xplained the disappearance
of Mr. Briscoe and the mare by the statement that "Phinny runned
out--pop-gun--_bang!_--an' bofe felled over the bluff." He called the
moonshiners' cave a cellar, however, and declared that he went hunting
for his mamma in a boat, and the counsel for the defence made the most of
such puerilities and contradictions. But the child was very explicit
concerning the riving from him of his coat by Phineas Copenny, and the
plan to throw it over the bluff, and it made a distinct impression on the
jury when he added that Copenny took his hat also--for no mention had
been made of the discovery of the hat in the quagmire in the valley--and
that Copenny had broken the elastic that held it under his chin and this
snapped his cheek. He could, nevertheless, give no account how he reached
the Qualla Boundary, and he broke off suddenly, dimpling, bright-eyed,
and roseate, to ask the judge if he knew "Polly Hopkins."

"Her is so-o pretty!" he cried out in tender regret.

Mrs. Royston was nettled by the laughter elicited by this query, with its
obvious fervor of enthusiasm, for she divined that the merriment of the
crowd was charged with ridicule of the incongruous object of his callow
adoration, the forlorn old fortune-teller, who had been so gentle and so
generous, albeit so alien to the civilization of the present day. Lillian
could but realize that the ministering angel is of no time or
nationality, and the transcendent beauty of its apparition may well be a
matter of spiritual and not merely visual perception. The heart of a
woman is no undecipherable palimpsest for the successive register of
fleeting impressions. Here was written in indelible script the tenderest
thought of affection, the kindest charity, and all the soft graces of
fostering sentiment, with no compensatory values of reciprocal loyalty,
or the imposing characters of authority. For the old squaw could not even
understand the justice of the dispensation; it seemed to her that with
impunity she was deserted, denied; her plea was a jest to right reason;
her love, in which the child had once rejoiced, was superfluous,
worthless, now that he had come to his own; her poor hearth, which his
bright infantile smiles had richly illumined, was dark, desolate; the
inexorable logic of law and worldly advantages was beyond her ken, and
she felt that she had only rescued and cherished the little waif that she
herself might be lacerated by grief and bereave