The Bondboy

by Ogden, George W

  “Yes, they’re doin’ what that little snip-snapper with them colored whiskers tells ’em to do!” said she.

  Solemn as the occasion was, a grin went round at the bald reference to a plainer fact. Even the dullest there had seen the grayish-red at the roots of the coroner’s beard. The coroner grew very red of face, and gave some orders to his stenographer, who wrote them down. He thanked the jurors and dismissed them. Bill Frost began to prepare for the journey to Shelbyville to turn Joe over to the sheriff.

  The first, and most important, thing in the list of preliminaries for the journey, was the proper adjustment of Bill’s mustache. Bill roached it up with a turn of the forefinger, using the back of it, which was rough, like a corn-cob. When he had got the ends elevated at a valiant angle, his hat firmly settled upon his head, and his suspenders tightened two inches, he touched Joe’s shoulder.

  “Come on!” he ordered as gruffly and formally as he could draw his edged voice.

  Joe stood, and Bill put his hand on his arm to pilot him, in all officiousness, out of the room. Mrs. Newbolt stepped in front of them as they approached.

  “Joe!” she cried appealingly.

  “That’s all right, Mother,” he comforted her, “everything will be cleared up and settled in a day or two. You go on home now, Mother, and look after things till I come.”

  “Step out of the way, step out of the way!” said Bill with spreading impatience.

  Mrs. Newbolt looked at the blustering official pityingly.

  “Bill Frost, you ain’t got as much sense as you was born with!” said she. She patted Joe’s shoulder, which was as near an approach to tenderness as he ever remembered her to make.

  Constable Frost fell into consultation with his adjutant, Sol Greening, as soon as he cleared the room with the prisoner. They discussed gravely in the prisoner’s hearing, for Bill kept his hand on Joe’s arm all the time, the advisability of tying him securely with a rope before starting on the journey to jail.

  Joe grew indignant over this base proposal. He declared that if Bill was afraid of him he would go alone to the county-seat and give himself up to the sheriff if they would set him free. Bill was a little assured by his prisoner’s evident sincerity.

  Another consultation brought them to the agreement that the best they could do, in the absence of handcuffs, was to hitch up to Isom’s buggy and make the prisoner drive. With hands employed on the lines, he could be watched narrowly by Bill who was to take Sol’s old navy six along in his mighty hand.

  Mrs. Newbolt viewed the officious constable’s preparations for the journey with many expressions of anger and disdain.

  “Just look at that old fool, Bill Frost, with that revolver!” said she, turning to the neighbors, who stood silently watching. “Just as if Joe would hurt anybody, or try to run away!”

  Sympathy seemed to be lacking in the crowd. Everybody was against Joe, that was attested by the glum faces and silence which met her on every hand. She was amazed at their stupidity. There they stood, people who had seen Joe grow up, people who knew that a Newbolt would give his last cent and go hungry to meet an obligation; that he would wear rags to pay his debts, as Peter had done, as Joe was doing after him; that he would work and strive night and day to keep fair his honorable name, and to preserve the honest record of the family clear and clean.

  They all knew that, and they knew that a Newbolt never lied, but they hunched their backs and turned away their heads as if they thought a body was going to hit them when she spoke. It disgusted her; she felt like she could turn loose on some of them with their own records, which she had from a generation back.

  She approached the buggy as Joe took up the lines and prepared to drive out of the gate.

  “I don’t see why they think you done it, son, it’s so unreasonable and unneighborly of them,” said she.

  “Neighborly!” said Joe, with sudden bitterness in his young voice. “What am I to them but ‘the pore folks’ boy’? They didn’t believe me, Mother, but when I get a chance to stand up before Judge Maxwell over at Shelbyville, I’ll be talking to a gentleman. A gentleman will understand.”

  That sounded like his father, she thought. It moved her with a feeling of the pride which she had reflected feebly for so many years.

  “I hope so, son,” said she. “If you’re not back in a day or two, I’ll be over to Shelbyville.”

  “Drive on, drive on!” ordered Bill, the old black revolver in his hand.

  The crowd was impressed by that weapon, knowing its history, as everybody did. Greening’s more or less honorable father had carried it with him when he rode in the train of Quantrell, the infamous bushwhacker. It was the old man’s boast to his dying day that he had exterminated a family of father and five sons in the raid upon Lawrence with that old weapon, without recharging it.

  Joe drove through the open gate without a look behind him. His face was pale, his heart was sick with the humiliation of that day. But he felt that it was only a temporary cloud into which he had stepped, and that clearing would come again in a little while. It was inconceivable to him how anybody could be so foolish as to believe, or even suspect, that he had murdered Isom Chase.

  The assembled people having heard all there was to hear, and seen all there was to see at the gate, began to straggle back to the farmhouse to gossip, to gape, and exclaim. To Greening and his family had fallen the office of comforting the widow and arranging for the burial, and now Sol had many offers to sit up with the corpse that night.

  Mrs. Newbolt stood at the roadside, looking after the conveyance which was taking her son away to jail, until a bend behind a tall hedge hid it from her eyes. She made no further attempt to find sympathy or support among her neighbors, who looked at her curiously as she stood there, and turned away selfishly when she faced them.

  Back over the road that she had hurried along that morning she trudged, slowly and without spirit, her feet like stones. As she went, she tried to arrange the day’s happenings in her mind. All was confusion there. The one plain thing, the thing that persisted and obtruded, was that they had arrested Joe on a charge that was at once hideous and unjust.

  Evening was falling when she reached the turn of the road and looked ahead to her home. She had no heart for supper, no heart to lift the latch of the kitchen door and enter there. There was no desire in her heart but for her son, and no comfort in the prospect of her oncoming night.

  * * *

  CHAPTER IX

  THE SEALED ENVELOPE

  In the light of Joe’s reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between himself and Isom; the unexplained mystery of the money which had been found in the burst bag on Isom’s breast; and Joe’s declaration that he had not seen it until Isom fell: in the light of all this, the people of that community believed the verdict of the coroner’s jury to be just.

  This refusal of Joe’s to talk out and explain everything was a display of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which they had not seen since old Peter’s death. But it looked more like bull-headedness to them.

  “Don’t the darned fool know he’s pokin’ his head under the gallus?” they asked.

  What was the trouble between him and Isom about? What was he doin’ there in the kitchen with the lamp lit that hour of the night? Where did that there money come from, gentlemen? That’s what I want you to tell me!

  Those were the questions which were being asked, man to man, group to group, and which nobody could answer, as they stood discussing it after Joe had been taken away to jail. The coroner mingled with them, giving them the weight of his experience.

  “That Newbolt’s deeper than he looks on the outside, gentlemen,” he said, shaking his serious whiskers. “There’s a lot more behind this case than we can see. Old Isom Chase was murdered, and that murder was planned away ahead. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anybody on the witness-stand as shrewd and sharp as that Newbolt bo
y. He knew just what to so say and just what to shut his jaws on. But we’ll fetch it out of him–or somebody else.”

  As men went home to take up their neglected tasks, they talked it all over. They wondered what Joe would have done with that money if he had succeeded in getting away with it; whether he would have made it out of the country, or whether the invincible Bill Frost, keen on his scent as a fox-hound, would have pursued him and brought him back.

  They wondered how high they built the gallows to hang a man, and discussed the probability of the event being public. They speculated on the manner in which Joe would go to his death, whether boldly, with his head up that way, or cringing and afraid, his proud heart and spirit broken, and whether he would confess at the end or carry his secret with him to the grave. Then they branched off into discussions of the pain of hanging, and wondered whether it was a “more horribler” death than drowning or burning in a haystack, or from eating pounded glass.

