made me mournful to think how pleasant it was up to
then, and how miserable ever since.
LEM BEEBE, sworn, said — “I was a-coming along,
that day, second of September, and Jim Lane was with
me, and it was towards sundown, and we heard loud
talk, like quarrelling, and we was very close, only
the hazel bushes between (that’s along the fence);
and we heard a voice say, ‘I’ve told you more’n once
I’d kill you,’ and knowed it was this prisoner’s
voice; and then we see a club come up above the
bushes and down out of sight again. and heard a
smashing thump and then a groan or two: and then we
crope soft to where we could see, and there laid
Jupiter Dunlap dead, and this prisoner standing over
him with the club; and the next he hauled the dead
man into a clump of bushes and hid him, and then we
stooped low, to be cut of sight, and got away.”
Well, it was awful. It kind of froze everybody’s
blood to hear it, and the house was ‘most as still whilst
he was telling it as if there warn’t nobody in it. And
when he was done, you could hear them gasp and sigh,
all over the house, and look at one another the same
as to say, “Ain’t it perfectly terrible — ain’t it awful!”
Now happened a thing that astonished me. All the
time the first witnesses was proving the bad blood and
the threats and all that, Tom Sawyer was alive and lay-
ing for them; and the minute they was through, he
went for them, and done his level best to catch them in
lies and spile their testimony. But now, how different.
When Lem first begun to talk, and never said anything
about speaking to Jubiter or trying to borrow a dog
off of him, he was all alive and laying for Lem, and you
could see he was getting ready to cross-question him to
death pretty soon, and then I judged him and me would
go on the stand by and by and tell what we heard him
and Jim Lane say. But the next time I looked at Tom
I got the cold shivers. Why, he was in the brownest
study you ever see — miles and miles away. He warn’t
hearing a word Lem Beebe was saying; and when he
got through he was still in that brown-study, just the
same. Our lawyer joggled him, and then he looked up
startled, and says, “Take the witness if you want him.
Lemme alone — I want to think.”
Well, that beat me. I couldn’t understand it. And
Benny and her mother — oh, they looked sick, they
was so troubled. They shoved their veils to one side
and tried to get his eye, but it warn’t any use, and I
couldn’t get his eye either. So the mud-turtle he
tackled the witness, but it didn’t amount to nothing;
and he made a mess of it.
Then they called up Jim Lane, and he told the very
same story over again, exact. Tom never listened to
this one at all, but set there thinking and thinking, miles
and miles away. So the mud-turtle went in alone
again and come out just as flat as he done before. The
lawyer for the prostitution looked very comfortable,
but the judge looked disgusted. You see, Tom was
just the same as a regular lawyer, nearly, because it
was Arkansaw law for a prisoner to choose anybody he
wanted to help his lawyer, and Tom had had Uncle
Silas shove him into the case, and now he was botching
it and you could see the judge didn’t like it much.
All that the mud-turtle got out of Lem and Jim was
this: he asked them:
“Why didn’t you go and tell what you saw?”
“We was afraid we would get mixed up in it our-
selves. And we was just starting down the river
a-hunting for all the week besides; but as soon as we
come back we found out they’d been searching for the
body, so then we went and told Brace Dunlap all