perfectly ca'm:

"Your honor, may I speak?"

"For God's sake, yes--go on!" says the judge, so astonished and mixed up
he didn't know what he was about hardly.

Then Tom he stood there and waited a second or two--that was for to work
up an "effect," as he calls it--then he started in just as ca'm as ever,
and says:

"For about two weeks now there's been a little bill sticking on the
front of this courthouse offering two thousand dollars reward for a
couple of big di'monds--stole at St. Louis. Them di'monds is worth twelve
thousand dollars. But never mind about that till I get to it. Now about
this murder. I will tell you all about it--how it happened--who done
it--every DEtail."

You could see everybody nestle now, and begin to listen for all they was
worth.

"This man here, Brace Dunlap, that's been sniveling so about his dead
brother that YOU know he never cared a straw for, wanted to marry that
young girl there, and she wouldn't have him. So he told Uncle Silas he
would make him sorry. Uncle Silas knowed how powerful he was, and how
little chance he had against such a man, and he was scared and worried,
and done everything he could think of to smooth him over and get him to
be good to him: he even took his no-account brother Jubiter on the farm
and give him wages and stinted his own family to pay them; and Jubiter
done everything his brother could contrive to insult Uncle Silas, and
fret and worry him, and try to drive Uncle Silas into doing him a hurt,
so as to injure Uncle Silas with the people. And it done it. Everybody
turned against him and said the meanest kind of things about him, and it
graduly broke his heart--yes, and he was so worried and distressed that
often he warn't hardly in his right mind.

"Well, on that Saturday that we've had so much trouble about, two of
these witnesses here, Lem Beebe and Jim Lane, come along by where Uncle
Silas and Jubiter Dunlap was at work--and that much of what they've said
is true, the rest is lies. They didn't hear Uncle Silas say he would
kill Jubiter; they didn't hear no blow struck; they didn't see no dead
man, and they didn't see Uncle Silas hide anything in the bushes. Look
at them now--how they set there, wishing they hadn't been so handy with
their tongues; anyway, they'll wish it before I get done.

"That same Saturday evening Bill and Jack Withers DID see one man
lugging off another one. That much of what they said is true, and the
rest is lies. First of