But it didn’t budge. So I hollered again,
and then Jim says:
“De man ain’t asleep—he’s
dead. You hold still—I’ll go
en see.”
He went, and bent down and looked, and says:
“It’s a dead man. Yes, indeedy;
naked, too. He’s ben shot in de back.
I reck’n he’s ben dead two er three days.
Come in, Huck, but doan’ look at his face—it’s
too gashly.”
I didn’t look at him at all. Jim throwed
some old rags over him, but he needn’t done
it; I didn’t want to see him. There was
heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the
floor, and old whisky bottles, and a couple of masks
made out of black cloth; and all over the walls was
the ignorantest kind of words and pictures made with
charcoal. There was two old dirty calico dresses,
and a sun-bonnet, and some women’s underclothes
hanging against the wall, and some men’s clothing,
too. We put the lot into the canoe—it
might come good. There was a boy’s old
speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that, too.
And there was a bottle that had had milk in it, and
it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would
a took the bottle, but it was broke. There was
a seedy old chest, and an old hair trunk with the
hinges broke. They stood open, but there warn’t
nothing left in them that was any account. The
way things was scattered about we reckoned the people
left in a hurry, and warn’t fixed so as to carry
off most of their stuff.
We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without
any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two
bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and
a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and
a ratty old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with
needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread
and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails,
and a fishline as thick as my little finger with some
monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and
a leather dog-collar, and a horseshoe, and some vials
of medicine that didn’t have no label on them;
and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good
curry-comb, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow,
and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of
it, but, barring that, it was a good enough leg, though
it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim,
and we couldn’t find the other one, though we
hunted all around.
And so, take it all around, we made a good haul.
When we was ready to shove off we was a quarter of
a mile below the island, and it was pretty broad day;
so I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with
the quilt, because if he set up people could tell
he was a nigger a good ways off. I paddled over
to the Illinois shore, and drifted down most a half
a mile doing it. I crept up the dead water under
the bank, and hadn’t no accidents and didn’t
see nobody. We got home all safe.
