Three young fellows, sitting at a table in a cheap ice-cream parlour—it had seemed a crystal palace to the old man and to Molly his wife, fresh from the deepest recesses of the mountains—had made fun of Molly and her sunbonnet.
When they did that, the mirrors that lined the walls, the enamelled-top tables, the sunlit street showing through wide-open doors, had all turned red before his eyes. He had risen from his chair and gone toward this seat of the scornful. "You fellers," he had warned in a low voice, "you fellers don't want to say anything like that again."
They had looked at him in sullen astonishment; then they had sprung to their feet. According to the testimony they gave in court, he had confronted one of them, an open knife hidden up his sleeve. This was not true, and he denied it stoutly on the stand. As a matter of fact, he had not thought of his knife until the three young bruisers, habitués of the place and of the questionable pool-room in the rear, rushed him all together, and a dirty-aproned waiter, coming up from behind, hit him a crack that jarred his skull. Then he had sprung back and drawn his knife.
The wounds he inflicted were not serious, he had simply held his assailants off; but the policeman who ran in, followed by a crowd, found the knife in his hand. The testimony was against him; besides, he did not make a good witness. No man does who holds something back. And what old Tom held back was the remark the young men had made.
On that point his lips were stubbornly sealed. He did not even tell his lawyer. As for Molly, she had not heard. Poor girl, she was a bit deaf, her sunbonnet came down close over her ears, and she had been eating her ice cream, oblivious. He did not want her to know, ever. He did not want the court to hear. What's more, he did not mean that it should hear.
The courts of justice, like the mills of the gods, ought to grind slowly and grind exceeding small—sifting carefully the evidence, examining deeply into the character and motives of accuser and accused. But the gods have eternity at their disposal, and their mills are run by unerring, self-administering laws, while the courts are sometimes harassed with a heavy docket that must be got through with and laws are made and administered by erring mortals. When they are overcrowded, there is inevitably, now and then, a victim.
Hence old Tom Abercrombie, chained to a cot, staring up at the roof of a tent, oppressed with a terrible loneliness; thinking of a long double cabin in a mountain-girded valley, far over the Tennessee line, where he and Molly had lived forty years; of the cornfields in a creek bottom, of children and of grandchildren, of widely scattered neighbours and friends.
Next day he was put to driving four mules hitched to a road scraper. Chains clanking, he had to climb as best he could into the iron seat. The humiliation of striped clothes he was spared; that barbarity had been done away with by law. He wore his black trousers, a blue shirt, and his broad-brimmed hat. Once on the seat no one passing along the road could see his shackles, but as if they were heated red-hot these symbols of shame burned into his flesh.
In the road ahead and in the road behind Negro pickers and shovellers toiled away, watched over by guards with shotguns. He saw the eyes of these guards turn constantly toward him. "You want to watch that old devil," Simmons had warned them. "He's dangerous."