Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Old Judge Priest

“Fall in – by twos!” commanded Judge Priest. “Forward – march!”

Half a minute later the gasjets that lighted Kamleiter’s Hall lighted only emptiness – an empty chest in a corner; empty chairs, some overturned on their sides, some upright on their legs; an empty hall doorway opening on an empty patch of darkness; and one of Judge Priest’s flannel-lined galoshes, gaping emptily where it had been forgotten.

From the street below rose a measured thud of feet on the hard-packed snow. Forrest’s Cavalry was on the march!

With bent backs straightening to the call of a high, strong impulse; with gimpy, gnarled legs rising and falling in brisk unison; with heads held high and chests puffed out; with their leader in front of them and their flag going before them – Forrest’s Cavalry went forward. Once and once only the double line stopped as it traversed the town, lying snug and for the most part still under its blanketing, of snow.

As the little column of old men swung round the first corner below Kamleiter’s Hall, the lights coming through the windows of Tony Palassi’s fruit shop made bright yellow patches on the white path they trod.

“Halt!” ordered Judge Priest suddenly; and he quit his place in the lead and made for the doorway.

“If you’re looking for Tony to go along and translate you’re wasting time, Judge,” sang’ out Mr. Crump. “He’s out-of town.”

“Is he?” said Judge Priest. “Well, that’s too bad!”

As though to make sure, he peered in through the glassed upper half of the fruitshop door. Within might be seen Mrs. Delia Callahan Palassi, wife of the proprietor, putting the place to rights before locking it up for the night; and at her skirts tagged Master Antonio Wolfe Tone Palassi, aged seven, only son and sole heir of the same, a round-bellied, red-cheeked little Italian-Irish-American. The judge put his hand on the latch and jiggled it.

“I tell you Tony’s not there,” repeated Mr. Crump impatiently.

If the judge heard him he paid no heed. He went through that door, leaving his command outside, as one might go who knew exactly what he was about. Little Tony Wolfe Tone recognised an old friend and came, gurgling a welcome, to greet him. Most of the children in town knew Judge Priest intimately, but little Tony Wolfe Tone was a particular favourite of his; and by the same token he was a particular favourite of Tony’s.

Whatever Judge Priest said to Mrs. Palassi didn’t take long for the saying of it; yet it must have been an argument powerfully persuading and powerfully potent. It is possible – mind you, I don’t make the positive assertion, but it is possible – he reminded her that the blood of a race of fighting kings ran in her veins; for in less than no time at all, when Judge Priest reissued from the fruit shop, there rode pack-fashion on his back a little figure so well bundled up against the cold that only a pair of big brown Italian eyes and a small, tiptilted Irish nose showed themselves, to prove that Judge Priest’s burden was not a woolly Teddy-bear, but a veritable small boy. No; I’m wrong there. One other thing proved it – a woman standing in the doorway, wringing her apron in her hands, her face ablaze with mother love and mother pride and mother fear, watching the hurrying procession as it moved down the wintry street straight into the red glare on ahead.

The flimsy framework of resiny pine burned fast, considering that much snow had lain on the roof and much snow had melted and run down the sides all day, to freeze again with the coming of nighttime. One end of the barracks had fallen into a muddle of black-charred ruination. The fire ate its way along steadily, purring and crackling and spitting as its red teeth bit into the wetted boards. Above, the whole sky was aglare with its wavering red reflections. The outlines of the bowl-shaped flat stood forth distinctly revealed in the glow of that great wooden brazier, and the snow that covered the earth was channelled across with red streaks, like spilt blood.

Here, against the nearermost bank, the foreigners were clumped in a tight, compact black huddle, all scared, but not so badly scared that they would not fight. Yonder, across the snow, through the gap where a side street debouched at a gentle slope into the hollow, the mob advanced – men and half-grown boys – to the number of perhaps four hundred, coming to get the man who had stabbed Beaver Yancy and string him up on the spot – and maybe to get a few of his friends and string them up as an added warning to all Dagos. They came on and came on until a space of not more than seventy-five yards separated the mob and the mob’s prospective victims. From the advancing mass a growling of many voices rose. Rampant, unloosed mischief was in the sound.

Somebody who was drunk yelled out shrill profanity and then laughed a maudlin laugh. The group against the bank kept silent. Theirs was the silence of a grim and desperate resolution. Their only shelter had been fired over their heads; they were beleaguered and ringed about with enemies; they had nowhere to run for safety, even had they been minded to run. So they would fight. They made ready with their weapons of defence – such weapons as they had.

