winter and that Mitch
said that, because it threw George off. Nobody believed in Tom Sawyer as
a real person but us--we did. We knew he was real. Mitch was going to
write a letter to him and send it to Hannibal, Missouri, for Mitch's dad
said there was no town of St. Petersburg in Missouri--and that Mark
Twain had used that name as a blind.

And just about then this here Nancy Allen disappeared. She was a funny
little woman about as big as a 'leven year old girl, and wore a shawl
around her head, and carried a cane and smoked a pipe. She allus came to
town with Old Bender and his wife which was a friend or somethin' of
Nancy, and a boy with a mouth as big as a colt's and as trembly, which
was Old Bender's boy. They all lived together near town, and used to
come in, first Old Bender, then his wife, then Nancy, then this boy
walkin' in file, and they'd go to the grocery store and set around all
day, and go home with bacon, tobacco and things.

[Illustration: The Bender Family]

I said Nancy disappeared in the winter. But there was snow and they
didn't come to town--so just when she died nobody knows. But as I said,
Mitch and I found her body right near a creek in Montgomery's woods in
April. The snow was gone, and there she lay, what was left of her,
wrapped up in her shawl. And no one knew how she got there or anything
about it.

Mitch was the most curious boy you ever saw. He had read sommers about
a singing bone--that if you take the bone of a person that has died like
this, and hollow it out so as to make it into kind of a horn, and blow
through it, a voice will come out of it and tell you how the person died
and where the money is that's left and everything. So when we found her,
Mitch was just about to take her arm bone which was stickin' through her
shawl to make a horn of when I says, "Don't, Mitch, you'll get into
trouble. That body must lie right there 'till the Corner comes." You see
my father was States Attorney and I'd heard him say that. So we left
Nancy just as she was and ran into town. I told my father, and the
Corner went out and took us along, and we told what we knew. Then they
took her body into town and got a jury and Mitch and I told about it,
and our names were printed in the paper.

There was a story around that Nancy Allen was a miser, and of course
they wondered how she died. And my pa got Old Bender in and
cross-questioned him a whole day, with Mitch and me hid on top of a
closet in the r