that ain't doing nothing to me. I allowed if the paynim was satisfied I
was, and we would let it stand at that.
Now Tom he got all that notion out of Walter Scott's book, which he was
always reading. And it WAS a wild notion, because in my opinion he never
could've raised the men, and if he did, as like as not he would've got
licked. I took the book and read all about it, and as near as I could
make it out, most of the folks that shook farming to go crusading had a
mighty rocky time of it.
CHAPTER II. THE BALLOON ASCENSION
WELL, Tom got up one thing after another, but they all had tender spots
about 'em somewheres, and he had to shove 'em aside. So at last he was
about in despair. Then the St. Louis papers begun to talk a good deal
about the balloon that was going to sail to Europe, and Tom sort of
thought he wanted to go down and see what it looked like, but couldn't
make up his mind. But the papers went on talking, and so he allowed that
maybe if he didn't go he mightn't ever have another chance to see a
balloon; and next, he found out that Nat Parsons was going down to see
it, and that decided him, of course. He wasn't going to have Nat Parsons
coming back bragging about seeing the balloon, and him having to listen
to it and keep quiet. So he wanted me and Jim to go too, and we went.
It was a noble big balloon, and had wings and fans and all sorts of
things, and wasn't like any balloon you see in pictures. It was away out
toward the edge of town, in a vacant lot, corner of Twelfth street; and
there was a big crowd around it, making fun of it, and making fun of the
man,--a lean pale feller with that soft kind of moonlight in his eyes,
you know,--and they kept saying it wouldn't go. It made him hot to hear
them, and he would turn on them and shake his fist and say they was
animals and blind, but some day they would find they had stood face to
face with one of the men that lifts up nations and makes civilizations,
and was too dull to know it; and right here on this spot their own
children and grandchildren would build a monument to him that would
outlast a thousand years, but his name would outlast the monument. And
then the crowd would burst out in a laugh again, and yell at him, and ask
him what was his name before he was married, and what he would take to
not do it, and what was his sister's cat's grandmother's name, and all
the things that a crowd says when they've got hold of a feller that they
see they can plague. Well, some things they said WAS funny,--yes, and
mighty witty too, I ain't denying that,--but all the same it warn't fair
nor brave, all them people pitching on one, and they so glib and sharp,
and him without any gift of talk to answer back with. But, good land!
what did he want to sass back for? You see, it couldn't do him no good,
and it was just nuts for them. They HAD him, you know. But that was his
way. I reckon he couldn't help it; he was made so, I judge. He was a good
enough sort of cretur, and hadn't no harm in him, and was just a genius,
as the papers said, which wasn't his fault. We can't all be sound: we've
got to be the way we're made. As near as I can make out, geniuses think
they know it all, and so they won't take people's advice, but always go
their own way, which makes everybody forsake them and despise them, and
that is perfectly natural. If they was humbler, and listened and tried to
learn, it would be better for them.
The part the professor was in was like a boat, and was big and roomy, and
had water-tight lockers around the inside to keep all sorts of things in,
and a body could sit on them, and make beds on them, too. We went aboard,
and there was twenty people there, snooping around and examining, and old
Nat Parsons was there, too. The professor kept fussing around getting
ready, and the people went ashore, drifting out one at a time, and old
Nat he was the last. Of course it wouldn't do to let him go out behind
US. We mustn't budge till he was gone, so we could be last ourselves.
But he was gone now, so it was time for us to follow. I heard a big
shout, and turned around--the city was dropping from under us like a
shot! It made me sick all through, I was so scared. Jim turned gray and
couldn't say a word, and Tom didn't say nothing, but looked excited. The
city went on dropping down, and down, and down; but we didn't seem to be
doing nothing but just hang in the air and stand still. The houses got
smaller and smaller, and the city pulled itself together, closer and
closer, and the men and wagons got to looking like ants and bugs crawling
around, and the streets like threads and cracks; and then it all kind of
melted together, and there wasn't any city any more it was only a big
scar on the earth, and it seemed to me a body could see up the river and
down the river about a thousand miles, though of course it wasn't so
much. By and by the earth was a ball--just a round ball, of a dull color,
with shiny stripes wriggling and winding around over it, which was
rivers. The Widder Douglas always told me the earth was round like a
ball, but I never took any stock in a lot of them superstitions o' hers,
and of course I paid no attention to that one, because I could see myself
that the world was the shape of a plate, and flat. I used to go up on the
hill, and take a look around and prove it for myself, because I reckon
the best way to get a sure thing on a fact is to go and examine for
yourself, and not take anybody's say-so. But I had to give in now that
the widder was right. That is, she was right as to the rest of the world,
but she warn't right about the part our village is in; that part is the
shape of a plate, and flat, I take my oath!
The professor had been quiet all this time, as if he was asleep; but he
broke loose now, and he was mighty bitter. He says something like this:
"Idiots! They said it wouldn't go; and they wanted to examine it, and spy
around and get the secret of it out of me. But I beat them. Nobody knows
the secret but me. Nobody knows what makes it move but me; and it's a new
power--a new power, and a thousand times the strongest in the earth!
Steam's foolishness to it! They said I couldn't go to Europe. To Europe!
Why, there's power aboard to last five years, and feed for three months.
They are fools! What do they know about it? Yes, and they said my
air-ship was flimsy. Why, she's good for fifty years! I can sail the
skies all my life if I want to, and steer where I please, though they
laughed at that, and said I couldn't. Couldn't steer! Come here, boy;
we'll see. You press these buttons as I tell you."
He made Tom steer the ship all about and every which way, and learnt him
the whole thing in nearly no time; and Tom said it was perfectly easy. He
made him fetch the ship down 'most to the earth, and had him spin her
along so close to the Illinois prairies that a body could talk to the
farmers, and hear everything they said perfectly plain; and he flung out
printed bills to them that told about the balloon, and said it was going
to Europe. Tom got so he could steer straight for a tree till he got
nearly to it, and then dart up and skin right along over the top of it.
Yes, and he showed Tom how to land her; and he done it first-rate, too,
and set her down in the prairies as soft as wool. But the minute we
started to skip out the professor says, "No, you don't!" and shot her up
in the air again. It was awful. I begun to beg, and so did Jim; but it
only give his temper a rise, and he begun to rage around and look wild
out of his eyes, and I was scared of him.
Well, then he got on to his troubles again, and mourned and grumbled
about the way he was treated, and couldn't seem to git over it, and
especially people's saying his ship was flimsy. He scoffed at that, and
at their saying she warn't simple and would be always getting out of
order. Get out of order! That graveled him; he said that she couldn't any
more get out of order than the solar sister.
He got worse and worse, and I never see a person take on so. It give me
the cold shivers to see him, and so it did Jim. By and by he got to
yelling and screaming, and then he swore the world shouldn't ever have
his secret at all now, it had treated him so mean. He said he would sail
his balloon around the globe just to show what he could do, and then he
would sink it in the sea, and sink us all along with it, too. Well, it
was the awfulest fix to be in, and here was night coming on!
He give us something to eat, and made us go to the other end of the boat,
and he laid down on a locker, where he could boss all the works, and put
his old pepper-box revolver under his head, and said if anybody come
fooling around there trying to land her, he would kill him.
We set scrunched up together, and thought considerable, but didn't say
much--only just a word once in a while when a body had to say something
or bust, we was so scared and worried. The night dragged along slow and
lonesome. We was pretty low down, and the moonshine made everything soft
and pretty, and the farmhouses looked snug and homeful, and we could hear
the farm sounds, and wished we could be down there; but, laws! we just
slipped along over them like a ghost, and never left a track.
Away in the night, when all the sounds was late sounds, and the air had a
late feel, and a late smell, too--about a two-o'clock feel, as near as I
could make out--Tom said the professor was so quiet this time he must be
asleep, and we'd better--
"Better what?" I says in a whisper, and feeling sick all over, because I
knowed what he was thinking about.
"Better slip back there and tie him, and land the ship," he says.
I says: "No, sir! Don' you budge, Tom Sawyer."
And Jim--well, Jim was kind o' gasping, he was so scared. He says:
"Oh, Mars Tom, DON'T! Ef you teches him, we's gone--we's gone sho'! I
ain't gwine anear him, not for nothin' in dis worl'. Mars Tom, he's plumb
crazy."
Tom whispers and says--"That's WHY we've got to do something. If he
wasn't crazy I wouldn't give shucks to be anywhere but here; you couldn't
hire me to get out--now that I've got used to this balloon and over the
scare of being cut loose from the solid ground--if he was in his right
mind. But it's no good politics, sailing around like this with a person
that's out of his head, and says he's going round the world and then
drown us all. We've GOT to do something, I tell you, and do it before he
wakes up, too, or we mayn't ever get another chance. Come!"
But it made us turn cold and creepy just to think of it, and we said we
wouldn't budge. So Tom was for slipping back there by himself to see if
he couldn't get at the steering-gear and land the ship. We begged and
begged him not to, but it warn't no use; so he got down on his hands and
knees, and begun to crawl an inch at a time, we a-holding our breath and
watching. After he got to the middle of the boat he crept slower than
ever, and it did seem like years to me. But at last we see him get to the
professor's head, and sort of raise up soft and look a good spell in his
face and listen. Then we see him begin to inch along again toward the
professor's feet where the steering-buttons was. Well, he got there all
safe, and was reaching slow and steady toward the buttons, but he knocked
down something that made a noise, and we see him slump down flat an' soft
in the bottom, and lay still. The professor stirred, and says, "What's
that?" But everybody kept dead still and quiet, and he begun to mutter
and mumble and nestle, like a person that's going to wake up, and I
thought I was going to die, I was so worried and scared.
Then a cloud slid over the moon, and I 'most cried, I was so glad. She
buried herself deeper and deeper into the cloud, and it got so dark we
couldn't see Tom. Then it began to sprinkle rain, and we could hear the
professor fussing at his ropes and things and abusing the weather. We was
afraid every minute he would touch Tom, and then we would be goners, and
no help; but Tom was already on his way back, and when we felt his hands
on our knees my breath stopped sudden, and my heart fell down 'mongst my
other works, because I couldn't tell in the dark but it might be the
professor! which I thought it WAS.
Dear! I was so glad to have him back that I was just as near happy as a
person could be that was up in the air that way with a deranged man. You
can't land a balloon in the dark, and so I hoped it would keep on
raining, for I didn't want Tom to go meddling any more and make us so
awful uncomfortable. Well, I got my wish. It drizzled and drizzled along
the rest of the night, which wasn't long, though it did seem so; and at
daybreak it cleared, and the world looked mighty soft and gray and
pretty, and the forests and fields so good to see again, and the horses
and cattle standing sober and thinking. Next, the sun come a-blazing up
gay and splendid, and then we began to feel rusty and stretchy, and first
we knowed we was all asleep.
CHAPTER III. TOM EXPLAINS
WE went to sleep about four o'clock, and woke up about eight. The
professor was setting back there at his end, looking glum. He pitched us
some breakfast, but he told us not to come abaft the midship compass.
That was about the middle of the boat. Well, when you are sharp-set, and
you eat and satisfy yourself, everything looks pretty different from what
it done before. It makes a body feel pretty near comfortable, even when
he is up in a balloon with a genius. We got to talking together.
There was one thing that kept bothering me, and by and by I says:
"Tom, didn't we start east?"
"Yes."
"How fast have we been going?"
"Well, you heard what the professor said when he was raging round.
Sometimes, he said, we was making fifty miles an hour, sometimes ninety,
sometimes a hundred; said that with a gale to help he could make three
hundred any time, and said if he wanted the gale, and wanted it blowing
the right direction, he only had to go up higher or down lower to find
it."
"Well, then, it's just as I reckoned. The professor lied."
"Why?"
"Because if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois, oughtn't
we?"
"Certainly."
"Well, we ain't."
"What's the reason we ain't?"
"I know by the color. We're right over Illinois yet. And you can see for
yourself that Indiana ain't in sight."
"I wonder what's the matter with you, Huck. You know by the COLOR?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"What's the color got to do with it?"
