The Blankenships being handy to the back gate of the Hill Street house, he adopted them at sight.  Their free mode of life suited him.  He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and Tom made cat-call signals at night that would bring Sam out on the shed roof at the back and down a little trellis and flight of steps to the group of boon companions, which, besides Tom, usually included John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the two younger Bowen boys.  They were not malicious boys, but just mischievous, fun-loving boys—­little boys of ten or twelve—­rather thoughtless, being mainly bent on having a good time.

They had a wide field of action:  they ranged from Holliday’s Hill on the north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods between.  They explored both banks of the river, the islands, and the deep wilderness of the Illinois shore.  They could run like turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one.  No orchard or melon-patch was entirely safe from them.  No dog or slave patrol was so watchful that they did not sooner or later elude it.  They borrowed boats with or without the owner’s consent—­it did not matter.

Most of their expeditions were harmless enough.  They often cruised up to Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day feasting.  There were quantities of turtles and their eggs there, and mussels, and plenty of fish.  Fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with incidental raiding, for adventure.  Bear Creek was their swimming-place by day, and the river-front at night-fall—­a favorite spot being where the railroad bridge now ends.  It was a good distance across to the island where, in the book, Tom Sawyer musters his pirate band, and where later Huck found Nigger Jim, but quite often in the evening they swam across to it, and when they had frolicked for an hour or more on the sandbar at the head of the island, they would swim back in the dusk, breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or dread.  They could swim all day, those little scamps, and seemed to have no fear.  Once, during his boyhood, Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles as he had to go.  He was seized with a cramp on the return trip.  His legs became useless and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms.

The adventures of Sam Clemens and his comrades would fill several books of the size of Tom Sawyer.  Many of them are, of course, forgotten now, but those still remembered show that Mark Twain had plenty of real material.