“Good,” said Mr. Clemens. “We can save a good bit of time and strain on the old man’s memory if you’ve read a book I wrote about ten years ago called Life on the Mississippi,” he said. I shook my head, somewhat embarrassed to admit this deficiency. “No? Worth a try. Let’s see if I can still piece it together.
“This happened in Munich, a dozen years ago. I was there on an extended visit, and made friends with a man I called Karl Ritter in my book, although that wasn’t his real name. Poor Ritter was on his deathbed, and knew it—consumption. I did my best to give him a cheerful human presence to make his last days easier. As I soon discovered, he spoke perfect English and wanted to speak it with me. I realized, somewhat later, that having someone he could talk to without being understood by his neighbors took a burden off his mind—here was a foreigner who knew nothing about him except what he decided to reveal—and after some time of feeling me out, he told me his life story.
“You can read my book if you want to know everything Ritter told me—although I kept a few key details out, or changed them enough to keep readers from guessing the whole truth. At any rate, Ritter had moved to America around 1855—had a job in St. Louis making shoes, didn’t like it, and moved to a little farm in Arkansas, where he married a local girl. A few years later, the Civil War began, but he decided to stick it out on the farm. One night toward the end of the war, he woke from a sound sleep to find his home invaded by two masked men, who bound and gagged him. From the snatches of conversation he overheard, he realized that the pair were soldiers in disguise, and that they had been searching for something in the house. Eventually they were frightened off and he escaped from his bonds, only to find his wife and child murdered.”
“How terrible!,” I said. “Surely they were rebel soldiers, and not our own boys.”
Clemens shook his head. “These men were Union cavalry, from one of the Wisconsin regiments. Putting on a blue coat doesn’t reform a man if he’s rotten already, and there were plenty of scoundrels on both sides in the war.”
“Did Ritter not apply to their superior officers for redress?”
“That was never likely. First of all, he 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
