ycamores down by Uncle Silas's field, and he went in there
to get a disguise out of his hand-bag and put it on before he showed
himself here in the town--and mind you he done that just a little after
the time that Uncle Silas was hitting Jubiter Dunlap over the head with
a club--for he DID hit him.

"But the minute the pals see that thief slide into the bunch of
sycamores, they jumped out of the bushes and slid in after him.

"They fell on him and clubbed him to death.

"Yes, for all he screamed and howled so, they never had no mercy on him,
but clubbed him to death. And two men that was running along the road
heard him yelling that way, and they made a rush into the sycamore
bunch--which was where they was bound for, anyway--and when the pals saw
them they lit out and the two new men after them a-chasing them as
tight as they could go. But only a minute or two--then these two new men
slipped back very quiet into the sycamores.

"THEN what did they do? I will tell you what they done. They found where
the thief had got his disguise out of his carpet-sack to put on; so one
of them strips and puts on that disguise."

Tom waited a little here, for some more "effect"--then he says, very
deliberate:

"The man that put on that dead man's disguise was--JUBITER DUNLAP!"

"Great Scott!" everybody shouted, all over the house, and old Uncle
Silas he looked perfectly astonished.

"Yes, it was Jubiter Dunlap. Not dead, you see. Then they pulled off the
dead man's boots and put Jubiter Dunlap's old ragged shoes on the corpse
and put the corpse's boots on Jubiter Dunlap. Then Jubiter Dunlap
stayed where he was, and the other man lugged the dead body off in the
twilight; and after midnight he went to Uncle Silas's house, and took
his old green work-robe off of the peg where it always hangs in the
passage betwixt the house and the kitchen and put it on, and stole the
long-handled shovel and went off down into the tobacker field and buried
the murdered man."

He stopped, and stood half a minute. Then--"And who do you reckon the
murdered man WAS? It was--JAKE Dunlap, the long-lost burglar!"

"Great Scott!"

"And the man that buried him was--BRACE Dunlap, his brother!"

"Great Scott!"

"And who do you reckon is this mowing idiot here that's letting on all
these weeks to be a deef and dumb stranger? It's--JUBITER Dunlap!"

My land, they all busted out in a howl, and you never see the like of
that excitement since the day you