Chapter 6 - Page 2

was pretty good times up in the woods
there, take it all around.

But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry,
and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts. He got
to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once
he locked me in and was gone three days. It was
dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned,
and I wasn't ever going to get out any more. I was
scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way
to leave there. I had tried to get out of that cabin
many a time, but I couldn't find no way. There
warn't a window to it big enough for a dog to get
through. I couldn't get up the chimbly; it was too
narrow. The door was thick, solid oak slabs. Pap
was pretty careful not to leave a knife or anything in
the cabin when he was away; I reckon I had hunted
the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I
was most all the time at it, because it was about the
only way to put in the time. But this time I found
something at last; I found an old rusty wood-saw
without any handle; it was laid in between a rafter
and the clapboards of the roof. I greased it up and
went to work. There was an old horse-blanket nailed
against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the
table, to keep the wind from blowing through the
chinks and putting the candle out. I got under the
table and raised the blanket, and went to work to saw
a section of the big bottom log out -- big enough to
let me through. Well, it was a good long job, but I
was getting towards the end of it when I heard pap's
gun in the woods. I got rid of the signs of my work,
and dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty
soon pap come in.

Pap warn't in a good humor -- so he was his natural
self. He said he was down town, and everything was
going wrong. His lawyer said he reckoned he would
win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got
started on the trial; but then there was ways to put it
off a long time, and Judge Thatcher knowed how to do
it And he said people allowed there'd be another
trial to get me away from him and give me to the
widow for my guardian, and they guessed it would win
this time. This shook me up considerable, because I
didn't want to go back to the widow's any more and
be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it.
Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed every-
thing and everybody he could think of, and then cussed
them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped
any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a
general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel
of people which he didn't know the names of, and so
called them what's-his-name when he got to them, and
went right along with his cussing.

He said he would