“I felt jes’ like the tail of a dog in a fight,—could neither holp nor hender the critter ez toted me ahint him, but war jes’ ez apt ter git gnawed ez him,” said Jerry Price disconsolately.
“I looked ter see the jedge fetch him a pop ’side the head, myself,” said the new juryman, evidently unacquainted with judicial methods. He had regarded his capture to serve on the jury as a woful disaster, and could hardly bear up under this aggregation of misfortunes. “Ef I hed knowed what war comin’, I wouldn’t hev followed him down them steers.”
“Six spry young steers ’mongst my cattle,—I’ll never see ’em agin!” cried old man Beames from out the darkness, reminded anew of his journeying herds under the insufficient guidance of Bob. “I hev never done no wrong in my life. I hev tuk heed ter my feet ter walk in the right way. An’ hyar in my old age, through another man’s fault, the door of a jail hev been shet on me.”
His voice dropped. They were all feeling the poignant humiliation of the imprisonment. They were honest men, to whom it could scarcely have come but for this mischance. At every contortion of wounded pride they turned upon the unlucky foreman.
“I ’lowed I’d drap in my tracks,” cried Ben Doaks, “whenst he jes’ tuk the Code o’ Tennessee by the hawns an’ tail, an’ dragged it up afore the jedge.”
And Jerry Price was fain to sneer, too.
“Did the Code hev nuthin’ in it ’bout cuttin’ out the tongue of a foreman of a jury?” he demanded.
But the Code was an unabated fact still, and the nephew of the ex-justice alone could say what was in it. “Naw, sir!” he retorted, emboldened by the allusion to his superior knowledge, “nor about jailin’ a jury, nuther. I don’t b’lieve the jedge hed the right ter jail the jury.”
“Waal,” drawled Jerry, satirically, “we-uns hed better make up our minds powerful quick how we air a-goin’ ter pay him back fur it.”
The foreman was saved the mortification of acknowledging the hopelessness of reprisal. A voice without sounded suddenly.