by Mark Twain
All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns – the men had slipped through the woods and came in from behind without their horses. Buck’s cousin was hit almost immediately, grabbed his stomach, which had begun to gush all red, and fell to the ground dead. Buck stayed behind the woodpile and returned fire for another hour or two, crying and cussing back at the men. He may have even hit one or two, but I got the idea that the number of men he was fighting with had grown considerable. After a time, the gunfire was so regular that Buck didn’t dare raise his head. Then Buck’s cousin began twitching and got to his feet again, and I never heard so much gunfire in my life. He was staggering forward, jerking back, falling over, and back to his feet again; and then he retrieved his gun and began moving forward.
“Give it to ‘em, Joe!” Buck sobbed, and I could tell by the weariness in his voice he had been hit a few times himself.
Joe went straight at them, and the men sang out “Kill him! Kill him!” and it made me so sick I almost fell out of the tree. He took dozens of hits, but managed to fire back four or five times. During this exchange, Buck lit out for the river, and almost made it, but was hit in the back – one of the things he feared most – and tumbled face-first into the shallow water. Then it was mostly target practice on Joe, who couldn’t fire anymore and was getting ripped up awful by the constant fire. Finally, a head shot knocked him to his back, and the men swarmed forward and one of them kicked the gun away from the body. They cussed at him something awful, and called him terrible names, shooting him until their guns were out of ammunition. Then they calmed down and went to the edge of the river and put a few more in Buck, then shoved him into moving water with a big stick. I cried a little for Buck up in the tree, and I think I cried a little for the rest of them too, cause they was all good to me, and I couldn’t really understand what was taking place and what they was doing to each other.
Later, I got down out of the tree, and Joe was still moaning and thrashing, but there warn’t a thing I could do to him that hadn’t been done. I crept down to the riverbank and found Buck a few hundred yards down the river in a snag of sticks and branches. He looked lodged fairly solid, so there was nothing I could do for him either.
It got dark, so I tramped off toward the crick, but the raft warn’t where Jim said he hid it. I sat in the mud and started sobbing. I didn’t care. Then a voice not twenty feet from me says:
“Is dat you, honey? Hush! Doan’ make so much noise!”
It was Jim’s voice, and nothing ever sounded so good before. I run along the bank and got aboard the raft, which was hid good, and Jim grabbed me and hugged me, he was so glad to see me. He says:
“Laws bless you, chile. I was right sho’s yo’ dead. Seems like all de white folk around here are dead. Dere’s houses en fire, dead livestock everywhere, blood, I ain’t never seen such a thing. An’ de people who ain’t dead still shootin’ at each other. Laws! White folk!”
I says:
“We’ll talk later, but I’m happy we found each other, Jim. Let’s shove off for the big water as fast as ever we can. Ain’t nothing left for me here.”
I didn’t feel easy till the raft was two miles below there and in the middle of the Mississippi. I hadn’t a bite to eat since yesterday, so Jim cooked up some corn-dodges, and pork and cabbage and greens, but as soon as the food got to my mouth, I lost my hunger. I went to the edge of the raft and drank a big gourd of water, and then I threw it up. Jim wanted me to eat something, so I ate a piece of something, but couldn’t eat no more. Jim said: no matter, and figured a good night’s sleep would make me hungry again. I said I hoped so, and smoked one of the good seegars, but that made me sick to my stomach again, so I just curled up in a blanket staring up at the stars and went to sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
The Duke and the Dauphin Come Aboard
Two or three days and nights went by, and I tried to put the bad thoughts of what I had seen out of my mind. I would dream of them from time to time, but when I woke up I did my best to concentrate on what lay in front of us.
Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river, more and more so as we went along – sometimes as wide as a mile and a half; we run nights and laid up and hid daytimes. Soon as night was gone we stopped navigating and tied up – almost always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut cottonwoods and willows, and hid the craft. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to cool off and freshen up. There warn’t a sound anywheres, and it was perfectly still, just like the whole world was asleep, with only the bullfrogs a-croaking maybe. The first thing you see of day is the outline of the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make out nothing else; then the sky gets all gray; then it warn’t black anymore and you can make out trading scows and such on the river. By and by you can see streaks in the water, which means there’s a snag in the current that makes the water pop and look that way; and then you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east part of the sky reddens up, and you can make out log cabins now on the other side and see the smoke coming out of the chimbleys from the morning fire; then a nice breeze springs up, so cool and sweet on account of the woods and the flowers and just the smell of the earth itself; but sometimes not that way at all, because they’ve left dead fish to rot or there’s something passing on the water that’s rotting, and it gets pretty rank and you wonder what it is that smells so powerful bad; and you hope it is just fish and such, and don’t let yourself linger on the thought.
