We dasn’t stop again at any town for days
and days; kept right along down the river. We
was down south in the warm weather now, and a mighty
long ways from home. We begun to come to trees
with Spanish moss on them, hanging down from the limbs
like long, gray beards. It was the first I ever
see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn and
dismal. So now the frauds reckoned they was
out of danger, and they begun to work the villages
again.
First they done a lecture on temperance; but they
didn’t make enough for them both to get drunk
on. Then in another village they started a dancing-school;
but they didn’t know no more how to dance than
a kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the
general public jumped in and pranced them out of town.
Another time they tried to go at yellocution; but
they didn’t yellocute long till the audience
got up and give them a solid good cussing, and made
them skip out. They tackled missionarying, and
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.
