It would be another hour before breakfast, so we went down into the trees, because Tom said we got to have some light to see how to dig by, and a lantern makes too much, and might get us into trouble. What we must have was a lot of them stones that’s called fox-fire, that just makes a soft kind of a light when you put them in a dark place. We found as many as we could carry and put them in the weeds, and sat down to rest, and Tom says, kind of not happy with things: "Curse it, this whole thing is just as easy and stupid as it can be. The most difficult part is just getting up a difficult plan. There ain’t no watchman to be drugged -- now there should be a watchman. There ain’t even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to. And there’s Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bed and off comes the chain. And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to that stupid black man, and don’t send nobody to watch him. Jim could a got out that window-hole by now, only there wouldn’t be no use trying to travel with a ten-foot chain on his leg. Why, hit it, Huck, it’s the stupidest thing I ever seen. We got to make up all the problems. Well, we can’t help it; so we'll do the best we can with what we’ve got. Anyway, there’s more glory in getting him out through a lot of problems and dangers, where there weren’t one of them given to you by the people who it was their job to do it, and you had to make them all out of your own head. Now look at just that one thing of the lantern. When you come down to the cold truth, we really got to let on that a lantern’s dangerous. Why, we could work with a parade full of torches if we wanted to, I believe. While I’m thinking of it, we got to hunt up something to make a saw out of the first opening we get."
"What do we want of a saw?"
"What do we want of a saw? Ain’t we got to saw the leg of Jim’s bed off, so as to get the chain loose?"
"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bed and pull the chain off."
"Well, if that ain’t just like you, Huck Finn. You can get up the most baby-school ways of going at a thing. Why, ain’t you ever read any books at all? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-woman way as that? No; the way all the best writers does is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just so, and eat the powder that comes from the sawing, so it can’t be found, and put some dirt and fat around the sawed place so the very best watchman can’t see no sign of it’s being sawed. Then, the night you’re ready, give the leg a kick, down she goes; pull off your chain, and there you are. Nothing to do but hang your rope ladder out the window, climb down it, break your leg in the moat -- because a rope ladder is nineteen foot too short, you know -- and there’s your horses and your servants, and they lift you up and throw you across a saddle, and away you go to your home country, wherever that is. It’s a real show that way, Huck. I wish there was a moat to this shack. If we get time, the night we break him out, we’ll dig one."
I says: "What do we want of a moat when we’re going to pull him out from under the shack?"
But he never heard me. He wasn’t hearing me or anything else. He had his head on his hand, thinking. Pretty soon he breathes deeply, shakes his head, then breathes deeply again, and says: "No, it wouldn’t do -- there ain’t enough need for it."
"For what?" I says.
"Why, to saw Jim’s leg off," he says.
"Good land!" I says; "Why, there ain’t no need for that at all. And what would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?"
"Well, some of the best ones has done it. They couldn’t get a chain off, so they just cut their hand off and left. A leg would be better. But we got to let that go. There ain’t need enough; and, besides, Jim’s a black man, and wouldn’t understand how it’s the way they do it in Europe; so we’ll let it go. But there’s one thing -- he can have a ladder; we can tear up our sheets and make him a ladder easy enough. And we can send it to him in a pie; it’s mostly done that way. And I’ve tasted worse pies."
"Why, Tom Sawyer, how you talk," I says; "Jim ain’t got no use for a rope ladder."
"He has got use for it. How you talk! You should say you don’t know nothing about it. He’s got to have a rope ladder; they all do."
"What in the world can he do with it?"
"Do with it? He can hide it in his bed, can’t he? That’s what they all do; and he’s got to, too. Huck, you don’t ever seem to want to do anything the way it’s always been done; you want to be starting something new all the time. Even if he don’t do nothing with it, ain’t it there in his bed, for them to study, after he’s gone? and don’t you think they’ll want things to study? You know they will. And you wouldn’t leave them any? That would be a pretty bad how-you-do, wouldn’t it! I never heard of such a thing."
"Well," I says, "if it’s in the rules, and he’s got to have it, all right, let him have it; because I don’t wish to go back on no rules; but there’s one thing, Tom Sawyer -- if we go to tearing up our sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we’re going to get into trouble with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you’re born. Now, the way I look at it, a ladder made from string bark don’t cost nothing, and don’t waste nothing, and is just as good to fill up a pie with, and hide in a mattress, as any rope ladder you can start; and as for Jim, he ain’t never done this kind of thing before, and so he don’t care what kind of a -- "
"Oh, rats, Huck Finn, if I was as stupid as you I’d keep still -- that’s what I’d do. Who ever heard of a prisoner making a ladder from string bark? Why, it’s perfectly crazy."
"Well, okay, Tom, fix it your own way; but if you’ll listen to me, you’ll let me borrow something off of the clothes-line."
He said that would do. And that gave him another thought, and he says: "Borrow a shirt, too."
"What do we want of a shirt, Tom?"
"Want it for Jim to keep a diary on."
"Diary your grandmother -- Jim can’t write."
"What difference if he can’t write -- he can make marks on the shirt, can’t he, if we make him a pen out of an old spoon or a piece of old iron?"
"Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better one; and faster, too."
"Prisoners don’t have a goose running around to pull pens out of, you air head. They make their pens out of the hardest piece of old metal that they can find; and it takes them weeks and weeks and months and months to shape it, because they’ve got to do it by rubbing it on the wall. They wouldn’t use a goose-feather if they had it. It ain’t the way it’s done."
"Well, then, what’ll we make him the ink out of?"
"Many makes it by rubbing the red powder off of old iron and adding tears; but that’s the easy way and it’s mostly for women; the best prisoners uses their own blood. Jim can do that; and when he wants to send any little word out to the world, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window. The Iron Mask always done that, and it’s a very good way, too."
"Jim ain’t got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan."
"That ain’t nothing; we can get him some."
"Can’t nobody read his plates."
"That ain’t got anything to do with it, Huck Finn. All he’s got to do is to write on the plate and throw it out. You don’t have to be able to read it. Why, half the time you can’t read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else."
"Well, then, what’s the point in wasting the plates?"
"Why, blame it all, it ain’t the prisoner’s plates."
"But it’s someone’s plates, ain’t it?"
"Well, what if it is? What does the prisoner care whose -- " He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing. So we headed back to the house.
Later that morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes-line; and I found an old bag and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing, because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it weren’t borrowing, it was robbing. He said we was working for the good of prisoners; and prisoners don’t care how they get a thing just so they get it, and nobody don’t blame them for it, either. It ain’t no sin in a prisoner to rob the things he needs to get away with, Tom said; it’s his right; and so, as long as we was working for a prisoner, we had a perfect right to rob anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves out of prison with. He said if we weren’t prisoners it would be a very different thing, and nobody but a low-down bad person would rob when he weren’t a prisoner. So we agreed we would rob everything there was that we could use. And yet he was quite angry, one day after that, when I robbed a watermelon out of the slave garden and eat it. He made me go and give the slaves ten cents without telling them why. Tom said that what he was trying to say was, we could rob anything we needed. Well, I says, I needed the watermelon. But he said I didn’t need it to get out of prison with; there’s where the difference was. He said if I’d a wanted it to hide a knife in, and secretly give it to Jim to kill the watchman with, it would a been all right. So I let it go at that, but truth is, I couldn’t see no point in my working for a prisoner if I got to think over a lot of little differences like that every time I see a good way to get some watermelon.
Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning until everybody was busy, and nobody around the yard; then Tom he carried the bag into the lean-to while I stood off a piece to keep watch. By and by he come out, and we went and sat down on the firewood to talk. He says: "Everything’s all right now apart from tools; and that’s easy fixed."
"Tools?" I says.
"Yes."
"Tools for what?"
"Why, to dig with. We ain’t going to chew him out, are we?"
"Ain’t them old crippled shovels and things in there good enough to dig a slave out with?" I says.
He turns on me, looking sad enough to make a body cry, and says: "Huck Finn, did you ever hear of a prisoner having shovels and things in his wardrobe to dig himself out with? Now I want to ask you -- if you got any reason in you at all -- what kind of a show would that give him to be proud of? Why, they might as well hand him the key and be done with it. A shovel -- why, they wouldn’t give one to a king."
"Well, then," I says, "if we don’t want the shovel, what do we want?"
"Two table-knives."
"To dig the bottom out from under that shack with?"
"Yes."
"That’s foolish, Tom."
"It don’t make no difference how foolish it is, it’s the right way -- and it’s the way it’s done. There ain’t no other way, that ever I heard of, and I’ve read all the books that gives any teaching about these things. They always dig out with a knife -- and not through dirt, mind you; generally it’s through solid rock. And it takes them for ever and ever. Why, there was a prisoner that got himself out that way; how long was he at it, do you think?"
"I don’t know."
"Well, try."
"I don’t know. A month and a half."
"Thirty-seven years -- and he come out in China. That’s the kind. I wish the bottom of this prison was solid rock."
"Jim don’t know nobody in China."
"What’s that got to do with it? That other man didn’t either. But you’re always a-going off on a side argument. Why can’t you stick to the point?"
"Okay. I don’t care where he comes out, so he comes out; and I'd say Jim don’t care either. But Jim’s too old for us to be digging him out with a table-knife. He won’t last."
"Yes he will last. You don’t think it’s going to take thirty-seven years to dig out through a dirt bottom, do you?"
"How long will it take, Tom?"
"Well, it’s too dangerous to take as long as we should, because it may not take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He’ll hear Jim ain’t from there. Then his next move will be to advertise Jim, or something like that. So we can’t take as long digging him out as we should. By rights I think we should be two years or more; but we can’t. Things can change so quickly here, what I say is that we dig right in, as fast as we can; and after that, we can let on, to ourselves, that we was at it thirty-seven years. Then we can pull him out and run him away the first time there’s an opening. Yes,
I think that’ll be the best way."
"Now, there’s good thinking in that," I says. "Letting on don’t cost nothing; and if it’s any help, I don’t mind letting on we was at it a hundred years. It wouldn’t hurt me none, after I got my hand in. So I’ll get along now, and rob two or three table-knives."
"Rob three," he says; "we want one to make a saw out of."
"Tom, if it ain’t against the rules to say it, there’s a dirty old saw-blade sticking under the boards behind the smoke-house."
He looked kind of tired and sad-like, and says: "It ain’t no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. Run along and rob the knives -- three of them." So I done it.
