The Bondboy Page 20

  Joe got up and walked his cell. How uncouth he was, thought he, his trousers in his boot-tops, his coat spare upon his growing frame. He regarded himself with a feeling of shame. Up to that time he never had given his clothing any thought. As long as it covered him, it was sufficient. But it was different after seeing Alice. Alice! What a soothing name!

  Joe never knew what Colonel Price said to the sheriff; but after the little gleam of sun had faded out of his cell, and the gnawings of his stomach had become painfully acute, his keeper came down with a basket on his arm. He took from it a dinner of boiled cabbage and beef, such as a healthy man might lean upon with confidence, and the horse-thief came in for his share of it, also.

  When the sheriff came to Joe’s cell for the empty dishes, he seemed very solicitous for his comfort and welfare.

  “Need any more cover on your bed, or anything?”

  No, Joe thought there was enough cover; and he did not recall in his present satisfied state of stomach, that his cell lacked any other comfort that the sheriff could supply.

  “Well, if you want anything, all you’ve got to do is holler,” said the sheriff in a friendly way.

  There is nothing equal to running for office to move the love of a man for his fellows, or to mellow his heart to magnanimous deeds.

  “Say,” called the horse-thief in voice softened by the vapors of his steaming dinner, “that friend of yours with the whiskers all over him is ace-high over here in this end of the dump! And say, friend, they could keep me here for life if they’d send purty girls like that one down here to see me once in a while. You’re in right, friend; you certainly air in right!”

  * * *

  Colonel Price had kindled a fire in his library that night, for the first chill of frost was in the air. He sat in meditative pose, the newspaper spread wide and crumpling upon the floor beside him in his listlessly swinging hand. The light of the blazing logs was laughing in his glasses, and the soft gleam of the shaded lamp was on his hair.

  Books by the hundred were there in the shelves about him. Old books, brown in the dignity of age and service to generations of men; new books, tucked among them in bright colors, like transient blooms in the homely stability of garden soil. There was a long oak table, made of native lumber and finished in its natural color, smoke-brown from age, like the books; and there was Alice, like a nimble bee skimming the sweets of flowers, flitting here and there in this scholar’s sanctuary.

  Colonel Price looked up out of his meditation and followed her with a smile.

  “Have you found them all?” he asked.

  “I’ve found Milton and The Lays of Ancient Rome and Don Quixote, but I can’t find the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” said she.

  “Judge Maxwell has it,” he nodded; “he carried it away more than a month ago. It was the first time he ever met an English translation, he said. I must get it from him; he has a remarkably short memory for borrowed books.”

  Alice joined him in the laugh over the judge’s shortcoming.

  “He’s a regular old dear!” she said.

  “Ah, yes; if he was only forty years younger, Alice–if he was only forty years younger!” the colonel sighed.

  “I like him better the way he is,” said she.

  “Where did that boy ever hear tell of Marcus Aurelius?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand him, he seems so strange and deep. He’s not like a boy. You’d think, from talking with him, that he’d had university advantages.”

  “It’s blood,” said the colonel, with the proud swelling of a man who can boast that precious endowment himself, “you can’t keep it down. There’s no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of birth; it’s all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of this European scum such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he’s got blood on only one side, at that.

  “But the best in all the Newbolt generations that have gone before seem to be concentrated in that boy. He’ll come through this thing as bright as a new bullet, and he’ll make his mark in the world, too. Marcus Aurelius. Well, bless my soul!”

  “Is it good?” she asked, stacking the books which she had selected on the table, standing with her hand on them, looking down at her smiling father with serious face.

  “I wouldn’t say that it would be good for a young lady with forty beaus and unable to choose among them, or for a frivolous young thing with three dances a week––”

  “Oh, never more than two at the very height of social dissipation in Shelbyville!” she laughed.

  He lifted a finger, imposing silence, and a laugh lurked in his eyes.

  “No, I’d not say that such a light-headed creature would find much fodder in the ruminations and speculations and wise conclusions of our respected friend, Marcus,” said he. “But a lad like Joe Newbolt, with a pair of eyes in his head like a prophet, will get a great deal of good, and even comfort, out of that book.”

  “We must get it from Judge Maxwell,” said she conclusively.

  “A strange lad, a strange lad,” reflected the colonel.

  “So tall and strong,” said she. “Why, from the way his mother spoke of him, I expected to see a little fellow with trousers up to his knees.”

  She sat at the table and began cutting the leaves of a new magazine.

  Colonel Price lifted his paper, smoothed the crumples out of it, adjusted the focus of his glasses, and resumed reading the county news. They seemed contented and happy there, alone, with their fire in the chimney. Fire itself is a companion. It is like youth in a room.

  There was between them a feeling of comradeship and understanding which seldom lives where youth stands on one hand, age on the other. Years ago Alice’s mother had gone beyond the storms and vexations of this life. Those two remaining of the little family had drawn together, closing up the space that her absence had made. There seemed no disparity of years, and their affection and fidelity had come to be a community pride.

