The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Undead

by Mark Twain

  “Yes.”

  “Whereabouts?” says I.

  “They’re takin’ him down to Silas Phelps’ place, two miles below here. He was a runaway, and now they’ve got him. He run off f’m somewhere up north, I reckon.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing they got him.”

  “I’ll say. There’s a two-hundred dollar reward on him. It’s like pickin’ up money off the road, you know.”

  “Yes it is. Who was it who nailed him?”

  “Ah, don’t know – some old feller – a stranger – and he sold him off to Phelps for forty dollars, because he’s got to go up the river and can’t hardly wait. You bet I’d wait fer two hundred.”

  “Me too,” says I. “But maybe he sold him so cheap, cause there’s something not straight about it.”

  “But it is, though – straight as a string. I seen the handbill the old gentleman was waving around. It tells all about him and paints him like a picture. He run away from some plantation, down below N’orleans. No-sirree-bob, it’s straight, alright.”

  Then I went back to the raft, and set in the wigwam to think. I thought until I made my head sore, but couldn’t see no way out of the trouble. After all the long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, everything was busted up and ruined, and they tricked Jim, and made him a slave again, for the rest of his life, amongst strangers, and all for forty dollars.

  I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see him in the day and in the night-time, moon-light, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. I couldn’t think of nothing but the good times we had together. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, and how glad he was when I came running out of the fog; and when I came up to him again in the swamp, around where the feud was; and such-like times. And he would always rub my head, and call me honey, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was, and I remember when he said I was the best friend he had in the whole world, and the only friend he’s got now.

  So I fixed that I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again, and I didn’t care what they might do to me, or what other people would think, or if I would have to go to hell for these things or not. Whatever I could do to get Jim, I would. And if I thought up something worse, I’d do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

  Then I got to thinking over how to do it, and turned over considerable many ways in my mind. At last I fixed on a plan that suited me. So I took my bearings, and as soon as it was dark, I took the raft to a little woody island that was down the river a piece, and hid it there. I slept the night in the woods and got up before it was light, and had my breakfast. Then I took the canoe and landed a bit below Phelp’s place; I hid an extra bundle of clothes in the woods, then filled up the canoe with water and sank it with rocks where I could find her again when I needed to.

  There was a river road with a sign on it, “Phelps Sawmill” but instead of staying to the road, I cut through the woods, and soon wish’t I hadn’t. I came upon something – in a little pasture surrounded on all sides by the woods – that I can only describe as a battlefield of some kind. There were dozens and dozens of dead men, and most of them had been Zum, by the condition of their bodies. Some on the one side looked like farmers and schoolteachers who had been pressed into duty. There had been some sort of big fight, some sort of Zum army that decided to go up against whatever was in front of it. Injun Joe had tried it back home, but this looked a lot more well thought-out. All of the fallen had been given a final shot in the head, or decapitated. There were four or five of ‘em hung from the trees, their hands bound in back, their faces and tongues black from the sun, but they still kicked and struggled like they had a little fight left in ‘em. I guess we had won this one. Both sides had gone away and I was alone, but I didn’t like it. The whole pasture was abuzz with flies, so I went back into the woods and went back to the river road, thinking it couldn’t be any worse for me.

  Of course, I was mistaken. The first person I see walking into town was the duke. He was sticking up handbills for a gala three-night performance – just like that other time. I was right up to him before I knew it. He looked astonished, and says:

  “Well, hel-lo, Adolphus.” Then he says, in a kind of bored but well-mannered tone. “Where’s the raft – got her in a good place?”

  I put on a face like he has asked me a mathematics puzzle, and say:

  “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

  Then his smile comes off, which is always a frightening thing, and he says:

  “Why would you be asking me?”

  I told him my whole story: how I figured the king would be useless for hours, so I went a-loafing around town to put in the time and wait; and how, after dark, I went back to the raft, and it was gone – along with Jim.

  “Says I to myself, ‘they’ve got into trouble and had to leave, and took Jim along with them; and now I’m in a strange country, and ain’t got no property no more, nor money, nor nothing, and no way to make a living’; so I sat down and cried. I slept in the woods all night, and this morning, I figured I’d come and see if I could find you two. But what’s become of Jim, and the raft?”

  “Blamed if I know what happened – at least what’s become of the raft. The old fool made a trade for your slave and got forty dollars, and when we found him in the tavern, he’d gambled away every cent except what he spent on whisky. When we got back, the raft was gone, and we figured you’d stole the raft and given us the shake.”

  “And leave Jim? He’s the only friend I got in this world.”

  “Well, he’s gone now, and so’s the money. The old fool sold him, and pissed away the money. So here we are, flat broke, and there warn’t anything for it but to try another performance and hope for lightning to strike us twice.”

  “Oh, I hope for you it does, but I got to find Jim. Who is it who bought him?”

