much more
serious and my heart positively stopped still as I seemed to see prison
doors close upon the young husband.

"Do you want to question the witness?" father asked of the lolling young
prosecutor.

"How long have you known the lady, Parson?" he asked, with a drawl and
one eye half closed.

There was an intense silence in the court room for almost a minute. Then
the Reverend Mr. Gregory Goodloe answered calmly:

"Three days."

"That might be long enough fer a parson, but it ain't fer a jury," the
young attorney answered, and there was a quizzical kindness in the old
judge's face as he smiled at Mr. Goodloe and shook his head.

Mr. Goodloe started to speak, but father waved him back to his seat,
turned to the judge and jury and began the most wonderful speech on the
subject of circumstantial evidence and ethical law that I have ever
heard. His beautiful deep voice was as clear as a bell and twenty years
seemed to have fallen from his shoulders. I was looking at and listening
to the man he had been before I was born. And when I could tear my eyes
from his radiant face I watched these stolid mountaineers with whom he
was working his will with a power they had never experienced before and
did not understand. The men in the jury box and the men on the hewn
benches dropped their eyes before his flaming ones as he shamed their
censorious manhood and some of the sun-bonneted women bent their heads
and sobbed when he arraigned them for the lack of motherhood and
sisterhood for the poor young wife who had come over the Ridge to live
among them.

"Would you men and women rather believe a girl light of love and
faithless, and send your neighbor to prison for two years of his young
life when he could mean much to you and his state and his nation, than
to give them a little human sympathy and justice. Do you prefer to pin
your faith to the value of a worthless, vagrant mule than--"

But just here, when Judge Nickols Morris Powers was winding himself up
for one of the greatest appeals to a jury he had ever made, a mule
stepped into the case and took away the honor of its winning. He poked
his inquisitive nose into a back window of the court room which looked
out upon the edge of the big woods, and gave the whole assemblage a
hew-haw of derision.

"Lordy mighty, that are Pete come back hisself with all the curkles in
the big woods sticking to him!" exclaimed Hiram Turner, as he rose and
went to examine his property. "