  It was a great, moving, awakening sensation in the countryside, that taking off of Isom Chase by a mysterious midnight shot. It pulled people up out of the drowse of a generation, and set them talking as they had not talked in twenty years. Their sluggish brains were heated by it, their sleeping hearts quickened.

  People were of the undivided opinion that Isom had caught Joe robbing him, and that Joe had shot him in the fear of punishment for the theft. Perhaps it is because chivalry is such a rare quality among the business activities of this life, that none of them believed he was shielding Isom’s wife, and that he was innocent of any wrong himself. They did not approve the attempt of the coroner to drag her into it. The shrewd insight of the little man cost him a good many votes that day.

  Joe Newbolt could very well be a robber, they said, for all his life had prepared him for a fall before the temptation of money. He could very well be a robber, indeed, and there was no room for him to turn out anything nobler, for wasn’t he the pore folks’ boy?

  Ollie was almost as short in her realization of what Joe had done for her as those who knew nothing at all of his motive of silence. In the relief of her escape from public disclosure of her intrigue with Morgan, she enjoyed a luxurious relaxation. It was like sleep after long watching.

  She did not understand the peril in which Joe stood on her account, nor consider that the future still held for both of them a trial which would test Joe’s strength as the corrosive tooth of acid challenges the purity of gold. It was enough for her that sunny afternoon, and sufficient to her shallow soul, to know that she was safe. She lay warm and restful in her bed while the neighbor women set the house to rights, and the men moved Isom’s body into the parlor to wait for the coffin which Sol Greening had gone after to the county-seat.

  Ollie watched the little warm white clouds against the blue of the October sky, and thought of the fleecy soft things which a mother loves to swaddle her baby in; she watched the shadow of falling leaves upon the floor, blowing past her window on the slant sunbeams.

  She was safe!

  Joe was accused, but she seemed to hold that a trivial incident in an exciting day. It would pass; he would clear himself, as he deserved to be cleared, and then, when Morgan came back for her and carried her away into his world, everything would be in tune.

  Perhaps it was because she knew that Joe was innocent that his accusation appeared so untenable and trivial to her. At any rate, the lawyers over at Shelbyville–wasn’t their cunning known around the world–could get him off. If it came to that, she would see that he had a good one, as good as money could employ. Joe had stood by her; she would stand by Joe. That was the extent of her concern that afternoon.

  It was pleasant to stretch there in peace, with no task before her, no rude summons to arise and work. Isom would call her no more at dawn; his voice would be silent in that house forever more. There was no regret in the thought, no pang, no pain.

  As one lives his life, so he must be pitied in death. Soft deeds father soft memories. There never was but one man who rose with the recollection of pleasant dreams from pillowing his head upon a stone, and that man was under the hand of God. Isom Chase had planted bitterness; his memory was gall.

  She was safe, and she was free. She had come into her expectations; the pre-nuptial dreams of enjoying Isom Chase’s wealth were suddenly at hand.

  Together with the old rifle and Isom’s blood-stained garments, the coroner had taken away the little bag of gold, to be used as evidence, he said. He had taken the money, just as it was in the little sack, a smear of blood on it, after counting it before witnesses and giving her a receipt for the amount. Two thousand dollars; one hundred pieces of twenty dollars each. That was the tale of the contents of the canvas bag which had lain grinning on Isom’s pulseless heart. It was not a great amount of money, considering Isom’s faculty for gaining and holding it. It was the general belief that he had ten, twenty, times that amount, besides his loans, hidden away, and the secret of his hiding-place had gone out of the world with Isom.

  Others said that he had put his money into lands, pointing to the many farms which he owned and rented in the county. But be that as it might, there was Ollie, young and handsome, well paid for her hard year as Isom’s wife, free now, and doubtless already willing at heart to make some young man happy. Nobody blamed her for that.

  It was well known that Isom had abused her, that her life had been cheerless and lonely under his roof. Those who did not know it from first-hand facts believed it on the general notoriety of the man. Contact with Isom Chase had been like sleeping on a corn-husk bed; there was no comfort in it, no matter which way one turned.

