Knight's Gambit by William Faulkner

stopped talking in time to hang just your jury and not your client.’
    ‘That’s right, sir,’ Uncle Gavin said. Because he was looking at me with his bright eyes, his thin, quick face, his wild hair already beginning to turn white. ‘Come here, Chick,’ he said. ‘I need you for a minute.’
    ‘Ask Judge Frazier to allow you to retract your oration, then let Charley sum up for you,’ grandfather said. But we were outside then, on the stairs, Uncle Gavin stopping halfway down, so that we stood exactly halfway from anywhere, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes brighter and intenter than ever.
    ‘This is not cricket,’ he said. ‘But justice is accomplished lots of times by methods that won’t bear looking at. They have moved the jury to the back room in Mrs. Rouncewell’s boardinghouse. The room right opposite that mulberry tree. If you could get into the back yard without anybody seeing you, and be careful when you climb the tree—’
    Nobody saw me. But I could look through the windy mulberry leaves into the room, and see and hear, both—the nine angry and disgusted men sprawled in chairs at the far end of the room; Mr. Holland, the foreman, and another man standing in front of the chair in which the little, worn, dried-out hill man sat. His name was Fentry. I remembered all their names, because Uncle Gavin said that to be a successful lawyer and politician in our country you did not need a silver tongue nor even an intelligence; you needed only an infallible memory for names. But I would have remembered his name anyway, because it was Stonewall Jackson—Stonewall Jackson Fentry.
    ‘Don’t you admit that he was running off with Book-wright’s seventeen-year-old daughter?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘Don’t you admit that he had a pistol in his hand when they found him? Don’t you admit that he wasn’t hardly buried before that woman turned up and proved she was already his wife? Don’t you admit that he was not only no-good but dangerous, and that if it hadn’t been Bookwright, sooner or later somebody else would have had to, and that Bookwright was just unlucky?’
    ‘Yes,’ Fentry said.
    ‘Then what do you want?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘What do you want?’
    ‘I can’t help it,’ Fentry said. ‘I ain’t going to vote Mr. Bookwright free.’
    And he didn’t. And that afternoon Judge Frazier discharged the jury and set the case for retrial in the next term of court; and the next morning Uncle Gavin came for me before I had finished breakfast.
    ‘Tell your mother we might be gone overnight,’ he said. ‘Tell her I promise not to let you get either shot, snake-bit or surfeited with soda pop.… Because I’ve got to know,’ he said. We were driving fast now, out the northeast road, and his eyes were bright, not baffled, just intent and eager. ‘He was born and raised and lived all his life out here at the very other end of the county, thirty miles from Frenchman’s Bend. He said under oath that he had never even seen Bookwright before, and you can look at him and see that he never had enough time off from hard work to learn how to lie in. I doubt if he ever even heard Bookwright’s name before.’
    We drove until almost noon. We were in the hills now, out of the rich flat land, among the pine and bracken, the poor soil, the little tilted and barren patches of gaunt corn and cotton which somehow endured, as the people they clothed and fed somehow endured; the roads we followed less than lanes, winding and narrow, rutted and dust choked, the car in second gear half the time. Then we saw the mailbox, the crude lettering: G. A. F ENTRY ; beyond it, the two-room log house with an open hall, and even I, a boy of twelve, could see that no woman’s hand had touched it in a lot of years. We entered the gate.
    Then a voice said, ‘Stop! Stop where you are!’ And we hadn’t even seen him—an old man, barefoot, with a fierce white bristle of mustache, in patched denim faded almost to the color of skim