Part 16

Tubal Cain would have felt as if he were dreaming had it not been for sundry recollections of stories of the matter-of-fact tendencies of the officer which were far from reassuring. He felt that he could hardly have faced the situation had not the dapper round-visaged young deputy, whose blond hair curled like a baby’s in tendrils on his red, freckled forehead, glanced up at him with a jocose wink as he proceeded to draw the cartridges from the mountaineer’s shooting-iron; the triumph of capture was still in his eye, while he lounged carelessly over the banisters of the staircase to evade the responsibility and labor of standing upright.

“Own up, daddy,” he cavalierly admonished the elder. “Tell what you were aimin’ to do. To rescue prisoners”--his superior snorted at the very word--“or rob us of our vally’bles?” The sheriff turned upon the deputy with a stare of inquiry as if wondering what these might be; then, vaguely apprehending the banter, said severely:--

“Cuttin’ jokes about your bizness, Jeemes, so constant, makes me ’feard it’s a leetle bit too confinin’ for such a gay bird as you. Bar-keepin’ in a saloon would fit your build better’n the sort o’ bar-keepin’ we do here, I’m thinkin’.”

Enott Blake might be laughed at on occasion, but he had a trick of making other men as serious as himself when he sought to play upon their foibles. The blond deputy’s countenance showed that it had another and deeper tinge of red in its capacity; he came to the perpendicular suddenly as, without lifting his eyes, he continued to revolve the cylinder of the pistol and to draw the cartridges seriatim. He was but newly appointed, and zealous of the favor of his superior.

“I dunno how I could bear up, though,” he said, with apology in the cadence of his voice, “if I didn’t crack a joke wunst in a while, considering I’m just broke into harness.”

“That’s a fact,” admitted the martial elder, visibly and solemnly placated. “Do you know what we were doin’ while you yelled, an’ capered, an’ cut up them monkey-shines in front of the jail?” he demanded sternly, turning to Tubal Cain Sims. “We were cuttin’ a man down that tried to hang himself.”

“Suicidin’,” put in the deputy, as if making a nice distinction between this voluntary suspension and the legal execution.

“An’ we were bringin’ the man to himself agin.”

“He’s crazy, crazy as a loon,” interpolated the deputy in a mutter, pulling the trigger and snapping the hammer of the empty weapon, and sighting it unpleasantly down the hall, aiming alternately at the sheriff and at Tubal Cain Sims, who could scarcely repress an admonition, but for awe’s sake desisted.

“Or more likely, simulatin’ insanity,” said the sheriff; “it’s plumb epidemic nowadays ’mongst the crim’nals.”

“Well, he come mighty nigh lightin’ out for a country where no vain pretenses avail,” remarked the loquacious deputy, one eye closed, and drawing a very fine line from the bridge of old Sims’s nose with the empty pistol.

“This is a country where they don’t avail, either,” retorted the sheriff, “not with any reasonable jury. And twelve men, though liable to be fools, ain’t fools o’ the same pattern. That’s the main thing: impanel a variety o’ fools, an’ the verdic’ is generally horse sense. Now, sir,” turning on Tubal Cain Sims, who could feel his hat rising up on his hair, “what do you want, anyhow?”

“Ter git out,--that’s all; ter git out o’ hyar!” exclaimed Tubal Sims, sickened with a ghastly horror of the presentment of the scene they had left, the walls that harbored it, the roof that sheltered it. Oh for the free pure mountain air, the wild untrodden lengths of the mountain wilderness, fresh with the sun and the dew, and the vigor of natural growths, and the sweet scent of woodland ways! As he cast up his eyes to the high window above the staircase he could have cried out aloud to see the bars, and he gazed at the door in a desperation that started the drops on his brow and brought the blood to his face, as if the intensity of his emotion had been some strong physical effort.

“What did you get in here for, then?” demanded the sheriff. “Most folks have to be fetched.”

Tubal Cain Sim’s heart failed him. Could it be possible that he had ever designed a fate like this for the man who had slept under his roof; who had eaten his bread; who had refused to maintain secrecy against him; who considered him and his claims, when his own, his very own, passed them by? He could not realize it. He refused to credit his cherished scheme; he felt that if once away from the paralyzing sight of the place, invention would rouse itself anew. Some other device would serve to rid the Cove of the man, and to frustrate his elopement with Euphemia. Tubal Sims was sure he could compass a new plan if once more he were free in the clear and open air.

