by Dave Mckay
“What do we want of a saw?”
“What do we want of a saw? Ain’t we got to saw the leg of Jim’s bed off, so as to get the chain loose?”
“Why, you just said a body could lift up the bed and pull the chain off.”
“Well, if that ain’t just like you, Huck Finn. You can get up the most baby-school ways of going at a thing. Why, ain’t you ever read any books at all? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-woman way as that? No; the way all the best writers does is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just so, and eat the powder that comes from the sawing, so it can’t be found, and put some dirt and fat around the sawed place so the very best watchman can’t see no sign of it’s being sawed. Then, the night you’re ready, give the leg a kick, down she goes; pull off your chain, and there you are. Nothing to do but hang your rope ladder out the window, climb down it, break your leg in the moat -- because a rope ladder is nineteen foot too short, you know -- and there’s your horses and your servants, and they lift you up and throw you across a saddle, and away you go to your home country, wherever that is. It’s a real show that way, Huck. I wish there was a moat to this shack. If we get time, the night we break him out, we’ll dig one.”
I says: “What do we want of a moat when we’re going to pull him out from under the shack?”
But he never heard me. He wasn’t hearing me or anything else. He had his head on his hand, thinking. Pretty soon he breathes deeply, shakes his head, then breathes deeply again, and says: “No, it wouldn’t do -- there ain’t enough need for it.”
“For what?” I says.
“Why, to saw Jim’s leg off,” he says.
“
Good land!” I says; “Why, there ain’t no need for that at all. And what would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?”
“Well, some of the best ones has done it. They couldn’t get a chain off, so they just cut their hand off and left. A leg would be better. But we got to let that go. There ain’t need enough; and, besides, Jim’s a black man, and wouldn’t understand how it’s the way they do it in Europe; so we’ll let it go. But there’s one thing -- he can have a ladder; we can tear up our sheets and make him a ladder easy enough. And we can send it to him in a pie; it’s mostly done that way. And I’ve tasted worse pies.”
“Why, Tom Sawyer, how you talk,” I says; “Jim ain’t got no use for a rope ladder.”
“He has got use for it. How you talk! You should say you don’t know nothing about it. He’s got to have a rope ladder; they all do.”
“What in the world can he do with it?”
“Do with it? He can hide it in his bed, can’t he? That’s what they all do; and he’s got to, too. Huck, you don’t ever seem to want to do anything the way it’s always been done; you want to be starting something new all the time. Even if he don’t do nothing with it, ain’t it there in his bed, for them to study, after he’s gone? and don’t you think they’ll want things to study? You know they will. And you wouldn’t leave them any? That would be a pretty bad how-you-do, wouldn’t it! I never heard of such a thing.”
“Well,” I says, “if it’s in the rules, and he’s got to have it, all right, let him have it; because I don’t wish to go back on no rules; but there’s one thing, Tom Sawyer -- if we go to tearing up our sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we’re going to get into trouble with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you’re born. Now, the way I look at it, a ladder made from string bark don’t cost nothing, and don’t waste nothing, and is just as good to fill up a pie with, and hide in a mattress, as any rope ladder you can start; and as for Jim, he ain’t never done this kind of thing before, and so he don’t care what kind of a -- “
“Oh, rats, Huck Finn, if I was as stupid as you I’d keep still -- that’s what I’d do. Who ever heard of a prisoner making a ladder from string bark? Why, it’s perfectly crazy.”
“Well, okay, Tom, fix it your own way; but if you’ll listen to me, you’ll let me borrow something off of the clothes-line.”
He said that would do. And that gave him another thought, and he says: “Borrow a shirt, too.”
“What do we want of a shirt, Tom?”
“Want it for Jim to keep a diary on.”
“Diary your grandmother -- Jim can’t write.”
“What difference if he can’t write -- he can make marks on the shirt, can’t he, if we make him a pen out of an old spoon or a piece of old iron?”
“Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better one; and faster, too.”
“Prisoners don’t have a goose running around to pull pens out of, you air head. They make their pens out of the hardest piece of old metal that they can find; and it takes them weeks and weeks and months and months to shape it, because they’ve got to do it by rubbing it on the wall. They wouldn’t use a goose-feather if they had it. It ain’t the way it’s done.”
“Well, then, what’ll we make him the ink out of?”
“Many makes it by rubbing the red powder off of old iron and adding tears; but that’s the easy way and it’s mostly for women; the best prisoners uses their own blood. Jim can do that; and when he wants to send any little word out to the world, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window. The Iron Mask always done that, and it’s a very good way, too.”
“Jim ain’t got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan.”
“That ain’t nothing; we can get him some.”
“Can’t nobody read his plates.”
