r in her
dish-wheeled buggy from Green Valley, and she was staying with her
married son, who worked on the railroad and lived in that little
pink-and-blue house behind the water-tank.

Oh, you could stand there--said Captain Taylor--and name all the old
settlers for twenty-seven mile in a ring! But the captain hadn't the
time, even if he was taken with the inclination, for the townspeople
began to come, and it was his duty to stand at the door and shut off the
stream when all the benches were full.

That was Judge Maxwell's order; nobody was to be allowed to stand around
the walls or in the aisles and jig and shuffle and kick up a disturbance
just when the lawyers or witnesses might be saying something that the
captain would be very anxious to hear. The captain indorsed the judge's
mandate, and sustained his judgment with internal warmth.

General Bryant and Colonel Moss Punton came early, and sat opposite each
other in the middle of the aisle, each on the end of a bench, where they
could look across and exchange opinions, yet escape being crowded by the
mongrel stock which was sure to come pouring in soon. A good many
unnoted sons of distinguished fathers arrived in pairs and troops, with
perfumery on their neckties and chewing-gum in their teeth; and their
sisters, for the greater part as lovely as they were knotty, warty,
pimply, and weak-shanked, came after them in churchlike decorum and
settled down on the benches like so many light-winged birds. But not
without a great many questioning glances and shy explorations around
them, not certain that this thing was proper and admissible, it being
such a mixed and dry-tobacco atmosphere. Seeing mothers here,
grandfathers there, uncles and aunts, cousins and neighbors everywhere,
they settled down, assured, to enjoy the day.

It was a delightfully horrid thing to be tried for murder, they said,
even though one was obscure and nobody, a bound servant in the fields of
the man whom he had slain. Especially if one came off clear.

Then Hammer arrived with three law-books under his arm. He was all sleek
and shining, perfumed to the last possible drop. His alpaca coat had
been replaced by a longer one of broadcloth, his black necktie surely
was as dignified and somberly learned of droop as Judge Burns', or Judge
Little's, or Attorney Pickell's, who got Perry Norris off for stealing
old man Purvis' cow.

Mrs. Newbolt was there already, awaiting him at the railing which
div