People in the court room craned their necks and listened intently. This witness promised to be interesting, to say the least.
Back near the main entrance to the court room there was some noise and confusion. A door had opened and a boy had stumbled in. Numb and stiff and faint with cold and fatigue he had tripped awkwardly over a constable’s staff and had fallen to the floor. People in that part of the room turned in their seats to see what the noise was about, and those near by looked curiously at the prostrate boy. He was helped to his feet by the constable, duly admonished, and given a seat on the last row of benches but one. It was Dannie Pickett. How he had managed to force his way, in the teeth of that terrible storm, through the great drifts that blocked the country roads, down into the deserted streets of the town, and thence to the county court-house, no one was ever afterward quite able to make out, nor was he himself ever able fully to explain. It was one of those feats of physical endurance made possible only by the splendid power of determination, and even then fairly striking across the border line of the naturally possible into the realm of the miraculous and the providential.
As Dannie breathed the warm air of the court room, he began to regain his strength, and, save the aching in his limbs, and the pricking sensations over his entire body, he suffered no pain. When the mist had cleared away from before his eyes, he saw that his grandfather, whom he had intended to search out, and to whom he had resolved to make his confession immediately on his arrival, was sitting up in the witness stand, undergoing examination. And down to his ears, through the intense quiet of the court room, came the lawyer’s question:—
“Don’t you know that the law of Pennsylvania makes it a crime, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to remove stakes set by a surveyor or engineer?”
Abner Pickett glared at his questioner.
“I ain’t here,” he replied, “to tell you what I know or don’t know about the laws o’ Pennsylvania. If you’ve got any questions to ask about the facts, ask ’em and I’ll answer to the best o’ my ability.”
Consciously or unconsciously he had placed himself within the rules of evidence and the protection of the law. Marshall saw that he had lost a point, and he started out on a new tack.
“Very well, Mr. Pickett. We will get down to facts. Where was this celebrated declaration of yours, as testified to by the preceding witness—where was it made?”
“On my side porch, in the evenin’ of September twenty-seventh; the evenin’ o’ the day the stakes were put in.”