and respected; always been peaceable and minding his
own business, the very last man in this whole deestrict
to touch a person, and everybody knows it. Suspect
HIM? Why, it ain’t any more possible than –”
“By authority of the State of Arkansaw, I arrest
you for the murder of Jubiter Dunlap!” shouts the
sheriff at the door.
It was awful. Aunt Sally and Benny flung themselves
at Uncle Silas, screaming and crying, and hugged him
and hung to him, and Aunt Sally said go away, she
wouldn’t ever give him up, they shouldn’t have him,
and the niggers they come crowding and crying to the
door and — well, I couldn’t stand it; it was enough to
break a person’s heart; so I got out.
They took him up to the little one-horse jail in the
village, and we all went along to tell him good-bye;
and Tom was feeling elegant, and says to me, “We’ll
have a most noble good time and heaps of danger some
dark night getting him out of there, Huck, and it’ll be
talked about everywheres and we will be celebrated;”
but the old man busted that scheme up the minute he
whispered to him about it. He said no, it was his duty
to stand whatever the law done to him, and he would
stick to the jail plumb through to the end, even if
there warn’t no door to it. It disappointed Tom
and graveled him a good deal, but he had to put up
with it.
But he felt responsible and bound to get his uncle
Silas free; and he told Aunt Sally, the last thing, not
to worry, because he was going to turn in and work
night and day and beat this game and fetch Uncle Silas
out innocent; and she was very loving to him and
thanked him and said she knowed he would do his very
best. And she told us to help Benny take care of the
house and the children, and then we had a good-bye
cry all around and went back to the farm, and left her
there to live with the jailer’s wife a month till the trial
in October.
CHAPTER XI.
TOM SAWYER DISCOVERS THE MURDERERS
WELL, that was a hard month on us all. Poor
Benny, she kept up the best she could, and me
and Tom tried to keep things cheerful there at the
house, but it kind of went for nothing, as you may say.
It was the same up at the jail. We went up every day
to see the old people, but it was awful dreary, because
the old man warn’t sleeping much, and was walking in
his sleep considerable and so he got to looking fagged
and miserable, and his mind got shaky, and we all got
afraid his troubles would break him down and kill him.
And whenever we tried to persuade him to feel cheer-
fuler, he only shook his head and said if we only
knowed what it was to carry around a murderer’s load
in your heart we wouldn’t talk that way. Tom and all
of us kept telling him it WASN’T murder, but just acci-
dental killing! but it never made any difference — it was
murder, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He
actu’ly begun to come out plain and square towards
trial time and acknowledge that he TRIED to kill the man.
Why, that was awful, you know. It made things seem
fifty times as dreadful, and there warn’t no more com-
fort for Aunt Sally and Benny. But he promised he
wouldn’t say a word about his murder when others
was around, and we was glad of that.
Tom Sawyer racked the head off of himself all that
month trying to plan some way out for Uncle Silas, and
many’s the night he kept me up ‘most all night with
this kind of tiresome work, but he couldn’t seem to get
on the right track no way. As for me, I reckoned a
body might as well give it up, it all looked so blue and
I was so downhearted; but he wouldn’t. He stuck to
the business right along, and went on planning and