by Mark Twain
He took up another strip of glass, and exclaimed:
‘Why, here’s old Roxy’s label! Are you going to ornament the royal palaces with nigger paw marks, too? By the date here, I was seven months old when this was done, and she was nursing me and her little nigger cub. There’s a line straight across her thumb-print. How comes that?’ and Tom held out the piece of glass to Wilson.
‘That is common,’ said the bored man, wearily. ‘Scar of a cut or a scratch, usually.’ And he took the strip of glass indifferently, and raised it toward the lamp.
All the blood sunk suddenly out of his face, his hand quaked, and he gazed at the polished surface before him with the glassy stare of a corpse.
‘Great Heavens! what’s the matter with you, Wilson? Are you going to faint?’
Tom sprang for a glass of water and offered it, but Wilson shrank shuddering from him, and said:
‘No, no!—take it away!’ His breast was rising and falling, and he moved his head about in a dull and wandering way, like a person who has been stunned. Presently he said, ‘I shall feel better when I get to bed; I have been overwrought to-day—yes, and overworked for many days.’
‘Then I’ll leave you and let you to get to your rest. Goodnight, old man.’ But as Tom went out he couldn’t deny himself a small parting gibe: ‘Don’t take it so hard; a body can’t win every time; you’ll hang somebody yet.’
Wilson muttered to himself, ‘It is no lie to say I am sorry I have to begin with you, miserable dog though you are!’
He braced himself up with a glass of cold whisky and went to work again. He did not compare the new finger-marks unintentionally left by Tom a few minutes before on Roxy’s glass with the tracings of the marks left on the knife-handle, there being no need of that (for his trained eye), but busied himself with another matter, muttering from time to time, ‘Idiot that I was!—Nothing but a girl would do me—a man in girl’s clothes never occurred to me.’ First, he hunted out the plate containing the finger-prints made by Tom when he was twelve years old, and laid it by itself; then he brought forth the marks made by Tom’s baby fingers when he was a suckling of seven months, and placed these two plates with the one containing this subject’s newly (and unconsciously) made record.
‘Now the series is complete,’ he said with satisfaction, and sat down to inspect these things and enjoy them.
But his enjoyment was brief He stared a considerable time at the three strips, and seemed stupefied with astonishment. At last he put them down and said: ‘I can’t make it out at all. Hang it! the baby’s don’t tally with the others!’
He walked the floor for half an hour, puzzling over his enigma, then he hunted out two other glass plates.
He sat down and puzzled over these things a good while, but kept muttering, ‘It’s no use—I can’t understand it. They don’t tally right, and yet I’ll swear the names and dates are right, and so of course they ought to tally. I never labelled one of these things carelessly in my life. There is a most extraordinary mystery here.’
He was tired out now, and his brains were beginning to clog. He said he would sleep himself fresh, and then see what he could do with this riddle. He slept through a troubled and unrestful hour, then unconsciousness began to shred away, and presently he rose drowsily to a sitting posture. ‘Now what was that dream?’ he said, trying to recall it. ‘What was that dream? It seemed to unravel that puz—’
He landed in the middle of the floor at a bound, without finishing the sentence, and ran and turned up his light and seized his ‘records.’ He took a single swift glance at them and cried out—
‘It’s so! Heavens, what a revelation! And for twenty-three years no man has ever suspected it!’
CHAPTER 21
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
April 1.—This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Wilson put on enough clothes for business purposes and went to work under a high pressure of steam. He was awake all over. All sense of weariness had been swept away by the invigorating refreshment of the great and hopeful discovery which he had made. He made fine and accurate reproductions of a number of his ‘records’, and then enlarged them on a scale of ten to one with his pantagraph. He did these pantagraph enlargements on sheets of white cardboard, and made each individual line of the bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which constituted the ‘pattern’ of a ‘record’ stand out bold and black by reinforcing it with ink. To the untrained eye the collection of delicate originals made by the human finger on the glass plates looked about alike; but when enlarged ten times they resembled the markings of a block of wood that has been sawed across the grain, and the dullest eye could detect at a glance, and at a distance of many feet, that no two of the patterns were alike. When Wilson had at last finished his tedious and difficult work, he arranged its results according to a plan in which a progressive order and sequence was a principal feature, then he added to the batch several pantagraph enlargements which he had made from time to time in bygone years.
The night was spent and the day well advanced now. By the time he had snatched a trifle of breakfast it was nine o‘clock, and the court ready to begin its sitting. He was in his place twelve minutes later with his ‘records’.
