Old Judge Priest

by Irvin S. Cobb

At starting time he ploughed his way through the drifts to the long plank shanty in the bottoms and threw open a door. Instead of being up and stirring, his charges lay in their bunks against the walls, all of them stretched out comfortably there, except a half dozen or so who brewed garlicky mixtures on the big stoves that stood at intervals in a row down the middle of the barracks. Employing the only language he knew, which was a profanely emphatic language, he ordered them to get up, get out and get to work. By shakes of the head, by words of smiling dissent and by gestures they made it plain to his understanding that for this one day at least they meant to do no labour in the open.

One more tolerant than Beaver Yancy, or perhaps one more skilled at translating signs, would have divined their reasons readily enough. They had come South expecting temperate weather. They did not like snow. They were not clad for exposure to snow. Their garments were thin and their shoes leaked. Therefore would they abide where they were until the snow had melted and the cold had moderated. Then they would work twice as hard to make up for this holiday.

The burly, big, overbearing man in the doorway was of a different frame of mind. In the absence of his superior officers and the padrone, his duty was to see that they pushed that job to a conclusion. He'd show 'em! He would make an example of one and the others would heed the lesson. He laid violent grasp on a little man who appeared to be a leader of opinion among his fellows and, with a big, mittened hand in the neckband of the other's shirt, dragged him, sputtering and expostulating, across the threshold and, with hard kicks of a heavy foot, heavily booted, propelled him out into the open.

The little man fell face forward into the snow. He bounced up like a chunk of new rubber. He had been wounded most grievously in his honour, bruised most painfully and ignominiously elsewhere. He jumped for the man who had mishandled him, his knifeblade licking out like a snake's tongue. He jabbed three times, hard and quick—then fled back indoors; and for a while, until help came in the guise of two children of a shanty-boater's family on their way to the railroad yards to pick up bits of coal, Beaver Yancy lay in the snow where he had dropped, bleeding like a stuck pig. He was not exactly cut to ribbons. First accounts had been exaggerated as first accounts so frequently are. But he had two holes in his right lung and one in the right side of his neck, and it was strongly presumptive that he would never again kick a Sicilian day labourer—or, for that matter, anybody else.

Judge Priest, speaking dispassionately from the aloof heights of the judicial temperament, had said it would be carrying out an excellent and timely idea if the chief of police found the knife-using individual and confined him in a place that was safe and sound; which, on being apprised of the occurrence, was exactly what the chief of police undertook to do. Accompanied by two dependable members of his day shift, he very promptly set out to make an arrest and an investigation; but serious obstacles confronted him.

To begin with, he had not the faintest notion of the criminal's identity or the criminal's appearance. The man he wanted was one among two hundred; but which one was he? Beaver Yancy, having been treated in Doctor Lake's office, was now at the city hospital in no condition to tell the name of his assailant even had he known it, or to describe him either, seeing that loss of blood, pain, shock and drugs had put him beyond the power of coherent speech. Nevertheless, the chief felt it a duty incumbent on him to lose no time in visiting what the Daily Evening News, with a touch of originality, called “the scene of the crime.” This he did.

Everything was quiet on the flatlands below the Old Fort when he got there, an hour after the stabbing. Midway between the bluff that marked the rim of the hollow and the fringe of willows along the river, stood the long plank barracks of the imported hands. Smoke rose from the stovepipes that broke the expanse of its snow-covered roof; about one door was a maze of tracks and crosstracks; at a certain place, which was, say, seventy-five feet from the door, the snow was wallowed and flurried as though a heavy oxhide had been dragged across its surface; and right there a dark spot showed reddish brown against the white background.

However, no figures moved and no faces showed at the small windows as the chief and his men, having floundered down the hill, cautiously approached the silent building; and when he knocked on the door with the end of his hickory walking stick, and knocked and knocked again, meantime demanding admittance in the name of the law, no one answered his knock or his hail. Losing patience, he put his shoulder to the fastened door and, with a heave, broke it away from its hinges and its hasp, so that it fell inward.

Through the opening he took a look, then felt in his overcoat pocket for his gun, making ready to check a rush with revolver shots if needs be; but there was no rush. Within the place two hundred frightened, desperate men silently confronted him. Some who had pistols were wearing them now in plain sight. Others had knives and had produced them. All had picks and shovels—dangerous enough weapons at close quarters in the hands of men skilled in the use of them.

Had the big-hatted chief been wise in the ways of these men, he might peacefully have attained his object by opening his topcoat and showing his blue uniform, his brass buttons and his gold star; but naturally he did not think of that, and as he stood there before them, demanding of them, in a language they did not know, to surrender the guilty one, he was ulstered, like any civilian, from his throat to the tops of his rubber boots.