Zeke and Ned Read online

  He paused a moment, and took a deep breath.

  “Jewel was of a marrying age,” Ned said carefully. “She seemed a fine girl. I believe she’ll make a good wife.”

  “Of course she’ll make a good wife,” the Judge said with a hint of indignation in his voice. “Do you think you have it in you to make a good husband, Mr. Christie? That’s a better question.”

  Ned had every intention of being a good husband to Jewel. He had been a good husband so far, and he saw no reason why he could not continue to be one. But how was he to convince Judge Sixkiller of that? Just looking at the stern old man with the curly white eyebrows made him feel tongue-tied.

  “I aim to be good to Jewel,” Ned said, finally. “I believe I can be good to her.”

  “I hope you are good to her,” the Judge said. “I will not have Jewel mistreated. She wouldn’t have married you unless she meant to be a good wife to you, and I imagine she expects you to stay alive and help her raise your children.”

  “Why, I aim to stay alive,” Ned said. “I aim to grow old with Jewel.”

  “Then stop piling on the pistols,” the Judge said. “You look like a gun rack. There’s too much wanton shooting in the District, and I mean to curb it. I have not felt the need to carry a weapon in more than thirty years. When I was a circuit judge, I rode all over this District with nothing on me but a pocketknife. If you do the same, you’ll live longer, and my granddaughter might escape the sorrow of being a widow.”

  The Judge looked out the window. Sheriff Bobtail and his prisoner were still milling around in the street. Zeke seemed to be smoking a cigar, which was vexatious behaviour in a man who was supposed to be incarcerated.

  “Go out there, Mr. Christie, and tell Sheriff Bobtail to proceed to the jail immediately and lock up that prisoner,” the Judge said. “Who told him to lag?”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Ned said, glad to have a reason to leave. Splitting logs with a hatchet would be preferable employment to having to address Judge B. H. Sixkiller. He did not feel that he had acquitted himself very well in the conversation, either.

  “I have nothing but the best intentions where my wife is concerned,” Ned said, before he went out the door.

  The Judge did not reply. He was staring out the window, across the wide street, and he looked galled.

  14

  “YOU EVIDENTLY NEED TO CLEAN OUT YOUR EARS, MR. BECK,” JUDGE Isaac Parker said emphatically. “They must be clogged up with earwax or filth of some kind. I’ve told you three times that I’d take the matter under advisement. Three times is more times than I care to repeat myself. It’s time for you to head home.”

  Willy Beck did not budge. He was planted right in front of the Judge, and he meant to stay there until he got some firm guarantees. So far, Judge Parker had failed to produce any.

  “My sister’s dead and buried,” he said. “Zeke Proctor shot her in broad daylight, her husband was a witness. I don’t want to hear no talk of advisement. I want you to send a marshal over to get him. Then let him be tried and hung.”

  “As you well know, the culprit is already incarcerated,” Judge Parker said. As soon as he could locate Chilly Stufflebean, his bailiff, he meant to dock his wages fifty cents for having let Willy Beck get past him and into the Judge’s office. Part of the bailiff’s job was to keep people with grievances as far toward the front of the courthouse as possible. Once they got back down the hall toward the Judge’s chambers, they were apt to prove hard to dislodge—Willy Beck, the man standing in front of him, was a case in point.

  “He’s in an Indian jail, and if they bring him to trial it’ll be in an Indian court and with an Indian jury,” Willy said. “Our brother’s lost a wife to foul play, and our brother’s white. We want that damn killer tried in your court. Then we want him hung.”

  “Was your sister a pure woman?” the Judge asked, suddenly. He looked out the window and saw Chilly making his way back from the outhouse. Chilly’s main drawback as a bailiff was his unstable gut. All too often, he was visiting the outhouse when he ought to have been keeping people like Willy Beck from interfering with the work of the court. Judge Parker was the court, and he suffered plenty of fools in the course of his work. But he did not suffer them gladly, and Willy Beck was no exception.

  “What?” Willy asked, when the Judge made the inquiry about Polly.

  “Was your sister a pure woman?” the Judge asked, again.

  “Of course she was pure—she was my sister,” Willy replied. “Zeke Proctor had no business going over to the mill bothering her. He was fair warned.”

