“I repeat the question—or I will answer it for you. When you fired the house——”
The woman screamed, and raised her hands in natural horror
“I never set the house on fire,” she cried—“It took from the stove-pipe in the garret, where it had taken twice before.”
“How can you know that, unless you saw it?—How see it, unless present?”
“I was not there, and did not see it; but I know the garret had caught twice before from that cook-stove-pipe. Aunt Dolly was very wrong to neglect it as she did.”
“And the blows on the head—who struck those blows, Sarah Burton?”
“How can I tell? I wasn’t there—no one but a fool could believe you have strength to do it.”
“How, then, was it done? Speak—I see it in your mind?”
“I saw the ploughshare lying on the heads of the skeletons; and I saw Moses Steen throw it off, in the confusion of first raking the embers. Moses will be likely to remember it, if sent for, and questioned.”
Here was a most important fact elicited under the impulse of self-justification; and a corresponding expression of surprise, passed in a murmur, through the audience. The eye of Mary Monson kindled with triumph; and she continued with renewed powers of command over the will and conscience of the witness.