' and he pointed up above him, 'has asked us to
look over your tackle and see whether it is safe enough to lift this
stone. He's afraid you'll drop it and smash his deck in. Since I've seen
it, and what you propose to lift it with, I've told him there's no
danger, for you'll never get it off the deck. We are both officers of
the Engineering Corps, and it is our business to know about
such things.'

"'What makes you think the Screamer won't lift it?' I asked.

"'Well,' says the Colonel, looking aloft, 'her boom ain't big enough,
and that Manila rope is too light. I should think it wasn't over three
and three-quarter-inch rope. We all know fifteen tons is enough weight
for that size rope, even with a fourfold purchase, and we understand
you say this stone weighs twenty-one.'

"'I'm sorry, gentlemen,' I said, 'and if you are worried about it you'd
better go 'board the brig, for I'm about ready to pick the stone up and
land her.'

"Well, the Major said he guessed he would, if I was determined to pull
the mast out of my sloop, but the Colonel said he'd stay by and see
it out.

"Just then Bill Nevins stuck his head out of the fo'c's'le. He was
blacker than I was; all smeared with grease and stripped to his waist.
It was hot enough anywhere, but it was sizzlin' down where he was.

"'All ready, Cap'n,' he says. 'She's got every pound she can carry.'

"I looked everything over--saw the butt of the boom was playin' free in
the wooden socket, chucked in a lot of tallow so it could move easy,
give an extra twist to the end of the guy, and hollered to Bill to go
ahead. She went chuckety-chuck, chuckety-chuck for half a dozen turns;
then she slowed down soon as she struck the full weight, and began to
pant like an old horse climbin' a hill. All this time the Colonel was
callin' out from where he stood near the tiller: 'She'll never lift it,
Captain--she'll never lift it.'

"Next come a scrapin' 'long the deck, and the big stone swung clear with
a foot o' daylight 'tween it and the deck. Then up she went, crawlin'
slowly inch by inch, till she reached the height of the brig's rail.

"Now come the wust part. I knew that when I gave orders to slack away
the guy-rope so as to swing the stone aboard the brig, the Screamer
would list over and dip her rail in the water. So I made a jump for the
rope ladder and shinned up the brig's side so as to take a hand in
landin' the stone properly on the brig's deck so as to save her beams
and break the jar when I lowered the stone down. I had one eye now on
the stone and the other on the water, which was curling over the
Screamer's rail and makin' for the fo'c's'le hatch. Should the water
pour down this hatch, out would go my fires and maybe up would come
her b'iler.

"'Ease away on that guy and lower away easy,' I hollered to Bill. The
stone dropped to within two feet of the brig's deck and swung back and
for'ards. Then I heard Bill yell. I was expectin' it.

"'Water's comin' in!'

"I leaned over the brig's rail and could see the slop of the sea combin'
over the Screamer's fo'c's'le hatch. Bill's fires _would_ be out the
next minute. There was just two feet now 'tween the stone and the deck
where I stood--too much to drop; but there was nothing else to do, and
I hollered:

"'All gone.'

"Down she come with a run, struck the big timbers on the deck, and by
Jiminy! ye could a-heard that old brig groan from stem to stern.

"I jumped on top of the stone and threw off the shackles, and the
Screamer came up on an even keel as easy as a duck ridin' the water.

"You just oughter seen the Colonel when the old boat righted herself,
and he had climbed up and stood 'longside the Major a-talkin' it over.

"Pretty soon he came up to where I was a-gettin' the tackle ready to
lower the stone in the hold, and he says:

"'Well, you made your word good, Cap'n, but I want to tell you that
nobody but an American could a-done it. It would cost me my commission
if I should try to do what you have done.'

"'Well, gentlemen,' I says, 'what was wrong about it? What's the matter
with the Screamer's rig?'

"'Well, the size of the rope for one thing,' says the Colonel, 'and the
boom.'

"'Well, p'haps you ain't looked it over,' I says, and I began
unravelling an end that stuck out near the shackle. 'If you'll look
close here'--and I held the end of the rope up--'you'll see that every
stran' of that rope is made of the best Manila yarn, and laid as smooth
as silk. I stood over that rope myself when it was put together. Old Sam
Hanson of New Bedford laid up that rope, and there ain't no better
nowhere. I knew what it had to do, and I warn't goin' to take no chances
of its not doin' it right. As to that boom, I want to tell ye that I
picked that boom out o' about two hundred sticks in Tom Carlin's
shipyard, in Stonington, and had it scraped and ironed just to please
me. There ain't a rotten knot in it from butt to finish, and mighty few
of any other kind. That stick's _growed right_--that's what's the matter
with it; and it bellies out in the middle, just where it ought to be
thickest.'

"Well, they didn't say nothin' for a while, 'cept to walk round the
stone once or twice and slap it with their hands, as if they wanted to
make sure it was all there. My men were all over it now, and we was
gettin' things in shape to finish up. I tell ye the boys were mighty
glad, and so was I. It had been a long pull of six months' work, and we
were out of most everything, and as soon as the big stone was down in
the brig's hold, and warped back and stowed with the others--and that
wouldn't take but a day or two more--we would clean up, get our money,
and light out for home.

"All this time the Colonel and the Major were buzzin' each other off by
the other rail. Pretty soon they both come over to where I stood, and
the Colonel reached out his hand.

