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When we struck the boat, she was about done loading, and
pretty soon she got off. The king never said nothing about going
aboard, so I lost my ride, after all. When the boat was gone, the
king made me paddle up another mile to a lonesome place, and
then he got ashore, and says:
"Now hustle back, right off, and fetch the duke up here, and the
new carpet-bags. And if he's gone over to t'other side, go over
there and git him. And tell him to git himself up regardless. Shove
along, now."
I see what he was up to; but I never said nothing, of course.
When I got back with the duke, we hid the canoe and then they set
158
down on a log, and the king told him everything, just like the
young fellow had said it- every last word of it. And all the time he
was a doing it, he tried to talk like an Englishman; and he done it
pretty well too, for a slouch. I can't imitate him, and so I ain't
agoing to try to; but he really done it pretty good. Then he says:
"How are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?"
The duke said, leave him alone for that; said he had played a
deef and dumb person on the histrionic boards. So then they waited
for a steamboat.
About the middle of the afternoon a couple of little boats come
along, but they didn't come from high enough up the river; but at
last there was a big one, and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl,
and we went aboard, and she was from Cincinnati; and when they
found we only wanted to go four or five mile, they was booming
mad, and give us a cussing, and said they wouldn't land us. But the
king was ca'm. He says:
"If gentlemen kin afford to pay a dollar a mile apiece, to be took
on and put off in a yawl, a steamboat kin afford to carry 'em, can't
it?"
So they softened down and said it was all right; and when we
got to the village, they yawled us ashore. About two dozen men
flocked down, when they see the yawl a coming; and when the
king says-
"Kin any of you gentlemen tell me where Mr. Peter Wilks
lives?" they give a glance at one another, and nodded their heads,
as much as to say, "What d' I tell you?" Then one of them says,
kind of soft and gentle:
"I'm sorry, sir, but the best we can do is to tell you where he did
live yesterday evening."
Sudden as winking, the ornery old cretur went all to smash, and
fell up against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried
down his back, and says:
"Alas, alas, our poor brother- gone, and we never got to see him;
oh, it's too, too hard!"
Then he turns around, blubbering, and making a lot of idiotic
signs to the duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn't drop a
carpet-bag and bust out a-crying. If they warn't the beatenest lot,
them two frauds, that ever I struck.
Well, the men gethered around, and sympathized with them, and
said all sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpet-bags
up the hill for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told
the king all about his brother's last moments, and the king he told it
all over again on his hands to the duke, and both of them took on
159
about that dead tanner like they'd lost the twelve disciples. Well, if
ever I struck anything like it, I'm a nigger. It was enough to make a
body ashamed of the human race.
160
Chapter Twenty-Five
The news was all over town in two minutes, and you could see
the people tearing down on the run, from every which way, some
of them putting on their coats as they come. Pretty soon we was in
the middle of a crowd, and the noise of the tramping was like a
soldier-march. The windows and door-yards was full; and every
minute somebody would say, over a fence:
"Is it them?"
And somebody trotting along with the gang would answer back
and say,
"You bet it is."
When we got to the house, the street in front of it was packed,
and the three girls was standing in the door. Mary Jane was
red-headed, but that don't make no difference, she was most awful
beautiful, and her face and her eyes was all lit up like glory, she
was so glad her uncles was come. The king he spread his arms, and
Mary Jane she jumped for them, and the hare-lip jumped for the
duke, and there they had it! Everybody most, leastways women,
cried for joy to see them meet again at last and have such good
times.
Then the king he hunched the duke, private- I see him do it- and
then he looked around and see the coffin, over in the corner on two
chairs; so then, him and the duke, with a hand across each other's [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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