Mystery fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Tom was packed in ten minutes, all except what his aunt and Mary would
finish up for him; then we waited ten more for her to get cooled down
and sweet and gentle again; for Tom said it took her ten minutes to
unruffle in times when half of her feathers was up, but twenty when
they was all up, and this was one of the times when they was all up.
Then we went down, being in a sweat to know what the letter said.
She was setting there in a brown study, with it laying in her lap. We
set down, and she says:
“They’re in considerable trouble down there, and they think you and
Huck’ll be a kind of diversion for them—’comfort,’ they say. Much of
that they’ll get out of you and Huck Finn, I reckon. There’s a neighbor
named Brace Dunlap that’s been wanting to marry their Benny for three
months, and at last they told him point blank and once for all, he
_could’t;_ so he has soured on them, and they’re worried about it. I
reckon he’s somebody they think they better be on the good side of, for
they’ve tried to please him by hiring his no-account brother to help on
the farm when they can’t hardly afford it, and don’t want him around
anyhow. Who are the Dunlaps?”
“They live about a mile from Uncle Silas’s place, Aunt Polly—all the
farmers live about a mile apart down there—and Brace Dunlap is a long
sight richer than any of the others, and owns a whole grist of niggers.
He’s a widower, thirty-six years old, without any children, and is
proud of his money and overbearing, and everybody is a little afraid of
him. I judge he thought he could have any girl he wanted, just for the
asking, and it must have set him back a good deal when he found he
couldn’t get Benny. Why, Benny’s only half as old as he is, and just as
sweet and lovely as—well, you’ve seen her. Poor old Uncle Silas—why,
it’s pitiful, him trying to curry favor that way—so hard pushed and
poor, and yet hiring that useless Jubiter Dunlap to please his ornery
brother.”
“What a name—Jubiter! Where’d he get it?”
“It’s only just a nickname. I reckon they’ve forgot his real name long
before this. He’s twenty-seven, now, and has had it ever since the
first time he ever went in swimming. The school teacher seen a round
brown mole the size of a dime on his left leg above his knee, and four
little bits of moles around it, when he was naked, and he said it
minded him of Jubiter and his moons; and the children thought it was
funny, and so they got to calling him Jubiter, and he’s Jubiter yet.
He’s tall, and lazy, and sly, and sneaky, and ruther cowardly, too, but
kind of good-natured, and wears long brown hair and no beard, and
hasn’t got a cent, and Brace boards him for nothing, and gives him his
old clothes to wear, and despises him. Jubiter is a twin.”
“What’s t’other twin like?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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