LITMIR.BIZ

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reality, now, so handsomely was his imagination working, and so his groans had gathered quite a genuine tone.

      Sid flew downstairs and said:

      “Oh, Aunt Polly, come! Tom’s dying!”

      “Dying!”

      “Yes’m. Don’t wait—come quick!”

      “Rubbage! I don’t believe it!”

      But she fled upstairs, nevertheless, with Sid and Mary at her heels. And her face grew white, too, and her lip trembled. When she reached the bedside she gasped out:

      “You, Tom! Tom, what’s the matter with you?”

      “Oh, auntie, I’m—”

      “What’s the matter with you—what is the matter with you, child?”

      “Oh, auntie, my sore toe’s mortified!”

      The old lady sank down into a chair and laughed a little, then cried a little, then did both together. This restored her and she said:

      “Tom, what a turn you did give me. Now you shut up that nonsense and climb out of this.”

      The groans ceased and the pain vanished from the toe. The boy felt a little foolish, and he said:

      “Aunt Polly, it seemed mortified, and it hurt so I never minded my tooth at all.”

      “Your tooth, indeed! What’s the matter with your tooth?”

      “One of them’s loose, and it aches perfectly awful.”

      “There, there, now, don’t begin that groaning again. Open your mouth. Well—your tooth is loose, but you’re not going to die about that. Mary, get me a silk thread, and a chunk of fire out of the kitchen.”

      Tom said:

      “Oh, please, auntie, don’t pull it out. It don’t hurt any more. I wish I may never stir if it does. Please don’t, auntie. I don’t want to stay home from school.”

      “Oh, you don’t, don’t you? So all this row was because you thought you’d get to stay home from school and go a-fishing? Tom, Tom, I love you so, and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your outrageousness.” By this time the dental instruments were ready. The old lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom’s tooth with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost. Then she seized the chunk of fire and suddenly thrust it almost into the boy’s face. The tooth hung dangling by the bedpost, now.

      But all trials bring their compensations. As Tom wended to school after breakfast, he was the envy of every boy he met because the gap in his upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and admirable way. He gathered quite a following of lads interested in the exhibition; and one that had cut his finger and had been a centre of fascination and homage up to this time, now found himself suddenly without an adherent, and shorn of his glory. His heart was heavy, and he said with a disdain which he did not feel that it wasn’t anything to spit like Tom Sawyer; but another boy said, “Sour grapes!” and he wandered away a dismantled hero.

      Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance. Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons far down the back; but one suspender supported his trousers; the seat of the trousers bagged low and contained nothing, the fringed legs dragged in the dirt when not rolled up.

      Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.

      Tom hailed the romantic outcast:

      “Hello, Huckleberry!”

      “Hello yourself, and see how you like it.”

      “What’s that you got?”

      “Dead cat.”

      “Lemme see him, Huck. My, he’s pretty stiff. Where’d you get him?”

      “Bought him off’n a boy.”

      “What did you give?”

      “I give a blue ticket and a bladder that I got at the slaughter-house.”

      “Where’d you get the blue ticket?”

      “Bought it off’n Ben Rogers two weeks ago for a hoop-stick.”

      “Say—what is dead cats good for, Huck?”

      “Good for? Cure warts with.”

      “No! Is that so? I know something that’s better.”

      “I bet you don’t. What is it?”

      “Why, spunk-water.”

      “Spunk-water! I wouldn’t give a dern for spunk-water.”

      “You wouldn’t, wouldn’t you? D’you ever try it?”

      “No, I hain’t. But Bob Tanner did.”

      “Who told you so!”

      “Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny Baker, and Johnny told Jim Hollis, and Jim told Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and the nigger told me. There now!”

      “Well, what of it? They’ll all lie. Leastways all but the nigger. I don’t know him. But I never see a nigger that wouldn’t lie. Shucks! Now you tell me how Bob Tanner done it, Huck.”

      “Why, he took and dipped his hand in a rotten stump where the rain-water was.”

      “In the daytime?”

      “Certainly.”

      “With his face to the stump?”

      “Yes. Least I reckon so.”

      “Did he say anything?”

      “I don’t reckon he did. I don’t know.”

      “Aha! Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-water such a blame fool way as that! Why, that ain’t a-going to do any good. You got to go all by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there’s a spunk-water stump, and just as it’s midnight you back up against the stump and jam your hand in and say:

      ‘Barley-corn, barley-corn, injun-meal shorts, Spunk-water, spunk-water, swaller these warts,’

      and then walk away quick, eleven steps, with your eyes shut, and then turn around three times and walk home without speaking to anybody. Because if you speak the charm’s busted.”

      “Well, that sounds like a good way; but that ain’t the way Bob Tanner done.”

      “No, sir, you can bet he didn’t, becuz he’s the wartiest boy in this town; and he wouldn’t have a wart on him if he’d knowed how to work spunk-water. I’ve took off thousands of warts off of my hands that way, Huck. I play with frogs so much that I’ve

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