“Kin any of you gentlemen tell me wher’ Mr. 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 all 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 carpetbag and bust out a-crying. If they warn’t the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I struck.