again–one step–reached for his prize and seized it, dropping
the knife sheath. Then he felt the old man’s strong grip upon him,
and a wild cry of “Help! help!” rang in his ear.
Without hesitation he drove the knife home–and was free.
Some of the notes escaped from his left hand and fell in the blood on
the floor. He dropped the knife and snatched them up and started to fly;
transferred them to his left hand, and seized the knife again,
in his fright and confusion, but remembered himself and flung it from him,
as being a dangerous witness to carry away with him.
He jumped for the stair-foot, and closed the door behind him;
and as he snatched his candle and fled upward,
the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of urgent footsteps
approaching the house. In another moment he was in his room,
and the twins were standing aghast over the body of the murdered man!
Tom put on his coat, buttoned his hat under it, threw on his
suit of girl’s clothes, dropped the veil, blew out his light,
locked the room door by which he had just entered, taking the key,
passed through his other door into the black hall,
locked that door and kept the key, then worked his way along in the dark
and descended the black stairs. He was not expecting to meet anybody,
for all interest was centered in the other part of the
house now; his calculation proved correct. By the time he was
passing through the backyard, Mrs. Pratt, her servants,
and a dozen half-dressed neighbors had joined the twins and the dead,
and accessions were still arriving at the front door.
As Tom, quaking as with a palsy, passed out at the gate,
three women came flying from the house on the opposite side of the lane.
They rushed by him and in at the gate, asking him what
the trouble was there, but not waiting for an answer.
Tom said to himself, “Those old maids waited to dress–they did the same
thing the night Stevens’s house burned down next door.”
In a few minutes he was in the haunted house. He lighted a candle and
took off his girl-clothes. There was blood on him all down his
left side, and his right hand was red with the stains of the
blood-soaked notes which he has crushed in it; but otherwise he
was free from this sort of evidence. He cleansed his hand on the straw,
and cleaned most of the smut from his face. Then he burned the male and
female attire to ashes, scattered the ashes,
and put on a disguise proper for a tramp. He blew out his light,
went below, and was soon loafing down the river road with the
intent to borrow and use one of Roxy’s devices. He found a canoe
and paddled down downstream, setting the canoe adrift as dawn
approached, and making his way by land to the next village,
where he kept out of sight till a transient steamer came along,
and then took deck passage for St. Louis. He was ill at ease
Dawson’s Landing was behind him; then he said to himself,
“All the detectives on earth couldn’t trace me now; there’s not a
vestige of a clue left in the world; that homicide will take its
place with the permanent mysteries, and people won’t get done
trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years.”
In St. Louis, next morning, he read this brief telegram in
the papers–dated at Dawson’s Landing:
Judge Driscoll, an old and respected citizen,
was assassinated here about midnight by a profligate Italian nobleman
or a barber on account of a quarrel growing out of the recent election.
The assassin will probably be lynched.
“One of the twins!” soliloquized Tom. “How lucky!
It is the knife that has done him this grace. We never know when
fortune is trying to favor us. I actually cursed Pudd’nhead
Wilson in my heart for putting it out of my power to sell that knife.
I take it back now.”
Tom was now rich and independent. He arranged with the
planter, and mailed to Wilson the new bill of sale which sold