“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 an 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.
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
a soldier march. The windows and dooryards was
full; and every minute somebody would say, over a fence:
“Is it them?”
And somebody trotting along with the gang would answer
back and say:
“You bet it is.”
When we got to the house the street in front of it
was packed, and the three girls was standing in the
door. Mary Jane was red-headed, but that
don’t make no difference, she was most awful
beautiful, and her face and her eyes was all lit up
like glory, she was so glad her uncles was come.
The king he spread his arms, and Mary Jane she jumped
for them, and the hare-lip jumped for the duke, and
there they had it! Everybody most, leastways
women, cried for joy to see them meet again at last
and have such good times.
