I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just
after dark.
I started across to the town from a little below the
ferry-landing, and the drift of the current fetched
me in at the bottom of the town. I tied up and
started along the bank. There was a light burning
in a little shanty that hadn’t been lived in
for a long time, and I wondered who had took up quarters
there. I slipped up and peeped in at the window.
There was a woman about forty year old in there knitting
by a candle that was on a pine table. I didn’t
know her face; she was a stranger, for you couldn’t
start a face in that town that I didn’t know.
Now this was lucky, because I was weakening; I was
getting afraid I had come; people might know my voice
and find me out. But if this woman had been in
such a little town two days she could tell me all
I wanted to know; so I knocked at the door, and made
up my mind I wouldn’t forget I was a girl.
“Come in,” says the woman, and I
did. She says: “Take a cheer.”
I done it. She looked me all over with her little
shiny eyes, and says:
“What might your name be?”
“Sarah Williams.”
“Where ‘bouts do you live? In this
neighborhood?’
“No’m. In Hookerville, seven mile
below. I’ve walked all the way and I’m
all tired out.”
“Hungry, too, I reckon. I’ll find
you something.”
“No’m, I ain’t hungry. I was
so hungry I had to stop two miles below here at a
farm; so I ain’t hungry no more. It’s
what makes me so late. My mother’s down
sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to
tell my uncle Abner Moore. He lives at the upper
end of the town, she says. I hain’t ever
been here before. Do you know him?”
“No; but I don’t know everybody yet.
I haven’t lived here quite two weeks.
It’s a considerable ways to the upper end of
the town. You better stay here all night.
Take off your bonnet.”
“No,” I says; “I’ll rest a
while, I reckon, and go on. I ain’t afeared
of the dark.”
She said she wouldn’t let me go by myself, but
her husband would be in by and by, maybe in a hour
and a half, and she’d send him along with me.
Then she got to talking about her husband, and about
her relations up the river, and her relations down
the river, and about how much better off they used
to was, and how they didn’t know but they’d
made a mistake coming to our town, instead of letting
well alone—and so on and so on, till I
was afeard I had made a mistake coming to her to find
out what was going on in the town; but by and by she
dropped on to pap and the murder, and then I was pretty
willing to let her clatter right along. She told
about me and Tom Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars
(only she got it ten) and all about pap and what a
hard lot he was, and what a hard lot I was, and at
last she got down to where I was murdered. I
says:
