Part 8

“And what is the name of this friend?” he asked in his grand, deep voice.

Mr. Irons didn't answer a word. He stood up, just so, and hauled off and hit Daniel the Mystic in the face. Daniel the Mystic said “Ouch!” in a loud, pained tone of voice, and fell backward over a chair and sat down hard right in the middle of the stage. George Muller, the town wit, declared afterward that he was looking right at Daniel the Mystic, and that Daniel the Mystic sat down so hard it parted his hair in the middle.

I heard somebody behind me make a choking outcry and turned to see D. C. Davello just bursting in upon us, with shock and surprise spreading all over his face. But just at that precise moment Fatty McManus, who was the biggest man in town, jumped up with an awkward clatter of his feet and stumbled and fell right into D. C. Davello, throwing his mighty arms about him as he did so. Locked together they rolled backward out of the door, and with a subconscious sense located somewhere in the back part of my skull I heard them go bumping down the steep stairs. I think there were ten distinct bumps.

David Pryor, one of our policemen, was sitting almost directly in front of me. He had been a policeman only two or three months and was the youngest of the three who policed the town at nights. When old Mr. Gid Irons knocked Daniel the Mystic down David Pryor bounced out of his seat and called out something and started to run toward them.

Old Judge Priest blocked his way on the instant, filling the whole of the narrow aisle. “Son,” he said, “where you aimin' to go to?”

“Lemme by, Judge,” sputtered David Pryor; “there's a fight startin' up yonder!”

Judge Priest didn't budge a visible inch, except to glance quickly backward over his shoulder toward the stage.

“Son,” he asked, “it takes two, don't it, to make a fight?”

“Yes,” panted David Pryor, trying to get past him, “yes, but--”

“Well, son, if you'd take another look up there you'd see there's only one person engaged in fightin' at this time. That's no fight--only a merited chastisement.”

“A chesty which?” asked David Pryor, puzzled. He was young and new to his job and full of the zeal of duty. But Judge Priest stood for law and order embodied, and David Pryor wavered.

“David, my son,” said Judge Priest, “if you, a sworn officer of the law, don't know what chastisement means you ought to. Set down by me here and I'll try to explain its meanin's.” He took him by the arm and pulled the bewildered young policeman down into a seat alongside his own and held him there, though David was still protesting and struggling feebly to be loose.

This I heard and saw out of a corner of my mind, the rest of me being concentrated on what was going on up on the stage among the overturning chairs and those scattering recruits in the cause of mesmerism. I saw Daniel the Mystic scramble to his feet and skitter about. He was wildly, furiously pained and bewildered. It must be painful in the extreme, and bewildering too, to any man to be suddenly and emphatically smitten in his good right eye by one who seemed all peace and elderly sedateness, and to behold an audience, which though cold, perhaps, had been friendly enough, arise in its entirety and most vociferously cheer the smiting. How much more so, then, in the case of a Seer of the Unseen, who is supposed to be able to discern such things ahead of their happening?

Daniel the Mystic looked this way and that, seeking a handy way of escape, but both ways were barred to him. At one side of the stage was Doctor Lake, aiming a walking stick at him like a spear; and at the other side was Mr. Felsburg, with an umbrella for a weapon.

Old Mr. Gid Irons was frightfully quick. His hands shot out with hard, fast dabbing motions like a cat striking at a rolling ball, and he planted his fists wheresoever he aimed.

Daniel the Mystic's long arms flew and flailed wildly in air and his mane of hair tossed. He threw his crossed hands across his face to save it and Mr. Irons hit him in the stomach. He lowered his hands to his vitals in an agonized clutch and Mr. Irons hit him in the jaw.

I know now in the light of a riper experience of such things that it was most wonderfully fast work, and all of it happening much faster than the time I have taken here to tell it, Mr. Gid Irons wading steadily in and Daniel the Mystic flopping about and threshing and yelling--he was beginning to yell--and the chairs flipping over on their backs and every-, body standing up and whooping. All of a sudden Daniel the Mystic went down flat on his back, calling for help on some one whose name I will take oath was not D. C. Davello. It sounded more like Thompson.

