The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was
the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and
clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his
new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old
time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and
rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most
froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up.  And when they come
to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could
navigate it.

The judge he felt kind of sore.  He said he reckoned a body could reform
the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn't know no other way.




CHAPTER VI.

WELL, pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he went
for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up that money, and he
went for me, too, for not stopping school.  He catched me a couple of
times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same, and dodged him
or outrun him most of the time.  I didn't want to go to school much
before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite pap.  That law trial was a
slow business--appeared like they warn't ever going to get started on
it; so every now and then I'd borrow two or three dollars off of the
judge for him, to keep from getting a cowhiding.  Every time he got money
he got drunk; and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town; and
every time he raised Cain he got jailed.  He was just suited--this kind
of thing was right in his line.

He got to hanging around the widow's too much and so she told him at last
that if he didn't quit using around there she would make trouble for him.
Well, WASN'T he mad?  He said he would show who was Huck Finn's boss.  So
he watched out for me one day in the spring, and catched me, and took me
up the river about three mile in a skiff, and crossed over to the
Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn't no houses but an old
log hut in a place where the timber was so thick you couldn't find it if
you didn't know where it was.

He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off.
We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key
under his head nights.  He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we
fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on.  Every little while he
locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and
traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and
had a good time, and licked me.  The widow she found out where I was by
and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap drove
him off with the gun, and it warn't long after that till I was used to
being where I was, and liked it--all but the cowhide part.

It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking
and fishing, and no books nor study.  Two months or more run along, and
my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got
to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a
plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever
bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the
time.  I didn't want to go back no more.  I had stopped cussing, because
the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't
no objections.  It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it
all around.

But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand
it. I was all over welts.  He got to going away so much, too, and locking
me in.  Once he locked me in and was gone three days.  It was dreadful
lonesome.  I judged he had got drowned, and I wasn't ever going to get
out any more.  I was scared.  I made up my mind I would fix up some way
to leave there.  I had tried to get out of that cabin many a time, but I
couldn't find no way.  There warn't a window to it big enough for a dog
to get through.  I couldn't get up the chimbly; it was too narrow.  The
door was thick, solid oak slabs.  Pap was pretty careful not to leave a
knife or anything in the cabin when he was away; I reckon I had hunted
the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I was most all the time
at it, because it was about the only way to put in the time.  But this
time I found something at last; I found an old rusty wood-saw without any
handle; it was laid in between a rafter and the clapboards of the roof.
I greased it up and went to work.  There was an old horse-blanket nailed
against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the table, to keep
the wind from blowing through the chinks and putting the candle out.  I
got under the table and raised the blanket, and went to work to saw a
section of the big bottom log out--big enough to let me through.  Well,
it was a good long job, but I was getting towards the end of it when I
heard pap's gun in the woods.  I got rid of the signs of my work, and
dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty soon pap come in.

Pap warn't in a good humor--so he was his natural self.  He said he was
down town, and everything was going wrong.  His lawyer said he reckoned
he would win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got started on
the trial; but then there was ways to put it off a long time, and Judge
Thatcher knowed how to do it.  And he said people allowed there'd be
another trial to get me away from him and give me to the widow for my
guardian, and they guessed it would win this time.  This shook me up
considerable, because I didn't want to go back to the widow's any more
and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it.  Then the old man
got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of,
and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any,
and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round,
including a considerable parcel of people which he didn't know the names
of, and so called them what's-his-name when he got to them, and went
right along with his cussing.