Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0141/01415.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 11KB | 205 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01415}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter LV}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{town
upon
lynch
now
always
every
hands
hero
time
}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter LV

A Vendetta And Other Things

     During my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the
impression that I was a boy - for in my dreams the faces were all young again,
and looked as they had looked in the old times; but I went to bed a hundred
years old, every night - for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they
are now.

     Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become
adjusted to the changed state of things.  I met young ladies who did not seem
to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young
ladies I had in mind - sometimes their granddaughters.  When you are told that
a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it;
but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it
seems impossible.  You say to yourself, "How can a little girl be a
grandmother?" It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that
while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in
that matter.

     I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not
the men.  I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their
wives had grown old.  These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

     There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone.  Dead, these
many years, they said.  Once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing
down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a
steamboat was coming.  Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not
expecting anybody by the boat - or any freight, either; and Stavely must have
known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked
to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this
boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to
receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should
come.  A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in
derision, as "Stavely's Landing." Stavely was one of my earliest admirations;
I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to
make of it before strangers, as he went flying down the street, struggling
with his fluttering coat.

     But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero.  He was a mighty
liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said.  He was a
romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with
awe.  I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence.  He
was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep
sigh and occasionally mutter broken sentences - confused and not intelligible
- but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver
and did me good: one was, "O God, it is his blood!" I sat on the tool-chest
and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime.
At last he said in a low voice:

     "My little friend, can you keep a secret?"

     I eagerly said I could.

     "A dark and dreadful one?"

     I satisfied him on that point.

     "Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I must relieve
my burdened soul, or I shall die!"

     He cautioned me once more to be "as silent as the grave"; then he told me
he was a "red-handed murderer." He put down his plane, held his hands out
before him, contemplated them sadly, and said:

     "Look - with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!"

     The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he
turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy.  He left
generalizing, and went into details - began with his first murder; described
it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his
second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on.  He had always done his
murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly
snatching it out and showing it to me.

     At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful
secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which
had been sluggish for a while back.  I sought him again and again, on my
Saturday holidays; in fact, I spent the summer with him - all of it which was
valuable to me.  His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something
fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder.  He
always gave names, dates, places - everything. This by and by enabled me to
note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe,
and that these victims were always named Lynch.  The destruction of the
Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty
had multiplied to sixty - and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got
the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly
punished persons all bore the same name.

     My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being;
but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the
story of his sad and blighted life.  He had loved one "too fair for earth,"
and she had reciprocated "with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble
nature." But he had a rival, a "base hireling" named Archibald Lynch, who said
the girl should be his, or he would "dye his hands in her heart's best blood."
The carpenter, "innocent and happy in love's young dream," gave no weight to
the threat, but led his "golden-haired darling to the altar," and there the
two were made one; there, also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in
blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done - with a knife - and the
bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet.  And what did the husband do?  He
plucked forth that knife, and.  kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to
"consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the
hated name of Lynch."

     That was it.  He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them,
from that day to this - twenty years.  He had always used that same
consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches, and with
it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark - a cross,
deeply incised.  Said he:

     "The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America, in
China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia, in
all the earth.  Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe a Lynch has
penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who have seen
it have shuddered and said, 'It is his mark; he has been here!' You have heard
of the Mysterious Avenger - look upon him, for before you stands no less a
person!  But beware - breathe not a word to any soul.  Be silent, and wait.
Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow
will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, 'He has been
here - it is the Mysterious Avenger's mark!' You will come here, but I shall
have vanished; you will see me no more."

     This ass had been reading the "Jibbenainosay," no doubt, and had had his
poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I
took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist.

     However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon
his impending doom, the more I could not sleep.  It seemed my plain duty to
save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for
myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about
to happen to him - under strict secrecy.  I advised him to "fly," and
certainly expected him to do it.  But he laughed at me; and he did not stop
there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering
and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him
get down on his knees and beg - then went off and left me to contemplate the
cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and
incomparable hero.  The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed
this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words
undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer,
but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug.  I was ashamed of him, and ashamed
of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any
more.  He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever
known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders
were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details
yet.

     The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town.  It is no
longer a village; it is a city, with a Mayor, and a council, and water-works,
and probably a debt.  It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and
energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the West and South - where a
well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen that one
doubts them when he does see them.  The customary half-dozen railways center
in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot, which cost a hundred thousand
dollars.  In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur;
the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took
away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in
lumber has grown up, and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results.
A deal of money changes hands there now.

     Bear Creek - so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly
bare of bears - is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of
piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it.  I used to get drowned in
it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going
again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a
person in.  It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day.  I
remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once.  Many
chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had
to be rebuilt.  The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of
it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action.  This is a
mistake.

     There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the
bluffs.  I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time.  In my time the
person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged
fourteen.  The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled
with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave.
The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing
for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it
and comment upon it.