The Heart's Kingdom

by Maria Thompson Daviess

Mr. Goodloe started to speak, but father waved him back to his seat, turned to the judge and jury and began the most wonderful speech on the subject of circumstantial evidence and ethical law that I have ever heard. His beautiful deep voice was as clear as a bell and twenty years seemed to have fallen from his shoulders. I was looking at and listening to the man he had been before I was born. And when I could tear my eyes from his radiant face I watched these stolid mountaineers with whom he was working his will with a power they had never experienced before and did not understand. The men in the jury box and the men on the hewn benches dropped their eyes before his flaming ones as he shamed their censorious manhood and some of the sun-bonneted women bent their heads and sobbed when he arraigned them for the lack of motherhood and sisterhood for the poor young wife who had come over the Ridge to live among them.

"Would you men and women rather believe a girl light of love and faithless, and send your neighbor to prison for two years of his young life when he could mean much to you and his state and his nation, than to give them a little human sympathy and justice. Do you prefer to pin your faith to the value of a worthless, vagrant mule than—"

But just here, when Judge Nickols Morris Powers was winding himself up for one of the greatest appeals to a jury he had ever made, a mule stepped into the case and took away the honor of its winning. He poked his inquisitive nose into a back window of the court room which looked out upon the edge of the big woods, and gave the whole assemblage a hew-haw of derision.

"Lordy mighty, that are Pete come back hisself with all the curkles in the big woods sticking to him!" exclaimed Hiram Turner, as he rose and went to examine his property. "He wasn't sold to no mule man, fer they crops the hair on their hoofs to see if they's healthy 'fore they buys. This here frees Jed."

"And now that you gentlemen have the testimony of a mule, will you not believe the word of Mrs. Bangs and Miss Powers about the valuable quilts?" my father said, after he had commanded silence by raising his hand.

"We shore do believe every word of it, stranger, and you won this here case and not that mule," a stern old sister in a gingham apron and black bonnet said, with a commanding glance at the jury.

"Yes, stranger," answered the hoary old foreman, whom to this day I believe to be the meek husband of the commanding old woman in the black bonnet. "I have done got the mind of the jury and they all voted fer you and not the mule."

"I hereby gives that mule to Jed Bangs and my daughter, Melissa, and I'll knock off a half on the price of his teammate to Jed if he gives me his fergiveness and hern," old Hiram rose and turned with his hand on the forelock of the mule hero to say to the assembled court room. "Go around and halter him quick, Jed, 'fore he breaks away again, the durned fool," he added in another voice.

"Yes, prisoner, you are declared free, and hurry to ketch him, fer he's straining ag'inst Hiram," was the judge's sentence, delivered from the bench as everybody rose and began to stream out to watch the tussle between Jed and the wild mule. Father and the parson were among the first to gain the door.

In the next few minutes I found that some of the shy mountain women were beginning to hover about me, and in another ten minutes I had laid the foundations of an export rug and quilt business that I have a feeling will thrive greatly.