of this unhallowed band. In any
case, truth requires this admission. If the band had a leader, it was
Sam, just as it was Tom Sawyer in the book. They were always ready to
listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--and to follow his
plans. They looked to him for ideas and directions, and he gloried in
being a leader and showing off, just as Tom did in the book. It seems
almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot days he could not have
looked down the years and caught a glimpse of his splendid destiny.

But of literary fame he could never have dreamed. The chief ambition
--the "permanent ambition"--of every Hannibal boy was to be a pilot. The
pilot in his splendid glass perch with his supreme power and princely
salary was to them the noblest of all human creatures. An elder Bowen
boy was already a pilot, and when he came home, as he did now and then,
his person seemed almost too sacred to touch.

Next to being a pilot, Sam thought he would like to be a pirate or a
bandit or a trapper-scout--something gorgeous and awe-inspiring, where
his word, his nod, would still be law. The river kept his river ambition
always fresh, and with the cave and the forest round about helped him to
imagine those other things.

The cave was the joy of his heart. It was a real cave, not merely a
hole, but a marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led back
into the bluffs and far down into the earth, even below the river, some
said. Sam Clemens never tired of the cave. He was willing any time to
quit fishing or swimming or melon-hunting for the three-mile walk, or
pull, that brought them to its mystic door. With its long corridors, its
royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, it was
exactly suitable, Sam thought, to be the lair of an outlaw, and in it he
imagined and carried out adventures which his faithful followers may not
always have understood, though enjoying them none the less for that
reason.

In Tom Sawyer, Indian Joe dies in the cave. He did not die there in real
life, but was lost there once and was very weak when they found him. He
was not as bad as painted in the book, though he was dissolute and
accounted dangerous; and when one night he died in reality, there came a
thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home, in bed, was certain
that Satan had come in person for the half-breed's soul. He covered his
head and said his prayers with fearful anxiety lest the evil one might
d