Part 20

"I want to go home first, Uncle Tom, and get the place out of debt, so mother and Barb'll be easy in their minds. Then I don't know what I _shall_ do. I don't feel as if I could ever come to town again without fetching mother with me. But I can't tell; I want to get out of this town; I hate the very sight of it. Come, Barb; do let's get off. Where's the horse? I want to get home, where I won't see any more of this crowd, and where I can be alone with you and mother."

Before they had made their way to the front door of the court-house the multitude outside had got firm hold of the fact of Tom's acquittal and the manner of it, and when he appeared they set up a shout; then there were cheers and more cheers. But Tom only looked worried, and sought to extricate himself from the people who followed him. At length he managed to get away from the last of them.

"You haven't ate anything to-day," said Janet, who clung to his hand and danced along by his side. "Come to our house to supper. I expect we'll have warm biscuits and honey."

"You dear little body!" said Tom. "I can't stop for supper to-night, Janet; I must go home with mother. I want to get out of the ugly town. I'll come and see you sometimes, and I'll have you out at the farm lots of times." He stopped to put his pale, trembling hand under her pretty chin; he turned her face up to his, he stooped and kissed her. But no entreaty could prevail on him to delay his departure. Not even the biscuits and honey on which Janet insisted. Hiram Mason helped him to hitch up old Blaze-face to the wagon. Then Tom turned to Hiram and grasped both his arms.

"You're going with us," he said abruptly.

"Not to-night, Tom. I'll come in a few days, when I've finished my writing in the clerk's office. I'll stop on my way home."

"I want to thank you, but I can't; confound it," said Tom.

"Never mind, Tom; I'm almost happier than you are."

"I'm not exactly happy, Mason," said Tom; "I've got that plaguey feeling of a rope around my neck yet. I can't get rid of it here in Moscow. Maybe out at the farm I shall be able to shake it off. Janet, won't you run into the house and tell mother and Barbara to come out quick--I want to get away."

Tom had expected that Bob McCord would take a place in the wagon, but Bob was not so modest as to forego a public triumph. He first went and recovered the wagon-spoke from beneath the court-house steps, where he had hidden it the night before. This he put into the baggy part of his "wamus," or hunting-jacket--the part above the belt into which he had often thrust prairie-chickens when he had no game-bag. Then he contrived to encounter Jake Hogan in the very thick of the crowd.

"O Jake!" he called, "what's the price uh rope? How's the hangin' business a-gittin' along these days? Doin' well at it, ain't yeh?"

"Wha' joo mean?" asked Jake, as he half turned about and regarded Bob with big eyes.

"Seems like's ef you'd ort to be'n ole han' by this time, Jake. You sot the time fer Tom's funeral three deffer'nt nights: wunst you wuz a-goin' to have it over't Perrysburg, un wunst the Sunday night that Pete Markham throwed you off the track weth that air yarn about a wall-eyed man weth red whiskers, un wunst ag'in las' night. Ev'ry time you sot it they wuz some sort uv a hitch; it didn't seem to come off rightly. S'pose un you try yer hand on Dave Sovine awhile. They's luck in a change."

"I hain't had no han' in no hangin's nor nuthin' uh that sort," snarled Jake.

"_You_ hain't? Jest you go un tell that out on Broad Run, sonny. Looky h-yer, Jake. I've got the evidence agin you, un ef you _dare_ me I'll go afore the gran' jury weth it. I jest dare you to dare me, _ef_ you dare."

But Jake did not dare to dare him. He only moved slowly away toward his horse, the excited crowd surging after him, to his disgust.

"Looky h-yer, Jake," Bob went on, following his retreat. "I want to gin you some _ad_vice as a well-wishin' friend un feller-citizen. Barb'ry knowed your v'ice las' night, un Barb'ry Grayson hain't the sort uv a gal to stan' the sort uv foolin' 't you've been a-doin' about Tom."

"Aw, you shet up yer jaw, now wonchoo?" said Jake.

