Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (free children's ebooks pdf .txt) 📗

We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern.  Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it.  Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so.  It was one of these regular summer storms.  It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—FST! it was as bright as glory, and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs—where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.

“Jim, this is nice,” I says.  "I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread.”

“Well, you wouldn’t a ben here ’f it hadn’t a ben for Jim.  You’d a ben down dah in de woods widout any dinner, en gittn’ mos’ drownded, too; dat you would, honey.  Chickens knows when it’s gwyne to rain, en so do de birds, chile.”

The river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days, till at last it was over the banks.  The water was three or four foot deep on the island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom.  On that side it was a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side it was the same old distance across—a half a mile—because the Missouri shore was just a wall of high bluffs.

Daytimes we paddled all over the island in the canoe, It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods, even if the sun was blazing outside.  We went winding in and out amongst the trees, and sometimes the vines hung so thick we had to back away and go some other way.  Well, on every old broken-down tree you could see rabbits and snakes and such things; and when the island had been overflowed a day or two they got so tame, on account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your hand on them if you wanted to; but not the snakes and turtles—they would slide off in the water.  The ridge our cavern was in was full of them. We could a had pets enough if we’d wanted them.

One night we catched a little section of a lumber raft—nice pine planks. It was twelve foot wide and about fifteen or sixteen foot long, and the top stood above water six or seven inches—a solid, level floor.  We could see saw-logs go by in the daylight sometimes, but we let them go; we didn’t show ourselves in daylight.

Another night when we was up at the head of the island, just before daylight, here comes a frame-house down, on the west side.  She was a two-story, and tilted over considerable.  We paddled out and got aboard—clumb in at an upstairs window.  But it was too dark to see yet, so we made the canoe fast and set in her to wait for daylight.

The light begun to come before we got to the foot of the island.  Then we looked in at the window.  We could make out a bed, and a table, and two old chairs, and lots of things around about on the floor, and there was clothes hanging against the wall.  There was something laying on the floor in the far corner that looked like a man.  So Jim says:

“Hello, you!”

But it didn’t budge.  So I hollered again, and then Jim says:

“De man ain’t asleep—he’s dead.  You hold still—I’ll go en see.”

He went, and bent down and looked, and says:

“It’s a dead man.  Yes, indeedy; naked, too.  He’s ben shot in de back. I reck’n he’s ben dead two er three days.  Come in, Huck, but doan’ look at his face—it’s too gashly.”