The Just and the Unjust | Page 4

unusually gracious mood, his father permitted him to verify this fact by feeling his bulging hip pocket. The feel of it was vastly pleasing to Custer, particularly when Mr. Shrimplin had to tell of strangers engaged in mysterious conversation on dark street corners, who slunk away as he approached. More than this, it was a matter of public knowledge that he had had numerous controversies in low portions of the town touching the right of the private citizen to throw stones at the street lamps; to Custer he made dire threats. He'd "toss a scare into them red necks yet! They'd bust his lamps once too often--he was laying for them! He knowed pretty well who done it, and when he found out for sure--" He winked at Custer, leaving it to his son's imagination to determine just what form his vengeance would take, and Custer, being nothing if not sanguinary, prayed for bloodshed.
But the thing that pleased the boy best was his father's account of those meetings with mysterious strangers. How as he approached they moved off with many a furtive backward glance; how he made as if to drive away in the opposite direction, and then at the first corner turned swiftly about and raced down some parallel street in hot pursuit, to come on them again, to their great and manifest discomfiture. Circumstantially he described each turn he made, down what streets he drove Bill at a gallop, up which he walked that trustworthy animal; all was elaborately worked out. The chase, however, always ended one way--the strangers disappeared unaccountably, and, search as he might, he could not find them again, but he and Custer felt certain that his activity had probably averted some criminal act.
In short, to Mr. Shrimplin and his son the small events of life magnified themselves, becoming distorted and portentous. A man, emerging suddenly from an alley in the dusk of the early evening, furnished them with a theme for infinite speculation and varied conjecture; that nine times out of ten the man said, "Hello, Shrimp!" and passed on his way perfectly well known to the little lamplighter was a matter of not the slightest importance. Sometimes, it is true, Mr. Shrimplin told of the salutation, but the man was always a stranger to him, and that he should have spoken, calling him by name, he and Custer agreed only added to the sinister mystery of the encounter.
It was midday on that twenty-seventh of November when Mr. Shrimplin killed Murphy of the solitary eye, and he reached the climax of the story just as Mrs. Shrimplin began to prepare the dressing for the small turkey that was to be the principal feature of their four-o'clock dinner. The morning's scanty fall of snow had been so added to as time passed that now it completely whitened the strip of brown turf in the little side yard beyond the kitchen windows.
"I think," said Mr. Shrimplin, "we are going to see some weather. Well, snow ain't a bad thing." His dreamy eyes rested on Custer for an instant; they seemed to invite a question.
"No?" said Custer interrogatively.
"If I was going to murder a man, I don't reckon I'd care to do it when there was snow on the ground."
Mrs. Shrimplin here suggested cynically that perhaps he dreaded cold feet, but her husband ignored this. To what he felt to be the commonplaceness of her outlook he had long since accustomed himself. He merely said:
"I suppose more criminals has been caught because they done their crimes when it was snowing than any other way. Only chance a feller would have to get off without leaving tracks would be in a balloon; I don't know as I ever heard of a murderer escaping in a balloon, but I reckon it could be done."
He disliked to relinquish such an original idea, and the subject of murderers and balloons, with such ramifications as suggested themselves to his mind, occupied him until dinner-time. He quitted the table to prepare for his night's work, and at five o'clock backed wild Bill into the shafts of his high cart, lighted the hissing gasolene torch, and mounted to his seat.
"I expect he'll want his head to-night; he's got a game look," he said to Custer, nodding toward Bill. Then, as he tucked a horse blanket snugly about his legs, he added: "It's a caution the way he gets over the ground. I never seen a horse that gets over the ground like Bill does."
Which was probably true enough, for Bill employed every known gait.
"He's a mighty well-broke horse!" agreed Custer in a tone of sincere conviction.
"He is. He's got more gaits than you can shake a stick at!" said Mr. Shrimplin.
Privately he labored under the delusion that Bill was dangerous; even years of singular