A man who appeared to hold some manner of leadership over the rest advanced a step from the front row of them. In his hand he held an old-fashioned cap-and-ball pistol at full cock. He raised his right arm and sighted along the levelled barrel at a spot midway between him and the oncoming crowd. Plainly he meant to fire when the first of his foes crossed an imaginary line. He squinted up his-eye, taking a careful aim; and he let his trigger finger slip gently inside the trigger guard – but he never fired.

On top of the hill, almost above his head, a bugle blared out. A fife and a drum cut in, playing something jiggy and brisk; and over the crest and down into the flat, two by two, marched a little column of old men, following after a small silken flag which flicked and whispered in the wind, and led by a short, round-bodied commander, who held by the hand a little briskly trotting figure of a child. Tony Wolfe Tone had grown too heavy for the judge to carry him all the way.

Out across the narrow space between the closing-in mob and the closed-in foreigners the marchers passed, their feet sinking ankle-deep into the crusted snow. Their leader gave a command; the music broke off and they spread out in single file, taking station, five feet apart from one another, so that between the two hostile groups a living hedge was interposed. And so they stood, with their hands down at their sides, some facing to the west, where the Italians were herded together, some facing toward the east, where the would-be lynchers, stricken with a great amazement, had come to a dead stand.

Judge Priest, still holding little Tony Wolfe Tone’s small mittened hand fast in his, spoke up, addressing the mob. His familiar figure was outlined against the burning barracks beyond him and behind him. His familiar whiny voice he lifted to so high a pitch that every man and boy there heard him.

“Feller citizens,” he stated, “this is part of Forrest’s Cavalry you see here. We done soldierin’ oncet and we’ve turned soldiers ag’in; but we ain’t armed – none of us. We’ve only got our bare hands. Ef you come on we can’t stop you with guns; but we ain’t agoin’ to budge, and ef you start shootin’ you’ll shorely git some of us. So ez a personal favour to me and these other gentlemen, I’d like to ast you jest to stand still where you are and not to shoot till after you see what we’re fixrin’ to try to do. That’s agreeable to you-all, ain’t it? You’ve got the whole night ahead of you – there’s no hurry, is there, boys?”

He did not wait for any answer from anyone. By name he knew a good half of them; by sight he knew the other half. And they all knew him; and they knew Tony Palassi’s boy; and they knew Father Minor, who stood at his right hand; and they knew the lame blacksmith and the little bench-legged Jewish merchant, and the rich banker and the poor carpenter, and the leading wholesaler, and all the other old men who stretched away from the judge in an uneven line, like fence posts for a fence that had not been built. They would not shoot yet; and, as though fully convinced in his own mind they would bide where they were until he was done, and relying completely on them to keep their unspoken promise, Judge Priest half-turned his back on the members of the mob and bent over little Tony.

“Little feller,” he said, “you ain’t skeered, are you?”

Tony looked up at his friend and shook his head stoutly. Tony was not scared. It was as good as play to Tony – all this was.

“That’s my sandy little pardner,” said Judge Priest; and he put his hands under Tony’s arms and heaved the child back up on his shoulders, and swung himself about so that he and Tony faced the huddle of silent figures in the shadow of the bank.

“You see all them men yonder, don’t you, boy?” he prompted. “Well, now you speak up ez loud ez you can, and you tell ‘em whut I’ve been tellin’ you to say all the way down the street ever since we left your mammy. You tell ‘em I’m the big judge of the big court. Tell ‘em there’s one man among ‘em who must come on and go with me. He’ll know and they’ll know which man I mean. Tell ‘em that man ain’t goin’ to be hurt ef he comes now. Tell ‘em that they ain’t none of ‘em goin’ to be hurt ef they all do what I say. Tell ‘em Father Minor is here to show ‘em to a safe, warm place where they kin spend the night. Kin you remember all that, sonny-boy? Then tell ‘em in Eyetalian – quick and loud.”

And Tony Wolfe Tone told them. Unmindful of the hundreds of eyes that were upon him, even forgetting for a minute to watch the fire – Tony opened wide his small mouth and in the tongue of his father’s people, richened perhaps by the sweet brogue of his mother’s land, and spiced here and there with a word or two of savoury good American slang, he gave the message a piping utterance.

