The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - 16

down the river. We was down south in the warm weather now, and a
mighty long ways from home. We begun to come to trees with Spanish
moss on them, hanging down from the limbs like long, gray beards. It
was the first I ever see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn and
dismal. So now the frauds reckoned they was out of danger, and they
begun to work the villages again.

First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn’t make enough
for them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started
a dancing-school; but they didn’t know no more how to dance than a
kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in
and pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at
yellocution; but they didn’t yellocute long till the audience got up
and give them a solid good cussing, and made them skip out. They
tackled missionarying, and mesmerizing, and doctoring, and telling
fortunes, and a little of everything; but they couldn’t seem to have
no luck. So at last they got just about dead broke, and laid around
the raft as she floated along, thinking and thinking, and never saying
nothing, by the half a day at a time, and dreadful blue and desperate.

And at last they took a change and begun to lay their heads together in
the wigwam and talk low and confidential two or three hours at a time. Jim
and me got uneasy. We didn’t like the look of it. We
judged they was studying up some kind of worse deviltry than ever. We
turned it over and over, and at last we made up our minds they was going
to break into somebody’s house or store, or was going into the
counterfeit-money business, or something. So then we was pretty scared,
and made up an agreement that we wouldn’t have nothing in the world
to do with such actions, and if we ever got the least show we would give
them the cold shake and clear out and leave them behind. Well, early one
morning we hid the raft in a good, safe place about two mile below a
little bit of a shabby village named Pikesville, and the king he went
ashore and told us all to stay hid whilst he went up to town and smelt
around to see if anybody had got any wind of the Royal Nonesuch there yet.
(“House to rob, you mean,” says I to myself; “and
when you get through robbing it you’ll come back here and wonder
what has become of me and Jim and the raft—and you’ll have to
take it out in wondering.”) And he said if he warn’t back by
midday the duke and me would know it was all right, and we was to come
along.

So we stayed where we was. The duke he fretted and sweated around,
and was in a mighty sour way. He scolded us for everything, and we
couldn’t seem to do nothing right; he found fault with every little
thing. Something was a-brewing, sure. I was good and glad when
midday come and no king; we could have a change, anyway—and maybe a
chance for the change on top of it. So me and the duke went
up to the village, and hunted around there for the king, and by and by we
found him in the back room of a little low doggery, very tight, and a lot
of loafers bullyragging him for sport, and he a-cussing and a-threatening
with all his might, and so tight he couldn’t walk, and couldn’t
do nothing to them. The duke he begun to abuse him for an old fool,
and the king begun to sass back, and the minute they was fairly at it I
lit out and shook the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down the river
road like a deer, for I see our chance; and I made up my mind that it
would be a long day before they ever see me and Jim again. I got
down there all out of breath but loaded up with joy, and sung out:

“Set her loose, Jim! we’re all right now!”

But there warn’t no answer, and nobody come out of the wigwam.
Jim was gone! I set up a shout—and then another—and
then another one; and run this way and that in the woods, whooping and
screeching; but it warn’t no use—old Jim was gone. Then
I set down and cried; I couldn’t help it. But I couldn’t set
still long. Pretty soon I went out on the road, trying to think what
I better do, and I run across a boy walking, and asked him if he’d
seen a strange nigger dressed so and so, and he says:

“Yes.”

“Whereabouts?” says I.

“Down to Silas Phelps’ place, two mile below here. He’s
a runaway nigger, and they’ve got him. Was you looking for
him?”

“You bet I ain’t! I run across him in the woods about an
hour or two ago, and he said if I hollered he’d cut my livers out—and
told me to lay down and stay where I was; and I done it. Been there
ever since; afeard to come out.”

“Well,” he says, “you needn’t be afeard no more,
becuz they’ve got him. He run off f’m down South, som’ers.”

“It’s a good job they got him.”

“Well, I reckon! There’s two hunderd dollars
reward on him. It’s like picking up money out’n the
road.”

“Yes, it is—and I could a had it if I’d been big enough;
I see him first. Who nailed him?”

“It was an old fellow—a stranger—and he sold out his
chance in him for forty dollars, becuz he’s got to go up the river
and can’t wait. Think o’ that, now! You bet I’d
wait, if it was seven year.”

“That’s me, every time,” says I. "But maybe his
chance ain’t worth no more than that, if he’ll sell it so
cheap. Maybe there’s something ain’t straight about it.”

“But it is, though—straight as a string. I see
the handbill myself. It tells all about him, to a dot—paints
him like a picture, and tells the plantation he’s frum, below Newrleans.
No-sirree-bob, they ain’t no trouble ’bout that
speculation, you bet you. Say, gimme a chaw tobacker, won’t
ye?”

