Don’t betray me, I wish to be your friend.
There is a desprate gang of cut-throats from over
in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway
nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare
you so as you will stay in the house and not bother
them. I am one of the gang, but have got religgion
and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again,
and will betray the helish design. They will
sneak down from northards, along the fence, at midnight
exact, with a false key, and go in the nigger’s
cabin to get him. I am to be off a piece and
blow a tin horn if I see any danger; but stead of
that I will Ba like a sheep soon as they get in
and not blow at all; then whilst they are getting
his chains loose, you slip there and lock them in,
and can kill them at your leasure. Don’t
do anything but just the way I am telling you; if
you do they will suspicion something and raise whoop-jamboreehoo.
I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the
right thing. Unknownfriend.
CHAPTER XL.
We was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and
took my canoe and went over the river a-fishing, with
a lunch, and had a good time, and took a look at the
raft and found her all right, and got home late to
supper, and found them in such a sweat and worry they
didn’t know which end they was standing on,
and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done
supper, and wouldn’t tell us what the trouble
was, and never let on a word about the new letter,
but didn’t need to, because we knowed as much
about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half
up stairs and her back was turned we slid for the
cellar cupboard and loaded up a good lunch and took
it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about
half-past eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally’s
dress that he stole and was going to start with the
lunch, but says:
“Where’s the butter?”
“I laid out a hunk of it,” I says, “on
a piece of a corn-pone.”
“Well, you left it laid out, then—it
ain’t here.”
“We can get along without it,” I says.
“We can get along with it, too,”
he says; “just you slide down cellar and fetch
it. And then mosey right down the lightning-rod
and come along. I’ll go and stuff the straw
into Jim’s clothes to represent his mother in
disguise, and be ready to Ba like a sheep and
shove soon as you get there.”
So out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk of
butter, big as a person’s fist, was where I
had left it, so I took up the slab of corn-pone with
it on, and blowed out my light, and started up stairs
very stealthy, and got up to the main floor all right,
but here comes Aunt Sally with a candle, and I clapped
the truck in my hat, and clapped my hat on my head,
and the next second she see me; and she says:
