"Then may I offer myself to the prisoner to conduct his defense?" father demanded, and he looked over at Jed, who in turn looked at Mr. Goodloe before he nodded.
"Then shoot ahead, stranger. Jim have told all they is about it, but you can have Hi and Bud Turner sworn in and git any more they have got to say. Them men speaks truth when they speaks." At which statement every good man and true nodded his head with firm conviction. A gaunt old mountaineer who sat over by the window cleared his throat in an embarra.s.sment that marked him as the Hiram Turner alluded to.
"I don"t think I shall need the testimony of Mr. Turner or his son,"
father answered quietly, as he stood tall and straight before the jury.
"I want to put Mr. Bangs" wife on the witness stand and question her before the jury. Sheriff, call Mrs. Bangs."
"Naw, stranger, naw," said Jed, and he rose as if to combat, but Mr.
Goodloe laid a restraining hand on his arm, and trembling, he took his seat.
"Don"t tell nothing, honey," he whispered, as the girl rose from her bench, laid aside her cavernous black bonnet and advanced, took the oath administered by the sheriff and stood facing father.
"Now, Mrs. Bangs," said father, with silvery tenderness in his voice which I felt sure had gained him the reputation of never having lost a case in which a woman was involved, "I want you to tell us all that happened on the day that Jed let the mule escape him. Look at me and tell me all about it."
"Well, stranger," began the mountain girl, with a look of confidence coming into her face that was like a little pink wide-open arbutus, "I reckon you won"t believe me--like Jed didn"t at first, though he do now."
"Don"t tell, honey," the prisoner commanded and implored in the one plea. "I"d rather take the pen. They won"t believe you."
"It war this way," she continued, without seeming to hear the command of her young husband, upon whose arm the parson again laid a restraining hand. "Jed he had unhitched the team and tied them with their rope halters to the fence "fore our cabin, when it was almost dark "fore we got thar. Then while I was unpacking the wagon he got on one horse and rid down the side of the gulch to see whar water was at. I was jest takin" the things in when a man come along leading five mules and riding on one. He was a city stranger in fine clothes and he asked me fer a meal because he had lost his way from a man who had a tent and grub. My mammy allus cooked fer strangers, so--"
"She sh.o.r.e do that," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mr. Turner, proud of his noted hospitality.
"So I made up a fire hasty in the yard and put on a coffee pot," the girl continued. "I had some corn pone and bacon my mammy had give me fer a snack and I het that up. Whilst I got the meal the stranger he went on unloading our wagon and then he come to a bundle of bed quilts what my mammy have been saving fer me from her mammy and her grandmammy. He took a notion to them and ast me how old they was and I told him about as old as any twenty-inch cedar on Old Harpeth. He asked me to trade "em, but I couldn"t abear to until he had riz to fifty dollars, what was the price of a young mule, all on account of his sister wanting quilts like them up in a big city. I was kinder crying quiet at letting "em go, but I thought about what that mule would be to Jed who wuz so good to me, so I give "em to him and he tied "em on his saddle and went away. It war most a hour when Jed come and when I told him and showed him the money, he didn"t believe me about them old quilts and he tooken the rope from around the neck of the mule he"d been riding and--"
She paused here in her story and put her scarlet flower face in her hands, while Jed groaned and dropped his own face down upon his arm. The old judge"s face took on a grim sternness, the jury stopped whittling and the face of every woman in the court room gazed upon the girl with stern unbelieving accusation.
"Go on, now, honey, but they won"t believe you," commanded Jed with a sob.
"Your husband took the rope from around the neck of the mule and left him untied?" asked father gently.
"What fer, Melissa?" asked the old judge, without gentleness or any show of confidence in what the shrinking woman was saying.
"To beat me with. He war crazed mad and called me a name, but I don"t hold it ag"in him," answered the young wife, with a glance at the cowering prisoner.