  Ollie, her eyes closed languidly, now languidly opened to follow the track of the lamb-fleece clouds, her young body feeling warm and pleasant, as if lately released from a sorely cramped state; Ollie, with little fleeting dreams in her pretty, shallow head, was believed by the women of the neighborhood to be in the way of realizing on Isom’s expectations of an heir. It was a little fiction that had taken its beginning from Sol Greening’s early talk, and owing to that rumor the coroner had been gentle with her beyond the inclination of his heart.

  The young widow smiled as she lay on her pillow and thought of the little intimate touches of tenderness which this baseless rumor had made her the beneficiary of at her neighbor’s hands. She was selfish enough to take advantage of their mistaken kindnesses and to surrender to their vigorous elbows the work below stairs. That was her day of freedom; it was her dawn of peace.

  It was pleasant to have come through stress and hardship to this restful eddy in the storm of life; to have faced peril and disgrace and come away still clean in the eyes of men. Ollie was content with things as they were, as the evening shadows closed the door upon the events of that trying day.

  Quite different was the case of Sarah Newbolt, once more back in her poor shelter, nested in bramble and clambering vine. She was dazed, the song was gone out of her heart. She was bereaved, and her lips were moving in endless repetition of supplication to the Almighty for the safety and restoration of her son.

  What was this grim thing of which they had accused her Joe? She could not yet get to the bottom of it, she could not understand how men could be so warped and blind. Why, Joe had told them how it happened, he had explained it as clear as well water, but they didn’t believe him. She went out and sat on the porch to think it out, if possible, and come to some way of helping Joe. There was not a friend to turn to, not a counselor to lean upon.

  She never had felt it lonely in the old place before, for there was companionship even in the memory of her dead, but this evening as she sat on the porch, the familiar objects in the yard growing dim through the oncoming night, the hollowness of desolation was there. Joe was in prison. The neighbors had refused to believe the word of her boy. There was nobody to help him but her. The hand of everybody else was against him. She had delivered him into bondage and brought this trouble to him, and now she must stir herself to set him free.

  “It’s all my ow
n doin’s,” said she in unsparing reproach. “My chickens has come to roost.”

  After nightfall she went into the kitchen where she sat a dreary while before her stove, leaning forward in her unlovely, ruminating pose. Through the open draft of the stove the red coals within it glowed, casting three little bars of light upon the floor. Now and then a stick burned in two and settled down, showering sparks through the grate. These little flashes lit up her brown and somber face, and discovered the slow tears upon her weathered cheeks. For a long time she sat thus, then at last she lifted her head and looked around the room. Her table stood as she had left it in the morning, no food had passed her lips since then. But the frantic turmoil of the first hours after Joe had been led away to jail had quieted.

  A plan of action had shaped itself in her mind. In the morning she would go to Shelbyville and seek her husband’s old friend, Colonel Henry Price, to solicit his advice and assistance. In a manner comforted by this resolution, she prepared herself a pot of coffee and some food. After the loneliest and most hopeless meal that she ever had eaten in her life, she went to bed.

  In the house of Isom Chase, where neighbors sat to watch the night out beside the shrouded body, there was a waste of oil in many lamps, such an illumination that it seemed a wonder that old Isom did not rise up from his gory bed to turn down the wicks and speak reproof. Everybody must have a light. If an errand for the living or a service for the dead called one from this room to that, there must be a light. That was a place of tragic mystery, a place of violence and death. If light had been lacking there on the deeds of Isom Chase, on his hoardings and hidings away; on the hour of his death and the mystery of it, then all this must be balanced tonight by gleams in every window, beams through every crevice; lamps here, lanterns there, candles in cupboards, cellar, and nook.

  Let there be light in the house of Isom Chase, and in the sharp espionage of curious eyes, for dark days hang over it, and the young widow who draws the pity of all because she cannot weep.