of?"

"Many makes it out of iron-rust and tears; but that's the common sort
and women; the best authorities uses their own blood. Jim can do that;
and when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious
message to let the world know where he's captivated, he can write it
on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the
window. The Iron Mask always done that, and it's a blame' good way,
too."

"Jim ain't got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan."

"That ain't nothing; we can get him some."

"Can't nobody _read_ his plates."

"That ain't got anything to _do_ with it, Huck Finn. All _he's_ got to
do is to write on the plate and throw it out. You don't _have_ to be
able to read it. Why, half the time you can't read anything a prisoner
writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else."

"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"

"Why, blame it all, it ain't the _prisoner's_ plates."

"But it's _somebody's_ plates, ain't it?"

"Well, spos'n it is? What does the _prisoner_ care whose--"

He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing. So we
cleared out for the house.

Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of
the clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we
went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it
borrowing, because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it
warn't borrowing, it was stealing. He said we was representing
prisoners; and prisoners don't care how they get a thing so they get
it, and nobody don't blame them for it, either. It ain't no crime in a
prisoner to steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said; it's
his right; and so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a
perfect right to steal anything on this place we had the least use for
to get ourselves out of prison with. He said if we warn't prisoners it
would be a very different thing, and nobody but a mean, ornery person
would steal when he warn't a prisoner. So we allowed we would steal
everything there was that come handy. And yet he made a mighty fuss,
one day, after that, when I stole a watermelon out of the nigger patch
and eat it; and he made me go and give the niggers a dime without
telling them what it was for. Tom said that what he meant was, we
could steal anything we _needed._ Well, I says, I needed the
watermelon. But he said I didn't need it to get out of prison with;
there's where the differenc