Death on the Mississippi: The Mark Twain Mysteries #1. Peter J. Heck
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hadn’t seen their faces, and second of all, he was dealing with an occupying army in wartime—normal rules and habits don’t apply. More to the point, he meant to take his revenge in person, rather than rely on the state.”
He saw that I was about to protest my outrage, and held up his hand to stop me. “Poor Ritter is beyond the jurisdiction of any human court, and I’m not about to play judge. He acted as he did, and I don’t know if I would have acted any differently in his shoes. But that’s not why I am telling you this story. Do you want to spout off some more nonsense, or do you want to hear the rest?” He glared at me for a moment; I bowed my head in acquiescence, and he continued.
“Ritter managed to identify which outfit the killers had come from, but he bided his time while planning his revenge. After a time, the troop was transferred about a hundred miles north, to a town along the river—a town I referred to in my book as Napoleon, Arkansas, although that wasn’t its name. Ritter knew that soldiers are superstitious devils, so he followed them there, disguised as a fortune-teller. He was able to attach himself to the troop and get a close look at a lot of them under the pretext of telling their fortunes. It didn’t take him long to spot one of the pair—the fellow had lost a thumb, which made him pretty conspicuous—but he wasn’t the one Ritter wanted most, the man who’d done the actual killing. And he found out that the men he was after were both Germans—this was a Wisconsin outfit, and about a third of the men were of German ancestry.
“Ritter had stumbled on another clue that, combined with his sham of fortune-telling, he expected to lead him to his man. The killer had left a thumbprint in blood on a piece of paper in Ritter’s house. Now, Ritter had a friend who had served as a prison guard, and from that man he’d learned that a thumbprint is unique—infallible identification of the man who made it. I’m working on a book right now that uses that fact. Anyhow, Ritter pretended that he could read a man’s fortune by dipping his thumb in ink and marking it on paper. What he really did was take the prints home at night and compare them to the print left by the killer—in his own dear wife’s blood. It took a long time, and interviews with dozens of the soldiers, but finally he found his man.”
“Surely, that would have been the time to reveal all to the officers in charge,” I said, but Clemens waved me into silence.
“Ritter’s long dead, Wentworth. None of us can go back and tell him what he ought to have done. What he in fact did required no small amount of courage, since he chose to confront the other, thumbless man, with his knowledge of the crime—although he concealed it behind the pretense of fortune-telling. His original intent was simply to confirm his suspicions with a confession, and that he got in full detail. But here is where the story becomes interesting. To Ritter’s surprise, the poor fellow fell on his knees and offered him a vast hidden treasure, if only he would advise him on how to avoid the terrible fate his ‘fortune’ had predicted.
“Ritter paid no attention to the fellow’s offer. All he wanted was revenge on the man who had murdered his loved ones. He sent the thumbless man away without learning the location of the treasure. That very night he lured the man’s companion, the one who’d murdered his family, to a lonely place and drove a knife through his heart. Then he fled. He had his revenge, Cabot, but it gave him no satisfaction. Nothing could bring back his wife and child, and now he carried a load of guilt as well. After years of wandering, he finally returned to Munich, his hometown. His health had begun to fail him, and his terrible adventures of a few years earlier had left him in a morbid frame of mind, so he took a small place as the night watchman in a deadhouse.
“His task was simply to watch the bodies for any sign that one of them might have been declared dead prematurely—for there was a great fear at that time of falling into a deep trance and awakening to find oneself buried alive. Such things do occasionally happen, although less often than the folks of Munich believed. Still, it was a great shock one night for him to hear the alarm that told him that one of the supposed corpses under his charge had come to life. When Ritter went to investigate, he discovered that the revived ‘corpse’ was the same thumbless soldier who had offered him a fortune so many years before!”
I was astonished, and told him so. “It is surely a sign of some greater plan in the universe that he would find the very man who had wronged him under his power at such a moment,” I said.
Mr. Clemens raised his eyebrows but made no reply, except to motion for me to replenish his whisky, which I did. My own glass was still half-full, and so I merely added another cube of ice. He took a long sip, said, “That’ll do the job,” and continued.
“The two soldiers were Germans, so the coincidence wasn’t as remarkable as some I’ve seen,” said my employer, now fishing out a fresh cigar and lighting it. I waited a moment as the aromatic billows of smoke replaced the sharp smell of the match. “I can tell you that for this man of all men to show up in the deadhouse that night was in Ritter’s eyes the last stroke of justice long delayed. For all the guilt that he had felt after dispatching the murderer, seeing the thumbless man again brought back all his rage and grief. Suffice it to say that in the morning, the thumbless soldier’s place was back among the dead.”
“What a monstrous tale!” I exclaimed.
“Perhaps; Ritter claimed that he merely let the fellow expire from the cold, although I’m not convinced that he told me the full truth of it. Still, poor old Ritter was looking his own death in the eye, so I trust the story as a whole. But in any event, the thumbless fellow lived long enough to try to ask Ritter a final favor—to tell his son the location of some ten thousand dollars in gold, hidden back in the little river town in Arkansas where Ritter had played fortune-teller. And so Ritter came at last into the secret that he had turned his back on so many years before—too late to get any good of it. He was an old man, already sick, and knew in his heart that he had no chance of surviving the long voyage to Arkansas to recover it. And so he died without ever laying eyes on it.”
“Ten thousand dollars! What a story!”
Clemens nodded. “Just before Ritter died, he told me the location, and made a dying man’s last request, which I promised to honor. He begged me to retrieve the gold and send it to the thumbless man’s boy, if he proved at all deserving, as a final means of assuaging his burden of guilt. I traced the boy to an address in Germany, and (watching him from a distance, and making discreet inquiries) satisfied myself that he deserved the gold; and so, a couple of years afterwards, I took a journey down the Mississippi, on a boat called the Gold Dust, under the guise of researching a book. I did in fact end up writing that book, but my real purpose was to visit a certain town in Arkansas and find a fortune I had promised a dying man to send to a young German boy I had never met.”
“And did you find it? This is a truly astonishing chain of events.” In truth, I had never before heard anything like it. I had dreamt of the romance of travel all my life, and read more than one wild tale of hidden treasure and dark doings, but I had hardly expected to find myself in the midst of such an adventure.
He rubbed his chin meditatively, staring out the window toward the evening sun. Finally he looked at me and resumed his tale. “No, I didn’t. The fact is, I became aware that someone was following me, someone who knew the story somehow—perhaps the thumbless man had told it more than once—and that if I recovered the money my own life would be in danger. So I did not even land in the town where the money was hidden, and cooked up a cock-and-bull tale to relate the experience, with the names and events changed just enough to keep anyone who didn’t know the truth from guessing it. If you’d read my book, you’d know that upon my arrival in Arkansas, I found that Napoleon, Arkansas had been washed away, many years ago, by the river. Sometimes it’s to your advantage to have a reputation as a humorist: most readers seem to have taken the story as I intended, as a tall tale with a preposterous ending. But the treasure is real, and it was never even in Napoleon—it was in another town altogether.”
“And the money is still there.”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“And you intend to get it this time.”
“That I do.” Mr. Clemens eyed me critically. “And I fully intend to send it to that