The Just and the Unjust | Page 4

who frequently
accompanied him on his rounds, with the wisdom of keeping the lamps
that shone upon the homes of members of the town council in
especially good order. Furthermore, there were possibilities of
adventure in the occupation; it took Mr. Shrimplin into out-of-the-way
streets and unfrequented alleys, and, as Custer knew, he always went
armed. Sometimes, when in an 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