The Bondboy Part 21

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?

Constable Bill Frost was not a man of such acute suspicion as Sol Greening. He was a thin, slow man with a high, sharp nose and a sprangling, yellow mustache which extended broadly, like the horns of a steer. It did not enter his mind to connect Joe with the tragedy in a criminal way as they rode together back to the farm.

When they arrived, they found Sol Greening and his married son Dan sitting on the front steps. Mrs. Greening was upstairs, comforting the young widow, who was "racked like a fiddle," according to Sol.

Sol took the constable around to the window and pointed out the body of Isom stretched beside the table.

"You're a officer of the law," said Sol, "and these here primisis is now in your hands and charge, but I don't think you orto go in that room. I think you orto leave him lay, just the way he dropped, for the coroner.

That's the law."

Frost was of the same opinion. He had no stomach for prying around dead men, anyhow.

"We'll leave him lay, Sol," said he.

"And it's my opinion that you orto put handcuffs on that feller," said Sol.

"Which feller?" asked Bill.

"That boy Joe," said Sol.

"Well, I ain't got any, and I wouldn't put 'em on him if I had," said Bill. "He told me all about how it happened when we was comin' over.

Why, you don't suspiciont he done it, do you, Sol?"

"Circ.u.mstantial evidence," said Sol, fresh from jury service and full of the law, "is dead ag'in' him, Bill. If I was you I'd slap him under arrest. They had words, you know."

"Yes; he told me they did," said Bill.

"But he didn't tell you what them words was about," said Sol deeply.

The constable turned to Sol, the shaft of suspicion working its way through the small door of his mind.

"By ganny!" said he.

"I'd take him up and hand him over to the sheriff in the morning,"

advised Sol.

"I reckon I better do it," Frost agreed, almost knocked breathless by the importance of the thing he had overlooked.

So they laid their heads together to come to a proper method of procedure, and presently they marched around the corner of the house, shoulder to shoulder, as if prepared to intercept and overwhelm Joe if he tried to make a dash for liberty.

They had left Joe sitting on the steps with Dan, and now they hurried around as if they expected to find his place empty and Dan stretched out, mangled and bleeding. But Joe was still there, in friendly conversation with Dan, showing no intention of running away. Frost advanced and laid his hand on Joe's shoulder.

"Joe Newbolt," said he, "I put you under arrest on the suspiciont of shootin' and murderin' Isom Chase in cold blood."

It was a formula contrived between the constable and Sol. Sol had insisted on the "cold blood." That was important and necessary, he declared. Omit that in making the arrest, and you had no case. It would fall through.

Joe stood up, placing himself at the immediate disposal of the constable, which was rather embarra.s.sing to Bill.