The Glass Village

The old farmer began quietly enough. When the rain drove him into the barn, he had taken the opportunity to reshoe the two horses. No, he had not left the barn... He dropped to a mutter. The Swedish iron that he used to use for the nails... Johnny could not make out whether the Swedish horseshoe nails were no longer available or Isbel could no longer afford them... The lined face, full of pits, a face of weathered granite, came alive in the most curious way. Muscles and nerves began to move, so that the stone seemed turning to a lava, heating more and more from below, until the whole rocky structure was in motion.

And then, with a roar, Mert Isbel erupted.

“Whoreson! Seducer! Antichrist!”

He was on his feet in a crouch, left arm dangling, right arm leveled, chin and nose thrust forward in total accusation.

He was addressing Josef Kowalczyk.

Kowalczyk pressed back in his chair like a man flattening before a hurricane. Andrew Webster’s bony little bottom lifted itself clear of his seat as he grasped the edge of the pine table.

“Merton,” said Judge Shinn in a shocked voice.

“Mr. Isbel—” began Adams.

“Mert!” Burney Hackett reached.

But Merton Isbel roared again, and as he roared the people held their breath. For this was not the outburst of a sane man heated to anger; it was the explosion of sanity itself. Mert Isbel was hallucinated. For the moment he thought Josef Kowalczyk was the traveling man who had destroyed his daughter Sarah a decade before. And he damned the destroyer and praised God for delivering him into his hands.

“Robber — despoiler of virgins — father of bastards — furrin scum!”

Before their immobilized eyes the old farmer lunged across the pine table and pulled the stupefied prisoner from the chair, his powerful hands about the man’s throat.

“Ten years I’ve waited — ten years — ten years...”

Kowalczyk’s skin turned from gray to gray-violet. His eyes popped. He made strangling noises...

It took six men to drag Mert Isbel off the prisoner. They held him down on Fanny Adams’s trestle table, pinning his arms, hanging onto his thrashing legs. Gradually his struggles subsided, the madness went out of his eyes. They got him to his feet and took him upstairs to one of the bedrooms.

Judge Shinn surveyed the wreckage wildly.

“We’ll recess, we’ll recess,” he kept saying. “Will you people please help clean up this mess!”

Lunch was solitary. Each man chewed away at Millie Pangman’s sandwich tastelessly.

It was only when Ferriss Adams rose to return to the Adams house that Judge Shinn remarked, “Better polish it off, Ferriss. We’re going nowhere with extreme rapidity. Were you intending to rest?”

Adams said, “I was, but Casavant said something this morning when I took him over to Aunt Fanny’s that I think ought to come out.”

“That earbender?” The Judge frowned. “What can he possibly contribute?”

“It’s about the painting on the easel.”

“Oh?” Andy Webster looked up, interested. “What about the painting on the easel?”

“Never mind,” said the Judge. “All right, Ferriss, put Casavant on and wind up. Does it matter what he has to say, Andy? Or what you have to say? What have you to say, by the way? You’ll have to make some gesture at a defense.”

“We have no defense,” grunted the old man. “Truth is our defense, only nobody’ll believe it. I can only put Kowalczyk on the stand and let it go at that.”

“You may not be so sure Kowalczyk’s telling the truth, Judge Webster,” said Adams slyly, “when you hear what Casavant says.”

“Oh?” said old Andy again.

Adams left, whistling.

Usher Peague glanced curiously at Johnny. “Judge Shinn’s been telling me some fabulous stories about you. What are you doing, son, preparing to serve us a hasenpfeffer from that rabbit you’ve got up your sleeve?”

“No rabbits,” said Johnny. “Or anything else up my sleeve. You heard the testimony this morning. Old Selina and the Hackett kids, the three Isbels — that’s six more whose alibis eliminate them, and since those were the only six left to eliminate...”

“Zero,” said Peague thoughtfully.

“Yep,” said Johnny. “By the trickiest kind of luck everybody in town has an alibi. Everybody, that is, but one. And that’s the one who was tagged for it from the start.”

“Well,” said Andy Webster, slamming down his napkin, “that’s that!”

Judge Shinn was massaging his head.

“There’s always,” said the Cudbury editor brightly, “the man from Mars.”