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cause pap hadn't no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there,

take it all around. ssssssssss

But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was

all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he

locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he

had got drowned and I wasn't ever going to get out any more. I was scared. I

made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there. I had tried to

get out of that cabin many a time, but I couldn't find no way. There warn't a

window to it big enought for a dog to get through. I couldn't get up the chimbly,

it was too narrow. The door was thick solid oak slabs. Pap was pretty careful

not to leave a knife or anything in the cabin when he was away; I reckon I had

hunted the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I was 'most all the time

at it, because it was about the only way to put in the time. But this time I found

something at last; I found an old rusty wood-saw without any handle; it was

laid in between a rafter and the clapboards of the roof. I greased it up and went

to work. There was an old horse-blanket nailed against the logs at the far end

of the cabin behind the table, to keep the wind from blowing through the chinks

and putting the candle out. I got under the table and raised the blanket and

went to work to saw a section of the big bottom log out, big enough to let me

through. Well, it was a good long job, but I was getting towards the end of it

when I heard pap's gun in the woods. I got rid of the signs of my work, and

dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty soon pap come in.

Pap warn't in a good humor -- so he was his natural self. He said he was down

to town, and everything was going wrong. His lawyer said he reckoned he

would win his lawsuit and get the money, if they ever got started on the trial;

but then there was ways to put it off a long time, and Judge Thatcher knowed

how to do it. And he said people allowed there'd be another trial to get me away

from him and give me to the widow for my guardian, and they guessed it would

win, this time. This shook me up considerable, because I didn't want to go back to

the widow's any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it. Then

the old man got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of,

and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any, and

after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round, including a con-

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