"It's got everything to do with it. Illinois is green, Indiana is pink.
You show me any pink down here, if you can. No, sir; it's green."
"Indiana PINK? Why, what a lie!"
"It ain't no lie; I've seen it on the map, and it's pink."
You never see a person so aggravated and disgusted. He says:
"Well, if I was such a numbskull as you, Huck Finn, I would jump over.
Seen it on the map! Huck Finn, did you reckon the States was the same
color out-of-doors as they are on the map?"
"Tom Sawyer, what's a map for? Ain't it to learn you facts?"
"Of course."
"Well, then, how's it going to do that if it tells lies? That's what I
want to know."
"Shucks, you muggins! It don't tell lies."
"It don't, don't it?"
"No, it don't."
"All right, then; if it don't, there ain't no two States the same color.
You git around THAT if you can, Tom Sawyer."
He see I had him, and Jim see it too; and I tell you, I felt pretty good,
for Tom Sawyer was always a hard person to git ahead of. Jim slapped his
leg and says:
"I tell YOU! dat's smart, dat's right down smart. Ain't no use, Mars Tom;
he got you DIS time, sho'!" He slapped his leg again, and says, "My LAN',
but it was smart one!"
I never felt so good in my life; and yet I didn't know I was saying
anything much till it was out. I was just mooning along, perfectly
careless, and not expecting anything was going to happen, and never
THINKING of such a thing at all, when, all of a sudden, out it came. Why,
it was just as much a surprise to me as it was to any of them. It was
just the same way it is when a person is munching along on a hunk of
corn-pone, and not thinking about anything, and all of a sudden bites
into a di'mond. Now all that HE knows first off is that it's some kind of
gravel he's bit into; but he don't find out it's a di'mond till he gits
it out and brushes off the sand and crumbs and one thing or another, and
has a look at it, and then he's surprised and glad--yes, and proud too;
though when you come to look the thing straight in the eye, he ain't
entitled to as much credit as he would 'a' been if he'd been HUNTING
di'monds. You can see the difference easy if you think it over. You see,
an accident, that way, ain't fairly as big a thing as a thing that's done
a-purpose. Anybody could find that di'mond in that corn-pone; but mind
you, it's got to be somebody that's got THAT KIND OF A CORN-PONE. That's
where that feller's credit comes in, you see; and that's where mine comes
in. I don't claim no great things--I don't reckon I could 'a' done it
again--but I done it that time; that's all I claim. And I hadn't no more
idea I could do such a thing, and warn't any more thinking about it or
trying to, than you be this minute. Why, I was just as ca'm, a body
couldn't be any ca'mer, and yet, all of a sudden, out it come. I've often
thought of that time, and I can remember just the way everything looked,
same as if it was only last week. I can see it all: beautiful rolling
country with woods and fields and lakes for hundreds and hundreds of
miles all around, and towns and villages scattered everywheres under us,
here and there and yonder; and the professor mooning over a chart on his
little table, and Tom's cap flopping in the rigging where it was hung up
to dry. And one thing in particular was a bird right alongside, not ten
foot off, going our way and trying to keep up, but losing ground all the
time; and a railroad train doing the same thing down there, sliding among
the trees and farms, and pouring out a long cloud of black smoke and now
and then a little puff of white; and when the white was gone so long you
had almost forgot it, you would hear a little faint toot, and that was
the whistle. And we left the bird and the train both behind, 'WAY behind,
and done it easy, too.
But Tom he was huffy, and said me and Jim was a couple of ignorant
blatherskites, and then he says:
"Suppose there's a brown calf and a big brown dog, and an artist is
making a picture of them. What is the MAIN thing that that artist has got
to do? He has got to paint them so you can tell them apart the minute you
look at them, hain't he? Of course. Well, then, do you want him to go and
paint BOTH of them brown? Certainly you don't. He paints one of them
blue, and then you can't make no mistake. It's just the same with the
maps. That's why they make every State a different color; it ain't to
deceive you, it's to keep you from deceiving yourself."
But I couldn't see no argument about that, and neither could Jim. Jim
shook his head, and says:
"Why, Mars Tom, if you knowed what chuckle-heads dem painters is, you'd
wait a long time before you'd fetch one er DEM in to back up a fac'. I's
gwine to tell you, den you kin see for you'self. I see one of 'em
a-paintin' away, one day, down in ole Hank Wilson's back lot, en I went
down to see, en he was paintin' dat old brindle cow wid de near horn
gone--you knows de one I means. En I ast him what he's paintin' her for,
en he say when he git her painted, de picture's wuth a hundred dollars.
Mars Tom, he could a got de cow fer fifteen, en I tole him so. Well, sah,
if you'll b'lieve me, he jes' shuck his head, dat painter did, en went on
a-dobbin'. Bless you, Mars Tom, DEY don't know nothin'."
Tom lost his temper. I notice a person 'most always does that's got laid
out in an argument. He told us to shut up, and maybe we'd feel better.
Then he see a town clock away off down yonder, and he took up the glass
and looked at it, and then looked at his silver turnip, and then at the
clock, and then at the turnip again, and says:
"That's funny! That clock's near about an hour fast."
So he put up his turnip. Then he see another clock, and took a look, and
it was an hour fast too. That puzzled him.
"That's a mighty curious thing," he says. "I don't understand it."
Then he took the glass and hunted up another clock, and sure enough it
was an hour fast too. Then his eyes began to spread and his breath to
come out kinder gaspy like, and he says:
"Ger-reat Scott, it's the LONGITUDE!"
I says, considerably scared:
"Well, what's been and gone and happened now?"
"Why, the thing that's happened is that this old bladder has slid over
Illinois and Indiana and Ohio like nothing, and this is the east end of
Pennsylvania or New York, or somewheres around there."
"Tom Sawyer, you don't mean it!"
"Yes, I do, and it's dead sure. We've covered about fifteen degrees of
longitude since we left St. Louis yesterday afternoon, and them clocks
are right. We've come close on to eight hundred miles."
I didn't believe it, but it made the cold streaks trickle down my back
just the same. In my experience I knowed it wouldn't take much short of
two weeks to do it down the Mississippi on a raft. Jim was working his
mind and studying. Pretty soon he says:
"Mars Tom, did you say dem clocks uz right?"
"Yes, they're right."
"Ain't yo' watch right, too?"
"She's right for St. Louis, but she's an hour wrong for here."
"Mars Tom, is you tryin' to let on dat de time ain't de SAME
everywheres?"
"No, it ain't the same everywheres, by a long shot."
Jim looked distressed, and says:
"It grieves me to hear you talk like dat, Mars Tom; I's right down
ashamed to hear you talk like dat, arter de way you's been raised.
Yassir, it'd break yo' Aunt Polly's heart to hear you."
Tom was astonished. He looked Jim over wondering, and didn't say nothing,
and Jim went on:
"Mars Tom, who put de people out yonder in St. Louis? De Lord done it.
Who put de people here whar we is? De Lord done it. Ain' dey bofe his
children? 'Cose dey is. WELL, den! is he gwine to SCRIMINATE 'twixt 'em?"
"Scriminate! I never heard such ignorance. There ain't no discriminating
about it. When he makes you and some more of his children black, and
makes the rest of us white, what do you call that?"
Jim see the p'int. He was stuck. He couldn't answer. Tom says:
"He does discriminate, you see, when he wants to; but this case HERE
ain't no discrimination of his, it's man's. The Lord made the day, and he
made the night; but he didn't invent the hours, and he didn't distribute
them around. Man did that."
"Mars Tom, is dat so? Man done it?"
"Certainly."
"Who tole him he could?"
"Nobody. He never asked."
Jim studied a minute, and says:
"Well, dat do beat me. I wouldn't 'a' tuck no sich resk. But some people
ain't scared o' nothin'. Dey bangs right ahead; DEY don't care what
happens. So den dey's allays an hour's diff'unce everywhah, Mars Tom?"
"An hour? No! It's four minutes difference for every degree of longitude,
you know. Fifteen of 'em's an hour, thirty of 'em's two hours, and so on.
When it's one clock Tuesday morning in England, it's eight o'clock the
night before in New York."
Jim moved a little way along the locker, and you could see he was
insulted. He kept shaking his head and muttering, and so I slid along to
him and patted him on the leg, and petted him up, and got him over the
worst of his feelings, and then he says:
"Mars Tom talkin' sich talk as dat! Choosday in one place en Monday in
t'other, bofe in the same day! Huck, dis ain't no place to joke--up here
whah we is. Two days in one day! How you gwine to get two days inter one
day? Can't git two hours inter one hour, kin you? Can't git two niggers
inter one nigger skin, kin you? Can't git two gallons of whisky inter a
one-gallon jug, kin you? No, sir, 'twould strain de jug. Yes, en even den
you couldn't, I don't believe. Why, looky here, Huck, s'posen de Choosday
was New Year's--now den! is you gwine to tell me it's dis year in one
place en las' year in t'other, bofe in de identical same minute? It's de
beatenest rubbage! I can't stan' it--I can't stan' to hear tell 'bout
it." Then he begun to shiver and turn gray, and Tom says:
"NOW what's the matter? What's the trouble?"
Jim could hardly speak, but he says:
"Mars Tom, you ain't jokin', en it's SO?"
"No, I'm not, and it is so."
Jim shivered again, and says:
"Den dat Monday could be de las' day, en dey wouldn't be no las' day in
England, en de dead wouldn't be called. We mustn't go over dah, Mars Tom.
Please git him to turn back; I wants to be whah--"
All of a sudden we see something, and all jumped up, and forgot
everything and begun to gaze. Tom says:
"Ain't that the--" He catched his breath, then says: "It IS, sure as you
live! It's the ocean!"
That made me and Jim catch our breath, too. Then we all stood petrified
but happy, for none of us had ever seen an ocean, or ever expected to.
Tom kept muttering:
"Atlantic Ocean--Atlantic. Land, don't it sound great! And that's IT--and
WE are looking at it--we! Why, it's just too splendid to believe!"
Then we see a big bank of black smoke; and when we got nearer, it was a
city--and a monster she was, too, with a thick fringe of ships around one
edge; and we wondered if it was New York, and begun to jaw and dispute
about it, and, first we knowed, it slid from under us and went flying
behind, and here we was, out over the very ocean itself, and going like a
cyclone. Then we woke up, I tell you!
We made a break aft and raised a wail, and begun to beg the professor to
turn back and land us, but he jerked out his pistol and motioned us back,
and we went, but nobody will ever know how bad we felt.
The land was gone, all but a little streak, like a snake, away off on the
edge of the water, and down under us was just ocean, ocean,
ocean--millions of miles of it, heaving and pitching and squirming, and
white sprays blowing from the wave-tops, and only a few ships in sight,
wallowing around and laying over, first on one side and then on t'other,
and sticking their bows under and then their sterns; and before long
there warn't no ships at all, and we had the sky and the whole ocean all
to ourselves, and the roomiest place I ever see and the lonesomest.
CHAPTER IV. STORM
AND it got lonesomer and lonesomer. There was the big sky up there, empty
and awful deep; and the ocean down there without a thing on it but just
the waves. All around us was a ring, where the sky and the water come
together; yes, a monstrous big ring it was, and we right in the dead
center of it--plumb in the center. We was racing along like a prairie
fire, but it never made any difference, we couldn't seem to git past that
center no way. I couldn't see that we ever gained an inch on that ring.
It made a body feel creepy, it was so curious and unaccountable.
Well, everything was so awful still that we got to talking in a very low
voice, and kept on getting creepier and lonesomer and less and less
talky, till at last the talk ran dry altogether, and we just set there
and "thunk," as Jim calls it, and never said a word the longest time.
The professor never stirred till the sun was overhead, then he stood up
and put a kind of triangle to his eye, and Tom said it was a sextant and
he was taking the sun to see whereabouts the balloon was. Then he
ciphered a little and looked in a book, and then he begun to carry on
again. He said lots of wild things, and, among others, he said he would
keep up this hundred-mile gait till the middle of to-morrow afternoon,
and then he'd land in London.
We said we would be humbly thankful.
He was turning away, but he whirled around when we said that, and give us
a long look of his blackest kind--one of the maliciousest and
suspiciousest looks I ever see. Then he says:
"You want to leave me. Don't try to deny it."
We didn't know what to say, so we held in and didn't say nothing at all.
He went aft and set down, but he couldn't seem to git that thing out of
his mind. Every now and then he would rip out something about it, and try
to make us answer him, but we dasn't.
It got lonesomer and lonesomer right along, and it did seem to me I
couldn't stand it. It was still worse when night begun to come on. By and
by Tom pinched me and whispers:
"Look!"
I took a glance aft, and see the professor taking a whet out of a bottle.
I didn't like the looks of that. By and by he took another drink, and
pretty soon he begun to sing. It was dark now, and getting black and
stormy. He went on singing, wilder and wilder, and the thunder begun to
mutter, and the wind to wheeze and moan among the ropes, and altogether
it was awful. It got so black we couldn't see him any more, and wished we
couldn't hear him, but we could. Then he got still; but he warn't still
ten minutes till we got suspicious, and wished he would start up his
noise again, so we could tell where he was. By and by there was a flash
of lightning, and we see him start to get up, but he staggered and fell
down. We heard him scream out in the dark:
"They don't want to go to England. All right, I'll change the course.
They want to leave me. I know they do. Well, they shall--and NOW!"
I 'most died when he said that. Then he was still again--still so long I
couldn't bear it, and it did seem to me the lightning wouldn't EVER come
again. But at last there was a blessed flash, and there he was, on his
hands and knees crawling, and not four feet from us. My, but his eyes was
terrible! He made a lunge for Tom, and says, "Overboard YOU go!" but it
was already pitch-dark again, and I couldn't see whether he got him or
not, and Tom didn't make a sound.
There was another long, horrible wait; then there was a flash, and I see
Tom's head sink down outside the boat and disappear. He was on the
rope-ladder that dangled down in the air from the gunnel. The professor
let off a shout and jumped for him, and straight off it was pitch-dark
again, and Jim groaned out, "Po' Mars Tom, he's a goner!" and made a jump
for the professor, but the professor warn't there.
Then we heard a couple of terrible screams, and then another not so loud,
and then another that was 'way below, and you could only JUST hear it;
and I heard Jim say, "Po' Mars Tom!"
Then it was awful still, and I reckon a person could 'a' counted four
thousand before the next flash come. When it come I see Jim on his knees,
with his arms on the locker and his face buried in them, and he was
crying. Before I could look over the edge it was all dark again, and I
was glad, because I didn't want to see. But when the next flash come, I
was watching, and down there I see somebody a-swinging in the wind on the
ladder, and it was Tom!
"Come up!" I shouts; "come up, Tom!"
His voice was so weak, and the wind roared so, I couldn't make out what
he said, but I thought he asked was the professor up there. I shouts:
"No, he's down in the ocean! Come up! Can we help you?"
Of course, all this in the dark.
"Huck, who is you hollerin' at?"
"I'm hollerin' at Tom."
"Oh, Huck, how kin you act so, when you know po' Mars Tom--" Then he let
off an awful scream, and flung his head and his arms back and let off
another one, because there was a white glare just then, and he had raised
up his face just in time to see Tom's, as white as snow, rise above the
gunnel and look him right in the eye. He thought it was Tom's ghost, you
see.
Tom clumb aboard, and when Jim found it WAS him, and not his ghost, he
hugged him, and called him all sorts of loving names, and carried on like
he was gone crazy, he was so glad. Says I:
"What did you wait for, Tom? Why didn't you come up at first?"
"I dasn't, Huck. I knowed somebody plunged down past me, but I didn't
know who it was in the dark. It could 'a' been you, it could 'a' been
Jim."
That was the way with Tom Sawyer--always sound. He warn't coming up till
he knowed where the professor was.
The storm let go about this time with all its might; and it was dreadful
the way the thunder boomed and tore, and the lightning glared out, and
the wind sung and screamed in the rigging, and the rain come down. One
second you couldn't see your hand before you, and the next you could
count the threads in your coat-sleeve, and see a whole wide desert of
waves pitching and tossing through a kind of veil of rain. A storm like
that is the loveliest thing there is, but it ain't at its best when you
are up in the sky and lost, and it's wet and lonesome, and there's just
been a death in the family.
We set there huddled up in the bow, and talked low about the poor
professor; and everybody was sorry for him, and sorry the world had made
fun of him and treated him so harsh, when he was doing the best he could,
and hadn't a friend nor nobody to encourage him and keep him from
brooding his mind away and going deranged. There was plenty of clothes
and blankets and everything at the other end, but we thought we'd ruther
take the rain than go meddling back there.
CHAPTER V. LAND
WE tried to make some plans, but we couldn't come to no agreement. Me and
Jim was for turning around and going back home, but Tom allowed that by
the time daylight come, so we could see our way, we would be so far
toward England that we might as well go there, and come back in a ship,
and have the glory of saying we done it.
About midnight the storm quit and the moon come out and lit up the ocean,
and we begun to feel comfortable and drowsy; so we stretched out on the
lockers and went to sleep, and never woke up again till sun-up. The sea
was sparkling like di'monds, and it was nice weather, and pretty soon our
things was all dry again.
We went aft to find some breakfast, and the first thing we noticed was
that there was a dim light burning in a compass back there under a hood.
Then Tom was disturbed. He says:
"You know what that means, easy enough. It means that somebody has got to
stay on watch and steer this thing the same as he would a ship, or she'll
wander around and go wherever the wind wants her to."
"Well," I says, "what's she been doing since--er--since we had the
accident?"
"Wandering," he says, kinder troubled--"wandering, without any doubt.
She's in a wind now that's blowing her south of east. We don't know how
long that's been going on, either."
So then he p'inted her east, and said he would hold her there till we
rousted out the breakfast. The professor had laid in everything a body
could want; he couldn't 'a' been better fixed. There wasn't no milk for
the coffee, but there was water, and everything else you could want, and
a charcoal stove and the fixings for it, and pipes and cigars and
matches; and wine and liquor, which warn't in our line; and books, and
maps, and charts, and an accordion; and furs, and blankets, and no end of
rubbish, like brass beads and brass jewelry, which Tom said was a sure
sign that he had an idea of visiting among savages. There was money, too.
Yes, the professor was well enough fixed.
After breakfast Tom learned me and Jim how to steer, and divided us all
up into four-hour watches, turn and turn about; and when his watch was
out I took his place, and he got out the professor's papers and pens and
wrote a letter home to his aunt Polly, telling her everything that had
happened to us, and dated it "IN THE WELKIN, APPROACHING ENGLAND," and
folded it together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and directed it,
and wrote above the direction, in big writing, "FROM TOM SAWYER, THE
ERRONORT," and said it would stump old Nat Parsons, the postmaster, when
it come along in the mail. I says:
"Tom Sawyer, this ain't no welkin, it's a balloon."
"Well, now, who SAID it was a welkin, smarty?"
"You've wrote it on the letter, anyway."
"What of it? That don't mean that the balloon's the welkin."
"Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a welkin?"
I see in a minute he was stuck. He raked and scraped around in his mind,
but he couldn't find nothing, so he had to say:
"I don't know, and nobody don't know. It's just a word, and it's a mighty
good word, too. There ain't many that lays over it. I don't believe
there's ANY that does."
"Shucks!" I says. "But what does it MEAN?--that's the p'int."
"I don't know what it means, I tell you. It's a word that people uses
for--for--well, it's ornamental. They don't put ruffles on a shirt to
keep a person warm, do they?"
"Course they don't."
"But they put them ON, don't they?"
"Yes."
"All right, then; that letter I wrote is a shirt, and the welkin's the
ruffle on it."
I judged that that would gravel Jim, and it did.
"Now, Mars Tom, it ain't no use to talk like dat; en, moreover, it's
sinful. You knows a letter ain't no shirt, en dey ain't no ruffles on it,
nuther. Dey ain't no place to put 'em on; you can't put em on, and dey
wouldn't stay ef you did."
"Oh DO shut up, and wait till something's started that you know something
about."
"Why, Mars Tom, sholy you can't mean to say I don't know about shirts,
when, goodness knows, I's toted home de washin' ever sence--"
"I tell you, this hasn't got anything to do with shirts. I only--"
"Why, Mars Tom, you said yo'self dat a letter--"
"Do you want to drive me crazy? Keep still. I only used it as a
metaphor."
That word kinder bricked us up for a minute. Then Jim says--rather timid,
because he see Tom was getting pretty tetchy:
"Mars Tom, what is a metaphor?"
"A metaphor's a--well, it's a--a--a metaphor's an illustration." He see
THAT didn't git home, so he tried again. "When I say birds of a feather
flocks together, it's a metaphorical way of saying--"
"But dey DON'T, Mars Tom. No, sir, 'deed dey don't. Dey ain't no feathers
dat's more alike den a bluebird en a jaybird, but ef you waits till you
catches dem birds together, you'll--"
"Oh, give us a rest! You can't get the simplest little thing through your
thick skull. Now don't bother me any more."
Jim was satisfied to stop. He was dreadful pleased with himself for
catching Tom out. The minute Tom begun to talk about birds I judged he
was a goner, because Jim knowed more about birds than both of us put
together. You see, he had killed hundreds and hundreds of them, and
that's the way to find out about birds. That's the way people does that
writes books about birds, and loves them so that they'll go hungry and
tired and take any amount of trouble to find a new bird and kill it.
Their name is ornithologers, and I could have been an ornithologer
myself, because I always loved birds and creatures; and I started out to
learn how to be one, and I see a bird setting on a limb of a high tree,
singing with its head tilted back and its mouth open, and before I
thought I fired, and his song stopped and he fell straight down from the
limb, all limp like a rag, and I run and picked him up and he was dead,
and his body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about this way and
that, like his neck was broke, and there was a little white skin over his
eyes, and one little drop of blood on the side of his head; and, laws! I
couldn't see nothing more for the tears; and I hain't never murdered no
creature since that warn't doing me no harm, and I ain't going to.
But I was aggravated about that welkin. I wanted to know. I got the
subject up again, and then Tom explained, the best he could. He said when
a person made a big speech the newspapers said the shouts of the people
made the welkin ring. He said they always said that, but none of them
ever told what it was, so he allowed it just meant outdoors and up high.
Well, that seemed sensible enough, so I was satisfied, and said so. That
pleased Tom and put him in a good humor again, and he says:
"Well, it's all right, then; and we'll let bygones be bygones. I don't
know for certain what a welkin is, but when we land in London we'll make
it ring, anyway, and don't you forget it."
He said an erronort was a person who sailed around in balloons; and said
it was a mighty sight finer to be Tom Sawyer the Erronort than to be Tom
Sawyer the Traveler, and we would be heard of all round the world, if we
pulled through all right, and so he wouldn't give shucks to be a traveler
now.
Toward the middle of the afternoon we got everything ready to land, and
we felt pretty good, too, and proud; and we kept watching with the
glasses, like Columbus discovering America. But we couldn't see nothing
but ocean. The afternoon wasted out and the sun shut down, and still
there warn't no land anywheres. We wondered what was the matter, but
reckoned it would come out all right, so we went on steering east, but
went up on a higher level so we wouldn't hit any steeples or mountains in
the dark.
It was my watch till midnight, and then it was Jim's; but Tom stayed up,
because he said ship captains done that when they was making the land,
and didn't stand no regular watch.
Well, when daylight come, Jim give a shout, and we jumped up and looked
over, and there was the land sure enough--land all around, as far as you
could see, and perfectly level and yaller. We didn't know how long we'd
been over it. There warn't no trees, nor hills, nor rocks, nor towns, and
Tom and Jim had took it for the sea. They took it for the sea in a dead
ca'm; but we was so high up, anyway, that if it had been the sea and
rough, it would 'a' looked smooth, all the same, in the night, that way.
