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_ chance 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