The Bondboy Read online

  Sol nodded.

  “Do you know anything about a man who had been boarding here the past week or two?”

  The coroner seemed to ask this as an afterthought.

  “Morgan,” said Sol, crossing his legs the other way for relief. “Yes, I knowed him.”

  “Did you see him here last night?”

  “No, he wasn’t here. The old lady said he stopped in at our house yesterday morning to sell me a ready-reckoner.”

  Sol chuckled, perhaps over what he considered a narrow escape.

  “I was over at Shelbyville, on the jury, and I wasn’t there, so he didn’t sell it. Been tryin’ to for a week. He told the old lady that was his last day here, and he was leavin’ then.”

  “And about what time of night was it when you heard the shot in Isom Chase’s house, and ran over?”

  “Along about first rooster-crow,” said Sol.

  “And that might be about what hour?”

  “Well, I’ve knowed ’em to crow at ’leven this time o’ year, and ag’in I’ve knowed ’em to put it off as late as two. But I should judge that it was about twelve when I come over here the first time last night.”

  Sol was excused with that. He left the witness-chair with ponderous solemnity. The coroner’s stenographer had taken down his testimony, and was now leaning back in his chair as serenely as if unconscious of his own marvelous accomplishment of being able to write down a man’s words as fast as he could talk.

  Not so to those who beheld the feat for the first time. They watched the young man, who was a ripe-cheeked chap with pale hair, as if they expected to catch him in the fraud and pretense of it in the end, and lay bare the deceit which he practised upon the world.

  The coroner was making notes of his own, stroking his black beard thoughtfully, and in the pause between witnesses the assembled neighbors had the pleasure of inspecting the parlor of dead Isom Chase which they had invaded, into which, living, he never had invited them.

  Isom’s first wife had arranged that room, in the hope of her young heart, years and years ago. Its walls were papered in bridal gaiety, its colors still bright, for the full light of day seldom fell into it as now. There hung a picture of that bride’s father, a man with shaved lip and a forest of beard from ears to Adam’s apple, in a little oval frame; and there, across the room, was another, of her mother, Quakerish in look, with smooth hair and a white something on her neck and bosom, held at her throat by a portrait brooch. On the table, just under that fast-writing young man’s eyes, was a glass thing shaped like a cake cover, protecting some flowers made of human hair, and sprigs of bachelor’s button, faded now, and losing their petals.

  There hung the marriage certificate of Isom and his first wife, framed in tarnished gilt which was flaking from the wood, a blue ribbon through a slit in one corner of the document, like the pendant of a seal, and there stood the horsehair-upholstered chairs, so spare of back and thin of shank that the rustics would stand rather than trust their corn-fed weight upon them. Underfoot was a store-bought carpet, as full of roses as the Elysian Fields, and over by the door lay a round, braided rag mat, into which Isom’s old wife had stitched the hunger of her heart and the brine of her lonely tears.

  The coroner looked up from his little red-leather note-book.

  “Joe Newbolt, step over here and be sworn,” said he.

  Joe crossed over to the witness-chair, picking his way through feet and legs. As he turned, facing the coroner, his hand upraised, Ollie looked at him steadily, her fingers fluttering and twining.

  Twelve hours had made a woeful change in her. She was as gaunt as a suckling she-hound, an old terror lay lurking in her young eyes. For one hour of dread is worse than a year of weeping. One may grieve, honestly and deeply, without wearing away the cheeks or burning out the heart, for there is a soft sorrow which lies upon the soul like a deadening mist upon the autumn fields. But there is no worry without waste. One day of it will burn more of the fuel of human life than a decade of placid sorrow.

  How much would he tell? Would it be all–the story of the caress in the kitchen door, the orchard’s secret, the attempt to run away from Isom–or would he shield her in some manner? If he should tell all, there sat an audience ready to snatch the tale and carry it away, and spread it abroad. Then disgrace would follow, pitiless and driving, and Morgan was not there to bear her away from it, or to mitigate its sting.

  Bill Frost edged over and stood behind the witness chair. His act gave the audience a thrill. “He’s under arrest!” they whispered, sending it from ear to ear. Most of them had known it before, but there was something so full and satisfying in the words. Not once before in years had there been occasion to use them; it might be years again before another opportunity presented. They had an official sound, a sound of adventure and desperation. And so they whispered them, neighbor nodding to neighbor in deep understanding as it went round the room, like a pass-word in secret conclave: “He’s under arrest!”

  There was nobody present to advise Joe of his rights. He had been accused of the crime and taken into custody, yet they were calling on him now to give evidence which might be used against him. If he had any doubt about the legality of the proceeding, he was too certain of the outcome of the inquiry to hesitate or demur. There was not a shadow of doubt in his mind that his neighbors, men who had known him all his life, and his father before him, would acquit him of all blame in the matter and set him free. They would believe him, assuredly. Therefore, he answered cheerfully when the coroner put the usual questions concerning age and nativity. Then the coroner leaned back in his chair.

  “Now, Joe, tell the jury just how it happened,” said he.

