“You mean did he want anything in return?”
“Exactly, my dear young lady.”
Peg's face on one side turned a deep magenta color, on the other a lighter cherry, while her nose was purple, and her forehead an Indian red. To add to the effect of this awkward and discomposing dramatic exhibition of embarrassment, she began to wipe her hands on her dress, and sat silent.
“I understand,” said the lawyer hastily. “No matter—the conditions WERE fulfilled.”
“No!” said Peg amazedly. “How could they be until he was dead?”
It was the lawyer's turn to color and grow embarrassed.
“He DID say something, and make some conditions,” continued Peg, with a certain firmness through her awkwardness; “but that's nobody's business but mine and his'n. And it's no call o' yours or theirs.”
“But, my dear Miss Moffat, if these very conditions were proofs of his right mind, you surely would not object to make them known, if only to enable you to put yourself in a condition to carry them out.”
“But,” said Peg cunningly, “s'pose you and the Court didn't think 'em satisfactory? S'pose you thought 'em QUEER? Eh?”
With this helpless limitation on the part of the defence, the case came to trial. Everybody remembers it,—how for six weeks it was the daily food of Calaveras County; how for six weeks the intellectual and moral and spiritual competency of Mr. James Byways to dispose of his property was discussed with learned and formal obscurity in the court, and with unlettered and independent prejudice by camp-fires and in bar-rooms. At the end of that time, when it was logically established that at least nine-tenths of the population of Calaveras were harmless lunatics, and everybody else's reason seemed to totter on its throne, an exhausted jury succumbed one day to the presence of Peg in the court-room. It was not a prepossessing presence at any time; but the excitement, and an injudicious attempt to ornament herself, brought her defects into a glaring relief that was almost unreal. Every freckle on her face stood out and asserted itself singly; her pale blue eyes, that gave no indication of her force of character, were weak and wandering, or stared blankly at the judge; her over-sized head, broad at the base, terminating in the scantiest possible light-colored braid in the middle of her narrow shoulders, was as hard and uninteresting as the wooden spheres that topped the railing against which she sat.