That night, when everybody was asleep, we climbed down the lightning rod and went into the shed and started digging with the knives. We dug until almost midnight. Our hands were covered with blisters, and you could hardly see that we had done anything.
“This isn’t a thirty-seven-year job,” I said. “This is a thirty-eight-year job, Tom Sawyer.”
He stopped and thought for a long time. Then he said, “It’s no use, Huck. Real prisoners have all the years they want, but we have to hurry. It isn’t right, and I wouldn’t like people to know, but we have to dig him out with the picks and pretend they’re knives.”
“Now you’re talking!” I said. “When I steal a slave or a watermelon, I don’t care how it’s done, as long as it’s done.”
“It might be all right for you to dig with a pick without pretending,” he said, “because you don’t know any better. But I do. Give me a knife.”
He had his own knife next to him, but I handed him mine. He threw it down and said again, “Give me a knife.”
I didn’t know what to do. Then I understood. I found a pick among the old tools and gave it to him, and he went to work without a word. He was always like that. Full of principle.
We dug for half an hour, until we couldn’t go on any longer. Afterward Tom’s hands were so sore that he couldn’t climb up the lightning rod.
“Can’t you think of a way?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but it’s against the rules. Come up the stairs and pretend you’re climbing a lightning rod.”
So he did.
The next day Tom stole a spoon, a brass candlestick and six candles from the house, and I stole three tin plates. That night we dug through and crawled up under Jim’s bed into the hut. Jim was so glad to see us he almost cried. He called us honey and wanted to cut the chain off his leg and leave right away. But Tom explained that it would be against the rules, and he told him all about our plans.
Jim said that Uncle Silas came in every day or two to pray with him. That gave Tom an idea. He told Jim we would send the rope ladder in a pie and other big things with Nat, the man who brought his food, and small things in Uncle Silas’s coat pocket, and Jim had to steal them out. He told him how to keep a diary on the shirt with his blood. Jim couldn’t see any sense in most of it, but he thought that because we were white, we knew better than he did, so he said he would do it all.
Tom said it was the best fun he ever had. If he could, he said, he would keep it up all our lives and leave Jim for our children to set free.
In the morning we cut the candlestick into small pieces, and Tom pushed one into the corn bread in Jim’s pan. We went along with Nat to see how it worked, and it worked fine: when Jim bit into the bread, he almost broke all his teeth.
Just then hounds started coming in from under Jim’s bed, until there were eleven of them in that little hut. We had forgotten to lock the shed door! Nat shouted “Witches!” and fell down among the dogs, groaning as if he was dying. Tom threw out a piece of Jim’s meat, the dogs ran after it, and he quickly shut both doors.
“Master Sid, you’ll say I’m a fool,” Nat said, “but I saw almost a million dogs, or devils, or something. I felt them all over me!”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Tom. “They come because they’re hungry. They need a witch pie, and I’ll make it for you. But when we bring it, you turn your back. Don’t look when Jim takes things out of the pan. And whatever you do, don’t touch the witch things.”
“Touch them, Master Sid? I wouldn’t touch them for ten hundred thousand billion dollars!”