Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  He interrupted her. “What do you mean? Try to tell me about it quietly, child.” He laid his hand on her shoulder.

  She told him breathlessly (while he grew more and more visibly perturbed and uneasy, biting his cigar to pieces and groaning at intervals) what she and Helen had seen in the storm. When she finished he took a few quick turns about the room with his hands thrust deep in his coat pockets, and then, charging her to repeat the story to no one, left the house, and, forgetting his fatigue, rapidly crossed the fields to the point where the bizarre figures of the night had shown themselves to the two girls at the window.

  The soft ground had been trampled by many feet. The boot-prints pointed to the northeast. He traced them backward to the southwest through the field, and saw where they had come from near the road, going northeast. Then, returning, he climbed the fence and followed them northward through the next field. From there, the next, beyond the road that was a continuation of Main Street, stretched to the railroad embankment. The track, raggedly defined in trampled loam and muddy furrow, bent in a direction which indicated that its terminus might be the switch where the empty cars had stood last night, waiting for the one-o’clock freight. Though the fields had been trampled down in many places by the searching parties, he felt sure of the direction taken by the Cross-Roads men, and he perceived that the searchers had mistaken the tracks he followed for those of earlier parties in the hunt. On the embankment he saw a number of men, walking west and examining the ground on each side, and a long line of people following them out from town. He stopped. He held the fate of Six-Cross-Roads in his hand and he knew it.

  He knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads, and that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the Cross-Roads would fight. If he had believed that the dissemination of his knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the men near him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive. They would not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as a prisoner; such a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also, they were not that kind; they had been “looking for him” a long time, and their one idea was to kill him.

  And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched. Of one thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and whipped while yet alive. In spite of his easy manners and geniality, there was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed before the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads “White-Cap” could have been laid upon him in chastisement. A great many good Americans of Carlow who knew him well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an untitled Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He was the only man the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as “Marse” since he came to Plattville, thirty years ago.

  Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages, in the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number they had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of the young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly in a trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge up in his breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more. Though long retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all his life a serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant lawlessness that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the people; their long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at last and wipe out the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could be held off over to-day, if men’s minds could cool over night, the law could strike and the innocent and the hotheaded be spared from suffering. He would wait; he would lay his information before the sheriff; and Horner would go quietly with a strong posse, for he would need a strong one. He began to retrace his steps.

  The men on the embankment were walking slowly, bending far over, their eyes fixed on the ground. Suddenly one of them stood erect and tossed his arms in the air and shouted loudly. Other men ran to him, and another far down the track repeated the shout and the gesture to another far in his rear; this man took it up, and shouted and waved to a fourth man, and so they passed the signal back to town. There came, almost immediately three long, loud whistles from a mill near the station, and the embankment grew black with people pouring out from town, while the searchers came running from the fields and woods and underbrush on both sides of the railway.

  Briscoe paused for the last time; then he began to walk slowly toward the embankment.

  The track lay level and straight, not dimming in the middle distances, the rails converging to points, both northwest and southeast, in the clean-washed air, like examples of perspective in a child’s drawing-book. About seventy miles to the west and north lay Rouen; and, in the same direction, nearly six miles from where the signal was given, the track was crossed by a road leading directly south to Six-Cross-Roads.

  The embankment had been newly ballasted with sand. What had been discovered was a broad brown stain on the south slope near the top. There were smaller stains above and below; none beyond it to left or right; and there were deep boot-prints in the sand. Men were examining the place excitedly, talking and gesticulating. It was Lige Willetts who had found it. His horse was tethered to a fence near by, at the end of a lane through a cornfield. Jared Wiley, the deputy, was talking to a group near the stain, explaining.

