him alone for that; said he had played a deef and
dumb person on the histrionic boards. So then they waited for a
steamboat.

About the middle of the afternoon a couple of little boats come along,
but they didn't come from high enough up the river; but at last there
was a big one, and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl, and we went
aboard, and she was from Cincinnati; and when they found we only
wanted to go four or five mile they was booming mad, and 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 all to smash, and fell up
against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried down his
back, and says:

"Alas, alas, our poor brother--gone, and we never got to see him; oh,
it's too, too hard!"

Then he turns around, blubbering, and 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