that's started in on a new life, and'll die
before he'll go back. You mark them words--don't forget I said them.
It's a clean hand now; shake it--don't be afeard."

So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The
judge's wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge--made
his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or
something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful
room, which was the spare room, and in the night some time he got
powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a
stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb
back again and had a good old time; and toward daylight he crawled out
again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left
arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him
after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room they had
to take soundings before they could navigate it.

The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could
reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn't know no other
way.

CHAPTER VI

Well, pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he
went for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up that money,
and he went for me, too, for not stopping school. He catched me a
couple of times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same,
and dodged him or outrun him most of the time. I didn't want to go to
school much before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite pap. That law
trial was a slow business--appeared like they warn't ever going to get
started on it; so every now and then I'd borrow two or three dollars
off of the judge for him, to keep from getting a cowhiding. Every time
he got money he got drunk; and every time he got drunk he raised Cain
around town; and every time he raised Cain he got jailed. He was just
suited--this kind of thing was right in his line.

He got to hanging around the widow's too much, and so she told him at
last that if he didn't quit using around there she would make trouble
for him. Well, _wasn't_ he mad? He said he would show who was Huck
Finn's boss. So he watched out for me one day in the spring, and
catched me, and took me up the river about three mile in a skiff, and
crossed over to the Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn't
no houses but an old log hut in a place where the timber was so thick
you couldn't find it if you didn't