  “Pure women don’t let rascals bother them—I’d like to see some scoundrel try and bother my wife,” the Judge said. “If there’s botherment to a level that the wife can’t handle, then it’s the husband’s place to chastise whoever it is that’s doing the bothering. It ain’t the court’s place. You couldn’t recruit enough marshals between here and Memphis to hold down that kind of botherment.”

  “But there was a killing!” Willy Beck insisted.

  “Yes—a woman—your sister,” the Judge replied, just as Chilly walked in the door. Chilly was shivering, although it was a warm day: thus his nickname.

  “I’ll take it under advisement. Now get this man out of here, Chilly,” the Judge ordered. “I have several warrants to issue.”

  “Then issue one for Zeke Proctor, while you’re issuing!” Willy Beck retorted. Judge Isaac Parker was proving a big disappointment. He was supposed to be the hanging judge, but he did not seem very interested in the fact that a murder had been committed, or convinced that Zeke Proctor needed hanging.

  “Not today, sir, don’t forget to clean out your ears when you get home,” the Judge said. “You may experience deafness later in life if you don’t swab the wax out once in a while.”

  Chilly was skinny but tall. The height was an advantage when it came to ushering folks out of the Judge’s chambers before they had finished having their say. Few people ever got out their say with Judge Parker.

  “That’s what court’s for, Chilly,” Judge Parker frequently informed him. “If I let them have their say before the trial, what it generally means is that I have to listen to a bunch of lies twice.”

  “They ain’t supposed to lie when the court’s in session, they’re under oath,” Chilly reminded the Judge.

  “Dogs ain’t supposed to suck eggs, either, but they do,” Judge Parker replied.

  15

  CHILLY STUFFLEBEAN, TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, DID NOT INTEND to be a bailiff all his life.

  He wanted to be a judge like his idol, Isaac Parker. The Judge had given him an old book of statutes, which he kept under his bailiff’s chair, to pore over in idle moments. Chilly had been told by a local doctor that he had insufficient blood in his body, the result being that he was skinny and much prone to the shivers. He kept a blanket draped over his chair to wrap up in. The old courthouse in Fort Smith was cold and dank, but it was Chilly’s home. Both his parents had died of lung infections when he was eleven, at which age Judge Parker took him in to do the sweeping and empty the spittoons.

  Chilly slept on a bench in the courtroom, wrapped in his blanket. Out the window, he could see the Arkansas River; sometimes the moon shone on the water, but more often the river would be wrapped in mist.

  Chilly loved the river. When his father was alive, they had a small boat to fish from, and Chilly liked to sit in the boat and watch the creatures of the river. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have a life beneath the water, as turtles did, and muskrats and snakes and fish. His father, Logan Stufflebean, had been a fine fisherman. Once he had hooked a catfish that weighed over one hundred pounds—they hung it up and weighed it on a scale at the hardware store.

  Chilly had cared deeply for his father. Sometimes, Chilly dreamed that his father was still alive. When the dream ended and he had to face the fact that his father was dead, the disappointment was so keen that he wiped tears off his cheeks.

  The thing Chil
ly liked to think about most was the law, a force he only dimly understood. The law did not exist in any one place or any one time, like the catfish his father had caught, or the mist that lay on the Arkansas River in the mornings. Judge Parker had nearly fifty books in his chambers, all of them crammed with law. The courthouse where Chilly worked and lived had been built because of the law. Judge Parker, the man he looked up to most, worked day and night, year in and year out, seeing that the law got enforced among the people. The law was everywhere, like air, but on court days it collected itself inside the courthouse, as mist collected itself on the surface of the river.

  Since Chilly lived in the courthouse and had for many years, he had come to feel that the Fort Smith courthouse was where most of the law belonged. He knew there were other courts—Indian courts, for example—but he could not imagine that there could be much better law than they had in Fort Smith, or a better judge than the Judge: Isaac Parker.

