CHAPTER THREE

Well I got a good going-over in the morning from old Miss Watson on account of
my clothes; but the widow she didn’t scold, but only cleaned off the grease and clay,
and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave awhile if I could. Then Miss Watson
she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every
day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it wasn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a
fish-line, but no hooks. It wasn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks
three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked
Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I
couldn’t make it out no way.
I set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I say to myself,
if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money
he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stole?
Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself, there was nothing in it. I went
and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it
was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant—I
must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for
them all the time, and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I
took it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I
couldn’t see no advantage about it—except for the other people; so at last I reckoned I
wouldn’t worry about it anymore, but just let it go. Sometimes the widow would take
me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make a body's mouth water; but
maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again. I judged I
could see that there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable
show with the widow's Providence, but if Miss Watson's got him there wasn’t no help
for him anymore. I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to the widow’s if
he wanted me, though I couldn’t make out how he was going to be any better off than
what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.

Pap he hadn’t been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I
didn’t want to see him no more. He used to always whale me when he was sober and
could get his hands on me; though I used to take to the woods most of the time when
he was around. Well, about this time he was found in the river drowned, about twelve
miles above town, so people said. They judged it was him, anyway; said this drowned
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man was just his size, and was ragged, and had uncommon long hair, which was all
like pap; but they couldn’t make nothing out of the face, because it had been in the
water so long it wasn’t much like a face at all. They said he was floating on his back in
the water. They took him and buried him on the bank. But I wasn’t comfortable long,
because I happened to think of something. I know mighty well that a drowned man
doesn’t float on his back, but on his face. So I know, then, that this wasn’t pap, but a
woman dressed up in a man’s clothes. So I was uncomfortable again. I judged the old
man would turn up again by and by, though I wished he wouldn’t.
We played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned. All the boys did.
We hadn’t robbed nobody, hadn’t killed any people, but only just pretended. We used
to hop out of the woods and go charging down on hog-drivers and women in carts
taking garden stuff to market, but we never hived any of them. Tom Sawyer called the
hogs “ingots,” and he called the turnips and stuff “Juley,” and we would go to the cave
and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed and
marked. But I couldn’t see no profit in it. One time Tom sent a boy to run about town
with a blazing stick, which he called a slogan (which was the sign for the Gang to get
together), and then he said he had got secret news by his spies that next day a whole
parcel of Spanish merchants and rich Arabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with
two hundred elephants, and six hundred camels, and over a thousand “Sumter” mules,
all loaded down with diamonds, and they didn’t have only a guard of four hundred
soldiers, and so we would lay in ambuscade, as he called it, and kill the lot and scoop
the things. He said we must slick up our swords and guns, and get ready. He never
could go after even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords and guns all scoured up
for it, though they were only lath and broom-sticks, and you might scour at them till
you rotted, and then they weren’t worth a mouthful of ashes more than what they were
before. I didn’t believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and Arabs, but I
wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the
ambuscade; and when we got the word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill.
But there weren’t no Spaniards and Arabs, and there were no camels nor no elephants.
It wasn’t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We
busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but
some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a
hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in, and made us drop everything
and cut. I didn’t see no diamonds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads
of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-ribs there, too, and elephants and
things. I said, why couldn’t we see them, then? He said if I weren’t so ignorant, but
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had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all
done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and
treasure, and so on, but we had enemies which he called magicians; and they had
turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite. I said, all right;
then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said I was a
numskull.
“Why,” said he, “a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they would hash you up
like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson. They are as tall as a tree and as big
around as a church.”
“Well,” I say, “‘spouse we got some genies to help us—can’t we lick the other crowd
then?”
“How you going to get them?”
“I don’t know. How do they get them?”
“Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come tearing in,
with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling, and
everything they’re told to do they up and do it. They don’t think nothing of pulling a
shot-tower up by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head
with it—or any other man.”
“Who makes them tear around so?”
“Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs the lamp or
the ring, and they’ve got to do whatever he says. If he tells them to build a palace forty
miles long out of diamonds, and fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and
fetch an emperor’s daughter from China for you to marry, they’ve got to do it—and
they’ve got to do it before sun-up next morning, too. And more: they’ve got to waltz
that palace around over the country wherever you want it, you understand.”
“Well,” says I, “I think they are a pack of flat-heads for not keeping the palace
themselves ’stead of fooling them away like that. And what’s more—if I was one of
them I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business and come to him
for the rubbing of an old tin lamp.”
“How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you’d have to come when he rubbed it, whether you
wanted to or not.”
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“What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right, then; I would come;
but I lay I’d make that man climb the highest tree there was in the country.”
“Shucks, it aim’s no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don’t seem to know anything,
somehow—perfect saphead.”
I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there
was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods
and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell
it; but it wasn’t no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that
stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-ribs and
the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school.