They hearkened and they understood. This baby, this bambino, speaking to them in a polyglot tongue they, nevertheless, could make out – surely he did not lie to them! And the priest of their own faith, standing in the snow close by the child, would not betray them. They knew better than that. Perhaps to them the flag, the drum, the fife, the bugle, the faint semblance of military formation maintained by these volunteer rescuers who had appeared so opportunely, promising succour and security and a habitation for the night – perhaps all this symbolised to them organised authority and organised protection, just as Judge Priest, in a flash of inspiration back in Kamleiter’s Hall, had guessed that it might.

Their leader, the man who held the pistol, advanced a pace or two and called out something; and when Tony Wolfe, from his perch on the old judge’s shoulders, had answered back, the man, as though satisfied, turned and might be seen busily confabbing with certain of his mates who clustered about him, gesticulating.

“Whut did he say, boy?” asked Judge Priest, craning his neck to look up.

“He say, Mister Judge, they wants to talk it over,” replied Tony, craning his neck to look down.

“And whut did you say to him then?”

“I say to him: ‘Go to it, kiddo!’”

In the sheltering crotch of little Tony’s two plump bestraddling legs, which encircled his neck, the old judge chuckled to himself. A wave of laughter ran through the ranks of the halted mob – Tony’s voice had carried so far as that, and Tony’s mode of speech apparently had met with favour. Mob psychology, according to some students, is hard to fathom; according to others, easy.

From the midst of the knot of Sicilians a man stepped forth – not the tall man with the gun, but a little stumpy man who moved with a limp. Alone, he walked through the crispened snow until he came up to where the veterans stood, waiting and watching. The mob, all intently quiet once more, waited and watched too.

With a touch of the dramatic instinct that belongs to his race, he flung down a dirk knife at Judge Priest’s feet and held out both his hands in token of surrender. To the men who came there to take his life he gave no heed – not so much as a sidewise glance over his shoulder did he give them. He looked into the judge’s face and into the face of little Tony, and into the earnest face of the old priest alongside these two.

“Boys” – the judge lifted Tony down and, with a gesture, was invoking the attention of his townsmen – “boys, here’s the man who did the knifin’ this mornin’, givin’ himself up to my pertection – and yours. He’s goin’ along with me now to the county jail, to be locked up ez a prisoner. I’ve passed my word and the word of this whole town that he shan’t be teched nor molested whilst he’s on his way there, nor after he gits there. I know there ain’t a single one of you but stands ready to help me keep that promise. I’m right, ain’t I, boys?”

“Oh, hell, judge – you win!” sang out a member of the mob, afterward identified as one of Beaver Yancy’s close friends, in a humorously creditable imitation of the judge’s own earnest whine. And at that everybody laughed again and somebody started a cheer.

“I thought so,” replied the judge. “And now, boys, I’ve got an idea. I reckin, after trampin’ all the way down here in the snow, none of us want to tramp back home ag’in without doin’ somethin’ – we don’t feel like ez ef we want to waste the whole evenin’, do we? See that shack burnin’ down? Well, it’s railroad property; and we don’t want the railroad to suffer. Let’s put her out – let’s put her out with snowballs!” Illustrating his suggestion, he stooped, scooped up a double handful of snow, squeezed it into a pellet and awkwardly tossed it in the general direction of the blazing barracks. It flew wide of the mark and fell short of it; but his intention was good, that being conceded. Whooping joyously, four hundred men and half-grown boys, or thereabouts such a number, pouched their weapons and dug into the drifted whiteness.

“Hold on a minute – we’ll do it to soldier music!” shouted the judge, and he gave a signal. The drum beat then; and old Mr. Harrison Treese buried the fife in his white whiskers and ripped loose on the air the first bars of Yankee Doodle. The judge molded another snowball for himself.

“All set? Then, ready! – aim! – fire!”

Approximately two hundred snowballs battered and splashed the flaming red target. A great sizzling sound rose.

Just after this first volley the only gun-powder shot of the evening was fired. It came out afterward that as a man named Ike Bowers stooped over to gather up some snow his pistol, which he had forgotten to uncock, slipped out of his pocket and fell on a broken bit of planking. There was a darting needle of fire and a smart crack. The Sicilians wavered for a minute, swaying back and forth, then steadied themselves as Father Minor stepped in among them with his arms uplifted; but Sergeant Jimmy Bagby put his hand to his head in a puzzled sort of way, spun round, and laid himself down full length in the snow.

