April 2022

In about a minute somebody spoke out of a window without putting his head out, and says:“Be done, boys! Who’s there?”I says:“It’s me.”“Who’s me?”“George Jackson, sir.”“What do you want?”“I don’t want nothing, sir. I only want to go along by, but the dogs won’t let me.”“What are you prowling around here this time of night […]

We slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession. She had four long sweeps* at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and

We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.Well,

By and by, when we got up, we turned over the truck the gang had stole off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three boxes of seegars. We hadn’t ever been this rich before in neither

Well, I catched my breath and most fainted. Shut up on a wreck with such a gang as that! But it warn’t no time to be sentimentering. We’d got to find that boat now—had to have it for ourselves. So we went a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too—seemed

It must a been close on to one o’clock when we got below the island at last, and the raft did seem to go mighty slow. If a boat was to come along we was going to take to the canoe and break for the Illinois shore; and it was well a boat didn’t come,

Come in,” says the woman, and I did. She says:“Take a cheer.”I done it. She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says:“What might your name be?”“Sarah Williams.”“Where ’bouts do you live? In this neighborhood?’“No’m. In Hookerville, seven mile below. I’ve walked all the way and I’m all tired out.”“Hungry, too, I

After breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess out how he come to be killed, but Jim didn’t want to. He said it would fetch bad luck; and besides, he said, he might come and ha’nt us; he said a man that warn’t buried was more likely to go a-ha’nting around

I wanted to go and look at a place right about the middle of the island that I’d found when I was exploring; so we started and soon got to it, because the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide.This place was a tolerable long, steep hill or ridge

The sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight o’clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees