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around to see. I stood on the bank and looked out over the river. All safe.

So I took the gun and went up a piece into the woods and was hunting around

for some birds, when I see a wild pig; hogs soon went wild in them bottoms

after they had got away from the prairie farms. I shot this fellow and took

him into camp. ssssssssss

I took the axe and smashed in the door -- I beat it and hacked it considerable,

a-doing it. I fetched the pig in and took him back nearly to the table and

hacked into his throat with the ax, and laid him down on the ground to bleed --

I say ground, because it was ground -- hard packed, and no boards. Well, next I

took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks in it, -- all I could drag -- and I started

it from the pig and dragged it to the door and through the woods down to the

river and dumped it in, and down it sunk, out of sight. You could easy see that

something had been dragged over the ground. I did wish Tom Sawyer was

there, I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in

the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a

thing as that. ssssssssss

Well, last I pulled out some of my hair, and bloodied the ax good, and stuck it

on the back side, and slung the ax in the corner. Then I took up the pig and held

him to my breast with my jacket (so he couldn't drip) till I got a good piece be-

low the house and then dumped him into the river. Now I thought of something

else. So I went and got the bag of meal and my old saw out of the canoe and

fetched them to the house. I took the bag to where it used to stand, and ripped

a hole in the bottom of it with the was, for there warn't no knives and forks on

the place -- pap done everything with his clasp-knife, about the cooking. Then

I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through the willows

east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five mile wide and full of rushes --

and ducks too, you might say, in the season. There was a slough or a creek

leading out of it on the other side, that went miles away, I don't know where,

but it didn't go to the river. The meal sifted out and made a little track all the

way to the lake. I dropped pap's whetstone there too, so as to look like it had

been done by accident. Then I tied up the rip in the meal sack with a string,

so it wouldn't leak no more, and took it and my saw to the canoe again.

It was about dark, now; so I dropped the canoe down the river under some

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