Teeftallow/Chapter 20

THE shooting of Tug Beavers precipitated a number of routine reactions in Irontown. Sheriff Bascom came from Lanesburg and telephoned to Florence, Alabama, for bloodhounds. On the evening train arrived an enormous dun-coloured bitch and a still huger dog, both grim as the crack of doom. The crowd around the station gave the two brutes a wide berth, awed by their ferocious aspect and their uncanny powers of trailing.

As soon as the dogs arrived, sheriff and constable started for the place of the shooting. A great crowd followed, Abner among them. The looks of the hounds, the fact that they were going to trail a man whom he knew very well appalled the youth. He could imagine Peck Bradley flying futilely through the hills, wading streams, walking the trunks of fallen trees, putting pepper into his shoes, trying every ruse, and still these terrible animals would follow the scent he must inevitably leave behind him.

The constable had gone to Peck Bradley's boarding house and obtained one of the murderer's shirts. When the hounds reached the place where Tug had been found, the constable tossed the shirt to them, let them sniff at it, learn the peculiar odour which this man and no other man on earth bore. Then the sagacious animals started off, dragging their keeper and the constable at the end of their chains. They made wider and wider circles around the spot.

The handler of the dogs shouted to the crowd to stand back and not confuse the scent, but they would not do it. So the brutes circled about, casting over a hundred different trails, remembering by some unbelievable power a certain ​peculiar odour, searching it out among scores of other smells superimposed upon it.

Presently the bitch lifted her great muzzle to the skies and vented a prolonged and melancholy baying. The dog lunged toward her at her call. The hounds had struck Peck's scent behind a boulder some twenty yards down the road. Six feet away lay an empty shotgun shell. The sheriff picked this up and put it in his pocket, the first thread of the hemp to go around Peck Bradley's neck.

A minute later the hounds struck off through the hills, towing the handlers after them. The crowd followed; some trotting to keep up; others falling behind; all rather excited at being on the actual trail of a murderer.

Only once in a long while did the hounds give mouth in their basso-profundo baying. They settled to a steady pull up hill and down dale. The crowd got strung out in the long line of march; presently some of the men began dropping out of the chase by ones and twos returned, walking more leisurely through the woods to the village.

Each straggler who returned was met by crowds eager to know exactly where the dogs struck the trail, which way Peck had gone, how long did it take them to pick up the scent? The telling of it was almost as exciting as seeing the dogs in action.

Peck had gone right through the manure pile behind Squire Meredith's barn, trying no doubt to throw the hounds off his trail. He turned up Grasshopper Ridge. He crossed this ridge and waded Big Ford Creek for about half a mile. Here the dogs split, one went up the creek, the other down. Half a mile up the creek the bitch again gave tongue; the dog came to her.

And so on and on and on, until the posse was reduced to the few men who actually saw the chase through. Then no more stragglers returned with their reports.

After that the village gleaned a general outline of the chase by telephone. Old man Darby heard the hounds on Piney Ridge. He had tried to go to them, but never could locate ​them as the sounds played tricks on him in the hills. Two of the Broadfoot girls had seen the men and the dogs pass through their cotton patch. The barking had scared them nearly to death. They didn't know it was dogs; thought it was some sort of varmints.

Then the chase bore so far away that only the flimsiest rumours drifted in: Peck was fighting the officers; he was not fighting the officers; he had begged something to eat at a Negro's shack; up on Harrican creek he had robbed an old man of his mule; he was making for the old John A. Murrell cave where, long before the Civil War, that noted desperado hid his stolen horses and Negroes before running them south to Louisiana. Everyone agreed that if Peck ever got into the Murrell cave, the officers would never get him out, it was so intricate and maze-like.

Three days later, Squire Meredith received a telephone message from Sheriff Bascom to get ready to hold Peck Bradley's trial at twelve o'clock, Saturday, that Peck was captured.

In the meantime sentiment in Irontown was being formed. On the morning after the shooting Mrs. Roxie Biggers paid a sort of visit of inspection to the Scovell House to see that Tug Beavers had what he needed. He had not. He lacked nightshirts. Now Tug had never worn a nightshirt in his life, but Mrs. Biggers held them indispensable to the recovery of health, so she would attend to it. She also found Tug's room unsanitary. It had a western exposure; the afternoon sun heated it up like a furnace and the bed was full of bugs. This was a great surprise to Abner; he had not seen any. Mrs. Biggers, so the village gossip reported, "laid into Miss Scovell about the room and gave her a piece of her mind." Then Mrs. Biggers started conscripting nightshirts; and while she was at it she seized enough for Tug and her husband, too. Mrs. Biggers never gave anything to charity herself except her services, but these services were dynamic.

