Right Tackle Todd

by Ralph Henry Barbour

“That all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, there have been too many vagrants around here lately, and I guess it’s about time some of them were made examples of. What do you know about this Webster?”

So Jim, beginning rather timorously but soon forgetting his awe of the listener, said his say. He made Webb out rather a fine character, and once or twice the Judge’s cigar trembled in his mouth and the Judge’s keen gray eyes, which weren’t really half so steel-like as he tried to make them, softened. Jim told how Webb had taught him to swim and pull an oar and use a paddle and had, in short, looked after him like an elder brother for so many years. And he told how Webb had dived into icy water that time when Jim had gone beneath the logs and had saved his life. Now and then the Judge asked a question, and one of them was “What’s your name?” and another was “You’re the boy they call ‘Slim’ Todd, aren’t you?” And finally, to Jim’s utter surprise, he and the Judge were talking football!

The Judge knew football, too. There wasn’t any doubt as to that. He had played it in school and college, and, although that had been a good twenty years before, he still followed the game and was an ardent “fan”; and traveled many miles each November to see his college meet its ancient rival. He hadn’t missed an Alton game so far this season, he told Jim, but he didn’t believe he’d be able to make the trip to New Falmouth this afternoon. Then he asked if Jim was going to play, and Jim said he expected to, and the Judge sighed and pushed his newspaper aside and made finger spots on the polished mahogany surface of the desk and moved his hands hither and yon and explained to Jim in detail the way in which he had got away around the enemy’s right on a certain blustery afternoon many years ago and sped twenty-six yards for the touchdown that had won the game. And Jim, watching and listening, saw the picture clearly and said “Gee!” once or twice with bated breath and sighed with vast relief when the Judge—only, of course, he wasn’t the Judge then—tore loose from the last tackler and fell across the blurred white line!

Then there was a knock on the door that led to the court room and the Judge straightened himself back in his chair and looked very judge-like on the instant. When the Clerk entered the Judge shook hands with Jim and walked to the corridor door with him. “I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Todd,” he said in his best judicial tones. “Good morning.” But the Judge’s hand pressed Jim’s very hard, and so Jim found courage to ask before the door closed behind them: “And about—about Webb, sir? You’ll be easy with him, sir?”

“My boy,” answered the Judge, looking just a bit pompous and severe, “his case will be judged absolutely on its merits. I can say no more than that.”

After which, while the Clerk of the Court coughed deprecatively in token that the Judge was due on the bench, the Judge’s right eye-lid, without in the least altering the expression of his face, closed slowly down over the steel-gray eye.

Comforted, indeed rather happier than he had been since yesterday afternoon, Jim passed into the court room and took a seat at the rear. The rest of the audience counted no more than two dozen. Jim had never been in any sort of a court before, and he was a little disappointed at the almost casual way in which the cases were disposed of. But the offenses were all minor ones and so probably deserved little ceremony. The Judge—strangely enough, Jim didn’t yet know his name—sat very straight behind his desk and looked unemotionally stern and gave his verdicts in crisp, terse words. Jim began to be a little uneasy. It seemed to him that the Judge was absolutely unable to say “Discharged”! Instead, it was “Ten days in jail” or “You are fined fifty dollars” or “Sentenced to thirty days: sentence suspended.” The prisoners were a dejected looking lot until Webb Todd stood up in his turn. Webb was perhaps more rumpled and seedy-looking than his predecessors, but there were no signs of dejection about him. Indeed he had a rather jaunty air as he faced the Judge, in spite of his unshaven face and cheap, skimpy, frayed clothes. The Judge viewed him keenly and at greater length than usual. The charge was read.

“What have you got to say for yourself, Webster?” asked the Judge.