The Prodigal Judge Part 18

"You're wanted," said the sheriff grimly, still keeping his hand on the judge's shoulder.

"For what?" demanded the judge thickly. The sheriff had no time in which to answer.

"I want my money!" shrieked the landlady.

"Your money--Mrs. Walker, you amaze me!" The judge drew himself up haughtily, in genuine astonishment.

"I want my money!" repeated Mrs. Walker in even more piercing tones.

"I am not aware that I owe you anything, madam. Thank G.o.d, I hold your receipted bill of recent date," answered the judge with chilling dignity.

"Good money--not this worthless tras.h.!.+" she shook a bill under his nose.

The judge recognized it as the one of which he had despoiled Hannibal.

"You have been catched pa.s.sing counterfeit," said the sheriff. A light broke on the judge, a light that dazzled and stunned. An officious and impatient gentleman tossed a looped end of the well-rope about his neck and the crowd yelled excitedly. This was something like--it had a taste for the man-hunt! The sheriff s.n.a.t.c.hed away the rope and dealt the officious gentleman a savage blow on the chin that sent him staggering backward into the arms of his friends.

"Now, see here, now--I'm going to arrest this old faller! I am going to put him in jail, and I ain't going to have no nonsense--do you hear me?"

he expostulated.

"I can explain--" cried the judge.

"Make him give me my money!" wailed Mrs Walker.

"Jezebel!" roared the judge, in a pa.s.sion of rage.

"Ca'm's the word, or you'll get 'em started!" whispered the sheriff.

The judge looked fearfully around. At his side stood Mahaffy, a yellow pallor splotching his thin cheeks. He seemed to be holding himself there by an effort.

"Speak to them, Solomon--speak to them--you know how I came by the money! Speak to them--you know I am innocent!" cried the judge, clutching his friend by the arm. Mahaffy opened his thin lips, but the crowd drowned his voice in a roar.

"He's his partner--"

"There's no evidence against him," said the sheriff.

A tall fellow, in a fringed hunting-s.h.i.+rt, shook a long finger under Mahaffy's aquiline nose.

"You scoot--that's what--you make tracks! And if we ever see your ugly face about here again, we'll--"

"You'll what?" inquired Mahaffy.

"We'll fix you out with feathers that won't molt, that's what!"

Mr. Mahaffy seemed to hesitate. His lean hands opened and closed, and he met the eyes of the crowd with a bitter, venomous stare. Some one gave him a shove and he staggered forward a step, snapping out a curse.

Before he could recover himself the shove was repeated.

"Lope on out of here!" yelled the tall fellow, who had first challenged his right to remain in Pleasantville or its environs. As the crowd fell apart to make way for him, willing hands were extended to give him the needed impetus, and without special volition of his own.

Mahaffy was hurried toward the road. His hat was knocked flat on his head--he turned with an angry snarl, the very embodiment of hate--but again he was thrust forward. And then, somehow, his walk became a run and the crowd started after him with delighted whoopings. Once more, and for the last time, he faced about, giving the judge a hopeless, despairing glance. His tormentors were s.n.a.t.c.hing up sods and stones and he had no choice. He turned, his long strides taking him swiftly over the ground, with the air full of missiles at his back.

Before he had gone a hundred yards he abandoned the road and, turning off across an unfenced field, ran toward the woods and swampy bottom.

Twenty men were in chase behind him. The judge was the sheriff's prisoner--that official had settled that point--but Mr. Mahaffy was common property, it was his cruel privilege to furnish excitement; his keen rage was almost equal to the fear that urged him on. Then the woods closed about him. His long legs, working tirelessly, carried him over fallen logs and through tall tangled thickets, the voices behind him growing more and more distant as he ran.

CHAPTER XII. THE FAMILY ON THE RAFT

That would unquestionably have been the end of Bob Yancy when he was shot out into the muddy waters of the Elk River, had not Mr.

Richard Keppel Cavendish, variously known as Long-Legged d.i.c.k, and Chills-and-Fever Cavendish, of Lincoln County, in the state of Tennessee, some months previously and after unprecedented mental effort on his part, decided that Lincoln County was no place for him. When he had established this idea firmly in his own mind and in the mind of Polly, his wife, he set about solving the problem of transportation.

Mr. Cavendish's paternal grandparent had drifted down the Holston and Tennessee; and Mr. Cavendish's father, in his son's youth, had poled up the Elk. Mr. Cavendish now determined to float down the Elk to its juncture with the Tennessee, down the Tennessee to the Ohio, and if need be, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and keep drifting until he found some spot exactly suited to his taste. Temperamentally, he was well adapted to drifting. No conception of vicarious activity could have been more congenial.

With this end in view he had toiled through late winter and early spring, building himself a raft on which to transport his few belongings and his numerous family; there were six little Cavendishes, and they ranged in years from four to eleven; there was in addition the baby, who was always enumerated separately. This particular infant Mr. Cavendish said he wouldn't take a million dollars for. He usually added feelingly that he wouldn't give a piece of chalk for another one.

