d him. He was
likely to be there at any hour of the day, and Tom made cat-call signals
at night that would bring Sam out on the shed roof at the back and down a
little trellis and flight of steps to the group of boon companions,
which, besides Tom, usually included John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the two
younger Bowen boys. They were not malicious boys, but just mischievous,
fun-loving boys--little boys of ten or twelve--rather thoughtless, being
mainly bent on having a good time.

They had a wide field of action: they ranged from Holliday's Hill on the
north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the
woods between. They explored both banks of the river, the islands, and
the deep wilderness of the Illinois shore. They could run like turkeys
and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. No
orchard or melon-patch was entirely safe from them. No dog or slave
patrol was so watchful that they did not sooner or later elude it. They
borrowed boats with or without the owner's consent--it did not matter.

Most of their expeditions were harmless enough. They often cruised up to
Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day
feasting. There were quantities of turtles and their eggs there, and
mussels, and plenty of fish. Fishing and swimming were their chief
pastimes, with incidental raiding, for adventure. Bear Creek was their
swimming-place by day, and the river-front at night-fall--a favorite spot
being where the railroad bridge now ends. It was a good distance across
to the island where, in the book, Tom Sawyer musters his pirate band, and
where later Huck found Nigger Jim, but quite often in the evening they
swam across to it, and when they had frolicked for an hour or more on the
sandbar at the head of the island, they would swim back in the dusk,
breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or
dread. They could swim all day, those little scamps, and seemed to have
no fear. Once, during his boyhood, Sam Clemens swam across to the
Illinois side, then turned and swam back again without landing, a
distance of at least two miles as he had to go. He was seized with a
cramp on the return trip. His legs became useless and he was obliged to
make the remaining distance with his arms.

The adventures of Sam Clemens and his comrades would fill several books
of the size of Tom Sawyer. Many of them are, of course, forgotten now,
but those still remembered s