Huckleberry Finn

by Dave Mckay

  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 he had carried away a very big bottle of whiskey, too, that he found under a wagon when he was starting home through the trees. The king said, take it all around, it was better than any day he’d ever put in in the missionary line. He said it weren’t no use talking; lost souls in Africa aren't near as good as pirates to work a camp meeting with.

  The duke was thinking he’d been doing pretty well until the king come to show up, but after that he didn’t think so that much. He had set up and printed off two little jobs for farmers in that printing shop -- horse advertisements -- and took the money, four dollars. And he had got in ten dollars’ worth of advertisements for the paper, which he said he would sell for four dollars if they would pay then and there -- so they done it. The price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he lined up three people to take it for half a dollar each if they would pay then and there too. They were going to pay in timber and onions as most did around there, but he said he had just bought the business and knocked down the price as low as he could, and needed the money. He set up a little piece of rhyming, which he made himself, out of his own head -- kind of sweet and sad -- the name of it was, “Yes, destroy, cold world, this breaking heart” -- and he left that all set up and ready to print in the paper, and didn’t ask 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 asked to be paid for, because it was for us. It had a picture of a slave with some clothes tied up on a stick over his shoulder, and “$200 reward” under it.

  The reading was all about Jim, and just perfectly fit him. It said he run away from St. Jacques’ farm, forty miles below New Orleans, last winter, and probably went north, and whoever would catch him and send him back he could have the reward and costs.

  “Now,” says the duke, “after tonight we can run days if we want to. Whenever we see anyone coming we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope, and lay him in the tent and show this paper and say we caught him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a river boat, so we borrowed this little raft 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 right thing -- we must keep it all together, as we say on the boards.”

  We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there couldn’t be no trouble about running days now. We judged we could make miles enough that night to get out of reach of the trouble we believed the duke’s work in the printing shop was going to make in that little town; then we could move right along if we wanted to.

  We kept low and quiet, and never pushed out until nearly ten o’clock; then we went by, pretty wide away from the town, and didn’t put up our lantern until we was well past where they could see us.

  When Jim called me to take the watch at four in the morning, he says: “Huck, does you think we gwyne to run across any more kings on dis trip?”

  “No,” I says, “I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” says he, “dat’s all right, den. I don’t have a problem with one or two kings, but dat’s enough. Dis one’s powerful drunk, and de duke ain’t 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 couldn’t remember it now.

  Chapter 21

  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 rough; but after they’d jumped in the river and took a swim it coloured them up better. After breakfast the king he sat down on the corner of the raft, and pulled off his shoes and pushed up his pants, and let his legs hang in the water, so as to be comfortable, and pulled out his pipe, and went to getting his Romeo and Juliet learned well enough to remember.

  When he had got it pretty good, him and the duke started to work on it together. The duke had to learn him over and over again how to say every line; and he made him breathe out sadly, and put his hand on his heart, and after a while he said he done it pretty well; “only,” he says, “you mustn’t shout out Romeo! that way, like a wild buffalo -- you must say it soft and sick and dying like so -- R-o-o-meo! that is the way; for Juliet’s a nice sweet child of a girl, you know, and she doesn’t talk like a donkey.”

  Well, next they got out two long swords that the duke made out of timber, and started to work on the sword fight -- the duke called himself Richard III; and the way they ran and jumped around the raft was great to see. But by and by the king fell off the raft, 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, King, we’ll want to make this a top drawer show, you know, so I think we’ll add a little more to it. We want a little something to do at the end if they ask for more. I’ll do a dance from Scotland or one that men do on ocean ships; and you -- well, let me see -- oh, I’ve got it -- you can do something from Hamlet; the most well known thing that Shakespeare ever wrote. Ah, it’s perfect, perfect! Always brings the house down. I don’t have it in my book -- I only have the one -- but I think I can piece it out from what I can remember. I’ll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call it back from inside my head.”

  So he went to walking up and down, thinking, and making an awful sad face every now and then; then he would lift up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on the front of his head and take a step back and kind of moan; next he would breathe deeply, and then he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to listen. Then he stands himself in the most wonderful way, with one leg pushed forward, and his arms reaching away up, and his head leaning back, looking up at the sky; and then he starts to talk and shout and squeeze his teeth together; and after that, all through his speaking, he cried, and moved around, and pushed out his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I seen before.

  Well, the old man he liked that piece, and he mighty soon got it so he could do it real well. It seemed like he was just born for it; and when he had his hand in and was getting to feel it strongly, it was real nice the way he would shout and cry when he was getting it off.

