18. “Red Chief,” says I to the kid, “would you like to go home?”
19. “Aw, what for?” says he. “I don’t have any fun at home. I hate to go to school. I like to camp out. Key.
Use of the unexpected. You won’t take me back home again, Snake-eye, will you?”
20. “Not right away,” says I. “We’ll stay here in the cave a while.”
21. “All right!” says he. “That’ll be fine. I never had such fun in all my life.”
A tribute throughout to the dime dreadful.
22. We went to bed about eleven o’clock. We spread down some wide blankets and quilts and put Red Chief between us. We weren’t afraid he’d run away. He kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for his rifle and screeching: “Hist! pard,” in mine and Bill’s ears, as the fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to his young imagination the stealthy approach of the outlaw band. Narrator lapses now and then into “better” language. At last, I fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamed that I had been kidnapped and chained to a tree by a ferocious pirate with red hair.
Contrast.
23. Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs—they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.
24. I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Chief was sitting on Bill’s chest, with one hand twined in Bill’s hair. In the other he had the sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon; and he was industriously and realistically trying to take Bill’s scalp, according to the sentence that had been pronounced upon him the evening before.
Plot Situation.