For days and days we didn’t stop at any town. We were far down in the South now, and gray moss hung from the trees like long gray beards. Then the frauds went back to their tricks in the villages: a dancing school, preaching, doctoring, telling fortunes. But they had no luck anywhere, and at last they had almost no money left.
Then they started talking low in the shelter for hours at a time. Jim and I didn’t like the look of it. We thought they were planning something worse than ever, and we agreed to leave them behind at the first chance.
One morning we hid the raft two miles below a poor little village called Pikesville, and the king went up to the village alone. When he didn’t come back by noon, the duke and I went to look for him. We found him in a little bar, very drunk. The duke started calling him an old fool, and as soon as they were really fighting, I ran. I flew down the river road like a deer, because I saw our chance, and shouted:
“Let her go, Jim! We’re all right now!”
But there was no answer. Jim was gone! I shouted and ran this way and that in the woods, but it was no use. Then I sat down and cried. I couldn’t help it.
On the road I met a boy. I described Jim and his clothes and asked if he had seen him.
“Yes,” he said. “He’s down at Silas Phelps’s place, two miles below here. He’s a runaway slave, and there’s a reward of two hundred dollars for him. An old stranger caught him and sold him to Mr. Phelps for forty dollars, because he couldn’t wait for the reward.”
I knew who the old stranger was. I went back to the raft and sat down to think. After this long trip, and after everything we had done for those two, they had made Jim a slave again for the rest of his life, among strangers, for forty dirty dollars.
If Jim had to be a slave, I thought, it was better at home, near his family, so I could write and tell Miss Watson where he was. But then everybody at home would know that Huck Finn had helped a slave get his freedom, and I would be ashamed to meet anybody from there. The more I thought about it, the more my conscience hurt me. All at once it hit me: God was watching me from heaven all this time, while I stole a poor old woman’s slave, a woman who had never done me any harm. Something inside me said, “You could have gone to Sunday school. They would have taught you that people who act like you burn in hell forever.”
That made me shiver. I decided to pray and try to be a better boy, so I got down on my knees. But the words wouldn’t come, and I knew very well why. My heart wasn’t right. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and write to Jim’s owner, but deep down I knew it was a lie, and God knew it too. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.
At last I had an idea: I would write the letter first, and then see if I could pray. Right away I felt as light as a feather. I got a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway slave Jim is down here two miles below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him, and he will give him up for the reward if you send for him.
Huck Finn
I felt good and washed clean of sin for the first time in my life. But I didn’t pray right away. I put the paper down and sat there thinking about our trip down the river. I saw Jim in front of me all the time, in the day and in the night, in moonlight and in storms, floating along with me, talking and singing and laughing. I saw him keeping watch for me after his own turn, so I could go on sleeping. I saw how glad he was when I came back out of the fog, and when I found him again in the swamp. He always called me honey and did everything he could for me. And I remembered the time I saved him by telling the men with guns that we had smallpox on the raft. He was so thankful, and he said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he had now. Then I happened to look around, and I saw that paper.
I picked it up and held it in my hand. I was shaking, because I had to choose, forever, between two things, and I knew it. I thought for a minute, almost holding my breath, and then I said to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and I tore it up.
They were awful thoughts and awful words, but I had said them, and I let them stay said. I would go back to being wicked, because that was how I was brought up. And to start with, I would steal Jim out of slavery again.
That night I hid the raft on a little island down the river. In the morning I put on my good clothes, paddled to the shore below the Phelps farm and sank the canoe where I could find it again. Then I walked on to the village, because I wanted to arrive at the farm from there.
The first man I saw in the village was the duke, putting up notices for the Royal Nonesuch. He looked surprised. “Where did you come from? Where’s the raft?”
I told him a story about helping a man catch a sheep all day. “When I got back, the raft was gone,” I said, and started to cry. “Where is Jim?”
“That old fool sold him,” the duke said, “and lost all the money in the bar.” Then he gave me an ugly look. “We have to be here three days. If you promise not to tell on us, I’ll tell you where he is. A farmer by the name of Silas Ph—” He stopped, and I could see him change his mind. He wanted me out of the way for those three days. “The man who bought him is Abram G. Foster. He lives forty miles from here, on the road to Lafayette. Start now, and don’t talk to anybody on the way.”
That was just what I wanted. I walked straight out into the country for a mile without looking back. Then I turned and went back through the woods toward the Phelps place.