I want to know
is, what's become of it?"

Jim was trembling all over, and so scared he couldn't speak, but he
wanted to ask that question himself if he could 'a' done it. Tom says:

"What's BECOME of it? Why, you see yourself it's gone."

"Yes, I know; but where's it gone TO?"

He looked me over and says:

"Well, now, Huck Finn, where WOULD it go to! Don't you know what a
myridge is?"

"No, I don't. What is it?"

"It ain't anything but imagination. There ain't anything TO it."

It warmed me up a little to hear him talk like that, and I says:

"What's the use you talking that kind of stuff, Tom Sawyer? Didn't I see
the lake?"

"Yes--you think you did."

"I don't think nothing about it, I DID see it."

"I tell you you DIDN'T see it either--because it warn't there to see."

It astonished Jim to hear him talk so, and he broke in and says, kind of
pleading and distressed:

"Mars Tom, PLEASE don't say sich things in sich an awful time as dis.
You ain't only reskin' yo' own self, but you's reskin' us--same way like
Anna Nias en Siffra. De lake WUZ dah--I seen it jis' as plain as I sees
you en Huck dis minute."

I says:

"Why, he seen it himself! He was the very one that seen it first. NOW,
then!"

"Yes, Mars Tom, hit's so--you can't deny it. We all seen it, en dat
PROVE it was dah."

"Proves it! How does it prove it?"

"Same way it does in de courts en everywheres, Mars Tom. One pusson
might be drunk, or dreamy or suthin', en he could be mistaken; en two
might, maybe; but I tell you, sah, when three sees a thing, drunk er
sober, it's SO. Dey ain't no gittin' aroun' dat, en you knows it, Mars
Tom."

"I don't know nothing of the kind. There used to be forty thousand
million people that seen the sun move from one side of the sky to the
other every day. Did that prove that the sun DONE it?"

"Course it did. En besides, dey warn't no 'casion to prove it. A body
'at's got any sense ain't gwine to doubt it. Dah she is now--a sailin'
thoo de sky, like she allays done."

Tom turned on me, then, and says:

"What do YOU say--is the sun standing still?"

"Tom Sawyer, what's the use to ask such a jackass question? Anybody that
ain't blind can see it don't stand still."

"Well," he says, "I'm lost in the sky with no company but a passel
of low-down animals that don't know no more than the head boss of a
university did three or four hundred years ago."

It warn't fair play, and I let him know it. I says: