They asked us a lot of questions. Why did we hide during the day? Was Jim a runaway slave? I said, “Would a runaway slave run south?”
No, they agreed he wouldn’t. But I had to explain things somehow, so I told them a story. My family lived in Pike County, Missouri, I said, and they all died except me, Pa and my little brother Ike. Pa had nothing left but sixteen dollars and Jim, so he caught a piece of a raft, and we started down the river to live with Uncle Ben below New Orleans. But one night a steamboat ran over the raft. Jim and I came up all right, but Pa was drunk and Ike was only four, and they never came up again. After that, people kept coming out in boats to take Jim away from me, because they thought he was a runaway. “So now we travel at night,” I said. “At night nobody bothers us.”
“Leave it to me,” said the duke. “I’ll think of a way for us to travel in the daytime.”
That night there was a big storm. The king and the duke went to sleep in the shelter, and Jim and I kept watch. My, how the wind screamed! The lightning lit up the white waves for half a mile around, and the thunder went rolling and rumbling away. When Jim took his turn keeping watch so I could sleep, there was no room for me in the shelter, so I lay outside in the warm rain. Then a big wave washed me off the raft. Jim nearly died laughing. He was the easiest man to make laugh that ever lived.
In the morning the duke said he and the king would do scenes from Shakespeare in the next good town: a sword fight, and the balcony scene from *Romeo and Juliet*. He would be Romeo, and the king would be Juliet.
“But Juliet is a young girl, Duke,” said the king. “My bald head and my white beard will look strange on her.”
“Don’t worry. These country people won’t think of that. And you’ll wear a long nightgown and a nightcap.”
There was a little town a few miles down the river, and after dinner the duke said he knew now how to travel in the daytime without danger for Jim. The king and the duke went over in the canoe, and since we needed coffee, I went along. The streets were empty, because everybody had gone to a camp meeting in the woods. The duke went to the printing office, and the king and I went to the camp meeting.
About a thousand people were there, singing and crying “Glory! Amen!” while the preachers shouted.
Before I knew it, the king was up on a platform, speaking to the people. He told them he had been a pirate for thirty years in the Indian Ocean. Last night he had been robbed and put off a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad, because now he was a changed man and happy for the first time in his life. He was going back to the Indian Ocean to bring all the pirates there to God. And every time he saved a pirate, he would tell him, “Don’t thank me. Thank the dear people of the Pokeville camp meeting!”
Then he cried, and so did everybody. Somebody shouted, “Let him pass the hat around!” So the king went through the crowd with his hat, wiping his eyes and blessing the people, and the prettiest girls asked if they could kiss him. Everybody invited him to stay, but he said he was in a hurry to start his work with the pirates.
Back on the raft, he counted the money: eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents. He had also found a big jug of whiskey under a wagon and brought it along. He said a story about pirates worked much better at a camp meeting than any other story.
The duke had made nine and a half dollars by printing notices and advertisements for people in town, and he had been proud of it until the king came back. Then he showed us one more thing he had printed, for us. It had a picture of a runaway slave with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and under it, “$200 reward.” It described Jim exactly and said he had run away last winter from a plantation below New Orleans.
“Now we can travel in the daytime,” said the duke. “When anybody comes, we’ll tie Jim up with a rope, show this notice and say we caught him up the river. We’re too poor to go by steamboat, so we’re taking him down on a raft to get the reward.”
We all said the duke was very smart.
When Jim woke me to take the watch at four in the morning, he said, “Huck, do you think we’ll meet any more kings on this trip?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Well, that’s all right, then. I don’t mind one or two kings, but that’s enough. This one is very drunk, and the duke isn’t much better.”
Jim had asked the king to speak some French, because he wanted to hear what it sounded like. But the king said he had been in this country so long, and had so much trouble, that he had forgotten it.