I didn’t have none, so he left. I went to the raft, and set
down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn’t come to nothing.
I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way
out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we’d
done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all
busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such
a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst
strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a
slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be
a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him
to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for
two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and
ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down
the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an
ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so
he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It
would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom;
and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready
to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way:
a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take
no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no
disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the
more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down
and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden
that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and
letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there
in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t
ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s
always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable
doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks
I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it
up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t
so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was
the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it
they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been
acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I
couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better.
So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why
wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from
Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they
wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it
was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double.
I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was
holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth
say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and
write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in
me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a
lie—I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what
to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the
letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing,
the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles
all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and
excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below
Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the
reward if you send.

Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt
so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do
it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking
how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost
and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking
over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in
the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and
we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I
couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only
the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n,
’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how
glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again
in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would
always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for
me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him
by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and
said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only
one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that
paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I
was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two
things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my
breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore
it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let
them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved
the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again,
which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t.
And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery
again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too;
because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole
hog.

Then I set to thinking over how to get at it, and turned over some
considerable many ways in my mind; and at last fixed up a plan that suited
me. So then I took the bearings of a woody island that was down the
river a piece, and as soon as it was fairly dark I crept out with my raft
and went for it, and hid it there, and then turned in. I slept the
night through, and got up before it was light, and had my breakfast, and
put on my store clothes, and tied up some others and one thing or another
in a bundle, and took the canoe and cleared for shore. I landed
below where I judged was Phelps’s place, and hid my bundle in the
woods, and then filled up the canoe with water, and loaded rocks into her
and sunk her where I could find her again when I wanted her, about a
quarter of a mile below a little steam sawmill that was on the bank.

Then I struck up the road, and when I passed the mill I see a sign on it,
“Phelps’s Sawmill,” and when I come to the farm-houses,
two or three hundred yards further along, I kept my eyes peeled, but didn’t
see nobody around, though it was good daylight now. But I didn’t
mind, because I didn’t want to see nobody just yet—I only
wanted to get the lay of the land. According to my plan, I was going to
turn up there from the village, not from below. So I just took a
look, and shoved along, straight for town. Well, the very first man I see
when I got there was the duke. He was sticking up a bill for the
Royal Nonesuch—three-night performance—like that other time.
They had the cheek, them frauds! I was right on him before I
could shirk. He looked astonished, and says:

“Hel-lo! Where’d you come from?”
Then he says, kind of glad and eager, “Where’s the raft?—got
her in a good place?”

I says:

“Why, that’s just what I was going to ask your grace.”

Then he didn’t look so joyful, and says:

“What was your idea for asking me?” he says.

“Well,” I says, “when I see the king in that doggery
yesterday I says to myself, we can’t get him home for hours, till he’s
soberer; so I went a-loafing around town to put in the time and wait.
A man up and offered me ten cents to help him pull a skiff over the
river and back to fetch a sheep, and so I went along; but when we was
dragging him to the boat, and the man left me a-holt of the rope and went
behind him to shove him along, he was too strong for me and jerked loose
and run, and we after him. We didn’t have no dog, and so we
had to chase him all over the country till we tired him out. We
never got him till dark; then we fetched him over, and I started down for
the raft. When I got there and see it was gone, I says to myself,
’They’ve got into trouble and had to leave; and they’ve
took my nigger, which is the only nigger I’ve got in the world, and
now I’m in a strange country, and ain’t got no property no
more, nor nothing, and no way to make my living;’ so I set down and
cried. I slept in the woods all night. But what did
become of the raft, then?—and Jim—poor Jim!”

“Blamed if I know—that is, what’s become of the raft.
That old fool had made a trade and got forty dollars, and when we
found him in the doggery the loafers had matched half-dollars with him and
got every cent but what he’d spent for whisky; and when I got him
home late last night and found the raft gone, we said, ‘That little
rascal has stole our raft and shook us, and run off down the river.’”

“I wouldn’t shake my nigger, would I?—the only
nigger I had in the world, and the only property.”

“We never thought of that. Fact is, I reckon we’d come
to consider him our nigger; yes, we did consider him so—goodness
knows we had trouble enough for him. So when we see the raft was
gone and we flat broke, there warn’t anything for it but to try the
Royal Nonesuch another shake. And I’ve pegged along ever since, dry
as a powder-horn. Where’s that ten cents? Give it here.”

