Huckleberry Finn Chapter 03 – Huck is Disappointed

Pap hadn’t been seen by anyone during the previous year, and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to see him again. When he wasn’t drunk and could catch me, he would beat me, though I tried to hide from him whenever he came to our town of St. Petersburg. Some people told me that he was found drowned in the Mississippi River about twelve miles from town. They assumed that it was Pap because the drowned man was his size and was wearing torn clothes and had unusu¬ ally long hair. Not much was left of his face because the body had been in the water a long time. They said that the body was floating on its back in the water. I knew that the body couldn’t have been Pap because a drowned man doesn’t float on his back; he floats on his face. The body had been that of a woman dressed in men’s clothing. They buried the body before I got to see it, but I was frightened knowing that Pap might soon return to find me.
The boys in Tom Sawyer’s club came together for meetings but we didn’t really steal money or kill anyone. We only imagined that we were killing people and taking their money. Tom Sawyer did a lot of fancy talking, but the rest of us did very little. After a while, I tired of this game. I told Tom Sawyer that I didn’t find the game fun, and he said that it was because I had no imagination. He said that if I read more books, I would know of many famous people who had good imaginations like his.