Chapter 28 - Page 2

says, "I don't want nothing more
out of YOU than just your word -- I druther have it than
another man's kiss-the-Bible." She smiled and red-
dened up very sweet, and I says, "If you don't mind
it, I'll shut the door -- and bolt it."

Then I come back and set down again, and says:

"Don't you holler. Just set still and take it like a
man. I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace
up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to
be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These
uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple
of frauds -- regular dead-beats. There, now we're
over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling
easy."

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, from where we first struck
that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear
through to where she flung herself on to the king's
breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or
seventeen times -- and then up she jumps, with her
face afire like sunset, and says:

"The brute! Come, don't waste a minute -- not a
SECOND -- we'll have them tarred and feathered, and
flung in the river!"

Says I:

"Cert'nly. But do you mean BEFORE you go to Mr.
Lothrop's, or --"

"Oh," she says, "what am I THINKING about!"
she says, and set right down again. "Don't mind
what I said -- please don't -- you WON'T, now, WILL
you?" Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind
of a way that I said I would die first. "I never
thought, I was so stirred up," she says; "now go on,
and I won't do so any more. You tell me what to do,
and whatever you say I'll do it."

"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two
frauds, and I'm fixed so I got to travel with them a
while longer, whether I want to or not -- I druther not
tell you why; and if you was to blow on them this
town would get me out of their claws, and I'd be all
right; but there'd be another person that you don't
know about who'd be in big trouble. Well, we got
to save HIM, hain't we? Of course. Well, then, we
won't blow on them."

Saying them words put a good idea in my head. I
see how maybe I could get me and Jim rid of the
frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave. But I
didn't want to run the raft in the daytime without any-
body aboard to answer questions but me; so I didn't
want the plan to begin working till pretty late to-night.
I says:

"Miss Mary Jane, I'll tell you what we'll do, and
you won't have to stay at Mr. Lothrop's so long,
nuther. How fur is it?"

"A little short of four miles -- right out