It was nearly midnight. The half-burned hull of the barracks in the deserted bottom below the Old Fort still smoked a little, but it no longer blazed. Its late occupants – all save one – slept in the P. A. & O. V. roundhouse, half a mile away, under police and clerical protection; this one was in a cell in the county jail, safe and sound, and it is probable that he slept also. That linguistic prodigy, Master Tony Wolfe Tone Palassi, being excessively awearied, snored in soft, little-boy snores at his mother’s side; and over him she cried tears of pride and visited soft kisses on his flushed, upturned face. To the family of the Palassis much honour had accrued – not forgetting the Callahans. At eleven o’clock the local correspondent of the Courier-Journal and other city papers had called up to know where he might get copies of her son’s latest photograph for widespread publication abroad.

The rest of the town, generally speaking, was at this late hour of midnight, also abed; but in the windows of Doctor Lake’s office, on the second floor of the Planters’ Bank building, lights burned, and on the leather couch in Doctor Lake’s inner room a pudgy figure, which breathed heavily, was stretched at full length, its hands passively flat on its breast, its head done up in many windings of cotton batting and surgical bandages. Above this figure stood old Doctor Lake, holding in the open palm of his left hand a small, black, flattened object. The door leading to the outer office opened a foot and the woe-begone face and dripping eyes of Judge Priest appeared through the slit.

“Get out!” snapped Doctor Lake without turning his head.

“Lew, it’s me!” said Judge Priest in the whisper that any civilised being other than a physician or a trained nurse instinctively assumes in the presence of a certain dread visitation. “I jest natchelly couldn’t wait no longer – not another minute! I wouldn’t ‘a’ traded one hair off of Jimmy Bagby’s old grey head fur all the Beaver Yancys that ever was whelped. Lew, is there a chance?”

“Billy Priest,” said Doctor Lake severely, “the main trouble with you is that you’re so liable to go off half-cocked. Beaver Yancy’s not going to die – you couldn’t kill him with an ax. I don’t know how that story got round to-night. And Jim Bagby’s all right too, except he’s going to have one whale of a headache tomorrow. The bullet glanced round his skull and stopped under the scalp. Here ‘tis – I just got it out… Oh, Lord! Now look what you’ve done, bursting in here and blubbering all around the place!”

The swathed form on the couch sat up and cocked an eye out from beneath a low-drawn fold of cheesecloth.

“Is that you, Judge?” demanded Sergeant Bagby in his usual voice and in almost his usual manner.

“Yes, Jimmy; it’s me.”

Judge Priest projected himself across the room toward his friend. He didn’t run; he didn’t jump; he didn’t waddle – he projected himself.

“Yes, Jimmy, it’s me.”

“Are any of the other boys out there in the other room?”

“Yes, Jimmy; they’re all out there, waitin’.”

“Well, quit snifflin’ and call ‘em right in!” said Sergeant Bagby crisply. “I’ve been tryin’ fur years to git somebody to set still long enough fur me to tell ‘em that there story about Gin’ral John C. Breckenridge and Gin’ral Simon Bolivar Buckner; and it seems like somethin’ always comes up to interrupt me. This looks like my chance to finish it, fur oncet. Call them boys all in!”

VIII. DOUBLE-BARRELLED JUSTICE

A LONG and limber man leaned against a doorjamb of the Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant, inhaling the mild dear air of the autumnal day and, with the air of a man who amply is satisfied by the aspect of things, contemplating creation at large as it revealed itself along Franklin Street. In such posture he suggested more than anything else a pair of callipers endowed with reason. For this, our disesteemed fellow citizen of the good old days which are gone, was probably the shortest-waisted man in the known world. In my time I have seen other men who might be deemed to be excessively short waisted, but never one to equal in this unique regard Old King Highpockets. A short span less of torso, and a dime museum would have claimed him, sure.

You would think me a gross exaggerator did I attempt to tell you how high up his legs forked; suffice it to say that, as to his suspenders, they crossed the spine just below his back collar button. Wherefore, although born a Magee and baptised an Elmer, it was inevitable in this community that from the days of his youth onward he should have been called what they did call him. To his six feet five and a half inches of lank structural design he owed the more descriptive part of his customary title. The rest of it – the regal-sounding part of it – had been bestowed upon him in his ripened maturity after he achieved for himself local dominance in an unhallowed but a lucrative calling.

