And whenever we tried to persuade him to feel cheer-
fuler, he only shook his head and said if we only
knowed what it was to carry around a murderer's load
in your heart we wouldn't talk that way. Tom and all
of us kept telling him it WASN'T murder, but just acci-
dental killing! but it never made any difference -- it was
murder, and he wouldn't have it any other way. He
actu'ly begun to come out plain and square towards
trial time and acknowledge that he TRIED to kill the man.
Why, that was awful, you know. It made things seem
fifty times as dreadful, and there warn't no more com-
fort for Aunt Sally and Benny. But he promised he
wouldn't say a word about his murder when others
was around, and we was glad of that.
Tom Sawyer racked the head off of himself all that
month trying to plan some way out for Uncle Silas, and
many's the night he kept me up 'most all night with
this kind of tiresome work, but he couldn't seem to get
on the right track no way. As for me, I reckoned a
body might as well give it up, it all looked so blue and
I was so downhearted; but he wouldn't. He stuck to
the business right along, and went on planning and
thinking and ransacking his head.
So at last the trial come on, towards the middle of
October, and we was all in the court. The place was
jammed, of course. Poor old Uncle Silas, he looked
more like a dead person than a live one, his eyes was so
hollow and he looked so thin and so mournful.
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