all got afraid his troubles would break
him down and kill him. And whenever we tried to persuade him to feel
cheerfuler, he only shook his head and said if we only knowed what it
was to carry around a murderer's load in your heart we wouldn't talk
that way. Tom and all of us kept telling him it WASN'T murder, but just
accidental killing! but it never made any difference--it was murder, and
he wouldn't have it any other way. He actu'ly begun to come out plain
and square towards trial time and acknowledge that he TRIED to kill the
man. Why, that was awful, you know. It made things seem fifty times as
dreadful, and there warn't no more comfort for Aunt Sally and Benny.
But he promised he wouldn't say a word about his murder when others was
around, and we was glad of that.

Tom Sawyer racked the head off of himself all that month trying to plan
some way out for Uncle Silas, and many's the night he kept me up 'most
all night with this kind of tiresome work, but he couldn't seem to get
on the right track no way. As for me, I reckoned a body might as well
give it up, it all looked so blue and I was so downhearted; but he
wouldn't. He stuck to the business right along, and went on planning and
thinking and ransacking his head.

So at last the trial come on, towards the middle of October, and we was
all in the court. The place was jammed, of course. Poor old Uncle Silas,
he looked more like a dead person than a live one, his eyes was so
hollow and he looked so thin and so mournful. Benny she set on one side
of him and Aunt Sally on the other, and they had veils on, and was
full of trouble. But Tom he set by our lawyer, and had his finger in
everywheres, of course. The lawyer let him, and the judge let him. He
'most took the business out of the lawyer's hands sometimes; which was
well enough, because that was only a mud-turtle of a back-settlement
lawyer and didn't know enough to come in when it rains, as the saying
is.

They swore in the jury, and then the lawyer for the prostitution got up
and begun. He made a terrible speech against the old man, that made him
moan and groan, and made Benny and Aunt Sally cry. The way HE told about
the murder kind of knocked us all stupid it was so different from the
old man's tale. He said he was going to prove that Uncle Silas was SEEN
to kill Jubiter Dunlap by two good witnesses, and done it deliberate,
and SAID he was going to kill him the very minute he hit him with the
club; and they s