Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb

VIII. THE MOB FROM MASSAC

YOU might call it a tragedy—this thing that came to pass down in our country here a few years back. For that was exactly what it was—a tragedy, and in its way a big one. Yet at the time nobody thought of calling it by any name at all. It was just one of those shifts that are inevitably bound to occur in the local politics of a county or a district; and when it did come, and was through and over with, most people accepted it as a matter of course.

There were some, however, it left jarred and dazed and bewildered—yes, and helpless too; men too old to readjust their altered fortunes to their altered conditions even if they had the spirit to try, which they hadn't. Take old Major J. Q. A. Pickett now. Attaching himself firmly to a certain spot at the far end of Sherrill's bar, with one leg hooked up over the brass bar-rail—a leg providentially foreshortened by a Minie ball at Shiloh, as if for that very purpose—the major expeditiously drank himself to death in a little less than four years, which was an exceedingly short time for the job, seeing he had always been a most hale and hearty old person, though grown a bit gnarly and skewed with the coming on of age. The major had been county clerk ever since Reconstruction; he was a gentleman and a scholar and could quote Latin and Sir Walter Scott's poetry by the running yard. Toward the last he quoted them with hiccups and a stutter.

Also there was Captain Andy J. Redcliffe, who was sheriff three terms handrunning and, before that, chief of police. Going out of office he went into the livery-stable business; but he didn't seem to make much headway against the Farrell Brothers, who 'owned the other livery stable and were younger men and spry and alert to get trade. He spent a few months sitting at the front door of his yawning, half-empty stables, nursing a grudge against nearly everything and plaintively garrulous on the subject of the ingratitude of republics in general and this republic in particular; and presently he sickened of one of those mysterious diseases that seem to attack elderly men of a full habit of life and to rob them of their health without denuding them of their flesh. His fat sagged on his bones in unwholesome, bloated folds and he wallowed unsteadily when he walked. One morning one of his stable hands found him dead in his office, and the Gideon K. Irons Camp turned out and gave him a comrade's funeral, with full military honors.

Also there were two or three others, including ex-County Treasurer Whitford, who shot himself through the head when a busy and conscientious successor found in his accounts a seeming shortage of four hundred and eighty dollars, which afterward turned out to be more a mistake in bookkeeping than anything else. Yet these men—all of them—might have seen what was coming had they watched. The storm that wrecked them was a long time making up—four years before it had threatened them.

There had grown up a younger generation of men who complained—and perhaps they had reason for the complaint—that they did nearly all the work of organizing and campaigning and furnished most of the votes to carry the elections, while a close combine of aging, fussy, autocratic old men held all the good county offices and fatted themselves on the spoils of county politics. These mutterings of discontent found shape in a sort of semi-organized revolt against the county ring, as the young fellows took to calling it, and for the county primary they made up a strong ticket among themselves—a ticket that included two smart young lawyers who could talk on their feet, and a popular young farmer for sheriff, and a live young harnessmaker as a representative of union labor, which was beginning to be a recognized force in the community with the coming of the two big tanneries. They made a hard fight of it, too, campaigning at every fork in the big road and every country store and blacksmith shop, and spouting arguments and oratory like so many inspired human spigots. Their elderly opponents took things easier. They rode about in top buggies and democrat wagons from barbecue to rally and from rally to schoolhouse meeting, steadfastly refusing the challenges of the younger men for a series of joint debates and contenting themselves with talking over old days with fading, grizzled men of their own generation. These elders, in turn, talked with their sons and sons-in-law and their nephews and neighbors; and so, when the primaries came, the young men's ticket stood beaten—but not by any big margin. It was close enough to be very close.

“Well, they've licked us this time!” said Dabney Prentiss, who afterward went to Congress from the district and made a brilliant record there. Dabney Prentiss had been the younger element's candidate for circuit-court judge against old Judge Priest. “They've licked us and the Lord only knows how they did it. Here we thought we had 'em out-organized, outgeneraled and outnumbered. All they did was to go out in the back districts and beat the bushes, and out crawled a lot of old men that everybody else thought were dead twenty years ago. I think they must hide under logs in the woods and only come out to vote. But, fellows”—he was addressing some of his companions in disappointment—“but, fellows, we can afford to wait and they can't. The day is going to come when it'll take something more than shaking an empty sleeve or waving a crippled old leg to carry an election in this county. Young men keep growing up all the time, but all that old men can do is to die off. Four years from now we'll win sure!” The four years went by, creakingly slow of passage to some and rolling fast to others; and in the summer of the fourth year another campaign started up and grew hot and hotter to match the weather, which was blazing hot. The August drought came, an arid and a blistering visitation. Except at dusk and at dawn the birds quit singing and hung about in the thick treetops, silent and nervous, with their bills agape and their throat feathers panting up and down. The roasting ears burned to death on the stalk and the wide fodder blades slowly cooked from sappy greenness to a brittle dead brown. The clods in the cornrows wore dry as powder and gave no nourishment for growing, ripening things. The dust powdered the blackberry vines until they lost their original color altogether, and at the roadside the medicinal mullein drooped its wilted long leaves, like lolling tongues that were all furred and roiled, as though the mullein suffered from the very fevers that its steeped juices are presumed to cure. At its full the moon shone hot and red, with two rings round it; and the two rings always used to mean water in our country—two rings for drinking water at the hotel, and for rainwater two rings round the moon—but week after week no rain fell and the face of the earth just seemed to dry up and blow away. Yet the campaign neither lost its edge nor abated any of its fervor by reason of the weather. Politics was the chief diversion and the main excitement in our county in those days—and still is.

One morning near the end of the month a dust-covered man on a sorely spent horse galloped in from Massac Creek, down in the far edge of the county; and when he had changed horses at Farrell Brothers' and started back again there went with him the sheriff, both of his deputies and two of the town policemen, the sheriff taking with him in his buckboard a pair of preternaturally grave dogs of a reddish-brown aspect, with long, drooping ears, and long, sad, stupid faces and eyes like the chief mourners' at a funeral. They were bloodhounds, imported at some cost from a kennel in Tennessee and reputed to be marvelously wise in the tracking down of criminals. By the time the posse was a mile away and headed for Massac a story had spread through the town that made men grit their teeth and sent certain armed and mounted volunteers hurrying out to join the manhunt.

Late that same afternoon a team of blown horses, wet as though they had wallowed in the river and drawing a top buggy, panted up to the little red-brick jail, which stood on the county square alongside the old wooden white courthouse, and halted there. Two men—a constable and a deputy sheriff—sat back under the overhanging top of the buggy, and between them something small was crushed, huddled down on the seat and almost hidden by their broad figures. They were both yellowed with the dust of a hard drive. It lay On their shoulders like powdered sulphur and was gummed to their eyelashes, so that when they batted their eyelids to clear their sight it gave them a grotesque, clownish look. They climbed laboriously out and stretched their limbs.