“Well,” I says, “what’s she been doing since—er—since we had the accident?”
“Wandering,” he says, kinder troubled—“wandering, without any doubt. She’s in a wind now that’s blowing her south of east. We don’t know how long that’s been going on, either.”
So then he p’inted her east, and said he would hold her there till we rousted out the breakfast. The professor had laid in everything a body could want; he couldn’t ’a’ been better fixed. There wasn’t no milk for the coffee, but there was water, and everything else you could want, and a charcoal stove and the fixings for it, and pipes and cigars and matches; and wine and liquor, which warn’t in our line; and books, and maps, and charts, and an accordion; and furs, and blankets, and no end of rubbish, like brass beads and brass jewelry, which Tom said was a sure sign that he had an idea of visiting among savages. There was money, too. Yes, the professor was well enough fixed.
After breakfast Tom learned me and Jim how to steer, and divided us all up into four-hour watches, turn and turn about; and when his watch was out I took his place, and he got out the professor’s papers and pens and wrote a letter home to his aunt Polly, telling her everything that had happened to us, and dated it “In the Welkin, approaching England,” and folded it together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and directed it, and wrote above the direction, in big writing, “From Tom Sawyer, the Erronort,” and said it would stump old Nat Parsons, the postmaster, when it come along in the mail. I says:
“Tom Sawyer, this ain’t no welkin, it’s a balloon.”
“Well, now, who said it was a welkin, smarty?”
“You’ve wrote it on the letter, anyway.”
“What of it? That don’t mean that the balloon’s the welkin.”
“Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a welkin?”
I see in a minute he was stuck. He raked and scraped around in his mind, but he couldn’t find nothing, so he had to say: