“Mr. Jem,” he said, “you better take Miss Jean Louise home. Mr. Jem, you hear me?” Jem turned his head. “Scout, go home. Dill, you’n‘Scout go home.”
“You gotta make me first,” I said, remembering Atticus’s blessed dictum. Jem scowled furiously at me, then said to Reverend Sykes,
“I think it’s okay, Reverend, she doesn’t understand it.” I was mortally offended. “I most certainly do, I c’n understand anything you can.”
“Aw hush. She doesn’t understand it, Reverend, she ain’t nine yet.” Reverend Sykes’s black eyes were anxious. “Mr. Finch know you all are here?”
“This ain’t fit for Miss Jean Louise or you boys either.” Jem shook his head. “He can’t see us this far away. It’s all right, Reverend.”
I knew Jem would win, because I knew nothing could make him leave now. Dill and I were safe, for a while: Atticus could see us from where he was.
As Judge Taylor banged his gavel, Mr. Ewell was sitting smugly in the witness chair, surveying his handiwork.
With one phrase he had turned happy picknickers into a sulky, tense, murmuring crowd, being slowly hypnotized by gavel taps lessening in intensity
until the only sound in the courtroom was a dim pink-pink- pink: the judge might have been rapping the bench with a pencil.
In possession of his court once more, Judge Taylor leaned back in his chair.
He looked suddenly weary; his age was showing, and I thought about what Atticus had said—
he and Mrs. Taylor didn’t kiss much—he must have been nearly seventy.
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