--I'm glad we found it out detective fashion; I
wouldn't give shucks for any other way. Now you work your mind, and
study out a plan to steal Jim, and I will study out one, too; and
we'll take the one we like the best."

What a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer's head I
wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown
in a circus, nor nothing I can think of. I went to thinking out a
plan, but only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where
the right plan was going to come from. Pretty soon Tom says:

"Ready?"

"Yes," I says.

"All right--bring it out."

"My plan is this," I says. "We can easy find out if it's Jim in there.
Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft over from the
island. Then the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the
old man's britches after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river
on the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me
and Jim used to do before. Wouldn't that plan work?"

"_Work?_ Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it's
too blame' simple; there ain't nothing _to_ it. What's the good of a
plan that ain't no more trouble than that? It's as mild as goose-milk.
Why, Huck, it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking into a soap
factory."

I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different;
but I knowed mighty well that whenever he got _his_ plan ready it
wouldn't have none of them objections to it.

And it didn't. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was
worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man
as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was
satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it
was here, because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way it was. I knowed
he would be changing it around every which way as we went along, and
heaving in new bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what
he done.

Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in
earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of
slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy
that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose;
and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not
leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind;
and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling,
than to stoo