Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Old Judge Priest

“Whut you need then is a blood purifier,” mocked the gamester. He pointed a long forefinger toward the drug store across the street. “You’d better go on over yonder to Hinkle’s and git him some. I see they’re advertisn’ a new brand in their window – a dollar a bottle and a cure guaranteed or else you gits your money back. Better invest!”

He showed her his back as he turned to enter the Blue Jug. Pausing halfway through the swinging doors he spoke again, and since he still looked over her head perhaps he did not see the look that had come into her eyes or mark how her hands were clenching and unclenching. Or if he did see these things perhaps he did not care.

“That’s all I’ve got to say to you,” he added, “exceptin’ this – I want this here to be the last time you come pesterin’ me on the street.”

“It will be,” she said slowly, and her voice was steady although her meagre frame shook. “It’s the last time I’m coming to you on the street, Elmer, for what’s mine by rights.”

“Then good-day to you.” He disappeared. She turned and went away, walking fast. Her name was Norfleet and she was a widow and alone in the world. Except for her son, who worked at Kattersmith Brothers’ brickyards as a helper for twelve dollars and a half a week, she had no kith or kin. She lived mainly by her needle, being a seamstress of sorts.

King Highpockets’ establishment was the nearest approach to a gilded gambling hell – to quote a phrase current – that we had. But certainly it was not gilded, although possibly by some it might have been likened to a hell. Under the friendly cover of darkness you ascended a steep flight of creaky wooden steps and when you had reached the first landing you knocked at a locked wooden door. The lock slid back and the door opened a cautious inch or two and a little grinning negro, whose name was Babe Givens, peeped out at you through the opening. If you were the right person, or if you looked as though you might be the right person, Babe Givens opened the door wider and made way for you to enter.

Entering then, you found yourself in a big room furnished most simply with two tables and some chairs and several spittoons upon the floor, and a portable rack for poker checks and a dumbwaiter in a corner – and that was all. There was no safe, the proprietor deeming it the part of safety to carry his cash capital on his person. There was no white-uniformed attendant to bring you wine, should you thirst, and turkey sandwiches, if you hungered while at play. I have read that such as these are provided in all properly conducted gambling hells in the great city, but King Highpockets ran a sure-thing shop, not a restaurant. Drinks, when desired, were paid for in advance, and came from the bar below on the shelf of the creaking dumbwaiter, after Babe Givens had called the order down a tin speaking tube. There were no rugs upon the floor, no pictures against the walls. Except for the decks of cards, opened fresh at each sitting, there was nothing new or bright about the place. The King might move his entire outfit in one two-horse wagon and put no great strain upon the team. He might lose it altogether and be out of pocket not more than seventy-five dollars. In him the utilitarian triumphed above the purely artistic; himself, he was not pretty to look upon.

Of the two tables, one ordinarily was for poker and the other was for craps. The King banked both games, and sometimes took a hand in the poker game if conditions seemed propitious. Whether he played though or whether he didn’t, he stood by always to lift a white chip out of each jackpot for a greedy and omnivorous kitty, whose mouth showed as a brassbound slot in the middle of the circular cover of dirty green baize. Trust him to minister to his kitty every pop. She was his pet and he loved her, and he never forgot her and her needs.

This night, though, the poker table lacked for tenants. The pay car had come and had dispensed of its delectable contents and had gone on south, and on this particular night most of the King’s guests were railroad men. Railroad men being proverbially fond of quick action and plenty of it, the crap table had been drawn out into the middle of the room and here all activities centred. Here, too, the King presided, making change as occasion demanded cards, opened fresh at each turn.

While he did this his assistant, an alert individual called Grimes – or Jay Bird Grimes, for short – kept track of the swift-travelling dice and of the betting, which like the dice moved from left to right, round and round and round again.

Jay Bird had need to keep both his eyes wide open, for present players and prospective players were ringed four deep about the table. The smoke of their cigars and their cigarettes went upward to add stratified richness to the thick blue clouds that crawled in layers against the ceiling, and the sweat of their brows ran down their faces to drip in drops upon the table as one after another they claimed the dotted cubes and shook, rattled and rolled ‘em, and snapped their finger in importunity, calling upon Big Dick or Phoebe Dice to come and to come right away. And then this one would fail to make his point and would lose his turn, and the overworked ivories would go into the snatching eager hand of that one who stood next him, and all the rest, waiting for their chance, would breathe hard, grunting in fancied imitation of negroes, and shouting out in a semi-hysterical fashion as the player passed or didn’t pass.

