Summary—Chapter 11: Conscience Racks Tom
The day after Tom and Huck witness Dr. Robinson’s murder,
some townspeople discover the doctor’s corpse in the graveyard,
along with Potter’s knife. A crowd gathers in the cemetery, and
then Potter himself appears. To Tom, Huck, and especially Potter’s
shock, Injun Joe describes how Potter committed the crime. Consequently,
the sheriff arrests Potter for murder.
Tom’s pangs of conscience over not telling the truth
about the murder keep him up at night, but Aunt Polly assumes that just
hearing about the horrid crime has upset him. Tom begins sneaking
to the window of Potter’s jail cell every few days to bring him
small gifts.
Summary—Chapter 12: The Cat and the Pain-Killer
Becky Thatcher falls ill and stops coming to school. Tom’s
depression worsens, so much so that Aunt Polly begins to worry about
his health. She gives him various ineffective “treatments,” which
culminate in an awful-tasting serum called “Pain-killer.” Tom finds
this last treatment so intolerable that he feeds it to the cat,
which reacts with extreme hyperactivity. Aunt Polly discovers what
Tom has done, but she begins to realize that “what was cruelty to
a cat might be cruelty to a boy, too,” and sends
him off to school without punishment. Becky finally returns to school
that morning, but she spurns Tom completely.
Summary—Chapter 13: The Pirate Crew Set Sail
Feeling mistreated, Tom resolves to act on his earlier
impulse to become a pirate. He meets Joe Harper, who is likewise
disaffected because his mother has wrongly accused and punished
him for stealing cream. They find Huck Finn, always up for a new
adventure, and the three agree to slip away to Jackson’s Island,
an uninhabited, forested isle three miles downriver from St. Petersburg.
That night, the three boys take a raft and pole their
way to the island, calling out meaningless nautical commands to
one another as they go. At about two in the morning they arrive
on the island, build a fire, and eat some bacon that Joe has stolen
for them. For the rest of the night they sit around and discuss
pirate conduct. Eventually, however, they think about the meat they
stole and reflect on the shamefulness of their petty crime—after
all, the Bible explicitly forbids stealing. They decide that “their
piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing”
and fall asleep.
Analysis—Chapters 11–13
Twain discourages us from feeling sympathy for Injun Joe,
the novel’s most pronounced villain. We learn that Dr. Robinson
once mistreated Injun Joe by chasing him off when he came begging
one night, but Injun Joe’s willingness to murder a man as retribution
for this relatively minor offense and his decision to pin the crime
on a pathetic drunk who instinctively trusts him confound our ability
to feel sorry for him.
