Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

As soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night, we went down the lightning rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of foxfire, and went to work. We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five feet along the middle of the bottom log. Tom said he was right behind Jim’s bed now, and we would dig in under it, and when we got through, nobody in the cabin could ever know there was any hole there, because Jim’s bedspread hung down almost to the ground, and you would have to raise it up and look under to see the hole. So we dug and dug with the case knives until almost midnight; and then we were dog-tired, and our hands were blistered, and yet you could hardly see that we had done anything. At last I said:

“This isn’t a thirty-seven-year job; this is a thirty-eight-year job, Tom Sawyer.”

He didn’t say anything. But he sighed, and pretty soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little while I knew that he was thinking. Then he said:

“It’s no use, Huck; it isn’t going to work. If we were prisoners it would, because then we’d have as many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we wouldn’t get more than a few minutes to dig, every day, while they were changing watches, and so our hands wouldn’t get blistered, and we could keep it up right along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the way it ought to be done. But we can’t fool along; we have to rush; we don’t have any time to spare. If we were to put in another night this way, we’d have to knock off for a week to let our hands get well—we couldn’t touch a case knife with them sooner.”

“Well, then, what are we going to do, Tom?”

“I’ll tell you. It isn’t right, and it isn’t moral, and I wouldn’t like it to get out; but there’s only the one way: we have to dig him out with the picks, and let on it’s case knives.”

“Now you’re talking!” I said; “your head gets leveler and leveler all the time, Tom Sawyer,” I said. “Picks are the thing, moral or no moral; and as for me, I don’t care shucks for the morality of it, anyhow. When I start in to steal an enslaved man, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school book, I’m not particular how it’s done as long as it’s done. What I want is my enslaved man; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday-school book; and if a pick’s the handiest thing, that’s the thing I’m going to dig that enslaved man or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don’t give a dead rat what the authorities think about it either.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s excuse for picks and letting on in a case like this; if it weren’t so, I wouldn’t approve of it, and I wouldn’t stand by and see the rules broken—because right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a person has no business doing wrong when he isn’t ignorant and knows better. It might do for you to dig Jim out with a pick, without any letting on, because you don’t know any better; but it wouldn’t for me, because I do know better. Give me a case knife.”

He had his own by him, but I handed him mine. He flung it down, and said:

“Give me a case knife.”

I didn’t know just what to do—but then I thought. I scratched around among the old tools, and got a pickax and gave it to him, and he took it and went to work, and never said a word.

He was always just that particular. Full of principle.

So then I got a shovel, and then we picked and shoveled, turn about, and made the fur fly. We stuck to it about half an hour, which was as long as we could stand up; but we had quite a hole to show for it. When I got upstairs I looked out the window and saw Tom doing his level best with the lightning rod, but he couldn’t manage it; his hands were so sore. At last he said:

“It’s no use; it can’t be done. What do you reckon I’d better do? Can’t you think of any way?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I reckon it isn’t regular. Come up the stairs, and let on it’s a lightning rod.”

So he did it.

The next day Tom stole a pewter spoon and a brass candlestick in the house, to make some pens for Jim out of, and six tallow candles; and I hung around the enslaved people’s cabins and watched for a chance, and stole three tin plates. Tom said it wasn’t enough; but I said nobody would ever see the plates that Jim threw out, because they would fall in the dog fennel and jimsonweed under the window hole—then we could tote them back and he could use them over again. So Tom was satisfied. Then he said:

“Now, the thing to study out is how to get the things to Jim.”

“Take them in through the hole,” I said, “when we get it done.”

He only just looked scornful, and said something about nobody ever having heard of such an idiotic idea, and then he went to studying. By and by he said he had figured out two or three ways, but there was no need to decide on any of them yet. He said we had to post Jim first.

That night we went down the lightning rod a little after ten, and took one of the candles along, and listened under the window hole, and heard Jim snoring; so we pitched it in, and it didn’t wake him. Then we whirled in with the pick and shovel, and in about two hours and a half the job was done. We crept in under Jim’s bed and into the cabin, and pawed around and found the candle and lit it, and stood over Jim awhile, and found him looking hearty and healthy, and then we woke him up gently and gradually. He was so glad to see us that he almost cried; and he called us honey, and all the pet names he could think of; and he wanted us to hunt up a cold chisel to cut the chain off his leg right away and clear out without losing any time. But Tom showed him how irregular that would be, and sat down and told him all about our plans, and how we could alter them in a minute any time there was an alarm; and told him not to be the least bit afraid, because we would see that he got away, for sure. So Jim said it was all right, and we sat there and talked over old times awhile, and then Tom asked a lot of questions, and when Jim told him that Uncle Silas came in every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt Sally came in to see if he was comfortable and had plenty to eat, and both of them were as kind as they could be, Tom said:

“Now I know how to fix it. We’ll send you some things by them.”

I said, “Don’t do anything of the kind; it’s one of the most foolish ideas I ever struck”; but he never paid any attention to me; he went right on. It was his way when he had his plans set.

So he told Jim how we would have to smuggle in the rope-ladder pie and other large things by Nat, the enslaved man who fed him, and that he must be on the lookout, and not be surprised, and not let Nat see him open them; and that we would put small things in our uncle’s coat pockets and he must steal them out; and that we would tie things to our aunt’s apron strings or put them in her apron pocket, if we got a chance; and he told him what they would be and what they were for. And he told him how to keep a journal on the shirt with his blood, and all that. He told him everything. Jim couldn’t see any sense in most of it, but he reckoned we were white folks and knew better than he did; so he was satisfied, and said he would do it all just as Tom said.

Jim had plenty of corncob pipes and tobacco; so we had a downright good, sociable time; then we crawled out through the hole, and so home to bed, with hands that looked as if they had been chewed. Tom was in high spirits. He said it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the most intellectual; and he said if he could only see his way to it, we would keep it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to get out; for he believed Jim would come to like it better and better the more he got used to it. He said that in that way it could be strung out to as much as eighty years, and would be the best time on record. And he said it would make all of us celebrated who had a hand in it.

In the morning we went out to the woodpile and chopped up the brass candlestick into handy sizes, and Tom put them and the pewter spoon in his pocket. Then we went to the enslaved people’s cabins, and while I drew Nat’s attention away, Tom shoved a piece of candlestick into the middle of a corn pone that was in Jim’s pan, and we went along with Nat to see how it would work, and it worked splendidly; when Jim bit into it, it almost mashed all his teeth out; and nothing could have worked better. Tom said so himself. Jim never let on that it was anything but a piece of rock or something like that that is always getting into bread, you know; but after that he never bit into anything without first jabbing his fork into it in three or four places.

And while we were standing there in the dimmish light, here came a couple of the hounds bulging in from under Jim’s bed; and they kept on piling in until there were eleven of them, and there was hardly room in there to get your breath. By jingo, we had forgotten to fasten that lean-to door! The enslaved man Nat only just hollered “Witches” once, and keeled over onto the floor among the dogs, and began to groan as if he were dying. Tom jerked the door open and flung out a slab of Jim’s meat, and the dogs went for it, and in two seconds he was out himself and back again and had shut the door, and I knew he had fixed the other door too. Then he went to work on the enslaved man, coaxing him and petting him, and asking him if he had been imagining he saw something again. He raised up, and blinked his eyes around, and said:

“Master Sid, you’ll say I’m a fool, but if I didn’t believe I saw almost a million dogs, or devils, or something, I hope I may die right here in these tracks. I did, most surely. Master Sid, I felt them—I felt them, sir; they were all over me. Dad fetch it, I just wish I could get my hands on one of those witches just once—only just once—that’s all I’d ask. But mostly I wish they’d leave me alone, I do.”

Tom said:

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think. What makes them come here just at this runaway enslaved man’s breakfast time? It’s because they’re hungry; that’s the reason. You make them a witch pie; that’s the thing for you to do.”

“But my land, Master Sid, how am I going to make them a witch pie? I don’t know how to make it. I haven’t ever heard of such a thing before.”

“Well, then, I’ll have to make it myself.”

“Will you do it, honey?—will you? I’ll worship the ground under your foot, I will!”

“All right, I’ll do it, seeing it’s you, and you’ve been good to us and showed us the runaway enslaved man. But you have to be mighty careful. When we come around, you turn your back; and then whatever we’ve put in the pan, don’t you let on you see it at all. And don’t you look when Jim unloads the pan—something might happen, I don’t know what. And above all, don’t you handle the witch things.”

“Handle them, Master Sid? What are you talking about? I wouldn’t lay the weight of my finger on them, not for ten hundred thousand billion dollars, I wouldn’t.”