The eagle eye of the sheriff marked the alert turning of Sims’s head toward the door. “What did you come here for, then?” he again demanded.

With hot eyes glancing hither and thither like a wild thing’s in a trap, Tubal Sims replied, with the inspiration of the moment, “I wanted ter view the man I hev voted fur so often an’ so constant.”

Now, the sheriff, like many other great men in their several places, had his vanity, and it is not hard to convince one who has been before the public eye that he fills that orb to the exclusion of any less worthy object. That Tubal Cain Sims should have journeyed fully thirty-five miles from the mountains to contemplate the resplendent dignity of the sheriff in his oft-resumed incumbency seemed possibly no disproportionate tribute to Enott Blake’s estimate of his own merits. But this view, however flattering, was hardly compatible with the lordly manner in which the old mountaineer had beaten upon the door of the jail, and the imperative tones with which he had summoned forth the servant of the public who owed his high estate to the suffrages of him aided by the likes of him.

A wonderful change is wrought in the moral atmosphere of a man by the event of an election. The candidate’s estate is vested by the announcement of the result. He owns his office for the time, and he breathes a free man. It is interesting to see how the muscles of his metaphorical knees straighten out, for the day of genuflection is over. Independence is reasserted in his eye; he bears himself as one who conquers by the prowess of his own bow and spear; and men whom he would fain conciliate last week need to search his eye for an expression they can recognize. They will be treated no more to that mollifying demonstration, the candidate’s smile.

The defeated aspirant’s once bland countenance, however, has assumed all the contours of the cynic’s. A bitter sort of nonchalance with a frequent forced laugh goes better combined with peanuts, if the place is not too high in the official scale and the candidate of no great social pretensions, since the hulls can be cast off with a flouting gesture which aids the general implication that the constituency may appropriately go hang, for all he cares. He is not hurt,--not he! He made the race to oblige his friends and party, and he now and again throws out intimations of a bigger piece of pie saving for him as a reward for filling the breach. Meantime peanuts perforce suffice.

Enott Blake, through much place-holding, had become imbued with the candidate’s antagonism to that assumption of all the power residing in the voting masses common to the arrogant but impotent unit. He was never elected by any one man, nor through any definitely exerted political influence. He served the people, and incidentally his own interest, and mighty glad they ought to be to get him, and this was what he felt especially after elections. If ever in the course of a canvass he had a qualm,--and it is said that the least imaginative of men are capable of nightmare,--he had the satisfaction of calling himself a fool thereafter, to think less of himself than people thought of him, and of counting endearingly his minie balls. He was a rare instance of a great personal popularity, and he had no mind to abate his pretensions before the preposterous patronage of this old mountaineer who possibly had not paid poll-tax for twenty years. He could no more be said to possess an enlightened curiosity than the hound trained to trail game could be accredited with an inquisitive interest in the natural history of the subject of his quest. It was only with a similar rudimentary instinct of the pursuit of prey that he felt stirring an intention to wring from the intruder the real reason for this strange entrance.

“No, no, my friend,” he said, with a kindling of his keen eye which expressed a degree of ferocity, “you can’t come it that-a-way on me. I’m a mighty fine man, I know, but folks ain’t got to sech a pass yet as to break into jail for a glimpse of me. You don’t get out of that door”--he nodded his head at it--“till you give me a reasonable reason for your extraordinary conduc’.”

Tubal Cain Sims was silent. His hard old lips suddenly shut fast. His eyes gleamed with a dogged light. He would not speak had he no will to speak, and the officer should see which could hold out the longest at this game. He remembered how often he had hearkened to the complaints of the preternatural quality of his obstinacy with which Jane Ann Sims had beguiled the conjugal way since, a quarter of a century ago, they had left the doorstep of Parson Greenought’s house man and wife. Surely, if it had time and again vanquished Jane Ann Sims, how could the sheriff, a mere man, abide it? He had not, however, reckoned on certain means of compulsion which were not within the power of the doughty contestant for domestic supremacy.

