When I got to the farm, it was all quiet, like a Sunday, and hot and sunny. The workers had gone to the fields. Bugs and flies hummed in the air, and that kind of sound makes everything seem lonely, as if everybody is dead and gone.
It was a small cotton farm, like all the others: a big log house for the white family, a kitchen, three small log cabins for the slaves, and one little hut all by itself against the back fence, with an ash hopper next to it. Hounds lay asleep in the sun.
I climbed over the back fence and started for the kitchen. I could hear a spinning wheel humming, and that is the loneliest sound in the whole world. I didn’t have any plan. I was trusting God to put the right words in my mouth when the time came, because I had noticed that he always did, if I left it alone.
Halfway there the hounds came for me, and in a moment I was in the middle of fifteen dogs, all barking and howling. A slave woman ran out of the kitchen with a rolling pin and sent them away, and half of them came right back, wagging their tails.
Then a white woman came running from the house, about forty-five or fifty years old, smiling all over. Her little children ran behind her.
“It’s you, at last! Isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said before I could think.
She hugged me and shook my hands, and tears ran down her face. “You don’t look as much like your mother as I thought you would. But I don’t care—I’m so glad to see you! Children, it’s your cousin! Say hello.”
She took me into the house and sat down in front of me, holding both my hands. “Don’t call me ma’am. Call me Aunt Sally. We expected you days ago. What kept you? Did the boat get stuck?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “It wasn’t that. Part of the engine blew up.”
“Good gracious! Was anybody hurt?”
“No, ma’am. It killed a slave.”
“Well, that’s lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt.” Then she told me her husband had gone to town every day to meet me. “But now tell me about my sister, and all of them. Tell me everything!”
I was stuck. I had no idea who I was supposed to be, and I opened my mouth to tell her the truth. But just then she pushed me down behind the bed.
“Here he comes! Keep your head down. I’ll play a joke on him.”
An old man came in.
“Has he come?” she asked.
“No,” said her husband. “I can’t understand it, Sally. Something must have happened to the boat. I’m really scared.”
“Oh, Silas! Look, up the road! Isn’t somebody coming?”
He went to the window, and she pulled me out. When he turned around, there she stood, smiling, and there I stood next to her, quiet and sweating.
“Why, who’s that?”
“Who do you think? It’s Tom Sawyer!”
I almost fell through the floor. But there was no time to think. The old man shook my hand and kept shaking it, and the woman danced around and laughed and cried. Then they both asked me about Sid and Mary and all the rest of the family.
But they couldn’t be as glad as I was. It was like being born again—I was so glad to find out who I was. For two hours I told them more about the Sawyer family than ever happened to six Sawyer families.
Being Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable, until I heard a steamboat coming down the river. What if Tom Sawyer was on that boat? What if he walked in and called out my name before I could give him a sign? I couldn’t let that happen. So I told them I was going to town to get my bag, which I had left at the landing. The old man wanted to come with me, but I said I could drive the horse myself.