Марк Твен
Tom Sawyer Abroad
CHAPTER X. THE TREASURE-HILL
TOM said it happened like this
A dervish was stumping it along through the Desert, on foot, one blazing hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and hungry, and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he run across a camel-driver with a hundred camels, and asked him for some a’ms. But the cameldriver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:
“Don’t you own these camels?”
“Yes, they’re mine.”
“Are you in debt?”
“Who – me? No.”
“Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain’t in debt is rich – and not only rich, but very rich. Ain’t it so?”
The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says:
“God has made you rich, and He has made me poor. He has His reasons, and they are wise, blessed be His name. But He has willed that His rich shall help His poor, and you have turned away from me, your brother, in my need, and He will remember this, and you will lose by it.”
That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the same he was born hoggish after money and didn’t like to let go a cent; so he begun to whine and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn’t git no return freight, and so he warn’t making no great things out of his trip. So the dervish starts along again, and says:
“All right, if you want to take the risk; but I reckon you’ve made a mistake this time, and missed a chance.”
Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had missed, because maybe there was money in it; so he run after the dervish, and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him that at last the dervish gave in, and says:
“Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is all the treasures of the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good kind heart and a noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just that man, I’ve got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could see the treasures and get them out.”
So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he cried, and begged, and took on, and went down on his knees, and said he was just that kind of a man, and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn’t ever described so exact before.
“Well, then,” says the dervish, “all right. If we load the hundred camels, can I have half of them?”
The driver was so glad he couldn’t hardly hold in, and says:
“Now you’re shouting.”
So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish got out his box and rubbed the salve on the driver’s right eye, and the hill opened and he went in, and there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and jewels sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.
So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded every camel till he couldn’t carry no more; then they said good-bye, and each of them started off with his fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running and overtook the dervish and says:
“You ain’t in society, you know, and you don’t really need all you’ve got. Won’t you be good, and let me have ten of your camels?”
“Well,” the dervish says, “I don’t know but what you say is reasonable enough.”
So he done it, and they separated and the dervish started off again with his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel-driver bawling after him again, and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him, saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough to see a dervish through, because they live very simple, you know, and don’t keep house, but board around and give their note.
But that warn’t the end yet. That ornery hound kept coming and coming till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn’t ever forgit the dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn’t been so good to him before, and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and started off again.
But do you know, it warn’t ten minutes till the camel-driver was unsatisfied again – he was the lowdownest reptyle in seven counties – and he come a-running again. And this time the thing he wanted was to get the dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye.
“Why?” said the dervish.
“Oh, you know,” says the driver.
“Know what?”
“Well, you can’t fool me,” says the driver. “You’re trying to keep back something from me, you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if I had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that’s valuable. Come – please put it on.”
The dervish says:
“I wasn’t keeping anything back from you. I don’t mind telling you what would happen if I put it on. You’d never see again. You’d be stone-blind the rest of your days.”
But do you know that beat wouldn’t believe him. No, he begged and begged, and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box and told him to put it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.
Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him; and says:
“Good-bye – a man that’s blind hain’t got no use for jewelry.”
And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the Desert.
Jim said he’d bet it was a lesson to him.
“Yes,” Tom says, “and like a considerable many lessons a body gets. They ain’t no account, because the thing don’t ever happen the same way again – and can’t. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn’t climb chimblies no more, and he hadn’t no more backs to break.”
“All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin’ by expe’ence. De Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire.”
“Well, I ain’t denying that a thing’s a lesson if it’s a thing that can happen twice just the same way. There’s lots of such things, and THEY educate a person, that’s what Uncle Abner always said; but there’s forty MILLION lots of the other kind – the kind that don’t happen the same way twice – and they ain’t no real use, they ain’t no more instructive than the small-pox. When you’ve got it, it ain’t no good to find out you ought to been vaccinated, and it ain’t no good to git vaccinated afterward, because the small-pox don’t come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people that’s all the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that happens, no matter whether – ”
But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a person always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of course he oughtn’t to go to sleep, because it’s shabby; but the finer a person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you come to look at it it ain’t nobody’s fault in particular; both of them’s to blame.
