Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  A few months later her mother died. Rachel was then seven years old. During the next three years she went on playing with the boys, and gradually building up a perfect conflagration of a reputation, as far as unusual enterprises and unsafe exploits went. Then at last arguments and reasonings began to have an effect upon her, and she presently stopped training with the boys.

  She played with the girls six months, and tried to get used to it and fond of it, but finally had to give it up. The amusements were not rugged enough; they were much too tame, not to say drowsy. Kissing parties and candy pullings in the winter, and picnics in the summer: these were good romps and lively, but they did not happen often enough, and the intermediate dissipations seemed wholly colorless to Rachel.

  She withdrew. She did not go back to the boys at once, but tried to get along by herself. But nature was too strong for her; she had to have company; within two months she was a tomboy again, and her life was once more a satisfaction to her, a worry to her friends, and a marvel to the rest of the community.

  Before the next four and a half years were out she had learned many masculine arts, and was more competent in them than any boy of her age in the town. All alone she learned how to swim, and with the boys she learned to skate. She was the only person of her sex in the county who had these accomplishments—they were taboo. She fished, boated, hunted, trapped, played “shinny” on the ice and ball on the land, and ran foot races. She broke horses for pastime, and for the risk there was in it. At fifteen she ranked as the strongest “boy” in the town, the smartest boxer, a willing and fearless fighter, and good to win any fight that her heart was in. The firemen conferred an honorary membership upon her, and allowed her to scale the roofs of burning houses and help handle the hose; for she liked that sort of employment, she had good judgment and coolness in danger, she was spry and active, and she attended strictly to business when on the roof. Whenever there was a fire she and her official belt and helmet were a part of the spectacle—sometimes lit up with the red flush of the flames, sometimes dimly glimpsed through the tumbling volumes of smoke, sometimes helping to get out the inmates, sometimes being helped out herself in a suffocated condition. Several times she saved lives, several times her own life was saved by her mates; and once when she was overcome by the smoke they penetrated to her and rescued her when the chance of success was so slender that they would not have taken the risk for another.

  She kept the community in an unrestful state; it could settle to no permanent conclusion about her. She was always rousing its resentment by her wild unfeminine ways, and always winning back its forgiveness again by some act or other of an undeniably creditable sort.

  By the time she was ten she had begun to help about the house, and before she was thirteen she was become in effect its mistress—mistress and assistant housekeeper. She kept the accounts, checked wastage, and was useful in other ways. But she had earned her picturesque nickname, and it stayed by her. It was a country where nicknames were common; and once acquired, they were a life-property, and inalienable. Rachel might develop into a saint, but that would not matter: the village would acknowledge the saintship and revere the saint, but it would still call her Hellfire Hotchkiss. Old use and habit would take care of that.

  Along in her sixteenth year she accidentally crossed the orbit of her early antagonist, Shad Stover, and this had good results for her; or rather it led up to something which did her that service. Shad Stover was now twenty, and had gone to the dogs, along with his brother Hal, who was twenty-one. They were dissipated young loafers, and had gotten the reputation of being desperadoes, also. They were as vain of this dark name as if they had legitimately earned it—which they hadn’t. They went armed—which was not the custom of the town—and every now and then they pulled their pepper-box revolvers and made some one beg for his life. They traveled in a pair—two on one—and they always selected their man with good discretion, and no bloodshed followed. It was a cheap way to build up a reputation, but it was effective. About once a month they added something to it in an inexpensive way: they got drunk and rode the streets firing their revolvers in the air and scaring the people out of their wits. They had become the terror of the town. There was a sheriff, and there was also a constable, but they could never be found when these things were going on. Warrants were not sued out by witnesses, for no one wanted to get into trouble with the Stovers.

  One day there was a commotion in the streets, and the cry went about that the Stovers had picked a quarrel with a stranger and were killing him. Rachel was on her way home from a ball-game, and had her bat in her hand. She turned a corner, and came upon the three men struggling together; at a little distance was gathered a crowd of citizens, gazing spell-bound and paralyzed. The Stovers had the stranger down, and he had a grip upon each of them and was shouting wildly for help. Just as Rachel arrived Shad snatched himself free and drew his revolver and bent over and thrust it in the man’s face and pulled the trigger. It missed fire, and Rachel’s bat fell before he could pull again. Then she struck the other brother senseless, and the stranger jumped up and ran away, grateful but not stopping to say so.

  A few days later old Aunt Betsy Davis paid Rachel a visit. She was no one’s aunt in particular, but just the town’s. The title indicated that she was kind and good and wise, well beloved, and in age. She said—

  “I want to have a little talk with you, dear. I was your mother’s friend, and I am yours, although you are so headstrong and have never done as I’ve tried to get you to do. But I’ve got to try again, and you must let me; for at last the thing has happened that I was afraid might happen: you are being talked about.”

  Rachel’s expression had been hardening for battle; but she broke into a little laugh, now, and said—

  “Talked about? Why, aunt Betsy, I was always talked about.”

  “Yes, dear, but not in this new way.”

  “New way?”

  “Yes. There is one kind of gossip that this town has never dealt in before, in the fifty-two years that I’ve lived in it—and has never had any occasion to. Not in one single case, if you leave out the town drunkard’s girls; and even that turned out to be a lie, and was stopped.”

  “Aunt Betsy!” Rachel’s face was crimson, and an angry light rose in her eyes.

  “There—now don’t lose your temper, child. Keep calm, and let us have a good sensible talk, and talk it out. Take it all around, this is a fair town, and a just town, and has been good to you—very good to you, everything considered, for you have led it a dance, and you know it. Now ain’t that so?”

  “Ye-s, but—”

  “Never mind the buts. Leave it just so. The town has been quite reasonably good to you, everything considered. Partly it was on account of your poor mother, partly on your father’s account and your own, and partly because it’s its natural and honorable disposition to stand by all its old families the best it can. Now then, haven’t you got your share to do by it? Of course you have. Have you done it? In some ways you haven’t, and I’m going to tell you about it. You’ve always preferred to play with the boys. Well, that’s all right, up to a certain limit; but you’ve gone away beyond the limit. You ought to have stopped long ago—oh, long ago. And stopped being fireman, too. Then there’s another thing. It’s all right for you to break all the wild horses in the county, as long as you like it and are the best hand at it; and it’s all right for you to keep a wild horse of your own and tear around the country everywhere on it all alone; but you are fifteen years old, now, and in many ways you are seventeen and could pass for a woman, and so the time has gone by for you to be riding astraddle.”

  “Why, I’ve not done it once since I was twelve, aunt Betsy.”

  “Is that so? Well, I’m glad of it; I hadn’t noticed. I’ll set that down to your credit. Now there’s another thing. If you must go boating, and shooting, and skating, and all that—however, let that go. I reckon you couldn’t break yourself. But anyway, you don’t need the boys’ company—you c
an go alone. You see, if you had let the boys alone, why then these reports wouldn’t ever—”

  “Aunt Betsy, does anybody believe those reports?”

  “Believe them? Why, how you talk! Of course they don’t. Our people don’t believe such things about our old families so easy as all that. They don’t believe it now, but if a thing goes on, and on, and on, being talked about, why that’s another matter. The thing to do is to stop it in time, and that is what I’ve come to plead with you to do, child, for your own sake and your father’s, and for the sake of your mother who is in her grave—a good friend to me she was, and I’m trying to be hers, now.”

  She closed with a trembling lip and an unsteady voice. Rachel was not hearing; she was lost in a reverie. Presently a flush crept into her face, and she muttered—

  “And they are talking about me—like that!” After a little she glanced up suddenly and said, “You spoke of it as new talk; how new is it?”

  “Two or three days old.”

  “Two or three days. Who started it?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “I think I can. The Stovers.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll horsewhip them both.”

  The old lady said with simplicity—

  “I was afraid you would. You are a dear good child, and your heart is always in the right place. And so like your grandfather. Dear me but he was a topper! And just as splendid as he could be.”

  After aunt Betsy took her leave, Rachel sat a long time silent and thinking. In the end, she arrived at a conclusion, apparently.

  “And they are talking about me—like that. Who would ever have dreamed it? Aunt Betsy is right. It is time to call a halt. It is a pity, too. The boys are such good company, and it is going to be so dull without them. Oh, everything seems to be made wrong, nothing seems to be the way it ought to be. Thug Carpenter is out of his sphere, I am out of mine. Neither of us can arrive at any success in life, we shall always be hampered and fretted and kept back by our misplaced sexes, and in the end defeated by them, whereas if we could change we should stand as good a chance as any of the young people in the town. I wonder which case is the hardest. I am sorry for him, and yet I do not see that he is any more entitled to pity than I am.”

  She went on thinking at random for a while longer, then her thoughts began to settle and take form and shape, and she ended by making a definite plan.

  “I will change my way of life. I will begin now, and stick to it. I will not train with the boys any more, nor do ungirlish things except when it is a duty and I ought to do them. I mean, I will not do them for mere pleasure. Before this I would have horsewhipped the Stovers just as a pleasure; but now it will be for a higher motive—a higher motive, and in every way a worthier one.

  “That is for Monday. Tomorrow I will go to church. I will go every Sunday. I do not want to, but it must be done. It is a duty.

  “Withdraw from the boys. The Stovers. Church. That makes three. Three in three days. It is enough to begin with; I suppose I have never done three in three weeks before—just as duties.”

  And being refreshed and contented by this wholesale purification, she went to bed.

  Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy

  Chapter 1

  WELL, we was back home and I was at the Widow Douglas’s up on Cardiff Hill again getting sivilised some more along of her and old Miss Watson all the winter and spring, and the Widow was hiring Jim for wages so he could buy his wife and children’s freedom some time or other, and the summer days was coming, now, and the new leaves and the wind-flowers was out, and marbles and hoops and kites was coming in, and it was already barefoot time and ever so bammy and soft and pleasant, and the damp a-stewing out of the ground and the birds a-carrying on in the woods, and everybody taking down the parlor stoves and stowing them up garret, and speckled straw hats and fish-hooks beginning to show up for sale, and the early girls out in white frocks and blue ribbons, and schoolboys getting restless and fidgetty, and anybody could see that the derned winter was over. Winter is plenty lovely enough when it is winter and the river is froze over and there’s hail and sleet and bitter cold and booming storms and all that, but spring is no good—just rainy and slushy and sloppy and dismal and ornery and uncomfortable, and ought to be stopped. Tom Sawyer he says the same.

