John Owens, the surviving witness to Isom Chase’s will, spent his dreary days at the poorhouse whittling long chains of interlocking rings, and fantastic creatures such as the human eye never beheld in nature, out of soft pine-wood. He had taken up that diversion shortly after the last of his afflictions, blindness, fell upon him and, as white pine was cheap, the superintendent of the institution indulged him without stint.
Uncle John, as he was called long years before the hard-riding world threw him, was a preacher back in the days of his youth, middling manhood and prosperity. He had ridden the country in the Campbellite faith, bringing hundreds into the fold, with a voice as big as a bull’s, and a long beard, which he wore buttoned under his vest in winter. And now in his speechlessness, darkness, and silence, he still preached in his way, carving out the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and female figures of hideous mien, the signification of which nobody rightly knew.
Uncle John had a little slate upon which he wrote his wants, but nobody had discovered any way of communicating with him save by taking his hand and guiding it to the object for which he had asked. For a long time he had written the one word “Paint” on his slate. That was the beginning of his use of it, when one word was all that he could get on a side of it at a time. After his fingers had become sensitive through his new art of whittling and feeling, he improved his writing, until he made it plain that he wanted paint to adorn his carved figures, so they could be sold.
It was the hope of the poor old soul that he could whittle himself out of the poorhouse, and live free and independent upon the grotesque productions of his knife, if they would give him paint to make them attractive, and thus get a start. He did not know how fantastic and ridiculous they were, having only his own touch to guide him to judgment of their merits.
Perhaps he was no less reasonable in this belief than certain painters, musicians, and writers, who place their own blind value upon the craft of their hands and brains, and will not set them aside for any jury that the world can impanel.
Uncle John never came to realize his hopes of freedom, any more than he ever came to realize the uselessness of paint for his angels when he had no eyes for applying it. He whittled on, in melancholy dejection, ring upon ring in his endless chains of rings, forging in bitter irony the emblems of bondage, when his old heart so longed to be free.
It was a bright day in the life of Uncle John Owens, then, when Ollie’s lawyer called at the poorhouse and placed under his hands some slender slips of cardboard bearing raised letters, the A B C of his age.
His bearded old face shone like a window in which a light has been struck as his fluttering fingers ran over the letters. He fumbled excitedly for his slate which hung about his neck, and his hand trembled as he wrote:
“More–book–more.”
It had been an experiment, the lawyer having doubted whether Uncle John’s untrained fingers, dulled by age, could pick out the letters, large as they were. He had nothing more to offer, therefore, and no way of answering the appeal. But that night an order for the New Testament in raised characters for the blind went out from Shelbyville.
Judge Little was making no progress in establishing the will. Nobody had come forward in answer to his advertisements
Meantime, in his cell in the county jail, Joe Newbolt was bearing the heaviest penance of his life. Alice had not come again. Two visiting days had passed, and there would be no more before the date of the trial, which was set for the following Monday. But since that dun morning when she had given him the mignonette, and he had drawn her unresisting body to the barrier of his prison door, she had visited him no more.
Joe reproached himself for it. He accused himself of having offended beyond forgiveness. In the humiliation which settled upon him, he wasted like water in the sun. The mignonette which she had given him withered, dried; its perfume vanished, its blossoms turned gray. She came no more. What did it matter if they convicted him before the judge, said he, now that Alice had condemned him in her heart. He lamented that he had blundered into such deep offending. His untutored heart had seen only the reflection of his own desire in her eyes that day. She did not care for him. It was only pity that he had distorted into love.
He had inquired about her, timidly, of the sheriff, who had looked at him with a slow wink, then formed his mouth into an egg-shaped aperture and held it so an exasperating while, as if he meant to whistle. The sheriff’s clownish behavior nettled Joe, for he was at a loss to understand what he meant.
“I thought maybe she’d sent over some books,” said Joe, blushing like a hollyhock.
“Books!” said the sheriff, with a grunt.
“Yes, sir,” Joe answered, respectfully.
“Huh, she never sent no books,” said the sheriff, turning away.
After a little he came back and stood before Joe’s door, with his long legs far apart, studying the prisoner calculatively, as a farmer stands when he estimates the weight of a hog.
“Cree-mo-nee!” said he.
He laughed then, much to Joe’s confusion, and totally beyond his comprehension. The sheriff left him with that. From the passage his laugh came back.
The day was Friday; Joe plucked up a little hope when he heard the sheriff conducting somebody to the corridor gate. It was Colonel Price, who had exercised his political influence over the sheriff and induced him to set aside his new regulations for the day. The colonel made apologies to Joe for what might seem his lack of interest in his welfare.
Joe inquired of him concerning Alice, with respectful dignity. She was well, said the colonel, and asked to be remembered. What else the colonel said on that occasion Joe did not recall. All that he could think of was that Alice had desired to be remembered.
What an ironical message to send him, thought Joe. If she only had come herself, and given him the assurance with her eyes that there was no stored censure, no burning reproach; if she had come, and quieted the doubt, the uncertainty, of his self-tortured soul. His case had become secondary beside Alice. The colonel talked of it, but Joe wondered if the mignonette in her garden was dead. The colonel shook his head gravely when he went away from the jail that day. It was plain that the boy was suffering with that load on his mind and the uncertainty of the outcome pressing upon him. He mentioned it to Alice.
“I think we’d better try to get him another lawyer,” said the colonel. “Hammer never will be equal to that job. It
“But he’s innocent–you don’t doubt that?” said she.
“Not for a minute,” the colonel declared. “I guess I should have been looking after him closer, but that picture intervened between us. He’s wearing away to a shadow, chafing and pining there in jail, poor chap.”
“Do you think he’ll consent to your employing another lawyer for him?” she asked, searching his face wistfully.
“I don’t know; he’s so set in the notion of loyalty to Hammer–just as if anybody could hurt Hammer’s feelings! If the boy will consent to it, I’ll hire Judge Burns at my own expense.”
“I don’t suppose he will,” sighed she.
“No, I reckon not, his notions are so high-flown,” the colonel admitted, with evident pride in the lofty bearing of the widow’s son.
“He’s longing for a run over the hills,” said she. “He told me he was.”
“A year of it in there would kill him,” the colonel said. “We must get him a lawyer who can disentangle him. I never saw anybody go down like that boy has gone down in the last month. It’s like taking a wild Indian out of the woods and putting him in a cage.”
The colonel put aside the corn picture for the day, and went out to confer with Judge Burns, a local lawyer who had gained a wide reputation in the defense of criminal cases. He was a doubly troubled man when he returned home that evening, for Joe had been firm in his refusal either to dismiss Hammer or admit another to his defense. In the library he had found Alice, downcast and gloomy, on the margin of tears.
“Why, honey, you mustn’t mope around this way,” he remonstrated gently. “What is it–what’s gone wrong with my little manager?”
She raised up from huddling her head against her arms on the table, pushed her fallen hair back from her eyes and gave him a wan smile.
“I just felt so lonely and depressed somehow,” said she, placing her hand on his where it lay on the table. “Never mind me, for I’ll be all right. What did he say?”
“Judge Burns?”
“Joe.”
The colonel drew a chair near and sat down, flinging out his hand with impatient gesture.
“I can’t do anything with him,” said he. “He says one lawyer will do as well as another, and Hammer’s doing all that can be done. ‘They’ll believe me or they’ll not believe me, colonel, and that’s all there is to it,’ says he, ‘and the best lawyer in the world can’t change that.’ And I don’t know but he’s right, too,” the colonel sighed. “He’s got to come out with that story, every word of it, or there’ll never be a jury picked in the whole State of Missouri that’ll take any stock in his testimony.”
“It will be a terrible thing for his mother if they don’t believe him,” said she.
“We’ll do all that he’ll allow us to do for him, we can’t do any more. It’s a gloomy outlook, a gloomy case all through. It was a bad piece of business when that mountain woman bound him out to old Isom Chase, to take his kicks and curses and live on starvation rations. He’s the last boy in the world that you’d conceive of being bound out; he don’t fit the case at all.”
“No, he doesn’t,” said she, reflectively.
“But don’t let the melancholy thing settle on you and disturb you, child. He’ll get out of it–or he’ll not–one way or the other, I reckon. It isn’t a thing for you to take to heart and worry over. I never should have taken you to that gloomy old jail to see him, at all.”
“I can’t forget him there–I’ll always see him there!” she shuddered. “He’s above them all–they’ll never understand him, never in this world!”
She got up, her hair hanging upon her shoulders, and left him abruptly, as if she had discovered something that lay in her heart. Colonel Price sat looking after her, his back very straight, his hand upon his knee.
“Well!” said he. Then, after a long ruminative spell: “Well!”
That same hour Hammer was laboring with his client in the jail, as he had labored fruitlessly before, in an endeavor to induce him to impart to him the thing that he had concealed at the coroner’s inquest into Isom Chase’s death. Hammer assured him that it would not pass beyond him in case that it had no value in establishing his innocence.