“That ain’t got anything to do with it, Huck Finn. All he’s got to do is to write on the plate and throw it out. You don’t have to be able to read it. Why, half the time you can’t read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else.”
“Well, then, what’s the point in wasting the plates?”
“Why, blame it all, it ain’t the prisoner’s plates.”
“But it’s someone’s plates, ain’t it?”
“Well, what if it is? What does the prisoner care whose -- “ He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing. So we headed back to the house.
Later that morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes-line; and I found an old bag and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing, because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it weren’t borrowing, it was robbing. He said we was working for the good of prisoners; and prisoners don’t care how they get a thing just so they get it, and nobody don’t blame them for it, either. It ain’t no sin in a prisoner to rob the things he needs to get away with, Tom said; it’s his right; and so, as long as we was working for a prisoner, we had a perfect right to rob anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves out of prison with. He said if we weren’t prisoners it would be a very different thing, and nobody but a low-down bad person would rob when he weren’t a prisoner. So we agreed we would rob everything there was that we could use. And yet he was quite angry, one day after that, when I robbed a watermelon out of the slave garden and eat it. He made me go and give the slaves ten cents without telling them why. Tom said that what he was trying to say was, we could rob anything we needed. Well, I says, I needed the watermelon. But he said I didn’t need it to get out of prison with; there’s where the difference was. He said if I’d a wanted it to hide a knife in, and secretly give it to Jim to kill the watchman with, it would a been all right. So I let it go at that, but truth is, I couldn’t see no point in my working for a prisoner if I got to think over a lot of little differences like that every time I see a good way to get some watermelon.
Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning until everybody was busy, and nobody around the yard; then Tom he carried the bag into the lean-to while I stood off a piece to keep watch. By and by he come out, and we went and sat down on the firewood to talk. He says: “Everything’s all right now apart from tools; and that’s easy fixed.”
“Tools?” I says.
“Yes.”
“Tools for what?”
“Why, to dig with. We ain’t going to chew him out, are we?”
“Ain’t them old crippled shovels and things in there good enough to dig a slave out with?” I says.
He turns on me, looking sad enough to make a body cry, and says: “Huck Finn, did you ever hear of a prisoner having shovels and things in his wardrobe to dig himself out with? Now I want to ask you -- if you got any reason in you at all -- what kind of a show would that give him to be proud of? Why, they might as well hand him the key and be done with it. A shovel -- why, they wouldn’t give one to a king.”
“Well, then,” I says, “if we don’t want the shovel, what do we want?”
“Two table-knives.”
“To dig the bottom out from under that shack with?”
“Yes.”
“That’s foolish, Tom.”
“It don’t make no difference how foolish it is, it’s the right way -- and it’s the way it’s done. There ain’t no other way, that ever I heard of, and I’ve read all the books that gives any teaching about these things. They always dig out with a knife -- and not through dirt, mind you; generally it’s through solid rock. And it takes them for ever and ever. Why, there was a prisoner that got himself out that way; how long was he at it, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, try.”
“I don’t know. A month and a half.”
“Thirty-seven years -- and he come out in China. That’s the kind. I wish the bottom of this prison was solid rock.”
“Jim don’t know nobody in China.”
“What’s that got to do with it? That other man didn’t either. But you’re always a-going off on a side argument. Why can’t you stick to the point?”
“Okay. I don’t care where he comes out, so he comes out; and I'd say Jim don’t care either. But Jim’s too old for us to be digging him out with a table-knife. He won’t last.”
“Yes he will last. You don’t think it’s going to take thirty-seven years to dig out through a dirt bottom, do you?”
“How long will it take, Tom?”
“Well, it’s too dangerous to take as long as we should, because it may not take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He’ll hear Jim ain’t from there. Then his next move will be to advertise Jim, or something like that. So we can’t take as long digging him out as we should. By rights I think we should be two years or more; but we can’t. Things can change so quickly here, what I say is that we dig right in, as fast as we can; and after that, we can let on, to ourselves, that we was at it thirty-seven years. Then we can pull him out and run him away the first time there’s an opening. Yes,
I think that’ll be the best way.”
“Now, there’s good thinking in that,” I says. “Letting on don’t cost nothing; and if it’s any help, I don’t mind letting on we was at it a hundred years. It wouldn’t hurt me none, after I got my hand in. So I’ll get along now, and rob two or three table-knives.”
“Rob three,” he says; “we want one to make a saw out of.”
“Tom, if it ain’t against the rules to say it, there’s a dirty old saw-blade sticking under the boards behind the smoke-house.”
He looked kind of tired and sad-like, and says: “It ain’t no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. Run along and rob the knives -- three of them.” So I done it.
