Read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim for Free Online

and put the key under his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was by and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn't long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it-all but the cowhide part.
    Still, he could take his aggressions out on the baggers, or bunderlugs, when the occasion took him. He might be mad as spit, but here comes another walkin’ dead man in need of a good lickin'. And pap would give it to ‘im, too. Them unbranded baggers was anyone's property, and there ‘as no penalty for abusin’ ‘em. Not that pap woulda cared about penalties, nohow.
    It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn't want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.
    One time we had us a bad bunderlug, one of the kinds you wish never've been let out of the bag in the first place. Real dangerous and nasty, like a pack of whupped ‘coons all bundled up into one person. All they do is bite and scratch and claw, and there was even a story or two about men having their brains scooped right out of their heads.
    Sounds like a story that Tom'd tell, but it wasn't.
    It was Arnold the blacksmith what got himself into a scrape with one of them full-baggers. Mean and vicious and just appeared at the shop as if he come out of nowhere. Well, blacksmith was a big ol’ lobcock an’ didn't reach for his hammer fast enough. Before he even knowed what hit him, that bunderlug was all upon him, and opening his skull to get at the good parts.
    I heard that story from the widow.
    When pap got himself into the same pickle, he weren't one to take no chances. This bagger come up out of the river, like a monster wrapped up in seaweeds, an’ he didn't even have to bare his teeth ‘fore pap knowed he was one of the bad ones.
    "Get th’ ax, boy,” he calls out.
    He put two shots in the bagger's head, and then hauled ‘im up ashore to cut ‘im down to smaller pieces. Pap was superstitious like that. He said the bad ones had the powers of the devil, an’ it was smart thinkin’ to buck ‘em up into parts, so they cain't be causin’ more troubles.
    I din’ argue with such thinkin'.
    At times like that, pap was nearly bearable.
    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, an’ maybe just a little bit scared, too. I judged he had got drowned, and I wasn't ever going to get out any more. Yes, I was right 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 enough 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