The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Chapters 13-21

The Black Avenger stood still with folded arms, "looking his last" upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing "she" could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.

But they discovered the danger in time, and made shift to avert it.

They tried to argue it away by reminding conscience that they had purloined sweetmeats and apples scores of times; but conscience was not to be appeased by such thin plausibilities; it seemed to them, in the end, that there was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only “hooking,” while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing — and there was a command against that in the Bible.

Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation.

Tom stirred up the other pirates and they all clattered away with a shout, and in a minute or two were stripped and chasing after and tumbling over each other in the shallow limpid water of the white sandbar.

He went on listening, and gathered by odds and ends that it was conjectured at first that the boys had got drowned while taking a swim...

Then with a mutual impulse the two bereaved women flung themselves into each other's arms and had a good, consoling cry, and then parted.

He rested again until the sun was well up and gilding the great river with its splendor, and then he plunged into the stream.

A sumptuous breakfast of bacon and fish was shortly provided, and as the boys set to work upon it, Tom recounted (and adorned) his adventures.

The storm culminated in one matchless effort that seemed likely to tear the island to pieces, burn it up, drown it to the tree-tops, blow it away, and deafen every creature in it, all at one and the same moment.

She soliloquized:
“Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But I haven’t got anything now to remember him by.”

And the loving attentions Aunt Polly lavished upon him were the one thing capable of making him more uncomfortable than he was before.

Becky roused up from her lethargy of distress and showed good interest in the proceedings.

No matter what the subject might be, a brainracking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification.

Even the boisterous winds unanimously came forth from their mystic homes, and blustered about as if to enhance by their aid the wildness of the scene.