Mystery fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
“Well, the time strung along and along, and that fellow never come!
Why, it strung along till dawn begun to break, and still he never come.
‘Thunder,’ I says, ‘what do you make out of this?—ain’t it suspicious?’
‘Land!’ Hal says, ‘do you reckon he’s playing us?—open the paper!’ I
done it, and by gracious there warn’t anything in it but a couple of
little pieces of loaf-sugar! _that’s_ the reason he could set there and
snooze all night so comfortable. Smart? Well, I reckon! He had had them
two papers all fixed and ready, and he had put one of them in place of
t’other right under our noses.
“We felt pretty cheap. But the thing to do, straight off, was to make a
plan; and we done it. We would do up the paper again, just as it was,
and slip in, very elaborate and soft, and lay it on the bunk again, and
let on _we_ didn’t know about any trick, and hadn’t any idea he was
a-laughing at us behind them bogus snores of his’n; and we would stick
by him, and the first night we was ashore we would get him drunk and
search him, and get the di’monds; and _do_ for him, too, if it warn’t
too risky. If we got the swag, we’d _got_ to do for him, or he would
hunt us down and do for us, sure. But I didn’t have no real hope. I
knowed we could get him drunk—he was always ready for that—but what’s
the good of it? You might search him a year and never find—Well, right
there I catched my breath and broke off my thought! For an idea went
ripping through my head that tore my brains to rags—and land, but I
felt gay and good! You see, I had had my boots off, to unswell my feet,
and just then I took up one of them to put it on, and I catched a
glimpse of the heel-bottom, and it just took my breath away. You
remember about that puzzlesome little screwdriver?”
“You bet I do,” says Tom, all excited.
“Well, when I catched that glimpse of that boot heel, the idea that
went smashing through my head was, I know where he’s hid the di’monds!
You look at this boot heel, now. See, it’s bottomed with a steel plate,
and the plate is fastened on with little screws. Now there wasn’t a
screw about that feller anywhere but in his boot heels; so, if he
needed a screwdriver, I reckoned I knowed why.”
“Huck, ain’t it bully!” says Tom.
“Well, I got my boots on, and we went down and slipped in and laid the
paper of sugar on the berth, and sat down soft and sheepish and went to
listening to Bud Dixon snore. Hal Clayton dropped off pretty soon, but
I didn’t; I wasn’t ever so wide awake in my life. I was spying out from
under the shade of my hat brim, searching the floor for leather. It
took me a long time, and I begun to think maybe my guess was wrong, but
at last I struck it. It laid over by the bulkhead, and was nearly the
color of the carpet. It was a little round plug about as thick as the
end of your little finger, and I says to myself there’s a di’mond in
the nest you’ve come from. Before long I spied out the plug’s mate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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