“Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run in the daytime if we want to. I’ll think the thing over⁠—I’ll invent a plan that’ll fix it. We’ll let it alone for today, because of course we don’t want to go by that town yonder in daylight⁠—it mightn’t be healthy.”

Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was squirting around low down in the sky, and the leaves was beginning to shiver⁠—it was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see what the beds was like. My bed was a straw tick better than Jim’s, which was a corn-shuck tick; there’s always cobs around about in a shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and when you roll over the dry shucks sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it makes such a rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he would take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn’t. He says:

“I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a sejested to you that a corn-shuck bed warn’t just fitten for me to sleep on. Your Grace’ll take the shuck bed yourself.”