Just before daybreak, the raft nears a small town, and the Duke insists on moving farther downriver before tying up and going ashore. When Huck says that he and James will wait with the raft, the Duke and the King make clear that they do not trust them and force both of them to come along. James briefly considers escaping with Huck, but the shallow water would make pursuit easy, so James decides that a failed attempt would only make their situation worse.

James leads the way through brush to a road and carefully notes the route back to the raft without marking it. At the road, James sees a sycamore limb scarred by ropes, which reminds James of Young George and fills James with dread. In the nearly empty town, an old man tells the group that everyone has gone to a revival. The King calls James his slave and even hints that James might be for sale, which angers Huck, but Huck is silenced. On the walk to the meeting, Huck also questions why the supposed French king has no French accent, and the King blusters his way around the challenge.

At the hilltop revival, James and Huck watch a preacher stage a public healing while assistants collect money from a large crowd. James and Huck both recognize the performance as fraud. The Duke sees an opportunity and steps forward, pretending to be a reformed pirate who now works as a missionary. As the crowd listens, James notices with growing alarm that no Black people are present, and the earlier sight of the scarred tree makes the place feel especially dangerous.

The Duke then uses James as part of the act, falsely presenting James as a savage from Borneo whom Christianity has civilized. James is summoned onstage and renamed on the spot, while Huck is ordered to pass a bag through the crowd and collect money. To extend the con, the Duke asks the King to perform Shakespeare, but the King badly mixes speeches, confuses the audience, and provokes questions from the preacher and the crowd. The Duke tries to recover by inventing more absurd pirate stories, but the performance starts to crack.

The scam collapses when a broad-shouldered man says James does not look as though James is from Borneo, and a woman notices that the Duke has given James different names. The King makes the lies worse by claiming people in Borneo customarily have several names. That contradiction turns suspicion into outrage. The crowd shouts that the Duke and King are liars and charlatans, and some people begin calling for a hanging, leaving James and Huck trapped in immediate danger because of the con men’s greed.