The Butterfly by James M. Cain

again. "I'm changing that plea."
    "And how about your new plea?"
    "What new plea, your honor?"
    "To the new charge, perjury."
    "My plea to that charge and both the other charges is not guilty. This girl is not my daughter, but she is my wife, and what law we've been violating I'd like somebody to explain me."
    "What do you mean she's not your daughter?"
    "I mean what I say."
    "Whose daughter is she then?"
    "Man by the name of Moke Blue."
    "That's a lie!"
    It snapped out of her before she even knew she was going to say it, and right away she apologized for it.
    "I'm sorry, Jess, to use that word. I take it back, but you'll have to take back what you said too. Even if it's to save me I can't bear to hear that."
    "It's not a lie and I don't take it back."
    "Who's Moke Blue?"
    I told them who Moke was, how he had broken up my home, how he and Belle had gone off together, how it had all started about a year before Kady was born. I didn't have any of it learned by heart or anything. I didn't even know what I was going to say next. "And you knew Moke Blue was her father?"
    "I knew I wasn't."
    "But you raised her just the same?"
    "I never saw her from the day my wife took her away with her till a year ago when she came with me to live."
    "And you started sleeping with her?"
    "I did not."
    "When did you start?"
    "After we were married."
    "You lived with her all that time in the same house and did nothing to her at all and then all of a sudden you decided it was time to marry her. Why didn't you marry her before?"
    "I was already married."
    "So we've got a little bigamy here too?"
    "My wife, my first wife, this wife's mother, died. The day after that I asked Kady to marry me. She said all right and we went to Gilroy."
    "You had her misrepresent her age?"
    "I'd forgotten her age."
    "And misrepresent the name of her father?"
    "After we were married, when she told me she had put down her father's name as Hiram Tyler, was the first I knew she really thought I was her father. I thought she knew about Moke."
    "Didn't you tell her?"
    "Then? I tried to, but I couldn't."
    "Why not?"
    "You heard her just now. Moke was a shiftless, no-account nothing, and if I told her the truth about him I thought she'd hate me for it and I loved her and didn't want her to."
    "Where is this Moke Blue?"
    "I don't know."
    The judge and the prosecutor looked at each other, and then the judge said to Kady: "Young woman, do you believe any of this?"
    She didn't answer, and he asked who Jane was and asked the same thing of her. She didn't answer, either. "Is there any neighbor of this man, who knew him and his wife at the time they were living together, who will testify he believes it, or had any knowledge of it at the time?"
    Nobody said anything. I said Moke had the same butterfly on his stomach that Danny had, that only the men in his family were born with it, and that Kady didn't have it but the boy did, and they didn't even bother to wake Danny up to look, where he was stretched out on the desk, with Jane's hat over his eyes to keep the light out. I was sunk, and I knew it, and Kady was sunk, and I knew that too. Until, all of a sudden, I happened to look at Ed Blue, and the look on his face told me I wasn't sunk, that I was going to win, that I'd rip it right out of him, what I had to have to be turned loose. The judge got ready to wind up the case. "Well, Tyler, until you get Moke Blue in court and produce some sort of direct substantiation of what you say, I'm afraid I'll have to regard it as a farfetched invention to escape the consequences of several serious crimes, so —
    "I can't get him up here."
    "Why not?"
    "He's afraid to come."
    "What's he afraid of?"
    "That I'll kill him."
    "Why would he be afraid of that?"
    He was looking at me like I was making a fool of myself and didn't know it but he would give me all the chance I wanted, and that was just how I wanted him to feel. "Because I ordered him off the creek when he tried to kill me, with a rifle that