"He done right," calmly announced one of the twelve good men and true, in the muddy boots and flannel shirt, and every mountain woman in the court room nodded her head in approval of the p.r.o.nouncement.
"Order in the court room. You all shet up and listen," commanded the judge, as father looked around the room and then at him with a stern demand for control of the situation.
"Then what happened, Mrs. Bangs?" father continued to question.
"I hollered and fought and skeered the mule off into the big woods where he can"t be found to keep my husband out of the pen," she answered with a sob. "It took me a week to make him believe about them quilts and then pappy come along and fought him about the mule and found the money, as he claimed he sold the mule fer what was the quilt money."
"That will do. Thank you, Mrs. Bangs," said father, with the same deference and tenderness he had used when he began to question her.
"Does the prosecution wish to question the witness?"
"They ain"t no use of questioning her when she says a man give her fifty dollars fer five old quilts," was the answer made by the young prosecuting attorney, who did not rise to his feet to make this remark.
"Please ask Mrs. Bangs if the quilts were woven ones of three colors, and then call me to the stand," I said to father quickly.
He put the question to the weeping young wife and got an affirmative answer, after which he dismissed her and had the sheriff swear me in.
"Can you throw any light upon the matter of the purchase or sale of these quilts, Miss Powers?" father questioned me formally.
"If they were old hand-woven, herb-dyed, knitted quilts, they are worth fifty dollars apiece in New York to-day. I paid that for one not five months ago," I said, staring haughtily into the calmly doubting faces of the mountaineers in the jury box and on the benches.
"Do you want to question the witness?" my father asked of the indolent young prosecutor.
"Don"t know who she is and don"t believe she is telling the truth," was the laconic refusal of the prosecutor to let me influence his case.
"Well, now, Jim, Parson Goodloe here brought the gal along with him and I reckon he can character witness for her," interposed the judge.
"Sheriff, swear in the parson." His command was duly executed.
"Mr. Goodloe, do you consider Miss Powers a woman who can be depended upon to speak the truth?" father asked him formally.
"I do," the Reverend Mr. Goodloe answered quietly, and just for a second a gleam from his eyes under their dull gold brows shot across the distance to me, and if it hadn"t all been so serious I should have laughed with glee at his thus having to declare himself about my character in public. But the next moment the situation became 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 circ.u.mstantial 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 a.s.semblage 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. "He wasn"t sold to no mule man, fer they crops the hair on their hoofs to see if they"s healthy "fore they buys.
This here frees Jed."
"And now that you gentlemen have the testimony of a mule, will you not believe the word of Mrs. Bangs and Miss Powers about the valuable quilts?" my father said, after he had commanded silence by raising his hand.
"We sh.o.r.e do believe every word of it, stranger, and you won this here case and not that mule," a stern old sister in a gingham ap.r.o.n and black bonnet said, with a commanding glance at the jury.
"Yes, stranger," answered the h.o.a.ry old foreman, whom to this day I believe to be the meek husband of the commanding old woman in the black bonnet. "I have done got the mind of the jury and they all voted fer you and not the mule."
"I hereby gives that mule to Jed Bangs and my daughter, Melissa, and I"ll knock off a half on the price of his teammate to Jed if he gives me his fergiveness and hern," old Hiram rose and turned with his hand on the forelock of the mule hero to say to the a.s.sembled court room. "Go around and halter him quick, Jed, "fore he breaks away again, the durned fool," he added in another voice.
"Yes, prisoner, you are declared free, and hurry to ketch him, fer he"s straining ag"inst Hiram," was the judge"s sentence, delivered from the bench as everybody rose and began to stream out to watch the tussle between Jed and the wild mule. Father and the parson were among the first to gain the door.
In the next few minutes I found that some of the shy mountain women were beginning to hover about me, and in another ten minutes I had laid the foundations of an export rug and quilt business that I have a feeling will thrive greatly.
"Were you arrested because your mother told you not to sell the quilts?"