As soon as he was well again, Pap went to court to get the money from Judge Thatcher. When he caught me going to school, he beat me, but I kept going, just to spite him. Every time he got money, he got drunk and made trouble in town and went to jail. This kind of life suited him fine.
When the widow told him to stay away from her house, he said he would show who was Huck Finn’s boss. One day in the spring he caught me and took me in a boat three miles up the river, across to the Illinois side. There, deep in the woods, stood an old log cabin. The trees were so thick that you couldn’t find it unless you knew where it was.
We lived on fish and what we shot with his gun. Now and then he locked me in, went to the store by the ferry, traded fish for whiskey, came home, got drunk and beat me. After a while I liked it there, all except the beatings. It was lazy and jolly, smoking and fishing all day, with no books, no washing and no Miss Watson. I didn’t want to go back any more.
But Pap used his stick on me more and more, and I was covered with marks. He locked me in more often too. Once he was gone for three days, and I thought he had drowned and I would never get out. I decided to find a way to leave.
At last I found an old rusty saw without a handle, up under the roof. Behind the table, an old horse blanket hung on the wall to keep the wind out. I got under the table, lifted the blanket and started to saw a piece out of the big bottom log, big enough for me to get through. I was nearly finished when I heard Pap’s gun in the woods. I hid my work, and soon he came in.
He was in a bad mood. People were talking about another trial to give me to the widow, he said, and this time they would win. That shook me, because I didn’t want to go back and be civilized. I decided to saw my way out that night if he got drunk enough, take the gun and walk across the country until nobody could find me.
While I was cooking supper, Pap drank whiskey and started talking about the government, as he always did when the whiskey began to work.
“You call this a government! The law wants to take a man’s own son away from him, and it helps old Judge Thatcher keep me from my money. And look here. There was a free Black man in town, from Ohio, with the whitest shirt you ever saw and a gold watch. They said he was a professor in a college and could speak all kinds of languages. And they said he could vote back home! What is this country coming to? It was election day, and I was going to vote myself, if I wasn’t too drunk to get there. But when they told me there was a state that let that man vote, I said I’ll never vote again. And I said, why isn’t this man put up for sale? And they said he couldn’t be sold until he had been in the state six months. And they call that a government!”
After supper he drank and drank. I waited for him to fall asleep, but he moaned and threw himself around for a long time, and at last I fell asleep myself, with the candle still burning.
Suddenly there was an awful scream. Pap was running around the cabin with wild eyes, shouting that snakes were crawling up his legs and biting him. “Take him off! He’s biting me on the neck!” But I couldn’t see any snakes. After a while he lay still and listened, and said very low, “Tramp, tramp, tramp. That’s the dead. They’re coming after me. But I won’t go!” He crawled under the table in his blanket, begging them to leave him alone, and cried.
Then he jumped up, saw me and came at me with a knife. He chased me around and around the cabin, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me. I begged and told him I was only Huck, but he only laughed a horrible laugh. Once he caught my jacket, but I slid out of it as quick as lightning and got away. At last he sat down with his back against the door and said he would rest a minute and then kill me. He put the knife under him and fell asleep.
I got the old chair, climbed up quietly and took down the gun. I made sure it was loaded. Then I laid it across a barrel, pointed at Pap, and sat down behind it to wait for him to move. And how slowly the time went by.