V. UP CLAY STREET
ONE behind the other, three short sections of a special came sliding into the yard sidings below the depot.
The cars clanked their drawheads together like manacles, as they were chivied and bullied and shoved about by a regular chain-gang boss of a switch engine. Some of the cars were ordinary box cars, just the plain galley slaves of commerce, but painted a uniform blue and provided with barred gratings; some were flat cars laden with huge wheeled burdens hooded under tarpaulins; and a few were sleeping cars that had been a bright yellow at the beginning of the season, with flaring red lettering down the sides, but now were faded to a shabby saffron.
It was just getting good broad day. The sleazy dun clouds that had been racked up along the east—like mill-ends left over from night's remnant counter, as a poet might have said had there been a poet there to say it—were now torn asunder, and through the tear the sun showed out, blushing red at his own nakedness and pushing ahead of him long shadows that stretched on the earth the wrong way. There was a taste of earliness in the air, a sort of compounded taste of dew and dust and maybe a little malaria.
Early as it was, there was a whopping big delegation of small boys, white and black, on hand for a volunteer reception committee. The eyes of these boys were bright and expectant in contrast to the eyes of the yard hands, who looked half dead for sleep and yawned and shivered. The boys welcomed the show train at the depot and ran alongside its various sections. They were mainly barefooted, but they avoided splinters in the butts of the crossties and sharp clinkers in the cinder ballast of the roadbed with the instinctive agility of a race of primitives.
Almost before the first string of cars halted and while the clanking of the iron links still ran down its length like a code signal being repeated, a lot of mop-headed men in overalls appeared, crawling out from all sorts of unsuspected sleeping places aboard. Magically a six-team of big white Norman horses materialized, dragging empty traces behind them. They must have been harnessed up together beforehand in a stock car somewhere. A corrugated wooden runway appeared to sprout downward and outward from an open car door, and down it bumped a high, open wagon with a big sheet-iron cooking range mounted on it and one short length of stovepipe rising above like a stumpy fighting-top on an armored cruiser. As the wheels thumped against the solid earth a man in a dirty apron, who had been balancing himself in the wagon, touched a match to some fuel in his firebox. Instantly black smoke came out of the top of the stack and a stinging smell of burning wood trailed behind him, as the six-horse team hooked on and he and his moving kitchen went lurching and rolling across shallow gulleys and over a rutted common, right into the red eye of the upcoming sun.
Other wagons followed, loaded with blue stakes, with coils of ropes, with great rolls of earth-stained canvas, and each took the same route, with four or six horses to drag it and a born charioteer in a flannel shirt to drive it. The common destination was a stretch of flat land a quarter of a mile away from the track. Truck patches backed up against this site on one side and the outlying cottages of the town flanked it on the other, and it was bordered with frayed fringes of ragweed and niggerheads, and was dotted over with the dried-mud chimneys of crawfish. In the thin turf here a geometric pattern of iron laying-out pins now appeared to spring up simultaneously, with rag pennons of red and blue fluttering in the tops, and at once a crew of men set to work with an orderly confusion, only stopping now and then to bellow back the growing swarms of boys who hung eagerly on the flank of each new operation. True to the promise of its lithographed glories the circus was in our midst, rain or shine, for this day and date only.
If there is any of the boy spirit left in us circus day may be esteemed to bring it out. And considering his age and bulk and his calling, there was a good deal of the boy left in our circuit judge—so much boy, in fact, that he, an early riser of note in a town much given to early rising, was up and dressing this morning a good hour ahead of his usual time. As he dressed he kept going to the side window of his bedroom and looking out. Eventually he had his reward. Through a break in the silver-leaf poplars he saw a great circus wagon crossing his line of vision an eighth of a mile away. Its top and sides were masked in canvas, but he caught a flicker of red and gold as the sun glinted on its wheels, and he saw the four horses tugging it along, and the dipping figure of the driver up above. The sight gave the old judge a little thrill down inside of him.
“I reckin that fellow was right when he said a man is only as old as he feels,” said Judge Priest to himself. “And I'm glad court ain't in session—I honestly am.” He opened his door and called down into the body of the silent house below: “Jeff! Oh, Jeff!”
“Yas, suh,” came up the prompt answer.