"Mr. Sheriff, arrest these two witnesses on suspicions of being
accessionary after the fact to the murder."

The lawyer for the prostitution jumps up all excited, and says:

"Your honor! I protest against this extraordi--"

"Set down!" says the judge, pulling his bowie and laying it on his
pulpit. "I beg you to respect the Court."

So he done it. Then he called Bill Withers.

BILL WITHERS, sworn, said: "I was coming along about sundown,
Saturday, September 2d, by the prisoner's field, and my
brother Jack was with me and we seen a man toting off
something heavy on his back and allowed it was a nigger
stealing corn; we couldn't see distinct; next we made out that
it was one man carrying another; and the way it hung, so kind
of limp, we judged it was somebody that was drunk; and by the
man's walk we said it was Parson Silas, and we judged he had
found Sam Cooper drunk in the road, which he was always trying
to reform him, and was toting him out of danger."

It made the people shiver to think of poor old Uncle Silas toting off the
diseased down to the place in his tobacker field where the dog dug up the
body, but there warn't much sympathy around amongst the faces, and I
heard one cuss say "'Tis the coldest blooded work I ever struck, lugging
a murdered man around like that, and going to bury him like a animal, and
him a preacher at that."