Huckleberry Finished by Livia J. Washburn Read Free Book Online

the stairs to the second deck. We went into the salon and found places to sit at the bar and at the tables, and there were comfortable chairs and divans scattered around the sumptuously furnished room.
    I didn’t see Eddie or Louise Kramer anywhere in the salon, but that didn’t surprise me, even though I was a little disappointed. I’d been hoping that Louise would feel better and would want to take in the show.
    A few minutes later, the double doors from the deck opened, and Mark Twain ambled in, cigar in hand. He went to the bar, rested an elbow on it, and looked around the room at the passengers, who had quieted down as he made his way across the salon. Once everyone was quiet, he said, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”
    That got a nice laugh. Mark acknowledged it with a wave of the unlit cigar. “I want to welcome all of you to the Southern Belle. As some of you may be aware, I worked on riverboats much like this one, back in my early days. I was an apprentice pilot to Captain Horace Bixby, whose task it was to teach me the river. But the face of the water itself, in time, became a wonderful book…a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
    I guessed that most of that must have been a passage from Life on the Mississippi that Mark Lansing had memorized. He continued talking in Twain’s words about the river, about how the slightest ripple might indicate a snag under the water that could tear the bottom right out of a riverboat. Despite its peaceful, placid appearance, the river hid many dangers under its slow-moving surface, and a good pilot had to be able to recognize all of them instinctively.
    Mark was good; I had to give him that. He spoke Twain’s words with precision and conviction. After a while, listening to him was like being back there roughly a hundred and fifty years earlier, when the country was still young and brawling and vibrant.
    Gradually the focus shifted from the river to young Sam Clemens’s boyhood in Hannibal. I didn’t know which pieces of writing the passages came from—probably more than one—but Mark wove them together into a narrative that was, well, rollicking. It was easy to see how young Sam’s experiences in Hannibal had become the stuff of fiction in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Mark kept the audience alternating between rapt attention and uproarious laughter. He never broke character and was never less than convincing in his portrayal.
    Most of the performance had to do with Hannibal and the Mississippi, but to wrap it up Mark performed some material about Twain’s days as a newspaper correspondent in the West, then talked about politics for a while. The jabs at Congress and the president were as timely as when Twain wrote them, and the passengers in the salon seemed to enjoy them a lot. When Mark waved his cigar in the air and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” they gave him a standing ovation.
    After the performance people crowded around to talk to him. Some of them even wanted an autograph, which Mark provided even though he looked a little uncomfortable doing so. I thought he did, anyway. He stayed in character while chatting with the passengers. I waited until they left him alone before I slipped up beside him.
    â€œOh, Mr. Twain, that was just amazin’,” I said in a breathless voice. “You’re my favorite writer in the whole wide world.”
    Mark kept smiling under the bushy mustache, but he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life.”
    â€œYou didn’t have anything to be scared about. You were great!”
    â€œYou really think