on it to hold it, and then slide out and git away, and
don’t let Aunt Polly catch a sight of you, nor nobody
else. Then you jump for the balloon and shove for
Mount Sinai three hundred miles an hour. You won’t
have lost more than an hour. You’ll start back at 7 or
8 A.M., village time, and be here in 24 hours, arriving
at 2 or 3 P.M., Mount Sinai time.”
Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He had
wrote on it:
“THURSDAY AFTERNOON. Tom Sawyer the Erro-
nort sends his love to Aunt Polly from Mount Sinai
where the Ark was, and so does Huck Finn, and she
will get it to-morrow morning half-past six.” *
[* This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck’s
error, not Tom’s. — M.T.]
“That’ll make her eyes bulge out and the tears
come,” he says. Then he says:
“Stand by! One — two — three — away you go!”
And away she DID go! Why, she seemed to whiz
out of sight in a second.
Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked
out over the whole big plain, and there we camped to
wait for the pipe.
The balloon come hack all right, and brung the pipe;
but Aunt Polly had catched Jim when he was getting
it, and anybody can guess what happened: she sent
for Tom. So Jim he says:
“Mars Tom, she’s out on de porch wid her eye sot on
de sky a-layin’ for you, en she say she ain’t gwyne to
budge from dah tell she gits hold of you. Dey’s gwyne
to be trouble, Mars Tom, ‘deed dey is.”
So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very
gay, neither.
END.