YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.  That book was made
by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.  There was things
which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  That is nothing.  I
never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt
Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.  Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she
is--and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which
is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Now the way that the book winds up is this:  Tom and me found the money
that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich.  We got six
thousand dollars apiece--all gold.  It was an awful sight of money when
it was piled up.  Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out
at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year
round--more than a body could tell what to do with.  The Widow Douglas
she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was
rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular
and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand
it no longer I lit out.  I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead
again, and was free and satisfied.  But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and
said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I
would go back to the widow and be respectable.  So I went back.

The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she
called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by
it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn't do nothing but
sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up.  Well, then, the old thing
commenced again.  The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come
to time. When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but
you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little
over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with
them,--that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself.  In a
barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the
juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the
Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and
by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so
then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in
dead people.

Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me.  But she
wouldn't.  She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must
try to not do it any more.  That is just the way with some people.  They
get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it.  Here she was
a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody,
being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a
thing that had some good in it.  And she took snuff, too; of course that
was all right, because she done it herself.

Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on,
had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now with a
spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then
the widow made her ease up.  I couldn't stood it much longer.  Then for
an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety.  Miss Watson would say,
"Don't put your feet up there, Huckleberry;" and "Don't scrunch up
like that, Huckleberry--set up straight;" and pretty soon she would
say, "Don't gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry--why don't you try to
behave?"  Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished
I was there. She got mad then, but I didn't mean no harm.  All I wanted
was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular.
 She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn't say it for
the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place.
 Well, I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I
made up my mind I wouldn't try for it.  But I never said so, because it
would only make trouble, and wouldn't do no good.

Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good
place.  She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all
day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.  So I didn't think
much of it. But I never said so.  I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer
would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight.  I was glad
about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.

Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome.
 By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then
everybody was off to bed.  I went up to my room with a piece of candle,
and put it on the table.  Then I set down in a chair by the window and
tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use.  I felt
so lonesome I most wished I was dead.  The stars were shining, and the
leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away
off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a
dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying
to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so
it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard
that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about
something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so
can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night
grieving.  I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some
company.  Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I
flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it
was all shriveled up.  I didn't need anybody to tell me that that was
an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad luck, so I was scared
and most shook the clothes off of me. I got up and turned around in my
tracks three times and crossed my breast every time; and then I tied
up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away.  But
I hadn't no confidence.  You do that when you've lost a horseshoe that
you've found, instead of nailing it up over the door, but I hadn't ever
heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you'd killed
a spider.

I set down again, a-shaking all over, and got out my pipe for a smoke;
for the house was all as still as death now, and so the widow wouldn't
know. Well, after a long time I heard the clock away off in the town
go boom--boom--boom--twelve licks; and all still again--stiller than
ever. Pretty soon I heard a twig snap down in the dark amongst the
trees--something was a stirring.  I set still and listened.  Directly I
could just barely hear a "me-yow! me-yow!" down there.  That was good!
 Says I, "me-yow! me-yow!" as soft as I could, and then I put out the
light and scrambled out of the window on to the shed.  Then I slipped
down to the ground and crawled in among the trees, and, sure enough,
there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me.




CHAPTER II.

WE went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of
the widow's garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our
heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made
a noise.  We scrouched down and laid still.  Miss Watson's big nigger,
named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty
clear, because there was a light behind him.  He got up and stretched
his neck out about a minute, listening.  Then he says:

"Who dah?"

He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right
between us; we could a touched him, nearly.  Well, likely it was
minutes and minutes that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close
together.  There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I
dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back,
right between my shoulders.  Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch.
 Well, I've noticed that thing plenty times since.  If you are with
the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't
sleepy--if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why
you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim
says:

"Say, who is you?  Whar is you?  Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n.
Well, I know what I's gwyne to do:  I's gwyne to set down here and
listen tell I hears it agin."

So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom.  He leaned his back up
against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched
one of mine.  My nose begun to itch.  It itched till the tears come into
my eyes.  But I dasn't scratch.  Then it begun to itch on the inside.
Next I got to itching underneath.  I didn't know how I was going to set
still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes; but
it seemed a sight longer than that.  I was itching in eleven different
places now.  I reckoned I couldn't stand it more'n a minute longer,
but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try.  Just then Jim begun
to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore--and then I was pretty soon
comfortable again.

Tom he made a sign to me--kind of a little noise with his mouth--and we
went creeping away on our hands and knees.  When we was ten foot off Tom
whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun.  But I said
no; he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I
warn't in. Then Tom said he hadn't got candles enough, and he would slip
in the kitchen and get some more.  I didn't want him to try.  I said Jim
might wake up and come.  But Tom wanted to resk it; so we slid in there
and got three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for pay.
Then we got out, and I was in a sweat to get away; but nothing would do
Tom but he must crawl to where Jim was, on his hands and knees, and play
something on him.  I waited, and it seemed a good while, everything was
so still and lonesome.

As soon as Tom was back we cut along the path, around the garden fence,
and by and by fetched up on the steep top of the hill the other side of
the house.  Tom said he slipped Jim's hat off of his head and hung it
on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn't wake.
Afterwards Jim said the witches be witched him and put him in a trance,
and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the trees again,
and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it.  And next time Jim told
it he said they rode him down to New Orleans; and, after that, every
time he told it he spread it more and more, till by and by he said they
rode him all over the world, and tired him most to death, and his back
was all over saddle-boils.  Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he
got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other niggers.  Niggers would come
miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any
nigger in that country.  Strange niggers would stand with their mouths
open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder.  Niggers is
always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but
whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things,
Jim would happen in and say, "Hm!  What you know 'bout witches?" and
that nigger was corked up and had to take a back seat.  Jim always kept
that five-center piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a
charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could
cure anybody with it and fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by
saying something to it; but he never told what it was he said to it.
 Niggers would come from all around there and give Jim anything they
had, just for a sight of that five-center piece; but they wouldn't touch
it, because the devil had had his hands on it.  Jim was most ruined for
a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil
and been rode by witches.

Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hilltop we looked away down
into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where
there was sick folks, maybe; and the stars over us was sparkling ever
so fine; and down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and
awful still and grand.  We went down the hill and found Jo Harper and
Ben Rogers, and two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard.
 So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half,
to the big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.

We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the
secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest
part of the bushes.  Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our
hands and knees.  We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave
opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked
under a wall where you wouldn't a noticed that there was a hole.  We
went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and
sweaty and cold, and there we stopped.  Tom says:

"Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang.
Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name
in blood."

Everybody was willing.  So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had
wrote the oath on, and read it.  It swore every boy to stick to the
band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to
any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and
his family must do it, and he mustn't eat and he mustn't sleep till he
had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign
of the band. And nobody that didn't belong to the band could use that
mark, and if he did he must be sued; and if he done it again he must be
killed.  And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he
must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the
ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with
blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it
and be forgot forever.

Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got
it out of his own head.  He said, some of it, but the rest was out of
pirate-books and robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned had
it.

Some thought it would be good to kill the _families_ of boys that told
the secrets.  Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote
it in. Then Ben Rogers says:

"Here's Huck Finn, he hain't got no family; what you going to do 'bout
him?"

"Well, hain't he got a father?" says Tom Sawyer.

"Yes, he's got a father, but you can't never find him these days.  He
used to lay drunk with the hogs in the tanyard, but he hain't been seen
in these parts for a year or more."

They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they
said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it
wouldn't be fair and square for the others.  Well, nobody could think of
anything to do--everybody was stumped, and set still.  I was most ready
to cry; but all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss
Watson--they could kill her.  Everybody said:

"Oh, she'll do.  That's all right.  Huck can come in."

Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with,
and I made my mark on the paper.

"Now," says Ben Rogers, "what's the line of business of this Gang?"

"Nothing only robbery and murder," Tom said.

"But who are we going to rob?--houses, or cattle, or--"

"Stuff! stealing cattle and such things ain't robbery; it's burglary,"
says Tom Sawyer.  "We ain't burglars.  That ain't no sort of style.  We
are highwaymen.  We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks
on, and kill the people and take their watches and money."

"Must we always kill the people?"

"Oh, certainly.  It's best.  Some authorities think different, but
mostly it's considered best to kill them--except some that you bring to
the cave here, and keep them till they're ransomed."

"Ransomed?  What's that?"

"I don't know.  But that's what they do.  I've seen it in books; and so
of course that's what we've got to do."

"But how can we do it if we don't know what it is?"

"Why, blame it all, we've _got_ to do it.  Don't I tell you it's in the
books?  Do you want to go to doing different from what's in the books,
and get things all muddled up?"

"Oh, that's all very fine to _say_, Tom Sawyer, but how in the nation
are these fellows going to be ransomed if we don't know how to do it
to them?--that's the thing I want to get at.  Now, what do you reckon it
is?"

"Well, I don't know.  But per'aps if we keep them till they're ransomed,
it means that we keep them till they're dead."

"Now, that's something _like_.  That'll answer.  Why couldn't you said
that before?  We'll keep them till they're ransomed to death; and a
bothersome lot they'll be, too--eating up everything, and always trying
to get loose."

"How you talk, Ben Rogers.  How can they get loose when there's a guard
over them, ready to shoot them down if they move a peg?"

"A guard!  Well, that _is_ good.  So somebody's got to set up all night
and never get any sleep, just so as to watch them.  I think that's
foolishness. Why can't a body take a club and ransom them as soon as
they get here?"

"Because it ain't in the books so--that's why.  Now, Ben Rogers, do you
want to do things regular, or don't you?--that's the idea.  Don't you
reckon that the people that made the books knows what's the correct
thing to do?  Do you reckon _you_ can learn 'em anything?  Not by a good
deal. No, sir, we'll just go on and ransom them in the regular way."

"All right.  I don't mind; but I say it's a fool way, anyhow.  Say, do
we kill the women, too?"

"Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.  Kill
the women?  No; nobody ever saw anything in the books like that.  You
fetch them to the cave, and you're always as polite as pie to them;
and by and by they fall in love with you, and never want to go home any
more."

"Well, if that's the way I'm agreed, but I don't take no stock in it.
Mighty soon we'll have the cave so cluttered up with women, and fellows
waiting to be ransomed, that there won't be no place for the robbers.
But go ahead, I ain't got nothing to say."

Little Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when they waked him up he was
scared, and cried, and said he wanted to go home to his ma, and didn't
want to be a robber any more.

So they all made fun of him, and called him cry-baby, and that made him
mad, and he said he would go straight and tell all the secrets.  But
Tom give him five cents to keep quiet, and said we would all go home and
meet next week, and rob somebody and kill some people.

Ben Rogers said he couldn't get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted
to begin next Sunday; but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it
on Sunday, and that settled the thing.  They agreed to get together and
fix a day as soon as they could, and then we elected Tom Sawyer first
captain and Jo Harper second captain of the Gang, and so started home.

I clumb up the shed and crept into my window just before day was
breaking. My new clothes was all greased up and clayey, and I was
dog-tired.




CHAPTER III.

WELL, I got a good going-over in the morning from old Miss Watson on
account of my clothes; but the widow she didn't scold, but only cleaned
off the grease and clay, and looked so sorry that I thought I would
behave awhile if I could.  Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet
and prayed, but nothing come of it.  She told me to pray every day, and
whatever I asked for I would get it.  But it warn't so.  I tried it.
Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks.  It warn't any good to me without
hooks.  I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I
couldn't make it work.  By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to
try for me, but she said I was a fool.  She never told me why, and I
couldn't make it out no way.

I set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it.
 I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't
Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork?  Why can't the widow get
back her silver snuffbox that was stole?  Why can't Miss Watson fat up?
No, says I to my self, there ain't nothing in it.  I went and told the
widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for
it was "spiritual gifts."  This was too many for me, but she told me
what she meant--I must help other people, and do everything I could for
other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about
myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it.  I went out in the
woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn't see no
advantage about it--except for the other people; so at last I reckoned
I wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it go.  Sometimes the
widow would take me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make
a body's mouth water; but maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold
and knock it all down again.  I judged I could see that there was two
Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with the
widow's Providence, but if Miss Watson's got him there warn't no help
for him any more.  I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong
to the widow's if he wanted me, though I couldn't make out how he was
a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was
so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.

Pap he hadn't been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable
for me; I didn't want to see him no more.  He used to always whale me
when he was sober and could get his hands on me; though I used to take
to the woods most of the time when he was around.  Well, about this time
he was found in the river drownded, about twelve mile above town, so
people said.  They judged it was him, anyway; said this drownded man was
just his size, and was ragged, and had uncommon long hair, which was all
like pap; but they couldn't make nothing out of the face, because it had
been in the water so long it warn't much like a face at all.  They said
he was floating on his back in the water.  They took him and buried him
on the bank.  But I warn't comfortable long, because I happened to think
of something.  I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on
his back, but on his face.  So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap, but
a woman dressed up in a man's clothes.  So I was uncomfortable again.
 I judged the old man would turn up again by and by, though I wished he
wouldn't.

We played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned.  All
the boys did.  We hadn't robbed nobody, hadn't killed any people, but
only just pretended.  We used to hop out of the woods and go charging
down on hog-drivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market,
but we never hived any of them.  Tom Sawyer called the hogs "ingots,"
and he called the turnips and stuff "julery," and we would go to the
cave and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed
and marked.  But I couldn't see no profit in it.  One time Tom sent a
boy to run about town with a blazing stick, which he called a slogan
(which was the sign for the Gang to get together), and then he said he
had got secret news by his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish
merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with two
hundred elephants, and six hundred camels, and over a thousand "sumter"
mules, all loaded down with di'monds, and they didn't have only a guard
of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay in ambuscade, as he called
it, and kill the lot and scoop the things.  He said we must slick up
our swords and guns, and get ready.  He never could go after even a
turnip-cart but he must have the swords and guns all scoured up for it,
though they was only lath and broomsticks, and you might scour at them
till you rotted, and then they warn't worth a mouthful of ashes more
than what they was before.  I didn't believe we could lick such a crowd
of Spaniards and A-rabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants,
so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got
the word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill.  But there warn't
no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn't no camels nor no elephants.
 It warn't anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class
at that.  We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we
never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got
a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the
teacher charged in, and made us drop everything and cut.

 I didn't see no di'monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so.  He said there was
loads of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-rabs there, too,
and elephants and things.  I said, why couldn't we see them, then?  He
said if I warn't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I
would know without asking.  He said it was all done by enchantment.  He
said there was hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and treasure,
and so on, but we had enemies which he called magicians; and they had
turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite.
 I said, all right; then the thing for us to do was to go for the
magicians.  Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull.

"Why," said he, "a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they
would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson.  They
are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church."

"Well," I says, "s'pose we got some genies to help _us_--can't we lick
the other crowd then?"

"How you going to get them?"

"I don't know.  How do _they_ get them?"

"Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies
come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and the
smoke a-rolling, and everything they're told to do they up and do it.
 They don't think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots, and
belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it--or any
other man."

"Who makes them tear around so?"

"Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring.  They belong to whoever rubs
the lamp or the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says.  If he
tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di'monds, and fill
it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and fetch an emperor's
daughter from China for you to marry, they've got to do it--and they've
got to do it before sun-up next morning, too.  And more:  they've got
to waltz that palace around over the country wherever you want it, you
understand."

"Well," says I, "I think they are a pack of flat-heads for not keeping
the palace themselves 'stead of fooling them away like that.  And what's
more--if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would
drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp."

"How you talk, Huck Finn.  Why, you'd _have_ to come when he rubbed it,
whether you wanted to or not."

"What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church?  All right, then;
I _would_ come; but I lay I'd make that man climb the highest tree there
was in the country."

"Shucks, it ain't no use to talk to you, Huck Finn.  You don't seem to
know anything, somehow--perfect saphead."

I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I
would see if there was anything in it.  I got an old tin lamp and an
iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat
like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn't
no use, none of the genies come.  So then I judged that all that stuff
was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies.  I reckoned he believed in the
A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different.  It had all
the marks of a Sunday-school.




CHAPTER IV.

WELL, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter
now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and
write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six
times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any
further than that if I was to live forever.  I don't take no stock in
mathematics, anyway.

At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it.
Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got next
day done me good and cheered me up.  So the longer I went to school the
easier it got to be.  I was getting sort of used to the widow's ways,
too, and they warn't so raspy on me.  Living in a house and sleeping in
a bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold weather I
used to slide out and sleep in the woods sometimes, and so that was a
rest to me.  I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the
new ones, too, a little bit. The widow said I was coming along slow but
sure, and doing very satisfactory.  She said she warn't ashamed of me.

One morning I happened to turn over the salt-cellar at breakfast.
 I reached for some of it as quick as I could to throw over my left
shoulder and keep off the bad luck, but Miss Watson was in ahead of me,
and crossed me off. She says, "Take your hands away, Huckleberry; what
a mess you are always making!"  The widow put in a good word for me, but
that warn't going to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well enough.
 I started out, after breakfast, feeling worried and shaky, and
wondering where it was going to fall on me, and what it was going to be.
 There is ways to keep off some kinds of bad luck, but this wasn't one
of them kind; so I never tried to do anything, but just poked along
low-spirited and on the watch-out.

I went down to the front garden and clumb over the stile where you go
through the high board fence.  There was an inch of new snow on the
ground, and I seen somebody's tracks.  They had come up from the quarry
and stood around the stile a while, and then went on around the garden
fence.  It was funny they hadn't come in, after standing around so.  I
couldn't make it out.  It was very curious, somehow.  I was going to
follow around, but I stooped down to look at the tracks first.  I didn't
notice anything at first, but next I did.  There was a cross in the left
boot-heel made with big nails, to keep off the devil.

I was up in a second and shinning down the hill.  I looked over my
shoulder every now and then, but I didn't see nobody.  I was at Judge
Thatcher's as quick as I could get there.  He said:

"Why, my boy, you are all out of breath.  Did you come for your
interest?"

"No, sir," I says; "is there some for me?"

"Oh, yes, a half-yearly is in last night--over a hundred and fifty
dollars.  Quite a fortune for you.  You had better let me invest it
along with your six thousand, because if you take it you'll spend it."

"No, sir," I says, "I don't want to spend it.  I don't want it at
all--nor the six thousand, nuther.  I want you to take it; I want to give
it to you--the six thousand and all."

He looked surprised.  He couldn't seem to make it out.  He says:

"Why, what can you mean, my boy?"

I says, "Don't you ask me no questions about it, please.  You'll take
it--won't you?"

He says:

"Well, I'm puzzled.  Is something the matter?"

"Please take it," says I, "and don't ask me nothing--then I won't have to
tell no lies."

He studied a while, and then he says:

"Oho-o!  I think I see.  You want to _sell_ all your property to me--not
give it.  That's the correct idea."

Then he wrote something on a paper and read it over, and says:

"There; you see it says 'for a consideration.'  That means I have bought
it of you and paid you for it.  Here's a dollar for you.  Now you sign
it."

So I signed it, and left.

Miss Watson's nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which
had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do
magic with it.  He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed
everything.  So I went to him that night and told him pap was here
again, for I found his tracks in the snow.  What I wanted to know was,
what he was going to do, and was he going to stay?  Jim got out his
hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped
it on the floor.  It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch.
 Jim tried it again, and then another time, and it acted just the same.
 Jim got down on his knees, and put his ear against it and listened.
 But it warn't no use; he said it wouldn't talk. He said sometimes it
wouldn't talk without money.  I told him I had an old slick counterfeit
quarter that warn't no good because the brass showed through the silver
a little, and it wouldn't pass nohow, even if the brass didn't show,
because it was so slick it felt greasy, and so that would tell on it
every time.  (I reckoned I wouldn't say nothing about the dollar I got
from the judge.) I said it was pretty bad money, but maybe the hair-ball
would take it, because maybe it wouldn't know the difference.  Jim smelt
it and bit it and rubbed it, and said he would manage so the hair-ball
would think it was good.  He said he would split open a raw Irish potato
and stick the quarter in between and keep it there all night, and next
morning you couldn't see no brass, and it wouldn't feel greasy no more,
and so anybody in town would take it in a minute, let alone a hair-ball.
 Well, I knowed a potato would do that before, but I had forgot it.

Jim put the quarter under the hair-ball, and got down and listened
again. This time he said the hair-ball was all right.  He said it
would tell my whole fortune if I wanted it to.  I says, go on.  So the
hair-ball talked to Jim, and Jim told it to me.  He says:

"Yo' ole father doan' know yit what he's a-gwyne to do.  Sometimes he
spec he'll go 'way, en den agin he spec he'll stay.  De bes' way is to
res' easy en let de ole man take his own way.  Dey's two angels hoverin'
roun' 'bout him.  One uv 'em is white en shiny, en t'other one is black.
De white one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sail
in en bust it all up.  A body can't tell yit which one gwyne to fetch
him at de las'.  But you is all right.  You gwyne to have considable
trouble in yo' life, en considable joy.  Sometimes you gwyne to git
hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne
to git well agin.  Dey's two gals flyin' 'bout you in yo' life.  One
uv 'em's light en t'other one is dark. One is rich en t'other is po'.
 You's gwyne to marry de po' one fust en de rich one by en by.  You
wants to keep 'way fum de water as much as you kin, en don't run no
resk, 'kase it's down in de bills dat you's gwyne to git hung."

When I lit my candle and went up to my room that night there sat pap his
own self!




CHAPTER V.

I had shut the door to.  Then I turned around and there he was.  I used
to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much.  I reckoned I
was scared now, too; but in a minute I see I was mistaken--that is, after
the first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched, he being
so unexpected; but right away after I see I warn't scared of him worth
bothring about.

He was most fifty, and he looked it.  His hair was long and tangled and
greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through
like he was behind vines.  It was all black, no gray; so was his long,
mixed-up whiskers.  There warn't no color in his face, where his face
showed; it was white; not like another man's white, but a white to make
a body sick, a white to make a body's flesh crawl--a tree-toad white, a
fish-belly white.  As for his clothes--just rags, that was all.  He had
one ankle resting on t'other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and
two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then.  His hat
was laying on the floor--an old black slouch with the top caved in, like
a lid.

I stood a-looking at him; he set there a-looking at me, with his chair
tilted back a little.  I set the candle down.  I noticed the window was
up; so he had clumb in by the shed.  He kept a-looking me all over.  By
and by he says:

"Starchy clothes--very.  You think you're a good deal of a big-bug,
_don't_ you?"

"Maybe I am, maybe I ain't," I says.

"Don't you give me none o' your lip," says he.  "You've put on
considerable many frills since I been away.  I'll take you down a peg
before I get done with you.  You're educated, too, they say--can read and
write.  You think you're better'n your father, now, don't you, because
he can't?  _I'll_ take it out of you.  Who told you you might meddle
with such hifalut'n foolishness, hey?--who told you you could?"

"The widow.  She told me."

"The widow, hey?--and who told the widow she could put in her shovel
about a thing that ain't none of her business?"

"Nobody never told her."

"Well, I'll learn her how to meddle.  And looky here--you drop that
school, you hear?  I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs
over his own father and let on to be better'n what _he_ is.  You lemme
catch you fooling around that school again, you hear?  Your mother
couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died.  None
of the family couldn't before _they_ died.  I can't; and here you're
a-swelling yourself up like this.  I ain't the man to stand it--you hear?
Say, lemme hear you read."

I took up a book and begun something about General Washington and the
wars. When I'd read about a half a minute, he fetched the book a whack
with his hand and knocked it across the house.  He says:

"It's so.  You can do it.  I had my doubts when you told me.  Now looky
here; you stop that putting on frills.  I won't have it.  I'll lay for
you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I'll tan you good.
First you know you'll get religion, too.  I never see such a son."

He took up a little blue and yaller picture of some cows and a boy, and
says:

"What's this?"

"It's something they give me for learning my lessons good."

He tore it up, and says:

"I'll give you something better--I'll give you a cowhide."

He set there a-mumbling and a-growling a minute, and then he says:

"_Ain't_ you a sweet-scented dandy, though?  A bed; and bedclothes; and
a look'n'-glass; and a piece of carpet on the floor--and your own father
got to sleep with the hogs in the tanyard.  I never see such a son.  I
bet I'll take some o' these frills out o' you before I'm done with you.
Why, there ain't no end to your airs--they say you're rich.  Hey?--how's
that?"

"They lie--that's how."

"Looky here--mind how you talk to me; I'm a-standing about all I can
stand now--so don't gimme no sass.  I've been in town two days, and I
hain't heard nothing but about you bein' rich.  I heard about it
away down the river, too.  That's why I come.  You git me that money
to-morrow--I want it."

"I hain't got no money."

"It's a lie.  Judge Thatcher's got it.  You git it.  I want it."

"I hain't got no money, I tell you.  You ask Judge Thatcher; he'll tell
you the same."

"All right.  I'll ask him; and I'll make him pungle, too, or I'll know
the reason why.  Say, how much you got in your pocket?  I want it."

"I hain't got only a dollar, and I want that to--"

"It don't make no difference what you want it for--you just shell it
out."

He took it and bit it to see if it was good, and then he said he was
going down town to get some whisky; said he hadn't had a drink all day.
When he had got out on the shed he put his head in again, and cussed
me for putting on frills and trying to be better than him; and when I
reckoned he was gone he come back and put his head in again, and told me
to mind about that school, because he was going to lay for me and lick
me if I didn't drop that.

Next day he was drunk, and he went to Judge Thatcher's and bullyragged
him, and tried to make him give up the money; but he couldn't, and then
he swore he'd make the law force him.

The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away
from him and let one of them be my guardian; but it was a new judge that
had just come, and he didn't know the old man; so he said courts mustn't
interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he'd druther
not take a child away from its father.  So Judge Thatcher and the widow
had to quit on the business.

That pleased the old man till he couldn't rest.  He said he'd cowhide
me till I was black and blue if I didn't raise some money for him.  I
borrowed three dollars from Judge Thatcher, and pap took it and got
drunk, and went a-blowing around and cussing and whooping and carrying
on; and he kept it up all over town, with a tin pan, till most midnight;
then they jailed him, and next day they had him before court, and jailed
him again for a week.  But he said _he_ was satisfied; said he was boss
of his son, and he'd make it warm for _him_.

When he got out the new judge said he was a-going to make a man of him.
So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and
had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just
old pie to him, so to speak.  And after supper he talked to him about
temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he'd been
a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going to turn over
a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn't be ashamed of, and he hoped the
judge would help him and not look down on him.  The judge said he could
hug him for them words; so he cried, and his wife she cried again; pap
said he'd been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the
judge said he believed it.  The old man said that what a man wanted
that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried
again.  And when it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his
hand, and says:

"Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all; take a-hold of it; shake it.
There's a hand that was the hand of a hog; but it ain't so no more; it's
the hand of a man that's started in on a new life, and'll die before
he'll go back.  You mark them words--don't forget I said them.  It's a
clean hand now; shake it--don't be afeard."

So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried.  The
judge's wife she kissed it.  Then the old man he signed a pledge--made
his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something
like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was
the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and
clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his
new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old
time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and
rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most
froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up.  And when they come
to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could
navigate it.

The judge he felt kind of sore.  He said he reckoned a body could reform
the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn't know no other way.




CHAPTER VI.

WELL, pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he went
for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up that money, and he
went for me, too, for not stopping school.  He catched me a couple of
times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same, and dodged
him or outrun him most of the time.  I didn't want to go to school much
before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite pap.  That law trial was a
slow business--appeared like they warn't ever going to get started on it;
so every now and then I'd borrow two or three dollars off of the judge
for him, to keep from getting a cowhiding.  Every time he got money he
got drunk; and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town; and
every time he raised Cain he got jailed.  He was just suited--this kind
of thing was right in his line.

He got to hanging around the widow's too much and so she told him at
last that if he didn't quit using around there she would make trouble
for him. Well, _wasn't_ he mad?  He said he would show who was Huck
Finn's boss.  So he watched out for me one day in the spring, and
catched me, and took me up the river about three mile in a skiff, and
crossed over to the Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn't
no houses but an old log hut in a place where the timber was so thick
you couldn't find it if you didn't know where it was.

He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off.
We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the
key under his head nights.  He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon,
and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on.  Every little
while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the
ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got
drunk and had a good time, and licked me.  The widow she found out where
I was by and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but
pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn't long after that till I was
used to being where I was, and liked it--all but the cowhide part.

It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking
and fishing, and no books nor study.  Two months or more run along, and
my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever
got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on
a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever
bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the
time.  I didn't want to go back no more.  I had stopped cussing, because
the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't
no objections.  It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it
all around.

But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand
it. I was all over welts.  He got to going away so much, too, and
locking me in.  Once he locked me in and was gone three days.  It was
dreadful lonesome.  I judged he had got drownded, and I wasn't ever
going to get out any more.  I was scared.  I made up my mind I would fix
up some way to leave there.  I had tried to get out of that cabin many
a time, but I couldn't find no way.  There warn't a window to it big
enough for a dog to get through.  I couldn't get up the chimbly; it
was too narrow.  The door was thick, solid oak slabs.  Pap was pretty
careful not to leave a knife or anything in the cabin when he was away;
I reckon I had hunted the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I
was most all the time at it, because it was about the only way to put in
the time.  But this time I found something at last; I found an old rusty
wood-saw without any handle; it was laid in between a rafter and the
clapboards of the roof. I greased it up and went to work.  There was an
old horse-blanket nailed against the logs at the far end of the cabin
behind the table, to keep the wind from blowing through the chinks and
putting the candle out.  I got under the table and raised the blanket,
and went to work to saw a section of the big bottom log out--big enough
to let me through.  Well, it was a good long job, but I was getting
towards the end of it when I heard pap's gun in the woods.  I got rid of
the signs of my work, and dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty
soon pap come in.

Pap warn't in a good humor--so he was his natural self.  He said he was
down town, and everything was going wrong.  His lawyer said he reckoned
he would win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got started on
the trial; but then there was ways to put it off a long time, and Judge
Thatcher knowed how to do it. And he said people allowed there'd be
another trial to get me away from him and give me to the widow for my
guardian, and they guessed it would win this time.  This shook me up
considerable, because I didn't want to go back to the widow's any more
and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it.  Then the old man
got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of,
and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any,
and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round,
including a considerable parcel of people which he didn't know the names
of, and so called them what's-his-name when he got to them, and went
right along with his cussing.

He said he would like to see the widow get me.  He said he would watch
out, and if they tried to come any such game on him he knowed of a place
six or seven mile off to stow me in, where they might hunt till they
dropped and they couldn't find me.  That made me pretty uneasy again,
but only for a minute; I reckoned I wouldn't stay on hand till he got
that chance.

The old man made me go to the skiff and fetch the things he had
got. There was a fifty-pound sack of corn meal, and a side of bacon,
ammunition, and a four-gallon jug of whisky, and an old book and two
newspapers for wadding, besides some tow.  I toted up a load, and went
back and set down on the bow of the skiff to rest.  I thought it all
over, and I reckoned I would walk off with the gun and some lines, and
take to the woods when I run away.  I guessed I wouldn't stay in one
place, but just tramp right across the country, mostly night times, and
hunt and fish to keep alive, and so get so far away that the old man nor
the widow couldn't ever find me any more.  I judged I would saw out and
leave that night if pap got drunk enough, and I reckoned he would.  I
got so full of it I didn't notice how long I was staying till the old
man hollered and asked me whether I was asleep or drownded.

I got the things all up to the cabin, and then it was about dark.  While
I was cooking supper the old man took a swig or two and got sort of
warmed up, and went to ripping again.  He had been drunk over in town,
and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at.  A body
would a thought he was Adam--he was just all mud.  Whenever his liquor
begun to work he most always went for the govment, this time he says:

"Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it's like.
Here's the law a-standing ready to take a man's son away from him--a
man's own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety
and all the expense of raising.  Yes, just as that man has got that
son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin' for
_him_ and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him.  And they call
_that_ govment!  That ain't all, nuther.  The law backs that old Judge
Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o' my property.  Here's what
the law does:  The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and
up'ards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets
him go round in clothes that ain't fitten for a hog. They call that
govment!  A man can't get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes
I've a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. Yes,
and I _told_ 'em so; I told old Thatcher so to his face.  Lots of 'em
heard me, and can tell what I said.  Says I, for two cents I'd leave the
blamed country and never come a-near it agin.  Them's the very words.  I
says look at my hat--if you call it a hat--but the lid raises up and the
rest of it goes down till it's below my chin, and then it ain't rightly
a hat at all, but more like my head was shoved up through a jint o'
stove-pipe.  Look at it, says I--such a hat for me to wear--one of the
wealthiest men in this town if I could git my rights.

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful.  Why, looky here.
There was a free nigger there from Ohio--a mulatter, most as white as
a white man.  He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the
shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine
clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a
silver-headed cane--the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State.  And
what do you think?  They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could
talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything.  And that ain't the
wust. They said he could _vote_ when he was at home.  Well, that let me
out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to?  It was 'lection day,
and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get
there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where
they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out.  I says I'll never vote agin.
 Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may
rot for all me--I'll never vote agin as long as I live.  And to see the
cool way of that nigger--why, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't
shoved him out o' the way.  I says to the people, why ain't this nigger
put up at auction and sold?--that's what I want to know.  And what do you
reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in
the State six months, and he hadn't been there that long yet.  There,
now--that's a specimen.  They call that a govment that can't sell a free
nigger till he's been in the State six months.  Here's a govment that
calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a
govment, and yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before
it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free
nigger, and--"

Pap was agoing on so he never noticed where his old limber legs was
taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork and
barked both shins, and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind
of language--mostly hove at the nigger and the govment, though he give
the tub some, too, all along, here and there.  He hopped around the
cabin considerable, first on one leg and then on the other, holding
first one shin and then the other one, and at last he let out with his
left foot all of a sudden and fetched the tub a rattling kick.  But it
warn't good judgment, because that was the boot that had a couple of his
toes leaking out of the front end of it; so now he raised a howl that
fairly made a body's hair raise, and down he went in the dirt, and
rolled there, and held his toes; and the cussing he done then laid over
anything he had ever done previous.  He said so his own self afterwards.
 He had heard old Sowberry Hagan in his best days, and he said it laid
over him, too; but I reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe.

After supper pap took the jug, and said he had enough whisky there
for two drunks and one delirium tremens.  That was always his word.  I
judged he would be blind drunk in about an hour, and then I would steal
the key, or saw myself out, one or t'other.  He drank and drank, and
tumbled down on his blankets by and by; but luck didn't run my way.
 He didn't go sound asleep, but was uneasy.  He groaned and moaned and
thrashed around this way and that for a long time.  At last I got so
sleepy I couldn't keep my eyes open all I could do, and so before I
knowed what I was about I was sound asleep, and the candle burning.

I don't know how long I was asleep, but all of a sudden there was an
awful scream and I was up.  There was pap looking wild, and skipping
around every which way and yelling about snakes.  He said they was
crawling up his legs; and then he would give a jump and scream, and say
one had bit him on the cheek--but I couldn't see no snakes.  He started
and run round and round the cabin, hollering "Take him off! take him
off! he's biting me on the neck!"  I never see a man look so wild in the
eyes. Pretty soon he was all fagged out, and fell down panting; then he
rolled over and over wonderful fast, kicking things every which way,
and striking and grabbing at the air with his hands, and screaming and
saying there was devils a-hold of him.  He wore out by and by, and laid
still a while, moaning.  Then he laid stiller, and didn't make a sound.
 I could hear the owls and the wolves away off in the woods, and it
seemed terrible still.  He was laying over by the corner. By and by he
raised up part way and listened, with his head to one side.  He says,
very low:

"Tramp--tramp--tramp; that's the dead; tramp--tramp--tramp; they're coming
after me; but I won't go.  Oh, they're here! don't touch me--don't! hands
off--they're cold; let go.  Oh, let a poor devil alone!"

Then he went down on all fours and crawled off, begging them to let him
alone, and he rolled himself up in his blanket and wallowed in under the
old pine table, still a-begging; and then he went to crying.  I could
hear him through the blanket.

By and by he rolled out and jumped up on his feet looking wild, and he
see me and went for me.  He chased me round and round the place with a
clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death, and saying he would kill me,
and then I couldn't come for him no more.  I begged, and told him I
was only Huck; but he laughed _such_ a screechy laugh, and roared and
cussed, and kept on chasing me up.  Once when I turned short and
dodged under his arm he made a grab and got me by the jacket between my
shoulders, and I thought I was gone; but I slid out of the jacket quick
as lightning, and saved myself. Pretty soon he was all tired out, and
dropped down with his back against the door, and said he would rest a
minute and then kill me. He put his knife under him, and said he would
sleep and get strong, and then he would see who was who.

So he dozed off pretty soon.  By and by I got the old split-bottom chair
and clumb up as easy as I could, not to make any noise, and got down the
gun.  I slipped the ramrod down it to make sure it was loaded, then I
laid it across the turnip barrel, pointing towards pap, and set down
behind it to wait for him to stir.  And how slow and still the time did
drag along.




CHAPTER VII.

"GIT up!  What you 'bout?"

I opened my eyes and looked around, trying to make out where I was.  It
was after sun-up, and I had been sound asleep.  Pap was standing over me
looking sour and sick, too.  He says:

"What you doin' with this gun?"

I judged he didn't know nothing about what he had been doing, so I says:

"Somebody tried to get in, so I was laying for him."

"Why didn't you roust me out?"

"Well, I tried to, but I couldn't; I couldn't budge you."

"Well, all right.  Don't stand there palavering all day, but out with
you and see if there's a fish on the lines for breakfast.  I'll be along
in a minute."

He unlocked the door, and I cleared out up the river-bank.  I noticed
some pieces of limbs and such things floating down, and a sprinkling of
bark; so I knowed the river had begun to rise.  I reckoned I would have
great times now if I was over at the town.  The June rise used to be
always luck for me; because as soon as that rise begins here comes
cordwood floating down, and pieces of log rafts--sometimes a dozen logs
together; so all you have to do is to catch them and sell them to the
wood-yards and the sawmill.

I went along up the bank with one eye out for pap and t'other one out
for what the rise might fetch along.  Well, all at once here comes a
canoe; just a beauty, too, about thirteen or fourteen foot long, riding
high like a duck.  I shot head-first off of the bank like a frog,
clothes and all on, and struck out for the canoe.  I just expected
there'd be somebody laying down in it, because people often done that
to fool folks, and when a chap had pulled a skiff out most to it they'd
raise up and laugh at him.  But it warn't so this time.  It was a
drift-canoe sure enough, and I clumb in and paddled her ashore.  Thinks
I, the old man will be glad when he sees this--she's worth ten dollars.
 But when I got to shore pap wasn't in sight yet, and as I was running
her into a little creek like a gully, all hung over with vines and
willows, I struck another idea:  I judged I'd hide her good, and then,
'stead of taking to the woods when I run off, I'd go down the river
about fifty mile and camp in one place for good, and not have such a
rough time tramping on foot.

It was pretty close to the shanty, and I thought I heard the old man
coming all the time; but I got her hid; and then I out and looked around
a bunch of willows, and there was the old man down the path a piece just
drawing a bead on a bird with his gun.  So he hadn't seen anything.

When he got along I was hard at it taking up a "trot" line.  He abused
me a little for being so slow; but I told him I fell in the river, and
that was what made me so long.  I knowed he would see I was wet, and
then he would be asking questions.  We got five catfish off the lines
and went home.

While we laid off after breakfast to sleep up, both of us being about
wore out, I got to thinking that if I could fix up some way to keep pap
and the widow from trying to follow me, it would be a certainer thing
than trusting to luck to get far enough off before they missed me; you
see, all kinds of things might happen.  Well, I didn't see no way for a
while, but by and by pap raised up a minute to drink another barrel of
water, and he says:

"Another time a man comes a-prowling round here you roust me out, you
hear? That man warn't here for no good.  I'd a shot him.  Next time you
roust me out, you hear?"

Then he dropped down and went to sleep again; but what he had been
saying give me the very idea I wanted.  I says to myself, I can fix it
now so nobody won't think of following me.

About twelve o'clock we turned out and went along up the bank.  The
river was coming up pretty fast, and lots of driftwood going by on the
rise. By and by along comes part of a log raft--nine logs fast together.
 We went out with the skiff and towed it ashore.  Then we had dinner.
Anybody but pap would a waited and seen the day through, so as to catch
more stuff; but that warn't pap's style.  Nine logs was enough for one
time; he must shove right over to town and sell.  So he locked me in and
took the skiff, and started off towing the raft about half-past three.
 I judged he wouldn't come back that night.  I waited till I reckoned he
had got a good start; then I out with my saw, and went to work on that
log again.  Before he was t'other side of the river I was out of the
hole; him and his raft was just a speck on the water away off yonder.

I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and
shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same
with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug.  I took all the coffee and
sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the
bucket and gourd; I took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two
blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot.  I took fish-lines and
matches and other things--everything that was worth a cent.  I cleaned
out the place.  I wanted an axe, but there wasn't any, only the one out
at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was going to leave that.  I fetched
out the gun, and now I was done.

I had wore the ground a good deal crawling out of the hole and dragging
out so many things.  So I fixed that as good as I could from the outside
by scattering dust on the place, which covered up the smoothness and the
sawdust.  Then I fixed the piece of log back into its place, and put two
rocks under it and one against it to hold it there, for it was bent up
at that place and didn't quite touch ground.  If you stood four or five
foot away and didn't know it was sawed, you wouldn't never notice
it; and besides, this was the back of the cabin, and it warn't likely
anybody would go fooling around there.

It was all grass clear to the canoe, so I hadn't left a track.  I
followed around to see.  I stood on the bank and looked out over the
river.  All safe.  So I took the gun and went up a piece into the woods,
and was hunting around for some birds when I see a wild pig; hogs soon
went wild in them bottoms after they had got away from the prairie
farms. I shot this fellow and took him into camp.

I took the axe and smashed in the door.  I beat it and hacked it
considerable a-doing it.  I fetched the pig in, and took him back nearly
to the table and hacked into his throat with the axe, and laid him down
on the ground to bleed; I say ground because it was ground--hard packed,
and no boards.  Well, next I took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks
in it--all I could drag--and I started it from the pig, and dragged it to
the door and through the woods down to the river and dumped it in, and
down it sunk, out of sight.  You could easy see that something had been
dragged over the ground.  I did wish Tom Sawyer was there; I knowed he
would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy
touches.  Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as
that.

Well, last I pulled out some of my hair, and blooded the axe good, and
stuck it on the back side, and slung the axe in the corner.  Then I
took up the pig and held him to my breast with my jacket (so he couldn't
drip) till I got a good piece below the house and then dumped him into
the river.  Now I thought of something else.  So I went and got the bag
of meal and my old saw out of the canoe, and fetched them to the house.
 I took the bag to where it used to stand, and ripped a hole in the
bottom of it with the saw, for there warn't no knives and forks on the
place--pap done everything with his clasp-knife about the cooking.  Then
I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through
the willows east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five mile wide
and full of rushes--and ducks too, you might say, in the season.  There
was a slough or a creek leading out of it on the other side that went
miles away, I don't know where, but it didn't go to the river.  The meal
sifted out and made a little track all the way to the lake.  I dropped
pap's whetstone there too, so as to look like it had been done by
accident. Then I tied up the rip in the meal sack with a string, so it
wouldn't leak no more, and took it and my saw to the canoe again.

It was about dark now; so I dropped the canoe down the river under some
willows that hung over the bank, and waited for the moon to rise.  I
made fast to a willow; then I took a bite to eat, and by and by laid
down in the canoe to smoke a pipe and lay out a plan.  I says to myself,
they'll follow the track of that sackful of rocks to the shore and then
drag the river for me.  And they'll follow that meal track to the lake
and go browsing down the creek that leads out of it to find the robbers
that killed me and took the things.  They won't ever hunt the river for
anything but my dead carcass. They'll soon get tired of that, and won't
bother no more about me.  All right; I can stop anywhere I want to.
Jackson's Island is good enough for me; I know that island pretty well,
and nobody ever comes there.  And then I can paddle over to town nights,
and slink around and pick up things I want. Jackson's Island's the
place.

I was pretty tired, and the first thing I knowed I was asleep.  When
I woke up I didn't know where I was for a minute.  I set up and looked
around, a little scared.  Then I remembered.  The river looked miles and
miles across.  The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs
that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from
shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and _smelt_ late.
You know what I mean--I don't know the words to put it in.

I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start
when I heard a sound away over the water.  I listened.  Pretty soon I
made it out.  It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from
oars working in rowlocks when it's a still night.  I peeped out through
the willow branches, and there it was--a skiff, away across the water.
 I couldn't tell how many was in it.  It kept a-coming, and when it was
abreast of me I see there warn't but one man in it.  Think's I, maybe
it's pap, though I warn't expecting him.  He dropped below me with the
current, and by and by he came a-swinging up shore in the easy water,
and he went by so close I could a reached out the gun and touched him.
 Well, it _was_ pap, sure enough--and sober, too, by the way he laid his
oars.

I didn't lose no time.  The next minute I was a-spinning down stream
soft but quick in the shade of the bank.  I made two mile and a half,
and then struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the middle of
the river, because pretty soon I would be passing the ferry landing, and
people might see me and hail me.  I got out amongst the driftwood, and
then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float.

 I laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking
away into the sky; not a cloud in it.  The sky looks ever so deep when
you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before.
 And how far a body can hear on the water such nights!  I heard people
talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too--every word
of it.  One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short
nights now.  T'other one said _this_ warn't one of the short ones, he
reckoned--and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they
laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and
laughed, but he didn't laugh; he ripped out something brisk, and said
let him alone.  The first fellow said he 'lowed to tell it to his
old woman--she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn't
nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it
was nearly three o'clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than
about a week longer.  After that the talk got further and further away,
and I couldn't make out the words any more; but I could hear the mumble,
and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.

I was away below the ferry now.  I rose up, and there was Jackson's
Island, about two mile and a half down stream, heavy timbered and
standing up out of the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like
a steamboat without any lights.  There warn't any signs of the bar at
the head--it was all under water now.

It didn't take me long to get there.  I shot past the head at a ripping
rate, the current was so swift, and then I got into the dead water and
landed on the side towards the Illinois shore.  I run the canoe into
a deep dent in the bank that I knowed about; I had to part the willow
branches to get in; and when I made fast nobody could a seen the canoe
from the outside.

I went up and set down on a log at the head of the island, and looked
out on the big river and the black driftwood and away over to the town,
three mile away, where there was three or four lights twinkling.  A
monstrous big lumber-raft was about a mile up stream, coming along down,
with a lantern in the middle of it.  I watched it come creeping down,
and when it was most abreast of where I stood I heard a man say, "Stern
oars, there! heave her head to stabboard!"  I heard that just as plain
as if the man was by my side.

There was a little gray in the sky now; so I stepped into the woods, and
laid down for a nap before breakfast.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight
o'clock.  I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about
things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied.  I
could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees
all about, and gloomy in there amongst them.  There was freckled places
on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the
freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little
breeze up there.  A couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me
very friendly.

I was powerful lazy and comfortable--didn't want to get up and cook
breakfast.  Well, I was dozing off again when I thinks I hears a deep
sound of "boom!" away up the river.  I rouses up, and rests on my elbow
and listens; pretty soon I hears it again.  I hopped up, and went and
looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying
on the water a long ways up--about abreast the ferry.  And there was the
ferryboat full of people floating along down.  I knowed what was the
matter now.  "Boom!" I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferryboat's
side.  You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my
carcass come to the top.

I was pretty hungry, but it warn't going to do for me to start a fire,
because they might see the smoke.  So I set there and watched the
cannon-smoke and listened to the boom.  The river was a mile wide there,
and it always looks pretty on a summer morning--so I was having a good
enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders if I only had a bite to
eat. Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in
loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the
drownded carcass and stop there.  So, says I, I'll keep a lookout, and
if any of them's floating around after me I'll give them a show.  I
changed to the Illinois edge of the island to see what luck I could
have, and I warn't disappointed.  A big double loaf come along, and I
most got it with a long stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out
further.  Of course I was where the current set in the closest to the
shore--I knowed enough for that.  But by and by along comes another one,
and this time I won.  I took out the plug and shook out the little dab
of quicksilver, and set my teeth in.  It was "baker's bread"--what the
quality eat; none of your low-down corn-pone.

I got a good place amongst the leaves, and set there on a log, munching
the bread and watching the ferry-boat, and very well satisfied.  And
then something struck me.  I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson
or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone
and done it.  So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that
thing--that is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the
parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for
only just the right kind.

I lit a pipe and had a good long smoke, and went on watching.  The
ferryboat was floating with the current, and I allowed I'd have a chance
to see who was aboard when she come along, because she would come in
close, where the bread did.  When she'd got pretty well along down
towards me, I put out my pipe and went to where I fished out the bread,
and laid down behind a log on the bank in a little open place.  Where
the log forked I could peep through.

By and by she come along, and she drifted in so close that they could
a run out a plank and walked ashore.  Most everybody was on the boat.
 Pap, and Judge Thatcher, and Bessie Thatcher, and Jo Harper, and Tom
Sawyer, and his old Aunt Polly, and Sid and Mary, and plenty more.
 Everybody was talking about the murder, but the captain broke in and
says:

"Look sharp, now; the current sets in the closest here, and maybe he's
washed ashore and got tangled amongst the brush at the water's edge.  I
hope so, anyway."

I didn't hope so.  They all crowded up and leaned over the rails, nearly
in my face, and kept still, watching with all their might.  I could see
them first-rate, but they couldn't see me.  Then the captain sung out:

"Stand away!" and the cannon let off such a blast right before me that
it made me deef with the noise and pretty near blind with the smoke, and
I judged I was gone.  If they'd a had some bullets in, I reckon they'd
a got the corpse they was after.  Well, I see I warn't hurt, thanks to
goodness. The boat floated on and went out of sight around the shoulder
of the island.  I could hear the booming now and then, further and
further off, and by and by, after an hour, I didn't hear it no more.
 The island was three mile long.  I judged they had got to the foot, and
was giving it up.  But they didn't yet a while.  They turned around
the foot of the island and started up the channel on the Missouri side,
under steam, and booming once in a while as they went.  I crossed over
to that side and watched them. When they got abreast the head of the
island they quit shooting and dropped over to the Missouri shore and
went home to the town.

I knowed I was all right now.  Nobody else would come a-hunting after
me. I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick
woods.  I made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my things
under so the rain couldn't get at them.  I catched a catfish and haggled
him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had
supper.  Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast.

When it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty well
satisfied; but by and by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set
on the bank and listened to the current swashing along, and counted the
stars and drift logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed;
there ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you
can't stay so, you soon get over it.

And so for three days and nights.  No difference--just the same thing.
But the next day I went exploring around down through the island.  I was
boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know
all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time.  I found plenty
strawberries, ripe and prime; and green summer grapes, and green
razberries; and the green blackberries was just beginning to show.  They
would all come handy by and by, I judged.

Well, I went fooling along in the deep woods till I judged I warn't
far from the foot of the island.  I had my gun along, but I hadn't shot
nothing; it was for protection; thought I would kill some game nigh
home. About this time I mighty near stepped on a good-sized snake,
and it went sliding off through the grass and flowers, and I after
it, trying to get a shot at it. I clipped along, and all of a sudden I
bounded right on to the ashes of a camp fire that was still smoking.

My heart jumped up amongst my lungs.  I never waited for to look
further, but uncocked my gun and went sneaking back on my tiptoes as
fast as ever I could.  Every now and then I stopped a second amongst the
thick leaves and listened, but my breath come so hard I couldn't hear
nothing else.  I slunk along another piece further, then listened again;
and so on, and so on.  If I see a stump, I took it for a man; if I trod
on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a person had cut one of my
breaths in two and I only got half, and the short half, too.

When I got to camp I warn't feeling very brash, there warn't much sand
in my craw; but I says, this ain't no time to be fooling around.  So I
got all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight,
and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an
old last year's camp, and then clumb a tree.

I reckon I was up in the tree two hours; but I didn't see nothing,
I didn't hear nothing--I only _thought_ I heard and seen as much as a
thousand things.  Well, I couldn't stay up there forever; so at last I
got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on the lookout all the
time. All I could get to eat was berries and what was left over from
breakfast.

By the time it was night I was pretty hungry.  So when it was good
and dark I slid out from shore before moonrise and paddled over to the
Illinois bank--about a quarter of a mile.  I went out in the woods and
cooked a supper, and I had about made up my mind I would stay there
all night when I hear a _plunkety-plunk, plunkety-plunk_, and says
to myself, horses coming; and next I hear people's voices.  I got
everything into the canoe as quick as I could, and then went creeping
through the woods to see what I could find out.  I hadn't got far when I
hear a man say:

"We better camp here if we can find a good place; the horses is about
beat out.  Let's look around."

I didn't wait, but shoved out and paddled away easy.  I tied up in the
old place, and reckoned I would sleep in the canoe.

I didn't sleep much.  I couldn't, somehow, for thinking.  And every time
I waked up I thought somebody had me by the neck.  So the sleep didn't
do me no good.  By and by I says to myself, I can't live this way; I'm
a-going to find out who it is that's here on the island with me; I'll
find it out or bust.  Well, I felt better right off.

So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two, and
then let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows.  The moon was
shining, and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day.
 I poked along well on to an hour, everything still as rocks and sound
asleep. Well, by this time I was most down to the foot of the island.  A
little ripply, cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying
the night was about done.  I give her a turn with the paddle and brung
her nose to shore; then I got my gun and slipped out and into the edge
of the woods.  I sat down there on a log, and looked out through the
leaves.  I see the moon go off watch, and the darkness begin to blanket
the river. But in a little while I see a pale streak over the treetops,
and knowed the day was coming.  So I took my gun and slipped off towards
where I had run across that camp fire, stopping every minute or two
to listen.  But I hadn't no luck somehow; I couldn't seem to find the
place.  But by and by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away
through the trees.  I went for it, cautious and slow.  By and by I was
close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground.  It
most give me the fan-tods. He had a blanket around his head, and his
head was nearly in the fire.  I set there behind a clump of bushes, in
about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady.  It was getting
gray daylight now.  Pretty soon he gapped and stretched himself and hove
off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson's Jim!  I bet I was glad to see
him.  I says:

"Hello, Jim!" and skipped out.

He bounced up and stared at me wild.  Then he drops down on his knees,
and puts his hands together and says:

"Doan' hurt me--don't!  I hain't ever done no harm to a ghos'.  I alwuz
liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em.  You go en git in de
river agin, whah you b'longs, en doan' do nuffn to Ole Jim, 'at 'uz
awluz yo' fren'."

Well, I warn't long making him understand I warn't dead.  I was ever so
glad to see Jim.  I warn't lonesome now.  I told him I warn't afraid of
_him_ telling the people where I was.  I talked along, but he only set
there and looked at me; never said nothing.  Then I says:

"It's good daylight.  Le's get breakfast.  Make up your camp fire good."

"What's de use er makin' up de camp fire to cook strawbries en sich
truck? But you got a gun, hain't you?  Den we kin git sumfn better den
strawbries."

"Strawberries and such truck," I says.  "Is that what you live on?"

"I couldn' git nuffn else," he says.

"Why, how long you been on the island, Jim?"

"I come heah de night arter you's killed."

"What, all that time?"

"Yes--indeedy."

"And ain't you had nothing but that kind of rubbage to eat?"

"No, sah--nuffn else."

"Well, you must be most starved, ain't you?"

"I reck'n I could eat a hoss.  I think I could. How long you ben on de
islan'?"

"Since the night I got killed."

"No!  W'y, what has you lived on?  But you got a gun.  Oh, yes, you got
a gun.  Dat's good.  Now you kill sumfn en I'll make up de fire."

So we went over to where the canoe was, and while he built a fire in
a grassy open place amongst the trees, I fetched meal and bacon and
coffee, and coffee-pot and frying-pan, and sugar and tin cups, and the
nigger was set back considerable, because he reckoned it was all done
with witchcraft. I catched a good big catfish, too, and Jim cleaned him
with his knife, and fried him.

When breakfast was ready we lolled on the grass and eat it smoking hot.
Jim laid it in with all his might, for he was most about starved.  Then
when we had got pretty well stuffed, we laid off and lazied.  By and by
Jim says:

"But looky here, Huck, who wuz it dat 'uz killed in dat shanty ef it
warn't you?"

Then I told him the whole thing, and he said it was smart.  He said Tom
Sawyer couldn't get up no better plan than what I had.  Then I says:

"How do you come to be here, Jim, and how'd you get here?"

He looked pretty uneasy, and didn't say nothing for a minute.  Then he
says:

"Maybe I better not tell."

"Why, Jim?"

"Well, dey's reasons.  But you wouldn' tell on me ef I uz to tell you,
would you, Huck?"

"Blamed if I would, Jim."

"Well, I b'lieve you, Huck.  I--_I run off_."

"Jim!"

"But mind, you said you wouldn' tell--you know you said you wouldn' tell,
Huck."

"Well, I did.  I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it.  Honest _injun_,
I will.  People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for
keeping mum--but that don't make no difference.  I ain't a-going to tell,
and I ain't a-going back there, anyways.  So, now, le's know all about
it."

"Well, you see, it 'uz dis way.  Ole missus--dat's Miss Watson--she pecks
on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she
wouldn' sell me down to Orleans.  But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader
roun' de place considable lately, en I begin to git oneasy.  Well, one
night I creeps to de do' pooty late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I
hear old missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but
she didn' want to, but she could git eight hund'd dollars for me, en it
'uz sich a big stack o' money she couldn' resis'.  De widder she try to
git her to say she wouldn' do it, but I never waited to hear de res'.  I
lit out mighty quick, I tell you.

"I tuck out en shin down de hill, en 'spec to steal a skift 'long de
sho' som'ers 'bove de town, but dey wuz people a-stirring yit, so I hid
in de ole tumble-down cooper-shop on de bank to wait for everybody to
go 'way. Well, I wuz dah all night.  Dey wuz somebody roun' all de time.
 'Long 'bout six in de mawnin' skifts begin to go by, en 'bout eight er
nine every skift dat went 'long wuz talkin' 'bout how yo' pap come over
to de town en say you's killed.  Dese las' skifts wuz full o' ladies en
genlmen a-goin' over for to see de place.  Sometimes dey'd pull up at
de sho' en take a res' b'fo' dey started acrost, so by de talk I got to
know all 'bout de killin'.  I 'uz powerful sorry you's killed, Huck, but
I ain't no mo' now.

"I laid dah under de shavin's all day.  I 'uz hungry, but I warn't
afeard; bekase I knowed ole missus en de widder wuz goin' to start to
de camp-meet'n' right arter breakfas' en be gone all day, en dey knows
I goes off wid de cattle 'bout daylight, so dey wouldn' 'spec to see me
roun' de place, en so dey wouldn' miss me tell arter dark in de evenin'.
De yuther servants wouldn' miss me, kase dey'd shin out en take holiday
soon as de ole folks 'uz out'n de way.

"Well, when it come dark I tuck out up de river road, en went 'bout two
mile er more to whah dey warn't no houses.  I'd made up my mine 'bout
what I's agwyne to do.  You see, ef I kep' on tryin' to git away afoot,
de dogs 'ud track me; ef I stole a skift to cross over, dey'd miss dat
skift, you see, en dey'd know 'bout whah I'd lan' on de yuther side, en
whah to pick up my track.  So I says, a raff is what I's arter; it doan'
_make_ no track.

"I see a light a-comin' roun' de p'int bymeby, so I wade' in en shove'
a log ahead o' me en swum more'n half way acrost de river, en got in
'mongst de drift-wood, en kep' my head down low, en kinder swum agin de
current tell de raff come along.  Den I swum to de stern uv it en tuck
a-holt.  It clouded up en 'uz pooty dark for a little while.  So I clumb
up en laid down on de planks.  De men 'uz all 'way yonder in de middle,
whah de lantern wuz.  De river wuz a-risin', en dey wuz a good current;
so I reck'n'd 'at by fo' in de mawnin' I'd be twenty-five mile down de
river, en den I'd slip in jis b'fo' daylight en swim asho', en take to
de woods on de Illinois side.

"But I didn' have no luck.  When we 'uz mos' down to de head er de
islan' a man begin to come aft wid de lantern, I see it warn't no use
fer to wait, so I slid overboard en struck out fer de islan'.  Well, I
had a notion I could lan' mos' anywhers, but I couldn't--bank too bluff.
 I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I found' a good place.  I went
into de woods en jedged I wouldn' fool wid raffs no mo', long as dey
move de lantern roun' so.  I had my pipe en a plug er dog-leg, en some
matches in my cap, en dey warn't wet, so I 'uz all right."

"And so you ain't had no meat nor bread to eat all this time?  Why
didn't you get mud-turkles?"

"How you gwyne to git 'm?  You can't slip up on um en grab um; en how's
a body gwyne to hit um wid a rock?  How could a body do it in de night?
 En I warn't gwyne to show mysef on de bank in de daytime."

"Well, that's so.  You've had to keep in the woods all the time, of
course. Did you hear 'em shooting the cannon?"

"Oh, yes.  I knowed dey was arter you.  I see um go by heah--watched um
thoo de bushes."

Some young birds come along, flying a yard or two at a time and
lighting. Jim said it was a sign it was going to rain.  He said it was
a sign when young chickens flew that way, and so he reckoned it was the
same way when young birds done it.  I was going to catch some of them,
but Jim wouldn't let me.  He said it was death.  He said his father laid
mighty sick once, and some of them catched a bird, and his old granny
said his father would die, and he did.

And Jim said you mustn't count the things you are going to cook for
dinner, because that would bring bad luck.  The same if you shook the
table-cloth after sundown.  And he said if a man owned a beehive
and that man died, the bees must be told about it before sun-up next
morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die.
 Jim said bees wouldn't sting idiots; but I didn't believe that, because
I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me.

I had heard about some of these things before, but not all of them.  Jim
knowed all kinds of signs.  He said he knowed most everything.  I said
it looked to me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I asked
him if there warn't any good-luck signs.  He says:

"Mighty few--an' _dey_ ain't no use to a body.  What you want to know
when good luck's a-comin' for?  Want to keep it off?"  And he said:  "Ef
you's got hairy arms en a hairy breas', it's a sign dat you's agwyne
to be rich. Well, dey's some use in a sign like dat, 'kase it's so fur
ahead. You see, maybe you's got to be po' a long time fust, en so you
might git discourage' en kill yo'sef 'f you didn' know by de sign dat
you gwyne to be rich bymeby."

"Have you got hairy arms and a hairy breast, Jim?"

"What's de use to ax dat question?  Don't you see I has?"

"Well, are you rich?"

"No, but I ben rich wunst, and gwyne to be rich agin.  Wunst I had
foteen dollars, but I tuck to specalat'n', en got busted out."

"What did you speculate in, Jim?"

"Well, fust I tackled stock."

"What kind of stock?"

"Why, live stock--cattle, you know.  I put ten dollars in a cow.  But
I ain' gwyne to resk no mo' money in stock.  De cow up 'n' died on my
han's."

"So you lost the ten dollars."

"No, I didn't lose it all.  I on'y los' 'bout nine of it.  I sole de
hide en taller for a dollar en ten cents."

"You had five dollars and ten cents left.  Did you speculate any more?"

"Yes.  You know that one-laigged nigger dat b'longs to old Misto
Bradish? Well, he sot up a bank, en say anybody dat put in a dollar
would git fo' dollars mo' at de en' er de year.  Well, all de niggers
went in, but dey didn't have much.  I wuz de on'y one dat had much.  So
I stuck out for mo' dan fo' dollars, en I said 'f I didn' git it I'd
start a bank mysef. Well, o' course dat nigger want' to keep me out er
de business, bekase he says dey warn't business 'nough for two banks, so
he say I could put in my five dollars en he pay me thirty-five at de en'
er de year.

"So I done it.  Den I reck'n'd I'd inves' de thirty-five dollars right
off en keep things a-movin'.  Dey wuz a nigger name' Bob, dat had
ketched a wood-flat, en his marster didn' know it; en I bought it off'n
him en told him to take de thirty-five dollars when de en' er de
year come; but somebody stole de wood-flat dat night, en nex day de
one-laigged nigger say de bank's busted.  So dey didn' none uv us git no
money."

"What did you do with the ten cents, Jim?"

"Well, I 'uz gwyne to spen' it, but I had a dream, en de dream tole me
to give it to a nigger name' Balum--Balum's Ass dey call him for short;
he's one er dem chuckleheads, you know.  But he's lucky, dey say, en I
see I warn't lucky.  De dream say let Balum inves' de ten cents en he'd
make a raise for me.  Well, Balum he tuck de money, en when he wuz in
church he hear de preacher say dat whoever give to de po' len' to de
Lord, en boun' to git his money back a hund'd times.  So Balum he tuck
en give de ten cents to de po', en laid low to see what wuz gwyne to
come of it."

"Well, what did come of it, Jim?"

"Nuffn never come of it.  I couldn' manage to k'leck dat money no way;
en Balum he couldn'.  I ain' gwyne to len' no mo' money 'dout I see de
security.  Boun' to git yo' money back a hund'd times, de preacher says!
Ef I could git de ten _cents_ back, I'd call it squah, en be glad er de
chanst."

"Well, it's all right anyway, Jim, long as you're going to be rich again
some time or other."

"Yes; en I's rich now, come to look at it.  I owns mysef, en I's wuth
eight hund'd dollars.  I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'."




CHAPTER IX.

I wanted to go and look at a place right about the middle of the island
that I'd found when I was exploring; so we started and soon got to it,
because the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a mile
wide.

This place was a tolerable long, steep hill or ridge about forty foot
high. We had a rough time getting to the top, the sides was so steep and
the bushes so thick.  We tramped and clumb around all over it, and by
and by found a good big cavern in the rock, most up to the top on the
side towards Illinois.  The cavern was as big as two or three rooms
bunched together, and Jim could stand up straight in it.  It was cool in
there. Jim was for putting our traps in there right away, but I said we
didn't want to be climbing up and down there all the time.

Jim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place, and had all the traps
in the cavern, we could rush there if anybody was to come to the island,
and they would never find us without dogs.  And, besides, he said them
little birds had said it was going to rain, and did I want the things to
get wet?

So we went back and got the canoe, and paddled up abreast the cavern,
and lugged all the traps up there.  Then we hunted up a place close by
to hide the canoe in, amongst the thick willows.  We took some fish off
of the lines and set them again, and begun to get ready for dinner.

The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in, and on one
side of the door the floor stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a
good place to build a fire on.  So we built it there and cooked dinner.

We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there.
We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern.  Pretty
soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was
right about it.  Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury,
too, and I never see the wind blow so.  It was one of these regular
summer storms.  It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black
outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that
the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would
come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the
pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would
follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they
was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and
blackest--_FST_! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little
glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm,
hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again
in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash,
and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the
under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs--where
it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.

"Jim, this is nice," I says.  "I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but
here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread."

"Well, you wouldn't a ben here 'f it hadn't a ben for Jim.  You'd a ben
down dah in de woods widout any dinner, en gittn' mos' drownded, too;
dat you would, honey.  Chickens knows when it's gwyne to rain, en so do
de birds, chile."

The river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days, till at
last it was over the banks.  The water was three or four foot deep on
the island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom.  On that side
it was a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side it was the same
old distance across--a half a mile--because the Missouri shore was just a
wall of high bluffs.

Daytimes we paddled all over the island in the canoe, It was mighty cool
and shady in the deep woods, even if the sun was blazing outside.  We
went winding in and out amongst the trees, and sometimes the vines hung
so thick we had to back away and go some other way.  Well, on every old
broken-down tree you could see rabbits and snakes and such things; and
when the island had been overflowed a day or two they got so tame, on
account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your
hand on them if you wanted to; but not the snakes and turtles--they would
slide off in the water.  The ridge our cavern was in was full of them.
We could a had pets enough if we'd wanted them.

One night we catched a little section of a lumber raft--nice pine planks.
It was twelve foot wide and about fifteen or sixteen foot long, and
the top stood above water six or seven inches--a solid, level floor.  We
could see saw-logs go by in the daylight sometimes, but we let them go;
we didn't show ourselves in daylight.

Another night when we was up at the head of the island, just before
daylight, here comes a frame-house down, on the west side.  She was
a two-story, and tilted over considerable.  We paddled out and got
aboard--clumb in at an upstairs window.  But it was too dark to see yet,
so we made the canoe fast and set in her to wait for daylight.

The light begun to come before we got to the foot of the island.  Then
we looked in at the window.  We could make out a bed, and a table, and
two old chairs, and lots of things around about on the floor, and there
was clothes hanging against the wall.  There was something laying on the
floor in the far corner that looked like a man.  So Jim says:

"Hello, you!"

But it didn't budge.  So I hollered again, and then Jim says:

"De man ain't asleep--he's dead.  You hold still--I'll go en see."

He went, and bent down and looked, and says:

"It's a dead man.  Yes, indeedy; naked, too.  He's ben shot in de back.
I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days.  Come in, Huck, but doan' look
at his face--it's too gashly."

I didn't look at him at all.  Jim throwed some old rags over him, but
he needn't done it; I didn't want to see him.  There was heaps of old
greasy cards scattered around over the floor, and old whisky bottles,
and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and all over the walls
was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures made with charcoal.
 There was two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some
women's underclothes hanging against the wall, and some men's clothing,
too.  We put the lot into the canoe--it might come good.  There was a
boy's old speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that, too.  And there
was a bottle that had had milk in it, and it had a rag stopper for a
baby to suck.  We would a took the bottle, but it was broke.  There was
a seedy old chest, and an old hair trunk with the hinges broke.  They
stood open, but there warn't nothing left in them that was any account.
 The way things was scattered about we reckoned the people left in a
hurry, and warn't fixed so as to carry off most of their stuff.

We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without any handle, and
a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow
candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty
old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and
beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet
and some nails, and a fishline as thick as my little finger with some
monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog-collar,
and a horseshoe, and some vials of medicine that didn't have no label
on them; and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb,
and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg.  The straps
was broke off of it, but, barring that, it was a good enough leg, though
it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find
the other one, though we hunted all around.

And so, take it all around, we made a good haul.  When we was ready to
shove off we was a quarter of a mile below the island, and it was pretty
broad day; so I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with the
quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was a nigger a good
ways off.  I paddled over to the Illinois shore, and drifted down most
a half a mile doing it.  I crept up the dead water under the bank, and
hadn't no accidents and didn't see nobody.  We got home all safe.




CHAPTER X.

AFTER breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess out how he
come to be killed, but Jim didn't want to.  He said it would fetch bad
luck; and besides, he said, he might come and ha'nt us; he said a man
that warn't buried was more likely to go a-ha'nting around than one
that was planted and comfortable.  That sounded pretty reasonable, so
I didn't say no more; but I couldn't keep from studying over it and
wishing I knowed who shot the man, and what they done it for.

We rummaged the clothes we'd got, and found eight dollars in silver
sewed up in the lining of an old blanket overcoat.  Jim said he reckoned
the people in that house stole the coat, because if they'd a knowed the
money was there they wouldn't a left it.  I said I reckoned they killed
him, too; but Jim didn't want to talk about that.  I says:

"Now you think it's bad luck; but what did you say when I fetched in the
snake-skin that I found on the top of the ridge day before yesterday?
You said it was the worst bad luck in the world to touch a snake-skin
with my hands.  Well, here's your bad luck!  We've raked in all this
truck and eight dollars besides.  I wish we could have some bad luck
like this every day, Jim."

"Never you mind, honey, never you mind.  Don't you git too peart.  It's
a-comin'.  Mind I tell you, it's a-comin'."

It did come, too.  It was a Tuesday that we had that talk.  Well, after
dinner Friday we was laying around in the grass at the upper end of the
ridge, and got out of tobacco.  I went to the cavern to get some, and
found a rattlesnake in there.  I killed him, and curled him up on the
foot of Jim's blanket, ever so natural, thinking there'd be some fun
when Jim found him there.  Well, by night I forgot all about the snake,
and when Jim flung himself down on the blanket while I struck a light
the snake's mate was there, and bit him.

He jumped up yelling, and the first thing the light showed was the
varmint curled up and ready for another spring.  I laid him out in a
second with a stick, and Jim grabbed pap's whisky-jug and begun to pour
it down.

He was barefooted, and the snake bit him right on the heel.  That all
comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave
a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it.  Jim told
me to chop off the snake's head and throw it away, and then skin the
body and roast a piece of it.  I done it, and he eat it and said it
would help cure him. He made me take off the rattles and tie them around
his wrist, too.  He said that that would help.  Then I slid out quiet
and throwed the snakes clear away amongst the bushes; for I warn't going
to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it.

Jim sucked and sucked at the jug, and now and then he got out of his
head and pitched around and yelled; but every time he come to himself he
went to sucking at the jug again.  His foot swelled up pretty big, and
so did his leg; but by and by the drunk begun to come, and so I judged
he was all right; but I'd druther been bit with a snake than pap's
whisky.

Jim was laid up for four days and nights.  Then the swelling was all
gone and he was around again.  I made up my mind I wouldn't ever take
a-holt of a snake-skin again with my hands, now that I see what had come
of it. Jim said he reckoned I would believe him next time.  And he said
that handling a snake-skin was such awful bad luck that maybe we hadn't
got to the end of it yet.  He said he druther see the new moon over his
left shoulder as much as a thousand times than take up a snake-skin
in his hand.  Well, I was getting to feel that way myself, though I've
always reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left shoulder is
one of the carelessest and foolishest things a body can do.  Old Hank
Bunker done it once, and bragged about it; and in less than two years he
got drunk and fell off of the shot-tower, and spread himself out so
that he was just a kind of a layer, as you may say; and they slid him
edgeways between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so
they say, but I didn't see it.  Pap told me.  But anyway it all come of
looking at the moon that way, like a fool.

Well, the days went along, and the river went down between its banks
again; and about the first thing we done was to bait one of the big
hooks with a skinned rabbit and set it and catch a catfish that was
as big as a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over two
hundred pounds. We couldn't handle him, of course; he would a flung us
into Illinois.  We just set there and watched him rip and tear around
till he drownded.  We found a brass button in his stomach and a round
ball, and lots of rubbage.  We split the ball open with the hatchet,
and there was a spool in it.  Jim said he'd had it there a long time, to
coat it over so and make a ball of it.  It was as big a fish as was ever
catched in the Mississippi, I reckon.  Jim said he hadn't ever seen
a bigger one.  He would a been worth a good deal over at the village.
 They peddle out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-house
there; everybody buys some of him; his meat's as white as snow and makes
a good fry.

Next morning I said it was getting slow and dull, and I wanted to get a
stirring up some way.  I said I reckoned I would slip over the river and
find out what was going on.  Jim liked that notion; but he said I
must go in the dark and look sharp.  Then he studied it over and said,
couldn't I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl?
 That was a good notion, too.  So we shortened up one of the calico
gowns, and I turned up my trouser-legs to my knees and got into it.  Jim
hitched it behind with the hooks, and it was a fair fit.  I put on the
sun-bonnet and tied it under my chin, and then for a body to look in
and see my face was like looking down a joint of stove-pipe.  Jim said
nobody would know me, even in the daytime, hardly.  I practiced around
all day to get the hang of the things, and by and by I could do pretty
well in them, only Jim said I didn't walk like a girl; and he said
I must quit pulling up my gown to get at my britches-pocket.  I took
notice, and done better.

I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark.

I started across to the town from a little below the ferry-landing, and
the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town.  I
tied up and started along the bank.  There was a light burning in a
little shanty that hadn't been lived in for a long time, and I wondered
who had took up quarters there.  I slipped up and peeped in at the
window.  There was a woman about forty year old in there knitting by
a candle that was on a pine table.  I didn't know her face; she was a
stranger, for you couldn't start a face in that town that I didn't know.
 Now this was lucky, because I was weakening; I was getting afraid I had
come; people might know my voice and find me out.  But if this woman had
been in such a little town two days she could tell me all I wanted to
know; so I knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn't forget I
was a girl.




CHAPTER XI.

"COME in," says the woman, and I did.  She says:  "Take a cheer."

I done it.  She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says:

"What might your name be?"

"Sarah Williams."

"Where 'bouts do you live?  In this neighborhood?'

"No'm.  In Hookerville, seven mile below.  I've walked all the way and
I'm all tired out."

"Hungry, too, I reckon.  I'll find you something."

"No'm, I ain't hungry.  I was so hungry I had to stop two miles below
here at a farm; so I ain't hungry no more.  It's what makes me so late.
My mother's down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to
tell my uncle Abner Moore.  He lives at the upper end of the town, she
says.  I hain't ever been here before.  Do you know him?"

"No; but I don't know everybody yet.  I haven't lived here quite two
weeks. It's a considerable ways to the upper end of the town.  You
better stay here all night.  Take off your bonnet."

"No," I says; "I'll rest a while, I reckon, and go on.  I ain't afeared
of the dark."

She said she wouldn't let me go by myself, but her husband would be in
by and by, maybe in a hour and a half, and she'd send him along with me.
Then she got to talking about her husband, and about her relations up
the river, and her relations down the river, and about how much better
off they used to was, and how they didn't know but they'd made a mistake
coming to our town, instead of letting well alone--and so on and so on,
till I was afeard I had made a mistake coming to her to find out what
was going on in the town; but by and by she dropped on to pap and the
murder, and then I was pretty willing to let her clatter right along.
 She told about me and Tom Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars (only
she got it ten) and all about pap and what a hard lot he was, and what
a hard lot I was, and at last she got down to where I was murdered.  I
says:

"Who done it?  We've heard considerable about these goings on down in
Hookerville, but we don't know who 'twas that killed Huck Finn."

"Well, I reckon there's a right smart chance of people _here_ that'd
like to know who killed him.  Some think old Finn done it himself."

"No--is that so?"

"Most everybody thought it at first.  He'll never know how nigh he come
to getting lynched.  But before night they changed around and judged it
was done by a runaway nigger named Jim."

"Why _he_--"

I stopped.  I reckoned I better keep still.  She run on, and never
noticed I had put in at all:

"The nigger run off the very night Huck Finn was killed.  So there's a
reward out for him--three hundred dollars.  And there's a reward out for
old Finn, too--two hundred dollars.  You see, he come to town the
morning after the murder, and told about it, and was out with 'em on the
ferryboat hunt, and right away after he up and left.  Before night they
wanted to lynch him, but he was gone, you see.  Well, next day they
found out the nigger was gone; they found out he hadn't ben seen sence
ten o'clock the night the murder was done.  So then they put it on him,
you see; and while they was full of it, next day, back comes old Finn,
and went boo-hooing to Judge Thatcher to get money to hunt for the
nigger all over Illinois with. The judge gave him some, and that evening
he got drunk, and was around till after midnight with a couple of mighty
hard-looking strangers, and then went off with them.  Well, he hain't
come back sence, and they ain't looking for him back till this thing
blows over a little, for people thinks now that he killed his boy and
fixed things so folks would think robbers done it, and then he'd get
Huck's money without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit.
 People do say he warn't any too good to do it.  Oh, he's sly, I reckon.
 If he don't come back for a year he'll be all right.  You can't prove
anything on him, you know; everything will be quieted down then, and
he'll walk in Huck's money as easy as nothing."

"Yes, I reckon so, 'm.  I don't see nothing in the way of it.  Has
everybody quit thinking the nigger done it?"

"Oh, no, not everybody.  A good many thinks he done it.  But they'll get
the nigger pretty soon now, and maybe they can scare it out of him."

"Why, are they after him yet?"

"Well, you're innocent, ain't you!  Does three hundred dollars lay
around every day for people to pick up?  Some folks think the nigger
ain't far from here.  I'm one of them--but I hain't talked it around.  A
few days ago I was talking with an old couple that lives next door in
the log shanty, and they happened to say hardly anybody ever goes to
that island over yonder that they call Jackson's Island.  Don't anybody
live there? says I. No, nobody, says they.  I didn't say any more, but
I done some thinking.  I was pretty near certain I'd seen smoke over
there, about the head of the island, a day or two before that, so I says
to myself, like as not that nigger's hiding over there; anyway, says
I, it's worth the trouble to give the place a hunt.  I hain't seen any
smoke sence, so I reckon maybe he's gone, if it was him; but husband's
going over to see--him and another man.  He was gone up the river; but he
got back to-day, and I told him as soon as he got here two hours ago."

I had got so uneasy I couldn't set still.  I had to do something with my
hands; so I took up a needle off of the table and went to threading
it. My hands shook, and I was making a bad job of it.  When the woman
stopped talking I looked up, and she was looking at me pretty curious
and smiling a little.  I put down the needle and thread, and let on to
be interested--and I was, too--and says:

"Three hundred dollars is a power of money.  I wish my mother could get
it. Is your husband going over there to-night?"

"Oh, yes.  He went up-town with the man I was telling you of, to get a
boat and see if they could borrow another gun.  They'll go over after
midnight."

"Couldn't they see better if they was to wait till daytime?"

"Yes.  And couldn't the nigger see better, too?  After midnight he'll
likely be asleep, and they can slip around through the woods and hunt up
his camp fire all the better for the dark, if he's got one."

"I didn't think of that."

The woman kept looking at me pretty curious, and I didn't feel a bit
comfortable.  Pretty soon she says,

"What did you say your name was, honey?"

"M--Mary Williams."

Somehow it didn't seem to me that I said it was Mary before, so I didn't
look up--seemed to me I said it was Sarah; so I felt sort of cornered,
and was afeared maybe I was looking it, too.  I wished the woman would
say something more; the longer she set still the uneasier I was.  But
now she says:

"Honey, I thought you said it was Sarah when you first come in?"

"Oh, yes'm, I did.  Sarah Mary Williams.  Sarah's my first name.  Some
calls me Sarah, some calls me Mary."

"Oh, that's the way of it?"

"Yes'm."

I was feeling better then, but I wished I was out of there, anyway.  I
couldn't look up yet.

Well, the woman fell to talking about how hard times was, and how poor
they had to live, and how the rats was as free as if they owned the
place, and so forth and so on, and then I got easy again.  She was right
about the rats. You'd see one stick his nose out of a hole in the corner
every little while.  She said she had to have things handy to throw at
them when she was alone, or they wouldn't give her no peace.  She showed
me a bar of lead twisted up into a knot, and said she was a good shot
with it generly, but she'd wrenched her arm a day or two ago, and didn't
know whether she could throw true now.  But she watched for a chance,
and directly banged away at a rat; but she missed him wide, and said
"Ouch!" it hurt her arm so.  Then she told me to try for the next one.
 I wanted to be getting away before the old man got back, but of course
I didn't let on.  I got the thing, and the first rat that showed his
nose I let drive, and if he'd a stayed where he was he'd a been a
tolerable sick rat.  She said that was first-rate, and she reckoned I
would hive the next one.  She went and got the lump of lead and fetched
it back, and brought along a hank of yarn which she wanted me to help
her with.  I held up my two hands and she put the hank over them, and
went on talking about her and her husband's matters.  But she broke off
to say:

"Keep your eye on the rats.  You better have the lead in your lap,
handy."

So she dropped the lump into my lap just at that moment, and I clapped
my legs together on it and she went on talking.  But only about a
minute. Then she took off the hank and looked me straight in the face,
and very pleasant, and says:

"Come, now, what's your real name?"

"Wh--what, mum?"

"What's your real name?  Is it Bill, or Tom, or Bob?--or what is it?"

I reckon I shook like a leaf, and I didn't know hardly what to do.  But
I says:

"Please to don't poke fun at a poor girl like me, mum.  If I'm in the
way here, I'll--"

"No, you won't.  Set down and stay where you are.  I ain't going to hurt
you, and I ain't going to tell on you, nuther.  You just tell me your
secret, and trust me.  I'll keep it; and, what's more, I'll help
you. So'll my old man if you want him to.  You see, you're a runaway
'prentice, that's all.  It ain't anything.  There ain't no harm in it.
You've been treated bad, and you made up your mind to cut.  Bless you,
child, I wouldn't tell on you.  Tell me all about it now, that's a good
boy."

So I said it wouldn't be no use to try to play it any longer, and I
would just make a clean breast and tell her everything, but she musn't
go back on her promise.  Then I told her my father and mother was dead,
and the law had bound me out to a mean old farmer in the country thirty
mile back from the river, and he treated me so bad I couldn't stand it
no longer; he went away to be gone a couple of days, and so I took my
chance and stole some of his daughter's old clothes and cleared out, and
I had been three nights coming the thirty miles.  I traveled nights,
and hid daytimes and slept, and the bag of bread and meat I carried from
home lasted me all the way, and I had a-plenty.  I said I believed my
uncle Abner Moore would take care of me, and so that was why I struck
out for this town of Goshen.

"Goshen, child?  This ain't Goshen.  This is St. Petersburg.  Goshen's
ten mile further up the river.  Who told you this was Goshen?"

"Why, a man I met at daybreak this morning, just as I was going to turn
into the woods for my regular sleep.  He told me when the roads forked I
must take the right hand, and five mile would fetch me to Goshen."

"He was drunk, I reckon.  He told you just exactly wrong."

"Well, he did act like he was drunk, but it ain't no matter now.  I got
to be moving along.  I'll fetch Goshen before daylight."

"Hold on a minute.  I'll put you up a snack to eat.  You might want it."

So she put me up a snack, and says:

"Say, when a cow's laying down, which end of her gets up first?  Answer
up prompt now--don't stop to study over it.  Which end gets up first?"

"The hind end, mum."

"Well, then, a horse?"

"The for'rard end, mum."

"Which side of a tree does the moss grow on?"

"North side."

"If fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how many of them eats with
their heads pointed the same direction?"

"The whole fifteen, mum."

"Well, I reckon you _have_ lived in the country.  I thought maybe you
was trying to hocus me again.  What's your real name, now?"

"George Peters, mum."

"Well, try to remember it, George.  Don't forget and tell me it's
Elexander before you go, and then get out by saying it's George
Elexander when I catch you.  And don't go about women in that old
calico.  You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe.
 Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the
thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and
poke the thread at it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a
man always does t'other way.  And when you throw at a rat or anything,
hitch yourself up a tiptoe and fetch your hand up over your head as
awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw
stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to
turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out
to one side, like a boy.  And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch
anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don't clap them
together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead.  Why, I
spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived
the other things just to make certain.  Now trot along to your uncle,
Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander Peters, and if you get into trouble
you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me, and I'll do what I can
to get you out of it.  Keep the river road all the way, and next time
you tramp take shoes and socks with you. The river road's a rocky one,
and your feet'll be in a condition when you get to Goshen, I reckon."

I went up the bank about fifty yards, and then I doubled on my tracks
and slipped back to where my canoe was, a good piece below the house.  I
jumped in, and was off in a hurry.  I went up-stream far enough to
make the head of the island, and then started across.  I took off the
sun-bonnet, for I didn't want no blinders on then.  When I was about the
middle I heard the clock begin to strike, so I stops and listens; the
sound come faint over the water but clear--eleven.  When I struck the
head of the island I never waited to blow, though I was most winded, but
I shoved right into the timber where my old camp used to be, and started
a good fire there on a high and dry spot.

Then I jumped in the canoe and dug out for our place, a mile and a half
below, as hard as I could go.  I landed, and slopped through the timber
and up the ridge and into the cavern.  There Jim laid, sound asleep on
the ground.  I roused him out and says:

"Git up and hump yourself, Jim!  There ain't a minute to lose.  They're
after us!"

Jim never asked no questions, he never said a word; but the way he
worked for the next half an hour showed about how he was scared.  By
that time everything we had in the world was on our raft, and she was
ready to be shoved out from the willow cove where she was hid.  We
put out the camp fire at the cavern the first thing, and didn't show a
candle outside after that.

I took the canoe out from the shore a little piece, and took a look;
but if there was a boat around I couldn't see it, for stars and shadows
ain't good to see by.  Then we got out the raft and slipped along down
in the shade, past the foot of the island dead still--never saying a
word.




CHAPTER XII.

IT must a been close on to one o'clock when we got below the island at
last, and the raft did seem to go mighty slow.  If a boat was to come
along we was going to take to the canoe and break for the Illinois
shore; and it was well a boat didn't come, for we hadn't ever thought to
put the gun in the canoe, or a fishing-line, or anything to eat.  We
was in ruther too much of a sweat to think of so many things.  It warn't
good judgment to put _everything_ on the raft.

If the men went to the island I just expect they found the camp fire I
built, and watched it all night for Jim to come.  Anyways, they stayed
away from us, and if my building the fire never fooled them it warn't no
fault of mine.  I played it as low down on them as I could.

When the first streak of day began to show we tied up to a towhead in a
big bend on the Illinois side, and hacked off cottonwood branches with
the hatchet, and covered up the raft with them so she looked like there
had been a cave-in in the bank there.  A tow-head is a sandbar that has
cottonwoods on it as thick as harrow-teeth.

We had mountains on the Missouri shore and heavy timber on the Illinois
side, and the channel was down the Missouri shore at that place, so we
warn't afraid of anybody running across us.  We laid there all day,
and watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and
up-bound steamboats fight the big river in the middle.  I told Jim all
about the time I had jabbering with that woman; and Jim said she was
a smart one, and if she was to start after us herself she wouldn't set
down and watch a camp fire--no, sir, she'd fetch a dog.  Well, then, I
said, why couldn't she tell her husband to fetch a dog?  Jim said he
bet she did think of it by the time the men was ready to start, and he
believed they must a gone up-town to get a dog and so they lost all that
time, or else we wouldn't be here on a towhead sixteen or seventeen mile
below the village--no, indeedy, we would be in that same old town again.
 So I said I didn't care what was the reason they didn't get us as long
as they didn't.

When it was beginning to come on dark we poked our heads out of the
cottonwood thicket, and looked up and down and across; nothing in sight;
so Jim took up some of the top planks of the raft and built a snug
wigwam to get under in blazing weather and rainy, and to keep the things
dry. Jim made a floor for the wigwam, and raised it a foot or more above
the level of the raft, so now the blankets and all the traps was out of
reach of steamboat waves.  Right in the middle of the wigwam we made a
layer of dirt about five or six inches deep with a frame around it for
to hold it to its place; this was to build a fire on in sloppy weather
or chilly; the wigwam would keep it from being seen.  We made an extra
steering-oar, too, because one of the others might get broke on a snag
or something. We fixed up a short forked stick to hang the old lantern
on, because we must always light the lantern whenever we see a steamboat
coming down-stream, to keep from getting run over; but we wouldn't have
to light it for up-stream boats unless we see we was in what they call
a "crossing"; for the river was pretty high yet, very low banks being
still a little under water; so up-bound boats didn't always run the
channel, but hunted easy water.

This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current
that was making over four mile an hour.  We catched fish and talked,
and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness.  It was kind of
solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking
up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it
warn't often that we laughed--only a little kind of a low chuckle.  We
had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to
us at all--that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides,
nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house could you see.  The
fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up.
In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand
people in St. Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful
spread of lights at two o'clock that still night.  There warn't a sound
there; everybody was asleep.

Every night now I used to slip ashore towards ten o'clock at some little
village, and buy ten or fifteen cents' worth of meal or bacon or other
stuff to eat; and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting
comfortable, and took him along.  Pap always said, take a chicken when
you get a chance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy
find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot.  I never see
pap when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to
say, anyway.

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a
watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of
that kind.  Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things if you
was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn't
anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.
 Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly
right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things
from the list and say we wouldn't borrow them any more--then he reckoned
it wouldn't be no harm to borrow the others.  So we talked it over all
one night, drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds
whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons,
or what.  But towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and
concluded to drop crabapples and p'simmons.  We warn't feeling just
right before that, but it was all comfortable now.  I was glad the way
it come out, too, because crabapples ain't ever good, and the p'simmons
wouldn't be ripe for two or three months yet.

We shot a water-fowl now and then that got up too early in the morning
or didn't go to bed early enough in the evening.  Take it all round, we
lived pretty high.

The fifth night below St. Louis we had a big storm after midnight, with
a power of thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in a solid
sheet. We stayed in the wigwam and let the raft take care of itself.
When the lightning glared out we could see a big straight river ahead,
and high, rocky bluffs on both sides.  By and by says I, "Hel-_lo_, Jim,
looky yonder!" It was a steamboat that had killed herself on a rock.
 We was drifting straight down for her.  The lightning showed her very
distinct.  She was leaning over, with part of her upper deck above
water, and you could see every little chimbly-guy clean and clear, and a
chair by the big bell, with an old slouch hat hanging on the back of it,
when the flashes come.

Well, it being away in the night and stormy, and all so mysterious-like,
I felt just the way any other boy would a felt when I see that wreck
laying there so mournful and lonesome in the middle of the river.  I
wanted to get aboard of her and slink around a little, and see what
there was there.  So I says:

"Le's land on her, Jim."

But Jim was dead against it at first.  He says:

"I doan' want to go fool'n 'long er no wrack.  We's doin' blame' well,
en we better let blame' well alone, as de good book says.  Like as not
dey's a watchman on dat wrack."

"Watchman your grandmother," I says; "there ain't nothing to watch but
the texas and the pilot-house; and do you reckon anybody's going to resk
his life for a texas and a pilot-house such a night as this, when
it's likely to break up and wash off down the river any minute?"  Jim
couldn't say nothing to that, so he didn't try.  "And besides," I says,
"we might borrow something worth having out of the captain's stateroom.
 Seegars, I bet you--and cost five cents apiece, solid cash.  Steamboat
captains is always rich, and get sixty dollars a month, and _they_ don't
care a cent what a thing costs, you know, long as they want it.  Stick a
candle in your pocket; I can't rest, Jim, till we give her a rummaging.
 Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing?  Not for pie, he
wouldn't. He'd call it an adventure--that's what he'd call it; and he'd
land on that wreck if it was his last act.  And wouldn't he throw style
into it?--wouldn't he spread himself, nor nothing?  Why, you'd think it
was Christopher C'lumbus discovering Kingdom-Come.  I wish Tom Sawyer
_was_ here."

Jim he grumbled a little, but give in.  He said we mustn't talk any more
than we could help, and then talk mighty low.  The lightning showed us
the wreck again just in time, and we fetched the stabboard derrick, and
made fast there.

The deck was high out here.  We went sneaking down the slope of it to
labboard, in the dark, towards the texas, feeling our way slow with our
feet, and spreading our hands out to fend off the guys, for it was so
dark we couldn't see no sign of them.  Pretty soon we struck the forward
end of the skylight, and clumb on to it; and the next step fetched us in
front of the captain's door, which was open, and by Jimminy, away down
through the texas-hall we see a light! and all in the same second we
seem to hear low voices in yonder!

Jim whispered and said he was feeling powerful sick, and told me to come
along.  I says, all right, and was going to start for the raft; but just
then I heard a voice wail out and say:

"Oh, please don't, boys; I swear I won't ever tell!"

Another voice said, pretty loud:

"It's a lie, Jim Turner.  You've acted this way before.  You always want
more'n your share of the truck, and you've always got it, too, because
you've swore 't if you didn't you'd tell.  But this time you've said
it jest one time too many.  You're the meanest, treacherousest hound in
this country."

By this time Jim was gone for the raft.  I was just a-biling with
curiosity; and I says to myself, Tom Sawyer wouldn't back out now,
and so I won't either; I'm a-going to see what's going on here.  So I
dropped on my hands and knees in the little passage, and crept aft
in the dark till there warn't but one stateroom betwixt me and the
cross-hall of the texas.  Then in there I see a man stretched on the
floor and tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him, and one
of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and the other one had a pistol.
 This one kept pointing the pistol at the man's head on the floor, and
saying:

"I'd _like_ to!  And I orter, too--a mean skunk!"

The man on the floor would shrivel up and say, "Oh, please don't, Bill;
I hain't ever goin' to tell."

And every time he said that the man with the lantern would laugh and
say:

"'Deed you _ain't!_  You never said no truer thing 'n that, you bet
you." And once he said:  "Hear him beg! and yit if we hadn't got the
best of him and tied him he'd a killed us both.  And what _for_?  Jist
for noth'n. Jist because we stood on our _rights_--that's what for.  But
I lay you ain't a-goin' to threaten nobody any more, Jim Turner.  Put
_up_ that pistol, Bill."

Bill says:

"I don't want to, Jake Packard.  I'm for killin' him--and didn't he kill
old Hatfield jist the same way--and don't he deserve it?"

"But I don't _want_ him killed, and I've got my reasons for it."

"Bless yo' heart for them words, Jake Packard!  I'll never forgit you
long's I live!" says the man on the floor, sort of blubbering.

Packard didn't take no notice of that, but hung up his lantern on a nail
and started towards where I was there in the dark, and motioned Bill
to come.  I crawfished as fast as I could about two yards, but the boat
slanted so that I couldn't make very good time; so to keep from getting
run over and catched I crawled into a stateroom on the upper side.
 The man came a-pawing along in the dark, and when Packard got to my
stateroom, he says:

"Here--come in here."

And in he come, and Bill after him.  But before they got in I was up
in the upper berth, cornered, and sorry I come.  Then they stood there,
with their hands on the ledge of the berth, and talked.  I couldn't see
them, but I could tell where they was by the whisky they'd been having.
 I was glad I didn't drink whisky; but it wouldn't made much difference
anyway, because most of the time they couldn't a treed me because I
didn't breathe.  I was too scared.  And, besides, a body _couldn't_
breathe and hear such talk.  They talked low and earnest.  Bill wanted
to kill Turner.  He says:

"He's said he'll tell, and he will.  If we was to give both our shares
to him _now_ it wouldn't make no difference after the row and the way
we've served him.  Shore's you're born, he'll turn State's evidence; now
you hear _me_.  I'm for putting him out of his troubles."

"So'm I," says Packard, very quiet.

"Blame it, I'd sorter begun to think you wasn't.  Well, then, that's all
right.  Le's go and do it."

"Hold on a minute; I hain't had my say yit.  You listen to me.
Shooting's good, but there's quieter ways if the thing's _got_ to be
done. But what I say is this:  it ain't good sense to go court'n around
after a halter if you can git at what you're up to in some way that's
jist as good and at the same time don't bring you into no resks.  Ain't
that so?"

"You bet it is.  But how you goin' to manage it this time?"

"Well, my idea is this:  we'll rustle around and gather up whatever
pickins we've overlooked in the staterooms, and shove for shore and hide
the truck. Then we'll wait.  Now I say it ain't a-goin' to be more'n two
hours befo' this wrack breaks up and washes off down the river.  See?
He'll be drownded, and won't have nobody to blame for it but his own
self.  I reckon that's a considerble sight better 'n killin' of him.
 I'm unfavorable to killin' a man as long as you can git aroun' it; it
ain't good sense, it ain't good morals.  Ain't I right?"

"Yes, I reck'n you are.  But s'pose she _don't_ break up and wash off?"

"Well, we can wait the two hours anyway and see, can't we?"

"All right, then; come along."

So they started, and I lit out, all in a cold sweat, and scrambled
forward. It was dark as pitch there; but I said, in a kind of a coarse
whisper, "Jim!" and he answered up, right at my elbow, with a sort of a
moan, and I says:

"Quick, Jim, it ain't no time for fooling around and moaning; there's a
gang of murderers in yonder, and if we don't hunt up their boat and set
her drifting down the river so these fellows can't get away from the
wreck there's one of 'em going to be in a bad fix.  But if we find their
boat we can put _all_ of 'em in a bad fix--for the sheriff 'll get 'em.
Quick--hurry!  I'll hunt the labboard side, you hunt the stabboard. You
start at the raft, and--"

"Oh, my lordy, lordy!  _raf'_?  Dey ain' no raf' no mo'; she done broke
loose en gone I--en here we is!"




CHAPTER XIII.

WELL, I catched my breath and most fainted.  Shut up on a wreck with
such a gang as that!  But it warn't no time to be sentimentering.  We'd
_got_ to find that boat now--had to have it for ourselves.  So we went
a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was,
too--seemed a week before we got to the stern.  No sign of a boat.  Jim
said he didn't believe he could go any further--so scared he hadn't
hardly any strength left, he said.  But I said, come on, if we get left
on this wreck we are in a fix, sure.  So on we prowled again.  We struck
for the stern of the texas, and found it, and then scrabbled along
forwards on the skylight, hanging on from shutter to shutter, for the
edge of the skylight was in the water.  When we got pretty close to the
cross-hall door there was the skiff, sure enough!  I could just barely
see her.  I felt ever so thankful.  In another second I would a been
aboard of her, but just then the door opened.  One of the men stuck his
head out only about a couple of foot from me, and I thought I was gone;
but he jerked it in again, and says:

"Heave that blame lantern out o' sight, Bill!"

He flung a bag of something into the boat, and then got in himself and
set down.  It was Packard.  Then Bill _he_ come out and got in.  Packard
says, in a low voice:

"All ready--shove off!"

I couldn't hardly hang on to the shutters, I was so weak.  But Bill
says:

"Hold on--'d you go through him?"

"No.  Didn't you?"

"No.  So he's got his share o' the cash yet."

"Well, then, come along; no use to take truck and leave money."

"Say, won't he suspicion what we're up to?"

"Maybe he won't.  But we got to have it anyway. Come along."

So they got out and went in.

The door slammed to because it was on the careened side; and in a half
second I was in the boat, and Jim come tumbling after me.  I out with my
knife and cut the rope, and away we went!

We didn't touch an oar, and we didn't speak nor whisper, nor hardly even
breathe.  We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the
paddle-box, and past the stern; then in a second or two more we was a
hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every
last sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.

When we was three or four hundred yards down-stream we see the lantern
show like a little spark at the texas door for a second, and we knowed
by that that the rascals had missed their boat, and was beginning to
understand that they was in just as much trouble now as Jim Turner was.

Then Jim manned the oars, and we took out after our raft.  Now was the
first time that I begun to worry about the men--I reckon I hadn't
had time to before.  I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for
murderers, to be in such a fix.  I says to myself, there ain't no
telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would
I like it?  So says I to Jim:

"The first light we see we'll land a hundred yards below it or above
it, in a place where it's a good hiding-place for you and the skiff, and
then I'll go and fix up some kind of a yarn, and get somebody to go for
that gang and get them out of their scrape, so they can be hung when
their time comes."

But that idea was a failure; for pretty soon it begun to storm again,
and this time worse than ever.  The rain poured down, and never a light
showed; everybody in bed, I reckon.  We boomed along down the river,
watching for lights and watching for our raft.  After a long time the
rain let up, but the clouds stayed, and the lightning kept whimpering,
and by and by a flash showed us a black thing ahead, floating, and we
made for it.

It was the raft, and mighty glad was we to get aboard of it again.  We
seen a light now away down to the right, on shore.  So I said I would
go for it. The skiff was half full of plunder which that gang had stole
there on the wreck.  We hustled it on to the raft in a pile, and I told
Jim to float along down, and show a light when he judged he had gone
about two mile, and keep it burning till I come; then I manned my oars
and shoved for the light.  As I got down towards it three or four more
showed--up on a hillside.  It was a village.  I closed in above the shore
light, and laid on my oars and floated.  As I went by I see it was a
lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a double-hull ferryboat.  I skimmed
around for the watchman, a-wondering whereabouts he slept; and by and
by I found him roosting on the bitts forward, with his head down between
his knees.  I gave his shoulder two or three little shoves, and begun to
cry.

He stirred up in a kind of a startlish way; but when he see it was only
me he took a good gap and stretch, and then he says:

"Hello, what's up?  Don't cry, bub.  What's the trouble?"

I says:

"Pap, and mam, and sis, and--"

Then I broke down.  He says:

"Oh, dang it now, _don't_ take on so; we all has to have our troubles,
and this 'n 'll come out all right.  What's the matter with 'em?"

"They're--they're--are you the watchman of the boat?"

"Yes," he says, kind of pretty-well-satisfied like.  "I'm the captain
and the owner and the mate and the pilot and watchman and head
deck-hand; and sometimes I'm the freight and passengers.  I ain't as
rich as old Jim Hornback, and I can't be so blame' generous and good
to Tom, Dick, and Harry as what he is, and slam around money the way he
does; but I've told him a many a time 't I wouldn't trade places with
him; for, says I, a sailor's life's the life for me, and I'm derned if
_I'd_ live two mile out o' town, where there ain't nothing ever goin'
on, not for all his spondulicks and as much more on top of it.  Says I--"

I broke in and says:

"They're in an awful peck of trouble, and--"

"_Who_ is?"

"Why, pap and mam and sis and Miss Hooker; and if you'd take your
ferryboat and go up there--"

"Up where?  Where are they?"

"On the wreck."

"What wreck?"

"Why, there ain't but one."

"What, you don't mean the Walter Scott?"

"Yes."

"Good land! what are they doin' _there_, for gracious sakes?"

"Well, they didn't go there a-purpose."

"I bet they didn't!  Why, great goodness, there ain't no chance for 'em
if they don't git off mighty quick!  Why, how in the nation did they
ever git into such a scrape?"

"Easy enough.  Miss Hooker was a-visiting up there to the town--"

"Yes, Booth's Landing--go on."

"She was a-visiting there at Booth's Landing, and just in the edge of
the evening she started over with her nigger woman in the horse-ferry
to stay all night at her friend's house, Miss What-you-may-call-her I
disremember her name--and they lost their steering-oar, and swung
around and went a-floating down, stern first, about two mile, and
saddle-baggsed on the wreck, and the ferryman and the nigger woman and
the horses was all lost, but Miss Hooker she made a grab and got aboard
the wreck.  Well, about an hour after dark we come along down in our
trading-scow, and it was so dark we didn't notice the wreck till we was
right on it; and so _we_ saddle-baggsed; but all of us was saved but
Bill Whipple--and oh, he _was_ the best cretur!--I most wish 't it had
been me, I do."

"My George!  It's the beatenest thing I ever struck.  And _then_ what
did you all do?"

"Well, we hollered and took on, but it's so wide there we couldn't
make nobody hear.  So pap said somebody got to get ashore and get help
somehow. I was the only one that could swim, so I made a dash for it,
and Miss Hooker she said if I didn't strike help sooner, come here and
hunt up her uncle, and he'd fix the thing.  I made the land about a mile
below, and been fooling along ever since, trying to get people to do
something, but they said, 'What, in such a night and such a current?
There ain't no sense in it; go for the steam ferry.'  Now if you'll go
and--"

"By Jackson, I'd _like_ to, and, blame it, I don't know but I will; but
who in the dingnation's a-going' to _pay_ for it?  Do you reckon your
pap--"

"Why _that's_ all right.  Miss Hooker she tole me, _particular_, that
her uncle Hornback--"

"Great guns! is _he_ her uncle?  Looky here, you break for that light
over yonder-way, and turn out west when you git there, and about a
quarter of a mile out you'll come to the tavern; tell 'em to dart you
out to Jim Hornback's, and he'll foot the bill.  And don't you fool
around any, because he'll want to know the news.  Tell him I'll have
his niece all safe before he can get to town.  Hump yourself, now; I'm
a-going up around the corner here to roust out my engineer."

I struck for the light, but as soon as he turned the corner I went back
and got into my skiff and bailed her out, and then pulled up shore in
the easy water about six hundred yards, and tucked myself in among
some woodboats; for I couldn't rest easy till I could see the ferryboat
start. But take it all around, I was feeling ruther comfortable on
accounts of taking all this trouble for that gang, for not many would
a done it.  I wished the widow knowed about it.  I judged she would be
proud of me for helping these rapscallions, because rapscallions and
dead beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest
in.

Well, before long here comes the wreck, dim and dusky, sliding along
down! A kind of cold shiver went through me, and then I struck out for
her.  She was very deep, and I see in a minute there warn't much chance
for anybody being alive in her.  I pulled all around her and hollered
a little, but there wasn't any answer; all dead still.  I felt a little
bit heavy-hearted about the gang, but not much, for I reckoned if they
could stand it I could.

Then here comes the ferryboat; so I shoved for the middle of the river
on a long down-stream slant; and when I judged I was out of eye-reach
I laid on my oars, and looked back and see her go and smell around the
wreck for Miss Hooker's remainders, because the captain would know her
uncle Hornback would want them; and then pretty soon the ferryboat give
it up and went for the shore, and I laid into my work and went a-booming
down the river.

It did seem a powerful long time before Jim's light showed up; and when
it did show it looked like it was a thousand mile off.  By the time I
got there the sky was beginning to get a little gray in the east; so we
struck for an island, and hid the raft, and sunk the skiff, and turned
in and slept like dead people.




CHAPTER XIV.

BY and by, when we got up, we turned over the truck the gang had stole
off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all
sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three
boxes of seegars.  We hadn't ever been this rich before in neither of
our lives.  The seegars was prime.  We laid off all the afternoon in the
woods talking, and me reading the books, and having a general good
time. I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck and at the
ferryboat, and I said these kinds of things was adventures; but he said
he didn't want no more adventures.  He said that when I went in the
texas and he crawled back to get on the raft and found her gone he
nearly died, because he judged it was all up with _him_ anyway it could
be fixed; for if he didn't get saved he would get drownded; and if he
did get saved, whoever saved him would send him back home so as to get
the reward, and then Miss Watson would sell him South, sure.  Well, he
was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a
nigger.

I read considerable to Jim about kings and dukes and earls and such, and
how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each
other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, 'stead
of mister; and Jim's eyes bugged out, and he was interested.  He says:

"I didn' know dey was so many un um.  I hain't hearn 'bout none un um,
skasely, but ole King Sollermun, onless you counts dem kings dat's in a
pack er k'yards.  How much do a king git?"

"Get?"  I says; "why, they get a thousand dollars a month if they want
it; they can have just as much as they want; everything belongs to
them."

"_Ain'_ dat gay?  En what dey got to do, Huck?"

"_They_ don't do nothing!  Why, how you talk! They just set around."

"No; is dat so?"

"Of course it is.  They just set around--except, maybe, when there's a
war; then they go to the war.  But other times they just lazy around; or
go hawking--just hawking and sp--Sh!--d' you hear a noise?"

We skipped out and looked; but it warn't nothing but the flutter of a
steamboat's wheel away down, coming around the point; so we come back.

"Yes," says I, "and other times, when things is dull, they fuss with the
parlyment; and if everybody don't go just so he whacks their heads off.
But mostly they hang round the harem."

"Roun' de which?"

"Harem."

"What's de harem?"

"The place where he keeps his wives.  Don't you know about the harem?
Solomon had one; he had about a million wives."

"Why, yes, dat's so; I--I'd done forgot it.  A harem's a bo'd'n-house, I
reck'n.  Mos' likely dey has rackety times in de nussery.  En I reck'n
de wives quarrels considable; en dat 'crease de racket.  Yit dey say
Sollermun de wises' man dat ever live'.  I doan' take no stock in
dat. Bekase why: would a wise man want to live in de mids' er sich a
blim-blammin' all de time?  No--'deed he wouldn't.  A wise man 'ud take
en buil' a biler-factry; en den he could shet _down_ de biler-factry
when he want to res'."

"Well, but he _was_ the wisest man, anyway; because the widow she told
me so, her own self."

"I doan k'yer what de widder say, he _warn't_ no wise man nuther.  He
had some er de dad-fetchedes' ways I ever see.  Does you know 'bout dat
chile dat he 'uz gwyne to chop in two?"

"Yes, the widow told me all about it."

"_Well_, den!  Warn' dat de beatenes' notion in de worl'?  You jes'
take en look at it a minute.  Dah's de stump, dah--dat's one er de women;
heah's you--dat's de yuther one; I's Sollermun; en dish yer dollar bill's
de chile.  Bofe un you claims it.  What does I do?  Does I shin aroun'
mongs' de neighbors en fine out which un you de bill _do_ b'long to, en
han' it over to de right one, all safe en soun', de way dat anybody dat
had any gumption would?  No; I take en whack de bill in _two_, en give
half un it to you, en de yuther half to de yuther woman.  Dat's de way
Sollermun was gwyne to do wid de chile.  Now I want to ast you:  what's
de use er dat half a bill?--can't buy noth'n wid it.  En what use is a
half a chile?  I wouldn' give a dern for a million un um."

"But hang it, Jim, you've clean missed the point--blame it, you've missed
it a thousand mile."

"Who?  Me?  Go 'long.  Doan' talk to me 'bout yo' pints.  I reck'n I
knows sense when I sees it; en dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as
dat. De 'spute warn't 'bout a half a chile, de 'spute was 'bout a whole
chile; en de man dat think he kin settle a 'spute 'bout a whole chile
wid a half a chile doan' know enough to come in out'n de rain.  Doan'
talk to me 'bout Sollermun, Huck, I knows him by de back."

"But I tell you you don't get the point."

"Blame de point!  I reck'n I knows what I knows.  En mine you, de _real_
pint is down furder--it's down deeper.  It lays in de way Sollermun was
raised.  You take a man dat's got on'y one or two chillen; is dat man
gwyne to be waseful o' chillen?  No, he ain't; he can't 'ford it.  _He_
know how to value 'em.  But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million
chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt.  _He_ as soon chop a
chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'.  A chile er two, mo' er less,
warn't no consekens to Sollermun, dad fatch him!"

I never see such a nigger.  If he got a notion in his head once, there
warn't no getting it out again.  He was the most down on Solomon of
any nigger I ever see.  So I went to talking about other kings, and let
Solomon slide.  I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off
in France long time ago; and about his little boy the dolphin, that
would a been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say
he died there.

"Po' little chap."

"But some says he got out and got away, and come to America."

"Dat's good!  But he'll be pooty lonesome--dey ain' no kings here, is
dey, Huck?"

"No."

"Den he cain't git no situation.  What he gwyne to do?"

"Well, I don't know.  Some of them gets on the police, and some of them
learns people how to talk French."

"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"

"_No_, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said--not a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted!  How do dat come?"

"I don't know; but it's so.  I got some of their jabber out of a book.
S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy--what would you
think?"

"I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over de head--dat is, if he
warn't white.  I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything.  It's only saying, do you know
how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he _say_ it?"

"Why, he _is_ a-saying it.  That's a Frenchman's _way_ of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout
it.  Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't
it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different
from _us_?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a _Frenchman_ to talk
different from us?  You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man.  Is a cow a
man?--er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the
yuther of 'em.  Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"_Well_, den!  Dad blame it, why doan' he _talk_ like a man?  You answer
me _dat_!"

I see it warn't no use wasting words--you can't learn a nigger to argue.
So I quit.




CHAPTER XV.

WE judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom
of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was
after.  We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the
Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.

Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead
to tie to, for it wouldn't do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled
ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn't anything
but little saplings to tie to.  I passed the line around one of them
right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and
the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and
away she went.  I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and
scared I couldn't budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me--and
then there warn't no raft in sight; you couldn't see twenty yards.  I
jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle
and set her back a stroke.  But she didn't come.  I was in such a hurry
I hadn't untied her.  I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so
excited my hands shook so I couldn't hardly do anything with them.

As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right
down the towhead.  That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead
warn't sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot
out into the solid white fog, and hadn't no more idea which way I was
going than a dead man.

Thinks I, it won't do to paddle; first I know I'll run into the bank
or a towhead or something; I got to set still and float, and yet it's
mighty fidgety business to have to hold your hands still at such a time.
 I whooped and listened.  Away down there somewheres I hears a small
whoop, and up comes my spirits.  I went tearing after it, listening
sharp to hear it again.  The next time it come I see I warn't heading
for it, but heading away to the right of it.  And the next time I was
heading away to the left of it--and not gaining on it much either, for
I was flying around, this way and that and t'other, but it was going
straight ahead all the time.

I did wish the fool would think to beat a tin pan, and beat it all the
time, but he never did, and it was the still places between the whoops
that was making the trouble for me.  Well, I fought along, and directly
I hears the whoop _behind_ me.  I was tangled good now.  That was
somebody else's whoop, or else I was turned around.

I throwed the paddle down.  I heard the whoop again; it was behind me
yet, but in a different place; it kept coming, and kept changing its
place, and I kept answering, till by and by it was in front of me again,
and I knowed the current had swung the canoe's head down-stream, and I
was all right if that was Jim and not some other raftsman hollering.
 I couldn't tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don't look
natural nor sound natural in a fog.

The whooping went on, and in about a minute I come a-booming down on a
cut bank with smoky ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed
me off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that fairly
roared, the currrent was tearing by them so swift.

In another second or two it was solid white and still again.  I set
perfectly still then, listening to my heart thump, and I reckon I didn't
draw a breath while it thumped a hundred.

I just give up then.  I knowed what the matter was.  That cut bank
was an island, and Jim had gone down t'other side of it.  It warn't no
towhead that you could float by in ten minutes.  It had the big timber
of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long and more than
half a mile wide.

I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon.  I
was floating along, of course, four or five miles an hour; but you don't
ever think of that.  No, you _feel_ like you are laying dead still on
the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by you don't think to
yourself how fast _you're_ going, but you catch your breath and think,
my! how that snag's tearing along.  If you think it ain't dismal and
lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it
once--you'll see.

Next, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and then; at last I hears
the answer a long ways off, and tries to follow it, but I couldn't do
it, and directly I judged I'd got into a nest of towheads, for I had
little dim glimpses of them on both sides of me--sometimes just a narrow
channel between, and some that I couldn't see I knowed was there because
I'd hear the wash of the current against the old dead brush and trash
that hung over the banks.  Well, I warn't long loosing the whoops down
amongst the towheads; and I only tried to chase them a little while,
anyway, because it was worse than chasing a Jack-o'-lantern.  You never
knowed a sound dodge around so, and swap places so quick and so much.

I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four or five times, to
keep from knocking the islands out of the river; and so I judged the
raft must be butting into the bank every now and then, or else it would
get further ahead and clear out of hearing--it was floating a little
faster than what I was.

Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by and by, but I couldn't
hear no sign of a whoop nowheres.  I reckoned Jim had fetched up on a
snag, maybe, and it was all up with him.  I was good and tired, so I
laid down in the canoe and said I wouldn't bother no more.  I didn't
want to go to sleep, of course; but I was so sleepy I couldn't help it;
so I thought I would take jest one little cat-nap.

But I reckon it was more than a cat-nap, for when I waked up the stars
was shining bright, the fog was all gone, and I was spinning down a
big bend stern first.  First I didn't know where I was; I thought I was
dreaming; and when things began to come back to me they seemed to come
up dim out of last week.

It was a monstrous big river here, with the tallest and the thickest
kind of timber on both banks; just a solid wall, as well as I could see
by the stars.  I looked away down-stream, and seen a black speck on the
water. I took after it; but when I got to it it warn't nothing but a
couple of sawlogs made fast together.  Then I see another speck, and
chased that; then another, and this time I was right.  It was the raft.

When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his
knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering-oar.  The
other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and
branches and dirt.  So she'd had a rough time.

I made fast and laid down under Jim's nose on the raft, and began to
gap, and stretch my fists out against Jim, and says:

"Hello, Jim, have I been asleep?  Why didn't you stir me up?"

"Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck?  En you ain' dead--you ain'
drownded--you's back agin?  It's too good for true, honey, it's too good
for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o' you.  No, you ain'
dead! you's back agin, 'live en soun', jis de same ole Huck--de same ole
Huck, thanks to goodness!"

"What's the matter with you, Jim?  You been a-drinking?"

"Drinkin'?  Has I ben a-drinkin'?  Has I had a chance to be a-drinkin'?"

"Well, then, what makes you talk so wild?"

"How does I talk wild?"

"_How_?  Why, hain't you been talking about my coming back, and all that
stuff, as if I'd been gone away?"

"Huck--Huck Finn, you look me in de eye; look me in de eye.  _Hain't_ you
ben gone away?"

"Gone away?  Why, what in the nation do you mean?  I hain't been gone
anywheres.  Where would I go to?"

"Well, looky here, boss, dey's sumf'n wrong, dey is.  Is I _me_, or who
_is_ I? Is I heah, or whah _is_ I?  Now dat's what I wants to know."

"Well, I think you're here, plain enough, but I think you're a
tangle-headed old fool, Jim."

"I is, is I?  Well, you answer me dis:  Didn't you tote out de line in
de canoe fer to make fas' to de tow-head?"

"No, I didn't.  What tow-head?  I hain't see no tow-head."

"You hain't seen no towhead?  Looky here, didn't de line pull loose en
de raf' go a-hummin' down de river, en leave you en de canoe behine in
de fog?"

"What fog?"

"Why, de fog!--de fog dat's been aroun' all night.  En didn't you whoop,
en didn't I whoop, tell we got mix' up in de islands en one un us got
los' en t'other one was jis' as good as los', 'kase he didn' know whah
he wuz? En didn't I bust up agin a lot er dem islands en have a turrible
time en mos' git drownded?  Now ain' dat so, boss--ain't it so?  You
answer me dat."

"Well, this is too many for me, Jim.  I hain't seen no fog, nor no
islands, nor no troubles, nor nothing.  I been setting here talking with
you all night till you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon
I done the same.  You couldn't a got drunk in that time, so of course
you've been dreaming."

"Dad fetch it, how is I gwyne to dream all dat in ten minutes?"

"Well, hang it all, you did dream it, because there didn't any of it
happen."

"But, Huck, it's all jis' as plain to me as--"

"It don't make no difference how plain it is; there ain't nothing in it.
I know, because I've been here all the time."

Jim didn't say nothing for about five minutes, but set there studying
over it.  Then he says:

"Well, den, I reck'n I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats ef it ain't
de powerfullest dream I ever see.  En I hain't ever had no dream b'fo'
dat's tired me like dis one."

"Oh, well, that's all right, because a dream does tire a body like
everything sometimes.  But this one was a staving dream; tell me all
about it, Jim."

So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as
it happened, only he painted it up considerable.  Then he said he must
start in and "'terpret" it, because it was sent for a warning.  He said
the first towhead stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but
the current was another man that would get us away from him.  The whoops
was warnings that would come to us every now and then, and if we didn't
try hard to make out to understand them they'd just take us into bad
luck, 'stead of keeping us out of it.  The lot of towheads was troubles
we was going to get into with quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean
folks, but if we minded our business and didn't talk back and aggravate
them, we would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big
clear river, which was the free States, and wouldn't have no more
trouble.

It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it
was clearing up again now.

"Oh, well, that's all interpreted well enough as far as it goes, Jim," I
says; "but what does _these_ things stand for?"

It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the smashed oar.  You
could see them first-rate now.

Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash
again.  He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he
couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place
again right away.  But when he did get the thing straightened around he
looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:

"What do dey stan' for?  I'se gwyne to tell you.  When I got all wore
out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz
mos' broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what become
er me en de raf'.  En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe
en soun', de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo'
foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could
make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie.  Dat truck dah is _trash_; en trash
is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em
ashamed."

Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without
saying anything but that.  But that was enough.  It made me feel so mean
I could almost kissed _his_ foot to get him to take it back.

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble
myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it
afterwards, neither.  I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I
wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way.




CHAPTER XVI.

WE slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a
monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession.  She had
four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty
men, likely.  She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open
camp fire in the middle, and a tall flag-pole at each end.  There was a
power of style about her.  It _amounted_ to something being a raftsman
on such a craft as that.

We went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up and got
hot.  The river was very wide, and was walled with solid timber on
both sides; you couldn't see a break in it hardly ever, or a light.  We
talked about Cairo, and wondered whether we would know it when we got to
it.  I said likely we wouldn't, because I had heard say there warn't but
about a dozen houses there, and if they didn't happen to have them lit
up, how was we going to know we was passing a town?  Jim said if the two
big rivers joined together there, that would show.  But I said maybe
we might think we was passing the foot of an island and coming into the
same old river again. That disturbed Jim--and me too.  So the question
was, what to do?  I said, paddle ashore the first time a light showed,
and tell them pap was behind, coming along with a trading-scow, and
was a green hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to
Cairo.  Jim thought it was a good idea, so we took a smoke on it and
waited.

There warn't nothing to do now but to look out sharp for the town, and
not pass it without seeing it.  He said he'd be mighty sure to see it,
because he'd be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it
he'd be in a slave country again and no more show for freedom.  Every
little while he jumps up and says:

"Dah she is?"

But it warn't.  It was Jack-o'-lanterns, or lightning bugs; so he set
down again, and went to watching, same as before.  Jim said it made him
all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.  Well, I can
tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him,
because I begun to get it through my head that he _was_ most free--and
who was to blame for it?  Why, _me_.  I couldn't get that out of my
conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn't
rest; I couldn't stay still in one place.  It hadn't ever come home to
me before, what this thing was that I was doing.  But now it did; and it
stayed with me, and scorched me more and more.  I tried to make out to
myself that I warn't to blame, because I didn't run Jim off from his
rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every
time, "But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a
paddled ashore and told somebody."  That was so--I couldn't get around
that noway.  That was where it pinched.  Conscience says to me, "What
had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her nigger go off
right under your eyes and never say one single word?  What did that poor
old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean?  Why, she tried to
learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to
be good to you every way she knowed how.  _That's_ what she done."

I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead.  I
fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was
fidgeting up and down past me.  We neither of us could keep still.
 Every time he danced around and says, "Dah's Cairo!" it went through me
like a shot, and I thought if it _was_ Cairo I reckoned I would die of
miserableness.

Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself.  He was
saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he
would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he
got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to
where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the
two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an
Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk.  He wouldn't ever dared to talk such
talk in his life before.  Just see what a difference it made in him the
minute he judged he was about free.  It was according to the old saying,
"Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell."  Thinks I, this is what
comes of my not thinking.  Here was this nigger, which I had as good
as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would
steal his children--children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a
man that hadn't ever done me no harm.

I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him.  My
conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says
to it, "Let up on me--it ain't too late yet--I'll paddle ashore at the
first light and tell."  I felt easy and happy and light as a feather
right off.  All my troubles was gone.  I went to looking out sharp for a
light, and sort of singing to myself.  By and by one showed.  Jim sings
out:

"We's safe, Huck, we's safe!  Jump up and crack yo' heels!  Dat's de
good ole Cairo at las', I jis knows it!"

I says:

"I'll take the canoe and go and see, Jim.  It mightn't be, you know."

He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom
for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says:

"Pooty soon I'll be a-shout'n' for joy, en I'll say, it's all on
accounts o' Huck; I's a free man, en I couldn't ever ben free ef it
hadn' ben for Huck; Huck done it.  Jim won't ever forgit you, Huck;
you's de bes' fren' Jim's ever had; en you's de _only_ fren' ole Jim's
got now."

I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says
this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me.  I went along
slow then, and I warn't right down certain whether I was glad I started
or whether I warn't.  When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:

"Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on'y white genlman dat ever kep' his
promise to ole Jim."

Well, I just felt sick.  But I says, I _got_ to do it--I can't get _out_
of it.  Right then along comes a skiff with two men in it with guns, and
they stopped and I stopped.  One of them says:

"What's that yonder?"

"A piece of a raft," I says.

"Do you belong on it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Any men on it?"

"Only one, sir."

"Well, there's five niggers run off to-night up yonder, above the head
of the bend.  Is your man white or black?"

I didn't answer up prompt.  I tried to, but the words wouldn't come. I
tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn't man
enough--hadn't the spunk of a rabbit.  I see I was weakening; so I just
give up trying, and up and says:

"He's white."

"I reckon we'll go and see for ourselves."

"I wish you would," says I, "because it's pap that's there, and maybe
you'd help me tow the raft ashore where the light is.  He's sick--and so
is mam and Mary Ann."

"Oh, the devil! we're in a hurry, boy.  But I s'pose we've got to.
 Come, buckle to your paddle, and let's get along."

I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars.  When we had made a
stroke or two, I says:

"Pap'll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can tell you.  Everybody goes
away when I want them to help me tow the raft ashore, and I can't do it
by myself."

"Well, that's infernal mean.  Odd, too.  Say, boy, what's the matter
with your father?"

"It's the--a--the--well, it ain't anything much."

They stopped pulling.  It warn't but a mighty little ways to the raft
now. One says:

"Boy, that's a lie.  What _is_ the matter with your pap?  Answer up
square now, and it'll be the better for you."

"I will, sir, I will, honest--but don't leave us, please.  It's
the--the--Gentlemen, if you'll only pull ahead, and let me heave you the
headline, you won't have to come a-near the raft--please do."

"Set her back, John, set her back!" says one.  They backed water.  "Keep
away, boy--keep to looard.  Confound it, I just expect the wind has
blowed it to us.  Your pap's got the small-pox, and you know it precious
well.  Why didn't you come out and say so?  Do you want to spread it all
over?"

"Well," says I, a-blubbering, "I've told everybody before, and they just
went away and left us."

"Poor devil, there's something in that.  We are right down sorry for
you, but we--well, hang it, we don't want the small-pox, you see.  Look
here, I'll tell you what to do.  Don't you try to land by yourself, or
you'll smash everything to pieces.  You float along down about twenty
miles, and you'll come to a town on the left-hand side of the river.  It
will be long after sun-up then, and when you ask for help you tell them
your folks are all down with chills and fever.  Don't be a fool again,
and let people guess what is the matter.  Now we're trying to do you a
kindness; so you just put twenty miles between us, that's a good boy.
 It wouldn't do any good to land yonder where the light is--it's only a
wood-yard. Say, I reckon your father's poor, and I'm bound to say he's
in pretty hard luck.  Here, I'll put a twenty-dollar gold piece on this
board, and you get it when it floats by.  I feel mighty mean to leave
you; but my kingdom! it won't do to fool with small-pox, don't you see?"

"Hold on, Parker," says the other man, "here's a twenty to put on the
board for me.  Good-bye, boy; you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you'll
be all right."

"That's so, my boy--good-bye, good-bye.  If you see any runaway niggers
you get help and nab them, and you can make some money by it."

"Good-bye, sir," says I; "I won't let no runaway niggers get by me if I
can help it."

They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I
knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me
to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get _started_ right when
he's little ain't got no show--when the pinch comes there ain't nothing
to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat.  Then I
thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a done right
and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now?  No, says
I, I'd feel bad--I'd feel just the same way I do now.  Well, then, says
I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do
right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
 I was stuck.  I couldn't answer that.  So I reckoned I wouldn't bother
no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at
the time.

I went into the wigwam; Jim warn't there.  I looked all around; he
warn't anywhere.  I says:

"Jim!"

"Here I is, Huck.  Is dey out o' sight yit?  Don't talk loud."

He was in the river under the stern oar, with just his nose out.  I told
him they were out of sight, so he come aboard.  He says:

"I was a-listenin' to all de talk, en I slips into de river en was gwyne
to shove for sho' if dey come aboard.  Den I was gwyne to swim to de
raf' agin when dey was gone.  But lawsy, how you did fool 'em, Huck!
 Dat _wuz_ de smartes' dodge!  I tell you, chile, I'spec it save' ole
Jim--ole Jim ain't going to forgit you for dat, honey."

Then we talked about the money.  It was a pretty good raise--twenty
dollars apiece.  Jim said we could take deck passage on a steamboat
now, and the money would last us as far as we wanted to go in the free
States. He said twenty mile more warn't far for the raft to go, but he
wished we was already there.

Towards daybreak we tied up, and Jim was mighty particular about hiding
the raft good.  Then he worked all day fixing things in bundles, and
getting all ready to quit rafting.

That night about ten we hove in sight of the lights of a town away down
in a left-hand bend.

I went off in the canoe to ask about it.  Pretty soon I found a man out
in the river with a skiff, setting a trot-line.  I ranged up and says:

"Mister, is that town Cairo?"

"Cairo? no.  You must be a blame' fool."

"What town is it, mister?"

"If you want to know, go and find out.  If you stay here botherin'
around me for about a half a minute longer you'll get something you
won't want."

I paddled to the raft.  Jim was awful disappointed, but I said never
mind, Cairo would be the next place, I reckoned.

We passed another town before daylight, and I was going out again; but
it was high ground, so I didn't go.  No high ground about Cairo, Jim
said. I had forgot it.  We laid up for the day on a towhead tolerable
close to the left-hand bank.  I begun to suspicion something.  So did
Jim.  I says:

"Maybe we went by Cairo in the fog that night."

He says:

"Doan' le's talk about it, Huck.  Po' niggers can't have no luck.  I
awluz 'spected dat rattlesnake-skin warn't done wid its work."

"I wish I'd never seen that snake-skin, Jim--I do wish I'd never laid
eyes on it."

"It ain't yo' fault, Huck; you didn' know.  Don't you blame yo'self
'bout it."

When it was daylight, here was the clear Ohio water inshore, sure
enough, and outside was the old regular Muddy!  So it was all up with
Cairo.

We talked it all over.  It wouldn't do to take to the shore; we couldn't
take the raft up the stream, of course.  There warn't no way but to wait
for dark, and start back in the canoe and take the chances.  So we slept
all day amongst the cottonwood thicket, so as to be fresh for the work,
and when we went back to the raft about dark the canoe was gone!

We didn't say a word for a good while.  There warn't anything to
say.  We both knowed well enough it was some more work of the
rattlesnake-skin; so what was the use to talk about it?  It would only
look like we was finding fault, and that would be bound to fetch more
bad luck--and keep on fetching it, too, till we knowed enough to keep
still.

By and by we talked about what we better do, and found there warn't no
way but just to go along down with the raft till we got a chance to buy
a canoe to go back in.  We warn't going to borrow it when there warn't
anybody around, the way pap would do, for that might set people after
us.

So we shoved out after dark on the raft.

Anybody that don't believe yet that it's foolishness to handle a
snake-skin, after all that that snake-skin done for us, will believe it
now if they read on and see what more it done for us.

The place to buy canoes is off of rafts laying up at shore.  But we
didn't see no rafts laying up; so we went along during three hours and
more.  Well, the night got gray and ruther thick, which is the next
meanest thing to fog.  You can't tell the shape of the river, and you
can't see no distance. It got to be very late and still, and then along
comes a steamboat up the river.  We lit the lantern, and judged she
would see it.  Up-stream boats didn't generly come close to us; they
go out and follow the bars and hunt for easy water under the reefs; but
nights like this they bull right up the channel against the whole river.

We could hear her pounding along, but we didn't see her good till she
was close.  She aimed right for us.  Often they do that and try to see
how close they can come without touching; sometimes the wheel bites off
a sweep, and then the pilot sticks his head out and laughs, and thinks
he's mighty smart.  Well, here she comes, and we said she was going to
try and shave us; but she didn't seem to be sheering off a bit.  She
was a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black
cloud with rows of glow-worms around it; but all of a sudden she bulged
out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining
like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right
over us.  There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the
engines, a powwow of cussing, and whistling of steam--and as Jim went
overboard on one side and I on the other, she come smashing straight
through the raft.

I dived--and I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a thirty-foot wheel
had got to go over me, and I wanted it to have plenty of room.  I could
always stay under water a minute; this time I reckon I stayed under a
minute and a half.  Then I bounced for the top in a hurry, for I was
nearly busting.  I popped out to my armpits and blowed the water out of
my nose, and puffed a bit.  Of course there was a booming current; and
of course that boat started her engines again ten seconds after she
stopped them, for they never cared much for raftsmen; so now she was
churning along up the river, out of sight in the thick weather, though I
could hear her.

I sung out for Jim about a dozen times, but I didn't get any answer;
so I grabbed a plank that touched me while I was "treading water," and
struck out for shore, shoving it ahead of me.  But I made out to see
that the drift of the current was towards the left-hand shore, which
meant that I was in a crossing; so I changed off and went that way.

It was one of these long, slanting, two-mile crossings; so I was a good
long time in getting over.  I made a safe landing, and clumb up the
bank. I couldn't see but a little ways, but I went poking along over
rough ground for a quarter of a mile or more, and then I run across a
big old-fashioned double log-house before I noticed it.  I was going to
rush by and get away, but a lot of dogs jumped out and went to howling
and barking at me, and I knowed better than to move another peg.




CHAPTER XVII.

IN about a minute somebody spoke out of a window without putting his
head out, and says:

"Be done, boys!  Who's there?"

I says:

"It's me."

"Who's me?"

"George Jackson, sir."

"What do you want?"

"I don't want nothing, sir.  I only want to go along by, but the dogs
won't let me."

"What are you prowling around here this time of night for--hey?"

"I warn't prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off of the steamboat."

"Oh, you did, did you?  Strike a light there, somebody.  What did you
say your name was?"

"George Jackson, sir.  I'm only a boy."

"Look here, if you're telling the truth you needn't be afraid--nobody'll
hurt you.  But don't try to budge; stand right where you are.  Rouse out
Bob and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns.  George Jackson, is there
anybody with you?"

"No, sir, nobody."

I heard the people stirring around in the house now, and see a light.
The man sung out:

"Snatch that light away, Betsy, you old fool--ain't you got any sense?
Put it on the floor behind the front door.  Bob, if you and Tom are
ready, take your places."

"All ready."

"Now, George Jackson, do you know the Shepherdsons?"

"No, sir; I never heard of them."

"Well, that may be so, and it mayn't.  Now, all ready.  Step forward,
George Jackson.  And mind, don't you hurry--come mighty slow.  If there's
anybody with you, let him keep back--if he shows himself he'll be shot.
Come along now.  Come slow; push the door open yourself--just enough to
squeeze in, d' you hear?"

I didn't hurry; I couldn't if I'd a wanted to.  I took one slow step at
a time and there warn't a sound, only I thought I could hear my heart.
 The dogs were as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind
me. When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard them unlocking and
unbarring and unbolting.  I put my hand on the door and pushed it a
little and a little more till somebody said, "There, that's enough--put
your head in." I done it, but I judged they would take it off.

The candle was on the floor, and there they all was, looking at me, and
me at them, for about a quarter of a minute:  Three big men with guns
pointed at me, which made me wince, I tell you; the oldest, gray
and about sixty, the other two thirty or more--all of them fine and
handsome--and the sweetest old gray-headed lady, and back of her two
young women which I couldn't see right well.  The old gentleman says:

"There; I reckon it's all right.  Come in."

As soon as I was in the old gentleman he locked the door and barred it
and bolted it, and told the young men to come in with their guns, and
they all went in a big parlor that had a new rag carpet on the floor,
and got together in a corner that was out of the range of the front
windows--there warn't none on the side.  They held the candle, and took a
good look at me, and all said, "Why, _he_ ain't a Shepherdson--no, there
ain't any Shepherdson about him."  Then the old man said he hoped I
wouldn't mind being searched for arms, because he didn't mean no harm by
it--it was only to make sure.  So he didn't pry into my pockets, but only
felt outside with his hands, and said it was all right.  He told me to
make myself easy and at home, and tell all about myself; but the old
lady says:

"Why, bless you, Saul, the poor thing's as wet as he can be; and don't
you reckon it may be he's hungry?"

"True for you, Rachel--I forgot."

So the old lady says:

"Betsy" (this was a nigger woman), "you fly around and get him something
to eat as quick as you can, poor thing; and one of you girls go and wake
up Buck and tell him--oh, here he is himself.  Buck, take this little
stranger and get the wet clothes off from him and dress him up in some
of yours that's dry."

Buck looked about as old as me--thirteen or fourteen or along there,
though he was a little bigger than me.  He hadn't on anything but a
shirt, and he was very frowzy-headed.  He came in gaping and digging one
fist into his eyes, and he was dragging a gun along with the other one.
He says:

"Ain't they no Shepherdsons around?"

They said, no, 'twas a false alarm.

"Well," he says, "if they'd a ben some, I reckon I'd a got one."

They all laughed, and Bob says:

"Why, Buck, they might have scalped us all, you've been so slow in
coming."

"Well, nobody come after me, and it ain't right I'm always kept down; I
don't get no show."

"Never mind, Buck, my boy," says the old man, "you'll have show enough,
all in good time, don't you fret about that.  Go 'long with you now, and
do as your mother told you."

When we got up-stairs to his room he got me a coarse shirt and a
roundabout and pants of his, and I put them on.  While I was at it he
asked me what my name was, but before I could tell him he started to
tell me about a bluejay and a young rabbit he had catched in the woods
day before yesterday, and he asked me where Moses was when the candle
went out.  I said I didn't know; I hadn't heard about it before, no way.

"Well, guess," he says.

"How'm I going to guess," says I, "when I never heard tell of it
before?"

"But you can guess, can't you?  It's just as easy."

"_Which_ candle?"  I says.

"Why, any candle," he says.

"I don't know where he was," says I; "where was he?"

"Why, he was in the _dark_!  That's where he was!"

"Well, if you knowed where he was, what did you ask me for?"

"Why, blame it, it's a riddle, don't you see?  Say, how long are you
going to stay here?  You got to stay always.  We can just have booming
times--they don't have no school now.  Do you own a dog?  I've got a
dog--and he'll go in the river and bring out chips that you throw in.  Do
you like to comb up Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness?  You bet
I don't, but ma she makes me.  Confound these ole britches!  I reckon
I'd better put 'em on, but I'd ruther not, it's so warm.  Are you all
ready? All right.  Come along, old hoss."

Cold corn-pone, cold corn-beef, butter and buttermilk--that is what they
had for me down there, and there ain't nothing better that ever I've
come across yet.  Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes,
except the nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women.  They
all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked.  The young women had
quilts around them, and their hair down their backs.  They all asked me
questions, and I told them how pap and me and all the family was living
on a little farm down at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister Mary Ann
run off and got married and never was heard of no more, and Bill went
to hunt them and he warn't heard of no more, and Tom and Mort died,
and then there warn't nobody but just me and pap left, and he was just
trimmed down to nothing, on account of his troubles; so when he died
I took what there was left, because the farm didn't belong to us, and
started up the river, deck passage, and fell overboard; and that was how
I come to be here.  So they said I could have a home there as long as I
wanted it.  Then it was most daylight and everybody went to bed, and I
went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all,
I had forgot what my name was. So I laid there about an hour trying to
think, and when Buck waked up I says:

"Can you spell, Buck?"

"Yes," he says.

"I bet you can't spell my name," says I.

"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.

"All right," says I, "go ahead."

"G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n--there now," he says.

"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think you could.  It ain't no
slouch of a name to spell--right off without studying."

I set it down, private, because somebody might want _me_ to spell it
next, and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was
used to it.

It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too.  I hadn't
seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much
style.  It didn't have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one
with a buckskin string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in
town. There warn't no bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed; but heaps
of parlors in towns has beds in them.  There was a big fireplace that
was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by
pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes
they wash them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown,
same as they do in town.  They had big brass dog-irons that could hold
up a saw-log. There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with
a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and
a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the
pendulum swinging behind it.  It was beautiful to hear that clock tick;
and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her
up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred
and fifty before she got tuckered out.  They wouldn't took any money for
her.

Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock,
made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy.  By one of the
parrots was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other;
and when you pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn't open
their mouths nor look different nor interested.  They squeaked through
underneath.  There was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out
behind those things.  On the table in the middle of the room was a kind
of a lovely crockery basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and
grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier
than real ones is, but they warn't real because you could see where
pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it
was, underneath.

This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and
blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around.  It
come all the way from Philadelphia, they said.  There was some books,
too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table.  One was a
big family Bible full of pictures.  One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a
man that left his family, it didn't say why.  I read considerable in it
now and then.  The statements was interesting, but tough.  Another was
Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't
read the poetry.  Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr.
Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body
was sick or dead.  There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books.  And
there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too--not bagged
down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.

They had pictures hung on the walls--mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes,
and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the
Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the
daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only
fifteen years old.  They was different from any pictures I ever see
before--blacker, mostly, than is common.  One was a woman in a slim black
dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in
the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with
a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and
very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a
tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand
hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule,
and underneath the picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas."
 Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight
to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a
chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird
laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath
the picture it said "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas."
 There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the
moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in
one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was
mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath
the picture it said "And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas."  These
was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take
to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the
fan-tods.  Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot
more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done
what they had lost.  But I reckoned that with her disposition she was
having a better time in the graveyard.  She was at work on what they
said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and
every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it
done, but she never got the chance.  It was a picture of a young woman
in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump
off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with
the tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her
breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up
towards the moon--and the idea was to see which pair would look best,
and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died
before she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the
head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung
flowers on it.  Other times it was hid with a little curtain.  The young
woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so
many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.

This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste
obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the
Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head.
It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a boy by the name
of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was drownded:

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D

And did young Stephen sicken,    And did young Stephen die? And did the
sad hearts thicken,    And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of    Young Stephen Dowling Bots; Though sad
hearts round him thickened,    'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,    Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name    Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe    That head of curly knots, Nor
stomach troubles laid him low,    Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,    Whilst I his fate do tell. His soul
did from this cold world fly    By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;    Alas it was too late; His spirit
was gone for to sport aloft    In the realms of the good and great.

If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was
fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by.  Buck
said she could rattle off poetry like nothing.  She didn't ever have to
stop to think.  He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't
find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down
another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about
anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful.
Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on
hand with her "tribute" before he was cold.  She called them tributes.
The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the
undertaker--the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and
then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was
Whistler.  She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained,
but she kinder pined away and did not live long.  Poor thing, many's the
time I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get
out her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been
aggravating me and I had soured on her a little.  I liked all that
family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between
us.  Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was
alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some
about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two
myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow.  They kept Emmeline's
room trim and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way she
liked to have them when she was alive, and nobody ever slept there.
 The old lady took care of the room herself, though there was plenty
of niggers, and she sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there
mostly.

Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on
the windows:  white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines
all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink.  There was a little
old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever
so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing "The Last Link is Broken"
and play "The Battle of Prague" on it.  The walls of all the rooms was
plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was
whitewashed on the outside.

It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed
and floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the
day, and it was a cool, comfortable place.  Nothing couldn't be better.
 And warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it too!




CHAPTER XVIII.

COL.  Grangerford was a gentleman, you see.  He was a gentleman all
over; and so was his family.  He was well born, as the saying is, and
that's worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas
said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy
in our town; and pap he always said it, too, though he warn't no more
quality than a mudcat himself.  Col.  Grangerford was very tall and
very slim, and had a darkish-paly complexion, not a sign of red in it
anywheres; he was clean shaved every morning all over his thin face, and
he had the thinnest kind of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and
a high nose, and heavy eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so
deep back that they seemed like they was looking out of caverns at
you, as you may say.  His forehead was high, and his hair was black and
straight and hung to his shoulders. His hands was long and thin, and
every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head
to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it;
and on Sundays he wore a blue tail-coat with brass buttons on it.  He
carried a mahogany cane with a silver head to it.  There warn't no
frivolishness about him, not a bit, and he warn't ever loud.  He was
as kind as he could be--you could feel that, you know, and so you had
confidence.  Sometimes he smiled, and it was good to see; but when he
straightened himself up like a liberty-pole, and the lightning begun to
flicker out from under his eyebrows, you wanted to climb a tree first,
and find out what the matter was afterwards.  He didn't ever have to
tell anybody to mind their manners--everybody was always good-mannered
where he was.  Everybody loved to have him around, too; he was sunshine
most always--I mean he made it seem like good weather.  When he turned
into a cloudbank it was awful dark for half a minute, and that was
enough; there wouldn't nothing go wrong again for a week.

When him and the old lady come down in the morning all the family got
up out of their chairs and give them good-day, and didn't set down again
till they had set down.  Then Tom and Bob went to the sideboard where
the decanter was, and mixed a glass of bitters and handed it to him, and
he held it in his hand and waited till Tom's and Bob's was mixed, and
then they bowed and said, "Our duty to you, sir, and madam;" and _they_
bowed the least bit in the world and said thank you, and so they drank,
all three, and Bob and Tom poured a spoonful of water on the sugar and
the mite of whisky or apple brandy in the bottom of their tumblers, and
give it to me and Buck, and we drank to the old people too.

Bob was the oldest and Tom next--tall, beautiful men with very broad
shoulders and brown faces, and long black hair and black eyes.  They
dressed in white linen from head to foot, like the old gentleman, and
wore broad Panama hats.

Then there was Miss Charlotte; she was twenty-five, and tall and proud
and grand, but as good as she could be when she warn't stirred up; but
when she was she had a look that would make you wilt in your tracks,
like her father.  She was beautiful.

So was her sister, Miss Sophia, but it was a different kind.  She was
gentle and sweet like a dove, and she was only twenty.

Each person had their own nigger to wait on them--Buck too.  My nigger
had a monstrous easy time, because I warn't used to having anybody do
anything for me, but Buck's was on the jump most of the time.

This was all there was of the family now, but there used to be
more--three sons; they got killed; and Emmeline that died.

The old gentleman owned a lot of farms and over a hundred niggers.
Sometimes a stack of people would come there, horseback, from ten or
fifteen mile around, and stay five or six days, and have such junketings
round about and on the river, and dances and picnics in the woods
daytimes, and balls at the house nights.  These people was mostly
kinfolks of the family.  The men brought their guns with them.  It was a
handsome lot of quality, I tell you.

There was another clan of aristocracy around there--five or six
families--mostly of the name of Shepherdson.  They was as high-toned
and well born and rich and grand as the tribe of Grangerfords.  The
Shepherdsons and Grangerfords used the same steamboat landing, which was
about two mile above our house; so sometimes when I went up there with a
lot of our folks I used to see a lot of the Shepherdsons there on their
fine horses.

One day Buck and me was away out in the woods hunting, and heard a horse
coming.  We was crossing the road.  Buck says:

"Quick!  Jump for the woods!"

We done it, and then peeped down the woods through the leaves.  Pretty
soon a splendid young man come galloping down the road, setting his
horse easy and looking like a soldier.  He had his gun across his
pommel.  I had seen him before.  It was young Harney Shepherdson.  I
heard Buck's gun go off at my ear, and Harney's hat tumbled off from his
head.  He grabbed his gun and rode straight to the place where we was
hid.  But we didn't wait.  We started through the woods on a run.  The
woods warn't thick, so I looked over my shoulder to dodge the bullet,
and twice I seen Harney cover Buck with his gun; and then he rode away
the way he come--to get his hat, I reckon, but I couldn't see.  We never
stopped running till we got home.  The old gentleman's eyes blazed a
minute--'twas pleasure, mainly, I judged--then his face sort of smoothed
down, and he says, kind of gentle:

"I don't like that shooting from behind a bush.  Why didn't you step
into the road, my boy?"

"The Shepherdsons don't, father.  They always take advantage."

Miss Charlotte she held her head up like a queen while Buck was telling
his tale, and her nostrils spread and her eyes snapped.  The two young
men looked dark, but never said nothing.  Miss Sophia she turned pale,
but the color come back when she found the man warn't hurt.

Soon as I could get Buck down by the corn-cribs under the trees by
ourselves, I says:

"Did you want to kill him, Buck?"

"Well, I bet I did."

"What did he do to you?"

"Him?  He never done nothing to me."

"Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?"

"Why, nothing--only it's on account of the feud."

"What's a feud?"

"Why, where was you raised?  Don't you know what a feud is?"

"Never heard of it before--tell me about it."

"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way:  A man has a quarrel with
another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills _him_;
then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the
_cousins_ chip in--and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't
no more feud.  But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time."

"Has this one been going on long, Buck?"

"Well, I should _reckon_!  It started thirty year ago, or som'ers along
there.  There was trouble 'bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle
it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the
man that won the suit--which he would naturally do, of course.  Anybody
would."

"What was the trouble about, Buck?--land?"

"I reckon maybe--I don't know."

"Well, who done the shooting?  Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherdson?"

"Laws, how do I know?  It was so long ago."

"Don't anybody know?"

"Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they
don't know now what the row was about in the first place."

"Has there been many killed, Buck?"

"Yes; right smart chance of funerals.  But they don't always kill.  Pa's
got a few buckshot in him; but he don't mind it 'cuz he don't weigh
much, anyway.  Bob's been carved up some with a bowie, and Tom's been
hurt once or twice."

"Has anybody been killed this year, Buck?"

"Yes; we got one and they got one.  'Bout three months ago my cousin
Bud, fourteen year old, was riding through the woods on t'other side
of the river, and didn't have no weapon with him, which was blame'
foolishness, and in a lonesome place he hears a horse a-coming behind
him, and sees old Baldy Shepherdson a-linkin' after him with his gun in
his hand and his white hair a-flying in the wind; and 'stead of jumping
off and taking to the brush, Bud 'lowed he could out-run him; so they
had it, nip and tuck, for five mile or more, the old man a-gaining all
the time; so at last Bud seen it warn't any use, so he stopped and faced
around so as to have the bullet holes in front, you know, and the old
man he rode up and shot him down.  But he didn't git much chance to
enjoy his luck, for inside of a week our folks laid _him_ out."

"I reckon that old man was a coward, Buck."

"I reckon he _warn't_ a coward.  Not by a blame' sight.  There ain't a
coward amongst them Shepherdsons--not a one.  And there ain't no cowards
amongst the Grangerfords either.  Why, that old man kep' up his end in a
fight one day for half an hour against three Grangerfords, and come
out winner.  They was all a-horseback; he lit off of his horse and got
behind a little woodpile, and kep' his horse before him to stop the
bullets; but the Grangerfords stayed on their horses and capered around
the old man, and peppered away at him, and he peppered away at them.
 Him and his horse both went home pretty leaky and crippled, but the
Grangerfords had to be _fetched_ home--and one of 'em was dead, and
another died the next day.  No, sir; if a body's out hunting for cowards
he don't want to fool away any time amongst them Shepherdsons, becuz
they don't breed any of that _kind_."

Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody
a-horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept
them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall.  The
Shepherdsons done the same.  It was pretty ornery preaching--all about
brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was
a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such
a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and
preforeordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me
to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.

About an hour after dinner everybody was dozing around, some in their
chairs and some in their rooms, and it got to be pretty dull.  Buck and
a dog was stretched out on the grass in the sun sound asleep.  I went up
to our room, and judged I would take a nap myself.  I found that sweet
Miss Sophia standing in her door, which was next to ours, and she took
me in her room and shut the door very soft, and asked me if I liked her,
and I said I did; and she asked me if I would do something for her and
not tell anybody, and I said I would.  Then she said she'd forgot her
Testament, and left it in the seat at church between two other books,
and would I slip out quiet and go there and fetch it to her, and not say
nothing to nobody.  I said I would. So I slid out and slipped off up the
road, and there warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two,
for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor
in summer-time because it's cool.  If you notice, most folks don't go to
church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.

Says I to myself, something's up; it ain't natural for a girl to be in
such a sweat about a Testament.  So I give it a shake, and out drops a
little piece of paper with "HALF-PAST TWO" wrote on it with a pencil.  I
ransacked it, but couldn't find anything else.  I couldn't make anything
out of that, so I put the paper in the book again, and when I got home
and upstairs there was Miss Sophia in her door waiting for me.  She
pulled me in and shut the door; then she looked in the Testament till
she found the paper, and as soon as she read it she looked glad; and
before a body could think she grabbed me and give me a squeeze, and
said I was the best boy in the world, and not to tell anybody.  She was
mighty red in the face for a minute, and her eyes lighted up, and it
made her powerful pretty.  I was a good deal astonished, but when I got
my breath I asked her what the paper was about, and she asked me if I
had read it, and I said no, and she asked me if I could read writing,
and I told her "no, only coarse-hand," and then she said the paper
warn't anything but a book-mark to keep her place, and I might go and
play now.

I went off down to the river, studying over this thing, and pretty soon
I noticed that my nigger was following along behind.  When we was out
of sight of the house he looked back and around a second, and then comes
a-running, and says:

"Mars Jawge, if you'll come down into de swamp I'll show you a whole
stack o' water-moccasins."

Thinks I, that's mighty curious; he said that yesterday.  He oughter
know a body don't love water-moccasins enough to go around hunting for
them. What is he up to, anyway?  So I says:

"All right; trot ahead."

I followed a half a mile; then he struck out over the swamp, and waded
ankle deep as much as another half-mile.  We come to a little flat piece
of land which was dry and very thick with trees and bushes and vines,
and he says:

"You shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars Jawge; dah's whah dey is.
I's seed 'm befo'; I don't k'yer to see 'em no mo'."

Then he slopped right along and went away, and pretty soon the trees hid
him.  I poked into the place a-ways and come to a little open patch
as big as a bedroom all hung around with vines, and found a man laying
there asleep--and, by jings, it was my old Jim!

I waked him up, and I reckoned it was going to be a grand surprise to
him to see me again, but it warn't.  He nearly cried he was so glad, but
he warn't surprised.  Said he swum along behind me that night, and heard
me yell every time, but dasn't answer, because he didn't want nobody to
pick _him_ up and take him into slavery again.  Says he:

"I got hurt a little, en couldn't swim fas', so I wuz a considable ways
behine you towards de las'; when you landed I reck'ned I could ketch
up wid you on de lan' 'dout havin' to shout at you, but when I see dat
house I begin to go slow.  I 'uz off too fur to hear what dey say to
you--I wuz 'fraid o' de dogs; but when it 'uz all quiet agin I knowed
you's in de house, so I struck out for de woods to wait for day.  Early
in de mawnin' some er de niggers come along, gwyne to de fields, en dey
tuk me en showed me dis place, whah de dogs can't track me on accounts
o' de water, en dey brings me truck to eat every night, en tells me how
you's a-gitt'n along."

"Why didn't you tell my Jack to fetch me here sooner, Jim?"

"Well, 'twarn't no use to 'sturb you, Huck, tell we could do sumfn--but
we's all right now.  I ben a-buyin' pots en pans en vittles, as I got a
chanst, en a-patchin' up de raf' nights when--"

"_What_ raft, Jim?"

"Our ole raf'."

"You mean to say our old raft warn't smashed all to flinders?"

"No, she warn't.  She was tore up a good deal--one en' of her was; but
dey warn't no great harm done, on'y our traps was mos' all los'.  Ef we
hadn' dive' so deep en swum so fur under water, en de night hadn' ben
so dark, en we warn't so sk'yerd, en ben sich punkin-heads, as de sayin'
is, we'd a seed de raf'.  But it's jis' as well we didn't, 'kase now
she's all fixed up agin mos' as good as new, en we's got a new lot o'
stuff, in de place o' what 'uz los'."

"Why, how did you get hold of the raft again, Jim--did you catch her?"

"How I gwyne to ketch her en I out in de woods?  No; some er de niggers
foun' her ketched on a snag along heah in de ben', en dey hid her in a
crick 'mongst de willows, en dey wuz so much jawin' 'bout which un 'um
she b'long to de mos' dat I come to heah 'bout it pooty soon, so I ups
en settles de trouble by tellin' 'um she don't b'long to none uv um, but
to you en me; en I ast 'm if dey gwyne to grab a young white genlman's
propaty, en git a hid'n for it?  Den I gin 'm ten cents apiece, en dey
'uz mighty well satisfied, en wisht some mo' raf's 'ud come along en
make 'm rich agin. Dey's mighty good to me, dese niggers is, en whatever
I wants 'm to do fur me I doan' have to ast 'm twice, honey.  Dat Jack's
a good nigger, en pooty smart."

"Yes, he is.  He ain't ever told me you was here; told me to come, and
he'd show me a lot of water-moccasins.  If anything happens _he_ ain't
mixed up in it.  He can say he never seen us together, and it 'll be the
truth."

I don't want to talk much about the next day.  I reckon I'll cut it
pretty short.  I waked up about dawn, and was a-going to turn over and
go to sleep again when I noticed how still it was--didn't seem to be
anybody stirring.  That warn't usual.  Next I noticed that Buck was
up and gone. Well, I gets up, a-wondering, and goes down stairs--nobody
around; everything as still as a mouse.  Just the same outside.  Thinks
I, what does it mean?  Down by the wood-pile I comes across my Jack, and
says:

"What's it all about?"

Says he:

"Don't you know, Mars Jawge?"

"No," says I, "I don't."

"Well, den, Miss Sophia's run off! 'deed she has.  She run off in de
night some time--nobody don't know jis' when; run off to get married
to dat young Harney Shepherdson, you know--leastways, so dey 'spec.  De
fambly foun' it out 'bout half an hour ago--maybe a little mo'--en' I
_tell_ you dey warn't no time los'.  Sich another hurryin' up guns
en hosses _you_ never see!  De women folks has gone for to stir up de
relations, en ole Mars Saul en de boys tuck dey guns en rode up de
river road for to try to ketch dat young man en kill him 'fo' he kin
git acrost de river wid Miss Sophia.  I reck'n dey's gwyne to be mighty
rough times."

"Buck went off 'thout waking me up."

"Well, I reck'n he _did_!  Dey warn't gwyne to mix you up in it.
 Mars Buck he loaded up his gun en 'lowed he's gwyne to fetch home a
Shepherdson or bust. Well, dey'll be plenty un 'm dah, I reck'n, en you
bet you he'll fetch one ef he gits a chanst."

I took up the river road as hard as I could put.  By and by I begin to
hear guns a good ways off.  When I come in sight of the log store and
the woodpile where the steamboats lands I worked along under the trees
and brush till I got to a good place, and then I clumb up into the
forks of a cottonwood that was out of reach, and watched.  There was a
wood-rank four foot high a little ways in front of the tree, and first I
was going to hide behind that; but maybe it was luckier I didn't.

There was four or five men cavorting around on their horses in the open
place before the log store, cussing and yelling, and trying to get at
a couple of young chaps that was behind the wood-rank alongside of the
steamboat landing; but they couldn't come it.  Every time one of them
showed himself on the river side of the woodpile he got shot at.  The
two boys was squatting back to back behind the pile, so they could watch
both ways.

By and by the men stopped cavorting around and yelling.  They started
riding towards the store; then up gets one of the boys, draws a steady
bead over the wood-rank, and drops one of them out of his saddle.  All
the men jumped off of their horses and grabbed the hurt one and started
to carry him to the store; and that minute the two boys started on the
run.  They got half way to the tree I was in before the men noticed.
Then the men see them, and jumped on their horses and took out after
them.  They gained on the boys, but it didn't do no good, the boys had
too good a start; they got to the woodpile that was in front of my tree,
and slipped in behind it, and so they had the bulge on the men again.
One of the boys was Buck, and the other was a slim young chap about
nineteen years old.

The men ripped around awhile, and then rode away.  As soon as they was
out of sight I sung out to Buck and told him.  He didn't know what
to make of my voice coming out of the tree at first.  He was awful
surprised.  He told me to watch out sharp and let him know when the
men come in sight again; said they was up to some devilment or
other--wouldn't be gone long.  I wished I was out of that tree, but I
dasn't come down.  Buck begun to cry and rip, and 'lowed that him and
his cousin Joe (that was the other young chap) would make up for this
day yet.  He said his father and his two brothers was killed, and two
or three of the enemy.  Said the Shepherdsons laid for them in
ambush.  Buck said his father and brothers ought to waited for their
relations--the Shepherdsons was too strong for them.  I asked him what
was become of young Harney and Miss Sophia.  He said they'd got across
the river and was safe.  I was glad of that; but the way Buck did take
on because he didn't manage to kill Harney that day he shot at him--I
hain't ever heard anything like it.

All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns--the men had
slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their
horses!  The boys jumped for the river--both of them hurt--and as they
swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and
singing out, "Kill them, kill them!"  It made me so sick I most fell out
of the tree.  I ain't a-going to tell _all_ that happened--it would make
me sick again if I was to do that.  I wished I hadn't ever come ashore
that night to see such things.  I ain't ever going to get shut of
them--lots of times I dream about them.

I stayed in the tree till it begun to get dark, afraid to come down.
Sometimes I heard guns away off in the woods; and twice I seen little
gangs of men gallop past the log store with guns; so I reckoned the
trouble was still a-going on.  I was mighty downhearted; so I made up my
mind I wouldn't ever go anear that house again, because I reckoned I
was to blame, somehow. I judged that that piece of paper meant that Miss
Sophia was to meet Harney somewheres at half-past two and run off; and
I judged I ought to told her father about that paper and the curious way
she acted, and then maybe he would a locked her up, and this awful mess
wouldn't ever happened.

When I got down out of the tree I crept along down the river bank a
piece, and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and
tugged at them till I got them ashore; then I covered up their faces,
and got away as quick as I could.  I cried a little when I was covering
up Buck's face, for he was mighty good to me.

It was just dark now.  I never went near the house, but struck through
the woods and made for the swamp.  Jim warn't on his island, so I
tramped off in a hurry for the crick, and crowded through the willows,
red-hot to jump aboard and get out of that awful country.  The raft was
gone!  My souls, but I was scared!  I couldn't get my breath for most
a minute. Then I raised a yell.  A voice not twenty-five foot from me
says:

"Good lan'! is dat you, honey?  Doan' make no noise."

It was Jim's voice--nothing ever sounded so good before.  I run along the
bank a piece and got aboard, and Jim he grabbed me and hugged me, he was
so glad to see me.  He says:

"Laws bless you, chile, I 'uz right down sho' you's dead agin.  Jack's
been heah; he say he reck'n you's ben shot, kase you didn' come home no
mo'; so I's jes' dis minute a startin' de raf' down towards de mouf er
de crick, so's to be all ready for to shove out en leave soon as Jack
comes agin en tells me for certain you _is_ dead.  Lawsy, I's mighty
glad to git you back again, honey."

I says:

"All right--that's mighty good; they won't find me, and they'll think
I've been killed, and floated down the river--there's something up there
that 'll help them think so--so don't you lose no time, Jim, but just
shove off for the big water as fast as ever you can."

I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in
the middle of the Mississippi.  Then we hung up our signal lantern, and
judged that we was free and safe once more.  I hadn't had a bite to eat
since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk,
and pork and cabbage and greens--there ain't nothing in the world so good
when it's cooked right--and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a
good time.  I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was
Jim to get away from the swamp.  We said there warn't no home like a
raft, after all.  Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a
raft don't.  You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.




CHAPTER XIX.

TWO or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by,
they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely.  Here is the way we put
in the time.  It was a monstrous big river down there--sometimes a mile
and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as
night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always
in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and
willows, and hid the raft with them.  Then we set out the lines.  Next
we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool
off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee
deep, and watched the daylight come.  Not a sound anywheres--perfectly
still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs
a-cluttering, maybe.  The first thing to see, looking away over the
water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side; you
couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more
paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and
warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots
drifting along ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and
long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or
jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and
by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the
streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it
and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off
of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a
log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of
the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can
throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and
comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell
on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way,
because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they
do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything
smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off
of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast.  And afterwards we would watch
the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by
lazy off to sleep.  Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and
maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the
other side you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was
a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn't be
nothing to hear nor nothing to see--just solid lonesomeness.  Next
you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it
chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd see the
axe flash and come down--you don't hear nothing; you see that axe go
up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the
_k'chunk_!--it had took all that time to come over the water.  So we
would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness.  Once
there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating
tin pans so the steamboats wouldn't run over them.  A scow or a
raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and
laughing--heard them plain; but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made
you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air.
 Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:

"No; spirits wouldn't say, 'Dern the dern fog.'"

Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the
middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted
her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and
talked about all kinds of things--we was always naked, day and night,
whenever the mosquitoes would let us--the new clothes Buck's folks made
for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on
clothes, nohow.

Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest
time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe
a spark--which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water
you could see a spark or two--on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe
you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts.
It's lovely to live on a raft.  We had the sky up there, all speckled
with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and
discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.  Jim he
allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would
have took too long to _make_ so many.  Jim said the moon could a _laid_
them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing
against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it
could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them
streak down.  Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the
nest.

Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the
dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out
of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful
pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and
her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her
waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the
raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't
tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

After midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or
three hours the shores was black--no more sparks in the cabin windows.
 These sparks was our clock--the first one that showed again meant
morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away.

One morning about daybreak I found a canoe and crossed over a chute to
the main shore--it was only two hundred yards--and paddled about a mile
up a crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn't get some
berries. Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cowpath crossed
the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as
they could foot it.  I thought I was a goner, for whenever anybody was
after anybody I judged it was _me_--or maybe Jim.  I was about to dig out
from there in a hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung
out and begged me to save their lives--said they hadn't been doing
nothing, and was being chased for it--said there was men and dogs
a-coming.  They wanted to jump right in, but I says:

"Don't you do it.  I don't hear the dogs and horses yet; you've got time
to crowd through the brush and get up the crick a little ways; then you
take to the water and wade down to me and get in--that'll throw the dogs
off the scent."

They done it, and soon as they was aboard I lit out for our towhead,
and in about five or ten minutes we heard the dogs and the men away off,
shouting. We heard them come along towards the crick, but couldn't
see them; they seemed to stop and fool around a while; then, as we got
further and further away all the time, we couldn't hardly hear them at
all; by the time we had left a mile of woods behind us and struck the
river, everything was quiet, and we paddled over to the towhead and hid
in the cottonwoods and was safe.

One of these fellows was about seventy or upwards, and had a bald head
and very gray whiskers.  He had an old battered-up slouch hat on, and
a greasy blue woollen shirt, and ragged old blue jeans britches stuffed
into his boot-tops, and home-knit galluses--no, he only had one.  He had
an old long-tailed blue jeans coat with slick brass buttons flung over
his arm, and both of them had big, fat, ratty-looking carpet-bags.

The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery.  After
breakfast we all laid off and talked, and the first thing that come out
was that these chaps didn't know one another.

"What got you into trouble?" says the baldhead to t'other chap.

"Well, I'd been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth--and
it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with it--but I
stayed about one night longer than I ought to, and was just in the act
of sliding out when I ran across you on the trail this side of town, and
you told me they were coming, and begged me to help you to get off.  So
I told you I was expecting trouble myself, and would scatter out _with_
you. That's the whole yarn--what's yourn?

"Well, I'd ben a-running' a little temperance revival thar 'bout a week,
and was the pet of the women folks, big and little, for I was makin' it
mighty warm for the rummies, I _tell_ you, and takin' as much as five
or six dollars a night--ten cents a head, children and niggers free--and
business a-growin' all the time, when somehow or another a little report
got around last night that I had a way of puttin' in my time with a
private jug on the sly.  A nigger rousted me out this mornin', and told
me the people was getherin' on the quiet with their dogs and horses, and
they'd be along pretty soon and give me 'bout half an hour's start,
and then run me down if they could; and if they got me they'd tar
and feather me and ride me on a rail, sure.  I didn't wait for no
breakfast--I warn't hungry."

"Old man," said the young one, "I reckon we might double-team it
together; what do you think?"

"I ain't undisposed.  What's your line--mainly?"

"Jour printer by trade; do a little in patent medicines;
theater-actor--tragedy, you know; take a turn to mesmerism and phrenology
when there's a chance; teach singing-geography school for a change;
sling a lecture sometimes--oh, I do lots of things--most anything that
comes handy, so it ain't work.  What's your lay?"

"I've done considerble in the doctoring way in my time.  Layin' on o'
hands is my best holt--for cancer and paralysis, and sich things; and I
k'n tell a fortune pretty good when I've got somebody along to find out
the facts for me.  Preachin's my line, too, and workin' camp-meetin's,
and missionaryin' around."

Nobody never said anything for a while; then the young man hove a sigh
and says:

"Alas!"

"What 're you alassin' about?" says the bald-head.

"To think I should have lived to be leading such a life, and be degraded
down into such company."  And he begun to wipe the corner of his eye
with a rag.

"Dern your skin, ain't the company good enough for you?" says the
baldhead, pretty pert and uppish.

"Yes, it _is_ good enough for me; it's as good as I deserve; for who
fetched me so low when I was so high?  I did myself.  I don't blame
_you_, gentlemen--far from it; I don't blame anybody.  I deserve it
all.  Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know--there's a grave
somewhere for me. The world may go on just as it's always done, and take
everything from me--loved ones, property, everything; but it can't take
that. Some day I'll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken
heart will be at rest."  He went on a-wiping.

"Drot your pore broken heart," says the baldhead; "what are you heaving
your pore broken heart at _us_ f'r?  _we_ hain't done nothing."

"No, I know you haven't.  I ain't blaming you, gentlemen.  I brought
myself down--yes, I did it myself.  It's right I should suffer--perfectly
right--I don't make any moan."

"Brought you down from whar?  Whar was you brought down from?"

"Ah, you would not believe me; the world never believes--let it pass--'tis
no matter.  The secret of my birth--"

"The secret of your birth!  Do you mean to say--"

"Gentlemen," says the young man, very solemn, "I will reveal it to you,
for I feel I may have confidence in you.  By rights I am a duke!"

Jim's eyes bugged out when he heard that; and I reckon mine did, too.
Then the baldhead says:  "No! you can't mean it?"

"Yes.  My great-grandfather, eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater, fled
to this country about the end of the last century, to breathe the pure
air of freedom; married here, and died, leaving a son, his own father
dying about the same time.  The second son of the late duke seized the
titles and estates--the infant real duke was ignored.  I am the lineal
descendant of that infant--I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and
here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised
by the cold world, ragged, worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the
companionship of felons on a raft!"

Jim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We tried to comfort him, but
he said it warn't much use, he couldn't be much comforted; said if we
was a mind to acknowledge him, that would do him more good than most
anything else; so we said we would, if he would tell us how.  He said we
ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say "Your Grace," or "My Lord,"
or "Your Lordship"--and he wouldn't mind it if we called him plain
"Bridgewater," which, he said, was a title anyway, and not a name; and
one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for
him he wanted done.

Well, that was all easy, so we done it.  All through dinner Jim stood
around and waited on him, and says, "Will yo' Grace have some o' dis or
some o' dat?" and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing to
him.

But the old man got pretty silent by and by--didn't have much to say, and
didn't look pretty comfortable over all that petting that was going on
around that duke.  He seemed to have something on his mind.  So, along
in the afternoon, he says:

"Looky here, Bilgewater," he says, "I'm nation sorry for you, but you
ain't the only person that's had troubles like that."

"No?"

"No you ain't.  You ain't the only person that's ben snaked down
wrongfully out'n a high place."

"Alas!"

"No, you ain't the only person that's had a secret of his birth."  And,
by jings, _he_ begins to cry.

"Hold!  What do you mean?"

"Bilgewater, kin I trust you?" says the old man, still sort of sobbing.

"To the bitter death!"  He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it,
and says, "That secret of your being:  speak!"

"Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!"

You bet you, Jim and me stared this time.  Then the duke says:

"You are what?"

"Yes, my friend, it is too true--your eyes is lookin' at this very moment
on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the
Sixteen and Marry Antonette."

"You!  At your age!  No!  You mean you're the late Charlemagne; you must
be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least."

"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung
these gray hairs and this premature balditude.  Yes, gentlemen, you
see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled,
trampled-on, and sufferin' rightful King of France."

Well, he cried and took on so that me and Jim didn't know hardly what to
do, we was so sorry--and so glad and proud we'd got him with us, too.
 So we set in, like we done before with the duke, and tried to comfort
_him_. But he said it warn't no use, nothing but to be dead and done
with it all could do him any good; though he said it often made him feel
easier and better for a while if people treated him according to his
rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him
"Your Majesty," and waited on him first at meals, and didn't set down
in his presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to majestying him,
and doing this and that and t'other for him, and standing up till he
told us we might set down.  This done him heaps of good, and so he
got cheerful and comfortable.  But the duke kind of soured on him, and
didn't look a bit satisfied with the way things was going; still,
the king acted real friendly towards him, and said the duke's
great-grandfather and all the other Dukes of Bilgewater was a good
deal thought of by _his_ father, and was allowed to come to the palace
considerable; but the duke stayed huffy a good while, till by and by the
king says:

"Like as not we got to be together a blamed long time on this h-yer
raft, Bilgewater, and so what's the use o' your bein' sour?  It 'll only
make things oncomfortable.  It ain't my fault I warn't born a duke,
it ain't your fault you warn't born a king--so what's the use to worry?
 Make the best o' things the way you find 'em, says I--that's my motto.
 This ain't no bad thing that we've struck here--plenty grub and an easy
life--come, give us your hand, duke, and le's all be friends."

The duke done it, and Jim and me was pretty glad to see it.  It took
away all the uncomfortableness and we felt mighty good over it, because
it would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the
raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody
to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others.

It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no
kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds.  But I
never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way;
then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble.  If they
wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as
it would keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so
I didn't tell him.  If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt
that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them
have their own way.




CHAPTER XX.

THEY asked us considerable many questions; wanted to know what we
covered up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of
running--was Jim a runaway nigger?  Says I:

"Goodness sakes! would a runaway nigger run _south_?"

No, they allowed he wouldn't.  I had to account for things some way, so
I says:

"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and
they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike.  Pa, he 'lowed
he'd break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a little
one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans.  Pa was
pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't
nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim.  That warn't
enough to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck passage nor no other way.
 Well, when the river rose pa had a streak of luck one day; he ketched
this piece of a raft; so we reckoned we'd go down to Orleans on it.
 Pa's luck didn't hold out; a steamboat run over the forrard corner of
the raft one night, and we all went overboard and dove under the wheel;
Jim and me come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was only four
years old, so they never come up no more.  Well, for the next day or
two we had considerable trouble, because people was always coming out in
skiffs and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they believed he was
a runaway nigger.  We don't run daytimes no more now; nights they don't
bother us."

The duke says:

"Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run in the daytime if we
want to.  I'll think the thing over--I'll invent a plan that'll fix it.
We'll let it alone for to-day, because of course we don't want to go by
that town yonder in daylight--it mightn't be healthy."

Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat
lightning was squirting around low down in the sky, and the leaves was
beginning to shiver--it was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see
that.  So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see
what the beds was like.  My bed was a straw tick better than Jim's,
which was a corn-shuck tick; there's always cobs around about in a shuck
tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and when you roll over the dry
shucks sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it
makes such a rustling that you wake up.  Well, the duke allowed he would
take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn't.  He says:

"I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a sejested to you that
a corn-shuck bed warn't just fitten for me to sleep on.  Your Grace 'll
take the shuck bed yourself."

Jim and me was in a sweat again for a minute, being afraid there was
going to be some more trouble amongst them; so we was pretty glad when
the duke says:

"'Tis my fate to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel of
oppression.  Misfortune has broken my once haughty spirit; I yield, I
submit; 'tis my fate.  I am alone in the world--let me suffer; can bear
it."

We got away as soon as it was good and dark.  The king told us to stand
well out towards the middle of the river, and not show a light till we
got a long ways below the town.  We come in sight of the little bunch of
lights by and by--that was the town, you know--and slid by, about a half
a mile out, all right.  When we was three-quarters of a mile below we
hoisted up our signal lantern; and about ten o'clock it come on to rain
and blow and thunder and lighten like everything; so the king told us
to both stay on watch till the weather got better; then him and the duke
crawled into the wigwam and turned in for the night.  It was my watch
below till twelve, but I wouldn't a turned in anyway if I'd had a bed,
because a body don't see such a storm as that every day in the week, not
by a long sight.  My souls, how the wind did scream along!  And every
second or two there'd come a glare that lit up the white-caps for a half
a mile around, and you'd see the islands looking dusty through the rain,
and the trees thrashing around in the wind; then comes a H-WHACK!--bum!
bum! bumble-umble-um-bum-bum-bum-bum--and the thunder would go rumbling
and grumbling away, and quit--and then RIP comes another flash and
another sockdolager.  The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes,
but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.  We didn't have no trouble
about snags; the lightning was glaring and flittering around so constant
that we could see them plenty soon enough to throw her head this way or
that and miss them.

I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time,
so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was always
mighty good that way, Jim was.  I crawled into the wigwam, but the king
and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn't no show for
me; so I laid outside--I didn't mind the rain, because it was warm, and
the waves warn't running so high now.  About two they come up again,
though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind, because
he reckoned they warn't high enough yet to do any harm; but he was
mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a
regular ripper and washed me overboard.  It most killed Jim a-laughing.
 He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway.

I took the watch, and Jim he laid down and snored away; and by and by
the storm let up for good and all; and the first cabin-light that showed
I rousted him out, and we slid the raft into hiding quarters for the
day.

The king got out an old ratty deck of cards after breakfast, and him
and the duke played seven-up a while, five cents a game.  Then they got
tired of it, and allowed they would "lay out a campaign," as they called
it. The duke went down into his carpet-bag, and fetched up a lot of
little printed bills and read them out loud.  One bill said, "The
celebrated Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris," would "lecture on the
Science of Phrenology" at such and such a place, on the blank day of
blank, at ten cents admission, and "furnish charts of character at
twenty-five cents apiece."  The duke said that was _him_.  In another
bill he was the "world-renowned Shakespearian tragedian, Garrick the
Younger, of Drury Lane, London."  In other bills he had a lot of other
names and done other wonderful things, like finding water and gold with
a "divining-rod," "dissipating witch spells," and so on.  By and by he
says:

"But the histrionic muse is the darling.  Have you ever trod the boards,
Royalty?"

"No," says the king.

"You shall, then, before you're three days older, Fallen Grandeur," says
the duke.  "The first good town we come to we'll hire a hall and do the
sword fight in Richard III. and the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.
How does that strike you?"

"I'm in, up to the hub, for anything that will pay, Bilgewater; but, you
see, I don't know nothing about play-actin', and hain't ever seen much
of it.  I was too small when pap used to have 'em at the palace.  Do you
reckon you can learn me?"

"Easy!"

"All right.  I'm jist a-freezn' for something fresh, anyway.  Le's
commence right away."

So the duke he told him all about who Romeo was and who Juliet was, and
said he was used to being Romeo, so the king could be Juliet.

"But if Juliet's such a young gal, duke, my peeled head and my white
whiskers is goin' to look oncommon odd on her, maybe."

"No, don't you worry; these country jakes won't ever think of that.
Besides, you know, you'll be in costume, and that makes all the
difference in the world; Juliet's in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight
before she goes to bed, and she's got on her night-gown and her ruffled
nightcap.  Here are the costumes for the parts."

He got out two or three curtain-calico suits, which he said was
meedyevil armor for Richard III. and t'other chap, and a long white
cotton nightshirt and a ruffled nightcap to match.  The king was
satisfied; so the duke got out his book and read the parts over in the
most splendid spread-eagle way, prancing around and acting at the same
time, to show how it had got to be done; then he give the book to the
king and told him to get his part by heart.

There was a little one-horse town about three mile down the bend, and
after dinner the duke said he had ciphered out his idea about how to run
in daylight without it being dangersome for Jim; so he allowed he would
go down to the town and fix that thing.  The king allowed he would go,
too, and see if he couldn't strike something.  We was out of coffee, so
Jim said I better go along with them in the canoe and get some.

When we got there there warn't nobody stirring; streets empty, and
perfectly dead and still, like Sunday.  We found a sick nigger sunning
himself in a back yard, and he said everybody that warn't too young or
too sick or too old was gone to camp-meeting, about two mile back in the
woods.  The king got the directions, and allowed he'd go and work that
camp-meeting for all it was worth, and I might go, too.

The duke said what he was after was a printing-office.  We found it;
a little bit of a concern, up over a carpenter shop--carpenters and
printers all gone to the meeting, and no doors locked.  It was a dirty,
littered-up place, and had ink marks, and handbills with pictures of
horses and runaway niggers on them, all over the walls.  The duke shed
his coat and said he was all right now.  So me and the king lit out for
the camp-meeting.

We got there in about a half an hour fairly dripping, for it was a most
awful hot day.  There was as much as a thousand people there from
twenty mile around.  The woods was full of teams and wagons, hitched
everywheres, feeding out of the wagon-troughs and stomping to keep
off the flies.  There was sheds made out of poles and roofed over with
branches, where they had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of
watermelons and green corn and such-like truck.

The preaching was going on under the same kinds of sheds, only they was
bigger and held crowds of people.  The benches was made out of outside
slabs of logs, with holes bored in the round side to drive sticks into
for legs. They didn't have no backs.  The preachers had high platforms
to stand on at one end of the sheds.  The women had on sun-bonnets;
and some had linsey-woolsey frocks, some gingham ones, and a few of the
young ones had on calico.  Some of the young men was barefooted, and
some of the children didn't have on any clothes but just a tow-linen
shirt.  Some of the old women was knitting, and some of the young folks
was courting on the sly.

The first shed we come to the preacher was lining out a hymn.  He lined
out two lines, everybody sung it, and it was kind of grand to hear it,
there was so many of them and they done it in such a rousing way; then
he lined out two more for them to sing--and so on.  The people woke up
more and more, and sung louder and louder; and towards the end some
begun to groan, and some begun to shout.  Then the preacher begun to
preach, and begun in earnest, too; and went weaving first to one side of
the platform and then the other, and then a-leaning down over the front
of it, with his arms and his body going all the time, and shouting his
words out with all his might; and every now and then he would hold up
his Bible and spread it open, and kind of pass it around this way and
that, shouting, "It's the brazen serpent in the wilderness!  Look upon
it and live!"  And people would shout out, "Glory!--A-a-_men_!"  And so
he went on, and the people groaning and crying and saying amen:

"Oh, come to the mourners' bench! come, black with sin! (_Amen_!) come,
sick and sore! (_Amen_!) come, lame and halt and blind! (_Amen_!) come,
pore and needy, sunk in shame! (_A-A-Men_!) come, all that's worn and
soiled and suffering!--come with a broken spirit! come with a contrite
heart! come in your rags and sin and dirt! the waters that cleanse
is free, the door of heaven stands open--oh, enter in and be at rest!"
(_A-A-Men_!  _Glory, Glory Hallelujah!_)

And so on.  You couldn't make out what the preacher said any more, on
account of the shouting and crying.  Folks got up everywheres in the
crowd, and worked their way just by main strength to the mourners'
bench, with the tears running down their faces; and when all the
mourners had got up there to the front benches in a crowd, they sung and
shouted and flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild.

Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him
over everybody; and next he went a-charging up on to the platform, and
the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it.  He
told them he was a pirate--been a pirate for thirty years out in the
Indian Ocean--and his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in
a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to
goodness he'd been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat
without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that
ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for
the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start
right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest
of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could
do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews
in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there
without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced
a pirate he would say to him, "Don't you thank me, don't you give me no
credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting,
natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher
there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!"

And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody.  Then somebody
sings out, "Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!"  Well,
a half a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, "Let _him_
pass the hat around!"  Then everybody said it, the preacher too.

So the king went all through the crowd with his hat swabbing his eyes,
and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being
so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the
prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would
up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he
always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or
six times--and he was invited to stay a week; and everybody wanted him to
live in their houses, and said they'd think it was an honor; but he said
as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he couldn't do no good, and
besides he was in a sweat to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to
work on the pirates.

When we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had
collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents.  And then he had
fetched away a three-gallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a
wagon when he was starting home through the woods.  The king said,
take it all around, it laid over any day he'd ever put in in the
missionarying line.  He said it warn't no use talking, heathens don't
amount to shucks alongside of pirates to work a camp-meeting with.

The duke was thinking _he'd_ been doing pretty well till the king come
to show up, but after that he didn't think so so much.  He had set
up and printed off two little jobs for farmers in that
printing-office--horse bills--and took the money, four dollars.  And he
had got in ten dollars' worth of advertisements for the paper, which he
said he would put in for four dollars if they would pay in advance--so
they done it. The price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he took
in three subscriptions for half a dollar apiece on condition of them
paying him in advance; they were going to pay in cordwood and onions as
usual, but he said he had just bought the concern and knocked down the
price as low as he could afford it, and was going to run it for cash.
 He set up a little piece of poetry, which he made, himself, out of
his own head--three verses--kind of sweet and saddish--the name of it was,
"Yes, crush, cold world, this breaking heart"--and he left that all set
up and ready to print in the paper, and didn't charge nothing for it.
 Well, he took in nine dollars and a half, and said he'd done a pretty
square day's work for it.

Then he showed us another little job he'd printed and hadn't charged
for, because it was for us.  It had a picture of a runaway nigger with
a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and "$200 reward" under it.  The
reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a dot.  It said
he run away from St. Jacques' plantation, forty mile below New Orleans,
last winter, and likely went north, and whoever would catch him and send
him back he could have the reward and expenses.

"Now," says the duke, "after to-night we can run in the daytime if we
want to.  Whenever we see anybody coming we can tie Jim hand and foot
with a rope, and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and say we
captured him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a steamboat,
so we got this little raft on credit from our friends and are going down
to get the reward.  Handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim,
but it wouldn't go well with the story of us being so poor.  Too much
like jewelry.  Ropes are the correct thing--we must preserve the unities,
as we say on the boards."

We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there couldn't be no trouble
about running daytimes.  We judged we could make miles enough that night
to get out of the reach of the powwow we reckoned the duke's work in
the printing office was going to make in that little town; then we could
boom right along if we wanted to.

We laid low and kept still, and never shoved out till nearly ten
o'clock; then we slid by, pretty wide away from the town, and didn't
hoist our lantern till we was clear out of sight of it.

When Jim called me to take the watch at four in the morning, he says:

"Huck, does you reck'n we gwyne to run acrost any mo' kings on dis
trip?"

"No," I says, "I reckon not."

"Well," says he, "dat's all right, den.  I doan' mine one er two kings,
but dat's enough.  Dis one's powerful drunk, en de duke ain' much
better."

I found Jim had been trying to get him to talk French, so he could hear
what it was like; but he said he had been in this country so long, and
had so much trouble, he'd forgot it.




CHAPTER XXI.

IT was after sun-up now, but we went right on and didn't tie up.  The
king and the duke turned out by and by looking pretty rusty; but after
they'd jumped overboard and took a swim it chippered them up a good
deal. After breakfast the king he took a seat on the corner of the raft,
and pulled off his boots and rolled up his britches, and let his legs
dangle in the water, so as to be comfortable, and lit his pipe, and went
to getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart.  When he had got it pretty
good him and the duke begun to practice it together.  The duke had to
learn him over and over again how to say every speech; and he made him
sigh, and put his hand on his heart, and after a while he said he done
it pretty well; "only," he says, "you mustn't bellow out _Romeo_!
that way, like a bull--you must say it soft and sick and languishy,
so--R-o-o-meo! that is the idea; for Juliet's a dear sweet mere child of
a girl, you know, and she doesn't bray like a jackass."

Well, next they got out a couple of long swords that the duke made out
of oak laths, and begun to practice the sword fight--the duke called
himself Richard III.; and the way they laid on and pranced around
the raft was grand to see.  But by and by the king tripped and fell
overboard, and after that they took a rest, and had a talk about all
kinds of adventures they'd had in other times along the river.

After dinner the duke says:

"Well, Capet, we'll want to make this a first-class show, you know, so
I guess we'll add a little more to it.  We want a little something to
answer encores with, anyway."

"What's onkores, Bilgewater?"

The duke told him, and then says:

"I'll answer by doing the Highland fling or the sailor's hornpipe; and
you--well, let me see--oh, I've got it--you can do Hamlet's soliloquy."

"Hamlet's which?"

"Hamlet's soliloquy, you know; the most celebrated thing in Shakespeare.
Ah, it's sublime, sublime!  Always fetches the house.  I haven't got
it in the book--I've only got one volume--but I reckon I can piece it out
from memory.  I'll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call
it back from recollection's vaults."

So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible
every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would
squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next
he would sigh, and next he'd let on to drop a tear.  It was beautiful
to see him. By and by he got it.  He told us to give attention.  Then
he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his
arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky;
and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth; and after that,
all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his
chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before.
 This is the speech--I learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it
to the king:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of
so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come
to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the
innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling
the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I
would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The
oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The law's delay, and the
quietus which his pangs might take. In the dead waste and middle of the
night, when churchyards yawn In customary suits of solemn black, But
that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world, And thus the native hue of
resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage, Is sicklied o'er with care.
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops, With this
regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. 'Tis a
consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope
not thy ponderous and marble jaws. But get thee to a nunnery&mdash;go!

Well, the old man he liked that speech, and he mighty soon got it so he
could do it first rate. It seemed like he was just born for it; and when
he had his hand in and was excited, it was perfectly lovely the way he
would rip and tear and rair up behind when he was getting it off.

The first chance we got, the duke he had some show bills printed; and
after that, for two or three days as we floated along, the raft was a
most uncommon lively place, for there warn't nothing but sword-fighting
and rehearsing--as the duke called it--going on all the time. One morning,
when we was pretty well down the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight
of a little one-horse town in a big bend; so we tied up about
three-quarters of a mile above it, in the mouth of a crick which was
shut in like a tunnel by the cypress trees, and all of us but Jim took
the canoe and went down there to see if there was any chance in that
place for our show.

We struck it mighty lucky; there was going to be a circus there that
afternoon, and the country people was already beginning to come in, in
all kinds of old shackly wagons, and on horses. The circus would leave
before night, so our show would have a pretty good chance. The duke he
hired the court house, and we went around and stuck up our bills. They
read like this:

Shaksperean Revival!!!

Wonderful Attraction!

For One Night Only! The world renowned tragedians,

David Garrick the younger, of Drury Lane Theatre, London,

and

Edmund Kean the elder, of the Royal Haymarket Theatre, Whitechapel,
Pudding Lane, Piccadilly, London, and the Royal Continental Theatres, in
their sublime Shaksperean Spectacle entitled The Balcony Scene in

Romeo and Juliet!!!

Romeo...................................... Mr. Garrick.

Juliet..................................... Mr. Kean.

Assisted by the whole strength of the company!

New costumes, new scenery, new appointments!

Also:

The thrilling, masterly, and blood-curdling Broad-sword conflict In
Richard III.!!!

Richard III................................ Mr. Garrick.

Richmond................................... Mr. Kean.

also:

(by special request,)

Hamlet's Immortal Soliloquy!!

By the Illustrious Kean!

Done by him 300 consecutive nights in Paris!

For One Night Only,

On account of imperative European engagements!

Admission 25 cents; children and servants, 10 cents.

Then we went loafing around the town. The stores and houses was most all
old shackly dried-up frame concerns that hadn't ever been painted; they
was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of
reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little
gardens around them, but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in
them but jimpson weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled-up
boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out
tin-ware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on
at different times; and they leaned every which-way, and had gates that
didn't generly have but one hinge--a leather one. Some of the fences
had been whitewashed, some time or another, but the duke said it was in
Clumbus's time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and
people driving them out.

All the stores was along one street.  They had white domestic awnings in
front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts.
There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting
on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and
chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching--a mighty ornery
lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella,
but didn't wear no coats nor waistcoats, they called one another Bill,
and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and
used considerable many cuss words.  There was as many as one loafer
leaning up against every awning-post, and he most always had his hands
in his britches-pockets, except when he fetched them out to lend a chaw
of tobacco or scratch.  What a body was hearing amongst them all the
time was:

"Gimme a chaw 'v tobacker, Hank."

"Cain't; I hain't got but one chaw left.  Ask Bill."

Maybe Bill he gives him a chaw; maybe he lies and says he ain't got
none. Some of them kinds of loafers never has a cent in the world, nor a
chaw of tobacco of their own.  They get all their chawing by borrowing;
they say to a fellow, "I wisht you'd len' me a chaw, Jack, I jist this
minute give Ben Thompson the last chaw I had"--which is a lie pretty
much everytime; it don't fool nobody but a stranger; but Jack ain't no
stranger, so he says:

"_You_ give him a chaw, did you?  So did your sister's cat's
grandmother. You pay me back the chaws you've awready borry'd off'n me,
Lafe Buckner, then I'll loan you one or two ton of it, and won't charge
you no back intrust, nuther."

"Well, I _did_ pay you back some of it wunst."

"Yes, you did--'bout six chaws.  You borry'd store tobacker and paid back
nigger-head."

Store tobacco is flat black plug, but these fellows mostly chaws the
natural leaf twisted.  When they borrow a chaw they don't generly cut it
off with a knife, but set the plug in between their teeth, and gnaw with
their teeth and tug at the plug with their hands till they get it in
two; then sometimes the one that owns the tobacco looks mournful at it
when it's handed back, and says, sarcastic:

"Here, gimme the _chaw_, and you take the _plug_."

All the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn't nothing else _but_
mud--mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places,
and two or three inches deep in _all_ the places.  The hogs loafed and
grunted around everywheres.  You'd see a muddy sow and a litter of pigs
come lazying along the street and whollop herself right down in the way,
where folks had to walk around her, and she'd stretch out and shut her
eyes and wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking her, and look as
happy as if she was on salary. And pretty soon you'd hear a loafer
sing out, "Hi!  _so_ boy! sick him, Tige!" and away the sow would go,
squealing most horrible, with a dog or two swinging to each ear, and
three or four dozen more a-coming; and then you would see all the
loafers get up and watch the thing out of sight, and laugh at the fun
and look grateful for the noise.  Then they'd settle back again till
there was a dog fight.  There couldn't anything wake them up all over,
and make them happy all over, like a dog fight--unless it might be
putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a
tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death.

On the river front some of the houses was sticking out over the bank,
and they was bowed and bent, and about ready to tumble in. The people
had moved out of them.  The bank was caved away under one corner of some
others, and that corner was hanging over.  People lived in them yet, but
it was dangersome, because sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house
caves in at a time.  Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep
will start in and cave along and cave along till it all caves into the
river in one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back,
and back, and back, because the river's always gnawing at it.

The nearer it got to noon that day the thicker and thicker was the
wagons and horses in the streets, and more coming all the time.
 Families fetched their dinners with them from the country, and eat them
in the wagons.  There was considerable whisky drinking going on, and I
seen three fights.  By and by somebody sings out:

"Here comes old Boggs!--in from the country for his little old monthly
drunk; here he comes, boys!"

All the loafers looked glad; I reckoned they was used to having fun out
of Boggs.  One of them says:

"Wonder who he's a-gwyne to chaw up this time.  If he'd a-chawed up all
the men he's ben a-gwyne to chaw up in the last twenty year he'd have
considerable ruputation now."

Another one says, "I wisht old Boggs 'd threaten me, 'cuz then I'd know
I warn't gwyne to die for a thousan' year."

Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an
Injun, and singing out:

"Cler the track, thar.  I'm on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is
a-gwyne to raise."

He was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle; he was over fifty year
old, and had a very red face.  Everybody yelled at him and laughed at
him and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and
lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now because
he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat
first, and spoon vittles to top off on."

He see me, and rode up and says:

"Whar'd you come f'm, boy?  You prepared to die?"

Then he rode on.  I was scared, but a man says:

"He don't mean nothing; he's always a-carryin' on like that when he's
drunk.  He's the best naturedest old fool in Arkansaw--never hurt nobody,
drunk nor sober."

Boggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and bent his head down
so he could see under the curtain of the awning and yells:

"Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you've swindled.
You're the houn' I'm after, and I'm a-gwyne to have you, too!"

And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could lay his tongue
to, and the whole street packed with people listening and laughing and
going on.  By and by a proud-looking man about fifty-five--and he was a
heap the best dressed man in that town, too--steps out of the store, and
the crowd drops back on each side to let him come.  He says to Boggs,
mighty ca'm and slow--he says:

"I'm tired of this, but I'll endure it till one o'clock.  Till one
o'clock, mind--no longer.  If you open your mouth against me only once
after that time you can't travel so far but I will find you."

Then he turns and goes in.  The crowd looked mighty sober; nobody
stirred, and there warn't no more laughing.  Boggs rode off
blackguarding Sherburn as loud as he could yell, all down the street;
and pretty soon back he comes and stops before the store, still keeping
it up.  Some men crowded around him and tried to get him to shut up,
but he wouldn't; they told him it would be one o'clock in about fifteen
minutes, and so he _must_ go home--he must go right away.  But it didn't
do no good.  He cussed away with all his might, and throwed his hat down
in the mud and rode over it, and pretty soon away he went a-raging down
the street again, with his gray hair a-flying. Everybody that could get
a chance at him tried their best to coax him off of his horse so they
could lock him up and get him sober; but it warn't no use--up the street
he would tear again, and give Sherburn another cussing.  By and by
somebody says:

"Go for his daughter!--quick, go for his daughter; sometimes he'll listen
to her.  If anybody can persuade him, she can."

So somebody started on a run.  I walked down street a ways and stopped.
In about five or ten minutes here comes Boggs again, but not on his
horse.  He was a-reeling across the street towards me, bare-headed, with
a friend on both sides of him a-holt of his arms and hurrying him along.
He was quiet, and looked uneasy; and he warn't hanging back any, but was
doing some of the hurrying himself.  Somebody sings out:

"Boggs!"

I looked over there to see who said it, and it was that Colonel
Sherburn. He was standing perfectly still in the street, and had a
pistol raised in his right hand--not aiming it, but holding it out with
the barrel tilted up towards the sky.  The same second I see a young
girl coming on the run, and two men with her.  Boggs and the men turned
round to see who called him, and when they see the pistol the men
jumped to one side, and the pistol-barrel come down slow and steady to
a level--both barrels cocked. Boggs throws up both of his hands and says,
"O Lord, don't shoot!"  Bang! goes the first shot, and he staggers back,
clawing at the air--bang! goes the second one, and he tumbles backwards
on to the ground, heavy and solid, with his arms spread out.  That young
girl screamed out and comes rushing, and down she throws herself on her
father, crying, and saying, "Oh, he's killed him, he's killed him!"  The
crowd closed up around them, and shouldered and jammed one another, with
their necks stretched, trying to see, and people on the inside trying to
shove them back and shouting, "Back, back! give him air, give him air!"

Colonel Sherburn he tossed his pistol on to the ground, and turned
around on his heels and walked off.

They took Boggs to a little drug store, the crowd pressing around just
the same, and the whole town following, and I rushed and got a good
place at the window, where I was close to him and could see in.  They
laid him on the floor and put one large Bible under his head, and opened
another one and spread it on his breast; but they tore open his shirt
first, and I seen where one of the bullets went in.  He made about a
dozen long gasps, his breast lifting the Bible up when he drawed in his
breath, and letting it down again when he breathed it out--and after that
he laid still; he was dead.  Then they pulled his daughter away from
him, screaming and crying, and took her off.  She was about sixteen, and
very sweet and gentle looking, but awful pale and scared.

Well, pretty soon the whole town was there, squirming and scrouging and
pushing and shoving to get at the window and have a look, but people
that had the places wouldn't give them up, and folks behind them was
saying all the time, "Say, now, you've looked enough, you fellows;
'tain't right and 'tain't fair for you to stay thar all the time, and
never give nobody a chance; other folks has their rights as well as
you."

There was considerable jawing back, so I slid out, thinking maybe
there was going to be trouble.  The streets was full, and everybody was
excited. Everybody that seen the shooting was telling how it happened,
and there was a big crowd packed around each one of these fellows,
stretching their necks and listening.  One long, lanky man, with long
hair and a big white fur stovepipe hat on the back of his head, and a
crooked-handled cane, marked out the places on the ground where Boggs
stood and where Sherburn stood, and the people following him around from
one place to t'other and watching everything he done, and bobbing their
heads to show they understood, and stooping a little and resting their
hands on their thighs to watch him mark the places on the ground with
his cane; and then he stood up straight and stiff where Sherburn had
stood, frowning and having his hat-brim down over his eyes, and sung
out, "Boggs!" and then fetched his cane down slow to a level, and says
"Bang!" staggered backwards, says "Bang!" again, and fell down flat on
his back. The people that had seen the thing said he done it perfect;
said it was just exactly the way it all happened.  Then as much as a
dozen people got out their bottles and treated him.

Well, by and by somebody said Sherburn ought to be lynched.  In about a
minute everybody was saying it; so away they went, mad and yelling, and
snatching down every clothes-line they come to to do the hanging with.




CHAPTER XXII.

THEY swarmed up towards Sherburn's house, a-whooping and raging like
Injuns, and everything had to clear the way or get run over and tromped
to mush, and it was awful to see.  Children was heeling it ahead of the
mob, screaming and trying to get out of the way; and every window along
the road was full of women's heads, and there was nigger boys in every
tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence; and as soon as the
mob would get nearly to them they would break and skaddle back out of
reach.  Lots of the women and girls was crying and taking on, scared
most to death.

They swarmed up in front of Sherburn's palings as thick as they could
jam together, and you couldn't hear yourself think for the noise.  It
was a little twenty-foot yard.  Some sung out "Tear down the fence! tear
down the fence!"  Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and
smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to
roll in like a wave.

Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch,
with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly
ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word.  The racket stopped, and the
wave sucked back.

Sherburn never said a word--just stood there, looking down.  The
stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable.  Sherburn run his eye slow
along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little to
out-gaze him, but they couldn't; they dropped their eyes and looked
sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant
kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread
that's got sand in it.

Then he says, slow and scornful:

"The idea of _you_ lynching anybody!  It's amusing.  The idea of you
thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a _man_!  Because you're brave
enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along
here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a
_man_?  Why, a _man's_ safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind--as
long as it's daytime and you're not behind him.

"Do I know you?  I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the
South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around.
The average man's a coward.  In the North he lets anybody walk over him
that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it.
In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men
in the daytime, and robbed the lot.  Your newspapers call you a
brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other
people--whereas you're just _as_ brave, and no braver.  Why don't your
juries hang murderers?  Because they're afraid the man's friends will
shoot them in the back, in the dark--and it's just what they _would_ do.

"So they always acquit; and then a _man_ goes in the night, with a
hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal.  Your mistake
is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the
other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks.  You
brought _part_ of a man--Buck Harkness, there--and if you hadn't had him
to start you, you'd a taken it out in blowing.

"You didn't want to come.  The average man don't like trouble and
danger. _You_ don't like trouble and danger.  But if only _half_ a
man--like Buck Harkness, there--shouts 'Lynch him! lynch him!' you're
afraid to back down--afraid you'll be found out to be what you
are--_cowards_--and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that
half-a-man's coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big
things you're going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's
what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in
them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their
officers.  But a mob without any _man_ at the head of it is _beneath_
pitifulness.  Now the thing for _you_ to do is to droop your tails and
go home and crawl in a hole.  If any real lynching's going to be done it
will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll
bring their masks, and fetch a _man_ along.  Now _leave_--and take your
half-a-man with you"--tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking
it when he says this.

The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing
off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking
tolerable cheap.  I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.

I went to the circus and loafed around the back side till the watchman
went by, and then dived in under the tent.  I had my twenty-dollar gold
piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it, because
there ain't no telling how soon you are going to need it, away from
home and amongst strangers that way.  You can't be too careful.  I ain't
opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain't no other way, but
there ain't no use in _wasting_ it on them.

It was a real bully circus.  It was the splendidest sight that ever was
when they all come riding in, two and two, a gentleman and lady, side
by side, the men just in their drawers and undershirts, and no shoes
nor stirrups, and resting their hands on their thighs easy and
comfortable--there must a been twenty of them--and every lady with a
lovely complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang
of real sure-enough queens, and dressed in clothes that cost millions of
dollars, and just littered with diamonds.  It was a powerful fine sight;
I never see anything so lovely.  And then one by one they got up
and stood, and went a-weaving around the ring so gentle and wavy and
graceful, the men looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with their
heads bobbing and skimming along, away up there under the tent-roof, and
every lady's rose-leafy dress flapping soft and silky around her hips,
and she looking like the most loveliest parasol.

And then faster and faster they went, all of them dancing, first one
foot out in the air and then the other, the horses leaning more and
more, and the ringmaster going round and round the center-pole, cracking
his whip and shouting "Hi!--hi!" and the clown cracking jokes behind
him; and by and by all hands dropped the reins, and every lady put her
knuckles on her hips and every gentleman folded his arms, and then how
the horses did lean over and hump themselves!  And so one after the
other they all skipped off into the ring, and made the sweetest bow I
ever see, and then scampered out, and everybody clapped their hands and
went just about wild.

Well, all through the circus they done the most astonishing things; and
all the time that clown carried on so it most killed the people.  The
ringmaster couldn't ever say a word to him but he was back at him quick
as a wink with the funniest things a body ever said; and how he ever
_could_ think of so many of them, and so sudden and so pat, was what I
couldn't noway understand. Why, I couldn't a thought of them in a year.
And by and by a drunk man tried to get into the ring--said he wanted to
ride; said he could ride as well as anybody that ever was.  They argued
and tried to keep him out, but he wouldn't listen, and the whole show
come to a standstill.  Then the people begun to holler at him and make
fun of him, and that made him mad, and he begun to rip and tear; so that
stirred up the people, and a lot of men begun to pile down off of the
benches and swarm towards the ring, saying, "Knock him down! throw him
out!" and one or two women begun to scream.  So, then, the ringmaster
he made a little speech, and said he hoped there wouldn't be no
disturbance, and if the man would promise he wouldn't make no more
trouble he would let him ride if he thought he could stay on the horse.
 So everybody laughed and said all right, and the man got on. The minute
he was on, the horse begun to rip and tear and jump and cavort around,
with two circus men hanging on to his bridle trying to hold him, and the
drunk man hanging on to his neck, and his heels flying in the air every
jump, and the whole crowd of people standing up shouting and laughing
till tears rolled down.  And at last, sure enough, all the circus men
could do, the horse broke loose, and away he went like the very nation,
round and round the ring, with that sot laying down on him and hanging
to his neck, with first one leg hanging most to the ground on one side,
and then t'other one on t'other side, and the people just crazy.  It
warn't funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see his danger.
 But pretty soon he struggled up astraddle and grabbed the bridle,
a-reeling this way and that; and the next minute he sprung up and
dropped the bridle and stood! and the horse a-going like a house afire
too.  He just stood up there, a-sailing around as easy and comfortable
as if he warn't ever drunk in his life--and then he begun to pull off his
clothes and sling them.  He shed them so thick they kind of clogged up
the air, and altogether he shed seventeen suits. And, then, there he
was, slim and handsome, and dressed the gaudiest and prettiest you
ever saw, and he lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly
hum--and finally skipped off, and made his bow and danced off to
the dressing-room, and everybody just a-howling with pleasure and
astonishment.

Then the ringmaster he see how he had been fooled, and he _was_ the
sickest ringmaster you ever see, I reckon.  Why, it was one of his own
men!  He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on
to nobody. Well, I felt sheepish enough to be took in so, but I wouldn't
a been in that ringmaster's place, not for a thousand dollars.  I don't
know; there may be bullier circuses than what that one was, but I
never struck them yet. Anyways, it was plenty good enough for _me_; and
wherever I run across it, it can have all of _my_ custom every time.

Well, that night we had _our_ show; but there warn't only about twelve
people there--just enough to pay expenses.  And they laughed all the
time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before
the show was over, but one boy which was asleep.  So the duke said these
Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted
was low comedy--and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he
reckoned.  He said he could size their style.  So next morning he got
some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off
some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village.  The bills said:




CHAPTER XXIII.

WELL, all day him and the king was hard at it, rigging up a stage and
a curtain and a row of candles for footlights; and that night the house
was jam full of men in no time.  When the place couldn't hold no more,
the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come on
to the stage and stood up before the curtain and made a little speech,
and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one
that ever was; and so he went on a-bragging about the tragedy, and about
Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it;
and at last when he'd got everybody's expectations up high enough, he
rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come a-prancing
out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over,
ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a
rainbow.  And--but never mind the rest of his outfit; it was just wild,
but it was awful funny. The people most killed themselves laughing; and
when the king got done capering and capered off behind the scenes, they
roared and clapped and stormed and haw-hawed till he come back and done
it over again, and after that they made him do it another time. Well, it
would make a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut.

Then the duke he lets the curtain down, and bows to the people, and says
the great tragedy will be performed only two nights more, on accounts of
pressing London engagements, where the seats is all sold already for it
in Drury Lane; and then he makes them another bow, and says if he has
succeeded in pleasing them and instructing them, he will be deeply
obleeged if they will mention it to their friends and get them to come
and see it.

Twenty people sings out:

"What, is it over?  Is that _all_?"

The duke says yes.  Then there was a fine time.  Everybody sings
out, "Sold!" and rose up mad, and was a-going for that stage and them
tragedians.  But a big, fine looking man jumps up on a bench and shouts:

"Hold on!  Just a word, gentlemen."  They stopped to listen.  "We are
sold--mighty badly sold.  But we don't want to be the laughing stock of
this whole town, I reckon, and never hear the last of this thing as long
as we live.  _No_.  What we want is to go out of here quiet, and talk
this show up, and sell the _rest_ of the town!  Then we'll all be in the
same boat.  Ain't that sensible?" ("You bet it is!--the jedge is right!"
everybody sings out.) "All right, then--not a word about any sell.  Go
along home, and advise everybody to come and see the tragedy."

Next day you couldn't hear nothing around that town but how splendid
that show was.  House was jammed again that night, and we sold this
crowd the same way.  When me and the king and the duke got home to the
raft we all had a supper; and by and by, about midnight, they made Jim
and me back her out and float her down the middle of the river, and
fetch her in and hide her about two mile below town.

The third night the house was crammed again--and they warn't new-comers
this time, but people that was at the show the other two nights.  I
stood by the duke at the door, and I see that every man that went in had
his pockets bulging, or something muffled up under his coat--and I see it
warn't no perfumery, neither, not by a long sight.  I smelt sickly eggs
by the barrel, and rotten cabbages, and such things; and if I know the
signs of a dead cat being around, and I bet I do, there was sixty-four
of them went in.  I shoved in there for a minute, but it was too various
for me; I couldn't stand it.  Well, when the place couldn't hold no more
people the duke he give a fellow a quarter and told him to tend door
for him a minute, and then he started around for the stage door, I after
him; but the minute we turned the corner and was in the dark he says:

"Walk fast now till you get away from the houses, and then shin for the
raft like the dickens was after you!"

I done it, and he done the same.  We struck the raft at the same time,
and in less than two seconds we was gliding down stream, all dark and
still, and edging towards the middle of the river, nobody saying a
word. I reckoned the poor king was in for a gaudy time of it with the
audience, but nothing of the sort; pretty soon he crawls out from under
the wigwam, and says:

"Well, how'd the old thing pan out this time, duke?"  He hadn't been
up-town at all.

We never showed a light till we was about ten mile below the village.
Then we lit up and had a supper, and the king and the duke fairly
laughed their bones loose over the way they'd served them people.  The
duke says:

"Greenhorns, flatheads!  I knew the first house would keep mum and let
the rest of the town get roped in; and I knew they'd lay for us the
third night, and consider it was _their_ turn now.  Well, it _is_ their
turn, and I'd give something to know how much they'd take for it.  I
_would_ just like to know how they're putting in their opportunity.
 They can turn it into a picnic if they want to--they brought plenty
provisions."

Them rapscallions took in four hundred and sixty-five dollars in that
three nights.  I never see money hauled in by the wagon-load like that
before.  By and by, when they was asleep and snoring, Jim says:

"Don't it s'prise you de way dem kings carries on, Huck?"

"No," I says, "it don't."

"Why don't it, Huck?"

"Well, it don't, because it's in the breed.  I reckon they're all
alike."

"But, Huck, dese kings o' ourn is reglar rapscallions; dat's jist what
dey is; dey's reglar rapscallions."

"Well, that's what I'm a-saying; all kings is mostly rapscallions, as
fur as I can make out."

"Is dat so?"

"You read about them once--you'll see.  Look at Henry the Eight; this 'n
's a Sunday-school Superintendent to _him_.  And look at Charles Second,
and Louis Fourteen, and Louis Fifteen, and James Second, and Edward
Second, and Richard Third, and forty more; besides all them Saxon
heptarchies that used to rip around so in old times and raise Cain.  My,
you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom.  He _was_ a
blossom.  He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head
next morning.  And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was
ordering up eggs.  'Fetch up Nell Gwynn,' he says.  They fetch her up.
Next morning, 'Chop off her head!'  And they chop it off.  'Fetch up
Jane Shore,' he says; and up she comes, Next morning, 'Chop off her
head'--and they chop it off.  'Ring up Fair Rosamun.'  Fair Rosamun
answers the bell.  Next morning, 'Chop off her head.'  And he made every
one of them tell him a tale every night; and he kept that up till he had
hogged a thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a
book, and called it Domesday Book--which was a good name and stated the
case.  You don't know kings, Jim, but I know them; and this old rip
of ourn is one of the cleanest I've struck in history.  Well, Henry he
takes a notion he wants to get up some trouble with this country. How
does he go at it--give notice?--give the country a show?  No.  All of a
sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks
out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on.  That was
_his_ style--he never give anybody a chance.  He had suspicions of his
father, the Duke of Wellington.  Well, what did he do?  Ask him to show
up?  No--drownded him in a butt of mamsey, like a cat.  S'pose people
left money laying around where he was--what did he do?  He collared it.
 S'pose he contracted to do a thing, and you paid him, and didn't set
down there and see that he done it--what did he do?  He always done the
other thing. S'pose he opened his mouth--what then?  If he didn't shut it
up powerful quick he'd lose a lie every time.  That's the kind of a bug
Henry was; and if we'd a had him along 'stead of our kings he'd a fooled
that town a heap worse than ourn done.  I don't say that ourn is lambs,
because they ain't, when you come right down to the cold facts; but they
ain't nothing to _that_ old ram, anyway.  All I say is, kings is kings,
and you got to make allowances.  Take them all around, they're a mighty
ornery lot. It's the way they're raised."

"But dis one do _smell_ so like de nation, Huck."

"Well, they all do, Jim.  We can't help the way a king smells; history
don't tell no way."

"Now de duke, he's a tolerble likely man in some ways."

"Yes, a duke's different.  But not very different.  This one's
a middling hard lot for a duke.  When he's drunk there ain't no
near-sighted man could tell him from a king."

"Well, anyways, I doan' hanker for no mo' un um, Huck.  Dese is all I
kin stan'."

"It's the way I feel, too, Jim.  But we've got them on our hands, and we
got to remember what they are, and make allowances.  Sometimes I wish we
could hear of a country that's out of kings."

What was the use to tell Jim these warn't real kings and dukes?  It
wouldn't a done no good; and, besides, it was just as I said:  you
couldn't tell them from the real kind.

I went to sleep, and Jim didn't call me when it was my turn.  He often
done that.  When I waked up just at daybreak he was sitting there with
his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself.  I
didn't take notice nor let on.  I knowed what it was about.  He was
thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low
and homesick; because he hadn't ever been away from home before in his
life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white
folks does for their'n.  It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so.
 He was often moaning and mourning that way nights, when he judged I
was asleep, and saying, "Po' little 'Lizabeth! po' little Johnny! it's
mighty hard; I spec' I ain't ever gwyne to see you no mo', no mo'!"  He
was a mighty good nigger, Jim was.

But this time I somehow got to talking to him about his wife and young
ones; and by and by he says:

"What makes me feel so bad dis time 'uz bekase I hear sumpn over yonder
on de bank like a whack, er a slam, while ago, en it mine me er de time
I treat my little 'Lizabeth so ornery.  She warn't on'y 'bout fo' year
ole, en she tuck de sk'yarlet fever, en had a powful rough spell; but
she got well, en one day she was a-stannin' aroun', en I says to her, I
says:

"'Shet de do'.'

"She never done it; jis' stood dah, kiner smilin' up at me.  It make me
mad; en I says agin, mighty loud, I says:

"'Doan' you hear me?  Shet de do'!'

"She jis stood de same way, kiner smilin' up.  I was a-bilin'!  I says:

"'I lay I _make_ you mine!'

"En wid dat I fetch' her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin'.
Den I went into de yuther room, en 'uz gone 'bout ten minutes; en when
I come back dah was dat do' a-stannin' open _yit_, en dat chile stannin'
mos' right in it, a-lookin' down and mournin', en de tears runnin' down.
 My, but I _wuz_ mad!  I was a-gwyne for de chile, but jis' den--it was a
do' dat open innerds--jis' den, 'long come de wind en slam it to, behine
de chile, ker-BLAM!--en my lan', de chile never move'!  My breff mos'
hop outer me; en I feel so--so--I doan' know HOW I feel.  I crope out,
all a-tremblin', en crope aroun' en open de do' easy en slow, en poke my
head in behine de chile, sof' en still, en all uv a sudden I says POW!
jis' as loud as I could yell.  _She never budge!_  Oh, Huck, I bust out
a-cryin' en grab her up in my arms, en say, 'Oh, de po' little thing!
 De Lord God Amighty fogive po' ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive
hisself as long's he live!'  Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb
deef en dumb--en I'd ben a-treat'n her so!"




CHAPTER XXIV.

NEXT day, towards night, we laid up under a little willow towhead out in
the middle, where there was a village on each side of the river, and the
duke and the king begun to lay out a plan for working them towns.  Jim
he spoke to the duke, and said he hoped it wouldn't take but a few
hours, because it got mighty heavy and tiresome to him when he had to
lay all day in the wigwam tied with the rope.  You see, when we left him
all alone we had to tie him, because if anybody happened on to him all
by himself and not tied it wouldn't look much like he was a runaway
nigger, you know. So the duke said it _was_ kind of hard to have to lay
roped all day, and he'd cipher out some way to get around it.

He was uncommon bright, the duke was, and he soon struck it.  He dressed
Jim up in King Lear's outfit--it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a
white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theater paint
and painted Jim's face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead,
dull, solid blue, like a man that's been drownded nine days.  Blamed if
he warn't the horriblest looking outrage I ever see.  Then the duke took
and wrote out a sign on a shingle so:

Sick Arab--but harmless when not out of his head.

And he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the lath up four or five
foot in front of the wigwam.  Jim was satisfied.  He said it was a sight
better than lying tied a couple of years every day, and trembling all
over every time there was a sound.  The duke told him to make himself
free and easy, and if anybody ever come meddling around, he must hop
out of the wigwam, and carry on a little, and fetch a howl or two like
a wild beast, and he reckoned they would light out and leave him alone.
 Which was sound enough judgment; but you take the average man, and he
wouldn't wait for him to howl.  Why, he didn't only look like he was
dead, he looked considerable more than that.

These rapscallions wanted to try the Nonesuch again, because there was
so much money in it, but they judged it wouldn't be safe, because maybe
the news might a worked along down by this time.  They couldn't hit no
project that suited exactly; so at last the duke said he reckoned he'd
lay off and work his brains an hour or two and see if he couldn't put up
something on the Arkansaw village; and the king he allowed he would drop
over to t'other village without any plan, but just trust in Providence
to lead him the profitable way--meaning the devil, I reckon.  We had all
bought store clothes where we stopped last; and now the king put his'n
on, and he told me to put mine on.  I done it, of course.  The king's
duds was all black, and he did look real swell and starchy.  I never
knowed how clothes could change a body before.  Why, before, he looked
like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he'd take off
his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand
and good and pious that you'd say he had walked right out of the ark,
and maybe was old Leviticus himself.  Jim cleaned up the canoe, and I
got my paddle ready.  There was a big steamboat laying at the shore away
up under the point, about three mile above the town--been there a couple
of hours, taking on freight.  Says the king:

"Seein' how I'm dressed, I reckon maybe I better arrive down from St.
Louis or Cincinnati, or some other big place.  Go for the steamboat,
Huckleberry; we'll come down to the village on her."

I didn't have to be ordered twice to go and take a steamboat ride.
 I fetched the shore a half a mile above the village, and then went
scooting along the bluff bank in the easy water.  Pretty soon we come to
a nice innocent-looking young country jake setting on a log swabbing the
sweat off of his face, for it was powerful warm weather; and he had a
couple of big carpet-bags by him.

"Run her nose in shore," says the king.  I done it.  "Wher' you bound
for, young man?"

"For the steamboat; going to Orleans."

"Git aboard," says the king.  "Hold on a minute, my servant 'll he'p you
with them bags.  Jump out and he'p the gentleman, Adolphus"--meaning me,
I see.

I done so, and then we all three started on again.  The young chap was
mighty thankful; said it was tough work toting his baggage such weather.
He asked the king where he was going, and the king told him he'd come
down the river and landed at the other village this morning, and now he
was going up a few mile to see an old friend on a farm up there.  The
young fellow says:

"When I first see you I says to myself, 'It's Mr. Wilks, sure, and he
come mighty near getting here in time.'  But then I says again, 'No, I
reckon it ain't him, or else he wouldn't be paddling up the river.'  You
_ain't_ him, are you?"

"No, my name's Blodgett--Elexander Blodgett--_Reverend_ Elexander
Blodgett, I s'pose I must say, as I'm one o' the Lord's poor servants.
 But still I'm jist as able to be sorry for Mr. Wilks for not arriving
in time, all the same, if he's missed anything by it--which I hope he
hasn't."

"Well, he don't miss any property by it, because he'll get that all
right; but he's missed seeing his brother Peter die--which he mayn't
mind, nobody can tell as to that--but his brother would a give anything
in this world to see _him_ before he died; never talked about nothing
else all these three weeks; hadn't seen him since they was boys
together--and hadn't ever seen his brother William at all--that's the deef
and dumb one--William ain't more than thirty or thirty-five.  Peter and
George were the only ones that come out here; George was the married
brother; him and his wife both died last year.  Harvey and William's the
only ones that's left now; and, as I was saying, they haven't got here
in time."

"Did anybody send 'em word?"

"Oh, yes; a month or two ago, when Peter was first took; because Peter
said then that he sorter felt like he warn't going to get well this
time. You see, he was pretty old, and George's g'yirls was too young to
be much company for him, except Mary Jane, the red-headed one; and so he
was kinder lonesome after George and his wife died, and didn't seem
to care much to live.  He most desperately wanted to see Harvey--and
William, too, for that matter--because he was one of them kind that can't
bear to make a will.  He left a letter behind for Harvey, and said he'd
told in it where his money was hid, and how he wanted the rest of the
property divided up so George's g'yirls would be all right--for George
didn't leave nothing.  And that letter was all they could get him to put
a pen to."

"Why do you reckon Harvey don't come?  Wher' does he live?"

"Oh, he lives in England--Sheffield--preaches there--hasn't ever been in
this country.  He hasn't had any too much time--and besides he mightn't a
got the letter at all, you know."

"Too bad, too bad he couldn't a lived to see his brothers, poor soul.
You going to Orleans, you say?"

"Yes, but that ain't only a part of it.  I'm going in a ship, next
Wednesday, for Ryo Janeero, where my uncle lives."

"It's a pretty long journey.  But it'll be lovely; wisht I was a-going.
Is Mary Jane the oldest?  How old is the others?"

"Mary Jane's nineteen, Susan's fifteen, and Joanna's about
fourteen--that's the one that gives herself to good works and has a
hare-lip."

"Poor things! to be left alone in the cold world so."

"Well, they could be worse off.  Old Peter had friends, and they
ain't going to let them come to no harm.  There's Hobson, the Babtis'
preacher; and Deacon Lot Hovey, and Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford,
and Levi Bell, the lawyer; and Dr. Robinson, and their wives, and the
widow Bartley, and--well, there's a lot of them; but these are the ones
that Peter was thickest with, and used to write about sometimes, when
he wrote home; so Harvey 'll know where to look for friends when he gets
here."

Well, the old man went on asking questions till he just fairly emptied
that young fellow.  Blamed if he didn't inquire about everybody and
everything in that blessed town, and all about the Wilkses; and about
Peter's business--which was a tanner; and about George's--which was a
carpenter; and about Harvey's--which was a dissentering minister; and so
on, and so on.  Then he says:

"What did you want to walk all the way up to the steamboat for?"

"Because she's a big Orleans boat, and I was afeard she mightn't stop
there.  When they're deep they won't stop for a hail.  A Cincinnati boat
will, but this is a St. Louis one."

"Was Peter Wilks well off?"

"Oh, yes, pretty well off.  He had houses and land, and it's reckoned he
left three or four thousand in cash hid up som'ers."

"When did you say he died?"

"I didn't say, but it was last night."

"Funeral to-morrow, likely?"

"Yes, 'bout the middle of the day."

"Well, it's all terrible sad; but we've all got to go, one time or
another. So what we want to do is to be prepared; then we're all right."

"Yes, sir, it's the best way.  Ma used to always say that."

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 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 a-going 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 histronic 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 gave 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 wher' 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 an 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 makes 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 gathered 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 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.




CHAPTER XXV.

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
dooryards 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 shoulder, and
t'other hand to their eyes, walked slow and solemn over there, everybody
dropping back to give them room, and all the talk and noise stopping,
people saying "Sh!" and all the men taking their hats off and drooping
their heads, so you could a heard a pin fall.  And when they got there
they bent over and looked in the coffin, and took one sight, and then
they bust out a-crying so you could a heard them to Orleans, most; and
then they put their arms around each other's necks, and hung their chins
over each other's shoulders; and then for three minutes, or maybe four,
I never see two men leak the way they done.  And, mind you, everybody
was doing the same; and the place was that damp I never see anything
like it. Then one of them got on one side of the coffin, and t'other on
t'other side, and they kneeled down and rested their foreheads on the
coffin, and let on to pray all to themselves.  Well, when it come
to that it worked the crowd like you never see anything like it, and
everybody broke down and went to sobbing right out loud--the poor girls,
too; and every woman, nearly, went up to the girls, without saying a
word, and kissed them, solemn, on the forehead, and then put their hand
on their head, and looked up towards the sky, with the tears running
down, and then busted out and went off sobbing and swabbing, and give
the next woman a show.  I never see anything so disgusting.

Well, by and by the king he gets up and comes forward a little, and
works himself up and slobbers out a speech, all full of tears and
flapdoodle about its being a sore trial for him and his poor brother
to lose the diseased, and to miss seeing diseased alive after the long
journey of four thousand mile, but it's a trial that's sweetened and
sanctified to us by this dear sympathy and these holy tears, and so he
thanks them out of his heart and out of his brother's heart, because out
of their mouths they can't, words being too weak and cold, and all that
kind of rot and slush, till it was just sickening; and then he blubbers
out a pious goody-goody Amen, and turns himself loose and goes to crying
fit to bust.

And the minute the words were out of his mouth somebody over in the
crowd struck up the doxolojer, and everybody joined in with all their
might, and it just warmed you up and made you feel as good as church
letting out. Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and
hogwash I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and
bully.

Then the king begins to work his jaw again, and says how him and his
nieces would be glad if a few of the main principal friends of the
family would take supper here with them this evening, and help set up
with the ashes of the diseased; and says if his poor brother laying
yonder could speak he knows who he would name, for they was names that
was very dear to him, and mentioned often in his letters; and so he will
name the same, to wit, as follows, vizz.:--Rev. Mr. Hobson, and Deacon
Lot Hovey, and Mr. Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford, and Levi Bell, and
Dr. Robinson, and their wives, and the widow Bartley.

Rev. Hobson and Dr. Robinson was down to the end of the town a-hunting
together--that is, I mean the doctor was shipping a sick man to t'other
world, and the preacher was pinting him right.  Lawyer Bell was away up
to Louisville on business.  But the rest was on hand, and so they all
come and shook hands with the king and thanked him and talked to him;
and then they shook hands with the duke and didn't say nothing, but just
kept a-smiling and bobbing their heads like a passel of sapheads whilst
he made all sorts of signs with his hands and said "Goo-goo--goo-goo-goo"
all the time, like a baby that can't talk.

So the king he blattered along, and managed to inquire about pretty
much everybody and dog in town, by his name, and mentioned all sorts
of little things that happened one time or another in the town, or to
George's family, or to Peter.  And he always let on that Peter wrote him
the things; but that was a lie:  he got every blessed one of them out of
that young flathead that we canoed up to the steamboat.

Then Mary Jane she fetched the letter her father left behind, and the
king he read it out loud and cried over it.  It give the dwelling-house
and three thousand dollars, gold, to the girls; and it give the tanyard
(which was doing a good business), along with some other houses and
land (worth about seven thousand), and three thousand dollars in gold
to Harvey and William, and told where the six thousand cash was hid down
cellar.  So these two frauds said they'd go and fetch it up, and have
everything square and above-board; and told me to come with a candle.
 We shut the cellar door behind us, and when they found the bag
they spilt it out on the floor, and it was a lovely sight, all them
yaller-boys.  My, the way the king's eyes did shine!  He slaps the duke
on the shoulder and says:

"Oh, _this_ ain't bully nor noth'n!  Oh, no, I reckon not!  Why,
_bully_, it beats the Nonesuch, _don't_ it?"

The duke allowed it did.  They pawed the yaller-boys, and sifted them
through their fingers and let them jingle down on the floor; and the
king says:

"It ain't no use talkin'; bein' brothers to a rich dead man and
representatives of furrin heirs that's got left is the line for you and
me, Bilge.  Thish yer comes of trust'n to Providence.  It's the best
way, in the long run.  I've tried 'em all, and ther' ain't no better
way."

Most everybody would a been satisfied with the pile, and took it on
trust; but no, they must count it.  So they counts it, and it comes out
four hundred and fifteen dollars short.  Says the king:

"Dern him, I wonder what he done with that four hundred and fifteen
dollars?"

They worried over that awhile, and ransacked all around for it.  Then
the duke says:

"Well, he was a pretty sick man, and likely he made a mistake--I reckon
that's the way of it.  The best way's to let it go, and keep still about
it.  We can spare it."

"Oh, shucks, yes, we can _spare_ it.  I don't k'yer noth'n 'bout
that--it's the _count_ I'm thinkin' about.  We want to be awful square
and open and above-board here, you know.  We want to lug this h-yer
money up stairs and count it before everybody--then ther' ain't noth'n
suspicious.  But when the dead man says ther's six thous'n dollars, you
know, we don't want to--"

"Hold on," says the duke.  "Le's make up the deffisit," and he begun to
haul out yaller-boys out of his pocket.

"It's a most amaz'n' good idea, duke--you _have_ got a rattlin' clever
head on you," says the king.  "Blest if the old Nonesuch ain't a heppin'
us out agin," and _he_ begun to haul out yaller-jackets and stack them
up.

It most busted them, but they made up the six thousand clean and clear.

"Say," says the duke, "I got another idea.  Le's go up stairs and count
this money, and then take and _give it to the girls_."

"Good land, duke, lemme hug you!  It's the most dazzling idea 'at ever a
man struck.  You have cert'nly got the most astonishin' head I ever see.
Oh, this is the boss dodge, ther' ain't no mistake 'bout it.  Let 'em
fetch along their suspicions now if they want to--this 'll lay 'em out."

When we got up-stairs everybody gethered around the table, and the king
he counted it and stacked it up, three hundred dollars in a pile--twenty
elegant little piles.  Everybody looked hungry at it, and licked their
chops.  Then they raked it into the bag again, and I see the king begin
to swell himself up for another speech.  He says:

"Friends all, my poor brother that lays yonder has done generous by
them that's left behind in the vale of sorrers.  He has done generous by
these yer poor little lambs that he loved and sheltered, and that's left
fatherless and motherless.  Yes, and we that knowed him knows that he
would a done _more_ generous by 'em if he hadn't ben afeard o' woundin'
his dear William and me.  Now, _wouldn't_ he?  Ther' ain't no question
'bout it in _my_ mind.  Well, then, what kind o' brothers would it be
that 'd stand in his way at sech a time?  And what kind o' uncles would
it be that 'd rob--yes, _rob_--sech poor sweet lambs as these 'at he loved
so at sech a time?  If I know William--and I _think_ I do--he--well, I'll
jest ask him." He turns around and begins to make a lot of signs to
the duke with his hands, and the duke he looks at him stupid and
leather-headed a while; then all of a sudden he seems to catch his
meaning, and jumps for the king, goo-gooing with all his might for joy,
and hugs him about fifteen times before he lets up.  Then the king says,
"I knowed it; I reckon _that 'll_ convince anybody the way _he_ feels
about it.  Here, Mary Jane, Susan, Joanner, take the money--take it
_all_.  It's the gift of him that lays yonder, cold but joyful."

Mary Jane she went for him, Susan and the hare-lip went for the
duke, and then such another hugging and kissing I never see yet.  And
everybody crowded up with the tears in their eyes, and most shook the
hands off of them frauds, saying all the time:

"You _dear_ good souls!--how _lovely_!--how _could_ you!"

Well, then, pretty soon all hands got to talking about the diseased
again, and how good he was, and what a loss he was, and all that; and
before long a big iron-jawed man worked himself in there from outside,
and stood a-listening and looking, and not saying anything; and nobody
saying anything to him either, because the king was talking and they was
all busy listening.  The king was saying--in the middle of something he'd
started in on--

"--they bein' partickler friends o' the diseased.  That's why they're
invited here this evenin'; but tomorrow we want _all_ to come--everybody;
for he respected everybody, he liked everybody, and so it's fitten that
his funeral orgies sh'd be public."

And so he went a-mooning on and on, liking to hear himself talk, and
every little while he fetched in his funeral orgies again, till the duke
he couldn't stand it no more; so he writes on a little scrap of paper,
"_Obsequies_, you old fool," and folds it up, and goes to goo-gooing and
reaching it over people's heads to him.  The king he reads it and puts
it in his pocket, and says:

"Poor William, afflicted as he is, his _heart's_ aluz right.  Asks me
to invite everybody to come to the funeral--wants me to make 'em all
welcome.  But he needn't a worried--it was jest what I was at."

Then he weaves along again, perfectly ca'm, and goes to dropping in his
funeral orgies again every now and then, just like he done before.  And
when he done it the third time he says:

"I say orgies, not because it's the common term, because it
ain't--obsequies bein' the common term--but because orgies is the right
term. Obsequies ain't used in England no more now--it's gone out.  We
say orgies now in England.  Orgies is better, because it means the thing
you're after more exact.  It's a word that's made up out'n the Greek
_orgo_, outside, open, abroad; and the Hebrew _jeesum_, to plant, cover
up; hence in_ter._  So, you see, funeral orgies is an open er public
funeral."

He was the _worst_ I ever struck.  Well, the iron-jawed man he laughed
right in his face.  Everybody was shocked.  Everybody says, "Why,
_doctor_!" and Abner Shackleford says:

"Why, Robinson, hain't you heard the news?  This is Harvey Wilks."

The king he smiled eager, and shoved out his flapper, and says:

"Is it my poor brother's dear good friend and physician?  I--"

"Keep your hands off of me!" says the doctor.  "_You_ talk like an
Englishman, _don't_ you?  It's the worst imitation I ever heard.  _You_
Peter Wilks's brother!  You're a fraud, that's what you are!"

Well, how they all took on!  They crowded around the doctor and tried to
quiet him down, and tried to explain to him and tell him how Harvey 'd
showed in forty ways that he _was_ Harvey, and knowed everybody by name,
and the names of the very dogs, and begged and _begged_ him not to hurt
Harvey's feelings and the poor girl's feelings, and all that.  But it
warn't no use; he stormed right along, and said any man that pretended
to be an Englishman and couldn't imitate the lingo no better than what
he did was a fraud and a liar.  The poor girls was hanging to the king
and crying; and all of a sudden the doctor ups and turns on _them_.  He
says:

"I was your father's friend, and I'm your friend; and I warn you as a
friend, and an honest one that wants to protect you and keep you out of
harm and trouble, to turn your backs on that scoundrel and have nothing
to do with him, the ignorant tramp, with his idiotic Greek and Hebrew,
as he calls it.  He is the thinnest kind of an impostor--has come here
with a lot of empty names and facts which he picked up somewheres, and
you take them for _proofs_, and are helped to fool yourselves by these
foolish friends here, who ought to know better.  Mary Jane Wilks, you
know me for your friend, and for your unselfish friend, too.  Now listen
to me; turn this pitiful rascal out--I _beg_ you to do it.  Will you?"

Mary Jane straightened herself up, and my, but she was handsome!  She
says:

"_Here_ is my answer."  She hove up the bag of money and put it in the
king's hands, and says, "Take this six thousand dollars, and invest for
me and my sisters any way you want to, and don't give us no receipt for
it."

Then she put her arm around the king on one side, and Susan and the
hare-lip done the same on the other.  Everybody clapped their hands and
stomped on the floor like a perfect storm, whilst the king held up his
head and smiled proud.  The doctor says:

"All right; I wash _my_ hands of the matter.  But I warn you all that a
time 's coming when you're going to feel sick whenever you think of this
day." And away he went.

"All right, doctor," says the king, kinder mocking him; "we'll try and
get 'em to send for you;" which made them all laugh, and they said it
was a prime good hit.




CHAPTER XXVI.

WELL, when they was all gone the king he asks Mary Jane how they was off
for spare rooms, and she said she had one spare room, which would do for
Uncle William, and she'd give her own room to Uncle Harvey, which was
a little bigger, and she would turn into the room with her sisters and
sleep on a cot; and up garret was a little cubby, with a pallet in it.
The king said the cubby would do for his valley--meaning me.

So Mary Jane took us up, and she showed them their rooms, which was
plain but nice.  She said she'd have her frocks and a lot of other traps
took out of her room if they was in Uncle Harvey's way, but he said
they warn't.  The frocks was hung along the wall, and before them was
a curtain made out of calico that hung down to the floor.  There was an
old hair trunk in one corner, and a guitar-box in another, and all sorts
of little knickknacks and jimcracks around, like girls brisken up a room
with.  The king said it was all the more homely and more pleasanter for
these fixings, and so don't disturb them.  The duke's room was pretty
small, but plenty good enough, and so was my cubby.

That night they had a big supper, and all them men and women was there,
and I stood behind the king and the duke's chairs and waited on them,
and the niggers waited on the rest.  Mary Jane she set at the head of
the table, with Susan alongside of her, and said how bad the biscuits
was, and how mean the preserves was, and how ornery and tough the fried
chickens was--and all that kind of rot, the way women always do for to
force out compliments; and the people all knowed everything was tiptop,
and said so--said "How _do_ you get biscuits to brown so nice?" and
"Where, for the land's sake, _did_ you get these amaz'n pickles?" and
all that kind of humbug talky-talk, just the way people always does at a
supper, you know.

And when it was all done me and the hare-lip had supper in the kitchen
off of the leavings, whilst the others was helping the niggers clean up
the things.  The hare-lip she got to pumping me about England, and blest
if I didn't think the ice was getting mighty thin sometimes.  She says:

"Did you ever see the king?"

"Who?  William Fourth?  Well, I bet I have--he goes to our church."  I
knowed he was dead years ago, but I never let on.  So when I says he
goes to our church, she says:

"What--regular?"

"Yes--regular.  His pew's right over opposite ourn--on t'other side the
pulpit."

"I thought he lived in London?"

"Well, he does.  Where _would_ he live?"

"But I thought _you_ lived in Sheffield?"

I see I was up a stump.  I had to let on to get choked with a chicken
bone, so as to get time to think how to get down again.  Then I says:

"I mean he goes to our church regular when he's in Sheffield.  That's
only in the summer time, when he comes there to take the sea baths."

"Why, how you talk--Sheffield ain't on the sea."

"Well, who said it was?"

"Why, you did."

"I _didn't_ nuther."

"You did!"

"I didn't."

"You did."

"I never said nothing of the kind."

"Well, what _did_ you say, then?"

"Said he come to take the sea _baths_--that's what I said."

"Well, then, how's he going to take the sea baths if it ain't on the
sea?"

"Looky here," I says; "did you ever see any Congress-water?"

"Yes."

"Well, did you have to go to Congress to get it?"

"Why, no."

"Well, neither does William Fourth have to go to the sea to get a sea
bath."

"How does he get it, then?"

"Gets it the way people down here gets Congress-water--in barrels.  There
in the palace at Sheffield they've got furnaces, and he wants his water
hot.  They can't bile that amount of water away off there at the sea.
They haven't got no conveniences for it."

"Oh, I see, now.  You might a said that in the first place and saved
time."

When she said that I see I was out of the woods again, and so I was
comfortable and glad.  Next, she says:

"Do you go to church, too?"

"Yes--regular."

"Where do you set?"

"Why, in our pew."

"_Whose_ pew?"

"Why, _ourn_--your Uncle Harvey's."

"His'n?  What does _he_ want with a pew?"

"Wants it to set in.  What did you _reckon_ he wanted with it?"

"Why, I thought he'd be in the pulpit."

Rot him, I forgot he was a preacher.  I see I was up a stump again, so I
played another chicken bone and got another think.  Then I says:

"Blame it, do you suppose there ain't but one preacher to a church?"

"Why, what do they want with more?"

"What!--to preach before a king?  I never did see such a girl as you.
They don't have no less than seventeen."

"Seventeen!  My land!  Why, I wouldn't set out such a string as that,
not if I _never_ got to glory.  It must take 'em a week."

"Shucks, they don't _all_ of 'em preach the same day--only _one_ of 'em."

"Well, then, what does the rest of 'em do?"

"Oh, nothing much.  Loll around, pass the plate--and one thing or
another.  But mainly they don't do nothing."

"Well, then, what are they _for_?"

"Why, they're for _style_.  Don't you know nothing?"

"Well, I don't _want_ to know no such foolishness as that.  How is
servants treated in England?  Do they treat 'em better 'n we treat our
niggers?"

"_No_!  A servant ain't nobody there.  They treat them worse than dogs."

"Don't they give 'em holidays, the way we do, Christmas and New Year's
week, and Fourth of July?"

"Oh, just listen!  A body could tell _you_ hain't ever been to England
by that.  Why, Hare-l--why, Joanna, they never see a holiday from year's
end to year's end; never go to the circus, nor theater, nor nigger
shows, nor nowheres."

"Nor church?"

"Nor church."

"But _you_ always went to church."

Well, I was gone up again.  I forgot I was the old man's servant.  But
next minute I whirled in on a kind of an explanation how a valley was
different from a common servant and _had_ to go to church whether he
wanted to or not, and set with the family, on account of its being the
law.  But I didn't do it pretty good, and when I got done I see she
warn't satisfied.  She says:

"Honest injun, now, hain't you been telling me a lot of lies?"

"Honest injun," says I.

"None of it at all?"

"None of it at all.  Not a lie in it," says I.

"Lay your hand on this book and say it."

I see it warn't nothing but a dictionary, so I laid my hand on it and
said it.  So then she looked a little better satisfied, and says:

"Well, then, I'll believe some of it; but I hope to gracious if I'll
believe the rest."

"What is it you won't believe, Joe?" says Mary Jane, stepping in with
Susan behind her.  "It ain't right nor kind for you to talk so to him,
and him a stranger and so far from his people.  How would you like to be
treated so?"

"That's always your way, Maim--always sailing in to help somebody before
they're hurt.  I hain't done nothing to him.  He's told some stretchers,
I reckon, and I said I wouldn't swallow it all; and that's every bit
and grain I _did_ say.  I reckon he can stand a little thing like that,
can't he?"

"I don't care whether 'twas little or whether 'twas big; he's here in
our house and a stranger, and it wasn't good of you to say it.  If you
was in his place it would make you feel ashamed; and so you oughtn't to
say a thing to another person that will make _them_ feel ashamed."

"Why, Mam, he said--"

"It don't make no difference what he _said_--that ain't the thing.  The
thing is for you to treat him _kind_, and not be saying things to make
him remember he ain't in his own country and amongst his own folks."

I says to myself, _this_ is a girl that I'm letting that old reptile rob
her of her money!

Then Susan _she_ waltzed in; and if you'll believe me, she did give
Hare-lip hark from the tomb!

Says I to myself, and this is _another_ one that I'm letting him rob her
of her money!

Then Mary Jane she took another inning, and went in sweet and lovely
again--which was her way; but when she got done there warn't hardly
anything left o' poor Hare-lip.  So she hollered.

"All right, then," says the other girls; "you just ask his pardon."

She done it, too; and she done it beautiful.  She done it so beautiful
it was good to hear; and I wished I could tell her a thousand lies, so
she could do it again.

I says to myself, this is _another_ one that I'm letting him rob her of
her money.  And when she got through they all jest laid theirselves
out to make me feel at home and know I was amongst friends.  I felt so
ornery and low down and mean that I says to myself, my mind's made up;
I'll hive that money for them or bust.

So then I lit out--for bed, I said, meaning some time or another.  When
I got by myself I went to thinking the thing over.  I says to myself,
shall I go to that doctor, private, and blow on these frauds?  No--that
won't do. He might tell who told him; then the king and the duke would
make it warm for me.  Shall I go, private, and tell Mary Jane?  No--I
dasn't do it. Her face would give them a hint, sure; they've got the
money, and they'd slide right out and get away with it.  If she was to
fetch in help I'd get mixed up in the business before it was done with,
I judge.  No; there ain't no good way but one.  I got to steal that
money, somehow; and I got to steal it some way that they won't suspicion
that I done it. They've got a good thing here, and they ain't a-going
to leave till they've played this family and this town for all they're
worth, so I'll find a chance time enough. I'll steal it and hide it; and
by and by, when I'm away down the river, I'll write a letter and tell
Mary Jane where it's hid.  But I better hive it tonight if I can,
because the doctor maybe hasn't let up as much as he lets on he has; he
might scare them out of here yet.

So, thinks I, I'll go and search them rooms.  Upstairs the hall was
dark, but I found the duke's room, and started to paw around it with
my hands; but I recollected it wouldn't be much like the king to let
anybody else take care of that money but his own self; so then I went to
his room and begun to paw around there.  But I see I couldn't do nothing
without a candle, and I dasn't light one, of course.  So I judged I'd
got to do the other thing--lay for them and eavesdrop.  About that time
I hears their footsteps coming, and was going to skip under the bed; I
reached for it, but it wasn't where I thought it would be; but I touched
the curtain that hid Mary Jane's frocks, so I jumped in behind that and
snuggled in amongst the gowns, and stood there perfectly still.

They come in and shut the door; and the first thing the duke done was to
get down and look under the bed.  Then I was glad I hadn't found the bed
when I wanted it.  And yet, you know, it's kind of natural to hide under
the bed when you are up to anything private.  They sets down then, and
the king says:

"Well, what is it?  And cut it middlin' short, because it's better for
us to be down there a-whoopin' up the mournin' than up here givin' 'em a
chance to talk us over."

"Well, this is it, Capet.  I ain't easy; I ain't comfortable.  That
doctor lays on my mind.  I wanted to know your plans.  I've got a
notion, and I think it's a sound one."

"What is it, duke?"

"That we better glide out of this before three in the morning, and clip
it down the river with what we've got.  Specially, seeing we got it so
easy--_given_ back to us, flung at our heads, as you may say, when of
course we allowed to have to steal it back.  I'm for knocking off and
lighting out."

That made me feel pretty bad.  About an hour or two ago it would a been
a little different, but now it made me feel bad and disappointed, The
king rips out and says:

"What!  And not sell out the rest o' the property?  March off like
a passel of fools and leave eight or nine thous'n' dollars' worth o'
property layin' around jest sufferin' to be scooped in?--and all good,
salable stuff, too."

The duke he grumbled; said the bag of gold was enough, and he didn't
want to go no deeper--didn't want to rob a lot of orphans of _everything_
they had.

"Why, how you talk!" says the king.  "We sha'n't rob 'em of nothing at
all but jest this money.  The people that _buys_ the property is the
suff'rers; because as soon 's it's found out 'at we didn't own it--which
won't be long after we've slid--the sale won't be valid, and it 'll all
go back to the estate.  These yer orphans 'll git their house back agin,
and that's enough for _them_; they're young and spry, and k'n easy
earn a livin'.  _they_ ain't a-goin to suffer.  Why, jest think--there's
thous'n's and thous'n's that ain't nigh so well off.  Bless you, _they_
ain't got noth'n' to complain of."

Well, the king he talked him blind; so at last he give in, and said all
right, but said he believed it was blamed foolishness to stay, and that
doctor hanging over them.  But the king says:

"Cuss the doctor!  What do we k'yer for _him_?  Hain't we got all the
fools in town on our side?  And ain't that a big enough majority in any
town?"

So they got ready to go down stairs again.  The duke says:

"I don't think we put that money in a good place."

That cheered me up.  I'd begun to think I warn't going to get a hint of
no kind to help me.  The king says:

"Why?"

"Because Mary Jane 'll be in mourning from this out; and first you know
the nigger that does up the rooms will get an order to box these duds
up and put 'em away; and do you reckon a nigger can run across money and
not borrow some of it?"

"Your head's level agin, duke," says the king; and he comes a-fumbling
under the curtain two or three foot from where I was.  I stuck tight to
the wall and kept mighty still, though quivery; and I wondered what them
fellows would say to me if they catched me; and I tried to think what
I'd better do if they did catch me.  But the king he got the bag before
I could think more than about a half a thought, and he never suspicioned
I was around.  They took and shoved the bag through a rip in the straw
tick that was under the feather-bed, and crammed it in a foot or two
amongst the straw and said it was all right now, because a nigger only
makes up the feather-bed, and don't turn over the straw tick only about
twice a year, and so it warn't in no danger of getting stole now.

But I knowed better.  I had it out of there before they was half-way
down stairs.  I groped along up to my cubby, and hid it there till I
could get a chance to do better.  I judged I better hide it outside
of the house somewheres, because if they missed it they would give the
house a good ransacking:  I knowed that very well.  Then I turned in,
with my clothes all on; but I couldn't a gone to sleep if I'd a wanted
to, I was in such a sweat to get through with the business.  By and by I
heard the king and the duke come up; so I rolled off my pallet and laid
with my chin at the top of my ladder, and waited to see if anything was
going to happen.  But nothing did.

So I held on till all the late sounds had quit and the early ones hadn't
begun yet; and then I slipped down the ladder.




CHAPTER XXVII.

I crept to their doors and listened; they was snoring.  So I tiptoed
along, and got down stairs all right.  There warn't a sound anywheres.
 I peeped through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the men that
was watching the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs.  The door
was open into the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a
candle in both rooms. I passed along, and the parlor door was open; but
I see there warn't nobody in there but the remainders of Peter; so I
shoved on by; but the front door was locked, and the key wasn't there.
 Just then I heard somebody coming down the stairs, back behind me.  I
run in the parlor and took a swift look around, and the only place I
see to hide the bag was in the coffin.  The lid was shoved along about
a foot, showing the dead man's face down in there, with a wet cloth over
it, and his shroud on.  I tucked the money-bag in under the lid, just
down beyond where his hands was crossed, which made me creep, they was
so cold, and then I run back across the room and in behind the door.

The person coming was Mary Jane.  She went to the coffin, very soft, and
kneeled down and looked in; then she put up her handkerchief, and I see
she begun to cry, though I couldn't hear her, and her back was to me.  I
slid out, and as I passed the dining-room I thought I'd make sure them
watchers hadn't seen me; so I looked through the crack, and everything
was all right.  They hadn't stirred.

I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts of the thing
playing out that way after I had took so much trouble and run so much
resk about it.  Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right; because
when we get down the river a hundred mile or two I could write back to
Mary Jane, and she could dig him up again and get it; but that ain't the
thing that's going to happen; the thing that's going to happen is, the
money 'll be found when they come to screw on the lid.  Then the king
'll get it again, and it 'll be a long day before he gives anybody
another chance to smouch it from him. Of course I _wanted_ to slide
down and get it out of there, but I dasn't try it.  Every minute it was
getting earlier now, and pretty soon some of them watchers would begin
to stir, and I might get catched--catched with six thousand dollars in my
hands that nobody hadn't hired me to take care of.  I don't wish to be
mixed up in no such business as that, I says to myself.

When I got down stairs in the morning the parlor was shut up, and the
watchers was gone.  There warn't nobody around but the family and the
widow Bartley and our tribe.  I watched their faces to see if anything
had been happening, but I couldn't tell.

Towards the middle of the day the undertaker come with his man, and they
set the coffin in the middle of the room on a couple of chairs, and then
set all our chairs in rows, and borrowed more from the neighbors till
the hall and the parlor and the dining-room was full.  I see the coffin
lid was the way it was before, but I dasn't go to look in under it, with
folks around.

Then the people begun to flock in, and the beats and the girls took
seats in the front row at the head of the coffin, and for a half an hour
the people filed around slow, in single rank, and looked down at the
dead man's face a minute, and some dropped in a tear, and it was
all very still and solemn, only the girls and the beats holding
handkerchiefs to their eyes and keeping their heads bent, and sobbing a
little.  There warn't no other sound but the scraping of the feet on
the floor and blowing noses--because people always blows them more at a
funeral than they do at other places except church.

When the place was packed full the undertaker he slid around in his
black gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last
touches, and getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable,
and making no more sound than a cat.  He never spoke; he moved people
around, he squeezed in late ones, he opened up passageways, and done
it with nods, and signs with his hands.  Then he took his place over
against the wall. He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever
see; and there warn't no more smile to him than there is to a ham.

They had borrowed a melodeum--a sick one; and when everything was ready
a young woman set down and worked it, and it was pretty skreeky and
colicky, and everybody joined in and sung, and Peter was the only one
that had a good thing, according to my notion.  Then the Reverend Hobson
opened up, slow and solemn, and begun to talk; and straight off the most
outrageous row busted out in the cellar a body ever heard; it was only
one dog, but he made a most powerful racket, and he kept it up right
along; the parson he had to stand there, over the coffin, and wait--you
couldn't hear yourself think.  It was right down awkward, and nobody
didn't seem to know what to do.  But pretty soon they see that
long-legged undertaker make a sign to the preacher as much as to say,
"Don't you worry--just depend on me."  Then he stooped down and begun
to glide along the wall, just his shoulders showing over the people's
heads.  So he glided along, and the powwow and racket getting more and
more outrageous all the time; and at last, when he had gone around two
sides of the room, he disappears down cellar.  Then in about two seconds
we heard a whack, and the dog he finished up with a most amazing howl or
two, and then everything was dead still, and the parson begun his solemn
talk where he left off.  In a minute or two here comes this undertaker's
back and shoulders gliding along the wall again; and so he glided and
glided around three sides of the room, and then rose up, and shaded his
mouth with his hands, and stretched his neck out towards the preacher,
over the people's heads, and says, in a kind of a coarse whisper, "_He
had a rat_!"  Then he drooped down and glided along the wall again to
his place.  You could see it was a great satisfaction to the people,
because naturally they wanted to know.  A little thing like that don't
cost nothing, and it's just the little things that makes a man to be
looked up to and liked.  There warn't no more popular man in town than
what that undertaker was.

Well, the funeral sermon was very good, but pison long and tiresome; and
then the king he shoved in and got off some of his usual rubbage, and
at last the job was through, and the undertaker begun to sneak up on the
coffin with his screw-driver.  I was in a sweat then, and watched him
pretty keen. But he never meddled at all; just slid the lid along as
soft as mush, and screwed it down tight and fast.  So there I was!  I
didn't know whether the money was in there or not.  So, says I, s'pose
somebody has hogged that bag on the sly?--now how do I know whether
to write to Mary Jane or not? S'pose she dug him up and didn't find
nothing, what would she think of me? Blame it, I says, I might get
hunted up and jailed; I'd better lay low and keep dark, and not write at
all; the thing's awful mixed now; trying to better it, I've worsened it
a hundred times, and I wish to goodness I'd just let it alone, dad fetch
the whole business!

They buried him, and we come back home, and I went to watching faces
again--I couldn't help it, and I couldn't rest easy.  But nothing come of
it; the faces didn't tell me nothing.

The king he visited around in the evening, and sweetened everybody up,
and made himself ever so friendly; and he give out the idea that his
congregation over in England would be in a sweat about him, so he must
hurry and settle up the estate right away and leave for home.  He was
very sorry he was so pushed, and so was everybody; they wished he could
stay longer, but they said they could see it couldn't be done.  And he
said of course him and William would take the girls home with them; and
that pleased everybody too, because then the girls would be well fixed
and amongst their own relations; and it pleased the girls, too--tickled
them so they clean forgot they ever had a trouble in the world; and told
him to sell out as quick as he wanted to, they would be ready.  Them
poor things was that glad and happy it made my heart ache to see them
getting fooled and lied to so, but I didn't see no safe way for me to
chip in and change the general tune.

Well, blamed if the king didn't bill the house and the niggers and all
the property for auction straight off--sale two days after the funeral;
but anybody could buy private beforehand if they wanted to.

So the next day after the funeral, along about noon-time, the girls' joy
got the first jolt.  A couple of nigger traders come along, and the king
sold them the niggers reasonable, for three-day drafts as they called
it, and away they went, the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their
mother down the river to Orleans.  I thought them poor girls and them
niggers would break their hearts for grief; they cried around each
other, and took on so it most made me down sick to see it.  The girls
said they hadn't ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold
away from the town.  I can't ever get it out of my memory, the sight of
them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other's necks
and crying; and I reckon I couldn't a stood it all, but would a had
to bust out and tell on our gang if I hadn't knowed the sale warn't no
account and the niggers would be back home in a week or two.

The thing made a big stir in the town, too, and a good many come out
flatfooted and said it was scandalous to separate the mother and the
children that way.  It injured the frauds some; but the old fool he
bulled right along, spite of all the duke could say or do, and I tell
you the duke was powerful uneasy.

Next day was auction day.  About broad day in the morning the king and
the duke come up in the garret and woke me up, and I see by their look
that there was trouble.  The king says:

"Was you in my room night before last?"

"No, your majesty"--which was the way I always called him when nobody but
our gang warn't around.

"Was you in there yisterday er last night?"

"No, your majesty."

"Honor bright, now--no lies."

"Honor bright, your majesty, I'm telling you the truth.  I hain't been
a-near your room since Miss Mary Jane took you and the duke and showed
it to you."

The duke says:

"Have you seen anybody else go in there?"

"No, your grace, not as I remember, I believe."

"Stop and think."

I studied awhile and see my chance; then I says:

"Well, I see the niggers go in there several times."

Both of them gave a little jump, and looked like they hadn't ever
expected it, and then like they _had_.  Then the duke says:

"What, all of them?"

"No--leastways, not all at once--that is, I don't think I ever see them
all come _out_ at once but just one time."

"Hello!  When was that?"

"It was the day we had the funeral.  In the morning.  It warn't early,
because I overslept.  I was just starting down the ladder, and I see
them."

"Well, go on, _go_ on!  What did they do?  How'd they act?"

"They didn't do nothing.  And they didn't act anyway much, as fur as I
see. They tiptoed away; so I seen, easy enough, that they'd shoved in
there to do up your majesty's room, or something, s'posing you was up;
and found you _warn't_ up, and so they was hoping to slide out of the
way of trouble without waking you up, if they hadn't already waked you
up."

"Great guns, _this_ is a go!" says the king; and both of them looked
pretty sick and tolerable silly.  They stood there a-thinking and
scratching their heads a minute, and the duke he bust into a kind of a
little raspy chuckle, and says:

"It does beat all how neat the niggers played their hand.  They let on
to be _sorry_ they was going out of this region!  And I believed they
_was_ sorry, and so did you, and so did everybody.  Don't ever tell _me_
any more that a nigger ain't got any histrionic talent.  Why, the way
they played that thing it would fool _anybody_.  In my opinion, there's
a fortune in 'em.  If I had capital and a theater, I wouldn't want a
better lay-out than that--and here we've gone and sold 'em for a song.
 Yes, and ain't privileged to sing the song yet.  Say, where _is_ that
song--that draft?"

"In the bank for to be collected.  Where _would_ it be?"

"Well, _that's_ all right then, thank goodness."

Says I, kind of timid-like:

"Is something gone wrong?"

The king whirls on me and rips out:

"None o' your business!  You keep your head shet, and mind y'r own
affairs--if you got any.  Long as you're in this town don't you forgit
_that_--you hear?"  Then he says to the duke, "We got to jest swaller it
and say noth'n':  mum's the word for _us_."

As they was starting down the ladder the duke he chuckles again, and
says:

"Quick sales _and_ small profits!  It's a good business--yes."

The king snarls around on him and says:

"I was trying to do for the best in sellin' 'em out so quick.  If the
profits has turned out to be none, lackin' considable, and none to
carry, is it my fault any more'n it's yourn?"

"Well, _they'd_ be in this house yet and we _wouldn't_ if I could a got
my advice listened to."