There was no visible communication between the older officer and the deputy when the young man said appealingly, “Ye won’t need handcuffs, Mr. Blake? Leastwise not till after we come from the jestice’s?”

“Handcuffs!” screeched Tubal Sims, as violently cast out from the stronghold of his obstinate silence as if he had been hurtled thence by a catapult. “Ye hev got no right to handcuff me! I kem hyar of my own free will an’ accord. I ain’t no prisoner. Open that thar door,” he continued, lowering his voice to a tone of command and turning majestically to the sheriff. “Open that door, or I’ll hev the law of ye.”

“Not till I have had the law of you,” replied the imperturbable functionary. “But, Jeemes,”--he turned with a disaffected aside to his young colleague,--“what d’ye go namin’ irons for? ’Tain’t polite to talk ’bout ironin’ a man old enough to be your father.”

The deputy looked about in vague despair. He had but sought the effect upon the imagination of the mention of shackles, and indeed his words had potently affected the fancy of the only man in the room who possessed that illusive pictorial faculty. The stanch old mountaineer was all a-tremble. What would Jane Ann Sims think of this? He might have known that this journeying abroad in secret and without her advice would result disastrously! What indeed would Jane Ann Sims think of this?

“Open that door!” he vociferated. “Ye hev got no right ter detain ME!”

“What for not?” demanded the sheriff sternly. “What d’ye call this fix’n’?” He opposed to Tubal Cain Sims’s nose, with the trifling intervenient space of an inch, his own pistol.

“Shootin’-iron!” sputtered Tubal, squinting fearfully at it.

“Worn in defiance o’ the law and to the terror o’ the people,” said the sheriff frowningly. “I have got to be indicted myself or to arrest you on that charge. And I reckon you know you ain’t got no right to carry concealed weepons.”

“Ain’t got no right ter w’ar a shootin’-iron!” exclaimed Tubal Sims, his eyes starting out of his head.

“Agin the law,” said the deputy airily.

“Agin the law!” echoed Tubal Sims, his back against the wall, and his eyes turning first to one, then to the other of his companions. “Lord! Lord! I never knowed afore how fur the flat-woods war abint the mountings! How air ye goin’ ter pertec’ yerself agin yer neighbor ’thout no shootin’-iron?” he asked cogently.

“By the law,” said both officers in unison.

“Thar ain’t no law in the mountings, thank Gawd!” cried Tubal Sims.

“There is law here,” declared the sheriff, “and a plenty of it to go round.”

“Thank Gawd!” echoed the pious deputy.

“Come, old man!” said the sheriff. “Come in here an’ set down, an’ sorter straighten out, an’ tell me what in hell ailed ye to come bangin’ on the jail door with a weepon called a shootin’-iron till you git yourself arrested for crim’nal offense. Surely, surely, you have got _some_ reason in you.”

He flung open a door close at hand, and Tubal Cain Sims, his knees trembling under him, so great was the nervous reaction in his metamorphosis from the masterful accuser to the despairing accused, was ushered into a room which seemed to him dark despite the glare of sunlight that fell broadside half across the bare floor from two tall windows,--a gaunt and haggard apartment suggestive of the intention of the building of which it was a part. These windows were not grated, but the fleckings of moving clouds barred the sunlight on the floor, and the mutter of thunder came renewed to the ear. The dust lay thick on the table in the centre of the room. A lounge covered with a startlingly gay quilt was in one corner, where Tubal Cain presumed the sheriff, in moments of fatigue which might be supposed to overpower even his stiff military figure in the deep midnight, slept with one eye open. A desk in the jamb by the fireplace held several bulky books, a large inkstand, a bag of fine-cut tobacco, a coarse glass tumbler which had nothing in it but a rank smell of a strong grade of corn whiskey, and a pipe half full of dead ashes, which the sheriff had hastily laid aside when summoned to the scene of the horrors perpetrated by a forlorn human being in the desperation of the fear of still greater horrors to come.