“Mr. Hammer, sir,” said Joe, with unbending dignity and firmness, “if the information you ask of me was mine to give, freely and honorably, I’d give it. You can see that. Maybe something will turn up between now and Monday that will make a change, but if not, you’ll have to do the best you can for me the way it stands. Maybe I oughtn’t expect you to go into the court and defend me, seeing that I can’t help you any more than I’m doing. If you feel that you’d better drop out of the case, you’re free to do it, without any hard feelings on my part, sir.”
Hammer had no intention of dropping the case, hopeless as he felt the defense to be. Even defeat would be glorious, and loss profitable, for his connection with the defense would sound his name from one end of the state to the other.
“I wouldn’t desert you in the hour of your need, Joe, for anything they could name,” said Hammer, with significant suggestion.
His manner, more than his words, carried the impression that they had named sums, recognizing in him an insuperable
“Thank you,” said Joe.
“But if Missis Chase was mixed up in it any way, I want you to tell me, Joe,” he pressed.
Joe said nothing. He looked as stiff and hard as one of the iron hitching-posts in front of the court-house, thought Hammer, the side of his face turned to the lawyer, who measured it with quick eyes.
“Was she, Joe?” whispered Hammer, leaning forward, his face close to the bars.
“The coroner asked me that,” replied Joe, harshly.
This unyielding quality of his client was baffling to Hammer, who was of the opinion that a good fatherly kick might break the crust of his reserve. Hammer had guessed the answer according to his own thick reasoning, and not very pellucid morals.
“Well, if you take the stand, Joe, they’ll make you tell it then,” Hammer warned him. “You’d better tell me in advance, so I can advise you how much to say.”
“I’ll have to get on somehow without your advice, thank you sir, Mr. Hammer, when it comes to how much to say,” said Joe.
“There’s not many lawyers–and I’ll tell you that right now in a perfectly plain and friendly way–that’d go ahead with your case under the conditions,” said Hammer. “But as I told you, I’ll stick to you and see you through. I wash my hands of any blame for the case, Joe, if it don’t turn out exactly the way you expect.”
Joe saw him leave without regret, for Hammer’s insistence seemed to him inexcusably vulgar. All men could not be like him, reflected Joe, his hope leaping forward to Judge Maxwell, whom he must soon confront.
Joe tossed the night through with his longing for Alice,
He pondered it a long time, and the face of the judge rose before him, and the eyes were brown and the hair in soft wavelets above a white forehead, and Alice stood in judgment over him. So it always ended; it was before Alice that he must plead and justify himself. She was his judge, his jury, and his world.
It was mid-afternoon when Mrs. Newbolt arrived for her last visit before the trial. She came down to his door in her somber dress, tall, bony and severe, thinner of face herself than she had been before, her eyes bright with the affection for her boy which her tongue never put into words. Her shoes were muddy, and the hem of her skirt draggled, for, high as she had held it in her heavy tramp, it had become splashed by the pools in the soft highway.
“Mother, you shouldn’t have come today over the bad roads,” said Joe with affectionate reproof.
“Lands, what’s a little mud!” said she, putting down a small bundle which she bore. “Well, it’ll be froze up by tomorrow, I reckon, it’s turnin’ sharp and cold.”
She looked at Joe anxiously, every shadow in his worn face carving its counterpart in her heart. There was no smile of gladness on her lips, for smiles had been so long apart from her life that the nerves which commanded them had grown stiff and hard.
“Yes,” said Joe, taking up her last words, “winter will
“Lord bless you, son!” said she, the words catching in her throat, tears rising to her eyes and standing so heavy that she must wipe them away.
“It will all be settled next week,” Joe told her confidently.
“I hope they won’t put it off no more,” said she wearily.
“No; Hammer says they’re sure to go ahead this time.”
“Ollie drove over yesterday evening and brought your things from Isom’s,” said she, lifting the bundle from the floor, forcing it to him between the bars. “I brought you a couple of clean shirts, for I knew you’d want one for tomorrow.”
“Yes, Mother, I’m glad you brought them,” said Joe.
“Ollie, she said she never would make you put in the rest of your time there if she had anything to say about it. But she said if Judge Little got them letters of administration he was after she expected he’d try to hold us to it, from what he said.”
“No matter, Mother.”
“And Ollie said if she ever did come into Isom’s property she’d make us a deed to our place.”
Mrs. Newbolt’s face bore a little gleam of hope when she told him this. Joe looked at her kindly.