We was all in a powerful excitement now, and grabbed the glasses and
hunted everywheres for London, but couldn't find hair nor hide of it, nor
any other settlement--nor any sign of a lake or a river, either. Tom was
clean beat. He said it warn't his notion of England; he thought England
looked like America, and always had that idea. So he said we better have
breakfast, and then drop down and inquire the quickest way to London. We
cut the breakfast pretty short, we was so impatient. As we slanted along
down, the weather began to moderate, and pretty soon we shed our furs.
But it kept ON moderating, and in a precious little while it was 'most
too moderate. We was close down now, and just blistering!
We settled down to within thirty foot of the land--that is, it was land
if sand is land; for this wasn't anything but pure sand. Tom and me clumb
down the ladder and took a run to stretch our legs, and it felt amazing
good--that is, the stretching did, but the sand scorched our feet like
hot embers. Next, we see somebody coming, and started to meet him; but we
heard Jim shout, and looked around and he was fairly dancing, and making
signs, and yelling. We couldn't make out what he said, but we was scared
anyway, and begun to heel it back to the balloon. When we got close
enough, we understood the words, and they made me sick:
"Run! Run fo' yo' life! Hit's a lion; I kin see him thoo de glass! Run,
boys; do please heel it de bes' you kin. He's bu'sted outen de menagerie,
en dey ain't nobody to stop him!"
It made Tom fly, but it took the stiffening all out of my legs. I could
only just gasp along the way you do in a dream when there's a ghost
gaining on you.
Tom got to the ladder and shinned up it a piece and waited for me; and as
soon as I got a foothold on it he shouted to Jim to soar away. But Jim
had clean lost his head, and said he had forgot how. So Tom shinned along
up and told me to follow; but the lion was arriving, fetching a most
ghastly roar with every lope, and my legs shook so I dasn't try to take
one of them out of the rounds for fear the other one would give way under
me.
But Tom was aboard by this time, and he started the balloon up a little,
and stopped it again as soon as the end of the ladder was ten or twelve
feet above ground. And there was the lion, a-ripping around under me, and
roaring and springing up in the air at the ladder, and only missing it
about a quarter of an inch, it seemed to me. It was delicious to be out
of his reach, perfectly delicious, and made me feel good and thankful all
up one side; but I was hanging there helpless and couldn't climb, and
that made me feel perfectly wretched and miserable all down the other. It
is most seldom that a person feels so mixed like that; and it is not to
be recommended, either.
Tom asked me what he'd better do, but I didn't know. He asked me if I
could hold on whilst he sailed away to a safe place and left the lion
behind. I said I could if he didn't go no higher than he was now; but if
he went higher I would lose my head and fall, sure. So he said, "Take a
good grip," and he started.
"Don't go so fast," I shouted. "It makes my head swim."
He had started like a lightning express. He slowed down, and we glided
over the sand slower, but still in a kind of sickening way; for it IS
uncomfortable to see things sliding and gliding under you like that, and
not a sound.
But pretty soon there was plenty of sound, for the lion was catching up.
His noise fetched others. You could see them coming on the lope from
every direction, and pretty soon there was a couple of dozen of them
under me, jumping up at the ladder and snarling and snapping at each
other; and so we went skimming along over the sand, and these fellers
doing what they could to help us to not forgit the occasion; and then
some other beasts come, without an invite, and they started a regular
riot down there.
We see this plan was a mistake. We couldn't ever git away from them at
this gait, and I couldn't hold on forever. So Tom took a think, and
struck another idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box
revolver, and then sail away while the others stopped to fight over the
carcass. So he stopped the balloon still, and done it, and then we sailed
off while the fuss was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off,
and they helped me aboard; but by the time we was out of reach again,
that gang was on hand once more. And when they see we was really gone and
they couldn't get us, they sat down on their hams and looked up at us so
kind of disappointed that it was as much as a person could do not to see
THEIR side of the matter.
CHAPTER VI. IT'S A CARAVAN
I WAS so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so I
made straight for my locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a
body couldn't get back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom give
the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft.
We had to go up a mile before we struck comfortable weather where it was
breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all straight
again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps up and
says:
"I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We're in the Great
Sahara, as sure as guns!"
He was so excited he couldn't hold still; but I wasn't. I says:
"Well, then, where's the Great Sahara? In England or in Scotland?"
"'Tain't in either; it's in Africa."
Jim's eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of
interest, because that was where his originals come from; but I didn't
more than half believe it. I couldn't, you know; it seemed too awful far
away for us to have traveled.
But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it, and said the lions
and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could 'a' found
out, before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres, if
he had thought of one thing; and when we asked him what, he said:
"These clocks. They're chronometers. You always read about them in sea
voyages. One of them is keeping Grinnage time, and the other is keeping
St. Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis it was four in the
afternoon by my watch and this clock, and it was ten at night by this
Grinnage clock. Well, at this time of the year the sun sets at about
seven o'clock. Now I noticed the time yesterday evening when the sun went
down, and it was half-past five o'clock by the Grinnage clock, and half
past 11 A.M. by my watch and the other clock. You see, the sun rose and
set by my watch in St. Louis, and the Grinnage clock was six hours fast;
but we've come so far east that it comes within less than half an hour of
setting by the Grinnage clock now, and I'm away out--more than four
hours and a half out. You see, that meant that we was closing up on the
longitude of Ireland, and would strike it before long if we was p'inted
right--which we wasn't. No, sir, we've been a-wandering--wandering 'way
down south of east, and it's my opinion we are in Africa. Look at this
map. You see how the shoulder of Africa sticks out to the west. Think how
fast we've traveled; if we had gone straight east we would be long past
England by this time. You watch for noon, all of you, and we'll stand up,
and when we can't cast a shadow we'll find that this Grinnage clock is
coming mighty close to marking twelve. Yes, sir, I think we're in Africa;
and it's just bully."
Jim was gazing down with the glass. He shook his head and says:
"Mars Tom, I reckon dey's a mistake som'er's, hain't seen no niggers
yit."
"That's nothing; they don't live in the desert. What is that, 'way off
yonder? Gimme a glass."
He took a long look, and said it was like a black string stretched across
the sand, but he couldn't guess what it was.
"Well," I says, "I reckon maybe you've got a chance now to find out
whereabouts this balloon is, because as like as not that is one of these
lines here, that's on the map, that you call meridians of longitude, and
we can drop down and look at its number, and--"
"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, I never see such a lunkhead as you. Did you
s'pose there's meridians of longitude on the EARTH?"
"Tom Sawyer, they're set down on the map, and you know it perfectly well,
and here they are, and you can see for yourself."
"Of course they're on the map, but that's nothing; there ain't any on the
GROUND."
"Tom, do you know that to be so?"
"Certainly I do."
"Well, then, that map's a liar again. I never see such a liar as that
map."
He fired up at that, and I was ready for him, and Jim was warming his
opinion, too, and next minute we'd 'a' broke loose on another argument,
if Tom hadn't dropped the glass and begun to clap his hands like a maniac
and sing out:
"Camels!--Camels!"
So I grabbed a glass and Jim, too, and took a look, but I was
disappointed, and says:
"Camels your granny; they're spiders."
"Spiders in a desert, you shad? Spiders walking in a procession? You
don't ever reflect, Huck Finn, and I reckon you really haven't got
anything to reflect WITH. Don't you know we're as much as a mile up in
the air, and that that string of crawlers is two or three miles away?
Spiders, good land! Spiders as big as a cow? Perhaps you'd like to go
down and milk one of 'em. But they're camels, just the same. It's a
caravan, that's what it is, and it's a mile long."
"Well, then, let's go down and look at it. I don't believe in it, and
ain't going to till I see it and know it."
"All right," he says, and give the command:
"Lower away."
As we come slanting down into the hot weather, we could see that it was
camels, sure enough, plodding along, an everlasting string of them, with
bales strapped to them, and several hundred men in long white robes, and
a thing like a shawl bound over their heads and hanging down with tassels
and fringes; and some of the men had long guns and some hadn't, and some
was riding and some was walking. And the weather--well, it was just
roasting. And how slow they did creep along! We swooped down now, all of
a sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their heads.
The men all set up a yell, and some of them fell flat on their stomachs,
some begun to fire their guns at us, and the rest broke and scampered
every which way, and so did the camels.
We see that we was making trouble, so we went up again about a mile, to
the cool weather, and watched them from there. It took them an hour to
get together and form the procession again; then they started along, but
we could see by the glasses that they wasn't paying much attention to
anything but us. We poked along, looking down at them with the glasses,
and by and by we see a big sand mound, and something like people the
other side of it, and there was something like a man laying on top of the
mound that raised his head up every now and then, and seemed to be
watching the caravan or us, we didn't know which. As the caravan got
nearer, he sneaked down on the other side and rushed to the other men and
horses--for that is what they was--and we see them mount in a hurry; and
next, here they come, like a house afire, some with lances and some with
long guns, and all of them yelling the best they could.
They come a-tearing down on to the caravan, and the next minute both
sides crashed together and was all mixed up, and there was such another
popping of guns as you never heard, and the air got so full of smoke you
could only catch glimpses of them struggling together. There must 'a'
been six hundred men in that battle, and it was terrible to see. Then
they broke up into gangs and groups, fighting tooth and nail, and
scurrying and scampering around, and laying into each other like
everything; and whenever the smoke cleared a little you could see dead
and wounded people and camels scattered far and wide and all about, and
camels racing off in every direction.
At last the robbers see they couldn't win, so their chief sounded a
signal, and all that was left of them broke away and went scampering
across the plain. The last man to go snatched up a child and carried it
off in front of him on his horse, and a woman run screaming and begging
after him, and followed him away off across the plain till she was
separated a long ways from her people; but it warn't no use, and she had
to give it up, and we see her sink down on the sand and cover her face
with her hands. Then Tom took the hellum, and started for that yahoo, and
we come a-whizzing down and made a swoop, and knocked him out of the
saddle, child and all; and he was jarred considerable, but the child
wasn't hurt, but laid there working its hands and legs in the air like a
tumble-bug that's on its back and can't turn over. The man went
staggering off to overtake his horse, and didn't know what had hit him,
for we was three or four hundred yards up in the air by this time.
We judged the woman would go and get the child now; but she didn't. We
could see her, through the glass, still setting there, with her head
bowed down on her knees; so of course she hadn't seen the performance,
and thought her child was clean gone with the man. She was nearly a half
a mile from her people, so we thought we might go down to the child,
which was about a quarter of a mile beyond her, and snake it to her
before the caravan people could git to us to do us any harm; and besides,
we reckoned they had enough business on their hands for one while,
anyway, with the wounded. We thought we'd chance it, and we did. We
swooped down and stopped, and Jim shinned down the ladder and fetched up
the kid, which was a nice fat little thing, and in a noble good humor,
too, considering it was just out of a battle and been tumbled off of a
horse; and then we started for the mother, and stopped back of her and
tolerable near by, and Jim slipped down and crept up easy, and when he
was close back of her the child goo-goo'd, the way a child does, and she
heard it, and whirled and fetched a shriek of joy, and made a jump for
the kid and snatched it and hugged it, and dropped it and hugged Jim, and
then snatched off a gold chain and hung it around Jim's neck, and hugged
him again, and jerked up the child again, a-sobbing and glorifying all
the time; and Jim he shoved for the ladder and up it, and in a minute we
was back up in the sky and the woman was staring up, with the back of her
head between her shoulders and the child with its arms locked around her
neck. And there she stood, as long as we was in sight a-sailing away in
the sky.
CHAPTER VII. TOM RESPECTS THE FLEA
"NOON!" says Tom, and so it was. His shadder was just a blot around his
feet. We looked, and the Grinnage clock was so close to twelve the
difference didn't amount to nothing. So Tom said London was right north
of us or right south of us, one or t'other, and he reckoned by the
weather and the sand and the camels it was north; and a good many miles
north, too; as many as from New York to the city of Mexico, he guessed.
Jim said he reckoned a balloon was a good deal the fastest thing in the
world, unless it might be some kinds of birds--a wild pigeon, maybe, or a
railroad.
