by Mark Twain
Jim grumbled a little, but gave in. He said we musn’t talk any more than we could help, and then talk mighty low. We slid up to her and fetched the stabboard derrick, and made fast there. Remembering how we got stuck in the house we found on the river earlier, I kept the ties loose in case we had to leave fast.
Everything was wet and slippery, and we skittered forward in the dark, feeling our way slow with our feet and spreading our hands in case our feet came loose. Pretty soon we got to the foot of the captain’s door, which was open, and by jiminy, away down the hall some, we seen a light! And all in the same instant we heard voices yonder!
Jim whispered and said he didn’t like the look of it and told me to come along, but just then I heard a voice wail out and say:
“Oh no, I changed my mind. This ain’t no good idea at all!”
Another voice said, pretty loud:
“Don’t you worry a thing about it, Jim Turner. You ought to know I hold you in the highest regard, and would sooner smash a stained glass window than injure a person such as yourself. T’will be no more than a little pinch, no more.”
By this time Jim had gone for the raft, but I was just a-bilin’ with curiosity. And I says to myself, Tom Sawyer wouldn’t back down now, so I won’t either; I’m going to see what’s going on here. So I dropped down to my hands and knees and crept forward in the dark hallway till there warn’t but one stateroom left in front of me. In there, I see a man stretched on the floor, tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him. One of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and the other had a pistol. The one holding the lantern had powder burns on his vest, and considerable blood on his chest from a wound no longer pumpin’. So he was Zum. The one with the pistol kept pointing it at the man bound on the floor, and said:
“We’re all in this together, Jim. It’s a foul night for it, but it can’t be helped. We’ve talked about this long enough. Enough of this living in fear, and living without, and living in hunger and pain. It just makes sense, lad. I snuffed old Jake Packard here, he’s come back sound, and now I’ll do the same for you. Pretty soon, you’re back, and I’m next. One-two-three. You won’t see me sobbin’ like a baby, either, I’ll wager. Then we’re out ‘a’ here, we hit the shore, and the sky’s the limit. There ain’t no downside to it.”
The man on the floor kept blubbering, and begging for his life, until Jake Packard came forward and stood in front of the pistol. He says:
“Put that pistol up, Bill.”
This seemed to surprise Bill, and Bill says:
“This warn’t in the plan. I’m for killin’ him. We all agreed.”
“But I don’t want him kilt. I’ve got my reasons for it.”
“Bless you, Jake Packard! Bless you! I’ll never forget you as long’s I live!” says the man on the floor, as curled up into a ball as he can get.
Packard hung up the lantern on a rail and started moving to where I was, motioning for Bill to follow. I moved as far away as I could to keep from getting run over, and hoped I was deep enough in the shadows, but I heard everything when they came next to me and Bill said:
“Why are you stretching this thing out, Jake? It’s just fear on his part. The man’s never been kilt before.” Bill gave out a little chuckle, but the other one said nothing.
I was wedged in a dark corner, and I was so scared I didn’t breathe. And besides, a person couldn’t breathe and hear such talk. They had made some kind of evil blood pact and intended to make themselves over as Zum. One of them had shot Jake Packard, and now they was going to kill Turner, but Turner was having second thoughts. Bill just wanted it done with. He says:
“I’m for doin’ this thing now, cause the only way is for us all to get kilt and be done with it. You warn’t such a baby, and I don’t intend to be. It discourages a man that he has so little grit. I’m thinkin’ we may have made us a mistake.”
Jake Packard was very quiet. “Well, it’s our mistake to make at this point. I just don’t think it’s good to shoot him when he’s all flustered and agitated. I’m afeared he’ll come back the same way, which would make him useless, see? Let’s you and me go in there and quiet him down, then one of us pop him in the heart when he’s relaxed a bit.”
“I’m all for that,” says Bill, relieved because they was both on the same page.
“So’m I,” says Packard, and that was that.
So they returned to the room, and started talking again, but it was all friendly, and they must have put their guns away, because soon Jim Turner is talking and laughing and no longer sounded like he was in fear of his life, which I guess was the point. I lit out again, backwards to where I came from, all in a cold sweat. It was dark as pitch when I got to the deck; but I said, in a kind of hoarse whisper, “Jim!” and he answered back, close by, and I says:
“Quick, Jim! It ain’t no time for fooling around and such. There’s a gang of murderers – and murdered – in yonder, and if we don’t hunt up their boat and set her adrift on the river, we’re both of us going to be in a bad fix. Quick – hurry! I’ll hunt for their boat, you get the raft untied and –“
“Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy, Huck. Dey ain’t no raft no more; she broke loose and drifted off down de river! It’s gone!”
Chapter Thirteen
The Fate of the ‘Walter Scott’
Well, I catched my breath and most fainted. Trapped on a tilting wreck with such a gang as that! But it warn’t no time to be sentimentaling. We had to find that boat now – for ourselves. So we went a-quakin’ down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too – seemed like a week before we got all the ways to the stern. No sign of a boat. Jim said he didn’t believe he could go any farther; he was so scared he hardly had any strength left at all. But I said, come on, Jim, if we get stranded here with this lot, we’re in for it, sure. So on we prowled. We began scrabbling along the port side, holding on for our lives, for the list of the wreck was leaning us out into the water, and the current would have pulled us away in a snap. We was moving shutter to shutter, and pretty soon, there was the skiff, sure enough. I could just barely see her. I felt ever so thankful. In another second I would have swung out and dropped onto her, but just then the door opened. One of the men stuck his head out and I thought I was a goner; but he jerked it back in again, and I hear:
“That was some sweet knife-work, Jake. In and out, right from behind. One-two-three. He’ll probably thank you for it. I would.”
He flung a bag of something into the boat. Then Packard came out and flung in some more. “Well, we’re all ready here. As soon as Jim comes back ‘round, we’re out of here. You want me to take care of anything else as long as we got the time. Like – you. Or are you going to want to put it off and ponder the thing awhile.”
Bill spat out a little laugh and says:
“You think I’m a chickenheart? I ain’t. Let’s go inside and you can show me your knife-work, too. Put the clock on us both and see who makes it back first.”
“That’s the talk, Bill. It’s just what I was hopin’ to hear.”
So they finished putting their stuff in the canoe and back inside they went. It made me a little sick to hear them talk about killing each other, like it was some Saturday chore that had to get done before there could be any fun, so I concentrated on just not falling into the water. The door slammed closed because it was on the careened side. I waited a half-second then dropped into the skiff, and Jim came tumbling in after me. I brought out my knife and cut the rope, and away we went.
We didn’t touch an oar, nor speak nor whisper, nor hardly even breathe. It was too awful. We went gliding swiftly along, dead silent, past the paddle-box, then past the stern. Then in another few beats we was a hundred yards past the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it. Jim let out a few moans that was like sobs that caught on his breath, and I did the same, thinking of the widow and how she always talked about the good place like it was something everybody knew about and craved; but
what I had just seen made me think the good place was just a story, something made up, while what was in front of me was real, and it made all the widow’s talk seem like the kind of lies you’d tell a baby that warn’t old enough to walk.
Then Jim manned the oars, and we took out after our raft. Now was the first time I began again to worry about the men, and how I’d be worrying about them following me the rest of my life, whether it made sense or not. Tom Sawyer and I kept thinking Injun Joe was out of our lives for good, and that he’d be a fool to return, but we was fools to think he wouldn’t. You couldn’t scare Joe like you could another person. Once he went Zum, nothing scared him, and the threat of jail and punishment just tickled him to think it was something we thought we could hold over him. Soon all three of the men we left behind would be Zum, and I figured they’d dog us till the day we died. Maybe it made no sense, as they hadn’t so much as seen our faces, but it made sense to me. So I says to Jim:
“First place we see lights, we’ll land directly below it in a good place for you and the skiff to hide, and I’ll go and fix up some sort of yarn, and get some people to go after that gang and take ‘em to justice.”
