The following day another interesting trial was conducted in the Court of Stringtown County. The force of the commonwealth was expended in a vain attempt to disprove the legality of the short will of the ?Corn Bug? as recorded on the slate of the child and witnessed by the dead minister. Again the judge permitted the evidence of the negress Dinah to be taken, and in summing up the case, declared that both in intent and deed the law had been complied with in the drafting of that unusual will concerning the authenticity of which there was no doubt, for the handwriting of Mr. Jones was well known and Dinah testified that it had been drawn by the direct command of the ?Corn Bug.? The property of the ?Corn Bug? was not claimed by kindred and, other than a disinherited, adopted brother, there were no possible heirs in law, for death had ended the line of descent. In sound mind and health, Mr. Hardman had openly stated in Stringtown, in presence of the Court and others, that the land and all but two thousand dollars of the gold (that had no legal existence) was to go to the girl. She was his heir, and the Court must certify to the legality of the will and appoint an administrator for the child. For that office the judge named Mr. Wagner, the clerk of Stringtown, who at once qualified and received his appointment. Thus when time for adjournment arrived that day, the tragedy begun in the tempest of the dying year, 1863, had closed so far as it concerned the present term of the Stringtown County Court.
When Judge Elford returned to his home, exhausted by the cares of the days that had preceded, his form was bent more than usual and his footsteps lagged as he moved from the door of the ?bus to his own threshold. But he made no complaint. And when the kerosene lamp was lighted and the window curtains of the small front room were drawn after supper, the faithful student and unselfish judge sat once more before his desk, which, with its bookcase above, constituted the greatest treasure of his lonely house.
Gone were his children, out into the world,—they had left him long ago; gone was the wife of his bosom—many years she had rested beneath the sward enclosed in Stringtown?s white-palinged fence; gone were the ambitions of boyhood and manhood; all had been swept away by the resistless broom that had brushed the years into oblivion. His life had been spent unselfishly in behalf of his countrymen and his beloved Commonwealth; no charity had appealed to him in vain, no wanderer had gone from his door unfed, penniless each New Year found him and penniless each old year left this man who spent the material returns that came with each season in behalf of this fellow-men, and gave his intellectual self to the cause of justice. Alone in his modest study sat the weary, venerable Kentucky judge, typical of hundreds of others who lived thirty years ago in that border state.
And as he sat in the dim lamplight of that modest room the record of his years arose before him, bearing again to his gaze the mother from out the long, long ago, the boyish feet, the spring of youth, the ambition of middle age and lastly the closing of life?s hopes and cares in the edge of the ending that was yet to come. And then, as the chain of thought-links closed, he rose, took from its place in the bookcase above him the leatherbound volume that he had opened in the presence of the village clerk, opened it again to the same page, that which gave the account of the Case in the Barren County Court, and read: ?I claim the Right of Clergy for this slave.? Then Cupe?s face came up and the past was pictured. Again he saw the open tomb into which the casket had been lowered; Cupe kneeling beside once more with strap in hand; again the face of the old darkey was raised as it had been in the long buried past; the rain drops fell, patter, patter; the sound of the vanished raindrops, deadened to all but him who sat alone that night, came again to life, and the mood-struck man heard from memory?s chamber the voice of the old negro who by his command had been so recently tortured, gently repeat: ?Bressed am de dead what de rain falls on.?
Slowly the head of the careworn man fell upon the hands that were now crossed over the open volume. The aching forehead touched the printed page, and as recent events crushed into his mind the lips again murmured the sentence spoken over that book, in that same room the night of Mr. Wagner?s visit: ?God forgive me if I have done a wrong.?
