Part 4

So the Indian or two, or half a dozen of them, had come to be his rent. For the rest, he did look after the cattle whenever he happened to be in the swamp, and Kirby always had the pick of his string of fish and bag of game.

Now, listening shrewdly to the ever-increasing rain, he dressed and picked up his lantern. Then he blew out the lamp and plunged into the storm. Bent double against wind and rain, lantern unlighted, because he loved to find his way in the dark, he hurried across the field. Just before he reached the main road he stopped. Along that road splashed three or four negroes, a lantern between them.

“Dat you, Mr. Jeff Potter?” one of them called.

But he did not answer. They were Kirby’s hands; they might want to go with him; they would be more trouble than they were worth; he would have to be pulling them, instead of cattle, out of the swamp before he got through. They hesitated a moment, then went on, mumbling to one another. Old Jeff grinned.

“When they git home,” he chuckled, “they’ll be tellin’ folks they seen a ha’nt.”

* * * * *

An eighth of a mile before he came to Blainey’s store he turned off into a narrow wood road seldom used. He could see pretty well in the dark, old Jeff could, but he wasn’t looking for anything like this--he almost ran into the car that stood there in the road!

He lit his lantern now and glanced all around. There was no one in the streaming woods. He went to the car, pulled aside the curtains that were fastened down, and peered in. The seats were empty. All excited, he went back to the rear and squatted down. The lantern light shone on the number and lettering of the license. It was a city car. He got out of his inside breastpocket a frazzled notebook, a sort of diary, in which he jotted down bits of wood lore and queer things he saw as he went about. From inside the leaves he took a stub pencil, and set down the number of that car, and the date on which he had seen it.

After he had gone away he looked back. There it was, big and long and silent. He hurried along through the thicket, across the field, and into the big woods of the swamp. Yes, the river was up. The lantern glistened on water where no water ought to be. Into it he splashed, up to his ankles, up to his knees, the trunks of trees coming forward toward him, then slipping back in silent procession, the shadows cast by the lantern darting here and there in the flooded woods, or moving about like enormous black clubs above his head.

He was thoroughly alarmed now--alarmed for Kirby’s cattle. A mile ahead was a high bit of ground, which they would make for and be safe if they sensed the danger of rising water and started in time. If they hadn’t--well, he would just have to round up as many as he could and drive them that way. The water was up to his waist now; still he kept on, holding the lantern high. If he had not known by heart every inch of the ground he would have stepped off into water over his head. But he knew how to keep to the ridges; he could even feel his way across a footlog covered by water; and after a while, all out of breath, he made out the high ground through the trees. The shine of the lantern long before he reached this haven showed the sleek sides and gleaming eyes of cattle huddled together.

“That’s it, boys an’ gals!” he yelled. “You knowed more’n I ’lowed you did! You still got some brains lef’ in yo’ thick flat heads!”

He was among them now, slapping their flanks, calling them by name, shoving them about familiarly to see if they were all here. Off to the side was a shed built by fishermen with a rough fireplace and chimney at one end. Here he built a fire, pulled off his wet trousers and socks and hung them up to dry. Then he raked together for a bed some straw which fishermen had used to sit on. His eyes in the firelight were bright now. This was the kind of thing he liked.

It was a deep sleep he fell into, so deep that he did not see through the forest an ever expanding glow in the sky; he did not hear the restless animals moving about as in vague terror; he did not hear out in the farm lands that bordered the swamp the excited crowing of cocks, as if some strange day had dawned.

It was four o’clock when he woke, got into his damp trousers and shoes and started back. It was pitch black. The waters had gone down somewhat, still he had to wade out. Clear of the swamp, he blew out the lantern.

When he came to the patch of woods where he had seen the car he stopped--there was no car here now! He struck a match and held it close to the ground to make sure it had not been a vision. There were the tracks where it had entered the woods, and others where it had been driven out again. He raised his head and sniffed the air. There was a strange smell abroad, as if the woods had been burned off in the night. Wondering what it could mean, he started on home.

* * * * *

Day was dawning as he passed Squire Kirby’s, and Jake, Kirby’s negro hand who fed the mules and horses, was just entering the yard. In the dim light Jake looked quickly at him, then stopped.

“Dat you, Mr. Jeff Potter?” he demanded.

There was something strange in Jake’s voice, and in his face too. Old Jeff thought about it as he splashed along the road home.

“Jake must ’a’ thought I was a ha’nt too,” he chuckled.

