Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Making those pens was a distressingly tough job, and so was the saw; and Jim figured the inscription was going to be the toughest of all. That’s the one that the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall. But he had to have it; Tom said he had to; there was no case of a state prisoner not scrabbling his inscription and his coat of arms to leave behind.

“Look at Lady Jane Grey,” he said; “look at Gilford Dudley; look at old Northumberland! Why, Huck, suppose it is considerable trouble? What are you going to do? How are you going to get around it? Jim has to do his inscription and coat of arms. They all do.”

Jim said:

“Why, Master Tom, I don’t have a coat of arms; I don’t have anything but this old shirt, and you know I have to keep the journal on that.”

“Oh, you don’t understand, Jim; a coat of arms is very different.”

“Well,” I said, “Jim’s right, anyway, when he says he doesn’t have a coat of arms, because he doesn’t.”

“I reckon I knew that,” Tom said, “but you bet he’ll have one before he goes out of this—because he’s going out right, and there aren’t going to be any flaws in his record.”

So while Jim and I filed away at the pens on a brickbat apiece, Jim making his out of the brass and I making mine out of the spoon, Tom set to work to think out the coat of arms. By and by he said he had struck so many good ones that he hardly knew which to take, but there was one that he reckoned he would decide on. He said:

“On the scutcheon we’ll have a bend or in the dexter base, a saltire murrey in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and under his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron vert in a chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field azure, with the nombril points rampant on a dancette indented; crest, a runaway enslaved man, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a couple of gules for supporters, which are you and me; motto, Maggiore fretta, minore atto. I got it out of a book—it means the more haste, the less speed.”

“Gee whillikins,” I said, “but what does the rest of it mean?”

“We don’t have time to bother over that,” he said; “we have to dig in like all get-out.”

“Well, anyway,” I said, “what’s some of it? What’s a fess?”

“A fess—a fess is—you don’t need to know what a fess is. I’ll show him how to make it when he gets to it.”

“Shucks, Tom,” I said, “I think you might tell a person. What’s a bar sinister?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But he has to have it. All the nobility does.”

That was just his way. If it didn’t suit him to explain a thing to you, he wouldn’t do it. You might pump at him for a week, and it wouldn’t make any difference.

He had all that coat of arms business fixed, so now he started in to finish up the rest of that part of the work, which was to plan out a mournful inscription—he said Jim had to have one, like they all did. He made up a lot, and wrote them out on a piece of paper, and read them off, like this:

1. Here a captive heart busted.

2. Here a poor prisoner, forsaken by the world and friends, fretted out his sorrowful life.

3. Here a lonely heart broke, and a worn spirit went to its rest, after thirty-seven years of solitary captivity.

4. Here, homeless and friendless, after thirty-seven years of bitter captivity, perished a noble stranger, natural son of Louis XIV.

Tom’s voice trembled while he was reading them, and he almost broke down. When he was done he couldn’t possibly make up his mind which one for Jim to scrabble onto the wall—they were all so good; but at last he decided he would let him scrabble them all on. Jim said it would take him a year to scrabble such a lot of truck onto the logs with a nail, and he didn’t know how to make letters, besides; but Tom said he would block them out for him, and then he wouldn’t have anything to do but just follow the lines. Then pretty soon he said:

“Come to think of it, the logs aren’t going to do; they don’t have log walls in a dungeon: we have to dig the inscriptions into a rock. We’ll fetch a rock.”

Jim said the rock was worse than the logs; he said it would take him such a blamed long time to dig them into a rock that he would never get out. But Tom said he would let me help him do it. Then he took a look to see how Jim and I were getting along with the pens. It was mighty pesky, tedious, hard work, and slow, and it gave my hands no chance to recover from the sores, and we hardly seemed to make any headway; so Tom said:

“I know how to fix it. We have to have a rock for the coat of arms and the mournful inscriptions, and we can kill two birds with that same rock. There’s a grand big grindstone down at the mill, and we’ll swipe it, and carve the things on it, and file out the pens and the saw on it, too.”

It was no slouch of an idea; and it was no slouch of a grindstone, either; but we agreed we would tackle it. It wasn’t quite midnight yet, so we cleared out for the mill, leaving Jim at work. We swiped the grindstone, and set out to roll her home, but it was an awfully tough job. Sometimes, no matter what we did, we couldn’t keep her from falling over, and she came mighty near mashing us every time. Tom said she was going to get one of us, for sure, before we got through. We got her halfway; and then we were completely played out, and almost drowned in sweat. We saw it was no use; we had to go and fetch Jim. So he raised up his bed and slid the chain off the bed leg, and wrapped it round and round his neck, and we crawled out through our hole and down there, and Jim and I laid into that grindstone and walked her along as if it were nothing; and Tom superintended. He could out-superintend any boy I ever saw. He knew how to do everything.

Our hole was pretty big, but it wasn’t big enough to get the grindstone through; but Jim took the pick and soon made it big enough. Then Tom marked out those things on it with the nail, and set Jim to work on them, with the nail for a chisel and an iron bolt from the rubbish in the lean-to for a hammer, and told him to work until the rest of his candle quit on him, and then he could go to bed, and hide the grindstone under his straw tick and sleep on it. Then we helped him fix his chain back on the bed leg, and were ready for bed ourselves. But Tom thought of something, and said:

“Do you have any spiders in here, Jim?”

“No, sir, thank goodness I don’t, Master Tom.”

“All right, we’ll get you some.”

“But bless you, honey, I don’t want any. I’m afraid of them. I’d just as soon have rattlesnakes around.”

Tom thought a minute or two, and said:

“It’s a good idea. And I reckon it’s been done. It must have been done; it stands to reason. Yes, it’s a prime good idea. Where could you keep it?”

