Then they called up Jim Lane, and he told the very same story over
again, exact. Tom never listened to this one at all, but set there
thinking and thinking, miles and miles away. So the mud-turtle went in
alone again and come out just as flat as he done before. The lawyer
for the prostitution looked very comfortable, but the judge looked
disgusted. You see, Tom was just the same as a regular lawyer, nearly,
because it was Arkansaw law for a prisoner to choose anybody he wanted
to help his lawyer, and Tom had had Uncle Silas shove him into the case,
and now he was botching it and you could see the judge didn't like it
much. All that the mud-turtle got out of Lem and Jim was this: he asked
them:

"Why didn't you go and tell what you saw?"

"We was afraid we would get mixed up in it ourselves. And we was just
starting down the river a-hunting for all the week besides; but as soon
as we come back we found out they'd been searching for the body, so then
we went and told Brace Dunlap all about it."

"When was that?"

"Saturday night, September 9th."

The judge he spoke up and says:

"Mr. Sheriff, arrest these two witnesses on suspicions of being
accessionary after the fact to the murder."

The lawyer for the prostitution jumps up all excited, and says:

"Your honor! I protest against this extraordi--"

"Set down!" says the judge, pulling his bowie and laying it on his
pulpit. "I beg you to respect the Court."

So he done it. Then he called Bill Withers.

BILL WITHERS, sworn, said: "I was coming along about sundown,
Saturday, September 2d, by the prisoner's field, and my
brother Jack was with me and we seen a man toting off
something heavy on his back and allowed it was a nigger
stealing corn; we couldn't see distinct; next we made out that
it was one man carrying another; and the way it hung, so kind
of limp, we judged it was somebody that was drunk; and by the
man's walk we said it was Parson Silas, and we judged he had
found Sam Cooper drunk in the road, which he was always trying
to reform him, and was toting him out of danger."

It made the people shiver to think of poor old Uncle Silas toting off
the diseased down to the place in his tobacker field where the dog dug
up the body, but there warn't much sympathy around amongst the faces,
and I heard one cuss say "'Tis the coldest blooded work I ever struck,
lugging a murdered man around like that, and going