And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old
Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so,
sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that
trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I
couldn’t ever understand before, until that
minute and that talk, how he could help a body
set a nigger free with his bringing-up.
Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote
to her that Tom and Sid had come all right and
safe, she says to herself:
“Look at that, now! I might have expected
it, letting him go off that way without anybody to
watch him. So now I got to go and trapse all
the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find
out what that creetur’s up to this time,
as long as I couldn’t seem to get any answer
out of you about it.”
“Why, I never heard nothing from you,”
says Aunt Sally.
“Well, I wonder! Why, I wrote you twice
to ask you what you could mean by Sid being here.”
“Well, I never got ’em, Sis.”
Aunt Polly she turns around slow and severe, and says:
“Well—what?” he says,
kind of pettish.
“Don t you what me, you impudent thing—hand
out them letters.”
“Them letters. I be bound, if I have
to take a-holt of you I’ll—”
“They’re in the trunk. There, now.
And they’re just the same as they was when
I got them out of the office. I hain’t
looked into them, I hain’t touched them.
But I knowed they’d make trouble, and I thought
if you warn’t in no hurry, I’d—”
“Well, you do need skinning, there ain’t
no mistake about it. And I wrote another one
to tell you I was coming; and I s’pose he—”
“No, it come yesterday; I hain’t read
it yet, but it’s all right, I’ve
got that one.”
I wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn’t,
but I reckoned maybe it was just as safe to not to.
So I never said nothing.
The first time I catched Tom private I asked
him what was his idea, time of the evasion?—what
it was he’d planned to do if the evasion worked
all right and he managed to set a nigger free that
was already free before? And he said, what he
had planned in his head from the start, if we got
Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river
on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth
of the river, and then tell him about his being free,
and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style,
and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead
and get out all the niggers around, and have them
waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and
a brass-band, and then he would be a hero, and so would
we. But I reckoned it was about as well the way
it was.
We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when
Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out
how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made
a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and
give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and
nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room,
and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars
for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it
up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and
busted out, and says:
