The Portable Mark Twain (65 page)

Somebody says:

“Well, it sounds very good, doctor, I'm obleeged to say.”

Then the others softened up a little, too, and I was mighty thankful to that old doctor for doing Jim that good turn; and I was glad it was according to my judgment of him, too; because I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man, the first time I see him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right out and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.

Then they come and locked him up. I hoped they was going to say he could have one or two of the chains took off, because they was rotten heavy, or could have meat and greens with his bread and water, but they didn't think of it, and I reckoned it warn't best for me to mix in, but I judged I'd get the doctor's yarn to Aunt Sally, somehow or other, as soon as I'd got through the breakers that was laying just ahead of me. Explanations, I mean, of how I forgot to mention about Sid being shot, when I was telling how him and me put in that dratted night paddling around hunting the runaway nigger.

But I had plenty time. Aunt Sally she stuck to the sick-room all day and all night; and every time I see Uncle Silas mooning around, I dodged him.

Next morning I heard Tom was a good deal better, and they said Aunt Sally was gone to get a nap. So I slips to the sick-room, and if I found him awake I reckoned we could put up a yarn for the family that would wash. But he was sleeping, and sleeping very peaceful, too; and pale, not fire-faced the way he was when he come. So I set down and laid for him to wake. In about a half an hour, Aunt Sally comes gliding in, and there I was, up a stump again! She motioned me to be still, and set down by me and begun to whisper, and said we could all be joyful now, because all the symptoms was first rate, and he'd been sleeping like that for ever so long, and looking better and peace-fuller all the time, and ten to one he'd wake up in his right mind.

So we set there watching, and by-and-by he stirs a bit, and opened his eyes very natural, and takes a look, and says:

“Hello, why I'm at
home!
How's that? Where's the raft?”

“It's all right,” I says.

“And
Jim?”

“The same,” I says, but couldn't say it pretty brash. But he never noticed, but says:

“Good! Splendid!
Now
we're all right and safe! Did you tell Aunty?”

I was going to say yes; but she chipped in and says:

“About what, Sid?”

“Why, about the way the whole thing was done.”

“What whole thing?”

“Why,
the
whole thing. There ain't but one; how we set the runaway nigger free—me and Tom.”

“Good land! Set the run—What
is
the child talking about! Dear, dear, out of his head again!”

“
No,
I ain't out of my HEAD; I know all what I'm talking about. We
did
set him free—me and Tom. We laid out to do it, and we
done
it. And we done it elegant, too.” He'd got a start, and she never checked him up, just set and stared and stared, and let him clip along, and I see it warn't no use for
me
to put in. “Why, Aunty, it cost us a power of work—weeks of it—hours and hours, every night, whilst you was all asleep. And we had to steal candles, and the sheet, and the shirt, and your dress, and spoons, and tin plates, and case-knives, and the warming-pan, and the grindstone, and flour, and just no end of things, and you can't think what work it was to make the saws, and pens, and inscriptions, and one thing or another, and you can't think
half
the fun it was. And we had to make up the pictures of coffins and things, and nonnamous letters from the robbers, and get up and down the lightning-rod, and dig the hole into the cabin, and make the rope-ladder and send it in cooked up in a pie, and send in spoons and things to work with, in your apron pocket”—

“Mercy sakes!”

—“and load up the cabin with rats and snakes and so on, for company for Jim; and then you kept Tom here so long with the butter in his hat that you come near spiling the whole business, because the men come before we was out of the cabin, and we had to rush, and they heard us and let drive at us, and I got my share, and we dodged out of the path and let them go by, and when the dogs come they warn't interested in us, but went for the most noise, and we got our canoe, and made for the raft, and was all safe, and Jim was a free man, and we done it all by ourselves, and
wasn't
it bully, Aunty!”

“Well, I never heard the likes of it all in my born days! So it was
you,
you little rapscallions, that's been making all this trouble, and turned everybody's wits clean inside out and scared us all most to death. I've as good a notion as ever I had in my life, to take it out o' you this very minute. To think, here I've been, night after night, a—
you
just get well once, you young scamp, and I lay I'll tan the Old Harry out o' both o' ye!”

But Tom, he
was
so proud and joyful, he just
couldn't
hold in, and his tongue just
went
it—she a-chipping in, and spitting fire all along, and both of them going it at once, like a cat-convention; and she says:

“
Well,
you get all the enjoyment you can out of it
now,
for mind I tell you if I catch you meddling with him again—”

“Meddling with
who?
” Tom says, dropping his smile and looking surprised.

“With
who?
Why, the runaway nigger, of course. Who'd you reckon?”

Tom looks at me very grave, and says:

“Tom, didn't you just tell me he was all right? Hasn't he got away?”

“
Him?
” says Aunt Sally; “the runaway nigger? 'Deed he hasn't. They've got him back, safe and sound, and he's in that cabin again, on bread and water, and loaded down with chains, till he's claimed or sold!”

Tom rose square up in bed, with his eye hot, and his nostrils opening and shutting like gills, and sings out to me:

“They hain't no
right
to shut him up!
Shove!
—and don't you lose a minute. Turn him loose! he ain't no slave; he's as free as any cretur that walks this earth!”

“What
does
the child mean?”

“I mean every word I
say,
Aunt Sally, and if somebody don't go,
I
'll go. I've knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him down the river, and
said
so; and she set him free in her will.”

“Then what on earth did
you
want to set him free for, seeing he was already free?”

“Well that
is
a question, I must say; and
just
like women! Why, I wanted the
adventure
of it; and I'd a waded neck-deep in blood too—goodness alive, AUNT POLLY!”

If she warn't standing right there, just inside the door, looking as sweet and contented as an angel half-full of pie, I wish I may never!

Aunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the head off of her, and cried over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed, for it was getting pretty sultry for
us,
seemed to me. And I peeped out, and in a little while Tom's Aunt Polly shook herself loose and stood there looking across at Tom over her spectacles—kind of grinding him into the earth, you know. And then she says:

“Yes, you
better
turn y'r head away—I would if I was you, Tom.”

“Oh, deary me!” says Aunt Sally; “
is
he changed so? Why, that ain't
Tom
it's Sid; Tom's—Tom's—why, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago.”

“You mean where's Huck
Finn
—that's what you mean! I reckon I hain't raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years, not to know him when I
see
him. That
would
be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from under that bed, Huck Finn.”

So I done it. But not feeling brash.

Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest looking persons I ever see; except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in, and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn't know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer-meeting sermon that night that give him a rattling reputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn't a understood it. So Tom's Aunt Polly, she told all about who I was, and what; and I had to up and tell how I was in such a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyer—she chipped in and says, Oh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I'm used to it, now, and tain't no need to change—that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom Sawyer, I had to stand it—there warn't no other way, and I knowed he wouldn't mind, because it would be nuts for him, being a mystery, and he'd make an adventure out of it and be perfectly satisfied. And so it turned out, and he let on to be Sid, and made things as soft as he could for me.

And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I couldn't ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he
could
help a body set a nigger free, with his bringing-up.

Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and
Sid
had come, all right and safe, she says to herself:

Look at that now! I might have expected it, letting him go off that way without anybody to watch him. So now I got to go and trapse all the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that creetur's up to,
this
time; as long as I couldn't seem to get any answer out of you about it.”

“Why, I never heard nothing from you,” says Aunt Sally.

“Well, I wonder! Why, I wrote to you twice, to ask you what you could mean by Sid being here.”

“Well, I never got em, Sis.”

Aunt Polly, she turns around slow and severe, and says:

“You, Tom!”

“Well—
what?
” he says, kind of pettish.

“Don't you what
me,
you impudent thing—hand out them letters.”

“What letters?”

“
Them
letters. I be bound, if I have to take aholt of you I'll—”

“They're in the trunk. There, now. And they're just the same as they was when I got them out of the office. I hain't looked into them, I hain't touched them. But I knowed they'd make trouble, and I thought if you warn't in no hurry, I'd—”

“Well, you
do
need skinning, there ain't no mistake about it. And I wrote another one to tell you I was coming; and I spose he—”

“No, it come yesterday; I hain't read it yet, but
it's
all right, I've got that one.”

I wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn't, but I reckoned maybe it was just as safe not to. So I never said nothing.

The first time I catched Tom, private, I asked him what was his idea, time of the evasion?—what it was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before? And he said, what he had planned in his head, from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river, on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and a brass band, and then he would be a hero, and so would we. But I reckened it was about as well the way it was.

We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room; and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:

“
Dah,
now, Huck, what I tell you?—what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan'? I
tole
you I got a hairy breas', en what's de sign un it; en I
tole
you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich
agin;
en it's come true; en heah she
is! Dah,
now! doan' talk to
me
—signs is
signs,
mine I tell you; en I knowed jis' 's well 'at I 'uz gwineter be rich agin as I's a stannin' heah dis minute!”

And then Tom he talked along, and talked along, and says, le's all three slide out of here, one of these nights, and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain't got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn't get none from home, because it's likely pap's been back before now, and got it all away from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.

“No he hain't,” Tom says; “it's all there, yet—six thousand dollars and more; and your pap hain't ever been back since. Hadn't when I come away, anyhow.”

Jim says, kind of solemn:

“He ain't a comin' back no mo', Huck.”

I says:

“Why, Jim?”

“Nemmine why, Huck—but he ain't comin' back no mo'.”

But I kept at him; so at last he says: