Old Bedford Forrest hisself was leadin us, and so naturally we just went along with him, shoes or no shoes. There was a regiment of Northern troops Yankees marchin on this town that mornin, and it seemed the word had traveled ahead of em that they was aimin to burn it down.
Probably it wasnt true. When we got to know them Yankees better afterward we found out that there really wasnt no difference, to speak of, between the run of us and the run of them. Probably it wasnt so at all. But in them days the people was prone to believe most anything about Yankees and the word was that they was cornin across country, a-burnin and cuttin and slashin, and the people here thought they was going to be burned out of house and home. So old Bedford Forrest he marched all night with a battalion of us four companies Kintuckians and Tennesseeans mostly, with a sprinklin of boys from Mississippi and Arkansas some of us ridin and some walkin afoot, like me we didnt always have horses enough to go round that last year. And somehow we got here before they did. It was a close race though between us them a-comin down from the North and us a-comin up from the other way. We met em down there by that little branch just below where your present railroad depot is. There wasnt no depot there then, but the branch looks just the same now as it did then and the bridge too. I walked acrost it this momin to see. Yes, suh, right there was where we met em. And there was a right smart fight.
Yes, suh, there was a right smart fight for about twenty minutes or maybe twenty-five and then we had breakfast.
He had been smiling gently as he went along. Now he broke into a throaty little chuckle.
Yes, suh, it all come back to me this mornin every little bit of it the breakfast and all. I didnt have much breakfast, though, as I recall none of us did probably just corn pone and branch water to wash it down with.
And he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as though the taste of the gritty cornmeal cakes was still there.
There was another little pause here; the witness seemed to be through. Durhams crisp question cut the silence like a gash with a knife.
Judge Priest, do you know the defendant at the bar, and if so, how well do you know him?
I was just comin to that, he answered with simplicity, and Im obliged to you for puttin me back on the track. Oh, I know the defendant at the bar mighty well as well as anybody on earth ever did know him, I reckin, unless twas his own maw and paw. Ive known him, in fact, from the time he was born and a gentler, better-disposed boy never grew up in our town. His nature seemed almost too sweet for a boy more like a girls but as a grown man he was always manly, and honest, and fair and not quarrelsome. Oh, yes, I know him. I knew his father and his mother before him. Its a funny thing too comin up this way but I remember that his paw was marchin right alongside of me the day we came through here in 64. He was wounded, his paw was, right at the edge of that little creek down yonder. He was wounded in the shoulder and he never did entirely git over it.
Again he stopped dead short, and he lifted his hand and tugged at the lobe of his right ear absently. Simultaneously Mr. Felsburg, who was sitting close to a window beyond the jury box, was also seized with nervousness, for he jerked out a handkerchief and with it mopped his brow so vigorously that, to one standing outside, it might have seemed that the handkerchief was actually being waved about as a signal.
Instantly then there broke upon the pause that still endured a sudden burst of music, a rollicking, jingling air. It was only a twenty-cent touth organ, three sleigh bells, and a pair of the rib bones of a beef-cow being played all at once by a saddle-colored negro man but it sounded for all the world like a fife-and-drum corps:
But to those older men and those older women the first jubilant bars rolled back the years like a scroll.
And it rose and rose and then as the unseen minstrel went slouching down Main Street, toward the depot and the creek it sank lower and became a thin thread of sound and then a broken thread of sound and then it died out altogether and once more there was silence in the court house of Forked Deer County.
Strangely enough not one listener had come to the windows to look out. The interruption from without had seemed part and parcel of what went on within. None faced to the rear, every one faced to the front.
There was Mr. Lukins now. As Mr. Lukins got upon his feet he said to himself in a tone of feeling that he be dad-fetched. But immediately changing his mind he stated that he would preferably be dad-blamed, and as he moved toward the bar rail one overhearing him might have gathered from remarks let fall that Mr. Lukins was going somewhere with the intention of being extensively dad-burned. But for all these threats Mr. Lukins didnt go anywhere, except as near the railing as he could press.