No answer.

"What were you doing with that gun?"

At which the boy comes yawning awake at last in the warm soft glow of daylight from the cabin door. The river is just beyond and he can see its dancing reflections aswarm upon the walls and hear its urgent movement within its banks and detect the buoyant morning rise of birdsong. "Somebody was trying to get in here last night," he says. "I was laying for him."

"Next time, you roust me out." The man looks sick and sore. "You roust me out and I'll see to him, you hear?"

"I will."

The boy cooks a breakfast of flapjacks and bacon while the man sits blinking on the porch nursing a dipper of water and studying the river and attempting to recover his lost equilibrium. He remains pensive all the day long, suspicious of some connection that he senses but cannot quite puzzle out among the prowler and the misery in his head and the boy that he is bent on keeping safe from harm. The current is strong and the river is thickly laden with debris and it takes all of his strength to navigate the skiff along the trotlines when the time comes. He blames it on his age and he wonders what sad fate the future will hold for him if he cannot obtain the boy's six thousand dollars as a bulwark against sure decline.

"Your grandpap is as rich as a king, I ever tell you that?"

"I know. How'd he get that way?"

"By never giving me a nickel," which as far as he is concerned might as well be true.

"Is that so?"

"That man was so by-God stingy he wouldn't give me a whipping."

Huck laughs as only a boy can, illuminating the river valley with an arc of sound that bends across the water like a handful of thrown coins.

"I mean it. He wouldn't so much as lay a hand on me. What kind of father is that?"

The boy must confess that he does not know.

"When I done wrong he'd cook up some other sort of punishment he reckoned would suit the crime."

"Like?"

"Like extra chores maybe. I don't know."

"You don't remember?"

"Not no more. Not too good." Scratching his aching head and marveling at how much of his experience has vanished into nothing.

"Too bad."

"I suppose."

They take note of a broken-up raft just drifting into sight in the shallows around the upstream bend and light out after it in the skiff.

"Might be eight or ten good logs to that one by the look of it."

"I reckon."

"Be worth catching."

They pole to it and make fast while it's still well upstream and then they proceed cautiously back using the current to their advantage as best they can but nonetheless struggling against the stubborn willful weight of the thing.

"My pap used to tell me I had it good."

"Did you?"

"It don't seem so."

"You weren't hungry," says the boy.

The man flashes him a boiling look and heaves on his pole as if he is driving the boy himself into the soft muddy bottom. "Are you hungry, boy?"

"No sir."

"All right." The pole sticks and he strains to haul it loose and loses ground in the freeing of it. "Be grateful for what you've got."

"I am."

"My pap said I had it good on account of we didn't have to live among no niggers."

"Who helped out?"

"We had a man."

"A white man?"

"A white man, Petersen. His wife too."

"Slaves?" The boy has never heard of such a thing.

"They was hired." They draw near the shore and the man jumps out into water hip-deep. "More'n once when I misbehaved Pap said he'd just as soon let the neighbor's nigger have a go at me." Straining with skiff and raft against the current. "Just so I knew how good I had it."

The boy jumps out now himself and ties the skiff fast to a tree.

"Said I'd get more than a whipping. Said I could count on being buggered up the ass if it come to that. Buggered up the ass by a filthy good-for-nothing nigger."

The boy has a pained look.

"You know what I mean by that, boy?"

"Yes sir. I know it."

"My pap told me that damn one-eyed nigger would bugger me up the ass if I didn't watch out." Tramping up into the mud, wringing out his trousers. "You think he was just talking?"

"No sir."

"Damn right." He makes to enter the cabin for an early glass of whiskey, since the ten clean logs of this raft are sure to make for a handsome windfall. "Damn right," he says again, leveling his eyes at the boy. "That's how good I had it."

RATHER THAN WAIT for fish or game or some other added bounty that he might bring upstream and sell in St. Petersburg he unfastens the broken raft from the skiff and poles off on it alone, making certain to lock the boy in before he goes. He reflects on how this valuable cache of lumber has passed this very way unnoticed once before, and when he reaches the St. Petersburg landing and strikes a bargain to shed himself of it he congratulates himself that merely by the exercise of his sharp riverman's eye and his main strength he has captured it and brought it back and sold it for enough money to purchase a gallon of forty-rod with change left over if he's careful. Thus does the wise and wary man turn all things to his advantage, as the river turns all things to her will. He rises up from the riverside and moves toward the village proper like some slow revenant, his feet dragging but his heart light with the idea of pleasures to come. Up an alley he goes past the rear of the Liberty Hotel wishing he had a catfish or two that he could trade with Cooper who's generous with his whiskey as long as it's not Monday which he does not believe it is.

"You that James?" To the man behind the bar.

"I am."

He spills coin onto the hardwood and brings the jug down beside it. "Whiskey."

"This is a decent place."

"I don't mind."

"We sell by the drink or we don't sell at all."