  Me and Jim and Tom was feeling good and thankful, and took the dug-out and paddled over to the head of Jackson’s island early Saturday morning where we could be by ourselves and plan out something to do. I mean it was Tom’s idea to plan out something to do—me and Jim never planned out things to do, which wears out a person’s brains and ain’t any use anyway, and is much easier and more comfortable to set still and let them happen their own way. But Tom Sawyer said it was a lazy way and put double as much on Providence as there was any use in. Jim allowed it was sinful to talk like that, and says—

  “Mars Tom, you ought not to talk so. You can’t relieve Prov’dence none, en he doan need yo’ help, nohow. En what’s mo’, Mars Tom, if you’s gwyne to try to plan out sump’n dat Prov’dence ain’ gwyne to ’prove of, den ole Jim got to pull out, too.”

  Tom seen that he was making a mistake, and resking getting Jim down on his projects before there was any to get down on. So he changed around a little, and says—

  “Jim, Providence appoints everything beforehand, don’t he?”

  “Yessah—’deed he do—fum de beginnin’ er de worl’.”

  “Very well. If I plan out a thing—thinking it’s me that’s planning it out, I mean—and it don’t go; what does that mean? Don’t it mean that it wasn’t Providence’s plan and he ain’t willing?”

  “Yessah, you can ’pen’ ’pon it—dat’s jes’ what it mean, every time.”

  “And if it does go, it means that it was Providence’s plan, and I just happened to hit it right, don’t it?”

  “Yessah, it’s jes’ what it mean, dead sho’.”

  “Well, then, it’s right for me to go ahead and keep on planning out things till I find out which is the one he wants done, ain’t it?”

  “W’y, sutt’nly, Mars Tom, dat’s all right, o’ course, en ain’ no sin en no harm—”

  “That is, I can suggest plans?”

  “Yassah, sutt’nly, you can sejest as many as you want to, Prov’dence ain’ gwyne to mine dat, if he can look ’em over fust, but doan you do none of ’em, Mars Tom, excep’ only jes’ de right one—becase de sin is shovin’ ahead en doin’ a plan dat Prov’dence ain’t satisfied wid.”

  Everything was satisfactry again. You see he just fooled Jim along and made him come out at the same hole he went in at, but Jim didn’t know it. So Tom says—

  “It’s all right, now, and we’ll set down here on the sand and plan out something that ’ll just make the summer buzz, and worth being alive. I’ve been examining the authorities and sort of posting up, and there’s two or three things that look good, and would just suit, I reckon—either of them.”

  “Well,” I says, “what’s the first one?”

  “The first one, and the biggest, is a civil war—if we can get it up.”

  “Shucks,” I says, “dern the civil war. Tom Sawyer, I might a knowed you’d get up something that’s full of danger and fuss and worry and expense and all that—it wouldn’t suit you, if it warn’t.”

  “And glory,” he says, excited, “you’re forgetting the glory—forgetting the main thing.”

  “Oh, cert’nly,” I says, “it’s got to have that in, you needn’t tell a person that. The first time I ketch old Jimmy Grimes fetching home a jug that hain’t got any rot-gut in it, I’ll say the next mericle that’s going to happen is Tom Sawyer fetching home a plan that hain’t got any glory in.”

  I said it very sarcastic. I just meant it to make him squirm, and it done it. He stiffened up, and was very distant, and said I was a jackass.

  Jim was a studying and studying, and pretty soon he says—

  “Mars Tom, what do dat word mean—civil?”


  “Well, it means—it means—well, anything that’s good, and kind, and polite, and all that—Christian, as you may say.”

  “Mars Tom, doan dey fight in de wars, en kill each other?”

  “Of course.”

  “Now den, does you call dat civil, en kind en polite, en does you call it Christian?”

  “Well—you see—well, you know—don’t you understand, it’s only just a name.’

  “Hi-yah! I was a layin’ for you, Mars Tom, en I got you dis time, sho’. Jist a name! Dat’s so. Civil war! Dey ain’ no sich war. De idear!—people dat’s good en kind en polite en b’long to de church a-marchin’ out en slashin’ en choppin’ en cussin’ en shootin’ one another—lan’, I knowed dey warn’t no sich thing. You done ’vent it yo’ own self, Mars Tom. En you want to take en drap dat plan, same as if she was hot. Don’t you git up no civil war, Mars Tom—Prov’dence ain’ gwyne to ’low it.”

  “How do you know, till it’s been tried?”

  “How does I know? I knows becase Prov’dence ain’ gwyne to let dat kind o’ people fight—he ain’ never hearn o’ no sich war.”