Early the next morning, Tom and I searched the rubbish heap in the backyard and found an old tin washtub.
We decided that we could use it to bake our big pie in.
We hid it in the hut, and then went into the house.
No one was in the kitchen yet, so we borrowed a spoon.
Tom said Jim could use it to scratch a sad message on his wall.
Later at breakfast, Aunt Sally looked red-faced and cross.
She said to Uncle Silas, "I've looked everywhere for your clean shirt, but I can't find it."
A piece of cornbread stuck in my throat, and I choked a little.
"That's not the only thing that's gone," she said.
"Somehow I've lost one of my best spoons.
Candles are missing from the cellar, too. But rats might have taken those.
Silas, I've asked you many times to plug the holes in the cellar so that they can't come in."
Uncle Silas apologized to his wife and said he would plug the holes that day.
Just then, a young black servant came into the kitchen and told Aunt Sally that a sheet was missing. At that, Aunt Sally grew very angry.
"Out of my kitchen, all of you!" she yelled.
That night, Tom and I put the sheet back on the line.
Then we snuck into the closet and took a different sheet.
We kept doing this for several days—taking a sheet from one place and putting one back in the other.
By the end of three days, Aunt Sally was so confused that she didn't know how many sheets she had.
She stopped complaining about the missing sheet.
We tore up the sheet and braided the strips together to make a rope ladder.
We pretended that it had taken us nine months to make it.
Next we had to bake a pie to hide the ladder in and give it to Jim.
That night, we borrowed flour from the kitchen.
The next day, we took it and the washtub into the woods, and we built a campfire to bake the pie.
The tub was large, but we needed a big pie to hide our ladder.
It was hard work. We didn't put anything inside the pie because we wanted to leave room for the ladder.
But the top crust kept collapsing, and we kept having to start again.
Finally, we realized that we had to bake the pie with the ladder already inside, and that is what we did.
Then we took the huge pie through the hole we'd dug and gave it to Jim.
We told him to be very careful eating the pie, so that he didn't chew the ladder.
And we told him that he should hide the ladder in his mattress. Jim agreed.
Tom said that he thought our plan was going very well.
But Jim hadn't yet used the spoon to scratch a sad message on the wall.
Tom made a list of things Jim might write, and his voice trembled with emotion when he read them to me:
1. Here, a captive heart broke.
2. Here, a poor prisoner, forgotten by the world, lived out his sad life.
3. Here, a lonely soul went to its rest, after 37 years of being a prisoner.
I agreed that they were very sad, but I saw a problem.
He doesn't know how to read or write.
Tom said that he would outline the letters on the wall, and Jim could trace over them.
The next night, we visited Jim again.
Tom told Jim that he really ought to have some spiders, or maybe some rats or snakes, in his prison.
Tom said that prisoners in books always had creatures like this.
"You could make them your pets," Tom said.
Jim thought this was a very bad idea, and so did I.
But I still didn't stop Tom. I wish I had.
The next day, we went down to the cellar and opened one of the holes Uncle Silas had mended.
Tom and I caught 16 rats in a wire cage and hid them under our bed.
However, the latch on our cage door popped open, and they all escaped.
It took us quite a while to catch 16 more.
We caught a few garter snakes too, and some of them got free in the house.
The whole family was becoming very nervous, with rats and snakes popping out when they weren't expecting them.
Meanwhile, we also caught spiders, frogs, and caterpillars.
We put all the creatures in Jim's shed.
Every time a rat gave Jim a little nip, he'd make a mark on the shirt in his blood.
Jim was kept very busy satisfying Tom's need for adventure.