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Huckleberry Finn

“One morning about day-break, I found a canoe and crossed over a chute to the main shore–it was only two hundred yards¬–and paddled about a mile up a crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn’t get some berries. Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cow-path crossed the crick, there comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they could foot it. I thought I was a goner, for whenever anybody was after anybody I judged it was me–or maybe Jim. I was about to dig out from there in a hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung out and begged me to save their lives–said they hadn’t been doing nothing, and was being chased for it¬–said there was men and does a-coming. They wanted to jump right in, but I says–
‘Don’t you do it. I don’t hear the dogs and horses yet; you’ve got time to crowd through the bush and get up the crick a little ways; then you’ll take to the water and wade down to me and get in–that’ll throw the dogs off the scent.’
They done it, and soon as they was aboard I lit out for our tow-head, and in about five or ten minutes we heard the gods and the men away off, shouting. We heard them coma along towards the crick, but couldn’t see them they seemed to stop and fool around a while; then, as we got further and further away all the time, we couldn’t hardly hear them at all; by the time we had left a mile of woods behind us and struck the river, everything was quiet, and we paddled over to the tow-head and hid in the cotton-woods and was safe.” -Huckleberry Finn, 110
Well, soon as we got done hidin the canoe in the cotton-woods by the raft, these two men got to talkin bout where they was comin from, what their professions was, an how they got into such a mess like this ‘un.
“Well, I reckon since you’re bein the younger of us, you’d best tell your yarn afore I tells mine.”
“Yessir,” the younger replied as he began his story. “T’was aught a week ago when I wus still captain o’ my steamboat...”
“You’s a...