TO TURKEY GULCH
The next morning I was very late in descending to my breakfast, but
arrived in time to witness Mammy's arraignment of my father, which was
conducted in perfect respect, but with great severity.
"I know, Jedge, that menfolks don't know lace that costs a million
dollars a yard from a blind woman's tatting, and that's what makes me
say what I does, that it sure am dangersome fer 'em to go on a rampage
in womenfolks' trunks. I ain't never goin' to git the stains from them
clods of earth outen my lambs' clothes, even if the minister did help
you put 'em on 'em."
"But, Melissa, those anemones were more valuable than any lace ever
manufactured, and I am sure that Charlotte will absolve me when she
hears of the exigencies of the case," father pleaded over the top of
his morning paper. Mammy was pretending to dust his study, as a blind to
the lecture she was administering.
"Yes, sir, I knows all that; but that lace was a heap more valuable than
that toothache in that wuthless Dabney's jaw, which he could er wropped
up, and hunted out all the old sheets for you instid of that petticoat
with them real lace ruffles," was Mammy's firm rejoinder, while she
passed a feather duster over the table and rolled her eyes at Dabney.
"Let's let them both off this time, Mammy. Dabney can take the trunks
where they belong and lock them up," I said, as I went toward the dining
room, while she followed to minister upon my tardiness.
"Them was all your finest lingerings," she said as she plied me with
breakfast. "And they was all lost on menfolks. They hasn't even one lady
rode by while I had 'em on the line in the sunshine," she grumbled as
she finally retired to the kitchen.
After finishing my coffee I sauntered to the front of the house, led by
a chorus of hearty laughter in a fluty tenor voice, accompanied by a
bass growl, in which I was sure that father was recounting the scrape in
which his and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's anemone adventure had got them.
I assured myself that I was annoyed by this repeated early morning
invasion of ministerial calls and intended to retire to my room until it
was over, but without knowing why, I found myself in the library and
greeting the enemy.
"Please forgive us. The case was one of dire necessity," the Reverend
Mr. Goodloe pleaded, as he rose and took my hand in his, and held it in
such a way that I was forced to look in his face and smile, whether I
wished it or not.
"From ambush I saw you take them, and I was powerless to prevent," I
answered with a smile at father.
"I came over to ask you if you wouldn't like to go away out into the
Harpeth Hills on a mission with me this wonderful morning. I don't know
exactly whether I am called to officiate at a birth or a death or that
intermediate festivity, a wedding. This is the summons from an old
friend of mine:" As he spoke he held out to me a greasy paper on which
were a few words scrawled with a pencil.
"Parson we need you in the morning bad. Please come with Bill
as brings this. Bring a bible and liniment and oblige your true
friend Jed Bangs and wife."
"Isn't your friend Bill able to elucidate?" I asked, as I passed the
paper on to father.
"Bill seems to be dumb without being deaf and has no histrionic talent
to act out the necessity, so I'm going with him. The Bangs family live
up on old Harpeth at Turkey Gulch, and Jed has shot partridges with me
all winter. Please, you and the Judge, come with me. I can get the car
over Paradise Ridge if I turn it into a wildcat. The morning is
delicious, and I feel that I'll need you both." Never in the world have
I heard a man's voice with such compelling notes in it that range from a
soft coax to a quiet command.
I had not the slightest idea of going with him and I was about to refuse
with as much sugary hauteur as I dared use to him, when I looked into
father's face and accepted. I had never been on a picnic with my father
in my life and I could not understand the pleading in his eyes for my
acceptance of this invitation to an adventure in his company, but then,
several times since I had come home, I had seen a father I had never
known before, and he fascinated me.
"The mountain laurel is in bloom and the rhododendron, and you are a
very gracious lady," the Reverend Mr. Goodloe assured me with a deep bow
over my hand, which he kissed in a very delightful foreign fashion which
made Mammy, who had come to the door to hear my decision, roll her eyes
in astonishment which, however, held no hint of criticism, for with her
the spiritual king could do no wrong.
"I got a snack fixed up jest's soon as that Dabney tol' me about the
junket," she announced. "And I'll put a little wine jelly and flannels
in if it am a baby and a bunch of white jessimings in case it am a
death."
"Suppose it is a wedding?" I asked her.
