Irvin Cobb - Those Times and These

TO me and to those of my generation, Judge Priest was always Judge Priest. So he was also to most of the people of our town and our county and our judicial district. A few men of his own age – mainly men who had served with him in the Big War – called him Billy, right to his face, and yet a few others, men of greater age than these, spoke of him and to him as William, giving to the name that benignant and most paternal air which an octogenarian may employ in referring to one who is ten or fifteen years his junior.

I was a fairly sizable young person before ever I found out that once upon a time among his intimates the Judge had worn yet another title. Information upon this subject was imparted to me one summery afternoon by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby as we two perched in company upon the porch of the old boat-store.

I don’t know what mission brought Sergeant Bagby three blocks down Franklin Street from his retail grocery establishment, unless it was that sometimes the boat-store porch was cool while the rest of the town baked. That is to say, it was cool by comparison. Little wanton breezes that strayed across the river paid fluttering visits there before they struck inland to perish miserably of heat prostration.

For the moment the Sergeant and I had the little wooden balcony to ourselves, nearly everybody else within sight and hearing having gone down the levee personally to enjoy the small excitement of seeing the stem-wheel packet Emily Foster land after successfully completing one of her regular triweekly round trips to Clarksburg and way landings.

At the blast of the Emily Foster’s whistles as she rounded to and put her nose upstream preparatory to sliding in alongside the wharf, divers coloured persons of the leisure class had roused from where they napped in the shady lee of freight piles and lined up on the outer gunwales of the wharf-boat ready to catch and make fast the head-line when it should be tossed across the intervening patch of water into their volunteer hands.

Two town hacks and two town drays had coursed down the steep gravelled incline, with the draymen standing erect upon the jouncing springless beds of their drays as was their way. In the matter of maintaining a balance over rough going and around abrupt turns, no chariot racers of old could have taught them anything. Only Sergeant Bagby and I, of all in the immediate vicinity, had remained where we were. The Sergeant was not of what you could exactly call a restless nature, and I, for the moment, must have been overcome by one of those fits of languor which occasionally descend upon the adolescent manling. We two bided where we sat.

With a tinkle of her engine bells, a calling out of orders and objurgations in the professionally hoarse, professionally profane voice of her head mate and a racking, asthmatic coughing and sighing and pounding from her exhaust pipes, the Emily Foster had found her berth; and now her late passengers came streaming up the slant of the hill – a lanky timberman or two, a commercial traveller – most patently a commercial traveller – a dressy person who looked as though he might be an advance agent for some amusement enterprise, and a family of movers, burdened with babies and bundles and accompanied by the inevitable hound dog. The commercial traveller and the suspected advance agent patronised the hacks – fare twenty-five cents anywhere inside the corporate limits – but the rest entered into the city afoot and sweating. At the very tail of the procession appeared our circuit judge, he being closely convoyed by his black house-boy, Jeff Poindexter, who packed the master’s bulging and ancient valise with one hand and bore a small collection of law books under his other arm.

Looking much like a high-land terrapin beneath the shelter of his venerable cotton umbrella, Judge Priest toiled up the hot slant. Observed from above, only his legs were visible for the moment. We knew him, though, by his legs – and also by Jeff and the umbrella. Alongside the eastern wall of the boat-store, nearmost of all buildings to the water-front, he halted in its welcome shadows to blow and to mop his streaming face with a vast square of handkerchief, and, while so engaged, glanced upward and beheld his friend, the Sergeant, beaming down upon him across the whittled banister rail.

“Hello, Jimmy!” he called in his high whine.

“Hello, yourself!” answered the Sergeant. “Been somewheres or jest traveling round?”

“Been somewheres,” vouchsafed the newly returned; “been up at Livingstonport all week, settin’ as special judge in place of Judge Given. He’s laid up in bed with a tech of summer complaint and I went up to git his docket cleaned up fur him. He’s better now, but still puny.”

“You got back ag’in in time to light right spang in the middle of a warm spell,” said Sergeant Bagby.

“Well,” stated Judge Priest, “it ain’t been exactly whut you’d call chilly up the river, neither. The present thaw appears to be gineral throughout this section of the country.” He waved a plump arm in farewell and slowly departed from view beyond the side wail of the boat-store.

“Looks like Judge Priest manages to take on a little more flesh every year he lives,” said the Sergeant, who was himself no lightweight, addressing the remark in my direction. “You wouldn’t scursely think it to see him waddlin’ ‘long, a to tin’ all that meat on his bones; but once’t upon a time he was mighty near ez slim ez his own ramrod and was commonly known ez little Fightin’ Billy. You wouldn’t, now, would you?”

The question I disregarded. It was the disclosure he had bared which appealed to my imagination and fired my curiosity. I said: “Mr. Bagby, I never knew anybody ever called Judge Priest that?”

“No, you natchelly wouldn’t,” said the Sergeant – “not onless you’d mebbe overheared some of us old fellers talkin’ amongst ourselves sometimes, with no outsiders present. It wouldn’t hardly be proper, ever’thing considered, to be referrin’ in public to the presidin’ judge of the first judicial district of the State of Kintucky by sech a name ez that. Besides which, he ain’t little any more. And then, there’s still another reason.”

“How did they ever come to call him that in the first place?” I asked.

“Well, young man, it makes quite a tale,” said the Sergeant. With an effort he hauled out his big silver watch, looked at its face, and then wedged it back into a hidden recess under one of the overlapping creases of his waistband.

“He acquired that there title at Shiloh, in the State of Tennessee, and by his own request he parted from it some three years and four months later on the banks of the Rio Grande River, in the Republic of Mexico, I bein’ present in pusson on both occasions. But ef you’ve got time to listen I reckin I’ve got jest about the time to tell it to you.”

“Yes, sir – if you please.” With eagerness, I hitched my cane-bottomed chair along the porch floor to be nearer him. And then as he seemed not to have heard my assent, I undertook to prompt him. “Er – what were you and Judge Priest doing down in Mexico, Mr. Bagby?”

“Tryin’ to git out of the United States of America fur one thing.” A little grin, almost a shamefaced grin, I thought, broke his round moist face up into fat wrinkles. He puckered his eyes in thought, looking out across the languid tawny river toward the green towhead in midstream and the cottonwoods on the far bank, a mile and more away. “But I don’t marvel much that you never heared the full circumstances before. Our bein’ down in Mexico together that time is a fact we never advertised ‘round for common consumption – neither one of us.”