Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

“Cap’n Buck! Cap’n Buck!” sputtered Jeff, so excited that he stuttered. “P-please, suh, is you seen my boss – Jedge Priest? I suttinly must see him right away. This here next heat is goin’ to be thro wed.”

It was rarely that Captain Buck Owings raised his voice above a low, deliberate drawl. He raised it a trifle now.

“What’s that, boy?” he demanded. “Who’s goin’ to throw this race?”

He caught up with Jeff and hurried along by him, Jeff explaining what he knew in half a dozen panted sentences. As Captain Buck Owings’ mind took in the situation, Captain Buck Owings’ gray eyes began to flicker a little.

Nowhere in sight was there any one who looked like the judge. Indeed, there were few persons at all to be seen on the scarred green turf across which they sped and those few were hurrying to join the crowds that packed thick upon the seats of the grandstand, and thicker along the infield fence and the homestretch. Somewhere beyond, the stable bell jangled. The little betting ring was empty almost and the lone bookmaker was turning his blackboard down.

His customary luck served Jeff in this crisis, however. From beneath a cuddy under the grandstand that bore a blue board lettered with the word “Refreshments” appeared the large, slow-moving form of the old judge. He was wiping his mouth with an enormous handkerchief as he headed deliberately for the infield fence. His venerable and benevolent pink face shone afar and Jeff literally flung himself at him.

“Oh, Jedge!” he yelled. “Oh, Jedge; please, suh, wait jes’ a minute!”

In some respects Judge Priest might be said to resemble Kipling’s East Indian elephant. He was large as to bulk and conservative as to his bodily movements; he never seemed to hurry, and yet when he set out to arrive at a given place in a given time he would be there in due season. He faced about and propelled himself toward the queerly matched pair approaching him with such haste.

As they met, Captain Buck Owings began to speak and his voice was back again at its level monotone, except that it had a little steaming sound in it, as though Captain Buck Owings were beginning to seethe and simmer gently somewhere down inside of himself.

“Judge Priest, suh,” said Captain Buck, “it looks like there’d be some tall swindlin’ done round here soon unless we can stop it. This boy of yours heard something. Jeff tell the judge what you heard just now.” And Jeff told, the words bubbling out of him in a stream:

“It’s done all fixed up betwixt them w’ite gen’lemen. That there Mr. Jackson Berry he’s been tormentin’ the stallion ontwell he break and lose the fust two heats. Now, w’en the money is all on the mare, they goin’ to turn round and do it the other way. Over on the backstretch that Mr. Van Wallace he’s goin’ to spite and tease Minnie May ontwell she go all to pieces, so the stallion’ll be jest natchelly bound to win; an’ ‘en they’ll split up the money amongst ‘em!”

“Ah-hah!” said Judge Priest; “the infernal scoundrels!” Even in this emergency his manner of speaking was almost deliberate; but he glanced toward the bookmaker’s block and made as if to go toward it.

“That there Yankee bookmaker gen’leman he’s into it too,” added Jeff. “I p’intedly heared ‘em both mention his name.”

“I might speak a few words in a kind of a warnin’ way to those two,” purred Captain Buck Owings. “I’ve got a right smart money adventured on this trottin’ race myself.” And he turned toward the track.

“Too late for that either, son,” said the old judge, pointing. “Look yonder!”

A joyful rumble was beginning to thunder from the grandstand. The constables had cleared the track, and from up beyond came the glint of the flashing sulky-spokes as the two conspirators wheeled about to score down and be off.

“Then I think maybe I’ll have to attend to ‘em personally after the race,” said Captain Buck Owings in a resigned tone.

“Son,” counseled Judge Priest, “I’d hate mightily to see you brought up for trial before me for shootin’ a rascal – especially after the mischief was done. I’d hate that mightily – I would so.”

“But, Judge,” protested Captain Buck Owings, “I may have to do it! It oughter be done. Nearly everybody here has bet on Minnie May. It’s plain robbin’ and stealin’!”

“That’s so,” assented the judge as Jeff danced a dog of excitement just behind him – “that’s so. It’s bad enough for those two to be robbin’ their own fellow-citizens; but it’s mainly the shame on our county fair I’m thinkin’ of.” The old judge had been a director and a stockholder of the County Jockey Club for twenty years or more. Until now its record had been clean. “Tryin’ to declare the result off afterward wouldn’t do much good. It would be the word of three white men against a nigger – and nobody would believe the nigger,” added Captain Buck Owings, finishing the sentence for him.

