Yes, Tom’s blemishless week had restored him to the favor of his aunt and uncle.

His mother was satisfied with him, too.  Privately, she believed she was coming to love him, but she did not say so.  She told him to go along to St. Louis now, and she would get ready and follow.  Then she smashed her whisky bottle and said: 

“Dah now!  I’s a-gwine to make you walk as straight as a string, Chambers, en so I’s bown, you ain’t gwine to git no bad example out o’ yo’ mammy.  I tole you you couldn’t go into no bad comp’ny.  Well, you’s gwine into my comp’ny, en I’s gwine to fill de bill.  Now, den, trot along, trot along!”

Tom went aboard one of the big transient boats that night with his heavy satchel of miscellaneous plunder, and slept the sleep of the unjust, which is serener and sounder than the other kind, as we know by the hanging-eve history of a million rascals.  But when he got up in the morning, luck was against him again:  a brother thief had robbed him while he slept, and gone ashore at some intermediate landing.

CHAPTER 16 —­ Sold Down the River

     If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he
     will not bite you.  This is the principal difference between
     a dog and a man. —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster.  It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster. —­ Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

When Roxana arrived, she found her son in such despair and misery that her heart was touched and her motherhood rose up strong in her.  He was ruined past hope now; his destruction would be immediate and sure, and he would be an outcast and friendless.  That was reason enough for a mother to love a child; so she loved him, and told him so.  It made him wince, secretly—­for she was a “nigger.”  That he was one himself was far from reconciling him to that despised race.

Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he responded uncomfortably, but as well as he could.  And she tried to comfort him, but that was not possible.  These intimacies quickly became horrible to him, and within the hour he began to try to get up courage enough to tell her so, and require that they be discontinued or very considerably modified.  But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now, for she had begun to think.  She was trying to invent a saving plan.  Finally she started up, and said she had found a way out.  Tom was almost suffocated by the joy of this sudden good news.  Roxana said: 

“Here is de plan, en she’ll win, sure.  I’s a nigger, en nobody ain’t gwine to doubt it dat hears me talk.  I’s wuth six hund’d dollahs.  Take en sell me, en pay off dese gamblers.”

Tom was dazed.  He was not sure he had heard aright.  He was dumb for a moment; then he said: