The adventure of the day mightily tormented Tom’s
dreams that night. Four times he had his hands
on that rich treasure and four times it wasted to
nothingness in his fingers as sleep forsook him and
wakefulness brought back the hard reality of his misfortune.
As he lay in the early morning recalling the incidents
of his great adventure, he noticed that they seemed
curiously subdued and far away—somewhat
as if they had happened in another world, or in a
time long gone by. Then it occurred to him that
the great adventure itself must be a dream! There
was one very strong argument in favor of this idea—namely,
that the quantity of coin he had seen was too vast
to be real. He had never seen as much as fifty
dollars in one mass before, and he was like all boys
of his age and station in life, in that he imagined
that all references to “hundreds” and
“thousands” were mere fanciful forms of
speech, and that no such sums really existed in the
world. He never had supposed for a moment that
so large a sum as a hundred dollars was to be found
in actual money in any one’s possession.
If his notions of hidden treasure had been analyzed,
they would have been found to consist of a handful
of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splendid, ungraspable
dollars.
But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper
and clearer under the attrition of thinking them over,
and so he presently found himself leaning to the impression
that the thing might not have been a dream, after
all. This uncertainty must be swept away.
He would snatch a hurried breakfast and go and find
Huck. Huck was sitting on the gunwale of a flatboat,
listlessly dangling his feet in the water and looking
very melancholy. Tom concluded to let Huck lead
up to the subject. If he did not do it, then
the adventure would be proved to have been only a
dream.
“Hello, Huck!”
“Hello, yourself.”
Silence, for a minute.
“Tom, if we’d ‘a’ left the
blame tools at the dead tree, we’d ‘a’
got the money. Oh, ain’t it awful!”
“’Tain’t a dream, then, ’tain’t
a dream! Somehow I most wish it was. Dog’d
if I don’t, Huck.”
“What ain’t a dream?”
“Oh, that thing yesterday. I been half
thinking it was.”
“Dream! If them stairs hadn’t broke
down you’d ‘a’ seen how much dream
it was! I’ve had dreams enough all night—with
that patch-eyed Spanish devil going for me all through
’em—rot him!”
“No, not rot him. Find him! Track
the money!”
“Tom, we’ll never find him. A feller
don’t have only one chance for such a pile—and
that one’s lost. I’d feel mighty shaky
if I was to see him, anyway.”
“Well, so’d I; but I’d like to see
him, anyway—and track him out—to
his Number Two.”
“Number Two—yes, that’s it.
I been thinking ’bout that. But I can’t
make nothing out of it. What do you reckon it
is?”