  The jury looked up with a little start of guilt at the coroner’s reference to itself, presenting a great deal of whiskers and shocks of untrimmed hair, together with some reddening of the face. For the jury had been following the movements of the coroner’s stenographer, as if it, also, expected to catch him in the trick of it that would incriminate him and send him to the penitentiary for life.

  “I’d been down to the barn and out by the gate, looking around,” said Joe. There he paused.

  “Yes; looking around,” encouraged the coroner, believing from the lad’s appearance and slow manner that he had a dull fellow in hand. “Now, what were you looking around for, Joe?”

  “I had a kind of uneasy feeling, and I wanted to see if everything was safe,” said Joe.

  “Afraid of horse-thieves, or something like that?”

  “Something like that,” nodded Joe.

  Mrs. Newbolt, sitting very straight-backed, held her lips tight, for she was impressed with the seriousness of the occasion. Now and then she nodded, as if confirming to herself some foregone conclusion.

  “Isom had left me in charge of the place, and I didn’t want him to come back and find anything gone,” Joe explained.

  “I see,” said the coroner in a friendly way. “Then what did you do?”

  “I went back to the house and lit the lamp in the kitchen,” said Joe.

  “How long was that before Isom came in?”

  “Only a little while; ten or fifteen minutes, or maybe less.”

  “And what did Isom say when he came in, Joe?”

  “He said he’d kill me, he was in a temper,” Joe replied.

  “You had no quarrel before he said that, Isom just burst right into the room and threatened to kill you, did he, Joe? Now, you’re sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m perfectly sure.”

  “What had you done to send Isom off into a temper that way?”

  “I hadn’t done a thing,” said Joe, meeting the coroner’s gaze honestly.

  The coroner asked him concerning his position in the room, what he was doing, and whether he had anything in his hands that excited Isom when he saw it.

  “My hands were as empty as they are this minute,” said Joe, but not without a little color in his cheeks when he remembered how hot and small Ollie’s hand had
felt within his own.

  “When did you first see this?” asked the coroner, holding up the sack with the burst corner which had lain on Isom’s breast.

  The ruptured corner had been tied with a string, and the sack bulged heavily in the coroner’s hand.

  “When Isom was lying on the floor after he was shot,” said Joe.

  A movement of feet was audible through the room. People looked at each other, incredulity in their eyes. The coroner returned to the incidents which led up to the shooting snapping back to that phase of the inquiry suddenly, as if in the expectation of catching Joe off his guard.

  “What did he threaten to kill you for?” he asked sharply.

  “Well, Isom was an unreasonable and quick-tempered man,” Joe replied.

  The coroner rose to his feet in a quick start, as if he intended to leap over the table. He pointed his finger at Joe, shaking his somber beard.

  “What did Isom Chase catch you at when he came into that kitchen?” he asked accusingly.

  “He saw me standing there, just about to blow out the light and go to bed,” said Joe.

  “What did you and Isom quarrel about last night?”

  Joe did not reply at once. He seemed debating with himself over the advisability of answering at all. Then he raised his slow eyes to the coroner’s face.

  “That was between him and me,” said he.

  “Very well,” said the coroner shortly, resuming his seat. “You may tell the jury how Isom Chase was shot.”

  Joe described Isom’s leap for the gun, the struggle he had with him to restrain him, the catching of the lock in the fork as Isom tugged at the barrel, the shot, and Isom’s death.

  When he finished, the coroner bent over his note-book again, as if little interested and less impressed. Silence fell over the room. Then the coroner spoke, his head still bent over the book, not even turning his face toward the witness, his voice soft and low.

  “You were alone with Isom in the kitchen when this happened?”

  A flash of heat ran over Ollie’s body. After it came a sweeping wave of cold. The room whirled; the world stood on edge. Her hour had struck; the last moment of her troubled security was speeding away. What would Joe answer to that?

  “Yes,” said Joe calmly, “we were alone.”

  Ollie breathed again; her heart’s constriction relaxed.

  The coroner wheeled on Joe.

  “Where was Mrs. Chase?” he asked.

  A little murmur, as of people drawing together with whispers; a little soft scuffing of cautiously shifted feet on the carpet, followed the question. Ollie shrank back, as if wincing from pain.

  “Mrs. Chase was upstairs in her room,” answered Joe.

  The weight of a thousand centuries lifted from Ollie’s body. Her vision cleared. Her breath came back in measured flow to her lips, moist and refreshing.

  He had not told. He was standing between her and the sharp tongues of those waiting people, already licking hungrily in their awakened suspicion, ready to sear her fair name like flames. But there was no gratitude in her heart that moment, no quick lifting of thankfulness nor understanding of the great peril which Joe had assumed for her. There was only relief, blessed, easing, cool relief. He had not told.

  But the coroner was a persistent man. He was making more than an investigation out of it; he was fairly turning it into a trial, with Joe as the defendant. The people were ready to see that, and appreciate his attempts to uncover the dark motive that lay behind this deed, of which they were convinced, almost to a man, that Joe was guilty.

  “Was Isom jealous of you?” asked the coroner, beginning the assault on Joe’s reserve suddenly again when it seemed that he was through. For the first time during the inquiry Joe’s voice was unsteady when he replied.

  “He had no cause to be, and you’ve got no right to ask me that, either, sir!” he said.

  “Shame on you, shame on you!” said Mrs. Newbolt, leaning toward the coroner, shaking her head reprovingly.

  “I’ve got the right to ask you anything that I see fit and proper, young man,” the coroner rebuked him sternly.

  “Well, maybe you have,” granted Joe, drawing himself straight in the chair.

  “Did Isom Chase ever find you alone with his wife?” the coroner asked.

  “Now you look here, sir, if you’ll ask me questions that a gentleman ought to ask, I’ll answer you like a gentleman, but I’ll never answer such questions as that!”

  There was a certain polite deference in Joe’s voice, which he felt that he owed, perhaps, to the office that the man represented, but there was a firmness above it all that was unmistakable.

  “You refuse to answer any more questions, then?” said the coroner slowly, and with a significance that was almost sinister.

  “I’ll answer any proper questions you care to ask me,” answered Joe.

  “Very well, then. You say that you and Isom quarreled last night?”

  “Yes, sir; we had a little spat.”

  “A little spat,” repeated the coroner, looking around the room as if to ask the people on whose votes he depended for reelection what they thought of a “little spat” which ended in a man’s death. There was a sort of broad humor about it which appealed to the blunt rural sense. A grin ran over their faces like a spreading wavelet on a pool. “Well now, what was the beginning of that ‘little spat’?”

  “Oh, what’s that got to do with it?” asked Joe impatiently. “You asked me that before.”

  “And I’m asking you again. What was that quarrel over?”

  “None of your business!” said Joe hotly, caring nothing for consequences.

  “Then you refuse to answer, and persist in your refusal?”

  “Well, we don’t seem to get on very well,” said Joe.

  “No, we don’t,” the coroner agreed snappishly. “Stand down; that will be all.”

  The listening people shifted and relaxed, leaned and whispered, turning quick eyes upon Joe, studying him with furtive wonder, as if they had discovered in him some fearful and hideous thing, which he, moving among them all his life, had kept concealed until that day.

  Ollie followed him in the witness-chair. She related her story, framed on the cue that she had taken from Greening’s testimony and Joe’s substantiation of it, in low, trembling voice, and with eyes downcast. She knew nothing about the tragedy until Sol called up to her, she said, and then she was in ignorance of what had happened. Mrs. Greening had told her when she came that Isom was killed.

  Ollie was asked about the book-agent boarder, as Greening had been asked. Morgan had left on the morning of the fateful day, she said, having finished his work in that part of the country. She and Joe were alone in the house that night.

  The coroner spared her, no matter how far his sharp suspicions flashed into the obscurity of the relations between herself and the young bondman. The people, especially the women, approved his leniency with nods. Her testimony concluded the inquiry, and the coroner addressed the jury.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will take into consideration the evidence you have heard, and determine, if possible, the manner in which Isom Chase came to his death, and fix the responsibility for the same. It is within your power to recommend that any person believed by you to be directly or indirectly responsible for his death, be held to the grand jury for further investigation. Gentlemen, you will now view the body.”

  Alive, Isom Chase had walked in the secret derision and contempt of his neighbors, despised for his parsimony, ridiculed for his manner of life. Dead, he had become an object of awe which they approached softly and with fear.

  Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet. The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other’s shoulders and then backed away.

  For Isom was
no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living, striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day. The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained.

  Somebody, it appeared, had sinned against old Isom Chase at the end, and Joe Newbolt knew who that person was. Here he had stood before them all and lifted up a wall of stubborn silence to shield the guilty head, and there was no doubt that it was his own.

  That also was the opinion of the coroner’s jury, which walked out from its deliberations in the kitchen in a little while and gave as its verdict that Isom Chase had come to his death by a gunshot wound, inflicted at the hands of Joseph Newbolt. The jury recommended that the accused be held to the grand jury, for indictment or dismissal.

  Mrs. Newbolt did not understand fully what was going forward, but she gathered that the verdict of the neighbors was unfriendly to Joe. She sat looking from the coroner to Joe, from Joe to the jurors, lined up with backs against the wall, as solemn and nervous as if waiting for a firing squad to appear and take aim at their patriotic breasts. She stood up in her bewilderment, and looked with puzzled, dazed expression around the room.

  “Joe didn’t do it, if that’s what you mean,” said she.

  “Madam–” began the coroner severely.

  “Yes, you little whiffet,” she burst out sharply, “you’re the one that put ’em up to do it! Joe didn’t do it, I tell you, and you men know that as well as I do. Every one of you has knowed him all his life!”

  “Madam, I must ask you not to interrupt the proceedings,” said the coroner.

  “Order in the court!” commanded the constable in his deepest official voice.

  “Oh, shut your fool mouth, Bill Frost!” said Mrs. Newbolt scornfully.

  “Never mind, Mother,” counseled Joe. “I’ll be all right. They have to do what they’re doing, I suppose.”