TOM SAWYER ABROAD




CHAPTER I. TOM SEEKS NEW ADVENTURES

DO you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? I mean
the adventures we had down the river, and the time we set the darky Jim
free and Tom got shot in the leg. No, he wasn't. It only just p'isoned
him for more. That was all the effect it had. You see, when we three came
back up the river in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, and
the village received us with a torchlight procession and speeches, and
everybody hurrah'd and shouted, it made us heroes, and that was what Tom
Sawyer had always been hankering to be.

For a while he WAS satisfied. Everybody made much of him, and he tilted
up his nose and stepped around the town as though he owned it. Some
called him Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and that just swelled him up fit to
bust. You see he laid over me and Jim considerable, because we only went
down the river on a raft and came back by the steamboat, but Tom went by
the steamboat both ways. The boys envied me and Jim a good deal, but
land! they just knuckled to the dirt before TOM.

Well, I don't know; maybe he might have been satisfied if it hadn't been
for old Nat Parsons, which was postmaster, and powerful long and slim,
and kind o' good-hearted and silly, and bald-headed, on account of his
age, and about the talkiest old cretur I ever see. For as much as thirty
years he'd been the only man in the village that had a reputation--I mean
a reputation for being a traveler, and of course he was mortal proud of