“Lookout, boys; she’s coming!”

She came.  The huge boulder kept to the ground at first, then, gathering momentum, it went bounding into the air.  About half-way down the hill it struck a sapling and cut it clean off.  This turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, hearing the noise and seeing the great mass come crashing in his direction, made a wild effort to whip up his mule.

The boys watched their bomb with growing interest.  It was headed straight for the negro, also for a cooper-shop across the road.  It made longer leaps with every bound, and, wherever it struck, fragments and dust would fly.  The shop happened to be empty, but the rest of the catastrophe would call for close investigation.  They wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land.  It was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get exactly in its path.  The boys stood holding their breath, their mouths open.

Then, suddenly, they could hardly believe their eyes; a little way above the road the boulder struck a projection, made one mighty leap into the air, sailed clear over the negro and his mule, and landed in the soft dirt beyond the road, only a fragment striking the shop, damaging, but not wrecking it.  Half buried in the ground, the great stone lay there for nearly forty years; then it was broken up.  It was the last rock the boys ever rolled down.  Nearly sixty years later John Briggs and Mark Twain walked across Holliday’s Hill and looked down toward the river road.

Mark Twain said:  “It was a mighty good thing, John, that stone acted the way it did.  We might have had to pay a fancy price for that old darky I can see him yet."[1]

It can be no harm now, to confess that the boy Sam Clemens—­a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at the time, and by no means large for his years—­was the leader of this unhallowed band.  In any case, truth requires this admission.  If the band had a leader, it was Sam, just as it was Tom Sawyer in the book.  They were always ready to listen to him—­they would even stop fishing to do that—­and to follow his plans.  They looked to him for ideas and directions, and he gloried in being a leader and showing off, just as Tom did in the book.  It seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot days he could not have looked down the years and caught a glimpse of his splendid destiny.

But of literary fame he could never have dreamed.  The chief ambition —­the “permanent ambition”—­of every Hannibal boy was to be a pilot.  The pilot in his splendid glass perch with his supreme power and princely salary was to them the noblest of all human creatures.  An elder Bowen boy was already a pilot, and when he came home, as he did now and then, his person seemed almost too sacred to touch.

Next to being a pilot, Sam thought he would like to be a pirate or a bandit or a trapper-scout—­something gorgeous and awe-inspiring, where his word, his nod, would still be law.  The river kept his river ambition always fresh, and with the cave and the forest round about helped him to imagine those other things.