TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE



CHAPTER I. AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK

[Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not
inventions, but facts--even to the public confession of the accused. I
take them from an old-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors, and
transfer the scenes to America. I have added some details, but only a
couple of them are important ones. -- M. T.]

WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger
Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on
Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the
ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer
onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next
mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away
it would be summer and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick
to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets
him to sighing and saddening around, and there's something the matter
with him, he don't know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and
mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high up on the
hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the
big Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points
where the timber looks smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and
everything's so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead and
gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all.

Don't you know what that is? It's spring fever. That is what the name of