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uncles at all -- they're a couples of frauds -- regular dead-beats. There, now we're

over the worst of it -- you can stand the rest middling easy."

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water

now, so I went right along, her eyes a blazing higher and higher all the time,

and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going

up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself onto'the king's

breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times and then

up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says:

"The brute! Come -- don't waste a minute --

not a second -- we'll have them tarred and

feathered, and flung in the river!" ssssssssss

Says I: ssssssssss

"Cert'nly. But do you mean, before you go

to Mr. Lothrop's, or" ssssssssss

"Oh," she says, "what am I thinking about!"

she says, and set right down again. "Don't mind

what I said -- please don't -- you won't, now, will

you?" Laying her silky hand on mind in that

kind of a way that I said I would die first. "I

never thought, I was so stirred up," she says;

"now go on, and I won't do so any more. You tell

me what to do, and whatever you say, I'll do it."

"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two

frauds, and I'm fixed so I got to travel with them

a while longer, whether I want to or not -- I

druther not tell you why -- and if you was to blow

on them this town would get me out of their claws, and I'd be all right, but

there'd be another person that you don't know about who'd be in big trouble. Well,

we got to save him, hain't we? Of course. Well, then, we won't blow on them."

Saying them words put a good idea in my head. I see how maybe I could

get me and Jim rid of the frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave. But

I didn't want to run the raft in day-time, without anybody aboard to answer

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