 1 Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted. Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished. Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot, by order of the author, per G. G. Chief of Ordinance. Explanatory In this book a number of dialects are used to it the Missouri Negro dialect, the extremist form of the backwards southwestern dialect, the ordinary Pike County dialect, and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork, but painstakingly and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. The author. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Seen, the Mississippi Valley, Time, forty to fifty years ago. Chapter One. Civilizing Huck. Miss Watson. Tom Sawyer waits. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly, Tom's Aunt Polly she is, and Mary and the widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before. Now the way that the book winds up is this. Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars a piece, all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us the dollar a day apiece all the year round, more than a body could tell what to do with. The widow Douglas she took me for her son, and loud she would civilize me. But it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal, regular, and decent the widow was in all her ways, and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar hogs head again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back. The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn't do nothing but sweat and sweat and feel all cramped up. Well, and the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and he had to come to time. When you got to the table, you couldn't go right to eatin', but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals. Though there weren't really anything to matter with him, that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different, things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around and the things go better. After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and Bullrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him, but by and by she let out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time. So then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people. Pretty soon I wanted to smoke and asked the widow to let me, but she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is, just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her and no use to anybody being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. She took snuff, too. Of course, that was all right, because she'd done it herself. Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid with goggles on, had just come to live with her and took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up. I couldn't stood it much longer. Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, Don't put your feet up there, Huckleberry. And don't scrunch up like that, Huckleberry, set up straight. And pretty soon she would say, Don't gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry. Why don't you try to behave? Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. Well, she got mad then. But I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewhere's. All I wanted was a change. I want a particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said. Said she wouldn't say it for the whole world. She was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble and wouldn't do no good. Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go round all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together. Miss Watson, she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed. I went up to my room with a piece of candle and put it on the table. Then I sat down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but there weren't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful. And I heard an owl way off, hoo-hooing about somebody that was dead, and a whipper-will and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die. And the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then a way out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company. Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle, and before I could budge it was all shriveled up. I didn't need anybody to tell me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off of me. I got up and turned around in my tracks three times and crossed my breast every time, and then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away. But I had no confidence. You do that when you've lost a horseshoe that you found instead of nailing it up over the door, but I hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you'd killed a spider. I sent down again, a shaking all over, and got out my pipe for a smoke, for the house was all as still as death now, and so the widow wouldn't know. Well, after a long time I heard the clock away off in the town go, boom, boom, boom, twelve licks, and all still again, stiller than ever. Pretty soon I heard a twig snap down in the dark amongst the trees. Something was stirring. I sat still and listened. Directly I could just barely hear a meow down there. That was good. It was as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and scrambled out the window onto the shed. Then I slipped down to the ground and crawled in among the trees, and sure enough there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me. End of chapter one. This is chapter two of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, chapter two. The boys escaped Jim. Tom Sawyer's gang. Deep-laid plans. We went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees, back towards the end of the widow's garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen, I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrunched down and laid still. Ms. Watson's big nigger named Jim was sitting in the kitchen door. We could see him pretty clear because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says, Who da? He listened some more. Then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us. Could have touched him nearly. Well, likely it was minutes and minutes that there weren't a sound, and we all there so close together. There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I didn't scratch it. And then my ear began to itch, next to my back, right between my shoulders. Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch. Well, I've noticed that thing plenty time since. If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy, if you're anywhere is where it won't do for you to scratch, why, you will itch all over and upwards of a thousand places. And pretty soon Jim says, Say, who is you? Why are you? Dog, my cats, if I didn't hear something. Well, I know what I was going to do. I was going to sit down here and listen till I hear it again. So he sits down on the ground betwixt me and Tom. He leaned his back up against a tree and stretched his legs out till one of the most touched one of mine. My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come into my eyes, but I doesn't scratch. Then it began to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching underneath. I didn't know how I was going to sit still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes, but it seemed a sight longer than that. I was itching in eleven different places now. I reckoned I couldn't stand it more than a minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try. Just then Jim began to breathe heavy. Next he began to snore. And then I was pretty soon comfortable again. Tom, he made a sign to me, kind of a little noise with his mouth, and we went creeping away on our hands and knees. When we was ten foot off, Tom whispered to me and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun. But I said no. He might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I weren't in. Then Tom said he hadn't got candles enough and he would slip in the kitchen and get some more. I didn't want him to try. I said Jim might wake up and come. But Tom wanted to rescue it. So we slid in there and got three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for pay. Then we got out and I was in a sweat to get away. But nothing would do Tom, but he must crawl to where Jim was on his hands and knees and play something on him. I waited, and it seemed a good while. Everything was so still and lonesome. As soon as Tom was back, we cut along the path, around the garden fence, and by and by fetched up on the steep top of the hill on the other side of the house. Tom said he slipped Jim's hat off his head and hung it on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn't wake. Afterwards Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a trance and rode him all over the state, and then set him under the trees again, and hung his hat on a limb to show who'd done it. And next time Jim told it, he said they rode him down to New Orleans, and after that, every time he told it, he spread it more and more, till by and by, he said they rode him all over the world, and tired him most to death, and his back was all over Saddle Boyle's. Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other niggers. Niggers would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any nigger in that country. Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Niggers is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire, but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, What do you know about witches? And that nigger was corked up and had to take a backseat. Jim always kept that five-centre piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it, and fetch witches whenever he wanted to, just by saying something to it. But he never told what it was he said to it. Niggers would come from all around there and give Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that five-centre piece. But they wouldn't touch it, because the devil had had his hands on it. Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches. Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hilltop, we looked away down into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick folks, maybe. And the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine. And down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and awful still and grand. We went down the hill and found Joe Harper and Ben Rogers, and two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard. So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two miles and a half to the big scar on the hillside and went ashore. We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon, ducked under a wall where you wouldn't have noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped. Tom says, Now, we'll start this band of robbers, and call it Tom Sawyer's gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood. Everybody was willing. So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets. And if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn't eat, and he mustn't sleep till he had killed him and hacked across in their breasts, which was the sign of the band. And nobody that didn't belong to the band could use that mark, and if he did, he must be sued, and if he'd done it again, he must be killed. And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up, and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot forever. Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said some of it, but the rest was out of pirate books and robber books, and every gang that was high-toned had it. Some thought it would be good to kill the families of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in. Then Ben Rogers says, Here's Huck Finn. He ain't got no family. What you gonna do about him? Well, ain't he got a father, says Tom Sawyer. Yes, he's got a father, but you can't never find him these days. He used to lay drunk with the hogs and the tanyard, but he ain't been seen in these parts for a year or more. They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn't be fair and square for the others. Well, nobody could think of anything to do. Everybody was stumped and sat still. I was most ready to cry. But all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson. They could kill her. Everybody said, Oh, she'll do. That's all right. Huck can come in. Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper. Now, says Ben Rogers, what's the line of business of this gang? Nothing. Only robbery and murder, Tom said. But who are we going to rob? Houses, or cattle, or stuff. Stealing cattle and such things ain't robbery. It's burglary, says Tom Sawyer. We ain't burglars. That ain't no sort of style. We are highwaymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road with masks on and kill the people and take their watches and money. Must we always kill the people? Oh, certainly. It's best. Some authorities think different, but mostly it's considered best to kill them, except some that you bring to the cave here and keep them till they're ransomed. Ransomed? What's that? I don't know. But that's what they do. I've seen it in books, and so of course that's what we've got to do. But how can we do it if we don't know what it is? Why, blame it all, we've got to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what's in the books and get things all muddled up? Oh, that's all very fine to say, Tom Sawyer, but how in the nation are these fellows going to be ransomed if we don't know how to do it to them? That's the thing I want to get at. Now, what do you reckon it is? Well, I don't know. But perhaps if we keep them till they're ransomed, it means that we keep them till they're dead. Now, that's something like that, Alanser. Why couldn't you said that before? We'll keep them till they're ransomed to death, and a bothersome lot they'll be, too, eating up everything and always trying to get loose. How you talk, Ben Rogers! How can they get loose when there's a guard over them ready to shoot them down if they move a peg? A guard! Well, that is good! So somebody's got to set up all night and never get any sleep just so as to watch them. I think that's foolishness. Why can't a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they get here? Because it ain't in the books, so that's why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular or don't you? That's the idea. Don't you reckon that the people that made the books knows what's the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn them anything? Not by a good deal. Nosa, we'll just go on and ransom them in the regular way. All right, I don't mind, but I say it's a fool way anyhow. Say, do we kill the women, too? Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you, I wouldn't let on. Kill the women? No, nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave and you're always as polite as pie to them, and by and by they fall in love with you and never want to go home any more. Well, if that's the way, I'm agreed. But I don't take no stock in it. Mighty soon we'll have the cave so cluttered up with women and fellows waiting to be ransomed, but there won't be no place for the robbers. But go ahead, I ain't got nothing to say. Little Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when they waked him up he was scared and cried and said he wanted to go home to his ma and didn't want to be a robber any more. So they all made fun of him and called him a cry-baby, and that made him mad, and he said he would go straight and tell all the secrets, but Tom gave him five cents to keep quiet and said we would all go home and meet next week and rob somebody and kill some people. Ben Rogers said he couldn't get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday, but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday, and that settled the thing. They agreed to get together and fix a day as soon as they could, and then we elected Tom Sawyer, first captain, and Joe Harper, second captain of the gang, and so started home. I clumped up the shed and crept into my window just before day was breaking. My new clothes was all greased up in clay, and I was dog-tired. End of Chapter 2 This is Chapter 3 of Huckleberry Finn. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, Chapter 3. A Good Going Over. Grace Triumphant. One of Tom Sawyer's lies. Well, I got a good going over in the morning from old Miss Watson, an account of my clothes, but the widow she didn't scold, but only cleaned off the grease and clay, and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave a while if I could. Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed. But nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it weren't so. I tried it. Once I got a fishline, with no hooks. It weren't any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work. By and by one day I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way. I sat down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't Deacon Win get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stolen? Why can't Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself. There ain't nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was spiritual gifts. This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant. I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn't see no advantage about it, except for the other people. So last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it go. Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about providence in a way to make a body's mouth water. Maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again. I judged I could see that there was two providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with a widow's providence, but if Miss Watson's got him, there weren't no help for him any more. I thought it all out and reckoned I would belong to the widows if he wanted me, though I couldn't make out how he was going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant and so kind of low down in ornery. Pap, he hadn't been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me. I didn't want to see him no more. He used to always wail me when he was sober and could get his hands on me, though I used to take to the woods most of the time when he was around. Well, about this time he was found in the river drowned, about twelve miles above town, so people said. They judged it was him, anyway, said this drowned man was just his size and was ragged and had uncommon long hair, which was all like Pap, but they couldn't make nothing out of the face because it had been in the water so long it weren't much like a face at all. They said he was floating on his back in the water. They took him and buried him on the bank, but I weren't comfortable long because I happened to think of something. I knowed mighty well that a drowned man don't float on his back but on his face, so I knowed then that this weren't Pap, but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes. So I was uncomfortable again. I judged the old man would turn up again by and by though I wished he wouldn't. We played robber now and then, about a month, and then I resigned. All the boys did. We hadn't robbed nobody, hadn't killed any people, but only just pretended. We used to hop out of the woods and go charging down on hog drivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market, but we never hived any of them. Tom Sawyer called the hogs ingots, and he called the turnips and stuff jewelry, and we would go to the cave and pow wow over what we had done and how many people we had killed and marked, but I couldn't see no profit in it. One time Tom sent a boy to run about town with a blazing stick which he called a slogan, which was the sign for the gang to get together, and then he said he had got secret news by his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich A-Rabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with two hundred elephants and six hundred camels, and over a thousand sumpter mules, all loaded down with diamonds, and they didn't have only a guard of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay in ambuscade, as he called it, and kill the lot and scoop the things. He said we must slick up our swords and guns and get ready. He never could go after even a turnip cart, but he must have the swords and guns all scoured up for it, though they was only laugh and broomsticks, and you might scour at them till you rotted, and then they weren't worth a mouthful of ashes more than what they was before. I didn't believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-Rabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade, and when we got the word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill, but there weren't no Spaniards and A-Rabs, and there weren't no camels nor no elephants. There weren't anything but a Sunday school picnic, and only a primer class at that. We busted it up and chased the children up the hollow, but we never got anything but some donuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Joe Harper got a hymn book and a tract, and then the teacher charged in and made us drop everything and cut. I didn't see no diamonds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there anyway, and he said there was A-Rabs there too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn't we see them then? He said if I weren't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and treasure and so on, but we had enemies which he called magicians, and they had turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday school just out of spite. I said, all right, then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said I was a numbskull. Why, he said he a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson. They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church. Well, I says, suppose we got some genies to help us. Can't we lick the other crowd then? How are you going to get them? I don't know. How do they get them? Why, they rob an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come tearing in with the thunder and lightning and ripping around and the smoke of rolling, and everything they're told to do, they up and do it. They don't think nothing of pulling a shop-tower up by the roots and belting a Sunday school superintendent over the head with it, or any other man. Who makes them tear around so? Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs the lamp or the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says. If he tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of diamonds and fill it full of chewing gum or whatever you want, and fetch an emperor's daughter from China for you to marry, they've got to do it. And they've got to do it before sun-up next morning too. And more, they've got to waltz that palace around over the country wherever you want it, you understand. Well, says I, I think they are a pack of flatheads for not keeping the palace themselves, instead of fooling them away like that. And what's more, if I was one of them, I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp. How you talk, Huck Finn! Why, you'd have to come when he rubbed it, whether you wanted to or not! What! And I as high as a tree, and as big as a church? All right then, I would come. But I lay I'd make that man climb the highest tree there was in the country. Shucks, it ain't no use to talk to you, Huck Finn! You don't seem to know anything somehow. Perfect sap head! I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an engine, calculating to build a palace and sell it. But it weren't no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckon he believed in A-Rabs and elephants, but as for me, I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday school. End of Chapter 3 This is Chapter 4 of Huckleberry Finn. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, Chapter 4 Huck and the Judge, Superstition Well, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics anyway. At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommentired I played hooky, and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of used to the widow's ways too, and they weren't so raspy on me. Living in a house and sleeping in a bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods sometimes, and so that was a rest to me. I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new ones too a little bit. The widow said I was coming along slow but sure and doing very satisfactory. She said she weren't ashamed of me. One morning I happened to turn over the salt cellar at breakfast. I reached for some of it, as quick as I could, to throw over my left shoulder and keep off the bad luck. But Miss Watson was in ahead of me and crossed me off. She says, Take your hands away, Huckleberry! What a mess you were always making! The widow put in a good word for me, but that weren't going to keep off the bad luck, I know that well enough. I started out after breakfast, feeling worried and shaky and wondering where it was going to fall on me, and what it was going to be. There is ways to keep off some kinds of bad luck, but this wasn't one of them kind, so I never tried to do anything, but just poked along low-spirited and on the watch out. I went down to the front garden and clump over the style where you go through the high board fence. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, and I seen somebody's tracks. They'd come up from the quarry and stood round the style a while, and then went on around the garden fence. It was funny they hadn't come in after standing around so. I couldn't make it out. It was very curious somehow. I was going to follow around, but I stooped down to look at the tracks first. I didn't notice anything at first, but next I did. There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails to keep off the devil. I was up in a second and shining down the hill. I looked over my shoulder every now and then, but I didn't see nobody. I was at Judge Thatcher's as quick as I could get there. He said, Why, my boy, you are all out of breath. Did you come for your interest? No, sir, I says. Is there some for me? Oh, yes, a half yearly is in last night. Over a hundred and fifty dollars. Quite a fortune for you. You'd better let me invest it along with your six thousand, because if you take it you'll spend it. No, sir, I says. I don't want to spend it. I don't want it at all. Nor the six thousand another. I want you to take it. I want to give it to you, the six thousand and all. He looked surprised. He couldn't seem to make it out. He says, Why, what can you mean, my boy? I says, Don't you ask me no questions about it, please. You'll take it, won't you? He says, Well, I'm puzzled. Is something the matter? Please take it, says I. And don't ask me nothing. Then I won't have to tell no lies. He studied a while and then he says, Oh, I think I see. You want to sell all your property to me, not give it. That's the correct idea. Then he wrote something on a paper and read it over and says, There, you see it says, For a consideration. That means I have bought it of you and paid you for it. Here's a dollar for you. Now, you sign it. So I signed and left. Miss Watson's nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything. So I went to him that night and told him Pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow. What I wanted to know was what he was going to do, and was he going to stay. Jim got out his hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the floor. It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch. Jim tried it again, and then another time, and it acted just the same. Jim got down on his knees and put his ear against it and listened. But it weren't no use. He said it wouldn't talk. He said sometimes it wouldn't talk without money. I told him I had an old slick counterfeit quarter that weren't no good, because the brass showed through the silver a little, and it wouldn't pass know-how, even if the brass didn't show, because it was so slick it felt greasy, and so that would tell on it every time. I reckoned I wouldn't say nothing about the dollar I got from the judge. I said it was pretty bad money, and maybe the hair-ball would take it, because maybe it wouldn't know the difference. Jim smelt it and bit it and rubbed it, and said he would manage so that hair-ball would think it was good. He said he would split open a raw Irish potato and stick the quarter in between and keep it there all night, and next morning he couldn't see no brass, and it wouldn't feel greasy no more, and so anybody in town would take it in a minute, let alone a hair-ball. Well, I know the potato would do that before, but I had forgot it. Jim put the quarter under the hair-ball and got down and listened again. This time he said the hair-ball was all right. He said it would tell my whole fortune if I wanted it to. I says, go on. So the hair-ball talked to Jim, and Jim told it to me. He says, The old father don't know yet what he's going to do. Sometimes he spec he'll go away, and then again he spec he'll stay. The best way is to rest easy and let the old man take his own way. Days two angels have him round about him. One of them is white and shiny, and the other one is black. The white one gets him to go right in a little while, then the black one sail in and bust it all up. A body can't tell yet which one going to fetch him at the last. But you is all right. You're going to have considerable trouble in your life and considerable joy. Sometimes you're going to get hurt, and sometimes you're going to get sick, but every time you's going to get well again. Days two gals flying about you in your life. One of them's light and the other one is dark. One is rich and the other is poor. Yours going to marry the poor one first, and the rich one by and by. He wants to keep away from the water as much as you can, and don't run no risk, in case it's down the bills that you're going to get hung. When I lit my candle and went up to my room that night, there sat Papp, his own self. End of Chapter 4 This is Chapter 5 of Huckleberry Finn. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Chapter 5 Huck's Father the Fond Parent Reform I had shut the door too, then I turned round and there he was. I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was scared now, too. But in a minute I see I was mistaken. That is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched, he being so unexpected. But right away after I see I weren't scared of him worth bothering about. He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray. So was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There weren't no color in his face where his face showed. It was white. Not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body's flesh crawl, a tree-toed white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes, just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on Totherney. The boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through. And he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor, an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid. I stood a-lookin' at him. He sat there, lookin' at me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle down. I noticed the window was up, so he had clumped in by the shed. He kept a-lookin' me all over, by and by. He says, Starchy clothes, ver! You think you're a good deal of big bug, don't you? Maybe I am, maybe I ain't. I says, Don't you give me none of your lip! he says. You put on considerable many frills since I've been away. I'll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You're educated, too, they say, can read and write. You think you're better than your father now, don't you? Because he can't. I'll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such highfalutin' foolishness, hey? Who told you you could? The widow, she told me. The widow, hey? And who told the widow she could put in her shovel about thing that ain't none of her business. Nobody never told her. Well, I'll learn her how to meddle. And look here, you dropped that school here. I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on heirs over his own father and let on to be better than what he is. You let me catch you foolin' around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write another, before she died. And none of the family couldn't before they died. I can't. And here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it here. Say, let me hear you read. I took up a book and begun something about General Washington in the wars. When I'd read about a half minute he fetched the book a whack with his hand and knocked it across the house. He says, it's so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now, look here. You stop that puttin' on frills. I won't have it. I'll lay for you, my smarty. And if I catch you about that school, I'll tan you good. First you know you. And get religion, too. I never see such a son. You took up a little blue and yaller picture of some cows and a boy and says, What's this? It's something they give me for learning my lessons good. He tore it up and says, I'll give you something better. I'll give you a cow hide. He sat there a mumbling and a growling a minute and then he says, Ain't you a sweet-scented dandy, though? A bed. And bed clothes. And a lookin' glass. And a piece of carpet on the floor. And your own father got to sleep with the hogs in the tanyard. I never see such a son. I bet I'll take some of these frills out of you before I'm done with you. Why, there ain't no end to your heirs. They say you're rich. Hey, how's that? They lie. That's how. Look here. Mind how you talk to me. I'm a-standing about all I can stand now, so don't give me no sass. I've been in town two days, and I ain't heard nothing but about you being rich. I heard about it way down the river, too. That's why I come. You get me that money tomorrow. I want it. I ain't got no money. It's a lie. Judge Thatcher's got it. You get it. I want it. I ain't got no money. I tell you. You ask Judge Thatcher. He'll tell you the same. All right. I'll ask him. And I'll make him pungle, too. Or I'll know the reason why. Say, how much you got in your pocket? I want it. I ain't got only a dollar, and I want that, too. I don't make no difference what you want it for. You just shell it out. He took it and bid it to see if it was good. And then he said he was going down town to get some whiskey. Said he hadn't had a drink all day. When he got out on the shed, he put his head in again and cussed me for putting on frills and trying to be better than him. And when I reckoned he was gone and he come back and put his head in again and told me to mind about school because he was going to lay for me and lick me if I didn't drop that. Next day he was drunk, and he went to see Judge Thatcher's and bully ragged him and tried to make him give up the money. But he couldn't, and then he swore he'd make the law force him. The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian. But it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn't know the old man. So he said the courts mustn't interfere and separate families if they could help it. Said he'd rather not take a child away from its father, so Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business. That pleased the old man till he couldn't rest. He said he'd cow-hide me till I was black and blue if I didn't raise some money for him. I borrowed three dollars from Judge Thatcher, and Pap took it and got drunk, and went a-blowing around and cussing and whooping and carrying on. And he kept it up all over town with a tin pan till most midnight. Then they jailed him. And next day they had him before court and jailed him again for a week. But he said he was satisfied. Said he was boss of his son, and he'd make it warm for him. When he got out the new judge said he was going to make a man of him. So he took him to his own house and dressed him up clean and nice, and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with a family and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he'd been a fool, and fooled away his life. But now he was going to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn't be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him for them words. So he cried, and his wife, she cried again. Pap said he'd been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so. So they cried again. And when it was bed time the old man rose up and held out his hand and says, Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all! Take a hold of it! Shake it! There's a hand that was the hand of a hog, but it ain't so no more. It's the hand of a man that started in on a new life, and he'll die before he'll go back. You mark them words. Don't forget I said them. It's a clean hand now. Shake it! Don't be afeard! So they shook it, one after the other, all around and cried. The judge's wife, she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge, made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room which was the spare room, and in the night sometime he got powerful, thirsty, and clumped out on the porch roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of 40 rod, and clumped back again, and had a good old time. And towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it, the judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shot-gun, maybe, but he didn't know no other way. End of chapter 5 This is chapter 6 of Huckleberry Finn. He went for Judge Thatcher, Huck decided to leave—political economy—thrashing around. Well, pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he went for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up that money, and he went for me, too, for not stopping school. He catched me a couple of times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same, and dodged him or outrun him most of the time. I didn't want to go to school much before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite PAP. That law-trial was a slow business. Appeared like they weren't ever going to get started on it, so every now and then I'd borrow two or three dollars off the judge for him to keep from getting a cow hiding. And every time he got money, he got drunk, and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town, and every time he raised Cain he got jailed. He was just suited. This kind of thing was right in his line. He got to hang it around the widows too much, and so she told him at last that if he didn't quit using around there she would make trouble for him. Well, wasn't he mad? He said he would show who was Huck Finn's boss, so he watched out for me one day in the spring, and catched me, and took me up the river about three miles in a skiff, and crossed over to the Illinois shore where it was woody, and there weren't no houses, but an old log hut in a place where the timber was so thick you couldn't find it if you didn't know where it was. He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head, knights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store three miles to the ferry, and traded fish and game for a whiskey, and fetched it home, and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was by and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me. But Pap drove him off with the gun, and it weren't long after that, till I was used to being where I was, and liked it, all but the cowhide part. It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widows where you had to wash and eat on the plate, and comb up, and go to bed, and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have Ole Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn't want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing because the widow didn't like it, but now I took to it again because Pap hadn't no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all round. But by and by Pap got too handy with his hickory, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned, and I wasn't ever going to get out any more. I was scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there. I had tried to get out of that cabin many a time, but I couldn't find no way. There weren't a window to it big enough for a dog to get through. I couldn't get up the chimney. It was too narrow. The door was thick, solid oak slabs. Pap was pretty careful not to leave a knife or anything in the cabin when he was away. I reckon I had hunted the place over as much as a hundred times. Well, I was most all the time at it because it was about the only way to put in the time. But this time I found something at last. I found an old rusty wood-saw without any handle. It was laid in between a rafter and the clabbards of the roof. I greased it up and went to work. There was an old horse-blanket nailed against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the table to keep the wind from blowing through the chinks and putting the candle out. I got under the table and raised the blanket and went to work to saw a section of the big bottom log out, big enough to let me through. Well, it was a good long job, but I was getting toward the end of it when I heard Pap's gun in the woods. I got rid of the signs of my work and dropped the blanket and hid my saw and pretty soon Pap came in. Pap warranted a good humor, so he was his natural self. He said he was downtown and everything was going wrong. His lawyer said he reckoned he would win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got started on the trial, but then there was ways to put it off a long time and Judge Thatcher knowed how to do it. And he said people allowed there'd be another trial to get me away from him and give me to the widow for my guardian, and they guessed it would win this time. This shook me up considerable because I didn't want to go back to the widows any more and be so cramped up and civilized as they called it. Then the old man got to cussing and he cussed everything and everybody he could think of and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all around, including a considerable parcel of people which he didn't know the names of, and so called them what's his name when he got to them, and went right along with his cussing. He said he would like to see the widow get me. He said he would watch out and if they tried to come in any such game on him, he noted of a place six or seven mile off to stow me in, where they might hunt till they dropped and they couldn't find me. That made me pretty uneasy again, but only for a minute. I reckoned I wouldn't stay on hand till he got that chance. The old man made me go to the skiff and fetch the things he had got. There was a fifty-pound sack of cornmeal, and a side of bacon, ammunition, and a four-gallon jug of whiskey, and an old book and two newspapers for wadding beside some tow. I towed it up the load and went back and sat down on the bow of the skiff to rest. I thought it all over, and I reckoned I would walk off with a gun and some lines and take to the woods when I run away. I guessed I wouldn't stay in one place, but just tramp right across the country, mostly in night-times, and hunt and fish to keep alive, and so get so far away that the old man nor the widow couldn't ever find me any more. I judged I would saw out and leave that night if Pap got drunk enough, and I reckoned he would. I got so full of it I didn't notice how long I was staying till the old man hollered and asked me whether I was asleep or drownded. I got the things all up to the cabin and then it was about dark. While I was cooking supper the old man took a swig or two and got sort of warmed up and went to Rippon again. He had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would have thought he was Adam, he was just all mud. Whenever his liquor began to work he most always went for that government. This time he says, Call this a government? Why, just look at it and see what it's like. Here's the law, standing ready to take a man's son away from him, a man's own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last and ready to go to work and begin to do something for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. Then they call that government? That ain't all, another. The law backs that old judge thatcher up and helps him to keep me out of my property. Here's what the law does. The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and upwards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round and close that ain't fitting for a hog. They call that government? A man can't get his rights in a government like this. Sometimes I have a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I told him so. I told old thatcher so to his face. Lots of him heard me and can tell what I said. Says I, for two cents I'd leave the blamed country and never come near again. Them's the very words. I says, look at my hat. If you call it a hat. But the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till it's below my chin, and then it ain't rightly a hat at all. But more like my head was shoved up through a gentle stovepipe. Look at it, says I. Such a hat for me to wear. And one of the wealthiest men in this town if I could get my rights. Oh, yes. This is a wonderful government, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio, a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat. And there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had. And he had a gold watch and chain and a silver-headed cane, the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the state. And what do you think? They said he was a professor in a college and could talk all kinds of languages and note everything. And that ain't the worst. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country you're coming to? It was election day and I was just about to go and vote myself if I weren't too drunk to get there. But when they told me there was a state in this country where they'd let that nigger vote I'd draw it out. I says I'll never vote again. Them's the very words I said. They all heard me. And the country may rot for all of me. I'll never vote again as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger. Why? He wouldn't give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out of the way. I says to the people, Why ain't this nigger put up at auction and sold? That's what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why? They said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in the state six months. And he hadn't been there that long yet. There now. That's a specimen. They call that a government that can't sell a free nigger till he's been in the state six months. Here's a government that calls itself a government, and lets on to be a government, and thinks it is a government, and yet's got to set stock still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal white-shirted free nigger, and pap was a going on so he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went ahead over heels over the tub of salt pork, and barked both shims, and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind of language, mostly hove at the nigger and the government, though he gives the tub some too all along here and there. He hopped around the cabin considerable, first on one leg and then on the other, holding first one shin and then the other one, and at last he let out with his left foot all of a sudden and fetched the tub a rattling kick. But it weren't good judgment, because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leaking out of the front end of it. So now he raised a howl that fairly made a body's hair raise, and down he went in the dirt and rolled there and held his toes, and the cussing he'd done then laid over anything he had ever done previous. He said so his own self afterwards, he had heard old Salbury Hagan in his best days, and he said it laid over him too. But I reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe. After supper, Pap took the jug and said he had had enough whisky there for two drunks and one delirium tremens. That was always his word. I judged he would be blind drunk in about an hour, and then I would steal the key or saw myself out one or two other. He drank and drank and tumbled down on his blankets by and by. But luck didn't run my way. He didn't go sound asleep, but was uneasy. He groaned and moaned and thrashed around this way and that for a long time. At last I got so sleepy I couldn't keep my eyes open all I could do, and so before I knowed what I was about, I was sound asleep and the candle burning. I don't know how long I was asleep, but all of a sudden there was an awful scream and I was up. There was Pap looking wild and skipping around every which way and yelling about snakes. He said they was crawling up his legs, and then he would give a jump and scream and said one had bit him on the cheek. But I couldn't see no snakes. He started and run around and round the cabin hollering, "'Take him off! Take him off! He's biting me on the neck!' I never see a man who looks so wild in the eyes. Pretty soon he was all fagged out and fell down panting. Then he rolled over and over wonderful fast, kicking things every which way and striking and grabbing at the air with his hands and screaming and saying there was devils a hold of him. He wore out by and by and laid still a while moaning. Then he laid stiller and didn't make a sound. I could hear the owls and the wolves away off in the woods and seemed terrible still. He was laying over by the corner. By and by he raised up part way and listened with his head to one side. He says, very low, Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! That's the dead. Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! They're coming after me. But I won't go. Oh, they're here. Don't touch me. Don't. Hands off. They're cold. Let go. Oh, let a poor devil alone! Then he went down on all fours and crawled off begging them to let him alone. And he rolled himself up in his blanket and wallowed in under the old pine table still a-bagging. And then he went to crying. I could hear him through the blanket. By and by he rolled out and jumped up on his feet looking wild and he see me and went for me. He chased me round and round the place with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death, saying he would kill me, and then I couldn't come for him no more. I begged and told him I was only huck, but he laughed such a screechy laugh and roared and cussed and kept on chasing me up. Once when I turned short and dodged under his arm he made a grab and got me by the jacket between my shoulders and I thought I was gone. But I slid out of the jacket quick as lightning and saved myself. Pretty soon he was all tired out and dropped down with his back against the door and said he would rest a minute and then kill me. He put his knife under him and said he would sleep and get strong and then he would see who was who. So he dozed off pretty soon. By and by I got the old split-bottom chair and climb up as easy as I could, not to make any noise, and got down the gun. I slipped the ram-rod down it to make sure it was loaded, then I laid it across the turnip-barrel, pointing towards Pap, and set down behind it to wait for him to stir. And how slow and still the time did drag along. CHAPTER VI I opened my eyes and looked around, trying to make out where I was. It was after sun-up and I had been sound asleep. Pap was standing over me looking sour and sick, too. He says, What are you doing with this gun? I judged he didn't know nothing about what he had been doing, so I says, Somebody tried to get in, so I was laying for him. Why didn't you rouse me out? Well, I tried to, but I couldn't. I couldn't budge you. Well, all right. Don't stand there pilavering all day, but out with you and see if there's a fish on the lines for breakfast. I'll be along in a minute. He unlocked the door and I cleared out up the river bank. I noticed some pieces of limbs and such things floating down and a sprinkling of bark, so I know the river had begun to rise. I reckoned I would have great times now if I was over at the town. The June rise used to be always luck for me, because as soon as that rise begins, here comes cordwood floating down and pieces of log rafts, sometimes a dozen logs together. So all you have to do is to catch them and sell them to the wood-yards and the sawmill. I went along up the bank with one eye out for pap and another one out for what the rise might fetch along. Well, all at once here comes a canoe, just a beauty too, about thirteen or fourteen foot long, riding high like a duck. I shot headfirst off the bank like a frog, closing all on, and struck out for the canoe. I just expected there'd be somebody laying down in it, because people often done that to fool folks, and when a chap had pulled a skiff out most to it, they'd raise up and laugh at him. But it weren't so this time. It was a drift canoe, sure enough, and I clummed in and paddled her ashore. Thinks I, the old man will be glad when he sees this, she's worth ten dollars. But when I got to shore, pap wasn't in sight yet, and as I was running her into the little creek like a gully, all hung over with vines and willows, I struck another idea. I judged I'd hide her good, and then, instead of taking to the woods when I run off, I'd go down the river about fifty mile and camp in one place for good, and not have such a rough time tramping on foot. It was pretty close to the shanty, and I thought I heard the old man coming all the time, but I got her head, and then I out and looked around a bunch of willows, and there was the old man down the path of peace, just drawn a bead on a bird with his gun, so he hadn't seen anything. When he got along, I was hard at it taking up a trot line. He abused me a little for being so slow, but I told him I fell in the river, and that was what made me so long. I knowed he would see I was wet, and then he would be asking questions. We got five catfish off the lines and went home. While we laid off after breakfast to sleep up, both of us being about wore out, I got to thinking that if I could fix up some way to keep pap and the widow from trying to follow me, it would be a certaintyer thing than trusting to luck to get far enough off before they missed me. You see, all kinds of things might happen. Well, I didn't see no way for a while, but by and by, pap raised up a minute to drink another barrel of water, and he says, Another time a man comes up prowling round here, you roust me out, you hear? That man warn't here for no good. I'd have shot him. Next time you roust me out, you hear? Then he dropped down and went to sleep again. But what he had been saying gave me the very idea I wanted. I says to myself, I can fix it now so nobody won't think of following me. About twelve o'clock we turned out and went along up the bank. The river was coming up pretty fast, and lots of driftwood going by on the rise. By and by along comes part of the log raft, nine logs fast together. We went out with a skiff and towed it ashore. Then we had dinner. Anybody but pap would have waited and seen the day through, so as to catch more stuff. But that warn't pap's style. Nine logs was enough for one time. He must shove right over to the town and sell. So he locked me in and took the skiff and started off towing the raft about half past three. I judged he wouldn't come back that night. I waited till I reckoned he had got a good start, then I out with my saw and went to work on that log again. Before he was to the other side of the river, I was out of the hole. Him and his raft was just a speck on the water away off yonder. I took the sack of cornmeal, and I took it to where the canoe was hid, and I shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in. Then I'd done the same with the side of bacon. Then the whisky jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all of the ammunition. I took the wadding, I took the bucket and gourd. I took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee pot. I took fish lines and matches and other things, everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I wanted an axe, but there wasn't any, only the one out at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done. I had wore the ground a good deal crawling out of the hole and dragging out so many things, so I fixed that as good as I could from the outside by scattering dust on the place, which covered up the smoothness and the sawdust. Then I fixed the piece of log back into its place and put two rocks under it and one against it to hold it there, for it was bent up at that place and didn't quite touch ground. If you stood four or five foot away and didn't know it was sawed, you wouldn't never notice it. And besides, this was the back of the cabin, and it weren't likely anybody would go fooling round there. It was all grass clear to the canoe so I hadn't left a track. I followed around to sea. I stood on the bank and looked out over the river, all safe. So I took the gun and went up a piece into the woods and was hunting around for some birds when I see a wild pig. Hogs soon went wild in them bottoms after they'd got away from the prairie farms. I shot this fellow and took him into camp. I took the axe and smashed in the door. I beat it and hacked it considerably doing it. I fetched the pig in and took him back nearly to the table and hacked into his throat with the axe and laid him down on the ground to bleed. I say ground because it was ground, hard-packed and no boards. Well, next I took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks in it, all like a drag. And I started it from the pig and dragged it to the door and threw the woods down to the river and dumped it in. And down it sunk out of sight. You could easy see that something had been dragged over the ground. I did wish Tom Sawyer was there. I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that. Well, last I pulled out some of my hair and blooded the axe good and stuck it on the backside and slung the axe in the corner. Then I took up the pig and held him to my breast with my jacket so he couldn't drip till I got a good piece below the house and then dumped him into the river. Now I thought of something else. So I went and I got a bag of meal and my old saw out of the canoe and fetched them to the house. I took the bag to where it used to stand and ripped a hole in the bottom of it with a saw, where there weren't no knives and forks on the place. Pap done everything with his clasp knife about the cooking. Then I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and threw the willows east of the house to a shallow lake that was five miles wide and full of rushes. And ducks too, you might say, in the season. There was a slaw or a creek leading out of it on the other side that went miles away, I don't know where, but it didn't go to the river. The meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to the lake. I dropped Pap's whetstone there too so as to look like it had been done by accident. Then I tied up the rip in the meal sack with a string so it wouldn't leak no more, and took it and my saw to the canoe again. It was about dark now, so I dropped the canoe down the river under some willows that hung over the bank and waited for the moon to rise. I made fast to a willow, then I took a bite to eat, and by and by laid down the canoe to smoke a pipe and lay out a plan. I says to myself, they'll follow the track of that sack full of rocks to the shore and then drag the river for me. And they'll follow that meal track to the lake and go browsing down the creek that leads out of it to find the robbers that killed me and took the things. They won't ever hunt the river for anything but my dead carcass. They'll soon get tired of that and won't bother no more about me. All right, I can stop anywhere I want to. Jackson's Island is good enough for me. I know that island pretty well and nobody ever comes there. And then I can paddle over to town nights and slink around and pick up things I want. Jackson's Island's the place. I was pretty tired, and the first thing I knowed I was asleep. When I woke up, I didn't know where I was for a minute. I set up and looked around, a little scared. Then I remembered. The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could have counted the drift logs that went to slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet and it looked late and smelt late. You know what I mean. I don't know the words to put it in. I took a good gap and a stretch and was just going to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over the water. I listened. Pretty soon I made it out. It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rollox when it's still night. I peeped out through the willow branches, and there it was, a skiff, away across the water. I couldn't tell how many was in it. It kept to come in. And when it was a breast of me, I see there weren't but one man in it, thinks I, maybe it's Pap, though I weren't expecting him. He dropped below me with a current, and by and by he came a swinging up shore in the easy water, and he went by so close I could have reached out the gun and touched him. Well, it was Pap, sure enough, and sober, too, by the way he laid his oars. I didn't lose no time. The next minute I was a spinnin' downstream soft but quick in the shade of the bank. I made two-mile-and-a-half and then struck out a quarter of a mile or more toward the middle of the river, because pretty soon I would be passing the ferry landing, and people might see me and hail me. I got out amongst the driftwood and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float. I laid there and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine. I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights? I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too, every word of it. One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now. The other one said this weren't one of the short ones, he reckoned, and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again. Then they waked up another fellow and told him and laughed. But he didn't laugh. He ripped out something brisk and said, Let him alone. The first fellow said he allowed to tell it to his old woman. She would think it was pretty good. But he said that weren't nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock and he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than about a week longer. After that the talk got further and further away and I couldn't make out the words any more. But I could hear the mumble, and now and then laugh, too. But it seemed a long ways off. I was away below the ferry now. I rose up, and there was Jackson's