“I don’t know.”
“Well, guess.”
“I don’t know. A month and a half.”
“THIRTY-SEVEN YEAR — and he come out in China. THAT’S the kind. I wish the bottom of THIS fortress was solid rock.”
“JIM don’t know nobody in China.”
“What’s THAT got to do with it? Neither did that other fellow. But you’re always a-wandering off on a side issue. Why can’t you stick to the main point?”
“All right — I don’t care where he comes out, so he COMES out; and Jim don’t, either, I reckon. But there’s one thing, anyway — Jim’s too old to be dug out with a case-knife. He won’t last.”
“Yes he will LAST, too. You don’t reckon it’s going to take thirty-seven years to dig out through a DIRT foundation, do you?”
“How long will it take, Tom?”
“Well, we can’t resk being as long as we ought to, because it mayn’t take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He’ll hear Jim ain’t from there. Then his next move will be to advertise Jim, or something like that. So we can’t resk being as long digging him out as we ought to. By rights I reckon we ought to be a couple of years; but we can’t. Things being so uncertain, what I recommend is this: that we really dig right in, as quick as we can; and after that, we can LET ON, to ourselves, that we was at it thirty-seven years. Then we can snatch him out and rush him away the first time there’s an alarm. Yes, I reckon that ‘ll be the best way.”
“Now, there’s SENSE in that,” I says. “Letting on don’t cost nothing; letting on ain’t no trouble; and if it’s any object, I don’t mind letting on we was at it a hundred and fifty year. It wouldn’t strain me none, after I got my hand in. So I’ll mosey along now, and smouch a couple of case-knives.”
“Smouch three,” he says; “we want one to make a saw out of.”
“Tom, if it ain’t unregular and irreligious to sejest it,” I says, “there’s an old rusty saw-blade around yonder sticking under the weather-boarding behind the smoke-house.”
He looked kind of weary and discouraged-like, and says:
“It ain’t no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. Run along and smouch the knives — three of them.” So I done it.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire, and went to work. We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the mid- dle of the bottom log. Tom said we was right behind Jim’s bed now, and we’d dig in under it, and when we got through there couldn’t nobody in the cabin ever know there was any hole there, because Jim’s counter- pin hung down most to the ground, and you’d have to raise it up and look under to see the hole. So we dug and dug with the case-knives till most midnight; and then we was dog-tired, and our hands was blistered, and yet you couldn’t see we’d done anything hardly. At last I says:
“This ain’t no thirty-seven year job; this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer.”
He never said nothing. But he sighed, and pretty soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little while I knowed that he was thinking. Then he says:
“It ain’t no use, Huck, it ain’t a-going to work. If we was prisoners it would, because then we’d have as many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we wouldn’t get but a few minutes to dig, every day, while they was changing watches, and so our hands wouldn’t get blistered, and we could keep it up right along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the way it ought to be done. But WE can’t fool along; we got to rush; we ain’t got no time to spare. If we was to put in another night this way we’d have to knock off for a week to let our hands get well — couldn’t touch a case-knife with them sooner.”