r in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway
nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare you so as you will
stay in the house and not bother them. I am one of the gang, but have
got religgion and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again, and will
betray the helish design. They will sneak down from northards, along the
fence, at midnight exact, with a false key, and go in the nigger's cabin
to get him. I am to be off a piece and blow a tin horn if I see any
danger; but stead of that I will BA like a sheep soon as they get in and
not blow at all; then whilst they are getting his chains loose, you slip
there and lock them in, and can kill them at your leasure. Don't do
anything but just the way I am telling you, if you do they will suspicion
something and raise whoop-jamboreehoo. I do not wish any reward but to
know I have done the right thing. UNKNOWN FRIEND.

CHAPTER XL.

WE was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and took my canoe and went
over the river a-fishing, with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a
look at the raft and found her all right, and got home late to supper,
and found them in such a sweat and worry they didn't know which end they
was standing on, and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done
supper, and wouldn't tell us what the trouble was, and never let on a
word about the new letter, but didn't need to, because we knowed as much
about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and her
back was turned we slid for the cellar cupboard and loaded up a good
lunch and took it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about
half-past eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally's dress that he stole and
was going to start with the lunch, but says:

"Where's the butter?"

"I laid out a hunk of it," I says, "on a piece of a corn-pone."

"Well, you LEFT it laid out, then--it ain't here."

"We can get along without it," I says.

"We can get along WITH it, too," he says; "just you slide down cellar and
fetch it. And then mosey right down the lightning-rod and come along.
I'll go and stuff the straw into Jim's clothes to represent his mother in
disguise, and be ready to BA like a sheep and shove soon as you get
there."

So out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk of butter, big as a
person's fist, was where I had left it, so I took up the slab of
corn-pone with it on, and blowed out my light, and started up stairs very
stealthy, and got up to the main