The Under Dog Part 8

"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 gla.s.s, and took it out to him.

"After he drunk it he handed me back the gla.s.s and driv off, sayin' he'd be round later. I took the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 n.o.body but Luke Shanders could 'a' done it, 'cause n.o.body had the gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 f.a.gin among men, this h.o.a.ry-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 G.o.d-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 pa.s.sage 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; pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d-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, b.u.t.toning 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 coa.r.s.e 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 t.i.ttle 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 p.r.o.ng 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."