THE STEADFAST HEART
stop and men git out…. Ma she screeched and I knowed it was robbers. Ma screeched agin. The robbers was still fer a spell. They had come close to the house and was waitin’. One of ’em banged the door like that!” He illustrated and a juryman started nervously. “Then Ma says, ‘Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!’” He repeated the word four times, just as the woman had done. “Then I pulled the trigger. It pulled hard—hard.” One could feel the agony of fear which must have been Angus’s as he had doubted his strength to pull that trigger. “Then it went off—bang!” In his excitement the boy shouted the word…. A faint scream sounded from the back of the courtroom, but went unreproved. “It went bang,” Angus repeated, “and I killed the robber…. The rest busted in and drove me and Ma off in a wagon and fetched us here.”
Browning stopped him. “Is that all that happened?”
“Yes,” said Angus, still trembling, with eyes preternaturally bright and staring.
“Have you told the truth?”
“Yes.”
“That,” said Browning to Crane, “is all.”
Among the spectators was a suppressed murmur, almost hysterical—and as the crowd, so with the jury. The twelve men who had in their keeping the life of Angus Burke listened to Mal-
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