Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Chapter Twenty-Eight Summary

Mary Jane is upset about the slaves being sold (families were broken up).
Huck, overcome by her misery and, more importantly, her beauty, breaks down and confesses everything to her.
Together they devise a plan. Or rather, Huck devises a plan and Mary Jane goes along with it.
The plan is, Mary Jane goes for the night to stay with Mr. Lothrop, because the girl’s got the poker face of a five-year-old with a sugar high. (In other words, she wouldn’t be able to hide her emotions from the duke and king.)
Huck says that there is someone else whose life hangs in the balance here (meaning Jim, though he doesn’t say as much to Mary Jane), and that’s why he needs time to escape before the situation plays out.
He tells her that later that night she should sneak back to the house and shine a candle in the window. If Huck doesn’t show up, it means he’s escaped (with Jim), and she can blow the whistle all she wants on the two frauds.
Huck then takes a piece of paper and writes down "Royal Nonesuch, Bricksville," so the duke and king can pay their dues for that little scam as well.
Then he remembers the money; he doesn’t want to distress the girl by telling her the cash got stowed in the coffin with Peter’s body, so he writes this down, too, and tells her not to look at the paper until she’s already on the road to Mr. Lothrop’s.
Mary Jane is all, "OK, sounds good to me," so she takes off, adding that she’ll pray for Huck.
Huck scoffs (to us, not her) that this is a big job.
With Mary Jane gone, Huck runs into the other sister, Susan.
He doesn’t want to trust someone else with the details, so he just makes up a story about the mumps – it’s a really horrible strain called pluribus-unum mumps.
Anyway, by means of this and other lies, he makes sure Susan isn’t going to say anything to the duke and king about her sister’s absence (she doesn’t want to delay their trip to England with their uncles while everyone sticks around to see if Mary Jane contracted pluribus-unum mumps).
Everything is going swimmingly until two men show up: the real brothers of the dead Peter Wilks.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Seven