CHAPTER 55

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 grand-daughters. 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.