The Prodigal Judge Part 15

said the judge plaintively. By way of answer, Mahaffy shot him a contemptuous glance. "Take a chair--do, Solomon!" entreated the judge.

"I don't force my society on any man, Mr. Price," said Mahaffy, with austere hostility of tone. The judge winced at the "Mr." That registered the extreme of Mahaffy's disfavor.

"You feel bitter about this, Solomon?" he said.

"I do," said Mahaffy, in a tone of utter finality.

"You'll feel better with three fingers of this trickling through your system," observed the judge, pushing a gla.s.s toward him.

"When did I ever sneak a jug into my shanty?" asked Mahaffy sternly, evidently conscious of entire rect.i.tude in this matter.

"I deplore your choice of words, Solomon," said the judge. "You know d.a.m.n well that if you'd been here I couldn't have got past your place with that jug! But let's deal with conditions. Here's the jug, with some liquor left in it--here's a gla.s.s. Now what more do you want?"

"Have I ever been caught like this?" demanded Mahaffy.

"No, you've invariably manifested the honorable disabilities of a gentleman. But don't set it all down to virtue. Maybe you haven't had the opportunity, maybe the temptation never came and found you weak and thirsty. Put away your sinful pride, Solomon--a sot like you has no business with the little niceties of selfrespect."

"Do I drink alone?" insisted Mahaffy doggedly.

"I never give you the chance," retorted his friend. Mr. Mahaffy drew near the table. "Sit down," urged the judge.

"I hope you feel mean?" said Mahaffy.

"If it's any satisfaction to you, I do," admitted the judge.

"You ought to." Mahaffy drew forward a chair. The judge filled his gla.s.s. But Mr. Mahaffy's lean face, with its long jaws and high cheek-bones, over which the sallow skin was tightly drawn, did not relax in its forbidding expression, even when he had tossed off his first gla.s.s.

"I love to see you in a perfectly natural att.i.tude like that, Solomon, with your arm crooked. What's the news from the landing?"

Mahaffy brought his fist down on the table.

"I heard the boat churning away round back of the bend, then I saw the lights, and she tied up and they tossed off the freight. Then she churned away again and her lights got back of the trees on the bank.

There was the lap of waves on the sh.o.r.e, and I was left with the half-dozen miserable loafers who'd crawled out to see the boat come in.

That's the news six days a week!"

By the river had come the judge, tentatively hopeful, but at heart expecting nothing, therefore immune to disappointment and equipped for failure. By the river had come Mr. Mahaffy, as unfit as the judge himself, and for the same reason, but sour and bitter with the world, believing always in the possibility of some miracle of regeneration.

Pleasantville's weekly paper, The Genius of Liberty, had dwelt at length upon those distinguished services judge Sloc.u.m Price had rendered the nation in war and peace, the judge having graciously furnished an array of facts otherwise difficult of access. That he was drunk at the time had but added to the splendor of the narrative. He had placed his ripe wisdom, the talents he had so a.s.siduously cultivated, at the services of his fellow citizens. He was prepared to represent them in any or all the courts. But he had remained undisturbed in his condition of preparedness; that erudite brain was unconcerned with any problem beyond financing his thirst at the tavern, where presently ingenuity, though it expressed itself with a silver tongue, failed him, and he realized that the river's spent floods had left him stranded with those other odds and ends of worthless drift that c.u.mbered its sun-scorched mud banks.

Something of all this pa.s.sed through his mind as he sat there sodden and dreamy, with the one fierce need of his nature quieted for the moment.

He had been stranded before, many times, in those long years during which he had moved steadily toward a diminishing heritage; indeed, nothing that was evil could contain the shock of a new experience. He had fought and lost all his battles--bitter struggles to think of even now, after the lapse of years, and the little he had to tell of himself was an intricate mingling of truth and falsehood, grotesque exaggeration, purposeless mendacity.

He and Mahaffy had met exactly one month before, on the deck of the steamer from which they had been put ash.o.r.e at the river landing two miles from Pleasantville. Mahaffy's historic era had begun just there.

Apparently he had no past of which he could be brought to speak. He admitted having been born in Boston some sixty years before, and was a printer by trade; further than this, he had not revealed himself, drunk or sober.

At the judge's elbow Mr. Mahaffy changed his position with nervous suddenness. Then he folded his long arms.

