“Lions a-comin’!—lions! Quick, Mars Tom! Jump for yo’ life, Huck!”
Oh, and didn’t we! We never stopped for clothes, but waltzed up the ladder just so. Jim lost his head straight off—he always done it whenever he got excited and scared; and so now, ’stead of just easing the ladder up from the ground a little, so the animals couldn’t reach it, he turned on a raft of power, and we went whizzing up and was dangling in the sky before he got his wits together and seen what a foolish thing he was doing. Then he stopped her, but he had clean forgot what to do next; so there we was, so high that the lions looked like pups, and we was drifting off on the wind.
But Tom he shinned up and went for the works and begun to slant her down, and back toward the lake, where the animals was gathering like a camp-meeting, and I judged he had lost his head, too; for he knowed I was too scared to climb, and did he want to dump me among the tigers and things?
But no, his head was level, he knowed what he was about. He swooped down to within thirty or forty feet of the lake, and stopped right over the center, and sung out:
“Leggo, and drop!”
I done it, and shot down, feet first, and seemed to go about a mile toward the bottom; and when I come up, he says:
“Now lay on your back and float till you’re rested and got your pluck back, then I’ll dip the ladder in the water and you can climb aboard.”
I done it. Now that was ever so smart in Tom, because if he had started off somewheres else to drop down on the sand, the menagerie would ’a’ come along, too, and might ’a’ kept us hunting a safe place till I got tuckered out and fell.
“And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting out the clothes”