He did not hear the news until nearly midday. Worn out, he had fallen asleep across the bed on reaching home and had not waked until after nine. Then he had wound up the clock, got his lonely breakfast, and made a shift of tidying up his room. After that, he went outside. The weather had cleared; it was a bland winter day of the South, with the drenched straw fields and woods sparkling in the sun. He wandered aimlessly around his yard a while, and finally sat down on a bench in front of his cabin, and lit his pipe. He did not notice that the negroes in front of that other cabin across the field were looking curiously his way.

He was very lonely now. The excitement of the night had passed. Usually on Sunday mornings like this he went to Blainey’s store, where others gathered--except when there was preaching--out in front and on the porch. They would be gathering there now, talking about him, and about the row last night. As for him, so long as he lived, he could never go there again.

And so he was brooding when Bill Carson came along the old field road. Bill’s face was grave and he was hurrying. As he turned into the yard Jeff rose, his heart suddenly pounding.

“Jeff, ain’t you heard, man?”

“Heerd what, Bill?”

“Frank Blainey’s store burned down at two o’clock las’ night!”

Off yonder across the field old Jeff was suddenly conscious that the negroes were looking his way; and in Carson’s eyes he saw a close, narrow, searching scrutiny.

“Come on inside,” said Carson.

And inside, half dazed, Jeff heard. Folks--some folks--said he did it. The Blaineys especially. Frank was telling everybody.

“You see, Jeff,” said Carson, gravely, “some niggers up here say they saw you goin’ toward the store at midnight. You didn’t have any lantern lit. Jake saw you comin’ back at daylight. They all spoke to you, but you didn’t speak to them. An’, Jeff, every other man aroun’ here was at that fire but you!”

“Bill!” The old man’s voice was rising, “Bill, tell me as man to man--do you believe I done it?”

Then Carson tried to quiet him, tried to evade the question, too. One thing was certain anyhow--the woman and children didn’t believe it. “I just left home, Jeff,” he said. “My wife an’ the kids had heard about it. They say they know you never done it. They made me come. I left little Ella cryin’. She wouldn’t go to Sunday-school this mornin’.”

But the old man was not to be put off. He was leaning across the table now, eyes dilated. The fear of all wild and half-wild creatures--the fear of the trap--was upon him. “Bill!” he cried. “Does Squire Kirby believe I done it? Tell me the truth, man, for God-A’mighty’s sake!”

“He don’t say, Jeff.”

Over and over, while Carson listened, old Jeff described his movements in the swamp the night before. At last Carson rose to go; there was pity in his eyes now in the presence of the old man’s excitement.

“You just stick aroun’ the house to-day,” he said kindly. “If you go where folks are they’ll start you talkin’.”

And old Jeff stayed at home. At first it was hard, for there was panic in his heart. He wanted to know what was going on beyond those woods that separated him from the more thickly settled part of the community. All morning, anxiously, he watched the road that led from the main thoroughfare to his cabin. Then after dinner, no one having come along the road, and his mind having grown weary of its own anxiety, he bethought him of little Ella Carson, who had cried, and who wouldn’t go to Sunday-school because they said he burned the store. And he went into the cabin, and from underneath the table picked out a piece of white pine boxing.

“I’ll carve her an Injun,” he said. “An Injun gal.”

And with the thought came relief. Hours he worked, sitting outside his cabin on the bench, while the shavings, ever finer drawn, accumulated at his feet and the formless fragment of dry-goods box took shape. Now and then he whetted his keen multibladed knife; now and then, all oblivious, he held the work up for his critical inspection.

Even the nose and chin he carved to a nicety, holding the little figure close, smiling at it now and then, the while his mind, running ahead, saw the completed work. She should have hair from the tip of a black mink’s tail; stain from a pokeberry bush would color her; he would strap a tiny papoose across her back with a bit of crimson cloth.

“The little gal will like that,” he chuckled. “Yes--she’ll like that!”

And as he worked, his face now knotted, now serene, he forgot the store and the fire, he did not observe the lengthening shadows, he did not feel the chill of late afternoon. The sun had dropped low when at last he arose suddenly and, still oblivious, started across the field toward the woods.

His old eyes burned with creative fires. This figure in his hand was the best thing he had ever done. She was his humble masterpiece, this Indian girl who had brought him forgetfulness in his trouble. She was ready to be colored now; but no ordinary pokeberry stain would do for her. Deep in the swamp grew bushes whose berries gave a finer and richer tint than any close about. There was an eager smile on his face as he entered the woods.

He had not seen the commotion among the watching negroes when he rose and hurried across the field; he had not seen them beckoning to someone coming along the road. Now, far in the woods, he did not hear the steps behind him as he pushed through the undergrowth that fringed the swamp.

He found the bush he wanted and began his work. He had stained her to the waist, a rich, dark-red color; he was all intent on his task, when he heard the rustle of leaves behind him, and turned. What he saw made him put the figure quickly in his pocket, as if to hide her from those narrowed eyes. For there, straight at him, head and shoulders above the bushes, came Tom Kelly, rural policeman.

