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"Prisoners don't have geese running around the donjon-keep to pull pens out

of, you muggins. They always make their pens out of the hardest, toughest,

troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or something like that they can get

their hands on; and it takes them weeks and weeks, and months and months

to file it out, too, because they've got to do it by rubbing it on the wall. They

wouldn't use a goose-quill if they had it. It ain't regular."

"Well, then, what'll we make him the ink out of?"

"Many makes it out of iron-rust and tears; but that's the common sort and

women; the best authorities uses their own blood. Jim can do that; and when he

wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message to let the world know

where he's captivated, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and

throw it out of the window. The Iron Mask always done that, and it's a blame'

good way, too." ssssssssss

"Jim ain't got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan."

"That ain't anything; we can get him some."

"Can't nobody read his plates."

"That ain't got nothing to do with it, Huck Finn. All he's got to do is to

write on the plate and throw it out. You don't have to be able to read it. Why,

half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or any-

where else." ssssssssss

"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"

"Why, blame it all, it ain't the prisoner's plates."

"But it's somebody's plates, ain't it?"

"Well, spos'n it is? What does the prisoner care whose"

He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing. So we

cleared out for the house. ssssssssss

Along during that morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the

clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and

got the fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing, because that was

what pap always called it; but Tom said it warn't borrowing, it was stealing.

He said we was representing prisoners; and prisoners don't care how they get a

thing so they get it, and nobody don't blame them for it, either. It ain't no

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