That night the court house was full of men in no time. The duke stood in front of the curtain and said this was the most exciting play that ever was. Then he pulled up the curtain, and the king came out, prancing on his hands and knees, with no clothes on. He was painted all over in stripes of every color, as bright as a rainbow. The people nearly died laughing, and they made him come back and do it twice more.
Then the duke let the curtain down, bowed and said the great play would be performed only two more nights. He asked them to tell their friends.
“What, is it over? Is that all?” twenty people shouted.
The duke said yes. Everybody shouted, “Cheated!” and started angrily toward the stage. But a big, fine-looking man jumped up on a bench and shouted:
“Wait, gentlemen! They cheated us, and badly. But we don’t want the whole town to laugh at us for the rest of our lives. Let’s go out of here quietly, say the show was great, and cheat the rest of the town! Then we’ll all be in the same boat.”
Everybody agreed. The next day all you heard in town was how wonderful the show was, and that night the hall was full again, and those people were cheated the same way.
The third night the hall was full again, but with people who had been there before. I stood by the duke at the door, and I saw that every man had his pockets full, or something under his coat. I smelled rotten eggs and rotten cabbages, and if I know the smell of a dead cat, and I bet I do, sixty-four of them went in. When the hall was full, the duke paid a man to watch the door and walked around toward the stage door, and I went after him. But the minute we turned the corner into the dark, he said:
“Walk fast until you’re past the houses, and then run for the raft as if the devil was after you!”
We reached the raft together, and in two seconds we were sliding down the river in the dark. I thought the poor king was having a terrible time with the audience. But then he crawled out of the shelter and said, “Well, how did it go this time, Duke?”
He hadn’t been in town at all.
Ten miles below the town we had supper, and the king and the duke laughed until they nearly fell apart over the way they had fooled those people. In three nights they had taken in four hundred and sixty-five dollars. I had never seen money come in like that before.
Later, when they were asleep and snoring, Jim said, “Doesn’t it surprise you, Huck, the way these kings act?”
“No,” I said. “I think they’re all alike. Read about kings, and you’ll see. Henry the Eighth married a new wife every day and cut off her head the next morning. Compared to him, our king is a Sunday-school teacher. Kings are kings, Jim, and you have to make allowances.”
“But this one smells so bad, Huck.”
“Well, they all do, Jim. We can’t help the way a king smells.”
“Well, I don’t want any more of them, Huck. These two are all I can take.”
What was the use of telling Jim these weren’t real kings and dukes? It wouldn’t do any good. And anyway, you couldn’t tell them from the real kind.
I went to sleep, and Jim didn’t wake me when it was my turn to watch. He often did that. When I woke up at daybreak, he was sitting with his head down between his knees, crying softly to himself. I didn’t say anything. I knew he was thinking about his wife and his children, far up the river, and he was homesick, because he had never been away from home before in his life. I do believe he cared just as much for his family as white people do for theirs. It doesn’t seem natural, but I think it’s so. He often cried like that at night, when he thought I was asleep, and said, “Poor little Elizabeth! Poor little Johnny! I don’t think I’ll ever see you again!” He was a very good man, Jim was.
But this time I somehow started talking to him about his family, and after a while he said:
“What makes me feel so bad this time is a sound I heard over on the bank a while ago, like a door slamming. It made me think of the time I treated my little Elizabeth so badly. She was only about four, and she had scarlet fever and was very sick. But she got well, and one day I said to her, ‘Shut the door.’
“She didn’t do it. She just stood there, smiling up at me. That made me angry, and I said again, very loud, ‘Don’t you hear me? Shut the door!’
“She just stood there the same way, smiling up. I was so angry that I hit her on the side of the head, and she fell down. Then I went into the other room for about ten minutes. When I came back, the door was still open, and the child was standing in it, looking down, with tears running down her face. I was going for her again, but just then the wind slammed the door shut behind her, *bang!* And Huck, the child never moved!
“I lost my breath. I crept up behind her, shaking all over, and shouted as loud as I could. She never moved, Huck! Oh, I started crying and took her in my arms and said, ‘Oh, the poor little thing! God forgive poor old Jim, because he will never forgive himself as long as he lives!’ She was deaf, Huck, completely deaf, and couldn’t speak, and I had treated her like that!”