The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sheriffs Bluff, by Thomas Nelson Page

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Title: The Sheriffs Bluff
1908

Author: Thomas Nelson Page

Release Date: November 16, 2007 [EBook #23510]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHERIFFS BLUFF ***

Produced by David Widger

THE SHERIFFS BLUFF

By Thomas Nelson Page

Charles Scribner's Sons New York, 1908

Copyright, 1891, 1904, 1906

I

The county of H------ was an old Colonial county, and even as late as
the time of my story contained many Colonial relics. Among them were the
court-house and the jail, and, at that time, the Judge and the Sheriff.

The court-house was an old brick edifice of solemn and grayish brown,
with a portico whose mighty columns might have stood before a temple
of Minerva overlooking the AEgean Sea. With its thick walls and massive
barred windows, it might have been thought the jail, until one saw the
jail. The jail once seen stood alone. A cube of stone, each block huge
enough to have come from the Pyramid of Cheops; the windows, or rather
the apertures, were small square openings, crossed and recrossed
with great bars of wrought iron, so massive that they might have been
fashioned on the forge of the Cyclops. Looking through them from the
outside, one saw just deep enough into the narrow cavern to see another
iron grating, and catch a suspicion of the darkness beyond. The entrance
was but a slit letting into a stone-paved corridor on which opened the
grinding iron doors of the four small cells, each door a grate of huge
iron bars, heavily crossed, with openings just large enough to admit
a hand. The jail was built, not to meet the sentimental or any other
requirements of a reasonable and humane age, but in that hard time when
crime was reckoned crime, when the very names of "gaol" and "prison"
stood for something clear and unmistakable.

The Judge of the circuit was himself a relic of the past, for his youth
had been cast among those great ones of the earth whose memory had come
down coupled with deeds so heroic and far-reaching, that even to the
next generation the actors appeared half enveloped and