Abstract
The best-known trial in twain, no doubt, is that of Muff Potter in Tom Sawyer. Tom and Huck took a dead cat to the graveyard along about midnight intending merely to get rid of warts, but they became eyewitnesses of a murder. When the devil came for old Hoss Williams, they were to heave the dead cat at him and repeat a charm that would “fetch any wart.” Instead of the devil, young Dr. Robinson came to rob the grave, accompanied by Muff Potter and Injun Joe, whom he had paid to dig up the body.
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He had the same idea later when Jim was imprisoned on Silas Phelps’s farm in Huck Finn and when Silas Phelps was imprisoned in Tom Sawyer, Detective.
Injun Joe returns to the village in disguise, and the boys barely escape death at his hands when he nearly discovers them in the abandoned house where they have gone to seek buried treasure. They are saved when the stairway gives way under the weight of Injun Joe. Injun Joe finds the treasure, and Tom and Huck watch him and try to find out where he has concealed it. Huck follows him one night and thus saves the Widow Douglas from the half-breed’s vengeance (the lady’s husband had once had Injun Joe punished for his rascality). Finally Injun Joe is found dead in the sealed cave, and the boys recover the treasure. It brought them six thousand dollars apiece. Invested at six percent, it earned them nearly a dollar a day—more than a boy knew what to do with in those old days.
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© 1958 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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McKeithan, D.M. (1958). The Trial of Muff Potter in Tom Sawyer. In: Court Trials in Mark Twain and other Essays. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-8244-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-8921-7
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