TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE
TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE
CHAPTER I.
AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK
[Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are,
they are not inventions, but facts — even to the
public confession of the accused. I take them from an
old-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors,
and transfer the scenes to America. I have added some
details, but only a couple of them are important
ones. — M. T.]
WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom
Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he
was chained up for a runaway slave down there on
Tom’s uncle Silas’s farm in Arkansaw. The frost was
working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and
it was getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every
day; and next it would be marble time, and next
mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next
kites, and then right away it would be summer and go-
ing in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to
look ahead like that and see how far off summer is.
Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening around,
and there’s something the matter with him, he don’t
know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and
mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lone-
some place high up on the hill in the edge of the woods,
and sets there and looks away off on the big Mississippi
down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points
where the timber looks smoky and dim it’s so far off and
still, and everything’s so solemn it seems like everybody
you’ve loved is dead and gone, and you ‘most wish you
was dead and gone too, and done with it all.
Don’t you know what that is? It’s spring fever.
That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got
it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you
DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you
want it so! It seems to you that mainly what you want
is to get away; get away from the same old tedious
things you’re so used to seeing and so tired of, and set
something new. That is the idea; you want to go and
be a wanderer; you want to go wandering far away to
strange countries where everything is mysterious and
wonderful and romantic. And if you can’t do that,
you’ll put up with considerable less; you’ll go any-
where you CAN go, just so as to get away, and be thank-
ful of the chance, too.
Well, me and Tom Sawyer had the spring fever, and
had it bad, too; but it warn’t any use to think about
Tom trying to get away, because, as he said, his Aunt
Polly wouldn’t let him quit school and go traipsing off
somers wasting time; so we was pretty blue. We was
setting on the front steps one day about sundown talk-
ing this way, when out comes his aunt Polly with a
letter in her hand and says:
“Tom, I reckon you’ve got to pack up and go down
to Arkansaw — your aunt Sally wants you.”
I ‘most jumped out of my skin for joy. I reckoned
Tom would fly at his aunt and hug her head off; but if
you believe me he set there like a rock, and never said
a word. It made me fit to cry to see him act so foolish,
with such a noble chance as this opening up. Why,
we might lose it if he didn’t speak up and show he was
thankful and grateful. But he set there and studied
and studied till I was that distressed I didn’t know
what to do; then he says, very ca’m, and I could a
shot him for it:
“Well,” he says, “I’m right down sorry, Aunt
Polly, but I reckon I got to be excused — for the
present.”
His aunt Polly was knocked so stupid and so mad at
the cold impudence of it that she couldn’t say a word
for as much as a half a minute, and this gave me a