MINERVA

was a good notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico gowns, and I turned up my trouser-legs to my knees and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with the hooks, and it was a fair fit. I put on the sun-bonnet and tied it under my chin, and then for a body to look in and see my face was like looking down a joint of stove-pipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even in the daytime, hardly. I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by-and-by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn’t walk like a girl; and he said I must quit pulling up my gown to get at my britches-pocket. I took notice, and done better. I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark. I started across to the town from a little below the ferry-landing, and the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town. I tied up and started along the bank. There was a light burning in a little shanty that hadn’t been lived in for a long time, and I wondered who had took up quarters there. I slipped up and peeped in at the window. There was a woman about forty year old in there knitting by a candle that was on a pine table. I didn’t know her face; she was a stranger, for you couldn’t start a face in that town that I didn’t know. Now this was lucky, because I was weakening; I was getting afraid I had come; people might know my voice and find me out. But if this woman had been in such a little town two days she could tell me all I wanted to know; so I knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn’t forget I was a girl. CHAPTER XI. “Come in,” says the woman, and I did. She says: “Take a cheer.” I done it. She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says: “What might your name be?” “Sarah Williams.” “Where ’bouts do you live? In this neighborhood?” “No’m. In Hookerville, seven mile below. I’ve walked all the way and I’m all tired out.” “Hungry, too, I reckon. I’ll find you something.” “No’m, I ain’t hungry. I was so hungry I had to stop two miles below here at a farm; so I ain’t hungry no more. It’s what makes me so late. My mother’s down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore. He lives at the upper end of the town, she says. I hain’t ever been here before. Do you know him?” “No; but I don’t know everybody yet. I haven’t lived here quite two weeks. It’s a considerable ways to the upper end of the town. You better stay here all night. Take off your bonnet.” “No,” I says; “I’ll rest a while, I reckon, and go on. I ain’t afeared of the dark.” She said she wouldn’t let me go by myself, but her husband would be in by-and-by, maybe in a hour and a half, and she’d send him along with me. Then she got to talking about her husband, and about her relations up the river, and her relations down the river, and about how much better off they used to was, and how they didn’t know but they’d made a mistake coming to our town, instead of letting well alone—and so on and so on, till I was afeard _I_ had made a mistake coming to her to find out what was going on in the town; but by-and-by she dropped on to pap and the murder, and then I was pretty willing to let her clatter right along. She told about me and Tom Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars (only she got it ten) and all about pap and what a hard lot he was, and what a hard lot I was, and at last she got down to where I was murdered. I says: