I feel sure of that, repeated the old Judge patiently, but is it true about this mortgage?
Yes, suh, she answered, and then she began to cry again, its true, but please dont even let Jimmy know. He thinks I had the money saved up from the marketin to hire Mr. Prentiss with, and I dont never want him to know the truth. No matter how his case goes I dont never want him to know. They had moved off down the gravel walk perhaps twenty feet, when suddenly the smouldering feud-hate stirred in the old womans blood; and it spread through her and made her meager frame quiver as if with an ague. And now the words came from her with a hiss of feeling:
Jedge Priest, that plague-taken scoundrel deserved killin! He was black hearted from the day he came into the world and black hearted he went out of it. You dont remember, maybe you was off soldierin at the time when he was jayhawkin back and forth along the State line here, burnin folks houses down over their heads and mistreatin the wimmin and children of them that was away in the army. I tell you, durin that last year before you all got back home, there was soldiers out after him out with guns in their hands and orders to shoot him down on sight, like a sheep-killin dog. He didnt have no right to live!
The girl got her quieted somehow; she was sobbing brokenly as they went away. For a long five minutes after the gate clicked behind the forlorn pair, Judge Priest stood on his porch in the attitude of one who had been pulled up short by the stirring of a memory of a long forgotten thing. After a bit he reached for his hat and closed the front door. He waddled heavily down the steps and disappeared in the aisle of the maples and silver leaf trees.
Half an hour later, clear over on the other side of town, two windows of the old court house flashed up as rectangles of light, set into a block of opaque blackness. Passers by idling homeward under the shade trees of the Square, wondered why the lights should be burning in the Judges chambers. Had any one of them been moved to investigate the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon he would have discovered the Judge at his desk, with his steel bowed spectacles balanced precariously on the tip of his pudgy nose and his round old face pulled into a pucker of intenseness as he dug through one sheaf after another of musty, snuffy-smelling documents. The broad top of the desk in front of him was piled with windrows of these ancient papers, that were gray along their creases with the pigeonhole dust of years, and seamy and buffed with age. Set in the wall behind him was a vault and the door of the vault was open, and within was a gap of emptiness on an upper shelf, which showed where all these papers had come from; and for further proof that they were matters
of court record there was a litter of many crumbly manila envelopes bearing inscriptions of faded ink, scattered about over the desk top, and on the floor where they had fallen.
For a good long time the old Judge rummaged briskly, pawing into the heaps in front of him and snorting briskly as the dust rose and tickled his nostrils. Eventually he restored most of the papers to their proper wrappers and replaced them in the vault, and then he began consulting divers books out of his law library ponderous volumes, bound in faded calf skin with splotches of brown, like liverspots, on their covers. It was nearly midnight before he finished. He got up creakily, and reaching on tiptoe an exertion which created a distinct hiatus of inches between the bottom of his wrinkled vest and the waistband of his trousers he turned out the gas jets. Instantly the old courthouse, sitting among the trees, became a solid black mass. He felt his way out into the hallway, barking his shins on a chair, and grunting softly to himself.
When young Jim Faxons case was called the next morning and the jailor brought him in, Jim wore hand-cuffs. At the term of court before this, a negro cow thief had got away coming across the court house yard and the Judge had issued orders to the jailor to use all due precautions in future. So the jailor, showing no favoritism, had seen fit to handcuff young Jim. Moreover, he forgot to bring along the key to the irons and while he was hurrying back to the jail to find it, young Jim had to wait between his women folk, with his bonds still fast upon him. Emmy Hardin bent forward and put her small hands over the steel, as though to hide the shameful sight of it from the eyes of the crowd and she kept her hands there until Jailor Watts came back and freed Jim. The little group of three sitting in a row inside the rail, just back of Lawyer Dabney Prentiss erect and frock-coated back, were all silent and all pale-faced, young Jim with the pallor of the jail and Emmy Hardin with the whiteness of her grief and her terror, but the old aunts face was a streaky, grayish white, and the wrinkles in her face and in her thin, corded neck looked inches deep.
Right away the case was called and both sides defense and commonwealth announced as ready to proceed to trial. The audience squared forward to watch the picking of the jurors, but there were never to be any jurors picked for the trial of this particular case.