The Mystery on the Mississippi

But if I ain’t Huck Finn, I was born and raised right here on the river near Hannibal, an’ I know every inch Huck and Tom traveled when they was here.”
    “You do?” Mart asked eagerly. “Could you show us? How about coming along with us up to town? We haven’t had anything to eat. We’ll buy your lunch at the cafe in Becky Thatcher’s house. Can you come?”
    The boy’s face lighted. “I don’t care if I do. But how can you stuff another person in this car ’thout a can opener?”
    “I’ll show you,” Mart answered, and he squeezed far back into the corner. “Have a square inch or two,” he said, waving airily to the space beside him.
    When the Bob-Whites told the boy their names, he repeated each one, then said, “I’m Lem Watkins. As I told you, I live right here on the river. My dad works down on the wharf. I’ve got three brothers. They work there, too. Say, are you awful hungry?”
    “Not exactly starving,” Trixie answered. “Why?”
    “Well, it’s this way. If you’ll slow down a mite, I’ll show you the road that leads over to the cave—you know, that cave where Tom and Becky was lost... where old Injun Joe died. Would you like to see it? Wouldn’t take you more’n part of an hour. Yeah?” His face was covered with a freckled smile. “Then turn here!”
    Jim followed Lem’s directions and stopped the car near a triangular entrance to a big cave. A number of other cars were parked there.
    “Tourists!” Lem said disgustedly. “You have to pay to get in. I forgot to tell you that. It’s the only thing you have to pay to see in all the Mark Twain places. You see, a man bought it from the city, an’ he has to charge admittance to get his money back. You don’t have to pay for me. I can wait here. If you did get me a ticket, though, I could sneak you around to some places they don’t let tourists into.”
    “It’s a deal!” Jim said, and he counted out the price of admission for all of them.
    A guide was just starting down one of the long corridors with a group of, sightseers. Lem ignored him and beckoned to the Bob-Whites. “Come over this way.”
    “This here’s Aladdin’s Palace,” he told them as they entered a huge cathedral-shaped room hung with glittering stalactites. Its walls were frescoed in candle smoke, with the names and addresses of thousands of visitors. In the far end of the big room, a miniature Niagara cascaded from a small spring that crept in between layers of limestone. Lem took his candle and walked back of it, illuminating it just as Tom Sawyer had done to impress Becky.
    All around them, bats flew in and out around the thick columns of crystal stalagmites. Honey cringed, remembering the bats in the frightening Ozark cave they had visited the summer before.
    “This here’s the bench where Tom an’ Becky sat when their candles give out an’ they almost starved to death,” Lem said. “They don’t let everybody in here now. They used to, but people got lost. I wish they’d never put all them electric lights around. A long time ago, we used to really have fun here. Want to see some more?”
    “No,” Honey and Trixie said in one breath.
    “It’s the bats,” Honey added. “They scare me. Missouri must have a lot of caves. We saw so many of them in the Ozarks.”
    “The state’s chuck-full of ’em,” Lem said proudly. “Now, I could show you another about a mile from here. Nobody owns it, an’ we go as far in as we want.”
    “I guess not, thanks,” Jim told him. “We haven’t too much time to spend in Hannibal. Right now, I guess we’d better go and get something to eat.”
    Disappointed, Lem apparently didn’t think he’d earned the ticket they had paid for at the cave entrance. “Shucks, you’d have to stay a month to really see anything. Tell you what. I got an idea. How’d you like to go over to Jackson’s Island and build a bonfire and cook our lunch? I got a raft right down in the willows. We can cross over in a jiffy. I do it all the time. When we get there,’ we can catch us some fish. My raft’s got pontoons on it,” he added proudly. “It can carry an army.”
    “Hooray!” Mart shouted. “We can stop at a grocery store and get some stuff.”
    “Just bread an’ eggs an’ maybe some bacon to sop the bread in,” Lem said. “I got me a fryin’ pan over there, an’ some tin cups. There’s a spring nearby, I mean nearby where I’m goin’ to take you. How about it?”
    “Let’s go!” Brian