The king sassed back as much as was safe for him, and then swapped
around and lit into _me_ again.  He give me down the banks for not
coming and _telling_ him I see the niggers come out of his room acting
that way--said any fool would a _knowed_ something was up.  And then
waltzed in and cussed _himself_ awhile, and said it all come of him not
laying late and taking his natural rest that morning, and he'd be
blamed if he'd ever do it again.  So they went off a-jawing; and I felt
dreadful glad I'd worked it all off on to the niggers, and yet hadn't
done the niggers no harm by it.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

BY and by it was getting-up time.  So I come down the ladder and started
for down-stairs; but as I come to the girls' room the door was open, and
I see Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was open and she'd
been packing things in it--getting ready to go to England.  But she
had stopped now with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her
hands, crying.  I felt awful bad to see it; of course anybody would.  I
went in there and says:

"Miss Mary Jane, you can't a-bear to see people in trouble, and I
can't--most always.  Tell me about it."

So she done it.  And it was the niggers--I just expected it.  She said
the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her; she didn't
know _how_ she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and
the children warn't ever going to see each other no more--and then busted
out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands, and says:

"Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain't _ever_ going to see each other any
more!"

"But they _will_--and inside of two weeks--and I _know_ it!" says I.

Laws, it was out before I could think!  And before I could budge she
throws her arms around my neck and told me to say it _again_, say it
_again_, say it _again_!

I see I had spoke too sudden and said too much, and was in a close
place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and she set there, very
impatient and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and
eased-up, like a person that's had a tooth pulled out.  So I went to
studying it out.  I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells
the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks,
though I ain't had no experience, and can't say for certain; but it
looks so to me, anyway; and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it
don't look to me like the truth is better and actuly _safer_ than a lie.
 I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it's
so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it.  Well, I
says to myself at last, I'm a-going to chance it; I'll up and tell the
truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of
powder and touching it off just to see where you'll go to. Then I says:

"Miss Mary Jane, is there any place out of town a little ways where you
could go and stay three or four days?"

"Yes; Mr. Lothrop's.  Why?"

"Never mind why yet.  If I'll tell you how I know the niggers will see
each other again inside of two weeks--here in this house--and _prove_ how
I know it--will you go to Mr. Lothrop's and stay four days?"

"Four days!" she says; "I'll stay a year!"

"All right," I says, "I don't want nothing more out of _you_ than just
your word--I druther have it than another man's kiss-the-Bible."  She
smiled and reddened up very sweet, and I says, "If you don't mind it,
I'll shut the door--and bolt it."

Then I come back and set down again, and says:

"Don't you holler.  Just set still and take it like a man.  I got to
tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a
bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for
it.  These uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of
frauds--regular dead-beats.  There, now we're over the worst of it, you
can stand the rest middling easy."

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal
water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher
all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck
that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she
flung herself on to the king's breast at the front door and he kissed
her sixteen or seventeen times--and then up she jumps, with her face
afire like sunset, and says:

"The brute!  Come, don't waste a minute--not a _second_--we'll have them
tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!"

Says I:

"Cert'nly.  But do you mean _before_ you go to Mr. Lothrop's, or--"

"Oh," she says, "what am I _thinking_ about!" she says, and set right
down again.  "Don't mind what I said--please don't--you _won't,_ now,
_will_ you?" Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that
I said I would die first.  "I never thought, I was so stirred up," she
says; "now go on, and I won't do so any more.  You tell me what to do,
and whatever you say I'll do it."

"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two frauds, and I'm fixed so
I got to travel with them a while longer, whether I want to or not--I
druther not tell you why; and if you was to blow on them this town would
get me out of their claws, and I'd be all right; but there'd be another
person that you don't know about who'd be in big trouble.  Well, we
got to save _him_, hain't we?  Of course.  Well, then, we won't blow on
them."

Saying them words put a good idea in my head.  I see how maybe I could
get me and Jim rid of the frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave.
But I didn't want to run the raft in the daytime without anybody aboard
to answer questions but me; so I didn't want the plan to begin working
till pretty late to-night.  I says:

"Miss Mary Jane, I'll tell you what we'll do, and you won't have to stay
at Mr. Lothrop's so long, nuther.  How fur is it?"

"A little short of four miles--right out in the country, back here."

"Well, that 'll answer.  Now you go along out there, and lay low
till nine or half-past to-night, and then get them to fetch you home
again--tell them you've thought of something.  If you get here before
eleven put a candle in this window, and if I don't turn up wait _till_
eleven, and _then_ if I don't turn up it means I'm gone, and out of the
way, and safe. Then you come out and spread the news around, and get
these beats jailed."

"Good," she says, "I'll do it."

"And if it just happens so that I don't get away, but get took up along
with them, you must up and say I told you the whole thing beforehand,
and you must stand by me all you can."

"Stand by you! indeed I will.  They sha'n't touch a hair of your head!"
she says, and I see her nostrils spread and her eyes snap when she said
it, too.

"If I get away I sha'n't be here," I says, "to prove these rapscallions
ain't your uncles, and I couldn't do it if I _was_ here.  I could swear
they was beats and bummers, that's all, though that's worth something.
Well, there's others can do that better than what I can, and they're
people that ain't going to be doubted as quick as I'd be.  I'll tell you
how to find them.  Gimme a pencil and a piece of paper.  There--'Royal
Nonesuch, Bricksville.'  Put it away, and don't lose it.  When the
court wants to find out something about these two, let them send up to
Bricksville and say they've got the men that played the Royal Nonesuch,
and ask for some witnesses--why, you'll have that entire town down here
before you can hardly wink, Miss Mary.  And they'll come a-biling, too."

I judged we had got everything fixed about right now.  So I says:

"Just let the auction go right along, and don't worry.  Nobody don't
have to pay for the things they buy till a whole day after the auction
on accounts of the short notice, and they ain't going out of this till
they get that money; and the way we've fixed it the sale ain't going to
count, and they ain't going to get no money.  It's just like the way
it was with the niggers--it warn't no sale, and the niggers will be
back before long.  Why, they can't collect the money for the _niggers_
yet--they're in the worst kind of a fix, Miss Mary."

"Well," she says, "I'll run down to breakfast now, and then I'll start
straight for Mr. Lothrop's."

"'Deed, _that_ ain't the ticket, Miss Mary Jane," I says, "by no manner
of means; go _before_ breakfast."

"Why?"

"What did you reckon I wanted you to go at all for, Miss Mary?"

"Well, I never thought--and come to think, I don't know.  What was it?"

"Why, it's because you ain't one of these leather-face people.  I don't
want no better book than what your face is.  A body can set down and
read it off like coarse print.  Do you reckon you can go and face your
uncles when they come to kiss you good-morning, and never--"

"There, there, don't!  Yes, I'll go before breakfast--I'll be glad to.
And leave my sisters with them?"

"Yes; never mind about them.  They've got to stand it yet a while.  They
might suspicion something if all of you was to go.  I don't want you to
see them, nor your sisters, nor nobody in this town; if a neighbor was
to ask how is your uncles this morning your face would tell something.
 No, you go right along, Miss Mary Jane, and I'll fix it with all of
them. I'll tell Miss Susan to give your love to your uncles and say
you've went away for a few hours for to get a little rest and change, or
to see a friend, and you'll be back to-night or early in the morning."

"Gone to see a friend is all right, but I won't have my love given to
them."

"Well, then, it sha'n't be."  It was well enough to tell _her_ so--no
harm in it.  It was only a little thing to do, and no trouble; and it's
the little things that smooths people's roads the most, down here below;
it would make Mary Jane comfortable, and it wouldn't cost nothing.  Then
I says:  "There's one more thing--that bag of money."

"Well, they've got that; and it makes me feel pretty silly to think
_how_ they got it."

"No, you're out, there.  They hain't got it."

"Why, who's got it?"

"I wish I knowed, but I don't.  I _had_ it, because I stole it from
them; and I stole it to give to you; and I know where I hid it, but I'm
afraid it ain't there no more.  I'm awful sorry, Miss Mary Jane, I'm
just as sorry as I can be; but I done the best I could; I did honest.  I
come nigh getting caught, and I had to shove it into the first place I
come to, and run--and it warn't a good place."

"Oh, stop blaming yourself--it's too bad to do it, and I won't allow
it--you couldn't help it; it wasn't your fault.  Where did you hide it?"

I didn't want to set her to thinking about her troubles again; and I
couldn't seem to get my mouth to tell her what would make her see that
corpse laying in the coffin with that bag of money on his stomach.  So
for a minute I didn't say nothing; then I says:

"I'd ruther not _tell_ you where I put it, Miss Mary Jane, if you don't
mind letting me off; but I'll write it for you on a piece of paper, and
you can read it along the road to Mr. Lothrop's, if you want to.  Do you
reckon that 'll do?"

"Oh, yes."

So I wrote:  "I put it in the coffin.  It was in there when you was
crying there, away in the night.  I was behind the door, and I was
mighty sorry for you, Miss Mary Jane."

It made my eyes water a little to remember her crying there all by
herself in the night, and them devils laying there right under her own
roof, shaming her and robbing her; and when I folded it up and give it
to her I see the water come into her eyes, too; and she shook me by the
hand, hard, and says:

"_Good_-bye.  I'm going to do everything just as you've told me; and if
I don't ever see you again, I sha'n't ever forget you and I'll think of
you a many and a many a time, and I'll _pray_ for you, too!"--and she was
gone.

Pray for me!  I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more
nearer her size.  But I bet she done it, just the same--she was just that
kind.  She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion--there
warn't no back-down to her, I judge.  You may say what you want to, but
in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in
my opinion she was just full of sand.  It sounds like flattery, but it
ain't no flattery.  And when it comes to beauty--and goodness, too--she
lays over them all.  I hain't ever seen her since that time that I see
her go out of that door; no, I hain't ever seen her since, but I reckon
I've thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying
she would pray for me; and if ever I'd a thought it would do any good
for me to pray for _her_, blamed if I wouldn't a done it or bust.

Well, Mary Jane she lit out the back way, I reckon; because nobody see
her go.  When I struck Susan and the hare-lip, I says:

"What's the name of them people over on t'other side of the river that
you all goes to see sometimes?"

They says:

"There's several; but it's the Proctors, mainly."

"That's the name," I says; "I most forgot it.  Well, Miss Mary Jane she
told me to tell you she's gone over there in a dreadful hurry--one of
them's sick."

"Which one?"

"I don't know; leastways, I kinder forget; but I thinks it's--"

"Sakes alive, I hope it ain't _Hanner_?"

"I'm sorry to say it," I says, "but Hanner's the very one."

"My goodness, and she so well only last week!  Is she took bad?"

"It ain't no name for it.  They set up with her all night, Miss Mary
Jane said, and they don't think she'll last many hours."

"Only think of that, now!  What's the matter with her?"

I couldn't think of anything reasonable, right off that way, so I says:

"Mumps."

"Mumps your granny!  They don't set up with people that's got the
mumps."

"They don't, don't they?  You better bet they do with _these_ mumps.
 These mumps is different.  It's a new kind, Miss Mary Jane said."

"How's it a new kind?"

"Because it's mixed up with other things."

"What other things?"

"Well, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and
yaller janders, and brain-fever, and I don't know what all."

"My land!  And they call it the _mumps_?"

"That's what Miss Mary Jane said."

"Well, what in the nation do they call it the _mumps_ for?"

"Why, because it _is_ the mumps.  That's what it starts with."

"Well, ther' ain't no sense in it.  A body might stump his toe, and take
pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains
out, and somebody come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull
up and say, 'Why, he stumped his _toe_.'  Would ther' be any sense
in that? _No_.  And ther' ain't no sense in _this_, nuther.  Is it
ketching?"

"Is it _ketching_?  Why, how you talk.  Is a _harrow_ catching--in the
dark? If you don't hitch on to one tooth, you're bound to on another,
ain't you? And you can't get away with that tooth without fetching the
whole harrow along, can you?  Well, these kind of mumps is a kind of a
harrow, as you may say--and it ain't no slouch of a harrow, nuther, you
come to get it hitched on good."

"Well, it's awful, I think," says the hare-lip.  "I'll go to Uncle
Harvey and--"

"Oh, yes," I says, "I _would_.  Of _course_ I would.  I wouldn't lose no
time."

"Well, why wouldn't you?"

"Just look at it a minute, and maybe you can see.  Hain't your uncles
obleegd to get along home to England as fast as they can?  And do you
reckon they'd be mean enough to go off and leave you to go all that
journey by yourselves?  _you_ know they'll wait for you.  So fur, so
good. Your uncle Harvey's a preacher, ain't he?  Very well, then; is a
_preacher_ going to deceive a steamboat clerk? is he going to deceive
a _ship clerk?_--so as to get them to let Miss Mary Jane go aboard?  Now
_you_ know he ain't.  What _will_ he do, then?  Why, he'll say, 'It's a
great pity, but my church matters has got to get along the best way they
can; for my niece has been exposed to the dreadful pluribus-unum mumps,
and so it's my bounden duty to set down here and wait the three months
it takes to show on her if she's got it.'  But never mind, if you think
it's best to tell your uncle Harvey--"

"Shucks, and stay fooling around here when we could all be having good
times in England whilst we was waiting to find out whether Mary Jane's
got it or not?  Why, you talk like a muggins."

"Well, anyway, maybe you'd better tell some of the neighbors."

"Listen at that, now.  You do beat all for natural stupidness.  Can't
you _see_ that _they'd_ go and tell?  Ther' ain't no way but just to not
tell anybody at _all_."

"Well, maybe you're right--yes, I judge you _are_ right."

"But I reckon we ought to tell Uncle Harvey she's gone out a while,
anyway, so he won't be uneasy about her?"

"Yes, Miss Mary Jane she wanted you to do that.  She says, 'Tell them to
give Uncle Harvey and William my love and a kiss, and say I've run over
the river to see Mr.'--Mr.--what _is_ the name of that rich family your
uncle Peter used to think so much of?--I mean the one that--"

"Why, you must mean the Apthorps, ain't it?"

"Of course; bother them kind of names, a body can't ever seem to
remember them, half the time, somehow.  Yes, she said, say she has run
over for to ask the Apthorps to be sure and come to the auction and buy
this house, because she allowed her uncle Peter would ruther they had
it than anybody else; and she's going to stick to them till they say
they'll come, and then, if she ain't too tired, she's coming home; and
if she is, she'll be home in the morning anyway.  She said, don't say
nothing about the Proctors, but only about the Apthorps--which 'll be
perfectly true, because she is going there to speak about their buying
the house; I know it, because she told me so herself."

"All right," they said, and cleared out to lay for their uncles, and
give them the love and the kisses, and tell them the message.

Everything was all right now.  The girls wouldn't say nothing because
they wanted to go to England; and the king and the duke would ruther
Mary Jane was off working for the auction than around in reach of
Doctor Robinson.  I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neat--I
reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself.  Of course he
would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not
being brung up to it.

Well, they held the auction in the public square, along towards the end
of the afternoon, and it strung along, and strung along, and the old man
he was on hand and looking his level pisonest, up there longside of the
auctioneer, and chipping in a little Scripture now and then, or a little
goody-goody saying of some kind, and the duke he was around goo-gooing
for sympathy all he knowed how, and just spreading himself generly.

But by and by the thing dragged through, and everything was
sold--everything but a little old trifling lot in the graveyard.  So
they'd got to work that off--I never see such a girafft as the king was
for wanting to swallow _everything_.  Well, whilst they was at it a
steamboat landed, and in about two minutes up comes a crowd a-whooping
and yelling and laughing and carrying on, and singing out:

"_Here's_ your opposition line! here's your two sets o' heirs to old
Peter Wilks--and you pays your money and you takes your choice!"




CHAPTER XXIX.

THEY was fetching a very nice-looking old gentleman along, and a
nice-looking younger one, with his right arm in a sling.  And, my souls,
how the people yelled and laughed, and kept it up.  But I didn't see no
joke about it, and I judged it would strain the duke and the king some
to see any.  I reckoned they'd turn pale.  But no, nary a pale did
_they_ turn. The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but
just went a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that's
googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed
down sorrowful on them new-comers like it give him the stomach-ache in
his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the
world.  Oh, he done it admirable.  Lots of the principal people
gethered around the king, to let him see they was on his side.  That old
gentleman that had just come looked all puzzled to death.  Pretty
soon he begun to speak, and I see straight off he pronounced _like_ an
Englishman--not the king's way, though the king's _was_ pretty good for
an imitation.  I can't give the old gent's words, nor I can't imitate
him; but he turned around to the crowd, and says, about like this:

"This is a surprise to me which I wasn't looking for; and I'll
acknowledge, candid and frank, I ain't very well fixed to meet it and
answer it; for my brother and me has had misfortunes; he's broke his
arm, and our baggage got put off at a town above here last night in the
night by a mistake.  I am Peter Wilks' brother Harvey, and this is his
brother William, which can't hear nor speak--and can't even make signs to
amount to much, now't he's only got one hand to work them with.  We are
who we say we are; and in a day or two, when I get the baggage, I can
prove it. But up till then I won't say nothing more, but go to the hotel
and wait."

So him and the new dummy started off; and the king he laughs, and
blethers out:

"Broke his arm--_very_ likely, _ain't_ it?--and very convenient, too,
for a fraud that's got to make signs, and ain't learnt how.  Lost
their baggage! That's _mighty_ good!--and mighty ingenious--under the
_circumstances_!"

So he laughed again; and so did everybody else, except three or four,
or maybe half a dozen.  One of these was that doctor; another one was
a sharp-looking gentleman, with a carpet-bag of the old-fashioned kind
made out of carpet-stuff, that had just come off of the steamboat and
was talking to him in a low voice, and glancing towards the king now and
then and nodding their heads--it was Levi Bell, the lawyer that was gone
up to Louisville; and another one was a big rough husky that come along
and listened to all the old gentleman said, and was listening to the
king now. And when the king got done this husky up and says:

"Say, looky here; if you are Harvey Wilks, when'd you come to this
town?"

"The day before the funeral, friend," says the king.

"But what time o' day?"

"In the evenin'--'bout an hour er two before sundown."

"_How'd_ you come?"

"I come down on the Susan Powell from Cincinnati."

"Well, then, how'd you come to be up at the Pint in the _mornin_'--in a
canoe?"

"I warn't up at the Pint in the mornin'."

"It's a lie."

Several of them jumped for him and begged him not to talk that way to an
old man and a preacher.

"Preacher be hanged, he's a fraud and a liar.  He was up at the Pint
that mornin'.  I live up there, don't I?  Well, I was up there, and
he was up there.  I see him there.  He come in a canoe, along with Tim
Collins and a boy."

The doctor he up and says:

"Would you know the boy again if you was to see him, Hines?"

"I reckon I would, but I don't know.  Why, yonder he is, now.  I know
him perfectly easy."

It was me he pointed at.  The doctor says:

"Neighbors, I don't know whether the new couple is frauds or not; but if
_these_ two ain't frauds, I am an idiot, that's all.  I think it's our
duty to see that they don't get away from here till we've looked into
this thing. Come along, Hines; come along, the rest of you.  We'll take
these fellows to the tavern and affront them with t'other couple, and I
reckon we'll find out _something_ before we get through."

It was nuts for the crowd, though maybe not for the king's friends; so
we all started.  It was about sundown.  The doctor he led me along by
the hand, and was plenty kind enough, but he never let go my hand.

We all got in a big room in the hotel, and lit up some candles, and
fetched in the new couple.  First, the doctor says:

"I don't wish to be too hard on these two men, but I think they're
frauds, and they may have complices that we don't know nothing about.
 If they have, won't the complices get away with that bag of gold Peter
Wilks left?  It ain't unlikely.  If these men ain't frauds, they won't
object to sending for that money and letting us keep it till they prove
they're all right--ain't that so?"

Everybody agreed to that.  So I judged they had our gang in a pretty
tight place right at the outstart.  But the king he only looked
sorrowful, and says:

"Gentlemen, I wish the money was there, for I ain't got no disposition
to throw anything in the way of a fair, open, out-and-out investigation
o' this misable business; but, alas, the money ain't there; you k'n send
and see, if you want to."

"Where is it, then?"

"Well, when my niece give it to me to keep for her I took and hid it
inside o' the straw tick o' my bed, not wishin' to bank it for the few
days we'd be here, and considerin' the bed a safe place, we not bein'
used to niggers, and suppos'n' 'em honest, like servants in England.
 The niggers stole it the very next mornin' after I had went down
stairs; and when I sold 'em I hadn't missed the money yit, so they got
clean away with it.  My servant here k'n tell you 'bout it, gentlemen."

The doctor and several said "Shucks!" and I see nobody didn't altogether
believe him.  One man asked me if I see the niggers steal it.  I said
no, but I see them sneaking out of the room and hustling away, and I
never thought nothing, only I reckoned they was afraid they had waked up
my master and was trying to get away before he made trouble with them.
 That was all they asked me.  Then the doctor whirls on me and says:

"Are _you_ English, too?"

I says yes; and him and some others laughed, and said, "Stuff!"

Well, then they sailed in on the general investigation, and there we had
it, up and down, hour in, hour out, and nobody never said a word about
supper, nor ever seemed to think about it--and so they kept it up, and
kept it up; and it _was_ the worst mixed-up thing you ever see.  They
made the king tell his yarn, and they made the old gentleman tell his'n;
and anybody but a lot of prejudiced chuckleheads would a _seen_ that the
old gentleman was spinning truth and t'other one lies.  And by and by
they had me up to tell what I knowed.  The king he give me a left-handed
look out of the corner of his eye, and so I knowed enough to talk on the
right side.  I begun to tell about Sheffield, and how we lived there,
and all about the English Wilkses, and so on; but I didn't get pretty
fur till the doctor begun to laugh; and Levi Bell, the lawyer, says:

"Set down, my boy; I wouldn't strain myself if I was you.  I reckon
you ain't used to lying, it don't seem to come handy; what you want is
practice.  You do it pretty awkward."

I didn't care nothing for the compliment, but I was glad to be let off,
anyway.

The doctor he started to say something, and turns and says:

"If you'd been in town at first, Levi Bell--" The king broke in and
reached out his hand, and says:

"Why, is this my poor dead brother's old friend that he's wrote so often
about?"

The lawyer and him shook hands, and the lawyer smiled and looked
pleased, and they talked right along awhile, and then got to one side
and talked low; and at last the lawyer speaks up and says:

"That 'll fix it.  I'll take the order and send it, along with your
brother's, and then they'll know it's all right."

So they got some paper and a pen, and the king he set down and twisted
his head to one side, and chawed his tongue, and scrawled off something;
and then they give the pen to the duke--and then for the first time the
duke looked sick.  But he took the pen and wrote.  So then the lawyer
turns to the new old gentleman and says:

"You and your brother please write a line or two and sign your names."

The old gentleman wrote, but nobody couldn't read it.  The lawyer looked
powerful astonished, and says:

"Well, it beats _me_"--and snaked a lot of old letters out of his pocket,
and examined them, and then examined the old man's writing, and then
_them_ again; and then says:  "These old letters is from Harvey Wilks;
and here's _these_ two handwritings, and anybody can see they didn't
write them" (the king and the duke looked sold and foolish, I tell
you, to see how the lawyer had took them in), "and here's _this_ old
gentleman's hand writing, and anybody can tell, easy enough, _he_ didn't
write them--fact is, the scratches he makes ain't properly _writing_ at
all.  Now, here's some letters from--"

The new old gentleman says:

"If you please, let me explain.  Nobody can read my hand but my brother
there--so he copies for me.  It's _his_ hand you've got there, not mine."

"_Well_!" says the lawyer, "this _is_ a state of things.  I've got some
of William's letters, too; so if you'll get him to write a line or so we
can com--"

"He _can't_ write with his left hand," says the old gentleman.  "If he
could use his right hand, you would see that he wrote his own letters
and mine too.  Look at both, please--they're by the same hand."

The lawyer done it, and says:

"I believe it's so--and if it ain't so, there's a heap stronger
resemblance than I'd noticed before, anyway.  Well, well, well!  I
thought we was right on the track of a solution, but it's gone to grass,
partly.  But anyway, one thing is proved--_these_ two ain't either of 'em
Wilkses"--and he wagged his head towards the king and the duke.

Well, what do you think?  That muleheaded old fool wouldn't give in
_then_! Indeed he wouldn't.  Said it warn't no fair test.  Said his
brother William was the cussedest joker in the world, and hadn't tried
to write--_he_ see William was going to play one of his jokes the minute
he put the pen to paper.  And so he warmed up and went warbling and
warbling right along till he was actuly beginning to believe what he was
saying _himself_; but pretty soon the new gentleman broke in, and says:

"I've thought of something.  Is there anybody here that helped to lay
out my br--helped to lay out the late Peter Wilks for burying?"

"Yes," says somebody, "me and Ab Turner done it.  We're both here."

Then the old man turns towards the king, and says:

"Perhaps this gentleman can tell me what was tattooed on his breast?"

Blamed if the king didn't have to brace up mighty quick, or he'd a
squshed down like a bluff bank that the river has cut under, it took
him so sudden; and, mind you, it was a thing that was calculated to make
most _anybody_ sqush to get fetched such a solid one as that without any
notice, because how was _he_ going to know what was tattooed on the man?
 He whitened a little; he couldn't help it; and it was mighty still in
there, and everybody bending a little forwards and gazing at him.  Says
I to myself, _now_ he'll throw up the sponge--there ain't no more use.
 Well, did he?  A body can't hardly believe it, but he didn't.  I reckon
he thought he'd keep the thing up till he tired them people out, so
they'd thin out, and him and the duke could break loose and get away.
 Anyway, he set there, and pretty soon he begun to smile, and says:

"Mf!  It's a _very_ tough question, _ain't_ it!  _yes_, sir, I k'n
tell you what's tattooed on his breast.  It's jest a small, thin, blue
arrow--that's what it is; and if you don't look clost, you can't see it.
 _now_ what do you say--hey?"

Well, I never see anything like that old blister for clean out-and-out
cheek.

The new old gentleman turns brisk towards Ab Turner and his pard, and
his eye lights up like he judged he'd got the king _this_ time, and
says:

"There--you've heard what he said!  Was there any such mark on Peter
Wilks' breast?"

Both of them spoke up and says:

"We didn't see no such mark."

"Good!" says the old gentleman.  "Now, what you _did_ see on his breast
was a small dim P, and a B (which is an initial he dropped when he was
young), and a W, with dashes between them, so:  P--B--W"--and he marked
them that way on a piece of paper.  "Come, ain't that what you saw?"

Both of them spoke up again, and says:

"No, we _didn't_.  We never seen any marks at all."

Well, everybody _was_ in a state of mind now, and they sings out:

"The whole _bilin_' of 'm 's frauds!  Le's duck 'em! le's drown 'em!
le's ride 'em on a rail!" and everybody was whooping at once, and there
was a rattling powwow.  But the lawyer he jumps on the table and yells,
and says:

"Gentlemen--gentle_men!_  Hear me just a word--just a _single_ word--if you
_please_!  There's one way yet--let's go and dig up the corpse and look."

That took them.

"Hooray!" they all shouted, and was starting right off; but the lawyer
and the doctor sung out:

"Hold on, hold on!  Collar all these four men and the boy, and fetch
_them_ along, too!"

"We'll do it!" they all shouted; "and if we don't find them marks we'll
lynch the whole gang!"

I _was_ scared, now, I tell you.  But there warn't no getting away, you
know. They gripped us all, and marched us right along, straight for the
graveyard, which was a mile and a half down the river, and the whole
town at our heels, for we made noise enough, and it was only nine in the
evening.

As we went by our house I wished I hadn't sent Mary Jane out of town;
because now if I could tip her the wink she'd light out and save me, and
blow on our dead-beats.

Well, we swarmed along down the river road, just carrying on like
wildcats; and to make it more scary the sky was darking up, and the
lightning beginning to wink and flitter, and the wind to shiver amongst
the leaves. This was the most awful trouble and most dangersome I ever
was in; and I was kinder stunned; everything was going so different from
what I had allowed for; stead of being fixed so I could take my own time
if I wanted to, and see all the fun, and have Mary Jane at my back to
save me and set me free when the close-fit come, here was nothing in the
world betwixt me and sudden death but just them tattoo-marks.  If they
didn't find them--

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think
about nothing else.  It got darker and darker, and it was a beautiful
time to give the crowd the slip; but that big husky had me by the
wrist--Hines--and a body might as well try to give Goliar the slip.  He
dragged me right along, he was so excited, and I had to run to keep up.

When they got there they swarmed into the graveyard and washed over it
like an overflow.  And when they got to the grave they found they had
about a hundred times as many shovels as they wanted, but nobody hadn't
thought to fetch a lantern.  But they sailed into digging anyway by the
flicker of the lightning, and sent a man to the nearest house, a half a
mile off, to borrow one.

So they dug and dug like everything; and it got awful dark, and the rain
started, and the wind swished and swushed along, and the lightning come
brisker and brisker, and the thunder boomed; but them people never took
no notice of it, they was so full of this business; and one minute
you could see everything and every face in that big crowd, and the
shovelfuls of dirt sailing up out of the grave, and the next second the
dark wiped it all out, and you couldn't see nothing at all.

At last they got out the coffin and begun to unscrew the lid, and then
such another crowding and shouldering and shoving as there was, to
scrouge in and get a sight, you never see; and in the dark, that way, it
was awful.  Hines he hurt my wrist dreadful pulling and tugging so,
and I reckon he clean forgot I was in the world, he was so excited and
panting.

All of a sudden the lightning let go a perfect sluice of white glare,
and somebody sings out:

"By the living jingo, here's the bag of gold on his breast!"

Hines let out a whoop, like everybody else, and dropped my wrist and
give a big surge to bust his way in and get a look, and the way I lit
out and shinned for the road in the dark there ain't nobody can tell.

I had the road all to myself, and I fairly flew--leastways, I had it all
to myself except the solid dark, and the now-and-then glares, and the
buzzing of the rain, and the thrashing of the wind, and the splitting of
the thunder; and sure as you are born I did clip it along!

When I struck the town I see there warn't nobody out in the storm, so
I never hunted for no back streets, but humped it straight through the
main one; and when I begun to get towards our house I aimed my eye and
set it. No light there; the house all dark--which made me feel sorry and
disappointed, I didn't know why.  But at last, just as I was sailing by,
_flash_ comes the light in Mary Jane's window! and my heart swelled up
sudden, like to bust; and the same second the house and all was behind
me in the dark, and wasn't ever going to be before me no more in this
world. She _was_ the best girl I ever see, and had the most sand.

The minute I was far enough above the town to see I could make the
towhead, I begun to look sharp for a boat to borrow, and the first
time the lightning showed me one that wasn't chained I snatched it and
shoved. It was a canoe, and warn't fastened with nothing but a rope.
 The towhead was a rattling big distance off, away out there in the
middle of the river, but I didn't lose no time; and when I struck the
raft at last I was so fagged I would a just laid down to blow and gasp
if I could afforded it.  But I didn't.  As I sprung aboard I sung out:

"Out with you, Jim, and set her loose!  Glory be to goodness, we're shut
of them!"

Jim lit out, and was a-coming for me with both arms spread, he was so
full of joy; but when I glimpsed him in the lightning my heart shot up
in my mouth and I went overboard backwards; for I forgot he was old King
Lear and a drownded A-rab all in one, and it most scared the livers and
lights out of me.  But Jim fished me out, and was going to hug me and
bless me, and so on, he was so glad I was back and we was shut of the
king and the duke, but I says:

"Not now; have it for breakfast, have it for breakfast!  Cut loose and
let her slide!"

So in two seconds away we went a-sliding down the river, and it _did_
seem so good to be free again and all by ourselves on the big river, and
nobody to bother us.  I had to skip around a bit, and jump up and crack
my heels a few times--I couldn't help it; but about the third crack
I noticed a sound that I knowed mighty well, and held my breath and
listened and waited; and sure enough, when the next flash busted out
over the water, here they come!--and just a-laying to their oars and
making their skiff hum!  It was the king and the duke.

So I wilted right down on to the planks then, and give up; and it was
all I could do to keep from crying.




CHAPTER XXX.

WHEN they got aboard the king went for me, and shook me by the collar,
and says:

"Tryin' to give us the slip, was ye, you pup!  Tired of our company,
hey?"

I says:

"No, your majesty, we warn't--_please_ don't, your majesty!"

"Quick, then, and tell us what _was_ your idea, or I'll shake the
insides out o' you!"

"Honest, I'll tell you everything just as it happened, your majesty.
 The man that had a-holt of me was very good to me, and kept saying he
had a boy about as big as me that died last year, and he was sorry
to see a boy in such a dangerous fix; and when they was all took by
surprise by finding the gold, and made a rush for the coffin, he lets go
of me and whispers, 'Heel it now, or they'll hang ye, sure!' and I lit
out.  It didn't seem no good for _me_ to stay--I couldn't do nothing,
and I didn't want to be hung if I could get away.  So I never stopped
running till I found the canoe; and when I got here I told Jim to hurry,
or they'd catch me and hang me yet, and said I was afeard you and the
duke wasn't alive now, and I was awful sorry, and so was Jim, and was
awful glad when we see you coming; you may ask Jim if I didn't."

Jim said it was so; and the king told him to shut up, and said, "Oh,
yes, it's _mighty_ likely!" and shook me up again, and said he reckoned
he'd drownd me.  But the duke says:

"Leggo the boy, you old idiot!  Would _you_ a done any different?  Did
you inquire around for _him_ when you got loose?  I don't remember it."

So the king let go of me, and begun to cuss that town and everybody in
it. But the duke says:

"You better a blame' sight give _yourself_ a good cussing, for you're
the one that's entitled to it most.  You hain't done a thing from the
start that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky
with that imaginary blue-arrow mark.  That _was_ bright--it was right
down bully; and it was the thing that saved us.  For if it hadn't been
for that they'd a jailed us till them Englishmen's baggage come--and
then--the penitentiary, you bet! But that trick took 'em to the
graveyard, and the gold done us a still bigger kindness; for if the
excited fools hadn't let go all holts and made that rush to get a
look we'd a slept in our cravats to-night--cravats warranted to _wear_,
too--longer than _we'd_ need 'em."

They was still a minute--thinking; then the king says, kind of
absent-minded like:

"Mf!  And we reckoned the _niggers_ stole it!"

That made me squirm!

"Yes," says the duke, kinder slow and deliberate and sarcastic, "_we_
did."

After about a half a minute the king drawls out:

"Leastways, I did."

The duke says, the same way:

"On the contrary, I did."

The king kind of ruffles up, and says:

"Looky here, Bilgewater, what'r you referrin' to?"

The duke says, pretty brisk:

"When it comes to that, maybe you'll let me ask, what was _you_
referring to?"

"Shucks!" says the king, very sarcastic; "but I don't know--maybe you was
asleep, and didn't know what you was about."

The duke bristles up now, and says:

"Oh, let _up_ on this cussed nonsense; do you take me for a blame' fool?
Don't you reckon I know who hid that money in that coffin?"

"_Yes_, sir!  I know you _do_ know, because you done it yourself!"

"It's a lie!"--and the duke went for him.  The king sings out:

"Take y'r hands off!--leggo my throat!--I take it all back!"

The duke says:

"Well, you just own up, first, that you _did_ hide that money there,
intending to give me the slip one of these days, and come back and dig
it up, and have it all to yourself."

"Wait jest a minute, duke--answer me this one question, honest and fair;
if you didn't put the money there, say it, and I'll b'lieve you, and
take back everything I said."

"You old scoundrel, I didn't, and you know I didn't.  There, now!"

"Well, then, I b'lieve you.  But answer me only jest this one more--now
_don't_ git mad; didn't you have it in your mind to hook the money and
hide it?"

The duke never said nothing for a little bit; then he says:

"Well, I don't care if I _did_, I didn't _do_ it, anyway.  But you not
only had it in mind to do it, but you _done_ it."

"I wisht I never die if I done it, duke, and that's honest.  I won't say
I warn't goin' to do it, because I _was_; but you--I mean somebody--got in
ahead o' me."

"It's a lie!  You done it, and you got to _say_ you done it, or--"

The king began to gurgle, and then he gasps out:

"'Nough!--I _own up!_"

I was very glad to hear him say that; it made me feel much more easier
than what I was feeling before.  So the duke took his hands off and
says:

"If you ever deny it again I'll drown you.  It's _well_ for you to set
there and blubber like a baby--it's fitten for you, after the way
you've acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble
everything--and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was my own
father.  You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it
saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for 'em.
 It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to _believe_
that rubbage.  Cuss you, I can see now why you was so anxious to make
up the deffisit--you wanted to get what money I'd got out of the Nonesuch
and one thing or another, and scoop it _all_!"

The king says, timid, and still a-snuffling:

"Why, duke, it was you that said make up the deffisit; it warn't me."

"Dry up!  I don't want to hear no more out of you!" says the duke.  "And
_now_ you see what you GOT by it.  They've got all their own money back,
and all of _ourn_ but a shekel or two _besides_.  G'long to bed, and
don't you deffersit _me_ no more deffersits, long 's _you_ live!"

So the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to his bottle for comfort,
and before long the duke tackled HIS bottle; and so in about a half an
hour they was as thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got the
lovinger they got, and went off a-snoring in each other's arms.  They
both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn't get mellow
enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag
again.  That made me feel easy and satisfied.  Of course when they got
to snoring we had a long gabble, and I told Jim everything.




CHAPTER XXXI.

WE dasn't stop again at any town for days and days; kept right along
down the river.  We was down south in the warm weather now, and a mighty
long ways from home.  We begun to come to trees with Spanish moss on
them, hanging down from the limbs like long, gray beards.  It was the
first I ever see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn and
dismal.  So now the frauds reckoned they was out of danger, and they
begun to work the villages again.

First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough
for them both to get drunk on.  Then in another village they started
a dancing-school; but they didn't know no more how to dance than a
kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped
in and pranced them out of town.  Another time they tried to go at
yellocution; but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and
give them a solid good cussing, and made them skip out.  They tackled
missionarying, and mesmerizing, and doctoring, and telling fortunes, and
a little of everything; but they couldn't seem to have no luck.  So at
last they got just about dead broke, and laid around the raft as she
floated along, thinking and thinking, and never saying nothing, by the
half a day at a time, and dreadful blue and desperate.

And at last they took a change and begun to lay their heads together in
the wigwam and talk low and confidential two or three hours at a time.
Jim and me got uneasy.  We didn't like the look of it.  We judged they
was studying up some kind of worse deviltry than ever.  We turned it
over and over, and at last we made up our minds they was going to break
into somebody's house or store, or was going into the counterfeit-money
business, or something. So then we was pretty scared, and made up an
agreement that we wouldn't have nothing in the world to do with such
actions, and if we ever got the least show we would give them the cold
shake and clear out and leave them behind. Well, early one morning we
hid the raft in a good, safe place about two mile below a little bit of
a shabby village named Pikesville, and the king he went ashore and told
us all to stay hid whilst he went up to town and smelt around to see
if anybody had got any wind of the Royal Nonesuch there yet. ("House to
rob, you _mean_," says I to myself; "and when you get through robbing it
you'll come back here and wonder what has become of me and Jim and the
raft--and you'll have to take it out in wondering.") And he said if he
warn't back by midday the duke and me would know it was all right, and
we was to come along.

So we stayed where we was.  The duke he fretted and sweated around, and
was in a mighty sour way.  He scolded us for everything, and we couldn't
seem to do nothing right; he found fault with every little thing.
Something was a-brewing, sure.  I was good and glad when midday come
and no king; we could have a change, anyway--and maybe a chance for _the_
change on top of it.  So me and the duke went up to the village, and
hunted around there for the king, and by and by we found him in the
back room of a little low doggery, very tight, and a lot of loafers
bullyragging him for sport, and he a-cussing and a-threatening with all
his might, and so tight he couldn't walk, and couldn't do nothing to
them.  The duke he begun to abuse him for an old fool, and the king
begun to sass back, and the minute they was fairly at it I lit out and
shook the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down the river road like
a deer, for I see our chance; and I made up my mind that it would be a
long day before they ever see me and Jim again.  I got down there all
out of breath but loaded up with joy, and sung out:

"Set her loose, Jim! we're all right now!"

But there warn't no answer, and nobody come out of the wigwam.  Jim was
gone!  I set up a shout--and then another--and then another one; and run
this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching; but it warn't
no use--old Jim was gone.  Then I set down and cried; I couldn't help
it. But I couldn't set still long.  Pretty soon I went out on the road,
trying to think what I better do, and I run across a boy walking, and
asked him if he'd seen a strange nigger dressed so and so, and he says:

"Yes."

"Whereabouts?" says I.

"Down to Silas Phelps' place, two mile below here.  He's a runaway
nigger, and they've got him.  Was you looking for him?"

"You bet I ain't!  I run across him in the woods about an hour or two
ago, and he said if I hollered he'd cut my livers out--and told me to lay
down and stay where I was; and I done it.  Been there ever since; afeard
to come out."

"Well," he says, "you needn't be afeard no more, becuz they've got him.
He run off f'm down South, som'ers."

"It's a good job they got him."

"Well, I _reckon_!  There's two hunderd dollars reward on him.  It's
like picking up money out'n the road."

"Yes, it is--and I could a had it if I'd been big enough; I see him
_first_. Who nailed him?"

"It was an old fellow--a stranger--and he sold out his chance in him for
forty dollars, becuz he's got to go up the river and can't wait.  Think
o' that, now!  You bet _I'd_ wait, if it was seven year."

"That's me, every time," says I.  "But maybe his chance ain't worth
no more than that, if he'll sell it so cheap.  Maybe there's something
ain't straight about it."

"But it _is_, though--straight as a string.  I see the handbill myself.
 It tells all about him, to a dot--paints him like a picture, and tells
the plantation he's frum, below Newr_leans_.  No-sirree-_bob_, they
ain't no trouble 'bout _that_ speculation, you bet you.  Say, gimme a
chaw tobacker, won't ye?"

I didn't have none, so he left.  I went to the raft, and set down in the
wigwam to think.  But I couldn't come to nothing.  I thought till I wore
my head sore, but I couldn't see no way out of the trouble.  After all
this long journey, and after all we'd done for them scoundrels, here it
was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because
they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make
him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty
dirty dollars.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to
be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd _got_ to be a
slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to
tell Miss Watson where he was.  But I soon give up that notion for two
things: she'd be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness
for leaving her, and so she'd sell him straight down the river again;
and if she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger,
and they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and
disgraced. And then think of _me_!  It would get all around that Huck
Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see
anybody from that town again I'd be ready to get down and lick his boots
for shame.  That's just the way:  a person does a low-down thing, and
then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he
can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.  That was my fix exactly. The more I
studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the
more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when
it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence
slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being
watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a
poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was
showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't a-going
to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further,
I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared.  Well, I tried the best I
could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung
up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame; but something inside of me
kept saying, "There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and
if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you there that people that acts as
I'd been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire."

It made me shiver.  And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I
couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better.  So
I kneeled down.  But the words wouldn't come.  Why wouldn't they?  It
warn't no use to try and hide it from Him.  Nor from _me_, neither.  I
knowed very well why they wouldn't come.  It was because my heart warn't
right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing
double.  I was letting _on_ to give up sin, but away inside of me I was
holding on to the biggest one of all.  I was trying to make my mouth
_say_ I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write
to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I
knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it.  You can't pray a lie--I found
that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to
do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and
then see if I can pray.  Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as
light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone.  So I
got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down
and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below
Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the
reward if you send.

_Huck Finn._

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever
felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.  But I didn't do it
straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking
how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost
and going to hell.  And went on thinking.  And got to thinking over our
trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time:  in the day
and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we
a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.  But somehow I
couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the
other kind.  I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of
calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when
I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp,
up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call
me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how
good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling
the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was
the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the _only_ one he's
got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place.  I took it up, and held it in my hand.  I was
a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and
I knowed it.  I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then
says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll _go_ to hell"--and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said.  And I let
them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.  I shoved the
whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again,
which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't.  And
for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again;
and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as
long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Then I set to thinking over how to get at it, and turned over some
considerable many ways in my mind; and at last fixed up a plan that
suited me.  So then I took the bearings of a woody island that was down
the river a piece, and as soon as it was fairly dark I crept out with my
raft and went for it, and hid it there, and then turned in.  I slept the
night through, and got up before it was light, and had my breakfast,
and put on my store clothes, and tied up some others and one thing or
another in a bundle, and took the canoe and cleared for shore.  I landed
below where I judged was Phelps's place, and hid my bundle in the woods,
and then filled up the canoe with water, and loaded rocks into her and
sunk her where I could find her again when I wanted her, about a quarter
of a mile below a little steam sawmill that was on the bank.

Then I struck up the road, and when I passed the mill I see a sign on
it, "Phelps's Sawmill," and when I come to the farm-houses, two or
three hundred yards further along, I kept my eyes peeled, but didn't
see nobody around, though it was good daylight now.  But I didn't mind,
because I didn't want to see nobody just yet--I only wanted to get the
lay of the land. According to my plan, I was going to turn up there from
the village, not from below.  So I just took a look, and shoved along,
straight for town. Well, the very first man I see when I got there was
the duke.  He was sticking up a bill for the Royal Nonesuch--three-night
performance--like that other time.  They had the cheek, them frauds!  I
was right on him before I could shirk.  He looked astonished, and says:

"Hel-_lo_!  Where'd _you_ come from?"  Then he says, kind of glad and
eager, "Where's the raft?--got her in a good place?"

I says:

"Why, that's just what I was going to ask your grace."

Then he didn't look so joyful, and says:

"What was your idea for asking _me_?" he says.

"Well," I says, "when I see the king in that doggery yesterday I says
to myself, we can't get him home for hours, till he's soberer; so I went
a-loafing around town to put in the time and wait.  A man up and offered
me ten cents to help him pull a skiff over the river and back to fetch
a sheep, and so I went along; but when we was dragging him to the boat,
and the man left me a-holt of the rope and went behind him to shove him
along, he was too strong for me and jerked loose and run, and we after
him.  We didn't have no dog, and so we had to chase him all over the
country till we tired him out.  We never got him till dark; then we
fetched him over, and I started down for the raft.  When I got there and
see it was gone, I says to myself, 'They've got into trouble and had to
leave; and they've took my nigger, which is the only nigger I've got in
the world, and now I'm in a strange country, and ain't got no property
no more, nor nothing, and no way to make my living;' so I set down and
cried.  I slept in the woods all night.  But what _did_ become of the
raft, then?--and Jim--poor Jim!"

"Blamed if I know--that is, what's become of the raft.  That old fool had
made a trade and got forty dollars, and when we found him in the doggery
the loafers had matched half-dollars with him and got every cent but
what he'd spent for whisky; and when I got him home late last night and
found the raft gone, we said, 'That little rascal has stole our raft and
shook us, and run off down the river.'"

"I wouldn't shake my _nigger_, would I?--the only nigger I had in the
world, and the only property."

"We never thought of that.  Fact is, I reckon we'd come to consider him
_our_ nigger; yes, we did consider him so--goodness knows we had trouble
enough for him.  So when we see the raft was gone and we flat broke,
there warn't anything for it but to try the Royal Nonesuch another
shake. And I've pegged along ever since, dry as a powder-horn.  Where's
that ten cents? Give it here."

I had considerable money, so I give him ten cents, but begged him to
spend it for something to eat, and give me some, because it was all the
money I had, and I hadn't had nothing to eat since yesterday.  He never
said nothing.  The next minute he whirls on me and says:

"Do you reckon that nigger would blow on us?  We'd skin him if he done
that!"

"How can he blow?  Hain't he run off?"

"No!  That old fool sold him, and never divided with me, and the money's
gone."

"_Sold_ him?"  I says, and begun to cry; "why, he was _my_ nigger, and
that was my money.  Where is he?--I want my nigger."

"Well, you can't _get_ your nigger, that's all--so dry up your
blubbering. Looky here--do you think _you'd_ venture to blow on us?
 Blamed if I think I'd trust you.  Why, if you _was_ to blow on us--"

He stopped, but I never see the duke look so ugly out of his eyes
before. I went on a-whimpering, and says:

"I don't want to blow on nobody; and I ain't got no time to blow, nohow.
I got to turn out and find my nigger."

He looked kinder bothered, and stood there with his bills fluttering on
his arm, thinking, and wrinkling up his forehead.  At last he says:

"I'll tell you something.  We got to be here three days.  If you'll
promise you won't blow, and won't let the nigger blow, I'll tell you
where to find him."

So I promised, and he says:

"A farmer by the name of Silas Ph--" and then he stopped.  You see, he
started to tell me the truth; but when he stopped that way, and begun to
study and think again, I reckoned he was changing his mind.  And so he
was. He wouldn't trust me; he wanted to make sure of having me out of
the way the whole three days.  So pretty soon he says:

"The man that bought him is named Abram Foster--Abram G. Foster--and he
lives forty mile back here in the country, on the road to Lafayette."

"All right," I says, "I can walk it in three days.  And I'll start this
very afternoon."

"No you wont, you'll start _now_; and don't you lose any time about it,
neither, nor do any gabbling by the way.  Just keep a tight tongue in
your head and move right along, and then you won't get into trouble with
_us_, d'ye hear?"

That was the order I wanted, and that was the one I played for.  I
wanted to be left free to work my plans.

"So clear out," he says; "and you can tell Mr. Foster whatever you want
to. Maybe you can get him to believe that Jim _is_ your nigger--some
idiots don't require documents--leastways I've heard there's such down
South here.  And when you tell him the handbill and the reward's bogus,
maybe he'll believe you when you explain to him what the idea was for
getting 'em out.  Go 'long now, and tell him anything you want to; but
mind you don't work your jaw any _between_ here and there."

So I left, and struck for the back country.  I didn't look around, but I
kinder felt like he was watching me.  But I knowed I could tire him out
at that.  I went straight out in the country as much as a mile before
I stopped; then I doubled back through the woods towards Phelps'.  I
reckoned I better start in on my plan straight off without fooling
around, because I wanted to stop Jim's mouth till these fellows could
get away.  I didn't want no trouble with their kind.  I'd seen all I
wanted to of them, and wanted to get entirely shut of them.




CHAPTER XXXII.

WHEN I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny;
the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint
dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and
like everybody's dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers
the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it's
spirits whispering--spirits that's been dead ever so many years--and you
always think they're talking about _you_.  As a general thing it makes a
body wish _he_ was dead, too, and done with it all.

Phelps' was one of these little one-horse cotton plantations, and they
all look alike.  A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out
of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different
length, to climb over the fence with, and for the women to stand on when
they are going to jump on to a horse; some sickly grass-patches in the
big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the
nap rubbed off; big double log-house for the white folks--hewed logs,
with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud-stripes
been whitewashed some time or another; round-log kitchen, with a big
broad, open but roofed passage joining it to the house; log smoke-house
back of the kitchen; three little log nigger-cabins in a row t'other
side the smoke-house; one little hut all by itself away down against
the back fence, and some outbuildings down a piece the other side;
ash-hopper and big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut; bench by
the kitchen door, with bucket of water and a gourd; hound asleep there
in the sun; more hounds asleep round about; about three shade trees away
off in a corner; some currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place
by the fence; outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then
the cotton fields begins, and after the fields the woods.

I went around and clumb over the back stile by the ash-hopper, and
started for the kitchen.  When I got a little ways I heard the dim hum
of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again;
and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead--for that _is_ the
lonesomest sound in the whole world.

I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting
to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for
I'd noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth
if I left it alone.

When I got half-way, first one hound and then another got up and went
for me, and of course I stopped and faced them, and kept still.  And
such another powwow as they made!  In a quarter of a minute I was a kind
of a hub of a wheel, as you may say--spokes made out of dogs--circle of
fifteen of them packed together around me, with their necks and noses
stretched up towards me, a-barking and howling; and more a-coming; you
could see them sailing over fences and around corners from everywheres.

A nigger woman come tearing out of the kitchen with a rolling-pin in her
hand, singing out, "Begone _you_ Tige! you Spot! begone sah!" and she
fetched first one and then another of them a clip and sent them howling,
and then the rest followed; and the next second half of them come back,
wagging their tails around me, and making friends with me.  There ain't
no harm in a hound, nohow.

And behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and two little nigger
boys without anything on but tow-linen shirts, and they hung on to their
mother's gown, and peeped out from behind her at me, bashful, the way
they always do.  And here comes the white woman running from the house,
about forty-five or fifty year old, bareheaded, and her spinning-stick
in her hand; and behind her comes her little white children, acting the
same way the little niggers was doing.  She was smiling all over so she
could hardly stand--and says:

"It's _you_, at last!--_ain't_ it?"

I out with a "Yes'm" before I thought.

She grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then gripped me by both hands
and shook and shook; and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over;
and she couldn't seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, "You
don't look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would; but law
sakes, I don't care for that, I'm so glad to see you!  Dear, dear, it
does seem like I could eat you up!  Children, it's your cousin Tom!--tell
him howdy."

But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and
hid behind her.  So she run on:

"Lize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right away--or did you get
your breakfast on the boat?"

I said I had got it on the boat.  So then she started for the house,
leading me by the hand, and the children tagging after.  When we got
there she set me down in a split-bottomed chair, and set herself down on
a little low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands, and says:

"Now I can have a _good_ look at you; and, laws-a-me, I've been hungry
for it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it's come
at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more.  What kep'
you?--boat get aground?"

"Yes'm--she--"

"Don't say yes'm--say Aunt Sally.  Where'd she get aground?"

I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't know whether the
boat would be coming up the river or down.  But I go a good deal on
instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up--from down towards
Orleans. That didn't help me much, though; for I didn't know the names
of bars down that way.  I see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the
name of the one we got aground on--or--Now I struck an idea, and fetched
it out:

"It warn't the grounding--that didn't keep us back but a little.  We
blowed out a cylinder-head."

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm.  Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.  Two years ago
last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old
Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man.  And
I think he died afterwards.  He was a Baptist.  Your uncle Silas knowed
a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well.  Yes, I
remember now, he _did_ die.  Mortification set in, and they had to
amputate him. But it didn't save him.  Yes, it was mortification--that
was it.  He turned blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious
resurrection. They say he was a sight to look at.  Your uncle's been up
to the town every day to fetch you. And he's gone again, not more'n an
hour ago; he'll be back any minute now. You must a met him on the road,
didn't you?--oldish man, with a--"

"No, I didn't see nobody, Aunt Sally.  The boat landed just at daylight,
and I left my baggage on the wharf-boat and went looking around the town
and out a piece in the country, to put in the time and not get here too
soon; and so I come down the back way."

"Who'd you give the baggage to?"

"Nobody."

"Why, child, it 'll be stole!"

"Not where I hid it I reckon it won't," I says.

"How'd you get your breakfast so early on the boat?"

It was kinder thin ice, but I says:

"The captain see me standing around, and told me I better have something
to eat before I went ashore; so he took me in the texas to the officers'
lunch, and give me all I wanted."

I was getting so uneasy I couldn't listen good.  I had my mind on the
children all the time; I wanted to get them out to one side and pump
them a little, and find out who I was.  But I couldn't get no show, Mrs.
Phelps kept it up and run on so.  Pretty soon she made the cold chills
streak all down my back, because she says:

"But here we're a-running on this way, and you hain't told me a word
about Sis, nor any of them.  Now I'll rest my works a little, and you
start up yourn; just tell me _everything_--tell me all about 'm all every
one of 'm; and how they are, and what they're doing, and what they told
you to tell me; and every last thing you can think of."

Well, I see I was up a stump--and up it good.  Providence had stood by
me this fur all right, but I was hard and tight aground now.  I see it
warn't a bit of use to try to go ahead--I'd got to throw up my hand.  So
I says to myself, here's another place where I got to resk the truth.
 I opened my mouth to begin; but she grabbed me and hustled me in behind
the bed, and says:

"Here he comes!  Stick your head down lower--there, that'll do; you can't
be seen now.  Don't you let on you're here.  I'll play a joke on him.
Children, don't you say a word."

I see I was in a fix now.  But it warn't no use to worry; there warn't
nothing to do but just hold still, and try and be ready to stand from
under when the lightning struck.

I had just one little glimpse of the old gentleman when he come in; then
the bed hid him.  Mrs. Phelps she jumps for him, and says:

"Has he come?"

"No," says her husband.

"Good-_ness_ gracious!" she says, "what in the warld can have become of
him?"

"I can't imagine," says the old gentleman; "and I must say it makes me
dreadful uneasy."

"Uneasy!" she says; "I'm ready to go distracted!  He _must_ a come; and
you've missed him along the road.  I _know_ it's so--something tells me
so."

"Why, Sally, I _couldn't_ miss him along the road--_you_ know that."

"But oh, dear, dear, what _will_ Sis say!  He must a come!  You must a
missed him.  He--"

"Oh, don't distress me any more'n I'm already distressed.  I don't know
what in the world to make of it.  I'm at my wit's end, and I don't mind
acknowledging 't I'm right down scared.  But there's no hope that he's
come; for he _couldn't_ come and me miss him.  Sally, it's terrible--just
terrible--something's happened to the boat, sure!"

"Why, Silas!  Look yonder!--up the road!--ain't that somebody coming?"

He sprung to the window at the head of the bed, and that give Mrs.
Phelps the chance she wanted.  She stooped down quick at the foot of the
bed and give me a pull, and out I come; and when he turned back from the
window there she stood, a-beaming and a-smiling like a house afire, and
I standing pretty meek and sweaty alongside.  The old gentleman stared,
and says:

"Why, who's that?"

"Who do you reckon 't is?"

"I hain't no idea.  Who _is_ it?"

"It's _Tom Sawyer!_"

By jings, I most slumped through the floor!  But there warn't no time to
swap knives; the old man grabbed me by the hand and shook, and kept on
shaking; and all the time how the woman did dance around and laugh and
cry; and then how they both did fire off questions about Sid, and Mary,
and the rest of the tribe.

But if they was joyful, it warn't nothing to what I was; for it was like
being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was.  Well, they froze
to me for two hours; and at last, when my chin was so tired it couldn't
hardly go any more, I had told them more about my family--I mean the
Sawyer family--than ever happened to any six Sawyer families.  And I
explained all about how we blowed out a cylinder-head at the mouth of
White River, and it took us three days to fix it.  Which was all right,
and worked first-rate; because _they_ didn't know but what it would take
three days to fix it.  If I'd a called it a bolthead it would a done
just as well.

Now I was feeling pretty comfortable all down one side, and pretty
uncomfortable all up the other.  Being Tom Sawyer was easy and
comfortable, and it stayed easy and comfortable till by and by I hear a
steamboat coughing along down the river.  Then I says to myself, s'pose
Tom Sawyer comes down on that boat?  And s'pose he steps in here any
minute, and sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to keep
quiet?

Well, I couldn't _have_ it that way; it wouldn't do at all.  I must go
up the road and waylay him.  So I told the folks I reckoned I would go
up to the town and fetch down my baggage.  The old gentleman was for
going along with me, but I said no, I could drive the horse myself, and
I druther he wouldn't take no trouble about me.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

SO I started for town in the wagon, and when I was half-way I see a
wagon coming, and sure enough it was Tom Sawyer, and I stopped and
waited till he come along.  I says "Hold on!" and it stopped alongside,
and his mouth opened up like a trunk, and stayed so; and he swallowed
two or three times like a person that's got a dry throat, and then says:

"I hain't ever done you no harm.  You know that.  So, then, what you
want to come back and ha'nt _me_ for?"

I says:

"I hain't come back--I hain't been _gone_."

When he heard my voice it righted him up some, but he warn't quite
satisfied yet.  He says:

"Don't you play nothing on me, because I wouldn't on you.  Honest injun
now, you ain't a ghost?"

"Honest injun, I ain't," I says.

"Well--I--I--well, that ought to settle it, of course; but I can't somehow
seem to understand it no way.  Looky here, warn't you ever murdered _at
all?_"

"No.  I warn't ever murdered at all--I played it on them.  You come in
here and feel of me if you don't believe me."

So he done it; and it satisfied him; and he was that glad to see me
again he didn't know what to do.  And he wanted to know all about it
right off, because it was a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it
hit him where he lived.  But I said, leave it alone till by and by; and
told his driver to wait, and we drove off a little piece, and I told
him the kind of a fix I was in, and what did he reckon we better do?  He
said, let him alone a minute, and don't disturb him.  So he thought and
thought, and pretty soon he says:

"It's all right; I've got it.  Take my trunk in your wagon, and let on
it's your'n; and you turn back and fool along slow, so as to get to the
house about the time you ought to; and I'll go towards town a piece, and
take a fresh start, and get there a quarter or a half an hour after you;
and you needn't let on to know me at first."

I says:

"All right; but wait a minute.  There's one more thing--a thing that
_nobody_ don't know but me.  And that is, there's a nigger here that
I'm a-trying to steal out of slavery, and his name is _Jim_--old Miss
Watson's Jim."

He says:

"What!  Why, Jim is--"

He stopped and went to studying.  I says:

"I know what you'll say.  You'll say it's dirty, low-down business; but
what if it is?  I'm low down; and I'm a-going to steal him, and I want
you keep mum and not let on.  Will you?"

His eye lit up, and he says:

"I'll _help_ you steal him!"

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot.  It was the most
astonishing speech I ever heard--and I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell
considerable in my estimation.  Only I couldn't believe it.  Tom Sawyer
a _nigger-stealer!_

"Oh, shucks!"  I says; "you're joking."

"I ain't joking, either."

"Well, then," I says, "joking or no joking, if you hear anything said
about a runaway nigger, don't forget to remember that _you_ don't know
nothing about him, and I don't know nothing about him."

Then we took the trunk and put it in my wagon, and he drove off his
way and I drove mine.  But of course I forgot all about driving slow on
accounts of being glad and full of thinking; so I got home a heap too
quick for that length of a trip.  The old gentleman was at the door, and
he says:

"Why, this is wonderful!  Whoever would a thought it was in that mare
to do it?  I wish we'd a timed her.  And she hain't sweated a hair--not
a hair. It's wonderful.  Why, I wouldn't take a hundred dollars for that
horse now--I wouldn't, honest; and yet I'd a sold her for fifteen before,
and thought 'twas all she was worth."

That's all he said.  He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see.
But it warn't surprising; because he warn't only just a farmer, he was
a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the
plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church
and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was
worth it, too.  There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and
done the same way, down South.

In about half an hour Tom's wagon drove up to the front stile, and Aunt
Sally she see it through the window, because it was only about fifty
yards, and says:

"Why, there's somebody come!  I wonder who 'tis?  Why, I do believe it's
a stranger.  Jimmy" (that's one of the children) "run and tell Lize to
put on another plate for dinner."

Everybody made a rush for the front door, because, of course, a stranger
don't come _every_ year, and so he lays over the yaller-fever, for
interest, when he does come.  Tom was over the stile and starting for
the house; the wagon was spinning up the road for the village, and we
was all bunched in the front door.  Tom had his store clothes on, and an
audience--and that was always nuts for Tom Sawyer.  In them circumstances
it warn't no trouble to him to throw in an amount of style that was
suitable.  He warn't a boy to meeky along up that yard like a sheep; no,
he come ca'm and important, like the ram.  When he got a-front of us he
lifts his hat ever so gracious and dainty, like it was the lid of a box
that had butterflies asleep in it and he didn't want to disturb them,
and says:

"Mr. Archibald Nichols, I presume?"

"No, my boy," says the old gentleman, "I'm sorry to say 't your driver
has deceived you; Nichols's place is down a matter of three mile more.
Come in, come in."

Tom he took a look back over his shoulder, and says, "Too late--he's out
of sight."

"Yes, he's gone, my son, and you must come in and eat your dinner with
us; and then we'll hitch up and take you down to Nichols's."

"Oh, I _can't_ make you so much trouble; I couldn't think of it.  I'll
walk--I don't mind the distance."

"But we won't _let_ you walk--it wouldn't be Southern hospitality to do
it. Come right in."

"Oh, _do_," says Aunt Sally; "it ain't a bit of trouble to us, not a
bit in the world.  You must stay.  It's a long, dusty three mile, and
we can't let you walk.  And, besides, I've already told 'em to put on
another plate when I see you coming; so you mustn't disappoint us.  Come
right in and make yourself at home."

So Tom he thanked them very hearty and handsome, and let himself be
persuaded, and come in; and when he was in he said he was a stranger
from Hicksville, Ohio, and his name was William Thompson--and he made
another bow.

Well, he run on, and on, and on, making up stuff about Hicksville and
everybody in it he could invent, and I getting a little nervious, and
wondering how this was going to help me out of my scrape; and at last,
still talking along, he reached over and kissed Aunt Sally right on the
mouth, and then settled back again in his chair comfortable, and was
going on talking; but she jumped up and wiped it off with the back of
her hand, and says:

"You owdacious puppy!"

He looked kind of hurt, and says:

"I'm surprised at you, m'am."

"You're s'rp--Why, what do you reckon I am?  I've a good notion to take
and--Say, what do you mean by kissing me?"

He looked kind of humble, and says:

"I didn't mean nothing, m'am.  I didn't mean no harm.  I--I--thought you'd
like it."

"Why, you born fool!"  She took up the spinning stick, and it looked
like it was all she could do to keep from giving him a crack with it.
 "What made you think I'd like it?"

"Well, I don't know.  Only, they--they--told me you would."

"_They_ told you I would.  Whoever told you's _another_ lunatic.  I
never heard the beat of it.  Who's _they_?"

"Why, everybody.  They all said so, m'am."

It was all she could do to hold in; and her eyes snapped, and her
fingers worked like she wanted to scratch him; and she says:

"Who's 'everybody'?  Out with their names, or ther'll be an idiot
short."

He got up and looked distressed, and fumbled his hat, and says:

"I'm sorry, and I warn't expecting it.  They told me to.  They all told
me to.  They all said, kiss her; and said she'd like it.  They all said
it--every one of them.  But I'm sorry, m'am, and I won't do it no more--I
won't, honest."

"You won't, won't you?  Well, I sh'd _reckon_ you won't!"

"No'm, I'm honest about it; I won't ever do it again--till you ask me."

"Till I _ask_ you!  Well, I never see the beat of it in my born days!
 I lay you'll be the Methusalem-numskull of creation before ever I ask
you--or the likes of you."

"Well," he says, "it does surprise me so.  I can't make it out, somehow.
They said you would, and I thought you would.  But--" He stopped and
looked around slow, like he wished he could run across a friendly eye
somewheres, and fetched up on the old gentleman's, and says, "Didn't
_you_ think she'd like me to kiss her, sir?"

"Why, no; I--I--well, no, I b'lieve I didn't."

Then he looks on around the same way to me, and says:

"Tom, didn't _you_ think Aunt Sally 'd open out her arms and say, 'Sid
Sawyer--'"

"My land!" she says, breaking in and jumping for him, "you impudent
young rascal, to fool a body so--" and was going to hug him, but he
fended her off, and says:

"No, not till you've asked me first."

So she didn't lose no time, but asked him; and hugged him and kissed
him over and over again, and then turned him over to the old man, and he
took what was left.  And after they got a little quiet again she says:

"Why, dear me, I never see such a surprise.  We warn't looking for _you_
at all, but only Tom.  Sis never wrote to me about anybody coming but
him."

"It's because it warn't _intended_ for any of us to come but Tom," he
says; "but I begged and begged, and at the last minute she let me
come, too; so, coming down the river, me and Tom thought it would be a
first-rate surprise for him to come here to the house first, and for me
to by and by tag along and drop in, and let on to be a stranger.  But it
was a mistake, Aunt Sally.  This ain't no healthy place for a stranger
to come."

"No--not impudent whelps, Sid.  You ought to had your jaws boxed; I
hain't been so put out since I don't know when.  But I don't care, I
don't mind the terms--I'd be willing to stand a thousand such jokes to
have you here. Well, to think of that performance!  I don't deny it, I
was most putrified with astonishment when you give me that smack."

We had dinner out in that broad open passage betwixt the house and
the kitchen; and there was things enough on that table for seven
families--and all hot, too; none of your flabby, tough meat that's laid
in a cupboard in a damp cellar all night and tastes like a hunk of
old cold cannibal in the morning.  Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long
blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn't cool it a bit,
neither, the way I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times.
 There was a considerable good deal of talk all the afternoon, and me
and Tom was on the lookout all the time; but it warn't no use, they
didn't happen to say nothing about any runaway nigger, and we was afraid
to try to work up to it.  But at supper, at night, one of the little
boys says:

"Pa, mayn't Tom and Sid and me go to the show?"

"No," says the old man, "I reckon there ain't going to be any; and you
couldn't go if there was; because the runaway nigger told Burton and
me all about that scandalous show, and Burton said he would tell the
people; so I reckon they've drove the owdacious loafers out of town
before this time."

So there it was!--but I couldn't help it.  Tom and me was to sleep in the
same room and bed; so, being tired, we bid good-night and went up to
bed right after supper, and clumb out of the window and down the
lightning-rod, and shoved for the town; for I didn't believe anybody was
going to give the king and the duke a hint, and so if I didn't hurry up
and give them one they'd get into trouble sure.

On the road Tom he told me all about how it was reckoned I was murdered,
and how pap disappeared pretty soon, and didn't come back no more, and
what a stir there was when Jim run away; and I told Tom all about our
Royal Nonesuch rapscallions, and as much of the raft voyage as I had
time to; and as we struck into the town and up through the the middle of
it--it was as much as half-after eight, then--here comes a raging rush of
people with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin
pans and blowing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go by;
and as they went by I see they had the king and the duke astraddle of a
rail--that is, I knowed it _was_ the king and the duke, though they was
all over tar and feathers, and didn't look like nothing in the
world that was human--just looked like a couple of monstrous big
soldier-plumes.  Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for
them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any
hardness against them any more in the world.  It was a dreadful thing to
see.  Human beings _can_ be awful cruel to one another.

We see we was too late--couldn't do no good.  We asked some stragglers
about it, and they said everybody went to the show looking very
innocent; and laid low and kept dark till the poor old king was in the
middle of his cavortings on the stage; then somebody give a signal, and
the house rose up and went for them.

So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling so brash as I was
before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehow--though
I hadn't done nothing.  But that's always the way; it don't make no
difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't
got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.  If I had a yaller dog that
didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him.
It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet
ain't no good, nohow.  Tom Sawyer he says the same.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

WE stopped talking, and got to thinking.  By and by Tom says:

"Looky here, Huck, what fools we are to not think of it before!  I bet I
know where Jim is."

"No!  Where?"

"In that hut down by the ash-hopper.  Why, looky here.  When we was at
dinner, didn't you see a nigger man go in there with some vittles?"

"Yes."

"What did you think the vittles was for?"

"For a dog."

"So 'd I. Well, it wasn't for a dog."

"Why?"

"Because part of it was watermelon."

"So it was--I noticed it.  Well, it does beat all that I never thought
about a dog not eating watermelon.  It shows how a body can see and
don't see at the same time."

"Well, the nigger unlocked the padlock when he went in, and he locked it
again when he came out.  He fetched uncle a key about the time we got up
from table--same key, I bet.  Watermelon shows man, lock shows prisoner;
and it ain't likely there's two prisoners on such a little plantation,
and where the people's all so kind and good.  Jim's the prisoner.  All
right--I'm glad we found it out detective fashion; I wouldn't give shucks
for any other way.  Now you work your mind, and study out a plan to
steal Jim, and I will study out one, too; and we'll take the one we like
the best."

What a head for just a boy to have!  If I had Tom Sawyer's head I
wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown
in a circus, nor nothing I can think of.  I went to thinking out a plan,
but only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where the right
plan was going to come from.  Pretty soon Tom says:

"Ready?"

"Yes," I says.

"All right--bring it out."

"My plan is this," I says.  "We can easy find out if it's Jim in there.
Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft over from the
island.  Then the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the
old man's britches after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river
on the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and
Jim used to do before.  Wouldn't that plan work?"

"_Work_?  Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats a-fighting.  But it's
too blame' simple; there ain't nothing _to_ it.  What's the good of a
plan that ain't no more trouble than that?  It's as mild as goose-milk.
 Why, Huck, it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking into a soap
factory."

I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different; but
I knowed mighty well that whenever he got _his_ plan ready it wouldn't
have none of them objections to it.

And it didn't.  He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was
worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man
as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides.  So I was satisfied,
and said we would waltz in on it.  I needn't tell what it was here,
because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was.  I knowed he would be
changing it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new
bullinesses wherever he got a chance.  And that is what he done.

Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in
earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery.
That was the thing that was too many for me.  Here was a boy that was
respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at
home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and
knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was,
without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to
this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame,
before everybody.  I _couldn't_ understand it no way at all.  It was
outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so; and so be
his true friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was and save
himself. And I _did_ start to tell him; but he shut me up, and says:

"Don't you reckon I know what I'm about?  Don't I generly know what I'm
about?"

"Yes."

"Didn't I _say_ I was going to help steal the nigger?"

"Yes."

"_Well_, then."

That's all he said, and that's all I said.  It warn't no use to say any
more; because when he said he'd do a thing, he always done it.  But I
couldn't make out how he was willing to go into this thing; so I just
let it go, and never bothered no more about it.  If he was bound to have
it so, I couldn't help it.

When we got home the house was all dark and still; so we went on down to
the hut by the ash-hopper for to examine it.  We went through the yard
so as to see what the hounds would do.  They knowed us, and didn't make
no more noise than country dogs is always doing when anything comes by
in the night.  When we got to the cabin we took a look at the front and
the two sides; and on the side I warn't acquainted with--which was the
north side--we found a square window-hole, up tolerable high, with just
one stout board nailed across it.  I says:

"Here's the ticket.  This hole's big enough for Jim to get through if we
wrench off the board."

Tom says:

"It's as simple as tit-tat-toe, three-in-a-row, and as easy as
playing hooky.  I should _hope_ we can find a way that's a little more
complicated than _that_, Huck Finn."

"Well, then," I says, "how 'll it do to saw him out, the way I done
before I was murdered that time?"

"That's more _like_," he says.  "It's real mysterious, and troublesome,
and good," he says; "but I bet we can find a way that's twice as long.
 There ain't no hurry; le's keep on looking around."

Betwixt the hut and the fence, on the back side, was a lean-to that
joined the hut at the eaves, and was made out of plank.  It was as long
as the hut, but narrow--only about six foot wide.  The door to it was at
the south end, and was padlocked.  Tom he went to the soap-kettle and
searched around, and fetched back the iron thing they lift the lid with;
so he took it and prized out one of the staples.  The chain fell down,
and we opened the door and went in, and shut it, and struck a match,
and see the shed was only built against a cabin and hadn't no connection
with it; and there warn't no floor to the shed, nor nothing in it but
some old rusty played-out hoes and spades and picks and a crippled plow.
 The match went out, and so did we, and shoved in the staple again, and
the door was locked as good as ever. Tom was joyful.  He says;

"Now we're all right.  We'll _dig_ him out.  It 'll take about a week!"

Then we started for the house, and I went in the back door--you only have
to pull a buckskin latch-string, they don't fasten the doors--but that
warn't romantical enough for Tom Sawyer; no way would do him but he must
climb up the lightning-rod.  But after he got up half way about three
times, and missed fire and fell every time, and the last time most
busted his brains out, he thought he'd got to give it up; but after he
was rested he allowed he would give her one more turn for luck, and this
time he made the trip.

In the morning we was up at break of day, and down to the nigger cabins
to pet the dogs and make friends with the nigger that fed Jim--if it
_was_ Jim that was being fed.  The niggers was just getting through
breakfast and starting for the fields; and Jim's nigger was piling up
a tin pan with bread and meat and things; and whilst the others was
leaving, the key come from the house.

This nigger had a good-natured, chuckle-headed face, and his wool was
all tied up in little bunches with thread.  That was to keep witches
off.  He said the witches was pestering him awful these nights, and
making him see all kinds of strange things, and hear all kinds of
strange words and noises, and he didn't believe he was ever witched so
long before in his life.  He got so worked up, and got to running on so
about his troubles, he forgot all about what he'd been a-going to do.
 So Tom says:

"What's the vittles for?  Going to feed the dogs?"

The nigger kind of smiled around gradually over his face, like when you
heave a brickbat in a mud-puddle, and he says:

"Yes, Mars Sid, A dog.  Cur'us dog, too.  Does you want to go en look at
'im?"

"Yes."

I hunched Tom, and whispers:

"You going, right here in the daybreak?  _that_ warn't the plan."

"No, it warn't; but it's the plan _now_."

So, drat him, we went along, but I didn't like it much.  When we got in
we couldn't hardly see anything, it was so dark; but Jim was there, sure
enough, and could see us; and he sings out:

"Why, _Huck_!  En good _lan_'! ain' dat Misto Tom?"

I just knowed how it would be; I just expected it.  I didn't know
nothing to do; and if I had I couldn't a done it, because that nigger
busted in and says:

"Why, de gracious sakes! do he know you genlmen?"

We could see pretty well now.  Tom he looked at the nigger, steady and
kind of wondering, and says:

"Does _who_ know us?"

"Why, dis-yer runaway nigger."

"I don't reckon he does; but what put that into your head?"

"What _put_ it dar?  Didn' he jis' dis minute sing out like he knowed
you?"

Tom says, in a puzzled-up kind of way:

"Well, that's mighty curious.  _Who_ sung out? _when_ did he sing out?
 _what_ did he sing out?" And turns to me, perfectly ca'm, and says,
"Did _you_ hear anybody sing out?"

Of course there warn't nothing to be said but the one thing; so I says:

"No; I ain't heard nobody say nothing."

Then he turns to Jim, and looks him over like he never see him before,
and says:

"Did you sing out?"

"No, sah," says Jim; "I hain't said nothing, sah."

"Not a word?"

"No, sah, I hain't said a word."

"Did you ever see us before?"

"No, sah; not as I knows on."

So Tom turns to the nigger, which was looking wild and distressed, and
says, kind of severe:

"What do you reckon's the matter with you, anyway?  What made you think
somebody sung out?"

"Oh, it's de dad-blame' witches, sah, en I wisht I was dead, I do.
 Dey's awluz at it, sah, en dey do mos' kill me, dey sk'yers me so.
 Please to don't tell nobody 'bout it sah, er ole Mars Silas he'll scole
me; 'kase he say dey _ain't_ no witches.  I jis' wish to goodness he was
heah now--_den_ what would he say!  I jis' bet he couldn' fine no way to
git aroun' it _dis_ time.  But it's awluz jis' so; people dat's _sot_,
stays sot; dey won't look into noth'n'en fine it out f'r deyselves, en
when _you_ fine it out en tell um 'bout it, dey doan' b'lieve you."

Tom give him a dime, and said we wouldn't tell nobody; and told him to
buy some more thread to tie up his wool with; and then looks at Jim, and
says:

"I wonder if Uncle Silas is going to hang this nigger.  If I was to
catch a nigger that was ungrateful enough to run away, I wouldn't give
him up, I'd hang him."  And whilst the nigger stepped to the door to
look at the dime and bite it to see if it was good, he whispers to Jim
and says:

"Don't ever let on to know us.  And if you hear any digging going on
nights, it's us; we're going to set you free."

Jim only had time to grab us by the hand and squeeze it; then the nigger
come back, and we said we'd come again some time if the nigger wanted
us to; and he said he would, more particular if it was dark, because the
witches went for him mostly in the dark, and it was good to have folks
around then.




CHAPTER XXXV.

IT would be most an hour yet till breakfast, so we left and struck down
into the woods; because Tom said we got to have _some_ light to see how
to dig by, and a lantern makes too much, and might get us into trouble;
what we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks that's called
fox-fire, and just makes a soft kind of a glow when you lay them in a
dark place.  We fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down
to rest, and Tom says, kind of dissatisfied:

"Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be.
And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan.
 There ain't no watchman to be drugged--now there _ought_ to be a
watchman.  There ain't even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to.  And
there's Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his
bed:  why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off
the chain.  And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the
punkin-headed nigger, and don't send nobody to watch the nigger.  Jim
could a got out of that window-hole before this, only there wouldn't be
no use trying to travel with a ten-foot chain on his leg.  Why, drat it,
Huck, it's the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent _all_
the difficulties.  Well, we can't help it; we got to do the best we can
with the materials we've got. Anyhow, there's one thing--there's more
honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers,
where there warn't one of them furnished to you by the people who it was
their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your
own head.  Now look at just that one thing of the lantern.  When you
come down to the cold facts, we simply got to _let on_ that a lantern's
resky.  Why, we could work with a torchlight procession if we wanted to,
I believe.  Now, whilst I think of it, we got to hunt up something to
make a saw out of the first chance we get."

"What do we want of a saw?"

"What do we _want_ of it?  Hain't we got to saw the leg of Jim's bed
off, so as to get the chain loose?"

"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain
off."

"Well, if that ain't just like you, Huck Finn.  You _can_ get up the
infant-schooliest ways of going at a thing.  Why, hain't you ever read
any books at all?--Baron Trenck, nor Casanova, nor Benvenuto Chelleeny,
nor Henri IV., nor none of them heroes?  Who ever heard of getting a
prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that?  No; the way all the
best authorities does is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just
so, and swallow the sawdust, so it can't be found, and put some dirt and
grease around the sawed place so the very keenest seneskal can't see
no sign of it's being sawed, and thinks the bed-leg is perfectly sound.
Then, the night you're ready, fetch the leg a kick, down she goes; slip
off your chain, and there you are.  Nothing to do but hitch your
rope ladder to the battlements, shin down it, break your leg in the
moat--because a rope ladder is nineteen foot too short, you know--and
there's your horses and your trusty vassles, and they scoop you up and
fling you across a saddle, and away you go to your native Langudoc, or
Navarre, or wherever it is. It's gaudy, Huck.  I wish there was a moat
to this cabin. If we get time, the night of the escape, we'll dig one."

I says:

"What do we want of a moat when we're going to snake him out from under
the cabin?"

But he never heard me.  He had forgot me and everything else.  He had
his chin in his hand, thinking.  Pretty soon he sighs and shakes his
head; then sighs again, and says:

"No, it wouldn't do--there ain't necessity enough for it."

"For what?"  I says.

"Why, to saw Jim's leg off," he says.

"Good land!"  I says; "why, there ain't _no_ necessity for it.  And what
would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?"

"Well, some of the best authorities has done it.  They couldn't get the
chain off, so they just cut their hand off and shoved.  And a leg would
be better still.  But we got to let that go.  There ain't necessity
enough in this case; and, besides, Jim's a nigger, and wouldn't
understand the reasons for it, and how it's the custom in Europe; so
we'll let it go.  But there's one thing--he can have a rope ladder; we
can tear up our sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough.  And we
can send it to him in a pie; it's mostly done that way.  And I've et
worse pies."

"Why, Tom Sawyer, how you talk," I says; "Jim ain't got no use for a
rope ladder."

"He _has_ got use for it.  How _you_ talk, you better say; you don't
know nothing about it.  He's _got_ to have a rope ladder; they all do."

"What in the nation can he _do_ with it?"

"_Do_ with it?  He can hide it in his bed, can't he?"  That's what they
all do; and _he's_ got to, too.  Huck, you don't ever seem to want to do
anything that's regular; you want to be starting something fresh all the
time. S'pose he _don't_ do nothing with it? ain't it there in his bed,
for a clew, after he's gone? and don't you reckon they'll want clews?
 Of course they will.  And you wouldn't leave them any?  That would be a
_pretty_ howdy-do, _wouldn't_ it!  I never heard of such a thing."

"Well," I says, "if it's in the regulations, and he's got to have
it, all right, let him have it; because I don't wish to go back on no
regulations; but there's one thing, Tom Sawyer--if we go to tearing up
our sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we're going to get into trouble
with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you're born.  Now, the way I look at
it, a hickry-bark ladder don't cost nothing, and don't waste nothing,
and is just as good to load up a pie with, and hide in a straw tick,
as any rag ladder you can start; and as for Jim, he ain't had no
experience, and so he don't care what kind of a--"

"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, if I was as ignorant as you I'd keep
still--that's what I'D do.  Who ever heard of a state prisoner escaping
by a hickry-bark ladder?  Why, it's perfectly ridiculous."

"Well, all right, Tom, fix it your own way; but if you'll take my
advice, you'll let me borrow a sheet off of the clothesline."

He said that would do.  And that gave him another idea, and he says:

"Borrow a shirt, too."

"What do we want of a shirt, Tom?"

"Want it for Jim to keep a journal on."

"Journal your granny--_Jim_ can't write."

"S'pose he _can't_ write--he can make marks on the shirt, can't he, if
we make him a pen out of an old pewter spoon or a piece of an old iron
barrel-hoop?"

"Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better
one; and quicker, too."

"_Prisoners_ don't have geese running around the donjon-keep to pull
pens out of, you muggins.  They _always_ make their pens out of the
hardest, toughest, troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or
something like that they can get their hands on; and it takes them weeks
and weeks and months and months to file it out, too, because they've got
to do it by rubbing it on the wall.  _They_ wouldn't use a goose-quill
if they had it. It ain't regular."

"Well, then, what'll we make him the ink out of?"

"Many makes it out of iron-rust and tears; but that's the common sort
and women; the best authorities uses their own blood.  Jim can do that;
and when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message
to let the world know where he's captivated, he can write it on the
bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window.  The
Iron Mask always done that, and it's a blame' good way, too."

"Jim ain't got no tin plates.  They feed him in a pan."

"That ain't nothing; we can get him some."

"Can't nobody _read_ his plates."

"That ain't got anything to _do_ with it, Huck Finn.  All _he's_ got to
do is to write on the plate and throw it out.  You don't _have_ to be
able to read it. Why, half the time you can't read anything a prisoner
writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else."

"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"

"Why, blame it all, it ain't the _prisoner's_ plates."

"But it's _somebody's_ plates, ain't it?"

"Well, spos'n it is?  What does the _prisoner_ care whose--"

He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing.  So we
cleared out for the house.

Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the
clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went
down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too.  I called it borrowing,
because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it warn't
borrowing, it was stealing.  He said we was representing prisoners; and
prisoners don't care how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody
don't blame them for it, either.  It ain't no crime in a prisoner to
steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said; it's his right; and
so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a perfect right to
steal anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves
out of prison with.  He said if we warn't prisoners it would be a very
different thing, and nobody but a mean, ornery person would steal when
he warn't a prisoner.  So we allowed we would steal everything there was
that come handy.  And yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that,
when I stole a watermelon out of the nigger-patch and eat it; and he
made me go and give the niggers a dime without telling them what it
was for. Tom said that what he meant was, we could steal anything we
_needed_. Well, I says, I needed the watermelon.  But he said I didn't
need it to get out of prison with; there's where the difference was.
 He said if I'd a wanted it to hide a knife in, and smuggle it to Jim
to kill the seneskal with, it would a been all right.  So I let it go at
that, though I couldn't see no advantage in my representing a prisoner
if I got to set down and chaw over a lot of gold-leaf distinctions like
that every time I see a chance to hog a watermelon.

Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning till everybody was settled
down to business, and nobody in sight around the yard; then Tom he
carried the sack into the lean-to whilst I stood off a piece to keep
watch.  By and by he come out, and we went and set down on the woodpile
to talk.  He says:

"Everything's all right now except tools; and that's easy fixed."

"Tools?"  I says.

"Yes."

"Tools for what?"

"Why, to dig with.  We ain't a-going to _gnaw_ him out, are we?"

"Ain't them old crippled picks and things in there good enough to dig a
nigger out with?"  I says.

He turns on me, looking pitying enough to make a body cry, and says:

"Huck Finn, did you _ever_ hear of a prisoner having picks and shovels,
and all the modern conveniences in his wardrobe to dig himself out with?
 Now I want to ask you--if you got any reasonableness in you at all--what
kind of a show would _that_ give him to be a hero?  Why, they might as
well lend him the key and done with it.  Picks and shovels--why, they
wouldn't furnish 'em to a king."

"Well, then," I says, "if we don't want the picks and shovels, what do
we want?"

"A couple of case-knives."

"To dig the foundations out from under that cabin with?"

"Yes."

"Confound it, it's foolish, Tom."

"It don't make no difference how foolish it is, it's the _right_ way--and
it's the regular way.  And there ain't no _other_ way, that ever I heard
of, and I've read all the books that gives any information about these
things. They always dig out with a case-knife--and not through dirt, mind
you; generly it's through solid rock.  And it takes them weeks and weeks
and weeks, and for ever and ever.  Why, look at one of them prisoners in
the bottom dungeon of the Castle Deef, in the harbor of Marseilles, that
dug himself out that way; how long was _he_ at it, you reckon?"

"I don't know."

"Well, guess."

"I don't know.  A month and a half."

"_Thirty-seven year_--and he come out in China.  _That's_ the kind.  I
wish the bottom of _this_ fortress was solid rock."

"_Jim_ don't know nobody in China."

"What's _that_ got to do with it?  Neither did that other fellow.  But
you're always a-wandering off on a side issue.  Why can't you stick to
the main point?"

"All right--I don't care where he comes out, so he _comes_ out; and Jim
don't, either, I reckon.  But there's one thing, anyway--Jim's too old to
be dug out with a case-knife.  He won't last."

"Yes he will _last_, too.  You don't reckon it's going to take
thirty-seven years to dig out through a _dirt_ foundation, do you?"

"How long will it take, Tom?"

"Well, we can't resk being as long as we ought to, because it mayn't
take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans.
 He'll hear Jim ain't from there.  Then his next move will be to
advertise Jim, or something like that.  So we can't resk being as long
digging him out as we ought to.  By rights I reckon we ought to be
a couple of years; but we can't.  Things being so uncertain, what I
recommend is this:  that we really dig right in, as quick as we can;
and after that, we can _let on_, to ourselves, that we was at it
thirty-seven years.  Then we can snatch him out and rush him away the
first time there's an alarm.  Yes, I reckon that 'll be the best way."

"Now, there's _sense_ in that," I says.  "Letting on don't cost nothing;
letting on ain't no trouble; and if it's any object, I don't mind
letting on we was at it a hundred and fifty year.  It wouldn't strain
me none, after I got my hand in.  So I'll mosey along now, and smouch a
couple of case-knives."

"Smouch three," he says; "we want one to make a saw out of."

"Tom, if it ain't unregular and irreligious to sejest it," I says,
"there's an old rusty saw-blade around yonder sticking under the
weather-boarding behind the smoke-house."

He looked kind of weary and discouraged-like, and says:

"It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck.  Run along and
smouch the knives--three of them."  So I done it.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the
lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our
pile of fox-fire, and went to work.  We cleared everything out of the
way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log.  Tom
said he was right behind Jim's bed now, and we'd dig in under it, and
when we got through there couldn't nobody in the cabin ever know there
was any hole there, because Jim's counter-pin hung down most to the
ground, and you'd have to raise it up and look under to see the hole.
 So we dug and dug with the case-knives till most midnight; and then
we was dog-tired, and our hands was blistered, and yet you couldn't see
we'd done anything hardly.  At last I says:

"This ain't no thirty-seven year job; this is a thirty-eight year job,
Tom Sawyer."

He never said nothing.  But he sighed, and pretty soon he stopped
digging, and then for a good little while I knowed that he was thinking.
Then he says:

"It ain't no use, Huck, it ain't a-going to work.  If we was prisoners
it would, because then we'd have as many years as we wanted, and no
hurry; and we wouldn't get but a few minutes to dig, every day, while
they was changing watches, and so our hands wouldn't get blistered, and
we could keep it up right along, year in and year out, and do it right,
and the way it ought to be done.  But _we_ can't fool along; we got to
rush; we ain't got no time to spare.  If we was to put in another
night this way we'd have to knock off for a week to let our hands get
well--couldn't touch a case-knife with them sooner."

"Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?"

"I'll tell you.  It ain't right, and it ain't moral, and I wouldn't like
it to get out; but there ain't only just the one way:  we got to dig him
out with the picks, and _let on_ it's case-knives."

"_Now_ you're _talking_!"  I says; "your head gets leveler and leveler
all the time, Tom Sawyer," I says.  "Picks is the thing, moral or no
moral; and as for me, I don't care shucks for the morality of it, nohow.
 When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school
book, I ain't no ways particular how it's done so it's done.  What I
want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my
Sunday-school book; and if a pick's the handiest thing, that's the thing
I'm a-going to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school
book out with; and I don't give a dead rat what the authorities thinks
about it nuther."

"Well," he says, "there's excuse for picks and letting-on in a case like
this; if it warn't so, I wouldn't approve of it, nor I wouldn't stand by
and see the rules broke--because right is right, and wrong is wrong,
and a body ain't got no business doing wrong when he ain't ignorant and
knows better.  It might answer for _you_ to dig Jim out with a pick,
_without_ any letting on, because you don't know no better; but it
wouldn't for me, because I do know better.  Gimme a case-knife."

He had his own by him, but I handed him mine.  He flung it down, and
says:

"Gimme a _case-knife_."

I didn't know just what to do--but then I thought.  I scratched around
amongst the old tools, and got a pickaxe and give it to him, and he took
it and went to work, and never said a word.

He was always just that particular.  Full of principle.

So then I got a shovel, and then we picked and shoveled, turn about,
and made the fur fly.  We stuck to it about a half an hour, which was as
long as we could stand up; but we had a good deal of a hole to show for
it. When I got up stairs I looked out at the window and see Tom doing
his level best with the lightning-rod, but he couldn't come it, his
hands was so sore.  At last he says:

"It ain't no use, it can't be done.  What you reckon I better do?  Can't
you think of no way?"

"Yes," I says, "but I reckon it ain't regular.  Come up the stairs, and
let on it's a lightning-rod."

So he done it.

Next day Tom stole a pewter spoon and a brass candlestick in the house,
for to make some pens for Jim out of, and six tallow candles; and I
hung around the nigger cabins and laid for a chance, and stole three tin
plates.  Tom says it wasn't enough; but I said nobody wouldn't ever see
the plates that Jim throwed out, because they'd fall in the dog-fennel
and jimpson weeds under the window-hole--then we could tote them back and
he could use them over again.  So Tom was satisfied.  Then he says:

"Now, the thing to study out is, how to get the things to Jim."

"Take them in through the hole," I says, "when we get it done."

He only just looked scornful, and said something about nobody ever heard
of such an idiotic idea, and then he went to studying.  By and by he
said he had ciphered out two or three ways, but there warn't no need to
decide on any of them yet.  Said we'd got to post Jim first.

That night we went down the lightning-rod a little after ten, and took
one of the candles along, and listened under the window-hole, and heard
Jim snoring; so we pitched it in, and it didn't wake him.  Then we
whirled in with the pick and shovel, and in about two hours and a half
the job was done.  We crept in under Jim's bed and into the cabin, and
pawed around and found the candle and lit it, and stood over Jim awhile,
and found him looking hearty and healthy, and then we woke him up gentle
and gradual.  He was so glad to see us he most cried; and called us
honey, and all the pet names he could think of; and was for having us
hunt up a cold-chisel to cut the chain off of his leg with right away,
and clearing out without losing any time.  But Tom he showed him how
unregular it would be, and set down and told him all about our plans,
and how we could alter them in a minute any time there was an alarm; and
not to be the least afraid, because we would see he got away, _sure_.
 So Jim he said it was all right, and we set there and talked over old
times awhile, and then Tom asked a lot of questions, and when Jim told
him Uncle Silas come in every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt
Sally come in to see if he was comfortable and had plenty to eat, and
both of them was kind as they could be, Tom says:

"_Now_ I know how to fix it.  We'll send you some things by them."

I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind; it's one of the most jackass
ideas I ever struck;" but he never paid no attention to me; went right
on.  It was his way when he'd got his plans set.

So he told Jim how we'd have to smuggle in the rope-ladder pie and other
large things by Nat, the nigger that fed him, and he must be on the
lookout, and not be surprised, and not let Nat see him open them; and
we would put small things in uncle's coat-pockets and he must steal them
out; and we would tie things to aunt's apron-strings or put them in her
apron-pocket, if we got a chance; and told him what they would be and
what they was for.  And told him how to keep a journal on the shirt with
his blood, and all that. He told him everything.  Jim he couldn't see
no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed
better than him; so he was satisfied, and said he would do it all just
as Tom said.

Jim had plenty corn-cob pipes and tobacco; so we had a right down good
sociable time; then we crawled out through the hole, and so home to
bed, with hands that looked like they'd been chawed.  Tom was in high
spirits. He said it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the
most intellectural; and said if he only could see his way to it we would
keep it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to
get out; for he believed Jim would come to like it better and better the
more he got used to it.  He said that in that way it could be strung out
to as much as eighty year, and would be the best time on record.  And he
said it would make us all celebrated that had a hand in it.

In the morning we went out to the woodpile and chopped up the brass
candlestick into handy sizes, and Tom put them and the pewter spoon in
his pocket.  Then we went to the nigger cabins, and while I got Nat's
notice off, Tom shoved a piece of candlestick into the middle of a
corn-pone that was in Jim's pan, and we went along with Nat to see how
it would work, and it just worked noble; when Jim bit into it it most
mashed all his teeth out; and there warn't ever anything could a worked
better. Tom said so himself. Jim he never let on but what it was only
just a piece of rock or something like that that's always getting into
bread, you know; but after that he never bit into nothing but what he
jabbed his fork into it in three or four places first.

And whilst we was a-standing there in the dimmish light, here comes a
couple of the hounds bulging in from under Jim's bed; and they kept on
piling in till there was eleven of them, and there warn't hardly room
in there to get your breath.  By jings, we forgot to fasten that lean-to
door!  The nigger Nat he only just hollered "Witches" once, and keeled
over on to the floor amongst the dogs, and begun to groan like he was
dying.  Tom jerked the door open and flung out a slab of Jim's meat,
and the dogs went for it, and in two seconds he was out himself and back
again and shut the door, and I knowed he'd fixed the other door too.
Then he went to work on the nigger, coaxing him and petting him, and
asking him if he'd been imagining he saw something again.  He raised up,
and blinked his eyes around, and says:

"Mars Sid, you'll say I's a fool, but if I didn't b'lieve I see most a
million dogs, er devils, er some'n, I wisht I may die right heah in dese
tracks.  I did, mos' sholy.  Mars Sid, I _felt_ um--I _felt_ um, sah; dey
was all over me.  Dad fetch it, I jis' wisht I could git my han's on one
er dem witches jis' wunst--on'y jis' wunst--it's all I'd ast.  But mos'ly
I wisht dey'd lemme 'lone, I does."

Tom says:

"Well, I tell you what I think.  What makes them come here just at this
runaway nigger's breakfast-time?  It's because they're hungry; that's
the reason.  You make them a witch pie; that's the thing for _you_ to
do."

"But my lan', Mars Sid, how's I gwyne to make 'm a witch pie?  I doan'
know how to make it.  I hain't ever hearn er sich a thing b'fo'."

"Well, then, I'll have to make it myself."

"Will you do it, honey?--will you?  I'll wusshup de groun' und' yo' foot,
I will!"

"All right, I'll do it, seeing it's you, and you've been good to us and
showed us the runaway nigger.  But you got to be mighty careful.  When
we come around, you turn your back; and then whatever we've put in the
pan, don't you let on you see it at all.  And don't you look when Jim
unloads the pan--something might happen, I don't know what.  And above
all, don't you _handle_ the witch-things."

"_Hannel 'M_, Mars Sid?  What _is_ you a-talkin' 'bout?  I wouldn'
lay de weight er my finger on um, not f'r ten hund'd thous'n billion
dollars, I wouldn't."




CHAPTER XXXVII.

THAT was all fixed.  So then we went away and went to the rubbage-pile
in the back yard, where they keep the old boots, and rags, and pieces
of bottles, and wore-out tin things, and all such truck, and scratched
around and found an old tin washpan, and stopped up the holes as well as
we could, to bake the pie in, and took it down cellar and stole it full
of flour and started for breakfast, and found a couple of shingle-nails
that Tom said would be handy for a prisoner to scrabble his name and
sorrows on the dungeon walls with, and dropped one of them in Aunt
Sally's apron-pocket which was hanging on a chair, and t'other we stuck
in the band of Uncle Silas's hat, which was on the bureau, because we
heard the children say their pa and ma was going to the runaway nigger's
house this morning, and then went to breakfast, and Tom dropped the
pewter spoon in Uncle Silas's coat-pocket, and Aunt Sally wasn't come
yet, so we had to wait a little while.

And when she come she was hot and red and cross, and couldn't hardly
wait for the blessing; and then she went to sluicing out coffee with one
hand and cracking the handiest child's head with her thimble with the
other, and says:

"I've hunted high and I've hunted low, and it does beat all what _has_
become of your other shirt."

My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers and things, and a hard
piece of corn-crust started down my throat after it and got met on the
road with a cough, and was shot across the table, and took one of the
children in the eye and curled him up like a fishing-worm, and let a cry
out of him the size of a warwhoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around
the gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of things for
about a quarter of a minute or as much as that, and I would a sold out
for half price if there was a bidder.  But after that we was all right
again--it was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind of cold.
Uncle Silas he says:

"It's most uncommon curious, I can't understand it.  I know perfectly
well I took it _off_, because--"

"Because you hain't got but one _on_.  Just _listen_ at the man!  I know
you took it off, and know it by a better way than your wool-gethering
memory, too, because it was on the clo's-line yesterday--I see it there
myself. But it's gone, that's the long and the short of it, and you'll
just have to change to a red flann'l one till I can get time to make a
new one. And it 'll be the third I've made in two years.  It just keeps
a body on the jump to keep you in shirts; and whatever you do manage to
_do_ with 'm all is more'n I can make out.  A body 'd think you _would_
learn to take some sort of care of 'em at your time of life."

"I know it, Sally, and I do try all I can.  But it oughtn't to be
altogether my fault, because, you know, I don't see them nor have
nothing to do with them except when they're on me; and I don't believe
I've ever lost one of them _off_ of me."

"Well, it ain't _your_ fault if you haven't, Silas; you'd a done it
if you could, I reckon.  And the shirt ain't all that's gone, nuther.
 Ther's a spoon gone; and _that_ ain't all.  There was ten, and now
ther's only nine. The calf got the shirt, I reckon, but the calf never
took the spoon, _that's_ certain."

"Why, what else is gone, Sally?"

"Ther's six _candles_ gone--that's what.  The rats could a got the
candles, and I reckon they did; I wonder they don't walk off with the
whole place, the way you're always going to stop their holes and don't
do it; and if they warn't fools they'd sleep in your hair, Silas--_you'd_
never find it out; but you can't lay the _spoon_ on the rats, and that I
know."

"Well, Sally, I'm in fault, and I acknowledge it; I've been remiss; but
I won't let to-morrow go by without stopping up them holes."

"Oh, I wouldn't hurry; next year 'll do.  Matilda Angelina Araminta
_Phelps!_"

Whack comes the thimble, and the child snatches her claws out of the
sugar-bowl without fooling around any.  Just then the nigger woman steps
on to the passage, and says:

"Missus, dey's a sheet gone."

"A _sheet_ gone!  Well, for the land's sake!"

"I'll stop up them holes to-day," says Uncle Silas, looking sorrowful.

"Oh, _do_ shet up!--s'pose the rats took the _sheet_?  _where's_ it gone,
Lize?"

"Clah to goodness I hain't no notion, Miss' Sally.  She wuz on de
clo'sline yistiddy, but she done gone:  she ain' dah no mo' now."

"I reckon the world _is_ coming to an end.  I _never_ see the beat of it
in all my born days.  A shirt, and a sheet, and a spoon, and six can--"

"Missus," comes a young yaller wench, "dey's a brass cannelstick
miss'n."

"Cler out from here, you hussy, er I'll take a skillet to ye!"

Well, she was just a-biling.  I begun to lay for a chance; I reckoned
I would sneak out and go for the woods till the weather moderated.  She
kept a-raging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and
everybody else mighty meek and quiet; and at last Uncle Silas, looking
kind of foolish, fishes up that spoon out of his pocket.  She stopped,
with her mouth open and her hands up; and as for me, I wished I was in
Jeruslem or somewheres. But not long, because she says:

"It's _just_ as I expected.  So you had it in your pocket all the time;
and like as not you've got the other things there, too.  How'd it get
there?"

"I reely don't know, Sally," he says, kind of apologizing, "or you know
I would tell.  I was a-studying over my text in Acts Seventeen before
breakfast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing, meaning to put
my Testament in, and it must be so, because my Testament ain't in; but
I'll go and see; and if the Testament is where I had it, I'll know I
didn't put it in, and that will show that I laid the Testament down and
took up the spoon, and--"

"Oh, for the land's sake!  Give a body a rest!  Go 'long now, the whole
kit and biling of ye; and don't come nigh me again till I've got back my
peace of mind."

I'D a heard her if she'd a said it to herself, let alone speaking it
out; and I'd a got up and obeyed her if I'd a been dead.  As we was
passing through the setting-room the old man he took up his hat, and the
shingle-nail fell out on the floor, and he just merely picked it up and
laid it on the mantel-shelf, and never said nothing, and went out.  Tom
see him do it, and remembered about the spoon, and says:

"Well, it ain't no use to send things by _him_ no more, he ain't
reliable." Then he says:  "But he done us a good turn with the spoon,
anyway, without knowing it, and so we'll go and do him one without _him_
knowing it--stop up his rat-holes."

There was a noble good lot of them down cellar, and it took us a whole
hour, but we done the job tight and good and shipshape.  Then we heard
steps on the stairs, and blowed out our light and hid; and here comes
the old man, with a candle in one hand and a bundle of stuff in t'other,
looking as absent-minded as year before last.  He went a mooning around,
first to one rat-hole and then another, till he'd been to them all.
 Then he stood about five minutes, picking tallow-drip off of his candle
and thinking.  Then he turns off slow and dreamy towards the stairs,
saying:

"Well, for the life of me I can't remember when I done it.  I could
show her now that I warn't to blame on account of the rats.  But never
mind--let it go.  I reckon it wouldn't do no good."

And so he went on a-mumbling up stairs, and then we left.  He was a
mighty nice old man.  And always is.

Tom was a good deal bothered about what to do for a spoon, but he said
we'd got to have it; so he took a think.  When he had ciphered it out
he told me how we was to do; then we went and waited around the
spoon-basket till we see Aunt Sally coming, and then Tom went to
counting the spoons and laying them out to one side, and I slid one of
them up my sleeve, and Tom says:

"Why, Aunt Sally, there ain't but nine spoons _yet_."

She says:

"Go 'long to your play, and don't bother me.  I know better, I counted
'm myself."

"Well, I've counted them twice, Aunty, and I can't make but nine."

She looked out of all patience, but of course she come to count--anybody
would.

"I declare to gracious ther' _ain't_ but nine!" she says.  "Why, what in
the world--plague _take_ the things, I'll count 'm again."

So I slipped back the one I had, and when she got done counting, she
says:

"Hang the troublesome rubbage, ther's _ten_ now!" and she looked huffy
and bothered both.  But Tom says:

"Why, Aunty, I don't think there's ten."

"You numskull, didn't you see me _count 'm?_"

"I know, but--"

"Well, I'll count 'm _again_."

So I smouched one, and they come out nine, same as the other time.
 Well, she _was_ in a tearing way--just a-trembling all over, she was so
mad.  But she counted and counted till she got that addled she'd start
to count in the basket for a spoon sometimes; and so, three times they
come out right, and three times they come out wrong.  Then she grabbed
up the basket and slammed it across the house and knocked the cat
galley-west; and she said cle'r out and let her have some peace, and if
we come bothering around her again betwixt that and dinner she'd skin
us.  So we had the odd spoon, and dropped it in her apron-pocket whilst
she was a-giving us our sailing orders, and Jim got it all right, along
with her shingle nail, before noon.  We was very well satisfied with
this business, and Tom allowed it was worth twice the trouble it took,
because he said _now_ she couldn't ever count them spoons twice alike
again to save her life; and wouldn't believe she'd counted them right if
she _did_; and said that after she'd about counted her head off for the
next three days he judged she'd give it up and offer to kill anybody
that wanted her to ever count them any more.

So we put the sheet back on the line that night, and stole one out of
her closet; and kept on putting it back and stealing it again for a
couple of days till she didn't know how many sheets she had any more,
and she didn't _care_, and warn't a-going to bullyrag the rest of her
soul out about it, and wouldn't count them again not to save her life;
she druther die first.

So we was all right now, as to the shirt and the sheet and the spoon
and the candles, by the help of the calf and the rats and the mixed-up
counting; and as to the candlestick, it warn't no consequence, it would
blow over by and by.

But that pie was a job; we had no end of trouble with that pie.  We
fixed it up away down in the woods, and cooked it there; and we got it
done at last, and very satisfactory, too; but not all in one day; and we
had to use up three wash-pans full of flour before we got through, and
we got burnt pretty much all over, in places, and eyes put out with
the smoke; because, you see, we didn't want nothing but a crust, and we
couldn't prop it up right, and she would always cave in.  But of course
we thought of the right way at last--which was to cook the ladder, too,
in the pie.  So then we laid in with Jim the second night, and tore
up the sheet all in little strings and twisted them together, and long
before daylight we had a lovely rope that you could a hung a person
with.  We let on it took nine months to make it.

And in the forenoon we took it down to the woods, but it wouldn't go
into the pie.  Being made of a whole sheet, that way, there was rope
enough for forty pies if we'd a wanted them, and plenty left over
for soup, or sausage, or anything you choose.  We could a had a whole
dinner.

But we didn't need it.  All we needed was just enough for the pie, and
so we throwed the rest away.  We didn't cook none of the pies in the
wash-pan--afraid the solder would melt; but Uncle Silas he had a noble
brass warming-pan which he thought considerable of, because it belonged
to one of his ancesters with a long wooden handle that come over from
England with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or one of them early
ships and was hid away up garret with a lot of other old pots and things
that was valuable, not on account of being any account, because they
warn't, but on account of them being relicts, you know, and we snaked
her out, private, and took her down there, but she failed on the first
pies, because we didn't know how, but she come up smiling on the last
one.  We took and lined her with dough, and set her in the coals, and
loaded her up with rag rope, and put on a dough roof, and shut down the
lid, and put hot embers on top, and stood off five foot, with the long
handle, cool and comfortable, and in fifteen minutes she turned out a
pie that was a satisfaction to look at. But the person that et it would
want to fetch a couple of kags of toothpicks along, for if that rope
ladder wouldn't cramp him down to business I don't know nothing what I'm
talking about, and lay him in enough stomach-ache to last him till next
time, too.

Nat didn't look when we put the witch pie in Jim's pan; and we put the
three tin plates in the bottom of the pan under the vittles; and so Jim
got everything all right, and as soon as he was by himself he busted
into the pie and hid the rope ladder inside of his straw tick,
and scratched some marks on a tin plate and throwed it out of the
window-hole.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

MAKING them pens was a distressid tough job, and so was the saw; and Jim
allowed the inscription was going to be the toughest of all.  That's the
one which the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall.  But he had to have
it; Tom said he'd _got_ to; there warn't no case of a state prisoner not
scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms.

"Look at Lady Jane Grey," he says; "look at Gilford Dudley; look at old
Northumberland!  Why, Huck, s'pose it _is_ considerble trouble?--what
you going to do?--how you going to get around it?  Jim's _got_ to do his
inscription and coat of arms.  They all do."

Jim says:

"Why, Mars Tom, I hain't got no coat o' arm; I hain't got nuffn but dish
yer ole shirt, en you knows I got to keep de journal on dat."

"Oh, you don't understand, Jim; a coat of arms is very different."

"Well," I says, "Jim's right, anyway, when he says he ain't got no coat
of arms, because he hain't."

"I reckon I knowed that," Tom says, "but you bet he'll have one before
he goes out of this--because he's going out _right_, and there ain't
going to be no flaws in his record."

So whilst me and Jim filed away at the pens on a brickbat apiece, Jim
a-making his'n out of the brass and I making mine out of the spoon,
Tom set to work to think out the coat of arms.  By and by he said he'd
struck so many good ones he didn't hardly know which to take, but there
was one which he reckoned he'd decide on.  He says:

"On the scutcheon we'll have a bend _or_ in the dexter base, a saltire
_murrey_ in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and under
his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron _vert_ in a
chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field _azure_, with the
nombril points rampant on a dancette indented; crest, a runaway nigger,
_sable_, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a
couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me; motto, _Maggiore
Fretta, Minore Otto._  Got it out of a book--means the more haste the
less speed."

"Geewhillikins," I says, "but what does the rest of it mean?"

"We ain't got no time to bother over that," he says; "we got to dig in
like all git-out."

"Well, anyway," I says, "what's _some_ of it?  What's a fess?"

"A fess--a fess is--_you_ don't need to know what a fess is.  I'll show
him how to make it when he gets to it."

"Shucks, Tom," I says, "I think you might tell a person.  What's a bar
sinister?"

"Oh, I don't know.  But he's got to have it.  All the nobility does."

That was just his way.  If it didn't suit him to explain a thing to you,
he wouldn't do it.  You might pump at him a week, it wouldn't make no
difference.

He'd got all that coat of arms business fixed, so now he started in to
finish up the rest of that part of the work, which was to plan out a
mournful inscription--said Jim got to have one, like they all done.  He
made up a lot, and wrote them out on a paper, and read them off, so:

1.  Here a captive heart busted. 2.  Here a poor prisoner, forsook by
the world and friends, fretted his sorrowful life. 3.  Here a lonely
heart broke, and a worn spirit went to its rest, after thirty-seven
years of solitary captivity. 4.  Here, homeless and friendless, after
thirty-seven years of bitter captivity, perished a noble stranger,
natural son of Louis XIV.

Tom's voice trembled whilst he was reading them, and he most broke down.
When he got done he couldn't no way make up his mind which one for Jim
to scrabble on to the wall, they was all so good; but at last he allowed
he would let him scrabble them all on.  Jim said it would take him a
year to scrabble such a lot of truck on to the logs with a nail, and he
didn't know how to make letters, besides; but Tom said he would block
them out for him, and then he wouldn't have nothing to do but just
follow the lines.  Then pretty soon he says:

"Come to think, the logs ain't a-going to do; they don't have log walls
in a dungeon:  we got to dig the inscriptions into a rock.  We'll fetch
a rock."

Jim said the rock was worse than the logs; he said it would take him
such a pison long time to dig them into a rock he wouldn't ever get out.
 But Tom said he would let me help him do it.  Then he took a look to
see how me and Jim was getting along with the pens.  It was most pesky
tedious hard work and slow, and didn't give my hands no show to get
well of the sores, and we didn't seem to make no headway, hardly; so Tom
says:

"I know how to fix it.  We got to have a rock for the coat of arms and
mournful inscriptions, and we can kill two birds with that same rock.
There's a gaudy big grindstone down at the mill, and we'll smouch it,
and carve the things on it, and file out the pens and the saw on it,
too."

It warn't no slouch of an idea; and it warn't no slouch of a grindstone
nuther; but we allowed we'd tackle it.  It warn't quite midnight yet,
so we cleared out for the mill, leaving Jim at work.  We smouched the
grindstone, and set out to roll her home, but it was a most nation tough
job. Sometimes, do what we could, we couldn't keep her from falling
over, and she come mighty near mashing us every time.  Tom said she was
going to get one of us, sure, before we got through.  We got her half
way; and then we was plumb played out, and most drownded with sweat.  We
see it warn't no use; we got to go and fetch Jim. So he raised up his
bed and slid the chain off of the bed-leg, and wrapt it round and round
his neck, and we crawled out through our hole and down there, and Jim
and me laid into that grindstone and walked her along like nothing; and
Tom superintended.  He could out-superintend any boy I ever see.  He
knowed how to do everything.

Our hole was pretty big, but it warn't big enough to get the grindstone
through; but Jim he took the pick and soon made it big enough.  Then Tom
marked out them things on it with the nail, and set Jim to work on them,
with the nail for a chisel and an iron bolt from the rubbage in the
lean-to for a hammer, and told him to work till the rest of his candle
quit on him, and then he could go to bed, and hide the grindstone under
his straw tick and sleep on it.  Then we helped him fix his chain back
on the bed-leg, and was ready for bed ourselves.  But Tom thought of
something, and says:

"You got any spiders in here, Jim?"

"No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain't, Mars Tom."

"All right, we'll get you some."

"But bless you, honey, I doan' _want_ none.  I's afeard un um.  I jis'
's soon have rattlesnakes aroun'."

Tom thought a minute or two, and says:

"It's a good idea.  And I reckon it's been done.  It _must_ a been done;
it stands to reason.  Yes, it's a prime good idea.  Where could you keep
it?"

"Keep what, Mars Tom?"

"Why, a rattlesnake."

"De goodness gracious alive, Mars Tom!  Why, if dey was a rattlesnake to
come in heah I'd take en bust right out thoo dat log wall, I would, wid
my head."

"Why, Jim, you wouldn't be afraid of it after a little.  You could tame
it."

"_Tame_ it!"

"Yes--easy enough.  Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting,
and they wouldn't _think_ of hurting a person that pets them.  Any book
will tell you that.  You try--that's all I ask; just try for two or three
days. Why, you can get him so, in a little while, that he'll love you;
and sleep with you; and won't stay away from you a minute; and will let
you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth."

"_Please_, Mars Tom--_doan_' talk so!  I can't _stan_' it!  He'd _let_
me shove his head in my mouf--fer a favor, hain't it?  I lay he'd wait a
pow'ful long time 'fo' I _ast_ him.  En mo' en dat, I doan' _want_ him
to sleep wid me."

"Jim, don't act so foolish.  A prisoner's _got_ to have some kind of a
dumb pet, and if a rattlesnake hain't ever been tried, why, there's more
glory to be gained in your being the first to ever try it than any other
way you could ever think of to save your life."

"Why, Mars Tom, I doan' _want_ no sich glory.  Snake take 'n bite
Jim's chin off, den _whah_ is de glory?  No, sah, I doan' want no sich
doin's."

"Blame it, can't you _try_?  I only _want_ you to try--you needn't keep
it up if it don't work."

"But de trouble all _done_ ef de snake bite me while I's a tryin' him.
Mars Tom, I's willin' to tackle mos' anything 'at ain't onreasonable,
but ef you en Huck fetches a rattlesnake in heah for me to tame, I's
gwyne to _leave_, dat's _shore_."

"Well, then, let it go, let it go, if you're so bull-headed about it.
 We can get you some garter-snakes, and you can tie some buttons on
their tails, and let on they're rattlesnakes, and I reckon that 'll have
to do."

"I k'n stan' _dem_, Mars Tom, but blame' 'f I couldn' get along widout
um, I tell you dat.  I never knowed b'fo' 't was so much bother and
trouble to be a prisoner."

"Well, it _always_ is when it's done right.  You got any rats around
here?"

"No, sah, I hain't seed none."

"Well, we'll get you some rats."

"Why, Mars Tom, I doan' _want_ no rats.  Dey's de dadblamedest creturs
to 'sturb a body, en rustle roun' over 'im, en bite his feet, when he's
tryin' to sleep, I ever see.  No, sah, gimme g'yarter-snakes, 'f I's
got to have 'm, but doan' gimme no rats; I hain' got no use f'r um,
skasely."

"But, Jim, you _got_ to have 'em--they all do.  So don't make no more
fuss about it.  Prisoners ain't ever without rats.  There ain't no
instance of it.  And they train them, and pet them, and learn them
tricks, and they get to be as sociable as flies.  But you got to play
music to them.  You got anything to play music on?"

"I ain' got nuffn but a coase comb en a piece o' paper, en a juice-harp;
but I reck'n dey wouldn' take no stock in a juice-harp."

"Yes they would _they_ don't care what kind of music 'tis.  A
jews-harp's plenty good enough for a rat.  All animals like music--in a
prison they dote on it.  Specially, painful music; and you can't get no
other kind out of a jews-harp.  It always interests them; they come out
to see what's the matter with you.  Yes, you're all right; you're fixed
very well.  You want to set on your bed nights before you go to sleep,
and early in the mornings, and play your jews-harp; play 'The Last Link
is Broken'--that's the thing that 'll scoop a rat quicker 'n anything
else; and when you've played about two minutes you'll see all the rats,
and the snakes, and spiders, and things begin to feel worried about you,
and come.  And they'll just fairly swarm over you, and have a noble good
time."

"Yes, _dey_ will, I reck'n, Mars Tom, but what kine er time is _Jim_
havin'? Blest if I kin see de pint.  But I'll do it ef I got to.  I
reck'n I better keep de animals satisfied, en not have no trouble in de
house."

Tom waited to think it over, and see if there wasn't nothing else; and
pretty soon he says:

"Oh, there's one thing I forgot.  Could you raise a flower here, do you
reckon?"

"I doan know but maybe I could, Mars Tom; but it's tolable dark in heah,
en I ain' got no use f'r no flower, nohow, en she'd be a pow'ful sight
o' trouble."

"Well, you try it, anyway.  Some other prisoners has done it."

"One er dem big cat-tail-lookin' mullen-stalks would grow in heah, Mars
Tom, I reck'n, but she wouldn't be wuth half de trouble she'd coss."

"Don't you believe it.  We'll fetch you a little one and you plant it in
the corner over there, and raise it.  And don't call it mullen, call it
Pitchiola--that's its right name when it's in a prison.  And you want to
water it with your tears."

"Why, I got plenty spring water, Mars Tom."

"You don't _want_ spring water; you want to water it with your tears.
 It's the way they always do."

"Why, Mars Tom, I lay I kin raise one er dem mullen-stalks twyste wid
spring water whiles another man's a _start'n_ one wid tears."

"That ain't the idea.  You _got_ to do it with tears."

"She'll die on my han's, Mars Tom, she sholy will; kase I doan' skasely
ever cry."

So Tom was stumped.  But he studied it over, and then said Jim would
have to worry along the best he could with an onion.  He promised
he would go to the nigger cabins and drop one, private, in Jim's
coffee-pot, in the morning. Jim said he would "jis' 's soon have
tobacker in his coffee;" and found so much fault with it, and with the
work and bother of raising the mullen, and jews-harping the rats, and
petting and flattering up the snakes and spiders and things, on top of
all the other work he had to do on pens, and inscriptions, and journals,
and things, which made it more trouble and worry and responsibility to
be a prisoner than anything he ever undertook, that Tom most lost all
patience with him; and said he was just loadened down with more gaudier
chances than a prisoner ever had in the world to make a name for
himself, and yet he didn't know enough to appreciate them, and they was
just about wasted on him.  So Jim he was sorry, and said he wouldn't
behave so no more, and then me and Tom shoved for bed.




CHAPTER XXXIX.

IN the morning we went up to the village and bought a wire rat-trap and
fetched it down, and unstopped the best rat-hole, and in about an hour
we had fifteen of the bulliest kind of ones; and then we took it and put
it in a safe place under Aunt Sally's bed.  But while we was gone for
spiders little Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Elexander Phelps found
it there, and opened the door of it to see if the rats would come out,
and they did; and Aunt Sally she come in, and when we got back she was
a-standing on top of the bed raising Cain, and the rats was doing what
they could to keep off the dull times for her.  So she took and dusted
us both with the hickry, and we was as much as two hours catching
another fifteen or sixteen, drat that meddlesome cub, and they warn't
the likeliest, nuther, because the first haul was the pick of the flock.
 I never see a likelier lot of rats than what that first haul was.

We got a splendid stock of sorted spiders, and bugs, and frogs, and
caterpillars, and one thing or another; and we like to got a hornet's
nest, but we didn't.  The family was at home.  We didn't give it right
up, but stayed with them as long as we could; because we allowed we'd
tire them out or they'd got to tire us out, and they done it.  Then we
got allycumpain and rubbed on the places, and was pretty near all right
again, but couldn't set down convenient.  And so we went for the snakes,
and grabbed a couple of dozen garters and house-snakes, and put them in
a bag, and put it in our room, and by that time it was supper-time, and
a rattling good honest day's work:  and hungry?--oh, no, I reckon not!
 And there warn't a blessed snake up there when we went back--we didn't
half tie the sack, and they worked out somehow, and left.  But it didn't
matter much, because they was still on the premises somewheres.  So
we judged we could get some of them again.  No, there warn't no real
scarcity of snakes about the house for a considerable spell.  You'd see
them dripping from the rafters and places every now and then; and they
generly landed in your plate, or down the back of your neck, and most
of the time where you didn't want them.  Well, they was handsome and
striped, and there warn't no harm in a million of them; but that never
made no difference to Aunt Sally; she despised snakes, be the breed what
they might, and she couldn't stand them no way you could fix it; and
every time one of them flopped down on her, it didn't make no difference
what she was doing, she would just lay that work down and light out.  I
never see such a woman.  And you could hear her whoop to Jericho.  You
couldn't get her to take a-holt of one of them with the tongs.  And if
she turned over and found one in bed she would scramble out and lift a
howl that you would think the house was afire.  She disturbed the old
man so that he said he could most wish there hadn't ever been no snakes
created.  Why, after every last snake had been gone clear out of the
house for as much as a week Aunt Sally warn't over it yet; she warn't
near over it; when she was setting thinking about something you could
touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and she would jump
right out of her stockings.  It was very curious.  But Tom said all
women was just so.  He said they was made that way for some reason or
other.

We got a licking every time one of our snakes come in her way, and she
allowed these lickings warn't nothing to what she would do if we ever
loaded up the place again with them.  I didn't mind the lickings,
because they didn't amount to nothing; but I minded the trouble we
had to lay in another lot.  But we got them laid in, and all the other
things; and you never see a cabin as blithesome as Jim's was when they'd
all swarm out for music and go for him.  Jim didn't like the spiders,
and the spiders didn't like Jim; and so they'd lay for him, and make it
mighty warm for him.  And he said that between the rats and the snakes
and the grindstone there warn't no room in bed for him, skasely; and
when there was, a body couldn't sleep, it was so lively, and it was
always lively, he said, because _they_ never all slept at one time, but
took turn about, so when the snakes was asleep the rats was on deck, and
when the rats turned in the snakes come on watch, so he always had one
gang under him, in his way, and t'other gang having a circus over him,
and if he got up to hunt a new place the spiders would take a chance at
him as he crossed over. He said if he ever got out this time he wouldn't
ever be a prisoner again, not for a salary.

Well, by the end of three weeks everything was in pretty good shape.
 The shirt was sent in early, in a pie, and every time a rat bit Jim he
would get up and write a little in his journal whilst the ink was fresh;
the pens was made, the inscriptions and so on was all carved on the
grindstone; the bed-leg was sawed in two, and we had et up the sawdust,
and it give us a most amazing stomach-ache.  We reckoned we was all
going to die, but didn't.  It was the most undigestible sawdust I ever
see; and Tom said the same.

But as I was saying, we'd got all the work done now, at last; and we was
all pretty much fagged out, too, but mainly Jim.  The old man had wrote
a couple of times to the plantation below Orleans to come and get their
runaway nigger, but hadn't got no answer, because there warn't no such
plantation; so he allowed he would advertise Jim in the St. Louis and
New Orleans papers; and when he mentioned the St. Louis ones it give me
the cold shivers, and I see we hadn't no time to lose. So Tom said, now
for the nonnamous letters.

"What's them?"  I says.

"Warnings to the people that something is up.  Sometimes it's done one
way, sometimes another.  But there's always somebody spying around that
gives notice to the governor of the castle.  When Louis XVI. was going
to light out of the Tooleries, a servant-girl done it.  It's a very good
way, and so is the nonnamous letters.  We'll use them both.  And it's
usual for the prisoner's mother to change clothes with him, and she
stays in, and he slides out in her clothes.  We'll do that, too."

"But looky here, Tom, what do we want to _warn_ anybody for that
something's up?  Let them find it out for themselves--it's their
lookout."

"Yes, I know; but you can't depend on them.  It's the way they've acted
from the very start--left us to do _everything_.  They're so confiding
and mullet-headed they don't take notice of nothing at all.  So if we
don't _give_ them notice there won't be nobody nor nothing to interfere
with us, and so after all our hard work and trouble this escape 'll go
off perfectly flat; won't amount to nothing--won't be nothing _to_ it."

"Well, as for me, Tom, that's the way I'd like."

"Shucks!" he says, and looked disgusted.  So I says:

"But I ain't going to make no complaint.  Any way that suits you suits
me. What you going to do about the servant-girl?"

"You'll be her.  You slide in, in the middle of the night, and hook that
yaller girl's frock."

"Why, Tom, that 'll make trouble next morning; because, of course, she
prob'bly hain't got any but that one."

"I know; but you don't want it but fifteen minutes, to carry the
nonnamous letter and shove it under the front door."

"All right, then, I'll do it; but I could carry it just as handy in my
own togs."

"You wouldn't look like a servant-girl _then_, would you?"

"No, but there won't be nobody to see what I look like, _anyway_."

"That ain't got nothing to do with it.  The thing for us to do is just
to do our _duty_, and not worry about whether anybody _sees_ us do it or
not. Hain't you got no principle at all?"

"All right, I ain't saying nothing; I'm the servant-girl.  Who's Jim's
mother?"

"I'm his mother.  I'll hook a gown from Aunt Sally."

"Well, then, you'll have to stay in the cabin when me and Jim leaves."

"Not much.  I'll stuff Jim's clothes full of straw and lay it on his bed
to represent his mother in disguise, and Jim 'll take the nigger woman's
gown off of me and wear it, and we'll all evade together.  When a
prisoner of style escapes it's called an evasion.  It's always called
so when a king escapes, f'rinstance.  And the same with a king's son;
it don't make no difference whether he's a natural one or an unnatural
one."

So Tom he wrote the nonnamous letter, and I smouched the yaller wench's
frock that night, and put it on, and shoved it under the front door, the
way Tom told me to.  It said:

Beware.  Trouble is brewing.  Keep a sharp lookout. _Unknown_ _Friend_.

Next night we stuck a picture, which Tom drawed in blood, of a skull and
crossbones on the front door; and next night another one of a coffin on
the back door.  I never see a family in such a sweat.  They couldn't a
been worse scared if the place had a been full of ghosts laying for them
behind everything and under the beds and shivering through the air.  If
a door banged, Aunt Sally she jumped and said "ouch!" if anything fell,
she jumped and said "ouch!" if you happened to touch her, when she
warn't noticing, she done the same; she couldn't face noway and be
satisfied, because she allowed there was something behind her every
time--so she was always a-whirling around sudden, and saying "ouch," and
before she'd got two-thirds around she'd whirl back again, and say it
again; and she was afraid to go to bed, but she dasn't set up.  So the
thing was working very well, Tom said; he said he never see a thing work
more satisfactory. He said it showed it was done right.

So he said, now for the grand bulge!  So the very next morning at the
streak of dawn we got another letter ready, and was wondering what we
better do with it, because we heard them say at supper they was going
to have a nigger on watch at both doors all night.  Tom he went down the
lightning-rod to spy around; and the nigger at the back door was asleep,
and he stuck it in the back of his neck and come back.  This letter
said:

Don't betray me, I wish to be your friend.  There is a desprate gang of
cutthroats from over in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway
nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare you so as you will
stay in the house and not bother them.  I am one of the gang, but have
got religgion and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again, and
will betray the helish design. They will sneak down from northards,
along the fence, at midnight exact, with a false key, and go in the
nigger's cabin to get him. I am to be off a piece and blow a tin horn
if I see any danger; but stead of that I will _baa_ like a sheep soon as
they get in and not blow at all; then whilst they are getting his
chains loose, you slip there and lock them in, and can kill them at your
leasure.  Don't do anything but just the way I am telling you, if you do
they will suspicion something and raise whoop-jamboreehoo. I do not wish
any reward but to know I have done the right thing. _Unknown Friend._




CHAPTER XL.

WE was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and took my canoe and went
over the river a-fishing, with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a
look at the raft and found her all right, and got home late to supper,
and found them in such a sweat and worry they didn't know which end they
was standing on, and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done
supper, and wouldn't tell us what the trouble was, and never let on a
word about the new letter, but didn't need to, because we knowed as much
about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and her
back was turned we slid for the cellar cupboard and loaded up a good
lunch and took it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about
half-past eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally's dress that he stole and
was going to start with the lunch, but says:

"Where's the butter?"

"I laid out a hunk of it," I says, "on a piece of a corn-pone."

"Well, you _left_ it laid out, then--it ain't here."

"We can get along without it," I says.

"We can get along _with_ it, too," he says; "just you slide down cellar
and fetch it.  And then mosey right down the lightning-rod and come
along. I'll go and stuff the straw into Jim's clothes to represent his
mother in disguise, and be ready to _baa_ like a sheep and shove soon as
you get there."

So out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk of butter, big as
a person's fist, was where I had left it, so I took up the slab of
corn-pone with it on, and blowed out my light, and started up stairs
very stealthy, and got up to the main floor all right, but here comes
Aunt Sally with a candle, and I clapped the truck in my hat, and clapped
my hat on my head, and the next second she see me; and she says:

"You been down cellar?"

"Yes'm."

"What you been doing down there?"

"Noth'n."

"_Noth'n!_"

"No'm."

"Well, then, what possessed you to go down there this time of night?"

"I don't know 'm."

"You don't _know_?  Don't answer me that way. Tom, I want to know what
you been _doing_ down there."

"I hain't been doing a single thing, Aunt Sally, I hope to gracious if I
have."

I reckoned she'd let me go now, and as a generl thing she would; but I
s'pose there was so many strange things going on she was just in a sweat
about every little thing that warn't yard-stick straight; so she says,
very decided:

"You just march into that setting-room and stay there till I come.  You
been up to something you no business to, and I lay I'll find out what it
is before I'M done with you."

So she went away as I opened the door and walked into the setting-room.
My, but there was a crowd there!  Fifteen farmers, and every one of them
had a gun.  I was most powerful sick, and slunk to a chair and set down.
They was setting around, some of them talking a little, in a low voice,
and all of them fidgety and uneasy, but trying to look like they warn't;
but I knowed they was, because they was always taking off their hats,
and putting them on, and scratching their heads, and changing their
seats, and fumbling with their buttons.  I warn't easy myself, but I
didn't take my hat off, all the same.

I did wish Aunt Sally would come, and get done with me, and lick me, if
she wanted to, and let me get away and tell Tom how we'd overdone this
thing, and what a thundering hornet's-nest we'd got ourselves into, so
we could stop fooling around straight off, and clear out with Jim before
these rips got out of patience and come for us.

At last she come and begun to ask me questions, but I _couldn't_ answer
them straight, I didn't know which end of me was up; because these men
was in such a fidget now that some was wanting to start right NOW and
lay for them desperadoes, and saying it warn't but a few minutes to
midnight; and others was trying to get them to hold on and wait for the
sheep-signal; and here was Aunty pegging away at the questions, and
me a-shaking all over and ready to sink down in my tracks I was
that scared; and the place getting hotter and hotter, and the butter
beginning to melt and run down my neck and behind my ears; and pretty
soon, when one of them says, "I'M for going and getting in the cabin
_first_ and right _now_, and catching them when they come," I most
dropped; and a streak of butter come a-trickling down my forehead, and
Aunt Sally she see it, and turns white as a sheet, and says:

"For the land's sake, what _is_ the matter with the child?  He's got the
brain-fever as shore as you're born, and they're oozing out!"

And everybody runs to see, and she snatches off my hat, and out comes
the bread and what was left of the butter, and she grabbed me, and
hugged me, and says:

"Oh, what a turn you did give me! and how glad and grateful I am it
ain't no worse; for luck's against us, and it never rains but it pours,
and when I see that truck I thought we'd lost you, for I knowed by
the color and all it was just like your brains would be if--Dear,
dear, whyd'nt you _tell_ me that was what you'd been down there for, I
wouldn't a cared.  Now cler out to bed, and don't lemme see no more of
you till morning!"

I was up stairs in a second, and down the lightning-rod in another one,
and shinning through the dark for the lean-to.  I couldn't hardly get my
words out, I was so anxious; but I told Tom as quick as I could we must
jump for it now, and not a minute to lose--the house full of men, yonder,
with guns!

His eyes just blazed; and he says:

"No!--is that so?  _ain't_ it bully!  Why, Huck, if it was to do over
again, I bet I could fetch two hundred!  If we could put it off till--"

"Hurry!  _Hurry_!"  I says.  "Where's Jim?"

"Right at your elbow; if you reach out your arm you can touch him.
 He's dressed, and everything's ready.  Now we'll slide out and give the
sheep-signal."

But then we heard the tramp of men coming to the door, and heard them
begin to fumble with the pad-lock, and heard a man say:

"I _told_ you we'd be too soon; they haven't come--the door is locked.
Here, I'll lock some of you into the cabin, and you lay for 'em in the
dark and kill 'em when they come; and the rest scatter around a piece,
and listen if you can hear 'em coming."

So in they come, but couldn't see us in the dark, and most trod on
us whilst we was hustling to get under the bed.  But we got under all
right, and out through the hole, swift but soft--Jim first, me next,
and Tom last, which was according to Tom's orders.  Now we was in the
lean-to, and heard trampings close by outside.  So we crept to the door,
and Tom stopped us there and put his eye to the crack, but couldn't make
out nothing, it was so dark; and whispered and said he would listen
for the steps to get further, and when he nudged us Jim must glide out
first, and him last.  So he set his ear to the crack and listened, and
listened, and listened, and the steps a-scraping around out there all
the time; and at last he nudged us, and we slid out, and stooped down,
not breathing, and not making the least noise, and slipped stealthy
towards the fence in Injun file, and got to it all right, and me and Jim
over it; but Tom's britches catched fast on a splinter on the top
rail, and then he hear the steps coming, so he had to pull loose, which
snapped the splinter and made a noise; and as he dropped in our tracks
and started somebody sings out:

"Who's that?  Answer, or I'll shoot!"

But we didn't answer; we just unfurled our heels and shoved.  Then there
was a rush, and a _Bang, Bang, Bang!_ and the bullets fairly whizzed
around us! We heard them sing out:

"Here they are!  They've broke for the river!  After 'em, boys, and turn
loose the dogs!"

So here they come, full tilt.  We could hear them because they wore
boots and yelled, but we didn't wear no boots and didn't yell.  We was
in the path to the mill; and when they got pretty close on to us we
dodged into the bush and let them go by, and then dropped in behind
them.  They'd had all the dogs shut up, so they wouldn't scare off the
robbers; but by this time somebody had let them loose, and here they
come, making powwow enough for a million; but they was our dogs; so we
stopped in our tracks till they catched up; and when they see it warn't
nobody but us, and no excitement to offer them, they only just said
howdy, and tore right ahead towards the shouting and clattering; and
then we up-steam again, and whizzed along after them till we was nearly
to the mill, and then struck up through the bush to where my canoe was
tied, and hopped in and pulled for dear life towards the middle of the
river, but didn't make no more noise than we was obleeged to. Then we
struck out, easy and comfortable, for the island where my raft was; and
we could hear them yelling and barking at each other all up and down the
bank, till we was so far away the sounds got dim and died out.  And when
we stepped on to the raft I says:

"_Now_, old Jim, you're a free man again, and I bet you won't ever be a
slave no more."

"En a mighty good job it wuz, too, Huck.  It 'uz planned beautiful, en
it 'uz done beautiful; en dey ain't _nobody_ kin git up a plan dat's mo'
mixed-up en splendid den what dat one wuz."

We was all glad as we could be, but Tom was the gladdest of all because
he had a bullet in the calf of his leg.

When me and Jim heard that we didn't feel so brash as what we did
before. It was hurting him considerable, and bleeding; so we laid him in
the wigwam and tore up one of the duke's shirts for to bandage him, but
he says:

"Gimme the rags; I can do it myself.  Don't stop now; don't fool around
here, and the evasion booming along so handsome; man the sweeps, and set
her loose!  Boys, we done it elegant!--'deed we did.  I wish _we'd_ a
had the handling of Louis XVI., there wouldn't a been no 'Son of Saint
Louis, ascend to heaven!' wrote down in _his_ biography; no, sir, we'd
a whooped him over the _border_--that's what we'd a done with _him_--and
done it just as slick as nothing at all, too.  Man the sweeps--man the
sweeps!"

But me and Jim was consulting--and thinking.  And after we'd thought a
minute, I says:

"Say it, Jim."

So he says:

"Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck.  Ef it wuz _him_ dat 'uz
bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, 'Go on
en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one?'  Is dat like
Mars Tom Sawyer?  Would he say dat?  You _bet_ he wouldn't!  _well_,
den, is _Jim_ gywne to say it?  No, sah--I doan' budge a step out'n dis
place 'dout a _doctor_, not if it's forty year!"

I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say--so
it was all right now, and I told Tom I was a-going for a doctor.
 He raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and
wouldn't budge; so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose
himself; but we wouldn't let him.  Then he give us a piece of his mind,
but it didn't do no good.

So when he sees me getting the canoe ready, he says:

"Well, then, if you're bound to go, I'll tell you the way to do when you
get to the village.  Shut the door and blindfold the doctor tight and
fast, and make him swear to be silent as the grave, and put a purse
full of gold in his hand, and then take and lead him all around the
back alleys and everywheres in the dark, and then fetch him here in the
canoe, in a roundabout way amongst the islands, and search him and take
his chalk away from him, and don't give it back to him till you get him
back to the village, or else he will chalk this raft so he can find it
again. It's the way they all do."

So I said I would, and left, and Jim was to hide in the woods when he
see the doctor coming till he was gone again.




CHAPTER XLI.

THE doctor was an old man; a very nice, kind-looking old man when I got
him up.  I told him me and my brother was over on Spanish Island hunting
yesterday afternoon, and camped on a piece of a raft we found, and about
midnight he must a kicked his gun in his dreams, for it went off and
shot him in the leg, and we wanted him to go over there and fix it and
not say nothing about it, nor let anybody know, because we wanted to
come home this evening and surprise the folks.

"Who is your folks?" he says.

"The Phelpses, down yonder."

"Oh," he says.  And after a minute, he says:

"How'd you say he got shot?"

"He had a dream," I says, "and it shot him."

"Singular dream," he says.

So he lit up his lantern, and got his saddle-bags, and we started.  But
when he sees the canoe he didn't like the look of her--said she was big
enough for one, but didn't look pretty safe for two.  I says:

"Oh, you needn't be afeard, sir, she carried the three of us easy
enough."

"What three?"

"Why, me and Sid, and--and--and _the guns_; that's what I mean."

"Oh," he says.

But he put his foot on the gunnel and rocked her, and shook his head,
and said he reckoned he'd look around for a bigger one.  But they was
all locked and chained; so he took my canoe, and said for me to wait
till he come back, or I could hunt around further, or maybe I better
go down home and get them ready for the surprise if I wanted to.  But
I said I didn't; so I told him just how to find the raft, and then he
started.

I struck an idea pretty soon.  I says to myself, spos'n he can't fix
that leg just in three shakes of a sheep's tail, as the saying is?
spos'n it takes him three or four days?  What are we going to do?--lay
around there till he lets the cat out of the bag?  No, sir; I know what
_I'll_ do.  I'll wait, and when he comes back if he says he's got to
go any more I'll get down there, too, if I swim; and we'll take and tie
him, and keep him, and shove out down the river; and when Tom's done
with him we'll give him what it's worth, or all we got, and then let him
get ashore.

So then I crept into a lumber-pile to get some sleep; and next time I
waked up the sun was away up over my head!  I shot out and went for the
doctor's house, but they told me he'd gone away in the night some time
or other, and warn't back yet.  Well, thinks I, that looks powerful bad
for Tom, and I'll dig out for the island right off.  So away I shoved,
and turned the corner, and nearly rammed my head into Uncle Silas's
stomach! He says:

"Why, _Tom!_  Where you been all this time, you rascal?"

"I hain't been nowheres," I says, "only just hunting for the runaway
nigger--me and Sid."

"Why, where ever did you go?" he says.  "Your aunt's been mighty
uneasy."

"She needn't," I says, "because we was all right.  We followed the men
and the dogs, but they outrun us, and we lost them; but we thought we
heard them on the water, so we got a canoe and took out after them and
crossed over, but couldn't find nothing of them; so we cruised along
up-shore till we got kind of tired and beat out; and tied up the canoe
and went to sleep, and never waked up till about an hour ago; then we
paddled over here to hear the news, and Sid's at the post-office to see
what he can hear, and I'm a-branching out to get something to eat for
us, and then we're going home."

So then we went to the post-office to get "Sid"; but just as I
suspicioned, he warn't there; so the old man he got a letter out of the
office, and we waited awhile longer, but Sid didn't come; so the old man
said, come along, let Sid foot it home, or canoe it, when he got done
fooling around--but we would ride.  I couldn't get him to let me stay
and wait for Sid; and he said there warn't no use in it, and I must come
along, and let Aunt Sally see we was all right.

When we got home Aunt Sally was that glad to see me she laughed and
cried both, and hugged me, and give me one of them lickings of hern that
don't amount to shucks, and said she'd serve Sid the same when he come.

And the place was plum full of farmers and farmers' wives, to dinner;
and such another clack a body never heard.  Old Mrs. Hotchkiss was the
worst; her tongue was a-going all the time.  She says:

"Well, Sister Phelps, I've ransacked that-air cabin over, an' I b'lieve
the nigger was crazy.  I says to Sister Damrell--didn't I, Sister
Damrell?--s'I, he's crazy, s'I--them's the very words I said.  You all
hearn me: he's crazy, s'I; everything shows it, s'I.  Look at that-air
grindstone, s'I; want to tell _me_'t any cretur 't's in his right mind
's a goin' to scrabble all them crazy things onto a grindstone, s'I?
 Here sich 'n' sich a person busted his heart; 'n' here so 'n' so
pegged along for thirty-seven year, 'n' all that--natcherl son o' Louis
somebody, 'n' sich everlast'n rubbage.  He's plumb crazy, s'I; it's what
I says in the fust place, it's what I says in the middle, 'n' it's what
I says last 'n' all the time--the nigger's crazy--crazy 's Nebokoodneezer,
s'I."

"An' look at that-air ladder made out'n rags, Sister Hotchkiss," says
old Mrs. Damrell; "what in the name o' goodness _could_ he ever want
of--"

"The very words I was a-sayin' no longer ago th'n this minute to Sister
Utterback, 'n' she'll tell you so herself.  Sh-she, look at that-air rag
ladder, sh-she; 'n' s'I, yes, _look_ at it, s'I--what _could_ he a-wanted
of it, s'I.  Sh-she, Sister Hotchkiss, sh-she--"

"But how in the nation'd they ever _git_ that grindstone _in_ there,
_anyway_? 'n' who dug that-air _hole_? 'n' who--"

"My very _words_, Brer Penrod!  I was a-sayin'--pass that-air sasser o'
m'lasses, won't ye?--I was a-sayin' to Sister Dunlap, jist this minute,
how _did_ they git that grindstone in there, s'I.  Without _help_, mind
you--'thout _help_!  _that's_ wher 'tis.  Don't tell _me_, s'I; there
_wuz_ help, s'I; 'n' ther' wuz a _plenty_ help, too, s'I; ther's ben a
_dozen_ a-helpin' that nigger, 'n' I lay I'd skin every last nigger on
this place but _I'd_ find out who done it, s'I; 'n' moreover, s'I--"

"A _dozen_ says you!--_forty_ couldn't a done every thing that's been
done. Look at them case-knife saws and things, how tedious they've been
made; look at that bed-leg sawed off with 'm, a week's work for six men;
look at that nigger made out'n straw on the bed; and look at--"

"You may _well_ say it, Brer Hightower!  It's jist as I was a-sayin'
to Brer Phelps, his own self.  S'e, what do _you_ think of it, Sister
Hotchkiss, s'e? Think o' what, Brer Phelps, s'I?  Think o' that bed-leg
sawed off that a way, s'e?  _think_ of it, s'I?  I lay it never sawed
_itself_ off, s'I--somebody _sawed_ it, s'I; that's my opinion, take it
or leave it, it mayn't be no 'count, s'I, but sich as 't is, it's my
opinion, s'I, 'n' if any body k'n start a better one, s'I, let him _do_
it, s'I, that's all.  I says to Sister Dunlap, s'I--"

"Why, dog my cats, they must a ben a house-full o' niggers in there
every night for four weeks to a done all that work, Sister Phelps.  Look
at that shirt--every last inch of it kivered over with secret African
writ'n done with blood!  Must a ben a raft uv 'm at it right along, all
the time, amost.  Why, I'd give two dollars to have it read to me; 'n'
as for the niggers that wrote it, I 'low I'd take 'n' lash 'm t'll--"

"People to _help_ him, Brother Marples!  Well, I reckon you'd _think_
so if you'd a been in this house for a while back.  Why, they've stole
everything they could lay their hands on--and we a-watching all the time,
mind you. They stole that shirt right off o' the line! and as for that
sheet they made the rag ladder out of, ther' ain't no telling how
many times they _didn't_ steal that; and flour, and candles, and
candlesticks, and spoons, and the old warming-pan, and most a thousand
things that I disremember now, and my new calico dress; and me and
Silas and my Sid and Tom on the constant watch day _and_ night, as I was
a-telling you, and not a one of us could catch hide nor hair nor sight
nor sound of them; and here at the last minute, lo and behold you, they
slides right in under our noses and fools us, and not only fools _us_
but the Injun Territory robbers too, and actuly gets _away_ with that
nigger safe and sound, and that with sixteen men and twenty-two dogs
right on their very heels at that very time!  I tell you, it just bangs
anything I ever _heard_ of. Why, _sperits_ couldn't a done better and
been no smarter. And I reckon they must a _been_ sperits--because, _you_
know our dogs, and ther' ain't no better; well, them dogs never even got
on the _track_ of 'm once!  You explain _that_ to me if you can!--_any_
of you!"

"Well, it does beat--"

"Laws alive, I never--"

"So help me, I wouldn't a be--"

"_House_-thieves as well as--"

"Goodnessgracioussakes, I'd a ben afeard to live in sich a--"

"'Fraid to _live_!--why, I was that scared I dasn't hardly go to bed, or
get up, or lay down, or _set_ down, Sister Ridgeway.  Why, they'd steal
the very--why, goodness sakes, you can guess what kind of a fluster I was
in by the time midnight come last night.  I hope to gracious if I warn't
afraid they'd steal some o' the family!  I was just to that pass I
didn't have no reasoning faculties no more.  It looks foolish enough
_now_, in the daytime; but I says to myself, there's my two poor boys
asleep, 'way up stairs in that lonesome room, and I declare to goodness
I was that uneasy 't I crep' up there and locked 'em in!  I _did_.  And
anybody would. Because, you know, when you get scared that way, and it
keeps running on, and getting worse and worse all the time, and your
wits gets to addling, and you get to doing all sorts o' wild things,
and by and by you think to yourself, spos'n I was a boy, and was away up
there, and the door ain't locked, and you--" She stopped, looking kind
of wondering, and then she turned her head around slow, and when her eye
lit on me--I got up and took a walk.

Says I to myself, I can explain better how we come to not be in that
room this morning if I go out to one side and study over it a little.
 So I done it.  But I dasn't go fur, or she'd a sent for me.  And when
it was late in the day the people all went, and then I come in and
told her the noise and shooting waked up me and "Sid," and the door was
locked, and we wanted to see the fun, so we went down the lightning-rod,
and both of us got hurt a little, and we didn't never want to try _that_
no more.  And then I went on and told her all what I told Uncle Silas
before; and then she said she'd forgive us, and maybe it was all right
enough anyway, and about what a body might expect of boys, for all boys
was a pretty harum-scarum lot as fur as she could see; and so, as long
as no harm hadn't come of it, she judged she better put in her time
being grateful we was alive and well and she had us still, stead of
fretting over what was past and done.  So then she kissed me, and patted
me on the head, and dropped into a kind of a brown study; and pretty
soon jumps up, and says:

"Why, lawsamercy, it's most night, and Sid not come yet!  What _has_
become of that boy?"

I see my chance; so I skips up and says:

"I'll run right up to town and get him," I says.

"No you won't," she says.  "You'll stay right wher' you are; _one's_
enough to be lost at a time.  If he ain't here to supper, your uncle 'll
go."

Well, he warn't there to supper; so right after supper uncle went.

He come back about ten a little bit uneasy; hadn't run across Tom's
track. Aunt Sally was a good _deal_ uneasy; but Uncle Silas he said
there warn't no occasion to be--boys will be boys, he said, and you'll
see this one turn up in the morning all sound and right.  So she had
to be satisfied.  But she said she'd set up for him a while anyway, and
keep a light burning so he could see it.

And then when I went up to bed she come up with me and fetched her
candle, and tucked me in, and mothered me so good I felt mean, and like
I couldn't look her in the face; and she set down on the bed and talked
with me a long time, and said what a splendid boy Sid was, and didn't
seem to want to ever stop talking about him; and kept asking me every
now and then if I reckoned he could a got lost, or hurt, or maybe
drownded, and might be laying at this minute somewheres suffering or
dead, and she not by him to help him, and so the tears would drip down
silent, and I would tell her that Sid was all right, and would be home
in the morning, sure; and she would squeeze my hand, or maybe kiss me,
and tell me to say it again, and keep on saying it, because it done her
good, and she was in so much trouble.  And when she was going away she
looked down in my eyes so steady and gentle, and says:

"The door ain't going to be locked, Tom, and there's the window and
the rod; but you'll be good, _won't_ you?  And you won't go?  For _my_
sake."

Laws knows I _wanted_ to go bad enough to see about Tom, and was all
intending to go; but after that I wouldn't a went, not for kingdoms.

But she was on my mind and Tom was on my mind, so I slept very restless.
And twice I went down the rod away in the night, and slipped around
front, and see her setting there by her candle in the window with her
eyes towards the road and the tears in them; and I wished I could do
something for her, but I couldn't, only to swear that I wouldn't never
do nothing to grieve her any more.  And the third time I waked up at
dawn, and slid down, and she was there yet, and her candle was most out,
and her old gray head was resting on her hand, and she was asleep.




CHAPTER XLII.

THE old man was uptown again before breakfast, but couldn't get no
track of Tom; and both of them set at the table thinking, and not saying
nothing, and looking mournful, and their coffee getting cold, and not
eating anything. And by and by the old man says:

"Did I give you the letter?"

"What letter?"

"The one I got yesterday out of the post-office."

"No, you didn't give me no letter."

"Well, I must a forgot it."

So he rummaged his pockets, and then went off somewheres where he had
laid it down, and fetched it, and give it to her.  She says:

"Why, it's from St. Petersburg--it's from Sis."

I allowed another walk would do me good; but I couldn't stir.  But
before she could break it open she dropped it and run--for she see
something. And so did I. It was Tom Sawyer on a mattress; and that old
doctor; and Jim, in _her_ calico dress, with his hands tied behind him;
and a lot of people.  I hid the letter behind the first thing that come
handy, and rushed.  She flung herself at Tom, crying, and says:

"Oh, he's dead, he's dead, I know he's dead!"

And Tom he turned his head a little, and muttered something or other,
which showed he warn't in his right mind; then she flung up her hands,
and says:

"He's alive, thank God!  And that's enough!" and she snatched a kiss of
him, and flew for the house to get the bed ready, and scattering orders
right and left at the niggers and everybody else, as fast as her tongue
could go, every jump of the way.

I followed the men to see what they was going to do with Jim; and the
old doctor and Uncle Silas followed after Tom into the house.  The men
was very huffy, and some of them wanted to hang Jim for an example to
all the other niggers around there, so they wouldn't be trying to run
away like Jim done, and making such a raft of trouble, and keeping a
whole family scared most to death for days and nights.  But the others
said, don't do it, it wouldn't answer at all; he ain't our nigger, and
his owner would turn up and make us pay for him, sure.  So that cooled
them down a little, because the people that's always the most anxious
for to hang a nigger that hain't done just right is always the very
ones that ain't the most anxious to pay for him when they've got their
satisfaction out of him.

They cussed Jim considerble, though, and give him a cuff or two side the
head once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to
know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes
on him, and chained him again, and not to no bed-leg this time, but to
a big staple drove into the bottom log, and chained his hands, too, and
both legs, and said he warn't to have nothing but bread and water to
eat after this till his owner come, or he was sold at auction because
he didn't come in a certain length of time, and filled up our hole, and
said a couple of farmers with guns must stand watch around about the
cabin every night, and a bulldog tied to the door in the daytime; and
about this time they was through with the job and was tapering off with
a kind of generl good-bye cussing, and then the old doctor comes and
takes a look, and says:

"Don't be no rougher on him than you're obleeged to, because he ain't
a bad nigger.  When I got to where I found the boy I see I couldn't cut
the bullet out without some help, and he warn't in no condition for
me to leave to go and get help; and he got a little worse and a little
worse, and after a long time he went out of his head, and wouldn't let
me come a-nigh him any more, and said if I chalked his raft he'd kill
me, and no end of wild foolishness like that, and I see I couldn't do
anything at all with him; so I says, I got to have _help_ somehow; and
the minute I says it out crawls this nigger from somewheres and says
he'll help, and he done it, too, and done it very well.  Of course I
judged he must be a runaway nigger, and there I _was_! and there I had
to stick right straight along all the rest of the day and all night.  It
was a fix, I tell you! I had a couple of patients with the chills, and
of course I'd of liked to run up to town and see them, but I dasn't,
because the nigger might get away, and then I'd be to blame; and yet
never a skiff come close enough for me to hail.  So there I had to stick
plumb until daylight this morning; and I never see a nigger that was a
better nuss or faithfuller, and yet he was risking his freedom to do it,
and was all tired out, too, and I see plain enough he'd been worked
main hard lately.  I liked the nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a
nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars--and kind treatment, too.  I
had everything I needed, and the boy was doing as well there as he
would a done at home--better, maybe, because it was so quiet; but there I
_was_, with both of 'm on my hands, and there I had to stick till about
dawn this morning; then some men in a skiff come by, and as good luck
would have it the nigger was setting by the pallet with his head propped
on his knees sound asleep; so I motioned them in quiet, and they slipped
up on him and grabbed him and tied him before he knowed what he was
about, and we never had no trouble. And the boy being in a kind of a
flighty sleep, too, we muffled the oars and hitched the raft on, and
towed her over very nice and quiet, and the nigger never made the least
row nor said a word from the start.  He ain't no bad nigger, gentlemen;
that's what I think about him."

Somebody says:

"Well, it sounds very good, doctor, I'm obleeged to say."

Then the others softened up a little, too, and I was mighty thankful
to that old doctor for doing Jim that good turn; and I was glad it was
according to my judgment of him, too; because I thought he had a good
heart in him and was a good man the first time I see him.  Then they
all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some
notice took of it, and reward.  So every one of them promised, right out
and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.

Then they come out and locked him up.  I hoped they was going to say he
could have one or two of the chains took off, because they was rotten
heavy, or could have meat and greens with his bread and water; but they
didn't think of it, and I reckoned it warn't best for me to mix in, but
I judged I'd get the doctor's yarn to Aunt Sally somehow or other as
soon as I'd got through the breakers that was laying just ahead of
me--explanations, I mean, of how I forgot to mention about Sid being shot
when I was telling how him and me put in that dratted night paddling
around hunting the runaway nigger.

But I had plenty time.  Aunt Sally she stuck to the sick-room all day
and all night, and every time I see Uncle Silas mooning around I dodged
him.

Next morning I heard Tom was a good deal better, and they said Aunt
Sally was gone to get a nap.  So I slips to the sick-room, and if I
found him awake I reckoned we could put up a yarn for the family that
would wash. But he was sleeping, and sleeping very peaceful, too; and
pale, not fire-faced the way he was when he come.  So I set down and
laid for him to wake.  In about half an hour Aunt Sally comes gliding
in, and there I was, up a stump again!  She motioned me to be still, and
set down by me, and begun to whisper, and said we could all be joyful
now, because all the symptoms was first-rate, and he'd been sleeping
like that for ever so long, and looking better and peacefuller all the
time, and ten to one he'd wake up in his right mind.

So we set there watching, and by and by he stirs a bit, and opened his
eyes very natural, and takes a look, and says:

"Hello!--why, I'm at _home_!  How's that?  Where's the raft?"

"It's all right," I says.

"And _Jim_?"

"The same," I says, but couldn't say it pretty brash.  But he never
noticed, but says:

"Good!  Splendid!  _Now_ we're all right and safe! Did you tell Aunty?"

I was going to say yes; but she chipped in and says:  "About what, Sid?"

"Why, about the way the whole thing was done."

"What whole thing?"

"Why, _the_ whole thing.  There ain't but one; how we set the runaway
nigger free--me and Tom."

"Good land!  Set the run--What _is_ the child talking about!  Dear, dear,
out of his head again!"

"_No_, I ain't out of my _head_; I know all what I'm talking about.  We
_did_ set him free--me and Tom.  We laid out to do it, and we _done_ it.
 And we done it elegant, too."  He'd got a start, and she never checked
him up, just set and stared and stared, and let him clip along, and
I see it warn't no use for _me_ to put in.  "Why, Aunty, it cost us a
power of work--weeks of it--hours and hours, every night, whilst you was
all asleep. And we had to steal candles, and the sheet, and the shirt,
and your dress, and spoons, and tin plates, and case-knives, and the
warming-pan, and the grindstone, and flour, and just no end of things,
and you can't think what work it was to make the saws, and pens, and
inscriptions, and one thing or another, and you can't think _half_ the
fun it was.  And we had to make up the pictures of coffins and things,
and nonnamous letters from the robbers, and get up and down the
lightning-rod, and dig the hole into the cabin, and made the rope ladder
and send it in cooked up in a pie, and send in spoons and things to work
with in your apron pocket--"

"Mercy sakes!"

"--and load up the cabin with rats and snakes and so on, for company for
Jim; and then you kept Tom here so long with the butter in his hat that
you come near spiling the whole business, because the men come before
we was out of the cabin, and we had to rush, and they heard us and let
drive at us, and I got my share, and we dodged out of the path and let
them go by, and when the dogs come they warn't interested in us, but
went for the most noise, and we got our canoe, and made for the
raft, and was all safe, and Jim was a free man, and we done it all by
ourselves, and _wasn't_ it bully, Aunty!"

"Well, I never heard the likes of it in all my born days!  So it was
_you_, you little rapscallions, that's been making all this trouble,
and turned everybody's wits clean inside out and scared us all most to
death.  I've as good a notion as ever I had in my life to take it out
o' you this very minute.  To think, here I've been, night after night,
a--_you_ just get well once, you young scamp, and I lay I'll tan the Old
Harry out o' both o' ye!"

But Tom, he _was_ so proud and joyful, he just _couldn't_ hold in,
and his tongue just _went_ it--she a-chipping in, and spitting fire all
along, and both of them going it at once, like a cat convention; and she
says:

"_Well_, you get all the enjoyment you can out of it _now_, for mind I
tell you if I catch you meddling with him again--"

"Meddling with _who_?"  Tom says, dropping his smile and looking
surprised.

"With _who_?  Why, the runaway nigger, of course.  Who'd you reckon?"

Tom looks at me very grave, and says:

"Tom, didn't you just tell me he was all right?  Hasn't he got away?"

"_Him_?" says Aunt Sally; "the runaway nigger?  'Deed he hasn't.
 They've got him back, safe and sound, and he's in that cabin again,
on bread and water, and loaded down with chains, till he's claimed or
sold!"

Tom rose square up in bed, with his eye hot, and his nostrils opening
and shutting like gills, and sings out to me:

"They hain't no _right_ to shut him up!  SHOVE!--and don't you lose a
minute.  Turn him loose! he ain't no slave; he's as free as any cretur
that walks this earth!"

"What _does_ the child mean?"

"I mean every word I _say_, Aunt Sally, and if somebody don't go, _I'll_
go. I've knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there.  Old Miss
Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to
sell him down the river, and _said_ so; and she set him free in her
will."

"Then what on earth did _you_ want to set him free for, seeing he was
already free?"

"Well, that _is_ a question, I must say; and just like women!  Why,
I wanted the _adventure_ of it; and I'd a waded neck-deep in blood
to--goodness alive, _Aunt Polly!_"

If she warn't standing right there, just inside the door, looking as
sweet and contented as an angel half full of pie, I wish I may never!

Aunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the head off of her, and
cried over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed,
for it was getting pretty sultry for us, seemed to me.  And I peeped
out, and in a little while Tom's Aunt Polly shook herself loose and
stood there looking across at Tom over her spectacles--kind of grinding
him into the earth, you know.  And then she says:

"Yes, you _better_ turn y'r head away--I would if I was you, Tom."

"Oh, deary me!" says Aunt Sally; "_Is_ he changed so?  Why, that ain't
_Tom_, it's Sid; Tom's--Tom's--why, where is Tom?  He was here a minute
ago."

"You mean where's Huck _Finn_--that's what you mean!  I reckon I hain't
raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years not to know him when I
_see_ him.  That _would_ be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from under that
bed, Huck Finn."

So I done it.  But not feeling brash.

Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest-looking persons I ever
see--except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in and they told
it all to him.  It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn't
know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer-meeting
sermon that night that gave him a rattling ruputation, because the
oldest man in the world couldn't a understood it.  So Tom's Aunt Polly,
she told all about who I was, and what; and I had to up and tell how
I was in such a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom
Sawyer--she chipped in and says, "Oh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I'm
used to it now, and 'tain't no need to change"--that when Aunt Sally took
me for Tom Sawyer I had to stand it--there warn't no other way, and
I knowed he wouldn't mind, because it would be nuts for him, being
a mystery, and he'd make an adventure out of it, and be perfectly
satisfied.  And so it turned out, and he let on to be Sid, and made
things as soft as he could for me.

And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting
Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took
all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I couldn't
ever understand before, until that minute and that talk, how he _could_
help a body set a nigger free with his bringing-up.

Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and
_Sid_ had come all right and safe, she says to herself:

"Look at that, now!  I might have expected it, letting him go off that
way without anybody to watch him.  So now I got to go and trapse all
the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that
creetur's up to _this_ time, as long as I couldn't seem to get any
answer out of you about it."

"Why, I never heard nothing from you," says Aunt Sally.

"Well, I wonder!  Why, I wrote you twice to ask you what you could mean
by Sid being here."

"Well, I never got 'em, Sis."

Aunt Polly she turns around slow and severe, and says:

"You, Tom!"

"Well--_what_?" he says, kind of pettish.

"Don't you what _me_, you impudent thing--hand out them letters."

"What letters?"

"_Them_ letters.  I be bound, if I have to take a-holt of you I'll--"

"They're in the trunk.  There, now.  And they're just the same as they
was when I got them out of the office.  I hain't looked into them, I
hain't touched them.  But I knowed they'd make trouble, and I thought if
you warn't in no hurry, I'd--"

"Well, you _do_ need skinning, there ain't no mistake about it.  And I
wrote another one to tell you I was coming; and I s'pose he--"

"No, it come yesterday; I hain't read it yet, but _it's_ all right, I've
got that one."

I wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn't, but I reckoned maybe it
was just as safe to not to.  So I never said nothing.




CHAPTER THE LAST

THE first time I catched Tom private I asked him what was his idea, time
of the evasion?--what it was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all
right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before?
And he said, what he had planned in his head from the start, if we got
Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river on the raft, and
have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about
his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style,
and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all
the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight
procession and a brass-band, and then he would be a hero, and so would
we.  But I reckoned it was about as well the way it was.

We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle
Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom,
they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him
all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do.  And we had
him up to the sick-room, and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty
dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good,
and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:

"Dah, now, Huck, what I tell you?--what I tell you up dah on Jackson
islan'?  I _tole_ you I got a hairy breas', en what's de sign un it; en
I _tole_ you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich _agin_; en it's
come true; en heah she is!  _dah_, now! doan' talk to _me_--signs is
_signs_, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis' 's well 'at I 'uz gwineter be
rich agin as I's a-stannin' heah dis minute!"

And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le's all three
slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for
howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a
couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I
ain't got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn't get
none from home, because it's likely pap's been back before now, and got
it all away from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.

"No, he hain't," Tom says; "it's all there yet--six thousand dollars
and more; and your pap hain't ever been back since.  Hadn't when I come
away, anyhow."

Jim says, kind of solemn:

"He ain't a-comin' back no mo', Huck."

I says:

"Why, Jim?"

"Nemmine why, Huck--but he ain't comin' back no mo."

But I kept at him; so at last he says:

"Doan' you 'member de house dat was float'n down de river, en dey wuz a
man in dah, kivered up, en I went in en unkivered him and didn' let you
come in?  Well, den, you kin git yo' money when you wants it, kase dat
wuz him."

Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard
for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't
nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd
a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it,
and ain't a-going to no more.  But I reckon I got to light out for the
Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me
and sivilize me, and I can't stand it.  I been there before.


The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are
historical, and the episodes which are used to illustrate them
are also historical.  It is not pretended that these laws and
customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only
pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other
civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is
no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in
practice in that day also.  One is quite justified in inferring
that whatever one of these laws or customs was lacking in that
remote time, its place was competently filled by a worse one.

The question as to whether there is such a thing as divine right
of kings is not settled in this book.  It was found too difficult.
That the executive head of a nation should be a person of lofty
character and extraordinary ability, was manifest and indisputable;
that none but the Deity could select that head unerringly, was
also manifest and indisputable; that the Deity ought to make that
selection, then, was likewise manifest and indisputable; consequently,
that He does make it, as claimed, was an unavoidable deduction.
I mean, until the author of this book encountered the Pompadour,
and Lady Castlemaine, and some other executive heads of that kind;
these were found so difficult to work into the scheme, that it
was judged better to take the other tack in this book (which
must be issued this fall), and then go into training and settle
the question in another book.  It is, of course, a thing which
ought to be settled, and I am not going to have anything particular
to do next winter anyway.

MARK TWAIN

HARTFORD, July 21, 1889






A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT




A WORD OF EXPLANATION

It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger
whom I am going to talk about.  He attracted me by three things:
his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor,
and the restfulness of his company--for he did all the talking.
We fell together, as modest people will, in the tail of the herd
that was being shown through, and he at once began to say things
which interested me.  As he talked along, softly, pleasantly,
flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this world
and time, and into some remote era and old forgotten country;
and so he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed
to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray
antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it!  Exactly as I would
speak of my nearest personal friends or enemies, or my most familiar
neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de Ganis, Sir Launcelot
of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the
Table Round--and how old, old, unspeakably old and faded and dry
and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on!  Presently
he turned to me and said, just as one might speak of the weather,
or any other common matter--

"You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about
transposition of epochs--and bodies?"

I said I had not heard of it.  He was so little interested--just
as when people speak of the weather--that he did not notice
whether I made him any answer or not. There was half a moment
of silence, immediately interrupted by the droning voice of the
salaried cicerone:

"Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur
and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramor
le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain-mail in
the left breast; can't be accounted for; supposed to have been
done with a bullet since invention of firearms--perhaps maliciously
by Cromwell's soldiers."

My acquaintance smiled--not a modern smile, but one that must
have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago--and muttered
apparently to himself:

"Wit ye well, _I saw it done_."  Then, after a pause, added:
"I did it myself."

By the time I had recovered from the electric surprise of this
remark, he was gone.

All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms, steeped
in a dream of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows,
and the wind roared about the eaves and corners.  From time to
time I dipped into old Sir Thomas Malory's enchanting book, and
fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures, breathed in
the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed again.  Midnight
being come at length, I read another tale, for a nightcap--this
which here follows, to wit:

HOW SIR LAUNCELOT SLEW TWO GIANTS, AND MADE A CASTLE FREE

   Anon withal came there upon him two great giants,
   well armed, all save the heads, with two horrible
   clubs in their hands.  Sir Launcelot put his shield
   afore him, and put the stroke away of the one
   giant, and with his sword he clave his head asunder.
   When his fellow saw that, he ran away as he were
   wood [*demented], for fear of the horrible strokes,
   and Sir Launcelot after him with all his might,
   and smote him on the shoulder, and clave him to
   the middle.  Then Sir Launcelot went into the hall,
   and there came afore him three score ladies and
   damsels, and all kneeled unto him, and thanked
   God and him of their deliverance.  For, sir, said
   they, the most part of us have been here this
   seven year their prisoners, and we have worked all
   manner of silk works for our meat, and we are all
   great gentle-women born, and blessed be the time,
   knight, that ever thou wert born; for thou hast
   done the most worship that ever did knight in the
   world, that will we bear record, and we all pray
   you to tell us your name, that we may tell our
   friends who delivered us out of prison.  Fair
   damsels, he said, my name is Sir Launcelot du
   Lake.  And so he departed from them and betaught
   them unto God.  And then he mounted upon his
   horse, and rode into many strange and wild
   countries, and through many waters and valleys,
   and evil was he lodged.  And at the last by
   fortune him happened against a night to come to
   a fair courtilage, and therein he found an old
   gentle-woman that lodged him with a good-will,
   and there he had good cheer for him and his horse.
   And when time was, his host brought him into a
   fair garret over the gate to his bed. There
   Sir Launcelot unarmed him, and set his harness
   by him, and went to bed, and anon he fell on
   sleep. So, soon after there came one on
   horseback, and knocked at the gate in great
   haste.  And when Sir Launcelot heard this he rose
   up, and looked out at the window, and saw by the
   moonlight three knights come riding after that
   one man, and all three lashed on him at once
   with swords, and that one knight turned on them
   knightly again and defended him. Truly, said
   Sir Launcelot, yonder one knight shall I help,
   for it were shame for me to see three knights
   on one, and if he be slain I am partner of his
   death.  And therewith he took his harness and
   went out at a window by a sheet down to the four
   knights, and then Sir Launcelot said on high,
   Turn you knights unto me, and leave your
   fighting with that knight. And then they all
   three left Sir Kay, and turned unto Sir Launcelot,
   and there began great battle, for they alight
   all three, and strake many strokes at Sir
   Launcelot, and assailed him on every side. Then
   Sir Kay dressed him for to have holpen Sir
   Launcelot.  Nay, sir, said he, I will none of
   your help, therefore as ye will have my help
   let me alone with them.  Sir Kay for the pleasure
   of the knight suffered him for to do his will,
   and so stood aside. And then anon within six
   strokes Sir Launcelot had stricken them to the earth.

   And then they all three cried, Sir Knight, we
   yield us unto you as man of might matchless.  As
   to that, said Sir Launcelot, I will not take
   your yielding unto me, but so that ye yield
   you unto Sir Kay the seneschal, on that covenant
   I will save your lives and else not.  Fair knight,
   said they, that were we loath to do; for as for
   Sir Kay we chased him hither, and had overcome
   him had ye not been; therefore, to yield us unto
   him it were no reason.  Well, as to that, said
   Sir Launcelot, advise you well, for ye may
   choose whether ye will die or live, for an ye be
   yielden, it shall be unto Sir Kay.  Fair knight,
   then they said, in saving our lives we will do
   as thou commandest us.  Then shall ye, said Sir
   Launcelot, on Whitsunday next coming go unto the
   court of King Arthur, and there shall ye yield
   you unto Queen Guenever, and put you all three
   in her grace and mercy, and say that Sir Kay
   sent you thither to be her prisoners.  On the morn
   Sir Launcelot arose early, and left Sir Kay
   sleeping; and Sir Launcelot took Sir Kay's armor
   and his shield and armed him, and so he went to
   the stable and took his horse, and took his leave
   of his host, and so he departed.  Then soon after
   arose Sir Kay and missed Sir Launcelot; and
   then he espied that he had his armor and his
   horse. Now by my faith I know well that he will
   grieve some of the court of King Arthur; for on
   him knights will be bold, and deem that it is I,
   and that will beguile them; and because of his
   armor and shield I am sure I shall ride in peace.
   And then soon after departed Sir Kay, and
   thanked his host.


As I laid the book down there was a knock at the door, and my
stranger came in.  I gave him a pipe and a chair, and made him
welcome.  I also comforted him with a hot Scotch whisky; gave him
another one; then still another--hoping always for his story.
After a fourth persuader, he drifted into it himself, in a quite
simple and natural way:



THE STRANGER'S HISTORY

I am an American.  I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State
of Connecticut--anyway, just over the river, in the country.  So
I am a Yankee of the Yankees--and practical; yes, and nearly
barren of sentiment, I suppose--or poetry, in other words.  My
father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was
both, along at first.  Then I went over to the great arms factory
and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned
to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all
sorts of labor-saving machinery.  Why, I could make anything
a body wanted--anything in the world, it didn't make any difference
what; and if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing,
I could invent one--and do it as easy as rolling off a log.  I became
head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me.

Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight--that goes
without saying.  With a couple of thousand rough men under one,
one has plenty of that sort of amusement.  I had, anyway.  At last
I met my match, and I got my dose.  It was during a misunderstanding
conducted with crowbars with a fellow we used to call Hercules.
He laid me out with a crusher alongside the head that made everything
crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my skull and made it
overlap its neighbor.  Then the world went out in darkness, and
I didn't feel anything more, and didn't know anything at all
--at least for a while.

When I came to again, I was sitting under an oak tree, on the
grass, with a whole beautiful and broad country landscape all
to myself--nearly.  Not entirely; for there was a fellow on a horse,
looking down at me--a fellow fresh out of a picture-book.  He was
in old-time iron armor from head to heel, with a helmet on his
head the shape of a nail-keg with slits in it; and he had a shield,
and a sword, and a prodigious spear; and his horse had armor on,
too, and a steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous
red and green silk trappings that hung down all around him like
a bedquilt, nearly to the ground.

"Fair sir, will ye just?" said this fellow.

"Will I which?"

"Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for--"

"What are you giving me?" I said.  "Get along back to your circus,
or I'll report you."

Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards
and then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear, with his
nail-keg bent down nearly to his horse's neck and his long spear
pointed straight ahead.  I saw he meant business, so I was up
the tree when he arrived.

He allowed that I was his property, the captive of his spear.
There was argument on his side--and the bulk of the advantage
--so I judged it best to humor him.  We fixed up an agreement
whereby I was to go with him and he was not to hurt me.  I came
down, and we started away, I walking by the side of his horse.
We marched comfortably along, through glades and over brooks which
I could not remember to have seen before--which puzzled me and
made me wonder--and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of
a circus.  So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was
from an asylum.  But we never came to an asylum--so I was up
a stump, as you may say.  I asked him how far we were from Hartford.
He said he had never heard of the place; which I took to be a lie,
but allowed it to go at that.  At the end of an hour we saw a
far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond
it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets,
the first I had ever seen out of a picture.

"Bridgeport?" said I, pointing.

"Camelot," said he.


My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness.  He caught
himself nodding, now, and smiled one of those pathetic, obsolete
smiles of his, and said:

"I find I can't go on; but come with me, I've got it all written
out, and you can read it if you like."

In his chamber, he said: "First, I kept a journal; then by and by,
after years, I took the journal and turned it into a book. How
long ago that was!"

He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the place where
I should begin:

"Begin here--I've already told you what goes before."  He was
steeped in drowsiness by this time.  As I went out at his door
I heard him murmur sleepily: "Give you good den, fair sir."

I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure.  The first part
of it--the great bulk of it--was parchment, and yellow with age.
I scanned a leaf particularly and saw that it was a palimpsest.
Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared traces
of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still--Latin words
and sentences: fragments from old monkish legends, evidently.
I turned to the place indicated by my stranger and began to read
--as follows:




THE TALE OF THE LOST LAND




CHAPTER I

CAMELOT

"Camelot--Camelot," said I to myself.  "I don't seem to remember
hearing of it before.  Name of the asylum, likely."

It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream,
and as lonesome as Sunday.  The air was full of the smell of
flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds,
and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life,
nothing going on.  The road was mainly a winding path with hoof-prints
in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels on either side in
the grass--wheels that apparently had a tire as broad as one's hand.

Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old, with a cataract
of golden hair streaming down over her shoulders, came along.
Around her head she wore a hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as
sweet an outfit as ever I saw, what there was of it.  She walked
indolently along, with a mind at rest, its peace reflected in her
innocent face.  The circus man paid no attention to her; didn't
even seem to see her.  And she--she was no more startled at his
fantastic make-up than if she was used to his like every day of
her life.  She was going by as indifferently as she might have gone
by a couple of cows; but when she happened to notice me, _then_
there was a change!  Up went her hands, and she was turned to stone;
her mouth dropped open, her eyes stared wide and timorously, she
was the picture of astonished curiosity touched with fear.  And
there she stood gazing, in a sort of stupefied fascination, till
we turned a corner of the wood and were lost to her view.  That
she should be startled at me instead of at the other man, was too
many for me; I couldn't make head or tail of it.  And that she
should seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally overlook her
own merits in that respect, was another puzzling thing, and a
display of magnanimity, too, that was surprising in one so young.
There was food for thought here.  I moved along as one in a dream.

As we approached the town, signs of life began to appear.  At
intervals we passed a wretched cabin, with a thatched roof, and
about it small fields and garden patches in an indifferent state of
cultivation.  There were people, too; brawny men, with long, coarse,
uncombed hair that hung down over their faces and made them look
like animals.  They and the women, as a rule, wore a coarse
tow-linen robe that came well below the knee, and a rude sort of
sandal, and many wore an iron collar.  The small boys and girls
were always naked; but nobody seemed to know it.  All of these
people stared at me, talked about me, ran into the huts and fetched
out their families to gape at me; but nobody ever noticed that
other fellow, except to make him humble salutation and get no
response for their pains.

In the town were some substantial windowless houses of stone
scattered among a wilderness of thatched cabins; the streets were
mere crooked alleys, and unpaved; troops of dogs and nude children
played in the sun and made life and noise; hogs roamed and rooted
contentedly about, and one of them lay in a reeking wallow in
the middle of the main thoroughfare and suckled her family.
Presently there was a distant blare of military music; it came
nearer, still nearer, and soon a noble cavalcade wound into view,
glorious with plumed helmets and flashing mail and flaunting banners
and rich doublets and horse-cloths and gilded spearheads; and
through the muck and swine, and naked brats, and joyous dogs, and
shabby huts, it took its gallant way, and in its wake we followed.
Followed through one winding alley and then another,--and climbing,
always climbing--till at last we gained the breezy height where
the huge castle stood.  There was an exchange of bugle blasts;
then a parley from the walls, where men-at-arms, in hauberk and
morion, marched back and forth with halberd at shoulder under
flapping banners with the rude figure of a dragon displayed upon
them; and then the great gates were flung open, the drawbridge
was lowered, and the head of the cavalcade swept forward under
the frowning arches; and we, following, soon found ourselves in
a great paved court, with towers and turrets stretching up into
the blue air on all the four sides; and all about us the dismount
was going on, and much greeting and ceremony, and running to and
fro, and a gay display of moving and intermingling colors, and
an altogether pleasant stir and noise and confusion.



CHAPTER II

KING ARTHUR'S COURT

The moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately and touched
an ancient common looking man on the shoulder and said, in an
insinuating, confidential way:

"Friend, do me a kindness.  Do you belong to the asylum, or are
you just on a visit or something like that?"

He looked me over stupidly, and said:

"Marry, fair sir, me seemeth--"

"That will do," I said; "I reckon you are a patient."

I moved away, cogitating, and at the same time keeping an eye
out for any chance passenger in his right mind that might come
along and give me some light.  I judged I had found one, presently;
so I drew him aside and said in his ear:

"If I could see the head keeper a minute--only just a minute--"

"Prithee do not let me."

"Let you _what_?"

"_Hinder_ me, then, if the word please thee better.  Then he went
on to say he was an under-cook and could not stop to gossip,
though he would like it another time; for it would comfort his
very liver to know where I got my clothes.  As he started away he
pointed and said yonder was one who was idle enough for my purpose,
and was seeking me besides, no doubt.  This was an airy slim boy
in shrimp-colored tights that made him look like a forked carrot,
the rest of his gear was blue silk and dainty laces and ruffles;
and he had long yellow curls, and wore a plumed pink satin cap
tilted complacently over his ear.  By his look, he was good-natured;
by his gait, he was satisfied with himself.  He was pretty enough
to frame.  He arrived, looked me over with a smiling and impudent
curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page.

"Go 'long," I said; "you ain't more than a paragraph."

It was pretty severe, but I was nettled.  However, it never phazed
him; he didn't appear to know he was hurt.  He began to talk and
laugh, in happy, thoughtless, boyish fashion, as we walked along,
and made himself old friends with me at once; asked me all sorts
of questions about myself and about my clothes, but never waited
for an answer--always chattered straight ahead, as if he didn't
know he had asked a question and wasn't expecting any reply, until
at last he happened to mention that he was born in the beginning
of the year 513.

It made the cold chills creep over me!  I stopped and said,
a little faintly:

"Maybe I didn't hear you just right.  Say it again--and say it
slow.  What year was it?"

"513."

"513!  You don't look it!  Come, my boy, I am a stranger and
friendless; be honest and honorable with me.  Are you in your
right mind?"

He said he was.

"Are these other people in their right minds?"

He said they were.

"And this isn't an asylum?  I mean, it isn't a place where they
cure crazy people?"

He said it wasn't.

"Well, then," I said, "either I am a lunatic, or something just
as awful has happened.  Now tell me, honest and true, where am I?"

"IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT."

I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home,
and then said:

"And according to your notions, what year is it now?"

"528--nineteenth of June."

I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered: "I shall
never see my friends again--never, never again.  They will not
be born for more than thirteen hundred years yet."

I seemed to believe the boy, I didn't know why.  _Something_ in me
seemed to believe him--my consciousness, as you may say; but my
reason didn't.  My reason straightway began to clamor; that was
natural.  I didn't know how to go about satisfying it, because
I knew that the testimony of men wouldn't serve--my reason would
say they were lunatics, and throw out their evidence.  But all
of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck.  I knew
that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the
sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and
began at 3 minutes after 12 noon.  I also knew that no total eclipse
of the sun was due in what to _me_ was the present year--i.e., 1879.
So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart
out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain
whether this boy was telling me the truth or not.

Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man, I now shoved this
whole problem clear out of my mind till its appointed day and hour
should come, in order that I might turn all my attention to the
circumstances of the present moment, and be alert and ready to
make the most out of them that could be made.  One thing at a time,
is my motto--and just play that thing for all it is worth, even
if it's only two pair and a jack.  I made up my mind to two things:
if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics
and couldn't get away, I would presently boss that asylum or know
the reason why; and if, on the other hand, it was really the sixth
century, all right, I didn't want any softer thing: I would boss
the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would
have the start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter
of thirteen hundred years and upward.  I'm not a man to waste
time after my mind's made up and there's work on hand; so I said
to the page:

"Now, Clarence, my boy--if that might happen to be your name
--I'll get you to post me up a little if you don't mind.  What is
the name of that apparition that brought me here?"

"My master and thine?  That is the good knight and great lord
Sir Kay the Seneschal, foster brother to our liege the king."

"Very good; go on, tell me everything."

He made a long story of it; but the part that had immediate interest
for me was this: He said I was Sir Kay's prisoner, and that
in the due course of custom I would be flung into a dungeon and
left there on scant commons until my friends ransomed me--unless
I chanced to rot, first.  I saw that the last chance had the best
show, but I didn't waste any bother about that; time was too
precious.  The page said, further, that dinner was about ended
in the great hall by this time, and that as soon as the sociability
and the heavy drinking should begin, Sir Kay would have me in and
exhibit me before King Arthur and his illustrious knights seated at
the Table Round, and would brag about his exploit in capturing
me, and would probably exaggerate the facts a little, but it
wouldn't be good form for me to correct him, and not over safe,
either; and when I was done being exhibited, then ho for the
dungeon; but he, Clarence, would find a way to come and see me every
now and then, and cheer me up, and help me get word to my friends.

Get word to my friends!  I thanked him; I couldn't do less; and
about this time a lackey came to say I was wanted; so Clarence
led me in and took me off to one side and sat down by me.

Well, it was a curious kind of spectacle, and interesting. It was
an immense place, and rather naked--yes, and full of loud contrasts.
It was very, very lofty; so lofty that the banners depending from
the arched beams and girders away up there floated in a sort of
twilight; there was a stone-railed gallery at each end, high up,
with musicians in the one, and women, clothed in stunning colors,
in the other.  The floor was of big stone flags laid in black and
white squares, rather battered by age and use, and needing repair.
As to ornament, there wasn't any, strictly speaking; though on
the walls hung some huge tapestries which were probably taxed
as works of art; battle-pieces, they were, with horses shaped like
those which children cut out of paper or create in gingerbread;
with men on them in scale armor whose scales are represented by
round holes--so that the man's coat looks as if it had been done
with a biscuit-punch.  There was a fireplace big enough to camp in;
and its projecting sides and hood, of carved and pillared stonework,
had the look of a cathedral door.  Along the walls stood men-at-arms,
in breastplate and morion, with halberds for their only weapon
--rigid as statues; and that is what they looked like.

In the middle of this groined and vaulted public square was an oaken
table which they called the Table Round.  It was as large as
a circus ring; and around it sat a great company of men dressed
in such various and splendid colors that it hurt one's eyes to look
at them.  They wore their plumed hats, right along, except that
whenever one addressed himself directly to the king, he lifted
his hat a trifle just as he was beginning his remark.

Mainly they were drinking--from entire ox horns; but a few were
still munching bread or gnawing beef bones.  There was about
an average of two dogs to one man; and these sat in expectant
attitudes till a spent bone was flung to them, and then they went
for it by brigades and divisions, with a rush, and there ensued
a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultuous chaos of
plunging heads and bodies and flashing tails, and the storm of
howlings and barkings deafened all speech for the time; but that
was no matter, for the dog-fight was always a bigger interest
anyway; the men rose, sometimes, to observe it the better and bet
on it, and the ladies and the musicians stretched themselves out
over their balusters with the same object; and all broke into
delighted ejaculations from time to time. In the end, the winning
dog stretched himself out comfortably with his bone between his
paws, and proceeded to growl over it, and gnaw it, and grease
the floor with it, just as fifty others were already doing; and the
rest of the court resumed their previous industries and entertainments.

As a rule, the speech and behavior of these people were gracious
and courtly; and I noticed that they were good and serious listeners
when anybody was telling anything--I mean in a dog-fightless
interval.  And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot;
telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and
winning naivety, and ready and willing to listen to anybody else's
lie, and believe it, too.  It was hard to associate them with
anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood
and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget
to shudder.

I was not the only prisoner present.  There were twenty or more.
Poor devils, many of them were maimed, hacked, carved, in a frightful
way; and their hair, their faces, their clothing, were caked with
black and stiffened drenchings of blood.  They were suffering
sharp physical pain, of course; and weariness, and hunger and
thirst, no doubt; and at least none had given them the comfort
of a wash, or even the poor charity of a lotion for their wounds;
yet you never heard them utter a moan or a groan, or saw them show
any sign of restlessness, or any disposition to complain.  The
thought was forced upon me: "The rascals--_they_ have served other
people so in their day; it being their own turn, now, they were
not expecting any better treatment than this; so their philosophical
bearing is not an outcome of mental training, intellectual fortitude,
reasoning; it is mere animal training; they are white Indians."



CHAPTER III

KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND

Mainly the Round Table talk was monologues--narrative accounts
of the adventures in which these prisoners were captured and their
friends and backers killed and stripped of their steeds and armor.
As a general thing--as far as I could make out--these murderous
adventures were not forays undertaken to avenge injuries, nor to
settle old disputes or sudden fallings out; no, as a rule they were
simply duels between strangers--duels between people who had never
even been introduced to each other, and between whom existed no
cause of offense whatever.  Many a time I had seen a couple of boys,
strangers, meet by chance, and say simultaneously, "I can lick you,"
and go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until now that
that sort of thing belonged to children only, and was a sign and
mark of childhood; but here were these big boobies sticking to it
and taking pride in it clear up into full age and beyond.  Yet there
was something very engaging about these great simple-hearted
creatures, something attractive and lovable.  There did not seem
to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait
a fish-hook with; but you didn't seem to mind that, after a little,
because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society
like that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled
its symmetry--perhaps rendered its existence impossible.

There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and
in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your
belittling criticisms and stilled them.  A most noble benignity
and purity reposed in the countenance of him they called Sir Galahad,
and likewise in the king's also; and there was majesty and greatness
in the giant frame and high bearing of Sir Launcelot of the Lake.

There was presently an incident which centered the general interest
upon this Sir Launcelot.  At a sign from a sort of master of
ceremonies, six or eight of the prisoners rose and came forward
in a body and knelt on the floor and lifted up their hands toward
the ladies' gallery and begged the grace of a word with the queen.
The most conspicuously situated lady in that massed flower-bed
of feminine show and finery inclined her head by way of assent,
and then the spokesman of the prisoners delivered himself and his
fellows into her hands for free pardon, ransom, captivity, or death,
as she in her good pleasure might elect; and this, as he said, he
was doing by command of Sir Kay the Seneschal, whose prisoners
they were, he having vanquished them by his single might and
prowess in sturdy conflict in the field.

Surprise and astonishment flashed from face to face all over
the house; the queen's gratified smile faded out at the name of
Sir Kay, and she looked disappointed; and the page whispered in
my ear with an accent and manner expressive of extravagant derision--

"Sir _Kay_, forsooth!  Oh, call me pet names, dearest, call me
a marine!  In twice a thousand years shall the unholy invention
of man labor at odds to beget the fellow to this majestic lie!"

Every eye was fastened with severe inquiry upon Sir Kay. But he
was equal to the occasion.  He got up and played his hand like
a major--and took every trick.  He said he would state the case
exactly according to the facts; he would tell the simple
straightforward tale, without comment of his own; "and then,"
said he, "if ye find glory and honor due, ye will give it unto him
who is the mightiest man of his hands that ever bare shield or
strake with sword in the ranks of Christian battle--even him that
sitteth there!" and he pointed to Sir Launcelot.  Ah, he fetched
them; it was a rattling good stroke.  Then he went on and told
how Sir Launcelot, seeking adventures, some brief time gone by,
killed seven giants at one sweep of his sword, and set a hundred
and forty-two captive maidens free; and then went further, still
seeking adventures, and found him (Sir Kay) fighting a desperate
fight against nine foreign knights, and straightway took the battle
solely into his own hands, and conquered the nine; and that night
Sir Launcelot rose quietly, and dressed him in Sir Kay's armor and
took Sir Kay's horse and gat him away into distant lands, and
vanquished sixteen knights in one pitched battle and thirty-four
in another; and all these and the former nine he made to swear
that about Whitsuntide they would ride to Arthur's court and yield
them to Queen Guenever's hands as captives of Sir Kay the Seneschal,
spoil of his knightly prowess; and now here were these half dozen,
and the rest would be along as soon as they might be healed of
their desperate wounds.

Well, it was touching to see the queen blush and smile, and look
embarrassed and happy, and fling furtive glances at Sir Launcelot
that would have got him shot in Arkansas, to a dead certainty.

Everybody praised the valor and magnanimity of Sir Launcelot; and
as for me, I was perfectly amazed, that one man, all by himself,
should have been able to beat down and capture such battalions
of practiced fighters.  I said as much to Clarence; but this mocking
featherhead only said:

"An Sir Kay had had time to get another skin of sour wine into him,
ye had seen the accompt doubled."

I looked at the boy in sorrow; and as I looked I saw the cloud of
a deep despondency settle upon his countenance.  I followed the
direction of his eye, and saw that a very old and white-bearded
man, clothed in a flowing black gown, had risen and was standing
at the table upon unsteady legs, and feebly swaying his ancient
head and surveying the company with his watery and wandering eye.
The same suffering look that was in the page's face was observable
in all the faces around--the look of dumb creatures who know that
they must endure and make no moan.

"Marry, we shall have it again," sighed the boy; "that same old
weary tale that he hath told a thousand times in the same words,
and that he _will_ tell till he dieth, every time he hath gotten his
barrel full and feeleth his exaggeration-mill a-working.  Would
God I had died or I saw this day!"

"Who is it?"

"Merlin, the mighty liar and magician, perdition singe him for
the weariness he worketh with his one tale!  But that men fear
him for that he hath the storms and the lightnings and all the
devils that be in hell at his beck and call, they would have dug
his entrails out these many years ago to get at that tale and
squelch it.  He telleth it always in the third person, making
believe he is too modest to glorify himself--maledictions light
upon him, misfortune be his dole!  Good friend, prithee call me
for evensong."

The boy nestled himself upon my shoulder and pretended to go
to sleep.  The old man began his tale; and presently the lad was
asleep in reality; so also were the dogs, and the court, the lackeys,
and the files of men-at-arms.  The droning voice droned on; a soft
snoring arose on all sides and supported it like a deep and subdued
accompaniment of wind instruments.  Some heads were bowed upon
folded arms, some lay back with open mouths that issued unconscious
music; the flies buzzed and bit, unmolested, the rats swarmed
softly out from a hundred holes, and pattered about, and made
themselves at home everywhere; and one of them sat up like a
squirrel on the king's head and held a bit of cheese in its hands
and nibbled it, and dribbled the crumbs in the king's face with
naive and impudent irreverence.  It was a tranquil scene, and
restful to the weary eye and the jaded spirit.

This was the old man's tale.  He said:

"Right so the king and Merlin departed, and went until an hermit
that was a good man and a great leech.  So the hermit searched
all his wounds and gave him good salves; so the king was there
three days, and then were his wounds well amended that he might
ride and go, and so departed.  And as they rode, Arthur said,
I have no sword.  No force,* [*Footnote from M.T.: No matter.]
said Merlin, hereby is a sword that shall be yours and I may.
So they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water
and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm
clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand.
Lo, said Merlin, yonder is that sword that I spake of.  With that
they saw a damsel going upon the lake.  What damsel is that?
said Arthur.  That is the Lady of the lake, said Merlin; and within
that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth,
and richly beseen, and this damsel will come to you anon, and then
speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword.  Anon
withal came the damsel unto Arthur and saluted him, and he her
again.  Damsel, said Arthur, what sword is that, that yonder
the arm holdeth above the water?  I would it were mine, for I have
no sword.  Sir Arthur King, said the damsel, that sword is mine,
and if ye will give me a gift when I ask it you, ye shall have it.
By my faith, said Arthur, I will give you what gift ye will ask.
Well, said the damsel, go ye into yonder barge and row yourself
to the sword, and take it and the scabbard with you, and I will ask
my gift when I see my time.  So Sir Arthur and Merlin alight, and
tied their horses to two trees, and so they went into the ship,
and when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur
took it up by the handles, and took it with him.  And the arm
and the hand went under the water; and so they came unto the land
and rode forth.  And then Sir Arthur saw a rich pavilion.  What
signifieth yonder pavilion?  It is the knight's pavilion, said
Merlin, that ye fought with last, Sir Pellinore, but he is out,
he is not there; he hath ado with a knight of yours, that hight
Egglame, and they have fought together, but at the last Egglame
fled, and else he had been dead, and he hath chased him even
to Carlion, and we shall meet with him anon in the highway.  That
is well said, said Arthur, now have I a sword, now will I wage
battle with him, and be avenged on him.  Sir, ye shall not so,
said Merlin, for the knight is weary of fighting and chasing, so
that ye shall have no worship to have ado with him; also, he will
not lightly be matched of one knight living; and therefore it is my
counsel, let him pass, for he shall do you good service in short
time, and his sons, after his days.  Also ye shall see that day
in short space ye shall be right glad to give him your sister
to wed.  When I see him, I will do as ye advise me, said Arthur.
Then Sir Arthur looked on the sword, and liked it passing well.
Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword or the scabbard?
Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur.  Ye are more unwise,
said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the sword, for while
ye have the scabbard upon you ye shall never lose no blood, be ye
never so sore wounded; therefore, keep well the scabbard always
with you.  So they rode into Carlion, and by the way they met with
Sir Pellinore; but Merlin had done such a craft that Pellinore saw
not Arthur, and he passed by without any words.  I marvel, said
Arthur, that the knight would not speak.  Sir, said Merlin, he saw
you not; for and he had seen you ye had not lightly departed.  So
they came unto Carlion, whereof his knights were passing glad.
And when they heard of his adventures they marveled that he would
jeopard his person so alone.  But all men of worship said it was
merry to be under such a chieftain that would put his person in
adventure as other poor knights did."



CHAPTER IV

SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST

It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully
told; but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference;
it was pleasant to the others when it was fresh, no doubt.

Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and he soon roused
the rest with a practical joke of a sufficiently poor quality.
He tied some metal mugs to a dog's tail and turned him loose,
and he tore around and around the place in a frenzy of fright,
with all the other dogs bellowing after him and battering and
crashing against everything that came in their way and making
altogether a chaos of confusion and a most deafening din and
turmoil; at which every man and woman of the multitude laughed
till the tears flowed, and some fell out of their chairs and
wallowed on the floor in ecstasy.  It was just like so many children.
Sir Dinadan was so proud of his exploit that he could not keep
from telling over and over again, to weariness, how the immortal
idea happened to occur to him; and as is the way with humorists
of his breed, he was still laughing at it after everybody else had
got through.  He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech
--of course a humorous speech.  I think I never heard so many old
played-out jokes strung together in my life.  He was worse than
the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus.  It seemed
peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was
born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had
given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years
afterwards.  It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing
as a new joke possible.  Everybody laughed at these antiquities
--but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later.
However, of course the scoffer didn't laugh--I mean the boy.  No,
he scoffed; there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said
the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest were
petrified.  I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, myself,
that the only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of
those jokes was by geologic periods.  But that neat idea hit
the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn't been invented yet.
However, I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate
the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through.  It is no use
to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn't ripe yet.

Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me
for fuel.  It was time for me to feel serious, and I did.  Sir Kay
told how he had encountered me in a far land of barbarians, who
all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did--a garb that was a work
of enchantment, and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt
by human hands.  However he had nullified the force of the
enchantment by prayer, and had killed my thirteen knights in
a three hours' battle, and taken me prisoner, sparing my life
in order that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited
to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court.  He spoke
of me all the time, in the blandest way, as "this prodigious giant,"
and "this horrible sky-towering monster," and "this tusked and
taloned man-devouring ogre", and everybody took in all this bosh
in the naivest way, and never smiled or seemed to notice that
there was any discrepancy between these watered statistics and me.
He said that in trying to escape from him I sprang into the top of
a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound, but he dislodged
me with a stone the size of a cow, which "all-to brast" the most
of my bones, and then swore me to appear at Arthur's court for
sentence.  He ended by condemning me to die at noon on the 21st;
and was so little concerned about it that he stopped to yawn before
he named the date.

I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was hardly enough
in my right mind to keep the run of a dispute that sprung up as
to how I had better be killed, the possibility of the killing being
doubted by some, because of the enchantment in my clothes. And yet
it was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-shops.
Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail, to wit: many of
the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would
have made a Comanche blush.  Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey
the idea.  However, I had read "Tom Jones," and "Roderick Random,"
and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first
ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner
in their talk, and in the morals and conduct which such talk
implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into our
own nineteenth century--in which century, broadly speaking,
the earliest samples of the real lady and real gentleman discoverable
in English history--or in European history, for that matter--may be
said to have made their appearance.  Suppose Sir Walter, instead
of putting the conversations into the mouths of his characters,
had allowed the characters to speak for themselves?  We should
have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena
which would embarrass a tramp in our day.  However, to the
unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate.  King Arthur's
people were not aware that they were indecent and I had presence
of mind enough not to mention it.

They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes that they were
mightily relieved, at last, when old Merlin swept the difficulty
away for them with a common-sense hint.  He asked them why they
were so dull--why didn't it occur to them to strip me.  In half a
minute I was as naked as a pair of tongs!  And dear, dear, to think
of it: I was the only embarrassed person there.  Everybody discussed
me; and did it as unconcernedly as if I had been a cabbage.
Queen Guenever was as naively interested as the rest, and said
she had never seen anybody with legs just like mine before.  It was
the only compliment I got--if it was a compliment.

Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my perilous clothes
in another.  I was shoved into a dark and narrow cell in a dungeon,
with some scant remnants for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed,
and no end of rats for company.



CHAPTER V

AN INSPIRATION

I was so tired that even my fears were not able to keep me awake long.

When I next came to myself, I seemed to have been asleep a very
long time.  My first thought was, "Well, what an astonishing dream
I've had!  I reckon I've waked only just in time to keep from
being hanged or drowned or burned or something....  I'll nap again
till the whistle blows, and then I'll go down to the arms factory
and have it out with Hercules."

But just then I heard the harsh music of rusty chains and bolts,
a light flashed in my eyes, and that butterfly, Clarence, stood
before me!  I gasped with surprise; my breath almost got away from me.

"What!" I said, "you here yet?  Go along with the rest of
the dream! scatter!"

But he only laughed, in his light-hearted way, and fell to making
fun of my sorry plight.

"All right," I said resignedly, "let the dream go on; I'm in no hurry."

"Prithee what dream?"

"What dream?  Why, the dream that I am in Arthur's court--a person
who never existed; and that I am talking to you, who are nothing
but a work of the imagination."

"Oh, la, indeed! and is it a dream that you're to be burned
to-morrow?  Ho-ho--answer me that!"

The shock that went through me was distressing.  I now began
to reason that my situation was in the last degree serious, dream
or no dream; for I knew by past experience of the lifelike intensity
of dreams, that to be burned to death, even in a dream, would be
very far from being a jest, and was a thing to be avoided, by any
means, fair or foul, that I could contrive.  So I said beseechingly:

"Ah, Clarence, good boy, only friend I've got,--for you _are_ my
friend, aren't you?--don't fail me; help me to devise some way
of escaping from this place!"

"Now do but hear thyself!  Escape?  Why, man, the corridors are
in guard and keep of men-at-arms."

"No doubt, no doubt.  But how many, Clarence?  Not many, I hope?"

"Full a score.  One may not hope to escape."  After a pause
--hesitatingly: "and there be other reasons--and weightier."

"Other ones? What are they?"

"Well, they say--oh, but I daren't, indeed daren't!"

"Why, poor lad, what is the matter?  Why do you blench?  Why do
you tremble so?"

"Oh, in sooth, there is need!  I do want to tell you, but--"

"Come, come, be brave, be a man--speak out, there's a good lad!"

He hesitated, pulled one way by desire, the other way by fear;
then he stole to the door and peeped out, listening; and finally
crept close to me and put his mouth to my ear and told me his
fearful news in a whisper, and with all the cowering apprehension
of one who was venturing upon awful ground and speaking of things
whose very mention might be freighted with death.

"Merlin, in his malice, has woven a spell about this dungeon, and
there bides not the man in these kingdoms that would be desperate
enough to essay to cross its lines with you!  Now God pity me,
I have told it!  Ah, be kind to me, be merciful to a poor boy who
means thee well; for an thou betray me I am lost!"

I laughed the only really refreshing laugh I had had for some time;
and shouted:

"Merlin has wrought a spell!  _Merlin_, forsooth!  That cheap old
humbug, that maundering old ass?  Bosh, pure bosh, the silliest bosh
in the world!  Why, it does seem to me that of all the childish,
idiotic, chuckle-headed, chicken-livered superstitions that ev
--oh, damn Merlin!"

But Clarence had slumped to his knees before I had half finished,
and he was like to go out of his mind with fright.

"Oh, beware!  These are awful words!  Any moment these walls
may crumble upon us if you say such things.  Oh call them back
before it is too late!"

Now this strange exhibition gave me a good idea and set me to
thinking.  If everybody about here was so honestly and sincerely
afraid of Merlin's pretended magic as Clarence was, certainly
a superior man like me ought to be shrewd enough to contrive
some way to take advantage of such a state of things.  I went
on thinking, and worked out a plan. Then I said:

"Get up.  Pull yourself together; look me in the eye.  Do you
know why I laughed?"

"No--but for our blessed Lady's sake, do it no more."

"Well, I'll tell you why I laughed.  Because I'm a magician myself."

"Thou!"  The boy recoiled a step, and caught his breath, for
the thing hit him rather sudden; but the aspect which he took
on was very, very respectful.  I took quick note of that; it
indicated that a humbug didn't need to have a reputation in this
asylum; people stood ready to take him at his word, without that.
I resumed.

"I've known Merlin seven hundred years, and he--"

"Seven hun--"

"Don't interrupt me.  He has died and come alive again thirteen
times, and traveled under a new name every time: Smith, Jones,
Robinson, Jackson, Peters, Haskins, Merlin--a new alias every
time he turns up.  I knew him in Egypt three hundred years ago;
I knew him in India five hundred years ago--he is always blethering
around in my way, everywhere I go; he makes me tired.  He don't
amount to shucks, as a magician; knows some of the old common
tricks, but has never got beyond the rudiments, and never will.
He is well enough for the provinces--one-night stands and that
sort of thing, you know--but dear me, _he_ oughtn't to set up for
an expert--anyway not where there's a real artist.  Now look here,
Clarence, I am going to stand your friend, right along, and in
return you must be mine.  I want you to do me a favor.  I want
you to get word to the king that I am a magician myself--and the
Supreme Grand High-yu-Muck-amuck and head of the tribe, at that;
and I want him to be made to understand that I am just quietly
arranging a little calamity here that will make the fur fly in these
realms if Sir Kay's project is carried out and any harm comes
to me.  Will you get that to the king for me?"

The poor boy was in such a state that he could hardly answer me.
It was pitiful to see a creature so terrified, so unnerved, so
demoralized.  But he promised everything; and on my side he made
me promise over and over again that I would remain his friend, and
never turn against him or cast any enchantments upon him. Then
he worked his way out, staying himself with his hand along the
wall, like a sick person.

Presently this thought occurred to me: how heedless I have been!
When the boy gets calm, he will wonder why a great magician like me
should have begged a boy like him to help me get out of this place;
he will put this and that together, and will see that I am a humbug.

I worried over that heedless blunder for an hour, and called myself
a great many hard names, meantime.  But finally it occurred to me
all of a sudden that these animals didn't reason; that _they_ never
put this and that together; that all their talk showed that they
didn't know a discrepancy when they saw it.  I was at rest, then.

But as soon as one is at rest, in this world, off he goes on
something else to worry about.  It occurred to me that I had made
another blunder: I had sent the boy off to alarm his betters with
a threat--I intending to invent a calamity at my leisure; now
the people who are the readiest and eagerest and willingest to
swallow miracles are the very ones who are hungriest to see you
perform them; suppose I should be called on for a sample?  Suppose
I should be asked to name my calamity?  Yes, I had made a blunder;
I ought to have invented my calamity first.  "What shall I do?
what can I say, to gain a little time?"  I was in trouble again;
in the deepest kind of trouble...

"There's a footstep!--they're coming.  If I had only just a moment
to think....  Good, I've got it.  I'm all right."

You see, it was the eclipse.  It came into my mind in the nick
of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played
an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my
chance.  I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn't be any
plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand
years ahead of those parties.

Clarence came in, subdued, distressed, and said:

"I hasted the message to our liege the king, and straightway he
had me to his presence.  He was frighted even to the marrow,
and was minded to give order for your instant enlargement, and
that you be clothed in fine raiment and lodged as befitted one so
great; but then came Merlin and spoiled all; for he persuaded
the king that you are mad, and know not whereof you speak; and
said your threat is but foolishness and idle vaporing.  They
disputed long, but in the end, Merlin, scoffing, said, 'Wherefore
hath he not _named_ his brave calamity?  Verily it is because he
cannot.'  This thrust did in a most sudden sort close the king's
mouth, and he could offer naught to turn the argument; and so,
reluctant, and full loth to do you the discourtesy, he yet prayeth
you to consider his perplexed case, as noting how the matter stands,
and name the calamity--if so be you have determined the nature
of it and the time of its coming.  Oh, prithee delay not; to delay
at such a time were to double and treble the perils that already
compass thee about.  Oh, be thou wise--name the calamity!"

I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my impressiveness
together, and then said:

"How long have I been shut up in this hole?"

"Ye were shut up when yesterday was well spent.  It is 9 of
the morning now."

"No!  Then I have slept well, sure enough.  Nine in the morning
now!  And yet it is the very complexion of midnight, to a shade.
This is the 20th, then?"

"The 20th--yes."

"And I am to be burned alive to-morrow."  The boy shuddered.

"At what hour?"

"At high noon."

"Now then, I will tell you what to say."  I paused, and stood over
that cowering lad a whole minute in awful silence; then, in a voice
deep, measured, charged with doom, I began, and rose by dramatically
graded stages to my colossal climax, which I delivered in as sublime
and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life: "Go back
and tell the king that at that hour I will smother the whole world
in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he
shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for lack
of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish
and die, to the last man!"

I had to carry the boy out myself, he sunk into such a collapse.
I handed him over to the soldiers, and went back.



CHAPTER VI

THE ECLIPSE

In the stillness and the darkness, realization soon began to
supplement knowledge.  The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but
when you come to _realize_ your fact, it takes on color. It is
all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to
the heart, and seeing it done.  In the stillness and the darkness,
the knowledge that I was in deadly danger took to itself deeper
and deeper meaning all the time; a something which was realization
crept inch by inch through my veins and turned me cold.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these,
as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there
comes a revulsion, and he rallies.  Hope springs up, and cheerfulness
along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for
himself, if anything can be done.  When my rally came, it came with
a bound.  I said to myself that my eclipse would be sure to save me,
and make me the greatest man in the kingdom besides; and straightway
my mercury went up to the top of the tube, and my solicitudes
all vanished.  I was as happy a man as there was in the world.
I was even impatient for to-morrow to come, I so wanted to gather
in that great triumph and be the center of all the nation's wonder
and reverence.  Besides, in a business way it would be the making
of me; I knew that.

Meantime there was one thing which had got pushed into the background
of my mind.  That was the half-conviction that when the nature
of my proposed calamity should be reported to those superstitious
people, it would have such an effect that they would want to
compromise.  So, by and by when I heard footsteps coming, that
thought was recalled to me, and I said to myself, "As sure as
anything, it's the compromise.  Well, if it is good, all right,
I will accept; but if it isn't, I mean to stand my ground and play
my hand for all it is worth."

The door opened, and some men-at-arms appeared.  The leader said:

"The stake is ready. Come!"

The stake!  The strength went out of me, and I almost fell down.
It is hard to get one's breath at such a time, such lumps come into
one's throat, and such gaspings; but as soon as I could speak, I said:

"But this is a mistake--the execution is to-morrow."

"Order changed; been set forward a day.  Haste thee!"

I was lost.  There was no help for me.  I was dazed, stupefied;
I had no command over myself, I only wandered purposely about,
like one out of his mind; so the soldiers took hold of me, and
pulled me along with them, out of the cell and along the maze of
underground corridors, and finally into the fierce glare of daylight
and the upper world.  As we stepped into the vast enclosed court
of the castle I got a shock; for the first thing I saw was the stake,
standing in the center, and near it the piled fagots and a monk.
On all four sides of the court the seated multitudes rose rank
above rank, forming sloping terraces that were rich with color.
The king and the queen sat in their thrones, the most conspicuous
figures there, of course.

To note all this, occupied but a second.  The next second Clarence
had slipped from some place of concealment and was pouring news
into my ear, his eyes beaming with triumph and gladness.  He said:

"Tis through _me_ the change was wrought!  And main hard have I worked
to do it, too.  But when I revealed to them the calamity in store,
and saw how mighty was the terror it did engender, then saw I also
that this was the time to strike!  Wherefore I diligently pretended,
unto this and that and the other one, that your power against the sun
could not reach its full until the morrow; and so if any would save
the sun and the world, you must be slain to-day, while your
enchantments are but in the weaving and lack potency.  Odsbodikins,
it was but a dull lie, a most indifferent invention, but you should
have seen them seize it and swallow it, in the frenzy of their
fright, as it were salvation sent from heaven; and all the while
was I laughing in my sleeve the one moment, to see them so cheaply
deceived, and glorifying God the next, that He was content to let
the meanest of His creatures be His instrument to the saving of
thy life.  Ah how happy has the matter sped!  You will not need
to do the sun a _real_ hurt--ah, forget not that, on your soul forget
it not!  Only make a little darkness--only the littlest little
darkness, mind, and cease with that.  It will be sufficient.  They
will see that I spoke falsely,--being ignorant, as they will fancy
--and with the falling of the first shadow of that darkness you
shall see them go mad with fear; and they will set you free and
make you great!  Go to thy triumph, now!  But remember--ah, good
friend, I implore thee remember my supplication, and do the blessed
sun no hurt.  For _my_ sake, thy true friend."

I choked out some words through my grief and misery; as much as
to say I would spare the sun; for which the lad's eyes paid me back
with such deep and loving gratitude that I had not the heart
to tell him his good-hearted foolishness had ruined me and sent me
to my death.

As the soldiers assisted me across the court the stillness was
so profound that if I had been blindfold I should have supposed
I was in a solitude instead of walled in by four thousand people.
There was not a movement perceptible in those masses of humanity;
they were as rigid as stone images, and as pale; and dread sat
upon every countenance.  This hush continued while I was being
chained to the stake; it still continued while the fagots were
carefully and tediously piled about my ankles, my knees, my thighs,
my body.  Then there was a pause, and a deeper hush, if possible,
and a man knelt down at my feet with a blazing torch; the multitude
strained forward, gazing, and parting slightly from their seats
without knowing it; the monk raised his hands above my head, and
his eyes toward the blue sky, and began some words in Latin; in
this attitude he droned on and on, a little while, and then stopped.
I waited two or three moments; then looked up; he was standing
there petrified.  With a common impulse the multitude rose slowly
up and stared into the sky.  I followed their eyes, as sure as guns,
there was my eclipse beginning!  The life went boiling through
my veins; I was a new man!  The rim of black spread slowly into
the sun's disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the
assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless.  I knew
that this gaze would be turned upon me, next.  When it was, I was
ready.  I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck,
with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun.  It was a noble
effect.  You could _see_ the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.
Two shouts rang out, one close upon the heels of the other:

"Apply the torch!"

"I forbid it!"

The one was from Merlin, the other from the king.  Merlin started
from his place--to apply the torch himself, I judged.  I said:

"Stay where you are.  If any man moves--even the king--before
I give him leave, I will blast him with thunder, I will consume
him with lightnings!"

The multitude sank meekly into their seats, and I was just expecting
they would.  Merlin hesitated a moment or two, and I was on pins
and needles during that little while.  Then he sat down, and I took
a good breath; for I knew I was master of the situation now.
The king said:

"Be merciful, fair sir, and essay no further in this perilous matter,
lest disaster follow.  It was reported to us that your powers could
not attain unto their full strength until the morrow; but--"

"Your Majesty thinks the report may have been a lie?  It _was_ a lie."

That made an immense effect; up went appealing hands everywhere,
and the king was assailed with a storm of supplications that
I might be bought off at any price, and the calamity stayed.
The king was eager to comply. He said:

"Name any terms, reverend sir, even to the halving of my kingdom;
but banish this calamity, spare the sun!"

My fortune was made.  I would have taken him up in a minute, but
I couldn't stop an eclipse; the thing was out of the question.  So
I asked time to consider.  The king said:

"How long--ah, how long, good sir?  Be merciful; look, it groweth
darker, moment by moment.  Prithee how long?"

"Not long.  Half an hour--maybe an hour."

There were a thousand pathetic protests, but I couldn't shorten up
any, for I couldn't remember how long a total eclipse lasts.  I was
in a puzzled condition, anyway, and wanted to think.  Something
was wrong about that eclipse, and the fact was very unsettling.
If this wasn't the one I was after, how was I to tell whether this
was the sixth century, or nothing but a dream?  Dear me, if I could
only prove it was the latter!  Here was a glad new hope.  If the boy
was right about the date, and this was surely the 20th, it _wasn't_
the sixth century.  I reached for the monk's sleeve, in considerable
excitement, and asked him what day of the month it was.

Hang him, he said it was the _twenty-first_!  It made me turn cold
to hear him.  I begged him not to make any mistake about it; but
he was sure; he knew it was the 21st.  So, that feather-headed
boy had botched things again!  The time of the day was right
for the eclipse; I had seen that for myself, in the beginning,
by the dial that was near by.  Yes, I was in King Arthur's court,
and I might as well make the most out of it I could.

The darkness was steadily growing, the people becoming more and
more distressed.  I now said:

"I have reflected, Sir King.  For a lesson, I will let this darkness
proceed, and spread night in the world; but whether I blot out
the sun for good, or restore it, shall rest with you.  These are
the terms, to wit: You shall remain king over all your dominions,
and receive all the glories and honors that belong to the kingship;
but you shall appoint me your perpetual minister and executive,
and give me for my services one per cent of such actual increase
of revenue over and above its present amount as I may succeed
in creating for the state.  If I can't live on that, I sha'n't ask
anybody to give me a lift.  Is it satisfactory?"

There was a prodigious roar of applause, and out of the midst
of it the king's voice rose, saying:

"Away with his bonds, and set him free! and do him homage, high
and low, rich and poor, for he is become the king's right hand,
is clothed with power and authority, and his seat is upon the highest
step of the throne!  Now sweep away this creeping night, and bring
the light and cheer again, that all the world may bless thee."

But I said:

"That a common man should be shamed before the world, is nothing;
but it were dishonor to the _king_ if any that saw his minister naked
should not also see him delivered from his shame.  If I might ask
that my clothes be brought again--"

"They are not meet," the king broke in.  "Fetch raiment of another
sort; clothe him like a prince!"

My idea worked.  I wanted to keep things as they were till the
eclipse was total, otherwise they would be trying again to get
me to dismiss the darkness, and of course I couldn't do it.  Sending
for the clothes gained some delay, but not enough.  So I had to make
another excuse.  I said it would be but natural if the king should
change his mind and repent to some extent of what he had done
under excitement; therefore I would let the darkness grow a while,
and if at the end of a reasonable time the king had kept his mind
the same, the darkness should be dismissed.  Neither the king nor
anybody else was satisfied with that arrangement, but I had
to stick to my point.

It grew darker and darker and blacker and blacker, while I struggled
with those awkward sixth-century clothes.  It got to be pitch dark,
at last, and the multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold
uncanny night breezes fan through the place and see the stars
come out and twinkle in the sky.  At last the eclipse was total,
and I was very glad of it, but everybody else was in misery; which
was quite natural. I said:

"The king, by his silence, still stands to the terms."  Then
I lifted up my hands--stood just so a moment--then I said, with
the most awful solemnity: "Let the enchantment dissolve and
pass harmless away!"

There was no response, for a moment, in that deep darkness and
that graveyard hush.  But when the silver rim of the sun pushed
itself out, a moment or two later, the assemblage broke loose with
a vast shout and came pouring down like a deluge to smother me
with blessings and gratitude; and Clarence was not the last of
the wash, to be sure.



CHAPTER VII

MERLIN'S TOWER

Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the Kingdom, as far
as political power and authority were concerned, much was made
of me.  My raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold,
and by consequence was very showy, also uncomfortable.  But habit
would soon reconcile me to my clothes; I was aware of that.  I was
given the choicest suite of apartments in the castle, after
the king's.  They were aglow with loud-colored silken hangings,
but the stone floors had nothing but rushes on them for a carpet,
and they were misfit rushes at that, being not all of one breed.
As for conveniences, properly speaking, there weren't any.  I mean
_little_ conveniences; it is the little conveniences that make
the real comfort of life.  The big oaken chairs, graced with rude
carvings, were well enough, but that was the stopping place.
There was no soap, no matches, no looking-glass--except a metal
one, about as powerful as a pail of water.  And not a chromo.
I had been used to chromos for years, and I saw now that without
my suspecting it a passion for art had got worked into the fabric
of my being, and was become a part of me.  It made me homesick
to look around over this proud and gaudy but heartless barrenness
and remember that in our house in East Hartford, all unpretending
as it was, you couldn't go into a room but you would find an
insurance-chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home
over the door; and in the parlor we had nine.  But here, even in
my grand room of state, there wasn't anything in the nature of
a picture except a thing the size of a bedquilt, which was either
woven or knitted (it had darned places in it), and nothing in it
was the right color or the right shape; and as for proportions,
even Raphael himself couldn't have botched them more formidably,
after all his practice on those nightmares they call his "celebrated
Hampton Court cartoons."  Raphael was a bird.  We had several
of his chromos; one was his "Miraculous Draught of Fishes," where
he puts in a miracle of his own--puts three men into a canoe which
wouldn't have held a dog without upsetting.  I always admired
to study R.'s art, it was so fresh and unconventional.

There wasn't even a bell or a speaking-tube in the castle.  I had
a great many servants, and those that were on duty lolled in the
anteroom; and when I wanted one of them I had to go and call for him.
There was no gas, there were no candles; a bronze dish half full
of boarding-house butter with a blazing rag floating in it was
the thing that produced what was regarded as light.  A lot of
these hung along the walls and modified the dark, just toned it
down enough to make it dismal.  If you went out at night, your
servants carried torches.  There were no books, pens, paper or
ink, and no glass in the openings they believed to be windows.
It is a little thing--glass is--until it is absent, then it becomes
a big thing.  But perhaps the worst of all was, that there wasn't
any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco.  I saw that I was just another
Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society
but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life
bearable I must do as he did--invent, contrive, create, reorganize
things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy.  Well,
that was in my line.

One thing troubled me along at first--the immense interest which
people took in me.  Apparently the whole nation wanted a look
at me.  It soon transpired that the eclipse had scared the British
world almost to death; that while it lasted the whole country,
from one end to the other, was in a pitiable state of panic, and
the churches, hermitages, and monkeries overflowed with praying
and weeping poor creatures who thought the end of the world was
come.  Then had followed the news that the producer of this awful
event was a stranger, a mighty magician at Arthur's court; that he
could have blown out the sun like a candle, and was just going
to do it when his mercy was purchased, and he then dissolved
his enchantments, and was now recognized and honored as the man
who had by his unaided might saved the globe from destruction and
its peoples from extinction.  Now if you consider that everybody
believed that, and not only believed it, but never even dreamed
of doubting it, you will easily understand that there was not
a person in all Britain that would not have walked fifty miles
to get a sight of me.  Of course I was all the talk--all other
subjects were dropped; even the king became suddenly a person of
minor interest and notoriety.  Within twenty-four hours the
delegations began to arrive, and from that time onward for a fortnight
they kept coming.  The village was crowded, and all the countryside.
I had to go out a dozen times a day and show myself to these
reverent and awe-stricken multitudes.  It came to be a great burden,
as to time and trouble, but of course it was at the same time
compensatingly agreeable to be so celebrated and such a center
of homage.  It turned Brer Merlin green with envy and spite, which
was a great satisfaction to me.  But there was one thing I couldn't
understand--nobody had asked for an autograph.  I spoke to Clarence
about it.  By George!  I had to explain to him what it was.  Then
he said nobody in the country could read or write but a few dozen
priests.  Land! think of that.

There was another thing that troubled me a little.  Those multitudes
presently began to agitate for another miracle.  That was natural.
To be able to carry back to their far homes the boast that they
had seen the man who could command the sun, riding in the heavens,
and be obeyed, would make them great in the eyes of their neighbors,
and envied by them all; but to be able to also say they had seen
him work a miracle themselves--why, people would come a distance
to see _them_.  The pressure got to be pretty strong.  There was
going to be an eclipse of the moon, and I knew the date and hour,
but it was too far away.  Two years.  I would have given a good
deal for license to hurry it up and use it now when there was
a big market for it.  It seemed a great pity to have it wasted so,
and come lagging along at a time when a body wouldn't have any
use for it, as like as not.  If it had been booked for only a month
away, I could have sold it short; but, as matters stood, I couldn't
seem to cipher out any way to make it do me any good, so I gave up
trying.  Next, Clarence found that old Merlin was making himself
busy on the sly among those people.  He was spreading a report that
I was a humbug, and that the reason I didn't accommodate the people
with a miracle was because I couldn't.  I saw that I must do
something.  I presently thought out a plan.

By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison--the same
cell I had occupied myself.  Then I gave public notice by herald
and trumpet that I should be busy with affairs of state for
a fortnight, but about the end of that time I would take a moment's
leisure and blow up Merlin's stone tower by fires from heaven;
in the meantime, whoso listened to evil reports about me, let him
beware.  Furthermore, I would perform but this one miracle at
this time, and no more; if it failed to satisfy and any murmured,
I would turn the murmurers into horses, and make them useful.
Quiet ensued.

I took Clarence into my confidence, to a certain degree, and we
went to work privately.  I told him that this was a sort of miracle
that required a trifle of preparation, and that it would be sudden
death to ever talk about these preparations to anybody.  That made
his mouth safe enough.  Clandestinely we made a few bushels of
first-rate blasting powder, and I superintended my armorers while
they constructed a lightning-rod and some wires.  This old stone
tower was very massive--and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman,
and four hundred years old.  Yes, and handsome, after a rude
fashion, and clothed with ivy from base to summit, as with a shirt
of scale mail.  It stood on a lonely eminence, in good view from
the castle, and about half a mile away.

Working by night, we stowed the powder in the tower--dug stones
out, on the inside, and buried the powder in the walls themselves,
which were fifteen feet thick at the base.  We put in a peck
at a time, in a dozen places.  We could have blown up the Tower
of London with these charges.  When the thirteenth night was come
we put up our lightning-rod, bedded it in one of the batches of
powder, and ran wires from it to the other batches.  Everybody
had shunned that locality from the day of my proclamation, but
on the morning of the fourteenth I thought best to warn the people,
through the heralds, to keep clear away--a quarter of a mile away.
Then added, by command, that at some time during the twenty-four
hours I would consummate the miracle, but would first give a brief
notice; by flags on the castle towers if in the daytime, by
torch-baskets in the same places if at night.

Thunder-showers had been tolerably frequent of late, and I was
not much afraid of a failure; still, I shouldn't have cared for
a delay of a day or two; I should have explained that I was busy
with affairs of state yet, and the people must wait.

Of course, we had a blazing sunny day--almost the first one without
a cloud for three weeks; things always happen so.  I kept secluded,
and watched the weather.  Clarence dropped in from time to time
and said the public excitement was growing and growing all the
time, and the whole country filling up with human masses as far
as one could see from the battlements.  At last the wind sprang up
and a cloud appeared--in the right quarter, too, and just at
nightfall.  For a little while I watched that distant cloud spread
and blacken, then I judged it was time for me to appear.  I ordered
the torch-baskets to be lit, and Merlin liberated and sent to me.
A quarter of an hour later I ascended the parapet and there found
the king and the court assembled and gazing off in the darkness
toward Merlin's Tower.  Already the darkness was so heavy that
one could not see far; these people and the old turrets, being
partly in deep shadow and partly in the red glow from the great
torch-baskets overhead, made a good deal of a picture.

Merlin arrived in a gloomy mood.  I said:

"You wanted to burn me alive when I had not done you any harm,
and latterly you have been trying to injure my professional
reputation.  Therefore I am going to call down fire and blow up
your tower, but it is only fair to give you a chance; now if you
think you can break my enchantments and ward off the fires, step
to the bat, it's your innings."

"I can, fair sir, and I will. Doubt it not."

He drew an imaginary circle on the stones of the roof, and burnt
a pinch of powder in it, which sent up a small cloud of aromatic
smoke, whereat everybody fell back and began to cross themselves
and get uncomfortable.  Then he began to mutter and make passes
in the air with his hands.  He worked himself up slowly and
gradually into a sort of frenzy, and got to thrashing around with
his arms like the sails of a windmill.  By this time the storm had
about reached us; the gusts of wind were flaring the torches and
making the shadows swash about, the first heavy drops of rain
were falling, the world abroad was black as pitch, the lightning
began to wink fitfully.  Of course, my rod would be loading itself
now.  In fact, things were imminent. So I said:

"You have had time enough.  I have given you every advantage,
and not interfered.  It is plain your magic is weak. It is only
fair that I begin now."

I made about three passes in the air, and then there was an awful
crash and that old tower leaped into the sky in chunks, along
with a vast volcanic fountain of fire that turned night to noonday,
and showed a thousand acres of human beings groveling on the ground
in a general collapse of consternation.  Well, it rained mortar and
masonry the rest of the week.  This was the report; but probably
the facts would have modified it.

It was an effective miracle.  The great bothersome temporary
population vanished.  There were a good many thousand tracks
in the mud the next morning, but they were all outward bound.
If I had advertised another miracle I couldn't have raised an
audience with a sheriff.

Merlin's stock was flat.  The king wanted to stop his wages; he
even wanted to banish him, but I interfered.  I said he would be
useful to work the weather, and attend to small matters like that,
and I would give him a lift now and then when his poor little
parlor-magic soured on him.  There wasn't a rag of his tower left,
but I had the government rebuild it for him, and advised him
to take boarders; but he was too high-toned for that.  And as for
being grateful, he never even said thank you.  He was a rather
hard lot, take him how you might; but then you couldn't fairly
expect a man to be sweet that had been set back so.



CHAPTER VIII

THE BOSS

To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have
the on-looking world consent to it is a finer.  The tower episode
solidified my power, and made it impregnable.  If any were perchance
disposed to be jealous and critical before that, they experienced
a change of heart, now.  There was not any one in the kingdom
who would have considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.

I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances.
For a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream,"
and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing
played itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize
that I was actually living in the sixth century, and in Arthur's
court, not a lunatic asylum.  After that, I was just as much
at home in that century as I could have been in any other; and
as for preference, I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth.
Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains,
pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country.
The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor;
not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities;
whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century?  I should
be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine
down street any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.

What a jump I had made!  I couldn't keep from thinking about it,
and contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil.  There
was nothing back of me that could approach it, unless it might be
Joseph's case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal
it, quite.  For it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendid
financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but the king, the general
public must have regarded him with a good deal of disfavor, whereas
I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and was
popular by reason of it.

I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself
was the shadow.  My power was colossal; and it was not a mere
name, as such things have generally been, it was the genuine
article.  I stood here, at the very spring and source of the second
great period of the world's history; and could see the trickling
stream of that history gather and deepen and broaden, and roll
its mighty tides down the far centuries; and I could note the
upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its long
array of thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses;
the war-making, campaign-directing wantons of France, and Charles
the Second's scepter-wielding drabs; but nowhere in the procession
was my full-sized fellow visible.  I was a Unique; and glad to know
that that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen
centuries and a half, for sure.  Yes, in power I was equal to
the king.  At the same time there was another power that was
a trifle stronger than both of us put together.  That was the Church.
I do not wish to disguise that fact.  I couldn't, if I wanted to.
But never mind about that, now; it will show up, in its proper
place, later on.  It didn't cause me any trouble in the beginning
--at least any of consequence.

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest.  And the
people!  They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race;
why, they were nothing but rabbits.  It was pitiful for a person
born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble
and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church
and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor
king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor
the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!
Why, dear me, _any_ kind of royalty, howsoever modified, _any_ kind
of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you
are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably
never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody
else tells you.  It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race
to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones
without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people
that have always figured as its aristocracies--a company of monarchs
and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and
obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.

The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and
simple, and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their
necks; and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name;
they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves
so.  The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one
object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble;
to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might
be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that
they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and
jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them,
be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures
of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves
the gods of this world.  And for all this, the thanks they got were
cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took
even this sort of attention as an honor.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe
and examine.  I had mine, the king and his people had theirs.
In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit,
and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason
and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.  For
instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men without
title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts
and acquirements or hadn't, were creatures of no more consideration
than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea
that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams
of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but
to be laughed at.  The way I was looked upon was odd, but it was
natural.  You know how the keeper and the public regard the elephant
in the menagerie: well, that is the idea.  They are full of
admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength; they
speak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels
which are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speak
with the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is able
to drive a thousand men before him.  But does that make him one
of _them_?  No; the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at
the idea.  He couldn't comprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn't
in any remote way conceive of it.  Well, to the king, the nobles,
and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps, I was
just that kind of an elephant, and nothing more.  I was admired,
also feared; but it was as an animal is admired and feared.
The animal is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not even
respected.  I had no pedigree, no inherited title; so in the king's
and nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me with
wonder and awe, but there was no reverence mixed with it; through
the force of inherited ideas they were not able to conceive of
anything being entitled to that except pedigree and lordship.
There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman Catholic
Church.  In two or three little centuries it had converted a nation
of men to a nation of worms.  Before the day of the Church's
supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up,
and had a man's pride and spirit and independence; and what
of greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement,
not by birth.  But then the Church came to the front, with an axe
to grind; and she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way
to skin a cat--or a nation; she invented "divine right of kings,"
and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the Beatitudes
--wrenching them from their good purpose to make them fortify
an evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience
to superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to the
commoner) meekness under insult; preached (still to the commoner,
always to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance
under oppression; and she introduced heritable ranks and
aristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations of the earth
to bow down to them and worship them.  Even down to my birth-century
that poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best
of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors
impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as
lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country
did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented
with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade
himself that he was proud of it.  It seems to show that there isn't
anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it.
Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been
in our American blood, too--I know that; but when I left America
it had disappeared--at least to all intents and purposes.  The
remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.  When
a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly
be said to be out of the system.

But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom.
Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master
intelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement
the one and only actually great man in that whole British world;
and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my
birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent
from a king's leman, acquired at second-hand from the slums of
London, was a better man than I was.  Such a personage was fawned
upon in Arthur's realm and reverently looked up to by everybody,
even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence,
and his morals as base as his lineage.  There were times when
_he_ could sit down in the king's presence, but I couldn't.  I could
have got a title easily enough, and that would have raised me
a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's, the giver
of it.  But I didn't ask for it; and I declined it when it was
offered.  I couldn't have enjoyed such a thing with my notions;
and it wouldn't have been fair, anyway, because as far back as
I could go, our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister.
I couldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine and proud
and set-up over any title except one that should come from the nation
itself, the only legitimate source; and such an one I hoped to win;
and in the course of years of honest and honorable endeavor, I did
win it and did wear it with a high and clean pride.  This title
fell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village,
was caught up as a happy thought and tossed from mouth to mouth
with a laugh and an affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept
the kingdom, and was become as familiar as the king's name.  I was
never known by any other designation afterward, whether in the
nation's talk or in grave debate upon matters of state at the
council-board of the sovereign.  This title, translated into modern
speech, would be THE BOSS.  Elected by the nation.  That suited me.
And it was a pretty high title.  There were very few THE'S, and
I was one of them.  If you spoke of the duke, or the earl, or
the bishop, how could anybody tell which one you meant?  But if
you spoke of The King or The Queen or The Boss, it was different.

Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him--respected
the office; at least respected it as much as I was capable of
respecting any unearned supremacy; but as MEN I looked down upon
him and his nobles--privately.  And he and they liked me, and
respected my office; but as an animal, without birth or sham title,
they looked down upon me--and were not particularly private about it,
either.  I didn't charge for my opinion about them, and they didn't
charge for their opinion about me: the account was square, the
books balanced, everybody was satisfied.



CHAPTER IX

THE TOURNAMENT

They were always having grand tournaments there at Camelot; and
very stirring and picturesque and ridiculous human bull-fights
they were, too, but just a little wearisome to the practical mind.
However, I was generally on hand--for two reasons: a man must
not hold himself aloof from the things which his friends and his
community have at heart if he would be liked--especially as
a statesman; and both as business man and statesman I wanted
to study the tournament and see if I couldn't invent an improvement
on it.  That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first
official thing I did, in my administration--and it was on the very
first day of it, too--was to start a patent office; for I knew
that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was
just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways.

Things ran along, a tournament nearly every week; and now and then
the boys used to want me to take a hand--I mean Sir Launcelot and
the rest--but I said I would by and by; no hurry yet, and too much
government machinery to oil up and set to rights and start a-going.

We had one tournament which was continued from day to day during
more than a week, and as many as five hundred knights took part
in it, from first to last.  They were weeks gathering.  They came
on horseback from everywhere; from the very ends of the country,
and even from beyond the sea; and many brought ladies, and all
brought squires and troops of servants.  It was a most gaudy and
gorgeous crowd, as to costumery, and very characteristic of the
country and the time, in the way of high animal spirits, innocent
indecencies of language, and happy-hearted indifference to morals.
It was fight or look on, all day and every day; and sing, gamble,
dance, carouse half the night every night.  They had a most noble
good time.  You never saw such people.  Those banks of beautiful
ladies, shining in their barbaric splendors, would see a knight
sprawl from his horse in the lists with a lanceshaft the thickness
of your ankle clean through him and the blood spouting, and instead
of fainting they would clap their hands and crowd each other for a
better view; only sometimes one would dive into her handkerchief,
and look ostentatiously broken-hearted, and then you could lay
two to one that there was a scandal there somewhere and she was
afraid the public hadn't found it out.

The noise at night would have been annoying to me ordinarily, but
I didn't mind it in the present circumstances, because it kept me
from hearing the quacks detaching legs and arms from the day's
cripples.  They ruined an uncommon good old cross-cut saw for me,
and broke the saw-buck, too, but I let it pass.  And as for my
axe--well, I made up my mind that the next time I lent an axe
to a surgeon I would pick my century.

I not only watched this tournament from day to day, but detailed
an intelligent priest from my Department of Public Morals and
Agriculture, and ordered him to report it; for it was my purpose
by and by, when I should have gotten the people along far enough,
to start a newspaper.  The first thing you want in a new country,
is a patent office; then work up your school system; and after that,
out with your paper.  A newspaper has its faults, and plenty of them,
but no matter, it's hark from the tomb for a dead nation, and don't
you forget it.  You can't resurrect a dead nation without it; there
isn't any way.  So I wanted to sample things, and be finding out
what sort of reporter-material I might be able to rake together out
of the sixth century when I should come to need it.

Well, the priest did very well, considering.  He got in all
the details, and that is a good thing in a local item: you see,
he had kept books for the undertaker-department of his church
when he was younger, and there, you know, the money's in the details;
the more details, the more swag: bearers, mutes, candles, prayers
--everything counts; and if the bereaved don't buy prayers enough
you mark up your candles with a forked pencil, and your bill
shows up all right.  And he had a good knack at getting in the
complimentary thing here and there about a knight that was likely
to advertise--no, I mean a knight that had influence; and he also
had a neat gift of exaggeration, for in his time he had kept door
for a pious hermit who lived in a sty and worked miracles.

Of course this novice's report lacked whoop and crash and lurid
description, and therefore wanted the true ring; but its antique
wording was quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances
and flavors of the time, and these little merits made up in a measure
for its more important lacks.  Here is an extract from it:

  Then Sir Brian de les Isles and Grummore Grummorsum,
  knights of the castle, encountered with Sir Aglovale and
  Sir Tor, and Sir Tor smote down Sir Grummore Grummorsum
  to the earth.  Then came Sir Carados of the dolorous
  tower, and Sir Turquine, knights of the castle, and
  there encountered with them Sir Percivale de Galis
  and Sir Lamorak de Galis, that were two brethren, and
  there encountered Sir Percivale with Sir Carados, and
  either brake their spears unto their hands, and then
  Sir Turquine with Sir Lamorak, and either of them smote
  down other, horse and all, to the earth, and either
  parties rescued other and horsed them again.  And Sir
  Arnold, and Sir Gauter, knights of the castle,
  encountered with Sir Brandiles and Sir Kay, and these
  four knights encountered mightily, and brake their
  spears to their hands.  Then came Sir Pertolope from
  the castle, and there encountered with him Sir Lionel,
  and there Sir Pertolope the green knight smote down Sir
  Lionel, brother to Sir Launcelot.  All this was marked
  by noble heralds, who bare him best, and their names.
  Then Sir Bleobaris brake his spear upon Sir Gareth,
  but of that stroke Sir Bleobaris fell to the earth.
  When Sir Galihodin saw that, he bad Sir Gareth keep him,
  and Sir Gareth smote him to the earth.  Then Sir Galihud
  gat a spear to avenge his brother, and in the same wise
  Sir Gareth served him, and Sir Dinadan and his brother
  La Cote Male Taile, and Sir Sagramore le Disirous, and
  Sir Dodinas le Savage; all these he bare down with one
  spear.  When King Aswisance of Ireland saw Sir Gareth
  fare so he marvelled what he might be, that one time
  seemed green, and another time, at his again coming,
  he seemed blue.  And thus at every course that he rode
  to and fro he changed his color, so that there might
  neither king nor knight have ready cognizance of him.
  Then Sir Agwisance the King of Ireland encountered
  with Sir Gareth, and there Sir Gareth smote him from
  his horse, saddle and all.  And then came King Carados
  of Scotland, and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and
  man.  And in the same wise he served King Uriens of the
  land of Gore.  And then there came in Sir Bagdemagus,
  and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and man to the
  earth.  And Bagdemagus's son Meliganus brake a spear
  upon Sir Gareth mightily and knightly.  And then Sir
  Galahault the noble prince cried on high, Knight with
  the many colors, well hast thou justed; now make thee
  ready that I may just with thee.  Sir Gareth heard him,
  and he gat a great spear, and so they encountered
  together, and there the prince brake his spear; but Sir
  Gareth smote him upon the left side of the helm, that
  he reeled here and there, and he had fallen down had not
  his men recovered him.  Truly, said King Arthur, that
  knight with the many colors is a good knight.  Wherefore
  the king called unto him Sir Launcelot, and prayed him
  to encounter with that knight.  Sir, said Launcelot, I
  may as well find in my heart for to forbear him at
  this time, for he hath had travail enough this day, and
  when a good knight doth so well upon some day, it is
  no good knight's part to let him of his worship, and,
  namely, when he seeth a knight hath done so great
  labour; for peradventure, said Sir Launcelot, his
  quarrel is here this day, and peradventure he is best
  beloved with this lady of all that be here, for I see
  well he paineth himself and enforceth him to do great
  deeds, and therefore, said Sir Launcelot, as for me,
  this day he shall have the honour; though it lay in my
  power to put him from it, I would not.

There was an unpleasant little episode that day, which for reasons
of state I struck out of my priest's report.  You will have noticed
that Garry was doing some great fighting in the engagement.  When
I say Garry I mean Sir Gareth.  Garry was my private pet name
for him; it suggests that I had a deep affection for him, and that
was the case.  But it was a private pet name only, and never spoken
aloud to any one, much less to him; being a noble, he would not
have endured a familiarity like that from me.  Well, to proceed:
I sat in the private box set apart for me as the king's minister.
While Sir Dinadan was waiting for his turn to enter the lists,
he came in there and sat down and began to talk; for he was always
making up to me, because I was a stranger and he liked to have
a fresh market for his jokes, the most of them having reached that
stage of wear where the teller has to do the laughing himself while
the other person looks sick.  I had always responded to his efforts
as well as I could, and felt a very deep and real kindness for him,
too, for the reason that if by malice of fate he knew the one
particular anecdote which I had heard oftenest and had most hated
and most loathed all my life, he had at least spared it me.  It was
one which I had heard attributed to every humorous person who
had ever stood on American soil, from Columbus down to Artemus Ward.
It was about a humorous lecturer who flooded an ignorant audience
with the killingest jokes for an hour and never got a laugh; and
then when he was leaving, some gray simpletons wrung him gratefully
by the hand and said it had been the funniest thing they had ever
heard, and "it was all they could do to keep from laughin' right
out in meetin'."  That anecdote never saw the day that it was
worth the telling; and yet I had sat under the telling of it
hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times, and
cried and cursed all the way through.  Then who can hope to know
what my feelings were, to hear this armor-plated ass start in on
it again, in the murky twilight of tradition, before the dawn of
history, while even Lactantius might be referred to as "the late
Lactantius," and the Crusades wouldn't be born for five hundred
years yet?  Just as he finished, the call-boy came; so, haw-hawing
like a demon, he went rattling and clanking out like a crate of
loose castings, and I knew nothing more.  It was some minutes
before I came to, and then I opened my eyes just in time to see
Sir Gareth fetch him an awful welt, and I unconsciously out with
the prayer, "I hope to gracious he's killed!"  But by ill-luck,
before I had got half through with the words, Sir Gareth crashed
into Sir Sagramor le Desirous and sent him thundering over his
horse's crupper, and Sir Sagramor caught my remark and thought
I meant it for _him_.

Well, whenever one of those people got a thing into his head,
there was no getting it out again.  I knew that, so I saved my
breath, and offered no explanations.  As soon as Sir Sagramor
got well, he notified me that there was a little account to settle
between us, and he named a day three or four years in the future;
place of settlement, the lists where the offense had been given.
I said I would be ready when he got back.  You see, he was going
for the Holy Grail.  The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail
now and then.  It was a several years' cruise.  They always put in
the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way,
though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was,
and I don't think any of them actually expected to find it, or
would have known what to do with it if he _had_ run across it.
You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that day, as you may
say; that was all.  Every year expeditions went out holy grailing,
and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for _them_.  There
was worlds of reputation in it, but no money.  Why, they actually
wanted _me_ to put in!  Well, I should smile.



CHAPTER X

BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION

The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was
a good deal discussed, for such things interested the boys.
The king thought I ought now to set forth in quest of adventures,
so that I might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet
Sir Sagramor when the several years should have rolled away.
I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me three
or four years yet to get things well fixed up and going smoothly;
then I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of
that time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no valuable
time would be lost by the postponement; I should then have been
in office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinery
would be so well developed that I could take a holiday without
its working any harm.

I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished.
In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all
sorts of industries under way--nuclei of future vast factories,
the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization.  In these
were gathered together the brightest young minds I could find,
and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time.
I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts--experts
in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling.  These nurseries
of mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their
obscure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their
precincts without a special permit--for I was afraid of the Church.

I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools the
first thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded
schools in full blast in those places, and also a complete variety
of Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and growing
condition.  Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted
to; there was perfect freedom in that matter.  But I confined public
religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting
nothing of it in my other educational buildings.  I could have
given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian
without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law
of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in
the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and
features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is
equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and
size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion,
angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and,
besides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power,
the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into
selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to
human liberty and paralysis to human thought.

All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them.
They had formerly been worked as savages always work mines--holes
grubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by
hand, at the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to put the mining
on a scientific basis as early as I could.

Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's
challenge struck me.

Four years rolled by--and then!  Well, you would never imagine
it in the world.  Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in
safe hands.  The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect
government.  An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect
earthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, the
despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease
of life perpetual.  But as a perishable perfect man must die, and
leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an
earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is
the worst form that is possible.

My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of
a kingdom at his command.  Unsuspected by this dark land, I had
the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very
nose!  It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was,
a gigantic and unassailable fact--and to be heard from, yet, if
I lived and had luck.  There it was, as sure a fact and as substantial
a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless
summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its
bowels.  My schools and churches were children four years before;
they were grown-up now; my shops of that day were vast factories
now; where I had a dozen trained men then, I had a thousand now;
where I had one brilliant expert then, I had fifty now.  I stood
with my hand on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn it on and
flood the midnight world with light at any moment.  But I was not
going to do the thing in that sudden way.  It was not my policy.
The people could not have stood it; and, moreover, I should have
had the Established Roman Catholic Church on my back in a minute.

No, I had been going cautiously all the while.  I had had confidential
agents trickling through the country some time, whose office was
to undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw
a little at this and that and the other superstition, and so prepare
the way gradually for a better order of things.  I was turning on
my light one-candle-power at a time, and meant to continue to do so.

I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom,
and they were doing very well.  I meant to work this racket more
and more, as time wore on, if nothing occurred to frighten me.
One of my deepest secrets was my West Point--my military academy.
I kept that most jealously out of sight; and I did the same with my
naval academy which I had established at a remote seaport.  Both
were prospering to my satisfaction.

Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head executive, my right
hand.  He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn't
anything he couldn't turn his hand to.  Of late I had been training
him for journalism, for the time seemed about right for a start
in the newspaper line; nothing big, but just a small weekly for
experimental circulation in my civilization-nurseries.  He took
to it like a duck; there was an editor concealed in him, sure.
Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked sixth century
and wrote nineteenth.  His journalistic style was climbing,
steadily; it was already up to the back settlement Alabama mark,
and couldn't be told from the editorial output of that region
either by matter or flavor.

We had another large departure on hand, too.  This was a telegraph
and a telephone; our first venture in this line.  These wires were
for private service only, as yet, and must be kept private until
a riper day should come.  We had a gang of men on the road, working
mainly by night.  They were stringing ground wires; we were afraid
to put up poles, for they would attract too much inquiry.  Ground
wires were good enough, in both instances, for my wires were
protected by an insulation of my own invention which was perfect.
My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, and
establishing connection with any considerable towns whose lights
betrayed their presence, and leaving experts in charge. Nobody
could tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobody
ever went intentionally to any place, but only struck it by
accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it without
thinking to inquire what its name was.  At one time and another
we had sent out topographical expeditions to survey and map the
kingdom, but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble.
So we had given the thing up, for the present; it would be poor
wisdom to antagonize the Church.

As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had been
when I arrived in it, to all intents and purposes.  I had made
changes, but they were necessarily slight, and they were not
noticeable.  Thus far, I had not even meddled with taxation,
outside of the taxes which provided the royal revenues.  I had
systematized those, and put the service on an effective and
righteous basis.  As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled,
and yet the burden was so much more equably distributed than
before, that all the kingdom felt a sense of relief, and the praises
of my administration were hearty and general.

Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did not mind it,
it could not have happened at a better time.  Earlier it could
have annoyed me, but now everything was in good hands and swimming
right along.  The king had reminded me several times, of late, that
the postponement I had asked for, four years before, had about
run out now.  It was a hint that I ought to be starting out to seek
adventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me worthy
of the honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still
out grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief expeditions,
and might be found any year, now.  So you see I was expecting
this interruption; it did not take me by surprise.



CHAPTER XI

THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES

There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they were
of both sexes.  Hardly a month went by without one of these tramps
arriving; and generally loaded with a tale about some princess or
other wanting help to get her out of some far-away castle where
she was held in captivity by a lawless scoundrel, usually a giant.
Now you would think that the first thing the king would do after
listening to such a novelette from an entire stranger, would be
to ask for credentials--yes, and a pointer or two as to locality
of castle, best route to it, and so on.  But nobody ever thought
of so simple and common-sense a thing at that.  No, everybody
swallowed these people's lies whole, and never asked a question
of any sort or about anything.  Well, one day when I was not
around, one of these people came along--it was a she one, this
time--and told a tale of the usual pattern.  Her mistress was
a captive in a vast and gloomy castle, along with forty-four other
young and beautiful girls, pretty much all of them princesses;
they had been languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-six
years; the masters of the castle were three stupendous brothers,
each with four arms and one eye--the eye in the center of the
forehead, and as big as a fruit.  Sort of fruit not mentioned;
their usual slovenliness in statistics.

Would you believe it?  The king and the whole Round Table were
in raptures over this preposterous opportunity for adventure.
Every knight of the Table jumped for the chance, and begged for it;
but to their vexation and chagrin the king conferred it upon me,
who had not asked for it at all.

By an effort, I contained my joy when Clarence brought me the news.
But he--he could not contain his.  His mouth gushed delight and
gratitude in a steady discharge--delight in my good fortune,
gratitude to the king for this splendid mark of his favor for me.
He could keep neither his legs nor his body still, but pirouetted
about the place in an airy ecstasy of happiness.

On my side, I could have cursed the kindness that conferred upon
me this benefaction, but I kept my vexation under the surface
for policy's sake, and did what I could to let on to be glad.
Indeed, I _said_ I was glad.  And in a way it was true; I was as
glad as a person is when he is scalped.

Well, one must make the best of things, and not waste time with
useless fretting, but get down to business and see what can be
done.  In all lies there is wheat among the chaff; I must get at
the wheat in this case: so I sent for the girl and she came.  She
was a comely enough creature, and soft and modest, but, if signs
went for anything, she didn't know as much as a lady's watch.  I said:

"My dear, have you been questioned as to particulars?"

She said she hadn't.

"Well, I didn't expect you had, but I thought I would ask, to make
sure; it's the way I've been raised.  Now you mustn't take it
unkindly if I remind you that as we don't know you, we must go
a little slow.  You may be all right, of course, and we'll hope
that you are; but to take it for granted isn't business.  _You_
understand that.  I'm obliged to ask you a few questions; just
answer up fair and square, and don't be afraid.  Where do you
live, when you are at home?"

"In the land of Moder, fair sir."

"Land of Moder.  I don't remember hearing of it before.
Parents living?"

"As to that, I know not if they be yet on live, sith it is many
years that I have lain shut up in the castle."

"Your name, please?"

"I hight the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, an it please you."

"Do you know anybody here who can identify you?"

"That were not likely, fair lord, I being come hither now for
the first time."

"Have you brought any letters--any documents--any proofs that
you are trustworthy and truthful?"

"Of a surety, no; and wherefore should I?  Have I not a tongue,
and cannot I say all that myself?"

"But _your_ saying it, you know, and somebody else's saying it,
is different."

"Different?  How might that be?  I fear me I do not understand."

"Don't _understand_?  Land of--why, you see--you see--why, great Scott,
can't you understand a little thing like that?  Can't you understand
the difference between your--_why_ do you look so innocent and idiotic!"

"I?  In truth I know not, but an it were the will of God."

"Yes, yes, I reckon that's about the size of it.  Don't mind my
seeming excited; I'm not.  Let us change the subject.  Now as
to this castle, with forty-five princesses in it, and three ogres
at the head of it, tell me--where is this harem?"

"Harem?"

"The _castle_, you understand; where is the castle?"

"Oh, as to that, it is great, and strong, and well beseen, and
lieth in a far country.  Yes, it is many leagues."

"_How_ many?"

"Ah, fair sir, it were woundily hard to tell, they are so many,
and do so lap the one upon the other, and being made all in the
same image and tincted with the same color, one may not know
the one league from its fellow, nor how to count them except
they be taken apart, and ye wit well it were God's work to do
that, being not within man's capacity; for ye will note--"

"Hold on, hold on, never mind about the distance; _whereabouts_
does the castle lie?  What's the direction from here?"

"Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from here; by reason
that the road lieth not straight, but turneth evermore; wherefore
the direction of its place abideth not, but is some time under
the one sky and anon under another, whereso if ye be minded that
it is in the east, and wend thitherward, ye shall observe that
the way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself by the space
of half a circle, and this marvel happing again and yet again and
still again, it will grieve you that you had thought by vanities
of the mind to thwart and bring to naught the will of Him that
giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth
Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles
and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving the
places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His
creatures that where He will He will, and where He will not He--"

"Oh, that's all right, that's all right, give us a rest; never mind
about the direction, _hang_ the direction--I beg pardon, I beg
a thousand pardons, I am not well to-day; pay no attention when
I soliloquize, it is an old habit, an old, bad habit, and hard
to get rid of when one's digestion is all disordered with eating
food that was raised forever and ever before he was born; good
land! a man can't keep his functions regular on spring chickens
thirteen hundred years old.  But come--never mind about that;
let's--have you got such a thing as a map of that region about
you?  Now a good map--"

"Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievers
have brought from over the great seas, which, being boiled in oil,
and an onion and salt added thereto, doth--"

"What, a map?  What are you talking about?  Don't you know what
a map is?  There, there, never mind, don't explain, I hate
explanations; they fog a thing up so that you can't tell anything
about it.  Run along, dear; good-day; show her the way, Clarence."

Oh, well, it was reasonably plain, now, why these donkeys didn't
prospect these liars for details.  It may be that this girl had
a fact in her somewhere, but I don't believe you could have sluiced
it out with a hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms of
blasting, even; it was a case for dynamite.  Why, she was a perfect
ass; and yet the king and his knights had listened to her as if
she had been a leaf out of the gospel.  It kind of sizes up the
whole party.  And think of the simple ways of this court: this
wandering wench hadn't any more trouble to get access to the king
in his palace than she would have had to get into the poorhouse
in my day and country.  In fact, he was glad to see her, glad
to hear her tale; with that adventure of hers to offer, she was
as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner.

Just as I was ending-up these reflections, Clarence came back.
I remarked upon the barren result of my efforts with the girl;
hadn't got hold of a single point that could help me to find
the castle.  The youth looked a little surprised, or puzzled,
or something, and intimated that he had been wondering to himself
what I had wanted to ask the girl all those questions for.

"Why, great guns," I said, "don't I want to find the castle?  And
how else would I go about it?"

"La, sweet your worship, one may lightly answer that, I ween.
She will go with thee.  They always do.  She will ride with thee."

"Ride with me?  Nonsense!"

"But of a truth she will.  She will ride with thee.  Thou shalt see."

"What?  She browse around the hills and scour the woods with me
--alone--and I as good as engaged to be married?  Why, it's scandalous.
Think how it would look."

My, the dear face that rose before me!  The boy was eager to know
all about this tender matter.  I swore him to secrecy and then
whispered her name--"Puss Flanagan."  He looked disappointed,
and said he didn't remember the countess.  How natural it was for
the little courtier to give her a rank.  He asked me where she lived.

"In East Har--" I came to myself and stopped, a little confused;
then I said, "Never mind, now; I'll tell you some time."

And might he see her?  Would I let him see her some day?

It was but a little thing to promise--thirteen hundred years
or so--and he so eager; so I said Yes.  But I sighed; I couldn't
help it.  And yet there was no sense in sighing, for she wasn't
born yet.  But that is the way we are made: we don't reason,
where we feel; we just feel.

My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and the
boys were very good to me, and made much of me, and seemed to have
forgotten their vexation and disappointment, and come to be as
anxious for me to hive those ogres and set those ripe old virgins
loose as if it were themselves that had the contract.  Well, they
_were_ good children--but just children, that is all.  And they
gave me no end of points about how to scout for giants, and how
to scoop them in; and they told me all sorts of charms against
enchantments, and gave me salves and other rubbish to put on my
wounds.  But it never occurred to one of them to reflect that if
I was such a wonderful necromancer as I was pretending to be,
I ought not to need salves or instructions, or charms against
enchantments, and, least of all, arms and armor, on a foray of any
kind--even against fire-spouting dragons, and devils hot from
perdition, let alone such poor adversaries as these I was after,
these commonplace ogres of the back settlements.

I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that was
the usual way; but I had the demon's own time with my armor,
and this delayed me a little.  It is troublesome to get into, and
there is so much detail.  First you wrap a layer or two of blanket
around your body, for a sort of cushion and to keep off the cold
iron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail--these
are made of small steel links woven together, and they form a fabric
so flexible that if you toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumps
into a pile like a peck of wet fish-net; it is very heavy and
is nearly the uncomfortablest material in the world for a night
shirt, yet plenty used it for that--tax collectors, and reformers,
and one-horse kings with a defective title, and those sorts of
people; then you put on your shoes--flat-boats roofed over with
interleaving bands of steel--and screw your clumsy spurs into
the heels.  Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your
cuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate,
and you begin to feel crowded; then you hitch onto the breastplate
the half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs
down in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down,
and isn't any real improvement on an inverted coal scuttle, either
for looks or for wear, or to wipe your hands on; next you belt
on your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms,
your iron gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto your
head, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it to hang over the back
of your neck--and there you are, snug as a candle in a candle-mould.
This is no time to dance.  Well, a man that is packed away like
that is a nut that isn't worth the cracking, there is so little of
the meat, when you get down to it, by comparison with the shell.

The boys helped me, or I never could have got in.  Just as we
finished, Sir Bedivere happened in, and I saw that as like as not
I hadn't chosen the most convenient outfit for a long trip.  How
stately he looked; and tall and broad and grand.  He had on his
head a conical steel casque that only came down to his ears, and
for visor had only a narrow steel bar that extended down to his
upper lip and protected his nose; and all the rest of him, from
neck to heel, was flexible chain mail, trousers and all.  But
pretty much all of him was hidden under his outside garment, which
of course was of chain mail, as I said, and hung straight from his
shoulders to his ankles; and from his middle to the bottom, both
before and behind, was divided, so that he could ride and let the
skirts hang down on each side.  He was going grailing, and it was
just the outfit for it, too.  I would have given a good deal for
that ulster, but it was too late now to be fooling around.  The sun
was just up, the king and the court were all on hand to see me off
and wish me luck; so it wouldn't be etiquette for me to tarry.
You don't get on your horse yourself; no, if you tried it you
would get disappointed.  They carry you out, just as they carry
a sun-struck man to the drug store, and put you on, and help get
you to rights, and fix your feet in the stirrups; and all the while
you do feel so strange and stuffy and like somebody else--like
somebody that has been married on a sudden, or struck by lightning,
or something like that, and hasn't quite fetched around yet, and
is sort of numb, and can't just get his bearings.  Then they
stood up the mast they called a spear, in its socket by my left
foot, and I gripped it with my hand; lastly they hung my shield
around my neck, and I was all complete and ready to up anchor
and get to sea.  Everybody was as good to me as they could be,
and a maid of honor gave me the stirrup-cup her own self.  There was
nothing more to do now, but for that damsel to get up behind me on
a pillion, which she did, and put an arm or so around me to hold on.