"I don't take no notice of weddings. It was a wedding that got me into
all the trouble of that Dabney and his wuthless son, Jefferson, what
ain't like me in no way." With which fling at Dabney--who was hovering
at the door--she rolled herself back to her kitchen.
"What have you been doing to her now, you rascal?" father demanded of
Dabney, who was handing him his hat and holding out his light overcoat
to put him into it.
"I jist stepped into the kitchen while her light rolls fer supper was
raisin' and got a ruckus fer it," was his mild answer. Dabney lived his
connubial life mildly in the midst of the storms of his better half.
"Well, don't do it again. And put that spade in Mr. Goodloe's car, for
I'm going to bring in some honeysuckle roots and a laurel sprout or two
to try out in the garden," father commanded, as I took my coat and hat
from the chair where I had thrown them the afternoon before, and went
out to the very unministerial-looking car which stood before the
parsonage.
Of course, I had accepted the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's invitation for the
journey out into the hills in order to sit beside this very new kind of
father I was dimly discovering myself to possess, but I do not to this
day know how it happened that I was crushed against the arm steering the
gray racer as we sped through Goodloets toward Old Harpeth, while the
judge sat beaming, though silent, beside the more silent Bill--who did
not beam, but looked out at the road ahead with the shadow in his face
of the fatalism that so many of the mountain folk possess.
We were just turning out from the edge of the town, past the last house
with its stately white pillars, when a bunch of pink-and-white
precipitated itself directly in front of the car--which made the first
of the wildcat springs that its master had prophesied for it and then
stood with its engine palpitating with what seemed like mechanical fear,
while I buried my head on the strong arm next to me, which I could feel
tremble for an instant as the Reverend Mr. Goodloe breathed a fervent,
"Thank God." Father rose from his seat with a good round oath and silent
Bill snorted like a wild animal.
"Why didn't you stop when you saw me coming?" an imperious young voice
demanded in tones of distinct anger, and Charlotte, my name daughter of
the house of Morgan, calmly climbed up on the running board, over the
door next to father, and settled herself in between him and the silent
Bill. "Now you can go on," she calmly announced, in a very much
mollified tone of voice as she shook out her ruffles into a less
compressed state and wiped her face with her dirty hand, much to the
detriment of the roses in her cheeks.
"Where are you going, Charlotte, may I inquire?" asked the Reverend Mr.
Goodloe in a cheerful and calm voice, though I saw that his fingers
still trembled on the steering wheel as he held back the enraged gray
engine. I was still speechless and I saw that father was in the same
condition.
"You said I might go 'next time' when my Auntie Harriet didn't want me
to go with you last Tuesday on account of my stomach from the raw potato
Jimmy dared me to eat. This is that time," she calmly answered, as she
gave an interested look at the silent Bill and again settled the short,
pink skirts.
"Yes, I did say that," admitted Mr. Goodloe, as he turned in his seat as
far as he could and began to argue the question. "But we shall be gone
almost all day and I am afraid your mother wouldn't want you to be gone
that long."
"Is it true for you to say that when you know that she will be mighty
glad for you to keep me safe with you all day?" Charlotte demanded of
him, looking directly into his smiling, friendly face.
"No, that wasn't quite honest, I'll admit," he answered her gravely with
the guilt of conviction showing in his face just as plainly as it would
have shown if one of his deacons had caught him evading a question of
grave moment. "And as it is the fulfillment of a promise which you
claim, I am going to ask Miss Powers and the judge if they will permit
me to add you to the party, and then go and get permission from your
mother to take you with us."
"My mother told me to go and bother Auntie Charlotte an hour or two and
that was when I met you. I ran into the car just minding my mother,"
Charlotte answered him with calm pride at her near achievement of death
through literal obedience.
"Just drive by and we'll call to Nell. I am afraid the case must have
been desperate, for I am seldom the victim," I said in an undertone to
our host, who acquiesced with a laugh. "Harriet Henderson must be dead,
for Nell usually sends the worse one to her," I added under my breath.
"My Auntie Harriet is having a man cut the ache out of one of her
teeth," Charlotte remarked, apropos of nothing, as the huge car swung
around into the street in which the Morgans reside. "And, besides, I
don't like her any more, because, when she said Sue had to have part of
the doll house she bought for us to play in down at her home, and I said
then Sue would have to take the outside because I wanted the inside, she
locked it up for all this week."
