We judged that three nights more would bring us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a river boat and go way up the Ohio to where slaves can be free, and then be out of trouble.
Well, the second night a fog started to come on, and we made for an island with some trees to tie to, for it wouldn’t do to try to run in a fog; but when I went ahead in the canoe, with the rope to tie up the raft, there weren’t anything but little baby trees to tie to. I passed the rope around one of them right on the border of the island, but the river was so strong that when the raft come flying by so quickly she pulled it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn’t move for almost half a minute it seemed to me -- and then there weren’t no raft to be seen; you couldn’t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run to the back of it, and picked up the oar and started to use it. But she didn’t move. I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so worried my hands shook so I couldn’t do much of anything with them.
As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the side of the island. That was all right as far as it went, but the island weren’t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I found myself out in the middle of solid white fog, and hadn’t no more understanding of which way I was going than a dead man.
Thinks I, it won’t do to use the oar; I’ll run into the beach or an island or something; I got to sit here and wait, and yet it’s mighty difficult business to have to hold your hands still at such a time. I shouted and listened. Away off in the distance I hears a small shout, and up comes my spirits. I went pushing after it, listening sharp to hear it again. The next time it come I see I weren’t heading for it, but heading away to the right of it.
And the next time I was heading away to the left of it -- and not getting much closer to it either, for I was flying around, this way and that, but it was going straight ahead all the time.
I wished the man would think to hit a tin pan, and do it all the time, but he never did, and it was the quiet places between the shouts that was making trouble for me. Well, I fought along, and soon I hears the shout behind me. I was mixed up good now. That was someone else’s shout, or else I was turned around.
I throwed the oar down. I heard the shout again; it was behind me yet, but in a different place; it kept coming, and kept changing its place, and I kept answering, until by and by it was in front of me again, and I knowed I was all right if that was Jim and not some other raft shouting. I couldn’t tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don’t look right or sound right in a fog.
The shouting went on, and in about a minute I come a-racing down on a short cliff on the side of the river with grey ghosts of big trees on it, and the movement of the river throwed me off to the left and moved me so quickly through a lot of branches that the sound of it was louder than any shout.
In another second or two it was solid white and quiet again. I sat there, listening to my heart bang inside of me, and I’d say I didn’t breathe at all while it hit against my ribs a hundred times.
I just give up then. I knowed what the problem was. That short cliff was an island, and Jim had gone down the other side of it. It weren’t no little island that you could be by in ten minutes. It had the big timber of a real island; it might be five or six miles long and more than half a mile wide.
I kept quiet, with my ears open, about fifteen minutes, I’d say. I was moving along, maybe four or five miles an hour; but you don’t ever think of that. No, you feel like you are not moving at all on the water; and if you see a branch go by you don’t think to yourself how fast you’re going, but you stop breathing for a second and you think, my! how that branch is flying along. If you think it wouldn’t make you sad and scared out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it once -- you’ll see.
Next, for about half an hour, I shouts now and then; at last I hears the answer a long way off, and tries to follow it, but I couldn’t do it, and soon I judged I had got into a nest of little islands, for I could see little movements of them on both sides of me -- sometimes just a narrow channel between, and some that I couldn’t see I knowed was there because I’d hear the wash of the water against the old dead bushes and branches that was hanging over the sides. Well, I weren’t long losing the shouts down in all those little islands; and I only tried to follow them a little while, anyway, because it was worse than running after a ghost. You never knowed a sound jump around so, and change places so quickly and so much.
I had to fight to get away from the sides of the islands pretty strongly four or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of the river; and so I judged the raft must be hitting into the sides every now and then too, or else it would be farther ahead and out of hearing -- it was moving a little faster than what I was.
Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by and by, but I couldn’t hear no sign of a shout nowhere. I reasoned Jim had been stopped by a branch, maybe, and it was all up with him. I was dead tired, so I lay myself down in the canoe and said I wouldn’t worry no more. I didn’t want to go to sleep; but I was so sleepy I couldn’t help it; so I thought I would take just one little very short sleep.
But I think it was more than a little sleep, for when I waked up the stars was out, the fog was all gone, and I was turning down a big bend back first. At first I thought I was dreaming; and when things started to come back to me they seemed to come up out of last week.
It was an awful big river here, with the tallest and the thickest kind of timber on both sides; just a solid wall, as well as I could see by the stars. I looked away down the river, and seen a black spot on the water. I took after it; but when I got to it it weren’t nothing but two saw logs tied together. Then I see another spot, and ran after that; then another, and this time I was right. It was the raft.
When I got to it Jim was sitting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering-oar. The other oar was broken off, and the raft was covered with leaves and branches and dirt. So she’d had a rough time.
I tied up and got down on the raft under Jim’s nose on the raft, and started to push my fists out against Jim, like I was just waking up, and says: "Hello, Jim, have I been asleep? Why didn’t you wake me up?"
"Good Lord, is dat you, Huck? And you ain’t dead -- you ain’t drowned -- you’s back again? It’s too good for true, honey, it’s too good for true. Let me look at you child, let me feel of you. No, you ain’t dead! you’s back again, alive and safe, just de same old Huck -- de same old Huck, thanks to de good Lord!"
"What’s the trouble with you, Jim? You been a-drinking?"
"Drinking? Has I been a-drinking? Has I had a way to be a-drinking?"
"Well, then, what makes you talk so wild?"
"How does I talk wild?"
"How? Why, ain’t you been talking about my coming back, and all that, as if I’d been gone away?"
"Huck -- Huck Finn, you look me in de eye; look me in de eye. Ain’t you been gone away?"
"Gone away? Why, what in the world do you mean? I ain’t been gone anywhere. Where would I go to?"
"Well, look here, boss, dey’s something wrong, dey is. Is I me, or who is I? Is I here, or where is I? Now dat’s what I wants to know."
"Well, I think you’re here, clear enough, but I think you’re a mixed up old crazy man, Jim."
"I is, is I? Well, you answer me dis: Didn’t you take out de rope in de canoe for to tie up to dat little island?"
"No, I didn’t. What little island? I ain’t seen no little island."
"You ain’t seen no little island? Look here, didn’t de rope pull loose and de raft go whistling down de river, and leave you and de canoe behind in de fog?"
"What fog?"
"Why, de fog! -- de fog dat’s been around all night. And didn’t you shout, and didn’t I shout, until we got mixed up in de islands and one of us got lost and t’other was just as good as lost, because he didn’t know where he was? And didn’t I hit up against a lot of dem islands and have an awful time and almost get drowned? Now ain’t dat so, boss -- ain’t it so? You answer me dat."
"Well, this is too much for me, Jim. I ain’t seen no fog, or no islands, or no troubles, or nothing. I been sitting here talking with you all night until you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I think I done the same. You couldn’t a got drunk in that time, so it must be you’ve been dreaming."
"Dad blame it, how is I gwyne to dream all dat in ten minutes?"
"Well, hang it all, you did dream it, because there didn’t any of it happen."
"But, Huck, it’s all just as clear to me as -- "
"It don’t make no difference how clear it is; there ain’t nothing in it. I know, because I’ve been here all the time."
Jim didn’t say nothing for about five minutes, but sat there studying over it. Then he says: "Well, den, I think I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats if it ain’t de powerfullest dream I ever seen. And I ain’t ever had no dream before dat’s tired me like dis one."
"Oh, well, that’s all right, because a dream does make a body tired like everything at times. But this one was a powerful dream; tell me all about it, Jim."
So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up a lot. Then he said he must start in and get the meaning of it, because it was sent for a warning. He said the first little island stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but the water movement was another man that would get us away from him. The shouts was warnings that would come to us every now and then, and if we didn’t try hard to make out to understand them they’d just take us into bad luck, instead of keeping us out of it. The group of little islands was troubles we was going to get into with people who want to argue, and with all kinds of bad people, but if we stayed to ourselves and didn’t talk back and make them angry, we would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big clear river, which was the free place, and we wouldn’t have no more trouble.
It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it was clearing up again now.
"Oh, well, that’s all understood well enough as far as it goes, Jim," I says; "but what does these things stand for?"
It was the leaves and dirt on the raft and the broken oar. You could see them easily now.
Jim looked at the messy raft, and then looked at me, and back at the raft again. He had got the dream so strong in his head that he couldn’t seem to shake it loose and get the truth back into its place again right away. But when he did get the thing straight he looked at me without ever smiling, and says: "What do dey stand for? I’s gwyne to tell you what dey stand for. When I got all tired out wid work, and wid de calling for you, and went to sleep, my heart was almost broken because you was lost, and I didn’t care no more what become of me and de raft. And when I wake up and find you back again, all safe and healthy, de tears come, and I could a got down on my knees and kissed your foot, I was so thankful. And all you was thinking about was how you could make a joke of old Jim wid a lie. Dat dere on de raft is dirt; and dirt is what people is dat puts dirt on de heads of dey friends and makes ‘em feel bad."
Then he got up slow and walked to the tent, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a slave; but I done it, and I weren’t ever sorry for it after that either. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t a done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.