Peter Wilks lives?" they give
a glance at one another, and nodded their heads, as much as to say, "What
d' I tell you?" Then one of them says, kind of soft and gentle:
"I'm sorry sir, but the best we can do is to tell you where he DID live
yesterday evening."
Sudden as winking the ornery old cretur went an to smash, and fell up
against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried down his
back, and says:
"Alas, alas, our poor brother--gone, and we never got to see him; oh,
it's too, too hard!"
Then he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot of idiotic signs to the
duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn't drop a carpet-bag and bust out
a-crying. If they warn't the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I
struck.
Well, the men gathered around and sympathized with them, and said all
sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpet-bags up the hill
for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all about
his brother's last moments, and the king he told it all over again on his
hands to the duke, and both of them took on about that dead tanner like
they'd lost the twelve disciples. Well, if ever I struck anything like
it, I'm a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE news was all over town in two minutes, and you could see the people
tearing down on the run from every which way, some of them putting on
their coats as they come.
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