“Miss Ballard, you admit that Peter Junior was lame when last you saw him, and you observe that the prisoner has no lameness, and you admit that you bound up a wound which had been inflicted on the head of Richard Kildene, and here you see the scar upon the prisoner; can you still on your sacred oath declare this man to be the son of the plaintiff?”
“Yes!” She looked earnestly at the prisoner. “It is not the same head and it is not the same scar.” Again she extended her hands toward the jury pleadingly and then toward the prisoner. “It is not by people’s legs we know them,––nor by their scars––it is by themselves––by––by their souls. Oh! I know you, Peter! I know you!”
With the first petulance Milton Hibbard had shown during the trial he now turned to the prisoner’s counsel and said: “Take the witness.”
“No cross-examination?” asked Nathan Goodbody, with a smile.
“No.”
Then Betty flung one look back at the Elder, and fled to her mother and hid her flushed face on Mary Ballard’s bosom.
Now for the first time Richard could take an interest in the trial merely for his own and Peter Junior’s sake. He saw Nathan Goodbody lean over and say a few words hurriedly to the prisoner, then rise and slightly lift his hand as if to make a special request.
“If the court please, the accused desires permission to 482 tell his own story. May he be sworn on his own behalf?”
Permission being given, the prisoner rose and walked to the witness chair, and having been sworn by the clerk to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, began his statement.
Standing there watching him, and listening, Richard felt his heart throb with the old friendship for this comrade of his childhood, his youth, and his young manhood, in school, in college, and, at last, tramping side by side on long marches, camping together, sleeping side by side through many a night when the morrow might bring for them death or wounds, victory or imprisonment,––sharing the same emotions even until the first great passion of their lives cut them asunder.