Chapter 31

CHAPTER XXXI.

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 mesmeriz-
ing, 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.

So we stayed where we was. The duke he fretted
and sweated around, and was in a mighty