  “You see them two must have knowed about the one-o’clock freight, and that it was to stop here to take on the empty lumber cars. I don’t know how they knowed it, but they did. It was this way: when they dropped from the window, they beat through the storm, straight for this side-track. At the same time Mr. Harkless leaves Briscoes’ goin’ west. It begins to rain. He cuts across to the railroad to have a sure footing, and strikin’ for the deepo for shelter — near place as any except Briscoes’ where he’d said good-night already and prob’ly don’t wish to go back, ‘fear of givin’ trouble or keepin’ ’em up — anybody can understand that. He comes along, and gets to where we are precisely at the time they do, them comin’ from town, him strikin’ for it. They run right into each other. That’s what happened. They re-cog-nized him and raised up on him and let him have it. What they done it with, I don’t know; we took everything in that line off of ’em; prob’ly used railroad iron; and what they done with him afterwards we don’t know; but we will by night. They’ll sweat it out of ’em up at Rouen when they get ’em.”

  “I reckon maybe some of us might help,” remarked Mr. Watts, reflectively.

  Jim Bardlock swore a violent oath. “That’s the talk!” he shouted. “Ef I ain’t the first man of this crowd to set my foot in Roowun, an’ first to beat in that jail door, an’ take ’em out an’ hang ’em by the neck till they’re dead, dead, dead, I’m not Town Marshal of Plattville, County of Carlow, State of Indiana, and the Lord have mercy on our souls!”

  Tom Martin looked at the brown stain and quickly turned away; then he went back slowly to the village. On the way he passed Warren Smith.

  “Is it so?” asked the lawyer.

  Martin answered with a dry throat. He looked out dimly over the sunlit fields, and swallowed once or twice. “Yes, it’s so. There’s a good deal of it there. Little more than a boy he was.” The old fellow passed his seamy hand over his eyes without concealment. “Peter ain’t very bright, sometimes, it seems to me,” he added, brokenly; “overlook Bodeffer and Fisbee and me and all of us old husks, and — and—” he gulped suddenly, then finished— “and act the fool and take a boy that’s the best we had. I wish the Almighty would take Peter off the gate; he ain’t fit fer it.”

  When the attorney reached the spot where the crowd was thickest, way was made for him. The old colored man, Xenophon, approached at the same time, leaning on a hickory stick and bent very far over, one hand resting on his hip as if to ease a rusty joint. The negro’s age was an incentive to fable; from his appearance he might have known the prophets, an
d he wore that hoary look of unearthly wisdom many decades of superstitious experience sometimes give to members of his race. His face, so tortured with wrinkles that it might have been made of innumerable black threads woven together, was a living mask of the mystery of his blood. Harkless had once said that Uncle Xenophon had visited heaven before Swedenborg and hell before Dante. To-day, as he slowly limped over the ties, his eyes were bright and dry under the solemn lids, and, though his heavy nostrils were unusually distended in the effort for regular breathing, the deeply puckered lips beneath them were set firmly.

  He stopped and looked at the faces before him. When he spoke his voice was gentle, and though the tremulousness of age harped on the vocal strings, it was rigidly controlled. “Kin some kine gelmun,” he asked, “please t’be so good ez t’ show de ole main whuh de W’ite-Caips is done shoot Marse Hawkliss?”

  “Here was where it happened, Uncle Zen,” answered Wiley, leaning him forward. “Here is the stain.”

  Xenophon bent over the spot on the sand, making little odd noises in his throat. Then he painfully resumed his former position. “Dass his blood,” he said, in the same gentle, quavering tone. “Dass my bes’ frien’ whut lay on de groun’ whuh yo staind, gelmun.”

  There was a pause, and no one spoke.

  “Dass whuh day laid ’im an’ dass whuh he lie,” the old negro continued. “Dey shot ’im in de fiels. Dey ain’ shot ’im hear-yondeh dey drugged ’im, but dis whuh he lie.” He bent over again, then knelt, groaningly, and placed his hand on the stain, one would have said, as a man might place his hand over a heart to see if it still beat. He was motionless, with the air of hearkening.

  “Marse, honey, is you gone?” He raised his voice as if calling, “Is you gone, suh? — Marse?”

