nights.  He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on.  Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me.  The widow she found out where I was by and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn't long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it--all but the cowhide part. It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study.  Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time.  I didn't want to go back no more.  I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't no objections.  It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around. But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts.  He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in.  Once he locked me in and was gone three days.  It was dreadful lonesome.  I judged he had got drownded, and I wasn't ever going to get out any more.  I was scared.  I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there.  I had tried to get out of that cabin many a time, but I couldn't find no way.  There warn't a window to it big enough for a dog to get through.  I couldn't get up the chimbly; it was too narrow.  The door was thick, solid oak slabs.  Pap was pretty careful not to leave a knife or anything in the cabin when he was away; I reckon I had hunted the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I was most all the tim