Pretty soon he got to worrying and fretting right along day in and day out, and when I asked him what was he in such a state about, he said it ’most broke his heart to think how time was slipping away, and him getting older and older, and no wars breaking out and no way of making a name for himself that he could see. Now that is the way boys is always thinking, but he was the first one I ever heard come out and say it.
So then he set to work to get up a plan to make him celebrated; and pretty soon he struck it, and offered to take me and Jim in. Tom Sawyer was always free and generous that way. There’s a-plenty of boys that’s mighty good and friendly when you’ve got a good thing, but when a good thing happens to come their way they don’t say a word to you, and try to hog it all. That warn’t ever Tom Sawyer’s way, I can say that for him. There’s plenty of boys that will come hankering and groveling around you when you’ve got an apple and beg the core off of you; but when they’ve got one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one time, they say thank you ’most to death, but there ain’t a-going to be no core. But I notice they always git come up with; all you got to do is to wait.
Well, we went out in the woods on the hill, and Tom told us what it was. It was a crusade.
“We went out in the woods on the hill, and Tom told us what it was. It was a crusade.”
“What’s a crusade?” I says.
He looked scornful, the way he’s always done when he was ashamed of a person, and says:
“Huck Finn, do you mean to tell me you don’t know what a crusade is?”
“No,” says I, “I don’t. And I don’t care to, nuther. I’ve lived till now and done without it, and had my health, too. But as soon as you tell me, I’ll know, and that’s soon enough. I don’t see any use in finding out things and clogging up my head with them when I mayn’t ever have any occasion to use ’em. There was Lance Williams, he learned how to talk Choctaw here till one come and dug his grave for him. Now, then, what’s a crusade? But I can tell you one thing before you begin; if it’s a patent-right, there’s no money in it. Bill Thompson he—”
“Patent-right!” says he. “I never see such an idiot. Why, a crusade is a kind of war.”