sign for the Gang to get together), and then he said he had got
secret news by his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with two
hundred elephants, and six hundred camels, and over a thousand
“sumter” mules, all loaded down with di’monds, and they didn’t
have only a guard of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay in
ambuscade, as he called it, and kill the lot and scoop the things. He
said we must slick up our swords and guns, and get ready. He never
could go after even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords and
guns all scoured up for it, though they was only lath and broomsticks, and you might scour at them till you rotted, and then they
warn’t worth a mouthful of ashes more than what they was before. I
didn’t believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs,
but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next
day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word we
rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn’t no
Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn’t no camels nor no elephants.
It warn’t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primerclass at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam,
though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book
and a tract; and then the teacher charged in, and made us drop
everything and cut. I didn’t see no di’monds, and I told Tom Sawyer
so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and he said there
was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn’t
we see them, then? He said if I warn’t so ignorant, but had read a
book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it
was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of soldiers
there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we had enemies
which he called magicians; and they had turned the whole thing
into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite. I said, all right; then
the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said
I was a numskull.
“Why,” said he, “a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they
would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson.
They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church.”
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
13
“Well,” I says, “s’pose we got some genies to help us—can’t we lick
the other crowd then?”
“How you going to get them?”
“I don’t know. How do they get them?”
“Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the
genies come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping
around and the smoke a-rolling, and everything they’re told to do
they up and do it. They don’t think nothing of pulling a shot-tower
up by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the
head with it—or any other man.”
“Who makes them tear around so?”
“Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever
rubs the lamp or the ring, and they’ve got to do whatever he says. If
he tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di’monds, and
fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and fetch an
emperor’s daughter from China for you to marry, they’ve got to do
it—and they’ve got to do it before sun-up next morning, too. And
more: they’ve got to waltz that palace around over the country wherever you want it, you understand.”
“Well,” says I, “I think they are a pack of flat-heads for not keeping
the palace themselves ‘stead of fooling them away like that. And
what’s more—if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho
before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of
an old tin lamp.”
“How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you’d have to come when he
rubbed it, whether you wanted to or not.”
“What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right,
then; I would come; but I lay I’d make that man climb the highest
tree there was in the country.”
“Shucks, it ain’t no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don’t seem
to know anything, somehow—perfect saphead.”
I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I
would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an
iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I
sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it
warn’t no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that