Tom Driscoll caught a slight glimpse of the ‘records’, and nudged his nearest friend and said, with a wink, ‘Pudd’nhead’s got a rare eye to business—thinks that as long as he can’t win his case it’s at least a noble good chance to advertise his palace-window decorations without any expense.’ Wilson was informed that his witnesses had been delayed, but would arrive presently; but he rose and said he should probably not have occasion to make use of their testimony. (An amused murmur ran through the room—‘It’s a clean back-down! he gives up without hitting a lick!’) Wilson continued—‘I have other testimony—and better.’ (This compelled interest, and evoked murmurs of surprise that had a detectable ingredient of disappointment in them.) ‘If I seem to be springing this evidence upon the court, I offer as my justification for this, that I did not discover its existence until late last night, and have been engaged in examining and classifying it ever since, until half an hour ago. I shall offer it presently; but first I wish to say a few preliminary words.
‘May it please the court, the claim given the front place, the claim most persistently urged, the claim most strenuously and I may even say aggressively and defiantly insisted upon by the prosecution, is this—that the person whose hand left the blood-stained fingerprints upon the handle of the Indian knife is the person who committed the murder.’ Wilson paused, during several moments, to give impressiveness to what he was about to say, and then added, tranquilly, ‘We grant that claim.’
It was an electrical surprise. No one was prepared for such an admission. A buzz of astonishment rose on all sides, and people were heard to intimate that the overworked lawyer had lost his mind. Even the veteran Judge, accustomed as he was to legal ambushes and masked batteries in criminal procedure, was not sure that his ears were not deceiving him, and asked counsel what it was he had said. Howard’s impassive face betrayed no sign, but his attitude and bearing lost something of their careless confidence for a moment. Wilson resumed:
‘We not only grant that claim, but we welcome it and strongly endorse it. Leaving that matter for the present, we will now proceed to consider other points in the case which we propose to establish by evidence, and shall include that one in the chain in its proper place.’
He had made up his mind to try a few hardy guesses, in mapping out his theory of the origin and motive of the murder—guesses designed to fill up gaps in it—guesses which could help if they hit, and would probably do no harm if they didn’t.
‘To my mind, certain circumstances of the case before the court seem to suggest a motive for the homicide quite different from the one insisted
on by the State. It is my conviction that the motive was not revenge, but robbery. It has been urged that the presence of the accused brothers in that fatal room, just after notification that one of them must take the life of Judge Driscoll or lose his own the moment the parties should meet, clearly signifies that the natural instinct of self-preservation moved my clients to go there secretly and save Count Luigi by destroying his adversary.
‘Then why did they stay there, after the deed was done? Mrs. Pratt had time, although she did not hear the cry for help, but woke up some moments later, to run to that room—and there she found these men standing, and making no effort to escape. If they were guilty, they ought to have been running out of the house at the same time that she was running to that room. If they had had such a strong instinct toward self-preservation as to move them to kill that unarmed man, what had become of it now, when it should have been more alert than ever? Would any of us have remained there? Let us slander not our intelligence to that degree.
‘Much stress has been laid upon the fact that the accused offered a very large reward for the knife with which this murder was done; that no thief came forward to claim that extraordinary reward; that the latter fact was good circumstantial evidence that the claim that the knife had been stolen was a vanity and a fraud; that these details, taken in connection with the memorable and apparently prophetic speech of the deceased concerning that knife, and the final discovery of that very knife in the fatal room where no living person was found present with the slaughtered man but the owner of the knife and his brother, form an indestructible chain of evidence which fixes the crime upon those unfortunate strangers.
‘But I shall presently ask to be sworn, and shall testify that there was a large reward offered for the thief, also; that it was offered secretly and not advertised; that this fact was indiscreetly mentioned—or at least tacitly admitted—in what was supposed to be safe circumstances, but may not have been. The thief may have been present himself.’ (Tom Driscoll had been looking at the speaker, but dropped his eyes at this point.) ‘In that case he would retain the knife in his possession, not daring to offer it for sale, or for pledge in a pawnshop.’ (There was a nodding of heads among the audience by way of admission that this was not a bad stroke.) ‘I shall prove to the satisfaction of the jury that there was a person in Judge Driscoll’s room several minutes before the accused entered it.’ (This produced a strong sensation; the last drowsy-head in the court-room roused up, now, and made preparation to listen.) ‘If it shall seem necessary, I will prove by the Misses Clarkson that they met a veiled person—ostensibly a woman—coming out of the back gate a few minutes after the cry for help was heard. This person was not a woman, but a man dressed in woman’s clothes.’ (Another sensation. Wilson had his eye on Tom when he hazarded this guess, to see what effect it would produce. He was satisfied with the result, and said to himself, ‘It was a success—he’s hit!’)
‘The object of that person in that house was robbery, not murder. It is true that the safe was not open, but there was an ordinary tin cash-box on the table, with three thousand dollars in it. It is easily supposable that the thief was concealed in the house; that he knew of this box, and of its owner’s habit of counting its contents and arranging his accounts at night—if he had that habit, which I do not assert, of course; that he tried to take the box while its owner slept, but made a noise and was seized, and had to use the knife to save himself from capture; and that he fled without his booty because he heard help coming.
