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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. ssssssssss
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. ssssssssss
When I got down stairs in the morning, the parlor was shut up, and the
watchers was gone. There warn't nobody around but the family and the widow
Bartley and our tribe. I watched their faces to see if anything had been happen-
ing, but I couldn't tell. ssssssssss
Towards the middle of the day the undertaker come, with his man, and they
set the coffin in the middle of the room on a couple of chairs, and then set all
our chairs in rows, and borrowed more from the neighbors till the hall and the
parlor and the dining-room was full. I see the coffin lid was the way it was
before, but I dasn't go to look in under it, with folks around.
Then the people begun to flock in, and the beats and the girls took seats in
the front row at the head of the coffin, and for a half an hour the people filed
around slow, in single rank, and looked down at the dead man's face a minute,
and some dropped in a tear, and it was all very still and solemn, only the girls
and the beats holding handkerchiefs to their eyes and keeping their heads bent,
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