  Thus, he was a little puzzled that the Judge had seemed reluctant to send marshals up to Tahlequah to bring back Zeke Proctor. Chilly had seen Zeke Proctor twice, both times when Zeke was riding in horseraces. Zeke was a fine rider, and had won both races, but that did not excuse him from the strictures of the law. If he shot a woman, he needed to face Judge Parker and make his case. Chilly, who ushered people in and out of the Judge’s chambers every day, resented the fact that people referred to Judge Parker as the hanging judge. It was most unfair, in Chilly’s view: the Judge had tried hundreds of men, and only hung seventy. If people could see the riffraff that came in and out of the courthouse, day after day, they would realize Judge Parker was actually picky about whom he chose to hang.

  Judge Parker liked to whittle, and kept a sharp pocketknife on his desk, just for that purpose. Part of Chilly’s job was to sweep up the shavings the Judge would have under his chair at the end of the day, willow shavings, mostly. Judge Parker preferred to whittle willow sticks. He liked the way willow wood smelled, and kept a good supply of whittling sticks in his desk drawer.

  In his eagerness to understand the law, Chilly would sometimes venture to ask the Judge a few questions, if the Judge had time and seemed receptive to inquiry. After ushering Willy Beck to the street, Chilly went back to the Judge’s chambers to see if there were errands that needed running. The Judge, who used no tobacco, was peeling a willow stick the way a cook peels a potato.

  “Are the Becks gone?” the Judge asked.

  “No,” Chilly replied. “They’re just standing outside the courthouse. I expect they’re hopin’ you’ll change your mind and send a marshal off after Zeke.”

  Judge Parker kept on peeling. “I can’t change my mind because I haven’t made it up yet,” he said. “You can’t pay attention to family sentiment when you’re doing this job, Chilly.”

  “No sir,” Chilly agreed. In his experience, families were the most troublesome part of law work. Mainly it was wives, thinking up reasons why their husbands should be let out of jail. But if it was not wives, it was mothers—and if it was not mothers, it was apt to be brothers. Nobody wanted to admit they had plain, simple criminals in their families. Chilly supposed he would have been the same way, if he had been lucky enough to have a family. He did hope someday to have a wife, but at present it was only a remote dream, more remote, almost, than his dream of being a judge. There were no schools handy where he might learn judging, and no women who had shown the least bit of interest in being his wife. Chilly cast fond glances at a girl named June Lawton, whose father was a preacher, but so far June had not cast many fond glances back. As far as Chilly could predict, he was very apt to go through life being a bailiff. At least he had a solid bench to sleep on at night.

  The Judge had peeled his willow stick. The peeling bark hung in one long curl, and then dropped to the floor.

  “What families want is vengeance,” the Judge told him. “But I’m not in the vengeance business.”

  “No sir,” Chilly said, again.

  “If you were the judge, what would you do in this case, Chilly?” the Judge asked. It amused him at times to test his bailiff’s reasoning powers by demanding that he play judge for a little while.

  “Well, I don’t know the facts,” Chilly answered. Having to play judge for the Judge made him mighty nervous. If he slipped up in his judgment, the Judge might think less of him, which would be a thing hard to endure. Judge Parker was the one person he had to look up to—he did not want to lose the Judge’s good opinion of him.

  “The facts are few, which is lucky,” Judge Parker said. “I don’t like cases where there’s a whole passel of facts. Zeke Proctor went up to the Beck mill one day and shot Polly Beck dead. What I have heard is that T. Spade Beck, who runs the mill, put weevils in Zeke’s corn. No sane individual would want weevils in his corn, and so Zeke went up there to kill T. Spade. Evidently, he was a poor shot—he hit the wife instead, and she died on the spot.”

  The Judge paused. Chilly held steady. There might be more facts to come. He did not want to render a hasty opinion.

  “What do you think about the weevils?” the Judge asked.

  “If I raised up a corn crop and somebody put weevils in it, I’d be mad, too,” Chilly ventured.

  “Ruining a man’s corn crop is an actionable offense, but it doesn’t necessarily call for murder,” the Judge commented, in a neutral voice. “Mr. Proctor then went to Tahlequah and turned himself in to Judge B. H. Sixkiller, who is a respected member of the judiciary. I respect him myself. Zeke Proctor admitted the killing, but claims it was an accident, which it probably was. A trial date has been set. They’re letting the man keep his dog in jail.”