"Cooper gives me a fair trade for provisions."

"What Cooper does is Cooper's business." Turning away to adjust a bottle in a grand array behind the bar. From beneath his eyebrows he keeps an eye on Finn's reflection in the mirror.

"He's always been fair with me."

"Then go see him." His hands are busy with the bottles for no reason.

"You saying my money's no good?"

"It's plenty good by the drink." He turns to assess the jug and then raises his eyes to the man's face. "But you don't look to me like a by-the-drink kind of individual."

"Not here I ain't," says Finn, taking the jug in the crook of his arm and scooping up the coins. "There's friendlier places in this town."

"Suit yourself."

Finn can tell when he's been bested and he knows when to leave off beating a dead horse and he has no time or patience to spare for any individual who would thwart his desires, so he puts the lobby of the Liberty Hotel behind him, walking through the double doors and out onto the broad sunny front porch all set about with white-painted rocking chairs. In one of these, her back to him and her expectant face to the street, sits the widow Douglas waiting on some lunchtime companion for this is the third Sunday of the month and such is her usual routine. She ceases rocking at the scent of him and turns. "What have you done with that boy?" Without any preliminary, as if he neither requires such nor deserves it.

"Took him where he belongs." He tongues a tooth and gives her only a portion of the attention that she surely believes is her due, for he is busy scanning the street and deciding where he might most profitably continue upon his errand.

"I must warn you, Mr. Finn."

"Is that so?" He fixes her with his gaze and speaks the words by way of returning threat unto threat, for now she has his attention in full.

"I must warn you," she goes on oblivious, for as a dignified and refined lady of the old school she is unaccustomed to the need for fear or even for cautious restraint in her dealings, "I must warn you that Judge Thatcher and I are taking steps to recover him."

"Is that so?" he says, more slowly this time but the same, for what else is there.

"Legal steps."

He commences to tap tap tapping the empty jug against his haunch with a slow tolling rhythm as insistent and long-suffering as any heartbeat. "Now what am I supposed to think about that."

"Think whatever you like." For rectitude and certainty and recent proximity to the judge have contrived to make her bold.

"The boy belongs to me."

"He deserves better."

"Don't we all."

He turns his back upon her and steps down off the porch into the street where his boots raise dust and leave a cross-marked trail.

"I'll have him," calls the widow from the safety of her chair on the porch of the Liberty Hotel.

"We'll see," says Finn as he goes, mainly to himself.

Later, penniless again as usual and armed with a jug full of whiskey and fortified with as much beyond that as was possible given the quantity of his coin, he goes down to the riverside and stands on the bank eyeing the tied-up skiffs and wondering where his has gone. In the gathering dark he paces from one to another rejecting each in turn while a spark catches somewhere in his brain fueled and nursed by the whiskey without intervention or even awareness on his part. He begins to suspect that his skiff is missing not by accident or as a matter of some other individual's convenience-for he has helped himself to many a handy boat when exigencies have demanded it, not excluding perhaps the very skiff that he has been using these days, although of this he cannot be entirely certain-but missing as part of a plot to separate him from the boy and thus from his rightful treasure. What, he wonders almost aloud, what will happen if he cannot return to the boy with all possible dispatch? Have the widow and the judge already sent some emissaries into the woods to track him down and steal him away? Was that cunning old widow counting upon the empty whiskey jug of his-for surely she took note of it-was she counting upon it to occupy his time and cloud his judgment and provide the ideal cover under which she and the judge could accomplish their plan? For a moment he nearly strikes out for her house or the judge's to wait and see but he cannot decide between the two, so in the end he cuts loose a likely boat and poles home to the cabin where he discovers his old skiff tied up safe and sound. He sets his recent one adrift rather than tie it up for he likes it less than the original and has no use for a second, and then he enters the cabin and finds the boy asleep and sleeps himself.

THE FATHER STANDS looking at the river for a minute and then turns his broad back to it. "How about some breakfast?" Indicating by the direction of his look that the boy should have undertaken its preparation long ago.

"You sell that raft?" Huck, from over the eggs.

"You bet."

"How much?"

"Enough. Some of them logs was rotten." As if he needs to make an excuse for how little he got or how much of it he spent on drink.

"Looked good enough to me."

"You don't know."

After a while the boy scrapes eggs and bacon onto the two tin plates and serves them up with hot coffee boiled black as tar. They sit eating side by side on the edge of the cabin porch with their legs adangle. "You're back early."

"I did my business."

"You happen to fetch any tobacco?"

"You didn't ask."

"You left in a hurry."

"I know it."

The man finishes his breakfast and drains his coffee cup and licks his plate clean and then the boy does likewise in turn.

"I don't like that town much."

"St. Pete?"

"I don't like it."

"I reckon it's all right."

"You'll get over it."

He lets that notion or threat or promise or whatever it is hang in the air while the boy considers.