The jury had listened to the buzzard's harangue, with their eyes, not with their ears. Down in their hearts there still rang the piteous words. The man-made machine was breaking down; its mechanism out of "gear"; the law that governed it defective. The God-law, the law of mercy, was being set in motion.
The voice of the Judge trembled a little as he delivered his charge, as if somehow a stray tear had clogged the passage from his heart to his lips. In low, earnest tones that every man strained his ear to catch, he reviewed the testimony of the witnesses, those I had not heard; took up the uncontradicted statement of the Deputy Marshal as evidenced by the exhibits before them; passed to the motive behind the alleged conspiracy; dwelt for a moment on the age and long confinement of the accused, and ended with the remark that if they believed his story to be an explanation of the facts, they must acquit him.
They never left their seats. Even the red-faced man voted out of turn in his eagerness. The God-law had triumphed! The old man was free.
The throng in the court-room rose and made their way to the doors, the old man going first, escorted by an officer to see him safely outside. The Judge disappeared through a door; the clerk lifted the lid of his desk and stowed beneath it the greasy, ragged Bible, stained with the lies of a thousand lips. The buzzard crammed his hat over his eyes, turned, and without a word to anyone, stalked out of the room.
I mingled with the motley throng, my ears alert for any spoken opinions. I had seen the flying-belt thrown from the machine and the stoppage of the engine. I wanted now to learn something of the hot breath of the people who had set it in motion eleven months and ten days before.
"Reckon he'll cut a blue streak for home now," muttered a court-lounger, buttoning up his coat; "that is, if he's got one. You'll never catch him sellin' any more moonshine."
"Been me, I'd soaked him," blurted out a corner-loafer. "If you can't convict one of these clay-eaters when you've got him dead to rights, ain't no use havin' no justice."
"I thought Tom [the buzzard] would land him," said a stout, gray-whiskered lawyer who was gathering up his papers. "First case Tom's lost this week. Goes pretty hard with him, you know, when he loses a case."
"It would have been an outrage, sir, if he had won it," broke in a stranger. "The arrest of an old man like that on such a charge, and his confinement for nearly a year in a hole like that one across the street, is a disgrace. Something is rotten in the way the laws are administered in the mountains of Kentucky, or outrages like this couldn't occur."
"He wouldn't thank you, sir, for interfering," remarked a bystander. "Being shut up isn't to him what it is to you and me. He's been taken care of for a year, hasn't he? Warmed and fed, and got his three meals a day. That's a blamed sight more than he gets at home. They're only half-human, these mountaineers, anyway. Don't worry; he's all right."