"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer, Detective (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

around and ransack him without any trouble. So we done it. I set my boots
and Bud's side by side, where they'd be handy. Then we stripped him and
searched his seams and his pockets and his socks and the inside of his
boots, and everything, and searched his bundle. Never found any di'monds.
We found the screwdriver, and Hal says, "What do you reckon he wanted with
that?" I said I didn't know; but when he wasn't looking I hooked it. At
last Hal he looked beat and discouraged, and said we'd got to give it up.
That was what I was waiting for. I says:
"There's one place we hain't searched."
"What place is that?" he says.
"His stomach."
"By gracious, I never thought of that! NOW we're on the homestretch, to
a dead moral certainty. How'll we manage?'
"Well," I says, "just stay by him till I turn out and hunt up a drug
store, and I reckon I'll fetch something that'll make them di'monds tired
of the company they're keeping."
"He said that's the ticket, and with him looking straight at me I slid
myself into Bud's boots instead of my own, and he never noticed. They was
just a shade large for me, but that was considerable better than being too
small. I got my bag as I went a-groping through the hall, and in about a
minute I was out the back way and stretching up the river road at a
five-mile gait.
"And not feeling so very bad, neither-walking on di'monds don't have no
such effect. When I had gone fifteen minutes I says to myself, there's
more'n a mile behind me, and everything quiet. Another five minutes and I
says there's considerable more land behind me now, and there's a man back
there that's begun to wonder what's the trouble. Another five and I says
to myself he's getting real uneasy-he's walking the floor now. Another
five, and I says to myself, there's two mile and a half behind me, and
he's AWFUL uneasy-beginning to cuss, I reckon. Pretty soon I says to
myself, forty minutes gone-he KNOWS there's something up! Fifty
minutes-the truth's a-busting on him now! he is reckoning I found the
di'monds whilst we was searching, and shoved them in my pocket and never
let on-yes, and he's starting out to hunt for me. He'll hunt for new
tracks in the dust, and they'll as likely send him down the river as up.
"Just then I see a man coming down on a mule, and before I thought I
jumped into the bush. It was stupid! When he got abreast he stopped and
waited a little for me to come out; then he rode on again. But I didn't
feel gay any more. I says to myself I've botched my chances by that; I
surely have, if he meets up with Hal Clayton.
"Well, about three in the morning I fetched Elexandria and see this
stern-wheeler laying there, and was very glad, because I felt perfectly
safe, now, you know. It was just daybreak. I went aboard and got this
stateroom and put on these clothes and went up in the pilot-house-to
watch, though I didn't reckon there was any need of it. I set there and
played with my di'monds and waited and waited for the boat to start, but
she didn't. You see, they was mending her machinery, but I didn't know
anything about it, not being very much used to steamboats.
"Well, to cut the tale short, we never left there till plumb noon; and
long before that I was hid in this stateroom; for before breakfast I see a