June found him aboard his raft with all his earthly possessions bestowed about him, awaiting the rains and freshets that were to waft him effortless into a newer country where he should have a white man's chance. At last the rains came, and he cast off from the bank at that unsalubrious spot where his father had elected to build his cabin on a strip of level bottom subject to periodic inundation. Wis.h.i.+ng fully to profit by the floods and reach the big water without delay, Cavendish ran the raft twenty-four hours at a stretch, sleeping by day while Polly managed the great sweep, only calling him when some dangerous bit of the river was to be navigated. Thus it happened that as Murrell and Slosson were dragging Yancy down the lane, Cavendish was just rounding a bend in the Elk, a quarter of a mile distant. Leaning loosely against the long handle of his sweep, he was watching the lane of bright water that ran between the black shadows cast by the trees on either bank. He was in s.h.i.+rt and trousers, barefoot and bareheaded, and his face, mild and contemplative, wore an expression of dreamy contentment.

Suddenly its expression changed. He became alert and watchful. He had heard a dull splash. Thinking that some tree had been swept into the flood, he sought to pierce the darkness that lay along the sh.o.r.e. Five or six minutes pa.s.sed as the raft glided along without sound. He was about to relapse into his former att.i.tude of listless ease when he caught sight of some object in the eddy that swept alongside. Mr.

Cavendish promptly detached himself from the handle of the sweep and ran to the edge of the raft.

"Good Lord--what's that!" he gasped, but he already knew it was a face, livid and blood-streaked. Dropping on his knees he reached out a pair of long arms and made a dexterous grab, and his fingers closed on the collar of Yancy's s.h.i.+rt. "Neighbor, I certainly have got you!" said Cavendish, between his teeth. He drew Yancy close alongside the raft, and, slipping a hand under each arm, pulled him clear of the water. The swift current swept the raft on down the stream. It rode fairly in the center of the lane of light, but no eye had observed its pa.s.sing. Mr.

Cavendish stood erect and stared down at the blood-stained face, then he dropped on his knees again and began a hurried examination of the still figure. "There's a little life here--not much, but some--you was well worth fis.h.i.+ng up!" he said approvingly, after a brief interval. "Polly!"

he called, raising his voice.

This brought Mrs. Cavendish from one of the two cabins that occupied the center of the raft. She was a young woman, still very comely, though of a matronly plumpness. She was in her nightgown, and when she caught sight of Yancy she uttered a shriek and fled back into the shanty.

"I declare, d.i.c.k, you might ha' told a body you wa'n't alone!" she said reproachfully.

Her cry had aroused the other denizens of the raft. The tow heads of the six little Cavendishes rose promptly from a long bolster in the smaller of the two shanties, and as promptly six little Cavendishes, each draped in a single non-committal garment, apparently cut by one pattern and not at all according to the wearer's years or length of limb, tumbled forth from their shelter.

"Sho', Polly, he's senseless! But you dress and come here quick. Now, you young folks, don't you tetch him!" for the six small Cavendishes, excited beyond measure, were crowding and shoving for a nearer sight of Yancy. They began to pelt their father with questions. Who was it? Sho', in the river? Sho', all cut up like that--who'd cut him? Had he hurt himself? Was he throwed in? When did pop fish him out? Was he dead? Why did he lay like that and not move or speak--sho'! This and much more was flung at Mr. Cavendish all in one breath, and each eager questioner seized him by the hand, the dangling sleeve of his s.h.i.+rt, or his trousers--they clutched him from all sides. "I never seen such a family!" said Mr. Cavendish helplessly. "Now, you-all shut up, or I 'low I'll lay into you!"

Mrs. Cavendish's appearance created a diversion in his favor. The six rushed on her tumultously. They seized her hands or struggled for a fragment of her skirt to hold while they poured out their tale. Pop had fished up a man--he'd been throwed in the river! Pop didn't know if he was dead or not--he was all cut and b.l.o.o.d.y.

"I declare, I've a mind to skin you if you don't keep still! Miss Constance," Polly addressed her eldest child, "I'm surprised at you! You might be a heathen savage for all you got on your back--get into some duds this instant!" Cavendish was on his knees again beside Yancy, and Polly, by a determined effort, rid herself of the children. "Why, he's a grand-looking man, ain't he?" she cried. "La, what a pity!"

"You can feel his heart beat, and he's bleeding some," said Cavendish.

"Let me see--just barely flutters, don't it? Henry, go mind the sweep and see we don't get aground! Keppel, you start a fire and warm some water! Connie, you tear up my other petticoat for bandages now, stir around, all of you!" And then began a period of breathless activity.

They first lifted Yancy into the circle of illumination cast by the fire Keppel had started on the hearth of flat stones before the shanties.

Then, with Constance to hold a pan of warm water, Mrs. Cavendish deftly bathed the gaping wound in Yancy's shoulder where Murrell had driven his knife. This she bandaged with strips torn from her petticoat. Next she began on the ragged cut left by Slosson's club.

"He's got a right to be dead!" said Cavendish.

"Get the shears, d.i.c.k--I must snip away some of his hair."

All this while the four half-naked youngest Cavendishes, very still now, stood about the stone hearth in the chill dawn and watched their mother's surgery with a breathless interest. Only the outcast Henry at the sweep ever and anon lifted his voice between sobs of mingled rage and disappointment, and demanded what was doing.

"Think he is going to die, Polly?" whispered Cavendish at length. Their heads, hers very black and glossy, his very blond, were close together as they bent above the injured man.