PAGE 7
The Belled Buzzard
by
“I–I ain’t well,” demurred the squire. “I’ve been sleepin’ porely these last few nights. It’s the heat,” he added quickly.
“Well, suh, you don’t look very brash, and that’s a fact,” said the constable; “but this here job ain’t goin’ to keep you long. You see it’s in such shape–the body is–that there ain’t no way of makin’ out who the feller was nor whut killed him. There ain’t nobody reported missin’ in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away, suh–if you’ll go along now.”
“I’ll go,” agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness. “I’ll go right now.” He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips demanding to be asked–the question the answer to which he yearned for and yet dreaded.
“How did they come to find–it?”
“Well, suh, that’s a funny thing,” said the constable. “Early this mornin’ Bristow’s oldest boy–that one they call Buddy–he heared a cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow’s got cows, as you know, and one or two of ’em is belled. And he kept on followin’ after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that’s near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it–this body.
“But, suh, squire, it wasn’t no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cowbell on his neck–that’s whut it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Belled Buzzard he’s come back agin and is hangin’ round. They tell me he ain’t been seen round here since the year of the yellow fever–I don’t remember myself, but that’s whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say–the niggers do–that when the Belled Buzzard comes it’s a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!”
The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea hen. The squire didn’t heed him. Hunched back in the buggy, he harkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the far-away, faint tonk-tonk! They were about half-way to Bristow’s place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before his companion heard it too.
The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder.
“Well, by doctors!” he cried, “if there ain’t the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day–he’s got an old cowbell hitched to his neck; and he’s shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that’s somethin’ you won’t see every day! In all my born days I ain’t never seen the beat of that!”
Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.
“Is he followin’ us?” asked the squire in a curiously flat, weighted voice.
“Which–him?” answered the constable, still stretching his neck. “No, he’s gone now–gone off to the left–jest a-zoomin’, like he’d done forgot somethin’.”
And Bristow’s place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground–those were the main things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow’s farm buildings.