A young freight conductor laid down a ten-dollar bill and the King covered it with another. The freight conductor ran that ten up to one hundred and eighty dollars, ten or twenty at a dip, then shot the whole amount and lost it; then lost ninety more on top of that, and with a white face and a quite empty pay envelope, still held fast in a shaking left hand, fell back out of the hunched-in, scrouging circle. But he didn’t go away; he stayed to watch the others, envious of those who temporarily beat the game, dismally sympathetic, with an unspoken fellow feeling, for those who, like him, went broke. Josh Herron, the roundhouse foreman, dropped half his month’s wages before he decided that, since luck plainly was not with him, he had had about enough. A clerk from the timekeeper’s office shoved in, taking his place.

When he wasn’t answering knocks at the door Babe Givens circulated about the outskirts of the tightened group like a small, black rabbit dog about a brush pile harbouring hares, his eyes all china and his mouth all ivory. The sound of those small squared bones dashing together in their worn leather cup was music to his Afric ears. The white man in the first place stole this game from Babe’s race, you know.

Babe had to answer knocks a good many times. Newcomers kept on climbing the stair and knuckling the door.

“Game’s mighty full, genelmens – but they’s always room fur one mo’. Step right in and wait yo’ turn,” Babe would say, ushering in the latest arrival. Babe was almost as happy as if he had been shooting himself.

As I say, they kept coming. At length, a few minutes before midnight, when the pile of silver under the King’s hands had grown from a molehill to a mountain and the wadded paper money made a small shock of yellow-and-green fodder upon the green pasture of the table-top, came still another, and this one most strangely burdened. Very mousily indeed this eleventh-hour visitor ascended the steps, and first trying the doorknob, knocked with a fumbling knock against the pine panels.

Babe drew back the bolt and peered out into the darkness at the solitary figure dimly seen. “Game’s mighty full, genelmen,” he began the formula of greeting, “but you kin – ”

Babe began it but he never finished it. Some-. thing long and black, something slim and fearsome – yes, most fearsome – slid through the opening, and grazed his nose so that the little darky, stricken limp, fell back.

“Please, suh, boss,” he begged, “fur Gawd’s sake don’t shoot – don’t shoot!”

Babe started his prayer in a babble but he ended it with a shriek – a shriek so imploringly loud that all there, however intent they might be, were bound to hear and take notice. Over the heads of his patrons Highpockets looked, and he stiffened where he stood. They all looked; they all stiffened.

There was just cause. Inside the door opening was a masked figure levelling down a double-barrelled shotgun upon them. Lacking the mask and the shotgun, and lacking, too, a certain rigid and purposeful pose which was most clearly defined in all its lines, the figure would have lacked all menace, indeed would have seemed to the casual eye a most impotent and grotesque figure. For it was but little better than five feet in stature and not overly broad. It wore garments too loose for it by many inches. The sleeve ends covered the small hands to the finger ends, and the trousers wrinkled, accordion fashion, to the tips of the absurdly small toes. An old slouch hat threatened to slip all the way down over the wearer’s face. The mask was a flimsy thing of black cambric, but the eyeholes, strange to say, were neatly worked with buttonhole stitching. From beneath the hatbrim at the back a hank of longish hair escaped. On the floor, a yard or so before the apparition where it had been dropped, rested an ancient black handbag unlatched and agape.

I am not meaning to claim that at the first instant of looking the several astonished eyes of the gathering in King Highpockets’ place comprehended all these details; it was the general effect that they got; and it was that shotgun which mainly made the difference in their point of view. What they did note most clearly – every man of them – was that the two hammers of the gun stood erect, ready to drop, and that a slim trigger finger played nervously inside the trigger guard, and that the twin muzzles, shifting and wavering like a pair, of round hard eyes gazing every way at once, seemed to fix a threatening stare upon all of them and upon each of them. If the heavy gun shook a bit in the grip of its holder that but added to the common peril. Anyone there would have taken his dying oath that the thing aimed for his shrinking vitals and none other’s. “Hands up – up high! And keep ‘em up!” The command, given in a high-pitched key, was practically unnecessary. Automatically, as it were, all arms there had risen to full stretch, so that the clump of their motionless bodies was fronded at the top with open palms and tremulous outstretched fingers. But the arms of old King Highpockets rose above all the rest and his fingers shook the shakiest.

