“Gabriel?” “Yes, Gabriel.” “Where did he go then?” “He went to bed.” “Where did you go?” “I went to bed.” “And the boy?” “Why, we all went to bed. It was after ten o’clock. Do you s’pose we sit up all night down at the gap?” “Really, I didn’t know, Mr. Pickett, without inquiring.” The witness was losing his temper, the lawyer was getting sarcastic, and the spectators were anticipating a still greater treat in store from the continuance of the examination. In his seat at the rear of the court room Dannie sat, dazed, motionless, listening and hearing as one in a dream; in his breast still the imperious demand of his conscience urging him to confess; in his palsied limbs no power to move. Then Marshall took up a new line of examination. He handed a paper to the witness directing his attention to the name at the bottom of it. “Is that your signature, Mr. Pickett?” he asked. The old man looked at the paper carefully. “Yes,” he replied, “it is. I wrote it myself.” “This paper is an agreement to sell to the Delaware Valley and Eastern Railroad Company a right of way fifty feet in width, through your property, on the line located by their engineers on September twenty-seventh last. You signed that paper voluntarily, without any coercion, naming your own price for the property?” “Let me tell you about that paper, young man.” “No; answer my question, yes or no.” “Then I say, yes. A hundred times, yes. I was neither bullied nor bought; but I was deceived and defrauded. When I signed that paper the only line of stakes I knew anything about was the line that went across the brook and around the graveyard. I supposed that was the route I was sellin’. I said so to the man who brought the paper. He didn’t undeceive me. To all intents and purposes he lied to me, and his corporation has attempted to rob me. Do you think, sir,” demanded the old man, rising from his chair, with the crimson spreading over his neck and face, and pointing his long forefinger at the lawyer, “do you think I would sell to any person or to any company, for any money in this world, the right to desecrate the graves of my dead; the right to disturb bodies that were so dear to me in life, that I would have given all I possessed to save them from the slightest hurt? Do you? I say, do you?” Marshall was getting more than he had bargained for; but he was too good a lawyer to permit himself to lose his grip. “Be seated, Mr. Pickett,” he said firmly, “and keep cool. Now, don’t you know that, regardless of your agreement to sell the right of way, a railroad company has a right, under the laws of this state, on complying with certain conditions, to build its railroad on any land belonging to any person?” The old man dropped back into his chair.