I had considerable money, so I give him ten cents, but begged him to spend
it for something to eat, and give me some, because it was all the money I
had, and I hadn’t had nothing to eat since yesterday. He never
said nothing. The next minute he whirls on me and says:

“Do you reckon that nigger would blow on us? We’d skin
him if he done that!”

“How can he blow? Hain’t he run off?”

“No! That old fool sold him, and never divided with me, and
the money’s gone.”

“Sold him?” I says, and begun to cry; “why,
he was my nigger, and that was my money. Where is he?—I
want my nigger.”

“Well, you can’t get your nigger, that’s all—so
dry up your blubbering. Looky here—do you think you’d
venture to blow on us? Blamed if I think I’d trust you. Why,
if you was to blow on us—”

He stopped, but I never see the duke look so ugly out of his eyes before.
I went on a-whimpering, and says:

“I don’t want to blow on nobody; and I ain’t got no time
to blow, nohow. I got to turn out and find my nigger.”

He looked kinder bothered, and stood there with his bills fluttering on
his arm, thinking, and wrinkling up his forehead. At last he says:

“I’ll tell you something. We got to be here three days.
If you’ll promise you won’t blow, and won’t let
the nigger blow, I’ll tell you where to find him.”

So I promised, and he says:

“A farmer by the name of Silas Ph—” and then he stopped.
You see, he started to tell me the truth; but when he stopped that
way, and begun to study and think again, I reckoned he was changing his
mind. And so he was. He wouldn’t trust me; he wanted to make
sure of having me out of the way the whole three days. So pretty
soon he says:

“The man that bought him is named Abram Foster—Abram G. Foster—and
he lives forty mile back here in the country, on the road to Lafayette.”

“All right,” I says, “I can walk it in three days.
And I’ll start this very afternoon.”

“No you wont, you’ll start now; and don’t you
lose any time about it, neither, nor do any gabbling by the way. Just
keep a tight tongue in your head and move right along, and then you won’t
get into trouble with us, d’ye hear?”

That was the order I wanted, and that was the one I played for. I
wanted to be left free to work my plans.

“So clear out,” he says; “and you can tell Mr. Foster
whatever you want to. Maybe you can get him to believe that Jim is
your nigger—some idiots don’t require documents—leastways
I’ve heard there’s such down South here. And when you
tell him the handbill and the reward’s bogus, maybe he’ll
believe you when you explain to him what the idea was for getting ’em
out. Go ’long now, and tell him anything you want to; but mind
you don’t work your jaw any between here and there.”

So I left, and struck for the back country. I didn’t look
around, but I kinder felt like he was watching me. But I knowed I
could tire him out at that. I went straight out in the country as
much as a mile before I stopped; then I doubled back through the woods
towards Phelps’. I reckoned I better start in on my plan
straight off without fooling around, because I wanted to stop Jim’s
mouth till these fellows could get away. I didn’t want no
trouble with their kind. I’d seen all I wanted to of them, and
wanted to get entirely shut of them.

---

CHAPTER XXXII.

WHEN I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny;
the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint
dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and
like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and
quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s
spirits whispering—spirits that’s been dead ever so many years—and
you always think they’re talking about you. As a
general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with
it all.

Phelps’ was one of these little one-horse cotton plantations, and
they all look alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile
made out of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a
different length, to climb over the fence with, and for the women to stand
on when they are going to jump on to a horse; some sickly grass-patches in
the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the
nap rubbed off; big double log-house for the white folks—hewed logs,
with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud-stripes been
whitewashed some time or another; round-log kitchen, with a big broad,
open but roofed passage joining it to the house; log smoke-house back of
the kitchen; three little log nigger-cabins in a row t’other side
the smoke-house; one little hut all by itself away down against the back
fence, and some outbuildings down a piece the other side; ash-hopper and
big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut; bench by the kitchen door,
with bucket of water and a gourd; hound asleep there in the sun; more
hounds asleep round about; about three shade trees away off in a corner;
some currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place by the fence;
outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cotton
fields begins, and after the fields the woods.

I went around and clumb over the back stile by the ash-hopper, and started
for the kitchen. When I got a little ways I heard the dim hum of a
spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I
knowed for certain I wished I was dead—for that is the
lonesomest sound in the whole world.

I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting
to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for I’d
noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if I
left it alone.

When I got half-way, first one hound and then another got up and went for
me, and of course I stopped and faced them, and kept still. And such
another powwow as they made! In a quarter of a minute I was a kind
of a hub of a wheel, as you may say—spokes made out of dogs—circle
of fifteen of them packed together around me, with their necks and noses
stretched up towards me, a-barking and howling; and more a-coming; you
could see them sailing over fences and around corners from everywheres.

A nigger woman come tearing out of the kitchen with a rolling-pin in her
hand, singing out, “Begone you Tige! you Spot! begone sah!”
and she fetched first one and then another of them a clip and sent them
howling, and then the rest followed; and the next second half of them come
back, wagging their tails around me, and making friends with me. There
ain’t no harm in a hound, nohow.

And behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and two little nigger boys
without anything on but tow-linen shirts, and they hung on to their mother’s
gown, and peeped out from behind her at me, bashful, the way they always
do. And here comes the white woman running from the house, about
forty-five or fifty year old, bareheaded, and her spinning-stick in her
hand; and behind her comes her little white children, acting the same way
the little niggers was doing. She was smiling all over so she could
hardly stand—and says:

“It’s you, at last!—ain’t it?”

I out with a “Yes’m” before I thought.

She grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then gripped me by both hands and
shook and shook; and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over; and
she couldn’t seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, “You
don’t look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would; but law
sakes, I don’t care for that, I’m so glad to see you! Dear,
dear, it does seem like I could eat you up! Children, it’s
your cousin Tom!—tell him howdy.”

But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and
hid behind her. So she run on:

“Lize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right away—or did
you get your breakfast on the boat?”

I said I had got it on the boat. So then she started for the house,
leading me by the hand, and the children tagging after. When we got
there she set me down in a split-bottomed chair, and set herself down on a
little low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands, and says:

“Now I can have a good look at you; and, laws-a-me, I’ve
been hungry for it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it’s
come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What
kep’ you?—boat get aground?”

“Yes’m—she—”

“Don’t say yes’m—say Aunt Sally. Where’d
she get aground?”

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know
whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a
good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up—from
down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t
know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent
a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on—or—Now
I struck an idea, and fetched it out:

“It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back
but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.
Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from
Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and
crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a
Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed
his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he did die. Mortification
set in, and they had to amputate him. But it didn’t save him. Yes,
it was mortification—that was it. He turned blue all over, and
died in the hope of a glorious resurrection. They say he was a sight to
look at. Your uncle’s been up to the town every day to fetch
you. And he’s gone again, not more’n an hour ago; he’ll
be back any minute now. You must a met him on the road, didn’t you?—oldish
man, with a—”

“No, I didn’t see nobody, Aunt Sally. The boat landed
just at daylight, and I left my baggage on the wharf-boat and went looking
around the town and out a piece in the country, to put in the time and not
get here too soon; and so I come down the back way.”

“Who’d you give the baggage to?”

“Nobody.”

“Why, child, it ’ll be stole!”

“Not where I hid it I reckon it won’t,” I says.

“How’d you get your breakfast so early on the boat?”

It was kinder thin ice, but I says:

“The captain see me standing around, and told me I better have
something to eat before I went ashore; so he took me in the texas to the
officers’ lunch, and give me all I wanted.”

I was getting so uneasy I couldn’t listen good. I had my mind
on the children all the time; I wanted to get them out to one side and
pump them a little, and find out who I was. But I couldn’t get
no show, Mrs. Phelps kept it up and run on so. Pretty soon she made
the cold chills streak all down my back, because she says:

“But here we’re a-running on this way, and you hain’t
told me a word about Sis, nor any of them. Now I’ll rest my
works a little, and you start up yourn; just tell me everything—tell
me all about ’m all every one of ’m; and how they are, and
what they’re doing, and what they told you to tell me; and every
last thing you can think of.”

Well, I see I was up a stump—and up it good. Providence had
stood by me this fur all right, but I was hard and tight aground now.
I see it warn’t a bit of use to try to go ahead—I’d
got to throw up my hand. So I says to myself, here’s another
place where I got to resk the truth. I opened my mouth to begin; but
she grabbed me and hustled me in behind the bed, and says:

“Here he comes! Stick your head down lower—there, that’ll
do; you can’t be seen now. Don’t you let on you’re
here. I’ll play a joke on him. Children, don’t you say a
word.”

I see I was in a fix now. But it warn’t no use to worry; there
warn’t nothing to do but just hold still, and try and be ready to
stand from under when the lightning struck.

I had just one little glimpse of the old gentleman when he come in; then
the bed hid him. Mrs. Phelps she jumps for him, and says:

“Has he come?”

“No,” says her husband.

“Good-ness gracious!” she says, “what in the
warld can have become of him?”

“I can’t imagine,” says the old gentleman; “and I
must say it makes me dreadful uneasy.”