Mississippi River Blues

by Tony Abbott

  “Murderer?” I suggested.

  “Exactly.”

  Tom frowned. “I’ll meet you all inside the courthouse. There’s something I have to do first.” He slipped through the gathering crowd and disappeared.

  After some minutes, Huck, Frankie, and I finally squeezed our way into the back row of the crowded courtroom, which was jammed wall to wall with townspeople. I looked around for Tom, but couldn’t spot him.

  Just as we sat down, Muff Potter was brought in, looking worse than ever. His eyes scanned the crowd, then he winced when he spotted Stinky Joe, sitting motionless in his seat, his eyes as steely and cold as ever.

  “Poor Muff,” I said.

  When the judge called the first witness, it turned out to be that guy who had seen Muff washing. The man claimed that Muff never washed, so he must be guilty. The crowd murmured agreement with that.

  When given the chance to ask the witness some questions, Muff Potter’s lawyer said, “No questions.”

  The next witness was the guy who had found the knife near the doctor’s body. Again, Muff’s lawyer had no questions for him.

  When the third witness identified the knife as Muff’s, and Muff’s lawyer still said, “No questions,” I got mad. “Why isn’t the doofus asking any questions?” I whispered to Frankie. “I’ve seen enough courtroom scenes on TV to know that you’re supposed to make the witnesses seem wrong. Even I could do a better job.”

  “Devin, I don’t think so—”

  But I couldn’t watch Muff take the rap for a crime he didn’t commit. I leaped up, and pounded the desk of Muff’s lawyer. “What kind of lawyer are you, anyway?”

  “A trial lawyer,” he said.

  “Well, stop trying and do something!”

  “I object, Your Honor.”

  “Did you hear that, Judge?” I said. “This man objects to your honor. How dare he! Fire him! Send him to jail! I’ll take over the questioning now.”

  “But, you haven’t tried any cases!” said the judge.

  “I’ll try anything once—ooomph!”

  I was suddenly on the floor. Frankie had tackled me.

  “Devin, you’re spoiling everything. Muff’s lawyer has a plan, and you’re wrecking it, big-time!”

  “A … plan?” I said.

  Frankie nodded. “If you’d read, you’d know. Look.”

  Muff’s lawyer stood before the court and said, “I wish to call … Thomas Sawyer to the stand!”

  “Whoa! A little surprise here!” I mumbled.

  Every eye fastened on Tom as he appeared at the side door. He took his place on the stand, looking scared.

  “Tom Sawyer,” said Muff’s lawyer, “where were you on the seventeenth of June, at the hour of midnight?”

  Tom opened his mouth, glanced at Stinky Joe’s cold, hard face, and closed it again. A moment later, Tom seemed to get his strength back.

  “In the graveyard,” he said.

  A crazy smile flitted across Joe’s face.

  “Were you anywhere near Hoss Williams’s grave?”

  “Yes, sir,” Tom answered. “As near as I am to you.”

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “Only a cat, sir,” Tom said. “A dead one.”

  There was a ripple of laughter in the courtroom.

  “Now, Tom,” said the lawyer, “tell us what you saw when you and your dead cat were in the graveyard.”

  Tom began, slowly at first, but then more easily, to describe everything he had seen that night. He purposely left out that Frankie and me and Huck were there with him. To keep us out of all the trouble, I guess.

  When Tom got to the big part, everyone in the room leaned in close and hung on every word he said.

  “And as the doctor fetched the board around and Muff Potter fell, Joe jumped with Muff’s knife and—”

  CRASH!

  As quick as lightning, the murderer sprang out of his seat, hurtled himself straight through a window, and was gone!

  “Whoa!” I said. “Is that guy guilty or what?”

  Chapter 14

  Faster than you can say, “There he goes!” search parties of noisy men with sticks were combing every street and alley in the village for signs of Stinky Joe.

  But nobody could find him anywhere.

  Muff Potter was free, of course. But an even bigger thing was that Tom was a hero. The townsfolk carried him right out of that courthouse and down the main street, cheering and whooping up a storm.

  Back at Aunt Polly’s, Tom told us what he had done.

  “After we saw Muff in jail, I felt so bad I went straight to Muff’s lawyer and told him how I saw Stinky Joe do the murder.”

  “Good job,” I said. “I was waiting for that lawyer to come up with something. It turned out to be something huge!”

  “Tom, you sure made Muff happy,” Huck added. “And Stinky Joe mad.”

  Frankie didn’t say anything.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

  She pulled me aside. “Devin, I’m really glad Muff is free, but we’re two thirds through the book, we’ve been to the school, the graveyard, the island, the courthouse, the jail, and no lost page. What if we don’t find it?”

  I grumbled at the thought. “Maybe it’s hidden somewhere we haven’t thought of.”

  Tom’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Hidden? As in … buried?” Then he nearly exploded with the word.

  “Treasure!”

  Tom was already running for the door. “If you got something that’s hidden, it’s most likely buried. And what’s buried is meant to be dug up!”

  “I like the way your brain works, Tom,” I said. “But where should we dig?”

  “Treasure is mostly hid under the floors of a haunted house!” he said.

  Frankie shuddered. “Haunted house?”

  “Luckily, we got one real close,” said Tom with a laugh. From Aunt Polly’s doorway, he pointed up the street to a hill. “Over Cardiff’s Hill. The hauntedest house in town. It’s a real spooker!”

  I looked at Frankie. Neither of us wanted to deal with a haunted house, but it was clear that we were running out of scenery in this story. We had to check it out.

  “Point the way, Tom,” I said.

  So we picked up a couple of bent shovels and picks from the shed behind Aunt Polly’s house and tramped up over the hill called Cardiff’s Hill.

  “There sure are a lot of hills back now,” I said.

  “And I think we tramped up every one,” said Frankie.

  “Yeah,” I commented. “Who says we’re lazy?”

  A little while later, we stood by an old house. An old, old house.

  “I see the guy who designed the graveyard also did this place,” Frankie said with a snort.

  I tried to laugh, but it was true.

  The house was surrounded by a broken fence, and weeds were smothering the whole yard all the way up to the doorstep. The chimney was a crumbled pile of stones at the side of the house, and if any window had glass in it at all, it was cracked.

  Plus, a whole corner of the roof had already caved in.

  “What are we waiting for?” said Tom. “Let’s go in.”

  “Go in?” I said. “It doesn’t seem safe to look at, let alone go into. Frankie, what do you say?”

  Frankie was reading a page of the book. “It says we go in.”

  “Gulp,” I said, gulping.

  We crept to the door and looked in at a wrecked living room with a dirt floor. A sort of fireplace was on one wall and was full of fallen bricks and charred wood. In the back of the front room was a cracked staircase hanging from the upper floor at an odd angle.

  “Falling down much?” I mumbled.

  Tom entered first. We followed. Everywhere we turned, we got ragged cobwebs in our faces.

  “Tasty,” I said, wiping a thick web from my lips.

  Since there was nothing much downstairs, somebody—not me—got the great idea that we should climb up those rickety stairs and poke around upstairs
.

  “Sort of cuts off our escape route—” said Frankie, “in case we see some of those haunted ghosts this place is supposed to be haunted with.”

  “Ghosts can follow a person anywhere,” said Huck.

  “Oh, thanks,” said Frankie. “I feel so much better.”

  We laid our tools against the fireplace and headed one by one up the cracked and crooked stairs.

  The same sort of ruin that was downstairs was upstairs, too. Broken doors, busted furniture, and dark, empty closets. Not much at all. We were about to go back down and begin digging for treasure when—

  “Shhh!” said Tom, holding up his hand. “I hear someone coming!”

  “It’s ghosts!” said Frankie. “I knew it! Ohhhhh!”

  In a flash, we were down on the floor, peering through the cracks between the planks, waiting for our hearts to stop pounding.

  Two men entered the front room below us.

  The first one was tall and wore a red poncho with a hood pulled over his head.

