Huckleberry Finn by Dave Mckay, Mark Twain (recommended books to read TXT) 📕

We got there in about a half an hour with our shirts wet from the heat, for it was a most awful hot day. There was as much as a thousand people there from twenty miles around. The place was full of horse teams and wagons tied to trees, with the horses hitting their feet on the ground to keep off the flies. There was shops made out of sticks and roofed over with branches, where they were selling lemon drinks and sweet biscuits, and watermelons and green corn and other things like that.

The preaching was going on under the same kinds of buildings, only they was bigger and held crowds of people. The benches was made out of half logs, with holes drilled in the round side to push sticks into for legs. They didn’t have no backs. The preachers had high places to stand on at one end of the buildings. The women had on sun-hats; and their best dresses. Some of the young men was without shoes, and some of the children didn’t have on any clothes but just a rough shirt. Some of the old women was knitting, and some of the young people was secretly looking for friends of the opposite sex.

The first building we come to the preacher was lining out a song. He’d say two lines, then everyone would sing it, and it was great to hear it, there was so many of them and they done it in such an enthusiastic way; then he lined out two more for them to sing -- and so on. The people come alive more and more, and were singing louder and louder; and toward the end some started to moan, and some started to shout. Then the preacher started to preach, and started in all sincerity, too; and went walking first to one side of the stage and then the other, and then a-leaning down over the front of it, with his arms and his body going all the time, and shouting his words out with all his strength; and every now and then he would hold up his Bible and open it out, and kind of pass it around this way and that, shouting, “It’s the gold snake in the desert! Look on it and live!” And people would shout out, “Glory! -- Amen!” And so he went on, with the people moaning and crying and saying amen:

“Oh, come to the sinners’ bench! come, you who are black with sin! (amen!) come, you who are sick and sore! (amen!) come, you who are crippled and blind! (amen!) come, you who are poor and in need! (a-a-men!) come, all that’s tired and dirty and hurting! -- come with a broken spirit! come with a humble heart! come in your old clothes and sin and dirt! The waters that will make you clean is free, the door of heaven stands open -- oh, come in and be at rest!” (a-a-men! glory, glory!) And so on. You couldn’t make out what the preacher said by this time, because of all the shouting and crying. People got up all over the crowd, and worked their way to the sinners’ bench, with the tears running down their faces; and when all the sinners had got up there to the front benches in a crowd, they would sing and shout and throw themselves down on the ground, just crazy and wild.

Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everyone; and next he went a-running up onto the stage where the other preacher was, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He told them he was a pirate -- been a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean -- and his men was thinned out a lot last year in a fight, and he was home now to take out some new men, and thanks to God he’d been robbed last night and put on land off of a river boat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the best thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the way of truth; for he could do it better than anyone else, because he knew all pirates in that ocean; and even if it took him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he brought a pirate to the Lord, he would say to him, “Don’t you thank me, don’t you give me nothing; it all belongs to them good people in Pokeville camp meeting, spiritual brothers who have reached out to the whole world, and that good preacher there is the truest friend a pirate ever had!”

And then he broke into tears, and so did everyone. Then someone sings out, “Take up some money for him, take it up!”

Well, five or six made a jump to do it, but someone sings out, “Let him pass the hat around!” Then everyone said it, the preacher too.

So the king went all through the crowd with his hat, rubbing his eyes, and blessing the people and saying how good they was and thanking them for being so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the prettiest girls, with tears running down their cheeks, would up and ask would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or six times. He was asked to stay a week; and everyone wanted him to live in their houses; said they’d think it was a gift to them if he stayed; but he said as this was the last day of the camp meeting he couldn’t do no good there, and besides he was in a hurry to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to work on the pirates.

When we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents. And he had carried away a very big bottle of whiskey, too, that he found under a wagon when he was starting home through the trees. The king said, take it all around, it was better than any day he’d ever put in in the missionary line. He said it weren’t no use talking; lost souls in Africa aren't near as good as pirates to work a camp meeting with.

The duke was thinking he’d been doing pretty well until the king come to show up, but after that he didn’t think so that much. He had set up and printed off two little jobs for farmers in that printing shop -- horse advertisements -- and took the money, four dollars. And he had got in ten dollars’ worth of advertisements for the paper, which he said he would sell for four dollars if they would pay then and there -- so they done it. The price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he lined up three people to take it for half a dollar each if they would pay then and there too. They were going to pay in timber and onions as most did around there, but he said he had just bought the business and knocked down the price as low as he could, and needed the money. He set up a little piece of rhyming, which he made himself, out of his own head -- kind of sweet and sad -- the name of it was, “Yes, destroy, cold world, this breaking heart” -- and he left that all set up and ready to print in the paper, and didn’t ask nothing for it. Well, he took in nine dollars and a half, and said he’d done a pretty square day’s work for it.

Then he showed us another little job he’d printed and hadn’t asked to be paid for, because it was for us. It had a picture of a slave with some clothes tied up on a stick over his shoulder, and “$200 reward” under it.

The reading was all about Jim, and just perfectly fit him. It said he run away from St. Jacques’ farm, forty miles below New Orleans, last winter, and probably went north, and whoever would catch him and send him back he could have the reward and costs.

“Now,” says the duke, “after tonight we can run days if we want to. Whenever we see anyone coming we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope, and lay him in the tent and show this paper and say we caught him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a river boat, so we borrowed this little raft from our friends and are going down to get the reward. Handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim, but it wouldn’t go well with the story of us being so poor. Too much like jewelry. Ropes are the right thing -- we must keep it all together, as we say on the boards.”

We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there couldn’t be no trouble about running days now. We judged we could make miles enough that night to get out of reach of the trouble we believed the duke’s work in the printing shop was going to make in that little town; then we could move right along if we wanted to.

We kept low and quiet, and never pushed out until nearly ten o’clock; then we went by, pretty wide away from the town, and didn’t put up our lantern until we was well past where they could see us.

When Jim called me to take the watch at four in the morning, he says: “Huck, does you think we gwyne to run across any more kings on dis trip?”

“No,” I says, “I don’t think so.”

“Well,” says he, “dat’s all right, den. I don’t have a problem with one or two kings, but dat’s enough. Dis one’s powerful drunk, and de duke ain’t much better.”

I found Jim had been trying to get him to talk French, so he could hear what it was like; but he said he had been in this country so long, and had so much trouble, he couldn’t remember it now.

Chapter 21

It was after sun-up now, but we went right on and didn’t tie up. The king and the duke turned out by and by looking pretty rough; but after they’d jumped in the river and took a swim it coloured them up better. After breakfast the king he sat down on the corner of the raft, and pulled off his shoes and pushed up his pants, and let his legs hang in the water, so as to be comfortable, and pulled out his pipe, and went to getting his Romeo and Juliet learned well enough to remember.

When he had got it pretty good, him and the duke started to work on it together. The duke had to learn him over and over again how to say every line; and he made him breathe out sadly, and put his hand on his heart, and after a while he said he done it pretty well; “only,” he says, “you mustn’t shout out Romeo! that way, like a wild buffalo -- you must say it soft and sick and dying like so -- R-o-o-meo! that is the way; for Juliet’s a nice sweet child of a girl, you know, and she doesn’t talk like a donkey.”

Well, next they got out two long swords that the duke made out of timber, and started to work on the sword fight