CHAPTER XXXVII

Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer prepare more tools and distractions for Jim’s escape. They salvage a tin washpan to bake a pie, plant shingle-nails on Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas, and Tom slips a pewter spoon into Silas’s pocket. At breakfast, Aunt Sally explodes over missing items—shirt, spoon, candles, sheet, and a candlestick.

When Silas sheepishly finds the spoon in his pocket, Tom and Huck slip to the cellar and secretly plug the rat-holes, giving Silas cover for his neglected chore. Tom then engineers a spoon-counting trick, swapping one in and out until Aunt Sally can no longer trust her own tallies. They use this chaos to pass Jim a spoon and a shingle-nail.

To meet Tom’s fanciful plan requirements, the boys repeatedly steal and replace a sheet until Aunt Sally gives up counting. They struggle to bake a pie that can conceal a rope ladder, finally twisting a sheet into a rope and learning to bake it inside a brass warming-pan taken from the garret.

After several failures, they produce a workable “witch pie” stuffed with the rag-rope ladder and slip it into Jim’s pan along with three tin plates. Jim covertly hides the rope ladder in his straw tick and scratches marks on a tin plate, then tosses the plate out through the window-hole as part of the staged prison narrative.