questions he would get suspicious and shet up his shell.
It turned out just so. It warn’t no trouble to see that
he WANTED to talk about it, but always along at first he
would scare away from it when he got on the very edge
of it, and go to talking about something else. The
way it come about was this: He got to asking us,
kind of indifferent like, about the passengers down on
deck. We told him about them. But he warn’t satis-
fied; we warn’t particular enough. He told us to de-
scribe them better. Tom done it. At last, when Tom
was describing one of the roughest and raggedest ones,
he gave a shiver and a gasp and says:
“Oh, lordy, that’s one of them! They’re aboard
sure — I just knowed it. I sort of hoped I had got
away, but I never believed it. Go on.”
Presently when Tom was describing another mangy,
rough deck passenger, he give that shiver again and
says:
“That’s him! — that’s the other one. If it would
only come a good black stormy night and I could get
ashore. You see, they’ve got spies on me. They’ve
got a right to come up and buy drinks at the bar
yonder forrard, and they take that chance to bribe
somebody to keep watch on me — porter or boots or
somebody. If I was to slip ashore without anybody
seeing me, they would know it inside of an hour.”
So then he got to wandering along, and pretty soon,
sure enough, he was telling! He was poking along
through his ups and downs, and when he come to that
place he went right along. He says:
“It was a confidence game. We played it on a julery-
shop in St. Louis. What we was after was a couple of
noble big di’monds as big as hazel-nuts, which every-
body was running to see. We was dressed up fine, and
we played it on them in broad daylight. We ordered
the di’monds sent to the hotel for us to see if we
wanted to buy, and when we was examining them we
had paste counterfeits all ready, and THEM was the things
that went back to the shop when we said the water
wasn’t quite fine enough for twelve thousand dollars.”
“TwelveQthousandQdollars!” Tom says. “Was
they really worth all that money, do you reckon?”
“Every cent of it.”
“And you fellows got away with them?”
“As easy as nothing. I don’t reckon the julery
people know they’ve been robbed yet. But it wouldn’t
be good sense to stay around St. Louis, of course, so
we considered where we’d go. One was for going one
way, one another, so we throwed up, heads or tails,
and the Upper Mississippi won. We done up the
di’monds in a paper and put our names on it and put
it in the keep of the hotel clerk, and told him not to
ever let either of us have it again without the others was
on hand to see it done; then we went down town, each
by his own self — because I reckon maybe we all had
the same notion. I don’t know for certain, but I
reckon maybe we had.”
“What notion?” Tom says.
“To rob the others.”
“What — one take everything, after all of you had
helped to get it?”
“Cert’nly.”
It disgusted Tom Sawyer, and he said it was the
orneriest, low-downest thing he ever heard of. But
Jake Dunlap said it warn’t unusual in the profession.
Said when a person was in that line of business he’d
got to look out for his own intrust, there warn’t no-
body else going to do it for him. And then he went
on. He says:
“You see, the trouble was, you couldn’t divide up
two di’monds amongst three. If there’d been three —
But never mind about that, there warn’t three. I
loafed along the back streets studying and studying.
And I says to myself, I’ll hog them di’monds the first
chance I get, and I’ll have a disguise all ready, and I’ll
give the boys the slip, and when I’m safe away I’ll put