Plot Summary
Chapter 26 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place entirely at the Wilks household, where the king and duke continue their impersonation of the dead Peter Wilks's brothers. Mary Jane assigns rooms to the frauds: Uncle Harvey gets her own room, Uncle William gets the spare room, and Huck is sent to a small cubby in the garret. That evening, a lavish supper is held, and Huck waits on the king and duke while the household's enslaved people serve the rest of the guests. Mary Jane performs the customary self-deprecation about her cooking, and the guests respond with effusive compliments in what Huck recognizes as empty social ritual.
Huck and Joanna
After supper, Huck eats in the kitchen with Joanna, the youngest Wilks sister whom he privately calls "the hare-lip." She interrogates him about life in England, and Huck spins increasingly desperate lies — claiming that King William IV attends their church regularly, that Sheffield has sea baths delivered in barrels, and that seventeen preachers serve a single congregation. Each time Joanna catches an inconsistency, Huck feigns choking on a chicken bone to buy thinking time. Joanna finally demands he swear on a book, which turns out to be a dictionary rather than a Bible. She remains only partly convinced, but when Mary Jane and Susan overhear the exchange, they scold Joanna for treating a guest unkindly and compel her to apologize. The sisters' genuine decency strikes Huck's conscience powerfully, and he resolves: "My mind's made up; I'll hive that money for them or bust."
The King and Duke's Plans
Huck sneaks upstairs to search for the stolen money. Unable to find it in the duke's room, he enters the king's room and hides behind a calico curtain among Mary Jane's dresses when the two con men return unexpectedly. Huck overhears a critical debate: the duke wants to flee immediately with the bag of gold, but the king insists on staying to sell the Wilks property as well, arguing that the orphans can "easy earn a livin'" and that the eventual buyers, not the sisters, will be the real victims. The king's greed wins out over the duke's caution, and they dismiss the threat posed by the suspicious local doctor by noting that they have "all the fools in town" on their side.
Huck Steals the Money
Before leaving, the duke raises a practical concern about the money's hiding place. The king retrieves the bag of gold from under the curtain — just feet from where Huck stands motionless — and shoves it through a rip in the straw tick beneath the feather bed, reasoning that the enslaved servants only turn the straw tick twice a year. Once the frauds go back downstairs, Huck immediately pulls the money from the mattress, carries it to his cubby, and resolves to hide it somewhere outside the house before they can discover the theft. He lies awake in his clothes, waiting for the house to fall silent so he can slip away with the gold.