Three dreadful days and nights dragged their tedious
hours along, and the village sank into a hopeless
stupor. No one had heart for anything. The
accidental discovery, just made, that the proprietor
of the Temperance Tavern kept liquor on his premises,
scarcely fluttered the public pulse, tremendous as
the fact was. In a lucid interval, Huck feebly
led up to the subject of taverns, and finally asked—dimly
dreading the worst—if anything had been
discovered at the Temperance Tavern since he had been
ill.
“Yes,” said the widow.
Huck started up in bed, wild-eyed:
“What? What was it?”
“Liquor!—and the place has been shut
up. Lie down, child—what a turn you
did give me!”
“Only tell me just one thing—only
just one—please! Was it Tom Sawyer
that found it?”
The widow burst into tears. “Hush, hush,
child, hush! I’ve told you before, you
must not talk. You are very, very sick!”
Then nothing but liquor had been found; there would
have been a great powwow if it had been the gold.
So the treasure was gone forever—gone forever!
But what could she be crying about? Curious that
she should cry.
These thoughts worked their dim way through Huck’s
mind, and under the weariness they gave him he fell
asleep. The widow said to herself:
“There—he’s asleep, poor wreck.
Tom Sawyer find it! Pity but somebody could find
Tom Sawyer! Ah, there ain’t many left, now,
that’s got hope enough, or strength enough,
either, to go on searching.”
Now to return to Tom and Becky’s share
in the picnic. They tripped along the murky aisles
with the rest of the company, visiting the familiar
wonders of the cave—wonders dubbed with
rather over-descriptive names, such as “The
Drawing-Room,” “The Cathedral,”
“Aladdin’s Palace,” and so on.
Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking began, and
Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the exertion
began to grow a trifle wearisome; then they wandered
down a sinuous avenue holding their candles aloft
and reading the tangled web-work of names, dates,
post-office addresses, and mottoes with which the rocky
walls had been frescoed (in candle-smoke). Still
drifting along and talking, they scarcely noticed
that they were now in a part of the cave whose walls
were not frescoed. They smoked their own names
under an overhanging shelf and moved on. Presently
they came to a place where a little stream of water,
trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment
with it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced
and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone.
Tom squeezed his small body behind it in order to
illuminate it for Becky’s gratification.
He found that it curtained a sort of steep natural
stairway which was enclosed between narrow walls, and
at once the ambition to be a discoverer seized him.
Becky responded to his call, and they made a smoke-mark