​When she had collected enough shirts to satisfy any and all uses, she worked out a plan what to do with Tug.

She bore down on Nannie Northcutt, her sister-in-law, and told Nannie she would have to have her best room for a while.

The banker's wife stared in consternation at the terrible chariteer and asked what she wanted with it.

She wanted to put Tug Beavers in it.

"That man that was killed last night!"

"He ain't dead, but he will die if we leave him down there in that hot cinch-y place!"

"That whisky-head who—"

"Nannie Northcutt!" cried Mrs. Roxie. "Don't you know this is the Lord's work to bring Irontown to repentance! If you don't do your duty in helpin' the afflicted, what do you think the Lord'll do to you?"

"But why don't you take him somewheres else?" cried Mrs. Nannie, with tears of outrage in her eyes.

"Because the Lord has called on you!" snapped Mrs. Roxie.

There was no getting around the point. Mrs. Roxie stood on the ancient Northcutt prescriptive right to enunciate the will of God. The Northcutt family always had done it. Undoubtedly, the old Hebrew prophets were some sort of distant relations of the Northcutts! At any rate, the prophets, according to reports, enjoyed the same sort of unpopularity as did Mrs. Roxie.

Mrs. Nannie evaded the requisition as hopelessly as a rabbit flies from a weasel. Finally and fatally, she aroused her large apathetic body to go into her cool dark front room and freshen up the bed to receive Tug Beavers. Mrs. Roxie immediately began to console her sister-in-law out of a genuine kindness of heart.

"Now, Nannie, you won't have a thing else to do. I'll have somebody else do all the tendin' to Mr. Beavers; all the settin' up; all the packin' of the slops an' feedin' him; an' when I git through I'll have somebody clean up yore front room an' leave it jest like I found it, so there." She patted Mrs. Nannie's shoulder.

​By this Mrs. Nannie knew that her sacrifice had been accepted and that she had received absolution from Irontown's patron saint.

Mrs. Biggers hurried out on the street and commandeered the first four Negroes she saw to move Tug from the Scovell House to the banker's home. The physician objected at first, but Mrs. Roxie pointed out the bugs and the heat of the room. The medic yielded the point and went with the good woman to prepare the unconscious man for the journey on a stretcher—that is, a wire cot used for a stretcher.

The change was made that afternoon.

When Abner returned to his lodging he found his landlady, Miss Scovell, in tears. Upon inquiry he learned she had been insulted and abused by that meddlesome cat, Roxie Biggers. Miss Scovell controlled her sobs barely long enough to fling out these maledictions, and then she began her queer dry hacking again, without a film of moisture in her eyes.

Abner went out to the porch swing to await the coming of Nessie. So filled had the intervening hours been with shock and excitement, that it seemed to Abner he had not seen Nessie for months. When finally she came from her work and joined him, he felt he could never leave off looking at the glory of her pale glossy hair, her rose complexion, and pansy eyes. He wished he could put his arms about her and draw her to him, so sweet and intimate did she seem.

And Nessie kept glancing at him from time to time with her bosom rising and falling under her low-cut blouse, and a faint smile playing perpetually on her lips; a smile that had in it not the least hint of that inherently vulgar thing called humour or mirth; she smiled because of her happiness, her tenderness, her wistfulness for him, and because she was upon the verge of tears.

That night when Mr. Biggers was going to bed, he asked, in his shaking tones, "Roxie—i-is this my n-night-gown?"

And Mrs. Roxie snapped, "Put it on an' don't worry me!" ​But she was immediately sorry for her sharpness and asked, "Do you feel all right to-night, Mr. Biggers?"

The wrecked man sat down on the side of his bed picking at his unaccustomed nightgown but afraid to say anything more to his wife.

"What are you doin'?" she asked.

"N-nothing." He stopped his picking.

"Well—le's pray before you go to bed for God to complete yore cure."

"Y-yes, l-let's pray. . . ."

Mrs. Roxie was not sure from her husband's face and tones whether or not he understood what she said. She helped him to a kneeling position beside the bed, got on her knees beside him, and prayed determinedly for his complete recovery.