Huckleberry Finn by Dave Mckay, Mark Twain (recommended books to read TXT) 📕

So we put the sheet back on the line that night, and robbed one out of the cabinet; and kept on putting it back and robbing it again for two days until she didn’t know how many sheets she had any more, and she didn’t care, and weren’t a-going to waste her life worrying about it, and wouldn’t count them again not to save her life; she would be happier to die first.

So we was all right now, as to the shirt and the sheet and the spoon and the candles, by the help of the goat and the rats and the mixed-up counting; and as to the candle-stick, it weren’t important; it would blow over by and by.

But that pie was a job; we had no end of trouble with it. We fixed it up away down in the trees, and cooked it there; and we got it done at last, and very well, too; but not all in one day; and we had to use up three wash-pans full of flour before we got through, and we got burned pretty much all over, in places, and eyes put out with the smoke. We didn’t want nothing but a pie covering for the rope ladder, and we couldn’t hold it up right, and it would always collapse in. But we thought of the right way at last -- which was to cook the ladder, too, in the pie. So then we stayed with Jim the second night, tearing up the sheet all in little strings and knitting them together, until, long before the sun come up, we had a very nice rope that you could a hanged a person with. We let on it took nine months to make.

And in the morning we took it down to the trees, but it wouldn’t go into the pie. Being made of a whole sheet, that way, there was rope enough for forty pies if we’d a wanted them, and enough left over for soup, or anything you choose. We could a had a whole dinner.

But we didn’t need it. All we needed was just enough for the pie, and so we throwed most of it away. We didn’t cook none of the pies in the wash-pan -- afraid the soft metal we used to stop the holes would melt; but Uncle Silas he had a beautiful warming-pan which he thought a lot of, because it belonged to one of his family a long time in the past. It had a long timber handle that come over from England in one of them early ships and was hiding away up in the roof with a lot of other old pans and things that was worth a lot, not because you could do anything with them, but just because they were so old. We snaked her out, secretly, and took her down there to the trees.

It didn’t work on the first pies, because we didn’t know how, but she come up smiling on the last one. We took and covered her with pie mix, and set her in the coals, and then filled her up with sheet rope, and put on a roof of pie mix, and shut down the cover, and put hot coals on top, and stood off five foot, with the long handle, cool and comfortable, and in fifteen minutes she turned out a pie that was a good feeling just to look at. But the person that eat it -- if that rope ladder wouldn’t make him sick I don’t know nothing what I’m talking about; and give him enough stomach pains to last him until next time, too.

Nat didn’t look when we put the witch pie in Jim’s pan; and we put the three tin plates in the bottom of the pan under the food; and so Jim got everything all right, and as soon as he was by himself he broke into the pie and put the rope ladder inside of his mattress, and scratched some marks on a tin plate and throwed it out of the window-hole.

Chapter 38

Making pens was a mighty difficult job, and so was the saw; and Jim said be believed the writing which the prisoner has to scratch on the wall was going to be the hardest of all. But he had to have it; Tom said so. There weren’t no story of a prisoner not scratching words to leave behind, and his coat of arms.

Jim says: “Why, I ain’t got no coat; I ain’t got nuffin but dis old shirt, and you knows I got to keep de diary on dat.”

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

“Well,” I says, “Jim’s right, anyway, when he says he ain’t got no coat of arms, because he ain’t.”

“I knowed that,” Tom says, “but you can be sure he’ll have one before he goes out of here -- because he’s going out right and there ain’t going to be no bad marks in his record.”

So while me and Jim rubbed away at the pens on two bricks, with Jim a-making his out of the candle-stick and me making mine out of the spoon, Tom set to work to think out the coat of arms. By and by he said he’d come up with so many good ones he didn’t hardly know which to take, but there was one which he thought he would choose over the others. He used a lot of words in saying it… words like a fess, that we didn’t understand.

“What are you on about, Tom Sawyer,” I says, “what does all that mean?”

“We ain’t got no time to worry over that,” he says; “we got to dig in like all get-out.”

“Well, anyway,” I says, “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.”

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

“Oh, I don’t know. But he’s got to have it. All the kings and lords does.”

