expected to prove
very little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the jury
as possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he could
drag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlers
in the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record from
the date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose of
sustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to draw
of his client's well-known honesty and clean past.

Fully an hour before Judge Maxwell arrived to open court, the benches
down toward the front were full. This vantage ground had been
preempted mainly by the old men whose hearing was growing dim. They
sat there with their old hands, as brown as blackberry roots, clasped
over their sticks and umbrellas, their peaked old chins up, their eyes
alert. Here and there among them sat an ancient dame, shawled and
kerchiefed, for the day was chill; and from them all there rose the
scent of dry tobacco-leaves, and out of their midst there sounded
the rustling of paper-bags and the cracking of peanut-shells.

"Gosh m' granny!" said Captain Bill Taylor, deputy sheriff, as he stood
a moment after placing a pitcher of water and a glass on the bench,
ready for Judge Maxwell's hand. "They're here from Necessity to
Tribulation!"

Of course the captain was stretching the territory represented by that
gathering somewhat, for those two historic post offices lay farther away
from Shelbyville than the average inhabitant of that country ever
journeyed in his life. But there was no denying that they had come from
surprising distances.

There was Uncle Posen Spratt, from Little Sugar Creek, with his
steer's-horn ear trumpet; and there were Nick Proctor and his wife,
July, from the hills beyond Destruction, seventeen miles over a road
that pitched from end to end when it didn't slant from side to side, and
took a shag-barked, sharp-shinned, cross-eyed wind-splitter to travel.
There sat old Bev Munday, from Blue Cut, who hadn't been that far away
from home since Jesse James got after him, with his old brown hat on his
head; and it was two to one in the opinion of everybody that he'd keep
it there till the sheriff ordered him to lift it off. Hiram Lee, from
Sni-a-bar Township was over there in the corner where he could slant up
and spit out of the window, and there was California Colboth, as big
around the waist as a cow, right behind him. She had came ove