So they shook it, one after the other, all around,
and cried. The judge’s wife she kissed
it. Then the old man he signed a pledge—made
his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time
on record, or something like that. Then they
tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was
the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful
thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid
down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug
of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old
time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk
as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his
left arm in two places, and was most froze to death
when somebody found him after sun-up. And when
they come to look at that spare room they had to take
soundings before they could navigate it.
The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned
a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe,
but he didn’t know no other way.
Well, pretty soon the old man was up and around
again, and then he went for Judge Thatcher in the
courts to make him give up that money, and he went
for me, too, for not stopping school. He catched
me a couple of times and thrashed me, but I went to
school just the same, and dodged him or outrun him
most of the time. I didn’t want to go to
school much before, but I reckoned I’d go now
to spite pap. That law trial was a slow business—appeared
like they warn’t ever going to get started on
it; so every now and then I’d borrow two or three
dollars off of the judge for him, to keep from getting
a cowhiding. Every time he got money he got
drunk; and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around
town; and every time he raised Cain he got jailed.
He was just suited—this kind of thing
was right in his line.
He got to hanging around the widow’s too much
and so she told him at last that if he didn’t
quit using around there she would make trouble for
him. Well, wasn’t he mad? He
said he would show who was Huck Finn’s boss.
So he watched out for me one day in the spring, and
catched me, and took me up the river about three mile
in a skiff, and crossed over to the Illinois shore
where it was woody and there warn’t no houses
but an old log hut in a place where the timber was
so thick you couldn’t find it if you didn’t
know where it was.
He kept me with him all the time, and I never got
a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin,
and he always locked the door and put the key under
his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole,
I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what
we lived on. Every little while he locked me
in and went down to the store, three miles, to the
ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched
it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked
me. The widow she found out where I was by and
by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me;
but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn’t
long after that till I was used to being where I was,
and liked it—all but the cowhide part.
