LITMIR.BIZ

      “AIN’T it gay?” said Joe.

      “It’s NUTS!” said Tom. “What would the boys say if they could see us?”

      “Say? Well, they’d just die to be here — hey, Hucky!”

      “I reckon so,” said Huckleberry; “anyways, I’m suited. I don’t want nothing better’n this. I don’t ever get enough to eat, gen’ally — and here they can’t come and pick at a feller and bullyrag him so.”

      “It’s just the life for me,” said Tom. “You don’t have to get up, mornings, and you don’t have to go to school, and wash, and all that blame foolishness. You see a pirate don’t have to do ANYTHING, Joe, when he’s ashore, but a hermit HE has to be praying considerable, and then he don’t have any fun, anyway, all by himself that way.”

      “Oh yes, that’s so,” said Joe, “but I hadn’t thought much about it, you know. I’d a good deal rather be a pirate, now that I’ve tried it.”

      “You see,” said Tom, “people don’t go much on hermits, nowadays, like they used to in old times, but a pirate’s always respected. And a hermit’s got to sleep on the hardest place he can find, and put sackcloth and ashes on his head, and stand out in the rain, and — ”

      “What does he put sackcloth and ashes on his head for?” inquired Huck.

      “I dono. But they’ve GOT to do it. Hermits always do. You’d have to do that if you was a hermit.”

      “Dern’d if I would,” said Huck.

      “Well, what would you do?”

      “I dono. But I wouldn’t do that.”

      “Why, Huck, you’d HAVE to. How’d you get around it?”

      “Why, I just wouldn’t stand it. I’d run away.”

      “Run away! Well, you WOULD be a nice old slouch of a hermit. You’d be a disgrace.”

      The Red-Handed made no response, being better employed. He had finished gouging out a cob, and now he fitted a weed stem to it, loaded it with tobacco, and was pressing a coal to the charge and blowing a cloud of fragrant smoke — he was in the full bloom of luxurious contentment. The other pirates envied him this majestic vice, and secretly resolved to acquire it shortly. Presently Huck said:

      “What does pirates have to do?”

      Tom said:

      “Oh, they have just a bully time — take ships and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there’s ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships — make ‘em walk a plank.”

      “And they carry the women to the island,” said Joe; “they don’t kill the women.”

      “No,” assented Tom, “they don’t kill the women — they’re too noble. And the women’s always beautiful, too.

      “And don’t they wear the bulliest clothes! Oh no! All gold and silver and di’monds,” said Joe, with enthusiasm.

      “Who?” said Huck.

      “Why, the pirates.”

      Huck scanned his own clothing forlornly.

      “I reckon I ain’t dressed fitten for a pirate,” said he, with a regretful pathos in his voice; “but I ain’t got none but these.”

      But the other boys told him the fine clothes would come fast enough, after they should have begun their adventures. They made him understand that his poor rags would do to begin with, though it was customary for wealthy pirates to start with a proper wardrobe.

      Gradually their talk died out and drowsiness began to steal upon the eyelids of the little waifs. The pipe dropped from the fingers of the Red-Handed, and he slept the sleep of the conscience-free and the weary. The Terror of the Seas and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main had more difficulty in getting to sleep. They said their prayers inwardly, and lying down, since there was nobody there with authority to make them kneel and recite aloud; in truth, they had a mind not to say them at all, but they were afraid to proceed to such lengths as that, lest they might call down a sudden and special thunderbolt from heaven. Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep — but an intruder came, now, that would not “down.” It was conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came. They tried to argue it away by reminding conscience that they had purloined sweetmeats and apples scores of times; but conscience was not to be appeased by such thin plausibilities; it seemed to them, in the end, that there was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only “hooking,” while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing — and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.