"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

were worth; but they were pretty faded, and didn't go for much, and it was
pitiful to see. And then Tom would take another innings, and then the old
man again-and so on, and so on, for an hour and more, each trying to beat
out the other.
You see, Parsons' travels happened like this: When he first got to be
postmaster and was green in the business, there come a letter for somebody
he didn't know, and there wasn't any such person in the village. Well, he
didn't know what to do, nor how to act, and there the letter stayed and
stayed, week in and week out, till the bare sight of it gave him a
conniption. The postage wasn't paid on it, and that was another thing to
worry about. There wasn't any way to collect that ten cents, and he
reckon'd the gov'ment would hold him responsible for it and maybe turn him
out besides, when they found he hadn't collected it. 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 adventures, and try to get ahead THAT way. That bullet-wound in
Tom's leg was a tough thing for Nat Parsons to buck against, but he bucked