Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

When they got aboard the king went for me, and shook me by the collar, and said:

“Trying to give us the slip, were you, you pup! Tired of our company, hey?”

I said:

“No, your majesty, we weren’t—please don’t, your majesty!”

“Quick, then, and tell us what your idea was, or I’ll shake the insides out of you!”

“Honestly, I’ll tell you everything just as it happened, your majesty. The man who had hold of me was very good to me, and kept saying he had a boy about as big as me who died last year, and he was sorry to see a boy in such a dangerous fix; and when they were all taken by surprise by finding the gold, and made a rush for the coffin, he let go of me and whispered, ‘Run for it now, or they’ll hang you, sure!’ and I lit out. It didn’t seem any good for me to stay—I couldn’t do anything, and I didn’t want to be hanged if I could get away. So I never stopped running until I found the canoe; and when I got here I told Jim to hurry, or they would catch me and hang me yet, and said I was afraid you and the duke weren’t alive now, and I was awfully sorry, and so was Jim, and was awfully glad when we saw you coming; you may ask Jim if I didn’t.”

Jim said it was so; and the king told him to shut up, and said, “Oh, yes, it’s mighty likely!” and shook me up again, and said he reckoned he would drown me. But the duke said:

“Let go of the boy, you old fool! Would you have done any differently? Did you inquire around for him when you got loose? I don’t remember it.”

So the king let go of me, and began to curse that town and everybody in it. But the duke said:

“You had a blamed sight better give yourself a good cursing, for you’re the one who’s entitled to it most. You haven’t done a thing from the start that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with that imaginary blue-arrow mark. That was bright—it was downright first-rate; and it was the thing that saved us. For if it hadn’t been for that, they would have jailed us until those Englishmen’s baggage came—and then—the penitentiary, you bet! But that trick took them to the graveyard, and the gold did us a still bigger kindness; for if the excited fools hadn’t let go all holds and made that rush to get a look, we would have slept in our cravats tonight—cravats warranted to wear, too—longer than we’d need them.”

They were silent for a minute—thinking; then the king said, kind of absent-mindedly:

“Mf! And we reckoned the enslaved people stole it!”

That made me squirm!

“Yes,” said the duke, kind of slow and deliberate and sarcastic, “we did.”

After about half a minute the king drawled out:

“At least, I did.”

The duke said, the same way:

“On the contrary, I did.”

The king kind of ruffled up, and said:

“Look here, Bilgewater, what are you referring to?”

The duke said, pretty briskly:

“When it comes to that, maybe you’ll let me ask, what were you referring to?”

“Shucks!” said the king, very sarcastically; “but I don’t know—maybe you were asleep, and didn’t know what you were about.”

The duke bristled up now, and said:

“Oh, let up on this cursed nonsense; do you take me for a blamed fool? Don’t you reckon I know who hid that money in that coffin?”

“Yes, sir! I know you do know, because you did it yourself!”

“It’s a lie!”—and the duke went for him. The king sang out:

“Take your hands off!—let go of my throat!—I take it all back!”

The duke said:

“Well, you just own up, first, that you did hide that money there, intending to give me the slip one of these days, and come back and dig it up, and have it all to yourself.”

“Wait just a minute, duke—answer me this one question, honestly and fairly; if you didn’t put the money there, say it, and I’ll believe you, and take back everything I said.”

“You old scoundrel, I didn’t, and you know I didn’t. There, now!”

“Well, then, I believe you. But answer me only just this one more—now don’t get mad; didn’t you have it in your mind to hook the money and hide it?”

The duke never said anything for a little bit; then he said:

“Well, I don’t care if I did; I didn’t do it, anyway. But you not only had it in mind to do it, but you did it.”

“I hope I never die if I did it, duke, and that’s the honest truth. I won’t say I wasn’t going to do it, because I was; but you—I mean somebody—got in ahead of me.”

“It’s a lie! You did it, and you have to say you did it, or—”

The king began to gurgle, and then he gasped out:

“Enough!—I own up!”

I was very glad to hear him say that; it made me feel much easier than I was feeling before. So the duke took his hands off and said:

“If you ever deny it again I’ll drown you. It’s well for you to sit there and blubber like a baby—it’s fitting for you, after the way you’ve acted. I never saw such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything—and all the time I was trusting you as if you were my own father. You ought to have been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on a lot of poor enslaved people, and never say a word for them. It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to believe that trash. Curse you, I can see now why you were so anxious to make up the deficit—you wanted to get what money I’d gotten out of the Nonesuch and one thing or another, and scoop it all!”

The king said, timidly, and still snuffling:

“Why, duke, it was you who said to make up the deficit; it wasn’t me.”

“Dry up! I don’t want to hear any more out of you!” said the duke. “And now you see what you got by it. They have all their own money back, and all of ours but a shekel or two besides. Go along to bed, and don’t you deficit me any more deficits as long as you live!”

So the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to his bottle for comfort, and before long the duke tackled his bottle; and so in about half an hour they were as thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got, the more loving they got, and went off snoring in each other’s arms. They both got mighty mellow, but I noticed the king didn’t get mellow enough to forget to remember not to deny hiding the money bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and I told Jim everything.