“And the scandal would remain jest the same,” bemoaned the old judge. “Buck, my son, unless we could do something before the race it looks like it’s hopeless. Ah!”

The roar from the grandstand above their heads deepened, then broke up into babblings and exclamations. The two trotters had swung past the mark, but Minnie May had slipped a length ahead at the tape and the judges had sent them back again. There would be a minute or two more of grace anyhow. The eyes of all three followed the nodding heads of the horses back up the stretch. Then Judge Priest, still watching, reached out for Jeff and dragged him round in front of him, dangling in his grip like a hooked black eel.

“Jeff, don’t I see a gate up yonder in the track fence right at the first turn?” he asked.

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff eagerly. “‘Tain’t locked neither. I come through it myse’f today. It opens on to a little road whut leads out past the stables to the big pike. I kin – ”

The old judge dropped his wriggling servitor and had Captain Buck Owings by the shoulder with one hand and was pointing with the other up the track, and was speaking, explaining something or other in a voice unusually brisk for him.

“See yonder, son!” he was saying. “The big oak on the inside – and the gate is jest across from it!”

Comprehension lit up the steamboat captain’s face, but the light went out as he slapped his hand back to his hip pocket – and slapped it flat.

“I knew I’d forgot something!” he lamented, despairingly. “Needin’ one worse than I ever did in my whole life – and then I leave mine home in my other pants!”

He shot the judge a look. The judge shook his head.

“Son,” he said, “the circuit judge of the first judicial district of Kintucky don’t tote such things.”

Captain Buck Owings raised a clenched fist to the blue sky above and swore impotently. For the third time the grandstand crowd was starting its roar. Judge Priest’s head began to waggle with little sidewise motions.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King’s Hell hounds, rambled with weaving indirectness round the corner of the grandstand not twenty feet from them. His gangrened cartridge-box was trying to climb up over his left shoulder from behind, his eyes were heavy with a warm and comforting drowsiness, and his Springfield’s iron butt-plate was scurfing up the dust a yard behind him as he hauled the musket along by the muzzle.

The judge saw him first; but, even as he spoke and pointed, Captain Buck Owings caught the meaning and jumped. There was a swirl of arms and legs as they struck, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, sorely shocked, staggered back against the wall with a loud grunt of surprise and indignation.

Half a second later, side by side, Captain Buck Owings and Judge Priest’s Jeff sped northward across the earth, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby staggered toward the only comforter near at hand, with his two empty arms upraised. Filled with a great and sudden sense of loss he fell upon Judge Priest’s neck, almost bearing his commander down by the weight of his grief.

“Carried her four years!” he exclaimed piteously; “four endurin’ years, Judge, and not a single dam’ Yankee ever laid his hand on her! Carried her ever since, and nobody ever dared to touch her! And now to lose her this away!”

His voice, which had risen to a bleat, sank to a sob and he wept unrestrainedly on the old judge’s shoulder. It looked as though these two old men were wrestling together, catch-as-catch-can.

The judge tried to shake his distressed friend off, but the sergeant clung fast. Over the bent shoulders of the other the judge saw the wheels flash by, going south, horses and drivers evened up. The “Go!” of the starting judge was instantly caught up by five hundred spectators and swallowed in a crackling yell. Oblivious of all these things the sergeant raised his sorrowing head and a melancholy satisfaction shone through his tears.

“I lost her,” he said; “but, by gum, Judge, it took all four of ‘em to git her away from me, didn’t it?”

None, perhaps, in all that crowd except old Judge Priest saw the two fleeting figures speeding north. All other eyes there were turned to the south, where the county’s rival trotters swung round the first turn, traveling together like teammates. None marked Captain Buck Owings as, strangely cumbered, he scuttled across the track from the outer side to the inner and dived like a rabbit under the fence at the head of the homestretch, where a big oak tree with a three-foot bole cast its lengthening shadows across the course. None marked Judge Priest’s Jeff coiling down like a black-snake behind an unlatched wooden gate almost opposite where the tree stood.

None marked these things, because at this moment something direful happened. Minnie May, the favorite, was breaking badly on the back length. Almost up on her hindlegs she lunged out ahead of her with her forefeet, like a boxer. That far away it looked to the grandstand crowds as though Van Wallace had lost his head entirely. One instant he was savagely lashing the mare along the flanks, the next he was pulling her until he was stretched out flat on his back, with his head back between the painted sulky wheels. And Blandville Boy, steady as a clock, was drawing ahead and making a long gap between them.

