t. Well, at last he
couldn't stand it any longer. He couldn't sleep nights, he couldn't eat,
he was thinned down to a shadder, yet he da'sn't ask anybody's advice,
for the very person he asked for advice might go back on him and let the
gov'ment know about the letter. He had the letter buried under the floor,
but that did no good; if he happened to see a person standing over the
place it'd give him the cold shivers, and loaded him up with suspicions,
and he would sit up that night till the town was still and dark, and then
he would sneak there and get it out and bury it in another place. Of
course, people got to avoiding him and shaking their heads and
whispering, because, the way he was looking and acting, they judged he
had killed somebody or done something terrible, they didn't know what,
and if he had been a stranger they would've lynched him.

Well, as I was saying, it got so he couldn't stand it any longer; so he
made up his mind to pull out for Washington, and just go to the President
of the United States and make a clean breast of the whole thing, not
keeping back an atom, and then fetch the letter out and lay it before the
whole gov'ment, and say, "Now, there she is--do with me what you're a
mind to; though as heaven is my judge I am an innocent man and not
deserving of the full penalties of the law and leaving behind me a family
that must starve and yet hadn't had a thing to do with it, which is the
whole truth and I can swear to it."

So he did it. He had a little wee bit of steamboating, and some
stage-coaching, but all the rest of the way was horseback, and it took
him three weeks to get to Washington. He saw lots of land and lots of
villages and four cities. He was gone 'most eight weeks, and there never
was such a proud man in the village as he when he got back. His travels
made him the greatest man in all that region, and the most talked about;
and people come from as much as thirty miles back in the country, and
from over in the Illinois bottoms, too, just to look at him--and there
they'd stand and gawk, and he'd gabble. You never see anything like it.

Well, there wasn't any way now to settle which was the greatest traveler;
some said it was Nat, some said it was Tom. Everybody allowed that Nat
had seen the most longitude, but they had to give in that whatever Tom
was short in longitude he had made up in latitude and climate. It was
about a stand-off; so both of them had to whoop up their dangerous
a