JIM TRUNDLE’S CRISIS
They were expecting Jim Trundle at the Cross-Roads that spring morning. His coming had been looked for even more anxiously than that of Sid Wombley, the wag of the “Cove.” Sid himself, when he dragged his long legs into the store, forgot to think of anything amusing to say as he looked the crowd over to see if Jim had preceded him.
It was on the end of his tongue to ask if Trundle had come and gone, but for once he said nothing. He seated himself on the head of a soda-keg and began to whittle the edge of the counter. Sid Wombley, quiet, suited the humor of the group better on this occasion than the same voluble individual in his natural element, so no one spoke to him, and all continued to watch the road leading to Trundle’s cabin.
The silence and the delay were too much for the patience of Wade Sims, a bold, dashing young man in tight-fitting trousers, sharp-heeled boots, and a sombrero like an unroped tent. He was, as he often expressed it, “afraid o’ nothin’ under a hide,” and if “the boys” had seen fit to give Jim Trundle notification, in the shape of a letter he would shortly receive, that he was a disgrace to the community, he saw no reason for so much secrecy. He wasn’t afraid of the verdict of any jury that could be impaneled in the three counties over which he openly traded horses and secretly disposed of illicit whisky.
“I reckon thar’s no doubt about the letter bein’ ready fer ‘im,” he remarked to Alf Carden, who stood in the little pigeon-holed pen of upright palings which was known as “the postoffice.”
“I reckon not,” was the reply, “when it’s about the only letter I got on hand.”
“I could make a mighty good guess who drapped it,” said Sims, with a grin at a one-armed man who had once held the position of book-keeper at a cotton-gin, and who wrote letters and legal documents for half the illiterate community, “but I wouldn’t give ’im away if I was under oath.”
“I have an idee who’s goin’ to drap it,” spoke up Sid Wombley from his soda-keg, and his sudden return to his natural condition evoked the first laugh of the morning. At that moment a little boy, the son of the storekeeper, who had been playing on the porch, came in quickly. His words and manner showed that he knew who was in request, if his intellect could not grasp the reason for it.
“Mr. Trundle is comin’ acrost the cotton-patch behind the store,” he announced, out of breath. Then silence fell on the group, a silence so complete that Jim Trundle’s strides over the plowed ground outside were distinctly heard. The next moment Trundle had crawled over the low rail fence at the side of the store, and with clattering, untied brogans was coming up the steps.
The doorway, as his tall, lank figure passed through it, framed a perfect picture of human poverty. His shirt, deeply dyed with the red of the soil, was full of slits and patches worn threadbare. The hems of his trousers had worn away, revealing triangular glimpses of his ankles, and a frayed piece of a suspender hung from a stout peg in the waistband behind.