"You asked if there was any news, Price; while we were waiting for the boat a raft tied up to the bank; the fellow aboard of it had a man he'd fished up out of the river, a man who'd been pretty well cut to pieces."

"Who was he?" asked the judge.

"n.o.body knew, and he wasn't conscious. I shouldn't be surprised if he never opens his lips again. When the doctor had looked to his cuts, the fellow on the raft cast off and went on down the Elk."

It occurred to the judge that he himself had news to impart. He must account for the boy's presence.

"While you've been taking your whiff of life down at the steamboat landing, Mahaffy, I've been experiencing a most extraordinary coincidence." The judge paused. By a sullen glare in his deep-sunk eyes Mr. Mahaffy seemed to bid him go on. "Back east--" the judge jerked his thumb with an indefinite gesture "back east at my ancestral home--" Mahaffy snorted harshly. "You don't believe I had an ancestral home?--well, I had! It was of brick, sir, with eight Corinthian columns across the front, having a s.p.a.cious paneled hall sixty feet long. I had the distinguished honor to entertain General Andrew Jackson there."

"Did you get those dimensions out of the jug?" inquiry Mahaffy, with a frightful bark that was intended for a sarcastic laugh.

"Sir, it is not in your province to judge me by my present degraded a.s.sociates. Near the house I have described--my father's and his father's before him, and mine now--but for the unparalleled misfortunes which have pursued me--lived a family by the name of Hazard. And when I went to the war of '12--"

"What were you in that b.l.o.o.d.y time, a sutler?" inquired Mahaffy insultingly.

"No, sir--a colonel of infantry!--I say, when I went to the war, one of these Hazards accompanied me as my orderly. His grandson is back of that curtain now--asleep--in my bed!" Mahaffy put down his gla.s.s.

"You were like this once before," he said darkly. But at that instant the shuck tick rattled noisily at some movement of the sleeping boy.

Mahaffy quitted his chair, and crossing the room, drew the quilt aside.

A glance sufficed to a.s.sure him that in part, at least, the judge spoke the truth. He let the curtain fall into place and resumed his chair.

"He's an orphan, Solomon; a poor, friendless orphan. Another might have turned him away from his door--I didn't; I hadn't the heart to. I bespeak your sympathy for him."

"Who is he?" asked Mahaffy.

"Haven't I just told you?" said the judge reproachfully. Mahaffy laughed.

"You've told me something. Who is he?"

"His name is Hannibal Wayne Hazard. Wait until he wakes up and see if it isn't."

"Sure he isn't kin to you?" said Mahaffy.

"Not a drop of my blood flows in the veins of any living creature,"

declared the judge with melancholy impressiveness. He continued with deepening feeling, "All I shall leave to posterity is my fame."

"Speaking of posterity, which isn't present, Mr. Price, I'll say it is embarra.s.sed by the attention," observed Mahaffy.

There was a long silence between them. Mr. Mahaffy drank, and when he did not drink he bit his under lip and studied the judge. This was always distressing to the latter gentleman. Mahaffy's silence he could never penetrate. What was back of it--judgment, criticism, disbelief--what? Or was it the silence of emptiness? Was Mahaffy dumb merely because he could think of nothing to say, or did his silence cloak his feelings-and what were his feelings? Did his meditations outrun his habitually insulting speech as he bit his under lip and glared at him? The judge always felt impelled to talk at such times, while Mahaffy, by that silence of his, seemed to weigh and condemn whatever he said.

The moon had slipped below the horizon. Pleasantville had long since gone to bed; it was only the judge's window that gave its light to the blackness of the night. There was a hoofbeat on the road. It came nearer and nearer, and presently sounded just beyond the door. Then it ceased, and a voice said:

"Hullo, there!" The judge scrambled to his feet, and taking up the candle, stepped, or rather staggered, into the yard. Mahaffy followed him.

"What's wanted?" asked the judge, as he lurched up to horse and rider, holding his candle aloft. The light showed a tail fellow mounted on a handsome bay horse. It was Murrell.

"Is there an inn hereabouts?" he asked.

"You'll find one down the road a ways," said Mahaffy. The judge said nothing. He was staring up at Murrell with drunken gravity.

"Have either of you gentlemen seen a boy go through here to-day? A boy about ten years old?" Murrell glanced from one to the other. Mr.