THE TREASURE-HILL

TOM said it happened like this.

A dervish was stumping it along through the

Desert, on foot, one blazing hot day, and he had come

a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and hungry,

and ornery and tired, and along about where we are

now he run across a camel-driver with a hundred

camels, and asked him for some a’ms. But the camel-driver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:

“Don’t you own these camels?”

“Yes, they’re mine.”

“Are you in debt?”

“Who — me? No.”

“Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain’t

in debt is rich — and not only rich, but very rich.

Ain’t it so?”

The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then

the dervish says:

“God has made you rich, and He has made me

poor. He has His reasons, and they are wise, blessed

be His name. But He has willed that His rich shall

help His poor, and you have turned away from me,

your brother, in my need, and He will remember this,

and you will lose by it.”

That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the

same he was born hoggish after money and didn’t like

to let go a cent; so he begun to whine and explain,

and said times was hard, and although he had took a

full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it,

he couldn’t git no return freight, and so he warn’t

making no great things out of his trip. So the dervish

starts along again, and says:

“All right, if you want to take the risk; but I

reckon you’ve made a mistake this time, and missed a

chance.”

Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what

kind of a chance he had missed, because maybe there

was money in it; so he run after the dervish, and

begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him

that at last the dervish gave in, and says:

“Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is

all the treasures of the earth, and I was looking around

for a man with a particular good kind heart and a

noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just

that man, I’ve got a kind of a salve I could put on

his eyes and he could see the treasures and get them

out.”

So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he

cried, and begged, and took on, and went down on his

knees, and said he was just that kind of a man, and

said he could fetch a thousand people that would say

he wasn’t ever described so exact before.

“Well, then,” says the dervish, “all right. If we

load the hundred camels, can I have half of them?”

The driver was so glad he couldn’t hardly hold in,

and says:

“Now you’re shouting.”

So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish

got out his box and rubbed the salve on the driver’s

right eye, and the hill opened and he went in, and

there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and

jewels sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.

So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded

every camel till he couldn’t carry no more; then they

said good-bye, and each of them started off with his

fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running

and overtook the dervish and says:

“You ain’t in society, you know, and you don’t

really need all you’ve got. Won’t you be good, and

let me have ten of your camels?”

“Well,” the dervish says, “I don’t know but what

you say is reasonable enough.”

So he done it, and they separated and the dervish

started off again with his forty. But pretty soon here

comes the camel-driver bawling after him again, and

whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of

him, saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough

to see a dervish through, because they live very simple,

you know, and don’t keep house, but board around

and give their note.

But that warn’t the end yet. That ornery hound

kept coming and coming till he had begged back all

the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he was

satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn’t

ever forgit the dervish as long as he lived, and nobody

hadn’t been so good to him before, and liberal. So

they shook hands good-bye, and separated and started

off again.

But do you know, it warn’t ten minutes till the

camel-driver was unsatisfied again — he was the low-downest reptyle in seven counties — and he come a-running again. And this time the thing he wanted was

to get the dervish to rub some of the salve on his other

eye.

“Why?” said the dervish.

“Oh, you know,” says the driver.

“Know what?”

“Well, you can’t fool me,” says the driver.

“You’re trying to keep back something from me,

you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that

if I had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot

more things that’s valuable. Come — please put it on.”

The dervish says:

“I wasn’t keeping anything back from you. I

don’t mind telling you what would happen if I put it

on. You’d never see again. You’d be stone-blind the

rest of your days.”

But do you know that beat wouldn’t believe him.

No, he begged and begged, and whined and cried, till

at last the dervish opened his box and told him to put

it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure

enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.

Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him

and made fun of him; and says:

“Good-bye — a man that’s blind hain’t got no use

for jewelry.”

And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and

left that man to wander around poor and miserable and

friendless the rest of his days in the Desert.

Jim said he’d bet it was a lesson to him.

“Yes,” Tom says, “and like a considerable many

lessons a body gets. They ain’t no account, because

the thing don’t ever happen the same way again — and

can’t. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly

and crippled his back for life, everybody said it would

be a lesson to him. What kind of a lesson? How

was he going to use it? He couldn’t climb chimblies

no more, and he hadn’t no more backs to break.”

“All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as

learnin’ by expe’ence. De Good Book say de burnt

chile shun de fire.”

“Well, I ain’t denying that a thing’s a lesson if it’s

a thing that can happen twice just the same way.

There’s lots of such things, and THEY educate a person,

that’s what Uncle Abner always said; but there’s forty

MILLION lots of the other kind — the kind that don’t

happen the same way twice — and they ain’t no real

use, they ain’t no more instructive than the small-pox.

When you’ve got it, it ain’t no good to find out you

ought to been vaccinated, and it ain’t no good to git

vaccinated afterward, because the small-pox don’t

come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner

said that the person that had took a bull by the tail

once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a

person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to

carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that

was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever

going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you,

Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people that’s all

the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that

happens, no matter whether —”

But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed,

because you know a person always feels bad when he

is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other person

is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that

way. Of course he oughtn’t to go to sleep, because

it’s shabby; but the finer a person talks the certainer

it is to make you sleep, and so when you come to look

at it it ain’t nobody’s fault in particular; both of

them’s to blame.

Jim begun to snore — soft and blubbery at first,

then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half a

dozen horrible ones like the last water sucking down

the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more

power to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in,

the way a cow does that is choking to death; and

when the person has got to that point he is at his level

best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block

with a dipperful of loddanum in him, but can’t wake

himself up although all that awful noise of his’n ain’t

but three inches from his own ears. And that is the

curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you

rake a match to light the candle, and that little bit of a

noise will fetch him. I wish I knowed what was the

reason of that, but there don’t seem to be no way to

find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole

Desert, and yanking the animals out, for miles and

miles around, to see what in the nation was going on

up there; there warn’t nobody nor nothing that was as

close to the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only

cretur that wasn’t disturbed by it. We yelled at him

and whooped at him, it never done no good; but the

first time there come a little wee noise that wasn’t of a

usual kind it woke him up. No, sir, I’ve thought it

all over, and so has Tom, and there ain’t no way to

find out why a snorer can’t hear himself snore.

Jim said he hadn’t been asleep; he just shut his eyes

so he could listen better.

Tom said nobody warn’t accusing him.

That made him look like he wished he hadn’t said

anything. And he wanted to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the camel-driver, just the way a person does when he has got

catched in something and wants to take it out of somebody else. He let into the camel-driver the hardest he

knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and he

praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had

to agree with him there, too. But Tom says:

“I ain’t so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful

liberal and good and unselfish, but I don’t quite see it.

He didn’t hunt up another poor dervish, did he? No,

he didn’t. If he was so unselfish, why didn’t he go in

there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go

along and be satisfied? No, sir, the person he was

hunting for was a man with a hundred camels. He

wanted to get away with all the treasure he could.”

“Why, Mars Tom, he was willin’ to divide, fair and

square; he only struck for fifty camels.”

“Because he knowed how he was going to get all of

them by and by.”

“Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make

him bline.”

“Yes, because he knowed the man’s character. It

was just the kind of a man he was hunting for — a

man that never believes in anybody’s word or anybody’s honorableness, because he ain’t got none of his

own. I reckon there’s lots of people like that dervish.

They swindle, right and left, but they always make the

other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep inside

of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain’t no

way to git hold of them. THEY don’t put the salve on

— oh, no, that would be sin; but they know how to

fool YOU into putting it on, then it’s you that blinds

yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel-driver

was just a pair — a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a

dull, coarse, ignorant one, but both of them rascals,

just the same.”

“Mars Tom, does you reckon dey’s any o’ dat kind

o’ salve in de worl’ now?”

“Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they’ve

got it in New York, and they put it on country people’s

eyes and show them all the railroads in the world, and

they go in and git them, and then when they rub the

salve on the other eye the other man bids them good-bye and goes off with their railroads. Here’s the

treasure-hill now. Lower away!”

We landed, but it warn’t as interesting as I thought

it was going to be, because we couldn’t find the place

where they went in to git the treasure. Still, it was

plenty interesting enough, just to see the mere hill

itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim

said he wou’dn’t ‘a’ missed it for three dollars, and I

felt the same way.

And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any was

the way Tom could come into a strange big country

like this and go straight and find a little hump like that

and tell it in a minute from a million other humps that

was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but

only his own learning and his own natural smartness.

We talked and talked it over together, but couldn’t

make out how he done it. He had the best head on

him I ever see; and all he lacked was age, to make a

name for himself equal to Captain Kidd or George

Washington. I bet you it would ‘a’ crowded either of

THEM to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it warn’t

nothing to Tom Sawyer; he went across Sahara and

put his finger on it as easy as you could pick a nigger

out of a bunch of angels.

We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped

up a raft of salt around the edges, and loaded up the

lion’s skin and the tiger’s so as they would keep till Jim

could tan them.

CHAPTER XI.