The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain [book club suggestions TXT] 📗

bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain’t no help for it. These uncles of yourn ain’t no uncles at all; they’re a couple of frauds⁠—regular deadbeats. There, now we’re over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy.”

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself on to the king’s breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times⁠—and then up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says:

“The brute! Come, don’t waste a minute⁠—not a second⁠—we’ll have them tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!”

Says I:

“Cert’nly. But do you mean before you go to Mr. Lothrop’s, or⁠—”

“Oh,” she says, “what am I thinking about!” she says, and set right down again. “Don’t mind what I said⁠—please don’t⁠—you won’t, now, will you?” Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would die first. “I never thought, I was so stirred up,” she says; “now go on, and I won’t do so any more. You tell me what to do, and whatever you say I’ll do it.”

“Well,” I says, “it’s a rough gang, them two frauds, and I’m fixed so I got to travel with them a while longer, whether I want to or not⁠—I druther not tell you why; and if you was to blow on them this town would get me out of their claws, and I’d be all right; but there’d be another person that you don’t know about who’d be in big trouble. Well, we got to save him, hain’t we? Of course. Well, then, we won’t blow on them.”

Saying them words put a good idea in my head. I see how maybe I could get me and Jim rid of the frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave. But I didn’t want to run the raft in the daytime without anybody aboard to answer questions but me; so I didn’t want the plan to begin working till pretty late tonight. I says:

“Miss Mary Jane, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, and you won’t have to stay at Mr. Lothrop’s so long, nuther. How fur is it?”

“A little short of four miles⁠—right out in the country, back here.”

“Well, that’ll answer. Now you go along out there, and lay low till nine or half-past tonight, and then get them to fetch you home again⁠—tell them you’ve thought of something. If you get here before eleven put a candle in this window, and if I don’t turn up wait till eleven, and then if I don’t turn up it means I’m gone, and out of the way, and safe. Then you come out and spread the news around, and get these beats jailed.”

“Good,” she says, “I’ll do it.”

“And if it just happens so that I don’t get away, but get took up along with them, you must up and say I told you the whole thing beforehand, and you must stand by me all you can.”

“Stand by you! indeed I will. They shan’t touch a hair of your head!” she says, and I see her nostrils spread and her eyes snap when she said it, too.

“If I get away I shan’t be here,” I says, “to prove these rapscallions ain’t your uncles, and I couldn’t do it if I was here. I could swear they was beats and bummers, that’s all, though that’s worth something. Well, there’s others can do that better than what I can, and they’re people that ain’t going to be doubted as quick as I’d be. I’ll tell you how to find them. Gimme a pencil and a piece of paper. There⁠—‘Royal Nonesuch, Bricksville.’ Put it away, and don’t lose it. When the court wants to find out something about these two, let them send up to Bricksville and say they’ve got the men that played the Royal Nonesuch, and ask for some witnesses⁠—why, you’ll have that entire town down here before you can hardly wink, Miss Mary. And they’ll come a-biling, too.”

I judged we had got everything fixed about right now. So I says:

“Just let the auction go right along, and don’t worry. Nobody don’t have to pay for the things they buy till a whole day after the auction on accounts of the short notice, and they ain’t going out of this till they get that money; and the way we’ve fixed it the sale ain’t going to count, and they ain’t going to get no money. It’s just like the way it was with the niggers⁠—it warn’t no sale, and the niggers will be back before long. Why, they can’t collect the money for the niggers yet⁠—they’re in the worst kind of a fix, Miss Mary.”

“Well,” she says, “I’ll run down to breakfast now, and then I’ll start straight for Mr. Lothrop’s.”

“ ’Deed, that ain’t the ticket, Miss Mary Jane,” I says, “by no manner of means; go before breakfast.”

“Why?”

“What did you reckon I wanted you to go at all for, Miss Mary?”

“Well, I never thought⁠—and come to think, I don’t know. What was it?”

“Why, it’s because you ain’t one of these leather-face people. I don’t want no better book than what your face is. A body can set down and read it off like coarse print. Do you reckon you can go and face your uncles when they come to kiss you good morning, and never⁠—”

“There, there, don’t! Yes, I’ll go before breakfast⁠—I’ll be glad to. And leave my sisters with them?”

“Yes; never mind about them. They’ve got to stand it yet a while. They might suspicion something if all of you was to go. I don’t want you to see them, nor your sisters, nor nobody in this town; if a neighbor was