Two or three days and nights went by, so quietly and smoothly and beautifully that they almost seemed to swim by. The river was huge down there, sometimes a mile and a half wide. We traveled at night and hid during the day. As soon as the night was nearly over, we tied up the raft behind a little island and covered it with branches. Then we had a swim and sat in the shallow water to watch the day come. Not a sound anywhere, as if the whole world was asleep. First a dull line far across the water, the woods on the other side. Then a pale place in the sky, and the river turning from black to gray, and mist curling up off the water, and the east turning red. Then a cool breeze came over, sweet with the smell of the woods and the flowers, and it was broad daylight, with everything smiling in the sun and the birds singing.
We cooked fish for breakfast, watched the lonely river and were lazy until we fell asleep. One day in a thick fog a boat passed so close that we could hear the men talking and laughing and swearing, but we couldn’t see a thing. Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I said, “No. Spirits wouldn’t say, ‘Darn this fog!’”
At night we let the raft float wherever the current took it, hung our legs in the water and talked about all kinds of things. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, full of stars, and we used to lie on our backs and talk about whether somebody made them or they just happened. Jim thought they were made, but I thought it would take too long to make so many. Jim said maybe the moon laid them, like eggs. Well, that seemed reasonable, because I’ve seen a frog lay nearly as many. Jim said the falling stars had gone bad and been thrown out of the nest.
One morning about daybreak I found a canoe and paddled up a creek on the main shore to look for berries. Suddenly two men came running down a path as fast as they could go. I thought they were after me, or maybe Jim, but they begged me to save their lives. They said men and dogs were coming after them, though they hadn’t done anything. I told them to walk through the water to me, so the dogs couldn’t follow their trail. Then I paddled them away fast. We heard the dogs and the men far behind, shouting, then nothing, and soon we were hidden on the raft and safe.
One man was about seventy, with a bald head and a gray beard. The other was about thirty. Both wore old, dirty clothes and carried big old bags. After breakfast we learned that they didn’t know each other. The young one had been selling a powder that cleaned people’s teeth but ruined them too, and he had stayed in town one night too long. The old one had been preaching against drinking, until people found out that he drank in secret, and now they wanted to cover him with tar and feathers. So the two agreed to work together.
Nobody said anything for a while. Then the young man sighed and wiped his eyes. “To think that I have to live in such company! But I don’t blame you, gentlemen. I brought myself down. The secret of my birth… I will tell you, because I feel I can trust you. By rights I am a duke!”
Jim’s eyes nearly jumped out of his head, and I think mine did too. “I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater, and here I am, ragged and hunted, on a raft with criminals!”
We felt very sorry for him. He said it would help him if we bowed when we spoke to him and called him “Your Grace”, and served him at dinner. That was easy, so we did it. Jim stood by him all through dinner and asked, “Would Your Grace like some of this, or some of that?” You could see the duke liked it very much.
But the old man got quiet. In the afternoon he began to cry and said, “Duke, you aren’t the only one with a secret about his birth. I am the lost son of the King of France!”
Jim and I stared this time, you can be sure. The duke said, “You? At your age?”
“Trouble has made my hair gray and my head bald, my friend. Yes, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the rightful King of France.”
So we comforted him too. He said it made him feel better when people went down on one knee to speak to him, called him “Your Majesty” and didn’t sit down until he told them to. So Jim and I did all that, and he got cheerful. But the duke stayed sour, until the king said:
“We’ll probably be on this raft together for a long time, Duke, so what’s the use of being sour? It isn’t my fault I wasn’t born a duke, and it isn’t your fault you weren’t born a king. Come on, give me your hand, and let’s all be friends.”
The duke shook his hand, and Jim and I were very glad. What you want above all things on a raft is for everybody to be happy and kind to each other.
It didn’t take me long to see that these liars weren’t kings or dukes at all, just low-down cheats. But I never said anything. That’s the best way: then you don’t have any fights or trouble. If they wanted us to call them a king and a duke, I didn’t mind, as long as it kept peace on the raft. And there was no use telling Jim, so I didn’t. If I never learned anything else from Pap, I learned that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.