“If anybody moves an inch I’ll shoot.”

“That don’t go for me – I ain’t aimin’ to move,” murmured Josh Herron. Josh was scared all right, but he chuckled as he said it. “Now – boy – you!”

The gun barrels dipped to the right an instant, including the detached form of Babe Givens in their swing.

“Yas, suh, boss, yas!”

“You put all that money in this grip sack here at my feet.”

“W-w-which money, boss?”

“All the money that’s there on that table yonder – every cent of it.”

The little darky feared the man who paid him his wages, but there were things in this world he feared more – masked faces and shotguns, for example. His knees smote together and his teeth became as castanets which played in his jaws, as with rolling eyes and a skin like wet ashes he moved shudderingly to obey. Between the table and the valise he made two round trips, carrying the first time silver, the second time paper, and then, his task accomplished, he collapsed against the wall because his legs would no longer hold him up. For there was water in his knee joints and his feet were very cold.

Through this nobody spoke; only the eyes of the armed one watched vigilantly everywhere and the shotgun ranged the assemblage across its front and back again. Under his breath some one made moan, as the heaping double handful of green-and-yellow stuff was crumpled down into the open-mawed bag. It might have been Highpockets who moaned.

“Now then,” bade the robber, when the paper had gone to join the silver, “anybody here who’s lost his money to-night or any other night can come and get it back. But come one at a time – and come mighty slow and careful.”

Curiously enough only two came – the young freight conductor and the youth who was a clerk in the time-keeper’s office at the yards.

Shamefacedly the freight conductor stooped, flinching away from the gun muzzles which pointed almost in his right ear, and picked out certain bills.

“I lost an even hundred – more’n I can afford to lose,” he mumbled. “I’m takin’ just my own hundred.” He retired rearward after the manner of a crab.

The boy wore an apologetic air as he salvaged twenty-two dollars from the cache. After he had crawfished back to the table where the others were, none else offered to stir.

“Anybody else?” inquired the collector of loot.

“Well, I squandered a little coin here this evenin’, but I’m satisfied,” spoke Josh Herron, now grinning openly. “I’m gittin’ my money’s worth.” He glanced sidewise toward the suffering proprietor.

“All done?”

Nobody answered.

“Here, boy, come here then!”

Babe Givens came – upon his knees.

“Close that bag.”

Babe fumbled the rusted claps shut.

“Now, shove it up close to me along the floor.”

Babe, he shoved it.

“Now get back yonder where you were.”

I leave it to you whether Babe got back yonder.

The figure swooped downward briskly, and two fingers of the hand which gripped the forearm of the gun caught in the looped handles of the black bag and brought it up dangling and heavy laden.

And now the custodian of these delectable spoils was backing toward the door, but still with weapon poised and ready.

“Stay right where you are for five minutes,” was the final warning from behind the cambric mask. “Five minutes, remember! Anybody who tries to come down those steps before that five minutes is up is going to get shot.”

The door slammed. Through the closed door the crap-shooters, each in his place and all listening as intently as devout worshippers in a church, heard the swift footsteps dying away. Josh Herron brought down his arms and took two steps forward.

“Wait, Josh, the time limit ain’t up yit,” counselled a well-wisher.

“Oh, I ain’t goin’ nowheres jest yit – I’m very comfortable here,” said Josh. He stooped and seemed to pick up some small object from the bare planks.

Five minutes later – or perhaps six – a procession moving cautiously, silently and in single file passed down the creaky stairs. It was noted – and commented upon – that the owner of the raided place, heaviest loser and chief mourner though he was, tagged away back at the tail of the line. Only Babe Givens was behind him, and Babe was well behind him too. At the foot of the stairs the frontmost man projected his head forth into the night, an inch at a time, ready to jerk it back again. But to his inquiring vision Franklin Street under its gas lamps yawned as empty as a new made grave.