And so we started, and everybody gave us a goodbye and waved their
handkerchiefs or helmets.  And everybody we met, going down the hill
and through the village was respectful to us, except some shabby
little boys on the outskirts.  They said:

"Oh, what a guy!"  And hove clods at us.

In my experience boys are the same in all ages.  They don't respect
anything, they don't care for anything or anybody.  They say
"Go up, baldhead" to the prophet going his unoffending way in
the gray of antiquity; they sass me in the holy gloom of the
Middle Ages; and I had seen them act the same way in Buchanan's
administration; I remember, because I was there and helped.  The
prophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and I wanted
to get down and settle with mine, but it wouldn't answer, because
I couldn't have got up again.  I hate a country without a derrick.



CHAPTER XII

SLOW TORTURE

Straight off, we were in the country.  It was most lovely and
pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning
in the first freshness of autumn.  From hilltops we saw fair
green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through
them, and island groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely
oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond
the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching
away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals
a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was
a castle.  We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew,
and we moved like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound
of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green
light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves
overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of runlets
went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of
whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the
world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich
gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried
by and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place
where the noise was; and where only the earliest birds were turning
out and getting to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder
and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for worms on
a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable remotenesses of
the woods.  And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.

About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into
the glare--it was along there somewhere, a couple of hours or so
after sun-up--it wasn't as pleasant as it had been.  It was
beginning to get hot.  This was quite noticeable.  We had a very
long pull, after that, without any shade.  Now it is curious how
progressively little frets grow and multiply after they once get
a start.  Things which I didn't mind at all, at first, I began
to mind now--and more and more, too, all the time.  The first
ten or fifteen times I wanted my handkerchief I didn't seem to care;
I got along, and said never mind, it isn't any matter, and dropped
it out of my mind.  But now it was different; I wanted it all
the time; it was nag, nag, nag, right along, and no rest; I couldn't
get it out of my mind; and so at last I lost my temper and said
hang a man that would make a suit of armor without any pockets
in it.  You see I had my handkerchief in my helmet; and some other
things; but it was that kind of a helmet that you can't take off
by yourself.  That hadn't occurred to me when I put it there;
and in fact I didn't know it.  I supposed it would be particularly
convenient there.  And so now, the thought of its being there,
so handy and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the
worse and the harder to bear.  Yes, the thing that you can't get
is the thing that you want, mainly; every one has noticed that.
Well, it took my mind off from everything else; took it clear off,
and centered it in my helmet; and mile after mile, there it stayed,
imagining the handkerchief, picturing the handkerchief; and it
was bitter and aggravating to have the salt sweat keep trickling
down into my eyes, and I couldn't get at it.  It seems like a little
thing, on paper, but it was not a little thing at all; it was
the most real kind of misery.  I would not say it if it was not so.
I made up my mind that I would carry along a reticule next time,
let it look how it might, and people say what they would.  Of course
these iron dudes of the Round Table would think it was scandalous,
and maybe raise Sheol about it, but as for me, give me comfort
first, and style afterwards.  So we jogged along, and now and then
we struck a stretch of dust, and it would tumble up in clouds and
get into my nose and make me sneeze and cry; and of course I said
things I oughtn't to have said, I don't deny that.  I am not
better than others.

We couldn't seem to meet anybody in this lonesome Britain, not
even an ogre; and, in the mood I was in then, it was well for
the ogre; that is, an ogre with a handkerchief.  Most knights
would have thought of nothing but getting his armor; but so I got
his bandanna, he could keep his hardware, for all of me.

Meantime, it was getting hotter and hotter in there.  You see,
the sun was beating down and warming up the iron more and more
all the time.  Well, when you are hot, that way, every little thing
irritates you.  When I trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes,
and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn't seem to stand that
shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my
back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched
in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn't
create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that
stove; and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron
settled down on you and the more and more tons you seemed to weigh
every minute.  And you had to be always changing hands, and passing
your spear over to the other foot, it got so irksome for one hand
to hold it long at a time.

Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in rivers, there comes
a time when you--when you--well, when you itch.  You are inside,
your hands are outside; so there you are; nothing but iron between.
It is not a light thing, let it sound as it may.  First it is one
place; then another; then some more; and it goes on spreading and
spreading, and at last the territory is all occupied, and nobody
can imagine what you feel like, nor how unpleasant it is.  And
when it had got to the worst, and it seemed to me that I could
not stand anything more, a fly got in through the bars and settled
on my nose, and the bars were stuck and wouldn't work, and I
couldn't get the visor up; and I could only shake my head, which
was baking hot by this time, and the fly--well, you know how a fly
acts when he has got a certainty--he only minded the shaking enough
to change from nose to lip, and lip to ear, and buzz and buzz
all around in there, and keep on lighting and biting, in a way
that a person, already so distressed as I was, simply could not
stand.  So I gave in, and got Alisande to unship the helmet and
relieve me of it.  Then she emptied the conveniences out of it
and fetched it full of water, and I drank and then stood up, and
she poured the rest down inside the armor. One cannot think how
refreshing it was.  She continued to fetch and pour until I was
well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.

It was good to have a rest--and peace.  But nothing is quite
perfect in this life, at any time.  I had made a pipe a while back,
and also some pretty fair tobacco; not the real thing, but what
some of the Indians use: the inside bark of the willow, dried.
These comforts had been in the helmet, and now I had them again,
but no matches.

Gradually, as the time wore along, one annoying fact was borne in
upon my understanding--that we were weather-bound.  An armed novice
cannot mount his horse without help and plenty of it.  Sandy was
not enough; not enough for me, anyway.  We had to wait until
somebody should come along.  Waiting, in silence, would have been
agreeable enough, for I was full of matter for reflection, and
wanted to give it a chance to work.  I wanted to try and think out
how it was that rational or even half-rational men could ever
have learned to wear armor, considering its inconveniences; and
how they had managed to keep up such a fashion for generations
when it was plain that what I had suffered to-day they had had
to suffer all the days of their lives.  I wanted to think that out;
and moreover I wanted to think out some way to reform this evil
and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion die out; but
thinking was out of the question in the circumstances.  You couldn't
think, where Sandy was.

She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had
a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head
sore like the drays and wagons in a city.  If she had had a cork
she would have been a comfort.  But you can't cork that kind;
they would die.  Her clack was going all day, and you would think
something would surely happen to her works, by and by; but no,
they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for
words.  She could grind, and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week,
and never stop to oil up or blow out.  And yet the result was just
nothing but wind.  She never had any ideas, any more than a fog
has.  She was a perfect blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw,
talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber; but just as good as she
could be.  I hadn't minded her mill that morning, on account of
having that hornets' nest of other troubles; but more than once
in the afternoon I had to say:

"Take a rest, child; the way you are using up all the domestic air,
the kingdom will have to go to importing it by to-morrow, and it's
a low enough treasury without that."



CHAPTER XIII

FREEMEN

Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be
contented.  Only a little while back, when I was riding and
suffering, what a heaven this peace, this rest, this sweet serenity
in this secluded shady nook by this purling stream would have
seemed, where I could keep perfectly comfortable all the time
by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now and then; yet
already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not
light my pipe--for, although I had long ago started a match factory,
I had forgotten to bring matches with me--and partly because we
had nothing to eat.  Here was another illustration of the childlike
improvidence of this age and people.  A man in armor always trusted
to chance for his food on a journey, and would have been scandalized
at the idea of hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear.  There
was probably not a knight of all the Round Table combination who
would not rather have died than been caught carrying such a thing
as that on his flagstaff.  And yet there could not be anything more
sensible.  It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of sandwiches
into my helmet, but I was interrupted in the act, and had to make
an excuse and lay them aside, and a dog got them.

Night approached, and with it a storm.  The darkness came on fast.
We must camp, of course.  I found a good shelter for the demoiselle
under a rock, and went off and found another for myself.  But
I was obliged to remain in my armor, because I could not get it off
by myself and yet could not allow Alisande to help, because it
would have seemed so like undressing before folk.  It would not
have amounted to that in reality, because I had clothes on
underneath; but the prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten
rid of just at a jump, and I knew that when it came to stripping
off that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.

With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind
blew, and the wilder the rain lashed around, the colder and colder
it got.  Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants and worms
and things began to flock in out of the wet and crawl down inside
my armor to get warm; and while some of them behaved well enough,
and snuggled up amongst my clothes and got quiet, the majority
were of a restless, uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still,
but went on prowling and hunting for they did not know what;
especially the ants, which went tickling along in wearisome
procession from one end of me to the other by the hour, and are
a kind of creatures which I never wish to sleep with again.
It would be my advice to persons situated in this way, to not roll
or thrash around, because this excites the interest of all the
different sorts of animals and makes every last one of them want
to turn out and see what is going on, and this makes things worse
than they were before, and of course makes you objurgate harder,
too, if you can.  Still, if one did not roll and thrash around
he would die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other;
there is no real choice.  Even after I was frozen solid I could
still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpse does when he is
taking electric treatment.  I said I would never wear armor
after this trip.

All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet was in a living
fire, as you may say, on account of that swarm of crawlers, that
same unanswerable question kept circling and circling through my
tired head: How do people stand this miserable armor?  How have
they managed to stand it all these generations?  How can they sleep
at night for dreading the tortures of next day?

When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight: seedy,
drowsy, fagged, from want of sleep; weary from thrashing around,
famished from long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of
the animals; and crippled with rheumatism.  And how had it fared
with the nobly born, the titled aristocrat, the Demoiselle Alisande
la Carteloise?  Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept
like the dead; and as for a bath, probably neither she nor any
other noble in the land had ever had one, and so she was not
missing it.  Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified
savages, those people.  This noble lady showed no impatience to get
to breakfast--and that smacks of the savage, too.  On their journeys
those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them;
and also how to freight up against probable fasts before starting,
after the style of the Indian and the anaconda.  As like as not,
Sandy was loaded for a three-day stretch.

We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along
behind.  In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor
creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded
as a road.  They were as humble as animals to me; and when I
proposed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, so
overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that
at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest.
My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said
in their hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the
other cattle--a remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely
because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended
them, for it didn't.  And yet they were not slaves, not chattels.
By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen.  Seven-tenths
of the free population of the country were of just their class and
degree: small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is
to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about
all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy,
and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and
leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king,
nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with
the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value
in any rationally constructed world.  And yet, by ingenious
contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail
of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and
banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be
the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long
that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only
that, but to believe it right and as it should be.  The priests
had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state
of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how
unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially
such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter
there and become respectfully quiet.

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in
a formerly American ear.  They were freemen, but they could not
leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his
permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have
their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery,
and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their
own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the
proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else's without remembering
him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him
gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice, leaving their
own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let
him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation
to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain
around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting
parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of
their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves,
and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops
they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would
the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came
the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first
the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner
took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad
upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty
to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble;
there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes
again, and yet other taxes--upon this free and independent pauper,
but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the
wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would
sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's
work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's
daughter--but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is
unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his
tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and
sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle
Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him
at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back,
and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property
and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work
on their lord the bishop's road three days each--gratis; every
head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each,
gratis, and a day or so added for their servants.  Why, it was
like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable
and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such
villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood--one: a settlement
of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for
each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of
that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and
shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell.
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it
and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other
in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had
lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand
persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are
all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror,
so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe,
compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty,
and heart-break?  What is swift death by lightning compared with
death by slow fire at the stake?  A city cemetery could contain the
coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so
diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could
hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror
--that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has
been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast
and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their
king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire.
There was something pitifully ludicrous about it.  I asked them
if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free
vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its
descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies,
to the exclusion of all other families--including the voter's; and
would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised
to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible
glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's
families--_including his own_.

They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had
never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them
that a nation could be so situated that every man _could_ have
a say in the government.  I said I had seen one--and that it would
last until it had an Established Church.  Again they were all
unhit--at first.  But presently one man looked up and asked me
to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could
soak into his understanding.  I did it; and after a little he had
the idea, and he brought his fist down and said _he_ didn't believe
a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down
in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation
its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes.
I said to myself:

"This one's a man.  If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would
make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove
myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its
system of government."

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to
its institutions or its office-holders.  The country is the real
thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing
to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are
extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out,
become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body
from winter, disease, and death.  To be loyal to rags, to shout
for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a loyalty
of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented
by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.  I was from Connecticut, whose
Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in
the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority
and instituted for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_
an undeniable and indefeasible right to _alter their form of
government_ in such a manner as they may think expedient."

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his
peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is
a traitor.  That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this
decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and
it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see
the matter as he does.

And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the
country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each
thousand of its population.  For the nine hundred and ninety-four
to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose
to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man,
it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black
treason.  So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation
where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all
the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves
a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.  It seemed
to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was
a new deal.  The thing that would have best suited the circus side
of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up
an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the
Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first
educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely
certain to get left.  I had never been accustomed to getting left,
even if I do say it myself.  Wherefore, the "deal" which had been
for some time working into shape in my mind was of a quite different
pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.

So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat
munching black bread with that abused and mistaught herd of human
sheep, but took him aside and talked matter of another sort to him.
After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his
veins; and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark--

   Put him in the Man-factory--

and gave it to him, and said:

"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands of
Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand."

"He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of the enthusiasm
went out of his face.

"How--a priest?  Didn't I tell you that no chattel of the Church,
no bond-slave of pope or bishop can enter my Man-Factory?  Didn't
I tell you that _you_ couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever
it might be, was your own free property?"

"Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore it liked me not,
and bred in me a cold doubt, to hear of this priest being there."

"But he isn't a priest, I tell you."

The man looked far from satisfied.  He said:

"He is not a priest, and yet can read?"

"He is not a priest and yet can read--yes, and write, too, for that
matter.  I taught him myself." The man's face cleared.  "And it is
the first thing that you yourself will be taught in that Factory--"

"I?  I would give blood out of my heart to know that art.  Why,
I will be your slave, your--"

"No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave.  Take your family
and go along.  Your lord the bishop will confiscate your small
property, but no matter.  Clarence will fix you all right."



CHAPTER XIV

"DEFEND THEE, LORD"

I paid three pennies for my breakfast, and a most extravagant
price it was, too, seeing that one could have breakfasted a dozen
persons for that money; but I was feeling good by this time, and
I had always been a kind of spendthrift anyway; and then these
people had wanted to give me the food for nothing, scant as
their provision was, and so it was a grateful pleasure to emphasize
my appreciation and sincere thankfulness with a good big financial
lift where the money would do so much more good than it would
in my helmet, where, these pennies being made of iron and not
stinted in weight, my half-dollar's worth was a good deal of a
burden to me.  I spent money rather too freely in those days,
it is true; but one reason for it was that I hadn't got the
proportions of things entirely adjusted, even yet, after so long
a sojourn in Britain--hadn't got along to where I was able to
absolutely realize that a penny in Arthur's land and a couple of
dollars in Connecticut were about one and the same thing: just
twins, as you may say, in purchasing power.  If my start from
Camelot could have been delayed a very few days I could have paid
these people in beautiful new coins from our own mint, and that
would have pleased me; and them, too, not less.  I had adopted
the American values exclusively.  In a week or two now, cents,
nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, and also a trifle of
gold, would be trickling in thin but steady streams all through
the commercial veins of the kingdom, and I looked to see this
new blood freshen up its life.

The farmers were bound to throw in something, to sort of offset
my liberality, whether I would or no; so I let them give me a flint
and steel; and as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy
and me on our horse, I lit my pipe.  When the first blast of smoke
shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke
for the woods, and Sandy went over backwards and struck the ground
with a dull thud.  They thought I was one of those fire-belching
dragons they had heard so much about from knights and other
professional liars.  I had infinite trouble to persuade those people
to venture back within explaining distance.  Then I told them that
this was only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none
but my enemies.  And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that
if all who felt no enmity toward me would come forward and pass
before me they should see that only those who remained behind would
be struck dead.  The procession moved with a good deal of promptness.
There were no casualties to report, for nobody had curiosity enough
to remain behind to see what would happen.

I lost some time, now, for these big children, their fears gone,
became so ravished with wonder over my awe-compelling fireworks
that I had to stay there and smoke a couple of pipes out before
they would let me go.  Still the delay was not wholly unproductive,
for it took all that time to get Sandy thoroughly wonted to the new
thing, she being so close to it, you know.  It plugged up her
conversation mill, too, for a considerable while, and that was
a gain.  But above all other benefits accruing, I had learned
something.  I was ready for any giant or any ogre that might come
along, now.

We tarried with a holy hermit, that night, and my opportunity
came about the middle of the next afternoon.  We were crossing
a vast meadow by way of short-cut, and I was musing absently,
hearing nothing, seeing nothing, when Sandy suddenly interrupted
a remark which she had begun that morning, with the cry:

"Defend thee, lord!--peril of life is toward!"

And she slipped down from the horse and ran a little way and stood.
I looked up and saw, far off in the shade of a tree, half a dozen
armed knights and their squires; and straightway there was bustle
among them and tightening of saddle-girths for the mount.  My pipe
was ready and would have been lit, if I had not been lost in
thinking about how to banish oppression from this land and restore
to all its people their stolen rights and manhood without disobliging
anybody.  I lit up at once, and by the time I had got a good head
of reserved steam on, here they came.  All together, too; none of
those chivalrous magnanimities which one reads so much about
--one courtly rascal at a time, and the rest standing by to see fair
play.  No, they came in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush,
they came like a volley from a battery; came with heads low down,
plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at a level.  It was
a handsome sight, a beautiful sight--for a man up a tree.  I laid
my lance in rest and waited, with my heart beating, till the iron
wave was just ready to break over me, then spouted a column of
white smoke through the bars of my helmet.  You should have seen
the wave go to pieces and scatter!  This was a finer sight than
the other one.

But these people stopped, two or three hundred yards away, and
this troubled me.  My satisfaction collapsed, and fear came;
I judged I was a lost man.  But Sandy was radiant; and was going
to be eloquent--but I stopped her, and told her my magic had
miscarried, somehow or other, and she must mount, with all despatch,
and we must ride for life.  No, she wouldn't.  She said that my
enchantment had disabled those knights; they were not riding on,
because they couldn't; wait, they would drop out of their saddles
presently, and we would get their horses and harness.  I could not
deceive such trusting simplicity, so I said it was a mistake; that
when my fireworks killed at all, they killed instantly; no, the men
would not die, there was something wrong about my apparatus,
I couldn't tell what; but we must hurry and get away, for those
people would attack us again, in a minute.  Sandy laughed, and said:

"Lack-a-day, sir, they be not of that breed!  Sir Launcelot will
give battle to dragons, and will abide by them, and will assail
them again, and yet again, and still again, until he do conquer
and destroy them; and so likewise will Sir Pellinore and Sir Aglovale
and Sir Carados, and mayhap others, but there be none else that
will venture it, let the idle say what the idle will.  And, la,
as to yonder base rufflers, think ye they have not their fill,
but yet desire more?"

"Well, then, what are they waiting for?  Why don't they leave?
Nobody's hindering.  Good land, I'm willing to let bygones be
bygones, I'm sure."

"Leave, is it?  Oh, give thyself easement as to that.  They dream
not of it, no, not they.  They wait to yield them."

"Come--really, is that 'sooth'--as you people say?  If they want to,
why don't they?"

"It would like them much; but an ye wot how dragons are esteemed,
ye would not hold them blamable. They fear to come."

"Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and--"

"Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming.  I will go."

And she did.  She was a handy person to have along on a raid.
I would have considered this a doubtful errand, myself.  I presently
saw the knights riding away, and Sandy coming back.  That was
a relief.  I judged she had somehow failed to get the first innings
--I mean in the conversation; otherwise the interview wouldn't have
been so short.  But it turned out that she had managed the business
well; in fact, admirably.  She said that when she told those people
I was The Boss, it hit them where they lived: "smote them sore
with fear and dread" was her word; and then they were ready to
put up with anything she might require.  So she swore them to appear
at Arthur's court within two days and yield them, with horse and
harness, and be my knights henceforth, and subject to my command.
How much better she managed that thing than I should have done
it myself!  She was a daisy.



CHAPTER XV

SANDY'S TALE

"And so I'm proprietor of some knights," said I, as we rode off.
"Who would ever have supposed that I should live to list up assets
of that sort.  I shan't know what to do with them; unless I raffle
them off.  How many of them are there, Sandy?"

"Seven, please you, sir, and their squires."

"It is a good haul.  Who are they?  Where do they hang out?"

"Where do they hang out?"

"Yes, where do they live?"

"Ah, I understood thee not.  That will I tell eftsoons."  Then she
said musingly, and softly, turning the words daintily over her
tongue: "Hang they out--hang they out--where hang--where do they
hang out; eh, right so; where do they hang out.  Of a truth the
phrase hath a fair and winsome grace, and is prettily worded
withal.  I will repeat it anon and anon in mine idlesse, whereby
I may peradventure learn it.  Where do they hang out.  Even so!
already it falleth trippingly from my tongue, and forasmuch as--"

"Don't forget the cowboys, Sandy."

"Cowboys?"

"Yes; the knights, you know: You were going to tell me about them.
A while back, you remember.  Figuratively speaking, game's called."

"Game--"

"Yes, yes, yes!  Go to the bat.  I mean, get to work on your
statistics, and don't burn so much kindling getting your fire
started.  Tell me about the knights."

"I will well, and lightly will begin.  So they two departed and
rode into a great forest.  And--"

"Great Scott!"

You see, I recognized my mistake at once.  I had set her works
a-going; it was my own fault; she would be thirty days getting down
to those facts.  And she generally began without a preface and
finished without a result.  If you interrupted her she would either
go right along without noticing, or answer with a couple of words,
and go back and say the sentence over again.  So, interruptions
only did harm; and yet I had to interrupt, and interrupt pretty
frequently, too, in order to save my life; a person would die if
he let her monotony drip on him right along all day.

"Great Scott!" I said in my distress.  She went right back and
began over again:

"So they two departed and rode into a great forest.  And--"

"_Which_ two?"

"Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine.  And so they came to an abbey of monks,
and there were well lodged.  So on the morn they heard their masses
in the abbey, and so they rode forth till they came to a great
forest; then was Sir Gawaine ware in a valley by a turret, of
twelve fair damsels, and two knights armed on great horses, and
the damsels went to and fro by a tree.  And then was Sir Gawaine
ware how there hung a white shield on that tree, and ever as the
damsels came by it they spit upon it, and some threw mire upon
the shield--"

"Now, if I hadn't seen the like myself in this country, Sandy,
I wouldn't believe it.  But I've seen it, and I can just see those
creatures now, parading before that shield and acting like that.
The women here do certainly act like all possessed.  Yes, and
I mean your best, too, society's very choicest brands.  The humblest
hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness,
patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land."

"Hello-girl?"

"Yes, but don't you ask me to explain; it's a new kind of a girl;
they don't have them here; one often speaks sharply to them when
they are not the least in fault, and he can't get over feeling
sorry for it and ashamed of himself in thirteen hundred years,
it's such shabby mean conduct and so unprovoked; the fact is,
no gentleman ever does it--though I--well, I myself, if I've got
to confess--"

"Peradventure she--"

"Never mind her; never mind her; I tell you I couldn't ever explain
her so you would understand."

"Even so be it, sith ye are so minded.  Then Sir Gawaine and
Sir Uwaine went and saluted them, and asked them why they did that
despite to the shield.  Sirs, said the damsels, we shall tell you.
There is a knight in this country that owneth this white shield,
and he is a passing good man of his hands, but he hateth all
ladies and gentlewomen, and therefore we do all this despite to
the shield.  I will say you, said Sir Gawaine, it beseemeth evil
a good knight to despise all ladies and gentlewomen, and peradventure
though he hate you he hath some cause, and peradventure he loveth
in some other places ladies and gentlewomen, and to be loved again,
and he such a man of prowess as ye speak of--"

"Man of prowess--yes, that is the man to please them, Sandy.
Man of brains--that is a thing they never think of.  Tom Sayers
--John Heenan--John L. Sullivan--pity but you could be here.  You
would have your legs under the Round Table and a 'Sir' in front
of your names within the twenty-four hours; and you could bring
about a new distribution of the married princesses and duchesses
of the Court in another twenty-four.  The fact is, it is just
a sort of polished-up court of Comanches, and there isn't a squaw
in it who doesn't stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert
to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt."

"--and he be such a man of prowess as ye speak of, said Sir Gawaine.
Now, what is his name?  Sir, said they, his name is Marhaus the
king's son of Ireland."

"Son of the king of Ireland, you mean; the other form doesn't mean
anything.  And look out and hold on tight, now, we must jump
this gully....  There, we are all right now.  This horse belongs in
the circus; he is born before his time."

"I know him well, said Sir Uwaine, he is a passing good knight as
any is on live."

"_On live_.  If you've got a fault in the world, Sandy, it is that
you are a shade too archaic.  But it isn't any matter."

"--for I saw him once proved at a justs where many knights were
gathered, and that time there might no man withstand him.  Ah, said
Sir Gawaine, damsels, methinketh ye are to blame, for it is to
suppose he that hung that shield there will not be long therefrom,
and then may those knights match him on horseback, and that is
more your worship than thus; for I will abide no longer to see
a knight's shield dishonored.  And therewith Sir Uwaine and
Sir Gawaine departed a little from them, and then were they ware
where Sir Marhaus came riding on a great horse straight toward
them.  And when the twelve damsels saw Sir Marhaus they fled into
the turret as they were wild, so that some of them fell by the way.
Then the one of the knights of the tower dressed his shield, and
said on high, Sir Marhaus defend thee.  And so they ran together
that the knight brake his spear on Marhaus, and Sir Marhaus smote
him so hard that he brake his neck and the horse's back--"

"Well, that is just the trouble about this state of things,
it ruins so many horses."

"That saw the other knight of the turret, and dressed him toward
Marhaus, and they went so eagerly together, that the knight of
the turret was soon smitten down, horse and man, stark dead--"

"_Another_ horse gone; I tell you it is a custom that ought to be
broken up.  I don't see how people with any feeling can applaud
and support it."

    .   .   .   .

"So these two knights came together with great random--"

I saw that I had been asleep and missed a chapter, but I didn't
say anything.  I judged that the Irish knight was in trouble with
the visitors by this time, and this turned out to be the case.

"--that Sir Uwaine smote Sir Marhaus that his spear brast in pieces
on the shield, and Sir Marhaus smote him so sore that horse and
man he bare to the earth, and hurt Sir Uwaine on the left side--"

"The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little _too_ simple;
the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions
suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas
of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about
them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all
alike: a couple of people come together with great random
--random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter, and
so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others,
but land! a body ought to discriminate--they come together with
great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield
and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail
and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in,
and brast _his_ spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down
_he_ goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake _his_ neck,
and then there's another elected, and another and another and still
another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to
figure up results, you can't tell one fight from another, nor who
whipped; and as a _picture_, of living, raging, roaring battle,
sho! why, it's pale and noiseless--just ghosts scuffling in a fog.
Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest
spectacle?--the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance?
Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy
brast a window, fireman brake his neck!'  Why, _that_ ain't a picture!"

It was a good deal of a lecture, I thought, but it didn't disturb
Sandy, didn't turn a feather; her steam soared steadily up again,
the minute I took off the lid:

"Then Sir Marhaus turned his horse and rode toward Gawaine with
his spear.  And when Sir Gawaine saw that, he dressed his shield,
and they aventred their spears, and they came together with all
the might of their horses, that either knight smote other so hard
in the midst of their shields, but Sir Gawaine's spear brake--"

"I knew it would."

--"but Sir Marhaus's spear held; and therewith Sir Gawaine and
his horse rushed down to the earth--"

"Just so--and brake his back."

--"and lightly Sir Gawaine rose upon his feet and pulled out
his sword, and dressed him toward Sir Marhaus on foot, and therewith
either came unto other eagerly, and smote together with their
swords, that their shields flew in cantels, and they bruised their
helms and their hauberks, and wounded either other.  But Sir Gawaine,
fro it passed nine of the clock, waxed by the space of three hours
ever stronger and stronger and thrice his might was increased.
All this espied Sir Marhaus, and had great wonder how his might
increased, and so they wounded other passing sore; and then when
it was come noon--"

The pelting sing-song of it carried me forward to scenes and
sounds of my boyhood days:

"N-e-e-ew Haven! ten minutes for refreshments--knductr'll strike
the gong-bell two minutes before train leaves--passengers for
the Shore line please take seats in the rear k'yar, this k'yar
don't go no furder--_ahh_-pls, _aw_-rnjz, b'_nan_ners,
_s-a-n-d_'ches, p--_op_-corn!"

--"and waxed past noon and drew toward evensong.  Sir Gawaine's
strength feebled and waxed passing faint, that unnethes he might
dure any longer, and Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger--"

"Which strained his armor, of course; and yet little would one
of these people mind a small thing like that."

--"and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have well felt that
ye are a passing good knight, and a marvelous man of might as ever
I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and
therefore it were a pity to do you hurt, for I feel you are passing
feeble.  Ah, said Sir Gawaine, gentle knight, ye say the word
that I should say.  And therewith they took off their helms and
either kissed other, and there they swore together either to love
other as brethren--"

But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking
about what a pity it was that men with such superb strength
--strength enabling them to stand up cased in cruelly burdensome
iron and drenched with perspiration, and hack and batter and bang
each other for six hours on a stretch--should not have been born
at a time when they could put it to some useful purpose.  Take
a jackass, for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength, and
puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because
he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is
a jackass.  It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should
never have been attempted in the first place.  And yet, once you
start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is
going to come of it.

When I came to myself again and began to listen, I perceived that
I had lost another chapter, and that Alisande had wandered a long
way off with her people.

"And so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones,
and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was
the head of the stream, a fair fountain, and three damsels sitting
thereby. In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight
since it was christened, but he found strange adventures--"

"This is not good form, Alisande.  Sir Marhaus the king's son of
Ireland talks like all the rest; you ought to give him a brogue,
or at least a characteristic expletive; by this means one would
recognize him as soon as he spoke, without his ever being named.
It is a common literary device with the great authors.  You should
make him say, 'In this country, be jabers, came never knight since
it was christened, but he found strange adventures, be jabers.'
You see how much better that sounds."

--"came never knight but he found strange adventures, be jabers.
Of a truth it doth indeed, fair lord, albeit 'tis passing hard
to say, though peradventure that will not tarry but better speed
with usage.  And then they rode to the damsels, and either saluted
other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and
she was threescore winter of age or more--"

"The _damsel_ was?"

"Even so, dear lord--and her hair was white under the garland--"

"Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not--the loose-fit
kind, that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and
fall out when you laugh."

"The second damsel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of
gold about her head.  The third damsel was but fifteen year of age--"

Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded
out of my hearing!

Fifteen!  Break--my heart! oh, my lost darling!  Just her age
who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom
I shall never see again!  How the thought of her carries me back
over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many,
many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft summer
mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say "Hello, Central!"
just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a
"Hello, Hank!" that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.
She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.

I could not follow Alisande's further explanation of who our
captured knights were, now--I mean in case she should ever get
to explaining who they were.  My interest was gone, my thoughts
were far away, and sad.  By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale,
caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague
way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels
up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east,
the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after
year and day.  Year and day--and without baggage.  It was of
a piece with the general simplicity of the country.

The sun was now setting.  It was about three in the afternoon when
Alisande had begun to tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made
pretty good progress with it--for her.  She would arrive some time
or other, no doubt, but she was not a person who could be hurried.

We were approaching a castle which stood on high ground; a huge,
strong, venerable structure, whose gray towers and battlements were
charmingly draped with ivy, and whose whole majestic mass was
drenched with splendors flung from the sinking sun.  It was the
largest castle we had seen, and so I thought it might be the one
we were after, but Sandy said no.  She did not know who owned it;
she said she had passed it without calling, when she went down
to Camelot.



CHAPTER XVI

MORGAN LE FAY

If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable
places to seek hospitality in.  As a matter of fact, knights errant
were _not_ persons to be believed--that is, measured by modern
standards of veracity; yet, measured by the standards of their own
time, and scaled accordingly, you got the truth.  It was very
simple: you discounted a statement ninety-seven per cent; the rest
was fact.  Now after making this allowance, the truth remained
that if I could find out something about a castle before ringing
the door-bell--I mean hailing the warders--it was the sensible
thing to do.  So I was pleased when I saw in the distance a horseman
making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from this castle.

As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet,
and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious
addition also--a stiff square garment like a herald's tabard.
However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer
and read this sign on his tabard:

  "Persimmon's Soap -- All the Prime-Donna Use It."

That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes
in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation.  In the
first place, it was a furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense
of knight errantry, though nobody suspected that but me.  I had
started a number of these people out--the bravest knights I could
get--each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device
or another, and I judged that by and by when they got to be numerous
enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then, even the
steel-clad ass that _hadn't_ any board would himself begin to look
ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.

Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating
suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness
among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people,
if the priests could be kept quiet.  This would undermine the Church.
I mean would be a step toward that.  Next, education--next, freedom
--and then she would begin to crumble.  It being my conviction that
any Established Church is an established crime, an established
slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in
any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it.  Why, in my
own former day--in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb
of time--there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been
born in a free country: a "free" country with the Corporation Act
and the Test still in force in it--timbers propped against men's
liberties and dishonored consciences to shore up an Established
Anachronism with.

My missionaries were taught to spell out the gilt signs on their
tabards--the showy gilding was a neat idea, I could have got the
king to wear a bulletin-board for the sake of that barbaric
splendor--they were to spell out these signs and then explain to
the lords and ladies what soap was; and if the lords and ladies
were afraid of it, get them to try it on a dog.  The missionary's
next move was to get the family together and try it on himself;
he was to stop at no experiment, however desperate, that could
convince the nobility that soap was harmless; if any final doubt
remained, he must catch a hermit--the woods were full of them;
saints they called themselves, and saints they were believed to be.
They were unspeakably holy, and worked miracles, and everybody
stood in awe of them.  If a hermit could survive a wash, and that
failed to convince a duke, give him up, let him alone.

Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant on the road
they washed him, and when he got well they swore him to go and
get a bulletin-board and disseminate soap and civilization the rest
of his days.  As a consequence the workers in the field were
increasing by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading.
My soap factory felt the strain early.  At first I had only two
hands; but before I had left home I was already employing fifteen,
and running night and day; and the atmospheric result was getting
so pronounced that the king went sort of fainting and gasping
around and said he did not believe he could stand it much longer,
and Sir Launcelot got so that he did hardly anything but walk up
and down the roof and swear, although I told him it was worse up
there than anywhere else, but he said he wanted plenty of air; and
he was always complaining that a palace was no place for a soap
factory anyway, and said if a man was to start one in his house
he would be damned if he wouldn't strangle him.  There were ladies
present, too, but much these people ever cared for that; they would
swear before children, if the wind was their way when the factory
was going.

This missionary knight's name was La Cote Male Taile, and he said
that this castle was the abode of Morgan le Fay, sister of
King Arthur, and wife of King Uriens, monarch of a realm about
as big as the District of Columbia--you could stand in the middle
of it and throw bricks into the next kingdom.  "Kings" and "Kingdoms"
were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in
Joshua's time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up
because they couldn't stretch out without a passport.

La Cote was much depressed, for he had scored here the worst
failure of his campaign.  He had not worked off a cake; yet he had
tried all the tricks of the trade, even to the washing of a hermit;
but the hermit died.  This was, indeed, a bad failure, for this
animal would now be dubbed a martyr, and would take his place
among the saints of the Roman calendar.  Thus made he his moan,
this poor Sir La Cote Male Taile, and sorrowed passing sore.  And
so my heart bled for him, and I was moved to comfort and stay him.
Wherefore I said:

"Forbear to grieve, fair knight, for this is not a defeat.  We have
brains, you and I; and for such as have brains there are no defeats,
but only victories.  Observe how we will turn this seeming disaster
into an advertisement; an advertisement for our soap; and the
biggest one, to draw, that was ever thought of; an advertisement
that will transform that Mount Washington defeat into a Matterhorn
victory.  We will put on your bulletin-board, '_Patronized by the
elect_.'  How does that strike you?"

"Verily, it is wonderly bethought!"

"Well, a body is bound to admit that for just a modest little
one-line ad, it's a corker."

So the poor colporteur's griefs vanished away.  He was a brave
fellow, and had done mighty feats of arms in his time.  His chief
celebrity rested upon the events of an excursion like this one
of mine, which he had once made with a damsel named Maledisant,
who was as handy with her tongue as was Sandy, though in a different
way, for her tongue churned forth only railings and insult, whereas
Sandy's music was of a kindlier sort.  I knew his story well, and so
I knew how to interpret the compassion that was in his face when he
bade me farewell.  He supposed I was having a bitter hard time of it.

Sandy and I discussed his story, as we rode along, and she said
that La Cote's bad luck had begun with the very beginning of that
trip; for the king's fool had overthrown him on the first day,
and in such cases it was customary for the girl to desert to the
conqueror, but Maledisant didn't do it; and also persisted afterward
in sticking to him, after all his defeats.  But, said I, suppose
the victor should decline to accept his spoil?  She said that that
wouldn't answer--he must.  He couldn't decline; it wouldn't be
regular.  I made a note of that.  If Sandy's music got to be too
burdensome, some time, I would let a knight defeat me, on the chance
that she would desert to him.

In due time we were challenged by the warders, from the castle
walls, and after a parley admitted.  I have nothing pleasant to
tell about that visit.  But it was not a disappointment, for I knew
Mrs. le Fay by reputation, and was not expecting anything pleasant.
She was held in awe by the whole realm, for she had made everybody
believe she was a great sorceress.  All her ways were wicked, all
her instincts devilish.  She was loaded to the eyelids with cold
malice.  All her history was black with crime; and among her crimes
murder was common.  I was most curious to see her; as curious as
I could have been to see Satan.  To my surprise she was beautiful;
black thoughts had failed to make her expression repulsive, age
had failed to wrinkle her satin skin or mar its bloomy freshness.
She could have passed for old Uriens' granddaughter, she could
have been mistaken for sister to her own son.

As soon as we were fairly within the castle gates we were ordered
into her presence.  King Uriens was there, a kind-faced old man
with a subdued look; and also the son, Sir Uwaine le Blanchemains,
in whom I was, of course, interested on account of the tradition
that he had once done battle with thirty knights, and also on
account of his trip with Sir Gawaine and Sir Marhaus, which Sandy
had been aging me with.  But Morgan was the main attraction, the
conspicuous personality here; she was head chief of this household,
that was plain.  She caused us to be seated, and then she began,
with all manner of pretty graces and graciousnesses, to ask me
questions.  Dear me, it was like a bird or a flute, or something,
talking.  I felt persuaded that this woman must have been
misrepresented, lied about.  She trilled along, and trilled along,
and presently a handsome young page, clothed like the rainbow, and
as easy and undulatory of movement as a wave, came with something
on a golden salver, and, kneeling to present it to her, overdid
his graces and lost his balance, and so fell lightly against her
knee.  She slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as
another person would have harpooned a rat!

Poor child! he slumped to the floor, twisted his silken limbs in
one great straining contortion of pain, and was dead.  Out of the
old king was wrung an involuntary "O-h!" of compassion.  The look
he got, made him cut it suddenly short and not put any more hyphens
in it.  Sir Uwaine, at a sign from his mother, went to the anteroom
and called some servants, and meanwhile madame went rippling sweetly
along with her talk.

I saw that she was a good housekeeper, for while she talked she
kept a corner of her eye on the servants to see that they made
no balks in handling the body and getting it out; when they came
with fresh clean towels, she sent back for the other kind; and
when they had finished wiping the floor and were going, she indicated
a crimson fleck the size of a tear which their duller eyes had
overlooked.  It was plain to me that La Cote Male Taile had failed
to see the mistress of the house.  Often, how louder and clearer
than any tongue, does dumb circumstantial evidence speak.

Morgan le Fay rippled along as musically as ever.  Marvelous woman.
And what a glance she had: when it fell in reproof upon those
servants, they shrunk and quailed as timid people do when the
lightning flashes out of a cloud.  I could have got the habit
myself.  It was the same with that poor old Brer Uriens; he was
always on the ragged edge of apprehension; she could not even turn
toward him but he winced.

In the midst of the talk I let drop a complimentary word about
King Arthur, forgetting for the moment how this woman hated her
brother.  That one little compliment was enough.  She clouded up
like storm; she called for her guards, and said:

"Hale me these varlets to the dungeons."

That struck cold on my ears, for her dungeons had a reputation.
Nothing occurred to me to say--or do.  But not so with Sandy.
As the guard laid a hand upon me, she piped up with the tranquilest
confidence, and said:

"God's wounds, dost thou covet destruction, thou maniac?  It is
The Boss!"

Now what a happy idea that was!--and so simple; yet it would never
have occurred to me.  I was born modest; not all over, but in spots;
and this was one of the spots.

The effect upon madame was electrical.  It cleared her countenance
and brought back her smiles and all her persuasive graces and
blandishments; but nevertheless she was not able to entirely cover up
with them the fact that she was in a ghastly fright. She said:

"La, but do list to thine handmaid! as if one gifted with powers
like to mine might say the thing which I have said unto one who
has vanquished Merlin, and not be jesting.  By mine enchantments
I foresaw your coming, and by them I knew you when you entered
here.  I did but play this little jest with hope to surprise you
into some display of your art, as not doubting you would blast
the guards with occult fires, consuming them to ashes on the spot,
a marvel much beyond mine own ability, yet one which I have long
been childishly curious to see."

The guards were less curious, and got out as soon as they got permission.



CHAPTER XVII

A ROYAL BANQUET

Madame, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no doubt judged that
I was deceived by her excuse; for her fright dissolved away, and
she was soon so importunate to have me give an exhibition and kill
somebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing.  However, to my
relief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers.  I will
say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous,
rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and
enthusiastically religious.  Nothing could divert them from the
regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the
Church.  More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his
enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat;
more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching
his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give
thanks, without even waiting to rob the body.  There was to be
nothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini,
that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later.  All the nobles of
Britain, with their families, attended divine service morning and
night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of them
had family worship five or six times a day besides.  The credit
of this belonged entirely to the Church.  Although I was no friend
to that Catholic Church, I was obliged to admit this.  And often,
in spite of me, I found myself saying, "What would this country
be without the Church?"

After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting hall which was
lighted by hundreds of grease-jets, and everything was as fine and
lavish and rudely splendid as might become the royal degree of the
hosts.  At the head of the hall, on a dais, was the table of the
king, queen, and their son, Prince Uwaine.  Stretching down the hall
from this, was the general table, on the floor.  At this, above
the salt, sat the visiting nobles and the grown members of their
families, of both sexes,--the resident Court, in effect--sixty-one
persons; below the salt sat minor officers of the household, with
their principal subordinates: altogether a hundred and eighteen
persons sitting, and about as many liveried servants standing
behind their chairs, or serving in one capacity or another.  It was
a very fine show.  In a gallery a band with cymbals, horns, harps,
and other horrors, opened the proceedings with what seemed to be
the crude first-draft or original agony of the wail known to later
centuries as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye."  It was new, and ought
to have been rehearsed a little more.  For some reason or other
the queen had the composer hanged, after dinner.

After this music, the priest who stood behind the royal table said
a noble long grace in ostensible Latin.  Then the battalion of
waiters broke away from their posts, and darted, rushed, flew,
fetched and carried, and the mighty feeding began; no words
anywhere, but absorbing attention to business.  The rows of chops
opened and shut in vast unison, and the sound of it was like to
the muffled burr of subterranean machinery.

The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unimaginable was the
destruction of substantials.  Of the chief feature of the feast
--the huge wild boar that lay stretched out so portly and imposing
at the start--nothing was left but the semblance of a hoop-skirt;
and he was but the type and symbol of what had happened to all
the other dishes.

With the pastries and so on, the heavy drinking began--and the talk.
Gallon after gallon of wine and mead disappeared, and everybody
got comfortable, then happy, then sparklingly joyous--both sexes,
--and by and by pretty noisy.  Men told anecdotes that were terrific
to hear, but nobody blushed; and when the nub was sprung, the
assemblage let go with a horse-laugh that shook the fortress.
Ladies answered back with historiettes that would almost have made
Queen Margaret of Navarre or even the great Elizabeth of England
hide behind a handkerchief, but nobody hid here, but only laughed
--howled, you may say.  In pretty much all of these dreadful stories,
ecclesiastics were the hardy heroes, but that didn't worry the
chaplain any, he had his laugh with the rest; more than that, upon
invitation he roared out a song which was of as daring a sort as
any that was sung that night.

By midnight everybody was fagged out, and sore with laughing; and,
as a rule, drunk: some weepingly, some affectionately, some
hilariously, some quarrelsomely, some dead and under the table.
Of the ladies, the worst spectacle was a lovely young duchess, whose
wedding-eve this was; and indeed she was a spectacle, sure enough.
Just as she was she could have sat in advance for the portrait of the
young daughter of the Regent d'Orleans, at the famous dinner whence
she was carried, foul-mouthed, intoxicated, and helpless, to her bed,
in the lost and lamented days of the Ancient Regime.

Suddenly, even while the priest was lifting his hands, and all
conscious heads were bowed in reverent expectation of the coming
blessing, there appeared under the arch of the far-off door at
the bottom of the hall an old and bent and white-haired lady,
leaning upon a crutch-stick; and she lifted the stick and pointed it
toward the queen and cried out:

"The wrath and curse of God fall upon you, woman without pity,
who have slain mine innocent grandchild and made desolate this
old heart that had nor chick, nor friend nor stay nor comfort in
all this world but him!"

Everybody crossed himself in a grisly fright, for a curse was an
awful thing to those people; but the queen rose up majestic, with
the death-light in her eye, and flung back this ruthless command:

"Lay hands on her!  To the stake with her!"

The guards left their posts to obey.  It was a shame; it was a
cruel thing to see.  What could be done?  Sandy gave me a look;
I knew she had another inspiration.  I said:

"Do what you choose."

She was up and facing toward the queen in a moment.  She indicated
me, and said:

"Madame, _he_ saith this may not be.  Recall the commandment, or he
will dissolve the castle and it shall vanish away like the instable
fabric of a dream!"

Confound it, what a crazy contract to pledge a person to!  What if
the queen--

But my consternation subsided there, and my panic passed off;
for the queen, all in a collapse, made no show of resistance but
gave a countermanding sign and sunk into her seat.  When she reached
it she was sober.  So were many of the others.  The assemblage rose,
whiffed ceremony to the winds, and rushed for the door like a mob;
overturning chairs, smashing crockery, tugging, struggling,
shouldering, crowding--anything to get out before I should change
my mind and puff the castle into the measureless dim vacancies of
space.  Well, well, well, they _were_ a superstitious lot.  It is
all a body can do to conceive of it.

The poor queen was so scared and humbled that she was even afraid
to hang the composer without first consulting me.  I was very sorry
for her--indeed, any one would have been, for she was really
suffering; so I was willing to do anything that was reasonable, and
had no desire to carry things to wanton extremities.  I therefore
considered the matter thoughtfully, and ended by having the
musicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye and
Bye again, which they did.  Then I saw that she was right, and
gave her permission to hang the whole band.  This little relaxation
of sternness had a good effect upon the queen.  A statesman gains
little by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad authority upon all
occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his
subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength.  A little
concession, now and then, where it can do no harm, is the wiser policy.

Now that the queen was at ease in her mind once more, and measurably
happy, her wine naturally began to assert itself again, and it got
a little the start of her.  I mean it set her music going--her silver
bell of a tongue.  Dear me, she was a master talker.  It would not
become me to suggest that it was pretty late and that I was a tired
man and very sleepy.  I wished I had gone off to bed when I had
the chance.  Now I must stick it out; there was no other way.  So
she tinkled along and along, in the otherwise profound and ghostly
hush of the sleeping castle, until by and by there came, as if
from deep down under us, a far-away sound, as of a muffled shriek
--with an expression of agony about it that made my flesh crawl.
The queen stopped, and her eyes lighted with pleasure; she tilted
her graceful head as a bird does when it listens.  The sound bored
its way up through the stillness again.

"What is it?" I said.

"It is truly a stubborn soul, and endureth long.  It is many hours now."

"Endureth what?"

"The rack.  Come--ye shall see a blithe sight.  An he yield not
his secret now, ye shall see him torn asunder."

What a silky smooth hellion she was; and so composed and serene,
when the cords all down my legs were hurting in sympathy with that
man's pain.  Conducted by mailed guards bearing flaring torches,
we tramped along echoing corridors, and down stone stairways dank
and dripping, and smelling of mould and ages of imprisoned night
--a chill, uncanny journey and a long one, and not made the shorter
or the cheerier by the sorceress's talk, which was about this
sufferer and his crime.  He had been accused by an anonymous
informer, of having killed a stag in the royal preserves.  I said:

"Anonymous testimony isn't just the right thing, your Highness.
It were fairer to confront the accused with the accuser."

"I had not thought of that, it being but of small consequence.
But an I would, I could not, for that the accuser came masked by
night, and told the forester, and straightway got him hence again,
and so the forester knoweth him not."

"Then is this Unknown the only person who saw the stag killed?"

"Marry, _no_ man _saw_ the killing, but this Unknown saw this hardy
wretch near to the spot where the stag lay, and came with right
loyal zeal and betrayed him to the forester."

"So the Unknown was near the dead stag, too?  Isn't it just possible
that he did the killing himself?  His loyal zeal--in a mask--looks
just a shade suspicious.  But what is your highness's idea for
racking the prisoner?  Where is the profit?"

"He will not confess, else; and then were his soul lost.  For his
crime his life is forfeited by the law--and of a surety will I see
that he payeth it!--but it were peril to my own soul to let him
die unconfessed and unabsolved.  Nay, I were a fool to fling me
into hell for _his_ accommodation."

"But, your Highness, suppose he has nothing to confess?"

"As to that, we shall see, anon.  An I rack him to death and he
confess not, it will peradventure show that he had indeed naught
to confess--ye will grant that that is sooth?  Then shall I not be
damned for an unconfessed man that had naught to confess
--wherefore, I shall be safe."

It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time.  It was useless to
argue with her.  Arguments have no chance against petrified
training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.  And
her training was everybody's.  The brightest intellect in the land
would not have been able to see that her position was defective.

As we entered the rack-cell I caught a picture that will not go
from me; I wish it would.  A native young giant of thirty or
thereabouts lay stretched upon the frame on his back, with his
wrists and ankles tied to ropes which led over windlasses at either
end.  There was no color in him; his features were contorted and
set, and sweat-drops stood upon his forehead.  A priest bent over
him on each side; the executioner stood by; guards were on duty;
smoking torches stood in sockets along the walls; in a corner
crouched a poor young creature, her face drawn with anguish,
a half-wild and hunted look in her eyes, and in her lap lay a little
child asleep.  Just as we stepped across the threshold the
executioner gave his machine a slight turn, which wrung a cry
from both the prisoner and the woman; but I shouted, and the
executioner released the strain without waiting to see who spoke.
I could not let this horror go on; it would have killed me to
see it.  I asked the queen to let me clear the place and speak
to the prisoner privately; and when she was going to object I spoke
in a low voice and said I did not want to make a scene before
her servants, but I must have my way; for I was King Arthur's
representative, and was speaking in his name.  She saw she had
to yield.  I asked her to indorse me to these people, and then
leave me.  It was not pleasant for her, but she took the pill;
and even went further than I was meaning to require.  I only wanted
the backing of her own authority; but she said:

"Ye will do in all things as this lord shall command.  It is The Boss."

It was certainly a good word to conjure with: you could see it
by the squirming of these rats.  The queen's guards fell into line,
and she and they marched away, with their torch-bearers, and woke
the echoes of the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of their
retreating footfalls.  I had the prisoner taken from the rack and
placed upon his bed, and medicaments applied to his hurts, and
wine given him to drink.  The woman crept near and looked on,
eagerly, lovingly, but timorously,--like one who fears a repulse;
indeed, she tried furtively to touch the man's forehead, and jumped
back, the picture of fright, when I turned unconsciously toward
her.  It was pitiful to see.

"Lord," I said, "stroke him, lass, if you want to.  Do anything
you're a mind to; don't mind me."

Why, her eyes were as grateful as an animal's, when you do it
a kindness that it understands.  The baby was out of her way and
she had her cheek against the man's in a minute and her hands
fondling his hair, and her happy tears running down.  The man
revived and caressed his wife with his eyes, which was all he
could do.  I judged I might clear the den, now, and I did; cleared
it of all but the family and myself.  Then I said:

"Now, my friend, tell me your side of this matter; I know
the other side."

The man moved his head in sign of refusal.  But the woman looked
pleased--as it seemed to me--pleased with my suggestion.  I went on--

"You know of me?"

"Yes.  All do, in Arthur's realms."

"If my reputation has come to you right and straight, you should
not be afraid to speak."

The woman broke in, eagerly:

"Ah, fair my lord, do thou persuade him!  Thou canst an thou wilt.
Ah, he suffereth so; and it is for me--for _me_!  And how can I bear it?
I would I might see him die--a sweet, swift death; oh, my Hugo,
I cannot bear this one!"

And she fell to sobbing and grovelling about my feet, and still
imploring.  Imploring what?  The man's death?  I could not quite
get the bearings of the thing.  But Hugo interrupted her and said:

"Peace!  Ye wit not what ye ask.  Shall I starve whom I love,
to win a gentle death?  I wend thou knewest me better."

"Well," I said, "I can't quite make this out.  It is a puzzle.  Now--"

"Ah, dear my lord, an ye will but persuade him!  Consider how
these his tortures wound me!  Oh, and he will not speak!--whereas,
the healing, the solace that lie in a blessed swift death--"

"What _are_ you maundering about?  He's going out from here a free
man and whole--he's not going to die."

The man's white face lit up, and the woman flung herself at me
in a most surprising explosion of joy, and cried out:

"He is saved!--for it is the king's word by the mouth of the king's
servant--Arthur, the king whose word is gold!"

"Well, then you do believe I can be trusted, after all.  Why
didn't you before?"

"Who doubted?  Not I, indeed; and not she."

"Well, why wouldn't you tell me your story, then?"

"Ye had made no promise; else had it been otherwise."

"I see, I see....  And yet I believe I don't quite see, after all.
You stood the torture and refused to confess; which shows plain
enough to even the dullest understanding that you had nothing
to confess--"

"I, my lord?  How so?  It was I that killed the deer!"

"You _did_?  Oh, dear, this is the most mixed-up business that ever--"

"Dear lord, I begged him on my knees to confess, but--"

"You _did_!  It gets thicker and thicker.  What did you want him
to do that for?"

"Sith it would bring him a quick death and save him all this
cruel pain."

"Well--yes, there is reason in that.  But _he_ didn't want the
quick death."

"He?  Why, of a surety he _did_."

"Well, then, why in the world _didn't_ he confess?"

"Ah, sweet sir, and leave my wife and chick without bread and shelter?"

"Oh, heart of gold, now I see it!  The bitter law takes the convicted
man's estate and beggars his widow and his orphans.  They could
torture you to death, but without conviction or confession they
could not rob your wife and baby.  You stood by them like a man;
and _you_--true wife and the woman that you are--you would have
bought him release from torture at cost to yourself of slow
starvation and death--well, it humbles a body to think what your
sex can do when it comes to self-sacrifice.  I'll book you both
for my colony; you'll like it there; it's a Factory where I'm going
to turn groping and grubbing automata into _men_."



CHAPTER XVIII

IN THE QUEEN'S DUNGEONS

Well, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent to his home.
I had a great desire to rack the executioner; not because he was
a good, painstaking and paingiving official,--for surely it was
not to his discredit that he performed his functions well--but to
pay him back for wantonly cuffing and otherwise distressing that
young woman.  The priests told me about this, and were generously
hot to have him punished.  Something of this disagreeable sort
was turning up every now and then.  I mean, episodes that showed
that not all priests were frauds and self-seekers, but that many,
even the great majority, of these that were down on the ground
among the common people, were sincere and right-hearted, and
devoted to the alleviation of human troubles and sufferings.
Well, it was a thing which could not be helped, so I seldom fretted
about it, and never many minutes at a time; it has never been my
way to bother much about things which you can't cure.  But I did
not like it, for it was just the sort of thing to keep people
reconciled to an Established Church.  We _must_ have a religion
--it goes without saying--but my idea is, to have it cut up into
forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been
the case in the United States in my time.  Concentration of power
in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is
only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed,
cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and
does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered
condition.  That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was only
an opinion--my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't
worth any more than the pope's--or any less, for that matter.

Well, I couldn't rack the executioner, neither would I overlook
the just complaint of the priests.  The man must be punished
somehow or other, so I degraded him from his office and made him
leader of the band--the new one that was to be started.  He begged
hard, and said he couldn't play--a plausible excuse, but too thin;
there wasn't a musician in the country that could.

The queen was a good deal outraged, next morning when she found
she was going to have neither Hugo's life nor his property.  But
I told her she must bear this cross; that while by law and custom
she certainly was entitled to both the man's life and his property,
there were extenuating circumstances, and so in Arthur the king's
name I had pardoned him.  The deer was ravaging the man's fields,
and he had killed it in sudden passion, and not for gain; and he
had carried it into the royal forest in the hope that that might make
detection of the misdoer impossible.  Confound her, I couldn't
make her see that sudden passion is an extenuating circumstance
in the killing of venison--or of a person--so I gave it up and let
her sulk it out.  I _did_ think I was going to make her see it by
remarking that her own sudden passion in the case of the page
modified that crime.

"Crime!" she exclaimed.  "How thou talkest!  Crime, forsooth!
Man, I am going to _pay_ for him!"

Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her.  Training--training is
everything; training is all there is _to_ a person.  We speak of
nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we
call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training.
We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are
transmitted to us, trained into us.  All that is original in us,
and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be
covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the
rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession
of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam
or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously
and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.  And as for me,
all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this
pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly
live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one
microscopic atom in me that is truly _me_: the rest may land in
Sheol and welcome for all I care.

No, confound her, her intellect was good, she had brains enough,
but her training made her an ass--that is, from a many-centuries-later
point of view.  To kill the page was no crime--it was her right;
and upon her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of offense.
She was a result of generations of training in the unexamined and
unassailed belief that the law which permitted her to kill a subject
when she chose was a perfectly right and righteous one.

Well, we must give even Satan his due.  She deserved a compliment
for one thing; and I tried to pay it, but the words stuck in my
throat.  She had a right to kill the boy, but she was in no wise
obliged to pay for him.  That was law for some other people, but
not for her.  She knew quite well that she was doing a large and
generous thing to pay for that lad, and that I ought in common
fairness to come out with something handsome about it, but I
couldn't--my mouth refused.  I couldn't help seeing, in my fancy,
that poor old grandma with the broken heart, and that fair young
creature lying butchered, his little silken pomps and vanities
laced with his golden blood.  How could she _pay_ for him!  _Whom_
could she pay?  And so, well knowing that this woman, trained
as she had been, deserved praise, even adulation, I was yet not
able to utter it, trained as I had been.  The best I could do was
to fish up a compliment from outside, so to speak--and the pity
of it was, that it was true:

"Madame, your people will adore you for this."

Quite true, but I meant to hang her for it some day if I lived.
Some of those laws were too bad, altogether too bad.  A master
might kill his slave for nothing--for mere spite, malice, or
to pass the time--just as we have seen that the crowned head could
do it with _his_ slave, that is to say, anybody.  A gentleman could
kill a free commoner, and pay for him--cash or garden-truck.
A noble could kill a noble without expense, as far as the law was
concerned, but reprisals in kind were to be expected.  _Any_body
could kill _some_body, except the commoner and the slave; these had
no privileges.  If they killed, it was murder, and the law wouldn't
stand murder.  It made short work of the experimenter--and of
his family, too, if he murdered somebody who belonged up among
the ornamental ranks.  If a commoner gave a noble even so much
as a Damiens-scratch which didn't kill or even hurt, he got Damiens'
dose for it just the same; they pulled him to rags and tatters
with horses, and all the world came to see the show, and crack
jokes, and have a good time; and some of the performances of the
best people present were as tough, and as properly unprintable,
as any that have been printed by the pleasant Casanova in his
chapter about the dismemberment of Louis XV's poor awkward enemy.

I had had enough of this grisly place by this time, and wanted
to leave, but I couldn't, because I had something on my mind that
my conscience kept prodding me about, and wouldn't let me forget.
If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn't have any conscience.
It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person;
and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot
be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have
less good and more comfort.  Still, this is only my opinion, and
I am only one man; others, with less experience, may think
differently.  They have a right to their view.  I only stand
to this: I have noticed my conscience for many years, and I know
it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started
with.  I suppose that in the beginning I prized it, because we
prize anything that is ours; and yet how foolish it was to think so.
If we look at it in another way, we see how absurd it is: if I had
an anvil in me would I prize it?  Of course not.  And yet when you
come to think, there is no real difference between a conscience
and an anvil--I mean for comfort.  I have noticed it a thousand
times.  And you could dissolve an anvil with acids, when you
couldn't stand it any longer; but there isn't any way that you can
work off a conscience--at least so it will stay worked off; not
that I know of, anyway.

There was something I wanted to do before leaving, but it was
a disagreeable matter, and I hated to go at it.  Well, it bothered
me all the morning.  I could have mentioned it to the old king,
but what would be the use?--he was but an extinct volcano; he had
been active in his time, but his fire was out, this good while,
he was only a stately ash-pile now; gentle enough, and kindly
enough for my purpose, without doubt, but not usable.  He was
nothing, this so-called king: the queen was the only power there.
And she was a Vesuvius.  As a favor, she might consent to warm
a flock of sparrows for you, but then she might take that very
opportunity to turn herself loose and bury a city.  However,
I reflected that as often as any other way, when you are expecting
the worst, you get something that is not so bad, after all.

So I braced up and placed my matter before her royal Highness.
I said I had been having a general jail-delivery at Camelot and
among neighboring castles, and with her permission I would like
to examine her collection, her bric-a-brac--that is to say, her
prisoners.  She resisted; but I was expecting that.  But she finally
consented.  I was expecting that, too, but not so soon.  That about
ended my discomfort.  She called her guards and torches, and
we went down into the dungeons.  These were down under the castle's
foundations, and mainly were small cells hollowed out of the living
rock.  Some of these cells had no light at all.  In one of them was
a woman, in foul rags, who sat on the ground, and would not answer
a question or speak a word, but only looked up at us once or twice,
through a cobweb of tangled hair, as if to see what casual thing
it might be that was disturbing with sound and light the meaningless
dull dream that was become her life; after that, she sat bowed,
with her dirt-caked fingers idly interlocked in her lap, and gave
no further sign.  This poor rack of bones was a woman of middle
age, apparently; but only apparently; she had been there nine
years, and was eighteen when she entered.  She was a commoner,
and had been sent here on her bridal night by Sir Breuse Sance Pite,
a neighboring lord whose vassal her father was, and to which said
lord she had refused what has since been called le droit du
seigneur, and, moreover, had opposed violence to violence and spilt
half a gill of his almost sacred blood.  The young husband had
interfered at that point, believing the bride's life in danger,
and had flung the noble out into the midst of the humble and
trembling wedding guests, in the parlor, and left him there
astonished at this strange treatment, and implacably embittered
against both bride and groom.  The said lord being cramped for
dungeon-room had asked the queen to accommodate his two criminals,
and here in her bastile they had been ever since; hither, indeed,
they had come before their crime was an hour old, and had never
seen each other since.  Here they were, kenneled like toads in the
same rock; they had passed nine pitch dark years within fifty feet
of each other, yet neither knew whether the other was alive or not.
All the first years, their only question had been--asked with
beseechings and tears that might have moved stones, in time,
perhaps, but hearts are not stones: "Is he alive?"  "Is she alive?"
But they had never got an answer; and at last that question was
not asked any more--or any other.

I wanted to see the man, after hearing all this.  He was thirty-four
years old, and looked sixty.  He sat upon a squared block of
stone, with his head bent down, his forearms resting on his knees,
his long hair hanging like a fringe before his face, and he was
muttering to himself.  He raised his chin and looked us slowly
over, in a listless dull way, blinking with the distress of the
torchlight, then dropped his head and fell to muttering again
and took no further notice of us.  There were some pathetically
suggestive dumb witnesses present.  On his wrists and ankles were
cicatrices, old smooth scars, and fastened to the stone on which
he sat was a chain with manacles and fetters attached; but this
apparatus lay idle on the ground, and was thick with rust.  Chains
cease to be needed after the spirit has gone out of a prisoner.

I could not rouse the man; so I said we would take him to her,
and see--to the bride who was the fairest thing in the earth to him,
once--roses, pearls, and dew made flesh, for him; a wonder-work,
the master-work of nature: with eyes like no other eyes, and voice
like no other voice, and a freshness, and lithe young grace, and
beauty, that belonged properly to the creatures of dreams--as he
thought--and to no other.  The sight of her would set his stagnant
blood leaping; the sight of her--

But it was a disappointment.  They sat together on the ground and
looked dimly wondering into each other's faces a while, with a
sort of weak animal curiosity; then forgot each other's presence,
and dropped their eyes, and you saw that they were away again and
wandering in some far land of dreams and shadows that we know
nothing about.

I had them taken out and sent to their friends.  The queen did not
like it much.  Not that she felt any personal interest in the matter,
but she thought it disrespectful to Sir Breuse Sance Pite.  However,
I assured her that if he found he couldn't stand it I would fix him
so that he could.

I set forty-seven prisoners loose out of those awful rat-holes,
and left only one in captivity.  He was a lord, and had killed
another lord, a sort of kinsman of the queen.  That other lord
had ambushed him to assassinate him, but this fellow had got the
best of him and cut his throat.  However, it was not for that that
I left him jailed, but for maliciously destroying the only public
well in one of his wretched villages.  The queen was bound to hang
him for killing her kinsman, but I would not allow it: it was no
crime to kill an assassin.  But I said I was willing to let her
hang him for destroying the well; so she concluded to put up with
that, as it was better than nothing.

Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those forty-seven
men and women were shut up there!  Indeed, some were there for
no distinct offense at all, but only to gratify somebody's spite;
and not always the queen's by any means, but a friend's.  The newest
prisoner's crime was a mere remark which he had made.  He said
he believed that men were about all alike, and one man as good
as another, barring clothes.  He said he believed that if you were
to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he
couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel
clerk.  Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced
to an ineffectual mush by idiotic training.  I set him loose and
sent him to the Factory.

Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the
face of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had been
pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin
ray from the blessed sun for his comfort.  The case of one of
these poor fellows was particularly hard.  From his dusky swallow's
hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could peer out
through the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in the
valley; and for twenty-two years he had watched it, with heartache
and longing, through that crack.  He could see the lights shine
there at night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in and
come out--his wife and children, some of them, no doubt, though
he could not make out at that distance.  In the course of years
he noted festivities there, and tried to rejoice, and wondered
if they were weddings or what they might be.  And he noted funerals;
and they wrung his heart.  He could make out the coffin, but he
could not determine its size, and so could not tell whether it was
wife or child.  He could see the procession form, with priests
and mourners, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret with
them.  He had left behind him five children and a wife; and in
nineteen years he had seen five funerals issue, and none of them
humble enough in pomp to denote a servant.  So he had lost five
of his treasures; there must still be one remaining--one now
infinitely, unspeakably precious,--but _which_ one? wife, or child?
That was the question that tortured him, by night and by day,
asleep and awake.  Well, to have an interest, of some sort, and
half a ray of light, when you are in a dungeon, is a great support
to the body and preserver of the intellect.  This man was in pretty
good condition yet.  By the time he had finished telling me his
distressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that you would
have been in yourself, if you have got average human curiosity;
that is to say, I was as burning up as he was to find out which
member of the family it was that was left.  So I took him over
home myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party it was, too
--typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy, and whole Niagaras of happy
tears; and by George! we found the aforetime young matron graying
toward the imminent verge of her half century, and the babies all
men and women, and some of them married and experimenting familywise
themselves--for not a soul of the tribe was dead!  Conceive of the
ingenious devilishness of that queen: she had a special hatred for
this prisoner, and she had _invented_ all those funerals herself,
to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest stroke of genius of
the whole thing was leaving the family-invoice a funeral _short_,
so as to let him wear his poor old soul out guessing.

But for me, he never would have got out.  Morgan le Fay hated him
with her whole heart, and she never would have softened toward him.
And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness than
deliberate depravity.  He had said she had red hair.  Well, she
had; but that was no way to speak of it.  When red-headed people
are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

Consider it: among these forty-seven captives there were five
whose names, offenses, and dates of incarceration were no longer
known!  One woman and four men--all bent, and wrinkled, and
mind-extinguished patriarchs.  They themselves had long ago forgotten
these details; at any rate they had mere vague theories about them,
nothing definite and nothing that they repeated twice in the same
way.  The succession of priests whose office it had been to pray
daily with the captives and remind them that God had put them
there, for some wise purpose or other, and teach them that patience,
humbleness, and submission to oppression was what He loved to see
in parties of a subordinate rank, had traditions about these poor
old human ruins, but nothing more.  These traditions went but
little way, for they concerned the length of the incarceration only,
and not the names of the offenses.  And even by the help of
tradition the only thing that could be proven was that none of
the five had seen daylight for thirty-five years: how much longer
this privation has lasted was not guessable.  The king and the queen
knew nothing about these poor creatures, except that they were
heirlooms, assets inherited, along with the throne, from the former
firm.  Nothing of their history had been transmitted with their
persons, and so the inheriting owners had considered them of no
value, and had felt no interest in them.  I said to the queen:

"Then why in the world didn't you set them free?"

The question was a puzzler.  She didn't know _why_ she hadn't, the
thing had never come up in her mind.  So here she was, forecasting
the veritable history of future prisoners of the Castle d'If,
without knowing it.  It seemed plain to me now, that with her
training, those inherited prisoners were merely property--nothing
more, nothing less.  Well, when we inherit property, it does not
occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not value it.

When I brought my procession of human bats up into the open world
and the glare of the afternoon sun--previously blindfolding them,
in charity for eyes so long untortured by light--they were a
spectacle to look at.  Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, pathetic
frights, every one; legitimatest possible children of Monarchy
by the Grace of God and the Established Church.  I muttered absently:

"I _wish_ I could photograph them!"

You have seen that kind of people who will never let on that they
don't know the meaning of a new big word.  The more ignorant they
are, the more pitifully certain they are to pretend you haven't
shot over their heads.  The queen was just one of that sort, and
was always making the stupidest blunders by reason of it.  She
hesitated a moment; then her face brightened up with sudden
comprehension, and she said she would do it for me.

I thought to myself: She? why what can she know about photography?
But it was a poor time to be thinking.  When I looked around, she
was moving on the procession with an axe!

Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan le Fay.  I have
seen a good many kinds of women in my time, but she laid over them
all for variety.  And how sharply characteristic of her this episode
was.  She had no more idea than a horse of how to photograph
a procession; but being in doubt, it was just like her to try
to do it with an axe.



CHAPTER XIX

KNIGHT-ERRANTRY AS A TRADE

Sandy and I were on the road again, next morning, bright and early.
It was so good to open up one's lungs and take in whole luscious
barrels-ful of the blessed God's untainted, dew-fashioned,
woodland-scented air once more, after suffocating body and mind for two
days and nights in the moral and physical stenches of that intolerable
old buzzard-roost!  I mean, for me: of course the place was all
right and agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used to
high life all her days.

Poor girl, her jaws had had a wearisome rest now for a while,
and I was expecting to get the consequences.  I was right; but she
had stood by me most helpfully in the castle, and had mightily
supported and reinforced me with gigantic foolishnesses which were
worth more for the occasion than wisdoms double their size; so
I thought she had earned a right to work her mill for a while,
if she wanted to, and I felt not a pang when she started it up:

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty
winter of age southward--"

"Are you going to see if you can work up another half-stretch on
the trail of the cowboys, Sandy?"

"Even so, fair my lord."

"Go ahead, then.  I won't interrupt this time, if I can help it.
Begin over again; start fair, and shake out all your reefs, and
I will load my pipe and give good attention."

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty
winter of age southward.  And so they came into a deep forest,
and by fortune they were nighted, and rode along in a deep way,
and at the last they came into a courtelage where abode the duke
of South Marches, and there they asked harbour.  And on the morn
the duke sent unto Sir Marhaus, and bad him make him ready.  And
so Sir Marhaus arose and armed him, and there was a mass sung
afore him, and he brake his fast, and so mounted on horseback in
the court of the castle, there they should do the battle.  So there
was the duke already on horseback, clean armed, and his six sons
by him, and every each had a spear in his hand, and so they
encountered, whereas the duke and his two sons brake their spears
upon him, but Sir Marhaus held up his spear and touched none of
them.  Then came the four sons by couples, and two of them brake
their spears, and so did the other two.  And all this while
Sir Marhaus touched them not.  Then Sir Marhaus ran to the duke,
and smote him with his spear that horse and man fell to the earth.
And so he served his sons.  And then Sir Marhaus alight down, and
bad the duke yield him or else he would slay him.  And then some
of his sons recovered, and would have set upon Sir Marhaus.  Then
Sir Marhaus said to the duke, Cease thy sons, or else I will do
the uttermost to you all.  When the duke saw he might not escape
the death, he cried to his sons, and charged them to yield them
to Sir Marhaus.  And they kneeled all down and put the pommels
of their swords to the knight, and so he received them.  And then
they holp up their father, and so by their common assent promised
unto Sir Marhaus never to be foes unto King Arthur, and thereupon
at Whitsuntide after, to come he and his sons, and put them in
the king's grace.*

[*Footnote: The story is borrowed, language and all, from the
Morte d'Arthur.--M.T.]

"Even so standeth the history, fair Sir Boss.  Now ye shall wit
that that very duke and his six sons are they whom but few days
past you also did overcome and send to Arthur's court!"

"Why, Sandy, you can't mean it!"

"An I speak not sooth, let it be the worse for me."

"Well, well, well,--now who would ever have thought it?  One
whole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy, it was an elegant haul.
Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious
hard work, too, but I begin to see that there _is_ money in it,
after all, if you have luck.  Not that I would ever engage in it
as a business, for I wouldn't.  No sound and legitimate business
can be established on a basis of speculation.  A successful whirl
in the knight-errantry line--now what is it when you blow away
the nonsense and come down to the cold facts?  It's just a corner
in pork, that's all, and you can't make anything else out of it.
You're rich--yes,--suddenly rich--for about a day, maybe a week;
then somebody corners the market on _you_, and down goes your
bucket-shop; ain't that so, Sandy?"

"Whethersoever it be that my mind miscarrieth, bewraying simple
language in such sort that the words do seem to come endlong
and overthwart--"

"There's no use in beating about the bush and trying to get around
it that way, Sandy, it's _so_, just as I say.  I _know_ it's so.  And,
moreover, when you come right down to the bedrock, knight-errantry
is _worse_ than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left, and
so somebody's benefited anyway; but when the market breaks, in a
knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his
checks, what have you got for assets?  Just a rubbish-pile of
battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware.  Can you
call _those_ assets?  Give me pork, every time.  Am I right?"

"Ah, peradventure my head being distraught by the manifold matters
whereunto the confusions of these but late adventured haps and
fortunings whereby not I alone nor you alone, but every each of us,
meseemeth--"

"No, it's not your head, Sandy.  Your head's all right, as far as
it goes, but you don't know business; that's where the trouble
is.  It unfits you to argue about business, and you're wrong
to be always trying.  However, that aside, it was a good haul,
anyway, and will breed a handsome crop of reputation in Arthur's
court.  And speaking of the cowboys, what a curious country this
is for women and men that never get old.  Now there's Morgan le Fay,
as fresh and young as a Vassar pullet, to all appearances, and
here is this old duke of the South Marches still slashing away with
sword and lance at his time of life, after raising such a family
as he has raised.  As I understand it, Sir Gawaine killed seven
of his sons, and still he had six left for Sir Marhaus and me to
take into camp.  And then there was that damsel of sixty winter
of age still excursioning around in her frosty bloom--How old
are you, Sandy?"

It was the first time I ever struck a still place in her.  The mill
had shut down for repairs, or something.



CHAPTER XX

THE OGRE'S CASTLE

Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for a
horse carrying triple--man, woman, and armor; then we stopped
for a long nooning under some trees by a limpid brook.

Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near he
made dolorous moan, and by the words of it I perceived that he
was cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of his
coming, for that I saw he bore a bulletin-board whereon in letters
all of shining gold was writ:

    "USE PETERSON'S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTH-BRUSH--ALL THE GO."

I was glad of his coming, for even by this token I knew him for
knight of mine.  It was Sir Madok de la Montaine, a burly great
fellow whose chief distinction was that he had come within an ace
of sending Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail once.  He was
never long in a stranger's presence without finding some pretext
or other to let out that great fact.  But there was another fact
of nearly the same size, which he never pushed upon anybody unasked,
and yet never withheld when asked: that was, that the reason he
didn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted and sent down
over horse-tail himself.  This innocent vast lubber did not see
any particular difference between the two facts.  I liked him,
for he was earnest in his work, and very valuable.  And he was so
fine to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grand
leonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield with its quaint
device of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush,
with motto: "Try Noyoudont."  This was a tooth-wash that I was
introducing.

He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it; but he would not
alight.  He said he was after the stove-polish man; and with this
he broke out cursing and swearing anew.  The bulletin-boarder
referred to was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and of
considerable celebrity on account of his having tried conclusions
in a tournament once, with no less a Mogul than Sir Gaheris
himself--although not successfully.  He was of a light and laughing
disposition, and to him nothing in this world was serious.  It was
for this reason that I had chosen him to work up a stove-polish
sentiment.  There were no stoves yet, and so there could be nothing
serious about stove-polish.  All that the agent needed to do was
to deftly and by degrees prepare the public for the great change,
and have them established in predilections toward neatness against
the time when the stove should appear upon the stage.

Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with cursings.  He
said he had cursed his soul to rags; and yet he would not get down
from his horse, neither would he take any rest, or listen to any
comfort, until he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled this
account.  It appeared, by what I could piece together of the
unprofane fragments of his statement, that he had chanced upon
Sir Ossaise at dawn of the morning, and been told that if he would
make a short cut across the fields and swamps and broken hills and
glades, he could head off a company of travelers who would be rare
customers for prophylactics and tooth-wash.  With characteristic
zeal Sir Madok had plunged away at once upon this quest, and after
three hours of awful crosslot riding had overhauled his game.  And
behold, it was the five patriarchs that had been released from the
dungeons the evening before!  Poor old creatures, it was all of
twenty years since any one of them had known what it was to be
equipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth.

"Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I do not stove-polish
him an I may find him, leave it to me; for never no knight that
hight Ossaise or aught else may do me this disservice and bide
on live, an I may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn a
great oath this day."

And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear and
gat him thence.  In the middle of the afternoon we came upon one
of those very patriarchs ourselves, in the edge of a poor village.
He was basking in the love of relatives and friends whom he had not
seen for fifty years; and about him and caressing him were also
descendants of his own body whom he had never seen at all till now;
but to him these were all strangers, his memory was gone, his mind
was stagnant.  It seemed incredible that a man could outlast half
a century shut up in a dark hole like a rat, but here were his old
wife and some old comrades to testify to it.  They could remember
him as he was in the freshness and strength of his young manhood,
when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother's hands
and went away into that long oblivion.  The people at the castle
could not tell within half a generation the length of time the man
had been shut up there for his unrecorded and forgotten offense;
but this old wife knew; and so did her old child, who stood there
among her married sons and daughters trying to realize a father
who had been to her a name, a thought, a formless image, a tradition,
all her life, and now was suddenly concreted into actual flesh
and blood and set before her face.

It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that
I have made room for it here, but on account of a thing which
seemed to me still more curious.  To wit, that this dreadful matter
brought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage against
these oppressors.  They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty
and outrage so long that nothing could have startled them but
a kindness.  Yes, here was a curious revelation, indeed, of the
depth to which this people had been sunk in slavery.  Their entire
being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation,
dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in
this life.  Their very imagination was dead.  When you can say
that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower
deep for him.

I rather wished I had gone some other road.  This was not the sort
of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out
a peaceful revolution in his mind.  For it could not help bringing
up the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing
to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever did
achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion:
it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must
_begin_ in blood, whatever may answer afterward.  If history teaches
anything, it teaches that.  What this folk needed, then, was a
Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.

Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitement
and feverish expectancy.  She said we were approaching the ogre's
castle.  I was surprised into an uncomfortable shock.  The object
of our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this sudden
resurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thing
for a moment, and roused up in me a smart interest.  Sandy's
excitement increased every moment; and so did mine, for that sort
of thing is catching.  My heart got to thumping.  You can't reason
with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which
the intellect scorns.  Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse,
motioned me to stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her head
bent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that bordered
a declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and quicker.  And they
kept it up while she was gaining her ambush and getting her glimpse
over the declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side on
my knees.  Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with her
finger, and said in a panting whisper:

"The castle!  The castle!  Lo, where it looms!"

What a welcome disappointment I experienced!  I said:

"Castle?  It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with a wattled
fence around it."

She looked surprised and distressed.  The animation faded out of
her face; and during many moments she was lost in thought and
silent.  Then:

"It was not enchanted aforetime," she said in a musing fashion,
as if to herself.  "And how strange is this marvel, and how awful
--that to the one perception it is enchanted and dight in a base
and shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is not
enchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firm and stately
still, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the blue air
from its towers.  And God shield us, how it pricks the heart to
see again these gracious captives, and the sorrow deepened in their
sweet faces!  We have tarried along, and are to blame."

I saw my cue.  The castle was enchanted to _me_, not to her. It would
be wasted time to try to argue her out of her delusion, it couldn't
be done; I must just humor it.  So I said:

"This is a common case--the enchanting of a thing to one eye and
leaving it in its proper form to another.  You have heard of it
before, Sandy, though you haven't happened to experience it.
But no harm is done.  In fact, it is lucky the way it is.  If these
ladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would be
necessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossible
if one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment.
And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without the
true key, you are liable to err, and turn your hogs into dogs,
and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and so on, and end by
reducing your materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gas
which you can't follow--which, of course, amounts to the same
thing.  But here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are under
the enchantment, and so it is of no consequence to dissolve it.
These ladies remain ladies to you, and to themselves, and to
everybody else; and at the same time they will suffer in no way
from my delusion, for when I know that an ostensible hog is a
lady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her."

"Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like an angel.  And I know
that thou wilt deliver them, for that thou art minded to great
deeds and art as strong a knight of your hands and as brave to will
and to do, as any that is on live."

"I will not leave a princess in the sty, Sandy.  Are those three
yonder that to my disordered eyes are starveling swine-herds--"

"The ogres, Are _they_ changed also?  It is most wonderful.  Now
am I fearful; for how canst thou strike with sure aim when five of
their nine cubits of stature are to thee invisible?  Ah, go warily,
fair sir; this is a mightier emprise than I wend."

"You be easy, Sandy.  All I need to know is, how _much_ of an ogre
is invisible; then I know how to locate his vitals.  Don't you be
afraid, I will make short work of these bunco-steerers.  Stay
where you are."

I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but plucky and hopeful,
and rode down to the pigsty, and struck up a trade with the
swine-herds.  I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogs
at the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latest
quotations.  I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the
manor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have been along
next day and swept off pretty much all the stock, leaving the
swine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses.  But
now the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would be
a stake left besides.  One of the men had ten children; and he
said that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs took
the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and offered
him a child and said:

"Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yet
rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?"

How curious.  The same thing had happened in the Wales of my day,
under this same old Established Church, which was supposed by many
to have changed its nature when it changed its disguise.

I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckoned
Sandy to come--which she did; and not leisurely, but with the rush
of a prairie fire.  And when I saw her fling herself upon those
hogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain them
to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them, and call them
reverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamed
of the human race.

We had to drive those hogs home--ten miles; and no ladies were
ever more fickle-minded or contrary.  They would stay in no road,
no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides, and flowed
away in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughest
places they could find.  And they must not be struck, or roughly
accosted; Sandy could not bear to see them treated in ways unbecoming
their rank.  The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called
my Lady, and your Highness, like the rest.  It is annoying and
difficult to scour around after hogs, in armor.  There was one
small countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hair
on her back, that was the devil for perversity.  She gave me a race
of an hour, over all sorts of country, and then we were right where
we had started from, having made not a rod of real progress.
I seized her at last by the tail, and brought her along squealing.
When I overtook Sandy she was horrified, and said it was in the
last degree indelicate to drag a countess by her train.

We got the hogs home just at dark--most of them.  The princess
Nerovens de Morganore was missing, and two of her ladies in waiting:
namely, Miss Angela Bohun, and the Demoiselle Elaine Courtemains,
the former of these two being a young black sow with a white star
in her forehead, and the latter a brown one with thin legs and a
slight limp in the forward shank on the starboard side--a couple
of the tryingest blisters to drive that I ever saw.  Also among
the missing were several mere baronesses--and I wanted them to
stay missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to be found; so
servants were sent out with torches to scour the woods and hills
to that end.

Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, great
guns!--well, I never saw anything like it.  Nor ever heard anything
like it.  And never smelt anything like it.  It was like an
insurrection in a gasometer.



CHAPTER XXI

THE PILGRIMS

When I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably tired; the stretching
out, and the relaxing of the long-tense muscles, how luxurious,
how delicious! but that was as far as I could get--sleep was out of
the question for the present.  The ripping and tearing and squealing
of the nobility up and down the halls and corridors was pandemonium
come again, and kept me broad awake.  Being awake, my thoughts
were busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves with Sandy's
curious delusion.  Here she was, as sane a person as the kingdom
could produce; and yet, from my point of view she was acting like
a crazy woman.  My land, the power of training! of influence!
of education!  It can bring a body up to believe anything.  I had
to put myself in Sandy's place to realize that she was not a
lunatic.  Yes, and put her in mine, to demonstrate how easy it is
to seem a lunatic to a person who has not been taught as you have
been taught.  If I had told Sandy I had seen a wagon, uninfluenced
by enchantment, spin along fifty miles an hour; had seen a man,
unequipped with magic powers, get into a basket and soar out of
sight among the clouds; and had listened, without any necromancer's
help, to the conversation of a person who was several hundred miles
away, Sandy would not merely have supposed me to be crazy, she
would have thought she knew it.  Everybody around her believed in
enchantments; nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle could
be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have been
the same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actuality
of the telephone and its wonders,--and in both cases would be
absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason.  Yes, Sandy
was sane; that must be admitted.  If I also would be sane--to Sandy
--I must keep my superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculous
locomotives, balloons, and telephones, to myself.  Also, I believed
that the world was not flat, and hadn't pillars under it to support
it, nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of water that
occupied all space above; but as I was the only person in the kingdom
afflicted with such impious and criminal opinions, I recognized
that it would be good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too,
if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by everybody
as a madman.

The next morning Sandy assembled the swine in the dining-room and
gave them their breakfast, waiting upon them personally and
manifesting in every way the deep reverence which the natives of
her island, ancient and modern, have always felt for rank, let its
outward casket and the mental and moral contents be what they may.
I could have eaten with the hogs if I had had birth approaching my
lofty official rank; but I hadn't, and so accepted the unavoidable
slight and made no complaint.  Sandy and I had our breakfast at
the second table.  The family were not at home.  I said:

"How many are in the family, Sandy, and where do they keep themselves?"

"Family?"

"Yes."

"Which family, good my lord?"

"Why, this family; your own family."

"Sooth to say, I understand you not.  I have no family."

"No family?  Why, Sandy, isn't this your home?"

"Now how indeed might that be?  I have no home."

"Well, then, whose house is this?"

"Ah, wit you well I would tell you an I knew myself."

"Come--you don't even know these people?  Then who invited us here?"

"None invited us.  We but came; that is all."

"Why, woman, this is a most extraordinary performance.  The
effrontery of it is beyond admiration.  We blandly march into
a man's house, and cram it full of the only really valuable nobility
the sun has yet discovered in the earth, and then it turns out
that we don't even know the man's name.  How did you ever venture
to take this extravagant liberty?  I supposed, of course, it was
your home.  What will the man say?"

"What will he say?  Forsooth what can he say but give thanks?"

"Thanks for what?"

Her face was filled with a puzzled surprise:

"Verily, thou troublest mine understanding with strange words.
Do ye dream that one of his estate is like to have the honor twice
in his life to entertain company such as we have brought to grace
his house withal?"

"Well, no--when you come to that.  No, it's an even bet that this
is the first time he has had a treat like this."

"Then let him be thankful, and manifest the same by grateful speech
and due humility; he were a dog, else, and the heir and ancestor
of dogs."

To my mind, the situation was uncomfortable.  It might become more so.
It might be a good idea to muster the hogs and move on.  So I said:

"The day is wasting, Sandy.  It is time to get the nobility together
and be moving."

"Wherefore, fair sir and Boss?"

"We want to take them to their home, don't we?"

"La, but list to him!  They be of all the regions of the earth!
Each must hie to her own home; wend you we might do all these
journeys in one so brief life as He hath appointed that created
life, and thereto death likewise with help of Adam, who by sin
done through persuasion of his helpmeet, she being wrought upon
and bewrayed by the beguilements of the great enemy of man, that
serpent hight Satan, aforetime consecrated and set apart unto that
evil work by overmastering spite and envy begotten in his heart
through fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a nature erst
so white and pure whenso it hove with the shining multitudes
its brethren-born in glade and shade of that fair heaven wherein
all such as native be to that rich estate and--"

"Great Scott!"

"My lord?"

"Well, you know we haven't got time for this sort of thing.  Don't
you see, we could distribute these people around the earth in less
time than it is going to take you to explain that we can't.  We
mustn't talk now, we must act.  You want to be careful; you mustn't
let your mill get the start of you that way, at a time like this.
To business now--and sharp's the word.  Who is to take the
aristocracy home?"

"Even their friends.  These will come for them from the far parts
of the earth."

This was lightning from a clear sky, for unexpectedness; and the
relief of it was like pardon to a prisoner.  She would remain to
deliver the goods, of course.

"Well, then, Sandy, as our enterprise is handsomely and successfully
ended, I will go home and report; and if ever another one--"

"I also am ready; I will go with thee."

This was recalling the pardon.

"How?  You will go with me?  Why should you?"

"Will I be traitor to my knight, dost think?  That were dishonor.
I may not part from thee until in knightly encounter in the field
some overmatching champion shall fairly win and fairly wear me.
I were to blame an I thought that that might ever hap."

"Elected for the long term," I sighed to myself.  "I may as well
make the best of it."  So then I spoke up and said:

"All right; let us make a start."

While she was gone to cry her farewells over the pork, I gave that
whole peerage away to the servants.  And I asked them to take
a duster and dust around a little where the nobilities had mainly
lodged and promenaded; but they considered that that would be
hardly worth while, and would moreover be a rather grave departure
from custom, and therefore likely to make talk.  A departure from
custom--that settled it; it was a nation capable of committing any
crime but that.  The servants said they would follow the fashion,
a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observance; they would
scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms and halls, and then the
evidence of the aristocratic visitation would be no longer visible.
It was a kind of satire on Nature: it was the scientific method,
the geologic method; it deposited the history of the family in
a stratified record; and the antiquary could dig through it and
tell by the remains of each period what changes of diet the family
had introduced successively for a hundred years.

The first thing we struck that day was a procession of pilgrims.
It was not going our way, but we joined it, nevertheless; for it
was hourly being borne in upon me now, that if I would govern
this country wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life,
and not at second hand, but by personal observation and scrutiny.

This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in this: that it
had in it a sample of about all the upper occupations and professions
the country could show, and a corresponding variety of costume.
There were young men and old men, young women and old women,
lively folk and grave folk.  They rode upon mules and horses, and
there was not a side-saddle in the party; for this specialty was
to remain unknown in England for nine hundred years yet.

It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious, happy, merry and
full of unconscious coarsenesses and innocent indecencies.  What
they regarded as the merry tale went the continual round and caused
no more embarrassment than it would have caused in the best English
society twelve centuries later.  Practical jokes worthy of the
English wits of the first quarter of the far-off nineteenth century
were sprung here and there and yonder along the line, and compelled
the delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright remark was
made at one end of the procession and started on its travels toward
the other, you could note its progress all the way by the sparkling
spray of laughter it threw off from its bows as it plowed along;
and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.

Sandy knew the goal and purpose of this pilgrimage, and she posted
me.  She said:

"They journey to the Valley of Holiness, for to be blessed of the
godly hermits and drink of the miraculous waters and be cleansed
from sin."

"Where is this watering place?"

"It lieth a two-day journey hence, by the borders of the land that
hight the Cuckoo Kingdom."

"Tell me about it.  Is it a celebrated place?"

"Oh, of a truth, yes.  There be none more so.  Of old time there
lived there an abbot and his monks.  Belike were none in the world
more holy than these; for they gave themselves to study of pious
books, and spoke not the one to the other, or indeed to any, and
ate decayed herbs and naught thereto, and slept hard, and prayed
much, and washed never; also they wore the same garment until it
fell from their bodies through age and decay.  Right so came they
to be known of all the world by reason of these holy austerities,
and visited by rich and poor, and reverenced."

"Proceed."

"But always there was lack of water there.  Whereas, upon a time,
the holy abbot prayed, and for answer a great stream of clear
water burst forth by miracle in a desert place.  Now were the
fickle monks tempted of the Fiend, and they wrought with their
abbot unceasingly by beggings and beseechings that he would construct
a bath; and when he was become aweary and might not resist more,
he said have ye your will, then, and granted that they asked.
Now mark thou what 'tis to forsake the ways of purity the which
He loveth, and wanton with such as be worldly and an offense.
These monks did enter into the bath and come thence washed as
white as snow; and lo, in that moment His sign appeared, in
miraculous rebuke! for His insulted waters ceased to flow, and
utterly vanished away."

"They fared mildly, Sandy, considering how that kind of crime
is regarded in this country."

"Belike; but it was their first sin; and they had been of perfect
life for long, and differing in naught from the angels.  Prayers,
tears, torturings of the flesh, all was vain to beguile that water
to flow again.  Even processions; even burnt-offerings; even votive
candles to the Virgin, did fail every each of them; and all in
the land did marvel."

"How odd to find that even this industry has its financial panics,
and at times sees its assignats and greenbacks languish to zero,
and everything come to a standstill.  Go on, Sandy."

"And so upon a time, after year and day, the good abbot made humble
surrender and destroyed the bath.  And behold, His anger was in that
moment appeased, and the waters gushed richly forth again, and even
unto this day they have not ceased to flow in that generous measure."

"Then I take it nobody has washed since."

"He that would essay it could have his halter free; yes, and
swiftly would he need it, too."

"The community has prospered since?"

"Even from that very day.  The fame of the miracle went abroad
into all lands.  From every land came monks to join; they came
even as the fishes come, in shoals; and the monastery added building
to building, and yet others to these, and so spread wide its arms
and took them in.  And nuns came, also; and more again, and yet
more; and built over against the monastery on the yon side of the
vale, and added building to building, until mighty was that nunnery.
And these were friendly unto those, and they joined their loving
labors together, and together they built a fair great foundling
asylum midway of the valley between."

"You spoke of some hermits, Sandy."

"These have gathered there from the ends of the earth.  A hermit
thriveth best where there be multitudes of pilgrims.  Ye shall not
find no hermit of no sort wanting.  If any shall mention a hermit
of a kind he thinketh new and not to be found but in some far
strange land, let him but scratch among the holes and caves and
swamps that line that Valley of Holiness, and whatsoever be his
breed, it skills not, he shall find a sample of it there."

I closed up alongside of a burly fellow with a fat good-humored
face, purposing to make myself agreeable and pick up some further
crumbs of fact; but I had hardly more than scraped acquaintance
with him when he began eagerly and awkwardly to lead up, in the
immemorial way, to that same old anecdote--the one Sir Dinadan
told me, what time I got into trouble with Sir Sagramor and was
challenged of him on account of it.  I excused myself and dropped
to the rear of the procession, sad at heart, willing to go hence
from this troubled life, this vale of tears, this brief day of
broken rest, of cloud and storm, of weary struggle and monotonous
defeat; and yet shrinking from the change, as remembering how long
eternity is, and how many have wended thither who know that anecdote.

Early in the afternoon we overtook another procession of pilgrims;
but in this one was no merriment, no jokes, no laughter, no playful
ways, nor any happy giddiness, whether of youth or age.  Yet both
were here, both age and youth; gray old men and women, strong men
and women of middle age, young husbands, young wives, little boys
and girls, and three babies at the breast.  Even the children were
smileless; there was not a face among all these half a hundred
people but was cast down, and bore that set expression of hopelessness
which is bred of long and hard trials and old acquaintance with
despair.  They were slaves.  Chains led from their fettered feet
and their manacled hands to a sole-leather belt about their waists;
and all except the children were also linked together in a file
six feet apart, by a single chain which led from collar to collar
all down the line.  They were on foot, and had tramped three
hundred miles in eighteen days, upon the cheapest odds and ends
of food, and stingy rations of that.  They had slept in these
chains every night, bundled together like swine.  They had upon
their bodies some poor rags, but they could not be said to be
clothed.  Their irons had chafed the skin from their ankles and
made sores which were ulcerated and wormy.  Their naked feet were
torn, and none walked without a limp.  Originally there had been a
hundred of these unfortunates, but about half had been sold on
the trip.  The trader in charge of them rode a horse and carried
a whip with a short handle and a long heavy lash divided into
several knotted tails at the end.  With this whip he cut the
shoulders of any that tottered from weariness and pain, and
straightened them up.  He did not speak; the whip conveyed his
desire without that.  None of these poor creatures looked up as
we rode along by; they showed no consciousness of our presence.
And they made no sound but one; that was the dull and awful clank
of their chains from end to end of the long file, as forty-three
burdened feet rose and fell in unison.  The file moved in a cloud
of its own making.

All these faces were gray with a coating of dust.  One has seen
the like of this coating upon furniture in unoccupied houses, and
has written his idle thought in it with his finger.  I was reminded
of this when I noticed the faces of some of those women, young
mothers carrying babes that were near to death and freedom, how
a something in their hearts was written in the dust upon their
faces, plain to see, and lord, how plain to read! for it was the
track of tears.  One of these young mothers was but a girl, and
it hurt me to the heart to read that writing, and reflect that it
was come up out of the breast of such a child, a breast that ought
not to know trouble yet, but only the gladness of the morning of
life; and no doubt--

She reeled just then, giddy with fatigue, and down came the lash
and flicked a flake of skin from her naked shoulder.  It stung me
as if I had been hit instead.  The master halted the file and
jumped from his horse.  He stormed and swore at this girl, and
said she had made annoyance enough with her laziness, and as this
was the last chance he should have, he would settle the account now.
She dropped on her knees and put up her hands and began to beg,
and cry, and implore, in a passion of terror, but the master gave
no attention.  He snatched the child from her, and then made the
men-slaves who were chained before and behind her throw her on
the ground and hold her there and expose her body; and then he
laid on with his lash like a madman till her back was flayed, she
shrieking and struggling the while piteously.  One of the men who
was holding her turned away his face, and for this humanity he was
reviled and flogged.

All our pilgrims looked on and commented--on the expert way in
which the whip was handled.  They were too much hardened by lifelong
everyday familiarity with slavery to notice that there was anything
else in the exhibition that invited comment.  This was what slavery
could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior
lobe of human feeling; for these pilgrims were kind-hearted people,
and they would not have allowed that man to treat a horse like that.

I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that
would not do.  I must not interfere too much and get myself a name
for riding over the country's laws and the citizen's rights
roughshod.  If I lived and prospered I would be the death of
slavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so
that when I became its executioner it should be by command of
the nation.

Just here was the wayside shop of a smith; and now arrived a landed
proprietor who had bought this girl a few miles back, deliverable
here where her irons could be taken off.  They were removed; then
there was a squabble between the gentleman and the dealer as to
which should pay the blacksmith.  The moment the girl was delivered
from her irons, she flung herself, all tears and frantic sobbings,
into the arms of the slave who had turned away his face when she
was whipped.  He strained her to his breast, and smothered her
face and the child's with kisses, and washed them with the rain
of his tears.  I suspected.  I inquired.  Yes, I was right; it was
husband and wife.  They had to be torn apart by force; the girl
had to be dragged away, and she struggled and fought and shrieked
like one gone mad till a turn of the road hid her from sight; and
even after that, we could still make out the fading plaint of those
receding shrieks.  And the husband and father, with his wife and
child gone, never to be seen by him again in life?--well, the look
of him one might not bear at all, and so I turned away; but I knew
I should never get his picture out of my mind again, and there
it is to this day, to wring my heartstrings whenever I think of it.

We put up at the inn in a village just at nightfall, and when
I rose next morning and looked abroad, I was ware where a knight
came riding in the golden glory of the new day, and recognized him
for knight of mine--Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy.  He was in the
gentlemen's furnishing line, and his missionarying specialty was
plug hats.  He was clothed all in steel, in the beautifulest armor
of the time--up to where his helmet ought to have been; but he
hadn't any helmet, he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was ridiculous
a spectacle as one might want to see.  It was another of my
surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it
grotesque and absurd.  Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with
leather hat boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight
he swore him into my service and fitted him with a plug and made
him wear it.  I dressed and ran down to welcome Sir Ozana and
get his news.

"How is trade?" I asked.

"Ye will note that I have but these four left; yet were they sixteen
whenas I got me from Camelot."

"Why, you have certainly done nobly, Sir Ozana.  Where have you
been foraging of late?"

"I am but now come from the Valley of Holiness, please you sir."

"I am pointed for that place myself.  Is there anything stirring
in the monkery, more than common?"

"By the mass ye may not question it!....  Give him good feed,
boy, and stint it not, an thou valuest thy crown; so get ye lightly
to the stable and do even as I bid....  Sir, it is parlous news
I bring, and--be these pilgrims?  Then ye may not do better, good
folk, than gather and hear the tale I have to tell, sith it
concerneth you, forasmuch as ye go to find that ye will not find,
and seek that ye will seek in vain, my life being hostage for my
word, and my word and message being these, namely: That a hap
has happened whereof the like has not been seen no more but once
this two hundred years, which was the first and last time that
that said misfortune strake the holy valley in that form by
commandment of the Most High whereto by reasons just and causes
thereunto contributing, wherein the matter--"

"The miraculous fount hath ceased to flow!"  This shout burst from
twenty pilgrim mouths at once.

"Ye say well, good people.  I was verging to it, even when ye spake."

"Has somebody been washing again?"

"Nay, it is suspected, but none believe it.  It is thought to be
some other sin, but none wit what."

"How are they feeling about the calamity?"

"None may describe it in words.  The fount is these nine days dry.
The prayers that did begin then, and the lamentations in sackcloth
and ashes, and the holy processions, none of these have ceased
nor night nor day; and so the monks and the nuns and the foundlings
be all exhausted, and do hang up prayers writ upon parchment,
sith that no strength is left in man to lift up voice.  And at last
they sent for thee, Sir Boss, to try magic and enchantment; and
if you could not come, then was the messenger to fetch Merlin,
and he is there these three days now, and saith he will fetch that
water though he burst the globe and wreck its kingdoms to accomplish
it; and right bravely doth he work his magic and call upon his
hellions to hie them hither and help, but not a whiff of moisture
hath he started yet, even so much as might qualify as mist upon
a copper mirror an ye count not the barrel of sweat he sweateth
betwixt sun and sun over the dire labors of his task; and if ye--"

Breakfast was ready.  As soon as it was over I showed to Sir Ozana
these words which I had written on the inside of his hat: "Chemical
Department, Laboratory extension, Section G. Pxxp.  Send two of
first size, two of No. 3, and six of No. 4, together with the proper
complementary details--and two of my trained assistants."  And I said:

"Now get you to Camelot as fast as you can fly, brave knight, and
show the writing to Clarence, and tell him to have these required
matters in the Valley of Holiness with all possible dispatch."

"I will well, Sir Boss," and he was off.



CHAPTER XXII

THE HOLY FOUNTAIN

The pilgrims were human beings.  Otherwise they would have acted
differently.  They had come a long and difficult journey, and now
when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main
thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as
horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done--turn back
and get at something profitable--no, anxious as they had before
been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty
times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be.
There is no accounting for human beings.

We made good time; and a couple of hours before sunset we stood
upon the high confines of the Valley of Holiness, and our eyes
swept it from end to end and noted its features.  That is, its
large features.  These were the three masses of buildings.  They
were distant and isolated temporalities shrunken to toy constructions
in the lonely waste of what seemed a desert--and was.  Such a scene
is always mournful, it is so impressively still, and looks so
steeped in death.  But there was a sound here which interrupted
the stillness only to add to its mournfulness; this was the faint
far sound of tolling bells which floated fitfully to us on the
passing breeze, and so faintly, so softly, that we hardly knew
whether we heard it with our ears or with our spirits.

We reached the monastery before dark, and there the males were
given lodging, but the women were sent over to the nunnery.  The
bells were close at hand now, and their solemn booming smote
upon the ear like a message of doom.  A superstitious despair
possessed the heart of every monk and published itself in his
ghastly face.  Everywhere, these black-robed, soft-sandaled,
tallow-visaged specters appeared, flitted about and disappeared,
noiseless as the creatures of a troubled dream, and as uncanny.

The old abbot's joy to see me was pathetic.  Even to tears; but
he did the shedding himself.  He said:

"Delay not, son, but get to thy saving work.  An we bring not
the water back again, and soon, we are ruined, and the good work
of two hundred years must end.  And see thou do it with enchantments
that be holy, for the Church will not endure that work in her cause
be done by devil's magic."

"When I work, Father, be sure there will be no devil's work
connected with it.  I shall use no arts that come of the devil,
and no elements not created by the hand of God.  But is Merlin
working strictly on pious lines?"

"Ah, he said he would, my son, he said he would, and took oath
to make his promise good."

"Well, in that case, let him proceed."

"But surely you will not sit idle by, but help?"

"It will not answer to mix methods, Father; neither would it be
professional courtesy.  Two of a trade must not underbid each
other.  We might as well cut rates and be done with it; it would
arrive at that in the end.  Merlin has the contract; no other
magician can touch it till he throws it up."

"But I will take it from him; it is a terrible emergency and the
act is thereby justified.  And if it were not so, who will give
law to the Church?  The Church giveth law to all; and what she
wills to do, that she may do, hurt whom it may.  I will take it
from him; you shall begin upon the moment."

"It may not be, Father.  No doubt, as you say, where power is
supreme, one can do as one likes and suffer no injury; but we poor
magicians are not so situated.  Merlin is a very good magician
in a small way, and has quite a neat provincial reputation.  He
is struggling along, doing the best he can, and it would not be
etiquette for me to take his job until he himself abandons it."

The abbot's face lighted.

"Ah, that is simple.  There are ways to persuade him to abandon it."

"No-no, Father, it skills not, as these people say.  If he were
persuaded against his will, he would load that well with a malicious
enchantment which would balk me until I found out its secret.
It might take a month.  I could set up a little enchantment of
mine which I call the telephone, and he could not find out its
secret in a hundred years.  Yes, you perceive, he might block me
for a month.  Would you like to risk a month in a dry time like this?"

"A month!  The mere thought of it maketh me to shudder.  Have it
thy way, my son.  But my heart is heavy with this disappointment.
Leave me, and let me wear my spirit with weariness and waiting,
even as I have done these ten long days, counterfeiting thus
the thing that is called rest, the prone body making outward sign
of repose where inwardly is none."

Of course, it would have been best, all round, for Merlin to waive
etiquette and quit and call it half a day, since he would never be
able to start that water, for he was a true magician of the time;
which is to say, the big miracles, the ones that gave him his
reputation, always had the luck to be performed when nobody but
Merlin was present; he couldn't start this well with all this crowd
around to see; a crowd was as bad for a magician's miracle in
that day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine; there was
sure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial
moment and spoil everything.  But I did not want Merlin to retire
from the job until I was ready to take hold of it effectively
myself; and I could not do that until I got my things from Camelot,
and that would take two or three days.

My presence gave the monks hope, and cheered them up a good deal;
insomuch that they ate a square meal that night for the first time
in ten days.  As soon as their stomachs had been properly reinforced
with food, their spirits began to rise fast; when the mead began to
go round they rose faster.  By the time everybody was half-seas over,
the holy community was in good shape to make a night of it; so we
stayed by the board and put it through on that line.  Matters got
to be very jolly.  Good old questionable stories were told that made
the tears run down and cavernous mouths stand wide and the round
bellies shake with laughter; and questionable songs were bellowed out
in a mighty chorus that drowned the boom of the tolling bells.

At last I ventured a story myself; and vast was the success of it.
Not right off, of course, for the native of those islands does
not, as a rule, dissolve upon the early applications of a humorous
thing; but the fifth time I told it, they began to crack in places;
the eight time I told it, they began to crumble; at the twelfth
repetition they fell apart in chunks; and at the fifteenth they
disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up.  This language
is figurative.  Those islanders--well, they are slow pay at first,
in the matter of return for your investment of effort, but in the end
they make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast.

I was at the well next day betimes.  Merlin was there, enchanting
away like a beaver, but not raising the moisture.  He was not in
a pleasant humor; and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract
was a shade too hefty for a novice he unlimbered his tongue and
cursed like a bishop--French bishop of the Regency days, I mean.

Matters were about as I expected to find them.  The "fountain" was
an ordinary well, it had been dug in the ordinary way, and stoned up
in the ordinary way.  There was no miracle about it.  Even the lie
that had created its reputation was not miraculous; I could have
told it myself, with one hand tied behind me.  The well was in a
dark chamber which stood in the center of a cut-stone chapel, whose
walls were hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that would
have made a chromo feel good; pictures historically commemorative
of curative miracles which had been achieved by the waters when
nobody was looking.  That is, nobody but angels; they are always
on deck when there is a miracle to the fore--so as to get put in
the picture, perhaps.  Angels are as fond of that as a fire company;
look at the old masters.

The well-chamber was dimly lighted by lamps; the water was drawn
with a windlass and chain by monks, and poured into troughs which
delivered it into stone reservoirs outside in the chapel--when
there was water to draw, I mean--and none but monks could enter
the well-chamber.  I entered it, for I had temporary authority
to do so, by courtesy of my professional brother and subordinate.
But he hadn't entered it himself.  He did everything by incantations;
he never worked his intellect.  If he had stepped in there and used
his eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could have cured
the well by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle in
the customary way; but no, he was an old numskull, a magician who
believed in his own magic; and no magician can thrive who is
handicapped with a superstition like that.

I had an idea that the well had sprung a leak; that some of the
wall stones near the bottom had fallen and exposed fissures that
allowed the water to escape.  I measured the chain--98 feet.  Then
I called in a couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and
made them lower me in the bucket.  When the chain was all paid out,
the candle confirmed my suspicion; a considerable section of the
wall was gone, exposing a good big fissure.

I almost regretted that my theory about the well's trouble was
correct, because I had another one that had a showy point or two
about it for a miracle.  I remembered that in America, many
centuries later, when an oil well ceased to flow, they used to
blast it out with a dynamite torpedo.  If I should find this well
dry and no explanation of it, I could astonish these people most
nobly by having a person of no especial value drop a dynamite
bomb into it.  It was my idea to appoint Merlin.  However, it was
plain that there was no occasion for the bomb.  One cannot have
everything the way he would like it.  A man has no business to
be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his
mind to get even.  That is what I did.  I said to myself, I am in no
hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good yet.  And it did, too.

When I was above ground again, I turned out the monks, and let down
a fish-line; the well was a hundred and fifty feet deep, and there
was forty-one feet of water in it.  I called in a monk and asked:

"How deep is the well?"

"That, sir, I wit not, having never been told."

"How does the water usually stand in it?"

"Near to the top, these two centuries, as the testimony goeth,
brought down to us through our predecessors."

It was true--as to recent times at least--for there was witness
to it, and better witness than a monk; only about twenty or thirty
feet of the chain showed wear and use, the rest of it was unworn
and rusty.  What had happened when the well gave out that other
time?  Without doubt some practical person had come along and
mended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot he had
discovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyed
the well would flow again.  The leak had befallen again now, and
these children would have prayed, and processioned, and tolled
their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried up and blew
away, and no innocent of them all would ever have thought to drop
a fish-line into the well or go down in it and find out what was
really the matter.  Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things
to get away from in the world.  It transmits itself like physical
form and feature; and for a man, in those days, to have had an idea
that his ancestors hadn't had, would have brought him under suspicion
of being illegitimate.  I said to the monk:

"It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry well, but we
will try, if my brother Merlin fails.  Brother Merlin is a very
passable artist, but only in the parlor-magic line, and he may
not succeed; in fact, is not likely to succeed.  But that should
be nothing to his discredit; the man that can do _this_ kind of
miracle knows enough to keep hotel."

"Hotel?  I mind not to have heard--"

"Of hotel?  It's what you call hostel.  The man that can do this
miracle can keep hostel.  I can do this miracle; I shall do this
miracle; yet I do not try to conceal from you that it is a miracle
to tax the occult powers to the last strain."

"None knoweth that truth better than the brotherhood, indeed; for
it is of record that aforetime it was parlous difficult and took
a year.  Natheless, God send you good success, and to that end
will we pray."

As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around
that the thing was difficult.  Many a small thing has been made
large by the right kind of advertising.  That monk was filled up
with the difficulty of this enterprise; he would fill up the others.
In two days the solicitude would be booming.

On my way home at noon, I met Sandy.  She had been sampling the
hermits.  I said:

"I would like to do that myself.  This is Wednesday.  Is there
a matinee?"

"A which, please you, sir?"

"Matinee.  Do they keep open afternoons?"

"Who?"

"The hermits, of course."

"Keep open?"

"Yes, keep open.  Isn't that plain enough?  Do they knock off at noon?"

"Knock off?"

"Knock off?--yes, knock off.  What is the matter with knock off?
I never saw such a dunderhead; can't you understand anything at all?
In plain terms, do they shut up shop, draw the game, bank the fires--"

"Shut up shop, draw--"

"There, never mind, let it go; you make me tired.  You can't seem
to understand the simplest thing."

"I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow
that I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of
none, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of
learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of
that most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to
the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of that
great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol
of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the
pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief
do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the
darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery,
these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is
but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind that
can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding
miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler
mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders, then
if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true,
wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and
may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this
complexion of mood and mind and understood that that I would
I could not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might
_nor_ could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be by advantage
turned to the desired _would_, and so I pray you mercy of my fault,
and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good
my master and most dear lord."

I couldn't make it all out--that is, the details--but I got the
general idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed.  It was not
fair to spring those nineteenth century technicalities upon the
untutored infant of the sixth and then rail at her because she
couldn't get their drift; and when she was making the honest best
drive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that she couldn't
fetch the home plate; and so I apologized.  Then we meandered
pleasantly away toward the hermit holes in sociable converse
together, and better friends than ever.

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence
for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station
and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless
transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that
I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German
Language.  I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she
began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took
the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words
had been water, I had been drowned, sure.  She had exactly the
German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a
mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war,
she would get it into a single sentence or die.  Whenever the literary
German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see
of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his
verb in his mouth.

We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon.  It was a most
strange menagerie.  The chief emulation among them seemed to be,
to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous
with vermin.  Their manner and attitudes were the last expression
of complacent self-righteousness.  It was one anchorite's pride
to lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite him and blister
him unmolested; it was another's to lean against a rock, all day
long, conspicuous to the admiration of the throng of pilgrims
and pray; it was another's to go naked and crawl around on all fours;
it was another's to drag about with him, year in and year out,
eighty pounds of iron; it was another's to never lie down when
he slept, but to stand among the thorn-bushes and snore when there
were pilgrims around to look; a woman, who had the white hair of
age, and no other apparel, was black from crown to heel with
forty-seven years of holy abstinence from water.  Groups of gazing
pilgrims stood around all and every of these strange objects, lost
in reverent wonder, and envious of the fleckless sanctity which
these pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven.

By and by we went to see one of the supremely great ones.  He was
a mighty celebrity; his fame had penetrated all Christendom; the
noble and the renowned journeyed from the remotest lands on the globe
to pay him reverence.  His stand was in the center of the widest part
of the valley; and it took all that space to hold his crowds.

His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform on
the top of it.  He was now doing what he had been doing every day
for twenty years up there--bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly
almost to his feet.  It was his way of praying.  I timed him with a
stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 minutes and
46 seconds.  It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste.
It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal
movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some
day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing
machine with it.  I afterward carried out that scheme, and got
five years' good service out of him; in which time he turned out
upward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which
was ten a day.  I worked him Sundays and all; he was going, Sundays,
the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the power.
These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the
materials--I furnished those myself, it would not have been right
to make him do that--and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a
dollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or
a blooded race horse in Arthurdom.  They were regarded as a perfect
protection against sin, and advertised as such by my knights
everywhere, with the paint-pot and stencil-plate; insomuch that
there was not a cliff or a bowlder or a dead wall in England but
you could read on it at a mile distance:

"Buy the only genuine St. Stylite; patronized by the Nobility.
Patent applied for."

There was more money in the business than one knew what to do with.
As it extended, I brought out a line of goods suitable for kings,
and a nobby thing for duchesses and that sort, with ruffles down
the forehatch and the running-gear clewed up with a featherstitch
to leeward and then hauled aft with a back-stay and triced up with
a half-turn in the standing rigging forward of the weather-gaskets.
Yes, it was a daisy.

But about that time I noticed that the motive power had taken to
standing on one leg, and I found that there was something the matter
with the other one; so I stocked the business and unloaded, taking
Sir Bors de Ganis into camp financially along with certain of his
friends; for the works stopped within a year, and the good saint
got him to his rest.  But he had earned it.  I can say that for him.

When I saw him that first time--however, his personal condition
will not quite bear description here.  You can read it in the
Lives of the Saints.*

[*All the details concerning the hermits, in this chapter, are from
Lecky--but greatly modified.  This book not being a history but
only a tale, the majority of the historian's frank details were too
strong for reproduction in it.--_Editor_]



CHAPTER XXIII

RESTORATION OF THE FOUNTAIN

Saturday noon I went to the well and looked on a while.  Merlin
was still burning smoke-powders, and pawing the air, and muttering
gibberish as hard as ever, but looking pretty down-hearted, for
of course he had not started even a perspiration in that well yet.
Finally I said:

"How does the thing promise by this time, partner?"

"Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest
enchantment known to the princes of the occult arts in the lands
of the East; an it fail me, naught can avail.  Peace, until I finish."

He raised a smoke this time that darkened all the region, and must
have made matters uncomfortable for the hermits, for the wind
was their way, and it rolled down over their dens in a dense and
billowy fog.  He poured out volumes of speech to match, and contorted
his body and sawed the air with his hands in a most extraordinary
way.  At the end of twenty minutes he dropped down panting, and
about exhausted.  Now arrived the abbot and several hundred monks
and nuns, and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of
acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke, and all
in a grand state of excitement.  The abbot inquired anxiously for
results.  Merlin said:

"If any labor of mortal might break the spell that binds these
waters, this which I have but just essayed had done it.  It has
failed; whereby I do now know that that which I had feared is
a truth established; the sign of this failure is, that the most
potent spirit known to the magicians of the East, and whose name
none may utter and live, has laid his spell upon this well.  The
mortal does not breathe, nor ever will, who can penetrate the secret
of that spell, and without that secret none can break it.  The
water will flow no more forever, good Father.  I have done what
man could.  Suffer me to go."

Of course this threw the abbot into a good deal of a consternation.
He turned to me with the signs of it in his face, and said:

"Ye have heard him. Is it true?"

"Part of it is."

"Not all, then, not all!  What part is true?"

"That that spirit with the Russian name has put his spell
upon the well."

"God's wounds, then are we ruined!"

"Possibly."

"But not certainly?  Ye mean, not certainly?"

"That is it."

"Wherefore, ye also mean that when he saith none can break the spell--"

"Yes, when he says that, he says what isn't necessarily true.
There are conditions under which an effort to break it may have
some chance--that is, some small, some trifling chance--of success."

"The conditions--"

"Oh, they are nothing difficult.  Only these: I want the well
and the surroundings for the space of half a mile, entirely to
myself from sunset to-day until I remove the ban--and nobody
allowed to cross the ground but by my authority."

"Are these all?"

"Yes."

"And you have no fear to try?"

"Oh, none.  One may fail, of course; and one may also succeed.
One can try, and I am ready to chance it.  I have my conditions?"

"These and all others ye may name.  I will issue commandment
to that effect."

"Wait," said Merlin, with an evil smile.  "Ye wit that he that
would break this spell must know that spirit's name?"

"Yes, I know his name."

"And wit you also that to know it skills not of itself, but ye
must likewise pronounce it?  Ha-ha!  Knew ye that?"

"Yes, I knew that, too."

"You had that knowledge!  Art a fool?  Are ye minded to utter
that name and die?"

"Utter it?  Why certainly.  I would utter it if it was Welsh."

"Ye are even a dead man, then; and I go to tell Arthur."

"That's all right.  Take your gripsack and get along.  The thing
for _you_ to do is to go home and work the weather, John W. Merlin."

It was a home shot, and it made him wince; for he was the worst
weather-failure in the kingdom.  Whenever he ordered up the
danger-signals along the coast there was a week's dead calm, sure,
and every time he prophesied fair weather it rained brickbats.
But I kept him in the weather bureau right along, to undermine
his reputation.  However, that shot raised his bile, and instead
of starting home to report my death, he said he would remain
and enjoy it.

My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty well fagged,
for they had traveled double tides.  They had pack-mules along,
and had brought everything I needed--tools, pump, lead pipe,
Greek fire, sheaves of big rockets, roman candles, colored fire
sprays, electric apparatus, and a lot of sundries--everything
necessary for the stateliest kind of a miracle.  They got their
supper and a nap, and about midnight we sallied out through a
solitude so wholly vacant and complete that it quite overpassed
the required conditions.  We took possession of the well and its
surroundings.  My boys were experts in all sorts of things, from
the stoning up of a well to the constructing of a mathematical
instrument.  An hour before sunrise we had that leak mended in
ship-shape fashion, and the water began to rise.  Then we stowed our
fireworks in the chapel, locked up the place, and went home to bed.

Before the noon mass was over, we were at the well again; for there
was a deal to do yet, and I was determined to spring the miracle
before midnight, for business reasons: for whereas a miracle
worked for the Church on a week-day is worth a good deal, it is
worth six times as much if you get it in on a Sunday.  In nine hours
the water had risen to its customary level--that is to say, it was
within twenty-three feet of the top.  We put in a little iron pump,
one of the first turned out by my works near the capital; we bored
into a stone reservoir which stood against the outer wall of the
well-chamber and inserted a section of lead pipe that was long
enough to reach to the door of the chapel and project beyond
the threshold, where the gushing water would be visible to the
two hundred and fifty acres of people I was intending should be
present on the flat plain in front of this little holy hillock at
the proper time.

We knocked the head out of an empty hogshead and hoisted this
hogshead to the flat roof of the chapel, where we clamped it down
fast, poured in gunpowder till it lay loosely an inch deep on the
bottom, then we stood up rockets in the hogshead as thick as they
could loosely stand, all the different breeds of rockets there are;
and they made a portly and imposing sheaf, I can tell you.  We
grounded the wire of a pocket electrical battery in that powder,
we placed a whole magazine of Greek fire on each corner of the
roof--blue on one corner, green on another, red on another, and
purple on the last--and grounded a wire in each.

About two hundred yards off, in the flat, we built a pen of
scantlings, about four feet high, and laid planks on it, and so
made a platform.  We covered it with swell tapestries borrowed
for the occasion, and topped it off with the abbot's own throne.
When you are going to do a miracle for an ignorant race, you want
to get in every detail that will count; you want to make all the
properties impressive to the public eye; you want to make matters
comfortable for your head guest; then you can turn yourself loose
and play your effects for all they are worth.  I know the value of
these things, for I know human nature.  You can't throw too much
style into a miracle.  It costs trouble, and work, and sometimes
money; but it pays in the end.  Well, we brought the wires to
the ground at the chapel, and then brought them under the ground
to the platform, and hid the batteries there.  We put a rope fence
a hundred feet square around the platform to keep off the common
multitude, and that finished the work.  My idea was, doors open
at 10:30, performance to begin at 11:25 sharp.  I wished I could
charge admission, but of course that wouldn't answer.  I instructed
my boys to be in the chapel as early as 10, before anybody was
around, and be ready to man the pumps at the proper time, and
make the fur fly.  Then we went home to supper.

The news of the disaster to the well had traveled far by this time;
and now for two or three days a steady avalanche of people had
been pouring into the valley.  The lower end of the valley was
become one huge camp; we should have a good house, no question
about that.  Criers went the rounds early in the evening and
announced the coming attempt, which put every pulse up to fever
heat.  They gave notice that the abbot and his official suite would
move in state and occupy the platform at 10:30, up to which time
all the region which was under my ban must be clear; the bells
would then cease from tolling, and this sign should be permission
to the multitudes to close in and take their places.

I was at the platform and all ready to do the honors when the
abbot's solemn procession hove in sight--which it did not do till
it was nearly to the rope fence, because it was a starless black
night and no torches permitted.  With it came Merlin, and took
a front seat on the platform; he was as good as his word for once.
One could not see the multitudes banked together beyond the ban,
but they were there, just the same.  The moment the bells stopped,
those banked masses broke and poured over the line like a vast
black wave, and for as much as a half hour it continued to flow,
and then it solidified itself, and you could have walked upon
a pavement of human heads to--well, miles.

We had a solemn stage-wait, now, for about twenty minutes--a thing
I had counted on for effect; it is always good to let your audience
have a chance to work up its expectancy.  At length, out of the
silence a noble Latin chant--men's voices--broke and swelled up
and rolled away into the night, a majestic tide of melody.  I had
put that up, too, and it was one of the best effects I ever invented.
When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my
hands abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted--that always
produces a dead hush--and then slowly pronounced this ghastly word
with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and
many women to faint:

"Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersgesellschafft!"

Just as I was moaning out the closing hunks of that word, I touched
off one of my electric connections and all that murky world of
people stood revealed in a hideous blue glare!  It was immense
--that effect!  Lots of people shrieked, women curled up and quit
in every direction, foundlings collapsed by platoons.  The abbot
and the monks crossed themselves nimbly and their lips fluttered
with agitated prayers.  Merlin held his grip, but he was astonished
clear down to his corns; he had never seen anything to begin
with that, before.  Now was the time to pile in the effects.  I lifted
my hands and groaned out this word--as it were in agony:

"Nihilistendynamittheaterkaestchenssprengungsattentaetsversuchungen!"

--and turned on the red fire!  You should have heard that Atlantic
of people moan and howl when that crimson hell joined the blue!
After sixty seconds I shouted:

"Transvaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthiertreibertrauungsthraenen-
tragoedie!"

--and lit up the green fire!  After waiting only forty seconds this
time, I spread my arms abroad and thundered out the devastating
syllables of this word of words:

"Mekkamuselmannenmassenmenchenmoerdermohrenmuttermarmormonumentenmacher!"

--and whirled on the purple glare!  There they were, all going
at once, red, blue, green, purple!--four furious volcanoes pouring
vast clouds of radiant smoke aloft, and spreading a blinding
rainbowed noonday to the furthest confines of that valley.  In
the distance one could see that fellow on the pillar standing rigid
against the background of sky, his seesaw stopped for the first
time in twenty years.  I knew the boys were at the pump now and
ready.  So I said to the abbot:

"The time is come, Father.  I am about to pronounce the dread name
and command the spell to dissolve.  You want to brace up, and take
hold of something."  Then I shouted to the people: "Behold, in
another minute the spell will be broken, or no mortal can break it.
If it break, all will know it, for you will see the sacred water
gush from the chapel door!"

I stood a few moments, to let the hearers have a chance to spread
my announcement to those who couldn't hear, and so convey it
to the furthest ranks, then I made a grand exhibition of extra
posturing and gesturing, and shouted:

"Lo, I command the fell spirit that possesses the holy fountain
to now disgorge into the skies all the infernal fires that still
remain in him, and straightway dissolve his spell and flee hence
to the pit, there to lie bound a thousand years.  By his own dread
name I command it--BGWJJILLIGKKK!"

Then I touched off the hogshead of rockets, and a vast fountain of
dazzling lances of fire vomited itself toward the zenith with a
hissing rush, and burst in mid-sky into a storm of flashing jewels!
One mighty groan of terror started up from the massed people
--then suddenly broke into a wild hosannah of joy--for there, fair
and plain in the uncanny glare, they saw the freed water leaping
forth!  The old abbot could not speak a word, for tears and the
chokings in his throat; without utterance of any sort, he folded me
in his arms and mashed me.  It was more eloquent than speech.
And harder to get over, too, in a country where there were really
no doctors that were worth a damaged nickel.

You should have seen those acres of people throw themselves down
in that water and kiss it; kiss it, and pet it, and fondle it, and
talk to it as if it were alive, and welcome it back with the dear
names they gave their darlings, just as if it had been a friend who
was long gone away and lost, and was come home again.  Yes, it was
pretty to see, and made me think more of them than I had done before.

I sent Merlin home on a shutter.  He had caved in and gone down
like a landslide when I pronounced that fearful name, and had
never come to since.  He never had heard that name before,--neither
had I--but to him it was the right one.  Any jumble would have
been the right one.  He admitted, afterward, that that spirit's own
mother could not have pronounced that name better than I did.
He never could understand how I survived it, and I didn't tell
him.  It is only young magicians that give away a secret like that.
Merlin spent three months working enchantments to try to find out
the deep trick of how to pronounce that name and outlive it.
But he didn't arrive.

When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back
reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind
of a superior being--and I was.  I was aware of that.  I took along
a night shift of monks, and taught them the mystery of the pump,
and set them to work, for it was plain that a good part of the
people out there were going to sit up with the water all night,
consequently it was but right that they should have all they wanted
of it.  To those monks that pump was a good deal of a miracle
itself, and they were full of wonder over it; and of admiration,
too, of the exceeding effectiveness of its performance.

It was a great night, an immense night.  There was reputation in it.
I could hardly get to sleep for glorying over it.



CHAPTER XXIV

A RIVAL MAGICIAN

My influence in the Valley of Holiness was something prodigious
now.  It seemed worth while to try to turn it to some valuable
account.  The thought came to me the next morning, and was suggested
by my seeing one of my knights who was in the soap line come
riding in.  According to history, the monks of this place two
centuries before had been worldly minded enough to want to wash.
It might be that there was a leaven of this unrighteousness still
remaining.  So I sounded a Brother:

"Wouldn't you like a bath?"

He shuddered at the thought--the thought of the peril of it to
the well--but he said with feeling:

"One needs not to ask that of a poor body who has not known that
blessed refreshment sith that he was a boy.  Would God I might
wash me! but it may not be, fair sir, tempt me not; it is forbidden."

And then he sighed in such a sorrowful way that I was resolved
he should have at least one layer of his real estate removed,
if it sized up my whole influence and bankrupted the pile.  So I
went to the abbot and asked for a permit for this Brother.  He
blenched at the idea--I don't mean that you could see him blench,
for of course you couldn't see it without you scraped him, and
I didn't care enough about it to scrape him, but I knew the blench
was there, just the same, and within a book-cover's thickness of
the surface, too--blenched, and trembled.  He said:

"Ah, son, ask aught else thou wilt, and it is thine, and freely
granted out of a grateful heart--but this, oh, this!  Would you
drive away the blessed water again?"

"No, Father, I will not drive it away.  I have mysterious knowledge
which teaches me that there was an error that other time when
it was thought the institution of the bath banished the fountain."
A large interest began to show up in the old man's face.  "My
knowledge informs me that the bath was innocent of that misfortune,
which was caused by quite another sort of sin."

"These are brave words--but--but right welcome, if they be true."

"They are true, indeed.  Let me build the bath again, Father.
Let me build it again, and the fountain shall flow forever."

"You promise this?--you promise it?  Say the word--say you promise it!"

"I do promise it."

"Then will I have the first bath myself!  Go--get ye to your work.
Tarry not, tarry not, but go."

I and my boys were at work, straight off.  The ruins of the old
bath were there yet in the basement of the monastery, not a stone
missing.  They had been left just so, all these lifetimes, and
avoided with a pious fear, as things accursed.  In two days we
had it all done and the water in--a spacious pool of clear pure
water that a body could swim in.  It was running water, too.
It came in, and went out, through the ancient pipes.  The old abbot
kept his word, and was the first to try it.  He went down black
and shaky, leaving the whole black community above troubled and
worried and full of bodings; but he came back white and joyful,
and the game was made! another triumph scored.

It was a good campaign that we made in that Valley of Holiness,
and I was very well satisfied, and ready to move on now, but
I struck a disappointment.  I caught a heavy cold, and it started
up an old lurking rheumatism of mine.  Of course the rheumatism
hunted up my weakest place and located itself there.  This was
the place where the abbot put his arms about me and mashed me, what
time he was moved to testify his gratitude to me with an embrace.

When at last I got out, I was a shadow.  But everybody was full
of attentions and kindnesses, and these brought cheer back into
my life, and were the right medicine to help a convalescent swiftly
up toward health and strength again; so I gained fast.

Sandy was worn out with nursing; so I made up my mind to turn out
and go a cruise alone, leaving her at the nunnery to rest up.
My idea was to disguise myself as a freeman of peasant degree
and wander through the country a week or two on foot.  This would
give me a chance to eat and lodge with the lowliest and poorest
class of free citizens on equal terms.  There was no other way
to inform myself perfectly of their everyday life and the operation
of the laws upon it.  If I went among them as a gentleman, there
would be restraints and conventionalities which would shut me out
from their private joys and troubles, and I should get no further
than the outside shell.

One morning I was out on a long walk to get up muscle for my trip,
and had climbed the ridge which bordered the northern extremity
of the valley, when I came upon an artificial opening in the face
of a low precipice, and recognized it by its location as a hermitage
which had often been pointed out to me from a distance as the den
of a hermit of high renown for dirt and austerity.  I knew he had
lately been offered a situation in the Great Sahara, where lions
and sandflies made the hermit-life peculiarly attractive and
difficult, and had gone to Africa to take possession, so I thought
I would look in and see how the atmosphere of this den agreed
with its reputation.

My surprise was great: the place was newly swept and scoured.
Then there was another surprise.  Back in the gloom of the cavern
I heard the clink of a little bell, and then this exclamation:

"Hello Central!  Is this you, Camelot?--Behold, thou mayst glad
thy heart an thou hast faith to believe the wonderful when that
it cometh in unexpected guise and maketh itself manifest in
impossible places--here standeth in the flesh his mightiness
The Boss, and with thine own ears shall ye hear him speak!"

Now what a radical reversal of things this was; what a jumbling
together of extravagant incongruities; what a fantastic conjunction
of opposites and irreconcilables--the home of the bogus miracle
become the home of a real one, the den of a mediaeval hermit turned
into a telephone office!

The telephone clerk stepped into the light, and I recognized one
of my young fellows.  I said:

"How long has this office been established here, Ulfius?"

"But since midnight, fair Sir Boss, an it please you.  We saw many
lights in the valley, and so judged it well to make a station,
for that where so many lights be needs must they indicate a town
of goodly size."

"Quite right.  It isn't a town in the customary sense, but it's
a good stand, anyway.  Do you know where you are?"

"Of that I have had no time to make inquiry; for whenas my
comradeship moved hence upon their labors, leaving me in charge,
I got me to needed rest, purposing to inquire when I waked, and
report the place's name to Camelot for record."

"Well, this is the Valley of Holiness."

It didn't take; I mean, he didn't start at the name, as I had
supposed he would.  He merely said:

"I will so report it."

"Why, the surrounding regions are filled with the noise of late
wonders that have happened here!  You didn't hear of them?"

"Ah, ye will remember we move by night, and avoid speech with all.
We learn naught but that we get by the telephone from Camelot."

"Why _they_ know all about this thing.  Haven't they told you anything
about the great miracle of the restoration of a holy fountain?"

"Oh, _that_?  Indeed yes.  But the name of _this_ valley doth woundily
differ from the name of _that_ one; indeed to differ wider were not pos--"

"What was that name, then?"

"The Valley of Hellishness."

"_That_ explains it.  Confound a telephone, anyway.  It is the very
demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of
divergence from similarity of sense.  But no matter, you know
the name of the place now.  Call up Camelot."

He did it, and had Clarence sent for.  It was good to hear my boy's
voice again.  It was like being home.  After some affectionate
interchanges, and some account of my late illness, I said:

"What is new?"

"The king and queen and many of the court do start even in this
hour, to go to your valley to pay pious homage to the waters ye
have restored, and cleanse themselves of sin, and see the place
where the infernal spirit spouted true hell-flames to the clouds
--an ye listen sharply ye may hear me wink and hear me likewise
smile a smile, sith 'twas I that made selection of those flames
from out our stock and sent them by your order."

"Does the king know the way to this place?"

"The king?--no, nor to any other in his realms, mayhap; but the lads
that holp you with your miracle will be his guide and lead the way,
and appoint the places for rests at noons and sleeps at night."

"This will bring them here--when?"

"Mid-afternoon, or later, the third day."

"Anything else in the way of news?"

"The king hath begun the raising of the standing army ye suggested
to him; one regiment is complete and officered."

"The mischief!  I wanted a main hand in that myself.  There is
only one body of men in the kingdom that are fitted to officer
a regular army."

"Yes--and now ye will marvel to know there's not so much as one
West Pointer in that regiment."

"What are you talking about?  Are you in earnest?"

"It is truly as I have said."

"Why, this makes me uneasy.  Who were chosen, and what was the
method?  Competitive examination?"

"Indeed, I know naught of the method.  I but know this--these
officers be all of noble family, and are born--what is it you
call it?--chuckleheads."

"There's something wrong, Clarence."

"Comfort yourself, then; for two candidates for a lieutenancy do
travel hence with the king--young nobles both--and if you but wait
where you are you will hear them questioned."

"That is news to the purpose.  I will get one West Pointer in,
anyway.  Mount a man and send him to that school with a message;
let him kill horses, if necessary, but he must be there before
sunset to-night and say--"

"There is no need.  I have laid a ground wire to the school.
Prithee let me connect you with it."

It sounded good!  In this atmosphere of telephones and lightning
communication with distant regions, I was breathing the breath
of life again after long suffocation.  I realized, then, what a
creepy, dull, inanimate horror this land had been to me all these
years, and how I had been in such a stifled condition of mind as
to have grown used to it almost beyond the power to notice it.

I gave my order to the superintendent of the Academy personally.
I also asked him to bring me some paper and a fountain pen and
a box or so of safety matches.  I was getting tired of doing
without these conveniences.  I could have them now, as I wasn't
going to wear armor any more at present, and therefore could get
at my pockets.

When I got back to the monastery, I found a thing of interest
going on.  The abbot and his monks were assembled in the great
hall, observing with childish wonder and faith the performances
of a new magician, a fresh arrival.  His dress was the extreme of
the fantastic; as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an Indian
medicine-man wears.  He was mowing, and mumbling, and gesticulating,
and drawing mystical figures in the air and on the floor,--the
regular thing, you know.  He was a celebrity from Asia--so he
said, and that was enough.  That sort of evidence was as good
as gold, and passed current everywhere.

How easy and cheap it was to be a great magician on this fellow's
terms.  His specialty was to tell you what any individual on the
face of the globe was doing at the moment; and what he had done
at any time in the past, and what he would do at any time in the
future.  He asked if any would like to know what the Emperor of
the East was doing now?  The sparkling eyes and the delighted rubbing
of hands made eloquent answer--this reverend crowd _would_ like to
know what that monarch was at, just as this moment.  The fraud
went through some more mummery, and then made grave announcement:

"The high and mighty Emperor of the East doth at this moment put
money in the palm of a holy begging friar--one, two, three pieces,
and they be all of silver."

A buzz of admiring exclamations broke out, all around:

"It is marvelous!"  "Wonderful!"  "What study, what labor, to have
acquired a so amazing power as this!"

Would they like to know what the Supreme Lord of Inde was doing?
Yes.  He told them what the Supreme Lord of Inde was doing.  Then
he told them what the Sultan of Egypt was at; also what the King
of the Remote Seas was about.  And so on and so on; and with each
new marvel the astonishment at his accuracy rose higher and higher.
They thought he must surely strike an uncertain place some time;
but no, he never had to hesitate, he always knew, and always with
unerring precision.  I saw that if this thing went on I should lose
my supremacy, this fellow would capture my following, I should
be left out in the cold.  I must put a cog in his wheel, and do it
right away, too.  I said:

"If I might ask, I should very greatly like to know what a certain
person is doing."

"Speak, and freely.  I will tell you."

"It will be difficult--perhaps impossible."

"My art knoweth not that word.  The more difficult it is, the more
certainly will I reveal it to you."

You see, I was working up the interest.  It was getting pretty
high, too; you could see that by the craning necks all around,
and the half-suspended breathing.  So now I climaxed it:

"If you make no mistake--if you tell me truly what I want to
know--I will give you two hundred silver pennies."

"The fortune is mine!  I will tell you what you would know."

"Then tell me what I am doing with my right hand."

"Ah-h!"  There was a general gasp of surprise.  It had not occurred
to anybody in the crowd--that simple trick of inquiring about
somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away.  The magician was
hit hard; it was an emergency that had never happened in his
experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know how to meet
it.  He looked stunned, confused; he couldn't say a word.  "Come,"
I said, "what are you waiting for?  Is it possible you can answer up,
right off, and tell what anybody on the other side of the earth is
doing, and yet can't tell what a person is doing who isn't three
yards from you?  Persons behind me know what I am doing with my
right hand--they will indorse you if you tell correctly."  He was
still dumb.  "Very well, I'll tell you why you don't speak up and
tell; it is because you don't know.  _You_ a magician!  Good friends,
this tramp is a mere fraud and liar."

This distressed the monks and terrified them.  They were not used
to hearing these awful beings called names, and they did not know
what might be the consequence.  There was a dead silence now;
superstitious bodings were in every mind.  The magician began to
pull his wits together, and when he presently smiled an easy,
nonchalant smile, it spread a mighty relief around; for it indicated
that his mood was not destructive.  He said:

"It hath struck me speechless, the frivolity of this person's
speech.  Let all know, if perchance there be any who know it not,
that enchanters of my degree deign not to concern themselves with
the doings of any but kings, princes, emperors, them that be born
in the purple and them only.  Had ye asked me what Arthur the great
king is doing, it were another matter, and I had told ye; but the
doings of a subject interest me not."

"Oh, I misunderstood you.  I thought you said 'anybody,' and so
I supposed 'anybody' included--well, anybody; that is, everybody."

"It doth--anybody that is of lofty birth; and the better if
he be royal."

"That, it meseemeth, might well be," said the abbot, who saw his
opportunity to smooth things and avert disaster, "for it were not
likely that so wonderful a gift as this would be conferred for
the revelation of the concerns of lesser beings than such as be
born near to the summits of greatness.  Our Arthur the king--"

"Would you know of him?" broke in the enchanter.

"Most gladly, yea, and gratefully."

Everybody was full of awe and interest again right away, the
incorrigible idiots.  They watched the incantations absorbingly,
and looked at me with a "There, now, what can you say to that?"
air, when the announcement came:

"The king is weary with the chase, and lieth in his palace these
two hours sleeping a dreamless sleep."

"God's benison upon him!" said the abbot, and crossed himself;
"may that sleep be to the refreshment of his body and his soul."

"And so it might be, if he were sleeping," I said, "but the king
is not sleeping, the king rides."

Here was trouble again--a conflict of authority.  Nobody knew which
of us to believe; I still had some reputation left.  The magician's
scorn was stirred, and he said:

"Lo, I have seen many wonderful soothsayers and prophets and
magicians in my life days, but none before that could sit idle and
see to the heart of things with never an incantation to help."

"You have lived in the woods, and lost much by it.  I use incantations
myself, as this good brotherhood are aware--but only on occasions
of moment."

When it comes to sarcasming, I reckon I know how to keep my end up.
That jab made this fellow squirm.  The abbot inquired after the
queen and the court, and got this information:

"They be all on sleep, being overcome by fatigue, like as to the king."

I said:

"That is merely another lie.  Half of them are about their amusements,
the queen and the other half are not sleeping, they ride.  Now
perhaps you can spread yourself a little, and tell us where the king
and queen and all that are this moment riding with them are going?"

"They sleep now, as I said; but on the morrow they will ride,
for they go a journey toward the sea."

"And where will they be the day after to-morrow at vespers?"

"Far to the north of Camelot, and half their journey will be done."

"That is another lie, by the space of a hundred and fifty miles.
Their journey will not be merely half done, it will be all done,
and they will be _here_, in this valley."

_That_ was a noble shot!  It set the abbot and the monks in a whirl
of excitement, and it rocked the enchanter to his base.  I followed
the thing right up:

"If the king does not arrive, I will have myself ridden on a rail:
if he does I will ride you on a rail instead."

Next day I went up to the telephone office and found that the king
had passed through two towns that were on the line.  I spotted
his progress on the succeeding day in the same way.  I kept these
matters to myself.  The third day's reports showed that if he
kept up his gait he would arrive by four in the afternoon.  There
was still no sign anywhere of interest in his coming; there seemed
to be no preparations making to receive him in state; a strange
thing, truly.  Only one thing could explain this: that other
magician had been cutting under me, sure.  This was true.  I asked
a friend of mine, a monk, about it, and he said, yes, the magician
had tried some further enchantments and found out that the court
had concluded to make no journey at all, but stay at home.  Think
of that!  Observe how much a reputation was worth in such a country.
These people had seen me do the very showiest bit of magic in
history, and the only one within their memory that had a positive
value, and yet here they were, ready to take up with an adventurer
who could offer no evidence of his powers but his mere unproven word.

However, it was not good politics to let the king come without
any fuss and feathers at all, so I went down and drummed up a
procession of pilgrims and smoked out a batch of hermits and
started them out at two o'clock to meet him.  And that was the
sort of state he arrived in.  The abbot was helpless with rage
and humiliation when I brought him out on a balcony and showed
him the head of the state marching in and never a monk on hand to
offer him welcome, and no stir of life or clang of joy-bell to glad
his spirit.  He took one look and then flew to rouse out his forces.
The next minute the bells were dinning furiously, and the various
buildings were vomiting monks and nuns, who went swarming in a
rush toward the coming procession; and with them went that magician
--and he was on a rail, too, by the abbot's order; and his reputation
was in the mud, and mine was in the sky again.  Yes, a man can
keep his trademark current in such a country, but he can't sit
around and do it; he has got to be on deck and attending to business
right along.



CHAPTER XXV

A COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION

When the king traveled for change of air, or made a progress, or
visited a distant noble whom he wished to bankrupt with the cost
of his keep, part of the administration moved with him.  It was
a fashion of the time.  The Commission charged with the examination
of candidates for posts in the army came with the king to the
Valley, whereas they could have transacted their business just
as well at home.  And although this expedition was strictly a
holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of his business
functions going just the same.  He touched for the evil, as usual;
he held court in the gate at sunrise and tried cases, for he was
himself Chief Justice of the King's Bench.

He shone very well in this latter office.  He was a wise and humane
judge, and he clearly did his honest best and fairest,--according
to his lights.  That is a large reservation.  His lights--I mean
his rearing--often colored his decisions.  Whenever there was a
dispute between a noble or gentleman and a person of lower degree,
the king's leanings and sympathies were for the former class always,
whether he suspected it or not.  It was impossible that this should
be otherwise.  The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's
moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a
privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders
under another name.  This has a harsh sound, and yet should not
be offensive to any--even to the noble himself--unless the fact
itself be an offense: for the statement simply formulates a fact.
The repulsive feature of slavery is the _thing_, not its name.  One
needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below
him to recognize--and in but indifferently modified measure
--the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these
are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling.
They are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's
old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being.
The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely
the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies.
He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother
for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in
famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.

One very curious case came before the king.  A young girl, an
orphan, who had a considerable estate, married a fine young fellow
who had nothing.  The girl's property was within a seigniory held
by the Church.  The bishop of the diocese, an arrogant scion of
the great nobility, claimed the girl's estate on the ground that
she had married privately, and thus had cheated the Church out
of one of its rights as lord of the seigniory--the one heretofore
referred to as le droit du seigneur.  The penalty of refusal or
avoidance was confiscation.  The girl's defense was, that the
lordship of the seigniory was vested in the bishop, and the
particular right here involved was not transferable, but must be
exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated; and that an older
law, of the Church itself, strictly barred the bishop from exercising
it.  It was a very odd case, indeed.

It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the
ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money
that built the Mansion House.  A person who had not taken the
Sacrament according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a
candidate for sheriff of London.  Thus Dissenters were ineligible;
they could not run if asked, they could not serve if elected.
The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise,
hit upon this neat device: they passed a by-law imposing a fine
of L400 upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for
sheriff, and a fine of L600 upon any person who, after being
elected sheriff, refused to serve.  Then they went to work and
elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up
until they had collected L15,000 in fines; and there stands the
stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen
in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees
slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given
their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good
and holy peoples that be in the earth.

The girl's case seemed strong to me; the bishop's case was just
as strong.  I did not see how the king was going to get out of
this hole.  But he got out.  I append his decision:

"Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a
child's affair for simpleness.  An the young bride had conveyed
notice, as in duty bound, to her feudal lord and proper master
and protector the bishop, she had suffered no loss, for the said
bishop could have got a dispensation making him, for temporary
conveniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right, and thus
would she have kept all she had.  Whereas, failing in her first
duty, she hath by that failure failed in all; for whoso, clinging
to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must fall; it being no
defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound, neither any
deliverance from his peril, as he shall find.  Pardy, the woman's
case is rotten at the source.  It is the decree of the court that
she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the
last farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in
the costs.  Next!"

Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months
old.  Poor young creatures!  They had lived these three months
lapped to the lips in worldly comforts.  These clothes and trinkets
they were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest stretch
of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of their degree; and in
these pretty clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he trying
to comfort her with hopeful words set to the music of despair,
they went from the judgment seat out into the world homeless,
bedless, breadless; why, the very beggars by the roadsides were
not so poor as they.

Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms satisfactory to
the Church and the rest of the aristocracy, no doubt.  Men write
many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but
the fact remains that where every man in a State has a vote, brutal
laws are impossible.  Arthur's people were of course poor material
for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy;
and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short
work of that law which the king had just been administering if it
had been submitted to their full and free vote.  There is a phrase
which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come
to seem to have sense and meaning--the sense and meaning implied
when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that or
the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-government";
and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation
somewhere, some time or other which _wasn't_ capable of it--wasn't as
able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or
would be to govern it.  The master minds of all nations, in all
ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation,
and from the mass of the nation only--not from its privileged
classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade
was; whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long
ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day
that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself.
Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best
governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still
behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the
same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way
down to the lowest.

King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond
my calculations.  I had not supposed he would move in the matter
while I was away; and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining
the merits of officers; I had only remarked that it would be wise
to submit every candidate to a sharp and searching examination;
and privately I meant to put together a list of military qualifications
that nobody could answer to but my West Pointers.  That ought
to have been attended to before I left; for the king was so taken
with the idea of a standing army that he couldn't wait but must
get about it at once, and get up as good a scheme of examination
as he could invent out of his own head.

I was impatient to see what this was; and to show, too, how much
more admirable was the one which I should display to the Examining
Board.  I intimated this, gently, to the king, and it fired his
curiosity.  When the Board was assembled, I followed him in; and
behind us came the candidates.  One of these candidates was a bright
young West Pointer of mine, and with him were a couple of my
West Point professors.

When I saw the Board, I did not know whether to cry or to laugh.
The head of it was the officer known to later centuries as Norroy
King-at-Arms!  The two other members were chiefs of bureaus in
his department; and all three were priests, of course; all officials
who had to know how to read and write were priests.

My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head
of the Board opened on him with official solemnity:

"Name?"

"Mal-ease."

"Son of?"

"Webster."

"Webster--Webster.  H'm--I--my memory faileth to recall the
name.  Condition?"

"Weaver."

"Weaver!--God keep us!"

The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one
clerk fainted, and the others came near it.  The chairman pulled
himself together, and said indignantly:

"It is sufficient.  Get you hence."

But I appealed to the king.  I begged that my candidate might be
examined.  The king was willing, but the Board, who were all
well-born folk, implored the king to spare them the indignity of
examining the weaver's son.  I knew they didn't know enough to
examine him anyway, so I joined my prayers to theirs and the king
turned the duty over to my professors.  I had had a blackboard
prepared, and it was put up now, and the circus began.  It was
beautiful to hear the lad lay out the science of war, and wallow
in details of battle and siege, of supply, transportation, mining
and countermining, grand tactics, big strategy and little strategy,
signal service, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and all about siege
guns, field guns, gatling guns, rifled guns, smooth bores, musket
practice, revolver practice--and not a solitary word of it all
could these catfish make head or tail of, you understand--and it
was handsome to see him chalk off mathematical nightmares on the
blackboard that would stump the angels themselves, and do it like
nothing, too--all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and
constellations, and mean time, and sidereal time, and dinner time,
and bedtime, and every other imaginable thing above the clouds or
under them that you could harry or bullyrag an enemy with and make
him wish he hadn't come--and when the boy made his military salute
and stood aside at last, I was proud enough to hug him, and all
those other people were so dazed they looked partly petrified,
partly drunk, and wholly caught out and snowed under.  I judged
that the cake was ours, and by a large majority.

Education is a great thing.  This was the same youth who had come
to West Point so ignorant that when I asked him, "If a general
officer should have a horse shot under him on the field of battle,
what ought he to do?" answered up naively and said:

"Get up and brush himself."

One of the young nobles was called up now.  I thought I would
question him a little myself.  I said:

"Can your lordship read?"

His face flushed indignantly, and he fired this at me:

"Takest me for a clerk?  I trow I am not of a blood that--"

"Answer the question!"

He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer "No."

"Can you write?"

He wanted to resent this, too, but I said:

"You will confine yourself to the questions, and make no comments.
You are not here to air your blood or your graces, and nothing
of the sort will be permitted.  Can you write?"

"No."

"Do you know the multiplication table?"

"I wit not what ye refer to."

"How much is 9 times 6?"

"It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency
requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred,
and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren
of the knowledge."

"If A trade a barrel of onions to B, worth 2 pence the bushel,
in exchange for a sheep worth 4 pence and a dog worth a penny,
and C kill the dog before delivery, because bitten by the same,
who mistook him for D, what sum is still due to A from B, and
which party pays for the dog, C or D, and who gets the money?
If A, is the penny sufficient, or may he claim consequential damages
in the form of additional money to represent the possible profit
which might have inured from the dog, and classifiable as earned
increment, that is to say, usufruct?"

"Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who
moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never
heard the fellow to this question for confusion of the mind and
congestion of the ducts of thought.  Wherefore I beseech you let
the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless
names work out their several salvations from their piteous and
wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their
trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should
but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself
to see the desolation wrought."

"What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation?"

"If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did promulgate them
whilst that I lay sick about the beginning of the year and thereby
failed to hear his proclamation."

"What do you know of the science of optics?"

"I know of governors of places, and seneschals of castles, and
sheriffs of counties, and many like small offices and titles of
honor, but him you call the Science of Optics I have not heard
of before; peradventure it is a new dignity."

"Yes, in this country."

Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official
position, of any kind under the sun!  Why, he had all the earmarks
of a typewriter copyist, if you leave out the disposition to
contribute uninvited emendations of your grammar and punctuation.
It was unaccountable that he didn't attempt a little help of that
sort out of his majestic supply of incapacity for the job.  But that
didn't prove that he hadn't material in him for the disposition,
it only proved that he wasn't a typewriter copyist yet.  After
nagging him a little more, I let the professors loose on him and
they turned him inside out, on the line of scientific war, and
found him empty, of course.  He knew somewhat about the warfare
of the time--bushwhacking around for ogres, and bull-fights in
the tournament ring, and such things--but otherwise he was empty
and useless.  Then we took the other young noble in hand, and he
was the first one's twin, for ignorance and incapacity.  I delivered
them into the hands of the chairman of the Board with the comfortable
consciousness that their cake was dough.  They were examined in
the previous order of precedence.

"Name, so please you?"

"Pertipole, son of Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."

"Grandfather?"

"Also Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."

"Great-grandfather?"

"The same name and title."

"Great-great-grandfather?"

"We had none, worshipful sir, the line failing before it had
reached so far back."

"It mattereth not.  It is a good four generations, and fulfilleth
the requirements of the rule."

"Fulfills what rule?" I asked.

"The rule requiring four generations of nobility or else the
candidate is not eligible."

"A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the army unless he can
prove four generations of noble descent?"

"Even so; neither lieutenant nor any other officer may be commissioned
without that qualification."

"Oh, come, this is an astonishing thing.  What good is such a
qualification as that?"

"What good?  It is a hardy question, fair sir and Boss, since it doth
go far to impugn the wisdom of even our holy Mother Church herself."

"As how?"

"For that she hath established the self-same rule regarding
saints.  By her law none may be canonized until he hath lain dead
four generations."

"I see, I see--it is the same thing.  It is wonderful.  In the one
case a man lies dead-alive four generations--mummified in ignorance
and sloth--and that qualifies him to command live people, and take
their weal and woe into his impotent hands; and in the other case,
a man lies bedded with death and worms four generations, and that
qualifies him for office in the celestial camp.  Does the king's
grace approve of this strange law?"

The king said:

"Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange.  All places of
honor and of profit do belong, by natural right, to them that be
of noble blood, and so these dignities in the army are their
property and would be so without this or any rule.  The rule is
but to mark a limit.  Its purpose is to keep out too recent blood,
which would bring into contempt these offices, and men of lofty
lineage would turn their backs and scorn to take them.  I were
to blame an I permitted this calamity.  _You_ can permit it an you
are minded so to do, for you have the delegated authority, but
that the king should do it were a most strange madness and not
comprehensible to any."

"I yield.  Proceed, sir Chief of the Herald's College."

The chairman resumed as follows:

"By what illustrious achievement for the honor of the Throne and
State did the founder of your great line lift himself to the
sacred dignity of the British nobility?"

"He built a brewery."

"Sire, the Board finds this candidate perfect in all the requirements
and qualifications for military command, and doth hold his case
open for decision after due examination of his competitor."

The competitor came forward and proved exactly four generations
of nobility himself.  So there was a tie in military qualifications
that far.

He stood aside a moment, and Sir Pertipole was questioned further:

"Of what condition was the wife of the founder of your line?"

"She came of the highest landed gentry, yet she was not noble;
she was gracious and pure and charitable, of a blameless life and
character, insomuch that in these regards was she peer of the
best lady in the land."

"That will do.  Stand down."  He called up the competing lordling
again, and asked: "What was the rank and condition of the
great-grandmother who conferred British nobility upon your
great house?"

"She was a king's leman and did climb to that splendid eminence
by her own unholpen merit from the sewer where she was born."

"Ah, this, indeed, is true nobility, this is the right and perfect
intermixture.  The lieutenancy is yours, fair lord.  Hold it not in
contempt; it is the humble step which will lead to grandeurs more
worthy of the splendor of an origin like to thine."

I was down in the bottomless pit of humiliation.  I had promised
myself an easy and zenith-scouring triumph, and this was the outcome!

I was almost ashamed to look my poor disappointed cadet in the
face.  I told him to go home and be patient, this wasn't the end.

I had a private audience with the king, and made a proposition.
I said it was quite right to officer that regiment with nobilities,
and he couldn't have done a wiser thing.  It would also be a good
idea to add five hundred officers to it; in fact, add as many
officers as there were nobles and relatives of nobles in the
country, even if there should finally be five times as many officers
as privates in it; and thus make it the crack regiment, the envied
regiment, the King's Own regiment, and entitled to fight on its
own hook and in its own way, and go whither it would and come
when it pleased, in time of war, and be utterly swell and independent.
This would make that regiment the heart's desire of all the
nobility, and they would all be satisfied and happy.  Then we
would make up the rest of the standing army out of commonplace
materials, and officer it with nobodies, as was proper--nobodies
selected on a basis of mere efficiency--and we would make this
regiment toe the line, allow it no aristocratic freedom from
restraint, and force it to do all the work and persistent hammering,
to the end that whenever the King's Own was tired and wanted to go
off for a change and rummage around amongst ogres and have a good
time, it could go without uneasiness, knowing that matters were in
safe hands behind it, and business going to be continued at the
old stand, same as usual.  The king was charmed with the idea.

When I noticed that, it gave me a valuable notion.  I thought
I saw my way out of an old and stubborn difficulty at last.  You
see, the royalties of the Pendragon stock were a long-lived race
and very fruitful.  Whenever a child was born to any of these
--and it was pretty often--there was wild joy in the nation's mouth,
and piteous sorrow in the nation's heart.  The joy was questionable,
but the grief was honest.  Because the event meant another call
for a Royal Grant.  Long was the list of these royalties, and
they were a heavy and steadily increasing burden upon the treasury
and a menace to the crown.  Yet Arthur could not believe this
latter fact, and he would not listen to any of my various projects
for substituting something in the place of the royal grants.  If I
could have persuaded him to now and then provide a support for
one of these outlying scions from his own pocket, I could have
made a grand to-do over it, and it would have had a good effect
with the nation; but no, he wouldn't hear of such a thing.  He had
something like a religious passion for royal grant; he seemed to
look upon it as a sort of sacred swag, and one could not irritate
him in any way so quickly and so surely as by an attack upon that
venerable institution.  If I ventured to cautiously hint that there
was not another respectable family in England that would humble
itself to hold out the hat--however, that is as far as I ever got;
he always cut me short there, and peremptorily, too.

But I believed I saw my chance at last.  I would form this crack
regiment out of officers alone--not a single private.  Half of it
should consist of nobles, who should fill all the places up to
Major-General, and serve gratis and pay their own expenses; and
they would be glad to do this when they should learn that the rest
of the regiment would consist exclusively of princes of the blood.
These princes of the blood should range in rank from Lieutenant-General
up to Field Marshal, and be gorgeously salaried and equipped and
fed by the state.  Moreover--and this was the master stroke
--it should be decreed that these princely grandees should be always
addressed by a stunningly gaudy and awe-compelling title (which
I would presently invent), and they and they only in all England
should be so addressed.  Finally, all princes of the blood should
have free choice; join that regiment, get that great title, and
renounce the royal grant, or stay out and receive a grant.  Neatest
touch of all: unborn but imminent princes of the blood could be
_born_ into the regiment, and start fair, with good wages and a
permanent situation, upon due notice from the parents.

All the boys would join, I was sure of that; so, all existing
grants would be relinquished; that the newly born would always
join was equally certain.  Within sixty days that quaint and
bizarre anomaly, the Royal Grant, would cease to be a living fact,
and take its place among the curiosities of the past.



CHAPTER XXVI

THE FIRST NEWSPAPER

When I told the king I was going out disguised as a petty freeman
to scour the country and familiarize myself with the humbler life
of the people, he was all afire with the novelty of the thing
in a minute, and was bound to take a chance in the adventure
himself--nothing should stop him--he would drop everything and
go along--it was the prettiest idea he had run across for many
a day.  He wanted to glide out the back way and start at once;
but I showed him that that wouldn't answer.  You see, he was billed
for the king's-evil--to touch for it, I mean--and it wouldn't be
right to disappoint the house and it wouldn't make a delay worth
considering, anyway, it was only a one-night stand.  And I thought
he ought to tell the queen he was going away.  He clouded up at
that and looked sad.  I was sorry I had spoken, especially when
he said mournfully:

"Thou forgettest that Launcelot is here; and where Launcelot is,
she noteth not the going forth of the king, nor what day he returneth."

Of course, I changed the Subject.  Yes, Guenever was beautiful,
it is true, but take her all around she was pretty slack.  I never
meddled in these matters, they weren't my affair, but I did hate
to see the way things were going on, and I don't mind saying that
much.  Many's the time she had asked me, "Sir Boss, hast seen
Sir Launcelot about?" but if ever she went fretting around for
the king I didn't happen to be around at the time.

There was a very good lay-out for the king's-evil business--very
tidy and creditable.  The king sat under a canopy of state; about
him were clustered a large body of the clergy in full canonicals.
Conspicuous, both for location and personal outfit, stood Marinel,
a hermit of the quack-doctor species, to introduce the sick.  All
abroad over the spacious floor, and clear down to the doors,
in a thick jumble, lay or sat the scrofulous, under a strong light.
It was as good as a tableau; in fact, it had all the look of being
gotten up for that, though it wasn't.  There were eight hundred
sick people present.  The work was slow; it lacked the interest
of novelty for me, because I had seen the ceremonies before;
the thing soon became tedious, but the proprieties required me
to stick it out.  The doctor was there for the reason that in all
such crowds there were many people who only imagined something
was the matter with them, and many who were consciously sound
but wanted the immortal honor of fleshly contact with a king, and
yet others who pretended to illness in order to get the piece of
coin that went with the touch.  Up to this time this coin had been
a wee little gold piece worth about a third of a dollar.  When you
consider how much that amount of money would buy, in that age
and country, and how usual it was to be scrofulous, when not dead,
you would understand that the annual king's-evil appropriation was
just the River and Harbor bill of that government for the grip it
took on the treasury and the chance it afforded for skinning the
surplus.  So I had privately concluded to touch the treasury itself
for the king's-evil.  I covered six-sevenths of the appropriation
into the treasury a week before starting from Camelot on my
adventures, and ordered that the other seventh be inflated into
five-cent nickels and delivered into the hands of the head clerk
of the King's Evil Department; a nickel to take the place of each
gold coin, you see, and do its work for it.  It might strain the
nickel some, but I judged it could stand it.  As a rule, I do not
approve of watering stock, but I considered it square enough
in this case, for it was just a gift, anyway.  Of course, you can
water a gift as much as you want to; and I generally do.  The old
gold and silver coins of the country were of ancient and unknown
origin, as a rule, but some of them were Roman; they were ill-shapen,
and seldom rounder than a moon that is a week past the full; they
were hammered, not minted, and they were so worn with use that
the devices upon them were as illegible as blisters, and looked
like them.  I judged that a sharp, bright new nickel, with a
first-rate likeness of the king on one side of it and Guenever
on the other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the tuck out
of scrofula as handy as a nobler coin and please the scrofulous
fancy more; and I was right.  This batch was the first it was
tried on, and it worked to a charm.  The saving in expense was
a notable economy.  You will see that by these figures: We touched
a trifle over 700 of the 800 patients; at former rates, this would
have cost the government about $240; at the new rate we pulled
through for about $35, thus saving upward of $200 at one swoop.
To appreciate the full magnitude of this stroke, consider these
other figures: the annual expenses of a national government amount
to the equivalent of a contribution of three days' average wages of
every individual of the population, counting every individual as
if he were a man.  If you take a nation of 60,000,000, where average
wages are $2 per day, three days' wages taken from each individual
will provide $360,000,000 and pay the government's expenses.  In my
day, in my own country, this money was collected from imposts,
and the citizen imagined that the foreign importer paid it, and it
made him comfortable to think so; whereas, in fact, it was paid
by the American people, and was so equally and exactly distributed
among them that the annual cost to the 100-millionaire and the
annual cost to the sucking child of the day-laborer was precisely
the same--each paid $6.  Nothing could be equaler than that,
I reckon.  Well, Scotland and Ireland were tributary to Arthur,
and the united populations of the British Islands amounted to
something less than 1,000,000.  A mechanic's average wage was
3 cents a day, when he paid his own keep.  By this rule the national
government's expenses were $90,000 a year, or about $250 a day.
Thus, by the substitution of nickels for gold on a king's-evil
day, I not only injured no one, dissatisfied no one, but pleased
all concerned and saved four-fifths of that day's national expense
into the bargain--a saving which would have been the equivalent
of $800,000 in my day in America.  In making this substitution
I had drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source--the wisdom
of my boyhood--for the true statesman does not despise any wisdom,
howsoever lowly may be its origin: in my boyhood I had always
saved my pennies and contributed buttons to the foreign missionary
cause.  The buttons would answer the ignorant savage as well as
the coin, the coin would answer me better than the buttons; all
hands were happy and nobody hurt.

Marinel took the patients as they came.  He examined the candidate;
if he couldn't qualify he was warned off; if he could he was passed
along to the king.  A priest pronounced the words, "They shall
lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover."  Then the king
stroked the ulcers, while the reading continued; finally, the
patient graduated and got his nickel--the king hanging it around
his neck himself--and was dismissed.  Would you think that that
would cure?  It certainly did.  Any mummery will cure if the
patient's faith is strong in it.  Up by Astolat there was a chapel
where the Virgin had once appeared to a girl who used to herd
geese around there--the girl said so herself--and they built the
chapel upon that spot and hung a picture in it representing the
occurrence--a picture which you would think it dangerous for a sick
person to approach; whereas, on the contrary, thousands of the lame
and the sick came and prayed before it every year and went away
whole and sound; and even the well could look upon it and live.
Of course, when I was told these things I did not believe them;
but when I went there and saw them I had to succumb.  I saw the
cures effected myself; and they were real cures and not questionable.
I saw cripples whom I had seen around Camelot for years on crutches,
arrive and pray before that picture, and put down their crutches
and walk off without a limp.  There were piles of crutches there
which had been left by such people as a testimony.

In other places people operated on a patient's mind, without saying
a word to him, and cured him.  In others, experts assembled patients
in a room and prayed over them, and appealed to their faith, and
those patients went away cured.  Wherever you find a king who can't
cure the king's-evil you can be sure that the most valuable
superstition that supports his throne--the subject's belief in
the divine appointment of his sovereign--has passed away.  In my
youth the monarchs of England had ceased to touch for the evil,
but there was no occasion for this diffidence: they could have
cured it forty-nine times in fifty.

Well, when the priest had been droning for three hours, and the
good king polishing the evidences, and the sick were still pressing
forward as plenty as ever, I got to feeling intolerably bored.
I was sitting by an open window not far from the canopy of state.
For the five hundredth time a patient stood forward to have his
repulsivenesses stroked; again those words were being droned out:
"they shall lay their hands on the sick"--when outside there rang
clear as a clarion a note that enchanted my soul and tumbled
thirteen worthless centuries about my ears: "Camelot _Weekly
Hosannah and Literary Volcano!_--latest irruption--only two cents
--all about the big miracle in the Valley of Holiness!"  One greater
than kings had arrived--the newsboy.  But I was the only person
in all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty birth, and
what this imperial magician was come into the world to do.

I dropped a nickel out of the window and got my paper; the
Adam-newsboy of the world went around the corner to get my change;
is around the corner yet.  It was delicious to see a newspaper
again, yet I was conscious of a secret shock when my eye fell upon
the first batch of display head-lines.  I had lived in a clammy
atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference, so long that they
sent a quivery little cold wave through me:


              HIGH TIMES IN THE VALLEY

                    OF HOLINESS!

                        ----

               THE WATER-WORKS CORKED!

                        ----

         BRER MERLIN WORKS HIS ARTS, BUT GETS
                        LEFT?

                        ----

      But the Boss scores on his first Innings!

                        ----

          The Miraculous Well Uncorked amid
                  awful outbursts of

              INFERNAL FIRE AND SMOKE
                     ATHUNDER!

                        ----

           THE BUZZARD-ROOST ASTONISHED!

                        ----

              UNPARALLELED REJOIBINGS!


--and so on, and so on.  Yes, it was too loud.  Once I could have
enjoyed it and seen nothing out of the way about it, but now its
note was discordant.  It was good Arkansas journalism, but this
was not Arkansas.  Moreover, the next to the last line was calculated
to give offense to the hermits, and perhaps lose us their advertising.
Indeed, there was too lightsome a tone of flippancy all through
the paper.  It was plain I had undergone a considerable change
without noticing it.  I found myself unpleasantly affected by
pert little irreverencies which would have seemed but proper and
airy graces of speech at an earlier period of my life.  There was an
abundance of the following breed of items, and they discomforted me:

   LOCAL SMOKE AND CINDERS.

   Sir Launcelot met up with old King
   Agrivance of Ireland unexpectedly last
   weok over on the moor south of Sir
   Balmoral le Merveilleuse's hog dasture.
   The widow has been notified.

   Expedition No. 3 will start adout the
   first of mext month on a search f8r Sir
   Sagramour le Desirous. It is in com-
   and of the renowned Knight of the Red
   Lawns, assissted by Sir Persant of Inde,
   who is compete9t. intelligent, courte-
   ous, and in every way a brick, and fur-
   tHer assisted by Sir Palamides the Sara-
   cen, who is no huckleberry hinself.
   This is no pic-nic, these boys mean
   busine&s.

   The readers of the Hosannah will re-
   gret to learn that the hadndsome and
   popular Sir Charolais of Gaul, who dur-
   ing his four weeks' stay at the Bull and
   Halibut, this city, has won every heart
   by his polished manners and elegant
   cPnversation, will pUll out to-day for
   home. Give us another call, Charley!

   The bdsiness end of the funeral of
   the late Sir Dalliance the duke's son of
   Cornwall, killed in an encounter with
   the Giant of the Knotted Bludgeon last
   Tuesday on the borders of the Plain of
   Enchantment was in the hands of the
   ever affable and efficient Mumble,
   prince of un3ertakers, then whom there
   exists none by whom it were a more
   satisfying pleasure to have the last sad
   offices performed. Give him a trial.

   The cordial thanks of the Hosannah
   office are due, from editor down to
   devil, to the ever courteous and thought-
   ful Lord High Stew d of the Palace's
   Third Assistant V  t for several sau-
   ceTs of ice crEam a quality calculated
   to make the ey of the recipients hu-
   mid with grt  ude; and it done it.
   When this  administration wants to
   chalk up a desirable name for early
   promotion, the Hosannah would like a
   chance to sudgest.

   The Demoiselle Irene Dewlap, of
   South Astolat, is visiting her uncle, the
   popular host of the Cattlemen's Board-
   ing Ho&se, Liver Lane, this city.

   Young Barker the bellows-mender is
   hoMe again, and looks much improved
   by his vacation round-up among the out-
   lying smithies. See his ad.

Of course it was good enough journalism for a beginning; I knew
that quite well, and yet it was somehow disappointing.  The
"Court Circular" pleased me better; indeed, its simple and dignified
respectfulness was a distinct refreshment to me after all those
disgraceful familiarities.  But even it could have been improved.
Do what one may, there is no getting an air of variety into a court
circular, I acknowledge that.  There is a profound monotonousness
about its facts that baffles and defeats one's sincerest efforts
to make them sparkle and enthuse.  The best way to manage--in fact,
the only sensible way--is to disguise repetitiousness of fact under
variety of form: skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle
of words.  It deceives the eye; you think it is a new fact; it
gives you the idea that the court is carrying on like everything;
this excites you, and you drain the whole column, with a good
appetite, and perhaps never notice that it's a barrel of soup made
out of a single bean.  Clarence's way was good, it was simple,
it was dignified, it was direct and business-like; all I say is,
it was not the best way:

             COURT CIRCULAR.

   On Monday, the king rode in the park.
   "  Tuesday,      "      "        "
   "  Wendesday     "      "        "
   "  Thursday      "      "        "
   "  Friday,       "      "        "
   "  Saturday      "      "        "
   "  Sunday,       "      "        "


However, take the paper by and large, I was vastly pleased with it.
Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and
there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything,
and it was good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and better
than was needed in Arthur's day and realm.  As a rule, the grammar
was leaky and the construction more or less lame; but I did not
much mind these things.  They are common defects of my own, and
one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he can't stand
perpendicular himself.

I was hungry enough for literature to want to take down the whole
paper at this one meal, but I got only a few bites, and then had
to postpone, because the monks around me besieged me so with eager
questions: What is this curious thing?  What is it for?  Is it a
handkerchief?--saddle blanket?--part of a shirt?  What is it made of?
How thin it is, and how dainty and frail; and how it rattles.
Will it wear, do you think, and won't the rain injure it?  Is it
writing that appears on it, or is it only ornamentation?  They
suspected it was writing, because those among them who knew how
to read Latin and had a smattering of Greek, recognized some of
the letters, but they could make nothing out of the result as a
whole.  I put my information in the simplest form I could:

"It is a public journal; I will explain what that is, another time.
It is not cloth, it is made of paper; some time I will explain
what paper is.  The lines on it are reading matter; and not written
by hand, but printed; by and by I will explain what printing is.
A thousand of these sheets have been made, all exactly like this,
in every minute detail--they can't be told apart."  Then they all
broke out with exclamations of surprise and admiration:

"A thousand!  Verily a mighty work--a year's work for many men."

"No--merely a day's work for a man and a boy."

They crossed themselves, and whiffed out a protective prayer or two.

"Ah-h--a miracle, a wonder!  Dark work of enchantment."

I let it go at that.  Then I read in a low voice, to as many as
could crowd their shaven heads within hearing distance, part of
the account of the miracle of the restoration of the well, and
was accompanied by astonished and reverent ejaculations all through:
"Ah-h-h!"  "How true!"  "Amazing, amazing!"  "These be the very
haps as they happened, in marvelous exactness!"  And might they
take this strange thing in their hands, and feel of it and examine
it?--they would be very careful.  Yes.  So they took it, handling
it as cautiously and devoutly as if it had been some holy thing
come from some supernatural region; and gently felt of its texture,
caressed its pleasant smooth surface with lingering touch, and
scanned the mysterious characters with fascinated eyes.  These
grouped bent heads, these charmed faces, these speaking eyes
--how beautiful to me!  For was not this my darling, and was not
all this mute wonder and interest and homage a most eloquent
tribute and unforced compliment to it?  I knew, then, how a mother
feels when women, whether strangers or friends, take her new baby,
and close themselves about it with one eager impulse, and bend
their heads over it in a tranced adoration that makes all the rest
of the universe vanish out of their consciousness and be as if it
were not, for that time.  I knew how she feels, and that there is
no other satisfied ambition, whether of king, conqueror, or poet,
that ever reaches half-way to that serene far summit or yields half
so divine a contentment.

During all the rest of the seance my paper traveled from group to
group all up and down and about that huge hall, and my happy eye
was upon it always, and I sat motionless, steeped in satisfaction,
drunk with enjoyment.  Yes, this was heaven; I was tasting it once,
if I might never taste it more.



CHAPTER XXVII

THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL INCOGNITO

About bedtime I took the king to my private quarters to cut his
hair and help him get the hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear.
The high classes wore their hair banged across the forehead but
hanging to the shoulders the rest of the way around, whereas the
lowest ranks of commoners were banged fore and aft both; the slaves
were bangless, and allowed their hair free growth.  So I inverted
a bowl over his head and cut away all the locks that hung below it.
I also trimmed his whiskers and mustache until they were only
about a half-inch long; and tried to do it inartistically, and
succeeded.  It was a villainous disfigurement.  When he got his
lubberly sandals on, and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth,
which hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was no
longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest
and most commonplace and unattractive.  We were dressed and barbered
alike, and could pass for small farmers, or farm bailiffs, or
shepherds, or carters; yes, or for village artisans, if we chose,
our costume being in effect universal among the poor, because of
its strength and cheapness.  I don't mean that it was really cheap
to a very poor person, but I do mean that it was the cheapest
material there was for male attire--manufactured material, you
understand.

We slipped away an hour before dawn, and by broad sun-up had made
eight or ten miles, and were in the midst of a sparsely settled
country.  I had a pretty heavy knapsack; it was laden with
provisions--provisions for the king to taper down on, till he
could take to the coarse fare of the country without damage.

I found a comfortable seat for the king by the roadside, and then
gave him a morsel or two to stay his stomach with.  Then I said
I would find some water for him, and strolled away.  Part of my
project was to get out of sight and sit down and rest a little
myself.  It had always been my custom to stand when in his presence;
even at the council board, except upon those rare occasions when
the sitting was a very long one, extending over hours; then I had
a trifling little backless thing which was like a reversed culvert
and was as comfortable as the toothache.  I didn't want to break
him in suddenly, but do it by degrees.  We should have to sit
together now when in company, or people would notice; but it would
not be good politics for me to be playing equality with him when
there was no necessity for it.

I found the water some three hundred yards away, and had been
resting about twenty minutes, when I heard voices.  That is all
right, I thought--peasants going to work; nobody else likely to be
stirring this early.  But the next moment these comers jingled into
sight around a turn of the road--smartly clad people of quality,
with luggage-mules and servants in their train!  I was off like
a shot, through the bushes, by the shortest cut.  For a while it
did seem that these people would pass the king before I could
get to him; but desperation gives you wings, you know, and I canted
my body forward, inflated my breast, and held my breath and flew.
I arrived.  And in plenty good enough time, too.

"Pardon, my king, but it's no time for ceremony--jump!  Jump to
your feet--some quality are coming!"

"Is that a marvel?  Let them come."

"But my liege!  You must not be seen sitting.  Rise!--and stand in
humble posture while they pass.  You are a peasant, you know."

"True--I had forgot it, so lost was I in planning of a huge war
with Gaul"--he was up by this time, but a farm could have got up
quicker, if there was any kind of a boom in real estate--"and
right-so a thought came randoming overthwart this majestic dream
the which--"

"A humbler attitude, my lord the king--and quick!  Duck your head!
--more!--still more!--droop it!"

He did his honest best, but lord, it was no great things.  He looked
as humble as the leaning tower at Pisa.  It is the most you could
say of it.  Indeed, it was such a thundering poor success that
it raised wondering scowls all along the line, and a gorgeous
flunkey at the tail end of it raised his whip; but I jumped in
time and was under it when it fell; and under cover of the volley
of coarse laughter which followed, I spoke up sharply and warned
the king to take no notice.  He mastered himself for the moment,
but it was a sore tax; he wanted to eat up the procession.  I said:

"It would end our adventures at the very start; and we, being
without weapons, could do nothing with that armed gang.  If we
are going to succeed in our emprise, we must not only look the
peasant but act the peasant."

"It is wisdom; none can gainsay it.  Let us go on, Sir Boss.
I will take note and learn, and do the best I may."

He kept his word.  He did the best he could, but I've seen better.
If you have ever seen an active, heedless, enterprising child
going diligently out of one mischief and into another all day
long, and an anxious mother at its heels all the while, and just
saving it by a hair from drowning itself or breaking its neck with
each new experiment, you've seen the king and me.

If I could have foreseen what the thing was going to be like,
I should have said, No, if anybody wants to make his living
exhibiting a king as a peasant, let him take the layout; I can
do better with a menagerie, and last longer.  And yet, during
the first three days I never allowed him to enter a hut or other
dwelling.  If he could pass muster anywhere during his early
novitiate it would be in small inns and on the road; so to these
places we confined ourselves.  Yes, he certainly did the best he
could, but what of that?  He didn't improve a bit that I could see.

He was always frightening me, always breaking out with fresh
astonishers, in new and unexpected places.  Toward evening on
the second day, what does he do but blandly fetch out a dirk
from inside his robe!

"Great guns, my liege, where did you get that?"

"From a smuggler at the inn, yester eve."

"What in the world possessed you to buy it?"

"We have escaped divers dangers by wit--thy wit--but I have
bethought me that it were but prudence if I bore a weapon, too.
Thine might fail thee in some pinch."

"But people of our condition are not allowed to carry arms.  What
would a lord say--yes, or any other person of whatever condition
--if he caught an upstart peasant with a dagger on his person?"

It was a lucky thing for us that nobody came along just then.
I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as
persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing
itself.  We walked along, silent and thinking.  Finally the king said:

"When ye know that I meditate a thing inconvenient, or that hath
a peril in it, why do you not warn me to cease from that project?"

It was a startling question, and a puzzler.  I didn't quite know
how to take hold of it, or what to say, and so, of course, I ended
by saying the natural thing:

"But, sire, how can I know what your thoughts are?"

The king stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at me.

"I believed thou wert greater than Merlin; and truly in magic
thou art.  But prophecy is greater than magic.  Merlin is a prophet."

I saw I had made a blunder.  I must get back my lost ground.
After a deep reflection and careful planning, I said:

"Sire, I have been misunderstood.  I will explain.  There are two
kinds of prophecy.  One is the gift to foretell things that are but
a little way off, the other is the gift to foretell things that
are whole ages and centuries away.  Which is the mightier gift,
do you think?"

"Oh, the last, most surely!"

"True.  Does Merlin possess it?"

"Partly, yes.  He foretold mysteries about my birth and future
kingship that were twenty years away."

"Has he ever gone beyond that?"

"He would not claim more, I think."

"It is probably his limit.  All prophets have their limit.  The limit
of some of the great prophets has been a hundred years."

"These are few, I ween."

"There have been two still greater ones, whose limit was four
hundred and six hundred years, and one whose limit compassed
even seven hundred and twenty."

"Gramercy, it is marvelous!"

"But what are these in comparison with me?  They are nothing."

"What?  Canst thou truly look beyond even so vast a stretch
of time as--"

"Seven hundred years?  My liege, as clear as the vision of an eagle
does my prophetic eye penetrate and lay bare the future of this
world for nearly thirteen centuries and a half!"

My land, you should have seen the king's eyes spread slowly open,
and lift the earth's entire atmosphere as much as an inch!  That
settled Brer Merlin.  One never had any occasion to prove his
facts, with these people; all he had to do was to state them.  It
never occurred to anybody to doubt the statement.

"Now, then," I continued, "I _could_ work both kinds of prophecy
--the long and the short--if I chose to take the trouble to keep
in practice; but I seldom exercise any but the long kind, because
the other is beneath my dignity.  It is properer to Merlin's sort
--stump-tail prophets, as we call them in the profession.  Of course,
I whet up now and then and flirt out a minor prophecy, but not
often--hardly ever, in fact.  You will remember that there was
great talk, when you reached the Valley of Holiness, about my
having prophesied your coming and the very hour of your arrival,
two or three days beforehand."

"Indeed, yes, I mind it now."

"Well, I could have done it as much as forty times easier, and
piled on a thousand times more detail into the bargain, if it had
been five hundred years away instead of two or three days."

"How amazing that it should be so!"

"Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five
hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five
hundred seconds off."

"And yet in reason it should clearly be the other way; it should
be five hundred times as easy to foretell the last as the first,
for, indeed, it is so close by that one uninspired might almost
see it.  In truth, the law of prophecy doth contradict the likelihoods,
most strangely making the difficult easy, and the easy difficult."

It was a wise head.  A peasant's cap was no safe disguise for it;
you could know it for a king's under a diving-bell, if you could
hear it work its intellect.

I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it.  The king
was as hungry to find out everything that was going to happen
during the next thirteen centuries as if he were expecting to live
in them.  From that time out, I prophesied myself bald-headed
trying to supply the demand.  I have done some indiscreet things in
my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the
worst.  Still, it had its ameliorations.  A prophet doesn't have
to have any brains.  They are good to have, of course, for the
ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional
work.  It is the restfulest vocation there is.  When the spirit of
prophecy comes upon you, you merely take your intellect and lay it
off in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it
alone; it will work itself: the result is prophecy.

Every day a knight-errant or so came along, and the sight of them
fired the king's martial spirit every time.  He would have forgotten
himself, sure, and said something to them in a style a suspicious
shade or so above his ostensible degree, and so I always got him
well out of the road in time.  Then he would stand and look with
all his eyes; and a proud light would flash from them, and his
nostrils would inflate like a war-horse's, and I knew he was
longing for a brush with them.  But about noon of the third day
I had stopped in the road to take a precaution which had been
suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to my share two days
before; a precaution which I had afterward decided to leave untaken,
I was so loath to institute it; but now I had just had a fresh
reminder: while striding heedlessly along, with jaw spread and
intellect at rest, for I was prophesying, I stubbed my toe and
fell sprawling.  I was so pale I couldn't think for a moment;
then I got softly and carefully up and unstrapped my knapsack.
I had that dynamite bomb in it, done up in wool in a box.  It was
a good thing to have along; the time would come when I could do
a valuable miracle with it, maybe, but it was a nervous thing
to have about me, and I didn't like to ask the king to carry it.
Yet I must either throw it away or think up some safe way to get
along with its society.  I got it out and slipped it into my scrip,
and just then here came a couple of knights.  The king stood,
stately as a statue, gazing toward them--had forgotten himself again,
of course--and before I could get a word of warning out, it was
time for him to skip, and well that he did it, too.  He supposed
they would turn aside.  Turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt
under foot?  When had he ever turned aside himself--or ever had
the chance to do it, if a peasant saw him or any other noble knight
in time to judiciously save him the trouble?  The knights paid
no attention to the king at all; it was his place to look out
himself, and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly
ridden down, and laughed at besides.

The king was in a flaming fury, and launched out his challenge
and epithets with a most royal vigor.  The knights were some little
distance by now.  They halted, greatly surprised, and turned in
their saddles and looked back, as if wondering if it might be worth
while to bother with such scum as we.  Then they wheeled and
started for us.  Not a moment must be lost.  I started for _them_.
I passed them at a rattling gait, and as I went by I flung out a
hair-lifting soul-scorching thirteen-jointed insult which made
the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison.  I got it out of
the nineteenth century where they know how.  They had such headway
that they were nearly to the king before they could check up;
then, frantic with rage, they stood up their horses on their hind
hoofs and whirled them around, and the next moment here they came,
breast to breast.  I was seventy yards off, then, and scrambling up
a great bowlder at the roadside.  When they were within thirty
yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level, depressed
their mailed heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming
straight out behind, most gallant to see, this lightning express
came tearing for me!  When they were within fifteen yards, I sent
that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under
the horses' noses.

Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see.  It resembled
a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi; and during the next
fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic
fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh.  I say we,
for the king joined the audience, of course, as soon as he had got
his breath again.  There was a hole there which would afford steady
work for all the people in that region for some years to come
--in trying to explain it, I mean; as for filling it up, that service
would be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of a
select few--peasants of that seignory; and they wouldn't get
anything for it, either.

But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was done with a
dynamite bomb.  This information did him no damage, because it
left him as intelligent as he was before.  However, it was a noble
miracle, in his eyes, and was another settler for Merlin.  I thought
it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort
that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions
were just right.  Otherwise he would be encoring it every time we
had a good subject, and that would be inconvenient, because I
hadn't any more bombs along.



CHAPTER XXVIII

DRILLING THE KING

On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, and we
had been tramping an hour in the chill dawn, I came to a resolution:
the king _must_ be drilled; things could not go on so, he must be
taken in hand and deliberately and conscientiously drilled, or we
couldn't ever venture to enter a dwelling; the very cats would know
this masquerader for a humbug and no peasant.  So I called a halt
and said:

"Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there
is no discrepancy; but as between your clothes and your bearing,
you are all wrong, there is a most noticeable discrepancy.  Your
soldierly stride, your lordly port--these will not do.  You stand
too straight, your looks are too high, too confident.  The cares
of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do not droop the chin,
they do not depress the high level of the eye-glance, they do not
put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them
in slouching body and unsure step.  It is the sordid cares of
the lowly born that do these things.  You must learn the trick;
you must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression,
insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap
the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and
approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very
infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go
to pieces at the first hut we stop at.  Pray try to walk like this."

The king took careful note, and then tried an imitation.

"Pretty fair--pretty fair.  Chin a little lower, please--there, very
good.  Eyes too high; pray don't look at the horizon, look at the
ground, ten steps in front of you.  Ah--that is better, that is
very good.  Wait, please; you betray too much vigor, too much
decision; you want more of a shamble.  Look at me, please--this is
what I mean....  Now you are getting it; that is the idea--at least,
it sort of approaches it....  Yes, that is pretty fair.  _But!_
There is a great big something wanting, I don't quite know what
it is.  Please walk thirty yards, so that I can get a perspective
on the thing....  Now, then--your head's right, speed's right,
shoulders right, eyes right, chin right, gait, carriage, general
style right--everything's right!  And yet the fact remains, the
aggregate's wrong.  The account don't balance.  Do it again,
please....  _Now_ I think I begin to see what it is.  Yes, I've
struck it.  You see, the genuine spiritlessness is wanting; that's
what's the trouble.  It's all _amateur_--mechanical details all
right, almost to a hair; everything about the delusion perfect,
except that it don't delude."

"What, then, must one do, to prevail?"

"Let me think... I can't seem to quite get at it.  In fact, there
isn't anything that can right the matter but practice.  This is
a good place for it: roots and stony ground to break up your
stately gait, a region not liable to interruption, only one field
and one hut in sight, and they so far away that nobody could
see us from there.  It will be well to move a little off the road
and put in the whole day drilling you, sire."

After the drill had gone on a little while, I said:

"Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the hut yonder,
and the family are before us.  Proceed, please--accost the head
of the house."

The king unconsciously straightened up like a monument, and said,
with frozen austerity:

"Varlet, bring a seat; and serve to me what cheer ye have."

"Ah, your grace, that is not well done."

"In what lacketh it?"

"These people do not call _each other_ varlets."

"Nay, is that true?"

"Yes; only those above them call them so."

"Then must I try again.  I will call him villein."

"No-no; for he may be a freeman."

"Ah--so.  Then peradventure I should call him goodman."

"That would answer, your grace, but it would be still better if
you said friend, or brother."

"Brother!--to dirt like that?"

"Ah, but _we_ are pretending to be dirt like that, too."

"It is even true.  I will say it.  Brother, bring a seat, and
thereto what cheer ye have, withal.  Now 'tis right."

"Not quite, not wholly right.  You have asked for one, not _us_
--for one, not both; food for one, a seat for one."

The king looked puzzled--he wasn't a very heavy weight, intellectually.
His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do
it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.

"Would _you_ have a seat also--and sit?"

"If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we were only pretending
to be equals--and playing the deception pretty poorly, too."

"It is well and truly said!  How wonderful is truth, come it in
whatsoever unexpected form it may!  Yes, he must bring out seats
and food for both, and in serving us present not ewer and napkin
with more show of respect to the one than to the other."

"And there is even yet a detail that needs correcting.  He must
bring nothing outside; we will go in--in among the dirt, and
possibly other repulsive things,--and take the food with the
household, and after the fashion of the house, and all on equal
terms, except the man be of the serf class; and finally, there
will be no ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf or free.  Please
walk again, my liege.  There--it is better--it is the best yet;
but not perfect.  The shoulders have known no ignobler burden
than iron mail, and they will not stoop."

"Give me, then, the bag.  I will learn the spirit that goeth
with burdens that have not honor.  It is the spirit that stoopeth
the shoulders, I ween, and not the weight; for armor is heavy,
yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it....
Nay, but me no buts, offer me no objections.  I will have the thing.
Strap it upon my back."

He was complete now with that knapsack on, and looked as little
like a king as any man I had ever seen.  But it was an obstinate
pair of shoulders; they could not seem to learn the trick of
stooping with any sort of deceptive naturalness.  The drill went on,
I prompting and correcting:

"Now, make believe you are in debt, and eaten up by relentless
creditors; you are out of work--which is horse-shoeing, let us
say--and can get none; and your wife is sick, your children are
crying because they are hungry--"

And so on, and so on.  I drilled him as representing in turn all
sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and
misfortunes.  But lord, it was only just words, words--they meant
nothing in the world to him, I might just as well have whistled.
Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have
suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to
describe.  There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and
complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves
that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than
a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much
bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they
know all about the one, but haven't tried the other.  But I know
all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money
enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days,
but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as
near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too.

Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation,
and is its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect,
engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate,
legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven
when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow
in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the
ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why,
certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord,
it's a sarcasm just the same.  The law of work does seem utterly
unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher
the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall
be his pay in cash, also.  And it's also the very law of those
transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.



CHAPTER XXIX

THE SMALLPOX HUT

When we arrived at that hut at mid-afternoon, we saw no signs
of life about it.  The field near by had been denuded of its crop
some time before, and had a skinned look, so exhaustively had
it been harvested and gleaned.  Fences, sheds, everything had a
ruined look, and were eloquent of poverty.  No animal was around
anywhere, no living thing in sight.  The stillness was awful, it
was like the stillness of death.  The cabin was a one-story one,
whose thatch was black with age, and ragged from lack of repair.

The door stood a trifle ajar.  We approached it stealthily--on tiptoe
and at half-breath--for that is the way one's feeling makes him do,
at such a time.  The king knocked.  We waited.  No answer.  Knocked
again.  No answer.  I pushed the door softly open and looked in.
I made out some dim forms, and a woman started up from the ground
and stared at me, as one does who is wakened from sleep.  Presently
she found her voice:

"Have mercy!" she pleaded.  "All is taken, nothing is left."

"I have not come to take anything, poor woman."

"You are not a priest?"

"No."

"Nor come not from the lord of the manor?"

"No, I am a stranger."

"Oh, then, for the fear of God, who visits with misery and death
such as be harmless, tarry not here, but fly!  This place is under
his curse--and his Church's."

"Let me come in and help you--you are sick and in trouble."

I was better used to the dim light now.  I could see her hollow
eyes fixed upon me.  I could see how emaciated she was.

"I tell you the place is under the Church's ban.  Save yourself
--and go, before some straggler see thee here, and report it."

"Give yourself no trouble about me; I don't care anything for the
Church's curse.  Let me help you."

"Now all good spirits--if there be any such--bless thee for that
word.  Would God I had a sup of water!--but hold, hold, forget
I said it, and fly; for there is that here that even he that
feareth not the Church must fear: this disease whereof we die.
Leave us, thou brave, good stranger, and take with thee such
whole and sincere blessing as them that be accursed can give."

But before this I had picked up a wooden bowl and was rushing
past the king on my way to the brook.  It was ten yards away.
When I got back and entered, the king was within, and was opening
the shutter that closed the window-hole, to let in air and light.
The place was full of a foul stench.  I put the bowl to the woman's
lips, and as she gripped it with her eager talons the shutter came
open and a strong light flooded her face.  Smallpox!

I sprang to the king, and said in his ear:

"Out of the door on the instant, sire! the woman is dying of that
disease that wasted the skirts of Camelot two years ago."

He did not budge.

"Of a truth I shall remain--and likewise help."

I whispered again:

"King, it must not be.  You must go."

"Ye mean well, and ye speak not unwisely.  But it were shame that
a king should know fear, and shame that belted knight should
withhold his hand where be such as need succor.  Peace, I will
not go.  It is you who must go.  The Church's ban is not upon me,
but it forbiddeth you to be here, and she will deal with you with
a heavy hand an word come to her of your trespass."

It was a desperate place for him to be in, and might cost him his
life, but it was no use to argue with him.  If he considered his
knightly honor at stake here, that was the end of argument; he
would stay, and nothing could prevent it; I was aware of that.
And so I dropped the subject.  The woman spoke:

"Fair sir, of your kindness will ye climb the ladder there,
and bring me news of what ye find?  Be not afraid to report,
for times can come when even a mother's heart is past breaking
--being already broke."

"Abide," said the king, "and give the woman to eat.  I will go."
And he put down the knapsack.

I turned to start, but the king had already started.  He halted,
and looked down upon a man who lay in a dim light, and had not
noticed us thus far, or spoken.

"Is it your husband?" the king asked.

"Yes."

"Is he asleep?"

"God be thanked for that one charity, yes--these three hours.
Where shall I pay to the full, my gratitude! for my heart is
bursting with it for that sleep he sleepeth now."

I said:

"We will be careful.  We will not wake him."

"Ah, no, that ye will not, for he is dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes, what triumph it is to know it!  None can harm him, none
insult him more.  He is in heaven now, and happy; or if not there,
he bides in hell and is content; for in that place he will find
neither abbot nor yet bishop.  We were boy and girl together; we
were man and wife these five and twenty years, and never separated
till this day.  Think how long that is to love and suffer together.
This morning was he out of his mind, and in his fancy we were
boy and girl again and wandering in the happy fields; and so in
that innocent glad converse wandered he far and farther, still
lightly gossiping, and entered into those other fields we know
not of, and was shut away from mortal sight.  And so there was
no parting, for in his fancy I went with him; he knew not but
I went with him, my hand in his--my young soft hand, not this
withered claw.  Ah, yes, to go, and know it not; to separate and
know it not; how could one go peace--fuller than that?  It was
his reward for a cruel life patiently borne."

There was a slight noise from the direction of the dim corner where
the ladder was.  It was the king descending.  I could see that he
was bearing something in one arm, and assisting himself with the
other.  He came forward into the light; upon his breast lay a
slender girl of fifteen.  She was but half conscious; she was dying
of smallpox.  Here was heroism at its last and loftiest possibility,
its utmost summit; this was challenging death in the open field
unarmed, with all the odds against the challenger, no reward set
upon the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth of gold
to gaze and applaud; and yet the king's bearing was as serenely
brave as it had always been in those cheaper contests where knight
meets knight in equal fight and clothed in protecting steel.  He
was great now; sublimely great.  The rude statues of his ancestors
in his palace should have an addition--I would see to that; and it
would not be a mailed king killing a giant or a dragon, like the
rest, it would be a king in commoner's garb bearing death in his
arms that a peasant mother might look her last upon her child and
be comforted.

He laid the girl down by her mother, who poured out endearments
and caresses from an overflowing heart, and one could detect a
flickering faint light of response in the child's eyes, but that
was all.  The mother hung over her, kissing her, petting her, and
imploring her to speak, but the lips only moved and no sound came.
I snatched my liquor flask from my knapsack, but the woman forbade
me, and said:

"No--she does not suffer; it is better so.  It might bring her back
to life.  None that be so good and kind as ye are would do her
that cruel hurt.  For look you--what is left to live for?  Her
brothers are gone, her father is gone, her mother goeth, the
Church's curse is upon her, and none may shelter or befriend her
even though she lay perishing in the road.  She is desolate.  I have
not asked you, good heart, if her sister be still on live, here
overhead; I had no need; ye had gone back, else, and not left
the poor thing forsaken--"

"She lieth at peace," interrupted the king, in a subdued voice.

"I would not change it.  How rich is this day in happiness!  Ah,
my Annis, thou shalt join thy sister soon--thou'rt on thy way,
and these be merciful friends that will not hinder."

And so she fell to murmuring and cooing over the girl again, and
softly stroking her face and hair, and kissing her and calling her
by endearing names; but there was scarcely sign of response now
in the glazing eyes.  I saw tears well from the king's eyes, and
trickle down his face.  The woman noticed them, too, and said:

"Ah, I know that sign: thou'st a wife at home, poor soul, and
you and she have gone hungry to bed, many's the time, that the
little ones might have your crust; you know what poverty is, and
the daily insults of your betters, and the heavy hand of the Church
and the king."

The king winced under this accidental home-shot, but kept still;
he was learning his part; and he was playing it well, too, for
a pretty dull beginner.  I struck up a diversion.  I offered the
woman food and liquor, but she refused both.  She would allow
nothing to come between her and the release of death.  Then I slipped
away and brought the dead child from aloft, and laid it by her.
This broke her down again, and there was another scene that was
full of heartbreak.  By and by I made another diversion, and beguiled
her to sketch her story.

"Ye know it well yourselves, having suffered it--for truly none
of our condition in Britain escape it.  It is the old, weary tale.
We fought and struggled and succeeded; meaning by success, that
we lived and did not die; more than that is not to be claimed.  No
troubles came that we could not outlive, till this year brought
them; then came they all at once, as one might say, and overwhelmed
us.  Years ago the lord of the manor planted certain fruit trees on
our farm; in the best part of it, too--a grievous wrong and shame--"

"But it was his right," interrupted the king.

"None denieth that, indeed; an the law mean anything, what is
the lord's is his, and what is mine is his also.  Our farm was
ours by lease, therefore 'twas likewise his, to do with it as he
would.  Some little time ago, three of those trees were found hewn
down.  Our three grown sons ran frightened to report the crime.
Well, in his lordship's dungeon there they lie, who saith there
shall they lie and rot till they confess.  They have naught to
confess, being innocent, wherefore there will they remain until
they die.  Ye know that right well, I ween.  Think how this left us;
a man, a woman and two children, to gather a crop that was planted
by so much greater force, yes, and protect it night and day from
pigeons and prowling animals that be sacred and must not be hurt
by any of our sort.  When my lord's crop was nearly ready for
the harvest, so also was ours; when his bell rang to call us to
his fields to harvest his crop for nothing, he would not allow that
I and my two girls should count for our three captive sons, but
for only two of them; so, for the lacking one were we daily fined.
All this time our own crop was perishing through neglect; and so
both the priest and his lordship fined us because their shares
of it were suffering through damage.  In the end the fines ate up
our crop--and they took it all; they took it all and made us harvest
it for them, without pay or food, and we starving.  Then the worst
came when I, being out of my mind with hunger and loss of my boys,
and grief to see my husband and my little maids in rags and misery
and despair, uttered a deep blasphemy--oh! a thousand of them!
--against the Church and the Church's ways.  It was ten days ago.
I had fallen sick with this disease, and it was to the priest
I said the words, for he was come to chide me for lack of due
humility under the chastening hand of God.  He carried my trespass
to his betters; I was stubborn; wherefore, presently upon my head
and upon all heads that were dear to me, fell the curse of Rome.

"Since that day we are avoided, shunned with horror.  None has
come near this hut to know whether we live or not.  The rest of us
were taken down.  Then I roused me and got up, as wife and mother
will.  It was little they could have eaten in any case; it was
less than little they had to eat.  But there was water, and I gave
them that.  How they craved it! and how they blessed it!  But the
end came yesterday; my strength broke down.  Yesterday was the
last time I ever saw my husband and this youngest child alive.
I have lain here all these hours--these ages, ye may say--listening,
listening for any sound up there that--"

She gave a sharp quick glance at her eldest daughter, then cried
out, "Oh, my darling!" and feebly gathered the stiffening form
to her sheltering arms.  She had recognized the death-rattle.



CHAPTER XXX

THE TRAGEDY OF THE MANOR-HOUSE

At midnight all was over, and we sat in the presence of four
corpses.  We covered them with such rags as we could find, and
started away, fastening the door behind us.  Their home must be
these people's grave, for they could not have Christian burial,
or be admitted to consecrated ground.  They were as dogs, wild
beasts, lepers, and no soul that valued its hope of eternal life
would throw it away by meddling in any sort with these rebuked and
smitten outcasts.

We had not moved four steps when I caught a sound as of footsteps
upon gravel.  My heart flew to my throat.  We must not be seen
coming from that house.  I plucked at the king's robe and we drew
back and took shelter behind the corner of the cabin.

"Now we are safe," I said, "but it was a close call--so to speak.
If the night had been lighter he might have seen us, no doubt,
he seemed to be so near."

"Mayhap it is but a beast and not a man at all."

"True.  But man or beast, it will be wise to stay here a minute
and let it get by and out of the way."

"Hark!  It cometh hither."

True again.  The step was coming toward us--straight toward the hut.
It must be a beast, then, and we might as well have saved our
trepidation.  I was going to step out, but the king laid his hand
upon my arm.  There was a moment of silence, then we heard a soft
knock on the cabin door.  It made me shiver.  Presently the knock
was repeated, and then we heard these words in a guarded voice:

"Mother!  Father!  Open--we have got free, and we bring news to
pale your cheeks but glad your hearts; and we may not tarry, but
must fly!  And--but they answer not.  Mother! father!--"

I drew the king toward the other end of the hut and whispered:

"Come--now we can get to the road."

The king hesitated, was going to demur; but just then we heard
the door give way, and knew that those desolate men were in the
presence of their dead.

"Come, my liege! in a moment they will strike a light, and then
will follow that which it would break your heart to hear."

He did not hesitate this time.  The moment we were in the road
I ran; and after a moment he threw dignity aside and followed.
I did not want to think of what was happening in the hut--I couldn't
bear it; I wanted to drive it out of my mind; so I struck into the
first subject that lay under that one in my mind:

"I have had the disease those people died of, and so have nothing
to fear; but if you have not had it also--"

He broke in upon me to say he was in trouble, and it was his
conscience that was troubling him:

"These young men have got free, they say--but _how_?  It is not
likely that their lord hath set them free."

"Oh, no, I make no doubt they escaped."

"That is my trouble; I have a fear that this is so, and your
suspicion doth confirm it, you having the same fear."

"I should not call it by that name though.  I do suspect that they
escaped, but if they did, I am not sorry, certainly."

"I am not sorry, I _think_--but--"

"What is it?  What is there for one to be troubled about?"

"_If_ they did escape, then are we bound in duty to lay hands upon
them and deliver them again to their lord; for it is not seemly
that one of his quality should suffer a so insolent and high-handed
outrage from persons of their base degree."

There it was again.  He could see only one side of it.  He was
born so, educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that
was rotten with this sort of unconscious brutality, brought down
by inheritance from a long procession of hearts that had each done
its share toward poisoning the stream.  To imprison these men
without proof, and starve their kindred, was no harm, for they were
merely peasants and subject to the will and pleasure of their lord,
no matter what fearful form it might take; but for these men to
break out of unjust captivity was insult and outrage, and a thing
not to be countenanced by any conscientious person who knew his
duty to his sacred caste.

I worked more than half an hour before I got him to change the
subject--and even then an outside matter did it for me.  This was
a something which caught our eyes as we struck the summit of a
small hill--a red glow, a good way off.

"That's a fire," said I.

Fires interested me considerably, because I was getting a good
deal of an insurance business started, and was also training some
horses and building some steam fire-engines, with an eye to a paid
fire department by and by.  The priests opposed both my fire and
life insurance, on the ground that it was an insolent attempt to
hinder the decrees of God; and if you pointed out that they did not
hinder the decrees in the least, but only modified the hard
consequences of them if you took out policies and had luck, they
retorted that that was gambling against the decrees of God, and was
just as bad.  So they managed to damage those industries more
or less, but I got even on my accident business.  As a rule, a knight
is a lummux, and some times even a labrick, and hence open to pretty
poor arguments when they come glibly from a superstition-monger,
but even _he_ could see the practical side of a thing once in a while;
and so of late you couldn't clean up a tournament and pile the
result without finding one of my accident-tickets in every helmet.

We stood there awhile, in the thick darkness and stillness, looking
toward the red blur in the distance, and trying to make out the
meaning of a far-away murmur that rose and fell fitfully on the
night.  Sometimes it swelled up and for a moment seemed less
remote; but when we were hopefully expecting it to betray its cause
and nature, it dulled and sank again, carrying its mystery with it.
We started down the hill in its direction, and the winding road
plunged us at once into almost solid darkness--darkness that was
packed and crammed in between two tall forest walls.  We groped
along down for half a mile, perhaps, that murmur growing more and
more distinct all the time.  The coming storm threatening more and
more, with now and then a little shiver of wind, a faint show of
lightning, and dull grumblings of distant thunder.  I was in the
lead.  I ran against something--a soft heavy something which gave,
slightly, to the impulse of my weight; at the same moment the
lightning glared out, and within a foot of my face was the writhing
face of a man who was hanging from the limb of a tree!  That is,
it seemed to be writhing, but it was not.  It was a grewsome sight.
Straightway there was an ear-splitting explosion of thunder, and
the bottom of heaven fell out; the rain poured down in a deluge.
No matter, we must try to cut this man down, on the chance that
there might be life in him yet, mustn't we?  The lightning came
quick and sharp now, and the place was alternately noonday and
midnight.  One moment the man would be hanging before me in an
intense light, and the next he was blotted out again in the darkness.
I told the king we must cut him down.  The king at once objected.

"If he hanged himself, he was willing to lose him property to
his lord; so let him be.  If others hanged him, belike they had
the right--let him hang."

"But--"

"But me no buts, but even leave him as he is.  And for yet another
reason.  When the lightning cometh again--there, look abroad."

Two others hanging, within fifty yards of us!

"It is not weather meet for doing useless courtesies unto dead folk.
They are past thanking you.  Come--it is unprofitable to tarry here."

There was reason in what he said, so we moved on.  Within the next
mile we counted six more hanging forms by the blaze of the lightning,
and altogether it was a grisly excursion.  That murmur was a murmur
no longer, it was a roar; a roar of men's voices.  A man came flying
by now, dimly through the darkness, and other men chasing him.
They disappeared.  Presently another case of the kind occurred,
and then another and another.  Then a sudden turn of the road
brought us in sight of that fire--it was a large manor-house, and
little or nothing was left of it--and everywhere men were flying
and other men raging after them in pursuit.

I warned the king that this was not a safe place for strangers.
We would better get away from the light, until matters should
improve.  We stepped back a little, and hid in the edge of the
wood.  From this hiding-place we saw both men and women hunted
by the mob.  The fearful work went on until nearly dawn.  Then,
the fire being out and the storm spent, the voices and flying
footsteps presently ceased, and darkness and stillness reigned again.

We ventured out, and hurried cautiously away; and although we were
worn out and sleepy, we kept on until we had put this place some
miles behind us.  Then we asked hospitality at the hut of a charcoal
burner, and got what was to be had.  A woman was up and about, but
the man was still asleep, on a straw shake-down, on the clay floor.
The woman seemed uneasy until I explained that we were travelers
and had lost our way and been wandering in the woods all night.
She became talkative, then, and asked if we had heard of the
terrible goings-on at the manor-house of Abblasoure.  Yes, we had
heard of them, but what we wanted now was rest and sleep.  The
king broke in:

"Sell us the house and take yourselves away, for we be perilous
company, being late come from people that died of the Spotted Death."

It was good of him, but unnecessary.  One of the commonest decorations
of the nation was the waffle-iron face.  I had early noticed that
the woman and her husband were both so decorated.  She made us
entirely welcome, and had no fears; and plainly she was immensely
impressed by the king's proposition; for, of course, it was a good
deal of an event in her life to run across a person of the king's
humble appearance who was ready to buy a man's house for the sake
of a night's lodging.  It gave her a large respect for us, and she
strained the lean possibilities of her hovel to the utmost to make
us comfortable.

We slept till far into the afternoon, and then got up hungry enough to
make cotter fare quite palatable to the king, the more particularly
as it was scant in quantity.  And also in variety; it consisted
solely of onions, salt, and the national black bread made out of
horse-feed.  The woman told us about the affair of the evening
before.  At ten or eleven at night, when everybody was in bed,
the manor-house burst into flames.  The country-side swarmed to
the rescue, and the family were saved, with one exception, the
master.  He did not appear.  Everybody was frantic over this loss,
and two brave yeomen sacrificed their lives in ransacking the
burning house seeking that valuable personage.  But after a while
he was found--what was left of him--which was his corpse.  It was
in a copse three hundred yards away, bound, gagged, stabbed in a
dozen places.

Who had done this?  Suspicion fell upon a humble family in the
neighborhood who had been lately treated with peculiar harshness
by the baron; and from these people the suspicion easily extended
itself to their relatives and familiars.  A suspicion was enough;
my lord's liveried retainers proclaimed an instant crusade against
these people, and were promptly joined by the community in general.
The woman's husband had been active with the mob, and had not
returned home until nearly dawn.  He was gone now to find out
what the general result had been.  While we were still talking he
came back from his quest.  His report was revolting enough.  Eighteen
persons hanged or butchered, and two yeomen and thirteen prisoners
lost in the fire.

"And how many prisoners were there altogether in the vaults?"

"Thirteen."

"Then every one of them was lost?"

"Yes, all."

"But the people arrived in time to save the family; how is it they
could save none of the prisoners?"

The man looked puzzled, and said:

"Would one unlock the vaults at such a time?  Marry, some would
have escaped."

"Then you mean that nobody _did_ unlock them?"

"None went near them, either to lock or unlock.  It standeth to
reason that the bolts were fast; wherefore it was only needful
to establish a watch, so that if any broke the bonds he might not
escape, but be taken. None were taken."

"Natheless, three did escape," said the king, "and ye will do well
to publish it and set justice upon their track, for these murthered
the baron and fired the house."

I was just expecting he would come out with that.  For a moment
the man and his wife showed an eager interest in this news and
an impatience to go out and spread it; then a sudden something
else betrayed itself in their faces, and they began to ask questions.
I answered the questions myself, and narrowly watched the effects
produced.  I was soon satisfied that the knowledge of who these
three prisoners were had somehow changed the atmosphere; that
our hosts' continued eagerness to go and spread the news was now
only pretended and not real.  The king did not notice the change,
and I was glad of that.  I worked the conversation around toward
other details of the night's proceedings, and noted that these
people were relieved to have it take that direction.

The painful thing observable about all this business was the
alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their
cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common
oppressor.  This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel
between a person of their own class and his lord, it was the natural
and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil's whole caste
to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever
stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter.  This
man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his
work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing against
them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable
as evidence, still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything
horrible about it.

This was depressing--to a man with the dream of a republic in his
head.  It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when
the "poor whites" of our South who were always despised and
frequently insulted by the slave-lords around them, and who owed
their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their
midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords
in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of
slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out
their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very
institution which degraded them.  And there was only one redeeming
feature connected with that pitiful piece of history; and that was,
that secretly the "poor white" did detest the slave-lord, and did
feel his own shame.  That feeling was not brought to the surface,
but the fact that it was there and could have been brought out,
under favoring circumstances, was something--in fact, it was enough;
for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it
doesn't show on the outside.

Well, as it turned out, this charcoal burner was just the twin of
the Southern "poor white" of the far future.  The king presently
showed impatience, and said:

"An ye prattle here all the day, justice will miscarry.  Think ye
the criminals will abide in their father's house?  They are fleeing,
they are not waiting.  You should look to it that a party of horse
be set upon their track."

The woman paled slightly, but quite perceptibly, and the man looked
flustered and irresolute.  I said:

"Come, friend, I will walk a little way with you, and explain which
direction I think they would try to take.  If they were merely
resisters of the gabelle or some kindred absurdity I would try
to protect them from capture; but when men murder a person of
high degree and likewise burn his house, that is another matter."

The last remark was for the king--to quiet him.  On the road
the man pulled his resolution together, and began the march with
a steady gait, but there was no eagerness in it.  By and by I said:

"What relation were these men to you--cousins?"

He turned as white as his layer of charcoal would let him, and
stopped, trembling.

"Ah, my God, how know ye that?"

"I didn't know it; it was a chance guess."

"Poor lads, they are lost.  And good lads they were, too."

"Were you actually going yonder to tell on them?"

He didn't quite know how to take that; but he said, hesitatingly:

"Ye-s."

"Then I think you are a damned scoundrel!"

It made him as glad as if I had called him an angel.

"Say the good words again, brother! for surely ye mean that ye
would not betray me an I failed of my duty."

"Duty?  There is no duty in the matter, except the duty to keep
still and let those men get away.  They've done a righteous deed."

He looked pleased; pleased, and touched with apprehension at the
same time.  He looked up and down the road to see that no one
was coming, and then said in a cautious voice:

"From what land come you, brother, that you speak such perilous
words, and seem not to be afraid?"

"They are not perilous words when spoken to one of my own caste,
I take it.  You would not tell anybody I said them?"

"I?  I would be drawn asunder by wild horses first."

"Well, then, let me say my say.  I have no fears of your repeating
it.  I think devil's work has been done last night upon those
innocent poor people.  That old baron got only what he deserved.
If I had my way, all his kind should have the same luck."

Fear and depression vanished from the man's manner, and gratefulness
and a brave animation took their place:

"Even though you be a spy, and your words a trap for my undoing,
yet are they such refreshment that to hear them again and others
like to them, I would go to the gallows happy, as having had one
good feast at least in a starved life.  And I will say my say now,
and ye may report it if ye be so minded.  I helped to hang my
neighbors for that it were peril to my own life to show lack of
zeal in the master's cause; the others helped for none other reason.
All rejoice to-day that he is dead, but all do go about seemingly
sorrowing, and shedding the hypocrite's tear, for in that lies
safety.  I have said the words, I have said the words! the only
ones that have ever tasted good in my mouth, and the reward of
that taste is sufficient.  Lead on, an ye will, be it even to the
scaffold, for I am ready."

There it was, you see.  A man is a man, at bottom.  Whole ages
of abuse and oppression cannot crush the manhood clear out of him.
Whoever thinks it a mistake is himself mistaken.  Yes, there is
plenty good enough material for a republic in the most degraded
people that ever existed--even the Russians; plenty of manhood
in them--even in the Germans--if one could but force it out of
its timid and suspicious privacy, to overthrow and trample in the
mud any throne that ever was set up and any nobility that ever
supported it.  We should see certain things yet, let us hope and
believe.  First, a modified monarchy, till Arthur's days were done,
then the destruction of the throne, nobility abolished, every
member of it bound out to some useful trade, universal suffrage
instituted, and the whole government placed in the hands of the
men and women of the nation there to remain.  Yes, there was no
occasion to give up my dream yet a while.



CHAPTER XXXI

MARCO

We strolled along in a sufficiently indolent fashion now, and
talked.  We must dispose of about the amount of time it ought
to take to go to the little hamlet of Abblasoure and put justice
on the track of those murderers and get back home again.  And
meantime I had an auxiliary interest which had never paled yet,
never lost its novelty for me since I had been in Arthur's kingdom:
the behavior--born of nice and exact subdivisions of caste--of chance
passers-by toward each other.  Toward the shaven monk who trudged
along with his cowl tilted back and the sweat washing down his
fat jowls, the coal-burner was deeply reverent; to the gentleman
he was abject; with the small farmer and the free mechanic he was
cordial and gossipy; and when a slave passed by with a countenance
respectfully lowered, this chap's nose was in the air--he couldn't
even see him.  Well, there are times when one would like to hang
the whole human race and finish the farce.

Presently we struck an incident.  A small mob of half-naked boys
and girls came tearing out of the woods, scared and shrieking.
The eldest among them were not more than twelve or fourteen years
old.  They implored help, but they were so beside themselves that
we couldn't make out what the matter was.  However, we plunged
into the wood, they skurrying in the lead, and the trouble was
quickly revealed: they had hanged a little fellow with a bark rope,
and he was kicking and struggling, in the process of choking to
death.  We rescued him, and fetched him around.  It was some more
human nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders;
they were playing mob, and had achieved a success which promised
to be a good deal more serious than they had bargained for.

It was not a dull excursion for me.  I managed to put in the time
very well.  I made various acquaintanceships, and in my quality
of stranger was able to ask as many questions as I wanted to.
A thing which naturally interested me, as a statesman, was the
matter of wages.  I picked up what I could under that head during
the afternoon.  A man who hasn't had much experience, and doesn't
think, is apt to measure a nation's prosperity or lack of prosperity
by the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the
nation is prosperous; if low, it isn't.  Which is an error.  It
isn't what sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's
the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages
are high in fact or only high in name.  I could remember how it
was in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth century.
In the North a carpenter got three dollars a day, gold valuation;
in the South he got fifty--payable in Confederate shinplasters
worth a dollar a bushel.  In the North a suit of overalls cost
three dollars--a day's wages; in the South it cost seventy-five
--which was two days' wages.  Other things were in proportion.
Consequently, wages were twice as high in the North as they were
in the South, because the one wage had that much more purchasing
power than the other had.

Yes, I made various acquaintances in the hamlet and a thing that
gratified me a good deal was to find our new coins in circulation
--lots of milrays, lots of mills, lots of cents, a good many nickels,
and some silver; all this among the artisans and commonalty
generally; yes, and even some gold--but that was at the bank,
that is to say, the goldsmith's.  I dropped in there while Marco,
the son of Marco, was haggling with a shopkeeper over a quarter
of a pound of salt, and asked for change for a twenty-dollar gold
piece.  They furnished it--that is, after they had chewed the piece,
and rung it on the counter, and tried acid on it, and asked me
where I got it, and who I was, and where I was from, and where
I was going to, and when I expected to get there, and perhaps
a couple of hundred more questions; and when they got aground,
I went right on and furnished them a lot of information voluntarily;
told them I owned a dog, and his name was Watch, and my first wife
was a Free Will Baptist, and her grandfather was a Prohibitionist,
and I used to know a man who had two thumbs on each hand and a wart
on the inside of his upper lip, and died in the hope of a glorious
resurrection, and so on, and so on, and so on, till even that
hungry village questioner began to look satisfied, and also a shade
put out; but he had to respect a man of my financial strength,
and so he didn't give me any lip, but I noticed he took it out of
his underlings, which was a perfectly natural thing to do.  Yes,
they changed my twenty, but I judged it strained the bank a little,
which was a thing to be expected, for it was the same as walking
into a paltry village store in the nineteenth century and requiring
the boss of it to change a two thousand-dollar bill for you all
of a sudden.  He could do it, maybe; but at the same time he
would wonder how a small farmer happened to be carrying so much
money around in his pocket; which was probably this goldsmith's
thought, too; for he followed me to the door and stood there gazing
after me with reverent admiration.

Our new money was not only handsomely circulating, but its language
was already glibly in use; that is to say, people had dropped
the names of the former moneys, and spoke of things as being worth
so many dollars or cents or mills or milrays now.  It was very
gratifying.  We were progressing, that was sure.

I got to know several master mechanics, but about the most interesting
fellow among them was the blacksmith, Dowley.  He was a live man
and a brisk talker, and had two journeymen and three apprentices,
and was doing a raging business.  In fact, he was getting rich,
hand over fist, and was vastly respected.  Marco was very proud of
having such a man for a friend.  He had taken me there ostensibly
to let me see the big establishment which bought so much of his
charcoal, but really to let me see what easy and almost familiar
terms he was on with this great man.  Dowley and I fraternized
at once; I had had just such picked men, splendid fellows, under
me in the Colt Arms Factory.  I was bound to see more of him, so
I invited him to come out to Marco's Sunday, and dine with us.
Marco was appalled, and held his breath; and when the grandee
accepted, he was so grateful that he almost forgot to be astonished
at the condescension.

Marco's joy was exuberant--but only for a moment; then he grew
thoughtful, then sad; and when he heard me tell Dowley I should
have Dickon, the boss mason, and Smug, the boss wheelwright, out
there, too, the coal-dust on his face turned to chalk, and he lost
his grip.  But I knew what was the matter with him; it was the
expense.  He saw ruin before him; he judged that his financial
days were numbered.  However, on our way to invite the others,
I said:

"You must allow me to have these friends come; and you must also
allow me to pay the costs."

His face cleared, and he said with spirit:

"But not all of it, not all of it.  Ye cannot well bear a burden
like to this alone."

I stopped him, and said:

"Now let's understand each other on the spot, old friend.  I am
only a farm bailiff, it is true; but I am not poor, nevertheless.
I have been very fortunate this year--you would be astonished
to know how I have thriven.  I tell you the honest truth when I say
I could squander away as many as a dozen feasts like this and never
care _that_ for the expense!" and I snapped my fingers.  I could
see myself rise a foot at a time in Marco's estimation, and when
I fetched out those last words I was become a very tower for style
and altitude.  "So you see, you must let me have my way.  You
can't contribute a cent to this orgy, that's _settled_."

"It's grand and good of you--"

"No, it isn't.  You've opened your house to Jones and me in the
most generous way; Jones was remarking upon it to-day, just before
you came back from the village; for although he wouldn't be likely
to say such a thing to you--because Jones isn't a talker, and is
diffident in society--he has a good heart and a grateful, and
knows how to appreciate it when he is well treated; yes, you and
your wife have been very hospitable toward us--"

"Ah, brother, 'tis nothing--_such_ hospitality!"

"But it _is_ something; the best a man has, freely given, is always
something, and is as good as a prince can do, and ranks right
along beside it--for even a prince can but do his best.  And so
we'll shop around and get up this layout now, and don't you worry
about the expense.  I'm one of the worst spendthrifts that ever
was born.  Why, do you know, sometimes in a single week I spend
--but never mind about that--you'd never believe it anyway."

And so we went gadding along, dropping in here and there, pricing
things, and gossiping with the shopkeepers about the riot, and now
and then running across pathetic reminders of it, in the persons of
shunned and tearful and houseless remnants of families whose homes
had been taken from them and their parents butchered or hanged.
The raiment of Marco and his wife was of coarse tow-linen and
linsey-woolsey respectively, and resembled township maps, it being
made up pretty exclusively of patches which had been added, township
by township, in the course of five or six years, until hardly a
hand's-breadth of the original garments was surviving and present.
Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account of
that swell company, and I didn't know just how to get at it
--with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already
been liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would
be just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantial
sort; so I said:

"And Marco, there's another thing which you must permit--out of
kindness for Jones--because you wouldn't want to offend him.
He was very anxious to testify his appreciation in some way, but
he is so diffident he couldn't venture it himself, and so he begged
me to buy some little things and give them to you and Dame Phyllis
and let him pay for them without your ever knowing they came from
him--you know how a delicate person feels about that sort of thing
--and so I said I would, and we would keep mum.  Well, his idea
was, a new outfit of clothes for you both--"

"Oh, it is wastefulness!  It may not be, brother, it may not be.
Consider the vastness of the sum--"

"Hang the vastness of the sum!  Try to keep quiet for a moment,
and see how it would seem; a body can't get in a word edgeways,
you talk so much.  You ought to cure that, Marco; it isn't good
form, you know, and it will grow on you if you don't check it.
Yes, we'll step in here now and price this man's stuff--and don't
forget to remember to not let on to Jones that you know he had
anything to do with it.  You can't think how curiously sensitive
and proud he is.  He's a farmer--pretty fairly well-to-do farmer
--and I'm his bailiff; _but_--the imagination of that man!  Why,
sometimes when he forgets himself and gets to blowing off, you'd
think he was one of the swells of the earth; and you might listen
to him a hundred years and never take him for a farmer--especially if
he talked agriculture.  He _thinks_ he's a Sheol of a farmer; thinks
he's old Grayback from Wayback; but between you and me privately
he don't know as much about farming as he does about running
a kingdom--still, whatever he talks about, you want to drop your
underjaw and listen, the same as if you had never heard such
incredible wisdom in all your life before, and were afraid you
might die before you got enough of it.  That will please Jones."

It tickled Marco to the marrow to hear about such an odd character;
but it also prepared him for accidents; and in my experience when
you travel with a king who is letting on to be something else and
can't remember it more than about half the time, you can't take
too many precautions.

This was the best store we had come across yet; it had everything
in it, in small quantities, from anvils and drygoods all the way
down to fish and pinchbeck jewelry.  I concluded I would bunch
my whole invoice right here, and not go pricing around any more.
So I got rid of Marco, by sending him off to invite the mason and
the wheelwright, which left the field free to me.  For I never care
to do a thing in a quiet way; it's got to be theatrical or I don't
take any interest in it.  I showed up money enough, in a careless
way, to corral the shopkeeper's respect, and then I wrote down
a list of the things I wanted, and handed it to him to see if he
could read it.  He could, and was proud to show that he could.
He said he had been educated by a priest, and could both read
and write.  He ran it through, and remarked with satisfaction that
it was a pretty heavy bill.  Well, and so it was, for a little
concern like that.  I was not only providing a swell dinner, but
some odds and ends of extras.  I ordered that the things be carted
out and delivered at the dwelling of Marco, the son of Marco,
by Saturday evening, and send me the bill at dinner-time Sunday.
He said I could depend upon his promptness and exactitude, it was
the rule of the house.  He also observed that he would throw in
a couple of miller-guns for the Marcos gratis--that everybody
was using them now.  He had a mighty opinion of that clever
device.  I said:

"And please fill them up to the middle mark, too; and add that
to the bill."

He would, with pleasure.  He filled them, and I took them with
me.  I couldn't venture to tell him that the miller-gun was a
little invention of my own, and that I had officially ordered that
every shopkeeper in the kingdom keep them on hand and sell them
at government price--which was the merest trifle, and the shopkeeper
got that, not the government.  We furnished them for nothing.

The king had hardly missed us when we got back at nightfall.  He
had early dropped again into his dream of a grand invasion of Gaul
with the whole strength of his kingdom at his back, and the afternoon
had slipped away without his ever coming to himself again.



CHAPTER XXXII

DOWLEY'S HUMILIATION

Well, when that cargo arrived toward sunset, Saturday afternoon,
I had my hands full to keep the Marcos from fainting.  They were
sure Jones and I were ruined past help, and they blamed themselves
as accessories to this bankruptcy.  You see, in addition to the
dinner-materials, which called for a sufficiently round sum,
I had bought a lot of extras for the future comfort of the family:
for instance, a big lot of wheat, a delicacy as rare to the tables
of their class as was ice-cream to a hermit's; also a sizeable
deal dinner-table; also two entire pounds of salt, which was
another piece of extravagance in those people's eyes; also crockery,
stools, the clothes, a small cask of beer, and so on.  I instructed
the Marcos to keep quiet about this sumptuousness, so as to give
me a chance to surprise the guests and show off a little.  Concerning
the new clothes, the simple couple were like children; they were up
and down, all night, to see if it wasn't nearly daylight, so that
they could put them on, and they were into them at last as much
as an hour before dawn was due.  Then their pleasure--not to say
delirium--was so fresh and novel and inspiring that the sight of it
paid me well for the interruptions which my sleep had suffered.
The king had slept just as usual--like the dead.  The Marcos could
not thank him for their clothes, that being forbidden; but they
tried every way they could think of to make him see how grateful
they were.  Which all went for nothing: he didn't notice any change.

It turned out to be one of those rich and rare fall days which is
just a June day toned down to a degree where it is heaven to be
out of doors.  Toward noon the guests arrived, and we assembled
under a great tree and were soon as sociable as old acquaintances.
Even the king's reserve melted a little, though it was some little
trouble to him to adjust himself to the name of Jones along at
first.  I had asked him to try to not forget that he was a farmer;
but I had also considered it prudent to ask him to let the thing
stand at that, and not elaborate it any.  Because he was just the
kind of person you could depend on to spoil a little thing like
that if you didn't warn him, his tongue was so handy, and his
spirit so willing, and his information so uncertain.

Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then
adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and
himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him
hum.  Self-made man, you know.  They know how to talk.  They do
deserve more credit than any other breed of men, yes, that is true;
and they are among the very first to find it out, too.  He told how
he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends
able to help him; how he had lived as the slaves of the meanest
master lived; how his day's work was from sixteen to eighteen hours
long, and yielded him only enough black bread to keep him in a
half-fed condition; how his faithful endeavors finally attracted
the attention of a good blacksmith, who came near knocking him
dead with kindness by suddenly offering, when he was totally
unprepared, to take him as his bound apprentice for nine years
and give him board and clothes and teach him the trade--or "mystery"
as Dowley called it.  That was his first great rise, his first
gorgeous stroke of fortune; and you saw that he couldn't yet speak
of it without a sort of eloquent wonder and delight that such a
gilded promotion should have fallen to the lot of a common human
being.  He got no new clothing during his apprenticeship, but on
his graduation day his master tricked him out in spang-new tow-linens
and made him feel unspeakably rich and fine.

"I remember me of that day!" the wheelwright sang out, with
enthusiasm.

"And I likewise!" cried the mason.  "I would not believe they
were thine own; in faith I could not."

"Nor other!" shouted Dowley, with sparkling eyes.  "I was like
to lose my character, the neighbors wending I had mayhap been
stealing.  It was a great day, a great day; one forgetteth not
days like that."

Yes, and his master was a fine man, and prosperous, and always
had a great feast of meat twice in the year, and with it white
bread, true wheaten bread; in fact, lived like a lord, so to speak.
And in time Dowley succeeded to the business and married the daughter.

"And now consider what is come to pass," said he, impressively.
"Two times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table."
He made a pause here, to let that fact sink home, then added
--"and eight times salt meat."

"It is even true," said the wheelwright, with bated breath.

"I know it of mine own knowledge," said the mason, in the same
reverent fashion.

"On my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year,"
added the master smith, with solemnity.  "I leave it to your own
consciences, friends, if this is not also true?"

"By my head, yes," cried the mason.

"I can testify it--and I do," said the wheelwright.

"And as to furniture, ye shall say yourselves what mine equipment
is."  He waved his hand in fine gesture of granting frank and
unhampered freedom of speech, and added: "Speak as ye are moved;
speak as ye would speak; an I were not here."

"Ye have five stools, and of the sweetest workmanship at that, albeit
your family is but three," said the wheelwright, with deep respect.

"And six wooden goblets, and six platters of wood and two of pewter
to eat and drink from withal," said the mason, impressively.  "And
I say it as knowing God is my judge, and we tarry not here alway,
but must answer at the last day for the things said in the body,
be they false or be they sooth."

"Now ye know what manner of man I am, brother Jones," said the
smith, with a fine and friendly condescension, "and doubtless ye
would look to find me a man jealous of his due of respect and
but sparing of outgo to strangers till their rating and quality be
assured, but trouble yourself not, as concerning that; wit ye well
ye shall find me a man that regardeth not these matters but is
willing to receive any he as his fellow and equal that carrieth
a right heart in his body, be his worldly estate howsoever modest.
And in token of it, here is my hand; and I say with my own mouth
we are equals--equals"--and he smiled around on the company with
the satisfaction of a god who is doing the handsome and gracious
thing and is quite well aware of it.

The king took the hand with a poorly disguised reluctance, and
let go of it as willingly as a lady lets go of a fish; all of which
had a good effect, for it was mistaken for an embarrassment natural
to one who was being called upon by greatness.

The dame brought out the table now, and set it under the tree.
It caused a visible stir of surprise, it being brand new and a
sumptuous article of deal.  But the surprise rose higher still
when the dame, with a body oozing easy indifference at every pore,
but eyes that gave it all away by absolutely flaming with vanity,
slowly unfolded an actual simon-pure tablecloth and spread it.
That was a notch above even the blacksmith's domestic grandeurs,
and it hit him hard; you could see it.  But Marco was in Paradise;
you could see that, too.  Then the dame brought two fine new
stools--whew! that was a sensation; it was visible in the eyes of
every guest.  Then she brought two more--as calmly as she could.
Sensation again--with awed murmurs.  Again she brought two
--walking on air, she was so proud.  The guests were petrified, and
the mason muttered:

"There is that about earthly pomps which doth ever move to reverence."

As the dame turned away, Marco couldn't help slapping on the climax
while the thing was hot; so he said with what was meant for a
languid composure but was a poor imitation of it:

"These suffice; leave the rest."

So there were more yet!  It was a fine effect.  I couldn't have
played the hand better myself.

From this out, the madam piled up the surprises with a rush that
fired the general astonishment up to a hundred and fifty in the
shade, and at the same time paralyzed expression of it down to
gasped "Oh's" and "Ah's," and mute upliftings of hands and eyes.
She fetched crockery--new, and plenty of it; new wooden goblets
and other table furniture; and beer, fish, chicken, a goose, eggs,
roast beef, roast mutton, a ham, a small roast pig, and a wealth
of genuine white wheaten bread.  Take it by and large, that spread
laid everything far and away in the shade that ever that crowd had
seen before.  And while they sat there just simply stupefied with
wonder and awe, I sort of waved my hand as if by accident, and
the storekeeper's son emerged from space and said he had come
to collect.

"That's all right," I said, indifferently.  "What is the amount?
give us the items."

Then he read off this bill, while those three amazed men listened,
and serene waves of satisfaction rolled over my soul and alternate
waves of terror and admiration surged over Marco's:

   2 pounds salt . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   200
   8 dozen pints beer, in the wood . . . . .   800
   3 bushels wheat . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,700
   2 pounds fish . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   100
   3 hens  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   400
   1 goose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   400
   3 dozen eggs  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   150
   1 roast of beef . . . . . . . . . . . . .   450
   1 roast of mutton . . . . . . . . . . . .   400
   1 ham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   800
   1 sucking pig . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   500
   2 crockery dinner sets  . . . . . . . . . 6,000
   2 men's suits and underwear . . . . . . . 2,800
   1 stuff and 1 linsey-woolsey gown
     and underwear . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,600
   8 wooden goblets  . . . . . . . . . . . .   800
   Various table furniture . . . . . . . . .10,000
   1 deal table  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000
   8 stools  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,000
   2 miller guns, loaded . . . . . . . . . . 3,000

He ceased.  There was a pale and awful silence.  Not a limb stirred.
Not a nostril betrayed the passage of breath.

"Is that all?" I asked, in a voice of the most perfect calmness.

"All, fair sir, save that certain matters of light moment are
placed together under a head hight sundries.  If it would like
you, I will sepa--"

"It is of no consequence," I said, accompanying the words with
a gesture of the most utter indifference; "give me the grand
total, please."

The clerk leaned against the tree to stay himself, and said:

"Thirty-nine thousand one hundred and fifty milrays!"

The wheelwright fell off his stool, the others grabbed the table
to save themselves, and there was a deep and general ejaculation of:

"God be with us in the day of disaster!"

The clerk hastened to say:

"My father chargeth me to say he cannot honorably require you
to pay it all at this time, and therefore only prayeth you--"

I paid no more heed than if it were the idle breeze, but, with an
air of indifference amounting almost to weariness, got out my money
and tossed four dollars on to the table.  Ah, you should have seen
them stare!

The clerk was astonished and charmed.  He asked me to retain
one of the dollars as security, until he could go to town and
--I interrupted:

"What, and fetch back nine cents?  Nonsense!  Take the whole.
Keep the change."

There was an amazed murmur to this effect:

"Verily this being is _made_ of money!  He throweth it away even
as if it were dirt."

The blacksmith was a crushed man.

The clerk took his money and reeled away drunk with fortune.  I said
to Marco and his wife:

"Good folk, here is a little trifle for you"--handing the miller-guns
as if it were a matter of no consequence, though each of them
contained fifteen cents in solid cash; and while the poor creatures
went to pieces with astonishment and gratitude, I turned to the
others and said as calmly as one would ask the time of day:

"Well, if we are all ready, I judge the dinner is.  Come, fall to."

Ah, well, it was immense; yes, it was a daisy.  I don't know that
I ever put a situation together better, or got happier spectacular
effects out of the materials available.  The blacksmith--well, he
was simply mashed.  Land! I wouldn't have felt what that man was
feeling, for anything in the world.  Here he had been blowing and
bragging about his grand meat-feast twice a year, and his fresh
meat twice a month, and his salt meat twice a week, and his white
bread every Sunday the year round--all for a family of three; the
entire cost for the year not above 69.2.6 (sixty-nine cents, two
mills and six milrays), and all of a sudden here comes along a man
who slashes out nearly four dollars on a single blow-out; and not
only that, but acts as if it made him tired to handle such small
sums.  Yes, Dowley was a good deal wilted, and shrunk-up and
collapsed; he had the aspect of a bladder-balloon that's been
stepped on by a cow.



CHAPTER XXXIII

SIXTH CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY

However, I made a dead set at him, and before the first third
of the dinner was reached, I had him happy again.  It was easy
to do--in a country of ranks and castes.  You see, in a country
where they have ranks and castes, a man isn't ever a man, he is
only part of a man, he can't ever get his full growth.  You prove
your superiority over him in station, or rank, or fortune, and
that's the end of it--he knuckles down.  You can't insult him
after that.  No, I don't mean quite that; of course you _can_ insult
him, I only mean it's difficult; and so, unless you've got a lot
of useless time on your hands it doesn't pay to try.  I had the
smith's reverence now, because I was apparently immensely prosperous
and rich; I could have had his adoration if I had had some little
gimcrack title of nobility.  And not only his, but any commoner's
in the land, though he were the mightiest production of all the ages,
in intellect, worth, and character, and I bankrupt in all three.
This was to remain so, as long as England should exist in the
earth.  With the spirit of prophecy upon me, I could look into
the future and see her erect statues and monuments to her unspeakable
Georges and other royal and noble clothes-horses, and leave unhonored
the creators of this world--after God--Gutenburg, Watt, Arkwright,
Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.

The king got his cargo aboard, and then, the talk not turning upon
battle, conquest, or iron-clad duel, he dulled down to drowsiness
and went off to take a nap.  Mrs. Marco cleared the table, placed
the beer keg handy, and went away to eat her dinner of leavings
in humble privacy, and the rest of us soon drifted into matters
near and dear to the hearts of our sort--business and wages,
of course.  At a first glance, things appeared to be exceeding
prosperous in this little tributary kingdom--whose lord was
King Bagdemagus--as compared with the state of things in my own
region.  They had the "protection" system in full force here,
whereas we were working along down toward free-trade, by easy
stages, and were now about half way.  Before long, Dowley and I
were doing all the talking, the others hungrily listening.  Dowley
warmed to his work, snuffed an advantage in the air, and began
to put questions which he considered pretty awkward ones for me,
and they did have something of that look:

"In your country, brother, what is the wage of a master bailiff,
master hind, carter, shepherd, swineherd?"

"Twenty-five milrays a day; that is to say, a quarter of a cent."

The smith's face beamed with joy.  He said:

"With us they are allowed the double of it!  And what may a mechanic
get--carpenter, dauber, mason, painter, blacksmith, wheelwright,
and the like?"

"On the average, fifty milrays; half a cent a day."

"Ho-ho!  With us they are allowed a hundred!  With us any good
mechanic is allowed a cent a day!  I count out the tailor, but
not the others--they are all allowed a cent a day, and in driving
times they get more--yes, up to a hundred and ten and even fifteen
milrays a day.  I've paid a hundred and fifteen myself, within
the week.  'Rah for protection--to Sheol with free-trade!"

And his face shone upon the company like a sunburst.  But I didn't
scare at all.  I rigged up my pile-driver, and allowed myself
fifteen minutes to drive him into the earth--drive him _all_ in
--drive him in till not even the curve of his skull should show
above ground.  Here is the way I started in on him.  I asked:

"What do you pay a pound for salt?"

"A hundred milrays."

"We pay forty.  What do you pay for beef and mutton--when you
buy it?"  That was a neat hit; it made the color come.

"It varieth somewhat, but not much; one may say seventy-five milrays
the pound."

"_We_ pay thirty-three.  What do you pay for eggs?"

"Fifty milrays the dozen."

"We pay twenty.  What do you pay for beer?"

"It costeth us eight and one-half milrays the pint."

"We get it for four; twenty-five bottles for a cent.
What do you pay for wheat?"

"At the rate of nine hundred milrays the bushel."

"We pay four hundred.  What do you pay for a man's tow-linen suit?"

"Thirteen cents."

"We pay six.  What do you pay for a stuff gown for the wife of the
laborer or the mechanic?"

"We pay eight cents, four mills."

"Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents and four mills,
we pay only four cents."  I prepared now to sock it to him.  I said:
"Look here, dear friend, _what's become of your high wages you
were bragging so about a few minutes ago?_"--and I looked around
on the company with placid satisfaction, for I had slipped up
on him gradually and tied him hand and foot, you see, without his
ever noticing that he was being tied at all.  "What's become of
those noble high wages of yours?--I seem to have knocked the
stuffing all out of them, it appears to me."

But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that
is all! he didn't grasp the situation at all, didn't know he had
walked into a trap, didn't discover that he was _in_ a trap.  I could
have shot him, from sheer vexation.  With cloudy eye and a struggling
intellect he fetched this out:

"Marry, I seem not to understand.  It is _proved_ that our wages
be double thine; how then may it be that thou'st knocked therefrom
the stuffing?--an miscall not the wonderly word, this being the
first time under grace and providence of God it hath been granted
me to hear it."

Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for stupidity on
his part, and partly because his fellows so manifestly sided with
him and were of his mind--if you might call it mind.  My position
was simple enough, plain enough; how could it ever be simplified
more?  However, I must try:

"Why, look here, brother Dowley, don't you see?  Your wages are
merely higher than ours in _name_, not in _fact_."

"Hear him!  They are the _double_--ye have confessed it yourself."

"Yes-yes, I don't deny that at all.  But that's got nothing to do
with it; the _amount_ of the wages in mere coins, with meaningless
names attached to them to know them by, has got nothing to do
with it.  The thing is, how much can you _buy_ with your wages?
--that's the idea.  While it is true that with you a good mechanic
is allowed about three dollars and a half a year, and with us only
about a dollar and seventy-five--"

"There--ye're confessing it again, ye're confessing it again!"

"Confound it, I've never denied it, I tell you!  What I say is
this.  With us _half_ a dollar buys more than a _dollar_ buys
with you--and THEREFORE it stands to reason and the commonest
kind of common-sense, that our wages are _higher_ than yours."

He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:

"Verily, I cannot make it out.  Ye've just said ours are the
higher, and with the same breath ye take it back."

"Oh, great Scott, isn't it possible to get such a simple thing
through your head?  Now look here--let me illustrate.  We pay
four cents for a woman's stuff gown, you pay 8.4.0, which is
four mills more than _double_.  What do you allow a laboring
woman who works on a farm?"

"Two mills a day."

"Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay her only a tenth
of a cent a day; and--"

"Again ye're conf--"

"Wait!  Now, you see, the thing is very simple; this time you'll
understand it.  For instance, it takes your woman 42 days to earn
her gown, at 2 mills a day--7 weeks' work; but ours earns hers
in forty days--two days _short_ of 7 weeks.  Your woman has a gown,
and her whole seven weeks wages are gone; ours has a gown, and
two days' wages left, to buy something else with.  There--_now_
you understand it!"

He looked--well, he merely looked dubious, it's the most I can say;
so did the others.  I waited--to let the thing work.  Dowley spoke
at last--and betrayed the fact that he actually hadn't gotten away
from his rooted and grounded superstitions yet.  He said, with
a trifle of hesitancy:

"But--but--ye cannot fail to grant that two mills a day is better
than one."

Shucks!  Well, of course, I hated to give it up.  So I chanced
another flyer:

"Let us suppose a case.  Suppose one of your journeymen goes out
and buys the following articles:

  "1 pound of salt;
   1 dozen eggs;
   1 dozen pints of beer;
   1 bushel of wheat;
   1 tow-linen suit;
   5 pounds of beef;
   5 pounds of mutton.

"The lot will cost him 32 cents.  It takes him 32 working days
to earn the money--5 weeks and 2 days.  Let him come to us and
work 32 days at _half_ the wages; he can buy all those things for
a shade under 14 1/2 cents; they will cost him a shade under 29
days' work, and he will have about half a week's wages over.  Carry
it through the year; he would save nearly a week's wages every
two months, _your_ man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks' wages
in a year, your man not a cent.  _Now_ I reckon you understand that
'high wages' and 'low wages' are phrases that don't mean anything
in the world until you find out which of them will _buy_ the most!"

It was a crusher.

But, alas! it didn't crush.  No, I had to give it up.  What those
people valued was _high wages_; it didn't seem to be a matter of
any consequence to them whether the high wages would buy anything
or not.  They stood for "protection," and swore by it, which was
reasonable enough, because interested parties had gulled them into
the notion that it was protection which had created their high
wages.  I proved to them that in a quarter of a century their wages
had advanced but 30 per cent., while the cost of living had gone
up 100; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced
40 per cent. while the cost of living had gone steadily down.  But
it didn't do any good.  Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.

Well, I was smarting under a sense of defeat.  Undeserved defeat,
but what of that?  That didn't soften the smart any.  And to think
of the circumstances! the first statesman of the age, the capablest
man, the best-informed man in the entire world, the loftiest
uncrowned head that had moved through the clouds of any political
firmament for centuries, sitting here apparently defeated in
argument by an ignorant country blacksmith!  And I could see that
those others were sorry for me--which made me blush till I could
smell my whiskers scorching.  Put yourself in my place; feel as mean
as I did, as ashamed as I felt--wouldn't _you_ have struck below the
belt to get even?  Yes, you would; it is simply human nature.
Well, that is what I did.  I am not trying to justify it; I'm only
saying that I was mad, and _anybody_ would have done it.

Well, when I make up my mind to hit a man, I don't plan out
a love-tap; no, that isn't my way; as long as I'm going to hit him
at all, I'm going to hit him a lifter.  And I don't jump at him
all of a sudden, and risk making a blundering half-way business
of it; no, I get away off yonder to one side, and work up on him
gradually, so that he never suspects that I'm going to hit him
at all; and by and by, all in a flash, he's flat on his back, and
he can't tell for the life of him how it all happened.  That is
the way I went for brother Dowley.  I started to talking lazy and
comfortable, as if I was just talking to pass the time; and the
oldest man in the world couldn't have taken the bearings of my
starting place and guessed where I was going to fetch up:

"Boys, there's a good many curious things about law, and custom,
and usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it;
yes, and about the drift and progress of human opinion and movement,
too.  There are written laws--they perish; but there are also
unwritten laws--_they_ are eternal.  Take the unwritten law of wages:
it says they've got to advance, little by little, straight through
the centuries.  And notice how it works.  We know what wages are
now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average, and say that's
the wages of to-day.  We know what the wages were a hundred years
ago, and what they were two hundred years ago; that's as far back
as we can get, but it suffices to give us the law of progress,
the measure and rate of the periodical augmentation; and so, without
a document to help us, we can come pretty close to determining
what the wages were three and four and five hundred years ago.
Good, so far.  Do we stop there?  No.  We stop looking backward;
we face around and apply the law to the future.  My friends, I can
tell you what people's wages are going to be at any date in the
future you want to know, for hundreds and hundreds of years."

"What, goodman, what!"

"Yes.  In seven hundred years wages will have risen to six times
what they are now, here in your region, and farm hands will be
allowed 3 cents a day, and mechanics 6."

"I would't I might die now and live then!" interrupted Smug, the
wheelwright, with a fine avaricious glow in his eye.

"And that isn't all; they'll get their board besides--such as it is:
it won't bloat them.  Two hundred and fifty years later--pay attention
now--a mechanic's wages will be--mind you, this is law, not
guesswork; a mechanic's wages will then be _twenty_ cents a day!"

There was a general gasp of awed astonishment, Dickon the mason
murmured, with raised eyes and hands:

"More than three weeks' pay for one day's work!"

"Riches!--of a truth, yes, riches!" muttered Marco, his breath
coming quick and short, with excitement.

"Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little,
as steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and
forty years more there'll be at least _one_ country where the
mechanic's average wage will be _two hundred_ cents a day!"

It knocked them absolutely dumb!  Not a man of them could get
his breath for upwards of two minutes.  Then the coal-burner
said prayerfully:

"Might I but live to see it!"

"It is the income of an earl!" said Smug.

"An earl, say ye?" said Dowley; "ye could say more than that and
speak no lie; there's no earl in the realm of Bagdemagus that hath
an income like to that.  Income of an earl--mf! it's the income
of an angel!"

"Now, then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages.
In that remote day, that man will earn, with _one_ week's work,
that bill of goods which it takes you upwards of _fifty_ weeks to
earn now.  Some other pretty surprising things are going to happen,
too.  Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring,
what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and
servant shall be for that year?"

"Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all,
the magistrate.  Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate
that fixes the wages."

"Doesn't ask any of those poor devils to _help_ him fix their wages
for them, does he?"

"Hm!  That _were_ an idea!  The master that's to pay him the money
is the one that's rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice."

"Yes--but I thought the other man might have some little trifle
at stake in it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures.
The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally.
These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall
have who _do_ work.  You see?  They're a 'combine'--a trade union,
to coin a new phrase--who band themselves together to force their
lowly brother to take what they choose to give.  Thirteen hundred
years hence--so says the unwritten law--the 'combine' will be the
other way, and then how these fine people's posterity will fume
and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade
unions!  Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the
wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and
then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple
of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing;
and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself.
Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation
to settle."

"Do ye believe--"

"That he actually will help to fix his own wages?  Yes, indeed.
And he will be strong and able, then."

"Brave times, brave times, of a truth!" sneered the prosperous smith.

"Oh,--and there's another detail.  In that day, a master may hire
a man for only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time,
if he wants to."

"What?"

"It's true.  Moreover, a magistrate won't be able to force a man
to work for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man
wants to or not."

"Will there be _no_ law or sense in that day?"

"Both of them, Dowley.  In that day a man will be his own property,
not the property of magistrate and master.  And he can leave town
whenever he wants to, if the wages don't suit him!--and they can't
put him in the pillory for it."

"Perdition catch such an age!" shouted Dowley, in strong indignation.
"An age of dogs, an age barren of reverence for superiors and
respect for authority!  The pillory--"

"Oh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution.  I think
the pillory ought to be abolished."

"A most strange idea.  Why?"

"Well, I'll tell you why.  Is a man ever put in the pillory for
a capital crime?"

"No."

"Is it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small
offense and then kill him?"

There was no answer.  I had scored my first point!  For the first
time, the smith wasn't up and ready.  The company noticed it.
Good effect.

"You don't answer, brother.  You were about to glorify the pillory
a while ago, and shed some pity on a future age that isn't going
to use it.  I think the pillory ought to be abolished.  What
usually happens when a poor fellow is put in the pillory for some
little offense that didn't amount to anything in the world?  The
mob try to have some fun with him, don't they?"

"Yes."

"They begin by clodding him; and they laugh themselves to pieces
to see him try to dodge one clod and get hit with another?"

"Yes."

"Then they throw dead cats at him, don't they?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, suppose he has a few personal enemies in that mob
and here and there a man or a woman with a secret grudge against
him--and suppose especially that he is unpopular in the community,
for his pride, or his prosperity, or one thing or another--stones
and bricks take the place of clods and cats presently, don't they?"

"There is no doubt of it."

"As a rule he is crippled for life, isn't he?--jaws broken, teeth
smashed out?--or legs mutilated, gangrened, presently cut off?
--or an eye knocked out, maybe both eyes?"

"It is true, God knoweth it."

"And if he is unpopular he can depend on _dying_, right there in
the stocks, can't he?"

"He surely can!  One may not deny it."

"I take it none of _you_ are unpopular--by reason of pride or
insolence, or conspicuous prosperity, or any of those things that
excite envy and malice among the base scum of a village?  _You_
wouldn't think it much of a risk to take a chance in the stocks?"

Dowley winced, visibly.  I judged he was hit.  But he didn't betray
it by any spoken word.  As for the others, they spoke out plainly,
and with strong feeling.  They said they had seen enough of the
stocks to know what a man's chance in them was, and they would
never consent to enter them if they could compromise on a quick
death by hanging.

"Well, to change the subject--for I think I've established my
point that the stocks ought to be abolished.  I think some of our
laws are pretty unfair.  For instance, if I do a thing which ought
to deliver me to the stocks, and you know I did it and yet keep
still and don't report me, _you_ will get the stocks if anybody
informs on you."

"Ah, but that would serve you but right," said Dowley, "for you
_must_ inform.  So saith the law."

The others coincided.

"Well, all right, let it go, since you vote me down.  But there's
one thing which certainly isn't fair.  The magistrate fixes a
mechanic's wage at one cent a day, for instance.  The law says that
if any master shall venture, even under utmost press of business,
to pay anything _over_ that cent a day, even for a single day, he
shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and whoever knows he did
it and doesn't inform, they also shall be fined and pilloried.  Now
it seems to me unfair, Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of us,
that because you thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within
a week you have paid a cent and fifteen mil--"

Oh, I tell _you_ it was a smasher!  You ought to have seen them to
go to pieces, the whole gang.  I had just slipped up on poor
smiling and complacent Dowley so nice and easy and softly, that
he never suspected anything was going to happen till the blow
came crashing down and knocked him all to rags.

A fine effect.  In fact, as fine as any I ever produced, with so
little time to work it up in.

But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the thing a little.
I was expecting to scare them, but I wasn't expecting to scare
them to death.  They were mighty near it, though.  You see they
had been a whole lifetime learning to appreciate the pillory; and
to have that thing staring them in the face, and every one of them
distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger, if I chose to go and
report--well, it was awful, and they couldn't seem to recover
from the shock, they couldn't seem to pull themselves together.
Pale, shaky, dumb, pitiful?  Why, they weren't any better than
so many dead men.  It was very uncomfortable.  Of course, I thought
they would appeal to me to keep mum, and then we would shake hands,
and take a drink all round, and laugh it off, and there an end.
But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a cruelly oppressed
and suspicious people, a people always accustomed to having advantage
taken of their helplessness, and never expecting just or kind
treatment from any but their own families and very closest intimates.
Appeal to _me_ to be gentle, to be fair, to be generous?  Of course,
they wanted to, but they couldn't dare.



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE YANKEE AND THE KING SOLD AS SLAVES

Well, what had I better do?  Nothing in a hurry, sure.  I must
get up a diversion; anything to employ me while I could think,
and while these poor fellows could have a chance to come to life
again.  There sat Marco, petrified in the act of trying to get
the hang of his miller-gun--turned to stone, just in the attitude
he was in when my pile-driver fell, the toy still gripped in his
unconscious fingers.  So I took it from him and proposed to explain
its mystery.  Mystery! a simple little thing like that; and yet it
was mysterious enough, for that race and that age.

I never saw such an awkward people, with machinery; you see, they
were totally unused to it.  The miller-gun was a little double-barreled
tube of toughened glass, with a neat little trick of a spring
to it, which upon pressure would let a shot escape.  But the shot
wouldn't hurt anybody, it would only drop into your hand.  In the
gun were two sizes--wee mustard-seed shot, and another sort that
were several times larger.  They were money.  The mustard-seed
shot represented milrays, the larger ones mills.  So the gun was
a purse; and very handy, too; you could pay out money in the dark
with it, with accuracy; and you could carry it in your mouth; or
in your vest pocket, if you had one.  I made them of several sizes
--one size so large that it would carry the equivalent of a dollar.
Using shot for money was a good thing for the government; the metal
cost nothing, and the money couldn't be counterfeited, for I was
the only person in the kingdom who knew how to manage a shot tower.
"Paying the shot" soon came to be a common phrase.  Yes, and I knew
it would still be passing men's lips, away down in the nineteenth
century, yet none would suspect how and when it originated.

The king joined us, about this time, mightily refreshed by his nap,
and feeling good.  Anything could make me nervous now, I was so
uneasy--for our lives were in danger; and so it worried me to
detect a complacent something in the king's eye which seemed to
indicate that he had been loading himself up for a performance
of some kind or other; confound it, why must he go and choose
such a time as this?

I was right.  He began, straight off, in the most innocently
artful, and transparent, and lubberly way, to lead up to the
subject of agriculture.  The cold sweat broke out all over me.
I wanted to whisper in his ear, "Man, we are in awful danger!
every moment is worth a principality till we get back these men's
confidence; _don't_ waste any of this golden time."  But of course
I couldn't do it.  Whisper to him?  It would look as if we were
conspiring.  So I had to sit there and look calm and pleasant while
the king stood over that dynamite mine and mooned along about his
damned onions and things.  At first the tumult of my own thoughts,
summoned by the danger-signal and swarming to the rescue from
every quarter of my skull, kept up such a hurrah and confusion
and fifing and drumming that I couldn't take in a word; but
presently when my mob of gathering plans began to crystallize
and fall into position and form line of battle, a sort of order and
quiet ensued and I caught the boom of the king's batteries, as if
out of remote distance:

"--were not the best way, methinks, albeit it is not to be denied
that authorities differ as concerning this point, some contending
that the onion is but an unwholesome berry when stricken early
from the tree--"

The audience showed signs of life, and sought each other's eyes
in a surprised and troubled way.

"--whileas others do yet maintain, with much show of reason, that
this is not of necessity the case, instancing that plums and other
like cereals do be always dug in the unripe state--"

The audience exhibited distinct distress; yes, and also fear.

"--yet are they clearly wholesome, the more especially when one
doth assuage the asperities of their nature by admixture of the
tranquilizing juice of the wayward cabbage--"

The wild light of terror began to glow in these men's eyes, and
one of them muttered, "These be errors, every one--God hath surely
smitten the mind of this farmer."  I was in miserable apprehension;
I sat upon thorns.

"--and further instancing the known truth that in the case of
animals, the young, which may be called the green fruit of the
creature, is the better, all confessing that when a goat is ripe,
his fur doth heat and sore engame his flesh, the which defect,
taken in connection with his several rancid habits, and fulsome
appetites, and godless attitudes of mind, and bilious quality
of morals--"

They rose and went for him!  With a fierce shout, "The one would
betray us, the other is mad!  Kill them!  Kill them!" they flung
themselves upon us.  What joy flamed up in the king's eye!  He
might be lame in agriculture, but this kind of thing was just in
his line.  He had been fasting long, he was hungry for a fight.
He hit the blacksmith a crack under the jaw that lifted him clear
off his feet and stretched him flat on his back.  "St. George for
Britain!" and he downed the wheelwright.  The mason was big, but
I laid him out like nothing.  The three gathered themselves up and
came again; went down again; came again; and kept on repeating
this, with native British pluck, until they were battered to jelly,
reeling with exhaustion, and so blind that they couldn't tell us
from each other; and yet they kept right on, hammering away with
what might was left in them.  Hammering each other--for we stepped
aside and looked on while they rolled, and struggled, and gouged,
and pounded, and bit, with the strict and wordless attention to
business of so many bulldogs.  We looked on without apprehension,
for they were fast getting past ability to go for help against us,
and the arena was far enough from the public road to be safe
from intrusion.

Well, while they were gradually playing out, it suddenly occurred
to me to wonder what had become of Marco.  I looked around; he
was nowhere to be seen.  Oh, but this was ominous!  I pulled the
king's sleeve, and we glided away and rushed for the hut.  No Marco
there, no Phyllis there!  They had gone to the road for help, sure.
I told the king to give his heels wings, and I would explain later.
We made good time across the open ground, and as we darted into
the shelter of the wood I glanced back and saw a mob of excited
peasants swarm into view, with Marco and his wife at their head.
They were making a world of noise, but that couldn't hurt anybody;
the wood was dense, and as soon as we were well into its depths
we would take to a tree and let them whistle.  Ah, but then came
another sound--dogs!  Yes, that was quite another matter.  It
magnified our contract--we must find running water.

We tore along at a good gait, and soon left the sounds far behind
and modified to a murmur.  We struck a stream and darted into it.
We waded swiftly down it, in the dim forest light, for as much
as three hundred yards, and then came across an oak with a great
bough sticking out over the water.  We climbed up on this bough,
and began to work our way along it to the body of the tree; now
we began to hear those sounds more plainly; so the mob had struck
our trail.  For a while the sounds approached pretty fast.  And
then for another while they didn't.  No doubt the dogs had found
the place where we had entered the stream, and were now waltzing
up and down the shores trying to pick up the trail again.

When we were snugly lodged in the tree and curtained with foliage,
the king was satisfied, but I was doubtful.  I believed we could
crawl along a branch and get into the next tree, and I judged it
worth while to try.  We tried it, and made a success of it, though
the king slipped, at the junction, and came near failing to connect.
We got comfortable lodgment and satisfactory concealment among
the foliage, and then we had nothing to do but listen to the hunt.

Presently we heard it coming--and coming on the jump, too; yes,
and down both sides of the stream.  Louder--louder--next minute
it swelled swiftly up into a roar of shoutings, barkings, tramplings,
and swept by like a cyclone.

"I was afraid that the overhanging branch would suggest something
to them," said I, "but I don't mind the disappointment.  Come,
my liege, it were well that we make good use of our time.  We've
flanked them.  Dark is coming on, presently.  If we can cross the
stream and get a good start, and borrow a couple of horses from
somebody's pasture to use for a few hours, we shall be safe enough."

We started down, and got nearly to the lowest limb, when we seemed
to hear the hunt returning.  We stopped to listen.

"Yes," said I, "they're baffled, they've given it up, they're on
their way home.  We will climb back to our roost again, and let
them go by."

So we climbed back.  The king listened a moment and said:

"They still search--I wit the sign.  We did best to abide."

He was right.  He knew more about hunting than I did.  The noise
approached steadily, but not with a rush.  The king said:

"They reason that we were advantaged by no parlous start of them,
and being on foot are as yet no mighty way from where we took
the water."

"Yes, sire, that is about it, I am afraid, though I was hoping
better things."

The noise drew nearer and nearer, and soon the van was drifting
under us, on both sides of the water.  A voice called a halt from
the other bank, and said:

"An they were so minded, they could get to yon tree by this branch
that overhangs, and yet not touch ground.  Ye will do well to send
a man up it."

"Marry, that we will do!"

I was obliged to admire my cuteness in foreseeing this very thing
and swapping trees to beat it.  But, don't you know, there are
some things that can beat smartness and foresight?  Awkwardness
and stupidity can.  The best swordsman in the world doesn't need
to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person
for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never
had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought
to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing
he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends
him on the spot.  Well, how could I, with all my gifts, make any
valuable preparation against a near-sighted, cross-eyed, pudding-headed
clown who would aim himself at the wrong tree and hit the right
one?  And that is what he did.  He went for the wrong tree, which
was, of course, the right one by mistake, and up he started.

Matters were serious now.  We remained still, and awaited developments.
The peasant toiled his difficult way up.  The king raised himself
up and stood; he made a leg ready, and when the comer's head
arrived in reach of it there was a dull thud, and down went the man
floundering to the ground.  There was a wild outbreak of anger
below, and the mob swarmed in from all around, and there we were
treed, and prisoners.  Another man started up; the bridging bough
was detected, and a volunteer started up the tree that furnished
the bridge.  The king ordered me to play Horatius and keep the
bridge.  For a while the enemy came thick and fast; but no matter,
the head man of each procession always got a buffet that dislodged
him as soon as he came in reach.  The king's spirits rose, his joy
was limitless.  He said that if nothing occurred to mar the prospect
we should have a beautiful night, for on this line of tactics we
could hold the tree against the whole country-side.

However, the mob soon came to that conclusion themselves; wherefore
they called off the assault and began to debate other plans.
They had no weapons, but there were plenty of stones, and stones
might answer.  We had no objections.  A stone might possibly
penetrate to us once in a while, but it wasn't very likely; we were
well protected by boughs and foliage, and were not visible from
any good aiming point.  If they would but waste half an hour in
stone-throwing, the dark would come to our help.  We were feeling
very well satisfied.  We could smile; almost laugh.

But we didn't; which was just as well, for we should have been
interrupted.  Before the stones had been raging through the leaves
and bouncing from the boughs fifteen minutes, we began to notice
a smell.  A couple of sniffs of it was enough of an explanation
--it was smoke!  Our game was up at last.  We recognized that.  When
smoke invites you, you have to come.  They raised their pile of
dry brush and damp weeds higher and higher, and when they saw
the thick cloud begin to roll up and smother the tree, they broke
out in a storm of joy-clamors.  I got enough breath to say:

"Proceed, my liege; after you is manners."

The king gasped:

"Follow me down, and then back thyself against one side of the
trunk, and leave me the other.  Then will we fight.  Let each pile
his dead according to his own fashion and taste."

Then he descended, barking and coughing, and I followed.  I struck
the ground an instant after him; we sprang to our appointed places,
and began to give and take with all our might.  The powwow and
racket were prodigious; it was a tempest of riot and confusion and
thick-falling blows.  Suddenly some horsemen tore into the midst
of the crowd, and a voice shouted:

"Hold--or ye are dead men!"

How good it sounded!  The owner of the voice bore all the marks of
a gentleman: picturesque and costly raiment, the aspect of command,
a hard countenance, with complexion and features marred by dissipation.
The mob fell humbly back, like so many spaniels.  The gentleman
inspected us critically, then said sharply to the peasants:

"What are ye doing to these people?"

"They be madmen, worshipful sir, that have come wandering we know
not whence, and--"

"Ye know not whence?  Do ye pretend ye know them not?"

"Most honored sir, we speak but the truth.  They are strangers
and unknown to any in this region; and they be the most violent
and bloodthirsty madmen that ever--"

"Peace!  Ye know not what ye say.  They are not mad.  Who are ye?
And whence are ye?  Explain."

"We are but peaceful strangers, sir," I said, "and traveling upon
our own concerns.  We are from a far country, and unacquainted
here.  We have purposed no harm; and yet but for your brave
interference and protection these people would have killed us.
As you have divined, sir, we are not mad; neither are we violent
or bloodthirsty."

The gentleman turned to his retinue and said calmly: "Lash me
these animals to their kennels!"

The mob vanished in an instant; and after them plunged the horsemen,
laying about them with their whips and pitilessly riding down such
as were witless enough to keep the road instead of taking to the
bush.  The shrieks and supplications presently died away in the
distance, and soon the horsemen began to straggle back.  Meantime
the gentleman had been questioning us more closely, but had dug
no particulars out of us.  We were lavish of recognition of the
service he was doing us, but we revealed nothing more than that we
were friendless strangers from a far country.  When the escort were
all returned, the gentleman said to one of his servants:

"Bring the led-horses and mount these people."

"Yes, my lord."

We were placed toward the rear, among the servants.  We traveled
pretty fast, and finally drew rein some time after dark at a
roadside inn some ten or twelve miles from the scene of our
troubles.  My lord went immediately to his room, after ordering
his supper, and we saw no more of him.  At dawn in the morning
we breakfasted and made ready to start.

My lord's chief attendant sauntered forward at that moment with
indolent grace, and said:

"Ye have said ye should continue upon this road, which is our
direction likewise; wherefore my lord, the earl Grip, hath given
commandment that ye retain the horses and ride, and that certain
of us ride with ye a twenty mile to a fair town that hight Cambenet,
whenso ye shall be out of peril."

We could do nothing less than express our thanks and accept the
offer.  We jogged along, six in the party, at a moderate and
comfortable gait, and in conversation learned that my lord Grip
was a very great personage in his own region, which lay a day's
journey beyond Cambenet.  We loitered to such a degree that it was
near the middle of the forenoon when we entered the market square
of the town.  We dismounted, and left our thanks once more for
my lord, and then approached a crowd assembled in the center of
the square, to see what might be the object of interest.  It was the
remnant of that old peregrinating band of slaves!  So they had
been dragging their chains about, all this weary time.  That poor
husband was gone, and also many others; and some few purchases
had been added to the gang.  The king was not interested, and
wanted to move along, but I was absorbed, and full of pity.  I could
not take my eyes away from these worn and wasted wrecks of humanity.
There they sat, grounded upon the ground, silent, uncomplaining,
with bowed heads, a pathetic sight.  And by hideous contrast, a
redundant orator was making a speech to another gathering not thirty
steps away, in fulsome laudation of "our glorious British liberties!"

I was boiling.  I had forgotten I was a plebeian, I was remembering
I was a man.  Cost what it might, I would mount that rostrum and--

Click! the king and I were handcuffed together!  Our companions,
those servants, had done it; my lord Grip stood looking on.  The
king burst out in a fury, and said:

"What meaneth this ill-mannered jest?"

My lord merely said to his head miscreant, coolly:

"Put up the slaves and sell them!"

_Slaves!_  The word had a new sound--and how unspeakably awful!  The
king lifted his manacles and brought them down with a deadly force;
but my lord was out of the way when they arrived.  A dozen of
the rascal's servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were
helpless, with our hands bound behind us.  We so loudly and so
earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested
attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd,
and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude.
The orator said:

"If, indeed, ye are freemen, ye have nought to fear--the God-given
liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter!
(Applause.)  Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs."

"What proofs?"

"Proof that ye are freemen."

Ah--I remembered!  I came to myself; I said nothing.  But the
king stormed out:

"Thou'rt insane, man.  It were better, and more in reason, that
this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are _not_ freemen."

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know
the laws; by words, not by effects.  They take a _meaning_, and get
to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

All hands shook their heads and looked disappointed; some turned
away, no longer interested.  The orator said--and this time in the
tones of business, not of sentiment:

"An ye do not know your country's laws, it were time ye learned
them.  Ye are strangers to us; ye will not deny that. Ye may be
freemen, we do not deny that; but also ye may be slaves.  The law
is clear: it doth not require the claimant to prove ye are slaves,
it requireth you to prove ye are not."

I said:

"Dear sir, give us only time to send to Astolat; or give us only
time to send to the Valley of Holiness--"

"Peace, good man, these are extraordinary requests, and you may
not hope to have them granted.  It would cost much time, and would
unwarrantably inconvenience your master--"

"_Master_, idiot!" stormed the king.  "I have no master, I myself
am the m--"

"Silence, for God's sake!"

I got the words out in time to stop the king.  We were in trouble
enough already; it could not help us any to give these people
the notion that we were lunatics.

There is no use in stringing out the details.  The earl put us up
and sold us at auction.  This same infernal law had existed in
our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years
later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that
they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without
the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the
minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience,
a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly
hellish.  Well, that's the way we are made.

Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine.  In a big town and an
active market we should have brought a good price; but this place
was utterly stagnant and so we sold at a figure which makes me
ashamed, every time I think of it.  The King of England brought
seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was
easily worth twelve dollars and I as easily worth fifteen.  But
that is the way things always go; if you force a sale on a dull
market, I don't care what the property is, you are going to make
a poor business of it, and you can make up your mind to it.  If
the earl had had wit enough to--

However, there is no occasion for my working my sympathies up
on his account.  Let him go, for the present; I took his number,
so to speak.

The slave-dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long
chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession.  We
took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon;
and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd that the King
of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered
and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men
and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely,
and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark.
Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king
than there is about a tramp, after all.  He is just a cheap and
hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king.  But reveal
his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look
at him.  I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.



CHAPTER XXXV

A PITIFUL INCIDENT

It's a world of surprises.  The king brooded; this was natural.
What would he brood about, should you say?  Why, about the prodigious
nature of his fall, of course--from the loftiest place in the world
to the lowest; from the most illustrious station in the world to
the obscurest; from the grandest vocation among men to the basest.
No, I take my oath that the thing that graveled him most, to start
with, was not this, but the price he had fetched!  He couldn't
seem to get over that seven dollars.  Well, it stunned me so, when
I first found it out, that I couldn't believe it; it didn't seem
natural.  But as soon as my mental sight cleared and I got a right
focus on it, I saw I was mistaken; it _was_ natural.  For this
reason: a king is a mere artificiality, and so a king's feelings,
like the impulses of an automatic doll, are mere artificialities;
but as a man, he is a reality, and his feelings, as a man, are
real, not phantoms.  It shames the average man to be valued below
his own estimate of his worth, and the king certainly wasn't
anything more than an average man, if he was up that high.

Confound him, he wearied me with arguments to show that in anything
like a fair market he would have fetched twenty-five dollars,
sure--a thing which was plainly nonsense, and full or the baldest
conceit; I wasn't worth it myself.  But it was tender ground for
me to argue on.  In fact, I had to simply shirk argument and do
the diplomatic instead.  I had to throw conscience aside, and
brazenly concede that he ought to have brought twenty-five dollars;
whereas I was quite well aware that in all the ages, the world had
never seen a king that was worth half the money, and during the
next thirteen centuries wouldn't see one that was worth the fourth
of it.  Yes, he tired me.  If he began to talk about the crops;
or about the recent weather; or about the condition of politics;
or about dogs, or cats, or morals, or theology--no matter what
--I sighed, for I knew what was coming; he was going to get out of it
a palliation of that tiresome seven-dollar sale.  Wherever we
halted where there was a crowd, he would give me a look which
said plainly: "if that thing could be tried over again now, with
this kind of folk, you would see a different result."  Well, when
he was first sold, it secretly tickled me to see him go for seven
dollars; but before he was done with his sweating and worrying
I wished he had fetched a hundred.  The thing never got a chance
to die, for every day, at one place or another, possible purchasers
looked us over, and, as often as any other way, their comment on
the king was something like this:

"Here's a two-dollar-and-a-half chump with a thirty-dollar style.
Pity but style was marketable."

At last this sort of remark produced an evil result.  Our owner
was a practical person and he perceived that this defect must be
mended if he hoped to find a purchaser for the king.  So he went
to work to take the style out of his sacred majesty.  I could have
given the man some valuable advice, but I didn't; you mustn't
volunteer advice to a slave-driver unless you want to damage
the cause you are arguing for.  I had found it a sufficiently
difficult job to reduce the king's style to a peasant's style,
even when he was a willing and anxious pupil; now then, to undertake
to reduce the king's style to a slave's style--and by force--go to!
it was a stately contract.  Never mind the details--it will save me
trouble to let you imagine them.  I will only remark that at the
end of a week there was plenty of evidence that lash and club
and fist had done their work well; the king's body was a sight
to see--and to weep over; but his spirit?--why, it wasn't even
phased.  Even that dull clod of a slave-driver was able to see
that there can be such a thing as a slave who will remain a man
till he dies; whose bones you can break, but whose manhood you
can't.  This man found that from his first effort down to his
latest, he couldn't ever come within reach of the king, but the
king was ready to plunge for him, and did it.  So he gave up
at last, and left the king in possession of his style unimpaired.
The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was
a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

We had a rough time for a month, tramping to and fro in the earth,
and suffering.  And what Englishman was the most interested in
the slavery question by that time?  His grace the king!  Yes; from
being the most indifferent, he was become the most interested.
He was become the bitterest hater of the institution I had ever
heard talk.  And so I ventured to ask once more a question which
I had asked years before and had gotten such a sharp answer that
I had not thought it prudent to meddle in the matter further.
Would he abolish slavery?

His answer was as sharp as before, but it was music this time;
I shouldn't ever wish to hear pleasanter, though the profanity
was not good, being awkwardly put together, and with the crash-word
almost in the middle instead of at the end, where, of course, it
ought to have been.

I was ready and willing to get free now; I hadn't wanted to get
free any sooner.  No, I cannot quite say that.  I had wanted to,
but I had not been willing to take desperate chances, and had
always dissuaded the king from them.  But now--ah, it was a new
atmosphere!  Liberty would be worth any cost that might be put
upon it now.  I set about a plan, and was straightway charmed
with it.  It would require time, yes, and patience, too, a great
deal of both.  One could invent quicker ways, and fully as sure
ones; but none that would be as picturesque as this; none that
could be made so dramatic.  And so I was not going to give this
one up.  It might delay us months, but no matter, I would carry
it out or break something.

Now and then we had an adventure.  One night we were overtaken
by a snow-storm while still a mile from the village we were making
for.  Almost instantly we were shut up as in a fog, the driving
snow was so thick.  You couldn't see a thing, and we were soon
lost.  The slave-driver lashed us desperately, for he saw ruin
before him, but his lashings only made matters worse, for they
drove us further from the road and from likelihood of succor.
So we had to stop at last and slump down in the snow where we
were.  The storm continued until toward midnight, then ceased.
By this time two of our feebler men and three of our women were
dead, and others past moving and threatened with death.  Our
master was nearly beside himself.  He stirred up the living, and
made us stand, jump, slap ourselves, to restore our circulation,
and he helped as well as he could with his whip.

Now came a diversion.  We heard shrieks and yells, and soon a
woman came running and crying; and seeing our group, she flung
herself into our midst and begged for protection.  A mob of people
came tearing after her, some with torches, and they said she was a
witch who had caused several cows to die by a strange disease,
and practiced her arts by help of a devil in the form of a black
cat.  This poor woman had been stoned until she hardly looked
human, she was so battered and bloody.  The mob wanted to burn her.

Well, now, what do you suppose our master did?  When we closed
around this poor creature to shelter her, he saw his chance.  He
said, burn her here, or they shouldn't have her at all.  Imagine
that!  They were willing.  They fastened her to a post; they
brought wood and piled it about her; they applied the torch while
she shrieked and pleaded and strained her two young daughters
to her breast; and our brute, with a heart solely for business,
lashed us into position about the stake and warmed us into life
and commercial value by the same fire which took away the innocent
life of that poor harmless mother.  That was the sort of master we
had.  I took _his_ number.  That snow-storm cost him nine of his
flock; and he was more brutal to us than ever, after that, for
many days together, he was so enraged over his loss.

We had adventures all along.  One day we ran into a procession.
And such a procession!  All the riffraff of the kingdom seemed
to be comprehended in it; and all drunk at that.  In the van was
a cart with a coffin in it, and on the coffin sat a comely young
girl of about eighteen suckling a baby, which she squeezed to her
breast in a passion of love every little while, and every little
while wiped from its face the tears which her eyes rained down
upon it; and always the foolish little thing smiled up at her,
happy and content, kneading her breast with its dimpled fat hand,
which she patted and fondled right over her breaking heart.

Men and women, boys and girls, trotted along beside or after
the cart, hooting, shouting profane and ribald remarks, singing
snatches of foul song, skipping, dancing--a very holiday of
hellions, a sickening sight.  We had struck a suburb of London,
outside the walls, and this was a sample of one sort of London
society.  Our master secured a good place for us near the gallows.
A priest was in attendance, and he helped the girl climb up, and
said comforting words to her, and made the under-sheriff provide
a stool for her.  Then he stood there by her on the gallows, and
for a moment looked down upon the mass of upturned faces at his
feet, then out over the solid pavement of heads that stretched away
on every side occupying the vacancies far and near, and then began
to tell the story of the case.  And there was pity in his voice
--how seldom a sound that was in that ignorant and savage land!
I remember every detail of what he said, except the words he said
it in; and so I change it into my own words:

"Law is intended to mete out justice.  Sometimes it fails. This
cannot be helped.  We can only grieve, and be resigned, and pray
for the soul of him who falls unfairly by the arm of the law, and
that his fellows may be few.  A law sends this poor young thing
to death--and it is right.  But another law had placed her where
she must commit her crime or starve with her child--and before God
that law is responsible for both her crime and her ignominious death!

"A little while ago this young thing, this child of eighteen years,
was as happy a wife and mother as any in England; and her lips
were blithe with song, which is the native speech of glad and
innocent hearts.  Her young husband was as happy as she; for he was
doing his whole duty, he worked early and late at his handicraft,
his bread was honest bread well and fairly earned, he was prospering,
he was furnishing shelter and sustenance to his family, he was
adding his mite to the wealth of the nation.  By consent of a
treacherous law, instant destruction fell upon this holy home and
swept it away!  That young husband was waylaid and impressed,
and sent to sea.  The wife knew nothing of it.  She sought him
everywhere, she moved the hardest hearts with the supplications
of her tears, the broken eloquence of her despair.  Weeks dragged
by, she watching, waiting, hoping, her mind going slowly to wreck
under the burden of her misery.  Little by little all her small
possessions went for food.  When she could no longer pay her rent,
they turned her out of doors.  She begged, while she had strength;
when she was starving at last, and her milk failing, she stole a
piece of linen cloth of the value of a fourth part of a cent,
thinking to sell it and save her child.  But she was seen by the
owner of the cloth.  She was put in jail and brought to trial.
The man testified to the facts.  A plea was made for her, and her
sorrowful story was told in her behalf.  She spoke, too, by
permission, and said she did steal the cloth, but that her mind
was so disordered of late by trouble that when she was overborne
with hunger all acts, criminal or other, swam meaningless through
her brain and she knew nothing rightly, except that she was so
hungry!  For a moment all were touched, and there was disposition
to deal mercifully with her, seeing that she was so young and
friendless, and her case so piteous, and the law that robbed her
of her support to blame as being the first and only cause of her
transgression; but the prosecuting officer replied that whereas
these things were all true, and most pitiful as well, still there
was much small theft in these days, and mistimed mercy here would
be a danger to property--oh, my God, is there no property in ruined
homes, and orphaned babes, and broken hearts that British law
holds precious!--and so he must require sentence.

"When the judge put on his black cap, the owner of the stolen
linen rose trembling up, his lip quivering, his face as gray as
ashes; and when the awful words came, he cried out, 'Oh, poor
child, poor child, I did not know it was death!' and fell as a
tree falls.  When they lifted him up his reason was gone; before
the sun was set, he had taken his own life.  A kindly man; a man
whose heart was right, at bottom; add his murder to this that
is to be now done here; and charge them both where they belong
--to the rulers and the bitter laws of Britain.  The time is come, my
child; let me pray over thee--not _for_ thee, dear abused poor heart
and innocent, but for them that be guilty of thy ruin and death,
who need it more."

After his prayer they put the noose around the young girl's neck,
and they had great trouble to adjust the knot under her ear,
because she was devouring the baby all the time, wildly kissing it,
and snatching it to her face and her breast, and drenching it
with tears, and half moaning, half shrieking all the while, and the
baby crowing, and laughing, and kicking its feet with delight over
what it took for romp and play.  Even the hangman couldn't stand it,
but turned away.  When all was ready the priest gently pulled and
tugged and forced the child out of the mother's arms, and stepped
quickly out of her reach; but she clasped her hands, and made a
wild spring toward him, with a shriek; but the rope--and the
under-sheriff--held her short.  Then she went on her knees and
stretched out her hands and cried:

"One more kiss--oh, my God, one more, one more,--it is the dying
that begs it!"

She got it; she almost smothered the little thing.  And when they
got it away again, she cried out:

"Oh, my child, my darling, it will die!  It has no home, it has
no father, no friend, no mother--"

"It has them all!" said that good priest.  "All these will I be
to it till I die."

You should have seen her face then!  Gratitude?  Lord, what do
you want with words to express that?  Words are only painted fire;
a look is the fire itself.  She gave that look, and carried it away
to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.



CHAPTER XXXVI

AN ENCOUNTER IN THE DARK

London--to a slave--was a sufficiently interesting place.  It was
merely a great big village; and mainly mud and thatch.  The streets
were muddy, crooked, unpaved.  The populace was an ever flocking
and drifting swarm of rags, and splendors, of nodding plumes and
shining armor.  The king had a palace there; he saw the outside
of it.  It made him sigh; yes, and swear a little, in a poor
juvenile sixth century way.  We saw knights and grandees whom
we knew, but they didn't know us in our rags and dirt and raw
welts and bruises, and wouldn't have recognized us if we had hailed
them, nor stopped to answer, either, it being unlawful to speak
with slaves on a chain.  Sandy passed within ten yards of me on
a mule--hunting for me, I imagined.  But the thing which clean
broke my heart was something which happened in front of our old
barrack in a square, while we were enduring the spectacle of a man
being boiled to death in oil for counterfeiting pennies.  It was
the sight of a newsboy--and I couldn't get at him!  Still, I had
one comfort--here was proof that Clarence was still alive and
banging away.  I meant to be with him before long; the thought was
full of cheer.

I had one little glimpse of another thing, one day, which gave me
a great uplift.  It was a wire stretching from housetop to housetop.
Telegraph or telephone, sure.  I did very much wish I had a little
piece of it.  It was just what I needed, in order to carry out my
project of escape.  My idea was to get loose some night, along with
the king, then gag and bind our master, change clothes with him,
batter him into the aspect of a stranger, hitch him to the slave-chain,
assume possession of the property, march to Camelot, and--

But you get my idea; you see what a stunning dramatic surprise
I would wind up with at the palace.  It was all feasible, if
I could only get hold of a slender piece of iron which I could
shape into a lock-pick.  I could then undo the lumbering padlocks
with which our chains were fastened, whenever I might choose.
But I never had any luck; no such thing ever happened to fall
in my way.  However, my chance came at last.  A gentleman who
had come twice before to dicker for me, without result, or indeed
any approach to a result, came again.  I was far from expecting
ever to belong to him, for the price asked for me from the time
I was first enslaved was exorbitant, and always provoked either
anger or derision, yet my master stuck stubbornly to it--twenty-two
dollars.  He wouldn't bate a cent.  The king was greatly admired,
because of his grand physique, but his kingly style was against
him, and he wasn't salable; nobody wanted that kind of a slave.
I considered myself safe from parting from him because of my
extravagant price.  No, I was not expecting to ever belong to
this gentleman whom I have spoken of, but he had something which
I expected would belong to me eventually, if he would but visit
us often enough.  It was a steel thing with a long pin to it, with
which his long cloth outside garment was fastened together in
front.  There were three of them. He had disappointed me twice,
because he did not come quite close enough to me to make my project
entirely safe; but this time I succeeded; I captured the lower
clasp of the three, and when he missed it he thought he had lost
it on the way.

I had a chance to be glad about a minute, then straightway a chance
to be sad again.  For when the purchase was about to fail, as usual,
the master suddenly spoke up and said what would be worded thus
--in modern English:

"I'll tell you what I'll do.  I'm tired supporting these two for
no good.  Give me twenty-two dollars for this one, and I'll throw
the other one in."

The king couldn't get his breath, he was in such a fury.  He began
to choke and gag, and meantime the master and the gentleman moved
away discussing.

"An ye will keep the offer open--"

"'Tis open till the morrow at this hour."

"Then I will answer you at that time," said the gentleman, and
disappeared, the master following him.

I had a time of it to cool the king down, but I managed it.
I whispered in his ear, to this effect:

"Your grace _will_ go for nothing, but after another fashion.  And
so shall I.  To-night we shall both be free."

"Ah!  How is that?"

"With this thing which I have stolen, I will unlock these locks
and cast off these chains to-night.  When he comes about nine-thirty
to inspect us for the night, we will seize him, gag him, batter
him, and early in the morning we will march out of this town,
proprietors of this caravan of slaves."

That was as far as I went, but the king was charmed and satisfied.
That evening we waited patiently for our fellow-slaves to get
to sleep and signify it by the usual sign, for you must not take
many chances on those poor fellows if you can avoid it.  It is
best to keep your own secrets.  No doubt they fidgeted only about
as usual, but it didn't seem so to me.  It seemed to me that they
were going to be forever getting down to their regular snoring.
As the time dragged on I got nervously afraid we shouldn't have
enough of it left for our needs; so I made several premature
attempts, and merely delayed things by it; for I couldn't seem
to touch a padlock, there in the dark, without starting a rattle
out of it which interrupted somebody's sleep and made him turn
over and wake some more of the gang.

But finally I did get my last iron off, and was a free man once
more.  I took a good breath of relief, and reached for the king's
irons.  Too late! in comes the master, with a light in one hand
and his heavy walking-staff in the other.  I snuggled close among
the wallow of snorers, to conceal as nearly as possible that I was
naked of irons; and I kept a sharp lookout and prepared to spring
for my man the moment he should bend over me.

But he didn't approach.  He stopped, gazed absently toward our
dusky mass a minute, evidently thinking about something else;
then set down his light, moved musingly toward the door, and before
a body could imagine what he was going to do, he was out of the
door and had closed it behind him.

"Quick!" said the king.  "Fetch him back!"

Of course, it was the thing to do, and I was up and out in a
moment.  But, dear me, there were no lamps in those days, and
it was a dark night.  But I glimpsed a dim figure a few steps
away.  I darted for it, threw myself upon it, and then there was
a state of things and lively!  We fought and scuffled and struggled,
and drew a crowd in no time.  They took an immense interest in
the fight and encouraged us all they could, and, in fact, couldn't
have been pleasanter or more cordial if it had been their own
fight.  Then a tremendous row broke out behind us, and as much
as half of our audience left us, with a rush, to invest some
sympathy in that.  Lanterns began to swing in all directions;
it was the watch gathering from far and near.  Presently a halberd
fell across my back, as a reminder, and I knew what it meant.
I was in custody.  So was my adversary.  We were marched off toward
prison, one on each side of the watchman.  Here was disaster,
here was a fine scheme gone to sudden destruction!  I tried to
imagine what would happen when the master should discover that
it was I who had been fighting him; and what would happen if they
jailed us together in the general apartment for brawlers and petty
law-breakers, as was the custom; and what might--

Just then my antagonist turned his face around in my direction,
the freckled light from the watchman's tin lantern fell on it,
and, by George, he was the wrong man!



CHAPTER XXXVII

AN AWFUL PREDICAMENT

Sleep?  It was impossible.  It would naturally have been impossible
in that noisome cavern of a jail, with its mangy crowd of drunken,
quarrelsome, and song-singing rapscallions.  But the thing that
made sleep all the more a thing not to be dreamed of, was my
racking impatience to get out of this place and find out the whole
size of what might have happened yonder in the slave-quarters
in consequence of that intolerable miscarriage of mine.

It was a long night, but the morning got around at last.  I made
a full and frank explanation to the court.  I said I was a slave,
the property of the great Earl Grip, who had arrived just after
dark at the Tabard inn in the village on the other side of the
water, and had stopped there over night, by compulsion, he being
taken deadly sick with a strange and sudden disorder.  I had been
ordered to cross to the city in all haste and bring the best
physician; I was doing my best; naturally I was running with all
my might; the night was dark, I ran against this common person
here, who seized me by the throat and began to pummel me, although
I told him my errand, and implored him, for the sake of the great
earl my master's mortal peril--

The common person interrupted and said it was a lie; and was going
to explain how I rushed upon him and attacked him without a word--

"Silence, sirrah!" from the court.  "Take him hence and give him
a few stripes whereby to teach him how to treat the servant of
a nobleman after a different fashion another time.  Go!"

Then the court begged my pardon, and hoped I would not fail
to tell his lordship it was in no wise the court's fault that this
high-handed thing had happened.  I said I would make it all right,
and so took my leave.  Took it just in time, too; he was starting
to ask me why I didn't fetch out these facts the moment I was
arrested.  I said I would if I had thought of it--which was true
--but that I was so battered by that man that all my wit was knocked
out of me--and so forth and so on, and got myself away, still
mumbling.  I didn't wait for breakfast.  No grass grew under my
feet.  I was soon at the slave quarters.  Empty--everybody gone!
That is, everybody except one body--the slave-master's.  It lay
there all battered to pulp; and all about were the evidences of
a terrific fight.  There was a rude board coffin on a cart at
the door, and workmen, assisted by the police, were thinning a
road through the gaping crowd in order that they might bring it in.

I picked out a man humble enough in life to condescend to talk
with one so shabby as I, and got his account of the matter.

"There were sixteen slaves here.  They rose against their master
in the night, and thou seest how it ended."

"Yes.  How did it begin?"

"There was no witness but the slaves.  They said the slave that
was most valuable got free of his bonds and escaped in some strange
way--by magic arts 'twas thought, by reason that he had no key,
and the locks were neither broke nor in any wise injured.  When
the master discovered his loss, he was mad with despair, and threw
himself upon his people with his heavy stick, who resisted and
brake his back and in other and divers ways did give him hurts
that brought him swiftly to his end."

"This is dreadful.  It will go hard with the slaves, no doubt,
upon the trial."

"Marry, the trial is over."

"Over!"

"Would they be a week, think you--and the matter so simple?  They
were not the half of a quarter of an hour at it."

"Why, I don't see how they could determine which were the guilty
ones in so short a time."

"_Which_ ones?  Indeed, they considered not particulars like to that.
They condemned them in a body.  Wit ye not the law?--which men
say the Romans left behind them here when they went--that if one
slave killeth his master all the slaves of that man must die for it."

"True.  I had forgotten.  And when will these die?"

"Belike within a four and twenty hours; albeit some say they will
wait a pair of days more, if peradventure they may find the missing
one meantime."

The missing one!  It made me feel uncomfortable.

"Is it likely they will find him?"

"Before the day is spent--yes.  They seek him everywhere.  They
stand at the gates of the town, with certain of the slaves who
will discover him to them if he cometh, and none can pass out
but he will be first examined."

"Might one see the place where the rest are confined?"

"The outside of it--yes.  The inside of it--but ye will not want
to see that."

I took the address of that prison for future reference and then
sauntered off.  At the first second-hand clothing shop I came to,
up a back street, I got a rough rig suitable for a common seaman
who might be going on a cold voyage, and bound up my face with
a liberal bandage, saying I had a toothache.  This concealed my
worst bruises.  It was a transformation.  I no longer resembled my
former self.  Then I struck out for that wire, found it and
followed it to its den.  It was a little room over a butcher's
shop--which meant that business wasn't very brisk in the telegraphic
line.  The young chap in charge was drowsing at his table.  I locked
the door and put the vast key in my bosom.  This alarmed the young
fellow, and he was going to make a noise; but I said:

"Save your wind; if you open your mouth you are dead, sure.  Tackle
your instrument.  Lively, now!  Call Camelot."

"This doth amaze me!  How should such as you know aught of such
matters as--"

"Call Camelot!  I am a desperate man.  Call Camelot, or get away
from the instrument and I will do it myself."

"What--you?"

"Yes--certainly.  Stop gabbling.  Call the palace."

He made the call.

"Now, then, call Clarence."

"Clarence _who_?"

"Never mind Clarence who.  Say you want Clarence; you'll get
an answer."

He did so.  We waited five nerve-straining minutes--ten minutes
--how long it did seem!--and then came a click that was as familiar
to me as a human voice; for Clarence had been my own pupil.

"Now, my lad, vacate!  They would have known _my_ touch, maybe,
and so your call was surest; but I'm all right now."

He vacated the place and cocked his ear to listen--but it didn't
win.  I used a cipher.  I didn't waste any time in sociabilities
with Clarence, but squared away for business, straight-off--thus:

"The king is here and in danger.  We were captured and brought
here as slaves.  We should not be able to prove our identity
--and the fact is, I am not in a position to try.  Send a telegram
for the palace here which will carry conviction with it."

His answer came straight back:

"They don't know anything about the telegraph; they haven't had
any experience yet, the line to London is so new.  Better not
venture that.  They might hang you.  Think up something else."

Might hang us!  Little he knew how closely he was crowding the
facts.  I couldn't think up anything for the moment.  Then an idea
struck me, and I started it along:

"Send five hundred picked knights with Launcelot in the lead; and
send them on the jump.  Let them enter by the southwest gate, and
look out for the man with a white cloth around his right arm."

The answer was prompt:

"They shall start in half an hour."

"All right, Clarence; now tell this lad here that I'm a friend
of yours and a dead-head; and that he must be discreet and say
nothing about this visit of mine."

The instrument began to talk to the youth and I hurried away.
I fell to ciphering.  In half an hour it would be nine o'clock.
Knights and horses in heavy armor couldn't travel very fast.
These would make the best time they could, and now that the ground
was in good condition, and no snow or mud, they would probably
make a seven-mile gait; they would have to change horses a couple
of times; they would arrive about six, or a little after; it would
still be plenty light enough; they would see the white cloth which
I should tie around my right arm, and I would take command.  We
would surround that prison and have the king out in no time.
It would be showy and picturesque enough, all things considered,
though I would have preferred noonday, on account of the more
theatrical aspect the thing would have.

Now, then, in order to increase the strings to my bow, I thought
I would look up some of those people whom I had formerly recognized,
and make myself known.  That would help us out of our scrape,
without the knights.  But I must proceed cautiously, for it was
a risky business.  I must get into sumptuous raiment, and it
wouldn't do to run and jump into it.  No, I must work up to it
by degrees, buying suit after suit of clothes, in shops wide apart,
and getting a little finer article with each change, until I should
finally reach silk and velvet, and be ready for my project.  So
I started.

But the scheme fell through like scat!  The first corner I turned,
I came plump upon one of our slaves, snooping around with a watchman.
I coughed at the moment, and he gave me a sudden look that bit right
into my marrow.  I judge he thought he had heard that cough before.
I turned immediately into a shop and worked along down the counter,
pricing things and watching out of the corner of my eye.  Those
people had stopped, and were talking together and looking in at
the door.  I made up my mind to get out the back way, if there
was a back way, and I asked the shopwoman if I could step out
there and look for the escaped slave, who was believed to be in
hiding back there somewhere, and said I was an officer in disguise,
and my pard was yonder at the door with one of the murderers in
charge, and would she be good enough to step there and tell him
he needn't wait, but had better go at once to the further end of
the back alley and be ready to head him off when I rousted him out.

She was blazing with eagerness to see one of those already celebrated
murderers, and she started on the errand at once.  I slipped out
the back way, locked the door behind me, put the key in my pocket
and started off, chuckling to myself and comfortable.

Well, I had gone and spoiled it again, made another mistake.
A double one, in fact.  There were plenty of ways to get rid of
that officer by some simple and plausible device, but no, I must
pick out a picturesque one; it is the crying defect of my character.
And then, I had ordered my procedure upon what the officer, being
human, would _naturally_ do; whereas when you are least expecting it,
a man will now and then go and do the very thing which it's _not_
natural for him to do.  The natural thing for the officer to do,
in this case, was to follow straight on my heels; he would find
a stout oaken door, securely locked, between him and me; before
he could break it down, I should be far away and engaged in slipping
into a succession of baffling disguises which would soon get me
into a sort of raiment which was a surer protection from meddling
law-dogs in Britain than any amount of mere innocence and purity
of character.  But instead of doing the natural thing, the officer
took me at my word, and followed my instructions.  And so, as I
came trotting out of that cul de sac, full of satisfaction with my
own cleverness, he turned the corner and I walked right into his
handcuffs.  If I had known it was a cul de sac--however, there
isn't any excusing a blunder like that, let it go.  Charge it up
to profit and loss.

Of course, I was indignant, and swore I had just come ashore from
a long voyage, and all that sort of thing--just to see, you know,
if it would deceive that slave.  But it didn't.  He knew me.  Then
I reproached him for betraying me.  He was more surprised than
hurt.  He stretched his eyes wide, and said:

"What, wouldst have me let thee, of all men, escape and not hang
with us, when thou'rt the very _cause_ of our hanging?  Go to!"

"Go to" was their way of saying "I should smile!" or "I like that!"
Queer talkers, those people.

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case,
and so I dropped the matter.  When you can't cure a disaster by
argument, what is the use to argue?  It isn't my way.  So I only said:

"You're not going to be hanged.  None of us are."

Both men laughed, and the slave said:

"Ye have not ranked as a fool--before.  You might better keep
your reputation, seeing the strain would not be for long."

"It will stand it, I reckon.  Before to-morrow we shall be out
of prison, and free to go where we will, besides."

The witty officer lifted at his left ear with his thumb, made
a rasping noise in his throat, and said:

"Out of prison--yes--ye say true.  And free likewise to go where
ye will, so ye wander not out of his grace the Devil's sultry realm."

I kept my temper, and said, indifferently:

"Now I suppose you really think we are going to hang within
a day or two."

"I thought it not many minutes ago, for so the thing was decided
and proclaimed."

"Ah, then you've changed your mind, is that it?"

"Even that.  I only _thought_, then; I _know_, now."

I felt sarcastical, so I said:

"Oh, sapient servant of the law, condescend to tell us, then,
what you _know_."

"That ye will all be hanged _to-day_, at mid-afternoon!  Oho! that
shot hit home!  Lean upon me."

The fact is I did need to lean upon somebody.  My knights couldn't
arrive in time.  They would be as much as three hours too late.
Nothing in the world could save the King of England; nor me, which
was more important.  More important, not merely to me, but to
the nation--the only nation on earth standing ready to blossom
into civilization.  I was sick.  I said no more, there wasn't
anything to say.  I knew what the man meant; that if the missing
slave was found, the postponement would be revoked, the execution
take place to-day.  Well, the missing slave was found.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

SIR LAUNCELOT AND KNIGHTS TO THE RESCUE

Nearing four in the afternoon.  The scene was just outside the
walls of London.  A cool, comfortable, superb day, with a brilliant
sun; the kind of day to make one want to live, not die.  The
multitude was prodigious and far-reaching; and yet we fifteen
poor devils hadn't a friend in it.  There was something painful
in that thought, look at it how you might.  There we sat, on our
tall scaffold, the butt of the hate and mockery of all those
enemies.  We were being made a holiday spectacle.  They had built
a sort of grand stand for the nobility and gentry, and these were
there in full force, with their ladies.  We recognized a good
many of them.

The crowd got a brief and unexpected dash of diversion out of
the king.  The moment we were freed of our bonds he sprang up,
in his fantastic rags, with face bruised out of all recognition, and
proclaimed himself Arthur, King of Britain, and denounced the
awful penalties of treason upon every soul there present if hair
of his sacred head were touched.  It startled and surprised him
to hear them break into a vast roar of laughter.  It wounded his
dignity, and he locked himself up in silence.  Then, although
the crowd begged him to go on, and tried to provoke him to it
by catcalls, jeers, and shouts of:

"Let him speak!  The king!  The king! his humble subjects hunger
and thirst for words of wisdom out of the mouth of their master
his Serene and Sacred Raggedness!"

But it went for nothing.  He put on all his majesty and sat under
this rain of contempt and insult unmoved.  He certainly was great
in his way.  Absently, I had taken off my white bandage and wound
it about my right arm.  When the crowd noticed this, they began
upon me.  They said:

"Doubtless this sailor-man is his minister--observe his costly
badge of office!"

I let them go on until they got tired, and then I said:

"Yes, I am his minister, The Boss; and to-morrow you will hear
that from Camelot which--"

I got no further.  They drowned me out with joyous derision.  But
presently there was silence; for the sheriffs of London, in their
official robes, with their subordinates, began to make a stir which
indicated that business was about to begin.  In the hush which
followed, our crime was recited, the death warrant read, then
everybody uncovered while a priest uttered a prayer.

Then a slave was blindfolded; the hangman unslung his rope.  There
lay the smooth road below us, we upon one side of it, the banked
multitude wailing its other side--a good clear road, and kept free
by the police--how good it would be to see my five hundred horsemen
come tearing down it!  But no, it was out of the possibilities.
I followed its receding thread out into the distance--not a horseman
on it, or sign of one.

There was a jerk, and the slave hung dangling; dangling and hideously
squirming, for his limbs were not tied.

A second rope was unslung, in a moment another slave was dangling.

In a minute a third slave was struggling in the air.  It was
dreadful.  I turned away my head a moment, and when I turned back
I missed the king!  They were blindfolding him!  I was paralyzed;
I couldn't move, I was choking, my tongue was petrified.  They
finished blindfolding him, they led him under the rope.  I couldn't
shake off that clinging impotence.  But when I saw them put the
noose around his neck, then everything let go in me and I made
a spring to the rescue--and as I made it I shot one more glance
abroad--by George! here they came, a-tilting!--five hundred mailed
and belted knights on bicycles!

The grandest sight that ever was seen.  Lord, how the plumes
streamed, how the sun flamed and flashed from the endless procession
of webby wheels!

I waved my right arm as Launcelot swept in--he recognized my rag
--I tore away noose and bandage, and shouted:

"On your knees, every rascal of you, and salute the king!  Who
fails shall sup in hell to-night!"

I always use that high style when I'm climaxing an effect.  Well,
it was noble to see Launcelot and the boys swarm up onto that
scaffold and heave sheriffs and such overboard.  And it was fine
to see that astonished multitude go down on their knees and beg
their lives of the king they had just been deriding and insulting.
And as he stood apart there, receiving this homage in rags,
I thought to myself, well, really there is something peculiarly
grand about the gait and bearing of a king, after all.

I was immensely satisfied.  Take the whole situation all around,
it was one of the gaudiest effects I ever instigated.

And presently up comes Clarence, his own self! and winks, and
says, very modernly:

"Good deal of a surprise, wasn't it?  I knew you'd like it.  I've
had the boys practicing this long time, privately; and just hungry
for a chance to show off."



CHAPTER XXXIX

THE YANKEE'S FIGHT WITH THE KNIGHTS

Home again, at Camelot.  A morning or two later I found the paper,
damp from the press, by my plate at the breakfast table.  I turned
to the advertising columns, knowing I should find something of
personal interest to me there.  It was this:

             DE PAR LE ROI.

   Know that the great lord and illus-
   trious Kni8ht, SIR SAGRAMOR LE
   DESIROUS having condescended to
   meet the King's Minister, Hank Mor-
    gan, the which is surnamed The Boss,
   for satisfgction of offence anciently given,
   these wilL engage in the lists by
   Camelot about the fourth hour of the
   morning of the sixteenth day of this
   next succeeding month. The battle
   will be a l outrance, sith the said offence
   was of a deadly sort, admitting of no
   comPosition.

             DE PAR LE ROI


Clarence's editorial reference to this affair was to this effect:

   It will be observed, by a gl7nce at our
   advertising columns, that the commu-
   nity is to be favored with a treat of un-
   usual interest in the tournament line.
   The names of the artists are warrant of
   good enterrainment. The box-office
   will be open at noon of the 13th; ad-
   mission 3 cents, reserved seatsh 5; pro-
   ceeds to go to the hospital fund  The
   royal pair and all the Court will be pres-
   ent. With these exceptions, and the
   press and the clergy, the free list is strict-
   ly susPended. Parties are hereby warn-
   ed against buying tickets of speculators;
   they will not be good at the door.
   Everybody knows and likes The Boss,
   everybody knows and likes Sir Sag.;
   come, let us give the lads a good send-
   off. ReMember, the proceeds go to a
   great and free charity, and one whose
   broad begevolence stretches out its help-
   ing hand, warm with the blood of a lov-
   ing heart, to all that suffer, regardless of
   race, creed, condition or color--the
   only charity yet established in the earth
   which has no politico-religious stop-
   cock on its compassion, but says Here
   flows the stream, let ALL come and
   drink! Turn out, all hands! fetch along
   your dou3hnuts and your gum-drops
   and have a good time. Pie for sale on
   the grounds, and rocks to crack it with;
   and ciRcus-lemonade--three drops of
   lime juice to a barrel of water.

   N.B. This is the first tournament
   under the new law, whidh allow each
   combatant to use any weapon he may pre-
   fer. You may want to make a note of that.

Up to the day set, there was no talk in all Britain of anything
but this combat.  All other topics sank into insignificance and
passed out of men's thoughts and interest.  It was not because
a tournament was a great matter, it was not because Sir Sagramor
had found the Holy Grail, for he had not, but had failed; it was
not because the second (official) personage in the kingdom was
one of the duellists; no, all these features were commonplace.
Yet there was abundant reason for the extraordinary interest which
this coming fight was creating.  It was born of the fact that all
the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men,
so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not
of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of superhuman art
and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master
enchanters of the age.  It was realized that the most prodigious
achievements of the most renowned knights could not be worthy
of comparison with a spectacle like this; they could be but child's
play, contrasted with this mysterious and awful battle of the gods.
Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel
between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against
mine.  It was known that Merlin had been busy whole days and nights
together, imbuing Sir Sagramor's arms and armor with supernal
powers of offense and defense, and that he had procured for him
from the spirits of the air a fleecy veil which would render the
wearer invisible to his antagonist while still visible to other
men.  Against Sir Sagramor, so weaponed and protected, a thousand
knights could accomplish nothing; against him no known enchantments
could prevail.  These facts were sure; regarding them there was
no doubt, no reason for doubt.  There was but one question: might
there be still other enchantments, _unknown_ to Merlin, which could
render Sir Sagramor's veil transparent to me, and make his enchanted
mail vulnerable to my weapons?  This was the one thing to be
decided in the lists.  Until then the world must remain in suspense.

So the world thought there was a vast matter at stake here, and
the world was right, but it was not the one they had in their
minds.  No, a far vaster one was upon the cast of this die:
_the life of knight-errantry_.  I was a champion, it was true, but
not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was the champion
of hard unsentimental common-sense and reason.  I was entering
the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.

Vast as the show-grounds were, there were no vacant spaces in them
outside of the lists, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 16th.
The mammoth grand-stand was clothed in flags, streamers, and rich
tapestries, and packed with several acres of small-fry tributary
kings, their suites, and the British aristocracy; with our own
royal gang in the chief place, and each and every individual
a flashing prism of gaudy silks and velvets--well, I never saw
anything to begin with it but a fight between an Upper Mississippi
sunset and the aurora borealis.  The huge camp of beflagged and
gay-colored tents at one end of the lists, with a stiff-standing
sentinel at every door and a shining shield hanging by him for
challenge, was another fine sight.  You see, every knight was
there who had any ambition or any caste feeling; for my feeling
toward their order was not much of a secret, and so here was their
chance.  If I won my fight with Sir Sagramor, others would have
the right to call me out as long as I might be willing to respond.

Down at our end there were but two tents; one for me, and another
for my servants.  At the appointed hour the king made a sign, and
the heralds, in their tabards, appeared and made proclamation,
naming the combatants and stating the cause of quarrel.  There
was a pause, then a ringing bugle-blast, which was the signal for
us to come forth.  All the multitude caught their breath, and
an eager curiosity flashed into every face.

Out from his tent rode great Sir Sagramor, an imposing tower
of iron, stately and rigid, his huge spear standing upright in its
socket and grasped in his strong hand, his grand horse's face and
breast cased in steel, his body clothed in rich trappings that
almost dragged the ground--oh, a most noble picture.  A great
shout went up, of welcome and admiration.

And then out I came.  But I didn't get any shout.  There was
a wondering and eloquent silence for a moment, then a great wave
of laughter began to sweep along that human sea, but a warning
bugle-blast cut its career short.  I was in the simplest and
comfortablest of gymnast costumes--flesh-colored tights from neck
to heel, with blue silk puffings about my loins, and bareheaded.
My horse was not above medium size, but he was alert, slender-limbed,
muscled with watchsprings, and just a greyhound to go.  He was
a beauty, glossy as silk, and naked as he was when he was born,
except for bridle and ranger-saddle.

The iron tower and the gorgeous bedquilt came cumbrously but
gracefully pirouetting down the lists, and we tripped lightly up
to meet them.  We halted; the tower saluted, I responded; then
we wheeled and rode side by side to the grand-stand and faced
our king and queen, to whom we made obeisance.  The queen exclaimed:

"Alack, Sir Boss, wilt fight naked, and without lance or sword or--"

But the king checked her and made her understand, with a polite
phrase or two, that this was none of her business.  The bugles
rang again; and we separated and rode to the ends of the lists,
and took position.  Now old Merlin stepped into view and cast
a dainty web of gossamer threads over Sir Sagramor which turned
him into Hamlet's ghost; the king made a sign, the bugles blew,
Sir Sagramor laid his great lance in rest, and the next moment here
he came thundering down the course with his veil flying out behind,
and I went whistling through the air like an arrow to meet him
--cocking my ear the while, as if noting the invisible knight's
position and progress by hearing, not sight.  A chorus of encouraging
shouts burst out for him, and one brave voice flung out a heartening
word for me--said:

"Go it, slim Jim!"

It was an even bet that Clarence had procured that favor for me
--and furnished the language, too.  When that formidable lance-point
was within a yard and a half of my breast I twitched my horse aside
without an effort, and the big knight swept by, scoring a blank.
I got plenty of applause that time.  We turned, braced up, and
down we came again.  Another blank for the knight, a roar of
applause for me.  This same thing was repeated once more; and
it fetched such a whirlwind of applause that Sir Sagramor lost his
temper, and at once changed his tactics and set himself the task
of chasing me down.  Why, he hadn't any show in the world at that;
it was a game of tag, with all the advantage on my side; I whirled
out of his path with ease whenever I chose, and once I slapped him
on the back as I went to the rear.  Finally I took the chase into
my own hands; and after that, turn, or twist, or do what he would,
he was never able to get behind me again; he found himself always
in front at the end of his maneuver.  So he gave up that business
and retired to his end of the lists.  His temper was clear gone now,
and he forgot himself and flung an insult at me which disposed
of mine.  I slipped my lasso from the horn of my saddle, and
grasped the coil in my right hand.  This time you should have seen
him come!--it was a business trip, sure; by his gait there was
blood in his eye.  I was sitting my horse at ease, and swinging
the great loop of my lasso in wide circles about my head; the
moment he was under way, I started for him; when the space between
us had narrowed to forty feet, I sent the snaky spirals of the rope
a-cleaving through the air, then darted aside and faced about and
brought my trained animal to a halt with all his feet braced under
him for a surge.  The next moment the rope sprang taut and yanked
Sir Sagramor out of the saddle!  Great Scott, but there was
a sensation!

Unquestionably, the popular thing in this world is novelty.  These
people had never seen anything of that cowboy business before,
and it carried them clear off their feet with delight.  From all
around and everywhere, the shout went up:

"Encore! encore!"

I wondered where they got the word, but there was no time to cipher
on philological matters, because the whole knight-errantry hive
was just humming now, and my prospect for trade couldn't have
been better.  The moment my lasso was released and Sir Sagramor
had been assisted to his tent, I hauled in the slack, took my
station and began to swing my loop around my head again.  I was
sure to have use for it as soon as they could elect a successor
for Sir Sagramor, and that couldn't take long where there were
so many hungry candidates.  Indeed, they elected one straight off
--Sir Hervis de Revel.

_Bzz_!  Here he came, like a house afire; I dodged: he passed like
a flash, with my horse-hair coils settling around his neck;
a second or so later, _fst_! his saddle was empty.

I got another encore; and another, and another, and still another.
When I had snaked five men out, things began to look serious to
the ironclads, and they stopped and consulted together.  As a
result, they decided that it was time to waive etiquette and send
their greatest and best against me.  To the astonishment of that
little world, I lassoed Sir Lamorak de Galis, and after him
Sir Galahad.  So you see there was simply nothing to be done now,
but play their right bower--bring out the superbest of the superb,
the mightiest of the mighty, the great Sir Launcelot himself!

A proud moment for me?  I should think so.  Yonder was Arthur,
King of Britain; yonder was Guenever; yes, and whole tribes of
little provincial kings and kinglets; and in the tented camp yonder,
renowned knights from many lands; and likewise the selectest body
known to chivalry, the Knights of the Table Round, the most
illustrious in Christendom; and biggest fact of all, the very sun
of their shining system was yonder couching his lance, the focal
point of forty thousand adoring eyes; and all by myself, here was
I laying for him.  Across my mind flitted the dear image of a
certain hello-girl of West Hartford, and I wished she could see
me now.  In that moment, down came the Invincible, with the rush
of a whirlwind--the courtly world rose to its feet and bent forward
--the fateful coils went circling through the air, and before you
could wink I was towing Sir Launcelot across the field on his
back, and kissing my hand to the storm of waving kerchiefs and
the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!

Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn,
and sat there drunk with glory, "The victory is perfect--no other
will venture against me--knight-errantry is dead."  Now imagine my
astonishment--and everybody else's, too--to hear the peculiar
bugle-call which announces that another competitor is about to
enter the lists!  There was a mystery here; I couldn't account for
this thing.  Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then
I noticed that my lasso was gone!  The old sleight-of-hand expert
had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.

The bugle blew again.  I looked, and down came Sagramor riding
again, with his dust brushed off and his veil nicely re-arranged.
I trotted up to meet him, and pretended to find him by the sound
of his horse's hoofs.  He said:

"Thou'rt quick of ear, but it will not save thee from this!" and
he touched the hilt of his great sword.  "An ye are not able to see
it, because of the influence of the veil, know that it is no cumbrous
lance, but a sword--and I ween ye will not be able to avoid it."

His visor was up; there was death in his smile.  I should never
be able to dodge his sword, that was plain.  Somebody was going
to die this time.  If he got the drop on me, I could name the
corpse.  We rode forward together, and saluted the royalties.
This time the king was disturbed.  He said:

"Where is thy strange weapon?"

"It is stolen, sire."

"Hast another at hand?"

"No, sire, I brought only the one."

Then Merlin mixed in:

"He brought but the one because there was but the one to bring.
There exists none other but that one.  It belongeth to the king
of the Demons of the Sea.  This man is a pretender, and ignorant,
else he had known that that weapon can be used in but eight bouts
only, and then it vanisheth away to its home under the sea."

"Then is he weaponless," said the king.  "Sir Sagramore, ye will
grant him leave to borrow."

"And I will lend!" said Sir Launcelot, limping up.  "He is as
brave a knight of his hands as any that be on live, and he shall
have mine."

He put his hand on his sword to draw it, but Sir Sagramor said:

"Stay, it may not be.  He shall fight with his own weapons; it
was his privilege to choose them and bring them.  If he has erred,
on his head be it."

"Knight!" said the king.  "Thou'rt overwrought with passion; it
disorders thy mind.  Wouldst kill a naked man?"

"An he do it, he shall answer it to me," said Sir Launcelot.

"I will answer it to any he that desireth!" retorted Sir Sagramor hotly.

Merlin broke in, rubbing his hands and smiling his lowdownest
smile of malicious gratification:

"'Tis well said, right well said!  And 'tis enough of parleying,
let my lord the king deliver the battle signal."

The king had to yield.  The bugle made proclamation, and we turned
apart and rode to our stations.  There we stood, a hundred yards
apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues.
And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute,
everybody gazing, nobody stirring.  It seemed as if the king could
not take heart to give the signal.  But at last he lifted his hand,
the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramor's long blade
described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him
come.  I sat still.  On he came.  I did not move.  People got so
excited that they shouted to me:

"Fly, fly!  Save thyself!  This is murther!"

I never budged so much as an inch till that thundering apparition
had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon
revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and
the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell
what had happened.

Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramor,
stone dead.

The people that ran to him were stricken dumb to find that the life
was actually gone out of the man and no reason for it visible,
no hurt upon his body, nothing like a wound.  There was a hole
through the breast of his chain-mail, but they attached no importance
to a little thing like that; and as a bullet wound there produces
but little blood, none came in sight because of the clothing and
swaddlings under the armor.  The body was dragged over to let
the king and the swells look down upon it.  They were stupefied
with astonishment naturally.  I was requested to come and explain
the miracle.  But I remained in my tracks, like a statue, and said:

"If it is a command, I will come, but my lord the king knows that
I am where the laws of combat require me to remain while any desire
to come against me."

I waited.  Nobody challenged.  Then I said:

"If there are any who doubt that this field is well and fairly won,
I do not wait for them to challenge me, I challenge them."

"It is a gallant offer," said the king, "and well beseems you.
Whom will you name first?"

"I name none, I challenge all!  Here I stand, and dare the chivalry
of England to come against me--not by individuals, but in mass!"

"What!" shouted a score of knights.

"You have heard the challenge.  Take it, or I proclaim you recreant
knights and vanquished, every one!"

It was a "bluff" you know.  At such a time it is sound judgment
to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what
it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to "call,"
and you rake in the chips.  But just this once--well, things looked
squally!  In just no time, five hundred knights were scrambling
into their saddles, and before you could wink a widely scattering
drove were under way and clattering down upon me.  I snatched
both revolvers from the holsters and began to measure distances
and calculate chances.

Bang!  One saddle empty.  Bang! another one.  Bang--bang, and
I bagged two.  Well, it was nip and tuck with us, and I knew it.
If I spent the eleventh shot without convincing these people,
the twelfth man would kill me, sure.  And so I never did feel
so happy as I did when my ninth downed its man and I detected
the wavering in the crowd which is premonitory of panic.  An instant
lost now could knock out my last chance.  But I didn't lose it.
I raised both revolvers and pointed them--the halted host stood
their ground just about one good square moment, then broke and fled.

The day was mine.  Knight-errantry was a doomed institution.  The
march of civilization was begun.  How did I feel?  Ah, you never
could imagine it.

And Brer Merlin?  His stock was flat again.  Somehow, every time
the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science,
the magic of fol-de-rol got left.



CHAPTER XL

THREE YEARS LATER

When I broke the back of knight-errantry that time, I no longer
felt obliged to work in secret.  So, the very next day I exposed
my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine
factories and workshops to an astonished world.  That is to say,
I exposed the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.

Well, it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly.
The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so
I must just simply paralyze them--nothing short of that would
answer.  You see, I was "bluffing" that last time in the field;
it would be natural for them to work around to that conclusion,
if I gave them a chance.  So I must not give them time; and I didn't.

I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted it up where
any priest could read it to them, and also kept it standing in
the advertising columns of the paper.

I not only renewed it, but added to its proportions.  I said,
name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up
_against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it_.

I was not bluffing this time.  I meant what I said; I could do
what I promised.  There wasn't any way to misunderstand the language
of that challenge.  Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived
that this was a plain case of "put up, or shut up."  They were
wise and did the latter.  In all the next three years they gave
me no trouble worth mentioning.

Consider the three years sped.  Now look around on England.  A happy
and prosperous country, and strangely altered.  Schools everywhere,
and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers.  Even
authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first
in the field, with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been
familiar with during thirteen centuries.  If he had left out that
old rancid one about the lecturer I wouldn't have said anything;
but I couldn't stand that one.  I suppressed the book and hanged
the author.

Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law;
taxation had been equalized.  The telegraph, the telephone, the
phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand
willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working
their way into favor.  We had a steamboat or two on the Thames,
we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial
marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover
America.

We were building several lines of railway, and our line from
Camelot to London was already finished and in operation.  I was
shrewd enough to make all offices connected with the passenger
service places of high and distinguished honor.  My idea was
to attract the chivalry and nobility, and make them useful and keep
them out of mischief.  The plan worked very well, the competition
for the places was hot.  The conductor of the 4.33 express was
a duke; there wasn't a passenger conductor on the line below
the degree of earl.  They were good men, every one, but they had
two defects which I couldn't cure, and so had to wink at: they
wouldn't lay aside their armor, and they would "knock down" fare
--I mean rob the company.

There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't in some useful
employment.  They were going from end to end of the country in all
manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering,
and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective
spreaders of civilization we had.  They went clothed in steel and
equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't
persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan,
or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal,
or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for,
they removed him and passed on.

I was very happy.  Things were working steadily toward a secretly
longed-for point.  You see, I had two schemes in my head which
were the vastest of all my projects.  The one was to overthrow the
Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins
--not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and
the other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commanding
that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced,
and given to men and women alike--at any rate to all men, wise
or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found
to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one.  Arthur was
good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age--that is
to say, forty--and I believed that in that time I could easily
have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager
for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history
of the world--a rounded and complete governmental revolution
without bloodshed.  The result to be a republic.  Well, I may
as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it:
I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first president
myself.  Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found
that out.

Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified
way.  His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with
a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective
chief magistrate.  He believed that no nation that had ever known
the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it
and not fade away and die of melancholy.  I urged that kings were
dangerous.  He said, then have cats.  He was sure that a royal
family of cats would answer every purpose.  They would be as useful
as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would
have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition
to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably
vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive;
finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other
royal house, and "Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace
of God King," would sound as well as it would when applied to
the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on.  "And as a rule," said
he, in his neat modern English, "the character of these cats would
be considerably above the character of the average king, and this
would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason
that a nation always models its morals after its monarch's.  The
worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and
harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties,
and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that
they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted
no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of
a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and
would certainly get it.  The eyes of the whole harried world would
soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers
would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill
the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should
become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within
forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should
furnish the cats.  The reign of universal peace would begin then,
to end no more forever....  Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow--fzt!--wow!"

Hang him, I supposed he was in earnest, and was beginning to be
persuaded by him, until he exploded that cat-howl and startled me
almost out of my clothes.  But he never could be in earnest.  He
didn't know what it was.  He had pictured a distinct and perfectly
rational and feasible improvement upon constitutional monarchy,
but he was too feather-headed to know it, or care anything about
it, either.  I was going to give him a scolding, but Sandy came
flying in at that moment, wild with terror, and so choked with sobs
that for a minute she could not get her voice.  I ran and took her
in my arms, and lavished caresses upon her and said, beseechingly:

"Speak, darling, speak!  What is it?"

Her head fell limp upon my bosom, and she gasped, almost inaudibly:

"HELLO-CENTRAL!"

"Quick!" I shouted to Clarence; "telephone the king's homeopath
to come!"

In two minutes I was kneeling by the child's crib, and Sandy was
dispatching servants here, there, and everywhere, all over the
palace.  I took in the situation almost at a glance--membranous
croup!  I bent down and whispered:

"Wake up, sweetheart!  Hello-Central."

She opened her soft eyes languidly, and made out to say:

"Papa."

That was a comfort.  She was far from dead yet.  I sent for
preparations of sulphur, I rousted out the croup-kettle myself;
for I don't sit down and wait for doctors when Sandy or the child
is sick.  I knew how to nurse both of them, and had had experience.
This little chap had lived in my arms a good part of its small life,
and often I could soothe away its troubles and get it to laugh
through the tear-dews on its eye-lashes when even its mother couldn't.

Sir Launcelot, in his richest armor, came striding along the great
hall now on his way to the stock-board; he was president of the
stock-board, and occupied the Siege Perilous, which he had bought
of Sir Galahad; for the stock-board consisted of the Knights of
the Round Table, and they used the Round Table for business purposes
now.  Seats at it were worth--well, you would never believe the
figure, so it is no use to state it.  Sir Launcelot was a bear, and
he had put up a corner in one of the new lines, and was just getting
ready to squeeze the shorts to-day; but what of that?  He was
the same old Launcelot, and when he glanced in as he was passing
the door and found out that his pet was sick, that was enough
for him; bulls and bears might fight it out their own way for all
him, he would come right in here and stand by little Hello-Central
for all he was worth.  And that was what he did.  He shied his
helmet into the corner, and in half a minute he had a new wick
in the alcohol lamp and was firing up on the croup-kettle.  By this
time Sandy had built a blanket canopy over the crib, and everything
was ready.

Sir Launcelot got up steam, he and I loaded up the kettle with
unslaked lime and carbolic acid, with a touch of lactic acid added
thereto, then filled the thing up with water and inserted the
steam-spout under the canopy.  Everything was ship-shape now,
and we sat down on either side of the crib to stand our watch.
Sandy was so grateful and so comforted that she charged a couple
of church-wardens with willow-bark and sumach-tobacco for us,
and told us to smoke as much as we pleased, it couldn't get under
the canopy, and she was used to smoke, being the first lady in the
land who had ever seen a cloud blown.  Well, there couldn't be
a more contented or comfortable sight than Sir Launcelot in his
noble armor sitting in gracious serenity at the end of a yard
of snowy church-warden.  He was a beautiful man, a lovely man,
and was just intended to make a wife and children happy.  But, of
course Guenever--however, it's no use to cry over what's done and
can't be helped.

Well, he stood watch-and-watch with me, right straight through,
for three days and nights, till the child was out of danger; then
he took her up in his great arms and kissed her, with his plumes
falling about her golden head, then laid her softly in Sandy's
lap again and took his stately way down the vast hall, between
the ranks of admiring men-at-arms and menials, and so disappeared.
And no instinct warned me that I should never look upon him again
in this world!  Lord, what a world of heart-break it is.

The doctors said we must take the child away, if we would coax
her back to health and strength again.  And she must have sea-air.
So we took a man-of-war, and a suite of two hundred and sixty
persons, and went cruising about, and after a fortnight of this we
stepped ashore on the French coast, and the doctors thought it
would be a good idea to make something of a stay there.  The little
king of that region offered us his hospitalities, and we were glad
to accept.  If he had had as many conveniences as he lacked, we
should have been plenty comfortable enough; even as it was, we
made out very well, in his queer old castle, by the help of comforts
and luxuries from the ship.

At the end of a month I sent the vessel home for fresh supplies,
and for news.  We expected her back in three or four days.  She
would bring me, along with other news, the result of a certain
experiment which I had been starting.  It was a project of mine
to replace the tournament with something which might furnish an
escape for the extra steam of the chivalry, keep those bucks
entertained and out of mischief, and at the same time preserve
the best thing in them, which was their hardy spirit of emulation.
I had had a choice band of them in private training for some time,
and the date was now arriving for their first public effort.

This experiment was baseball.  In order to give the thing vogue
from the start, and place it out of the reach of criticism, I chose
my nines by rank, not capacity.  There wasn't a knight in either
team who wasn't a sceptered sovereign.  As for material of this
sort, there was a glut of it always around Arthur.  You couldn't
throw a brick in any direction and not cripple a king.  Of course,
I couldn't get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn't
do that when they bathed.  They consented to differentiate the
armor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but that
was the most they would do.  So, one of the teams wore chain-mail
ulsters, and the other wore plate-armor made of my new Bessemer
steel.  Their practice in the field was the most fantastic thing I
ever saw.  Being ball-proof, they never skipped out of the way,
but stood still and took the result; when a Bessemer was at the bat
and a ball hit him, it would bound a hundred and fifty yards
sometimes.  And when a man was running, and threw himself on his
stomach to slide to his base, it was like an iron-clad coming into
port.  At first I appointed men of no rank to act as umpires, but
I had to discontinue that.  These people were no easier to please
than other nines.  The umpire's first decision was usually his
last; they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted him
home on a shutter.  When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived
a game, umpiring got to be unpopular.  So I was obliged to appoint
somebody whose rank and lofty position under the government would
protect him.

Here are the names of the nines:

     BESSEMERS                   ULSTERS

   KING ARTHUR.                EMPEROR LUCIUS.
   KING LOT OF LOTHIAN.        KING LOGRIS.
   KING OF NORTHGALIS.         KING MARHALT OF IRELAND.
   KING MARSIL.                KING MORGANORE.
   KING OF LITTLE BRITAIN.     KING MARK OF CORNWALL.
   KING LABOR.                 KING NENTRES OF GARLOT.
   KING PELLAM OF LISTENGESE.  KING MELIODAS OF LIONES.
   KING BAGDEMAGUS.            KING OF THE LAKE.
   KING TOLLEME LA FEINTES.    THE SOWDAN OF SYRIA.

                  Umpire--CLARENCE.

The first public game would certainly draw fifty thousand people;
and for solid fun would be worth going around the world to see.
Everything would be favorable; it was balmy and beautiful spring
weather now, and Nature was all tailored out in her new clothes.



CHAPTER XLI

THE INTERDICT

However, my attention was suddenly snatched from such matters;
our child began to lose ground again, and we had to go to sitting
up with her, her case became so serious.  We couldn't bear to allow
anybody to help in this service, so we two stood watch-and-watch,
day in and day out.  Ah, Sandy, what a right heart she had, how
simple, and genuine, and good she was!  She was a flawless wife
and mother; and yet I had married her for no other particular
reasons, except that by the customs of chivalry she was my property
until some knight should win her from me in the field.  She had
hunted Britain over for me; had found me at the hanging-bout
outside of London, and had straightway resumed her old place at
my side in the placidest way and as of right.  I was a New Englander,
and in my opinion this sort of partnership would compromise her,
sooner or later.  She couldn't see how, but I cut argument short
and we had a wedding.

Now I didn't know I was drawing a prize, yet that was what I did
draw.  Within the twelvemonth I became her worshiper; and ours
was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was.  People
talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same
sex.  What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship
of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of
both are the same?  There is no place for comparison between
the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.

In my dreams, along at first, I still wandered thirteen centuries
away, and my unsatisfied spirit went calling and harking all up
and down the unreplying vacancies of a vanished world.  Many a
time Sandy heard that imploring cry come from my lips in my sleep.
With a grand magnanimity she saddled that cry of mine upon our
child, conceiving it to be the name of some lost darling of mine.
It touched me to tears, and it also nearly knocked me off my feet,
too, when she smiled up in my face for an earned reward, and played
her quaint and pretty surprise upon me:

"The name of one who was dear to thee is here preserved, here made
holy, and the music of it will abide alway in our ears.  Now
thou'lt kiss me, as knowing the name I have given the child."

But I didn't know it, all the same.  I hadn't an idea in the
world; but it would have been cruel to confess it and spoil her
pretty game; so I never let on, but said:

"Yes, I know, sweetheart--how dear and good it is of you, too!
But I want to hear these lips of yours, which are also mine, utter
it first--then its music will be perfect."

Pleased to the marrow, she murmured:

"HELLO-CENTRAL!"

I didn't laugh--I am always thankful for that--but the strain
ruptured every cartilage in me, and for weeks afterward I could
hear my bones clack when I walked.  She never found out her mistake.
The first time she heard that form of salute used at the telephone
she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given
order for it: that henceforth and forever the telephone must
always be invoked with that reverent formality, in perpetual honor
and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake.  This
was not true.  But it answered.

Well, during two weeks and a half we watched by the crib, and in
our deep solicitude we were unconscious of any world outside of
that sick-room.  Then our reward came: the center of the universe
turned the corner and began to mend.  Grateful?  It isn't the term.
There _isn't_ any term for it.  You know that yourself, if you've
watched your child through the Valley of the Shadow and seen it
come back to life and sweep night out of the earth with one
all-illuminating smile that you could cover with your hand.

Why, we were back in this world in one instant!  Then we looked
the same startled thought into each other's eyes at the same
moment; more than two weeks gone, and that ship not back yet!

In another minute I appeared in the presence of my train.  They
had been steeped in troubled bodings all this time--their faces
showed it.  I called an escort and we galloped five miles to a
hilltop overlooking the sea.  Where was my great commerce that
so lately had made these glistening expanses populous and beautiful
with its white-winged flocks?  Vanished, every one!  Not a sail,
from verge to verge, not a smoke-bank--just a dead and empty
solitude, in place of all that brisk and breezy life.

I went swiftly back, saying not a word to anybody.  I told Sandy
this ghastly news.  We could imagine no explanation that would
begin to explain.  Had there been an invasion? an earthquake?
a pestilence?  Had the nation been swept out of existence?  But
guessing was profitless.  I must go--at once.  I borrowed the king's
navy--a "ship" no bigger than a steam launch--and was soon ready.

The parting--ah, yes, that was hard.  As I was devouring the child
with last kisses, it brisked up and jabbered out its vocabulary!
--the first time in more than two weeks, and it made fools of us
for joy.  The darling mispronunciations of childhood!--dear me,
there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it
wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never
visit his bereaved ear again.  Well, how good it was to be able
to carry that gracious memory away with me!

I approached England the next morning, with the wide highway of
salt water all to myself.  There were ships in the harbor, at
Dover, but they were naked as to sails, and there was no sign
of life about them.  It was Sunday; yet at Canterbury the streets
were empty; strangest of all, there was not even a priest in sight,
and no stroke of a bell fell upon my ear.  The mournfulness of
death was everywhere.  I couldn't understand it.  At last, in
the further edge of that town I saw a small funeral procession
--just a family and a few friends following a coffin--no priest;
a funeral without bell, book, or candle; there was a church there
close at hand, but they passed it by weeping, and did not enter it;
I glanced up at the belfry, and there hung the bell, shrouded in
black, and its tongue tied back.  Now I knew!  Now I understood
the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England.  Invasion?
Invasion is a triviality to it.  It was the INTERDICT!

I asked no questions; I didn't need to ask any.  The Church had
struck; the thing for me to do was to get into a disguise, and
go warily.  One of my servants gave me a suit of clothes, and
when we were safe beyond the town I put them on, and from that time
I traveled alone; I could not risk the embarrassment of company.

A miserable journey.  A desolate silence everywhere.  Even in
London itself.  Traffic had ceased; men did not talk or laugh, or
go in groups, or even in couples; they moved aimlessly about, each
man by himself, with his head down, and woe and terror at his heart.
The Tower showed recent war-scars.  Verily, much had been happening.

Of course, I meant to take the train for Camelot.  Train!  Why,
the station was as vacant as a cavern.  I moved on.  The journey
to Camelot was a repetition of what I had already seen.  The Monday
and the Tuesday differed in no way from the Sunday.  I arrived
far in the night.  From being the best electric-lighted town in
the kingdom and the most like a recumbent sun of anything you ever
saw, it was become simply a blot--a blot upon darkness--that is
to say, it was darker and solider than the rest of the darkness,
and so you could see it a little better; it made me feel as if
maybe it was symbolical--a sort of sign that the Church was going to
_keep_ the upper hand now, and snuff out all my beautiful civilization
just like that.  I found no life stirring in the somber streets.
I groped my way with a heavy heart.  The vast castle loomed black
upon the hilltop, not a spark visible about it.  The drawbridge
was down, the great gate stood wide, I entered without challenge,
my own heels making the only sound I heard--and it was sepulchral
enough, in those huge vacant courts.



CHAPTER XLII

WAR!

I found Clarence alone in his quarters, drowned in melancholy;
and in place of the electric light, he had reinstituted the ancient
rag-lamp, and sat there in a grisly twilight with all curtains
drawn tight.  He sprang up and rushed for me eagerly, saying:

"Oh, it's worth a billion milrays to look upon a live person again!"

He knew me as easily as if I hadn't been disguised at all.  Which
frightened me; one may easily believe that.

"Quick, now, tell me the meaning of this fearful disaster," I said.
"How did it come about?"

"Well, if there hadn't been any Queen Guenever, it wouldn't have
come so early; but it would have come, anyway.  It would have
come on your own account by and by; by luck, it happened to come
on the queen's."

"_And_ Sir Launcelot's?"

"Just so."

"Give me the details."

"I reckon you will grant that during some years there has been
only one pair of eyes in these kingdoms that has not been looking
steadily askance at the queen and Sir Launcelot--"

"Yes, King Arthur's."

"--and only one heart that was without suspicion--"

"Yes--the king's; a heart that isn't capable of thinking evil
of a friend."

"Well, the king might have gone on, still happy and unsuspecting,
to the end of his days, but for one of your modern improvements
--the stock-board.  When you left, three miles of the London,
Canterbury and Dover were ready for the rails, and also ready and
ripe for manipulation in the stock-market.  It was wildcat, and
everybody knew it.  The stock was for sale at a give-away.  What
does Sir Launcelot do, but--"

"Yes, I know; he quietly picked up nearly all of it for a song;
then he bought about twice as much more, deliverable upon call;
and he was about to call when I left."

"Very well, he did call.  The boys couldn't deliver.  Oh, he had
them--and he just settled his grip and squeezed them.  They were
laughing in their sleeves over their smartness in selling stock
to him at 15 and 16 and along there that wasn't worth 10.  Well,
when they had laughed long enough on that side of their mouths,
they rested-up that side by shifting the laugh to the other side.
That was when they compromised with the Invincible at 283!"

"Good land!"

"He skinned them alive, and they deserved it--anyway, the whole
kingdom rejoiced.  Well, among the flayed were Sir Agravaine and
Sir Mordred, nephews to the king.  End of the first act.  Act
second, scene first, an apartment in Carlisle castle, where the
court had gone for a few days' hunting.  Persons present, the
whole tribe of the king's nephews.  Mordred and Agravaine propose
to call the guileless Arthur's attention to Guenever and Sir
Launcelot.  Sir Gawaine, Sir Gareth, and Sir Gaheris will have
nothing to do with it.  A dispute ensues, with loud talk; in the
midst of it enter the king.  Mordred and Agravaine spring their
devastating tale upon him.  _Tableau_.  A trap is laid for Launcelot,
by the king's command, and Sir Launcelot walks into it.  He made
it sufficiently uncomfortable for the ambushed witnesses--to wit,
Mordred, Agravaine, and twelve knights of lesser rank, for he
killed every one of them but Mordred; but of course that couldn't
straighten matters between Launcelot and the king, and didn't."

"Oh, dear, only one thing could result--I see that.  War, and
the knights of the realm divided into a king's party and a
Sir Launcelot's party."

"Yes--that was the way of it.  The king sent the queen to the
stake, proposing to purify her with fire.  Launcelot and his
knights rescued her, and in doing it slew certain good old friends
of yours and mine--in fact, some of the best we ever had; to wit,
Sir Belias le Orgulous, Sir Segwarides, Sir Griflet le Fils de Dieu,
Sir Brandiles, Sir Aglovale--"

"Oh, you tear out my heartstrings."

"--wait, I'm not done yet--Sir Tor, Sir Gauter, Sir Gillimer--"

"The very best man in my subordinate nine.  What a handy right-fielder
he was!"

"--Sir Reynold's three brothers, Sir Damus, Sir Priamus, Sir Kay
the Stranger--"

"My peerless short-stop!  I've seen him catch a daisy-cutter in
his teeth.  Come, I can't stand this!"

"--Sir Driant, Sir Lambegus, Sir Herminde, Sir Pertilope,
Sir Perimones, and--whom do you think?"

"Rush!  Go on."

"Sir Gaheris, and Sir Gareth--both!"

"Oh, incredible!  Their love for Launcelot was indestructible."

"Well, it was an accident.  They were simply onlookers; they were
unarmed, and were merely there to witness the queen's punishment.
Sir Launcelot smote down whoever came in the way of his blind fury,
and he killed these without noticing who they were.  Here is an
instantaneous photograph one of our boys got of the battle; it's
for sale on every news-stand.  There--the figures nearest the queen
are Sir Launcelot with his sword up, and Sir Gareth gasping his
latest breath.  You can catch the agony in the queen's face through
the curling smoke.  It's a rattling battle-picture."

"Indeed, it is.  We must take good care of it; its historical value
is incalculable.  Go on."

"Well, the rest of the tale is just war, pure and simple.  Launcelot
retreated to his town and castle of Joyous Gard, and gathered
there a great following of knights.  The king, with a great host,
went there, and there was desperate fighting during several days,
and, as a result, all the plain around was paved with corpses
and cast-iron.  Then the Church patched up a peace between Arthur
and Launcelot and the queen and everybody--everybody but Sir Gawaine.
He was bitter about the slaying of his brothers, Gareth and Gaheris,
and would not be appeased.  He notified Launcelot to get him
thence, and make swift preparation, and look to be soon attacked.
So Launcelot sailed to his Duchy of Guienne with his following, and
Gawaine soon followed with an army, and he beguiled Arthur to go
with him.  Arthur left the kingdom in Sir Mordred's hands until
you should return--"

"Ah--a king's customary wisdom!"

"Yes.  Sir Mordred set himself at once to work to make his kingship
permanent.  He was going to marry Guenever, as a first move; but
she fled and shut herself up in the Tower of London.  Mordred
attacked; the Bishop of Canterbury dropped down on him with the
Interdict.  The king returned; Mordred fought him at Dover, at
Canterbury, and again at Barham Down.  Then there was talk of peace
and a composition.  Terms, Mordred to have Cornwall and Kent during
Arthur's life, and the whole kingdom afterward."

"Well, upon my word!  My dream of a republic to _be_ a dream, and
so remain."

"Yes.  The two armies lay near Salisbury.  Gawaine--Gawaine's head
is at Dover Castle, he fell in the fight there--Gawaine appeared to
Arthur in a dream, at least his ghost did, and warned him to
refrain from conflict for a month, let the delay cost what it might.
But battle was precipitated by an accident.  Arthur had given
order that if a sword was raised during the consultation over
the proposed treaty with Mordred, sound the trumpet and fall on!
for he had no confidence in Mordred.  Mordred had given a similar
order to _his_ people.  Well, by and by an adder bit a knight's heel;
the knight forgot all about the order, and made a slash at the
adder with his sword.  Inside of half a minute those two prodigious
hosts came together with a crash!  They butchered away all day.
Then the king--however, we have started something fresh since
you left--our paper has."

"No?  What is that?"

"War correspondence!"

"Why, that's good."

"Yes, the paper was booming right along, for the Interdict made
no impression, got no grip, while the war lasted.  I had war
correspondents with both armies.  I will finish that battle by
reading you what one of the boys says:

   'Then the king looked about him, and then was he
   ware of all his host and of all his good knights
   were left no more on live but two knights, that
   was Sir Lucan de Butlere, and his brother Sir
   Bedivere: and they were full sore wounded.  Jesu
   mercy, said the king, where are all my noble
   knights becomen?  Alas that ever I should see this
   doleful day.  For now, said Arthur, I am come to
   mine end.  But would to God that I wist where were
   that traitor Sir Mordred, that hath caused all
   this mischief.  Then was King Arthur ware where Sir
   Mordred leaned upon his sword among a great heap
   of dead men.  Now give me my spear, said Arthur
   unto Sir Lucan, for yonder I have espied the
   traitor that all this woe hath wrought.  Sir, let
   him be, said Sir Lucan, for he is unhappy; and if
   ye pass this unhappy day, ye shall be right well
   revenged upon him.  Good lord, remember ye of your
   night's dream, and what the spirit of Sir Gawaine
   told you this night, yet God of his great goodness
   hath preserved you hitherto.  Therefore, for God's
   sake, my lord, leave off by this. For blessed be
   God ye have won the field: for here we be three
   on live, and with Sir Mordred is none on live.
   And if ye leave off now, this wicked day of
   destiny is past.  Tide me death, betide me life,
   saith the king, now I see him yonder alone, he
   shall never escape mine hands, for at a better
   avail shall I never have him.  God speed you well,
   said Sir Bedivere.  Then the king gat his spear
   in both his hands, and ran toward Sir Mordred
   crying, Traitor, now is thy death day come.  And
   when Sir Mordred heard Sir Arthur, he ran until
   him with his sword drawn in his hand.  And then
   King Arthur smote Sir Mordred under the shield,
   with a foin of his spear throughout the body more
   than a fathom.  And when Sir Mordred felt that he
   had his death's wound, he thrust himself, with
   the might that he had, up to the butt of King
   Arthur's spear.  And right so he smote his father
   Arthur with his sword holden in both his hands,
   on the side of the head, that the sword pierced
   the helmet and the brain-pan, and therewithal
   Sir Mordred fell stark dead to the earth.  And
   the noble Arthur fell in a swoon to the earth,
   and there he swooned oft-times--'"

"That is a good piece of war correspondence, Clarence; you are
a first-rate newspaper man.  Well--is the king all right?  Did
he get well?"

"Poor soul, no.  He is dead."

I was utterly stunned; it had not seemed to me that any wound
could be mortal to him.

"And the queen, Clarence?"

"She is a nun, in Almesbury."

"What changes! and in such a short while.  It is inconceivable.
What next, I wonder?"

"I can tell you what next."

"Well?"

"Stake our lives and stand by them!"

"What do you mean by that?"

"The Church is master now.  The Interdict included you with Mordred;
it is not to be removed while you remain alive.  The clans are
gathering.  The Church has gathered all the knights that are left
alive, and as soon as you are discovered we shall have business
on our hands."

"Stuff!  With our deadly scientific war-material; with our hosts
of trained--"

"Save your breath--we haven't sixty faithful left!"

"What are you saying?  Our schools, our colleges, our vast
workshops, our--"

"When those knights come, those establishments will empty themselves
and go over to the enemy.  Did you think you had educated the
superstition out of those people?"

"I certainly did think it."

"Well, then, you may unthink it.  They stood every strain easily
--until the Interdict.  Since then, they merely put on a bold
outside--at heart they are quaking.  Make up your mind to it
--when the armies come, the mask will fall."

"It's hard news.  We are lost.  They will turn our own science
against us."

"No they won't."

"Why?"

"Because I and a handful of the faithful have blocked that game.
I'll tell you what I've done, and what moved me to it.  Smart as
you are, the Church was smarter.  It was the Church that sent
you cruising--through her servants, the doctors."

"Clarence!"

"It is the truth.  I know it.  Every officer of your ship was
the Church's picked servant, and so was every man of the crew."

"Oh, come!"

"It is just as I tell you.  I did not find out these things at once,
but I found them out finally.  Did you send me verbal information,
by the commander of the ship, to the effect that upon his return
to you, with supplies, you were going to leave Cadiz--"

"Cadiz!  I haven't been at Cadiz at all!"

"--going to leave Cadiz and cruise in distant seas indefinitely,
for the health of your family?  Did you send me that word?"

"Of course not.  I would have written, wouldn't I?"

"Naturally.  I was troubled and suspicious.  When the commander
sailed again I managed to ship a spy with him.  I have never
heard of vessel or spy since.  I gave myself two weeks to hear
from you in.  Then I resolved to send a ship to Cadiz.  There was
a reason why I didn't."

"What was that?"

"Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared!  Also, as
suddenly and as mysteriously, the railway and telegraph and
telephone service ceased, the men all deserted, poles were cut
down, the Church laid a ban upon the electric light!  I had to be
up and doing--and straight off.  Your life was safe--nobody in
these kingdoms but Merlin would venture to touch such a magician
as you without ten thousand men at his back--I had nothing to
think of but how to put preparations in the best trim against your
coming.  I felt safe myself--nobody would be anxious to touch
a pet of yours.  So this is what I did.  From our various works
I selected all the men--boys I mean--whose faithfulness under
whatsoever pressure I could swear to, and I called them together
secretly and gave them their instructions.  There are fifty-two of
them; none younger than fourteen, and none above seventeen years old."

"Why did you select boys?"

"Because all the others were born in an atmosphere of superstition
and reared in it.  It is in their blood and bones.  We imagined
we had educated it out of them; they thought so, too; the Interdict
woke them up like a thunderclap!  It revealed them to themselves,
and it revealed them to me, too.  With boys it was different.  Such
as have been under our training from seven to ten years have had
no acquaintance with the Church's terrors, and it was among these
that I found my fifty-two.  As a next move, I paid a private visit
to that old cave of Merlin's--not the small one--the big one--"

"Yes, the one where we secretly established our first great electric
plant when I was projecting a miracle."

"Just so.  And as that miracle hadn't become necessary then,
I thought it might be a good idea to utilize the plant now.  I've
provisioned the cave for a siege--"

"A good idea, a first-rate idea."

"I think so.  I placed four of my boys there as a guard--inside,
and out of sight.  Nobody was to be hurt--while outside; but any
attempt to enter--well, we said just let anybody try it!  Then
I went out into the hills and uncovered and cut the secret wires
which connected your bedroom with the wires that go to the dynamite
deposits under all our vast factories, mills, workshops, magazines,
etc., and about midnight I and my boys turned out and connected
that wire with the cave, and nobody but you and I suspects where
the other end of it goes to.  We laid it under ground, of course, and
it was all finished in a couple of hours or so.  We sha'n't have
to leave our fortress now when we want to blow up our civilization."

"It was the right move--and the natural one; military necessity,
in the changed condition of things.  Well, what changes _have_ come!
We expected to be besieged in the palace some time or other, but
--however, go on."

"Next, we built a wire fence."

"Wire fence?"

"Yes.  You dropped the hint of it yourself, two or three years ago."

"Oh, I remember--the time the Church tried her strength against
us the first time, and presently thought it wise to wait for a
hopefuler season.  Well, how have you arranged the fence?"

"I start twelve immensely strong wires--naked, not insulated
--from a big dynamo in the cave--dynamo with no brushes except
a positive and a negative one--"

"Yes, that's right."

"The wires go out from the cave and fence in a circle of level
ground a hundred yards in diameter; they make twelve independent
fences, ten feet apart--that is to say, twelve circles within
circles--and their ends come into the cave again."

"Right; go on."

"The fences are fastened to heavy oaken posts only three feet apart,
and these posts are sunk five feet in the ground."

"That is good and strong."

"Yes.  The wires have no ground-connection outside of the cave.
They go out from the positive brush of the dynamo; there is a
ground-connection through the negative brush; the other ends of
the wire return to the cave, and each is grounded independently."

"No, no, that won't do!"

"Why?"

"It's too expensive--uses up force for nothing.  You don't want
any ground-connection except the one through the negative brush.
The other end of every wire must be brought back into the cave
and fastened independently, and _without_ any ground-connection.
Now, then, observe the economy of it.  A cavalry charge hurls
itself against the fence; you are using no power, you are spending
no money, for there is only one ground-connection till those horses
come against the wire; the moment they touch it they form a
connection with the negative brush _through the ground_, and drop
dead.  Don't you see?--you are using no energy until it is needed;
your lightning is there, and ready, like the load in a gun; but
it isn't costing you a cent till you touch it off.  Oh, yes, the
single ground-connection--"

"Of course!  I don't know how I overlooked that.  It's not only
cheaper, but it's more effectual than the other way, for if wires
break or get tangled, no harm is done."

"No, especially if we have a tell-tale in the cave and disconnect
the broken wire.  Well, go on.  The gatlings?"

"Yes--that's arranged.  In the center of the inner circle, on a
spacious platform six feet high, I've grouped a battery of thirteen
gatling guns, and provided plenty of ammunition."

"That's it.  They command every approach, and when the Church's
knights arrive, there's going to be music.  The brow of the
precipice over the cave--"

"I've got a wire fence there, and a gatling.  They won't drop any
rocks down on us."

"Well, and the glass-cylinder dynamite torpedoes?"

"That's attended to.  It's the prettiest garden that was ever
planted.  It's a belt forty feet wide, and goes around the outer
fence--distance between it and the fence one hundred yards--kind of
neutral ground that space is.  There isn't a single square yard
of that whole belt but is equipped with a torpedo.  We laid them
on the surface of the ground, and sprinkled a layer of sand over
them.  It's an innocent looking garden, but you let a man start
in to hoe it once, and you'll see."

"You tested the torpedoes?"

"Well, I was going to, but--"

"But what?  Why, it's an immense oversight not to apply a--"

"Test?  Yes, I know; but they're all right; I laid a few in the
public road beyond our lines and they've been tested."

"Oh, that alters the case.  Who did it?"

"A Church committee."

"How kind!"

"Yes.  They came to command us to make submission.  You see they
didn't really come to test the torpedoes; that was merely an incident."

"Did the committee make a report?"

"Yes, they made one.  You could have heard it a mile."

"Unanimous?"

"That was the nature of it.  After that I put up some signs, for the
protection of future committees, and we have had no intruders since."

"Clarence, you've done a world of work, and done it perfectly."

"We had plenty of time for it; there wasn't any occasion for hurry."

We sat silent awhile, thinking.  Then my mind was made up, and
I said:

"Yes, everything is ready; everything is shipshape, no detail is
wanting.  I know what to do now."

"So do I; sit down and wait."

"No, _sir_! rise up and _strike_!"

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes, indeed!  The _de_fensive isn't in my line, and the _of_fensive
is.  That is, when I hold a fair hand--two-thirds as good a hand
as the enemy.  Oh, yes, we'll rise up and strike; that's our game."

"A hundred to one you are right.  When does the performance begin?"

"_Now!_  We'll proclaim the Republic."

"Well, that _will_ precipitate things, sure enough!"

"It will make them buzz, I tell you!  England will be a hornets'
nest before noon to-morrow, if the Church's hand hasn't lost its
cunning--and we know it hasn't.  Now you write and I'll dictate thus:

                      "PROCLAMATION

                           ---

   "BE IT KNOWN UNTO ALL.  Whereas the king having died
   and left no heir, it becomes my duty to continue the
   executive authority vested in me, until a government
   shall have been created and set in motion.  The
   monarchy has lapsed, it no longer exists.  By
   consequence, all political power has reverted to its
   original source, the people of the nation.  With the
   monarchy, its several adjuncts died also; wherefore
   there is no longer a nobility, no longer a privileged
   class, no longer an Established Church; all men are
   become exactly equal; they are upon one common
   level, and religion is free.  _A Republic is hereby
   proclaimed_, as being the natural estate of a nation
   when other authority has ceased.  It is the duty of
   the British people to meet together immediately,
   and by their votes elect representatives and deliver
   into their hands the government."

I signed it "The Boss," and dated it from Merlin's Cave.
Clarence said--

"Why, that tells where we are, and invites them to call right away."

"That is the idea.  We _strike_--by the Proclamation--then it's
their innings.  Now have the thing set up and printed and posted,
right off; that is, give the order; then, if you've got a couple
of bicycles handy at the foot of the hill, ho for Merlin's Cave!"

"I shall be ready in ten minutes.  What a cyclone there is going
to be to-morrow when this piece of paper gets to work!...  It's a
pleasant old palace, this is; I wonder if we shall ever again
--but never mind about that."



CHAPTER XLIII

THE BATTLE OF THE SAND BELT

In Merlin's Cave--Clarence and I and fifty-two fresh, bright,
well-educated, clean-minded young British boys.  At dawn I sent
an order to the factories and to all our great works to stop
operations and remove all life to a safe distance, as everything
was going to be blown up by secret mines, "_and no telling at what
moment--therefore, vacate at once_."  These people knew me, and
had confidence in my word.  They would clear out without waiting
to part their hair, and I could take my own time about dating the
explosion.  You couldn't hire one of them to go back during the
century, if the explosion was still impending.

We had a week of waiting.  It was not dull for me, because I was
writing all the time.  During the first three days, I finished
turning my old diary into this narrative form; it only required
a chapter or so to bring it down to date.  The rest of the week
I took up in writing letters to my wife.  It was always my habit
to write to Sandy every day, whenever we were separate, and now
I kept up the habit for love of it, and of her, though I couldn't
do anything with the letters, of course, after I had written them.
But it put in the time, you see, and was almost like talking;
it was almost as if I was saying, "Sandy, if you and Hello-Central
were here in the cave, instead of only your photographs, what
good times we could have!"  And then, you know, I could imagine
the baby goo-gooing something out in reply, with its fists in its
mouth and itself stretched across its mother's lap on its back,
and she a-laughing and admiring and worshipping, and now and then
tickling under the baby's chin to set it cackling, and then maybe
throwing in a word of answer to me herself--and so on and so on
--well, don't you know, I could sit there in the cave with my pen,
and keep it up, that way, by the hour with them.  Why, it was
almost like having us all together again.

I had spies out every night, of course, to get news.  Every report
made things look more and more impressive.  The hosts were gathering,
gathering; down all the roads and paths of England the knights were
riding, and priests rode with them, to hearten these original
Crusaders, this being the Church's war.  All the nobilities, big
and little, were on their way, and all the gentry.  This was all
as was expected.  We should thin out this sort of folk to such
a degree that the people would have nothing to do but just step
to the front with their republic and--

Ah, what a donkey I was!  Toward the end of the week I began to get
this large and disenchanting fact through my head: that the mass
of the nation had swung their caps and shouted for the republic for
about one day, and there an end!  The Church, the nobles, and
the gentry then turned one grand, all-disapproving frown upon them
and shriveled them into sheep!  From that moment the sheep had
begun to gather to the fold--that is to say, the camps--and offer
their valueless lives and their valuable wool to the "righteous
cause."  Why, even the very men who had lately been slaves were
in the "righteous cause," and glorifying it, praying for it,
sentimentally slabbering over it, just like all the other commoners.
Imagine such human muck as this; conceive of this folly!

Yes, it was now "Death to the Republic!" everywhere--not a dissenting
voice.  All England was marching against us!  Truly, this was more
than I had bargained for.

I watched my fifty-two boys narrowly; watched their faces, their
walk, their unconscious attitudes: for all these are a language
--a language given us purposely that it may betray us in times of
emergency, when we have secrets which we want to keep.  I knew
that that thought would keep saying itself over and over again
in their minds and hearts, _All England is marching against us!_
and ever more strenuously imploring attention with each repetition,
ever more sharply realizing itself to their imaginations, until
even in their sleep they would find no rest from it, but hear
the vague and flitting creatures of the dreams say, _All England_
--ALL ENGLAND!--_is marching against you_!  I knew all this would
happen; I knew that ultimately the pressure would become so great
that it would compel utterance; therefore, I must be ready with an
answer at that time--an answer well chosen and tranquilizing.

I was right.  The time came.  They HAD to speak.  Poor lads, it
was pitiful to see, they were so pale, so worn, so troubled.  At
first their spokesman could hardly find voice or words; but he
presently got both.  This is what he said--and he put it in the
neat modern English taught him in my schools:

"We have tried to forget what we are--English boys!  We have tried
to put reason before sentiment, duty before love; our minds
approve, but our hearts reproach us.  While apparently it was
only the nobility, only the gentry, only the twenty-five or thirty
thousand knights left alive out of the late wars, we were of one
mind, and undisturbed by any troubling doubt; each and every one
of these fifty-two lads who stand here before you, said, 'They
have chosen--it is their affair.'  But think!--the matter is
altered--_All England is marching against us_!  Oh, sir, consider!
--reflect!--these people are our people, they are bone of our bone,
flesh of our flesh, we love them--do not ask us to destroy our nation!"

Well, it shows the value of looking ahead, and being ready for
a thing when it happens.  If I hadn't foreseen this thing and been
fixed, that boy would have had me!--I couldn't have said a word.
But I was fixed.  I said:

"My boys, your hearts are in the right place, you have thought the
worthy thought, you have done the worthy thing.  You are English
boys, you will remain English boys, and you will keep that name
unsmirched.  Give yourselves no further concern, let your minds be
at peace.  Consider this: while all England is marching against
us, who is in the van?  Who, by the commonest rules of war, will
march in the front?  Answer me."

"The mounted host of mailed knights."

"True.  They are thirty thousand strong.  Acres deep they will march.
Now, observe: none but _they_ will ever strike the sand-belt!  Then
there will be an episode!  Immediately after, the civilian multitude
in the rear will retire, to meet business engagements elsewhere.
None but nobles and gentry are knights, and _none but these_ will
remain to dance to our music after that episode.  It is absolutely
true that we shall have to fight nobody but these thirty thousand
knights.  Now speak, and it shall be as you decide.  Shall we
avoid the battle, retire from the field?"

"NO!!!"

The shout was unanimous and hearty.

"Are you--are you--well, afraid of these thirty thousand knights?"

That joke brought out a good laugh, the boys' troubles vanished
away, and they went gaily to their posts.  Ah, they were a darling
fifty-two!  As pretty as girls, too.

I was ready for the enemy now.  Let the approaching big day come
along--it would find us on deck.

The big day arrived on time.  At dawn the sentry on watch in the
corral came into the cave and reported a moving black mass under
the horizon, and a faint sound which he thought to be military
music.  Breakfast was just ready; we sat down and ate it.

This over, I made the boys a little speech, and then sent out
a detail to man the battery, with Clarence in command of it.

The sun rose presently and sent its unobstructed splendors over
the land, and we saw a prodigious host moving slowly toward us,
with the steady drift and aligned front of a wave of the sea.
Nearer and nearer it came, and more and more sublimely imposing
became its aspect; yes, all England was there, apparently.  Soon
we could see the innumerable banners fluttering, and then the sun
struck the sea of armor and set it all aflash.  Yes, it was a fine
sight; I hadn't ever seen anything to beat it.

At last we could make out details.  All the front ranks, no telling
how many acres deep, were horsemen--plumed knights in armor.
Suddenly we heard the blare of trumpets; the slow walk burst into
a gallop, and then--well, it was wonderful to see!  Down swept
that vast horse-shoe wave--it approached the sand-belt--my breath
stood still; nearer, nearer--the strip of green turf beyond the
yellow belt grew narrow--narrower still--became a mere ribbon in
front of the horses--then disappeared under their hoofs.  Great
Scott!  Why, the whole front of that host shot into the sky with
a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments;
and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was
left of the multitude from our sight.

Time for the second step in the plan of campaign!  I touched
a button, and shook the bones of England loose from her spine!

In that explosion all our noble civilization-factories went up in
the air and disappeared from the earth.  It was a pity, but it
was necessary.  We could not afford to let the enemy turn our own
weapons against us.

Now ensued one of the dullest quarter-hours I had ever endured.
We waited in a silent solitude enclosed by our circles of wire,
and by a circle of heavy smoke outside of these.  We couldn't
see over the wall of smoke, and we couldn't see through it.  But
at last it began to shred away lazily, and by the end of another
quarter-hour the land was clear and our curiosity was enabled
to satisfy itself.  No living creature was in sight!  We now
perceived that additions had been made to our defenses.  The
dynamite had dug a ditch more than a hundred feet wide, all around
us, and cast up an embankment some twenty-five feet high on both
borders of it.  As to destruction of life, it was amazing.  Moreover,
it was beyond estimate.  Of course, we could not _count_ the dead,
because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous
protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons.

No life was in sight, but necessarily there must have been some
wounded in the rear ranks, who were carried off the field under
cover of the wall of smoke; there would be sickness among the
others--there always is, after an episode like that.  But there
would be no reinforcements; this was the last stand of the chivalry
of England; it was all that was left of the order, after the recent
annihilating wars.  So I felt quite safe in believing that the
utmost force that could for the future be brought against us
would be but small; that is, of knights.  I therefore issued a
congratulatory proclamation to my army in these words:

   SOLDIERS, CHAMPIONS OF HUMAN LIBERTY AND EQUALITY:
   Your General congratulates you!  In the pride of his
   strength and the vanity of his renown, an arrogant
   enemy came against you.  You were ready.  The conflict
   was brief; on your side, glorious.  This mighty
   victory, having been achieved utterly without loss,
   stands without example in history.  So long as the
   planets shall continue to move in their orbits, the
   BATTLE OF THE SAND-BELT will not perish out of the
   memories of men.

                                THE BOSS.

I read it well, and the applause I got was very gratifying to me.
I then wound up with these remarks:

"The war with the English nation, as a nation, is at an end.
The nation has retired from the field and the war.  Before it can
be persuaded to return, war will have ceased.  This campaign is
the only one that is going to be fought.  It will be brief
--the briefest in history.  Also the most destructive to life,
considered from the standpoint of proportion of casualties to
numbers engaged.  We are done with the nation; henceforth we deal
only with the knights.  English knights can be killed, but they
cannot be conquered.  We know what is before us.  While one of
these men remains alive, our task is not finished, the war is not
ended.  We will kill them all."  [Loud and long continued applause.]

I picketed the great embankments thrown up around our lines by
the dynamite explosion--merely a lookout of a couple of boys
to announce the enemy when he should appear again.

Next, I sent an engineer and forty men to a point just beyond
our lines on the south, to turn a mountain brook that was there,
and bring it within our lines and under our command, arranging
it in such a way that I could make instant use of it in an emergency.
The forty men were divided into two shifts of twenty each, and
were to relieve each other every two hours.  In ten hours the
work was accomplished.

It was nightfall now, and I withdrew my pickets.  The one who
had had the northern outlook reported a camp in sight, but visible
with the glass only.  He also reported that a few knights had been
feeling their way toward us, and had driven some cattle across our
lines, but that the knights themselves had not come very near.
That was what I had been expecting.  They were feeling us, you
see; they wanted to know if we were going to play that red terror
on them again.  They would grow bolder in the night, perhaps.
I believed I knew what project they would attempt, because it was
plainly the thing I would attempt myself if I were in their places
and as ignorant as they were.  I mentioned it to Clarence.

"I think you are right," said he; "it is the obvious thing for
them to try."

"Well, then," I said, "if they do it they are doomed."

"Certainly."

"They won't have the slightest show in the world."

"Of course they won't."

"It's dreadful, Clarence.  It seems an awful pity."

The thing disturbed me so that I couldn't get any peace of mind
for thinking of it and worrying over it.  So, at last, to quiet
my conscience, I framed this message to the knights:

   TO THE HONORABLE THE COMMANDER OF THE INSURGENT
   CHIVALRY OF ENGLAND: YOU fight in vain.  We know
   your strength--if one may call it by that name.
   We know that at the utmost you cannot bring
   against us above five and twenty thousand knights.
   Therefore, you have no chance--none whatever.
   Reflect: we are well equipped, well fortified, we
   number 54.  Fifty-four what?  Men?  No, MINDS--the
   capablest in the world; a force against which
   mere animal might may no more hope to prevail than
   may the idle waves of the sea hope to prevail
   against the granite barriers of England.  Be advised.
   We offer you your lives; for the sake of your
   families, do not reject the gift.  We offer you
   this chance, and it is the last: throw down your
   arms; surrender unconditionally to the Republic,
   and all will be forgiven.

                          (Signed) THE BOSS.

I read it to Clarence, and said I proposed to send it by a flag
of truce.  He laughed the sarcastic laugh he was born with, and said:

"Somehow it seems impossible for you to ever fully realize what
these nobilities are.  Now let us save a little time and trouble.
Consider me the commander of the knights yonder.  Now, then,
you are the flag of truce; approach and deliver me your message,
and I will give you your answer."

I humored the idea.  I came forward under an imaginary guard of
the enemy's soldiers, produced my paper, and read it through.
For answer, Clarence struck the paper out of my hand, pursed up
a scornful lip and said with lofty disdain:

"Dismember me this animal, and return him in a basket to the
base-born knave who sent him; other answer have I none!"

How empty is theory in presence of fact!  And this was just fact,
and nothing else.  It was the thing that would have happened,
there was no getting around that.  I tore up the paper and granted
my mistimed sentimentalities a permanent rest.

Then, to business.  I tested the electric signals from the gatling
platform to the cave, and made sure that they were all right;
I tested and retested those which commanded the fences--these
were signals whereby I could break and renew the electric current
in each fence independently of the others at will.  I placed the
brook-connection under the guard and authority of three of my
best boys, who would alternate in two-hour watches all night and
promptly obey my signal, if I should have occasion to give it
--three revolver-shots in quick succession.  Sentry-duty was discarded
for the night, and the corral left empty of life; I ordered that
quiet be maintained in the cave, and the electric lights turned
down to a glimmer.

As soon as it was good and dark, I shut off the current from all
the fences, and then groped my way out to the embankment bordering
our side of the great dynamite ditch.  I crept to the top of it
and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch.  But it was
too dark to see anything.  As for sounds, there were none.  The
stillness was deathlike.  True, there were the usual night-sounds
of the country--the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects,
the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine
--but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified
it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.

I presently gave up looking, the night shut down so black, but
I kept my ears strained to catch the least suspicious sound, for
I judged I had only to wait, and I shouldn't be disappointed.
However, I had to wait a long time.  At last I caught what you
may call in distinct glimpses of sound dulled metallic sound.
I pricked up my ears, then, and held my breath, for this was the
sort of thing I had been waiting for.  This sound thickened, and
approached--from toward the north.  Presently, I heard it at my
own level--the ridge-top of the opposite embankment, a hundred
feet or more away.  Then I seemed to see a row of black dots appear
along that ridge--human heads?  I couldn't tell; it mightn't be
anything at all; you can't depend on your eyes when your imagination
is out of focus.  However, the question was soon settled.  I heard
that metallic noise descending into the great ditch.  It augmented
fast, it spread all along, and it unmistakably furnished me this
fact: an armed host was taking up its quarters in the ditch.  Yes,
these people were arranging a little surprise party for us.  We
could expect entertainment about dawn, possibly earlier.

I groped my way back to the corral now; I had seen enough.  I went
to the platform and signaled to turn the current on to the two
inner fences.  Then I went into the cave, and found everything
satisfactory there--nobody awake but the working-watch.  I woke
Clarence and told him the great ditch was filling up with men,
and that I believed all the knights were coming for us in a body.
It was my notion that as soon as dawn approached we could expect
the ditch's ambuscaded thousands to swarm up over the embankment
and make an assault, and be followed immediately by the rest
of their army.

Clarence said:

"They will be wanting to send a scout or two in the dark to make
preliminary observations.  Why not take the lightning off the
outer fences, and give them a chance?"

"I've already done it, Clarence.  Did you ever know me to be
inhospitable?"

"No, you are a good heart.  I want to go and--"

"Be a reception committee?  I will go, too."

We crossed the corral and lay down together between the two inside
fences.  Even the dim light of the cave had disordered our eyesight
somewhat, but the focus straightway began to regulate itself and
soon it was adjusted for present circumstances.  We had had to feel
our way before, but we could make out to see the fence posts now.
We started a whispered conversation, but suddenly Clarence broke
off and said:

"What is that?"

"What is what?"

"That thing yonder."

"What thing--where?"

"There beyond you a little piece--dark something--a dull shape
of some kind--against the second fence."

I gazed and he gazed.  I said:

"Could it be a man, Clarence?"

"No, I think not.  If you notice, it looks a lit--why, it _is_
a man!--leaning on the fence."

"I certainly believe it is; let us go and see."

We crept along on our hands and knees until we were pretty close,
and then looked up.  Yes, it was a man--a dim great figure in armor,
standing erect, with both hands on the upper wire--and, of course,
there was a smell of burning flesh.  Poor fellow, dead as a
door-nail, and never knew what hurt him.  He stood there like a
statue--no motion about him, except that his plumes swished about
a little in the night wind.  We rose up and looked in through
the bars of his visor, but couldn't make out whether we knew him
or not--features too dim and shadowed.

We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down to the ground
where we were.  We made out another knight vaguely; he was coming
very stealthily, and feeling his way.  He was near enough now for
us to see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend and
step under it and over the lower one.  Now he arrived at the
first knight--and started slightly when he discovered him.  He
stood a moment--no doubt wondering why the other one didn't move
on; then he said, in a low voice, "Why dreamest thou here, good
Sir Mar--" then he laid his hand on the corpse's shoulder--and just
uttered a little soft moan and sunk down dead.  Killed by a dead
man, you see--killed by a dead friend, in fact.  There was something
awful about it.

These early birds came scattering along after each other, about
one every five minutes in our vicinity, during half an hour.
They brought no armor of offense but their swords; as a rule,
they carried the sword ready in the hand, and put it forward and
found the wires with it.  We would now and then see a blue spark
when the knight that caused it was so far away as to be invisible
to us; but we knew what had happened, all the same; poor fellow,
he had touched a charged wire with his sword and been electrocuted.
We had brief intervals of grim stillness, interrupted with piteous
regularity by the clash made by the falling of an iron-clad; and
this sort of thing was going on, right along, and was very creepy
there in the dark and lonesomeness.

We concluded to make a tour between the inner fences.  We elected
to walk upright, for convenience's sake; we argued that if discerned,
we should be taken for friends rather than enemies, and in any case
we should be out of reach of swords, and these gentry did not seem
to have any spears along.  Well, it was a curious trip.  Everywhere
dead men were lying outside the second fence--not plainly visible,
but still visible; and we counted fifteen of those pathetic
statues--dead knights standing with their hands on the upper wire.

One thing seemed to be sufficiently demonstrated: our current
was so tremendous that it killed before the victim could cry out.
Pretty soon we detected a muffled and heavy sound, and next moment
we guessed what it was.  It was a surprise in force coming! I whispered
Clarence to go and wake the army, and notify it to wait in silence
in the cave for further orders.  He was soon back, and we stood
by the inner fence and watched the silent lightning do its awful
work upon that swarming host.  One could make out but little of
detail; but he could note that a black mass was piling itself up
beyond the second fence.  That swelling bulk was dead men!  Our
camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead--a bulwark,
a breastwork, of corpses, you may say.  One terrible thing about
this thing was the absence of human voices; there were no cheers,
no war cries; being intent upon a surprise, these men moved as
noiselessly as they could; and always when the front rank was near
enough to their goal to make it proper for them to begin to get
a shout ready, of course they struck the fatal line and went down
without testifying.

I sent a current through the third fence now; and almost immediately
through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up.
I believed the time was come now for my climax; I believed that
that whole army was in our trap.  Anyway, it was high time to find
out.  So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame
on the top of our precipice.

Land, what a sight!  We were enclosed in three walls of dead men!
All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living,
who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires.
The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say,
with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize
their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance.  You see, in
another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then
they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires
would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them
their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time
was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and
struck the whole host dead in their tracks!  _There_ was a groan
you could _hear_!  It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men.
It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.

A glance showed that the rest of the enemy--perhaps ten thousand
strong--were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing
forward to the assault.  Consequently we had them _all!_ and had
them past help.  Time for the last act of the tragedy.  I fired
the three appointed revolver shots--which meant:

"Turn on the water!"

There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain
brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a
hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.

"Stand to your guns, men!  Open fire!"

The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten
thousand.  They halted, they stood their ground a moment against
that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and
swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale.  A full fourth
part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment;
the three-fourths reached it and plunged over--to death by drowning.

Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance
was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were
masters of England.  Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune!  In a little while--say an hour
--happened a thing, by my own fault, which--but I have no heart
to write that.  Let the record end here.



CHAPTER XLIV

A POSTSCRIPT BY CLARENCE

I, Clarence, must write it for him.  He proposed that we two
go out and see if any help could be accorded the wounded.  I was
strenuous against the project.  I said that if there were many,
we could do but little for them; and it would not be wise for us to
trust ourselves among them, anyway.  But he could seldom be turned
from a purpose once formed; so we shut off the electric current
from the fences, took an escort along, climbed over the enclosing
ramparts of dead knights, and moved out upon the field.  The first
wounded mall who appealed for help was sitting with his back
against a dead comrade.  When The Boss bent over him and spoke
to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him.  That knight was
Sir Meliagraunce, as I found out by tearing off his helmet.  He
will not ask for help any more.

We carried The Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was
not very serious, the best care we could.  In this service we had
the help of Merlin, though we did not know it.  He was disguised
as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife.
In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he
had appeared a few days after The Boss was hurt and offered to cook
for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps
which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving.  The Boss
had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with
finishing up his record.

We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed.  We
were in a trap, you see--a trap of our own making.  If we stayed
where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our
defenses, we should no longer be invincible.  We had conquered;
in turn we were conquered.  The Boss recognized this; we all
recognized it.  If we could go to one of those new camps and
patch up some kind of terms with the enemy--yes, but The Boss
could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that
were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands.
Others were taken down, and still others.  To-morrow--

_To-morrow._  It is here.  And with it the end.  About midnight
I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about
The Boss's head and face, and wondered what it meant.  Everybody
but the dynamo-watch lay steeped in sleep; there was no sound.
The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing
toward the door.  I called out:

"Stop!  What have you been doing?"

She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:

"Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered!  These others are perishing
--you also.  Ye shall all die in this place--every one--except _him_.
He sleepeth now--and shall sleep thirteen centuries.  I am Merlin!"

Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled
about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one
of our wires.  His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still
laughing.  I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until
the corpse turns to dust.

The Boss has never stirred--sleeps like a stone.  If he does not
wake to-day we shall understand what kind of a sleep it is, and
his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses
of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it.  As for
the rest of us--well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever
escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and
loyally hide this Manuscript with The Boss, our dear good chief,
whose property it is, be he alive or dead.



THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT





FINAL P.S. BY M.T.

The dawn was come when I laid the Manuscript aside.  The rain
had almost ceased, the world was gray and sad, the exhausted storm
was sighing and sobbing itself to rest.  I went to the stranger's
room, and listened at his door, which was slightly ajar.  I could
hear his voice, and so I knocked.  There was no answer, but I still
heard the voice.  I peeped in.  The man lay on his back in bed,
talking brokenly but with spirit, and punctuating with his arms,
which he thrashed about, restlessly, as sick people do in delirium.
I slipped in softly and bent over him.  His mutterings and
ejaculations went on.  I spoke--merely a word, to call his attention.
His glassy eyes and his ashy face were alight in an instant with
pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome:

"Oh, Sandy, you are come at last--how I have longed for you!  Sit
by me--do not leave me--never leave me again, Sandy, never again.
Where is your hand?--give it me, dear, let me hold it--there
--now all is well, all is peace, and I am happy again--_we_ are happy
again, isn't it so, Sandy?  You are so dim, so vague, you are but
a mist, a cloud, but you are _here_, and that is blessedness sufficient;
and I have your hand; don't take it away--it is for only a little
while, I shall not require it long....  Was that the child?...
Hello-Central!... she doesn't answer.  Asleep, perhaps?  Bring her
when she wakes, and let me touch her hands, her face, her hair,
and tell her good-bye....  Sandy!  Yes, you are there.  I lost
myself a moment, and I thought you were gone....  Have I been
sick long?  It must be so; it seems months to me.  And such dreams!
such strange and awful dreams, Sandy!  Dreams that were as real
as reality--delirium, of course, but _so_ real!  Why, I thought
the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn't get
home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy
of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I and a handful of
my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England!
But even that was not the strangest.  I seemed to be a creature
out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even _that_ was
as real as the rest!  Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that
age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set
down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an
abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! between
me and my home and my friends! between me and all that is dear
to me, all that could make life worth the living!  It was awful
--awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy.  Ah, watch by me, Sandy
--stay by me every moment--_don't_ let me go out of my mind again;
death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with
the torture of those hideous dreams--I cannot endure _that_ again....
Sandy?..."

He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he
lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death.  Presently
his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign
I knew that his end was at hand with the first suggestion of the
death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed
to listen: then he said:

"A bugle?...  It is the king!  The drawbridge, there!  Man the
battlements!--turn out the--"

He was getting up his last "effect"; but he never finished it.
Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two
were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates
of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an
individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom
I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.

The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and
slaves in the West at the period of this story--that is to say, thirty or
forty years ago.

Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and
girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account,
for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what
they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked,
and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.

THE AUTHOR.

HARTFORD, 1876.




CHAPTER I

"TOM!"

No answer.

"TOM!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the
room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or
never looked _through_ them for so small a thing as a boy; they were
her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not
service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well.
She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but
still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--"

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching
under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the
punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

"I never did see the beat of that boy!"

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the
tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So
she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted:

"Y-o-u-u TOM!"

There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize
a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.

"There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in
there?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What _is_ that
truck?"

"I don't know, aunt."

"Well, I know. It's jam--that's what it is. Forty times I've said if you
didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch."

The switch hovered in the air--the peril was desperate--

"My! Look behind you, aunt!"

The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger.
The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and
disappeared over it.

His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle
laugh.

"Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played me tricks
enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old
fools is the biggest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks,
as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days,
and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how long
he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make
out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down again and
I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's
the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child,
as the Good Book says. I'm a laying up sin and suffering for us both,
I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own
dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him,
somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and
every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Well-a-well, man that is
born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture
says, and I reckon it's so. He'll play hookey this evening, * and [*
Southwestern for "afternoon"] I'll just be obleeged to make him work,
tomorrow, to punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work Saturdays,
when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he
hates anything else, and I've _got_ to do some of my duty by him, or
I'll be the ruination of the child."

Tom did play hookey, and he had a very good time. He got back home
barely in season to help Jim, the small colored boy, saw next-day's wood
and split the kindlings before supper--at least he was there in time
to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did three-fourths of the work.
Tom's younger brother (or rather half-brother) Sid was already through
with his part of the work (picking up chips), for he was a quiet boy,
and had no adventurous, trouble-some ways.

While Tom was eating his supper, and stealing sugar as opportunity
offered, Aunt Polly asked him questions that were full of guile, and
very deep--for she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments. Like
many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she
was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she
loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low
cunning. Said she:

"Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn't it?"

"Yes'm."

"Powerful warm, warn't it?"

"Yes'm."

"Didn't you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?"

A bit of a scare shot through Tom--a touch of uncomfortable suspicion. He
searched Aunt Polly's face, but it told him nothing. So he said:

"No'm--well, not very much."

The old lady reached out her hand and felt Tom's shirt, and said:

"But you ain't too warm now, though." And it flattered her to reflect
that she had discovered that the shirt was dry without anybody knowing
that that was what she had in her mind. But in spite of her, Tom knew
where the wind lay, now. So he forestalled what might be the next move:

"Some of us pumped on our heads--mine's damp yet. See?"

Aunt Polly was vexed to think she had overlooked that bit of
circumstantial evidence, and missed a trick. Then she had a new
inspiration:

"Tom, you didn't have to undo your shirt collar where I sewed it, to
pump on your head, did you? Unbutton your jacket!"

The trouble vanished out of Tom's face. He opened his jacket. His shirt
collar was securely sewed.

"Bother! Well, go 'long with you. I'd made sure you'd played hookey
and been a-swimming. But I forgive ye, Tom. I reckon you're a kind of a
singed cat, as the saying is--better'n you look. _This_ time."

She was half sorry her sagacity had miscarried, and half glad that Tom
had stumbled into obedient conduct for once.

But Sidney said:

"Well, now, if I didn't think you sewed his collar with white thread,
but it's black."

"Why, I did sew it with white! Tom!"

But Tom did not wait for the rest. As he went out at the door he said:

"Siddy, I'll lick you for that."

In a safe place Tom examined two large needles which were thrust into
the lapels of his jacket, and had thread bound about them--one needle
carried white thread and the other black. He said:

"She'd never noticed if it hadn't been for Sid. Confound it! sometimes
she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to
gee-miny she'd stick to one or t'other--I can't keep the run of 'em. But
I bet you I'll lam Sid for that. I'll learn him!"

He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well
though--and loathed him.

Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not
because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a
man's are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore
them down and drove them out of his mind for the time--just as men's
misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new
interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired
from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it un-disturbed. It
consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble,
produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short
intervals in the midst of the music--the reader probably remembers how to
do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him
the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of
harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer
feels who has discovered a new planet--no doubt, as far as strong, deep,
unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the
astronomer.

The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom
checked his whistle. A stranger was before him--a boy a shade larger
than himself. A new-comer of any age or either sex was an im-pressive
curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy
was well dressed, too--well dressed on a week-day. This was simply as
astounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his close-buttoned blue cloth
roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes
on--and it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a bright bit of
ribbon. He had a citified air about him that ate into Tom's vitals. The
more Tom stared at the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his nose
at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own outfit seemed to
him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other moved--but only
sidewise, in a circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the
time. Finally Tom said:

"I can lick you!"

"I'd like to see you try it."

"Well, I can do it."

"No you can't, either."

"Yes I can."

"No you can't."

"I can."

"You can't."

"Can!"

"Can't!"

An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said:

"What's your name?"

"'Tisn't any of your business, maybe."

"Well I 'low I'll _make_ it my business."

"Well why don't you?"

"If you say much, I will."

"Much--much--_much_. There now."

"Oh, you think you're mighty smart, _don't_ you? I could lick you with
one hand tied behind me, if I wanted to."

"Well why don't you _do_ it? You _say_ you can do it."

"Well I _will_, if you fool with me."

"Oh yes--I've seen whole families in the same fix."

"Smarty! You think you're _some_, now, _don't_ you? Oh, what a hat!"

"You can lump that hat if you don't like it. I dare you to knock it
off--and anybody that'll take a dare will suck eggs."

"You're a liar!"

"You're another."

"You're a fighting liar and dasn't take it up."

"Aw--take a walk!"

"Say--if you give me much more of your sass I'll take and bounce a rock
off'n your head."

"Oh, of _course_ you will."

"Well I _will_."

"Well why don't you _do_ it then? What do you keep _saying_ you will
for? Why don't you _do_ it? It's because you're afraid."

"I _ain't_ afraid."

"You are."

"I ain't."

"You are."

Another pause, and more eying and sidling around each other. Presently
they were shoulder to shoulder. Tom said:

"Get away from here!"

"Go away yourself!"

"I won't."

"I won't either."

So they stood, each with a foot placed at an angle as a brace, and both
shoving with might and main, and glowering at each other with hate. But
neither could get an advantage. After struggling till both were hot and
flushed, each relaxed his strain with watchful caution, and Tom said:

"You're a coward and a pup. I'll tell my big brother on you, and he can
thrash you with his little finger, and I'll make him do it, too."

"What do I care for your big brother? I've got a brother that's bigger
than he is--and what's more, he can throw him over that fence, too."
[Both brothers were imaginary.]

"That's a lie."

"_Your_ saying so don't make it so."

Tom drew a line in the dust with his big toe, and said:

"I dare you to step over that, and I'll lick you till you can't stand
up. Anybody that'll take a dare will steal sheep."

The new boy stepped over promptly, and said:

"Now you said you'd do it, now let's see you do it."

"Don't you crowd me now; you better look out."

"Well, you _said_ you'd do it--why don't you do it?"

"By jingo! for two cents I _will_ do it."

The new boy took two broad coppers out of his pocket and held them out
with derision. Tom struck them to the ground. In an instant both boys
were rolling and tumbling in the dirt, gripped together like cats; and
for the space of a minute they tugged and tore at each other's hair and
clothes, punched and scratched each other's nose, and covered themselves
with dust and glory. Presently the confusion took form, and through the
fog of battle Tom appeared, seated astride the new boy, and pounding him
with his fists. "Holler 'nuff!" said he.

The boy only struggled to free himself. He was crying--mainly from rage.

"Holler 'nuff!"--and the pounding went on.

At last the stranger got out a smothered "'Nuff!" and Tom let him up and
said:

"Now that'll learn you. Better look out who you're fooling with next
time."

The new boy went off brushing the dust from his clothes, sobbing,
snuffling, and occasionally looking back and shaking his head and
threatening what he would do to Tom the "next time he caught him out."
To which Tom responded with jeers, and started off in high feather, and
as soon as his back was turned the new boy snatched up a stone, threw it
and hit him between the shoulders and then turned tail and ran like
an antelope. Tom chased the traitor home, and thus found out where he
lived. He then held a position at the gate for some time, daring the
enemy to come outside, but the enemy only made faces at him through the
window and declined. At last the enemy's mother appeared, and called Tom
a bad, vicious, vulgar child, and ordered him away. So he went away; but
he said he "'lowed" to "lay" for that boy.

He got home pretty late that night, and when he climbed cautiously in
at the window, he uncovered an ambuscade, in the person of his aunt; and
when she saw the state his clothes were in her resolution to turn his
Saturday holiday into captivity at hard labor became adamantine in its
firmness.




CHAPTER II

SATURDAY morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and
fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if
the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in
every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom
and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond
the village and above it, was green with vegetation and it lay just far
enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a
long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and
a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board
fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a
burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost
plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant
whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed
fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged. Jim came skipping out at
the gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing water from
the town pump had always been hateful work in Tom's eyes, before, but
now it did not strike him so. He remembered that there was company at
the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls were always there
waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting,
skylarking. And he remembered that although the pump was only a hundred
and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with a bucket of water under an
hour--and even then somebody generally had to go after him. Tom said:

"Say, Jim, I'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash some."

Jim shook his head and said:

"Can't, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an' git dis water
an' not stop foolin' roun' wid anybody. She say she spec' Mars Tom gwine
to ax me to whitewash, an' so she tole me go 'long an' 'tend to my own
business--she 'lowed _she'd_ 'tend to de whitewashin'."

"Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That's the way she always talks.
Gimme the bucket--I won't be gone only a a minute. _She_ won't ever
know."

"Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me.
'Deed she would."

"_She_! She never licks anybody--whacks 'em over the head with her
thimble--and who cares for that, I'd like to know. She talks awful, but
talk don't hurt--anyways it don't if she don't cry. Jim, I'll give you a
marvel. I'll give you a white alley!"

Jim began to waver.

"White alley, Jim! And it's a bully taw."

"My! Dat's a mighty gay marvel, I tell you! But Mars Tom I's powerful
'fraid ole missis--"

"And besides, if you will I'll show you my sore toe."

Jim was only human--this attraction was too much for him. He put down
his pail, took the white alley, and bent over the toe with absorbing
interest while the bandage was being unwound. In another moment he
was flying down the street with his pail and a tingling rear, Tom was
whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field with
a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye.

But Tom's energy did not last. He began to think of the fun he had
planned for this day, and his sorrows multiplied. Soon the free boys
would come tripping along on all sorts of delicious expeditions, and
they would make a world of fun of him for having to work--the very
thought of it burnt him like fire. He got out his worldly wealth and
examined it--bits of toys, marbles, and trash; enough to buy an exchange
of _work_, maybe, but not half enough to buy so much as half an hour
of pure freedom. So he returned his straitened means to his pocket, and
gave up the idea of trying to buy the boys. At this dark and hopeless
moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great,
magnificent inspiration.

He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work. Ben Rogers hove in
sight presently--the very boy, of all boys, whose ridicule he had been
dreading. Ben's gait was the hop-skip-and-jump--proof enough that his
heart was light and his anticipations high. He was eating an apple, and
giving a long, melodious whoop, at intervals, followed by a deep-toned
ding-dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he was personating a steamboat. As
he drew near, he slackened speed, took the middle of the street, leaned
far over to starboard and rounded to ponderously and with laborious pomp
and circumstance--for he was personating the Big Missouri, and considered
himself to be drawing nine feet of water. He was boat and captain and
engine-bells combined, so he had to imagine himself standing on his own
hurricane-deck giving the orders and executing them:

"Stop her, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling!" The headway ran almost out, and he
drew up slowly toward the sidewalk.

"Ship up to back! Ting-a-ling-ling!" His arms straightened and stiffened
down his sides.

"Set her back on the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow! ch-chow-wow!
Chow!" His right hand, mean-time, describing stately circles--for it was
representing a forty-foot wheel.

"Let her go back on the labboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow-ch-chow-chow!"
The left hand began to describe circles.

"Stop the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Stop the labboard! Come ahead on
the stabboard! Stop her! Let your outside turn over slow! Ting-a-ling-ling!
Chow-ow-ow! Get out that head-line! _lively_ now! Come--out with
your spring-line--what're you about there! Take a turn round that stump
with the bight of it! Stand by that stage, now--let her go! Done with
the engines, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling! SH'T! S'H'T! SH'T!" (trying the
gauge-cocks).

Tom went on whitewashing--paid no attention to the steamboat. Ben stared
a moment and then said: "_Hi-Yi! You're_ up a stump, ain't you!"

No answer. Tom surveyed his last touch with the eye of an artist, then
he gave his brush another gentle sweep and surveyed the result, as
before. Ben ranged up alongside of him. Tom's mouth watered for the
apple, but he stuck to his work. Ben said:

"Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?"

Tom wheeled suddenly and said:

"Why, it's you, Ben! I warn't noticing."

"Say--I'm going in a-swimming, I am. Don't you wish you could? But of
course you'd druther _work_--wouldn't you? Course you would!"

Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said:

"What do you call work?"

"Why, ain't _that_ work?"

Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:

"Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know, is, it suits Tom
Sawyer."

"Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you _like_ it?"

The brush continued to move.

"Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get a
chance to whitewash a fence every day?"

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple.
Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth--stepped back to note the
effect--added a touch here and there--criticised the effect again--Ben
watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more
absorbed. Presently he said:

"Say, Tom, let _me_ whitewash a little."

Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered his mind:

"No--no--I reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly's awful
particular about this fence--right here on the street, you know--but if it
was the back fence I wouldn't mind and _she_ wouldn't. Yes, she's awful
particular about this fence; it's got to be done very careful; I reckon
there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it
the way it's got to be done."

"No--is that so? Oh come, now--lemme just try. Only just a little--I'd let
_you_, if you was me, Tom."

"Ben, I'd like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly--well, Jim wanted to do
it, but she wouldn't let him; Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn't let
Sid. Now don't you see how I'm fixed? If you was to tackle this fence
and anything was to happen to it--"

"Oh, shucks, I'll be just as careful. Now lemme try. Say--I'll give you
the core of my apple."

"Well, here--No, Ben, now don't. I'm afeard--"

"I'll give you _all_ of it!"

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his
heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the
sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by,
dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more
innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every
little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time
Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for
a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in
for a dead rat and a string to swing it with--and so on, and so on, hour
after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a
poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in
wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part
of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool
cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a
glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles,
six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a
dog-collar--but no dog--the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel,
and a dilapidated old window sash.

He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while--plenty of company--and
the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn't run out of
whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He
had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely,
that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary
to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and
wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have
comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is _obliged_ to do,
and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And
this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or
performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing
Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England
who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a
daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable
money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn
it into work and then they would resign.

The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken place
in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward headquarters to
report.




CHAPTER III

TOM presented himself before Aunt Polly, who was sitting by an
open window in a pleasant rearward apartment, which was bedroom,
breakfast-room, dining-room, and library, combined. The balmy summer
air, the restful quiet, the odor of the flowers, and the drowsing
murmur of the bees had had their effect, and she was nodding over her
knitting--for she had no company but the cat, and it was asleep in her
lap. Her spectacles were propped up on her gray head for safety. She had
thought that of course Tom had deserted long ago, and she wondered at
seeing him place himself in her power again in this intrepid way. He
said: "Mayn't I go and play now, aunt?"

"What, a'ready? How much have you done?"

"It's all done, aunt."

"Tom, don't lie to me--I can't bear it."

"I ain't, aunt; it _is_ all done."

Aunt Polly placed small trust in such evidence. She went out to see for
herself; and she would have been content to find twenty per cent. of
Tom's statement true. When she found the entire fence white-washed, and
not only whitewashed but elaborately coated and recoated, and even a
streak added to the ground, her astonishment was almost unspeakable. She
said:

"Well, I never! There's no getting round it, you can work when you're a
mind to, Tom." And then she diluted the compliment by adding, "But it's
powerful seldom you're a mind to, I'm bound to say. Well, go 'long and
play; but mind you get back some time in a week, or I'll tan you."

She was so overcome by the splendor of his achievement that she took
him into the closet and selected a choice apple and delivered it to him,
along with an improving lecture upon the added value and flavor a treat
took to itself when it came without sin through virtuous effort.
And while she closed with a happy Scriptural flourish, he "hooked" a
doughnut.

Then he skipped out, and saw Sid just starting up the outside stairway
that led to the back rooms on the second floor. Clods were handy and
the air was full of them in a twinkling. They raged around Sid like a
hail-storm; and before Aunt Polly could collect her surprised faculties
and sally to the rescue, six or seven clods had taken personal effect,
and Tom was over the fence and gone. There was a gate, but as a general
thing he was too crowded for time to make use of it. His soul was at
peace, now that he had settled with Sid for calling attention to his
black thread and getting him into trouble.

Tom skirted the block, and came round into a muddy alley that led by the
back of his aunt's cow-stable. He presently got safely beyond the reach
of capture and punishment, and hastened toward the public square of the
village, where two "military" companies of boys had met for conflict,
according to previous appointment. Tom was General of one of these
armies, Joe Harper (a bosom friend) General of the other. These two
great commanders did not condescend to fight in person--that being better
suited to the still smaller fry--but sat together on an eminence
and conducted the field operations by orders delivered through
aides-de-camp. Tom's army won a great victory, after a long and
hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged,
the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the
necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and
marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone.

As he was passing by the house where Jeff Thatcher lived, he saw a new
girl in the garden--a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow
hair plaited into two long-tails, white summer frock and embroidered
pan-talettes. The fresh-crowned hero fell without firing a shot. A
certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his heart and left not even a
memory of herself behind. He had thought he loved her to distraction;
he had regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was only a poor
little evanescent partiality. He had been months winning her; she had
confessed hardly a week ago; he had been the happiest and the proudest
boy in the world only seven short days, and here in one instant of time
she had gone out of his heart like a casual stranger whose visit is
done.

He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had
discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and
began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win
her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some time;
but by-and-by, while he was in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic
performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending
her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and leaned on it,
grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a
moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved a great
sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. But his face lit up,
right away, for she tossed a pansy over the fence a moment before she
disappeared.

The boy ran around and stopped within a foot or two of the flower, and
then shaded his eyes with his hand and began to look down street as
if he had discovered something of interest going on in that direction.
Presently he picked up a straw and began trying to balance it on his
nose, with his head tilted far back; and as he moved from side to side,
in his efforts, he edged nearer and nearer toward the pansy; finally his
bare foot rested upon it, his pliant toes closed upon it, and he hopped
away with the treasure and disappeared round the corner. But only for a
minute--only while he could button the flower inside his jacket, next
his heart--or next his stomach, possibly, for he was not much posted in
anatomy, and not hypercritical, anyway.

He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, "showing
off," as before; but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom
comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some
window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode
home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions.

All through supper his spirits were so high that his aunt wondered "what
had got into the child." He took a good scolding about clodding Sid, and
did not seem to mind it in the least. He tried to steal sugar under his
aunt's very nose, and got his knuckles rapped for it. He said:

"Aunt, you don't whack Sid when he takes it."

"Well, Sid don't torment a body the way you do. You'd be always into
that sugar if I warn't watching you."

Presently she stepped into the kitchen, and Sid, happy in his immunity,
reached for the sugar-bowl--a sort of glorying over Tom which was
wellnigh unbearable. But Sid's fingers slipped and the bowl dropped and
broke. Tom was in ecstasies. In such ecstasies that he even controlled
his tongue and was silent. He said to himself that he would not speak a
word, even when his aunt came in, but would sit perfectly still till she
asked who did the mischief; and then he would tell, and there would be
nothing so good in the world as to see that pet model "catch it." He was
so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold himself when the old
lady came back and stood above the wreck discharging lightnings of wrath
from over her spectacles. He said to himself, "Now it's coming!" And the
next instant he was sprawling on the floor! The potent palm was uplifted
to strike again when Tom cried out:

"Hold on, now, what 'er you belting _me_ for?--Sid broke it!"

Aunt Polly paused, perplexed, and Tom looked for healing pity. But when
she got her tongue again, she only said:

"Umf! Well, you didn't get a lick amiss, I reckon. You been into some
other audacious mischief when I wasn't around, like enough."

Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something
kind and loving; but she judged that this would be construed into a
confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that.
So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with a troubled heart.
Tom sulked in a corner and exalted his woes. He knew that in her heart
his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the
consciousness of it. He would hang out no signals, he would take notice
of none. He knew that a yearning glance fell upon him, now and then,
through a film of tears, but he refused recognition of it. He pictured
himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching
one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and
die with that word unsaid. Ah, how would she feel then? And he pictured
himself brought home from the river, dead, with his curls all wet, and
his sore heart at rest. How she would throw herself upon him, and how
her tears would fall like rain, and her lips pray God to give her back
her boy and she would never, never abuse him any more! But he would
lie there cold and white and make no sign--a poor little sufferer, whose
griefs were at an end. He so worked upon his feelings with the pathos of
these dreams, that he had to keep swallowing, he was so like to choke;
and his eyes swam in a blur of water, which overflowed when he winked,
and ran down and trickled from the end of his nose. And such a luxury to
him was this petting of his sorrows, that he could not bear to have any
worldly cheeriness or any grating delight intrude upon it; it was too
sacred for such contact; and so, presently, when his cousin Mary danced
in, all alive with the joy of seeing home again after an age-long visit
of one week to the country, he got up and moved in clouds and darkness
out at one door as she brought song and sunshine in at the other.

He wandered far from the accustomed haunts of boys, and sought desolate
places that were in harmony with his spirit. A log raft in the river
invited him, and he seated himself on its outer edge and contemplated
the dreary vastness of the stream, wishing, the while, that he could
only be drowned, all at once and unconsciously, without undergoing the
uncomfortable routine devised by nature. Then he thought of his flower.
He got it out, rumpled and wilted, and it mightily increased his dismal
felicity. He wondered if she would pity him if she knew? Would she
cry, and wish that she had a right to put her arms around his neck and
comfort him? Or would she turn coldly away like all the hollow world?
This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable suffering that he
worked it over and over again in his mind and set it up in new and
varied lights, till he wore it threadbare. At last he rose up sighing
and departed in the darkness.

About half-past nine or ten o'clock he came along the deserted street to
where the Adored Unknown lived; he paused a moment; no sound fell upon
his listening ear; a candle was casting a dull glow upon the curtain
of a second-story window. Was the sacred presence there? He climbed the
fence, threaded his stealthy way through the plants, till he stood under
that window; he looked up at it long, and with emotion; then he laid him
down on the ground under it, disposing himself upon his back, with his
hands clasped upon his breast and holding his poor wilted flower.
And thus he would die--out in the cold world, with no shelter over his
homeless head, no friendly hand to wipe the death-damps from his brow,
no loving face to bend pityingly over him when the great agony came. And
thus _she_ would see him when she looked out upon the glad morning, and
oh! would she drop one little tear upon his poor, lifeless form, would
she heave one little sigh to see a bright young life so rudely blighted,
so untimely cut down?

The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant voice profaned the holy
calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains!

The strangling hero sprang up with a relieving snort. There was a whiz
as of a missile in the air, mingled with the murmur of a curse, a sound
as of shivering glass followed, and a small, vague form went over the
fence and shot away in the gloom.

Not long after, as Tom, all undressed for bed, was surveying his
drenched garments by the light of a tallow dip, Sid woke up; but if he
had any dim idea of making any "references to allusions," he thought
better of it and held his peace, for there was danger in Tom's eye.

Tom turned in without the added vexation of prayers, and Sid made mental
note of the omission.




CHAPTER IV

THE sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful
village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family
worship: it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid
courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of
originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of
the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.

Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and went to work to "get
his verses." Sid had learned his lesson days before. Tom bent all his
energies to the memorizing of five verses, and he chose part of the
Sermon on the Mount, because he could find no verses that were shorter.
At the end of half an hour Tom had a vague general idea of his lesson,
but no more, for his mind was traversing the whole field of human
thought, and his hands were busy with distracting recreations. Mary took
his book to hear him recite, and he tried to find his way through the
fog:

"Blessed are the--a--a--"

"Poor"--

"Yes--poor; blessed are the poor--a--a--"

"In spirit--"

"In spirit; blessed are the poor in spirit, for they--they--"

"_Theirs_--"

"For _theirs_. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they--they--"

"Sh--"

"For they--a--"

"S, H, A--"

"For they S, H--Oh, I don't know what it is!"

"_Shall_!"

"Oh, _shall_! for they shall--for they shall--a--a--shall mourn--a--a--blessed
are they that shall--they that--a--they that shall mourn, for they
shall--a--shall _what_? Why don't you tell me, Mary?--what do you want to
be so mean for?"

"Oh, Tom, you poor thick-headed thing, I'm not teasing you. I wouldn't
do that. You must go and learn it again. Don't you be discouraged, Tom,
you'll manage it--and if you do, I'll give you something ever so nice.
There, now, that's a good boy."

"All right! What is it, Mary, tell me what it is."

"Never you mind, Tom. You know if I say it's nice, it is nice."

"You bet you that's so, Mary. All right, I'll tackle it again."

And he did "tackle it again"--and under the double pressure of curiosity
and prospective gain he did it with such spirit that he accomplished a
shining success. Mary gave him a brand-new "Barlow" knife worth twelve
and a half cents; and the convulsion of delight that swept his system
shook him to his foundations. True, the knife would not cut anything,
but it was a "sure-enough" Barlow, and there was inconceivable grandeur
in that--though where the Western boys ever got the idea that such a
weapon could possibly be counterfeited to its injury is an imposing
mystery and will always remain so, perhaps. Tom contrived to scarify the
cupboard with it, and was arranging to begin on the bureau, when he was
called off to dress for Sunday-school.

Mary gave him a tin basin of water and a piece of soap, and he went
outside the door and set the basin on a little bench there; then he
dipped the soap in the water and laid it down; turned up his sleeves;
poured out the water on the ground, gently, and then entered the kitchen
and began to wipe his face diligently on the towel behind the door. But
Mary removed the towel and said:

"Now ain't you ashamed, Tom. You mustn't be so bad. Water won't hurt
you."

Tom was a trifle disconcerted. The basin was refilled, and this time he
stood over it a little while, gathering resolution; took in a big breath
and began. When he entered the kitchen presently, with both eyes shut
and groping for the towel with his hands, an honorable testimony of
suds and water was dripping from his face. But when he emerged from
the towel, he was not yet satisfactory, for the clean territory stopped
short at his chin and his jaws, like a mask; below and beyond this line
there was a dark expanse of unirrigated soil that spread downward in
front and backward around his neck. Mary took him in hand, and when she
was done with him he was a man and a brother, without distinction of
color, and his saturated hair was neatly brushed, and its short curls
wrought into a dainty and symmetrical general effect. [He privately
smoothed out the curls, with labor and difficulty, and plastered his
hair close down to his head; for he held curls to be effeminate, and his
own filled his life with bitterness.] Then Mary got out a suit of his
clothing that had been used only on Sundays during two years--they were
simply called his "other clothes"--and so by that we know the size of his
wardrobe. The girl "put him to rights" after he had dressed himself;
she buttoned his neat roundabout up to his chin, turned his vast shirt
collar down over his shoulders, brushed him off and crowned him with
his speckled straw hat. He now looked exceedingly improved and
uncomfortable. He was fully as uncomfortable as he looked; for there
was a restraint about whole clothes and cleanliness that galled him. He
hoped that Mary would forget his shoes, but the hope was blighted; she
coated them thoroughly with tallow, as was the custom, and brought
them out. He lost his temper and said he was always being made to do
everything he didn't want to do. But Mary said, persuasively:

"Please, Tom--that's a good boy."

So he got into the shoes snarling. Mary was soon ready, and the three
children set out for Sunday-school--a place that Tom hated with his whole
heart; but Sid and Mary were fond of it.

Sabbath-school hours were from nine to half-past ten; and then church
service. Two of the children always remained for the sermon voluntarily,
and the other always remained too--for stronger reasons. The church's
high-backed, uncushioned pews would seat about three hundred persons;
the edifice was but a small, plain affair, with a sort of pine board
tree-box on top of it for a steeple. At the door Tom dropped back a step
and accosted a Sunday-dressed comrade:

"Say, Billy, got a yaller ticket?"

"Yes."

"What'll you take for her?"

"What'll you give?"

"Piece of lickrish and a fish-hook."

"Less see 'em."

Tom exhibited. They were satisfactory, and the property changed hands.
Then Tom traded a couple of white alleys for three red tickets, and some
small trifle or other for a couple of blue ones. He waylaid other
boys as they came, and went on buying tickets of various colors ten
or fifteen minutes longer. He entered the church, now, with a swarm
of clean and noisy boys and girls, proceeded to his seat and started
a quarrel with the first boy that came handy. The teacher, a grave,
elderly man, interfered; then turned his back a moment and Tom pulled a
boy's hair in the next bench, and was absorbed in his book when the boy
turned around; stuck a pin in another boy, presently, in order to hear
him say "Ouch!" and got a new reprimand from his teacher. Tom's whole
class were of a pattern--restless, noisy, and troublesome. When they came
to recite their lessons, not one of them knew his verses perfectly, but
had to be prompted all along. However, they worried through, and each
got his reward--in small blue tickets, each with a passage of Scripture
on it; each blue ticket was pay for two verses of the recitation. Ten
blue tickets equalled a red one, and could be exchanged for it; ten red
tickets equalled a yellow one; for ten yellow tickets the superintendent
gave a very plainly bound Bible (worth forty cents in those easy
times) to the pupil. How many of my readers would have the industry and
application to memorize two thousand verses, even for a Dore Bible? And
yet Mary had acquired two Bibles in this way--it was the patient work of
two years--and a boy of German parentage had won four or five. He once
recited three thousand verses without stopping; but the strain upon his
mental faculties was too great, and he was little better than an idiot
from that day forth--a grievous misfortune for the school, for on great
occasions, before company, the superintendent (as Tom expressed it)
had always made this boy come out and "spread himself." Only the older
pupils managed to keep their tickets and stick to their tedious work
long enough to get a Bible, and so the delivery of one of these prizes
was a rare and noteworthy circumstance; the successful pupil was so
great and conspicuous for that day that on the spot every scholar's
heart was fired with a fresh ambition that often lasted a couple
of weeks. It is possible that Tom's mental stomach had never really
hungered for one of those prizes, but unquestionably his entire being
had for many a day longed for the glory and the eclat that came with it.

In due course the superintendent stood up in front of the pulpit, with
a closed hymn-book in his hand and his forefinger inserted between its
leaves, and commanded attention. When a Sunday-school superintendent
makes his customary little speech, a hymn-book in the hand is as
necessary as is the inevitable sheet of music in the hand of a singer
who stands forward on the platform and sings a solo at a concert--though
why, is a mystery: for neither the hymn-book nor the sheet of music
is ever referred to by the sufferer. This superintendent was a slim
creature of thirty-five, with a sandy goatee and short sandy hair; he
wore a stiff standing-collar whose upper edge almost reached his ears
and whose sharp points curved forward abreast the corners of his mouth--a
fence that compelled a straight lookout ahead, and a turning of the
whole body when a side view was required; his chin was propped on a
spreading cravat which was as broad and as long as a bank-note, and had
fringed ends; his boot toes were turned sharply up, in the fashion
of the day, like sleigh-runners--an effect patiently and laboriously
produced by the young men by sitting with their toes pressed against a
wall for hours together. Mr. Walters was very earnest of mien, and very
sincere and honest at heart; and he held sacred things and places
in such reverence, and so separated them from worldly matters, that
unconsciously to himself his Sunday-school voice had acquired a peculiar
intonation which was wholly absent on week-days. He began after this
fashion:

"Now, children, I want you all to sit up just as straight and pretty as
you can and give me all your attention for a minute or two. There--that
is it. That is the way good little boys and girls should do. I see one
little girl who is looking out of the window--I am afraid she thinks I
am out there somewhere--perhaps up in one of the trees making a speech
to the little birds. [Applausive titter.] I want to tell you how good it
makes me feel to see so many bright, clean little faces assembled in a
place like this, learning to do right and be good." And so forth and so
on. It is not necessary to set down the rest of the oration. It was of a
pattern which does not vary, and so it is familiar to us all.

The latter third of the speech was marred by the resumption of fights
and other recreations among certain of the bad boys, and by fidgetings
and whisperings that extended far and wide, washing even to the bases of
isolated and incorruptible rocks like Sid and Mary. But now every sound
ceased suddenly, with the subsidence of Mr. Walters' voice, and the
conclusion of the speech was received with a burst of silent gratitude.

A good part of the whispering had been occasioned by an event which was
more or less rare--the entrance of visitors: lawyer Thatcher, accompanied
by a very feeble and aged man; a fine, portly, middle-aged gentleman
with iron-gray hair; and a dignified lady who was doubtless the latter's
wife. The lady was leading a child. Tom had been restless and full of
chafings and repinings; conscience-smitten, too--he could not meet Amy
Lawrence's eye, he could not brook her loving gaze. But when he saw this
small newcomer his soul was all ablaze with bliss in a moment. The next
moment he was "showing off" with all his might--cuffing boys, pulling
hair, making faces--in a word, using every art that seemed likely to
fascinate a girl and win her applause. His exaltation had but one
alloy--the memory of his humiliation in this angel's garden--and that
record in sand was fast washing out, under the waves of happiness that
were sweeping over it now.

The visitors were given the highest seat of honor, and as soon as Mr.
Walters' speech was finished, he introduced them to the school. The
middle-aged man turned out to be a prodigious personage--no less a one
than the county judge--altogether the most august creation these children
had ever looked upon--and they wondered what kind of material he was made
of--and they half wanted to hear him roar, and were half afraid he might,
too. He was from Constantinople, twelve miles away--so he had travelled,
and seen the world--these very eyes had looked upon the county
court-house--which was said to have a tin roof. The awe which these
reflections inspired was attested by the impressive silence and the
ranks of staring eyes. This was the great Judge Thatcher, brother of
their own lawyer. Jeff Thatcher immediately went forward, to be familiar
with the great man and be envied by the school. It would have been music
to his soul to hear the whisperings:

"Look at him, Jim! He's a going up there. Say--look! he's a going to
shake hands with him--he _is_ shaking hands with him! By jings, don't you
wish you was Jeff?"

Mr. Walters fell to "showing off," with all sorts of official bustlings
and activities, giving orders, delivering judgments, discharging
directions here, there, everywhere that he could find a target. The
librarian "showed off"--running hither and thither with his arms full of
books and making a deal of the splutter and fuss that insect authority
delights in. The young lady teachers "showed off"--bending sweetly over
pupils that were lately being boxed, lifting pretty warning fingers
at bad little boys and patting good ones lovingly. The young gentlemen
teachers "showed off" with small scoldings and other little displays of
authority and fine attention to discipline--and most of the teachers, of
both sexes, found business up at the library, by the pulpit; and it was
business that frequently had to be done over again two or three times
(with much seeming vexation). The little girls "showed off" in various
ways, and the little boys "showed off" with such diligence that the air
was thick with paper wads and the murmur of scufflings. And above it
all the great man sat and beamed a majestic judicial smile upon all
the house, and warmed himself in the sun of his own grandeur--for he was
"showing off," too.

There was only one thing wanting to make Mr. Walters' ecstasy complete,
and that was a chance to deliver a Bible-prize and exhibit a prodigy.
Several pupils had a few yellow tickets, but none had enough--he had been
around among the star pupils inquiring. He would have given worlds, now,
to have that German lad back again with a sound mind.

And now at this moment, when hope was dead, Tom Sawyer came forward with
nine yellow tickets, nine red tickets, and ten blue ones, and demanded
a Bible. This was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Walters was not
expecting an application from this source for the next ten years. But
there was no getting around it--here were the certified checks, and they
were good for their face. Tom was therefore elevated to a place with
the Judge and the other elect, and the great news was announced from
headquarters. It was the most stunning surprise of the decade, and
so profound was the sensation that it lifted the new hero up to the
judicial one's altitude, and the school had two marvels to gaze upon
in place of one. The boys were all eaten up with envy--but those that
suffered the bitterest pangs were those who perceived too late that they
themselves had contributed to this hated splendor by trading tickets to
Tom for the wealth he had amassed in selling whitewashing privileges.
These despised themselves, as being the dupes of a wily fraud, a
guileful snake in the grass.

The prize was delivered to Tom with as much effusion as the
superintendent could pump up under the circumstances; but it lacked
somewhat of the true gush, for the poor fellow's instinct taught him
that there was a mystery here that could not well bear the light,
perhaps; it was simply preposterous that this boy had warehoused two
thousand sheaves of Scriptural wisdom on his premises--a dozen would
strain his capacity, without a doubt.

Amy Lawrence was proud and glad, and she tried to make Tom see it in
her face--but he wouldn't look. She wondered; then she was just a grain
troubled; next a dim suspicion came and went--came again; she watched;
a furtive glance told her worlds--and then her heart broke, and she was
jealous, and angry, and the tears came and she hated everybody. Tom most
of all (she thought).

Tom was introduced to the Judge; but his tongue was tied, his breath
would hardly come, his heart quaked--partly because of the awful
greatness of the man, but mainly because he was her parent. He would
have liked to fall down and worship him, if it were in the dark. The
Judge put his hand on Tom's head and called him a fine little man, and
asked him what his name was. The boy stammered, gasped, and got it out:

"Tom."

"Oh, no, not Tom--it is--"

"Thomas."

"Ah, that's it. I thought there was more to it, maybe. That's very well.
But you've another one I daresay, and you'll tell it to me, won't you?"

"Tell the gentleman your other name, Thomas," said Walters, "and say
sir. You mustn't forget your manners."

"Thomas Sawyer--sir."

"That's it! That's a good boy. Fine boy. Fine, manly little fellow. Two
thousand verses is a great many--very, very great many. And you never can
be sorry for the trouble you took to learn them; for knowledge is worth
more than anything there is in the world; it's what makes great men
and good men; you'll be a great man and a good man yourself, some
day, Thomas, and then you'll look back and say, It's all owing to the
precious Sunday-school privileges of my boyhood--it's all owing to
my dear teachers that taught me to learn--it's all owing to the good
superintendent, who encouraged me, and watched over me, and gave me a
beautiful Bible--a splendid elegant Bible--to keep and have it all for my
own, always--it's all owing to right bringing up! That is what you will
say, Thomas--and you wouldn't take any money for those two thousand
verses--no indeed you wouldn't. And now you wouldn't mind telling me and
this lady some of the things you've learned--no, I know you wouldn't--for
we are proud of little boys that learn. Now, no doubt you know the names
of all the twelve disciples. Won't you tell us the names of the first
two that were appointed?"

Tom was tugging at a button-hole and looking sheepish. He blushed,
now, and his eyes fell. Mr. Walters' heart sank within him. He said
to himself, it is not possible that the boy can answer the simplest
question--why _did_ the Judge ask him? Yet he felt obliged to speak up
and say:

"Answer the gentleman, Thomas--don't be afraid."

Tom still hung fire.

"Now I know you'll tell me," said the lady. "The names of the first two
disciples were--"

"_David And Goliah!_"

Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.




CHAPTER V

ABOUT half-past ten the cracked bell of the small church began to ring,
and presently the people began to gather for the morning sermon. The
Sunday-school children distributed themselves about the house and
occupied pews with their parents, so as to be under supervision. Aunt
Polly came, and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with her--Tom being placed next
the aisle, in order that he might be as far away from the open window
and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible. The crowd filed up
the aisles: the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better days;
the mayor and his wife--for they had a mayor there, among other
unnecessaries; the justice of the peace; the widow Douglass, fair,
smart, and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and well-to-do, her hill
mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and much
the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg could
boast; the bent and venerable Major and Mrs. Ward; lawyer Riverson, the
new notable from a distance; next the belle of the village, followed by
a troop of lawn-clad and ribbon-decked young heart-breakers; then all
the young clerks in town in a body--for they had stood in the vestibule
sucking their cane-heads, a circling wall of oiled and simpering
admirers, till the last girl had run their gantlet; and last of all came
the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful care of his mother as
if she were cut glass. He always brought his mother to church, and was
the pride of all the matrons. The boys all hated him, he was so
good. And besides, he had been "thrown up to them" so much. His
white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind, as usual on
Sundays--accidentally. Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked upon boys
who had as snobs.

The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more,
to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the
church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the
choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered and whispered all
through service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred,
but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago,
and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in
some foreign country.

The minister gave out the hymn, and read it through with a relish, in a
peculiar style which was much admired in that part of the country. His
voice began on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached a
certain point, where it bore with strong emphasis upon the topmost word
and then plunged down as if from a spring-board:

Shall I be car-ri-ed toe the skies, on flow'ry _beds_ of ease,

Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro' _blood_-y seas?

He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church "sociables" he was
always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies
would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps,
and "wall" their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, "Words
cannot express it; it is too beautiful, TOO beautiful for this mortal
earth."

After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into
a bulletin-board, and read off "notices" of meetings and societies and
things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of
doom--a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities,
away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is
to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went
into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the
church; for the other churches of the village; for the village itself;
for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United
States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the
President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed
by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of
European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light
and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear
withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with
a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace
and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a
grateful harvest of good. Amen.

There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down.
The boy whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer, he
only endured it--if he even did that much. He was restive all through it;
he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously--for he was not
listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the clergyman's regular
route over it--and when a little trifle of new matter was interlarded,
his ear detected it and his whole nature resented it; he considered
additions unfair, and scoundrelly. In the midst of the prayer a fly had
lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by
calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and
polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with
the body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping
its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they
had been coat-tails; going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if
it knew it was perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom's
hands itched to grab for it they did not dare--he believed his soul would
be instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going
on. But with the closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal
forward; and the instant the "Amen" was out the fly was a prisoner of
war. His aunt detected the act and made him let it go.

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an
argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod--and
yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and
thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly
worth the saving. Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he
always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything
else about the discourse. However, this time he was really interested
for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving picture of the
assembling together of the world's hosts at the millennium when the lion
and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead
them. But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle
were lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the
principal character before the on-looking nations; his face lit with the
thought, and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child,
if it was a tame lion.

Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed.
Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was
a large black beetle with formidable jaws--a "pinchbug," he called it. It
was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to
take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went
floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went
into the boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless legs,
unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it; but it was safe out
of his reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found relief in
the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came
idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the
quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the
drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around
it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew
bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly
snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy
the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws,
and continued his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent
and absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin
descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp,
a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards
away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators
shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind fans and
hand-kerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked foolish,
and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a
craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on
it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his
fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at
it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But
he grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse himself with a
fly but found no relief; followed an ant around, with his nose close
to the floor, and quickly wearied of that; yawned, sighed, forgot the
beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony
and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so
did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew
down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the
home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was
but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of
light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang
into its master's lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of
distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance.

By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with
suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill.
The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all
possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even the gravest
sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of
unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson
had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to the whole
congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced.

Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was
some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety
in it. He had but one marring thought; he was willing that the dog
should play with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright in
him to carry it off.




CHAPTER VI

MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found
him so--because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He
generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday,
it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious.

Tom lay thinking. Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was
sick; then he could stay home from school. Here was a vague possibility.
He canvassed his system. No ailment was found, and he investigated
again. This time he thought he could detect colicky symptoms, and he
began to encourage them with considerable hope. But they soon grew
feeble, and presently died wholly away. He reflected further. Suddenly
he discovered something. One of his upper front teeth was loose. This
was lucky; he was about to begin to groan, as a "starter," as he
called it, when it occurred to him that if he came into court with that
argument, his aunt would pull it out, and that would hurt. So he thought
he would hold the tooth in reserve for the present, and seek further.
Nothing offered for some little time, and then he remembered hearing
the doctor tell about a certain thing that laid up a patient for two or
three weeks and threatened to make him lose a finger. So the boy eagerly
drew his sore toe from under the sheet and held it up for inspection.
But now he did not know the necessary symptoms. However, it seemed
well worth while to chance it, so he fell to groaning with considerable
spirit.

But Sid slept on unconscious.

Tom groaned louder, and fancied that he began to feel pain in the toe.

No result from Sid.

Tom was panting with his exertions by this time. He took a rest and then
swelled himself up and fetched a succession of admirable groans.

Sid snored on.

Tom was aggravated. He said, "Sid, Sid!" and shook him. This course
worked well, and Tom began to groan again. Sid yawned, stretched, then
brought himself up on his elbow with a snort, and began to stare at Tom.
Tom went on groaning. Sid said:

"Tom! Say, Tom!" [No response.] "Here, Tom! TOM! What is the matter,
Tom?" And he shook him and looked in his face anxiously.

Tom moaned out:

"Oh, don't, Sid. Don't joggle me."

"Why, what's the matter, Tom? I must call auntie."

"No--never mind. It'll be over by and by, maybe. Don't call anybody."

"But I must! _Don't_ groan so, Tom, it's awful. How long you been this
way?"

"Hours. Ouch! Oh, don't stir so, Sid, you'll kill me."

"Tom, why didn't you wake me sooner? Oh, Tom, _don't!_ It makes my flesh
crawl to hear you. Tom, what is the matter?"

"I forgive you everything, Sid. [Groan.] Everything you've ever done to
me. When I'm gone--"

"Oh, Tom, you ain't dying, are you? Don't, Tom--oh, don't. Maybe--"

"I forgive everybody, Sid. [Groan.] Tell 'em so, Sid. And Sid, you give
my window-sash and my cat with one eye to that new girl that's come to
town, and tell her--"

But Sid had snatched his clothes and gone. Tom was suffering in reality,
now, so handsomely was his imagination working, and so his groans had
gathered quite a genuine tone.

Sid flew downstairs and said:

"Oh, Aunt Polly, come! Tom's dying!"

"Dying!"

"Yes'm. Don't wait--come quick!"

"Rubbage! I don't believe it!"

But she fled upstairs, nevertheless, with Sid and Mary at her heels.
And her face grew white, too, and her lip trembled. When she reached the
bedside she gasped out:

"You, Tom! Tom, what's the matter with you?"

"Oh, auntie, I'm--"

"What's the matter with you--what is the matter with you, child?"

"Oh, auntie, my sore toe's mortified!"

The old lady sank down into a chair and laughed a little, then cried a
little, then did both together. This restored her and she said:

"Tom, what a turn you did give me. Now you shut up that nonsense and
climb out of this."

The groans ceased and the pain vanished from the toe. The boy felt a
little foolish, and he said:

"Aunt Polly, it _seemed_ mortified, and it hurt so I never minded my
tooth at all."

"Your tooth, indeed! What's the matter with your tooth?"

"One of them's loose, and it aches perfectly awful."

"There, there, now, don't begin that groaning again. Open your mouth.
Well--your tooth _is_ loose, but you're not going to die about that.
Mary, get me a silk thread, and a chunk of fire out of the kitchen."

Tom said:

"Oh, please, auntie, don't pull it out. It don't hurt any more. I wish
I may never stir if it does. Please don't, auntie. I don't want to stay
home from school."

"Oh, you don't, don't you? So all this row was because you thought you'd
get to stay home from school and go a-fishing? Tom, Tom, I love you so,
and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your
outrageousness." By this time the dental instruments were ready. The old
lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's tooth with a loop
and tied the other to the bedpost. Then she seized the chunk of fire and
suddenly thrust it almost into the boy's face. The tooth hung dangling
by the bedpost, now.

But all trials bring their compensations. As Tom wended to school after
breakfast, he was the envy of every boy he met because the gap in his
upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and admirable
way. He gathered quite a following of lads interested in the exhibition;
and one that had cut his finger and had been a centre of fascination and
homage up to this time, now found himself suddenly without an adherent,
and shorn of his glory. His heart was heavy, and he said with a disdain
which he did not feel that it wasn't anything to spit like Tom Sawyer;
but another boy said, "Sour grapes!" and he wandered away a dismantled
hero.

Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry
Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and
dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless
and vulgar and bad--and because all their children admired him so, and
delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like
him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied
Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders
not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance.
Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown
men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat
was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim; his coat,
when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons
far down the back; but one suspender supported his trousers; the seat of
the trousers bagged low and contained nothing, the fringed legs dragged
in the dirt when not rolled up.

Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps
in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to
school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could
go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it
suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he
pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring
and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor
put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything
that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed,
hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.

Tom hailed the romantic outcast:

"Hello, Huckleberry!"

"Hello yourself, and see how you like it."

"What's that you got?"

"Dead cat."

"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?"

"Bought him off'n a boy."

"What did you give?"

"I give a blue ticket and a bladder that I got at the slaughter-house."

"Where'd you get the blue ticket?"

"Bought it off'n Ben Rogers two weeks ago for a hoop-stick."

"Say--what is dead cats good for, Huck?"

"Good for? Cure warts with."

"No! Is that so? I know something that's better."

"I bet you don't. What is it?"

"Why, spunk-water."

"Spunk-water! I wouldn't give a dern for spunk-water."

"You wouldn't, wouldn't you? D'you ever try it?"

"No, I hain't. But Bob Tanner did."

"Who told you so!"

"Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny Baker, and Johnny
told Jim Hollis, and Jim told Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and the
nigger told me. There now!"

"Well, what of it? They'll all lie. Leastways all but the nigger. I
don't know _him_. But I never see a nigger that _wouldn't_ lie. Shucks!
Now you tell me how Bob Tanner done it, Huck."

"Why, he took and dipped his hand in a rotten stump where the rain-water
was."

"In the daytime?"

"Certainly."

"With his face to the stump?"

"Yes. Least I reckon so."

"Did he say anything?"

"I don't reckon he did. I don't know."

"Aha! Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-water such a blame fool
way as that! Why, that ain't a-going to do any good. You got to go all
by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there's a
spunk-water stump, and just as it's midnight you back up against the stump
and jam your hand in and say:

'Barley-corn, barley-corn, injun-meal shorts, Spunk-water, spunk-water,
swaller these warts,'

and then walk away quick, eleven steps, with your eyes shut, and then
turn around three times and walk home without speaking to anybody.
Because if you speak the charm's busted."

"Well, that sounds like a good way; but that ain't the way Bob Tanner
done."

"No, sir, you can bet he didn't, becuz he's the wartiest boy in this
town; and he wouldn't have a wart on him if he'd knowed how to work
spunk-water. I've took off thousands of warts off of my hands that way,
Huck. I play with frogs so much that I've always got considerable many
warts. Sometimes I take 'em off with a bean."

"Yes, bean's good. I've done that."

"Have you? What's your way?"

"You take and split the bean, and cut the wart so as to get some blood,
and then you put the blood on one piece of the bean and take and dig
a hole and bury it 'bout midnight at the crossroads in the dark of the
moon, and then you burn up the rest of the bean. You see that piece
that's got the blood on it will keep drawing and drawing, trying to
fetch the other piece to it, and so that helps the blood to draw the
wart, and pretty soon off she comes."

"Yes, that's it, Huck--that's it; though when you're burying it if you
say 'Down bean; off wart; come no more to bother me!' it's better.
That's the way Joe Harper does, and he's been nearly to Coonville and
most everywheres. But say--how do you cure 'em with dead cats?"

"Why, you take your cat and go and get in the grave-yard 'long about
midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it's
midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can't see
'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear 'em talk;
and when they're taking that feller away, you heave your cat after 'em
and say, 'Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm
done with ye!' That'll fetch _any_ wart."

"Sounds right. D'you ever try it, Huck?"

"No, but old Mother Hopkins told me."

"Well, I reckon it's so, then. Becuz they say she's a witch."

"Say! Why, Tom, I _know_ she is. She witched pap. Pap says so his own
self. He come along one day, and he see she was a-witching him, so he
took up a rock, and if she hadn't dodged, he'd a got her. Well, that
very night he rolled off'n a shed wher' he was a layin drunk, and broke
his arm."

"Why, that's awful. How did he know she was a-witching him?"

"Lord, pap can tell, easy. Pap says when they keep looking at you right
stiddy, they're a-witching you. Specially if they mumble. Becuz when
they mumble they're saying the Lord's Prayer backards."

"Say, Hucky, when you going to try the cat?"

"To-night. I reckon they'll come after old Hoss Williams to-night."

"But they buried him Saturday. Didn't they get him Saturday night?"

"Why, how you talk! How could their charms work till midnight?--and
_then_ it's Sunday. Devils don't slosh around much of a Sunday, I don't
reckon."

"I never thought of that. That's so. Lemme go with you?"

"Of course--if you ain't afeard."

"Afeard! 'Tain't likely. Will you meow?"

"Yes--and you meow back, if you get a chance. Last time, you kep' me
a-meowing around till old Hays went to throwing rocks at me and says
'Dern that cat!' and so I hove a brick through his window--but don't you
tell."

"I won't. I couldn't meow that night, becuz auntie was watching me, but
I'll meow this time. Say--what's that?"

"Nothing but a tick."

"Where'd you get him?"

"Out in the woods."

"What'll you take for him?"

"I don't know. I don't want to sell him."

"All right. It's a mighty small tick, anyway."

"Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong to them. I'm
satisfied with it. It's a good enough tick for me."

"Sho, there's ticks a plenty. I could have a thousand of 'em if I wanted
to."

"Well, why don't you? Becuz you know mighty well you can't. This is a
pretty early tick, I reckon. It's the first one I've seen this year."

"Say, Huck--I'll give you my tooth for him."

"Less see it."

Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry viewed
it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said:

"Is it genuwyne?"

Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy.

"Well, all right," said Huckleberry, "it's a trade."

Tom enclosed the tick in the percussion-cap box that had lately been the
pinchbug's prison, and the boys separated, each feeling wealthier than
before.

When Tom reached the little isolated frame school-house, he strode in
briskly, with the manner of one who had come with all honest speed. He
hung his hat on a peg and flung himself into his seat with business-like
alacrity. The master, throned on high in his great splint-bottom
arm-chair, was dozing, lulled by the drowsy hum of study. The
interruption roused him.

"Thomas Sawyer!"

Tom knew that when his name was pronounced in full, it meant trouble.

"Sir!"

"Come up here. Now, sir, why are you late again, as usual?"

Tom was about to take refuge in a lie, when he saw two long tails of
yellow hair hanging down a back that he recognized by the electric
sympathy of love; and by that form was _the only vacant place_ on the
girls' side of the school-house. He instantly said:

"_I stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn!_"

The master's pulse stood still, and he stared helplessly. The buzz of
study ceased. The pupils wondered if this foolhardy boy had lost his
mind. The master said:

"You--you did what?"

"Stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn."

There was no mistaking the words.

"Thomas Sawyer, this is the most astounding confession I have ever
listened to. No mere ferule will answer for this offence. Take off your
jacket."

The master's arm performed until it was tired and the stock of switches
notably diminished. Then the order followed:

"Now, sir, go and sit with the girls! And let this be a warning to you."

The titter that rippled around the room appeared to abash the boy, but
in reality that result was caused rather more by his worshipful awe
of his unknown idol and the dread pleasure that lay in his high good
fortune. He sat down upon the end of the pine bench and the girl hitched
herself away from him with a toss of her head. Nudges and winks and
whispers traversed the room, but Tom sat still, with his arms upon the
long, low desk before him, and seemed to study his book.

By and by attention ceased from him, and the accustomed school murmur
rose upon the dull air once more. Presently the boy began to steal
furtive glances at the girl. She observed it, "made a mouth" at him
and gave him the back of her head for the space of a minute. When she
cautiously faced around again, a peach lay before her. She thrust it
away. Tom gently put it back. She thrust it away again, but with less
animosity. Tom patiently returned it to its place. Then she let it
remain. Tom scrawled on his slate, "Please take it--I got more." The
girl glanced at the words, but made no sign. Now the boy began to draw
something on the slate, hiding his work with his left hand. For a time
the girl refused to notice; but her human curiosity presently began
to manifest itself by hardly perceptible signs. The boy worked on,
apparently unconscious. The girl made a sort of non-committal attempt
to see, but the boy did not betray that he was aware of it. At last she
gave in and hesitatingly whispered:

"Let me see it."

Tom partly uncovered a dismal caricature of a house with two gable ends
to it and a corkscrew of smoke issuing from the chimney. Then the girl's
interest began to fasten itself upon the work and she forgot everything
else. When it was finished, she gazed a moment, then whispered:

"It's nice--make a man."

The artist erected a man in the front yard, that resembled a derrick. He
could have stepped over the house; but the girl was not hypercritical;
she was satisfied with the monster, and whispered:

"It's a beautiful man--now make me coming along."

Tom drew an hour-glass with a full moon and straw limbs to it and armed
the spreading fingers with a portentous fan. The girl said:

"It's ever so nice--I wish I could draw."

"It's easy," whispered Tom, "I'll learn you."

"Oh, will you? When?"

"At noon. Do you go home to dinner?"

"I'll stay if you will."

"Good--that's a whack. What's your name?"

"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer."

"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me
Tom, will you?"

"Yes."

Now Tom began to scrawl something on the slate, hiding the words from
the girl. But she was not backward this time. She begged to see. Tom
said:

"Oh, it ain't anything."

"Yes it is."

"No it ain't. You don't want to see."

"Yes I do, indeed I do. Please let me."

"You'll tell."

"No I won't--deed and deed and double deed won't."

"You won't tell anybody at all? Ever, as long as you live?"

"No, I won't ever tell _any_body. Now let me."

"Oh, _you_ don't want to see!"

"Now that you treat me so, I _will_ see." And she put her small hand
upon his and a little scuffle ensued, Tom pretending to resist in
earnest but letting his hand slip by degrees till these words were
revealed: "_I love you_."

"Oh, you bad thing!" And she hit his hand a smart rap, but reddened and
looked pleased, nevertheless.

Just at this juncture the boy felt a slow, fateful grip closing on his
ear, and a steady lifting impulse. In that wise he was borne across the
house and deposited in his own seat, under a peppering fire of giggles
from the whole school. Then the master stood over him during a few awful
moments, and finally moved away to his throne without saying a word. But
although Tom's ear tingled, his heart was jubilant.

As the school quieted down Tom made an honest effort to study, but
the turmoil within him was too great. In turn he took his place in the
reading class and made a botch of it; then in the geography class and
turned lakes into mountains, mountains into rivers, and rivers into
continents, till chaos was come again; then in the spelling class, and
got "turned down," by a succession of mere baby words, till he brought
up at the foot and yielded up the pewter medal which he had worn with
ostentation for months.




CHAPTER VII

THE harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his ideas
wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It seemed
to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was utterly dead.
There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days.
The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed
the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in the
flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a
shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance; a few birds
floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other living thing was visible
but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom's heart ached to be free, or
else to have something of interest to do to pass the dreary time.
His hand wandered into his pocket and his face lit up with a glow of
gratitude that was prayer, though he did not know it. Then furtively
the percussion-cap box came out. He released the tick and put him on
the long flat desk. The creature probably glowed with a gratitude that
amounted to prayer, too, at this moment, but it was premature: for when
he started thankfully to travel off, Tom turned him aside with a pin and
made him take a new direction.

Tom's bosom friend sat next him, suffering just as Tom had been, and
now he was deeply and gratefully interested in this entertainment in
an instant. This bosom friend was Joe Harper. The two boys were sworn
friends all the week, and embattled enemies on Saturdays. Joe took a
pin out of his lapel and began to assist in exercising the prisoner.
The sport grew in interest momently. Soon Tom said that they were
interfering with each other, and neither getting the fullest benefit
of the tick. So he put Joe's slate on the desk and drew a line down the
middle of it from top to bottom.

"Now," said he, "as long as he is on your side you can stir him up and
I'll let him alone; but if you let him get away and get on my side,
you're to leave him alone as long as I can keep him from crossing over."

"All right, go ahead; start him up."

The tick escaped from Tom, presently, and crossed the equator. Joe
harassed him awhile, and then he got away and crossed back again. This
change of base occurred often. While one boy was worrying the tick with
absorbing interest, the other would look on with interest as strong, the
two heads bowed together over the slate, and the two souls dead to all
things else. At last luck seemed to settle and abide with Joe. The
tick tried this, that, and the other course, and got as excited and as
anxious as the boys themselves, but time and again just as he would
have victory in his very grasp, so to speak, and Tom's fingers would
be twitching to begin, Joe's pin would deftly head him off, and keep
possession. At last Tom could stand it no longer. The temptation was too
strong. So he reached out and lent a hand with his pin. Joe was angry in
a moment. Said he:

"Tom, you let him alone."

"I only just want to stir him up a little, Joe."

"No, sir, it ain't fair; you just let him alone."

"Blame it, I ain't going to stir him much."

"Let him alone, I tell you."

"I won't!"

"You shall--he's on my side of the line."

"Look here, Joe Harper, whose is that tick?"

"I don't care whose tick he is--he's on my side of the line, and you
sha'n't touch him."

"Well, I'll just bet I will, though. He's my tick and I'll do what I
blame please with him, or die!"

A tremendous whack came down on Tom's shoulders, and its duplicate on
Joe's; and for the space of two minutes the dust continued to fly from
the two jackets and the whole school to enjoy it. The boys had been
too absorbed to notice the hush that had stolen upon the school awhile
before when the master came tiptoeing down the room and stood over them.
He had contemplated a good part of the performance before he contributed
his bit of variety to it.

When school broke up at noon, Tom flew to Becky Thatcher, and whispered
in her ear:

"Put on your bonnet and let on you're going home; and when you get to
the corner, give the rest of 'em the slip, and turn down through the
lane and come back. I'll go the other way and come it over 'em the same
way."

So the one went off with one group of scholars, and the other with
another. In a little while the two met at the bottom of the lane, and
when they reached the school they had it all to themselves. Then they
sat together, with a slate before them, and Tom gave Becky the pencil
and held her hand in his, guiding it, and so created another surprising
house. When the interest in art began to wane, the two fell to talking.
Tom was swimming in bliss. He said:

"Do you love rats?"

"No! I hate them!"

"Well, I do, too--_live_ ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing round your
head with a string."

"No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What I like is chewing-gum."

"Oh, I should say so! I wish I had some now."

"Do you? I've got some. I'll let you chew it awhile, but you must give
it back to me."

That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their legs
against the bench in excess of contentment.

"Was you ever at a circus?" said Tom.

"Yes, and my pa's going to take me again some time, if I'm good."

"I been to the circus three or four times--lots of times. Church ain't
shucks to a circus. There's things going on at a circus all the time.
I'm going to be a clown in a circus when I grow up."

"Oh, are you! That will be nice. They're so lovely, all spotted up."

"Yes, that's so. And they get slathers of money--most a dollar a day, Ben
Rogers says. Say, Becky, was you ever engaged?"

"What's that?"

"Why, engaged to be married."

"No."

"Would you like to?"

"I reckon so. I don't know. What is it like?"

"Like? Why it ain't like anything. You only just tell a boy you won't
ever have anybody but him, ever ever ever, and then you kiss and that's
all. Anybody can do it."

"Kiss? What do you kiss for?"

"Why, that, you know, is to--well, they always do that."

"Everybody?"

"Why, yes, everybody that's in love with each other. Do you remember
what I wrote on the slate?"

"Ye--yes."

"What was it?"

"I sha'n't tell you."

"Shall I tell _you_?"

"Ye--yes--but some other time."

"No, now."

"No, not now--to-morrow."

"Oh, no, _now_. Please, Becky--I'll whisper it, I'll whisper it ever so
easy."

Becky hesitating, Tom took silence for consent, and passed his arm about
her waist and whispered the tale ever so softly, with his mouth close to
her ear. And then he added:

"Now you whisper it to me--just the same."

She resisted, for a while, and then said:

"You turn your face away so you can't see, and then I will. But you
mustn't ever tell anybody--_will_ you, Tom? Now you won't, _will_ you?"

"No, indeed, indeed I won't. Now, Becky."

He turned his face away. She bent timidly around till her breath stirred
his curls and whispered, "I--love--you!"

Then she sprang away and ran around and around the desks and benches,
with Tom after her, and took refuge in a corner at last, with her little
white apron to her face. Tom clasped her about her neck and pleaded:

"Now, Becky, it's all done--all over but the kiss. Don't you be afraid
of that--it ain't anything at all. Please, Becky." And he tugged at her
apron and the hands.

By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop; her face, all glowing
with the struggle, came up and submitted. Tom kissed the red lips and
said:

"Now it's all done, Becky. And always after this, you know, you ain't
ever to love anybody but me, and you ain't ever to marry anybody but me,
ever never and forever. Will you?"

"No, I'll never love anybody but you, Tom, and I'll never marry anybody
but you--and you ain't to ever marry anybody but me, either."

"Certainly. Of course. That's _part_ of it. And always coming to school
or when we're going home, you're to walk with me, when there ain't
anybody looking--and you choose me and I choose you at parties, because
that's the way you do when you're engaged."

"It's so nice. I never heard of it before."

"Oh, it's ever so gay! Why, me and Amy Lawrence--"

The big eyes told Tom his blunder and he stopped, confused.

"Oh, Tom! Then I ain't the first you've ever been engaged to!"

The child began to cry. Tom said:

"Oh, don't cry, Becky, I don't care for her any more."

"Yes, you do, Tom--you know you do."

Tom tried to put his arm about her neck, but she pushed him away and
turned her face to the wall, and went on crying. Tom tried again, with
soothing words in his mouth, and was repulsed again. Then his pride was
up, and he strode away and went outside. He stood about, restless and
uneasy, for a while, glancing at the door, every now and then, hoping
she would repent and come to find him. But she did not. Then he began
to feel badly and fear that he was in the wrong. It was a hard struggle
with him to make new advances, now, but he nerved himself to it and
entered. She was still standing back there in the corner, sobbing, with
her face to the wall. Tom's heart smote him. He went to her and stood a
moment, not knowing exactly how to proceed. Then he said hesitatingly:

"Becky, I--I don't care for anybody but you."

No reply--but sobs.

"Becky"--pleadingly. "Becky, won't you say something?"

More sobs.

Tom got out his chiefest jewel, a brass knob from the top of an andiron,
and passed it around her so that she could see it, and said:

"Please, Becky, won't you take it?"

She struck it to the floor. Then Tom marched out of the house and over
the hills and far away, to return to school no more that day. Presently
Becky began to suspect. She ran to the door; he was not in sight; she
flew around to the play-yard; he was not there. Then she called:

"Tom! Come back, Tom!"

She listened intently, but there was no answer. She had no companions
but silence and loneliness. So she sat down to cry again and upbraid
herself; and by this time the scholars began to gather again, and she
had to hide her griefs and still her broken heart and take up the cross
of a long, dreary, aching afternoon, with none among the strangers about
her to exchange sorrows with.




CHAPTER VIII

TOM dodged hither and thither through lanes until he was well out of the
track of returning scholars, and then fell into a moody jog. He crossed
a small "branch" two or three times, because of a prevailing juvenile
superstition that to cross water baffled pursuit. Half an hour later
he was disappearing behind the Douglas mansion on the summit of Cardiff
Hill, and the school-house was hardly distinguishable away off in the
valley behind him. He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to
the centre of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading oak.
There was not even a zephyr stirring; the dead noonday heat had even
stilled the songs of the birds; nature lay in a trance that was broken
by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a wood-pecker, and
this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the
more profound. The boy's soul was steeped in melancholy; his feelings
were in happy accord with his surroundings. He sat long with his elbows
on his knees and his chin in his hands, meditating. It seemed to him
that life was but a trouble, at best, and he more than half envied Jimmy
Hodges, so lately released; it must be very peaceful, he thought, to lie
and slumber and dream forever and ever, with the wind whispering through
the trees and caressing the grass and the flowers over the grave, and
nothing to bother and grieve about, ever any more. If he only had a
clean Sunday-school record he could be willing to go, and be done with
it all. Now as to this girl. What had he done? Nothing. He had meant
the best in the world, and been treated like a dog--like a very dog. She
would be sorry some day--maybe when it was too late. Ah, if he could only
die _temporarily_!

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained
shape long at a time. Tom presently began to drift insensibly back into
the concerns of this life again. What if he turned his back, now, and
disappeared mysteriously? What if he went away--ever so far away, into
unknown countries beyond the seas--and never came back any more! How
would she feel then! The idea of being a clown recurred to him now, only
to fill him with disgust. For frivolity and jokes and spotted tights
were an offense, when they intruded themselves upon a spirit that was
exalted into the vague august realm of the romantic. No, he would be
a soldier, and return after long years, all war-worn and illustrious.
No--better still, he would join the Indians, and hunt buffaloes and go on
the warpath in the mountain ranges and the trackless great plains of the
Far West, and away in the future come back a great chief, bristling with
feathers, hideous with paint, and prance into Sunday-school, some drowsy
summer morning, with a blood-curdling war-whoop, and sear the eyeballs
of all his companions with unappeasable envy. But no, there was
something gaudier even than this. He would be a pirate! That was it!
_now_ his future lay plain before him, and glowing with unimaginable
splendor. How his name would fill the world, and make people shudder!
How gloriously he would go plowing the dancing seas, in his long, low,
black-hulled racer, the Spirit of the Storm, with his grisly flag flying
at the fore! And at the zenith of his fame, how he would suddenly appear
at the old village and stalk into church, brown and weather-beaten, in
his black velvet doublet and trunks, his great jack-boots, his crimson
sash, his belt bristling with horse-pistols, his crime-rusted cutlass
at his side, his slouch hat with waving plumes, his black flag unfurled,
with the skull and crossbones on it, and hear with swelling ecstasy
the whisperings, "It's Tom Sawyer the Pirate!--the Black Avenger of the
Spanish Main!"

Yes, it was settled; his career was determined. He would run away from
home and enter upon it. He would start the very next morning. Therefore
he must now begin to get ready. He would collect his resources together.
He went to a rotten log near at hand and began to dig under one end of
it with his Barlow knife. He soon struck wood that sounded hollow. He
put his hand there and uttered this incantation impressively:

"What hasn't come here, come! What's here, stay here!"

Then he scraped away the dirt, and exposed a pine shingle. He took it
up and disclosed a shapely little treasure-house whose bottom and sides
were of shingles. In it lay a marble. Tom's astonishment was bound-less!
He scratched his head with a perplexed air, and said:

"Well, that beats anything!"

Then he tossed the marble away pettishly, and stood cogitating. The
truth was, that a superstition of his had failed, here, which he and
all his comrades had always looked upon as infallible. If you buried
a marble with certain necessary incantations, and left it alone a
fortnight, and then opened the place with the incantation he had just
used, you would find that all the marbles you had ever lost had gathered
themselves together there, meantime, no matter how widely they had been
separated. But now, this thing had actually and unquestionably failed.
Tom's whole structure of faith was shaken to its foundations. He had
many a time heard of this thing succeeding but never of its failing
before. It did not occur to him that he had tried it several times
before, himself, but could never find the hiding-places afterward. He
puzzled over the matter some time, and finally decided that some witch
had interfered and broken the charm. He thought he would satisfy himself
on that point; so he searched around till he found a small sandy spot
with a little funnel-shaped depression in it. He laid himself down and
put his mouth close to this depression and called--

"Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know! Doodle-bug,
doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know!"

The sand began to work, and presently a small black bug appeared for a
second and then darted under again in a fright.

"He dasn't tell! So it _was_ a witch that done it. I just knowed it."

He well knew the futility of trying to contend against witches, so he
gave up discouraged. But it occurred to him that he might as well have
the marble he had just thrown away, and therefore he went and made a
patient search for it. But he could not find it. Now he went back to his
treasure-house and carefully placed himself just as he had been standing
when he tossed the marble away; then he took another marble from his
pocket and tossed it in the same way, saying:

"Brother, go find your brother!"

He watched where it stopped, and went there and looked. But it must
have fallen short or gone too far; so he tried twice more. The last
repetition was successful. The two marbles lay within a foot of each
other.

Just here the blast of a toy tin trumpet came faintly down the green
aisles of the forest. Tom flung off his jacket and trousers, turned
a suspender into a belt, raked away some brush behind the rotten log,
disclosing a rude bow and arrow, a lath sword and a tin trumpet, and
in a moment had seized these things and bounded away, barelegged,
with fluttering shirt. He presently halted under a great elm, blew an
answering blast, and then began to tiptoe and look warily out, this way
and that. He said cautiously--to an imaginary company:

"Hold, my merry men! Keep hid till I blow."

Now appeared Joe Harper, as airily clad and elaborately armed as Tom.
Tom called:

"Hold! Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?"

"Guy of Guisborne wants no man's pass. Who art thou that--that--"

"Dares to hold such language," said Tom, prompting--for they talked "by
the book," from memory.

"Who art thou that dares to hold such language?"

"I, indeed! I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase soon shall know."

"Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw? Right gladly will I dispute
with thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee!"

They took their lath swords, dumped their other traps on the ground,
struck a fencing attitude, foot to foot, and began a grave, careful
combat, "two up and two down." Presently Tom said:

"Now, if you've got the hang, go it lively!"

So they "went it lively," panting and perspiring with the work. By and
by Tom shouted:

"Fall! fall! Why don't you fall?"

"I sha'n't! Why don't you fall yourself? You're getting the worst of
it."

"Why, that ain't anything. I can't fall; that ain't the way it is in the
book. The book says, 'Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy
of Guisborne.' You're to turn around and let me hit you in the back."

There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received the
whack and fell.

"Now," said Joe, getting up, "you got to let me kill _you_. That's
fair."

"Why, I can't do that, it ain't in the book."

"Well, it's blamed mean--that's all."

"Well, say, Joe, you can be Friar Tuck or Much the miller's son, and lam
me with a quarter-staff; or I'll be the Sheriff of Nottingham and you be
Robin Hood a little while and kill me."

This was satisfactory, and so these adventures were carried out. Then
Tom became Robin Hood again, and was allowed by the treacherous nun to
bleed his strength away through his neglected wound. And at last Joe,
representing a whole tribe of weeping outlaws, dragged him sadly forth,
gave his bow into his feeble hands, and Tom said, "Where this arrow
falls, there bury poor Robin Hood under the greenwood tree." Then he
shot the arrow and fell back and would have died, but he lit on a nettle
and sprang up too gaily for a corpse.

The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off
grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern
civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss.
They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than
President of the United States forever.




CHAPTER IX

AT half-past nine, that night, Tom and Sid were sent to bed, as usual.
They said their prayers, and Sid was soon asleep. Tom lay awake and
waited, in restless impatience. When it seemed to him that it must be
nearly daylight, he heard the clock strike ten! This was despair. He
would have tossed and fidgeted, as his nerves demanded, but he was
afraid he might wake Sid. So he lay still, and stared up into the dark.
Everything was dismally still. By and by, out of the stillness, little,
scarcely perceptible noises began to emphasize themselves. The ticking
of the clock began to bring itself into notice. Old beams began to crack
mysteriously. The stairs creaked faintly. Evidently spirits were abroad.
A measured, muffled snore issued from Aunt Polly's chamber. And now the
tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate,
began. Next the ghastly ticking of a death-watch in the wall at the
bed's head made Tom shudder--it meant that somebody's days were numbered.
Then the howl of a far-off dog rose on the night air, and was answered
by a fainter howl from a remoter distance. Tom was in an agony. At last
he was satisfied that time had ceased and eternity begun; he began to
doze, in spite of himself; the clock chimed eleven, but he did not hear
it. And then there came, mingling with his half-formed dreams, a most
melancholy caterwauling. The raising of a neighboring window disturbed
him. A cry of "Scat! you devil!" and the crash of an empty bottle
against the back of his aunt's woodshed brought him wide awake, and a
single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping
along the roof of the "ell" on all fours. He "meow'd" with caution once
or twice, as he went; then jumped to the roof of the woodshed and thence
to the ground. Huckleberry Finn was there, with his dead cat. The boys
moved off and disappeared in the gloom. At the end of half an hour they
were wading through the tall grass of the graveyard.

It was a graveyard of the old-fashioned Western kind. It was on a hill,
about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy board fence
around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of the
time, but stood upright nowhere. Grass and weeds grew rank over the
whole cemetery. All the old graves were sunken in, there was not a
tombstone on the place; round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over
the graves, leaning for support and finding none. "Sacred to the memory
of" So-and-So had been painted on them once, but it could no longer have
been read, on the most of them, now, even if there had been light.

A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tom feared it might be the
spirits of the dead, complaining at being disturbed. The boys talked
little, and only under their breath, for the time and the place and the
pervading solemnity and silence oppressed their spirits. They found the
sharp new heap they were seeking, and ensconced themselves within the
protection of three great elms that grew in a bunch within a few feet of
the grave.

Then they waited in silence for what seemed a long time. The hooting of
a distant owl was all the sound that troubled the dead stillness. Tom's
reflections grew oppressive. He must force some talk. So he said in a
whisper:

"Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for us to be here?"

Huckleberry whispered:

"I wisht I knowed. It's awful solemn like, _ain't_ it?"

"I bet it is."

There was a considerable pause, while the boys canvassed this matter
inwardly. Then Tom whispered:

"Say, Hucky--do you reckon Hoss Williams hears us talking?"

"O' course he does. Least his sperrit does."

Tom, after a pause:

"I wish I'd said Mister Williams. But I never meant any harm. Everybody
calls him Hoss."

"A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout these-yer dead
people, Tom."

This was a damper, and conversation died again.

Presently Tom seized his comrade's arm and said:

"Sh!"

"What is it, Tom?" And the two clung together with beating hearts.

"Sh! There 'tis again! Didn't you hear it?"

"I--"

"There! Now you hear it."

"Lord, Tom, they're coming! They're coming, sure. What'll we do?"

"I dono. Think they'll see us?"

"Oh, Tom, they can see in the dark, same as cats. I wisht I hadn't
come."

"Oh, don't be afeard. I don't believe they'll bother us. We ain't doing
any harm. If we keep perfectly still, maybe they won't notice us at
all."

"I'll try to, Tom, but, Lord, I'm all of a shiver."

"Listen!"

The boys bent their heads together and scarcely breathed. A muffled
sound of voices floated up from the far end of the graveyard.

"Look! See there!" whispered Tom. "What is it?"

"It's devil-fire. Oh, Tom, this is awful."

Some vague figures approached through the gloom, swinging an
old-fashioned tin lantern that freckled the ground with innumerable
little spangles of light. Presently Huckleberry whispered with a
shudder:

"It's the devils sure enough. Three of 'em! Lordy, Tom, we're goners!
Can you pray?"

"I'll try, but don't you be afeard. They ain't going to hurt us. 'Now I
lay me down to sleep, I--'"

"Sh!"

"What is it, Huck?"

"They're _humans_! One of 'em is, anyway. One of 'em's old Muff Potter's
voice."

"No--'tain't so, is it?"

"I bet I know it. Don't you stir nor budge. He ain't sharp enough to
notice us. Drunk, the same as usual, likely--blamed old rip!"

"All right, I'll keep still. Now they're stuck. Can't find it. Here they
come again. Now they're hot. Cold again. Hot again. Red hot! They're
p'inted right, this time. Say, Huck, I know another o' them voices; it's
Injun Joe."

"That's so--that murderin' half-breed! I'd druther they was devils a dern
sight. What kin they be up to?"

The whisper died wholly out, now, for the three men had reached the
grave and stood within a few feet of the boys' hiding-place.

"Here it is," said the third voice; and the owner of it held the lantern
up and revealed the face of young Doctor Robinson.

Potter and Injun Joe were carrying a handbarrow with a rope and a couple
of shovels on it. They cast down their load and began to open the grave.
The doctor put the lantern at the head of the grave and came and sat
down with his back against one of the elm trees. He was so close the
boys could have touched him.

"Hurry, men!" he said, in a low voice; "the moon might come out at any
moment."

They growled a response and went on digging. For some time there was no
noise but the grating sound of the spades discharging their freight of
mould and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade struck upon
the coffin with a dull woody accent, and within another minute or two
the men had hoisted it out on the ground. They pried off the lid with
their shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the ground. The
moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid face.
The barrow was got ready and the corpse placed on it, covered with a
blanket, and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out a large
spring-knife and cut off the dangling end of the rope and then said:

"Now the cussed thing's ready, Sawbones, and you'll just out with
another five, or here she stays."

"That's the talk!" said Injun Joe.

"Look here, what does this mean?" said the doctor. "You required your
pay in advance, and I've paid you."

"Yes, and you done more than that," said Injun Joe, approaching the
doctor, who was now standing. "Five years ago you drove me away from
your father's kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something to
eat, and you said I warn't there for any good; and when I swore I'd get
even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for
a vagrant. Did you think I'd forget? The Injun blood ain't in me for
nothing. And now I've _got_ you, and you got to _settle_, you know!"

He was threatening the doctor, with his fist in his face, by this time.
The doctor struck out suddenly and stretched the ruffian on the ground.
Potter dropped his knife, and exclaimed:

"Here, now, don't you hit my pard!" and the next moment he had grappled
with the doctor and the two were struggling with might and main,
trampling the grass and tearing the ground with their heels. Injun Joe
sprang to his feet, his eyes flaming with passion, snatched up Potter's
knife, and went creeping, catlike and stooping, round and round about
the combatants, seeking an opportunity. All at once the doctor flung
himself free, seized the heavy headboard of Williams' grave and felled
Potter to the earth with it--and in the same instant the half-breed saw
his chance and drove the knife to the hilt in the young man's breast. He
reeled and fell partly upon Potter, flooding him with his blood, and in
the same moment the clouds blotted out the dreadful spectacle and the
two frightened boys went speeding away in the dark.

Presently, when the moon emerged again, Injun Joe was standing over the
two forms, contemplating them. The doctor murmured inarticulately, gave
a long gasp or two and was still. The half-breed muttered:

"_That_ score is settled--damn you."

Then he robbed the body. After which he put the fatal knife in Potter's
open right hand, and sat down on the dismantled coffin. Three--four--five
minutes passed, and then Potter began to stir and moan. His hand closed
upon the knife; he raised it, glanced at it, and let it fall, with a
shudder. Then he sat up, pushing the body from him, and gazed at it, and
then around him, confusedly. His eyes met Joe's.

"Lord, how is this, Joe?" he said.

"It's a dirty business," said Joe, without moving.

"What did you do it for?"

"I! I never done it!"

"Look here! That kind of talk won't wash."

Potter trembled and grew white.

"I thought I'd got sober. I'd no business to drink to-night. But it's
in my head yet--worse'n when we started here. I'm all in a muddle;
can't recollect anything of it, hardly. Tell me, Joe--_honest_, now,
old feller--did I do it? Joe, I never meant to--'pon my soul and honor, I
never meant to, Joe. Tell me how it was, Joe. Oh, it's awful--and him so
young and promising."

"Why, you two was scuffling, and he fetched you one with the headboard
and you fell flat; and then up you come, all reeling and staggering
like, and snatched the knife and jammed it into him, just as he fetched
you another awful clip--and here you've laid, as dead as a wedge til
now."

"Oh, I didn't know what I was a-doing. I wish I may die this minute if I
did. It was all on account of the whiskey and the excitement, I reckon.
I never used a weepon in my life before, Joe. I've fought, but never
with weepons. They'll all say that. Joe, don't tell! Say you won't tell,
Joe--that's a good feller. I always liked you, Joe, and stood up for you,
too. Don't you remember? You _won't_ tell, _will_ you, Joe?" And the
poor creature dropped on his knees before the stolid murderer, and
clasped his appealing hands.

"No, you've always been fair and square with me, Muff Potter, and I
won't go back on you. There, now, that's as fair as a man can say."

"Oh, Joe, you're an angel. I'll bless you for this the longest day I
live." And Potter began to cry.

"Come, now, that's enough of that. This ain't any time for blubbering.
You be off yonder way and I'll go this. Move, now, and don't leave any
tracks behind you."

Potter started on a trot that quickly increased to a run. The half-breed
stood looking after him. He muttered:

"If he's as much stunned with the lick and fuddled with the rum as he
had the look of being, he won't think of the knife till he's gone so
far he'll be afraid to come back after it to such a place by
himself--chicken-heart!"

Two or three minutes later the murdered man, the blanketed corpse, the
lidless coffin, and the open grave were under no inspection but the
moon's. The stillness was complete again, too.




CHAPTER X

THE two boys flew on and on, toward the village, speechless with
horror. They glanced backward over their shoulders from time to time,
apprehensively, as if they feared they might be followed. Every stump
that started up in their path seemed a man and an enemy, and made them
catch their breath; and as they sped by some outlying cottages that lay
near the village, the barking of the aroused watch-dogs seemed to give
wings to their feet.

"If we can only get to the old tannery before we break down!" whispered
Tom, in short catches between breaths. "I can't stand it much longer."

Huckleberry's hard pantings were his only reply, and the boys fixed
their eyes on the goal of their hopes and bent to their work to win it.
They gained steadily on it, and at last, breast to breast, they burst
through the open door and fell grateful and exhausted in the sheltering
shadows beyond. By and by their pulses slowed down, and Tom whispered:

"Huckleberry, what do you reckon'll come of this?"

"If Doctor Robinson dies, I reckon hanging'll come of it."

"Do you though?"

"Why, I _know_ it, Tom."

Tom thought a while, then he said:

"Who'll tell? We?"

"What are you talking about? S'pose something happened and Injun Joe
_didn't_ hang? Why, he'd kill us some time or other, just as dead sure
as we're a laying here."

"That's just what I was thinking to myself, Huck."

"If anybody tells, let Muff Potter do it, if he's fool enough. He's
generally drunk enough."

Tom said nothing--went on thinking. Presently he whispered:

"Huck, Muff Potter don't know it. How can he tell?"

"What's the reason he don't know it?"

"Because he'd just got that whack when Injun Joe done it. D'you reckon
he could see anything? D'you reckon he knowed anything?"

"By hokey, that's so, Tom!"

"And besides, look-a-here--maybe that whack done for _him_!"

"No, 'taint likely, Tom. He had liquor in him; I could see that; and
besides, he always has. Well, when pap's full, you might take and belt
him over the head with a church and you couldn't phase him. He says so,
his own self. So it's the same with Muff Potter, of course. But if a man
was dead sober, I reckon maybe that whack might fetch him; I dono."

After another reflective silence, Tom said:

"Hucky, you sure you can keep mum?"

"Tom, we _got_ to keep mum. You know that. That Injun devil wouldn't
make any more of drownding us than a couple of cats, if we was to squeak
'bout this and they didn't hang him. Now, look-a-here, Tom, less take
and swear to one another--that's what we got to do--swear to keep mum."

"I'm agreed. It's the best thing. Would you just hold hands and swear
that we--"

"Oh no, that wouldn't do for this. That's good enough for little
rubbishy common things--specially with gals, cuz _they_ go back on you
anyway, and blab if they get in a huff--but there orter be writing 'bout
a big thing like this. And blood."

Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful;
the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.
He picked up a clean pine shingle that lay in the moon-light, took a
little fragment of "red keel" out of his pocket, got the moon on
his work, and painfully scrawled these lines, emphasizing each slow
down-stroke by clamping his tongue between his teeth, and letting up the
pressure on the up-strokes. [See next page.]

"Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer swears they will keep mum about This and They
wish They may Drop down dead in Their Tracks if They ever Tell and Rot."

Huckleberry was filled with admiration of Tom's facility in writing, and
the sublimity of his language. He at once took a pin from his lapel and
was going to prick his flesh, but Tom said:

"Hold on! Don't do that. A pin's brass. It might have verdigrease on
it."

"What's verdigrease?"

"It's p'ison. That's what it is. You just swaller some of it once--you'll
see."

So Tom unwound the thread from one of his needles, and each boy pricked
the ball of his thumb and squeezed out a drop of blood. In time, after
many squeezes, Tom managed to sign his initials, using the ball of his
little finger for a pen. Then he showed Huckleberry how to make an H and
an F, and the oath was complete. They buried the shingle close to the
wall, with some dismal ceremonies and incantations, and the fetters
that bound their tongues were considered to be locked and the key thrown
away.

A figure crept stealthily through a break in the other end of the ruined
building, now, but they did not notice it.

"Tom," whispered Huckleberry, "does this keep us from _ever_
telling--_always_?"

"Of course it does. It don't make any difference _what_ happens, we got
to keep mum. We'd drop down dead--don't _you_ know that?"

"Yes, I reckon that's so."

They continued to whisper for some little time. Presently a dog set up
a long, lugubrious howl just outside--within ten feet of them. The boys
clasped each other suddenly, in an agony of fright.

"Which of us does he mean?" gasped Huckleberry.

"I dono--peep through the crack. Quick!"

"No, _you_, Tom!"

"I can't--I can't _do_ it, Huck!"

"Please, Tom. There 'tis again!"

"Oh, lordy, I'm thankful!" whispered Tom. "I know his voice. It's Bull
Harbison." *

[* If Mr. Harbison owned a slave named Bull, Tom would have spoken of
him as "Harbison's Bull," but a son or a dog of that name was "Bull
Harbison."]

"Oh, that's good--I tell you, Tom, I was most scared to death; I'd a bet
anything it was a _stray_ dog."

The dog howled again. The boys' hearts sank once more.

"Oh, my! that ain't no Bull Harbison!" whispered Huckleberry. "_Do_,
Tom!"

Tom, quaking with fear, yielded, and put his eye to the crack. His
whisper was hardly audible when he said:

"Oh, Huck, _its a stray dog_!"

"Quick, Tom, quick! Who does he mean?"

"Huck, he must mean us both--we're right together."

"Oh, Tom, I reckon we're goners. I reckon there ain't no mistake 'bout
where _I'll_ go to. I been so wicked."

"Dad fetch it! This comes of playing hookey and doing everything a
feller's told _not_ to do. I might a been good, like Sid, if I'd a
tried--but no, I wouldn't, of course. But if ever I get off this time,
I lay I'll just _waller_ in Sunday-schools!" And Tom began to snuffle a
little.

"_You_ bad!" and Huckleberry began to snuffle too. "Consound it, Tom
Sawyer, you're just old pie, 'long-side o' what I am. Oh, _lordy_,
lordy, lordy, I wisht I only had half your chance."

Tom choked off and whispered:

"Look, Hucky, look! He's got his _back_ to us!"

Hucky looked, with joy in his heart.

"Well, he has, by jingoes! Did he before?"

"Yes, he did. But I, like a fool, never thought. Oh, this is bully, you
know. _Now_ who can he mean?"

The howling stopped. Tom pricked up his ears.

"Sh! What's that?" he whispered.

"Sounds like--like hogs grunting. No--it's somebody snoring, Tom."

"That _is_ it! Where 'bouts is it, Huck?"

"I bleeve it's down at 'tother end. Sounds so, anyway. Pap used to sleep
there, sometimes, 'long with the hogs, but laws bless you, he just lifts
things when _he_ snores. Besides, I reckon he ain't ever coming back to
this town any more."

The spirit of adventure rose in the boys' souls once more.

"Hucky, do you das't to go if I lead?"

"I don't like to, much. Tom, s'pose it's Injun Joe!"

Tom quailed. But presently the temptation rose up strong again and the
boys agreed to try, with the understanding that they would take to their
heels if the snoring stopped. So they went tiptoeing stealthily down,
the one behind the other. When they had got to within five steps of the
snorer, Tom stepped on a stick, and it broke with a sharp snap. The man
moaned, writhed a little, and his face came into the moonlight. It was
Muff Potter. The boys' hearts had stood still, and their hopes too,
when the man moved, but their fears passed away now. They tip-toed out,
through the broken weather-boarding, and stopped at a little distance
to exchange a parting word. That long, lugubrious howl rose on the night
air again! They turned and saw the strange dog standing within a few
feet of where Potter was lying, and _facing_ Potter, with his nose
pointing heavenward.

"Oh, geeminy, it's _him_!" exclaimed both boys, in a breath.

"Say, Tom--they say a stray dog come howling around Johnny Miller's
house, 'bout midnight, as much as two weeks ago; and a whippoorwill come
in and lit on the banisters and sung, the very same evening; and there
ain't anybody dead there yet."

"Well, I know that. And suppose there ain't. Didn't Gracie Miller fall
in the kitchen fire and burn herself terrible the very next Saturday?"

"Yes, but she ain't _dead_. And what's more, she's getting better, too."

"All right, you wait and see. She's a goner, just as dead sure as Muff
Potter's a goner. That's what the niggers say, and they know all about
these kind of things, Huck."

Then they separated, cogitating. When Tom crept in at his bedroom window
the night was almost spent. He undressed with excessive caution, and
fell asleep congratulating himself that nobody knew of his escapade. He
was not aware that the gently-snoring Sid was awake, and had been so for
an hour.

When Tom awoke, Sid was dressed and gone. There was a late look in the
light, a late sense in the atmosphere. He was startled. Why had he not
been called--persecuted till he was up, as usual? The thought filled
him with bodings. Within five minutes he was dressed and down-stairs,
feeling sore and drowsy. The family were still at table, but they had
finished breakfast. There was no voice of rebuke; but there were averted
eyes; there was a silence and an air of solemnity that struck a chill
to the culprit's heart. He sat down and tried to seem gay, but it
was up-hill work; it roused no smile, no response, and he lapsed into
silence and let his heart sink down to the depths.

After breakfast his aunt took him aside, and Tom almost brightened in
the hope that he was going to be flogged; but it was not so. His aunt
wept over him and asked him how he could go and break her old heart so;
and finally told him to go on, and ruin himself and bring her gray hairs
with sorrow to the grave, for it was no use for her to try any more.
This was worse than a thousand whippings, and Tom's heart was sorer now
than his body. He cried, he pleaded for forgiveness, promised to reform
over and over again, and then received his dismissal, feeling that
he had won but an imperfect forgiveness and established but a feeble
confidence.

He left the presence too miserable to even feel revengeful toward
Sid; and so the latter's prompt retreat through the back gate was
unnecessary. He moped to school gloomy and sad, and took his flogging,
along with Joe Harper, for playing hookey the day before, with the
air of one whose heart was busy with heavier woes and wholly dead to
trifles. Then he betook himself to his seat, rested his elbows on his
desk and his jaws in his hands, and stared at the wall with the stony
stare of suffering that has reached the limit and can no further go.
His elbow was pressing against some hard substance. After a long time
he slowly and sadly changed his position, and took up this object with
a sigh. It was in a paper. He unrolled it. A long, lingering, colossal
sigh followed, and his heart broke. It was his brass andiron knob!

This final feather broke the camel's back.




CHAPTER XI

CLOSE upon the hour of noon the whole village was suddenly electrified
with the ghastly news. No need of the as yet un-dreamed-of telegraph;
the tale flew from man to man, from group to group, from house to house,
with little less than telegraphic speed. Of course the schoolmaster gave
holi-day for that afternoon; the town would have thought strangely of
him if he had not.

A gory knife had been found close to the murdered man, and it had been
recognized by somebody as belonging to Muff Potter--so the story ran. And
it was said that a belated citizen had come upon Potter washing himself
in the "branch" about one or two o'clock in the morning, and that Potter
had at once sneaked off--suspicious circumstances, especially the washing
which was not a habit with Potter. It was also said that the town had
been ransacked for this "murderer" (the public are not slow in the
matter of sifting evidence and arriving at a verdict), but that he
could not be found. Horsemen had departed down all the roads in every
direction, and the Sheriff "was confident" that he would be captured
before night.

All the town was drifting toward the graveyard. Tom's heartbreak
vanished and he joined the procession, not because he would not
a thousand times rather go anywhere else, but because an awful,
unaccountable fascination drew him on. Arrived at the dreadful place, he
wormed his small body through the crowd and saw the dismal spectacle.
It seemed to him an age since he was there before. Somebody pinched
his arm. He turned, and his eyes met Huckleberry's. Then both looked
elsewhere at once, and wondered if anybody had noticed anything in their
mutual glance. But everybody was talking, and intent upon the grisly
spectacle before them.

"Poor fellow!" "Poor young fellow!" "This ought to be a lesson to grave
robbers!" "Muff Potter'll hang for this if they catch him!" This was the
drift of remark; and the minister said, "It was a judgment; His hand is
here."

Now Tom shivered from head to heel; for his eye fell upon the stolid
face of Injun Joe. At this moment the crowd began to sway and struggle,
and voices shouted, "It's him! it's him! he's coming himself!"

"Who? Who?" from twenty voices.

"Muff Potter!"

"Hallo, he's stopped!--Look out, he's turning! Don't let him get away!"

People in the branches of the trees over Tom's head said he wasn't
trying to get away--he only looked doubtful and perplexed.

"Infernal impudence!" said a bystander; "wanted to come and take a quiet
look at his work, I reckon--didn't expect any company."

The crowd fell apart, now, and the Sheriff came through, ostentatiously
leading Potter by the arm. The poor fellow's face was haggard, and
his eyes showed the fear that was upon him. When he stood before the
murdered man, he shook as with a palsy, and he put his face in his hands
and burst into tears.

"I didn't do it, friends," he sobbed; "'pon my word and honor I never
done it."

"Who's accused you?" shouted a voice.

This shot seemed to carry home. Potter lifted his face and looked around
him with a pathetic hopelessness in his eyes. He saw Injun Joe, and
exclaimed:

"Oh, Injun Joe, you promised me you'd never--"

"Is that your knife?" and it was thrust before him by the Sheriff.

Potter would have fallen if they had not caught him and eased him to the
ground. Then he said:

"Something told me 't if I didn't come back and get--" He shuddered; then
waved his nerveless hand with a vanquished gesture and said, "Tell 'em,
Joe, tell 'em--it ain't any use any more."

Then Huckleberry and Tom stood dumb and staring, and heard the
stony-hearted liar reel off his serene statement, they expecting every
moment that the clear sky would deliver God's lightnings upon his head,
and wondering to see how long the stroke was delayed. And when he had
finished and still stood alive and whole, their wavering impulse to
break their oath and save the poor betrayed prisoner's life faded and
vanished away, for plainly this miscreant had sold himself to Satan and
it would be fatal to meddle with the property of such a power as that.

"Why didn't you leave? What did you want to come here for?" somebody
said.

"I couldn't help it--I couldn't help it," Potter moaned. "I wanted to
run away, but I couldn't seem to come anywhere but here." And he fell to
sobbing again.

Injun Joe repeated his statement, just as calmly, a few minutes
afterward on the inquest, under oath; and the boys, seeing that the
lightnings were still withheld, were confirmed in their belief that
Joe had sold himself to the devil. He was now become, to them, the most
balefully interesting object they had ever looked upon, and they could
not take their fascinated eyes from his face.

They inwardly resolved to watch him nights, when opportunity should
offer, in the hope of getting a glimpse of his dread master.

Injun Joe helped to raise the body of the murdered man and put it in
a wagon for removal; and it was whispered through the shuddering
crowd that the wound bled a little! The boys thought that this happy
circumstance would turn suspicion in the right direction; but they were
disappointed, for more than one villager remarked:

"It was within three feet of Muff Potter when it done it."

Tom's fearful secret and gnawing conscience disturbed his sleep for as
much as a week after this; and at breakfast one morning Sid said:

"Tom, you pitch around and talk in your sleep so much that you keep me
awake half the time."

Tom blanched and dropped his eyes.

"It's a bad sign," said Aunt Polly, gravely. "What you got on your mind,
Tom?"

"Nothing. Nothing 't I know of." But the boy's hand shook so that he
spilled his coffee.

"And you do talk such stuff," Sid said. "Last night you said, 'It's
blood, it's blood, that's what it is!' You said that over and over.
And you said, 'Don't torment me so--I'll tell!' Tell _what_? What is it
you'll tell?"

Everything was swimming before Tom. There is no telling what might have
happened, now, but luckily the concern passed out of Aunt Polly's face
and she came to Tom's relief without knowing it. She said:

"Sho! It's that dreadful murder. I dream about it most every night
myself. Sometimes I dream it's me that done it."

Mary said she had been affected much the same way. Sid seemed satisfied.
Tom got out of the presence as quick as he plausibly could, and after
that he complained of toothache for a week, and tied up his jaws every
night. He never knew that Sid lay nightly watching, and frequently
slipped the bandage free and then leaned on his elbow listening a good
while at a time, and afterward slipped the bandage back to its place
again. Tom's distress of mind wore off gradually and the toothache grew
irksome and was discarded. If Sid really managed to make anything out of
Tom's disjointed mutterings, he kept it to himself.

It seemed to Tom that his schoolmates never would get done holding
inquests on dead cats, and thus keeping his trouble present to his mind.
Sid noticed that Tom never was coroner at one of these inquiries,
though it had been his habit to take the lead in all new enterprises;
he noticed, too, that Tom never acted as a witness--and that was strange;
and Sid did not overlook the fact that Tom even showed a marked aversion
to these inquests, and always avoided them when he could. Sid marvelled,
but said nothing. However, even inquests went out of vogue at last, and
ceased to torture Tom's conscience.

Every day or two, during this time of sorrow, Tom watched his
opportunity and went to the little grated jail-window and smuggled such
small comforts through to the "murderer" as he could get hold of. The
jail was a trifling little brick den that stood in a marsh at the edge
of the village, and no guards were afforded for it; indeed, it
was seldom occupied. These offerings greatly helped to ease Tom's
conscience.

The villagers had a strong desire to tar-and-feather Injun Joe and ride
him on a rail, for body-snatching, but so formidable was his character
that nobody could be found who was willing to take the lead in the
matter, so it was dropped. He had been careful to begin both of his
inquest-statements with the fight, without confessing the grave-robbery
that preceded it; therefore it was deemed wisest not to try the case in
the courts at present.




CHAPTER XII

ONE of the reasons why Tom's mind had drifted away from its secret
troubles was, that it had found a new and weighty matter to interest
itself about. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to school. Tom had
struggled with his pride a few days, and tried to "whistle her down the
wind," but failed. He began to find himself hanging around her father's
house, nights, and feeling very miserable. She was ill. What if she
should die! There was distraction in the thought. He no longer took an
interest in war, nor even in piracy. The charm of life was gone; there
was nothing but dreariness left. He put his hoop away, and his bat;
there was no joy in them any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to
try all manner of remedies on him. She was one of those people who
are infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of
producing health or mending it. She was an inveterate experimenter in
these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a
fever, right away, to try it; not on herself, for she was never ailing,
but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for all the
"Health" periodicals and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance
they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the "rot" they
contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up,
and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and
what frame of mind to keep one's self in, and what sort of clothing
to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her
health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they
had recommended the month before. She was as simple-hearted and honest
as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered
together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed
with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with
"hell following after." But she never suspected that she was not an
angel of healing and the balm of Gilead in disguise, to the suffering
neighbors.

The water treatment was new, now, and Tom's low condition was a windfall
to her. She had him out at daylight every morning, stood him up in the
wood-shed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water; then she scrubbed
him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him to; then she
rolled him up in a wet sheet and put him away under blankets till she
sweated his soul clean and "the yellow stains of it came through his
pores"--as Tom said.

Yet notwithstanding all this, the boy grew more and more melancholy and
pale and dejected. She added hot baths, sitz baths, shower baths, and
plunges. The boy remained as dismal as a hearse. She began to assist the
water with a slim oatmeal diet and blister-plasters. She calculated his
capacity as she would a jug's, and filled him up every day with quack
cure-alls.

Tom had become indifferent to persecution by this time. This phase
filled the old lady's heart with consternation. This indifference must
be broken up at any cost. Now she heard of Pain-killer for the first
time. She ordered a lot at once. She tasted it and was filled with
gratitude. It was simply fire in a liquid form. She dropped the water
treatment and everything else, and pinned her faith to Pain-killer.
She gave Tom a teaspoonful and watched with the deepest anxiety for the
result. Her troubles were instantly at rest, her soul at peace again;
for the "indifference" was broken up. The boy could not have shown a
wilder, heartier interest, if she had built a fire under him.

Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of life might be
romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have
too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he
thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit upon that of
professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He asked for it so often that he
became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and
quit bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had no misgivings
to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom, she watched the bottle
clandestinely. She found that the medicine did really diminish, but it
did not occur to her that the boy was mending the health of a crack in
the sitting-room floor with it.

One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow
cat came along, purring, eyeing the teaspoon avariciously, and begging
for a taste. Tom said:

"Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter."

But Peter signified that he did want it.

"You better make sure."

Peter was sure.

"Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you, because there ain't
anything mean about me; but if you find you don't like it, you mustn't
blame anybody but your own self."

Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down
the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then
delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging
against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. Next
he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment,
with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his
unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again
spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time
to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty hurrah,
and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the flower-pots
with him. The old lady stood petrified with astonishment, peering over
her glasses; Tom lay on the floor expiring with laughter.

"Tom, what on earth ails that cat?"

"I don't know, aunt," gasped the boy.

"Why, I never see anything like it. What did make him act so?"

"Deed I don't know, Aunt Polly; cats always act so when they're having a
good time."

"They do, do they?" There was something in the tone that made Tom
apprehensive.

"Yes'm. That is, I believe they do."

"You _do_?"

"Yes'm."

The old lady was bending down, Tom watching, with interest emphasized
by anxiety. Too late he divined her "drift." The handle of the telltale
tea-spoon was visible under the bed-valance. Aunt Polly took it, held it
up. Tom winced, and dropped his eyes. Aunt Polly raised him by the usual
handle--his ear--and cracked his head soundly with her thimble.

"Now, sir, what did you want to treat that poor dumb beast so, for?"

"I done it out of pity for him--because he hadn't any aunt."

"Hadn't any aunt!--you numskull. What has that got to do with it?"

"Heaps. Because if he'd had one she'd a burnt him out herself! She'd a
roasted his bowels out of him 'thout any more feeling than if he was a
human!"

Aunt Polly felt a sudden pang of remorse. This was putting the thing in
a new light; what was cruelty to a cat _might_ be cruelty to a boy, too.
She began to soften; she felt sorry. Her eyes watered a little, and she
put her hand on Tom's head and said gently:

"I was meaning for the best, Tom. And, Tom, it _did_ do you good."

Tom looked up in her face with just a perceptible twinkle peeping
through his gravity.

"I know you was meaning for the best, aunty, and so was I with Peter. It
done _him_ good, too. I never see him get around so since--"

"Oh, go 'long with you, Tom, before you aggravate me again. And you try
and see if you can't be a good boy, for once, and you needn't take any
more medicine."

Tom reached school ahead of time. It was noticed that this strange thing
had been occurring every day latterly. And now, as usual of late,
he hung about the gate of the schoolyard instead of playing with his
comrades. He was sick, he said, and he looked it. He tried to seem to
be looking everywhere but whither he really was looking--down the road.
Presently Jeff Thatcher hove in sight, and Tom's face lighted; he gazed
a moment, and then turned sorrowfully away. When Jeff arrived, Tom
accosted him; and "led up" warily to opportunities for remark about
Becky, but the giddy lad never could see the bait. Tom watched and
watched, hoping whenever a frisking frock came in sight, and hating the
owner of it as soon as he saw she was not the right one. At last frocks
ceased to appear, and he dropped hopelessly into the dumps; he entered
the empty schoolhouse and sat down to suffer. Then one more frock passed
in at the gate, and Tom's heart gave a great bound. The next instant he
was out, and "going on" like an Indian; yelling, laughing, chasing boys,
jumping over the fence at risk of life and limb, throwing handsprings,
standing on his head--doing all the heroic things he could conceive of,
and keeping a furtive eye out, all the while, to see if Becky Thatcher
was noticing. But she seemed to be unconscious of it all; she never
looked. Could it be possible that she was not aware that he was there?
He carried his exploits to her immediate vicinity; came war-whooping
around, snatched a boy's cap, hurled it to the roof of the schoolhouse,
broke through a group of boys, tumbling them in every direction, and
fell sprawling, himself, under Becky's nose, almost upsetting her--and
she turned, with her nose in the air, and he heard her say: "Mf! some
people think they're mighty smart--always showing off!"

Tom's cheeks burned. He gathered himself up and sneaked off, crushed and
crestfallen.




CHAPTER XIII

TOM'S mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a
forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out
what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried
to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing
would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame
_him_ for the consequences--why shouldn't they? What right had the
friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would
lead a life of crime. There was no choice.

By this time he was far down Meadow Lane, and the bell for school to
"take up" tinkled faintly upon his ear. He sobbed, now, to think he
should never, never hear that old familiar sound any more--it was very
hard, but it was forced on him; since he was driven out into the cold
world, he must submit--but he forgave them. Then the sobs came thick and
fast.

Just at this point he met his soul's sworn comrade, Joe
Harper--hard-eyed, and with evidently a great and dismal purpose in his
heart. Plainly here were "two souls with but a single thought." Tom,
wiping his eyes with his sleeve, began to blubber out something about
a resolution to escape from hard usage and lack of sympathy at home by
roaming abroad into the great world never to return; and ended by hoping
that Joe would not forget him.

But it transpired that this was a request which Joe had just been going
to make of Tom, and had come to hunt him up for that purpose. His mother
had whipped him for drinking some cream which he had never tasted and
knew nothing about; it was plain that she was tired of him and wished
him to go; if she felt that way, there was nothing for him to do but
succumb; he hoped she would be happy, and never regret having driven her
poor boy out into the unfeeling world to suffer and die.

As the two boys walked sorrowing along, they made a new compact to stand
by each other and be brothers and never separate till death relieved
them of their troubles. Then they began to lay their plans. Joe was for
being a hermit, and living on crusts in a remote cave, and dying,
some time, of cold and want and grief; but after listening to Tom, he
conceded that there were some conspicuous advantages about a life of
crime, and so he consented to be a pirate.

Three miles below St. Petersburg, at a point where the Mississippi River
was a trifle over a mile wide, there was a long, narrow, wooded island,
with a shallow bar at the head of it, and this offered well as a
rendezvous. It was not inhabited; it lay far over toward the further
shore, abreast a dense and almost wholly unpeopled forest. So Jackson's
Island was chosen. Who were to be the subjects of their piracies was a
matter that did not occur to them. Then they hunted up Huckleberry Finn,
and he joined them promptly, for all careers were one to him; he was
indifferent. They presently separated to meet at a lonely spot on the
river-bank two miles above the village at the favorite hour--which was
midnight. There was a small log raft there which they meant to capture.
Each would bring hooks and lines, and such provision as he could steal
in the most dark and mysterious way--as became outlaws. And before the
afternoon was done, they had all managed to enjoy the sweet glory of
spreading the fact that pretty soon the town would "hear something." All
who got this vague hint were cautioned to "be mum and wait."

About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles,
and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the
meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay
like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the
quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under
the bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were answered in the
same way. Then a guarded voice said:

"Who goes there?"

"Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names."

"Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas." Tom
had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature.

"'Tis well. Give the countersign."

Two hoarse whispers delivered the same awful word simultaneously to the
brooding night:

"_Blood_!"

Then Tom tumbled his ham over the bluff and let himself down after it,
tearing both skin and clothes to some extent in the effort. There was
an easy, comfortable path along the shore under the bluff, but it lacked
the advantages of difficulty and danger so valued by a pirate.

The Terror of the Seas had brought a side of bacon, and had about worn
himself out with getting it there. Finn the Red-Handed had stolen a
skillet and a quantity of half-cured leaf tobacco, and had also brought
a few corn-cobs to make pipes with. But none of the pirates smoked or
"chewed" but himself. The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main said it
would never do to start without some fire. That was a wise thought;
matches were hardly known there in that day. They saw a fire smouldering
upon a great raft a hundred yards above, and they went stealthily
thither and helped themselves to a chunk. They made an imposing
adventure of it, saying, "Hist!" every now and then, and suddenly
halting with finger on lip; moving with hands on imaginary dagger-hilts;
and giving orders in dismal whispers that if "the foe" stirred, to "let
him have it to the hilt," because "dead men tell no tales." They knew
well enough that the raftsmen were all down at the village laying
in stores or having a spree, but still that was no excuse for their
conducting this thing in an unpiratical way.

They shoved off, presently, Tom in command, Huck at the after oar and
Joe at the forward. Tom stood amidships, gloomy-browed, and with folded
arms, and gave his orders in a low, stern whisper:

"Luff, and bring her to the wind!"

"Aye-aye, sir!"

"Steady, steady-y-y-y!"

"Steady it is, sir!"

"Let her go off a point!"

"Point it is, sir!"

As the boys steadily and monotonously drove the raft toward mid-stream
it was no doubt understood that these orders were given only for
"style," and were not intended to mean anything in particular.

"What sail's she carrying?"

"Courses, tops'ls, and flying-jib, sir."

"Send the r'yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of
ye--foretopmaststuns'l! Lively, now!"

"Aye-aye, sir!"

"Shake out that maintogalans'l! Sheets and braces! _now_ my hearties!"

"Aye-aye, sir!"

"Hellum-a-lee--hard a port! Stand by to meet her when she comes! Port,
port! _Now_, men! With a will! Stead-y-y-y!"

"Steady it is, sir!"

The raft drew beyond the middle of the river; the boys pointed her head
right, and then lay on their oars. The river was not high, so there was
not more than a two or three mile current. Hardly a word was said during
the next three-quarters of an hour. Now the raft was passing before
the distant town. Two or three glimmering lights showed where it lay,
peacefully sleeping, beyond the vague vast sweep of star-gemmed water,
unconscious of the tremendous event that was happening. The Black
Avenger stood still with folded arms, "looking his last" upon the scene
of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing "she" could see
him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with dauntless
heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips. It was but
a small strain on his imagination to remove Jackson's Island beyond
eye-shot of the village, and so he "looked his last" with a broken and
satisfied heart. The other pirates were looking their last, too; and
they all looked so long that they came near letting the current drift
them out of the range of the island. But they discovered the danger in
time, and made shift to avert it. About two o'clock in the morning the
raft grounded on the bar two hundred yards above the head of the island,
and they waded back and forth until they had landed their freight. Part
of the little raft's belongings consisted of an old sail, and this they
spread over a nook in the bushes for a tent to shelter their provisions;
but they themselves would sleep in the open air in good weather, as
became outlaws.

They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps
within the sombre depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in
the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock
they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild,
free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island,
far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to
civilization. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy
glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest temple, and upon the
varnished foliage and festooning vines.

When the last crisp slice of bacon was gone, and the last allowance
of corn pone devoured, the boys stretched themselves out on the grass,
filled with contentment. They could have found a cooler place, but
they would not deny themselves such a romantic feature as the roasting
campfire.

"_Ain't_ it gay?" said Joe.

"It's _nuts_!" said Tom. "What would the boys say if they could see us?"

"Say? Well, they'd just die to be here--hey, Hucky!"

"I reckon so," said Huckleberry; "anyways, I'm suited. I don't want
nothing better'n this. I don't ever get enough to eat, gen'ally--and here
they can't come and pick at a feller and bullyrag him so."

"It's just the life for me," said Tom. "You don't have to get up,
mornings, and you don't have to go to school, and wash, and all that
blame foolishness. You see a pirate don't have to do _anything_, Joe,
when he's ashore, but a hermit _he_ has to be praying considerable, and
then he don't have any fun, anyway, all by himself that way."

"Oh yes, that's so," said Joe, "but I hadn't thought much about it, you
know. I'd a good deal rather be a pirate, now that I've tried it."

"You see," said Tom, "people don't go much on hermits, nowadays, like
they used to in old times, but a pirate's always respected. And
a hermit's got to sleep on the hardest place he can find, and put
sackcloth and ashes on his head, and stand out in the rain, and--"

"What does he put sackcloth and ashes on his head for?" inquired Huck.

"I dono. But they've _got_ to do it. Hermits always do. You'd have to do
that if you was a hermit."

"Dern'd if I would," said Huck.

"Well, what would you do?"

"I dono. But I wouldn't do that."

"Why, Huck, you'd _have_ to. How'd you get around it?"

"Why, I just wouldn't stand it. I'd run away."

"Run away! Well, you _would_ be a nice old slouch of a hermit. You'd be
a disgrace."

The Red-Handed made no response, being better employed. He had finished
gouging out a cob, and now he fitted a weed stem to it, loaded it with
tobacco, and was pressing a coal to the charge and blowing a cloud of
fragrant smoke--he was in the full bloom of luxurious contentment. The
other pirates envied him this majestic vice, and secretly resolved to
acquire it shortly. Presently Huck said:

"What does pirates have to do?"

Tom said:

"Oh, they have just a bully time--take ships and burn them, and get the
money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's ghosts
and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships--make 'em walk a
plank."

"And they carry the women to the island," said Joe; "they don't kill the
women."

"No," assented Tom, "they don't kill the women--they're too noble. And
the women's always beautiful, too.

"And don't they wear the bulliest clothes! Oh no! All gold and silver
and di'monds," said Joe, with enthusiasm.

"Who?" said Huck.

"Why, the pirates."

Huck scanned his own clothing forlornly.

"I reckon I ain't dressed fitten for a pirate," said he, with a
regretful pathos in his voice; "but I ain't got none but these."

But the other boys told him the fine clothes would come fast enough,
after they should have begun their adventures. They made him understand
that his poor rags would do to begin with, though it was customary for
wealthy pirates to start with a proper wardrobe.

Gradually their talk died out and drowsiness began to steal upon the
eyelids of the little waifs. The pipe dropped from the fingers of the
Red-Handed, and he slept the sleep of the conscience-free and the weary.
The Terror of the Seas and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main had
more difficulty in getting to sleep. They said their prayers inwardly,
and lying down, since there was nobody there with authority to make them
kneel and recite aloud; in truth, they had a mind not to say them at
all, but they were afraid to proceed to such lengths as that, lest they
might call down a sudden and special thunderbolt from heaven. Then at
once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep--but an
intruder came, now, that would not "down." It was conscience. They began
to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and
next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came.
They tried to argue it away by reminding conscience that they had
purloined sweetmeats and apples scores of times; but conscience was not
to be appeased by such thin plausibilities; it seemed to them, in the
end, that there was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking
sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such
valuables was plain simple stealing--and there was a command against that
in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in
the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the
crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously
inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.




CHAPTER XIV

WHEN Tom awoke in the morning, he wondered where he was. He sat up and
rubbed his eyes and looked around. Then he comprehended. It was the cool
gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the
deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not
a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation. Beaded dewdrops stood
upon the leaves and grasses. A white layer of ashes covered the fire,
and a thin blue breath of smoke rose straight into the air. Joe and Huck
still slept.

Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another answered; presently
the hammering of a woodpecker was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray
of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life
manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going
to work unfolded itself to the musing boy. A little green worm came
crawling over a dewy leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air
from time to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding again--for he
was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm approached him, of its own
accord, he sat as still as a stone, with his hopes rising and falling,
by turns, as the creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to
go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful moment with its
curved body in the air and then came decisively down upon Tom's leg and
began a journey over him, his whole heart was glad--for that meant that
he was going to have a new suit of clothes--without the shadow of a
doubt a gaudy piratical uniform. Now a procession of ants appeared,
from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors; one struggled
manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms,
and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk. A brown spotted lady-bug climbed
the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and
said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your
children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it--which
did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was
credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity
more than once. A tumblebug came next, heaving sturdily at its ball, and
Tom touched the creature, to see it shut its legs against its body
and pretend to be dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this time. A
catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head, and trilled
out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then
a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig
almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the
strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow
of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to
inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild things had probably never
seen a human being before and scarcely knew whether to be afraid or not.
All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight
pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few
butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.

Tom stirred up the other pirates and they all clattered away with
a shout, and in a minute or two were stripped and chasing after and
tumbling over each other in the shallow limpid water of the white
sandbar. They felt no longing for the little village sleeping in the
distance beyond the majestic waste of water. A vagrant current or a
slight rise in the river had carried off their raft, but this only
gratified them, since its going was something like burning the bridge
between them and civilization.

They came back to camp wonderfully refreshed, glad-hearted, and
ravenous; and they soon had the camp-fire blazing up again. Huck found a
spring of clear cold water close by, and the boys made cups of broad oak
or hickory leaves, and felt that water, sweetened with such a wildwood
charm as that, would be a good enough substitute for coffee. While Joe
was slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him to hold on a
minute; they stepped to a promising nook in the river-bank and threw in
their lines; almost immediately they had reward. Joe had not had time
to get impatient before they were back again with some handsome bass,
a couple of sun-perch and a small catfish--provisions enough for quite a
family. They fried the fish with the bacon, and were astonished; for
no fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They did not know that the
quicker a fresh-water fish is on the fire after he is caught the better
he is; and they reflected little upon what a sauce open-air sleeping,
open-air exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient of hunger make, too.

They lay around in the shade, after breakfast, while Huck had a smoke,
and then went off through the woods on an exploring expedition. They
tramped gayly along, over decaying logs, through tangled underbrush,
among solemn monarchs of the forest, hung from their crowns to the
ground with a drooping regalia of grape-vines. Now and then they came
upon snug nooks carpeted with grass and jeweled with flowers.

They found plenty of things to be delighted with, but nothing to be
astonished at. They discovered that the island was about three miles
long and a quarter of a mile wide, and that the shore it lay closest to
was only separated from it by a narrow channel hardly two hundred yards
wide. They took a swim about every hour, so it was close upon the middle
of the afternoon when they got back to camp. They were too hungry to
stop to fish, but they fared sumptuously upon cold ham, and then threw
themselves down in the shade to talk. But the talk soon began to drag,
and then died. The stillness, the solemnity that brooded in the woods,
and the sense of loneliness, began to tell upon the spirits of the boys.
They fell to thinking. A sort of undefined longing crept upon them. This
took dim shape, presently--it was budding homesickness. Even Finn the
Red-Handed was dreaming of his doorsteps and empty hogsheads. But they
were all ashamed of their weakness, and none was brave enough to speak
his thought.

For some time, now, the boys had been dully conscious of a peculiar
sound in the distance, just as one sometimes is of the ticking of a
clock which he takes no distinct note of. But now this mysterious sound
became more pronounced, and forced a recognition. The boys started,
glanced at each other, and then each assumed a listening attitude. There
was a long silence, profound and unbroken; then a deep, sullen boom came
floating down out of the distance.

"What is it!" exclaimed Joe, under his breath.

"I wonder," said Tom in a whisper.

"'Tain't thunder," said Huckleberry, in an awed tone, "becuz thunder--"

"Hark!" said Tom. "Listen--don't talk."

They waited a time that seemed an age, and then the same muffled boom
troubled the solemn hush.

"Let's go and see."

They sprang to their feet and hurried to the shore toward the town. They
parted the bushes on the bank and peered out over the water. The little
steam ferry-boat was about a mile below the village, drifting with the
current. Her broad deck seemed crowded with people. There were a great
many skiffs rowing about or floating with the stream in the neighborhood
of the ferryboat, but the boys could not determine what the men in
them were doing. Presently a great jet of white smoke burst from the
ferryboat's side, and as it expanded and rose in a lazy cloud, that same
dull throb of sound was borne to the listeners again.

"I know now!" exclaimed Tom; "somebody's drownded!"

"That's it!" said Huck; "they done that last summer, when Bill Turner
got drownded; they shoot a cannon over the water, and that makes
him come up to the top. Yes, and they take loaves of bread and put
quicksilver in 'em and set 'em afloat, and wherever there's anybody
that's drownded, they'll float right there and stop."

"Yes, I've heard about that," said Joe. "I wonder what makes the bread
do that."

"Oh, it ain't the bread, so much," said Tom; "I reckon it's mostly what
they _say_ over it before they start it out."

"But they don't say anything over it," said Huck. "I've seen 'em and
they don't."

"Well, that's funny," said Tom. "But maybe they say it to themselves. Of
_course_ they do. Anybody might know that."

The other boys agreed that there was reason in what Tom said, because
an ignorant lump of bread, uninstructed by an incantation, could not
be expected to act very intelligently when set upon an errand of such
gravity.

"By jings, I wish I was over there, now," said Joe.

"I do too" said Huck "I'd give heaps to know who it is."

The boys still listened and watched. Presently a revealing thought
flashed through Tom's mind, and he exclaimed:

"Boys, I know who's drownded--it's us!"

They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph; they
were missed; they were mourned; hearts were breaking on their account;
tears were being shed; accusing memories of unkindness to these poor
lost lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being
indulged; and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole town,
and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was
concerned. This was fine. It was worth while to be a pirate, after all.

As twilight drew on, the ferryboat went back to her accustomed business
and the skiffs disappeared. The pirates returned to camp. They were
jubilant with vanity over their new grandeur and the illustrious trouble
they were making. They caught fish, cooked supper and ate it, and then
fell to guessing at what the village was thinking and saying about them;
and the pictures they drew of the public distress on their account were
gratifying to look upon--from their point of view. But when the shadows
of night closed them in, they gradually ceased to talk, and sat gazing
into the fire, with their minds evidently wandering elsewhere. The
excitement was gone, now, and Tom and Joe could not keep back thoughts
of certain persons at home who were not enjoying this fine frolic as
much as they were. Misgivings came; they grew troubled and unhappy; a
sigh or two escaped, unawares. By and by Joe timidly ventured upon a
roundabout "feeler" as to how the others might look upon a return to
civilization--not right now, but--

Tom withered him with derision! Huck, being uncommitted as yet, joined
in with Tom, and the waverer quickly "explained," and was glad to get
out of the scrape with as little taint of chicken-hearted home-sickness
clinging to his garments as he could. Mutiny was effectually laid to
rest for the moment.

As the night deepened, Huck began to nod, and presently to snore.
Joe followed next. Tom lay upon his elbow motionless, for some time,
watching the two intently. At last he got up cautiously, on his knees,
and went searching among the grass and the flickering reflections flung
by the campfire. He picked up and inspected several large semi-cylinders
of the thin white bark of a sycamore, and finally chose two which seemed
to suit him. Then he knelt by the fire and painfully wrote something
upon each of these with his "red keel"; one he rolled up and put in his
jacket pocket, and the other he put in Joe's hat and removed it to a
little distance from the owner. And he also put into the hat certain
schoolboy treasures of almost inestimable value--among them a lump of
chalk, an India-rubber ball, three fishhooks, and one of that kind
of marbles known as a "sure 'nough crystal." Then he tiptoed his way
cautiously among the trees till he felt that he was out of hearing, and
straightway broke into a keen run in the direction of the sandbar.




CHAPTER XV

A few minutes later Tom was in the shoal water of the bar, wading toward
the Illinois shore. Before the depth reached his middle he was halfway
over; the current would permit no more wading, now, so he struck out
confidently to swim the remaining hundred yards. He swam quartering
upstream, but still was swept downward rather faster than he had
expected. However, he reached the shore finally, and drifted along till
he found a low place and drew himself out. He put his hand on his jacket
pocket, found his piece of bark safe, and then struck through the woods,
following the shore, with streaming garments. Shortly before ten
o'clock he came out into an open place opposite the village, and saw the
ferryboat lying in the shadow of the trees and the high bank. Everything
was quiet under the blinking stars. He crept down the bank, watching
with all his eyes, slipped into the water, swam three or four strokes
and climbed into the skiff that did "yawl" duty at the boat's stern. He
laid himself down under the thwarts and waited, panting.

Presently the cracked bell tapped and a voice gave the order to "cast
off." A minute or two later the skiff's head was standing high up,
against the boat's swell, and the voyage was begun. Tom felt happy in
his success, for he knew it was the boat's last trip for the night. At
the end of a long twelve or fifteen minutes the wheels stopped, and
Tom slipped overboard and swam ashore in the dusk, landing fifty yards
downstream, out of danger of possible stragglers.

He flew along unfrequented alleys, and shortly found himself at his
aunt's back fence. He climbed over, approached the "ell," and looked
in at the sitting-room window, for a light was burning there. There
sat Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, and Joe Harper's mother, grouped together,
talking. They were by the bed, and the bed was between them and the
door. Tom went to the door and began to softly lift the latch; then
he pressed gently and the door yielded a crack; he continued pushing
cautiously, and quaking every time it creaked, till he judged he might
squeeze through on his knees; so he put his head through and began,
warily.

"What makes the candle blow so?" said Aunt Polly. Tom hurried up. "Why,
that door's open, I believe. Why, of course it is. No end of strange
things now. Go 'long and shut it, Sid."

Tom disappeared under the bed just in time. He lay and "breathed"
himself for a time, and then crept to where he could almost touch his
aunt's foot.

"But as I was saying," said Aunt Polly, "he warn't _bad_, so to say--only
misch_ee_vous. Only just giddy, and harum-scarum, you know. He warn't
any more responsible than a colt. _He_ never meant any harm, and he was
the best-hearted boy that ever was"--and she began to cry.

"It was just so with my Joe--always full of his devilment, and up to
every kind of mischief, but he was just as unselfish and kind as he
could be--and laws bless me, to think I went and whipped him for taking
that cream, never once recollecting that I throwed it out myself because
it was sour, and I never to see him again in this world, never, never,
never, poor abused boy!" And Mrs. Harper sobbed as if her heart would
break.

"I hope Tom's better off where he is," said Sid, "but if he'd been
better in some ways--"

"_Sid!_" Tom felt the glare of the old lady's eye, though he could not
see it. "Not a word against my Tom, now that he's gone! God'll take care
of _him_--never you trouble _your_self, sir! Oh, Mrs. Harper, I don't
know how to give him up! I don't know how to give him up! He was such a
comfort to me, although he tormented my old heart out of me, 'most."

"The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away--Blessed be the name of
the Lord! But it's so hard--Oh, it's so hard! Only last Saturday my Joe
busted a firecracker right under my nose and I knocked him sprawling.
Little did I know then, how soon--Oh, if it was to do over again I'd hug
him and bless him for it."

"Yes, yes, yes, I know just how you feel, Mrs. Harper, I know just
exactly how you feel. No longer ago than yesterday noon, my Tom took
and filled the cat full of Pain-killer, and I did think the cretur would
tear the house down. And God forgive me, I cracked Tom's head with my
thimble, poor boy, poor dead boy. But he's out of all his troubles now.
And the last words I ever heard him say was to reproach--"

But this memory was too much for the old lady, and she broke entirely
down. Tom was snuffling, now, himself--and more in pity of himself than
anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word
for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself
than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief
to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy--and
the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his
nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.

He went on listening, and gathered by odds and ends that it was
conjectured at first that the boys had got drowned while taking a swim;
then the small raft had been missed; next, certain boys said the missing
lads had promised that the village should "hear something" soon; the
wise-heads had "put this and that together" and decided that the lads
had gone off on that raft and would turn up at the next town below,
presently; but toward noon the raft had been found, lodged against the
Missouri shore some five or six miles below the village--and then hope
perished; they must be drowned, else hunger would have driven them home
by nightfall if not sooner. It was believed that the search for the
bodies had been a fruitless effort merely because the drowning must
have occurred in mid-channel, since the boys, being good swimmers, would
otherwise have escaped to shore. This was Wednesday night. If the bodies
continued missing until Sunday, all hope would be given over, and the
funerals would be preached on that morning. Tom shuddered.

Mrs. Harper gave a sobbing goodnight and turned to go. Then with a
mutual impulse the two bereaved women flung themselves into each other's
arms and had a good, consoling cry, and then parted. Aunt Polly was
tender far beyond her wont, in her goodnight to Sid and Mary. Sid
snuffled a bit and Mary went off crying with all her heart.

Aunt Polly knelt down and prayed for Tom so touchingly, so appealingly,
and with such measureless love in her words and her old trembling voice,
that he was weltering in tears again, long before she was through.

He had to keep still long after she went to bed, for she kept making
broken-hearted ejaculations from time to time, tossing unrestfully, and
turning over. But at last she was still, only moaning a little in her
sleep. Now the boy stole out, rose gradually by the bedside, shaded the
candle-light with his hand, and stood regarding her. His heart was full
of pity for her. He took out his sycamore scroll and placed it by the
candle. But something occurred to him, and he lingered considering.
His face lighted with a happy solution of his thought; he put the bark
hastily in his pocket. Then he bent over and kissed the faded lips, and
straightway made his stealthy exit, latching the door behind him.

He threaded his way back to the ferry landing, found nobody at large
there, and walked boldly on board the boat, for he knew she was
tenantless except that there was a watchman, who always turned in and
slept like a graven image. He untied the skiff at the stern, slipped
into it, and was soon rowing cautiously upstream. When he had pulled a
mile above the village, he started quartering across and bent himself
stoutly to his work. He hit the landing on the other side neatly, for
this was a familiar bit of work to him. He was moved to capture
the skiff, arguing that it might be considered a ship and therefore
legitimate prey for a pirate, but he knew a thorough search would be
made for it and that might end in revelations. So he stepped ashore and
entered the woods.

He sat down and took a long rest, torturing himself meanwhile to keep
awake, and then started warily down the home-stretch. The night was far
spent. It was broad daylight before he found himself fairly abreast the
island bar. He rested again until the sun was well up and gilding the
great river with its splendor, and then he plunged into the stream. A
little later he paused, dripping, upon the threshold of the camp, and
heard Joe say:

"No, Tom's true-blue, Huck, and he'll come back. He won't desert. He
knows that would be a disgrace to a pirate, and Tom's too proud for that
sort of thing. He's up to something or other. Now I wonder what?"

"Well, the things is ours, anyway, ain't they?"

"Pretty near, but not yet, Huck. The writing says they are if he ain't
back here to breakfast."

"Which he is!" exclaimed Tom, with fine dramatic effect, stepping
grandly into camp.

A sumptuous breakfast of bacon and fish was shortly provided, and as the
boys set to work upon it, Tom recounted (and adorned) his adventures.
They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done.
Then Tom hid himself away in a shady nook to sleep till noon, and the
other pirates got ready to fish and explore.




CHAPTER XVI

AFTER dinner all the gang turned out to hunt for turtle eggs on the bar.
They went about poking sticks into the sand, and when they found a soft
place they went down on their knees and dug with their hands. Sometimes
they would take fifty or sixty eggs out of one hole. They were perfectly
round white things a trifle smaller than an English walnut. They had a
famous fried-egg feast that night, and another on Friday morning.

After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and
chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until
they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal
water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their
legs from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun.
And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each
other's faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other, with
averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and
struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all
went under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up blowing,
sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time.

When they were well exhausted, they would run out and sprawl on the dry,
hot sand, and lie there and cover themselves up with it, and by and by
break for the water again and go through the original performance once
more. Finally it occurred to them that their naked skin represented
flesh-colored "tights" very fairly; so they drew a ring in the sand and
had a circus--with three clowns in it, for none would yield this proudest
post to his neighbor.

Next they got their marbles and played "knucks" and "ringtaw" and
"keeps" till that amusement grew stale. Then Joe and Huck had another
swim, but Tom would not venture, because he found that in kicking off
his trousers he had kicked his string of rattlesnake rattles off his
ankle, and he wondered how he had escaped cramp so long without the
protection of this mysterious charm. He did not venture again until he
had found it, and by that time the other boys were tired and ready to
rest. They gradually wandered apart, dropped into the "dumps," and
fell to gazing longingly across the wide river to where the village lay
drowsing in the sun. Tom found himself writing "BECKY" in the sand with
his big toe; he scratched it out, and was angry with himself for his
weakness. But he wrote it again, nevertheless; he could not help it. He
erased it once more and then took himself out of temptation by driving
the other boys together and joining them.

But Joe's spirits had gone down almost beyond resurrection. He was so
homesick that he could hardly endure the misery of it. The tears lay
very near the surface. Huck was melancholy, too. Tom was downhearted,
but tried hard not to show it. He had a secret which he was not ready
to tell, yet, but if this mutinous depression was not broken up soon, he
would have to bring it out. He said, with a great show of cheerfulness:

"I bet there's been pirates on this island before, boys. We'll explore
it again. They've hid treasures here somewhere. How'd you feel to light
on a rotten chest full of gold and silver--hey?"

But it roused only faint enthusiasm, which faded out, with no reply.
Tom tried one or two other seductions; but they failed, too. It was
discouraging work. Joe sat poking up the sand with a stick and looking
very gloomy. Finally he said:

"Oh, boys, let's give it up. I want to go home. It's so lonesome."

"Oh no, Joe, you'll feel better by and by," said Tom. "Just think of the
fishing that's here."

"I don't care for fishing. I want to go home."

"But, Joe, there ain't such another swimming-place anywhere."

"Swimming's no good. I don't seem to care for it, somehow, when there
ain't anybody to say I sha'n't go in. I mean to go home."

"Oh, shucks! Baby! You want to see your mother, I reckon."

"Yes, I _do_ want to see my mother--and you would, too, if you had one. I
ain't any more baby than you are." And Joe snuffled a little.

"Well, we'll let the crybaby go home to his mother, won't we, Huck? Poor
thing--does it want to see its mother? And so it shall. You like it here,
don't you, Huck? We'll stay, won't we?"

Huck said, "Y-e-s"--without any heart in it.

"I'll never speak to you again as long as I live," said Joe, rising.
"There now!" And he moved moodily away and began to dress himself.

"Who cares!" said Tom. "Nobody wants you to. Go 'long home and get
laughed at. Oh, you're a nice pirate. Huck and me ain't crybabies. We'll
stay, won't we, Huck? Let him go if he wants to. I reckon we can get
along without him, per'aps."

But Tom was uneasy, nevertheless, and was alarmed to see Joe go sullenly
on with his dressing. And then it was discomforting to see Huck eying
Joe's preparations so wistfully, and keeping up such an ominous silence.
Presently, without a parting word, Joe began to wade off toward the
Illinois shore. Tom's heart began to sink. He glanced at Huck. Huck
could not bear the look, and dropped his eyes. Then he said:

"I want to go, too, Tom. It was getting so lonesome anyway, and now
it'll be worse. Let's us go, too, Tom."

"I won't! You can all go, if you want to. I mean to stay."

"Tom, I better go."

"Well, go 'long--who's hendering you."

Huck began to pick up his scattered clothes. He said:

"Tom, I wisht you'd come, too. Now you think it over. We'll wait for you
when we get to shore."

"Well, you'll wait a blame long time, that's all."

Huck started sorrowfully away, and Tom stood looking after him, with a
strong desire tugging at his heart to yield his pride and go along
too. He hoped the boys would stop, but they still waded slowly on. It
suddenly dawned on Tom that it was become very lonely and still. He made
one final struggle with his pride, and then darted after his comrades,
yelling:

"Wait! Wait! I want to tell you something!"

They presently stopped and turned around. When he got to where they
were, he began unfolding his secret, and they listened moodily till
at last they saw the "point" he was driving at, and then they set up a
warwhoop of applause and said it was "splendid!" and said if he had
told them at first, they wouldn't have started away. He made a plausible
excuse; but his real reason had been the fear that not even the secret
would keep them with him any very great length of time, and so he had
meant to hold it in reserve as a last seduction.

The lads came gayly back and went at their sports again with a will,
chattering all the time about Tom's stupendous plan and admiring the
genius of it. After a dainty egg and fish dinner, Tom said he wanted to
learn to smoke, now. Joe caught at the idea and said he would like to
try, too. So Huck made pipes and filled them. These novices had never
smoked anything before but cigars made of grapevine, and they "bit" the
tongue, and were not considered manly anyway.

Now they stretched themselves out on their elbows and began to puff,
charily, and with slender confidence. The smoke had an unpleasant taste,
and they gagged a little, but Tom said:

"Why, it's just as easy! If I'd a knowed this was all, I'd a learnt long
ago."

"So would I," said Joe. "It's just nothing."

"Why, many a time I've looked at people smoking, and thought well I wish
I could do that; but I never thought I could," said Tom.

"That's just the way with me, hain't it, Huck? You've heard me talk just
that way--haven't you, Huck? I'll leave it to Huck if I haven't."

"Yes--heaps of times," said Huck.

"Well, I have too," said Tom; "oh, hundreds of times. Once down by the
slaughter-house. Don't you remember, Huck? Bob Tanner was there, and
Johnny Miller, and Jeff Thatcher, when I said it. Don't you remember,
Huck, 'bout me saying that?"

"Yes, that's so," said Huck. "That was the day after I lost a white
alley. No, 'twas the day before."

"There--I told you so," said Tom. "Huck recollects it."

"I bleeve I could smoke this pipe all day," said Joe. "I don't feel
sick."

"Neither do I," said Tom. "I could smoke it all day. But I bet you Jeff
Thatcher couldn't."

