The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Tom Sawyer talks the neighborhood into whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence for him, and gets paid for the privilege. Then he and Huckleberry Finn take a dead cat to the graveyard at midnight and watch Injun Joe knife a man. Tom plays pirate on Jackson's Island, courts Becky Thatcher, is called to the witness stand at a murder trial he had sworn a blood oath to stay out of, and is finally lost in McDougal's cave with the killer somewhere inside it. Fair warning: Injun Joe is a half-breed caricature and the period's racial slur is on the page. Episodic, genuinely funny, and much darker in its back half than the fence scene suggests.