While living with the Grangerfords, Huck is impressed by their manners and mode of living. Every member of the family has a Negro servant, including Huck. The only other aristocratic family is named Shepherdson and, one day while Huck and Buck are walking, Buck jumps behind a bush and shoots at young Harney Shepherdson. Huck is confused, and Buck explains that the two families are having a feud. Since Huck has never heard of a feud, Buck has to explain that it is a type of quarrel in which everyone on one side wants to kill everyone on the other side until “by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud.” This particular feud has been going on for thirty years and everyone has forgotten how it started.
One day when Huck is delivering a,-nessage for Miss Sophia Grangerford, his servant takes hi.., down to the river. There he discovers Jim in hiding. Jim has been collecting material and preparing the raft for the day when he and Huck can continue their journey.
With the knowledge that Miss Sophia has run off with Harney Shepherdson, the feud breaks out with more intensity. So many Grangerfords and Shepherdsons are killed that Huck is sorry that he ever came on shore. He escapes as quickly as possible, rejoins Jim, and they continue their journey down the river.
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Two or three days and nights slide by as they travel by night and hide by day. One morning about daybreak, Huck finds a canoe, crosses to the main shore, and paddles up a creek looking for berries. Suddenly he hears two men being pursued by dogs and other men are following the dogs. When the pursued men beg Huck to save them, he quickly tells them the best way to throw the dogs off their scent.
One man is seventy and bald the other is about thirty. They are not acquainted but both were run out of the town because of their efforts to defraud the citizens by cheating, quackery, and other fraudulent schemes. Once on the raft, the youngest claims to be the rightful Duke of Bridgewater. After Huck and Jim hear his sad story, they begin to treat him with respect. The older man then tells them that he is the lost Dauphin of France. Huck, however, is not deceived and knows that the two are nothing more than “humbugs and frauds.”
They question Huck about the presence of Jim on the raft and are temporarily satisfied when Huck assures them that a runaway slave would never run south. Huck then invents another fantastic story to protect both Jim and himself.
The two frauds soon appropriate both beds in the wigwam, leaving Jim and Huck out in the rain. By this time, even Jim doesn’t want any more kings and dukes to appear. The two frauds pool their resources and decide to rehearse a Shakespearian presentation of Romeo and Juliet, letting the seventy-year-old king play the part of Juliet. When the raft stops for provisions near a small town, the king wanders into a camp meeting where he pretends to be a reformed pirate in need of money to go back and reform the other pirates. By this ruse, he is able to collect eighty-seven dollars and seventy cents.
Meanwhile, the duke goes to a, printing office where he cheats the owner out of nine dollars and, at the same time, prints a handbill describing Jim as a runaway slave from forty miles below New Orleans. If anyone questions them, they will simply say that they are returning Jim for the reward.
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The king and the duke begin to rehearse for the Shakespearean production which they will present in some town along the river. When they arrive in a small Arkansas town, there is already a circus there. The duke distributes his advertisements of the show throughout the town.
While Huck is lounging around the town, a person named Boggs comes in from the country “for his little old monthly drunk.” Everybody laughs at him as he proclaims drunkenly that he is there to “kill old Colonel Sherburn.” While the townspeople are assuring Huck that Boggs is harmless, they are also sending for Boggs’ daughter to take care of him. However, before she arrives, Boggs continues to insult Colonel Sherburn, who appears with a gun and shoots Boggs down in cold blood just as the daughter arrives.
Led by a man named Buck Harkness, a mob gathers, gets drunk, and then goes to Colonel Sherburn’s house to lynch the murderer. The colonel calls them cowards and taunts them by saying that if any lynching is to be done, it will be done in the dark with a man, not half a man, as a leader. At the end of Colonel Sherburn’s speech, the crowd “broke all apart and went tearing off every which way.”
Huck, intent on seeing the circus, dives under the tent and marvels at the color and action of it all. Later, since only twelve people attend the Shakespearean performance, the duke and the king change to a performance where ladies and children are not admitted, thus assuring themselves of a good turnout.
The show is, of course, a fraud and a cheat, but those seeing it the first night do not admit being taken in and advise their neighbors to see the second performance. The third night, both audiences return, ready to tar and feather the king and the duke, but the two con men catch on to the audience’s intent and escape to the raft after having cheated the town out of four hundred and sixty-five dollars.
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