"I say, Jake," said McCord, still pursuing the crest-fallen leader of Broad Run, while the crowd moved about Big Bob as a storm center. "I say there, Jake; liker 'n not Barb'ry'll stay in town to-night un go afore the gran' jury to-morry. Now ef I wuz you I'd cl'ar the county this very _i_dentical night. Your ornery lantern-jawed face wouldn' look half's han'some as Tom's in that air box in front uv the sher'f."

"You shet up!" said Jake.

"Come un shet me up, wonch you?" said Bob, rubbing his hands and laughing.

Jake had reached his horse now, and without another word he mounted and rode away. But Bob kept walking about with his fists in his pockets, his big elbows protruding, and his face radiant with mischief until Sheriff Plunkett came out of the court-house.

"I say, Sher'f," he called, "how many men'd you say they wuz in that air fust mob?"

"Nigh onto forty, I should think," said Plunkett; "but of course I can't just exactly say." And he walked away, not liking to be catechised. There was something mysterious about that mob, and he was afraid there might be something that would count in the next election.

"They had pistols, didn't they?" Bob continued, following him.

"Yes, to be sure," said Plunkett, pausing irresolutely.

"Now looky h-yer, Sher'f; I know sumpin about that air mob. They wuzn't but jest on'y two men in the whole thing. I don't say who they _wuz_"; and here Bob looked about on the crowd, which showed unmistakable signs of its relish for this revelation.

"Un as fer pistols, they did have 'em. I've got one of 'em h-yer." Bob here pulled the wagon-spoke from the depths of his hunting-shirt. "That's one of the identical hoss-pistols that wuz p'inted at your head las' night. Felt kind-uh cold un creepy like, didn't it now, Hank Plunkett, when its muzzle was agin yer head, un it cocked, besides? Ha-a! ha!"

The crowd jeered and joined in Bob's wild merriment.

"I'll have you arrested," said the sheriff severely. "You've confessed enough now to make the grand jury indict you."

"Fer what? Fer savin' the life uv a innercent man? That'd be a purty howdy-do, now wouldn't it? Un it would be a lovely story to tell at my trial, that the sher'f uv this yere county gin up his keys to two men, _two lonesome men weth on'y wagon-spokes_! He-e! An' the wagon-spokes cocked! A wagon-spoke's a mighty bad thing when it does go off, especially ef it's loadened with buckshot."

Plunkett came close to McCord, and said in an undertone loud enough to be heard by others: "Ah, Bob, I knowed it wuz your voice, un I knowed your grip. They ain't any other man in this county that can put me down the way you did las' night. But don't you tell Jake ur any of his crowd about it"; and he winked knowingly at Bob.

"Aw, go to thunder, now!" said Bob, speaking loudly and not to be cajoled into giving up his fun. "Sher'f, you can't come no gum games on _me_. By jeementley crickets, you wuz skeered, un that's all they is about it. You wilted so 't I wuz afeerd you'd clean faint away afore I could git out uv yeh where the keys wuz. Why didn't you hide Tom summers? You wuz afeerd Broad Run'd vote agin you, un you as good as tole Jake Hogan ut you wouldn' make no trouble when he come to lynch Tom."

"No, I didn't; I didn't have anything to say to Jake."

"Ef you take my case afore the gran' jury un I'm tried, I'll prove it on yeh. Now, Hank Plunkett, they's two things that'll never happen." Here Bob smote his right fist into his left palm. "One is 't you'll ever fetch my case afore the gran' jury. That's as shore's you're born. T' other is that you'll ever be elected ag'in! Wha'd joo turn off Pete Markham fer? Fer tryin' to save Tom, un to please Broad Run. Now you're come up weth, ole hoss. Markham'll be the nex' sher'f. You jest cut a notch in a stick to remember't Big Bob McCord tole you so. Ef 't hadn' been fer me 'n' Abe Lincoln you 'n' Jake, 'twext and 'tween yeh, 'd 'a' hung the wrong feller. Now I jest want to see you fetch me afore the court wunst. Ef you pester me too much, I'm derned 'f I don't go thar on m' own hook."

"You've been drinking, Bob," said Plunkett, as he hurried away; but the people evidently sided with McCord, whose exploit of mobbing the sheriff almost single-handed had made him more than ever the champion of the county.