"Jeff Thatcher! Why, he'd keel over just with two draws. Just let him
try it once. _He'd_ see!"

"I bet he would. And Johnny Miller--I wish could see Johnny Miller tackle
it once."

"Oh, don't I!" said Joe. "Why, I bet you Johnny Miller couldn't any more
do this than nothing. Just one little snifter would fetch _him_."

"'Deed it would, Joe. Say--I wish the boys could see us now."

"So do I."

"Say--boys, don't say anything about it, and some time when they're
around, I'll come up to you and say, 'Joe, got a pipe? I want a smoke.'
And you'll say, kind of careless like, as if it warn't anything, you'll
say, 'Yes, I got my _old_ pipe, and another one, but my tobacker ain't
very good.' And I'll say, 'Oh, that's all right, if it's _strong_
enough.' And then you'll out with the pipes, and we'll light up just as
ca'm, and then just see 'em look!"

"By jings, that'll be gay, Tom! I wish it was _now_!"

"So do I! And when we tell 'em we learned when we was off pirating,
won't they wish they'd been along?"

"Oh, I reckon not! I'll just _bet_ they will!"

So the talk ran on. But presently it began to flag a trifle, and
grow disjointed. The silences widened; the expectoration marvellously
increased. Every pore inside the boys' cheeks became a spouting
fountain; they could scarcely bail out the cellars under their tongues
fast enough to prevent an inundation; little overflowings down their
throats occurred in spite of all they could do, and sudden retchings
followed every time. Both boys were looking very pale and miserable,
now. Joe's pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers. Tom's followed. Both
fountains were going furiously and both pumps bailing with might and
main. Joe said feebly:

"I've lost my knife. I reckon I better go and find it."

Tom said, with quivering lips and halting utterance:

"I'll help you. You go over that way and I'll hunt around by the spring.
No, you needn't come, Huck--we can find it."

So Huck sat down again, and waited an hour. Then he found it lonesome,
and went to find his comrades. They were wide apart in the woods, both
very pale, both fast asleep. But something informed him that if they had
had any trouble they had got rid of it.

They were not talkative at supper that night. They had a humble look,
and when Huck prepared his pipe after the meal and was going to prepare
theirs, they said no, they were not feeling very well--something they ate
at dinner had disagreed with them.

About midnight Joe awoke, and called the boys. There was a brooding
oppressiveness in the air that seemed to bode something. The boys
huddled themselves together and sought the friendly companionship of
the fire, though the dull dead heat of the breathless atmosphere was
stifling. They sat still, intent and waiting. The solemn hush continued.
Beyond the light of the fire everything was swallowed up in the
blackness of darkness. Presently there came a quivering glow that
vaguely revealed the foliage for a moment and then vanished. By and by
another came, a little stronger. Then another. Then a faint moan came
sighing through the branches of the forest and the boys felt a fleeting
breath upon their cheeks, and shuddered with the fancy that the Spirit
of the Night had gone by. There was a pause. Now a weird flash turned
night into day and showed every little grassblade, separate and
distinct, that grew about their feet. And it showed three white,
startled faces, too. A deep peal of thunder went rolling and tumbling
down the heavens and lost itself in sullen rumblings in the distance. A
sweep of chilly air passed by, rustling all the leaves and snowing the
flaky ashes broadcast about the fire. Another fierce glare lit up the
forest and an instant crash followed that seemed to rend the treetops
right over the boys' heads. They clung together in terror, in the thick
gloom that followed. A few big raindrops fell pattering upon the leaves.

"Quick! boys, go for the tent!" exclaimed Tom.

They sprang away, stumbling over roots and among vines in the dark, no
two plunging in the same direction. A furious blast roared through
the trees, making everything sing as it went. One blinding flash after
another came, and peal on peal of deafening thunder. And now a drenching
rain poured down and the rising hurricane drove it in sheets along the
ground. The boys cried out to each other, but the roaring wind and the
booming thunderblasts drowned their voices utterly. However, one by one
they straggled in at last and took shelter under the tent, cold, scared,
and streaming with water; but to have company in misery seemed something
to be grateful for. They could not talk, the old sail flapped so
furiously, even if the other noises would have allowed them. The tempest
rose higher and higher, and presently the sail tore loose from its
fastenings and went winging away on the blast. The boys seized each
others' hands and fled, with many tumblings and bruises, to the shelter
of a great oak that stood upon the riverbank. Now the battle was at its
highest. Under the ceaseless conflagration of lightning that flamed
in the skies, everything below stood out in cleancut and shadowless
distinctness: the bending trees, the billowy river, white with foam, the
driving spray of spumeflakes, the dim outlines of the high bluffs on
the other side, glimpsed through the drifting cloudrack and the slanting
veil of rain. Every little while some giant tree yielded the fight
and fell crashing through the younger growth; and the unflagging
thunderpeals came now in ear-splitting explosive bursts, keen and sharp,
and unspeakably appalling. The storm culminated in one matchless effort
that seemed likely to tear the island to pieces, burn it up, drown it to
the treetops, blow it away, and deafen every creature in it, all at one
and the same moment. It was a wild night for homeless young heads to be
out in.

But at last the battle was done, and the forces retired with weaker and
weaker threatenings and grumblings, and peace resumed her sway. The
boys went back to camp, a good deal awed; but they found there was still
something to be thankful for, because the great sycamore, the shelter
of their beds, was a ruin, now, blasted by the lightnings, and they were
not under it when the catastrophe happened.

Everything in camp was drenched, the campfire as well; for they were but
heedless lads, like their generation, and had made no provision against
rain. Here was matter for dismay, for they were soaked through and
chilled. They were eloquent in their distress; but they presently
discovered that the fire had eaten so far up under the great log it had
been built against (where it curved upward and separated itself from
the ground), that a handbreadth or so of it had escaped wetting; so they
patiently wrought until, with shreds and bark gathered from the under
sides of sheltered logs, they coaxed the fire to burn again. Then they
piled on great dead boughs till they had a roaring furnace, and were
gladhearted once more. They dried their boiled ham and had a feast,
and after that they sat by the fire and expanded and glorified their
midnight adventure until morning, for there was not a dry spot to sleep
on, anywhere around.

As the sun began to steal in upon the boys, drowsiness came over
them, and they went out on the sandbar and lay down to sleep. They got
scorched out by and by, and drearily set about getting breakfast. After
the meal they felt rusty, and stiff-jointed, and a little homesick once
more. Tom saw the signs, and fell to cheering up the pirates as well as
he could. But they cared nothing for marbles, or circus, or swimming, or
anything. He reminded them of the imposing secret, and raised a ray of
cheer. While it lasted, he got them interested in a new device. This was
to knock off being pirates, for a while, and be Indians for a change.
They were attracted by this idea; so it was not long before they were
stripped, and striped from head to heel with black mud, like so many
zebras--all of them chiefs, of course--and then they went tearing through
the woods to attack an English settlement.

By and by they separated into three hostile tribes, and darted upon each
other from ambush with dreadful warwhoops, and killed and scalped each
other by thousands. It was a gory day. Consequently it was an extremely
satisfactory one.

They assembled in camp toward suppertime, hungry and happy; but now
a difficulty arose--hostile Indians could not break the bread of
hospitality together without first making peace, and this was a simple
impossibility without smoking a pipe of peace. There was no other
process that ever they had heard of. Two of the savages almost wished
they had remained pirates. However, there was no other way; so with such
show of cheerfulness as they could muster they called for the pipe and
took their whiff as it passed, in due form.

And behold, they were glad they had gone into savagery, for they had
gained something; they found that they could now smoke a little without
having to go and hunt for a lost knife; they did not get sick enough to
be seriously uncomfortable. They were not likely to fool away this high
promise for lack of effort. No, they practised cautiously, after supper,
with right fair success, and so they spent a jubilant evening. They were
prouder and happier in their new acquirement than they would have been
in the scalping and skinning of the Six Nations. We will leave them to
smoke and chatter and brag, since we have no further use for them at
present.




CHAPTER XVII

BUT there was no hilarity in the little town that same tranquil Saturday
afternoon. The Harpers, and Aunt Polly's family, were being put into
mourning, with great grief and many tears. An unusual quiet possessed
the village, although it was ordinarily quiet enough, in all conscience.
The villagers conducted their concerns with an absent air, and talked
little; but they sighed often. The Saturday holiday seemed a burden to
the children. They had no heart in their sports, and gradually gave them
up.

In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself moping about the deserted
schoolhouse yard, and feeling very melancholy. But she found nothing
there to comfort her. She soliloquized:

"Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But I haven't got
anything now to remember him by." And she choked back a little sob.

Presently she stopped, and said to herself:

"It was right here. Oh, if it was to do over again, I wouldn't say
that--I wouldn't say it for the whole world. But he's gone now; I'll
never, never, never see him any more."

This thought broke her down, and she wandered away, with tears rolling
down her cheeks. Then quite a group of boys and girls--playmates of Tom's
and Joe's--came by, and stood looking over the paling fence and talking
in reverent tones of how Tom did so-and-so the last time they saw
him, and how Joe said this and that small trifle (pregnant with awful
prophecy, as they could easily see now!)--and each speaker pointed out
the exact spot where the lost lads stood at the time, and then added
something like "and I was a-standing just so--just as I am now, and as if
you was him--I was as close as that--and he smiled, just this way--and then
something seemed to go all over me, like--awful, you know--and I never
thought what it meant, of course, but I can see now!"

Then there was a dispute about who saw the dead boys last in life, and
many claimed that dismal distinction, and offered evidences, more or
less tampered with by the witness; and when it was ultimately decided
who _did_ see the departed last, and exchanged the last words with them,
the lucky parties took upon themselves a sort of sacred importance,
and were gaped at and envied by all the rest. One poor chap, who had
no other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the
remembrance:

"Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once."

But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that,
and so that cheapened the distinction too much. The group loitered away,
still recalling memories of the lost heroes, in awed voices.

When the Sunday-school hour was finished, the next morning, the bell
began to toll, instead of ringing in the usual way. It was a very still
Sabbath, and the mournful sound seemed in keeping with the musing hush
that lay upon nature. The villagers began to gather, loitering a moment
in the vestibule to converse in whispers about the sad event. But there
was no whispering in the house; only the funereal rustling of dresses
as the women gathered to their seats disturbed the silence there. None
could remember when the little church had been so full before. There
was finally a waiting pause, an expectant dumbness, and then Aunt Polly
entered, followed by Sid and Mary, and they by the Harper family, all in
deep black, and the whole congregation, the old minister as well, rose
reverently and stood until the mourners were seated in the front pew.
There was another communing silence, broken at intervals by muffled
sobs, and then the minister spread his hands abroad and prayed. A moving
hymn was sung, and the text followed: "I am the Resurrection and the
Life."

As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the
graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that
every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang
in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always
before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor
boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the
departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the
people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes
were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had
seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation
became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last
the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus
of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and
crying in the pulpit.

There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later
the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above
his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair
of eyes followed the minister's, and then almost with one impulse the
congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up
the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin of drooping rags,
sneaking sheepishly in the rear! They had been hid in the unused gallery
listening to their own funeral sermon!

Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored
ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings, while
poor Huck stood abashed and uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what
to do or where to hide from so many unwelcoming eyes. He wavered, and
started to slink away, but Tom seized him and said:

"Aunt Polly, it ain't fair. Somebody's got to be glad to see Huck."

"And so they shall. I'm glad to see him, poor motherless thing!" And
the loving attentions Aunt Polly lavished upon him were the one thing
capable of making him more uncomfortable than he was before.

Suddenly the minister shouted at the top of his voice: "Praise God from
whom all blessings flow--_sing_!--and put your hearts in it!"

And they did. Old Hundred swelled up with a triumphant burst, and
while it shook the rafters Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the
envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the
proudest moment of his life.

As the "sold" congregation trooped out they said they would almost be
willing to be made ridiculous again to hear Old Hundred sung like that
once more.

Tom got more cuffs and kisses that day--according to Aunt Polly's varying
moods--than he had earned before in a year; and he hardly knew which
expressed the most gratefulness to God and affection for himself.




CHAPTER XVIII

THAT was Tom's great secret--the scheme to return home with his brother
pirates and attend their own funerals. They had paddled over to the
Missouri shore on a log, at dusk on Saturday, landing five or six miles
below the village; they had slept in the woods at the edge of the town
till nearly daylight, and had then crept through back lanes and alleys
and finished their sleep in the gallery of the church among a chaos of
invalided benches.

At breakfast, Monday morning, Aunt Polly and Mary were very loving to
Tom, and very attentive to his wants. There was an unusual amount of
talk. In the course of it Aunt Polly said:

"Well, I don't say it wasn't a fine joke, Tom, to keep everybody
suffering 'most a week so you boys had a good time, but it is a pity you
could be so hard-hearted as to let me suffer so. If you could come over
on a log to go to your funeral, you could have come over and give me a
hint some way that you warn't dead, but only run off."

"Yes, you could have done that, Tom," said Mary; "and I believe you
would if you had thought of it."

"Would you, Tom?" said Aunt Polly, her face lighting wistfully. "Say,
now, would you, if you'd thought of it?"

"I--well, I don't know. 'Twould 'a' spoiled everything."

"Tom, I hoped you loved me that much," said Aunt Polly, with a grieved
tone that discomforted the boy. "It would have been something if you'd
cared enough to _think_ of it, even if you didn't _do_ it."

"Now, auntie, that ain't any harm," pleaded Mary; "it's only Tom's giddy
way--he is always in such a rush that he never thinks of anything."

"More's the pity. Sid would have thought. And Sid would have come and
_done_ it, too. Tom, you'll look back, some day, when it's too late,
and wish you'd cared a little more for me when it would have cost you so
little."

"Now, auntie, you know I do care for you," said Tom.

"I'd know it better if you acted more like it."

"I wish now I'd thought," said Tom, with a repentant tone; "but I dreamt
about you, anyway. That's something, ain't it?"

"It ain't much--a cat does that much--but it's better than nothing. What
did you dream?"

"Why, Wednesday night I dreamt that you was sitting over there by the
bed, and Sid was sitting by the woodbox, and Mary next to him."

"Well, so we did. So we always do. I'm glad your dreams could take even
that much trouble about us."

"And I dreamt that Joe Harper's mother was here."

"Why, she was here! Did you dream any more?"

"Oh, lots. But it's so dim, now."

"Well, try to recollect--can't you?"

"Somehow it seems to me that the wind--the wind blowed the--the--"

"Try harder, Tom! The wind did blow something. Come!"

Tom pressed his fingers on his forehead an anxious minute, and then
said:

"I've got it now! I've got it now! It blowed the candle!"

"Mercy on us! Go on, Tom--go on!"

"And it seems to me that you said, 'Why, I believe that that door--'"

"Go _on_, Tom!"

"Just let me study a moment--just a moment. Oh, yes--you said you believed
the door was open."

"As I'm sitting here, I did! Didn't I, Mary! Go on!"

"And then--and then--well I won't be certain, but it seems like as if you
made Sid go and--and--"

"Well? Well? What did I make him do, Tom? What did I make him do?"

"You made him--you--Oh, you made him shut it."

"Well, for the land's sake! I never heard the beat of that in all my
days! Don't tell _me_ there ain't anything in dreams, any more. Sereny
Harper shall know of this before I'm an hour older. I'd like to see her
get around _this_ with her rubbage 'bout superstition. Go on, Tom!"

"Oh, it's all getting just as bright as day, now. Next you said I warn't
_bad_, only mischeevous and harum-scarum, and not any more responsible
than--than--I think it was a colt, or something."

"And so it was! Well, goodness gracious! Go on, Tom!"

"And then you began to cry."

"So I did. So I did. Not the first time, neither. And then--"

"Then Mrs. Harper she began to cry, and said Joe was just the same, and
she wished she hadn't whipped him for taking cream when she'd throwed it
out her own self--"

"Tom! The sperrit was upon you! You was a prophesying--that's what you
was doing! Land alive, go on, Tom!"

"Then Sid he said--he said--"

"I don't think I said anything," said Sid.

"Yes you did, Sid," said Mary.

"Shut your heads and let Tom go on! What did he say, Tom?"

"He said--I _think_ he said he hoped I was better off where I was gone
to, but if I'd been better sometimes--"

"_There_, d'you hear that! It was his very words!"

"And you shut him up sharp."

"I lay I did! There must 'a' been an angel there. There _was_ an angel
there, somewheres!"

"And Mrs. Harper told about Joe scaring her with a firecracker, and you
told about Peter and the Pain-killer--"

"Just as true as I live!"

"And then there was a whole lot of talk 'bout dragging the river for us,
and 'bout having the funeral Sunday, and then you and old Miss Harper
hugged and cried, and she went."

"It happened just so! It happened just so, as sure as I'm a-sitting in
these very tracks. Tom, you couldn't told it more like if you'd 'a' seen
it! And then what? Go on, Tom!"

"Then I thought you prayed for me--and I could see you and hear every
word you said. And you went to bed, and I was so sorry that I took and
wrote on a piece of sycamore bark, 'We ain't dead--we are only off being
pirates,' and put it on the table by the candle; and then you looked
so good, laying there asleep, that I thought I went and leaned over and
kissed you on the lips."

"Did you, Tom, _did_ you! I just forgive you everything for that!" And
she seized the boy in a crushing embrace that made him feel like the
guiltiest of villains.

"It was very kind, even though it was only a--dream," Sid soliloquized
just audibly.

"Shut up, Sid! A body does just the same in a dream as he'd do if he was
awake. Here's a big Milum apple I've been saving for you, Tom, if you
was ever found again--now go 'long to school. I'm thankful to the good
God and Father of us all I've got you back, that's long-suffering and
merciful to them that believe on Him and keep His word, though goodness
knows I'm unworthy of it, but if only the worthy ones got His blessings
and had His hand to help them over the rough places, there's few enough
would smile here or ever enter into His rest when the long night comes.
Go 'long Sid, Mary, Tom--take yourselves off--you've hendered me long
enough."

The children left for school, and the old lady to call on Mrs. Harper
and vanquish her realism with Tom's marvellous dream. Sid had better
judgment than to utter the thought that was in his mind as he left the
house. It was this: "Pretty thin--as long a dream as that, without any
mistakes in it!"

What a hero Tom was become, now! He did not go skipping and prancing,
but moved with a dignified swagger as became a pirate who felt that the
public eye was on him. And indeed it was; he tried not to seem to see
the looks or hear the remarks as he passed along, but they were food and
drink to him. Smaller boys than himself flocked at his heels, as proud
to be seen with him, and tolerated by him, as if he had been the drummer
at the head of a procession or the elephant leading a menagerie into
town. Boys of his own size pretended not to know he had been away at
all; but they were consuming with envy, nevertheless. They would have
given anything to have that swarthy sun-tanned skin of his, and his
glittering notoriety; and Tom would not have parted with either for a
circus.

At school the children made so much of him and of Joe, and delivered
such eloquent admiration from their eyes, that the two heroes were
not long in becoming insufferably "stuck-up." They began to tell their
adventures to hungry listeners--but they only began; it was not a
thing likely to have an end, with imaginations like theirs to furnish
material. And finally, when they got out their pipes and went serenely
puffing around, the very summit of glory was reached.

Tom decided that he could be independent of Becky Thatcher now. Glory
was sufficient. He would live for glory. Now that he was distinguished,
maybe she would be wanting to "make up." Well, let her--she should see
that he could be as indifferent as some other people. Presently she
arrived. Tom pretended not to see her. He moved away and joined a group
of boys and girls and began to talk. Soon he observed that she was
tripping gayly back and forth with flushed face and dancing eyes,
pretending to be busy chasing schoolmates, and screaming with laughter
when she made a capture; but he noticed that she always made her
captures in his vicinity, and that she seemed to cast a conscious eye
in his direction at such times, too. It gratified all the vicious vanity
that was in him; and so, instead of winning him, it only "set him up"
the more and made him the more diligent to avoid betraying that he
knew she was about. Presently she gave over skylarking, and moved
irresolutely about, sighing once or twice and glancing furtively and
wistfully toward Tom. Then she observed that now Tom was talking more
particularly to Amy Lawrence than to any one else. She felt a sharp pang
and grew disturbed and uneasy at once. She tried to go away, but her
feet were treacherous, and carried her to the group instead. She said to
a girl almost at Tom's elbow--with sham vivacity:

"Why, Mary Austin! you bad girl, why didn't you come to Sunday-school?"

"I did come--didn't you see me?"

"Why, no! Did you? Where did you sit?"

"I was in Miss Peters' class, where I always go. I saw _you_."

"Did you? Why, it's funny I didn't see you. I wanted to tell you about
the picnic."

"Oh, that's jolly. Who's going to give it?"

"My ma's going to let me have one."

"Oh, goody; I hope she'll let _me_ come."

"Well, she will. The picnic's for me. She'll let anybody come that I
want, and I want you."

"That's ever so nice. When is it going to be?"

"By and by. Maybe about vacation."

"Oh, won't it be fun! You going to have all the girls and boys?"

"Yes, every one that's friends to me--or wants to be"; and she glanced
ever so furtively at Tom, but he talked right along to Amy Lawrence
about the terrible storm on the island, and how the lightning tore the
great sycamore tree "all to flinders" while he was "standing within
three feet of it."

"Oh, may I come?" said Grace Miller.

"Yes."

"And me?" said Sally Rogers.

"Yes."

"And me, too?" said Susy Harper. "And Joe?"

"Yes."

And so on, with clapping of joyful hands till all the group had begged
for invitations but Tom and Amy. Then Tom turned coolly away, still
talking, and took Amy with him. Becky's lips trembled and the tears
came to her eyes; she hid these signs with a forced gayety and went on
chattering, but the life had gone out of the picnic, now, and out of
everything else; she got away as soon as she could and hid herself and
had what her sex call "a good cry." Then she sat moody, with wounded
pride, till the bell rang. She roused up, now, with a vindictive cast
in her eye, and gave her plaited tails a shake and said she knew what
_she'd_ do.

At recess Tom continued his flirtation with Amy with jubilant
self-satisfaction. And he kept drifting about to find Becky and lacerate
her with the performance. At last he spied her, but there was a sudden
falling of his mercury. She was sitting cosily on a little bench behind
the schoolhouse looking at a picture-book with Alfred Temple--and so
absorbed were they, and their heads so close together over the book,
that they did not seem to be conscious of anything in the world besides.
Jealousy ran red-hot through Tom's veins. He began to hate himself for
throwing away the chance Becky had offered for a reconciliation. He
called himself a fool, and all the hard names he could think of. He
wanted to cry with vexation. Amy chatted happily along, as they walked,
for her heart was singing, but Tom's tongue had lost its function. He
did not hear what Amy was saying, and whenever she paused expectantly
he could only stammer an awkward assent, which was as often misplaced
as otherwise. He kept drifting to the rear of the schoolhouse, again and
again, to sear his eyeballs with the hateful spectacle there. He could
not help it. And it maddened him to see, as he thought he saw, that
Becky Thatcher never once suspected that he was even in the land of the
living. But she did see, nevertheless; and she knew she was winning her
fight, too, and was glad to see him suffer as she had suffered.

Amy's happy prattle became intolerable. Tom hinted at things he had
to attend to; things that must be done; and time was fleeting. But in
vain--the girl chirped on. Tom thought, "Oh, hang her, ain't I ever going
to get rid of her?" At last he must be attending to those things--and she
said artlessly that she would be "around" when school let out. And he
hastened away, hating her for it.

"Any other boy!" Tom thought, grating his teeth. "Any boy in the whole
town but that Saint Louis smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is
aristocracy! Oh, all right, I licked you the first day you ever saw this
town, mister, and I'll lick you again! You just wait till I catch you
out! I'll just take and--"

And he went through the motions of thrashing an imaginary boy--pummelling
the air, and kicking and gouging. "Oh, you do, do you? You holler
'nough, do you? Now, then, let that learn you!" And so the imaginary
flogging was finished to his satisfaction.

Tom fled home at noon. His conscience could not endure any more of Amy's
grateful happiness, and his jealousy could bear no more of the other
distress. Becky resumed her picture inspections with Alfred, but as the
minutes dragged along and no Tom came to suffer, her triumph began to
cloud and she lost interest; gravity and absentmindedness followed,
and then melancholy; two or three times she pricked up her ear at
a footstep, but it was a false hope; no Tom came. At last she grew
entirely miserable and wished she hadn't carried it so far. When
poor Alfred, seeing that he was losing her, he did not know how, kept
exclaiming: "Oh, here's a jolly one! look at this!" she lost patience at
last, and said, "Oh, don't bother me! I don't care for them!" and burst
into tears, and got up and walked away.

Alfred dropped alongside and was going to try to comfort her, but she
said:

"Go away and leave me alone, can't you! I hate you!"

So the boy halted, wondering what he could have done--for she had said
she would look at pictures all through the nooning--and she walked on,
crying. Then Alfred went musing into the deserted schoolhouse. He was
humiliated and angry. He easily guessed his way to the truth--the girl
had simply made a convenience of him to vent her spite upon Tom Sawyer.
He was far from hating Tom the less when this thought occurred to him.
He wished there was some way to get that boy into trouble without much
risk to himself. Tom's spelling-book fell under his eye. Here was his
opportunity. He gratefully opened to the lesson for the afternoon and
poured ink upon the page.

Becky, glancing in at a window behind him at the moment, saw the act,
and moved on, without discovering herself. She started homeward, now,
intending to find Tom and tell him; Tom would be thankful and their
troubles would be healed. Before she was half way home, however, she
had changed her mind. The thought of Tom's treatment of her when she was
talking about her picnic came scorching back and filled her with shame.
She resolved to let him get whipped on the damaged spelling-book's
account, and to hate him forever, into the bargain.




CHAPTER XIX

TOM arrived at home in a dreary mood, and the first thing his aunt said
to him showed him that he had brought his sorrows to an unpromising
market:

"Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive!"

"Auntie, what have I done?"

"Well, you've done enough. Here I go over to Sereny Harper, like an old
softy, expecting I'm going to make her believe all that rubbage about
that dream, when lo and behold you she'd found out from Joe that you was
over here and heard all the talk we had that night. Tom, I don't know
what is to become of a boy that will act like that. It makes me feel so
bad to think you could let me go to Sereny Harper and make such a fool
of myself and never say a word."

This was a new aspect of the thing. His smartness of the morning had
seemed to Tom a good joke before, and very ingenious. It merely looked
mean and shabby now. He hung his head and could not think of anything to
say for a moment. Then he said:

"Auntie, I wish I hadn't done it--but I didn't think."

"Oh, child, you never think. You never think of anything but your
own selfishness. You could think to come all the way over here from
Jackson's Island in the night to laugh at our troubles, and you could
think to fool me with a lie about a dream; but you couldn't ever think
to pity us and save us from sorrow."

"Auntie, I know now it was mean, but I didn't mean to be mean. I didn't,
honest. And besides, I didn't come over here to laugh at you that
night."

"What did you come for, then?"

"It was to tell you not to be uneasy about us, because we hadn't got
drownded."

"Tom, Tom, I would be the thankfullest soul in this world if I could
believe you ever had as good a thought as that, but you know you never
did--and I know it, Tom."

"Indeed and 'deed I did, auntie--I wish I may never stir if I didn't."

"Oh, Tom, don't lie--don't do it. It only makes things a hundred times
worse."

"It ain't a lie, auntie; it's the truth. I wanted to keep you from
grieving--that was all that made me come."

"I'd give the whole world to believe that--it would cover up a power
of sins, Tom. I'd 'most be glad you'd run off and acted so bad. But it
ain't reasonable; because, why didn't you tell me, child?"

"Why, you see, when you got to talking about the funeral, I just got all
full of the idea of our coming and hiding in the church, and I couldn't
somehow bear to spoil it. So I just put the bark back in my pocket and
kept mum."

"What bark?"

"The bark I had wrote on to tell you we'd gone pirating. I wish, now,
you'd waked up when I kissed you--I do, honest."

The hard lines in his aunt's face relaxed and a sudden tenderness dawned
in her eyes.

"_Did_ you kiss me, Tom?"

"Why, yes, I did."

"Are you sure you did, Tom?"

"Why, yes, I did, auntie--certain sure."

"What did you kiss me for, Tom?"

"Because I loved you so, and you laid there moaning and I was so sorry."

The words sounded like truth. The old lady could not hide a tremor in
her voice when she said:

"Kiss me again, Tom!--and be off with you to school, now, and don't
bother me any more."

The moment he was gone, she ran to a closet and got out the ruin of a
jacket which Tom had gone pirating in. Then she stopped, with it in her
hand, and said to herself:

"No, I don't dare. Poor boy, I reckon he's lied about it--but it's a
blessed, blessed lie, there's such a comfort come from it. I hope
the Lord--I _know_ the Lord will forgive him, because it was such
good-heartedness in him to tell it. But I don't want to find out it's a
lie. I won't look."

She put the jacket away, and stood by musing a minute. Twice she put out
her hand to take the garment again, and twice she refrained. Once more
she ventured, and this time she fortified herself with the thought:
"It's a good lie--it's a good lie--I won't let it grieve me." So she
sought the jacket pocket. A moment later she was reading Tom's piece of
bark through flowing tears and saying: "I could forgive the boy, now, if
he'd committed a million sins!"




CHAPTER XX

THERE was something about Aunt Polly's manner, when she kissed Tom, that
swept away his low spirits and made him lighthearted and happy again. He
started to school and had the luck of coming upon Becky Thatcher at the
head of Meadow Lane. His mood always determined his manner. Without a
moment's hesitation he ran to her and said:

"I acted mighty mean today, Becky, and I'm so sorry. I won't ever, ever
do that way again, as long as ever I live--please make up, won't you?"

The girl stopped and looked him scornfully in the face:

"I'll thank you to keep yourself _to_ yourself, Mr. Thomas Sawyer. I'll
never speak to you again."

She tossed her head and passed on. Tom was so stunned that he had not
even presence of mind enough to say "Who cares, Miss Smarty?" until the
right time to say it had gone by. So he said nothing. But he was in a
fine rage, nevertheless. He moped into the schoolyard wishing she were
a boy, and imagining how he would trounce her if she were. He presently
encountered her and delivered a stinging remark as he passed. She hurled
one in return, and the angry breach was complete. It seemed to Becky, in
her hot resentment, that she could hardly wait for school to "take in,"
she was so impatient to see Tom flogged for the injured spelling-book.
If she had had any lingering notion of exposing Alfred Temple, Tom's
offensive fling had driven it entirely away.

Poor girl, she did not know how fast she was nearing trouble herself.
The master, Mr. Dobbins, had reached middle age with an unsatisfied
ambition. The darling of his desires was, to be a doctor, but
poverty had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village
schoolmaster. Every day he took a mysterious book out of his desk and
absorbed himself in it at times when no classes were reciting. He kept
that book under lock and key. There was not an urchin in school but was
perishing to have a glimpse of it, but the chance never came. Every boy
and girl had a theory about the nature of that book; but no two theories
were alike, and there was no way of getting at the facts in the case.
Now, as Becky was passing by the desk, which stood near the door, she
noticed that the key was in the lock! It was a precious moment. She
glanced around; found herself alone, and the next instant she had the
book in her hands. The titlepage--Professor Somebody's _Anatomy_--carried
no information to her mind; so she began to turn the leaves. She came at
once upon a handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece--a human figure,
stark naked. At that moment a shadow fell on the page and Tom Sawyer
stepped in at the door and caught a glimpse of the picture. Becky
snatched at the book to close it, and had the hard luck to tear the
pictured page half down the middle. She thrust the volume into the desk,
turned the key, and burst out crying with shame and vexation.

"Tom Sawyer, you are just as mean as you can be, to sneak up on a person
and look at what they're looking at."

"How could I know you was looking at anything?"

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Sawyer; you know you're
going to tell on me, and oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! I'll be
whipped, and I never was whipped in school."

Then she stamped her little foot and said:

"_Be_ so mean if you want to! I know something that's going to happen.
You just wait and you'll see! Hateful, hateful, hateful!"--and she flung
out of the house with a new explosion of crying.

Tom stood still, rather flustered by this onslaught. Presently he said
to himself:

"What a curious kind of a fool a girl is! Never been licked in
school! Shucks! What's a licking! That's just like a girl--they're so
thin-skinned and chicken-hearted. Well, of course I ain't going to tell
old Dobbins on this little fool, because there's other ways of getting
even on her, that ain't so mean; but what of it? Old Dobbins will ask
who it was tore his book. Nobody'll answer. Then he'll do just the way
he always does--ask first one and then t'other, and when he comes to the
right girl he'll know it, without any telling. Girls' faces always tell
on them. They ain't got any backbone. She'll get licked. Well, it's a
kind of a tight place for Becky Thatcher, because there ain't any way
out of it." Tom conned the thing a moment longer, and then added: "All
right, though; she'd like to see me in just such a fix--let her sweat it
out!"

Tom joined the mob of skylarking scholars outside. In a few moments the
master arrived and school "took in." Tom did not feel a strong interest
in his studies. Every time he stole a glance at the girls' side of the
room Becky's face troubled him. Considering all things, he did not want
to pity her, and yet it was all he could do to help it. He could get
up no exultation that was really worthy the name. Presently the
spelling-book discovery was made, and Tom's mind was entirely full
of his own matters for a while after that. Becky roused up from her
lethargy of distress and showed good interest in the proceedings. She
did not expect that Tom could get out of his trouble by denying that he
spilt the ink on the book himself; and she was right. The denial only
seemed to make the thing worse for Tom. Becky supposed she would be glad
of that, and she tried to believe she was glad of it, but she found she
was not certain. When the worst came to the worst, she had an impulse
to get up and tell on Alfred Temple, but she made an effort and forced
herself to keep still--because, said she to herself, "he'll tell about me
tearing the picture sure. I wouldn't say a word, not to save his life!"

Tom took his whipping and went back to his seat not at all
broken-hearted, for he thought it was possible that he had unknowingly
upset the ink on the spelling-book himself, in some skylarking bout--he
had denied it for form's sake and because it was custom, and had stuck
to the denial from principle.

A whole hour drifted by, the master sat nodding in his throne, the air
was drowsy with the hum of study. By and by, Mr. Dobbins straightened
himself up, yawned, then unlocked his desk, and reached for his book,
but seemed undecided whether to take it out or leave it. Most of the
pupils glanced up languidly, but there were two among them that watched
his movements with intent eyes. Mr. Dobbins fingered his book absently
for a while, then took it out and settled himself in his chair to read!
Tom shot a glance at Becky. He had seen a hunted and helpless rabbit
look as she did, with a gun levelled at its head. Instantly he forgot
his quarrel with her. Quick--something must be done! done in a flash,
too! But the very imminence of the emergency paralyzed his invention.
Good!--he had an inspiration! He would run and snatch the book, spring
through the door and fly. But his resolution shook for one little
instant, and the chance was lost--the master opened the volume. If Tom
only had the wasted opportunity back again! Too late. There was no help
for Becky now, he said. The next moment the master faced the school.
Every eye sank under his gaze. There was that in it which smote even
the innocent with fear. There was silence while one might count ten--the
master was gathering his wrath. Then he spoke: "Who tore this book?"

There was not a sound. One could have heard a pin drop. The stillness
continued; the master searched face after face for signs of guilt.

"Benjamin Rogers, did you tear this book?"

A denial. Another pause.

"Joseph Harper, did you?"

Another denial. Tom's uneasiness grew more and more intense under the
slow torture of these proceedings. The master scanned the ranks of
boys--considered a while, then turned to the girls:

"Amy Lawrence?"

A shake of the head.

"Gracie Miller?"

The same sign.

"Susan Harper, did you do this?"

Another negative. The next girl was Becky Thatcher. Tom was trembling
from head to foot with excitement and a sense of the hopelessness of the
situation.

"Rebecca Thatcher" [Tom glanced at her face--it was white with
terror]--"did you tear--no, look me in the face" [her hands rose in
appeal]--"did you tear this book?"

A thought shot like lightning through Tom's brain. He sprang to his feet
and shouted--"I done it!"

The school stared in perplexity at this incredible folly. Tom stood a
moment, to gather his dismembered faculties; and when he stepped forward
to go to his punishment the surprise, the gratitude, the adoration that
shone upon him out of poor Becky's eyes seemed pay enough for a hundred
floggings. Inspired by the splendor of his own act, he took without
an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr. Dobbins had ever
administered; and also received with indifference the added cruelty of a
command to remain two hours after school should be dismissed--for he
knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity was done, and not
count the tedious time as loss, either.

Tom went to bed that night planning vengeance against Alfred Temple; for
with shame and repentance Becky had told him all, not forgetting her own
treachery; but even the longing for vengeance had to give way, soon, to
pleasanter musings, and he fell asleep at last with Becky's latest words
lingering dreamily in his ear--

"Tom, how _could_ you be so noble!"




CHAPTER XXI

VACATION was approaching. The schoolmaster, always severe, grew severer
and more exacting than ever, for he wanted the school to make a good
showing on "Examination" day. His rod and his ferule were seldom idle
now--at least among the smaller pupils. Only the biggest boys, and young
ladies of eighteen and twenty, escaped lashing. Mr. Dobbins' lashings
were very vigorous ones, too; for although he carried, under his wig, a
perfectly bald and shiny head, he had only reached middle age, and there
was no sign of feebleness in his muscle. As the great day approached,
all the tyranny that was in him came to the surface; he seemed to take a
vindictive pleasure in punishing the least shortcomings. The consequence
was, that the smaller boys spent their days in terror and suffering and
their nights in plotting revenge. They threw away no opportunity to do
the master a mischief. But he kept ahead all the time. The retribution
that followed every vengeful success was so sweeping and majestic that
the boys always retired from the field badly worsted. At last they
conspired together and hit upon a plan that promised a dazzling victory.
They swore in the signpainter's boy, told him the scheme, and asked his
help. He had his own reasons for being delighted, for the master boarded
in his father's family and had given the boy ample cause to hate him.
The master's wife would go on a visit to the country in a few days, and
there would be nothing to interfere with the plan; the master always
prepared himself for great occasions by getting pretty well fuddled, and
the signpainter's boy said that when the dominie had reached the proper
condition on Examination Evening he would "manage the thing" while he
napped in his chair; then he would have him awakened at the right time
and hurried away to school.

In the fulness of time the interesting occasion arrived. At eight in
the evening the schoolhouse was brilliantly lighted, and adorned with
wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers. The master sat throned in
his great chair upon a raised platform, with his blackboard behind him.
He was looking tolerably mellow. Three rows of benches on each side and
six rows in front of him were occupied by the dignitaries of the town
and by the parents of the pupils. To his left, back of the rows of
citizens, was a spacious temporary platform upon which were seated the
scholars who were to take part in the exercises of the evening; rows of
small boys, washed and dressed to an intolerable state of discomfort;
rows of gawky big boys; snowbanks of girls and young ladies clad in
lawn and muslin and conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their
grandmothers' ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue ribbon and
the flowers in their hair. All the rest of the house was filled with
non-participating scholars.

The exercises began. A very little boy stood up and sheepishly recited,
"You'd scarce expect one of my age to speak in public on the stage,"
etc.--accompanying himself with the painfully exact and spasmodic
gestures which a machine might have used--supposing the machine to be a
trifle out of order. But he got through safely, though cruelly scared,
and got a fine round of applause when he made his manufactured bow and
retired.

A little shamefaced girl lisped, "Mary had a little lamb," etc.,
performed a compassion-inspiring curtsy, got her meed of applause, and
sat down flushed and happy.

Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and soared into
the unquenchable and indestructible "Give me liberty or give me death"
speech, with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down in the
middle of it. A ghastly stage-fright seized him, his legs quaked under
him and he was like to choke. True, he had the manifest sympathy of the
house but he had the house's silence, too, which was even worse than
its sympathy. The master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom
struggled awhile and then retired, utterly defeated. There was a weak
attempt at applause, but it died early.

"The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" followed; also "The Assyrian Came
Down," and other declamatory gems. Then there were reading exercises,
and a spelling fight. The meagre Latin class recited with honor. The
prime feature of the evening was in order, now--original "compositions"
by the young ladies. Each in her turn stepped forward to the edge of the
platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript (tied with dainty
ribbon), and proceeded to read, with labored attention to "expression"
and punctuation. The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon
similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers,
and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the
Crusades. "Friendship" was one; "Memories of Other Days"; "Religion in
History"; "Dream Land"; "The Advantages of Culture"; "Forms of Political
Government Compared and Contrasted"; "Melancholy"; "Filial Love"; "Heart
Longings," etc., etc.

A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted
melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language";
another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words
and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that
conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable
sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one
of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brainracking effort was
made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious
mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of
these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the
fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today; it never will
be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in
all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their
compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the
most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is always
the longest and the most relentlessly pious. But enough of this. Homely
truth is unpalatable.

Let us return to the "Examination." The first composition that was read
was one entitled "Is this, then, Life?" Perhaps the reader can endure an
extract from it:

"In the common walks of life, with what delightful emotions does the
youthful mind look forward to some anticipated scene of festivity!
Imagination is busy sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy. In fancy, the
voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the festive throng, 'the
observed of all observers.' Her graceful form, arrayed in snowy robes,
is whirling through the mazes of the joyous dance; her eye is brightest,
her step is lightest in the gay assembly.

"In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by, and the welcome hour
arrives for her entrance into the Elysian world, of which she has
had such bright dreams. How fairy-like does everything appear to her
enchanted vision! Each new scene is more charming than the last. But
after a while she finds that beneath this goodly exterior, all is
vanity, the flattery which once charmed her soul, now grates harshly
upon her ear; the ballroom has lost its charms; and with wasted health
and imbittered heart, she turns away with the conviction that earthly
pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the soul!"

And so forth and so on. There was a buzz of gratification from time to
time during the reading, accompanied by whispered ejaculations of "How
sweet!" "How eloquent!" "So true!" etc., and after the thing had closed
with a peculiarly afflicting sermon the applause was enthusiastic.

Then arose a slim, melancholy girl, whose face had the "interesting"
paleness that comes of pills and indigestion, and read a "poem." Two
stanzas of it will do:

"A MISSOURI MAIDEN'S FAREWELL TO ALABAMA

"Alabama, goodbye! I love thee well! But yet for a while do I leave thee
now! Sad, yes, sad thoughts of thee my heart doth swell, And burning
recollections throng my brow! For I have wandered through thy flowery
woods; Have roamed and read near Tallapoosa's stream; Have listened to
Tallassee's warring floods, And wooed on Coosa's side Aurora's beam.

"Yet shame I not to bear an o'erfull heart, Nor blush to turn behind
my tearful eyes; 'Tis from no stranger land I now must part, 'Tis to no
strangers left I yield these sighs. Welcome and home were mine within
this State, Whose vales I leave--whose spires fade fast from me And cold
must be mine eyes, and heart, and tete, When, dear Alabama! they turn
cold on thee!" There were very few there who knew what "tete" meant, but
the poem was very satisfactory, nevertheless.

Next appeared a dark-complexioned, black-eyed, black-haired young lady,
who paused an impressive moment, assumed a tragic expression, and began
to read in a measured, solemn tone:

"A VISION

"Dark and tempestuous was night. Around the throne on high not a single
star quivered; but the deep intonations of the heavy thunder constantly
vibrated upon the ear; whilst the terrific lightning revelled in angry
mood through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming to scorn the power
exerted over its terror by the illustrious Franklin! Even the boisterous
winds unanimously came forth from their mystic homes, and blustered
about as if to enhance by their aid the wildness of the scene.

"At such a time, so dark, so dreary, for human sympathy my very spirit
sighed; but instead thereof,

"'My dearest friend, my counsellor, my comforter and guide--My joy in
grief, my second bliss in joy,' came to my side. She moved like one of
those bright beings pictured in the sunny walks of fancy's Eden by
the romantic and young, a queen of beauty unadorned save by her own
transcendent loveliness. So soft was her step, it failed to make even a
sound, and but for the magical thrill imparted by her genial touch,
as other unobtrusive beauties, she would have glided away
unperceived--unsought. A strange sadness rested upon her features, like
icy tears upon the robe of December, as she pointed to the contending
elements without, and bade me contemplate the two beings presented."

This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with a
sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took
the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest
effort of the evening. The mayor of the village, in delivering the prize
to the author of it, made a warm speech in which he said that it was by
far the most "eloquent" thing he had ever listened to, and that Daniel
Webster himself might well be proud of it.

It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which
the word "beauteous" was over-fondled, and human experience referred to
as "life's page," was up to the usual average.

Now the master, mellow almost to the verge of geniality, put his chair
aside, turned his back to the audience, and began to draw a map of
America on the blackboard, to exercise the geography class upon. But he
made a sad business of it with his unsteady hand, and a smothered titter
rippled over the house. He knew what the matter was, and set himself to
right it. He sponged out lines and remade them; but he only distorted
them more than ever, and the tittering was more pronounced. He threw his
entire attention upon his work, now, as if determined not to be put down
by the mirth. He felt that all eyes were fastened upon him; he imagined
he was succeeding, and yet the tittering continued; it even manifestly
increased. And well it might. There was a garret above, pierced with
a scuttle over his head; and down through this scuttle came a cat,
suspended around the haunches by a string; she had a rag tied about
her head and jaws to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she
curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung downward and clawed
at the intangible air. The tittering rose higher and higher--the cat was
within six inches of the absorbed teacher's head--down, down, a little
lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate claws, clung to it,
and was snatched up into the garret in an instant with her trophy still
in her possession! And how the light did blaze abroad from the master's
bald pate--for the signpainter's boy had _gilded_ it!

That broke up the meeting. The boys were avenged. Vacation had come.

NOTE:--The pretended "compositions" quoted in this chapter are taken
without alteration from a volume entitled "Prose and Poetry, by a
Western Lady"--but they are exactly and precisely after the schoolgirl
pattern, and hence are much happier than any mere imitations could be.




CHAPTER XXII

TOM joined the new order of Cadets of Temperance, being attracted by the
showy character of their "regalia." He promised to abstain from smoking,
chewing, and profanity as long as he remained a member. Now he found out
a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way
in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. Tom soon
found himself tormented with a desire to drink and swear; the desire
grew to be so intense that nothing but the hope of a chance to display
himself in his red sash kept him from withdrawing from the order. Fourth
of July was coming; but he soon gave that up--gave it up before he had
worn his shackles over forty-eight hours--and fixed his hopes upon old
Judge Frazer, justice of the peace, who was apparently on his deathbed
and would have a big public funeral, since he was so high an official.
During three days Tom was deeply concerned about the Judge's condition
and hungry for news of it. Sometimes his hopes ran high--so high that
he would venture to get out his regalia and practise before the
looking-glass. But the Judge had a most discouraging way of fluctuating.
At last he was pronounced upon the mend--and then convalescent. Tom was
disgusted; and felt a sense of injury, too. He handed in his resignation
at once--and that night the Judge suffered a relapse and died. Tom
resolved that he would never trust a man like that again.

The funeral was a fine thing. The Cadets paraded in a style calculated
to kill the late member with envy. Tom was a free boy again,
however--there was something in that. He could drink and swear, now--but
found to his surprise that he did not want to. The simple fact that he
could, took the desire away, and the charm of it.

Tom presently wondered to find that his coveted vacation was beginning
to hang a little heavily on his hands.

He attempted a diary--but nothing happened during three days, and so he
abandoned it.

The first of all the negro minstrel shows came to town, and made a
sensation. Tom and Joe Harper got up a band of performers and were happy
for two days.

Even the Glorious Fourth was in some sense a failure, for it rained
hard, there was no procession in consequence, and the greatest man
in the world (as Tom supposed), Mr. Benton, an actual United States
Senator, proved an overwhelming disappointment--for he was not
twenty-five feet high, nor even anywhere in the neighborhood of it.

A circus came. The boys played circus for three days afterward in tents
made of rag carpeting--admission, three pins for boys, two for girls--and
then circusing was abandoned.

A phrenologist and a mesmerizer came--and went again and left the village
duller and drearier than ever.

There were some boys-and-girls' parties, but they were so few and so
delightful that they only made the aching voids between ache the harder.

Becky Thatcher was gone to her Constantinople home to stay with her
parents during vacation--so there was no bright side to life anywhere.

The dreadful secret of the murder was a chronic misery. It was a very
cancer for permanency and pain.

Then came the measles.

During two long weeks Tom lay a prisoner, dead to the world and its
happenings. He was very ill, he was interested in nothing. When he got
upon his feet at last and moved feebly downtown, a melancholy change had
come over everything and every creature. There had been a "revival," and
everybody had "got religion," not only the adults, but even the boys and
girls. Tom went about, hoping against hope for the sight of one blessed
sinful face, but disappointment crossed him everywhere. He found Joe
Harper studying a Testament, and turned sadly away from the depressing
spectacle. He sought Ben Rogers, and found him visiting the poor with a
basket of tracts. He hunted up Jim Hollis, who called his attention to
the precious blessing of his late measles as a warning. Every boy
he encountered added another ton to his depression; and when, in
desperation, he flew for refuge at last to the bosom of Huckleberry Finn
and was received with a Scriptural quotation, his heart broke and he
crept home and to bed realizing that he alone of all the town was lost,
forever and forever.

And that night there came on a terrific storm, with driving rain, awful
claps of thunder and blinding sheets of lightning. He covered his head
with the bedclothes and waited in a horror of suspense for his doom; for
he had not the shadow of a doubt that all this hubbub was about him.
He believed he had taxed the forbearance of the powers above to the
extremity of endurance and that this was the result. It might have
seemed to him a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a
battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous about the
getting up such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf from
under an insect like himself.

By and by the tempest spent itself and died without accomplishing its
object. The boy's first impulse was to be grateful, and reform. His
second was to wait--for there might not be any more storms.

The next day the doctors were back; Tom had relapsed. The three weeks he
spent on his back this time seemed an entire age. When he got abroad
at last he was hardly grateful that he had been spared, remembering how
lonely was his estate, how companionless and forlorn he was. He drifted
listlessly down the street and found Jim Hollis acting as judge in a
juvenile court that was trying a cat for murder, in the presence of her
victim, a bird. He found Joe Harper and Huck Finn up an alley eating a
stolen melon. Poor lads! they--like Tom--had suffered a relapse.




CHAPTER XXIII

AT last the sleepy atmosphere was stirred--and vigorously: the murder
trial came on in the court. It became the absorbing topic of village
talk immediately. Tom could not get away from it. Every reference to
the murder sent a shudder to his heart, for his troubled conscience
and fears almost persuaded him that these remarks were put forth in
his hearing as "feelers"; he did not see how he could be suspected of
knowing anything about the murder, but still he could not be comfortable
in the midst of this gossip. It kept him in a cold shiver all the time.
He took Huck to a lonely place to have a talk with him. It would be some
relief to unseal his tongue for a little while; to divide his burden of
distress with another sufferer. Moreover, he wanted to assure himself
that Huck had remained discreet.

"Huck, have you ever told anybody about--that?"

"'Bout what?"

"You know what."

"Oh--'course I haven't."

"Never a word?"

"Never a solitary word, so help me. What makes you ask?"

"Well, I was afeard."

"Why, Tom Sawyer, we wouldn't be alive two days if that got found out.
_You_ know that."

Tom felt more comfortable. After a pause:

"Huck, they couldn't anybody get you to tell, could they?"

"Get me to tell? Why, if I wanted that halfbreed devil to drownd me they
could get me to tell. They ain't no different way."

"Well, that's all right, then. I reckon we're safe as long as we keep
mum. But let's swear again, anyway. It's more surer."

"I'm agreed."

So they swore again with dread solemnities.

"What is the talk around, Huck? I've heard a power of it."

"Talk? Well, it's just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the
time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so's I want to hide som'ers."

"That's just the same way they go on round me. I reckon he's a goner.
Don't you feel sorry for him, sometimes?"

"Most always--most always. He ain't no account; but then he hain't ever
done anything to hurt anybody. Just fishes a little, to get money to
get drunk on--and loafs around considerable; but lord, we all do
that--leastways most of us--preachers and such like. But he's kind of
good--he give me half a fish, once, when there warn't enough for two; and
lots of times he's kind of stood by me when I was out of luck."

"Well, he's mended kites for me, Huck, and knitted hooks on to my line.
I wish we could get him out of there."

"My! we couldn't get him out, Tom. And besides, 'twouldn't do any good;
they'd ketch him again."

"Yes--so they would. But I hate to hear 'em abuse him so like the dickens
when he never done--that."

"I do too, Tom. Lord, I hear 'em say he's the bloodiest looking villain
in this country, and they wonder he wasn't ever hung before."

"Yes, they talk like that, all the time. I've heard 'em say that if he
was to get free they'd lynch him."

"And they'd do it, too."

The boys had a long talk, but it brought them little comfort. As the
twilight drew on, they found themselves hanging about the neighborhood
of the little isolated jail, perhaps with an undefined hope that
something would happen that might clear away their difficulties. But
nothing happened; there seemed to be no angels or fairies interested in
this luckless captive.

The boys did as they had often done before--went to the cell grating and
gave Potter some tobacco and matches. He was on the ground floor and
there were no guards.

His gratitude for their gifts had always smote their consciences
before--it cut deeper than ever, this time. They felt cowardly and
treacherous to the last degree when Potter said:

"You've been mighty good to me, boys--better'n anybody else in this town.
And I don't forget it, I don't. Often I says to myself, says I, 'I used
to mend all the boys' kites and things, and show 'em where the good
fishin' places was, and befriend 'em what I could, and now they've
all forgot old Muff when he's in trouble; but Tom don't, and Huck
don't--_they_ don't forget him, says I, 'and I don't forget them.' Well,
boys, I done an awful thing--drunk and crazy at the time--that's the only
way I account for it--and now I got to swing for it, and it's right.
Right, and _best_, too, I reckon--hope so, anyway. Well, we won't talk
about that. I don't want to make _you_ feel bad; you've befriended me.
But what I want to say, is, don't _you_ ever get drunk--then you won't
ever get here. Stand a litter furder west--so--that's it; it's a prime
comfort to see faces that's friendly when a body's in such a muck
of trouble, and there don't none come here but yourn. Good friendly
faces--good friendly faces. Git up on one another's backs and let me
touch 'em. That's it. Shake hands--yourn'll come through the bars, but
mine's too big. Little hands, and weak--but they've helped Muff Potter a
power, and they'd help him more if they could."

Tom went home miserable, and his dreams that night were full of horrors.
The next day and the day after, he hung about the courtroom, drawn by an
almost irresistible impulse to go in, but forcing himself to stay out.
Huck was having the same experience. They studiously avoided each other.
Each wandered away, from time to time, but the same dismal fascination
always brought them back presently. Tom kept his ears open when idlers
sauntered out of the courtroom, but invariably heard distressing
news--the toils were closing more and more relentlessly around poor
Potter. At the end of the second day the village talk was to the effect
that Injun Joe's evidence stood firm and unshaken, and that there was
not the slightest question as to what the jury's verdict would be.

Tom was out late, that night, and came to bed through the window. He
was in a tremendous state of excitement. It was hours before he got to
sleep. All the village flocked to the courthouse the next morning, for
this was to be the great day. Both sexes were about equally represented
in the packed audience. After a long wait the jury filed in and took
their places; shortly afterward, Potter, pale and haggard, timid and
hopeless, was brought in, with chains upon him, and seated where all
the curious eyes could stare at him; no less conspicuous was Injun Joe,
stolid as ever. There was another pause, and then the judge arrived and
the sheriff proclaimed the opening of the court. The usual whisperings
among the lawyers and gathering together of papers followed. These
details and accompanying delays worked up an atmosphere of preparation
that was as impressive as it was fascinating.

Now a witness was called who testified that he found Muff Potter washing
in the brook, at an early hour of the morning that the murder was
discovered, and that he immediately sneaked away. After some further
questioning, counsel for the prosecution said:

"Take the witness."

The prisoner raised his eyes for a moment, but dropped them again when
his own counsel said:

"I have no questions to ask him."

The next witness proved the finding of the knife near the corpse.
Counsel for the prosecution said:

"Take the witness."

"I have no questions to ask him," Potter's lawyer replied.

A third witness swore he had often seen the knife in Potter's
possession.

"Take the witness."

Counsel for Potter declined to question him. The faces of the audience
began to betray annoyance. Did this attorney mean to throw away his
client's life without an effort?

Several witnesses deposed concerning Potter's guilty behavior when
brought to the scene of the murder. They were allowed to leave the stand
without being cross-questioned.

Every detail of the damaging circumstances that occurred in the
graveyard upon that morning which all present remembered so well was
brought out by credible witnesses, but none of them were cross-examined
by Potter's lawyer. The perplexity and dissatisfaction of the house
expressed itself in murmurs and provoked a reproof from the bench.
Counsel for the prosecution now said:

"By the oaths of citizens whose simple word is above suspicion, we have
fastened this awful crime, beyond all possibility of question, upon the
unhappy prisoner at the bar. We rest our case here."

A groan escaped from poor Potter, and he put his face in his hands and
rocked his body softly to and fro, while a painful silence reigned
in the courtroom. Many men were moved, and many women's compassion
testified itself in tears. Counsel for the defence rose and said:

"Your honor, in our remarks at the opening of this trial, we
foreshadowed our purpose to prove that our client did this fearful deed
while under the influence of a blind and irresponsible delirium produced
by drink. We have changed our mind. We shall not offer that plea." [Then
to the clerk:] "Call Thomas Sawyer!"

A puzzled amazement awoke in every face in the house, not even excepting
Potter's. Every eye fastened itself with wondering interest upon Tom as
he rose and took his place upon the stand. The boy looked wild enough,
for he was badly scared. The oath was administered.

"Thomas Sawyer, where were you on the seventeenth of June, about the
hour of midnight?"

Tom glanced at Injun Joe's iron face and his tongue failed him. The
audience listened breathless, but the words refused to come. After a few
moments, however, the boy got a little of his strength back, and managed
to put enough of it into his voice to make part of the house hear:

"In the graveyard!"

"A little bit louder, please. Don't be afraid. You were--"

"In the graveyard."

A contemptuous smile flitted across Injun Joe's face.

"Were you anywhere near Horse Williams' grave?"

"Yes, sir."

"Speak up--just a trifle louder. How near were you?"

"Near as I am to you."

"Were you hidden, or not?"

"I was hid."

"Where?"

"Behind the elms that's on the edge of the grave."

Injun Joe gave a barely perceptible start.

"Any one with you?"

"Yes, sir. I went there with--"

"Wait--wait a moment. Never mind mentioning your companion's name. We
will produce him at the proper time. Did you carry anything there with
you."

Tom hesitated and looked confused.

"Speak out, my boy--don't be diffident. The truth is always respectable.
What did you take there?"

"Only a--a--dead cat."

There was a ripple of mirth, which the court checked.

"We will produce the skeleton of that cat. Now, my boy, tell us
everything that occurred--tell it in your own way--don't skip anything,
and don't be afraid."

Tom began--hesitatingly at first, but as he warmed to his subject his
words flowed more and more easily; in a little while every sound ceased
but his own voice; every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and
bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time,
rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale. The strain upon pent
emotion reached its climax when the boy said:

"--and as the doctor fetched the board around and Muff Potter fell, Injun
Joe jumped with the knife and--"

Crash! Quick as lightning the halfbreed sprang for a window, tore his
way through all opposers, and was gone!




CHAPTER XXIV

TOM was a glittering hero once more--the pet of the old, the envy of the
young. His name even went into immortal print, for the village paper
magnified him. There were some that believed he would be President, yet,
if he escaped hanging.

As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom
and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort
of conduct is to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find
fault with it.

Tom's days were days of splendor and exultation to him, but his nights
were seasons of horror. Injun Joe infested all his dreams, and always
with doom in his eye. Hardly any temptation could persuade the boy
to stir abroad after nightfall. Poor Huck was in the same state of
wretchedness and terror, for Tom had told the whole story to the lawyer
the night before the great day of the trial, and Huck was sore afraid
that his share in the business might leak out, yet, notwithstanding
Injun Joe's flight had saved him the suffering of testifying in court.
The poor fellow had got the attorney to promise secrecy, but what of
that? Since Tom's harassed conscience had managed to drive him to the
lawyer's house by night and wring a dread tale from lips that had
been sealed with the dismalest and most formidable of oaths, Huck's
confidence in the human race was wellnigh obliterated.

Daily Muff Potter's gratitude made Tom glad he had spoken; but nightly
he wished he had sealed up his tongue.

Half the time Tom was afraid Injun Joe would never be captured; the
other half he was afraid he would be. He felt sure he never could draw a
safe breath again until that man was dead and he had seen the corpse.

Rewards had been offered, the country had been scoured, but no Injun
Joe was found. One of those omniscient and aweinspiring marvels, a
detective, came up from St. Louis, moused around, shook his head, looked
wise, and made that sort of astounding success which members of that
craft usually achieve. That is to say, he "found a clew." But you can't
hang a "clew" for murder, and so after that detective had got through
and gone home, Tom felt just as insecure as he was before.

The slow days drifted on, and each left behind it a slightly lightened
weight of apprehension.




CHAPTER XXV

THERE comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy's life when he has
a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. This desire
suddenly came upon Tom one day. He sallied out to find Joe Harper,
but failed of success. Next he sought Ben Rogers; he had gone fishing.
Presently he stumbled upon Huck Finn the Red-Handed. Huck would
answer. Tom took him to a private place and opened the matter to him
confidentially. Huck was willing. Huck was always willing to take a hand
in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital,
for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is
not money. "Where'll we dig?" said Huck.

"Oh, most anywhere."

"Why, is it hid all around?"

"No, indeed it ain't. It's hid in mighty particular places,
Huck--sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of
a limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but
mostly under the floor in ha'nted houses."

"Who hides it?"

"Why, robbers, of course--who'd you reckon? Sunday-school
sup'rintendents?"

"I don't know. If 'twas mine I wouldn't hide it; I'd spend it and have a
good time."

"So would I. But robbers don't do that way. They always hide it and
leave it there."

"Don't they come after it any more?"

"No, they think they will, but they generally forget the marks, or else
they die. Anyway, it lays there a long time and gets rusty; and by and
by somebody finds an old yellow paper that tells how to find the marks--a
paper that's got to be ciphered over about a week because it's mostly
signs and hy'roglyphics."

"Hyro--which?"

"Hy'roglyphics--pictures and things, you know, that don't seem to mean
anything."

"Have you got one of them papers, Tom?"

"No."

"Well then, how you going to find the marks?"

"I don't want any marks. They always bury it under a ha'nted house or on
an island, or under a dead tree that's got one limb sticking out. Well,
we've tried Jackson's Island a little, and we can try it again some
time; and there's the old ha'nted house up the Still-House branch, and
there's lots of dead-limb trees--dead loads of 'em."

"Is it under all of them?"

"How you talk! No!"

"Then how you going to know which one to go for?"

"Go for all of 'em!"

"Why, Tom, it'll take all summer."

"Well, what of that? Suppose you find a brass pot with a hundred dollars
in it, all rusty and gray, or rotten chest full of di'monds. How's
that?"

Huck's eyes glowed.

"That's bully. Plenty bully enough for me. Just you gimme the hundred
dollars and I don't want no di'monds."

"All right. But I bet you I ain't going to throw off on di'monds. Some
of 'em's worth twenty dollars apiece--there ain't any, hardly, but's
worth six bits or a dollar."

"No! Is that so?"

"Cert'nly--anybody'll tell you so. Hain't you ever seen one, Huck?"

"Not as I remember."

"Oh, kings have slathers of them."

"Well, I don' know no kings, Tom."

"I reckon you don't. But if you was to go to Europe you'd see a raft of
'em hopping around."

"Do they hop?"

"Hop?--your granny! No!"

"Well, what did you say they did, for?"

"Shucks, I only meant you'd _see_ 'em--not hopping, of course--what do
they want to hop for?--but I mean you'd just see 'em--scattered around,
you know, in a kind of a general way. Like that old humpbacked Richard."

"Richard? What's his other name?"

"He didn't have any other name. Kings don't have any but a given name."

"No?"

"But they don't."

"Well, if they like it, Tom, all right; but I don't want to be a king
and have only just a given name, like a nigger. But say--where you going
to dig first?"

"Well, I don't know. S'pose we tackle that old dead-limb tree on the
hill t'other side of Still-House branch?"

"I'm agreed."

So they got a crippled pick and a shovel, and set out on their
three-mile tramp. They arrived hot and panting, and threw themselves
down in the shade of a neighboring elm to rest and have a smoke.

"I like this," said Tom.

"So do I."

"Say, Huck, if we find a treasure here, what you going to do with your
share?"

"Well, I'll have pie and a glass of soda every day, and I'll go to every
circus that comes along. I bet I'll have a gay time."

"Well, ain't you going to save any of it?"

"Save it? What for?"

"Why, so as to have something to live on, by and by."

"Oh, that ain't any use. Pap would come back to thish-yer town some day
and get his claws on it if I didn't hurry up, and I tell you he'd clean
it out pretty quick. What you going to do with yourn, Tom?"

"I'm going to buy a new drum, and a sure'nough sword, and a red necktie
and a bull pup, and get married."

"Married!"

"That's it."

"Tom, you--why, you ain't in your right mind."

"Wait--you'll see."

"Well, that's the foolishest thing you could do. Look at pap and my
mother. Fight! Why, they used to fight all the time. I remember, mighty
well."

"That ain't anything. The girl I'm going to marry won't fight."

"Tom, I reckon they're all alike. They'll all comb a body. Now you
better think 'bout this awhile. I tell you you better. What's the name
of the gal?"

"It ain't a gal at all--it's a girl."

"It's all the same, I reckon; some says gal, some says girl--both's
right, like enough. Anyway, what's her name, Tom?"

"I'll tell you some time--not now."

"All right--that'll do. Only if you get married I'll be more lonesomer
than ever."

"No you won't. You'll come and live with me. Now stir out of this and
we'll go to digging."

They worked and sweated for half an hour. No result. They toiled another
halfhour. Still no result. Huck said:

"Do they always bury it as deep as this?"

"Sometimes--not always. Not generally. I reckon we haven't got the right
place."

So they chose a new spot and began again. The labor dragged a little,
but still they made progress. They pegged away in silence for some time.
Finally Huck leaned on his shovel, swabbed the beaded drops from his
brow with his sleeve, and said:

"Where you going to dig next, after we get this one?"

"I reckon maybe we'll tackle the old tree that's over yonder on Cardiff
Hill back of the widow's."

"I reckon that'll be a good one. But won't the widow take it away from
us, Tom? It's on her land."

"_She_ take it away! Maybe she'd like to try it once. Whoever finds one
of these hid treasures, it belongs to him. It don't make any difference
whose land it's on."

That was satisfactory. The work went on. By and by Huck said:

"Blame it, we must be in the wrong place again. What do you think?"

"It is mighty curious, Huck. I don't understand it. Sometimes witches
interfere. I reckon maybe that's what's the trouble now."

"Shucks! Witches ain't got no power in the daytime."

"Well, that's so. I didn't think of that. Oh, I know what the matter is!
What a blamed lot of fools we are! You got to find out where the shadow
of the limb falls at midnight, and that's where you dig!"

"Then consound it, we've fooled away all this work for nothing. Now hang
it all, we got to come back in the night. It's an awful long way. Can
you get out?"

"I bet I will. We've got to do it tonight, too, because if somebody sees
these holes they'll know in a minute what's here and they'll go for it."

"Well, I'll come around and maow tonight."

"All right. Let's hide the tools in the bushes."

The boys were there that night, about the appointed time. They sat in
the shadow waiting. It was a lonely place, and an hour made solemn by
old traditions. Spirits whispered in the rustling leaves, ghosts lurked
in the murky nooks, the deep baying of a hound floated up out of the
distance, an owl answered with his sepulchral note. The boys were
subdued by these solemnities, and talked little. By and by they judged
that twelve had come; they marked where the shadow fell, and began to
dig. Their hopes commenced to rise. Their interest grew stronger, and
their industry kept pace with it. The hole deepened and still deepened,
but every time their hearts jumped to hear the pick strike upon
something, they only suffered a new disappointment. It was only a stone
or a chunk. At last Tom said:

"It ain't any use, Huck, we're wrong again."

"Well, but we _can't_ be wrong. We spotted the shadder to a dot."

"I know it, but then there's another thing."

"What's that?".

"Why, we only guessed at the time. Like enough it was too late or too
early."

Huck dropped his shovel.

"That's it," said he. "That's the very trouble. We got to give this one
up. We can't ever tell the right time, and besides this kind of thing's
too awful, here this time of night with witches and ghosts a-fluttering
around so. I feel as if something's behind me all the time;  and I'm
afeard to turn around, becuz maybe there's others in front a-waiting for
a chance. I been creeping all over, ever since I got here."

"Well, I've been pretty much so, too, Huck. They most always put in a
dead man when they bury a treasure under a tree, to look out for it."

"Lordy!"

"Yes, they do. I've always heard that."

"Tom, I don't like to fool around much where there's dead people. A
body's bound to get into trouble with 'em, sure."

"I don't like to stir 'em up, either. S'pose this one here was to stick
his skull out and say something!"

"Don't Tom! It's awful."

"Well, it just is. Huck, I don't feel comfortable a bit."

"Say, Tom, let's give this place up, and try somewheres else."

"All right, I reckon we better."

"What'll it be?"

Tom considered awhile; and then said:

"The ha'nted house. That's it!"

"Blame it, I don't like ha'nted houses, Tom. Why, they're a dern sight
worse'n dead people. Dead people might talk, maybe, but they don't come
sliding around in a shroud, when you ain't noticing, and peep over your
shoulder all of a sudden and grit their teeth, the way a ghost does. I
couldn't stand such a thing as that, Tom--nobody could."

"Yes, but, Huck, ghosts don't travel around only at night. They won't
hender us from digging there in the daytime."

"Well, that's so. But you know mighty well people don't go about that
ha'nted house in the day nor the night."

"Well, that's mostly because they don't like to go where a man's been
murdered, anyway--but nothing's ever been seen around that house except
in the night--just some blue lights slipping by the windows--no regular
ghosts."

"Well, where you see one of them blue lights flickering around, Tom,
you can bet there's a ghost mighty close behind it. It stands to reason.
Becuz you know that they don't anybody but ghosts use 'em."

"Yes, that's so. But anyway they don't come around in the daytime, so
what's the use of our being afeard?"

"Well, all right. We'll tackle the ha'nted house if you say so--but I
reckon it's taking chances."

They had started down the hill by this time. There in the middle of the
moonlit valley below them stood the "ha'nted" house, utterly isolated,
its fences gone long ago, rank weeds smothering the very doorsteps, the
chimney crumbled to ruin, the window-sashes vacant, a corner of the roof
caved in. The boys gazed awhile, half expecting to see a blue light flit
past a window; then talking in a low tone, as befitted the time and the
circumstances, they struck far off to the right, to give the haunted
house a wide berth, and took their way homeward through the woods that
adorned the rearward side of Cardiff Hill.




CHAPTER XVI

ABOUT noon the next day the boys arrived at the dead tree; they had come
for their tools. Tom was impatient to go to the haunted house; Huck was
measurably so, also--but suddenly said:

"Lookyhere, Tom, do you know what day it is?"

Tom mentally ran over the days of the week, and then quickly lifted his
eyes with a startled look in them--

"My! I never once thought of it, Huck!"

"Well, I didn't neither, but all at once it popped onto me that it was
Friday."

"Blame it, a body can't be too careful, Huck. We might 'a' got into an
awful scrape, tackling such a thing on a Friday."

"_Might_! Better say we _would_! There's some lucky days, maybe, but
Friday ain't."

"Any fool knows that. I don't reckon _you_ was the first that found it
out, Huck."

"Well, I never said I was, did I? And Friday ain't all, neither. I had a
rotten bad dream last night--dreampt about rats."

"No! Sure sign of trouble. Did they fight?"

"No."

"Well, that's good, Huck. When they don't fight it's only a sign that
there's trouble around, you know. All we got to do is to look mighty
sharp and keep out of it. We'll drop this thing for today, and play. Do
you know Robin Hood, Huck?"

"No. Who's Robin Hood?"

"Why, he was one of the greatest men that was ever in England--and the
best. He was a robber."

"Cracky, I wisht I was. Who did he rob?"

"Only sheriffs and bishops and rich people and kings, and such like. But
he never bothered the poor. He loved 'em. He always divided up with 'em
perfectly square."

"Well, he must 'a' been a brick."

"I bet you he was, Huck. Oh, he was the noblest man that ever was.
They ain't any such men now, I can tell you. He could lick any man in
England, with one hand tied behind him; and he could take his yew bow
and plug a ten-cent piece every time, a mile and a half."

"What's a _yew_ bow?"

"I don't know. It's some kind of a bow, of course. And if he hit that
dime only on the edge he would set down and cry--and curse. But we'll
play Robin Hood--it's nobby fun. I'll learn you."

"I'm agreed."

So they played Robin Hood all the afternoon, now and then casting a
yearning eye down upon the haunted house and passing a remark about the
morrow's prospects and possibilities there. As the sun began to sink
into the west they took their way homeward athwart the long shadows
of the trees and soon were buried from sight in the forests of Cardiff
Hill.

On Saturday, shortly after noon, the boys were at the dead tree again.
They had a smoke and a chat in the shade, and then dug a little in their
last hole, not with great hope, but merely because Tom said there were
so many cases where people had given up a treasure after getting down
within six inches of it, and then somebody else had come along and
turned it up with a single thrust of a shovel. The thing failed this
time, however, so the boys shouldered their tools and went away feeling
that they had not trifled with fortune, but had fulfilled all the
requirements that belong to the business of treasure-hunting.

When they reached the haunted house there was something so weird and
grisly about the dead silence that reigned there under the baking sun,
and something so depressing about the loneliness and desolation of the
place, that they were afraid, for a moment, to venture in. Then they
crept to the door and took a trembling peep. They saw a weedgrown,
floorless room, unplastered, an ancient fireplace, vacant windows,
a ruinous staircase; and here, there, and everywhere hung ragged and
abandoned cobwebs. They presently entered, softly, with quickened
pulses, talking in whispers, ears alert to catch the slightest sound,
and muscles tense and ready for instant retreat.

In a little while familiarity modified their fears and they gave the
place a critical and interested examination, rather admiring their own
boldness, and wondering at it, too. Next they wanted to look upstairs.
This was something like cutting off retreat, but they got to daring
each other, and of course there could be but one result--they threw their
tools into a corner and made the ascent. Up there were the same signs of
decay. In one corner they found a closet that promised mystery, but the
promise was a fraud--there was nothing in it. Their courage was up now
and well in hand. They were about to go down and begin work when--

"Sh!" said Tom.

"What is it?" whispered Huck, blanching with fright.

"Sh!... There!... Hear it?"

"Yes!... Oh, my! Let's run!"

"Keep still! Don't you budge! They're coming right toward the door."

The boys stretched themselves upon the floor with their eyes to
knotholes in the planking, and lay waiting, in a misery of fear.

"They've stopped.... No--coming.... Here they are. Don't whisper another
word, Huck. My goodness, I wish I was out of this!"

Two men entered. Each boy said to himself: "There's the old deaf and
dumb Spaniard that's been about town once or twice lately--never saw
t'other man before."

"T'other" was a ragged, unkempt creature, with nothing very pleasant
in his face. The Spaniard was wrapped in a serape; he had bushy white
whiskers; long white hair flowed from under his sombrero, and he wore
green goggles. When they came in, "t'other" was talking in a low voice;
they sat down on the ground, facing the door, with their backs to the
wall, and the speaker continued his remarks. His manner became less
guarded and his words more distinct as he proceeded:

"No," said he, "I've thought it all over, and I don't like it. It's
dangerous."

"Dangerous!" grunted the "deaf and dumb" Spaniard--to the vast surprise
of the boys. "Milksop!"

This voice made the boys gasp and quake. It was Injun Joe's! There was
silence for some time. Then Joe said:

"What's any more dangerous than that job up yonder--but nothing's come of
it."

"That's different. Away up the river so, and not another house about.
'Twon't ever be known that we tried, anyway, long as we didn't succeed."

"Well, what's more dangerous than coming here in the daytime!--anybody
would suspicion us that saw us."

"I know that. But there warn't any other place as handy after that fool
of a job. I want to quit this shanty. I wanted to yesterday, only it
warn't any use trying to stir out of here, with those infernal boys
playing over there on the hill right in full view."

"Those infernal boys" quaked again under the inspiration of this remark,
and thought how lucky it was that they had remembered it was Friday and
concluded to wait a day. They wished in their hearts they had waited a
year.

The two men got out some food and made a luncheon. After a long and
thoughtful silence, Injun Joe said:

"Look here, lad--you go back up the river where you belong. Wait there
till you hear from me. I'll take the chances on dropping into this town
just once more, for a look. We'll do that 'dangerous' job after I've
spied around a little and think things look well for it. Then for Texas!
We'll leg it together!"

This was satisfactory. Both men presently fell to yawning, and Injun Joe
said:

"I'm dead for sleep! It's your turn to watch."

He curled down in the weeds and soon began to snore. His comrade stirred
him once or twice and he became quiet. Presently the watcher began to
nod; his head drooped lower and lower, both men began to snore now.

The boys drew a long, grateful breath. Tom whispered:

"Now's our chance--come!"

Huck said:

"I can't--I'd die if they was to wake."

Tom urged--Huck held back. At last Tom rose slowly and softly, and
started alone. But the first step he made wrung such a hideous creak
from the crazy floor that he sank down almost dead with fright. He never
made a second attempt. The boys lay there counting the dragging moments
till it seemed to them that time must be done and eternity growing gray;
and then they were grateful to note that at last the sun was setting.

Now one snore ceased. Injun Joe sat up, stared around--smiled grimly upon
his comrade, whose head was drooping upon his knees--stirred him up with
his foot and said:

"Here! _You're_ a watchman, ain't you! All right, though--nothing's
happened."

"My! have I been asleep?"

"Oh, partly, partly. Nearly time for us to be moving, pard. What'll we
do with what little swag we've got left?"

"I don't know--leave it here as we've always done, I reckon. No use to
take it away till we start south. Six hundred and fifty in silver's
something to carry."

"Well--all right--it won't matter to come here once more."

"No--but I'd say come in the night as we used to do--it's better."

"Yes: but look here; it may be a good while before I get the right
chance at that job; accidents might happen; 'tain't in such a very good
place; we'll just regularly bury it--and bury it deep."

"Good idea," said the comrade, who walked across the room, knelt down,
raised one of the rearward hearth-stones and took out a bag that jingled
pleasantly. He subtracted from it twenty or thirty dollars for himself
and as much for Injun Joe, and passed the bag to the latter, who was on
his knees in the corner, now, digging with his bowie-knife.

The boys forgot all their fears, all their miseries in an instant. With
gloating eyes they watched every movement. Luck!--the splendor of it was
beyond all imagination! Six hundred dollars was money enough to make
half a dozen boys rich! Here was treasure-hunting under the happiest
auspices--there would not be any bothersome uncertainty as to where to
dig. They nudged each other every moment--eloquent nudges and easily
understood, for they simply meant--"Oh, but ain't you glad _now_ we're
here!"

Joe's knife struck upon something.

"Hello!" said he.

"What is it?" said his comrade.

"Half-rotten plank--no, it's a box, I believe. Here--bear a hand and we'll
see what it's here for. Never mind, I've broke a hole."

He reached his hand in and drew it out--

"Man, it's money!"

The two men examined the handful of coins. They were gold. The boys
above were as excited as themselves, and as delighted.

Joe's comrade said:

"We'll make quick work of this. There's an old rusty pick over amongst
the weeds in the corner the other side of the fireplace--I saw it a
minute ago."

He ran and brought the boys' pick and shovel. Injun Joe took the
pick, looked it over critically, shook his head, muttered something to
himself, and then began to use it. The box was soon unearthed. It was
not very large; it was iron bound and had been very strong before the
slow years had injured it. The men contemplated the treasure awhile in
blissful silence.

"Pard, there's thousands of dollars here," said Injun Joe.

"'Twas always said that Murrel's gang used to be around here one
summer," the stranger observed.

"I know it," said Injun Joe; "and this looks like it, I should say."

"Now you won't need to do that job."

The halfbreed frowned. Said he:

"You don't know me. Least you don't know all about that thing. 'Tain't
robbery altogether--it's _revenge_!" and a wicked light flamed in his
eyes. "I'll need your help in it. When it's finished--then Texas. Go home
to your Nance and your kids, and stand by till you hear from me."

"Well--if you say so; what'll we do with this--bury it again?"

"Yes. [Ravishing delight overhead.] _No_! by the great Sachem, no!
[Profound distress overhead.] I'd nearly forgot. That pick had fresh
earth on it! [The boys were sick with terror in a moment.] What business
has a pick and a shovel here? What business with fresh earth on
them? Who brought them here--and where are they gone? Have you heard
anybody?--seen anybody? What! bury it again and leave them to come and
see the ground disturbed? Not exactly--not exactly. We'll take it to my
den."

"Why, of course! Might have thought of that before. You mean Number
One?"

"No--Number Two--under the cross. The other place is bad--too common."

"All right. It's nearly dark enough to start."

Injun Joe got up and went about from window to window cautiously peeping
out. Presently he said:

"Who could have brought those tools here? Do you reckon they can be
upstairs?"

The boys' breath forsook them. Injun Joe put his hand on his knife,
halted a moment, undecided, and then turned toward the stairway. The
boys thought of the closet, but their strength was gone. The steps came
creaking up the stairs--the intolerable distress of the situation woke
the stricken resolution of the lads--they were about to spring for the
closet, when there was a crash of rotten timbers and Injun Joe landed on
the ground amid the debris of the ruined stairway. He gathered himself
up cursing, and his comrade said:

"Now what's the use of all that? If it's anybody, and they're up there,
let them _stay_ there--who cares? If they want to jump down, now, and get
into trouble, who objects? It will be dark in fifteen minutes--and then
let them follow us if they want to. I'm willing. In my opinion, whoever
hove those things in here caught a sight of us and took us for ghosts or
devils or something. I'll bet they're running yet."

Joe grumbled awhile; then he agreed with his friend that what daylight
was left ought to be economized in getting things ready for leaving.
Shortly afterward they slipped out of the house in the deepening
twilight, and moved toward the river with their precious box.

Tom and Huck rose up, weak but vastly relieved, and stared after them
through the chinks between the logs of the house. Follow? Not they. They
were content to reach ground again without broken necks, and take the
townward track over the hill. They did not talk much. They were too much
absorbed in hating themselves--hating the ill luck that made them take
the spade and the pick there. But for that, Injun Joe never would have
suspected. He would have hidden the silver with the gold to wait
there till his "revenge" was satisfied, and then he would have had the
misfortune to find that money turn up missing. Bitter, bitter luck that
the tools were ever brought there!

They resolved to keep a lookout for that Spaniard when he should come to
town spying out for chances to do his revengeful job, and follow him to
"Number Two," wherever that might be. Then a ghastly thought occurred to
Tom.

"Revenge? What if he means _us_, Huck!"

"Oh, don't!" said Huck, nearly fainting.

They talked it all over, and as they entered town they agreed to believe
that he might possibly mean somebody else--at least that he might at
least mean nobody but Tom, since only Tom had testified.

Very, very small comfort it was to Tom to be alone in danger! Company
would be a palpable improvement, he thought.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE adventure of the day mightily tormented Tom's dreams that night.
Four times he had his hands on that rich treasure and four times
it wasted to nothingness in his fingers as sleep forsook him and
wakefulness brought back the hard reality of his misfortune. As he lay
in the early morning recalling the incidents of his great adventure, he
noticed that they seemed curiously subdued and far away--somewhat as if
they had happened in another world, or in a time long gone by. Then it
occurred to him that the great adventure itself must be a dream! There
was one very strong argument in favor of this idea--namely, that the
quantity of coin he had seen was too vast to be real. He had never seen
as much as fifty dollars in one mass before, and he was like all boys of
his age and station in life, in that he imagined that all references to
"hundreds" and "thousands" were mere fanciful forms of speech, and that
no such sums really existed in the world. He never had supposed for
a moment that so large a sum as a hundred dollars was to be found in
actual money in any one's possession. If his notions of hidden treasure
had been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of a handful of
real dimes and a bushel of vague, splendid, ungraspable dollars.

But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer
under the attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found
himself leaning to the impression that the thing might not have been a
dream, after all. This uncertainty must be swept away. He would snatch a
hurried breakfast and go and find Huck. Huck was sitting on the gunwale
of a flatboat, listlessly dangling his feet in the water and looking
very melancholy. Tom concluded to let Huck lead up to the subject. If
he did not do it, then the adventure would be proved to have been only a
dream.

"Hello, Huck!"

"Hello, yourself."

Silence, for a minute.

"Tom, if we'd 'a' left the blame tools at the dead tree, we'd 'a' got
the money. Oh, ain't it awful!"

"'Tain't a dream, then, 'tain't a dream! Somehow I most wish it was.
Dog'd if I don't, Huck."

"What ain't a dream?"

"Oh, that thing yesterday. I been half thinking it was."

"Dream! If them stairs hadn't broke down you'd 'a' seen how much dream
it was! I've had dreams enough all night--with that patch-eyed Spanish
devil going for me all through 'em--rot him!"

"No, not rot him. _Find_ him! Track the money!"

"Tom, we'll never find him. A feller don't have only one chance for such
a pile--and that one's lost. I'd feel mighty shaky if I was to see him,
anyway."

"Well, so'd I; but I'd like to see him, anyway--and track him out--to his
Number Two."

"Number Two--yes, that's it. I been thinking 'bout that. But I can't make
nothing out of it. What do you reckon it is?"

"I dono. It's too deep. Say, Huck--maybe it's the number of a house!"

"Goody!... No, Tom, that ain't it. If it is, it ain't in this one-horse
town. They ain't no numbers here."

"Well, that's so. Lemme think a minute. Here--it's the number of a
room--in a tavern, you know!"

"Oh, that's the trick! They ain't only two taverns. We can find out
quick."

"You stay here, Huck, till I come."

Tom was off at once. He did not care to have Huck's company in public
places. He was gone half an hour. He found that in the best tavern, No.
2 had long been occupied by a young lawyer, and was still so occupied.
In the less ostentatious house, No. 2 was a mystery. The tavern-keeper's
young son said it was kept locked all the time, and he never saw anybody
go into it or come out of it except at night; he did not know any
particular reason for this state of things; had had some little
curiosity, but it was rather feeble; had made the most of the mystery
by entertaining himself with the idea that that room was "ha'nted"; had
noticed that there was a light in there the night before.

"That's what I've found out, Huck. I reckon that's the very No. 2 we're
after."

"I reckon it is, Tom. Now what you going to do?"

"Lemme think."

Tom thought a long time. Then he said:

"I'll tell you. The back door of that No. 2 is the door that comes out
into that little close alley between the tavern and the old rattle trap
of a brick store. Now you get hold of all the doorkeys you can find, and
I'll nip all of auntie's, and the first dark night we'll go there and
try 'em. And mind you, keep a lookout for Injun Joe, because he said he
was going to drop into town and spy around once more for a chance to get
his revenge. If you see him, you just follow him; and if he don't go to
that No. 2, that ain't the place."

"Lordy, I don't want to foller him by myself!"

"Why, it'll be night, sure. He mightn't ever see you--and if he did,
maybe he'd never think anything."

"Well, if it's pretty dark I reckon I'll track him. I dono--I dono. I'll
try."

"You bet I'll follow him, if it's dark, Huck. Why, he might 'a' found
out he couldn't get his revenge, and be going right after that money."

"It's so, Tom, it's so. I'll foller him; I will, by jingoes!"

"Now you're _talking_! Don't you ever weaken, Huck, and I won't."




CHAPTER XXVIII

THAT night Tom and Huck were ready for their adventure. They hung about
the neighborhood of the tavern until after nine, one watching the alley
at a distance and the other the tavern door. Nobody entered the alley or
left it; nobody resembling the Spaniard entered or left the tavern
door. The night promised to be a fair one; so Tom went home with the
understanding that if a considerable degree of darkness came on, Huck
was to come and "maow," whereupon he would slip out and try the keys.
But the night remained clear, and Huck closed his watch and retired to
bed in an empty sugar hogshead about twelve.

Tuesday the boys had the same ill luck. Also Wednesday. But Thursday
night promised better. Tom slipped out in good season with his aunt's
old tin lantern, and a large towel to blindfold it with. He hid the
lantern in Huck's sugar hogshead and the watch began. An hour before
midnight the tavern closed up and its lights (the only ones thereabouts)
were put out. No Spaniard had been seen. Nobody had entered or left the
alley. Everything was auspicious. The blackness of darkness reigned,
the perfect stillness was interrupted only by occasional mutterings of
distant thunder.

Tom got his lantern, lit it in the hogshead, wrapped it closely in the
towel, and the two adventurers crept in the gloom toward the tavern.
Huck stood sentry and Tom felt his way into the alley. Then there was
a season of waiting anxiety that weighed upon Huck's spirits like a
mountain. He began to wish he could see a flash from the lantern--it
would frighten him, but it would at least tell him that Tom was alive
yet. It seemed hours since Tom had disappeared. Surely he must have
fainted; maybe he was dead; maybe his heart had burst under terror and
excitement. In his uneasiness Huck found himself drawing closer
and closer to the alley; fearing all sorts of dreadful things, and
momentarily expecting some catastrophe to happen that would take away
his breath. There was not much to take away, for he seemed only able to
inhale it by thimblefuls, and his heart would soon wear itself out, the
way it was beating. Suddenly there was a flash of light and Tom came
tearing by him: "Run!" said he; "run, for your life!"

He needn't have repeated it; once was enough; Huck was making thirty or
forty miles an hour before the repetition was uttered. The boys never
stopped till they reached the shed of a deserted slaughter-house at the
lower end of the village. Just as they got within its shelter the storm
burst and the rain poured down. As soon as Tom got his breath he said:

"Huck, it was awful! I tried two of the keys, just as soft as I could;
but they seemed to make such a power of racket that I couldn't hardly
get my breath I was so scared. They wouldn't turn in the lock, either.
Well, without noticing what I was doing, I took hold of the knob, and
open comes the door! It warn't locked! I hopped in, and shook off the
towel, and, _Great Caesar's Ghost!_"

"What!--what'd you see, Tom?"

"Huck, I most stepped onto Injun Joe's hand!"

"No!"

"Yes! He was lying there, sound asleep on the floor, with his old patch
on his eye and his arms spread out."

"Lordy, what did you do? Did he wake up?"

"No, never budged. Drunk, I reckon. I just grabbed that towel and
started!"

"I'd never 'a' thought of the towel, I bet!"

"Well, I would. My aunt would make me mighty sick if I lost it."

"Say, Tom, did you see that box?"

"Huck, I didn't wait to look around. I didn't see the box, I didn't see
the cross. I didn't see anything but a bottle and a tin cup on the floor
by Injun Joe; yes, I saw two barrels and lots more bottles in the room.
Don't you see, now, what's the matter with that ha'nted room?"

"How?"

"Why, it's ha'nted with whiskey! Maybe _all_ the Temperance Taverns have
got a ha'nted room, hey, Huck?"

"Well, I reckon maybe that's so. Who'd 'a' thought such a thing? But
say, Tom, now's a mighty good time to get that box, if Injun Joe's
drunk."

"It is, that! You try it!"

Huck shuddered.

"Well, no--I reckon not."

"And I reckon not, Huck. Only one bottle alongside of Injun Joe ain't
enough. If there'd been three, he'd be drunk enough and I'd do it."

There was a long pause for reflection, and then Tom said:

"Lookyhere, Huck, less not try that thing any more till we know Injun
Joe's not in there. It's too scary. Now, if we watch every night, we'll
be dead sure to see him go out, some time or other, and then we'll
snatch that box quicker'n lightning."

"Well, I'm agreed. I'll watch the whole night long, and I'll do it every
night, too, if you'll do the other part of the job."

"All right, I will. All you got to do is to trot up Hooper Street a
block and maow--and if I'm asleep, you throw some gravel at the window
and that'll fetch me."

"Agreed, and good as wheat!"

"Now, Huck, the storm's over, and I'll go home. It'll begin to be
daylight in a couple of hours. You go back and watch that long, will
you?"

"I said I would, Tom, and I will. I'll ha'nt that tavern every night for
a year! I'll sleep all day and I'll stand watch all night."

"That's all right. Now, where you going to sleep?"

"In Ben Rogers' hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man,
Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any
time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can spare it.
That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I don't ever act as
if I was above him. Sometime I've set right down and eat _with_ him. But
you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry
he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing."

"Well, if I don't want you in the daytime, I'll let you sleep. I won't
come bothering around. Any time you see something's up, in the night,
just skip right around and maow."




CHAPTER XXIX

THE first thing Tom heard on Friday morning was a glad piece of
news--Judge Thatcher's family had come back to town the night before.
Both Injun Joe and the treasure sunk into secondary importance for a
moment, and Becky took the chief place in the boy's interest. He saw her
and they had an exhausting good time playing "hispy" and "gully-keeper"
with a crowd of their schoolmates. The day was completed and crowned in
a peculiarly satisfactory way: Becky teased her mother to appoint
the next day for the long-promised and long-delayed picnic, and she
consented. The child's delight was boundless; and Tom's not more
moderate. The invitations were sent out before sunset, and straightway
the young folks of the village were thrown into a fever of preparation
and pleasurable anticipation. Tom's excitement enabled him to keep
awake until a pretty late hour, and he had good hopes of hearing Huck's
"maow," and of having his treasure to astonish Becky and the picnickers
with, next day; but he was disappointed. No signal came that night.

Morning came, eventually, and by ten or eleven o'clock a giddy and
rollicking company were gathered at Judge Thatcher's, and everything was
ready for a start. It was not the custom for elderly people to mar the
picnics with their presence. The children were considered safe enough
under the wings of a few young ladies of eighteen and a few young
gentlemen of twenty-three or thereabouts. The old steam ferry-boat was
chartered for the occasion; presently the gay throng filed up the main
street laden with provision-baskets. Sid was sick and had to miss
the fun; Mary remained at home to entertain him. The last thing Mrs.
Thatcher said to Becky, was:

"You'll not get back till late. Perhaps you'd better stay all night with
some of the girls that live near the ferry-landing, child."

"Then I'll stay with Susy Harper, mamma."

"Very well. And mind and behave yourself and don't be any trouble."

Presently, as they tripped along, Tom said to Becky:

"Say--I'll tell you what we'll do. 'Stead of going to Joe Harper's we'll
climb right up the hill and stop at the Widow Douglas'. She'll have
ice-cream! She has it most every day--dead loads of it. And she'll be
awful glad to have us."

"Oh, that will be fun!"

Then Becky reflected a moment and said:

"But what will mamma say?"

"How'll she ever know?"

The girl turned the idea over in her mind, and said reluctantly:

"I reckon it's wrong--but--"

"But shucks! Your mother won't know, and so what's the harm? All she
wants is that you'll be safe; and I bet you she'd 'a' said go there if
she'd 'a' thought of it. I know she would!"

The Widow Douglas' splendid hospitality was a tempting bait. It and
Tom's persuasions presently carried the day. So it was decided to say
nothing to anybody about the night's programme. Presently it occurred to
Tom that maybe Huck might come this very night and give the signal. The
thought took a deal of the spirit out of his anticipations. Still he
could not bear to give up the fun at Widow Douglas'. And why should he
give it up, he reasoned--the signal did not come the night before, so
why should it be any more likely to come tonight? The sure fun of the
evening outweighed the uncertain treasure; and, boy-like, he determined
to yield to the stronger inclination and not allow himself to think of
the box of money another time that day.

Three miles below town the ferryboat stopped at the mouth of a woody
hollow and tied up. The crowd swarmed ashore and soon the forest
distances and craggy heights echoed far and near with shoutings and
laughter. All the different ways of getting hot and tired were gone
through with, and by-and-by the rovers straggled back to camp fortified
with responsible appetites, and then the destruction of the good things
began. After the feast there was a refreshing season of rest and chat in
the shade of spreading oaks. By-and-by somebody shouted:

"Who's ready for the cave?"

Everybody was. Bundles of candles were procured, and straightway there
was a general scamper up the hill. The mouth of the cave was up the
hillside--an opening shaped like a letter A. Its massive oaken door stood
unbarred. Within was a small chamber, chilly as an icehouse, and walled
by Nature with solid limestone that was dewy with a cold sweat. It was
romantic and mysterious to stand here in the deep gloom and look out
upon the green valley shining in the sun. But the impressiveness of the
situation quickly wore off, and the romping began again. The moment
a candle was lighted there was a general rush upon the owner of it; a
struggle and a gallant defence followed, but the candle was soon knocked
down or blown out, and then there was a glad clamor of laughter and a
new chase. But all things have an end. By-and-by the procession went
filing down the steep descent of the main avenue, the flickering rank of
lights dimly revealing the lofty walls of rock almost to their point of
junction sixty feet overhead. This main avenue was not more than
eight or ten feet wide. Every few steps other lofty and still narrower
crevices branched from it on either hand--for McDougal's cave was but a
vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and out again
and led nowhere. It was said that one might wander days and nights
together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never
find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and
still down, into the earth, and it was just the same--labyrinth under
labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man "knew" the cave. That was
an impossible thing. Most of the young men knew a portion of it, and it
was not customary to venture much beyond this known portion. Tom Sawyer
knew as much of the cave as any one.

The procession moved along the main avenue some three-quarters of
a mile, and then groups and couples began to slip aside into branch
avenues, fly along the dismal corridors, and take each other by surprise
at points where the corridors joined again. Parties were able to elude
each other for the space of half an hour without going beyond the
"known" ground.

By-and-by, one group after another came straggling back to the mouth
of the cave, panting, hilarious, smeared from head to foot with tallow
drippings, daubed with clay, and entirely delighted with the success of
the day. Then they were astonished to find that they had been taking
no note of time and that night was about at hand. The clanging bell had
been calling for half an hour. However, this sort of close to the day's
adventures was romantic and therefore satisfactory. When the ferryboat
with her wild freight pushed into the stream, nobody cared sixpence for
the wasted time but the captain of the craft.

Huck was already upon his watch when the ferryboat's lights went
glinting past the wharf. He heard no noise on board, for the young
people were as subdued and still as people usually are who are nearly
tired to death. He wondered what boat it was, and why she did not
stop at the wharf--and then he dropped her out of his mind and put his
attention upon his business. The night was growing cloudy and dark. Ten
o'clock came, and the noise of vehicles ceased, scattered lights began
to wink out, all straggling foot-passengers disappeared, the village
betook itself to its slumbers and left the small watcher alone with the
silence and the ghosts. Eleven o'clock came, and the tavern lights were
put out; darkness everywhere, now. Huck waited what seemed a weary long
time, but nothing happened. His faith was weakening. Was there any use?
Was there really any use? Why not give it up and turn in?

A noise fell upon his ear. He was all attention in an instant. The alley
door closed softly. He sprang to the corner of the brick store. The next
moment two men brushed by him, and one seemed to have something under
his arm. It must be that box! So they were going to remove the treasure.
Why call Tom now? It would be absurd--the men would get away with the box
and never be found again. No, he would stick to their wake and follow
them; he would trust to the darkness for security from discovery. So
communing with himself, Huck stepped out and glided along behind the
men, cat-like, with bare feet, allowing them to keep just far enough
ahead not to be invisible.

They moved up the river street three blocks, then turned to the left up
a crossstreet. They went straight ahead, then, until they came to the
path that led up Cardiff Hill; this they took. They passed by the old
Welshman's house, halfway up the hill, without hesitating, and still
climbed upward. Good, thought Huck, they will bury it in the old quarry.
But they never stopped at the quarry. They passed on, up the summit.
They plunged into the narrow path between the tall sumach bushes, and
were at once hidden in the gloom. Huck closed up and shortened his
distance, now, for they would never be able to see him. He trotted along
awhile; then slackened his pace, fearing he was gaining too fast; moved
on a piece, then stopped altogether; listened; no sound; none, save that
he seemed to hear the beating of his own heart. The hooting of an
owl came over the hill--ominous sound! But no footsteps. Heavens, was
everything lost! He was about to spring with winged feet, when a man
cleared his throat not four feet from him! Huck's heart shot into his
throat, but he swallowed it again; and then he stood there shaking as
if a dozen agues had taken charge of him at once, and so weak that he
thought he must surely fall to the ground. He knew where he was. He
knew he was within five steps of the stile leading into Widow Douglas'
grounds. Very well, he thought, let them bury it there; it won't be hard
to find.

Now there was a voice--a very low voice--Injun Joe's:

"Damn her, maybe she's got company--there's lights, late as it is."

"I can't see any."

This was that stranger's voice--the stranger of the haunted house. A
deadly chill went to Huck's heart--this, then, was the "revenge" job! His
thought was, to fly. Then he remembered that the Widow Douglas had been
kind to him more than once, and maybe these men were going to murder
her. He wished he dared venture to warn her; but he knew he didn't
dare--they might come and catch him. He thought all this and more in
the moment that elapsed between the stranger's remark and Injun Joe's
next--which was--

"Because the bush is in your way. Now--this way--now you see, don't you?"

"Yes. Well, there _is_ company there, I reckon. Better give it up."

"Give it up, and I just leaving this country forever! Give it up and
maybe never have another chance. I tell you again, as I've told you
before, I don't care for her swag--you may have it. But her husband was
rough on me--many times he was rough on me--and mainly he was the justice
of the peace that jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain't all. It ain't
a millionth part of it! He had me _horsewhipped_!--horsewhipped in
front of the jail, like a nigger!--with all the town looking on!
_Horsewhipped_!--do you understand? He took advantage of me and died. But
I'll take it out of _her_."

"Oh, don't kill her! Don't do that!"

"Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill _him_ if he was
here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don't
kill her--bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils--you notch her
ears like a sow!"

"By God, that's--"

"Keep your opinion to yourself! It will be safest for you. I'll tie her
to the bed. If she bleeds to death, is that my fault? I'll not cry, if
she does. My friend, you'll help me in this thing--for _my_ sake--that's
why you're here--I mightn't be able alone. If you flinch, I'll kill you.
Do you understand that? And if I have to kill you, I'll kill her--and
then I reckon nobody'll ever know much about who done this business."

"Well, if it's got to be done, let's get at it. The quicker the
better--I'm all in a shiver."

"Do it _now_? And company there? Look here--I'll get suspicious of you,
first thing you know. No--we'll wait till the lights are out--there's no
hurry."

Huck felt that a silence was going to ensue--a thing still more awful
than any amount of murderous talk; so he held his breath and stepped
gingerly back; planted his foot carefully and firmly, after balancing,
one-legged, in a precarious way and almost toppling over, first on one
side and then on the other. He took another step back, with the same
elaboration and the same risks; then another and another, and--a twig
snapped under his foot! His breath stopped and he listened. There was no
sound--the stillness was perfect. His gratitude was measureless. Now he
turned in his tracks, between the walls of sumach bushes--turned
himself as carefully as if he were a ship--and then stepped quickly but
cautiously along. When he emerged at the quarry he felt secure, and
so he picked up his nimble heels and flew. Down, down he sped, till he
reached the Welshman's. He banged at the door, and presently the heads
of the old man and his two stalwart sons were thrust from windows.

"What's the row there? Who's banging? What do you want?"

"Let me in--quick! I'll tell everything."

"Why, who are you?"

"Huckleberry Finn--quick, let me in!"

"Huckleberry Finn, indeed! It ain't a name to open many doors, I judge!
But let him in, lads, and let's see what's the trouble."

"Please don't ever tell I told you," were Huck's first words when he got
in. "Please don't--I'd be killed, sure--but the widow's been good friends
to me sometimes, and I want to tell--I _will_ tell if you'll promise you
won't ever say it was me."

"By George, he _has_ got something to tell, or he wouldn't act so!"
exclaimed the old man; "out with it and nobody here'll ever tell, lad."

Three minutes later the old man and his sons, well armed, were up the
hill, and just entering the sumach path on tiptoe, their weapons in
their hands. Huck accompanied them no further. He hid behind a great
bowlder and fell to listening. There was a lagging, anxious silence, and
then all of a sudden there was an explosion of firearms and a cry.

Huck waited for no particulars. He sprang away and sped down the hill as
fast as his legs could carry him.




CHAPTER XXX

AS the earliest suspicion of dawn appeared on Sunday morning, Huck came
groping up the hill and rapped gently at the old Welshman's door. The
inmates were asleep, but it was a sleep that was set on a hair-trigger,
on account of the exciting episode of the night. A call came from a
window:

"Who's there!"

Huck's scared voice answered in a low tone:

"Please let me in! It's only Huck Finn!"

"It's a name that can open this door night or day, lad!--and welcome!"

These were strange words to the vagabond boy's ears, and the pleasantest
he had ever heard. He could not recollect that the closing word had ever
been applied in his case before. The door was quickly unlocked, and he
entered. Huck was given a seat and the old man and his brace of tall
sons speedily dressed themselves.

"Now, my boy, I hope you're good and hungry, because breakfast will be
ready as soon as the sun's up, and we'll have a piping hot one, too--make
yourself easy about that! I and the boys hoped you'd turn up and stop
here last night."

"I was awful scared," said Huck, "and I run. I took out when the pistols
went off, and I didn't stop for three mile. I've come now becuz I wanted
to know about it, you know; and I come before daylight becuz I didn't
want to run across them devils, even if they was dead."

"Well, poor chap, you do look as if you'd had a hard night of it--but
there's a bed here for you when you've had your breakfast. No, they
ain't dead, lad--we are sorry enough for that. You see we knew right
where to put our hands on them, by your description; so we crept along
on tiptoe till we got within fifteen feet of them--dark as a cellar that
sumach path was--and just then I found I was going to sneeze. It was the
meanest kind of luck! I tried to keep it back, but no use--'twas bound to
come, and it did come! I was in the lead with my pistol raised, and when
the sneeze started those scoundrels a-rustling to get out of the path,
I sung out, 'Fire boys!' and blazed away at the place where the rustling
was. So did the boys. But they were off in a jiffy, those villains, and
we after them, down through the woods. I judge we never touched them.
They fired a shot apiece as they started, but their bullets whizzed by
and didn't do us any harm. As soon as we lost the sound of their feet
we quit chasing, and went down and stirred up the constables. They got a
posse together, and went off to guard the river bank, and as soon as it
is light the sheriff and a gang are going to beat up the woods. My boys
will be with them presently. I wish we had some sort of description of
those rascals--'twould help a good deal. But you couldn't see what they
were like, in the dark, lad, I suppose?"

"Oh yes; I saw them downtown and follered them."

"Splendid! Describe them--describe them, my boy!"

"One's the old deaf and dumb Spaniard that's ben around here once or
twice, and t'other's a mean-looking, ragged--"

"That's enough, lad, we know the men! Happened on them in the woods back
of the widow's one day, and they slunk away. Off with you, boys, and
tell the sheriff--get your breakfast tomorrow morning!"

The Welshman's sons departed at once. As they were leaving the room Huck
sprang up and exclaimed:

"Oh, please don't tell _any_body it was me that blowed on them! Oh,
please!"

"All right if you say it, Huck, but you ought to have the credit of what
you did."

"Oh no, no! Please don't tell!"

When the young men were gone, the old Welshman said:

"They won't tell--and I won't. But why don't you want it known?"

Huck would not explain, further than to say that he already knew too
much about one of those men and would not have the man know that he knew
anything against him for the whole world--he would be killed for knowing
it, sure.

The old man promised secrecy once more, and said:

"How did you come to follow these fellows, lad? Were they looking
suspicious?"

Huck was silent while he framed a duly cautious reply. Then he said:

"Well, you see, I'm a kind of a hard lot,--least everybody says so, and
I don't see nothing agin it--and sometimes I can't sleep much, on account
of thinking about it and sort of trying to strike out a new way of
doing. That was the way of it last night. I couldn't sleep, and so I
come along upstreet 'bout midnight, a-turning it all over, and when I
got to that old shackly brick store by the Temperance Tavern, I backed
up agin the wall to have another think. Well, just then along comes
these two chaps slipping along close by me, with something under their
arm, and I reckoned they'd stole it. One was a-smoking, and t'other one
wanted a light; so they stopped right before me and the cigars lit up
their faces and I see that the big one was the deaf and dumb Spaniard,
by his white whiskers and the patch on his eye, and t'other one was a
rusty, ragged-looking devil."

"Could you see the rags by the light of the cigars?"

This staggered Huck for a moment. Then he said:

"Well, I don't know--but somehow it seems as if I did."

"Then they went on, and you--"

"Follered 'em--yes. That was it. I wanted to see what was up--they sneaked
along so. I dogged 'em to the widder's stile, and stood in the dark and
heard the ragged one beg for the widder, and the Spaniard swear he'd
spile her looks just as I told you and your two--"

"What! The _deaf and dumb_ man said all that!"

Huck had made another terrible mistake! He was trying his best to keep
the old man from getting the faintest hint of who the Spaniard might be,
and yet his tongue seemed determined to get him into trouble in spite of
all he could do. He made several efforts to creep out of his scrape,
but the old man's eye was upon him and he made blunder after blunder.
Presently the Welshman said:

"My boy, don't be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt a hair of your head for
all the world. No--I'd protect you--I'd protect you. This Spaniard is
not deaf and dumb; you've let that slip without intending it; you can't
cover that up now. You know something about that Spaniard that you want
to keep dark. Now trust me--tell me what it is, and trust me--I won't
betray you."

Huck looked into the old man's honest eyes a moment, then bent over and
whispered in his ear:

"'Tain't a Spaniard--it's Injun Joe!"

The Welshman almost jumped out of his chair. In a moment he said:

"It's all plain enough, now. When you talked about notching ears and
slitting noses I judged that that was your own embellishment, because
white men don't take that sort of revenge. But an Injun! That's a
different matter altogether."

During breakfast the talk went on, and in the course of it the old man
said that the last thing which he and his sons had done, before going
to bed, was to get a lantern and examine the stile and its vicinity for
marks of blood. They found none, but captured a bulky bundle of--

"Of _what_?"

If the words had been lightning they could not have leaped with a more
stunning suddenness from Huck's blanched lips. His eyes were staring
wide, now, and his breath suspended--waiting for the answer. The Welshman
started--stared in return--three seconds--five seconds--ten--then replied:

"Of burglar's tools. Why, what's the _matter_ with you?"

Huck sank back, panting gently, but deeply, unutterably grateful. The
Welshman eyed him gravely, curiously--and presently said:

"Yes, burglar's tools. That appears to relieve you a good deal. But what
did give you that turn? What were _you_ expecting we'd found?"

Huck was in a close place--the inquiring eye was upon him--he would have
given anything for material for a plausible answer--nothing suggested
itself--the inquiring eye was boring deeper and deeper--a senseless
reply offered--there was no time to weigh it, so at a venture he uttered
it--feebly:

"Sunday-school books, maybe."

Poor Huck was too distressed to smile, but the old man laughed loud and
joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and
ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a-man's pocket, because
it cut down the doctor's bill like everything. Then he added:

"Poor old chap, you're white and jaded--you ain't well a bit--no wonder
you're a little flighty and off your balance. But you'll come out of it.
Rest and sleep will fetch you out all right, I hope."

Huck was irritated to think he had been such a goose and betrayed such
a suspicious excitement, for he had dropped the idea that the parcel
brought from the tavern was the treasure, as soon as he had heard the
talk at the widow's stile. He had only thought it was not the treasure,
however--he had not known that it wasn't--and so the suggestion of a
captured bundle was too much for his self-possession. But on the whole
he felt glad the little episode had happened, for now he knew beyond all
question that that bundle was not _the_ bundle, and so his mind was
at rest and exceedingly comfortable. In fact, everything seemed to be
drifting just in the right direction, now; the treasure must be still
in No. 2, the men would be captured and jailed that day, and he and
Tom could seize the gold that night without any trouble or any fear of
interruption.

Just as breakfast was completed there was a knock at the door. Huck
jumped for a hiding-place, for he had no mind to be connected even
remotely with the late event. The Welshman admitted several ladies and
gentlemen, among them the Widow Douglas, and noticed that groups of
citizens were climbing up the hill--to stare at the stile. So the news
had spread. The Welshman had to tell the story of the night to the
visitors. The widow's gratitude for her preservation was outspoken.

"Don't say a word about it, madam. There's another that you're more
beholden to than you are to me and my boys, maybe, but he don't allow me
to tell his name. We wouldn't have been there but for him."

Of course this excited a curiosity so vast that it almost belittled the
main matter--but the Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his
visitors, and through them be transmitted to the whole town, for he
refused to part with his secret. When all else had been learned, the
widow said:

"I went to sleep reading in bed and slept straight through all that
noise. Why didn't you come and wake me?"

"We judged it warn't worth while. Those fellows warn't likely to come
again--they hadn't any tools left to work with, and what was the use of
waking you up and scaring you to death? My three negro men stood guard
at your house all the rest of the night. They've just come back."

More visitors came, and the story had to be told and retold for a couple
of hours more.

There was no Sabbath-school during day-school vacation, but everybody
was early at church. The stirring event was well canvassed. News came
that not a sign of the two villains had been yet discovered. When the
sermon was finished, Judge Thatcher's wife dropped alongside of Mrs.
Harper as she moved down the aisle with the crowd and said:

"Is my Becky going to sleep all day? I just expected she would be tired
to death."

"Your Becky?"

"Yes," with a startled look--"didn't she stay with you last night?"

"Why, no."

Mrs. Thatcher turned pale, and sank into a pew, just as Aunt Polly,
talking briskly with a friend, passed by. Aunt Polly said:

"Goodmorning, Mrs. Thatcher. Goodmorning, Mrs. Harper. I've got a boy
that's turned up missing. I reckon my Tom stayed at your house last
night--one of you. And now he's afraid to come to church. I've got to
settle with him."

Mrs. Thatcher shook her head feebly and turned paler than ever.

"He didn't stay with us," said Mrs. Harper, beginning to look uneasy. A
marked anxiety came into Aunt Polly's face.

"Joe Harper, have you seen my Tom this morning?"

"No'm."

"When did you see him last?"

Joe tried to remember, but was not sure he could say. The people had
stopped moving out of church. Whispers passed along, and a boding
uneasiness took possession of every countenance. Children were anxiously
questioned, and young teachers. They all said they had not noticed
whether Tom and Becky were on board the ferryboat on the homeward trip;
it was dark; no one thought of inquiring if any one was missing. One
young man finally blurted out his fear that they were still in the cave!
Mrs. Thatcher swooned away. Aunt Polly fell to crying and wringing her
hands.

The alarm swept from lip to lip, from group to group, from street to
street, and within five minutes the bells were wildly clanging and
the whole town was up! The Cardiff Hill episode sank into instant
insignificance, the burglars were forgotten, horses were saddled, skiffs
were manned, the ferryboat ordered out, and before the horror was half
an hour old, two hundred men were pouring down highroad and river toward
the cave.

All the long afternoon the village seemed empty and dead. Many women
visited Aunt Polly and Mrs. Thatcher and tried to comfort them. They
cried with them, too, and that was still better than words. All the
tedious night the town waited for news; but when the morning dawned at
last, all the word that came was, "Send more candles--and send food."
Mrs. Thatcher was almost crazed; and Aunt Polly, also. Judge Thatcher
sent messages of hope and encouragement from the cave, but they conveyed
no real cheer.

The old Welshman came home toward daylight, spattered with
candle-grease, smeared with clay, and almost worn out. He found Huck
still in the bed that had been provided for him, and delirious with
fever. The physicians were all at the cave, so the Widow Douglas came
and took charge of the patient. She said she would do her best by him,
because, whether he was good, bad, or indifferent, he was the Lord's,
and nothing that was the Lord's was a thing to be neglected. The
Welshman said Huck had good spots in him, and the widow said:

"You can depend on it. That's the Lord's mark. He don't leave it off.
He never does. Puts it somewhere on every creature that comes from his
hands."

Early in the forenoon parties of jaded men began to straggle into the
village, but the strongest of the citizens continued searching. All the
news that could be gained was that remotenesses of the cavern were being
ransacked that had never been visited before; that every corner and
crevice was going to be thoroughly searched; that wherever one wandered
through the maze of passages, lights were to be seen flitting hither
and thither in the distance, and shoutings and pistol-shots sent their
hollow reverberations to the ear down the sombre aisles. In one place,
far from the section usually traversed by tourists, the names "BECKY &
TOM" had been found traced upon the rocky wall with candle-smoke, and
near at hand a grease-soiled bit of ribbon. Mrs. Thatcher recognized the
ribbon and cried over it. She said it was the last relic she should ever
have of her child; and that no other memorial of her could ever be so
precious, because this one parted latest from the living body before the
awful death came. Some said that now and then, in the cave, a far-away
speck of light would glimmer, and then a glorious shout would burst
forth and a score of men go trooping down the echoing aisle--and then a
sickening disappointment always followed; the children were not there;
it was only a searcher's light.

Three dreadful days and nights dragged their tedious hours along, and
the village sank into a hopeless stupor. No one had heart for anything.
The accidental discovery, just made, that the proprietor of the
Temperance Tavern kept liquor on his premises, scarcely fluttered the
public pulse, tremendous as the fact was. In a lucid interval, Huck
feebly led up to the subject of taverns, and finally asked--dimly
dreading the worst--if anything had been discovered at the Temperance
Tavern since he had been ill.

"Yes," said the widow.

Huck started up in bed, wildeyed:

"What? What was it?"

"Liquor!--and the place has been shut up. Lie down, child--what a turn you
did give me!"

"Only tell me just one thing--only just one--please! Was it Tom Sawyer
that found it?"

The widow burst into tears. "Hush, hush, child, hush! I've told you
before, you must _not_ talk. You are very, very sick!"

Then nothing but liquor had been found; there would have been a great
powwow if it had been the gold. So the treasure was gone forever--gone
forever! But what could she be crying about? Curious that she should
cry.

These thoughts worked their dim way through Huck's mind, and under the
weariness they gave him he fell asleep. The widow said to herself:

"There--he's asleep, poor wreck. Tom Sawyer find it! Pity but somebody
could find Tom Sawyer! Ah, there ain't many left, now, that's got hope
enough, or strength enough, either, to go on searching."




CHAPTER XXXI

NOW to return to Tom and Becky's share in the picnic. They tripped along
the murky aisles with the rest of the company, visiting the familiar
wonders of the cave--wonders dubbed with rather over-descriptive names,
such as "The Drawing-Room," "The Cathedral," "Aladdin's Palace," and
so on. Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking began, and Tom and Becky
engaged in it with zeal until the exertion began to grow a trifle
wearisome; then they wandered down a sinuous avenue holding their
candles aloft and reading the tangled webwork of names, dates,
postoffice addresses, and mottoes with which the rocky walls had been
frescoed (in candle-smoke). Still drifting along and talking, they
scarcely noticed that they were now in a part of the cave whose walls
were not frescoed. They smoked their own names under an overhanging
shelf and moved on. Presently they came to a place where a little stream
of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment with
it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced and ruffled Niagara
in gleaming and imperishable stone. Tom squeezed his small body behind
it in order to illuminate it for Becky's gratification. He found that
it curtained a sort of steep natural stairway which was enclosed between
narrow walls, and at once the ambition to be a discoverer seized him.

Becky responded to his call, and they made a smoke-mark for future
guidance, and started upon their quest. They wound this way and that,
far down into the secret depths of the cave, made another mark, and
branched off in search of novelties to tell the upper world about. In
one place they found a spacious cavern, from whose ceiling depended a
multitude of shining stalactites of the length and circumference of
a man's leg; they walked all about it, wondering and admiring, and
presently left it by one of the numerous passages that opened into
it. This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was
incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst
of a cavern whose walls were supported by many fantastic pillars which
had been formed by the joining of great stalactites and stalagmites
together, the result of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries. Under the
roof vast knots of bats had packed themselves together, thousands in a
bunch; the lights disturbed the creatures and they came flocking down by
hundreds, squeaking and darting furiously at the candles. Tom knew their
ways and the danger of this sort of conduct. He seized Becky's hand and
hurried her into the first corridor that offered; and none too soon, for
a bat struck Becky's light out with its wing while she was passing out
of the cavern. The bats chased the children a good distance; but the
fugitives plunged into every new passage that offered, and at last got
rid of the perilous things. Tom found a subterranean lake, shortly,
which stretched its dim length away until its shape was lost in the
shadows. He wanted to explore its borders, but concluded that it would
be best to sit down and rest awhile, first. Now, for the first time, the
deep stillness of the place laid a clammy hand upon the spirits of the
children. Becky said:

"Why, I didn't notice, but it seems ever so long since I heard any of
the others."

"Come to think, Becky, we are away down below them--and I don't know how
far away north, or south, or east, or whichever it is. We couldn't hear
them here."

Becky grew apprehensive.

"I wonder how long we've been down here, Tom? We better start back."

"Yes, I reckon we better. P'raps we better."

"Can you find the way, Tom? It's all a mixed-up crookedness to me."

"I reckon I could find it--but then the bats. If they put our candles
out it will be an awful fix. Let's try some other way, so as not to go
through there."

"Well. But I hope we won't get lost. It would be so awful!" and the girl
shuddered at the thought of the dreadful possibilities.

They started through a corridor, and traversed it in silence a long
way, glancing at each new opening, to see if there was anything familiar
about the look of it; but they were all strange. Every time Tom made an
examination, Becky would watch his face for an encouraging sign, and he
would say cheerily:

"Oh, it's all right. This ain't the one, but we'll come to it right
away!"

But he felt less and less hopeful with each failure, and presently began
to turn off into diverging avenues at sheer random, in desperate hope of
finding the one that was wanted. He still said it was "all right," but
there was such a leaden dread at his heart that the words had lost their
ring and sounded just as if he had said, "All is lost!" Becky clung to
his side in an anguish of fear, and tried hard to keep back the tears,
but they would come. At last she said:

"Oh, Tom, never mind the bats, let's go back that way! We seem to get
worse and worse off all the time."

"Listen!" said he.

Profound silence; silence so deep that even their breathings were
conspicuous in the hush. Tom shouted. The call went echoing down
the empty aisles and died out in the distance in a faint sound that
resembled a ripple of mocking laughter.

"Oh, don't do it again, Tom, it is too horrid," said Becky.

"It is horrid, but I better, Becky; they might hear us, you know," and
he shouted again.

The "might" was even a chillier horror than the ghostly laughter, it so
confessed a perishing hope. The children stood still and listened; but
there was no result. Tom turned upon the back track at once, and hurried
his steps. It was but a little while before a certain indecision in his
manner revealed another fearful fact to Becky--he could not find his way
back!

"Oh, Tom, you didn't make any marks!"

"Becky, I was such a fool! Such a fool! I never thought we might want to
come back! No--I can't find the way. It's all mixed up."

"Tom, Tom, we're lost! we're lost! We never can get out of this awful
place! Oh, why _did_ we ever leave the others!"

She sank to the ground and burst into such a frenzy of crying that Tom
was appalled with the idea that she might die, or lose her reason. He
sat down by her and put his arms around her; she buried her face in
his bosom, she clung to him, she poured out her terrors, her unavailing
regrets, and the far echoes turned them all to jeering laughter. Tom
begged her to pluck up hope again, and she said she could not. He fell
to blaming and abusing himself for getting her into this miserable
situation; this had a better effect. She said she would try to hope
again, she would get up and follow wherever he might lead if only he
would not talk like that any more. For he was no more to blame than she,
she said.

So they moved on again--aimlessly--simply at random--all they could do
was to move, keep moving. For a little while, hope made a show of
reviving--not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its
nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and
familiarity with failure.

By-and-by Tom took Becky's candle and blew it out. This economy meant so
much! Words were not needed. Becky understood, and her hope died again.
She knew that Tom had a whole candle and three or four pieces in his
pockets--yet he must economize.

By-and-by, fatigue began to assert its claims; the children tried to pay
attention, for it was dreadful to think of sitting down when time was
grown to be so precious, moving, in some direction, in any direction,
was at least progress and might bear fruit; but to sit down was to
invite death and shorten its pursuit.

At last Becky's frail limbs refused to carry her farther. She sat down.
Tom rested with her, and they talked of home, and the friends there,
and the comfortable beds and, above all, the light! Becky cried, and Tom
tried to think of some way of comforting her, but all his encouragements
were grown thread-bare with use, and sounded like sarcasms. Fatigue bore
so heavily upon Becky that she drowsed off to sleep. Tom was grateful.
He sat looking into her drawn face and saw it grow smooth and natural
under the influence of pleasant dreams; and by-and-by a smile dawned and
rested there. The peaceful face reflected somewhat of peace and healing
into his own spirit, and his thoughts wandered away to bygone times and
dreamy memories. While he was deep in his musings, Becky woke up with a
breezy little laugh--but it was stricken dead upon her lips, and a groan
followed it.

"Oh, how _could_ I sleep! I wish I never, never had waked! No! No, I
don't, Tom! Don't look so! I won't say it again."

"I'm glad you've slept, Becky; you'll feel rested, now, and we'll find
the way out."

"We can try, Tom; but I've seen such a beautiful country in my dream. I
reckon we are going there."

"Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying."

They rose up and wandered along, hand in hand and hopeless. They tried
to estimate how long they had been in the cave, but all they knew was
that it seemed days and weeks, and yet it was plain that this could not
be, for their candles were not gone yet. A long time after this--they
could not tell how long--Tom said they must go softly and listen for
dripping water--they must find a spring. They found one presently, and
Tom said it was time to rest again. Both were cruelly tired, yet Becky
said she thought she could go a little farther. She was surprised to
hear Tom dissent. She could not understand it. They sat down, and Tom
fastened his candle to the wall in front of them with some clay. Thought
was soon busy; nothing was said for some time. Then Becky broke the
silence:

"Tom, I am so hungry!"

Tom took something out of his pocket.

"Do you remember this?" said he.

Becky almost smiled.

"It's our wedding-cake, Tom."

"Yes--I wish it was as big as a barrel, for it's all we've got."

"I saved it from the picnic for us to dream on, Tom, the way grownup
people do with wedding-cake--but it'll be our--"

She dropped the sentence where it was. Tom divided the cake and Becky
ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at his moiety. There was
abundance of cold water to finish the feast with. By-and-by Becky
suggested that they move on again. Tom was silent a moment. Then he
said:

"Becky, can you bear it if I tell you something?"

Becky's face paled, but she thought she could.

"Well, then, Becky, we must stay here, where there's water to drink.
That little piece is our last candle!"

Becky gave loose to tears and wailings. Tom did what he could to comfort
her, but with little effect. At length Becky said:

"Tom!"

"Well, Becky?"

"They'll miss us and hunt for us!"

"Yes, they will! Certainly they will!"

"Maybe they're hunting for us now, Tom."

"Why, I reckon maybe they are. I hope they are."

"When would they miss us, Tom?"

"When they get back to the boat, I reckon."

"Tom, it might be dark then--would they notice we hadn't come?"

"I don't know. But anyway, your mother would miss you as soon as they
got home."

A frightened look in Becky's face brought Tom to his senses and he saw
that he had made a blunder. Becky was not to have gone home that night!
The children became silent and thoughtful. In a moment a new burst of
grief from Becky showed Tom that the thing in his mind had struck hers
also--that the Sabbath morning might be half spent before Mrs. Thatcher
discovered that Becky was not at Mrs. Harper's.

The children fastened their eyes upon their bit of candle and watched it
melt slowly and pitilessly away; saw the half inch of wick stand alone
at last; saw the feeble flame rise and fall, climb the thin column of
smoke, linger at its top a moment, and then--the horror of utter darkness
reigned!

How long afterward it was that Becky came to a slow consciousness that
she was crying in Tom's arms, neither could tell. All that they knew
was, that after what seemed a mighty stretch of time, both awoke out of
a dead stupor of sleep and resumed their miseries once more. Tom said
it might be Sunday, now--maybe Monday. He tried to get Becky to talk, but
her sorrows were too oppressive, all her hopes were gone. Tom said that
they must have been missed long ago, and no doubt the search was going
on. He would shout and maybe some one would come. He tried it; but in
the darkness the distant echoes sounded so hideously that he tried it no
more.

The hours wasted away, and hunger came to torment the captives again. A
portion of Tom's half of the cake was left; they divided and ate it. But
they seemed hungrier than before. The poor morsel of food only whetted
desire.

By-and-by Tom said:

"SH! Did you hear that?"

Both held their breath and listened. There was a sound like the
faintest, far-off shout. Instantly Tom answered it, and leading Becky by
the hand, started groping down the corridor in its direction. Presently
he listened again; again the sound was heard, and apparently a little
nearer.

"It's them!" said Tom; "they're coming! Come along, Becky--we're all
right now!"

The joy of the prisoners was almost overwhelming. Their speed was slow,
however, because pitfalls were somewhat common, and had to be guarded
against. They shortly came to one and had to stop. It might be three
feet deep, it might be a hundred--there was no passing it at any rate.
Tom got down on his breast and reached as far down as he could. No
bottom. They must stay there and wait until the searchers came. They
listened; evidently the distant shoutings were growing more distant!
a moment or two more and they had gone altogether. The heart-sinking
misery of it! Tom whooped until he was hoarse, but it was of no use. He
talked hopefully to Becky; but an age of anxious waiting passed and no
sounds came again.

The children groped their way back to the spring. The weary time dragged
on; they slept again, and awoke famished and woe-stricken. Tom believed
it must be Tuesday by this time.

Now an idea struck him. There were some side passages near at hand. It
would be better to explore some of these than bear the weight of the
heavy time in idleness. He took a kite-line from his pocket, tied it to
a projection, and he and Becky started, Tom in the lead, unwinding the
line as he groped along. At the end of twenty steps the corridor ended
in a "jumping-off place." Tom got down on his knees and felt below,
and then as far around the corner as he could reach with his hands
conveniently; he made an effort to stretch yet a little farther to the
right, and at that moment, not twenty yards away, a human hand, holding
a candle, appeared from behind a rock! Tom lifted up a glorious shout,
and instantly that hand was followed by the body it belonged to--Injun
Joe's! Tom was paralyzed; he could not move. He was vastly gratified the
next moment, to see the "Spaniard" take to his heels and get himself out
of sight. Tom wondered that Joe had not recognized his voice and come
over and killed him for testifying in court. But the echoes must have
disguised the voice. Without doubt, that was it, he reasoned. Tom's
fright weakened every muscle in his body. He said to himself that if he
had strength enough to get back to the spring he would stay there, and
nothing should tempt him to run the risk of meeting Injun Joe again. He
was careful to keep from Becky what it was he had seen. He told her he
had only shouted "for luck."

But hunger and wretchedness rise superior to fears in the long run.
Another tedious wait at the spring and another long sleep brought
changes. The children awoke tortured with a raging hunger. Tom believed
that it must be Wednesday or Thursday or even Friday or Saturday, now,
and that the search had been given over. He proposed to explore another
passage. He felt willing to risk Injun Joe and all other terrors. But
Becky was very weak. She had sunk into a dreary apathy and would not be
roused. She said she would wait, now, where she was, and die--it would
not be long. She told Tom to go with the kite-line and explore if he
chose; but she implored him to come back every little while and speak
to her; and she made him promise that when the awful time came, he would
stay by her and hold her hand until all was over.

Tom kissed her, with a choking sensation in his throat, and made a show
of being confident of finding the searchers or an escape from the cave;
then he took the kite-line in his hand and went groping down one of the
passages on his hands and knees, distressed with hunger and sick with
bodings of coming doom.




CHAPTER XXXII

TUESDAY afternoon came, and waned to the twilight. The village of St.
Petersburg still mourned. The lost children had not been found. Public
prayers had been offered up for them, and many and many a private prayer
that had the petitioner's whole heart in it; but still no good news came
from the cave. The majority of the searchers had given up the quest
and gone back to their daily avocations, saying that it was plain the
children could never be found. Mrs. Thatcher was very ill, and a great
part of the time delirious. People said it was heartbreaking to hear her
call her child, and raise her head and listen a whole minute at a time,
then lay it wearily down again with a moan. Aunt Polly had drooped into
a settled melancholy, and her gray hair had grown almost white. The
village went to its rest on Tuesday night, sad and forlorn.

Away in the middle of the night a wild peal burst from the village
bells, and in a moment the streets were swarming with frantic half-clad
people, who shouted, "Turn out! turn out! they're found! they're found!"
Tin pans and horns were added to the din, the population massed itself
and moved toward the river, met the children coming in an open carriage
drawn by shouting citizens, thronged around it, joined its homeward
march, and swept magnificently up the main street roaring huzzah after
huzzah!

The village was illuminated; nobody went to bed again; it was the
greatest night the little town had ever seen. During the first half-hour
a procession of villagers filed through Judge Thatcher's house, seized
the saved ones and kissed them, squeezed Mrs. Thatcher's hand, tried to
speak but couldn't--and drifted out raining tears all over the place.

Aunt Polly's happiness was complete, and Mrs. Thatcher's nearly so. It
would be complete, however, as soon as the messenger dispatched with the
great news to the cave should get the word to her husband. Tom lay upon
a sofa with an eager auditory about him and told the history of the
wonderful adventure, putting in many striking additions to adorn it
withal; and closed with a description of how he left Becky and went
on an exploring expedition; how he followed two avenues as far as his
kite-line would reach; how he followed a third to the fullest stretch
of the kite-line, and was about to turn back when he glimpsed a far-off
speck that looked like daylight; dropped the line and groped toward it,
pushed his head and shoulders through a small hole, and saw the broad
Mississippi rolling by!

And if it had only happened to be night he would not have seen that
speck of daylight and would not have explored that passage any more! He
told how he went back for Becky and broke the good news and she told
him not to fret her with such stuff, for she was tired, and knew she was
going to die, and wanted to. He described how he labored with her and
convinced her; and how she almost died for joy when she had groped to
where she actually saw the blue speck of daylight; how he pushed his way
out at the hole and then helped her out; how they sat there and cried
for gladness; how some men came along in a skiff and Tom hailed them
and told them their situation and their famished condition; how the men
didn't believe the wild tale at first, "because," said they, "you are
five miles down the river below the valley the cave is in"--then took
them aboard, rowed to a house, gave them supper, made them rest till two
or three hours after dark and then brought them home.

Before day-dawn, Judge Thatcher and the handful of searchers with him
were tracked out, in the cave, by the twine clews they had strung behind
them, and informed of the great news.

Three days and nights of toil and hunger in the cave were not to
be shaken off at once, as Tom and Becky soon discovered. They were
bedridden all of Wednesday and Thursday, and seemed to grow more and
more tired and worn, all the time. Tom got about, a little, on Thursday,
was downtown Friday, and nearly as whole as ever Saturday; but Becky
did not leave her room until Sunday, and then she looked as if she had
passed through a wasting illness.

Tom learned of Huck's sickness and went to see him on Friday, but could
not be admitted to the bedroom; neither could he on Saturday or Sunday.
He was admitted daily after that, but was warned to keep still about his
adventure and introduce no exciting topic. The Widow Douglas stayed by
to see that he obeyed. At home Tom learned of the Cardiff Hill event;
also that the "ragged man's" body had eventually been found in the river
near the ferry-landing; he had been drowned while trying to escape,
perhaps.

About a fortnight after Tom's rescue from the cave, he started off to
visit Huck, who had grown plenty strong enough, now, to hear exciting
talk, and Tom had some that would interest him, he thought. Judge
Thatcher's house was on Tom's way, and he stopped to see Becky. The
Judge and some friends set Tom to talking, and some one asked him
ironically if he wouldn't like to go to the cave again. Tom said he
thought he wouldn't mind it. The Judge said:

"Well, there are others just like you, Tom, I've not the least doubt.
But we have taken care of that. Nobody will get lost in that cave any
more."

"Why?"

"Because I had its big door sheathed with boiler iron two weeks ago, and
triple-locked--and I've got the keys."

Tom turned as white as a sheet.

"What's the matter, boy! Here, run, somebody! Fetch a glass of water!"

The water was brought and thrown into Tom's face.

"Ah, now you're all right. What was the matter with you, Tom?"

"Oh, Judge, Injun Joe's in the cave!"




CHAPTER XXXIII

WITHIN a few minutes the news had spread, and a dozen skiff-loads of
men were on their way to McDougal's cave, and the ferryboat, well filled
with passengers, soon followed. Tom Sawyer was in the skiff that bore
Judge Thatcher.

When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sight presented itself in
the dim twilight of the place. Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground,
dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing
eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer
of the free world outside. Tom was touched, for he knew by his own
experience how this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved, but
nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief and security, now,
which revealed to him in a degree which he had not fully appreciated
before how vast a weight of dread had been lying upon him since the day
he lifted his voice against this bloody-minded outcast.

Injun Joe's bowie-knife lay close by, its blade broken in two. The great
foundation-beam of the door had been chipped and hacked through, with
tedious labor; useless labor, too, it was, for the native rock formed a
sill outside it, and upon that stubborn material the knife had wrought
no effect; the only damage done was to the knife itself. But if there
had been no stony obstruction there the labor would have been useless
still, for if the beam had been wholly cut away Injun Joe could not have
squeezed his body under the door, and he knew it. So he had only hacked
that place in order to be doing something--in order to pass the weary
time--in order to employ his tortured faculties. Ordinarily one could
find half a dozen bits of candle stuck around in the crevices of this
vestibule, left there by tourists; but there were none now. The prisoner
had searched them out and eaten them. He had also contrived to catch a
few bats, and these, also, he had eaten, leaving only their claws. The
poor unfortunate had starved to death. In one place, near at hand, a
stalagmite had been slowly growing up from the ground for ages, builded
by the water-drip from a stalactite overhead. The captive had broken off
the stalagmite, and upon the stump had placed a stone, wherein he had
scooped a shallow hollow to catch the precious drop that fell once
in every three minutes with the dreary regularity of a clock-tick--a
dessertspoonful once in four and twenty hours. That drop was falling
when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome
were laid; when Christ was crucified; when the Conqueror created the
British empire; when Columbus sailed; when the massacre at Lexington was
"news."

It is falling now; it will still be falling when all these things shall
have sunk down the afternoon of history, and the twilight of tradition,
and been swallowed up in the thick night of oblivion. Has everything a
purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand
years to be ready for this flitting human insect's need? and has it
another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come? No
matter. It is many and many a year since the hapless half-breed scooped
out the stone to catch the priceless drops, but to this day the tourist
stares longest at that pathetic stone and that slow-dropping water when
he comes to see the wonders of McDougal's cave. Injun Joe's cup stands
first in the list of the cavern's marvels; even "Aladdin's Palace"
cannot rival it.

Injun Joe was buried near the mouth of the cave; and people flocked
there in boats and wagons from the towns and from all the farms and
hamlets for seven miles around; they brought their children, and
all sorts of provisions, and confessed that they had had almost as
satisfactory a time at the funeral as they could have had at the
hanging.

This funeral stopped the further growth of one thing--the petition to the
governor for Injun Joe's pardon. The petition had been largely signed;
many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a committee of
sappy women been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the
governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty
under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the
village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would
have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a
pardon-petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired
and leaky water-works.

The morning after the funeral Tom took Huck to a private place to have
an important talk. Huck had learned all about Tom's adventure from the
Welshman and the Widow Douglas, by this time, but Tom said he reckoned
there was one thing they had not told him; that thing was what he wanted
to talk about now. Huck's face saddened. He said:

"I know what it is. You got into No. 2 and never found anything but
whiskey. Nobody told me it was you; but I just knowed it must 'a' ben
you, soon as I heard 'bout that whiskey business; and I knowed you
hadn't got the money becuz you'd 'a' got at me some way or other and
told me even if you was mum to everybody else. Tom, something's always
told me we'd never get holt of that swag."

"Why, Huck, I never told on that tavern-keeper. _You_ know his tavern
was all right the Saturday I went to the picnic. Don't you remember you
was to watch there that night?"

"Oh yes! Why, it seems 'bout a year ago. It was that very night that I
follered Injun Joe to the widder's."

"_You_ followed him?"

"Yes--but you keep mum. I reckon Injun Joe's left friends behind him, and
I don't want 'em souring on me and doing me mean tricks. If it hadn't
ben for me he'd be down in Texas now, all right."

Then Huck told his entire adventure in confidence to Tom, who had only
heard of the Welshman's part of it before.

"Well," said Huck, presently, coming back to the main question, "whoever
nipped the whiskey in No. 2, nipped the money, too, I reckon--anyways
it's a goner for us, Tom."

"Huck, that money wasn't ever in No. 2!"

"What!" Huck searched his comrade's face keenly. "Tom, have you got on
the track of that money again?"

"Huck, it's in the cave!"

Huck's eyes blazed.

"Say it again, Tom."

"The money's in the cave!"

"Tom--honest injun, now--is it fun, or earnest?"

"Earnest, Huck--just as earnest as ever I was in my life. Will you go in
there with me and help get it out?"

"I bet I will! I will if it's where we can blaze our way to it and not
get lost."

"Huck, we can do that without the least little bit of trouble in the
world."

"Good as wheat! What makes you think the money's--"

"Huck, you just wait till we get in there. If we don't find it I'll
agree to give you my drum and every thing I've got in the world. I will,
by jings."

"All right--it's a whiz. When do you say?"

"Right now, if you say it. Are you strong enough?"

"Is it far in the cave? I ben on my pins a little, three or four days,
now, but I can't walk more'n a mile, Tom--least I don't think I could."

"It's about five mile into there the way anybody but me would go, Huck,
but there's a mighty short cut that they don't anybody but me know
about. Huck, I'll take you right to it in a skiff. I'll float the skiff
down there, and I'll pull it back again all by myself. You needn't ever
turn your hand over."

"Less start right off, Tom."

"All right. We want some bread and meat, and our pipes, and a little
bag or two, and two or three kite-strings, and some of these new-fangled
things they call lucifer matches. I tell you, many's the time I wished I
had some when I was in there before."

A trifle after noon the boys borrowed a small skiff from a citizen who
was absent, and got under way at once. When they were several miles
below "Cave Hollow," Tom said:

"Now you see this bluff here looks all alike all the way down from the
cave hollow--no houses, no wood-yards, bushes all alike. But do you see
that white place up yonder where there's been a landslide? Well, that's
one of my marks. We'll get ashore, now."

They landed.

"Now, Huck, where we're a-standing you could touch that hole I got out
of with a fishing-pole. See if you can find it."

Huck searched all the place about, and found nothing. Tom proudly
marched into a thick clump of sumach bushes and said:

"Here you are! Look at it, Huck; it's the snuggest hole in this country.
You just keep mum about it. All along I've been wanting to be a robber,
but I knew I'd got to have a thing like this, and where to run across
it was the bother. We've got it now, and we'll keep it quiet, only we'll
let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers in--because of course there's got to be a
Gang, or else there wouldn't be any style about it. Tom Sawyer's Gang--it
sounds splendid, don't it, Huck?"

"Well, it just does, Tom. And who'll we rob?"

"Oh, most anybody. Waylay people--that's mostly the way."

"And kill them?"

"No, not always. Hive them in the cave till they raise a ransom."

"What's a ransom?"

"Money. You make them raise all they can, off'n their friends; and after
you've kept them a year, if it ain't raised then you kill them. That's
the general way. Only you don't kill the women. You shut up the women,
but you don't kill them. They're always beautiful and rich, and awfully
scared. You take their watches and things, but you always take your hat
off and talk polite. They ain't anybody as polite as robbers--you'll see
that in any book. Well, the women get to loving you, and after they've
been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after that
you couldn't get them to leave. If you drove them out they'd turn right
around and come back. It's so in all the books."

"Why, it's real bully, Tom. I believe it's better'n to be a pirate."

"Yes, it's better in some ways, because it's close to home and circuses
and all that."

By this time everything was ready and the boys entered the hole, Tom in
the lead. They toiled their way to the farther end of the tunnel, then
made their spliced kite-strings fast and moved on. A few steps brought
them to the spring, and Tom felt a shudder quiver all through him.
He showed Huck the fragment of candle-wick perched on a lump of clay
against the wall, and described how he and Becky had watched the flame
struggle and expire.

The boys began to quiet down to whispers, now, for the stillness and
gloom of the place oppressed their spirits. They went on, and presently
entered and followed Tom's other corridor until they reached the
"jumping-off place." The candles revealed the fact that it was not
really a precipice, but only a steep clay hill twenty or thirty feet
high. Tom whispered:

"Now I'll show you something, Huck."

He held his candle aloft and said:

"Look as far around the corner as you can. Do you see that? There--on the
big rock over yonder--done with candle-smoke."

"Tom, it's a _cross_!"

"_Now_ where's your Number Two? '_under the cross_,' hey? Right yonder's
where I saw Injun Joe poke up his candle, Huck!"

Huck stared at the mystic sign awhile, and then said with a shaky voice:

"Tom, less git out of here!"

"What! and leave the treasure?"

"Yes--leave it. Injun Joe's ghost is round about there, certain."

"No it ain't, Huck, no it ain't. It would ha'nt the place where he
died--away out at the mouth of the cave--five mile from here."

"No, Tom, it wouldn't. It would hang round the money. I know the ways of
ghosts, and so do you."

Tom began to fear that Huck was right. Mis-givings gathered in his mind.
But presently an idea occurred to him--

"Lookyhere, Huck, what fools we're making of ourselves! Injun Joe's
ghost ain't a going to come around where there's a cross!"

The point was well taken. It had its effect.

"Tom, I didn't think of that. But that's so. It's luck for us, that
cross is. I reckon we'll climb down there and have a hunt for that box."

Tom went first, cutting rude steps in the clay hill as he descended.
Huck followed. Four avenues opened out of the small cavern which the
great rock stood in. The boys examined three of them with no result.
They found a small recess in the one nearest the base of the rock, with
a pallet of blankets spread down in it; also an old suspender, some
bacon rind, and the well-gnawed bones of two or three fowls. But there
was no moneybox. The lads searched and researched this place, but in
vain. Tom said:

"He said _under_ the cross. Well, this comes nearest to being under the
cross. It can't be under the rock itself, because that sets solid on the
ground."

They searched everywhere once more, and then sat down discouraged. Huck
could suggest nothing. By-and-by Tom said:

"Lookyhere, Huck, there's footprints and some candle-grease on the clay
about one side of this rock, but not on the other sides. Now, what's
that for? I bet you the money _is_ under the rock. I'm going to dig in
the clay."

"That ain't no bad notion, Tom!" said Huck with animation.

Tom's "real Barlow" was out at once, and he had not dug four inches
before he struck wood.

"Hey, Huck!--you hear that?"

Huck began to dig and scratch now. Some boards were soon uncovered and
removed. They had concealed a natural chasm which led under the rock.
Tom got into this and held his candle as far under the rock as he
could, but said he could not see to the end of the rift. He proposed
to explore. He stooped and passed under; the narrow way descended
gradually. He followed its winding course, first to the right, then to
the left, Huck at his heels. Tom turned a short curve, by-and-by, and
exclaimed:

"My goodness, Huck, lookyhere!"

It was the treasure-box, sure enough, occupying a snug little cavern,
along with an empty powder-keg, a couple of guns in leather cases, two
or three pairs of old moccasins, a leather belt, and some other rubbish
well soaked with the water-drip.

"Got it at last!" said Huck, ploughing among the tarnished coins with
his hand. "My, but we're rich, Tom!"

"Huck, I always reckoned we'd get it. It's just too good to believe, but
we _have_ got it, sure! Say--let's not fool around here. Let's snake it
out. Lemme see if I can lift the box."

It weighed about fifty pounds. Tom could lift it, after an awkward
fashion, but could not carry it conveniently.

"I thought so," he said; "_They_ carried it like it was heavy, that day
at the ha'nted house. I noticed that. I reckon I was right to think of
fetching the little bags along."

The money was soon in the bags and the boys took it up to the cross
rock.

"Now less fetch the guns and things," said Huck.

"No, Huck--leave them there. They're just the tricks to have when we
go to robbing. We'll keep them there all the time, and we'll hold our
orgies there, too. It's an awful snug place for orgies."

"What orgies?"

"I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to
have them, too. Come along, Huck, we've been in here a long time. It's
getting late, I reckon. I'm hungry, too. We'll eat and smoke when we get
to the skiff."

They presently emerged into the clump of sumach bushes, looked warily
out, found the coast clear, and were soon lunching and smoking in the
skiff. As the sun dipped toward the horizon they pushed out and got
under way. Tom skimmed up the shore through the long twilight, chatting
cheerily with Huck, and landed shortly after dark.

"Now, Huck," said Tom, "we'll hide the money in the loft of the widow's
woodshed, and I'll come up in the morning and we'll count it and divide,
and then we'll hunt up a place out in the woods for it where it will be
safe. Just you lay quiet here and watch the stuff till I run and hook
Benny Taylor's little wagon; I won't be gone a minute."

He disappeared, and presently returned with the wagon, put the two small
sacks into it, threw some old rags on top of them, and started off,
dragging his cargo behind him. When the boys reached the Welshman's
house, they stopped to rest. Just as they were about to move on, the
Welshman stepped out and said:

"Hallo, who's that?"

"Huck and Tom Sawyer."

"Good! Come along with me, boys, you are keeping everybody waiting.
Here--hurry up, trot ahead--I'll haul the wagon for you. Why, it's not as
light as it might be. Got bricks in it?--or old metal?"

"Old metal," said Tom.

"I judged so; the boys in this town will take more trouble and fool away
more time hunting up six bits' worth of old iron to sell to the foundry
than they would to make twice the money at regular work. But that's
human nature--hurry along, hurry along!"

The boys wanted to know what the hurry was about.

"Never mind; you'll see, when we get to the Widow Douglas'."

Huck said with some apprehension--for he was long used to being falsely
accused:

"Mr. Jones, we haven't been doing nothing."

The Welshman laughed.

"Well, I don't know, Huck, my boy. I don't know about that. Ain't you
and the widow good friends?"

"Yes. Well, she's ben good friends to me, anyway."

"All right, then. What do you want to be afraid for?"

This question was not entirely answered in Huck's slow mind before he
found himself pushed, along with Tom, into Mrs. Douglas' drawing-room.
Mr. Jones left the wagon near the door and followed.

The place was grandly lighted, and everybody that was of any consequence
in the village was there. The Thatchers were there, the Harpers, the
Rogerses, Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, the minister, the editor, and a great
many more, and all dressed in their best. The widow received the boys
as heartily as any one could well receive two such looking beings. They
were covered with clay and candle-grease. Aunt Polly blushed crimson
with humiliation, and frowned and shook her head at Tom. Nobody suffered
half as much as the two boys did, however. Mr. Jones said:

"Tom wasn't at home, yet, so I gave him up; but I stumbled on him and
Huck right at my door, and so I just brought them along in a hurry."

"And you did just right," said the widow. "Come with me, boys."

She took them to a bedchamber and said:

"Now wash and dress yourselves. Here are two new suits of
clothes--shirts, socks, everything complete. They're Huck's--no, no
thanks, Huck--Mr. Jones bought one and I the other. But they'll fit both
of you. Get into them. We'll wait--come down when you are slicked up
enough."

Then she left.




CHAPTER XXXIV

HUCK said: "Tom, we can slope, if we can find a rope. The window ain't
high from the ground."

"Shucks! what do you want to slope for?"

"Well, I ain't used to that kind of a crowd. I can't stand it. I ain't
going down there, Tom."

"Oh, bother! It ain't anything. I don't mind it a bit. I'll take care of
you."

Sid appeared.

"Tom," said he, "auntie has been waiting for you all the afternoon. Mary
got your Sunday clothes ready, and everybody's been fretting about you.
Say--ain't this grease and clay, on your clothes?"

"Now, Mr. Siddy, you jist 'tend to your own business. What's all this
blowout about, anyway?"

"It's one of the widow's parties that she's always having. This time
it's for the Welshman and his sons, on account of that scrape they
helped her out of the other night. And say--I can tell you something, if
you want to know."

"Well, what?"

"Why, old Mr. Jones is going to try to spring something on the people
here tonight, but I overheard him tell auntie today about it, as a
secret, but I reckon it's not much of a secret now. Everybody knows--the
widow, too, for all she tries to let on she don't. Mr. Jones was bound
Huck should be here--couldn't get along with his grand secret without
Huck, you know!"

"Secret about what, Sid?"

"About Huck tracking the robbers to the widow's. I reckon Mr. Jones was
going to make a grand time over his surprise, but I bet you it will drop
pretty flat."

Sid chuckled in a very contented and satisfied way.

"Sid, was it you that told?"

"Oh, never mind who it was. _Somebody_ told--that's enough."

"Sid, there's only one person in this town mean enough to do that, and
that's you. If you had been in Huck's place you'd 'a' sneaked down the
hill and never told anybody on the robbers. You can't do any but mean
things, and you can't bear to see anybody praised for doing good ones.
There--no thanks, as the widow says"--and Tom cuffed Sid's ears and helped
him to the door with several kicks. "Now go and tell auntie if you
dare--and tomorrow you'll catch it!"

Some minutes later the widow's guests were at the supper-table, and a
dozen children were propped up at little side-tables in the same room,
after the fashion of that country and that day. At the proper time Mr.
Jones made his little speech, in which he thanked the widow for the
honor she was doing himself and his sons, but said that there was
another person whose modesty--

And so forth and so on. He sprung his secret about Huck's share in
the adventure in the finest dramatic manner he was master of, but the
surprise it occasioned was largely counterfeit and not as clamorous and
effusive as it might have been under happier circumstances. However,
the widow made a pretty fair show of astonishment, and heaped so many
compliments and so much gratitude upon Huck that he almost forgot
the nearly intolerable discomfort of his new clothes in the entirely
intolerable discomfort of being set up as a target for everybody's gaze
and everybody's laudations.

The widow said she meant to give Huck a home under her roof and have him
educated; and that when she could spare the money she would start him in
business in a modest way. Tom's chance was come. He said:

"Huck don't need it. Huck's rich."

Nothing but a heavy strain upon the good manners of the company kept
back the due and proper complimentary laugh at this pleasant joke. But
the silence was a little awkward. Tom broke it:

"Huck's got money. Maybe you don't believe it, but he's got lots of it.
Oh, you needn't smile--I reckon I can show you. You just wait a minute."

Tom ran out of doors. The company looked at each other with a perplexed
interest--and inquiringly at Huck, who was tongue-tied.

"Sid, what ails Tom?" said Aunt Polly. "He--well, there ain't ever any
making of that boy out. I never--"

Tom entered, struggling with the weight of his sacks, and Aunt Polly
did not finish her sentence. Tom poured the mass of yellow coin upon the
table and said:

"There--what did I tell you? Half of it's Huck's and half of it's mine!"

The spectacle took the general breath away. All gazed, nobody spoke for
a moment. Then there was a unanimous call for an explanation. Tom said
he could furnish it, and he did. The tale was long, but brimful of
interest. There was scarcely an interruption from any one to break the
charm of its flow. When he had finished, Mr. Jones said:

"I thought I had fixed up a little surprise for this occasion, but it
don't amount to anything now. This one makes it sing mighty small, I'm
willing to allow."

The money was counted. The sum amounted to a little over twelve thousand
dollars. It was more than any one present had ever seen at one time
before, though several persons were there who were worth considerably
more than that in property.




CHAPTER XXXV

THE reader may rest satisfied that Tom's and Huck's windfall made a
mighty stir in the poor little village of St. Petersburg. So vast a
sum, all in actual cash, seemed next to incredible. It was talked
about, gloated over, glorified, until the reason of many of the citizens
tottered under the strain of the unhealthy excitement. Every "haunted"
house in St. Petersburg and the neighboring villages was dissected,
plank by plank, and its foundations dug up and ransacked for hidden
treasure--and not by boys, but men--pretty grave, unromantic men, too,
some of them. Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were courted, admired,
stared at. The boys were not able to remember that their remarks had
possessed weight before; but now their sayings were treasured and
repeated; everything they did seemed somehow to be regarded as
remarkable; they had evidently lost the power of doing and saying
commonplace things; moreover, their past history was raked up and
discovered to bear marks of conspicuous originality. The village paper
published biographical sketches of the boys.

The Widow Douglas put Huck's money out at six per cent., and Judge
Thatcher did the same with Tom's at Aunt Polly's request. Each lad had
an income, now, that was simply prodigious--a dollar for every weekday in
the year and half of the Sundays. It was just what the minister got--no,
it was what he was promised--he generally couldn't collect it. A dollar
and a quarter a week would board, lodge, and school a boy in those old
simple days--and clothe him and wash him, too, for that matter.

Judge Thatcher had conceived a great opinion of Tom. He said that no
commonplace boy would ever have got his daughter out of the cave. When
Becky told her father, in strict confidence, how Tom had taken her
whipping at school, the Judge was visibly moved; and when she pleaded
grace for the mighty lie which Tom had told in order to shift that
whipping from her shoulders to his own, the Judge said with a fine
outburst that it was a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie--a lie that
was worthy to hold up its head and march down through history breast to
breast with George Washington's lauded Truth about the hatchet! Becky
thought her father had never looked so tall and so superb as when he
walked the floor and stamped his foot and said that. She went straight
off and told Tom about it.

Judge Thatcher hoped to see Tom a great lawyer or a great soldier some
day. He said he meant to look to it that Tom should be admitted to the
National Military Academy and afterward trained in the best law school
in the country, in order that he might be ready for either career or
both.

Huck Finn's wealth and the fact that he was now under the Widow Douglas'
protection introduced him into society--no, dragged him into it, hurled
him into it--and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear. The
widow's servants kept him clean and neat, combed and brushed, and they
bedded him nightly in unsympathetic sheets that had not one little spot
or stain which he could press to his heart and know for a friend. He had
to eat with a knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup, and plate;
he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so
properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he
turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him
hand and foot.

He bravely bore his miseries three weeks, and then one day turned up
missing. For forty-eight hours the widow hunted for him everywhere in
great distress. The public were profoundly concerned; they searched high
and low, they dragged the river for his body. Early the third morning
Tom Sawyer wisely went poking among some old empty hogsheads down behind
the abandoned slaughter-house, and in one of them he found the refugee.
Huck had slept there; he had just breakfasted upon some stolen odds and
ends of food, and was lying off, now, in comfort, with his pipe. He was
unkempt, uncombed, and clad in the same old ruin of rags that had made
him picturesque in the days when he was free and happy. Tom routed him
out, told him the trouble he had been causing, and urged him to go home.
Huck's face lost its tranquil content, and took a melancholy cast. He
said:

"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it, and it don't work; it don't
work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The widder's good to me,
and friendly; but I can't stand them ways. She makes me get up just
at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all
to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them
blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to any air
git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't
set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a
cellar-door for--well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church
and sweat and sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in
there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by
a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell--everything's so
awful reg'lar a body can't stand it."

"Well, everybody does that way, Huck."

"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I can't
_stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy--I don't
take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing;
I got to ask to go in a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do
everything. Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got
to go up in the attic and rip out awhile, every day, to git a taste
in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me smoke;
she wouldn't let me yell, she wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor
scratch, before folks--" [Then with a spasm of special irritation and
injury]--"And dad fetch it, she prayed all the time! I never see such a
woman! I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to. And besides, that school's
going to open, and I'd a had to go to it--well, I wouldn't stand _that_,
Tom. Looky-here, Tom, being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's
just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead
all the time. Now these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and
I ain't ever going to shake 'em any more. Tom, I wouldn't ever got into
all this trouble if it hadn't 'a' ben for that money; now you just take
my sheer of it along with your'n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes--not
many times, becuz I don't give a dern for a thing 'thout it's tollable
hard to git--and you go and beg off for me with the widder."

"Oh, Huck, you know I can't do that. 'Tain't fair; and besides if you'll
try this thing just a while longer you'll come to like it."

"Like it! Yes--the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long
enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed
smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and
I'll stick to 'em, too. Blame it all! just as we'd got guns, and a cave,
and all just fixed to rob, here this dern foolishness has got to come up
and spile it all!"

Tom saw his opportunity--

"Lookyhere, Huck, being rich ain't going to keep me back from turning
robber."

"No! Oh, good-licks; are you in real dead-wood earnest, Tom?"

"Just as dead earnest as I'm sitting here. But Huck, we can't let you
into the gang if you ain't respectable, you know."

Huck's joy was quenched.

"Can't let me in, Tom? Didn't you let me go for a pirate?"

"Yes, but that's different. A robber is more high-toned than what a
pirate is--as a general thing. In most countries they're awful high up in
the nobility--dukes and such."

"Now, Tom, hain't you always ben friendly to me? You wouldn't shet me
out, would you, Tom? You wouldn't do that, now, _would_ you, Tom?"

"Huck, I wouldn't want to, and I _don't_ want to--but what would people
say? Why, they'd say, 'Mph! Tom Sawyer's Gang! pretty low characters in
it!' They'd mean you, Huck. You wouldn't like that, and I wouldn't."

Huck was silent for some time, engaged in a mental struggle. Finally he
said:

"Well, I'll go back to the widder for a month and tackle it and see if I
can come to stand it, if you'll let me b'long to the gang, Tom."

"All right, Huck, it's a whiz! Come along, old chap, and I'll ask the
widow to let up on you a little, Huck."

"Will you, Tom--now will you? That's good. If she'll let up on some of
the roughest things, I'll smoke private and cuss private, and crowd
through or bust. When you going to start the gang and turn robbers?"

"Oh, right off. We'll get the boys together and have the initiation
tonight, maybe."

"Have the which?"

"Have the initiation."

"What's that?"

"It's to swear to stand by one another, and never tell the gang's
secrets, even if you're chopped all to flinders, and kill anybody and
all his family that hurts one of the gang."

"That's gay--that's mighty gay, Tom, I tell you."

"Well, I bet it is. And all that swearing's got to be done at midnight,
in the lonesomest, awfulest place you can find--a ha'nted house is the
best, but they're all ripped up now."

"Well, midnight's good, anyway, Tom."

"Yes, so it is. And you've got to swear on a coffin, and sign it with
blood."

"Now, that's something _like_! Why, it's a million times bullier than
pirating. I'll stick to the widder till I rot, Tom; and if I git to be
a reg'lar ripper of a robber, and everybody talking 'bout it, I reckon
she'll be proud she snaked me in out of the wet."

CONCLUSION

SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a _boy_, it
must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the
history of a _man_. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows
exactly where to stop--that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of
juveniles, he must stop where he best can.

Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are
prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worth while to take up the
story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they
turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that
part of their lives at present.
     _There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can
     be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
     Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about
     perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler
     animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead
     of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are
     left in doubt._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I
was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without
first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by
a trained barrister--if that is what they are called. These chapters are
right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate
eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest
Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for
his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni
Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn
around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where
that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into
the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and
yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a
chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline
outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where they sell
the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good as it was
then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it. He was a little rusty
on his law, but he rubbed up for this book, and those two or three legal
chapters are right and straight, now. He told me so himself.

Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893, at the Villa
Viviani, village of Settignano, three miles back of Florence, on the
hills--the same certainly affording the most charming view to be found
on this planet, and with it the most dreamlike and enchanting sunsets to
be found in any planet or even in any solar system--and given, too, in
the swell room of the house, with the busts of Cerretani senators and
other grandees of this line looking approvingly down upon me, as they
used to look down upon Dante, and mutely asking me to adopt them into my
family, which I do with pleasure, for my remotest ancestors are but
spring chickens compared with these robed and stately antiques, and it
will be a great and satisfying lift for me, that six hundred years will.

Mark Twain.




CHAPTER 1 -- Pudd'nhead Wins His Name

     _Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick._ --Pudd'nhead
     Wilson's Calendar


The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on the
Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per steamboat,
below St. Louis.

In 1830 it was a snug collection of modest one- and two-story frame
dwellings, whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from sight
by climbing tangles of rose vines, honeysuckles, and morning glories.
Each of these pretty homes had a garden in front fenced with white
palings and opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds, touch-me-nots,
prince's-feathers, and other old-fashioned flowers; while on the
windowsills of the houses stood wooden boxes containing moss rose plants
and terra-cotta pots in which grew a breed of geranium whose spread of
intensely red blossoms accented the prevailing pink tint of the rose-clad
house-front like an explosion of flame. When there was room on the ledge
outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there--in sunny
weather--stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry
belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then that house was
complete, and its contentment and peace were made manifest to the world
by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible. A home without a cat--and
a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat--may be a perfect
home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge of the brick
sidewalks, stood locust trees with trunks protected by wooden boxing, and
these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrancer in spring, when
the clusters of buds came forth. The main street, one block back from
the river, and running parallel with it, was the sole business street.
It was six blocks long, and in each block two or three brick stores,
three stories high, towered above interjected bunches of little frame
shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind the street's whole length.
The candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility proud and ancient along
the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated merely the humble
barbershop along the main street of Dawson's Landing. On a chief corner
stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to bottom with tin pots
and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy notice to the world (when
the wind blew) that his shop was on hand for business at that corner.

The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river; its
body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline; its most rearward
border fringed itself out and scattered its houses about its base line of
the hills; the hills rose high, enclosing the town in a half-moon curve,
clothed with forests from foot to summit.

Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to the
little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big
Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight;
and this was the case also with the great flotilla of "transients."
These latter came out of a dozen rivers--the Illinois, the Missouri, the
Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red
River, the White River, and so on--and were bound every whither and
stocked with every imaginable comfort or necessity, which the
Mississippi's communities could want, from the frosty Falls of St.
Anthony down through nine climates to torrid New Orleans.

Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked grain
and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and comfortable and
contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly--very slowly,
in fact, but still it was growing.

The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court. He was very proud of his old Virginian
ancestry, and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately
manners, he kept up its traditions. He was fine and just and generous.
To be a gentleman--a gentleman without stain or blemish--was his only
religion, and to it he was always faithful. He was respected, esteemed,
and beloved by all of the community. He was well off, and was gradually
adding to his store. He and his wife were very nearly happy, but not
quite, for they had no children. The longing for the treasure of a child
had grown stronger and stronger as the years slipped away, but the
blessing never came--and was never to come.

With this pair lived the judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt, and
she also was childless--childless, and sorrowful for that reason, and not
to be comforted. The women were good and commonplace people, and did
their duty, and had their reward in clear consciences and the community's
approbation. They were Presbyterians, the judge was a freethinker.

Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged almost forty, was another old
Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families. He was a
fine, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest requirements
of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority on the "code",
and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you in the field if
any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious to you, and
explain it with any weapon you might prefer from bradawls to artillery.
He was very popular with the people, and was the judge's dearest friend.

Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F.F.V. of formidable
caliber--however, with him we have no concern.

Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the judge, and younger than he
by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his
hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup, and
scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective
antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous
man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing. On
the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house; one to
him, one to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name. Roxana was twenty
years old. She was up and around the same day, with her hands full, for
she was tending both babes.

Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week. Roxy remained in charge of the
children. She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself in
his speculations and left her to her own devices.

In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.
This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage. He had
wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior of the
State of New York, to seek his fortune. He was twenty-five years old,
college bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern law
school a couple of years before.

He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent
blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle of
a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no doubt
have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing. But he
made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it
"gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens
when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself
very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as
one who is thinking aloud:

"I wish I owned half of that dog."

"Why?" somebody asked.

"Because I would kill my half."

The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found
no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from
him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One
said:

"'Pears to be a fool."

"'Pears?" said another. "_Is,_ I reckon you better say."

"Said he wished he owned _half_ of the dog, the idiot," said a third.
"What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half?
Do you reckon he thought it would live?"

"Why, he must have thought it, unless he IS the downrightest fool in the
world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own the
whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died, he
would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed that
half instead of his own. Don't it look that way to you, gents?"

"Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so;
if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end, it
would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because if
you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man that can tell
whose half it was; but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could
kill his end of it and--"

"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other
end died, which it would. In my opinion that man ain't in his right
mind."

"In my opinion he hain't _got_ any mind."

No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."

"That's what he is;" said No. 4. "He's a labrick--just a Simon-pure
labrick, if there was one."

"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool. That's the way I put him up," said No. 5.
"Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments."

"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6. "Perfect jackass--yes, and it
ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead. If he ain't a pudd'nhead,
I ain't no judge, that's all."

Mr. Wilson stood elected. The incident was told all over the town, and
gravely discussed by everybody. Within a week he had lost his first
name; Pudd'nhead took its place. In time he came to be liked, and well
liked too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on, and it
stayed. That first day's verdict made him a fool, and he was not able to
get it set aside, or even modified. The nickname soon ceased to carry
any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place, and was
to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.




CHAPTER 2 -- Driscoll Spares His Slaves

     _Adam was but human--this explains it all. He did not want
     the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it
     was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the
     serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent._ --Pudd'nhead
     Wilson's Calendar


Pudd'nhead Wilson had a trifle of money when he arrived, and he bought a
small house on the extreme western verge of the town. Between it and
Judge Driscoll's house there was only a grassy yard, with a paling fence
dividing the properties in the middle. He hired a small office down in
the town and hung out a tin sign with these words on it:

D A V I D W I L S O N

ATTORNEY AND COUNSELOR-AT-LAW

SURVEYING, CONVEYANCING, ETC.

But his deadly remark had ruined his chance--at least in the law. No
clients came. He took down his sign, after a while, and put it up on his
own house with the law features knocked out of it. It offered his
services now in the humble capacities of land surveyor and expert
accountant. Now and then he got a job of surveying to do, and now and
then a merchant got him to straighten out his books. With Scotch patience
and pluck he resolved to live down his reputation and work his way into
the legal field yet. Poor fellow, he could foresee that it was going to
take him such a weary long time to do it.

He had a rich abundance of idle time, but it never hung heavy on his
hands, for he interested himself in every new thing that was born into
the universe of ideas, and studied it, and experimented upon it at his
house. One of his pet fads was palmistry. To another one he gave no
name, neither would he explain to anybody what its purpose was, but
merely said it was an amusement. In fact, he had found that his fads
added to his reputation as a pudd'nhead; there, he was growing chary of
being too communicative about them. The fad without a name was one which
dealt with people's finger marks. He carried in his coat pocket a
shallow box with grooves in it, and in the grooves strips of glass five
inches long and three inches wide. Along the lower edge of each strip
was pasted a slip of white paper. He asked people to pass their hands
through their hair (thus collecting upon them a thin coating of the
natural oil) and then making a thumb-mark on a glass strip, following it
with the mark of the ball of each finger in succession. Under this row
of faint grease prints he would write a record on the strip of white
paper--thus:

JOHN SMITH, right hand--

and add the day of the month and the year, then take Smith's left hand on
another glass strip, and add name and date and the words "left hand." The
strips were now returned to the grooved box, and took their place among
what Wilson called his "records."

He often studied his records, examining and poring over them with
absorbing interest until far into the night; but what he found there--if
he found anything--he revealed to no one. Sometimes he copied on paper
the involved and delicate pattern left by the ball of the finger, and
then vastly enlarged it with a pantograph so that he could examine its
web of curving lines with ease and convenience.

One sweltering afternoon--it was the first day of July, 1830--he was at
work over a set of tangled account books in his workroom, which looked
westward over a stretch of vacant lots, when a conversation outside
disturbed him. It was carried on in yells, which showed that the people
engaged in it were not close together.

"Say, Roxy, how does yo' baby come on?" This from the distant voice.

"Fust-rate. How does _you_ come on, Jasper?" This yell was from close
by.

"Oh, I's middlin'; hain't got noth'n' to complain of, I's gwine to come
a-court'n you bimeby, Roxy."

"_You_ is, you black mud cat! Yah--yah--yah! I got somep'n' better to
do den 'sociat'n' wid niggers as black as you is. Is ole Miss Cooper's
Nancy done give you de mitten?" Roxy followed this sally with another
discharge of carefree laughter.

"You's jealous, Roxy, dat's what's de matter wid you, you
hussy--yah--yah--yah! Dat's de time I got you!"

"Oh, yes, _you_ got me, hain't you. 'Clah to goodness if dat conceit o'
yo'n strikes in, Jasper, it gwine to kill you sho'. If you b'longed to
me, I'd sell you down de river 'fo' you git too fur gone. Fust time I
runs acrost yo' marster, I's gwine to tell him so."

This idle and aimless jabber went on and on, both parties enjoying the
friendly duel and each well satisfied with his own share of the wit
exchanged--for wit they considered it.

Wilson stepped to the window to observe the combatants; he could not work
while their chatter continued. Over in the vacant lots was Jasper,
young, coal black, and of magnificent build, sitting on a wheelbarrow in
the pelting sun--at work, supposably, whereas he was in fact only
preparing for it by taking an hour's rest before beginning. In front of
Wilson's porch stood Roxy, with a local handmade baby wagon, in which sat
her two charges--one at each end and facing each other. From Roxy's
manner of speech, a stranger would have expected her to be black, but she
was not. Only one sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not
show. She was of majestic form and stature, her attitudes were imposing
and statuesque, and her gestures and movements distinguished by a noble
and stately grace. Her complexion was very fair, with the rosy glow of
vigorous health in her cheeks, her face was full of character and
expression, her eyes were brown and liquid, and she had a heavy suit of
fine soft hair which was also brown, but the fact was not apparent
because her head was bound about with a checkered handkerchief and the
hair was concealed under it. Her face was shapely, intelligent, and
comely--even beautiful. She had an easy, independent carriage--when she
was among her own caste--and a high and "sassy" way, withal; but of
course she was meek and humble enough where white people were.

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one
sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and
made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was
thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law
and custom a Negro. He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white
comrade, but even the father of the white child was able to tell the
children apart--little as he had commerce with them--by their clothes;
for the white babe wore ruffled soft muslin and a coral necklace, while
the other wore merely a coarse tow-linen shirt which barely reached to
its knees, and no jewelry.

The white child's name was Thomas a Becket Driscoll, the other's name was
Valet de Chambre: no surname--slaves hadn't the privilege. Roxana had
heard that phrase somewhere, the fine sound of it had pleased her ear,
and as she had supposed it was a name, she loaded it on to her darling.
It soon got shorted to "Chambers," of course.

Wilson knew Roxy by sight, and when the duel of wits begun to play out,
he stepped outside to gather in a record or two. Jasper went to work
energetically, at once, perceiving that his leisure was observed. Wilson
inspected the children and asked:

"How old are they, Roxy?"

"Bofe de same age, sir--five months. Bawn de fust o' Feb'uary."

"They're handsome little chaps. One's just as handsome as the other,
too."

A delighted smile exposed the girl's white teeth, and she said:

"Bless yo' soul, Misto Wilson, it's pow'ful nice o' you to say dat,
'ca'se one of 'em ain't on'y a nigger. Mighty prime little nigger, _I_
al'ays says, but dat's 'ca'se it's mine, o' course."

"How do you tell them apart, Roxy, when they haven't any clothes on?"

Roxy laughed a laugh proportioned to her size, and said:

"Oh, _I_ kin tell 'em 'part, Misto Wilson, but I bet Marse Percy
couldn't, not to save his life."

Wilson chatted along for awhile, and presently got Roxy's fingerprints
for his collection--right hand and left--on a couple of his glass strips;
then labeled and dated them, and took the "records" of both children, and
labeled and dated them also.

Two months later, on the third of September, he took this trio of finger
marks again. He liked to have a "series," two or three "takings" at
intervals during the period of childhood, these to be followed at
intervals of several years.

The next day--that is to say, on the fourth of September--something
occurred which profoundly impressed Roxana. Mr. Driscoll missed another
small sum of money--which is a way of saying that this was not a new
thing, but had happened before. In truth, it had happened three times
before. Driscoll's patience was exhausted. He was a fairly humane man
toward slaves and other animals; he was an exceedingly humane man toward
the erring of his own race. Theft he could not abide, and plainly there
was a thief in his house. Necessarily the thief must be one of his
Negros. Sharp measures must be taken. He called his servants before him.
There were three of these, besides Roxy: a man, a woman, and a boy
twelve years old. They were not related. Mr. Driscoll said:

"You have all been warned before. It has done no good. This time I will
teach you a lesson. I will sell the thief. Which of you is the guilty
one?"

They all shuddered at the threat, for here they had a good home, and a
new one was likely to be a change for the worse. The denial was general.
None had stolen anything--not money, anyway--a little sugar, or cake, or
honey, or something like that, that "Marse Percy wouldn't mind or miss"
but not money--never a cent of money. They were eloquent in their
protestations, but Mr. Driscoll was not moved by them. He answered each
in turn with a stern "Name the thief!"

The truth was, all were guilty but Roxana; she suspected that the others
were guilty, but she did not know them to be so. She was horrified to
think how near she had come to being guilty herself; she had been saved
in the nick of time by a revival in the colored Methodist Church, a
fortnight before, at which time and place she "got religion." The very
next day after that gracious experience, while her change of style was
fresh upon her and she was vain of her purified condition, her master
left a couple dollars unprotected on his desk, and she happened upon that
temptation when she was polishing around with a dustrag. She looked at
the money awhile with a steady rising resentment, then she burst out
with:

"Dad blame dat revival, I wisht it had 'a' be'n put off till tomorrow!"

Then she covered the tempter with a book, and another member of the
kitchen cabinet got it. She made this sacrifice as a matter of religious
etiquette; as a thing necessary just now, but by no means to be wrested
into a precedent; no, a week or two would limber up her piety, then she
would be rational again, and the next two dollars that got left out in
the cold would find a comforter--and she could name the comforter.

Was she bad? Was she worse than the general run of her race? No. They
had an unfair show in the battle of life, and they held it no sin to take
military advantage of the enemy--in a small way; in a small way, but not
in a large one. They would smouch provisions from the pantry whenever
they got a chance; or a brass thimble, or a cake of wax, or an emery bag,
or a paper of needles, or a silver spoon, or a dollar bill, or small
articles of clothing, or any other property of light value; and so far
were they from considering such reprisals sinful, that they would go to
church and shout and pray the loudest and sincerest with their plunder in
their pockets. A farm smokehouse had to be kept heavily padlocked, or
even the colored deacon himself could not resist a ham when Providence
showed him in a dream, or otherwise, where such a thing hung lonesome,
and longed for someone to love. But with a hundred hanging before him,
the deacon would not take two--that is, on the same night. On frosty
nights the humane Negro prowler would warm the end of the plank and put
it up under the cold claws of chickens roosting in a tree; a drowsy hen
would step on to the comfortable board, softly clucking her gratitude,
and the prowler would dump her into his bag, and later into his stomach,
perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed
him of an inestimable treasure--his liberty--he was not committing any
sin that God would remember against him in the Last Great Day.

"Name the thief!"

For the fourth time Mr. Driscoll had said it, and always in the same hard
tone. And now he added these words of awful import:

"I give you one minute." He took out his watch. "If at the end of that
time, you have not confessed, I will not only sell all four of you,
BUT--I will sell you DOWN THE RIVER!"

It was equivalent to condemning them to hell! No Missouri Negro doubted
this. Roxy reeled in her tracks, and the color vanished out of her face;
the others dropped to their knees as if they had been shot; tears gushed
from their eyes, their supplicating hands went up, and three answers came
in the one instant.

"I done it!"

"I done it!"

"I done it!--have mercy, marster--Lord have mercy on us po' niggers!"

"Very good," said the master, putting up his watch, "I will sell you
_here_ though you don't deserve it. You ought to be sold down the
river."

The culprits flung themselves prone, in an ecstasy of gratitude, and
kissed his feet, declaring that they would never forget his goodness and
never cease to pray for him as long as they lived. They were sincere, for
like a god he had stretched forth his mighty hand and closed the gates of
hell against them. He knew, himself, that he had done a noble and
gracious thing, and was privately well pleased with his magnanimity; and
that night he set the incident down in his diary, so that his son might
read it in after years, and be thereby moved to deeds of gentleness and
humanity himself.




CHAPTER 3 -- Roxy Plays a Shrewd Trick

     _Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is,
     knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first
     great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the
     world._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


Percy Driscoll slept well the night he saved his house minions from
going down the river, but no wink of sleep visited Roxy's eyes. A
profound terror had taken possession of her. Her child could grow up and
be sold down the river! The thought crazed her with horror. If she dozed
and lost herself for a moment, the next moment she was on her feet flying
to her child's cradle to see if it was still there. Then she would gather
it to her heart and pour out her love upon it in a frenzy of kisses,
moaning, crying, and saying, "Dey sha'n't, oh, dey _sha'nt'!'_--yo' po'
mammy will kill you fust!"

Once, when she was tucking him back in its cradle again, the other child
nestled in its sleep and attracted her attention. She went and stood
over it a long time communing with herself.

"What has my po' baby done, dat he couldn't have yo' luck? He hain't done
nuth'n. God was good to you; why warn't he good to him? Dey can't sell
_you_ down de river. I hates yo' pappy; he hain't got no heart--for
niggers, he hain't, anyways. I hates him, en I could kill him!" She
paused awhile, thinking; then she burst into wild sobbings again, and
turned away, saying, "Oh, I got to kill my chile, dey ain't no yuther
way--killin' _him_ wouldn't save de chile fum goin' down de river. Oh, I
got to do it, yo' po' mammy's got to kill you to save you, honey." She
gathered her baby to her bosom now, and began to smother it with
caresses. "Mammy's got to kill you--how _kin_ I do it! But yo' mammy
ain't gwine to desert you--no, no, _dah_, don't cry--she gwine _wid_
you, she gwine to kill herself too. Come along, honey, come along wid
mammy; we gwine to jump in de river, den troubles o' dis worl' is all
over--dey don't sell po' niggers down the river over _yonder_."

She stared toward the door, crooning to the child and hushing it; midway
she stopped, suddenly. She had caught sight of her new Sunday gown--a
cheap curtain-calico thing, a conflagration of gaudy colors and fantastic
figures. She surveyed it wistfully, longingly.

"Hain't ever wore it yet," she said, "en it's just lovely." Then she
nodded her head in response to a pleasant idea, and added, "No, I ain't
gwine to be fished out, wid everybody lookin' at me, in dis mis'able ole
linsey-woolsey."

She put down the child and made the change. She looked in the glass and
was astonished at her beauty. She resolved to make her death toilet
perfect. She took off her handkerchief turban and dressed her glossy
wealth of hair "like white folks"; she added some odds and ends of rather
lurid ribbon and a spray of atrocious artificial flowers; finally she
threw over her shoulders a fluffy thing called a "cloud" in that day,
which was of a blazing red complexion. Then she was ready for the tomb.

She gathered up her baby once more; but when her eye fell upon its
miserably short little gray tow-linen shirt and noted the contrast
between its pauper shabbiness and her own volcanic eruption of infernal
splendors, her mother-heart was touched, and she was ashamed.

"No, dolling mammy ain't gwine to treat you so. De angels is gwine to
'mire you jist as much as dey does yo' mammy. Ain't gwine to have 'em
putt'n dey han's up 'fo' dey eyes en sayin' to David and Goliah en dem
yuther prophets, 'Dat chile is dress' to indelicate fo' dis place.'"

By this time she had stripped off the shirt. Now she clothed the naked
little creature in one of Thomas `a Becket's snowy, long baby gowns, with
its bright blue bows and dainty flummery of ruffles.

"Dah--now you's fixed." She propped the child in a chair and stood off
to inspect it. Straightway her eyes begun to widen with astonishment and
admiration, and she clapped her hands and cried out, "Why, it do beat
all! I _never_ knowed you was so lovely. Marse Tommy ain't a bit
puttier--not a single bit."

She stepped over and glanced at the other infant; she flung a glance
back at her own; then one more at the heir of the house. Now a strange
light dawned in her eyes, and in a moment she was lost in thought. She
seemed in a trance; when she came out of it, she muttered, "When I 'uz
a-washin' 'em in de tub, yistiddy, he own pappy asked me which of 'em was
his'n."

She began to move around like one in a dream. She undressed Thomas `a
Becket, stripping him of everything, and put the tow-linen shirt on him.
She put his coral necklace on her own child's neck. Then she placed the
children side by side, and after earnest inspection she muttered:

"Now who would b'lieve clo'es could do de like o' dat? Dog my cats if it
ain't all _I_ kin do to tell t' other fum which, let alone his pappy."

She put her cub in Tommy's elegant cradle and said:

"You's young Marse _Tom_ fum dis out, en I got to practice and git used
to 'memberin' to call you dat, honey, or I's gwine to make a mistake
sometime en git us bofe into trouble. Dah--now you lay still en don't
fret no mo', Marse Tom. Oh, thank de lord in heaven, you's saved, you's
saved! Dey ain't no man kin ever sell mammy's po' little honey down de
river now!"

She put the heir of the house in her own child's unpainted pine cradle,
and said, contemplating its slumbering form uneasily:

"I's sorry for you, honey; I's sorry, God knows I is--but what _kin_ I
do, what _could_ I do? Yo' pappy would sell him to somebody, sometime,
en den he'd go down de river, sho', en I couldn't, couldn't, _couldn't_
stan' it."

She flung herself on her bed and began to think and toss, toss and think.
By and by she sat suddenly upright, for a comforting thought had flown
through her worried mind--

"'T ain't no sin--_white_ folks has done it! It ain't no sin, glory to
goodness it ain't no sin! _Dey's_ done it--yes, en dey was de biggest
quality in de whole bilin', too--_kings!"_

She began to muse; she was trying to gather out of her memory the dim
particulars of some tale she had heard some time or other. At last she
said--

"Now I's got it; now I 'member. It was dat ole nigger preacher dat tole
it, de time he come over here fum Illinois en preached in de nigger
church. He said dey ain't nobody kin save his own self--can't do it by
faith, can't do it by works, can't do it no way at all. Free grace is de
_on'y_ way, en dat don't come fum nobody but jis' de Lord; en _he_ kin
give it to anybody He please, saint or sinner--_he_ don't kyer. He do
jis' as He's a mineter. He s'lect out anybody dat suit Him, en put
another one in his place, and make de fust one happy forever en leave t'
other one to burn wid Satan. De preacher said it was jist like dey done
in Englan' one time, long time ago. De queen she lef' her baby layin'
aroun' one day, en went out callin'; an one 'o de niggers roun'bout de
place dat was 'mos' white, she come in en see de chile layin' aroun', en
tuck en put her own chile's clo's on de queen's chile, en put de queen's
chile's clo'es on her own chile, en den lef' her own chile layin' aroun',
en tuck en toted de queen's chile home to de nigger quarter, en nobody
ever foun' it out, en her chile was de king bimeby, en sole de queen's
chile down de river one time when dey had to settle up de estate. Dah,
now--de preacher said it his own self, en it ain't no sin, 'ca'se white
folks done it. DEY done it--yes, DEY done it; en not on'y jis' common
white folks nuther, but de biggest quality dey is in de whole bilin'.
_Oh_, I's _so_ glad I 'member 'bout dat!"

She got lighthearted and happy, and went to the cradles, and spent what
was left of the night "practicing." She would give her own child a light
pat and say humbly, "Lay still, Marse Tom," then give the real Tom a pat
and say with severity, "Lay _still_, Chambers! Does you want me to take
somep'n _to_ you?"

As she progressed with her practice, she was surprised to see how
steadily and surely the awe which had kept her tongue reverent and her
manner humble toward her young master was transferring itself to her
speech and manner toward the usurper, and how similarly handy she was
becoming in transferring her motherly curtness of speech and
peremptoriness of manner to the unlucky heir of the ancient house of
Driscoll.

She took occasional rests from practicing, and absorbed herself in
calculating her chances.

"Dey'll sell dese niggers today fo' stealin' de money, den dey'll buy
some mo' dat don't now de chillen--so _dat's_ all right. When I takes de
chillen out to git de air, de minute I's roun' de corner I's gwine to
gaum dey mouths all roun' wid jam, den dey can't _nobody_ notice dey's
changed. Yes, I gwine ter do dat till I's safe, if it's a year.

"Dey ain't but one man dat I's afeard of, en dat's dat Pudd'nhead Wilson.
Dey calls him a pudd'nhead, en says he's a fool. My lan, dat man ain't
no mo' fool den I is! He's de smartes' man in dis town, lessn' it's
Jedge Driscoll or maybe Pem Howard. Blame dat man, he worries me wid dem
ornery glasses o' his'n; _I_ b'lieve he's a witch. But nemmine, I's gwine
to happen aroun' dah one o' dese days en let on dat I reckon he wants to
print a chillen's fingers ag'in; en if HE don't notice dey's changed, I
bound dey ain't nobody gwine to notice it, en den I's safe, sho'. But I
reckon I'll tote along a hoss-shoe to keep off de witch work."

The new Negros gave Roxy no trouble, of course. The master gave her
none, for one of his speculations was in jeopardy, and his mind was so
occupied that he hardly saw the children when he looked at them, and all
Roxy had to do was to get them both into a gale of laughter when he came
about; then their faces were mainly cavities exposing gums, and he was
gone again before the spasm passed and the little creatures resumed a
human aspect.

Within a few days the fate of the speculation became so dubious that Mr.
Percy went away with his brother, the judge, to see what could be done
with it. It was a land speculation as usual, and it had gotten
complicated with a lawsuit. The men were gone seven weeks. Before they
got back, Roxy had paid her visit to Wilson, and was satisfied. Wilson
took the fingerprints, labeled them with the names and with the date
--October the first--put them carefully away, and continued his chat with
Roxy, who seemed very anxious that he should admire the great advance in
flesh and beauty which the babes had made since he took their
fingerprints a month before. He complimented their improvement to her
contentment; and as they were without any disguise of jam or other stain,
she trembled all the while and was miserably frightened lest at any
moment he--

But he didn't. He discovered nothing; and she went home jubilant, and
dropped all concern about the matter permanently out of her mind.




CHAPTER 4 -- The Ways of the Changelings

     _Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one
     was, that they escaped teething._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's
     Calendar

     _There is this trouble about special providences--namely,
     there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to
     be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears,
     and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of
     the episode than the prophet did, because they got the
     children._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


This history must henceforth accommodate itself to the change which
Roxana has consummated, and call the real heir "Chambers" and the
usurping little slave, "Thomas `a Becket"--shortening this latter name to
"Tom," for daily use, as the people about him did.

"Tom" was a bad baby, from the very beginning of his usurpation. He would
cry for nothing; he would burst into storms of devilish temper without
notice, and let go scream after scream and squall after squall, then
climax the thing with "holding his breath"--that frightful specialty of
the teething nursling, in the throes of which the creature exhausts its
lungs, then is convulsed with noiseless squirmings and twistings and
kickings in the effort to get its breath, while the lips turn blue and
the mouth stands wide and rigid, offering for inspection one wee tooth
set in the lower rim of a hoop of red gums; and when the appalling
stillness has endured until one is sure the lost breath will never
return, a nurse comes flying, and dashes water in the child's face,
and--presto! the lungs fill, and instantly discharge a shriek, or a yell,
or a howl which bursts the listening ear and surprises the owner of it
into saying words which would not go well with a halo if he had one. The
baby Tom would claw anybody who came within reach of his nails, and pound
anybody he could reach with his rattle. He would scream for water until
he got it, and then throw cup and all on the floor and scream for more.
He was indulged in all his caprices, howsoever troublesome and
exasperating they might be; he was allowed to eat anything he wanted,
particularly things that would give him the stomach-ache.

When he got to be old enough to begin to toddle about and say broken
words and get an idea of what his hands were for, he was a more
consummate pest than ever. Roxy got no rest while he was awake. He would
call for anything and everything he saw, simply saying, "Awnt it!" (want
it), which was a command. When it was brought, he said in a frenzy, and
motioning it away with his hands, "Don't awnt it! don't awnt it!" and the
moment it was gone he set up frantic yells of "Awnt it! awnt it!" and
Roxy had to give wings to her heels to get that thing back to him again
before he could get time to carry out his intention of going into
convulsions about it.

What he preferred above all other things was the tongs. This was because
his "father" had forbidden him to have them lest he break windows and
furniture with them. The moment Roxy's back was turned he would toddle
to the presence of the tongs and say, "Like it!" and cock his eye to one
side or see if Roxy was observed; then, "Awnt it!" and cock his eye
again; then, "Hab it!" with another furtive glance; and finally, "Take
it!"--and the prize was his. The next moment the heavy implement was
raised aloft; the next, there was a crash and a squall, and the cat was
off on three legs to meet an engagement; Roxy would arrive just as the
lamp or a window went to irremediable smash.

Tom got all the petting, Chambers got none. Tom got all the delicacies,
Chambers got mush and milk, and clabber without sugar. In consequence
Tom was a sickly child and Chambers wasn't. Tom was "fractious," as Roxy
called it, and overbearing; Chambers was meek and docile.

With all her splendid common sense and practical everyday ability, Roxy
was a doting fool of a mother. She was this toward her child--and she
was also more than this: by the fiction created by herself, he was
become her master; the necessity of recognizing this relation outwardly
and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express the
recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in
practicing these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into
habit; it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result
followed: deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew
practically into self-deceptions as well; the mock reverence became real
reverence, the mock homage real homage; the little counterfeit rift of
separation between imitation-slave and imitation-master widened and
widened, and became an abyss, and a very real one--and on one side of it
stood Roxy, the dupe of her own deceptions, and on the other stood her
child, no longer a usurper to her, but her accepted and recognized
master. He was her darling, her master, and her deity all in one, and in
her worship of him she forgot who she was and what he had been.

In babyhood Tom cuffed and banged and scratched Chambers unrebuked, and
Chambers early learned that between meekly bearing it and resenting it,
the advantage all lay with the former policy. The few times that his
persecutions had moved him beyond control and made him fight back had
cost him very dear at headquarters; not at the hands of Roxy, for if she
ever went beyond scolding him sharply for "forgett'n' who his young
marster was," she at least never extended her punishment beyond a box on
the ear. No, Percy Driscoll was the person. He told Chambers that under
no provocation whatever was he privileged to lift his hand against his
little master. Chambers overstepped the line three times, and got three
such convincing canings from the man who was his father and didn't know
it, that he took Tom's cruelties in all humility after that, and made no
more experiments.

Outside the house the two boys were together all through their boyhood.
Chambers was strong beyond his years, and a good fighter; strong because
he was coarsely fed and hard worked about the house, and a good fighter
because Tom furnished him plenty of practice--on white boys whom he
hated and was afraid of. Chambers was his constant bodyguard, to and
from school; he was present on the playground at recess to protect his
charge. He fought himself into such a formidable reputation, by and by,
that Tom could have changed clothes with him, and "ridden in peace," like
Sir Kay in Launcelot's armor.

He was good at games of skill, too. Tom staked him with marbles to play
"keeps" with, and then took all the winnings away from him. In the winter
season Chambers was on hand, in Tom's worn-out clothes, with "holy" red
mittens, and "holy" shoes, and pants "holy" at the knees and seat, to
drag a sled up the hill for Tom, warmly clad, to ride down on; but he
never got a ride himself. He built snowmen and snow fortifications under
Tom's directions. He was Tom's patient target when Tom wanted to do some
snowballing, but the target couldn't fire back. Chambers carried Tom's
skates to the river and strapped them on him, then trotted around after
him on the ice, so as to be on hand when he wanted; but he wasn't ever
asked to try the skates himself.

In summer the pet pastime of the boys of Dawson's Landing was to steal
apples, peaches, and melons from the farmer's fruit wagons--mainly on
account of the risk they ran of getting their heads laid open with the
butt of the farmer's whip. Tom was a distinguished adept at these
thefts--by proxy. Chambers did his stealing, and got the peach stones,
apple cores, and melon rinds for his share.

Tom always made Chambers go in swimming with him, and stay by him as a
protection. When Tom had had enough, he would slip out and tie knots in
Chamber's shirt, dip the knots in the water and make them hard to undo,
then dress himself and sit by and laugh while the naked shiverer tugged
at the stubborn knots with his teeth.

Tom did his humble comrade these various ill turns partly out of native
viciousness, and partly because he hated him for his superiorities of
physique and pluck, and for his manifold cleverness. Tom couldn't dive,
for it gave him splitting headaches. Chambers could dive without
inconvenience, and was fond of doing it. He excited so much admiration,
one day, among a crowd of white boys, by throwing back somersaults from
the stern of a canoe, that it wearied Tom's spirit, and at last he shoved
the canoe underneath Chambers while he was in the air--so he came down on
his head in the canoe bottom; and while he lay unconscious, several of
Tom's ancient adversaries saw that their long-desired opportunity was
come, and they gave the false heir such a drubbing that with Chamber's
best help he was hardly able to drag himself home afterward.

When the boys was fifteen and upward, Tom was "showing off" in the river
one day, when he was taken with a cramp, and shouted for help. It was a
common trick with the boys--particularly if a stranger was present--to
pretend a cramp and howl for help; then when the stranger came tearing
hand over hand to the rescue, the howler would go on struggling and
howling till he was close at hand, then replace the howl with a sarcastic
smile and swim blandly away, while the town boys assailed the dupe with a
volley of jeers and laughter. Tom had never tried this joke as yet, but
was supposed to be trying it now, so the boys held warily back; but
Chambers believed his master was in earnest; therefore, he swam out, and
arrived in time, unfortunately, and saved his life.

This was the last feather. Tom had managed to endure everything else,
but to have to remain publicly and permanently under such an obligation
as this to a nigger, and to this nigger of all niggers--this was too
much. He heaped insults upon Chambers for "pretending" to think he was in
earnest in calling for help, and said that anybody but a blockheaded
nigger would have known he was funning and left him alone.

Tom's enemies were in strong force here, so they came out with their
opinions quite freely. They laughed at him, and called him coward, liar,
sneak, and other sorts of pet names, and told him they meant to call
Chambers by a new name after this, and make it common in the town--"Tom
Driscoll's nigger pappy,"--to signify that he had had a second birth into
this life, and that Chambers was the author of his new being. Tom grew
frantic under these taunts, and shouted:

"Knock their heads off, Chambers! Knock their heads off! What do you
stand there with your hands in your pockets for?"

Chambers expostulated, and said, "But, Marse Tom, dey's too many of
'em--dey's--"

"Do you hear me?"

"Please, Marse Tom, don't make me! Dey's so many of 'em dat--"

Tom sprang at him and drove his pocketknife into him two or three times
before the boys could snatch him away and give the wounded lad a chance
to escape. He was considerably hurt, but not seriously. If the blade had
been a little longer, his career would have ended there.

Tom had long ago taught Roxy "her place." It had been many a day now
since she had ventured a caress or a fondling epithet in his quarter.
Such things, from a "nigger," were repulsive to him, and she had been
warned to keep her distance and remember who she was. She saw her
darling gradually cease from being her son, she saw THAT detail perish
utterly; all that was left was master--master, pure and simple, and it
was not a gentle mastership, either. She saw herself sink from the
sublime height of motherhood to the somber depths of unmodified slavery,
the abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete. She was
merely his chattel now, his convenience, his dog, his cringing and
helpless slave, the humble and unresisting victim of his capricious
temper and vicious nature.

Sometimes she could not go to sleep, even when worn out with fatigue,
because her rage boiled so high over the day's experiences with her boy.
She would mumble and mutter to herself:

"He struck me en I warn't no way to blame--struck me in de face, right
before folks. En he's al'ays callin' me nigger wench, en hussy, en all
dem mean names, when I's doin' de very bes' I kin. Oh, Lord, I done so
much for him--I lif' him away up to what he is--en dis is what I git for
it."

Sometimes when some outrage of peculiar offensiveness stung her to the
heart, she would plan schemes of vengeance and revel in the fancied
spectacle of his exposure to the world as an imposter and a slave; but in
the midst of these joys fear would strike her; she had made him too
strong; she could prove nothing, and--heavens, she might get sold down
the river for her pains! So her schemes always went for nothing, and she
laid them aside in impotent rage against the fates, and against herself
for playing the fool on that fatal September day in not providing herself
with a witness for use in the day when such a thing might be needed for
the appeasing of her vengeance-hungry heart.

And yet the moment Tom happened to be good to her, and kind--and this
occurred every now and then--all her sore places were healed, and she was
happy; happy and proud, for this was her son, her nigger son, lording it
among the whites and securely avenging their crimes against her race.

There were two grand funerals in Dawson's Landing that fall--the fall of
1845. One was that of Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, the other that of
Percy Driscoll.

On his deathbed Driscoll set Roxy free and delivered his idolized
ostensible son solemnly into the keeping of his brother, the judge, and
his wife. Those childless people were glad to get him. Childless people
are not difficult to please.

Judge Driscoll had gone privately to his brother, a month before, and
bought Chambers. He had heard that Tom had been trying to get his father
to sell the boy down the river, and he wanted to prevent the scandal--for
public sentiment did not approve of that way of treating family servants
for light cause or for no cause.

Percy Driscoll had worn himself out in trying to save his great
speculative landed estate, and had died without succeeding. He was hardly
in his grave before the boom collapsed and left his envied young devil of
an heir a pauper. But that was nothing; his uncle told him he should be
his heir and have all his fortune when he died; so Tom was comforted.

Roxy had no home now; so she resolved to go around and say good-by to her
friends and then clear out and see the world--that is to say, she would
go chambermaiding on a steamboat, the darling ambition of her race and
sex.

Her last call was on the black giant, Jasper. She found him chopping
Pudd'nhead Wilson's winter provision of wood.

Wilson was chatting with him when Roxy arrived. He asked her how she
could bear to go off chambermaiding and leave her boys; and chaffingly
offered to copy off a series of their fingerprints, reaching up to their
twelfth year, for her to remember them by; but she sobered in a moment,
wondering if he suspected anything; then she said she believed she didn't
want them. Wilson said to himself, "The drop of black blood in her is
superstitious; she thinks there's some devilry, some witch business about
my glass mystery somewhere; she used to come here with an old horseshoe
in her hand; it could have been an accident, but I doubt it."




CHAPTER 5 -- The Twins Thrill Dawson's Landing

     _Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond;
     cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college
     education._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _Remark of Dr. Baldwin's, concerning upstarts: We don't care
     to eat toadstools that think they are truffles._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


Mrs. York Driscoll enjoyed two years of bliss with that prize,
Tom--bliss that was troubled a little at times, it is true, but bliss
nevertheless; then she died, and her husband and his childless sister,
Mrs. Pratt, continued this bliss-business at the old stand. Tom was
petted and indulged and spoiled to his entire content--or nearly that.
This went on till he was nineteen, then he was sent to Yale. He went
handsomely equipped with "conditions," but otherwise he was not an object
of distinction there. He remained at Yale two years, and then threw up
the struggle. He came home with his manners a good deal improved; he had
lost his surliness and brusqueness, and was rather pleasantly soft and
smooth, now; he was furtively, and sometimes openly, ironical of speech,
and given to gently touching people on the raw, but he did it with a
good-natured semiconscious air that carried it off safely, and kept him
from getting into trouble. He was as indolent as ever and showed no very
strenuous desire to hunt up an occupation. People argued from this that
he preferred to be supported by his uncle until his uncle's shoes should
become vacant. He brought back one or two new habits with him, one of
which he rather openly practiced--tippling--but concealed another, which
was gambling. It would not do to gamble where his uncle could hear of
it; he knew that quite well.

Tom's Eastern polish was not popular among the young people. They could
have endured it, perhaps, if Tom had stopped there; but he wore gloves,
and that they couldn't stand, and wouldn't; so he was mainly without
society. He brought home with him a suit of clothes of such exquisite
style and cut in fashion--Eastern fashion, city fashion--that it filled
everybody with anguish and was regarded as a peculiarly wanton affront.
He enjoyed the feeling which he was exciting, and paraded the town serene
and happy all day; but the young fellows set a tailor to work that night,
and when Tom started out on his parade next morning, he found the old
deformed Negro bell ringer straddling along in his wake tricked out in a
flamboyant curtain-calico exaggeration of his finery, and imitating his
fancy Eastern graces as well as he could.

Tom surrendered, and after that clothed himself in the local fashion. But
the dull country town was tiresome to him, since his acquaintanceship
with livelier regions, and it grew daily more and more so. He began to
make little trips to St. Louis for refreshment. There he found
companionship to suit him, and pleasures to his taste, along with more
freedom, in some particulars, than he could have at home. So, during the
next two years, his visits to the city grew in frequency and his
tarryings there grew steadily longer in duration.

He was getting into deep waters. He was taking chances, privately, which
might get him into trouble some day--in fact, _did_.

Judge Driscoll had retired from the bench and from all business
activities in 1850, and had now been comfortably idle three years. He was
president of the Freethinkers' Society, and Pudd'nhead Wilson was the
other member. The society's weekly discussions were now the old lawyer's
main interest in life. Pudd'nhead was still toiling in obscurity at the
bottom of the ladder, under the blight of that unlucky remark which he
had let fall twenty-three years before about the dog.

Judge Driscoll was his friend, and claimed that he had a mind above the
average, but that was regarded as one of the judge's whims, and it failed
to modify the public opinion. Or rather, that was one of the reasons why
it failed, but there was another and better one. If the judge had stopped
with bare assertion, it would have had a good deal of effect; but he made
the mistake of trying to prove his position. For some years Wilson had
been privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a
calendar, with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical
form, appended to each date; and the judge thought that these quips and
fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful
of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But
irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focused for
it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest terms, and decided
without hesitancy that if there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson
was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt
for good and all. That is just the way in this world; an enemy can partly
ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete
the thing and make it perfect. After this the judge felt tenderer than
ever toward Wilson, and surer than ever that his calendar had merit.

Judge Driscoll could be a freethinker and still hold his place in society
because he was the person of most consequence to the community, and
therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions.
The other member of his pet organization was allowed the like liberty
because he was a cipher in the estimation of the public, and nobody
attached any importance to what he thought or did. He was liked, he was
welcome enough all around, but he simply didn't count for anything.

The Widow Cooper--affectionately called "Aunt Patsy" by everybody--lived
in a snug and comely cottage with her daughter Rowena, who was nineteen,
romantic, amiable, and very pretty, but otherwise of no consequence.
Rowena had a couple of young brothers--also of no consequence.

The widow had a large spare room, which she let to a lodger, with board,
when she could find one, but this room had been empty for a year now, to
her sorrow. Her income was only sufficient for the family support, and
she needed the lodging money for trifling luxuries. But now, at last, on
a flaming June day, she found herself happy; her tedious wait was ended;
her year-worn advertisement had been answered; and not by a village
applicant, no, no!--this letter was from away off yonder in the dim great
world to the North; it was from St. Louis. She sat on her porch gazing
out with unseeing eyes upon the shining reaches of the mighty
Mississippi, her thoughts steeped in her good fortune. Indeed it was
specially good fortune, for she was to have two lodgers instead of one.

She had read the letter to the family, and Rowena had danced away to see
to the cleaning and airing of the room by the slave woman, Nancy, and the
boys had rushed abroad in the town to spread the great news, for it was a
matter of public interest, and the public would wonder and not be pleased
if not informed. Presently Rowena returned, all ablush with joyous
excitement, and begged for a rereading of the letter. It was framed thus:

HONORED MADAM: My brother and I have seen your advertisement, by chance,
and beg leave to take the room you offer. We are twenty-four years of
age and twins. We are Italians by birth, but have lived long in the
various countries of Europe, and several years in the United States. Our
names are Luigi and Angelo Capello. You desire but one guest; but, dear
madam, if you will allow us to pay for two, we will not incommode you.
We shall be down Thursday.

"Italians! How romantic! Just think, Ma--there's never been one in this
town, and everybody will be dying to see them, and they're all OURS!
Think of that!"

"Yes, I reckon they'll make a grand stir."

"Oh, indeed they will. The whole town will be on its head!
Think--they've been in Europe and everywhere! There's never been a
traveler in this town before, Ma, I shouldn't wonder if they've seen
kings!"

"Well, a body can't tell, but they'll make stir enough, without that."

"Yes, that's of course. Luigi--Angelo. They're lovely names; and so
grand and foreign--not like Jones and Robinson and such. Thursday they
are coming, and this is only Tuesday; it's a cruel long time to wait.
Here comes Judge Driscoll in at the gate. He's heard about it. I'll go
and open the door."

The judge was full of congratulations and curiosity. The letter was read
and discussed. Soon Justice Robinson arrived with more congratulations,
and there was a new reading and a new discussion. This was the beginning.
Neighbor after neighbor, of both sexes, followed, and the procession
drifted in and out all day and evening and all Wednesday and Thursday.
The letter was read and reread until it was nearly worn out; everybody
admired its courtly and gracious tone, and smooth and practiced style,
everybody was sympathetic and excited, and the Coopers were steeped in
happiness all the while.

The boats were very uncertain in low water in these primitive times. This
time the Thursday boat had not arrived at ten at night--so the people
had waited at the landing all day for nothing; they were driven to their
homes by a heavy storm without having had a view of the illustrious
foreigners.

Eleven o'clock came; and the Cooper house was the only one in the town
that still had lights burning. The rain and thunder were booming yet,
and the anxious family were still waiting, still hoping. At last there
was a knock at the door, and the family jumped to open it. Two Negro men
entered, each carrying a trunk, and proceeded upstairs toward the guest
room. Then entered the twins--the handsomest, the best dressed, the most
distinguished-looking pair of young fellows the West had ever seen. One
was a little fairer than the other, but otherwise they were exact
duplicates.




CHAPTER 6 -- Swimming in Glory

     _Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even
     the undertaker will be sorry._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's
     Calendar

     _Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by
     any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


At breakfast in the morning, the twins' charm of manner and easy and
polished bearing made speedy conquest of the family's good graces. All
constraint and formality quickly disappeared, and the friendliest feeling
succeeded. Aunt Patsy called them by their Christian names almost from
the beginning. She was full of the keenest curiosity about them, and
showed it; they responded by talking about themselves, which pleased her
greatly. It presently appeared that in their early youth they had known
poverty and hardship. As the talk wandered along, the old lady watched
for the right place to drop in a question or two concerning that matter,
and when she found it, she said to the blond twin, who was now doing the
biographies in his turn while the brunette one rested:

"If it ain't asking what I ought not to ask, Mr. Angelo, how did you come
to be so friendless and in such trouble when you were little? Do you mind
telling? But don't, if you do."

"Oh, we don't mind it at all, madam; in our case it was merely
misfortune, and nobody's fault. Our parents were well to do, there in
Italy, and we were their only child. We were of the old Florentine
nobility"--Rowena's heart gave a great bound, her nostrils expanded, and
a fine light played in her eyes--"and when the war broke out, my father
was on the losing side and had to fly for his life. His estates were
confiscated, his personal property seized, and there we were, in Germany,
strangers, friendless, and in fact paupers. My brother and I were ten
years old, and well educated for that age, very studious, very fond of
our books, and well grounded in the German, French, Spanish, and English
languages. Also, we were marvelous musical prodigies--if you will allow
me to say it, it being only the truth.

"Our father survived his misfortunes only a month, our mother soon
followed him, and we were alone in the world. Our parents could have
made themselves comfortable by exhibiting us as a show, and they had many
and large offers; but the thought revolted their pride, and they said
they would starve and die first. But what they wouldn't consent to do,
we had to do without the formality of consent. We were seized for the
debts occasioned by their illness and their funerals, and placed among
the attractions of a cheap museum in Berlin to earn the liquidation
money. It took us two years to get out of that slavery. We traveled all
about Germany, receiving no wages, and not even our keep. We had to be
exhibited for nothing, and beg our bread.

"Well, madam, the rest is not of much consequence. When we escaped from
that slavery at twelve years of age, we were in some respects men.
Experience had taught us some valuable things; among others, how to take
care of ourselves, how to avoid and defeat sharks and sharpers, and how
to conduct our own business for our own profit and without other people's
help. We traveled everywhere--years and years--picking up smatterings
of strange tongues, familiarizing ourselves with strange sights and
strange customs, accumulating an education of a wide and varied and
curious sort. It was a pleasant life. We went to Venice--to London,
Paris, Russia, India, China, Japan--"

At this point Nancy, the slave woman, thrust her head in at the door and
exclaimed:

"Ole Missus, de house is plum' jam full o' people, en dey's jes
a-spi'lin' to see de gen'lemen!" She indicated the twins with a nod of
her head, and tucked it back out of sight again.

It was a proud occasion for the widow, and she promised herself high
satisfaction in showing off her fine foreign birds before her neighbors
and friends--simple folk who had hardly ever seen a foreigner of any
kind, and never one of any distinction or style. Yet her feeling was
moderate indeed when contrasted with Rowena's. Rowena was in the clouds,
she walked on air; this was to be the greatest day, the most romantic
episode in the colorless history of that dull country town. She was to
be familiarly near the source of its glory and feel the full flood of it
pour over her and about her; the other girls could only gaze and envy,
not partake.

The widow was ready, Rowena was ready, so also were the foreigners.

The party moved along the hall, the twins in advance, and entered the
open parlor door, whence issued a low hum of conversation. The twins took
a position near the door, the widow stood at Luigi's side, Rowena stood
beside Angelo, and the march-past and the introductions began. The widow
was all smiles and contentment. She received the procession and passed
it on to Rowena.

"Good mornin', Sister Cooper"--handshake.

"Good morning, Brother Higgins--Count Luigi Capello, Mr. Higgins"
--handshake, followed by a devouring stare and "I'm glad to see ye,"
on the part of Higgins, and a courteous inclination of the head and a
pleasant "Most happy!" on the part of Count Luigi.

"Good mornin', Roweny"--handshake.

"Good morning, Mr. Higgins--present you to Count Angelo Capello."
Handshake, admiring stare, "Glad to see ye"--courteous nod, smily "Most
happy!" and Higgins passes on.

None of these visitors was at ease, but, being honest people, they didn't
pretend to be. None of them had ever seen a person bearing a title of
nobility before, and none had been expecting to see one now, consequently
the title came upon them as a kind of pile-driving surprise and caught
them unprepared. A few tried to rise to the emergency, and got out an
awkward "My lord," or "Your lordship," or something of that sort, but the
great majority were overwhelmed by the unaccustomed word and its dim and
awful associations with gilded courts and stately ceremony and anointed
kingship, so they only fumbled through the handshake and passed on,
speechless. Now and then, as happens at all receptions everywhere, a
more than ordinary friendly soul blocked the procession and kept it
waiting while he inquired how the brothers liked the village, and how
long they were going to stay, and if their family was well, and dragged
in the weather, and hoped it would get cooler soon, and all that sort of
thing, so as to be able to say, when he got home, "I had quite a long
talk with them"; but nobody did or said anything of a regrettable kind,
and so the great affair went through to the end in a creditable and
satisfactory fashion.

General conversation followed, and the twins drifted about from group to
group, talking easily and fluently and winning approval, compelling
admiration and achieving favor from all. The widow followed their
conquering march with a proud eye, and every now and then Rowena said to
herself with deep satisfaction, "And to think they are ours--all ours!"

There were no idle moments for mother or daughter. Eager inquiries
concerning the twins were pouring into their enchanted ears all the time;
each was the constant center of a group of breathless listeners; each
recognized that she knew now for the first time the real meaning of that
great word Glory, and perceived the stupendous value of it, and
understood why men in all ages had been willing to throw away meaner
happiness, treasure, life itself, to get a taste of its sublime and
supreme joy. Napoleon and all his kind stood accounted for--and
justified.

When Rowena had at last done all her duty by the people in the parlor,
she went upstairs to satisfy the longings of an overflow meeting there,
for the parlor was not big enough to hold all the comers. Again she was
besieged by eager questioners, and again she swam in sunset seas of
glory. When the forenoon was nearly gone, she recognized with a pang
that this most splendid episode of her life was almost over, that nothing
could prolong it, that nothing quite its equal could ever fall to her
fortune again. But never mind, it was sufficient unto itself, the grand
occasion had moved on an ascending scale from the start, and was a noble
and memorable success. If the twins could but do some crowning act now
to climax it, something usual, something startling, something to
concentrate upon themselves the company's loftiest admiration, something
in the nature of an electric surprise--

Here a prodigious slam-banging broke out below, and everybody rushed down
to see. It was the twins, knocking out a classic four-handed piece on
the piano in great style. Rowena was satisfied--satisfied down to the
bottom of her heart.

The young strangers were kept long at the piano. The villagers were
astonished and enchanted with the magnificence of their performance, and
could not bear to have them stop. All the music that they had ever heard
before seemed spiritless prentice-work and barren of grace and charm when
compared with these intoxicating floods of melodious sound. They realized
that for once in their lives they were hearing masters.




CHAPTER 7 -- The Unknown Nymph

     _One of the most striking differences between a cat and a
     lie is that a cat has only nine lives._ --Pudd'nhead
     Wilson's Calendar


The company broke up reluctantly, and drifted toward their several
homes, chatting with vivacity and all agreeing that it would be many a
long day before Dawson's Landing would see the equal of this one again.
The twins had accepted several invitations while the reception was in
progress, and had also volunteered to play some duets at an amateur
entertainment for the benefit of a local charity. Society was eager to
receive them to its bosom. Judge Driscoll had the good fortune to secure
them for an immediate drive, and to be the first to display them in
public. They entered his buggy with him and were paraded down the main
street, everybody flocking to the windows and sidewalks to see.

The judge showed the strangers the new graveyard, and the jail, and where
the richest man lived, and the Freemasons' hall, and the Methodist
church, and the Presbyterian church, and where the Baptist church was
going to be when they got some money to build it with, and showed them
the town hall and the slaughterhouse, and got out the independent fire
company in uniform and had them put out an imaginary fire; then he let
them inspect the muskets of the militia company, and poured out an
exhaustless stream of enthusiasm over all these splendors, and seemed
very well satisfied with the responses he got, for the twins admired his
admiration, and paid him back the best they could, though they could have
done better if some fifteen or sixteen hundred thousand previous
experiences of this sort in various countries had not already rubbed off
a considerable part of the novelty in it.

The judge laid himself out hospitality to make them have a good time, and
if there was a defect anywhere, it was not his fault. He told them a good
many humorous anecdotes, and always forgot the nub, but they were always
able to furnish it, for these yarns were of a pretty early vintage, and
they had had many a rejuvenating pull at them before. And he told them
all about his several dignities, and how he had held this and that and
the other place of honor or profit, and had once been to the legislature,
and was now president of the Society of Freethinkers. He said the
society had been in existence four years, and already had two members,
and was firmly established. He would call for the brothers in the
evening, if they would like to attend a meeting of it.

Accordingly he called for them, and on the way he told them all about
Pudd'nhead Wilson, in order that they might get a favorable impression of
him in advance and be prepared to like him. This scheme succeeded--the
favorable impression was achieved. Later it was confirmed and solidified
when Wilson proposed that out of courtesy to the strangers the usual
topics be put aside and the hour be devoted to conversation upon ordinary
subjects and the cultivation of friendly relations and good-fellowship--a
proposition which was put to vote and carried.

The hour passed quickly away in lively talk, and when it was ended, the
lonesome and neglected Wilson was richer by two friends than he had been
when it began. He invited the twins to look in at his lodgings
presently, after disposing of an intervening engagement, and they
accepted with pleasure.

Toward the middle of the evening, they found themselves on the road to
his house. Pudd'nhead was at home waiting for them and putting in his
time puzzling over a thing which had come under his notice that morning.
The matter was this: He happened to be up very early--at dawn, in fact;
and he crossed the hall, which divided his cottage through the center,
and entered a room to get something there. The window of the room had no
curtains, for that side of the house had long been unoccupied, and
through this window he caught sight of something which surprised and
interested him. It was a young woman--a young woman where properly no
young woman belonged; for she was in Judge Driscoll's house, and in the
bedroom over the judge's private study or sitting room. This was young
Tom Driscoll's bedroom. He and the judge, the judge's widowed sister Mrs.
Pratt, and three Negro servants were the only people who belonged in the
house. Who, then, might this young lady be? The two houses were
separated by an ordinary yard, with a low fence running back through its
middle from the street in front to the lane in the rear. The distance
was not great, and Wilson was able to see the girl very well, the window
shades of the room she was in being up, and the window also. The girl had
on a neat and trim summer dress, patterned in broad stripes of pink and
white, and her bonnet was equipped with a pink veil. She was practicing
steps, gaits and attitudes, apparently; she was doing the thing
gracefully, and was very much absorbed in her work. Who could she be, and
how came she to be in young Tom Driscoll's room?

Wilson had quickly chosen a position from which he could watch the girl
without running much risk of being seen by her, and he remained there
hoping she would raise her veil and betray her face. But she
disappointed him. After a matter of twenty minutes she disappeared and
although he stayed at his post half an hour longer, she came no more.

Toward noon he dropped in at the judge's and talked with Mrs. Pratt about
the great event of the day, the levee of the distinguished foreigners at
Aunt Patsy Cooper's. He asked after her nephew Tom, and she said he was
on his way home and that she was expecting him to arrive a little before
night, and added that she and the judge were gratified to gather from his
letters that he was conducting himself very nicely and creditably--at
which Wilson winked to himself privately. Wilson did not ask if there was
a newcomer in the house, but he asked questions that would have brought
light-throwing answers as to that matter if Mrs. Pratt had had any light
to throw; so he went away satisfied that he knew of things that were
going on in her house of which she herself was not aware.

He was now awaiting for the twins, and still puzzling over the problem of
who that girl might be, and how she happened to be in that young fellow's
room at daybreak in the morning.




CHAPTER 8 -- Marse Tom Tramples His Chance

     _The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady
     and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a
     whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money._ --Pudd'nhead
     Wilson's Calendar

     _Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be
     a young June bug than an old bird of paradise._ --Pudd'nhead
     Wilson's Calendar


It is necessary now to hunt up Roxy.

At the time she was set free and went away chambermaiding, she was
thirty-five. She got a berth as second chambermaid on a Cincinnati boat
in the New Orleans trade, the _Grand Mogul_. A couple of trips made her
wonted and easygoing at the work, and infatuated her with the stir and
adventure and independence of steamboat life. Then she was promoted and
become head chambermaid. She was a favorite with the officers, and
exceedingly proud of their joking and friendly way with her.

During eight years she served three parts of the year on that boat, and
the winters on a Vicksburg packet. But now for two months, she had had
rheumatism in her arms, and was obliged to let the washtub alone. So she
resigned. But she was well fixed--rich, as she would have described it;
for she had lived a steady life, and had banked four dollars every month
in New Orleans as a provision for her old age. She said in the start
that she had "put shoes on one bar'footed nigger to tromple on her with,"
and that one mistake like that was enough; she would be independent of
the human race thenceforth forevermore if hard work and economy could
accomplish it. When the boat touched the levee at New Orleans she bade
good-by to her comrades on the _Grand Mogul_ and moved her kit ashore.

But she was back in a hour. The bank had gone to smash and carried her
four hundred dollars with it. She was a pauper and homeless. Also
disabled bodily, at least for the present. The officers were full of
sympathy for her in her trouble, and made up a little purse for her. She
resolved to go to her birthplace; she had friends there among the Negros,
and the unfortunate always help the unfortunate, she was well aware of
that; those lowly comrades of her youth would not let her starve.

She took the little local packet at Cairo, and now she was on the
homestretch. Time had worn away her bitterness against her son, and she
was able to think of him with serenity. She put the vile side of him out
of her mind, and dwelt only on recollections of his occasional acts of
kindness to her. She gilded and otherwise decorated these, and made them
very pleasant to contemplate. She began to long to see him. She would go
and fawn upon him slavelike--for this would have to be her attitude, of
course--and maybe she would find that time had modified him, and that he
would be glad to see his long-forgotten old nurse and treat her gently.
That would be lovely; that would make her forget her woes and her
poverty.

Her poverty! That thought inspired her to add another castle to her
dream: maybe he would give her a trifle now and then--maybe a dollar,
once a month, say; any little thing like that would help, oh, ever so
much.

By the time she reached Dawson's Landing, she was her old self again; her
blues were gone, she was in high feather. She would get along, surely;
there were many kitchens where the servants would share their meals with
her, and also steal sugar and apples and other dainties for her to carry
home--or give her a chance to pilfer them herself, which would answer
just as well. And there was the church. She was a more rabid and devoted
Methodist than ever, and her piety was no sham, but was strong and
sincere. Yes, with plenty of creature comforts and her old place in the
amen corner in her possession again, she would be perfectly happy and at
peace thenceforward to the end.

She went to Judge Driscoll's kitchen first of all. She was received
there in great form and with vast enthusiasm. Her wonderful travels, and
the strange countries she had seen, and the adventures she had had, made
her a marvel and a heroine of romance. The Negros hung enchanted upon a
great story of her experiences, interrupting her all along with eager
questions, with laughter, exclamations of delight, and expressions of
applause; and she was obliged to confess to herself that if there was
anything better in this world than steamboating, it was the glory to be
got by telling about it. The audience loaded her stomach with their
dinners, and then stole the pantry bare to load up her basket.

Tom was in St. Louis. The servants said he had spent the best part of
his time there during the previous two years. Roxy came every day, and
had many talks about the family and its affairs. Once she asked why Tom
was away so much. The ostensible "Chambers" said:

"De fac' is, ole marster kin git along better when young marster's away
den he kin when he's in de town; yes, en he love him better, too; so he
gives him fifty dollahs a month--"

"No, is dat so? Chambers, you's a-jokin', ain't you?"

"'Clah to goodness I ain't, Mammy; Marse Tom tole me so his own self. But
nemmine, 'tain't enough."

"My lan', what de reason 'tain't enough?"

"Well, I's gwine to tell you, if you gimme a chanst, Mammy. De reason it
ain't enough is 'ca'se Marse Tom gambles."

Roxy threw up her hands in astonishment, and Chambers went on:

"Ole marster found it out, 'ca'se he had to pay two hundred dollahs for
Marse Tom's gamblin' debts, en dat's true, Mammy, jes as dead certain as
you's bawn."

"Two--hund'd dollahs! Why, what is you talkin' 'bout?
Two--hund'd--dollahs. Sakes alive, it's 'mos' enough to buy a tol'able
good secondhand nigger wid. En you ain't lyin', honey? You wouldn't lie
to you' old Mammy?"

"It's God's own truth, jes as I tell you--two hund'd dollahs--I wisht I
may never stir outen my tracks if it ain't so. En, oh, my lan', ole Marse
was jes a-hoppin'! He was b'ilin' mad, I tell you! He tuck 'n'
dissenhurrit him."

"Disen_whiched_ him?"

"Dissenhurrit him."

"What's dat? What do you mean?"

"Means he bu'sted de will."

"Bu's--ted de will! He wouldn't _ever_ treat him so! Take it back, you
mis'able imitation nigger dat I bore in sorrow en tribbilation."

Roxy's pet castle--an occasional dollar from Tom's pocket--was tumbling
to ruin before her eyes. She could not abide such a disaster as that;
she couldn't endure the thought of it. Her remark amused Chambers.

"Yah-yah-yah! Jes listen to dat! If I's imitation, what is you? Bofe of
us is imitation _white_--dat's what we is--en pow'ful good imitation,
too. Yah-yah-yah! We don't 'mount to noth'n as imitation _niggers_; en
as for--"

"Shet up yo' foolin', 'fo' I knock you side de head, en tell me 'bout de
will. Tell me 'tain't bu'sted--do, honey, en I'll never forgit you."

"Well, _'tain't_--'ca'se dey's a new one made, en Marse Tom's all right
ag'in. But what is you in sich a sweat 'bout it for, Mammy? 'Tain't
none o' your business I don't reckon."

"'Tain't none o' my business? Whose business is it den, I'd like to
know? Wuz I his mother tell he was fifteen years old, or wusn't I?--you
answer me dat. En you speck I could see him turned out po' and ornery on
de worl' en never care noth'n' 'bout it? I reckon if you'd ever be'n a
mother yo'self, Valet de Chambers, you wouldn't talk sich foolishness as
dat."

"Well, den, ole Marse forgive him en fixed up de will ag'in--do dat
satisfy you?"

Yes, she was satisfied now, and quite happy and sentimental over it. She
kept coming daily, and at last she was told that Tom had come home. She
began to tremble with emotion, and straightway sent to beg him to let his
"po' ole nigger Mammy have jes one sight of him en die for joy."

Tom was stretched at his lazy ease on a sofa when Chambers brought the
petition. Time had not modified his ancient detestation of the humble
drudge and protector of his boyhood; it was still bitter and
uncompromising. He sat up and bent a severe gaze upon the face of the
young fellow whose name he was unconsciously using and whose family
rights he was enjoying. He maintained the gaze until the victim of it
had become satisfactorily pallid with terror, then he said:

"What does the old rip want with me?"

The petition was meekly repeated.

"Who gave you permission to come and disturb me with the social
attentions of niggers?"

Tom had risen. The other young man was trembling now, visibly. He saw
what was coming, and bent his head sideways, and put up his left arm to
shield it. Tom rained cuffs upon the head and its shield, saying no
word: the victim received each blow with a beseeching, "Please, Marse
Tom!--oh, please, Marse Tom!" Seven blows--then Tom said, "Face the
door--march!" He followed behind with one, two, three solid kicks. The
last one helped the pure-white slave over the door-sill, and he limped
away mopping his eyes with his old, ragged sleeve. Tom shouted after
him, "Send her in!"

Then he flung himself panting on the sofa again, and rasped out the
remark, "He arrived just at the right moment; I was full to the brim with
bitter thinkings, and nobody to take it out of. How refreshing it was!
I feel better."

Tom's mother entered now, closing the door behind her, and approached her
son with all the wheedling and supplication servilities that fear and
interest can impart to the words and attitudes of the born slave. She
stopped a yard from her boy and made two or three admiring exclamations
over his manly stature and general handsomeness, and Tom put an arm under
his head and hoisted a leg over the sofa back in order to look properly
indifferent.

"My lan', how you is growed, honey! 'Clah to goodness, I wouldn't
a-knowed you, Marse Tom! 'Deed I wouldn't! Look at me good; does you
'member old Roxy? Does you know yo' old nigger mammy, honey? Well now, I
kin lay down en die in peace, 'ca'se I'se seed--"

"Cut it short, Goddamn it, cut it short! What is it you want?"

"You heah dat? Jes the same old Marse Tom, al'ays so gay and funnin' wid
de ole mammy. I'uz jes as shore--"

"Cut it short, I tell you, and get along! What do you want?"

This was a bitter disappointment. Roxy had for so many days nourished
and fondled and petted her notion that Tom would be glad to see his old
nurse, and would make her proud and happy to the marrow with a cordial
word or two, that it took two rebuffs to convince her that he was not
funning, and that her beautiful dream was a fond and foolish variety, a
shabby and pitiful mistake. She was hurt to the heart, and so ashamed
that for a moment she did not quite know what to do or how to act. Then
her breast began to heave, the tears came, and in her forlornness she was
moved to try that other dream of hers--an appeal to her boy's charity;
and so, upon the impulse, and without reflection, she offered her
supplication:

"Oh, Marse Tom, de po' ole mammy is in sich hard luck dese days; en she's
kinder crippled in de arms and can't work, en if you could gimme a
dollah--on'y jes one little dol--"

Tom was on his feet so suddenly that the supplicant was startled into a
jump herself.

"A dollar!--give you a dollar! I've a notion to strangle you! Is _that_
your errand here? Clear out! And be quick about it!"

Roxy backed slowly toward the door. When she was halfway she stopped,
and said mournfully:

"Marse Tom, I nussed you when you was a little baby, en I raised you all
by myself tell you was 'most a young man; en now you is young en rich, en
I is po' en gitt'n ole, en I come heah b'leavin' dat you would he'p de
ole mammy 'long down de little road dat's lef' 'twix' her en de grave,
en--"

Tom relished this tune less than any that he had preceded it, for it
began to wake up a sort of echo in his conscience; so he interrupted and
said with decision, though without asperity, that he was not in a
situation to help her, and wasn't going to do it.

"Ain't you ever gwine to he'p me, Marse Tom?"

"No! Now go away and don't bother me any more."

Roxy's head was down, in an attitude of humility. But now the fires of
her old wrongs flamed up in her breast and began to burn fiercely. She
raised her head slowly, till it was well up, and at the same time her
great frame unconsciously assumed an erect and masterful attitude, with
all the majesty and grace of her vanished youth in it. She raised her
finger and punctuated with it.

"You has said de word. You has had yo' chance, en you has trompled it
under yo' foot. When you git another one, you'll git down on yo' knees
en _beg_ for it!"

A cold chill went to Tom's heart, he didn't know why; for he did not
reflect that such words, from such an incongruous source, and so solemnly
delivered, could not easily fail of that effect. However, he did the
natural thing: he replied with bluster and mockery.

"_You'll_ give me a chance--_you_! Perhaps I'd better get down on my
knees now! But in case I don't--just for argument's sake--what's going
to happen, pray?"

"Dis is what is gwine to happen, I's gwine as straight to yo' uncle as I
kin walk, en tell him every las' thing I knows 'bout you."

Tom's cheek blenched, and she saw it. Disturbing thoughts began to chase
each other through his head. "How can she know? And yet she must have
found out--she looks it. I've had the will back only three months, and
am already deep in debt again, and moving heaven and earth to save myself
from exposure and destruction, with a reasonably fair show of getting the
thing covered up if I'm let alone, and now this fiend has gone and found
me out somehow or other. I wonder how much she knows? Oh, oh, oh, it's
enough to break a body's heart! But I've got to humor her--there's no
other way."

Then he worked up a rather sickly sample of a gay laugh and a hollow
chipperness of manner, and said:

"Well, well, Roxy dear, old friends like you and me mustn't quarrel.
Here's your dollar--now tell me what you know."

He held out the wildcat bill; she stood as she was, and made no movement.
It was her turn to scorn persuasive foolery now, and she did not waste
it. She said, with a grim implacability in voice and manner which made
Tom almost realize that even a former slave can remember for ten minutes
insults and injuries returned for compliments and flatteries received,
and can also enjoy taking revenge for them when the opportunity offers:

"What does I know? I'll tell you what I knows, I knows enough to bu'st
dat will to flinders--en more, mind you, _more!_"

Tom was aghast.

"More?" he said, "What do you call more? Where's there any room for
more?"

Roxy laughed a mocking laugh, and said scoffingly, with a toss of her
head, and her hands on her hips:

"Yes!--oh, I reckon! _co'se_ you'd like to know--wid yo' po' little ole
rag dollah. What you reckon I's gwine to tell _you_ for?--you ain't got
no money. I's gwine to tell yo' uncle--en I'll do it dis minute,
too--he'll gimme FIVE dollahs for de news, en mighty glad, too."

She swung herself around disdainfully, and started away. Tom was in a
panic. He seized her skirts, and implored her to wait. She turned and
said, loftily:

"Look-a-heah, what 'uz it I tole you?"

"You--you--I don't remember anything. What was it you told me?"

"I tole you dat de next time I give you a chance you'd git down on yo'
knees en beg for it."

Tom was stupefied for a moment. He was panting with excitement. Then he
said:

"Oh, Roxy, you wouldn't require your young master to do such a horrible
thing. You can't mean it."

"I'll let you know mighty quick whether I means it or not! You call me
names, en as good as spit on me when I comes here, po' en ornery en
'umble, to praise you for bein' growed up so fine and handsome, en tell
you how I used to nuss you en tend you en watch you when you 'uz sick en
hadn't no mother but me in de whole worl', en beg you to give de po' ole
nigger a dollah for to get her som'n' to eat, en you call me
names--_names_, dad blame you! Yassir, I gives you jes one chance mo',
and dat's _now_, en it las' on'y half a second--you hear?"

Tom slumped to his knees and began to beg, saying:

"You see I'm begging, and it's honest begging, too! Now tell me, Roxy,
tell me."

The heir of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage looked down on
him and seemed to drink in deep draughts of satisfaction. Then she said:

"Fine nice young white gen'l'man kneelin' down to a nigger wench! I's
wanted to see dat jes once befo' I's called. Now, Gabr'el, blow de hawn,
I's ready . . . Git up!"

Tom did it. He said, humbly:

"Now, Roxy, don't punish me any more. I deserved what I've got, but be
good and let me off with that. Don't go to uncle. Tell me--I'll give
you the five dollars."

"Yes, I bet you will; en you won't stop dah, nuther. But I ain't gwine
to tell you heah--"

"Good gracious, no!"

"Is you 'feared o' de ha'nted house?"

"N-no."

"Well, den, you come to de ha'nted house 'bout ten or 'leven tonight, en
climb up de ladder, 'ca'se de sta'rsteps is broke down, en you'll find
me. I's a-roostin' in de ha'nted house 'ca'se I can't 'ford to roos'
nowher's else." She started toward the door, but stopped and said,
"Gimme de dollah bill!" He gave it to her. She examined it and said,
"H'm--like enough de bank's bu'sted." She started again, but halted
again. "Has you got any whisky?"

"Yes, a little."

"Fetch it!"

He ran to his room overhead and brought down a bottle which was
two-thirds full. She tilted it up and took a drink. Her eyes sparkled
with satisfaction, and she tucked the bottle under her shawl, saying,
"It's prime. I'll take it along."

Tom humbly held the door for her, and she marched out as grim and erect
as a grenadier.




CHAPTER 9 -- Tom Practices Sycophancy

     _Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a
     funeral? It is because we are not the person involved._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition.
     There was once a man who, not being able to find any other
     fault with his coal, complained that there were too many
     prehistoric toads in it._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


Tom flung himself on the sofa, and put his throbbing head in his hands,
and rested his elbows on his knees. He rocked himself back and forth and
moaned.

"I've knelt to a nigger wench!" he muttered. "I thought I had struck the
deepest depths of degradation before, but oh, dear, it was nothing to
this. . . . Well, there is one consolation, such as it is--I've struck
bottom this time; there's nothing lower."

But that was a hasty conclusion.

At ten that night he climbed the ladder in the haunted house, pale, weak,
and wretched. Roxy was standing in the door of one of the rooms,
waiting, for she had heard him.

This was a two-story log house which had acquired the reputation a few
years ago of being haunted, and that was the end of its usefulness.
Nobody would live in it afterward, or go near it by night, and most
people even gave it a wide berth in the daytime. As it had no
competition, it was called _the_ haunted house. It was getting crazy and
ruinous now, from long neglect. It stood three hundred yards beyond
Pudd'nhead Wilson's house, with nothing between but vacancy. It was the
last house in the town at that end.

Tom followed Roxy into the room. She had a pile of clean straw in the
corner for a bed, some cheap but well-kept clothing was hanging on the
wall, there was a tin lantern freckling the floor with little spots of
light, and there were various soap and candle boxes scattered about,
which served for chairs. The two sat down. Roxy said:

"Now den, I'll tell you straight off, en I'll begin to k'leck de money
later on; I ain't in no hurry. What does you reckon I's gwine to tell
you?"

"Well, you--you--oh, Roxy, don't make it too hard for me! Come right out
and tell me you've found out somehow what a shape I'm in on account of
dissipation and foolishness."

"Disposition en foolishness! NO sir, dat ain't it. Dat jist ain't
nothin' at all, 'longside o' what _I_ knows."

Tom stared at her, and said:

"Why, Roxy, what do you mean?"

She rose, and gloomed above him like a Fate.

"I means dis--en it's de Lord's truth. You ain't no more kin to ole
Marse Driscoll den I is! _dat's_ what I means!" and her eyes flamed
with triumph.

"What?"

"Yassir, en _dat_ ain't all! You's a _nigger!_--_bawn_ a nigger and a
_slave!_--en you's a nigger en a slave dis minute; en if I opens my mouf
ole Marse Driscoll'll sell you down de river befo' you is two days older
den what you is now!"

"It's a thundering lie, you miserable old blatherskite!"

"It ain't no lie, nuther. It's just de truth, en nothin' _but_ de truth,
so he'p me. Yassir--you's my _son_--"

"You devil!"

"En dat po' boy dat you's be'n a-kickin' en a-cuffin' today is Percy
Driscoll's son en yo' _marster_--"

"You beast!"

"En _his_ name is Tom Driscoll, en _yo's_ name's Valet de Chambers, en
you ain't GOT no fambly name, beca'se niggers don't _have_ em!"

Tom sprang up and seized a billet of wood and raised it, but his mother
only laughed at him, and said:

"Set down, you pup! Does you think you kin skyer me? It ain't in you,
nor de likes of you. I reckon you'd shoot me in de back, maybe, if you
got a chance, for dat's jist yo' style--_I_ knows you, throo en
throo--but I don't mind gitt'n killed, beca'se all dis is down in writin'
and it's in safe hands, too, en de man dat's got it knows whah to look
for de right man when I gits killed. Oh, bless yo' soul, if you puts yo'
mother up for as big a fool as _you_ is, you's pow'ful mistaken, I kin
tell you! Now den, you set still en behave yo'self; en don't you git up
ag'in till I tell you!"

Tom fretted and chafed awhile in a whirlwind of disorganizing sensations
and emotions, and finally said, with something like settled conviction:

"The whole thing is moonshine; now then, go ahead and do your worst; I'm
done with you."

Roxy made no answer. She took the lantern and started for the door. Tom
was in a cold panic in a moment.

"Come back, come back!" he wailed. "I didn't mean it, Roxy; I take it
all back, and I'll never say it again! Please come back, Roxy!"

The woman stood a moment, then she said gravely:

"Dat's one thing you's got to stop, Valet de Chambers. You can't call me
_Roxy_, same as if you was my equal. Chillen don't speak to dey mammies
like dat. You'll call me ma or mammy, dat's what you'll call
me--leastways when de ain't nobody aroun'. _Say_ it!"

It cost Tom a struggle, but he got it out.

"Dat's all right, don't you ever forgit it ag'in, if you knows what's
good for you. Now den, you had said you wouldn't ever call it lies en
moonshine ag'in. I'll tell you dis, for a warnin': if you ever does say
it ag'in, it's de LAS' time you'll ever say it to me; I'll tramp as
straight to de judge as I kin walk, en tell him who you is, en _prove_
it. Does you b'lieve me when I says dat?"

"Oh," groaned Tom, "I more than believe it; I _know_ it."

Roxy knew her conquest was complete. She could have proved nothing to
anybody, and her threat of writings was a lie; but she knew the person
she was dealing with, and had made both statements without any doubt as
to the effect they would produce.

She went and sat down on her candle box, and the pride and pomp of her
victorious attitude made it a throne. She said:

"Now den, Chambers, we's gwine to talk business, en dey ain't gwine to be
no mo' foolishness. In de fust place, you gits fifty dollahs a month;
you's gwine to han' over half of it to yo' ma. Plank it out!"

But Tom had only six dollars in the world. He gave her that, and
promised to start fair on next month's pension.

"Chambers, how much is you in debt?"

Tom shuddered, and said:

"Nearly three hundred dollars."

"How is you gwine to pay it?"

Tom groaned out: "Oh, I don't know; don't ask me such awful questions."

But she stuck to her point until she wearied a confession out of him: he
had been prowling about in disguise, stealing small valuables from
private houses; in fact, he made a good deal of a raid on his fellow
villagers a fortnight before, when he was supposed to be in St. Louis;
but he doubted if he had sent away enough stuff to realize the required
amount, and was afraid to make a further venture in the present excited
state of the town. His mother approved of his conduct, and offered to
help, but this frightened him. He tremblingly ventured to say that if
she would retire from the town he should feel better and safer, and could
hold his head higher--and was going on to make an argument, but she
interrupted and surprised him pleasantly by saying she was ready; it
didn't make any difference to her where she stayed, so that she got her
share of the pension regularly. She said she would not go far, and would
call at the haunted house once a month for her money. Then she said:

"I don't hate you so much now, but I've hated you a many a year--and
anybody would. Didn't I change you off, en give you a good fambly en a
good name, en made you a white gen'l'man en rich, wid store clothes
on--en what did I git for it? You despised me all de time, en was al'ays
sayin' mean hard things to me befo' folks, en wouldn't ever let me forgit
I's a nigger--en--en--"

She fell to sobbing, and broke down. Tom said: "But you know I didn't
know you were my mother; and besides--"

"Well, nemmine 'bout dat, now; let it go. I's gwine to fo'git it." Then
she added fiercely, "En don't ever make me remember it ag'in, or you'll
be sorry, _I_ tell you."

When they were parting, Tom said, in the most persuasive way he could
command:

"Ma, would you mind telling me who was my father?"

He had supposed he was asking an embarrassing question. He was mistaken.
Roxy drew herself up with a proud toss of her head, and said:

"Does I mine tellin' you? No, dat I don't! You ain't got no 'casion to
be shame' o' yo' father, _I_ kin tell you. He wuz de highest quality in
dis whole town--ole Virginny stock. Fust famblies, he wuz. Jes as good
stock as de Driscolls en de Howards, de bes' day dey ever seed." She put
on a little prouder air, if possible, and added impressively: "Does you
'member Cunnel Cecil Burleigh Essex, dat died de same year yo' young
Marse Tom Driscoll's pappy died, en all de Masons en Odd Fellers en
Churches turned out en give him de bigges' funeral dis town ever seed?
Dat's de man."

Under the inspiration of her soaring complacency the departed graces of
her earlier days returned to her, and her bearing took to itself a
dignity and state that might have passed for queenly if her surroundings
had been a little more in keeping with it.

"Dey ain't another nigger in dis town dat's as highbawn as you is. Now
den, go 'long! En jes you hold yo' head up as high as you want to--you
has de right, en dat I kin swah."




CHAPTER 10 -- The Nymph Revealed

     _All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange
     complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to
     live._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _When angry, count four; when very angry, swear._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had sudden wakings out of
his sleep, and his first thought was, "Oh, joy, it was all a dream!"
Then he laid himself heavily down again, with a groan and the muttered
words, "A nigger! I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead!"

He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror, and then he
resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous sleep. He began to
think. Sufficiently bitter thinkings they were. They wandered along
something after this fashion:

"Why were niggers _and_ whites made? What crime did the uncreated first
nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is
this awful difference made between white and black? . . . How hard the
nigger's fate seems, this morning!--yet until last night such a thought
never entered my head."

He sighed and groaned an hour or more away. Then "Chambers" came humbly
in to say that breakfast was nearly ready. "Tom" blushed scarlet to see
this aristocratic white youth cringe to him, a nigger, and call him
"Young Marster." He said roughly:

"Get out of my sight!" and when the youth was gone, he muttered, "He has
done me no harm, poor wretch, but he is an eyesore to me now, for he is
Driscoll, the young gentleman, and I am a--oh, I wish I was dead!"

A gigantic eruption, like that of Krakatoa a few years ago, with the
accompanying earthquakes, tidal waves, and clouds of volcanic dust,
changes the face of the surrounding landscape beyond recognition,
bringing down the high lands, elevating the low, making fair lakes where
deserts had been, and deserts where green prairies had smiled before.
The tremendous catastrophe which had befallen Tom had changed his moral
landscape in much the same way. Some of his low places he found lifted to
ideals, some of his ideas had sunk to the valleys, and lay there with the
sackcloth and ashes of pumice stone and sulphur on their ruined heads.

For days he wandered in lonely places, thinking, thinking, thinking
--trying to get his bearings. It was new work. If he met a friend, he
found that the habit of a lifetime had in some mysterious way vanished
--his arm hung limp, instead of involuntarily extending the hand for a
shake. It was the "nigger" in him asserting its humility, and he blushed
and was abashed. And the "nigger" in him was surprised when the white
friend put out his hand for a shake with him. He found the "nigger" in
him involuntarily giving the road, on the sidewalk, to a white rowdy and
loafer. When Rowena, the dearest thing his heart knew, the idol of his
secret worship, invited him in, the "nigger" in him made an embarrassed
excuse and was afraid to enter and sit with the dread white folks on
equal terms. The "nigger" in him went shrinking and skulking here and
there and yonder, and fancying it saw suspicion and maybe detection in
all faces, tones, and gestures. So strange and uncharacteristic was
Tom's conduct that people noticed it, and turned to look after him when
he passed on; and when he glanced back--as he could not help doing, in
spite of his best resistance--and caught that puzzled expression in a
person's face, it gave him a sick feeling, and he took himself out of
view as quickly as he could. He presently came to have a hunted sense
and a hunted look, and then he fled away to the hilltops and the
solitudes. He said to himself that the curse of Ham was upon him.

He dreaded his meals; the "nigger" in him was ashamed to sit at the white
folk's table, and feared discovery all the time; and once when Judge
Driscoll said, "What's the matter with you? You look as meek as a
nigger," he felt as secret murderers are said to feel when the accuser
says, "Thou art the man!" Tom said he was not well, and left the table.

His ostensible "aunt's" solicitudes and endearments were become a terror
to him, and he avoided them.

And all the time, hatred of his ostensible "uncle" was steadily growing
in his heart; for he said to himself, "He is white; and I am his chattel,
his property, his goods, and he can sell me, just as he could his dog."

For as much as a week after this, Tom imagined that his character had
undergone a pretty radical change. But that was because he did not know
himself.

In several ways his opinions were totally changed, and would never go
back to what they were before, but the main structure of his character
was not changed, and could not be changed. One or two very important
features of it were altered, and in time effects would result from this,
if opportunity offered--effects of a quite serious nature, too. Under the
influence of a great mental and moral upheaval, his character and his
habits had taken on the appearance of complete change, but after a while
with the subsidence of the storm, both began to settle toward their
former places. He dropped gradually back into his old frivolous and
easygoing ways and conditions of feeling and manner of speech, and no
familiar of his could have detected anything in him that differentiated
him from the weak and careless Tom of other days.

The theft raid which he had made upon the village turned out better than
he had ventured to hope. It produced the sum necessary to pay his gaming
debts, and saved him from exposure to his uncle and another smashing of
the will. He and his mother learned to like each other fairly well. She
couldn't love him, as yet, because there "warn't nothing _to_ him," as
she expressed it, but her nature needed something or somebody to rule
over, and he was better than nothing. Her strong character and
aggressive and commanding ways compelled Tom's admiration in spite of the
fact that he got more illustrations of them than he needed for his
comfort. However, as a rule her conversation was made up of racy tales
about the privacies of the chief families of the town (for she went
harvesting among their kitchens every time she came to the village), and
Tom enjoyed this. It was just in his line. She always collected her
half of his pension punctually, and he was always at the haunted house to
have a chat with her on these occasions. Every now and then, she paid
him a visit there on between-days also.

Occasions he would run up to St. Louis for a few weeks, and at last
temptation caught him again. He won a lot of money, but lost it, and
with it a deal more besides, which he promised to raise as soon as
possible.

For this purpose he projected a new raid on his town. He never meddled
with any other town, for he was afraid to venture into houses whose ins
and outs he did not know and the habits of whose households he was not
acquainted with. He arrived at the haunted house in disguise on the
Wednesday before the advent of the twins--after writing his Aunt Pratt
that he would not arrive until two days after--and laying in hiding there
with his mother until toward daylight Friday morning, when he went to his
uncle's house and entered by the back way with his own key, and slipped
up to his room where he could have the use of the mirror and toilet
articles. He had a suit of girl's clothes with him in a bundle as a
disguise for his raid, and was wearing a suit of his mother's clothing,
with black gloves and veil. By dawn he was tricked out for his raid, but
he caught a glimpse of Pudd'nhead Wilson through the window over the way,
and knew that Pudd'nhead had caught a glimpse of him. So he entertained
Wilson with some airs and graces and attitudes for a while, then stepped
out of sight and resumed the other disguise, and by and by went down and
out the back way and started downtown to reconnoiter the scene of his
intended labors.

But he was ill at ease. He had changed back to Roxy's dress, with the
stoop of age added to the disguise, so that Wilson would not bother
himself about a humble old women leaving a neighbor's house by the back
way in the early morning, in case he was still spying. But supposing
Wilson had seen him leave, and had thought it suspicious, and had also
followed him? The thought made Tom cold. He gave up the raid for the
day, and hurried back to the haunted house by the obscurest route he
knew. His mother was gone; but she came back, by and by, with the news of
the grand reception at Patsy Cooper's, and soon persuaded him that the
opportunity was like a special Providence, it was so inviting and
perfect. So he went raiding, after all, and made a nice success of it
while everybody was gone to Patsy Cooper's. Success gave him nerve and
even actual intrepidity; insomuch, indeed, that after he had conveyed his
harvest to his mother in a back alley, he went to the reception himself,
and added several of the valuables of that house to his takings.

After this long digression we have now arrived once more at the point
where Pudd'nhead Wilson, while waiting for the arrival of the twins on
that same Friday evening, sat puzzling over the strange apparition of
that morning--a girl in young Tom Driscoll's bedroom; fretting, and
guessing, and puzzling over it, and wondering who the shameless creature
might be.




CHAPTER 11 -- Pudd'nhead's Thrilling Discovery

     _There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and
     the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1--to tell him
     you have read one of his books; 2--to tell him you have read
     all of his books; 3--to ask him to let you read the
     manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his
     respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries
     you clear into his heart._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


The twins arrived presently, and talk began. It flowed along chattily
and sociably, and under its influence the new friendship gathered ease
and strength. Wilson got out his Calendar, by request, and read a
passage or two from it, which the twins praised quite cordially. This
pleased the author so much that he complied gladly when they asked him to
lend them a batch of the work to read at home. In the course of their
wide travels, they had found out that there are three sure ways of
pleasing an author; they were now working the best of the three.

There was an interruption now. Young Driscoll appeared, and joined the
party. He pretended to be seeing the distinguished strangers for the
first time when they rose to shake hands; but this was only a blind, as
he had already had a glimpse of them, at the reception, while robbing the
house. The twins made mental note that he was smooth-faced and rather
handsome, and smooth and undulatory in his movements--graceful, in fact.
Angelo thought he had a good eye; Luigi thought there was something
veiled and sly about it. Angelo thought he had a pleasant free-and-easy
way of talking; Luigi thought it was more so than was agreeable. Angelo
thought he was a sufficiently nice young man; Luigi reserved his
decision. Tom's first contribution to the conversation was a question
which he had put to Wilson a hundred times before. It was always cheerily
and good-natured put, and always inflicted a little pang, for it touched
a secret sore; but this time the pang was sharp, since strangers were
present.

"Well, how does the law come on? Had a case yet?"

Wilson bit his lip, but answered, "No--not yet," with as much
indifference as he could assume. Judge Driscoll had generously left the
law feature out of Wilson's biography which he had furnished to the
twins. Young Tom laughed pleasantly, and said:

"Wilson's a lawyer, gentlemen, but he doesn't practice now."

The sarcasm bit, but Wilson kept himself under control, and said without
passion:

"I don't practice, it is true. It is true that I have never had a case,
and have had to earn a poor living for twenty years as an expert
accountant in a town where I can't get a hold of a set of books to
untangle as often as I should like. But it is also true that I did
myself well for the practice of the law. By the time I was your age,
Tom, I had chosen a profession, and was soon competent to enter upon it."
Tom winced. "I never got a chance to try my hand at it, and I may never
get a chance; and yet if I ever do get it, I shall be found ready, for I
have kept up my law studies all these years."

"That's it; that's good grit! I like to see it. I've a notion to throw
all my business your way. My business and your law practice ought to
make a pretty gay team, Dave," and the young fellow laughed again.

"If you will throw--" Wilson had thought of the girl in Tom's bedroom,
and was going to say, "If you will throw the surreptitious and
disreputable part of your business my way, it may amount to something,"
but thought better of it and said,

"However, this matter doesn't fit well in a general conversation."

"All right, we'll change the subject; I guess you were about to give me
another dig, anyway, so I'm willing to change. How's the Awful Mystery
flourishing these days? Wilson's got a scheme for driving plain window
glass panes out of the market by decorating it with greasy finger marks,
and getting rich by selling it at famine prices to the crowned heads over
in Europe to outfit their palaces with. Fetch it out, Dave."

Wilson brought three of his glass strips, and said:

"I get the subject to pass the fingers of his right hand through his hair,
so as to get a little coating of the natural oil on them, and then press
the balls of them on the glass. A fine and delicate print of the lines
in the skin results, and is permanent, if it doesn't come in contact with
something able to rub it off. You begin, Tom."

"Why, I think you took my finger marks once or twice before."

"Yes, but you were a little boy the last time, only about twelve years
old."

"That's so. Of course, I've changed entirely since then, and variety is
what the crowned heads want, I guess."

He passed his fingers through his crop of short hair, and pressed them
one at a time on the glass. Angelo made a print of his fingers on
another glass, and Luigi followed with a third. Wilson marked the
glasses with names and dates, and put them away. Tom gave one of his
little laughs, and said:

"I thought I wouldn't say anything, but if variety is what you are after,
you have wasted a piece of glass. The hand print of one twin is the same
as the hand print of the fellow twin."

"Well, it's done now, and I like to have them both, anyway," said Wilson,
returned to his place.

"But look here, Dave," said Tom, "you used to tell people's fortunes, too,
when you took their finger marks. Dave's just an all-round genius--a
genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed
here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets
generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his
scientifics, and they call his skull a notion factory--hey, Dave, ain't
it so? But never mind, he'll make his mark someday--finger mark, you
know, he-he! But really, you want to let him take a shy at your palms
once; it's worth twice the price of admission or your money's returned at
the door. Why, he'll read your wrinkles as easy as a book, and not only
tell you fifty or sixty things that's going to happen to you, but fifty
or sixty thousand that ain't. Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an
inspired jack-at-all-science we've got in this town, and don't know it."

Wilson winced under this nagging and not very courteous chaff, and the
twins suffered with him and for him. They rightly judged, now, that the
best way to relieve him would be to take the thing in earnest and
treat it with respect, ignoring Tom's rather overdone raillery; so Luigi
said:

"We have seen something of palmistry in our wanderings, and know very
well what astonishing things it can do. If it isn't a science, and one
of the greatest of them too, I don't know what its other name ought to
be. In the Orient--"

Tom looked surprised and incredulous. He said:

"That juggling a science? But really, you ain't serious, are you?"

"Yes, entirely so. Four years ago we had our hands read out to us as if
our plans had been covered with print."

"Well, do you mean to say there was actually anything in it?" asked Tom,
his incredulity beginning to weaken a little.

"There was this much in it," said Angelo: "what was told us of our
characters was minutely exact--we could have not have bettered it
ourselves. Next, two or three memorable things that have happened to us
were laid bare--things which no one present but ourselves could have
known about."

"Why, it's rank sorcery!" exclaimed Tom, who was now becoming very much
interested. "And how did they make out with what was going to happen to
you in the future?"

"On the whole, quite fairly," said Luigi. "Two or three of the most
striking things foretold have happened since; much the most striking one
of all happened within that same year. Some of the minor prophesies have
come true; some of the minor and some of the major ones have not been
fulfilled yet, and of course may never be: still, I should be more
surprised if they failed to arrive than if they didn't."

Tom was entirely sobered, and profoundly impressed. He said,
apologetically:

"Dave, I wasn't meaning to belittle that science; I was only chaffing
--chattering, I reckon I'd better say. I wish you would look at their
palms. Come, won't you?"

"Why certainly, if you want me to; but you know I've had no chance to
become an expert, and don't claim to be one. When a past event is
somewhat prominently recorded in the palm, I can generally detect that,
but minor ones often escape me--not always, of course, but often--but I
haven't much confidence in myself when it comes to reading the future. I
am talking as if palmistry was a daily study with me, but that is not so.
I haven't examined half a dozen hands in the last half dozen years; you
see, the people got to joking about it, and I stopped to let the talk die
down. I'll tell you what we'll do, Count Luigi: I'll make a try at your
past, and if I have any success there--no, on the whole, I'll let the
future alone; that's really the affair of an expert."

He took Luigi's hand. Tom said:

"Wait--don't look yet, Dave! Count Luigi, here's paper and pencil. Set
down that thing that you said was the most striking one that was foretold
to you, and happened less than a year afterward, and give it to me so I
can see if Dave finds it in your hand."

Luigi wrote a line privately, and folded up the piece of paper, and
handed it to Tom, saying:

"I'll tell you when to look at it, if he finds it."

Wilson began to study Luigi's palm, tracing life lines, heart lines, head
lines, and so on, and noting carefully their relations with the cobweb of
finer and more delicate marks and lines that enmeshed them on all sides;
he felt of the fleshy cushion at the base of the thumb and noted its
shape; he felt of the fleshy side of the hand between the wrist and the
base of the little finger and noted its shape also; he painstakingly
examined the fingers, observing their form, proportions, and natural
manner of disposing themselves when in repose. All this process was
watched by the three spectators with absorbing interest, their heads bent
together over Luigi's palm, and nobody disturbing the stillness with a
word. Wilson now entered upon a close survey of the palm again, and his
revelations began.

He mapped out Luigi's character and disposition, his tastes, aversions,
proclivities, ambitions, and eccentricities in a way which sometimes made
Luigi wince and the others laugh, but both twins declared that the chart
was artistically drawn and was correct.

Next, Wilson took up Luigi's history. He proceeded cautiously and with
hesitation now, moving his finger slowly along the great lines of the
palm, and now and then halting it at a "star" or some such landmark, and
examining that neighborhood minutely. He proclaimed one or two past
events, Luigi confirmed his correctness, and the search went on.
Presently Wilson glanced up suddenly with a surprised expression.

"Here is a record of an incident which you would perhaps not wish me
to--"

"Bring it out," said Luigi, good-naturedly. "I promise you sha'n't
embarrass me."

But Wilson still hesitated, and did not seem quite to know what to do.
Then he said:

"I think it is too delicate a matter to--to--I believe I would rather
write it or whisper it to you, and let you decide for yourself whether
you want it talked out or not."

"That will answer," said Luigi. "Write it."

Wilson wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to Luigi, who
read it to himself and said to Tom:

"Unfold your slip and read it, Mr. Driscoll."

Tom said:

"'IT WAS PROPHESIED THAT I WOULD KILL A MAN. IT CAME TRUE BEFORE THE
YEAR WAS OUT.'"

Tom added, "Great Scott!"

Luigi handed Wilson's paper to Tom, and said:

"Now read this one."

Tom read:

"'YOU HAVE KILLED SOMEONE, BUT WHETHER MAN, WOMAN, OR CHILD, I DO NOT
MAKE OUT.'"

"Caesar's ghost!" commented Tom, with astonishment. "It beats anything
that was ever heard of! Why, a man's own hand is his deadliest enemy!
Just think of that--a man's own hand keeps a record of the deepest and
fatalest secrets of his life, and is treacherously ready to expose
himself to any black-magic stranger that comes along. But what do you
let a person look at your hand for, with that awful thing printed on it?"

"Oh," said Luigi, reposefully, "I don't mind it. I killed the man for
good reasons, and I don't regret it."

"What were the reasons?"

"Well, he needed killing."

"I'll tell you why he did it, since he won't say himself," said Angelo,
warmly. "He did it to save my life, that's what he did it for. So it was
a noble act, and not a thing to be hid in the dark."

"So it was, so it was," said Wilson. "To do such a thing to save a
brother's life is a great and fine action."

"Now come," said Luigi, "it is very pleasant to hear you say these
things, but for unselfishness, or heroism, or magnanimity, the
circumstances won't stand scrutiny. You overlook one detail; suppose I
hadn't saved Angelo's life, what would have become of mine? If I had let
the man kill him, wouldn't he have killed me, too? I saved my own life,
you see."

