MINERVA

g of cutthroats from over in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare you so as you will stay in the house and not bother them. I am one of the gang, but have got religgion and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again, and will betray the helish design. They will sneak down from northards, along the fence, at midnight exact, with a false key, and go in the nigger’s cabin to get him. I am to be off a piece and blow a tin horn if I see any danger; but stead of that I will BA like a sheep soon as they get in and not blow at all; then whilst they are getting his chains loose, you slip there and lock them in, and can kill them at your leasure. Don’t do anything but just the way I am telling you, if you do they will suspicion something and raise whoop-jamboreehoo. I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing. UNKNOWN FRIEND CHAPTER XL. We was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and took my canoe and went over the river a-fishing, with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a look at the raft and found her all right, and got home late to supper, and found them in such a sweat and worry they didn’t know which end they was standing on, and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done supper, and wouldn’t tell us what the trouble was, and never let on a word about the new letter, but didn’t need to, because we knowed as much about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and her back was turned we slid for the cellar cupboard and loaded up a good lunch and took it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about half-past eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally’s dress that he stole and was going to start with the lunch, but says: “Where’s the butter?” “I laid out a hunk of it,” I says, “on a piece of a corn-pone.” “Well, you _left_ it laid out, then—it ain’t here.” “We can get along without it,” I says. “We can get along _with_ it, too,” he says; “just you slide down cellar and fetch it. And then mosey right down the lightning-rod and come along. I’ll go and stuff the straw into Jim’s clothes to represent his mother in disguise, and be ready to _ba_ like a sheep and shove soon as you get there.” So out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk of butter, big as a person’s fist, was where I had left it, so I took up the slab of corn-pone with it on, and blowed out my light, and started up stairs very stealthy, and got up to the main floor all right, but here comes Aunt Sally with a candle, and I clapped the truck in my hat, and clapped my hat on my head, and the next second she see me; and she says: “You been down cellar?” “Yes’m.” “What you been doing down there?” “Noth’n.” “_Noth’n!_” “No’m.” “Well, then, what possessed you to go down there this time of night?” “I don’t know ’m.” “You don’t _know?_ Don’t answer me that way. Tom, I want to know what you been _doing_ down there.” “I hain’t been doing a single thing, Aunt Sally, I hope to gracious if I have.” I reckoned she’d let me go now, and as a generl thing she would; but I s’pose there was so many strange things going on she was just in a sweat about every little thing that warn’t yard-stick straight; so she says, very decided: “You just march into that setting-room and stay there till I come. You been up to something you no business to, and