For some unuttered and indefinable reason practically all of the present company felt in a mood promptly to betake themselves home. On his homeward way Josh Herron travelled in the company of a sorely shaken grocery clerk, and between them they, going up the street, discussed the startling episode in which they had just figured.

“Lookin’ down that pair of barrels certainly made a true believer out of old Highpockets, didn’t it?” said the grocer’s clerk, when the event had been gone over verbally from its beginning to its end. “Did you happen to see, Josh, how slow he poked his old head out past them doorjambs even after Jasper Waller told him the coast was clear? Put me in mind of one of these here old snappin’-turtles comin’ out of his shell after a skeer. Well, I had a little touch of the buck-ager myself,” he confessed.

“It was sorter up to our long-laiged friend to be a little bit careful,” said Josh Herron. “Coupled up the way he is, one buckshot would be liable to go through his gizzard and his lights at the same time.”

A little later the grocery clerk spoke, in reference to a certain quite natural curiosity which seemingly lay at the top of his thoughts, since he had voiced it at least three times within the short space of one city block:

“I wonder who that there runty hold-up could ‘a’ been?”

“Yes, I wonder?” repeated Josh Herron in a peculiar voice.

“He certainly took a long chance, whoever he was – doin’ the whole job single handed,” continued the grocery clerk. “Well, I ain’t begrudgin’ him the eight dollars of mine that he packed off with him, seein’ as how he stripped old Highpockets as clean as a whistle. And he couldn’t ‘a’ been nothin’ but a half-grown boy neither, judgin’ from his build.”

“Boy – hell! Say, Oscar, are you as blind as the rest of that crowd?”’ asked Josh Herron, coming to a halt beneath a corner gas lamp. “Was you so skeered, too, you couldn’t see a thing that was right there before your eyes as plain as day?”

“What you talkin’ about?” demanded the other. “If it wasn’t a boy, what was it – a dwarf?”

“Oscar, kin you keep a secret?” asked Josh Herron, grinning happily. “Yes? Then look here.”

He opened his right hand. Across the palm of it lay a bent wire hairpin.

It is possible that Oscar, the grocer’s clerk, did know how to keep a secret. As to that I would not presume to speak. Conceding that he did, it is equally certain that some persons did not possess the same gift of reticence. By noon of the following day, practically all who had ears to hear with had heard in one guise or another the story of those midnight proceedings upstairs over the Blue Jug. It was inevitable that the editor of the Daily Evening News should hear it, too, which he did – from a dozen different sources and by a dozen differing versions. For publication at least the distressed Highpockets had nothing to say. All things being considered, this was but natural, as you will concede.

Naturally, also, none might be found in all the width and breadth of the municipality who would confess to having been an eye witness to the despoiling operations, because if you admitted so much it followed in the same breath you convicted yourself of being a frequenter of gaming establishments, and, moreover, of being one of a considerable number of large, strong men who had suffered themselves to be coerced by one diminutive bandit. So, lacking authoritative facts to go upon, and names of individuals with which to buttress his statements, Editor Tompkins, employing his best humorous vein, wrote and caused to be printed an account veiled and vague, but not so very heavily veiled at that and not so vague but that one who knew a thing or two might guess out the riddle of his tale.

Coincidentally, certain other things happened which might or might not bear a relationship to the main event. Old Mrs. Postelwaite received by mail, in an unmarked envelope and from an unknown donor, three hundred and odd dollars – no great fortune in itself, but a sum amply sufficient to pay off the mortgage on her small birdbox of a dwelling, and so save the place which she called home from foreclosure at the instigation of the Building & Loan Company. Since little Mrs. Shetler, who lived out on Wheelis Street, had no present source of income other than what she derived by taking subscription orders for literary works which nobody cared to read and few, except through a spirit of compassion for Mrs. Shetler, cared to buy, it seemed fair to assume that from like mysterious agencies she acquired the exact amount of her husband’s shortage, then owing to Kattersmith Brothers, his recent employers. This amount being duly turned over to that firm the fugitive was enabled to return from his hiding and, rehabilitated, to assume his former place in the community. For the first time in months little Mrs. Shetler wore a smile upon her face and carried her head erect when she went abroad. Seeing that smile you would have said yourself that it was worth every cent of the money.