“She could afford to, Mother,” said he, “it was paid for in interest on that loan to Isom.”
“But Isom, he never would ’a’ give in to that,” said she. “Your pap he paid twelve per cent interest on that loan for sixteen years.”
“I figured it all up, Mother,” said he.
There was nothing for her to sit on in the corridor; she stood holding to the bars to take some of the weight from her tired feet.
“I don’t want to hurry you off, Mother,” said Joe, “but
“Never mind, Joe, it takes more than a little walk like that to play me out.”
“You’d better stop in at Colonel Price’s and rest a while before you start back,” he suggested.
“Maybe I will,” said she.
She plunged her hand into the black draw-string bag which she carried on her arm, rummaging among its contents.
“That little rambo tree you planted a couple of years ago had two apples on it,” she told him, “but I never noticed ’em all summer, the leaves was so thick and it was such a little feller, anyhow.”
“It is a little one to begin bearing,” said Joe, with a boy’s interest in a thing that he has done with his own hand turning out to be something.
“Yes; and I aimed to leave them on the tree till you could see them, but the hard wind yesterday shook ’em off. Here they are, I’ve fetched ’em to you, son.”
Joe took the apples, the recollection of the high hopes which he had centered around that little apple-tree when he planted it coming back to him like a scented wind at dawn. He had planned to make that tree the nucleus of an orchard, which was to grow and spread until it covered the old home place, the fields adjoining, and lifted the curse of poverty from the Newbolt name. It had been a boyish plan which his bondage to Isom Chase had set back.
He had not given it up for a day while he labored in Chase’s fields. When he became his own man he always intended to take it up and put it through. Now, there in his hand, was the first fruit of his big intention, and in that moment Joe reviewed his old pleasant dream.
He saw again as he had pictured it before, to the relief of
For the pain of prison he had not wept, nor for its shame. The vexing circumstance of being misunderstood, the dread threat of the future had not claimed a tear. But for a dream which had sprung like a sweet flower in his young heart and had passed away like a mist, he wept.
His mother knew nothing about that blasted dream; the gloom of his cell concealed his tears. He rubbed the fruit along his coat sleeve, as if to make it shine, as a fruiterer polishes the apples in his stall.
“All right, Mother, I’m glad you brought them,” he said, although there was no gladness in his voice.
“I planned to fetch you in some fried chicken today, too,” said she, “but the pesky rooster I had under the tub got away when I went to take him out. If you’d like some, Joe, I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“No, no; don’t you tramp over here tomorrow, Mother,” he admonished, “and don’t bother about the chicken. I don’t seem to have any appetite any more. But you wait till I’m out of here a day or two; then you’ll see me eat.”
“Well, then I guess I’ll be goin’ on back, Joe; and bright and early Monday morning I’ll be on hand at the court. Maybe we’ll be able to go home together that evenin’, son.”
“Hammer says it will take two or three days,” Joe told her, “but I don’t see what they can do to make it string out
“I’ll beseech the Lord all day tomorrow, son, to open their ears that they may hear,” said she solemnly. “And when the time comes to speak tell it all, Joe, tell it all!”
“Yes, Mother, when the time comes,” said he gently.
“Tell ’em all Isom said to you, son,” she charged.
“Don’t you worry over that now, Mother.”
She felt that her son drew away from her, in his haughty manner of self-sufficiency, as he spoke. She sighed, shaking her head sadly. “Well, I’ll be rackin’ off home,” she said.
“If you stop at the colonel’s to rest a while, Mother–and I wish you would, for you’re all tired out–you might hand this book back to Miss Price. She loaned it to me. Tell her I read it long ago, and I’d have sent it back before now, only I thought she might come after it herself some time.”
His mother turned to him, a curious expression in her face.
“Don’t she come any more, Joe?”
“She’s been busy with other things, I guess,” said he.
“Maybe,” she allowed, with a feeling of resentment against the book on account of its cold, unfriendly owner.
She had almost reached the corridor gate when Joe called after her.
“No, don’t tell her that,” he requested. “Don’t tell her anything. Just hand it back, please, Mother.”
“Whatever you say, Joe.”
Joe heard the steel gate close after her and the sheriff’s voice loud above his mother’s as they went toward the door.
Loyal as he was to his mother, the thought of her went out with her, and in her place stood the slender figure of youth, her lips “like a thread of scarlet.” One day more to wait for the event of his justification and vindication, or at least the beginning of it, thought Joe.
Ah, if Alice only would come to lighten the interval!
