d of September, and Jim Lane was with me, and it was
towards sundown, and we heard loud talk, like quarrelling,
and we was very close, only the hazel bushes between (that's
along the fence); and we heard a voice say, 'I've told you
more'n once I'd kill you,' and knowed it was this prisoner's
voice; and then we see a club come up above the bushes and
down out of sight again, and heard a smashing thump and then
a groan or two: and then we crope soft to where we could
see, and there laid Jupiter Dunlap dead, and this prisoner
standing over him with the club; and the next he hauled the
dead man into a clump of bushes and hid him, and then we
stooped low, to be cut of sight, and got away."

Well, it was awful. It kind of froze everybody's blood to hear it, and
the house was 'most as still whilst he was telling it as if there warn't
nobody in it. And when he was done, you could hear them gasp and sigh,
all over the house, and look at one another the same as to say, "Ain't
it perfectly terrible--ain't it awful!"

Now happened a thing that astonished me. All the time the first
witnesses was proving the bad blood and the threats and all that, Tom
Sawyer was alive and laying for them; and the minute they was through,
he went for them, and done his level best to catch them in lies and
spile their testimony. But now, how different. When Lem first begun to
talk, and never said anything about speaking to Jubiter or trying to
borrow a dog off of him, he was all alive and laying for Lem, and you
could see he was getting ready to cross-question him to death pretty
soon, and then I judged him and me would go on the stand by and by and
tell what we heard him and Jim Lane say. But the next time I looked at
Tom I got the cold shivers. Why, he was in the brownest study you ever
see--miles and miles away. He warn't hearing a word Lem Beebe was saying;
and when he got through he was still in that brown-study, just the same.
Our lawyer joggled him, and then he looked up startled, and says, "Take
the witness if you want him. Lemme alone--I want to think."

Well, that beat me. I couldn't understand it. And Benny and her
mother--oh, they looked sick, they was so troubled. They shoved their
veils to one side and tried to get his eye, but it warn't any use, and
I couldn't get his eye either. So the mud-turtle he tackled the witness,
but it didn't amount to nothing; and he made a mess of it.