Tubal Cain Sims’s mind, unaccustomed to morbid influences, could not detach itself from the idea. Despite his absorptions on his own account, he followed as an independent train of thought futile speculations as to where in the building this man might be,--close at hand, and he felt a nervous thrill at the possible propinquity, or in some remote cell and out of hearing; what had he guiltily done, or was he falsely accused; had he been really resuscitated, or had the potentialities of life merely flickered up like the spurious quickening of a failing candle before the moment of extinction, and was he even now, while the officers lingered here, dead again, and this time beyond recall; or would he not, left to his own devices, once more attempt his life? The old mountaineer could not forbear. He turned to the sheriff with an excited eye.

“Ain’t ye ’feard he’ll hang hisself again?” he said huskily.

The officer stared. “Who?” he inquired, with knitted brow, as if he had forgotten the occurrence absolutely; then with renewing recollection, “You can bet your life he won’t.”

“Why not?” asked Sims, the clatter of his boots on the bare floor silent as he stopped short.

The deputy gave a fleering laugh, ending in a “ki-yi” of the extremity of derision. He had flung himself into a chair, and, with his elbows on the table, looked up with a scornful grin at Tubal Cain Sims, who seemed to entertain solicitude as to the capacities for management and discipline of Enott Blake, famous as the veriest martinet of a drill-sergeant years before he ever saw the inside of Kildeer County jail.

This absurd officiousness, however, met with more leniency from the sheriff. Whether it was that, from his steady diet of commendation, his vanity could afford to dispense with such poor crumbs as Tubal Cain Sims might have it in his power to offer, or whether he was desirous of the emollient effects of indulgence to loosen his visitor’s tongue, he apparently took no heed of this breach of the proprieties.

“He’s all right now. You needn’t have no anxiety ’bout him,” he said, as if it were a matter of course to be brought to book in this way.

“He can’t hurt himself nor any one else now,” echoed the deputy, taking his cue.

Sims turned from one to the other inquiringly.

“Got him in a cage,” said the sheriff grimly.

For one moment Tubal Cain Sims silently cursed his curiosity that had elicited this fact for his knowledge and provision for future nightmares. It was of the order of things that sets the natural impulses of humanity and sympathy adverse to all the necessities of law and justice. He stared at the two officers, as if they were monsters. Perhaps only his weapon, empty in the deputy’s pistol-pocket, persuaded his apparent acquiescence.

“Good Lord!” he gasped, “that’s powerful tur’ble,--powerful tur’ble!”

The sheriff was no mind-reader. He deemed that the allusion applied to the unjudicial hanging.

“Not so very,” he said, seating himself in a splint-bottomed chair, and elevating his boots to the topmost bar of the rusty, fireless grate. “’Tain’t nigh so bad as havin’ ’em fire the jail,” he added gloomily. “They have played that joke on me five times. All this part o’ the buildin’ is new. Burnt spang down the last time we had a fire.”

“Take a chair, sir, take a chair,” said the conformable deputy, perceiving that politeness had come to be the order of the day.

Tubal Sims, almost paralyzed by the number and character of the new impressions crowded upon his unaccustomed old brain, still stood staring from one to the other, his sunburned, grooved, lank-jawed face showing a sharp contrast with his shock of tow hair, which, having been yellow and growing partially gray, seemed to have reverted to the lighter tint that it had affected when he came into the world. His hat was perched on the back of his head, and now and then he reached up to readjust it there; some subtle connection surely exists between the hat of a man and his brain, some obscure ganglion, for never does embarrassment beset his intellect but the solicitous hand travels straight to the outer integument. His creased boots moved slowly forward with the jeans-clothed continuations above them. He doubtfully seized on the back of a chair, and, still gazing from one to the other of his companions, deposited himself with exaggerated caution on the stanch wooden seat as if he half expected it to collapse beneath him.

“Now,” said the sheriff smoothly, “you are a sensible man, I know, an’ I wish you well.”

“How ’bout that thar pistol?” said Tubal Cain Sims, instantly presuming upon this expression of amity.

“I didn’t make that law,” said Enott Blake testily. “But I’m here to enforce it, and you’ll find that I know my duty an’ will do it.”

Tubal Sims relapsed into his friendless despair. And once more the deputy essayed a new device.

He turned his round, red, freckled, good-natured face full upon the visitor across the table, and, pushing back his black hat from the blond tendrils that overhung his forehead like an overgrown infant’s, he said, fixing a grave blue eye upon Tubal Sims, “You came here to tell us about some crime you’ve s’picioned.”

