Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Chapter Nineteen Summary

So they’re back in the raft.
Huck spends some time describing the beautiful surroundings on the river. It’s quite lovely, should you feel inclined to READ YOUR BOOK.
Also, he and Jim tend to be naked. A lot. Just go with it – it’s part of the whole "being one with nature" thing.
One morning, just as it’s getting light, Huck finds a canoe and paddles to shore to look for some berries.
Just then, two men come tearing through the bush, running towards the water. He thinks they’re after him or Jim, but it turns out they’re on the lam themselves.
Of course Huck, having a soft spot for criminals, helps them hide and takes them aboard the raft with Jim.
OK, so one of these guys is old, around seventy, and pretty ratty-looking. The other is around thirty, and equally ratty.
We soon see that these guys don’t even know each other; they’re just two criminals that met while running away from the law.
The younger man reveals that he was selling a kind of toothpaste that accidentally-kinda-sorta took the enamel off people’s teeth.
The older man got in similar trouble for running a scam himself. He ran a "temperance revival meeting" (which is much like Alcoholics Anonymous, except without the anonymity and it’s actually more a scam than helpful in any way) until it got out that he was quite the drinker himself. So that was that.
The two men decide that working together would likely be more lucrative than scamming each other. It’s a match made in con-artist heaven.
Then the young man starts crying and using ridiculous words like "Alas." He reveals that he’s actually royalty.
A duke, in fact.
Actually, he’s the Duke of Bridgewater.
Of course, this means that Huck and Jim have to call him "Your Lordship" and serve him and all that jazz.
The older man raises his eyebrows, calls the duke "Bilgewater," which is great, and declares that he himself is royalty, too. What a coincidence! The funny thing is, this guy is actually a king (Louis XVII, of France, he says), which in the rock-paper-scissor world of fake-titles means he crushes the hell out of the duke.
Jim gets right to worshipping him, too.
It doesn’t take Huck too long to realize that these guys are total liars. But he says the easiest way to get along in life is to not cause too many quarrels. If they want to be called "Your majesty," he says, it’s no skin off his nose.
This, he says, is something he learned from his Pap; with people like this, you just need to let them have their own way. So he doesn’t tell Jim they’re lying.

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Eighteen