Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Terrified, Huck and Jim search for the skiff the men used to reach the wreck, at long last finding it. Just as they do, one of the three men pokes his head out of a door mere feet away from Huck. But the man doesn’t see him in the dark. After the man goes back with his partner into the steamboat, Huck and Jim make a break for the skiff, jump in, and cut it loose. They drift in silence.

Huck realizes it must be dreadful to be in the position the robber-murderers are in, trapped on the steamboat without any means of escape. After all, he figures that he himself might become a murderer one day, and then, he says, “how would I like it?” He thinks of ways to save the murderers from the steamboat, but the storm threatens to make any rescue impossible.

In the darkness, Huck and Jim spot their unmanned raft and paddle towards it. Upon reaching it, Jim boards, and Huck tells him to signal with a light when he has floated two miles so that Huck, in the skiff, can meet up with him. Soon afterward, as Huck paddles toward Jim’s light, Huck sees a village on the shore. After arriving there, he lies to a watchman, telling him that “pap, and mam, and sis, and Miss Hooker” are up the river in a wrecked steamboat, in dire trouble. The watchmen refuses to help, at first, but then paddles top help once Huck lies that the watchman will be paid for rescuing them.

Huck feels good about going to so much trouble to save the gang in the steamboat. He thinks that the Widow would be proud of him, because “rapscallions and dead beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in.” Before long, the wreck is towed by the watchman’s ferryboat to the village. Huck, heavy-hearted, realizes that all the robbers must have died. He shoves off and, at last, rejoins Jim, on an island, where the pair “turned in and slept like dead people.”