That night Jake Hogan, afraid of arrest, succeeded in trading his cabin, with the front door still unhinged, and his little patch of rugged ground for a one-horse wagon and some provisions. Over the wagon he stretched his only two bed-sheets of unbleached domestic for covering. Before noon the next day, he had passed safely out of the county. The raw-boned horse, the rickety wagon, the impoverished and unwilling cow tied behind, the two yellow mongrel pups between the wagon-wheels, and the frowsy-headed wife alongside of him were token enough to every experienced eye that here was a poor whitey on his travels. To all inquiries regarding his destination, Jake returned:

"I'm boun' fer _Mes_souri. Yeh see they hain't no kind of a chance fer a poor man in this yer daudrautted Eelinoys country."

Once an example of migration had been set, his neighbors grew restless also, and in a year or two nearly all of them had obeyed their hereditary instinct and followed him to Pike County in Missouri. The most of the Broad Run neighborhood is now included in a great grazing farm; here a few logs, there some tumble-down ruins of a stick-chimney, and in another place a rough stone hearth, only remain to indicate the resting-place for a few years of a half-nomadic clan, whose members or their descendants are by this time engaged, probably, in helping to rid the Pacific coast of its unchristian Chinese.

XXIX

THE CLOSE OF A CAREER

Dave Sovine's partial confession, which had served to acquit Tom, was sufficient at the next term of the court to condemn him, for no plea of accidental shooting could save him after he had tried to escape at the expense of another man's life. During his trial the motive for shooting Lockwood remained an inexplicable mystery. But when once Dave was convinced that his execution was inevitable and there was an end to all the delights of deviltry, he proceeded to play the only card remaining in his hand, and to euchre Justice on her own deal. Like other murderers of his kind he became religious, and nothing could be more encouraging to criminals than the clearness and fervor of his religious experience, and his absolute certainty of the rewards of paradise. His superiority in wickedness had made him the hero of all the green goslings of the village; his tardy conversion and shining professions made him an object of philanthropic interest to sentimental people and gave him the consolations of conspicuity to the last.

It was during this lurid sunset period of his unnecessary existence that Dave made confessions. These were not always consistent one with another; the capacity for simple and direct truth-telling is a talent denied to men of Sovine's stamp, nor can it be developed in a brief season of penitence. It is quite probable that Sovine failed to state the exact truth even when narrating his religious experiences. But by a comparison of his stories, with some elimination of contradictory elements, the main facts regarding the death of George Lockwood were made out with passable clearness. Being of a thrifty turn of mind, Lockwood had, by a series of careful observations, detected one of the principal tricks employed by Dave to win the money of the unwary. It had been Lockwood's purpose to play the trick back on Dave at some favorable opportunity, but this he found quite impossible. To bring himself to Dave's proficiency in manipulation no end of assiduous practice would be needful. There remained one other way in which he might utilize his discovery. It was an established rule in that part of the country that he who detected his opponent in the very act of cheating at cards might carry off the stakes.

When Lockwood went to the camp-meeting he put into his pocket a bit of candle, in order to have a game with Dave; and when on encountering him Dave proposed the game, the two went out into the woods, remote from the meeting, Lockwood lighted his candle and they sat down on a log to play. Lockwood won at first and doubled the stakes at every game, until Dave, seeing that his pocket-money was running short, and the candle fast wasting in the breezes, concluded to sweep in the stakes with his favorite trick. George Lockwood exposed the cheat at the very instant, and put the stakes in his pocket. But Dave had received his education in its higher branches in the South-west of half a century ago, and he had no notion of suffering himself to be bankrupted so easily. He drew his pistol and demanded the stakes, following Lockwood with reiterated threats, until, in a moment of exasperation, he shot him. A crowd came quickly at the sound of the pistol, and Dave had the shrewdness not to run away and not to attempt to take any money from George Lockwood's person. Remembering Tom Grayson's threats, he declared, with his usual alertness in mendacity, that he had seen Grayson do the shooting, and thus diverted attention from himself.

