ng to become of Johnny Montgomery. Father gave me
such a strange look, neither angry nor sad--something which I did not
at all understand. He didn't urge me further, he hardly looked at me,
but I was conscious of his set profile while I listened to a
disagreement between Mr. Dingley's associate and Mr. Jackson. Mr.
Jackson waved his arms a good deal, but the little man kept saying, "I
insist, your Honor!" And finally the judge seemed to decide it in a
way that pleased Mr. Dingley's man; though Mr. Dingley himself seemed
not to be interested, paying no attention at all to the little man, who
kept leaning over and speaking excitedly to him, and the court crier
was calling for "Latovier."

A pale, indefinite-looking creature rose up from somewhere out of the
crowd and shuffled slowly toward the witness-box. "There he is," I
heard the whispers around me. "Why, don't you know? That's the man
who was shipped off. They only got him back yesterday. He's supposed
to know--"

I felt in my heart that something decisive was coming, and I had a
premonition it was going to be something bad; the man appeared so
wretchedly nervous as he sat there in the witness-box. He kept
glancing at Johnny Montgomery, shuffling his feet and shifting his hat
from hand to hand and what they got out of him came not at all as a
story, but only with very many questions.

It seemed he had a little gunsmith's shop, not very well known, to
which, he admitted, gentlemen such as the prisoner there, hardly ever
came. But he said that on a certain night, perhaps two months ago, the
prisoner and another man had come into the shop and looked a long time
and bargained for the very best pistol he had in the place. It was a
mother-of-pearl handle, he said, with trimmings of steel, and quite
small. He had told them that it was hardly the weapon for a man to
carry, and Johnny Montgomery had answered him that he did not mean to
carry it long.

At this there was quite an uproar in the court, the lawyers shouting,
the clerk trying to call order, and a great commotion in the press
about the door. But I do not remember being afraid, only the
inconvenience of having father keep his arm around my shoulders while I
was trying to see how Johnny Montgomery looked. Finally quiet was
restored, and then the man who had gone into the gunsmith's with Johnny
testified; and after another pause, with all my expectations strained
to tighter pitch than I could bear, c