“Did n't your daughter ever talk about what she wanted done with the boy?”
“Talk about it?” said James. “Why, she didn't talk about nothing else. She used to have it all over every time we went in. It was all about how mother 'n me must do this with him and do that with him,—how he was to go to school, what room he was going to sleep in to our house, and all that.”
Mr. Baker desired to make no cross-examination, and James's wife was called, and testified in her quaint way to the same effect.
By a keen, homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what would be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not formulated it to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors, who had watched with his daughter through the last nights of her life. She was one of the poorest women of the village. Her husband was shiftless, and was somewhat given to drink. She had a large family, with little to bring them up on. Her life had been one long struggle. She was extremely poorly dressed, and although she was neat, there was an air of unthrift or discouragement about her dress. She wore an oversack which evidently had originally been made for some one else; it lacked one button. She was faded and worn and homely; but the moment she spoke she impressed you as a woman of conscience. She had talked in the long watches of the night with the boy's mother, and she confirmed what James and his wife had said. There could be no question what the mother had desired.
Mr. Baker ventured out upon the thin ice of cross-examination.
“She must have talked about her father-in-law, Captain Pelham?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said the woman, “often.”
“She seemed to be attached to him?”
“Yes, indeed,” said the woman, quickly; “she was always telling how good he was to her; I have heard her say there was n't no better man in the world.”
“She must have talked about what he could do for the boy?”