Doctor Lake dropped his walking stick and ran out from the wings.

“It would be highly improper to strike a man when he's down,” he counseled Mr. Irons as he grabbed Daniel the Mystic by the armpits and heaved him up flappingly. “Allow me to help the gentleman to his feet.”

Mr. Irons hit him just once more, a straight jabbing center blow, and knocked him clear into and under his black calico cabinet, so far in it and under it that its curtains covered all but his legs, which continued to flutter and waggle feebly.

“Get a couple-a chairs, Gideon.” This advice came from Mr. Herman Felsburg who jumped up and down and directed an imaginary orchestra of bass drummers with his umbrella for a baton--“Get a couple-a chairs and stand on the son-of-a-gun's stomach. It does the subcheck no harm and the subcheck feels no pain. As a favor to me, Gideon, I ask you, stand on his stomach.”

But Mr. Irons was through. He turned about and came down the runway and passed out, rearing back and jarring his heels down hard. If he had spoken a single word the whole time I hadn't heard it. As I remarked several times before he was a small man and so I am not trying to explain the optical delusion of the moment. I am only trying to tell how Mr. Gid Irons looked as he passed me. He looked seven feet tall.

It must have been just about this time that D. C. Davello worked his way out from underneath the hippopotamously vast bulk of Fatty McManus and started running back up the stairs. But before he reached the door the city marshal, who had been standing downstairs all the time and strange to say, hadn't, it would appear, heard any of the clamor, ran up behind him and arrested him for loud talking and disorderly conduct. The city marshal obtusely didn't look inside the door for visual evidences of any trouble within; he would listen to no reason. He grabbed D. C. Davello by the coat collar and pulled him back to the sidewalk and had him halfway across Market Square to the lock-up before the captive could make him understand what had really happened. Even then the official displayed a dense and gummy stupidity, for he kept demanding further details and made the other tell everything over to him at least twice. This also took time, because D. C. Davello was excited and stammering and the city marshal was constantly interrupting him. So that, by the time he finally got the straight of things into his head and they got back to St. Clair Hall, the lights were out and the stairs were dark and the last of the audience was tailing away. The city marshal stopped, as if taken with a clever idea, and looked at his watch and remarked to D. C. Davello that he and his friend the Professor would just about have time to catch the 10:50 accommodation for Louisville if they hurried; which seemed strange advice to be giving, seeing that D. C. Davello hadn't asked about trains at all.

Nevertheless he took it--the advice--which also necessitated taking the train.

Even in so short a time the news seemed to have spread with most mysterious speed, that Daniel the Mystic had canceled his second night's engagement and would be leaving us on the 10:50. Quite a crowd went to the depot to see him off. We boys tagged along, too, keeping pace with Judge Priest and Doctor Lake and Major Joe Sam Covington and certain other elderly residents, who, as they tramped along, maintained a sort of irregular formation, walking two by two just as they did when the Veterans' Camp turned out for a funeral or a reunion.

There must have been something wrong down the road that night with the 10:50. Usually she was anywhere from one to three hours late, but this night she strangely came in on time. She was already whistling for the crossing above Kattersmith's brickyard when we arrived, moving in force. D. C. Davello saw us from afar and remembered some business that took him briskly back behind the freight shed. But Daniel the Mystic sat on a baggage truck with a handkerchief to his face, and seemed not to see any of us coming until our advance guard filed up and flanked him.

“Well, suh,” said Judge Priest, “you had a signal honor paid you in this community tonight.”

Daniel the Mystic raised his head. The light from a tin reflector lamp. shone on his face and showed its abundant damages. You would hardly have known Daniel the Mystic for the same person. His gorgeousness and grandeur of person had fallen from him like a discarded garment, and his nose dripped redly.

“I--had--what?” he answered, speaking somewhat thickly because of his swollen lip.

“A mighty signal honor,” said Judge Priest, in his thin whine. “In the presence of a representative gatherin' of our best people you were licked by the most efficient and the quickest-actin' scout that ever served in General John Morgan's entire cavalry command.”

