That morning Tom put the spoon he had stolen in Uncle Silas’s coat pocket, for Jim, because Uncle Silas was going to visit the runaway slave in the hut. Then we went in to breakfast.
Aunt Sally came in hot and red and angry. “I’ve looked high and low,” she said to Uncle Silas, “and I can’t find your other shirt.”
My heart dropped, and a piece of corn bread went down the wrong way. I coughed, and it flew across the table and hit one of the children in the eye.
“I know I took it off,” Uncle Silas said.
“I hung it on the clothesline myself,” said Aunt Sally. “And the shirt isn’t all. There were ten spoons, and now there are only nine. And six candles are gone. The rats could take the candles, because you never stop up their holes. But rats don’t take spoons!”
Then a slave woman came to the door. “Miss Sally, a sheet is gone.”
Aunt Sally was boiling. Then Uncle Silas, looking foolish, pulled the spoon out of his pocket. She stopped with her mouth open, and I wished I was a thousand miles away.
“So you had it in your pocket all the time!”
“I really don’t know how it got there, Sally,” he said. “I was reading my Bible before breakfast. Maybe I put the spoon in my pocket instead of the Bible.”
“Oh, leave me in peace! Go away, all of you, and don’t come near me until I have my peace of mind back.”
“It’s no use sending things by him,” Tom said outside. “He isn’t reliable.” But we still needed a spoon for Jim. So when Aunt Sally came by, Tom began to count the spoons in the basket, and I slid one up my sleeve.
“Aunt Sally, there are only nine spoons.”
She counted them herself and got nine. I put the spoon back while she wasn’t looking, and she counted again and got ten. Tom said he didn’t think there were ten, so she counted again, and I took one, and it was nine. Three times she got nine and three times ten. At last she threw the basket across the room, hit the cat and told us to get out. While she shouted, we slipped away with the spoon, and Jim had it before noon. Tom said that now she could never count those spoons the same way twice.
We did the same with the sheets. We put the sheet back on the line and took another one from her closet, again and again, until she didn’t know how many sheets she had and didn’t care.
The pie was the hardest job. At night we tore up the sheet in Jim’s hut and twisted it into a long rope ladder. Then we took it into the woods and baked it in a pie inside Uncle Silas’s old brass warming pan, which his family had brought from England long ago. We burned ourselves and used up a lot of flour, because the top kept falling in, but at last we made a pie that was lovely to look at. But anyone who tried to eat it was going to have a very bad stomachache.
Nat didn’t look when we put the pie in Jim’s food pan. As soon as Jim was alone, he hid the rope ladder in his straw mattress.