The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapters 22–30

Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that’s got sand in it.
Then he says, slow and scornful...

The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man?

So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal.

And then one by one they got up and stood, and went a-weaving around the ring so gentle and wavy and graceful, the men looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with their heads bobbing and skimming along, away up there under the tent-roof, and every lady’s rose-leafy dress flapping soft and silky around her hips, and she looking like the most loveliest parasol.

The minute he was on, the horse begun to rip and tear and jump and cavort around, with two circus men hanging on to his bridle trying to hold him, and the drunk man hanging on to his neck, and his heels flying in the air every jump, and the whole crowd of people standing up shouting and laughing till tears rolled down.

And at last, sure enough, all the circus men could do, the horse broke loose, and away he went like the very nation, round and round the ring, with that sot laying down on him and hanging to his neck, with first one leg hanging most to the ground on one side, and then t’other one on t’other side, and the people just crazy.

He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. Well, I felt sheepish enough to be took in so, but I wouldn’t a been in that ringmaster’s place, not for a thousand dollars.

When the place couldn’t hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come on to the stage and stood up before the curtain and made a little speech, and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one that ever was; and so he went on a-bragging about the tragedy, and about Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it...

They can turn it into a picnic if they want to—they brought plenty provisions.

He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs.

“Well, anyways, I doan’ hanker for no mo’ un um, Huck. Dese is all I kin stan’.”

Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb—en I’d ben a-treat’n her so!

Then the duke took and wrote out a sign on a shingle so:
Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head.
And he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the lath up four or five foot in front of the wigwam.

Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he’d take off his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and good and pious that you’d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself.

Well, by and by the king he gets up and comes forward a little, and works himself up and slobbers out a speech, all full of tears and flapdoodle about its being a sore trial for him and his poor brother to lose the diseased, and to miss seeing diseased alive after the long journey of four thousand mile, but it’s a trial that’s sweetened and sanctified to us by this dear sympathy and these holy tears...

Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

But the rest was on hand, and so they all come and shook hands with the king and thanked him and talked to him; and then they shook hands with the duke and didn’t say nothing, but just kept a-smiling and bobbing their heads like a passel of sapheads whilst he made all sorts of signs with his hands and said “Goo-goo—goo-goo-goo” all the time, like a baby that can’t talk.

We want to be awful square and open and above-board here, you know. We want to lug this h-yer money up stairs and count it before everybody—then ther’ ain’t noth’n suspicious.

When we got up-stairs everybody gethered around the table, and the king he counted it and stacked it up, three hundred dollars in a pile—twenty elegant little piles.

Poor William, afflicted as he is, his heart’s aluz right. Asks me to invite everybody to come to the funeral—wants me to make ’em all welcome.

I was your father’s friend, and I’m your friend; and I warn you as a friend, and an honest one that wants to protect you and keep you out of harm and trouble, to turn your backs on that scoundrel and have nothing to do with him, the ignorant tramp, with his idiotic Greek and Hebrew, as he calls it.

He is the thinnest kind of an impostor—has come here with a lot of empty names and facts which he picked up somewheres, and you take them for proofs, and are helped to fool yourselves by these foolish friends here, who ought to know better.

Well, when they was all gone the king he asks Mary Jane how they was off for spare rooms, and she said she had one spare room, which would do for Uncle William, and she’d give her own room to Uncle Harvey, which was a little bigger, and she would turn into the room with her sisters and sleep on a cot; and up garret was a little cubby, with a pallet in it.

“Why, I thought he’d be in the pulpit.”
Rot him, I forgot he was a preacher.

These yer orphans’ll git their house back agin, and that’s enough for them; they’re young and spry, and k’n easy earn a livin’. they ain’t a-goin to suffer.

By and by I heard the king and the duke come up; so I rolled off my pallet and laid with my chin at the top of my ladder, and waited to see if anything was going to happen.

The lid was shoved along about a foot, showing the dead man’s face down in there, with a wet cloth over it, and his shroud on.

He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see; and there warn’t no more smile to him than there is to a ham.

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing...

“Well, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and yaller janders, and brain-fever, and I don’t know what all.”

But by and by the thing dragged through, and everything was sold—everything but a little old trifling lot in the graveyard.

I reckoned they’d turn pale. But no, nary a pale did they turn.

This is a surprise to me which I wasn’t looking for; and I’ll acknowledge, candid and frank, I ain’t very well fixed to meet it and answer it; for my brother and me has had misfortunes; he’s broke his arm, and our baggage got put off at a town above here last night in the night by a mistake.

This is a surprise to me which I wasn’t looking for; and I’ll acknowledge, candid and frank, I ain’t very well fixed to meet it and answer it; for my brother and me has had misfortunes; he’s broke his arm, and our baggage got put off at a town above here last night in the night by a mistake.

“Broke his arm—very likely, ain’t it?—and very convenient, too, for a fraud that’s got to make signs, and ain’t learnt how. Lost their baggage! That’s mighty good!—and mighty ingenious—under the circumstances!”

I don’t wish to be too hard on these two men, but I think they’re frauds, and they may have complices that we don’t know nothing about. If they have, won’t the complices get away with that bag of gold Peter Wilks left?

Said his brother William was the cussedest joker in the world, and hadn’t tried to write—he see William was going to play one of his jokes the minute he put the pen to paper. And so he warmed up and went warbling and warbling right along till he was actuly beginning to believe what he was saying himself...

You hain’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.

But that trick took ’em to the graveyard, and the gold done us a still bigger kindness; for if the excited fools hadn’t let go all holts and made that rush to get a look we’d a slept in our cravats to-night—cravats warranted to wear, too—longer than we’d need ’em.

The duke bristles up now, and says:
“Oh, let up on this cussed nonsense; do you take me for a blame’ fool? Don’t you reckon I know who hid that money in that coffin?”