But Tom said he had read about railroads in England going nearly a
hundred miles an hour for a little ways, and there never was a bird in
the world that could do that--except one, and that was a flea.
"A flea? Why, Mars Tom, in de fust place he ain't a bird, strickly
speakin'--"
"He ain't a bird, eh? Well, then, what is he?"
"I don't rightly know, Mars Tom, but I speck he's only jist a' animal.
No, I reckon dat won't do, nuther, he ain't big enough for a' animal. He
mus' be a bug. Yassir, dat's what he is, he's a bug."
"I bet he ain't, but let it go. What's your second place?"
"Well, in de second place, birds is creturs dat goes a long ways, but a
flea don't."
"He don't, don't he? Come, now, what IS a long distance, if you know?"
"Why, it's miles, and lots of 'em--anybody knows dat."
"Can't a man walk miles?"
"Yassir, he kin."
"As many as a railroad?"
"Yassir, if you give him time."
"Can't a flea?"
"Well--I s'pose so--ef you gives him heaps of time."
"Now you begin to see, don't you, that DISTANCE ain't the thing to judge
by, at all; it's the time it takes to go the distance IN that COUNTS,
ain't it?"
"Well, hit do look sorter so, but I wouldn't 'a' b'lieved it, Mars Tom."
"It's a matter of PROPORTION, that's what it is; and when you come to
gauge a thing's speed by its size, where's your bird and your man and
your railroad, alongside of a flea? The fastest man can't run more than
about ten miles in an hour--not much over ten thousand times his own
length. But all the books says any common ordinary third-class flea can
jump a hundred and fifty times his own length; yes, and he can make five
jumps a second too--seven hundred and fifty times his own length, in one
little second--for he don't fool away any time stopping and starting--he
does them both at the same time; you'll see, if you try to put your
finger on him. Now that's a common, ordinary, third-class flea's gait;
but you take an Eyetalian FIRST-class, that's been the pet of the
nobility all his life, and hasn't ever knowed what want or sickness or
exposure was, and he can jump more than three hundred times his own
length, and keep it up all day, five such jumps every second, which is
fifteen hundred times his own length. Well, suppose a man could go
fifteen hundred times his own length in a second--say, a mile and a half.
It's ninety miles a minute; it's considerable more than five thousand
miles an hour. Where's your man NOW?--yes, and your bird, and your
railroad, and your balloon? Laws, they don't amount to shucks 'longside
of a flea. A flea is just a comet b'iled down small."
Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim said:
"Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin' en no lies, Mars Tom?"
"Yes, they are; they're perfectly true."
"Well, den, honey, a body's got to respec' a flea. I ain't had no respec'
for um befo', sca'sely, but dey ain't no gittin' roun' it, dey do deserve
it, dat's certain."
"Well, I bet they do. They've got ever so much more sense, and brains,
and brightness, in proportion to their size, than any other cretur in the
world. A person can learn them 'most anything; and they learn it quicker
than any other cretur, too. They've been learnt to haul little carriages
in harness, and go this way and that way and t'other way according to
their orders; yes, and to march and drill like soldiers, doing it as
exact, according to orders, as soldiers does it. They've been learnt to
do all sorts of hard and troublesome things. S'pose you could cultivate a
flea up to the size of a man, and keep his natural smartness a-growing
and a-growing right along up, bigger and bigger, and keener and keener,
in the same proportion--where'd the human race be, do you reckon? That
flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn't any more
prevent it than you can prevent lightning."
"My lan', Mars Tom, I never knowed dey was so much TO de beas'. No, sir,
I never had no idea of it, and dat's de fac'."
"There's more to him, by a long sight, than there is to any other cretur,
man or beast, in proportion to size. He's the interestingest of them all.
People have so much to say about an ant's strength, and an elephant's,
and a locomotive's. Shucks, they don't begin with a flea. He can lift two
or three hundred times his own weight. And none of them can come anywhere
near it. And, moreover, he has got notions of his own, and is very
particular, and you can't fool him; his instinct, or his judgment, or
whatever it is, is perfectly sound and clear, and don't ever make a
mistake. People think all humans are alike to a flea. It ain't so.
There's folks that he won't go near, hungry or not hungry, and I'm one of
them. I've never had one of them on me in my life."
"Mars Tom!"
"It's so; I ain't joking."
"Well, sah, I hain't ever heard de likes o' dat befo'." Jim couldn't
believe it, and I couldn't; so we had to drop down to the sand and git a
supply and see. Tom was right. They went for me and Jim by the thousand,
but not a one of them lit on Tom. There warn't no explaining it, but
there it was and there warn't no getting around it. He said it had always
been just so, and he'd just as soon be where there was a million of them
as not; they'd never touch him nor bother him.
We went up to the cold weather to freeze 'em out, and stayed a little
spell, and then come back to the comfortable weather and went lazying
along twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, the way we'd been doing for
the last few hours. The reason was, that the longer we was in that
solemn, peaceful desert, the more the hurry and fuss got kind of soothed
down in us, and the more happier and contented and satisfied we got to
feeling, and the more we got to liking the desert, and then loving it. So
we had cramped the speed down, as I was saying, and was having a most
noble good lazy time, sometimes watching through the glasses, sometimes
stretched out on the lockers reading, sometimes taking a nap.
It didn't seem like we was the same lot that was in such a state to find
land and git ashore, but it was. But we had got over that--clean over it.
We was used to the balloon now and not afraid any more, and didn't want
to be anywheres else. Why, it seemed just like home; it 'most seemed as
if I had been born and raised in it, and Jim and Tom said the same. And
always I had had hateful people around me, a-nagging at me, and pestering
of me, and scolding, and finding fault, and fussing and bothering, and
sticking to me, and keeping after me, and making me do this, and making
me do that and t'other, and always selecting out the things I didn't want
to do, and then giving me Sam Hill because I shirked and done something
else, and just aggravating the life out of a body all the time; but up
here in the sky it was so still and sunshiny and lovely, and plenty to
eat, and plenty of sleep, and strange things to see, and no nagging and
no pestering, and no good people, and just holiday all the time. Land, I
warn't in no hurry to git out and buck at civilization again. Now, one of
the worst things about civilization is, that anybody that gits a letter
with trouble in it comes and tells you all about it and makes you feel
bad, and the newspapers fetches you the troubles of everybody all over
the world, and keeps you downhearted and dismal 'most all the time, and
it's such a heavy load for a person. I hate them newspapers; and I hate
letters; and if I had my way I wouldn't allow nobody to load his troubles
on to other folks he ain't acquainted with, on t'other side of the world,
that way. Well, up in a balloon there ain't any of that, and it's the
darlingest place there is.
We had supper, and that night was one of the prettiest nights I ever see.
The moon made it just like daylight, only a heap softer; and once we see
a lion standing all alone by himself, just all alone on the earth, it
seemed like, and his shadder laid on the sand by him like a puddle of
ink. That's the kind of moonlight to have.
Mainly we laid on our backs and talked; we didn't want to go to sleep.
Tom said we was right in the midst of the Arabian Nights now. He said it
was right along here that one of the cutest things in that book happened;
so we looked down and watched while he told about it, because there ain't
anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has
talked about. It was a tale about a camel-driver that had lost his camel,
and he come along in the desert and met a man, and says:
"Have you run across a stray camel to-day?"
And the man says:
"Was he blind in his left eye?"
"Yes."
"Had he lost an upper front tooth?"
"Yes."
"Was his off hind leg lame?"
"Yes."
"Was he loaded with millet-seed on one side and honey on the other?"
"Yes, but you needn't go into no more details--that's the one, and I'm
in a hurry. Where did you see him?"
"I hain't seen him at all," the man says.
"Hain't seen him at all? How can you describe him so close, then?"
"Because when a person knows how to use his eyes, everything has got a
meaning to it; but most people's eyes ain't any good to them. I knowed a
camel had been along, because I seen his track. I knowed he was lame in
his off hind leg because he had favored that foot and trod light on it,
and his track showed it. I knowed he was blind on his left side because
he only nibbled the grass on the right side of the trail. I knowed he had
lost an upper front tooth because where he bit into the sod his
teeth-print showed it. The millet-seed sifted out on one side--the ants
told me that; the honey leaked out on the other--the flies told me that.
I know all about your camel, but I hain't seen him."
Jim says:
"Go on, Mars Tom, hit's a mighty good tale, and powerful interestin'."
"That's all," Tom says.
"ALL?" says Jim, astonished. "What 'come o' de camel?"
"I don't know."
"Mars Tom, don't de tale say?"
"No."
Jim puzzled a minute, then he says:
"Well! Ef dat ain't de beatenes' tale ever I struck. Jist gits to de
place whah de intrust is gittin' red-hot, en down she breaks. Why, Mars
Tom, dey ain't no SENSE in a tale dat acts like dat. Hain't you got no
IDEA whether de man got de camel back er not?"
"No, I haven't."
I see myself there warn't no sense in the tale, to chop square off that
way before it come to anything, but I warn't going to say so, because I
could see Tom was souring up pretty fast over the way it flatted out and
the way Jim had popped on to the weak place in it, and I don't think it's
fair for everybody to pile on to a feller when he's down. But Tom he
whirls on me and says:
"What do YOU think of the tale?"
Of course, then, I had to come out and make a clean breast and say it did
seem to me, too, same as it did to Jim, that as long as the tale stopped
square in the middle and never got to no place, it really warn't worth
the trouble of telling.
Tom's chin dropped on his breast, and 'stead of being mad, as I reckoned
he'd be, to hear me scoff at his tale that way, he seemed to be only sad;
and he says:
"Some people can see, and some can't--just as that man said. Let alone a
camel, if a cyclone had gone by, YOU duffers wouldn't 'a' noticed the
track."
I don't know what he meant by that, and he didn't say; it was just one of
his irrulevances, I reckon--he was full of them, sometimes, when he was
in a close place and couldn't see no other way out--but I didn't mind.
We'd spotted the soft place in that tale sharp enough, he couldn't git
away from that little fact. It graveled him like the nation, too, I
reckon, much as he tried not to let on.
CHAPTER VIII. THE DISAPPEARING LAKE
WE had an early breakfast in the morning, and set looking down on the
desert, and the weather was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn't
high up. You have to come down lower and lower after sundown in the
desert, because it cools off so fast; and so, by the time it is getting
toward dawn, you are skimming along only a little ways above the sand.
We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground, and
now and then gazing off across the desert to see if anything was
stirring, and then down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden almost
right under us we see a lot of men and camels laying scattered about,
perfectly quiet, like they was asleep.
We shut off the power, and backed up and stood over them, and then we see
that they was all dead. It give us the cold shivers. And it made us hush
down, too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We dropped down slow
and stopped, and me and Tom clumb down and went among them. There was
men, and women, and children. They was dried by the sun and dark and
shriveled and leathery, like the pictures of mummies you see in books.
And yet they looked just as human, you wouldn't 'a' believed it; just
like they was asleep.
Some of the people and animals was partly covered with sand, but most of
them not, for the sand was thin there, and the bed was gravel and hard.
Most of the clothes had rotted away; and when you took hold of a rag, it
tore with a touch, like spiderweb. Tom reckoned they had been laying
there for years.
Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had swords on and had shawl
belts with long, silver-mounted pistols stuck in them. All the camels had
their loads on yet, but the packs had busted or rotted and spilt the
freight out on the ground. We didn't reckon the swords was any good to
the dead people any more, so we took one apiece, and some pistols. We
took a small box, too, because it was so handsome and inlaid so fine; and
then we wanted to bury the people; but there warn't no way to do it that
we could think of, and nothing to do it with but sand, and that would
blow away again, of course.
Then we mounted high and sailed away, and pretty soon that black spot on
the sand was out of sight, and we wouldn't ever see them poor people
again in this world. We wondered, and reasoned, and tried to guess how
they come to be there, and how it all happened to them, but we couldn't
make it out. First we thought maybe they got lost, and wandered around
and about till their food and water give out and they starved to death;
but Tom said no wild animals nor vultures hadn't meddled with them, and
so that guess wouldn't do. So at last we give it up, and judged we
wouldn't think about it no more, because it made us low-spirited.
