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, be-
hind 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 sud-
den Tom whispers:
“Look! — what’s that?”
“Don’t!” I says. “Don’t take a person by sur-
prise that way. I’m ‘most ready to die, anyway, with-
out 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:
“They’re mostly dim and smoky, or like they’re
made out of fog, but this one wasn’t.”
“No,” I says; “I seen the goggles and the whiskers
perfectly plain.”
“Yes, and the very colors in them loud countrified
Sunday clothes — plaid breeches, green and black –”
“Cotton velvet westcot, fire-red and yaller squares –”
“Leather straps to the bottoms of the breeches legs
and one of them hanging unbottoned –”
“Yes, and that hat –”
“What a hat for a ghost to wear!”
You see it was the first season anybody wore that
kind — a black sitff-brim stove-pipe, very high, and
not smooth, with a round top — just like a sugar-loaf.
“Did you notice if its hair was the same, Huck?”
“No — seems to me I did, then again it seems to me
I didn’t.”
“I didn’t either; but it had its bag along, I noticed