By this time Jim was gone for the raft
By this time Jim was gone for the raft. I was just a-biling with curiosity; and I says to myself, Tom Sawyer wouldn’t back out now, and so I won’t either; I’m a-going to see what’s going on here. So I dropped on my hands and knees in the little passage, and crept aft in the dark till there warn’t but one stateroom betwixt me and the cross-hall of the texas. Then in there I see a man stretched on the floor and tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him, and one of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and the other one had a pistol. This one kept pointing the pistol at the man’s head on the floor, and saying:
“I’d LIKE to! And I orter, too — a mean skunk!”
The man on the floor would shrivel up and say, “Oh, please don’t, Bill; I hain’t ever goin’ to tell.”
And every time he said that the man with the lantern would laugh and say:
“‘Deed you AIN’T! You never said no truer thing ‘n that, you bet you.” And once he said: “Hear him beg! and yit if we hadn’t got the best of him and tied him he’d a killed us both. And what FOR? Jist for noth’n. Jist because we stood on our RIGHTS — that’s what for. But I lay you ain’t a-goin’ to threaten nobody any more, Jim Turner. Put UP that pistol, Bill.”
Bill says:
“I don’t want to, Jake Packard. I’m for killin’ him — and didn’t he kill old Hatfield jist the same way — and don’t he deserve it?”
“But I don’t WANT him killed, and I’ve got my reasons for it.”
“Bless yo’ heart for them words, Jake Packard! I’ll never forgit you long’s I live!” says the man on the floor, sort of blubbering.
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