Chapter 3 - Page 2

Hannibal when I was a boy,--
an acre or so of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft,
a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered
about the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters,--and I
remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews,
the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors;
for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on
these rafts and have a ride.

By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that
now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in,
in this place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at,
by fits and starts, during the past five or six years,
and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.
The book is a story which details some passages in the life
of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town
drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away from
his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who
wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him;
and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped.
They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high
water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river
by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--
whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States.
But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it.
By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is
persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge
raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them,
creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering
the needed information by eavesdropping:--

But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is
impatient to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by
Jim said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no
risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen--
they would talk about Cairo, because they would be calculating
to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they would
send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something.
Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most always
start a good plan when you wanted one.

I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river,
and struck out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got
down nearly to her, I eased up and went slow and cautious.
But everything was all right--nobody at the sweeps.
So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp
fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched along and got
in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire.
There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck of course.