A little smoke won’t be noticed now, so we take some fish off the line and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we just set there and watch the lonesomeness of the river and by and by laze off to sleep. Wake up sometime later and look to see what woke us, and maybe it is a steamboat coughing along upstream, so far off you can hardly tell nothing about her other than if she were a stern-wheel or a side-wheel. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by were all beating on tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run them over. A scow or a raft went by so close in the fog, we could hear them talking and laughing – hear them plain – but we couldn’t see a thing.
Soon as it was night we shoved off again, and when we got to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit our pipes and made a smoke, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked – we was almost always just about naked, whenever the mosquitoes left us alone – the new clothes I had from Buck’s folks were too good to be comfortable in, but I figured they would be softer and easier to walk around in after a few months.
Sometimes we had the whole river to ourselves for the longest time, and when it was real quiet, you could hear a fiddle or an accordion come over the water from one of the other crafts, or from some cabin up on land. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, and the moon and the stars, and we used to watch the stars that fell, too.
Once or twice a night a steamboat would slip by, and the sparks from the smokestacks would shoot up and rain down on the river like tiny stars, and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner in the river and we’d be by ourselves again, and by and by her waves would get to us and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn’t hear nothing again, except maybe the frogs or something.
One morning just about daybreak I found a canoe and paddled it to the main shore and up a little crick to see if I couldn’t find some berries hanging over the water. Just as I was passing a place where a kind of cow path went along the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they could foot it. I judged I was a goner, for when anybody was after anybody, I judged they was after me – or Jim.
I was about to paddle out, but they was pretty close to me by then, and sung out and begged me to save their lives – said they hadn’t done nothing, and was being chased for it – and said there was men and dogs a-coming. They wanted to jump in the canoe right then, but I says:
“Don’t do it! I don’t hear
the dogs yet, so you’ve got a little time. Crowd through that brush yonder and get up the crick a ways; then take to the water and wade down to me – that’ll throw the dogs off the scent.”
They done it, and as soon as I pulled them aboard I lit out for the raft. About ten minutes later, we heard the dogs and the men away off, shouting. They seemed to stop by the crick awhile; then as we set the raft farther down the river, we couldn’t hear them any more at all. It was quiet again, and we paddled to the other shore and hid in the cottonwoods and was safe.
One of the fellows was about seventy, and had a bald head, and very gray whiskers. He had an old battered up slouch hat and a greasy blue woolen shirt, and ragged old blue jean britches stuffed inside his boot tops. He had an old blue jeans coat with shiny brass buttons, and both of them had big, fat, ratty-looking carpet-bags.
The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed much the same. After breakfast we laid around and talked, and the first thing that came out was these two chaps didn’t even know one another.
“What got you into trouble?” says the baldheaded one to t’other.
“Well, I was selling an article in some towns along the river – a medicine, more or less – that you would administer to the elderly or to the dying, and if got enough of a dose into a person before they passed away, it would ward off the Zum and you could have a nice leisurely burial. No need for that messy decapitation, you see. The concept was worth a million bucks. Ah, if only it would ‘a’ worked.” He sighed at the injustice of it. “Someone passes away while I’m in town and it doesn’t work, well, I can say they didn’t have a big enough dose in their body, and they reckon it was their fault, not mine, and they should’ve started a bit sooner. But when three or four die at the same time and every single one of them comes back, the relatives come to believe I was just making up a story to take their money – which is what happened here. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. That’s the whole yarn – what’s your’n?”
“Well, I was runnin’ a sort of spiritual revival for ‘bout a week. I had a little tent – very quiet and somber – and would go into a trance and search for a person’s departed kin; then I’d smile and say, ‘Ah, I’ve contacted the person you have in mind. Did you have a question for them?’ Most always, it was the same question; and the answer was always the same: the departed had no ill will toward their family and loved ones for what they had to do to their bodies once they was dead. Oh, you should ‘a’ seen it; people breaking down and weeping with gratitude that grandma-ma wasn’t vexed that you sawed off her head. Sometimes they would even bring me the body before it had gone Zum, and I’d take a brass horn that had been specially blessed, and I’d put it next to their ear and shout questions into it. Then I’d sit down, and my eyes would roll up in my head, and I’d shake and jerk some, just like they do when they turn, and I’d give them an answer. I’d get the same response; sheer gratitude. I tell you, I was takin’ in as much as six dollars a night, and many folk brought me a covered dish as well as payment.”
“How’d that happen to unravel?” the old man asked.
“Well, business was so good, I started relaxing and nipping at a little jug I had on the sly, and wasn’t really paying all the attention I should. Some folks brought in a dead body and propped him into a chair, I ask some questions, go into a trance, and turns out the man wasn’t really dead. He was just pretendin’, to see if he could put one over one me. One of the servants in my employ rousted me this morn’ and told me the jig was up and that they was putting together a group that had definite plans to tar and feather me and ride me out on a rail. That’s when I got.”