"The modern business acumen of the feministic persuasion," father
remarked, as we all laughed at this candid revelation of an egocentric
attitude of mind in small Charlotte.
After a few whirls of the gray wheels we paused a moment at the Morgan
gate.
"Heavens, yes, and thank you," called Nell in response to our demand for
her small daughter's company. "If I had another one clean, I'd give it
to you."
"Better go on quick, for Jimmy can wash in a piece of a minute if he
wants to," warned Charlotte, and in a second the parson had sent the
gray car flying out toward Old Harpeth, though I saw him glance back
with a trace of distress in his eyes at the fading vision of a small boy
running, howling, to the front gate of the Morgan residence.
"Now mother'll whip him for crying if she does as she says she would,
but she won't," observed the tender big sister, as she rose to her feet
and waved a maddening farewell to the distressed urchin being left
behind.
"Is she totally depraved?" I asked of the young Charlotte's spiritual
adviser at my side.
"No; perfectly honest," he answered me with a glint in his eyes that was
a laughing challenge.
"There is something awful about honesty," I answered, without appearing
to notice the glint.
"There wouldn't be if it were a universal custom," was the answer I got
as we whirled by a farmer's wood lot and began to climb the first
foothill of Old Harpeth.
All my life I have been going out to Old Harpeth on excursions, but
never had I spent a day like the one I had begun with the Jaguar in his
native fastnesses. The whole old mountain was beginning to bud and I
could almost see it draping on a regal Persian garment of rose and green
threaded with purple and blue woven against the old brown and gray of
the earth color. The wine-colored trillium with its huge spotted leaves,
the slender white dog-tooth violets, the rose-pink arbutus, the blue
star myrtle and the crimson oak buds, were matted into a vast robe that
was gorgeously oriental, while a perfume that was surely more delicious
than any ever wafted from the gardens of Arabia floated past us in gusts
through which the gray car sped without the slightest shortness of
breath. I seemed a million miles away from the great fetid city in which
I had been living--and fast going farther. As we wound up and up into
the great forest which is the crown of Old Harpeth, we could look down
through occasional vistas and see the Harpeth River curling and bending
through pastures in which the chocolate plowed fields were laid off in
huge checks with the green meadows, while the farmhouses and barns
dotted the valley like the crude figures on a hand-woven chintz.
There are very few men who know enough not to talk to a woman when she
has no desire for their conversation, but the Reverend Jaguar seemed to
be one of the variety who comprehend the value of silences, and neither
of us spoke for at least ten miles, though, of course, it was his duty
to make hay while the sun of my nature shone upon him and delicately to
inquire into my spiritual condition. He didn't. He just let the wind
blow into my empty spaces and kept his eyes and thoughts on the road
ahead of him. Charlotte's chatter with father was blown back from me and
I was happy in a kind of aloneness I had never felt before.
"We are in Hastings County now and in a few minutes we shall be in Hicks
Center, the county seat," were the first words that broke in on my
self-communion as we began to speed past rough board and log cabins,
each surrounded by a picket fence which in no way seemed to fend the
doorsteps from razor-back pigs, chickens and a few young mules and
calves. "It must be court day, for I don't see a single inhabitant
sitting chewing under his own vine and fig tree."
"Yes; it's the first Monday," answered father, as the gray machine
pulled gallantly through a few hundred feet of thick, black mud and
turned from the wilderness into the public square of the metropolis of
Hicks Center.
"Yes, court is in session and there the whole population is in the
courthouse," said father, as we glided slowly down the village street.
"They must be trying a murder or a horse-stealing case," and I saw his
eyes gleam for a second under their heavy brows as the eyes of an old
war horse must gleam when he scents powder.
"Ugh," assented silent Bill, making the first remark of the journey, and
as he spoke the syllable he rose and pointed to the courthouse, which
stood in the midst of a mud-covered public square, completely surrounded
by hitching-posts to which were hitched all the vehicles of locomotion
of the last century down to the present in Hicks Center--which had not
as yet arrived as far as the day of the motor car.
"Is Jed in there, Bill?" demanded the Reverend Mr. Goodloe; and as Bill
assented with muscular vigor, if not vocal, he drew the gray car up
beside, an old-fashioned carryall, whose wheels were at least five feet
high and which had hitched to its pole an old horse and a young mule.