“Tryin’ to git away, was you, ol’ man?” grinned Kelly. “Well, it’s bad policy, an’ you’re old enough to know it.” Then solemnly, with eyes still narrowed, as if within him resided all the dignity and all the sternness of the law: “I’ve got a warrant here for you, swore out this afternoon befo’ Magistrate Kirby by Frank Blainey. Come along now, an’ don’t raise no trouble.”

* * * * *

It might all have been different if the old man had listened to his friends--to Squire Kirby, who next morning bound him over to court, and to Bill Carson, who went on his bond, two thousand dollars it was, for hadn’t he tried to make a get-away, and hadn’t Frank Blainey bitterly opposed turning him loose at all?

The squire and Carson, in a conference after the preliminary trial, advised him to employ to defend him Allen and Cathcart, both of them young, energetic, and highly successful lawyers, and offered between them to advance the money to pay the bill. It wasn’t because he doubted their friendship, or was ungrateful, that he did not heed their advice. But these lawyers were young, their minds were taken up with big affairs. What was an old man to them?

Then Jeff had his prejudices, too. More than once, when he was in the county seat, he had seen on the windows of the town skyscraper the gilded sign of Allen and Cathcart. He had seen their big cars and their handsome homes on Main Street. Now, in his extremity, and in his ignorance also, he distrusted them with the poor man’s distrust of the ostentatiously well-to-do. He did not want Allen and Cathcart.

Even while Kirby and Carson talked, his mind, in relief, had turned to another lawyer, old like himself, and neither rich nor ostentatious--old Colonel Donaldson, whom Sam Blainey used to employ to look up deeds, who had come out one day to fish with him and Sam. This was the lawyer he wanted.

* * * * *

He said nothing about it; he asked no one’s advice; but at four o’clock on the morning after his release on bail he set out on foot to the county seat, and at nine o’clock presented himself at the ancient and shabby offices of Colonel Donaldson on Law Row, just behind the courthouse. Heart pounding fast, he told his story to the dry and pedantic old lawyer, who sat behind a littered table in a dingy room where rows of dusty books, Shakespeares, Miltons, Thackerays, Dickenses, and Scotts climbed upward to the cobwebby ceiling.

Anybody would have told him this was not the man to go to; that it had been years since he appeared in court in anything but civil cases; that he might be the man to run down an old deed, but not to plead a case before a jury; that such fires of youth as he might have possessed--and it was said that he had known them once--had burned out long ago.

And yet old Jeff, looking at that thin old scholar surrounded by his books, trembled lest his case be turned down; while his friends, had they known, would have trembled lest it be accepted. And no one who knew the colonel would have dreamed that he would take such a case. It must have been some queer bond that exists between old men that moved him.

“Very well, sir,” he said, dryly, “I’ll take the case. Yes, I recall Sam Blainey quite distinctly--a fine man. I remember the fishing trip to which you refer.”

He asked a number of questions, rather wearily, leaning back, tips of fingers together. His eyes under his spectacles, that were dusty like his window panes, did light up just a moment when his questions brought out the fact that Jeff had seen a car in the woods. Then he copied down the number in a notebook. He would look into that, he said without conviction.

“God knows!” It broke from old Jeff, it was a cry for sympathy. “God knows I never burned that sto’!”

The voice of the ancient lawyer was dry and unimpressed. “Unfortunately, in a case of this kind it’s court and jury, not the Almighty, which you have to convince.... The Indian, you say, you were staining on that afternoon when you were arrested in the swamp--and by the way, sir, it’s a bad thing to be arrested in a swamp--have you that Indian with you?”

Trembling, the old man reached in the pocket of his ragged overcoat. Because of some fear that in his absence his cabin would be searched, he had brought his treasure with him.

“Here she is, Colonel,” he said eagerly.

The lawyer reached across the table, took the figure, and holding it up looked at it with a smile strangely sweet. Then he arose and went over to a rusty safe in the corner. He put her carefully away in the drawer, closed the iron doors on her and turned the combination.

“I’ll just keep this,” he said. “And now that will be all this morning. I’ll try and arrange for your case to be called as near the opening of court as possible. Keep close at home. And remember--don’t tell anybody anything.”

He turned to a shelf and got down a volume--probably he had already dismissed the case from his mind; and Jeff came out into the alley, above which towered the walls of the courthouse where soon he was to appear before judge and jury, with only that dry old recluse to stand between him and the penitentiary.

