Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX.

THEY asked us considerable many questions; wanted
to know what we covered up the raft that way
for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running --
was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I:

"Goodness sakes! would a runaway nigger run
SOUTH?"

No, they allowed he wouldn't. I had to account
for things some way, so I says:

"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri,
where I was born, and they all died off but me and pa
and my brother Ike. Pa, he 'lowed he'd break up
and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a
little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile
below Orleans. Pa was pretty poor, and had some
debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't nothing
left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That
warn't enough to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck
passage nor no other way. Well, when the river rose
pa had a streak of luck one day; he ketched this piece
of a raft; so we reckoned we'd go down to Orleans on
it. Pa's luck didn't hold out; a steamboat run over
the forrard corner of the raft one night, and we all
went overboard and dove under the wheel; Jim and
me come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was
only four years old, so they never come up no more.
Well, for the next day or two we had considerable
trouble, because people was always coming out in skiffs
and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they be-
lieved he was a runaway nigger. We don't run day-
times no more now; nights they don't bother us."

The duke says:

"Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run
in the daytime if we want to. I'll think the thing
over -- I'll invent a plan that'll fix it. We'll let it
alone for to-day, because of course we don't want to
go by that town yonder in daylight -- it mightn't be
healthy."

Towards night it begun to darken up and look like
rain; the heat lightning was squirting around low down
in the sky, and the leaves was beginning to shiver -- it
was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see that.
So the duke and the king went to overhauling our
wigwam, to see what the beds was like. My bed was
a straw tickQbetter than Jim's, which was a corn-
shuck tick; there's always cobs around about in a
shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and
when you roll over the dry shucks sound like you was
rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it makes such a
rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he
would take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn't.
He says:

"I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a
sejested to you that a corn-shuck bed warn't just fitten
for me to sleep on. Your Grace 'll take the shuck
bed yourself."

Jim and