She laid her work down in her lap, and gazed intently at him. His face had the transient glow of his pipe upon it, and then, as he took it from his lips, was as indistinct as his long, lank figure disposed in the doorway.
“They oughtn’t ter do it,—but they do. I ain’t never seen nare jury hold a drunk man ez up an’ down ’sponsible ez ef he war sober. They’ll lean ter him ef he could be proved drunk.”
Alethea said nothing. Her mental attitude was one of intense receptivity. Her keen appreciation of how much depended on her comprehension, her desire that no point should escape her attention, were positive pain in their acute consciousness.
The discerning Jerry went on with that acumen and cogency which were such odd concomitants of his ignorance and uncouthness:—
“It makes me laff every time I see a witness swore ter tell ‘the truth, the whole truth, an’ nuthin’ but the truth.’ Folks is so apt ter b’lieve the truth air jes’ what they wanter b’lieve. Git them boys skeered up right smart ’bout the revenuers on one side an’ the moonshiners on t’ other, an’ they’ll feel the truth war ez none o’ we-uns hed ennythin’ ter drink that night; mought hev hed a dram o’ cider, or mebbe nuther stronger ’n yerb tea, but nobody war bodaciously boozy. Then they don’t know sure enough whar the liquor kem from; mos’ folks don’t b’lieve thar’s no still round ’bout the mountings now.”
Alethea leaned back in the rocking-chair, her nerveless hands falling idly upon the work in her lap. The crude mosaic of advertisements on the walls started out with abnormal distinctness, as a tiny flame rose from the embers and fell into sudden extinction among the ashes, leaving the only picture in the room the dusky night-scene dimly painted in purple and dove color upon the panes of the window.
It was only she who could remedy the deficiency in this valuable testimony. She knew full well the source of their secret supply. She it was who had seen the jug left in the barn by the roistering blades, and the moonshiner swing down from the loft to seize upon it. She had his full confession from his own lips. She appreciated the distinctions the jury would make between hilarious drunken sport and coolly intentional malice in the prisoner, and that it was in her hands to sacrifice one of these men to the other.
For the first time she was quick to distrust her own intuitions. Her tyrant conscience, hitherto always ready to immolate every cherished wish on the altar of the right, seemed now the suavest mentor, urging that her lover’s liberty, his life for aught she knew, should not be jeopardized to protect a man whose vocation she accounted a curse to the community. She felt a secret amaze that her first vague project should expand into a fully equipped plan, with hardly a conscious process of thought to give it shape and detail. Her natural doubts, her efforts at alternatives, were flouted by some inner imperious determination. It was in the nature of a concession from this suddenly elate and willful power that she obtained her own consent, as she would have phrased it, to warn Sam Marvin, for the sake of his “houseful,” that he might elude capture, and perhaps save his still and appliances from destruction. And she would warn Jerry, too, despite that triumphant, tumultuous consciousness which held all else so slight since she had knowledge that could aid in proving Mink’s irresponsibility for what he had really done, and his innocence of the graver crime of which he was accused.
“Jerry,” she said, observing that Mrs. Purvine had fallen asleep in her chair, her moon face all askew, her idle hands neatly rolled up in her apron,—“Jerry, I reckon ye wouldn’t want me a-goin’ testifyin’ ter Shaftesville ef ye knowed I seen you-uns leave the jug that evenin’ in Boke’s barn. I sca’cely b’lieved ’twar ye, at fust, all of ye acted so cur’ous; I ’lowed ’twar sperits in yer likeness. An’ I seen the distiller kem an’ git the jug. An’ he seen me.”