Tom Sawyer Abroad eBook

Dear!  I was so glad to have him back that I was just as near happy as a person could be that was up in the air that way with a deranged man.  You can’t land a balloon in the dark, and so I hoped it would keep on raining, for I didn’t want Tom to go meddling any more and make us so awful uncomfortable.  Well, I got my wish.  It drizzled and drizzled along the rest of the night, which wasn’t long, though it did seem so; and at daybreak it cleared, and the world looked mighty soft and gray and pretty, and the forests and fields so good to see again, and the horses and cattle standing sober and thinking.  Next, the sun come a-blazing up gay and splendid, and then we began to feel rusty and stretchy, and first we knowed we was all asleep.

CHAPTER III.  TOM EXPLAINS

We went to sleep about four o’clock, and woke up about eight.  The professor was setting back there at his end, looking glum.  He pitched us some breakfast, but he told us not to come abaft the midship compass.  That was about the middle of the boat.  Well, when you are sharp-set, and you eat and satisfy yourself, everything looks pretty different from what it done before.  It makes a body feel pretty near comfortable, even when he is up in a balloon with a genius.  We got to talking together.

There was one thing that kept bothering me, and by and by I says: 

“Tom, didn’t we start east?”

“Yes.”

“How fast have we been going?”

“Well, you heard what the professor said when he was raging round.  Sometimes, he said, we was making fifty miles an hour, sometimes ninety, sometimes a hundred; said that with a gale to help he could make three hundred any time, and said if he wanted the gale, and wanted it blowing the right direction, he only had to go up higher or down lower to find it.”

“Well, then, it’s just as I reckoned.  The professor lied.”

“Why?”

“Because if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois, oughtn’t we?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, we ain’t.”

“What’s the reason we ain’t?”

“I know by the color.  We’re right over Illinois yet.  And you can see for yourself that Indiana ain’t in sight.”

“I wonder what’s the matter with you, Huck.  You know by the color?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“What’s the color got to do with it?”

“It’s got everything to do with it.  Illinois is green, Indiana is pink.  You show me any pink down here, if you can.  No, sir; it’s green.”

“Indiana pink?  Why, what a lie!”

“It ain’t no lie; I’ve seen it on the map, and it’s pink.”

You never see a person so aggravated and disgusted.  He says: 

“Well, if I was such a numbskull as you, Huck Finn, I would jump over.  Seen it on the map!  Huck Finn, did you reckon the States was the same color out-of-doors as they are on the map?”