At this dark and hopeless moment he found a way out.
He took up his brush and went to work. Ben Rogers, his friend was walking along the street eating an apple. From time to time he produced sounds: ding-dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he was personating a steamboat. As he came closer, he called:
‘Tom!’
No answer. Tom had been whitewashing, then he looked at the fence with the eye of an artist. Tom’s mouth watered for the apple, but he continued working. Ben said:
‘Hello, old chap!’ Tom turned to Ben.
‘Why, it’s you, Ben! I didn’t notice you.’
‘I’m going swimming. Would you like to join me? Oh, I see, you can’t go, you have to work!’
‘What do you call work?’
‘Why, isn’t THAT work?’
Tom continued his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:
‘Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. All I know is it suits Tom Sawyer.’
‘Don’t say you LIKE it. I won’t believe you!’
The brush continued to move.
‘Like it? Well, does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?’
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped biting his apple. He was getting more and more interested. At last he said:
‘Tom, let ME whitewash a little.’
‘If it was the back fence I wouldn’t mind and aunt Polly wouldn’t. But it’s the front fence; it must be done very carefully. There isn’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it should be done.’
‘Oh, let me just try. Only just a little. I’ll give you the core of my apple.’
‘No, Ben, I’m afraid–’
‘I’ll give you ALL of it!’
Tom gave the brush to Ben and sat in the shade.
He didn’t have to work any more. Some other boys stopped by now and then; at first they joked but remained to whitewash. Billy Fisher bought his chance to whitewash for a kite, Johnny Miller – for a dead rat – and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the afternoon came, Tom who had been so poor in the morning, became a wealthy boy. Besides the before mentioned things, he had twelve marbles, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a tin soldier, a kitten with only one eye, the handle of a knife, and a lot of other valuable things.
He had had a nice, good, idle time, plenty of company – and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it!
* * *
Tom came to the living-room which was their bedroom, breakfast-room, dining-room, and library at the same time, Aunt Polly was sitting by an open window. She was sure that Tom had left long ago, and she was surprised at seeing him.