Old Judge Priest

by Irvin S. Cobb

The Cumberland Queen blew her whistle for departure and as the roar died away Mr. Houser might be heard in the act of finishing a sentence touching with gentle irony upon the topic which seemed so to irk and irritate Mr. Montjoy. He never finished it.

Up, from his chair, sprang Mr. Montjoy, and shook a knotted fist beneath Mr. Houser's nose.

“How dare you?” he demanded. “How dare you indulge in your cheap sarcasm—your low scurrilities—regarding one of the grandest men the Southland ever produced?”

His voice turned falsetto and soared to a slate-pencilly screech:

“I repeat it, sir—how dare you—you underbred ignoramus—you who never knew what it was to have a noble grandfather! Nobody knows who your grandfather was. I doubt whether anybody knows who your father——”

Perhaps it was what Mr. Montjoy appeared to be on the point of asserting. Perhaps it was that his knuckles, as he brandished his fist in Mr. Houser's face, grazed Mr. Houser's cheek.

Mr. Houser stretched forth a solid arm and gripped a handful of sinewy fingers in the lapels of Mr. Montjoy's coat. He didn't strike Mr. Montjoy, but he took him and he shook him—oh, how he shook him. He shook him up and down, and back and forth and to and fro and forward and rearward; shook him until his collar came undone and his nose glasses flew off into space; shook him until his hair came down in his eyes and his teeth rattled in his jaw; shook him into limp, breathless, voiceless helplessness, and then holding him, dangling and flopping for a moment, slapped him once very gently, almost as a mother might slap an erring child of exceedingly tender years; and dropped the limp form, and stepped over it and climbed down off the platform into the midst of the excited crowd. The third of the series of the joint debates was ended; also the series itself.

Judge Priest instantly shoved forward, his size and his impetuosity clearing the path for him through a press of lesser and less determined bodies. He thrust a firm hand into the crook of his nephew's arm and led him off up the street clear of those who might have sought either to compliment or to reprehend the young man. As they went away linked together thus, it was observed that the judge wore upon his broad face a look of sore distress and it was overheard that he grievously lamented the most regrettable occurrence which had just transpired and that openly he reproached young Houser for his elemental response to the verbal attacks of Mr. Montjoy and, in view of the profound physical and spiritual shock to Mr. Montjoy's well-known pride and dignity, that he expressed a deep concern for the possible outcome. Upon this last head, he was particularly and shrilly emphatic.

In such a fashion, with the nephew striving vainly to speak in his own defence and with the uncle as constantly interrupting to reprimand him and to warn him of the peril he had brought upon his head, and all in so loud a voice as to be clearly audible to any persons hovering nearby, the pair continued upon their journey until they reached Soule's Drug Store. There, with a final sorrowful nod of the judge's head and a final shake of his admonishing forefinger, they parted. The younger man departed, presumably for his home to meditate upon his foolhardy conduct and the older went inside the store and retired to Mr. Soule's little box of an office at the rear, hard by the prescription case. Carefully closing the door after him to insure privacy, he remained there for upwards of an hour, engaged undoubtedly in melancholy reflections touching upon the outbreak of his most culpable kinsman and upon the conceivable consequences. He must have done some writing, too, for when at length he emerged he was holding in one hand a sealed envelope. Summoning to him Logan Baker, Mr. Soule's coloured errand boy, he entrusted the note to Logan, along with a quarter of a dollar for messenger hire, and sent the black boy away. From this circumstance several persons who chanced to be in Soule's, hypothesised that very probably the judge had taken it upon himself to write Mr. Montjoy a note of apology in the name of his nephew and of himself. However, this upon the part of the onlookers was but a supposition. They merely were engaged in the old practice, so hallowed among bystanders, of putting two and two together, by such process sometimes attaining a total of four, and sometimes not.

As regards, on the other hand, Quintus Q. Montjoy, he retained no distinct recollection of the passage homeward, following his mishandling by Tobias J. Houser. For the time a seething confusion ruled his being. Mingled emotions of chagrin, rage and shame—but most of all rage—boiled in his brain until the top of his skull threatened to come right off. Since he was a schoolboy until now, none had laid so much as an impious finger upon him. For the first time in his life he felt the warm strong desire to shed human blood, to see it spatter and pour forth in red streams. The spirit of his grandfather waked and walked within him; anyway it is but fair to assume that it did so.