we'd find; an' after
Locals found out what it was 'at Hammy had schemed out, he joined in
enthusiastic, an' said that if the' had never been a part writ to fit
'em yet, he could do it on the spot, an' he wasn't swamped with
business right then anyway. "Yes," I sez, "it's a great idee, an' we'll
sure draw a mammoth crowd. We'll charge 'em a library apiece an' get
enough litachure to last us a hundred years."

"At best, sarcasm is out of season; at worst, the season 's out of it,"
sez Hammy to me: "and furthermore, good friend, in life, as on the
stage, your part must be a role of actions, not of words." I used to
say over the things 'at this pair made up, until I had 'em by heart,
an' since then I've had a lot o' fun springin' 'em on strangers. They
used to speak to me as though I was a horse, and of me as though I was
part of the furniture. Hammy sez to me one day, "Me good man, you do
very well with your hands, but kindly Nature designed your head merely
for a hatrack."

They could say these little things right off the roll, an' it allus
made me feel like a fish out o' water, somehow, but I stored 'em up in
my memory, an' I've got my worth out of 'em all right.

We did open the trunks a week or so after this--and clothes! Well, say,
Miller sure was the dresser. The' was fifteen hats in a little trunk
built a-purpose for 'em, an' the' was all kinds of vests an' pants an'
neckties 'at a feller could imagine. But best of all was a book 'at we
found at the bottom of one o' the trunks. It was a hard-shelled book,
an' I never took much stock in that kind. When it's my turn to read a
book, a little old paper-back fits me out all right. I've been fooled
on them hard-shells too often; but this here one was a hummer.

I ain't no tenderfoot when it comes to a book, but this one was sure
the corkin'est I ever met up with. I had allus thought 'at "Seventeen
Buckets o' Blood; or the Mormon Widder's Revenge" was about the extreme
limit in books, but this here one lays over even that. It was called
"Monte Cristo," an' had the darndest set o' Dago names in it ever a
mortal human bein' laid eyes on. I tried to mine it out by myself at
first, but pshaw, every cuss in the book had a name like an Injun town,
an' the' was about as many characters in the book as the' is on the
earth; so I delegated Hammy to read her out loud. This suited Hammy to
the limit, an' he didn't only read her--he acted her. He'd roar an'
screech an' whisper an'