Past the steamboat landing, the shore was low and woodsy like a lot of the islands in the Big River back home, and it got me to thinking about other ways a body might blunder through life. By piloting a riverboat for a sample. That would be ever so splendid, and just thinking on it lifted some my sunk spirits. But probably I warn’t smart enough. Well, I could do the loading. Folks running away from the war was saying the whole river back home was on fire and the bullets was flying like mosquitoes in August, but in this nation a body can get shot anywheres, and getting shot on the river beats getting shot in the desert every time.
The day warn’t hardly more’n begun when I got back to the church, but it was already growing dark and puckering up like it might snow some more. The preacher warn’t around. Maybe he was hiding somewheres from all the right-minded townsfolk. I found a morsel of bread on his pine table and, though it was at least a week old and worse even than the hardtack we got fed at the army forts, I borrowed it and went and stretched out on a pew under a heap of blankets to gnaw on it.
The next thing I knowed, Tom was setting there talking to me. I judged it was Tom. He seemed more like a spirit, appearing so sudden like that and in such a place. He had a candle, and the light from it made his face come and go. “What I wanted to tell you, Huck, is that there is two kinds of injuns,” Tom says, if it was Tom. “There’s the ones who slaughter white folks and roast them for supper, and there’s the ones they call friendlies who ain’t cannibals. The friendlies respect the white man and try to act just like him, which is why some of them keep slaves and eat with forks, and lots of them is even Christians.” I believed Tom like I always done, but I didn’t believe him. I was glad he come back, but I didn’t know why he’d waked me up to tell me that. Then I seen the others. Becky Thatcher. The preacher. Tom’s horse. “Huck, I’m gonna leave you for a time,” Tom says.
It turned out him and Becky was getting hitched by the preacher, and me and the horse was the witnesses. Tom was giving the horse to the preacher as pay for marrying them, and him and Becky was taking the steamboat upriver the next day on its final journey of the year to connect up with the big riverboats headed down towards St. Petersburg. “You can come and see us off,” he says.
The news shook me up considerable, but I done my best not to show it. Neither me nor the horse didn’t say nothing, though the horse wagged his head about like he was looking for the way out. Well, he’d never been to church before and he didn’t know how to act proper. It sure warn’t the place to be dropping what he was dropping, but he didn’t know that. Becky had bought some beer with her pappy’s money to celebrate the wedding with and after the preacher had went and took the horse with him, the three of us set there in the church and drunk it. She’d also found some doughnuts and jelly somewheres to go with it. The hotel was jam full, Becky said, but a gentleman give up his room for them. She was staring at Tom like he was the most amazing thing she ever seen.
“You missed something great, Huck, when you left,” Tom says. “One a them injun braves starts yelping out that if we found a white man’s body with his head cut off and stuffed up his own backside, he was the one who done it. And he beat his chest with his tied-up fists and somehow got his britches down and wagged his naked backside at everybody. Ain’t that a hoot?” Becky was blushing and excused herself to step outside a minute and Tom leaned close and says, “I learnt something here, Huck, about the law and how it makes some folks poor and some folks powerful rich and famous. I want me some a that power, Huck. Judge Thatcher will learn me. I’ll come back and I’ll find you wherever you are and we’ll have adventures again. But they’ll be better ones.”
When they’d left, I blanketed me and Jackson and we headed south.
CHAPTER V
HEN ME AND the general first crossed trails, Tom Sawyer had been gone east some five or six years. Though he said he’d come back out and find me, he never did. I allowed he must a forgot. I seen a pretty girl who looked like Becky some years later over a-near a Wyoming trailhead, and if it was her, I judged that Tom was like enough there, too, but he didn’t show himself.