That was just his way. If he didn’t feel like giving an answer, he wouldn’t do it. You might pump him a week, it wouldn’t make no difference.

He’d got all that coat of arms business fixed, so now he started in to plan out a sad line to scratch on the wall -- said Jim got to have one, like they all done.

He made up a lot, and wrote them out on a paper, like so:

Here lies a prisoner’s broken heart.

Here a poor prisoner, hated by the world and friends, lived his sad awful life

Here a tired spirit went to its rest, after thirty-seven years in prison.

Here, without a home or friends, died a stranger who was the son of Louis XIV.

Tom’s voice was shaking as he was reading them, and he almost broke down. When he got done he couldn’t no way make up his mind which one for Jim to scratch onto the wall, they was all so good; but at last he said he would let him scratch them all on. Jim said it would take him a year to scratch such a lot of foolishness onto the logs with a nail, and, besides, he didn’t know how to make letters; but Tom said he would draw them out for him, and then he wouldn’t have nothing to do but just follow the lines. Then pretty soon he says:

“Come to think, the logs ain’t a-going to do; they don’t have log walls in a prison: we got to dig the words into a rock. We’ll get a rock.”

Jim said a rock was worse than logs; he said it would take him such a poison long time to dig them into a rock he wouldn’t ever get out. But Tom said he would let me help him do it. Then he took a look to see how me and Jim was getting along with the pens. It was awful hard, slow work, and didn’t give my hands no show to get well of the sores, and we didn’t seem to be getting nowhere, hardly; so Tom says: “I know how to fix it. We got to have a rock for the coat of arms and one for the sad writing, and we can kill two birds with that same rock. There’s a great big round flat stone that they use to make flour, and we’ll borrow it, and dig the lines into it, and make the pens and saw sharp on it, too.”

It weren’t no little plan; and it weren’t no little stone either; but we said we’d try it. It weren’t quite midnight yet, so we cleared out for the timber yard, leaving Jim at work.

We got the stone, and started to wheel her home, but it was a most awful job. Do what we could, we couldn’t keep her from falling over, and she come mighty close to falling on us every time.

Tom said she was going to get one of us, sure, before we got through. We got her half way; and then we was fully played out, and almost drowning from the heat. We seen it weren’t no use; we got to go and get Jim. So he lifted up his bed and pulled the chain off of the bed-leg, and coiled it round and round his neck, and we went out through our hole and down there, and Jim and me took that stone and walked her along like nothing; and Tom was the leader. He could out-lead any boy I ever seen. He knowed how to do everything.

Our hole was pretty big, but it weren’t big enough to get the stone through; but Jim he took the shovel and soon made it big enough. Then Tom marked out them things on it with the nail, and set Jim to work on them, with a big piece of metal from things we found in the lean-to, to be used for a hammer on the nail. Tom told him to work until his candle quit on him, and then he could go to bed, and hide the stone under his mattress and sleep on it. Then we helped him fix his chain back on the bed-leg, and was ready for bed ourselves. But Tom thought of something, and says: “You got any spiders in here, Jim?”

“No, sir, thanks to de good Lord I ain’t, Master Tom.”

“All right, we’ll get you some.”

“But bless you, honey, I don’t want none. I’s afraid of ‘em. I just as soon have rattlesnakes around.”

Tom thought a minute or two, and says:

“What a good plan! And I think it’s been done. It must a been done; it stands to reason. Yes, it’s a very good plan. Where could you keep it?”

“Keep what, Master Tom?”

“Why, a rattlesnake.”

“What you talking about, Master Tom? Why, if dey was a rattlesnake to come in here I’d take and break right out through dat log wall, I would, wid my head.”

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

“Make friends with it?”

“Yes -- easy enough. Every animal is thankful for people being kind and touching them softly, and they wouldn’t think of hurting a person that touches them softly. 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 coil him around your neck and put his head in your mouth.”

“Please, Master Tom -- don’t talk so! I can’t stand it! He’d let me put his head in my mouth? -- because I want it, is dat it? I think he’d wait a powerful long time before I’d ask him. And more den dat, I don’t want him to sleep wid me.”

“Jim, don’t act so