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Besides these tales of Judge Priest, Cobb wrote several detached short-stories, and many humorous articles for _The Post_ during 1912.

The best of this humor appeared simultaneously with _Back Home_, in a delightful little book, called _Cobb's Anatomy_ (New York, 1912). This contained four essays on the following subjects: "Tummies," perhaps the funniest thing he has done so far; "Teeth;" "Hair;" "Hands and Feet." The only adverse criticism to make of the work was its length: it was too short. Its sequel will appear in 1913 under the title of _Cobb's Bill of Fare_, containing four humorous skits. Aside from his Judge Priest yarns, which began in _The Post_ in the autumn of 1911 and ran throughout the year of 1912, and his humorous papers which also appeared from time to time, Cobb wrote the greatest short-story ever written by a Kentuckian (save that first book of stories by James Lane Allen), entitled "The Belled Buzzard" (_The Post_, September 28, 1912). This, with "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," and "Fishhead,"

which is to be published in _The Cavalier_ for January 11, 1913, after having been rejected by almost every reputable magazine in America, form a trio of horror tales of such power as to compel comparison with the best work of Edgar Poe, with the "shade" going to the Kentuckian in many minds. All three of them, together with "The Escape of Mr.

Trimm"; "The Exit of Anse Dugmore," a Kentucky mountain yarn; and four unpublished stories, called "Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories"; "Smoke of Battle"; "To the Editor of the Sun;" and "Guilty as Charged," will appear in book form in the autumn of 1913, entitled _The Escape of Mr. Trimm_.

In summing up Cobb's work for the New York _Sun_, Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey magazines, wrote: "Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humorists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humorists in the world, although Cobb is one of them.... Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allan Poe at their best.... If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his." And George Horace Lorimer holds that Cobb is "the biggest writing-man ever born in Kentucky; and he's going to get better all the time." This is certainly high praise, but that it voices the opinions of many people is beyond all question. "The great 'find' of 1912" may be the trade-mark of his future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Everybody's Magazine_ (April, 1911); _Hampton's Magazine_ (October, 1911); _The American Magazine_ (November, 1912); _Who's Cobb and Why_, by R. H. Davis (New York, 1912, a brochure).

THE BELLED BUZZARD[86]

[From _The Saturday Evening Post_ (Philadelphia, September 28, 1912)]

There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big Niggerwool, which lay nearer the river. It was traversable only by those who knew it well--an oblong stretch of yellow mud and yellower water, measuring, maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings of cane-break and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree-trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth.

It was untenanted of living things--except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the voice of the swamp itself.

On one side Little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road, and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am speaking of it was midsummer, and from these canes and weeds and waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering.

They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a man's head.

Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weedstems rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat, but with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a turkey-gobbler.

He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was afraid of being found out.

He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet and, taken with an idea, he stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B.

Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill.

He felt perfectly natural--not like a man who had just taken a fellowman's life--but natural and safe, and well satisfied with himself and his morning's work. And he was safe--that was the main thing--absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the thing for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these months. There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had worked out as plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living creature except himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden. No one had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no one had seen the squire emerge, three hours later, alone. The gun, having served its purpose, was hidden again, in a place no mortal eye would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his shoulderblades, the dead man was lying where he might lie undiscovered for months or for years, or forever. His pedler's pack was buried in the mud so deep that not even the probing crawfishes could find it. He would never be missed probably. There was but the slightest likelihood that inquiry would ever be made for him--let alone a search. He was a stranger and a foreigner, the dead man was, whose comings and goings made no great stir in the neighborhood, and whose failure to come again would be taken as a matter of course--just one of those shiftless, wandering dagoes, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That was one of the best things about it--these dagoes never had any people in this country to worry about them or look for them when they disappeared. And so it was all over and done with, and nobody the wiser. The squire clapped his hands together briskly with the air of a man dismissing a subject from his mind for good, and mended his gait.

He felt no stabbings of conscience. On the contrary, a glow of gratification filled him. His house was saved from scandal; his present wife would philander no more--before his very eyes--with these young dagoes, who came from nobody knew where, with packs on their backs and persuasive, wheedling tongues in their heads. At this thought the squire raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked pretty good to him--the small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flowerbeds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout.

At the fence he halted and turned about, carelessly and casually, and looked back along the way he had come. Everything was as it should be--the weedfield steaming in the heat; the empty road stretching along the crooked ridge like a long gray snake sunning itself; and beyond it, massing up, the dark, cloaking stretch of swamp. Everything was all right, but----. The squire's eyes, in their loose sacs of skin, narrowed and squinted. Out of the blue arch away over yonder a small black dot had resolved itself and was swinging to and fro, like a mote. A buzzard--hey? Well, there were always buzzards about on a clear day like this. Buzzards were nothing to worry about--almost any time you could see one buzzard, or a dozen buzzards if you were a mind to look for them.

But this particular buzzard now--wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool? The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the buzzards until this minute. Sometimes when cattle strayed the owners had been known to follow the buzzards, knowing mighty well that if the buzzards led the way to where the stray was, the stray would be past the small salvage of hide and hoofs--but the owner's doubts would be set at rest for good and all.

There was a grain of disquiet in this. The squire shook his head to drive the thought away--yet it persisted, coming back like a midge dancing before his face. Once at home, however, Squire Gathers deported himself in a perfectly normal manner. With the satisfied proprietorial eye of an elderly husband who has no rivals, he considered his young wife, busied about her household duties. He sat in an easy-chair upon his front gallery and read his yesterday's Courier-Journal which the rural carrier had brought him; but he kept stepping out into the yard to peer up into the sky and all about him.

To the second Mrs. Gathers he explained that he was looking for weather signs. A day as hot and still as this one was a regular weather-breeder; there ought to be rain before night.

"Maybe so," she said; "but looking's not going to bring rain."

Nevertheless the squire continued to look. There was really nothing to worry about; still at midday he did not eat much dinner, and before his wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard--or, anyhow, he judged it was the first one he had seen--was swinging back and forth in great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp--closer and closer--until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards.

Were there four of them? No; there were five--five in all.

Such is the way of the buzzard--that shifting black question-mark which punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air.

In broad loops and swirls this dot swings round and round and round, coming a little closer to earth at every turn and always with one particular spot upon the earth for the axis of its wheel. Out of space also other moving spots emerge and grow larger as they tack and jibe and drop nearer, coming in their leisurely buzzard way to the feast.

There is no haste--the feast will wait. If it is a dumb creature that has fallen stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing, with awkward outthrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls too tight--but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect--he hangs aloft longer; but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, has chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard.

The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire--not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think about them any more; but he did--unceasingly.

By supper-time there were seven of them.

He slept light and slept badly. It was not the thought of that dead man lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether. Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked drowsily what ailed him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything?

Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering him, he told her. It was a hot-enough night--wasn't it? And when a man got a little along in life he was apt to be a light sleeper--wasn't that so? Well, then? She turned upon her side and slept again with her light, purring snore. The squire lay awake, thinking hard and waiting for day to come.

At the first faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there, in his shirt in the half light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck-opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing, splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to the south. Buzzards are early risers too. Presently, as the heavens shimmered with the miracle of sunrise, he could make them out--six or seven, or maybe eight.

An hour after breakfast the squire was on his way down through the weed field to the country road. He went half eagerly, half unwillingly. He wanted to make sure about those buzzards. It might be that they were aiming for the old pasture at the head of the swamp.

There were sheep grazing there--and it might be that a sheep had died.

Buzzards were notoriously fond of sheep, when dead. Or, if they were pointed for the swamp he must satisfy himself exactly what part of the swamp it was. He was at the stake-and-rider fence when a mare came jogging down the road, drawing a rig with a man in it. At sight of the squire in the field the man pulled up.

"Hi, squire!" he began. "Goin' somewheres?"

"No; jest knockin' about," the squire said--"jest sorter lookin' the place over."

"Hot agin--ain't it?" said the other.

The squire allowed that it was, for a fact, mighty hot. Commonplaces of gossip followed this--county politics, and a neighbor's wife sick of breakbone fever down the road a piece. The subject of crops succeeded inevitably. The squire spoke of the need of rain. Instantly he regretted it, for the other man, who was by way of being a weather wiseacre, cocked his head aloft to study the sky for any signs of clouds.

"Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said, pointing upward with his whipstock.

"Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of carelessness in his voice.

"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?"

"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin'

nothin, I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear weather."

"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.

"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly.

"There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over the other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs."

"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.

He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made people curious--made them ask questions.

He was halfway across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all running together briskly.

A cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left? And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny. He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on four legs.

One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings--a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven--and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too--an ordinary cowbell--that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye he was seeing him.

Once, years and years and years ago, some one trapped a buzzard, and before freeing it clamped about its skinny neck a copper band with a cowbell pendent from it. Since then the bird so ornamented has been seen a hundred times--and heard oftener--over an area as wide as half the continent. It has been reported, now in Kentucky, now in Florida, now in North Carolina--now anywhere between the Ohio River and the Gulf. Crossroads correspondents take their pens in hand to write to the country papers that on such and such a date, at such a place, So-and-So saw the Belled Buzzard. Always it is the Belled Buzzard, never a belled buzzard. The Belled Buzzard is an institution.

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