“Keep what, Master Tom?”

“Why, a rattlesnake.”

“Goodness gracious alive, Master Tom! Why, if a rattlesnake were to come in here, I’d bust right out through that log wall, I would, with my head.”

“Why, Jim, you wouldn’t be afraid of it after a little. You could tame it.”

“Tame it!”

“Yes—easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and wouldn’t think of hurting a person who pets it. Any book will tell you that. You try—that’s all I ask; just try for two or three days. Why, you can get him so, in a little while, that he’ll love you; and sleep with you; and won’t stay away from you a minute; and will let you wrap him around your neck and put his head in your mouth.”

“Please, Master Tom—don’t talk like that! I can’t stand it! He’d let me shove his head in my mouth—as a favor, wouldn’t he? I bet he’d wait a mighty long time before I asked him. And more than that, I don’t want him to sleep with me.”

“Jim, don’t act so foolish. A prisoner has to have some kind of a silent pet, and if a rattlesnake hasn’t ever been tried, why, there’s more glory to be gained in your being the first to ever try it than in any other way you could ever think of to save your life.”

“Why, Master Tom, I don’t want any such glory. If a snake bites Jim’s chin off, then where is the glory? No, sir, I don’t want any such doings.”

“Blame it, can’t you try? I only want you to try—you don’t need to keep it up if it doesn’t work.”

“But the trouble is all over if the snake bites me while I’m trying him. Master Tom, I’m willing to tackle almost anything that isn’t unreasonable, but if you and Huck fetch a rattlesnake in here for me to tame, I’m going to leave, that’s for sure.”

“Well, then, let it go, let it go, if you’re so bullheaded about it. We can get you some garter snakes, and you can tie some buttons on their tails, and let on they’re rattlesnakes, and I reckon that’ll have to do.”

“I can stand them, Master Tom, but I’ll be blamed if I couldn’t get along without them, I tell you that. I never knew before that it was so much bother and trouble to be a prisoner.”

“Well, it always is when it’s done right. Do you have any rats around here?”

“No, sir, I haven’t seen any.”

“Well, we’ll get you some rats.”

“Why, Master Tom, I don’t want any rats. They’re the dad-blamedest creatures I ever saw to disturb a person, and rustle around over him, and bite his feet, when he’s trying to sleep. No, sir, give me garter snakes, if I have to have them, but don’t give me any rats; I have scarcely any use for them.”

“But, Jim, you have to have them—they all do. So don’t make any more fuss about it. Prisoners are never without rats. There is no instance of it. And they train them, and pet them, and teach them tricks, and they get to be as sociable as flies. But you have to play music to them. Do you have anything to play music on?”

“I don’t have anything but a coarse comb and a piece of paper, and a jaw harp; but I reckon they wouldn’t take any stock in a jaw harp.”

“Yes, they would. They don’t care what kind of music it is. A jaw harp is plenty good enough for a rat. All animals like music—in a prison they dote on it. Especially painful music; and you can’t get any other kind out of a jaw harp. It always interests them; they come out to see what’s the matter with you. Yes, you’re all right; you’re fixed very well. You want to sit on your bed at night before you go to sleep, and early in the morning, and play your jaw harp; play ‘The Last Link is Broken’—that’s the thing that’ll scoop a rat quicker than anything else; and when you’ve played about two minutes you’ll see all the rats, and the snakes, and spiders, and things begin to feel worried about you, and come. And they’ll just fairly swarm over you, and have a grand time.”

“Yes, they will, I reckon, Master Tom, but what kind of time is Jim having? I’ll be blessed if I can see the point. But I’ll do it if I have to. I reckon I’d better keep the animals satisfied, and not have any trouble in the house.”

Tom waited to think it over, and see if there was anything else; and pretty soon he said:

“Oh, there’s one thing I forgot. Could you raise a flower here, do you reckon?”

“I don’t know, but maybe I could, Master Tom; but it’s tolerably dark in here, and I don’t have any use for a flower, anyhow, and it would be a mighty lot of trouble.”

“Well, you try it, anyway. Some other prisoners have done it.”

“One of those big cattail-looking mullein stalks would grow in here, Master Tom, I reckon, but it wouldn’t be worth half the trouble it would cost.”

“Don’t you believe it. We’ll fetch you a little one and you plant it in the corner over there, and raise it. And don’t call it mullein; call it Pitchiola—that’s its right name when it’s in a prison. And you want to water it with your tears.”

“Why, I have plenty of spring water, Master Tom.”

“You don’t want spring water; you want to water it with your tears. It’s the way they always do.”

“Why, Master Tom, I bet I can raise one of those mullein stalks twice with spring water while another man is starting one with tears.”

“That isn’t the idea. You have to do it with tears.”

“It will die on my hands, Master Tom, it surely will; because I hardly ever cry.”

So Tom was stumped. But he studied it over, and then said Jim would have to worry along the best he could with an onion. He promised he would go to the enslaved people’s cabins and drop one, privately, in Jim’s coffeepot in the morning. Jim said he would “just as soon have tobacco in his coffee,” and he found so much fault with it—and with the work and bother of raising the mullein, and playing the jaw harp to the rats, and petting and flattering up the snakes and spiders and things, on top of all the other work he had to do on pens, and inscriptions, and journals, and things, which made it more trouble and worry and responsibility to be a prisoner than anything he had ever undertaken—that Tom almost lost all patience with him; and said he was just loaded down with more splendid chances than a prisoner ever had in the world to make a name for himself, and yet he didn’t know enough to appreciate them, and they were just about wasted on him. So Jim was sorry, and said he wouldn’t behave so anymore, and then Tom and I shoved for bed.