Sitting down the above-named seemed a person of no more than ordinary height, this being by reason of the architectural peculiarities just referred to. But standing up, as at the present moment, he reared head and gander neck above the run of humanity. From this personal eminence he now looked about him and below him as he took the gun. There was not a cloud in the general sky; none in his private and individual sky either. He had done well the night before and likewise the night before that; he expected to do as well or better the coming night. Upstairs over the Blue Jug King Highpockets took in gambling – both plain and fancy gambling.

There passed upon the opposite side of the street one Beck Giltner. With him the tall man in the doorway exchanged a distant and formal greeting expressed in short nods. Between these two no great amount of friendliness was lost. Professionally speaking they were opponents. Beck Giltner was by way of being in the card and dicing line himself, but he was known as a square gambler, meaning by that, to most of mankind he presented a plane surface of ostensible honesty and fair dealing, whereas within an initiated circle rumour had it that his rival of the Blue Jug was so crooked he threw a shadow like a brace and bit. Beck Giltner made it a rule of business to strip only those who could afford to lose their pecuniary peltries. Minors, drunkards, half-wits and chronic losers were barred from his tables. But all was fish – I use the word advisedly – all was fish that came to the net of Highpockets.

Beck Giltner passed upon his business. So did other and more reputable members of society. A short straggling procession of gentlemen went by, all headed westward, and each followed at a suitable interval by his negro “boy,” who might be anywhere between seventeen and seventy years of age. An hour or two later these travellers would return, bound for their offices downtown. Going back they would mainly travel in pairs, and their trailing black servitors would be burdened, front and back, with “samples” – sheafs of tobacco bound together and sealed with blobs of red sealing wax and tagged. For this was in the time before the Trust and the Night Riders had between them disrupted the trade down in the historic Black Patch, and the mode of marketing the weed by loose leaf was a thing as yet undreamed of. They would be prizing on the breaks in Key & Buckner’s long warehouse pretty soon. The official auctioneer had already reported himself, and to the ear for blocks round came distantly a sharp rifle-fire clatter as the warehouse hands knocked the hoops off the big hogsheads and the freed staves rattled down in windrows upon the uneven floor.

A locomotive whistled at the crossing two squares up the street, and the King smiled a little smile and rasped a lean and avaricious chin with a fabulously bony hand. He opined that locomotive would be drawing the monthly pay car which was due. The coming of the pay car meant many sportive railroad men – shopmen, yardmen, trainmen – abroad that evening with the good new money burning holes in the linings of their pockets.

Close by him, just behind him, a voice spoke his name – his proper name which he seldom heard – and the sound of it rubbed the smile off his face and turned it on the instant into a grim, long war-mask of a face.

“Mister Magee – Elmer – just a minute, please!”

Without shifting his body he turned his head and over the peak of one shoulder he regarded her dourly. She was a small woman and she was verging on middle age, and she was an exceedingly shabby little woman. Whatever of comeliness she might ever have had was now and forever gone from her. Hard years and the strain of them had ground the colour in and rubbed the plumpness out of her face, leaving in payment therefor deep lines and a loose skin-sac under the chin and hollows in the cheeks. The shapeless, sleazy black garments that she wore effectually concealed any remnant of grace that might yet abide in her body. Only her eyes testified she had ever been anything except a forlorn and drooping slattern. They were big bright black eyes.

This briefly was the aspect of the woman who stood alongside him, speaking his name. She had come up so quietly that he never heard her. But then her shoes were old and worn and had lasted long past the age when shoes will squeak.

He made no move to raise his hat. Slantwise across the high ridge of his twisted shoulder he looked at her long and contemptuously.

“Well,” he said at length, “back ag’in, huh? Well, whut is it now, huh?”

She put up a little work-gnarled hand to a tight skew of brown hair streaked thickly with grey. In the gesture was something essentially feminine – something pathetic too.

“I reckon you know already what it is, Elmer,” she said. “It’s about my boy – it’s about Eddie.”

“I told you before and I tell you ag’in I ain’t your boy’s guardeen,” he answered her.

“How comes you keep on pesterin’ me – I ain’t got that boy of yourn?”

“Yes, you have got him,” she said, her voice shaking and threatening to break. “You’ve got him body and soul. And I want him – me, his mother. I want you to give him back to me.”

