Huckleberry Fiend Read Online Free

bother.”
    “What! Why wouldn’t they?”
    She put up her palms in simultaneous frustration and puzzlement. “I guess they just don’t want to know. A dealer once said to me, ‘Put it this way, Miss McCormick— if you found a nugget that weighed a ton, would you want to know it was fool’s gold?’ ”
    “He must have read Roughing It .”
    “That’s mostly about silver.” She spoke automatically, her heart not really in it. I could see she was feeling downcast about the authentication problem.
    She pushed over two copies of letters from Mark Twain— the same words, but different dates. One was written on letterhead from the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. “Look at the date,” said Linda.
    “Eighteen eighty-three.”
    “He left San Francisco in 1866, returned briefly in ’68, and never went back after that.”
    “Maybe he had some leftover stationery.”
    She shook her head. “Look at the blue lines.”
    She had drawn diagonal lines from the left-hand margin to the right-hand one, a few inches down the page. “Compare the two documents,” she said, “and note that the lines cross the same letter of the same word in each one. The one dated 1875 is genuine. It’s possible Clemens copied it later on Bohemian Club stationery, but not with every letter lined up exactly as it was before. That’s far too precise to be real. This one’s a forgery. But it’s one of the few times a collector’s bothered to check. Unfortunately, he did it as an afterthought.”
    “So he’s out of luck.”
    “Not necessarily. If he wanted to, he could probably unload it for what he paid or more.”
    “It’s that bad, is it?”
    She shrugged. “People are stupid.”
    “What kind of paper did Mark Twain write on?”
    “Half-sheets, usually. Why don’t I send you a sample of the real thing along with the facsimile? I know—‘1002’.”
    “What’s that?”
    She smiled a scholarly and secretive smile. “Probably the worst story Clemens ever wrote. But he finished it about the time he finished Huck, so the paper and handwriting ought to be similar.”
    I left Linda with reluctance, but that’s the way things are done at the Bancroft Library, the noncirculating collection of which the Mark Twain Papers are a part. You may examine documents or books only in the reading room, and before you go in, you must check your belongings in a locker, bringing in only a pencil or typewriter. Absolutely no pens. I liked that about the place— it made me feel as if the collection were being well taken care of. I also liked the idea that anyone over eighteen could use the library, not only Cal students and graduates. Anyone off the street could walk in and examine a rare, important manuscript. But of course hardly anyone wanted to.
    I did, though. It surprised me how much I looked forward to holding papers that this time I knew, without a doubt, Mark Twain had written with his own hand.
    When the facsimile and the story finally came down, I was so excited I couldn’t decide which to look at first. I settled, finally, on the story, and almost fell on the floor when I saw it. The cream-colored paper was the same thickness, size, and color as that of the manuscript I had at home. The clear, expansive handwriting was unmistakable.
    Just to be sure, I pulled out the one-page Xerox I’d brought. Booker’s manuscript couldn’t— just couldn’t— be other than the real thing. There was simply no way. I knew instantly why collectors didn’t bother to have documents authenticated. You just knew .
    I turned to the facsimile, placing my Xerox over the first page— exactly the same size! I started to read: “Well, away in the night, & stormy, & all so mysterious-like…” That didn’t sound right. It should have picked up after Colonel Sherburn shot old Boggs. This seemed to have to do with finding a wrecked steamboat. But then, out of some dusty corner of memory, I remembered the name of the steamboat— Walter Scott. It was the