Pete stopped dramatically; his little sparkling black eyes traveled quickly from one face to another to note the effect he had made. Mr. Peaslee's spirits were rising; the grand jury could not believe such a "passel of lies"—only, only was one of those holes "beeg as mah t'umb" made, perchance, by a marble?
"That's a mighty moving narrative," commented Sampson, dryly. "Did I understand you to say that you were hit in the head or the arm?"
"Bose of it," averred Pete, without winking.
"I didn't shoot any bag of marbles," whispered Mr. Peaslee to his neighbor, who nodded. That he had the courage to address a remark to any one shows how his spirits were rising.
"You said you were going along the short cut through Mr. Edwards's orchard, didn't you?" the state's attorney now asked.
"Yes, seh," said Pete.
Paige stepped to a big blackboard, which he had had set up at the end of the room, and rapidly sketched a plan of the Edwards' lot, with the aid of a memorandum of measurements which he had secured. A line across the upper left-hand corner represented the path commonly used by the neighbors in going through the Edwards's orchard.
"Now, Mr. Lamoury," resumed Paige, "I don't quite understand how, if you were on the path there, you could have seen young Edwards, or he you. The barn seems to be in the way until just at the right-hand end, and when you get to that, you'd have to look through about ten rows of apple-trees. Now weren't you a little off the line?"
"Dame!" exclaimed Pete, ingenuously. "Ah'll was got for be, since Ah was shoot, ain't it? Ah'll can't remembler."
"Mr. Edwards told us," continued Paige, while Solomon's heart warmed to him, "that he saw you fall out of some bushes. Now these are the only bushes there are," and he rapidly indicated on the board the rows of currant bushes, the asparagus, the sunflowers, and the lilacs which lined the garden on its right-hand corner. "That's a good way from the path."