The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Double Barrelled Detective Story, by Mark Twain

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Title: A Double Barrelled Detective Story

Author: Mark Twain

Release Date: April, 2002 [Etext #3180]
Posting Date: January 25, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE ***

Produced by David Widger

A DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY

By Mark Twain

PART I

"We ought never to do wrong when people are looking."

I

The first scene is in the country, in Virginia; the time, 1880. There
has been a wedding, between a handsome young man of slender means and
a rich young girl--a case of love at first sight and a precipitate
marriage; a marriage bitterly opposed by the girl's widowed father.

Jacob Fuller, the bridegroom, is twenty-six years old, is of an old but
unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor,
and for King James's purse's profit, so everybody said--some maliciously
the rest merely because they believed it. The bride is nineteen and
beautiful. She is intense, high-strung, romantic, immeasurably proud of
her Cavalier blood, and passionate in her love for her young husband.
For its sake she braved her father's displeasure, endured his
reproaches, listened with loyalty unshaken to his warning predictions,
and went from his house without his blessing, proud and happy in the
proofs she was thus giving of the quality of the affection which had
made its home in her heart.

The morning after the marriage there was a sad surprise for her. Her
husband put aside her proffered caresses, and said:

"Sit down. I have something to say to you. I loved you. That was
before I asked your father to give you to me. His refusal is not my
grievance--I could have endured that. But the things he said of me to
you--that is a different matter. There--you needn't speak; I know quite
well what they were; I got them from authentic sources. Among other
things he said that my character was written in my face; that I was
treacherous, a dissembler, a coward, and a brute without sense of
pity or compassion: the 'Sedgemoor trade-mark,' he called it--and
'white