"Yes, that is your way of talking," said Angelo, "but I know you--I
don't believe you thought of yourself at all. I keep that weapon yet
that Luigi killed the man with, and I'll show it to you sometime. That
incident makes it interesting, and it had a history before it came into
Luigi's hands which adds to its interest. It was given to Luigi by a
great Indian prince, the Gaikowar of Baroda, and it had been in his
family two or three centuries. It killed a good many disagreeable people
who troubled the hearthstone at one time or another. It isn't much too
look at, except it isn't shaped like other knives, or dirks, or whatever
it may be called--here, I'll draw it for you." He took a sheet of paper
and made a rapid sketch. "There it is--a broad and murderous blade, with
edges like a razor for sharpness. The devices engraved on it are the
ciphers or names of its long line of possessors--I had Luigi's name added
in Roman letters myself with our coat of arms, as you see. You notice
what a curious handle the thing has. It is solid ivory, polished like a
mirror, and is four or five inches long--round, and as thick as a large
man's wrist, with the end squared off flat, for your thumb to rest on;
for you grasp it, with your thumb resting on the blunt end--so--and lift
it along and strike downward. The Gaikowar showed us how the thing was
done when he gave it to Luigi, and before that night was ended, Luigi had
used the knife, and the Gaikowar was a man short by reason of it. The
sheath is magnificently ornamented with gems of great value. You will
find a sheath more worth looking at than the knife itself, of course."

Tom said to himself:

"It's lucky I came here. I would have sold that knife for a song; I
supposed the jewels were glass."

"But go on; don't stop," said Wilson. "Our curiosity is up now, to hear
about the homicide. Tell us about that."

"Well, briefly, the knife was to blame for that, all around. A native
servant slipped into our room in the palace in the night, to kill us and
steal the knife on account of the fortune encrusted on its sheath,
without a doubt. Luigi had it under his pillow; we were in bed together.
There was a dim night-light burning. I was asleep, but Luigi was awake,
and he thought he detected a vague form nearing the bed. He slipped the
knife out of the sheath and was ready and unembarrassed by hampering
bedclothes, for the weather was hot and we hadn't any. Suddenly that
native rose at the bedside, and bent over me with his right hand lifted
and a dirk in it aimed at my throat; but Luigi grabbed his wrist, pulled
him downward, and drove his own knife into the man's neck. That is the
whole story."

Wilson and Tom drew deep breaths, and after some general chat about the
tragedy, Pudd'nhead said, taking Tom's hand:

"Now, Tom, I've never had a look at your palms, as it happens; perhaps
you've got some little questionable privacies that need--hel-lo!"

Tom had snatched away his hand, and was looking a good deal confused.

"Why, he's blushing!" said Luigi.

Tom darted an ugly look at him, and said sharply:

"Well, if I am, it ain't because I'm a murderer!" Luigi's dark face
flushed, but before he could speak or move, Tom added with anxious haste:
"Oh, I beg a thousand pardons. I didn't mean that; it was out before I
thought, and I'm very, very sorry--you must forgive me!"

Wilson came to the rescue, and smoothed things down as well as he could;
and in fact was entirely successful as far as the twins were concerned,
for they felt sorrier for the affront put upon him by his guest's
outburst of ill manners than for the insult offered to Luigi. But the
success was not so pronounced with the offender. Tom tried to seem at
his ease, and he went through the motions fairly well, but at bottom he
felt resentful toward all the three witnesses of his exhibition; in fact,
he felt so annoyed at them for having witnessed it and noticed it that he
almost forgot to feel annoyed at himself for placing it before them.
However, something presently happened which made him almost comfortable,
and brought him nearly back to a state of charity and friendliness. This
was a little spat between the twins; not much of a spat, but still a
spat; and before they got far with it, they were in a decided condition
of irritation while pretending to be actuated by more respectable
motives. By his help the fire got warmed up to the blazing point, and he
might have had the happiness of seeing the flames show up in another
moment, but for the interruption of a knock on the door--an interruption
which fretted him as much as it gratified Wilson. Wilson opened the
door.

The visitor was a good-natured, ignorant, energetic middle-aged Irishman
named John Buckstone, who was a great politician in a small way, and
always took a large share in public matters of every sort. One of the
town's chief excitements, just now, was over the matter of rum. There
was a strong rum party and a strong anti-rum party. Buckstone was
training with the rum party, and he had been sent to hunt up the twins
and invite them to attend a mass meeting of that faction. He delivered
his errand, and said the clans were already gathering in the big hall
over the market house. Luigi accepted the invitation cordially. Angelo
less cordially, since he disliked crowds, and did not drink the powerful
intoxicants of America. In fact, he was even a teetotaler sometimes
--when it was judicious to be one.

The twins left with Buckstone, and Tom Driscoll joined the company with
them uninvited.

In the distance, one could see a long wavering line of torches drifting
down the main street, and could hear the throbbing of the bass drum, the
clash of cymbals, the squeaking of a fife or two, and the faint roar of
remote hurrahs. The tail end of this procession was climbing the market
house stairs when the twins arrived in its neighborhood; when they
reached the hall, it was full of people, torches, smoke, noise, and
enthusiasm. They were conducted to the platform by Buckstone--Tom
Driscoll still following--and were delivered to the chairman in the midst
of a prodigious explosion of welcome. When the noise had moderated a
little, the chair proposed that "our illustrious guests be at once
elected, by complimentary acclamation, to membership in our ever-glorious
organization, the paradise of the free and the perdition of the slave."

This eloquent discharge opened the floodgates of enthusiasm again, and
the election was carried with thundering unanimity. Then arose a storm
of cries:

"Wet them down! Wet them down! Give them a drink!"

Glasses of whisky were handed to the twins. Luigi waves his aloft, then
brought it to his lips; but Angelo set his down. There was another storm
of cries.

"What's the matter with the other one?" "What is the blond one going
back on us for?" "Explain! Explain!"

The chairman inquired, and then reported:

"We have made an unfortunate mistake, gentlemen. I find that the Count
Angelo Capello is opposed to our creed--is a teetotaler, in fact, and was
not intending to apply for membership with us. He desires that we
reconsider the vote by which he was elected. What is the pleasure of the
house?"

There was a general burst of laughter, plentifully accented with
whistlings and catcalls, but the energetic use of the gavel presently
restored something like order. Then a man spoke from the crowd, and said
that while he was very sorry that the mistake had been made, it would not
be possible to rectify it at the present meeting. According to the
bylaws, it must go over to the next regular meeting for action. He would
not offer a motion, as none was required. He desired to apologize to the
gentlemen in the name of the house, and begged to assure him that as far
as it might lie in the power of the Sons of Liberty, his temporary
membership in the order would be made pleasant to him.

This speech was received with great applause, mixed with cries of:

"That's the talk!" "He's a good fellow, anyway, if he _is_ a teetotaler!"
"Drink his health!" "Give him a rouser, and no heeltaps!"

Glasses were handed around, and everybody on the platform drank Angelo's
health, while the house bellowed forth in song:


      For he's a jolly good fel-low,
      For he's a jolly good fel-low,
      For he's a jolly good fe-el-low,
      Which nobody can deny.

Tom Driscoll drank. It was his second glass, for he had drunk Angelo's
the moment that Angelo had set it down. The two drinks made him very
merry--almost idiotically so, and he began to take a most lively and
prominent part in the proceedings, particularly in the music and catcalls
and side remarks.

The chairman was still standing at the front, the twins at his side. The
extraordinarily close resemblance of the brothers to each other suggested
a witticism to Tom Driscoll, and just as the chairman began a speech he
skipped forward and said, with an air of tipsy confidence, to the
audience:

"Boys, I move that he keeps still and lets this human philopena snip you
out a speech."

The descriptive aptness of the phrase caught the house, and a mighty
burst of laughter followed.

Luigi's southern blood leaped to the boiling point in a moment under the
sharp humiliation of this insult delivered in the presence of four
hundred strangers. It was not in the young man's nature to let the
matter pass, or to delay the squaring of the account. He took a couple of
strides and halted behind the unsuspecting joker. Then he drew back and
delivered a kick of such titanic vigor that it lifted Tom clear over the
footlights and landed him on the heads of the front row of the Sons of
Liberty.

Even a sober person does not like to have a human being emptied on him
when he is not doing any harm; a person who is not sober cannot endure
such an attention at all. The nest of Sons of Liberty that Driscoll
landed in had not a sober bird in it; in fact there was probably not an
entirely sober one in the auditorium. Driscoll was promptly and
indignantly flung on the heads of Sons in the next row, and these Sons
passed him on toward the rear, and then immediately began to pummel the
front row Sons who had passed him to them. This course was strictly
followed by bench after bench as Driscoll traveled in his tumultuous and
airy flight toward the door; so he left behind him an ever-lengthening
wake of raging and plunging and fighting and swearing humanity. Down went
group after group of torches, and presently above the deafening clatter
of the gavel, roar of angry voices, and crash of succumbing benches, rose
the paralyzing cry of "_fire!_"

The fighting ceased instantly; the cursing ceased; for one distinctly
defined moment, there was a dead hush, a motionless calm, where the
tempest had been; then with one impulse the multitude awoke to life and
energy again, and went surging and struggling and swaying, this way and
that, its outer edges melting away through windows and doors and
gradually lessening the pressure and relieving the mass.

The fireboys were never on hand so suddenly before; for there was no
distance to go this time, their quarters being in the rear end of the
market house, There was an engine company and a hook-and-ladder company.
Half of each was composed of rummies and the other half of anti-rummies,
after the moral and political share-and-share-alike fashion of the
frontier town of the period. Enough anti-rummies were loafing in quarters
to man the engine and the ladders. In two minutes they had their red
shirts and helmets on--they never stirred officially in unofficial
costume--and as the mass meeting overhead smashed through the long row of
windows and poured out upon the roof of the arcade, the deliverers were
ready for them with a powerful stream of water, which washed some of them
off the roof and nearly drowned the rest. But water was preferable to
fire, and still the stampede from the windows continued, and still the
pitiless drenching assailed it until the building was empty; then the
fireboys mounted to the hall and flooded it with water enough to
annihilate forty times as much fire as there was there; for a village
fire company does not often get a chance to show off, and so when it does
get a chance, it makes the most of it. Such citizens of that village as
were of a thoughtful and judicious temperament did not insure against
fire; they insured against the fire company.




CHAPTER 12 -- The Shame of Judge Driscoll

     _Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence
     of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a
     compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose
     misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably
     the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of
     fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will
     attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and
     strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the
     earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and
     all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the
     immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than
     is the man who walks the streets of a city that was
     threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we
     speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know
     what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him
     at the head of the procession._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's
     Calendar


Judge Driscoll was in bed and asleep by ten o'clock on Friday night, and
he was up and gone a-fishing before daylight in the morning with his
friend Pembroke Howard. These two had been boys together in Virginia
when that state still ranked as the chief and most imposing member of the
Union, and they still coupled the proud and affectionate adjective "old"
with her name when they spoke of her. In Missouri a recognized
superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia; and this
superiority was exalted to supremacy when a person of such nativity could
also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth.
The Howards and Driscolls were of this aristocracy. In their eyes, it
was a nobility. It had its unwritten laws, and they were as clearly
defined and as strict as any that could be found among the printed
statutes of the land. The F.F.V. was born a gentleman; his highest duty in
life was to watch over that great inheritance and keep it unsmirched. He
must keep his honor spotless. Those laws were his chart; his course was
marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as half a point of the
compass, it meant shipwreck to his honor; that is to say, degradation
from his rank as a gentleman. These laws required certain things of him
which his religion might forbid: then his religion must yield--the laws
could not be relaxed to accommodate religions or anything else. Honor
stood first; and the laws defined what it was and wherein it differed in
certain details from honor as defined by church creeds and by the social
laws and customs of some of the minor divisions of the globe that had got
crowded out when the sacred boundaries of Virginia were staked out.

If Judge Driscoll was the recognized first citizen of Dawson's Landing,
Pembroke Howard was easily its recognized second citizen. He was called
"the great lawyer"--an earned title. He and Driscoll were of the same
age--a year or two past sixty.

Although Driscoll was a freethinker and Howard a strong and determined
Presbyterian, their warm intimacy suffered no impairment in consequence.
They were men whose opinions were their own property and not subject to
revision and amendment, suggestion or criticism, by anybody, even their
friends.

The day's fishing finished, they came floating downstream in their skiff,
talking national politics and other high matters, and presently met a
skiff coming up from town, with a man in it who said:

"I reckon you know one of the new twins gave your nephew a kicking last
night, Judge?"

"Did WHAT?"

"Gave him a kicking."

The old judge's lips paled, and his eyes began to flame. He choked with
anger for a moment, then he got out what he was trying to say:

"Well--well--go on! Give me the details!"

The man did it. At the finish the judge was silent a minute, turning
over in his mind the shameful picture of Tom's flight over the
footlights; then he said, as if musing aloud,

"H'm--I don't understand it. I was asleep at home. He didn't wake me.
Thought he was competent to manage his affair without my help, I reckon."
His face lit up with pride and pleasure at that thought, and he said with
a cheery complacency, "I like that--it's the true old blood--hey,
Pembroke?"

Howard smiled an iron smile, and nodded his head approvingly. Then the
news-bringer spoke again.

"But Tom beat the twin on the trial."

The judge looked at the man wonderingly, and said:

"The trial? What trial?"

"Why, Tom had him up before Judge Robinson for assault and battery."

The old man shrank suddenly together like one who has received a death
stroke. Howard sprang for him as he sank forward in a swoon, and took
him in his arms, and bedded him on his back in the boat. He sprinkled
water in his face, and said to the startled visitor:

"Go, now--don't let him come to and find you here. You see what an
effect your heedless speech has had; you ought to have been more
considerate than to blurt out such a cruel piece of slander as that."

"I'm right down sorry I did it now, Mr. Howard, and I wouldn't have done
it if I had thought; but it ain't slander; it's perfectly true, just as I
told him."

He rowed away. Presently the old judge came out of his faint and looked
up piteously into the sympathetic face that was bent over him.

"Say it ain't true, Pembroke; tell me it ain't true!" he said in a weak
voice.

There was nothing weak in the deep organ tones that responded:

"You know it's a lie as well as I do, old friend. He is of the best
blood of the Old Dominion."

"God bless you for saying it!" said the old gentleman, fervently. "Ah,
Pembroke, it was such a blow!"

Howard stayed by his friend, and saw him home, and entered the house with
him. It was dark, and past supper-time, but the judge was not thinking
of supper; he was eager to hear the slander refuted from headquarters,
and as eager to have Howard hear it, too. Tom was sent for, and he came
immediately. He was bruised and lame, and was not a happy-looking
object. His uncle made him sit down, and said:

"We have been hearing about your adventure, Tom, with a handsome lie
added for embellishment. Now pulverize that lie to dust! What measures
have you taken? How does the thing stand?"

Tom answered guilelessly: "It don't stand at all; it's all over. I had
him up in court and beat him. Pudd'nhead Wilson defended him--first
case he ever had, and lost it. The judge fined the miserable hound five
dollars for the assault."

Howard and the judge sprang to their feet with the opening sentence
--why, neither knew; then they stood gazing vacantly at each other.
Howard stood a moment, then sat mournfully down without saying anything.
The judge's wrath began to kindle, and he burst out:

"You cur! You scum! You vermin! Do you mean to tell me that blood of
my race has suffered a blow and crawled to a court of law about it?
Answer me!"

Tom's head drooped, and he answered with an eloquent silence. His uncle
stared at him with a mixed expression of amazement and shame and
incredulity that was sorrowful to see. At last he said:

"Which of the twins was it?"

"Count Luigi."

"You have challenged him?"

"N--no," hesitated Tom, turning pale.

"You will challenge him tonight. Howard will carry it."

Tom began to turn sick, and to show it. He turned his hat round and
round in his hand, his uncle glowering blacker and blacker upon him as
the heavy seconds drifted by; then at last he began to stammer, and said
piteously:

"Oh, please, don't ask me to do it, uncle! He is a murderous devil--I
never could--I--I'm afraid of him!"

Old Driscoll's mouth opened and closed three times before he could get it
to perform its office; then he stormed out:

"A coward in my family! A Driscoll a coward! Oh, what have I done to
deserve this infamy!" He tottered to his secretary in the corner,
repeated that lament again and again in heartbreaking tones, and got out
of a drawer a paper, which he slowly tore to bits, scattering the bits
absently in his track as he walked up and down the room, still grieving
and lamenting. At last he said:

"There it is, shreds and fragments once more--my will. Once more you
have forced me to disinherit you, you base son of a most noble father!
Leave my sight! Go--before I spit on you!"

The young man did not tarry. Then the judge turned to Howard:

"You will be my second, old friend?"

"Of course."

"There is pen and paper. Draft the cartel, and lose no time."

"The Count shall have it in his hands in fifteen minutes," said Howard.

Tom was very heavyhearted. His appetite was gone with his property and
his self-respect. He went out the back way and wandered down the obscure
lane grieving, and wondering if any course of future conduct, however
discreet and carefully perfected and watched over, could win back his
uncle's favor and persuade him to reconstruct once more that generous
will which had just gone to ruin before his eyes. He finally concluded
that it could. He said to himself that he had accomplished this sort of
triumph once already, and that what had been done once could be done
again. He would set about it. He would bend every energy to the task,
and he would score that triumph once more, cost what it might to his
convenience, limit as it might his frivolous and liberty-loving life.

"To begin," he says to himself, "I'll square up with the proceeds of my
raid, and then gambling has got to be stopped--and stopped short off.
It's the worst vice I've got--from my standpoint, anyway, because it's
the one he can most easily find out, through the impatience of my
creditors. He thought it expensive to have to pay two hundred dollars to
them for me once. Expensive--_that!_ Why, it cost me the whole of his
fortune--but, of course, he never thought of that; some people can't
think of any but their own side of a case. If he had known how deep I am
in now, the will would have gone to pot without waiting for a duel to
help. Three hundred dollars! It's a pile! But he'll never hear of it,
I'm thankful to say. The minute I've cleared it off, I'm safe; and I'll
never touch a card again. Anyway, I won't while he lives, I make oath to
that. I'm entering on my last reform--I know it--yes, and I'll win; but
after that, if I ever slip again I'm gone."




CHAPTER 13 -- Tom Stares at Ruin

     _When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I
     know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a
     different life._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to
     speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January,
     September, April, November, May, March, June, December,
     August, and February._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


Thus mournfully communing with himself, Tom moped along the lane past
Pudd'nhead Wilson's house, and still on and on between fences enclosing
vacant country on each hand till he neared the haunted house, then he
came moping back again, with many sighs and heavy with trouble. He sorely
wanted cheerful company. Rowena! His heart gave a bound at the thought,
but the next thought quieted it--the detested twins would be there.

He was on the inhabited side of Wilson's house, and now as he approached
it, he noticed that the sitting room was lighted. This would do; others
made him feel unwelcome sometimes, but Wilson never failed in courtesy
toward him, and a kindly courtesy does at least save one's feelings, even
if it is not professing to stand for a welcome. Wilson heard footsteps at
his threshold, then the clearing of a throat.

"It's that fickle-tempered, dissipated young goose--poor devil, he find
friends pretty scarce today, likely, after the disgrace of carrying a
personal assault case into a law-court."

A dejected knock. "Come in!"

Tom entered, and dropped into a chair, without saying anything. Wilson
said kindly:

"Why, my boy, you look desolate. Don't take it so hard. Try and forget
you have been kicked."

"Oh, dear," said Tom, wretchedly, "it's not that, Pudd'nhead--it's not
that. It's a thousand times worse than that--oh, yes, a million times
worse."

"Why, Tom, what do you mean? Has Rowena--"

"Flung me? _No_, but the old man has."

Wilson said to himself, "Aha!" and thought of the mysterious girl in the
bedroom. "The Driscolls have been making discoveries!" Then he said
aloud, gravely:

"Tom, there are some kinds of dissipation which--"

"Oh, shucks, this hasn't got anything to do with dissipation. He wanted
me to challenge that derned Italian savage, and I wouldn't do it."

"Yes, of course he would do that," said Wilson in a meditative
matter-of-course way, "but the thing that puzzled me was, why he didn't
look to that last night, for one thing, and why he let you carry such a
matter into a court of law at all, either before the duel or after it.
It's no place for it. It was not like him. I couldn't understand it.
How did it happen?"

"It happened because he didn't know anything about it. He was asleep
when I got home last night."

"And you didn't wake him? Tom, is that possible?"

Tom was not getting much comfort here. He fidgeted a moment, then said:

"I didn't choose to tell him--that's all. He was going a-fishing before
dawn, with Pembroke Howard, and if I got the twins into the common
calaboose--and I thought sure I could--I never dreamed of their slipping
out on a paltry fine for such an outrageous offense--well, once in the
calaboose they would be disgraced, and uncle wouldn't want any duels with
that sort of characters, and wouldn't allow any.

"Tom, I am ashamed of you! I don't see how you could treat your good old
uncle so. I am a better friend of his than you are; for if I had known
the circumstances I would have kept that case out of court until I got
word to him and let him have the gentleman's chance."

"You would?" exclaimed Tom, with lively surprise. "And it your first
case! And you know perfectly well there never would have _been_ any case
if he had got that chance, don't you? And you'd have finished your days
a pauper nobody, instead of being an actually launched and recognized
lawyer today. And you would really have done that, would you?"

"Certainly."

Tom looked at him a moment or two, then shook his head sorrowfully and
said:

"I believe you--upon my word I do. I don't know why I do, but I do.
Pudd'nhead Wilson, I think you're the biggest fool I ever saw."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it."

"Well, he has been requiring you to fight the Italian, and you have
refused. You degenerate remnant of an honorable line! I'm thoroughly
ashamed of you, Tom!"

"Oh, that's nothing! I don't care for anything, now that the will's torn
up again."

"Tom, tell me squarely--didn't he find any fault with you for anything
but those two things--carrying the case into court and refusing to
fight?"

He watched the young fellow's face narrowly, but it was entirely
reposeful, and so also was the voice that answered:

"No, he didn't find any other fault with me. If he had had any to find,
he would have begun yesterday, for he was just in the humor for it. He
drove that jack-pair around town and showed them the sights, and when he
came home he couldn't find his father's old silver watch that don't keep
time and he thinks so much of, and couldn't remember what he did with it
three or four days ago when he saw it last, and when I suggested that it
probably wasn't lost but stolen, it put him in a regular passion, and he
said I was a fool--which convinced me, without any trouble, that that
was just what he was afraid _had_ happened, himself, but did not want to
believe it, because lost things stand a better chance of being found
again than stolen ones."

"Whe-ew!" whistled Wilson. "Score another one the list."

"Another what?"

"Another theft!"

"Theft?"

"Yes, theft. That watch isn't lost, it's stolen. There's been another
raid on the town--and just the same old mysterious sort of thing that has
happened once before, as you remember."

"You don't mean it!"

"It's as sure as you are born! Have you missed anything yourself?"

"No. That is, I did miss a silver pencil case that Aunt Mary Pratt gave
me last birthday--"

"You'll find it stolen--that's what you'll find."

"No, I sha'n't; for when I suggested theft about the watch and got such a
rap, I went and examined my room, and the pencil case was missing, but it
was only mislaid, and I found it again."

"You are sure you missed nothing else?"

"Well, nothing of consequence. I missed a small plain gold ring worth
two or three dollars, but that will turn up. I'll look again."

"In my opinion you'll not find it. There's been a raid, I tell you. Come
_in!_"

Mr. Justice Robinson entered, followed by Buckstone and the town
constable, Jim Blake. They sat down, and after some wandering and
aimless weather-conversation Wilson said:

"By the way, We've just added another to the list of thefts, maybe two.
Judge Driscoll's old silver watch is gone, and Tom here has missed a gold
ring."

"Well, it is a bad business," said the justice, "and gets worse the
further it goes. The Hankses, the Dobsons, the Pilligrews, the Ortons,
the Grangers, the Hales, the Fullers, the Holcombs, in fact everybody
that lives around about Patsy Cooper's had been robbed of little things
like trinkets and teaspoons and suchlike small valuables that are easily
carried off. It's perfectly plain that the thief took advantage of the
reception at Patsy Cooper's when all the neighbors were in her house and
all their niggers hanging around her fence for a look at the show, to
raid the vacant houses undisturbed. Patsy is miserable about it;
miserable on account of the neighbors, and particularly miserable on
account of her foreigners, of course; so miserable on their account that
she hasn't any room to worry about her own little losses."

"It's the same old raider," said Wilson. "I suppose there isn't any
doubt about that."

"Constable Blake doesn't think so."

"No, you're wrong there," said Blake. "The other times it was a man;
there was plenty of signs of that, as we know, in the profession, though
we never got hands on him; but this time it's a woman."

Wilson thought of the mysterious girl straight off. She was always in
his mind now. But she failed him again. Blake continued:

"She's a stoop-shouldered old woman with a covered basket on her arm, in
a black veil, dressed in mourning. I saw her going aboard the ferryboat
yesterday. Lives in Illinois, I reckon; but I don't care where she
lives, I'm going to get her--she can make herself sure of that."

"What makes you think she's the thief?"

"Well, there ain't any other, for one thing; and for another, some nigger
draymen that happened to be driving along saw her coming out of or going
into houses, and told me so--and it just happens that they was _robbed_,
every time."

It was granted that this was plenty good enough circumstantial evidence.
A pensive silence followed, which lasted some moments, then Wilson said:

"There's one good thing, anyway. She can't either pawn or sell Count
Luigi's costly Indian dagger."

"My!" said Tom. "Is _that_ gone?"

"Yes."

"Well, that was a haul! But why can't she pawn it or sell it?"

"Because when the twins went home from the Sons of Liberty meeting last
night, news of the raid was sifting in from everywhere, and Aunt Patsy
was in distress to know if they had lost anything. They found that the
dagger was gone, and they notified the police and pawnbrokers everywhere.
It was a great haul, yes, but the old woman won't get anything out of it,
because she'll get caught."

"Did they offer a reward?" asked Buckstone.

"Yes, five hundred dollars for the knife, and five hundred more for the
thief."

"What a leather-headed idea!" exclaimed the constable. "The thief das'n't
go near them, nor send anybody. Whoever goes is going to get himself
nabbed, for their ain't any pawnbroker that's going to lose the chance
to--"

If anybody had noticed Tom's face at that time, the gray-green color of
it might have provoked curiosity; but nobody did. He said to himself:
"I'm gone! I never can square up; the rest of the plunder won't pawn or
sell for half of the bill. Oh, I know it--I'm gone, I'm gone--and this
time it's for good. Oh, this is awful--I don't know what to do, nor
which way to turn!"

"Softly, softly," said Wilson to Blake. "I planned their scheme for them
at midnight last night, and it was all finished up shipshape by two this
morning. They'll get their dagger back, and then I'll explain to you how
the thing was done."

There were strong signs of a general curiosity, and Buckstone said:

"Well, you have whetted us up pretty sharp, Wilson, and I'm free to say
that if you don't mind telling us in confidence--"

"Oh, I'd as soon tell as not, Buckstone, but as long as the twins and I
agreed to say nothing about it, we must let it stand so. But you can take
my word for it, you won't be kept waiting three days. Somebody will apply
for that reward pretty promptly, and I'll show you the thief and the
dagger both very soon afterward."

The constable was disappointed, and also perplexed. He said:

"It may all be--yes, and I hope it will, but I'm blamed if I can see my
way through it. It's too many for yours truly."

The subject seemed about talked out. Nobody seemed to have anything
further to offer. After a silence the justice of the peace informed
Wilson that he and Buckstone and the constable had come as a committee,
on the part of the Democratic party, to ask him to run for mayor--for the
little town was about to become a city and the first charter election was
approaching. It was the first attention which Wilson had ever received
at the hands of any party; it was a sufficiently humble one, but it was a
recognition of his debut into the town's life and activities at last; it
was a step upward, and he was deeply gratified. He accepted, and the
committee departed, followed by young Tom.




CHAPTER 14 -- Roxana Insists Upon Reform

     _The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be
     mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world's
     luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of
     the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels
     eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know
     it because she repented._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


About the time that Wilson was bowing the committee out, Pembroke Howard
was entering the next house to report. He found the old judge sitting
grim and straight in his chair, waiting.

"Well, Howard--the news?"

"The best in the world."

"Accepts, does he?" and the light of battle gleamed joyously in the
Judge's eye.

"Accepts? Why he jumped at it."

"Did, did he? Now that's fine--that's very fine. I like that. When is
it to be?"

"Now! Straight off! Tonight! An admirable fellow--admirable!"

"Admirable? He's a darling! Why, it's an honor as well as a pleasure to
stand up before such a man. Come--off with you! Go and arrange
everything--and give him my heartiest compliments. A rare fellow, indeed;
an admirable fellow, as you have said!"

"I'll have him in the vacant stretch between Wilson's and the haunted
house within the hour, and I'll bring my own pistols."

Judge Driscoll began to walk the floor in a state of pleased excitement;
but presently he stopped, and began to think--began to think of Tom.
Twice he moved toward the secretary, and twice he turned away again; but
finally he said:

"This may be my last night in the world--I must not take the chance. He
is worthless and unworthy, but it is largely my fault. He was entrusted
to me by my brother on his dying bed, and I have indulged him to his
hurt, instead of training him up severely, and making a man of him, I
have violated my trust, and I must not add the sin of desertion to that.
I have forgiven him once already, and would subject him to a long and
hard trial before forgiving him again, if I could live; but I must not
run that risk. No, I must restore the will. But if I survive the duel, I
will hide it away, and he will not know, and I will not tell him until he
reforms, and I see that his reformation is going to be permanent."

He redrew the will, and his ostensible nephew was heir to a fortune
again. As he was finishing his task, Tom, wearied with another brooding
tramp, entered the house and went tiptoeing past the sitting room door.
He glanced in, and hurried on, for the sight of his uncle was nothing but
terrors for him tonight. But his uncle was writing! That was unusual at
this late hour. What could he be writing? A chill of anxiety settled
down upon Tom's heart. Did that writing concern him? He was afraid so.
He reflected that when ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles,
but in showers. He said he would get a glimpse of that document or know
the reason why. He heard someone coming, and stepped out of sight and
hearing. It was Pembroke Howard. What could be hatching?

Howard said, with great satisfaction:

"Everything's right and ready. He's gone to the battleground with his
second and the surgeon--also with his brother. I've arranged it all with
Wilson--Wilson's his second. We are to have three shots apiece."

"Good! How is the moon?"

"Bright as day, nearly. Perfect, for the distance--fifteen yards. No
wind--not a breath; hot and still."

"All good; all first-rate. Here, Pembroke, read this, and witness it."

Pembroke read and witnessed the will, then gave the old man's hand a
hearty shake and said:

"Now that's right, York--but I knew you would do it. You couldn't leave
that poor chap to fight along without means or profession, with certain
defeat before him, and I knew you wouldn't, for his father's sake if not
for his own."

"For his dead father's sake, I couldn't, I know; for poor Percy--but you
know what Percy was to me. But mind--Tom is not to know of this unless I
fall tonight."

"I understand. I'll keep the secret."

The judge put the will away, and the two started for the battleground. In
another minute the will was in Tom's hands. His misery vanished, his
feelings underwent a tremendous revulsion. He put the will carefully back
in its place, and spread his mouth and swung his hat once, twice, three
times around his head, in imitation of three rousing huzzahs, no sound
issuing from his lips. He fell to communing with himself excitedly and
joyously, but every now and then he let off another volley of dumb
hurrahs.

He said to himself: "I've got the fortune again, but I'll not let on
that I know about it. And this time I'm going to hang on to it. I take no
more risks. I'll gamble no more, I'll drink no more, because--well,
because I'll not go where there is any of that sort of thing going on,
again. It's the sure way, and the only sure way; I might have thought of
that sooner--well, yes, if I had wanted to. But now--dear me, I've had a
scare this time, and I'll take no more chances. Not a single chance
more. Land! I persuaded myself this evening that I could fetch him
around without any great amount of effort, but I've been getting more and
more heavyhearted and doubtful straight along, ever since. If he tells
me about this thing, all right; but if he doesn't, I sha'n't let on.
I--well, I'd like to tell Pudd'nhead Wilson, but--no, I'll think about
that; perhaps I won't." He whirled off another dead huzzah, and said,
"I'm reformed, and this time I'll stay so, sure!"

He was about to close with a final grand silent demonstration, when he
suddenly recollected that Wilson had put it out of his power to pawn or
sell the Indian knife, and that he was once more in awful peril of
exposure by his creditors for that reason. His joy collapsed utterly, and
he turned away and moped toward the door moaning and lamenting over the
bitterness of his luck. He dragged himself upstairs, and brooded in his
room a long time, disconsolate and forlorn, with Luigi's Indian knife for
a text. At last he sighed and said:

"When I supposed these stones were glass and this ivory bone, the thing
hadn't any interest for me because it hadn't any value, and couldn't help
me out of my trouble. But now--why, now it is full of interest; yes, and
of a sort to break a body's heart. It's a bag of gold that has turned to
dirt and ashes in my hands. It could save me, and save me so easily, and
yet I've got to go to ruin. It's like drowning with a life preserver in
my reach. All the hard luck comes to me, and all the good luck goes to
other people--Pudd'nhead Wilson, for instance; even his career has got a
sort of a little start at last, and what has he done to deserve it, I
should like to know? Yes, he has opened his own road, but he isn't
content with that, but must block mine. It's a sordid, selfish world, and
I wish I was out of it." He allowed the light of the candle to play upon
the jewels of the sheath, but the flashings and sparklings had no charm
for his eye; they were only just so many pangs to his heart. "I must not
say anything to Roxy about this thing," he said. "She is too daring. She
would be for digging these stones out and selling them, and then--why,
she would be arrested and the stones traced, and then--" The thought made
him quake, and he hid the knife away, trembling all over and glancing
furtively about, like a criminal who fancies that the accuser is already
at hand.

Should he try to sleep? Oh, no, sleep was not for him; his trouble was
too haunting, too afflicting for that. He must have somebody to mourn
with. He would carry his despair to Roxy.

He had heard several distant gunshots, but that sort of thing was not
uncommon, and they had made no impression upon him. He went out at the
back door, and turned westward. He passed Wilson's house and proceeded
along the lane, and presently saw several figures approaching Wilson's
place through the vacant lots. These were the duelists returning from the
fight; he thought he recognized them, but as he had no desire for white
people's company, he stooped down behind the fence until they were out of
his way.

Roxy was feeling fine. She said:

"Whah was you, child? Warn't you in it?"

"In what?"

"In de duel."

"Duel? Has there been a duel?"

"Co'se dey has. De ole Jedge has be'n havin' a duel wid one o' dem
twins."

"Great Scott!" Then he added to himself: "That's what made him remake
the will; he thought he might get killed, and it softened him toward me.
And that's what he and Howard were so busy about. . . . Oh dear, if the
twin had only killed him, I should be out of my--"

"What is you mumblin' 'bout, Chambers? Whah was you? Didn't you know dey
was gwine to be a duel?"

"No, I didn't. The old man tried to get me to fight one with Count
Luigi, but he didn't succeed, so I reckon he concluded to patch up the
family honor himself."

He laughed at the idea, and went rambling on with a detailed account of
his talk with the judge, and how shocked and ashamed the judge was to
find that he had a coward in his family. He glanced up at last, and got
a shock himself. Roxana's bosom was heaving with suppressed passion, and
she was glowering down upon him with measureless contempt written in her
face.

"En you refuse' to fight a man dat kicked you, 'stid o' jumpin' at de
chance! En you ain't got no mo' feelin' den to come en tell me, dat
fetched sich a po' lowdown ornery rabbit into de worl'! Pah! it make me
sick! It's de nigger in you, dat's what it is. Thirty-one parts o' you
is white, en on'y one part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo'
_soul_. 'Tain't wuth savin'; 'tain't wuth totin' out on a shovel en
throwin' en de gutter. You has disgraced yo' birth. What would yo' pa
think o' you? It's enough to make him turn in his grave."

The last three sentences stung Tom into a fury, and he said to himself
that if his father were only alive and in reach of assassination his
mother would soon find that he had a very clear notion of the size of his
indebtedness to that man, and was willing to pay it up in full, and would
do it too, even at risk of his life; but he kept this thought to himself;
that was safest in his mother's present state.

"Whatever has come o' yo' Essex blood? Dat's what I can't understan'.
En it ain't on'y jist Essex blood dat's in you, not by a long
sight--'deed it ain't! My great-great-great-gran'father en yo'
great-great-great-great-gran'father was Ole Cap'n John Smith, de highest
blood dat Ole Virginny ever turned out, en _his_ great-great-gran'mother,
or somers along back dah, was Pocahontas de Injun queen, en her husbun'
was a nigger king outen Africa--en yit here you is, a slinkin' outen a
duel en disgracin' our whole line like a ornery lowdown hound! Yes, it's
de nigger in you!"

She sat down on her candle box and fell into a reverie. Tom did not
disturb her; he sometimes lacked prudence, but it was not in
circumstances of this kind, Roxana's storm went gradually down, but it
died hard, and even when it seemed to be quite gone, it would now and
then break out in a distant rumble, so to speak, in the form of muttered
ejaculations. One of these was, "Ain't nigger enough in him to show in
his fingernails, en dat takes mighty little--yit dey's enough to pain
his soul."

Presently she muttered. "Yassir, enough to paint a whole thimbleful of
'em." At last her ramblings ceased altogether, and her countenance began
to clear--a welcome sight to Tom, who had learned her moods, and knew she
was on the threshold of good humor now. He noticed that from time to time
she unconsciously carried her finger to the end of her nose. He looked
closer and said:

"Why, Mammy, the end of your nose is skinned. How did that come?"

She sent out the sort of wholehearted peal of laughter which God had
vouchsafed in its perfection to none but the happy angels in heaven and
the bruised and broken black slave on the earth, and said:

"Dad fetch dat duel, I be'n in it myself."

"Gracious! did a bullet do that?"

"Yassir, you bet it did!"

"Well, I declare! Why, how did that happen?"

"Happened dis-away. I 'uz a-sett'n' here kinder dozin' in de dark, en
_che-bang!_ goes a gun, right out dah. I skips along out towards t'other
end o' de house to see what's gwine on, en stops by de ole winder on de
side towards Pudd'nhead Wilson's house dat ain't got no sash in it--but
dey ain't none of 'em got any sashes, for as dat's concerned--en I stood
dah in de dark en look out, en dar in the moonlight, right down under me
'uz one o' de twins a-cussin'--not much, but jist a-cussin' soft--it 'uz
de brown one dat 'uz cussin,' 'ca'se he 'uz hit in de shoulder. En
Doctor Claypool he 'uz a-workin' at him, en Pudd'nhead Wilson he 'uz
a-he'pin', en ole Jedge Driscoll en Pem Howard 'uz a-standin' out yonder
a little piece waitin' for 'em to get ready agin. En treckly dey squared
off en give de word, en _bang-bang_ went de pistols, en de twin he say,
'Ouch!'--hit him on de han' dis time--en I hear dat same bullet go
_spat!_ ag'in de logs under de winder; en de nex' time dey shoot, de twin
say, 'Ouch!' ag'in, en I done it too, 'ca'se de bullet glance' on his
cheekbone en skip up here en glance' on de side o' de winder en whiz
right acrost my face en tuck de hide off'n my nose--why, if I'd 'a'
be'n jist a inch or a inch en a half furder 't would 'a' tuck de whole
nose en disfiggered me. Here's de bullet; I hunted her up."

"Did you stand there all the time?"

"Dat's a question to ask, ain't it! What else would I do? Does I git a
chance to see a duel every day?"

"Why, you were right in range! Weren't you afraid?"

The woman gave a sniff of scorn.

"'Fraid! De Smith-Pocahontases ain't 'fraid o' nothin', let alone
bullets."

"They've got pluck enough, I suppose; what they lack is judgment. _I_
wouldn't have stood there."

"Nobody's accusin' you!"

"Did anybody else get hurt?"

"Yes, we all got hit 'cep' de blon' twin en de doctor en de seconds. De
Jedge didn't git hurt, but I hear Pudd'nhead say de bullet snip some o'
his ha'r off."

"'George!" said Tom to himself, "to come so near being out of my trouble,
and miss it by an inch. Oh dear, dear, he will live to find me out and
sell me to some nigger trader yet--yes, and he would do it in a minute."
Then he said aloud, in a grave tone:

"Mother, we are in an awful fix."

Roxana caught her breath with a spasm, and said:

"Chile! What you hit a body so sudden for, like dat? What's be'n en gone
en happen'?"

"Well, there's one thing I didn't tell you. When I wouldn't fight, he
tore up the will again, and--"

Roxana's face turned a dead white, and she said:

"Now you's _done!_--done forever! Dat's de end. Bofe un us is gwine to
starve to--"

"Wait and hear me through, can't you! I reckon that when he resolved to
fight, himself, he thought he might get killed and not have a chance to
forgive me any more in this life, so he made the will again, and I've
seen it, and it's all right. But--"

"Oh, thank goodness, den we's safe ag'in!--safe! en so what did you want
to come here en talk sich dreadful--"

"Hold ON, I tell you, and let me finish. The swag I gathered won't half
square me up, and the first thing we know, my creditors--well, you know
what'll happen."

Roxana dropped her chin, and told her son to leave her alone--she must
think this matter out. Presently she said impressively:

"You got to go mighty keerful now, I tell you! En here's what you got to
do. He didn't git killed, en if you gives him de least reason, he'll
bust de will ag'in, en dat's de _las'_ time, now you hear me! So--you's
got to show him what you kin do in de nex' few days. You got to be pison
good, en let him see it; you got to do everything dat'll make him b'lieve
in you, en you got to sweeten aroun' ole Aunt Pratt, too--she's pow'ful
strong with de Jedge, en de bes' frien' you got. Nex', you'll go 'long
away to Sent Louis, en dat'll _keep_ him in yo' favor. Den you go en make
a bargain wid dem people. You tell 'em he ain't gwine to live long--en
dat's de fac', too--en tell 'em you'll pay 'em intrust, en big intrust,
too--ten per--what you call it?"

"Ten percent a month?"

"Dat's it. Den you take and sell yo' truck aroun', a little at a time,
en pay de intrust. How long will it las'?"

"I think there's enough to pay the interest five or six months." "Den
you's all right. If he don't die in six months, dat don't make no
diff'rence--Providence'll provide. You's gwine to be safe--if you
behaves." She bent an austere eye on him and added, "En you IS gwine to
behave--does you know dat?"

He laughed and said he was going to try, anyway. She did not unbend. She
said gravely:

"Tryin' ain't de thing. You's gwine to _do_ it. You ain't gwine to
steal a pin--'ca'se it ain't safe no mo'; en you ain't gwine into no bad
comp'ny--not even once, you understand; en you ain't gwine to drink a
drop--nary a single drop; en you ain't gwine to gamble one single
gamble--not one! Dis ain't what you's gwine to try to do, it's what
you's gwine to DO. En I'll tell you how I knows it. Dis is how. I's
gwine to foller along to Sent Louis my own self; en you's gwine to come
to me every day o' your life, en I'll look you over; en if you fails in
one single one o' dem things--jist _one_--I take my oath I'll come
straight down to dis town en tell de Jedge you's a nigger en a slave--en
_prove_ it!" She paused to let her words sink home. Then she added,
"Chambers, does you b'lieve me when I says dat?"

Tom was sober enough now. There was no levity in his voice when he
answered:

"Yes, Mother, I know, now, that I am reformed--and permanently.
Permanently--and beyond the reach of any human temptation."

"Den g'long home en begin!"




CHAPTER 15 -- The Robber Robbed

     _Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one
     basket"--which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your
     money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all
     your eggs in the one basket and--WATCH THAT BASKET!"_
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


What a time of it Dawson's Landing was having! All its life it had been
asleep, but now it hardly got a chance for a nod, so swiftly did big
events and crashing surprises come along in one another's wake: Friday
morning, first glimpse of Real Nobility, also grand reception at Aunt
Patsy Cooper's, also great robber raid; Friday evening, dramatic kicking
of the heir of the chief citizen in presence of four hundred people;
Saturday morning, emergence as practicing lawyer of the long-submerged
Pudd'nhead Wilson; Saturday night, duel between chief citizen and titled
stranger.

The people took more pride in the duel than in all the other events put
together, perhaps. It was a glory to their town to have such a thing
happen there. In their eyes the principals had reached the summit of
human honor. Everybody paid homage to their names; their praises were in
all mouths. Even the duelists' subordinates came in for a handsome share
of the public approbation: wherefore Pudd'nhead Wilson was suddenly
become a man of consequence. When asked to run for the mayoralty Saturday
night, he was risking defeat, but Sunday morning found him a made man and
his success assured.

The twins were prodigiously great now; the town took them to its bosom
with enthusiasm. Day after day, and night after night, they went dining
and visiting from house to house, making friends, enlarging and
solidifying their popularity, and charming and surprising all with their
musical prodigies, and now and then heightening the effects with samples
of what they could do in other directions, out of their stock of rare and
curious accomplishments. They were so pleased that they gave the
regulation thirty days' notice, the required preparation for citizenship,
and resolved to finish their days in this pleasant place. That was the
climax. The delighted community rose as one man and applauded; and when
the twins were asked to stand for seats in the forthcoming aldermanic
board, and consented, the public contentment was rounded and complete.

Tom Driscoll was not happy over these things; they sunk deep, and hurt
all the way down. He hated the one twin for kicking him, and the other
one for being the kicker's brother.

Now and then the people wondered why nothing was heard of the raider, or
of the stolen knife or the other plunder, but nobody was able to throw
any light on that matter. Nearly a week had drifted by, and still the
thing remained a vexed mystery.

On Sunday Constable Blake and Pudd'nhead Wilson met on the street, and
Tom Driscoll joined them in time to open their conversation for them. He
said to Blake: "You are not looking well, Blake; you seem to be annoyed
about something. Has anything gone wrong in the detective business? I
believe you fairly and justifiably claim to have a pretty good reputation
in that line, isn't it so?"--which made Blake feel good, and look it;
but Tom added, "for a country detective"--which made Blake feel the other
way, and not only look it, but betray it in his voice.

"Yes, sir, I _have_ got a reputation; and it's as good as anybody's in
the profession, too, country or no country."

"Oh, I beg pardon; I didn't mean any offense. What I started out to ask
was only about the old woman that raided the town--the stoop-shouldered
old woman, you know, that you said you were going to catch; and I knew
you would, too, because you have the reputation of never boasting,
and--well, you--you've caught the old woman?"

"Damn the old woman!"

"Why, sho! you don't mean to say you haven't caught her?"

"No, I haven't caught her. If anybody could have caught her, I could;
but nobody couldn't, I don't care who he is."

"I am sorry, real sorry--for your sake; because, when it gets around that
a detective has expressed himself confidently, and then--"

"Don't you worry, that's all--don't you worry; and as for the town, the
town needn't worry either. She's my meat--make yourself easy about that.
I'm on her track; I've got clues that--"

"That's good! Now if you could get an old veteran detective down from
St. Louis to help you find out what the clues mean, and where they lead
to, and then--"

"I'm plenty veteran enough myself, and I don't need anybody's help. I'll
have her inside of a we--inside of a month. That I'll swear to!"

Tom said carelessly:

"I suppose that will answer--yes, that will answer. But I reckon she is
pretty old, and old people don't often outlive the cautious pace of the
professional detective when he has got his clues together and is out on
his still-hunt."

Blake's dull face flushed under this gibe, but before he could set his
retort in order Tom had turned to Wilson, and was saying, with placid
indifference of manner and voice:

"Who got the reward, Pudd'nhead?"

Wilson winced slightly, and saw that his own turn was come.

"What reward?"

"Why, the reward for the thief, and the other one for the knife."

Wilson answered--and rather uncomfortably, to judge by his hesitating
fashion of delivering himself:

"Well, the--well, in face, nobody has claimed it yet."

Tom seemed surprised.

"Why, is that so?"

Wilson showed a trifle of irritation when he replied:

"Yes, it's so. And what of it?"

"Oh, nothing. Only I thought you had struck out a new idea, and invented
a scheme that was going to revolutionize the timeworn and ineffectual
methods of the--" He stopped, and turned to Blake, who was happy now
that another had taken his place on the gridiron. "Blake, didn't you
understand him to intimate that it wouldn't be necessary for you to hunt
the old woman down?"

"'B'George, he said he'd have thief and swag both inside of three days
--he did, by hokey! and that's just about a week ago. Why, I said at the
time that no thief and no thief's pal was going to try to pawn or sell a
thing where he knowed the pawnbroker could get both rewards by taking HIM
into camp _with_ the swag. It was the blessedest idea that ever I
struck!"

"You'd change your mind," said Wilson, with irritated bluntness, "if you
knew the entire scheme instead of only part of it."

"Well," said the constable, pensively, "I had the idea that it wouldn't
work, and up to now I'm right anyway."

"Very well, then, let it stand at that, and give it a further show. It
has worked at least as well as your own methods, you perceive."

The constable hadn't anything handy to hit back with, so he discharged a
discontented sniff, and said nothing.

After the night that Wilson had partly revealed his scheme at his house,
Tom had tried for several days to guess out the secret of the rest of it,
but had failed. Then it occurred to him to give Roxana's smarter head a
chance at it. He made up a supposititious case, and laid it before
her. She thought it over, and delivered her verdict upon it. Tom said
to himself, "She's hit it, sure!" He thought he would test that verdict
now, and watch Wilson's face; so he said reflectively:

"Wilson, you're not a fool--a fact of recent discovery. Whatever your
scheme was, it had sense in it, Blake's opinion to the contrary
notwithstanding. I don't ask you to reveal it, but I will suppose a
case--a case which you will answer as a starting point for the real thing
I am going to come at, and that's all I want. You offered five hundred
dollars for the knife, and five hundred for the thief. We will suppose,
for argument's sake, that the first reward is _advertised_ and the second
offered by _private letter_ to pawnbrokers and--"

Blake slapped his thigh, and cried out:

"By Jackson, he's got you, Pudd'nhead! Now why couldn't I or _any_ fool
have thought of that?"

Wilson said to himself, "Anybody with a reasonably good head would have
thought of it. I am not surprised that Blake didn't detect it; I am only
surprised that Tom did. There is more to him than I supposed." He said
nothing aloud, and Tom went on:

"Very well. The thief would not suspect that there was a trap, and he
would bring or send the knife, and say he bought it for a song, or found
it in the road, or something like that, and try to collect the reward,
and be arrested--wouldn't he?"

"Yes," said Wilson.

"I think so," said Tom. "There can't be any doubt of it. Have you ever
seen that knife?"

"No."

"Has any friend of yours?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, I begin to think I understand why your scheme failed."

"What do you mean, Tom? What are you driving at?" asked Wilson, with a
dawning sense of discomfort.

"Why, that there _isn't_ any such knife."

"Look here, Wilson," said Blake, "Tom Driscoll's right, for a thousand
dollars--if I had it."

Wilson's blood warmed a little, and he wondered if he had been played
upon by those strangers; it certainly had something of that look. But
what could they gain by it? He threw out that suggestion. Tom replied:

"Gain? Oh, nothing that you would value, maybe. But they are strangers
making their way in a new community. Is it nothing to them to appear as
pets of an Oriental prince--at no expense? Is it nothing to them to be
able to dazzle this poor town with thousand-dollar rewards--at no
expense? Wilson, there isn't any such knife, or your scheme would have
fetched it to light. Or if there is any such knife, they've got it yet.
I believe, myself, that they've seen such a knife, for Angelo pictured it
out with his pencil too swiftly and handily for him to have been
inventing it, and of course I can't swear that they've never had it; but
this I'll go bail for--if they had it when they came to this town,
they've got it yet."

Blake said:

"It looks mighty reasonable, the way Tom puts it; it most certainly
does."

Tom responded, turning to leave:

"You find the old woman, Blake, and if she can't furnish the knife, go
and search the twins!"

Tom sauntered away. Wilson felt a good deal depressed. He hardly knew
what to think. He was loath to withdraw his faith from the twins, and
was resolved not to do it on the present indecisive evidence; but--well,
he would think, and then decide how to act.

"Blake, what do you think of this matter?"

"Well, Pudd'nhead, I'm bound to say I put it up the way Tom does. They
hadn't the knife; or if they had it, they've got it yet."

The men parted. Wilson said to himself:

"I believe they had it; if it had been stolen, the scheme would have
restored it, that is certain. And so I believe they've got it."

Tom had no purpose in his mind when he encountered those two men. When he
began his talk he hoped to be able to gall them a little and get a trifle
of malicious entertainment out of it. But when he left, he left in great
spirits, for he perceived that just by pure luck and no troublesome labor
he had accomplished several delightful things: he had touched both men
on a raw spot and seen them squirm; he had modified Wilson's sweetness
for the twins with one small bitter taste that he wouldn't be able to get
out of his mouth right away; and, best of all, he had taken the hated
twins down a peg with the community; for Blake would gossip around
freely, after the manner of detectives, and within a week the town would
be laughing at them in its sleeve for offering a gaudy reward for a
bauble which they either never possessed or hadn't lost. Tom was very
well satisfied with himself.

Tom's behavior at home had been perfect during the entire week. His uncle
and aunt had seen nothing like it before. They could find no fault with
him anywhere.

Saturday evening he said to the Judge:

"I've had something preying on my mind, uncle, and as I am going away,
and might never see you again, I can't bear it any longer. I made you
believe I was afraid to fight that Italian adventurer. I had to get out
of it on some pretext or other, and maybe I chose badly, being taken
unawares, but no honorable person could consent to meet him in the field,
knowing what I knew about him."

"Indeed? What was that?"

"Count Luigi is a confessed assassin."

"Incredible."

"It's perfectly true. Wilson detected it in his hand, by palmistry, and
charged him with it, and cornered him up so close that he had to confess;
but both twins begged us on their knees to keep the secret, and swore
they would lead straight lives here; and it was all so pitiful that we
gave our word of honor never to expose them while they kept the promise.
You would have done it yourself, uncle."

"You are right, my boy; I would. A man's secret is still his own
property, and sacred, when it has been surprised out of him like that.
You did well, and I am proud of you." Then he added mournfully, "But I
wish I could have been saved the shame of meeting an assassin on the
field of honor."

"It couldn't be helped, uncle. If I had known you were going to
challenge him, I should have felt obliged to sacrifice my pledged word in
order to stop it, but Wilson couldn't be expected to do otherwise than
keep silent."

"Oh, no, Wilson did right, and is in no way to blame. Tom, Tom, you have
lifted a heavy load from my heart; I was stung to the very soul when I
seemed to have discovered that I had a coward in my family."

"You may imagine what it cost ME to assume such a part, uncle."

"Oh, I know it, poor boy, I know it. And I can understand how much it
has cost you to remain under that unjust stigma to this time. But it is
all right now, and no harm is done. You have restored my comfort of
mind, and with it your own; and both of us had suffered enough."

The old man sat awhile plunged in thought; then he looked up with a
satisfied light in his eye, and said: "That this assassin should have
put the affront upon me of letting me meet him on the field of honor as
if he were a gentleman is a matter which I will presently settle--but not
now. I will not shoot him until after election. I see a way to ruin them
both before; I will attend to that first. Neither of them shall be
elected, that I promise. You are sure that the fact that he is an
assassin has not got abroad?"

"Perfectly certain of it, sir."

"It will be a good card. I will fling a hint at it from the stump on the
polling day. It will sweep the ground from under both of them."

"There's not a doubt of it. It will finish them."

"That and outside work among the voters will, to a certainty. I want you
to come down here by and by and work privately among the rag-tag and
bobtail. You shall spend money among them; I will furnish it."

Another point scored against the detested twins! Really it was a great
day for Tom. He was encouraged to chance a parting shot, now, at the
same target, and did it.

"You know that wonderful Indian knife that the twins have been making
such a to-do about? Well, there's no track or trace of it yet; so the
town is beginning to sneer and gossip and laugh. Half the people believe
they never had any such knife, the other half believe they had it and
have got it still. I've heard twenty people talking like that today."

Yes, Tom's blemishless week had restored him to the favor of his aunt and
uncle.

His mother was satisfied with him, too. Privately, she believed she was
coming to love him, but she did not say so. She told him to go along to
St. Louis now, and she would get ready and follow. Then she smashed her
whisky bottle and said:

"Dah now! I's a-gwine to make you walk as straight as a string,
Chambers, en so I's bown, you ain't gwine to git no bad example out o'
yo' mammy. I tole you you couldn't go into no bad comp'ny. Well, you's
gwine into my comp'ny, en I's gwine to fill de bill. Now, den, trot
along, trot along!"

Tom went aboard one of the big transient boats that night with his heavy
satchel of miscellaneous plunder, and slept the sleep of the unjust,
which is serener and sounder than the other kind, as we know by the
hanging-eve history of a million rascals. But when he got up in the
morning, luck was against him again: a brother thief had robbed him while
he slept, and gone ashore at some intermediate landing.




CHAPTER 16 -- Sold Down the River

     _If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he
     will not bite you. This is the principal difference between
     a dog and a man._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about
     the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the
     habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have
     been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


When Roxana arrived, she found her son in such despair and misery that
her heart was touched and her motherhood rose up strong in her. He was
ruined past hope now; his destruction would be immediate and sure, and he
would be an outcast and friendless. That was reason enough for a mother
to love a child; so she loved him, and told him so. It made him wince,
secretly--for she was a "nigger." That he was one himself was far from
reconciling him to that despised race.

Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he responded
uncomfortably, but as well as he could. And she tried to comfort him, but
that was not possible. These intimacies quickly became horrible to him,
and within the hour he began to try to get up courage enough to tell her
so, and require that they be discontinued or very considerably modified.
But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now, for she had
begun to think. She was trying to invent a saving plan. Finally she
started up, and said she had found a way out. Tom was almost suffocated
by the joy of this sudden good news. Roxana said:

"Here is de plan, en she'll win, sure. I's a nigger, en nobody ain't
gwine to doubt it dat hears me talk. I's wuth six hund'd dollahs. Take
en sell me, en pay off dese gamblers."

Tom was dazed. He was not sure he had heard aright. He was dumb for a
moment; then he said:

"Do you mean that you would be sold into slavery to save me?"

"Ain't you my chile? En does you know anything dat a mother won't do for
her chile? Day ain't nothin' a white mother won't do for her chile. Who
made 'em so? De Lord done it. En who made de niggers? De Lord made 'em.
In de inside, mothers is all de same. De good lord he made 'em so. I's
gwine to be sole into slavery, en in a year you's gwine to buy yo' ole
mammy free ag'in. I'll show you how. Dat's de plan."

Tom's hopes began to rise, and his spirits along with them. He said:

"It's lovely of you, Mammy--it's just--"

"Say it ag'in! En keep on sayin' it! It's all de pay a body kin want in
dis worl', en it's mo' den enough. Laws bless you, honey, when I's slav'
aroun', en dey 'buses me, if I knows you's a-sayin' dat, 'way off yonder
somers, it'll heal up all de sore places, en I kin stan' 'em."

"I DO say it again, Mammy, and I'll keep on saying it, too. But how am I
going to sell you? You're free, you know."

"Much diff'rence dat make! White folks ain't partic'lar. De law kin sell
me now if dey tell me to leave de state in six months en I don't go. You
draw up a paper--bill o' sale--en put it 'way off yonder, down in de
middle o' Kaintuck somers, en sign some names to it, en say you'll sell
me cheap 'ca'se you's hard up; you'll find you ain't gwine to have no
trouble. You take me up de country a piece, en sell me on a farm; dem
people ain't gwine to ask no questions if I's a bargain."

Tom forged a bill of sale and sold his mother to an Arkansas cotton
planter for a trifle over six hundred dollars. He did not want to commit
this treachery, but luck threw the man in his way, and this saved him the
necessity of going up-country to hunt up a purchaser, with the added risk
of having to answer a lot of questions, whereas this planter was so
pleased with Roxy that he asked next to none at all. Besides, the
planter insisted that Roxy wouldn't know where she was, at first, and
that by the time she found out she would already have been contented.

So Tom argued with himself that it was an immense advantaged for Roxy to
have a master who was pleased with her, as this planter manifestly was.
In almost no time his flowing reasonings carried him to the point of even
half believing he was doing Roxy a splendid surreptitious service in
selling her "down the river." And then he kept diligently saying to
himself all the time: "It's for only a year. In a year I buy her free
again; she'll keep that in mind, and it'll reconcile her." Yes; the
little deception could do no harm, and everything would come out right
and pleasant in the end, anyway. By agreement, the conversation in
Roxy's presence was all about the man's "up-country" farm, and how
pleasant a place it was, and how happy the slaves were there; so poor
Roxy was entirely deceived; and easily, for she was not dreaming that her
own son could be guilty of treason to a mother who, in voluntarily going
into slavery--slavery of any kind, mild or severe, or of any duration,
brief or long--was making a sacrifice for him compared with which death
would have been a poor and commonplace one. She lavished tears and
loving caresses upon him privately, and then went away with her owner
--went away brokenhearted, and yet proud to do it.

Tom scored his accounts, and resolved to keep to the very letter of his
reform, and never to put that will in jeopardy again. He had three
hundred dollars left. According to his mother's plan, he was to put that
safely away, and add her half of his pension to it monthly. In one year
this fund would buy her free again.

For a whole week he was not able to sleep well, so much the villainy
which he had played upon his trusting mother preyed upon his rag of
conscience; but after that he began to get comfortable again, and was
presently able to sleep like any other miscreant.

The boat bore Roxy away from St. Louis at four in the afternoon, and she
stood on the lower guard abaft the paddle box and watched Tom through a
blur of tears until he melted into the throng of people and disappeared;
then she looked no more, but sat there on a coil of cable crying till far
into the night. When she went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between
the clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to wait for the
morning, and, waiting, grieve.

It had been imagined that she "would not know," and would think she was
traveling upstream. She! Why, she had been steamboating for years. At
dawn she got up and went listlessly and sat down on the cable coil again.
She passed many a snag whose "break" could have told her a thing to break
her heart, for it showed a current moving in the same direction that the
boat was going; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she did not notice.
But at last the roar of a bigger and nearer break than usual brought her
out of her torpor, and she looked up, and her practiced eye fell upon
that telltale rush of water. For one moment her petrified gaze fixed
itself there. Then her head dropped upon her breast, and she said:

"Oh, de good Lord God have mercy on po' sinful me--I'S SOLE DOWN DE
RIVER!"




CHAPTER 17 -- The Judge Utters Dire Prophesy

     _Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first,
     you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and
     by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _JULY 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day
     than in all the other days of the year put together. This
     proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July
     per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


The summer weeks dragged by, and then the political campaign opened
--opened in pretty warm fashion, and waxed hotter and hotter daily. The
twins threw themselves into it with their whole heart, for their
self-love was engaged. Their popularity, so general at first, had
suffered afterward; mainly because they had been TOO popular, and so a
natural reaction had followed. Besides, it had been diligently whispered
around that it was curious--indeed, VERY curious--that that wonderful
knife of theirs did not turn up--IF it was so valuable, or IF it had ever
existed. And with the whisperings went chucklings and nudgings and winks,
and such things have an effect. The twins considered that success in the
election would reinstate them, and that defeat would work them
irreparable damage. Therefore they worked hard, but not harder than
Judge Driscoll and Tom worked against them in the closing days of the
canvass. Tom's conduct had remained so letter-perfect during two whole
months now, that his uncle not only trusted him with money with which to
persuade voters, but trusted him to go and get it himself out of the safe
in the private sitting room.

The closing speech of the campaign was made by Judge Driscoll, and he
made it against both of the foreigners. It was disastrously effective.
He poured out rivers of ridicule upon them, and forced the big mass
meeting to laugh and applaud. He scoffed at them as adventurers,
mountebanks, sideshow riffraff, dime museum freaks; he assailed their
showy titles with measureless derision; he said they were back-alley
barbers disguised as nobilities, peanut peddlers masquerading as
gentlemen, organ-grinders bereft of their brother monkey. At last he
stopped and stood still. He waited until the place had become absolutely
silent and expectant, then he delivered his deadliest shot; delivered it
with ice-cold seriousness and deliberation, with a significant emphasis
upon the closing words: he said he believed that the reward offered for
the lost knife was humbug and bunkum, and that its owner would know where
to find it whenever he should have occasion TO ASSASSINATE SOMEBODY.

Then he stepped from the stand, leaving a startled and impressive hush
behind him instead of the customary explosion of cheers and party cries.

The strange remark flew far and wide over the town and made an
extraordinary sensation. Everybody was asking, "What could he mean by
that?" And everybody went on asking that question, but in vain; for the
judge only said he knew what he was talking about, and stopped there; Tom
said he hadn't any idea what his uncle meant, and Wilson, whenever he was
asked what he thought it meant, parried the question by asking the
questioner what HE thought it meant.

Wilson was elected, the twins were defeated--crushed, in fact, and left
forlorn and substantially friendless. Tom went back to St. Louis happy.

Dawson's Landing had a week of repose now, and it needed it. But it was
in an expectant state, for the air was full of rumors of a new duel.
Judge Driscoll's election labors had prostrated him, but it was said that
as soon as he was well enough to entertain a challenge he would get one
from Count Luigi.

The brothers withdrew entirely from society, and nursed their humiliation
in privacy. They avoided the people, and went out for exercise only late
at night, when the streets were deserted.




CHAPTER 18 -- Roxana Commands

     _Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of
     the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth
     staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone
     by._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _THANKSGIVING DAY. Let us all give humble, hearty, and
     sincere thanks now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji
     they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not
     become you and me to sneer at Fiji._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's
     Calendar


The Friday after the election was a rainy one in St. Louis. It rained
all day long, and rained hard, apparently trying its best to wash that
soot-blackened town white, but of course not succeeding. Toward midnight
Tom Driscoll arrived at his lodgings from the theater in the heavy
downpour, and closed his umbrella and let himself in; but when he would
have shut the door, he found that there was another person
entering--doubtless another lodger; this person closed the door and
tramped upstairs behind Tom. Tom found his door in the dark, and entered
it, and turned up the gas. When he faced about, lightly whistling, he
saw the back of a man. The man was closing and locking his door from
him. His whistle faded out and he felt uneasy. The man turned around, a
wreck of shabby old clothes, sodden with rain and all a-drip, and showed
a black face under an old slouch hat. Tom was frightened. He tried to
order the man out, but the words refused to come, and the other man got
the start. He said, in a low voice:

"Keep still--I's yo' mother!"

Tom sunk in a heap on a chair, and gasped out:

"It was mean of me, and base--I know it; but I meant it for the best, I
did indeed--I can swear it."

Roxana stood awhile looking mutely down on him while he writhed in shame
and went on incoherently babbling self-accusations mixed with pitiful
attempts at explanation and palliation of his crime; then she seated
herself and took off her hat, and her unkept masses of long brown hair
tumbled down about her shoulders.

"It warn't no fault o' yo'n dat dat ain't gray," she said sadly, noticing
the hair.

"I know it, I know it! I'm a scoundrel. But I swear I meant it for the
best. It was a mistake, of course, but I thought it was for the best, I
truly did."

Roxana began to cry softly, and presently words began to find their way
out between her sobs. They were uttered lamentingly, rather than
angrily.

"Sell a pusson down de river--DOWN DE RIVER!--for de bes'! I wouldn't
treat a dog so! I is all broke down en wore out now, en so I reckon
it ain't in me to storm aroun' no mo', like I used to when I 'uz trompled
on en 'bused. I don't know--but maybe it's so. Leastways, I's suffered
so much dat mournin' seem to come mo' handy to me now den stormin'."

These words should have touched Tom Driscoll, but if they did, that
effect was obliterated by a stronger one--one which removed the heavy
weight of fear which lay upon him, and gave his crushed spirit a most
grateful rebound, and filled all his small soul with a deep sense of
relief. But he kept prudently still, and ventured no comment. There was
a voiceless interval of some duration now, in which no sounds were heard
but the beating of the rain upon the panes, the sighing and complaining
of the winds, and now and then a muffled sob from Roxana. The sobs became
more and more infrequent, and at last ceased. Then the refugee began to
talk again.

"Shet down dat light a little. More. More yit. A pusson dat is hunted
don't like de light. Dah--dat'll do. I kin see whah you is, en dat's
enough. I's gwine to tell you de tale, en cut it jes as short as I kin,
en den I'll tell you what you's got to do. Dat man dat bought me ain't a
bad man; he's good enough, as planters goes; en if he could 'a' had his
way I'd 'a' be'n a house servant in his fambly en be'n comfortable: but
his wife she was a Yank, en not right down good lookin', en she riz up
agin me straight off; so den dey sent me out to de quarter 'mongst de
common fiel' han's. Dat woman warn't satisfied even wid dat, but she
worked up de overseer ag'in' me, she 'uz dat jealous en hateful; so de
overseer he had me out befo' day in de mawnin's en worked me de whole
long day as long as dey'uz any light to see by; en many's de lashin's I
got 'ca'se I couldn't come up to de work o' de stronges'. Dat overseer
wuz a Yank too, outen New Englan', en anybody down South kin tell you
what dat mean. DEY knows how to work a nigger to death, en dey knows how
to whale 'em too--whale 'em till dey backs is welted like a washboard.
'Long at fust my marster say de good word for me to de overseer, but dat
'uz bad for me; for de mistis she fine it out, en arter dat I jist
ketched it at every turn--dey warn't no mercy for me no mo'."

Tom's heart was fired--with fury against the planter's wife; and he said
to himself, "But for that meddlesome fool, everything would have gone all
right." He added a deep and bitter curse against her.

The expression of this sentiment was fiercely written in his face, and
stood thus revealed to Roxana by a white glare of lightning which turned
the somber dusk of the room into dazzling day at that moment. She was
pleased--pleased and grateful; for did not that expression show that her
child was capable of grieving for his mother's wrongs and of feeling
resentment toward her persecutors?--a thing which she had been doubting.
But her flash of happiness was only a flash, and went out again and left
her spirit dark; for she said to herself, "He sole me down de river--he
can't feel for a body long; dis'll pass en go." Then she took up her tale
again.

"'Bout ten days ago I 'uz sayin' to myself dat I couldn't las' many mo'
weeks I 'uz so wore out wid de awful work en de lashin's, en so
downhearted en misable. En I didn't care no mo', nuther--life warn't
wuth noth'n' to me, if I got to go on like dat. Well, when a body is in
a frame o' mine like dat, what do a body care what a body do? Dey was a
little sickly nigger wench 'bout ten year ole dat 'uz good to me, en
hadn't no mammy, po' thing, en I loved her en she loved me; en she come
out whah I 'uz workin' en she had a roasted tater, en tried to slip it to
me--robbin' herself, you see, 'ca'se she knowed de overseer didn't give
me enough to eat--en he ketched her at it, en giver her a lick acrost de
back wid his stick, which 'uz as thick as a broom handle, en she drop'
screamin' on de groun', en squirmin' en wallerin' aroun' in de dust like
a spider dat's got crippled. I couldn't stan' it. All de hellfire dat
'uz ever in my heart flame' up, en I snatch de stick outen his han' en
laid him flat. He laid dah moanin' en cussin', en all out of his head,
you know, en de niggers 'uz plumb sk'yred to death. Dey gathered roun'
him to he'p him, en I jumped on his hoss en took out for de river as
tight as I could go. I knowed what dey would do wid me. Soon as he got
well he would start in en work me to death if marster let him; en if dey
didn't do dat, they'd sell me furder down de river, en dat's de same
thing, so I 'lowed to drown myself en git out o' my troubles. It 'uz
gitt'n' towards dark. I 'uz at de river in two minutes. Den I see a
canoe, en I says dey ain't no use to drown myself tell I got to; so I
ties de hoss in de edge o' de timber en shove out down de river, keepin'
in under de shelter o' de bluff bank en prayin' for de dark to shet down
quick. I had a pow'ful good start, 'ca'se de big house 'uz three mile
back f'om de river en on'y de work mules to ride dah on, en on'y niggers
ride 'em, en DEY warn't gwine to hurry--dey'd gimme all de chance dey
could. Befo' a body could go to de house en back it would be long pas'
dark, en dey couldn't track de hoss en fine out which way I went tell
mawnin', en de niggers would tell 'em all de lies dey could 'bout it.

"Well, de dark come, en I went on a-spinnin' down de river. I paddled
mo'n two hours, den I warn't worried no mo', so I quit paddlin' en
floated down de current, considerin' what I 'uz gwine to do if I didn't
have to drown myself. I made up some plans, en floated along, turnin'
'em over in my mine. Well, when it 'uz a little pas' midnight, as I
reckoned, en I had come fifteen or twenty mile, I see de lights o' a
steamboat layin' at de bank, whah dey warn't no town en no woodyard, en
putty soon I ketched de shape o' de chimbly tops ag'in' de stars, en den
good gracious me, I 'most jumped out o' my skin for joy! It 'uz de GRAN'
MOGUL--I 'uz chambermaid on her for eight seasons in de Cincinnati en
Orleans trade. I slid 'long pas'--don't see nobody stirrin' nowhah--hear
'em a-hammerin' away in de engine room, den I knowed what de matter
was--some o' de machinery's broke. I got asho' below de boat and turn'
de canoe loose, den I goes 'long up, en dey 'uz jes one plank out, en I
step' 'board de boat. It 'uz pow'ful hot, deckhan's en roustabouts 'uz
sprawled aroun' asleep on de fo'cas'l', de second mate, Jim Bangs, he sot
dah on de bitts wid his head down, asleep--'ca'se dat's de way de second
mate stan' de cap'n's watch!--en de ole watchman, Billy Hatch, he 'uz
a-noddin' on de companionway;--en I knowed 'em all; en, lan', but dey did
look good! I says to myself, I wished old marster'd come along NOW en
try to take me--bless yo' heart, I's 'mong frien's, I is. So I tromped
right along 'mongst 'em, en went up on de b'iler deck en 'way back aft to
de ladies' cabin guard, en sot down dah in de same cheer dat I'd sot in
'mos' a hund'd million times, I reckon; en it 'uz jist home ag'in, I tell
you!

"In 'bout an hour I heard de ready bell jingle, en den de racket begin.
Putty soon I hear de gong strike. 'Set her back on de outside,' I says
to myself. 'I reckon I knows dat music!' I hear de gong ag'in. 'Come
ahead on de inside,' I says. Gong ag'in. 'Stop de outside.' gong ag'in.
'Come ahead on de outside--now we's pinted for Sent Louis, en I's outer
de woods en ain't got to drown myself at all.' I knowed de MOGUL 'uz in
de Sent Louis trade now, you see. It 'uz jes fair daylight when we
passed our plantation, en I seed a gang o' niggers en white folks huntin'
up en down de sho', en troublin' deyselves a good deal 'bout me; but I
warn't troublin' myself none 'bout dem.

"'Bout dat time Sally Jackson, dat used to be my second chambermaid en
'uz head chambermaid now, she come out on de guard, en 'uz pow'ful glad
to see me, en so 'uz all de officers; en I tole 'em I'd got kidnapped en
sole down de river, en dey made me up twenty dollahs en give it to me, en
Sally she rigged me out wid good clo'es, en when I got here I went
straight to whah you used to wuz, en den I come to dis house, en dey say
you's away but 'spected back every day; so I didn't dast to go down de
river to Dawson's, 'ca'se I might miss you.

"Well, las' Monday I 'uz pass'n by one o' dem places in fourth street
whah deh sticks up runaway nigger bills, en he'ps to ketch 'em, en I seed
my marster! I 'mos' flopped down on de groun', I felt so gone. He had
his back to me, en 'uz talkin' to de man en givin' him some bills--nigger
bills, I reckon, en I's de nigger. He's offerin' a reward--dat's it.
Ain't I right, don't you reckon?"

Tom had been gradually sinking into a state of ghastly terror, and he
said to himself, now: "I'm lost, no matter what turn things take! This
man has said to me that he thinks there was something suspicious about
that sale; he said he had a letter from a passenger on the GRAND MOGUL
saying that Roxy came here on that boat and that everybody on board knew
all about the case; so he says that her coming here instead of flying to
a free state looks bad for me, and that if I don't find her for him, and
that pretty soon, he will make trouble for me. I never believed that
story; I couldn't believe she would be so dead to all motherly instincts
as to come here, knowing the risk she would run of getting me into
irremediable trouble. And after all, here she is! And I stupidly swore
I would help find her, thinking it was a perfectly safe thing to promise.
If I venture to deliver her up, she--she--but how can I help myself?
I've got to do that or pay the money, and where's the money to come from?
I--I--well, I should think that if he would swear to treat her kindly
hereafter--and she says, herself, that he is a good man--and if he would
swear to never allow her to be overworked, or ill fed, or--"

A flash of lightning exposed Tom's pallid face, drawn and rigid with
these worrying thoughts. Roxana spoke up sharply now, and there was
apprehension in her voice.

"Turn up dat light! I want to see yo' face better. Dah now--lemme look
at you. Chambers, you's as white as yo' shirt! Has you see dat man? Has
he be'n to see you?"

"Ye-s."

"When?"

"Monday noon."

"Monday noon! Was he on my track?"

"He--well, he thought he was. That is, he hoped he was. This is the bill
you saw." He took it out of his pocket.

"Read it to me!"

She was panting with excitement, and there was a dusky glow in her eyes
that Tom could not translate with certainty, but there seemed to be
something threatening about it. The handbill had the usual rude woodcut
of a turbaned Negro woman running, with the customary bundle on a stick
over her shoulder, and the heading in bold type, "$100 REWARD." Tom read
the bill aloud--at least the part that described Roxana and named the
master and his St. Louis address and the address of the Fourth street
agency; but he left out the item that applicants for the reward might
also apply to Mr. Thomas Driscoll.

"Gimme de bill!"

Tom had folded it and was putting it in his pocket. He felt a chilly
streak creeping down his back, but said as carelessly as he could:

"The bill? Why, it isn't any use to you, you can't read it. What do you
want with it?"

"Gimme de bill!" Tom gave it to her, but with a reluctance which he
could not entirely disguise. "Did you read it ALL to me?"

"Certainly I did."

"Hole up yo' han' en swah to it."

Tom did it. Roxana put the bill carefully away in her pocket, with her
eyes fixed upon Tom's face all the while; then she said:

"Yo's lyin'!"

"What would I want to lie about it for?"

"I don't know--but you is. Dat's my opinion, anyways. But nemmine 'bout
dat. When I seed dat man I 'uz dat sk'yerd dat I could sca'cely wobble
home. Den I give a nigger man a dollar for dese clo'es, en I ain't be'in
in a house sence, night ner day, till now. I blacked my face en laid hid
in de cellar of a ole house dat's burnt down, daytimes, en robbed de
sugar hogsheads en grain sacks on de wharf, nights, to git somethin' to
eat, en never dast to try to buy noth'n', en I's 'mos' starved. En I
never dast to come near dis place till dis rainy night, when dey ain't no
people roun' sca'cely. But tonight I be'n a-stanin' in de dark alley
ever sence night come, waitin' for you to go by. En here I is."

She fell to thinking. Presently she said:

"You seed dat man at noon, las' Monday?"

"Yes."

"I seed him de middle o' dat arternoon. He hunted you up, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Did he give you de bill dat time?"

"No, he hadn't got it printed yet."

Roxana darted a suspicious glance at him.

"Did you he'p him fix up de bill?"

Tom cursed himself for making that stupid blunder, and tried to rectify
it by saying he remembered now that it WAS at noon Monday that the man
gave him the bill. Roxana said:

"You's lyin' ag'in, sho." Then she straightened up and raised her
finger:

"Now den! I's gwine to ask you a question, en I wants to know how you's
gwine to git aroun' it. You knowed he 'uz arter me; en if you run off,
'stid o' stayin' here to he'p him, he'd know dey 'uz somethin' wrong
'bout dis business, en den he would inquire 'bout you, en dat would take
him to yo' uncle, en yo' uncle would read de bill en see dat you be'n
sellin' a free nigger down de river, en you know HIM, I reckon! He'd
t'ar up de will en kick you outen de house. Now, den, you answer me dis
question: hain't you tole dat man dat I would be sho' to come here, en
den you would fix it so he could set a trap en ketch me?"

Tom recognized that neither lies nor arguments could help him any
longer--he was in a vise, with the screw turned on, and out of it there
was no budging. His face began to take on an ugly look, and presently he
said, with a snarl:

"Well, what could I do? You see, yourself, that I was in his grip and
couldn't get out."

Roxy scorched him with a scornful gaze awhile, then she said:

"What could you do? You could be Judas to yo' own mother to save yo'
wuthless hide! Would anybody b'lieve it? No--a dog couldn't! You is de
lowdownest orneriest hound dat was ever pup'd into dis worl'--en I's
'sponsible for it!"--and she spat on him.

He made no effort to resent this. Roxy reflected a moment, then she
said:

"Now I'll tell you what you's gwine to do. You's gwine to give dat man
de money dat you's got laid up, en make him wait till you kin go to de
judge en git de res' en buy me free agin."

"Thunder! What are you thinking of? Go and ask him for three hundred
dollars and odd? What would I tell him I want it for, pray?"

Roxy's answer was delivered in a serene and level voice.

"You'll tell him you's sole me to pay yo' gamblin' debts en dat you lied
to me en was a villain, en dat I 'quires you to git dat money en buy me
back ag'in."

"Why, you've gone stark mad! He would tear the will to shreds in a
minute--don't you know that?"

"Yes, I does."

"Then you don't believe I'm idiot enough to go to him, do you?"

"I don't b'lieve nothin' 'bout it--I KNOWS you's a-goin'. I knows it
'ca'se you knows dat if you don't raise dat money I'll go to him myself,
en den he'll sell YOU down de river, en you kin see how you like it!"

Tom rose, trembling and excited, and there was an evil light in his eye.
He strode to the door and said he must get out of this suffocating place
for a moment and clear his brain in the fresh air so that he could
determine what to do. The door wouldn't open. Roxy smiled grimly, and
said:

"I's got the key, honey--set down. You needn't cle'r up yo' brain none
to fine out what you gwine to do--_I_ knows what you's gwine to do." Tom
sat down and began to pass his hands through his hair with a helpless and
desperate air. Roxy said, "Is dat man in dis house?"

Tom glanced up with a surprised expression, and asked:

"What gave you such an idea?"

"You done it. Gwine out to cle'r yo' brain! In de fust place you ain't
got none to cle'r, en in de second place yo' ornery eye tole on you.
You's de lowdownest hound dat ever--but I done told you dat befo'. Now
den, dis is Friday. You kin fix it up wid dat man, en tell him you's
gwine away to git de res' o' de money, en dat you'll be back wid it nex'
Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. You understan'?"

Tom answered sullenly: "Yes."

"En when you gits de new bill o' sale dat sells me to my own self, take
en send it in de mail to Mr. Pudd'nhead Wilson, en write on de back dat
he's to keep it tell I come. You understan'?"

"Yes."

"Dat's all den. Take yo' umbreller, en put on yo' hat."

"Why?"

"Beca'se you's gwine to see me home to de wharf. You see dis knife? I's
toted it aroun' sence de day I seed dat man en bought dese clo'es en it.
If he ketch me, I's gwine to kill myself wid it. Now start along, en go
sof', en lead de way; en if you gives a sign in dis house, or if anybody
comes up to you in de street, I's gwine to jam it right into you.
Chambers, does you b'lieve me when I says dat?"

"It's no use to bother me with that question. I know your word's good."

"Yes, it's diff'rent from yo'n! Shet de light out en move along--here's
de key."

They were not followed. Tom trembled every time a late straggler brushed
by them on the street, and half expected to feel the cold steel in his
back. Roxy was right at his heels and always in reach. After tramping a
mile they reached a wide vacancy on the deserted wharves, and in this
dark and rainy desert they parted.

As Tom trudged home his mind was full of dreary thoughts and wild plans;
but at last he said to himself, wearily:

"There is but the one way out. I must follow her plan. But with a
variation--I will not ask for the money and ruin myself; I will ROB the
old skinflint."




CHAPTER 19 -- The Prophesy Realized

     _Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of
     a good example._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

     _It were not best that we should all think alike; it is
     difference of opinion that makes horse races._ --Pudd'nhead
     Wilson's Calendar


Dawson's Landing was comfortably finishing its season of dull repose and
waiting patiently for the duel. Count Luigi was waiting, too; but not
patiently, rumor said. Sunday came, and Luigi insisted on having his
challenge conveyed. Wilson carried it. Judge Driscoll declined to fight
with an assassin--"that is," he added significantly, "in the field of
honor."

Elsewhere, of course, he would be ready. Wilson tried to convince him
that if he had been present himself when Angelo told him about the
homicide committed by Luigi, he would not have considered the act
discreditable to Luigi; but the obstinate old man was not to be moved.

Wilson went back to his principal and reported the failure of his
mission. Luigi was incensed, and asked how it could be that the old
gentleman, who was by no means dull-witted, held his trifling nephew's
evidence in inferences to be of more value than Wilson's. But Wilson
laughed, and said:

"That is quite simple; that is easily explicable. I am not his doll--his
baby--his infatuation: his nature is. The judge and his late wife never
had any children. The judge and his wife were past middle age when this
treasure fell into their lap. One must make allowances for a parental
instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is
famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely
satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it
can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is
measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil
adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through
thick and thin. Tom is this old man's angel; he is infatuated with him.
Tom can persuade him into things which other people can't--not all
things; I don't mean that, but a good many--particularly one class of
things: the things that create or abolish personal partialities or
prejudices in the old man's mind. The old man liked both of you. Tom
conceived a hatred for you. That was enough; it turned the old man
around at once. The oldest and strongest friendship must go to the ground
when one of these late-adopted darlings throws a brick at it."

"It's a curious philosophy," said Luigi.

"It ain't philosophy at all--it's a fact. And there is something
pathetic and beautiful about it, too. I think there is nothing more
pathetic than to see one of these poor old childless couples taking a
menagerie of yelping little worthless dogs to their hearts; and then
adding some cursing and squawking parrots and a jackass-voiced macaw; and
next a couple of hundred screeching songbirds, and presently some fetid
guinea pigs and rabbits, and a howling colony of cats. It is all a
groping and ignorant effort to construct out of base metal and brass
filings, so to speak, something to take the place of that golden treasure
denied them by Nature, a child. But this is a digression. The unwritten
law of this region requires you to kill Judge Driscoll on sight, and he
and the community will expect that attention at your hands--though of
course your own death by his bullet will answer every purpose. Look out
for him! Are you healed--that is, fixed?"

"Yes, he shall have his opportunity. If he attacks me, I will respond."

As Wilson was leaving, he said:

"The judge is still a little used up by his campaign work, and will not
get out for a day or so; but when he does get out, you want to be on the
alert."

About eleven at night the twins went out for exercise, and started on a
long stroll in the veiled moonlight.

Tom Driscoll had landed at Hackett's Store, two miles below Dawson's,
just about half an hour earlier, the only passenger for that lonely spot,
and had walked up the shore road and entered Judge Driscoll's house
without having encountered anyone either on the road or under the roof.

He pulled down his window blinds and lighted his candle. He laid off his
coat and hat and began his preparations. He unlocked his trunk and got
his suit of girl's clothes out from under the male attire in it, and laid
it by. Then he blacked his face with burnt cork and put the cork in his
pocket. His plan was to slip down to his uncle's private sitting room
below, pass into the bedroom, steal the safe key from the old gentleman's
clothes, and then go back and rob the safe. He took up his candle to
start. His courage and confidence were high, up to this point, but both
began to waver a little now. Suppose he should make a noise, by some
accident, and get caught--say, in the act of opening the safe? Perhaps
it would be well to go armed. He took the Indian knife from its hiding
place, and felt a pleasant return of his wandering courage. He slipped
stealthily down the narrow stair, his hair rising and his pulses halting
at the slightest creak. When he was halfway down, he was disturbed to
perceive that the landing below was touched by a faint glow of light.
What could that mean? Was his uncle still up? No, that was not likely;
he must have left his night taper there when he went to bed. Tom crept
on down, pausing at every step to listen. He found the door standing
open, and glanced in. What he saw pleased him beyond measure. His uncle
was asleep on the sofa; on a small table at the head of the sofa a lamp
was burning low, and by it stood the old man's small cashbox, closed.
Near the box was a pile of bank notes and a piece of paper covered with
figures in pencil. The safe door was not open. Evidently the sleeper had
wearied himself with work upon his finances, and was taking a rest.

Tom set his candle on the stairs, and began to make his way toward the
pile of notes, stooping low as he went. When he was passing his uncle,
the old man stirred in his sleep, and Tom stopped instantly--stopped, and
softly drew the knife from its sheath, with his heart thumping, and his
eyes fastened upon his benefactor's face. After a moment or two he
ventured forward again--one step--reached for his prize and seized it,
dropping the knife sheath. Then he felt the old man's strong grip upon
him, and a wild cry of "Help! help!" rang in his ear. Without hesitation
he drove the knife home--and was free. Some of the notes escaped from his
left hand and fell in the blood on the floor. He dropped the knife and
snatched them up and started to fly; transferred them to his left hand,
and seized the knife again, in his fright and confusion, but remembered
himself and flung it from him, as being a dangerous witness to carry away
with him.

He jumped for the stair-foot, and closed the door behind him; and as he
snatched his candle and fled upward, the stillness of the night was
broken by the sound of urgent footsteps approaching the house. In another
moment he was in his room, and the twins were standing aghast over the
body of the murdered man!

Tom put on his coat, buttoned his hat under it, threw on his suit of
girl's clothes, dropped the veil, blew out his light, locked the room
door by which he had just entered, taking the key, passed through his
other door into the black hall, locked that door and kept the key, then
worked his way along in the dark and descended the black stairs. He was
not expecting to meet anybody, for all interest was centered in the other
part of the house now; his calculation proved correct. By the time he
was passing through the backyard, Mrs. Pratt, her servants, and a dozen
half-dressed neighbors had joined the twins and the dead, and accessions
were still arriving at the front door.

As Tom, quaking as with a palsy, passed out at the gate, three women came
flying from the house on the opposite side of the lane. They rushed by
him and in at the gate, asking him what the trouble was there, but not
waiting for an answer. Tom said to himself, "Those old maids waited to
dress--they did the same thing the night Stevens's house burned down next
door." In a few minutes he was in the haunted house. He lighted a candle
and took off his girl-clothes. There was blood on him all down his left
side, and his right hand was red with the stains of the blood-soaked
notes which he has crushed in it; but otherwise he was free from this
sort of evidence. He cleansed his hand on the straw, and cleaned most of
the smut from his face. Then he burned the male and female attire to
ashes, scattered the ashes, and put on a disguise proper for a tramp. He
blew out his light, went below, and was soon loafing down the river road
with the intent to borrow and use one of Roxy's devices. He found a
canoe and paddled down downstream, setting the canoe adrift as dawn
approached, and making his way by land to the next village, where he kept
out of sight till a transient steamer came along, and then took deck
passage for St. Louis. He was ill at ease until Dawson's Landing was behind
him; then he said to himself, "All the detectives on earth couldn't trace
me now; there's not a vestige of a clue left in the world; that homicide
will take its place with the permanent mysteries, and people won't get
done trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years."

In St. Louis, next morning, he read this brief telegram in the
papers--dated at Dawson's Landing:

      Judge Driscoll, an old and respected citizen, was assassinated
      here about midnight by a profligate Italian nobleman or a
      barber on account of a quarrel growing out of the recent
      election. The assassin will probably be lynched.

"One of the twins!" soliloquized Tom. "How lucky! It is the knife that
has done him this grace. We never know when fortune is trying to favor
us. I actually cursed Pudd'nhead Wilson in my heart for putting it out
of my power to sell that knife. I take it back now."

Tom was now rich and independent. He arranged with the planter, and
mailed to Wilson the new bill of sale which sold Roxana to herself; then
he telegraphed his Aunt Pratt:

      Have seen the awful news in the papers and am almost
      prostrated with grief. Shall start by packet today. Try to
      bear up till I come.

When Wilson reached the house of mourning and had gathered such details
as Mrs. Pratt and the rest of the crowd could tell him, he took command
as mayor, and gave orders that nothing should be touched, but everything
left as it was until Justice Robinson should arrive and take the proper
measures as coroner. He cleared everybody out of the room but the twins
and himself. The sheriff soon arrived and took the twins away to jail.
Wilson told them to keep heart, and promised to do his best in their
defense when the case should come to trial. Justice Robinson came
presently, and with him Constable Blake. They examined the room
thoroughly. They found the knife and the sheath. Wilson noticed that
there were fingerprints on the knife's handle. That pleased him, for the
twins had required the earliest comers to make a scrutiny of their hands
and clothes, and neither these people nor Wilson himself had found any
bloodstains upon them. Could there be a possibility that the twins had
spoken the truth when they had said they found the man dead when they ran
into the house in answer to the cry for help? He thought of that
mysterious girl at once. But this was not the sort of work for a girl to
be engaged in. No matter; Tom Driscoll's room must be examined.

After the coroner's jury had viewed the body and its surroundings, Wilson
suggested a search upstairs, and he went along. The jury forced an
entrance to Tom's room, but found nothing, of course.

The coroner's jury found that the homicide was committed by Luigi, and
that Angelo was accessory to it.

The town was bitter against the misfortunates, and for the first few days
after the murder they were in constant danger of being lynched. The
grand jury presently indicted Luigi for murder in the first degree, and
Angelo as accessory before the fact. The twins were transferred from the
city jail to the county prison to await trial.

Wilson examined the finger marks on the knife handle and said to himself,
"Neither of the twins made those marks. Then manifestly there was
another person concerned, either in his own interest or as hired
assassin."

But who could it be? That, he must try to find out. The safe was not
opened, the cashbox was closed, and had three thousand dollars in it.
Then robbery was not the motive, and revenge was. Where had the murdered
man an enemy except Luigi? There was but that one person in the world
with a deep grudge against him.

The mysterious girl! The girl was a great trial to Wilson. If the motive
had been robbery, the girl might answer; but there wasn't any girl that
would want to take this old man's life for revenge. He had no quarrels
with girls; he was a gentleman.

Wilson had perfect tracings of the finger marks of the knife handle; and
among his glass records he had a great array of fingerprints of women and
girls, collected during the last fifteen or eighteen years, but he
scanned them in vain, they successfully withstood every test; among them
were no duplicates of the prints on the knife.

The presence of the knife on the stage of the murder was a worrying
circumstance for Wilson. A week previously he had as good as admitted to
himself that he believed Luigi had possessed such a knife, and that he
still possessed it notwithstanding his pretense that it had been stolen.
And now here was the knife, and with it the twins. Half the town had
said the twins were humbugging when they claimed they had lost their
knife, and now these people were joyful, and said, "I told you so!"

If their fingerprints had been on the handle--but useless to bother any
further about that; the fingerprints on the handle were NOT theirs--that
he knew perfectly.

Wilson refused to suspect Tom; for first, Tom couldn't murder anybody--he
hadn't character enough; secondly, if he could murder a person he
wouldn't select his doting benefactor and nearest relative; thirdly,
self-interest was in the way; for while the uncle lived, Tom was sure of
a free support and a chance to get the destroyed will revived again, but
with the uncle gone, that chance was gone too. It was true the will had
really been revived, as was now discovered, but Tom could not have been
aware of it, or he would have spoken of it, in his native talky,
unsecretive way. Finally, Tom was in St. Louis when the murder was done,
and got the news out of the morning journals, as was shown by his
telegram to his aunt. These speculations were unemphasized sensations
rather than articulated thoughts, for Wilson would have laughed at the
idea of seriously connecting Tom with the murder.

Wilson regarded the case of the twins as desperate--in fact, about
hopeless. For he argued that if a confederate was not found, an
enlightened Missouri jury would hang them; sure; if a confederate was
found, that would not improve the matter, but simply furnish one more
person for the sheriff to hang. Nothing could save the twins but the
discovery of a person who did the murder on his sole personal account--an
undertaking which had all the aspect of the impossible. Still, the
person who made the fingerprints must be sought. The twins might have no
case WITH them, but they certainly would have none without him.

So Wilson mooned around, thinking, thinking, guessing, guessing, day and
night, and arriving nowhere. Whenever he ran across a girl or a woman he
was not acquainted with, he got her fingerprints, on one pretext or
another; and they always cost him a sigh when he got home, for they never
tallied with the finger marks on the knife handle.

As to the mysterious girl, Tom swore he knew no such girl, and did not
remember ever seeing a girl wearing a dress like the one described by
Wilson. He admitted that he did not always lock his room, and that
sometimes the servants forgot to lock the house doors; still, in his
opinion the girl must have made but few visits or she would have been
discovered. When Wilson tried to connect her with the stealing raid, and
thought she might have been the old woman's confederate, if not the very
thief disguised as an old woman, Tom seemed stuck, and also much
interested, and said he would keep a sharp eye out for this person or
persons, although he was afraid that she or they would be too smart to
venture again into a town where everybody would now be on the watch for a
good while to come.

Everybody was pitying Tom, he looked so quiet and sorrowful, and seemed
to feel his great loss so deeply. He was playing a part, but it was not
all a part. The picture of his alleged uncle, as he had last seen him,
was before him in the dark pretty frequently, when he was away, and
called again in his dreams, when he was asleep. He wouldn't go into the
room where the tragedy had happened. This charmed the doting Mrs. Pratt,
who realized now, "as she had never done before," she said, what a
sensitive and delicate nature her darling had, and how he adored his poor
uncle.




CHAPTER 20 -- The Murderer Chuckles

     _Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence
     is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to
     be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil,
     sharpened by any woman; if you have witnesses, you will find
     she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect
     of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


The weeks dragged along, no friend visiting the jailed twins but their
counsel and Aunt Patsy Cooper, and the day of trial came at last--the
heaviest day in Wilson's life; for with all his tireless diligence he had
discovered no sign or trace of the missing confederate. "Confederate"
was the term he had long ago privately accepted for that person--not as
being unquestionably the right term, but as being the least possibly the
right one, though he was never able to understand why the twins did not
vanish and escape, as the confederate had done, instead of remaining by
the murdered man and getting caught there.

The courthouse was crowded, of course, and would remain so to the finish,
for not only in the town itself, but in the country for miles around, the
trial was the one topic of conversation among the people. Mrs. Pratt, in
deep mourning, and Tom with a weed on his hat, had seats near Pembroke
Howard, the public prosecutor, and back of them sat a great array of
friends of the family. The twins had but one friend present to keep
their counsel in countenance, their poor old sorrowing landlady. She sat
near Wilson, and looked her friendliest. In the "nigger corner" sat
Chambers; also Roxy, with good clothes on, and her bill of sale in her
pocket. It was her most precious possession, and she never parted with
it, day or night. Tom had allowed her thirty-five dollars a month ever
since he came into his property, and had said that he and she ought to be
grateful to the twins for making them rich; but had roused such a temper
in her by this speech that he did not repeat the argument afterward. She
said the old judge had treated her child a thousand times better than he
deserved, and had never done her an unkindness in his life; so she hated
these outlandish devils for killing him, and shouldn't ever sleep
satisfied till she saw them hanged for it. She was here to watch the
trial now, and was going to lift up just one "hooraw" over it if the
county judge put her in jail a year for it. She gave her turbaned head a
toss and said, "When dat verdic' comes, I's gwine to lif' dat ROOF, now,
I TELL you."

Pembroke Howard briefly sketched the state's case. He said he would show
by a chain of circumstantial evidence without break or fault in it
anywhere, that the principal prisoner at the bar committed the murder;
that the motive was partly revenge, and partly a desire to take his own
life out of jeopardy, and that his brother, by his presence, was a
consenting accessory to the crime; a crime which was the basest known to
the calendar of human misdeeds--assassination; that it was conceived by
the blackest of hearts and consummated by the cowardliest of hands; a
crime which had broken a loving sister's heart, blighted the happiness of
a young nephew who was as dear as a son, brought inconsolable grief to
many friends, and sorrow and loss to the whole community. The utmost
penalty of the outraged law would be exacted, and upon the accused, now
present at the bar, that penalty would unquestionably be executed. He
would reserve further remark until his closing speech.

He was strongly moved, and so also was the whole house; Mrs. Pratt and
several other women were weeping when he sat down, and many an eye that
was full of hate was riveted upon the unhappy prisoners.

Witness after witness was called by the state, and questioned at length;
but the cross questioning was brief. Wilson knew they could furnish
nothing valuable for his side. People were sorry for Pudd'nhead Wilson;
his budding career would get hurt by this trial.

Several witnesses swore they heard Judge Driscoll say in his public
speech that the twins would be able to find their lost knife again when
they needed it to assassinate somebody with. This was not news, but now
it was seen to have been sorrowfully prophetic, and a profound sensation
quivered through the hushed courtroom when those dismal words were
repeated.

The public prosecutor rose and said that it was within his knowledge,
through a conversation held with Judge Driscoll on the last day of his
life, that counsel for the defense had brought him a challenge from the
person charged at the bar with murder; that he had refused to fight with
a confessed assassin--"that is, on the field of honor," but had added
significantly, that he would be ready for him elsewhere. Presumably
the person here charged with murder was warned that he must kill or be
killed the first time he should meet Judge Driscoll. If counsel for the
defense chose to let the statement stand so, he would not call him to the
witness stand. Mr. Wilson said he would offer no denial. [Murmurs in the
house: "It is getting worse and worse for Wilson's case."]

Mrs. Pratt testified that she heard no outcry, and did not know what woke
her up, unless it was the sound of rapid footsteps approaching the front
door. She jumped up and ran out in the hall just as she was, and heard
the footsteps flying up the front steps and then following behind her as
she ran to the sitting room. There she found the accused standing over
her murdered brother. [Here she broke down and sobbed. Sensation in the
court.] Resuming, she said the persons entered behind her were Mr. Rogers
and Mr. Buckstone.

Cross-examined by Wilson, she said the twins proclaimed their innocence;
declared that they had been taking a walk, and had hurried to the house
in response to a cry for help which was so loud and strong that they had
heard it at a considerable distance; that they begged her and the
gentlemen just mentioned to examine their hands and clothes--which was
done, and no blood stains found.

Confirmatory evidence followed from Rogers and Buckstone.

The finding of the knife was verified, the advertisement minutely
describing it and offering a reward for it was put in evidence, and its
exact correspondence with that description proved. Then followed a few
minor details, and the case for the state was closed.

Wilson said that he had three witnesses, the Misses Clarkson, who would
testify that they met a veiled young woman leaving Judge Driscoll's
premises by the back gate a few minutes after the cries for help were
heard, and that their evidence, taken with certain circumstantial
evidence which he would call the court's attention to, would in his
opinion convince the court that there was still one person concerned in
this crime who had not yet been found, and also that a stay of
proceedings ought to be granted, in justice to his clients, until that
person should be discovered. As it was late, he would ask leave to defer
the examination of his three witnesses until the next morning.

The crowd poured out of the place and went flocking away in excited
groups and couples, taking the events of the session over with vivacity
and consuming interest, and everybody seemed to have had a satisfactory
and enjoyable day except the accused, their counsel, and their old lady
friend. There was no cheer among these, and no substantial hope.

In parting with the twins Aunt Patsy did attempt a good-night with a gay
pretense of hope and cheer in it, but broke down without finishing.

Absolutely secure as Tom considered himself to be, the opening
solemnities of the trial had nevertheless oppressed him with a vague
uneasiness, his being a nature sensitive to even the smallest alarms; but
from the moment that the poverty and weakness of Wilson's case lay
exposed to the court, he was comfortable once more, even jubilant. He
left the courtroom sarcastically sorry for Wilson. "The Clarksons met an
unknown woman in the back lane," he said to himself, "THAT is his case!
I'll give him a century to find her in--a couple of them if he likes. A
woman who doesn't exist any longer, and the clothes that gave her her sex
burnt up and the ashes thrown away--oh, certainly, he'll find HER easy
enough!" This reflection set him to admiring, for the hundredth time,
the shrewd ingenuities by which he had insured himself against
detection--more, against even suspicion.

"Nearly always in cases like this there is some little detail or other
overlooked, some wee little track or trace left behind, and detection
follows; but here there's not even the faintest suggestion of a trace
left. No more than a bird leaves when it flies through the air--yes,
through the night, you may say. The man that can track a bird through the
air in the dark and find that bird is the man to track me out and find
the judge's assassin--no other need apply. And that is the job that has
been laid out for poor Pudd'nhead Wilson, of all people in the world!
Lord, it will be pathetically funny to see him grubbing and groping after
that woman that don't exist, and the right person sitting under his very
nose all the time!" The more he thought the situation over, the more the
humor of it struck him. Finally he said, "I'll never let him hear the
last of that woman. Every time I catch him in company, to his dying day,
I'll ask him in the guileless affectionate way that used to gravel him so
when I inquired how his unborn law business was coming along, 'Got on her
track yet--hey, Pudd'nhead?'" He wanted to laugh, but that would not
have answered; there were people about, and he was mourning for his
uncle. He made up his mind that it would be good entertainment to look
in on Wilson that night and watch him worry over his barren law case and
goad him with an exasperating word or two of sympathy and commiseration
now and then.

Wilson wanted no supper, he had no appetite. He got out all the
fingerprints of girls and women in his collection of records and pored
gloomily over them an hour or more, trying to convince himself that that
troublesome girl's marks were there somewhere and had been overlooked.
But it was not so. He drew back his chair, clasped his hands over his
head, and gave himself up to dull and arid musings.

Tom Driscoll dropped in, an hour after dark, and said with a pleasant
laugh as he took a seat:

"Hello, we've gone back to the amusements of our days of neglect and
obscurity for consolation, have we?" and he took up one of the glass
strips and held it against the light to inspect it. "Come, cheer up, old
man; there's no use in losing your grip and going back to this child's
play merely because this big sunspot is drifting across your shiny new
disk. It'll pass, and you'll be all right again"--and he laid the glass
down. "Did you think you could win always?"

"Oh, no," said Wilson, with a sigh, "I didn't expect that, but I can't
believe Luigi killed your uncle, and I feel very sorry for him. It makes
me blue. And you would feel as I do, Tom, if you were not prejudiced
against those young fellows."

"I don't know about that," and Tom's countenance darkened, for his memory
reverted to his kicking. "I owe them no good will, considering the
brunet one's treatment of me that night. Prejudice or no prejudice,
Pudd'nhead, I don't like them, and when they get their deserts you're not
going to find me sitting on the mourner's bench."

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 thumbprint. 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 sank 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 had been
stunned. Presently he said, "I shall feel better when I get to bed; I
have been overwrought today; yes, and overworked for many days."

"Then I'll leave you and let you get to your rest. Good night, 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 for 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
fingerprints 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 the 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 labeled one of these thing 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 -- Doom

     _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 pantograph. He did these pantograph
enlargements on sheets of white cardboard, and made each individual line
of the bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which consisted of
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 his results according to a plan in which a progressive order
and sequence was a principal feature; then he added to the batch several
pantograph 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 was
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 window palace 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 backdown! 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 bloodstained 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 not slander 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 fixed 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; and 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 courtroom 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 cashbox 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
mementos 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 identified--and that without shade of doubt or question.
These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak,
and this autograph can not be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or
hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and 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 scrutinizing 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 neighbor'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 twins' hands 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 in to this world that did not
carry from birth to death a sure identifier in this mysterious and
marvelous 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 and 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 cruel 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 labeled with
name and date; not labeled 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 fingerprints 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 fingers 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:

"This is Count Luigi's right hand; this one, three signatures below, is
his left. Here is Count Angelo's right; down here is his left. Now for
the other pane: here and here are Count Luigi's, here and here are his
brother's." He faced about. "Am I right?"

A deafening explosion of applause was the answer. The bench said:

"This certainly approaches the miraculous!"

Wilson turned to the window again and remarked, pointing with his finger:

"This is the signature of Mr. Justice Robinson. [Applause.] This, of
Constable Blake. [Applause.] This of John Mason, juryman. [Applause.]
This, of the sheriff. [Applause.] I cannot name the others, but I have
them all at home, named and dated, and could identify them all by my
fingerprint records."

He moved to his place through a storm of applause--which the sheriff
stopped, and also made the people sit down, for they were all standing
and struggling to see, of course. Court, jury, sheriff, and everybody
had been too absorbed in observing Wilson's performance to attend to the
audience earlier.

"Now then," said Wilson, "I have here the natal autographs of the two
children--thrown up to ten times the natural size by the pantograph, so
that anyone who can see at all can tell the markings apart at a glance.
We will call the children A and B. Here are A's finger marks, taken at
the age of five months. Here they are again taken at seven months. [Tom
started.] They are alike, you see. Here are B's at five months, and also
at seven months. They, too, exactly copy each other, but the patterns
are quite different from A's, you observe. I shall refer to these again
presently, but we will turn them face down now.

"Here, thrown up ten sizes, are the natal autographs of the two persons
who are here before you accused of murdering Judge Driscoll. I made these
pantograph copies last night, and will so swear when I go upon the
witness stand. I ask the jury to compare them with the finger marks of
the accused upon the windowpanes, and tell the court if they are the
same."

He passed a powerful magnifying glass to the foreman.

One juryman after another took the cardboard and the glass and made the
comparison. Then the foreman said to the judge:

"Your honor, we are all agreed that they are identical."

Wilson said to the foreman:

"Please turn that cardboard face down, and take this one, and compare it
searchingly, by the magnifier, with the fatal signature upon the knife
handle, and report your finding to the court."

Again the jury made minute examinations, and again reported:

"We find them to be exactly identical, your honor."

Wilson turned toward the counsel for the prosecution, and there was a
clearly recognizable note of warning in his voice when he said:

"May it please the court, the state has claimed, strenuously and
persistently, that the bloodstained fingerprints upon that knife handle
were left there by the assassin of Judge Driscoll. You have heard us
grant that claim, and welcome it." He turned to the jury: "Compare the
fingerprints of the accused with the fingerprints left by the
assassin--and report."

The comparison began. As it proceeded, all movement and all sound
ceased, and the deep silence of an absorbed and waiting suspense settled
upon the house; and when at last the words came, "THEY DO NOT EVEN
RESEMBLE," a thundercrash of applause followed and the house sprang to
its feet, but was quickly repressed by official force and brought to
order again. Tom was altering his position every few minutes now, but
none of his changes brought repose nor any small trifle of comfort. When
the house's attention was become fixed once more, Wilson said gravely,
indicating the twins with a gesture:

"These men are innocent--I have no further concern with them. [Another
outbreak of applause began, but was promptly checked.] We will now
proceed to find the guilty. [Tom's eyes were starting from their
sockets--yes, it was a cruel day for the bereaved youth, everybody
thought.] We will return to the infant autographs of A and B. I will
ask the jury to take these large pantograph facsimilies of A's marked
five months and seven months. Do they tally?"

The foreman responded: "Perfectly."

"Now examine this pantograph, taken at eight months, and also marked A.
Does it tally with the other two?"

The surprised response was:

"NO--THEY DIFFER WIDELY!"

"You are quite right. Now take these two pantographs of B's autograph,
marked five months and seven months. Do they tally with each other?"

"Yes--perfectly."

"Take this third pantograph marked B, eight months. Does it tally with
B's other two?"

"BY NO MEANS!"

"Do you know how to account for those strange discrepancies? I will tell
you. For a purpose unknown to us, but probably a selfish one, somebody
changed those children in the cradle."

This produced a vast sensation, naturally; Roxana was astonished at this
admirable guess, but not disturbed by it. To guess the exchange was one
thing, to guess who did it quite another. Pudd'nhead Wilson could do
wonderful things, no doubt, but he couldn't do impossible ones. Safe?
She was perfectly safe. She smiled privately.

"Between the ages of seven months and eight months those children were
changed in the cradle"--he made one of this effect--collecting pauses,
and added--"and the person who did it is in this house!"

Roxy's pulses stood still! The house was thrilled as with an electric
shock, and the people half rose as if to seek a glimpse of the person who
had made that exchange. Tom was growing limp; the life seemed oozing out
of him. Wilson resumed:

"A was put into B's cradle in the nursery; B was transferred to the
kitchen and became a Negro and a slave [Sensation--confusion of angry
ejaculations]--but within a quarter of an hour he will stand before you
white and free! [Burst of applause, checked by the officers.] From
seven months onward until now, A has still been a usurper, and in my
finger record he bears B's name. Here is his pantograph at the age of
twelve. Compare it with the assassin's signature upon the knife handle.
Do they tally?"

The foreman answered:

"TO THE MINUTEST DETAIL!"

Wilson said, solemnly:

"The murderer of your friend and mine--York Driscoll of the generous hand
and the kindly spirit--sits in among you. Valet de Chambre, Negro and
slave--falsely called Thomas a Becket Driscoll--make upon the window the
fingerprints that will hang you!"

Tom turned his ashen face imploring toward the speaker, made some
impotent movements with his white lips, then slid limp and lifeless to
the floor.

Wilson broke the awed silence with the words:

"There is no need. He has confessed."

Roxy flung herself upon her knees, covered her face with her hands, and
out through her sobs the words struggled:

"De Lord have mercy on me, po' misasble sinner dat I is!"

The clock struck twelve.

The court rose; the new prisoner, handcuffed, was removed.



CONCLUSION

     _It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie
     thinks he is the best judge of one._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's
     Calendar

     _OCTOBER 12, THE DISCOVERY. It was wonderful to find
     America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it._
     --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar


The town sat up all night to discuss the amazing events of the day and
swap guesses as to when Tom's trial would begin. Troop after troop of
citizens came to serenade Wilson, and require a speech, and shout
themselves hoarse over every sentence that fell from his lips--for all
his sentences were golden, now, all were marvelous. His long fight
against hard luck and prejudice was ended; he was a made man for good.
And as each of these roaring gangs of enthusiasts marched away, some
remorseful member of it was quite sure to raise his voice and say:

"And this is the man the likes of us have called a pudd'nhead for more
than twenty years. He has resigned from that position, friends."

"Yes, but it isn't vacant--we're elected."

The twins were heroes of romance, now, and with rehabilitated
reputations. But they were weary of Western adventure, and straightway
retired to Europe.

Roxy's heart was broken. The young fellow upon whom she had inflicted
twenty-three years of slavery continued the false heir's pension of
thirty-five dollars a month to her, but her hurts were too deep for money
to heal; the spirit in her eye was quenched, her martial bearing departed
with it, and the voice of her laughter ceased in the land. In her church
and its affairs she found her only solace.

The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a most
embarrassing situation. He could neither read nor write, and his speech
was the basest dialect of the Negro quarter. His gait, his attitudes, his
gestures, his bearing, his laugh--all were vulgar and uncouth; his
manners were the manners of a slave. Money and fine clothes could not
mend these defects or cover them up; they only made them more glaring and
the more pathetic. The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the
white man's parlor, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the
kitchen. The family pew was a misery to him, yet he could nevermore enter
into the solacing refuge of the "nigger gallery"--that was closed to him
for good and all. But we cannot follow his curious fate further--that
would be a long story.

The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment
for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate was
in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty
percent of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the
creditors came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an
error for which THEY were in no way to blame the false heir was not
inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great wrong and
loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that
"Tom" was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that
they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services
during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to
that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place,
they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll;
therefore it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt
lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in
this. Everybody granted that if "Tom" were white and free it would be
unquestionably right to punish him--it would be no loss to anybody; but
to shut up a valuable slave for life--that was quite another matter.

As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and
the creditors sold him down the river.





AUTHOR'S NOTE TO "THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS"

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time
of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He
has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has
some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he
trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting
results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought
which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little
tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he
is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as
it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on
till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has
happened to me so many times.

And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the
long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and
find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case
of a magazine sketch which I once started to write--a funny and fantastic
sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of
its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book. Much
the same thing happened with PUDD'NHEAD WILSON. I had a sufficiently
hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a
tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing
circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one
story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and
interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and
annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid
it would unseat the reader's reason, I did not know what was the matter
with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one.
It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back
and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied
over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had
no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and
left the other--a kind of literary Caesarean operation.

Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled
out? He has been told many a time how the born-and-trained novelist
works; won't he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him
how the jackleg does it?

Originally the story was called THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS. I meant to
make it very short. I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian
"freak"--or "freaks"--which was--or which were--on exhibition in our
cities--a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a
single body and a single pair of legs--and I thought I would write an
extravagantly fantastic little story with this freak of nature for
hero--or heroes--a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and
two boys for the minor parts. I lavishly elaborated these people and
their doings, of course. But the tale kept spreading along and spreading
along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more
and more room with their talk and their affairs. Among them came a
stranger named Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently
the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named
Tom Driscoll, whose proper place was away in the obscure background.
Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost
entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private
venture of their own--a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by
rights.

When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had
become of the team I had originally started out with--Aunt Patsy Cooper,
Aunt Betsy Hale, and two boys, and Rowena the lightweight heroine--they
were nowhere to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or
other. I hunted about and found them--found them stranded, idle,
forgotten, and permanently useless. It was very awkward. It was awkward
all around, but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there
was a love match on, between her and one of the twins that constituted
the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering heat and thrown in a
quite dramatic love quarrel, wherein Rowena scathingly denounced her
betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed at his explanation of how it had
happened, and wouldn't listen to it, and had driven him from her in the
usual "forever" way; and now here she sat crying and brokenhearted; for
she had found that he had spoken only the truth; that it was not he, but
the other of the freak that had drunk the liquor that made him drunk;
that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in his
life, and altogether tight as a brick three days in the week, was wholly
innocent of blame; and indeed, when sober, was constantly doing all he
could to reform his brother, the other half, who never got any
satisfaction out of drinking, anyway, because liquor never affected him.
Yes, here she was, stranded with that deep injustice of hers torturing
her poor torn heart.

I didn't know what to do with her. I was as sorry for her as anybody
could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was
sidetracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in, anywhere.
I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do. After spreading
her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be
absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her. I thought and
thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw
plainly that there was really no way but one--I must simply give her the
grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so
much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she
was such an ass and said such stupid, irritating things and was so
nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So at the top of
Chapter XVII I put a "Calendar" remark concerning July the Fourth, and
began the chapter with this statistic:

"Rowena went out in the backyard after supper to see the fireworks and
fell down the well and got drowned."

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it,
because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it
loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way,
and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out
people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those
others; so I hunted up the two boys and said, "They went out back one
night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned." Next I
searched around and found old Aunt Patsy and Aunt Betsy Hale where they
were around, and said, "They went out back one night to visit the sick
and fell down the well and got drowned." I was going to drown some
others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept
that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people,
and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more
anyway.

Still the story was unsatisfactory. Here was a set of new characters who
were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to
the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a
great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and
fell down the well. There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must
search it out and cure it.

The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of--two stories in
one, a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled out the farce and left the
tragedy. This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as
characters. Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth
drowning; so I removed that detail. Also I took the twins apart and made
two separate men of them. They had no occasion to have foreign names now,
but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them
christened as they were and made no explanation.
In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second
quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the
name of Canty, who did not want him.  On the same day another English
child was born to a rich family of the name of Tudor, who did want him.
All England wanted him too.  England had so longed for him, and hoped
for him, and prayed God for him, that, now that he was really come, the
people went nearly mad for joy.  Mere acquaintances hugged and kissed
each other and cried. Everybody took a holiday, and high and low, rich
and poor, feasted and danced and sang, and got very mellow; and they
kept this up for days and nights together.  By day, London was a sight
to see, with gay banners waving from every balcony and housetop, and
splendid pageants marching along.  By night, it was again a sight
to see, with its great bonfires at every corner, and its troops of
revellers making merry around them.  There was no talk in all England
but of the new baby, Edward Tudor, Prince of Wales, who lay lapped in
silks and satins, unconscious of all this fuss, and not knowing that
great lords and ladies were tending him and watching over him--and not
caring, either.  But there was no talk about the other baby, Tom Canty,
lapped in his poor rags, except among the family of paupers whom he had
just come to trouble with his presence.




CHAPTER II. Tom's early life.

Let us skip a number of years.

London was fifteen hundred years old, and was a great town--for that
day. It had a hundred thousand inhabitants--some think double as many.
 The streets were very narrow, and crooked, and dirty, especially in the
part where Tom Canty lived, which was not far from London Bridge.  The
houses were of wood, with the second story projecting over the first,
and the third sticking its elbows out beyond the second.  The higher
the houses grew, the broader they grew.  They were skeletons of strong
criss-cross beams, with solid material between, coated with plaster.
 The beams were painted red or blue or black, according to the owner's
taste, and this gave the houses a very picturesque look.  The windows
were small, glazed with little diamond-shaped panes, and they opened
outward, on hinges, like doors.

The house which Tom's father lived in was up a foul little pocket called
Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane.  It was small, decayed, and rickety,
but it was packed full of wretchedly poor families. Canty's tribe
occupied a room on the third floor.  The mother and father had a sort of
bedstead in the corner; but Tom, his grandmother, and his two sisters,
Bet and Nan, were not restricted--they had all the floor to themselves,
and might sleep where they chose.  There were the remains of a blanket
or two, and some bundles of ancient and dirty straw, but these could not
rightly be called beds, for they were not organised; they were kicked
into a general pile, mornings, and selections made from the mass at
night, for service.

Bet and Nan were fifteen years old--twins.  They were good-hearted
girls, unclean, clothed in rags, and profoundly ignorant.  Their mother
was like them.  But the father and the grandmother were a couple of
fiends.  They got drunk whenever they could; then they fought each other
or anybody else who came in the way; they cursed and swore always, drunk
or sober; John Canty was a thief, and his mother a beggar.  They made
beggars of the children, but failed to make thieves of them.  Among,
but not of, the dreadful rabble that inhabited the house, was a good old
priest whom the King had turned out of house and home with a pension of
a few farthings, and he used to get the children aside and teach them
right ways secretly. Father Andrew also taught Tom a little Latin, and
how to read and write; and would have done the same with the girls,
but they were afraid of the jeers of their friends, who could not have
endured such a queer accomplishment in them.

All Offal Court was just such another hive as Canty's house.
Drunkenness, riot and brawling were the order, there, every night and
nearly all night long.  Broken heads were as common as hunger in that
place.  Yet little Tom was not unhappy.  He had a hard time of it, but
did not know it.  It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys
had, therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing.
 When he came home empty-handed at night, he knew his father would
curse him and thrash him first, and that when he was done the awful
grandmother would do it all over again and improve on it; and that away
in the night his starving mother would slip to him stealthily with any
miserable scrap or crust she had been able to save for him by going
hungry herself, notwithstanding she was often caught in that sort of
treason and soundly beaten for it by her husband.

No, Tom's life went along well enough, especially in summer.  He only
begged just enough to save himself, for the laws against mendicancy were
stringent, and the penalties heavy; so he put in a good deal of his time
listening to good Father Andrew's charming old tales and legends
about giants and fairies, dwarfs and genii, and enchanted castles, and
gorgeous kings and princes.  His head grew to be full of these wonderful
things, and many a night as he lay in the dark on his scant and
offensive straw, tired, hungry, and smarting from a thrashing, he
unleashed his imagination and soon forgot his aches and pains in
delicious picturings to himself of the charmed life of a petted prince
in a regal palace.  One desire came in time to haunt him day and night:
 it was to see a real prince, with his own eyes.  He spoke of it once to
some of his Offal Court comrades; but they jeered him and scoffed him so
unmercifully that he was glad to keep his dream to himself after that.

He often read the priest's old books and got him to explain and enlarge
upon them.  His dreamings and readings worked certain changes in him,
by-and-by.  His dream-people were so fine that he grew to lament his
shabby clothing and his dirt, and to wish to be clean and better clad.
 He went on playing in the mud just the same, and enjoying it, too; but,
instead of splashing around in the Thames solely for the fun of it,
he began to find an added value in it because of the washings and
cleansings it afforded.

Tom could always find something going on around the Maypole in
Cheapside, and at the fairs; and now and then he and the rest of London
had a chance to see a military parade when some famous unfortunate was
carried prisoner to the Tower, by land or boat. One summer's day he saw
poor Anne Askew and three men burned at the stake in Smithfield, and
heard an ex-Bishop preach a sermon to them which did not interest him.
Yes, Tom's life was varied and pleasant enough, on the whole.

By-and-by Tom's reading and dreaming about princely life wrought such a
strong effect upon him that he began to _act_ the prince, unconsciously.
His speech and manners became curiously ceremonious and courtly, to the
vast admiration and amusement of his intimates.  But Tom's influence
among these young people began to grow now, day by day; and in time he
came to be looked up to, by them, with a sort of wondering awe, as a
superior being.  He seemed to know so much! and he could do and say such
marvellous things! and withal, he was so deep and wise!  Tom's remarks,
and Tom's performances, were reported by the boys to their elders; and
these, also, presently began to discuss Tom Canty, and to regard him
as a most gifted and extraordinary creature.  Full-grown people brought
their perplexities to Tom for solution, and were often astonished at the
wit and wisdom of his decisions.  In fact he was become a hero to all
who knew him except his own family--these, only, saw nothing in him.

Privately, after a while, Tom organised a royal court!  He was the
prince; his special comrades were guards, chamberlains, equerries, lords
and ladies in waiting, and the royal family.  Daily the mock prince was
received with elaborate ceremonials borrowed by Tom from his romantic
readings; daily the great affairs of the mimic kingdom were discussed
in the royal council, and daily his mimic highness issued decrees to his
imaginary armies, navies, and viceroyalties.

After which, he would go forth in his rags and beg a few farthings, eat
his poor crust, take his customary cuffs and abuse, and then stretch
himself upon his handful of foul straw, and resume his empty grandeurs
in his dreams.

And still his desire to look just once upon a real prince, in the flesh,
grew upon him, day by day, and week by week, until at last it absorbed
all other desires, and became the one passion of his life.

One January day, on his usual begging tour, he tramped despondently up
and down the region round about Mincing Lane and Little East Cheap, hour
after hour, bare-footed and cold, looking in at cook-shop windows and
longing for the dreadful pork-pies and other deadly inventions displayed
there--for to him these were dainties fit for the angels; that is,
judging by the smell, they were--for it had never been his good luck to
own and eat one. There was a cold drizzle of rain; the atmosphere was
murky; it was a melancholy day.  At night Tom reached home so wet and
tired and hungry that it was not possible for his father and grandmother
to observe his forlorn condition and not be moved--after their fashion;
wherefore they gave him a brisk cuffing at once and sent him to bed.
 For a long time his pain and hunger, and the swearing and fighting
going on in the building, kept him awake; but at last his thoughts
drifted away to far, romantic lands, and he fell asleep in the company
of jewelled and gilded princelings who live in vast palaces, and had
servants salaaming before them or flying to execute their orders.  And
then, as usual, he dreamed that _he_ was a princeling himself.

All night long the glories of his royal estate shone upon him; he moved
among great lords and ladies, in a blaze of light, breathing perfumes,
drinking in delicious music, and answering the reverent obeisances of
the glittering throng as it parted to make way for him, with here a
smile, and there a nod of his princely head.

And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness
about him, his dream had had its usual effect--it had intensified the
sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold.  Then came bitterness,
and heart-break, and tears.




CHAPTER III. Tom's meeting with the Prince.

Tom got up hungry, and sauntered hungry away, but with his thoughts busy
with the shadowy splendours of his night's dreams. He wandered here
and there in the city, hardly noticing where he was going, or what
was happening around him.  People jostled him, and some gave him rough
speech; but it was all lost on the musing boy.  By-and-by he found
himself at Temple Bar, the farthest from home he had ever travelled in
that direction.  He stopped and considered a moment, then fell into his
imaginings again, and passed on outside the walls of London.  The Strand
had ceased to be a country-road then, and regarded itself as a street,
but by a strained construction; for, though there was a tolerably
compact row of houses on one side of it, there were only some scattered
great buildings on the other, these being palaces of rich nobles, with
ample and beautiful grounds stretching to the river--grounds that are
now closely packed with grim acres of brick and stone.

Tom discovered Charing Village presently, and rested himself at the
beautiful cross built there by a bereaved king of earlier days; then
idled down a quiet, lovely road, past the great cardinal's
stately palace, toward a far more mighty and majestic palace
beyond--Westminster. Tom stared in glad wonder at the vast pile of
masonry, the wide-spreading wings, the frowning bastions and turrets,
the huge stone gateway, with its gilded bars and its magnificent array
of colossal granite lions, and other the signs and symbols of English
royalty.  Was the desire of his soul to be satisfied at last?  Here,
indeed, was a king's palace.  Might he not hope to see a prince now--a
prince of flesh and blood, if Heaven were willing?

At each side of the gilded gate stood a living statue--that is to say,
an erect and stately and motionless man-at-arms, clad from head to heel
in shining steel armour.  At a respectful distance were many country
folk, and people from the city, waiting for any chance glimpse of
royalty that might offer.  Splendid carriages, with splendid people
in them and splendid servants outside, were arriving and departing by
several other noble gateways that pierced the royal enclosure.

Poor little Tom, in his rags, approached, and was moving slowly and
timidly past the sentinels, with a beating heart and a rising hope, when
all at once he caught sight through the golden bars of a spectacle that
almost made him shout for joy.  Within was a comely boy, tanned and
brown with sturdy outdoor sports and exercises, whose clothing was all
of lovely silks and satins, shining with jewels; at his hip a little
jewelled sword and dagger; dainty buskins on his feet, with red heels;
and on his head a jaunty crimson cap, with drooping plumes fastened
with a great sparkling gem.  Several gorgeous gentlemen stood near--his
servants, without a doubt.  Oh! he was a prince--a prince, a living
prince, a real prince--without the shadow of a question; and the prayer
of the pauper-boy's heart was answered at last.

Tom's breath came quick and short with excitement, and his eyes grew big
with wonder and delight.  Everything gave way in his mind instantly
to one desire:  that was to get close to the prince, and have a good,
devouring look at him.  Before he knew what he was about, he had his
face against the gate-bars.  The next instant one of the soldiers
snatched him rudely away, and sent him spinning among the gaping crowd
of country gawks and London idlers.  The soldier said,--

"Mind thy manners, thou young beggar!"

The crowd jeered and laughed; but the young prince sprang to the gate
with his face flushed, and his eyes flashing with indignation, and cried
out,--

"How dar'st thou use a poor lad like that?  How dar'st thou use the King
my father's meanest subject so?  Open the gates, and let him in!"

You should have seen that fickle crowd snatch off their hats then.
You should have heard them cheer, and shout, "Long live the Prince of
Wales!"

The soldiers presented arms with their halberds, opened the gates,
and presented again as the little Prince of Poverty passed in, in his
fluttering rags, to join hands with the Prince of Limitless Plenty.

Edward Tudor said--

"Thou lookest tired and hungry:  thou'st been treated ill.  Come with
me."

Half a dozen attendants sprang forward to--I don't know what; interfere,
no doubt.  But they were waved aside with a right royal gesture, and
they stopped stock still where they were, like so many statues.  Edward
took Tom to a rich apartment in the palace, which he called his cabinet.
 By his command a repast was brought such as Tom had never encountered
before except in books.  The prince, with princely delicacy and
breeding, sent away the servants, so that his humble guest might not be
embarrassed by their critical presence; then he sat near by, and asked
questions while Tom ate.

"What is thy name, lad?"

"Tom Canty, an' it please thee, sir."

"'Tis an odd one.  Where dost live?"

"In the city, please thee, sir.  Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane."

"Offal Court!  Truly 'tis another odd one.  Hast parents?"

"Parents have I, sir, and a grand-dam likewise that is but indifferently
precious to me, God forgive me if it be offence to say it--also twin
sisters, Nan and Bet."

"Then is thy grand-dam not over kind to thee, I take it?"

"Neither to any other is she, so please your worship.  She hath a wicked
heart, and worketh evil all her days."

"Doth she mistreat thee?"

"There be times that she stayeth her hand, being asleep or overcome with
drink; but when she hath her judgment clear again, she maketh it up to
me with goodly beatings."

A fierce look came into the little prince's eyes, and he cried out--

"What!  Beatings?"

"Oh, indeed, yes, please you, sir."

"_Beatings_!--and thou so frail and little.  Hark ye:  before the night
come, she shall hie her to the Tower.  The King my father"--

"In sooth, you forget, sir, her low degree.  The Tower is for the great
alone."

"True, indeed.  I had not thought of that.  I will consider of her
punishment.  Is thy father kind to thee?"

"Not more than Gammer Canty, sir."

"Fathers be alike, mayhap.  Mine hath not a doll's temper.  He smiteth
with a heavy hand, yet spareth me:  he spareth me not always with his
tongue, though, sooth to say.  How doth thy mother use thee?"

"She is good, sir, and giveth me neither sorrow nor pain of any sort.
And Nan and Bet are like to her in this."

"How old be these?"

"Fifteen, an' it please you, sir."

"The Lady Elizabeth, my sister, is fourteen, and the Lady Jane Grey,
my cousin, is of mine own age, and comely and gracious withal; but
my sister the Lady Mary, with her gloomy mien and--Look you:  do thy
sisters forbid their servants to smile, lest the sin destroy their
souls?"

"They?  Oh, dost think, sir, that _they_ have servants?"

The little prince contemplated the little pauper gravely a moment, then
said--

"And prithee, why not?  Who helpeth them undress at night?  Who attireth
them when they rise?"

"None, sir.  Would'st have them take off their garment, and sleep
without--like the beasts?"

"Their garment!  Have they but one?"

"Ah, good your worship, what would they do with more?  Truly they have
not two bodies each."

"It is a quaint and marvellous thought!  Thy pardon, I had not meant
to laugh.  But thy good Nan and thy Bet shall have raiment and lackeys
enow, and that soon, too:  my cofferer shall look to it.  No, thank me
not; 'tis nothing.  Thou speakest well; thou hast an easy grace in it.
 Art learned?"

"I know not if I am or not, sir.  The good priest that is called Father
Andrew taught me, of his kindness, from his books."

"Know'st thou the Latin?"

"But scantly, sir, I doubt."

"Learn it, lad:  'tis hard only at first.  The Greek is harder; but
neither these nor any tongues else, I think, are hard to the Lady
Elizabeth and my cousin.  Thou should'st hear those damsels at it!  But
tell me of thy Offal Court.  Hast thou a pleasant life there?"

"In truth, yes, so please you, sir, save when one is hungry. There
be Punch-and-Judy shows, and monkeys--oh such antic creatures! and so
bravely dressed!--and there be plays wherein they that play do shout
and fight till all are slain, and 'tis so fine to see, and costeth but
a farthing--albeit 'tis main hard to get the farthing, please your
worship."

"Tell me more."

"We lads of Offal Court do strive against each other with the cudgel,
like to the fashion of the 'prentices, sometimes."

The prince's eyes flashed.  Said he--

"Marry, that would not I mislike.  Tell me more."

"We strive in races, sir, to see who of us shall be fleetest."

"That would I like also.  Speak on."

"In summer, sir, we wade and swim in the canals and in the river, and
each doth duck his neighbour, and splatter him with water, and dive and
shout and tumble and--"

"'Twould be worth my father's kingdom but to enjoy it once! Prithee go
on."

"We dance and sing about the Maypole in Cheapside; we play in the sand,
each covering his neighbour up; and times we make mud pastry--oh
the lovely mud, it hath not its like for delightfulness in all the
world!--we do fairly wallow in the mud, sir, saving your worship's
presence."

"Oh, prithee, say no more, 'tis glorious!  If that I could but clothe me
in raiment like to thine, and strip my feet, and revel in the mud once,
just once, with none to rebuke me or forbid, meseemeth I could forego
the crown!"

"And if that I could clothe me once, sweet sir, as thou art clad--just
once--"

"Oho, would'st like it?  Then so shall it be.  Doff thy rags, and don
these splendours, lad!  It is a brief happiness, but will be not less
keen for that.  We will have it while we may, and change again before
any come to molest."

A few minutes later the little Prince of Wales was garlanded with Tom's
fluttering odds and ends, and the little Prince of Pauperdom was tricked
out in the gaudy plumage of royalty.  The two went and stood side by
side before a great mirror, and lo, a miracle: there did not seem to
have been any change made!  They stared at each other, then at the
glass, then at each other again.  At last the puzzled princeling said--

"What dost thou make of this?"

"Ah, good your worship, require me not to answer.  It is not meet that
one of my degree should utter the thing."

"Then will _I_ utter it.  Thou hast the same hair, the same eyes, the
same voice and manner, the same form and stature, the same face and
countenance that I bear.  Fared we forth naked, there is none could
say which was you, and which the Prince of Wales.  And, now that I
am clothed as thou wert clothed, it seemeth I should be able the more
nearly to feel as thou didst when the brute soldier--Hark ye, is not
this a bruise upon your hand?"

"Yes; but it is a slight thing, and your worship knoweth that the poor
man-at-arms--"

"Peace!  It was a shameful thing and a cruel!" cried the little prince,
stamping his bare foot.  "If the King--Stir not a step till I come
again! It is a command!"

In a moment he had snatched up and put away an article of national
importance that lay upon a table, and was out at the door and flying
through the palace grounds in his bannered rags, with a hot face and
glowing eyes.  As soon as he reached the great gate, he seized the bars,
and tried to shake them, shouting--

"Open!  Unbar the gates!"

The soldier that had maltreated Tom obeyed promptly; and as the prince
burst through the portal, half-smothered with royal wrath, the soldier
fetched him a sounding box on the ear that sent him whirling to the
roadway, and said--

"Take that, thou beggar's spawn, for what thou got'st me from his
Highness!"

The crowd roared with laughter.  The prince picked himself out of the
mud, and made fiercely at the sentry, shouting--

"I am the Prince of Wales, my person is sacred; and thou shalt hang for
laying thy hand upon me!"

The soldier brought his halberd to a present-arms and said mockingly--

"I salute your gracious Highness."  Then angrily--"Be off, thou crazy
rubbish!"

Here the jeering crowd closed round the poor little prince, and hustled
him far down the road, hooting him, and shouting--

"Way for his Royal Highness!  Way for the Prince of Wales!"




CHAPTER IV. The Prince's troubles begin.

After hours of persistent pursuit and persecution, the little prince was
at last deserted by the rabble and left to himself.  As long as he had
been able to rage against the mob, and threaten it royally, and
royally utter commands that were good stuff to laugh at, he was very
entertaining; but when weariness finally forced him to be silent, he was
no longer of use to his tormentors, and they sought amusement elsewhere.
He looked about him, now, but could not recognise the locality.  He
was within the city of London--that was all he knew.  He moved on,
aimlessly, and in a little while the houses thinned, and the passers-by
were infrequent.  He bathed his bleeding feet in the brook which flowed
then where Farringdon Street now is; rested a few moments, then passed
on, and presently came upon a great space with only a few scattered
houses in it, and a prodigious church.  He recognised this church.
 Scaffoldings were about, everywhere, and swarms of workmen; for it was
undergoing elaborate repairs.  The prince took heart at once--he felt
that his troubles were at an end, now.  He said to himself, "It is the
ancient Grey Friars' Church, which the king my father hath taken from
the monks and given for a home for ever for poor and forsaken children,
and new-named it Christ's Church.  Right gladly will they serve the son
of him who hath done so generously by them--and the more that that son
is himself as poor and as forlorn as any that be sheltered here this
day, or ever shall be."

He was soon in the midst of a crowd of boys who were running, jumping,
playing at ball and leap-frog, and otherwise disporting themselves, and
right noisily, too.  They were all dressed alike, and in the fashion
which in that day prevailed among serving-men and 'prentices{1}--that
is to say, each had on the crown of his head a flat black cap about the
size of a saucer, which was not useful as a covering, it being of such
scanty dimensions, neither was it ornamental; from beneath it the hair
fell, unparted, to the middle of the forehead, and was cropped straight
around; a clerical band at the neck; a blue gown that fitted closely
and hung as low as the knees or lower; full sleeves; a broad red belt;
bright yellow stockings, gartered above the knees; low shoes with large
metal buckles. It was a sufficiently ugly costume.

The boys stopped their play and flocked about the prince, who said with
native dignity--

"Good lads, say to your master that Edward Prince of Wales desireth
speech with him."

A great shout went up at this, and one rude fellow said--

"Marry, art thou his grace's messenger, beggar?"

The prince's face flushed with anger, and his ready hand flew to his
hip, but there was nothing there.  There was a storm of laughter, and
one boy said--

"Didst mark that?  He fancied he had a sword--belike he is the prince
himself."

This sally brought more laughter.  Poor Edward drew himself up proudly
and said--

"I am the prince; and it ill beseemeth you that feed upon the king my
father's bounty to use me so."

This was vastly enjoyed, as the laughter testified.  The youth who had
first spoken, shouted to his comrades--

"Ho, swine, slaves, pensioners of his grace's princely father, where be
your manners?  Down on your marrow bones, all of ye, and do reverence to
his kingly port and royal rags!"

With boisterous mirth they dropped upon their knees in a body and did
mock homage to their prey.  The prince spurned the nearest boy with his
foot, and said fiercely--

"Take thou that, till the morrow come and I build thee a gibbet!"

Ah, but this was not a joke--this was going beyond fun.  The laughter
ceased on the instant, and fury took its place.  A dozen shouted--

"Hale him forth!  To the horse-pond, to the horse-pond!  Where be the
dogs?  Ho, there, Lion! ho, Fangs!"

Then followed such a thing as England had never seen before--the sacred
person of the heir to the throne rudely buffeted by plebeian hands, and
set upon and torn by dogs.

As night drew to a close that day, the prince found himself far down in
the close-built portion of the city.  His body was bruised, his hands
were bleeding, and his rags were all besmirched with mud.  He wandered
on and on, and grew more and more bewildered, and so tired and faint
he could hardly drag one foot after the other.  He had ceased to ask
questions of anyone, since they brought him only insult instead of
information.  He kept muttering to himself, "Offal Court--that is the
name; if I can but find it before my strength is wholly spent and I
drop, then am I saved--for his people will take me to the palace and
prove that I am none of theirs, but the true prince, and I shall have
mine own again."  And now and then his mind reverted to his treatment
by those rude Christ's Hospital boys, and he said, "When I am king, they
shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books;
for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved, and the
heart.  I will keep this diligently in my remembrance, that this day's
lesson be not lost upon me, and my people suffer thereby; for learning
softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity." {1}

The lights began to twinkle, it came on to rain, the wind rose, and a
raw and gusty night set in.  The houseless prince, the homeless heir to
the throne of England, still moved on, drifting deeper into the maze
of squalid alleys where the swarming hives of poverty and misery were
massed together.

Suddenly a great drunken ruffian collared him and said--

"Out to this time of night again, and hast not brought a farthing home,
I warrant me!  If it be so, an' I do not break all the bones in thy lean
body, then am I not John Canty, but some other."

The prince twisted himself loose, unconsciously brushed his profaned
shoulder, and eagerly said--

"Oh, art _his_ father, truly?  Sweet heaven grant it be so--then wilt
thou fetch him away and restore me!"

"_His_ father?  I know not what thou mean'st; I but know I am _thy_
father, as thou shalt soon have cause to--"

"Oh, jest not, palter not, delay not!--I am worn, I am wounded, I can
bear no more.  Take me to the king my father, and he will make thee rich
beyond thy wildest dreams.  Believe me, man, believe me!--I speak no
lie, but only the truth!--put forth thy hand and save me!  I am indeed
the Prince of Wales!"

The man stared down, stupefied, upon the lad, then shook his head and
muttered--

"Gone stark mad as any Tom o' Bedlam!"--then collared him once more,
and said with a coarse laugh and an oath, "But mad or no mad, I and thy
Gammer Canty will soon find where the soft places in thy bones lie, or
I'm no true man!"

With this he dragged the frantic and struggling prince away, and
disappeared up a front court followed by a delighted and noisy swarm of
human vermin.




CHAPTER V. Tom as a Patrician.

Tom Canty, left alone in the prince's cabinet, made good use of his
opportunity.  He turned himself this way and that before the great
mirror, admiring his finery; then walked away, imitating the prince's
high-bred carriage, and still observing results in the glass.  Next he
drew the beautiful sword, and bowed, kissing the blade, and laying it
across his breast, as he had seen a noble knight do, by way of salute to
the lieutenant of the Tower, five or six weeks before, when delivering
the great lords of Norfolk and Surrey into his hands for captivity.  Tom
played with the jewelled dagger that hung upon his thigh; he examined
the costly and exquisite ornaments of the room; he tried each of the
sumptuous chairs, and thought how proud he would be if the Offal Court
herd could only peep in and see him in his grandeur.  He wondered if
they would believe the marvellous tale he should tell when he got home,
or if they would shake their heads, and say his overtaxed imagination
had at last upset his reason.

At the end of half an hour it suddenly occurred to him that the prince
was gone a long time; then right away he began to feel lonely; very
soon he fell to listening and longing, and ceased to toy with the
pretty things about him; he grew uneasy, then restless, then distressed.
Suppose some one should come, and catch him in the prince's clothes, and
the prince not there to explain.  Might they not hang him at once,
and inquire into his case afterward?  He had heard that the great
were prompt about small matters.  His fear rose higher and higher; and
trembling he softly opened the door to the antechamber, resolved to
fly and seek the prince, and, through him, protection and release.  Six
gorgeous gentlemen-servants and two young pages of high degree, clothed
like butterflies, sprang to their feet and bowed low before him.  He
stepped quickly back and shut the door.  He said--

"Oh, they mock at me!  They will go and tell.  Oh! why came I here to
cast away my life?"

He walked up and down the floor, filled with nameless fears, listening,
starting at every trifling sound.  Presently the door swung open, and a
silken page said--

"The Lady Jane Grey."

The door closed and a sweet young girl, richly clad, bounded toward him.
But she stopped suddenly, and said in a distressed voice--

"Oh, what aileth thee, my lord?"

Tom's breath was nearly failing him; but he made shift to stammer out--

"Ah, be merciful, thou!  In sooth I am no lord, but only poor Tom Canty
of Offal Court in the city.  Prithee let me see the prince, and he will
of his grace restore to me my rags, and let me hence unhurt.  Oh, be
thou merciful, and save me!"

By this time the boy was on his knees, and supplicating with his eyes
and uplifted hands as well as with his tongue.  The young girl seemed
horror-stricken.  She cried out--

"O my lord, on thy knees?--and to _me_!"

Then she fled away in fright; and Tom, smitten with despair, sank down,
murmuring--

"There is no help, there is no hope.  Now will they come and take me."

Whilst he lay there benumbed with terror, dreadful tidings were speeding
through the palace.  The whisper--for it was whispered always--flew from
menial to menial, from lord to lady, down all the long corridors, from
story to story, from saloon to saloon, "The prince hath gone mad, the
prince hath gone mad!"  Soon every saloon, every marble hall, had its
groups of glittering lords and ladies, and other groups of dazzling
lesser folk, talking earnestly together in whispers, and every face
had in it dismay. Presently a splendid official came marching by these
groups, making solemn proclamation--

"IN THE NAME OF THE KING!

Let none list to this false and foolish matter, upon pain of death, nor
discuss the same, nor carry it abroad.  In the name of the King!"

The whisperings ceased as suddenly as if the whisperers had been
stricken dumb.

Soon there was a general buzz along the corridors, of "The prince! See,
the prince comes!"

Poor Tom came slowly walking past the low-bowing groups, trying to
bow in return, and meekly gazing upon his strange surroundings with
bewildered and pathetic eyes.  Great nobles walked upon each side of
him, making him lean upon them, and so steady his steps. Behind him
followed the court-physicians and some servants.

Presently Tom found himself in a noble apartment of the palace and heard
the door close behind him.  Around him stood those who had come with
him. Before him, at a little distance, reclined a very large and very
fat man, with a wide, pulpy face, and a stern expression.  His large
head was very grey; and his whiskers, which he wore only around his
face, like a frame, were grey also.  His clothing was of rich stuff,
but old, and slightly frayed in places.  One of his swollen legs had a
pillow under it, and was wrapped in bandages.  There was silence now;
and there was no head there but was bent in reverence, except this
man's.  This stern-countenanced invalid was the dread Henry VIII.  He
said--and his face grew gentle as he began to speak--

"How now, my lord Edward, my prince?  Hast been minded to cozen me, the
good King thy father, who loveth thee, and kindly useth thee, with a
sorry jest?"

Poor Tom was listening, as well as his dazed faculties would let him,
to the beginning of this speech; but when the words 'me, the good King'
fell upon his ear, his face blanched, and he dropped as instantly upon
his knees as if a shot had brought him there. Lifting up his hands, he
exclaimed--

"Thou the _King_?  Then am I undone indeed!"

This speech seemed to stun the King.  His eyes wandered from face to
face aimlessly, then rested, bewildered, upon the boy before him.  Then
he said in a tone of deep disappointment--

"Alack, I had believed the rumour disproportioned to the truth; but I
fear me 'tis not so."  He breathed a heavy sigh, and said in a gentle
voice, "Come to thy father, child:  thou art not well."

Tom was assisted to his feet, and approached the Majesty of England,
humble and trembling.  The King took the frightened face between his
hands, and gazed earnestly and lovingly into it awhile, as if seeking
some grateful sign of returning reason there, then pressed the curly
head against his breast, and patted it tenderly.  Presently he said--

"Dost not know thy father, child?  Break not mine old heart; say thou
know'st me.  Thou _dost_ know me, dost thou not?"

"Yea:  thou art my dread lord the King, whom God preserve!"

"True, true--that is well--be comforted, tremble not so; there is none
here would hurt thee; there is none here but loves thee. Thou art better
now; thy ill dream passeth--is't not so?  Thou wilt not miscall thyself
again, as they say thou didst a little while agone?"

"I pray thee of thy grace believe me, I did but speak the truth, most
dread lord; for I am the meanest among thy subjects, being a pauper
born, and 'tis by a sore mischance and accident I am here, albeit I was
therein nothing blameful.  I am but young to die, and thou canst save me
with one little word.  Oh speak it, sir!"

"Die?  Talk not so, sweet prince--peace, peace, to thy troubled
heart--thou shalt not die!"

Tom dropped upon his knees with a glad cry--

"God requite thy mercy, O my King, and save thee long to bless thy
land!" Then springing up, he turned a joyful face toward the two lords
in waiting, and exclaimed, "Thou heard'st it!  I am not to die:  the
King hath said it!"  There was no movement, save that all bowed with
grave respect; but no one spoke.  He hesitated, a little confused, then
turned timidly toward the King, saying, "I may go now?"

"Go?  Surely, if thou desirest.  But why not tarry yet a little? Whither
would'st go?"

Tom dropped his eyes, and answered humbly--

"Peradventure I mistook; but I did think me free, and so was I moved
to seek again the kennel where I was born and bred to misery, yet which
harboureth my mother and my sisters, and so is home to me; whereas these
pomps and splendours whereunto I am not used--oh, please you, sir, to
let me go!"

The King was silent and thoughtful a while, and his face betrayed a
growing distress and uneasiness.  Presently he said, with something of
hope in his voice--

"Perchance he is but mad upon this one strain, and hath his wits
unmarred as toucheth other matter.  God send it may be so!  We will make
trial."

Then he asked Tom a question in Latin, and Tom answered him lamely in
the same tongue.  The lords and doctors manifested their gratification
also. The King said--

"'Twas not according to his schooling and ability, but showeth that his
mind is but diseased, not stricken fatally.  How say you, sir?"

The physician addressed bowed low, and replied--

"It jumpeth with my own conviction, sire, that thou hast divined
aright."

The King looked pleased with this encouragement, coming as it did from
so excellent authority, and continued with good heart--

"Now mark ye all:  we will try him further."

He put a question to Tom in French.  Tom stood silent a moment,
embarrassed by having so many eyes centred upon him, then said
diffidently--

"I have no knowledge of this tongue, so please your majesty."

The King fell back upon his couch.  The attendants flew to his
assistance; but he put them aside, and said--

"Trouble me not--it is nothing but a scurvy faintness.  Raise me! There,
'tis sufficient.  Come hither, child; there, rest thy poor troubled head
upon thy father's heart, and be at peace.  Thou'lt soon be well:  'tis
but a passing fantasy.  Fear thou not; thou'lt soon be well."  Then
he turned toward the company:  his gentle manner changed, and baleful
lightnings began to play from his eyes.  He said--

"List ye all!  This my son is mad; but it is not permanent.  Over-study
hath done this, and somewhat too much of confinement.  Away with his
books and teachers! see ye to it.  Pleasure him with sports, beguile him
in wholesome ways, so that his health come again."  He raised himself
higher still, and went on with energy, "He is mad; but he is my son,
and England's heir; and, mad or sane, still shall he reign!  And hear ye
further, and proclaim it: whoso speaketh of this his distemper worketh
against the peace and order of these realms, and shall to the gallows!
. . . Give me to drink--I burn:  this sorrow sappeth my strength. . . .
There, take away the cup. . . . Support me.  There, that is well.  Mad,
is he?  Were he a thousand times mad, yet is he Prince of Wales, and I
the King will confirm it.  This very morrow shall he be installed in his
princely dignity in due and ancient form.  Take instant order for it, my
lord Hertford."

One of the nobles knelt at the royal couch, and said--

"The King's majesty knoweth that the Hereditary Great Marshal of England
lieth attainted in the Tower.  It were not meet that one attainted--"

"Peace!  Insult not mine ears with his hated name.  Is this man to
live for ever?  Am I to be baulked of my will?  Is the prince to tarry
uninstalled, because, forsooth, the realm lacketh an Earl Marshal
free of treasonable taint to invest him with his honours? No, by the
splendour of God!  Warn my Parliament to bring me Norfolk's doom before
the sun rise again, else shall they answer for it grievously!" {1}

Lord Hertford said--

"The King's will is law;" and, rising, returned to his former place.

Gradually the wrath faded out of the old King's face, and he said--

"Kiss me, my prince.  There . . . what fearest thou?  Am I not thy
loving father?"

"Thou art good to me that am unworthy, O mighty and gracious lord: that
in truth I know.  But--but--it grieveth me to think of him that is to
die, and--"

"Ah, 'tis like thee, 'tis like thee!  I know thy heart is still the
same, even though thy mind hath suffered hurt, for thou wert ever of a
gentle spirit.  But this duke standeth between thee and thine honours:
 I will have another in his stead that shall bring no taint to his great
office. Comfort thee, my prince:  trouble not thy poor head with this
matter."

"But is it not I that speed him hence, my liege?  How long might he not
live, but for me?"

"Take no thought of him, my prince:  he is not worthy.  Kiss me once
again, and go to thy trifles and amusements; for my malady distresseth
me.  I am aweary, and would rest.  Go with thine uncle Hertford and thy
people, and come again when my body is refreshed."

Tom, heavy-hearted, was conducted from the presence, for this last
sentence was a death-blow to the hope he had cherished that now he would
be set free.  Once more he heard the buzz of low voices exclaiming, "The
prince, the prince comes!"

His spirits sank lower and lower as he moved between the glittering
files of bowing courtiers; for he recognised that he was indeed a
captive now, and might remain for ever shut up in this gilded cage, a
forlorn and friendless prince, except God in his mercy take pity on him
and set him free.

And, turn where he would, he seemed to see floating in the air the
severed head and the remembered face of the great Duke of Norfolk, the
eyes fixed on him reproachfully.

His old dreams had been so pleasant; but this reality was so dreary!




CHAPTER VI. Tom receives instructions.

Tom was conducted to the principal apartment of a noble suite, and made
to sit down--a thing which he was loth to do, since there were elderly
men and men of high degree about him.  He begged them to be seated
also, but they only bowed their thanks or murmured them, and remained
standing. He would have insisted, but his 'uncle' the Earl of Hertford
whispered in his ear--

"Prithee, insist not, my lord; it is not meet that they sit in thy
presence."

The Lord St. John was announced, and after making obeisance to Tom, he
said--

"I come upon the King's errand, concerning a matter which requireth
privacy.  Will it please your royal highness to dismiss all that attend
you here, save my lord the Earl of Hertford?"

Observing that Tom did not seem to know how to proceed, Hertford
whispered him to make a sign with his hand, and not trouble himself to
speak unless he chose.  When the waiting gentlemen had retired, Lord St.
John said--

"His majesty commandeth, that for due and weighty reasons of state, the
prince's grace shall hide his infirmity in all ways that be within his
power, till it be passed and he be as he was before.  To wit, that he
shall deny to none that he is the true prince, and heir to England's
greatness; that he shall uphold his princely dignity, and shall receive,
without word or sign of protest, that reverence and observance which
unto it do appertain of right and ancient usage; that he shall cease to
speak to any of that lowly birth and life his malady hath conjured
out of the unwholesome imaginings of o'er-wrought fancy; that he shall
strive with diligence to bring unto his memory again those faces which
he was wont to know--and where he faileth he shall hold his peace,
neither betraying by semblance of surprise or other sign that he hath
forgot; that upon occasions of state, whensoever any matter shall
perplex him as to the thing he should do or the utterance he should
make, he shall show nought of unrest to the curious that look on, but
take advice in that matter of the Lord Hertford, or my humble self,
which are commanded of the King to be upon this service and close at
call, till this commandment be dissolved. Thus saith the King's majesty,
who sendeth greeting to your royal highness, and prayeth that God will
of His mercy quickly heal you and have you now and ever in His holy
keeping."

The Lord St. John made reverence and stood aside.  Tom replied
resignedly--

"The King hath said it.  None may palter with the King's command, or fit
it to his ease, where it doth chafe, with deft evasions. The King shall
be obeyed."

Lord Hertford said--

"Touching the King's majesty's ordainment concerning books and such like
serious matters, it may peradventure please your highness to ease your
time with lightsome entertainment, lest you go wearied to the banquet
and suffer harm thereby."

Tom's face showed inquiring surprise; and a blush followed when he saw
Lord St. John's eyes bent sorrowfully upon him.  His lordship said--

"Thy memory still wrongeth thee, and thou hast shown surprise--but
suffer it not to trouble thee, for 'tis a matter that will not bide,
but depart with thy mending malady.  My Lord of Hertford speaketh of
the city's banquet which the King's majesty did promise, some two months
flown, your highness should attend.  Thou recallest it now?"

"It grieves me to confess it had indeed escaped me," said Tom, in a
hesitating voice; and blushed again.

At this moment the Lady Elizabeth and the Lady Jane Grey were announced.
The two lords exchanged significant glances, and Hertford stepped
quickly toward the door.  As the young girls passed him, he said in a
low voice--

"I pray ye, ladies, seem not to observe his humours, nor show surprise
when his memory doth lapse--it will grieve you to note how it doth stick
at every trifle."

Meantime Lord St. John was saying in Tom's ear--

"Please you, sir, keep diligently in mind his majesty's desire. Remember
all thou canst--_seem_ to remember all else.  Let them not perceive that
thou art much changed from thy wont, for thou knowest how tenderly thy
old play-fellows bear thee in their hearts and how 'twould grieve them.
Art willing, sir, that I remain?--and thine uncle?"

Tom signified assent with a gesture and a murmured word, for he was
already learning, and in his simple heart was resolved to acquit himself
as best he might, according to the King's command.

In spite of every precaution, the conversation among the young people
became a little embarrassing at times.  More than once, in truth,
Tom was near to breaking down and confessing himself unequal to his
tremendous part; but the tact of the Princess Elizabeth saved him, or a
word from one or the other of the vigilant lords, thrown in apparently
by chance, had the same happy effect.  Once the little Lady Jane turned
to Tom and dismayed him with this question,--

"Hast paid thy duty to the Queen's majesty to-day, my lord?"

Tom hesitated, looked distressed, and was about to stammer out something
at hazard, when Lord St. John took the word and answered for him
with the easy grace of a courtier accustomed to encounter delicate
difficulties and to be ready for them--

"He hath indeed, madam, and she did greatly hearten him, as touching his
majesty's condition; is it not so, your highness?"

Tom mumbled something that stood for assent, but felt that he was
getting upon dangerous ground.  Somewhat later it was mentioned that
Tom was to study no more at present, whereupon her little ladyship
exclaimed--

"'Tis a pity, 'tis a pity!  Thou wert proceeding bravely.  But bide thy
time in patience:  it will not be for long.  Thou'lt yet be graced
with learning like thy father, and make thy tongue master of as many
languages as his, good my prince."

"My father!" cried Tom, off his guard for the moment.  "I trow he cannot
speak his own so that any but the swine that kennel in the styes may
tell his meaning; and as for learning of any sort soever--"

He looked up and encountered a solemn warning in my Lord St. John's
eyes.

He stopped, blushed, then continued low and sadly: "Ah, my malady
persecuteth me again, and my mind wandereth.  I meant the King's grace
no irreverence."

"We know it, sir," said the Princess Elizabeth, taking her 'brother's'
hand between her two palms, respectfully but caressingly; "trouble not
thyself as to that.  The fault is none of thine, but thy distemper's."

"Thou'rt a gentle comforter, sweet lady," said Tom, gratefully, "and my
heart moveth me to thank thee for't, an' I may be so bold."

Once the giddy little Lady Jane fired a simple Greek phrase at Tom.
 The Princess Elizabeth's quick eye saw by the serene blankness of the
target's front that the shaft was overshot; so she tranquilly delivered
a return volley of sounding Greek on Tom's behalf, and then straightway
changed the talk to other matters.

Time wore on pleasantly, and likewise smoothly, on the whole. Snags and
sandbars grew less and less frequent, and Tom grew more and more at
his ease, seeing that all were so lovingly bent upon helping him and
overlooking his mistakes.  When it came out that the little ladies were
to accompany him to the Lord Mayor's banquet in the evening, his heart
gave a bound of relief and delight, for he felt that he should not be
friendless, now, among that multitude of strangers; whereas, an
hour earlier, the idea of their going with him would have been an
insupportable terror to him.

Tom's guardian angels, the two lords, had had less comfort in the
interview than the other parties to it.  They felt much as if they were
piloting a great ship through a dangerous channel; they were on the
alert constantly, and found their office no child's play. Wherefore,
at last, when the ladies' visit was drawing to a close and the Lord
Guilford Dudley was announced, they not only felt that their charge had
been sufficiently taxed for the present, but also that they themselves
were not in the best condition to take their ship back and make their
anxious voyage all over again.  So they respectfully advised Tom to
excuse himself, which he was very glad to do, although a slight shade
of disappointment might have been observed upon my Lady Jane's face when
she heard the splendid stripling denied admittance.

There was a pause now, a sort of waiting silence which Tom could not
understand.  He glanced at Lord Hertford, who gave him a sign--but he
failed to understand that also.  The ready Elizabeth came to the rescue
with her usual easy grace.  She made reverence and said--

"Have we leave of the prince's grace my brother to go?"

Tom said--

"Indeed your ladyships can have whatsoever of me they will, for the
asking; yet would I rather give them any other thing that in my poor
power lieth, than leave to take the light and blessing of their presence
hence.  Give ye good den, and God be with ye!" Then he smiled inwardly
at the thought, "'Tis not for nought I have dwelt but among princes in
my reading, and taught my tongue some slight trick of their broidered
and gracious speech withal!"

When the illustrious maidens were gone, Tom turned wearily to his
keepers and said--

"May it please your lordships to grant me leave to go into some corner
and rest me?"

Lord Hertford said--

"So please your highness, it is for you to command, it is for us to
obey. That thou should'st rest is indeed a needful thing, since thou
must journey to the city presently."

He touched a bell, and a page appeared, who was ordered to desire the
presence of Sir William Herbert.  This gentleman came straightway, and
conducted Tom to an inner apartment.  Tom's first movement there was
to reach for a cup of water; but a silk-and-velvet servitor seized it,
dropped upon one knee, and offered it to him on a golden salver.

Next the tired captive sat down and was going to take off his buskins,
timidly asking leave with his eye, but another silk-and-velvet
discomforter went down upon his knees and took the office from him.  He
made two or three further efforts to help himself, but being promptly
forestalled each time, he finally gave up, with a sigh of resignation
and a murmured "Beshrew me, but I marvel they do not require to breathe
for me also!"  Slippered, and wrapped in a sumptuous robe, he laid
himself down at last to rest, but not to sleep, for his head was too
full of thoughts and the room too full of people.  He could not dismiss
the former, so they stayed; he did not know enough to dismiss the
latter, so they stayed also, to his vast regret--and theirs.

Tom's departure had left his two noble guardians alone.  They mused a
while, with much head-shaking and walking the floor, then Lord St. John
said--

"Plainly, what dost thou think?"

"Plainly, then, this.  The King is near his end; my nephew is mad--mad
will mount the throne, and mad remain.  God protect England, since she
will need it!"

"Verily it promiseth so, indeed.  But . . . have you no misgivings as to
. . . as to . . ."

The speaker hesitated, and finally stopped.  He evidently felt that he
was upon delicate ground.  Lord Hertford stopped before him, looked into
his face with a clear, frank eye, and said--

"Speak on--there is none to hear but me.  Misgivings as to what?"

"I am full loth to word the thing that is in my mind, and thou so near
to him in blood, my lord.  But craving pardon if I do offend, seemeth it
not strange that madness could so change his port and manner?--not but
that his port and speech are princely still, but that they _differ_,
in one unweighty trifle or another, from what his custom was aforetime.
 Seemeth it not strange that madness should filch from his memory his
father's very lineaments; the customs and observances that are his due
from such as be about him; and, leaving him his Latin, strip him of his
Greek and French?  My lord, be not offended, but ease my mind of its
disquiet and receive my grateful thanks.  It haunteth me, his saying he
was not the prince, and so--"

"Peace, my lord, thou utterest treason!  Hast forgot the King's command?
Remember I am party to thy crime if I but listen."

St. John paled, and hastened to say--

"I was in fault, I do confess it.  Betray me not, grant me this grace
out of thy courtesy, and I will neither think nor speak of this thing
more. Deal not hardly with me, sir, else am I ruined."

"I am content, my lord.  So thou offend not again, here or in the
ears of others, it shall be as though thou hadst not spoken.  But thou
need'st not have misgivings.  He is my sister's son; are not his voice,
his face, his form, familiar to me from his cradle? Madness can do all
the odd conflicting things thou seest in him, and more.  Dost not recall
how that the old Baron Marley, being mad, forgot the favour of his
own countenance that he had known for sixty years, and held it was
another's; nay, even claimed he was the son of Mary Magdalene, and that
his head was made of Spanish glass; and, sooth to say, he suffered none
to touch it, lest by mischance some heedless hand might shiver it?  Give
thy misgivings easement, good my lord.  This is the very prince--I know
him well--and soon will be thy king; it may advantage thee to bear this
in mind, and more dwell upon it than the other."

After some further talk, in which the Lord St. John covered up his
mistake as well as he could by repeated protests that his faith was
thoroughly grounded now, and could not be assailed by doubts again, the
Lord Hertford relieved his fellow-keeper, and sat down to keep watch and
ward alone.  He was soon deep in meditation, and evidently the longer he
thought, the more he was bothered.  By-and-by he began to pace the floor
and mutter.

"Tush, he _must_ be the prince!  Will any be in all the land maintain
there can be two, not of one blood and birth, so marvellously twinned?
 And even were it so, 'twere yet a stranger miracle that chance should
cast the one into the other's place. Nay, 'tis folly, folly, folly!"

Presently he said--

"Now were he impostor and called himself prince, look you _that_ would
be natural; that would be reasonable.  But lived ever an impostor yet,
who, being called prince by the king, prince by the court, prince by
all, _denied_ his dignity and pleaded against his exaltation?  _No_!  By
the soul of St. Swithin, no!  This is the true prince, gone mad!"




CHAPTER VII. Tom's first royal dinner.

Somewhat after one in the afternoon, Tom resignedly underwent the ordeal
of being dressed for dinner.  He found himself as finely clothed as
before, but everything different, everything changed, from his ruff to
his stockings.  He was presently conducted with much state to a spacious
and ornate apartment, where a table was already set for one.  Its
furniture was all of massy gold, and beautified with designs which
well-nigh made it priceless, since they were the work of Benvenuto.  The
room was half-filled with noble servitors.  A chaplain said grace, and
Tom was about to fall to, for hunger had long been constitutional with
him, but was interrupted by my lord the Earl of Berkeley, who fastened a
napkin about his neck; for the great post of Diaperers to the Prince
of Wales was hereditary in this nobleman's family.  Tom's cupbearer was
present, and forestalled all his attempts to help himself to wine.  The
Taster to his highness the Prince of Wales was there also, prepared to
taste any suspicious dish upon requirement, and run the risk of being
poisoned.  He was only an ornamental appendage at this time, and was
seldom called upon to exercise his function; but there had been times,
not many generations past, when the office of taster had its perils,
and was not a grandeur to be desired.  Why they did not use a dog or a
plumber seems strange; but all the ways of royalty are strange.  My
Lord d'Arcy, First Groom of the Chamber, was there, to do goodness knows
what; but there he was--let that suffice.  The Lord Chief Butler was
there, and stood behind Tom's chair, overseeing the solemnities, under
command of the Lord Great Steward and the Lord Head Cook, who stood
near.  Tom had three hundred and eighty-four servants beside these;
but they were not all in that room, of course, nor the quarter of them;
neither was Tom aware yet that they existed.

All those that were present had been well drilled within the hour to
remember that the prince was temporarily out of his head, and to be
careful to show no surprise at his vagaries.  These 'vagaries' were
soon on exhibition before them; but they only moved their compassion and
their sorrow, not their mirth.  It was a heavy affliction to them to see
the beloved prince so stricken.

Poor Tom ate with his fingers mainly; but no one smiled at it, or even
seemed to observe it.  He inspected his napkin curiously, and with deep
interest, for it was of a very dainty and beautiful fabric, then said
with simplicity--

"Prithee, take it away, lest in mine unheedfulness it be soiled."

The Hereditary Diaperer took it away with reverent manner, and without
word or protest of any sort.

Tom examined the turnips and the lettuce with interest, and asked what
they were, and if they were to be eaten; for it was only recently that
men had begun to raise these things in England in place of importing
them as luxuries from Holland. {1}  His question was answered with grave
respect, and no surprise manifested.  When he had finished his dessert,
he filled his pockets with nuts; but nobody appeared to be aware of it,
or disturbed by it.  But the next moment he was himself disturbed by
it, and showed discomposure; for this was the only service he had been
permitted to do with his own hands during the meal, and he did not doubt
that he had done a most improper and unprincely thing.  At that moment
the muscles of his nose began to twitch, and the end of that organ to
lift and wrinkle.  This continued, and Tom began to evince a growing
distress.  He looked appealingly, first at one and then another of the
lords about him, and tears came into his eyes.  They sprang forward with
dismay in their faces, and begged to know his trouble.  Tom said with
genuine anguish--

"I crave your indulgence:  my nose itcheth cruelly.  What is the custom
and usage in this emergence?  Prithee, speed, for 'tis but a little time
that I can bear it."

None smiled; but all were sore perplexed, and looked one to the other
in deep tribulation for counsel.  But behold, here was a dead wall, and
nothing in English history to tell how to get over it.  The Master of
Ceremonies was not present:  there was no one who felt safe to venture
upon this uncharted sea, or risk the attempt to solve this solemn
problem.  Alas! there was no Hereditary Scratcher.  Meantime the tears
had overflowed their banks, and begun to trickle down Tom's cheeks.  His
twitching nose was pleading more urgently than ever for relief.  At last
nature broke down the barriers of etiquette:  Tom lifted up an inward
prayer for pardon if he was doing wrong, and brought relief to the
burdened hearts of his court by scratching his nose himself.

His meal being ended, a lord came and held before him a broad, shallow,
golden dish with fragrant rosewater in it, to cleanse his mouth and
fingers with; and my lord the Hereditary Diaperer stood by with a napkin
for his use.  Tom gazed at the dish a puzzled moment or two, then raised
it to his lips, and gravely took a draught.  Then he returned it to the
waiting lord, and said--

"Nay, it likes me not, my lord:  it hath a pretty flavour, but it
wanteth strength."

This new eccentricity of the prince's ruined mind made all the hearts
about him ache; but the sad sight moved none to merriment.

Tom's next unconscious blunder was to get up and leave the table
just when the chaplain had taken his stand behind his chair, and with
uplifted hands, and closed, uplifted eyes, was in the act of beginning
the blessing.  Still nobody seemed to perceive that the prince had done
a thing unusual.

By his own request our small friend was now conducted to his private
cabinet, and left there alone to his own devices.  Hanging upon hooks in
the oaken wainscoting were the several pieces of a suit of shining steel
armour, covered all over with beautiful designs exquisitely inlaid
in gold.  This martial panoply belonged to the true prince--a recent
present from Madam Parr the Queen. Tom put on the greaves, the
gauntlets, the plumed helmet, and such other pieces as he could don
without assistance, and for a while was minded to call for help and
complete the matter, but bethought him of the nuts he had brought away
from dinner, and the joy it would be to eat them with no crowd to eye
him, and no Grand Hereditaries to pester him with undesired services;
so he restored the pretty things to their several places, and soon was
cracking nuts, and feeling almost naturally happy for the first time
since God for his sins had made him a prince.  When the nuts were all
gone, he stumbled upon some inviting books in a closet, among them one
about the etiquette of the English court.  This was a prize. He lay down
upon a sumptuous divan, and proceeded to instruct himself with honest
zeal.  Let us leave him there for the present.




CHAPTER VIII. The Question of the Seal.

About five o'clock Henry VIII. awoke out of an unrefreshing nap, and
muttered to himself, "Troublous dreams, troublous dreams! Mine end is
now at hand:  so say these warnings, and my failing pulses do confirm
it." Presently a wicked light flamed up in his eye, and he muttered,
"Yet will not I die till _He_ go before."

His attendants perceiving that he was awake, one of them asked his
pleasure concerning the Lord Chancellor, who was waiting without.

"Admit him, admit him!" exclaimed the King eagerly.

The Lord Chancellor entered, and knelt by the King's couch, saying--

"I have given order, and, according to the King's command, the peers of
the realm, in their robes, do now stand at the bar of the House, where,
having confirmed the Duke of Norfolk's doom, they humbly wait his
majesty's further pleasure in the matter."

The King's face lit up with a fierce joy.  Said he--

"Lift me up!  In mine own person will I go before my Parliament, and
with mine own hand will I seal the warrant that rids me of--"

His voice failed; an ashen pallor swept the flush from his cheeks; and
the attendants eased him back upon his pillows, and hurriedly assisted
him with restoratives.  Presently he said sorrowfully--

"Alack, how have I longed for this sweet hour! and lo, too late it
cometh, and I am robbed of this so coveted chance.  But speed ye, speed
ye! let others do this happy office sith 'tis denied to me. I put my
Great Seal in commission:  choose thou the lords that shall compose it,
and get ye to your work.  Speed ye, man!  Before the sun shall rise and
set again, bring me his head that I may see it."

"According to the King's command, so shall it be.  Will't please your
majesty to order that the Seal be now restored to me, so that I may
forth upon the business?"

"The Seal?  Who keepeth the Seal but thou?"

"Please your majesty, you did take it from me two days since, saying it
should no more do its office till your own royal hand should use it upon
the Duke of Norfolk's warrant."

"Why, so in sooth I did:  I do remember. . . . What did I with it?...
I am very feeble. . . . So oft these days doth my memory play the
traitor with me. . . . 'Tis strange, strange--"

The King dropped into inarticulate mumblings, shaking his grey head
weakly from time to time, and gropingly trying to recollect what he
had done with the Seal.  At last my Lord Hertford ventured to kneel and
offer information--

"Sire, if that I may be so bold, here be several that do remember with
me how that you gave the Great Seal into the hands of his highness the
Prince of Wales to keep against the day that--"

"True, most true!" interrupted the King.  "Fetch it!  Go:  time flieth!"

Lord Hertford flew to Tom, but returned to the King before very long,
troubled and empty-handed.  He delivered himself to this effect--

"It grieveth me, my lord the King, to bear so heavy and unwelcome
tidings; but it is the will of God that the prince's affliction abideth
still, and he cannot recall to mind that he received the Seal.  So came
I quickly to report, thinking it were waste of precious time, and
little worth withal, that any should attempt to search the long array of
chambers and saloons that belong unto his royal high--"

A groan from the King interrupted the lord at this point.  After a
little while his majesty said, with a deep sadness in his tone--

"Trouble him no more, poor child.  The hand of God lieth heavy upon him,
and my heart goeth out in loving compassion for him, and sorrow that I
may not bear his burden on mine old trouble-weighted shoulders, and so
bring him peace."

He closed his eyes, fell to mumbling, and presently was silent. After
a time he opened his eyes again, and gazed vacantly around until his
glance rested upon the kneeling Lord Chancellor. Instantly his face
flushed with wrath--

"What, thou here yet!  By the glory of God, an' thou gettest not about
that traitor's business, thy mitre shall have holiday the morrow for
lack of a head to grace withal!"

The trembling Chancellor answered--

"Good your Majesty, I cry you mercy!  I but waited for the Seal."

"Man, hast lost thy wits?  The small Seal which aforetime I was wont
to take with me abroad lieth in my treasury.  And, since the Great Seal
hath flown away, shall not it suffice?  Hast lost thy wits?  Begone!
 And hark ye--come no more till thou do bring his head."

The poor Chancellor was not long in removing himself from this dangerous
vicinity; nor did the commission waste time in giving the royal assent
to the work of the slavish Parliament, and appointing the morrow for the
beheading of the premier peer of England, the luckless Duke of Norfolk.




CHAPTER IX. The river pageant.

At nine in the evening the whole vast river-front of the palace was
blazing with light.  The river itself, as far as the eye could reach
citywards, was so thickly covered with watermen's boats and with
pleasure-barges, all fringed with coloured lanterns, and gently agitated
by the waves, that it resembled a glowing and limitless garden of
flowers stirred to soft motion by summer winds.  The grand terrace of
stone steps leading down to the water, spacious enough to mass the army
of a German principality upon, was a picture to see, with its ranks
of royal halberdiers in polished armour, and its troops of brilliantly
costumed servitors flitting up and down, and to and fro, in the hurry of
preparation.

Presently a command was given, and immediately all living creatures
vanished from the steps.  Now the air was heavy with the hush of
suspense and expectancy.  As far as one's vision could carry, he might
see the myriads of people in the boats rise up, and shade their eyes
from the glare of lanterns and torches, and gaze toward the palace.

A file of forty or fifty state barges drew up to the steps.  They were
richly gilt, and their lofty prows and sterns were elaborately carved.
Some of them were decorated with banners and streamers; some with
cloth-of-gold and arras embroidered with coats-of-arms; others with
silken flags that had numberless little silver bells fastened to them,
which shook out tiny showers of joyous music whenever the breezes
fluttered them; others of yet higher pretensions, since they belonged to
nobles in the prince's immediate service, had their sides picturesquely
fenced with shields gorgeously emblazoned with armorial bearings.  Each
state barge was towed by a tender.  Besides the rowers, these tenders
carried each a number of men-at-arms in glossy helmet and breastplate,
and a company of musicians.

The advance-guard of the expected procession now appeared in the great
gateway, a troop of halberdiers.  'They were dressed in striped hose of
black and tawny, velvet caps graced at the sides with silver roses, and
doublets of murrey and blue cloth, embroidered on the front and back
with the three feathers, the prince's blazon, woven in gold.  Their
halberd staves were covered with crimson velvet, fastened with gilt
nails, and ornamented with gold tassels.  Filing off on the right and
left, they formed two long lines, extending from the gateway of the
palace to the water's edge.  A thick rayed cloth or carpet was
then unfolded, and laid down between them by attendants in the
gold-and-crimson liveries of the prince.  This done, a flourish of
trumpets resounded from within.  A lively prelude arose from the
musicians on the water; and two ushers with white wands marched with a
slow and stately pace from the portal.  They were followed by an officer
bearing the civic mace, after whom came another carrying the city's
sword; then several sergeants of the city guard, in their full
accoutrements, and with badges on their sleeves; then the Garter
King-at-arms, in his tabard; then several Knights of the Bath, each with
a white lace on his sleeve; then their esquires; then the judges, in
their robes of scarlet and coifs; then the Lord High Chancellor of
England, in a robe of scarlet, open before, and purfled with minever;
then a deputation of aldermen, in their scarlet cloaks; and then the
heads of the different civic companies, in their robes of state. Now
came twelve French gentlemen, in splendid habiliments, consisting of
pourpoints of white damask barred with gold, short mantles of
crimson velvet lined with violet taffeta, and carnation coloured
hauts-de-chausses, and took their way down the steps.  They were of the
suite of the French ambassador, and were followed by twelve cavaliers of
the suite of the Spanish ambassador, clothed in black velvet, unrelieved
by any ornament.  Following these came several great English nobles with
their attendants.'

There was a flourish of trumpets within; and the Prince's uncle, the
future great Duke of Somerset, emerged from the gateway, arrayed in a
'doublet of black cloth-of-gold, and a cloak of crimson satin flowered
with gold, and ribanded with nets of silver.'  He turned, doffed
his plumed cap, bent his body in a low reverence, and began to step
backward, bowing at each step.  A prolonged trumpet-blast followed, and
a proclamation, "Way for the high and mighty the Lord Edward, Prince of
Wales!"  High aloft on the palace walls a long line of red tongues of
flame leapt forth with a thunder-crash; the massed world on the river
burst into a mighty roar of welcome; and Tom Canty, the cause and hero
of it all, stepped into view and slightly bowed his princely head.

He was 'magnificently habited in a doublet of white satin, with a
front-piece of purple cloth-of-tissue, powdered with diamonds, and edged
with ermine.  Over this he wore a mantle of white cloth-of-gold, pounced
with the triple-feathered crest, lined with blue satin, set with pearls
and precious stones, and fastened with a clasp of brilliants.  About his
neck hung the order of the Garter, and several princely foreign orders;'
and wherever light fell upon him jewels responded with a blinding flash.
 O Tom Canty, born in a hovel, bred in the gutters of London, familiar
with rags and dirt and misery, what a spectacle is this!




CHAPTER X. The Prince in the toils.

We left John Canty dragging the rightful prince into Offal Court, with
a noisy and delighted mob at his heels.  There was but one person in it
who offered a pleading word for the captive, and he was not heeded; he
was hardly even heard, so great was the turmoil.  The Prince continued
to struggle for freedom, and to rage against the treatment he was
suffering, until John Canty lost what little patience was left in him,
and raised his oaken cudgel in a sudden fury over the Prince's head.
 The single pleader for the lad sprang to stop the man's arm, and the
blow descended upon his own wrist.  Canty roared out--

"Thou'lt meddle, wilt thou?  Then have thy reward."

His cudgel crashed down upon the meddler's head:  there was a groan, a
dim form sank to the ground among the feet of the crowd, and the next
moment it lay there in the dark alone.  The mob pressed on, their
enjoyment nothing disturbed by this episode.

Presently the Prince found himself in John Canty's abode, with the door
closed against the outsiders.  By the vague light of a tallow candle
which was thrust into a bottle, he made out the main features of the
loathsome den, and also the occupants of it.  Two frowsy girls and
a middle-aged woman cowered against the wall in one corner, with the
aspect of animals habituated to harsh usage, and expecting and dreading
it now. From another corner stole a withered hag with streaming grey
hair and malignant eyes.  John Canty said to this one--

"Tarry!  There's fine mummeries here.  Mar them not till thou'st enjoyed
them:  then let thy hand be heavy as thou wilt.  Stand forth, lad.  Now
say thy foolery again, an thou'st not forgot it. Name thy name.  Who art
thou?"

The insulted blood mounted to the little prince's cheek once more, and
he lifted a steady and indignant gaze to the man's face and said--

"'Tis but ill-breeding in such as thou to command me to speak.  I tell
thee now, as I told thee before, I am Edward, Prince of Wales, and none
other."

The stunning surprise of this reply nailed the hag's feet to the floor
where she stood, and almost took her breath.  She stared at the Prince
in stupid amazement, which so amused her ruffianly son, that he burst
into a roar of laughter.  But the effect upon Tom Canty's mother and
sisters was different.  Their dread of bodily injury gave way at once to
distress of a different sort.  They ran forward with woe and dismay in
their faces, exclaiming--

"Oh, poor Tom, poor lad!"

The mother fell on her knees before the Prince, put her hands upon his
shoulders, and gazed yearningly into his face through her rising tears.
Then she said--

"Oh, my poor boy!  Thy foolish reading hath wrought its woeful work at
last, and ta'en thy wit away.  Ah! why did'st thou cleave to it when I
so warned thee 'gainst it?  Thou'st broke thy mother's heart."

The Prince looked into her face, and said gently--

"Thy son is well, and hath not lost his wits, good dame.  Comfort thee:
let me to the palace where he is, and straightway will the King my
father restore him to thee."

"The King thy father!  Oh, my child! unsay these words that be freighted
with death for thee, and ruin for all that be near to thee.  Shake of
this gruesome dream.  Call back thy poor wandering memory.  Look upon
me. Am not I thy mother that bore thee, and loveth thee?"

The Prince shook his head and reluctantly said--

"God knoweth I am loth to grieve thy heart; but truly have I never
looked upon thy face before."

The woman sank back to a sitting posture on the floor, and, covering her
eyes with her hands, gave way to heart-broken sobs and wailings.

"Let the show go on!" shouted Canty.  "What, Nan!--what, Bet! mannerless
wenches! will ye stand in the Prince's presence?  Upon your knees, ye
pauper scum, and do him reverence!"

He followed this with another horse-laugh.  The girls began to plead
timidly for their brother; and Nan said--

"An thou wilt but let him to bed, father, rest and sleep will heal his
madness:  prithee, do."

"Do, father," said Bet; "he is more worn than is his wont.  To-morrow
will he be himself again, and will beg with diligence, and come not
empty home again."

This remark sobered the father's joviality, and brought his mind to
business.  He turned angrily upon the Prince, and said--

"The morrow must we pay two pennies to him that owns this hole; two
pennies, mark ye--all this money for a half-year's rent, else out of
this we go.  Show what thou'st gathered with thy lazy begging."

The Prince said--

"Offend me not with thy sordid matters.  I tell thee again I am the
King's son."

A sounding blow upon the Prince's shoulder from Canty's broad palm
sent him staggering into goodwife Canty's arms, who clasped him to her
breast, and sheltered him from a pelting rain of cuffs and slaps by
interposing her own person.  The frightened girls retreated to their
corner; but the grandmother stepped eagerly forward to assist her son.
 The Prince sprang away from Mrs. Canty, exclaiming--

"Thou shalt not suffer for me, madam.  Let these swine do their will
upon me alone."

This speech infuriated the swine to such a degree that they set about
their work without waste of time.  Between them they belaboured the boy
right soundly, and then gave the girls and their mother a beating for
showing sympathy for the victim.

"Now," said Canty, "to bed, all of ye.  The entertainment has tired me."

The light was put out, and the family retired.  As soon as the snorings
of the head of the house and his mother showed that they were asleep,
the young girls crept to where the Prince lay, and covered him tenderly
from the cold with straw and rags; and their mother crept to him also,
and stroked his hair, and cried over him, whispering broken words of
comfort and compassion in his ear the while.  She had saved a morsel for
him to eat, also; but the boy's pains had swept away all appetite--at
least for black and tasteless crusts.  He was touched by her brave and
costly defence of him, and by her commiseration; and he thanked her in
very noble and princely words, and begged her to go to her sleep and try
to forget her sorrows.  And he added that the King his father would not
let her loyal kindness and devotion go unrewarded.  This return to his
'madness' broke her heart anew, and she strained him to her breast again
and again, and then went back, drowned in tears, to her bed.

As she lay thinking and mourning, the suggestion began to creep into
her mind that there was an undefinable something about this boy that was
lacking in Tom Canty, mad or sane.  She could not describe it, she could
not tell just what it was, and yet her sharp mother-instinct seemed to
detect it and perceive it.  What if the boy were really not her son,
after all?  Oh, absurd!  She almost smiled at the idea, spite of her
griefs and troubles.  No matter, she found that it was an idea that
would not 'down,' but persisted in haunting her.  It pursued her, it
harassed her, it clung to her, and refused to be put away or ignored.
 At last she perceived that there was not going to be any peace for her
until she should devise a test that should prove, clearly and without
question, whether this lad was her son or not, and so banish these
wearing and worrying doubts.  Ah, yes, this was plainly the right way
out of the difficulty; therefore she set her wits to work at once to
contrive that test.  But it was an easier thing to propose than to
accomplish.  She turned over in her mind one promising test after
another, but was obliged to relinquish them all--none of them were
absolutely sure, absolutely perfect; and an imperfect one could not
satisfy her.  Evidently she was racking her head in vain--it seemed
manifest that she must give the matter up.  While this depressing
thought was passing through her mind, her ear caught the regular
breathing of the boy, and she knew he had fallen asleep.  And while she
listened, the measured breathing was broken by a soft, startled
cry, such as one utters in a troubled dream.  This chance occurrence
furnished her instantly with a plan worth all her laboured tests
combined.  She at once set herself feverishly, but noiselessly, to work
to relight her candle, muttering to herself, "Had I but seen him _then_,
I should have known!  Since that day, when he was little, that the
powder burst in his face, he hath never been startled of a sudden out of
his dreams or out of his thinkings, but he hath cast his hand before his
eyes, even as he did that day; and not as others would do it, with the
palm inward, but always with the palm turned outward--I have seen it a
hundred times, and it hath never varied nor ever failed.  Yes, I shall
soon know, now!"

By this time she had crept to the slumbering boy's side, with the
candle, shaded, in her hand.  She bent heedfully and warily over him,
scarcely breathing in her suppressed excitement, and suddenly flashed
the light in his face and struck the floor by his ear with her knuckles.
 The sleeper's eyes sprang wide open, and he cast a startled stare about
him--but he made no special movement with his hands.

The poor woman was smitten almost helpless with surprise and grief;
but she contrived to hide her emotions, and to soothe the boy to sleep
again; then she crept apart and communed miserably with herself upon
the disastrous result of her experiment.  She tried to believe that her
Tom's madness had banished this habitual gesture of his; but she could
not do it.  "No," she said, "his _hands_ are not mad; they could not
unlearn so old a habit in so brief a time.  Oh, this is a heavy day for
me!"

Still, hope was as stubborn now as doubt had been before; she could not
bring herself to accept the verdict of the test; she must try the thing
again--the failure must have been only an accident; so she startled the
boy out of his sleep a second and a third time, at intervals--with the
same result which had marked the first test; then she dragged herself to
bed, and fell sorrowfully asleep, saying, "But I cannot give him up--oh
no, I cannot, I cannot--he _must_ be my boy!"

The poor mother's interruptions having ceased, and the Prince's pains
having gradually lost their power to disturb him, utter weariness at
last sealed his eyes in a profound and restful sleep. Hour after hour
slipped away, and still he slept like the dead. Thus four or five hours
passed. Then his stupor began to lighten. Presently, while half asleep
and half awake, he murmured--

"Sir William!"

After a moment--

"Ho, Sir William Herbert!  Hie thee hither, and list to the strangest
dream that ever . . . Sir William! dost hear?  Man, I did think me
changed to a pauper, and . . . Ho there!  Guards! Sir William!  What!
is there no groom of the chamber in waiting? Alack! it shall go hard
with--"

"What aileth thee?" asked a whisper near him.  "Who art thou calling?"

"Sir William Herbert.  Who art thou?"

"I?  Who should I be, but thy sister Nan?  Oh, Tom, I had forgot!
Thou'rt mad yet--poor lad, thou'rt mad yet:  would I had never woke to
know it again!  But prithee master thy tongue, lest we be all beaten
till we die!"

The startled Prince sprang partly up, but a sharp reminder from his
stiffened bruises brought him to himself, and he sank back among his
foul straw with a moan and the ejaculation--

"Alas! it was no dream, then!"

In a moment all the heavy sorrow and misery which sleep had banished
were upon him again, and he realised that he was no longer a petted
prince in a palace, with the adoring eyes of a nation upon him, but
a pauper, an outcast, clothed in rags, prisoner in a den fit only for
beasts, and consorting with beggars and thieves.

In the midst of his grief he began to be conscious of hilarious noises
and shoutings, apparently but a block or two away.  The next moment
there were several sharp raps at the door; John Canty ceased from
snoring and said--

"Who knocketh?  What wilt thou?"

A voice answered--

"Know'st thou who it was thou laid thy cudgel on?"

"No.  Neither know I, nor care."

"Belike thou'lt change thy note eftsoons.  An thou would save thy neck,
nothing but flight may stead thee.  The man is this moment delivering up
the ghost.  'Tis the priest, Father Andrew!"

"God-a-mercy!" exclaimed Canty.  He roused his family, and hoarsely
commanded, "Up with ye all and fly--or bide where ye are and perish!"

Scarcely five minutes later the Canty household were in the street and
flying for their lives.  John Canty held the Prince by the wrist, and
hurried him along the dark way, giving him this caution in a low voice--

"Mind thy tongue, thou mad fool, and speak not our name.  I will choose
me a new name, speedily, to throw the law's dogs off the scent.  Mind
thy tongue, I tell thee!"

He growled these words to the rest of the family--

"If it so chance that we be separated, let each make for London Bridge;
whoso findeth himself as far as the last linen-draper's shop on the
bridge, let him tarry there till the others be come, then will we flee
into Southwark together."

At this moment the party burst suddenly out of darkness into light;
and not only into light, but into the midst of a multitude of singing,
dancing, and shouting people, massed together on the river frontage.
There was a line of bonfires stretching as far as one could see, up
and down the Thames; London Bridge was illuminated; Southwark Bridge
likewise; the entire river was aglow with the flash and sheen of
coloured lights; and constant explosions of fireworks filled the skies
with an intricate commingling of shooting splendours and a thick rain
of dazzling sparks that almost turned night into day; everywhere were
crowds of revellers; all London seemed to be at large.

John Canty delivered himself of a furious curse and commanded a retreat;
but it was too late.  He and his tribe were swallowed up in that
swarming hive of humanity, and hopelessly separated from each other in
an instant. We are not considering that the Prince was one of his tribe;
Canty still kept his grip upon him.  The Prince's heart was beating high
with hopes of escape, now.  A burly waterman, considerably exalted with
liquor, found himself rudely shoved by Canty in his efforts to plough
through the crowd; he laid his great hand on Canty's shoulder and said--

"Nay, whither so fast, friend?  Dost canker thy soul with sordid
business when all that be leal men and true make holiday?"

"Mine affairs are mine own, they concern thee not," answered Canty,
roughly; "take away thy hand and let me pass."

"Sith that is thy humour, thou'lt _not_ pass, till thou'st drunk to the
Prince of Wales, I tell thee that," said the waterman, barring the way
resolutely.

"Give me the cup, then, and make speed, make speed!"

Other revellers were interested by this time.  They cried out--

"The loving-cup, the loving-cup! make the sour knave drink the
loving-cup, else will we feed him to the fishes."

So a huge loving-cup was brought; the waterman, grasping it by one of
its handles, and with the other hand bearing up the end of an imaginary
napkin, presented it in due and ancient form to Canty, who had to grasp
the opposite handle with one of his hands and take off the lid with the
other, according to ancient custom. This left the Prince hand-free for
a second, of course.  He wasted no time, but dived among the forest of
legs about him and disappeared.  In another moment he could not have
been harder to find, under that tossing sea of life, if its billows had
been the Atlantic's and he a lost sixpence.

He very soon realised this fact, and straightway busied himself about
his own affairs without further thought of John Canty.  He quickly
realised another thing, too.  To wit, that a spurious Prince of Wales
was being feasted by the city in his stead.  He easily concluded that
the pauper lad, Tom Canty, had deliberately taken advantage of his
stupendous opportunity and become a usurper.

Therefore there was but one course to pursue--find his way to the
Guildhall, make himself known, and denounce the impostor.  He also made
up his mind that Tom should be allowed a reasonable time for spiritual
preparation, and then be hanged, drawn and quartered, according to the
law and usage of the day in cases of high treason.




CHAPTER XI. At Guildhall.

The royal barge, attended by its gorgeous fleet, took its stately way
down the Thames through the wilderness of illuminated boats. The air was
laden with music; the river banks were beruffled with joy-flames; the
distant city lay in a soft luminous glow from its countless invisible
bonfires; above it rose many a slender spire into the sky, incrusted
with sparkling lights, wherefore in their remoteness they seemed like
jewelled lances thrust aloft; as the fleet swept along, it was greeted
from the banks with a continuous hoarse roar of cheers and the ceaseless
flash and boom of artillery.

To Tom Canty, half buried in his silken cushions, these sounds and this
spectacle were a wonder unspeakably sublime and astonishing. To his
little friends at his side, the Princess Elizabeth and the Lady Jane
Grey, they were nothing.

Arrived at the Dowgate, the fleet was towed up the limpid Walbrook
(whose channel has now been for two centuries buried out of sight under
acres of buildings) to Bucklersbury, past houses and under bridges
populous with merry-makers and brilliantly lighted, and at last came to
a halt in a basin where now is Barge Yard, in the centre of the ancient
city of London.  Tom disembarked, and he and his gallant procession
crossed Cheapside and made a short march through the Old Jewry and
Basinghall Street to the Guildhall.

Tom and his little ladies were received with due ceremony by the Lord
Mayor and the Fathers of the City, in their gold chains and scarlet
robes of state, and conducted to a rich canopy of state at the head of
the great hall, preceded by heralds making proclamation, and by the Mace
and the City Sword.  The lords and ladies who were to attend upon Tom
and his two small friends took their places behind their chairs.

At a lower table the Court grandees and other guests of noble degree
were seated, with the magnates of the city; the commoners took places at
a multitude of tables on the main floor of the hall.  From their lofty
vantage-ground the giants Gog and Magog, the ancient guardians of the
city, contemplated the spectacle below them with eyes grown familiar
to it in forgotten generations.  There was a bugle-blast and a
proclamation, and a fat butler appeared in a high perch in the leftward
wall, followed by his servitors bearing with impressive solemnity a
royal baron of beef, smoking hot and ready for the knife.

After grace, Tom (being instructed) rose--and the whole house with
him--and drank from a portly golden loving-cup with the Princess
Elizabeth; from her it passed to the Lady Jane, and then traversed the
general assemblage.  So the banquet began.

By midnight the revelry was at its height.  Now came one of those
picturesque spectacles so admired in that old day.  A description of it
is still extant in the quaint wording of a chronicler who witnessed it:

'Space being made, presently entered a baron and an earl appareled after
the Turkish fashion in long robes of bawdkin powdered with gold; hats on
their heads of crimson velvet, with great rolls of gold, girded with two
swords, called scimitars, hanging by great bawdricks of gold.  Next came
yet another baron and another earl, in two long gowns of yellow satin,
traversed with white satin, and in every bend of white was a bend of
crimson satin, after the fashion of Russia, with furred hats of gray on
their heads; either of them having an hatchet in their hands, and boots
with pykes' (points a foot long), 'turned up.  And after them came
a knight, then the Lord High Admiral, and with him five nobles, in
doublets of crimson velvet, voyded low on the back and before to the
cannell-bone, laced on the breasts with chains of silver; and over
that, short cloaks of crimson satin, and on their heads hats after
the dancers' fashion, with pheasants' feathers in them.  These were
appareled after the fashion of Prussia.  The torchbearers, which were
about an hundred, were appareled in crimson satin and green, like Moors,
their faces black. Next came in a mommarye. Then the minstrels, which
were disguised, danced; and the lords and ladies did wildly dance also,
that it was a pleasure to behold.'

And while Tom, in his high seat, was gazing upon this 'wild' dancing,
lost in admiration of the dazzling commingling of kaleidoscopic colours
which the whirling turmoil of gaudy figures below him presented, the
ragged but real little Prince of Wales was proclaiming his rights and
his wrongs, denouncing the impostor, and clamouring for admission at
the gates of Guildhall! The crowd enjoyed this episode prodigiously,
and pressed forward and craned their necks to see the small rioter.
Presently they began to taunt him and mock at him, purposely to goad him
into a higher and still more entertaining fury.  Tears of mortification
sprang to his eyes, but he stood his ground and defied the mob right
royally.  Other taunts followed, added mockings stung him, and he
exclaimed--

"I tell ye again, you pack of unmannerly curs, I am the Prince of Wales!
And all forlorn and friendless as I be, with none to give me word of
grace or help me in my need, yet will not I be driven from my ground,
but will maintain it!"

"Though thou be prince or no prince, 'tis all one, thou be'st a gallant
lad, and not friendless neither!  Here stand I by thy side to prove
it; and mind I tell thee thou might'st have a worser friend than Miles
Hendon and yet not tire thy legs with seeking. Rest thy small jaw, my
child; I talk the language of these base kennel-rats like to a very
native."

The speaker was a sort of Don Caesar de Bazan in dress, aspect, and
bearing.  He was tall, trim-built, muscular.  His doublet and trunks
were of rich material, but faded and threadbare, and their gold-lace
adornments were sadly tarnished; his ruff was rumpled and damaged;
the plume in his slouched hat was broken and had a bedraggled and
disreputable look; at his side he wore a long rapier in a rusty iron
sheath; his swaggering carriage marked him at once as a ruffler of
the camp.  The speech of this fantastic figure was received with an
explosion of jeers and laughter.  Some cried, "'Tis another prince in
disguise!" "'Ware thy tongue, friend:  belike he is dangerous!"
 "Marry, he looketh it--mark his eye!"  "Pluck the lad from him--to the
horse-pond wi' the cub!"

Instantly a hand was laid upon the Prince, under the impulse of this
happy thought; as instantly the stranger's long sword was out and the
meddler went to the earth under a sounding thump with the flat of it.
The next moment a score of voices shouted, "Kill the dog!  Kill him!
Kill him!" and the mob closed in on the warrior, who backed himself
against a wall and began to lay about him with his long weapon like a
madman.  His victims sprawled this way and that, but the mob-tide poured
over their prostrate forms and dashed itself against the champion with
undiminished fury.

His moments seemed numbered, his destruction certain, when suddenly a
trumpet-blast sounded, a voice shouted, "Way for the King's messenger!"
and a troop of horsemen came charging down upon the mob, who fled out of
harm's reach as fast as their legs could carry them. The bold stranger
caught up the Prince in his arms, and was soon far away from danger and
the multitude.

Return we within the Guildhall.  Suddenly, high above the jubilant roar
and thunder of the revel, broke the clear peal of a bugle-note.  There
was instant silence--a deep hush; then a single voice rose--that of the
messenger from the palace--and began to pipe forth a proclamation, the
whole multitude standing listening.

The closing words, solemnly pronounced, were--

"The King is dead!"

The great assemblage bent their heads upon their breasts with one
accord; remained so, in profound silence, a few moments; then all sank
upon their knees in a body, stretched out their hands toward Tom, and a
mighty shout burst forth that seemed to shake the building--

"Long live the King!"

Poor Tom's dazed eyes wandered abroad over this stupefying spectacle,
and finally rested dreamily upon the kneeling princesses beside him, a
moment, then upon the Earl of Hertford. A sudden purpose dawned in his
face.  He said, in a low tone, at Lord Hertford's ear--

"Answer me truly, on thy faith and honour!  Uttered I here a command,
the which none but a king might hold privilege and prerogative to utter,
would such commandment be obeyed, and none rise up to say me nay?"

"None, my liege, in all these realms.  In thy person bides the majesty
of England.  Thou art the king--thy word is law."

Tom responded, in a strong, earnest voice, and with great animation--

"Then shall the king's law be law of mercy, from this day, and never
more be law of blood!  Up from thy knees and away!  To the Tower, and
say the King decrees the Duke of Norfolk shall not die!"

The words were caught up and carried eagerly from lip to lip far and
wide over the hall, and as Hertford hurried from the presence, another
prodigious shout burst forth--

"The reign of blood is ended!  Long live Edward, King of England!"




CHAPTER XII. The Prince and his Deliverer.

As soon as Miles Hendon and the little prince were clear of the mob,
they struck down through back lanes and alleys toward the river.  Their
way was unobstructed until they approached London Bridge; then they
ploughed into the multitude again, Hendon keeping a fast grip upon
the Prince's--no, the King's--wrist.  The tremendous news was already
abroad, and the boy learned it from a thousand voices at once--"The King
is dead!"  The tidings struck a chill to the heart of the poor little
waif, and sent a shudder through his frame.  He realised the greatness
of his loss, and was filled with a bitter grief; for the grim tyrant who
had been such a terror to others had always been gentle with him.  The
tears sprang to his eyes and blurred all objects.  For an instant
he felt himself the most forlorn, outcast, and forsaken of God's
creatures--then another cry shook the night with its far-reaching
thunders:  "Long live King Edward the Sixth!" and this made his eyes
kindle, and thrilled him with pride to his fingers' ends. "Ah," he
thought, "how grand and strange it seems--_I am King_!"

Our friends threaded their way slowly through the throngs upon the
bridge.  This structure, which had stood for six hundred years, and
had been a noisy and populous thoroughfare all that time, was a curious
affair, for a closely packed rank of stores and shops, with family
quarters overhead, stretched along both sides of it, from one bank of
the river to the other.  The Bridge was a sort of town to itself; it
had its inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food
markets, its manufacturing industries, and even its church.  It
looked upon the two neighbours which it linked together--London
and Southwark--as being well enough as suburbs, but not otherwise
particularly important.  It was a close corporation, so to speak; it was
a narrow town, of a single street a fifth of a mile long, its
population was but a village population and everybody in it knew all
his fellow-townsmen intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers
before them--and all their little family affairs into the bargain.  It
had its aristocracy, of course--its fine old families of butchers, and
bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for five
or six hundred years, and knew the great history of the Bridge from
beginning to end, and all its strange legends; and who always talked
bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts, and lied in a long, level,
direct, substantial bridgy way.  It was just the sort of population to
be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited. Children were born on the
Bridge, were reared there, grew to old age, and finally died without
ever having set a foot upon any part of the world but London Bridge
alone.  Such people would naturally imagine that the mighty and
interminable procession which moved through its street night and day,
with its confused roar of shouts and cries, its neighings and bellowing
and bleatings and its muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in
this world, and themselves somehow the proprietors of it.  And so they
were, in effect--at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and
did--for a consideration--whenever a returning king or hero gave it a
fleeting splendour, for there was no place like it for affording a long,
straight, uninterrupted view of marching columns.

Men born and reared upon the Bridge found life unendurably dull and
inane elsewhere.  History tells of one of these who left the Bridge at
the age of seventy-one and retired to the country.  But he could only
fret and toss in his bed; he could not go to sleep, the deep stillness
was so painful, so awful, so oppressive.  When he was worn out with it,
at last, he fled back to his old home, a lean and haggard spectre, and
fell peacefully to rest and pleasant dreams under the lulling music of
the lashing waters and the boom and crash and thunder of London Bridge.

In the times of which we are writing, the Bridge furnished 'object
lessons' in English history for its children--namely, the livid and
decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes atop of its
gateways.  But we digress.

Hendon's lodgings were in the little inn on the Bridge.  As he neared
the door with his small friend, a rough voice said--

"So, thou'rt come at last!  Thou'lt not escape again, I warrant thee;
and if pounding thy bones to a pudding can teach thee somewhat, thou'lt
not keep us waiting another time, mayhap,"--and John Canty put out his
hand to seize the boy.

Miles Hendon stepped in the way and said--

"Not too fast, friend.  Thou art needlessly rough, methinks.  What is
the lad to thee?"

"If it be any business of thine to make and meddle in others' affairs,
he is my son."

"'Tis a lie!" cried the little King, hotly.

"Boldly said, and I believe thee, whether thy small headpiece be sound
or cracked, my boy.  But whether this scurvy ruffian be thy father
or no, 'tis all one, he shall not have thee to beat thee and abuse,
according to his threat, so thou prefer to bide with me."

"I do, I do--I know him not, I loathe him, and will die before I will go
with him."

"Then 'tis settled, and there is nought more to say."

"We will see, as to that!" exclaimed John Canty, striding past Hendon to
get at the boy; "by force shall he--"

"If thou do but touch him, thou animated offal, I will spit thee like a
goose!" said Hendon, barring the way and laying his hand upon his sword
hilt.  Canty drew back.  "Now mark ye," continued Hendon, "I took this
lad under my protection when a mob of such as thou would have mishandled
him, mayhap killed him; dost imagine I will desert him now to a worser
fate?--for whether thou art his father or no--and sooth to say, I think
it is a lie--a decent swift death were better for such a lad than life
in such brute hands as thine.  So go thy ways, and set quick about it,
for I like not much bandying of words, being not over-patient in my
nature."

John Canty moved off, muttering threats and curses, and was swallowed
from sight in the crowd.  Hendon ascended three flights of stairs to his
room, with his charge, after ordering a meal to be sent thither.  It
was a poor apartment, with a shabby bed and some odds and ends of old
furniture in it, and was vaguely lighted by a couple of sickly candles.
The little King dragged himself to the bed and lay down upon it, almost
exhausted with hunger and fatigue.  He had been on his feet a good
part of a day and a night (for it was now two or three o'clock in the
morning), and had eaten nothing meantime.  He murmured drowsily--

"Prithee call me when the table is spread," and sank into a deep sleep
immediately.

A smile twinkled in Hendon's eye, and he said to himself--

"By the mass, the little beggar takes to one's quarters and usurps one's
bed with as natural and easy a grace as if he owned them--with never
a by-your-leave or so-please-it-you, or anything of the sort.  In his
diseased ravings he called himself the Prince of Wales, and bravely doth
he keep up the character.  Poor little friendless rat, doubtless his
mind has been disordered with ill-usage.  Well, I will be his friend;
I have saved him, and it draweth me strongly to him; already I love the
bold-tongued little rascal.  How soldier-like he faced the smutty rabble
and flung back his high defiance!  And what a comely, sweet and gentle
face he hath, now that sleep hath conjured away its troubles and its
griefs. I will teach him; I will cure his malady; yea, I will be his
elder brother, and care for him and watch over him; and whoso would
shame him or do him hurt may order his shroud, for though I be burnt for
it he shall need it!"

He bent over the boy and contemplated him with kind and pitying
interest, tapping the young cheek tenderly and smoothing back the
tangled curls with his great brown hand.  A slight shiver passed over
the boy's form. Hendon muttered--

"See, now, how like a man it was to let him lie here uncovered and fill
his body with deadly rheums.  Now what shall I do? 'twill wake him to
take him up and put him within the bed, and he sorely needeth sleep."

He looked about for extra covering, but finding none, doffed his doublet
and wrapped the lad in it, saying, "I am used to nipping air and scant
apparel, 'tis little I shall mind the cold!"--then walked up and down
the room, to keep his blood in motion, soliloquising as before.

"His injured mind persuades him he is Prince of Wales; 'twill be odd to
have a Prince of Wales still with us, now that he that _was_ the prince
is prince no more, but king--for this poor mind is set upon the one
fantasy, and will not reason out that now it should cast by the prince
and call itself the king. . . If my father liveth still, after these
seven years that I have heard nought from home in my foreign dungeon, he
will welcome the poor lad and give him generous shelter for my sake; so
will my good elder brother, Arthur; my other brother, Hugh--but I will
crack his crown an _he_ interfere, the fox-hearted, ill-conditioned
animal! Yes, thither will we fare--and straightway, too."

A servant entered with a smoking meal, disposed it upon a small deal
table, placed the chairs, and took his departure, leaving such cheap
lodgers as these to wait upon themselves.  The door slammed after him,
and the noise woke the boy, who sprang to a sitting posture, and shot
a glad glance about him; then a grieved look came into his face and he
murmured to himself, with a deep sigh, "Alack, it was but a dream, woe
is me!"  Next he noticed Miles Hendon's doublet--glanced from that to
Hendon, comprehended the sacrifice that had been made for him, and said,
gently--

"Thou art good to me, yes, thou art very good to me.  Take it and put it
on--I shall not need it more."

Then he got up and walked to the washstand in the corner and stood
there, waiting.  Hendon said in a cheery voice--

"We'll have a right hearty sup and bite, now, for everything is savoury
and smoking hot, and that and thy nap together will make thee a little
man again, never fear!"

The boy made no answer, but bent a steady look, that was filled with
grave surprise, and also somewhat touched with impatience, upon the tall
knight of the sword.  Hendon was puzzled, and said--

"What's amiss?"

"Good sir, I would wash me."

"Oh, is that all?  Ask no permission of Miles Hendon for aught thou
cravest.  Make thyself perfectly free here, and welcome, with all that
are his belongings."

Still the boy stood, and moved not; more, he tapped the floor once or
twice with his small impatient foot.  Hendon was wholly perplexed.  Said
he--

"Bless us, what is it?"

"Prithee pour the water, and make not so many words!"

Hendon, suppressing a horse-laugh, and saying to himself, "By all the
saints, but this is admirable!" stepped briskly forward and did the
small insolent's bidding; then stood by, in a sort of stupefaction,
until the command, "Come--the towel!" woke him sharply up.  He took up a
towel, from under the boy's nose, and handed it to him without comment.
 He now proceeded to comfort his own face with a wash, and while he was
at it his adopted child seated himself at the table and prepared to fall
to. Hendon despatched his ablutions with alacrity, then drew back the
other chair and was about to place himself at table, when the boy said,
indignantly--

"Forbear!  Wouldst sit in the presence of the King?"

This blow staggered Hendon to his foundations.  He muttered to himself,
"Lo, the poor thing's madness is up with the time!  It hath changed
with the great change that is come to the realm, and now in fancy is
he _king_! Good lack, I must humour the conceit, too--there is no other
way--faith, he would order me to the Tower, else!"

And pleased with this jest, he removed the chair from the table,
took his stand behind the King, and proceeded to wait upon him in the
courtliest way he was capable of.

While the King ate, the rigour of his royal dignity relaxed a little,
and with his growing contentment came a desire to talk. He said--"I
think thou callest thyself Miles Hendon, if I heard thee aright?"

"Yes, Sire," Miles replied; then observed to himself, "If I _must_
humour the poor lad's madness, I must 'Sire' him, I must 'Majesty' him,
I must not go by halves, I must stick at nothing that belongeth to the
part I play, else shall I play it ill and work evil to this charitable
and kindly cause."

The King warmed his heart with a second glass of wine, and said--"I
would know thee--tell me thy story.  Thou hast a gallant way with thee,
and a noble--art nobly born?"

"We are of the tail of the nobility, good your Majesty.  My father is
a baronet--one of the smaller lords by knight service {2}--Sir Richard
Hendon of Hendon Hall, by Monk's Holm in Kent."

"The name has escaped my memory.  Go on--tell me thy story."

"'Tis not much, your Majesty, yet perchance it may beguile a short
half-hour for want of a better.  My father, Sir Richard, is very rich,
and of a most generous nature.  My mother died whilst I was yet a
boy.  I have two brothers:  Arthur, my elder, with a soul like to
his father's; and Hugh, younger than I, a mean spirit, covetous,
treacherous, vicious, underhanded--a reptile.  Such was he from the
cradle; such was he ten years past, when I last saw him--a ripe rascal
at nineteen, I being twenty then, and Arthur twenty-two.  There is
none other of us but the Lady Edith, my cousin--she was sixteen
then--beautiful, gentle, good, the daughter of an earl, the last of her
race, heiress of a great fortune and a lapsed title.  My father was her
guardian.  I loved her and she loved me; but she was betrothed to Arthur
from the cradle, and Sir Richard would not suffer the contract to be
broken.  Arthur loved another maid, and bade us be of good cheer and
hold fast to the hope that delay and luck together would some day give
success to our several causes.  Hugh loved the Lady Edith's fortune,
though in truth he said it was herself he loved--but then 'twas his way,
alway, to say the one thing and mean the other.  But he lost his arts
upon the girl; he could deceive my father, but none else.  My father
loved him best of us all, and trusted and believed him; for he was the
youngest child, and others hated him--these qualities being in all
ages sufficient to win a parent's dearest love; and he had a smooth
persuasive tongue, with an admirable gift of lying--and these be
qualities which do mightily assist a blind affection to cozen itself.
 I was wild--in troth I might go yet farther and say _very_ wild, though
'twas a wildness of an innocent sort, since it hurt none but me, brought
shame to none, nor loss, nor had in it any taint of crime or baseness,
or what might not beseem mine honourable degree.

"Yet did my brother Hugh turn these faults to good account--he seeing
that our brother Arthur's health was but indifferent, and hoping the
worst might work him profit were I swept out of the path--so--but 'twere
a long tale, good my liege, and little worth the telling.  Briefly,
then, this brother did deftly magnify my faults and make them
crimes; ending his base work with finding a silken ladder in mine
apartments--conveyed thither by his own means--and did convince my
father by this, and suborned evidence of servants and other lying
knaves, that I was minded to carry off my Edith and marry with her in
rank defiance of his will.

"Three years of banishment from home and England might make a soldier
and a man of me, my father said, and teach me some degree of wisdom.
 I fought out my long probation in the continental wars, tasting
sumptuously of hard knocks, privation, and adventure; but in my last
battle I was taken captive, and during the seven years that have waxed
and waned since then, a foreign dungeon hath harboured me.  Through wit
and courage I won to the free air at last, and fled hither straight; and
am but just arrived, right poor in purse and raiment, and poorer still
in knowledge of what these dull seven years have wrought at Hendon Hall,
its people and belongings.  So please you, sir, my meagre tale is told."

"Thou hast been shamefully abused!" said the little King, with a
flashing eye.  "But I will right thee--by the cross will I!  The King
hath said it."

Then, fired by the story of Miles's wrongs, he loosed his tongue and
poured the history of his own recent misfortunes into the ears of his
astonished listener.  When he had finished, Miles said to himself--

"Lo, what an imagination he hath!  Verily, this is no common mind; else,
crazed or sane, it could not weave so straight and gaudy a tale as this
out of the airy nothings wherewith it hath wrought this curious romaunt.
Poor ruined little head, it shall not lack friend or shelter whilst I
bide with the living.  He shall never leave my side; he shall be my
pet, my little comrade.  And he shall be cured!--ay, made whole and
sound--then will he make himself a name--and proud shall I be to say,
'Yes, he is mine--I took him, a homeless little ragamuffin, but I saw
what was in him, and I said his name would be heard some day--behold
him, observe him--was I right?'"

The King spoke--in a thoughtful, measured voice--

"Thou didst save me injury and shame, perchance my life, and so my
crown. Such service demandeth rich reward.  Name thy desire, and so it
be within the compass of my royal power, it is thine."

This fantastic suggestion startled Hendon out of his reverie.  He was
about to thank the King and put the matter aside with saying he had only
done his duty and desired no reward, but a wiser thought came into his
head, and he asked leave to be silent a few moments and consider the
gracious offer--an idea which the King gravely approved, remarking that
it was best to be not too hasty with a thing of such great import.

Miles reflected during some moments, then said to himself, "Yes, that is
the thing to do--by any other means it were impossible to get at it--and
certes, this hour's experience has taught me 'twould be most wearing and
inconvenient to continue it as it is. Yes, I will propose it; 'twas a
happy accident that I did not throw the chance away."  Then he dropped
upon one knee and said--

"My poor service went not beyond the limit of a subject's simple duty,
and therefore hath no merit; but since your Majesty is pleased to hold
it worthy some reward, I take heart of grace to make petition to this
effect.  Near four hundred years ago, as your grace knoweth, there being
ill blood betwixt John, King of England, and the King of France, it was
decreed that two champions should fight together in the lists, and so
settle the dispute by what is called the arbitrament of God.  These two
kings, and the Spanish king, being assembled to witness and judge the
conflict, the French champion appeared; but so redoubtable was he, that
our English knights refused to measure weapons with him.  So the matter,
which was a weighty one, was like to go against the English monarch by
default.  Now in the Tower lay the Lord de Courcy, the mightiest arm in
England, stripped of his honours and possessions, and wasting with
long captivity.  Appeal was made to him; he gave assent, and came forth
arrayed for battle; but no sooner did the Frenchman glimpse his huge
frame and hear his famous name but he fled away, and the French king's
cause was lost.  King John restored De Courcy's titles and possessions,
and said, 'Name thy wish and thou shalt have it, though it cost me half
my kingdom;' whereat De Courcy, kneeling, as I do now, made answer,
'This, then, I ask, my liege; that I and my successors may have and
hold the privilege of remaining covered in the presence of the kings of
England, henceforth while the throne shall last.' The boon was granted,
as your Majesty knoweth; and there hath been no time, these four hundred
years, that that line has failed of an heir; and so, even unto this day,
the head of that ancient house still weareth his hat or helm before the
King's Majesty, without let or hindrance, and this none other may do.
{3} Invoking this precedent in aid of my prayer, I beseech the King to
grant to me but this one grace and privilege--to my more than sufficient
reward--and none other, to wit:  that I and my heirs, for ever, may
_sit_ in the presence of the Majesty of England!"

"Rise, Sir Miles Hendon, Knight," said the King, gravely--giving the
accolade with Hendon's sword--"rise, and seat thyself.  Thy petition is
granted.  Whilst England remains, and the crown continues, the privilege
shall not lapse."

His Majesty walked apart, musing, and Hendon dropped into a chair at
table, observing to himself, "'Twas a brave thought, and hath wrought
me a mighty deliverance; my legs are grievously wearied. An I had not
thought of that, I must have had to stand for weeks, till my poor lad's
wits are cured."  After a little, he went on, "And so I am become a
knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows! A most odd and strange
position, truly, for one so matter-of-fact as I.  I will not laugh--no,
God forbid, for this thing which is so substanceless to me is _real_ to
him.  And to me, also, in one way, it is not a falsity, for it reflects
with truth the sweet and generous spirit that is in him."  After
a pause: "Ah, what if he should call me by my fine title before
folk!--there'd be a merry contrast betwixt my glory and my raiment!  But
no matter, let him call me what he will, so it please him; I shall be
content."




CHAPTER XIII. The disappearance of the Prince.

A heavy drowsiness presently fell upon the two comrades.  The King
said--

"Remove these rags."--meaning his clothing.

Hendon disapparelled the boy without dissent or remark, tucked him up in
bed, then glanced about the room, saying to himself, ruefully, "He hath
taken my bed again, as before--marry, what shall _I_ do?"  The little
King observed his perplexity, and dissipated it with a word.  He said,
sleepily--

"Thou wilt sleep athwart the door, and guard it."  In a moment more he
was out of his troubles, in a deep slumber.

"Dear heart, he should have been born a king!" muttered Hendon,
admiringly; "he playeth the part to a marvel."

Then he stretched himself across the door, on the floor, saying
contentedly--

"I have lodged worse for seven years; 'twould be but ill gratitude to
Him above to find fault with this."

He dropped asleep as the dawn appeared.  Toward noon he rose, uncovered
his unconscious ward--a section at a time--and took his measure with a
string.  The King awoke, just as he had completed his work, complained
of the cold, and asked what he was doing.

"'Tis done, now, my liege," said Hendon; "I have a bit of business
outside, but will presently return; sleep thou again--thou needest it.
There--let me cover thy head also--thou'lt be warm the sooner."

The King was back in dreamland before this speech was ended. Miles
slipped softly out, and slipped as softly in again, in the course of
thirty or forty minutes, with a complete second-hand suit of boy's
clothing, of cheap material, and showing signs of wear; but tidy, and
suited to the season of the year.  He seated himself, and began to
overhaul his purchase, mumbling to himself--

"A longer purse would have got a better sort, but when one has not the
long purse one must be content with what a short one may do--

"'There was a woman in our town, In our town did dwell--'

"He stirred, methinks--I must sing in a less thunderous key; 'tis not
good to mar his sleep, with this journey before him, and he so wearied
out, poor chap . . . This garment--'tis well enough--a stitch here and
another one there will set it aright.  This other is better, albeit a
stitch or two will not come amiss in it, likewise . . . _These_ be very
good and sound, and will keep his small feet warm and dry--an odd new
thing to him, belike, since he has doubtless been used to foot it bare,
winters and summers the same . . . Would thread were bread, seeing one
getteth a year's sufficiency for a farthing, and such a brave big needle
without cost, for mere love.  Now shall I have the demon's own time to
thread it!"

And so he had.  He did as men have always done, and probably always will
do, to the end of time--held the needle still, and tried to thrust the
thread through the eye, which is the opposite of a woman's way.  Time
and time again the thread missed the mark, going sometimes on one side
of the needle, sometimes on the other, sometimes doubling up against the
shaft; but he was patient, having been through these experiences before,
when he was soldiering.  He succeeded at last, and took up the garment
that had lain waiting, meantime, across his lap, and began his work.

"The inn is paid--the breakfast that is to come, included--and there is
wherewithal left to buy a couple of donkeys and meet our little costs
for the two or three days betwixt this and the plenty that awaits us at
Hendon Hall--

"'She loved her hus--'

"Body o' me!  I have driven the needle under my nail! . . . It matters
little--'tis not a novelty--yet 'tis not a convenience, neither. . . .
We shall be merry there, little one, never doubt it! Thy troubles will
vanish there, and likewise thy sad distemper--

"'She loved her husband dearilee, But another man--'

"These be noble large stitches!"--holding the garment up and viewing
it admiringly--"they have a grandeur and a majesty that do cause
these small stingy ones of the tailor-man to look mightily paltry and
plebeian--

"'She loved her husband dearilee, But another man he loved she,--'

"Marry, 'tis done--a goodly piece of work, too, and wrought with
expedition.  Now will I wake him, apparel him, pour for him, feed him,
and then will we hie us to the mart by the Tabard Inn in Southwark
and--be pleased to rise, my liege!--he answereth not--what ho, my
liege!--of a truth must I profane his sacred person with a touch, sith
his slumber is deaf to speech.  What!"

He threw back the covers--the boy was gone!

He stared about him in speechless astonishment for a moment; noticed for
the first time that his ward's ragged raiment was also missing; then he
began to rage and storm and shout for the innkeeper.  At that moment a
servant entered with the breakfast.

"Explain, thou limb of Satan, or thy time is come!" roared the man of
war, and made so savage a spring toward the waiter that this latter
could not find his tongue, for the instant, for fright and surprise.
 "Where is the boy?"

In disjointed and trembling syllables the man gave the information
desired.

"You were hardly gone from the place, your worship, when a youth came
running and said it was your worship's will that the boy come to you
straight, at the bridge-end on the Southwark side.  I brought him
hither; and when he woke the lad and gave his message, the lad did
grumble some little for being disturbed 'so early,' as he called it, but
straightway trussed on his rags and went with the youth, only saying
it had been better manners that your worship came yourself, not sent a
stranger--and so--"

"And so thou'rt a fool!--a fool and easily cozened--hang all thy breed!
Yet mayhap no hurt is done.  Possibly no harm is meant the boy.  I will
go fetch him.  Make the table ready.  Stay! the coverings of the bed
were disposed as if one lay beneath them--happened that by accident?"

"I know not, good your worship.  I saw the youth meddle with them--he
that came for the boy."

"Thousand deaths!  'Twas done to deceive me--'tis plain 'twas done to
gain time.  Hark ye!  Was that youth alone?"

"All alone, your worship."

"Art sure?"

"Sure, your worship."

"Collect thy scattered wits--bethink thee--take time, man."

After a moment's thought, the servant said--

"When he came, none came with him; but now I remember me that as the two
stepped into the throng of the Bridge, a ruffian-looking man plunged out
from some near place; and just as he was joining them--"

"What _then_?--out with it!" thundered the impatient Hendon,
interrupting.

"Just then the crowd lapped them up and closed them in, and I saw no
more, being called by my master, who was in a rage because a joint that
the scrivener had ordered was forgot, though I take all the saints to
witness that to blame _me_ for that miscarriage were like holding the
unborn babe to judgment for sins com--"

"Out of my sight, idiot!  Thy prating drives me mad!  Hold! Whither art
flying?  Canst not bide still an instant?  Went they toward Southwark?"

"Even so, your worship--for, as I said before, as to that detestable
joint, the babe unborn is no whit more blameless than--"

"Art here _yet_!  And prating still!  Vanish, lest I throttle thee!" The
servitor vanished.  Hendon followed after him, passed him, and plunged
down the stairs two steps at a stride, muttering, "'Tis that scurvy
villain that claimed he was his son.  I have lost thee, my poor little
mad master--it is a bitter thought--and I had come to love thee so!  No!
by book and bell, _not_ lost!  Not lost, for I will ransack the land
till I find thee again.  Poor child, yonder is his breakfast--and mine,
but I have no hunger now; so, let the rats have it--speed, speed! that
is the word!"  As he wormed his swift way through the noisy multitudes
upon the Bridge he several times said to himself--clinging to the
thought as if it were a particularly pleasing one--"He grumbled, but he
_went_--he went, yes, because he thought Miles Hendon asked it, sweet
lad--he would ne'er have done it for another, I know it well."




CHAPTER XIV. 'Le Roi est mort--vive le Roi.'

Toward daylight of the same morning, Tom Canty stirred out of a heavy
sleep and opened his eyes in the dark.  He lay silent a few moments,
trying to analyse his confused thoughts and impressions, and get some
sort of meaning out of them; then suddenly he burst out in a rapturous
but guarded voice--

"I see it all, I see it all!  Now God be thanked, I am indeed awake at
last!  Come, joy! vanish, sorrow!  Ho, Nan! Bet! kick off your straw and
hie ye hither to my side, till I do pour into your unbelieving ears the
wildest madcap dream that ever the spirits of night did conjure up to
astonish the soul of man withal! . . . Ho, Nan, I say!  Bet!"

A dim form appeared at his side, and a voice said--

"Wilt deign to deliver thy commands?"

"Commands? . . . O, woe is me, I know thy voice!  Speak thou--who am I?"

"Thou?  In sooth, yesternight wert thou the Prince of Wales; to-day art
thou my most gracious liege, Edward, King of England."

Tom buried his head among his pillows, murmuring plaintively--

"Alack, it was no dream!  Go to thy rest, sweet sir--leave me to my
sorrows."

Tom slept again, and after a time he had this pleasant dream.  He
thought it was summer, and he was playing, all alone, in the fair meadow
called Goodman's Fields, when a dwarf only a foot high, with long red
whiskers and a humped back, appeared to him suddenly and said, "Dig by
that stump."  He did so, and found twelve bright new pennies--wonderful
riches!  Yet this was not the best of it; for the dwarf said--

"I know thee.  Thou art a good lad, and a deserving; thy distresses
shall end, for the day of thy reward is come.  Dig here every seventh
day, and thou shalt find always the same treasure, twelve bright new
pennies. Tell none--keep the secret."

Then the dwarf vanished, and Tom flew to Offal Court with his prize,
saying to himself, "Every night will I give my father a penny; he
will think I begged it, it will glad his heart, and I shall no more
be beaten. One penny every week the good priest that teacheth me shall
have; mother, Nan, and Bet the other four. We be done with hunger and
rags, now, done with fears and frets and savage usage."

In his dream he reached his sordid home all out of breath, but with
eyes dancing with grateful enthusiasm; cast four of his pennies into his
mother's lap and cried out--

"They are for thee!--all of them, every one!--for thee and Nan and
Bet--and honestly come by, not begged nor stolen!"

The happy and astonished mother strained him to her breast and
exclaimed--

"It waxeth late--may it please your Majesty to rise?"

Ah! that was not the answer he was expecting.  The dream had snapped
asunder--he was awake.

He opened his eyes--the richly clad First Lord of the Bedchamber was
kneeling by his couch.  The gladness of the lying dream faded away--the
poor boy recognised that he was still a captive and a king.  The room
was filled with courtiers clothed in purple mantles--the mourning
colour--and with noble servants of the monarch.  Tom sat up in bed and
gazed out from the heavy silken curtains upon this fine company.

The weighty business of dressing began, and one courtier after another
knelt and paid his court and offered to the little King his condolences
upon his heavy loss, whilst the dressing proceeded.  In the beginning, a
shirt was taken up by the Chief Equerry in Waiting, who passed it to the
First Lord of the Buckhounds, who passed it to the Second Gentleman of
the Bedchamber, who passed it to the Head Ranger of Windsor Forest,
who passed it to the Third Groom of the Stole, who passed it to the
Chancellor Royal of the Duchy of Lancaster, who passed it to the Master
of the Wardrobe, who passed it to Norroy King-at-Arms, who passed it to
the Constable of the Tower, who passed it to the Chief Steward of the
Household, who passed it to the Hereditary Grand Diaperer, who passed it
to the Lord High Admiral of England, who passed it to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, who passed it to the First Lord of the Bedchamber, who took
what was left of it and put it on Tom.  Poor little wondering chap, it
reminded him of passing buckets at a fire.

Each garment in its turn had to go through this slow and solemn process;
consequently Tom grew very weary of the ceremony; so weary that he felt
an almost gushing gratefulness when he at last saw his long silken hose
begin the journey down the line and knew that the end of the matter
was drawing near.  But he exulted too soon.  The First Lord of the
Bedchamber received the hose and was about to encase Tom's legs in them,
when a sudden flush invaded his face and he hurriedly hustled the things
back into the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury with an astounded
look and a whispered, "See, my lord!" pointing to a something connected
with the hose.  The Archbishop paled, then flushed, and passed the
hose to the Lord High Admiral, whispering, "See, my lord!"  The Admiral
passed the hose to the Hereditary Grand Diaperer, and had hardly breath
enough in his body to ejaculate, "See, my lord!"  The hose drifted
backward along the line, to the Chief Steward of the Household, the
Constable of the Tower, Norroy King-at-Arms, the Master of the Wardrobe,
the Chancellor Royal of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Third Groom of the
Stole, the Head Ranger of Windsor Forest, the Second Gentleman of the
Bedchamber, the First Lord of the Buckhounds,--accompanied always with
that amazed and frightened "See! see!"--till they finally reached the
hands of the Chief Equerry in Waiting, who gazed a moment, with a pallid
face, upon what had caused all this dismay, then hoarsely whispered,
"Body of my life, a tag gone from a truss-point!--to the Tower with
the Head Keeper of the King's Hose!"--after which he leaned upon the
shoulder of the First Lord of the Buckhounds to regather his vanished
strength whilst fresh hose, without any damaged strings to them, were
brought.

But all things must have an end, and so in time Tom Canty was in a
condition to get out of bed.  The proper official poured water, the
proper official engineered the washing, the proper official stood by
with a towel, and by-and-by Tom got safely through the purifying stage
and was ready for the services of the Hairdresser-royal.  When he at
length emerged from this master's hands, he was a gracious figure and
as pretty as a girl, in his mantle and trunks of purple satin, and
purple-plumed cap.  He now moved in state toward his breakfast-room,
through the midst of the courtly assemblage; and as he passed, these
fell back, leaving his way free, and dropped upon their knees.

After breakfast he was conducted, with regal ceremony, attended by his
great officers and his guard of fifty Gentlemen Pensioners bearing gilt
battle-axes, to the throne-room, where he proceeded to transact business
of state.  His 'uncle,' Lord Hertford, took his stand by the throne, to
assist the royal mind with wise counsel.

The body of illustrious men named by the late King as his executors
appeared, to ask Tom's approval of certain acts of theirs--rather a
form, and yet not wholly a form, since there was no Protector as yet.
 The Archbishop of Canterbury made report of the decree of the Council
of Executors concerning the obsequies of his late most illustrious
Majesty, and finished by reading the signatures of the Executors, to
wit:  the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Lord Chancellor of England;
William Lord St. John; John Lord Russell; Edward Earl of Hertford; John
Viscount Lisle; Cuthbert Bishop of Durham--

Tom was not listening--an earlier clause of the document was puzzling
him.  At this point he turned and whispered to Lord Hertford--

"What day did he say the burial hath been appointed for?"

"The sixteenth of the coming month, my liege."

"'Tis a strange folly.  Will he keep?"

Poor chap, he was still new to the customs of royalty; he was used to
seeing the forlorn dead of Offal Court hustled out of the way with a
very different sort of expedition.  However, the Lord Hertford set his
mind at rest with a word or two.

A secretary of state presented an order of the Council appointing the
morrow at eleven for the reception of the foreign ambassadors, and
desired the King's assent.

Tom turned an inquiring look toward Hertford, who whispered--

"Your Majesty will signify consent.  They come to testify their royal
masters' sense of the heavy calamity which hath visited your Grace and
the realm of England."

Tom did as he was bidden.  Another secretary began to read a preamble
concerning the expenses of the late King's household, which had amounted
to 28,000 pounds during the preceding six months--a sum so vast that it
made Tom Canty gasp; he gasped again when the fact appeared that 20,000
pounds of this money was still owing and unpaid; {4} and once more when
it appeared that the King's coffers were about empty, and his twelve
hundred servants much embarrassed for lack of the wages due them.  Tom
spoke out, with lively apprehension--

"We be going to the dogs, 'tis plain.  'Tis meet and necessary that we
take a smaller house and set the servants at large, sith they be of no
value but to make delay, and trouble one with offices that harass the
spirit and shame the soul, they misbecoming any but a doll, that hath
nor brains nor hands to help itself withal.  I remember me of a small
house that standeth over against the fish-market, by Billingsgate--"

A sharp pressure upon Tom's arm stopped his foolish tongue and sent a
blush to his face; but no countenance there betrayed any sign that this
strange speech had been remarked or given concern.

A secretary made report that forasmuch as the late King had provided in
his will for conferring the ducal degree upon the Earl of Hertford and
raising his brother, Sir Thomas Seymour, to the peerage, and likewise
Hertford's son to an earldom, together with similar aggrandisements to
other great servants of the Crown, the Council had resolved to hold a
sitting on the 16th of February for the delivering and confirming of
these honours, and that meantime, the late King not having granted,
in writing, estates suitable to the support of these dignities, the
Council, knowing his private wishes in that regard, had thought proper
to grant to Seymour '500 pound lands,' and to Hertford's son '800
pound lands, and 300 pound of the next bishop's lands which should fall
vacant,'--his present Majesty being willing. {5}

Tom was about to blurt out something about the propriety of paying the
late King's debts first, before squandering all this money, but a
timely touch upon his arm, from the thoughtful Hertford, saved him
this indiscretion; wherefore he gave the royal assent, without spoken
comment, but with much inward discomfort.  While he sat reflecting a
moment over the ease with which he was doing strange and glittering
miracles, a happy thought shot into his mind:  why not make his mother
Duchess of Offal Court, and give her an estate?  But a sorrowful
thought swept it instantly away: he was only a king in name, these grave
veterans and great nobles were his masters; to them his mother was only
the creature of a diseased mind; they would simply listen to his project
with unbelieving ears, then send for the doctor.

The dull work went tediously on.  Petitions were read, and
proclamations, patents, and all manner of wordy, repetitious, and
wearisome papers relating to the public business; and at last Tom sighed
pathetically and murmured to himself, "In what have I offended, that the
good God should take me away from the fields and the free air and the
sunshine, to shut me up here and make me a king and afflict me so?"
 Then his poor muddled head nodded a while and presently drooped to his
shoulder; and the business of the empire came to a standstill for want
of that august factor, the ratifying power.  Silence ensued around
the slumbering child, and the sages of the realm ceased from their
deliberations.

During the forenoon, Tom had an enjoyable hour, by permission of his
keepers, Hertford and St. John, with the Lady Elizabeth and the little
Lady Jane Grey; though the spirits of the princesses were rather subdued
by the mighty stroke that had fallen upon the royal house; and at the
end of the visit his 'elder sister'--afterwards the 'Bloody Mary' of
history--chilled him with a solemn interview which had but one merit in
his eyes, its brevity.  He had a few moments to himself, and then a slim
lad of about twelve years of age was admitted to his presence, whose
clothing, except his snowy ruff and the laces about his wrists, was of
black,--doublet, hose, and all.  He bore no badge of mourning but a knot
of purple ribbon on his shoulder.  He advanced hesitatingly, with head
bowed and bare, and dropped upon one knee in front of Tom. Tom sat still
and contemplated him soberly a moment.  Then he said--

"Rise, lad.  Who art thou.  What wouldst have?"

The boy rose, and stood at graceful ease, but with an aspect of concern
in his face.  He said--

"Of a surety thou must remember me, my lord.  I am thy whipping-boy."

"My _whipping_-boy?"

"The same, your Grace.  I am Humphrey--Humphrey Marlow."

Tom perceived that here was someone whom his keepers ought to have
posted him about.  The situation was delicate.  What should he
do?--pretend he knew this lad, and then betray by his every utterance
that he had never heard of him before?  No, that would not do.  An idea
came to his relief: accidents like this might be likely to happen with
some frequency, now that business urgencies would often call Hertford
and St. John from his side, they being members of the Council of
Executors; therefore perhaps it would be well to strike out a plan
himself to meet the requirements of such emergencies.  Yes, that would
be a wise course--he would practise on this boy, and see what sort of
success he might achieve.  So he stroked his brow perplexedly a moment
or two, and presently said--

"Now I seem to remember thee somewhat--but my wit is clogged and dim
with suffering--"

"Alack, my poor master!" ejaculated the whipping-boy, with feeling;
adding, to himself, "In truth 'tis as they said--his mind is gone--alas,
poor soul!  But misfortune catch me, how am I forgetting!  They said one
must not seem to observe that aught is wrong with him."

"'Tis strange how my memory doth wanton with me these days," said Tom.
"But mind it not--I mend apace--a little clue doth often serve to bring
me back again the things and names which had escaped me.  (And not they,
only, forsooth, but e'en such as I ne'er heard before--as this lad shall
see.)  Give thy business speech."

"'Tis matter of small weight, my liege, yet will I touch upon it, an' it
please your Grace.  Two days gone by, when your Majesty faulted thrice
in your Greek--in the morning lessons,--dost remember it?"

"Y-e-s--methinks I do.  (It is not much of a lie--an' I had meddled with
the Greek at all, I had not faulted simply thrice, but forty times.)
Yes, I do recall it, now--go on."

"The master, being wroth with what he termed such slovenly and doltish
work, did promise that he would soundly whip me for it--and--"

"Whip _thee_!" said Tom, astonished out of his presence of mind. "Why
should he whip _thee_ for faults of mine?"

"Ah, your Grace forgetteth again.  He always scourgeth me when thou dost
fail in thy lessons."

"True, true--I had forgot.  Thou teachest me in private--then if I fail,
he argueth that thy office was lamely done, and--"

"Oh, my liege, what words are these?  I, the humblest of thy servants,
presume to teach _thee_?"

"Then where is thy blame?  What riddle is this?  Am I in truth gone mad,
or is it thou?  Explain--speak out."

"But, good your Majesty, there's nought that needeth simplifying.--None
may visit the sacred person of the Prince of Wales with blows;
wherefore, when he faulteth, 'tis I that take them; and meet it is and
right, for that it is mine office and my livelihood." {1}

Tom stared at the tranquil boy, observing to himself, "Lo, it is a
wonderful thing,--a most strange and curious trade; I marvel they have
not hired a boy to take my combings and my dressings for me--would
heaven they would!--an' they will do this thing, I will take my lashings
in mine own person, giving God thanks for the change." Then he said
aloud--

"And hast thou been beaten, poor friend, according to the promise?"

"No, good your Majesty, my punishment was appointed for this day, and
peradventure it may be annulled, as unbefitting the season of mourning
that is come upon us; I know not, and so have made bold to come hither
and remind your Grace about your gracious promise to intercede in my
behalf--"

"With the master?  To save thee thy whipping?"

"Ah, thou dost remember!"

"My memory mendeth, thou seest.  Set thy mind at ease--thy back shall go
unscathed--I will see to it."

"Oh, thanks, my good lord!" cried the boy, dropping upon his knee again.
"Mayhap I have ventured far enow; and yet--"

Seeing Master Humphrey hesitate, Tom encouraged him to go on, saying he
was "in the granting mood."

"Then will I speak it out, for it lieth near my heart.  Sith thou art
no more Prince of Wales but King, thou canst order matters as thou wilt,
with none to say thee nay; wherefore it is not in reason that thou wilt
longer vex thyself with dreary studies, but wilt burn thy books and
turn thy mind to things less irksome. Then am I ruined, and mine orphan
sisters with me!"

"Ruined?  Prithee how?"

"My back is my bread, O my gracious liege! if it go idle, I starve.  An'
thou cease from study mine office is gone thou'lt need no whipping-boy.
Do not turn me away!"

Tom was touched with this pathetic distress.  He said, with a right
royal burst of generosity--

"Discomfort thyself no further, lad.  Thine office shall be permanent in
thee and thy line for ever."  Then he struck the boy a light blow on the
shoulder with the flat of his sword, exclaiming, "Rise, Humphrey Marlow,
Hereditary Grand Whipping-Boy to the Royal House of England!  Banish
sorrow--I will betake me to my books again, and study so ill that they
must in justice treble thy wage, so mightily shall the business of thine
office be augmented."

The grateful Humphrey responded fervidly--

"Thanks, O most noble master, this princely lavishness doth far surpass
my most distempered dreams of fortune.  Now shall I be happy all my
days, and all the house of Marlow after me."

Tom had wit enough to perceive that here was a lad who could be useful
to him.  He encouraged Humphrey to talk, and he was nothing loath.
 He was delighted to believe that he was helping in Tom's 'cure'; for
always, as soon as he had finished calling back to Tom's diseased mind
the various particulars of his experiences and adventures in the royal
school-room and elsewhere about the palace, he noticed that Tom was then
able to 'recall' the circumstances quite clearly.  At the end of an
hour Tom found himself well freighted with very valuable information
concerning personages and matters pertaining to the Court; so he
resolved to draw instruction from this source daily; and to this end he
would give order to admit Humphrey to the royal closet whenever he might
come, provided the Majesty of England was not engaged with other people.
 Humphrey had hardly been dismissed when my Lord Hertford arrived with
more trouble for Tom.

He said that the Lords of the Council, fearing that some overwrought
report of the King's damaged health might have leaked out and got
abroad, they deemed it wise and best that his Majesty should begin to
dine in public after a day or two--his wholesome complexion and vigorous
step, assisted by a carefully guarded repose of manner and ease and
grace of demeanour, would more surely quiet the general pulse--in case
any evil rumours _had_ gone about--than any other scheme that could be
devised.

Then the Earl proceeded, very delicately, to instruct Tom as to the
observances proper to the stately occasion, under the rather thin
disguise of 'reminding' him concerning things already known to him; but
to his vast gratification it turned out that Tom needed very little help
in this line--he had been making use of Humphrey in that direction, for
Humphrey had mentioned that within a few days he was to begin to dine
in public; having gathered it from the swift-winged gossip of the Court.
Tom kept these facts to himself, however.

Seeing the royal memory so improved, the Earl ventured to apply a
few tests to it, in an apparently casual way, to find out how far its
amendment had progressed.  The results were happy, here and there, in
spots--spots where Humphrey's tracks remained--and on the whole my lord
was greatly pleased and encouraged.  So encouraged was he, indeed, that
he spoke up and said in a quite hopeful voice--

"Now am I persuaded that if your Majesty will but tax your memory yet
a little further, it will resolve the puzzle of the Great Seal--a loss
which was of moment yesterday, although of none to-day, since its term
of service ended with our late lord's life. May it please your Grace to
make the trial?"

Tom was at sea--a Great Seal was something which he was totally
unacquainted with.  After a moment's hesitation he looked up innocently
and asked--

"What was it like, my lord?"

The Earl started, almost imperceptibly, muttering to himself, "Alack,
his wits are flown again!--it was ill wisdom to lead him on to strain
them"--then he deftly turned the talk to other matters, with the purpose
of sweeping the unlucky seal out of Tom's thoughts--a purpose which
easily succeeded.




CHAPTER XV. Tom as King.

The next day the foreign ambassadors came, with their gorgeous trains;
and Tom, throned in awful state, received them.  The splendours of the
scene delighted his eye and fired his imagination at first, but
the audience was long and dreary, and so were most of the
addresses--wherefore, what began as a pleasure grew into weariness and
home-sickness by-and-by.  Tom said the words which Hertford put into
his mouth from time to time, and tried hard to acquit himself
satisfactorily, but he was too new to such things, and too ill at ease
to accomplish more than a tolerable success.  He looked sufficiently
like a king, but he was ill able to feel like one.  He was cordially
glad when the ceremony was ended.

The larger part of his day was 'wasted'--as he termed it, in his own
mind--in labours pertaining to his royal office.  Even the two hours
devoted to certain princely pastimes and recreations were rather a
burden to him than otherwise, they were so fettered by restrictions
and ceremonious observances.  However, he had a private hour with
his whipping-boy which he counted clear gain, since he got both
entertainment and needful information out of it.

The third day of Tom Canty's kingship came and went much as the others
had done, but there was a lifting of his cloud in one way--he felt
less uncomfortable than at first; he was getting a little used to his
circumstances and surroundings; his chains still galled, but not all the
time; he found that the presence and homage of the great afflicted and
embarrassed him less and less sharply with every hour that drifted over
his head.

But for one single dread, he could have seen the fourth day approach
without serious distress--the dining in public; it was to begin that
day. There were greater matters in the programme--for on that day
he would have to preside at a council which would take his views and
commands concerning the policy to be pursued toward various foreign
nations scattered far and near over the great globe; on that day, too,
Hertford would be formally chosen to the grand office of Lord Protector;
other things of note were appointed for that fourth day, also; but to
Tom they were all insignificant compared with the ordeal of dining all
by himself with a multitude of curious eyes fastened upon him and a
multitude of mouths whispering comments upon his performance,--and upon
his mistakes, if he should be so unlucky as to make any.

Still, nothing could stop that fourth day, and so it came.  It found
poor Tom low-spirited and absent-minded, and this mood continued; he
could not shake it off.  The ordinary duties of the morning dragged upon
his hands, and wearied him.  Once more he felt the sense of captivity
heavy upon him.

Late in the forenoon he was in a large audience-chamber, conversing
with the Earl of Hertford and dully awaiting the striking of the hour
appointed for a visit of ceremony from a considerable number of great
officials and courtiers.

After a little while, Tom, who had wandered to a window and become
interested in the life and movement of the great highway beyond the
palace gates--and not idly interested, but longing with all his heart
to take part in person in its stir and freedom--saw the van of a hooting
and shouting mob of disorderly men, women, and children of the lowest
and poorest degree approaching from up the road.

"I would I knew what 'tis about!" he exclaimed, with all a boy's
curiosity in such happenings.

"Thou art the King!" solemnly responded the Earl, with a reverence.
"Have I your Grace's leave to act?"

"O blithely, yes!  O gladly, yes!" exclaimed Tom excitedly, adding to
himself with a lively sense of satisfaction, "In truth, being a king is
not all dreariness--it hath its compensations and conveniences."

The Earl called a page, and sent him to the captain of the guard with
the order--

"Let the mob be halted, and inquiry made concerning the occasion of its
movement.  By the King's command!"

A few seconds later a long rank of the royal guards, cased in flashing
steel, filed out at the gates and formed across the highway in front
of the multitude.  A messenger returned, to report that the crowd were
following a man, a woman, and a young girl to execution for crimes
committed against the peace and dignity of the realm.

Death--and a violent death--for these poor unfortunates!  The thought
wrung Tom's heart-strings.  The spirit of compassion took control of
him, to the exclusion of all other considerations; he never thought of
the offended laws, or of the grief or loss which these three criminals
had inflicted upon their victims; he could think of nothing but the
scaffold and the grisly fate hanging over the heads of the condemned.
 His concern made him even forget, for the moment, that he was but the
false shadow of a king, not the substance; and before he knew it he had
blurted out the command--

"Bring them here!"

Then he blushed scarlet, and a sort of apology sprung to his lips; but
observing that his order had wrought no sort of surprise in the Earl or
the waiting page, he suppressed the words he was about to utter.  The
page, in the most matter-of-course way, made a profound obeisance
and retired backwards out of the room to deliver the command.  Tom
experienced a glow of pride and a renewed sense of the compensating
advantages of the kingly office. He said to himself, "Truly it is like
what I was used to feel when I read the old priest's tales, and did
imagine mine own self a prince, giving law and command to all, saying
'Do this, do that,' whilst none durst offer let or hindrance to my
will."

Now the doors swung open; one high-sounding title after another was
announced, the personages owning them followed, and the place was
quickly half-filled with noble folk and finery.  But Tom was hardly
conscious of the presence of these people, so wrought up was he and so
intensely absorbed in that other and more interesting matter.  He seated
himself absently in his chair of state, and turned his eyes upon the
door with manifestations of impatient expectancy; seeing which, the
company forbore to trouble him, and fell to chatting a mixture of public
business and court gossip one with another.

In a little while the measured tread of military men was heard
approaching, and the culprits entered the presence in charge of an
under-sheriff and escorted by a detail of the king's guard.  The civil
officer knelt before Tom, then stood aside; the three doomed persons
knelt, also, and remained so; the guard took position behind Tom's
chair.  Tom scanned the prisoners curiously. Something about the dress
or appearance of the man had stirred a vague memory in him.  "Methinks
I have seen this man ere now . . . but the when or the where fail
me."--Such was Tom's thought. Just then the man glanced quickly up and
quickly dropped his face again, not being able to endure the awful port
of sovereignty; but the one full glimpse of the face which Tom got was
sufficient.  He said to himself: "Now is the matter clear; this is the
stranger that plucked Giles Witt out of the Thames, and saved his life,
that windy, bitter, first day of the New Year--a brave good deed--pity
he hath been doing baser ones and got himself in this sad case . . . I
have not forgot the day, neither the hour; by reason that an hour after,
upon the stroke of eleven, I did get a hiding by the hand of Gammer
Canty which was of so goodly and admired severity that all that
went before or followed after it were but fondlings and caresses by
comparison."

Tom now ordered that the woman and the girl be removed from the presence
for a little time; then addressed himself to the under-sheriff, saying--

"Good sir, what is this man's offence?"

The officer knelt, and answered--

"So please your Majesty, he hath taken the life of a subject by poison."

Tom's compassion for the prisoner, and admiration of him as the daring
rescuer of a drowning boy, experienced a most damaging shock.

"The thing was proven upon him?" he asked.

"Most clearly, sire."

Tom sighed, and said--

"Take him away--he hath earned his death.  'Tis a pity, for he was a
brave heart--na--na, I mean he hath the _look_ of it!"

The prisoner clasped his hands together with sudden energy, and wrung
them despairingly, at the same time appealing imploringly to the 'King'
in broken and terrified phrases--

"O my lord the King, an' thou canst pity the lost, have pity upon me!  I
am innocent--neither hath that wherewith I am charged been more than
but lamely proved--yet I speak not of that; the judgment is gone forth
against me and may not suffer alteration; yet in mine extremity I beg a
boon, for my doom is more than I can bear. A grace, a grace, my lord the
King! in thy royal compassion grant my prayer--give commandment that I
be hanged!"

Tom was amazed.  This was not the outcome he had looked for.

"Odds my life, a strange _boon_!  Was it not the fate intended thee?"

"O good my liege, not so!  It is ordered that I be _boiled alive_!"

The hideous surprise of these words almost made Tom spring from his
chair.  As soon as he could recover his wits he cried out--

"Have thy wish, poor soul! an' thou had poisoned a hundred men thou
shouldst not suffer so miserable a death."

The prisoner bowed his face to the ground and burst into passionate
expressions of gratitude--ending with--

"If ever thou shouldst know misfortune--which God forefend!--may thy
goodness to me this day be remembered and requited!"

Tom turned to the Earl of Hertford, and said--

"My lord, is it believable that there was warrant for this man's
ferocious doom?"

"It is the law, your Grace--for poisoners.  In Germany coiners be boiled
to death in _oil_--not cast in of a sudden, but by a rope let down into
the oil by degrees, and slowly; first the feet, then the legs, then--"

"O prithee no more, my lord, I cannot bear it!" cried Tom, covering
his eyes with his hands to shut out the picture.  "I beseech your good
lordship that order be taken to change this law--oh, let no more poor
creatures be visited with its tortures."

The Earl's face showed profound gratification, for he was a man of
merciful and generous impulses--a thing not very common with his class
in that fierce age.  He said--

"These your Grace's noble words have sealed its doom.  History will
remember it to the honour of your royal house."

The under-sheriff was about to remove his prisoner; Tom gave him a sign
to wait; then he said--

"Good sir, I would look into this matter further.  The man has said his
deed was but lamely proved.  Tell me what thou knowest."

"If the King's grace please, it did appear upon the trial that this
man entered into a house in the hamlet of Islington where one lay
sick--three witnesses say it was at ten of the clock in the morning, and
two say it was some minutes later--the sick man being alone at the time,
and sleeping--and presently the man came forth again and went his
way.  The sick man died within the hour, being torn with spasms and
retchings."

"Did any see the poison given?  Was poison found?"

"Marry, no, my liege."

"Then how doth one know there was poison given at all?"

"Please your Majesty, the doctors testified that none die with such
symptoms but by poison."

Weighty evidence, this, in that simple age.  Tom recognised its
formidable nature, and said--

"The doctor knoweth his trade--belike they were right.  The matter hath
an ill-look for this poor man."

"Yet was not this all, your Majesty; there is more and worse. Many
testified that a witch, since gone from the village, none know whither,
did foretell, and speak it privately in their ears, that the sick
man _would die by poison_--and more, that a stranger would give it--a
stranger with brown hair and clothed in a worn and common garb; and
surely this prisoner doth answer woundily to the bill.  Please your
Majesty to give the circumstance that solemn weight which is its due,
seeing it was _foretold_."

This was an argument of tremendous force in that superstitious day.  Tom
felt that the thing was settled; if evidence was worth anything, this
poor fellow's guilt was proved.  Still he offered the prisoner a chance,
saying--

"If thou canst say aught in thy behalf, speak."

"Nought that will avail, my King.  I am innocent, yet cannot I make
it appear.  I have no friends, else might I show that I was not in
Islington that day; so also might I show that at that hour they name I
was above a league away, seeing I was at Wapping Old Stairs; yea more,
my King, for I could show, that whilst they say I was _taking_ life, I
was _saving_ it.  A drowning boy--"

"Peace!  Sheriff, name the day the deed was done!"

"At ten in the morning, or some minutes later, the first day of the New
Year, most illustrious--"

"Let the prisoner go free--it is the King's will!"

Another blush followed this unregal outburst, and he covered his
indecorum as well as he could by adding--

"It enrageth me that a man should be hanged upon such idle, hare-brained
evidence!"

A low buzz of admiration swept through the assemblage.  It was not
admiration of the decree that had been delivered by Tom, for the
propriety or expediency of pardoning a convicted poisoner was a thing
which few there would have felt justified in either admitting or
admiring--no, the admiration was for the intelligence and spirit which
Tom had displayed.  Some of the low-voiced remarks were to this effect--

"This is no mad king--he hath his wits sound."

"How sanely he put his questions--how like his former natural self was
this abrupt imperious disposal of the matter!"

"God be thanked, his infirmity is spent!  This is no weakling, but a
king.  He hath borne himself like to his own father."

The air being filled with applause, Tom's ear necessarily caught a
little of it.  The effect which this had upon him was to put him
greatly at his ease, and also to charge his system with very gratifying
sensations.

However, his juvenile curiosity soon rose superior to these pleasant
thoughts and feelings; he was eager to know what sort of deadly mischief
the woman and the little girl could have been about; so, by his command,
the two terrified and sobbing creatures were brought before him.

"What is it that these have done?" he inquired of the sheriff.

"Please your Majesty, a black crime is charged upon them, and clearly
proven; wherefore the judges have decreed, according to the law, that
they be hanged.  They sold themselves to the devil--such is their
crime."

Tom shuddered.  He had been taught to abhor people who did this wicked
thing.  Still, he was not going to deny himself the pleasure of feeding
his curiosity for all that; so he asked--

"Where was this done?--and when?"

"On a midnight in December, in a ruined church, your Majesty."

Tom shuddered again.

"Who was there present?"

"Only these two, your grace--and _that other_."

"Have these confessed?"

"Nay, not so, sire--they do deny it."

"Then prithee, how was it known?"

"Certain witness did see them wending thither, good your Majesty; this
bred the suspicion, and dire effects have since confirmed and justified
it.  In particular, it is in evidence that through the wicked power so
obtained, they did invoke and bring about a storm that wasted all the
region round about.  Above forty witnesses have proved the storm; and
sooth one might have had a thousand, for all had reason to remember it,
sith all had suffered by it."

"Certes this is a serious matter."  Tom turned this dark piece of
scoundrelism over in his mind a while, then asked--

"Suffered the woman also by the storm?"

Several old heads among the assemblage nodded their recognition of
the wisdom of this question.  The sheriff, however, saw nothing
consequential in the inquiry; he answered, with simple directness--

"Indeed did she, your Majesty, and most righteously, as all aver. Her
habitation was swept away, and herself and child left shelterless."

"Methinks the power to do herself so ill a turn was dearly bought. She
had been cheated, had she paid but a farthing for it; that she paid
her soul, and her child's, argueth that she is mad; if she is mad she
knoweth not what she doth, therefore sinneth not."

The elderly heads nodded recognition of Tom's wisdom once more, and one
individual murmured, "An' the King be mad himself, according to report,
then is it a madness of a sort that would improve the sanity of some I
wot of, if by the gentle providence of God they could but catch it."

"What age hath the child?" asked Tom.

"Nine years, please your Majesty."

"By the law of England may a child enter into covenant and sell itself,
my lord?" asked Tom, turning to a learned judge.

"The law doth not permit a child to make or meddle in any weighty
matter, good my liege, holding that its callow wit unfitteth it to cope
with the riper wit and evil schemings of them that are its elders.  The
_Devil_ may buy a child, if he so choose, and the child agree thereto,
but not an Englishman--in this latter case the contract would be null
and void."

"It seemeth a rude unchristian thing, and ill contrived, that English
law denieth privileges to Englishmen to waste them on the devil!" cried
Tom, with honest heat.

This novel view of the matter excited many smiles, and was stored
away in many heads to be repeated about the Court as evidence of Tom's
originality as well as progress toward mental health.

The elder culprit had ceased from sobbing, and was hanging upon Tom's
words with an excited interest and a growing hope.  Tom noticed this,
and it strongly inclined his sympathies toward her in her perilous and
unfriended situation.  Presently he asked--

"How wrought they to bring the storm?"

"_By pulling off their stockings_, sire."

This astonished Tom, and also fired his curiosity to fever heat. He
said, eagerly--

"It is wonderful!  Hath it always this dread effect?"

"Always, my liege--at least if the woman desire it, and utter the
needful words, either in her mind or with her tongue."

Tom turned to the woman, and said with impetuous zeal--

"Exert thy power--I would see a storm!"

There was a sudden paling of cheeks in the superstitious assemblage, and
a general, though unexpressed, desire to get out of the place--all of
which was lost upon Tom, who was dead to everything but the proposed
cataclysm.  Seeing a puzzled and astonished look in the woman's face, he
added, excitedly--

"Never fear--thou shalt be blameless.  More--thou shalt go free--none
shall touch thee.  Exert thy power."

"Oh, my lord the King, I have it not--I have been falsely accused."

"Thy fears stay thee.  Be of good heart, thou shalt suffer no harm.
 Make a storm--it mattereth not how small a one--I require nought great
or harmful, but indeed prefer the opposite--do this and thy life is
spared--thou shalt go out free, with thy child, bearing the King's
pardon, and safe from hurt or malice from any in the realm."

The woman prostrated herself, and protested, with tears, that she had
no power to do the miracle, else she would gladly win her child's life
alone, and be content to lose her own, if by obedience to the King's
command so precious a grace might be acquired.

Tom urged--the woman still adhered to her declarations.  Finally he
said--

"I think the woman hath said true.  An' _my_ mother were in her place
and gifted with the devil's functions, she had not stayed a moment to
call her storms and lay the whole land in ruins, if the saving of my
forfeit life were the price she got!  It is argument that other
mothers are made in like mould.  Thou art free, goodwife--thou and thy
child--for I do think thee innocent.  _Now_ thou'st nought to fear,
being pardoned--pull off thy stockings!--an' thou canst make me a storm,
thou shalt be rich!"

