The crowd brought along a nice-looking old gentleman and a younger one with his arm in a sling. I thought the king and the duke would turn pale, but not them. The king only looked sadly at the newcomers, as if it hurt him to think there were such frauds in the world.
The old gentleman spoke like a real Englishman, not like the king. “I am Peter Wilks’s brother Harvey,” he said, “and this is his brother William, who can’t hear or speak. He has broken his arm, and our bags were put off the boat by mistake at a town up the river. When they come, I can prove who we are. Until then I’ll wait at the hotel.”
The king laughed. “Broke his arm! Very handy for a man who has to make signs and hasn’t learned how. And lost their bags! Very clever!”
Most of the crowd laughed with him, but not the doctor, and not Levi Bell, the lawyer, who had just come back. A big rough man named Hines didn’t laugh either.
“If you are Harvey Wilks,” Hines said to the king, “how did you come to this town?”
“On a steamboat from Cincinnati.”
“That’s a lie. That morning you were up at the Point in a canoe. I live there, and I saw you, with a boy. Why, there he is now.” He pointed at me.
So the doctor took us all to the hotel, with the new pair too. He held my hand the whole way, kindly, but he never let it go.
There the doctor asked for the bag of gold, to keep it safe until it was all settled. The king said sadly that the slaves had stolen it from his room, and I said I had seen them sneaking out. Then for hours they asked questions. The king told his story, and the old gentleman told his, and anybody could see that one was telling the truth and the other lies. When they made me tell about our life in Sheffield, the lawyer stopped me. “Sit down, my boy. I can see you aren’t used to lying. You need practice.”
Then the lawyer took some old letters from Harvey Wilks out of his pocket and had both pairs write a few lines. The king’s and the duke’s writing was nothing like the letters. But nobody could read the old gentleman’s writing at all.
“My brother William copies my letters for me,” he said. “But he can’t write with his left hand.”
The lawyer had some letters from William too, and he saw that they were in the same hand as Harvey’s. “Well, one thing is proved,” he said, and pointed at the king and the duke. “These two aren’t Wilkses.”
But the stubborn old fool still wouldn’t give in. He talked and talked, until the old gentleman asked, “Who here helped prepare my brother’s body for burial?”
“I did, with another man,” somebody said. “We’re both here.”
The old gentleman turned to the king. “Then perhaps this gentleman can tell me what was tattooed on Peter’s chest?”
The king went a little white. Everybody leaned forward and looked at him. Now he’ll give up, I thought. But he smiled and said, “It’s just a small, thin blue arrow, and if you don’t look closely, you can’t see it.”
I never saw such nerve.
“Did you see any such mark?” the old gentleman asked the two men.
“No, we didn’t.”
“Good! What you did see was a small P, a B and a W, with lines between them.”
“No. We didn’t see any marks at all.”
Now everybody went wild. “They’re all frauds! Let’s drown them! Let’s hang them!” But the lawyer jumped on the table and shouted, “Gentlemen! There’s one more way. Let’s go and dig up the body and look!”
They took the four men and me to the graveyard, with the whole town behind us. I was scared now, I can tell you. As we passed our house, I wished I hadn’t sent Mary Jane away.
A storm was coming, and Hines held my wrist so tight that I had to run to keep up. Nothing in the world stood between me and death but those tattoo marks. If they didn’t find them—
At the grave they dug by the light of the lightning, while the rain came down and the thunder crashed. At last they opened the coffin, and everybody pushed forward to see.
Suddenly the lightning lit everything up, and somebody shouted, “Look! The bag of gold is on his chest!”
Hines let go of my wrist to push in and look, and I ran for the road in the dark like I had never run before.
Nobody was out in the storm, so I ran straight through the main street. As I passed our house, a light suddenly came on in Mary Jane’s window, and my heart almost burst. Then the house was behind me in the dark, and I knew I would never see it again in this world. She was the best girl I ever met.
Above the town I found a boat that was only tied with a rope and rowed out to the raft as fast as I could. Jim came running with his arms open, he was so glad, but when I saw him in the lightning, I fell backwards into the water. I had forgotten that the duke had dressed him as a king and painted him blue. Jim pulled me out and wanted to hug me.
“Not now! Save it for breakfast! Cut it loose, Jim!”
In two seconds we were sliding down the river. It felt so good to be free again, all by ourselves on the big river, that I jumped up and down for joy. But then I heard a sound I knew very well. I held my breath and waited, and when the next flash of lightning lit up the water, there they were, rowing hard after us: the king and the duke.
I fell down on the raft and gave up. It was all I could do not to cry.