"That team makes a nice balance of--temperament," Mr. Goodloe remarked,
as he lifted out Charlotte and then turned to swing me, in his strong
arms, free of a mud puddle and onto the old brick pavement which was
green with the moss of generations.
Then, piloted by the silent Bill, we made our way through a quiet throng
of men and women and children, from the awkward age of shoe-top trousers
and skirts to that which, in many cases, was partaking from the maternal
fount, as the women stood in groups and whispered as they looked at us
shyly. Somehow their decorous calico skirts, which just cleared the
ground, made me feel naked in my own of white corduroy, which was all of
eight inches from the mud in which theirs had draggled.
And as silent as they, even Charlotte's chatter subdued, we entered the
court room and were led through a crowd up to the front seat. At least
the rest of us were seated, but the judge, jury and prisoner and
prosecuting attorney rose in a body and shook hands with the Reverend
Mr. Goodloe as if he were their common and best beloved son.
"He's been in the Harpeth Valley less than a year, and look at that.
We've been here all our lives and they don't know who we are,"
whispered father, with the same pride shining in his eyes that shone
upon the parson from the eyes of the gaunt prisoner, who rose and shook
hands with Mr. Goodloe with the sheriff beside him, while the rough old
judge from the bench waited his turn.
"We accommodated Jed by waiting until you come before we begun his
trial, Parson," the judge said, as he turned back to his bench, which
was a splint-bottom chair behind a rude table, dignity being lent to the
chair by its being the only one in the room. The rest of the population
of the court room of Hicks Center were seated upon benches made of split
and hewn logs.
"Thank you, Mr. Hilldrop," said the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, as he sat down
beside the prisoner and began a whispered conversation with him.
"The court have come to order. Shoot ahead, Jim, and tell us what Jed
have done and how he done it," commanded the judge, as he tilted back
his chair, took out his knife and began to whittle a stick of bright red
cedar. Twelve good men and true, attired in butternut trousers stuffed
into muddy boots, settled themselves in the jury box, which was a log
bench set at right angles to the other benches, a little apart from the
table and chair of the judge, and nine of them took out their knives and
bits of cedar and began to follow the lead of the judge in making fine
pink curls fall upon the floor.
"May it please your honor, the prisoner is charged with the stealing of
a young mule," said a lanky young mountain lawyer, who had put on a coat
over his flannel shirt and brushed a little patch of tow hair just above
his brows in deference to his position of prosecuting attorney.
"State yo' case," commanded the judge, as he tried the point of his
splinter against his thumb to test its whittled sharpness.
"Hiram Turner, over at Sycamore, lent Jed a team of mules to haul his
daughter, who married Jed, home in a wagon with her beds and truck, and
when he come down Paradise Ridge to git the team, Jed claimed one had
got away from him and run off in the big woods. They was a horse and
mule trader come along the same day Jed lost the mule and when Hi and
his boy, Bud, knocked Jed down in a fight they found fifty dollars on
him in a wad what he won't say where he got it."
With which concise statement the prosecuting attorney sat down and
fanned his perspiring brow with his ragged felt hat.
"Got anything to say, Jed?" inquired the judge in a friendly and
leisurely fashion, after the accused had been duly sworn in by the
sheriff. "How come a man like you to let a mule git away from him?"
With the judge's friendly question there entered another actor on the
scene, in the person of a mountain girl who had been cowering on a bench
just behind Jed, her face hidden by a black calico split bonnet.
"Please lemme tell, Jed," she pleaded in a soft whisper that only father
and I heard, as we sat just behind her.
"Naw," was the one word he gave her, but it was spoken with a soft
little purr in his husky voice. Then he answered the judge with a kind
of quiet dignity, which I saw that the twelve booted jurymen listened to
with respect.
"Jedge," he said, with a stern look into the judge's face, "I reckon
you'll have to send me down to the pen. I let that mule git away from me
and I didn't steal or sell him; that is all I got to say." And he sat
down. I felt father start at my side and then sink back onto his bench.
"Where did you git the money, Jed?" the judge demanded.
"That I ain't a-telling," answered Jed determinedly. "Jest send me down
to the pen, fer you-all know all you'll ever know."
