The Widow, Pap and the Island (Chapters 1–7)

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another.

Now the way that book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece — all gold. Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round — more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.

The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn't do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals. Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on, took a set at me with a spelling-book. She said all a body would have to do in the good place was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much of it. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.

Tom's gang met in a cave and swore an oath in blood, and Tom read out of his books about robbing and killing and holding people to ransom, though none of us knowed what ransom was. We played robber for a month, and never robbed nobody but a Sunday-school picnic, which Tom said was a caravan of A-rabs and elephants; I didn't see no di'monds or camels, and I judged it had all the marks of a Sunday-school. Then I resigned.

Then one morning I seen tracks in the snow by the stile, and there was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to keep off the devil. Pap was back. I went straight to Judge Thatcher and made him take my money for nothing — "for a consideration" — so Pap couldn't get it.

Pap was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and his face, where you could see it, was white — not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. He set in my room when I come home and said I was putting on frills, going to school and learning to read, and he'd learn me to put on airs over my own father. He wanted my money, and when he couldn't get it he went to law about it, and got drunk, and the new judge took him home and cleaned him up and he cried and said he'd turned over a new leaf; and that night he traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod and got drunk as a fiddler and fell off the porch and broke his arm in two places.

He took to hanging around the widow's, and she said she'd make trouble if he didn't quit; so one day he catched me and took me up the river about three mile in a skiff, and crossed over to the Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn't no houses but an old log hut, and kept me there. It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. But Pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and he went off and locked me in for days at a time, and when he was drunk he would rage at the gov'ment. Once he got the delirium tremens and chased me round the cabin with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death. Then I knowed I had to get out.

I'd found an old saw, and I'd sawed a hole in the logs behind the table. When Pap went off to town I finished it, and took everything that was worth anything out of the cabin — meal, bacon, the coffee-pot, the gun — and loaded them into a canoe I'd found adrift. Then I took the axe and smashed in the door, and killed a wild pig, and dragged it and spread its blood on the ground, and pulled out some of my hair and stuck it on the axe, and dragged a sack of rocks down to the river to make it look like a body had been drug there; and I busted the meal sack so the trail would lead off to a pond. They'd think robbers had killed me. Then I paddled down to Jackson's Island in the night.

The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could 'a' counted the drift-logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean — I don't know the words to put it in.