“But a last word, Uncle Amos. Maybe you don’t realize the weight a dying man’s words carry with a jury, but it’s far beyond their normal significance, believe me. It’s about as though a jury considers a dying man to be half an angel already, and more or less speaking from two worlds at once.”
“Oh, I recognize the fascination that deathbed utterances hold for the liv—” Ponsonby froze. Suddenly he shouted, “Not two worlds!”
Paul almost dropped his drink. “What the devil—?”
“Not ‘two worlds,’ Paul, but ‘one world’! That’s what Nicholas was trying to say! It has to be, don’t you see? Because the rest of it — I did not and we and quarreled — they all fit so perfectly! My God, what a ninny I’ve been! Going around for months with that young man’s salvation staring me in the face and if it hadn’t been for your chance remark just now I might have overlooked it altogether!”
Both men were on their feet, Ponsonby heading for the door, Paul close on his heels.
“Uncle Amos, what the devil are you talking about?”
“The fact that Nicholas Twining wasn’t replying to those people at his bedside, my boy.” Ponsonby spoke over his shoulder as he led the way into his study. “His thoughts were a century away, dwelling on a man whom he had loved all his life and virtually lived with for the last four years of it. Have you ever written a book, Paul, one that demands exhaustive research? Do you have any idea how completely such a task can consume your every waking thought when you’re deeply involved in it? And, ninny that I am, Ann Twining even mentioned to me one time that her father had just started work on the final chapter of his Life of Thoreau the day he was attacked. And that’s the chapter, don’t you see, that most likely was to tell of Thoreau’s death?”
“Thoreau? Then you mean—?”
“I mean that Nicholas Twining was thinking about Henry David Thoreau! And what more natural than that a man who probably sensed he was dying should let his last thoughts drift back to the dying words of a man whom he had admired in life above all others?”
Ponsonby selected a thick volume from one of his crowded shelves and began hastily thumbing through it. “This is a more popular than a scholarly biography, but all the more reason they should be here. That’s what’s so blasted annoying — I know I’ve read them a hundred times, my boy; they’re both well-known literary anecdotes, two deathbed sallies as memorable in their way as anything Thoreau ever wrote, and — yes, here’s one of them.” And Ponsonby read aloud:
“Shortly before the end, the fiery anti-slavery orator, Parker Pillsbury, visited the sick room and remarked to his dying friend, ‘You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.’ But Thoreau’s characteristic sense of humor had not deserted him, and he replied dryly: ‘One world at a time.’
“Don’t you remember, Paul? — Nurse Gebhorn thought that Nicholas had mumbled some other word in that sentence and not just been gasping for breath. And of course she was right; he was trying to say, One world at a time.
“But I don’t see what that has to do with a… a hanging Indian!”
“And the other anecdote ought to be here, too,” continued Ponsonby. “Yes, here it is.” And again he read aloud:
“As death drew near, his pious Aunt Louisa, a devout Calvinist, asked him if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau’s reply Stands as a fitting epitaph for this questing, rebellious man who had lived all his forty-four years in ‘the infinite expectation of the dawn.’ Said he: ‘I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.’ ”
Ponsonby closed the book with a snap and beamed triumphantly at his godson. “Don’t you see? — it wasn’t Ann that Nicholas was mumbling, as the sergeant testified, nor was it and, as Nurse Gebhorn thought. It was Aunt — I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt — and the orderly was right all along.”
Paul spoke quietly, spacing his words deliberately, as though he were a teacher trying to get through to a retarded child: “But what does all that have to do with a noose and an Indian?”
“Why, it ought to be obvious, my boy. Don’t you recall Nicholas’ next remark? It was, That’s a fallacy; that’s not right. In other words, those two remarks, although both have been presented as Thoreau’s dying words, are not his last words. Which words—”
“Had something to do with a noose and an Indian?”
“Perhaps.”
“That would be great, Uncle Amos! Go on!”
“Go on?”
“Yes. Read me the part about the hanging Indian, for Pete’s sake!”
Ponsonby calmly returned the book to its place on the shelf. “There’s nothing here about that, my boy — what I read was the closing paragraph of this particular biography. As a matter of fact, I don’t recall ever having read a remark about hanging an Indian.”
Paul Anders stared at his godfather. “Do you mean to say you don’t actually know that Thoreau’s last words were something about a noose and an Indian? That you’ve led me on like this, building up my hopes, without really remembering anything of the sort?”
“The fact that I don’t recall having read it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t so, my boy. American literature has never been my specialty. Now I can tell you that William Cowper died asking, ‘What does it signify?’ and that Robert Burns passed away muttering, ‘That damned rascal, Matthew Penn!’ and that the last words spoken by Lord Chesterfield were ‘Give Dayrolles a chair,’ because I happen to have done extensive biographical research on those gentlemen. But I’m familiar with only the broad facts of Thoreau’s life.”
“But great Scott, Uncle Amos, I can’t go before that jury and argue that Professor Twining was obviously thinking about Thoreau’s last words, and since they weren’t this and they weren’t that, they must have been something about hanging an Indian. I’d be laughed out of court!”
“Tut, tut, my boy, don’t carry on so. You ought to know by now that the true measure of an education is not what you can remember, but how adept you are at finding things out. And since Nicholas Twining had obviously learned from some source what Thoreau’s last words actually were, I suggest we start our search in his library. Mrs. Garvey!”
Ponsonby turned to his housekeeper just as she appeared in the doorway to announce dinner. “Put the dinner back in the oven, my good woman, and then phone Ann Twining to say that Paul and I are on our way over. Tell her we’re on the trail of information which may clear her fiancé” — Ponsonby noted the gathering storm on Mrs. Garvey’s brow—” and almost certainly lead to the ultimate incarceration of that black-hearted scoundrel, Luther Cobb!”
“It’s no use, Uncle Amos,” said Paul two hours later. “We’ve been through these books three times, and there’s nothing in any of them about Thoreau’s wanting to hang an Indian — or not wanting to hang one, which would seem more likely from some of the things we’ve read.”
Paul and Ann were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Twining library, surrounded by books on Thoreau, while Ponsonby perched atop his late colleague’s shelf-ladder, scanning the upper shelves for any book they might have overlooked.
Their search had uncovered many facts about Thoreau’s last year of life. They had learned that ten months before his death he had traveled to Minnesota and there for the first time had visited a frontier Indian village; they discovered that in his final weeks he had been working steadily on the manuscript-account of several earlier journeys to the Maine woods, where Indian guides had been among his close companions; they learned that in his last days, in spite of an illness which all knew must soon prove fatal, he had visited many friends and spoken often about his admiration for the Indian people and his indignation at the way the nation had treated them.