Part 21 (1/2)
But there were certain humiliations and indignities which a gentleman could not bend his neck to; and being led away by an inferior man like Sol Greening to be delivered up, just as if he thought that he might have run away if given an opening, was one of them. Sol had pa.s.sed on through the open gate, which he had not stopped to close when he ran in, before he noticed that Joe was not following. He looked back. Joe was standing inside the fence, his arms folded across his chest.
”Come on here!” ordered Sol.
”No, I'm not going any farther with you, Sol,” said Joe quietly. ”If there's any arresting to be done, I guess I can do it myself.”
Greening was a self-important man in his small-bore way, who saw in this night's tragedy fine material for increasing his consequence, at least temporarily, in that community. The first man on the b.l.o.o.d.y scene, the man to shut up the room for the coroner, the man to make the arrest and deliver the murderer to the constable--all within half an hour. It was a distinction which Greening did not feel like yielding.
”Come on here, I tell you!” he commanded again.
”If you want to get on your horse and go after Bill, I'll wait right here till he comes,” said Joe; ”but I'll not go any farther with you. I didn't shoot Isom, Sol, and you know it. If you don't want to go after Bill, then I'll go on over there alone and tell him what's happened. If he wants to arrest me then, he can do it.”
Seeing that by this arrangement much of his glory would get away from him, Greening stepped forward and reached out his hand, as if to compel submission. Joe lifted his own hand to intercept it with warning gesture.
”No, don't you touch me, Sol!” he cautioned.
Greening let his hand fall. He stepped back a pace, Joe's subdued, calm warning penetrating his senses like the sound of a blow on an anvil.
Last week this gangling strip of a youngster was nothing but a boy, fetching and carrying in Isom Chase's barn-yard. Tonight, big and bony and broad-shouldered, he was a man, with the same outward gentleness over the iron inside of him as old Peter Newbolt before him; the same soft word in his mouth as his Kentucky father, who had, without oath or malediction, shot dead a Kansas Redleg, in the old days of border strife, for spitting on his boot.
”Will you go, or shall I?” asked Joe.
Greening made a show of considering it a minute.
”Well, Joe, you go on over and tell him yourself,” said he, putting on the front of generosity and confidence, ”I know you won't run off.”
”If I had anything to run off for, I'd go as quick as anybody, I guess,”
said Joe.
”I'll go and fetch the old lady over to keep company with Mrs. Chase,”
said Sol, hurriedly striking across the road.
Joe remained standing there a little while. The growing wind, which marked the high tide of night, lifted his hat-brim and let the moonlight fall upon his troubled face. Around him was the peace of the sleeping earth, with its ripe harvest in its hand; the scents of ripe leaves and fruit came out of the orchard; the breath of curing clover from the fields.
Joe brought a horse from the barn and leaped on its bare back. He turned into the highroad, las.h.i.+ng the animal with the halter, and galloped away to summon Constable Bill Frost.
Past hedges he rode, where cricket drummers beat the long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moons.h.i.+ne champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was damp and cold, like a wet hand on the face; up to hill-crests, over which the perfumes of autumn were blowing--the spices of goldenrod and ragweed, the elusive scent of hedge orange, the sweet of curing fodder in the shock; past peace and contentment, and the ripe reward of men's summer toil.
Isom Chase was dead; stark, white, with blood upon his beard.
There a dog barked, far away, raising a ripple on the placid night; there a c.o.c.k crowed, and there another caught his cry; it pa.s.sed on, on, fading away eastward, traveling like an alarm, like a spreading wave, until it spent itself against the margin of breaking day.
Isom Chase was dead, with an armful of gold upon his breast.
Aye, Isom Chase was dead. Back there in the still house his limbs were stiffening upon his kitchen floor. Isom Chase was dead on the eve of the most bountiful harvest his lands had yielded him in all his toil-freighted years. Dead, with his fields around him; dead, with the maize dangling heavy ears in the white moonlight; dead, with the gold of pumpkin lurking like unminted treasure in the margin of his field. Dead, with fat cattle in his pastures, fat swine in his confines, sleek horses in his barn-stalls, fat c.o.c.kerels on his perch; dead, with a young wife shrinking among the shadows above his cold forehead, her eyes unclouded by a tear, her panting breast undisturbed by a sigh of pity or of pain.
CHAPTER VIII
WILL HE TELL?