The redeemed creature was loud in her gratitude, and proceeded to
obey, whilst Tom looked on with eager expectancy, a little marred
by apprehension; the courtiers at the same time manifesting decided
discomfort and uneasiness.  The woman stripped her own feet and her
little girl's also, and plainly did her best to reward the King's
generosity with an earthquake, but it was all a failure and a
disappointment.  Tom sighed, and said--

"There, good soul, trouble thyself no further, thy power is departed
out of thee.  Go thy way in peace; and if it return to thee at any time,
forget me not, but fetch me a storm." {13}




CHAPTER XVI. The State Dinner.

The dinner hour drew near--yet strangely enough, the thought brought
but slight discomfort to Tom, and hardly any terror.  The morning's
experiences had wonderfully built up his confidence; the poor little
ash-cat was already more wonted to his strange garret, after four
days' habit, than a mature person could have become in a full month.  A
child's facility in accommodating itself to circumstances was never more
strikingly illustrated.

Let us privileged ones hurry to the great banqueting-room and have a
glance at matters there whilst Tom is being made ready for the
imposing occasion.  It is a spacious apartment, with gilded pillars
and pilasters, and pictured walls and ceilings.  At the door stand tall
guards, as rigid as statues, dressed in rich and picturesque costumes,
and bearing halberds.  In a high gallery which runs all around the place
is a band of musicians and a packed company of citizens of both sexes,
in brilliant attire.  In the centre of the room, upon a raised platform,
is Tom's table. Now let the ancient chronicler speak:

"A gentleman enters the room bearing a rod, and along with him another
bearing a tablecloth, which, after they have both kneeled three times
with the utmost veneration, he spreads upon the table, and after
kneeling again they both retire; then come two others, one with the rod
again, the other with a salt-cellar, a plate, and bread; when they have
kneeled as the others had done, and placed what was brought upon the
table, they too retire with the same ceremonies performed by the first;
at last come two nobles, richly clothed, one bearing a tasting-knife,
who, after prostrating themselves three times in the most graceful
manner, approach and rub the table with bread and salt, with as much awe
as if the King had been present." {6}

So end the solemn preliminaries.  Now, far down the echoing corridors
we hear a bugle-blast, and the indistinct cry, "Place for the King!
 Way for the King's most excellent majesty!"  These sounds are momently
repeated--they grow nearer and nearer--and presently, almost in our
faces, the martial note peals and the cry rings out, "Way for the King!"
 At this instant the shining pageant appears, and files in at the door,
with a measured march. Let the chronicler speak again:--

"First come Gentlemen, Barons, Earls, Knights of the Garter, all richly
dressed and bareheaded; next comes the Chancellor, between two, one of
which carries the royal sceptre, the other the Sword of State in a red
scabbard, studded with golden fleurs-de-lis, the point upwards; next
comes the King himself--whom, upon his appearing, twelve trumpets and
many drums salute with a great burst of welcome, whilst all in the
galleries rise in their places, crying 'God save the King!'  After him
come nobles attached to his person, and on his right and left march his
guard of honour, his fifty Gentlemen Pensioners, with gilt battle-axes."

This was all fine and pleasant.  Tom's pulse beat high, and a glad light
was in his eye.  He bore himself right gracefully, and all the more
so because he was not thinking of how he was doing it, his mind being
charmed and occupied with the blithe sights and sounds about him--and
besides, nobody can be very ungraceful in nicely-fitting beautiful
clothes after he has grown a little used to them--especially if he is
for the moment unconscious of them. Tom remembered his instructions, and
acknowledged his greeting with a slight inclination of his plumed head,
and a courteous "I thank ye, my good people."

He seated himself at table, without removing his cap; and did it without
the least embarrassment; for to eat with one's cap on was the one
solitary royal custom upon which the kings and the Cantys met upon
common ground, neither party having any advantage over the other in the
matter of old familiarity with it.  The pageant broke up and grouped
itself picturesquely, and remained bareheaded.

Now to the sound of gay music the Yeomen of the Guard entered,--"the
tallest and mightiest men in England, they being carefully selected in
this regard"--but we will let the chronicler tell about it:--

"The Yeomen of the Guard entered, bareheaded, clothed in scarlet, with
golden roses upon their backs; and these went and came, bringing in each
turn a course of dishes, served in plate.  These dishes were received
by a gentleman in the same order they were brought, and placed upon
the table, while the taster gave to each guard a mouthful to eat of the
particular dish he had brought, for fear of any poison."

Tom made a good dinner, notwithstanding he was conscious that hundreds
of eyes followed each morsel to his mouth and watched him eat it with an
interest which could not have been more intense if it had been a deadly
explosive and was expected to blow him up and scatter him all about
the place.  He was careful not to hurry, and equally careful not to do
anything whatever for himself, but wait till the proper official knelt
down and did it for him.  He got through without a mistake--flawless and
precious triumph.

When the meal was over at last and he marched away in the midst of his
bright pageant, with the happy noises in his ears of blaring bugles,
rolling drums, and thundering acclamations, he felt that if he had seen
the worst of dining in public it was an ordeal which he would be glad
to endure several times a day if by that means he could but buy himself
free from some of the more formidable requirements of his royal office.




CHAPTER XVII. Foo-foo the First.

Miles Hendon hurried along toward the Southwark end of the bridge,
keeping a sharp look-out for the persons he sought, and hoping and
expecting to overtake them presently.  He was disappointed in this,
however.  By asking questions, he was enabled to track them part of the
way through Southwark; then all traces ceased, and he was perplexed as
to how to proceed.  Still, he continued his efforts as best he
could during the rest of the day.  Nightfall found him leg-weary,
half-famished, and his desire as far from accomplishment as ever; so
he supped at the Tabard Inn and went to bed, resolved to make an early
start in the morning, and give the town an exhaustive search.  As he lay
thinking and planning, he presently began to reason thus:  The boy would
escape from the ruffian, his reputed father, if possible; would he go
back to London and seek his former haunts?  No, he would not do that,
he would avoid recapture. What, then, would he do?  Never having had a
friend in the world, or a protector, until he met Miles Hendon, he would
naturally try to find that friend again, provided the effort did not
require him to go toward London and danger.  He would strike for Hendon
Hall, that is what he would do, for he knew Hendon was homeward bound
and there he might expect to find him.  Yes, the case was plain to
Hendon--he must lose no more time in Southwark, but move at once through
Kent, toward Monk's Holm, searching the wood and inquiring as he went.
 Let us return to the vanished little King now.

The ruffian whom the waiter at the inn on the bridge saw 'about to join'
the youth and the King did not exactly join them, but fell in close
behind them and followed their steps.  He said nothing. His left arm was
in a sling, and he wore a large green patch over his left eye; he limped
slightly, and used an oaken staff as a support.  The youth led the King
a crooked course through Southwark, and by-and-by struck into the
high road beyond.  The King was irritated, now, and said he would stop
here--it was Hendon's place to come to him, not his to go to Hendon.  He
would not endure such insolence; he would stop where he was.  The youth
said--

"Thou'lt tarry here, and thy friend lying wounded in the wood yonder?
 So be it, then."

The King's manner changed at once.  He cried out--

"Wounded?  And who hath dared to do it?  But that is apart; lead on,
lead on!  Faster, sirrah!  Art shod with lead?  Wounded, is he?  Now
though the doer of it be a duke's son he shall rue it!"

It was some distance to the wood, but the space was speedily traversed.
The youth looked about him, discovered a bough sticking in the ground,
with a small bit of rag tied to it, then led the way into the forest,
watching for similar boughs and finding them at intervals; they were
evidently guides to the point he was aiming at.  By-and-by an open place
was reached, where were the charred remains of a farm-house, and near
them a barn which was falling to ruin and decay.  There was no sign of
life anywhere, and utter silence prevailed.  The youth entered the barn,
the King following eagerly upon his heels.  No one there! The King shot
a surprised and suspicious glance at the youth, and asked--

"Where is he?"

A mocking laugh was his answer.  The King was in a rage in a moment; he
seized a billet of wood and was in the act of charging upon the youth
when another mocking laugh fell upon his ear.  It was from the lame
ruffian who had been following at a distance. The King turned and said
angrily--

"Who art thou?  What is thy business here?"

"Leave thy foolery," said the man, "and quiet thyself.  My disguise is
none so good that thou canst pretend thou knowest not thy father through
it."

"Thou art not my father.  I know thee not.  I am the King.  If thou hast
hid my servant, find him for me, or thou shalt sup sorrow for what thou
hast done."

John Canty replied, in a stern and measured voice--

"It is plain thou art mad, and I am loath to punish thee;  but if thou
provoke me, I must.  Thy prating doth no harm here, where there are
no ears that need to mind thy follies; yet it is well to practise thy
tongue to wary speech, that it may do no hurt when our quarters change.
 I have done a murder, and may not tarry at home--neither shalt thou,
seeing I need thy service.  My name is changed, for wise reasons; it is
Hobbs--John Hobbs; thine is Jack--charge thy memory accordingly.  Now,
then, speak.  Where is thy mother?  Where are thy sisters?  They came
not to the place appointed--knowest thou whither they went?"

The King answered sullenly--

"Trouble me not with these riddles.  My mother is dead; my sisters are
in the palace."

The youth near by burst into a derisive laugh, and the King would have
assaulted him, but Canty--or Hobbs, as he now called himself--prevented
him, and said--

"Peace, Hugo, vex him not; his mind is astray, and thy ways fret him.
Sit thee down, Jack, and quiet thyself; thou shalt have a morsel to eat,
anon."

Hobbs and Hugo fell to talking together, in low voices, and the King
removed himself as far as he could from their disagreeable company.
 He withdrew into the twilight of the farther end of the barn, where
he found the earthen floor bedded a foot deep with straw.  He lay down
here, drew straw over himself in lieu of blankets, and was soon absorbed
in thinking.  He had many griefs, but the minor ones were swept almost
into forgetfulness by the supreme one, the loss of his father.  To
the rest of the world the name of Henry VIII. brought a shiver, and
suggested an ogre whose nostrils breathed destruction and whose hand
dealt scourgings and death; but to this boy the name brought only
sensations of pleasure; the figure it invoked wore a countenance that
was all gentleness and affection.  He called to mind a long succession
of loving passages between his father and himself, and dwelt fondly upon
them, his unstinted tears attesting how deep and real was the grief that
possessed his heart. As the afternoon wasted away, the lad, wearied with
his troubles, sank gradually into a tranquil and healing slumber.

After a considerable time--he could not tell how long--his senses
struggled to a half-consciousness, and as he lay with closed eyes
vaguely wondering where he was and what had been happening, he noted a
murmurous sound, the sullen beating of rain upon the roof. A snug sense
of comfort stole over him, which was rudely broken, the next moment,
by a chorus of piping cackles and coarse laughter.  It startled him
disagreeably, and he unmuffled his head to see whence this interruption
proceeded.  A grim and unsightly picture met his eye.  A bright fire was
burning in the middle of the floor, at the other end of the barn; and
around it, and lit weirdly up by the red glare, lolled and sprawled the
motliest company of tattered gutter-scum and ruffians, of both sexes, he
had ever read or dreamed of.  There were huge stalwart men, brown
with exposure, long-haired, and clothed in fantastic rags; there were
middle-sized youths, of truculent countenance, and similarly clad; there
were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones,
with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping
from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with
his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the
implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls,
some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud,
brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were three
sore-faced babies; there were a couple of starveling curs, with strings
about their necks, whose office was to lead the blind.

The night was come, the gang had just finished feasting, an orgy was
beginning; the can of liquor was passing from mouth to mouth. A general
cry broke forth--

"A song! a song from the Bat and Dick and Dot-and-go-One!"

One of the blind men got up, and made ready by casting aside the patches
that sheltered his excellent eyes, and the pathetic placard which
recited the cause of his calamity.  Dot-and-go-One disencumbered himself
of his timber leg and took his place, upon sound and healthy limbs,
beside his fellow-rascal; then they roared out a rollicking ditty,
and were reinforced by the whole crew, at the end of each stanza, in
a rousing chorus.  By the time the last stanza was reached, the
half-drunken enthusiasm had risen to such a pitch, that everybody joined
in and sang it clear through from the beginning, producing a volume of
villainous sound that made the rafters quake.  These were the inspiring
words:--

'Bien Darkman's then, Bouse Mort and Ken, The bien Coves bings awast, On
Chates to trine by Rome Coves dine For his long lib at last. Bing'd out
bien Morts and toure, and toure, Bing out of the Rome vile bine, And
toure the Cove that cloy'd your duds, Upon the Chates to trine.'

(From'The English Rogue.' London, 1665.)

Conversation followed; not in the thieves' dialect of the song, for that
was only used in talk when unfriendly ears might be listening.  In the
course of it, it appeared that 'John Hobbs' was not altogether a new
recruit, but had trained in the gang at some former time.  His later
history was called for, and when he said he had 'accidentally' killed a
man, considerable satisfaction was expressed; when he added that the
man was a priest, he was roundly applauded, and had to take a drink with
everybody.  Old acquaintances welcomed him joyously, and new ones were
proud to shake him by the hand.  He was asked why he had 'tarried away
so many months.'  He answered--

"London is better than the country, and safer, these late years, the
laws be so bitter and so diligently enforced.  An' I had not had that
accident, I had stayed there.  I had resolved to stay, and never more
venture country-wards--but the accident has ended that."

He inquired how many persons the gang numbered now.  The 'ruffler,' or
chief, answered--

"Five and twenty sturdy budges, bulks, files, clapperdogeons and
maunders, counting the dells and doxies and other morts. {7}  Most are
here, the rest are wandering eastward, along the winter lay. We follow
at dawn."

"I do not see the Wen among the honest folk about me.  Where may he be?"

"Poor lad, his diet is brimstone, now, and over hot for a delicate
taste. He was killed in a brawl, somewhere about midsummer."

"I sorrow to hear that; the Wen was a capable man, and brave."

"That was he, truly.  Black Bess, his dell, is of us yet, but absent on
the eastward tramp; a fine lass, of nice ways and orderly conduct, none
ever seeing her drunk above four days in the seven."

"She was ever strict--I remember it well--a goodly wench and worthy
all commendation.  Her mother was more free and less particular; a
troublesome and ugly-tempered beldame, but furnished with a wit above
the common."

"We lost her through it.  Her gift of palmistry and other sorts of
fortune-telling begot for her at last a witch's name and fame. The
law roasted her to death at a slow fire.  It did touch me to a sort of
tenderness to see the gallant way she met her lot--cursing and reviling
all the crowd that gaped and gazed around her, whilst the flames licked
upward toward her face and catched her thin locks and crackled about
her old gray head--cursing them! why an' thou should'st live a thousand
years thoud'st never hear so masterful a cursing.  Alack, her art died
with her.  There be base and weakling imitations left, but no true
blasphemy."

The Ruffler sighed; the listeners sighed in sympathy; a general
depression fell upon the company for a moment, for even hardened
outcasts like these are not wholly dead to sentiment, but are able to
feel a fleeting sense of loss and affliction at wide intervals and
under peculiarly favouring circumstances--as in cases like to this, for
instance, when genius and culture depart and leave no heir.  However, a
deep drink all round soon restored the spirits of the mourners.

"Have any others of our friends fared hardly?" asked Hobbs.

"Some--yes.  Particularly new comers--such as small husbandmen turned
shiftless and hungry upon the world because their farms were taken from
them to be changed to sheep ranges.  They begged, and were whipped at
the cart's tail, naked from the girdle up, till the blood ran; then set
in the stocks to be pelted; they begged again, were whipped again, and
deprived of an ear; they begged a third time--poor devils, what else
could they do?--and were branded on the cheek with a red-hot iron, then
sold for slaves; they ran away, were hunted down, and hanged.  'Tis
a brief tale, and quickly told.  Others of us have fared less hardly.
Stand forth, Yokel, Burns, and Hodge--show your adornments!"

These stood up and stripped away some of their rags, exposing their
backs, criss-crossed with ropy old welts left by the lash; one turned
up his hair and showed the place where a left ear had once been; another
showed a brand upon his shoulder--the letter V--and a mutilated ear; the
third said--

"I am Yokel, once a farmer and prosperous, with loving wife and
kids--now am I somewhat different in estate and calling; and the wife
and kids are gone; mayhap they are in heaven, mayhap in--in the other
place--but the kindly God be thanked, they bide no more in _England_!
 My good old blameless mother strove to earn bread by nursing the sick;
one of these died, the doctors knew not how, so my mother was burnt for
a witch, whilst my babes looked on and wailed.  English law!--up,
all, with your cups!--now all together and with a cheer!--drink to the
merciful English law that delivered _her_ from the English hell!  Thank
you, mates, one and all.  I begged, from house to house--I and the
wife--bearing with us the hungry kids--but it was crime to be hungry in
England--so they stripped us and lashed us through three towns.  Drink
ye all again to the merciful English law!--for its lash drank deep of my
Mary's blood and its blessed deliverance came quick.  She lies there, in
the potter's field, safe from all harms.  And the kids--well, whilst
the law lashed me from town to town, they starved. Drink, lads--only
a drop--a drop to the poor kids, that never did any creature harm.
 I begged again--begged, for a crust, and got the stocks and lost an
ear--see, here bides the stump; I begged again, and here is the stump
of the other to keep me minded of it. And still I begged again, and was
sold for a slave--here on my cheek under this stain, if I washed it off,
ye might see the red S the branding-iron left there!  A _slave_!  Do
you understand that word?  An English _slave_!--that is he that stands
before ye.  I have run from my master, and when I am found--the heavy
curse of heaven fall on the law of the land that hath commanded it!--I
shall hang!" {1}

A ringing voice came through the murky air--

"Thou shalt _not_!--and this day the end of that law is come!"

All turned, and saw the fantastic figure of the little King approaching
hurriedly; as it emerged into the light and was clearly revealed, a
general explosion of inquiries broke out--

"Who is it?  _What_ is it?  Who art thou, manikin?"

The boy stood unconfused in the midst of all those surprised and
questioning eyes, and answered with princely dignity--

"I am Edward, King of England."

A wild burst of laughter followed, partly of derision and partly of
delight in the excellence of the joke.  The King was stung.  He said
sharply--

"Ye mannerless vagrants, is this your recognition of the royal boon I
have promised?"

He said more, with angry voice and excited gesture, but it was lost in
a whirlwind of laughter and mocking exclamations.  'John Hobbs' made
several attempts to make himself heard above the din, and at last
succeeded--saying--

"Mates, he is my son, a dreamer, a fool, and stark mad--mind him not--he
thinketh he _is_ the King."

"I _am_ the King," said Edward, turning toward him, "as thou shalt know
to thy cost, in good time.  Thou hast confessed a murder--thou shalt
swing for it."

"_Thou'lt_ betray me?--_thou_?  An' I get my hands upon thee--"

"Tut-tut!" said the burley Ruffler, interposing in time to save the
King, and emphasising this service by knocking Hobbs down with his fist,
"hast respect for neither Kings _nor_ Rufflers?  An' thou insult my
presence so again, I'll hang thee up myself."  Then he said to his
Majesty, "Thou must make no threats against thy mates, lad; and thou
must guard thy tongue from saying evil of them elsewhere.  _Be king_, if
it please thy mad humour, but be not harmful in it.  Sink the title thou
hast uttered--'tis treason; we be bad men in some few trifling ways, but
none among us is so base as to be traitor to his King; we be loving
and loyal hearts, in that regard.  Note if I speak truth.  Now--all
together:  'Long live Edward, King of England!'"

"LONG LIVE EDWARD, KING OF ENGLAND!"

The response came with such a thundergust from the motley crew that the
crazy building vibrated to the sound.  The little King's face lighted
with pleasure for an instant, and he slightly inclined his head, and
said with grave simplicity--

"I thank you, my good people."

This unexpected result threw the company into convulsions of merriment.
When something like quiet was presently come again, the Ruffler said,
firmly, but with an accent of good nature--

"Drop it, boy, 'tis not wise, nor well.  Humour thy fancy, if thou must,
but choose some other title."

A tinker shrieked out a suggestion--

"Foo-foo the First, King of the Mooncalves!"

The title 'took,' at once, every throat responded, and a roaring shout
went up, of--

"Long live Foo-foo the First, King of the Mooncalves!" followed by
hootings, cat-calls, and peals of laughter.

"Hale him forth, and crown him!"

"Robe him!"

"Sceptre him!"

"Throne him!"

These and twenty other cries broke out at once! and almost before the
poor little victim could draw a breath he was crowned with a tin basin,
robed in a tattered blanket, throned upon a barrel, and sceptred with
the tinker's soldering-iron.  Then all flung themselves upon their
knees about him and sent up a chorus of ironical wailings, and mocking
supplications, whilst they swabbed their eyes with their soiled and
ragged sleeves and aprons--

"Be gracious to us, O sweet King!"

"Trample not upon thy beseeching worms, O noble Majesty!"

"Pity thy slaves, and comfort them with a royal kick!"

"Cheer us and warm us with thy gracious rays, O flaming sun of
sovereignty!"

"Sanctify the ground with the touch of thy foot, that we may eat the
dirt and be ennobled!"

"Deign to spit upon us, O Sire, that our children's children may tell of
thy princely condescension, and be proud and happy for ever!"

But the humorous tinker made the 'hit' of the evening and carried off
the honours.  Kneeling, he pretended to kiss the King's foot, and was
indignantly spurned; whereupon he went about begging for a rag to paste
over the place upon his face which had been touched by the foot, saying
it must be preserved from contact with the vulgar air, and that he
should make his fortune by going on the highway and exposing it to
view at the rate of a hundred shillings a sight.  He made himself so
killingly funny that he was the envy and admiration of the whole mangy
rabble.

Tears of shame and indignation stood in the little monarch's eyes; and
the thought in his heart was, "Had I offered them a deep wrong they
could not be more cruel--yet have I proffered nought but to do them a
kindness--and it is thus they use me for it!"




CHAPTER XVIII. The Prince with the Tramps.

The troop of vagabonds turned out at early dawn, and set forward on
their march.  There was a lowering sky overhead, sloppy ground under
foot, and a winter chill in the air.  All gaiety was gone from the
company; some were sullen and silent, some were irritable and petulant,
none were gentle-humoured, all were thirsty.

The Ruffler put 'Jack' in Hugo's charge, with some brief instructions,
and commanded John Canty to keep away from him and let him alone; he
also warned Hugo not to be too rough with the lad.

After a while the weather grew milder, and the clouds lifted somewhat.
The troop ceased to shiver, and their spirits began to improve.  They
grew more and more cheerful, and finally began to chaff each other and
insult passengers along the highway.  This showed that they were awaking
to an appreciation of life and its joys once more.  The dread in which
their sort was held was apparent in the fact that everybody gave them
the road, and took their ribald insolences meekly, without venturing
to talk back. They snatched linen from the hedges, occasionally in full
view of the owners, who made no protest, but only seemed grateful that
they did not take the hedges, too.

By-and-by they invaded a small farmhouse and made themselves at home
while the trembling farmer and his people swept the larder clean to
furnish a breakfast for them.  They chucked the housewife and her
daughters under the chin whilst receiving the food from their hands, and
made coarse jests about them, accompanied with insulting epithets and
bursts of horse-laughter.  They threw bones and vegetables at the farmer
and his sons, kept them dodging all the time, and applauded uproariously
when a good hit was made. They ended by buttering the head of one of
the daughters who resented some of their familiarities.  When they took
their leave they threatened to come back and burn the house over the
heads of the family if any report of their doings got to the ears of the
authorities.

About noon, after a long and weary tramp, the gang came to a halt behind
a hedge on the outskirts of a considerable village.  An hour was allowed
for rest, then the crew scattered themselves abroad to enter the village
at different points to ply their various trades--'Jack' was sent with
Hugo.  They wandered hither and thither for some time, Hugo watching
for opportunities to do a stroke of business, but finding none--so he
finally said--

"I see nought to steal; it is a paltry place.  Wherefore we will beg."

"_We_, forsooth!  Follow thy trade--it befits thee.  But _I_ will not
beg."

"Thou'lt not beg!" exclaimed Hugo, eyeing the King with surprise.
"Prithee, since when hast thou reformed?"

"What dost thou mean?"

"Mean?  Hast thou not begged the streets of London all thy life?"

"I?  Thou idiot!"

"Spare thy compliments--thy stock will last the longer.  Thy father says
thou hast begged all thy days.  Mayhap he lied. Peradventure you will
even make so bold as to _say_ he lied," scoffed Hugo.

"Him _you_ call my father?  Yes, he lied."

"Come, play not thy merry game of madman so far, mate; use it for thy
amusement, not thy hurt.  An' I tell him this, he will scorch thee
finely for it."

"Save thyself the trouble.  I will tell him."

"I like thy spirit, I do in truth; but I do not admire thy judgment.
Bone-rackings and bastings be plenty enow in this life, without going
out of one's way to invite them.  But a truce to these matters; _I_
believe your father.  I doubt not he can lie; I doubt not he _doth_
lie, upon occasion, for the best of us do that; but there is no occasion
here.  A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for
nought.  But come; sith it is thy humour to give over begging,
wherewithal shall we busy ourselves?  With robbing kitchens?"

The King said, impatiently--

"Have done with this folly--you weary me!"

Hugo replied, with temper--

"Now harkee, mate; you will not beg, you will not rob; so be it. But I
will tell you what you _will_ do.  You will play decoy whilst _I_ beg.
Refuse, an' you think you may venture!"

The King was about to reply contemptuously, when Hugo said,
interrupting--

"Peace!  Here comes one with a kindly face.  Now will I fall down in
a fit.  When the stranger runs to me, set you up a wail, and fall upon
your knees, seeming to weep; then cry out as all the devils of misery
were in your belly, and say, 'Oh, sir, it is my poor afflicted brother,
and we be friendless; o' God's name cast through your merciful eyes one
pitiful look upon a sick, forsaken, and most miserable wretch; bestow
one little penny out of thy riches upon one smitten of God and ready
to perish!'--and mind you, keep you _on_ wailing, and abate not till we
bilk him of his penny, else shall you rue it."

Then immediately Hugo began to moan, and groan, and roll his eyes, and
reel and totter about; and when the stranger was close at hand, down he
sprawled before him, with a shriek, and began to writhe and wallow in
the dirt, in seeming agony.

"O, dear, O dear!" cried the benevolent stranger, "O poor soul, poor
soul, how he doth suffer!  There--let me help thee up."

"O noble sir, forbear, and God love you for a princely gentleman--but it
giveth me cruel pain to touch me when I am taken so.  My brother there
will tell your worship how I am racked with anguish when these fits be
upon me.  A penny, dear sir, a penny, to buy a little food; then leave
me to my sorrows."

"A penny! thou shalt have three, thou hapless creature,"--and he fumbled
in his pocket with nervous haste and got them out. "There, poor lad,
take them and most welcome.  Now come hither, my boy, and help me carry
thy stricken brother to yon house, where--"

"I am not his brother," said the King, interrupting.

"What! not his brother?"

"Oh, hear him!" groaned Hugo, then privately ground his teeth. "He
denies his own brother--and he with one foot in the grave!"

"Boy, thou art indeed hard of heart, if this is thy brother.  For
shame!--and he scarce able to move hand or foot.  If he is not thy
brother, who is he, then?"

"A beggar and a thief!  He has got your money and has picked your pocket
likewise.  An' thou would'st do a healing miracle, lay thy staff over
his shoulders and trust Providence for the rest."

But Hugo did not tarry for the miracle.  In a moment he was up and off
like the wind, the gentleman following after and raising the hue and cry
lustily as he went.  The King, breathing deep gratitude to Heaven for
his own release, fled in the opposite direction, and did not slacken
his pace until he was out of harm's reach.  He took the first road that
offered, and soon put the village behind him.  He hurried along, as
briskly as he could, during several hours, keeping a nervous watch over
his shoulder for pursuit; but his fears left him at last, and a grateful
sense of security took their place.  He recognised, now, that he was
hungry, and also very tired.  So he halted at a farmhouse; but when
he was about to speak, he was cut short and driven rudely away.  His
clothes were against him.

He wandered on, wounded and indignant, and was resolved to put himself
in the way of like treatment no more.  But hunger is pride's master; so,
as the evening drew near, he made an attempt at another farmhouse; but
here he fared worse than before; for he was called hard names and was
promised arrest as a vagrant except he moved on promptly.

The night came on, chilly and overcast; and still the footsore monarch
laboured slowly on.  He was obliged to keep moving, for every time he
sat down to rest he was soon penetrated to the bone with the cold.  All
his sensations and experiences, as he moved through the solemn gloom
and the empty vastness of the night, were new and strange to him.  At
intervals he heard voices approach, pass by, and fade into silence; and
as he saw nothing more of the bodies they belonged to than a sort of
formless drifting blur, there was something spectral and uncanny about
it all that made him shudder.  Occasionally he caught the twinkle of a
light--always far away, apparently--almost in another world; if he heard
the tinkle of a sheep's bell, it was vague, distant, indistinct;
the muffled lowing of the herds floated to him on the night wind in
vanishing cadences, a mournful sound; now and then came the complaining
howl of a dog over viewless expanses of field and forest; all sounds
were remote; they made the little King feel that all life and activity
were far removed from him, and that he stood solitary, companionless, in
the centre of a measureless solitude.

He stumbled along, through the gruesome fascinations of this new
experience, startled occasionally by the soft rustling of the dry leaves
overhead, so like human whispers they seemed to sound; and by-and-by he
came suddenly upon the freckled light of a tin lantern near at hand.  He
stepped back into the shadows and waited.  The lantern stood by the
open door of a barn.  The King waited some time--there was no sound,
and nobody stirring.  He got so cold, standing still, and the hospitable
barn looked so enticing, that at last he resolved to risk everything and
enter. He started swiftly and stealthily, and just as he was crossing
the threshold he heard voices behind him.  He darted behind a cask,
within the barn, and stooped down.  Two farm-labourers came in, bringing
the lantern with them, and fell to work, talking meanwhile.  Whilst they
moved about with the light, the King made good use of his eyes and took
the bearings of what seemed to be a good-sized stall at the further end
of the place, purposing to grope his way to it when he should be left to
himself.  He also noted the position of a pile of horse blankets, midway
of the route, with the intent to levy upon them for the service of the
crown of England for one night.

By-and-by the men finished and went away, fastening the door behind
them and taking the lantern with them.  The shivering King made for the
blankets, with as good speed as the darkness would allow; gathered them
up, and then groped his way safely to the stall.  Of two of the blankets
he made a bed, then covered himself with the remaining two.  He was a
glad monarch, now, though the blankets were old and thin, and not quite
warm enough; and besides gave out a pungent horsey odour that was almost
suffocatingly powerful.

Although the King was hungry and chilly, he was also so tired and so
drowsy that these latter influences soon began to get the advantage
of the former, and he presently dozed off into a state of
semi-consciousness.  Then, just as he was on the point of losing himself
wholly, he distinctly felt something touch him!  He was broad awake in
a moment, and gasping for breath.  The cold horror of that mysterious
touch in the dark almost made his heart stand still.  He lay motionless,
and listened, scarcely breathing. But nothing stirred, and there was
no sound.  He continued to listen, and wait, during what seemed a long
time, but still nothing stirred, and there was no sound.  So he began
to drop into a drowse once more, at last; and all at once he felt that
mysterious touch again!  It was a grisly thing, this light touch from
this noiseless and invisible presence; it made the boy sick with ghostly
fears.  What should he do?  That was the question; but he did not know
how to answer it.  Should he leave these reasonably comfortable quarters
and fly from this inscrutable horror?  But fly whither?  He could
not get out of the barn; and the idea of scurrying blindly hither and
thither in the dark, within the captivity of the four walls, with this
phantom gliding after him, and visiting him with that soft hideous touch
upon cheek or shoulder at every turn, was intolerable.  But to stay
where he was, and endure this living death all night--was that better?
 No.  What, then, was there left to do?  Ah, there was but one course;
he knew it well--he must put out his hand and find that thing!

It was easy to think this; but it was hard to brace himself up to try
it. Three times he stretched his hand a little way out into the dark,
gingerly; and snatched it suddenly back, with a gasp--not because it
had encountered anything, but because he had felt so sure it was just
_going_ to.  But the fourth time, he groped a little further, and his
hand lightly swept against something soft and warm.  This petrified him,
nearly, with fright; his mind was in such a state that he could imagine
the thing to be nothing else than a corpse, newly dead and still warm.
He thought he would rather die than touch it again.  But he thought this
false thought because he did not know the immortal strength of
human curiosity. In no long time his hand was tremblingly groping
again--against his judgment, and without his consent--but groping
persistently on, just the same.  It encountered a bunch of long hair; he
shuddered, but followed up the hair and found what seemed to be a warm
rope; followed up the rope and found an innocent calf!--for the rope was
not a rope at all, but the calf's tail.

The King was cordially ashamed of himself for having gotten all that
fright and misery out of so paltry a matter as a slumbering calf; but he
need not have felt so about it, for it was not the calf that frightened
him, but a dreadful non-existent something which the calf stood for; and
any other boy, in those old superstitious times, would have acted and
suffered just as he had done.

The King was not only delighted to find that the creature was only a
calf, but delighted to have the calf's company; for he had been feeling
so lonesome and friendless that the company and comradeship of even
this humble animal were welcome.  And he had been so buffeted, so rudely
entreated by his own kind, that it was a real comfort to him to feel
that he was at last in the society of a fellow-creature that had at
least a soft heart and a gentle spirit, whatever loftier attributes
might be lacking.  So he resolved to waive rank and make friends with
the calf.

While stroking its sleek warm back--for it lay near him and within easy
reach--it occurred to him that this calf might be utilised in more ways
than one.  Whereupon he re-arranged his bed, spreading it down close to
the calf; then he cuddled himself up to the calf's back, drew the covers
up over himself and his friend, and in a minute or two was as warm and
comfortable as he had ever been in the downy couches of the regal palace
of Westminster.

Pleasant thoughts came at once; life took on a cheerfuller seeming.  He
was free of the bonds of servitude and crime, free of the companionship
of base and brutal outlaws; he was warm; he was sheltered; in a word, he
was happy.  The night wind was rising; it swept by in fitful gusts
that made the old barn quake and rattle, then its forces died down
at intervals, and went moaning and wailing around corners and
projections--but it was all music to the King, now that he was snug and
comfortable: let it blow and rage, let it batter and bang, let it moan
and wail, he minded it not, he only enjoyed it.  He merely snuggled
the closer to his friend, in a luxury of warm contentment, and drifted
blissfully out of consciousness into a deep and dreamless sleep that
was full of serenity and peace.  The distant dogs howled, the melancholy
kine complained, and the winds went on raging, whilst furious sheets
of rain drove along the roof; but the Majesty of England slept on,
undisturbed, and the calf did the same, it being a simple creature, and
not easily troubled by storms or embarrassed by sleeping with a king.




CHAPTER XIX. The Prince with the peasants.

When the King awoke in the early morning, he found that a wet but
thoughtful rat had crept into the place during the night and made a cosy
bed for itself in his bosom.  Being disturbed now, it scampered away.
The boy smiled, and said, "Poor fool, why so fearful?  I am as forlorn
as thou.  'Twould be a sham in me to hurt the helpless, who am myself so
helpless.  Moreover, I owe you thanks for a good omen; for when a king
has fallen so low that the very rats do make a bed of him, it surely
meaneth that his fortunes be upon the turn, since it is plain he can no
lower go."

He got up and stepped out of the stall, and just then he heard the sound
of children's voices.  The barn door opened and a couple of little girls
came in.  As soon as they saw him their talking and laughing ceased, and
they stopped and stood still, gazing at him with strong curiosity; they
presently began to whisper together, then they approached nearer, and
stopped again to gaze and whisper.  By-and-by they gathered courage and
began to discuss him aloud.  One said--

"He hath a comely face."

The other added--

"And pretty hair."

"But is ill clothed enow."

"And how starved he looketh."

They came still nearer, sidling shyly around and about him, examining
him minutely from all points, as if he were some strange new kind of
animal, but warily and watchfully the while, as if they half feared he
might be a sort of animal that would bite, upon occasion.  Finally they
halted before him, holding each other's hands for protection, and took a
good satisfying stare with their innocent eyes; then one of them plucked
up all her courage and inquired with honest directness--

"Who art thou, boy?"

"I am the King," was the grave answer.

The children gave a little start, and their eyes spread themselves wide
open and remained so during a speechless half minute.  Then curiosity
broke the silence--

"The _King_?  What King?"

"The King of England."

The children looked at each other--then at him--then at each other
again--wonderingly, perplexedly; then one said--

"Didst hear him, Margery?--he said he is the King.  Can that be true?"

"How can it be else but true, Prissy?  Would he say a lie?  For look
you, Prissy, an' it were not true, it _would_ be a lie.  It surely would
be. Now think on't.  For all things that be not true, be lies--thou
canst make nought else out of it."

It was a good tight argument, without a leak in it anywhere; and it left
Prissy's half-doubts not a leg to stand on.  She considered a moment,
then put the King upon his honour with the simple remark--

"If thou art truly the King, then I believe thee."

"I am truly the King."

This settled the matter.  His Majesty's royalty was accepted without
further question or discussion, and the two little girls began at once
to inquire into how he came to be where he was, and how he came to be so
unroyally clad, and whither he was bound, and all about his affairs.  It
was a mighty relief to him to pour out his troubles where they would not
be scoffed at or doubted; so he told his tale with feeling, forgetting
even his hunger for the time; and it was received with the deepest and
tenderest sympathy by the gentle little maids.  But when he got down
to his latest experiences and they learned how long he had been without
food, they cut him short and hurried him away to the farmhouse to find a
breakfast for him.

The King was cheerful and happy now, and said to himself, "When I
am come to mine own again, I will always honour little children,
remembering how that these trusted me and believed in me in my time
of trouble; whilst they that were older, and thought themselves wiser,
mocked at me and held me for a liar."

The children's mother received the King kindly, and was full of pity;
for his forlorn condition and apparently crazed intellect touched her
womanly heart.  She was a widow, and rather poor; consequently she had
seen trouble enough to enable her to feel for the unfortunate.  She
imagined that the demented boy had wandered away from his friends or
keepers; so she tried to find out whence he had come, in order that
she might take measures to return him; but all her references to
neighbouring towns and villages, and all her inquiries in the same line
went for nothing--the boy's face, and his answers, too, showed that the
things she was talking of were not familiar to him.  He spoke earnestly
and simply about court matters, and broke down, more than once, when
speaking of the late King 'his father'; but whenever the conversation
changed to baser topics, he lost interest and became silent.

The woman was mightily puzzled; but she did not give up.  As she
proceeded with her cooking, she set herself to contriving devices to
surprise the boy into betraying his real secret.  She talked about
cattle--he showed no concern; then about sheep--the same result:  so
her guess that he had been a shepherd boy was an error; she talked about
mills; and about weavers, tinkers, smiths, trades and tradesmen of all
sorts; and about Bedlam, and jails, and charitable retreats:  but no
matter, she was baffled at all points.  Not altogether, either; for she
argued that she had narrowed the thing down to domestic service.  Yes,
she was sure she was on the right track, now; he must have been a house
servant.  So she led up to that.  But the result was discouraging. The
subject of sweeping appeared to weary him; fire-building failed to stir
him; scrubbing and scouring awoke no enthusiasm. The goodwife touched,
with a perishing hope, and rather as a matter of form, upon the subject
of cooking.  To her surprise, and her vast delight, the King's face
lighted at once!  Ah, she had hunted him down at last, she thought; and
she was right proud, too, of the devious shrewdness and tact which had
accomplished it.

Her tired tongue got a chance to rest, now; for the King's, inspired
by gnawing hunger and the fragrant smells that came from the sputtering
pots and pans, turned itself loose and delivered itself up to such an
eloquent dissertation upon certain toothsome dishes, that within three
minutes the woman said to herself, "Of a truth I was right--he hath
holpen in a kitchen!"  Then he broadened his bill of fare, and discussed
it with such appreciation and animation, that the goodwife said to
herself, "Good lack! how can he know so many dishes, and so fine ones
withal?  For these belong only upon the tables of the rich and great.
 Ah, now I see! ragged outcast as he is, he must have served in the
palace before his reason went astray; yes, he must have helped in the
very kitchen of the King himself!  I will test him."

Full of eagerness to prove her sagacity, she told the King to mind the
cooking a moment--hinting that he might manufacture and add a dish or
two, if he chose; then she went out of the room and gave her children a
sign to follow after.  The King muttered--

"Another English king had a commission like to this, in a bygone
time--it is nothing against my dignity to undertake an office which the
great Alfred stooped to assume.  But I will try to better serve my trust
than he; for he let the cakes burn."

The intent was good, but the performance was not answerable to it, for
this King, like the other one, soon fell into deep thinkings concerning
his vast affairs, and the same calamity resulted--the cookery got
burned. The woman returned in time to save the breakfast from entire
destruction; and she promptly brought the King out of his dreams with a
brisk and cordial tongue-lashing. Then, seeing how troubled he was
over his violated trust, she softened at once, and was all goodness and
gentleness toward him.

The boy made a hearty and satisfying meal, and was greatly refreshed and
gladdened by it.  It was a meal which was distinguished by this curious
feature, that rank was waived on both sides; yet neither recipient
of the favour was aware that it had been extended.  The goodwife had
intended to feed this young tramp with broken victuals in a corner,
like any other tramp or like a dog; but she was so remorseful for the
scolding she had given him, that she did what she could to atone for it
by allowing him to sit at the family table and eat with his betters, on
ostensible terms of equality with them; and the King, on his side, was
so remorseful for having broken his trust, after the family had been so
kind to him, that he forced himself to atone for it by humbling himself
to the family level, instead of requiring the woman and her children to
stand and wait upon him, while he occupied their table in the solitary
state due to his birth and dignity.  It does us all good to unbend
sometimes.  This good woman was made happy all the day long by the
applauses which she got out of herself for her magnanimous condescension
to a tramp; and the King was just as self-complacent over his gracious
humility toward a humble peasant woman.

When breakfast was over, the housewife told the King to wash up the
dishes.  This command was a staggerer, for a moment, and the King came
near rebelling; but then he said to himself, "Alfred the Great watched
the cakes; doubtless he would have washed the dishes too--therefore will
I essay it."

He made a sufficiently poor job of it; and to his surprise too, for the
cleaning of wooden spoons and trenchers had seemed an easy thing to do.
It was a tedious and troublesome piece of work, but he finished it
at last.  He was becoming impatient to get away on his journey now;
however, he was not to lose this thrifty dame's society so easily.  She
furnished him some little odds and ends of employment, which he got
through with after a fair fashion and with some credit.  Then she set
him and the little girls to paring some winter apples; but he was so
awkward at this service that she retired him from it and gave him a
butcher knife to grind.

Afterwards she kept him carding wool until he began to think he had laid
the good King Alfred about far enough in the shade for the present in
the matter of showy menial heroisms that would read picturesquely in
story-books and histories, and so he was half-minded to resign.  And
when, just after the noonday dinner, the goodwife gave him a basket
of kittens to drown, he did resign.  At least he was just going to
resign--for he felt that he must draw the line somewhere, and it
seemed to him that to draw it at kitten-drowning was about the right
thing--when there was an interruption.  The interruption was John
Canty--with a peddler's pack on his back--and Hugo.

The King discovered these rascals approaching the front gate before they
had had a chance to see him; so he said nothing about drawing the line,
but took up his basket of kittens and stepped quietly out the back way,
without a word.  He left the creatures in an out-house, and hurried on,
into a narrow lane at the rear.




CHAPTER XX. The Prince and the hermit.

The high hedge hid him from the house, now; and so, under the impulse of
a deadly fright, he let out all his forces and sped toward a wood in the
distance.  He never looked back until he had almost gained the shelter
of the forest; then he turned and descried two figures in the distance.
That was sufficient; he did not wait to scan them critically, but
hurried on, and never abated his pace till he was far within the
twilight depths of the wood. Then he stopped; being persuaded that he
was now tolerably safe. He listened intently, but the stillness was
profound and solemn--awful, even, and depressing to the spirits.  At
wide intervals his straining ear did detect sounds, but they were so
remote, and hollow, and mysterious, that they seemed not to be real
sounds, but only the moaning and complaining ghosts of departed
ones.  So the sounds were yet more dreary than the silence which they
interrupted.

It was his purpose, in the beginning, to stay where he was the rest of
the day; but a chill soon invaded his perspiring body, and he was at
last obliged to resume movement in order to get warm. He struck straight
through the forest, hoping to pierce to a road presently, but he was
disappointed in this.  He travelled on and on; but the farther he went,
the denser the wood became, apparently.  The gloom began to thicken,
by-and-by, and the King realised that the night was coming on.  It made
him shudder to think of spending it in such an uncanny place; so he
tried to hurry faster, but he only made the less speed, for he could
not now see well enough to choose his steps judiciously; consequently he
kept tripping over roots and tangling himself in vines and briers.

And how glad he was when at last he caught the glimmer of a light! He
approached it warily, stopping often to look about him and listen.  It
came from an unglazed window-opening in a shabby little hut.  He heard
a voice, now, and felt a disposition to run and hide; but he changed his
mind at once, for this voice was praying, evidently.  He glided to the
one window of the hut, raised himself on tiptoe, and stole a glance
within.  The room was small; its floor was the natural earth, beaten
hard by use; in a corner was a bed of rushes and a ragged blanket or
two; near it was a pail, a cup, a basin, and two or three pots and pans;
there was a short bench and a three-legged stool; on the hearth the
remains of a faggot fire were smouldering; before a shrine, which was
lighted by a single candle, knelt an aged man, and on an old wooden box
at his side lay an open book and a human skull.  The man was of large,
bony frame; his hair and whiskers were very long and snowy white; he
was clothed in a robe of sheepskins which reached from his neck to his
heels.

"A holy hermit!" said the King to himself; "now am I indeed fortunate."

The hermit rose from his knees; the King knocked.  A deep voice
responded--

"Enter!--but leave sin behind, for the ground whereon thou shalt stand
is holy!"

The King entered, and paused.  The hermit turned a pair of gleaming,
unrestful eyes upon him, and said--

"Who art thou?"

"I am the King," came the answer, with placid simplicity.

"Welcome, King!" cried the hermit, with enthusiasm.  Then, bustling
about with feverish activity, and constantly saying, "Welcome, welcome,"
he arranged his bench, seated the King on it, by the hearth, threw some
faggots on the fire, and finally fell to pacing the floor with a nervous
stride.

"Welcome!  Many have sought sanctuary here, but they were not worthy,
and were turned away.  But a King who casts his crown away, and despises
the vain splendours of his office, and clothes his body in rags, to
devote his life to holiness and the mortification of the flesh--he is
worthy, he is welcome!--here shall he abide all his days till death
come."  The King hastened to interrupt and explain, but the hermit paid
no attention to him--did not even hear him, apparently, but went right
on with his talk, with a raised voice and a growing energy.  "And thou
shalt be at peace here.  None shall find out thy refuge to disquiet thee
with supplications to return to that empty and foolish life which God
hath moved thee to abandon.  Thou shalt pray here; thou shalt study the
Book; thou shalt meditate upon the follies and delusions of this world,
and upon the sublimities of the world to come; thou shalt feed upon
crusts and herbs, and scourge thy body with whips, daily, to the
purifying of thy soul. Thou shalt wear a hair shirt next thy skin;
thou shalt drink water only; and thou shalt be at peace; yes, wholly at
peace; for whoso comes to seek thee shall go his way again, baffled; he
shall not find thee, he shall not molest thee."

The old man, still pacing back and forth, ceased to speak aloud, and
began to mutter.  The King seized this opportunity to state his case;
and he did it with an eloquence inspired by uneasiness and apprehension.
 But the hermit went on muttering, and gave no heed.  And still
muttering, he approached the King and said impressively--

"'Sh!  I will tell you a secret!"  He bent down to impart it, but
checked himself, and assumed a listening attitude.  After a moment
or two he went on tiptoe to the window-opening, put his head out, and
peered around in the gloaming, then came tiptoeing back again, put his
face close down to the King's, and whispered--

"I am an archangel!"

The King started violently, and said to himself, "Would God I were with
the outlaws again; for lo, now am I the prisoner of a madman!"  His
apprehensions were heightened, and they showed plainly in his face.  In
a low excited voice the hermit continued--

"I see you feel my atmosphere!  There's awe in your face!  None may
be in this atmosphere and not be thus affected; for it is the very
atmosphere of heaven.  I go thither and return, in the twinkling of an
eye.  I was made an archangel on this very spot, it is five years ago,
by angels sent from heaven to confer that awful dignity.  Their presence
filled this place with an intolerable brightness.  And they knelt to me,
King! yes, they knelt to me! for I was greater than they.  I have walked
in the courts of heaven, and held speech with the patriarchs.  Touch
my hand--be not afraid--touch it.  There--now thou hast touched a hand
which has been clasped by Abraham and Isaac and Jacob!  For I have
walked in the golden courts; I have seen the Deity face to face!"  He
paused, to give this speech effect; then his face suddenly changed, and
he started to his feet again saying, with angry energy, "Yes, I am an
archangel; _a mere archangel!_--I that might have been pope!  It is
verily true.  I was told it from heaven in a dream, twenty years ago;
ah, yes, I was to be pope!--and I _should_ have been pope, for Heaven
had said it--but the King dissolved my religious house, and I, poor
obscure unfriended monk, was cast homeless upon the world, robbed of my
mighty destiny!" Here he began to mumble again, and beat his forehead in
futile rage, with his fist; now and then articulating a venomous curse,
and now and then a pathetic "Wherefore I am nought but an archangel--I
that should have been pope!"

So he went on, for an hour, whilst the poor little King sat and
suffered. Then all at once the old man's frenzy departed, and he became
all gentleness.  His voice softened, he came down out of his clouds, and
fell to prattling along so simply and so humanly, that he soon won the
King's heart completely.  The old devotee moved the boy nearer to the
fire and made him comfortable; doctored his small bruises and abrasions
with a deft and tender hand; and then set about preparing and cooking a
supper--chatting pleasantly all the time, and occasionally stroking the
lad's cheek or patting his head, in such a gently caressing way that in
a little while all the fear and repulsion inspired by the archangel were
changed to reverence and affection for the man.

This happy state of things continued while the two ate the supper; then,
after a prayer before the shrine, the hermit put the boy to bed, in a
small adjoining room, tucking him in as snugly and lovingly as a mother
might; and so, with a parting caress, left him and sat down by the
fire, and began to poke the brands about in an absent and aimless way.
Presently he paused; then tapped his forehead several times with his
fingers, as if trying to recall some thought which had escaped from his
mind.  Apparently he was unsuccessful.  Now he started quickly up, and
entered his guest's room, and said--

"Thou art King?"

"Yes," was the response, drowsily uttered.

"What King?"

"Of England."

"Of England?  Then Henry is gone!"

"Alack, it is so.  I am his son."

A black frown settled down upon the hermit's face, and he clenched his
bony hands with a vindictive energy.  He stood a few moments, breathing
fast and swallowing repeatedly, then said in a husky voice--

"Dost know it was he that turned us out into the world houseless and
homeless?"

There was no response.  The old man bent down and scanned the boy's
reposeful face and listened to his placid breathing.  "He sleeps--sleeps
soundly;" and the frown vanished away and gave place to an expression of
evil satisfaction.  A smile flitted across the dreaming boy's features.
The hermit muttered, "So--his heart is happy;" and he turned away.  He
went stealthily about the place, seeking here and there for something;
now and then halting to listen, now and then jerking his head around
and casting a quick glance toward the bed; and always muttering, always
mumbling to himself.  At last he found what he seemed to want--a rusty
old butcher knife and a whetstone.  Then he crept to his place by the
fire, sat himself down, and began to whet the knife softly on the stone,
still muttering, mumbling, ejaculating.  The winds sighed around the
lonely place, the mysterious voices of the night floated by out of the
distances.  The shining eyes of venturesome mice and rats peered out at
the old man from cracks and coverts, but he went on with his work, rapt,
absorbed, and noted none of these things.

At long intervals he drew his thumb along the edge of his knife, and
nodded his head with satisfaction.  "It grows sharper," he said; "yes,
it grows sharper."

He took no note of the flight of time, but worked tranquilly on,
entertaining himself with his thoughts, which broke out occasionally in
articulate speech--

"His father wrought us evil, he destroyed us--and is gone down into the
eternal fires!  Yes, down into the eternal fires!  He escaped us--but it
was God's will, yes it was God's will, we must not repine.  But he
hath not escaped the fires!  No, he hath not escaped the fires, the
consuming, unpitying, remorseless fires--and _they_ are everlasting!"

And so he wrought, and still wrought--mumbling, chuckling a low rasping
chuckle at times--and at times breaking again into words--

"It was his father that did it all.  I am but an archangel; but for him
I should be pope!"

The King stirred.  The hermit sprang noiselessly to the bedside, and
went down upon his knees, bending over the prostrate form with his knife
uplifted.  The boy stirred again; his eyes came open for an instant, but
there was no speculation in them, they saw nothing; the next moment his
tranquil breathing showed that his sleep was sound once more.

The hermit watched and listened, for a time, keeping his position and
scarcely breathing; then he slowly lowered his arms, and presently crept
away, saying,--

"It is long past midnight; it is not best that he should cry out, lest
by accident someone be passing."

He glided about his hovel, gathering a rag here, a thong there, and
another one yonder; then he returned, and by careful and gentle handling
he managed to tie the King's ankles together without waking him.  Next
he essayed to tie the wrists; he made several attempts to cross them,
but the boy always drew one hand or the other away, just as the cord was
ready to be applied; but at last, when the archangel was almost ready
to despair, the boy crossed his hands himself, and the next moment
they were bound. Now a bandage was passed under the sleeper's chin and
brought up over his head and tied fast--and so softly, so gradually,
and so deftly were the knots drawn together and compacted, that the boy
slept peacefully through it all without stirring.




CHAPTER XXI. Hendon to the rescue.

The old man glided away, stooping, stealthy, cat-like, and brought the
low bench.  He seated himself upon it, half his body in the dim and
flickering light, and the other half in shadow; and so, with his craving
eyes bent upon the slumbering boy, he kept his patient vigil there,
heedless of the drift of time, and softly whetted his knife, and mumbled
and chuckled; and in aspect and attitude he resembled nothing so much as
a grizzly, monstrous spider, gloating over some hapless insect that lay
bound and helpless in his web.

After a long while, the old man, who was still gazing,--yet not seeing,
his mind having settled into a dreamy abstraction,--observed, on a
sudden, that the boy's eyes were open! wide open and staring!--staring
up in frozen horror at the knife.  The smile of a gratified devil crept
over the old man's face, and he said, without changing his attitude or
his occupation--

"Son of Henry the Eighth, hast thou prayed?"

The boy struggled helplessly in his bonds, and at the same time forced
a smothered sound through his closed jaws, which the hermit chose to
interpret as an affirmative answer to his question.

"Then pray again.  Pray the prayer for the dying!"

A shudder shook the boy's frame, and his face blenched.  Then he
struggled again to free himself--turning and twisting himself this way
and that; tugging frantically, fiercely, desperately--but uselessly--to
burst his fetters; and all the while the old ogre smiled down upon him,
and nodded his head, and placidly whetted his knife; mumbling, from time
to time, "The moments are precious, they are few and precious--pray the
prayer for the dying!"

The boy uttered a despairing groan, and ceased from his struggles,
panting.  The tears came, then, and trickled, one after the other, down
his face; but this piteous sight wrought no softening effect upon the
savage old man.

The dawn was coming now; the hermit observed it, and spoke up sharply,
with a touch of nervous apprehension in his voice--

"I may not indulge this ecstasy longer!  The night is already gone.  It
seems but a moment--only a moment; would it had endured a year!  Seed of
the Church's spoiler, close thy perishing eyes, an' thou fearest to look
upon--"

The rest was lost in inarticulate mutterings.  The old man sank upon his
knees, his knife in his hand, and bent himself over the moaning boy.

Hark!  There was a sound of voices near the cabin--the knife dropped
from the hermit's hand; he cast a sheepskin over the boy and started up,
trembling.  The sounds increased, and presently the voices became rough
and angry; then came blows, and cries for help; then a clatter of swift
footsteps, retreating.  Immediately came a succession of thundering
knocks upon the cabin door, followed by--

"Hullo-o-o!  Open!  And despatch, in the name of all the devils!"

Oh, this was the blessedest sound that had ever made music in the King's
ears; for it was Miles Hendon's voice!

The hermit, grinding his teeth in impotent rage, moved swiftly out of
the bedchamber, closing the door behind him; and straightway the King
heard a talk, to this effect, proceeding from the 'chapel':--

"Homage and greeting, reverend sir!  Where is the boy--_my_ boy?"

"What boy, friend?"

"What boy!  Lie me no lies, sir priest, play me no deceptions!--I am not
in the humour for it.  Near to this place I caught the scoundrels who I
judged did steal him from me, and I made them confess; they said he was
at large again, and they had tracked him to your door.  They showed me
his very footprints.  Now palter no more; for look you, holy sir, an'
thou produce him not--Where is the boy?"

"O good sir, peradventure you mean the ragged regal vagrant that tarried
here the night.  If such as you take an interest in such as he, know,
then, that I have sent him of an errand.  He will be back anon."

"How soon?  How soon?  Come, waste not the time--cannot I overtake him?
How soon will he be back?"

"Thou need'st not stir; he will return quickly."

"So be it, then.  I will try to wait.  But stop!--_you_ sent him of an
errand?--you!  Verily this is a lie--he would not go.  He would pull thy
old beard, an' thou didst offer him such an insolence. Thou hast lied,
friend; thou hast surely lied!  He would not go for thee, nor for any
man."

"For any _man_--no; haply not.  But I am not a man."

"_What_!  Now o' God's name what art thou, then?"

"It is a secret--mark thou reveal it not.  I am an archangel!"

There was a tremendous ejaculation from Miles Hendon--not altogether
unprofane--followed by--

"This doth well and truly account for his complaisance!  Right well
I knew he would budge nor hand nor foot in the menial service of any
mortal; but, lord, even a king must obey when an archangel gives the
word o' command!  Let me--'sh!  What noise was that?"

All this while the little King had been yonder, alternately quaking with
terror and trembling with hope; and all the while, too, he had thrown
all the strength he could into his anguished moanings, constantly
expecting them to reach Hendon's ear, but always realising, with
bitterness, that they failed, or at least made no impression.  So this
last remark of his servant came as comes a reviving breath from fresh
fields to the dying; and he exerted himself once more, and with all his
energy, just as the hermit was saying--

"Noise?  I heard only the wind."

"Mayhap it was.  Yes, doubtless that was it.  I have been hearing it
faintly all the--there it is again!  It is not the wind!  What an odd
sound!  Come, we will hunt it out!"

Now the King's joy was nearly insupportable.  His tired lungs did
their utmost--and hopefully, too--but the sealed jaws and the muffling
sheepskin sadly crippled the effort.  Then the poor fellow's heart sank,
to hear the hermit say--

"Ah, it came from without--I think from the copse yonder.  Come, I will
lead the way."

The King heard the two pass out, talking; heard their footsteps die
quickly away--then he was alone with a boding, brooding, awful silence.

It seemed an age till he heard the steps and voices approaching
again--and this time he heard an added sound,--the trampling of hoofs,
apparently.  Then he heard Hendon say--

"I will not wait longer.  I _cannot_ wait longer.  He has lost his way
in this thick wood.  Which direction took he?  Quick--point it out to
me."

"He--but wait; I will go with thee."

"Good--good!  Why, truly thou art better than thy looks.  Marry I do
not think there's not another archangel with so right a heart as thine.
 Wilt ride?  Wilt take the wee donkey that's for my boy, or wilt thou
fork thy holy legs over this ill-conditioned slave of a mule that I have
provided for myself?--and had been cheated in too, had he cost but the
indifferent sum of a month's usury on a brass farthing let to a tinker
out of work."

"No--ride thy mule, and lead thine ass; I am surer on mine own feet, and
will walk."

"Then prithee mind the little beast for me while I take my life in my
hands and make what success I may toward mounting the big one."

Then followed a confusion of kicks, cuffs, tramplings and plungings,
accompanied by a thunderous intermingling of volleyed curses, and
finally a bitter apostrophe to the mule, which must have broken its
spirit, for hostilities seemed to cease from that moment.

With unutterable misery the fettered little King heard the voices and
footsteps fade away and die out.  All hope forsook him, now, for the
moment, and a dull despair settled down upon his heart. "My only friend
is deceived and got rid of," he said; "the hermit will return and--"  He
finished with a gasp; and at once fell to struggling so frantically with
his bonds again, that he shook off the smothering sheepskin.

And now he heard the door open!  The sound chilled him to the
marrow--already he seemed to feel the knife at his throat.  Horror made
him close his eyes; horror made him open them again--and before him
stood John Canty and Hugo!

He would have said "Thank God!" if his jaws had been free.

A moment or two later his limbs were at liberty, and his captors, each
gripping him by an arm, were hurrying him with all speed through the
forest.




CHAPTER XXII. A Victim of Treachery.

Once more 'King Foo-foo the First' was roving with the tramps and
outlaws, a butt for their coarse jests and dull-witted railleries, and
sometimes the victim of small spitefulness at the hands of Canty and
Hugo when the Ruffler's back was turned.  None but Canty and Hugo really
disliked him.  Some of the others liked him, and all admired his pluck
and spirit.  During two or three days, Hugo, in whose ward and charge
the King was, did what he covertly could to make the boy uncomfortable;
and at night, during the customary orgies, he amused the company by
putting small indignities upon him--always as if by accident.  Twice he
stepped upon the King's toes--accidentally--and the King, as became his
royalty, was contemptuously unconscious of it and indifferent to it; but
the third time Hugo entertained himself in that way, the King felled
him to the ground with a cudgel, to the prodigious delight of the tribe.
 Hugo, consumed with anger and shame, sprang up, seized a cudgel, and
came at his small adversary in a fury.  Instantly a ring was formed
around the gladiators, and the betting and cheering began.

But poor Hugo stood no chance whatever.  His frantic and lubberly
'prentice-work found but a poor market for itself when pitted against
an arm which had been trained by the first masters of Europe in
single-stick, quarter-staff, and every art and trick of swordsmanship.
 The little King stood, alert but at graceful ease, and caught and
turned aside the thick rain of blows with a facility and precision which
set the motley on-lookers wild with admiration; and every now and then,
when his practised eye detected an opening, and a lightning-swift rap
upon Hugo's head followed as a result, the storm of cheers and laughter
that swept the place was something wonderful to hear.  At the end of
fifteen minutes, Hugo, all battered, bruised, and the target for
a pitiless bombardment of ridicule, slunk from the field; and the
unscathed hero of the fight was seized and borne aloft upon the
shoulders of the joyous rabble to the place of honour beside the
Ruffler, where with vast ceremony he was crowned King of the Game-Cocks;
his meaner title being at the same time solemnly cancelled and annulled,
and a decree of banishment from the gang pronounced against any who
should thenceforth utter it.

All attempts to make the King serviceable to the troop had failed. He
had stubbornly refused to act; moreover, he was always trying to escape.
 He had been thrust into an unwatched kitchen, the first day of his
return; he not only came forth empty-handed, but tried to rouse the
housemates. He was sent out with a tinker to help him at his work;
he would not work; moreover, he threatened the tinker with his own
soldering-iron; and finally both Hugo and the tinker found their
hands full with the mere matter of keeping his from getting away.  He
delivered the thunders of his royalty upon the heads of all who hampered
his liberties or tried to force him to service.  He was sent out, in
Hugo's charge, in company with a slatternly woman and a diseased baby,
to beg; but the result was not encouraging--he declined to plead for the
mendicants, or be a party to their cause in any way.

Thus several days went by; and the miseries of this tramping life, and
the weariness and sordidness and meanness and vulgarity of it, became
gradually and steadily so intolerable to the captive that he began at
last to feel that his release from the hermit's knife must prove only a
temporary respite from death, at best.

But at night, in his dreams, these things were forgotten, and he was
on his throne, and master again.  This, of course, intensified the
sufferings of the awakening--so the mortifications of each succeeding
morning of the few that passed between his return to bondage and the
combat with Hugo, grew bitterer and bitterer, and harder and harder to
bear.

The morning after that combat, Hugo got up with a heart filled with
vengeful purposes against the King.  He had two plans, in particular.
One was to inflict upon the lad what would be, to his proud spirit
and 'imagined' royalty, a peculiar humiliation; and if he failed to
accomplish this, his other plan was to put a crime of some kind upon the
King, and then betray him into the implacable clutches of the law.

In pursuance of the first plan, he purposed to put a 'clime' upon the
King's leg; rightly judging that that would mortify him to the last and
perfect degree; and as soon as the clime should operate, he meant to get
Canty's help, and _force_ the King to expose his leg in the highway
and beg for alms.  'Clime' was the cant term for a sore, artificially
created. To make a clime, the operator made a paste or poultice of
unslaked lime, soap, and the rust of old iron, and spread it upon a
piece of leather, which was then bound tightly upon the leg.  This would
presently fret off the skin, and make the flesh raw and angry-looking;
blood was then rubbed upon the limb, which, being fully dried, took on a
dark and repulsive colour.  Then a bandage of soiled rags was put on in
a cleverly careless way which would allow the hideous ulcer to be seen,
and move the compassion of the passer-by. {8}

Hugo got the help of the tinker whom the King had cowed with the
soldering-iron; they took the boy out on a tinkering tramp, and as soon
as they were out of sight of the camp they threw him down and the tinker
held him while Hugo bound the poultice tight and fast upon his leg.

The King raged and stormed, and promised to hang the two the moment the
sceptre was in his hand again; but they kept a firm grip upon him
and enjoyed his impotent struggling and jeered at his threats.  This
continued until the poultice began to bite; and in no long time its work
would have been perfected, if there had been no interruption.  But there
was; for about this time the 'slave' who had made the speech denouncing
England's laws, appeared on the scene, and put an end to the enterprise,
and stripped off the poultice and bandage.

The King wanted to borrow his deliverer's cudgel and warm the jackets
of the two rascals on the spot; but the man said no, it would bring
trouble--leave the matter till night; the whole tribe being together,
then, the outside world would not venture to interfere or interrupt.  He
marched the party back to camp and reported the affair to the Ruffler,
who listened, pondered, and then decided that the King should not be
again detailed to beg, since it was plain he was worthy of something
higher and better--wherefore, on the spot he promoted him from the
mendicant rank and appointed him to steal!

Hugo was overjoyed.  He had already tried to make the King steal, and
failed; but there would be no more trouble of that sort, now, for of
course the King would not dream of defying a distinct command delivered
directly from head-quarters.  So he planned a raid for that very
afternoon, purposing to get the King in the law's grip in the course of
it; and to do it, too, with such ingenious strategy, that it should seem
to be accidental and unintentional; for the King of the Game-Cocks was
popular now, and the gang might not deal over-gently with an unpopular
member who played so serious a treachery upon him as the delivering him
over to the common enemy, the law.

Very well.  All in good time Hugo strolled off to a neighbouring village
with his prey; and the two drifted slowly up and down one street after
another, the one watching sharply for a sure chance to achieve his evil
purpose, and the other watching as sharply for a chance to dart away and
get free of his infamous captivity for ever.

Both threw away some tolerably fair-looking opportunities; for both,
in their secret hearts, were resolved to make absolutely sure work this
time, and neither meant to allow his fevered desires to seduce him into
any venture that had much uncertainty about it.

Hugo's chance came first.  For at last a woman approached who carried a
fat package of some sort in a basket.  Hugo's eyes sparkled with sinful
pleasure as he said to himself, "Breath o' my life, an' I can but
put _that_ upon him, 'tis good-den and God keep thee, King of the
Game-Cocks!" He waited and watched--outwardly patient, but inwardly
consuming with excitement--till the woman had passed by, and the time
was ripe; then said, in a low voice--

"Tarry here till I come again," and darted stealthily after the prey.

The King's heart was filled with joy--he could make his escape, now, if
Hugo's quest only carried him far enough away.

But he was to have no such luck.  Hugo crept behind the woman, snatched
the package, and came running back, wrapping it in an old piece of
blanket which he carried on his arm.  The hue and cry was raised in a
moment, by the woman, who knew her loss by the lightening of her burden,
although she had not seen the pilfering done.  Hugo thrust the bundle
into the King's hands without halting, saying--

"Now speed ye after me with the rest, and cry 'Stop thief!' but mind ye
lead them astray!"

The next moment Hugo turned a corner and darted down a crooked
alley--and in another moment or two he lounged into view again, looking
innocent and indifferent, and took up a position behind a post to watch
results.

The insulted King threw the bundle on the ground; and the blanket fell
away from it just as the woman arrived, with an augmenting crowd at her
heels; she seized the King's wrist with one hand, snatched up her bundle
with the other, and began to pour out a tirade of abuse upon the boy
while he struggled, without success, to free himself from her grip.

Hugo had seen enough--his enemy was captured and the law would get him,
now--so he slipped away, jubilant and chuckling, and wended campwards,
framing a judicious version of the matter to give to the Ruffler's crew
as he strode along.

The King continued to struggle in the woman's strong grasp, and now and
then cried out in vexation--

"Unhand me, thou foolish creature; it was not I that bereaved thee of
thy paltry goods."

The crowd closed around, threatening the King and calling him names; a
brawny blacksmith in leather apron, and sleeves rolled to his elbows,
made a reach for him, saying he would trounce him well, for a lesson;
but just then a long sword flashed in the air and fell with convincing
force upon the man's arm, flat side down, the fantastic owner of it
remarking pleasantly, at the same time--

"Marry, good souls, let us proceed gently, not with ill blood and
uncharitable words.  This is matter for the law's consideration,
not private and unofficial handling.  Loose thy hold from the boy,
goodwife."

The blacksmith averaged the stalwart soldier with a glance, then went
muttering away, rubbing his arm; the woman released the boy's wrist
reluctantly; the crowd eyed the stranger unlovingly, but prudently
closed their mouths.  The King sprang to his deliverer's side, with
flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, exclaiming--

"Thou hast lagged sorely, but thou comest in good season, now, Sir
Miles; carve me this rabble to rags!"




CHAPTER XXIII. The Prince a prisoner.

Hendon forced back a smile, and bent down and whispered in the King's
ear--

"Softly, softly, my prince, wag thy tongue warily--nay, suffer it not to
wag at all.  Trust in me--all shall go well in the end." Then he added
to himself:  "_Sir_ Miles!  Bless me, I had totally forgot I was a
knight! Lord, how marvellous a thing it is, the grip his memory doth
take upon his quaint and crazy fancies! . . . An empty and foolish title
is mine, and yet it is something to have deserved it; for I think it is
more honour to be held worthy to be a spectre-knight in his Kingdom of
Dreams and Shadows, than to be held base enough to be an earl in some of
the _real_ kingdoms of this world."

The crowd fell apart to admit a constable, who approached and was about
to lay his hand upon the King's shoulder, when Hendon said--

"Gently, good friend, withhold your hand--he shall go peaceably; I am
responsible for that.  Lead on, we will follow."

The officer led, with the woman and her bundle; Miles and the King
followed after, with the crowd at their heels.  The King was inclined to
rebel; but Hendon said to him in a low voice--

"Reflect, Sire--your laws are the wholesome breath of your own royalty;
shall their source resist them, yet require the branches to respect
them? Apparently one of these laws has been broken; when the King is on
his throne again, can it ever grieve him to remember that when he was
seemingly a private person he loyally sank the king in the citizen and
submitted to its authority?"

"Thou art right; say no more; thou shalt see that whatsoever the King
of England requires a subject to suffer, under the law, he will himself
suffer while he holdeth the station of a subject."

When the woman was called upon to testify before the justice of the
peace, she swore that the small prisoner at the bar was the person who
had committed the theft; there was none able to show the contrary, so
the King stood convicted.  The bundle was now unrolled, and when the
contents proved to be a plump little dressed pig, the judge looked
troubled, whilst Hendon turned pale, and his body was thrilled with an
electric shiver of dismay; but the King remained unmoved, protected
by his ignorance.  The judge meditated, during an ominous pause, then
turned to the woman, with the question--

"What dost thou hold this property to be worth?"

The woman courtesied and replied--

"Three shillings and eightpence, your worship--I could not abate a penny
and set forth the value honestly."

The justice glanced around uncomfortably upon the crowd, then nodded to
the constable, and said--

"Clear the court and close the doors."

It was done.  None remained but the two officials, the accused, the
accuser, and Miles Hendon.  This latter was rigid and colourless, and
on his forehead big drops of cold sweat gathered, broke and blended
together, and trickled down his face.  The judge turned to the woman
again, and said, in a compassionate voice--

"'Tis a poor ignorant lad, and mayhap was driven hard by hunger, for
these be grievous times for the unfortunate; mark you, he hath not an
evil face--but when hunger driveth--Good woman! dost know that when one
steals a thing above the value of thirteenpence ha'penny the law saith
he shall _hang_ for it?"

The little King started, wide-eyed with consternation, but controlled
himself and held his peace; but not so the woman.  She sprang to her
feet, shaking with fright, and cried out--

"Oh, good lack, what have I done!  God-a-mercy, I would not hang
the poor thing for the whole world!  Ah, save me from this, your
worship--what shall I do, what _can_ I do?"

The justice maintained his judicial composure, and simply said--

"Doubtless it is allowable to revise the value, since it is not yet writ
upon the record."

"Then in God's name call the pig eightpence, and heaven bless the day
that freed my conscience of this awesome thing!"

Miles Hendon forgot all decorum in his delight; and surprised the King
and wounded his dignity, by throwing his arms around him and hugging
him. The woman made her grateful adieux and started away with her pig;
and when the constable opened the door for her, he followed her out into
the narrow hall.  The justice proceeded to write in his record book.
 Hendon, always alert, thought he would like to know why the officer
followed the woman out; so he slipped softly into the dusky hall and
listened.  He heard a conversation to this effect--

"It is a fat pig, and promises good eating; I will buy it of thee; here
is the eightpence."

"Eightpence, indeed!  Thou'lt do no such thing.  It cost me three
shillings and eightpence, good honest coin of the last reign, that old
Harry that's just dead ne'er touched or tampered with.  A fig for thy
eightpence!"

"Stands the wind in that quarter?  Thou wast under oath, and so swore
falsely when thou saidst the value was but eightpence.  Come straightway
back with me before his worship, and answer for the crime!--and then the
lad will hang."

"There, there, dear heart, say no more, I am content.  Give me the
eightpence, and hold thy peace about the matter."

The woman went off crying:  Hendon slipped back into the court room,
and the constable presently followed, after hiding his prize in some
convenient place.  The justice wrote a while longer, then read the King
a wise and kindly lecture, and sentenced him to a short imprisonment
in the common jail, to be followed by a public flogging.  The astounded
King opened his mouth, and was probably going to order the good judge to
be beheaded on the spot; but he caught a warning sign from Hendon, and
succeeded in closing his mouth again before he lost anything out of it.
Hendon took him by the hand, now, made reverence to the justice, and the
two departed in the wake of the constable toward the jail.  The moment
the street was reached, the inflamed monarch halted, snatched away his
hand, and exclaimed--

"Idiot, dost imagine I will enter a common jail _alive_?"

Hendon bent down and said, somewhat sharply--

"_Will_ you trust in me?  Peace! and forbear to worsen our chances with
dangerous speech.  What God wills, will happen; thou canst not hurry it,
thou canst not alter it; therefore wait, and be patient--'twill be time
enow to rail or rejoice when what is to happen has happened." {1}




CHAPTER XXIV. The Escape.

The short winter day was nearly ended.  The streets were deserted, save
for a few random stragglers, and these hurried straight along, with the
intent look of people who were only anxious to accomplish their errands
as quickly as possible, and then snugly house themselves from the rising
wind and the gathering twilight. They looked neither to the right nor to
the left; they paid no attention to our party, they did not even seem
to see them. Edward the Sixth wondered if the spectacle of a king on his
way to jail had ever encountered such marvellous indifference before.
By-and-by the constable arrived at a deserted market-square, and
proceeded to cross it.  When he had reached the middle of it, Hendon
laid his hand upon his arm, and said in a low voice--

"Bide a moment, good sir, there is none in hearing, and I would say a
word to thee."

"My duty forbids it, sir; prithee hinder me not, the night comes on."

"Stay, nevertheless, for the matter concerns thee nearly.  Turn thy back
a moment and seem not to see:  _let this poor lad escape_."

"This to me, sir!  I arrest thee in--"

"Nay, be not too hasty.  See thou be careful and commit no foolish
error,"--then he shut his voice down to a whisper, and said in the man's
ear--"the pig thou hast purchased for eightpence may cost thee thy neck,
man!"

The poor constable, taken by surprise, was speechless, at first, then
found his tongue and fell to blustering and threatening; but Hendon
was tranquil, and waited with patience till his breath was spent; then
said--

"I have a liking to thee, friend, and would not willingly see thee
come to harm.  Observe, I heard it all--every word.  I will prove it to
thee." Then he repeated the conversation which the officer and the woman
had had together in the hall, word for word, and ended with--

"There--have I set it forth correctly?  Should not I be able to set it
forth correctly before the judge, if occasion required?"

The man was dumb with fear and distress, for a moment; then he rallied,
and said with forced lightness--

"'Tis making a mighty matter, indeed, out of a jest; I but plagued the
woman for mine amusement."

"Kept you the woman's pig for amusement?"

The man answered sharply--

"Nought else, good sir--I tell thee 'twas but a jest."

"I do begin to believe thee," said Hendon, with a perplexing mixture of
mockery and half-conviction in his tone; "but tarry thou here a
moment whilst I run and ask his worship--for nathless, he being a man
experienced in law, in jests, in--"

He was moving away, still talking; the constable hesitated, fidgeted,
spat out an oath or two, then cried out--

"Hold, hold, good sir--prithee wait a little--the judge!  Why, man, he
hath no more sympathy with a jest than hath a dead corpse!--come, and we
will speak further.  Ods body!  I seem to be in evil case--and all for
an innocent and thoughtless pleasantry. I am a man of family; and my
wife and little ones--List to reason, good your worship: what wouldst
thou of me?"

"Only that thou be blind and dumb and paralytic whilst one may count a
hundred thousand--counting slowly," said Hendon, with the expression of
a man who asks but a reasonable favour, and that a very little one.

"It is my destruction!" said the constable despairingly.  "Ah, be
reasonable, good sir; only look at this matter, on all its sides, and
see how mere a jest it is--how manifestly and how plainly it is so.  And
even if one granted it were not a jest, it is a fault so small that
e'en the grimmest penalty it could call forth would be but a rebuke and
warning from the judge's lips."

Hendon replied with a solemnity which chilled the air about him--

"This jest of thine hath a name, in law,--wot you what it is?"

"I knew it not!  Peradventure I have been unwise.  I never dreamed it
had a name--ah, sweet heaven, I thought it was original."

"Yes, it hath a name.  In the law this crime is called Non compos mentis
lex talionis sic transit gloria mundi."

"Ah, my God!"

"And the penalty is death!"

"God be merciful to me a sinner!"

"By advantage taken of one in fault, in dire peril, and at thy mercy,
thou hast seized goods worth above thirteenpence ha'penny, paying but
a trifle for the same; and this, in the eye of the law, is constructive
barratry, misprision of treason, malfeasance in office, ad hominem
expurgatis in statu quo--and the penalty is death by the halter, without
ransom, commutation, or benefit of clergy."

"Bear me up, bear me up, sweet sir, my legs do fail me!  Be thou
merciful--spare me this doom, and I will turn my back and see nought
that shall happen."

"Good! now thou'rt wise and reasonable.  And thou'lt restore the pig?"

"I will, I will indeed--nor ever touch another, though heaven send it
and an archangel fetch it.  Go--I am blind for thy sake--I see nothing.
 I will say thou didst break in and wrest the prisoner from my hands by
force.  It is but a crazy, ancient door--I will batter it down myself
betwixt midnight and the morning."

"Do it, good soul, no harm will come of it; the judge hath a loving
charity for this poor lad, and will shed no tears and break no jailer's
bones for his escape."




CHAPTER XXV. Hendon Hall.

As soon as Hendon and the King were out of sight of the constable, his
Majesty was instructed to hurry to a certain place outside the town, and
wait there, whilst Hendon should go to the inn and settle his account.
Half an hour later the two friends were blithely jogging eastward on
Hendon's sorry steeds.  The King was warm and comfortable, now, for
he had cast his rags and clothed himself in the second-hand suit which
Hendon had bought on London Bridge.

Hendon wished to guard against over-fatiguing the boy; he judged that
hard journeys, irregular meals, and illiberal measures of sleep would be
bad for his crazed mind; whilst rest, regularity, and moderate exercise
would be pretty sure to hasten its cure; he longed to see the stricken
intellect made well again and its diseased visions driven out of the
tormented little head; therefore he resolved to move by easy stages
toward the home whence he had so long been banished, instead of obeying
the impulse of his impatience and hurrying along night and day.

When he and the King had journeyed about ten miles, they reached a
considerable village, and halted there for the night, at a good inn.
 The former relations were resumed; Hendon stood behind the King's
chair, while he dined, and waited upon him; undressed him when he was
ready for bed; then took the floor for his own quarters, and slept
athwart the door, rolled up in a blanket.

The next day, and the day after, they jogged lazily along talking
over the adventures they had met since their separation, and mightily
enjoying each other's narratives.  Hendon detailed all his wide
wanderings in search of the King, and described how the archangel had
led him a fool's journey all over the forest, and taken him back to
the hut, finally, when he found he could not get rid of him.  Then--he
said--the old man went into the bedchamber and came staggering back
looking broken-hearted, and saying he had expected to find that the boy
had returned and laid down in there to rest, but it was not so.  Hendon
had waited at the hut all day; hope of the King's return died out, then,
and he departed upon the quest again.

"And old Sanctum Sanctorum _was_ truly sorry your highness came not
back," said Hendon; "I saw it in his face."

"Marry I will never doubt _that_!" said the King--and then told his own
story; after which, Hendon was sorry he had not destroyed the archangel.

During the last day of the trip, Hendon's spirits were soaring. His
tongue ran constantly.  He talked about his old father, and his brother
Arthur, and told of many things which illustrated their high and
generous characters; he went into loving frenzies over his Edith,
and was so glad-hearted that he was even able to say some gentle and
brotherly things about Hugh.  He dwelt a deal on the coming meeting
at Hendon Hall; what a surprise it would be to everybody, and what an
outburst of thanksgiving and delight there would be.

It was a fair region, dotted with cottages and orchards, and the road
led through broad pasture lands whose receding expanses, marked with
gentle elevations and depressions, suggested the swelling and subsiding
undulations of the sea.  In the afternoon the returning prodigal made
constant deflections from his course to see if by ascending some hillock
he might not pierce the distance and catch a glimpse of his home.  At
last he was successful, and cried out excitedly--

"There is the village, my Prince, and there is the Hall close by! You
may see the towers from here; and that wood there--that is my father's
park. Ah, _now_ thou'lt know what state and grandeur be! A house with
seventy rooms--think of that!--and seven and twenty servants!  A brave
lodging for such as we, is it not so?  Come, let us speed--my impatience
will not brook further delay."

All possible hurry was made; still, it was after three o'clock before
the village was reached.  The travellers scampered through it, Hendon's
tongue going all the time.  "Here is the church--covered with the same
ivy--none gone, none added."  "Yonder is the inn, the old Red Lion,--and
yonder is the market-place."  "Here is the Maypole, and here the
pump--nothing is altered; nothing but the people, at any rate; ten years
make a change in people; some of these I seem to know, but none know
me."  So his chat ran on. The end of the village was soon reached; then
the travellers struck into a crooked, narrow road, walled in with tall
hedges, and hurried briskly along it for half a mile, then passed into a
vast flower garden through an imposing gateway, whose huge stone pillars
bore sculptured armorial devices.  A noble mansion was before them.

"Welcome to Hendon Hall, my King!" exclaimed Miles.  "Ah, 'tis a great
day!  My father and my brother, and the Lady Edith will be so mad with
joy that they will have eyes and tongue for none but me in the first
transports of the meeting, and so thou'lt seem but coldly welcomed--but
mind it not; 'twill soon seem otherwise; for when I say thou art my
ward, and tell them how costly is my love for thee, thou'lt see them
take thee to their breasts for Miles Hendon's sake, and make their house
and hearts thy home for ever after!"

The next moment Hendon sprang to the ground before the great door,
helped the King down, then took him by the hand and rushed within. A few
steps brought him to a spacious apartment; he entered, seated the King
with more hurry than ceremony, then ran toward a young man who sat at a
writing-table in front of a generous fire of logs.

"Embrace me, Hugh," he cried, "and say thou'rt glad I am come again! and
call our father, for home is not home till I shall touch his hand, and
see his face, and hear his voice once more!"

But Hugh only drew back, after betraying a momentary surprise, and bent
a grave stare upon the intruder--a stare which indicated somewhat of
offended dignity, at first, then changed, in response to some inward
thought or purpose, to an expression of marvelling curiosity, mixed with
a real or assumed compassion.  Presently he said, in a mild voice--

"Thy wits seem touched, poor stranger; doubtless thou hast suffered
privations and rude buffetings at the world's hands; thy looks and dress
betoken it.  Whom dost thou take me to be?"

"Take thee?  Prithee for whom else than whom thou art?  I take thee to
be Hugh Hendon," said Miles, sharply.

The other continued, in the same soft tone--

"And whom dost thou imagine thyself to be?"

"Imagination hath nought to do with it!  Dost thou pretend thou knowest
me not for thy brother Miles Hendon?"

An expression of pleased surprise flitted across Hugh's face, and he
exclaimed--

"What! thou art not jesting? can the dead come to life?  God be praised
if it be so!  Our poor lost boy restored to our arms after all these
cruel years!  Ah, it seems too good to be true, it _is_ too good to be
true--I charge thee, have pity, do not trifle with me!  Quick--come to
the light--let me scan thee well!"

He seized Miles by the arm, dragged him to the window, and began to
devour him from head to foot with his eyes, turning him this way and
that, and stepping briskly around him and about him to prove him
from all points of view; whilst the returned prodigal, all aglow with
gladness, smiled, laughed, and kept nodding his head and saying--

"Go on, brother, go on, and fear not; thou'lt find nor limb nor feature
that cannot bide the test.  Scour and scan me to thy content, my good
old Hugh--I am indeed thy old Miles, thy same old Miles, thy lost
brother, is't not so?  Ah, 'tis a great day--I _said_ 'twas a great day!
 Give me thy hand, give me thy cheek--lord, I am like to die of very
joy!"

He was about to throw himself upon his brother; but Hugh put up his hand
in dissent, then dropped his chin mournfully upon his breast, saying
with emotion--

"Ah, God of his mercy give me strength to bear this grievous
disappointment!"

Miles, amazed, could not speak for a moment; then he found his tongue,
and cried out--

"_What_ disappointment?  Am I not thy brother?"

Hugh shook his head sadly, and said--

"I pray heaven it may prove so, and that other eyes may find the
resemblances that are hid from mine.  Alack, I fear me the letter spoke
but too truly."

"What letter?"

"One that came from over sea, some six or seven years ago.  It said my
brother died in battle."

"It was a lie!  Call thy father--he will know me."

"One may not call the dead."

"Dead?" Miles's voice was subdued, and his lips trembled.  "My father
dead!--oh, this is heavy news.  Half my new joy is withered now.
 Prithee let me see my brother Arthur--he will know me; he will know me
and console me."

"He, also, is dead."

"God be merciful to me, a stricken man!  Gone,--both gone--the worthy
taken and the worthless spared, in me!  Ah! I crave your mercy!--do not
say the Lady Edith--"

"Is dead?  No, she lives."

"Then, God be praised, my joy is whole again!  Speed thee, brother--let
her come to me!  An' _she_ say I am not myself--but she will not; no,
no, _she_ will know me, I were a fool to doubt it. Bring her--bring the
old servants; they, too, will know me."

"All are gone but five--Peter, Halsey, David, Bernard, and Margaret."

So saying, Hugh left the room.  Miles stood musing a while, then began
to walk the floor, muttering--

"The five arch-villains have survived the two-and-twenty leal and
honest--'tis an odd thing."

He continued walking back and forth, muttering to himself; he had
forgotten the King entirely.  By-and-by his Majesty said gravely, and
with a touch of genuine compassion, though the words themselves were
capable of being interpreted ironically--

"Mind not thy mischance, good man; there be others in the world whose
identity is denied, and whose claims are derided.  Thou hast company."

"Ah, my King," cried Hendon, colouring slightly, "do not thou condemn
me--wait, and thou shalt see.  I am no impostor--she will say it; you
shall hear it from the sweetest lips in England.  I an impostor?  Why, I
know this old hall, these pictures of my ancestors, and all these things
that are about us, as a child knoweth its own nursery.  Here was I born
and bred, my lord; I speak the truth; I would not deceive thee; and
should none else believe, I pray thee do not _thou_ doubt me--I could
not bear it."

"I do not doubt thee," said the King, with a childlike simplicity and
faith.

"I thank thee out of my heart!" exclaimed Hendon with a fervency which
showed that he was touched.  The King added, with the same gentle
simplicity--

"Dost thou doubt _me_?"

A guilty confusion seized upon Hendon, and he was grateful that the door
opened to admit Hugh, at that moment, and saved him the necessity of
replying.

A beautiful lady, richly clothed, followed Hugh, and after her came
several liveried servants.  The lady walked slowly, with her head bowed
and her eyes fixed upon the floor.  The face was unspeakably sad.  Miles
Hendon sprang forward, crying out--

"Oh, my Edith, my darling--"

But Hugh waved him back, gravely, and said to the lady--

"Look upon him.  Do you know him?"

At the sound of Miles's voice the woman had started slightly, and her
cheeks had flushed; she was trembling now.  She stood still, during an
impressive pause of several moments; then slowly lifted up her head and
looked into Hendon's eyes with a stony and frightened gaze; the blood
sank out of her face, drop by drop, till nothing remained but the grey
pallor of death; then she said, in a voice as dead as the face, "I know
him not!" and turned, with a moan and a stifled sob, and tottered out of
the room.

Miles Hendon sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands.
After a pause, his brother said to the servants--

"You have observed him.  Do you know him?"

They shook their heads; then the master said--

"The servants know you not, sir.  I fear there is some mistake. You have
seen that my wife knew you not."

"Thy _wife_!"  In an instant Hugh was pinned to the wall, with an iron
grip about his throat.  "Oh, thou fox-hearted slave, I see it all!
 Thou'st writ the lying letter thyself, and my stolen bride and goods
are its fruit.  There--now get thee gone, lest I shame mine honourable
soldiership with the slaying of so pitiful a mannikin!"

Hugh, red-faced, and almost suffocated, reeled to the nearest chair, and
commanded the servants to seize and bind the murderous stranger.  They
hesitated, and one of them said--

"He is armed, Sir Hugh, and we are weaponless."

"Armed!  What of it, and ye so many?  Upon him, I say!"

But Miles warned them to be careful what they did, and added--

"Ye know me of old--I have not changed; come on, an' it like you."

This reminder did not hearten the servants much; they still held back.

"Then go, ye paltry cowards, and arm yourselves and guard the doors,
whilst I send one to fetch the watch!" said Hugh.  He turned at the
threshold, and said to Miles, "You'll find it to your advantage to
offend not with useless endeavours at escape."

"Escape?  Spare thyself discomfort, an' that is all that troubles thee.
For Miles Hendon is master of Hendon Hall and all its belongings.  He
will remain--doubt it not."




CHAPTER XXVI. Disowned.

The King sat musing a few moments, then looked up and said--

"'Tis strange--most strange.  I cannot account for it."

"No, it is not strange, my liege.  I know him, and this conduct is but
natural.  He was a rascal from his birth."

"Oh, I spake not of _him_, Sir Miles."

"Not of him?  Then of what?  What is it that is strange?"

"That the King is not missed."

"How?  Which?  I doubt I do not understand."

"Indeed?  Doth it not strike you as being passing strange that the land
is not filled with couriers and proclamations describing my person and
making search for me?  Is it no matter for commotion and distress that
the Head of the State is gone; that I am vanished away and lost?"

"Most true, my King, I had forgot."  Then Hendon sighed, and muttered to
himself, "Poor ruined mind--still busy with its pathetic dream."

"But I have a plan that shall right us both--I will write a paper, in
three tongues--Latin, Greek and English--and thou shalt haste away with
it to London in the morning.  Give it to none but my uncle, the Lord
Hertford; when he shall see it, he will know and say I wrote it.  Then
he will send for me."

"Might it not be best, my Prince, that we wait here until I prove myself
and make my rights secure to my domains?  I should be so much the better
able then to--"

The King interrupted him imperiously--

"Peace!  What are thy paltry domains, thy trivial interests, contrasted
with matters which concern the weal of a nation and the integrity of a
throne?"  Then, he added, in a gentle voice, as if he were sorry for his
severity, "Obey, and have no fear; I will right thee, I will make thee
whole--yes, more than whole.  I shall remember, and requite."

So saying, he took the pen, and set himself to work.  Hendon
contemplated him lovingly a while, then said to himself--

"An' it were dark, I should think it _was_ a king that spoke; there's
no denying it, when the humour's upon on him he doth thunder and lighten
like your true King; now where got he that trick?  See him scribble and
scratch away contentedly at his meaningless pot-hooks, fancying them to
be Latin and Greek--and except my wit shall serve me with a lucky device
for diverting him from his purpose, I shall be forced to pretend to post
away to-morrow on this wild errand he hath invented for me."

The next moment Sir Miles's thoughts had gone back to the recent
episode. So absorbed was he in his musings, that when the King presently
handed him the paper which he had been writing, he received it and
pocketed it without being conscious of the act. "How marvellous strange
she acted," he muttered.  "I think she knew me--and I think she did
_not_ know me. These opinions do conflict, I perceive it plainly; I
cannot reconcile them, neither can I, by argument, dismiss either of the
two, or even persuade one to outweigh the other.  The matter standeth
simply thus: she _must_ have known my face, my figure, my voice, for how
could it be otherwise?  Yet she __said_ _she knew me not, and that is
proof perfect, for she cannot lie.  But stop--I think I begin to see.
Peradventure he hath influenced her, commanded her, compelled her to
lie.  That is the solution.  The riddle is unriddled.  She seemed dead
with fear--yes, she was under his compulsion.  I will seek her; I will
find her; now that he is away, she will speak her true mind.  She will
remember the old times when we were little playfellows together, and
this will soften her heart, and she will no more betray me, but will
confess me.  There is no treacherous blood in her--no, she was always
honest and true.  She has loved me, in those old days--this is my
security; for whom one has loved, one cannot betray."

He stepped eagerly toward the door; at that moment it opened, and the
Lady Edith entered.  She was very pale, but she walked with a firm step,
and her carriage was full of grace and gentle dignity. Her face was as
sad as before.

Miles sprang forward, with a happy confidence, to meet her, but she
checked him with a hardly perceptible gesture, and he stopped where he
was.  She seated herself, and asked him to do likewise. Thus simply did
she take the sense of old comradeship out of him, and transform him
into a stranger and a guest.  The surprise of it, the bewildering
unexpectedness of it, made him begin to question, for a moment, if he
_was_ the person he was pretending to be, after all.  The Lady Edith
said--

"Sir, I have come to warn you.  The mad cannot be persuaded out of
their delusions, perchance; but doubtless they may be persuaded to avoid
perils.  I think this dream of yours hath the seeming of honest truth to
you, and therefore is not criminal--but do not tarry here with it; for
here it is dangerous."  She looked steadily into Miles's face a moment,
then added, impressively, "It is the more dangerous for that you _are_
much like what our lost lad must have grown to be if he had lived."

"Heavens, madam, but I _am_ he!"

"I truly think you think it, sir.  I question not your honesty in that;
I but warn you, that is all.  My husband is master in this region; his
power hath hardly any limit; the people prosper or starve, as he wills.
If you resembled not the man whom you profess to be, my husband might
bid you pleasure yourself with your dream in peace; but trust me, I know
him well; I know what he will do; he will say to all that you are but a
mad impostor, and straightway all will echo him."  She bent upon Miles
that same steady look once more, and added:  "If you _were_ Miles
Hendon, and he knew it and all the region knew it--consider what I
am saying, weigh it well--you would stand in the same peril, your
punishment would be no less sure; he would deny you and denounce you,
and none would be bold enough to give you countenance."

"Most truly I believe it," said Miles, bitterly.  "The power that
can command one life-long friend to betray and disown another, and be
obeyed, may well look to be obeyed in quarters where bread and life are
on the stake and no cobweb ties of loyalty and honour are concerned."

A faint tinge appeared for a moment in the lady's cheek, and she dropped
her eyes to the floor; but her voice betrayed no emotion when she
proceeded--

"I have warned you--I must still warn you--to go hence.  This man will
destroy you, else.  He is a tyrant who knows no pity.  I, who am
his fettered slave, know this.  Poor Miles, and Arthur, and my dear
guardian, Sir Richard, are free of him, and at rest:  better that
you were with them than that you bide here in the clutches of this
miscreant.  Your pretensions are a menace to his title and possessions;
you have assaulted him in his own house:  you are ruined if you stay.
 Go--do not hesitate. If you lack money, take this purse, I beg of you,
and bribe the servants to let you pass. Oh, be warned, poor soul, and
escape while you may."

Miles declined the purse with a gesture, and rose up and stood before
her.

"Grant me one thing," he said.  "Let your eyes rest upon mine, so that I
may see if they be steady.  There--now answer me.  Am I Miles Hendon?"

"No.  I know you not."

"Swear it!"

The answer was low, but distinct--

"I swear."

"Oh, this passes belief!"

"Fly!  Why will you waste the precious time?  Fly, and save yourself."

At that moment the officers burst into the room, and a violent struggle
began; but Hendon was soon overpowered and dragged away. The King was
taken also, and both were bound and led to prison.




CHAPTER XXVII. In Prison.

The cells were all crowded; so the two friends were chained in a large
room where persons charged with trifling offences were commonly kept.
They had company, for there were some twenty manacled and fettered
prisoners here, of both sexes and of varying ages,--an obscene and noisy
gang.  The King chafed bitterly over the stupendous indignity thus put
upon his royalty, but Hendon was moody and taciturn.  He was pretty
thoroughly bewildered; he had come home, a jubilant prodigal, expecting
to find everybody wild with joy over his return; and instead had got the
cold shoulder and a jail.  The promise and the fulfilment differed so
widely that the effect was stunning; he could not decide whether it
was most tragic or most grotesque.  He felt much as a man might who had
danced blithely out to enjoy a rainbow, and got struck by lightning.

But gradually his confused and tormenting thoughts settled down into
some sort of order, and then his mind centred itself upon Edith.  He
turned her conduct over, and examined it in all lights, but he could not
make anything satisfactory out of it.  Did she know him--or didn't she
know him?  It was a perplexing puzzle, and occupied him a long time; but
he ended, finally, with the conviction that she did know him, and had
repudiated him for interested reasons.  He wanted to load her name with
curses now; but this name had so long been sacred to him that he found
he could not bring his tongue to profane it.

Wrapped in prison blankets of a soiled and tattered condition, Hendon
and the King passed a troubled night.  For a bribe the jailer had
furnished liquor to some of the prisoners; singing of ribald songs,
fighting, shouting, and carousing was the natural consequence.  At last,
a while after midnight, a man attacked a woman and nearly killed her by
beating her over the head with his manacles before the jailer could
come to the rescue.  The jailer restored peace by giving the man a sound
clubbing about the head and shoulders--then the carousing ceased;
and after that, all had an opportunity to sleep who did not mind the
annoyance of the moanings and groanings of the two wounded people.

During the ensuing week, the days and nights were of a monotonous
sameness as to events; men whose faces Hendon remembered more or less
distinctly, came, by day, to gaze at the 'impostor' and repudiate
and insult him; and by night the carousing and brawling went on with
symmetrical regularity.  However, there was a change of incident at
last. The jailer brought in an old man, and said to him--

"The villain is in this room--cast thy old eyes about and see if thou
canst say which is he."

Hendon glanced up, and experienced a pleasant sensation for the first
time since he had been in the jail.  He said to himself, "This is Blake
Andrews, a servant all his life in my father's family--a good honest
soul, with a right heart in his breast. That is, formerly.  But none are
true now; all are liars.  This man will know me--and will deny me, too,
like the rest."

The old man gazed around the room, glanced at each face in turn, and
finally said--

"I see none here but paltry knaves, scum o' the streets.  Which is he?"

The jailer laughed.

"Here," he said; "scan this big animal, and grant me an opinion."

The old man approached, and looked Hendon over, long and earnestly, then
shook his head and said--

"Marry, _this_ is no Hendon--nor ever was!"

"Right!  Thy old eyes are sound yet.  An' I were Sir Hugh, I would take
the shabby carle and--"

The jailer finished by lifting himself a-tip-toe with an imaginary
halter, at the same time making a gurgling noise in his throat
suggestive of suffocation.  The old man said, vindictively--

"Let him bless God an' he fare no worse.  An' _I_ had the handling o'
the villain he should roast, or I am no true man!"

The jailer laughed a pleasant hyena laugh, and said--

"Give him a piece of thy mind, old man--they all do it.  Thou'lt find it
good diversion."

Then he sauntered toward his ante-room and disappeared.  The old man
dropped upon his knees and whispered--

"God be thanked, thou'rt come again, my master!  I believed thou wert
dead these seven years, and lo, here thou art alive!  I knew thee the
moment I saw thee; and main hard work it was to keep a stony countenance
and seem to see none here but tuppenny knaves and rubbish o' the
streets. I am old and poor, Sir Miles; but say the word and I will go
forth and proclaim the truth though I be strangled for it."

"No," said Hendon; "thou shalt not.  It would ruin thee, and yet help
but little in my cause.  But I thank thee, for thou hast given me back
somewhat of my lost faith in my kind."

The old servant became very valuable to Hendon and the King; for
he dropped in several times a day to 'abuse' the former, and always
smuggled in a few delicacies to help out the prison bill of fare; he
also furnished the current news.  Hendon reserved the dainties for the
King; without them his Majesty might not have survived, for he was
not able to eat the coarse and wretched food provided by the jailer.
 Andrews was obliged to confine himself to brief visits, in order to
avoid suspicion; but he managed to impart a fair degree of information
each time--information delivered in a low voice, for Hendon's benefit,
and interlarded with insulting epithets delivered in a louder voice for
the benefit of other hearers.

So, little by little, the story of the family came out.  Arthur had
been dead six years.  This loss, with the absence of news from Hendon,
impaired the father's health; he believed he was going to die, and he
wished to see Hugh and Edith settled in life before he passed away; but
Edith begged hard for delay, hoping for Miles's return; then the letter
came which brought the news of Miles's death; the shock prostrated Sir
Richard; he believed his end was very near, and he and Hugh insisted
upon the marriage; Edith begged for and obtained a month's respite,
then another, and finally a third; the marriage then took place by
the death-bed of Sir Richard.  It had not proved a happy one.  It was
whispered about the country that shortly after the nuptials the bride
found among her husband's papers several rough and incomplete drafts of
the fatal letter, and had accused him of precipitating the marriage--and
Sir Richard's death, too--by a wicked forgery. Tales of cruelty to the
Lady Edith and the servants were to be heard on all hands; and since the
father's death Sir Hugh had thrown off all soft disguises and become
a pitiless master toward all who in any way depended upon him and his
domains for bread.

There was a bit of Andrew's gossip which the King listened to with a
lively interest--

"There is rumour that the King is mad.  But in charity forbear to say
_I_ mentioned it, for 'tis death to speak of it, they say."

His Majesty glared at the old man and said--

"The King is _not_ mad, good man--and thou'lt find it to thy advantage
to busy thyself with matters that nearer concern thee than this
seditious prattle."

"What doth the lad mean?" said Andrews, surprised at this brisk assault
from such an unexpected quarter.  Hendon gave him a sign, and he did not
pursue his question, but went on with his budget--

"The late King is to be buried at Windsor in a day or two--the 16th of
the month--and the new King will be crowned at Westminster the 20th."

"Methinks they must needs find him first," muttered his Majesty; then
added, confidently, "but they will look to that--and so also shall I."

"In the name of--"

But the old man got no further--a warning sign from Hendon checked his
remark.  He resumed the thread of his gossip--

"Sir Hugh goeth to the coronation--and with grand hopes.  He confidently
looketh to come back a peer, for he is high in favour with the Lord
Protector."

"What Lord Protector?" asked his Majesty.

"His Grace the Duke of Somerset."

"What Duke of Somerset?"

"Marry, there is but one--Seymour, Earl of Hertford."

The King asked sharply--

"Since when is _he_ a duke, and Lord Protector?"

"Since the last day of January."

"And prithee who made him so?"

"Himself and the Great Council--with help of the King."

His Majesty started violently.  "The _King_!" he cried.  "_What_ king,
good sir?"

"What king, indeed! (God-a-mercy, what aileth the boy?)  Sith we have
but one, 'tis not difficult to answer--his most sacred Majesty King
Edward the Sixth--whom God preserve!  Yea, and a dear and gracious
little urchin is he, too; and whether he be mad or no--and they say he
mendeth daily--his praises are on all men's lips; and all bless him,
likewise, and offer prayers that he may be spared to reign long in
England; for he began humanely with saving the old Duke of Norfolk's
life, and now is he bent on destroying the cruellest of the laws that
harry and oppress the people."

This news struck his Majesty dumb with amazement, and plunged him into
so deep and dismal a reverie that he heard no more of the old man's
gossip. He wondered if the 'little urchin' was the beggar-boy whom
he left dressed in his own garments in the palace.  It did not seem
possible that this could be, for surely his manners and speech would
betray him if he pretended to be the Prince of Wales--then he would be
driven out, and search made for the true prince.  Could it be that the
Court had set up some sprig of the nobility in his place?  No, for his
uncle would not allow that--he was all-powerful and could and would
crush such a movement, of course.  The boy's musings profited him
nothing; the more he tried to unriddle the mystery the more perplexed he
became, the more his head ached, and the worse he slept.  His
impatience to get to London grew hourly, and his captivity became almost
unendurable.

Hendon's arts all failed with the King--he could not be comforted; but a
couple of women who were chained near him succeeded better. Under their
gentle ministrations he found peace and learned a degree of patience.
 He was very grateful, and came to love them dearly and to delight in
the sweet and soothing influence of their presence.  He asked them why
they were in prison, and when they said they were Baptists, he smiled,
and inquired--

"Is that a crime to be shut up for in a prison?  Now I grieve, for I
shall lose ye--they will not keep ye long for such a little thing."

They did not answer; and something in their faces made him uneasy. He
said, eagerly--

"You do not speak; be good to me, and tell me--there will be no other
punishment?  Prithee tell me there is no fear of that."

They tried to change the topic, but his fears were aroused, and he
pursued it--

"Will they scourge thee?  No, no, they would not be so cruel!  Say they
would not.  Come, they _will_ not, will they?"

The women betrayed confusion and distress, but there was no avoiding an
answer, so one of them said, in a voice choked with emotion--

"Oh, thou'lt break our hearts, thou gentle spirit!--God will help us to
bear our--"

"It is a confession!" the King broke in.  "Then they _will_ scourge
thee, the stony-hearted wretches!  But oh, thou must not weep, I cannot
bear it.  Keep up thy courage--I shall come to my own in time to save
thee from this bitter thing, and I will do it!"

When the King awoke in the morning, the women were gone.

"They are saved!" he said, joyfully; then added, despondently, "but woe
is me!--for they were my comforters."

Each of them had left a shred of ribbon pinned to his clothing, in token
of remembrance.  He said he would keep these things always; and that
soon he would seek out these dear good friends of his and take them
under his protection.

Just then the jailer came in with some subordinates, and commanded that
the prisoners be conducted to the jail-yard.  The King was overjoyed--it
would be a blessed thing to see the blue sky and breathe the fresh air
once more.  He fretted and chafed at the slowness of the officers, but
his turn came at last, and he was released from his staple and ordered
to follow the other prisoners with Hendon.

The court or quadrangle was stone-paved, and open to the sky.  The
prisoners entered it through a massive archway of masonry, and were
placed in file, standing, with their backs against the wall. A rope
was stretched in front of them, and they were also guarded by their
officers. It was a chill and lowering morning, and a light snow which
had fallen during the night whitened the great empty space and added
to the general dismalness of its aspect. Now and then a wintry wind
shivered through the place and sent the snow eddying hither and thither.

In the centre of the court stood two women, chained to posts.  A glance
showed the King that these were his good friends.  He shuddered, and
said to himself, "Alack, they are not gone free, as I had thought.  To
think that such as these should know the lash!--in England!  Ay, there's
the shame of it--not in Heathennesse, Christian England!  They will be
scourged; and I, whom they have comforted and kindly entreated, must
look on and see the great wrong done; it is strange, so strange, that
I, the very source of power in this broad realm, am helpless to protect
them. But let these miscreants look well to themselves, for there is a
day coming when I will require of them a heavy reckoning for this work.
 For every blow they strike now, they shall feel a hundred then."

A great gate swung open, and a crowd of citizens poured in.  They
flocked around the two women, and hid them from the King's view. A
clergyman entered and passed through the crowd, and he also was hidden.
 The King now heard talking, back and forth, as if questions were being
asked and answered, but he could not make out what was said.  Next there
was a deal of bustle and preparation, and much passing and repassing of
officials through that part of the crowd that stood on the further side
of the women; and whilst this proceeded a deep hush gradually fell upon
the people.

Now, by command, the masses parted and fell aside, and the King saw a
spectacle that froze the marrow in his bones.  Faggots had been piled
about the two women, and a kneeling man was lighting them!

The women bowed their heads, and covered their faces with their hands;
the yellow flames began to climb upward among the snapping and crackling
faggots, and wreaths of blue smoke to stream away on the wind; the
clergyman lifted his hands and began a prayer--just then two young girls
came flying through the great gate, uttering piercing screams, and threw
themselves upon the women at the stake.  Instantly they were torn away
by the officers, and one of them was kept in a tight grip, but the other
broke loose, saying she would die with her mother; and before she could
be stopped she had flung her arms about her mother's neck again.  She
was torn away once more, and with her gown on fire.  Two or three men
held her, and the burning portion of her gown was snatched off and
thrown flaming aside, she struggling all the while to free herself, and
saying she would be alone in the world, now; and begging to be allowed
to die with her mother.  Both the girls screamed continually, and fought
for freedom; but suddenly this tumult was drowned under a volley of
heart-piercing shrieks of mortal agony--the King glanced from the
frantic girls to the stake, then turned away and leaned his ashen face
against the wall, and looked no more.  He said, "That which I have seen,
in that one little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will
abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the
nights, till I die.  Would God I had been blind!"

Hendon was watching the King.  He said to himself, with satisfaction,
"His disorder mendeth; he hath changed, and groweth gentler.  If he had
followed his wont, he would have stormed at these varlets, and said he
was King, and commanded that the women be turned loose unscathed.  Soon
his delusion will pass away and be forgotten, and his poor mind will be
whole again.  God speed the day!"

That same day several prisoners were brought in to remain over night,
who were being conveyed, under guard, to various places in the kingdom,
to undergo punishment for crimes committed.  The King conversed with
these--he had made it a point, from the beginning, to instruct himself
for the kingly office by questioning prisoners whenever the opportunity
offered--and the tale of their woes wrung his heart.  One of them was
a poor half-witted woman who had stolen a yard or two of cloth from a
weaver--she was to be hanged for it.  Another was a man who had been
accused of stealing a horse; he said the proof had failed, and he had
imagined that he was safe from the halter; but no--he was hardly free
before he was arraigned for killing a deer in the King's park; this was
proved against him, and now he was on his way to the gallows.  There was
a tradesman's apprentice whose case particularly distressed the King;
this youth said he found a hawk, one evening, that had escaped from its
owner, and he took it home with him, imagining himself entitled to it;
but the court convicted him of stealing it, and sentenced him to death.

The King was furious over these inhumanities, and wanted Hendon to break
jail and fly with him to Westminster, so that he could mount his throne
and hold out his sceptre in mercy over these unfortunate people and
save their lives.  "Poor child," sighed Hendon, "these woeful tales
have brought his malady upon him again; alack, but for this evil hap, he
would have been well in a little time."

Among these prisoners was an old lawyer--a man with a strong face and a
dauntless mien.  Three years past, he had written a pamphlet against the
Lord Chancellor, accusing him of injustice, and had been punished for
it by the loss of his ears in the pillory, and degradation from the
bar, and in addition had been fined 3,000 pounds and sentenced to
imprisonment for life.  Lately he had repeated his offence; and in
consequence was now under sentence to lose _what remained of his ears_,
pay a fine of 5,000 pounds, be branded on both cheeks, and remain in
prison for life.

"These be honourable scars," he said, and turned back his grey hair and
showed the mutilated stubs of what had once been his ears.

The King's eye burned with passion.  He said--

"None believe in me--neither wilt thou.  But no matter--within the
compass of a month thou shalt be free; and more, the laws that have
dishonoured thee, and shamed the English name, shall be swept from the
statute books.  The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to
their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy." {1}




CHAPTER XXVIII. The sacrifice.

Meantime Miles was growing sufficiently tired of confinement and
inaction.  But now his trial came on, to his great gratification, and
he thought he could welcome any sentence provided a further imprisonment
should not be a part of it.  But he was mistaken about that.  He was in
a fine fury when he found himself described as a 'sturdy vagabond' and
sentenced to sit two hours in the stocks for bearing that character
and for assaulting the master of Hendon Hall.  His pretensions as to
brothership with his prosecutor, and rightful heirship to the Hendon
honours and estates, were left contemptuously unnoticed, as being not
even worth examination.

He raged and threatened on his way to punishment, but it did no good; he
was snatched roughly along by the officers, and got an occasional cuff,
besides, for his irreverent conduct.

The King could not pierce through the rabble that swarmed behind; so
he was obliged to follow in the rear, remote from his good friend and
servant.  The King had been nearly condemned to the stocks himself for
being in such bad company, but had been let off with a lecture and a
warning, in consideration of his youth.  When the crowd at last halted,
he flitted feverishly from point to point around its outer rim, hunting
a place to get through; and at last, after a deal of difficulty and
delay, succeeded.  There sat his poor henchman in the degrading stocks,
the sport and butt of a dirty mob--he, the body servant of the King
of England!  Edward had heard the sentence pronounced, but he had not
realised the half that it meant.  His anger began to rise as the sense
of this new indignity which had been put upon him sank home; it jumped
to summer heat, the next moment, when he saw an egg sail through the air
and crush itself against Hendon's cheek, and heard the crowd roar
its enjoyment of the episode.  He sprang across the open circle and
confronted the officer in charge, crying--

"For shame!  This is my servant--set him free!  I am the--"

"Oh, peace!" exclaimed Hendon, in a panic, "thou'lt destroy thyself.
Mind him not, officer, he is mad."

"Give thyself no trouble as to the matter of minding him, good man, I
have small mind to mind him; but as to teaching him somewhat, to that
I am well inclined."  He turned to a subordinate and said, "Give the
little fool a taste or two of the lash, to mend his manners."

"Half a dozen will better serve his turn," suggested Sir Hugh, who had
ridden up, a moment before, to take a passing glance at the proceedings.

The King was seized.  He did not even struggle, so paralysed was he
with the mere thought of the monstrous outrage that was proposed to be
inflicted upon his sacred person.  History was already defiled with
the record of the scourging of an English king with whips--it was an
intolerable reflection that he must furnish a duplicate of that shameful
page.  He was in the toils, there was no help for him; he must either
take this punishment or beg for its remission.  Hard conditions; he
would take the stripes--a king might do that, but a king could not beg.

But meantime, Miles Hendon was resolving the difficulty.  "Let the child
go," said he; "ye heartless dogs, do ye not see how young and frail he
is?  Let him go--I will take his lashes."

"Marry, a good thought--and thanks for it," said Sir Hugh, his face
lighting with a sardonic satisfaction.  "Let the little beggar go, and
give this fellow a dozen in his place--an honest dozen, well laid on."
The King was in the act of entering a fierce protest, but Sir Hugh
silenced him with the potent remark, "Yes, speak up, do, and free thy
mind--only, mark ye, that for each word you utter he shall get six
strokes the more."

Hendon was removed from the stocks, and his back laid bare; and whilst
the lash was applied the poor little King turned away his face and
allowed unroyal tears to channel his cheeks unchecked. "Ah, brave good
heart," he said to himself, "this loyal deed shall never perish out of
my memory.  I will not forget it--and neither shall _they_!" he added,
with passion.  Whilst he mused, his appreciation of Hendon's magnanimous
conduct grew to greater and still greater dimensions in his mind, and
so also did his gratefulness for it.  Presently he said to himself, "Who
saves his prince from wounds and possible death--and this he did for
me--performs high service; but it is little--it is nothing--oh, less
than nothing!--when 'tis weighed against the act of him who saves his
prince from _shame_!"

Hendon made no outcry under the scourge, but bore the heavy blows with
soldierly fortitude.  This, together with his redeeming the boy by
taking his stripes for him, compelled the respect of even that forlorn
and degraded mob that was gathered there; and its gibes and hootings
died away, and no sound remained but the sound of the falling blows.
 The stillness that pervaded the place, when Hendon found himself once
more in the stocks, was in strong contrast with the insulting clamour
which had prevailed there so little a while before.  The King came
softly to Hendon's side, and whispered in his ear--

"Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher
than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility
to men."  He picked up the scourge from the ground, touched Hendon's
bleeding shoulders lightly with it, and whispered, "Edward of England
dubs thee Earl!"

Hendon was touched.  The water welled to his eyes, yet at the same time
the grisly humour of the situation and circumstances so undermined his
gravity that it was all he could do to keep some sign of his inward
mirth from showing outside.  To be suddenly hoisted, naked and gory,
from the common stocks to the Alpine altitude and splendour of
an Earldom, seemed to him the last possibility in the line of the
grotesque.  He said to himself, "Now am I finely tinselled, indeed!
 The spectre-knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows is become a
spectre-earl--a dizzy flight for a callow wing!  An' this go on, I
shall presently be hung like a very maypole with fantastic gauds and
make-believe honours.  But I shall value them, all valueless as
they are, for the love that doth bestow them. Better these poor mock
dignities of mine, that come unasked, from a clean hand and a right
spirit, than real ones bought by servility from grudging and interested
power."

The dreaded Sir Hugh wheeled his horse about, and as he spurred away,
the living wall divided silently to let him pass, and as silently closed
together again.  And so remained; nobody went so far as to venture
a remark in favour of the prisoner, or in compliment to him; but no
matter--the absence of abuse was a sufficient homage in itself.  A
late comer who was not posted as to the present circumstances, and who
delivered a sneer at the 'impostor,' and was in the act of following it
with a dead cat, was promptly knocked down and kicked out, without any
words, and then the deep quiet resumed sway once more.




CHAPTER XXIX. To London.

When Hendon's term of service in the stocks was finished, he was
released and ordered to quit the region and come back no more. His sword
was restored to him, and also his mule and his donkey. He mounted
and rode off, followed by the King, the crowd opening with quiet
respectfulness to let them pass, and then dispersing when they were
gone.

Hendon was soon absorbed in thought.  There were questions of high
import to be answered.  What should he do?  Whither should he go?
Powerful help must be found somewhere, or he must relinquish his
inheritance and remain under the imputation of being an impostor
besides.  Where could he hope to find this powerful help?  Where,
indeed!  It was a knotty question. By-and-by a thought occurred to him
which pointed to a possibility--the slenderest of slender possibilities,
certainly, but still worth considering, for lack of any other that
promised anything at all.  He remembered what old Andrews had said about
the young King's goodness and his generous championship of the wronged
and unfortunate.  Why not go and try to get speech of him and beg for
justice?  Ah, yes, but could so fantastic a pauper get admission to the
august presence of a monarch? Never mind--let that matter take care of
itself; it was a bridge that would not need to be crossed till he should
come to it.  He was an old campaigner, and used to inventing shifts and
expedients:  no doubt he would be able to find a way.  Yes, he would
strike for the capital. Maybe his father's old friend Sir Humphrey
Marlow would help him--'good old Sir Humphrey, Head Lieutenant of the
late King's kitchen, or stables, or something'--Miles could not remember
just what or which.  Now that he had something to turn his energies to,
a distinctly defined object to accomplish, the fog of humiliation and
depression which had settled down upon his spirits lifted and blew away,
and he raised his head and looked about him.  He was surprised to see
how far he had come; the village was away behind him.  The King was
jogging along in his wake, with his head bowed; for he, too, was deep
in plans and thinkings.  A sorrowful misgiving clouded Hendon's new-born
cheerfulness:  would the boy be willing to go again to a city where,
during all his brief life, he had never known anything but ill-usage and
pinching want?  But the question must be asked; it could not be avoided;
so Hendon reined up, and called out--

"I had forgotten to inquire whither we are bound.  Thy commands, my
liege!"

"To London!"

Hendon moved on again, mightily contented with the answer--but astounded
at it too.

The whole journey was made without an adventure of importance. But it
ended with one.  About ten o'clock on the night of the 19th of February
they stepped upon London Bridge, in the midst of a writhing, struggling
jam of howling and hurrahing people, whose beer-jolly faces stood out
strongly in the glare from manifold torches--and at that instant the
decaying head of some former duke or other grandee tumbled down between
them, striking Hendon on the elbow and then bounding off among the
hurrying confusion of feet. So evanescent and unstable are men's works
in this world!--the late good King is but three weeks dead and three
days in his grave, and already the adornments which he took such pains
to select from prominent people for his noble bridge are falling.  A
citizen stumbled over that head, and drove his own head into the back of
somebody in front of him, who turned and knocked down the first person
that came handy, and was promptly laid out himself by that person's
friend.  It was the right ripe time for a free fight, for the
festivities of the morrow--Coronation Day--were already beginning;
everybody was full of strong drink and patriotism; within five minutes
the free fight was occupying a good deal of ground; within ten or twelve
it covered an acre of so, and was become a riot.  By this time Hendon
and the King were hopelessly separated from each other and lost in the
rush and turmoil of the roaring masses of humanity.  And so we leave
them.




CHAPTER XXX. Tom's progress.

Whilst the true King wandered about the land poorly clad, poorly
fed, cuffed and derided by tramps one while, herding with thieves
and murderers in a jail another, and called idiot and impostor by
all impartially, the mock King Tom Canty enjoyed quite a different
experience.

When we saw him last, royalty was just beginning to have a bright side
for him.  This bright side went on brightening more and more every
day: in a very little while it was become almost all sunshine and
delightfulness.  He lost his fears; his misgivings faded out and died;
his embarrassments departed, and gave place to an easy and confident
bearing.  He worked the whipping-boy mine to ever-increasing profit.

He ordered my Lady Elizabeth and my Lady Jane Grey into his presence
when he wanted to play or talk, and dismissed them when he was done with
them, with the air of one familiarly accustomed to such performances.
 It no longer confused him to have these lofty personages kiss his hand
at parting.

He came to enjoy being conducted to bed in state at night, and dressed
with intricate and solemn ceremony in the morning.  It came to be a
proud pleasure to march to dinner attended by a glittering procession
of officers of state and gentlemen-at-arms; insomuch, indeed, that he
doubled his guard of gentlemen-at-arms, and made them a hundred.  He
liked to hear the bugles sounding down the long corridors, and the
distant voices responding, "Way for the King!"

He even learned to enjoy sitting in throned state in council, and
seeming to be something more than the Lord Protector's mouthpiece. He
liked to receive great ambassadors and their gorgeous trains, and listen
to the affectionate messages they brought from illustrious monarchs who
called him brother.  O happy Tom Canty, late of Offal Court!

He enjoyed his splendid clothes, and ordered more:  he found his four
hundred servants too few for his proper grandeur, and trebled them.  The
adulation of salaaming courtiers came to be sweet music to his ears.  He
remained kind and gentle, and a sturdy and determined champion of all
that were oppressed, and he made tireless war upon unjust laws:  yet
upon occasion, being offended, he could turn upon an earl, or even a
duke, and give him a look that would make him tremble.  Once, when his
royal 'sister,' the grimly holy Lady Mary, set herself to reason with
him against the wisdom of his course in pardoning so many people who
would otherwise be jailed, or hanged, or burned, and reminded him that
their august late father's prisons had sometimes contained as high as
sixty thousand convicts at one time, and that during his admirable reign
he had delivered seventy-two thousand thieves and robbers over to death
by the executioner, {9} the boy was filled with generous indignation,
and commanded her to go to her closet, and beseech God to take away the
stone that was in her breast, and give her a human heart.

Did Tom Canty never feel troubled about the poor little rightful prince
who had treated him so kindly, and flown out with such hot zeal to
avenge him upon the insolent sentinel at the palace-gate? Yes; his first
royal days and nights were pretty well sprinkled with painful thoughts
about the lost prince, and with sincere longings for his return, and
happy restoration to his native rights and splendours.  But as time
wore on, and the prince did not come, Tom's mind became more and more
occupied with his new and enchanting experiences, and by little and
little the vanished monarch faded almost out of his thoughts; and
finally, when he did intrude upon them at intervals, he was become an
unwelcome spectre, for he made Tom feel guilty and ashamed.

Tom's poor mother and sisters travelled the same road out of his mind.
At first he pined for them, sorrowed for them, longed to see them, but
later, the thought of their coming some day in their rags and dirt, and
betraying him with their kisses, and pulling him down from his lofty
place, and dragging him back to penury and degradation and the slums,
made him shudder.  At last they ceased to trouble his thoughts almost
wholly.  And he was content, even glad:  for, whenever their mournful
and accusing faces did rise before him now, they made him feel more
despicable than the worms that crawl.

At midnight of the 19th of February, Tom Canty was sinking to sleep in
his rich bed in the palace, guarded by his loyal vassals, and surrounded
by the pomps of royalty, a happy boy; for tomorrow was the day appointed
for his solemn crowning as King of England. At that same hour, Edward,
the true king, hungry and thirsty, soiled and draggled, worn with
travel, and clothed in rags and shreds--his share of the results of the
riot--was wedged in among a crowd of people who were watching with deep
interest certain hurrying gangs of workmen who streamed in and out of
Westminster Abbey, busy as ants:  they were making the last preparation
for the royal coronation.




CHAPTER XXXI. The Recognition procession.

When Tom Canty awoke the next morning, the air was heavy with a
thunderous murmur:  all the distances were charged with it.  It was
music to him; for it meant that the English world was out in its
strength to give loyal welcome to the great day.

Presently Tom found himself once more the chief figure in a wonderful
floating pageant on the Thames; for by ancient custom the 'recognition
procession' through London must start from the Tower, and he was bound
thither.

When he arrived there, the sides of the venerable fortress seemed
suddenly rent in a thousand places, and from every rent leaped a
red tongue of flame and a white gush of smoke; a deafening explosion
followed, which drowned the shoutings of the multitude, and made the
ground tremble; the flame-jets, the smoke, and the explosions, were
repeated over and over again with marvellous celerity, so that in a few
moments the old Tower disappeared in the vast fog of its own smoke, all
but the very top of the tall pile called the White Tower; this, with
its banners, stood out above the dense bank of vapour as a mountain-peak
projects above a cloud-rack.

Tom Canty, splendidly arrayed, mounted a prancing war-steed, whose rich
trappings almost reached to the ground; his 'uncle,' the Lord Protector
Somerset, similarly mounted, took place in his rear; the King's Guard
formed in single ranks on either side, clad in burnished armour;
after the Protector followed a seemingly interminable procession of
resplendent nobles attended by their vassals; after these came the lord
mayor and the aldermanic body, in crimson velvet robes, and with their
gold chains across their breasts; and after these the officers and
members of all the guilds of London, in rich raiment, and bearing the
showy banners of the several corporations.  Also in the procession, as a
special guard of honour through the city, was the Ancient and Honourable
Artillery Company--an organisation already three hundred years old
at that time, and the only military body in England possessing the
privilege (which it still possesses in our day) of holding itself
independent of the commands of Parliament.  It was a brilliant
spectacle, and was hailed with acclamations all along the line, as it
took its stately way through the packed multitudes of citizens. The
chronicler says, 'The King, as he entered the city, was received by the
people with prayers, welcomings, cries, and tender words, and all signs
which argue an earnest love of subjects toward their sovereign; and the
King, by holding up his glad countenance to such as stood afar off, and
most tender language to those that stood nigh his Grace, showed himself
no less thankful to receive the people's goodwill than they to offer it.
 To all that wished him well, he gave thanks.  To such as bade "God save
his Grace," he said in return, "God save you all!" and added that "he
thanked them with all his heart." Wonderfully transported were the
people with the loving answers and gestures of their King.'

In Fenchurch Street a 'fair child, in costly apparel,' stood on a stage
to welcome his Majesty to the city.  The last verse of his greeting was
in these words--

'Welcome, O King! as much as hearts can think; Welcome, again, as much
as tongue can tell,--Welcome to joyous tongues, and hearts that will
not shrink: God thee preserve, we pray, and wish thee ever well.'

The people burst forth in a glad shout, repeating with one voice what
the child had said.  Tom Canty gazed abroad over the surging sea of
eager faces, and his heart swelled with exultation; and he felt that
the one thing worth living for in this world was to be a king, and a
nation's idol.  Presently he caught sight, at a distance, of a couple
of his ragged Offal Court comrades--one of them the lord high admiral in
his late mimic court, the other the first lord of the bedchamber in the
same pretentious fiction; and his pride swelled higher than ever.  Oh,
if they could only recognise him now!  What unspeakable glory it would
be, if they could recognise him, and realise that the derided mock king
of the slums and back alleys was become a real King, with illustrious
dukes and princes for his humble menials, and the English world at his
feet!  But he had to deny himself, and choke down his desire, for such
a recognition might cost more than it would come to:  so he turned away
his head, and left the two soiled lads to go on with their shoutings and
glad adulations, unsuspicious of whom it was they were lavishing them
upon.

Every now and then rose the cry, "A largess! a largess!" and Tom
responded by scattering a handful of bright new coins abroad for the
multitude to scramble for.

The chronicler says, 'At the upper end of Gracechurch Street, before the
sign of the Eagle, the city had erected a gorgeous arch, beneath which
was a stage, which stretched from one side of the street to the other.
This was an historical pageant, representing the King's immediate
progenitors.  There sat Elizabeth of York in the midst of an immense
white rose, whose petals formed elaborate furbelows around her; by her
side was Henry VII., issuing out of a vast red rose, disposed in the
same manner:  the hands of the royal pair were locked together, and the
wedding-ring ostentatiously displayed.  From the red and white roses
proceeded a stem, which reached up to a second stage, occupied by Henry
VIII., issuing from a red and white rose, with the effigy of the new
King's mother, Jane Seymour, represented by his side.  One branch sprang
from this pair, which mounted to a third stage, where sat the effigy of
Edward VI. himself, enthroned in royal majesty; and the whole pageant
was framed with wreaths of roses, red and white.'

This quaint and gaudy spectacle so wrought upon the rejoicing people,
that their acclamations utterly smothered the small voice of the child
whose business it was to explain the thing in eulogistic rhymes.  But
Tom Canty was not sorry; for this loyal uproar was sweeter music to him
than any poetry, no matter what its quality might be.  Whithersoever Tom
turned his happy young face, the people recognised the exactness of his
effigy's likeness to himself, the flesh and blood counterpart; and new
whirlwinds of applause burst forth.

The great pageant moved on, and still on, under one triumphal arch after
another, and past a bewildering succession of spectacular and symbolical
tableaux, each of which typified and exalted some virtue, or talent, or
merit, of the little King's.  'Throughout the whole of Cheapside, from
every penthouse and window, hung banners and streamers; and the richest
carpets, stuffs, and cloth-of-gold tapestried the streets--specimens
of the great wealth of the stores within; and the splendour of this
thoroughfare was equalled in the other streets, and in some even
surpassed.'

"And all these wonders and these marvels are to welcome me--me!"
murmured Tom Canty.

The mock King's cheeks were flushed with excitement, his eyes were
flashing, his senses swam in a delirium of pleasure.  At this point,
just as he was raising his hand to fling another rich largess, he caught
sight of a pale, astounded face, which was strained forward out of
the second rank of the crowd, its intense eyes riveted upon him.  A
sickening consternation struck through him; he recognised his
mother! and up flew his hand, palm outward, before his eyes--that old
involuntary gesture, born of a forgotten episode, and perpetuated by
habit.  In an instant more she had torn her way out of the press, and
past the guards, and was at his side.  She embraced his leg, she covered
it with kisses, she cried, "O my child, my darling!" lifting toward him
a face that was transfigured with joy and love.  The same instant an
officer of the King's Guard snatched her away with a curse, and sent
her reeling back whence she came with a vigorous impulse from his
strong arm.  The words "I do not know you, woman!" were falling from Tom
Canty's lips when this piteous thing occurred; but it smote him to the
heart to see her treated so; and as she turned for a last glimpse of
him, whilst the crowd was swallowing her from his sight, she seemed so
wounded, so broken-hearted, that a shame fell upon him which consumed
his pride to ashes, and withered his stolen royalty.  His grandeurs were
stricken valueless: they seemed to fall away from him like rotten rags.

The procession moved on, and still on, through ever augmenting
splendours and ever augmenting tempests of welcome; but to Tom Canty
they were as if they had not been.  He neither saw nor heard.  Royalty
had lost its grace and sweetness; its pomps were become a reproach.
 Remorse was eating his heart out.  He said, "Would God I were free of
my captivity!"

He had unconsciously dropped back into the phraseology of the first days
of his compulsory greatness.

The shining pageant still went winding like a radiant and interminable
serpent down the crooked lanes of the quaint old city, and through the
huzzaing hosts; but still the King rode with bowed head and vacant eyes,
seeing only his mother's face and that wounded look in it.

"Largess, largess!"  The cry fell upon an unheeding ear.

"Long live Edward of England!"  It seemed as if the earth shook with the
explosion; but there was no response from the King.  He heard it only as
one hears the thunder of the surf when it is blown to the ear out of a
great distance, for it was smothered under another sound which was still
nearer, in his own breast, in his accusing conscience--a voice which
kept repeating those shameful words, "I do not know you, woman!"

The words smote upon the King's soul as the strokes of a funeral bell
smite upon the soul of a surviving friend when they remind him of secret
treacheries suffered at his hands by him that is gone.

New glories were unfolded at every turning; new wonders, new marvels,
sprang into view; the pent clamours of waiting batteries were released;
new raptures poured from the throats of the waiting multitudes:  but the
King gave no sign, and the accusing voice that went moaning through his
comfortless breast was all the sound he heard.

By-and-by the gladness in the faces of the populace changed a little,
and became touched with a something like solicitude or anxiety:  an
abatement in the volume of the applause was observable too.  The Lord
Protector was quick to notice these things:  he was as quick to detect
the cause.  He spurred to the King's side, bent low in his saddle,
uncovered, and said--

"My liege, it is an ill time for dreaming.  The people observe thy
downcast head, thy clouded mien, and they take it for an omen.  Be
advised:  unveil the sun of royalty, and let it shine upon these boding
vapours, and disperse them.  Lift up thy face, and smile upon the
people."

So saying, the Duke scattered a handful of coins to right and left, then
retired to his place.  The mock King did mechanically as he had been
bidden.  His smile had no heart in it, but few eyes were near enough
or sharp enough to detect that.  The noddings of his plumed head as he
saluted his subjects were full of grace and graciousness; the largess
which he delivered from his hand was royally liberal:  so the people's
anxiety vanished, and the acclamations burst forth again in as mighty a
volume as before.

Still once more, a little before the progress was ended, the Duke was
obliged to ride forward, and make remonstrance.  He whispered--

"O dread sovereign! shake off these fatal humours; the eyes of the world
are upon thee."  Then he added with sharp annoyance, "Perdition catch
that crazy pauper! 'twas she that hath disturbed your Highness."

The gorgeous figure turned a lustreless eye upon the Duke, and said in a
dead voice--

"She was my mother!"

"My God!" groaned the Protector as he reined his horse backward to his
post, "the omen was pregnant with prophecy.  He is gone mad again!"




CHAPTER XXXII. Coronation Day.

Let us go backward a few hours, and place ourselves in Westminster
Abbey, at four o'clock in the morning of this memorable Coronation Day.
 We are not without company; for although it is still night, we find
the torch-lighted galleries already filling up with people who are well
content to sit still and wait seven or eight hours till the time shall
come for them to see what they may not hope to see twice in their
lives--the coronation of a King.  Yes, London and Westminster have been
astir ever since the warning guns boomed at three o'clock, and already
crowds of untitled rich folk who have bought the privilege of trying
to find sitting-room in the galleries are flocking in at the entrances
reserved for their sort.

The hours drag along tediously enough.  All stir has ceased for some
time, for every gallery has long ago been packed.  We may sit, now, and
look and think at our leisure.  We have glimpses, here and there
and yonder, through the dim cathedral twilight, of portions of many
galleries and balconies, wedged full with other people, the other
portions of these galleries and balconies being cut off from sight by
intervening pillars and architectural projections.  We have in view
the whole of the great north transept--empty, and waiting for England's
privileged ones.  We see also the ample area or platform, carpeted with
rich stuffs, whereon the throne stands.  The throne occupies the centre
of the platform, and is raised above it upon an elevation of four steps.
Within the seat of the throne is enclosed a rough flat rock--the stone
of Scone--which many generations of Scottish kings sat on to be crowned,
and so it in time became holy enough to answer a like purpose for
English monarchs.  Both the throne and its footstool are covered with
cloth of gold.

Stillness reigns, the torches blink dully, the time drags heavily.
But at last the lagging daylight asserts itself, the torches are
extinguished, and a mellow radiance suffuses the great spaces. All
features of the noble building are distinct now, but soft and dreamy,
for the sun is lightly veiled with clouds.

At seven o'clock the first break in the drowsy monotony occurs; for on
the stroke of this hour the first peeress enters the transept, clothed
like Solomon for splendour, and is conducted to her appointed place
by an official clad in satins and velvets, whilst a duplicate of him
gathers up the lady's long train, follows after, and, when the lady is
seated, arranges the train across her lap for her.  He then places her
footstool according to her desire, after which he puts her coronet where
it will be convenient to her hand when the time for the simultaneous
coroneting of the nobles shall arrive.

By this time the peeresses are flowing in in a glittering stream, and
the satin-clad officials are flitting and glinting everywhere, seating
them and making them comfortable.  The scene is animated enough now.
 There is stir and life, and shifting colour everywhere.  After a time,
quiet reigns again; for the peeresses are all come and are all in their
places, a solid acre or such a matter, of human flowers, resplendent in
variegated colours, and frosted like a Milky Way with diamonds.  There
are all ages here: brown, wrinkled, white-haired dowagers who are able
to go back, and still back, down the stream of time, and recall the
crowning of Richard III. and the troublous days of that old forgotten
age; and there are handsome middle-aged dames; and lovely and gracious
young matrons; and gentle and beautiful young girls, with beaming eyes
and fresh complexions, who may possibly put on their jewelled coronets
awkwardly when the great time comes; for the matter will be new to
them, and their excitement will be a sore hindrance. Still, this may
not happen, for the hair of all these ladies has been arranged with a
special view to the swift and successful lodging of the crown in its
place when the signal comes.

We have seen that this massed array of peeresses is sown thick with
diamonds, and we also see that it is a marvellous spectacle--but now we
are about to be astonished in earnest.  About nine, the clouds suddenly
break away and a shaft of sunshine cleaves the mellow atmosphere, and
drifts slowly along the ranks of ladies; and every rank it touches
flames into a dazzling splendour of many-coloured fires, and we tingle
to our finger-tips with the electric thrill that is shot through us by
the surprise and the beauty of the spectacle!  Presently a special envoy
from some distant corner of the Orient, marching with the general body
of foreign ambassadors, crosses this bar of sunshine, and we catch our
breath, the glory that streams and flashes and palpitates about him is
so overpowering; for he is crusted from head to heel with gems, and his
slightest movement showers a dancing radiance all around him.

Let us change the tense for convenience.  The time drifted along--one
hour--two hours--two hours and a half; then the deep booming of
artillery told that the King and his grand procession had arrived at
last; so the waiting multitude rejoiced.  All knew that a further delay
must follow, for the King must be prepared and robed for the solemn
ceremony; but this delay would be pleasantly occupied by the assembling
of the peers of the realm in their stately robes.  These were conducted
ceremoniously to their seats, and their coronets placed conveniently
at hand; and meanwhile the multitude in the galleries were alive with
interest, for most of them were beholding for the first time, dukes,
earls, and barons, whose names had been historical for five hundred
years.  When all were finally seated, the spectacle from the galleries
and all coigns of vantage was complete; a gorgeous one to look upon and
to remember.

Now the robed and mitred great heads of the church, and their
attendants, filed in upon the platform and took their appointed places;
these were followed by the Lord Protector and other great officials, and
these again by a steel-clad detachment of the Guard.

There was a waiting pause; then, at a signal, a triumphant peal of music
burst forth, and Tom Canty, clothed in a long robe of cloth of gold,
appeared at a door, and stepped upon the platform.  The entire multitude
rose, and the ceremony of the Recognition ensued.

Then a noble anthem swept the Abbey with its rich waves of sound; and
thus heralded and welcomed, Tom Canty was conducted to the throne.
 The ancient ceremonies went on, with impressive solemnity, whilst the
audience gazed; and as they drew nearer and nearer to completion, Tom
Canty grew pale, and still paler, and a deep and steadily deepening woe
and despondency settled down upon his spirits and upon his remorseful
heart.

At last the final act was at hand.  The Archbishop of Canterbury lifted
up the crown of England from its cushion and held it out over the
trembling mock-King's head.  In the same instant a rainbow-radiance
flashed along the spacious transept; for with one impulse every
individual in the great concourse of nobles lifted a coronet and poised
it over his or her head--and paused in that attitude.

A deep hush pervaded the Abbey.  At this impressive moment, a startling
apparition intruded upon the scene--an apparition observed by none in
the absorbed multitude, until it suddenly appeared, moving up the great
central aisle.  It was a boy, bareheaded, ill shod, and clothed in
coarse plebeian garments that were falling to rags.  He raised his hand
with a solemnity which ill comported with his soiled and sorry aspect,
and delivered this note of warning--

"I forbid you to set the crown of England upon that forfeited head.  I
am the King!"

In an instant several indignant hands were laid upon the boy; but in
the same instant Tom Canty, in his regal vestments, made a swift step
forward, and cried out in a ringing voice--

"Loose him and forbear!  He _is_ the King!"

A sort of panic of astonishment swept the assemblage, and they partly
rose in their places and stared in a bewildered way at one another and
at the chief figures in this scene, like persons who wondered whether
they were awake and in their senses, or asleep and dreaming.  The Lord
Protector was as amazed as the rest, but quickly recovered himself, and
exclaimed in a voice of authority--

"Mind not his Majesty, his malady is upon him again--seize the
vagabond!"

He would have been obeyed, but the mock-King stamped his foot and cried
out--

"On your peril!  Touch him not, he is the King!"

The hands were withheld; a paralysis fell upon the house; no one moved,
no one spoke; indeed, no one knew how to act or what to say, in so
strange and surprising an emergency.  While all minds were struggling to
right themselves, the boy still moved steadily forward, with high port
and confident mien; he had never halted from the beginning; and while
the tangled minds still floundered helplessly, he stepped upon the
platform, and the mock-King ran with a glad face to meet him; and fell
on his knees before him and said--

"Oh, my lord the King, let poor Tom Canty be first to swear fealty to
thee, and say, 'Put on thy crown and enter into thine own again!'"

The Lord Protector's eye fell sternly upon the new-comer's face; but
straightway the sternness vanished away, and gave place to an expression
of wondering surprise.  This thing happened also to the other great
officers.  They glanced at each other, and retreated a step by a common
and unconscious impulse.  The thought in each mind was the same:  "What
a strange resemblance!"

The Lord Protector reflected a moment or two in perplexity, then he
said, with grave respectfulness--

"By your favour, sir, I desire to ask certain questions which--"

"I will answer them, my lord."

The Duke asked him many questions about the Court, the late King, the
prince, the princesses--the boy answered them correctly and without
hesitating.  He described the rooms of state in the palace, the late
King's apartments, and those of the Prince of Wales.

It was strange; it was wonderful; yes, it was unaccountable--so all said
that heard it.  The tide was beginning to turn, and Tom Canty's hopes to
run high, when the Lord Protector shook his head and said--

"It is true it is most wonderful--but it is no more than our lord the
King likewise can do."  This remark, and this reference to himself as
still the King, saddened Tom Canty, and he felt his hopes crumbling from
under him.  "These are not _proofs_," added the Protector.

The tide was turning very fast now, very fast indeed--but in the wrong
direction; it was leaving poor Tom Canty stranded on the throne,
and sweeping the other out to sea.  The Lord Protector communed with
himself--shook his head--the thought forced itself upon him, "It is
perilous to the State and to us all, to entertain so fateful a riddle as
this; it could divide the nation and undermine the throne."  He turned
and said--

"Sir Thomas, arrest this--No, hold!"  His face lighted, and he
confronted the ragged candidate with this question--

"Where lieth the Great Seal?  Answer me this truly, and the riddle is
unriddled; for only he that was Prince of Wales _can_ so answer! On so
trivial a thing hang a throne and a dynasty!"

It was a lucky thought, a happy thought.  That it was so considered by
the great officials was manifested by the silent applause that shot from
eye to eye around their circle in the form of bright approving glances.
Yes, none but the true prince could dissolve the stubborn mystery of the
vanished Great Seal--this forlorn little impostor had been taught his
lesson well, but here his teachings must fail, for his teacher himself
could not answer _that_ question--ah, very good, very good indeed;
now we shall be rid of this troublesome and perilous business in
short order! And so they nodded invisibly and smiled inwardly with
satisfaction, and looked to see this foolish lad stricken with a palsy
of guilty confusion. How surprised they were, then, to see nothing of
the sort happen--how they marvelled to hear him answer up promptly, in a
confident and untroubled voice, and say--

"There is nought in this riddle that is difficult."  Then, without so
much as a by-your-leave to anybody, he turned and gave this command,
with the easy manner of one accustomed to doing such things: "My Lord
St. John, go you to my private cabinet in the palace--for none knoweth
the place better than you--and, close down to the floor, in the left
corner remotest from the door that opens from the ante-chamber, you
shall find in the wall a brazen nail-head; press upon it and a little
jewel-closet will fly open which not even you do know of--no, nor
any soul else in all the world but me and the trusty artisan that did
contrive it for me. The first thing that falleth under your eye will be
the Great Seal--fetch it hither."

All the company wondered at this speech, and wondered still more to see
the little mendicant pick out this peer without hesitancy or apparent
fear of mistake, and call him by name with such a placidly convincing
air of having known him all his life.  The peer was almost surprised
into obeying.  He even made a movement as if to go, but quickly
recovered his tranquil attitude and confessed his blunder with a blush.
 Tom Canty turned upon him and said, sharply--

"Why dost thou hesitate?  Hast not heard the King's command?  Go!"

The Lord St. John made a deep obeisance--and it was observed that it was
a significantly cautious and non-committal one, it not being delivered
at either of the kings, but at the neutral ground about half-way between
the two--and took his leave.

Now began a movement of the gorgeous particles of that official group
which was slow, scarcely perceptible, and yet steady and persistent--a
movement such as is observed in a kaleidoscope that is turned slowly,
whereby the components of one splendid cluster fall away and join
themselves to another--a movement which, little by little, in the
present case, dissolved the glittering crowd that stood about Tom Canty
and clustered it together again in the neighbourhood of the new-comer.
 Tom Canty stood almost alone. Now ensued a brief season of deep
suspense and waiting--during which even the few faint hearts still
remaining near Tom Canty gradually scraped together courage enough to
glide, one by one, over to the majority.  So at last Tom Canty, in his
royal robes and jewels, stood wholly alone and isolated from the world,
a conspicuous figure, occupying an eloquent vacancy.

Now the Lord St. John was seen returning.  As he advanced up
the mid-aisle the interest was so intense that the low murmur of
conversation in the great assemblage died out and was succeeded by
a profound hush, a breathless stillness, through which his footfalls
pulsed with a dull and distant sound.  Every eye was fastened upon him
as he moved along.  He reached the platform, paused a moment, then moved
toward Tom Canty with a deep obeisance, and said--

"Sire, the Seal is not there!"

A mob does not melt away from the presence of a plague-patient with more
haste than the band of pallid and terrified courtiers melted away from
the presence of the shabby little claimant of the Crown.  In a moment
he stood all alone, without friend or supporter, a target upon which
was concentrated a bitter fire of scornful and angry looks.  The Lord
Protector called out fiercely--

"Cast the beggar into the street, and scourge him through the town--the
paltry knave is worth no more consideration!"

Officers of the guard sprang forward to obey, but Tom Canty waved them
off and said--

"Back!  Whoso touches him perils his life!"

The Lord Protector was perplexed in the last degree.  He said to the
Lord St. John--

"Searched you well?--but it boots not to ask that.  It doth seem passing
strange.  Little things, trifles, slip out of one's ken, and one does
not think it matter for surprise; but how so bulky a thing as the
Seal of England can vanish away and no man be able to get track of it
again--a massy golden disk--"

Tom Canty, with beaming eyes, sprang forward and shouted--

"Hold, that is enough!  Was it round?--and thick?--and had it letters
and devices graved upon it?--yes?  Oh, _now_ I know what this Great Seal
is that there's been such worry and pother about. An' ye had described
it to me, ye could have had it three weeks ago.  Right well I know where
it lies; but it was not I that put it there--first."

"Who, then, my liege?" asked the Lord Protector.

"He that stands there--the rightful King of England.  And he shall tell
you himself where it lies--then you will believe he knew it of his own
knowledge.  Bethink thee, my King--spur thy memory--it was the last, the
very _last_ thing thou didst that day before thou didst rush forth from
the palace, clothed in my rags, to punish the soldier that insulted me."

A silence ensued, undisturbed by a movement or a whisper, and all eyes
were fixed upon the new-comer, who stood, with bent head and corrugated
brow, groping in his memory among a thronging multitude of valueless
recollections for one single little elusive fact, which, found, would
seat him upon a throne--unfound, would leave him as he was, for good and
all--a pauper and an outcast.  Moment after moment passed--the moments
built themselves into minutes--still the boy struggled silently on, and
gave no sign.  But at last he heaved a sigh, shook his head slowly, and
said, with a trembling lip and in a despondent voice--

"I call the scene back--all of it--but the Seal hath no place in it."
 He paused, then looked up, and said with gentle dignity, "My lords and
gentlemen, if ye will rob your rightful sovereign of his own for lack of
this evidence which he is not able to furnish, I may not stay ye, being
powerless.  But--"

"Oh, folly, oh, madness, my King!" cried Tom Canty, in a panic,
"wait!--think!  Do not give up!--the cause is not lost!  Nor _shall_ be,
neither! List to what I say--follow every word--I am going to bring that
morning back again, every hap just as it happened.  We talked--I told
you of my sisters, Nan and Bet--ah, yes, you remember that; and about
mine old grandam--and the rough games of the lads of Offal Court--yes,
you remember these things also; very well, follow me still, you shall
recall everything.  You gave me food and drink, and did with princely
courtesy send away the servants, so that my low breeding might not shame
me before them--ah, yes, this also you remember."

As Tom checked off his details, and the other boy nodded his head in
recognition of them, the great audience and the officials stared in
puzzled wonderment; the tale sounded like true history, yet how could
this impossible conjunction between a prince and a beggar-boy have come
about?  Never was a company of people so perplexed, so interested, and
so stupefied, before.

"For a jest, my prince, we did exchange garments.  Then we stood before
a mirror; and so alike were we that both said it seemed as if there had
been no change made--yes, you remember that.  Then you noticed that the
soldier had hurt my hand--look! here it is, I cannot yet even write with
it, the fingers are so stiff.  At this your Highness sprang up, vowing
vengeance upon that soldier, and ran towards the door--you passed a
table--that thing you call the Seal lay on that table--you snatched
it up and looked eagerly about, as if for a place to hide it--your eye
caught sight of--"

"There, 'tis sufficient!--and the good God be thanked!" exclaimed the
ragged claimant, in a mighty excitement.  "Go, my good St. John--in an
arm-piece of the Milanese armour that hangs on the wall, thou'lt find
the Seal!"

"Right, my King! right!" cried Tom Canty; "_Now_ the sceptre of England
is thine own; and it were better for him that would dispute it that he
had been born dumb!  Go, my Lord St. John, give thy feet wings!"

The whole assemblage was on its feet now, and well-nigh out of its mind
with uneasiness, apprehension, and consuming excitement.  On the floor
and on the platform a deafening buzz of frantic conversation burst
forth, and for some time nobody knew anything or heard anything or was
interested in anything but what his neighbour was shouting into his ear,
or he was shouting into his neighbour's ear.  Time--nobody knew how much
of it--swept by unheeded and unnoted.  At last a sudden hush fell upon
the house, and in the same moment St. John appeared upon the platform,
and held the Great Seal aloft in his hand.  Then such a shout went up--

"Long live the true King!"

For five minutes the air quaked with shouts and the crash of musical
instruments, and was white with a storm of waving handkerchiefs; and
through it all a ragged lad, the most conspicuous figure in England,
stood, flushed and happy and proud, in the centre of the spacious
platform, with the great vassals of the kingdom kneeling around him.

Then all rose, and Tom Canty cried out--

"Now, O my King, take these regal garments back, and give poor Tom, thy
servant, his shreds and remnants again."

The Lord Protector spoke up--

"Let the small varlet be stripped and flung into the Tower."

But the new King, the true King, said--

"I will not have it so.  But for him I had not got my crown again--none
shall lay a hand upon him to harm him.  And as for thee, my good uncle,
my Lord Protector, this conduct of thine is not grateful toward
this poor lad, for I hear he hath made thee a duke"--the Protector
blushed--"yet he was not a king; wherefore what is thy fine title
worth now?  To-morrow you shall sue to me, _through him_, for its
confirmation, else no duke, but a simple earl, shalt thou remain."

Under this rebuke, his Grace the Duke of Somerset retired a little from
the front for the moment.  The King turned to Tom, and said kindly--"My
poor boy, how was it that you could remember where I hid the Seal when I
could not remember it myself?"

"Ah, my King, that was easy, since I used it divers days."

"Used it--yet could not explain where it was?"

"I did not know it was _that_ they wanted.  They did not describe it,
your Majesty."

"Then how used you it?"

The red blood began to steal up into Tom's cheeks, and he dropped his
eyes and was silent.

"Speak up, good lad, and fear nothing," said the King.  "How used you
the Great Seal of England?"

Tom stammered a moment, in a pathetic confusion, then got it out--

"To crack nuts with!"

Poor child, the avalanche of laughter that greeted this nearly swept him
off his feet.  But if a doubt remained in any mind that Tom Canty was
not the King of England and familiar with the august appurtenances of
royalty, this reply disposed of it utterly.

Meantime the sumptuous robe of state had been removed from Tom's
shoulders to the King's, whose rags were effectually hidden from sight
under it.  Then the coronation ceremonies were resumed; the true King
was anointed and the crown set upon his head, whilst cannon thundered
the news to the city, and all London seemed to rock with applause.




CHAPTER XXXIII. Edward as King.

Miles Hendon was picturesque enough before he got into the riot on
London Bridge--he was more so when he got out of it.  He had but little
money when he got in, none at all when he got out.  The pickpockets had
stripped him of his last farthing.

But no matter, so he found his boy.  Being a soldier, he did not go at
his task in a random way, but set to work, first of all, to arrange his
campaign.

What would the boy naturally do?  Where would he naturally go?
Well--argued Miles--he would naturally go to his former haunts, for that
is the instinct of unsound minds, when homeless and forsaken, as well
as of sound ones.  Whereabouts were his former haunts?  His rags,
taken together with the low villain who seemed to know him and who even
claimed to be his father, indicated that his home was in one or another
of the poorest and meanest districts of London.  Would the search for
him be difficult, or long?  No, it was likely to be easy and brief.  He
would not hunt for the boy, he would hunt for a crowd; in the centre of
a big crowd or a little one, sooner or later, he should find his poor
little friend, sure; and the mangy mob would be entertaining itself
with pestering and aggravating the boy, who would be proclaiming himself
King, as usual.  Then Miles Hendon would cripple some of those people,
and carry off his little ward, and comfort and cheer him with loving
words, and the two would never be separated any more.

So Miles started on his quest.  Hour after hour he tramped through back
alleys and squalid streets, seeking groups and crowds, and finding no
end of them, but never any sign of the boy.  This greatly surprised him,
but did not discourage him.  To his notion, there was nothing the matter
with his plan of campaign; the only miscalculation about it was that the
campaign was becoming a lengthy one, whereas he had expected it to be
short.

When daylight arrived, at last, he had made many a mile, and canvassed
many a crowd, but the only result was that he was tolerably tired,
rather hungry and very sleepy.  He wanted some breakfast, but there was
no way to get it.  To beg for it did not occur to him; as to pawning
his sword, he would as soon have thought of parting with his honour;
he could spare some of his clothes--yes, but one could as easily find a
customer for a disease as for such clothes.

At noon he was still tramping--among the rabble which followed after
the royal procession, now; for he argued that this regal display would
attract his little lunatic powerfully.  He followed the pageant through
all its devious windings about London, and all the way to Westminster
and the Abbey.  He drifted here and there amongst the multitudes
that were massed in the vicinity for a weary long time, baffled and
perplexed, and finally wandered off, thinking, and trying to contrive
some way to better his plan of campaign.  By-and-by, when he came to
himself out of his musings, he discovered that the town was far behind
him and that the day was growing old.  He was near the river, and in the
country; it was a region of fine rural seats--not the sort of district
to welcome clothes like his.

It was not at all cold; so he stretched himself on the ground in the lee
of a hedge to rest and think.  Drowsiness presently began to settle upon
his senses; the faint and far-off boom of cannon was wafted to his ear,
and he said to himself, "The new King is crowned," and straightway fell
asleep.  He had not slept or rested, before, for more than thirty hours.
He did not wake again until near the middle of the next morning.

He got up, lame, stiff, and half famished, washed himself in the river,
stayed his stomach with a pint or two of water, and trudged off toward
Westminster, grumbling at himself for having wasted so much time.
 Hunger helped him to a new plan, now; he would try to get speech with
old Sir Humphrey Marlow and borrow a few marks, and--but that was enough
of a plan for the present; it would be time enough to enlarge it when
this first stage should be accomplished.

Toward eleven o'clock he approached the palace; and although a host of
showy people were about him, moving in the same direction, he was not
inconspicuous--his costume took care of that.  He watched these people's
faces narrowly, hoping to find a charitable one whose possessor might
be willing to carry his name to the old lieutenant--as to trying to get
into the palace himself, that was simply out of the question.

Presently our whipping-boy passed him, then wheeled about and scanned
his figure well, saying to himself, "An' that is not the very vagabond
his Majesty is in such a worry about, then am I an ass--though belike I
was that before.  He answereth the description to a rag--that God should
make two such would be to cheapen miracles by wasteful repetition.  I
would I could contrive an excuse to speak with him."

Miles Hendon saved him the trouble; for he turned about, then, as a man
generally will when somebody mesmerises him by gazing hard at him from
behind; and observing a strong interest in the boy's eyes, he stepped
toward him and said--

"You have just come out from the palace; do you belong there?"

"Yes, your worship."

"Know you Sir Humphrey Marlow?"

The boy started, and said to himself, "Lord! mine old departed father!"
Then he answered aloud, "Right well, your worship."

"Good--is he within?"

"Yes," said the boy; and added, to himself, "within his grave."

"Might I crave your favour to carry my name to him, and say I beg to say
a word in his ear?"

"I will despatch the business right willingly, fair sir."

"Then say Miles Hendon, son of Sir Richard, is here without--I shall be
greatly bounden to you, my good lad."

The boy looked disappointed.  "The King did not name him so," he said to
himself; "but it mattereth not, this is his twin brother, and can give
his Majesty news of t'other Sir-Odds-and-Ends, I warrant."  So he said
to Miles, "Step in there a moment, good sir, and wait till I bring you
word."

Hendon retired to the place indicated--it was a recess sunk in the
palace wall, with a stone bench in it--a shelter for sentinels in bad
weather. He had hardly seated himself when some halberdiers, in charge
of an officer, passed by.  The officer saw him, halted his men, and
commanded Hendon to come forth.  He obeyed, and was promptly arrested
as a suspicious character prowling within the precincts of the palace.
 Things began to look ugly.  Poor Miles was going to explain, but the
officer roughly silenced him, and ordered his men to disarm him and
search him.

"God of his mercy grant that they find somewhat," said poor Miles; "I
have searched enow, and failed, yet is my need greater than theirs."

Nothing was found but a document.  The officer tore it open, and Hendon
smiled when he recognised the 'pot-hooks' made by his lost little friend
that black day at Hendon Hall.  The officer's face grew dark as he read
the English paragraph, and Miles blenched to the opposite colour as he
listened.

"Another new claimant of the Crown!" cried the officer.  "Verily they
breed like rabbits, to-day.  Seize the rascal, men, and see ye keep
him fast whilst I convey this precious paper within and send it to the
King."

He hurried away, leaving the prisoner in the grip of the halberdiers.

"Now is my evil luck ended at last," muttered Hendon, "for I shall
dangle at a rope's end for a certainty, by reason of that bit of
writing.  And what will become of my poor lad!--ah, only the good God
knoweth."

By-and-by he saw the officer coming again, in a great hurry; so he
plucked his courage together, purposing to meet his trouble as became a
man.  The officer ordered the men to loose the prisoner and return his
sword to him; then bowed respectfully, and said--

"Please you, sir, to follow me."

Hendon followed, saying to himself, "An' I were not travelling to death
and judgment, and so must needs economise in sin, I would throttle this
knave for his mock courtesy."

The two traversed a populous court, and arrived at the grand entrance of
the palace, where the officer, with another bow, delivered Hendon into
the hands of a gorgeous official, who received him with profound respect
and led him forward through a great hall, lined on both sides with rows
of splendid flunkeys (who made reverential obeisance as the two passed
along, but fell into death-throes of silent laughter at our stately
scarecrow the moment his back was turned), and up a broad staircase,
among flocks of fine folk, and finally conducted him into a vast room,
clove a passage for him through the assembled nobility of England, then
made a bow, reminded him to take his hat off, and left him standing in
the middle of the room, a mark for all eyes, for plenty of indignant
frowns, and for a sufficiency of amused and derisive smiles.

Miles Hendon was entirely bewildered.  There sat the young King, under
a canopy of state, five steps away, with his head bent down and aside,
speaking with a sort of human bird of paradise--a duke, maybe.  Hendon
observed to himself that it was hard enough to be sentenced to death
in the full vigour of life, without having this peculiarly public
humiliation added.  He wished the King would hurry about it--some of the
gaudy people near by were becoming pretty offensive.  At this moment
the King raised his head slightly, and Hendon caught a good view of his
face. The sight nearly took his breath away!--He stood gazing at the
fair young face like one transfixed; then presently ejaculated--

"Lo, the Lord of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows on his throne!"

He muttered some broken sentences, still gazing and marvelling; then
turned his eyes around and about, scanning the gorgeous throng and the
splendid saloon, murmuring, "But these are _real_--verily these are
_real_--surely it is not a dream."

He stared at the King again--and thought, "_Is_ it a dream . . . or _is_
he the veritable Sovereign of England, and not the friendless poor Tom
o' Bedlam I took him for--who shall solve me this riddle?"

A sudden idea flashed in his eye, and he strode to the wall, gathered up
a chair, brought it back, planted it on the floor, and sat down in it!

A buzz of indignation broke out, a rough hand was laid upon him and a
voice exclaimed--

"Up, thou mannerless clown! would'st sit in the presence of the King?"

The disturbance attracted his Majesty's attention, who stretched forth
his hand and cried out--

"Touch him not, it is his right!"

The throng fell back, stupefied.  The King went on--

"Learn ye all, ladies, lords, and gentlemen, that this is my trusty and
well-beloved servant, Miles Hendon, who interposed his good sword and
saved his prince from bodily harm and possible death--and for this he is
a knight, by the King's voice.  Also learn, that for a higher service,
in that he saved his sovereign stripes and shame, taking these upon
himself, he is a peer of England, Earl of Kent, and shall have gold
and lands meet for the dignity.  More--the privilege which he hath just
exercised is his by royal grant; for we have ordained that the chiefs
of his line shall have and hold the right to sit in the presence of the
Majesty of England henceforth, age after age, so long as the crown shall
endure.  Molest him not."

Two persons, who, through delay, had only arrived from the country
during this morning, and had now been in this room only five minutes,
stood listening to these words and looking at the King, then at the
scarecrow, then at the King again, in a sort of torpid bewilderment.
 These were Sir Hugh and the Lady Edith.  But the new Earl did not
see them.  He was still staring at the monarch, in a dazed way, and
muttering--

"Oh, body o' me!  _this_ my pauper!  This my lunatic!  This is he whom
_I_ would show what grandeur was, in my house of seventy rooms and
seven-and-twenty servants!  This is he who had never known aught but
rags for raiment, kicks for comfort, and offal for diet!  This is he
whom _I_ adopted and would make respectable! Would God I had a bag to
hide my head in!"

Then his manners suddenly came back to him, and he dropped upon his
knees, with his hands between the King's, and swore allegiance and did
homage for his lands and titles.  Then he rose and stood respectfully
aside, a mark still for all eyes--and much envy, too.

Now the King discovered Sir Hugh, and spoke out with wrathful voice and
kindling eye--

"Strip this robber of his false show and stolen estates, and put him
under lock and key till I have need of him."

The late Sir Hugh was led away.

There was a stir at the other end of the room, now; the assemblage fell
apart, and Tom Canty, quaintly but richly clothed, marched down, between
these living walls, preceded by an usher.  He knelt before the King, who
said--

"I have learned the story of these past few weeks, and am well pleased
with thee.  Thou hast governed the realm with right royal gentleness and
mercy.  Thou hast found thy mother and thy sisters again?  Good; they
shall be cared for--and thy father shall hang, if thou desire it and the
law consent.  Know, all ye that hear my voice, that from this day, they
that abide in the shelter of Christ's Hospital and share the King's
bounty shall have their minds and hearts fed, as well as their baser
parts; and this boy shall dwell there, and hold the chief place in its
honourable body of governors, during life.  And for that he hath been
a king, it is meet that other than common observance shall be his due;
wherefore note this his dress of state, for by it he shall be known, and
none shall copy it; and wheresoever he shall come, it shall remind the
people that he hath been royal, in his time, and none shall deny him his
due of reverence or fail to give him salutation.  He hath the throne's
protection, he hath the crown's support, he shall be known and called by
the honourable title of the King's Ward."

The proud and happy Tom Canty rose and kissed the King's hand, and was
conducted from the presence.  He did not waste any time, but flew to his
mother, to tell her and Nan and Bet all about it and get them to help
him enjoy the great news. {1}

Conclusion. Justice and retribution.

When the mysteries were all cleared up, it came out, by confession of
Hugh Hendon, that his wife had repudiated Miles by his command, that
day at Hendon Hall--a command assisted and supported by the perfectly
trustworthy promise that if she did not deny that he was Miles Hendon,
and stand firmly to it, he would have her life; whereupon she said,
"Take it!"--she did not value it--and she would not repudiate
Miles; then the husband said he would spare her life but have Miles
assassinated!  This was a different matter; so she gave her word and
kept it.

Hugh was not prosecuted for his threats or for stealing his brother's
estates and title, because the wife and brother would not testify
against him--and the former would not have been allowed to do it, even
if she had wanted to.  Hugh deserted his wife and went over to the
continent, where he presently died; and by-and-by the Earl of Kent
married his relict. There were grand times and rejoicings at Hendon
village when the couple paid their first visit to the Hall.

Tom Canty's father was never heard of again.

The King sought out the farmer who had been branded and sold as a slave,
and reclaimed him from his evil life with the Ruffler's gang, and put
him in the way of a comfortable livelihood.

He also took that old lawyer out of prison and remitted his fine. He
provided good homes for the daughters of the two Baptist women whom he
saw burned at the stake, and roundly punished the official who laid the
undeserved stripes upon Miles Hendon's back.

He saved from the gallows the boy who had captured the stray falcon, and
also the woman who had stolen a remnant of cloth from a weaver; but he
was too late to save the man who had been convicted of killing a deer in
the royal forest.

He showed favour to the justice who had pitied him when he was supposed
to have stolen a pig, and he had the gratification of seeing him grow in
the public esteem and become a great and honoured man.

As long as the King lived he was fond of telling the story of his
adventures, all through, from the hour that the sentinel cuffed him
away from the palace gate till the final midnight when he deftly mixed
himself into a gang of hurrying workmen and so slipped into the Abbey
and climbed up and hid himself in the Confessor's tomb, and then slept
so long, next day, that he came within one of missing the Coronation
altogether.  He said that the frequent rehearsing of the precious lesson
kept him strong in his purpose to make its teachings yield benefits to
his people; and so, whilst his life was spared he should continue to
tell the story, and thus keep its sorrowful spectacles fresh in his
memory and the springs of pity replenished in his heart.

Miles Hendon and Tom Canty were favourites of the King, all through his
brief reign, and his sincere mourners when he died. The good Earl
of Kent had too much sense to abuse his peculiar privilege; but he
exercised it twice after the instance we have seen of it before he was
called from this world--once at the accession of Queen Mary, and once at
the accession of Queen Elizabeth.  A descendant of his exercised it
at the accession of James I.  Before this one's son chose to use the
privilege, near a quarter of a century had elapsed, and the 'privilege
of the Kents' had faded out of most people's memories; so, when the Kent
of that day appeared before Charles I. and his court and sat down in the
sovereign's presence to assert and perpetuate the right of his house,
there was a fine stir indeed!  But the matter was soon explained, and
the right confirmed.  The last Earl of the line fell in the wars of the
Commonwealth fighting for the King, and the odd privilege ended with
him.

Tom Canty lived to be a very old man, a handsome, white-haired old
fellow, of grave and benignant aspect.  As long as he lasted he was
honoured; and he was also reverenced, for his striking and peculiar
costume kept the people reminded that 'in his time he had been royal;'
so, wherever he appeared the crowd fell apart, making way for him, and
whispering, one to another, "Doff thy hat, it is the King's Ward!"--and
so they saluted, and got his kindly smile in return--and they valued it,
too, for his was an honourable history.

Yes, King Edward VI. lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them
worthily.  More than once, when some great dignitary, some gilded vassal
of the crown, made argument against his leniency, and urged that some
law which he was bent upon amending was gentle enough for its purpose,
and wrought no suffering or oppression which any one need mightily mind,
the young King turned the mournful eloquence of his great compassionate
eyes upon him and answered--

"What dost _thou_ know of suffering and oppression?  I and my people
know, but not thou."

The reign of Edward VI. was a singularly merciful one for those harsh
times.  Now that we are taking leave of him, let us try to keep this in
our minds, to his credit.

FOOTNOTES AND TWAIN'S NOTES

{1}  For Mark Twain's note see below under the relevant chapter heading.

{2}  He refers to the order of baronets, or baronettes; the barones
minores, as distinct from the parliamentary barons--not, it need hardly
be said, to the baronets of later creation.

{3}  The lords of Kingsale, descendants of De Courcy, still enjoy this
curious privilege.

{4}  Hume.

{5}  Ib.

{6}  Leigh Hunt's 'The Town,' p.408, quotation from an early tourist.

{7}  Canting terms for various kinds of thieves, beggars and vagabonds,
and their female companions.

{8}  From 'The English Rogue.'  London, 1665.

{9}  Hume's England.

{10}  See Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p. 11.

NOTE 1, Chapter IV. Christ's Hospital Costume.

It is most reasonable to regard the dress as copied from the costume
of the citizens of London of that period, when long blue coats were the
common habit of apprentices and serving-men, and yellow stockings
were generally worn; the coat fits closely to the body, but has loose
sleeves, and beneath is worn a sleeveless yellow under-coat; around the
waist is a red leathern girdle; a clerical band around the neck, and
a small flat black cap, about the size of a saucer, completes the
costume.--Timbs' Curiosities of London.

NOTE 2, Chapter IV.

It appears that Christ's Hospital was not originally founded as a
_school_; its object was to rescue children from the streets, to
shelter, feed, clothe them.--Timbs' Curiosities of London.

NOTE 3, Chapter V. The Duke of Norfolk's Condemnation commanded.

The King was now approaching fast towards his end; and fearing lest
Norfolk should escape him, he sent a message to the Commons, by which
he desired them to hasten the Bill, on pretence that Norfolk enjoyed the
dignity of Earl Marshal, and it was necessary to appoint another, who
might officiate at the ensuing ceremony of installing his son Prince of
Wales.--Hume's History of England, vol. iii. p. 307.

NOTE 4, Chapter VII.

It was not till the end of this reign (Henry VIII.) that any salads,
carrots, turnips, or other edible roots were produced in England.  The
little of these vegetables that was used was formerly imported from
Holland and Flanders.  Queen Catherine, when she wanted a salad, was
obliged to despatch a messenger thither on purpose.--Hume's History of
England, vol. iii. p. 314.

NOTE 5, Chapter VIII. Attainder of Norfolk.

The House of Peers, without examining the prisoner, without trial or
evidence, passed a Bill of Attainder against him and sent it down to the
Commons . . . The obsequious Commons obeyed his (the King's)
directions; and the King, having affixed the Royal assent to the Bill by
commissioners, issued orders for the execution of Norfolk on the morning
of January 29 (the next day).--Hume's History of England, vol iii. p
306.

NOTE 6, Chapter X. The Loving-cup.

The loving-cup, and the peculiar ceremonies observed in drinking from
it, are older than English history.  It is thought that both are Danish
importations.  As far back as knowledge goes, the loving-cup has always
been drunk at English banquets.  Tradition explains the ceremonies in
this way.  In the rude ancient times it was deemed a wise precaution
to have both hands of both drinkers employed, lest while the pledger
pledged his love and fidelity to the pledgee, the pledgee take that
opportunity to slip a dirk into him!

NOTE 7, Chapter XI. The Duke of Norfolk's narrow Escape.

Had Henry VIII. survived a few hours longer, his order for the duke's
execution would have been carried into effect. 'But news being
carried to the Tower that the King himself had expired that night,
the lieutenant deferred obeying the warrant; and it was not thought
advisable by the Council to begin a new reign by the death of the
greatest nobleman in the kingdom, who had been condemned by a sentence
so unjust and tyrannical.'--Hume's History of England, vol. iii, p. 307.

NOTE 8, Chapter XIV. The Whipping-boy.

James I. and Charles II. had whipping-boys, when they were little
fellows, to take their punishment for them when they fell short in their
lessons; so I have ventured to furnish my small prince with one, for my
own purposes.

NOTES to Chapter XV.

Character of Hertford.

The young King discovered an extreme attachment to his uncle, who
was, in the main, a man of moderation and probity.--Hume's History of
England, vol. iii, p324.

But if he (the Protector) gave offence by assuming too much state, he
deserves great praise on account of the laws passed this session,
by which the rigour of former statutes was much mitigated, and some
security given to the freedom of the constitution.  All laws were
repealed which extended the crime of treason beyond the statute of the
twenty-fifth of Edward III.; all laws enacted during the late reign
extending the crime of felony; all the former laws against Lollardy or
heresy, together with the statute of the Six Articles.  None were to be
accused for words, but within a month after they were spoken.  By
these repeals several of the most rigorous laws that ever had passed
in England were annulled; and some dawn, both of civil and religious
liberty, began to appear to the people.  A repeal also passed of that
law, the destruction of all laws, by which the King's proclamation was
made of equal force with a statute.--Ibid. vol. iii. p. 339.

Boiling to Death.

In the reign of Henry VIII. poisoners were, by Act of Parliament,
condemned to be _boiled to death_.  This Act was repealed in the
following reign.

In Germany, even in the seventeenth century, this horrible punishment
was inflicted on coiners and counterfeiters.  Taylor, the Water Poet,
describes an execution he witnessed in Hamburg in 1616.  The judgment
pronounced against a coiner of false money was that he should '_be
boiled to death in oil_; not thrown into the vessel at once, but with
a pulley or rope to be hanged under the armpits, and then let down into
the oil _by degrees_; first the feet, and next the legs, and so to boil
his flesh from his bones alive.'--Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws,
True and False, p. 13.

The Famous Stocking Case.

A woman and her daughter, _nine years old_, were hanged in Huntingdon
for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off
their stockings!--Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False,
p. 20.

NOTE 10, Chapter XVII. Enslaving.

So young a King and so ignorant a peasant were likely to make mistakes;
and this is an instance in point.  This peasant was suffering from this
law _by anticipation_; the King was venting his indignation against a
law which was not yet in existence; for this hideous statute was to
have birth in this little King's _own reign_. However, we know, from the
humanity of his character, that it could never have been suggested by
him.

NOTES to Chapter XXIII. Death for Trifling Larcenies.

When Connecticut and New Haven were framing their first codes, larceny
above the value of twelve pence was a capital crime in England--as it
had been since the time of Henry I.--Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue
Laws, True and False, p. 17.

The curious old book called The English Rogue makes the limit thirteen
pence ha'penny:  death being the portion of any who steal a thing 'above
the value of thirteen pence ha'penny.'

NOTES to Chapter XXVII.

From many descriptions of larceny the law expressly took away the
benefit of clergy:  to steal a horse, or a _hawk_, or woollen cloth from
the weaver, was a hanging matter.  So it was to kill a deer from the
King's forest, or to export sheep from the kingdom.--Dr. J. Hammond
Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p.13.

William Prynne, a learned barrister, was sentenced (long after Edward
VI.'s time) to lose both his ears in the pillory, to degradation from
the bar, a fine of 3,000 pounds, and imprisonment for life.  Three years
afterwards he gave new offence to Laud by publishing a pamphlet against
the hierarchy.  He was again prosecuted, and was sentenced to lose _what
remained of his ears_, to pay a fine of 5,000 pounds, to be _branded on
both his cheeks_ with the letters S. L. (for Seditious Libeller), and to
remain in prison for life.  The severity of this sentence was equalled
by the savage rigour of its execution.--Ibid. p. 12.

NOTES to Chapter XXXIII.

Christ's Hospital, or Bluecoat School, 'the noblest institution in the
world.'

The ground on which the Priory of the Grey Friars stood was conferred
by Henry VIII. on the Corporation of London (who caused the institution
there of a home for poor boys and girls). Subsequently, Edward VI.
caused the old Priory to be properly repaired, and founded within
it that noble establishment called the Bluecoat School, or Christ's
Hospital, for the _education_ and maintenance of orphans and the
children of indigent persons . . . Edward would not let him (Bishop
Ridley) depart till the letter was written (to the Lord Mayor), and then
charged him to deliver it himself, and signify his special request and
commandment that no time might be lost in proposing what was convenient,
and apprising him of the proceedings.  The work was zealously
undertaken, Ridley himself engaging in it; and the result was the
founding of Christ's Hospital for the education of poor children. (The
King endowed several other charities at the same time.) "Lord God," said
he, "I yield Thee most hearty thanks that Thou hast given me life thus
long to finish this work to the glory of Thy name!"  That innocent and
most exemplary life was drawing rapidly to its close, and in a few days
he rendered up his spirit to his Creator, praying God to defend the
realm from Papistry.--J. Heneage Jesse's London:  its Celebrated
Characters and Places.

In the Great Hall hangs a large picture of King Edward VI. seated on his
throne, in a scarlet and ermined robe, holding the sceptre in his left
hand, and presenting with the other the Charter to the kneeling Lord
Mayor.  By his side stands the Chancellor, holding the seals, and next
to him are other officers of state.  Bishop Ridley kneels before him
with uplifted hands, as if supplicating a blessing on the event; whilst
the Aldermen, etc., with the Lord Mayor, kneel on both sides, occupying
the middle ground of the picture; and lastly, in front, are a double row
of boys on one side and girls on the other, from the master and matron
down to the boy and girl who have stepped forward from their respective
rows, and kneel with raised hands before the King.--Timbs' Curiosities
of London, p. 98.

Christ's Hospital, by ancient custom, possesses the privilege of
addressing the Sovereign on the occasion of his or her coming into the
City to partake of the hospitality of the Corporation of London.--Ibid.

The Dining Hall, with its lobby and organ-gallery, occupies the entire
storey, which is 187 feet long, 51 feet wide, and 47 feet high; it is
lit by nine large windows, filled with stained glass on the south side;
and is, next to Westminster Hall, the noblest room in the metropolis.
 Here the boys, now about 800 in number, dine; and here are held the
'Suppings in Public,' to which visitors are admitted by tickets issued
by the Treasurer and by the Governors of Christ's Hospital.  The tables
are laid with cheese in wooden bowls, beer in wooden piggins, poured
from leathern jacks, and bread brought in large baskets.  The official
company enter; the Lord Mayor, or President, takes his seat in a state
chair made of oak from St. Catherine's Church, by the Tower; a hymn
is sung, accompanied by the organ; a 'Grecian,' or head boy, reads the
prayers from the pulpit, silence being enforced by three drops of a
wooden hammer.  After prayer the supper commences, and the visitors walk
between the tables.  At its close the 'trade-boys' take up the baskets,
bowls, jacks, piggins, and candlesticks, and pass in procession, the
bowing to the Governors being curiously formal.  This spectacle was
witnessed by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1845.

Among the more eminent Bluecoat boys are Joshua Barnes, editor
of Anacreon and Euripides; Jeremiah Markland, the eminent critic,
particularly in Greek Literature; Camden, the antiquary; Bishop
Stillingfleet; Samuel Richardson, the novelist; Thomas Mitchell, the
translator of Aristophanes; Thomas Barnes, many years editor of the
London Times; Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt.

No boy is admitted before he is seven years old, or after he is nine;
and no boy can remain in the school after he is fifteen, King's boys and
'Grecians' alone excepted.  There are about 500 Governors, at the head
of whom are the Sovereign and the Prince of Wales.  The qualification
for a Governor is payment of 500 pounds.--Ibid.

GENERAL NOTE.

One hears much about the 'hideous Blue Laws of Connecticut,' and is
accustomed to shudder piously when they are mentioned.  There are people
in America--and even in England!--who imagine that they were a very
monument of malignity, pitilessness, and inhumanity; whereas in reality
they were about the first _sweeping departure from judicial atrocity_
which the 'civilised' world had seen.  This humane and kindly Blue Law
Code, of two hundred and forty years ago, stands all by itself,
with ages of bloody law on the further side of it, and a century and
three-quarters of bloody English law on _this_ side of it.

There has never been a time--under the Blue Laws or any other--when
above _fourteen_ crimes were punishable by death in Connecticut.  But in
England, within the memory of men who are still hale in body and mind,
_two hundred and twenty-three_ crimes were punishable by death! {10}
 These facts are worth knowing--and worth thinking about, too.
THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace
river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the
Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four
thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the
crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses
up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the
crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three
times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much
as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the
Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water
supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the
Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on
the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The
Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four
subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some
hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its
drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales,
Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy,
and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi
valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its
mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction
of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a
mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes,
until, at the 'Passes,' above the mouth, it is but little over half
a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi's depth is
eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred
and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper,
but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez
(three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet.
But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New
Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.

An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reports of
able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and
six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico--which brings to mind
Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi--'the Great Sewer.' This
mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and
forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually; it has
extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which
have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of
the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge,
where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between
there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that
piece of country, without any trouble at all--one hundred and twenty
thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that
lies around there anywhere.

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way--its disposition to
make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus
straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened
itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious
effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural
districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town
of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has
radically changed the position, and Delta is now _two miles above_
Vicksburg.

Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that
cut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions:
for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a
cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his
land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and
subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening
in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from
Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.

The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it
is always changing its habitat _bodily_--is always moving bodily
_sidewise_. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the
region it used to occupy. As a result, the original _site _of that
settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of
the river, in the State of Mississippi. _Nearly the whole of that one
thousand three hundred miles of old mississippi river which la salle
floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry
ground now_. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the
left of it in other places.

Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the
mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast
enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's
Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years
ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.

But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for
the present--I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its
historical history--so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous
first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake
epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good
many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil
present epoch in what shall be left of the book.

The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word
'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently
retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of
course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American
history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no
distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent.
To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi
River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without
interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset
by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their
scientific names;--as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but
you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture
of it.

The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but
when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it,
he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the
American dates which is quite respectable for age.

For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less
than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at
Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, _Sans Peur Et Sans
Reproche_; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by
the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,--the act
which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river,
Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not
yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the Last
Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born,
but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child;
Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto
Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame, and
each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; Margaret
of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious books,--the
first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being
sometimes better literature preservers than holiness; lax court morals
and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and
the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who
could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion
of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of full
rank and children by brevet their pastime.

In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition:
the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was
roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the
continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword
and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries,
burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English
reformation and his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the
banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death;
eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St.
Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was
not yet written; Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must
still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.

Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which
considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and
gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his
priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers
to multiply the river's dimensions by ten--the Spanish custom of the
day--and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On
the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite
that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites
during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One
may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it
up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of
a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a
trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his
grave considerably more than half a century, the _second _white man saw
the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to
elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek
in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and
America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore
the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements
on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication
with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering,
enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads
and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization
and whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling
them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole
populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy
furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must
have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did
hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course,
proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere
mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled
exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want
such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for
a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and
undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and
had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or
even take any particular notice of it.

But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out
that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes
upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same
notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance.

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the
river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations?
Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had
discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed
that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore
afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition
had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.




CHAPTER 2

The River and Its Explorers

LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were
graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among
them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and
stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the
expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one
sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent
several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful
trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois,
before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape
that he could strike for the Mississippi.

And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the
merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the
banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from
Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette
had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that
if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would
name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all
explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four
with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of
meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other
requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint
chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.'

On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and
their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the
Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: 'Before them a wide and rapid current
coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick
in forests.' He continues: 'Turning southward, they paddled down the
stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.'

A big cat-fish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him; and
reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was
on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained
a demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would
engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.' I have seen a Mississippi
cat-fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and
fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had
a fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come.

'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great
prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the
fierce and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders
through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them.'

The voyagers moved cautiously: 'Landed at night and made a fire to cook
their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some
way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till
morning.'

They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two
weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful solitude,
then. And it is now, over most of its stretch.

But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints
of men in the mud of the western bank--a Robinson Crusoe experience
which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in
print. They had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious and
pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting
for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the
country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. They found them, by
and by, and were hospitably received and well treated--if to be received
by an Indian chief who has taken off his last rag in order to appear
at his level best is to be received hospitably; and if to be treated
abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game, including dog, and have
these things forked into one's mouth by the ungloved fingers of Indians
is to be well treated. In the morning the chief and six hundred of his
tribesmen escorted the Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly
farewell.

On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude and
fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short distance below
'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current
of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs,
branches, and uprooted trees.' This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that
savage river,' which 'descending from its mad career through a vast
unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its
gentle sister.'

By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes;
they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the
deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade
of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and
exchanged civilities with another party of Indians; and at last
they reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about a month out from their
starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to
meet and murder them; but they appealed to the Virgin for help; so in
place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and
fol-de-rol.

They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not
empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They believed
it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now, and carried
their great news to Canada.

But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the
proof. He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but
at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the
dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented
the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a
following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three
Frenchmen. They moved in procession down the surface of the frozen
river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on sledges.

At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the
Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through the
fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth
of the Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp,
landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where
they halted and built Fort Prudhomme.

'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their
adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and
more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The
hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening
flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.'

Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the dense
forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First, they
were greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had before
been greeted by them--with the booming of the war drum and the flourish
of arms. The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's case; the
pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle. The white man and the
red man struck hands and entertained each other during three days. Then,
to the admiration of the savages, La Salle set up a cross with the
arms of France on it, and took possession of the whole country for the
king--the cool fashion of the time--while the priest piously consecrated
the robbery with a hymn. The priest explained the mysteries of the faith
'by signs,' for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with
possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they
had just been robbed of. And also, by signs, La Salle drew from these
simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the
Putrid, over the water. Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies.

These performances took place on the site of the future town of
Napoleon, Arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised
on the banks of the great river. Marquette's and Joliet's voyage
of discovery ended at the same spot--the site of the future town of
Napoleon. When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back
in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot--the site of the
future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four
memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration of the
mighty river, occurred, by accident, in one and the same place. It is a
most curious distinction, when one comes to look at it and think about
it. France stole that vast country on that spot, the future Napoleon;
and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country back again!--make
restitution, not to the owners, but to their white American heirs.

The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites,
since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,' and visited an
imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country, whose capital city was a
substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw--better houses than
many that exist there now. The chiefs house contained an audience room
forty feet square; and there he received Tonty in State, surrounded by
sixty old men clothed in white cloaks. There was a temple in the town,
with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to
the sun.

The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the
present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political
despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a
sacred fire.' It must have been like getting home again; it was home
with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV.

A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood in the shadow of
his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from Delaware, and
from Itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific,
with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his prodigy
achieved. Mr. Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums
up:

'On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous
accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the
Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of
the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks
of the Rocky Mountains--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked
deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by
a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of
Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half
a mile.'




CHAPTER 3

Frescoes from the Past

APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no, the
distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate
and time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been.

Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the river's borders
had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before
the river had a commerce. Between La Salle's opening of the river and
the time when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like
a regular and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne
of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV. and
Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gone down in
the red tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a name that was
beginning to be talked about. Truly, there were snails in those days.

The river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats,
broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New
Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back
by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time
this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and
hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with
sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties
like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless
fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal
of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric
finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy,
faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.

By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years,
these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers
did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in
New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.

But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed
that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating
died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate,
or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him,
he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed
in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.

In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end
was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand,
and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to
describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used
to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--an acre or so of white,
sweet-smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more,
three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for
storm-quarters,--and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk
of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning
successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get
on these rafts and have a ride.

By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed
and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place, a
chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts,
during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course
of five or six more. The book is a story which details some passages in
the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard
of my time out west, there. He has run away from his persecuting
father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice,
truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the
widow's has also escaped. They have found a fragment of a lumber raft
(it is high water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river
by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--whence
the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States. But in a
fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By and by they begin to suspect
the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by
swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead
of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the
needed information by eavesdropping:--

But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient to
find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim said it was such
a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big
raft and crawl aboard and listen--they would talk about Cairo, because
they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or
anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or
something. Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most
always start a good plan when you wanted one.

I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck
out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly to her,
I eased up and went slow and cautious. But everything was all
right--nobody at the sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till I was
most abreast the camp fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and
inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather
side of the fire. There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on
deck of course. And a mighty rough-looking lot, too. They had a jug, and
tin cups, and they kept the jug moving. One man was singing--roaring,
you may say; and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway. He roared
through his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long.
When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop, and then
another was sung. It begun:--

'There was a woman in our towdn, In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,) She
loved her husband dear-i-lee, But another man twysteas wed'l.

Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo, Ri-too, riloo, rilay--She loved her
husband dear-i-lee, But another man twyste as wed'l.

And so on--fourteen verses. It was kind of poor, and when he was going
to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow
died on; and another one said, 'Oh, give us a rest.' And another one
told him to take a walk. They made fun of him till he got mad and jumped
up and begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lame any thief in the
lot.

They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there
jumped up and says--

'Set whar you are, gentlemen. Leave him to me; he's my meat.'

Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together
every time. He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes,
and says, 'You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;' and flung his hat
down, which was all over ribbons, and says, 'You lay thar tell his
sufferin's is over.'

Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and
shouted out--

'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted,
copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!--Look at me!
I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a
hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly
related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take
nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in
robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm
ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the
thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according
to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is
music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold
your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!'

All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and
looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking
up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and beating his
breast with his fist, saying, 'Look at me, gentlemen!' When he got
through, he jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, and
let off a roaring 'Whoo-oop! I'm the bloodiest son of a wildcat that
lives!'

Then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch hat down
over his right eye; then he bent stooping forward, with his back sagged
and his south end sticking out far, and his fists a-shoving out and
drawing in in front of him, and so went around in a little circle
about three times, swelling himself up and breathing hard. Then he
straightened, and jumped up and cracked his heels together three times,
before he lit again (that made them cheer), and he begun to shout like
this--

'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's
a-coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working!
whoo-oop! I'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! Smoked
glass, here, for all! Don't attempt to look at me with the naked
eye, gentlemen! When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and
parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for
whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep
with the thunder! When I'm cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe
in it; when I'm hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when I'm
thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I range the
earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and
spread! I put my hand on the sun's face and make it night in the earth;
I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself
and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather--don't use the
naked eye! I'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The
massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments,
the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The
boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property,
and I bury my dead on my own premises!' He jumped up and cracked his
heels together three times before he lit (they cheered him again), and
as he come down he shouted out: 'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for
the pet child of calamity's a-coming!'

Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again--the first
one--the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity chipped in
again, bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time,
swelling round and round each other and punching their fists most into
each other's faces, and whooping and jawing like Injuns; then Bob called
the Child names, and the Child called him names back again: next, Bob
called him a heap rougher names and the Child come back at him with the
very worst kind of language; next, Bob knocked the Child's hat off, and
the Child picked it up and kicked Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob
went and got it and said never mind, this warn't going to be the last
of this thing, because he was a man that never forgot and never forgive,
and so the Child better look out, for there was a time a-coming, just
as sure as he was a living man, that he would have to answer to him with
the best blood in his body. The Child said no man was willinger than
he was for that time to come, and he would give Bob fair warning, now,
never to cross his path again, for he could never rest till he had waded
in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on
account of his family, if he had one.

Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and
shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do; but a
little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says--

'Come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards, and I'll thrash
the two of ye!'

And he done it, too. He snatched them, he jerked them this way and that,
he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could
get up. Why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like dogs--and
how the other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands all the way
through, and shout 'Sail in, Corpse-Maker!' 'Hi! at him again, Child of
Calamity!' 'Bully for you, little Davy!' Well, it was a perfect pow-wow
for a while. Bob and the Child had red noses and black eyes when they
got through. Little Davy made them own up that they were sneaks and
cowards and not fit to eat with a dog or drink with a nigger; then Bob
and the Child shook hands with each other, very solemn, and said they
had always respected each other and was willing to let bygones be
bygones. So then they washed their faces in the river; and just then
there was a loud order to stand by for a crossing, and some of them went
forward to man the sweeps there, and the rest went aft to handle the
after-sweeps.

I laid still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a
pipe that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and
they stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing
again. Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another
patted juba, and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular
old-fashioned keel-boat break-down. They couldn't keep that up very long
without getting winded, so by and by they settled around the jug again.

They sung 'jolly, jolly raftman's the life for me,' with a rousing
chorus, and then they got to talking about differences betwixt hogs, and
their different kind of habits; and next about women and their different
ways: and next about the best ways to put out houses that was afire; and
next about what ought to be done with the Injuns; and next about what
a king had to do, and how much he got; and next about how to make cats
fight; and next about what to do when a man has fits; and next about
differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man
they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink
than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this
yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to
three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage
of the river, and then it warn't no better than Ohio water--what you
wanted to do was to keep it stirred up--and when the river was low, keep
mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be.

The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness
in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in
his stomach if he wanted to. He says--

'You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth
chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they
grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the
water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't
richen a soil any.'

And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi
water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is
low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east
side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you
get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all
thick and yaller the rest of the way across. Then they talked about how
to keep tobacco from getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts
and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but Ed says--

'Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? Now let me
have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right
along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss
of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick
Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard--gaping and
stretching, he was--and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed
his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe,
and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says--

'"Why looky-here," he says, "ain't that Buck Miller's place, over yander
in the bend."

'"Yes," says I, "it is--why." He laid his pipe down and leant his head
on his hand, and says--

'"I thought we'd be furder down." I says--

'"I thought it too, when I went off watch"--we was standing six hours on
and six off--"but the boys told me," I says, "that the raft didn't seem
to hardly move, for the last hour," says I, "though she's a slipping
along all right, now," says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says--

'"I've seed a raft act so before, along here," he says, "'pears to me
the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the last
two years," he says.

'Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around
on the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always doing what he
sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no sense in it. Pretty
soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard
and quartering behind us. I see he was looking at it, too. I says--

'"What's that?" He says, sort of pettish,--

'"Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l."

'"An empty bar'l!" says I, "why," says I, "a spy-glass is a fool to your
eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?" He says--

'"I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it might be,"
says he.

'"Yes," I says, "so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a
body can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that," I says.

'We hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. By and by I
says--

'"Why looky-here, Dick Allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us, I
believe."

'He never said nothing. The thing gained and gained, and I judged it
must be a dog that was about tired out. Well, we swung down into
the crossing, and the thing floated across the bright streak of the
moonshine, and, by George, it was bar'l. Says I--

'"Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l, when it
was a half a mile off," says I. Says he--

'"I don't know." Says I--

'"You tell me, Dick Allbright." He says--

'"Well, I knowed it was a bar'l; I've seen it before; lots has seen it;
they says it's a haunted bar'l."

'I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there, and
I told them what Dick said. It floated right along abreast, now, and
didn't gain any more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for having
it aboard, but the rest didn't want to. Dick Allbright said rafts that
had fooled with it had got bad luck by it. The captain of the watch
said he didn't believe in it. He said he reckoned the bar'l gained on us
because it was in a little better current than what we was. He said it
would leave by and by.

'So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song, and
then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called for
another song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar'l stuck right
thar in the same place, and the song didn't seem to have much warm-up to
it, somehow, and so they didn't finish it, and there warn't any cheers,
but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything for a minute. Then
everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got off a joke, but it
warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and even the chap that made the joke
didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual. We all just settled down glum,
and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy and oncomfortable. Well, sir, it
shut down black and still, and then the wind begin to moan around, and
next the lightning begin to play and the thunder to grumble. And pretty
soon there was a regular storm, and in the middle of it a man that was
running aft stumbled and fell and sprained his ankle so that he had
to lay up. This made the boys shake their heads. And every time the
lightning come, there was that bar'l with the blue lights winking around
it. We was always on the look-out for it. But by and by, towards dawn,
she was gone. When the day come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we
warn't sorry, neither.

'But next night about half-past nine, when there was songs and high
jinks going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on the
stabboard side. There warn't no more high jinks. Everybody got solemn;
nobody talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set around
moody and look at the bar'l. It begun to cloud up again. When the watch
changed, the off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in. The storm ripped
and roared around all night, and in the middle of it another man tripped
and sprained his ankle, and had to knock off. The bar'l left towards
day, and nobody see it go.

'Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. I don't mean the
kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone--not that. They was
quiet, but they all drunk more than usual--not together--but each man
sidled off and took it private, by himself.

'After dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung, nobody talked;
the boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort of huddled together,
forrard; and for two hours they set there, perfectly still, looking
steady in the one direction, and heaving a sigh once in a while. And
then, here comes the bar'l again. She took up her old place. She staid
there all night; nobody turned in. The storm come on again, after
midnight. It got awful dark; the rain poured down; hail, too; the
thunder boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind blowed a hurricane; and
the lightning spread over everything in big sheets of glare, and showed
the whole raft as plain as day; and the river lashed up white as milk
as far as you could see for miles, and there was that bar'l jiggering
along, same as ever. The captain ordered the watch to man the after
sweeps for a crossing, and nobody would go--no more sprained ankles for
them, they said. They wouldn't even walk aft. Well then, just then the
sky split wide open, with a crash, and the lightning killed two men of
the after watch, and crippled two more. Crippled them how, says you?
Why, sprained their ankles!

'The bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, towards dawn. Well, not
a body eat a bite at breakfast that morning. After that the men loafed
around, in twos and threes, and talked low together. But none of them
herded with Dick Allbright. They all give him the cold shake. If he come
around where any of the men was, they split up and sidled away. They
wouldn't man the sweeps with him. The captain had all the skiffs hauled
up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and wouldn't let the dead men
be took ashore to be planted; he didn't believe a man that got ashore
would come back; and he was right.

'After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be
trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on. A
good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l on
other trips, and that had an ugly look. Some wanted to put him ashore.
Some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again.

'This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched
together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you, here
she comes again. Down she comes, slow and steady, and settles into her
old tracks. You could a heard a pin drop. Then up comes the captain, and
says:--

'"Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't want this bar'l
to be dogging us all the way to Orleans, and _you _don't; well, then,
how's the best way to stop it? Burn it up,--that's the way. I'm going
to fetch it aboard," he says. And before anybody could say a word, in he
went.

'He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread
to one side. But the old man got it aboard and busted in the head,
and there was a baby in it! Yes, sir, a stark naked baby. It was Dick
Allbright's baby; he owned up and said so.

'"Yes," he says, a-leaning over it, "yes, it is my own lamented darling,
my poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased," says he,--for he could
curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a
mind to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres. Yes,
he said he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night he
choked his child, which was crying, not intending to kill it,--which was
prob'ly a lie,--and then he was scared, and buried it in a bar'l, before
his wife got home, and off he went, and struck the northern trail and
went to rafting; and this was the third year that the bar'l had chased
him. He said the bad luck always begun light, and lasted till four men
was killed, and then the bar'l didn't come any more after that. He
said if the men would stand it one more night,--and was a-going on like
that,--but the men had got enough. They started to get out a boat to
take him ashore and lynch him, but he grabbed the little child all of a
sudden and jumped overboard with it hugged up to his breast and shedding
tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffering soul,
nor Charles William neither.'

'_Who _was shedding tears?' says Bob; 'was it Allbright or the baby?'

'Why, Allbright, of course; didn't I tell you the baby was dead. Been
dead three years--how could it cry?'

'Well, never mind how it could cry--how could it _keep _all that time?'
says Davy. 'You answer me that.'

'I don't know how it done it,' says Ed. 'It done it though--that's all I
know about it.'

'Say--what did they do with the bar'l?' says the Child of Calamity.

'Why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead.'

'Edward, did the child look like it was choked?' says one.

'Did it have its hair parted?' says another.

'What was the brand on that bar'l, Eddy?' says a fellow they called
Bill.

'Have you got the papers for them statistics, Edmund?' says Jimmy.

'Say, Edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the lightning.'
says Davy.

'Him? O, no, he was both of 'em,' says Bob. Then they all haw-hawed.

'Say, Edward, don't you reckon you'd better take a pill? You look
bad--don't you feel pale?' says the Child of Calamity.

'O, come, now, Eddy,' says Jimmy, 'show up; you must a kept part of that
bar'l to prove the thing by. Show us the bunghole--do--and we'll all
believe you.'

'Say, boys,' says Bill, 'less divide it up. Thar's thirteen of us. I can
swaller a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest.'

Ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he ripped
out pretty savage, and then walked off aft cussing to himself, and they
yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you could hear
them a mile.

'Boys, we'll split a watermelon on that,' says the Child of Calamity;
and he come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles
where I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and naked; so
he says 'Ouch!' and jumped back.

'Fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys--there's a snake here as
big as a cow!'

So they run there with a lantern and crowded up and looked in on me.

'Come out of that, you beggar!' says one.

'Who are you?' says another.

'What are you after here? Speak up prompt, or overboard you go.

'Snake him out, boys. Snatch him out by the heels.'

I began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling. They looked me
over, wondering, and the Child of Calamity says--

'A cussed thief! Lend a hand and less heave him overboard!'

'No,' says Big Bob, 'less get out the paint-pot and paint him a sky blue
all over from head to heel, and then heave him over!'

'Good, that 's it. Go for the paint, Jimmy.'

When the paint come, and Bob took the brush and was just going to begin,
the others laughing and rubbing their hands, I begun to cry, and that
sort of worked on Davy, and he says--

''Vast there! He 's nothing but a cub. 'I'll paint the man that tetches
him!'

So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled, and
Bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up.

'Come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here,' says Davy.
'Now set down there and give an account of yourself. How long have you
been aboard here?'

'Not over a quarter of a minute, sir,' says I.

'How did you get dry so quick?'

'I don't know, sir. I'm always that way, mostly.'

'Oh, you are, are you. What's your name?'

I warn't going to tell my name. I didn't know what to say, so I just
says--

'Charles William Allbright, sir.'

Then they roared--the whole crowd; and I was mighty glad I said that,
because maybe laughing would get them in a better humor.

When they got done laughing, Davy says--

'It won't hardly do, Charles William. You couldn't have growed this much
in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the bar'l, you
know, and dead at that. Come, now, tell a straight story, and nobody'll
hurt you, if you ain't up to anything wrong. What _is_ your name?'

'Aleck Hopkins, sir. Aleck James Hopkins.'

'Well, Aleck, where did you come from, here?'

'From a trading scow. She lays up the bend yonder. I was born on her.
Pap has traded up and down here all his life; and he told me to swim off
here, because when you went by he said he would like to get some of you
to speak to a Mr. Jonas Turner, in Cairo, and tell him--'

'Oh, come!'

'Yes, sir; it's as true as the world; Pap he says--'

'Oh, your grandmother!'

They all laughed, and I tried again to talk, but they broke in on me and
stopped me.

'Now, looky-here,' says Davy; 'you're scared, and so you talk wild.
Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?'

'Yes, sir, in a trading scow. She lays up at the head of the bend. But I
warn't born in her. It's our first trip.'

'Now you're talking! What did you come aboard here, for? To steal?'

'No, sir, I didn't.--It was only to get a ride on the raft. All boys
does that.'

'Well, I know that. But what did you hide for?'

'Sometimes they drive the boys off.'

'So they do. They might steal. Looky-here; if we let you off this time,
will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?'

''Deed I will, boss. You try me.'

'All right, then. You ain't but little ways from shore. Overboard with
you, and don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way.--Blast
it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and blue!'

I didn't wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore.
When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around
the point. I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home
again.

The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has
furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which I
desire to offer in this place.

I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush times
of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination--the
marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there. I believe there has
been nothing like it elsewhere in the world.




CHAPTER 4

The Boys' Ambition

WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades
in our village {footnote [1. Hannibal, Missouri]} on the west bank of
the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient
ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus
came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro
minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that
kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good,
God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in
its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and
another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious
with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not
only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I
can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white
town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty,
or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water
Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against
the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep--with
shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and
a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in
watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles
scattered about the 'levee;' a pile of 'skids' on the slope of the
stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow
of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to
listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great
Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its
mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the
other side; the 'point' above the town, and the 'point' below, bounding
the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very
still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke
appears above one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman,
famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry,
'S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes! The town drunkard
stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every
house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling
the dead town is alive and moving.

Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common
center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon
the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And
the boat _is_ rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and
trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded
device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass
and 'gingerbread', perched on top of the 'texas' deck behind them; the
paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the
boat's name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck
are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag
gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the
fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the
captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great
volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the
chimneys--a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just
before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the
broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deckhand
stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand;
the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks, the captain lifts
his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning
the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as
there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to
discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling
and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the
steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black
smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead
again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.

My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed
the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that
offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but
the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first
wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white apron
on and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades could
see me; later I thought I would rather be the deckhand who stood on the
end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was
particularly conspicuous. But these were only day-dreams,--they were too
heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. By and by one of our
boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time. At last he turned
up as apprentice engineer or 'striker' on a steamboat. This thing shook
the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been
notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this
eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing generous
about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage to have a
rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit
on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could all see him and envy
him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home
and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that
nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used
all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used
to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. He would
speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in an easy, natural way that
would make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about 'St.
Looy' like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions when
he 'was coming down Fourth Street,' or when he was 'passing by the
Planter's House,' or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the
brakes of 'the old Big Missouri;' and then he would go on and lie about
how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day. Two
or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among
us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general
knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They
lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless
'cub'-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair oil.
Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain. He wore
a leather belt and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially
admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. No girl could withstand
his charms. He 'cut out' every boy in the village. When his boat blew up
at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not
known for months. But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned,
and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero,
stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the
partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point
where it was open to criticism.

This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily
followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son
became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud
clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a
boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge,
became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even
in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary--from a hundred
and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.
Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now
some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river--at
least our parents would not let us.

So by and by I ran away. I said I never would come home again till I was
a pilot and could come in glory. But somehow I could not manage it.
I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like
sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the
pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and
clerks. I had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time
being, but I had comforting daydreams of a future when I should be a
great and honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of
these mates and clerks and pay for them.




CHAPTER 5

I Want to be a Cub-pilot

MONTHS afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death, and
I found myself without an ambition. But I was ashamed to go home. I was
in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career. I had
been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon by an
expedition sent out by our government. It was said that the expedition,
owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part of the country
lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles from the mouth of
the river. It was only about fifteen hundred miles from Cincinnati to
New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship. I had thirty dollars
left; I would go and complete the exploration of the Amazon. This was
all the thought I gave to the subject. I never was great in matters of
detail. I packed my valise, and took passage on an ancient tub called
the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans. For the sum of sixteen dollars I had
the scarred and tarnished splendors of 'her' main saloon principally
to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser
travelers.

When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio,
I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a
traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an
exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes
which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a
glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I
was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had
hardly a trace of contempt in it. Still, when we stopped at villages and
wood-yards, I could not help lolling carelessly upon the railings of the
boiler deck to enjoy the envy of the country boys on the bank. If
they did not seem to discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their
attention, or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me.
And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave other
signs of being mightily bored with traveling.

I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the sun
could strike me, because I wanted to get the bronzed and weather-beaten
look of an old traveler. Before the second day was half gone I
experienced a joy which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw
that the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck. I
wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now.

We reached Louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it. We stuck
hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay there
four days. I was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a part
of the boat's family, a sort of infant son to the captain and younger
brother to the officers. There is no estimating the pride I took in this
grandeur, or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for those
people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatman scorns that sort
of presumption in a mere landsman. I particularly longed to acquire the
least trifle of notice from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert
for an opportunity to do him a service to that end. It came at last. The
riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on the forecastle,
and I went down there and stood around in the way--or mostly skipping
out of it--till the mate suddenly roared a general order for somebody to
bring him a capstan bar. I sprang to his side and said: 'Tell me where
it is--I'll fetch it!'

If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor
of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate
was. He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me. It took
him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again. Then
he said impressively: 'Well, if this don't beat hell!' and turned to his
work with the air of a man who had been confronted with a problem too
abstruse for solution.

I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day. I did not go
to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else had finished.
I did not feel so much like a member of the boat's family now as before.
However, my spirits returned, in installments, as we pursued our way
down the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so, because it was not in
(young) human nature not to admire him. He was huge and muscular, his
face was bearded and whiskered all over; he had a red woman and a blue
woman tattooed on his right arm,--one on each side of a blue anchor with
a red rope to it; and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he
was getting out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and
hear. He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world
feel it, too. When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged
it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of
profanity thundering after it. I could not help contrasting the way in
which the average landsman would give an order, with the mate's way
of doing it. If the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot
farther forward, he would probably say: 'James, or William, one of you
push that plank forward, please;' but put the mate in his place and he
would roar out: 'Here, now, start that gang-plank for'ard! Lively, now!
_what_'re you about! Snatch it! SNATCH it! There! there! Aft again! aft
again! don't you hear me. Dash it to dash! are you going to _sleep _over
it! '_Vast _heaving. 'Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to heave it clear
astern? _Where_'re you going with that barrel! _For'ard_ with it 'fore
I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-_dashed _split between a tired
mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!'

I wished I could talk like that.

When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off,
I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with
the boat--the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first, but I
presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him.
So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck,
and in time he melted into conversation. He could not well have helped
it, I hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that
I felt honored by his notice. He told me the names of dim capes and
shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night,
under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself.
He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a
week--or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But
I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved
mountains if it had been applied judiciously. What was it to me that he
was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin? What was it to me that his
grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void
of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his
conversation? He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that
was enough for me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears
dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.

He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl or an
alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his
father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the
cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of
them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which; and by and by
his father died and his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as
he phrased it. After his mother shook him, members of the nobility with
whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of
'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and from that point my watchman threw off all
trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that
bristled all along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so
reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and
the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat
speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.

It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar,
ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the
wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated
its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into
this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he
had come to believe it himself.




CHAPTER 6

A Cub-pilot's Experience

WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other
delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in making
the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance to get
acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the
boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever
for me.

It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken
deck passage--more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me
on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after
we should arrive. But he probably died or forgot, for he never came. It
was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy,
and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [1.
'Deck' Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]}

I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not be likely
to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the
other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not
suffice for so imposing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could
afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it followed that I must contrive
a new career. The 'Paul Jones' was now bound for St. Louis. I planned
a siege against my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he
surrendered. He agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New
Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the
first wages I should receive after graduating. I entered upon the small
enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great
Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had
really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not
have had the courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was
to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be
much of a trick, since it was so wide.

The boat backed out from New Orleans at four in the afternoon, and it
was 'our watch' until eight. Mr. Bixby, my chief, 'straightened her
up,' plowed her along past the sterns of the other boats that lay at the
Levee, and then said, 'Here, take her; shave those steamships as close
as you'd peel an apple.' I took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered
up into the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape
the side off every ship in the line, we were so close. I held my breath
and began to claw the boat away from the danger; and I had my own
opinion of the pilot who had known no better than to get us into such
peril, but I was too wise to express it. In half a minute I had a wide
margin of safety intervening between the 'Paul Jones' and the ships; and
within ten seconds more I was set aside in disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was
going into danger again and flaying me alive with abuse of my cowardice.
I was stung, but I was obliged to admire the easy confidence with which
my chief loafed from side to side of his wheel, and trimmed the ships so
closely that disaster seemed ceaselessly imminent. When he had cooled a
little he told me that the easy water was close ashore and the current
outside, and therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to get the
benefit of the former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage
of the latter. In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream pilot and
leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence.

Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things. Said
he, 'This is Six-Mile Point.' I assented. It was pleasant enough
information, but I could not see the bearing of it. I was not conscious
that it was a matter of any interest to me. Another time he said, 'This
is Nine-Mile Point.' Later he said, 'This is Twelve-Mile Point.' They
were all about level with the water's edge; they all looked about alike
to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would
change the subject. But no; he would crowd up around a point, hugging
the shore with affection, and then say: 'The slack water ends here,
abreast this bunch of China-trees; now we cross over.' So he crossed
over. He gave me the wheel once or twice, but I had no luck. I either
came near chipping off the edge of a sugar plantation, or I yawed too
far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again and got abused.

The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At
midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman
said--

'Come! turn out!'

And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure;
so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon
the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed.
I said:--

'What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the
night for. Now as like as not I'll not get to sleep again to-night.'

The watchman said--

'Well, if this an't good, I'm blest.'

The 'off-watch' was just turning in, and I heard some brutal laughter
from them, and such remarks as 'Hello, watchman! an't the new cub turned
out yet? He's delicate, likely. Give him some sugar in a rag and send
for the chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.'

About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a minute
later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on
and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here
was something fresh--this thing of getting up in the middle of the night
to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to
me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never
happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run
them. I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had
imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this
new phase of it.

It was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were out.
The big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed at a star
and was holding her straight up the middle of the river. The shores on
either hand were not much more than half a mile apart, but they seemed
wonderfully far away and ever so vague and indistinct. The mate said:--

'We've got to land at Jones's plantation, sir.'

The vengeful spirit in me exulted. I said to myself, I wish you joy
of your job, Mr. Bixby; you'll have a good time finding Mr. Jones's
plantation such a night as this; and I hope you never _will _find it as
long as you live.

Mr. Bixby said to the mate:--

'Upper end of the plantation, or the lower?'

'Upper.'

'I can't do it. The stumps there are out of water at this stage: It's no
great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with that.'

'All right, sir. If Jones don't like it he'll have to lump it, I
reckon.'

And then the mate left. My exultation began to cool and my wonder to
come up. Here was a man who not only proposed to find this plantation on
such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred. I dreadfully
wanted to ask a question, but I was carrying about as many short answers
as my cargo-room would admit of, so I held my peace. All I desired
to ask Mr. Bixby was the simple question whether he was ass enough to
really imagine he was going to find that plantation on a night when all
plantations were exactly alike and all the same color. But I held in. I
used to have fine inspirations of prudence in those days.

Mr. Bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same as
if it had been daylight. And not only that, but singing--

'Father in heaven, the day is declining,' etc.

It seemed to me that I had put my life in the keeping of a peculiarly
reckless outcast. Presently he turned on me and said:--

'What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?'

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I
didn't know.

'Don't _know_?'

This manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment. But I
had to say just what I had said before.

'Well, you're a smart one,' said Mr. Bixby. 'What's the name of the
_next_ point?'

Once more I didn't know.

'Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of _any _point or place I
told you.'

I studied a while and decided that I couldn't.

'Look here! What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point, to
cross over?'

'I--I--don't know.'

'You--you--don't know?' mimicking my drawling manner of speech. 'What
_do_ you know?'

'I--I--nothing, for certain.'

'By the great Caesar's ghost, I believe you! You're the stupidest
dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of
you being a pilot--you! Why, you don't know enough to pilot a cow down a
lane.'

Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from one
side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would boil a
while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again.

'Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points
for?'

I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation
provoked me to say:--

'Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought.'

This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing
the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran
over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up
a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby
was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would
_talk back_. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an
irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther
away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice
and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was
empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught
curses enough to disturb your mother with. Presently he said to me in
the gentlest way--

'My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I tell
you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot,
and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just
like A B C.'

That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with
anything but blank cartridges. However, I did not feel discouraged long.
I judged that it was best to make some allowances, for doubtless Mr.
Bixby was 'stretching.' Presently he pulled a rope and struck a few
strokes on the big bell. The stars were all gone now, and the night was
as black as ink. I could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but I
was not entirely certain that I could see the shore. The voice of the
invisible watchman called up from the hurricane deck--

'What's this, sir?'

'Jones's plantation.'

I said to myself, I wish I might venture to offer a small bet that it
isn't. But I did not chirp. I only waited to see. Mr. Bixby handled the
engine bells, and in due time the boat's nose came to the land, a torch
glowed from the forecastle, a man skipped ashore, a darky's voice on the
bank said, 'Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones,' and the next moment we
were standing up the river again, all serene. I reflected deeply awhile,
and then said--but not aloud--'Well, the finding of that plantation was
the luckiest accident that ever happened; but it couldn't happen again
in a hundred years.' And I fully believed it was an accident, too.

By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, I had
learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight,
and before we reached St. Louis I had made a trifle of progress in
night-work, but only a trifle. I had a note-book that fairly bristled
with the names of towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.;
but the information was to be found only in the notebook--none of it was
in my head. It made my heart ache to think I had only got half of the
river set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours on,
day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every time
I had slept since the voyage began.

My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I
packed my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When I
stood in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed
perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and
aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the
little 'Paul Jones' a large craft. There were other differences, too.
The 'Paul Jones's' pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap,
cramped for room: but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to
have a dance in; showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa;
leather cushions and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit,
to spin yarns and 'look at the river;' bright, fanciful 'cuspadores'
instead of a broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth
on the floor; a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my
head, costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs
for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black 'texas-tender,' to bring
up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night. Now this
was 'something like,' and so I began to take heart once more to believe
that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all. The moment we
were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself
with joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I
looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a
splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter,
on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed
chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and
the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost.
The boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak) was as
spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and
there was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts down
there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring
from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers!
This was unutterable pomp. The mighty engines--but enough of this. I had
never felt so fine before. And when I found that the regiment of natty
servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete.




CHAPTER 7

A Daring Deed

WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost.
Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but I could
make neither head nor tail of it: you understand, it was turned around.
I had seen it when coming up-stream, but I had never faced about to see
how it looked when it was behind me. My heart broke again, for it was
plain that I had got to learn this troublesome river _both ways_.

The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to 'look at the river.'
What is called the 'upper river' (the two hundred miles between St.
Louis and Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the Mississippi
changes its channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find
it necessary to run down to Cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats
were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water was at a low stage.
A deal of this 'looking at the river' was done by poor fellows who
seldom had a berth, and whose only hope of getting one lay in their
being always freshly posted and therefore ready to drop into the shoes
of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on account of such pilot's
sudden illness, or some other necessity. And a good many of them
constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not because they ever
really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being guests of the boat)
it was cheaper to 'look at the river' than stay ashore and pay board. In
time these fellows grew dainty in their tastes, and only infested boats
that had an established reputation for setting good tables. All visiting
pilots were useful, for they were always ready and willing, winter or
summer, night or day, to go out in the yawl and help buoy the channel
or assist the boat's pilots in any way they could. They were likewise
welcome because all pilots are tireless talkers, when gathered together,
and as they talk only about the river they are always understood and
are always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on
earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride
of kings.

We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip. There
were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great
pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate
shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots.
They were choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity
proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots. The
others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall
felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth.

I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say
torpid. I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel
when it was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest
that stood nearest did that when occasion required--and this was pretty
much all the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the
scant water. I stood in a corner; and the talk I listened to took the
hope all out of me. One visitor said to another--

'Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?'

'It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the
"Diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on
the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised
the reef--quarter less twain--then straightened up for the middle bar
till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend,
then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the
point, and came through a-booming--nine and a half.'

'Pretty square crossing, an't it?'

'Yes, but the upper bar 's working down fast.'

Another pilot spoke up and said--

'I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from
the false point--mark twain--raised the second reef abreast the big snag
in the bend, and had quarter less twain.'

One of the gorgeous ones remarked--

'I don't want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that's a good deal
of water for Plum Point, it seems to me.'

There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on
the boaster and 'settled' him. And so they went on talk-talk-talking.
Meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, 'Now if my ears
hear aright, I have not only to get the names of all the towns and
islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm
personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood
and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve
hundred miles; and more than that, I must actually know where these
things are in the dark, unless these guests are gifted with eyes that
can pierce through two miles of solid blackness; I wish the piloting
business was in Jericho and I had never thought of it.'

At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to land),
and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward end of the
texas, and looked up inquiringly. Mr. Bixby said--

'We will lay up here all night, captain.'

'Very well, sir.'

That was all. The boat came to shore and was tied up for the night. It
seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he pleased, without
asking so grand a captain's permission. I took my supper and
went immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and
experiences. My late voyage's note-booking was but a confusion of
meaningless names. It had tangled me all up in a knot every time I had
looked at it in the daytime. I now hoped for respite in sleep; but
no, it reveled all through my head till sunrise again, a frantic and
tireless nightmare.

Next morning I felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. We went booming
along, taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to 'get out of
the river' (as getting out to Cairo was called) before night should
overtake us. But Mr. Bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently
grounded the boat, and we lost so much time in getting her off that
it was plain that darkness would overtake us a good long way above
the mouth. This was a great misfortune, especially to certain of our
visiting pilots, whose boats would have to wait for their return, no
matter how long that might be. It sobered the pilot-house talk a good
deal. Coming up-stream, pilots did not mind low water or any kind
of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog. But down-stream work was
different; a boat was too nearly helpless, with a stiff current pushing
behind her; so it was not customary to run down-stream at night in low
water.

There seemed to be one small hope, however: if we could get through
the intricate and dangerous Hat Island crossing before night, we could
venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water.
But it would be insanity to attempt Hat Island at night. So there was
a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the day, and a constant
ciphering upon the speed we were making; Hat Island was the eternal
subject; sometimes hope was high and sometimes we were delayed in a
bad crossing, and down it went again. For hours all hands lay under the
burden of this suppressed excitement; it was even communicated to me,
and I got to feeling so solicitous about Hat Island, and under such
an awful pressure of responsibility, that I wished I might have five
minutes on shore to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over
again. We were standing no regular watches. Each of our pilots ran such
portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream, because of
his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot house
constantly.

An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W----stepped
aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand
and was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody said, with a
doomful sigh--

'Well, yonder's Hat Island--and we can't make it.' All the watches
closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its
being 'too bad, too bad--ah, if we could only have got here half an hour
sooner!' and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment.
Some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. The
sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on. Inquiring looks passed
from one guest to another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob
and had turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let the
knob turn back again. We bore steadily down the bend. More looks were
exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration--but no words. Insensibly
the men drew together behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or
two dim stars came out. The dead silence and sense of waiting became
oppressive. Mr. Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from
the big bell floated off on the night. Then a pause, and one more note
was struck. The watchman's voice followed, from the hurricane deck--

'Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!'

The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were
gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.

'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three!... Quarter-less three!... Half
twain!... Quarter twain!... M-a-r-k twain!... Quarter-less--'

Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far
below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to
whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on--and
it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was
watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was
calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on
a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible
marks--for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea--he
would meet and fasten her there. Out of the murmur of half-audible talk,
one caught a coherent sentence now and then--such as--

'There; she's over the first reef all right!'

After a pause, another subdued voice--

'Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!'

'Now she's in the marks; over she goes!'

Somebody else muttered--

'Oh, it was done beautiful--_beautiful_!'

Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the
current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars
being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it
held one's heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than
that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We were closing
right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent
seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest
impulse to do _something_, anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr.
Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots
stood shoulder to shoulder at his back.

'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered.

The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was
down to--

'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!....
Seven-and--'

Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer--

'Stand by, now!'

'Aye-aye, sir!'

'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and--'

We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing,
shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it--every ounce you've
got!' then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!'
The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex
of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And
such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a
pilot-house before!

There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night;
and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked
about by river men.

Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great
steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that
not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind
reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush
the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass
almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would
snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and
destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo
in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the
bargain.

The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby,
uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said--

'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!'




CHAPTER 8

Perplexing Lessons

At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my
head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously
inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut
my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving
out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that
I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those
little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough
to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of
something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with
this settler--

'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'

He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm.
I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any
particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course,
and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.

I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of
ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even
remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word
'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I
waited. By and by he said--

'My boy, you've got to know the _shape _of the river perfectly. It is
all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else
is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the
night that it has in the day-time.'

'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?'

'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the
shape of it. You can't see it.'

'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling
variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I
know the shape of the front hall at home?'

'On my honor, you've got to know them _better _than any man ever did
know the shapes of the halls in his own house.'

'I wish I was dead!'

'Now I don't want to discourage you, but--'

'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.'

'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around
it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't
know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch
of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid
cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen
minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time
when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in
one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape
of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your
pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark
night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be
straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd _run _them for
straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right
into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that
in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes
way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's
one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any
particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the
oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of _moonlight
_change the shape of the river in different ways. You see--'

'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the
river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If
I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me
stoop-shouldered.'

'_No_! you only learn _the _shape of the river, and you learn it with
such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's
_in your head_, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'

'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it.
Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'

Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch, and
he said--

'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,
you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old
sycamore-snag, now.{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it
can do no harm to explain that 'inside' means between the snag and the
shore.--M.T.]}

So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty
apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to
learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other
was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every
twenty-four hours.

That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river
custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While
the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner,
the retiring pilot, would say something like this--

'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point; had
quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [Two fathoms.
'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet.
'Mark three' is three fathoms.]} with the other.'

'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?'

'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the
bar, and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the "Sunny
South"--hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.'

And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner
{footnote ['Partner' is a technical term for 'the other pilot'.]} would
mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast
of such-and-such a man's wood-yard or plantation. This was courtesy;
I supposed it was necessity. But Mr. W---- came on watch full twelve
minutes late on this particular night,--a tremendous breach of
etiquette; in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr.
Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel
and marched out of the pilot-house without a word. I was appalled; it
was a villainous night for blackness, we were in a particularly wide
and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to
anything, and it seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that
poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was. But I
resolved that I would stand by him any way. He should find that he was
not wholly friendless. So I stood around, and waited to be asked where
we were. But Mr. W---- plunged on serenely through the solid firmament
of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth.
Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would
rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to
me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to
snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat.
I presently climbed up on the bench; I did not think it was safe to go
to sleep while this lunatic was on watch.

However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the
next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, Mr. W----
gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o'clock and all
well--but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying
to ache at once.

Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it
was to do Mr. W---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was. It took five
minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr.
Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin;
because he paid me a compliment--and not much of a one either. He said,

'Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more different kinds
of an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What did you suppose he
wanted to know for?'

I said I thought it might be a convenience to him.

'Convenience D-nation! Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the
river in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?'

'Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it _is_ the
front hall; but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark
and not tell me which hall it is; how am I to know?'

'Well you've _got _to, on the river!'

'All right. Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W---- '

'I should say so. Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and
utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.'

I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me
unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name of
being careless, and injuring things.

I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the
eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands
on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded
point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go
to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was
beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and
the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the
bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very
point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into
the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when
I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long
enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as
dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the
hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when
I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned
these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said--

'That's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn't change
every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use. Take this place where
we are now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one
hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits
at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a
hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock; and then the
moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I've got to
waltz to larboard again, or I'll have a misunderstanding with a snag
that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it
were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn't change its shape on bad
nights there would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside
of a year.'

It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the
different ways that could be thought of,--upside down, wrong end first,
inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and then know what to do on
gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the
course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my
self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed,
and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after this
fashion--

'How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall,
trip before last?'

I considered this an outrage. I said--

'Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through that tangled
place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I
can remember such a mess as that?'

'My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact
spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water,
in everyone of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New
Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip
mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for
they're not often twice alike. You must keep them separate.'

When I came to myself again, I said--

'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead,
and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to
retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only
fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and
if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I
went on crutches.'

'Now drop that! When I say I'll learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the
river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on
it, I'll learn him or kill him.'




CHAPTER 9

Continued Perplexities

THERE was no use in arguing with a person like this. I promptly put
such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the
countless crossing-marks began to stay with me. But the result was just
the same. I never could more than get one knotty thing learned before
another presented itself. Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the
water and pretending to read it as if it were a book; but it was a
book that told me nothing. A time came at last, however, when Mr.
Bixby seemed to think me far enough advanced to bear a lesson on
water-reading. So he began--

'Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? Now,
that's a reef. Moreover, it's a bluff reef. There is a solid sand-bar
under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house.
There is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it.
If you were to hit it you would knock the boat's brains out. Do you see
where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to fade away?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef. You can climb
over there, and not hurt anything. Cross over, now, and follow along
close under the reef--easy water there--not much current.'

I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end. Then Mr.
Bixby said--

'Now get ready. Wait till I give the word. She won't want to mount the
reef; a boat hates shoal water. Stand by--wait--WAIT--keep her well in
hand. NOW cramp her down! Snatch her! snatch her!'

He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until
it was hard down, and then we held it so. The boat resisted, and refused
to answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted
the reef, and sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her
bows.

'Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. When
she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort
of way, let up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night
that the water is too shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little,
toward the point. You are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under
every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy
and allows the sediment to sink. Do you see those fine lines on the face
of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan. Well, those are
little reefs; you want to just miss the ends of them, but run them
pretty close. Now look out--look out! Don't you crowd that slick,
greasy-looking place; there ain't nine feet there; she won't stand it.
She begins to smell it; look sharp, I tell you! Oh blazes, there you go!
Stop the starboard wheel! Quick! Ship up to back! Set her back!

The engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly, shooting
white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes, but it was
too late. The boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest; the foamy ridges
that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared, a great dead swell
came rolling forward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to
larboard, and went tearing away toward the other shore as if she were
about scared to death. We were a good mile from where we ought to have
been, when we finally got the upper hand of her again.

During the afternoon watch the next day, Mr. Bixby asked me if I knew
how to run the next few miles. I said--

'Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start
out from the lower end of Higgins's wood-yard, make a square crossing
and--'

'That's all right. I'll be back before you close up on the next point.'

But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon a
piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that
he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily
along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in
my sole charge such a length of time before. I even got to 'setting'
her and letting the wheel go, entirely, while I vaingloriously turned
my back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy
indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great
pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front
again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't clapped
my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those frightful bluff
reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows! My head
was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and
could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that
it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat answered and
turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, and
still it followed, still it kept--right across my bows! I never looked
to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash was imminent--why
didn't that villain come! If I committed the crime of ringing a bell,
I might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the boat. So
in blind desperation I started such a rattling 'shivaree' down below as
never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst
the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious
way, and my reason forsook its throne--we were about to crash into the
woods on the other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly
into view on the hurricane deck. My soul went out to him in gratitude.
My distress vanished; I would have felt safe on the brink of Niagara,
with Mr. Bixby on the hurricane deck. He blandly and sweetly took
his tooth-pick out of his mouth between his fingers, as if it were a
cigar--we were just in the act of climbing an overhanging big tree,
and the passengers were scudding astern like rats--and lifted up these
commands to me ever so gently--

'Stop the starboard. Stop the larboard. Set her back on both.'

The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs a critical
instant, then reluctantly began to back away.

'Stop the larboard. Come ahead on it. Stop the starboard. Come ahead on
it. Point her for the bar.'

I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning. Mr. Bixby came in and
said, with mock simplicity--

'When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times
before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.'

I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I hadn't had any hail.

'Ah! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The officer of the watch will tell
you when he wants to wood up.'

I went on consuming and said I wasn't after wood.

'Indeed? Why, what could you want over here in the bend, then? Did you
ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this stage of the
river?'

'No sir,--and I wasn't trying to follow it. I was getting away from a
bluff reef.'

'No, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles of where
you were.'

'But I saw it. It was as bluff as that one yonder.'

'Just about. Run over it!'

'Do you give it as an order?'

'Yes. Run over it.'

'If I don't, I wish I may die.'

'All right; I am taking the responsibility.' I was just as anxious to
kill the boat, now, as I had been to save her before. I impressed my
orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight
break for the reef. As it disappeared under our bows I held my breath;
but we slid over it like oil.

'Now don't you see the difference? It wasn't anything but a _wind _reef.
The wind does that.'

'So I see. But it is exactly like a bluff reef. How am I ever going to
tell them apart?'

'I can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just naturally
_know _one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or
how you know them apart'

It turned out to be true. The face of the water, in time, became a
wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated
passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its
most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new
story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there
was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could
leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip,
thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There
never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest
was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every
reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a
peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions
when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an
_italicized _passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of
the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at
the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that
could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is
the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most
hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read
this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by
the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these
were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of
reading-matter.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know
every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I
knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.
But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be
restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had
gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful
sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad
expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red
hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating,
black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling
upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling
rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was
faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and
radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was
densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was
broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver;
and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single
leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that
was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images,
woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near,
the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing
moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The
world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home.
But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the
glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight
wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether
to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should
have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it,
inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have
wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small
thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef
which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if
it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a
dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in
the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is
shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest
is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very
best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead
tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and
then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night
without the friendly old landmark.

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the
value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it
could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since
those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely
flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples
above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick
with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever
see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and
comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he
sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his
trade?




CHAPTER 10

Completing My Education

WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have
preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting
as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not
quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way,
what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted,
and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run
them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels
very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but
piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like
the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change
constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose
sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and
shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and
all weathers without the aid of a single light-house or a single buoy;
for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this
three or four thousand miles of villainous river.{footnote [True at the
time referred to; not true now (1882).]} I feel justified in enlarging
upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure no one has ever
yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a steamboat himself,
and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. If the theme were
hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with the reader; but
since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable
degree of room with it.

When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the
river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and
trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had learned to read the
face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper;
and finally, when I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless
array of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them, I
judged that my education was complete: so I got to tilting my cap to the
side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in my mouth at the wheel. Mr.
Bixby had his eye on these airs. One day he said--

'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?'

'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.'

'Very poor eye--very poor. Take the glass.'

I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell. I suppose that that
bank is about a foot and a half high.'

'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bank along
here last trip?'

'I don't know; I never noticed.'

'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.'

'Why?'

'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you.
For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whether
there's more water or less in the river along here than there was last
trip.'

'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantage of him
there.

'Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so, and then
you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot bank here last
trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now. What does that signify?'

'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.'

'Very good. Is the river rising or falling?'

'Rising.'

'No it ain't.'

'I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some drift-wood floating down the
stream.'

'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while
after the river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this.
Wait till you come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do
you see this narrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the
water was higher. You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank
helps in other ways. Do you see that stump on the false point?'

'Ay, ay, sir.'

'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it. You must make a note of
that.'

'Why?'

'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.'

'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.'

'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water enough in
103 _now_, yet there may not be by the time we get there; but the bank
will keep us posted all along. You don't run close chutes on a falling
river, up-stream, and there are precious few of them that you are
allowed to run at all down-stream. There's a law of the United States
against it. The river may be rising by the time we get to 103, and in
that case we'll run it. We are drawing--how much?'

'Six feet aft,--six and a half forward.'

'Well, you do seem to know something.'

'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an
everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles,
month in and month out?'

'Of course!'

My emotions were too deep for words for a while. Presently I said--'

And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?'

'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip as
you've ever seen it run before--so to speak. If the river begins to rise
again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out of
the river, high and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across low
places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle of
bars that cover three hundred acres of river; we'll creep through cracks
where you've always thought was solid land; we'll dart through the woods
and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side; we'll see the
hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo.'

'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as I
already know.'

'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.'

'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went into this
business.'

'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be when you've
learned it.'

'Ah, I never can learn it.'

'I will see that you _do_.'

By and by I ventured again--

'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the
river--shapes and all--and so I can run it at night?'

'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end of the river
to the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is water
enough in each of these countless places--like that stump, you know.
When the river first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the
deepest of them; when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen;
the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on: so you see you have
to know your banks and marks to a dead moral certainty, and never get
them mixed; for when you start through one of those cracks, there's
no backing out again, as there is in the big river; you've got to go
through, or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river.
There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all except
when the river is brim full and over the banks.'

'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'

'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when you start into
one of those places you've got to go through. They are too narrow to
turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is
always up at the head; never elsewhere. And the head of them is always
likely to be filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon
their depth by, this season, may not answer for next.'

'Learn a new set, then, every year?'

'Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up through the
middle of the river for?'

The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we
held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down
the river. The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting
dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been
washed away. It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through
this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to
point; and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and
then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right
under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could
only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one
end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat
in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we
would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center,
with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit
a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across
our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would have to do a
little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction. We often
hit _white _logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were
right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night. A
white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.

Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious
timber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi, coal barges from
Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from
'Posey County,' Indiana, freighted with 'fruit and furniture'--the
usual term for describing it, though in plain English the freight thus
aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins. Pilots bore a mortal hatred to
these craft; and it was returned with usury. The law required all such
helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was
often broken. All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up,
right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice, with the backwoods
'whang' to it, would wail out--

'Whar'n the ---- you goin' to! Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed
aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!'

Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces
would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if
under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands
would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our
wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and
down the dead blackness would shut again. And that flatboatman would be
sure to go into New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he
had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern
down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on
deck.

Once, at night, in one of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an
island) which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark
as the inside of a cow,' we should have eaten up a Posey County family,
fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down
below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off,
doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we
had good hopes for a moment. These people brought up their lantern,
then, of course; and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious
family stood in the light of it--both sexes and various ages--and cursed
us till everything turned blue. Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through
our pilot-house, when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow
place.




CHAPTER 11

The River Rises

DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance.
We were running chute after chute,--a new world to me,--and if there was
a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet
a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a
still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water.
And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged.

Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously
along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and
a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant a log raft would appear vaguely
through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap
knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled on all
the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! One doesn't hit a rock or
a solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused.

You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried
a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed
steamboating days. Indeed they did. Twenty times a day we would be
cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals
were drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a
couple of miles. Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come
fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. It would 'ease
all,' in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would
shout, 'Gimme a pa-a-per!' as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. The
clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals. If these were
picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen other
skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything. You
understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare.
No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and
come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would heave over
neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles. The amount of hard
swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command when
impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have pulled a
heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible.

As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the
time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were
hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before;
we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend,
which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through
chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken
wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these
chutes were utter solitudes. The dense, untouched forest overhung both
banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human
creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grape-vines, the
grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering creepers
waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the
spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown away
there. The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep, except
at the head; the current was gentle; under the 'points' the water was
absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender
willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in them
as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly.

Behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder
little log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two
above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked, yellow-faced
male miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows on knees, jaws in
hands, grinding tobacco and discharging the result at floating chips
through crevices left by lost teeth; while the rest of the family and
the few farm-animals were huddled together in an empty wood-flat riding
at her moorings close at hand. In this flat-boat the family would have
to cook and eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or
possibly weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let
them get back to their log-cabin and their chills again--chills being
a merciful provision of an all-wise Providence to enable them to take
exercise without exertion. And this sort of watery camping out was a
thing which these people were rather liable to be treated to a couple
of times a year: by the December rise out of the Ohio, and the June rise
out of the Mississippi. And yet these were kindly dispensations, for
they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and
then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They appreciated the
blessing, too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide open and made
the most of these occasions. Now what _could _these banished creatures
find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season!

Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found our course
completely bridged by a great fallen tree. This will serve to show how
narrow some of the chutes were. The passengers had an hour's recreation
in a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away;
for there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend.

From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have
no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense
forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm
or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the
river' much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from
Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter. The river is more
than a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places.
Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their
timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and
there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees. The timber
is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four
miles. When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off
their crops in a hurry. When they have finished grinding the cane, they
form the refuse of the stalks (which they call _bagasse_) into great
piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse
is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills. Now the piles of
damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen.

An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the
Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this
embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a
hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as
a general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of
smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is
over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and
see how she will feel. And see how you will feel, too! You find yourself
away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades
out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern
the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see
a straggling tree when you don't. The plantations themselves are
transformed by the smoke, and look like a part of the sea. All through
your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty.
You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know. All that you
are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank
and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore. And
you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the
embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small
comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. One
of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one
night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was no
novelty about it; it had often been done before.

I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish to add a curious
thing, while it is in my mind. It is only relevant in that it is
connected with piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the
river, a Mr. X., who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind
was troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up
and walk in his sleep and do strange things. He was once fellow-pilot
for a trip or two with George Ealer, on a great New Orleans passenger
packet. During a considerable part of the first trip George was uneasy,
but got over it by and by, as X. seemed content to stay in his bed when
asleep. Late one night the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas; the
water was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and
tangled condition. X. had seen the crossing since Ealer had, and as the
night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark, Ealer was considering
whether he had not better have X. called to assist in running the place,
when the door opened and X. walked in. Now on very dark nights, light is
a deadly enemy to piloting; you are aware that if you stand in a lighted
room, on such a night, you cannot see things in the street to any
purpose; but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can
make out objects in the street pretty well. So, on very dark nights,
pilots do not smoke; they allow no fire in the pilot-house stove if
there is a crack which can allow the least ray to escape; they order the
furnaces to be curtained with huge tarpaulins and the sky-lights to
be closely blinded. Then no light whatever issues from the boat. The
undefinable shape that now entered the pilot-house had Mr. X.'s voice.
This said--

'Let me take her, George; I've seen this place since you have, and it
is so crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier than I could tell
you how to do it.'

'It is kind of you, and I swear _I_ am willing. I haven't got another
drop of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning around and around
the wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is
swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig.'

So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. The black
phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything, steadied the waltzing
steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her a little
to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time
had been noonday. When Ealer observed this marvel of steering, he wished
he had not confessed! He stared, and wondered, and finally said--

'Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another
mistake of mine.'

X. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. He rang for the
leads; he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and
neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel
and peered blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his
position; as the leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines
entirely, and the dead silence and suspense of 'drifting' followed when
the shoalest water was struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her
handsomely over, and then began to work her warily into the next system
of shoal marks; the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines
followed, the boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered
upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly
she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted
tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a
tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into deep
water and safety!

Ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great, relieving sigh, and
said--

'That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the
Mississippi River! I wouldn't believed it could be done, if I hadn't
seen it.'

There was no reply, and he added--

'Just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get
a cup of coffee.'

A minute later Ealer was biting into a pie, down in the 'texas,' and
comforting himself with coffee. Just then the night watchman happened
in, and was about to happen out again, when he noticed Ealer and
exclaimed--

'Who is at the wheel, sir?'

'X.'

'Dart for the pilot-house, quicker than lightning!'

The next moment both men were flying up the pilot-house companion way,
three steps at a jump! Nobody there! The great steamer was whistling
down the middle of the river at her own sweet will! The watchman shot
out of the place again; Ealer seized the wheel, set an engine back with
power, and held his breath while the boat reluctantly swung away from
a 'towhead' which she was about to knock into the middle of the Gulf of
Mexico!

By and by the watchman came back and said--

'Didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep, when he first came up
here?'

'_No_.'

'Well, he was. I found him walking along on top of the railings just as
unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement; and I put him to bed;
now just this minute there he was again, away astern, going through that
sort of tight-rope deviltry the same as before.'

'Well, I think I'll stay by, next time he has one of those fits. But I
hope he'll have them often. You just ought to have seen him take this
boat through Helena crossing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And
if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when
he is sound asleep, what _couldn't_ he do if he was dead!'




CHAPTER 12

Sounding

WHEN the river is very low, and one's steamboat is 'drawing all the
water' there is in the channel,--or a few inches more, as was often
the case in the old times,--one must be painfully circumspect in his
piloting. We used to have to 'sound' a number of particularly bad places
almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage.

Sounding is done in this way. The boat ties up at the shore, just above
the shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his 'cub' or steersman
and a picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out in
the yawl--provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a
regularly-devised 'sounding-boat'--and proceeds to hunt for the best
water, the pilot on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass,
meantime, and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat's
whistle, signifying 'try higher up' or 'try lower down;' for the surface
of the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible
when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand. The
whistle signals are seldom necessary, however; never, perhaps, except
when the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water's surface.
When the yawl has reached the shoal place, the speed is slackened, the
pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long,
and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to 'hold her up to
starboard;' or, 'let her fall off to larboard;'{footnote [The term
'larboard' is never used at sea now, to signify the left hand; but was
always used on the river in my time]} or 'steady--steady as you go.'

When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching the shoalest
part of the reef, the command is given to 'ease all!' Then the men stop
rowing and the yawl drifts with the current. The next order is, 'Stand
by with the buoy!' The moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot
delivers the order, 'Let go the buoy!' and over she goes. If the pilot
is not satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water
higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. Being
finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men stand their
oars straight up in the air, in line; a blast from the boat's whistle
indicates that the signal has been seen; then the men 'give way' on
their oars and lay the yawl alongside the buoy; the steamer comes
creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her
power for the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical moment,
turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over the buoy and
the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. Or maybe she doesn't; maybe
she 'strikes and swings.' Then she has to while away several hours (or
days) sparring herself off.

Sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead, hunting
the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. Often there
is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a
glorious summer day, or a blustering night. But in winter the cold and
the peril take most of the fun out of it.

A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end
turned up; it is a reversed school-house bench, with one of the supports
left and the other removed. It is anchored on the shoalest part of the
reef by a rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. But for
the resistance of the turned-up end of the reversed bench, the current
would pull the buoy under water. At night, a paper lantern with a candle
in it is fastened on top of the buoy, and this can be seen a mile or
more, a little glimmering spark in the waste of blackness.

Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding.
There is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger; it is
so gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer
a swift yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the
boat when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the
oars; it is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the bows;
there is music in the rush of the water; it is deliciously exhilarating,
in summer, to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the
world of wavelets is dancing in the sun. It is such grandeur, too, to
the cub, to get a chance to give an order; for often the pilot will
simply say, 'Let her go about!' and leave the rest to the cub, who
instantly cries, in his sternest tone of command, 'Ease starboard!
Strong on the larboard! Starboard give way! With a will, men!' The cub
enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers
are watching all the yawl's movements with absorbing interest if the
time be daylight; and if it be night he knows that those same wondering
eyes are fastened upon the yawl's lantern as it glides out into the
gloom and dims away in the remote distance.

One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with
her uncle and aunt, every day and all day long. I fell in love with her.
So did Mr. Thornburg's cub, Tom G----. Tom and I had been bosom friends
until this time; but now a coolness began to arise. I told the girl a
good many of my river adventures, and made myself out a good deal of a
hero; Tom tried to make himself appear to be a hero, too, and succeeded
to some extent, but then he always had a way of embroidering. However,
virtue is its own reward, so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead
in the contest. About this time something happened which promised
handsomely for me: the pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head
of 21. This would occur about nine or ten o'clock at night, when
the passengers would be still up; it would be Mr. Thornburg's watch,
therefore my chief would have to do the sounding. We had a perfect love
of a sounding-boat--long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as a greyhound;
her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve oarsmen; one of the mates
was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew, for ours was a
steamer where no end of 'style' was put on.

We tied up at the shore above 21, and got ready. It was a foul night,
and the river was so wide, there, that a landsman's uneducated eyes
could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. The passengers
were alert and interested; everything was satisfactory. As I hurried
through the engine-room, picturesquely gotten up in storm toggery, I met
Tom, and could not forbear delivering myself of a mean speech--

'Ain't you glad _you _don't have to go out sounding?'

Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said--

'Now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. I was
going after it, but I'd see you in Halifax, now, before I'd do it.'

'Who wants you to get it? I don't. It's in the sounding-boat.'

'It ain't, either. It's been new-painted; and it's been up on the
ladies' cabin guards two days, drying.'

I flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and
wondering ladies just in time to hear the command:

'Give way, men!'

I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the
unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him
with the sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool's errand to
fetch. Then that young girl said to me--

'Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! Do
you think there is any danger?'

I would rather have been stabbed. I went off, full of venom, to help in
the pilot-house. By and by the boat's lantern disappeared, and after an
interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away.
Mr. Thornburg blew the whistle, in acknowledgment, backed the steamer
out, and made for it. We flew along for a while, then slackened steam
and went cautiously gliding toward the spark. Presently Mr. Thornburg
exclaimed--

'Hello, the buoy-lantern's out!'

He stopped the engines. A moment or two later he said--

'Why, there it is again!'

So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads.
Gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again! Mr.
Thornburg muttered--

'Well, I don't understand this. I believe that buoy has drifted off the
reef. Seems to be a little too far to the left. No matter, it is safest
to run over it anyhow.'

So, in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light.
Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. Thornburg
seized the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed--

'My soul, it's the sounding-boat!'

A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below--a pause--and then
the sound of grinding and crashing followed. Mr. Thornburg exclaimed--

'There! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat to lucifer
matches! Run! See who is killed!'

I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. My chief and the
third mate and nearly all the men were safe. They had discovered their
danger when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great
guards overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew
what to do; at my chiefs order they sprang at the right instant, seized
the guard, and were hauled aboard. The next moment the sounding-yawl
swept aft to the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. Two of
the men and the cub Tom, were missing--a fact which spread like wildfire
over the boat. The passengers came flocking to the forward gangway,
ladies and all, anxious-eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of
the dreadful thing. And often and again I heard them say, 'Poor fellows!
poor boy, poor boy!'

By this time the boat's yawl was manned and away, to search for the
missing. Now a faint call was heard, off to the left. The yawl had
disappeared in the other direction. Half the people rushed to one side
to encourage the swimmer with their shouts; the other half rushed the
other way to shriek to the yawl to turn about. By the callings,
the swimmer was approaching, but some said the sound showed failing
strength. The crowd massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings,
leaning over and staring into the gloom; and every faint and fainter cry
wrung from them such words as, 'Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there
no way to save him?'

But still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently the voice
said pluckily--

'I can make it! Stand by with a rope!'

What a rousing cheer they gave him! The chief mate took his stand in the
glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped
about him. The next moment the swimmer's face appeared in the circle of
light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp and
drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. It was that devil Tom.

The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men.
They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck
by the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but
had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel. It was
nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so; but everybody
went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass, as if he
had done something great. That girl couldn't seem to have enough of that
pitiful 'hero' the rest of the trip; but little I cared; I loathed her,
any way.

The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat's lantern for the
buoy-light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy he fell
away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took up a
position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of the
steamer's course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited. Having
to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking; he looked up when
he judged that the steamer was about on the reef; saw that the buoy was
gone, but supposed that the steamer had already run over it; he went
on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer was getting very close on
him, but that was the correct thing; it was her business to shave him
closely, for convenience in taking him aboard; he was expecting her to
sheer off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon him that she was
trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he
sang out, 'Stand by to spring for the guard, men!' and the next instant
the jump was made.




CHAPTER 13

A Pilot's Needs

BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make
plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the
peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there
is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has
brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do.
That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is
so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact'
sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if
he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,' instead of the
vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing
it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and
know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street
in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently
until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and
little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly
name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in
that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a
tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge
who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will
go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and
position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of
those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must
know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if
you will take half of the signs in that long street, and _change their
places_ once a month, and still manage to know their new positions
accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes
without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a
pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.

I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world.
To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and be able to recite them
glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book
and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant
mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's
massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the
handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately, and believe I am
not expanding the truth when I do it. Many will think my figure too
strong, but pilots will not.

And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work; how
placidly effortless is its way; how _unconsciously _it lays up its vast
stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single
valuable package of them all! Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry,
'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!' until
it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be
going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking,
and no longer consciously listening to the leadsman; and in the midst
of this endless string of half twains let a single 'quarter twain!' be
interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again,
just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with
precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain
was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and
side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat
there and put her in that same spot again yourself! The cry of 'quarter
twain' did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained
faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of
depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without
requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking
and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a
monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and
then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A,
etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or
three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell
what objects you were passing at the moment it was done. But you could
if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that
sort of thing mechanically.

Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will
develop it into a very colossus of capability. But _only in the matters
it is daily drilled in_. A time would come when the man's faculties
could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could
not help holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if you asked
that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten
chances to one that he could not tell you. Astonishing things can be
done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one
particular line of business.

At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief,
Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles of that
stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. When he had seen
each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was
so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license; a few
trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day and
night--and he ranked A 1, too.

Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats
of memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was born in
him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name.
Instantly Mr. Brown would break in--

'Oh, I knew _him_. Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar
on the side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh. He was only
in the Southern trade six months. That was thirteen years ago. I made a
trip with him. There was five feet in the upper river then; the "Henry
Blake" grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half; the
"George Elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the "Sunflower"--'

'Why, the "Sunflower" didn't sink until--'

'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of
December; Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first
clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these
things a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the
"Sunflower." Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of
the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died
two years after 3rd of March,--erysipelas. I never saw either of the
Hardys,--they were Alleghany River men,--but people who knew them told
me all these things. And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter
and summer just the same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she
was from New England--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It
was in the blood. She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton
before she was married.'

And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go. He could _not _forget
any thing. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained
as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for
years, as the most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot's
memory; its grasp was universal. If he were talking about a trifling
letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver
you the entire screed from memory. And then without observing that he
was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely
to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that
letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's
relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too.

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences
are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting
circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog
his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable
bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. He picks up every little
grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside. Mr. Brown
would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny
anecdote about a dog. He would be 'so full of laugh' that he could
hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog's breed and
personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's
family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in
it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry
provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that one of these
events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter' of such and such a
year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with
the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the
high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest
corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; cows and
horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders;
the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural;
from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course
the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or
four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go out
of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years
before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the
original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,
after all this waiting and hungering.

A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he
must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a
cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle
of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot
be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite
say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man
must _start _with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed
as a pilot.

The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it
does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after
the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,' alone and under
the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the
position. When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted
with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his
steamboat, night or day, that he presently begins to imagine that it is
_his _courage that animates him; but the first time the pilot steps out
and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's.
He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo
altogether. The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment;
he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them; all his
knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes he is as white as a
sheet and scared almost to death. Therefore pilots wisely train these
cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little
more calmly. A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon
the candidate.

Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward I
used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it. I had become a good
steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all the work to do on our watch,
night and day; Mr. Bixby seldom made a suggestion to me; all he ever did
was to take the wheel on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad
crossings, land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman of
leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. The lower river
was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any
crossing between Cairo and New Orleans without help or instruction,
I should have felt irreparably hurt. The idea of being afraid of any
crossing in the lot, in the _day-time_, was a thing too preposterous for
contemplation. Well, one matchless summer's day I was bowling down the
bend above island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as
high as a giraffe's, when Mr. Bixby said--

'I am going below a while. I suppose you know the next crossing?'

This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest
crossing in the whole river. One couldn't come to any harm, whether he
ran it right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom
there. I knew all this, perfectly well.

'Know how to _run _it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.'

'How much water is there in it?'

'Well, that is an odd question. I couldn't get bottom there with a
church steeple.'

'You think so, do you?'

The very tone of the question shook my confidence. That was what Mr.
Bixby was expecting. He left, without saying anything more. I began to
imagine all sorts of things. Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent
somebody down to the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the
leadsmen, another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers,
and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where he could
observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane
deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk. Every moment or two a
straggler was added to my audience; and before I got to the head of
the island I had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my
nose. I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across, the
captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his
voice--

'Where is Mr. Bixby?'

'Gone below, sir.'

But that did the business for me. My imagination began to construct
dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the
run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave
of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every
joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. I seized the
bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again; dropped it once more;
clutched it tremblingly one again, and pulled it so feebly that I could
hardly hear the stroke myself. Captain and mate sang out instantly, and
both together--

'Starboard lead there! and quick about it!'

This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel;
but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new
dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find
perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again.
Then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry--

'D-e-e-p four!'

Deep four in a bottomless crossing! The terror of it took my breath
away.

'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three... Quarter less three!... Half twain!'

This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines.

'Quarter twain! Quarter twain! _Mark _twain!'

I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking
from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck
out so far.

'Quarter _less _twain! Nine and a _half_!'

We were _drawing _nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could
not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and
shouted to the engineer--

'Oh, Ben, if you love me, _back _her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal
_soul_ out of her!'

I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr.
Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane
deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter. I saw it all, now,
and I felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the
lead, set the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and said--

'It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, _wasn't_ it? I suppose I'll
never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the
head of 66.'

'Well, no, you won't, maybe. In fact I hope you won't; for I want you
to learn something by that experience. Didn't you _know _there was no
bottom in that crossing?'

'Yes, sir, I did.'

'Very well, then. You shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else to shake
your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And another
thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward. That
isn't going to help matters any.'

It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the
hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase
which I had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, 'Oh, Ben, if
you love me, back her!'




CHAPTER 14

Rank and Dignity of Piloting

IN my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutiae of the
science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension
of what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to
show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very
worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no
surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have
followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is
plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely
independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the
hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains
forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be
independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and
patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no
clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of
his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the
public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we
print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries
and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot
had none. The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp
of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while the
vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign was over.

The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the
sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly
as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the
bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements
were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from
nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed,
the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or
suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better
how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the
novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute
in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of
eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain
destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with
apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference, in that
particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit
it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will
easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he
was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with
marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all
the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly
communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only
people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in
the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one's own
grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects.

By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of
commands. It 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape
of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.
In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New
Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five
days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the
wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard
at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up
town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The
moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and
they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and
everything in readiness for another voyage.

When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he
took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on
the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in
idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was
frozen up. And one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred
dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore
got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up
to. When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small
Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and
treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing
which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they
belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade (Kansas
times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to
about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that
day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-wheel tub,
accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots--

'Gentlemen, I've got a pretty good trip for the upcountry, and shall
want you about a month. How much will it be?'

'Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.'

'Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I'll
divide!'

I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were important
in landsmen's eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the
dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to
be of the crew of such stately craft as the 'Aleck Scott' or the 'Grand
Turk.' Negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats
were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well
aware of that fact too. A stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro
ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many airs. Finally one of the
managers bustled up to him and said--

'Who _is_ you, any way? Who is you? dat's what I wants to know!'

The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself
up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not
putting on all those airs on a stinted capital.

'Who _is_ I? Who _is _I? I let you know mighty quick who I is! I want
you niggers to understan' dat I fires de middle do'{footnote [Door]} on
de "Aleck Scott!"'

That was sufficient.

The barber of the 'Grand Turk' was a spruce young negro, who aired his
importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle
in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were much
given to flirting, at twilight, on the banquettes of the back streets.
Somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in
one of those localities. A middle-aged negro woman projected her head
through a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors
should hear and envy), 'You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute!
Stannin' out dah foolin' 'long wid dat low trash, an' heah's de barber
offn de "Gran' Turk" wants to conwerse wid you!'

My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar official
position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings
Stephen W---- naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good
fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a
most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and
comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most
august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most
persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to
the majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around
a bit of harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost
fascinating--but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old Captain
Y----once, and was 'relieved' from duty when the boat got to New
Orleans. Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y----
shuddered at the mere mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice
piped out something like this:--

'Why, bless me! I wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat for the
world--not for the whole world! He swears, he sings, he whistles, he
yells--I never saw such an Injun to yell. All times of the night--it
never made any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for
anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish
comfort he got out of it. I never could get into a sound sleep but
he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those
dreadful war-whoops. A queer being--very queer being; no respect for
anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me "Johnny." And he kept a
fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably. This seemed to distress the cat,
and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep where that man--and his
family--was. And reckless. There never was anything like it. Now you may
believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here, he brought my boat
a-tilting down through those awful snags at Chicot under a rattling
head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation, at that! My
officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was a-tearing
right down through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and praying,
I wish I may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth and go
to _whistling_! Yes, sir; whistling "Buffalo gals, can't you come out
tonight, can't you come out to-night, can't you come out to-night;" and
doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren't related
to the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down
on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to
be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!'

Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work
and as usual out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in
a very 'close place,' and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one
hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just half wages, the captain
agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all
the guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out
of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting
of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced,
but said nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped
out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal
surprised. He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was
whistling placidly, and attending to business. The captain stood around
a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a
suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort
of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled
a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. But soon he
was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. Presently he
ventured to remark, with deference--

'Pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir?'

'Well, I should say so! Bank-full _is_ a pretty liberal stage.'

'Seems to be a good deal of current here.'

'Good deal don't describe it! It's worse than a mill-race.'

'Isn't it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?'

'Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can't be too careful with a steamboat.
It's pretty safe out here; can't strike any bottom here, you can depend
on that.'

The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate, he would
probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he
appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the
middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi,
and whistling the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious.
In by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and
gaining steadily; she began to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck
to the middle of the river. Speech was _wrung _from the captain. He
said--

'Mr. W----, don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance?'

'I think it does, but I don't know.'

'Don't know! Well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through?'

'I expect there is, but I am not certain.'

'Upon my word this is odd! Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are
going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they
do?'

'_They_! Why, _they _are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! But
don't you be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford to know for a
hundred and twenty-five!'

The captain surrendered.

Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the
rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels.




CHAPTER 15

The Pilots' Monopoly

ONE day, on board the 'Aleck Scott,' my chief, Mr. Bixby, was crawling
carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and
everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man,
kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from
the hurricane deck--

'For gracious' sake, give her steam, Mr. Bixby! give her steam! She'll
never raise the reef on this headway!'

For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. Bixby, one would have
supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when
the danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a
consuming fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever
listened to. No bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain's
cause was weak; for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction
quietly.

Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting,
and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the
fraternity of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few
words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the
protection of their guild. It was curious and noteworthy in this,
that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest
commercial organization ever formed among men.