Island, about two-mile-and-a-half downstream, heavy-timbered and standing up out of the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like a steamboat without any lights. There weren't any signs of the bar at the head. It was all under water now. It didn't take me long to get there. I shot past the head at a ripping rate. The current was so swift. And then I got into the dead water and landed on the side toward the Illinois shore. I run the canoe into a deep dent in the bank that I knowed about. I had to part the willow branches to get in. And when I made fast, nobody could have seen the canoe from the outside. I went up and sat down on a log at the head of the island and looked out on the big river and the black driftwood and away over to the town three-mile away, where there was three or four lights twinkling. A monstrous big lumber raft was about a mile upstream coming along down, with a lantern in the middle of it. I watched it come creeping down, and when it was most abreast of where I stood I heard a man say, Sturn oars there! Heaver, head to stop it! I heard that just as plain as if the man was by my side. There was a little gray in the sky now, so I stepped into the woods and laid down for a nap before breakfast. END OF CHAPTER VIII. SLEEPING IN THE WOODS, RAISING THE DEAD, EXPLORING THE ISLAND, FINDING GYM, GYM'S ESCAPE, SIGNS, BALM. The sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight o'clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and rather comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there. A couple squirrels sat on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly. I was powerful, lazy, and comfortable. Didn't want to get up and cook breakfast. Well, I was dozing off again when I think I hear a deep sound of BOOM, way up the river. I rouses up and rests on my elbows and listens. Pretty soon I hear it again. I hopped up and went and looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying on the water a long ways up, about a breast of the ferry. And there was the ferry boat, full of people floating along down. I knowed what was the matter now. BOOM! I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferry boat side. You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my carcass come to the top. I was pretty hungry, but it weren't going to do for me to start a fire, because they might see the smoke. So I sat there and watched the cannon smoke and listened to the BOOM. The river was a mile wide there, and it always looks pretty on a summer morning. So I was having a good enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders if I only had a bite to eat. Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the drowned carcass and stop there. So, says I, I'll keep a look out, and if any of them's floating around after me, I'll give them a show. I changed to the Illinois edge of the island to see what luck I could have, and I weren't disappointed. A big double loaf come along, and I most got it with a long stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out further. Of course I was where the current set in the closest to the shore. I knowed enough for that. But by and by along comes another one, and this time I won. I took out the plug and shook out the little dab of quicksilver, and set my teeth in. It was baker's bread, what the quality eat. None of your low-down corn-pone. I got a good place amongst the leaves, and sat there on a log, munching the bread and watching the ferry-boat, and very well satisfied. And then something struck me. I says, and I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it. So there ain't no doubt, but there is something in that thing. That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind. I lit a pipe, and had a good long smoke, and went on watching. The ferry-boat was floating with the current, and I allowed I'd have a chance to see who was aboard when she'd come along, because she would come in close, where the bread did. When she'd got pretty well along down toward me, I put out my pipe, and went to where I fished out the bread, and laid down behind the log on the bank in a little open place, where the log forked I could peep through. By and by she'd come along, and she drifted in so close that they could have run out a plank and walked ashore. Most everybody was on the boat, Pap, and Judge Thatcher, and Bessie Thatcher, and Joe Harper, and Tom Sawyer, and his old aunt Polly, and Sid, and Mary, and plenty more. Everybody was talking about the murder, but the captain broke in and says, Look sharp, now! The current sets in the closest here, and maybe he's washed ashore and got tangled amongst the brush at the water's edge. I hope so, anyway. I didn't hope so. They all crowded up and leaned over the rails, and nearly in my face, and kept still, watching with all their might. I could see them, first rate, but they couldn't see me. Then the captain sung out, Stand away! And the cannon let off such a blast right before me that it made me deep with a noise, and pretty near blind with a smoke, and I judged I was gone. If they'd had some bullets in, I reckon they'd got the corpse they was after. Well, I see I warn't hurt, thanks to goodness. The boat floated on and went out a sight around the shoulder of the island. I could hear the booming now, and then further and further off, and by and by after an hour I didn't hear it no more. The island was three miles long. I judged they'd got to the foot, and was giving it up. But they didn't yet a while. They turned around the foot of the island and started up the channel on the Missouri side, under steam, and boomed once in a while as they went. I crossed over to that side and watched them. When they got abreast the head of the island, they quit shooting and dropped over to the Missouri shore and went home to the town. I knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would have come a huntin' after me. I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick woods. I made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my things under so the rain couldn't get at them. I catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my campfire and had supper. Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast. When it was dark I sat by my campfire smoking and feeling pretty well satisfied. But by and by it got sort of lonesome. And so I went and sat on the bank and listened to the currents swashing along and counted the stars and drift logs and rafts that come down and then went to bed. There ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome. You can't stay so, you soon get over it. And so for three days and nights. No difference, just the same thing. But the next day I went exploring around down through the island. I was boss of it. It all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all about it. But mainly I wanted to put in the time. I found plenty strawberries, ripe and prime, green summer grapes, and green raspberries. And the green blackberries was just beginning to show. They would all come handy by and by, I judged. Well, I went fooling along in the deep woods till I judged I weren't far from the foot of the island. I had my gun along, but I hadn't shot nothing. It was for protection. Thought I would kill some game nigh home. About this time my mighty near stepped on a good-sized snake, and it went sliding off through the grass and flowers, and I, after it, tried to get a shot at it. I clipped along, and all of a sudden I bounded right on the ashes of a campfire that was still smoking. My heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I never waited for it to look further, but uncocked my gun and went sneaking back on my tiptoes as fast as ever I could. Every now and then I stopped a second amongst the thick leaves and listened, but my breath came so hard I couldn't hear nothing else. I slunk along another piece further, then listened again, and so on and so on. If I see a stump, I took it for a man. If I trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a person that cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half and the short half, too. When I got to camp I weren't feeling very brash. There weren't much sand in my crawl, but I says this ain't no time to be fooling around, so I got all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight, and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an old last year's camp, then clumma tree. I reckon I was up in the tree two hours, but I didn't see nothing. I didn't hear nothing. I only thought I heard and seen as much as a thousand things. Well, I couldn't stay up there forever, so at last I got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on the lookout all the time. All I could get to eat was berries and what was left over from breakfast. By the time it was night I was pretty hungry, so when it was good and dark I slid out from shore before moonrise and paddled over to the Illinois bank about a quarter of a mile. I went out in the woods and cooked a supper, and I had about made up my mind I would stay there all night when I hear a plunkety-plunk, plunkety-plunked, and says to myself, horses coming. And next I hear people's voices. I got everything into the canoe as quick as I could and then went creeping through the woods to see what I could find out. I hadn't got far when I hear a man say, We better camp here if we can find a good place. The horses is about beat out. Let's look around. I didn't wait, but shoved out and paddled away easy. I tied up in the old place and reckoned I would sleep in the canoe. I didn't sleep much. I couldn't, somehow, for thinking, and every time I waked up I thought somebody had me by the neck, so the sleep didn't do me no good. By and by says to myself, I can't live this way. I'm going to find out who it is that's here on the island with me. I'll find it out or bust. Well, I felt better right off. So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two and then let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows. The moon was shining and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I poked along well on to an hour. Everything still is rocks and sound asleep. Well, by this time I was most down to the foot of the island. A little ripply cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying the night was about done. I give her a turn with a paddle and brung her nose to shore. Then I got my gun and slipped out and into the edge of the woods. I sat down there on a log and looked out through the leaves. I see the moon go off watch, and the darkness began to blank at the river. But in a little while I see a pale streak over the treetops, and no the day was coming. So I took my gun and slipped off towards where I had run across that campfire, stopping every minute or two to listen. But I hadn't no luck somehow. I couldn't seem to find the place. But by and by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away through the trees. I went for it, cautious and slow. By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most give me the phantods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I sat there behind a clump of bushes, in about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight now. Pretty soon he gapped and stretched himself and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson's Jim. I bet I was glad to see him. I says, Hello, Jim! and skipped out. He bounced up and stared at me wild. Then he drops down on his knees and puts his hands together and says, Don't hurt me, don't. I ain't ever done no harm to the ghost. I always liked that people, and done all I could for them. You go and get in the river again, why you belongs, and don't do nothing to old Jim? That is all was your friend. Well, I weren't long making him understand I weren't dead. I was ever so glad to see Jim. I weren't lonesome now. I told him I weren't afraid of him telling the people where I was. I talked along, but he only sat there and looked at me, never said nothing. Then I says, It's good daylight. Let's get breakfast. Make up your campfire good. What's the user making up the campfire to cook strawberries in such truck? But you got a gun. Then we can get something better in strawberries. Strawberries in such truck, I says, Is that what you live on? I couldn't get nothing else, he says. Why, how long have you been on the island, Jim? I come here the night after yours is killed. What, all that time? Yes, indeedy. And ain't you had nothing but that kind of rubbish to eat? No, sir. And nothing else. Well, you