But I knowed better. I had it out of there before
they was half-way down stairs. I groped along
up to my cubby, and hid it there till I could get
a chance to do better. I judged I better hide
it outside of the house somewheres, because if they
missed it they would give the house a good ransacking:
I knowed that very well. Then I turned in, with
my clothes all on; but I couldn’t a gone to
sleep if I’d a wanted to, I was in such a sweat
to get through with the business. By and by I
heard the king and the duke come up; so I rolled off
my pallet and laid with my chin at the top of my ladder,
and waited to see if anything was going to happen.
But nothing did.
So I held on till all the late sounds had quit and
the early ones hadn’t begun yet; and then I
slipped down the ladder.
I crept to their doors and listened; they was
snoring. So I tiptoed along, and got down stairs
all right. There warn’t a sound anywheres.
I peeped through a crack of the dining-room door,
and see the men that was watching the corpse all sound
asleep on their chairs. The door was open into
the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there
was a candle in both rooms. I passed along, and
the parlor door was open; but I see there warn’t
nobody in there but the remainders of Peter; so I shoved
on by; but the front door was locked, and the key
wasn’t there. Just then I heard somebody
coming down the stairs, back behind me. I run
in the parlor and took a swift look around, and the
only place I see to hide the bag was in the coffin.
The lid was shoved along about a foot, showing the
dead man’s face down in there, with a wet cloth
over it, and his shroud on. I tucked the money-bag
in under the lid, just down beyond where his hands
was crossed, which made me creep, they was so cold,
and then I run back across the room and in behind
the door.
The person coming was Mary Jane. She went to
the coffin, very soft, and kneeled down and looked
in; then she put up her handkerchief, and I see she
begun to cry, though I couldn’t hear her, and
her back was to me. I slid out, and as I passed
the dining-room I thought I’d make sure them
watchers hadn’t seen me; so I looked through
the crack, and everything was all right. They
hadn’t stirred.
I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts
of the thing playing out that way after I had took
so much trouble and run so much resk about it.
Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right; because
when we get down the river a hundred mile or two I
could write back to Mary Jane, and she could dig him
up again and get it; but that ain’t the thing
that’s going to happen; the thing that’s
going to happen is, the money ’ll be found when
they come to screw on the lid. Then the king
’ll get it again, and it ’ll be a long
day before he gives anybody another chance to smouch
it from him. Of course I wanted to slide
down and get it out of there, but I dasn’t try
it. Every minute it was getting earlier now,
and pretty soon some of them watchers would begin to
stir, and I might get catched—catched with
six thousand dollars in my hands that nobody hadn’t
hired me to take care of. I don’t wish
to be mixed up in no such business as that, I says
to myself.