His gaze lifted until he considered empty space a foot above her head. Slowly he reached an angular arm back under his right shoulder blade and fished about there until he had extracted from a hip pocket a long, black rectangle of navy chewing tobacco that was like a shingle newly dipped in creosote. It was a virgin plug – he bought a fresh one every morning and by night would make a ragged remnant of it. With the deliberation of a man who has plenty of time to spare, he set his stained front teeth in a corner of it and gnawed off a big scallop of the rank stuff. His tongue herded it back into his jaw, where it made a lump. He put the plug away. She stood silently through this, kneading her hands together, a most humble suppliant awaiting this monarch’s pleasure.

“You told me all that there foolishness the other time,” he said. “Ain’t you got no new song to sing this time? Ef you have I’ll listen, mebbe. Ef you ain’t I’ll tell you good-by.”

“Elmer,” she said, “what kind of a man are you? Haven’t you got any compassions at all? Why, Elmer, your pa and my pa were soldiers together in the same regiment. You and me were raised together right here in this town. We went to the same schoolhouse together as children – don’t you remember? You weren’t a mean boy then. Why, I used to think you was right good-hearted. For the sake of those old days won’t you do something about Eddie? It’s wrong and it’s sinful – what you’re doing to him and the rest of the young boys in this town.”

“Ef you think that why come to me?” he demanded. “Why not go to the police with your troubles?” He split his lips back, and a double row of discoloured snags that projected from the gums like little chisels showed between them.

“And have ‘em laugh in my face, same as you’re doing now? Have ‘em tell me to go and get the evidence? Oh, I know you’re safe enough there. I reckon you know who your friends are. You shut up when the Grand Jury meets; and once in a while when things get hot for you, like they did when that Law and Order League was so busy, you close up your place; and once in a while you go up to court and pay a fine and then you keep right on. But it’s not you that’s paying the fine – I know that mighty good and well. The money to pay it comes out of the pockets of poor women in this town – wives and mothers and sisters.

“Oh, there’s others besides me that are suffering this minute. There’s that poor, little, broken-hearted Mrs. Shetler, out there on Wheelis Street – the one whose husband had to run away because he fell short in his accounts with the brickyard. And there’s that poor, old Mrs. Postelwaite, that’s about to lose the home that she’s worked her fingers to the bone, mighty near, to help pay for, and she’ll be left without a roof over her head in her old age because her husband’s went and lost every cent he can get his hands on playing cards in your place, and so now they can’t meet their mortgage payments. And there’s plenty of others if the truth was only known. And oh, there’s me and my boy – the only boy I’ve got. Elmer Magee, how you can sleep nights I don’t see!” “I don’t,” he said. “I work nights.” His wit appealed to him, for he grinned again. “Say, listen here!” His mood had changed and he spat the next words out. “Ef you think I ain’t good company for that son of yourn, why don’t you make him stay away from me? I ain’t hankerin’ none fur his society.”

“I’ve tried to, Elmer – God knows I’ve tried to, time and time again. That’s why I’ve come back to you once more to ask you if you won’t help me. I’ve gone down on my knees alone and prayed for help and I’ve prayed with Eddie, too, and I’ve pleaded with him. He don’t run round town carousing like some boys his age do. He don’t drink and he’s not wild, except it just seems like he can’t leave gambling alone. Oh, he’s promised me and promised me he’d quit, but he’s weak – and he’s only a boy. I’ve kept track of his losings as well as I could, and I know that first and last he’s lost nearly two hundred dollars playing cards with you and your crowd. That may not be much to you, Elmer – I reckon you’re rich – but it’s a lot to a lone woman like me. It means bread and meat and house rent and clothes to go on my back – that’s what it means to me. My feet are mighty near out of these shoes I’ve got on, and right this minute there’s not a cent in the house. I don’t say you cheated him, but the money’s gone and you got it. And it’s ruining my boy. He’s only a boy – he won’t be twenty-one till the twelfth day of next April. If only you wouldn’t let him come inside your place he’d behave himself – I know he would.

“So you see, Elmer, you’re the only one that can make him go straight – that’s why I’ve come back to you this second time. I reckon he ain’t so much to blame. You know – yes, you’ve got reason to know better than anybody else – that his father before him couldn’t leave playing cards alone. I hoped I could raise Eddie different. As a little thing I used to tell him playing cards were the devil’s own playthings. But it seems like he can’t just help it. I reckon it’s in his blood.”