Jim begun to snore – soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones like the last water sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that is choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at his level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a dipperful of loddanum in him, but can’t wake himself up although all that awful noise of his’n ain’t but three inches from his own ears. And that is the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a match to light the candle, and that little bit of a noise will fetch him. I wish I knowed what was the reason of that, but there don’t seem to be no way to find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole Desert, and yanking the animals out, for miles and miles around, to see what in the nation was going on up there; there warn’t nobody nor nothing that was as close to the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only cretur that wasn’t disturbed by it. We yelled at him and whooped at him, it never done no good; but the first time there come a little wee noise that wasn’t of a usual kind it woke him up. No, sir, I’ve thought it all over, and so has Tom, and there ain’t no way to find out why a snorer can’t hear himself snore.
Jim said he hadn’t been asleep; he just shut his eyes so he could listen better.
Tom said nobody warn’t accusing him.
That made him look like he wished he hadn’t said anything. And he wanted to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the camel-driver, just the way a person does when he has got catched in something and wants to take it out of somebody else. He let into the camel-driver the hardest he knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and he praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had to agree with him there, too. But Tom says:
“I ain’t so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good and unselfish, but I don’t quite see it. He didn’t hunt up another poor dervish, did he? No, he didn’t. If he was so unselfish, why didn’t he go in there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go along and be satisfied? No, sir, the person he was hunting for was a man with a hundred camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could.”
“Why, Mars Tom, he was willin’ to divide, fair and square; he only struck for fifty camels.”
“Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by.”
“Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make him bline.”
“Yes, because he knowed the man’s character. It was just the kind of a man he was hunting for – a man that never believes in anybody’s word or anybody’s honorableness, because he ain’t got none of his own. I reckon there’s lots of people like that dervish. They swindle, right and left, but they always make the other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep inside of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain’t no way to git hold of them. THEY don’t put the salve on – oh, no, that would be sin; but they know how to fool YOU into putting it on, then it’s you that blinds yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel-driver was just a pair – a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a dull, coarse, ignorant one, but both of them rascals, just the same.”
“Mars Tom, does you reckon dey’s any o’ dat kind o’ salve in de worl’ now?”
“Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they’ve got it in New York, and they put it on country people’s eyes and show them all the railroads in the world, and they go in and git them, and then when they rub the salve on the other eye the other man bids them goodbye and goes off with their railroads. Here’s the treasure-hill now. Lower away!”
We landed, but it warn’t as interesting as I thought it was going to be, because we couldn’t find the place where they went in to git the treasure. Still, it was plenty interesting enough, just to see the mere hill itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim said he wou’dn’t ‘a’ missed it for three dollars, and I felt the same way.
And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any was the way Tom could come into a strange big country like this and go straight and find a little hump like that and tell it in a minute from a million other humps that was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but only his own learning and his own natural smartness. We talked and talked it over together, but couldn’t make out how he done it. He had the best head on him I ever see; and all he lacked was age, to make a name for himself equal to Captain Kidd or George Washington. I bet you it would ‘a’ crowded either of THEM to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it warn’t nothing to Tom Sawyer; he went across Sahara and put his finger on it as easy as you could pick a nigger out of a bunch of angels.
We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped up a raft of salt around the edges, and loaded up the lion’s skin and the tiger’s so as they would keep till Jim could tan them.
CHAPTER XI. THE SAND-STORM
WE went a-fooling along for a day or two, and then just as the full moon was touching the ground on the other side of the desert, we see a string of little black figgers moving across its big silver face. You could see them as plain as if they was painted on the moon with ink. It was another caravan. We cooled down our speed and tagged along after it, just to have company, though it warn’t going our way. It was a rattler, that caravan, and a most bully sight to look at next morning when the sun come a-streaming across the desert and flung the long shadders of the camels on the gold sand like a thousand grand-daddy-long-legses marching in procession. We never went very near it, because we knowed better now than to act like that and scare people’s camels and break up their caravans. It was the gayest outfit you ever see, for rich clothes and nobby style. Some of the chiefs rode on dromedaries, the first we ever see, and very tall, and they go plunging along like they was on stilts, and they rock the man that is on them pretty violent and churn up his dinner considerable, I bet you, but they make noble good time, and a camel ain’t nowheres with them for speed.
