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Updated: May 18, 2025
"That is a question," replied the judge, deliberating at his pause and sucking in his cheeks, "which will have to be decided." "Does he favor Isom any?" asked Sol. "Who?" queried the judge. "Isom's boy." "There doubtless is some resemblance it is only natural that there should be a resemblance between father and son," nodded the judge. "But as for myself, I cannot say."
N. B. To be opened by John B. Little, in case he is living at the time of my death. If he is not, then this is to be filed by the finder, unopened, in the probate court. That was the superscription in Isom's writing, correctly spelled, correctly punctuated, after his precise way in all business affairs.
The women around Ollie in her room tried to provoke her tears by reference to Isom's good qualities, his widely known honesty, his ceaseless striving to lay up property which he knew he couldn't take with him, which he realized that his young wife would live long years after him to enjoy.
He remembered the strong face and the long iron-gray hair of Judge Maxwell; only a little while ago Joe had given him some apples which he had stopped to admire as he drove past Isom's orchard in his sagging, mud-splashed, old buggy. He was a good man; the uprightness of his life spoke from his face. Judge Maxwell was a man to understand. Poor Ollie; poor weak, shrinking Ollie!
He tiptoed to the door at the foot of the stairs, and listened again; tiptoed back to the outer portal, which he had left swinging behind him, and closed it gently. There was no sound from above now to indicate that Ollie was awake. Sol stood near Isom's body, straining and listening, his hand to his ear. "She must 'a' been turnin' over in bed," said he. "Well, I guess I'll have to call her.
"Isom, Isom!" warned Joe, leaping after him. Isom was wrenching at the gun to free the breech from the fork when Joe caught him by the shoulder and tried to drag him back. "Look out the hammer!" he cried. But quicker than the strength of Joe's young arm, quicker than old Isom's wrath, was the fire in that corroded cap; quicker than the old man's hand, the powder in the nipple of the ancient gun.
He probably believed that his case was already made, people said, or else he was reserving his fire for Isom's widow, who, it seemed to everybody, had turned against nature and her own interests in allying herself with the accused. The morning was consumed in the examination of these character witnesses, Hammer finishing with the last of them just before the midday adjournment.
She never came to that part of the orchard to gather wind-falls for the pigs she was not gathering them at all during Isom's absence, he had relieved her of that and there was nothing else to call her away from the house at that time of the day. The lush clover struck him mid-thigh, progress through it was difficult.
"Well, I hear you've got track of Isom's boy at last, Judge?" said he, pulling up close beside the judge's mount, so the sound of the horses' feet sucking loose from the clay of the muddy road would not cheat him out of a word. Judge Little rode a low, yellow horse, commonly called a "buckskin" in that country.
A yell broke on the night Crump's cry again and the boy swayed across the rock, and falling at the brink, dropped with a limp struggle out of sight. THE news of Isom's fate reached the miller by way of Hazlan before the next noon. Several men in the Brayton cabin had recognized the boy in the moonlight. At daybreak they found bloodstains on the ledge and on a narrow shelf a few feet farther down.
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