  Alice was far from being the frivolous young thing that her father’s banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year to year, to be certain, for it had been the regular fate of adolescent male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the affection; but it seemed to become a settled and permanent affliction in others, threatening to incapacitate them from happiness, according to their young view of it, and blast their ambitions in the face of the world.

  Every girl, to greater or less extent, has her courtiers of that kind. Nature has arranged this sort of tribute for the little queen-bees of humanity’s hives. And so there were other girls in Shelbyville who had their train of beaus, but there was none quite so popular or so much desired as Alice Price.

  Alice was considered the first beauty of the place. Added to this primary desirability was the fact that, in the fine gradations of pedigrees and the stringent exactions of blood which the patrician families of Shelbyville drew, Colonel Price and his daughter were the topmost plumes on the peacock of aristocracy. Other young ladies seemed to make all haste to assuage the pangs of at least one young man by marrying him, and to blunt the hopes of the rest by that decisive act. Not so Alice Price. She was frank and friendly, as eager for the laughter of life as any healthy young woman should be, but she gave the young men kindly counsel when they became insistent or boresome, and sent them away.

  Shelbyville was founded by Kentuckians; some of the old State’s best families were represented there. A person’s pedigree was his credentials in the society of the slumbering little town, nestled away among the blue hills of Missouri. It did not matter so much about one’s past, for blood will have its vagaries and outflingings of youthful spirit; and even less what the future promised, just so there was blood to vouch for him at the present.

  Blood had not done a great deal for Shelbyvil
le, no matter what its excellencies in social and political life. The old town stood just about as it was finished, sixty years and more before that time. Upstart cities had sprung up not far away, throwing Shelbyville into hopeless shadow. The entire energies of its pioneers seemed to have been expended in its foundation, leaving them too much exhausted to transmit any of their former fire and strength to their sons. It followed that the sons of Shelbyville were not what their fathers had been.

  Of course, there were exceptions where one of them rose once in a while and made a streak across the state or national firmament. Some of them were eminent in the grave professions; most of them were conductors of street cars in Kansas City, the nearest metropolis. There was not room in Shelbyville for all its sons to establish themselves at law, even if they had all been equipped, and if a man could not be a lawyer or a college professor, what was open to him, indeed, but conducting a street-car? That was a placid life.

  It is remarkable how Kentuckians can maintain the breed of their horses through many generations, but so frequently fall short in the standard of their sons. Kentuckians are only an instance. The same might be said of kings.

  Not understanding her exactions in the matter, nor her broader requirements, Shelbyville could not make out why Alice Price remained unmated. She was almost twenty, they said, which was coming very close to the age-limit in Shelbyville. It was nothing unusual for girls to marry there at seventeen, and become grandmothers at thirty-seven.

  If she wanted better blood than she could find in Shelbyville, the old gentlemen said, twisting their white old heads in argumentative finality, she’d have to go to the nobility of Europe. Even then she’d be running her chances, by Ned! They grew indignant when she refused to have their sons. They took it up with the colonel, they remonstrated, they went into pedigrees and offered to produce documents.

  There was Shelley Bryant’s father, a fine, straight-backed old gentleman with beard as white as the plumage of a dove. His son was a small, red-faced, sandy-haired, pale-eyed chap with spaces between his big front teeth. He traded in horses, and sometimes made as much as fifteen dollars on a Saturday. His magnitude of glory and manly dignity as compared to his father’s was about that of a tin pan to the sun.

  When Alice refused Shelley, the old general–he had won the title in war, unlike Colonel Price–went to the colonel and laid the matter off with a good deal of emphasis and flourishing of his knotted black stick. If a woman demanded blood, said the general, where could she aspire above Shelley? And beyond blood, what was there to be considered when it came to marrying and breeding up a race of men?

  Champion that he was of blood and lineage, Colonel Price was nettled by the old gentleman’s presumptuous urging of his unlikely son’s cause.

  “I am of the opinion, sir,” Colonel Price replied, with a good bit of hauteur and heat, “that my daughter always has given, and always will give, the preference to brains!”

  General Bryant had not spoken to the colonel for two months after that, and his son Shelley had proved his superiority by going off to Kansas City and taking a job reading gas-meters.

  Colonel Price went to the mantel and filled his pipe from the tobacco-jar. He sat smoking for a little while, his paper on his knee.

  “The lad’s in deeper trouble, I’m afraid, than he understands,” said he at last, as if continuing his reflections aloud, “and it may take a bigger heave to pull him out than any of us think right now.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” said Alice, looking across at him suddenly, her eyes wide open with concern. “I understood that this was just a preliminary proceeding, a sort of formality to conform to the legal requirements, and that he would be released when they brought him up before Judge Maxwell. At least, that was the impression that he gave me of the case himself.”

