Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

For so long had Judge Priest been wifeless and childless that many of the younger generation in our town knew nothing of the tragedy in this old man's life—which was that the same diphtheria epidemic that took both his babies in one week's time had widowed him too. We knew he loved other people's children; some of us never suspected that once upon a time he had had children of his own to love. Except in his memory no images of the dead babies endured, and this crayon portrait was the sole sentimental reminder left to him of his married life. And so, to him, it was a perfect and a matchless thing. He wouldn't have traded it for all the canvases of all the old masters in all the art galleries in this round big world.

This night, before he undressed, he went over and stood in front of it and looked at it for a while. There was dust in the grooves of the heavy tarnished gilt frame. From the top bureau drawer he took a big silk handkerchief and carefully he wiped the dust away. Then, before he put the handkerchief back in its place, he straightened the thing upon the nail which held it, and gave the glass front an awkward little caress with his pudgy old hand.

“It's been a long, long time, honey, since you went away and left me,” he said slowly, in the voice of one addressing a hearer very near at hand; “but I still miss you and the babies powerfully. And sometimes it's sorter lonesome here without you.”

A little later, when the light had been turned out, a noise like a long, deep sigh sounded out in the darkness. That, though, might have been the wheeze of the afflicted bedsprings as the old judge let his weight down in the bed.

An hour passed and there was another small sound there—a muffled nibbling sound. Behind the wainscoting, between bedroom and bathroom, a young, adventuresome rat gnawed at a box of matches which he had found on the floor in the hall and had dragged to his nest in the wall. From within the box a strangely tantalising aroma escaped; the rat, being deluded thereby into the belief that phosphorus might be an edible dainty, was minded to sample the contents. Presently his teeth met through the cover of the box. There was a sharp flaring pop, followed by a swift succession of other pops, and the rat gave a jump and departed elsewhere in great haste, with a hot bad smell in his snout and his adolescent whiskers quite entirely singed away.

The Confederates, in ragged uniforms of butternut jeans, were squatted in a clump of pawpaw bushes on the edge of a stretch of ploughed ground. From the woods on the far side of the field Yankee skirmishers were shooting toward them. A shell from the batteries must have fallen nearby and set fire to the dried leaves and the fallen brush, for the smoke kept blowing in a fellow's face, choking him and making him cough. Captain Tip Meldrum, the commander of Company B, was just behind the men, giving the order to fire back. High Private Billy Priest aimed his musket at the thickets where the Yankees were hidden and pulled the trigger, but the cap on the nipple of his piece was defective or something, and the charge wouldn't explode. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” yelled Captain Tip Meldrum over and over again, and then he yanked out his own horse-pistol and emptied it into the hostile timber. But Private Priest's gun still balked. He flung it down—and found himself sitting up in bed, gasping.

The dream hadn't been altogether a dream at that. For there was indeed smoke in the judge's eyes and his nostrils—plenty of it. A revolver was cracking out its shots somewhere near at hand; somebody outside his window was shrieking “Fire!” at the top of a good strong voice. In the distance other voices were taking up the cry.

In an earlier day, when a fire started in town, the man who discovered it drew his pistol if he were on the highway, or snatched it up if he chanced to be at home, and pointing its barrel at the sky emptied it into the air as fast as the cylinder would turn. The man next door followed suit and so on until volleys were rattling all over the neighbourhood. Thus were the townspeople aroused and, along with the townspeople, the members of the volunteer fire department. Now we had a paid department and a regular electric-alarm system, predicated on boxes and gongs and wires and things; but in outlying districts the pistol-shooting fashion of spreading the word still prevailed to a considerable extent, and more especially did it prevail at nighttime. So it didn't take the late dreamer longer than the shake of a sheep's tail to separate what was fancy from what was reality.

As Judge Priest, yet half asleep but waking up mighty fast, shoved his stout legs into his trousers and tucked the tails of his nightshirt down inside the waistband, he decided it must be his barn and not his house that was afire. The smoke which filled the room seemed to be eddying in through the side window, from across the end of the ell structure. He thought of his old white mare, Mittie May, fast in her stall under the hay loft, and of Jeff, who was one of the soundest sleepers in the world, in his room right alongside the mow. There was need for him to move, and move fast. He must awaken Jeff first, and then get Mittie May out of danger. Barefooted, he felt his way across the room and along the hall and down the stairs, mending his gait as he went. And then, as he jerked the front door open and stumbled out upon the porch, he came into violent collision with Ed Tilghman, Junior, who lived across the street, and who had just bounded up the porch steps with the idea of hammering on the front-door panels. Tilghman was a young man and the judge an old one; it was inevitable the judge should suffer the more painful consequences of the sudden impact of their two bodies together. He went down sideways with a great hard thump, his forehead striking against a sharp corner of the door jamb. He was senseless, and a little stream of blood was beginning to trickle down his face as Tilghman dragged him down off the porch into the yard and stretched him on his back in the grass, and then ran to fetch water.

In that same minute the big bell in the tower of fire headquarters, half a mile away, began sounding in measured beats, and a small hungry-looking tongue of flame licked up across the sill and flickered for a moment through the smoke which was pouring forth out of the bathroom window and rolling across the flat top of the extension. The smoke gushed out still thicker, smothering down the red pennon, but in a second or two it showed again, and this time it brought with it two more like it. The bathroom window became a frame for a cloudy pink glare, and the purring note of the fire became a brisk and healthy crackle as it ate through the seasoned clapboards of the outer wall.