Tom Sawyer Detective | Page 3

Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning machines, OCR
software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright licenses, and every other sort of
contribution you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association /
Illinois Benedictine College".
This "Small Print!" by Charles B. Kramer, Attorney Internet
([email protected]); TEL: (212-254-5093) *END*THE SMALL PRINT!
FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Internet Wiretap Edition of
TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE by MARK TWAIN
Electronic edition by

TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE

CHAPTER I.
AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK
[Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not inventions, but
facts--even to the public confession of the accused. I take them from an old-time Swedish
criminal trial, change the actors, and transfer the scenes to America. I have added some
details, but only a couple of them are important ones. -- M. T.]
WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the
time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm in
Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and it was
getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time,
and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it
would be summer and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead
like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening
around, and there's something the matter with him, he don't know what. But anyway, he
gets out by himself and mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high

up on the hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the big
Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points where the timber
looks smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and everything's so solemn it seems like
everybody you've loved is dead and gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too,
and done with it all.
Don't you know what that is? It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when
you've got it, you want--oh, you don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly
makes your heart ache, you want it so! It seems to you that mainly what you want is to
get away; get away from the same old tedious things you're so used to seeing and so tired
of, and set something new. That is the idea; you want to go and be a wanderer; you want
to go wandering far away to strange countries where everything is mysterious and
wonderful and romantic. And if you can't do that, you'll put up with considerable less;
you'll go anywhere you CAN go, just so as to get away, and be thankful of the chance,
too.
Well, me and Tom Sawyer had the spring fever, and had it bad, too; but it warn't any use
to think about Tom trying to get away, because, as he said, his Aunt Polly wouldn't let
him quit school and go traipsing off somers wasting time; so we was pretty blue. We was
setting on the front steps one day about sundown talking this way, when out comes his
aunt Polly with a letter in her hand and says:
"Tom, I reckon you've got to pack up and go down to Arkansaw--your aunt Sally wants
you."
I 'most jumped out of my skin for joy. I reckoned Tom would fly at his aunt and hug her
head off; but if you believe me he set there like a rock, and never said a word. It made me
fit to cry to see him act so foolish, with such a noble chance as this opening up. Why, we
might lose it if he didn't speak up and show he was thankful and grateful. But he set there
and studied and studied till I was that distressed I didn't know what to do; then he says,
very ca'm, and I could a shot him for it:
"Well," he says, "I'm right down sorry, Aunt Polly, but I reckon I got to be excused--for
the present."
His aunt Polly was knocked so stupid and so mad at the cold impudence of it that she
couldn't say a word for as much as a half a minute, and this gave me a chance to nudge
Tom and whisper:
"Ain't you got any sense? Sp'iling such a noble chance as this and throwing it away?"
But he warn't disturbed. He mumbled back:
"Huck Finn, do you want me to