So it all
come back to me just the way it was that day; and it
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.
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