yes, and overworked for many days.”
“Then I’ll leave you and let you get to your rest.
Good night, old man.” But as Tom went out he couldn’t deny himself
a small parting gibe: “Don’t take it so hard; a body can’t win
every time; you’ll hang somebody yet.”
Wilson muttered to himself, “It is no lie to say I am sorry
I have to begin with you, miserable dog though you are!”
He braced himself up with a glass of cold whisky, and went
to work again. He did not compare the new finger marks
unintentionally left by Tom a few minutes before on Roxy’s glass
with the tracings of the marks left on the knife handle, there
being no need for that (for his trained eye), but busied himself
with another matter, muttering from time to time, “Idiot that I was!–
Nothing but a GIRL would do me–a man in girl’s clothes
never occurred to me.” First, he hunted out the plate containing
the fingerprints made by Tom when he was twelve years old, and
laid it by itself; then he brought forth the marks made by Tom’s
baby fingers when he was a suckling of seven months, and placed
these two plates with the one containing this subject’s newly
(and unconsciously) made record
“Now the series is complete,” he said with satisfaction,
and sat down to inspect these things and enjoy them.
But his enjoyment was brief. He stared a considerable time
at the three strips, and seemed stupefied with astonishment.
At last he put them down and said, “I can’t make it out at all–
hang it, the baby’s don’t tally with the others!”
He walked the floor for half an hour puzzling over his enigma,
then he hunted out the other glass plates.
He sat down and puzzled over these things a good while,
but kept muttering, “It’s no use; I can’t understand it.
They don’t tally right, and yet I’ll swear the names and dates are right,
and so of course they OUGHT to tally. I never labeled one of
these thing carelessly in my life. There is a most extraordinary
mystery here.”
He was tired out now, and his brains were beginning to clog.
He said he would sleep himself fresh, and then see what he could
do with this riddle. He slept through a troubled and unrestful hour,
then unconsciousness began to shred away, and presently he
rose drowsily to a sitting posture. “Now what was that dream?”
he said, trying to recall it. “What was that dream? It seemed
to unravel that puz–”
He landed in the middle of the floor at a bound, without
finishing the sentence, and ran and turned up his light and
seized his “records.” He took a single swift glance at them and
cried out:
“It’s so! Heavens, what a revelation! And for twenty-three
years no man has ever suspected it!”
CHAPTER 21
Doom
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it,
inspiring the cabbages.
–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
APRIL 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what
we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Wilson put on enough clothes for business purposes and went
to work under a high pressure of steam. He was awake all over.
All sense of weariness had been swept away by the invigorating
refreshment of the great and hopeful discovery which he had made.
He made fine and accurate reproductions of a number of his
“records,” and then enlarged them on a scale of ten to one with
his pantograph. He did these pantograph enlargements on sheets
of white cardboard, and made each individual line of the
bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which consisted of
the “pattern” of a “record” stand out bold and black by
reinforcing it with ink. To the untrained eye the collection of
delicate originals made by the human finger on the glass plates
looked about alike; but when enlarged ten times they resembled
the markings of a block of wood that has been sawed across the
grain, and the dullest eye could detect at a glance, and at a