ed, and no boards. Well, next I took an old sack and
put a lot of big rocks in it--all I could drag--and I started it from
the pig, and dragged it to the door and through the woods down to the
river and dumped it in, and down it sunk, out of sight. You could easy
see that something had been dragged over the ground. I did wish Tom
Sawyer was there; I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of
business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself
like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that.
Well, last I pulled out some of my hair, and blooded the ax good, and
stuck it on the back side, and slung the ax in the corner. Then I took
up the pig and held him to my breast with my jacket (so he couldn't
drip) till I got a good piece below the house and then dumped him into
the river. Now I thought of something else. So I went and got the bag
of meal and my old saw out of the canoe, and fetched them to the
house. I took the bag to where it used to stand, and ripped a hole in
the bottom of it with the saw, for there warn't no knives and forks on
the place--pap done everything with his clasp-knife about the cooking.
Then I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and
through the willows east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five
mile wide and full of rushes--and ducks too, you might say, in the
season. There was a slough or a creek leading out of it on the other
side that went miles away, I don't know where, but it didn't go to the
river. The meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to the
lake. I dropped pap's whetstone there too, so as to look like it had
been done by accident. Then I tied up the rip in the meal-sack with a
string, so it wouldn't leak no more, and took it and my saw to the
canoe again.
It was about dark now; so I dropped the canoe down the river under
some willows that hung over the bank, and waited for the moon to rise.
I made fast to a willow; then I took a bite to eat, and by and by laid
down in the canoe to smoke a pipe and lay out a plan. I says to
myself, they'll follow the track of that sackful of rocks to the shore
and then drag the river for me. And they'll follow that meal track to
the lake and go browsing down the creek that leads out of it to find
the robbers that killed me and took the things. They won't ever hunt
the river for anything but my dead carcass. They'll soon get tired of
that, and won't bother no more about me. All right; I can stop
a
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