Then he scraped away the dirt,and exposed a pine shingle.He took it up and disclosed a shapely little treasure-house whose bottom and sides were of shingles. In it lay a marble. Tom’s astonishment was boundless!He scratched his head with a perplexed air, and said:
“Well, that beats anything!”
Then he tossed the marble away pettishly,and stood cogitating. The truth was,that a superstition of his had failed, here,which he and all his comrades had always looked upon as infallible.If you buried a marble with certain necessary incantations,and left it alone a fortnight,and then opened the place with the incantation he had just used,you would find that all the marbles you had ever lost had gathered themselves together there, meantime, no matter how widely they had been separated. But now, this thing had actually and unquestionably failed. Tom’s whole structure of faith was shaken to its foundations. He had many a time heard of this thing succeeding but never of its failing before. It did not occur to him that he had tried it several times before, himself, but could never find the hiding-places afterward. He puzzled over the matter some time, and finally decided that some witch had interfered and broken the charm. He thought he would satisfy himself on that point; so he searched around till he found a small sandy spot with a little funnel-shaped depression in it. He laid himself down and put his mouth close to this depression and called—
“Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know!Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know!”
The sand began to work,and presently a small black bug appeared for a second and then darted under again in a fright.
“He dasn’t tell!So it _was_ a witch that done it. I just knowed it.”
He well knew the futility of trying to contend against witches,so he gave up discouraged.But it occurred to him that he might as well have the marble he had just thrown away, and therefore he went and made a patient search for it. But he could not find it. Now he went back to his treasure-house and carefully placed himself just as he had been standing when he tossed the marble away; then he took another marble from his pocket and tossed it in the same way, saying:
“Brother, go find your brother!”
He watched where it stopped, and went there and looked.But it must have fallen short or gone too far;so he tried twice more.The last repetition was successful.The two marbles lay within a foot of each other.
Just here the blast of a toy tin trumpet came faintly down the green aisles of the forest. Tom flung off his jacket and trousers, turned a suspender into a belt, raked away some brush behind the rotten log, disclosing a rude bow and arrow, a lath sword and a tin trumpet, and in a moment had seized these things and bounded away, barelegged, with fluttering shirt. He presently halted under a great elm, blew an answering blast, and then began to tiptoe and look warily out, this way and that. He said cautiously—to an imaginary company:
“Hold, my merry men!Keep hid till I blow.”
Now appeared Joe Harper,as airily clad and elaborately armed as Tom. Tom called:
“Hold!Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?”
“Guy of Guisborne wants no man’s pass.Who art thou that—that—”
“Dares to hold such language,” said Tom,prompting—for they talked “by the book,” from memory.
“Who art thou that dares to hold such language?”
“I, indeed!I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase soon shall know. ”
“Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw?Right gladly will I dispute with thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee!”
They took their lath swords,dumped their other traps on the ground,struck a fencing attitude, foot to foot,and began a grave, careful combat,“two up and two down.” Presently Tom said:
“Now, if you’ve got the hang, go it lively!”
So they “went it lively,” panting and perspiring with the work.By and by Tom shouted:
“Fall!fall!Why don’t you fall?”
“I sha’n’t!Why don’t you fall yourself?You’re getting the worst of it.”
“Why, that ain’t anything. I can’t fall;that ain’t the way it is in the book. The book says,‘Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guisborne.’ You’re to turn around and let me hit you in the back.”
There was no getting around the authorities,so Joe turned, received the whack and fell.
“Now,” said Joe, getting up,“you got to let me kill _you_. That’s fair.”
“Why, I can’t do that, it ain’t in the book.”
“Well, it’s blamed mean—that’s all.”
“Well, say, Joe, you can be Friar Tuck or Much the miller’s son,and lam me with a quarter-staff;or I’ll be the Sheriff of Nottingham and you be Robin Hood a little while and kill me.”
This was satisfactory,and so these adventures were carried out.Then Tom became Robin Hood again,and was allowed by the treacherous nun to bleed his strength away through his neglected wound. And at last Joe, representing a whole tribe of weeping outlaws, dragged him sadly forth, gave his bow into his feeble hands, and Tom said, “Where this arrow falls, there bury poor Robin Hood under the greenwood tree.” Then he shot the arrow and fell back and would have died, but he lit on a nettle and sprang up too gaily for a corpse.
The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements,and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more,and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.
CHAPTER IX
At half-past nine, that night,Tom and Sid were sent to bed, as usual.They said their prayers, and Sid was soon asleep.Tom lay awake and waited, in restless impatience.When it seemed to him that it must be nearly daylight,he heard the clock strike ten!This was despair. He would have tossed and fidgeted,as his nerves demanded,but he was afraid he might wake Sid. So he lay still,and stared up into the dark.Everything was dismally still. By and by,out of the stillness, little,scarcely perceptible noises began to emphasize themselves.The ticking of the clock began to bring itself into notice.Old beams began to crack mysteriously.The stairs creaked faintly.Evidently spirits were abroad. A measured,muffled snore issued from Aunt Polly’s chamber.And now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate, began. Next the ghastly ticking of a death-watch in the wall at the bed’s head made Tom shudder—it meant that somebody’s days were numbered. Then the howl of a far-off dog rose on the night air, and was answered by a fainter howl from a remoter distance. Tom was in an agony. At last he was satisfied that time had ceased and eternity begun; he began to doze, in spite of himself; the clock chimed eleven, but he did not hear it. And then there came, mingling with his half-formed dreams, a most melancholy caterwauling. The raising of a neighboring window disturbed him. A cry of “Scat!you devil!” and the crash of an empty bottle against the back of his aunt’s woodshed brought him wide awake, and a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the “ell” on all fours. He “meow’d” with caution once or twice, as he went; then jumped to the roof of the woodshed and thence to the ground. Huckleberry Finn was there, with his dead cat. The boys moved off and disappeared in the gloom. At the end of half an hour they were wading through the tall grass of the graveyard.