  The duke shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not interested in this kind of transaction –“ and then he started thinking. He wanted to make sure I was out of the way for the next three days so as not to botch up their scam. So pretty soon he says:

  “Oh, now I remember. The man who bought him is Abram Foster – and he lives forty miles from here, on the road to Lafayette.” He points down the road away from town. “So go along now and find your friend, and mind you don’t work your jaw any between here and there.”

  So I left, and went back into the woods to be out of the duke’s sight. Soon I was in the pasture again amid the legions of dead and the millions of flies, but I walked through them without stopping to gap or ponder. When I finally came out of the woods again, I could see a plantation in the distance, and had a pretty good idea it was where I wanted to go.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I Get a New Name

  When I walked up closer to the house it was all still and Sunday-like, and kind of sunshiny; all the hands had gone to the fields and there was that kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome, like everybody’s gone and died; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel the spirits are whispering – spirits that’s been dead 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, if that was only the end of it and not just the end of part one, which contains all the fun and happy and joyous times, leaving nothing but the grey and rotting horrors to come.

  Phelps’s was one of those little one-horse cotton plantations and they all look alike. A rail fence and a two-acre yard, with as much barb wire as they could afford to string up, to snag and hook-up the occasional Zum until someone comes to dispatch him; a stile made of logs sawed-off and upended in steps, like barrels of different lengths, convenient enough for regular folks and mostly impossible to navigate for Zum; some sickly patches of grass in the big yard for the little kids to play on while someone watches from a por
ch or window; a few rough guard towers put up to give a person a view of the surrounding lands – now mostly unoccupied because there was other chores to do rather than sit in a windy perch all day and more’n likely fall asleep for an hour or two in the middle of the day; a round-log kitchen, connecting to a house; a smoke-house back of the kitchen; three little cabins for the owned folks, all in the row on t’other side of the smokehouse; some outbuildings down a piece, still inside the fence and the wire; a bench by the kitchen door, with a bucket of water and a gourd; dogs here and there, asleep wherever they could find some shade; about three shade trees off in the corner, and a child’s version of a guard tower built into one of the trees for a clever fort; some current and gooseberry bushes in one place on both sides of the fence; then the cotton fields begins, and just before the woods, a zone where all the bushes and trees have been knocked flat to give a person a little ten-second heads up in case something bad came through the trees; and then the woods.

  I went and clumb over the back stile and started for the kitchen. I went right along, no particular plan in mind but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time came; for I’d noticed that Providence always seemed to put the right words in my mouth if I just believed and left it alone.

  When I got half-way to the house, an old hound picks up his ears and trots out to me, just sort of baying and moaning in a general way. Then another one answers the call, and then another, and in a few blinks of the eye there was fifteen of them all packed together around me, with their noses stretched up toward me, a-barking and howling; and more a-coming; you could see them sailing over fences and coming around corners, and pouring from out under the house where it was nice and cool. I guess it made sense to own a dozen dogs or so; a Zum might slip by a man in a guard tower, and might even drag himself over the stile, but they’d never go unnoticed past a racket of old dogs.

  A servant woman comes out of the kitchen with a basin of water in her hands and just throws it in the air, singing out: “Begone! you tige! You Spot! Begone!” and by the time the water drops down and hits the dirt, the dogs was scattering again, sorting themselves out; and the next second half of them come back again, wagging their tails around me and jumping up and licking my face, making friends with me. But I imagine something else happens if t’were Zum that walked up to the kitchen.

  And behind that woman comes another woman, and then some little children, some small enough to be a-hangin’ onto their mother’s gown. And here comes the white woman of the house, about forty-five or fifty years old; she was smiling all over so she could barely stand, and says:

  “It’s you at last! Ain’t it?”

  “Yes’m,” says I, without a thought in my head.

  She grabbed me to her and held on tight; and then she grabbed my hands and the tears came to her eyes, and she couldn’t seem to hug me and squeeze me enough, and kept saying “You don’t look like your maw as much as I reckoned you would, but law sakes, I’m so glad to see you! Dear, dear, I could just eat you up! Children, it’s your cousin Tom! – come say hello to him.”

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

  “Oh, honey, did you get yourself a breakfast on the boat?”

  I said I got one on the boat. So she took me by the hand and towed me into the kitchen, and set me down on a chair, and set herself down on a stool in front of me, and says:

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

  “Yes’m – “

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

  I didn’t know exactly what to say, but my instinct told me she would be coming up – from Orleans. But that wouldn’t help me all that much, as I warn’t familiar with the sandbars and what names they had, and the river, so I fetched out a whole different idea.

  “It warn’t the grounding that slowed us up – that only held us back a little. We blowed out a cylinder head.”

  “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

  “Yes’m. Several. Killed one man outright, and he had no identification on him, so they bound him head to toe with rope, sewed him into a canvas bag, and kept him below by the boilers, should he start kicking again and making a nuisance.”

