"
"My goodness," I says, "we'll be as rich as Creosote, won't we, Tom?"
"Yes--Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little
hill for the treasures of the earth, and didn't know he was walking over
the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the
driver."
"Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?"
"Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the
easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles of
sand at ten cents a vial."
Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook
his head and says:
"Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials--a king couldn't. We better not
try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho'."
Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account of
the vials, but it wasn't. He set there thinking, and got bluer and bluer,
and at last he says:
"Boys, it won't work; we got to give it up."
"Why, Tom?"
"On account of the duties."
I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:
"What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can't git around it, why can't we
just DO it? People often has to."
But he says:
"Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you
strike a frontier--that's the border of a country, you know--you find a
custom-house there, and the gov'ment officers comes and rummages among
your things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because it's
their duty to bust you if they can, and if you don't pay the duty they'll
hog your sand.
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