Marshall, the lawyer, was becoming annoyed. He rose to his feet and shook his forefinger angrily at Gabriel.
“You know more about this matter than you are willing to reveal,” he shouted. “Now, sir, I want you to tell this court what you know and all you know about the removal or threatened removal of those stakes!”
Gabriel looked smilingly down upon him.
“Well,” he replied slowly, “ez ol’ Isra’l Pidgin use to say, ‘Ef ye don’t know a thing, better let somebody else tell it.’ Thuffore I’d a leetle ruther somebody else’d tell it.”
“And who is Israel Pidgin?”
“Oh, an ol’ feller I use to know up in York State.”
“Confine yourself to Pennsylvania and answer my question. I shall try to make it simple and direct. Did you, at any time, hear any person make a threat to remove those stakes, or express a wish to have them removed? Yes or no.”
This question was getting dangerously close to Abner Pickett. Gabriel recalled, with startling distinctness, that night on his employer’s porch, when the old man declared with such terrible emphasis that no person could do a better deed than to pull out all the stakes and throw them into the brook. And there was Abner Pickett now, sitting on the front bench, head and shoulders above the crowd, piercing him through with those clear blue eyes. He was in a quandary. He hesitated long before replying.
“Well,” he said, at last, “I can’t say that I heard anybody say adzackly that; no, I can’t.”
The lawyer followed up his clew mercilessly.