“What han I to do wi’ their teeth?”
“Well, look now, and tell me if the two front teeth in each hare don’t appear to have been snapped off.”
Old William took up a dead hare and bared its teeth.
“Now the other,” urged Mr. Blackburn. “Well?”
“It looks summat like it, to be sewer,” conceded the gamekeeper.
“Well, what do you make of it?” William scratched his head. Then a light illumined his countenance. “It’ll happen be a birth-mark; that’s it, a birth-mark,—and at a sign from Mr. Blackburn stepped from the box much more nimbly than he had entered it.
“That’s the case, your Worships,” said Mr Alison.
“Now, Mr. Blackburn,” said the clerk.
“I don’t purpose wasting your Worships’ time by any opening remarks. I shall call my witnesses, and after you have heard what they have to say your Worships will have had the story of as pretty a conspiracy to damn an innocent man as has ever been exposed in this or any other Court of Justice. —Holmes.”
I stepped into the witness-box, and, as I took the greasy Testament in my hand and kissed the book in obedience to the clerk’s command, heartily wished myself a thousand miles away. I saw the magistrates, and the lawyers, and the crowd in a blurred maze, my knees gave under my weight, and the only thing real in all the universe appeared to be the ledge of the witness-box, to which I clung desperately.