“Oh dear,” says the young man.
“Yes. My thoughts exactly.”
After a while, the young man says: “I reckon you and me might double-team it together; what do you think? It seems we’re in pretty much the same line of work.”
“I ain’t indisposed. What’s your line – mainly?”
“I do a little in patent medicines; I’ve done very well here; a bit of theater – tragedy, mostly; I take a turn at mesmerology and phrenology when there’s an opportunity; teach singing; tutor a few subjects; sling a lecture sometimes – oh, I got quite a line. What’s your lay?”
The old man taps out his pipe on his heel and says: “I’ve done considerable doctorin’ in my time. Layin’ on o’ hands, and sich things. I kin tell a fortune pretty good if the person in question is open and don’t mind talking about hisself. Done some preachin’ too, and working camp-meetings. Lately it seems to be all Zum.”
The young man clapped his hands together. “It’s funny, cause it’s the truth.”
“That’s where the real, solid money is,” the old man said.
Nobody said anything for a while; then the young man made a deep sigh and says:
“Alas!”
“What are you alassin’ about?” says the baldhead.
The young man didn’t have to be asked twice. He said he was miserable, as he had once been so high in life, but now had come so low. He said his heart was broken, as the world would never believe the secret of his birth.
“Out with it,” says the baldhead.
The young man goes on to say that by rights, he’s a duke.
Jim’s eyes bugged out when he heard it, and I reckon mine did too. Then the baldhead says: “Keep goin’. So you say you’re a duke…”
And the young man blurts it all out. His great grand-father was the eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater. He fled to this country – for love, it was said – at the end of the last century, married, and raised several children. He died of the pox at about the same time as the young man’s father. Then he clears his throat and says: “I am the lineal descendent, the rightful Duke of Bridgewater, and here I am, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted by men, despised by the whole world, degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft.” And here he waved his hand to Jim and I, meaning us.
Jim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We tried to comfort him, but he said it warn’t much use. But he thought it might do him a world of good if we might bow when we spoke to him, and say “Your grace,” or “Your Lordship” when addressing him; and one of us ought to wait on him at dinner and do any little thing he wanted; well, that was easy, so we done it.
All through dinner, Jim stood around and waited on him, and says “Will yo’ Grace have ano’fer piece o’ fish, o’ some greens?” and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing to him.
But the old man got pretty silent by and by, and didn’t seem that comfortable over all that petting that was going on around the duke. So, late in the afternoon, he clears his throat and says:
“Looky here, Bilgewater, I’m nation sorry for you, but you ain’t the only person that’s had trouble like that.”
“No?” says the duke.
“No, it ain’t. You ain’t the only person that’s been snaked down wrongfully out’n a high place.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. You ain’t the only person with a secret to his birth.” And by jings, he begins to cry.
“Bilgewater, kin I trust you?” says the old man between sobs.
“To the death!” says the duke. “Speak!”
“Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!”
Jim and I had our mouths dropped open this time, you bet. Then the duke says:
“The what?”
“Yes, my friend. It’s sadly true – your eyes is looking at the poor disappeared Dauphin, Louis the Seventeen, son of Louis the Sixteen and Mary Antoinette.”
“You?” cries the duke.
“Yes, gentlemen, indeed. You see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wandering, exiled, trampled-on, and rightful King of France!”
Well, Jim and I was so glad and proud to have him on our raft we tried to comfort him too; and he said it always made him feel easier if people treated him according to his rank, and to get down on one knee when we spoke to him, and always call him “Your Majes
ty” and wait on him first at meals. So Jim and I went to majestying him, and this done him heaps of good, but pretty soon the duke gets kind of sour again, and stayed huffy until by and by the kind says:
“Like as not we’ll be together a blamed long time on this here raft, Bilgewater. So what’s the use of your long face? Make the best of things, that’s my motto. This ain’t no bad thing we got ourselves into – plenty of grub and an easy life – come, give me your hand, duke, and let’s all be friends.”
The duke done it, and Jim and I were pretty glad to see it. It took away all the uncomfortableness, and everyone on the raft was satisfied.
It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these two liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just lowdown humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, and never let on. It they wanted to call themselves kings and pashas, I hadn’t no objections. The one thing I learnt from pap was that the best way to get along with people was to let them have their own way, so long as it didn’t get in the way of your own.
Chapter Nineteen
What Royalty did to Parkville
They asked us considerable many questions, and wanted to know why we covered up the raft that way and why we laid by in the daytime instead of running – was Jim some kind of runaway slave? Says I:
“Goodness sakes? Would it make sense for a runaway slave to head south?”
No, they allowed it wouldn’t, but I had to account for things some way, so I says:
“My folks were living in Pike County, Missouri, which is where I was born, but they all died off but me and paw.”
