by Tony Abbott
“Timmy the Sailor was very wrong about this,” I grumbled. “Boats are the opposite of fun, fun, fun.”
“Steady it is, sir!” yelled Joe, making our voyage sound even more official.
The raft drew beyond the middle of the river, and Tom and Huck “hit the oars,” which were just planks of wood. Hardly a word was said during the next hour or so as the raft passed by the village. Two or three glimmering lights showed where everybody was sleeping peacefully.
The Black Avenger (Tom) stood still with folded arms, looking his last upon the town.
“I was happy there once,” he proclaimed. “No more! I wish Becky Thatcher could see me now, on the wild sea, facing danger and death, going to my doom with a grin on my lips. Then she’d change her tune.…”
“To do that,” I said, “all you have to do is—”
“Devin!” Frankie practically screamed. “Stuff it!”
I stuffed it.
The raft leaked plenty, but we soon plowed into the island and tumbled off onto mostly dry land. Our voyage had lasted almost two hours.
It was the middle of the night.
Tom and Huck dragged the mast and sail up onto land and made it part of the tent where we were going to spend the night.
Frankie looked at me. “Are we really going to do this? Sleep out here on this island?”
“The missing page might be hidden here,” I said. “Plus we’re all deathy and skeletony now, so who cares about bugs and snakes and cold weather and hunger and bugs, right?”
“Right,” she said, gulping. “We’re tough, right?”
“Very tough. Sort of.”
That’s Frankie and me.
Very tough, sort-of pirates.
Chapter 11
In less time than it takes for Mr. Wexler to pop a quiz, Huck fixed up a hammock more secure and comfortable than any you could get from an L.L.Bean catalog.
He grinned as he did the same for each of us.
“You know, Frankie,” I said, “I’m deciding that Huck is one very cool dude. This hammock is first-rate.”
“As long as it keeps me off the ground,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tom and Joe were getting the first-ever official pirate fire going. We all jammed around it to warm the food and our hands.
I looked around. “Okay, we’ve sailed the pirate ship, we’ve landed on the island, what else do pirates do?”
Huck laughed. “Do? Well they … and they … plus there’s … hey, I don’t know. What do pirates do?”
Frankie raised her hand, since she had the book. “It actually says right here. Pirates attack ships, and burn them, get the money and bury it in awful places on their island where ghosts and spirits watch over it, and if they have spare time, they make people walk the plank.”
“Good words,” said Huck. “But I guess pirates do mostly bad things.”
We all sat around the fire, thinking of all those bad things. Tom spoke unexpectedly. “I don’t like that we snatched food from Aunt Polly,” he said.
Huck made a noise in his throat, then wagged his head. “Or the raft we took. Maybe that wasn’t right, either. Let’s take a vow saying we won’t steal again.”
“We’ll be the first pirates not to steal!” said Joe.
Everybody liked that idea.
Soon, all the other pirates and I, exhausted from our voyage and swinging more and more slowly in our customized, Huck-made hammocks, fell asleep.
When I woke up, I had nearly forgotten where I was. The early morning was cool and gray, and the woods were mostly quiet around us. It was so different from waking up to my noisy alarm clock at home.
Not a tree stirred over my hammock. Dewdrops hung on the leaves and in the grass below. The fire was out, but a thin blue wreath of smoke coiled up from the ashes and into the air. It was very peaceful. I liked it.
“Going swimming!” Tom yelped suddenly, and Huck and Joe bolted up with big grins. In a flash, all three pirate boys raced off to the water on the far side of the island where we wouldn’t be seen by any villagers who might be out for a morning boat ride.
Frankie flipped out of her hammock. “Okay, Dev, if the page is here, we’d better hurry and look for it before we leave the island and this part of the story ends.”
Together, we covered every inch of the island. There were hanging vines, clearings in the trees that burned from the hot sun right above us, and swampy areas where our shoes got stuck.
That was loads of fun.
Searching the place didn’t take us very long, because the island wasn’t that big. We didn’t find a signed page from an old book, but we did see something else.
It was Frankie who spotted it first.
“A boat,” she said, pointing to the river.
I peered out from behind the rock I was looking under. There was a little steam ferryboat about a mile below the village, drifting with the current. The deck was crowded with people. Then a big jet of white smoke burst from the ferryboat’s side—poom!
It was a cannon, blasting a shot straight up the river.
“They’re up to something,” said Frankie.
“Hey, Tom!” I called. “Huck! Joe! Come here!”
The three boys came running out of the woods. They were dressed in leaves and branches and vines, fresh from playing jungle pirates.
“What are they doing out there?” Frankie asked. “They’re firing over the water at nothing.”
And as we watched—poom! poom!—the cannon started blasting again.
“I know!” exclaimed Tom. “Somebody’s drowned!”
“That’s it,” said Huck. “They done that last summer when Bill Turner got drowned. They shoot a cannon over the water, and that makes the water roil all up and the drowned person comes floating up to the surface.”
“Sounds scientific,” I said.
“It’s very,” Huck agreed.
“I wonder who drowned,” said Joe Harper.
Frankie thought about that, frowning for a while. Then her eyes grew big. “Wait a second! I know who’s drowned!”
