He looked kind of weary and discouraged-like, and
says:
“It ain’t no use to try to learn you nothing,
Huck. Run along and smouch the knives—three
of them.” So I done it.
As soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that
night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves
up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire,
and went to work. We cleared everything out of
the way, about four or five foot along the middle
of the bottom log. Tom said we was right behind
Jim’s bed now, and we’d dig in under it,
and when we got through there couldn’t nobody
in the cabin ever know there was any hole there, because
Jim’s counter-pin hung down most to the ground,
and you’d have to raise it up and look under
to see the hole. So we dug and dug with the
case-knives till most midnight; and then we was dog-tired,
and our hands was blistered, and yet you couldn’t
see we’d done anything hardly. At last
I says:
“This ain’t no thirty-seven year job;
this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer.”
He never said nothing. But he sighed, and pretty
soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little
while I knowed that he was thinking. Then he
says:
“It ain’t no use, Huck, it ain’t
a-going to work. If we was prisoners it would,
because then we’d have as many years as we wanted,
and no hurry; and we wouldn’t get but a few
minutes to dig, every day, while they was changing
watches, and so our hands wouldn’t get blistered,
and we could keep it up right along, year in and year
out, and do it right, and the way it ought to be done.
But we can’t fool along; we got to rush;
we ain’t got no time to spare. If we was
to put in another night this way we’d have to
knock off for a week to let our hands get well—couldn’t
touch a case-knife with them sooner.”
“Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?”
“I’ll tell you. It ain’t right,
and it ain’t moral, and I wouldn’t like
it to get out; but there ain’t only just the
one way: we got to dig him out with the picks,
and let on it’s case-knives.”
“Now you’re talking!”
I says; “your head gets leveler and leveler
all the time, Tom Sawyer,” I says. “Picks
is the thing, moral or no moral; and as for me, I
don’t care shucks for the morality of it, nohow.
When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon,
or a Sunday-school book, I ain’t no ways particular
how it’s done so it’s done. What
I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon;
or what I want is my Sunday-school book; and if a
pick’s the handiest thing, that’s the thing
I’m a-going to dig that nigger or that watermelon
or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don’t
give a dead rat what the authorities thinks about
it nuther.”
“Well,” he says, “there’s
excuse for picks and letting-on in a case like this;
if it warn’t so, I wouldn’t approve of
it, nor I wouldn’t stand by and see the rules
broke—because right is right, and wrong
is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing
wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.
It might answer for you to dig Jim out with a
pick, without any letting on, because you don’t
know no better; but it wouldn’t for me, because
I do know better. Gimme a case-knife.”
