thinking and ransacking his head.
So at last the trial come on, towards the middle of
October, and we was all in the court. The place was
jammed, of course. Poor old Uncle Silas, he looked
more like a dead person than a live one, his eyes was so
hollow and he looked so thin and so mournful. Benny
she set on one side of him and Aunt Sally on the other,
and they had veils on, and was full of trouble. But
Tom he set by our lawyer, and had his finger in every-
wheres, of course. The lawyer let him, and the judge
let him. He ‘most took the business out of the law-
yer’s hands sometimes; which was well enough, be-
cause that was only a mud-turtle of a back-settlement
lawyer and didn’t know enough to come in when it
rains, as the saying is.
They swore in the jury, and then the lawyer for the
prostitution got up and begun. He made a terrible
speech against the old man, that made him moan and
groan, and made Benny and Aunt Sally cry. The way
HE told about the murder kind of knocked us all stupid
it was so different from the old man’s tale. He said
he was going to prove that Uncle Silas was SEEN to
kill Jubiter Dunlap by two good witnesses, and done it
deliberate, and SAID he was going to kill him the very
minute he hit him with the club; and they seen him hide
Jubiter in the bushes, and they seen that Jubiter was
stone-dead. And said Uncle Silas come later and
lugged Jubiter down into the tobacker field, and two
men seen him do it. And said Uncle Silas turned out,
away in the night, and buried Jubiter, and a man seen
him at it.
I says to myself, poor old Uncle Silas has been lying
about it because he reckoned nobody seen him and he
couldn’t bear to break Aunt Sally’s heart and Benny’s;
and right he was: as for me, I would ‘a’ lied the
same way, and so would anybody that had any feeling,
to save them such misery and sorrow which THEY warn’t
no ways responsible for. Well, it made our lawyer
look pretty sick; and it knocked Tom silly, too, for a
little spell, but then he braced up and let on that he
warn’t worried — but I knowed he WAS, all the same.
And the people — my, but it made a stir amongst
them!
And when that lawyer was done telling the jury what
he was going to prove, he set down and begun to work
his witnesses.
First, he called a lot of them to show that there was
bad blood betwixt Uncle Silas and the diseased; and
they told how they had heard Uncle Silas threaten the
diseased, at one time and another, and how it got
worse and worse and everybody was talking about it,
and how diseased got afraid of his life, and told two or
three of them he was certain Uncle Silas would up and
kill him some time or another.
Tom and our lawyer asked them some questions;
but it warn’t no use, they stuck to what they said.
Next, they called up Lem Beebe, and he took the
stand. It come into my mind, then, how Lem and Jim
Lane had come along talking, that time, about borrow-
ing a dog or something from Jubiter Dunlap; and that
brought up the blackberries and the lantern; and that
brought up Bill and Jack Withers, and how they passed
by, talking about a nigger stealing Uncle Silas’s corn;
and that fetched up our old ghost that come along
about the same time and scared us so — and here HE
was too, and a privileged character, on accounts of his
being deef and dumb and a stranger, and they had fixed
him a chair inside the railing, where he could cross his
legs and be comfortable, whilst the other people was all
in a jam so they couldn’t hardly breathe. So it all
come back to me just the way it was that day; and it