He had no further thought at the time than to get out of a present difficulty; it was his purpose to leave the country before the trial should come on. But he found himself watched, and he imagined that he was suspected. He saw no chance to move without making sure of his own arrest; he became alarmed and unfitted for decision by the sense of his peril; as the trial approached, his nerves, shaken by dissipations, were unstrung by the debate within him. He saw ghosts at night and his sleep almost entirely forsook him. This horror of a doom that seemed perpetually to hang over him was greatly enhanced by the cross-examination to which he was subjected; from the first he misdoubted that Lincoln had penetrated his whole secret and possessed the means of making it known. And when he heard himself charged publicly with the murder and as publicly arrested, he believed that some evidence against him had been found; he did not draw the line between the charge and the proof, and the half confession escaped him in the first breakdown produced by sudden despair.

But at the last he spoke edifyingly from the scaffold, and died with as much composure and more self-complacency than Tom would have shown had he fallen a victim to Dave's rascality. What becomes of such men in another world is none of my business. But I am rather pleased to have them depart, be it to paradise, or purgatory, or limbo, or any other compartment of the world of spirits. In some moods I could even wish them a prosperous voyage to the Gehenna of our forefathers, now somewhat obsolescent, if only they would begone and cease to vex this rogue-ridden little world of ours.

XXX

TOM AND RACHEL

When Tom rode home from the trial with his mother and Barbara, his emotions were not just what one might expect; the events of the day and the tremendous strain on his nerves had benumbed him. He was only conscious that it gave him a great pleasure to leave the village behind, and to get once more upon the open prairie, which was glorified by the tints and shadows of the setting sun. The fields of maize, with their tassels growing brown and already too ripe and stiff to wave freely, and with their long blades becoming harsh and dry, so that the summer rustle had changed to a characteristic autumnal rattling, seemed to greet him like old friends who had visibly aged in his absence. Tom found his mind, from sheer strain and weariness, fixing itself on unimportant things; he noted that the corn-silk which protruded from the shucks was black, and that the shucks themselves were taking on that sear look which is the sure token of the ripeness of the ear within the envelope. Now and then he marked an ear that had grown so long as to push its nose of cob quite beyond the envelope. The stretches of prairie grass showed a mixture of green and brown; the September rains had freshened a part of the herbage, giving it a new verdure, but the riper stalks and blades had maintained their neutral colors. These things interested Tom in a general way, as marking the peaceful changes that had taken place in the familiar face of nature during his period of incarceration. What he felt in regarding these trifles was simply that he was alive and once more free to go where he pleased. He said little, and replied to the remarks of his mother and Barbara briefly, and he drove old Blaze-face at a speed quite unbecoming a horse at his time of life. The people whom he passed cheered him, or called out their well-meant congratulation, or their bitter remarks about Dave Sovine, but Tom on his part was not demonstrative; he even drove past Rachel Albaugh and her brother Ike with only a nod of recognition. To any remark of his mother and Barbara about Dave's villainy, and to any allusion to the case, he returned the briefest answers, giving the impression that he wished to get mentally as well as physically away from the subject. When he got home he asked for an old-fashioned country hoe-cake for supper, and he would have the table set out on the kitchen porch; he said it seemed so delightful to be permitted to go out-of-doors again. After supper he turned old Blaze into the pasture, with a notion that he too might prefer his liberty.

In reflecting on the events of the day, Barbara remembered with pleasure that Rachel had congratulated Tom. It made his vindication complete that the young woman who had refused his attentions when he was accused of nothing worse than foolish gambling had now taken pains to show her good-will in public. But when the question of a possible renewal of the relations between Tom and his old sweetheart came up in Barbara's mind, there was always a doubt. Not that there was anything objectionable about Rachel Albaugh. Barbara said to her mother over and over again, in the days that followed Tom's acquittal, that there was nothing against Rachel. If Rachel was not very industrious she was certainly "easy-tempered." In her favor it could be said that she had a beautiful face, and that she would be joint heiress with her brother to a large and well-improved prairie farm, to say nothing of her father's tract of timber-land.

After a while Barbara came to wish that Tom's old affection for Rachel might be kindled again. She did not like to see him so changed. He plodded incessantly at farm work, and he seemed to have lost his relish for society. If any one came to the house, he managed to have business abroad. He was not precisely gloomy, but the change in him was so marked that it made his sister unhappy.

