[Illustration] Tom Sawyer, Detective By Mark Twain Contents CHAPTER I. AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK CHAPTER II. JAKE DUNLAP CHAPTER III. A DIAMOND ROBBERY CHAPTER IV. THE THREE SLEEPERS CHAPTER V. A TRAGEDY IN THE WOODS CHAPTER VI. PLANS TO SECURE THE DIAMONDS CHAPTER VII. A NIGHT’S VIGIL CHAPTER VIII. TALKING WITH THE GHOST CHAPTER IX. FINDING OF JUBITER DUNLAP CHAPTER X. THE ARREST OF UNCLE SILAS CHAPTER XI. TOM SAWYER DISCOVERS THE MURDERERS CHAPTER I. AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK [Note: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not inventions, but facts—even to the public confession of the accused. I take them from an old-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors, and transfer the scenes to America. I have added some details, but only a couple of them are important ones. — M. T.] Well, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom’s uncle Silas’s farm in Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening around, and there’s something the matter with him, he don’t know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high up on the hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the big Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points where the timber looks smoky and dim it’s so far off and still, and everything’s so solemn it seems like everybody you’ve loved is dead and gone, and you ’most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all. Don’t you know what that is? It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you _do_ want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! It seems to you that mainly what you want is to get away; get away from the same old tedious things you’re so used to seeing and so tired of, and set something new. That is the idea; you want to go and be a wanderer; you want to go wandering far away to strange countries where everything is mysterious and wonderful and romantic. And if you can’t do that, you’ll put up with considerable less; you’ll go anywhere you _can_ go, just so as to get away, and be thankful of the chance, too.