The Heart's Kingdom

"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--"