  He looked up at the circle about him, and, still kneeling, not taking his hand from the sand, seeming to wait for a sign, to listen for a voice, he said: “Whafo’ you gelmun think de good Lawd summon Marse Hawkliss? Kaze he de mos’ fittes’? You know dat man he ketch me in de cole night, wintuh ‘to’ lais’, stealin’ ’is wood. You know whut he done t’de ole thief? Tek an’ bull’ up big fiah een ole Zen’ shainty; say, ‘He’p yo’se’f an’ welcome. Reckon you hongry, too, ain’ you, Xenophon?’ Tek an’ feed me. Tek an’ tek keer o’ me ev’ since. Ah pump de baith full in de mawin’; mek ’is bed; pull de weeds out’n of de front walk — dass all. He tek me in. When Ah aisk ’im ain’ he fraid keep ole thief he say, jesso: ‘Dass all my fault, Xenophon; ought look you up long ‘go; ought know long ‘go you be cole dese baid nights. Reckon Ahm de thievenest one us two, Xenophon, keepin’ all dis wood stock’ up when you got none,’ he say, jesso. Tek me in; say he lahk a thief. Pay me sala’y. Feed me. Dass de main whut de Caips gone shot lais’ night.” He raised his head sharply, and the mystery in his gloomy eyes intensified as they opened wide and stared at the sky, unseeingly.

  “Ise bawn wid a cawl!” he exclaimed, loudly. His twisted frame was braced to an extreme tension. “Ise bawn wid a cawl! De blood anssuh!”

  “It wasn’t the Cross-Roads, Uncle Xenophon,” said Warren Smith, laying his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  Xenophon rose to his feet. He stretched a long, bony arm straight to the west, where the Cross-Roads lay; stood rigid and silent, like a seer; then spoke:

  “De men whut shot Marse Hawkliss lies yondeh, hidin’ f’um de light o’ day. An’ him” — he swerved his whole rigid body till the arm pointed northwest— “he lies yondeh. You won’t find him heah. Dey fought ’im een de fiel’s an’ dey druggen ’im heah. Dis whim dey lay ’im down. Ise bawn wid a cawl!”

  There were exclamations from the listeners, for Xenophon spoke as one having authority. Suddenly he turned and pointed his outstretched hand full at Judge Briscoe.

  “An’ dass de main,” he cried, “dass de main kin tell you Ah speak de trufe.”

  Before he was answered, Eph Watts looked at Briscoe keenly and then turned to Lige Willetts and whispered: “Get on your horse, ride in, and ring the court-house bell like the devil. Do as I say!”

  Tears stood in the judge’s eyes. “It is so,” he said, solemnly. “He speaks the truth. I didn’t mean to tell it to-day, but somehow—” He paused. “The hounds!” he cried. “They deserve it! My daughter saw them crossing the fields in the night — saw them climb the fence, hoods, gowns, and all, a big crowd of them. She and the lady who is visiting us saw them, saw them plainly. The lady saw them several times, clear as day, by the flashes of lightning — the scoundrels were coming this way. They must have been dragging him with them then. He couldn’t have had a show for his life amongst them. Do what you like — maybe they’ve got him at the Cross-Roads. If there’s a chance of it — dead or alive — bring him back!”

  A voice rang out above the clamor that followed the judge’s speech.

  “‘Bring him back!’ God could, maybe, but He won’t. Who’s travelling my way? I go west!” Hartley Bowlder had ridden his sorrel up the embankment, and the horse stood between the rails. There was an angry roar from the crowd; the prosecutor pleaded and threatened unheeded; and as for the deputy sheriff, he declared his intention of taking with him all who wished to go as his posse. Eph Watts succeeded in making himself heard above the tumult.

  “The Square!” he shouted. “Start from the Square. We want everybody, and we’ll need them. We want every one in Carlow to be implicated in this posse.”

