The next morning Miss Watson scolded me about my clothes, but the widow only cleaned them and looked so sad that I thought I would behave for a while. Miss Watson told me to pray every day, and I would get whatever I asked for. But it wasn’t true. I tried it. Once I got a fishing line, but no hooks, and I prayed for the hooks three or four times, but none came. I thought about it in the woods. If people get everything they pray for, why doesn’t the widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stolen? No, I said to myself, there’s nothing in it.
My father, Pap, hadn’t been seen for more than a year, and that was fine with me. When he was sober and could catch me, he always beat me. Around this time, people found a drowned man in the river, twelve miles above the town. He was Pap’s size, he wore rags, and he had very long hair, so people said it was Pap. They said he was floating on his back, and they buried him by the river. But I had heard that drowned men floated face down and drowned women floated on their backs. So I decided it wasn’t Pap, but a woman in a man’s clothes. I thought the old man would turn up again some day, though I wished he wouldn’t.
We played robbers for about a month, and then all of us quit. We hadn’t robbed or killed anybody; we had only pretended. One day Tom said his spies had brought him secret news: the next day a big group of Spanish merchants and rich Arabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with two hundred elephants and six hundred camels, all loaded with diamonds. I didn’t believe we could beat so many, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants. So on Saturday, when we got the sign, we ran out of the woods and down the hill. But there weren’t any Spaniards or Arabs, and there weren’t any camels or elephants. It was only a Sunday-school picnic for little children. All we got was some doughnuts and jam, and then the teacher came and made us drop everything and run.
I told Tom I didn’t see any diamonds. He said they were there, and Arabs and elephants too, but our enemies, the magicians, had turned it all into a Sunday-school picnic by magic. If I had read a book called *Don Quixote*, I would know that.
“Then let’s get some genies to help us,” I said.
“You rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring,” said Tom, “and the genies come with thunder and lightning and smoke, and they have to do everything you say. If you tell them to build a palace forty miles long out of diamonds, they have to do it before morning.”
“I think they’re fools for not keeping the palace for themselves,” I said. “If I was a genie, I wouldn’t come to a man just because he rubbed an old tin lamp.”
“You’d have to come, whether you wanted to or not. Oh, it’s no use talking to you, Huck Finn. You don’t know anything.”
I thought about it for two or three days, and then I took an old tin lamp and an iron ring into the woods and rubbed and rubbed until I was sweating. I was planning to build a palace and sell it. But no genies came. So I decided that all that stuff was just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I think he believed in the Arabs and the elephants, but I don’t. It looked like a Sunday-school picnic to me.