We set and talked a long time about his chances, and
Tom said he was all right if the pals struck up the
river instead of down, but it wasn’t likely,
because maybe they knowed where he was from; more likely
they would go right, and dog him all day, him not
suspecting, and kill him when it come dark, and take
the boots. So we was pretty sorrowful.
CHAPTER V. A TRAGEDY IN THE WOODS
We didn’t get done tinkering the machinery
till away late in the afternoon, and so it was so
close to sundown when we got home that we never stopped
on our road, but made a break for the sycamores as
tight as we could go, to tell Jake what the delay
was, and have him wait till we could go to Brace’s
and find out how things was there. It was getting
pretty dim by the time we turned the corner of the
woods, sweating and panting with that long run, and
see the sycamores thirty yards ahead of us; and just
then we see a couple of men run into the bunch and
heard two or three terrible screams for help.
“Poor Jake is killed, sure,” we says.
We was scared through and through, and broke for the
tobacker field and hid there, trembling so our clothes
would hardly stay on; and just as we skipped in there,
a couple of men went tearing by, and into the bunch
they went, and in a second out jumps four men and took
out up the road as tight as they could go, two chasing
two.
We laid down, kind of weak and sick, and listened
for more sounds, but didn’t hear none for a
good while but just our hearts. We was thinking
of that awful thing laying yonder in the sycamores,
and it seemed like being that close to a ghost, and
it give me the cold shudders. The moon come a-swelling
up out of the ground, now, powerful big and round and
bright, behind a comb of trees, like a face looking
through prison bars, and the black shadders and white
places begun to creep around, and it was miserable
quiet and still and night-breezy and graveyardy and
scary. All of a sudden Tom whispers:
“Look!—what’s that?”
“Don’t!” I says. “Don’t
take a person by surprise that way. I’m
’most ready to die, anyway, without you doing
that.”
“Look, I tell you. It’s something
coming out of the sycamores.”
“Don’t, Tom!”
“It’s terrible tall!”
“Oh, lordy-lordy! let’s—”
“Keep still—it’s a-coming this
way.”
He was so excited he could hardly get breath enough
to whisper. I had to look. I couldn’t
help it. So now we was both on our knees with
our chins on a fence rail and gazing—yes,
and gasping too. It was coming down the road—coming
in the shadder of the trees, and you couldn’t
see it good; not till it was pretty close to us; then
it stepped into a bright splotch of moonlight and
we sunk right down in our tracks—it was
Jake Dunlap’s ghost! That was what we said
to ourselves.
We couldn’t stir for a minute or two; then it
was gone We talked about it in low voices. Tom
says:
Copyrights
Tom Sawyer Detective from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