‘I have now done with my theory, and will proceed to the evidences by which I propose to try to prove its soundness.’ Wilson took up several of his strips of glass. When the audience recognized these familiar mementoes of Pudd‘nhead’s old-time childish ‘puttering’ and folly, the tense and funereal interest vanished out of their faces, and the house burst into volleys of relieving and refreshing laughter, and Tom chirked up and joined in the fun himself; but Wilson was apparently not disturbed. He arranged his ‘records’ on the table before him, and said:
‘I beg the indulgence of the court while I make a few remarks in explanation of some evidence which I am about to introduce, and which I shall presently ask to be allowed to verify under oath on the witness stand. Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identined—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. This signature is not his face—age can change that beyond recognition; it is not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not his height, for duplicates of that exist, it is not his form, for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature is each man’s very own—there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe!’ (The audience were interested once more.)
‘This autograph consists of the delicate lines or corrugations with which Nature marks the insides of the hands and the soles of the feet. If you will look at the balls of your fingers—you that have very sharp eyesight—you will observe that these dainty curving lines lie close together, like those that indicate the borders of oceans in maps, and that they form various clearly defined patterns, such as arches, circles, long curves, whorls, etc., and that these patterns differ on the different fingers.’ (Every man in the room had his hand up to the light, now, and his head canted to one side, and was minutely scrutinising the balls of his fingers; there were whispered ejaculations of ‘Why, it’s so—I never noticed that before!’) ‘The patterns on the right hand are not the same as those on the left.’ (Ejaculations of ‘Why, that’s so, too!’) ‘Taken finger for finger, your patterns differ from your neighbour’s.’ (Comparisons were made all over the house—even the Judge and jury were absorbed in this curious work.) ‘The patterns of a twin’s right hand are not the same as those on his left. One twin’s patterns are never the same as his fellow-twin’s patterns—the jury will find that the patterns upon the finger-balls of the accused follow this rule.’ (An examination of the twins’ hands was begun at once.) ‘You have often heard of twins who were so exactly alike that when dressed alike their own parents could not tell them apart. Yet there was never a twin born into this world that did not carry from birth to death a sure identifier in this mysterious and marvellous natal autograph. That once known to you, his fellow-twin could never personate him and deceive you.’
Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that. The stillness gives warning that something is coming. All palms and finger-balls went down, now, all slouching forms straightened, all heads came up, all eyes were fastened upon Wilson’s face. He waited yet one, two, three moments, to let his pause complete and perfect its spell upon the house; then, when through the profound hush he could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, he put out his hand and took the Indian knife by the blade and held it aloft where all could see the sinister spots upon its ivory handle; then he said, in a level, passionless voice:
‘Upon this haft stands the assassin’s natal autograph, written in the blood of that helpless and unoffending old man who loved you and whom you all loved. There is but one man in the whole earth whose hand can duplicate that crimson sign’—he paused and raised his eyes to the pendulum swinging back and forth—‘and please God we will produce that man in this room before the clock strikes noon!’
Stunned, distraught, unconscious of its own movement, the house half rose, as if expecting to see the murderer appear at the door, and a breeze of muttered ejaculations swept the place. ‘Order in the court!—sit down!’ This from the sheriff. He was obeyed, and quiet reigned again. Wilson stole a glance at Tom, and said to himself: ‘He is flying signals of distress, now; even people who despise him are pitying him; they think this is a hard ordeal for a young fellow who has lost his benefactor by so crue
l a stroke—and they are right.’ He resumed his speech:
‘For more than twenty years I have amused my compulsory leisure with collecting these curious physical signatures in this town. At my house I have hundreds upon hundreds of them. Each and every one is labelled with name and date; not labelled the next day, or even the next hour, but in the very minute that the impression was taken. When I go upon the witness stand I will repeat under oath the things which I am now saying. I have the finger-prints of the court, the sheriff, and every member of the jury. There is hardly a person in this room, white or black, whose natal signature I cannot produce, and not one of them can so disguise himself that I cannot pick him out from a multitude of his fellow-creatures and unerringly identify him by his hands. And if he and I should live to be a hundred I could still do it!’ (The interest of the audience was steadily deepening now.)
‘I have studied some of these signatures so much that I know them as well as the bank cashier knows the autograph of his oldest customer. While I turn my back now, I beg that several persons will be so good as to pass their fingers through their hair, and then press them upon one of the panes of the window near the jury, and that among them the accused may set their finger-marks. Also, I beg that these experimenters, or others, will set their finger-marks upon another pane, and add again the marks of the accused, but not placing them in the same order or relation to the other signatures as before—for, by one chance in a million a person might happen upon the right marks by pure guesswork once, therefore I wish to be tested twice.’
He turned his back, and the two panes were quickly covered with delicately-lined oval spots, but visible only to such persons as could get a dark background for them—the foliage of a tree outside, for instance. Then, upon call, Wilson went to the window, made his examination, and said:
