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 ladiesI had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When youare told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there isnothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she isa 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 youhave 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 wearingto 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 hiscoat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming.
Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybodyby the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have knownthat everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him;he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousandtons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life,enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receiptfor those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come.
A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derisionas 'Stavely's Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations;I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the displayhe was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flyingdown 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 wasplaning 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 shiverand did me good: one was, 'O God, it is his blood!' I sat on the tool-chestand 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 myhairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me.
At the end of this first seance I went home with six of hisfearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a greathelp to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back.
I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact Ispent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me.
His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something freshand stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder.
He always gave names, dates, places--everything. This by and by enabledme to note two things: that he had killed his victims in everyquarter 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 beheard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity,and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all borethe same name.
My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to anyliving being; but felt that he could trust me, and thereforehe 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 handsin her heart's best blood.' The carpenter, 'innocent andhappy 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 handswere 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 'consecratehis life to the extermination of all the human scum that bearthe 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 sameconsecrated 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 Lynchhas penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those whohave 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 youstands 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 viewa gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will trembleand 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 hadnot 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 Ireflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep.
It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainerand more important duty to get some sleep for myself,so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell himwhat 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 medown to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering andscornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face,made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off andleft 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 thisLynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fatefulwords undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a heroto me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug.
I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no furtherinterest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was aheavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known.
The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginarymurders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember alltheir 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 restof the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalkare 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 hugecommerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerceis one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now.
Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularlybare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands andcontinents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it.
I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and bedrained 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 thisdisease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and allthe houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt.
The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of itis 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 personwho 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 withalcohol, 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 thingfor the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine itand comment upon it.
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