Ackerman whispered to the lawyer.
“Did you tell Mr. Ackerman, Uncle Isaac, that, as you started to run away from the masqueraders that night, you saw John Graham at your gate—ran into him?”
“Nasah, I nebber say no sech thing!” Isaac shouted, glaring and shaking his head at Ackerman.
“Didn’t you tell the same gentleman that later in the evening you saw John Graham seated on a rustic near the house watching it from the outside?”
“Nasah! dat I didn’t!”
“Do you know that if you swear a lie——”
“I ain’t swar no lie!” Isaac interrupted with religious fervour. “I’se de Lord’s Sanctified One, sah. I ain’t done no sin since I got sanctification. Yassah, praise God!”
“Don’t you know,” repeated the lawyer, “that if you swear to a lie on that witness stand you can be sent to the penitentiary for perjury?”
“I knows dey ain’t gwine sen’ me dar—I knows dat,” Isaac said with a grin, and his Negro acquaintances in the jury box laughed.
The lawyer changed his line of questions. “You say you saw John Graham strike the death-blow?”