Mystery fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Next, they called up Lem Beebe, and he took the stand. It come into my
mind, then, how Lem and Jim Lane had come along talking, that time,
about borrowing a dog or something from Jubiter Dunlap; and that
brought up the blackberries and the lantern; and that brought up Bill
and Jack Withers, and how they passed by, talking about a nigger
stealing Uncle Silas’s corn; and that fetched up our old ghost that
come along about the same time and scared us so—and here _he_ was too,
and a privileged character, on accounts of his being deef and dumb and
a stranger, and they had fixed him a chair inside the railing, where he
could cross his legs and be comfortable, whilst the other people was
all in a jam so they couldn’t hardly breathe. 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 out 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!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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