Chapter 37

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THAT was all fixed. So then we went away and
went to the rubbage-pile in the back yard, where
they keep the old boots, and rags, and pieces of
bottles, and wore-out tin things, and all such truck,
and scratched around and found an old tin washpan,
and stopped up the holes as well as we could, to bake
the pie in, and took it down cellar and stole it full of
flour and started for breakfast, and found a couple of
shingle-nails that Tom said would be handy for a
prisoner to scrabble his name and sorrows on the
dungeon walls with, and dropped one of them in Aunt
Sally's apron-pocket which was hanging on a chair,
and t'other we stuck in the band of Uncle Silas's hat,
which was on the bureau, because we heard the chil-
dren say their pa and ma was going to the runaway
nigger's house this morning, and then went to break-
fast, and Tom dropped the pewter spoon in Uncle
Silas's coat-pocket, and Aunt Sally wasn't come yet,
so we had to wait a little while.

And when she come she was hot and red and cross,
and couldn't hardly wait for the blessing; and then
she went to sluicing out coffee with one hand and
cracking the handiest child's head with her thimble
with the other, and says:

"I've hunted high and I've hunted low, and it does
beat all what HAS become of your other shirt."

My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers
and things, and a hard piece of corn-crust started down
my throat after it and got met on the road with a
cough, and was shot across the table, and took one
of the children in the eye and curled him up like a
fishing-worm, and let a cry out of him the size of a
warwhoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around the
gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of
things for about a quarter of a minute or as much as
that, and I would a sold out for half price if there was
a bidder. But after that we was all right again -- it
was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind
of cold. Uncle Silas he says:

"It's most uncommon curious, I can't understand
it. I know perfectly well I took it OFF, because --"

"Because you hain't got but one ON. Just LISTEN at
the man! I know you took it off, and know it by a
better way than your wool-gethering memory, too,
because it was on the clo's-line yesterday -- I see it
there myself. But it's gone, that's the long and the
short of it, and you'll just have to change to a red
flann'l one till I can get time to make a new one.
And it 'll be the third I've made in two years. It just
keeps a body on the jump to keep you in shirts; and
whatever you do manage to DO with 'm all is more'n I
can make out. A body 'd think you WOULD learn to
take some