Then we opened the box, and it had gems and jewels in it, quite a pile,
and some little veils of the kind the dead women had on, with fringes
made out of curious gold money that we warn't acquainted with. We
wondered if we better go and try to find them again and give it back; but
Tom thought it over and said no, it was a country that was full of
robbers, and they would come and steal it; and then the sin would be on
us for putting the temptation in their way. So we went on; but I wished
we had took all they had, so there wouldn't 'a' been no temptation at all
left.
We had had two hours of that blazing weather down there, and was dreadful
thirsty when we got aboard again. We went straight for the water, but it
was spoiled and bitter, besides being pretty near hot enough to scald
your mouth. We couldn't drink it. It was Mississippi river water, the
best in the world, and we stirred up the mud in it to see if that would
help, but no, the mud wasn't any better than the water. Well, we hadn't
been so very, very thirsty before, while we was interested in the lost
people, but we was now, and as soon as we found we couldn't have a drink,
we was more than thirty-five times as thirsty as we was a quarter of a
minute before. Why, in a little while we wanted to hold our mouths open
and pant like a dog.
Tom said to keep a sharp lookout, all around, everywheres, because we'd
got to find an oasis or there warn't no telling what would happen. So we
done it. We kept the glasses gliding around all the time, till our arms
got so tired we couldn't hold them any more. Two hours--three hours--just
gazing and gazing, and nothing but sand, sand, SAND, and you could see
the quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear, dear, a body don't know
what real misery is till he is thirsty all the way through and is certain
he ain't ever going to come to any water any more. At last I couldn't
stand it to look around on them baking plains; I laid down on the locker,
and give it up.
But by and by Tom raised a whoop, and there she was! A lake, wide and
shiny, with pa'm-trees leaning over it asleep, and their shadders in the
water just as soft and delicate as ever you see. I never see anything
look so good. It was a long ways off, but that warn't anything to us; we
just slapped on a hundred-mile gait, and calculated to be there in seven
minutes; but she stayed the same old distance away, all the time; we
couldn't seem to gain on her; yes, sir, just as far, and shiny, and like
a dream; but we couldn't get no nearer; and at last, all of a sudden, she
was gone!
Tom's eyes took a spread, and he says:
"Boys, it was a MYridge!" Said it like he was glad. I didn't see nothing
to be glad about. I says:
"Maybe. I don't care nothing about its name, the thing I want to know is,
what's become of it?"
Jim was trembling all over, and so scared he couldn't speak, but he
wanted to ask that question himself if he could 'a' done it. Tom says:
"What's BECOME of it? Why, you see yourself it's gone."
"Yes, I know; but where's it gone TO?"
He looked me over and says:
"Well, now, Huck Finn, where WOULD it go to! Don't you know what a
myridge is?"
"No, I don't. What is it?"
"It ain't anything but imagination. There ain't anything TO it."
It warmed me up a little to hear him talk like that, and I says:
"What's the use you talking that kind of stuff, Tom Sawyer? Didn't I see
the lake?"
"Yes--you think you did."
"I don't think nothing about it, I DID see it."
"I tell you you DIDN'T see it either--because it warn't there to see."
It astonished Jim to hear him talk so, and he broke in and says, kind of
pleading and distressed:
"Mars Tom, PLEASE don't say sich things in sich an awful time as dis. You
ain't only reskin' yo' own self, but you's reskin' us--same way like Anna
Nias en Siffra. De lake WUZ dah--I seen it jis' as plain as I sees you en
Huck dis minute."
I says:
"Why, he seen it himself! He was the very one that seen it first. NOW,
then!"
"Yes, Mars Tom, hit's so--you can't deny it. We all seen it, en dat PROVE
it was dah."
"Proves it! How does it prove it?"
"Same way it does in de courts en everywheres, Mars Tom. One pusson might
be drunk, or dreamy or suthin', en he could be mistaken; en two might,
maybe; but I tell you, sah, when three sees a thing, drunk er sober, it's
SO. Dey ain't no gittin' aroun' dat, en you knows it, Mars Tom."
"I don't know nothing of the kind. There used to be forty thousand
million people that seen the sun move from one side of the sky to the
other every day. Did that prove that the sun DONE it?"
"Course it did. En besides, dey warn't no 'casion to prove it. A body
'at's got any sense ain't gwine to doubt it. Dah she is now--a sailin'
thoo de sky, like she allays done."
Tom turned on me, then, and says:
"What do YOU say--is the sun standing still?"
"Tom Sawyer, what's the use to ask such a jackass question? Anybody that
ain't blind can see it don't stand still."
"Well," he says, "I'm lost in the sky with no company but a passel of
low-down animals that don't know no more than the head boss of a
university did three or four hundred years ago."
It warn't fair play, and I let him know it. I says:
"Throwin' mud ain't arguin', Tom Sawyer."
"Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness gracious, dah's de lake agi'n!" yelled
Jim, just then. "NOW, Mars Tom, what you gwine to say?"
Yes, sir, there was the lake again, away yonder across the desert,
perfectly plain, trees and all, just the same as it was before. I says:
"I reckon you're satisfied now, Tom Sawyer."
But he says, perfectly ca'm:
"Yes, satisfied there ain't no lake there."
Jim says:
"DON'T talk so, Mars Tom--it sk'yers me to hear you. It's so hot, en
you's so thirsty, dat you ain't in yo' right mine, Mars Tom. Oh, but
don't she look good! 'clah I doan' know how I's gwine to wait tell we
gits dah, I's SO thirsty."
"Well, you'll have to wait; and it won't do you no good, either, because
there ain't no lake there, I tell you."
I says:
"Jim, don't you take your eye off of it, and I won't, either."
"'Deed I won't; en bless you, honey, I couldn't ef I wanted to."
We went a-tearing along toward it, piling the miles behind us like
nothing, but never gaining an inch on it--and all of a sudden it was
gone again! Jim staggered, and 'most fell down. When he got his breath he
says, gasping like a fish:
"Mars Tom, hit's a GHOS', dat's what it is, en I hopes to goodness we
ain't gwine to see it no mo'. Dey's BEEN a lake, en suthin's happened, en
de lake's dead, en we's seen its ghos'; we's seen it twiste, en dat's
proof. De desert's ha'nted, it's ha'nted, sho; oh, Mars Tom, le''s git
outen it; I'd ruther die den have de night ketch us in it ag'in en de
ghos' er dat lake come a-mournin' aroun' us en we asleep en doan' know de
danger we's in."
"Ghost, you gander! It ain't anything but air and heat and thirstiness
pasted together by a person's imagination. If I--gimme the glass!"
He grabbed it and begun to gaze off to the right.
"It's a flock of birds," he says. "It's getting toward sundown, and
they're making a bee-line across our track for somewheres. They mean
business--maybe they're going for food or water, or both. Let her go to
starboard!--Port your hellum! Hard down! There--ease up--steady, as you
go."
We shut down some of the power, so as not to outspeed them, and took out
after them. We went skimming along a quarter of a mile behind them, and
when we had followed them an hour and a half and was getting pretty
discouraged, and was thirsty clean to unendurableness, Tom says:
"Take the glass, one of you, and see what that is, away ahead of the
birds."
Jim got the first glimpse, and slumped down on the locker sick. He was
most crying, and says:
"She's dah ag'in, Mars Tom, she's dah ag'in, en I knows I's gwine to die,
'case when a body sees a ghos' de third time, dat's what it means. I
wisht I'd never come in dis balloon, dat I does."
He wouldn't look no more, and what he said made me afraid, too, because I
knowed it was true, for that has always been the way with ghosts; so then
I wouldn't look any more, either. Both of us begged Tom to turn off and
go some other way, but he wouldn't, and said we was ignorant
superstitious blatherskites. Yes, and he'll git come up with, one of
these days, I says to myself, insulting ghosts that way. They'll stand it
for a while, maybe, but they won't stand it always, for anybody that
knows about ghosts knows how easy they are hurt, and how revengeful they
are.
So we was all quiet and still, Jim and me being scared, and Tom busy. By
and by Tom fetched the balloon to a standstill, and says:
"NOW get up and look, you sapheads."
We done it, and there was the sure-enough water right under us!--clear,
and blue, and cool, and deep, and wavy with the breeze, the loveliest
sight that ever was. And all about it was grassy banks, and flowers, and
shady groves of big trees, looped together with vines, and all looking so
peaceful and comfortable--enough to make a body cry, it was so
beautiful.
Jim DID cry, and rip and dance and carry on, he was so thankful and out
of his mind for joy. It was my watch, so I had to stay by the works, but
Tom and Jim clumb down and drunk a barrel apiece, and fetched me up a
lot, and I've tasted a many a good thing in my life, but nothing that
ever begun with that water.
Then we went down and had a swim, and then Tom came up and spelled me,
and me and Jim had a swim, and then Jim spelled Tom, and me and Tom had a
foot-race and a boxing-mill, and I don't reckon I ever had such a good
time in my life. It warn't so very hot, because it was close on to
evening, and we hadn't any clothes on, anyway. Clothes is well enough in
school, and in towns, and at balls, too, but there ain't no sense in them
when there ain't no civilization nor other kinds of bothers and fussiness
around.
"Lions a-comin'!--lions! Quick, Mars Tom! Jump for yo' life, Huck!"
Oh, and didn't we! We never stopped for clothes, but waltzed up the
ladder just so. Jim lost his head straight off--he always done it
whenever he got excited and scared; and so now, 'stead of just easing the
ladder up from the ground a little, so the animals couldn't reach it, he
turned on a raft of power, and we went whizzing up and was dangling in
the sky before he got his wits together and seen what a foolish thing he
was doing. Then he stopped her, but he had clean forgot what to do next;
so there we was, so high that the lions looked like pups, and we was
drifting off on the wind.
But Tom he shinned up and went for the works and begun to slant her down,
and back toward the lake, where the animals was gathering like a
camp-meeting, and I judged he had lost HIS head, too; for he knowed I was
too scared to climb, and did he want to dump me among the tigers and
things?
But no, his head was level, he knowed what he was about. He swooped down
to within thirty or forty feet of the lake, and stopped right over the
center, and sung out:
"Leggo, and drop!"
I done it, and shot down, feet first, and seemed to go about a mile
toward the bottom; and when I come up, he says:
"Now lay on your back and float till you're rested and got your pluck
back, then I'll dip the ladder in the water and you can climb aboard."
I done it. Now that was ever so smart in Tom, because if he had started
off somewheres else to drop down on the sand, the menagerie would 'a'
come along, too, and might 'a' kept us hunting a safe place till I got
tuckered out and fell.
And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting out the clothes, and
trying to divide them up so there would be some for all, but there was a
misunderstanding about it somewheres, on account of some of them trying
to hog more than their share; so there was another insurrection, and you
never see anything like it in the world. There must 'a' been fifty of
them, all mixed up together, snorting and roaring and snapping and biting
and tearing, legs and tails in the air, and you couldn't tell which was
which, and the sand and fur a-flying. And when they got done, some was
dead and some was limping off crippled, and the rest was setting around
on the battlefield, some of them licking their sore places and the others
looking up at us and seemed to be kind of inviting us to come down and
have some fun, but which we didn't want any.
As for the clothes, they warn't any, any more. Every last rag of them was
inside of the animals; and not agreeing with them very well, I don't
reckon, for there was considerable many brass buttons on them, and there
was knives in the pockets, too, and smoking tobacco, and nails and chalk
and marbles and fishhooks and things. But I wasn't caring. All that was
bothering me was, that all we had now was the professor's clothes, a big
enough assortment, but not suitable to go into company with, if we came
across any, because the britches was as long as tunnels, and the coats
and things according. Still, there was everything a tailor needed, and
Jim was a kind of jack legged tailor, and he allowed he could soon trim a
suit or two down for us that would answer.
