te a little
while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my
rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two
days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door
and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just
heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were
several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying
round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot
and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could
not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that
everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not
even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum;
and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to
anything on account of it, I felt that there was no need for me to
worry, and I did not--not worry then nor later. But for some time past I
had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country
opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out
my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out
here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only
me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement
before I do so.

"But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum's body after he was
dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it
was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and
then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it.
Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired
out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of
the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would
throw a different-sized bullet. But they never thought to do so."

Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: "You mean to say that no
autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?"

Answer by Bledsoe: "If you mean by performing an autopsy that they
probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they
did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to
everybody such a plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had
killed him."

Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: "I take it that you are making
this confession of your own free will and in order to