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- extracted_at
- 2026-01-28T02:36:01.312Z
- extracted_by
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- start_line
- 8312
- text
- “Huck, you just wait till we get in there. If we don’t find it I’ll
agree to give you my drum and every thing I’ve got in the world. I will,
by jings.”
“All right—it’s a whiz. When do you say?”
“Right now, if you say it. Are you strong enough?”
“Is it far in the cave? I ben on my pins a little, three or four days,
now, but I can’t walk more’n a mile, Tom—least I don’t think I could.”
“It’s about five mile into there the way anybody but me would go, Huck,
but there’s a mighty short cut that they don’t anybody but me know
about. Huck, I’ll take you right to it in a skiff. I’ll float the skiff
down there, and I’ll pull it back again all by myself. You needn’t ever
turn your hand over.”
“Less start right off, Tom.”
“All right. We want some bread and meat, and our pipes, and a little
bag or two, and two or three kite-strings, and some of these new-fangled
things they call lucifer matches. I tell you, many’s the time I wished I
had some when I was in there before.”
A trifle after noon the boys borrowed a small skiff from a citizen who
was absent, and got under way at once. When they were several miles
below “Cave Hollow,” Tom said:
“Now you see this bluff here looks all alike all the way down from the
cave hollow—no houses, no wood-yards, bushes all alike. But do you see
that white place up yonder where there’s been a landslide? Well, that’s
one of my marks. We’ll get ashore, now.”
They landed.
“Now, Huck, where we’re a-standing you could touch that hole I got out
of with a fishing-pole. See if you can find it.”
Huck searched all the place about, and found nothing. Tom proudly
marched into a thick clump of sumach bushes and said:
“Here you are! Look at it, Huck; it’s the snuggest hole in this country.
You just keep mum about it. All along I’ve been wanting to be a robber,
but I knew I’d got to have a thing like this, and where to run across
it was the bother. We’ve got it now, and we’ll keep it quiet, only we’ll
let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers in—because of course there’s got to be a
Gang, or else there wouldn’t be any style about it. Tom Sawyer’s Gang—it
sounds splendid, don’t it, Huck?”
“Well, it just does, Tom. And who’ll we rob?”
“Oh, most anybody. Waylay people—that’s mostly the way.”
“And kill them?”
“No, not always. Hive them in the cave till they raise a ransom.”
“What’s a ransom?”
“Money. You make them raise all they can, off’n their friends; and after
you’ve kept them a year, if it ain’t raised then you kill them. That’s
the general way. Only you don’t kill the women. You shut up the women,
but you don’t kill them. They’re always beautiful and rich, and awfully
scared. You take their watches and things, but you always take your hat
off and talk polite. They ain’t anybody as polite as robbers—you’ll see
that in any book. Well, the women get to loving you, and after they’ve
been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after that
you couldn’t get them to leave. If you drove them out they’d turn right
around and come back. It’s so in all the books.”
“Why, it’s real bully, Tom. I believe it’s better’n to be a pirate.”
“Yes, it’s better in some ways, because it’s close to home and circuses
and all that.”
By this time everything was ready and the boys entered the hole, Tom in
the lead. They toiled their way to the farther end of the tunnel, then
made their spliced kite-strings fast and moved on. A few steps brought
them to the spring, and Tom felt a shudder quiver all through him.
He showed Huck the fragment of candle-wick perched on a lump of clay
against the wall, and described how he and Becky had watched the flame
struggle and expire.
- title
- Chunk 3