now we're over the worst of it, you
can stand the rest middling easy."

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal
water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher
all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first
struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to
where she flung herself onto the king's breast at the front door and
he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times--and then up she jumps, with
her face afire like sunset, and says:

"The brute! Come, don't waste a minute--not a _second_--we'll have
them tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!"

Says I:

"Cert'nly. But do you mean _before_ you go to Mr. Lothrop's, or--"

"Oh," she says, "what am I _thinking_ about!" she says, and set right
down again. "Don't mind what I said--please don't--you _won't_, now,
_will_ you?" Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that
I said I would die first. "I never thought, I was so stirred up," she
says; "now go on, and I won't do so any more. You tell me what to do,
and whatever you say I'll do it."

"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two frauds, and I'm fixed so
I got to travel with them a while longer, whether I want to or not--I
druther not tell you why; and if you was to blow on them this town
would get me out of their claws, and I'd be all right; but there'd be
another person that you don't know about who'd be in big trouble.
Well, we got to save _him_, hain't we? Of course. Well, then, we won't
blow on them."

Saying them words put a good idea in my head. I see how maybe I could
get me and Jim rid of the frauds; get them jailed here, and then
leave. But I didn't want to run the raft in the daytime without
anybody aboard to answer questions but me; so I didn't want the plan
to begin working till pretty late to-night. I says:

"Miss Mary Jane, I'll tell you what we'll do, and you won't have to
stay at Mr. Lothrop's so long, nuther. How fur is it?"

"A little short of four miles--right out in the country, back here."

"Well, that 'll answer. Now you go along out there, and lay low till
nine or half past to-night, and then get them to fetch you home
again--tell them you've thought of something. If you get here before
eleven put a candle in this window, and if I don't turn up wait _till_
eleven, and _then_ if I don't turn up it means I'm gone, and out of
the way, and safe. Then you come out and spread the news aro