Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Full Text: Chapter 40

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Full Text: Chapter 40 : Page 5

"Gimme the rags; I can do it myself.  Don't stop now; don't fool around here, and the evasion booming along so handsome; man the sweeps, and set her loose!  Boys, we done it elegant!—'deed we did.  I wish _we'd_ a had the handling of Louis XVI., there wouldn't a been no 'Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!' wrote down in _his_ biography; no, sir, we'd a whooped him over the _border_—that's what we'd a done with _him_—and done it just as slick as nothing at all, too.  Man the sweeps—man the sweeps!"

But me and Jim was consulting—and thinking.  And after we'd thought a minute, I says:

"Say it, Jim."

So he says:

"Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck.  Ef it wuz _him_ dat 'uz bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, 'Go on en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one?'  Is dat like Mars Tom Sawyer?  Would he say dat?  You _bet_ he wouldn't!  _well_, den, is _Jim_ gywne to say it?  No, sah—I doan' budge a step out'n dis place 'dout a _doctor_, not if it's forty year!"

I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say—so it was all right now, and I told Tom I was a-going for a doctor.  He raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and wouldn't budge; so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose himself; but we wouldn't let him.  Then he give us a piece of his mind, but it didn't do no good.

So when he sees me getting the canoe ready, he says:

"Well, then, if you're bound to go, I'll tell you the way to do when you get to the village.  Shut the door and blindfold the doctor tight and fast, and make him swear to be silent as the grave, and put a purse full of gold in his hand, and then take and lead him all around the back alleys and everywheres in the dark, and then fetch him here in the canoe, in a roundabout way amongst the islands, and search him and take his chalk away from him, and don't give it back to him till you get him back to the village, or else he will chalk this raft so he can find it again. It's the way they all do."

So I said I would, and left, and Jim was to hide in the woods when he see the doctor coming till he was gone again.

Read Shmoop's Analysis of Chapter 40