Tom Sawyer Detective | Page 4

let her SEE how bad I want to go? Why, she'd begin to
doubt, right away, and imagine a lot of sicknesses and dangers and objections, and first
you know she'd take it all back. You lemme alone; I reckon I know how to work her."
Now I never would 'a' thought of that. But he was right. Tom Sawyer was always

right--the levelest head I ever see, and always AT himself and ready for anything you
might spring on him. By this time his aunt Polly was all straight again, and she let fly.
She says:
"You'll be excused! YOU will! Well, I never heard the like of it in all my days! The idea
of you talking like that to ME! Now take yourself off and pack your traps; and if I hear
another word out of you about what you'll be excused from and what you won't, I lay
I'LL excuse you--with a hickory!"
She hit his head a thump with her thimble as we dodged by, and he let on to be
whimpering as we struck for the stairs. Up in his room he hugged me, he was so out of
his head for gladness because he was going traveling. And he says:
"Before we get away she'll wish she hadn't let me go, but she won't know any way to get
around it now. After what she's said, her pride won't let her take it back."
Tom was packed in ten minutes, all except what his aunt and Mary would finish up for
him; then we waited ten more for her to get cooled down and sweet and gentle again; for
Tom said it took her ten minutes to unruffle in times when half of her feathers was up,
but twenty when they was all up, and this was one of the times when they was all up.
Then we went down, being in a sweat to know what the letter said.
She was setting there in a brown study, with it laying in her lap. We set down, and she
says:
"They're in considerable trouble down there, and they think you and Huck'll be a kind of
diversion for them--'comfort,' they say. Much of that they'll get out of you and Huck Finn,
I reckon. There's a neighbor named Brace Dunlap that's been wanting to marry their
Benny for three months, and at last they told him point blank and once for all, he
COULDN'T; so he has soured on them, and they're worried about it. I reckon he's
somebody they think they better be on the good side of, for they've tried to please him by
hiring his no-account brother to help on the farm when they can't hardly afford it, and
don't want him around anyhow. Who are the Dunlaps?"
"They live about a mile from Uncle Silas's place, Aunt Polly--all the farmers live about a
mile apart down there--and Brace Dunlap is a long sight richer than any of the others, and
owns a whole grist of niggers. He's a widower, thirty-six years old, without any children,
and is proud of his money and overbearing, and everybody is a little afraid of him. I
judge he thought he could have any girl he wanted, just for the asking, and it must have
set him back a good deal when he found he couldn't get Benny. Why, Benny's only half
as old as he is, and just as sweet and lovely as--well, you've seen her. Poor old Uncle
Silas--why, it's pitiful, him trying to curry favor that way--so hard pushed and poor, and
yet hiring that useless Jubiter Dunlap to please his ornery brother."
"What a name--Jubiter! Where'd he get it?"
"It's only just a nickname. I reckon they've forgot his real name long before this. He's
twenty-seven, now, and has had it ever since the first time he ever went in swimming.

The school teacher seen a round brown mole the size of a dime on his left leg above his
knee, and four little bits of moles around it, when he was naked, and he said it minded
him of Jubiter and his moons; and the children thought it was funny, and so they got to
calling him Jubiter, and he's Jubiter yet. He's tall, and lazy, and sly, and sneaky, and
ruther cowardly, too, but kind of good-natured, and wears long brown hair and no beard,
and hasn't got a cent, and Brace boards him for nothing, and gives him his old clothes to
wear, and despises him. Jubiter is a twin."
"What's t'other twin like?"
"Just exactly like Jubiter--so they say; used to was, anyway, but he hain't been seen for
seven years. He got to robbing when he was nineteen or twenty, and they jailed him; but
he broke