  “I’ve seen that first one around town just after the trial,” Huck whispered. “People say he’s a Spaniard from Spain or someplace. The other one I don’t know.”

  The other one was a ragged creature with a nasty face who looked as if he were a graduate of the Muff Potter School of Personal Washing. Grimy isn’t the word. Dirt was cleaner than this guy.

  He slung a small bag of coins onto the bare floor.

  “I’ve thought it over,” he growled in a deep voice. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” grunted the Spanish guy. “Pah!”

  First of all, the Spanish guy wasn’t speaking Spanish. And second of all, we had all heard that voice before.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Frankie hissed. “It’s—him!”

  We all knew it was true. This tall Spanish guy was merely disguised as a tall Spanish guy. He was in reality a tall, stinky guy named Joe. In other words, Stinky Joe!

  “We’ll do the robbery, then we’ll head for Texas with all the money,” snarled Joe. “But first, there’s some revenge that I’m planning.”

  “Revenge?” whispered Tom.

  “On us!” whispered Huck.

  “Let’s bury this sack of money deep and come back after the job,” said Joe. From under his poncho he pulled a knife with a blade as big as a surfboard and started hacking away at the ground near the foot of the stairs.

  Suddenly, his knife struck something.

  “What is it?” Dirt Guy asked.

  “A box!” said Joe. “Grab those shovels and help me.”

  Mr. Unclean took hold of our shovels and plunged one of them deep into the ground. Joe took the other and did the same. In no time, they pulled up a strongbox. With a sharp whack of the shovel, the lid flew open.

  “There’s thousands of dollars here!” said Joe.

  I gasped.

  But not at the dollars.

  There was something else in the box, too.

  Frankie and I saw it at the same time and grabbed each other’s arms. We stared at the box. We stared at each other, then back at the box.

  “The lost page!” she whispered.

  It was exactly that. The lost page of Mrs. Figglehopper’s classic copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was sitting right there with the gold and silver coins in the box. I could even see the dark scrawl of the author, Mark Twain, at the bottom of the page.

  Stinky Joe shut the box with a loud clunk. “We’ll take this and hide it in our secret place—you know, number two, under the cross.”

  We all looked at one another, puzzled.

  “Number two under the cross?” I whispered. “Where is that?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Joe, staring at the shovels they had used to dig up the box. “Where did these tools come from?”

  “Uh-oh,” whispered Frankie.

  Dirt Man stood up. “People brought them?”

  “People … who might still be here?” said Joe, peering up at the ceiling. “People who might be … upstairs?”

  I nearly had a heart attack. Forget nearly—I did have a heart attack!

  Stinky Joe grabbed that huge battle knife of his and started up the stairs.

  “We’re goners!” whispered Tom. “Joe will find us and take that knife and …”

  CR-CR-CRASH! There was a horrible crackling of rotten wood as Stinky Joe tumbled to the ground amid the ruins of the stairs.

  “Yes!” I shouted. To myself.

  “Ohhhh, never mind this!” groaned Joe, clambering to his feet and rubbing his shoulder. “We’ll take our treasure and be gone before anyone sees us, anyhow!”

  A few minutes later, the two bandits slipped out of the house and rushed away with their precious box of gold and silver.

  And the even-more-precious lost page of our book.

  Chapter 15

  “We have to get it back!” I said to Frankie as we shot back to Aunt Polly’s house.

  “No kidding,” she said. “If we don’t get it, we might get stuck in this book forever and never make it back home. Tom, you’ve got to help us get that treasure box!”

  But the minute we hit Aunt Polly’s house, the word treasure faded from Tom’s mind.

  It was replaced by another word.

  Picnic.

  “I just remembered!” Tom gasped. “Becky’s having her picnic today. I gotta go to that!”

  Frankie gave me a look. “Oh, man, not again with the Becky business? We’ve got treasure to find!”

  But Tom was too excited about the picnic to think about the treasure right then. “We’ll go up the river to McDougal’s meadow. It’s the best spot for a picnic. Then we can go exploring in McDougal’s cave.”

