Tom and I crept along a path among the trees. As we passed the kitchen, I fell over a root and made a noise. We dropped down and lay still. Miss Watson’s slave Jim was sitting in the kitchen doorway, with a light behind him. He stood up and listened.
“Who’s there?”
He walked quietly down and stood right between us. For minutes there wasn’t a sound. My ankle started to itch, then my ear, then my back, but I didn’t dare scratch. When you are somewhere you can’t scratch, you itch in a thousand places.
“I’m sure I heard something,” Jim said. “Well, I’ll sit down right here and listen until I hear it again.”
He sat down between Tom and me with his back against a tree. Soon I was itching in eleven different places, and I didn’t think I could stand it another minute. But just then Jim began to breathe heavily, and then to snore.
We crept away on our hands and knees. Tom took three candles from the kitchen and left five cents on the table to pay for them. Then he crawled back to Jim, took Jim’s hat off his head and hung it on a branch right over him. Jim didn’t wake up.
Afterwards Jim said that witches had put a spell on him and ridden him all over the state, and then hung his hat on a branch to show who did it. Each time he told it, the story grew, until they had ridden him all over the world. Slaves came from miles around to hear him tell it, and Jim was terribly proud. He wore Tom’s five-cent piece on a string around his neck and said the devil gave it to him.
Down by the river we found Joe Harper, Ben Rogers and a few other boys. We took a boat and rowed down the river to a hill, where Tom showed us a hole hidden in thick bushes. We lit the candles and crawled in, and deep inside the cave we stopped in a kind of room, cold and wet.
“Now we’ll start this band of robbers,” Tom said, “and call it Tom Sawyer’s Gang. Everybody who wants to join has to take an oath and write his name in blood.”
Tom’s oath said that the gang would cut the throat of any boy who told its secrets. Some boys thought his family should be killed too. Tom said that was a good idea and wrote it in. Then Ben Rogers said:
“Here’s Huck Finn. He hasn’t got any family. What are you going to do about him?”
“Well, hasn’t he got a father?” said Tom.
“Yes, but you can never find him these days. He used to lie drunk with the pigs, but nobody has seen him around here for a year or more.”
They were going to leave me out, because it wouldn’t be fair to the others if I had no family for the gang to kill. I was almost ready to cry. Then I had an idea: I offered them Miss Watson. They could kill her.
“Oh, she’ll do,” everybody said. “Huck can come in.”
We all pricked our fingers to get blood, and I made my mark on the paper.
“Now,” said Ben Rogers, “what’s the business of this gang?”
“Nothing but robbery and murder,” Tom said. “We stop coaches on the road, with masks on, and take people’s watches and money. Some of them we keep here in the cave until they’re ransomed.”
“Ransomed? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. But that’s what they do in the books, so of course we have to do it.”
“But how can we do it if we don’t know what it is?”
“We have to do it anyway. Didn’t I tell you it’s in the books?”
Little Tommy Barnes cried and said he wanted to go home to his mother, but Tom gave him five cents to keep quiet. We elected Tom first captain and Joe Harper second captain, and went home.
I climbed in through my window just before the sun came up. My new clothes were all dirty with grease and mud, and I was dead tired.