  The first time we was able the duke he had some papers printed; and after that, for two or three days as we went along down the river, the raft was full of action, for there weren’t nothing but sword fighting and saying their lines going on all the time. One morning, when we was pretty well down the bottom of Arkansas, we could see a little one-horse town in a big bend; so we tied up almost a mile above it, in the mouth of a shallow little side river which was covered over by willows like it was a cave. All of us but Jim took the canoe and went down there to see if it would be a good place for our show.

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

  Shakspeare Comes Alive ! ! !

  Wonderful Show! For One Night Only!

  Two of the world’s best actors,

  David Garrick the Younger,

  of Drury Lane Theatre London,

  and

  Edmund Kean the Older,

  of the King’s Haymarket Theatre,

  Whitechapel, Pudding Lane,

  Piccadilly, London,

  in their wonderful show of

  the best of Shakspeare,

  being a scene from

  Romeo and Juliet ! ! !

  Romeo...................Mr. Garrick

  Juliet..................Mr. Kea
n

  New uniforms, new scenes, new showings! Also:

  The emotion filled, expert, and dangerous

  Sword fight from Richard III ! ! !

  Richard III.............Mr. Garrick

  Richmond................Mr. Kean

  Also:

  (by special request)

  Hamlet’s Best Lines ! !

  By The wonderful Kean!

  Done by him over 300 nights in Paris!

  For One Night Only,

  Because of important showings in Europe!

  Adults 25 cents; children and servants, 10 cents.

  Then we went walking around town. The shops and houses was most all old, rough, dried up timber buildings that hadn’t ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on legs, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was flooded. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn’t seem to grow hardly anything in them but weeds, and sunflowers, and ashes, and old broken shoes, and pieces of bottles, and thrown out clothes, and empty tins. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different times; and they leaned every which way, and had gates that often didn’t have but one piece of leather for a hinge. Some of the fences had been white-washed some time or another, but the duke said it was in Columbus’ time, like enough. There was often pigs in the garden, and people running them out.

  All the shops was along one street. They had a white roof over the footpath, and the country people tied their horses to the vertical logs holding the roof up. There was empty barrels under the roof, and people sitting on them all day long, cutting sticks with their knives; and chewing tobacco, and making sleepy faces -- a mighty rough group. Most of them had on yellow grass hats almost as wide as an umbrella, but didn’t wear no coats. They called one another Bill, and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and slow, and used a lot of bad words. There was as many as one lazy person leaning up against each log holding up the roof, and he most always had his hands in his pants pockets, apart from when he brought them out to get a piece of tobacco or to scratch. What a body was hearing between them all the time was:

  “Give me a chew of tobacco, Hank.“

  “Can’t; I ain’t got but one chew left. Ask Bill.”

  Maybe Bill he gives him a chew; maybe he lies and says he ain’t got none. Some of them do-nothing boys never has a cent in the world, or a chew of tobacco of their own. They get all their chewing by borrowing; they say to a friend, “I wish you’d borrow me a chew, Jack, I just this minute give Ben Thompson the last one I had” -- which is a lie pretty much every time; it don’t trick nobody but a stranger; but Jack ain’t no stranger, so he says:

  “You give him a chew, did you? So did your sister’s cat’s grandmother. You pay me back the chews you’ve already borrowed off a me, Lafe Buckner, then I’ll let you have one or two wagons full of it, and won’t ask you for no back interest, either.”

  “Well, I did pay you back some of it once.”

  “Yes, you did -- about six chews. You borrowed shop tobacco and paid back home made.”

  Shop tobacco is flat black, but these boys mostly chews the leaves coiled up. When they borrow a chew they don’t as a rule cut it off with a knife, but put the whole piece in between their teeth, and bite with their teeth and pull at it with their hands until they get it in two; then sometimes the one that owns the tobacco looks sadly at it when it’s handed back, and says:

  “Here, give me the chew, and you take what’s left.”

  All the streets and lanes was just mud; they weren’t nothing else but mud -- mud as black as tar and close to a foot deep in some places. The pigs was walking and lying around wherever you looked. You’d see a dirty old mother pig and a lot of little ones come lazying along the street and drop right down in the way, where people had to walk around her, and she’d lie there and shut her eyes and move her ears while the babies was milking her, and look as happy as if she was being paid for it. Pretty soon you’d hear one of the lazy boys sing out, “Go get her Tiger! Get that pig!” and away the pig would go, making a most awful noise, with a dog on each ear, and more a-coming; and then you would see all the do-nothings get up and watch until they couldn’t see it no more, and laugh and look like they was thankful for the noise. Then they’d sit down again until there was a dog fight. There couldn’t anything wake them up and make them happy all over like a dog fight -- apart from maybe tying a tin pan to a dog's tail and seeing him run himself to death.

