Sheriff Wickliff leaned out of his office window, the better to watch the boy soldiers march down the street. The huge pile of stone that is the presumed home of Justice for the county stands in the same yard with the old yellow stone jail. The court-house is ornate and imposing, although a hundred active chimneys daub its eaves and carvings, but the jail is as plain as a sledge-hammer. Yet during Sheriff Wickliff’s administration, while Joe Raker kept jail and Mrs. Raker was matron, window-gardens brightened the grim walls all summer, and chrysanthemums and roses blazoned the black bars in winter.
Above the jail the street is a pretty street, with trim cottages and lawns and gardens; below, the sky-lines dwindle ignobly into shabby one and two story wooden shops devoted to the humbler handicrafts. It is not a street favored by processions; only the little soldiers of the Orphans’ Home Company would choose to tramp over its unkempt macadam. Good reason they had, too, since thus they passed the sheriff’s office, and it was the sheriff who had given most of the money for their uniforms, and their drums and fifes outright.
A voice at the sheriff’s elbow caused him to turn.
“Well, Amos,” said his deputy, with Western familiarity, “getting the interest on your money?”
Wickliff smiled as he unbent his great frame; he was six feet two inches in height, with bones and thews to match his stature. A stiff black mustache, curving about his mouth and lifting as he smiled, made his white teeth look the whiter. One of the upper teeth was crooked. That angle had come in an ugly fight (when he was a special officer and detective) in the Chicago stock-yards, he having to hold a mob at bay, single-handed, to save the life of a wounded policeman. The scar seaming his jaw and neck belonged to the time that he captured a notorious gang of train-robbers. He brought the robbers in—that is, he brought their bodies; and “That scar was worth three thousand dollars to me,” he was wont to say. In point of fact it was worth more, because he had invested the money so advantageously that, thanks to it and the savings which he had been able to add, in spite of his free hand he was now become a man of property. The sheriff’s high cheek-bones, straight hair (black as a dead coal), and narrow black eyes were the arguments for a general belief that an Indian ancestor lurked somewhere in the foliage of his genealogical tree. All that people really knew about him was that his mother died when he was a baby, and his father, about the same time, was killed in battle, leaving their only child to drift from one reluctant protector to another, until he brought up in the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home of the State. If the sheriff’s eyes were Indian, Indians may have very gentle eyes. He turned them now on the deputy with a smile.
“Well, Joe, what’s up?” said he.
“The lightning-rod feller wants to see you, as soon as you come back to the jail, he says. And here’s something he dropped as he was going to his room. Don’t look much like it could be his mother. Must have prigged it.”
The sheriff examined the photograph, an ordinary cabinet card. The portrait was that of a woman, pictured with the relentless frankness of a rural photographer’s camera. Every sad line in the plain elderly face, every wrinkle in the ill-fitting silk gown, showed with a brutal distinctness, and somehow made the picture more pathetic. The woman’s hair was gray and thin; her eyes, which were dark, looked straight forward, and seemed to meet the sheriff’s gaze. They had no especial beauty of form, but they, as well as the mouth, had an expression of wistful kindliness that fixed his eyes on them for a full minute. He sighed as he dropped his hand. Then he observed that there was writing on the reverse side of the carte, and lifted it again to read.
In a neat cramped hand was written:
“To Eddy, from Mother.