d, 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.

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 happening, but I couldn't tell.

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 th