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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 agoing 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 about 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." ssssssssss

And every time he said that, the man with the lantern would laugh, and say:

ssssssssss

"'Deed you ain't! You never said no truer thing 'n that, you bet you."

once he said: - Hear him beg! and yit if we hadn't got the best of him

tied h,m, he'd a killed us both. And what for? Jist for noth'n. Jist be-

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