“Ah, now you’re all right. What was
the matter with you, Tom?”
“Oh, Judge, Injun Joe’s in the cave!”
Within a few minutes the news had spread, and
a dozen skiff-loads of men were on their way to McDougal’s
cave, and the ferryboat, well filled with passengers,
soon followed. Tom Sawyer was in the skiff that
bore Judge Thatcher.
When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sight
presented itself in the dim twilight of the place.
Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with
his face close to the crack of the door, as if his
longing eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment,
upon the light and the cheer of the free world outside.
Tom was touched, for he knew by his own experience
how this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved,
but nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief
and security, now, which revealed to him in a degree
which he had not fully appreciated before how vast
a weight of dread had been lying upon him since the
day he lifted his voice against this bloody-minded
outcast.
Injun Joe’s bowie-knife lay close by, its blade
broken in two. The great foundation-beam of the
door had been chipped and hacked through, with tedious
labor; useless labor, too, it was, for the native rock
formed a sill outside it, and upon that stubborn material
the knife had wrought no effect; the only damage done
was to the knife itself. But if there had been
no stony obstruction there the labor would have been
useless still, for if the beam had been wholly cut
away Injun Joe could not have squeezed his body under
the door, and he knew it. So he had only hacked
that place in order to be doing something—in
order to pass the weary time—in order to
employ his tortured faculties. Ordinarily one
could find half a dozen bits of candle stuck around
in the crevices of this vestibule, left there by tourists;
but there were none now. The prisoner had searched
them out and eaten them. He had also contrived
to catch a few bats, and these, also, he had eaten,
leaving only their claws. The poor unfortunate
had starved to death. In one place, near at hand,
a stalagmite had been slowly growing up from the ground
for ages, builded by the water-drip from a stalactite
overhead. The captive had broken off the stalagmite,
and upon the stump had placed a stone, wherein he
had scooped a shallow hollow to catch the precious
drop that fell once in every three minutes with the
dreary regularity of a clock-tick—a dessertspoonful
once in four and twenty hours. That drop was
falling when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell;
when the foundations of Rome were laid when Christ
was crucified; when the Conqueror created the British
empire; when Columbus sailed; when the massacre at
Lexington was “news.” It is falling
now; it will still be falling when all these things
shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and
the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in
