Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter 27 Summary & Analysis

Huck tries to take the money outside. He makes it as far as the parlor, where Peter Wilks’s corpse lies in its coffin and sleeping men sit around, before he hears footsteps coming toward him. Huck quickly hides the money in the open coffin and then hides himself behind a door. The footsteps are those of Mary Jane, who comes into the parlor, stands before her uncle’s coffin, and quietly mourns.

Huck creeps back up to his room, and night turns to day. In the afternoon, Peter Wilks’s funeral is held. Mourners walk past Wilks’s coffin, looking down, some crying. Huck notices how often people blow their noses, how soft and gliding and stealthy the undertaker is, and he concludes that Peter Wilks “was the only one that had a good thing.” As the preacher is speaking, a dog begins to bark. The undertaker goes out reassuringly, hits the dog till it’s silent, and comes back in. The townspeople appreciate the undertaker’s actions; he’s a very popular man in town.

After the king “got off some of his usual rubbage” by giving another speech, the undertaker seals the coffin. Huck can’t be sure whether the bag of gold is still in there or if somebody took it out, and he’s worried that Mary Jane and her sisters might never get it back. The king says he and the duke must be leaving for England, and tells the Wilks girls that they’re welcome to come. The two con men, meanwhile, are in the process of selling all of the Wilks estate, house and slaves and all—they plan to keep the money from the sale, then leave the unlucky buyer to discover once they are gone that the purchase is null and void because it was sold by men who had no right to sell it. Huck’s heart aches to see the girls get fooled like this, but can’t think of a way to safely expose the duke and king.

In selling the Wilks’s family of slaves, the king separates a mother from her children. The Wilks girls are distraught at this, and, if Huck hadn’t known that “the sale was of no account” and that the family of slaves would soon be reunited, he figures he would have had to tell on the duke and king.

Later, the duke and king also question Huck about whether he’s been in their room. Huck lies and says that he hasn’t, but that he did see some black slaves go in there several times. The duke and king are upset to learn this, thinking the slaves stole the bag of money hidden in the mattress, but the two also know they can’t do anything because the slaves have already been sold. The duke and king yell at each other and, as they walk off, Huck is glad to have made it seem like the slaves stole the money without bringing harm to them.