So I started for town in the wagon, and when I was half-way I see a wagon coming, and sure enough it was Tom Sawyer, and I stopped and waited till he come along. I says 'Hold on!
' and it stopped alongside, and his mouth opened up like a trunk, and stayed so; and he swallowed two or three times like a person that’s got a dry throat, and then says: 'I hain’t ever done you no harm. You know that.
So, then, what you want to come back and ha’nt me for? ' I says: 'I hain’t come back—I hain’t been gone. ' When he heard my voice it righted him up some, but he warn’t quite satisfied yet.
He says: 'Don’t you play nothing on me, because I wouldn’t on you. Honest injun now, you ain’t a ghost? ' 'Honest injun, I ain’t,' I says.
'Well—I—I—well, that ought to settle it, of course; but I can’t somehow seem to understand it no way. Looky here, warn’t you ever murdered at all? ' 'No. I warn’t ever murdered at all—I played it on them.
You come in here and feel of me if you don’t believe me. ' So he done it; and it satisfied him; and he was that glad to see me again he didn’t know what to do.
And he wanted to know all about it right off, because it was a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it hit him where he lived.
But I said, leave it alone till by-and-by; and told his driver to wait, and we drove off a little piece, and I told him the kind of a fix I was in, and what did he reckon we better do?
He said, let him alone a minute, and don’t disturb him. So he thought and thought,