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

by Irvin S. Cobb

“Now pull him up on his feet!” commanded Bynum. “I guess we might as well leave them cuffs on him—eh?” he said to the deputy sheriff. The deputy nodded. Bynum took down from a peg over the jailer's desk a ring bearing many jingling keys of handwrought iron. “Bring him in here, Jim,” he bade the trusty.

He stepped through the inner door and the negro Jim followed him, steering the manacled little negro. Quarles, the constable, and the deputy sheriff tagged behind to see their catch properly caged. They went along a short corridor, filled with a stifling, baked heat and heavy with the smell of penned-up creatures. There were faces at the barred doors of the cells that lined one side of this corridor—all black or yellow faces except one white one; and from these cells came no sound at all as the three white men and the two negroes passed. Only the lone white prisoner spoke out.

“Who is he, Dink?” he called eagerly. “What's he done?”

“Shut up!” ordered his keeper briefly, and that was the only answer he made. At the far end of the passage Bynum turned a key in a creaky lock and threw back the barred door of an inner cell, sheathed with iron and lacking a window. The trusty shoved in the little handcuffed negro and the negro groveled on the wooden floor upon all fours. Bynum locked the door and the three white men tramped back through the silent corridor, followed by the sets of white eyes that stared out unwinkingly at them through the iron-latticed grills. It was significant that from the time of the arrival at the jail not one of the whites had laid his hands actually upon the prisoner. “Well, boys,” said Bynum to the others by way of a farewell, “there he is and there he'll stay—unless than Massac Creek folks come and git him. You've done your sworn duty and I've done mine. I locked him up and I won't be responsible for what happens now. I know this much—I ain't goin' to git myself crippled up savin' that nigger. If a mob wants to come let 'em come on!”

No mob came from Massac that night or the next night either; and on the second day there was a big basket picnic and rally under a brush arbor at the Shady Grove schoolhouse—the biggest meeting of the whole campaign it was to be, with speaking, and the silver cornet band out from town to make music, and the oldest living Democrat in the county sitting on the platform, and all that. Braving the piled-on layers of heat that rode the parched country like witch-hags half the town went to Shady Grove. Nearly everybody went that could travel. All the morning wagons and buggies were clattering out of town, headed toward the west. And in the cooking dead calm of the midaftemoon the mob from Massac came.

They came by roundabout ways, avoiding those main traveled roads over which the crowds were gathering in toward the common focus of the Shady Grove schoolhouse; and coming so, on horseback by twos and threes, and leaving their horses in a thicket half a mile out, they were able to reach the edge of the town unnoticed and unsuspected. The rest, their leader figured, would be easy. A mistake in judgment by the town fathers in an earlier day had put the public square near the northern boundary, and the town, instead of growing up to it, grew away from it in the opposite direction, so that the square stood well beyond the thickly settled district.

All things had worked out well for their purpose. The sheriff and the jailer, both candidates for renomination, were at Shady Grove, and the sheriff had all his deputies with him, electioneering for their own jobs and his. Legal Row, the little street of lawyers' offices back of the square, might have been a byroad in old Pompeii for all the life that showed along its short and simmering length. No idlers lay under the water maples and the red oaks in the square. The jail baked in the sunlight, silent as a brick tomb, which indeed it somewhat resembled; and on the wide portico of the courthouse a loafer dog of remote hound antecedents alternately napped and roused to snap at the buzzing flies. The door of the clerk's office stood agape and through the opening came musty, snuffy smells of old leather and dry-rotted deeds. The wide hallway that ran from end to end of the old building was empty and echoed like a cave to the frequent thump of the loafer dog's leg joints upon the planking.

Indeed, the whole place had but a single occupant. In his office back of the circuit-court room Judge Priest was asleep, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his short, plump legs propped on a table and his pudgy hands locked across his stomach, which gently rose and fell with his breathing. His straw hat was on the table, and in a corner leaned his inevitable traveling companion in summer weather—a vast and cavernous umbrella of a pattern that is probably obsolete now, an unkempt old drab slattern of an umbrella with a cracked wooden handle and a crippled rib that dangled away from its fellows as though shamed by its afflicted state. The campaigning had been hard on the old judge. The Monday before, at a rally at Temple's Mills, he had fainted, and this day he hadn't felt equal to going to Shady Grove. Instead he had come to his office alter dinner to write some letters and had fallen asleep. He slept on for an hour, a picture of pink and cherubic old age, with little headings of sweat popping out thickly on his high bald head and a gentle little snoring sound, of first a drone and then a whistle, pouring steadily from his pursed lips.

Outside a dry-fly rasped the brooding silence up and down with its fret-saw refrain. In the open spaces the little heat waves danced like so many stress marks, accenting the warmth and giving emphasis to it; and far down the street, which ran past the courthouse and the jail and melted into a country road so imperceptibly that none knew exactly where the street left off and the road began, there appeared a straggling, irregular company of men marching, their shapes more than half hid in a dust column of their own raising. The Massac men were coming.

I believe there is a popular conception to the effect that an oncoming mob invariably utters a certain indescribable, sinister, muttering sound that is peculiar to mobs. For all I know that may be true of some mobs, but certain it was that this mob gave vent to no such sounds. This mob came on steadily, making no more noise than any similar group of seventy-five or eighty men tramping over a dusty road might be expected to make.