Blandville Boy came on grandly – far ahead at the half; still farther ahead nearing the three-quarters. All need for breaking her gait being now over, crafty Van Wallace had steadied the mare and again she trotted perfectly – trotted fast too; but the mischief was done and she was hopelessly out of it, being sure to be beaten and lucky if she saved being distanced.

The whole thing had worked beautifully, without a hitch. This thought was singing high in Jackson Berry’s mind as he steered the stud-horse past the three-quarter post and saw just beyond the last turn the straightaway of the homestretch, opening up empty and white ahead of him. And then, seventy-five yards away, he beheld a most horrifying apparition!

Against a big oak at the inner-track fence, sheltered from the view of all behind, but in full sight of the turn, stood Captain Buck Owings, drawing down on him with a huge and hideous firearm. How was Jackson Berry, thus rudely jarred from pleasing prospects, to know that Sergeant Jimmy Bagby’s old Springfield musket hadn’t been fired since Appomattox – that its lode was a solid mass of corroded metal, its stock worm-eaten walnut and its barrel choked up thick with forty years of rust! All Jackson Berry knew was that the fearsome muzzle of an awful weapon was following him as he moved down toward it and that behind the tall mule’s ear of a hammer and the brass guard of the trigger he saw the cold, forbidding gray of Captain Buck Owings’ face and the colder, more forbidding, even grayer eye of Captain Buck Owings – a man known to be dangerous when irritated – and tolerably easy to irritate!

Before that menacing aim and posture Jackson Berry’s flesh turned to wine jelly and quivered on his bones. His eyes bulged out on his cheeks and his cheeks went white to match his eyes. Had it not been for the stallion’s stern between them, his knees would have knocked together. Involuntarily he drew back on the reins, hauling in desperately until Blandville Boy’s jaws were pulled apart like the red painted mouth of a hobby-horse and his forelegs sawed the air. The horse was fighting to keep on to the nearing finish, but the man could feel the slugs of lead in his flinching body.

And then – and then – fifty scant feet ahead of him and a scanter twenty above where the armed madman stood – a wide gate flew open; and, as this gap of salvation broke into the line of the encompassing fence, the welcome clarion of Judge Priest’s Jeff rose in a shriek: “This way out, boss – this way out!”

It was a time for quick thinking; and to persons as totally, wholly scared as Jackson Berry was, thinking comes wondrous easy. One despairing half-glance he threw upon the goal just ahead of him and the other half on that unwavering rifle-muzzle, now looming so dose that he could catch the glint of its sights. Throwing himself far back in his reeling sulky Jackson Berry gave a desperate yank on the lines that lifted the sorely pestered stallion clear out of his stride, then sawed on the right-hand rein until he swung the horse’s head through the opening, grazing one wheel against a gatepost – and was gone past the whooping Jeff, lickety-split, down the dirt road, through the dust and out on the big road toward town.

Jeff slammed the gate shut and vanished instantly. Captain Buck Owings dropped his weapon into the long, rank grass and slid round the treetrunk. And half a minute later Van Wallace, all discomfited and puzzled, with all his fine hopes dished and dashed, sorely against his own will jogged Minnie May a winner past a grandstand that recovered from its dumb astonishment in ample time to rise and yell its approval of the result.

Judge Priest being a childless widower of many years’ standing, his household was administered for him by Jeff as general manager, and by Aunt Dilsey Turner as kitchen goddess. Between them the old judge fared well and they fared better. Aunt Dilsey was a master hand at a cookstove; but she went home at night, no matter what the state of the weather, wearing one of those long, wide capes – dolmans, I think they used to call them – that hung dear down to the knees, hiding the wearer’s hands and whatsoever the hands might be carrying.

It was a fad of Aunt Dilsey’s to bring one covered splint basket and one close-mouthed tin bucket with her when she came to work in the morning, and to take both of them away with her – under her dolman cape – at night; and in her cabin on Plunkett’s Hill she had a large family of her own and two paying boarders, all of whom had the appearance of being well nourished. If you, reader, are Southern-born, these seemingly trivial details may convey a meaning to your understanding.

So Aunt Dilsey Turner looked after the judge’s wants from the big old kitchen that was detached from the rest of the rambling white house, and Jeff had the run of his sideboard, his tobacco caddy, and his wardrobe. The judge was kept comfortable and they were kept happy, each respecting the other’s property rights.