PAGE 5
The Sheriffs Bluff
by
“Mr. Sheriff, bring in that unfortunate inebriate whom I sentenced to confinement in the gaol yesterday. The Court, while sensible of the imperative necessity of protecting itself from all unseemly disorder and preserving its dignity undiminished, nevertheless always leans to the side of mercy. The Court trusts that a night’s incarceration may have sufficiently sobered and chastened the poor creature. The Court will therefore give him a brief admonition and will then discharge him.”
The Judge sat back in his large arm-chair and waited benignantly with his gaze resting placidly in front of him, while a deathly silence fell on the crowd and every eye in the courthouse was turned on the Sheriff.
Thompson, standing at his desk, was staring at the Judge with jaw dropped and a dazed look like a man who had suddenly to face judgment. He opened his lips twice as if to speak, then turned and went slowly out of the court-house like a man in a dream, while those left behind looked in each other’s eyes, some half scared and others more than half amused.
Outside, Thompson stopped just between two of the great pillars. He rammed his hands deep in his pockets and gazed vacantly over the court-green and up the road.
“What will he do with you! Remove you!” asked two or three friends who had slipped out of the door behind him and now stood about him.
“He ‘ll put me in jail–and remove me.”
*****
“No matter if he says black ‘s white and white ‘s black, don’t you open your mouth or you ‘ll get it. It ‘s much as I can do to keep you out of jail this minute.”
“But, Sheriff–! But, Aleck–! Just wait a minute! I don’t—-“
The next instant he was inside the courthouse and the Sheriff was marching him up the aisle between the upturned faces. He planted him at the bar immediately before the Court, pulling off his hat in such a way as to drag his hair over his face and give him an even more dishevelled appearance than before. Then he moved around to his own desk, keeping his eye fixed piercingly on the astonished Creel’s bewildered face. A gasp went over the court-room, and the Bar stared at the prisoner in blank amazement.
The Judge alone appeared oblivious of his presence. He had sat absolutely silent and motionless since he had given the order to the Sheriff to produce the prisoner, his face expressive of deep reflection. Now he withdrew his eye from the ceiling.
“Oh!”
With impressive deliberation he put on his large gold-rimmed spectacles; sat up in his chair; assumed his most judicial expression, which sat curiously on his benignant face, and looked severely down upon the culprit. The court-room shivered and Thompson’s round face grew perceptibly whiter; but his eyes, after a single glance darted at the Judge, never left the face of the man at the bar.
The next second the Judge began to speak, and Thompson, and the court-room with him, heaved a deep sigh of relief.
“Young man,” said the Judge, “you have committed an act of grievous impropriety. You have been guilty of one of the most reprehensible offences that any citizen of a Commonwealth founded upon order and justice could commit, an act of such flagrant culpability that the Court, in the maintenance of its dignity and in the interest of the Commonwealth found it necessary to visit upon you punishment of great severity and incarcerate you in the gaol usually reserved for the most depraved malefactors. Intemperance is one of the most debasing of vices. It impairs the intellect and undermines the constitution. To the inhibition of Holy Writ is added the cumulative if inferential prohibition of the Law, which declines to consider inebriety, though extreme enough in degree to impair if not destroy the reasoning faculty, in mitigation of crime of the highest—- dignity. If you had no beloved family to whom your conduct would be an affliction, yet you have a duty to yourself and to the Commonwealth which you have flagrantly violated. To shocking inebriety you added the even grosser misdemeanor of disturbing a Court in the exercise of its supreme function: the calm, orderly, and deliberate administration of justice between the citizens of the Commonwealth.”