rolled off my
pallet and laid with my chin at the top of my ladder, and waited to
see if anything was going to happen. But nothing did.

So I held on till all the late sounds had quit and the early ones
hadn't begun yet; and then I slipped down the ladder.

CHAPTER XXVII

I crept to their doors and listened; they was snoring. So I tiptoed
along, and got downstairs all right. There warn't a sound anywheres. I
peeped through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the men that
was watching the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs. The door was
open into the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a
candle in both rooms. I passed along, and the parlor door was open;
but I see there warn't nobody in there but the remainders of Peter; so
I shoved on by; but the front door was locked, and the key wasn't
there. Just then I heard somebody coming down the stairs, back behind
me. I run in the parlor and took a swift look around, and the only
place I see to hide the bag was in the coffin. The lid was shoved
along about a foot, showing the dead man's face down in there, with a
wet cloth over it, and his shroud on. I tucked the money-bag in under
the lid, just down beyond where his hands was crossed, which made me
creep, they was so cold, and then I run back across the room and in
behind the door.

The person coming was Mary Jane. She went to the coffin, very soft,
and kneeled down and looked in; then she put up her handkerchief, and
I see she begun to cry, though I couldn't hear her, and her back was
to me. I slid out, and as I passed the dining-room I thought I'd make
sure them watchers hadn't seen me; so I looked through the crack, and
everything was all right. They hadn't stirred.

I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts of the thing
playing out that way after I had took so much trouble and run so much
resk about it. Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right;
because when we get down the river a hundred mile or two I could write
back to Mary Jane, and she could dig him up again and get it; but that
ain't the thing that's going to happen; the thing that's going to
happen is, the money'll be found when they come to screw on the lid.
Then the king 'll get it again, and it 'll be a long day before he
gives anybody another chance to smouch it from him. Of course I
_wanted_ to slide down and get it out of there, but I dasn't try it.
Every minute it was getting earlier now, and pretty s