The Widow Norfleet, seamstress, squared up her indebtedness with divers neighbourhood tradesmen, and paid up her back house rent, and after doing all this still had enough ready cash left to provide winter time garments for herself and a new suit for her threadbare son Eddie. Finally, Mrs. Matilda Weeks, who constituted in herself an unofficial but highly efficient local charity organisation, discovered on a certain morning when she awoke that, during the night, some kindly soul had shoved under her front door a plain Manila wrapper, containing merely a line of writing on a sheet of cheap, blue-ruled notepaper: “For the poor people,” and nearly three hundred dollars in bills – merely that, and nothing more. It was exactly in keeping with Mrs. Weeks’ own peculiar mode of philanthropy that she should accept this anonymous gift and make use of it without asking any questions whatsoever.

“I think, by all accounts, it must be tainted money,” said Mrs. Weeks, “but I don’t know any better way of making dirty money clean than by doing a little good with it.”

So she kept the donation intact against the coming of the Christmas, and then she devoted it to filling many Christmas dinner baskets and many Christmas stockings for the families of shanty-boaters, whose floating domiciles clustered like a flock of very disreputable water fowl down by the willows, below town, these shiftless river gypsies being included among Mrs. Weeks’ favourite wards.

Meanwhile, for upward of a week after the hold-up no steps of whatsoever nature were taken by the members of the police force. For the matter of that, no steps which might be called authoritative or in strict accordance with the statutes made and provided were ever taken by them or any one of them. But one evening the acting head of the department went forth upon a private mission. Our regular chief, Gabe Henley, was laid up that fall, bedfast with inflammatory rheumatism, and the fact of his being for the time an invalid may possibly help to explain a good deal, seeing that Gabe had the name for both honesty and earnestness in the discharge of his duties, even if he did fall some degrees short of the mental stature of an intellectual giant.

So it was the acting chief – he resigned shortly thereafter, as I recall – who took it upon himself to pay a sort of domiciliary visit to the three-room cottage where the Widow Norfleet lived with her son Eddie and took in sewing. He bore no warrant qualifying him for violent entry, search of the premises or seizure of the person, and perhaps that was why he made no effort to force his way within the little house; or maybe he desired only to put a few pointed questions to the head of the house. So while he stood at the locked front door, knocking until his knuckles stung him and his patience had become quite utterly exhausted, a woman let herself out at the back of the house and ran bareheaded through an alley which opened into Clay Street, Clay Street being the next street to the west. When she returned home again at the end of perhaps half an hour a peep through a hooded and shuttered front window revealed to her that the brass-buttoned caller had departed.

It was the next morning, to follow with chronological exactitude the sequence of this narrative, that our efficient young commonwealth’s attorney, Jerome G. Flournoy, let himself into the chambers of the circuit judge. Mr. Flournoy wore between his brows a little V of perplexity. But Judge Priest, whom he found sitting by a grate fire stoking away at his cob pipe, appeared to have not a single care concealed anywhere about his person. Certainly his forehead was free of those wrinkles which are presumed to denote troublesomeness of thought on the inside.

“Judge,” began Mr. Flournoy, without any prolonged preliminaries, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to take up that Blue Jug affair. And I do hate mightily to do it, seeing what the consequences are liable to be. So I thought I’d talk it over with you first, if you don’t mind.”

“Son,” whined Judge Priest, and to Mr. Flournoy it seemed that the phantom shadow of a wink rested for the twentieth part of a second on the old judge’s left eyelid, “speakin’ officially, it’s barely possible that I don’t know whut case you have reference to.”

“Well, unofficially then, you’re bound to have heard the talk that’s going round town,” said Mr. Flournoy. “Nobody’s talked of anything else much this past week, so far as I’ve been able to notice. Just between you and me, Judge, I made up my mind, right from the first, that unless it was crowded on me I wasn’t going to take cognisance of the thing at all. That’s the principal reason why I haven’t mentioned the subject in your presence before now. As a private citizen, it struck me that that short-waisted crook got exactly what was coming to him, especially as I never heard of bad money being put to better purposes. But aside from what he lost in cash – and I reckon he doesn’t think any more of a silver dollar than you do of both your legs – it made him the laughing stock of twenty thousand people, and more particularly after the true inside facts began to circulate.”

“Now that you mention it, son,” remarked Judge Priest blandly, “it strikes me that I did ketch the distant sound of gigglin’ here and there durin’ the past few days.”

