Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Full Text: Chapter 35

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Full Text: Chapter 35 : Page 1

IT would be most an hour yet till breakfast, so we left and struck down into the woods; because Tom said we got to have _some_ light to see how to dig by, and a lantern makes too much, and might get us into trouble; what we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks that's called fox-fire, and just makes a soft kind of a glow when you lay them in a dark place.  We fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down to rest, and Tom says, kind of dissatisfied:

"Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be. And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan.  There ain't no watchman to be drugged—now there _ought_ to be a watchman.  There ain't even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to.  And there's Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed:  why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain.  And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin-headed n*****, and don't send nobody to watch the n*****.  Jim could a got out of that window-hole before this, only there wouldn't be no use trying to travel with a ten-foot chain on his leg.  Why, drat it, Huck, it's the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent _all_ the difficulties.  Well, we can't help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we've got. Anyhow, there's one thing—there's more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn't one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head.  Now look at just that one thing of the lantern.  When you come down to the cold facts, we simply got to _let on_ that a lantern's resky.  Why, we could work with a torchlight procession if we wanted to, I believe.  Now, whilst I think of it, we got to hunt up something to make a saw out of the first chance we get."

"What do we want of a saw?"

"What do we _want_ of it?  Hain't we got to saw the leg of Jim's bed off, so as to get the chain loose?"

"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain off."

Read Shmoop's Analysis of Chapter 35