But the reply of Daniel the Mystic, if he made one, was never heard of living man, because at that moment the 10:50 accommodation came in and her locomotive began exhausting.

V. UP CLAY STREET

ONE behind the other, three short sections of a special came sliding into the yard sidings below the depot.

The cars clanked their drawheads together like manacles, as they were chivied and bullied and shoved about by a regular chain-gang boss of a switch engine. Some of the cars were ordinary box cars, just the plain galley slaves of commerce, but painted a uniform blue and provided with barred gratings; some were flat cars laden with huge wheeled burdens hooded under tarpaulins; and a few were sleeping cars that had been a bright yellow at the beginning of the season, with flaring red lettering down the sides, but now were faded to a shabby saffron.

It was just getting good broad day. The sleazy dun clouds that had been racked up along the east--like mill-ends left over from night's remnant counter, as a poet might have said had there been a poet there to say it--were now torn asunder, and through the tear the sun showed out, blushing red at his own nakedness and pushing ahead of him long shadows that stretched on the earth the wrong way. There was a taste of earliness in the air, a sort of compounded taste of dew and dust and maybe a little malaria.

Early as it was, there was a whopping big delegation of small boys, white and black, on hand for a volunteer reception committee. The eyes of these boys were bright and expectant in contrast to the eyes of the yard hands, who looked half dead for sleep and yawned and shivered. The boys welcomed the show train at the depot and ran alongside its various sections. They were mainly barefooted, but they avoided splinters in the butts of the crossties and sharp clinkers in the cinder ballast of the roadbed with the instinctive agility of a race of primitives.

Almost before the first string of cars halted and while the clanking of the iron links still ran down its length like a code signal being repeated, a lot of mop-headed men in overalls appeared, crawling out from all sorts of unsuspected sleeping places aboard. Magically a six-team of big white Norman horses materialized, dragging empty traces behind them. They must have been harnessed up together beforehand in a stock car somewhere. A corrugated wooden runway appeared to sprout downward and outward from an open car door, and down it bumped a high, open wagon with a big sheet-iron cooking range mounted on it and one short length of stovepipe rising above like a stumpy fighting-top on an armored cruiser. As the wheels thumped against the solid earth a man in a dirty apron, who had been balancing himself in the wagon, touched a match to some fuel in his firebox. Instantly black smoke came out of the top of the stack and a stinging smell of burning wood trailed behind him, as the six-horse team hooked on and he and his moving kitchen went lurching and rolling across shallow gulleys and over a rutted common, right into the red eye of the upcoming sun.

Other wagons followed, loaded with blue stakes, with coils of ropes, with great rolls of earth-stained canvas, and each took the same route, with four or six horses to drag it and a born charioteer in a flannel shirt to drive it. The common destination was a stretch of flat land a quarter of a mile away from the track. Truck patches backed up against this site on one side and the outlying cottages of the town flanked it on the other, and it was bordered with frayed fringes of ragweed and niggerheads, and was dotted over with the dried-mud chimneys of crawfish. In the thin turf here a geometric pattern of iron laying-out pins now appeared to spring up simultaneously, with rag pennons of red and blue fluttering in the tops, and at once a crew of men set to work with an orderly confusion, only stopping now and then to bellow back the growing swarms of boys who hung eagerly on the flank of each new operation. True to the promise of its lithographed glories the circus was in our midst, rain or shine, for this day and date only.

If there is any of the boy spirit left in us circus day may be esteemed to bring it out. And considering his age and bulk and his calling, there was a good deal of the boy left in our circuit judge--so much boy, in fact, that he, an early riser of note in a town much given to early rising, was up and dressing this morning a good hour ahead of his usual time. As he dressed he kept going to the side window of his bedroom and looking out. Eventually he had his reward. Through a break in the silver-leaf poplars he saw a great circus wagon crossing his line of vision an eighth of a mile away. Its top and sides were masked in canvas, but he caught a flicker of red and gold as the sun glinted on its wheels, and he saw the four horses tugging it along, and the dipping figure of the driver up above. The sight gave the old judge a little thrill down inside of him.

