“Why, Huck, I never told on that tavern-keeper. You know his tavern was all right the Saturday I went to the picnic. Don’t you remember you was to watch there that night?”
“Oh yes! Why, it seems ’bout a year ago. It
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was that very night that I follered Injun Joe to the widder’s.”
“You followed him?”
“Yes — but you keep mum. I reckon Injun Joe’s left friends behind him, and I don’t want ’em souring on me and doing me mean tricks. If it hadn’t ben for me he’d be down in Texas now, all right.”
Then Huck told his entire adventure in confidence to Tom, who had only heard of the Welshman’s part of it before.
“Well,” said Huck, presently, coming back to the main question, “whoever nipped the whiskey in No. 2, nipped the money, too, I reckon — anyways it’s a goner for us, Tom.”
“Huck, that money wasn’t ever in No. 2!”
“What!” Huck searched his comrade’s face keenly. “Tom, have you got on the track of that money again?”
“Huck, it’s in the cave!”
Huck’s eyes blazed.
“Say it again, Tom.”
“The money’s in the cave!”
“Tom — honest injun, now — is it fun, or earnest?”
“Earnest, Huck — just as earnest as ever I was in my life. Will you go in there with me and help get it out?”
“I bet I will! I will if it’s where we can blaze our way to it and not get lost.”
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“Huck, we can do that without the least little bit of trouble in the world.”
“Good as wheat! What makes you think the money’s — ”
“Huck, you just wait till we get in there. If we don’t find it I’ll agree to give you my drum and every thing I’ve got in the world. I will, by jings.”
“All right — it’s a whiz. When do you say?”
“Right now, if you say it. Are you strong enough?”
“Is it far in the cave? I ben on my pins a little, three or four days, now, but I can’t walk more’n a mile, Tom — least I don’t think I could.”
“It’s about five mile into there the way anybody but me would go, Huck, but there’s a mighty short cut that they don’t anybody but me know about. Huck, I’ll take you right to it in a skiff. I’ll float the skiff down there, and I’ll pull it back again all by myself. You needn’t ever turn your hand over.”
“Less start right off, Tom.”
“All right. We want some bread and meat, and our pipes, and a little bag or two, and two or three kite-strings, and some of these new-fangled things they call lucifer matches. I tell you, many’s the time I wished I had some when I was in there before.”
A trifle after noon the boys borrowed a small skiff from a citizen who was absent, and got under way at once. When they were several miles below “Cave Hollow,” Tom said:
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“Now you see this bluff here looks all alike all the way down from the cave hollow — no houses, no wood-yards, bushes all alike. But do you see that white place up yonder where there’s been a landslide? Well, that’s one of my marks. We’ll get ashore, now.”
They landed.
“Now, Huck, where we’re a-standing you could touch that hole I got out of with a fishing-pole. See if you can find it.”
Huck searched all the place about, and found nothing. Tom proudly marched into a thick clump of sumach bushes and said:
“Here you are! Look at it, Huck; it’s the snuggest hole in this country. You just keep mum about it. All along I’ve been wanting to be a robber, but I knew I’d got to have a thing like this, and where to run across it was the bother. We’ve got it now, and we’ll keep it quiet, only we’ll let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers in — because of course there’s got to be a Gang, or else there wouldn’t be any style about it. Tom Sawyer’s Gang — it sounds splendid, don’t it, Huck?”