CHAPTER IX. TOM DISCOURSES ON THE DESERT
STILL, we thought we would drop down there a minute, but on another
errand. Most of the professor's cargo of food was put up in cans, in the
new way that somebody had just invented; the rest was fresh. When you
fetch Missouri beefsteak to the Great Sahara, you want to be particular
and stay up in the coolish weather. So we reckoned we would drop down
into the lion market and see how we could make out there.
We hauled in the ladder and dropped down till we was just above the reach
of the animals, then we let down a rope with a slip-knot in it and hauled
up a dead lion, a small tender one, then yanked up a cub tiger. We had to
keep the congregation off with the revolver, or they would 'a' took a
hand in the proceedings and helped.
We carved off a supply from both, and saved the skins, and hove the rest
overboard. Then we baited some of the professor's hooks with the fresh
meat and went a-fishing. We stood over the lake just a convenient
distance above the water, and catched a lot of the nicest fish you ever
see. It was a most amazing good supper we had; lion steak, tiger steak,
fried fish, and hot corn-pone. I don't want nothing better than that.
We had some fruit to finish off with. We got it out of the top of a
monstrous tall tree. It was a very slim tree that hadn't a branch on it
from the bottom plumb to the top, and there it bursted out like a
feather-duster. It was a pa'm-tree, of course; anybody knows a pa'm-tree
the minute he see it, by the pictures. We went for cocoanuts in this one,
but there warn't none. There was only big loose bunches of things like
oversized grapes, and Tom allowed they was dates, because he said they
answered the description in the Arabian Nights and the other books. Of
course they mightn't be, and they might be poison; so we had to wait a
spell, and watch and see if the birds et them. They done it; so we done
it, too, and they was most amazing good.
By this time monstrous big birds begun to come and settle on the dead
animals. They was plucky creturs; they would tackle one end of a lion
that was being gnawed at the other end by another lion. If the lion drove
the bird away, it didn't do no good; he was back again the minute the
lion was busy.
The big birds come out of every part of the sky--you could make them out
with the glass while they was still so far away you couldn't see them
with your naked eye. Tom said the birds didn't find out the meat was
there by the smell; they had to find it out by seeing it. Oh, but ain't
that an eye for you! Tom said at the distance of five mile a patch of
dead lions couldn't look any bigger than a person's finger-nail, and he
couldn't imagine how the birds could notice such a little thing so far
off.
It was strange and unnatural to see lion eat lion, and we thought maybe
they warn't kin. But Jim said that didn't make no difference. He said a
hog was fond of her own children, and so was a spider, and he reckoned
maybe a lion was pretty near as unprincipled though maybe not quite. He
thought likely a lion wouldn't eat his own father, if he knowed which was
him, but reckoned he would eat his brother-in-law if he was uncommon
hungry, and eat his mother-in-law any time. But RECKONING don't settle
nothing. You can reckon till the cows come home, but that don't fetch you
to no decision. So we give it up and let it drop.
Generly it was very still in the Desert nights, but this time there was
music. A lot of other animals come to dinner; sneaking yelpers that Tom
allowed was jackals, and roached-backed ones that he said was hyenas; and
all the whole biling of them kept up a racket all the time. They made a
picture in the moonlight that was more different than any picture I ever
see. We had a line out and made fast to the top of a tree, and didn't
stand no watch, but all turned in and slept; but I was up two or three
times to look down at the animals and hear the music. It was like having
a front seat at a menagerie for nothing, which I hadn't ever had before,
and so it seemed foolish to sleep and not make the most of it; I mightn't
ever have such a chance again.
We went a-fishing again in the early dawn, and then lazied around all day
in the deep shade on an island, taking turn about to watch and see that
none of the animals come a-snooping around there after erronorts for
dinner. We was going to leave the next day, but couldn't, it was too
lovely.
The day after, when we rose up toward the sky and sailed off eastward, we
looked back and watched that place till it warn't nothing but just a
speck in the Desert, and I tell you it was like saying good-bye to a
friend that you ain't ever going to see any more.
Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says:
"Mars Tom, we's mos' to de end er de Desert now, I speck."
"Why?"
"Well, hit stan' to reason we is. You knows how long we's been a-skimmin'
over it. Mus' be mos' out o' san'. Hit's a wonder to me dat it's hilt out
as long as it has."
"Shucks, there's plenty sand, you needn't worry."
"Oh, I ain't a-worryin', Mars Tom, only wonderin', dat's all. De Lord's
got plenty san', I ain't doubtin' dat; but nemmine, He ain't gwyne to
WAS'E it jist on dat account; en I allows dat dis Desert's plenty big
enough now, jist de way she is, en you can't spread her out no mo' 'dout
was'in' san'."
"Oh, go 'long! we ain't much more than fairly STARTED across this Desert
yet. The United States is a pretty big country, ain't it? Ain't it,
Huck?"
"Yes," I says, "there ain't no bigger one, I don't reckon."
"Well," he says, "this Desert is about the shape of the United States,
and if you was to lay it down on top of the United States, it would cover
the land of the free out of sight like a blanket. There'd be a little
corner sticking out, up at Maine and away up northwest, and Florida
sticking out like a turtle's tail, and that's all. We've took California
away from the Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the
Pacific coast is ours now, and if you laid the Great Sahara down with her
edge on the Pacific, she would cover the United States and stick out past
New York six hundred miles into the Atlantic ocean."
I say:
"Good land! have you got the documents for that, Tom Sawyer?"
"Yes, and they're right here, and I've been studying them. You can look
for yourself. From New York to the Pacific is 2,600 miles. From one end
of the Great Desert to the other is 3,200. The United States contains
3,600,000 square miles, the Desert contains 4,162,000. With the Desert's
bulk you could cover up every last inch of the United States, and in
under where the edges projected out, you could tuck England, Scotland,
Ireland, France, Denmark, and all Germany. Yes, sir, you could hide the
home of the brave and all of them countries clean out of sight under the
Great Sahara, and you would still have 2,000 square miles of sand left."
"Well," I says, "it clean beats me. Why, Tom, it shows that the Lord took
as much pains makin' this Desert as makin' the United States and all them
other countries."
Jim says: "Huck, dat don' stan' to reason. I reckon dis Desert wa'n't
made at all. Now you take en look at it like dis--you look at it, and see
ef I's right. What's a desert good for? 'Taint good for nuthin'. Dey
ain't no way to make it pay. Hain't dat so, Huck?"
"Yes, I reckon."
"Hain't it so, Mars Tom?"
"I guess so. Go on."
"Ef a thing ain't no good, it's made in vain, ain't it?"
"Yes."
"NOW, den! Do de Lord make anything in vain? You answer me dat."
"Well--no, He don't."
"Den how come He make a desert?"
"Well, go on. How DID He come to make it?"
"Mars Tom, I b'lieve it uz jes like when you's buildin' a house; dey's
allays a lot o' truck en rubbish lef' over. What does you do wid it?
Doan' you take en k'yart it off en dump it into a ole vacant back lot?
'Course. Now, den, it's my opinion hit was jes like dat--dat de Great
Sahara warn't made at all, she jes HAPPEN'."
I said it was a real good argument, and I believed it was the best one
Jim ever made. Tom he said the same, but said the trouble about arguments
is, they ain't nothing but THEORIES, after all, and theories don't prove
nothing, they only give you a place to rest on, a spell, when you are
tuckered out butting around and around trying to find out something there
ain't no way TO find out. And he says:
"There's another trouble about theories: there's always a hole in them
somewheres, sure, if you look close enough. It's just so with this one of
Jim's. Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How does it
come that there was just exactly enough star-stuff, and none left over?
How does it come there ain't no sand-pile up there?"
But Jim was fixed for him and says:
"What's de Milky Way?--dat's what I want to know. What's de Milky Way?
Answer me dat!"
In my opinion it was just a sockdologer. It's only an opinion, it's only
MY opinion and others may think different; but I said it then and I stand
to it now--it was a sockdologer. And moreover, besides, it landed Tom
Sawyer. He couldn't say a word. He had that stunned look of a person
that's been shot in the back with a kag of nails. All he said was, as for
people like me and Jim, he'd just as soon have intellectual intercourse
with a catfish. But anybody can say that--and I notice they always do,
when somebody has fetched them a lifter. Tom Sawyer was tired of that end
of the subject.
So we got back to talking about the size of the Desert again, and the
more we compared it with this and that and t'other thing, the more nobler
and bigger and grander it got to look right along. And so, hunting among
the figgers, Tom found, by and by, that it was just the same size as the
Empire of China. Then he showed us the spread the Empire of China made on
the map, and the room she took up in the world. Well, it was wonderful to
think of, and I says:
"Why, I've heard talk about this Desert plenty of times, but I never
knowed before how important she was."
Then Tom says:
"Important! Sahara important! That's just the way with some people. If a
thing's big, it's important. That's all the sense they've got. All they
can see is SIZE. Why, look at England. It's the most important country in
the world; and yet you could put it in China's vest-pocket; and not only
that, but you'd have the dickens's own time to find it again the next
time you wanted it. And look at Russia. It spreads all around and
everywhere, and yet ain't no more important in this world than Rhode
Island is, and hasn't got half as much in it that's worth saving."
Away off now we see a little hill, a-standing up just on the edge of the
world. Tom broke off his talk, and reached for a glass very much excited,
and took a look, and says:
"That's it--it's the one I've been looking for, sure. If I'm right, it's
the one the dervish took the man into and showed him all the treasures."
So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the Arabian
Nights.
CHAPTER X. THE TREASURE-HILL
TOM said it happened like this.
A dervish was stumping it along through the Desert, on foot, one blazing
hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and
hungry, and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he run
across a camel-driver with a hundred camels, and asked him for some a'ms.
But the cameldriver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:
"Don't you own these camels?"
"Yes, they're mine."
"Are you in debt?"
"Who--me? No."
"Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain't in debt is rich--and
not only rich, but very rich. Ain't it so?"
The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says:
"God has made you rich, and He has made me poor. He has His reasons, and
they are wise, blessed be His name. But He has willed that His rich shall
help His poor, and you have turned away from me, your brother, in my
need, and He will remember this, and you will lose by it."
That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the same he was born
hoggish after money and didn't like to let go a cent; so he begun to
whine and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a
full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn't git
no return freight, and so he warn't making no great things out of his
trip. So the dervish starts along again, and says:
"All right, if you want to take the risk; but I reckon you've made a
mistake this time, and missed a chance."
Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had
missed, because maybe there was money in it; so he run after the dervish,
and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him that at last the
dervish gave in, and says:
"Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is all the treasures of
the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good kind
heart and a noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just
that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could
see the treasures and get them out."
So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he cried, and begged, and
took on, and went down on his knees, and said he was just that kind of a
man, and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn't
ever described so exact before.
"Well, then," says the dervish, "all right. If we load the hundred
camels, can I have half of them?"
The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in, and says:
"Now you're shouting."
So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish got out his box and
rubbed the salve on the driver's right eye, and the hill opened and he
went in, and there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and jewels
sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.
So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded every camel till he
couldn't carry no more; then they said good-bye, and each of them started
off with his fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running and
overtook the dervish and says:
"You ain't in society, you know, and you don't really need all you've
got. Won't you be good, and let me have ten of your camels?"
"Well," the dervish says, "I don't know but what you say is reasonable
enough."
So he done it, and they separated and the dervish started off again with
his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel-driver bawling after him
again, and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him,
saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough to see a dervish
through, because they live very simple, you know, and don't keep house,
but board around and give their note.
But that warn't the end yet. That ornery hound kept coming and coming
till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he
was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't ever forgit the
dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn't been so good to him
before, and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and
started off again.
But do you know, it warn't ten minutes till the camel-driver was
unsatisfied again--he was the lowdownest reptyle in seven counties--and
he come a-running again. And this time the thing he wanted was to get the
dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye.
"Why?" said the dervish.
"Oh, you know," says the driver.
"Know what?"
"Well, you can't fool me," says the driver. "You're trying to keep back
something from me, you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if I
had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that's
valuable. Come--please put it on."