“I reckin that fellow was right when he said a man is only as old as he feels,” said Judge Priest to himself. “And I'm glad court ain't in session--I honestly am.” He opened his door and called down into the body of the silent house below: “Jeff! Oh, Jeff!”

“Yas, suh,” came up the prompt answer.

“Jeff, you go out yonder to the kitchen and tell Aunt Dilsey to hurry along my breakfast. I'll be down right away.”

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff; “I'll bring it right in, suh.”

Jeff was as anxious as the judge that the ceremony of breakfast might be speedily over; and, to tell the truth, so was Aunt Dilsey, who fluttered with impatience as she fried the judge's matinal ham and dished up the hominy. Aunt Dilsey regularly patronized all circuses, but she specialized in sideshows. The sideshow got a dime of hers before the big show started and again after it ended. She could remember from year to year just how the sideshow banners looked and how many there were of them, and on the mantelpiece in her cabin was ranged a fly-blown row of freaks' photographs purchased at the exceedingly reasonable rate of ten cents for cabinet sizes and twenty-five for the full length.

So there was no delay about serving the judge's breakfast or about clearing the table afterward. For that one morning, anyhow, the breakfast dishes went unwashed. Even as the judge put on his straw hat and came out on the front porch, the back door was already discharging Jeff and Aunt Dilsey. By the time the judge had traversed the shady yard and unlatched the front gate, Jeff was halfway to the showground and mending his gait all the time. Less than five minutes later Jeff was being ordered, somewhat rudely, off the side of a boarded-up cage, upon which he had climbed with a view to ascertaining, by a peep through the barred air-vent under the driver's seat, whether the mysterious creature inside looked as strange as it smelled; and less than five minutes after that, Jeff, having reached a working understanding with the custodian of the cage, who likewise happened to be in charge of certain ring stock, was convoying a string of trick ponies to the water-trough over by the planing mill. Aunt Dilsey, moving more slowly--yet guided, nevertheless, by a sure instinct--presently anchored herself at the precise spot where the sideshow tent would stand. Here several lodge sisters soon joined her. They formed a comfortable brown clump, stationary in the midst of many brisk; activities.

The judge stood at his gate a minute, lighting his corncob pipe. As he stood there a farm wagon clattered by, coming in from the country. Its bed was full of kitchen chairs and the kitchen chairs contained a family, including two pretty country girls in their teens, who were dressed in fluttering white with a plenitude of red and blue ribbons. The head of the family, driving, returned the judge's waved greeting somewhat stiffly. It was plain that his person was chafed and his whole being put under restraint by the fell influences of a Sunday coat and the hard collar that was buttoned on to the neckband of his blue shirt.

His pipe being lighted, the judge headed leisurely in the same direction that the laden farm wagon had taken. Along Clay Street from the judge's house to the main part of town, where the business houses and the stores centered, was a mile walk nearly, up a fairly steepish hill and down again, but shaded well all the way by water maples and silver-leaf trees. There weren't more than eight houses or ten along Clay Street, and these, with the exception of the judge's roomy, white-porched house standing aloof in its two acres of poorly kept lawn, were all little two-room frame houses, each in a small, bare inclosure of its own, with wide, weed-grown spaces between it and its next-door neighbors. These were the homes of those who in a city would haye been tenement dwellers. In front of them stretched narrow wooden sidewalks, dappled now with patches of shadow and of soft, warm sunshine.

