The boy looked at his father: one look was enough.

"Yes, sorr. I had an ugly fit on."

Poor little shrinking shivering wretch, with his cowed figure and
trembling lips! It is safe to say that an "ugly fit" seized upon every
person listening to that futile confession.

Ed Rankin felt the blood boil in his veins. He glanced at Myra Beckwith,
sitting among the audience within the bar. She was leaning forward with
her hands clasped tightly, watching the boy. There were tears in her
eyes, and Rankin blessed her for them.

It was clear that the district attorney himself was a good deal wrought
upon, for his manner grew quieter every minute. He sat with his head
slightly forward, looking out from under his brows straight into the
miserable little face before him. His questions came short and incisive.

"State to the jury again how you hurt your ear."

"Sure I fell off a horse."

"Hm! You fell off a horse and lit on your ear?"

"Yes, sorr."

"And this ingenious tumble took place before the racket in the cellar?"

"Yes, sorr."

"How long before?"

"I guess about a week."

"Your mother testified that it happened the same morning."

"Yes, sorr. It was the same marning."

The poor little chap's answers were getting almost inaudible. He looked
spent with misery and apprehension. He gave no sign of tears. His wan,
pinched little face looked as if he had cried so much in his short life
that there was no longer any relief in it. He was soon dismissed, and
went shuffling back to his cold corner.

The woman and girls proved no more available for purposes of justice
than the boy. Their testimony was perfectly consistent and absolutely
unshakable; it had been thoroughly beaten into them, that was clear.

When it came time for Rumpety to plead his own cause before the jury he
proved quite equal to the situation. He planted himself before them and
harangued them like any third-rate criminal lawyer.

"I tell you, gen'lemen," he declared, "it's no small b'y's job to keep
that fahmily in arder!" and he proceeded to describe them as a
cantankerous lot, to be ruled only by that ideal justice tempered by
mercy which he was apparently a master in dispensing.

At the last he waxed pathetic, and, in a tearful voice, somewhat at
odds with his dry, wicked little eyes, he cried, "I've got a row to hoe,
that if there was a lot of men in it they'd have hanged themselves from
a rafter!"

With which magnificent climax and a profoun