CHAPTER XXXIX.

At dawn, Huck and Tom fetch a rat trap, capture a prime lot, and hide it under Aunt Sally’s bed. A child, Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Alexander Phelps, opens the trap, releasing the rats and sending Aunt Sally onto the bed in a panic. After a whipping and more work, Huck and Tom replenish the rats, then collect spiders, bugs, frogs, and chase a hornet’s nest before quitting.

They bag two dozen harmless snakes, but the sack comes untied and the snakes infest the house, repeatedly startling Aunt Sally and disrupting the family. Huck and Tom endure more punishments and restock the creatures, while Jim suffers nightly from the pests swarming his cabin. Jim complains that snakes, rats, and spiders take shifts tormenting him, and vows never to be a prisoner again.

After three weeks, the props are complete: the shirt for Jim’s journal (written between rat bites when the “ink” is fresh), homemade pens, carved inscriptions on the grindstone, and a bed-leg sawed off—its sawdust eaten, causing stomachaches. Silas Phelps, getting no reply from a supposed plantation, decides to advertise Jim in St. Louis and New Orleans, spurring Huck and Tom to hurry.

Tom dictates “nonnamous” warnings to create proper melodrama. Huck steals a servant girl’s dress to deliver the first note; then they add bloody skull-and-crossbones and coffin drawings on the doors, keeping Aunt Sally jumpy and sleepless. Finally, Tom plants a detailed letter on a sleeping guard, claiming to be a repentant gang member who reveals a midnight plot to steal Jim and instructs the family to lock the intruders in when he bleats like a sheep.

With the household thoroughly alarmed and the hour set, Tom declares the “grand bulge” ready, positioning their overblown “evasion” to unfold at midnight before Silas’s advertisements can expose Jim.