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

by Irvin S. Cobb

“Jedge Priest, for the last time, stand aside!” warned the beaky-nosed man. His voice carried the accent of finality and ultimate decision in it. “You've done wore our patience plum' out. Boys, if you're ready come on!”

“One minute!” The judge's shrill blare of command held them against their wills. He was lowering his umbrella. “One minute and one word more!”

Shuffling their impatient feet they watched him backing with a sort of ungainly alertness over from right to left, dragging the battered brass ferrule of his umbrella after him, so that it made a line from one curb of the narrow street to the other. Doing this his eyes never left their startled faces. At the far side he halted and stepped over so that they faced this line from one side and he from the other. The line lay between them, furrowed in the deep dust.

“Men,” he said, and his lifelong affectation of deliberately ungrammatical speech was all gone from him, “I have said to you all I can say. I will now kill the first man who puts his foot across that line!”

There was nothing Homeric, nothing heroic about it. Even the line he had made in the dust waggled, and was skewed and crooked like the trail of a blind worm. His old figure was still as grotesquely plump and misshapen as ever—the broken rib of his umbrella slanted askew like the crippled wing of a fat bat; but the pudgy hand that brought the big blue gun out of the right pocket of the alpaca coat and swung it out and up, muzzle lifted, was steady and sure. His thumb drew the hammer back and the double click broke on the amazed dumb silence that had fallen like two clangs upon an anvil. The wrinkles in his face all set into fixed, hard lines.

It was about six feet from them to where the line crossed the road. Heavily, slowly, diffidently, as though their feet were weighted with the leaden boots of a deep sea diver, yet pushed on by one common spirit, they moved a foot at a time right up to the line. And there they halted, their eyes shifting from him to the dustmark and back again, rubbing their shoulders up against one another and shuffling on their legs like cattle startled by a snake in the path.

The beaky-nosed man fumbled in the breast of his unbuttoned vest, loosening a revolver in a shoulder holster. A twenty-year-old boy, his face under its coating of dust as white as flour dough, made as if to push past him and break across the line; but the Massac blacksmith caught him and plucked him back. The leader, still fumbling inside his vest, addressed the judge hoarsely:

“I certainly don't want to have to kill you Jedge Priest!” he said doggedly.

“I don't want to have to kill anybody,” answered back Judge Priest; “but, as God is my judge, I'm going to kill the first one of you that crosses that line. If it was my own brother I'd kill him. I don't know which one of you will kill me, but I know which one I'm going to kill—the first man across!”

They swayed their bodies from side to side—not forward but from side to side. They fingered their weapons, and some of them swore in a disappointed, irritated sort of way. This lasted perhaps half a minute, perhaps a whole minute—anyway it lasted for some such measurable period of time—before the crumbling crust of their resolution was broken through. The break came from the front and the center. Their leader, the lank, tall man with the down-tilted nose, was the first to give ground visibly. He turned about and without a word he began pushing a passage for himself through the scrouging pack of them. Breathing hard, like men who had run a hard race, they followed him, going away with scarcely a backward glance toward the man who—alone—had daunted them. They followed after their leader as mules follow after a bell-mare, wiping their grimy shirtsleeves across their sweaty, grimier faces and glancing toward each other with puzzled, questioning looks. One of them left a heavy can of coal-oil behind him upright in the middle of the road.