Jim shook his head. “It don’t need no yarn, Huck. The truth’ll be strange enough for anyone listenin’.”
Pretty soon it began to storm again, this time worse than ever. The rain poured down and we went along down the river, watching for lights and keeping an eye out for our raft. After a time the rain let up, and by and by a flash of lightning showed us a black thing ahead, floating, and we made for it.
It was the raft, and mighty glad we were to get aboard it again. We tied the skiff off to one side, as it was half full of plunder the gang had pulled from the wreck. We hauled it onto the raft in a pile, and I told Jim to take the raft and float along down, no more than two miles, and keep a light burning till I got back. Then I untied the skiff again and made for a little village that had a few lights burning. As I neared the shore, I could see a lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a large, double-hull ferryboat. I skimmed and found the watchman, sleeping under a shelter on a small dock. When I woke him, he stirred up in a startlish way, but when he sees it was only me, he snarls and asks me what I am doing, and I tell him, only leaving out the parts with Jim in them.
He took me with him and we went to some meeting hall a little bit aware from the shoreline, where there was another guard standing next to the building, trying to stay dry. He tells the other one to ring the alarm bell and get a group of men together, as there was a gang of Zum stranded on the wreck.
“What wreck?” the guard says.
“Why, there ain’t but one.”
“What, you mean the ‘Walter Scott’?”
“That’s the one.”
“Good lord, what are they doin’ there, for gracious sakes?”
“Just ring the alarm, Harvey. The boy’ll tell it all once when we get the men assembled. Keep ringin’ it till you get everyone. Everyone is what it’s going to take.”
The guard started clanging the bell, and the watchman took me inside the hall where it was warm and dry, and we waited for a mob of men to gather, and it warn’t long. They all came dressed for the rain, and all of them armed. Most of them had been asleep, but when I told them the story, they woke up fast.
“And you say they kilt each other?” one of them asked. “On purpose?”
“Yessir. The first one shot the one they called Jake Packard, and then Jake knifed a man name of Joe Turner, and then Bill – who I guessed was the leader – asked Jake Packard to kill him, and said he wasn’t afraid a’tall.”
“I know Jake Packard,” one of the men said. “I hired him to work on a barn I was building. Caught him in my house a day when he thought I was somewhere else, and I got rid of him on the spot.”
Then the sheriff came in and I had to tell the whole story again anyway. He says to me:
“How old are you, son?”
“Fourteen, or thereabouts.”
He looked around. “You can stay here and keep warm, or ride along with us. Which will it be?”
“I’m goin’ with you,” says I.
“Suit yourself,” he says.
They lit a bunch of creosote torches, and then split into two groups, one gang of men going back upriver in two-man skiffs, the other group all going aboard the ferryboat. Soon everyone was upriver and next to the wreck of the Walter Scott. You could hear the water going through the wreck and the crackling of the torches, and not much else. Then the sheriff hailed the wreck several times, but got no response.
“Shall I board her, sir?” one of the men standing in the skiffs asked, and the sheriff said no way in the world would he send men he knew and lived alongside into an unlit, leaning wreck of a boat with a bunch of Zum crawling around somewhere.
There was a shot that come from one of the shuttered windows on the wreck, a little wisp of smoke, and the man who had asked the question of the sheriff grunted and doubled over into the skiff. Then there was another shot, and a piece of wood flew off a column next to the sheriff. He ducked down and pulled me with him, then told his men to return fire, and there was another loud crackle of gunfire. Another man on one of the skiffs took a wound in the arm, and the sheriff yelled out to all the skiffs to pull back and get tied up on the other side of the ferryboat where it would be safe.
