ut the time we got up
from table--same key, I bet. Watermelon shows man, lock shows prisoner;
and it ain't likely there's two prisoners on such a little plantation,
and where the people's all so kind and good. Jim's the prisoner. All
right--I'm glad we found it out detective fashion; I wouldn't give
shucks for any other way. Now you work your mind, and study out a plan
to steal Jim, and I will study out one, too; and we'll take the one we
like the best."

What a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer's head I
wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in
a circus, nor nothing I can think of. I went to thinking out a plan, but
only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where the right plan
was going to come from. Pretty soon Tom says:

"Ready?"

"Yes," I says.

"All right--bring it out."

"My plan is this," I says. "We can easy find out if it's Jim in there.
Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft over from the
island. Then the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the
old man's britches after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river on
the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and Jim
used to do before. Wouldn't that plan work?"

"WORK? Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it's too
blame' simple; there ain't nothing TO it. What's the good of a plan that
ain't no more trouble than that? It's as mild as goose-milk. Why, Huck,
it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking into a soap factory."

I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different; but I
knowed mighty well that whenever he got HIS plan ready it wouldn't have
none of them objections to it.

And it didn't. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was
worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as
mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and
said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it was here, because I
knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing
it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new
bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.

Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in
earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery.
That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was
respectable and well brun