The dervish says:
"I wasn't keeping anything back from you. I don't mind telling you what
would happen if I put it on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone-blind
the rest of your days."
But do you know that beat wouldn't believe him. No, he begged and begged,
and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box and told
him to put it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure enough he
was as blind as a bat in a minute.
Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him;
and says:
"Good-bye--a man that's blind hain't got no use for jewelry."
And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander
around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the
Desert.
Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him.
"Yes," Tom says, "and like a considerable many lessons a body gets. They
ain't no account, because the thing don't ever happen the same way
again--and can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled
his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind
of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies no
more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."
"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence. De
Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire."
"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can
happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and THEY
educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty
MILLION lots of the other kind--the kind that don't happen the same way
twice--and they ain't no real use, they ain't no more instructive than
the small-pox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you ought
to been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git vaccinated afterward,
because the small-pox don't come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle
Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had
learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a
person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting
knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever
going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was
down on them people that's all the time trying to dig a lesson out of
everything that happens, no matter whether--"
But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a person
always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other
person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of
course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because it's shabby; but the finer a
person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you come
to look at it it ain't nobody's fault in particular; both of them's to
blame.
Jim begun to snore--soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a
stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones like the last water
sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power
to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that
is choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at
his level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a
dipperful of loddanum in him, but can't wake himself up although all that
awful noise of his'n ain't but three inches from his own ears. And that
is the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a match to
light the candle, and that little bit of a noise will fetch him. I wish I
knowed what was the reason of that, but there don't seem to be no way to
find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole Desert, and yanking the
animals out, for miles and miles around, to see what in the nation was
going on up there; there warn't nobody nor nothing that was as close to
the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only cretur that wasn't disturbed
by it. We yelled at him and whooped at him, it never done no good; but
the first time there come a little wee noise that wasn't of a usual kind
it woke him up. No, sir, I've thought it all over, and so has Tom, and
there ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.
Jim said he hadn't been asleep; he just shut his eyes so he could listen
better.
Tom said nobody warn't accusing him.
That made him look like he wished he hadn't said anything. And he wanted
to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the
camel-driver, just the way a person does when he has got catched in
something and wants to take it out of somebody else. He let into the
camel-driver the hardest he knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and
he praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had to agree with
him there, too. But Tom says:
"I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good and
unselfish, but I don't quite see it. He didn't hunt up another poor
dervish, did he? No, he didn't. If he was so unselfish, why didn't he go
in there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go along and be
satisfied? No, sir, the person he was hunting for was a man with a
hundred camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could."
"Why, Mars Tom, he was willin' to divide, fair and square; he only struck
for fifty camels."
"Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by."
"Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make him bline."
"Yes, because he knowed the man's character. It was just the kind of a
man he was hunting for--a man that never believes in anybody's word or
anybody's honorableness, because he ain't got none of his own. I reckon
there's lots of people like that dervish. They swindle, right and left,
but they always make the other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep
inside of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain't no way to
git hold of them. THEY don't put the salve on--oh, no, that would be
sin; but they know how to fool YOU into putting it on, then it's you that
blinds yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel-driver was just a
pair--a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a dull, coarse, ignorant one, but
both of them rascals, just the same."
"Mars Tom, does you reckon dey's any o' dat kind o' salve in de worl'
now?"
"Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they've got it in New York, and
they put it on country people's eyes and show them all the railroads in
the world, and they go in and git them, and then when they rub the salve
on the other eye the other man bids them goodbye and goes off with their
railroads. Here's the treasure-hill now. Lower away!"
We landed, but it warn't as interesting as I thought it was going to be,
because we couldn't find the place where they went in to git the
treasure. Still, it was plenty interesting enough, just to see the mere
hill itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim said he wou'dn't
'a' missed it for three dollars, and I felt the same way.
And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any was the way Tom could come
into a strange big country like this and go straight and find a little
hump like that and tell it in a minute from a million other humps that
was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but only his own
learning and his own natural smartness. We talked and talked it over
together, but couldn't make out how he done it. He had the best head on
him I ever see; and all he lacked was age, to make a name for himself
equal to Captain Kidd or George Washington. I bet you it would 'a'
crowded either of THEM to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it
warn't nothing to Tom Sawyer; he went across Sahara and put his finger on
it as easy as you could pick a nigger out of a bunch of angels.
We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped up a raft of salt
around the edges, and loaded up the lion's skin and the tiger's so as
they would keep till Jim could tan them.
CHAPTER XI. THE SAND-STORM
WE went a-fooling along for a day or two, and then just as the full moon
was touching the ground on the other side of the desert, we see a string
of little black figgers moving across its big silver face. You could see
them as plain as if they was painted on the moon with ink. It was another
caravan. We cooled down our speed and tagged along after it, just to have
company, though it warn't going our way. It was a rattler, that caravan,
and a most bully sight to look at next morning when the sun come
a-streaming across the desert and flung the long shadders of the camels
on the gold sand like a thousand grand-daddy-long-legses marching in
procession. We never went very near it, because we knowed better now than
to act like that and scare people's camels and break up their caravans.
It was the gayest outfit you ever see, for rich clothes and nobby style.
Some of the chiefs rode on dromedaries, the first we ever see, and very
tall, and they go plunging along like they was on stilts, and they rock
the man that is on them pretty violent and churn up his dinner
considerable, I bet you, but they make noble good time, and a camel ain't
nowheres with them for speed.
The caravan camped, during the middle part of the day, and then started
again about the middle of the afternoon. Before long the sun begun to
look very curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to copper,
and after that it begun to look like a blood-red ball, and the air got
hot and close, and pretty soon all the sky in the west darkened up and
looked thick and foggy, but fiery and dreadful--like it looks through a
piece of red glass, you know. We looked down and see a big confusion
going on in the caravan, and a rushing every which way like they was
scared; and then they all flopped down flat in the sand and laid there
perfectly still.
Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide
wall, and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it
was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us,
and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our
faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out:
"It's a sand-storm--turn your backs to it!"
We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand
beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we
couldn't see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was
setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads
out and could hardly breathe.
Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off
across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and
looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn't anything but
just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and
camels was smothered and dead and buried--buried under ten foot of sand,
we reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered
them, and all that time their friends wouldn't ever know what become of
that caravan. Tom said:
"NOW we know what it was that happened to the people we got the swords
and pistols from."
Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day now. They got buried
in a sand-storm, and the wild animals couldn't get at them, and the wind
never uncovered them again until they was dried to leather and warn't fit
to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry for them poor people as a
person could for anybody, and as mournful, too, but we was mistaken; this
last caravan's death went harder with us, a good deal harder. You see,
the others was total strangers, and we never got to feeling acquainted
with them at all, except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching
the girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We was huvvering
around them a whole night and 'most a whole day, and had got to feeling
real friendly with them, and acquainted. I have found out that there
ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than
to travel with them. Just so with these. We kind of liked them from the
start, and traveling with them put on the finisher. The longer we
traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better
and better we liked them, and the gladder and gladder we was that we run
across them. We had come to know some of them so well that we called them
by name when we was talking about them, and soon got so familiar and
sociable that we even dropped the Miss and Mister and just used their
plain names without any handle, and it did not seem unpolite, but just
the right thing. Of course, it wasn't their own names, but names we give
them. There was Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson, and
Colonel Jacob McDougal and Miss Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah
Butler and young Bushrod Butler, and these was big chiefs mostly that
wore splendid great turbans and simmeters, and dressed like the Grand
Mogul, and their families. But as soon as we come to know them good, and
like them very much, it warn't Mister, nor Judge, nor nothing, any more,
but only Elleck, and Addy, and Jake, and Hattie, and Jerry, and Buck, and
so on.
And you know the more you join in with people in their joys and their
sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. Now we warn't
cold and indifferent, the way most travelers is, we was right down
friendly and sociable, and took a chance in everything that was going,
and the caravan could depend on us to be on hand every time, it didn't
make no difference what it was.
When they camped, we camped right over them, ten or twelve hundred feet
up in the air. When they et a meal, we et ourn, and it made it ever so
much home-liker to have their company. When they had a wedding that
night, and Buck and Addy got married, we got ourselves up in the very
starchiest of the professor's duds for the blow-out, and when they danced
we jined in and shook a foot up there.
But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the nearest, and it was a
funeral that done it with us. It was next morning, just in the still
dawn. We didn't know the diseased, and he warn't in our set, but that
never made no difference; he belonged to the caravan, and that was
enough, and there warn't no more sincerer tears shed over him than the
ones we dripped on him from up there eleven hundred foot on high.
Yes, parting with this caravan was much more bitterer than it was to part
with them others, which was comparative strangers, and been dead so long,
anyway. We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of them, too,
and now to have death snatch them from right before our faces while we
was looking, and leave us so lonesome and friendless in the middle of
that big desert, it did hurt so, and we wished we mightn't ever make any
more friends on that voyage if we was going to lose them again like that.
We couldn't keep from talking about them, and they was all the time
coming up in our memory, and looking just the way they looked when we was
all alive and happy together. We could see the line marching, and the
shiny spearheads a-winking in the sun; we could see the dromedaries
lumbering along; we could see the wedding and the funeral; and more
oftener than anything else we could see them praying, because they don't
allow nothing to prevent that; whenever the call come, several times a
day, they would stop right there, and stand up and face to the east, and
lift back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin, and four or
five times they would go down on their knees, and then fall forward and
touch their forehead to the ground.
Well, it warn't good to go on talking about them, lovely as they was in
their life, and dear to us in their life and death both, because it
didn't do no good, and made us too down-hearted. Jim allowed he was going
to live as good a life as he could, so he could see them again in a
better world; and Tom kept still and didn't tell him they was only
Mohammedans; it warn't no use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad
enough just as it was.
When we woke up next morning we was feeling a little cheerfuller, and had
had a most powerful good sleep, because sand is the comfortablest bed
there is, and I don't see why people that can afford it don't have it
more. And it's terrible good ballast, too; I never see the balloon so
steady before.
Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and wondered what we better do with
it; it was good sand, and it didn't seem good sense to throw it away. Jim
says:
"Mars Tom, can't we tote it back home en sell it? How long'll it take?"
"Depends on the way we go."
"Well, sah, she's wuth a quarter of a dollar a load at home, en I reckon
we's got as much as twenty loads, hain't we? How much would dat be?"
"Five dollars."
"By jings, Mars Tom, le's shove for home right on de spot! Hit's more'n a
dollar en a half apiece, hain't it?"
"Yes."
"Well, ef dat ain't makin' money de easiest ever I struck! She jes'
rained in--never cos' us a lick o' work. Le's mosey right along, Mars
Tom."
But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy and excited he never
heard him. Pretty soon he says:
"Five dollars--sho! Look here, this sand's worth--worth--why, it's worth
no end of money."
"How is dat, Mars Tom? Go on, honey, go on!"
"Well, the minute people knows it's genuwyne sand from the genuwyne
Desert of Sahara, they'll just be in a perfect state of mind to git hold
of some of it to keep on the what-not in a vial with a label on it for a
curiosity. All we got to do is to put it up in vials and float around all
over the United States and peddle them out at ten cents apiece. We've got
all of ten thousand dollars' worth of sand in this boat."
Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout
whoopjamboreehoo, and Tom says:
"And we can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and
fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we've carted this whole
Desert over there and sold it out; and there ain't ever going to be any
opposition, either, because we'll take out a patent."
"My goodness," I says, "we'll be as rich as Creosote, won't we, Tom?"
"Yes--Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little
hill for the treasures of the earth, and didn't know he was walking over
the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the
driver."
"Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?"
"Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the
easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles of
sand at ten cents a vial."
Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook
his head and says:
"Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials--a king couldn't. We better not
try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho'."
Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account of
the vials, but it wasn't. He set there thinking, and got bluer and bluer,
and at last he says:
"Boys, it won't work; we got to give it up."
"Why, Tom?"
"On account of the duties."
I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:
"What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can't git around it, why can't we
just DO it? People often has to."
But he says: