“Is it a’going all through?” asked the miller, referring to the mill.
“Running as pretty as a coach-and-four when I left at seven this morning,” said Sam.
“And how did thee come?”
“By the marrowbone stage, as don’t pay no tolls; how else?” The miller did not express a single word of approbation, but he looked up and down at his son’s legs and limbs, delighted to think that the young man was at work in the mill this morning, had since that walked seventeen miles, and now stood before them showing no sign of fatigue.
“What are they a’doing on now, Sam?” asked Carry, in a whisper. Sam had already been into the court, and was able to inform them that the “big swell of all was making a speech, in which he was telling everybody every ’varsal thing about it. And what do you think, father?”
“I don’t think nothing,” said the miller.
“They’ve been and found Trumbull’s money-box buried in old mother Burrows’s garden at Pycroft.” Carry uttered the slightest possible scream as she heard this, thinking of the place which she had known so well. “Dash my buttons if they ain’t,” continued Sam. “It’s about up with ’em now.”
“They’ll be hung—of course,” said the miller.
“What asses men is,” said Sam; “—to go to bury the box there! Why didn’t they smash it into atoms?”
“Them as goes crooked in big things is like to go crooked in little,” said the miller.
At about two Sam and Carry were told to go into Court, and way was made for the old man to accompany them. At that moment the cross-examination was being continued of the man who, early on the Sunday morning, had seen the Grinder with his companion in the cart on the road leading towards Pycroft Common. A big burly barrister, with a broad forehead and grey eyes, was questioning this witness as to the identity of the men in the cart; and at every answer that he received he turned round to the jury as though he would say “There, then, what do you think of the case now, when such a man as that is brought before you to give evidence?” “You will swear, then, that these two men who are here in the dock were the two men you saw that morning in that cart?” The witness said that he would so swear. “You knew them both before, of course?” The witness declared that he had never seen either of them before in his life. “And you expect the jury to believe, now that the lives of these men depend on their believing it, that after the lapse of a year you can identify these two men, whom you had never seen before, and who were at that time being carried along the road at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour?” The witness, who had already encountered a good many of these questions, and who was inclined to be rough rather than timid, said that he didn’t care twopence what the jury believed. It was simply his business to tell what he knew. Then the judge looked at that wicked witness—who had talked in this wretched, jeering way about twopence!—looked at him over his spectacles, and shaking his head as though with pity at that witness’s wickedness, cautioned him as to the peril of his body, making, too, a marked reference to the peril of his soul by that melancholy wagging of the head. Then the burly barrister with the broad forehead looked up beseechingly to the jury. Was it right that any man should be hung for any offence against whom such a witness as this was brought up to give testimony? It was the manifest feeling of the crowd in the court that the witness himself ought to be hung immediately. “You may go down, sir,” said the burly barrister, giving an impression to those who looked on, but did not understand, that the case was over as far as it depended on that man’s evidence. The burly barrister himself was not so sanguine. He knew very well that the judge who had wagged his head in so melancholy a way at the iniquity of a witness who had dared to say that he didn’t care twopence, would, when he was summing up, refer to the presence of the two prisoners in the cart as a thing fairly supported by evidence. The amount of the burly barrister’s achievement was simply this—that for the moment a sort of sympathy was excited on behalf of the prisoners by the disapprobation which was aroused against the wicked man who hadn’t cared twopence. Sympathy, like electricity, will run so quick that no man may stop it. If sympathy might be made to run through the jury-box there might perchance be a man or two there weak enough to entertain it to the prejudice of his duty on that day. The hopes of the burly barrister in this matter did not go further than that.
Then there was another man put forward who had seen neither of the prisoners, but had seen the cart and pony at Pycroft Common, and had known that the cart and pony were for the time in the possession of the Grinder. He was questioned by the burly barrister about himself rather than about his evidence; and when he had been made to own that he had been five times in prison, the burly barrister was almost justified in the look he gave to the jury, and he shook his head as though