"Well, Jed," the judge was beginning to say in an argumentative tone of
voice, when father arose and stepped in front of the bench.
"May it please your honor to appoint a counsel for the defense?" he
asked in a ringing voice that brought all the outsiders crowding into
the door. I had never heard or seen my father in a court room and I had
never suspected him of the resonant silver voice with which he made his
demand.
"We ain't got a lawyer in Hicks Center but Jim Handy here, and he can't
prosecute and defend too. I always kinder looks out fer the prisoners
myself," answered the judge.
"Then may I offer myself to the prisoner to conduct his defense?" father
demanded, and he looked over at Jed, who in turn looked at Mr. Goodloe
before he nodded.
"Then shoot ahead, stranger. Jim have told all they is about it, but
you can have Hi and Bud Turner sworn in and git any more they have got
to say. Them men speaks truth when they speaks." At which statement
every good man and true nodded his head with firm conviction. A gaunt
old mountaineer who sat over by the window cleared his throat in an
embarrassment that marked him as the Hiram Turner alluded to.
"I don't think I shall need the testimony of Mr. Turner or his son,"
father answered quietly, as he stood tall and straight before the jury.
"I want to put Mr. Bangs' wife on the witness stand and question her
before the jury. Sheriff, call Mrs. Bangs."
"Naw, stranger, naw," said Jed, and he rose as if to combat, but Mr.
Goodloe laid a restraining hand on his arm, and trembling, he took his
seat.
"Don't tell nothing, honey," he whispered, as the girl rose from her
bench, laid aside her cavernous black bonnet and advanced, took the oath
administered by the sheriff and stood facing father.
"Now, Mrs. Bangs," said father, with silvery tenderness in his voice
which I felt sure had gained him the reputation of never having lost a
case in which a woman was involved, "I want you to tell us all that
happened on the day that Jed let the mule escape him. Look at me and
tell me all about it."
"Well, stranger," began the mountain girl, with a look of confidence
coming into her face that was like a little pink wide-open arbutus, "I
reckon you won't believe me--like Jed didn't at first, though he do
now."
"Don't tell, honey," the prisoner commanded and implored in the one
plea. "I'd rather take the pen. They won't believe you."
"It war this way," she continued, without seeming to hear the command of
her young husband, upon whose arm the parson again laid a restraining
hand. "Jed he had unhitched the team and tied them with their rope
halters to the fence 'fore our cabin, when it was almost dark 'fore we
got thar. Then while I was unpacking the wagon he got on one horse and
rid down the side of the gulch to see whar water was at. I was jest
takin' the things in when a man come along leading five mules and riding
on one. He was a city stranger in fine clothes and he asked me fer a
meal because he had lost his way from a man who had a tent and grub. My
mammy allus cooked fer strangers, so--"
"She shore do that," ejaculated Mr. Turner, proud of his noted
hospitality.
"So I made up a fire hasty in the yard and put on a coffee pot," the
girl continued. "I had some corn pone and bacon my mammy had give me fer
a snack and I het that up. Whilst I got the meal the stranger he went on
unloading our wagon and then he come to a bundle of bed quilts what my
mammy have been saving fer me from her mammy and her grandmammy. He took
a notion to them and ast me how old they was and I told him about as old
as any twenty-inch cedar on Old Harpeth. He asked me to trade 'em, but I
couldn't abear to until he had riz to fifty dollars, what was the price
of a young mule, all on account of his sister wanting quilts like them
up in a big city. I was kinder crying quiet at letting 'em go, but I
thought about what that mule would be to Jed who wuz so good to me, so I
give 'em to him and he tied 'em on his saddle and went away. It war most
a hour when Jed come and when I told him and showed him the money, he
didn't believe me about them old quilts and he tooken the rope from
around the neck of the mule he'd been riding and--"
She paused here in her story and put her scarlet flower face in her
hands, while Jed groaned and dropped his own face down upon his arm. The
old judge's face took on a grim sternness, the jury stopped whittling
and the face of every woman in the court room gazed upon the girl with
stern unbelieving accusation.
"Go on, now, honey, but they won't believe you," commanded Jed with a
sob.
"Your husband took the rope from around the neck of the mule and left
him untied?" asked father gently.
"What fer, Melissa?" asked the old judge, without gentleness or any show
of confidence in what the shrinking woman was saying.