“Who?” asked Tom.
“It’s us!” she cried.
Instantly, the three boys grinned.
“They think we’ve drowned!” yelped Huck. “They’ll cry now for sure. And us? We’re heroes!”
Tom cheered and whooped for a while, then stopped. He had a strange look on his face. So did Joe, actually.
I had the book, but I didn’t need to read it to know what was going on with the pirates. One look at Tom’s face—and Joe’s, too—and I knew they were thinking about people back home who probably weren’t having much fun at the idea of the boys being dead.
Only Huck kept on grinning through every cannon blast. I knew that was because he had no family of his own.
“Maybe we should go back.” Joe said.
“Never!” said Tom abruptly, probably trying to hide his own feelings. “That’s just being chicken! Aren’t you the Terror of the Seas, a great pirate who laughs at death?”
“Sure I am,” Joe insisted. “I’m the biggest death-laugher ever. Ha … ha … ha … See?”
“Then that’s that,” said Tom. “Tomorrow, we search for treasure!”
After that, we all went back to camp and threw ourselves down, talking rough-and-tough pirate talk. But long before nightfall, the talk lost its rough-and-toughness. Tom and Joe went silent first. Then Huck.
They were sleeping.
When I looked over at Frankie, she was snoring softly with the book snuggled under her head as her pillow.
“Okay, then. Sleep for me, too,” I murmured.
I closed my eyes and started to drift off, thinking about the pillows on my bed at home and how soft they were, when I heard a noise from around the campfire.
Popping my lids open, I saw Tom tiptoe off through the trees and break into a run in the direction of the river.
Chapter 12
I shifted into sneaky mode and followed Tom. Not only was I in the real dark but
because Frankie had the book, I was in the dark about what was going to happen. Still, I figured that the story probably headed Tom’s way, so I went.
He waded into the river and swam across at the narrowest point, not far from the village.
Of course, I got wet, too. I hated that.
Once ashore, Tom flew along from one alley to another, and pretty soon I caught sight of that very high, very long, very white fence Frankie and I had helped paint.
I chuckled to myself. “So, the Black Avenger isn’t so tough, after all. He’s gone home to visit his aunt Polly.”
Tom edged over to the back door and slipped inside. I waited a minute, then did the same. Inside, he hid himself in the shadows, and I hid, watching him. There was talking coming from a lit room in the front of the house.
“He wasn’t bad,” Aunt Polly was saying, “only mischievous. He never meant any harm, and he was the best-hearted boy that ever … ever … was—”
I heard her begin to cry.
“It was the same with my Joe!” said Mrs. Harper. “Always full of devilment, but just as unselfish and kind as he could be.”
She started to cry, too.
So did Tom. I guess seeing his aunt and Mrs. Harper break down was too much for him. He was about to crash into the room, when Mrs. Harper said something that made him stop.
“If the bodies are still missing by Sunday, we’re going to have the funerals that morning.”
Tom froze in the shadows while everybody wailed to think about funerals for their little boys, and even one for Huck, who was nobody’s little boy.
Finally, Aunt Polly knelt down in the lamplight and prayed for Tom, and he pulled back into the shadows and went still.
After a while, Mrs. Harper went home, Aunt Polly went to bed, and the house was quiet. I saw Tom tiptoe into his aunt’s room. He had a note all written out on a strip of bark. He took it out and reached over to her nightstand, but then he stopped, took it back, and gave his aunt a kiss. Then, just before he slid out, I slid out.
As he started away from the house, I jumped in front of him. “Why didn’t you wake her up?” I asked.
“Devin?” he gasped. “What—did you follow me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I think you should tell your poor Aunt Polly that you’re alive. She was crying so hard!”
Tom’s face was taken over by a frown. “I would have. Except for a secret thing I’m planning that’s even better.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Never mind,” said Tom. “And don’t go telling Joe and Huck you saw me here. Go ahead, promise.”
I backed up. “Whoa. Just don’t make me sign anything in blood.”
“I won’t. Just don’t tell.”
I agreed, and we shook hands on it. Then we headed back to the island, which of course left me soaking wet again. It was morning by the time we strolled into the camp. Huck and Joe were showing Frankie how to make a slingshot from a thick tree branch and some vines. She was telling them about theme parks, but they weren’t really getting it.
Huck and Joe and Frankie leaped up when they saw Tom, and explained that they were sick of the island and wanted to go home. Frankie was the loudest.
“We’ve done the island,” she said. “Backward, forward, up, down, there’s no treasure. We’re running out of pages—I mean, time. So let’s go back to town already.”
But Tom insisted. “If we stay a few more days, something great will happen. Then, I promise, we’ll leave.”
Joe shrugged, then agreed. Huck agreed.
Frankie crossed her arms and grumbled to herself.
So we stayed on the island until Sunday when, in the early hours of the morning, we rafted back to shore.
When the five of us trudged down the dusty main street, the village seemed hushed and still.
At that moment, the church bell began to toll—dong! dong! dong!—and the streets began to fill with people dressed in their best and darkest clothes.
“What is this all about?” asked Joe.
Tom held such a big grin on his face, the corners of his mouth almost met in the back. “Funerals! For us! We’ll be guests at our own deaths! That’s my big surprise!”
Huck leaped in the air. “I love it!”
“Me, too!” said Tom. “Now, come on. Let’s go hide near the church.”
We scrambled up to the churchyard before anyone saw us and dived behind the bushes that lined the walk. The villagers headed into the churchyard, whispering as they trudged up the path, about the sad doings on the river, but went silent once they crossed the threshold and entered the church. Soon, the whole town was inside.
We crept to the door and peered in.
“I can’t remember when the church was so full before,” said Joe.
“I can’t remember the last time I was in it,” said Huck with a chuckle. “And now it’s too late, because I’m dead.”
“You’re not actually dead,” said Frankie.
“Oh, right,” he said. “I keep forgetting.”
Tom seemed to want to laugh, but his eyes caught sight of Aunt Polly and his half brother Sid and half sister Mary all in black. They sat next to the Harpers, who were also in completely black outfits.
“I almost want to cry for those poor kids,” I said.
Frankie grunted. “Devin, we’re not dead.”
The preacher stood at the pulpit and began to speak.
It was a sorrowful speech. The minister talked about Tom and Joe and even Huck. He remembered incidents in their lives that showed how sweet and generous they were, what noble and fine children they were.
The congregation became more and more moved as the minister went on, until at last the whole group broke down and wept in loud wails and sobs. Even the minister began crying in the pulpit.
“The time is right,” said Tom. “And here we … go!”
With that, Tom pushed open the doors with a bang, and he and Huck and Joe strode in, all grins and smiles.
The minister raised his eyes from his soggy handkerchief and stood frozen in the pulpit. First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister’s, and then the whole congregation rose together and stared.
“The three dead boys!” someone whispered.
“They’re marching up the aisle!”
“They’re—alive!”
Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves on the boys and almost smothered them nearly to death with kisses and hugs and stuff.
The minister shouted at the top of his voice: “Sing! Sing the hymn, ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow!’ Sing, I say! And put your hearts into it!”
And everyone did. The sound was amazing. As if everyone had trained to be an opera singer, the sound of everybody singing somehow sounded really beautiful.
And while the song shook the rafters of the church, Tom turned to us and said, “What a day for us pirates! What a homecoming for a band of cutthroats!”
Becky Thatcher nearly hugged Tom herself. She settled for proclaiming that she would have a great picnic to celebrate the boys’ homecoming.
“It’s a great day,” I said. “We’re alive. Talk about fun, fun, fun? This is terrific!”
But Frankie pulled me aside and gave me a look.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Something we forgot about is coming back. Something not so great and fun.”
She opened the book to the next chapter. I read the first line. I gasped.
“The murder trial of Muff Potter!”
Chapter 13
No sooner had everyone finished cheering about Tom and the boys being alive, than they started gossiping about the trial getting ready to start.
“It’s all Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter on the street,” Huck said, when we met at the courthouse the next day.
Tom shook his head slowly. “I reckon he’s a goner. I sure feel sorry for him sometimes.”
“Muff’s always been good to me,” said Huck. “He gave me h
alf a fish once when there wasn’t enough for two. He loafs around, of course, but we all do that.”
“I’m even an expert loafer myself,” I said.
“He’s mended kites for me,” said Tom. “And helped me knot hooks on my fishing line.”
Frankie frowned. “Maybe we could break him out?”
Tom and Huck both shook their heads.
“I heard people say that if he was to get free, they’d find him and hang him, anyway,” said Huck.
That stopped conversation for a while.
“Let’s go to him now,” said Tom. “At least we can make him feel better.”
That sounded good to all of us, so together we sneaked between the buildings until we were behind the jail. Tom went to the barred window and peeked in. “Muff?”
The balding head rose up slowly behind the bars, blinked, and grinned at us. A strange pain stung my throat and chest as I saw the poor guy in there. Like Frankie, I really wanted to bust him free, but the story didn’t seem to want to go there.
Huck passed some tobacco and matches through the bars, and Muff looked as if he would cry at the kindness of it.
“You’ve been mighty good to me,” Muff said. “Better than anybody else in town. And I won’t forget it. Often I’ve said to myself, I used to mend all the boys’ kites and things and show them where the good fishing was and befriend them when I could, and now they’ve all forgotten old Muff when he’s in trouble, but Tom don’t and Huck don’t, they don’t forget him! And I don’t forget them! Well, boys, I’ve done an awful thing. I was drunk and crazy at the time, I guess, and now I’ve got to pay for it with my life. It’s only right …”
We so wanted to tell Muff that he was innocent, but we settled for asking him if he had seen any lost page with a scribble on it in the jail. He shook his head. Finally, we all left the place, miserable and sad and feeling wrong about the whole thing.
“The author’s not going to let this happen, is he?” Frankie said as we headed out to the main street.
“It looks like it,” I said.
“But this is so wrong!” she said. “All the evidence will point to Muff being guilty. Everyone will be too afraid of Stinkhead Joe to say anything. He’ll just be sitting there in the courtroom like some kind of …”