When I woke up, the sun was high. I was lying in the cool shade, feeling lazy and comfortable, when I heard a deep “boom!” far up the river. I looked out through the leaves. The ferryboat was full of people and floating down toward me. “Boom!” White smoke came out of its side. They were firing a cannon over the water to make my dead body come up to the top.
I was hungry, but I couldn’t make a fire, because they might see the smoke. Then I remembered that people put quicksilver in loaves of bread and let them float on the river, because they believed the bread would go straight to a drowned body and stop there. So I watched the water, and soon a big loaf came along. I caught it with a long stick, took out the quicksilver and ate. I thought, the widow or the preacher probably prayed that this bread would find me, and it did. So praying works when somebody like the widow does it. It just doesn’t work for me.
Then I lay down behind a log on the bank. The ferryboat came in so close that I could see everybody on it: Pap, Judge Thatcher, Tom Sawyer and his old Aunt Polly, Sid and plenty more. They were all talking about the murder. They leaned over the rails, nearly in my face, but they couldn’t see me. Then the cannon went off right in front of me, so loud that I nearly went deaf. If there had been a ball in it, I think they would have got the body they were looking for. The boat went on around the island, booming now and then, and at last it went home to the town.
Now I knew I was safe. I made a nice camp in the thick woods, caught a fish and cooked my supper. When it got dark, I sat on the bank, listened to the river and counted the stars. I got kind of lonely, so I went to bed. That is the best thing to do when you are lonely. You soon get over it.
It went on like that for three days. Then I went exploring down through the island. I was the boss of it; it all belonged to me, you could say. I was walking through the woods with my gun when suddenly I stepped right onto the ashes of a campfire. It was still smoking.
My heart jumped into my throat. I crept back on tiptoe as fast as I could, stopping every few steps to listen. If I saw a tree stump, I thought it was a man. If I broke a stick under my foot, I felt as if somebody had cut my breath in two and left me only half of it. Back at camp I hid everything in the canoe and climbed a tree. I stayed up there two hours. I didn’t see or hear anything, but I thought I heard and saw about a thousand things.
That night I slept in the canoe, but not much. Every time I woke up, I thought somebody had me by the neck. At last I said to myself, I can’t live like this. I’m going to find out who is here on the island with me.
Just before daylight I took my gun and went back through the woods. After a while I saw a fire through the trees. A man was lying beside it with a blanket over his head. I sat behind some bushes and watched him. Soon he stretched and threw off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson’s Jim! I was so glad to see him.
“Hello, Jim!” I said, and jumped out.
He stared at me with wild eyes. Then he fell on his knees, put his hands together and said:
“Please don’t hurt me! I never did any harm to a ghost. You go back in the river where you belong, and don’t do anything to old Jim. I was always your friend.”
It didn’t take long to make him understand I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t lonely any more. He had been on the island since the night after I was “killed”, and he had eaten nothing but berries. So I brought corn meal, bacon and coffee from the canoe, and caught a big catfish, and Jim fried it. Then I told him my whole story, and he said Tom Sawyer couldn’t think of a better plan.
“How did you get here, Jim?” I asked.
He looked uneasy. “Maybe I’d better not tell. You wouldn’t tell on me, would you, Huck?”
“I would never tell, Jim.”
“Well, I believe you, Huck. I—I ran away.”
“Jim!”
“But remember, you said you wouldn’t tell.”
“Well, I did say it, and I’ll keep my word. People would call me an abolitionist and hate me for keeping quiet, but that doesn’t matter. I won’t tell. So tell me all about it.”
“Well, Miss Watson always said she would never sell me down to New Orleans. But lately there was a slave trader around the place a lot, and I began to worry. One night I heard her tell the widow she was going to sell me down to New Orleans. She didn’t want to, she said, but she could get eight hundred dollars for me, and that was such a big pile of money that she couldn’t say no. I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I left fast, I can tell you.”
He hid all the next day by the river, and from the people in the boats he heard that I was killed. That night he swam out to a log raft that was going down the river, but near the island a man with a lantern came toward him, so he slid into the water and swam ashore.
Jim knew all kinds of signs, and it seemed to me they were all about bad luck. So I asked him if there weren’t any good-luck signs.
“Very few, and they’re no use. Why do you want to know when good luck is coming? Do you want to keep it away? But if you’ve got hairy arms and a hairy chest, it’s a sign you’re going to be rich.”
“Have you got hairy arms and a hairy chest, Jim?”
“Can’t you see I have?”
“Well, are you rich?”
“No, but I was rich once, and I’m going to be rich again. Once I had fourteen dollars. I spent ten dollars on a cow, and the cow died. I put the rest in a bank, and the bank went broke.”
“Well, it’s all right, Jim, as long as you’re going to be rich again some day.”
“Yes, and I’m rich now, when I think about it. I own myself, and I’m worth eight hundred dollars. I wish I had the money. I wouldn’t want any more.”