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.
It was a graveyard of the old-fashioned Western kind. It was on a hill,
about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy board fence
around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of the
time, but stood upright nowhere. Grass and weeds grew rank over the
whole cemetery. All the old graves were sunken in, there was not a
tombstone on the place; round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over
the graves, leaning for support and finding none. Sacred to the memory
of So-and-So had been painted on them once, but it could no longer have
been read, on the most of them, now, even if there had been light.
A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tom feared it might be the
spirits of the dead, complaining at being disturbed. The boys talked
little, and only under their breath, for the time and the place and the
pervading solemnity and silence oppressed their spirits. They found the
sharp new heap they were seeking, and ensconced themselves within the
protection of three great elms that grew in a bunch within a few feet of
the grave.
Then they waited in silence for what seemed a long time. The hooting of
a distant owl was all the sound that troubled the dead stillness. Tom s
reflections grew oppressive. He must force some talk. So he said in a
whisper:
Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for us to be here?
Huckleberry whispered:
I wisht I knowed. It s awful solemn like, _ain t_ it?
I bet it is.
71