  “His dog?” Chilly said. “Why would he need his dog, if he’s in jail?”

  Judge Parker had begun to whittle on the willow stick. He whittled carefully, but he wasn’t trying to whittle the stick into any kind of shape—he was just whittling it away, shaving by fine shaving. He didn’t respond to Chilly’s question about the dog. From Chilly’s point of view, the fact that Judge Parker was aware that Zeke Proctor had his dog in jail was itself a remarkable thing. The Judge spent most of his time in his chambers, speaking to as few people as possible—yet, he knew everything that went on, not only in Fort Smith and eastern Arkansas, but way up into Indian Territory as well.

  “Be sound on your facts, Chilly,” the Judge had told him many times. “A man who’s sound on his facts needn’t hesitate in his judgments.”

  Chilly doubted that he would ever be as sound on his facts, about Zeke Proctor or anything else, as Judge Parker. But the Judge was waiting for him to say something, and he knew he must not hesitate too long.

  “I expect it was an accident, Judge,” he said. “I doubt Zeke meant to kill the woman.”

  “Accident or not, she’s dead—the question is, should I let Judge Sixkiller try him, or should I attempt to bring him here?” the Judge asked. “The Becks want him tried in white court, and the Cherokees want to try him themselves.”

  Chilly did not know what to say. The Indian courts were such a constant problem that Chilly wondered why the government had ever let them be set up. It was obvious to him that their court was as good as anybody could ask for, and Judge Parker the best judge in Arkansas, if not the best judge anywhere. Why would the Cherokees keep wanting to try criminals when Judge Parker was more than willing to take on the task?

  “Chilly, answer the question,” the Judge said, as he whittled the willow stick into a smooth cylinder of wood. “Should I bring Zeke Proctor here for trial, or should I let Judge Sixkiller handle the matter?”

  “It would be good for you to try him, if you’ve got the time,” Chilly replied cautiously.

  “You ain’t looking at the matter carefully enough,” the Judge promptly informed him. “Of course I’ve got the time—there’s always time to hold court. The problem here ain’t time—it’s money.”

  “Oh,” Chilly said. The Judge was always complaining that the government did not allot him enough money to run hi
s court properly. Chilly himself was only responsible for sweeping and bailiffing and the spittoons. The money was not his province, and he had no idea what sums the Judge had in mind when he complained about the government. He himself was paid $35 a month, plus his bench. In his opinion, he had one of the better jobs available in Fort Smith at the time, and he did not intend to complain, though, of course, the Judge was free to rail against the government if he saw fit.

  “This court is broke till next month,” the Judge informed him. “It can’t afford the kerosene to keep the lanterns burning. If it happened to be a dark day when we tried Zeke, it’d be so dark in the courthouse that we might not even be able to see the rascal. He might slip out a window and be thirty miles away eating catfish before we even noticed he was gone.”

  Chilly was shocked by that statement. Even if the courtroom was a little dark, he thought he was a good enough bailiff to keep a prisoner from slipping out a window.

  “Judge, I’d tackle the man before I’d let that happen,” Chilly said.

  “Chilly, I was trying to explain to you that this court exists in a state of poverty,” the Judge said, slightly annoyed by the protest. “We can’t afford kerosene, not till next month, and we also can’t afford marshals. The only way I could afford to send a marshal up there to Tahlequah to try and talk Judge Sixkiller out of his prisoner was if there happened to be a marshal fool enough to work for free. And a marshal fool enough to work for free probably couldn’t hold his own in a discussion with Judge Sixkiller.

  “I have no doubt such a man would come back empty handed,” he added, conclusively.

  “Oh—I see,” Chilly said, confident that he now understood the Judge’s position. It was dangerous work, marshaling, particularly if the marshaling involved a foray into the Indian lands. Quite a few marshals fell victim to ambushes, and most of the ambushing was done by whiskeysellers, many of whom were white men—criminals and fugitives—hiding out from the white law. Selling whiskey in the Territory was a serious crime, and a large reward was available to any marshal who brought a whiskeyseller to trial. Several marshals had been tempted by the reward to go up toward the Mountain in search of whiskeysellers. Three or four had come back badly shot up, and an equal number had never come back at all.