Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
– this way out!”
It was a time for quick thinking; and to persons as totally, wholly scared as Jackson Berry was, thinking comes wondrous easy. One despairing half-glance he threw upon the goal just ahead of him and the other half on that unwavering rifle-muzzle, now looming so dose that he could catch the glint of its sights. Throwing himself far back in his reeling sulky Jackson Berry gave a desperate yank on the lines that lifted the sorely pestered stallion clear out of his stride, then sawed on the right-hand rein until he swung the horse’s head through the opening, grazing one wheel against a gatepost – and was gone past the whooping Jeff, lickety-split, down the dirt road, through the dust and out on the big road toward town.
Jeff slammed the gate shut and vanished instantly. Captain Buck Owings dropped his weapon into the long, rank grass and slid round the treetrunk. And half a minute later Van Wallace, all discomfited and puzzled, with all his fine hopes dished and dashed, sorely against his own will jogged Minnie May a winner past a grandstand that recovered from its dumb astonishment in ample time to rise and yell its approval of the result.
Judge Priest being a childless widower of many years’ standing, his household was administered for him by Jeff as general manager, and by Aunt Dilsey Turner as kitchen goddess. Between them the old judge fared well and they fared better. Aunt Dilsey was a master hand at a cookstove; but she went home at night, no matter what the state of the weather, wearing one of those long, wide capes – dolmans, I think they used to call them – that hung dear down to the knees, hiding the wearer’s hands and whatsoever the hands might be carrying.
It was a fad of Aunt Dilsey’s to bring one covered splint basket and one close-mouthed tin bucket with her when she came to work in the morning, and to take both of them away with her – under her dolman cape – at night; and in her cabin on Plunkett’s Hill she had a large family of her own and two paying boarders, all of whom had the appearance of being well nourished. If you, reader, are Southern-born, these seemingly trivial details may convey a meaning to your understanding.
So Aunt Dilsey Turner looked after the judge’s wants from the big old kitchen that was detached from the rest of the rambling white house, and Jeff had the run of his sideboard, his tobacco caddy, and his wardrobe. The judge was kept comfortable and they were kept happy, each respecting the other’s property rights.
It was nine o’clock in the evening of the last day of the county fair. The judge, mellowly comfortable in his shirtsleeves, reclined in a big easy rocking-chair in his sitting room. There was a small fire of hickory wood in the fireplace and the little flames bickered together and the embers popped as they charred a dimmer red. The old judge was smoking his homemade corncob pipe with the long cane stem, and sending smoke wreaths aloft to shred away like cobweb skeins against the dingy ceiling.
“Jeff!” he called to a black shadow fidgeting about in the background.
“Yas, suh, Jedge; right yere!”
“Jeff, if your discernin’ taste in handmade sour-mash whisky has permitted any of that last batch of liquor I bought to remain in the demijohn, I wish you’d mix me up a little toddy.”
Jeff snickered and mixed the toddy, mixing it more hurriedly then common, because he was anxious to be gone. It was Saturday night – a night dedicated by long usage to his people; and in Jeff’s pocket was more ready money than his pocket had ever held before at any one time. Moreover, in the interval between dusk and dark, Jeff’s wardrobe had been most grandly garnished. Above Mr. Clay Saunders’ former blue serge coat a crimson necktie burned like a beacon, and below the creased legs of Mr. Otterbuck’s late pearl-gray trousers now appeared a pair of new patent-leather shoes with pointed toes turned up at the ends like sleigh-runners and cloth uppers in the effective colors of the Douglas plaid and rows of 24-point white pearl buttons.
Assuredly Jeff was anxious to be on his way. He placed the filled toddy glass at the old judge’s elbow and sought unostentatiously to withdraw himself.
“Jeff!” said the judge.
“Yas, suh.”
“I believe Mr. Jackson Berry did not see fit to return to the fair grounds this evenin’ and protest the result of the third heat?”
“No, suh,” said Jeff; “frum whut I heared some of the w’ite folks sayin’, he driv right straight home and went to bed and had a sort of a chill.”
“Ah-hah!” said the judge, sipping reflectively. Jeff fidgeted and drew nearer a halfopen window, listening out into the maple-lined street. Two blocks down the street he could hear the colored brass band playing in front of the Colored Odd Fellows Hall for a “festibul.”
“Jeff,” said Judge Priest musingly, “violence or a show of violence is always to be deplored.” Jeff had only a hazy idea of what the old judge meant by that, but in all his professional life Jeff had never intentionally disagreed in conversation with any white adult – let alone a generous employer. So:
“Yas, suh,” assented Jeff promptly; “it suttinly is.”
“But there are times and places,” went on the old judge, “when it is necessary.”
“Yas, suh,” said Jeff, catching the drift – “lak at a racetrack!”
“Ah-hah! Quite so,” said Judge Priest, nodding. “And, Jeff, did it ever occur to you that there are better ways of killin’ a cat than by chokin’ him with butter?”
“Indeed yas, suh,” said Jeff. “Sometimes you kin do it best with one of these yere ole rusty Confedrit guns!”
At that precise moment, in a little house on the next street, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby’s family, having prevailed upon him to remove his shoes and his cartridge-belt before retiring, were severally engaged in an attempt to dissuade him from a firmly expressed purpose of taking his Springfield musket to bed with him.
III. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD
WE had a feud once down in our country, not one of those sanguinary feuds of the mountains involving a whole district and forcing constant enlargements of hillside burying grounds, nor yet a feud handed down as a deadly legacy from one generation to another until its origin is forgotten and its legatees only know how they hate without knowing why, but a shabby, small neighborhood vendetta affecting but two families only, and those in a far corner of the county – the Flemings and the Faxons.
Nevertheless, this feud, such as it was, persisted in a sluggish intermittent kind of a way for twenty years or so. It started in a dispute over a line boundary away back in War Times when a Faxon shot a Fleming and was in turn shot by another Fleming; and it lasted until the Faxons tired of fence-corner, briar-patch warfare and moved down into Tennessee, all but one branch of them, who came into town and settled there, leaving the Flemings dominant in the Gum Spring precinct. So the feud ceased to be an institution after that and became a memory, living only in certain smouldering animosities which manifested themselves at local elections and the like, until it flared up momentarily in the taking-off of old Ranee Fleming at the hands of young Jim Faxon; and then it died, and died for good.
It is the manner of the taking-off of this one of the Flemings that makes material for the story I am telling here. By all accounts it would appear that the Faxons had been rather a weak-spined race who fought mostly on the defensive and were lacking in that malignant persistency that made old Ranee Fleming’s name one to scare bad children with in the unsettled days following the Surrender. I remember how we boys used to watch him, half-fearsomely and half-admiringly, when he came to town on a Court Monday or on a Saturday and swaggered about, unkempt and mud-crusted and frequently half drunk. Late in the afternoon he would mount unsteadily to the tilted seat of his spring wagon and go back home to the Gum Spring country lashing at his team until they danced with terror and splitting the big road wide open through the middle. And that night at the places where the older men congregated there would be tales to tell of those troubled mid-sixties when old Ranee had worn the turn-coat of a guerilla, preying first on one side and then on the other.
Now young Jim Faxon, last male survivor of his clan, and direct in the line of the original fighting Faxons, was a different sort of person altogether, a quiet, undersized, decent-spoken young chap