Suddenly Harshaw, tossing his hair from his brow, leaned forward, with his folded arms on the table before him.
“Did you not, sir,” he said, smacking his confident red lips, and with an exasperatingly deliberate delivery,—“did you not on the twentieth day of August ascend a certain summit of the Great Smoky Mountains called Piomingo Bald, and there”—he derisively thrust out his red tongue and withdrew it swiftly—“shoot and kill a certain cow, believing it to belong to Mink Lo—to Reuben Lorey?”
The judge’s eyes were fixed upon Rood. He seemed strangely agitated, shocked; his face assumed a ghastly pallor.
The attorney-general protested that the juror was not obliged to answer a question which tended to fasten disgrace, nay crime, upon him; Harshaw the while still leaning on the table, laughing silently, and looking with the roseate dimples of corpulent triumph at their discomfiture.
“The juror need not answer,” said the judge.
“I’m mighty willin’ ter answer, jedge,” gasped Rood. “I never done no sech thing sence I war born.”
In the estimation of all the crowd it was natural that he should say this; to accept the privilege of silence would be admission.
“Let me put another question in altogether another field,” said Harshaw, smoothing his yellow beard. “If it please the court to permit us to cite the decision of an inferior court, perhaps, but altogether beyond the jurisdiction of this honorable court, I should like to refer to the dicta in the courts of Cupid. Were not you and the prisoner suitors for the hand of the same young lady?”
It tickled him, to use a phrase most descriptive of the enjoyment he experienced, to describe in this inflated manner the humble “courtin’” of the mountaineers. There was a broad smile on many of the faces within the bar, the townspeople relishing particularly a joke of this character on the mountain folks. The judge’s discerning gray eye was fixed upon him as his pink laugh expanded, his peculiarly red lips showing his strong white teeth.
“Yes, sir, we war,” Rood admitted. He was calm now; his agitation had excited no comment; it was to be expected in a man surprised, confounded, and dismayed by so serious a charge.