  “Goodness child, I’m so happy it warn’t you! Two years ago your Uncle Silas was coming up from Orleans and she blowed a cylinder-head and it crippled a man, and he died soon after. Yes, I remember that now. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate his legs – both of them! He turned blue all over and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection. Then they took off his head. They say it was a sight to look at.

  “Yes’m,” says I.

  “Your uncle’s been up to the town every day to fetch you. And he’s gone now, too. You must ‘a’ passed him on the road, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t see anybody, Aunt Sally. The boat landed before daylight, and I left my baggage on the wharf-boat. And mostly I steered clear of anyone I saw on the road – I’d just kinder go into the woods until they passed, cause I didn’t know who’s good and who ain’t. Best not take chances, I always says.”

  Mrs. Phelps kept it up then, and pretty soon she made the cold chills streak down my back, because she says:

  “And here I am runnin’ on this way, and you ain’t told me a word about Sis, nor any of them. Tell me everything! How they are, and they they’re all doing, and what they told you to tell me – every last thing you can think of!”

  Well I was up a stump – and up it good. Providence had stood by me this fur all right, but I was hard aground now. So I says to myself, I got to risk the truth. I opened my mouth to begin, and suddenly the dogs outside start baying and howling and hollering again, and by and by an old gentleman walks in the door, all dusty from a long walk.

  “Silas!”

  “Sally – who’s this standing in the middle of our kitchen?”

  She stood a-beamin’ and a-smilin’ like a house afire, and I was standing pretty meek and sweaty alongside. The old man just stared at me, all puzzled, and she says:

  “Who do you reckon it is?”

  “I hain’t no idea. Who is it?”

  “Why, it’s Tom Sawyer!”

  By jings, I most slumped to the floor. The old man grabbed me by the hand and shook, then gave me a big bear-hug, and all the time the woman did dance around and laugh and cry; and then they both set, and begin firing off questions about Sid, and Mary, and Aunt Polly, and the rest of the tribe.

  But if they was joyful, it warn’t nothing compared to how I felt. It was like being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was. Well, they set and listened to me for more’n two hours, and I told them more about my family – I mean the Sawyer family – that ever happened to any six Sawyer families. I even throw’d in some of my real adventures along the river, and everything I told them, they was happy to hear.

  Being Tom Sawyer was right easy and comfortable, and it stayed that way till by and by I hear a steamboat coughing along the river. And I says to myself, s’pose Tom Sawyer is on that boat? And s’pose he walks up to this house and sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to keep quiet?

  Well, I couldn’t bear that. It wouldn’t do at all. So I told the folks I reckoned I would walk back into town and fetch my baggage. The old gentleman was for going along with me, but I said no, he had put himself out for me enough for one day. I could drive the horse myself, and if I seen any Zum, I’d give the horses a crack of the whip and just run ‘em down. The old gentleman clapped me on the shoulders and said that was some clever thinking; and I had to agree with him.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Pitiful Ending of Royalty

  So I started for town in the wagon, but never once saw a Zum. I guess whoever wrote that sign was serious when they called
it Zum-free. Of course, I didn’t see much of anybody, and that was kind of a lonesome feeling itself. When I got halfway I saw another wagon coming, and watched till it came up close. It was Tom Sawyer, and I stood in the wagon and waved, and says, “Hold on!” and it stopped alongside; his mouth was opened up like a trunk, and stayed so. He swallowed two or three times like a person that’s got a dry throat, and then he says:

  “I hain’t never done you no harm. You know that. So why you want to come back and ha’nt me so for?”

  I says:

  “I hain’t come back. I hain’t been gone.”

  When he heard my voice it righted him up some, but he warn’t quite satisfied yet. He says:

  “Don’t you be playin’ tricks on me, because I wouldn’t on you. Honest injun, you ain’t a ghost?”

  “Honest injun, I ain’t. I ain’t Zum neither.”

  He kinder smiles and says:

  “It you was Zum, you’d be trying to eat that horse, not get somewheres on him.”

  I let out a laugh, a good one, and it seemed like I hadn’t ‘a’ laughed for the longest time. It was good to see my old friend again.

  “Looky here,” says he, “warn’t you murdered and all? –“

  “No. I warn’t ever murdered. It was a trick I played to get out from under paw. He was wearing me down and I needed to get away – from him and Miss Watson. So I faked it and lit out.”

  That satisfied him. And he wanted to know all about what I’d been doing right off, because it was sort of a Tom Sawyer grand adventure, all thrilling and mysterious, and so it hit him where he lived. But I said I would tell the whole thing to him soon enough; and so we told his driver to wait, and walked off a piece, and I told him the fix I was in, and what did he reckon we better do? He said to let him alone for a minute and not talk, and he would ponder the thing. So he thought and thought, and pretty soon he says:

  “I’ve got it. Take my trunk in your wagon, and let on that it’s yourn. You turn your wagon about and fool around some, so you get back to the house about the time you ought to. I’ll go back towards town a bit and take a fresh start, and get there after you; and you needn’t let on that you know me at first.”