  “Joe is an unsophisticated and honest lad,” said the colonel. “There is something in the case that he refused to disclose or discuss before the coroner’s jury, they say. I don’t know what it is, but it’s in relation to the quarrel between him and Isom Chase which preceded the tragedy. He seems to raise a point of honor on it, or something. I heard them say this afternoon that it was nothing but the fear that it would disclose his motive for the crime. They say he was making off with old Chase’s money, but I don’t believe that.”

  “They’re wrong if they think that,” said she, shaking her head seriously, “he’d never do a thing like that.”

  “No, I don’t believe he would. But they found a bag of money in the room, old Chase had it clamped in the hook of his arm, they say.”

  “Well, I’m sure Joe Newbolt never had his hands on it, anyhow,” said she.

  “That’s right,” approved the colonel, nodding in slow thoughtfulness; “we must stand up for him, for his own sake as well as Peter’s. He’s worthy.”

  “And he’s innocent. Can’t you see that, father?”

  “As plain as daylight,” the colonel said.

  The colonel stretched out his legs toward the blaze, crossed his feet and smoked in comfort.

  “But I wonder what it can be that the boy’s holding back?”

  “He has a reason for it, whatever it is,” she declared.

  “That’s as certain as taxes,” said the colonel. “He’s a remarkable boy, considering the chances he’s had–bound out like a nigger slave, and beaten and starved, I’ll warrant. A remark-able lad; very, very. Don’t you think so, Alice?”

  “I think he is, indeed,” said she.

  A long silence.

  A stick in the chimney burned in two, the heavy ends outside the dogs dropped down, the red brands pointing upward. The colonel put his hand to his beard and sat in meditation. The wind was rising. Now and then it sounded like a groan in the chimney-top. Gray ashes formed, frost-like, over the ardent coals. The silence between them held unbroken.

  Both sat, thought-wandering, looking into the fire....

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIII

  UNTIL THE DAY BREAK

  Although Isom Chase had been in his grave a week, and Judge Little had been cracking his coat-tails over the road between his home and the county-seat daily, the matter of the will and the administration of the estate remained as in the beginning.

  Judge Little had filed the will for probate, and had made application for letters of administration, which the court had denied. Under the terms of the will, it was pointed out, he was empowered to act in that capacity only in case of the testator’s death before the majority of the legatee. The date of the document proved that the heir was now long past his majority, and the only interest that remained to Judge Little in the matter seemed to be the discovery of the testator’s unknown, unseen, and unbelieved-in son.

  If Isom ever had fathered a son, indeed, and the child had died in infancy, the fact had slipped the recollection of the oldest settler. Perhaps the proof of that mysterious matter lay in the hands of the two witnesses to Isom’s will. They should know, if anybody knew, people said.

  One of these witnesses, Thomas Cogshawl, had died long since, and there remained behind neither trace nor remembrance of him save a leaning, yellowed tombstone carrying the record of his achievements in this world. They were succinctly recounted in two words: Born and Died. His descendants were scattered, his family dispersed.

  The other witness, John Owens, was in the county poorhouse, deaf, dumb, and blind, his children dead, his money gone. Communication with him, except by prods and thumps, had been out of the question for ten years and more.

  On the advice of her neighbors, Ollie had engaged a lawyer to guard her interests, and make a fight in the courts, if it came to that, in an effort to retain the property. It was a shame, said the neighbors; Isom never had a son, or, if he did have one, he had no business to do any such surreptitious fathering.

  While they denounced Isom, Judge Little was advertising in the metropolitan papers for the mysterious legatee, for there is no man so faithful to his trust as the administrator of another’s estate
. Although the property had not yet succeeded to his hands, the judge was proceeding in confidence. If the existence of Isom Chase’s son could not be proved, neither could it be disproved.

  And there stood the will in Isom’s writing as plain as cow tracks, naming him as administrator. It would all work into his hands at the end, and there were rewards and emoluments for an administrator who understood his business, in that estate.

  That is true in the case of any executor in the affairs of dead men, or receiver in the muddled business of the living. That accounts for such men’s inflexibility in carrying out the provisions of unfeeling testators and the decrees of heartless courts. The law must be applied to the letter, the wishes of the deceased fulfilled to the last hateful particular, for the longer the administrator or receiver is in place, the longer flows the soothing stream of fees.

  Ollie had passed out of the brief tranquillity which had settled on her after the inquest and funeral. Worry had overtaken her again, and a longing for the return of Morgan, which seemed destined never to be quieted.

  There was not so much concern for her in the ultimate disposal of Isom’s estate, for she had consoled herself all along, since the discovery of the will, that she would soon be above the need of his miserly scrapings and hoarded revenues of stint. Morgan would come, triumphant in his red-wheeled buggy, and bear her away to the sweet recompense of love, and the quick noises of life beyond that drowsy place. For Morgan, and love, she could give it all over without one regret, or a glance behind.

  Yet, with the thought of what she already had given for Morgan and love a quick catching of pain, a troubled stirring bordering on panic, rose in her breast. Where was Morgan, why did he remain away when he might come boldly now, like a man, and claim his own? What if Morgan never should come back? What if she should find herself a double widow, bereft of both the living and the dead?