chance to nudge Tom and whisper:
“Ain’t you got any sense? Sp’iling such a noble
chance as this and throwing it away?”
But he warn’t disturbed. He mumbled back:
“Huck Finn, do you want me to let her SEE how bad
I want to go? Why, she’d begin to doubt, right
away, and imagine a lot of sicknesses and dangers and
objections, and first you know she’d take it all back.
You lemme alone; I reckon I know how to work her.”
Now I never would ‘a’ thought of that. But he was
right. Tom Sawyer was always right — the levelest
head I ever see, and always AT himself and ready for
anything you might spring on him. By this time his
aunt Polly was all straight again, and she let fly. She
says:
“You’ll be excused! YOU will! Well, I never
heard the like of it in all my days! The idea of you
talking like that to ME! Now take yourself off and
pack your traps; and if I hear another word out of
you about what you’ll be excused from and what you
won’t, I lay I’LL excuse you — with a hickory!”
She hit his head a thump with her thimble as we
dodged by, and he let on to be whimpering as we
struck for the stairs. Up in his room he hugged me,
he was so out of his head for gladness because he was
going traveling. And he says:
“Before we get away she’ll wish she hadn’t let me
go, but she won’t know any way to get around it now.
After what she’s said, her pride won’t let her take it
back.”
Tom was packed in ten minutes, all except what his
aunt and Mary would finish up for him; then we waited
ten more for her to get cooled down and sweet and
gentle again; for Tom said it took her ten minutes to
unruffle in times when half of her feathers was up, but
twenty when they was all up, and this was one of the
times when they was all up. Then we went down,
being in a sweat to know what the letter said.
She was setting there in a brown study, with it laying
in her lap. We set down, and she says:
“They’re in considerable trouble down there, and
they think you and Huck’ll be a kind of diversion for
them — ‘comfort,’ they say. Much of that they’ll get
out of you and Huck Finn, I reckon. There’s a neigh-
bor named Brace Dunlap that’s been wanting to marry
their Benny for three months, and at last they told him
point blank and once for all, he COULDN’T; so he has soured
on them, and they’re worried about it. I reckon he’s
somebody they think they better be on the good side
of, for they’ve tried to please him by hiring his no-
account brother to help on the farm when they can’t
hardly afford it, and don’t want him around anyhow.
Who are the Dunlaps?”
“They live about a mile from Uncle Silas’s place,
Aunt Polly — all the farmers live about a mile apart
down there — and Brace Dunlap is a long sight richer
than any of the others, and owns a whole grist of nig-
gers. He’s a widower, thirty-six years old, without
any children, and is proud of his money and overbear-
ing, and everybody is a little afraid of him. I judge he
thought he could have any girl he wanted, just for the
asking, and it must have set him back a good deal when
he found he couldn’t get Benny. Why, Benny’s only
half as old as he is, and just as sweet and lovely asQ
well, you’ve seen her. Poor old Uncle Silas — why,
it’s pitiful, him trying to curry favor that way — so hard
pushed and poor, and yet hiring that useless Jubiter
Dunlap to please his ornery brother.”
“What a name — Jubiter! Where’d he get it?”
“It’s only just a nickname. I reckon they’ve forgot
his real name long before this. He’s twenty-seven,
now, and has had it ever since the first time he ever