Chapter 36
As soon as we knew everyone was asleep, we went down the lightning-rod, and shut our-selves up in the lean-to, and got out the fox-fire, and went to work. We moved everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log. Tom said we was right behind Jim’s bed now, and we’d dig in under it, and when we got through there couldn’t nobody in the shack ever know there was any hole there, because Jim’s quilt came down almost to the ground, and you’d have to lift it up and look under to see the hole. So we worked and worked with the table-knives until almost midnight; and then we was dog-tired, and our hands was covered in sores, and yet you couldn’t see we’d done anything hardly.
At last I says: “This ain’t no thirty-seven year job; this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer.”
He never said nothing. But he breathed deeply, and pretty soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little while I knowed he was thinking. Then he says: “It ain’t no use, Huck, it ain’t a-going to work. If we was prisoners it would, because then we’d have as many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we wouldn’t get but a few minutes to dig, every day, while they was changing watches, and so our hands wouldn’t get sore, and we could keep it up, year in and year out, and do it right, the way it should be done. But we can’t do that; we got to hurry; we ain’t got no time to waste. If we was to put in another night this way we’d have to knock off for a week to let our hands get better -- couldn’t touch a table-knife with them sooner.”
“Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?”
“I’ll tell you. It ain’t right, and it’s a sin, and I wouldn’t like it to get out; but there ain’t only just the one way: we got to dig him out with the shovel, and let on it’s table-knives.”
“Now you’re talking!” I says; “your head gets leveler and leveler all the time, Tom Sawyer,” I says. “Shovels is the thing, sin or no sin; and as for me, I don’t care dirt for the sin of it, anyway. When I start in to rob a slave, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain’t no ways worried how it’s done, just so it’s done. What I want is my black man; or my watermelon; or my Sunday-school book; and if a shovel is the best thing, that’s the thing I’m a-going to dig that black man or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don’t give a dead rat what the experts thinks about it either.”
“Well,” he says, “there’s reason enough for shovels and letting-on in a job like this; if it weren’t so, I wouldn’t agree to it, and I wouldn’t stand by and see the rules broke -- because right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he knows better. It might answer for you to dig Jim out with a shovel, without any letting on, because you don’t know no better; but it wouldn’t for me, because I do know better. Give me a table-knife.”
He had his own by him, but I handed him mine. He threw it down, and says:
“Give me a table-knife.”
I didn’t know just what to do -- but then I thought. I scratched around through the old tools, and got a shovel and give it to him, and he took it and went to work, and never said a word.
He was always just that careful to do the thing right.
So then I got a shovel too, and then we made the feathers fly. We stayed at it about a half an hour, which was as long as we could stand up; but we had a good start of a hole to show for it. When I got up the steps to our room I looked out at the window and see Tom doing his level best with the lightning-rod, but he couldn’t come it, his hands was so sore. At last he says: “It ain’t no use, it can’t be done. What do you think I should do? Can’t you think of no way?”
“Yes,” I says, “but I think it ain’t by the rules. Come up the steps, and let on it’s a lightning-rod.”
So he done it.
Next day Tom robbed a spoon and a candle-stick, for to make some pens for Jim out of, and six candles; and I wait- ed around the Blacks’ cabins until I was able to rob three tin plates. Tom said it weren’t enough; but I said nobody wouldn’t ever see the plates that Jim throwed out, because they’d fall in the weeds under the window-hole -- then we could carry them back and he could use them over again. So Tom was happy with that. Then he says: “Now, the thing to study out is, how to get the things to Jim.”
“Take 'em in through the hole,” I says, “when we're done.”
He only just looked angry, and said something about nobody ever heard of such a stupid plan, and then he went to studying. By and by he said he had worked out two or three ways, but there weren’t no need to choose any of them yet. Said we�
��d got to tell Jim what was happening first.
That night we went down the lightning-rod a little after ten, and took one of the candles along, and listened under the window-hole, and heard Jim snoring; so we threw it in, and it didn’t wake him. Then we got to work with the shovel, and in about two hours and a half the job was done. We worked our way in under Jim’s bed and into the shack, and felt around and found the candle and put a light to it, and stood over Jim. He looked strong and healthy. Softly and slowly we got him to wake up. He was so glad to see us he almost cried; and called us honey, and all the nice names he could think of; and was for having us hunt up something to cut the chain off of his leg with right away, and leaving there without losing any time. But Tom he showed him how wrong it would be, and sat down and told him all about our plans, and how we could change them in a minute any time there was any trouble; and not to be the least afraid, because we would see he got away, sure. So Jim he said it was all right, and we sat there and talked over old times for a while, and then Tom asked a lot of questions, and when Jim told him Uncle Silas come in every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt Sally come in to see if he was comfortable and had enough to eat, and both of them was kind as they could be, Tom says: “Now I know how to fix it. We’ll send you some things by them.”