Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His PeopleCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
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Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The steam calliope man had an inspiration too. He was a person of no
great refinement, the calliope man, and he worked a shell game for his
main source of income and lived rough and lived hard, so it may not have
been an inspiration after all, but merely the happy accident of chance.
But whether it was or it wasn't, he suddenly and without seeming reason
switched from the tune he was playing and made his calliope sound out
the first bars of the music which somebody once set to the sweetest
childhood verses that Eugene Field ever wrote--the verses that begin:
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
The parade resumed its march then and went on, tailing away through
the dappled sunshine under the trees, and up over the hill and down the
other side of it, but the clown looked back as he scalped the crest and
waved one arm, in a baggy calico sleeve, with a sort of friendly goodby
motion to somebody behind him; and as for the steam calliope man, he
kept on playing the little Boy Blue verses until he disappeared.
As a matter of fact, he was still playing them when he passed a
wide-porched old white house almost at the end of the empty street,
where a stout old man in a wrinkly white linen suit leaned across a
gate and regarded the steam calliope man with a satisfied almost a
proprietorial air.
VI. WHEN THE FIGHTING WAS GOOD
“MISTER SHERIFF,” ordered the judge, “bring Pressley G. Harper to the
bar.”
Judge Priest, as I may have set forth before, had two habits of
speech--one purposely ungrammatical and thickly larded with the
vernacular of the country crossroads--that was for his private walks and
conversations, and for his campaignings; but the other was of good and
proper and dignified English, and it he reserved for official acts and
utterances. Whether upon the bench or off it, though, his voice had that
high-pitched, fiddle-string note which carried far and clearly; and on
this day, when he spoke, the sheriff roused up instantly from where he
had been enjoying forty winks between the bewhittled arms of a tilted
chair and bestirred himself. He hurried out of a side door. A little,
whispering, hunching stir went through the courtroom. Spectators
reclining upon the benches, partly on their spines and partly on their
shoulderblades, straightened and bent forward. Inside the rail, which
set apart the legal goats from the civic sheep, a score of eyes were
fixed speculatively upon the judge's face, rising above the top of
the tall, scarred desk where he sat; but his face gave no dew to his
thoughts; and if the mind back of the beneficent, mild blue eyes was
troubled, the eyes themselves looked out unvexed through the steel-bowed
spectacles that rode low on the old judge's nose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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