Perhaps halfway along was a particularly shabby little brown house that pushed dose up to the street line. A straggly catalpa tree shaded its narrow porch. This was the home of Lemuel Hammersmith; and Hammersmith seems such a name as should by right belong to a masterful, upstanding man with something of Thor or Vulcan or Judas Maccabaeus in him--it appears to have that sound. But Lemuel Hammersmith was no such man. In a city he would have been lost altogether--swallowed up among a mass of more important, pushing folk. But in a town as small as ours he had distinction. He belonged to more secret orders than any man in town--he belonged to all there were. Their small mummeries and mysteries, conducted behind closed doors, had for him a lure that there was no resisting; he just had to join. As I now recall, he never rose to high rank in any one of them, never wore the impressive regalia and the weighty title of a supreme officer; but when a lodge brother died he nearly always served on the committee that drew up the resolutions of respect. In moments of half-timid expanding he had been known to boast mildly that his signature, appended to resolutions of respect, suitably engrossed and properly framed, hung on the parlor walls of more than a hundred homes. He was a small and inconsequential man and he led a small and inconsequential life, giving his days to clerking in Noble & Barry's coal office for fifty dollars a month, and his nights to his lodge meetings and to drawing up resolutions of respect. In the latter direction he certainly had a gift; the underlying sympathy of his nature found its outlet there. And he had a pale, sickly wife and a paler, sicklier child.

On this circus day he had been stationed in front of his house for a good half hour, watching up the street for some one. This some one, as it turned out, was Judge Priest. At sight of the old judge coming along, Mr. Hammersmith went forward to meet him and fell in alongside, keeping pace with him.

“Good momin', son,” said the old judge, who knew everybody that lived in town. “How's the little feller this mornin'?”

“Judge, I'm sorry to say that Lemuel Junior ain't no better this momin',” answered the little coal clerk with a hitching of his voice. “We're afraid--his mother and me--that he ain't never goin' to be no better. I've had Doctor Lake in again and he says there really ain't anything we can do--he says it's just a matter of a little time now. Old Aunt Hannah Holmes says he's got bone erysipelas, and that if we could 'a' got him away from here in time we might have saved him. But I don't know--we done the best we could. I try to be reconciled. Lemuel Junior he suffers so at times that it'll be a mercy, I reckin--but it's hard on you, judge--it's tumble hard on you when it's your only child.”

“My son,” said the old judge, speaking slowly, “it's so hard that I know nothin' I could say or do would be any comfort to you. But I'm sorry--I'm mighty sorry for you all. I know what it is. I buried mine, both of 'em, in one week's time, and that's thirty years and more ago; but it still hurts mightily sometimes. I wish't there was something I could do.”

“Well, there is,” said Hammersmith--“there is, judge, maybe. That's why I've been standin' down here waitin' for you. You see, Lemmy he was tumble sharp set on goin' to the circus today. He's been readin' the circus bills that I'd bring home to him until he knew 'em off by heart. He always did have a mighty bright mind for rememberin' things. We was aimin' to take him to the show this evenin', bundled up in a bedquilt, you know, and settin' off with him in a kind of a quiet place somewhere. But he had a bad night and we just can't make out to do it--he's too weak to stand it--and it was most breakin' his heart for a while; but then he said if he could just see the parade he'd be satisfied.

“And, judge, that's the point--he's took it into his head that you can fix it some way so he can see it. We tried to argue him out of it, but you know how it is, tryin' to argue with a child as sick as Lemuel Junior's been. He--he won't listen to nothin' we say.”

A great compassion shadowed the judge's face. His hand went out and found the sloping shoulder of the father and patted it clumsily. He didn't say anything. There didn't seem to be anything to say.

“So we just had to humor him along. His maw has had him at the front window for an hour now, propped up on a pillow, waitin' for you to come by. He wouldn't listen to nothin' else. And, judge--if you can humor him at all--any way at all--do it, please--”

He broke off because they were almost in the shadow of the catalpa tree, and now the judge's name was called out by a voice that was as thin and elfin as though the throat that spoke it were strung with fine silver wires.

“Oh, judge--oh, Mister Judge Priest!”

The judge stopped, and, putting his hands on the palings, looked across them at the little sick boy. He saw a face that seemed to be all eyes and mouth and bulging, blue-veined forehead--he was shockingly reminded of a new-hatched sparrow--and the big eyes were feverishly alight with the look that is seen only in the eyes of those who already have begun to glimpse the great secret that lies beyond the ken of the rest of us.

“Why, hello, little feller,” said the judge, with a false heartiness. “I'm sorry to see you laid up again.”