The terrible mistake he had made was duly impressed on him that night by Kirby, who drove over to arrange to take him to town to consult Allen and Cathcart in the morning. Jeff had to admit now what he had done, and Kirby was dumfounded.

“You want to go to the pen?” he demanded, pointing his finger at his tenant, his white beard thrust belligerently forward. “You think you’d like it there, old man? Do you know how strong the evidence is against you? Don’t you know, Jeff, I wouldn’t have sent you up if it hadn’t been? Have you any notion how slim yo’ chance is? My God, man--old Donaldson!”

“He’s smart, Mr. Kirby!” cried Jeff. “Ever seen his books? Piled up to the ceilin’, clutterin’ up the winders and fireplaces?”

“An’ what kind of books? Ol’ law books in one room, yes. Novels an’ po’try in the other! It was the novels an’ po’try you saw; an’ it’s the novels an’ po’try he reads. Jeff, listen to me--what made him take the case, God only knows. He’s forgot about it by now. His mind is back on them ol’ Romans an’ centurions. There’s been millions an’ billions of people in the world he knows about--history an’ the like. What difference does one ol’ feller in the pen make to him? He was thinkin’ about ancient Babylon an’ Sodom an’ Gomorrah this mornin’. He don’t even know what he’s done. He’ll forget to come to the trial! Now let’s get down to brass tacks. You let me go to town to-morrow an’ tell him you’ve changed yo’ mind. It’s yo’ life you’re playin’ with, man! If you go to the pen for arson you’ll die there! You’ll never come out again! You’re too old!”

Jeff’s face knotted with pain. But he was true to his simple code. “It--it’s too late, Squire. I’ve give him the case. It wouldn’t be fair--no, it wouldn’t be fair.”

On the third day of the March term of court, at a quarter of nine in the morning, pale and drawn of face, old Jeff climbed the spiral stairs of the courthouse with Squire Kirby, grimly silent, beside him. Only one communication, in all the weeks that had elapsed since Jeff’s visit to him, had Colonel Donaldson sent. That was a crisp notice to appear this morning in court.

Behind them followed Bill Carson and his wife, and little Ella. A strange postscript to the notice had read: “I’m requesting that Ella Carson be present in court.”

“He’s all balled up,” Kirby had sneered when he read it. “He likely thinks it was Ella Carson that was present at the sto’ that night instead of Sam Raine’s wife!”

Down the aisle they passed, the crowd that was already filling the court-room turning to look at them curiously. Kirby shot a quick glance at the lawyers’ tables inside the bar rail.

“He ain’t even here!” he whispered to Jeff. “I hope to God he’s forgot. Then the co’t will give you a _lawyer_!”

The sheriff pointed out the table for the defendant and his lawyer. Kirby sat down beside Jeff; the Carsons found a place on the front bench of the main court-room.

“Silence in the court!” cried the sheriff.

Overawed, and with a queer feeling that he was choking, old Jeff saw the judge enter in his black robes, while the courthouse rose and stood until His Honor was seated. Yonder in an ante-room, laughing and chatting, he made out young Burton Evans, prosecuting attorney, strong, ruddy, confident. And then, last, down the aisle came old Colonel Donaldson, dressed like a preacher or an undertaker, in a long black coat with a narrow white tie. He shook hands flabbily; he walked over to the table below the clerk’s desk and carefully placed on it a small bundle, wrapped in paper.

He came back and sat down at his table, with Jeff between him and Kirby. The court grew quiet. In a haze the old man rose, Donaldson beside him. Crisp, quick, accusing, Burton Evans, glancing fiercely now and then into the old man’s eyes, read off the indictment, long, meaningless, full of legal phrases. The jury was picked, Donaldson after a few careless questions, discarding six of them, then relapsing into his chair. The trial of old Jeff Potter was on.

* * * * *

It was in some respects the strangest case ever tried in that old court-room; for Colonel Donaldson, sitting listless and abstracted beside his client, lived up to the worst predictions of Kirby. He just let everything slide. The judge, an old man himself, looked now and then at this strange lawyer for the defense with something like a frown. Jeff was too dazed to say anything. Only Kirby fought--fought in angry whispers, leaning across Jeff, his eyes blazing into Donaldson’s.

Three witnesses for the State told the same story of the row in the store. The negroes who had passed along the road described having seen him going toward the store about twelve o’clock that night. He had stopped, they said, as if to hide, and hadn’t answered when they called him by name. No, he didn’t have a lantern, or if he had one it wasn’t lit.

“Ask ’em,” whispered Kirby to Donaldson, “how they know it was Jeff Potter in the dark. Ask ’em, sir. Ask ’em!”

“Why, my dear sir,” retorted Donaldson in a whisper hard and dry, “my client here doesn’t even deny it.”