“That’s just it – the giggling must’ve got under the scoundrel’s hide finally. I gather that at the beginning Magee made up his mind to keep his mouth shut and just take his medicine. But I figure him for the kind that can’t stand being laughed at very long – and his own gang have just naturally been laughing him to death all week. Anyhow, he came to my house today right after breakfast, and called on me as the commonwealth’s attorney to put the facts before the Grand Jury when it convenes next Monday for the fall term. He’s even willing to testify himself, he says. And he says he can prove what went with the money that he lost that night – or most of it – and what became of the rest of it.

“That’s not all, Judge, either. Right on top of that, when I got down to my office I found a letter from Mrs. Hetty Norfleet, saying she had nothing to conceal from the duly sworn officers of the law, and that she was perfectly willing to answer any charges that might be made against her, and that she would come to me and make a full statement any time I wanted her to come. Or substantially that,” amended Mr. Flournoy, with the lawyer’s instinct.

“Is that possible?” quoth the judge in tones of a mild surprise. With his thumb he tamped down the smoulder in his pipe. The job appeared to require care; certainly it required full half a minute of time. When next he spoke he had entirely departed from the main line of the topic in hand.

“I reckin, son, you never knowed little Gil Nickolas, did you? No, ‘taint in reason that you would. He died long before your time. Let’s see – he must’ve died way back yonder about eighteen-sixty-nine, or maybe ‘twas eighteen-seventy? He got hisself purty badly shot up at Chickamauga and never did entirely git over it. Well, sir, that there little Gil Nickolas wasn’t much bigger than a cake of lye soap after a hard day’; washin’, but let me tell you, he was a mighty gallant soldier of the late Southern Confederacy. I know he was because we both served together in old Company B – the first company that went out of this town after the fussin’ started. Yes, suh, he shorely was a spunky little raskil. |I reckin he belonged to a spunky outfit – I never knowed one of his breed yit that didn’t have more sand, when it come right down to cases, than you could load onto a hoss and waggin.” Again he paused to minister to the spark of life in his pipe bowl. “I recall one time, the first year of the war, me and Gil was out on a kind of a foragin’ trip together and – ”

“I beg your pardon, Judge Priest,” broke in Mr. Flournoy a trifle stiffly, “but I was speaking of the trouble Mrs. Hetty Norfleet’s gotten herself into.”

“I know you was,” assented Judge Priest, “and that’s whut put me in mind of little Gil Nickolas. He was her paw. I ain’t seen much of her here of recent years, but I reckin she’s had a purty toler’ble hard time of it. Her husband wasn’t much account ez I remember him in his lifetime.”

“She has had a hard time of it – mighty hard,” assented Mr. Flournoy, “and that’s one of the things that makes my job all the harder for me.”

“How so?” inquired Judge Priest. “Because,” expounded Mr. Flournoy, “now, I suppose, I’ve got to put her under arrest and bring her to trial. In a way of speaking Magee has got the law on his side. Certainly he’s got the right to call on me to act. On the surface of things the police are keeping out of it – I reckon we both know why – and so it’s being put up to me. Magee points out, very truly, that it’s a felony charge anyhow, and that even if his dear friend, the acting chief, should start the ball rolling, in the long run, sooner or later, the case would be bound to land in circuit court.”

“And whut then?” asked Judge Priest.

“Oh, nothing much,” said Mr. Flournoy bitterly, “nothing much, except that if that poor little woman confesses – and I judge by the tone of her letter she’s ready to do just that – anyway, everybody in town knows by now that she was the one that held up that joint of Magee’s at the point of a shotgun – why the jurors, under their oaths, are bound to bring in a verdict of guilty, no matter how they may feel about it personally. Magee has about reached the point where he’d risk a jail term for himself to see her sentenced to the penitentiary. Judge Priest, I’d almost rather resign my office than be the means of seeing that poor, little, plucky woman convicted for doing the thing she has done.”

“Wait a minute, son! Hold your hosses and wait a minute!” put in the judge. “Mebbe it won’t be absolutely necessary fur you to up and resign so abrupt. Your valuable services are needed round this courthouse.”

“What’s that you say, Judge?” asked the young prosecutor, straightening his body out of the despondent curve into which he had looped it.