  On the river front some of the houses were half out over the river, and they was leaning and bending, and about ready to fall in. People had moved out of them. The side of the river was broken away under only one corner of others, with that corner hanging over, and people lived in them yet. It was dangerous, because at times a piece of land as wide as a house breaks off and falls in. Sometimes a belt of land four hundred yards deep will start in and break along and break along until it all ends up in the river in one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back, and back, because the river’s always chewing at it.

  The closer it got to noon the thicker was the wagons and horses in the streets, and more coming all the time. Families brought their dinners with them from the country, and eat them in the wagons. There was a lot of whiskey drinking going on, and I seen three fights.

  By and by someone sings out: “Here comes old Boggs! -- in from the country for his monthly drunk; here he comes, boys!” All the do-nothings looked glad; I’d say they was used to having fun out of Boggs. One of them says: “Who is he a-gwyne to chew up this time. If he’d a-chewed up all the men he’s been a-gwyne to chew up in the last twenty years he’d be very well known by now.”

  Another one says, “I wish Boggs'd say he was gwyne to fight me; then I’d know I weren’t gwyne to die for a thousand years.”

  Boggs come a-racing along on his horse, shouting like an Indian, and singing out: “Clear the way, there. I’m angry, and the price of a funeral is a-gwyne to go up.”

  He was drunk, and leaning over in his saddle; he was over fifty year old, and had a very red face. Everyone shouted at him and laughed at him and he shouted back, and said he’d fix them and lay them out in turns, but he couldn’t wait now because he’d come to town to kill old Sherburn, and his saying was, “Meat first, and spoon food to top off on.”

  He sees me, and rides up and says: “Where’d you come from, boy? You prepared to die?”

  Then he went on.

  I was scared, but a man says: “He don’t mean nothing; he’s always a-carrying on like that when he’s drunk. He’s the nicest old man in Arkansas -- never hurt nobody, drunk or not.”

  Boggs stopped in front of the biggest shop in town, and leaned his head down so he could see under the footpath roof and shouts: “Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you’ve robbed. You’re the dog I’m after. I’m a-gwyne to have you, too!”

  And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could put his tongue on, and the whole street filled with people listening and laughing and going on. By and by a proud-looking man about fifty-five -- and he was by far the best dressed man in town, too -- steps out of the shop, and the crowd drops back on each side to let him come. He says to Boggs, very quiet and slow -- he says: “I’m tired of this, but I’ll put up with it until one o’clock. Until one o’clock, remember -- 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 pretty serious; nobody moved, and there weren’t no more laughing. Boggs went off saying bad things about Sherburn as loud as he could, all down the street; and pretty soon back he comes and stops before the shop, still keeping it up. Some men crowded around 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 shouted away with all his strength, and throwed his hat down in the mud and walk
ed the horse over it, and pretty soon away he went a-shouting down the street again, with his grey hair a-flying. Everyone that could get to him tried their best to get him to come off of his horse so they could lock him up away from the drink; but it weren’t no use -- up the street he would ride again, and give Sherburn another round. By and by someone says: “Go for his daughter! -- hurry, go for his daughter; sometimes he’ll listen to her. If anyone can stop him, she can.”

  So someone started on a run. I walked down the street a ways and stopped. In about five or ten minutes here comes Boggs again, but not on his horse. He was coming across the street toward me, no hat on, with a friend on both sides of him holding his arms and hurrying him along. He was quiet, and looked scared; and he weren’t hanging back any, but was doing some of the hurrying himself. Someone sings out: “Boggs!”

  I looked over there to see who said it, and it was that Sherburn. He was standing in one place in the street, and was holding a gun in his right hand -- not pointing it at Boggs, but holding it out with it pointing up toward the sky. The same second I see a young girl coming on the run, and two men with her. Boggs and the men turned around to see who called him, and when they see the gun the men jumped to one side, and the gun come down slowly, to where it was horizontal. Boggs throws up both of his hands and says, “Oh Lord, don’t shoot!” Bang! goes the gun and he falls back, reaching at the air -- bang! it goes again, and he falls backward onto the ground, heavy and solid, with his arms out.