Chapter 36

CHAPTER XXXVI.

AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that
night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut
ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of
fox-fire, and went to work. We cleared everything
out of the way, about four or five foot along the mid-
dle of the bottom log. Tom said we was right behind
Jim's bed now, and we'd dig in under it, and when we
got through there couldn't nobody in the cabin ever
know there was any hole there, because Jim's counter-
pin hung down most to the ground, and you'd have to
raise it up and look under to see the hole. So we dug
and dug with the case-knives till most midnight; and
then we was dog-tired, and our hands was blistered,
and yet you couldn't see we'd done anything hardly.
At last I says:

"This ain't no thirty-seven year job; this is a
thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer."

He never said nothing. But he sighed, and pretty
soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little
while I knowed that he was thinking. Then he says:

"It ain't no use, Huck, it ain't a-going to work. If
we was prisoners it would, because then we'd have as
many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we
wouldn't get but a few minutes to dig, every day,
while they was changing watches, and so our hands
wouldn't get blistered, and we could keep it up right
along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the
way it ought to be done. But WE can't fool along;
we got to rush; we ain't got no time to spare. If we
was to put in another night this way we'd have to
knock off for a week to let our hands get well --
couldn't touch a case-knife with them sooner."

"Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?"

"I'll tell you. It ain't right, and it ain't moral, .
and I wouldn't like it to get out; but there ain't only
just the one way: we got to dig him out with the
picks, and LET ON it's case-knives."

"NOW you're TALKING!" I says; "your head gets
leveler and leveler all the time, Tom Sawyer," I
says. "Picks is the thing, moral or no moral; and as
for me, I don't care shucks for the morality of it,
nohow. When I start in to steal a nigger, or a water-
melon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain't no ways
particular how it's done so it's done. What I want is
my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what
I want is my Sunday-school book; and if a pick's the
handiest thing, that's the thing I'm a-going to dig that
nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book
out with; and I don't give a dead rat what the au-
thorities thinks about it nuther."

"Well," he says, "there's excuse for picks and
letting-on in a case like this; if it warn't so, I wouldn't
approve of it, nor I wouldn't stand