The caravan camped, during the middle part of the day, and then started again about the middle of the afternoon. Before long the sun begun to look very curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to copper, and after that it begun to look like a blood-red ball, and the air got hot and close, and pretty soon all the sky in the west darkened up and looked thick and foggy, but fiery and dreadful – like it looks through a piece of red glass, you know. We looked down and see a big confusion going on in the caravan, and a rushing every which way like they was scared; and then they all flopped down flat in the sand and laid there perfectly still.
Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out:
“It’s a sand-storm – turn your backs to it!”
We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we couldn’t see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads out and could hardly breathe.
Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn’t anything but just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and dead and buried – buried under ten foot of sand, we reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends wouldn’t ever know what become of that caravan. Tom said:
“NOW we know what it was that happened to the people we got the swords and pistols from.”
Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day now. They got buried in a sand-storm, and the wild animals couldn’t get at them, and the wind never uncovered them again until they was dried to leather and warn’t fit to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry for them poor people as a person could for anybody, and as mournful, too, but we was mistaken; this last caravan’s death went harder with us, a good deal harder. You see, the others was total strangers, and we never got to feeling acquainted with them at all, except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching the girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We was huvvering around them a whole night and ‘most a whole day, and had got to feeling real friendly with them, and acquainted. I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. Just so with these. We kind of liked them from the start, and traveling with them put on the finisher. The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them, and the gladder and gladder we was that we run across them. We had come to know some of them so well that we called them by name when we was talking about them, and soon got so familiar and sociable that we even dropped the Miss and Mister and just used their plain names without any handle, and it did not seem unpolite, but just the right thing. Of course, it wasn’t their own names, but names we give them. There was Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson, and Colonel Jacob McDougal and Miss Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and young Bushrod Butler, and these was big chiefs mostly that wore splendid great turbans and simmeters, and dressed like the Grand Mogul, and their families. But as soon as we come to know them good, and like them very much, it warn’t Mister, nor Judge, nor nothing, any more, but only Elleck, and Addy, and Jake, and Hattie, and Jerry, and Buck, and so on.
And you know the more you join in with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. Now we warn’t cold and indifferent, the way most travelers is, we was right down friendly and sociable, and took a chance in everything that was going, and the caravan could depend on us to be on hand every time, it didn’t make no difference what it was.
When they camped, we camped right over them, ten or twelve hundred feet up in the air. When they et a meal, we et ourn, and it made it ever so much home-liker to have their company. When they had a wedding that night, and Buck and Addy got married, we got ourselves up in the very starchiest of the professor’s duds for the blow-out, and when they danced we jined in and shook a foot up there.
But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the nearest, and it was a funeral that done it with us. It was next morning, just in the still dawn. We didn’t know the diseased, and he warn’t in our set, but that never made no difference; he belonged to the caravan, and that was enough, and there warn’t no more sincerer tears shed over him than the ones we dripped on him from up there eleven hundred foot on high.
Yes, parting with this caravan was much more bitterer than it was to part with them others, which was comparative strangers, and been dead so long, anyway. We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of them, too, and now to have death snatch them from right before our faces while we was looking, and leave us so lonesome and friendless in the middle of that big desert, it did hurt so, and we wished we mightn’t ever make any more friends on that voyage if we was going to lose them again like that.
We couldn’t keep from talking about them, and they was all the time coming up in our memory, and looking just the way they looked when we was all alive and happy together. We could see the line marching, and the shiny spearheads a-winking in the sun; we could see the dromedaries lumbering along; we could see the wedding and the funeral; and more oftener than anything else we could see them praying, because they don’t allow nothing to prevent that; whenever the call come, several times a day, they would stop right there, and stand up and face to the east, and lift back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin, and four or five times they would go down on their knees, and then fall forward and touch their forehead to the ground.