"'Cap'n Brandt,' he says--and he had a look in his face as if he meant
it--and he did, every word of it--'it would give Major Severn and myself
great pleasure if you would dine with us to-night at the Canteen. The
Admiral is coming, and some brother officers who would be pleased to
know you.'

"Well, I was struck all of a heap for a minute, knowing what kind of
clo'es I had to go in, and so I says:

"'Well, gentlemen, that's very nice of you, and I see you mean it, and
if I had anything fittin' to wear there's nothin' I would like better;
but ye see how I'm fixed,' and I lifted my arms so he could see a few
holes that he might a-missed before, and I motioned to some other parts
of my get-up that needed repairs.

"'That don't make no difference, Cap'n, what kind of clo'es you come in.
We dine at eight o'clock.'

"Of course I knew I couldn't go, and I didn't want 'em to think I
intended to go when I didn't, so I says, rather positive-like:

"'Very much obliged, gentlemen, but I guess I'll have to get you to
count me out this time.' I knowed I warn't fittin' to sit at anybody's
table, especially if that old Admiral was comin'.

"The Colonel see I was in earnest, and he stepped up, quick-like, and
laid his hand on my shoulder.

"'Captain Brandt,' he says, 'we ain't worryin' 'bout your clo'es, and
don't you worry. You can come in your shirt, you can come in your socks,
or you can come without one damned rag--only come!'"

The Captain stopped, shook the ashes from his cigar, slowly raised
himself to his feet, and reached for his hat.

"Did you go, Captain?" I asked.

The Captain looked at me for a moment with one of those quizzical
glances which so often light up his face when something amuses him, and
said, as he blew a cloud of smoke to the ceiling:

"Well, I didn't forget my manners. When it got dark--dark, mind ye--I
went up and sat on the piazza and had a smoke with 'em--Admiral and all.
But I didn't go to dinner--not in them pants."



A PROCESSION OF UMBRELLAS


I

This all happened on the banks of the Seine, above St. Cloud--above
Suresne, in fact, or rather its bridge--the new one that has pieced out
the old one with the quaint stone arches that we love.

A silver-gray haze, a pure French gray, hung over the river, softening
the sky-line of the near-by hills, and making ghosts of a row of
gendarme poplars guarding the opposite bank.

On my side of the stream wandered a path close to the water's edge--so
close that I could fill my water-cups without leaving my
sketching-stool. Over this path, striped with shadows, big trees
towered, their gnarled branches interlaced above my head. On my right,
rising out of a green sward cleared of all underbrush, towered other
trees, their black trunks sharp-cut against the haze. In the distance,
side by side with the path, wound the river, still asleep, save where it
flashed into waves of silver laughter at the touch of some frolicsome
puff of wind. Elsewhere, although the sun was now hours high, it dozed
away, nestling under the overhanging branches making their morning
toilet in its depths. But for these long, straight flashes of silver
light glinting between the tree-trunks, one could not tell where the
haze ended and the river began.

As I worked on, my white umbrella tilted at the exact angle so that my
palette, hand, and canvas would be hidden from the inquisitive sun, a
group of figures emerged from a clump of low trees, and made their way
across the green sward--the man in an ivory-black coat, evidently a
priest, even at that distance; the woman in a burnt-umber dress with a
dot of Chinese white for a head--probably a cap; and the third, a girl
of six or eight in a brown madder dress and yellow-ochre hat.

An out-door painter, while at work, tumbles everything that crosses his
path or comes within range of his vision into the crucible of his
palette. The most majestic of mountains and the softest of summer clouds
are to him but flat washes of cobalt, and the loveliest of dimples on
the fairest of cheeks but a shadow-tone, and a high light made real by
pats of indigo and vermilion.

So in the three figures went among my trees, the priest in the
background against a mass of yellow light--black against yellow is
always a safe contrast; the burnt-umber woman breaking the straight line
of a trunk, and the child--red on green--intensifying a slash of zinober
that illumined my own grassy sward.

Then my interest in the group ceased. The priest, no doubt, was taking
his sister, or his aunt, or his mother, with their own or somebody
else's little girl, out for an airing, and they had come at the precise
moment when I had begun to long for just such a collection of people;
and now they could take themselves off and out of my perspective,
particularly the reddish-brown girl who kept on dancing in the sunniest
places, running ahead of the priest and the woman, lighting up and
accentuating half a dozen other corners of the wood interior before me
in as many minutes, and making me regret before the paint was half dry
on her own little figure that I had not waited for a better composition.

Then she caught sight of my umbrella.

She came straight toward me with that slowing of pace as she approached
the nearer, her curiosity getting the better of her timidity--quite as a
fawn or a little calf would have done, attracted by some bit of color or
movement which was new to it. The brown madder dress I now saw was
dotted with little spots of red, like sprays of berries; the
yellow-ochre hat was wound with a blue ribbon, and tied with a bow on
one side. I could see, too, that she wore slippers, and that her hair
was platted in two pig-tails, and hung down her back, the ends fastened
with a ribbon that matched the one on her hat.

She stood quite still, her face perfectly impassive, her little hands
clasped together, the brim of her hat shading her eyes, which looked
straight at my canvas.

I gave no sign of her presence. It is dangerous to break down the
reserve of silence, which is often the only barrier between an out-door
painter and the crowds that surround him. Persisted in, it not only
compels their respect, even to the lowering of their voices and the
tip-toeing in and out of the circle about you, but shortens the time of
their visits, a consummation devoutly to be wished. So I worked on in