“Were you subpœnaed as a witness in this case?” he asked.
“No,” replied Dannie, “I wasn’t.”
“Then what was it that led you to come here and make this remarkable statement?”
“Well, I’ll tell you how it was. I got to thinkin’ about it yesterday, after they’d all gone, and I thought an’ thought, till it seemed as if it’d kill me if I didn’t tell somebody. An’ so, last night, I told Aunt Martha. An’ she said the only way to make it right was by tellin’ those that had been injured by what I’d done. So we made it up between us that I was to come up here the first thing this mornin’ an’ tell it all. And I tried to get here before court began; but—but I couldn’t make out to do it. I—I’m sorry I was so long comin’; but I hope it ain’t too late?”
Marshall looked up at him incredulously.
“You haven’t come here from Pickett’s Gap to-day, my boy?”
“Yes, sir. I left there this mornin’ real early; before it began to drift much.”
“But the roads are absolutely impassable!”
“I know. We had hard work. The roads were drifted full. I came in the stage as far as the poor-house. The horses gave out there. Then the stage driver and I, we footed it as far as Keene’s. From there I walked on to Mooreville alone.”
As he recalled that awful journey Dannie looked up wearily, and out over the sea of sympathetic faces turned toward him in the court room. But he was too tired to see them. They floated indistinctly before him. They seemed to advance and recede, to expand and contract, alternately to fade and find form before his aching eyes.