For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month;
but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased,
the wages began to fall little by little. It was easy to discover the
reason of this. Too many pilots were being 'made.' It was nice to have
a 'cub,' a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years,
gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked; all pilots and
captains had sons or nephews who wanted to be pilots. By and by it came
to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. When a
steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any
two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's license for him by
signing an application directed to the United States Inspector. Nothing
further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs of
capacity required.

Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine
the wages, in order to get berths. Too late--apparently--the knights of
the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly, something had to be done,
and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing. A close organization.
Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an impossibility; so
it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. It was too likely to ruin
whoever ventured to move in the matter. But at last about a dozen of
the boldest--and some of them the best--pilots on the river launched
themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a
special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name
of the Pilots' Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed
their organization, contributed capital, put 'association' wages up to
two hundred and fifty dollars at once--and then retired to their homes,
for they were promptly discharged from employment. But there were two
or three unnoticed trifles in their by-laws which had the seeds of
propagation in them. For instance, all idle members of the association,
in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per
month. This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks
of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season. Better have
twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve
dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed.

Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw
twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their
children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's
expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten
pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from
interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on
drays, in ambulances,--any way, so they got there. They paid in their
twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a
month, and calculate their burial bills.

By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class
ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out
of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river.
Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent.
of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the
association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and
no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the
association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and
leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and
everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result
which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the
busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one
hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some
cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the
fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not
one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers
used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the
members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for
a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like.
However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the
contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and
added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable,
for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed
before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred
and fifty dollars--the association figure--and became firmly fixed
there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member
was hired. The hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds,
now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up
with.

However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached,
business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois and
Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the
New Orleans trade. All of a sudden pilots were in great demand, and were
correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter
pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and
owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts
offered! So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must
be sought out and asked for their services. Captain ---- was the first
man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the
loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the
association pilots and said--

'Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so
I'll give in with as good a grace as I can. I've come to hire you; get
your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o'clock.'

'I don't know about that. Who is your other pilot?'

'I've got I. S----. Why?'

'I can't go with him. He don't belong to the association.'

'What!'

'It's so.'

'Do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the
very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your
association?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Well, if this isn't putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a
benevolence; but I begin to think that I am the party that wants a favor
done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?'

'Yes.'

'Show it to me.'

So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon
satisfied the captain, who said--

'Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S---- for the entire season.'

'I will provide for you,' said the secretary. 'I will detail a pilot to
go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock.'

'But if I discharge S----, he will come on me for the whole season's
wages.'

'Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S----, captain. We
cannot meddle in your private affairs.'

The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge
S----, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot
in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. Every
day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain
discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and
installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very little while,
idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business
was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to
the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together
with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether,
and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing
business 'spurt' was over.

Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats
that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very
long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association
that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give
information about the channel to any 'outsider.' By this time about half
the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none
but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came
to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play
equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town from
one end of the river to the other, there was a 'wharf-boat' to land
at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for
transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each
of these wharf-boats the association's officers placed a strong box
fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but
one--the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a
sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government
had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every
association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or
rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked
for river information by a stranger--for the success of the St. Louis
and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in
a dozen neighboring steamboat trades--was the association man's sign and
diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing
a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his
question was politely ignored.

From the association's secretary each member received a package of more
or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a billhead, on handsome paper,
properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this--

These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and
deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the
first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be
entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus--

'St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead
cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up
square.' Then under head of Remarks: 'Go just outside the wrecks; this
is important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.'

The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it
the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took
out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers)
concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself
thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat
again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat
into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his
aid.

Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve
or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day!
The pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal
place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch
it for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to
run it. His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If
the reports in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his
mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his
steam-whistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching;
the signal was answered in a peculiar way if that boat's pilots were
association men; and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all
uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the
inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail.

The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis was
to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and
hang it up there,--after which he was free to visit his family. In these
parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the
channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped
talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the
latest uncertainty. Other craftsmen can 'sink the shop,' sometimes,
and interest themselves in other matters. Not so with a pilot; he must
devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else; for it
would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. He has
no time or words to waste if he would keep 'posted.'

But the outsiders had a hard time of it. No particular place to meet
and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and
unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man
sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that
was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have
answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive.

Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to
ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble,
whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men.
Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively
with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly independent of
the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter,
began to feel pretty uncomfortable. Still, they made a show of keeping
up the brag, until one black day when every captain of the lot was
formally ordered to immediately discharge his outsiders and take
association pilots in their stead. And who was it that had the dashing
presumption to do that? Alas, it came from a power behind the throne
that was greater than the throne itself. It was the underwriters!

It was no time to 'swap knives.' Every outsider had to take his trunk
ashore at once. Of course it was supposed that there was collusion
between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The
latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the 'report' system of
the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their
decision among themselves and upon plain business principles.

There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of
the outsiders now. But no matter, there was but one course for them to
pursue, and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups,
and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were
surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For
instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that
sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the
applicant had received each and every month since the founding of
the association. In many cases this amounted to three or four hundred
dollars. Still, the association would not entertain the application
until the money was present. Even then a single adverse vote killed the
application. Every member had to vote 'Yes' or 'No' in person and before
witnesses; so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots
were so long absent on voyages. However, the repentant sinners scraped
their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process,
they were added to the fold. A time came, at last, when only about ten
remained outside. They said they would starve before they would apply.
They remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture
to employ them.

By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date
the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the
branch associations had grown strong, now, and the Red River one had
advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten
outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There
was another new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues
not only on all the wages they had received since the association was
born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at
work up to the time of their application, instead of going off to pout
in idleness. It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but
it was accomplished at last. The most virulent sinner of this batch had
stayed out and allowed 'dues' to accumulate against him so long that he
had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application.

The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong. There
was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the reception
of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time
a limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the
association, upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than
eighteen years old, and of respectable family and good character; he
must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in
advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain
under the commands of the association until a great part of the
membership (more than half, I think) should be willing to sign his
application for a pilot's license.

All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their
masters and adopted by the association. The president and secretary
detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and
changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot
could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of
the cubs would be ordered to go with him.

The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's financial
resources. The association attended its own funerals in state, and paid
for them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon
searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a
search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars.

The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business,
also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on
steamboats.

The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in
the world. By the United States law, no man could become a pilot unless
two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was
nobody outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the
making of pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others
become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones
to take their places. In time, the association could put wages up to any
figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry
the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the
licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there
would be no help for it.

The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between
the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed.
Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it
themselves. When the pilots' association announced, months beforehand,
that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to
five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put
freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river
the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate
of wages about to be established. It was a rather slender argument, but
the farmers did not seem to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that
to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under
the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of
forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the
new wages.

So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their
own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five hundred dollars,
too, and move for another advance in freights. It was a novel idea,
but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced
again. The new association decreed (for this was before all the
outsiders had been taken into the pilots' association) that if any
captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to
discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several
of these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew
strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that
all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree
that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association
captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they
would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so
they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances.

As I have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest
monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible.
And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad
stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern
railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers;
next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating
industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the
cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St.
Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with
every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding
everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over,
but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast
introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New
Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the
twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science
of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past!




CHAPTER 16

Racing Days

IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between four
and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward they would
be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation), and so one
had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long,
of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which
supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading
abroad over the city. Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at
the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern.
Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than
usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels and boxes were
spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage-planks, belated
passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping
to reach the forecastle companion way alive, but having their doubts
about it; women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with
husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a
failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general
distraction; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither
in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together,
and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity,
except vaguely and dimly; every windlass connected with every forehatch,
from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping
up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the
half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring
such songs as 'De Las' Sack! De Las' Sack!'--inspired to unimaginable
exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody
else mad.

By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers would be
packed and black with passengers. The 'last bells' would begin to clang,
all down the line, and then the powwow seemed to double; in a moment or
two the final warning came,--a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs, with
the cry, 'All dat ain't goin', please to git asho'!'--and behold, the
powwow quadrupled! People came swarming ashore, overturning excited
stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a
long array of stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary
latest passenger clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and
everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild
spring shoreward over his head.

Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide
gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd the decks of boats
that are not to go, in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer
straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes
swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black
smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually
swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best 'voice' in
the lot towering from the midst (being mounted on the capstan), waving
his hat or a flag, and all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting
cannons boom and the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and
huzza! Steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession
goes winging its flight up the river.

In the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a
big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear the crews sing,
especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with
the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public
always had an idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was
the case--that is, after the laws were passed which restricted each boat
to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch. No engineer was ever
sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on
the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place
was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and
allowed chips to get into the 'doctor' and shut off the water supply
from the boilers.

In the 'flush times' of steamboating, a race between two notoriously
fleet steamers was an event of vast importance. The date was set for
it several weeks in advance, and from that time forward, the whole
Mississippi Valley was in a state of consuming excitement. Politics and
the weather were dropped, and people talked only of the coming race. As
the time approached, the two steamers 'stripped' and got ready. Every
encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind
or water, was removed, if the boat could possibly do without it. The
'spars,' and sometimes even their supporting derricks, were sent ashore,
and no means left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground. When
the 'Eclipse' and the 'A. L. Shotwell' ran their great race many years
ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the
fanciful device which hung between the 'Eclipse's' chimneys, and that
for that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head
shaved. But I always doubted these things.

If the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a
half feet forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that
exact figure--she wouldn't enter a dose of homoeopathic pills on her
manifest after that. Hardly any passengers were taken, because they not
only add weight but they never will 'trim boat.' They always run to
the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and
experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part
his hair in the middle with a spirit level.

No way-freights and no way-passengers were allowed, for the racers would
stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only 'touch and
go.' Coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and
these were kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's
warning. Double crews were carried, so that all work could be quickly
done.

The chosen date being come, and all things in readiness, the two great
steamers back into the stream, and lie there jockeying a moment, and
apparently watching each other's slightest movement, like sentient
creatures; flags drooping, the pent steam shrieking through
safety-valves, the black smoke rolling and tumbling from the chimneys
and darkening all the air. People, people everywhere; the shores, the
house-tops, the steamboats, the ships, are packed with them, and you
know that the borders of the broad Mississippi are going to be fringed
with humanity thence northward twelve hundred miles, to welcome these
racers.

Presently tall columns of steam burst from the 'scape-pipes of both
steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes mounted
on capstans wave their small flags above the massed crews on the
forecastles, two plaintive solos linger on the air a few waiting
seconds, two mighty choruses burst forth--and here they come! Brass
bands bray Hail Columbia, huzza after huzza thunders from the shores,
and the stately creatures go whistling by like the wind.

Those boats will never halt a moment between New Orleans and St. Louis,
except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty-cord
wood-boats alongside. You should be on board when they take a couple of
those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each; by the time
you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be wondering what
has become of that wood.

Two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after
day. They might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are
not all alike, and the smartest pilots will win the race. If one of the
boats has a 'lightning' pilot, whose 'partner' is a trifle his inferior,
you can tell which one is on watch by noting whether that boat has
gained ground or lost some during each four-hour stretch. The shrewdest
pilot can delay a boat if he has not a fine genius for steering.
Steering is a very high art. One must not keep a rudder dragging across
a boat's stem if he wants to get up the river fast.

There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was
on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left
port in. But of course this was at rare intervals. Ferryboats used to
lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting
for us to get by. This was at still rarer intervals. I had the documents
for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid.
This boat, the 'John J. Roe,' was so slow that when she finally sunk in
Madrid Bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it. That was
always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record, any
way. She was dismally slow; still, we often had pretty exciting times
racing with islands, and rafts, and such things. One trip, however, we
did rather well. We went to St. Louis in sixteen days. But even at
this rattling gait I think we changed watches three times in Fort Adams
reach, which is five miles long. A 'reach' is a piece of straight river,
and of course the current drives through such a place in a pretty lively
way.

That trip we went to Grand Gulf, from New Orleans, in four days (three
hundred and forty miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' did it in one.
We were nine days out, in the chute of 63 (seven hundred miles); the
'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' went there in two days. Something over a
generation ago, a boat called the 'J. M. White' went from New Orleans
to Cairo in three days, six hours, and forty-four minutes. In 1853 the
'Eclipse' made the same trip in three days, three hours, and twenty
minutes.{footnote [Time disputed. Some authorities add 1 hour and 16
minutes to this.]} In 1870 the 'R. E. Lee' did it in three days and
_one_ hour. This last is called the fastest trip on record. I will
try to show that it was not. For this reason: the distance between
New Orleans and Cairo, when the 'J. M. White' ran it, was about eleven
hundred and six miles; consequently her average speed was a trifle over
fourteen miles per hour. In the 'Eclipse's' day the distance between
the two ports had become reduced to one thousand and eighty miles;
consequently her average speed was a shade under fourteen and
three-eighths miles per hour. In the 'R. E. Lee's' time the distance
had diminished to about one thousand and thirty miles; consequently her
average was about fourteen and one-eighth miles per hour. Therefore the
'Eclipse's' was conspicuously the fastest time that has ever been made.




CHAPTER 17

Cut-offs and Stephen

THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They give me
an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's oddest
peculiarities,--that of shortening its length from time to time. If
you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will
pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi
River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo,
Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked,
with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two
hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so
crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.

The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep
horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to
get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck,
half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple
of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed
of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is
rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and
therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little
gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the
water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened:
to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,
and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its
value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds itself
away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around it will soon
shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down goes
its value to a fourth of its former worth. Watches are kept on those
narrow necks, at needful times, and if a man happens to be caught
cutting a ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever having
another opportunity to cut a ditch.

Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. Once there
was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only half a mile
across, in its narrowest place. You could walk across there in fifteen
minutes; but if you made the journey around the cape on a raft, you
traveled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing. In 1722 the
river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed, and thus
shortened itself thirty-five miles. In the same way it shortened itself
twenty-five miles at Black Hawk Point in 1699. Below Red River Landing,
Raccourci cut-off was made (forty or fifty years ago, I think). This
shortened the river twenty-eight miles. In our day, if you travel by
river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost,
you go only seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and
seventy-six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight
miles!--shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance.
At some forgotten time in the past, cut-offs were made above Vidalia,
Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84; and at Hale's Point. These
shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles.

Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at
Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut
Bend; and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate,
sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend,
which shortened the river ten miles or more.

Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve
hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago.
It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was
one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost
sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred
and seventy-three miles at present.

Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and
'let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had
occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the
far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is
here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue
from! Nor 'development of species,' either! Glacial epochs are great
things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe:--

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi
has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average
of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm
person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic
Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower
Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand
miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and
forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and
three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their
streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor
and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about
science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a
trifling investment of fact.

When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been
speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move. The water
cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become
twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished,
for no power on earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a
hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide.
The current flowing around the bend traveled formerly only five miles
an hour; now it is tremendously increased by the shortening of the
distance. I was on board the first boat that tried to go through the
cut-off at American Bend, but we did not get through. It was toward
midnight, and a wild night it was--thunder, lightning, and torrents of
rain. It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making about
fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen was the best our
boat could do, even in tolerably slack water, therefore perhaps we were
foolish to try the cut-off. However, Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he
kept on trying. The eddy running up the bank, under the 'point,' was
about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would go flying
up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of steam,
and 'stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that was whirling
by the point. But all our preparations were useless. The instant the
current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the
forecastle, and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep
his feet. The next instant we were away down the river, clawing with
might and main to keep out of the woods. We tried the experiment
four times. I stood on the forecastle companion way to see. It was
astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn
tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her
nose. The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about
the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank. Under the
lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly
acres tumble into the river; and the crash they made was not a bad
effort at thunder. Once, when we spun around, we only missed a house
about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the window; and in
the same instant that house went overboard. Nobody could stay on our
forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged
athwart the current. At the end of our fourth effort we brought up
in the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was
overflowed, of course. A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters
of a mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty,
and so saved ten miles.

The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles.
There used to be a tradition connected with it. It was said that a boat
came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the
usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made. It was
a grisly, hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted. The
old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running
away from mysterious reefs, and occasionally hitting one. The perplexed
pilots fell to swearing, and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary
wish that they might never get out of that place. As always happens
in such cases, that particular prayer was answered, and the others
neglected. So to this day that phantom steamer is still butting around
in that deserted river, trying to find her way out. More than one grave
watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly, dismal nights, he has glanced
fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the head of the island,
and seen the faint glow of the specter steamer's lights drifting through
the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her 'scape-pipes and
the plaintive cry of her leadsmen.

In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this chapter with
one more reminiscence of 'Stephen.'

Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen's note for borrowed sums,
ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward. Stephen never paid
one of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about
renewing them every twelve months.

Of course there came a time, at last, when Stephen could no longer
borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was obliged to lie in wait for
new men who did not know him. Such a victim was good-hearted, simple
natured young Yates (I use a fictitious name, but the real name began,
as this one does, with a Y). Young Yates graduated as a pilot, got a
berth, and when the month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk's
office and received his two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new
bills, Stephen was there! His silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very
little while Yates's two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands.
The fact was soon known at pilot headquarters, and the amusement and
satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous. But innocent
Yates never suspected that Stephen's promise to pay promptly at the
end of the week was a worthless one. Yates called for his money at the
stipulated time; Stephen sweetened him up and put him off a week. He
called then, according to agreement, and came away sugar-coated again,
but suffering under another postponement. So the thing went on. Yates
haunted Stephen week after week, to no purpose, and at last gave it
up. And then straightway Stephen began to haunt Yates! Wherever Yates
appeared, there was the inevitable Stephen. And not only there, but
beaming with affection and gushing with apologies for not being able to
pay. By and by, whenever poor Yates saw him coming, he would turn and
fly, and drag his company with him, if he had company; but it was of
no use; his debtor would run him down and corner him. Panting and
red-faced, Stephen would come, with outstretched hands and eager eyes,
invade the conversation, shake both of Yates's arms loose in their
sockets, and begin--

'My, what a race I've had! I saw you didn't see me, and so I clapped on
all steam for fear I'd miss you entirely. And here you are! there, just
stand so, and let me look at you! just the same old noble countenance.'
[To Yates's friend:] 'Just look at him! _Look _at him! Ain't it just
_good _to look at him! _ain't_ it now? Ain't he just a picture! _Some
_call him a picture; I call him a panorama! That's what he is--an entire
panorama. And now I'm reminded! How I do wish I could have seen you an
hour earlier! For twenty-four hours I've been saving up that two hundred
and fifty dollars for you; been looking for you everywhere. I waited at
the Planter's from six yesterday evening till two o'clock this morning,
without rest or food; my wife says, "Where have you been all night?"
I said, "This debt lies heavy on my mind." She says, "In all my days I
never saw a man take a debt to heart the way you do." I said, "It's my
nature; how can I change it?" She says, "Well, do go to bed and get some
rest." I said, "Not till that poor, noble young man has got his money."
So I set up all night, and this morning out I shot, and the first man
I struck told me you had shipped on the "Grand Turk" and gone to New
Orleans. Well, sir, I had to lean up against a building and cry. So help
me goodness, I couldn't help it. The man that owned the place come
out cleaning up with a rag, and said he didn't like to have people cry
against his building, and then it seemed to me that the whole world had
turned against me, and it wasn't any use to live any more; and coming
along an hour ago, suffering no man knows what agony, I met Jim Wilson
and paid him the two hundred and fifty dollars on account; and to think
that here you are, now, and I haven't got a cent! But as sure as I am
standing here on this ground on this particular brick,--there, I've
scratched a mark on the brick to remember it by,--I'll borrow that money
and pay it over to you at twelve o'clock sharp, tomorrow! Now, stand so;
let me look at you just once more.'

And so on. Yates's life became a burden to him. He could not escape his
debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able
to pay. He dreaded to show himself in the street, lest he should find
Stephen lying in wait for him at the corner.

Bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days.
They met there about as much to exchange river news as to play. One
morning Yates was there; Stephen was there, too, but kept out of sight.
But by and by, when about all the pilots had arrived who were in town,
Stephen suddenly appeared in the midst, and rushed for Yates as for a
long-lost brother.

'_Oh_, I am so glad to see you! Oh my soul, the sight of you is such a
comfort to my eyes! Gentlemen, I owe all of you money; among you I owe
probably forty thousand dollars. I want to pay it; I intend to pay it
every last cent of it. You all know, without my telling you, what sorrow
it has cost me to remain so long under such deep obligations to such
patient and generous friends; but the sharpest pang I suffer--by far
the sharpest--is from the debt I owe to this noble young man here; and I
have come to this place this morning especially to make the announcement
that I have at last found a method whereby I can pay off all my debts!
And most especially I wanted _him _to be here when I announced it. Yes,
my faithful friend,--my benefactor, I've found the method! I've found
the method to pay off all my debts, and you'll get your money!' Hope
dawned in Yates's eye; then Stephen, beaming benignantly, and placing
his hand upon Yates's head, added, 'I am going to pay them off in
alphabetical order!'

Then he turned and disappeared. The full significance of Stephen's
'method' did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two
minutes; and then Yates murmured with a sigh--

'Well, the Y's stand a gaudy chance. He won't get any further than the
C's in _this _world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has
wasted away in the next one, I'll still be referred to up there as "that
poor, ragged pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days!"




CHAPTER 18

I Take a Few Extra Lessons

DURING the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, I served
under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboatmen and
many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always convenient for Mr.
Bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody
else. I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in
that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted
with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found
in fiction, biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in upon me,
that the average shore-employment requires as much as forty years
to equip a man with this sort of an education. When I say I am still
profiting by this thing, I do not mean that it has constituted me a
judge of men--no, it has not done that; for judges of men are born, not
made. My profit is various in kind and degree; but the feature of it
which I value most is the zest which that early experience has given
to my later reading. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or
biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the
reason that I have known him before--met him on the river.

The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that
vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania'--the man
referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome.
He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced,
ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying
tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart.
No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch
below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft,
my soul became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house.

I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man.
The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was 'straightening down;'
I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be
semi-officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous
a boat. Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all
fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look around. I thought he took a
furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this
notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was
picking his way among some dangerous 'breaks' abreast the woodyards;
therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so I stepped softly
to the high bench and took a seat.

There was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned and inspected
me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about--as
it seemed to me--a quarter of an hour. After which he removed his
countenance and I saw it no more for some seconds; then it came around
once more, and this question greeted me--

'Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?'

'Yes, sir.'

After this there was a pause and another inspection. Then--

'What's your name?'

I told him. He repeated it after me. It was probably the only thing he
ever forgot; for although I was with him many months he never addressed
himself to me in any other way than 'Here!' and then his command
followed.

'Where was you born?'

'In Florida, Missouri.'

A pause. Then--

'Dern sight better staid there!'

By means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions, he pumped my
family history out of me.

The leads were going now, in the first crossing. This interrupted the
inquest. When the leads had been laid in, he resumed--

'How long you been on the river?'

I told him. After a pause--

'Where'd you get them shoes?'

I gave him the information.

'Hold up your foot!'

I did so. He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and
contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his
high sugar-loaf hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then
ejaculated, 'Well, I'll be dod derned!' and returned to his wheel.

What occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing which is
still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. It must have
been all of fifteen minutes--fifteen minutes of dull, homesick
silence--before that long horse-face swung round upon me again--and
then, what a change! It was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was
working. Now came this shriek--

'Here!--You going to set there all day?'

I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric
suddenness of the surprise. As soon as I could get my voice I said,
apologetically:--'I have had no orders, sir.'

'You've had no _orders_! My, what a fine bird we are! We must have
_orders_! Our father was a _gentleman_--owned slaves--and we've been
to _school_. Yes, _we _are a gentleman, _too_, and got to have _orders!
orders_, is it? _Orders _is what you want! Dod dern my skin, _i'll_
learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here about your
dod-derned _orders_! G'way from the wheel!' (I had approached it without
knowing it.)

I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses
stupefied by this frantic assault.

'What you standing there for? Take that ice-pitcher down to the
texas-tender-come, move along, and don't you be all day about it!'

The moment I got back to the pilot-house, Brown said--

'Here! What was you doing down there all this time?'

'I couldn't find the texas-tender; I had to go all the way to the
pantry.'

'Derned likely story! Fill up the stove.'

I proceeded to do so. He watched me like a cat. Presently he shouted--

'Put down that shovel! Deadest numskull I ever saw--ain't even got sense
enough to load up a stove.'

All through the watch this sort of thing went on. Yes, and the
subsequent watches were much like it, during a stretch of months. As I
have said, I soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread. The moment
I was in the presence, even in the darkest night, I could feel those
yellow eyes upon me, and knew their owner was watching for a pretext to
spit out some venom on me. Preliminarily he would say--

'Here! Take the wheel.'

Two minutes later--

'_Where _in the nation you going to? Pull her down! pull her down!'

After another moment--

'Say! You going to hold her all day? Let her go--meet her! meet her!'

Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and meet
her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time.

George Ritchie was the other pilot's cub. He was having good times now;
for his boss, George Ealer, was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't. Ritchie
had steeled for Brown the season before; consequently he knew exactly
how to entertain himself and plague me, all by the one operation.
Whenever I took the wheel for a moment on Ealer's watch, Ritchie would
sit back on the bench and play Brown, with continual ejaculations of
'Snatch her! snatch her! Derndest mud-cat I ever saw!' 'Here! Where you
going _now_? Going to run over that snag?' 'Pull her _down_! Don't you
hear me? Pull her _down!_' 'There she goes! _Just _as I expected! I
_told_ you not to cramp that reef. G'way from the wheel!'

So I always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was; and
sometimes it seemed to me that Ritchie's good-natured badgering was
pretty nearly as aggravating as Brown's dead-earnest nagging.

I often wanted to kill Brown, but this would not answer. A cub had
to take everything his boss gave, in the way of vigorous comment and
criticism; and we all believed that there was a United States law making
it a penitentiary offense to strike or threaten a pilot who was on
duty. However, I could _imagine _myself killing Brown; there was no law
against that; and that was the thing I used always to do the moment I
was abed. Instead of going over my river in my mind as was my duty,
I threw business aside for pleasure, and killed Brown. I killed Brown
every night for months; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new
and picturesque ones;--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness
of design and ghastliness of situation and environment.

Brown was _always _watching for a pretext to find fault; and if he could
find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. He would scold you for
shaving a shore, and for not shaving it; for hugging a bar, and for not
hugging it; for 'pulling down' when not invited, and for not pulling
down when not invited; for firing up without orders, and for waiting
_for_ orders. In a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with
_everything _you did; and another invariable rule of his was to throw
all his remarks (to you) into the form of an insult.

One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily laden.
Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; I was at the other,
standing by to 'pull down' or 'shove up.' He cast a furtive glance at me
every now and then. I had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was
trying to invent a trap for me. I wondered what shape it was going to
take. By and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual
snarly way--

'Here!--See if you've got gumption enough to round her to.'

This was simply _bound _to be a success; nothing could prevent it; for
he had never allowed me to round the boat to before; consequently, no
matter how I might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. He
stood back there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what
might have been foreseen: I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and
didn't know what I was about; I started too early to bring the boat
around, but detected a green gleam of joy in Brown's eye, and corrected
my mistake; I started around once more while too high up, but corrected
myself again in time; I made other false moves, and still managed to
save myself; but at last I grew so confused and anxious that I tumbled
into the very worst blunder of all--I got too far down before beginning
to fetch the boat around. Brown's chance was come.

His face turned red with passion; he made one bound, hurled me across
the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to
pour out a stream of vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out
of breath. In the course of this speech he called me all the different
kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice I thought he
was even going to swear--but he didn't this time. 'Dod dern' was the
nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing, for he had been brought
up with a wholesome respect for future fire and brimstone.

That was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience on the
hurricane deck. When I went to bed that night, I killed Brown in
seventeen different ways--all of them new.




CHAPTER 19

Brown and I Exchange Compliments

Two trips later, I got into serious trouble. Brown was steering; I was
'pulling down.' My younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck, and
shouted to Brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below.
Brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything. But that was his
way: he never condescended to take notice of an under clerk. The wind
was blowing; Brown was deaf (although he always pretended he wasn't),
and I very much doubted if he had heard the order. If I had two heads,
I would have spoken; but as I had only one, it seemed judicious to take
care of it; so I kept still.

Presently, sure enough, we went sailing by that plantation. Captain
Klinefelter appeared on the deck, and said--

'Let her come around, sir, let her come around. Didn't Henry tell you to
land here?'

'_No_, sir!'

'I sent him up to do, it.'

'He did come up; and that's all the good it done, the dod-derned fool.
He never said anything.'

'Didn't _you _hear him?' asked the captain of me.

Of course I didn't want to be mixed up in this business, but there was
no way to avoid it; so I said--

'Yes, sir.'

I knew what Brown's next remark would be, before he uttered it; it was--

'Shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.'

I closed my mouth according to instructions. An hour later, Henry
entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. He was a
thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see him come, for I knew
Brown would have no pity on him. Brown began, straightway--

'Here! why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?'

'I did tell you, Mr. Brown.'

'It's a lie!'

I said--

'You lie, yourself. He did tell you.'

Brown glared at me in unaffected surprise; and for as much as a moment
he was entirely speechless; then he shouted to me--

'I'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to Henry, 'And you
leave the pilot-house; out with you!'

It was pilot law, and must be obeyed. The boy started out, and even had
his foot on the upper step outside the door, when Brown, with a sudden
access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal and sprang after him;
but I was between, with a heavy stool, and I hit Brown a good honest
blow which stretched-him out.

I had committed the crime of crimes--I had lifted my hand against a
pilot on duty! I supposed I was booked for the penitentiary sure, and
couldn't be booked any surer if I went on and squared my long account
with this person while I had the chance; consequently I stuck to him and
pounded him with my fists a considerable time--I do not know how long,
the pleasure of it probably made it seem longer than it really was;--but
in the end he struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel: a
very natural solicitude, for, all this time, here was this steamboat
tearing down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody
at the helm! However, Eagle Bend was two miles wide at this bank-full
stage, and correspondingly long and deep; and the boat was steering
herself straight down the middle and taking no chances. Still, that was
only luck--a body _might _have found her charging into the woods.

Perceiving, at a glance, that the 'Pennsylvania' was in no danger, Brown
gathered up the big spy-glass, war-club fashion, and ordered me out of
the pilot-house with more than Comanche bluster. But I was not afraid of
him now; so, instead of going, I tarried, and criticized his grammar; I
reformed his ferocious speeches for him, and put them into good English,
calling his attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard
dialect of the Pennsylvanian collieries whence he was extracted.
He could have done his part to admiration in a cross-fire of mere
vituperation, of course; but he was not equipped for this species of
controversy; so he presently laid aside his glass and took the wheel,
muttering and shaking his head; and I retired to the bench. The racket
had brought everybody to the hurricane deck, and I trembled when I
saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the crowd. I said
to myself, 'Now I _am_ done for!'--For although, as a rule, he was so
fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family, and so patient of minor
shortcomings, he could be stern enough when the fault was worth it.

I tried to imagine what he _would _do to a cub pilot who had been guilty
of such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard-deep with costly
freight and alive with passengers. Our watch was nearly ended. I thought
I would go and hide somewhere till I got a chance to slide ashore. So
I slipped out of the pilot-house, and down the steps, and around to
the texas door--and was in the act of gliding within, when the captain
confronted me! I dropped my head, and he stood over me in silence a
moment or two, then said impressively--

'Follow me.'

I dropped into his wake; he led the way to his parlor in the forward end
of the texas. We were alone, now. He closed the after door; then moved
slowly to the forward one and closed that. He sat down; I stood before
him. He looked at me some little time, then said--

'So you have been fighting Mr. Brown?'

I answered meekly--

'Yes, sir.'

'Do you know that that is a very serious matter?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully five
minutes with no one at the wheel?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Did you strike him first?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What with?'

'A stool, sir.'

'Hard?'

'Middling, sir.'

'Did it knock him down?'

'He--he fell, sir.'

'Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What did you do?'

'Pounded him, sir.'

'Pounded him?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Did you pound him much?--that is, severely?'

'One might call it that, sir, maybe.'

'I'm deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You
have been guilty of a great crime; and don't you ever be guilty of it
again, on this boat. _But_--lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound
thrashing, do you hear? I'll pay the expenses. Now go--and mind you, not
a word of this to anybody. Clear out with you!--you've been guilty of a
great crime, you whelp!'

I slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty
deliverance; and I heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat
thighs after I had closed his door.

When Brown came off watch he went straight to the captain, who was
talking with some passengers on the boiler deck, and demanded that I be
put ashore in New Orleans--and added--

'I'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that cub stays.'

The captain said--

'But he needn't come round when you are on watch, Mr. Brown.

'I won't even stay on the same boat with him. One of us has got to go
ashore.'

'Very well,' said the captain, 'let it be yourself;' and resumed his
talk with the passengers.

During the brief remainder of the trip, I knew how an emancipated slave
feels; for I was an emancipated slave myself. While we lay at landings,
I listened to George Ealer's flute; or to his readings from his two
bibles, that is to say, Goldsmith and Shakespeare; or I played chess
with him--and would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back
his last move and ran the game out differently.




CHAPTER 20

A Catastrophe

WE lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed in
finding another pilot; so he proposed that I should stand a daylight
watch, and leave the night watches to George Ealer. But I was afraid; I
had never stood a watch of any sort by myself, and I believed I should
be sure to get into trouble in the head of some chute, or ground the
boat in a near cut through some bar or other. Brown remained in his
place; but he would not travel with me. So the captain gave me an order
on the captain of the 'A. T. Lacey,' for a passage to St. Louis, and
said he would find a new pilot there and my steersman's berth could
then be resumed. The 'Lacey' was to leave a couple of days after the
'Pennsylvania.'

The night before the '_Pennsylvania_' left, Henry and I sat chatting
on a freight pile on the levee till midnight. The subject of the chat,
mainly, was one which I think we had not exploited before--steamboat
disasters. One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it;
the water which was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing
past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;--but
it would arrive at the right time and the right place. We doubted if
persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster
and attendant panic; still, they might be of _some _use; so we decided
that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least
stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in
the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and
acted accordingly.

The 'Lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'Pennsylvania.' We
touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out, and somebody
shouted--

'The "Pennsylvania" is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred and fifty
lives lost!'

At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra, issued by a
Memphis paper, which gave some particulars. It mentioned my brother, and
said he was not hurt.

Further up the river we got a later extra. My brother was again
mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help. We did not get
full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis. This is the
sorrowful story--

It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. The 'Pennsylvania' was
creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles below Memphis on
a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast being emptied.
George Ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, I think; the second engineer
and a striker had the watch in the engine room; the second mate had
the watch on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood, and my brother, clerks, were
asleep, as were also Brown and the head engineer, the carpenter, the
chief mate, and one striker; Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's
chair, and the barber was preparing to shave him. There were a good many
cabin passengers aboard, and three or four hundred deck passengers--so
it was said at the time--and not very many of them were astir. The wood
being nearly all out of the flat now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full
steam, and the next moment four of the eight boilers exploded with a
thunderous crash, and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted
toward the sky! The main part of the mass, with the chimneys, dropped
upon the boat again, a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish--and
then, after a little, fire broke out.

Many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the
river; among these were Mr. Wood and my brother, and the carpenter. The
carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the water
seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot, and George Black,
chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion. The
barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelter in it and unhurt, was left with
its back overhanging vacancy--everything forward of it, floor and all,
had disappeared; and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt,
stood with one toe projecting over space, still stirring his lather
unconsciously, and saying, not a word.

When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he
knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels of his
coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in
its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth. He had ample
time to attend to these details while he was going up and returning. He
presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers, forty feet below the
former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other stuff,
and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam. All of the many who breathed
that steam, died; none escaped. But Ealer breathed none of it. He made
his way to the free air as quickly as he could; and when the steam
cleared away he returned and climbed up on the boilers again, and
patiently hunted out each and every one of his chessmen and the several
joints of his flute.

By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks and groans
filled the air. A great many persons had been scalded, a great many
crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's
body--I think they said he was a priest. He did not die at once, and his
sufferings were very dreadful. A young French naval cadet, of fifteen,
son of a French admiral, was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures
manfully. Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to their posts,
nevertheless. They drew the wood-boat aft, and they and the captain
fought back the frantic herd of frightened immigrants till the wounded
could be brought there and placed in safety first.

When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore,
which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said he
believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and therefore
would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. So they parted,
and Henry returned.

By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several persons
who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously for help.
All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless; so the buckets were
presently thrown aside and the officers fell-to with axes and tried to
cut the prisoners out. A striker was one of the captives; he said he was
not injured, but could not free himself; and when he saw that the fire
was likely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one would
shoot him, and thus save him from the more dreadful death. The fire did
drive the axmen away, and they had to listen, helpless, to this poor
fellow's supplications till the flames ended his miseries.

The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there;
it was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floated down
the river toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the head of the
island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked
occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants, or help for their
hurts, during the rest of the day. A steamer came along, finally,
and carried the unfortunates to Memphis, and there the most lavish
assistance was at once forthcoming. By this time Henry was insensible.
The physicians examined his injuries and saw that they were fatal, and
naturally turned their main attention to patients who could be saved.

Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great
public hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphis
came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of
all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded. All the
physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students; and the
rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted. And
Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a disaster
like the 'Pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors, and she was
experienced, above all other cities on the river, in the gracious office
of the Good Samaritan.'

The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to
me. Two long rows of prostrate forms--more than forty, in all--and every
face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome
spectacle. I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy
experience it was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly
depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It
was done in order that the _morale _of the other patients might not be
injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony.
The fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible,
and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants;
but no matter: everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with
its muffled step and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it
wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave.

I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no
more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than
once. His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in
linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.
He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and
shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his
disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into
a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and
he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, _hump
_yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to
be all _day_ getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this
explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which
nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then
while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the
cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was
bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions; so the
doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind or out
of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by that
treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He suspected
that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his
water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once, when he had
been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his
hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst,
tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and
threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him.
Three times I saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed
to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and
demanded to be taken back. He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.

But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that
go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated
judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers
had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of
the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away,
and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' His hour had struck;
we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.




CHAPTER 21

A Section in My Biography

IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I
dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent
work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted
smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was
going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel
when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was
suspended, my occupation was gone.

I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada;
next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a
reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich
Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next,
an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I
became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other
rocks of New England.

In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years
that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a
pilot-house.

Let us resume, now.




CHAPTER 22

I Return to My Muttons

AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the
river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left;
so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a
stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle
of April.

As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some
thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were
recognized, on the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk,
inquire, and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it
was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding
stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put
the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so I
concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage
to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly
good, but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones, and
Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember
them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted.
How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new _alias _in mind? This is a
great mystery. I was innocent; and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on
my new name when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if I had had
a crime on my conscience to further confuse me, I could never have kept
the name by me at all.

We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18.

'EVENING. Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually
out of it as one travels away from New York.'

I find that among my notes. It makes no difference which direction you
take, the fact remains the same. Whether you move north, south, east,
or west, no matter: you can get up in the morning and guess how far you
have come, by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that
time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--I do not mean of
the women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that _carriage _is at the
bottom of this thing; and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies
and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made
by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this has no
perceptible effect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakes
those people for New-Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace, and snap,
and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mere clothing cannot
effect.

'APRIL 19. This morning, struck into the region of full
goatees--sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.'

It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely
fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance
whom you had supposed dead for a generation. The goatee extends over
a wide extent of country; and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in
Adam and the biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from
the assaults of the scientists.

'AFTERNOON. At the railway stations the loafers carry _both _hands in
their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand
was sometimes out of doors,--here, never. This is an important fact in
geography.'

If the loafers determined the character of a country, it would be still
more important, of course.

'Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to
scratch one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity
are wanting. This has an ominous look.'

By and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region. Fifty years ago, the
tobacco-chewing region covered the Union. It is greatly restricted now.

Next, boots began to appear. Not in strong force, however. Later--away
down the Mississippi--they became the rule. They disappeared from other
sections of the Union with the mud; no doubt they will disappear from
the river villages, also, when proper pavements come in.

We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counter of the
hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name, with a miserable
attempt at careless ease. The clerk paused, and inspected me in the
compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is
found in doubtful circumstances; then he said--

'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want. Used to clerk at
the St. James, in New York.'

An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. We started to the
supper room, and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere. How odd
and unfair it is: wicked impostors go around lecturing under my _Nom
De Guerre_ and nobody suspects them; but when an honest man attempts an
imposture, he is exposed at once.

One thing seemed plain: we must start down the river the next day, if
people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate:
an unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in
St. Louis. The Southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a
comfortable time there. It is large, and well conducted, and its
decorations do not make one cry, as do those of the vast Palmer House,
in Chicago. True, the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period,
and the cues and balls of the Post-Pliocene; but there was refreshment
in this, not discomfort; for there is rest and healing in the
contemplation of antiquities.

The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the
absence of the river man. If he was there he had taken in his sign,
he was in disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces, and
ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it, which
used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd in
the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis. In those
times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men; given
fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from
the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now, and the
steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. Why, in my time they used to
call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him on the shoulder;
I watched for that. But none of these people did it. Manifestly a glory
that once was had dissolved and vanished away in these twenty-one years.

When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers,
crying. Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter,
Ferguson, Bascom, nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that
a body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he
perceived that you meant him. He said--

'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?--drink this
slush?'

'Can't you drink it?'

'I could if I had some other water to wash it with.'

Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not
affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of
centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the
turbulent, bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly
an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the
diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate
the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them
both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is
very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases
hunger; the other, thirst. But the natives do not take them separately,
but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the
bottom of a glass, they stir it up, and then take the draught as they
would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter,
but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case.
It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for
all other purposes, except baptizing.

Next morning, we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but
little changed. It _was _greatly changed, but it did not seem so;
because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade
a new thing to look new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the
moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its
size, since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of 400,000
inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts, it looked about as it
had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there is not as much smoke in St.
Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used to bank itself in a dense
billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view. This
shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke
there, I think. I heard no complaint.

However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in
dwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautiful
and modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them;
whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks,
and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched
frame-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough
when it was rarer.

There was another change--the Forest Park. This was new to me. It is
beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit of having been
made mainly by nature. There are other parks, and fine ones, notably
Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens; for St. Louis interested herself
in such improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities.

The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six
million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do
it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled
metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on
every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had
allowed that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go
by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance;
yet there were reasons at the time to justify this course.

A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five
or fifty years ago, said--'The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill
lighted.' Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are
ill paved yet; but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now.
The 'Catholic New Church' was the only notable building then, and Mr.
Murray was confidently called upon to admire it, with its 'species of
Grecian portico, surmounted by a kind of steeple, much too diminutive
in its proportions, and surmounted by sundry ornaments' which the
unimaginative Scotchman found himself 'quite unable to describe;' and
therefore was grateful when a German tourist helped him out with the
exclamation--'By--, they look exactly like bed-posts!' St. Louis is
well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now, and the
little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost its
importance a long time ago. Still, this would not surprise Mr. Murray,
if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of St.
Louis with strong confidence.

The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I
realized how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes in
detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too:
changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity.

But the change of changes was on the 'levee.' This time, a departure
from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see
a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was
woeful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the
billiard-saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His
occupation is gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the
common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous.
Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro
fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy,
where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!{footnote [Capt.
Marryat, writing forty-five years ago says: 'St. Louis has 20,000
inhabitants. _The river abreast of the town is crowded with steamboats,
lying in two or three tiers_.']} Here was desolation, indeed.

'The old, old sea, as one in tears, Comes murmuring, with foamy lips,
And knocking at the vacant piers, Calls for his long-lost multitude of
ships.'

The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and
completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had
done its share in the slaughter and spoliation. Remains of former
steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge doesn't
pay. Still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know
that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had
been supposed to be.

The pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalks were rather
out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud. All this was familiar
and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs
of men, and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in
their stead. The immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but
business was dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen
had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of
ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others
asleep. St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city; but the
river-edge of it seems dead past resurrection.

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty
years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty
more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of
course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who
could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with
what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may be called
dead.

It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip
to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the
steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the
steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed
the through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of
stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat
competition was out of the question.

Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers. This is in
the hands--along the two thousand miles of river between St. Paul and
New Orleans---of two or three close corporations well fortified with
capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like management and system,
these make a sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once
prodigious steamboating industry. I suppose that St. Louis and New
Orleans have not suffered materially by the change, but alas for the
wood-yard man!

He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise
stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks, and he sold
uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail; but all
the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest
spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile. Where now is the
once wood-yard man?




CHAPTER 23

Traveling Incognito

MY idea was, to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis and New
Orleans. To do this, it would be necessary to go from place to place by
the short packet lines. It was an easy plan to make, and would have been
an easy one to follow, twenty years ago--but not now. There are wide
intervals between boats, these days.

I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements of St.
Genevieve and Kaskaskia, sixty miles below St. Louis. There was only one
boat advertised for that section--a Grand Tower packet. Still, one
boat was enough; so we went down to look at her. She was a venerable
rack-heap, and a fraud to boot; for she was playing herself for personal
property, whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her
that she was righteously taxable as real estate. There are places in
New England where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty
dollars an acre. The soil on her forecastle was quite good--the new crop
of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places.
The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would have been well
suited for grapes, with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling. The
soil of the boiler deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing
purposes. A colored boy was on watch here--nobody else visible. We
gathered from him that this calm craft would go, as advertised, 'if she
got her trip;' if she didn't get it, she would wait for it.

'Has she got any of her trip?'

'Bless you, no, boss. She ain't unloadened, yit. She only come in dis
mawnin'.'

He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it might
be to-morrow or maybe next day. This would not answer at all; so we had
to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm. We had one
more arrow in our quiver: a Vicksburg packet, the 'Gold Dust,' was to
leave at 5 P.M. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave up the idea
of stopping off here and there, as being impracticable. She was neat,
clean, and comfortable. We camped on the boiler deck, and bought some
cheap literature to kill time with. The vender was a venerable Irishman
with a benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily in the socket,
and from him we learned that he had lived in St. Louis thirty-four years
and had never been across the river during that period. Then he wandered
into a very flowing lecture, filled with classic names and allusions,
which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather
apparent that this was not the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth,
that the speech had been delivered. He was a good deal of a character,
and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling. A
random remark, connecting Irishmen and beer, brought this nugget of
information out of him--

They don't drink it, sir. They can't drink it, sir. Give an Irishman
lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with
copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is
the saving of him, sir.'

At eight o'clock, promptly, we backed out and crossed the river. As we
crept toward the shore, in the thick darkness, a blinding glory of white
electric light burst suddenly from our forecastle, and lit up the
water and the warehouses as with a noon-day glare. Another big
change, this--no more flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual
torch-baskets, now: their day is past. Next, instead of calling out a
score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a hatful of
steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended, launched it,
deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing was over
and done with before a mate in the olden time could have got his
profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. Why this new
and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the
first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to realize what
a dull-witted slug the average human being is.

We finally got away at two in the morning, and when I turned out at
six, we were rounding to at a rocky point where there was an old
stone warehouse--at any rate, the ruins of it; two or three decayed
dwelling-houses were near by, in the shelter of the leafy hills; but
there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen.
I wondered if I had forgotten the river; for I had no recollection
whatever of this place; the shape of the river, too, was unfamiliar;
there was nothing in sight, anywhere, that I could remember ever having
seen before. I was surprised, disappointed, and annoyed.

We put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed,
lady-like young girls, together with sundry Russia-leather bags. A
strange place for such folk! No carriage was waiting. The party moved
off as if they had not expected any, and struck down a winding country
road afoot.

But the mystery was explained when we got under way again; for these
people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind
a tow-head (i.e., new island) a couple of miles below this landing.
I couldn't remember that town; I couldn't place it, couldn't call its
name. So I lost part of my temper. I suspected that it might be St.
Genevieve--and so it proved to be. Observe what this eccentric river had
been about: it had built up this huge useless tow-head directly in
front of this town, cut off its river communications, fenced it away
completely, and made a 'country' town of it. It is a fine old place,
too, and deserved a better fate. It was settled by the French, and is a
relic of a time when one could travel from the mouths of the Mississippi
to Quebec and be on French territory and under French rule all the way.

Presently I ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance
toward the pilot-house.




CHAPTER 24

My Incognito is Exploded

AFTER a close study of the face of the pilot on watch, I was satisfied
that I had never seen him before; so I went up there. The pilot
inspected me; I re-inspected the pilot. These customary preliminaries
over, I sat down on the high bench, and he faced about and went on with
his work. Every detail of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one
exception,--a large-mouthed tube under the breast-board. I puzzled over
that thing a considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for.

'To hear the engine-bells through.'

It was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented half a
century sooner. So I was thinking, when the pilot asked--

'Do you know what this rope is for?'

I managed to get around this question, without committing myself.

'Is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?'

I crept under that one.

'Where are you from?'

'New England.'

'First time you have ever been West?'

I climbed over this one.

'If you take an interest in such things, I can tell you what all these
things are for.'

I said I should like it.

'This,' putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, 'is to sound the
fire-alarm; this,' putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, 'is to call the
texas-tender; this one,' indicating the whistle-lever, 'is to call the
captain'--and so he went on, touching one object after another, and
reeling off his tranquil spool of lies.

I had never felt so like a passenger before. I thanked him, with
emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it down in my note-book. The
pilot warmed to his opportunity, and proceeded to load me up in the good
old-fashioned way. At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his
invention; but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all
right. He drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river's
marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another, and backed them up
with some pretty gigantic illustrations. For instance--

'Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well,
when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over
sixty feet high and two miles long. All washed away but that.' [This
with a sigh.]

I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing,
in any ordinary way, would be too good for him.

Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft
on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently
drew attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through
familiarity, and observed that it was an 'alligator boat.'

'An alligator boat? What's it for?'

'To dredge out alligators with.'

'Are they so thick as to be troublesome?'

'Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down. But they used
to be. Not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where
the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point, and Stack Island, and so
on--places they call alligator beds.'

'Did they actually impede navigation?'

'Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that
we didn't get aground on alligators.'

It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk.
However, I restrained myself and said--

'It must have been dreadful.'

'Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting. It was so
hard to tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around
so--never lie still five minutes at a time. You can tell a wind-reef,
straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a
sand-reef--that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth
anything. Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and when
you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when _you _get there,
the devils have swapped around so, meantime. Of course there were some
few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they
could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it
wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it. Let
me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and
Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon,
and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood--all A-1 alligator
pilots. _They _could tell alligator water as far as another Christian
could tell whiskey. Read it?--Ah, _couldn't_ they, though! I only wish I
had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half
off. Yes, and it paid them to do it, too. A good alligator pilot could
always get fifteen hundred dollars a month. Nights, other people had to
lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid up for alligators;
they never laid up for anything but fog. They could _smell _the best
alligator water it was said; I don't know whether it was so or not, and
I think a body's got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he
knows himself, without going around backing up other people's say-so's,
though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it, as long as
they can roust out something wonderful to tell. Which is not the style
of Robert Styles, by as much as three fathom--maybe quarter-_less_.'

[My! Was this Rob Styles?--This mustached and stately figure?-A
slim enough cub, in my time. How he has improved in comeliness in
five-and-twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After
these musings, I said aloud--

'I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much
good, because they could come back again right away.'

'If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't
talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he's _convinced_. It's
the last you hear of _him_. He wouldn't come back for pie. If there's
one thing that an alligator is more down on than another, it's being
dredged. Besides, they were not simply shoved out of the way; the most
of the scoopful were scooped aboard; they emptied them into the
hold; and when they had got a trip, they took them to Orleans to the
Government works.'

'What for?'

'Why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides. All the Government shoes
are made of alligator hide. It makes the best shoes in the world. They
last five years, and they won't absorb water. The alligator fishery is
a Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property--just
like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and Government fines you
fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision
of treason--lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. And they will, if
you're a Democrat. The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you
can't touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the Government, and
you've got to let him alone.'

'Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?'

'Oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.'

'Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?'

'Just for police duty--nothing more. They merely go up and down now
and then. The present generation of alligators know them as easy as a
burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp and
go for the woods.'

After rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator
business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein,
and told of some tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats
of his acquaintance, dwelling at special length upon a certain
extraordinary performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished
fleet--and then adding--

'That boat was the "_Cyclone_,"--last trip she ever made--she sunk, that
very trip--captain was Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I
struck. He couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather.
Why, he would make you fairly shudder. He _was _the most scandalous
liar! I left him, finally; I couldn't stand it. The proverb says, "like
master, like man;" and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come
under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live. He paid first-class
wages; but said I, What's wages when your reputation's in danger? So I
let the wages go, and froze to my reputation. And I've never regretted
it. Reputation's worth everything, ain't it? That's the way I look at
it. He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world--all
packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged.
They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up
in the air. People thought it was vanity, but it wasn't, it was malice.
If you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be nineteen feet high, but
he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of drawing. He was intended
to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he
didn't get there; he was only five feet ten. That's what he was, and
that's what he is. You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the
size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.
That "Cyclone" was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer that
ever walked the waters. Set her amidships, in a big river, and just let
her go; it was all you had to do. She would hold herself on a star
all night, if you let her alone. You couldn't ever feel her rudder. It
wasn't any more labor to steer her than it is to count the Republican
vote in a South Carolina election. One morning, just at daybreak, the
last trip she ever made, they took her rudder aboard to mend it; I
didn't know anything about it; I backed her out from the wood-yard
and went a-weaving down the river all serene. When I had gone about
twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked crossings--'

'Without any rudder?'

'Yes--old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with me
for running such a dark night--'

'Such a _dark night_?--Why, you said--'

'Never mind what I said,--'twas as dark as Egypt now, though pretty soon
the moon began to rise, and--'

'You mean the _sun_--because you started out just at break of--look
here! Was this _before _you quitted the captain on account of his lying,
or--'

'It was before--oh, a long time before. And as I was saying, he--'

'But was this the trip she sunk, or was--'

'Oh, no!--months afterward. And so the old man, he--'

'Then she made _two _last trips, because you said--'

He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration, and
said--

'Here!' (calling me by name), '_you _take her and lie a while--you're
handier at it than I am. Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an
innocent!--why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words; and I made
up my mind to find out what was your little game. It was to _draw me
out_. Well, I let you, didn't I? Now take the wheel and finish the
watch; and next time play fair, and you won't have to work your
passage.'

Thus ended the fictitious-name business. And not six hours out from St.
Louis! but I had gained a privilege, any way, for I had been itching
to get my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. I seemed to have
forgotten the river, but I hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat,
nor how to enjoy it, either.




CHAPTER 25

From Cairo to Hickman

THE scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo--two hundred miles--is varied and
beautiful. The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now,
and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing
between. Our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to
breeze and sunshine, and our boat threw the miles out behind her with
satisfactory despatch.

We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a
penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too,
there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau. The former town gets
its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the
water on the Missouri side of the river--a piece of nature's fanciful
handiwork--and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of
that region. For nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's
Bake Oven--so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble
anybody else's bake oven; and the Devil's Tea Table--this latter a great
smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched
some fifty or sixty feet above the river, beside a beflowered and
garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for
anybody, Devil or Christian. Away down the river we have the Devil's
Elbow and the Devil's Race-course, and lots of other property of his
which I cannot now call to mind.

The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in
old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new
coat of whitewash all over. Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old
coat once more. 'Uncle' Mumford, our second officer, said the place had
been suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its
best now. But he said it was not strange that it didn't waste white-wash
on itself, for more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than
anywhere in the West; and added--'On a dairy farm you never can get any
milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it
is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.' In my own
experience I knew the first two items to be true; and also that people
who sell candy don't care for candy; therefore there was plausibility in
Uncle Mumford's final observation that 'people who make lime run more to
religion than whitewash.' Uncle Mumford said, further, that Grand Tower
was a great coaling center and a prospering place.

Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome
appearance. There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the
town by the river. Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for
thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri! There was another
college higher up on an airy summit--a bright new edifice, picturesquely
and peculiarly towered and pinnacled--a sort of gigantic casters, with
the cruets all complete. Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the
Athens of Missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already
mentioned; and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another.
He directed my attention to what he called the 'strong and pervasive
religious look of the town,' but I could not see that it looked more
religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the
same kind of bricks. Partialities often make people see more than really
exists.

Uncle Mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river. He is a man of
practical sense and a level head; has observed; has had much experience
of one sort and another; has opinions; has, also, just a perceptible
dash of poetry in his composition, an easy gift of speech, a thick
growl in his voice, and an oath or two where he can get at them when the
exigencies of his office require a spiritual lift. He is a mate of the
blessed old-time kind; and goes gravely damning around, when there is
work to the fore, in a way to mellow the ex-steamboatman's heart with
sweet soft longings for the vanished days that shall come no more.
'_Git _up there you! Going to be all day? Why d'n't you _say _you was
petrified in your hind legs, before you shipped!'

He is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm; so they
like him, and stay with him. He is still in the slouchy garb of the
old generation of mates; but next trip the Anchor Line will have him in
uniform--a natty blue naval uniform, with brass buttons, along with all
the officers of the line--and then he will be a totally different style
of scenery from what he is now.

Uniforms on the Mississippi! It beats all the other changes put
together, for surprise. Still, there is another surprise--that it was
not made fifty years ago. It is so manifestly sensible, that it might
have been thought of earlier, one would suppose. During fifty years, out
there, the innocent passenger in need of help and information, has been
mistaking the mate for the cook, and the captain for the barber--and
being roughly entertained for it, too. But his troubles are ended now.
And the greatly improved aspect of the boat's staff is another advantage
achieved by the dress-reform period.

Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau. They used to call it
'Steersman's Bend;' plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always;
about the only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed to
take a boat through, in low water.

Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot of it,
were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone conspicuous
alteration. Nor the Chain, either--in the nature of things; for it is a
chain of sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats
on bad nights. A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of
sight; among the rest my first friend the 'Paul Jones;' she knocked her
bottom out, and went down like a pot, so the historian told me--Uncle
Mumford. He said she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher. To me,
this sufficiently accounted for the disaster; as it did, of course, to
Mumford, who added--

'But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter,
and call it superstition. But you will always notice that they are
people who have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher. I went
down the river once in such company. We grounded at Bloody Island; we
grounded at Hanging Dog; we grounded just below this same Commerce;
we jolted Beaver Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the
'Graveyard' behind Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight;
we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into Cairo
with nine feet of water in the hold--may have been more, may have been
less. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The men lost their heads
with terror. They painted the mare blue, in sight of town, and threw the
preacher overboard, or we should not have arrived at all. The preacher
was fished out and saved. He acknowledged, himself, that he had been to
blame. I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.'

That this combination--of preacher and gray mare--should breed calamity,
seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is
fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor
reason. I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous
friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but
persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the
same day--it may have been the next, and some say it was, though I think
it was the same day--he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was
borne to his home a corpse. This is literally true.

No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away.
I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in,
except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere. It was a bad
region--all around and about Hat Island, in early days. A farmer who
lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had
left their bones strung along within sight from his house. Between
St. Louis and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;--two
hundred wrecks, altogether.

I could recognize big changes from Commerce down. Beaver Dam Rock was
out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;'
it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it.
A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the
Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more. The island called
Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early
destruction. Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of a
steamboat. The perilous 'Graveyard,' among whose numberless wrecks
we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly, is far away from the
channel now, and a terror to nobody. One of the islands formerly called
the Two Sisters is gone entirely; the other, which used to lie close
to the Illinois shore, is now on the Missouri side, a mile away; it is
joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the
seam is--but it is Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on
it have to ferry themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay
Illinois taxes: singular state of things!

Near the mouth of the river several islands were missing--washed away.
Cairo was still there--easily visible across the long, flat point upon
whose further verge it stands; but we had to steam a long way around
to get to it. Night fell as we were going out of the 'Upper River' and
meeting the floods of the Ohio. We dashed along without anxiety; for
the hidden rock which used to lie right in the way has moved up stream
a long distance out of the channel; or rather, about one county has gone
into the river from the Missouri point, and the Cairo point has 'made
down' and added to its long tongue of territory correspondingly. The
Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man's
farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's
neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings.

Going into Cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid no
attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows. By doing some
strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss, for he would have
made good literature.

Cairo is a brisk town now; and is substantially built, and has a city
look about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate, as
per Mr. Dickens's portrait of it. However, it was already building with
bricks when I had seen it last--which was when Colonel (now General)
Grant was drilling his first command there. Uncle Mumford says the
libraries and Sunday-schools have done a good work in Cairo, as well as
the brick masons. Cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her
situation at the junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous
that she cannot well help prospering.

When I turned out, in the morning, we had passed Columbus, Kentucky,
and were approaching Hickman, a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill.
Hickman is in a rich tobacco region, and formerly enjoyed a great and
lucrative trade in that staple, collecting it there in her warehouses
from a large area of country and shipping it by boat; but Uncle Mumford
says she built a railway to facilitate this commerce a little more, and
he thinks it facilitated it the wrong way--took the bulk of the trade
out of her hands by 'collaring it along the line without gathering it at
her doors.'




CHAPTER 26

Under Fire

TALK began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down into the
upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time. Columbus was just
behind us, so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of
Belmont. Several of the boat's officers had seen active service in the
Mississippi war-fleet. I gathered that they found themselves sadly out
of their element in that kind of business at first, but afterward got
accustomed to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it. One
of our pilots had his first war experience in the Belmont fight, as a
pilot on a boat in the Confederate service. I had often had a curiosity
to know how a green hand might feel, in his maiden battle, perched all
solitary and alone on high in a pilot house, a target for Tom, Dick
and Harry, and nobody at his elbow to shame him from showing the white
feather when matters grew hot and perilous around him; so, to me his
story was valuable--it filled a gap for me which all histories had left
till that time empty.

THE PILOT'S FIRST BATTLE

He said--

It was the 7th of November. The fight began at seven in the morning. I
was on the 'R. H. W. Hill.' Took over a load of troops from Columbus.
Came back, and took over a battery of artillery. My partner said he
was going to see the fight; wanted me to go along. I said, no, I wasn't
anxious, I would look at it from the pilot-house. He said I was a
coward, and left.

That fight was an awful sight. General Cheatham made his men strip their
coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'Now follow me to hell
or victory!' I heard him say that from the pilot-house; and then he
galloped in, at the head of his troops. Old General Pillow, with his
white hair, mounted on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his troops
as lively as a boy. By and by the Federals chased the rebels back, and
here they came! tearing along, everybody for himself and Devil take the
hindmost! and down under the bank they scrambled, and took shelter. I
was sitting with my legs hanging out of the pilot-house window. All at
once I noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear. Judged it was a bullet.
I didn't stop to think about anything, I just tilted over backwards and
landed on the floor, and staid there. The balls came booming around.
Three cannon-balls went through the chimney; one ball took off the
corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming and bursting all
around. Mighty warm times--I wished I hadn't come.

I lay there on the pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster
and faster. I crept in behind the big stove, in the middle of the
pilot-house. Presently a minie-ball came through the stove, and just
grazed my head, and cut my hat. I judged it was time to go away
from there. The captain was on the roof with a red-headed major from
Memphis--a fine-looking man. I heard him say he wanted to leave here,
but 'that pilot is killed.' I crept over to the starboard side to pull
the bell to set her back; raised up and took a look, and I saw about
fifteen shot holes through the window panes; had come so lively I hadn't
noticed them. I glanced out on the water, and the spattering shot were
like a hailstorm. I thought best to get out of that place. I went down
the pilot-house guy, head first--not feet first but head first--slid
down--before I struck the deck, the captain said we must leave there. So
I climbed up the guy and got on the floor again. About that time, they
collared my partner and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between
two soldiers. Somebody had said I was killed. He put his head in and saw
me on the floor reaching for the backing bells. He said, 'Oh, hell, he
ain't shot,' and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and
ran below. We were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then
got away all right.

The next time I saw my partner, I said, 'Now, come out, be honest, and
tell me the truth. Where did you go when you went to see that battle?'
He says, 'I went down in the hold.'

All through that fight I was scared nearly to death. I hardly knew
anything, I was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me.
Next day General Polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and
gallant conduct. I never said anything, I let it go at that. I judged it
wasn't so, but it was not for me to contradict a general officer.

Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go off to
the Hot Springs. When there, I got a good many letters from commanders
saying they wanted me to come back. I declined, because I wasn't well
enough or strong enough; but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had
made.

A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me that that
pilot had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;' that his subsequent
career in the war was proof of it.

We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below
and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy
carriage and an intelligent face. We were approaching Island No. 10,
a place so celebrated during the war. This gentleman's home was on the
main shore in its neighborhood. I had some talk with him about the war
times; but presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of
the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer
between warring families, than in this particular region. This gentleman
said--

'There's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I reckon
the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons. Nobody don't
know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago; the
Darnells and the Watsons don't know, if there's any of them living,
which I don't think there is. Some says it was about a horse or a
cow--anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn't of no
consequence--none in the world--both families was rich. The thing could
have been fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn't do. Rough words
had been passed; and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that.
That horse or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and
crippling! Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other;
and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud
and kept it a-going. And it's just as I say; they went on shooting each
other, year in and year out--making a kind of a religion of it, you
see--till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Wherever
a Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of 'em was
going to get hurt--only question was, which of them got the drop on
the other. They'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the
family. They didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet,
they puffed and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. A man
shot a boy twelve years old--happened on him in the woods, and didn't
give him no chance. If he _had _'a' given him a chance, the boy'd 'a'
shot him. Both families belonged to the same church (everybody around
here is religious); through all this fifty or sixty years' fuss, both
tribes was there every Sunday, to worship. They lived each side of the
line, and the church was at a landing called Compromise. Half the church
and half the aisle was in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee. Sundays
you'd see the families drive up, all in their Sunday clothes, men,
women, and children, and file up the aisle, and set down, quiet and
orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church and the other on
the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns up against
the wall, handy, and then all hands would join in with the prayer and
praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down, along
with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. I don't know; never
was at that church in my life; but I remember that that's what used to
be said.

'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a
young man of nineteen out and killed him. Don't remember whether it was
the Darnells and Watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this
young man rode up--steamboat laying there at the time--and the first
thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind a
wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and
they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their
might. Think he wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him
and chased him into the river; and as he swum along down stream, they
followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck
shore he was dead. Windy Marshall told me about it. He saw it. He was
captain of the boat.

'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two
sons concluded they'd leave the country. They started to take steamboat
just above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just
as the two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their
wives on their arms. The fight begun then, and they never got no
further--both of them killed. After that, old Darnell got into trouble
with the man that run the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst
of it--and died. But his friends shot old Darnell through and
through--filled him full of bullets, and ended him.'

The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease
and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. His loose
grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. This habit
among educated men in the West is not universal, but it is
prevalent--prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and
to a degree which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at. I heard a
Westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country,
say 'never mind, it _don't make no difference_, anyway.' A life-long
resident who was present heard it, but it made no impression upon her.
She was able to recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it; but
she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the
time--a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such
blasphemous grammar, from such a source, and be unconscious of the deed,
the crime must be tolerably common--so common that the general ear has
become dulled by familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer
sensitive to such affronts.

No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever written
it--_no_ one, either in the world or out of it (taking the Scriptures
for evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to
exact grammatical perfection from the peoples of the Valley; but they
and all other peoples may justly be required to refrain from _knowingly
and purposely_ debauching their grammar.

I found the river greatly changed at Island No. 10. The island which
I remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide,
heavily timbered, and lay near the Kentucky shore--within two hundred
yards of it, I should say. Now, however, one had to hunt for it with a
spy-glass. Nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft, and
this was no longer near the Kentucky shore; it was clear over against
the opposite shore, a mile away. In war times the island had been an
important place, for it commanded the situation; and, being heavily
fortified, there was no getting by it. It lay between the upper and
lower divisions of the Union forces, and kept them separate, until a
junction was finally effected across the Missouri neck of land; but the
island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide river is without
obstruction.

In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into
Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a
mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee.

The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise unchanged
from its former condition and aspect. Its blocks of frame-houses were
still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same
old forests. It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither
grown nor diminished in size. It was said that the recent high water had
invaded it and damaged its looks. This was surprising news; for in low
water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day an
overflow had always been considered an impossibility. This present flood
of 1882 Will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several
generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. It put all
the unprotected low lands under water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke
down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river;
and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the
Mississippi was _seventy miles_ wide! a number of lives were lost,
and the destruction of property was fearful. The crops were destroyed,
houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge
on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait
in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national
and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue
them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for
months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor
had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting
description of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans
_Times-Democrat's_ relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been
falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks
still under water.




CHAPTER 27

Some Imported Articles

WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once! an
infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness
of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. League
after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide
along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores,
with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface
and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day
goes, the night comes, and again the day--and still the same, night
after night and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of
serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity,
realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for
by the good and thoughtless!

Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America,
from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of
them--a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the
land during many, many years. Each tourist took notes, and went home and
published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable,
kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed
progenitors. A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain
of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those
strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then. The
emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not
all formed on one pattern, of course; they _had _to be various, along
at first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their
emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions
from one's predecessors. And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest
things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier
to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall. R.N.,
writing fifty-five years ago, says--

'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to
behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble
I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river
flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything. But it was
not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times, that I came to a
right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.'

Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months
later in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the
Mississippi--

'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this
mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with
the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly
desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he
might have drawn images of another Borgia from its horrors. One only
object rears itself above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a
vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar, and it still
stands, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding
prophet of that which is to come.'

Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years
later--

'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred
miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature,
that you begin to understand all his might and majesty. You see him
fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies
of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away
large masses of soil with all their growth, and there forming islands,
destined at some future period to be the residence of man; and while
indulging in this prospect, it is then time for reflection to suggest
that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand
miles, and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before
reaching its ocean destination.'

Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea
tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray--

'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a
century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected
from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The
stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been
committed. It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing
fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as
it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its banks, or trust yourself
without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating
torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received
into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [There was a foolish
superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the Mississippi
would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to
rise to the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface
without assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and
most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as
you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the
panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man.
Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of
little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its
course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the
stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots,
often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river,
which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the
whole country round; and as soon as it forces its way through its former
channel, plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest
(upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon,
the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous
navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed
dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time to
steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. There are
no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of
the Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf,
polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. It is a
river of desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful
rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you
imagine it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the
wonderful power of steam.'

It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen;
still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted
visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common
sewer,' it has a value. A value, though marred in the matter of
statistics by inaccuracies; for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish
for anybody, and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.'

Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at
Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as
follows--

'The Mississippi! It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt
myself afloat upon its waters. How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in
my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the
lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless
region to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its
course to the ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in
the temperate zone! Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length,
steaming against its tide. I looked upon it with that reverence with
which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature.'

So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon the
deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. Captain
Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says--

'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without
seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting
of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.'

The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old
original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head
of the procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the
solemn stretches of the great river--La Salle, whose name will last as
long as the river itself shall last. We quote from Mr. Parkman--

'And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April, the
river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that
of the west, and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle
passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and
marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew
fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the
great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless,
voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign
of life.'

Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing the
arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the
New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence,
they chanted the _Te Deum, The Exaudiat_, and the _Domine Salvum Fac
Regem_.'

Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth,
the victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a
loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast
countries watered by it, in the name of the King. The column bore this
inscription--

LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE; LE NEUVIEME AVRIL,
1682.

New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the
bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the
time came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other
directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and
devastation everywhere.




CHAPTER 28

Uncle Mumford Unloads

ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost wholly
to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have
passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also
occasional little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with
the peddler's family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble
Hamlet and Co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all absent.
Far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more. She
was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouth of the Obion
River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that she was named for me--or
_he_ was named for me, whichever you prefer. As this was the first time
I had ever encountered this species of honor, it seems excusable to
mention it, and at the same time call the attention of the authorities
to the tardiness of my recognition of it.

Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large
island, and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to
the main shore now, and has retired from business as an island.

As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell, but
that was nothing to shudder about--in these modern times. For now
the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of
two-thousand-mile torchlight procession. In the head of every crossing,
and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a
clear-burning lamp. You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is
always a beacon in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast.
One might almost say that lamps have been squandered there. Dozens of
crossings are lighted which were not shoal when they were created,
and have never been shoal since; crossings so plain, too, and also so
straight, that a steamboat can take herself through them without any
help, after she has been through once. Lamps in such places are of
course not wasted; it is much more convenient and comfortable for a
pilot to hold on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won't
stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time, for she
can of course make more miles with her rudder amidships than she can
with it squared across her stern and holding her back.

But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large
extent. It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance
out of it. For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once
was. The government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these
matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out
all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they
allow no new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you,
on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with
you; so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified
darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out
your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an
eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and
George Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses
by compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have
patented the whole. With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with
considerable security, and with a confidence unknown in the old days.

With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of daylight
in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed, and a chart and
compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good stage of water, is
now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage, and is hardly more than
three times as romantic.

And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor
Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger
wages of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there.
They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand
his watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the
shore. We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed
now, as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are
lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too.
Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers. The
Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has
taken away its state and dignity.

Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the exception
that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also a lot of
other lights on the Point and along its shore; these latter glinting
from the fleet of the United States River Commission, and from a village
which the officials have built on the land for offices and for the
employees of the service. The military engineers of the Commission
have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over
again--a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating
it. They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current;
and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it
stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi, they are
felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of
shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof,
and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected
the wasting shores with rows of piles. One who knows the Mississippi
will promptly aver--not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that
lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go
here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has
sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not
tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put
these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not
their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their
abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and
handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific
man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,
with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which
seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and
say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and
undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into
right and reasonable conduct.

I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I
give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be
relied on as being full and correct; except that I have here and there
left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in
blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to
break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding
to its information or its clearness. Not that I have ventured to
strike out all such interjections; I have removed only those which were
obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which I felt any question
about, I have judged it safest to let it remain.

UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS

Uncle Mumford said--

'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--I have
watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about
it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be _what are you
sucking your fingers there for ?--collar that kag of nails!_ Four years
at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a
good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river. You turn one
of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard
bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to
wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around,
and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it,
and do just as they said, every time. But this ain't that kind of a
river. They have started in here with big confidence, and the best
intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. What does
Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say? Says enough to knock _their _little game
galley-west, don't it? Now you look at their methods once. There at
Devil's Island, in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way,
the water wanted to go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what
does the river care for a stone wall? When it got ready, it just bulged
through it. Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up
there--but not down here they can't. Down here in the Lower River, they
drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from
slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut
somebody else's bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the banks?
Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper. They are
pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won't do any good. If the river has
got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs.
Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through
the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the
water when the river is low. What do you reckon that is for? If I know,
I wish I may land in--_hump yourself, you son of an undertaker!--out
with that coal-oil, now, lively, lively!_ And just look at what they are
trying to do down there at Milliken's Bend. There's been a cut-off in
that section, and Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It's a country town
now. The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town
except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the
bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the
foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river
used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water
around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used
to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. That is, they are
going to take this whole Mississippi, and twist it around and make it
run several miles _up stream_. Well you've got to admire men that deal
in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you
haven't got to believe they can _do_ such miracles, have you! And yet
you ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe
way, where a man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the
same time buy enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they
win. Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads
of money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten
thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't
a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than
bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats
and nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and
lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as
she'd be in heaven. And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats
left at all, the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and
dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make
navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and
all the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school
su----_what-in-the-nation-you-fooling-around-there-for, you sons of
unrighteousness, heirs of perdition! going to be a year getting that
hogshead ashore?'_

During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations
with river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River
Commission--with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:--

1. Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarily and
permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened
shores, etc.

2. Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spent only on
building and repairing the great system of levees.

3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee, the higher the
river's bottom will rise; and that consequently the levee system is a
mistake.

4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time, by
turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc.

5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish
the Mississippi in low-water seasons.

Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories
you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis
that he does not believe in that theory; and after you have had
experience, you do not take this course doubtfully, or hesitatingly, but
with the confidence of a dying murderer--converted one, I mean. For you
will have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are
not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after
the other. No, there will always be one or two with the other diseases
along between. And as you proceed, you will find out one or two other
things. You will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but is
contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it. You may
vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--it will
do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't; the moment you rub
against any one of those theorists, make up your mind that it is time to
hang out your yellow flag.

Yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt--only
part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures
the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. If your man is a
Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of
deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease,
sure; but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five
theories that may have previously got into your system.

I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not, in mournful
numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which one numbered the biggest
sick list, for I do not know. In truth, no one can answer the latter
question. Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder. Every
man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it every day, during
such moments as he is able to spare from talking about the war; and each
of the several chief theories has its host of zealous partisans; but,
as I have said, it is not possible to determine which cause numbers the
most recruits.

All were agreed upon one point, however: if Congress would make a
sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result. Very well;
since then the appropriation has been made--possibly a sufficient one,
certainly not too large a one. Let us hope that the prophecy will be
amply fulfilled.

One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from Mr.
Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near
ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the Union.
What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be found in
the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix B.]}

Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash,
the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words, with the
same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain. Here is a
case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'--

'The towboat "Jos. B. Williams" is on her way to New Orleans with a
tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels
(seventy-six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel,
being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else in the
world. Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to $18,000. It
would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and thirty-three
bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal. At $10 per ton, or
$100 per car, which would be a fair price for the distance by rail, the
freight bill would amount to $180,000, or $162,000 more by rail than by
river. The tow will be taken from Pittsburg to New Orleans in fourteen
or fifteen days. It would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to
the train to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels
of coal, and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it
would take one whole summer to put it through by rail.'

When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a
whole summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to
keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial
mind.




CHAPTER 29

A Few Specimen Bricks

WE passed through the Plum Point region, turned Craighead's Point,
and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow,
memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war.
Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of
several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be
found in American history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a
size correspondent to that huge and somber title. We have the 'Boston
Massacre,' where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch
Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow
tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and the
performances of Coeur de Lion, that fine 'hero,' before we accomplish
it.

More of the river's freaks. In times past, the channel used to strike
above Island 37, by Brandywine Bar, and down towards Island 39.
Afterward, changed its course and went from Brandywine down through
Vogelman's chute in the Devil's Elbow, to Island 39--part of this course
reversing the old order; the river running _up_ four or five miles,
instead of down, and cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles of
distance. This in 1876. All that region is now called Centennial Island.

There is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding
places of the once celebrated 'Murel's Gang.' This was a colossal
combination of robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and
counterfeiters, engaged in business along the river some fifty or sixty
years ago. While our journey across the country towards St. Louis was in
progress we had had no end of Jesse James and his stirring history; for
he had just been assassinated by an agent of the Governor of Missouri,
and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers.
Cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys. According to these,
he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed. It
was a mistake. Murel was his equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity;
in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and
comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior
in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale.
James's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning
of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; Murel projected negro
insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on
occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation.
What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this
stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections
and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn
to do his evil will!

Here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator, from a now
forgotten book which was published half a century ago--

He appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain.
When he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher;
and it is said that his discourses were very 'soul-moving'--interesting
the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their horses, which
were carried away by his confederates while he was preaching. But the
stealing of horses in one State, and selling them in another, was but
a small portion of their business; the most lucrative was the enticing
slaves to run away from their masters, that they might sell them in
another quarter. This was arranged as follows; they would tell a negro
that if he would run away from his master, and allow them to sell him,
he should receive a portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his
return to them a second time they would send him to a free State, where
he would be safe.

The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money and
freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to
their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or
four times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by
them; but as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom
was to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them,
which was the negro himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body
into the Mississippi. Even if it was established that they had stolen
a negro, before he was murdered, they were always prepared to evade
punishment; for they concealed the negro who had run away, until he
was advertised, and a reward offered to any man who would catch him. An
advertisement of this kind warrants the person to take the property, if
found. And then the negro becomes a property in trust, when, therefore,
they sold the negro, it only became a breach of trust, not stealing; and
for a breach of trust, the owner of the property can only have redress
by a civil action, which was useless, as the damages were never paid.
It may be inquired, how it was that Murel escaped Lynch law under such
circumstances This will be easily understood when it is stated that he
had _more than a thousand sworn confederates_, all ready at a moment's
notice to support any of the gang who might be in trouble. The names of
all the principal confederates of Murel were obtained from himself, in
a manner which I shall presently explain. The gang was composed of two
classes: the Heads or Council, as they were called, who planned and
concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted to about four hundred.
The other class were the active agents, and were termed strikers, and
amounted to about six hundred and fifty. These were the tools in the
hands of the others; they ran all the risk, and received but a small
portion of the money; they were in the power of the leaders of the gang,
who would sacrifice them at any time by handing them over to justice, or
sinking their bodies in the Mississippi. The general rendezvous of this
gang of miscreants was on the Arkansas side of the river, where they
concealed their negroes in the morasses and cane-brakes.

The depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt; but
so well were their plans arranged, that although Murel, who was always
active, was everywhere suspected, there was no proof to be obtained. It
so happened, however, that a young man of the name of Stewart, who was
looking after two slaves which Murel had decoyed away, fell in with him
and obtained his confidence, took the oath, and was admitted into the
gang as one of the General Council. By this means all was discovered;
for Stewart turned traitor, although he had taken the oath, and having
obtained every information, exposed the whole concern, the names of all
the parties, and finally succeeded in bringing home sufficient
evidence against Murel, to procure his conviction and sentence to the
Penitentiary (Murel was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment); so
many people who were supposed to be honest, and bore a respectable name
in the different States, were found to be among the list of the Grand
Council as published by Stewart, that every attempt was made to throw
discredit upon his assertions--his character was vilified, and more
than one attempt was made to assassinate him. He was obliged to quit the
Southern States in consequence. It is, however, now well ascertained
to have been all true; and although some blame Mr. Stewart for having
violated his oath, they no longer attempt to deny that his revelations
were correct. I will quote one or two portions of Murel's confessions to
Mr. Stewart, made to him when they were journeying together. I ought to
have observed, that the ultimate intentions of Murel and his associates
were, by his own account, on a very extended scale; having no less
an object in view than _raising the blacks against the whites, taking
possession of, and plundering new orleans, and making themselves
possessors of the territory_. The following are a few extracts:--

'I collected all my friends about New Orleans at one of our friends'
houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all
our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion
at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose.
Every man's business being assigned him, I started to Natchez on foot,
having sold my horse in New Orleans,--with the intention of stealing
another after I started. I walked four days, and no opportunity offered
for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve, I had become tired,
and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little. While I was
sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man
came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him,
I was determined to have his horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler.
He rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose
and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He
did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek,
and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and
stopped. I hitched his horse, and then made him undress himself, all to
his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He said,
'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I
die,' I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He turned around and
dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head.

I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the
creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and
thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to
examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek.
His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on
and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them. I rolled up his
clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth
of the best quality. I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and
directed my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for
the last five days.

'Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses
and started for Georgia. We got in company with a young South Carolinian
just before we got to Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all
about his business. He had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but
when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and he declined
purchasing. We concluded he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I
understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never
had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near
a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my
whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he
rode up by the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the
side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses
and fingered his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars.
Crenshaw said he knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his
arms, and I by his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow
of the precipice, and tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight; we
then tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth
two hundred dollars.

'We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a
little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a negro
in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he had been
purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men. It was rather squally
times, but any port in a storm: we took the negro that night on the bank
of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend, and Crenshaw shot him
through the head. We took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek.

'He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansaw River for
upwards of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him
into the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled
the tragic scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of
secrecy; as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery
to all but the fraternity. He sold the negro, first and last, for nearly
two thousand dollars, and then put him for ever out of the reach of all
pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the negro;
and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and
catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long day
to the silent repose of his skeleton.'

We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by
its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil
War. Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in
that fight: Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery,
Commodore of the Confederate fleet. Both saw a great deal of active
service during the war, and achieved high reputations for pluck and
capacity.

As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay
with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course--Vicksburg. We were so
pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change. I had an
errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas, but
perhaps I could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.' I said as
much; so we decided to stick to present quarters.

The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a
beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the
river. The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way
to incite distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved
for the town's sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent
reform, however, for it was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a
reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation
of the yellow-fever. In those awful days the people were swept off by
hundreds, by thousands; and so great was the reduction caused by flight
and by death together, that the population was diminished three-fourths,
and so remained for a time. Business stood nearly still, and the streets
bore an empty Sunday aspect.

Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time, drawn by a German
tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness of the scenes which he
describes. It is from Chapter VII, of his book, just published, in
Leipzig, 'Mississippi-Fahrten, von Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'--

'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height. Daily,
hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic. The city was become
a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population had deserted the place,
and only the poor, the aged and the sick, remained behind, a sure prey
for the insidious enemy. The houses were closed: little lamps burned in
front of many--a sign that here death had entered. Often, several lay
dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape. The stores
were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead.

'Fearful evil! In the briefest space it struck down and swept away even
the most vigorous victim. A slight indisposition, then an hour of
fever, then the hideous delirium, then--the Yellow Death! On the street
corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken by the
disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid. Food failed. Meat
spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air, and turned
black.

'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season they cease,
and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come with the coffin,
nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard. In the night stillness
reigns. Only the physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets;
and out of the distance, at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the
railway train, which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by
furies, flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.'

But there is life enough there now. The population exceeds forty
thousand and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition.
We drove about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of
squirrels there; saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways
enticing to the eye; and got a good breakfast at the hotel.

A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has
a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops; and
manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly
to have cotton mills and elevators.

Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--an
increase of sixty thousand over the year before. Out from her healthy
commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway; and a sixth is being
added.

This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished and
unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books
long time ago. In the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and
vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope, Memphis seems to have consisted mainly
of one long street of log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled
around rearward toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of
mud. That was fifty-five years ago. She stopped at the hotel. Plainly it
was not the one which gave us our breakfast. She says--

'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full. They ate in
perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner
was over literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were
those produced by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of
coughing, _etc_.'

'Coughing, etc.' The 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there, a word
which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints. You
will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which
she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy,
well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual harmless
military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy
pretense--

'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious
rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange
uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the
contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our
dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the
whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful
manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced
us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and
majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything
rather than an hour of enjoyment.'




CHAPTER 30

Sketches by the Way

IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere, and
very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land,
flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in
places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work
gone to ruin, and all to be done over again, with straitened means and a
weakened courage. A melancholy picture, and a continuous one;--hundreds
of miles of it. Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet
deep, in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without
farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that the
keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge
his trust,--and often in desperate weather. Yet I was told that the
work is faithfully performed, in all weathers; and not always by
men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick or absent. The Government
furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting
and tending. A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a
month.

The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever. The island
has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main
shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate. No
signs left of the wreck of the 'Pennsylvania.' Some farmer will turn up
her bones with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised.

We were getting down now into the migrating negro region. These poor
people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for
the privation now. They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel
seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for
any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want
to be moving. The amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the
conundrum for them. If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it
be fifty. If not, a shorter flight will do.

During a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails. Sometimes
there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous
with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry
ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules,
and horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark--no other food for
them in the flood-wasted land. Sometimes there was a single lonely
landing-cabin; near it the colored family that had hailed us; little and
big, old and young, roosting on the scant pile of household goods; these
consisting of a rusty gun, some bed-ticks, chests, tinware, stools,
a crippled looking-glass, a venerable arm-chair, and six or eight
base-born and spiritless yellow curs, attached to the family by strings.
They must have their dogs; can't go without their dogs. Yet the dogs are
never willing; they always object; so, one after another, in ridiculous
procession, they are dragged aboard; all four feet braced and sliding
along the stage, head likely to be pulled off; but the tugger marching
determinedly forward, bending to his work, with the rope over his
shoulder for better purchase. Sometimes a child is forgotten and left on
the bank; but never a dog.

The usual river-gossip going on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63--an
island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times.
They said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot with
him one trip--a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow--left him at
the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch. The ancient mariner
went up through the chute, and down the river outside; and up the chute
and down the river again; and yet again and again; and handed the
boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours of honest
endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had originally
taken the wheel! A darkey on shore who had observed the boat go by,
about thirteen times, said, 'clar to gracious, I wouldn't be s'prised if
dey's a whole line o' dem Sk'ylarks!'

Anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing of
opinion. The 'Eclipse' was renowned for her swiftness. One day she
passed along; an old darkey on shore, absorbed in his own matters, did
not notice what steamer it was. Presently someone asked--

'Any boat gone up?'

'Yes, sah.'

'Was she going fast?'

'Oh, so-so--loafin' along.'

'Now, do you know what boat that was?'

'No, sah.'

'Why, uncle, that was the "Eclipse."'

'No! Is dat so? Well, I bet it was--cause she jes' went by here
a-_sparklin_'!'

Piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people
down along here, During the early weeks of high water, A's fence rails
washed down on B's ground, and B's rails washed up in the eddy and
landed on A's ground. A said, 'Let the thing remain so; I will use your
rails, and you use mine.' But B objected--wouldn't have it so. One day,
A came down on B's ground to get his rails. B said, 'I'll kill you!' and
proceeded for him with his revolver. A said, 'I'm not armed.' So B, who
wished to do only what was right, threw down his revolver; then pulled
a knife, and cut A's throat all around, but gave his principal attention
to the front, and so failed to sever the jugular. Struggling around, A
managed to get his hands on the discarded revolver, and shot B dead with
it--and recovered from his own injuries.

Further gossip;--after which, everybody went below to get afternoon
coffee, and left me at the wheel, alone, Something presently reminded
me of our last hour in St. Louis, part of which I spent on this boat's
hurricane deck, aft. I was joined there by a stranger, who dropped into
conversation with me--a brisk young fellow, who said he was born in a
town in the interior of Wisconsin, and had never seen a steamboat until
a week before. Also said that on the way down from La Crosse he had
inspected and examined his boat so diligently and with such passionate
interest that he had mastered the whole thing from stem to rudder-blade.
Asked me where I was from. I answered, New England. 'Oh, a Yank!' said
he; and went chatting straight along, without waiting for assent or
denial. He immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell
me the names of her different parts, and teach me their uses. Before I
could enter protest or excuse, he was already rattling glibly away at
his benevolent work; and when I perceived that he was misnaming the
things, and inhospitably amusing himself at the expense of an innocent
stranger from a far country, I held my peace, and let him have his way.
He gave me a world of misinformation; and the further he went, the wider
his imagination expanded, and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of
deceit. Sometimes, after palming off a particularly fantastic and
outrageous lie upon me, he was so 'full of laugh' that he had to
step aside for a minute, upon one pretext or another, to keep me from
suspecting. I staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished.
Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn' me all about a
steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had overlooked anything, just
ask him and he would supply the lack. 'Anything about this boat that you
don't know the name of or the purpose of, you come to me and I'll tell
you.' I said I would, and took my departure; disappeared, and approached
him from another quarter, whence he could not see me. There he sat, all
alone, doubling himself up and writhing this way and that, in the throes
of unappeasable laughter. He must have made himself sick; for he was
not publicly visible afterward for several days. Meantime, the episode
dropped out of my mind.

The thing that reminded me of it now, when I was alone at the wheel,
was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door,
with the knob in his hand, silently and severely inspecting me. I don't
know when I have seen anybody look so injured as he did. He did not
say anything--simply stood there and looked; reproachfully looked and
pondered. Finally he shut the door, and started away; halted on the
texas a minute; came slowly back and stood in the door again, with that
grieved look in his face; gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke, then
said--

'You let me learn you all about a steamboat, didn't you?'

'Yes,' I confessed.

'Yes, you did--_didn't_ you?'

'Yes.'

'You are the feller that--that--'

Language failed. Pause--impotent struggle for further words--then he
gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good.
Afterward I saw him several times below during the trip; but he was
cold--would not look at me. Idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat to
play his witless practical joke upon me, in the beginning, I would have
persuaded his thoughts into some other direction, and saved him from
committing that wanton and silly impoliteness.

I had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings, for one
cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are
enchanting. First, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush
broods everywhere. Next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness,
isolation, remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn
creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray,
and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water
is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there
is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity
is profound and infinitely satisfying. Then a bird pipes up, another
follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music.
You see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere of song
which seems to sing itself. When the light has become a little stronger,
you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have
the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it
paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape,
a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of
spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest
one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim
vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all
this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections
of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in
it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when
the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of
gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you
grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering.

We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning--scene of a
strange and tragic accident in the old times, Captain Poe had a small
stern-wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife. One night
the boat struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with
astonishing suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor when
the captain got aft. So he cut into his wife's state-room from above
with an ax; she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one
than was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten boards
and clove her skull.

This bend is all filled up now--result of a cut-off; and the same agent
has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend, and set
it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing
steamers.

Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being
of recent birth--Arkansas City. It was born of a railway; the Little
Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there.
We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was.
'Well,' said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes
to take time and be accurate, 'It's a hell of a place.' A description
which was photographic for exactness. There were several rows and
clusters of shabby frame-houses, and a supply of mud sufficient to
insure the town against a famine in that article for a hundred years;
for the overflow had but lately subsided. There were stagnant ponds
in the streets, here and there, and a dozen rude scows were scattered
about, lying aground wherever they happened to have been when the waters
drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping on foot once
more. Still, it is a thriving place, with a rich country behind it, an
elevator in front of it, and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of
cotton-seed oil. I had never seen this kind of a mill before.

Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it is worth $12
or $13 a ton now, and none of it is thrown away. The oil made from it is
colorless, tasteless, and almost if not entirely odorless. It is claimed
that it can, by proper manipulation, be made to resemble and perform the
office of any and all oils, and be produced at a cheaper rate than
the cheapest of the originals. Sagacious people shipped it to Italy,
doctored it, labeled it, and brought it back as olive oil. This trade
grew to be so formidable that Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory
impost upon it to keep it from working serious injury to her oil
industry.

Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi. Her
perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on
that side of the river. In its normal condition it is a pretty town; but
the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it; whole
streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water, and the outsides
of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain extending upwards
from the foundations. Stranded and discarded scows lay all about;
plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing; the board
sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,--a couple of men
trotting along them could make a blind man think a cavalry charge
was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep, and in many
places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing. A Mississippi
inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire.

We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday: two full hours'
liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. In the back streets
but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored
folk--mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered
in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring
and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.

Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population--which
is placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally
productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty
thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has
a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has
$1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways,
and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross
receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New
Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000.




CHAPTER 31

A Thumb-print and What Came of It

WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my
errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad--not
best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand.
The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one
form, now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:
is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little
sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and
no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it. Plain question and plain
answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed
best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their
disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main
argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface,
in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and _agreed
_to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise
thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make _two _unwise things of
it, by carrying out that determination.

I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good
success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show
them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to
blame for it, I presently drifted into its history--substantially as
follows:

Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.
In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's _pension_, 1a,
Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the
house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her
two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to
me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one
of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses
until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in
a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were
thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on
slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white,
rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides
of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these
lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks
of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger
of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring;
and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a
watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert
and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who,
waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest,
movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined
myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging
watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all
my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful
summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if
the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to
make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle
and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went
my way with a humbled crest.

Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed--

'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.
He has been a night-watchman there.'

He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his
head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless,
his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was
talon-like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her
introduction of me. The man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly
out from the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he
lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the widow kept
straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and
an American. The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even
eager--and the next moment he and I were alone together.

I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;
thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.

This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day,
and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and
children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three
things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light
glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its
place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever
saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for
that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing
that I said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know,
by either sight or hearing, when I left the room.

When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two
months, he one day said, abruptly--

'I will tell you my story.'

A DYING MAN S CONFESSION

Then he went on as follows:--

I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to
die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too.
You say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find
opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange
experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my
history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you
will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will
willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative.

Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being
long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to
settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I
had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely
good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in
miniature. It was the happiest of happy households.

One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up out of a sodden
lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with
chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other,
in a hoarse whisper, 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as
for the child--'

The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice--

'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or I wouldn't
have come.'

'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you
done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help
rummage.'

Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had
a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber
had no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around my poor cabin for a
moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper--

'It's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag, and
revive him up.'

The other said--

'All right--provided no clubbing.'

'No clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.'

They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of
voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened;
the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout--

'_Hello_, the house! Show a light, we want water.'

'The captain's voice, by G--!' said the stage-whispering ruffian,
and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their
bull's-eye as they ran.

The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--there seemed to
be a dozen of the horses--and I heard nothing more.

I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. I tried to speak,
but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound. I listened for my
wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently, but no sound
came from the other end of the room where their bed was. This silence
became more and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. Could
you have endured an hour of it, do you think? Pity me, then, who had
to endure three. Three hours--? it was three ages! Whenever the clock
struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since I had heard it last. All
this time I was struggling in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, I got
myself free, and rose up and stretched my stiff limbs. I was able to
distinguish details pretty well. The floor was littered with things
thrown there by the robbers during their search for my savings. The
first object that caught my particular attention was a document of mine
which I had seen the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast
away. It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end of the room. Oh,
poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended,
mine begun!

Did I appeal to the law--I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the
King drink for him? Oh, no, no, no--I wanted no impertinent interference
of the law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing
to me! Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I
would find the debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you
say? How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither
seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any
idea who they might be? Nevertheless, I _was _sure--quite sure, quite
confident. I had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue
which would not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would
lack the secret of how to apply it. I shall come to that, presently--you
shall see. Let us go on, now, taking things in their due order. There
was one circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction
to begin with: Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp
disguise; and not new to military service, but old in it--regulars,
perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures,
carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I thought,
but said nothing. And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice,
by G--!'--the one whose life I would have. Two miles away, several
regiments were in camp, and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When I
learned that Captain Blakely, of Company C had passed our way, that
night, with an escort, I said nothing, but in that company I resolved to
seek my man. In conversation I studiously and persistently described the
robbers as tramps, camp followers; and among this class the people made
useless search, none suspecting the soldiers but me.

Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made a disguise for
myself out of various odds and ends of clothing; in the nearest village
I bought a pair of blue goggles. By-and-bye, when the military camp
broke up, and Company C was ordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon,
I secreted my small hoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in
the night. When Company C arrived in Napoleon, I was already there. Yes,
I was there, with a new trade--fortune-teller. Not to seem partial, I
made friends and told fortunes among all the companies garrisoned there;
but I gave Company C the great bulk of my attentions. I made myself
limitlessly obliging to these particular men; they could ask me no
favor, put upon me no risk, which I would decline. I became the willing
butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity; I became a favorite.

I early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me! And
when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my
last misgiving vanished; I was _sure _I was on the right track. This
man's name was Kruger, a German. There were nine Germans in the company.
I watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no
especial intimates. But I was his intimate; and I took care to make
the intimacy grow. Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could
hardly restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point
out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed to bridle
my tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity
offered.

My apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. I
painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper,
studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. What
was my idea in this nonsense? It was this: When I was a youth, I knew an
old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told
me that there was one thing about a person which never changed, from
the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said
that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human
beings. In these days, we photograph the new criminal, and hang his
picture in the Rogues' Gallery for future reference; but that Frenchman,
in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new prisoner's thumb
and put that away for future reference. He always said that pictures
were no good--future disguises could make them useless; 'The thumb's
the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.' And he used
to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances; it always
succeeded.

I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all alone,
and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine the
devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals,
with that document by my side which bore the right-hand
thumb-and-finger-marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the
dearest blood--to me--that was ever shed on this earth! And many and
many a time I had to repeat the same old disappointed remark, 'will they
_never _correspond!'

But my reward came at last. It was the print of the thumb of the
forty-third man of Company C whom I had experimented on--Private Franz
Adler. An hour before, I did not know the murderer's name, or voice,
or figure, or face, or nationality; but now I knew all these things!
I believed I might feel sure; the Frenchman's repeated demonstrations
being so good a warranty. Still, there was a way to _make _sure. I had
an impression of Kruger's left thumb. In the morning I took him aside
when he was off duty; and when we were out of sight and hearing of
witnesses, I said, impressively--

'A part of your fortune is so grave, that I thought it would be better
for you if I did not tell it in public. You and another man, whose
fortune I was studying last night,--Private Adler,--have been murdering
a woman and a child! You are being dogged: within five days both of you
will be assassinated.'

He dropped on his knees, frightened out of his wits; and for five
minutes he kept pouring out the same set of words, like a demented
person, and in the same half-crying way which was one of my memories of
that murderous night in my cabin--

'I didn't do it; upon my soul I didn't do it; and I tried to keep _him
_from doing it; I did, as God is my witness. He did it alone.'

This was all I wanted. And I tried to get rid of the fool; but no, he
clung to me, imploring me to save him from the assassin. He said--

'I have money--ten thousand dollars--hid away, the fruit of loot and
thievery; save me--tell me what to do, and you shall have it, every
penny. Two-thirds of it is my cousin Adler's; but you can take it
all. We hid it when we first came here. But I hid it in a new place
yesterday, and have not told him--shall not tell him. I was going to
desert, and get away with it all. It is gold, and too heavy to carry
when one is running and dodging; but a woman who has been gone over the
river two days to prepare my way for me is going to follow me with it;
and if I got no chance to describe the hiding-place to her I was going
to slip my silver watch into her hand, or send it to her, and she would
understand. There's a piece of paper in the back of the case, which
tells it all. Here, take the watch--tell me what to do!'

He was trying to press his watch upon me, and was exposing the paper
and explaining it to me, when Adler appeared on the scene, about a dozen
yards away. I said to poor Kruger--

'Put up your watch, I don't want it. You shan't come to any harm. Go,
now; I must tell Adler his fortune. Presently I will tell you how to
escape the assassin; meantime I shall have to examine your thumbmark
again. Say nothing to Adler about this thing--say nothing to anybody.'

He went away filled with fright and gratitude, poor devil. I told Adler
a long fortune--purposely so long that I could not finish it; promised
to come to him on guard, that night, and tell him the really important
part of it--the tragical part of it, I said--so must be out of reach of
eavesdroppers. They always kept a picket-watch outside the town--mere
discipline and ceremony--no occasion for it, no enemy around.

Toward midnight I set out, equipped with the countersign, and picked my
way toward the lonely region where Adler was to keep his watch. It was
so dark that I stumbled right on a dim figure almost before I could get
out a protecting word. The sentinel hailed and I answered, both at the
same moment. I added, 'It's only me--the fortune-teller.' Then I slipped
to the poor devil's side, and without a word I drove my dirk into his
heart! _Ya wohl_, laughed I, it _was _the tragedy part of his fortune,
indeed! As he fell from his horse, he clutched at me, and my blue
goggles remained in his hand; and away plunged the beast dragging him,
with his foot in the stirrup.

I fled through the woods, and made good my escape, leaving the accusing
goggles behind me in that dead man's hand.

This was fifteen or sixteen years ago. Since then I have wandered
aimlessly about the earth, sometimes at work, sometimes idle; sometimes
with money, sometimes with none; but always tired of life, and wishing
it was done, for my mission here was finished, with the act of that
night; and the only pleasure, solace, satisfaction I had, in all those
tedious years, was in the daily reflection, 'I have killed him!'

Four years ago, my health began to fail. I had wandered into Munich, in
my purposeless way. Being out of money, I sought work, and got it; did
my duty faithfully about a year, and was then given the berth of night
watchman yonder in that dead-house which you visited lately. The place
suited my mood. I liked it. I liked being with the dead--liked being
alone with them. I used to wander among those rigid corpses, and peer
into their austere faces, by the hour. The later the time, the more
impressive it was; I preferred the late time. Sometimes I turned the
lights low: this gave perspective, you see; and the imagination could
play; always, the dim receding ranks of the dead inspired one with weird
and fascinating fancies. Two years ago--I had been there a year then--I
was sitting all alone in the watch-room, one gusty winter's night,
chilled, numb, comfortless; drowsing gradually into unconsciousness; the
sobbing of the wind and the slamming of distant shutters falling fainter
and fainter upon my dulling ear each moment, when sharp and suddenly
that dead-bell rang out a blood-curdling alarum over my head! The shock
of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the first time I had ever heard
it.

I gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. About midway
down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright, wagging
its head slowly from one side to the other--a grisly spectacle! Its side
was toward me. I hurried to it and peered into its face. Heavens, it was
Adler!

Can you divine what my first thought was? Put into words, it was this:
'It seems, then, you escaped me once: there will be a different result
this time!'

Evidently this creature was suffering unimaginable terrors. Think what
it must have been to wake up in the midst of that voiceless hush, and,
look out over that grim congregation of the dead! What gratitude shone
in his skinny white face when he saw a living form before him! And how
the fervency of this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell
upon the life-giving cordials which I carried in my hands! Then imagine
the horror which came into this pinched face when I put the cordials
behind me, and said mockingly--

'Speak up, Franz Adler--call upon these dead. Doubtless they will listen
and have pity; but here there is none else that will.'

He tried to speak, but that part of the shroud which bound his jaws,
held firm and would not let him. He tried to lift imploring hands, but
they were crossed upon his breast and tied. I said--

'Shout, Franz Adler; make the sleepers in the distant streets hear you
and bring help. Shout--and lose no time, for there is little to lose.
What, you cannot? That is a pity; but it is no matter--it does not
always bring help. When you and your cousin murdered a helpless woman
and child in a cabin in Arkansas--my wife, it was, and my child!--they
shrieked for help, you remember; but it did no good; you remember that
it did no good, is it not so? Your teeth chatter--then why cannot
you shout? Loosen the bandages with your hands--then you can. Ah, I
see--your hands are tied, they cannot aid you. How strangely things
repeat themselves, after long years; for _my_ hands were tied, that
night, you remember? Yes, tied much as yours are now--how odd that is.
I could not pull free. It did not occur to you to untie me; it does not
occur to me to untie you. Sh--! there's a late footstep. It is
coming this way. Hark, how near it is! One can count the
footfalls--one--two--three. There--it is just outside. Now is the time!
Shout, man, shout!--it is the one sole chance between you and eternity!
Ah, you see you have delayed too long--it is gone by. There--it is dying
out. It is gone! Think of it--reflect upon it--you have heard a human
footstep for the last time. How curious it must be, to listen to so
common a sound as that, and know that one will never hear the fellow to
it again.'

Oh, my friend, the agony in that shrouded face was ecstasy to see! I
thought of a new torture, and applied it--assisting myself with a trifle
of lying invention--

'That poor Kruger tried to save my wife and child, and I did him a
grateful good turn for it when the time came. I persuaded him to
rob you; and I and a woman helped him to desert, and got him away in
safety.' A look as of surprise and triumph shone out dimly through the
anguish in my victim's face. I was disturbed, disquieted. I said--

'What, then--didn't he escape?'

A negative shake of the head.

'No? What happened, then?'

The satisfaction in the shrouded face was still plainer. The man tried
to mumble out some words--could not succeed; tried to express something
with his obstructed hands--failed; paused a moment, then feebly tilted
his head, in a meaning way, toward the corpse that lay nearest him.

'Dead?' I asked. 'Failed to escape?--caught in the act and shot?'

Negative shake of the head.

'How, then?'

Again the man tried to do something with his hands. I watched closely,
but could not guess the intent. I bent over and watched still more
intently. He had twisted a thumb around and was weakly punching at his
breast with it. 'Ah--stabbed, do you mean?'

Affirmative nod, accompanied by a spectral smile of such peculiar
devilishness, that it struck an awakening light through my dull brain,
and I cried--

'Did I stab him, mistaking him for you?--for that stroke was meant for
none but you.'

The affirmative nod of the re-dying rascal was as joyous as his failing
strength was able to put into its expression.

'O, miserable, miserable me, to slaughter the pitying soul that, stood a
friend to my darlings when they were helpless, and would have saved them
if he could! miserable, oh, miserable, miserable me!'

I fancied I heard the muffled gurgle of a mocking laugh. I took my face
out of my hands, and saw my enemy sinking back upon his inclined board.

He was a satisfactory long time dying. He had a wonderful vitality, an
astonishing constitution. Yes, he was a pleasant long time at it. I got
a chair and a newspaper, and sat down by him and read. Occasionally I
took a sip of brandy. This was necessary, on account of the cold. But I
did it partly because I saw, that along at first, whenever I reached
for the bottle, he thought I was going to give him some. I read aloud:
mainly imaginary accounts of people snatched from the grave's threshold
and restored to life and vigor by a few spoonsful of liquor and a warm
bath. Yes, he had a long, hard death of it--three hours and six minutes,
from the time he rang his bell.

It is believed that in all these eighteen years that have elapsed
since the institution of the corpse-watch, no shrouded occupant of the
Bavarian dead-houses has ever rung its bell. Well, it is a harmless
belief. Let it stand at that.

The chill of that death-room had penetrated my bones. It revived and
fastened upon me the disease which had been afflicting me, but which, up
to that night, had been steadily disappearing. That man murdered my wife
and my child; and in three days hence he will have added me to his list.
No matter--God! how delicious the memory of it!--I caught him escaping
from his grave, and thrust him back into it.

After that night, I was confined to my bed for a week; but as soon as
I could get about, I went to the dead-house books and got the number of
the house which Adler had died in. A wretched lodging-house, it was.
It was my idea that he would naturally have gotten hold of Kruger's
effects, being his cousin; and I wanted to get Kruger's watch, if I
could. But while I was sick, Adler's things had been sold and scattered,
all except a few old letters, and some odds and ends of no value.
However, through those letters, I traced out a son of Kruger's, the
only relative left. He is a man of thirty now, a shoemaker by trade,
and living at No. 14 Konigstrasse, Mannheim--widower, with several small
children. Without explaining to him why, I have furnished two-thirds of
his support, ever since.

Now, as to that watch--see how strangely things happen! I traced it
around and about Germany for more than a year, at considerable cost in
money and vexation; and at last I got it. Got it, and was unspeakably
glad; opened it, and found nothing in it! Why, I might have known that
that bit of paper was not going to stay there all this time. Of course
I gave up that ten thousand dollars then; gave it up, and dropped it out
of my mind: and most sorrowfully, for I had wanted it for Kruger's son.

Last night, when I consented at last that I must die, I began to make
ready. I proceeded to burn all useless papers; and sure enough, from a
batch of Adler's, not previously examined with thoroughness, out dropped
that long-desired scrap! I recognized it in a moment. Here it is--I will
translate it:

'Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of
Orleans and Market. Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row.
Stick notice there, saying how many are to come.'

There--take it, and preserve it. Kruger explained that that stone was
removable; and that it was in the north wall of the foundation, fourth
row from the top, and third stone from the west. The money is secreted
behind it. He said the closing sentence was a blind, to mislead in
case the paper should fall into wrong hands. It probably performed that
office for Adler.

Now I want to beg that when you make your intended journey down the
river, you will hunt out that hidden money, and send it to Adam Kruger,
care of the Mannheim address which I have mentioned. It will make a rich
man of him, and I shall sleep the sounder in my grave for knowing that I
have done what I could for the son of the man who tried to save my
wife and child--albeit my hand ignorantly struck him down, whereas the
impulse of my heart would have been to shield and serve him.




CHAPTER 32

The Disposal of a Bonanza

'SUCH was Ritter's narrative,' said I to my two friends. There was a
profound and impressive silence, which lasted a considerable time; then
both men broke into a fusillade of exciting and admiring ejaculations
over the strange incidents of the tale; and this, along with a rattling
fire of questions, was kept up until all hands were about out of breath.
Then my friends began to cool down, and draw off, under shelter of
occasional volleys, into silence and abysmal reverie. For ten minutes
now, there was stillness. Then Rogers said dreamily--

'Ten thousand dollars.'

Adding, after a considerable pause--

'Ten thousand. It is a heap of money.'

Presently the poet inquired--

'Are you going to send it to him right away?'

'Yes,' I said. 'It is a queer question.'

No reply. After a little, Rogers asked, hesitatingly:

'_All _of it?--That is--I mean--'

'Certainly, all of it.'

I was going to say more, but stopped--was stopped by a train of thought
which started up in me. Thompson spoke, but my mind was absent, and I
did not catch what he said. But I heard Rogers answer--

'Yes, it seems so to me. It ought to be quite sufficient; for I don't
see that he has done anything.'

Presently the poet said--

'When you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient. Just look at
it--five thousand dollars! Why, he couldn't spend it in a lifetime! And
it would injure him, too; perhaps ruin him--you want to look at that.
In a little while he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe
take to drinking, maltreat his motherless children, drift into other
evil courses, go steadily from bad to worse--'

'Yes, that's it,' interrupted Rogers, fervently, 'I've seen it a hundred
times--yes, more than a hundred. You put money into the hands of a man
like that, if you want to destroy him, that's all; just put money into
his hands, it's all you've got to do; and if it don't pull him down,
and take all the usefulness out of him, and all the self-respect and
everything, then I don't know human nature--ain't that so, Thompson?
And even if we were to give him a _third _of it; why, in less than six
months--'

'Less than six _weeks_, you'd better say!' said I, warming up and
breaking in. 'Unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands
where he couldn't touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than--'

'Of _course _he wouldn't,' said Thompson; 'I've edited books for
that kind of people; and the moment they get their hands on the
royalty--maybe it's three thousand, maybe it's two thousand--'

'What business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars, I should
like to know?' broke in Rogers, earnestly. 'A man perhaps perfectly
contented now, there in Mannheim, surrounded by his own class, eating
his bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone can
give, enjoying his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart; and
_blest_!--yes, I say blest! blest above all the myriads that go in silk
attire and walk the empty artificial round of social folly--but just
you put that temptation before him once! just you lay fifteen hundred
dollars before a man like that, and say--'

'Fifteen hundred devils!' cried I, '_five _hundred would rot his
principles, paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to
the gutter, thence to the almshouse, thence to----'

'_Why _put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?' interrupted the poet
earnestly and appealingly. 'He is happy where he is, and _as _he is.
Every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of
high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave
him undisturbed. That is real friendship, that is true friendship. We
could follow other courses that would be more showy; but none that would
be so truly kind and wise, depend upon it.'

After some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his
heart, felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter. It
was manifest that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker
_something_. There was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and
we finally decided to send him a chromo.

Well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily to
everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out: it transpired that these
two men were expecting to share equally in the money with me. That was
not my idea. I said that if they got half of it between them they might
consider themselves lucky. Rogers said--

'Who would have had _any _if it hadn't been for me? I flung out the
first hint--but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.'

Thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very
moment that Rogers had originally spoken.

I retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough,
and without anybody's help. I was slow about thinking, maybe, but I was
sure.

This matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man
got pretty badly battered. As soon as I had got myself mended up after
a fashion, I ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor. I
found Captain McCord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would
permit--

'I have come to say good-bye, captain. I wish to go ashore at Napoleon.'

'Go ashore where?'

'Napoleon.'

The captain laughed; but seeing that I was not in a jovial mood, stopped
that and said--

'But are you serious?'

'Serious? I certainly am.'

The captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said--

'He wants to get off at Napoleon!'

'Napoleon?'

'That's what he says.'

'Great Caesar's ghost!'

Uncle Mumford approached along the deck. The captain said--

'Uncle, here's a friend of yours wants to get off at Napoleon!'

'Well, by--?'

I said--

'Come, what is all this about? Can't a man go ashore at Napoleon if he
wants to?'

'Why, hang it, don't you know? There _isn't_ any Napoleon any more.
Hasn't been for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it,
tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!'

'Carried the _whole _town away?-banks, churches, jails,
newspaper-offices, court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable
_everything _?'

'Everything. just a fifteen-minute job.' or such a matter. Didn't leave
hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty
and one brick chimney. This boat is paddling along right now, where the
dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all
that's left of Napoleon. These dense woods on the right used to be a
mile back of the town. Take a look behind you--up-stream--now you begin
to recognize this country, don't you?'

'Yes, I do recognize it now. It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard
of; by a long shot the most wonderful--and unexpected.'

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and
umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news. Thompson put
a half-dollar in my hand and said softly--

'For my share of the chromo.'

Rogers followed suit.

Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between
unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good
big self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat
of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine
hospital; town of innumerable fights--an inquest every day; town where
I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the
whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed
news of the 'Pennsylvania's' mournful disaster a quarter of a century
ago; a town no more--swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes;
nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!




CHAPTER 33

Refreshments and Ethics

IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former
Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of
men and made them a vanity and a jest. When the State of Arkansas was
chartered, she controlled 'to the center of the river'--a most unstable
line. The State of Mississippi claimed 'to the channel'--another shifty
and unstable line. No. 74 belonged to Arkansas. By and by a cut-off
threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi.
'Middle of the river' on one side of it, 'channel' on the other. That
is as I understand the problem. Whether I have got the details right
or wrong, this _fact _remains: that here is this big and exceedingly
valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and
belonging to neither the one State nor the other; paying taxes to
neither, owing allegiance to neither. One man owns the whole island, and
of right is 'the man without a country.'

Island 92 belongs to Arkansas. The river moved it over and joined it
to Mississippi. A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a
Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under
Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required).

We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy--steamboat or
other moving thing seldom seen. Scenery as always: stretch upon stretch
of almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless
solitude. Here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on
the gray and grassless banks--cabins which had formerly stood a quarter
or half-mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther
and farther back as the shores caved in. As at Pilcher's Point, for
instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards in
three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had already caught
up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once more.

Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old
times; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is
Greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish
in the Valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing
a gross trade of $2,500,000 annually. A growing town.

There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an
enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results. Colonel Calhoun,
a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston and formed a syndicate
which purchased a large tract of land on the river, in Chicot County,
Arkansas--some ten thousand acres--for cotton-growing. The purpose is to
work on a cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle their own product;
supply their negro laborers with provisions and necessaries at a
trifling profit, say 8 or 10 per cent.; furnish them comfortable
quarters, etc., and encourage them to save money and remain on the
place. If this proves a financial success, as seems quite certain, they
propose to establish a banking-house in Greenville, and lend money at an
unburdensome rate of interest--6 per cent. is spoken of.

The trouble heretofore has been--I am quoting remarks of planters and
steamboatmen--that the planters, although owning the land, were without
cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop to carry on the
business. Consequently, the commission dealer who furnishes the money
takes some risk and demands big interest--usually 10 per cent., and
2{half} per cent. for negotiating the loan. The planter has also to buy
his supplies through the same dealer, paying commissions and profits.
Then when he ships his crop, the dealer adds his commissions, insurance,
etc. So, taking it by and large, and first and last, the dealer's share
of that crop is about 25 per cent.'{footnote ['But what can the State do
where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from
18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of purchasing their
crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege
of purchasing all their supplies at 100 per cent. profit?'--_Edward
Atkinson_.]}

A cotton-planter's estimate of the average margin of profit on planting,
in his section: One man and mule will raise ten acres of cotton, giving
ten bales cotton, worth, say, $500; cost of producing, say $350; net
profit, $150, or $15 per acre. There is also a profit now from
the cotton-seed, which formerly had little value--none where much
transportation was necessary. In sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton
four hundred are lint, worth, say, ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred
pounds of seed, worth $12 or $13 per ton. Maybe in future even the stems
will not be thrown away. Mr. Edward Atkinson says that for each bale
of cotton there are fifteen hundred pounds of stems, and that these are
very rich in phosphate of lime and potash; that when ground and mixed
with ensilage or cotton-seed meal (which is too rich for use as fodder
in large quantities), the stem mixture makes a superior food, rich in
all the elements needed for the production of milk, meat, and bone.
Heretofore the stems have been considered a nuisance.

Complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former
slave, since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation
with him, no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a 'store'
himself, and supply the negro's wants and thus protect the negro's
pocket and make him able and willing to stay on the place and an
advantage to him to do it, but lets that privilege to some thrifty
Israelite, who encourages the thoughtless negro and wife to buy all
sorts of things which they could do without--buy on credit, at big
prices, month after month, credit based on the negro's share of the
growing crop; and at the end of the season, the negro's share belongs
to the Israelite,' the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged,
dissatisfied, restless, and both he and the planter are injured; for he
will take steamboat and migrate, and the planter must get a stranger in
his place who does not know him, does not care for him, will fatten the
Israelite a season, and follow his predecessor per steamboat.

It is hoped that the Calhoun Company will show, by its humane and
protective treatment of its laborers, that its method is the most
profitable for both planter and negro; and it is believed that a general
adoption of that method will then follow.

And where so many are saying their say, shall not the barkeeper testify?
He is thoughtful, observant, never drinks; endeavors to earn his salary,
and _would _earn it if there were custom enough. He says the people
along here in Mississippi and Louisiana will send up the river to buy
vegetables rather than raise them, and they will come aboard at the
landings and buy fruits of the barkeeper. Thinks they 'don't know
anything but cotton;' believes they don't know how to raise vegetables
and fruit--'at least the most of them.' Says 'a nigger will go to H for
a watermelon' ('H' is all I find in the stenographer's report--means
Halifax probably, though that seems a good way to go for a watermelon).
Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up the river, brings them
down and sells them for fifty. 'Why does he mix such elaborate and
picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?' Because they won't
have any other. 'They want a big drink; don't make any difference what
you make it of, they want the worth of their money. You give a nigger a
plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents--will he touch it? No.
Ain't size enough to it. But you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless
rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful--red's the
main thing--and he wouldn't put down that glass to go to a circus.'

All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned by one firm.
They furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the
barkeepers 'on salary.' Good liquors? Yes, on some of the boats, where
there are the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it. On
the other boats? No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it.
'Brandy? Yes, I've got brandy, plenty of it; but you don't want any of
it unless you've made your will.' It isn't as it used to be in the
old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and
everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad,
and the rest don't drink.' In the old times the barkeeper owned the bar
himself, 'and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was
the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a trip. A
father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune. Now he
leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will
do. Yes, indeedy, times are changed. Why, do you know, on the principal
line of boats on the Upper Mississippi, they don't have any bar at all!
Sounds like poetry, but it's the petrified truth.'




CHAPTER 34

Tough Yarns

STACK island. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence,
Louisiana--which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come
to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable
gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the
place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling--also with truth.

A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region
which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a
steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas City,
and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower packet.
He was an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly
unworldly, for a river man. Among other things, he said that Arkansas
had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations
concerning the mosquitoes here. One may smile, said he, and turn the
matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the
effects produced, in the way of discouragement of immigration, and
diminished values of property, it was quite the opposite of a small
thing, or thing in any wise to be coughed down or sneered at. These
mosquitoes had been persistently represented as being formidable and
lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size,
diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you would have
supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was soft on the
Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of Lake
Providence to make up for it--'those Lake Providence colossi,' as he
finely called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that
four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would
kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of
casual way--and yet significant way--to 'the fact that the life policy
in its simplest form is unknown in Lake Providence--they take out a
mosquito policy besides.' He told many remarkable things about those
lawless insects. Among others, said he had seen them try to vote.
Noticing that this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us,
he modified it a little: said he might have been mistaken, as to that
particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls 'canvassing.'

There was another passenger--friend of H.'s--who backed up the harsh
evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures
which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizable, merely
pretty sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold,
inexorable 'Wait--knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go
on;' or, 'Wait--you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it
down--you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always
dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;' or, 'Pardon, once more: if
you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to
get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the
water there is in the river already; stick to facts--just stick to
the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen
truth--ain't that so, gentlemen?' He explained privately that it was
necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds;
it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., 'knew to his
sorrow.' Said he, 'I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous
lie once, that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was
actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and
people came miles to see me fan myself with it.'




CHAPTER 35

Vicksburg During the Trouble

WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but
we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like
Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless
water--also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the
river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town;
that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land
some distance below it.

Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous
war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls,
cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service
during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863.
They were used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;
not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They
were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then
branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six
weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are some materials out of which to
reproduce it:--

Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand
non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly
in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries;
hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro;
no God-speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed
acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious
dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see
steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing
toward the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;
no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over
bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet
there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten
dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a
gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of
drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to
do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three
o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured
tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of
hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in
a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky
is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring
bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city;
descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment
later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children
scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the
humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.

The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron
rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;
silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;
by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and
reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow
heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about,
stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh
air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off
home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness
continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the
war-tempest breaks forth once more.

There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the
population of a village--would they not come to know each other, after a
week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate
experiences of one would be of interest to all?

Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost
anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could
you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the
imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did
experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it
might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is
an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;
novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's
former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his
imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live
that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and
feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what
then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become
commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a
landsman's pulse.

Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man
and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people
told it without fire, almost without interest.

A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues
eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore
the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home
and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the
possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks
about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect:--

'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us,
anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays,
and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the
night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.
At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did
afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched
them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or
three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning,
through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all
over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of
false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that
game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things
already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about
shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a
light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say,
'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of
it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it. If a
shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood
still;--uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let
go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a
ripper!' or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe,
we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead.
In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again,
gents!' and shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading
the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye
canted up watching the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they
were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make
certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for
shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter
of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying
around. Ours hadn't; they had _iron _litter. Sometimes a man
would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his
neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front
yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn't stand such
a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses
vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. _Whole _panes were as scarce
as news.

'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye
pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit
quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on
account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and
pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer
combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had
an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was
just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while,
and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got
hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know,
but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left
it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick
the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I
reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey _is saved_.'
And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as
scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another
taste during the siege.

'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.
Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no
turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made
a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night,
Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.

'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a
dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged
there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I
don't know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever
rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us
within a couple of years. One night a shell burst in front of the hole
and caved it in and stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while,
digging out. Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two
openings--ought to have thought of it at first.

'Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two. Of course
it was good; anything is good when you are starving.

This man had kept a diary during--six weeks? No, only the first six
days. The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third,
one--loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two
the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific
Vicksburg having now become commonplace and matter of course.

The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general
reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety,
full of incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longer
than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases,
both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the
bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine.

The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here. Over the
great gateway is this inscription:--

"HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861
TO 1865."

The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide
prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad
terraces, with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment
in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a
piece of native wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect
in its charm. Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the
national Government. The Government's work is always conspicuous for
excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its
work well in the first place, and then takes care of it.

By winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth between
perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we drove out a
mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the
surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton. Its metal
will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced
its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations
are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It overlooks a
picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque
itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds. The battered remnant of
the marble monument has been removed to the National Cemetery.

On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed
us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard
since the day it fell there during the siege.

'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went
for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't; I says, "Jes'
make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place,
jes' as you's a mind to, but I's got business out in de woods, I has!"'

Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant
residences; it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers;
is pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural
regions, and has a promising future of prosperity and importance.

Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up
their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and
upbuilding, henceforth. They are acting upon this idea. The signs are,
that the next twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in
the Valley, in the direction of increased population and wealth, and in
the intellectual advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go
naturally with these. And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river
towns will manage to find and use a chance, here and there, to cripple
and retard their progress. They kept themselves back in the days of
steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded
as to prohibit what may be called small _retail _traffic in freights and
passengers. Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not
afford to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight.
Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns
diligently and effectively discouraged it. They could have had many
boats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high
rates compulsory. It was a policy which extended--and extends--from New
Orleans to St. Paul.

We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower--an
interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this
time, because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in
force--but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New
Orleans boat on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project.

Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night. I insert
it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it
belongs here--for it doesn't. It was told by a passenger--a college
professor--and was called to the surface in the course of a general
conversation which began with talk about horses, drifted into talk
about astronomy, then into talk about the lynching of the gamblers
in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into talk about dreams and
superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute over free trade
and protection.




CHAPTER 36

The Professor's Yarn

IT was in the early days. I was not a college professor then. I was a
humble-minded young land-surveyor, with the world before me--to survey,
in case anybody wanted it done. I had a contract to survey a route for a
great mining-ditch in California, and I was on my way thither, by sea--a
three or four weeks' voyage. There were a good many passengers, but I
had very little to say to them; reading and dreaming were my passions,
and I avoided conversation in order to indulge these appetites. There
were three professional gamblers on board--rough, repulsive fellows. I
never had any talk with them, yet I could not help seeing them with some
frequency, for they gambled in an upper-deck stateroom every day and
night, and in my promenades I often had glimpses of them through their
door, which stood a little ajar to let out the surplus tobacco smoke and
profanity. They were an evil and hateful presence, but I had to put up
with it, of course,

There was one other passenger who fell under my eye a good deal, for he
seemed determined to be friendly with me, and I could not have gotten
rid of him without running some chance of hurting his feelings, and I
was far from wishing to do that. Besides, there was something engaging
in his countrified simplicity and his beaming good-nature. The first
time I saw this Mr. John Backus, I guessed, from his clothes and his
looks, that he was a grazier or farmer from the backwoods of some
western State--doubtless Ohio--and afterward when he dropped into his
personal history and I discovered that he _was _a cattle-raiser from
interior Ohio, I was so pleased with my own penetration that I warmed
toward him for verifying my instinct.

He got to dropping alongside me every day, after breakfast, to help me
make my promenade; and so, in the course of time, his easy-working jaw
had told me everything about his business, his prospects, his family,
his relatives, his politics--in fact everything that concerned a Backus,
living or dead. And meantime I think he had managed to get out of me
everything I knew about my trade, my tribe, my purposes, my prospects,
and myself. He was a gentle and persuasive genius, and this thing showed
it; for I was not given to talking about my matters. I said something
about triangulation, once; the stately word pleased his ear; he inquired
what it meant; I explained; after that he quietly and inoffensively
ignored my name, and always called me Triangle.

What an enthusiast he was in cattle! At the bare name of a bull or
a cow, his eye would light and his eloquent tongue would turn itself
loose. As long as I would walk and listen, he would walk and talk; he
knew all breeds, he loved all breeds, he caressed them all with his
affectionate tongue. I tramped along in voiceless misery whilst the
cattle question was up; when I could endure it no longer, I used to
deftly insert a scientific topic into the conversation; then my eye
fired and his faded; my tongue fluttered, his stopped; life was a joy to
me, and a sadness to him.

One day he said, a little hesitatingly, and with somewhat of
diffidence--

'Triangle, would you mind coming down to my stateroom a minute, and have
a little talk on a certain matter?'

I went with him at once. Arrived there, he put his head out, glanced up
and down the saloon warily, then closed the door and locked it. He sat
down on the sofa, and he said--

'I'm a-going to make a little proposition to you, and if it strikes
you favorable, it'll be a middling good thing for both of us. You ain't
a-going out to Californy for fun, nuther am I--it's business, ain't that
so? Well, you can do me a good turn, and so can I you, if we see fit.
I've raked and scraped and saved, a considerable many years, and I've
got it all here.' He unlocked an old hair trunk, tumbled a chaos of
shabby clothes aside, and drew a short stout bag into view for a moment,
then buried it again and relocked the trunk. Dropping his voice to a
cautious low tone, he continued, 'She's all there--a round ten thousand
dollars in yellow-boys; now this is my little idea: What I don't know
about raising cattle, ain't worth knowing. There's mints of money in it,
in Californy. Well, I know, and you know, that all along a line that
's being surveyed, there 's little dabs of land that they call "gores,"
that fall to the surveyor free gratis for nothing. All you've got to do,
on your side, is to survey in such a way that the "gores" will fall on
good fat land, then you turn 'em over to me, I stock 'em with cattle,
in rolls the cash, I plank out your share of the dollars regular, right
along, and--'

I was sorry to wither his blooming enthusiasm, but it could not be
helped. I interrupted, and said severely--

'I am not that kind of a surveyor. Let us change the subject, Mr.
Backus.'

It was pitiful to see his confusion and hear his awkward and shamefaced
apologies. I was as much distressed as he was--especially as he seemed
so far from having suspected that there was anything improper in his
proposition. So I hastened to console him and lead him on to forget his
mishap in a conversational orgy about cattle and butchery. We were lying
at Acapulco; and, as we went on deck, it happened luckily that the crew
were just beginning to hoist some beeves aboard in slings. Backus's
melancholy vanished instantly, and with it the memory of his late
mistake.

'Now only look at that!' cried he; 'My goodness, Triangle, what _would
_they say to it in _Ohio_. Wouldn't their eyes bug out, to see 'em
handled like that?--wouldn't they, though?'

All the passengers were on deck to look--even the gamblers--and Backus
knew them all, and had afflicted them all with his pet topic. As I moved
away, I saw one of the gamblers approach and accost him; then another
of them; then the third. I halted; waited; watched; the conversation
continued between the four men; it grew earnest; Backus drew gradually
away; the gamblers followed, and kept at his elbow. I was uncomfortable.
However, as they passed me presently, I heard Backus say, with a tone of
persecuted annoyance--

'But it ain't any use, gentlemen; I tell you again, as I've told you a
half a dozen times before, I warn't raised to it, and I ain't a-going to
resk it.'

I felt relieved. 'His level head will be his sufficient protection,' I
said to myself.

During the fortnight's run from Acapulco to San Francisco I several
times saw the gamblers talking earnestly with Backus, and once I threw
out a gentle warning to him. He chuckled comfortably and said--

'Oh, yes! they tag around after me considerable--want me to play a
little, just for amusement, they say--but laws-a-me, if my folks have
told me once to look out for that sort of live-stock, they've told me a
thousand times, I reckon.'

By-and-bye, in due course, we were approaching San Francisco. It was
an ugly black night, with a strong wind blowing, but there was not much
sea. I was on deck, alone. Toward ten I started below. A figure issued
from the gamblers' den, and disappeared in the darkness. I experienced
a shock, for I was sure it was Backus. I flew down the companion-way,
looked about for him, could not find him, then returned to the deck just
in time to catch a glimpse of him as he re-entered that confounded nest
of rascality. Had he yielded at last? I feared it. What had he gone
below for?--His bag of coin? Possibly. I drew near the door, full of
bodings. It was a-crack, and I glanced in and saw a sight that made me
bitterly wish I had given my attention to saving my poor cattle-friend,
instead of reading and dreaming my foolish time away. He was gambling.
Worse still, he was being plied with champagne, and was already showing
some effect from it. He praised the 'cider,' as he called it, and said
now that he had got a taste of it he almost believed he would drink it
if it was spirits, it was so good and so ahead of anything he had ever
run across before. Surreptitious smiles, at this, passed from one rascal
to another, and they filled all the glasses, and whilst Backus honestly
drained his to the bottom they pretended to do the same, but threw the
wine over their shoulders.

I could not bear the scene, so I wandered forward and tried to interest
myself in the sea and the voices of the wind. But no, my uneasy spirit
kept dragging me back at quarter-hour intervals; and always I saw Backus
drinking his wine--fairly and squarely, and the others throwing theirs
away. It was the painfullest night I ever spent.

The only hope I had was that we might reach our anchorage with
speed--that would break up the game. I helped the ship along all I could
with my prayers. At last we went booming through the Golden Gate, and my
pulses leaped for joy. I hurried back to that door and glanced in. Alas,
there was small room for hope--Backus's eyes were heavy and bloodshot,
his sweaty face was crimson, his speech maudlin and thick, his body
sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motion of the ship. He drained
another glass to the dregs, whilst the cards were being dealt.

He took his hand, glanced at it, and his dull eyes lit up for a moment.
The gamblers observed it, and showed their gratification by hardly
perceptible signs.

'How many cards?'

'None!' said Backus.

One villain--named Hank Wiley--discarded one card, the others three
each. The betting began. Heretofore the bets had been trifling--a dollar
or two; but Backus started off with an eagle now, Wiley hesitated a
moment, then 'saw it' and 'went ten dollars better.' The other two threw
up their hands.

Backus went twenty better. Wiley said--

'I see that, and go you a hundred better!' then smiled and reached for
the money.

'Let it alone,' said Backus, with drunken gravity.

'What! you mean to say you're going to cover it?'

'Cover it? Well, I reckon I am--and lay another hundred on top of it,
too.'

He reached down inside his overcoat and produced the required sum.

'Oh, that's your little game, is it? I see your raise, and raise it five
hundred!' said Wiley.

'Five hundred better.' said the foolish bull-driver, and pulled out the
amount and showered it on the pile. The three conspirators hardly tried
to conceal their exultation.

All diplomacy and pretense were dropped now, and the sharp exclamations
came thick and fast, and the yellow pyramid grew higher and higher. At
last ten thousand dollars lay in view. Wiley cast a bag of coin on the
table, and said with mocking gentleness--

'Five thousand dollars better, my friend from the rural districts--what
do you say _now_?'

'I _call _you!' said Backus, heaving his golden shot-bag on the pile.
'What have you got?'

'Four kings, you d--d fool!' and Wiley threw down his cards and
surrounded the stakes with his arms.

'Four _aces_, you ass!' thundered Backus, covering his man with a cocked
revolver. '_I'm a professional gambler myself, and i've been laying for
you duffers all this voyage!'_

Down went the anchor, rumbledy-dum-dum! and the long trip was ended.

Well--well, it is a sad world. One of the three gamblers was Backus's
'pal.' It was he that dealt the fateful hands. According to an
understanding with the two victims, he was to have given Backus four
queens, but alas, he didn't.

A week later, I stumbled upon Backus--arrayed in the height of
fashion--in Montgomery Street. He said, cheerily, as we were parting--

'Ah, by-the-way, you needn't mind about those gores. I don't really know
anything about cattle, except what I was able to pick up in a week's
apprenticeship over in Jersey just before we sailed. My cattle-culture
and cattle-enthusiasm have served their turn--I shan't need them any
more.'

Next day we reluctantly parted from the 'Gold Dust' and her officers,
hoping to see that boat and all those officers again, some day. A thing
which the fates were to render tragically impossible!




CHAPTER 37

The End of the 'Gold Dust'

FOR, three months later, August 8, while I was writing one of these
foregoing chapters, the New York papers brought this telegram--

A TERRIBLE DISASTER.

SEVENTEEN PERSONS KILLED BY AN EXPLOSION ON THE STEAMER 'GOLD DUST.'

'NASHVILLE, Aug. 7.--A despatch from Hickman, Ky., says--

'The steamer "Gold Dust" exploded her boilers at three o'clock to-day,
just after leaving Hickman. Forty-seven persons were scalded and
seventeen are missing. The boat was landed in the eddy just above the
town, and through the exertions of the citizens the cabin passengers,
officers, and part of the crew and deck passengers were taken ashore and
removed to the hotels and residences. Twenty-four of the injured were
lying in Holcomb's dry-goods store at one time, where they received
every attention before being removed to more comfortable places.'

A list of the names followed, whereby it appeared that of the seventeen
dead, one was the barkeeper; and among the forty-seven wounded, were the
captain, chief mate, second mate, and second and third clerks; also Mr.
Lem S. Gray, pilot, and several members of the crew.

In answer to a private telegram, we learned that none of these was
severely hurt, except Mr. Gray. Letters received afterward confirmed
this news, and said that Mr. Gray was improving and would get well.
Later letters spoke less hopefully of his case; and finally came one
announcing his death. A good man, a most companionable and manly man,
and worthy of a kindlier fate.




CHAPTER 38

The House Beautiful

WE took passage in a Cincinnati boat for New Orleans; or on a Cincinnati
boat--either is correct; the former is the eastern form of putting it,
the latter the western.

Mr. Dickens declined to agree that the Mississippi steamboats were
'magnificent,' or that they were 'floating palaces,'--terms which
had always been applied to them; terms which did not over-express the
admiration with which the people viewed them.

Mr. Dickens's position was unassailable, possibly; the people's position
was certainly unassailable. If Mr. Dickens was comparing these boats
with the crown jewels; or with the Taj, or with the Matterhorn; or with
some other priceless or wonderful thing which he had seen, they were not
magnificent--he was right. The people compared them with what they had
seen; and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent--the
term was the correct one, it was not at all too strong. The people were
as right as was Mr. Dickens. The steamboats were finer than anything on
shore. Compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in
the Valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were 'palaces.' To
a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis, they were not
magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority of those
populations, and to the entire populations spread over both banks
between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces; they tallied with
the citizen's dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it.

Every town and village along that vast stretch of double river-frontage
had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--the home of its
wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. It is easy to describe it:
large grassy yard, with paling fence painted white--in fair repair;
brick walk from gate to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house,
painted white and porticoed like a Grecian temple--with this difference,
that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals were a pathetic
sham, being made of white pine, and painted; iron knocker; brass door
knob--discolored, for lack of polishing. Within, an uncarpeted hall, of
planed boards; opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen--in
some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet; mahogany
center-table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade--standing on a
gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns, by the young ladies
of the house, and called a lamp-mat; several books, piled and disposed,
with cast-iron exactness, according to an inherited and unchangeable
plan; among them, Tupper, much penciled; also, 'Friendship's Offering,'
and 'Affection's Wreath,' with their sappy inanities illustrated
in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian; 'Alonzo and Melissa:'
maybe 'Ivanhoe:' also 'Album,' full of original 'poetry' of the
Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed; two or three
goody-goody works--'Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,' etc.; current
number of the chaste and innocuous Godey's 'Lady's Book,' with painted
fashion-plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike--lips and
eyelids the same size--each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge
sticking from under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot.
Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing
through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. On
each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of
peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or
in wax, and painted to resemble the originals--which they don't. Over
middle of mantel, engraving--Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the
wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and-lightning crewels by
one of the young ladies--work of art which would have made Washington
hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was
going to be taken of it. Piano--kettle in disguise--with music, bound
and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand near by: Battle of Prague;
Bird Waltz; Arkansas Traveler; Rosin the Bow; Marseilles Hymn; On a Lone
Barren Isle (St. Helena); The Last Link is Broken; She wore a Wreath of
Roses the Night when last we met; Go, forget me, Why should Sorrow o'er
that Brow a Shadow fling; Hours there were to Memory Dearer; Long, Long
Ago; Days of Absence; A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling
Deep; Bird at Sea; and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive
singer has left it, _ro_-holl on, silver _moo_-hoon, guide the
_trav_-el-lerr his _way_, etc. Tilted pensively against the piano, a
guitar--guitar capable of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you
give it a start. Frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on
the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses:
progenitor of the 'God Bless Our Home' of modern commerce. Framed in
black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed
on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white
crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds,
pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal
conspicuous in the corner. Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena. Steel-plates, Trumbull's Battle of
Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar. Copper-plates, Moses Smiting
the Rock, and Return of the Prodigal Son. In big gilt frame, slander
of the family in oil: papa holding a book ('Constitution of the United
States'); guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from
its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped
pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with
ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back. These
persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned. Opposite, in
gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff,
old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from
a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock dome,
large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax. Pyramidal
what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of
the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the Lord's
Prayer carved on it; another shell--of the long-oval sort, narrow,
straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end--portrait
of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had Washington's
mouth, originally--artist should have built to that. These two are
memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French
Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz, with gold
wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in
it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle
who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors--being
skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in
the rock-candy style--works of art which were achieved by the young
ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots
in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a
card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its
under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--limbs
and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter
presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be
attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon,
done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents,
cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no
templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in
the distance--that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague
figures lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured from
doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much
combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible
Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize
could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped
together--husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and
both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the
daguerreotypist's brisk 'Now smile, if you please!' Bracketed over
what-not--place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done
by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died. Pity,
too; for she might have repented of this in time. Horse-hair chairs,
horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from under you. Window shades,
of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castles stenciled on them in
fierce colors. Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin,
gilded. Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort,
with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening; snuffy
feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane-seat chairs, splint-bottomed
rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size, veneered frame;
inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly--but not certainly;
brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers. Nothing else in the room.
Not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has
ever seen one.

That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the
suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis. When he stepped aboard
a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world: chimney-tops
cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--and maybe painted red;
pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with
white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the
derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture
on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and
furnished with Windsor armchairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white
'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving
patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead
all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, each
an April shower of glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling
everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a
long-drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying
spectacle! In the ladies' cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft
as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers.
Then the Bridal Chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still
alive and unhanged, at that day--Bridal Chamber whose pretentious
flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect of
that hosannahing citizen. Every state-room had its couple of cozy clean
bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes
there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could
be told from mosquito netting by an expert--though generally these
things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved passengers cleansed themselves
at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also
public towels, public combs, and public soap.

Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her in her
highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable, and satisfactory
estate. Now cake her over with a layer of ancient and obdurate dirt,
and you have the Cincinnati steamer awhile ago referred to. Not all
over--only inside; for she was ably officered in all departments except
the steward's.

But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the
counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times: for
the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change; neither
has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any.




CHAPTER 39

Manufactures and Miscreants

WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it
is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off; a former distance
of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw
Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana, out into the country and ended
its career as a river town. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by
a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will
magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the
exiled town.

In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached
Natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet
to come, is not on a hill, but only on high ground. Famous
Natchez-under-the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in
outward aspect--judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession
of foreign tourists--it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small,
straggling, and shabby. It had a desperate reputation, morally, in
the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking,
carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the
river, in those days. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has
always been attractive. Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its
charms:

'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs,
as they call the short intervals of high ground. The town of Natchez is
beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that
its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that
stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto
and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers that flourish
there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the
furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air,
or endure the winter without shelter. With the exception of this
sweet spot, I thought all the little towns and villages we passed
wretched-looking in the extreme.'

Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now, and is
adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all rich outlying
regions that are naturally tributary to her. And like Vicksburg and New
Orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makes thirty tons of ice a day.
In Vicksburg and Natchez, in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich
could wear it. But anybody and everybody can have it now. I visited one
of the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions
might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics. But there was
nothing striking in the aspect of the place. It was merely a spacious
house, with some innocent steam machinery in one end of it and some big
porcelain pipes running here and there. No, not porcelain--they merely
seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammonia which was being breathed
through them had coated them to the thickness of your hand with solid
milk-white ice. It ought to have melted; for one did not require winter
clothing in that atmosphere: but it did not melt; the inside of the pipe
was too cold.

Sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes, a foot square and two
feet long, and open at the top end. These were full of clear water;
and around each box, salt and other proper stuff was packed; also, the
ammonia gases were applied to the water in some way which will always
remain a secret to me, because I was not able to understand the process.
While the water in the boxes gradually froze, men gave it a stir or two
with a stick occasionally--to liberate the air-bubbles, I think. Other
men were continually lifting out boxes whose contents had become hard
frozen. They gave the box a single dip into a vat of boiling water, to
melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin, then they shot the block
out upon a platform car, and it was ready for market. These big blocks
were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. In certain of them, big bouquets
of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers had been frozen-in; in others,
beautiful silken-clad French dolls, and other pretty objects.
These blocks were to be set on end in a platter, in the center of
dinner-tables, to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for
the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate
glass. I was told that this factory could retail its ice, by wagon,
throughout New Orleans, in the humblest dwelling-house quantities, at
six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficient profit. This being the
case, there is business for ice-factories in the North; for we get ice
on no such terms there, if one take less than three hundred and fifty
pounds at a delivery.

The Rosalie Yarn Mill, of Natchez, has a capacity of 6,000 spindles and
160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began
operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with
4,000 spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000, all subscribed in the
town. Two years later, the same stockholders increased their capital to
$225,000; added a third story to the mill, increased its length to 317
feet; added machinery to increase the capacity to 10,300 spindles and
304 looms. The company now employ 250 operatives, many of whom are
citizens of Natchez. 'The mill works 5,000 bales of cotton annually and
manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and
sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000 yards of these goods per
year.'{footnote [New Orleans Times-Democrat, 26 Aug, 1882.]} A close
corporation--stock held at $5,000 per share, but none in the market.

The changes in the Mississippi River are great and strange, yet were to
be expected; but I was not expecting to live to see Natchez and these
other river towns become manufacturing strongholds and railway centers.

Speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talk upon that topic which I
heard--which I overheard--on board the Cincinnati boat. I awoke out of
a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion of voices in my ears. I
listened--two men were talking; subject, apparently, the great
inundation. I looked out through the open transom. The two men were
eating a late breakfast; sitting opposite each other; nobody else
around. They closed up the inundation with a few words--having used it,
evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--then they
dropped into business. It soon transpired that they were drummers--one
belonging in Cincinnati, the other in New Orleans. Brisk men, energetic
of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their
religion.

'Now as to this article,' said Cincinnati, slashing into the ostensible
butter and holding forward a slab of it on his knife-blade, 'it's from
our house; look at it--smell of it--taste it. Put any test on it you
want to. Take your own time--no hurry--make it thorough. There
now--what do you say? butter, ain't it. Not by a thundering sight--it's
oleomargarine! Yes, sir, that's what it is--oleomargarine. You can't
tell it from butter; by George, an _expert _can't. It's from our house.
We supply most of the boats in the West; there's hardly a pound of
butter on one of them. We are crawling right along--_jumping _right
along is the word. We are going to have that entire trade. Yes, and the
hotel trade, too. You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you
can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in
the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, outside of the biggest cities. Why, we
are turning out oleomargarine _now _by the thousands of tons. And we can
sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has _got _to take it--can't
get around it you see. Butter don't stand any show--there ain't any
chance for competition. Butter's had its _day_--and from this out,
butter goes to the wall. There's more money in oleomargarine than--why,
you can't imagine the business we do. I've stopped in every town from
Cincinnati to Natchez; and I've sent home big orders from every one of
them.'

And so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer, in the same fervid
strain. Then New Orleans piped up and said--

Yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's a certainty; but it ain't the
only one around that's first-rate. For instance, they make olive-oil out
of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that you can't tell them apart.'

'Yes, that's so,' responded Cincinnati, 'and it was a tip-top business
for a while. They sent it over and brought it back from France and
Italy, with the United States custom-house mark on it to indorse it for
genuine, and there was no end of cash in it; but France and Italy broke
up the game--of course they naturally would. Cracked on such a rattling
impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn't stand the raise; had to hang
up and quit.'

'Oh, it _did_, did it? You wait here a minute.'

Goes to his state-room, brings back a couple of long bottles, and takes
out the corks--says:

'There now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the
labels. One of 'm's from Europe, the other's never been out of this
country. One's European olive-oil, the other's American cotton-seed
olive-oil. Tell 'm apart? 'Course you can't. Nobody can. People that
want to, can go to the expense and trouble of shipping their oils to
Europe and back--it's their privilege; but our firm knows a trick worth
six of that. We turn out the whole thing--clean from the word go--in our
factory in New Orleans: labels, bottles, oil, everything. Well, no, not
labels: been buying them abroad--get them dirt-cheap there. You see,
there's just one little wee speck, essence, or whatever it is, in
a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give it a smell, or a flavor, or
something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectly easy then to
turn the oil into any kind of oil you want to, and there ain't anybody
that can detect the true from the false. Well, we know how to get that
one little particle out--and we're the only firm that does. And we turn
out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable! We are doing
a ripping trade, too--as I could easily show you by my order-book for
this trip. Maybe you'll butter everybody's bread pretty soon, but we'll
cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, and that's a
dead-certain thing.'

Cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration. The two scoundrels
exchanged business-cards, and rose. As they left the table, Cincinnati
said--

'But you have to have custom-house marks, don't you? How do you manage
that?'

I did not catch the answer.

We passed Port Hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the
war--the night-battle there between Farragut's fleet and the Confederate
land batteries, April 14th, 1863; and the memorable land battle, two
months later, which lasted eight hours--eight hours of exceptionally
fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally, in the repulse of the
Union forces with great slaughter.




CHAPTER 40

Castles and Culture

BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so; like
a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications,
no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia-trees in the Capitol
grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge
snow-ball blossoms. The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want
distance on it, because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom
blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly
in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the
plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters
clustered together in the middle distance--were in view. And there was a
tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air.

And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise: a wide river hence
to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars,
snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.

Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for
it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been
built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago,
with his medieval romances. The South has not yet recovered from the
debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes
and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still
survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the
wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories
and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy
humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough, that a
whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine
within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever
have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more
pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and
perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let
dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this
restoration-money to the building of something genuine.

Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly
of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female
Institute' of Columbia; Tennessee. The following remark is from the same
advertisement--

'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and
beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to
the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and
ivy-mantled porches.'

Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping
hotel in a castle.

By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough;
but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age
romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and
infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has
seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake.

Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.'
Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in that
unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems
to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter,
and means the same thing: that is, if either phrase means anything at
all--

'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by
sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the
exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south.
Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this
continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the
southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and
propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and
solicit southern patronage.'

{footnote [Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutes after ten
o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry,
Jr., were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday
afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to
kill him. This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry that it
was not the place to settle their difficulties. Mabry then told O'Connor
he should not live. It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not.
The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some
property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoon Mabry sent word
to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight. This morning Major O'Connor
was standing in the door of the Mechanics' National Bank, of which
he was president. General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay
Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the
bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired.
Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. As he fell O'Connor fired
again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh. O'Connor then reached
into the bank and got another shot gun. About this time Joseph A. Mabry,
Jr., son of General Mabry, came rushing down the street, unseen by
O'Connor until within forty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the
shot taking effect in O'Connor's right breast, passing through the body
near the heart. The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired, the
load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side. Mabry fell
pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantly O'Connor fell dead
without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise, but fell back dead. The whole
tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neither of the three spoke
after he was shot. General Mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body.
A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot, and
another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had their clothing
pierced by buckshot. The affair caused great excitement, and Gay Street
was thronged with thousands of people. General Mabry and his son Joe
were acquitted only a few days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don
Lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. Will Mabry was
killed by Don Lusby last Christmas. Major Thomas O'Connor was President
of the Mechanics' National Bank here, and was the wealthiest man in the
State.--_Associated Press Telegram_.

One day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville, Tenn.,
Female College, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told that his
brother-in-law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him. Burton, it
seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife into another. The
Professor armed himself with a double-barreled shot gun, started out in
search of his brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon,
and blew his brains out. The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the
Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community;
knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public
sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself.

About the same time, two young men in North Carolina quarreled about a
girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged. Friends tried to reconcile
them, but had their labor for their pains. On the 24th the young men
met in the public highway. One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the
other an ax. The man with the club fought desperately for his life, but
it was a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blow sent his
club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead man.

About the same time, two 'highly connected' young Virginians, clerks in
a hardware store at Charlottesville, while 'skylarking,' came to blows.
Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads's eyes; Roads demanded an
apology; Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was
inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and
it was too late at night to procure them. One of them suggested that
butcher-knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the
suggestion; the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash in
his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal. If Dick has been arrested,
the news has not reached us. He 'expressed deep regret,' and we are
told by a Staunton correspondent of the _Philadelphia Press_ that 'every
effort has been made to hush the matter up.'--_Extracts From The Public
Journals_.]}

What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that,
probably blows it from a castle.

From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border both
sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels
back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear.
Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both
banks--standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad
river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.
A most home-like and happy-looking region. And now and then you see a
pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees. Here is
testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed
along here half a century ago. Mrs. Trollope says--

'The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued
unvaried for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and
luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange,
were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary of
looking at them.'

Captain Basil Hall--

'The district of country which lies adjacent to the Mississippi, in
the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar
planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous
slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly thriving air to
the river scenery.

All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. The
descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in
order to exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day--except
as to the 'trigness' of the houses. The whitewash is gone from the
negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so
shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected
look. It is the blight of the war. Twenty-one years ago everything was
trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had been in 1827,
as described by those tourists.

Unfortunate tourists! People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies,
and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same. They
told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators--or crocodiles, as she calls
them--were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a
blood-curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into
a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children.
The woman, by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible
alligator; but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children
besides. One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be
sensitive--but they were. It is difficult, at this day, to understand,
and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave,
honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Capt. Basil
Hall got.




CHAPTER 41

The Metropolis of the South

THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were
unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped
in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms
through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under
his level and out of sight. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New
Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee-rim,
the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a
dish--and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down
upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that
frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.

The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city
looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of
Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the
war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed
with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a
sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned
into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a
height had the war news sent up the price of the article.

The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as
many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not
altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.

The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increased
in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The
dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep,
trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of
reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the
sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads;
the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as
dusty-looking as ever.

Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly,
with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying
street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas
crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode.

Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speak in broad,
general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the
cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far-seeing,
and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is
true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough, genuine
enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like
a state prison. But it was built before the war. Architecture in America
may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe,
has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck--to have had no great
fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case,
I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical
improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this
in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Boston was commonplace
before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city
in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty,
elegance, and tastefulness.

However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. When
completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and beautiful
building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams
or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city, it will
be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has
been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate
eye and taste; a _suggester_, so to speak.

The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious,
long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city and the
city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep.
Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature.
The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent
disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times
a day, by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never
stands still, but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have
been made; and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during
the long intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one
of the healthiest cities in the Union. There's plenty of ice now for
everybody, manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially,
and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our
visit, it was the best lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking.
The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New
York, and very much better. One had this modified noonday not only in
Canal and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch
of five miles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city
now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style
pleasure resorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is
everywhere. One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The
newspapers, as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they
are. Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news,
let it cost what it may. The editorial work is not hack-grinding, but
literature. As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it
may be mentioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained
a report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley,
from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles. That issue
of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page; two
hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column;
an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say,
not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book.
One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans.

I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domestic article
in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains as it always
was. All the dwellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I
mean--and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are
spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas,
or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions
stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses,
out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and
many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with
their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and
comfortable-looking.

One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty
cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which
is propped against the house-corner on stilts. There is a
mansion-and-brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very
incongruous at first. But the people cannot have wells, and so they
take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or
graves,{footnote [The Israelites are buried in graves--by permission, I
take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are
buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep.]}
the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and
few of the living complain, and none of the others.




CHAPTER 42

Hygiene and Sentiment

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have
a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble,
generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks
and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a
thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching
into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all
at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and
are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business
streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those
people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do
after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides,
their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.
Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many
of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and
children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow
finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly
but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some such
emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette
at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful breast-pin, so
to say. The immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and
there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for
you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate,
and lasts like boiler-iron.

On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged
reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies.
Their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's
reputation. They change color when a person comes along and hangs up
an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do
that.

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying
all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot
accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it.
It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. Graveyards may have been
justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead
body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the
air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must
die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when
even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long
career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It
is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have
now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.
But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a
generation after St. Anne's death and burial, _made _several
thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle-performances are simply
compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint,
it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and
outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most
of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where you find one that
pays--like St. Anne--you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit
of the statute. And none of them pay any more than the principal of what
they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound. A
Saint can never _quite _return the principal, however; for his dead body
_kills _people, whereas his relics _heal _only--they never restore the
dead to life. That part of the account is always left unsettled.

'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:
"The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results
in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with
not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the
_specific_ germs of the diseases from which death resulted."

'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through
eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is
practically no limit to their power of escape.

'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported
that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two
per thousand--more than double that of any other. In this district were
three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than
three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity
of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease.

'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of
the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, _three
hundred years previously_, the victims of the pestilence had been
buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks
that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an
immediate outbreak of disease.'--_North American Review, No. 3, Vol.
135._

In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of
cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show
what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:--

'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals
in the United States than the Government expends for public-school
purposes. Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the
liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during
the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to
resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the
combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!
These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and
expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of
property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'

For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the
ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious
as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than
burial, because so cheap {footnote [Four or five dollars is the minimum
cost.]}--so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they
would do by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a
muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would
resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for
two thousand years.

I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy
manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and
as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is
necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.
To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was
writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.
He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was
within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain
wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost less
than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.
He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.




CHAPTER 43

The Art of Inhumation

ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not
seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed. I
said--

'But you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now. Where did you get
all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? Give me the address.'

He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched
pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on
it, and went on chuckling while I read, 'J. B----, _Undertaker_.' Then
he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward, and cried
out--

'That's what's the matter! It used to be rough times with me when you
knew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular. Big
fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared; after
that, dull policy-business till next fire. Town like this don't have
fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that
he gets discouraged. But you bet you, this is the business! People don't
wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop off right along--there
ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line. I just started in with
two or three little old coffins and a hired hearse, and now look at the
thing! I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't
care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell
house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.'

'Does a coffin pay so well. Is there much profit on a coffin?'

'Go-way! How you talk!' Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of
the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm; 'Look here;
there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap. That's a coffin.
There's one thing in this world which a person don't ever try to jew you
down on. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person
don't say--"I'll look around a little, and if I find I can't do better
I'll come back and take it." That's a coffin. There's one thing in this
world which a person won't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't
take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he
can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That's
a coffin. And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to
worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that's a coffin.
Undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in Christendom, and the
nobbiest.

'Why, just look at it. A rich man won't have anything but your very
best; and you can just pile it on, too--pile it on and sock it to
him--he won't ever holler. And you take in a poor man, and if you work
him right he'll bust himself on a single lay-out. Or especially a woman.
F'r instance: Mrs. O'Flaherty comes in--widow--wiping her eyes and kind
of moaning. Unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the
stock; says--

'"And fhat might ye ask for that wan?"

'"Thirty-nine dollars, madam," says I.

'"It 's a foine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried like a
gintleman, as he was, if I have to work me fingers off for it. I'll have
that wan, sor."

'"Yes, madam," says I, "and it is a very good one, too; not costly, to
be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes, as the
saying is." And as she starts out, I heave in, kind of casually, "This
one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but I am afraid--well,
sixty-five dollars is a rather--rather--but no matter, I felt obliged to
say to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy--"

'"D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that
joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"

'"Yes, madam."

'"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last
rap the O'Flaherties can raise; and moind you, stick on some extras,
too, and I'll give ye another dollar."

'And as I lay-in with the livery stables, of course I don't forget to
mention that Mrs. O'Shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars' worth of hacks
and flung as much style into Dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke
or an assassin. And of course she sails in and goes the O'Shaughnessy
about four hacks and an omnibus better. That used to be, but that's all
played now; that is, in this particular town. The Irish got to piling up
hacks so, on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry
for two years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up.
He don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.'

'Well,' said I, 'if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary
times, what must you be in an epidemic?'

He shook his head.

'No, you're off, there. We don't like to see an epidemic. An epidemic
don't pay. Well, of course I don't mean that, exactly; but it don't pay
in proportion to the regular thing. Don't it occur to you, why?'

No.

'Think.'

'I can't imagine. What is it?'

'It's just two things.'

'Well, what are they?'

'One's Embamming.'

'And what's the other?'

'Ice.'

'How is that?'

'Well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice; one
day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come. Takes a lot of
it--melts fast. We charge jewelry rates for that ice, and war-prices for
attendance. Well, don't you know, when there's an epidemic, they rush
'em to the cemetery the minute the breath's out. No market for ice in an
epidemic. Same with Embamming. You take a family that's able to embam,
and you've got a soft thing. You can mention sixteen different ways to
do it--though there _ain't_ only one or two ways, when you come down to
the bottom facts of it--and they'll take the highest-priced way, every
time. It's human nature--human nature in grief. It don't reason,
you see. Time being, it don't care a dam. All it wants is physical
immortality for deceased, and they're willing to pay for it. All you've
got to do is to just be ca'm and stack it up--they'll stand the racket.
Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't _give _away; and get
your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours
he is worth a cool six hundred--that's what _he's_ worth. There ain't
anything equal to it but trading rats for di'monds in time of famine.
Well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to
embam. No, indeed they don't; and it hurts the business like hell-th,
as we say--hurts it like hell-th, _health_, see?--Our little joke in the
trade. Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any--I
mean, when you're going by, sometime.'

In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself, if any has
been done. I have not enlarged on him.

With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject.
As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once,
who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner--

'I wouldn't worry about that, if I had your chances.' Much he knew about
it--the family all so opposed to it.




CHAPTER 44

City Sights

THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--bears no
resemblance to the American end of the city: the American end which lies
beyond the intervening brick business-center. The houses are massed in
blocks; are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here
and there a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered
on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed verandas running
along the several stories. Their chief beauty is the deep, warm,
varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the
plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural
a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This
charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be
found elsewhere in America.

The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is often
exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large cipher
or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate
forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made, and are
now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable. They are become
_bric-a-brac_.

The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of
New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of 'the
Grandissimes.' In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its
interior life and its history. In truth, I find by experience, that the
untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge
of it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact
with it.

With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and
illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you
have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet
fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine
shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination:
a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the
rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened
long-sighted native.

We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices.
There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it
as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has
ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the
fact. It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the
Academy of Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption
of the light by the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the
crop except in the aisles. The fact that the ushers grow their
buttonhole-bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had
the right kind of an agricultural head to the establishment.

We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in front
of it; the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the
worldly sort, and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we
drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and out on to the
wide dead level beyond, where the villas are, and the water wheels to
drain the town, and the commons populous with cows and children; passing
by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate;
but we took him on trust, and did not visit him. He was a pirate with
a tremendous and sanguinary history; and as long as he preserved
unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his name and the grandeur of
his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his from high and
low; but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry
alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept. When he
died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has come
into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman.
To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably
forget what he became.

Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road,
with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and
there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded
cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of
form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures--such was our course and
the surroundings of it. There was an occasional alligator swimming
comfortably along in the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored
person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still
water and watching for a bite.

And by-and-bye we reached the West End, a collection of hotels of the
usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around,
and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the
thresholds. We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the
chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less
criminal forms of sin.

Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and to Spanish
Fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands, take strolls in
the open air under the electric lights, go sailing on the lake, and
entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways.

We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the
pompano. Notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the
city. He was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his
fame. In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones;
as large as one's thumb--delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled
whitebait; also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small
soft-shell crabs of a most superior breed. The other dishes were what
one might get at Delmonico's, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken
of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose.

In the West and South they have a new institution--the Broom Brigade.
It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume, and go
through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket. It is a
very pretty sight, on private view. When they perform on the stage of
a theater, in the blaze of colored fires, it must be a fine and
fascinating spectacle. I saw them go through their complex manual with
grace, spirit, and admirable precision. I saw them do everything which
a human being can possibly do with a broom, except sweep. I did not see
them sweep. But I know they could learn. What they have already learned
proves that. And if they ever should learn, and should go on the
war-path down Tchoupitoulas or some of those other streets around there,
those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few
minutes. But the girls themselves wouldn't; so nothing would be really
gained, after all.

The drill was in the Washington Artillery building. In this building
we saw many interesting relics of the war. Also a fine oil-painting
representing Stonewall Jackson's last interview with General Lee. Both
men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee.
The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are
authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing
without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another--

First Interview between Lee and Jackson.

Last Interview between Lee and Jackson.

Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee.

Jackson Accepting Lee's Invitation to Dinner.

Jackson Declining Lee's Invitation to Dinner--with Thanks.

Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat.

Jackson Reporting a Great Victory.

Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.

It tells _one _story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly
and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.' The artist
would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's last interview if
he could have done it. But he couldn't, for there wasn't any way to do
it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of
significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome,
people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the
celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.' It shows what
a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it
unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head
in a bag.'

I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing
to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At
least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated
Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He
says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and 'Gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,' and so
on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to
the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it
come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from
the North, nor inherited from England. Many Southerners--most
Southerners--put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound.
For instance, they say Mr. K'yahtah (Carter) and speak of playing
k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. And they have the pleasant
custom--long ago fallen into decay in the North--of frequently employing
the respectful 'Sir.' Instead of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they
say 'Yes, Suh', 'No, Suh.'

But there are some infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,' and the
addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed. I heard an educated gentleman
say, 'Like the flag-officer did.' His cook or his butler would have
said, 'Like the flag-officer done.' You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have
you been at?' And here is the aggravated form--heard a ragged street
Arab say it to a comrade: 'I was a-ask'n' Tom whah you was a-sett'n'
at.' The very elect carelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and
many of them say, 'I didn't go to do it,' meaning 'I didn't mean to do
it.' The Northern word 'guess'--imported from England, where it used
to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee
original--is but little used among Southerners. They say 'reckon.' They
haven't any 'doesn't' in their language; they say 'don't' instead.
The unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.' It is nearly as bad as
the Northern 'hadn't ought.' This reminds me that a remark of a very
peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood (in the North) a few
days ago: 'He hadn't ought to have went.' How is that? Isn't that a good
deal of a triumph? One knows the orders combined in this half-breed's
architecture without inquiring: one parent Northern, the other Southern.
To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, 'Where is John gone?' This form is
so common--so nearly universal, in fact--that if she had used 'whither'
instead of 'where,' I think it would have sounded like an affectation.

We picked up one excellent word--a word worth traveling to New Orleans
to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.' They
pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish--so they said. We discovered it
at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day;
heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the
third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a
restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when
they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's
dozen.' It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom
originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant
buys something in a shop--or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I
know--he finishes the operation by saying--

'Give me something for lagniappe.'

The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root,
gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the
governor--I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.

When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New
Orleans--and you say, 'What, again?--no, I've had enough;' the other
party says, 'But just this one time more--this is for lagniappe.' When
the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too
high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would
have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his 'I beg
pardon--no harm intended,' into the briefer form of 'Oh, that's for
lagniappe.' If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill
of coffee down the back of your neck, he says 'For lagniappe, sah,' and
gets you another cup without extra charge.




CHAPTER 45

Southern Sports

IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a
month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject
for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient
reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it
can easily happen that four of them--and possibly five--were not in the
field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the
war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation;
and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will
remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you
have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the
war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would
soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up.

The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was
in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great
chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant;
the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake
up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other
topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they
date from it. All day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened
since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the
waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or
aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in
his own person, by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced
stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity
invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside.

At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside--

'You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war.
It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because
nothing else has so strong an interest for us. And there is another
reason: In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled
all the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence, you
can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainly remind
some listener of something that happened during the war--and out he
comes with it. Of course that brings the talk back to the war. You may
try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house, and we may
all join in and help, but there can be but one result: the most random
topic would load every man up with war reminiscences, and shut him up,
too; and talk would be likely to stop presently, because you can't talk
pale inconsequentialities when you've got a crimson fact or fancy in
your head that you are burning to fetch out.'

The poet was sitting some little distance away; and presently he began
to speak--about the moon.

The gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:' 'There,
the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but you will see that it
will suggest something to somebody about the war; in ten minutes from
now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.'

The poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surprise to
him; had had the impression that down here, toward the equator, the
moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up North; had had the
impression that when he visited New Orleans, many years ago, the moon--

Interruption from the other end of the room--

'Let me explain that. Reminds me of an anecdote. Everything is changed
since the war, for better or for worse; but you'll find people down here
born grumblers, who see no change except the change for the worse. There
was an old negro woman of this sort. A young New-Yorker said in her
presence, "What a wonderful moon you have down here!" She sighed and
said, "Ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo' de
waw!"'

The new topic was dead already. But the poet resurrected it, and gave it
a new start.

A brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference between Northern
and Southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined. Moonlight
talk drifted easily into talk about artificial methods of dispelling
darkness. Then somebody remembered that when Farragut advanced upon
Port Hudson on a dark night--and did not wish to assist the aim of the
Confederate gunners--he carried no battle-lanterns, but painted the
decks of his ships white, and thus created a dim but valuable light,
which enabled his own men to grope their way around with considerable
facility. At this point the war got the floor again--the ten minutes not
quite up yet.

I was not sorry, for war talk by men who have been in a war is always
interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is
likely to be dull.

We went to a cockpit in New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon. I had never
seen a cock-fight before. There were men and boys there of all ages and
all colors, and of many languages and nationalities. But I noticed one
quite conspicuous and surprising absence: the traditional brutal faces.
There were no brutal faces. With no cock-fighting going on, you could
have played the gathering on a stranger for a prayer-meeting; and after
it began, for a revival--provided you blindfolded your stranger--for the
shouting was something prodigious.

A negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside. The
cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called, they were
taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed, poked toward
each other, and finally liberated. The big black cock plunged instantly
at the little gray one and struck him on the head with his spur. The
gray responded with spirit. Then the Babel of many-tongued shoutings
broke out, and ceased not thenceforth. When the cocks had been fighting
some little time, I was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both
were blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell
down. Yet they would not give up, neither would they die. The negro and
the white man would pick them up every few seconds, wipe them off, blow
cold water on them in a fine spray, and take their heads in their mouths
and hold them there a moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps;
I do not know. Then, being set down again, the dying creatures would
totter gropingly about, with dragging wings, find each other, strike a
guesswork blow or two, and fall exhausted once more.

I did not see the end of the battle. I forced myself to endure it
as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight; so I made frank
confession to that effect, and we retired. We heard afterward that the
black cock died in the ring, and fighting to the last.

Evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport' for such
as have had a degree of familiarity with it. I never saw people enjoy
anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. The case was the
same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten. They lost themselves
in frenzies of delight. The 'cocking-main' is an inhuman sort of
entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much
more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the
cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is
not the fox's case.

We assisted--in the French sense--at a mule race, one day. I believe I
enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there. I enjoyed it more
than I remember having enjoyed any other animal race I ever saw. The
grand-stand was well filled with the beauty and the chivalry of New
Orleans. That phrase is not original with me. It is the Southern
reporter's. He has used it for two generations. He uses it twenty
times a day, or twenty thousand times a day; or a million times a
day--according to the exigencies. He is obliged to use it a million
times a day, if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women
that often; for he has no other phrase for such service except that
single one. He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him.
There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that
pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. If he had been in Palestine in the
early times, we should have had no references to 'much people' out of
him. No, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry of Galilee'
assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount. It is likely that the men
and women of the South are sick enough of that phrase by this time, and
would like a change, but there is no immediate prospect of their getting
it.

The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery
style; wastes no words, and does not gush. Not so with his average
correspondent. In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a
trained hand; but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs
from that. For instance--

The 'Times-Democrat' sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last
April. This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the
Captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip
with him. They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out
up the creek. That was all there was 'to it.' And that is all that
the editor of the 'Times-Democrat' would have got out of it. There was
nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else
out of it. He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure
perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space. But his
special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics. He
just throws off all restraint and wallows in them--

'On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our
cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up
the bayou.'

Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved
out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words, and is also
destructive of compactness of statement.

The trouble with the Southern reporter is--Women. They unsettle
him; they throw him off his balance. He is plain, and sensible, and
satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight. Then he goes all to pieces;
his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic. From reading the above
extract, you would imagine that this student of Sir Walter Scott is
an apprentice, and knows next to nothing about handling a pen. On the
contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs, in his long letter, that he
knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give
him the artificial-flower complaint. For instance--

'At 4 o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east, and
presently from the Gulf there came a blow which increased in severity
every moment. It was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was
a delay. The oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the
tugging of the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature
waves in mocking of much larger bodies of water. A lull permitted a
start, and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind
blowing. As darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wish
themselves nearer home.'

There is nothing the matter with that. It is good description, compactly
put. Yet there was great temptation, there, to drop into lurid writing.

But let us return to the mule. Since I left him, I have rummaged around
and found a full report of the race. In it I find confirmation of the
theory which I broached just now--namely, that the trouble with the
Southern reporter is Women: Women, supplemented by Walter Scott and his
knights and beauty and chivalry, and so on. This is an excellent report,
as long as the women stay out of it. But when they intrude, we have this
frantic result--

'It will be probably a long time before the ladies' stand presents such
a sea of foam-like loveliness as it did yesterday. The New Orleans women
are always charming, but never so much so as at this time of the year,
when in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breath of
balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable. The stand was so
crowded with them that, walking at their feet and seeing no possibility
of approach, many a man appreciated as he never did before the Peri's
feeling at the Gates of Paradise, and wondered what was the priceless
boon that would admit him to their sacred presence. Sparkling on their
white-robed breasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite
knights, and were it not for the fact that the doughty heroes appeared
on unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one of King
Arthur's gala-days.'

There were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules, they
were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects. Some were
handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek, some hadn't had
their fur brushed lately; some were innocently gay and frisky; some were
full of malice and all unrighteousness; guessing from looks, some of
them thought the matter on hand was war, some thought it was a lark, the
rest took it for a religious occasion. And each mule acted according to
his convictions. The result was an absence of harmony well compensated
by a conspicuous presence of variety--variety of a picturesque and
entertaining sort.

All the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society. If the
reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of New Orleans
attend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, the thing is explained now. It
is a fashion-freak; all connected with it are people of fashion.

It is great fun, and cordially liked. The mule-race is one of the marked
occasions of the year. It has brought some pretty fast mules to the
front. One of these had to be ruled out, because he was so fast that he
turned the thing into a one-mule contest, and robbed it of one of its
best features--variety. But every now and then somebody disguises him
with a new name and a new complexion, and rings him in again.

The riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks,
satins, and velvets.

The thirteen mules got away in a body, after a couple of false starts,
and scampered off with prodigious spirit. As each mule and each rider
had a distinct opinion of his own as to how the race ought to be run,
and which side of the track was best in certain circumstances, and how
often the track ought to be crossed, and when a collision ought to
be accomplished, and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six
conflicting opinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion,
and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical.

Mile heat; time 2:22. Eight of the thirteen mules distanced. I had a bet
on a mule which would have won if the procession had been reversed. The
second heat was good fun; and so was the 'consolation race for beaten
mules,' which followed later; but the first heat was the best in that
respect.

I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race;
but, next to that, I prefer the gay and joyous mule-rush. Two red-hot
steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve--that is
to say, every rivet in the boilers--quaking and shaking and groaning
from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black
smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into
long breaks of hissing foam--this is sport that makes a body's very
liver curl with enjoyment. A horse-race is pretty tame and colorless
in comparison. Still, a horse-race might be well enough, in its way,
perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts. But then,
nobody is ever killed. At least, nobody was ever killed when I was at a
horse-race. They have been crippled, it is true; but this is little to
the purpose.




CHAPTER 46

Enchantments and Enchanters

THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived
too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of
the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights
and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made
gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and
in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other
diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it
filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking
and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the
spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety.
There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither
this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any
outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence;
and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in
which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not
on account of the police.

Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation;
but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out
of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl
and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the
monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land,
is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances
of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well,
perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line
between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.

This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans
until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and
Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could
hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very
brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul
of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the
romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and
Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that
keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the
North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall
upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be
also its last.

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set
two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the
_ancien regime_ and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves
a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above
birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that
whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men,
since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable
for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate
the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the
world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty,
humanity, and progress.

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single
might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the
world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms
of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with
the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham
chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did
measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other
individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part
of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they
flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation
ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome
civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and
commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so
you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive
works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune
romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought
to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the
Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of
phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval
mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than
it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major
or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he,
also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it
was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence
for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on
slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of
Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it
existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for
the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never
should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a
plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild
proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so
did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter
as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be
traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any
other thing or person.

One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence
penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or
Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will
find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism,
sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly
done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This
sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country,
there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence,
the South was able to show as many well-known literary names,
proportioned to population, as the North could.

But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair
competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out
that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings
to it--clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a
consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever
there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under
present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present;
they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of
genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but
upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England,
and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as
witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very
few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead
of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a
dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out.

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm
is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought
by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval
chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far
as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty
nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work
undermined it.




CHAPTER 47

Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable

MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlanta at
seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him. We were
able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by
his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us
from a trustworthy source. He was said to be undersized, red-haired,
and somewhat freckled. He was the only man in the party whose outside
tallied with this bill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He
is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface,
but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see
that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and
beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle
Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. I seem
to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the
public I am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are
permissible among friends.

He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to
Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of
the nation's nurseries. They said--

'Why, he 's white!'

They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought,
that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle
Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it
turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to
venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to
show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof
against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer
Rabbit ourselves.

Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than
anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the
country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of
French dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them
in perfection. It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean-ah
Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing
'Louisihanna _rif_-fusing to Hanter the Union,' along with passages of
nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript.

It came out in conversation, that in two different instances Mr. Cable
got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible
French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and
sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or
were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember
which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good
deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs
in so excessively public a manner.

Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote
the book called 'The Gilded Age.' There is a character in it called
'Sellers.' I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning;
but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. He asked
me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.' Of course I
said I could not, without stimulants. He said that away out West, once,
he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man
bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.' He added--

'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before
this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. We will
confiscate his name. The name you are using is common, and therefore
dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the
whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name--it is
a rock.'

So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week,
one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white
men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel
suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to
suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [Figures taken from memory,
and probably incorrect. Think it was more.]} copies of the book and
change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers' in future editions.




CHAPTER 48

Sugar and Postage

ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most
wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over
me--now captain of the great steamer 'City of Baton Rouge,' the latest
and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line. The same slender figure, the
same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same
decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military
bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or
lost in weight, not a hair turned. It is a curious thing, to leave a man
thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and
find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this
kind before, I believe. There were some crow's-feet, but they counted
for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous.

His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, purposing
to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and I joined a party of
ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river
fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar
plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed,
ram-shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever
seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside,
since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness
of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life.

Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above
the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by
an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--Jackson's
victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two
nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If
we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have
been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still,
Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over
the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us
by Jackson's presidency.

The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the
hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large
scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The
traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the
required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls
the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field,
between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot
and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson
river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it,
that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in
air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea,
and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it.

The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and
fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand
trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific
fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it
lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's
crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last
year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific
methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons,
to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was
in my time.

The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little
crabs--'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction
whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs;
for they bore into the levees, and ruin them.

The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and
filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar
is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the
centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the
evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to
remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the
molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through
the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have
jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and
easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the
most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to
impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for
a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men
in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it.

We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain
Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed
between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted
useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be
covered up and invisible.

We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,'
which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all
communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings
and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with
the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede.

We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited
time, we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was
a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental
and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot,
whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always
this-worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance of
the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a
machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it.
He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song.
He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again from
a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load
of such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of
discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so
delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy.

Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and
gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along, and I learned from
them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends
during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer
for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been
receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a
New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by
distance: from the local post-office in Paradise to New York, five
dollars; from New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr.
Manchester very well. I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple
of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This
uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half
a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked
a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and
sixty-five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance
just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr.
Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr.
Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair
example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the
way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came
from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I
owe him an apology--

QUESTION. Where are you?

ANSWER. In the spirit world.

Q. Are you happy?

A. Very happy. Perfectly happy.

Q. How do you amuse yourself?

A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits.

Q. What else?

A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary.

Q. What do you talk about?

A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth,
and how to influence them for their good.

Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall
you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are?

No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous
questions.

Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in
frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious
about frivolous questions upon the subject?

No reply.

Q. Would you like to come back?

A. No.

Q. Would you say that under oath?

A. Yes.

Q. What do you eat there?

A. We do not eat.

Q. What do you drink?

A. We do not drink.

Q. What do you smoke?

A. We do not smoke.

Q. What do you read?

A. We do not read.

Q. Do all the good people go to your place?

A. Yes.

Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it,
in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other
place.

A. No reply.

Q. When did you die?

A. I did not die, I passed away.

Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have you been in
the spirit land?

A. We have no measurements of time here.

Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in
your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your
former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for.
You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true?

A. Yes.

Q. Then name the day of the month.

(Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by
violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time.
Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such
things being without importance to them.)

Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to
the spirit land?

This was granted to be the case.

Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it?

(More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium.
Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the
year.)

Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last
question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail
to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting,
since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did
you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe?

A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) _Natural death_.

This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his
relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary
intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great
pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for
his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the
amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there.

This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receives letters from
spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them
all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are
filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a
tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One
of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally
describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how to contrive an
improved railway car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it
is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy
we are.'




CHAPTER 49

Episodes in Pilot Life

IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five
of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming
as an occupation. Of course this was not because they were peculiarly
gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than
in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some
other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is
private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the
pilot-house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a
thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling
lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to
themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at
such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and
peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn,
and at last enjoy.

But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished
anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them: they
support their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from the river
annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next
frost. Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out
of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way
he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural
season. So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's
slave the hardest half of the year.

One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. He knew a
trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by
applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into
the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every
three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third.
But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. The expert
explained that his share was not reached. The farm produced only two
loads.

Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--the outcome
fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. Captain Montgomery, whom I
had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet
in the great battle before Memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam
ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant
and narrow escape. He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb
his serenity. Once when he was captain of the 'Crescent City,' I was
bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting
orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. I had stopped
the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was
evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell,
and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such
was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew better
than to touch a bell without orders. My duty was to hold the boat
steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take
care of themselves--which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of
steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come
very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was
napping in the texas.... Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and
uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear
in time to see the entertainment. But he did. Just as we were walking
into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with
heavenly serenity, 'Set her back on both'--which I did; but a trifle
late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other
boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain
never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark
that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in
the same way again in like circumstances.

One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a
very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel
until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast-board
with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He
died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was
the only life lost.

The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of
this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a
like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late;
_but there is no instance of a pilot deserting his post to save his life
while by remaining and sacrificing it he might secure other lives from
destruction._ It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and
well worth while to put it in italics, too.

The 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with
a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor
of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful
in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even
young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the
wheel, and die there when occasion requires. In a Memphis graveyard is
buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago,
in White River, to save the lives of other men. He said to the captain
that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance
away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the
river would be to insure the loss of many lives. He reached the bar
and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had
closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned.
He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to
reply--

'I will not go. If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay, no one will be
lost but me. I will stay.'

There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the
pilot's. There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that
Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I
started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged
to turn back before my object was accomplished.

The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--blown up,
near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had
fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that
another and very particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for,
had stepped out of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to
collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen
again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben
Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom I used to quarrel
with, all through every daylight watch. A heedless, reckless creature he
was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger
brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat
on the hurricane deck. Thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had
gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' He was
promptly gratified. The bear chased him around and around the deck,
for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the
railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and
went into the texas to chew it. The off-watch turned out with alacrity,
and left the bear in sole possession. He presently grew lonesome, and
started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat--visited every part
of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a
voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last,
those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in
hiding, and the boat was a solitude.

I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from
heart disease, in 1869. The captain was on the roof at the time. He saw
the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and
found the pilot lying dead on the floor.

Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not injured, but the
other pilot was lost.

George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into the river from
the wheel, and disabled. The water was very cold; he clung to a cotton
bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when
he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. They
tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life
back into him, and got him safe to Memphis. He is one of Bixby's pilots
on the 'Baton Rouge' now.

Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of
romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. When I
knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted,
full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to
fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. In a Western
city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their
family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. The
young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not George
Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this
narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and
the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. Being ashamed, they
lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married.
Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed
them. After that, they were able to continue their sin without
concealment. By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he
followed after her. Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among
the mourners sat the two young sinners. The will was opened and solemnly
read. It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to _Mrs.
George Johnson!_

And there was no such person. The young sinners fled forth then, and did
a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure Justice of
the Peace, and got him to antedate the thing. That did no sort of good.
The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with
extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune,
leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably
chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny
to bless themselves withal. Such are the actual facts; and not all
novels have for a base so telling a situation.




CHAPTER 50

The 'Original Jacobs'

WE had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead. He
was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and
on the river. He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old
age--as I remember him--his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his
eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as
firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of
pilots. He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot
before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other
steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time I speak of, had ever turned
a wheel. Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in
which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their
associates. He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added
some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been
sufficiently stiff in its original state.

He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his
first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first
steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi. At the time of his
death a correspondent of the 'St. Louis Republican' culled the following
items from the diary--

'In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer "Rambler," at
Florence, Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and
back--this on the "Gen. Carrol," between Nashville and New Orleans. It
was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap
of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was
the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were
wanted. The proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt,
rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of
the present day.

'In 1827 we find him on board the "President," a boat of two hundred and
eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans.
Thence he joined the "Jubilee" in 1828, and on this boat he did his
first piloting in the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from
Herculaneum to St. Genevieve. On May 26, 1836, he completed and left
Pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "Prairie," a boat of four hundred
tons, and the first steamer with a _State-Room cabin_ ever seen at St.
Louis. In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which
has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in
fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress.

'As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal
notes from his general log--

'In March, 1825, Gen. Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the
low-pressure steamer "Natchez."

'In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to
celebrate the occasion of Gen. Jackson's visit to that city.

'In 1830 the "North American" made the run from New Orleans to Memphis
in six days--best time on record to that date. It has since been made in
two days and ten hours.

'In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed.

'In 1832 steamer "Hudson" made the run from White River to Helena, a
distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. This was the source of
much talk and speculation among parties directly interested.

'In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed.

'Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by
reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips
to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and
four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.'

Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill
fell there, and talking ceased. For this reason: whenever six pilots
were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged
ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before
these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were,
how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking
largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always
making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to
make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible,
and envy the old stagers in the like degree. And how these complacent
baldheads _would_ swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen,
twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the
marveling and envying youngsters!

And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately
figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of
Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. Imagine the size of the
silence that would result on the instant. And imagine the feelings of
those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the
ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a
reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that
had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company
had ever set his foot in a pilot-house!

Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the
above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. If one
might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty
dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and
never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name
which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. If you
might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular
about little details; never spoke of 'the State of Mississippi,' for
instance--no, he would say, 'When the State of Mississippi was where
Arkansas now is,' and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in
a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he
would say, 'When Louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'When Missouri
was on the Illinois side.'

The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used
to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the
river, and sign them '_Mark Twain_,' and give them to the 'New Orleans
Picayune.' They related to the stage and condition of the river, and
were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison.
But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the
captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the
first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular
point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island
So-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation
as 'disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.' In these antique
interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and
they used to chaff the 'Mark Twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery.

It so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [The original MS.
of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans.
It reads as follows--

VICKSBURG May 4, 1859.

'My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water
is higher this far up than it has been since 8. My opinion is that the
water will be feet deep in Canal street before the first of next June.
Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under
water, and it has not been since 1815.

'I. Sellers.']}

became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued it broadly,
very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred
or a thousand words. I was a 'cub' at the time. I showed my performance
to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'New
Orleans True Delta.' It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy
service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no
malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man
to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know
then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that
which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in
print.

Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day
forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It
was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain
Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It
was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater
distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but
he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me.

He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again
signed 'Mark Twain' to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought
the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new
journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient
mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it
was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found
in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I
have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.

The captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love
for it. He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near
him until he did die. It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine
cemetery, St. Louis. It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at
the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it
represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a
cinder, if duty required it.

The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we
approached New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage
of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of
electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful.




CHAPTER 51

Reminiscences

WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfully
hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished.
I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so
pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing
more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft.

I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and
'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,'
in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys
equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and
presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural
and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no
break in my river life. There was a 'cub,' and I judged that he
would take the wheel now; and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the
pilot-house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He
made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat
and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen, because
I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain
looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and
crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth
of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a
quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever
steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere
pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim.

We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half--
much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water.

The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie
successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance
the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself. This
sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart.

By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the
reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six
hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree
itself. The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding
fog, were very pretty things to see.

We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and
still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned
energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was
accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the
tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent
the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and
gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches
violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift
waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf
that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their
kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No color that was visible
anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge
from the solid cloud-bank overhead. The river was leaden; all distances
the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were
dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming
legions marched. The thunder-peals were constant and deafening;
explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between,
and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying
to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced
effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed
delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in
unintermittent procession. The rain poured down in amazing volume; the
ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased
in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them
sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and
straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see
what time it was.

People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms; but the storms
which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some
which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the
Alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I
don't wish to.

On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long,
which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was
so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to
the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in
rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more
time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made
right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary
now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find
out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet,
or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be
supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost.

We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was
observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees
with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious
effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out
from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and
thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell
to singing. We judged that they mistook this superb artificial day
for the genuine article. We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly
well-ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so
speedily. By means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out
nearly all the old friends. One was missing, however; he went to his
reward, whatever it was, two years ago. But I found out all about him.
His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a
very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our
village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the
town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap
royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and
prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith
cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This
vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and
irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis.
I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street
corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting
his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his
forehead--imagining himself to be Othello or some such character, and
imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were
awestruck.

I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not
succeed. However, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a
member of the Walnut Street theater company--and he tried to say it with
indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation
showed through it. He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar, for
that night, and if I should come I would see him. _If_ I should come! I
said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead.

I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'How
strange it is! _We_ always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he
comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound,
the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and
promptly welcomed and honored.'

But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended;
for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills.
I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he
asked--

'Did you see me?'

'No, you weren't there.'

He looked surprised and disappointed. He said--

'Yes, I was. Indeed I was. I was a Roman soldier.'

'Which one?'

'Why didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank,
and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?'

'Do you mean the Roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in
nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading
on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed
like themselves?'

'That's it! that's it! I was one of them Roman soldiers. I was the next
to the last one. A half a year ago I used to always be the last one; but
I've been promoted.'

Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to
the last--a matter of thirty-four years. Sometimes they cast him for a
'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. He could be trusted to go
and say, 'My lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a
sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to
miss fire. Yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of
Hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief
that some day he would be invited to play it!

And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen
to our village such ages and ages ago! What noble horseshoes this man
might have made, but for those Englishmen; and what an inadequate Roman
soldier he _did _make!

A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth
Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me,
then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow,
and finally said with deep asperity--

'Look here, _have you got that drink yet?_'

A maniac, I judged, at first. But all in a flash I recognized him. I
made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered
as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how--

'Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place
where they keep it. Come in and help.'

He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was
agreeable. He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all
his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make
me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of
his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise.

This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty
years ago. I spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and
had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. We saw some of
the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory
where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth
against the rioters, under command of a military man. We drilled till
about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great
force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before
them. Our column moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my musket
was very heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the
seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my
friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out
and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home. I was not feeling
any solicitude about him of course, because I knew he was so well armed,
now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. If I had
had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him.
I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man
had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St.
Louis, and felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave
a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots
all right or not. I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know
that. And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the
circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than
I was.

One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the
'Globe-Democrat' came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics,
whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning
and evening church services the day before, and 23,102 children attended
Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons, out of the city's total of 400,000
population, respected the day religious-wise. I found these statistics,
in a condensed form, in a telegram of the Associated Press, and
preserved them. They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher
state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. But now
that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph
mutilated them. It cannot be that there are more than 150,000 Catholics
in the town; the other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out
of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362
attended church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics,
116,188 went to church and Sunday-school.




CHAPTER 52

A Burning Brand

_All _at once the thought came into my mind, 'I have not sought out Mr.
Brown.'

Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject,
and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have
carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome.

Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong
feeling, 'If ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the
great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the
hand.'

The occasion and the circumstances were as follows. A friend of mine, a
clergyman, came one evening and said--

'I have a most remarkable letter here, which I want to read to you, if
I can do it without breaking down. I must preface it with some
explanations, however. The letter is written by an ex-thief and
ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained
with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank God, with a mine of pure
gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. His letter is written to a
burglar named Williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain
State prison, for burglary. Williams was a particularly daring burglar,
and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last
and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at
night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $8,000
in government bonds. Williams was not a common sort of person, by
any means; he was a graduate of Harvard College, and came of good New
England stock. His father was a clergyman. While lying in jail, his
health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. This
fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary
confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. He fell into serious
thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with
strong influence upon his mind and heart. He put his old life behind
him, and became an earnest Christian. Some ladies in the town heard of
this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his
good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. The
trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the State prison for
the term of nine years, as I have before said. In the prison he became
acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk,
Jack Hunt, the writer of the letter which I am going to read. You will
see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for Hunt. When Hunt's time was
out, he wandered to St. Louis; and from that place he wrote his letter
to Williams. The letter got no further than the office of the prison
warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters
from outside. The prison authorities read this letter, but did not
destroy it. They had not the heart to do it. They read it to several
persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom I
spoke a while ago. The other day I came across an old friend of mine--a
clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. The mere
remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without
his voice breaking. He promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it
is--an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved.
It has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning
has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'--

St. Louis, June 9th 1872.

Mr. W---- friend Charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to
get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you.
i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in
prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought
i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off I didn't, but i
noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker,
nor want gasing & all the boys knod it.

I used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing
months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day
my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (_quit stealing_)
& live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done
in my life. The state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i
thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. When
we got to Chicago on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old
woman's leather;

(_Robbed her of her pocketbook_) i hadn't no more than got it off when i
wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be
a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the
leather was a grip (_easy to get_)--but i kept clos to her & when she
got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything.
& she tumbled (_discovered_) her leather was off (_gone_)--is this
it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i
hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a
hurry. When i got here i had $1 and 25 cents left & i didn't get no work
for 3 days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (_for
a deck hand_)--The afternoon of the 3rd day I spent my last 10 cts for
moons (_large, round sea-biscuit_) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was
thinking i would have to go on the dipe (_picking pockets_) again, when
i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the Lord when
he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i
tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, Lord give
a poor fellow a chance to square it for 3 months for Christ's sake,
amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an
hour after that i was in 4th St. & this is what happened & is the cause
of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get
done writing. As i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse
running away with a carriage with 2 children in it, & I grabed up a
peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street,
& when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could
drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little &
I grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the
gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children
were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $50 green back, & my
asking the Lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i
couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, &

coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my
head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill
and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep
the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for
i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive
horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $16
a month & bord me. You bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my
little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life
& of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the
Lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting
me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs
(clothes) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the Lord had done
for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep
an eye on me. When I had been there about a week Mr. Brown (that's his
name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me
if i was a Christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the
bible instead of papers & books--Well Charlie i thought i had better
give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in
prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work &
how the Lord got me the job when I asked him; & the only way i had to
pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me
a chance for 3 months--he talked to me like a father for a long time,
& told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my
life, for i had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear
no one giving me a back cap (_exposing his past life_) & running me
off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me
another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would
help me one or 2 hours every nite, & he gave me a Arithmetic, a spelling
book, a Geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me
come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible
class in the Sunday School which i likes very much for it helps me to
understand my bible better.

Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago, & as you
said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another
of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a
lifetime Charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you I do think God has
forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray
for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he
helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel
to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to
the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk
with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no,
not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now
i feel that God has called me & on the first Sunday in July i will join
the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i
cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i
aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled
all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse
it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, &
that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name,
& i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as
another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out
i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont
be mad--I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50--
if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish
you would let me send you some now. I send you with this a receipt for
a year of Littles Living Age, i didn't know what you would like & i told
Mr. Brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you
so i could send you chuck (_refreshments_) on holidays; it would spoil
this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any
way--next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will
advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary
store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday
school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two
sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (_little boys_) & got them
to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class
where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these
kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going
after them every Sunday hour before school time, I also got 4 girls
to come. tell Mack and Harry about me, if they will come out here when
their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse
this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write
as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was
afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the
boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here
treats me as kind as they can--Mr. Brown is going to write to you
sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your
very true friend

C---- W----

who you know as Jack Hunt.

I send you Mr. Brown's card. Send my letter to him.

Here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single
grace or ornament to help it out. I have seldom been so deeply stirred
by any piece of writing. The reader of it halted, all the way through,
on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings
by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company
with it. He was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his
being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything
like a decent command over his feelings. The result was not promising.
However, he determined to risk it; and did. He got through tolerably
well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to
the end.

The fame of the letter spread through the town. A brother minister came
and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the
sermon to twelve hundred people on a Sunday morning, and the letter
drowned them in their own tears. Then my friend put it into a sermon and
went before his Sunday morning congregation with it. It scored another
triumph. The house wept as one individual.

My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our
northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he
might possibly chance to need a sermon. He was asked to preach, one day.
The little church was full. Among the people present were the late Dr.
J. G. Holland, the late Mr. Seymour of the 'New York Times,' Mr. Page,
the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think, Senator Frye,
of Maine. The marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were
moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down Dr.
Holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who
were there. Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he
said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had
speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to
write so priceless a tract.

Ah, that unlucky Page!--and another man. If they had only been in
Jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all
the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody
might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest,
ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to
fool poor confiding mortals with!

The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and
large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was
rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal!

The reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some
miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. My friend came back
from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began
once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of
said audiences; I begged hard for permission to print the letter in a
magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people
got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing,
but not in print; copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far
regions.

Charles Dudley Warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter
was read and wept over. At the church door, afterward, he dropped a
peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question--

'Do you know that letter to be genuine?'

It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that
sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol
always have. Some talk followed--

'Why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?'

'Nothing that I know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and
fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised
hand. I think it was done by an educated man.'

The literary artist had detected the literary machinery. If you will
look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in
every line.

Straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion
sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where
Williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked
if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print
the letter and tell its history. He presently received this answer--

Rev.--------

MY dear friend,--In regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no
doubt as to its genuineness. 'Williams,' to whom it was written, lay in
our jail and professed to have been converted, and Rev. Mr.----, the
chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as
one can have in any such case.

The letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a Sunday-school
teacher,--sent either by Williams himself, or the chaplain of the
State's prison, probably. She has been greatly annoyed in having so much
publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to
Williams. In regard to its publication, I can give no permission; though
if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the
country, I think you might take the responsibility and do it.

It is a wonderful letter, which no Christian genius, much less one
unsanctified, could ever have written. As showing the work of grace in
a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own
origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of
wickedness.

'Mr. Brown' of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man. Do all whom
you send from Hartford serve their Master as well?

P.S.--Williams is still in the State's prison, serving out a long
sentence--of nine years, I think. He has been sick and threatened with
consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately. This lady that I
speak of corresponds with him, I presume, and will be quite sure to look
after him.

This letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went Mr.
Williams's stock again. Mr. Warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the
cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. It was a suspicion
based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal
evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness
this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above
quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no Christian genius, much
less one unsanctified, could ever have written.'

I had permission now to print--provided I suppressed names and places
and sent my narrative out of the country. So I chose an Australian
magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set
myself to work on my article. And the ministers set the pumps going
again, with the letter to work the handles.

But meantime Brother Page had been agitating. He had not visited the
penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to
the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently
inquiries. He got an answer, dated four days later than that other
Brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it
wandered into my hands. The original is before me, now, and I here
append it. It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most
solid description--

STATE'S PRISON, CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE, July 11, 1873.

_Dear Bro. Page_,--Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me.
I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. It purports to be
addressed to some prisoner here. No such letter ever came to a prisoner
here. All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison
before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could
not be forgotten. Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a
dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel.
His name is an assumed one. I am glad to have made your acquaintance.
I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should
like to deliver the same in your vicinity.

And so ended that little drama. My poor article went into the fire;
for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely
richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around
me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit
for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. They said:
'Wait--the wound is too fresh, yet.' All the copies of the famous
letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the
aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. As a rule, the town
was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where
the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the
ex-convict's letter.

A word of explanation. 'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter,
was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate, son of
a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of
the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged
him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the
genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the
nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect,
indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of
prison.

That 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately
left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent
reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the
epistle, if he even took note of it at all, This is the 'nub'--

'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--_I was afraid when
you was bleeding you would die_--give my respects,' etc.

That is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it.
Nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it;
and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation
of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of
consumption.

When I for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, I felt
that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered. And it
so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever I
visited that city again, I would seek out that excellent man and kiss
the hem of his garment if it was a new one. Well, I visited St. Louis,
but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown; for, alas! the investigations of long
ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like 'Jack Hunt,' was not a
real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, Williams--
burglar, Harvard graduate, son of a clergyman.




CHAPTER 53

My Boyhood's Home

WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul
Packet Company, and started up the river.

When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was
twenty-two or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the
estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down
eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the
river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which
will bring it within ten miles of St. Louis.

About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of Alton,
Illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of Louisiana,
Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now;
however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. I could not
clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for when I retired
from the rebel army in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at
least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how
to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native
genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not
badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all
equal to it.

There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with
glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was.

At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood
was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another
glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly
counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the
memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine
years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a
photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of
a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the
Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look
upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar
and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses--
saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in
my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished
houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness.

It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through
the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is,
and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar
objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get
a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I
could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good
deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil
refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the
other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy
again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been
dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that;
for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into
each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a
baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who
was a plump young bride at that time.'

From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and
wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the
most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous remark
to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St.
Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that
my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; I
cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me,
and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about
to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh
and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the
others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked
with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of
spirit.

An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we
discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not
remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years.
So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked
him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--what
became of him?

'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the
world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and
memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.'

'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.'

'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.'

I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village
school when I was a boy.

'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college; but life
whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the
Territories, years ago, a defeated man.'

I asked after another of the bright boys.

'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.'

I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of
the professions when I was a boy.

'He went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to
law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away
for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to
gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children
to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to worse, and
finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend
to attend the funeral.'

'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young
fellow that ever was.'

I named another boy.

'Oh, he is all right. Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is
prospering.'

Same verdict concerning other boys.

I named three school-girls.

'The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is
long ago dead--never married.'

I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts.

'She is all right. Been married three times; buried two husbands,
divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old
fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around
here and there, most everywheres.'

The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple--

'Killed in the war.'

I named another boy.

'Well, now, his case is curious! There wasn't a human being in this town
but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just
a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it.
Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri
to-day, I'm a Democrat!'

'Is that so?'

'It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth.'

'How do you account for it?'

'Account for it? There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you
send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned
fool they'll never find it out. There's one thing sure--if I had a
damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis--
it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well,
when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it
over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?'

'Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the
Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis
people.'

'Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle--
they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could
have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want to
realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.'

I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some
were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come
to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was
comforting:

'Prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.'

I asked about Miss----.

Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it
from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a
shred of her mind back.'

If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six
years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was
a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come
tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a
lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface,
she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked
up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover
from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that
people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did.

After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally
inquired about _myself_:

'Oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. If they'd
sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.'

It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having
told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith.




CHAPTER 54

Past and Present

Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the
distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy
past. Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem
Hackett (fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in
a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of
life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws,
but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct
purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually
local in application.

When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday. He fell
out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. Being loaded with sin,
he went to the bottom like an anvil. He was the only boy in the village
who slept that night. We others all lay awake, repenting. We had not
needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that
Lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. There was
a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until
near dawn. The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along
the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky
blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out
white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut
down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to
rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. I sat up
in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world,
and expecting it. To me there was nothing strange or incongruous in
heaven's making such an uproar about Lem Hackett. Apparently it was the
right and proper thing to do. Not a doubt entered my mind that all the
angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing
the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction
and approval. There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious
way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest
on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers
to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years.
I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most
likely to be discovered. That discovery could have but one result: I
should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river had been
fairly warmed out of him. I knew that this would be only just and fair.
I was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a
secret bitterness against Lem for having attracted this fatal attention
to me, but I could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in
infesting my breast in spite of me. Every time the lightning glared
I caught my breath, and judged I was gone. In my terror and misery, I
meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which
were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and I tried
to pretend to myself that I was simply doing this in a casual way, and
without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose
of getting rid of it myself. With deep sagacity I put these
mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed
sham-supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass
unnoticed--'Possibly they may repent.' 'It is true that Jim Smith broke
a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. And
although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the
village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he
would. And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on
Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small
useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had
thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. Pity but they would
repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.'

But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor
chaps--who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the
same moment, though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly
left my candle burning. It was not a time to neglect even trifling
precautions. There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for
attracting notice to me--so I put the light out.

It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I
ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had
committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure
that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was
wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory.
It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and
calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless I had not only made my
own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had
already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the lightning had stretched them
all dead in their beds by this time! The anguish and the fright which
this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by
comparison.

Things had become truly serious. I resolved to turn over a new leaf
instantly; I also resolved to connect myself with the church the next
day, if I survived to see its sun appear. I resolved to cease from sin
in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after.
I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick;
carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation
conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor but they would
smash the basket over my head for my pains); I would instruct other boys
in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; I would subsist
entirely on tracts; I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard--
and finally, if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to
live, I would go for a missionary.

The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep with
a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering in
that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my
own loss.

But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys
were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was
a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account and
nobody's else. The world looked so bright and safe that there did not
seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. I was a little
subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose
of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful,
comfortable time again, until the next storm.

That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most
unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced; for on the
afternoon of that day, 'Dutchy' was drowned. Dutchy belonged to our
Sunday-school. He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in
out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious
memory. One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the
talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of
Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and
got drowned.

Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all
bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole
the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some
twelve feet under water. We were diving and 'seeing who could stay under
longest.' We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles.
Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter
and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed
hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be
fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just
this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing
at him.' Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'All right,
Dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.'

Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed
the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry
bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation,
when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent
and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were 'so full of laugh' with
the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles.
Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers,
said, with surprise--

'Why, he hasn't come up, yet!'

The laughing stopped.

'Boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one.

'Never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for
it.'

There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and
all began to peer through the vines. Before long, the boys' faces
began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still there was no
movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces
to turn pale. We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our
horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances
to the water.

'Somebody must go down and see!'

Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task.

'Draw straws!'

So we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were
about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I
could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and
presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it
had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened
suddenness.

The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there,
helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of
us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly
be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of
anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the
smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into
our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them
wrong-side-out and upside-down, as a rule. Then we scurried away and
gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy.
We had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost
not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life.

The night presently closed down. Then came on that tremendous and
utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed; I could not
understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The
elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away
in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of
me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'If a boy who
knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is
there for anybody else?'

Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy's
account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of
such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the
only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with
all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn
over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that
boy, no matter how hard I might try. Nevertheless I did turn it over--a
highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of
cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month
I had so drifted backward that again I was as lost and comfortable as
ever.

Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called these
ancient happenings back to mind; so I got me back into the present and
went down the hill.

On my way through town to the hotel, I saw the house which was my home
when I was a boy. At present rates, the people who now occupy it are of
no more value than I am; but in my time they would have been worth not
less than five hundred dollars apiece. They are colored folk.

After breakfast, I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of
the Sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare
with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had
probably taken me as a model--though I do not remember as to that now.
By the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick
church called the 'Old Ship of Zion,' which I had attended as a
Sunday-school scholar; and I found the locality easily enough, but not
the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice
was in its place. The pupils were better dressed and better looking
than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their
ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their
faces. Still, I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning
wistfulness, and if I had been a girl I would have cried; for they were
the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and
girls some of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to
hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other,
so many years gone by--and, Lord, where be they now!

I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to
remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent
who had been a tow-headed Sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the
early ages, recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild nonsense to
those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could
not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been
recognized as out of character with me.

Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and I was
resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger
Sunday-school I found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so I was
very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a
good look at the scholars. On the spur of the moment I could not recall
any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when
I was a pupil there; and I was sorry for this, since it would have given
me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look
at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness
not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size. As I talked
merely to get a chance to inspect; and as I strung out the random
rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, I judged it but decent to
confess these low motives, and I did so.

If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see
him. The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect:
perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in
filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a
prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed
place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse
off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing
reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the
mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became
of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into
details. He succeeded in life.




CHAPTER 55

A Vendetta and Other Things

DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the
impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young
again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed
a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I had been seeing those
faces as they are now.

Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become
adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not
seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of
the young ladies I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When
you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing
surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you
knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How
can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept
and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends
have not been standing still, in that matter.

I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not
the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their
wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be
good.

There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone. Dead, these
many years, they said. Once or twice a day, the saddler used to go
tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then
everybody knew a steamboat was coming. Everybody knew, also, that John
Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either;
and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no
difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred
thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life,
enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those
saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. A malicious Quincy
paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'Stavely's
Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations; I envied him his
rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it,
before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his
fluttering coat.

But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty
liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a
romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed
me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his
confidence. He was planing a board, and every now and then he would
pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences--
confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation
sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'O God,
it is his blood!' I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly
admired him; for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low
voice--

'My little friend, can you keep a secret?'

I eagerly said I could.

'A dark and dreadful one?'

I satisfied him on that point.

'Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I _must
_relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die!'

He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told
me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' He put down his plane, held his hands
out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said--

'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!'

The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he
turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He
left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder;
described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then
passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had
always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs
rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me.

At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful
secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams,
which had been sluggish for a while back. I sought him again and again,
on my Saturday holidays; in fact I spent the summer with him--all of
it which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for
he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each
successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places--everything. This
by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims
in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named
Lynch. The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after
Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to
be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and
I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the
same name.

My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being;
but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before
me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one 'too fair
for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of
her pure and noble nature.' But he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named
Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his
hands in her heart's best blood.' The carpenter, 'innocent and happy
in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his
'golden-haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one;
there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over
their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell
a corpse at her husband's feet. And what did the husband do? He plucked
forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to
'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that
bear the hated name of Lynch.'

That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering
them, from that day to this--twenty years. He had always used that same
consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches,
and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar
mark--a cross, deeply incised. Said he--

'The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America,
in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of
Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe,
a Lynch has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and
those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "It is his mark, he has
been here." You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger--look upon him, for
before you stands no less a person! But beware--breathe not a word to
any soul. Be silent, and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast
to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and
men will tremble and whisper, "He has been here--it is the Mysterious
Avenger's mark!" You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will
see me no more.'

This ass had been reading the 'Jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had
his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book
then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a
plagiarist.

However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected
upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain
duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get
some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell
him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. I advised him
to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. But he laughed at me; and
he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the
carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions,
slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off
and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my
eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero.

The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in
his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished;
but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only
a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of
myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop
any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I
had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his
imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I
remember all their details yet.

The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is
no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and
water-works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a
thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west
and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so
seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary
half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot
which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no
specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed
a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a
hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and
a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money
changes hands there now.

Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly
bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents
of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get
drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated
and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is
unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills
and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had
this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses
were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge
between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists
to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake.

There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the
bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my
time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his
daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a
copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of
the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable;
and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to
drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it.




CHAPTER 56

A Question of Law

THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the
small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A
citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was
burned to death in the calaboose?'

Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and
the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the
calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of
delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I
mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim
was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden
tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much
of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was
wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his
mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on
the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused
themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some
appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a
pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such
sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I
went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed,
heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An hour or
two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by
the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two
in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned
out, of course--I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches
disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing
of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men,
women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and
staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and
tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he
seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was
the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the
only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its
blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke
into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not
so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that
the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and
that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As
to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that
was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me.

I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and
I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the
matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a
doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were
found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt
into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they
themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter,
I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I
was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and
so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience,
that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in
looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which
sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick
it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of
intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' For a boy of ten years, I was
carrying a pretty weighty cargo.

All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that I was
an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my
bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by
the light of the moon. I said--

'What is the matter?'

'You talk so much I can't sleep.'

I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat
and my hair on end.

'What did I say. Quick--out with it--what did I say?'

'Nothing much.'

'It's a lie--you know everything.'

'Everything about what?'

'You know well enough. About _that_.'

'About _what_?--I don't know what you are talking about. I think you are
sick or crazy or something. But anyway, you're awake, and I'll get to
sleep while I've got a chance.'

He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror
over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of
my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know?--what a
distress is this uncertainty! But by and by I evolved an idea--I would
wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him
up, and said--

'Suppose a man should come to you drunk--'

'This is foolish--I never get drunk.'

'I don't mean you, idiot--I mean the man. Suppose a _man _should come
to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you
forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--'

'How could you load a tomahawk?'

'I don't mean the tomahawk, and I didn't say the tomahawk; I said
the pistol. Now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is
serious. There's been a man killed.'

'What! in this town?'

'Yes, in this town.'

'Well, go on--I won't say a single word.'

'Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it,
because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that
pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident,
being drunk. Well, would it be murder?'

'No--suicide.'

'No, no. I don't mean _his _act, I mean yours: would you be a murderer
for letting him have that pistol?'

After deep thought came this answer--

'Well, I should think I was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes,
probably murder, but I don't quite know.'

This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict.
I should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other
way. But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious
effects. I said--

'I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you
know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?'

'No.'

'Haven't you the least idea?'

'Not the least.'

'Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?'

'Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.'

'Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his
pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the calaboose with those
very matches, and burnt himself up.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?'

'Let me see. The man was drunk?'

'Yes, he was drunk.'

'Very drunk?'

'Yes.'

'And the boy knew it?'

'Yes, he knew it.'

There was a long pause. Then came this heavy verdict--

'If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man.
This is certain.'

Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and
I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence
pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say
next. I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right. He said--

'I know the boy.'

I had nothing to say; so I said nothing. I simply shuddered. Then he
added--

'Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew
perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz!'

I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with
admiration--

'Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?'

'You told it in your sleep.'

I said to myself, 'How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be
cultivated.'

My brother rattled innocently on--

'When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about
"matches," which I couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when
you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches,
I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three
times; so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew
it was Ben that burnt that man up.'

I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked--

'Are you going to give him up to the law?'

'No,' I said; 'I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep
an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where
he is and reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him.'

'How good you are!'

'Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this.'

And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon
faded away.

The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my
notice--the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there.
I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored
coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. He was
to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But he
missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. He excused himself by
saying--

'De time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in
de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early
for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de
sermon. Diffunce in de time. A body can't make no calculations 'bout
it.'

I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four.




CHAPTER 57

An Archangel

FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the
presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical
nineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work. The
happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect
of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that
everywhere appear.

Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and
now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.

But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in
a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the
projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full
confidence; but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City,
thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six
houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin,
is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless
Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage: it was
situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas Quincy
stands high up on the slope of a hill.

In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England
town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings
and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And
there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive
drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and
costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a
square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some
large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a
great scale.

La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was
told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.

Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary
year there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful.
Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they
always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the
semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a
figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded
with greenbacks.

The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing
with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for
which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful
city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has
advanced, not retrograded, in that respect.

A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now.
This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred
feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is
of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will
endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions.

After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river
again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that
erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but
he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him--

He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on
the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his
book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp
of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour,
never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then
to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its
contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his
permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts
of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his
intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted.

His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that
they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore
more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. Nobody
could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice
itself.

He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the
training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his
name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty
miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for
a volcano does not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late
distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning
Dean--

The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great
mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A
distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had
been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes,
the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed
to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and
rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a
curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him,
rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the
stage and save his country.

Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and
everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless
stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a
dozen persons present. It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at
the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of
antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle;
an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and
wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long
black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage;
bob-tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back,
with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small,
stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever
bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with
sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and
dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise
held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple
of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave.
The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave
started--laughter, this time. It was followed by another, then a
third--this last one boisterous.

And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap,
tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody
listening, everybody laughing and whispering. The speaker talked on
unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and
silence and attention resulted. He followed it quick and fast, with
other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words
out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to
discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break
into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering
straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still
thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside,
firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after
the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another
Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone
and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash,
explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet
in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers,
through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs.

'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped
lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.'

Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city; and
also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing
city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy
factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober
city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill
to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale,
borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by
conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of
Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race,
except water. This measure was approved by all the rational people in
the State; but not by the bench of Judges.

Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices
for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department,
a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still
employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system.

In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes a
go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera-house
has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby
dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of Burlington's size.

We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it
from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now,
had a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has clear outgrown the
town which I used to know. In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as
a small place--which it isn't now. But I remember it best for a
lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a
butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it,
unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil. I tried
to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the
family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any
half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil--he
whetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worth while to make
trouble about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of
the matter and saved my skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit
his father; and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet.

And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets.
I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them.
They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every
imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies
of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding
purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but
sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippi region
has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is the true
Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the
name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. I do not know.




CHAPTER 58

On the Upper River

THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch
processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour, the
boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west; and
with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise
and respect gather emphasis and increase. Such a people, and such
achievements as theirs, compel homage. This is an independent race who
think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are
educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best
and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a
school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law.
Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.

This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its
babyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may
forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It
is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not
visited it. For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and
down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and
written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth
seeing or that had anything to see. In not six of all these books is
there mention of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five
or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns
were projected. The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old
regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of St.
Louis.

Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great
towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next
morning. A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand
people. Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand;
Moline, ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve
thousand; Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five
thousand; Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand,
Minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward.

The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them
in his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept. So new
is this region, that I, who am comparatively young, am yet older than
it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a population of three persons,
Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis
died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an
increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and
ninety-nine persons. He had a frog's fertility.

I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St.
Paul and Minneapolis, are several months old. These towns are far larger
now. In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the
former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. This
book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the
figures will be worth much then.

We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning
a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all
comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and
cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. Therefore
we will give that phrase a rest. The Indians have a tradition that
Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673. The
next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy
years later--in 1834. Davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people
within the past thirty years. She sends more children to her schools
now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. She has
the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions
of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm,
and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder
companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. Davenport is
the official residence of two bishops--Episcopal and Catholic.

Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island, which lies at
the foot of the Upper Rapids. A great railroad bridge connects the two
towns--one of the thirteen which fret the Mississippi and the pilots,
between St. Louis and St. Paul.

The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile
wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it
into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and
threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center
of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone
four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. These
are the Government workshops; for the Rock Island establishment is a
national armory and arsenal.

We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no
other kind on the Upper Mississippi--and pass Moline, a center of vast
manufacturing industries; and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers;
and presently reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region.
The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. Dubuque has a
great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory
which has for customers all Christendom in general. At least so I was
told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. He said--

'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to
plow, and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat
that plow; and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up
with, either.'

All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions.
Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was
Keokuk's, further down. A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de
Mort--Death's-head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drove
a band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death
for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve,
or jump off and kill themselves. Black Hawk adopted the ways of the
white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was
buried, near Des Moines, in Christian fashion, modified by Indian
custom; that is to say, clothed in a Christian military uniform, and
with a Christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a
sitting posture. Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief.
The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature was
really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over.

We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was
olive-green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on
it. Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion
as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood
stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from
caving banks.

The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region,
charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft
beauty of their adornment. The steep verdant slope, whose base is at
the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks,
which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns
and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. And then you have the
shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted
at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels;
and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of
stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of
white steamers vanishing around remote points. And it is all as
tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about
it--nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.

Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does,
ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's
warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway
you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for
your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose
stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as
soon as you sell it. It makes me shudder to this day, to remember that
I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. It must be an awful
thing to have a railroad left on your hands.

The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost
the whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles. These
railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. The clerk of our
boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. In that day
the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so
heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made
upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very
independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say. The
clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present,
thus--

'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and
straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted
behind--man on shore takes off hat and says--

'"Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take
them."

'Captain says--

'"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him.

'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the
way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't
got any ramrod to interfere with, and says--

'"Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't
seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?"

'"Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and
goes to talking with somebody else.

'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn
now. Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom
full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid
deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. To
get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of
nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted
with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. But it's all changed
now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent
self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone
where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either;
went by the train.'

Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but
not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with
joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking,
breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly
along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small
crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a
suggestion of romance about them anywhere.

Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow
and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. Behind was
solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water,
curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on
both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple
stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday
intensified. The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking.

We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's
camping-places; and after some hours of progress through varied and
beautiful scenery, reached La Crosse. Here is a town of twelve or
thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with
blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally
fine enough, to command respect in any city. It is a choice town, and we
made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though
the weather was rainier than necessary.




CHAPTER 59

Legends and Scenery

WE added several passengers to our list, at La Crosse; among others an
old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early
settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. Pardonably proud of
it, too. He said--

'You'll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give the Hudson
points. You'll have the Queen's Bluff--seven hundred feet high, and
just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and Trempeleau
Island, which isn't like any other island in America, I believe, for it
is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of Indian
traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun
just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. And
above Winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the Thousand
Islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so
green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat
on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous
bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just
the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to
throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.'

The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two--but not
very powerful ones.

After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and
described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands to St. Paul;
naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such
nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and
there, with such a complacent air of 't
isn't-anything,-I-can-do-it-any-time-I-want-to, and letting off fine
surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that I
presently began to suspect--

But no matter what I began to suspect. Hear him--

'Ten miles above Winona we come to Fountain City, nestling sweetly at
the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, Jovelike, toward the
blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have
known no other contact save that of angels' wings.

'And next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous
aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about
twelve miles, and strike Mount Vernon, six hundred feet high, with
romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud
shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing
Mount Vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted.

'And so we move on. Past Chimney Rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred
feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is attracted
by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet--the ideal
mountain pyramid. Its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its
sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder
at nature's workings. From its dizzy heights superb views of the
forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are
brought within its focus. What grander river scenery can be conceived,
as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of
these bluffs upon the valleys below? The primeval wildness and awful
loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's God, excite
feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can
never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction.

'Next we have the Lion's Head and the Lioness's Head, carved by nature's
hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the
river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley
before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with
verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in
their lap the beautiful Wabasha, City of the Healing Waters, puissant
foe of Bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's
works, incomparable Lake Pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the
tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and
unappeasable.

'And so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes,
the mighty Sugar Loaf, and the sublime Maiden's Rock--which latter,
romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the
birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears
the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song
and story.

'Then Frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer
tourists; then progressive Red Wing; and Diamond Bluff, impressive and
preponderous in its lone sublimity; then Prescott and the St. Croix; and
anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul, giant
young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in the
van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization,
carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise,
sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking
scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the
school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance,
crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the
pulpit; and ever--'

'Have you ever traveled with a panorama?'

'I have formerly served in that capacity.'

My suspicion was confirmed.

'Do you still travel with it?'

'No, she is laid up till the fall season opens. I am helping now to work
up the materials for a Tourist's Guide which the St. Louis and St.
Paul Packet Company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of
travelers who go by that line.'

'When you were talking of Maiden's Rock, you spoke of the long-departed
Winona, darling of Indian song and story. Is she the maiden of the
rock?--and are the two connected by legend?'

'Yes, and a very tragic and painful one. Perhaps the most celebrated, as
well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the Mississippi.'

We asked him to tell it. He dropped out of his conversational vein and
back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows--

'A little distance above Lake City is a famous point known as Maiden's
Rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic
interest from the event which gave it its name, Not many years ago this
locality was a favorite resort for the Sioux Indians on account of the
fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were
always to be found in this locality. Among the families which used
to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of Wabasha. We-no-na
(first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a
lover belonging to the same band. But her stern parents had promised her
hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. The
day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. She appeared to accede
to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of
gathering flowers for the feast. On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran
to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were
below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself
from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.'

'Dashed who in pieces--her parents?'

'Yes.'

'Well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. And moreover,
there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which I was not
looking for. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of
Indian legend. There are fifty Lover's Leaps along the Mississippi from
whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only
jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. What
became of Winona?'

'She was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together
and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis
said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to
some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit
mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early
deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's
protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of
a censorious world.'

I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it
assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled me to imagine
such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night.

As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian
tales and traditions. But I reminded him that people usually merely
mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and
judiciously stopped there. Why? Because the impression left, was that
these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression
which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. I showed him
a lot of this sort of literature which I had been collecting, and he
confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and I
ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of
this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of
Winona. He granted these facts, but said that if I would hunt up Mr.
Schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless
out of print, I would find some Indian inventions in it that were very
far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in
Hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from Schoolcraft's book; and
that there were others in the same book which Mr. Longfellow could have
turned into verse with good effect. For instance, there was the legend
of 'The Undying Head.' He could not tell it, for many of the details
had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and
enlarge my respect for the Indian imagination. He said that this tale,
and most of the others in the book, were current among the Indians
along this part of the Mississippi when he first came here; and that
the contributors to Schoolcraft's book had got them directly from Indian
lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without
embellishments of their own.

I have found the book. The lecturer was right. There are several legends
in it which confirm what he said. I will offer two of them--'The Undying
Head,' and 'Peboan and Seegwun, an Allegory of the Seasons.' The latter
is used in Hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if
only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the
helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm--

PEBOAN AND SEEGWUN.

An old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen
stream. It was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, He
appeared very old and very desolate. His locks were white with age, and
he trembled in every joint. Day after day passed in solitude, and he
heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the
new-fallen snow.

One day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and
entered his dwelling. His cheeks were red with the blood of youth,
his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. He
walked with a light and quick step. His forehead was bound with a wreath
of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch
of flowers in his hand.

'Ah, my son,' said the old man, 'I am happy to see you. Come in. Come
and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to
see. Let us pass the night together. I will tell you of my prowess and
exploits, and what I can perform. You shall do the same, and we will
amuse ourselves.'

He then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having
filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves,
handed it to his guest. When this ceremony was concluded they began to
speak.

'I blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. The
water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.'

'I breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.'

'I shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. The
leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away.
The birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. The animals
hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as
flint.'

'I shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of
soft rain fall upon the earth. The plants lift up their heads out of
the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. My voice
recalls the birds. The warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. Music
fills the groves wherever I walk, and all nature rejoices.'

At length the sun began to rise. A gentle warmth came over the place.
The tongue of the old man became silent. The robin and bluebird began
to sing on the top of the lodge. The stream began to murmur by the door,
and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal
breeze.

Daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his
entertainer. When he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of
Peboan.{footnote [Winter.]} Streams began to flow from his eyes. As the
sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted
completely away. Nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the
miskodeed,{footnote [The trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with
a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants.

'The Undying Head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird
conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of
movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [See appendix D.]}




CHAPTER 60

Speculations and Conclusions

WE reached St. Paul, at the head of navigation of the Mississippi, and
there our voyage of two thousand miles from New Orleans ended. It is
about a ten-day trip by steamer. It can probably be done quicker by
rail. I judge so because I know that one may go by rail from St. Louis
to Hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven
hours. This is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry.

The season being far advanced when we were in New Orleans, the roses and
magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in St. Paul it was the snow,
In New Orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a
crater, apparently; here in St. Paul we caught a frequent benumbing one
from over a glacier, apparently.

But I wander from my theme. St. Paul is a wonderful town. It is put
together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of
intending to stay. Its post-office was established thirty-six years ago;
and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to
Washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. Such is
the legend. Two frame houses were built that year, and several persons
were added to the population. A recent number of the leading St. Paul
paper, the 'Pioneer Press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid
contrast to that old state of things, to wit: Population, autumn of the
present year (1882), 71,000; number of letters handled, first half of
the year, 1,209,387; number of houses built during three-quarters of
the year, 989; their cost, $3,186,000. The increase of letters over the
corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. Last year
the new buildings added to the city cost above $4,500,000. St.
Paul's strength lies in her commerce--I mean his commerce. He is a
manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but
he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. Last year his jobbing
trade amounted to upwards of $52,000,000.

He has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the
one recently burned--for he is the capital of the State. He has churches
without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich
Protestant puts up, the kind that the poor Irish 'hired-girl' delights
to erect. What a passion for building majestic churches the Irish
hired-girl has. It is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we
enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. In
fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this
beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat,
and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and
bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely,
and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one
praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered
purse it symbolizes.

This is a land of libraries and schools. St. Paul has three public
libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand
books. He has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more
than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries.

There is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact,
that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first;
but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was
distinctly the other way. The error is to be corrected.

The town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above
the sea level. It is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is
offered from its streets.

It is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. All
the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being
compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for
other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of
the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in.

How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of
civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat,
never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never
the missionary--but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over;
you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey--I mean he arrives
after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax
and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next,
the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin
of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant
that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance
committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the
newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands
turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization
is established for ever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the
van-leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like a
foreigner--and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great
truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had
been conversant with the facts, he would have said--

Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way.

This great van-leader arrived upon the ground which St. Paul now
occupies, in June 1837. Yes, at that date, Pierre Parrant, a Canadian,
built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to
the Indians. The result is before us.

All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth,
intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash
and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply to his near neighbor,
Minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two
cities.

These extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but
were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting
along under a single mayor. At any rate, within five years from
now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings
stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be
able to tell where the one Siamese twin leaves off and the other begins.
Combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty
thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. Thus, this
center of population at the head of Mississippi navigation, will then
begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the
foot of it--New Orleans.

Minneapolis is situated at the falls of St. Anthony, which stretch
across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two
feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable
value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the Falls as
a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph
taken.

Thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest
of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet
of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper
and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories,
without number, so to speak. The great flouring-mills here and at St.
Paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of
grinding it.

Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains
arrive and depart daily. In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism
thrives. Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three
monthlies.

There is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still,
its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. There are
sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000; there are
six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. There
are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. The banks
aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade of
the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year.

Near St. Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest--Fort
Snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the
falls of Minnehaha, White-bear Lake, and so forth. The beautiful falls
of Minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from
me, in that direction. The White-bear Lake is less known. It is a lovely
sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth
and fashion of the State. It has its club-house, and its hotel, with the
modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and
plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. There are a dozen minor
summer resorts around about St. Paul and Minneapolis, but the White-bear
Lake is the resort. Connected with White-bear Lake is a most idiotic
Indian legend. I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I
could, but the task is beyond my strength. The guide-book names the
preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' Without
further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose
upon the reader--

A LEGEND OF WHITE-BEAR LAKE.

Every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a
nation of red men, an island in the middle of White-bear Lake has been
visited by a band of Indians for the purpose of making maple sugar.

Tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young
warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also,
the maiden loved the warrior. He had again and again been refused her
hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and
his old consort called him a woman!

The sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose
high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his
flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the
mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as
he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his
feet heavily. As he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped
from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. He
began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as
he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his
shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. She took her
place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the Indian
has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own
freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. As the legend runs, a
large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter
weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. He at length
approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name,
walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy
snow toward the island. It was the same spring ensuing that the lovers
met. They had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the
branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (The same tree is
still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) For fear
of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they
might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they
were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was
heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his
blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the
blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. Instantly
every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all
unarmed. Cries and wailings went up from every mouth. What was to be
done'? In the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless
maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he
were used to scenes like this. One deafening yell from the lover warrior
is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away
to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single
bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree
to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of
a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. The animal turned, and with one
stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next
moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened
the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold.

That night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as
the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the
gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon
had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. Their children for
many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake
derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the
fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for Kis-se-me-pa and
Ka-go-ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge
monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground.

It is a perplexing business. First, she fell down out of the tree--she
and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the
blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket;
meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,'
climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after
him--apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the
bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the
bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? No--nothing of the sort. You get
yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of
a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down
flat--nothing saved but the girl. Whereas, one is not interested in
the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. Nevertheless,
there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a
thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. A dead man could
get up a better legend than this one. I don't mean a fresh dead man
either; I mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks.

We struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that
astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and
fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities.
It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with
Chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.
She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you
passed through the last time. The Pennsylvania road rushed us to New
York without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route;
and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys I
have ever had the good fortune to make.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A

(FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES DEMOCRAT OF MARCH 29, 1882.)

VOYAGE OF THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S RELIEF BOAT THROUGH THE INUNDATED REGIONS

IT was nine o'clock Thursday morning when the 'Susie' left the
Mississippi and entered Old River, or what is now called the mouth of
the Red. Ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over
the levees on the Chandler plantation, the most northern point in Pointe
Coupee parish. The water completely covered the place, although the
levees had given way but a short time before. The stock had been
gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the
animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. On
the right-hand side of the river is Turnbull's Island, and on it is a
large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile
in the State. The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual
floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. The
top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all
of it was submerged.

The trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in,
and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye
is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. We pass mile after
mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in
water. A water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long
avenue of silence. A pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses
the Red River on its way out to the Mississippi, but the sad-faced
paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. The puffing of the
boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. It is not
the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn
silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition.
We passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this
morning. They were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a
supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. Their rafts were about
twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been
placed, on which they built their fire.

The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi
showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to
enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short
way to the Gulf. Small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great
demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them
where they will bring the greatest price. From what was told me by Mr.
C. P. Ferguson, a planter near Red River Landing, whose place has just
gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. The
negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper
levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy.
On Thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and
brought in, many yet remaining.

One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through
a flood. At sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with
fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it
is expected. In fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would
be appreciated. The river here is known only because there is an opening
in the trees, and that is all. It is in width, from Fort Adams on the
left bank of the Mississippi to the bank of Rapides Parish, a distance
of about sixty miles. A large portion of this was under cultivation,
particularly along the Mississippi and back of the Red. When Red River
proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it,
pursuing the same direction as that of the Mississippi.

After a run of some hours, Black River was reached. Hardly was it
entered before signs of suffering became visible. All the willows
along the banks were stripped of their leaves. One man, whom your
correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head
of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. At the first appearance of water
he had started to drive them to the high lands of Avoyelles, thirty-five
miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs.
Black River is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water.
A dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost
impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in
the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely
distinguished in the gloom.

A few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully
eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the
strong current, the tops of cabins. Here and there one overturned was
surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future
island.

In order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any
point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a
wood-pile. On rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth,
shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful
black eyes, and demure manners. The boy asked for a paper, which was
thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell
of the boat.

Presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in
the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old
voyageur. The little one looked more like an Indian than a white child,
and laughed when asked if she were afraid. She had been raised in a
pirogue and could go anywhere. She was bound out to pick willow leaves
for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three
inches deep on the floors. At its back door was moored a raft about
thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of
this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. The family did not
complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought
a supply of wood in a flat.

From this point to the Mississippi River, fifteen miles, there is not
a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles
there is nothing but the river's flood. Black River had risen during
Thursday, the 23rd, 1{three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night
still. As we progress up the river habitations become more frequent,
but are yet still miles apart. Nearly all of them are deserted, and the
out-houses floated off. To add to the gloom, almost every living thing
seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of
the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. Sometimes a morose gar
will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this
everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. Down the river floats
now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split
fence-rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair
of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it
bears them along. A picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph
of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded
by the water and despoiled of this ornament.

At dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was
hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night.

A pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and
river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape
study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. The motion of
the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled,
and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was!
Usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum
of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. The dark
recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and
even the ripplings of the current die away.

At daylight Friday morning all hands were up, and up the Black we
started. The morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is
remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. The blossoms of the haw
perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along
the banks. The trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth
than below. More fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same
scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures,
negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest
residence just showing its eaves above water. The sun came up in a
glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades
of green. Not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is
apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches
of the largest trees. All along, the bordering willows have been denuded
of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this
fodder for their animals. An old man in a pirogue was asked how the
willow leaves agreed with his cattle. He stopped in his work, and with
an ominous shake of his head replied: 'Well, sir, it 's enough to keep
warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the
hogs, particularly the small ones. They is dropping off powerful fast.
But what can you do? It 's all we've got.'

At thirty miles above the mouth of Black River the water extends from
Natchez on the Mississippi across to the pine hills of Louisiana, a
distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not
ten feet under it. The tendency of the current up the Black is toward
the west. In fact, so much is this the case, the waters of Red River
have been driven down from toward the Calcasieu country, and the waters
of the Black enter the Red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the
former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. The
water now in sight of us is entirely from the Mississippi.

Up to Trinity, or rather Troy, which is but a short distance below,
the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for
their present personal needs. Their cattle, though, are suffering and
dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get
breeds disease.

After a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there
were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. Here were seen
more pictures of distress. On the inside of the houses the inmates
had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. The
bed-posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four
feet from the improvised floor. The buildings looked very insecure,
and threatened every moment to float off. Near the houses were cattle
standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. They did not
move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. The
sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to
die unless speedily rescued. Cattle differ from horses in this peculiar
quality. A horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search
of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion
it drops in the water and drowns.

At half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the
line of the bank. Rounding to we ran alongside, and General York stepped
aboard. He was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the
'Times-Democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her.
He said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. People were
in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. The water was
so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. It had
already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it
reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept
away. If this occurs, there will be great loss of life. The General
spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to
save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had
perished. Already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from
Troy, on Black River, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a
very great quantity remained and were in dire need. The water was now
eighteen inches higher than in 1874, and there was no land between
Vidalia and the hills of Catahoula.

At two o'clock the 'Susie' reached Troy, sixty-five miles above the
mouth of Black River. Here on the left comes in Little River; just
beyond that the Ouachita, and on the right the Tensas. These three
rivers form the Black River. Troy, or a portion of it, is situated on
and around three large Indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise
above the present water about twelve feet. They are about one hundred
and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. The
houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to
a depth of eighteen inches on their floors.

These elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are
the only points of refuge for miles. When we arrived we found them
crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up.
They were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. One of
these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day
we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing
their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by General
York. Here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the
management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. Children were paddling
about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts.

General York has put into operation a perfect system in regard to
furnishing relief. He makes a personal inspection of the place where it
is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats
chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle
are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of Catahoula. He
has made Troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their
supply of feed for cattle. On the opposite side of Little River, which
branches to the left out of Black, and between it and the Ouachita,
is situated the town of Trinity, which is hourly threatened with
destruction. It is much lower than Troy, and the water is eight and nine
feet deep in the houses. A strong current sweeps through it, and it is
remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. The residents of
both Troy and Trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have
to be furnished with food.

As soon as the 'Susie' reached Troy, she was turned over to General
York, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more
rapidly. Nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to
lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below.
At Tom Hooper's place, a few miles from Troy, a large flat, with about
fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. The animals were fed,
and soon regained some strength. To-day we go on Little River, where the
suffering is greatest.

DOWN BLACK RIVER

Saturday Evening, March 25.

We started down Black River quite early, under the direction of General
York, to bring out what stock could be reached. Going down river a flat
in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back
in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. In
the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a
gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty.
Taking a skiff with the General, your reporter was pulled up to a little
house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the
floors. In one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of
the place, while in the other the Widow Taylor and her son were seated
on a scaffold raised on the floor. One or two dug-outs were drifting
about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. When the flat
was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of
getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat.
General York, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired
to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,' has
sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose. Mrs. Taylor said she thanked Major
Burke, but she would try and hold out. The remarkable tenacity of the
people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. Just below, at
a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the
house of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. We
steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. Looking out
of the half of the window left above water, was Mrs. Ellis, who is in
feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest
not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work
animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family
lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. The stove was
below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house
threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and,
in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr.
Ellis came out in a dug-out, and General York told him that he had come
to his relief; that 'The Times-Democrat' boat was at his service, and
would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat
would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy.
Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in,
Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until
Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the
door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger
they were in. These are but two instances of the many. After weeks of
privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave
only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build
a scaffold on which to stand. It seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the
love for the old place was stronger than that for safety.

After leaving the Ellis place, the next spot touched at was the Oswald
place. Here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were
fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds,
their heads were above the top of the entrance. It was found impossible
to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so
axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. After much labor the
horses and mules were securely placed on the flat.

At each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs
arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need.
Notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their
stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity,
which General York, who is working with indomitable energy, will get
landed in the pine hills by Tuesday.

All along Black River the 'Susie' has been visited by scores of
planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of
suffering and loss. An old planter, who has lived on the river since
1844, said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than
one quarter of the stock has been lost. Luckily the people cared first
for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were
housed in a place of safety. The rise which still continues, and was two
inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it
is that the work of General York is of such a great value. From daylight
to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his
kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. One
unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in New Orleans, is told all
along the river. It appears for some years past the planters have been
dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his
hands. When the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in
fact, for such little necessities as were required. No response to these
letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with
plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain
life. It is needless to say he is not popular now on Back River.

The hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on
Black River are in Catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from Black River.

After filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of T. S.
Hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling,
and we are now taking them up Little River to the hills.

THE FLOOD STILL RISING

Troy: March 27, 1882, noon.

The flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four
hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. General York
feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as
the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. We intend to
go up the Tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go
down Black River to take off families. There is a lack of steam
transportation here to meet the emergency. The General has three boats
chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock
is greater than they can meet with promptness. All are working night and
day, and the 'Susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. The
rise has placed Trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it
is expected that some of the houses will float off. Troy is a little
higher, yet all are in the water. Reports have come in that a woman
and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated
off. Their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before
yesterday. One would not believe the utter passiveness of the people.

As yet no news has been received of the steamer 'Delia,' which is
supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on Lake Catahoula.
She is due here now, but has not arrived. Even the mail here is most
uncertain, and this I send by skiff to Natchez to get it to you. It is
impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who
know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well
versed in the production of this section.

General York desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent
should be duplicated and sent at once. It is impossible to make any
estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the
rise. The residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be
appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in.

If rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would
not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to Troy
as a center, and the General will have it properly disposed of. He
has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in
motion now, two hundred will be required.

APPENDIX B

THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COMMISSION

THE condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi, immediately
after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of
war most to be deplored. Fictitious property in slaves was not only
righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon
the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the
levee system.

It might have been expected by those who have not investigated the
subject, that such important improvements as the construction and
maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several
States. But what can the State do where the people are under subjection
to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under
the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at
these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at
100 per cent. profit?

It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that
the control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all, must be
undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by
States. The river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be
compassed under a divided or separate system of administration.

Neither are the States especially interested competent to combine among
themselves for the necessary operations. The work must begin far up the
river; at least as far as Cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted
upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river.

It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the
elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the
subject, and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted,
as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks
in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should
be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction
or control can be considered conclusive?

It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore,
General Comstock, and General Suter, of the United States Engineers;
Professor Henry Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question
of hydrography), of the United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod,
the State Engineer of Louisiana; Jas. B. Eads, whose success with the
jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of his competency, and Judge Taylor,
of Indiana.

It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled,
to contest the judgment of such a board as this.

The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in
accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations
of nature where meeting our wants. As in nature the growth of trees and
their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support
the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree
of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and
brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. It
is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at
first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles
under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which
willows will grow freely. In this work there are many details connected
with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to
present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would
only complicate the conception. Through the larger part of the river
works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks
on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the
stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points.
The works having in view this conservative object may be generally
designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of
brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting.
This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri
River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments,
and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as
permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small
quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low
river will have to be more or less paved with stone.

Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not
unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the
rivers of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar
treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture.

The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not
necessarily in immediate connection. It may be set back a short distance
from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet.
The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and
compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel,
without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise
must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and
once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away.

Under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the
result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that
a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less
frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in
proportion to area of cross section. The ultimate effect of levees and
revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river
into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. The first
effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing
greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section,
and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of
the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so
improved as to admit this flow with less rise. The actual experience
with levees upon the Mississippi River, with no attempt to hold the
banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence
furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees
had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should
have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe
from inundation.

Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river
can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it
is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may
be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the
coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying
levees of ordinary height. That the actual capacity of a channel through
alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown,
but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods.

It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving
the Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets, since these
sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking
minds, and have no support among engineers. Were the river bed
cast-iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity;
but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single
deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of
cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of
treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape.

In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in
as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit,
the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the
proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the Mississippi
River Commission.

The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his
part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which
calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which
interests every citizen of the United States, and is one of the methods
of reconstruction which ought to be approved. It is a war claim which
implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases
of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people
of the whole country.

EDWARD ATKINSON.

Boston: April 14, 1882.

APPENDIX C

RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES

HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, I am induced, ere I
conclude, again to mention what I consider as one of the most remarkable
traits in the national character of the Americans; namely, their
exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or
written concerning them. Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I
can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the
appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.' In fact,
it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned
through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the Union to
the other, was by no means over when I left the country in July 1831, a
couple of years after the shock.

I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till
July 1830, that I procured a copy of them. One bookseller to whom I
applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the
nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing
should induce him to sell another. Other persons of his profession must,
however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town,
village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop
was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any
occasion whatever.

An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under
censure, have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of
character; but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's
work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to
excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility.

It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were
of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. I never heard of any
instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism
was so overthrown by passion. I do not speak of the want of justice, and
of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be
expected. Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens
of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze
blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. It was not,
therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a
traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. The
extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the
rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of
the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with
which they fancied they had been treated.

Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth,
from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly as
often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover
the causes why Captain Hall had visited the United States, and why he
had published his book.

I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the
statement had been conveyed by an official report, that Captain Hall
had been sent out by the British Government expressly for the purpose
of checking the growing admiration of England for the Government of the
United States,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had
come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found
anything to object to.

I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it is
the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. So deep is
the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without
being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one
should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their
country.

The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in
England; I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes
wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's
curse into classic American; if they had done so, on placing (he, Basil
Hall) between brackets, instead of (he, Obadiah) it would have saved
them a world of trouble.

I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length
to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my
surprise at their contents. To say that I found not one exaggerated
statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. It is
impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that Captain
Hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. When he praises,
it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident
reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge
him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be
known.

In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible
advantage. Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the
most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential
recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full
drawing-room style and state from one end of the Union to the other.
He saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity
of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its
imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had.

Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself
acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of
receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation
with the most distinguished citizens. Of these opportunities he made
excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that
sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical
traveler alone can give. This has made his volumes highly interesting
and valuable; but I am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal
penetration to visit the United States with no other means of becoming
acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day
intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the
moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears to have done;
and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if Captain
Hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given
expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against
many points in the American character, with which he shows from other
circumstances that he was well acquainted. His rule appears to have been
to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his
readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive
folks he was writing about. He states his own opinions and feelings, and
leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them;
but he spares the Americans the bitterness which a detail of the
circumstances would have produced.

If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions
of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must bear it; and were the
question one of mere idle speculation, I certainly would not court the
abuse I must meet for stating it. But it is not so.

. . . . . . .

The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for
irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to
persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as
affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret
hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to
betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the
bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is,
that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite
suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the
same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he
could possibly find anything favorable.

APPENDIX D

THE UNDYING HEAD

IN a remote part of the North lived a man and his sister, who had never
seen a human being. Seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from
home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little
distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his
arrows, with their barbs in the ground. Telling his sister where they
had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail
of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. She had then only to
drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. Thus she lived till she
attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was Iamo, said
to her: 'Sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. Listen to my
advice. If you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. Take
the implements with which we kindle our fires. Go some distance from our
lodge and build a separate fire. When you are in want of food, I will
tell you where to find it. You must cook for yourself, and I will for
myself. When you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or
bring any of the utensils you use. Be sure always to fasten to your belt
the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. As
for myself, I must do the best I can.' His sister promised to obey him
in all he had said.

Shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. She was alone in
her lodge, combing her hair. She had just untied the belt to which the
implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother
had alluded, occurred. She ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot
the belt. Afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. Finally,
she decided to enter the lodge and get it. For, thought she, my brother
is not at home, and I will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. She
went back. Running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming
out when her brother came in sight. He knew what was the matter. 'Oh,'
he said, 'did I not tell you to take care. But now you have killed me.'
She was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'What can you
do there now. The accident has happened. Go in, and stay where you have
always stayed. And what will become of you? You have killed me.'

He then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after
both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. Still he
directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always
have food. The inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached
his first rib; and he said: 'Sister, my end is near. You must do as
I tell you. You see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. It
contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all
colors. As soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my
war-club. It has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. When it is
free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must
open at one end. Then hang it up in its former place. Do not forget
my bow and arrows. One of the last you will take to procure food. The
remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that I can look
towards the door. Now and then I will speak to you, but not often.' His
sister again promised to obey.

In a little time his breast was affected. 'Now,' said he, 'take the
club and strike off my head.' She was afraid, but he told her to muster
courage. 'Strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. Mustering all
her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'Now,' said the
head, 'place me where I told you.' And fearfully she obeyed it in all
its commands. Retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge
as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it
thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed.
One day the head said: 'The time is not distant when I shall be freed
from this situation, and I shall have to undergo many sore evils. So
the superior manito decrees, and I must bear all patiently.' In this
situation we must leave the head.

In a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous
and warlike band of Indians. In this village was a family of ten young
men--brothers. It was in the spring of the year that the youngest of
these blackened his face and fasted. His dreams were propitious. Having
ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none
in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended
to go. Though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence.
Having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams
were, and that he had called them together to know if they would
accompany him in a war excursion. They all answered they would. The
third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with
his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'Yes,'
said he, 'I will go, and this will be the way I will treat those I am
going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and
gave a yell. The others spoke to him, saying: 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis,
when you are in other people's lodges.' So he sat down. Then, in turn,
they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. The
youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but
secretly to prepare for their journey. They all promised obedience, and
Mudjikewis was the first to say so.

The time for their departure drew near. Word was given to assemble on a
certain night, when they would depart immediately. Mudjikewis was loud
in his demands for his moccasins. Several times his wife asked him the
reason. 'Besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'Quick, quick,'
said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be
quick.' He thus revealed the secret. That night they met and started.
The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others
should follow them. When it was daylight, the leader took snow and made
a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'It was in this way
I saw snow fall in a dream, so that I could not be tracked.' And he told
them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the
snow began to fall in very large flakes. Near as they walked, it was
with difficulty they could see each other. The snow continued falling
all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track
them.

They had now walked for several days, and Mudjikewis was always in
the rear. One day, running suddenly forward, he gave the
_saw-saw-quan_,{footnote [War-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his
war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning.
'Brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way I will serve those we are
going to fight.' The leader answered, 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, the one I
lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' Again he fell back and
thought to himself: 'What! what! who can this be he is leading us to?'
He felt fearful and was silent. Day after day they traveled on, till
they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones
were bleaching in the sun. The leader spoke: 'They are the bones of
those who have gone before us. None has ever yet returned to tell the
sad tale of their fate.' Again Mudjikewis became restless, and, running
forward, gave the accustomed yell. Advancing to a large rock which stood
above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'See, brothers,'
said he, 'thus will I treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'Still,
still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom I am leading you is not
to be compared to the rock.'

Mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'I wonder who
this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. Still they
continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the
place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back
as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had
ever escaped. At last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which
they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth
bear.

The distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal
caused him to be plainly seen. 'There,' said the leader, 'it is he to
whom I am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a
mishemokwa and a manito. It is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e.
wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed
their lives. You must not be fearful: be manly. We shall find him
asleep.' Then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the
animal's neck. 'This,' said he, 'is what we must get. It contains the
wampum.' Then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over
the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the
least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. All their efforts
were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. He tried, and
the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no
farther. Then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and
succeeded. Placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'Now we must
run,' and off they started. When one became fatigued with its weight,
another would relieve him. Thus they ran till they had passed the bones
of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking
back, they saw the monster slowly rising. He stood some time before he
missed his wampum. Soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant
thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and
say, 'Who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not
so large but that I can find them;' and he descended from the hill in
pursuit. As if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. Very
soon he approached the party. They, however, kept the belt, exchanging
it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on
them fast. 'Brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you,
when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a
guardian?' A dead silence followed. 'Well,' said he, 'fasting, I dreamed
of being in danger of instant death, when I saw a small lodge, with
smoke curling from its top. An old man lived in it, and I dreamed he
helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and
giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the
depths of his stomach, and what is called _checaudum_. Getting upon a
piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its
top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward
and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge,
saying, 'Nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear
will kill us.' 'Sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man.
'Who is a great manito?' said he. 'There is none but me; but let me
look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little
distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful
leaps. He closed the door. 'Yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito:
my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked
my protection, and I granted it; so now, come what may, I will protect
you. When the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other
door of the lodge.' Then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where
he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. Taking out two small
black dogs, he placed them before him. 'These are the ones I use when I
fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of
one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge
by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. When he attained his full
size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out
at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the
lodge. A terrible combat ensued. The skies rang with the howls of the
fierce monsters. The remaining dog soon took the field. The brothers,
at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the
opposite side of the lodge. They had not proceeded far before they heard
the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'Well,'
said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will
soon be after us.' They started with fresh vigor, for they had received
food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again
was fast gaining upon them. Again the leader asked the brothers if they
could do nothing for their safety. All were silent. The leader, running
forward, did as before. 'I dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great
trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his
lodge.' Taking courage, they still went on. After going a short distance
they saw the lodge of the old manito. They entered immediately and
claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. The old
man, setting meat before them, said: 'Eat! who is a manito? there is no
manito but me; there is none whom I fear;' and the earth trembled as
the monster advanced. The old man opened the door and saw him coming.
He shut it slowly, and said: 'Yes, my grandchildren, you have brought
trouble upon me.' Procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small
war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the
other side of the lodge. As he handled the clubs, they became very
large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door.
Then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear
stumbled. Renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was
broken, but the bear fell senseless. Each blow the old man gave him
sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till
they filled the heavens.

The young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. They
could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. First he moved
his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. The old man shared
the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in
pieces. Again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. Not
yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now
so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they
could do nothing. 'Well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted;
after this I have but one more.' He advanced, invoking his guardian
spirit to aid him. 'Once,' said he, 'I dreamed that, being sorely
pressed, I came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe,
partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. Do not fear,'
he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' And so it was, even as he had said.
Coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately
they embarked. Scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when
they saw the bear arrive at its borders. Lifting himself on his hind
legs, he looked all around. Then he waded into the water; then losing
his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the
lake. Meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his
movements. He traveled all around, till at last he came to the place
from whence he started. Then he commenced drinking up the water, and
they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. The leader
encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. When only a short
distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were
drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain.

Then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully.
'Now is the time, Mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. Take
courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his
mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' He obeyed, and
stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed
the canoe for the open mouth of the monster.

Rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when
Mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the
_saw-saw-quan_. The bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned
by the blow. But before Mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged
all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great
velocity to the opposite shore. Instantly leaving the canoe, again they
fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. The earth
again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. Their
spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. The leader exerted himself,
by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if
they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as
before, all were silent. 'Then,' he said, 'this is the last time I can
apply to my guardian spirit. Now, if we do not succeed, our fates are
decided.' He ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness,
and gave the yell. 'We shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at
the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. In him I place great
confidence. Do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound.
We shall soon reach his lodge. Run, run,' he cried.

Returning now to Iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition
we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure
food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals.
One day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with
pleasure. At last it spoke. 'Oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful
situation you have been the cause of placing me! Soon, very soon, a
party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! How
can I give what I would have done with so much pleasure? Nevertheless,
take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of
placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they
arrive. When you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and
say, "Alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. I was the cause
of it." If they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them.
And now you must follow my directions strictly. When the bear is near,
go out and meet him. You will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows,
and my head. You must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my
paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair,
and whatever else it contains. As the bear approaches, you will take
all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "This is my deceased
brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each
of them as far as you can. The virtues contained in them will cause him
to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and
that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "See, this
is my deceased brother's head." He will then fall senseless. By this
time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your
assistance. You must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small
pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he
will again revive.' She promised that all should be done as he said.
She had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader
was heard calling upon Iamo for aid. The woman went out and said as her
brother had directed. But the war party being closely pursued, came
up to the lodge. She invited them in, and placed the meat before them.
While they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. Untying the
medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his
approach. When he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she
had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but,
still advancing, came close to the woman. Saying as she was commanded,
she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. As it
rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the
head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. The bear,
tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. Then she cried for help,
and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their
strength and spirits.

Mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the
head. This he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the
others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they
then scattered in every direction. While thus employed, happening to
look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they
saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears,
such as are seen at the present day. The country was soon overspread
with these black animals. And it was from this monster that the present
race of bears derived their origin.

Having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. In the
meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the
head, placed them again in the sack. But the head did not speak again,
probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster.

Having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their
flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own
country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they
now were. One day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the
purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. They were
very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone,
by talking and jesting with each other. One of them spoke and said, 'We
have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she
will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. It
may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. In the meantime
take food to our sister.' They went and requested the head. She told
them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried
to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure.
One day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked
by unknown Indians. The skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of
their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. The young men
fought desperately till they were all killed. The attacking party then
retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the
number of missing and slain. One of their young men had stayed away,
and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head
was hung up. Seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some
time with fear and surprise. However, he took it down and opened the
sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which
he placed on his head.

Starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party,
when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it,
and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. They all looked at
the head and made sport of it. Numbers of the young men took the paint
and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair
and said--

'Look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.'

But the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed
them on their heads. Then again they used all kinds of indignity to the
head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who
had used the feathers. Then the chief commanded them to throw away all
except the head. 'We will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can
do with it. We will try to make it shut its eyes.'

When they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and
hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which
would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'We will
then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.'

Meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young
men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went
in search of it. The young men she found lying within short distances
of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. Various other bodies lay
scattered in different directions around them. She searched for the head
and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. She raised her voice and
wept, and blackened her face. Then she walked in different directions,
till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. Then she
found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their
qualities, had left them. She thought to herself that she would find her
brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some
of his paints and feathers. These she carefully put up, and hung upon
the branch of a tree till her return.

At dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. Here
she used a charm, common among Indians when they wish to meet with a
kind reception. On applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she
was kindly received. She made known her errand. The old man promised to
aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and
that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over
it continually. The former are considered as manitoes. She said she only
wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the
door of the lodge. She knew she had not sufficient power to take it by
force. 'Come with me,' said the Indian, 'I will take you there.' They
went, and they took their seats near the door. The council-lodge was
filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly
keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat.
They saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke
and said: 'Ha! ha! It is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.'
The sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her
brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'Well,' said the
chief, 'I thought we would make you do something at last. Look! look at
it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed
and passed their jokes upon it. The chief, looking around, and observing
the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'Who have
you got there? I have never seen that woman before in our village.'
'Yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine,
and seldom goes out. She stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to
come with me to this place.' In the center of the lodge sat one of those
young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying
themselves before others. 'Why,' said he, 'I have seen her often, and it
is to this lodge I go almost every night to court her.' All the others
laughed and continued their games. The young man did not know he was
telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped.

She returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own
country. Coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers
lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. Then taking
an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'Brothers,
get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' This she repeated three
times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their
feet.

Mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'Why,'
said he, 'I have overslept myself.' 'No, indeed,' said one of the
others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister
who has brought us to life?' The young men took the bodies of their
enemies and burned them. Soon after, the woman went to procure wives for
them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with
ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the
eldest. Mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the
one he liked. But he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. And
they were well matched, for she was a female magician. They then all
moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women
must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying
to untie it. They all said they would do so with pleasure. The eldest
made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the
air.

Toward daylight she returned. She had been unsuccessful, as she
succeeded in untying only one of the knots. All took their turns
regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time.
But when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she
reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the
Indians never could see any one. For ten nights now, the smoke had not
ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. This last night they
were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head.

The young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high
through the air, and they heard her saying: 'Prepare the body of our
brother.' And as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where
the black body of Iamo lay. His sister commenced cutting the neck part,
from which the neck had been severed. She cut so deep as to cause it to
bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying
medicines, expelled the blackness. In the meantime, the one who brought
it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed.

As soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid
of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring Iamo to all
his former beauty and manliness. All rejoiced in the happy termination
of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when
Iamo said: 'Now I will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which
contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions.
But the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of
the belt held the richest and rarest.

They were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to
life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned
different stations in the invisible world. Only Mudjikewis's place was,
however, named. He was to direct the west wind, hence generally called
Kebeyun, there to remain for ever. They were commanded, as they had
it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and,
forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things
with a liberal hand. And they were also commanded that it should also
be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be
emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil
and war.

The spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their
respective abodes on high; while Iamo, with his sister Iamoqua,
descended into the depths below.
