a-coming, and when the king says: “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 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.  Pretty soon we was in the middle of a crowd, and the noise of the tramping was like a soldier march.  The windows and dooryards was full; and every minute somebody would say, over a fence: “Is it _them_?” And somebody trotting along with the gang would answer back and say: “You bet it is.” When we got to the house the street in front of it was packed, and the three girls was standing in the door.  Mary Jane _was_ red-headed, but that don't make no difference, she was most