“There—you’ve heard what he said! Was there any such mark on Peter Wilks’s breast?”
Both of them spoke up and says:
“We didn’t see no such mark.”
“Good!” says the old gentleman. “Now, what you did see on his breast was a small dim P, and a B (which is an initial he dropped when he was young), and a W, and dashes between them, so: P—B—W”—and he marked them that way on a piece of paper. “Come, ain’t that what you saw?”
Both of them spoke up again, and says:
“No, we didn’t. We never seen any marks at all.”
Well, everybody was in a state of mind now, and they sings out:
“The whole bilin’ of ’m ’s frauds! Le’s duck ’em! le’s drown ’em! le’s ride ’em on a rail!” and everybody was whooping at once, and there was a rattling powwow. But the lawyer he jumps on the table and yells, and says:
“Gentlemen—gentlemen! Hear me just a word—just a single word—if you PLEASE! There’s one way yet—let’s go and dig up the corpse and look.”
That took them.