He painted prize-winning heifers and horses; portraits from the faces of men as nature had made them, with more or less fidelity, and from faded photographs and treasured daguerreotypes of days before and during the war, with whatever embellishments their owners required. He painted plates of apples which had taken prizes at the county fair, and royal pumpkins and kingly swine which had won like high distinctions. But the one thing he painted because he loved it, and could do it better than anybody else, was corn.
At corn Colonel Price stood alone. He painted it in bunches hanging on barn doors, and in disordered heaps in the husk, a gleam of the grain showing here and there; and he painted it shelled from the cob. No matter where or how he painted it, his corn always was ripe and seasoned, like himself, and always so true to nature, color, form, crinkle, wrinkle, and guttered heart, that farmers stood before it marveling.
Colonel Price’s heifers might be–very frequently they were–hulky and bumpy and out of proportion, his horses strangely foreshortened and hindlengthened; but there never was any fault to be found with his corn. Corn absolved him of all his sins against animate and inanimate things which had stood before his brush in his long life; corn 173 apotheosized him, corn lifted him to the throne and put the laurel upon his old white locks.
The colonel had lived in Shelbyville for more than thirty years, in the same stately house with its three Ionic pillars reaching from ground to gable, supporting the two balconies facing toward the east. A square away on one hand was the court-house, a square away on the other the Presbyterian church; and around him were the homes of men whom he had seen come there young, and ripen with him in that quiet place. Above him on the hill stood the famous old college, its maples and elms around it, and coming down from it on each side of the broad street which led to its classic door.
Colonel Price turned his thoughts from mint to men as he came across the dewy lawn, his gleanings in his hand, his bare head gleaming in the morning sun. He had heard, the evening before, of the arrest of Peter Newbolt’s boy for the murder of Isom Chase, and the news of it had come to him with a disturbing shock, almost as poignant as if one of his own blood had been accused.
The colonel knew the sad story of Peter marrying below his estate away back there in Kentucky long ago. The Newbolts were blue-grass people, entitled to mate with the best in the land. Peter had debased his blood by marrying a mountain girl. Colonel Price had held it always to Peter’s credit that he had been ashamed of his mésalliance, and had plunged away into the woods of Missouri with his bride to hide her from the eyes of his aristocratic family and friends.
Back in Kentucky the colonel’s family and the Newbolt’s had been neighbors. A few years after Peter made his dash across the Mississippi with his bride, and the journey on horseback to his new home, young Price had followed, drawn to Shelbyville by the fame of that place at a seat of culture and knowledge, which even in that early day had spread afar. The colonel–not having won his title then–came across 174 the river with his easel under one arm and his pride under the other. He had kept both of them in honor all those years.
On the hopes and ambitions of those early days the colonel had realized, in a small way, something in the measure of a man who sets to work with the intention of making a million and finds himself content at last to count his gains by hundreds. He had taken up politics as a spice to the placid life of art, and once had represented his district in the state assembly, and four times had been elected county clerk. Then he had retired on his honors, with a competence from his early investments and an undivided ambition to paint corn.
Through all those years he had watched the struggles of Peter Newbolt, who never seemed able to kick a foothold in the steps of success, and he had seen him die at last, with his unrealized schemes of life around him. And now Peter’s boy was in jail, charged with slaying old Isom Chase. Death had its compensations, at the worst, reflected the colonel. It had spared Peter this crowning disgrace.
That boy must be a throw-back, thought the colonel, to the ambuscading, feud-fighting men on his mother’s side. The Newbolts never had been accused of crime back in Kentucky. There they had been the legislators, the judges, the governors, and senators. Yes, thought the colonel, coming around the corner of the house, lifting the fragrant bunch of mint to his face and pausing a step while he drank its breath; yes, the boy must be a throw-back. It wasn’t in the Newbolt blood to do a thing like that.