Colonel Starbottle's Client. Bret Harte
click, a stamp on the floor, and a voice crying coarsely: “Curse it all—missed again!”
To the stranger’s astonishment, the Colonel was on his feet in an instant, gasping with inarticulate rage. Flinging the door open, he confronted the startled bar-keeper empurpled and stertorous.
“Blank it all, sir, do you call this a saloon for gentlemen, or a corral for swearing cattle? Or do you mean to say that the conversation of two gentlemen upon delicate professional—and—er—domestic affairs—is to be broken upon by the blank profanity of low-bred hounds over their picayune gambling! Take them my kyard, sir,” choked the Colonel, who was always Southern and dialectic in his excited as in his softest moments, “and tell them that Colonel Starbottle will nevah dyarken these doahs again.”
Before the astonished bar-keeper could reply, the Colonel had dashed back into the room, clapped his hat on his head, and seized his book, letters, and cane. “Mr. Corbin,” he said with gasping dignity, “I will take these papahs, and consult them again in my own office—where, if you will do me the honor, sir, to call at ten o’clock to-morrow, I will give you my opinion.” He strode out of the saloon beside the half awe-stricken, half-amused, yet all discreetly silent loungers, followed by his wondering but gloomy client. At the door they parted,—the Colonel tiptoeing towards his office as if dancing with rage, the stranger darkly plodding through the stifling dust in the opposite direction, with what might have been a faint suggestion to his counselor, that the paths of the homicide did not lie beside the still cool waters.
CHAPTER II
The house of Captain Masterton Dows, at Pineville, Kentucky, was a fine specimen of Southern classical architecture, being an exact copy of Major Fauquier’s house in Virginia, which was in turn only a slight variation from a well-known statesman’s historical villa in Alabama, that everybody knew was designed from a famous Greek temple on the Piraeus. Not but that it shared this resemblance with the County Court House and the Odd Fellows’ Hall, but the addition of training jessamine and Cherokee rose to the columns of the portico, and over the colonnade leading to its offices, showed a certain domestic distinction. And the sky line of its incongruously high roof was pleasantly broken against adjacent green pines, butternut, and darker cypress.
A nearer approach showed the stuccoed gateposts—whose red brick core was revealed through the dropping plaster—opening in a wall of half-rough stone, half-wooden palisade, equally covered with shining moss and parasitical vines, which hid a tangled garden left to its own unkempt luxuriance. Yet there was a reminiscence of past formality and even pretentiousness in a wide box-bordered terrace and one or two stuccoed vases prematurely worn and time-stained; while several rare exotics had, however, thriven so unwisely and well in that stimulating soil as to lose their exclusive refinement and acquire a certain temporary vulgarity. A few, with the not uncommon enthusiasm of aliens, had adopted certain native peculiarities with a zeal that far exceeded any indigenous performance. But dominant through all was the continual suggestion of precocious fruition and premature decay that lingered like a sad perfume in the garden, but made itself persistent if less poetical in the house.
Here the fluted wooden columns of the portico and colonnade seemed to have taken upon themselves a sodden and unwholesome age unknown to stone and mortar. Moss and creeper clung to paint that time had neither dried nor mellowed, but left still glairy in its white consistency. There were rusty red blotches around inflamed nail-holes in the swollen wood, as of punctures in living flesh; along the entablature and cornices and in the dank gutters decay had taken the form of a mild deliquescence; and the pillars were spotted as if Nature had dropped over the too early ruin a few unclean tears. The house itself was lifted upon a broad wooden foundation painted to imitate marble with such hopeless mendacity that the architect at the last moment had added a green border, and the owner permitted a fallen board to remain off so as to allow a few privileged fowls to openly explore the interior. When Miss Sally Dows played the piano in the drawing-room she was at times accompanied by the uplifted voice of the sympathetic hounds who sought its quiet retreat in ill-health or low spirits, and from whom she was separated only by an imperfectly carpeted floor of yawning seams. The infant progeny of “Mammy Judy,” an old nurse, made this a hiding-place from domestic justice, where they were eventually betrayed by subterranean giggling that had once or twice brought bashful confusion to the hearts of Miss Sally’s admirers, and mischievous security to that finished coquette herself.
It was a pleasant September afternoon, on possibly one of these occasions, that Miss Sally, sitting before the piano, alternately striking a few notes with three pink fingers and glancing at her reflection in the polished rosewood surface of the lifted keyboard case, was heard to utter this languid protest:—
“Quit that kind of talk, Chet, unless you just admire to have every word of it repeated all over the county. Those little niggers of Mammy Judy’s are lying round somewhere and are mighty ‘cute, and sassy, I tell you. It’s nothin’ to ME, sure, but Miss Hilda mightn’t like to hear of it. So soon after your particular attention to her at last night’s pawty too.”
Here a fresh-looking young fellow of six-and-twenty, leaning uneasily over the piano from the opposite side, was heard to murmur that he didn’t care what Miss Hilda heard, nor the whole world, for the matter of that. “But,” he added, with a faint smile, “folks allow that you know how to PLAY UP sometimes, and put on the loud pedal, when you don’t want Mammy’s niggers to hear.”
“Indeed,” said the young lady demurely. “Like this?”
She put out a distracting little foot, clothed in the white stocking and cool black prunella slipper then de rigueur in the State, and, pressing it on the pedal, began to drum vigorously on the keys. In vain the amorous Chet protested in a voice which the instrument drowned. Perceiving which the artful young lady opened her blue eyes mildly and said:—
“I reckon it IS so; it DOES kind of prevent you hearing what you don’t want to hear.”
“You know well enough what I mean,” said the youth gloomily. “And that ain’t all that folks say. They allow that you’re doin’ a heap too much correspondence with that Californian rough that killed Tom Jeffcourt over there.”
“Do they?” said the young lady, with a slight curl of her pretty lip. “Then perhaps they allow that if it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t be sending a hundred dollars a month to Aunt Martha?”
“Yes,” said the fatuous youth; “but they allow he killed Tom for his money. And they do say it’s mighty queer doin’s in yo’ writin’ religious letters to him, and Tom your own cousin.”
“Oh, they tell those lies HERE, do they? But do they say anything about how, when the same lies were told over in California, the lawyer they’ve got over there, called Colonel Starbottle,—a Southern man too,—got up and just wrote to Aunt Martha that she’d better quit that afore she got prosecuted? They didn’t tell you that, did they, Mister Chester Brooks?”
But here the unfortunate Brooks, after the fashion of all jealous lovers, deserted his allies for his fair enemy. “I don’t cotton to what THEY say, Sally, but you DO write to him, and I don’t see what you’ve got to write about—you and him. Jule Jeffcourt says that when you got religion at Louisville during the revival, you felt you had a call to write and save sinners, and you did that as your trial and probation, but that since you backslided and are worldly again, and go to parties, you just keep it up for foolin’ and flirtin’! SHE ain’t goin’ to weaken on the man that shot her brother, just because he’s got a gold mine and—a mustache!”
“She takes his MONEY all the same,” said Miss Sally.
“SHE don’t,—her mother does. SHE says if she was a man she’d have blood for blood!”
“My!” said Miss Sally, in affected consternation. “It’s a wonder she don’t apply to you to act for her.”
“If it was MY brother he killed, I’d challenge him quick enough,” said Chet, flushing through his thin pink skin and light hair.
“Marry her, then, and that’ll make you one of the family. I reckon Miss Hilda can bear it,” rejoined the young lady pertly.
“Look