"To beat me with. He war crazed mad and called me a name, but I don't
hold it ag'in him," answered the young wife, with a glance at the
cowering prisoner.
"He done right," calmly announced one of the twelve good men and true,
in the muddy boots and flannel shirt, and every mountain woman in the
court room nodded her head in approval of the pronouncement.
"Order in the court room. You all shet up and listen," commanded the
judge, as father looked around the room and then at him with a stern
demand for control of the situation.
"Then what happened, Mrs. Bangs?" father continued to question.
"I hollered and fought and skeered the mule off into the big woods where
he can't be found to keep my husband out of the pen," she answered with
a sob. "It took me a week to make him believe about them quilts and then
pappy come along and fought him about the mule and found the money, as
he claimed he sold the mule fer what was the quilt money."
"That will do. Thank you, Mrs. Bangs," said father, with the same
deference and tenderness he had used when he began to question her.
"Does the prosecution wish to question the witness?"
"They ain't no use of questioning her when she says a man give her fifty
dollars fer five old quilts," was the answer made by the young
prosecuting attorney, who did not rise to his feet to make this remark.
"Please ask Mrs. Bangs if the quilts were woven ones of three colors,
and then call me to the stand," I said to father quickly.
He put the question to the weeping young wife and got an affirmative
answer, after which he dismissed her and had the sheriff swear me in.
"Can you throw any light upon the matter of the purchase or sale of
these quilts, Miss Powers?" father questioned me formally.
"If they were old hand-woven, herb-dyed, knitted quilts, they are worth
fifty dollars apiece in New York to-day. I paid that for one not five
months ago," I said, staring haughtily into the calmly doubting faces of
the mountaineers in the jury box and on the benches.
"Do you want to question the witness?" my father asked of the indolent
young prosecutor.
"Don't know who she is and don't believe she is telling the truth," was
the laconic refusal of the prosecutor to let me influence his case.
"Well, now, Jim, Parson Goodloe here brought the gal along with him and
I reckon he can character witness for her," interposed the judge.
"Sheriff, swear in the parson." His command was duly executed.
"Mr. Goodloe, do you consider Miss Powers a woman who can be depended
upon to speak the truth?" father asked him formally.
"I do," the Reverend Mr. Goodloe answered quietly, and just for a second
a gleam from his eyes under their dull gold brows shot across the
distance to me, and if it hadn't all been so serious I should have
laughed with glee at his thus having to declare himself about my
character in public. But the next moment the situation became much more
serious and my heart positively stopped still as I seemed to see prison
doors close upon the young husband.
"Do you want to question the witness?" father asked of the lolling young
prosecutor.
"How long have you known the lady, Parson?" he asked, with a drawl and
one eye half closed.
There was an intense silence in the court room for almost a minute. Then
the Reverend Mr. Gregory Goodloe answered calmly:
"Three days."
"That might be long enough fer a parson, but it ain't fer a jury," the
young attorney answered, and there was a quizzical kindness in the old
judge's face as he smiled at Mr. Goodloe and shook his head.
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.
"Were you arrested because your mother told you not to sell the quilts?"
was Charlotte's sympathetic question to the young Mrs. Bangs; and I saw
the mite take a clean handkerchief from her small pink pocket and apply
it to the tears that were coursing down Melissa's cheeks over the
dimples which her smiling mouth was putting in their way. "Just be a
good girl and God will forgive you," she comforted further, nestling a
dirty pink cheek, which rubbed off, against Melissa's wet one.
"And I asked if she were totally depraved, less than an hour ago," I
apologized to my name daughter in my heart.
All the way home I sat beside father, and once I laid a timid hand in
his, through whose fingers the pride I had in him must have flowed into
his. He flushed for a second and then was pale again.
"You can't put new wine in old bottles, daughter," he said sadly, as he
glanced down into the valley. The car was running smoothly, slowly and
noiselessly around a sharp curve, and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe both
heard and answered the sad axiom.
"The finest wine mellows in casks and is then bottled free of dregs,
Judge. I think the wine of life is of that vintage," he said, with one
of his radiant smiles that I could see fairly warm father from his
paleness.
"I wonder just what he meant by 'the wine of life,'" I asked myself as I
went to say good night to Old Harpeth after I put out my light before
going to bed.