By this time Jim was gone for the raft. I was just a-biling with curiosity; and I says to myself, Tom Sawyer wouldn't back out now, and so I won't either; I'm agoing to see what's going on here. So I dropped on my hands and knees, in the little passage, and crept aft in the dark, till there warn't but about one stateroom betwixt me and the cross-hall of the texas. Then, in there I see a man stretched on the floor and tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him,
and one of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and the other one had a pistol. This one kept pointing the pistol at the man's head on the floor and saying—
"PLEASE DON'T, BILL"
"I'd like to! And I orter, too, a mean skunk!"
The man on the floor would shrivel up, and say: "Oh, please don't, Bill—I hain't ever goin' to tell."
And every time he said that, the man with the lantern would laugh, and say:
"'Deed you ain't! You never said no truer thing 'n that, you bet you." And once he said: "Hear him beg! and yit if we hadn't got the best of him and tied him, he'd a killed us both. And what for? Jist for noth'n. Jist be-
