"Before we get away she'll wish she hadn't let me go, but she won't know
any way to get around it now. After what she's said, her pride won't let
her take it back."

Tom was packed in ten minutes, all except what his aunt and Mary would
finish up for him; then we waited ten more for her to get cooled down and
sweet and gentle again; for Tom said it took her ten minutes to unruffle
in times when half of her feathers was up, but twenty when they was all
up, and this was one of the times when they was all up. Then we went
down, being in a sweat to know what the letter said.

She was setting there in a brown study, with it laying in her lap. We
set down, and she says:

"They're in considerable trouble down there, and they think you and
Huck'll be a kind of diversion for them--'comfort,' they say. Much of
that they'll get out of you and Huck Finn, I reckon. There's a neighbor
named Brace Dunlap that's been wanting to marry their Benny for three
months, and at last they told him point blank and once for all, he
COULDN'T; so he has soured on them, and they're worried about it. I
reckon he's somebody they think they better be on the good side of, for
they've tried to please him by hiring his no-account brother to help on
the farm when they can't hardly afford it, and don't want him around
anyhow. Who are the Dunlaps?"

"They live about a mile from Uncle Silas's place, Aunt Polly--all the
farmers live about a mile apart down there--and Brace Dunlap is a long
sight richer than any of the others, and owns a whole grist of niggers.
He's a widower, thirty-six years old, without any children, and is proud