"Why don't you go to see Rachel?" she asked, a week after the trial. Barbara was straining her eyes down the road, as she often did in those days. "Rachel would be glad to see you again, Tom, like as not."

"Maybe she would," answered Tom, as he picked up the pail and started to the spring for water by way of cutting off all further talk on the question.

The days went by without Tom's showing by any sign that he cared to see Rachel, and to Barbara's grief the days went by without Hiram Mason's promised arrival at the Graysons'. But there came presently a note from Hiram to Barbara, saying that he had been detained by the necessity he was under of finishing Magill's writing, and by the difficulty he found in getting his pay from the easy-going clerk for what he had done. But he hoped to stop on his way home in three or four days. This note was brought from Moscow by Bob McCord, who also brought Janet. The child had teased her father into letting her come out in Aunt Martha's wagon with Bob, whom she had seen driving past the house on his way in.

Janet spent her time in the country wholly with Tom. She followed him afield, she climbed with him into the barn lofts, she sat on the back of old Blaze when Tom led him to water, she went into the forest when Tom went to fell trees for fire-wood, she helped him to pick apples, and she was as happy in all this as she would have been in the Elysian Fields.

"Cousin Tom," she said, the day after her arrival, as she leaned out of the high, open window of the hay-loft, "yonder's a lady getting down on the horse-block at the house."

Tom climbed up from the threshing-floor to the mow, and, standing well back out of sight in the gloom of the loft, he recognized Rachel Albaugh's horse. Then he went back again to his wheat-fanning on the threshing-floor.

"Aren't you going to go and help her?" said Janet, when Tom stopped the noisy fanning-mill to shovel back the wheat and to rake away the cheat.

"Pshaw!" said Tom. "A country girl doesn't need any help to get off a horse."

Rachel had come to call on Barbara, nor did she admit to herself that her visit had anything to do with Tom. But she found herself in an attitude to which she was unaccustomed. From the moment that Tom had been charged with murder her liking for him increased. The question of his guilt or innocence did not disturb her--except in so far as it jeoparded his life; he was at least a dashing fellow, out of the common run. And now that he had been acquitted, and was a hero of everybody, Rachel found in herself a passion that was greater than her vanity, and that overmastered even her prudence. She was tormented by her thoughts of Tom in the day, she dreamed of him at night. Tom would not come to her, and she felt herself at length drawn by a force she could not resist to go to him.

Barbara asked Rachel to stay to dinner, and promised that Tom would put away her horse as soon as he knew that she had come. This was but the common hospitality of the country, but Barbara hoped that Rachel's presence might evoke Tom's old buoyant self again. And so, while Barbara sat on the loom-bench weaving a web of striped linsey, Rachel sat near her, knitting. It appeared to Barbara that Rachel had undergone almost as great a change as Tom. She had lost her taciturnity. Her tongue kept pace with the click of her needles. She only broke the thread of her talk when she paused to take the end of one needle out of the quill of her knitting-case and put another in. Under color of sympathy for the Graysons in their troubles she talked of what was in her mind. How dreadful it must have been for Tom to be in jail! How anxious he must have been at the trial! How well he bore up under it all! How proud he must have been when he was acquitted! These and such remarks were web and woof of her talk, while Barbara was throwing her nimble shuttle to and fro and driving the threads home with the double-beat of her loom-comb.

By half-past 11 the early farm dinner was almost ready, and Mrs. Grayson blew a blast on the tin horn which hung outside of the door, to let Tom and Janet know that they were to come in.

When Tom heard the horn he went and led Rachel's horse to the stable, after perching Janet in the saddle; and then he delayed long enough to shuck out and give him eight or ten ears of corn. After this he came to the house and washed his hands and face in the country way, with much splash and spatter, in a basin that sat on a bench outside of the door, and Janet washed hers, imitating to the best of her ability Tom's splattering way of dashing the water about. Then the two used the towel that hung on a roller in the kitchen porch, and Tom entered the kitchen with his clothes soiled by labor and with that look of healthful fatigue which comes of plentiful exercise in the open air.

"Howdy, Rachel? All well 't your house?" This was the almost invariable formula of country politeness, and it was accompanied by a faint smile of welcome and a grasp of her hand.