  “A … cave?” I said. “No, thanks. I don’t do caves. I’ve already been stuck in a closet. It was like a cave in there. I didn’t like it. Sorry, no caves for me.”

  Tom turned to me, his face alight with excitement. “McDougal’s cave is deep, and filled with bats. You need candles to go in there or you might wander for days and nights and never find the way out!”

  “Mmm,” I said. “You do make it sound good, but no.”

  Shrugging, Tom left us and ran off to join the crowd gathering outside Becky’s house.

  Huck made a sort of grunting sound in his throat. “Picnics? Yuck. Stinky Joe used to go to a tavern in town. Maybe his secret hiding place, ‘number two under the cross,’ is there. We could check. And while Tom’s eating pie, we’ll find our treasure!”

  Frankie brightened. “I like the way you think, Huck. Did I ever tell you that I think you should have your own book?”

  Huck grinned. “I like that idea plenty. Now let’s go find that strongbox!”

  A few hours later, Huck, Frankie, and I were squirreled away in an alley in town. Night had fallen. Tom and Becky and the others had been picnicking all day, but the three of us were doing the real work of the story.

  We were going to hunt down Joe’s treasure!

  “Joe used to hang out at the tavern across the street,” said Huck, pointing to a dark building not far from where we crouched. “If he’s up to his old ways, maybe we’ll see him there … and follow him.”

  “Shh!” I said.

  We had just enough time to slide into an alcove behind a store when two men brushed by us and onto the darkened street ahead. One of the men had something under his arm. It looked boxy and heavy.

  “It’s Joe all right,” I gasped. “I can smell him. And he’s got the box!”

  Huck nodded. “Let’s follow him.”

  We stepped out and padded behind the two men like quiet cats. They moved up the street for three blocks, then turned up a cross street to the left. Then straight ahead, then onto a path that led out of town,

  “Where are they going?” asked Frankie.

  We followed the men until they stopped.

  “The Widow Douglas’s house!” Huck whispered, pointing to a small house in the moonlit distance.

  The two bad guys loomed tall on the hill o
verlooking the house.

  Then Stinky Joe spoke. “Time for my revenge.”

  Huck turned to us. “Revenge? On the widow? I thought he was after us?”

  Joe spoke again. “I never liked her. But her husband was the worst. He never treated me square. Now that I’m leaving for Texas, I’ve got to pay her back. I’m going to get her once and for all!”

  Frankie turned. “We’d better get help. And fast!”

  We stepped away as softly as we could and made our way back down the hill. We ran and ran until we reached another house.

  “The old Welshman lives here!” said Huck, panting up to the front door. “We have to let him know!”

  Huck banged hard on the door. An old man’s head poked out a window above us. He rubbed his eyes.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Frankie!” said Frankie.

  “Who?”

  “Devin!” I yelled.

  “Who?”

  “Huckleberry Finn!” Huck said finally.

  The man snorted. “Huckleberry Finn? That isn’t a name to open many doors around here. But come in and let’s see what the trouble is.”

  The old man and his two sons let us in.

  “Please don’t ever tell I told you,” Huck blurted out, “but the widow’s been a good friend to me, and Stinky Joe is planning to hurt her!”

  A minute later, the old man and his sons were up the hill near the widow’s house. We tagged behind them, but then there was the sound of a gun going off. Blam!

  “Holy cow, a battle! I’m outta here!” said Frankie.

  “Me, too!” said Huck.

  “Me, three!” I added.

  We raced away as fast as our legs could carry us. After we ran out of steam, we stopped and listened for a while. Hearing no more shooting, Frankie and I consulted the book. After we had turned a few pages, it was the next day, so we went back to the old Welshman’s place. Huck banged hard on the door once more.

  The old Welshman again poked his head out of the window. “Who’s there?”

  “Frankie!” said Frankie.

  “Who?”

  “Devin!” I yelled.

  “Who?”

  “Huckleberry Finn!” said Huck.

  The man whooped. “Huckleberry Finn! That name can open this door anytime!”

  Huck smiled a surprised smile. “That’s the first time I ever heard those words.”