The sheriff plucked up his faculties as if an inspiration had smitten him. “You were going to give us the names an’ fac’s as far as you knew or they had developed,” he followed hard on the heels of the pioneering deputy.

“You caved after you got here, ’cause you wished the man no harm, and the sight o’ the jail sorter staggered you,” pursued the subordinate.

“But you had some personal motive,” interjected the sheriff, suddenly solicitous for the verisimilitude of the sketch of the interior workings of Tubal Cain’s astounded intellect. “It has to be a mighty plain, open case, with no s’picion ’bout it, when information ain’t got some _personal_ motive,--justifiable, maybe, and without direct malice, but _personal_ motive.”

Tubal Cain Sims’s head turned from one to the other with a pivotal action which was less suggestive of muscles than of machinery. His eyes were starting from beneath his shaggy, overhanging eyebrows. His lower jaw had dropped. Thus dangled before him, his own identity was as recognizable to him as to their divination. If he had had time to think, there might have seemed something uncanny in this facile meddling with the secrets of his inner consciousness, hardly so plain to his own prognosis as in their exposition, but moment by moment he was hurried on.

“Your personal motive in giving this information,” continued the deputy, “is because you are afraid of the man.”

“Not for myse’f,” blurted out Tubal Sims. “Before Gawd, I’ll swear, not for myse’f.” He was all unaware of an impending disclosure of the facts that he had resolved to hide, since the horrors of the jail, the true, visible presentment of the abstract idea of imprisonment, had burst upon his shuddering realization. He had forgotten his caution. His obstinate reticence relaxed. All the manhood within him roused to the alarm of the possibility that these officers should impute to him fear of any man for his own sake. He lifted a trembling, stiffened old hand with a deprecatory gesture. “Jes’ one--jes’ one darter!” He lowered his voice in expostulation.

“One daughter!” echoed the sheriff in surprise.

“Gittin’ interestin’,” murmured the flippant deputy.

“An’ this hyar man wants ter marry her, an’ she is willin’ ter marry him, an’--an’ he spoke of runnin’ away.” Tubal Cain Sims brought this enormity out with a sudden dilation of the eyes irresistible to the impudent deputy.

“Powerful painful to the survivors!” he snorted in a choking chuckle, “but not even a misdemeanor agin the law o’ the land.”

The sheriff’s countenance changed. Not that he apprehended any cause for mirth, for it might be safely said that he had not laughed at a joke for the past six years, and it would have been a matter of some interest to know how he appraised the cachinnation habitually going on all around about him, and which he was temperamentally debarred from sharing. His face merely took on a perplexed and keenly inquisitive expression as he bent his brow as to a worthy mystery.

“You know a man can’t be arrested for runnin’ away with a young woman an’ marryin’ her,” he expostulated. “You ain’t such a fool as to think you can take the law to him to prevent that.”

There are few people in this world who do not arrogate to themselves special mental supremacy. Folly is like unto the jewel in the forehead of the toad in that the creature thus endowed is unaware of its possession. Tubal Cain Sims had perceived subacutely the acumen of both the officers, and was emulous of demonstrating his own intellectual gifts. The word “fool” is a lash that stings, and, smarting, he protested:--

“The law would purvent it mighty quick by not waitin’ fur him, ef he hed commit crimes.”

“What’d he ever do?” demanded the sheriff incredulously. And the deputy sat very still and silent.

Now, the peculiarity of being literal-minded has special reference to exoteric phenomena introduced for mental contemplation, but is easily coexistent with the evolution of an esoteric train of ideas, the complication of which is nullified by familiarity incident to their production. The sheriff was a plain man, a serious-minded man, who could not see a joke when it was before his nose; so literal-minded a man that because he never perceived the latent scheme of another, he himself was never suspected of scheming.

“What’d he ever do?” he repeated, and it did not occur to Tubal Cain Sims that he had not yet mentioned the juggler’s name, nor so much as suggested his own or the locality whence he came.

“I ain’t keerin’ ter know _whut_ he done!” he asseverated, led on by the non-compliant look of the other. “I _know_ he done _somewhut_; an’ Phemie ain’t goin’ ter be ’lowed ter marry no evil-doer an’ crim’nal agin the law.”