Three or four months went by, and now it was deep in winter. I had been to school most of the time, and I could read and write a little. I could say the multiplication table up to six times seven, though I always said that was thirty-five, and I don’t think I could ever get further than that if I lived forever.
At first I hated school, but after a while I could stand it. I was getting used to the widow’s ways too. I liked the old ways best, but I was starting to like the new ones a little. The widow said I was coming along slowly but surely, and she wasn’t ashamed of me.
One morning at breakfast I knocked over the salt. I reached for some to throw over my left shoulder and keep away the bad luck, but Miss Watson stopped me. After breakfast I went out feeling worried, wondering when the bad luck would come.
There was an inch of new snow in the front garden, and by the fence I saw somebody’s tracks. Somebody had stood there for a while and then gone on. In the track of the left boot there was a cross, made with big nails in the heel to keep away the devil. I knew whose boot that was.
In a second I was running down the hill to Judge Thatcher’s house.
“Why, my boy, you’re all out of breath,” he said. “Did you come for your interest?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t want it, or the six thousand either. I want you to take it. I want to give it to you, all of it.”
He looked surprised. “Why, what do you mean, my boy? Is something wrong?”
“Please take it,” I said, “and don’t ask me anything. Then I won’t have to tell any lies.”
He thought for a while. “Oh! I think I see. You want to sell all your property to me, not give it.” He wrote something on a paper. “There. It says I have bought it from you and paid you for it. Here’s a dollar. Now you sign it.”
So I signed it and left.
Miss Watson’s slave Jim had a hair-ball as big as your fist that had come out of the stomach of an ox, and he did magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside it that knew everything. In the evening I went to him and told him that Pap was back. I wanted to know what Pap was going to do.
Jim dropped the hair-ball on the floor and listened, but he said it wouldn’t talk without money. I gave him an old fake quarter. (I didn’t say anything about the judge’s dollar.) Jim said a night inside a raw potato would make it look good, good enough even for a hair-ball. Then the hair-ball talked to him, and Jim told me what it said:
“Your old father doesn’t know yet what he’s going to do. Sometimes he thinks he’ll go away, and then again he thinks he’ll stay. There are two angels flying around him, one white and shiny and the other black. The white one gets him to do right for a while, then the black one comes and spoils it all. Nobody can tell yet which one will get him in the end. But you’re all right. You’ll have a lot of trouble in your life, and a lot of joy. Stay away from the water as much as you can, and don’t take any risks, because it’s written that you’re going to be hanged.”
That night, when I lit my candle and went up to my room, there sat Pap himself!