He ordered several men to gather up the torches and pitch them about the wreck, and to heed the gunfire. One or two of the torches rolled off the deck of the listing wreck into the water, but most stayed onboard, and a few went through windows and caught at the dryer wood and cloth fabric inside.
The men on the skiffs soon took up positions with their weapons, with the wounded I guess somewhere inside being tended to. The Zum on the wreck kept up a steady barrage, but everyone on the ferryboat stayed under cover until the fires on the wreck were throwing off a good deal of heat and light. You could feel the heat on your face from as far away as where we were, and you could hear glass breaking with the heat and little explosions coming from the ruined boat.
Then, one of the Zum appeared on the second-floor landing of the wreck, his clothes aflame, and the sheriff and the assembled crew let loose a tremendous volley. The man jerked back with each hit and finally stumbled into the water. I couldn’t tell which one he was.
The wreck burned brighter and brighter over the next hour, but no one else showed themselves. It burnt down to the waterline, dim and smoky, then something finally gave way and all of a sudden it shuddered and sank down into the water. A kind of cold shiver went through me, and soon after the ferryboat moved back and brought the wounded men back to town where they could be properly cared for.
I didn’t wait around after we got tied up. I went back to my skiff in the dark, put her into the stream, and pulled on the oars as hard as I could, moving through water that was dark and filled with chunks of burnt lumber and black, cold embers. I didn’t fear these Zum much anymore, and I laid into my work and went a-booming down the river.
It seemed like a powerful long time before Jim’s light showed up, and by the time I got there the sky was beginning to get a little gray in the east; so we struck out for an island, hid the raft and sank the skiff, and turned in and slept like dead people; the way they used to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
We Continue
By and by, we went through the pile of truck the gang had pulled off the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of other things, and a lot of old leather books, and a spy-glass, and three boxes of seegars. We hadn’t ever been this rich before in our lives. The seegars were prime. We laid off the whole afternoon going through the stuff, me easing back smoking a seegar and reading from the books and having a good time. I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck, and when they surrounded the wreck and set it afire, and I said these things were adventures; but he shook his head and said he didn’t want no more adventures. He said when he left and crawled back to the raft and found h
er gone he nearly died, because he judged it was all over for him no matter what happened; if the Zum gang came after him, he said he wouldn’t let himself be caught and would’ve jumped into the river and drownded; and if he got plucked outta the water, whoever saved him would know what he was and would send him back to Miss Watson’s for the reward, and then Miss Watson would sell him South, sure. Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for an owned folk who never had a day’s education in a proper school.
I read considerable from the books, one in particular that was all about history and had colored drawings of kings and dukes and earls and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and what kind of style and manners they walked around with, and how they called each other your majesty and your grace, and your lordship and so on, ‘stead of mister. Jim perked up his ears when he heard this and says:
“They’s curious folk over dey. You says dey’s a bunch ‘a’ dem kings, but I only heard ‘bout just one, ol’ King Sollerman; and dat’s from de good book, which I suspect was a while before what you’se showing me here.”
“I expect,” says I, not sure but wanting to be agreeable. Then I spy a little packet of papers folded together, not from the books, but more likely something that one of the gang was carrying around. I unfolded it and showed it to Jim. It was a bunch of newspaper articles torn out ‘a’ the papers, and I couldn’t see no date or what village published it, but it was all about what had happened to the Walter Scott.
It read that a Zum had gotten onto the ferryboat, and they somehow caught it and bound him up and put him in the wheelhouse, as they had a policy a’gin shooting passengers. But he must have broke loose and had at the captain while his back was turned, cause the ferryboat drifted free for a time, till it slipped more sideways in the water, and started tilting and taking on water, and then it saddle-bagged onto a snag and tore the bottom up some. The towns sent out a bunch of smaller craft that was available nearby to pull off the passengers, and then they was all set to put down the Zum that was still in the wheelhouse, but by then it was too dangerous to stay on the boat, so they figured they’d just let it sit there till the river broke it up and sent it downriver in pieces.