Well, it warn’t good to go on talking about them, lovely as they was in their life, and dear to us in their life and death both, because it didn’t do no good, and made us too down-hearted. Jim allowed he was going to live as good a life as he could, so he could see them again in a better world; and Tom kept still and didn’t tell him they was only Mohammedans; it warn’t no use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad enough just as it was.
When we woke up next morning we was feeling a little cheerfuller, and had had a most powerful good sleep, because sand is the comfortablest bed there is, and I don’t see why people that can afford it don’t have it more. And it’s terrible good ballast, too; I never see the balloon so steady before.
Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and wondered what we better do with it; it was good sand, and it didn’t seem good sense to throw it away. Jim says:
“Mars Tom, can’t we tote it back home en sell it? How long’ll it take?”
“Depends on the way we go.”
“Well, sah, she’s wuth a quarter of a dollar a load at home, en I reckon we’s got as much as twenty loads, hain’t we? How much would dat be?”
“Five dollars.”
“By jings, Mars Tom, le’s shove for home right on de spot! Hit’s more’n a dollar en a half apiece, hain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ef dat ain’t makin’ money de easiest ever I struck! She jes’ rained in – never cos’ us a lick o’ work. Le’s mosey right along, Mars Tom.”
But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy and excited he never heard him. Pretty soon he says:
“Five dollars – sho! Look here, this sand’s worth – worth – why, it’s worth no end of money.”
“How is dat, Mars Tom? Go on, honey, go on!”
“Well, the minute people knows it’s genuwyne sand from the genuwyne Desert of Sahara, they’ll just be in a perfect state of mind to git hold of some of it to keep on the what-not in a vial with a label on it for a curiosity. All we got to do is to put it up in vials and float around all over the United States and peddle them out at ten cents apiece. We’ve got all of ten thousand dollars’ worth of sand in this boat.”
Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout whoopjamboreehoo, and Tom says:
“And we can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole Desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either, because we’ll take out a patent.”
“My goodness,” I says, “we’ll be as rich as Creosote, won’t we, Tom?”
“Yes – Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little hill for the treasures of the earth, and didn’t know he was walking over the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the driver.”
“Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?”
“Well, I don’t know yet. It’s got to be ciphered, and it ain’t the easiest job to do, either, because it’s over four million square miles of sand at ten cents a vial.”
Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook his head and says:
“Mars Tom, we can’t ‘ford all dem vials – a king couldn’t. We better not try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho’.”
Tom’s excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account of the vials, but it wasn’t. He set there thinking, and got bluer and bluer, and at last he says:
“Boys, it won’t work; we got to give it up.”
“Why, Tom?”
“On account of the duties.”
I couldn’t make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:
“What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can’t git around it, why can’t we just DO it? People often has to.”
But he says:
“Oh, it ain’t that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you strike a frontier – that’s the border of a country, you know – you find a custom-house there, and the gov’ment officers comes and rummages among your things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because it’s their duty to bust you if they can, and if you don’t pay the duty they’ll hog your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don’t deceive nobody, it’s just hogging, and that’s all it is. Now if we try to carry this sand home the way we’re pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git tired – just frontier after frontier – Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and so on, and they’ll all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we CAN’T go THAT road.”
“Why, Tom,” I says, “we can sail right over their old frontiers; how are THEY going to stop us?”
He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:
“Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?”
I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:
“Well, we’re shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we’ve come, there’s the New York custom-house, and that is worse than all of them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we’ve got.”
“Why?”
“Well, they can’t raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when they can’t raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per cent. on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it.”
“There ain’t no sense in that, Tom Sawyer.”
“Who said there WAS? What do you talk to me like that for, Huck Finn? You wait till I say a thing’s got sense in it before you go to accusing me of saying it.”
“All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry. Go on.”
Jim says:
“Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty onto everything we can’t raise in America, en don’t make no ‘stinction ‘twix’ anything?”
“Yes, that’s what they do.”
“Mars Tom, ain’t de blessin’ o’ de Lord de mos’ valuable thing dey is?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Don’t de preacher stan’ up in de pulpit en call it down on de people?”
“Yes.”
“Whah do it come from?”
“From heaven.”
“Yassir! you’s jes’ right, ‘deed you is, honey – it come from heaven, en dat’s a foreign country. NOW, den! do dey put a tax on dat blessin’?”
“No, they don’t.”
“Course dey don’t; en so it stan’ to reason dat you’s mistaken, Mars Tom. Dey wouldn’t put de tax on po’ truck like san’, dat everybody ain’t ‘bleeged to have, en leave it off’n de bes’ thing dey is, which nobody can’t git along widout.”
Tom Sawyer was stumped; he see Jim had got him where he couldn’t budge. He tried to wiggle out by saying they had FORGOT to put on that tax, but they’d be sure to remember about it, next session of Congress, and then they’d put it on, but that was a poor lame come-off, and he knowed it. He said there warn’t nothing foreign that warn’t taxed but just that one, and so they couldn’t be consistent without taxing it, and to be consistent was the first law of politics. So he stuck to it that they’d left it out unintentional and would be certain to do their best to fix it before they got caught and laughed at.
But I didn’t feel no more interest in such things, as long as we couldn’t git our sand through, and it made me low-spirited, and Jim the same. Tom he tried to cheer us up by saying he would think up another speculation for us that would be just as good as this one and better, but it didn’t do no good, we didn’t believe there was any as big as this. It was mighty hard; such a little while ago we was so rich, and could ‘a’ bought a country and started a kingdom and been celebrated and happy, and now we was so poor and ornery again, and had our sand left on our hands. The sand was looking so lovely before, just like gold and di’monds, and the feel of it was so soft and so silky and nice, but now I couldn’t bear the sight of it, it made me sick to look at it, and I knowed I wouldn’t ever feel comfortable again till we got shut of it, and I didn’t have it there no more to remind us of what we had been and what we had got degraded down to. The others was feeling the same way about it that I was. I knowed it, because they cheered up so, the minute I says le’s throw this truck overboard.
Well, it was going to be work, you know, and pretty solid work, too; so Tom he divided it up according to fairness and strength. He said me and him would clear out a fifth apiece of the sand, and Jim three-fifths. Jim he didn’t quite like that arrangement. He says:
“Course I’s de stronges’, en I’s willin’ to do a share accordin’, but by jings you’s kinder pilin’ it onto ole Jim, Mars Tom, hain’t you?”
“Well, I didn’t think so, Jim, but you try your hand at fixing it, and let’s see.”
So Jim reckoned it wouldn’t be no more than fair if me and Tom done a TENTH apiece. Tom he turned his back to git room and be private, and then he smole a smile that spread around and covered the whole Sahara to the westward, back to the Atlantic edge of it where we come from. Then he turned around again and said it was a good enough arrangement, and we was satisfied if Jim was. Jim said he was.
So then Tom measured off our two-tenths in the bow and left the rest for Jim, and it surprised Jim a good deal to see how much difference there was and what a raging lot of sand his share come to, and said he was powerful glad now that he had spoke up in time and got the first arrangement altered, for he said that even the way it was now, there was more sand than enjoyment in his end of the contract, he believed.
Then we laid into it. It was mighty hot work, and tough; so hot we had to move up into cooler weather or we couldn’t ‘a’ stood it. Me and Tom took turn about, and one worked while t’other rested, but there warn’t nobody to spell poor old Jim, and he made all that part of Africa damp, he sweated so. We couldn’t work good, we was so full of laugh, and Jim he kept fretting and wanting to know what tickled us so, and we had to keep making up things to account for it, and they was pretty poor inventions, but they done well enough, Jim didn’t see through them. At last when we got done we was ‘most dead, but not with work but with laughing. By and by Jim was ‘most dead, too, but: it was with work; then we took turns and spelled him, and he was as thankfull as he could be, and would set on the gunnel and swab the sweat, and heave and pant, and say how good we was to a poor old nigger, and he wouldn’t ever forgit us. He was always the gratefulest nigger I ever see, for any little thing you done for him. He was only nigger outside; inside he was as white as you be.
