 of the window. The Iron Mask always done that, and it's a
blame' good way, too.«
    »Jim ain't got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan.«
    »That ain't anything; we can get him some.«
    »Can't nobody read his plates.«
    »That ain't got nothing to do with it, Huck Finn. All he's got to do is to
write on the plate and throw it out You don't have to be able to read it. Why,
half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or
anywhere else.«
    »Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?«
    »Why, blame it all, it ain't the prisoner's plates.«
    »But it's somebody's plates, ain't it?«
    »Well, spos'n it is? What does the prisoner care whose -«
    He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing. So we
cleared out for the house.
    Along during that morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the
clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and
got the fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing, because that was
what pap always called it; but Tom said it warn't borrowing, it was stealing. He
said we was representing prisoners; and prisoners don't care how they get a
thing so they get it, and nobody don't blame them for it, either. It ain't no
crime in a prisoner to steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said; it's
his right; and so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a perfect
right to steal anything on this place we had the least use for, to get ourselves
out of prison with. He said if we warn't prisoners it would be a very different
thing, and nobody but a mean ornery person would steal when he warn't a
prisoner. So we allowed we would steal everything there was that come handy. And
yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that, when I stole a watermelon out of
the nigger patch and eat it; and he made me go and give the niggers a dime,
without telling them what it was for. Tom said that what he meant