must be most starved, ain't you? I reckon I could eat a horse. I think I could. How long have you been on the island? Since the night I got killed. No. Why, what has you lived on? But you got a gun. Oh, yes, you got a gun. That's good. Now, you kill something and now make up the fire. So we went over to where the canoe was and while he built a fire in a grassy open place amongst the trees, I fetched meal and bacon and coffee and coffee pot and frying pan and sugar and tin cups and the nigger was set back considerable, because he reckoned it was all done with witchcraft. I catched a good big catfish, too, and Jim cleaned him with his knife and fried him. When breakfast was ready we lulled on the grass and eat it smoking hot. Jim laid it in with all his might, for he was most about starved. Then when we had got pretty well stuffed we laid off and lazied. By and by Jim says, But look at here, Huck, who was it that is killed in that shanty if it weren't you? Then I told him the whole thing and he said it was smart. He said Tom Sawyer couldn't get up no better plan than what I had. Then I says, How do you come to be here, Jim? And how'd you get here? He looked pretty uneasy and didn't say nothing for a minute. Then he says, Maybe I better not tell. Why, Jim? Well, day's reasons. But you wouldn't tell on me if I was to tell you, would you, Huck? Blamed if I would, Jim. Well, I believe you, Huck. I run off. Jim. But mind you said you wouldn't tell. You know you said you wouldn't tell, Huck. Well, I did. I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it. Honest engine, I will. People would call me a low-down abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum, but that don't make no difference. I ain't going to tell, and I ain't going back there anyways. So now let's know all about it. Well, you see, it is this way. Old Mrs., that's Miss Watson, she pecks on me all the time, and treats me pretty rough. But she all says she wouldn't sell me down to Orleans. But I noticed there was a nigger trader round to place considerable lately, and I began to get on easy. Well, one night I creeped to the dough, putty late, and the dough weren't quite shut. And I hear old Mrs. tell the widow she'd gone to sell me down to Orleans. But she didn't want to. But she could get eight hundred dollars from me, and it's such a big stack of money she couldn't resist. The widow she'd try to get her to say she wouldn't do it. But I never waited to hear the rest. I lit out mighty quick, I tell you. I took out and shinned down the hill and inspected to steal a skiff to the long to shore summers, about town. But there was people astaring it, so I hid in the old tumble-down Cooper shop on the bank, to wait for everybody to go away. Well, I was there all night. There was somebody round all the time. Long about six in the morning, skiffs began to go by, and about eight or nine every skiff that went long was talking about how your pap come over to the town and say you's killed. And these last skiffs was full of old ladies and gentlemen going over for to see the place. Sometimes they'd pull up to shore and take a rest before they started to cross, so by the talk I got to know all about the killing. I was powerful sorry you's killed, Huck, but I ain't no more now. I laid down to the shavings all day. I was hungry, but I weren't afeard, because I know the old missus and the widow was going to start to the camp, meeting and right after breakfast, and be gone all day. And they know as I goes off with the cattle about daylight, so they wouldn't expect to see me round the place, and so they wouldn't miss me till I had a dark in the evening. The other servants wouldn't miss me, because they'd shin out and take holiday soon as the old folks was out in the way. Well, when it come dark I took out up the river road, and went about two mile or more to why there weren't no houses. I'd made up my mind about what I was going to do. You see, if I kept on trying to get way foot, the dogs would track me. If I stole a skift to cross over, they'd miss that skift, you see, and they'd know about where I'd land on, the other side, and why to pick up my track. So I says, a raft is what I's either. Had gone make no track. I see a light come round the pant with bye-bye, so I wade in the shore of a log ahead of me, and I swum more and half way across the river, and got in amongst the driftwood, and kept my head down low, and kind of swum again the current till the raft come along. Then I swum to the stern of it, and took a hold. It clouded up and was pretty dark for a little while, so I clump up and laid down on the planks. The man is all way yonder in the middle while the lantern was. The river was arising, and there was a good current, so I reckoned that by fall in the mornin' I'd be twenty-five miles down the river, and then I'd slip in just before daylight and swim ashore, and take to the woods on the Illinois side. But I didn't have no luck. When we was most down to the head of the island, a man began to come aft with the lantern. I see it weren't no use for the wait, so I slid overboard, and struck out for the island. Well, I had a notion I could land most anywheres, but I couldn't. Bank too bluff. I was most to the foot of the island before I found a good place. I went into the woods, and judged I wouldn't fool with rafts no more, long as they moved the lantern round so. I had my pipe, and a plug, or dog-leg, and some matches in my cap, and they weren't wet, so I was all right. And so you ain't had no meat nor bread to eat all this time? Why didn't you get mud-turcles? How you going to get them? You can't slip up on them and grab them. And how's a body going to hit them with a rock? How could a body do it in the night? And I weren't going to show myself on the bank in a daytime. Well, that's so. You've had to keep in the woods all the time, of course. Did you hear him shooting the cannon? Oh, yes. I know they was out to you. I seen them go by here. Watched them through the bushes. Some young birds come along, flying a yard or two at a time, and lighting. Jim said it was a sign it was going to rain. He said it was a sign when young chickens flew that way, and so he reckoned it was the same way when young birds done it. I was going to catch some of them, but Jim wouldn't let me. He said it was death. He said his father laid mighty sick once, and some of them catched a bird, and his old granny said his father would die. And he did. And Jim said you mustn't count the things you were going to cook for dinner, because that would bring bad luck. The same if you shook the tablecloth after sundown. And he said if a man owned a beehive, and that man died, the bees must be told about it before the sun up next morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die. Jim said bees wouldn't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me. I had heard about some of these things before, but not all of them. Jim knowed all kinds of signs. He said he knowed most everything. I said it looked to me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I asked him if there weren't any good luck signs. And he says, mighty few, and they ain't no use to a body. What do you want to know when good luck's are coming for? Want to keep it off? And he said if you's got hairy arms and hairy breasts, and it's a sign that you's going to be rich, well, there's some use in a sign like that, in case it's so fur ahead. You see, maybe you's got to be poor a long time first, and so you might get discouraged and kill yourself if you didn't know by design that you're going to be rich by and by. If you got hairy arms and hairy breasts, Jim, what's the use act that question? Don't you see I has? Well, are you rich? No. But I've been rich once, and going to be rich again. Once I had fourteen dollars, but I tucked to speculate and got busted out. What did you speculate in, Jim? Well, first I tackled stock. What kind of stock? Why, livestock, cattle, you know. I put ten dollars in a cow. But I ain't going to risk no more money in stock. The cow up and died on my hands. So you lost ten dollars? No, I didn't lose it all. I only lost about nine of it. I sold a hide and teller for a dollar and ten cents. You had five dollars and ten cents left. Did you speculate any more? Yes. You know that one-legged nigger that belongs to old Mr. Bradish? Well, he sought up a bank and say anybody that put in a dollar would get four dollars more at the end of the year. Well, all the niggers went in, but they didn't have much. I was the only one that had much, so I stuck out for more than four dollars. And I said, if I didn't get it, I'd start a bank myself. Well, of course that nigger want to keep me out of their business, because he says they weren't business enough for two banks, so he say I could put in my five dollars and he pay me thirty-five at the end of their year. So I'd done it. Then I reckoned I'd invest the thirty-five dollars right off and keep things a-moving. There was a nigger named Bob that had catched a wood-flat, and his master didn't know it. And I bought it off in him and told him to take the thirty-five dollars when the end of year come. But somebody stole the wood-flat that night, and next day the one-legged nigger say the banks busted, so didn't none of us get no money. What did you do with the ten cents, Jim? Well, I's quite a spandit, but I had a dream. And a dream told me to give it to a nigger named Balham. Balham's ass, they call him for short. He's one of them chuckleheads, you know. But he's lucky, they say, and I see I weren't lucky. The dream say, let Balham invest the ten cents, and he'd make a raise for me. Well, Balham he tucked the money, and when he was in church he heard the preacher say that whoever give to the pole lend to the Lord, and bound to get his money back a hundred times. So Balham he tucked and give the ten cents to the pole, and laid low to see what was going to come of it. Well, what did come of it, Jim? Nothing never come of it. I couldn't manage to collect that money no way. And Balham he couldn't. I ain't going to lend no more money, doubt I see the security. Bound to get your money back a hundred times, the preacher says. If I could get the ten cents back I'd call it square, and be clouded or chanced. Well, it's all right anyway, Jim. Long as you're going to be rich again, some time or other. Yes. And I as rich now come to look at it. I owns myself, and I as with eight hundred dollars. I wish to had the money. I wouldn't want no more. CHAPTER IX The Cave, the Floating House I wanted to go and look at a place right about the middle of the island that I'd found when I was exploring. So we started and soon got to it, because the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide. This place was a tolerable long steep hill or a ridge about forty foot high. We had a rough time getting to the top, the sides was so steep and the bushes so thick. We tramped and clump around all over it, and by and by found a good big cavern in the rock, most up to the top on the side toward Illinois. The cavern was as big as two or three rooms bunched together, and Jim could stand up straight in it. It was cool in there. Jim was for putting our traps in there right away. But I said we didn't want to be climbing up and down there all the time. Jim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place, and had all the traps in the cavern, we could rush there if anybody was to come to the island, and they would never find us without dogs. And besides, he said them little birds had said it was going to rain. And did I want the things to get wet? So we went back and got the canoe and paddled up abreast the cavern and lugged all the traps up there. Then we hunted up a place close by to hide the canoe in amongst the thick willows. We took some fish off of the lines, and set them again, and begun to get ready for dinner. The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hog's head in, and on one side of the door the floors stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a good place to build a fire on. So we built it there, and cooked dinner. We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten. So the birds was right about it. Directly it began to rain, and it rained like all fury too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside and lovely. And the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees awful little ways looked dim and spider-webby. And here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves. And then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to toss in their arms as if they were just wild. And next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—it was as bright as glory. And you'd have a little glimpse of treetops, a plunge in about a way, off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before. Dark as sin again in a second. And now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the underside of the world, like rolling empty barrels downstairs, where it's long stairs, and they bounce a good deal, you know. "'Jim, this is nice,' I says. I wouldn't want to be nowhere else, but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot cornbread.' "'Well, you wouldn't have been here if hadn't been for Jim. You'd have been down to add the woods, without any dinner, and getting most drowned, too. Dought you would, honey. Chickens know when it's going to rain. And so do birds, child.' The river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days until at last it was over the banks. The water was three or four foot deep on the island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom. On that side it was a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side it was the same old distance across, a half a mile, because the Missouri shore was just a wall of high bluffs. Day times we paddled all over the island in the canoe. It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods, even if the sun was blazing outside. We went winding in and out amongst the trees, and sometimes the vines hung so thick we had to back away and go some other way. Well, on every old broken-down tree you could see rabbits and snakes and such things, and when the island had been overflowed a day or two they got so tame, on account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your hand on them if you wanted to. But not the snakes and turtles. They would slide off in the water. The ridge our cavern was in was full of them. We could have had pets enough if we wanted them. One night we catched a little section of a lumber raft, nice pine planks. It was twelve foot wide and about fifteen or sixteen foot long, and the top stood above water six or seven inches, a solid level floor. We could see saw-logs go by in the daylight sometimes, but we let them go. We didn't show ourselves in daylight. Another night, when we was up at the head of the island, just before daylight, there comes a frame-house down on the west side. She was a two-storey and tilted over considerable. We paddled out and got aboard, clum in at an upstairs window. But it was too dark to see yet, so we made the canoe fast and sat in her to wait for daylight. The light begun to come before we got to the foot of the island. Then we looked in at the window. We could make out a bed and a table and two old chairs and lots of things around about on the floor, and there was clothes hanging against the wall. There was something laying on the floor in the far corner that looked like a man. So Jim says, �Hello, you!� But it didn't budge. So I hollered again, then Jim says, �The man ain't asleep. He's dead. You hold still. I'll go and see.� He went and bent down and looked and says, �It's a dead man. Yes indeedy. Naked too. He's been shot in the back. I reckon he's been dead two or three days. Come in, Huck, but don't look at his face. It's too gashily.� I didn't look at him at all. Jim throwed some old rags over him, but he needn't done it. I didn't want to see him. There was heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the floor and old whiskey bottles, and a couple of masks made out of black cloth, and all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures made with charcoal. There was two old dirty calico dresses and a sun bonnet and some women's underclothes hanging against the wall, and some men's clothing too. We put the lot into the canoe. It might come good. There was a boy's old speckled straw hat on the floor. I took that, too. And there was a bottle that had milk in it, and it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would have took the bottle, but it was broke. There was a seedy old chest and an old hair-trunk with the hinges broke. They stood open, but there weren't nothing left in them that was any count. The way things were scattered about we reckoned the people left in a hurry, and weren't fixed so as to carry off most of their stuff. We got an old tin lantern and a butcher knife without any handle, and a brand new barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed quilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fish-line as thick as my little finger with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin and a leather dog-collar and a horseshoe, and some vials of medicine that didn't have no label on them. And just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb, and, Jim, he found a ratty old fiddle-bow and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of it, but, barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find the other one, though we hunted all around. And so, take it all round, we made a good haul. When we was ready to shove off, we was a quarter of a mile below the island, and it was a pretty broad day, so I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with a quilt, because if he set up, people could tell he was a nigger a good way's off. I paddled over to the Illinois shore, and drifted down most a half-mile doing it. I crept up the dead water under the bank, and had no accidents and didn't see nobody. We got home all safe. END OF CHAPTER X After breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess out how he came to be killed, but Jim didn't want to. He said it would fetch bad luck, and besides he said he might come and hunt us. He said a man that weren't buried was more likely to go hunting around than one that was planted and comfortable. That sounded pretty reasonable, so I didn't say no more. But I couldn't keep from studying over it and wishing I knowed who shot the man and what they'd done it for. We rummaged the clothes we'd got, and found eight dollars in silver sewed up in the lining of an old blanket overcoat. Jim said he reckoned the people in that house stole the coat, because if they had to know the money was there they wouldn't have left it. I said I reckon they killed him too, but Jim didn't want to talk about that. I was. Now you think it's bad luck, but what did you say when I fetched in the snakeskin that I found on the top of the ridge day before yesterday? You said it was the worst bad luck in the world to touch a snakeskin with my hands. Well, here's your bad luck. We've raked in all this truck and eight dollars besides. I wish we could have some bad luck like this every day, Jim. Never you mind, hon, never you mind. Don't you get too brute. It's a common. Mind I tell you it's a common. It did come, too. It was a Tuesday that we had that talk. Well, after dinner Friday we was laying around in the grass at the upper end of the ridge and got out of tobacco. I went to the cavern to get some, and found a rattlesnake in there. I killed him and curled him up on the foot of Jim's blanket, ever so natural, thinking there'd be some fun when Jim found him there. Well, by night I forgot all about the snake, and when Jim flung himself down on the blanket while I struck a light, the snake's mate was there and bit him. He jumped up yelling, and the first thing the light showed was the varmint curled up and ready for another spring. I laid him out in the second with a stick, and Jim grabbed Pap's whiskey jug and begun to pour it down. He was barefooted, and the snake bit him right on the heel. That all comes with my being such a fool as to not remember that whenever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it. Jim told me to chop off the snake's head and throw it away, and then skin the body and roast a piece of it. I'd done it, and he ate it and said it would help cure him. He made me take off the rattles and tie them around his wrists, too. He said that that would help. Then I slid out quiet and I throwed the snake's clear way amongst the bushes, for I weren't going to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it. Jim sucked and sucked at the jug, and now and then he got out of his head and pitched around and yelled, but every time he come to himself he went to suckin' at the jug again. His foot swelled up pretty big, and so did his leg. But by and by the drunk began to come, and so I judged he was all right. But I'd rather been spit with a snake than, perhaps, whiskey. Jim was laid up for four days and nights, then the swelling was all gone and he was around again. I made up my mind I wouldn't ever take a hold of a snake-skin again with my hands, now that I'd seen what had come of it. Jim said he reckoned I would believe him next time, and he said that handling a snake-skin was such awful bad luck that maybe we hadn't got to the end of it yet. He said he'd rather see the new moon over his left shoulder as much as a thousand times and take up a snake-skin in his hand. Well, I was gettin' to feel that way myself, though I've always reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left shoulder is one of the carelessest and foolishest thing a body can do. Old Hank Bunker'd done it once and bragged about it, and in less than two years he got drunk, fell off of the shop-tower, and spread himself out so that he was just kind of a layer, as you may say, and they slid him edgewise between two barn doors for a coffin and buried him so they say, but I didn't see it. Papp told me. But anyway, it all come of lookin' at the moon that way, like a fool. Well, the days went along and the river went down between its banks again, and about the first thing we'd done was to bait one of the big hooks with a skinned rabbit and set it and catch a catfish that was as big as a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over two hundred pounds. We couldn't handle him, of course. He would've flung us into Illinois. We just sat there and watched him rip and tear around till he drowned. We found a brass button in his stomach, and a round ball, and lots of rubbish. We split the ball open with a hatchet, and there was a spool in it. Jim said he'd had it there a long time to coat it over so, and make a ball of it. It was as big a fish as it was ever catched in the Mississippi, I reckon. Jim said he hadn't ever seen a bigger one. He would've been worth a good deal over at the village. They peddle out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-house there. Everybody buys some of them. His meats is white as snow and makes a good fry. Next morning I said I was gettin' slow and dull, and I wanted to get a stirring up some way. I said I reckoned I would slip over the river and find out what was goin' on. Jim liked that notion, and he said I must go in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied it over and said, couldn't I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl? That was a good notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico gowns, and I turned up my trouser legs to my knees and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with the hooks, and it was a fair fit. I put on a sun-bonnet and tied it under my chin, and then for a body to look in and see my face was like lookin' down a joint of a stove-pipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even in the day-time hardly. I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by and by I could do pretty well in them. Only Jim said I didn't walk like a girl. And he said I must quit pullin' up my gown to get at my britch's pocket. I took notice and done better. I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark. I started across to the town from a little below the ferry landing, and the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town. I tied up and started along the bank. There was a light burning in a little shanty that hadn't been lived in for a long time, and I wondered who had took up quarters there. I slipped up and peeped in at the window. There was a woman about forty years old in there knitting by a candle that was on a pine-table. I didn't know her face. She was a stranger. For you couldn't start a face in that town that I didn't know. Now, this was lucky, because I was weakening. I was getting afraid I'd come. People might know my voice and find me out. But if this woman had been in such a little town two days, she could tell me all I wanted to know. So I knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn't forget I was a girl.