The next morning the king sat on the corner of the raft with his legs in the water and learned his part in *Romeo and Juliet*. Then he and the duke practiced together. “Don’t shout *Romeo!* like that, like a bull,” the duke said. “Say it soft and sweet: *Ro-o-meo!* Juliet is a dear young girl, you know.”
Next they practiced the sword fight with wooden swords. They jumped around the raft beautifully, until the king fell into the river. Then the duke taught him Hamlet’s famous speech, “To be, or not to be.” He didn’t have it in his book, so he put it together from memory, and I don’t think it was all Hamlet. But the old man shouted it out wonderfully, as if he was born for it.
For the next few days there was nothing on the raft but sword fights and practice. One morning, far down in Arkansas, we came to a little town called Bricksville. We hid the raft in a creek above it, and all of us except Jim took the canoe to see if there was a chance for our show there.
We were lucky. A circus was coming that afternoon, and people from the country were already arriving in old wagons and on horses. The duke hired the court house, and we put up notices: the world-famous actors David Garrick the Younger and Edmund Kean the Elder, from London, in scenes from Shakespeare, for one night only.
Then we walked around the town. The houses were old and had never been painted, and the gardens grew nothing but weeds, old boots and broken bottles. In front of every store, lazy men sat on boxes all day long, chewing tobacco and yawning. The streets were nothing but mud, black as tar. Pigs lay in the middle of the street, and when a dog chased one away screaming, all the lazy men stood up and laughed. Along the river, some houses hung over the bank, ready to fall in, because the river was always eating the land.
Toward noon the streets filled with wagons and horses, and there was a lot of whiskey drinking. Then somebody shouted:
“Here comes old Boggs! In from the country for his monthly drunk!”
The lazy men looked happy. “I wonder who he’s going to kill this time,” one said. “If he had killed all the men he promised to kill in the last twenty years, he’d be famous by now.”
Boggs came riding along, shouting. He was over fifty, with a very red face, and so drunk he could hardly stay on his horse. He said he had come to kill old Colonel Sherburn. He rode up to me and said, “Are you ready to die, boy?” I was scared, but a man said, “He doesn’t mean anything. He never hurt anybody in his life.”
Boggs stopped in front of the biggest store and shouted, “Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you cheated!” He called Sherburn every bad name he knew, and the whole street listened and laughed.
After a while a proud-looking man of about fifty-five, the best-dressed man in town, stepped out of the store. He spoke to Boggs very calmly and slowly:
“I’m tired of this, but I’ll put up with it until one o’clock. Until one o’clock, and no longer. If you insult me even once after that, I will find you, wherever you go.”
Then he went back inside. Nobody laughed any more. Boggs rode up and down the street, still shouting insults at Sherburn. Some men told him it would be one o’clock in fifteen minutes and he must go home right away, but he didn’t listen.
“Get his daughter!” somebody said. “Sometimes he listens to her.”
Somebody ran off. In a few minutes Boggs came walking across the street toward me, without his hat, with a friend holding each arm. He was quiet now and looked worried. Then somebody called:
“Boggs!”
It was Colonel Sherburn. He was standing perfectly still in the street with a pistol in his hand, pointing at the sky. At the same moment I saw a young girl running toward us. Boggs’s friends jumped to the side, and the pistol came down slowly until it pointed straight at Boggs. Boggs threw up both hands and said, “Oh Lord, don’t shoot!” Bang! went the first shot, and he stepped back. Bang! went the second, and he fell backward to the ground with his arms spread out. The young girl screamed and threw herself on her father, crying, “Oh, he’s killed him! He’s killed him!”
Colonel Sherburn threw his pistol on the ground, turned around and walked away.
They carried Boggs into a little drugstore, and I got a place at the window. They laid him on the floor and put a big Bible on his chest. He breathed a dozen long breaths, and the Bible went up and down. Then he lay still. He was dead. They pulled his daughter away, screaming and crying. She was about sixteen, very sweet and gentle-looking, but terribly pale and scared.
Soon the streets were full of excited people. One tall man showed a crowd where Boggs had stood and where Sherburn had stood, shouted “Boggs!”, said “Bang!” twice and fell flat on his back. People said he did it perfectly, and a dozen of them gave him drinks from their bottles.
Then somebody said Sherburn should be hanged. In a minute everybody was saying it. Away they went, angry and shouting, pulling down every clothesline they passed to do the hanging with.