“Well, it’s facts I am a-going to tell,” she sniffed indignantly.  “It’s facts that I mean to tell.”  Here her voice rose to a keen pitch, and she began to abuse the defendant.  Again and again the court insisted that she must tell what there was suspicious about the school-master.  At last she got it out.

“Well, fer one thing, what kind of gals did he go with?  Hey?  Why, with my bound gal, Hanner, a-loafin’ along through the blue-grass paster at ten o’clock, and keepin’ that gal that’s got no protector but me out that a-way, and destroyin’ her character by his company, that a’n’t fit fer nobody.”

Here Bronson saw that he had caught a tartar.  He said he had no more questions to ask of Mrs. Means, and that, unless the defendant wished to cross-question her, she could stand aside.  Ralph said he would like to ask her one question.

“Did I ever go with your daughter Miranda?”

“No, you didn’t,” answered the witness, with a tone and a toss of the head that let the cat out, and set the court-room in a giggle.  Bronson saw that he was gaining nothing, and now resolved to follow the line which Small had indicated.

Pete Jones was called, and swore point-blank that he heard Ralph go out of the house soon after he went to bed, and that he heard him return at two in the morning.  This testimony was given without hesitation, and made a great impression against Ralph in the minds of the justices.  Mrs. Jones, a poor, brow-beaten woman, came on the stand in a frightened way, and swore to the same lies as her husband.  Ralph cross-questioned her, but her part had been well learned.

There, seemed now little hope for Ralph.  But just at this moment who should stride into the school-house but Pearson, the one-legged old soldier basket-maker?  He had crept home the night before, “to see ef the ole woman didn’t want somethin’,” and hearing of Ralph’s arrest, he concluded that the time for him to make “a forrard movement” had come, and so he determined to face the foe.

“Looky here, Squar,” he said, wiping the perspiration from his brow, “looky here.  I jes want to say that I kin tell as much about this case as anybody.”

“Let us hear it, then,” said Bronson, who thought he would nail Ralph now for certain.

So, with many allusions to the time he fit at Lundy’s Lane, and some indignant remarks about the pack of thieves that driv him off, and a passing tribute to Miss Martha Hawkins, and sundry other digressions, in which he had to be checked, the old man told how he’d drunk whisky at Welch’s store that night, and how Welch’s whisky was all-fired mean, and how it allers went straight to his head, and how he had got a leetle too much, and how he had felt kyinder gin aout by the time he got to the blacksmith’s shop, and how he had laid down to rest, and how as he s’posed the boys had crated him, and how he thought it war all-fired mean to crate a old soldier what fit the Britishers, and lost his leg by one of