  “They will be!” shouted a farmer. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “We want to get into some sort of shape,” cried Eph.

  “Shape, hell!” said Hartley Bowlder.

  There was a hiss and clang and rattle behind him, and a steam whistle shrieked. The crowd divided, and Hartley’s sorrel jumped just in time as the westbound accommodation rushed through on its way to Rouen. From the rear platform leaned the sheriff, Horner, waving his hands frantically as he flew by, but no one understood — or cared — what he said, or, in the general excitement, even wondered why he was leaving the scene of his duty at such a time. When the train had dwindled to a dot and disappeared, and the noise of its rush grew faint, the court-house bell was heard ringing, and the mob was piling pell-mell into the village to form on the Square. The judge stood alone on the embankment.

  “That settles it,” he said aloud, gloomily, watching the last figures. He took off his hat and pushed back the thick, white hair from his forehead. “Nothing to do but wait. Might as well go home for that. Blast it!” he exclaimed, impatiently. “I don’t want to go there. It’s too hard on the little girl. If she hadn’t come till next week she’d never have known John Harkless.”

  CHAPTER XI. JOHN BROWN’S BODY

  ALL MORNING HORSEMEN had been galloping through Six-Cross-Roads, sometimes singly, oftener in company. At one-o’clock the last posse passed through on its return to the county-seat, and after that there was a long, complete silence, while the miry corners were undisturbed by a single hoof-beat. No unkempt colt nickered from his musty stall; the sparse young corn that was used to rasp and chuckle greenly stood rigid in the fields. Up the Plattville pike despairingly cackled one old hen, with her wabbling sailor run, smit with a superstitious horror of nothing, in the stillness; she hid herself in the shadow underneath a rickety barn, and her shrieking ceased.

  Only on the Wimby farm were there signs of life. The old lady who had sent Harkless roses sat by the window all morning and wiped her eyes, watching the horsemen ride by; sometimes they would hail her and tell her there was nothing yet. About two-o’clock, her husband rattled up in a buckboard, and got out the late, and more authentic, Mr. Wimby’s shot-gun, which he carefully cleaned and oiled, in spite of its hammerless and quite useless condition, sitting, meanwhile, by the window opposite his wife, and often looking up from his work to shake his weak fist at his neighbors’ domiciles and creak decrepit curses and denunciations.

  But the Cross-Roads was ready. It knew what was coming now. Frightened, desperate, sullen, it was ready.


  The afternoon wore on, and lengthening shadows fell upon a peaceful — one would have said, a sleeping — country. The sun-dried pike, already dusty, stretched its serene length between green borders flecked with purple and yellow and white weedflowers; and the tree shadows were not shade, but warm blue and lavender glows in the general pervasion of still, bright light, the sky curving its deep, unburnished, penetrable blue over all, with no single drift of fleece upon it to be reflected in the creek that wound along past willow and sycamore. A woodpecker’s telegraphy broke the quiet like a volley of pistol shots.

  But far eastward on the pike there slowly developed a soft, white haze. It grew denser and larger. Gradually it rolled nearer. Dimly behind it could be discerned a darker, moving nucleus that extended far back upon the road. A heavy tremor began to stir the air — faint manifold sounds, a waxing, increasing, multitudinous rumor.

  The pike ascended a long, slight slope leading west up to the Cross-Roads. From a thicket of iron-weed at the foot of this slope was thrust the hard, lean visage of an undersized girl of fourteen. Her fierce eyes examined the approaching cloud of dust intently. A redness rose under the burnt yellow skin and colored the wizened cheeks.

  They were coming.

  She stepped quickly out of the tangle, and darted up the road, running with the speed of a fleet little terrier, not opening her lips, not calling out, but holding her two thin hands high above her head. That was all. But Birnam wood was come to Dunsinane at last, and the messenger sped. Out of the weeds in the corners of the snake fence, in the upper part of the rise, silently lifted the heads of men whose sallowness became a sickish white as the child flew by.