that we was at it thirty-seven years.  Then we can snatch him out and rush him away the first time there's an alarm.  Yes, I reckon that 'll be the best way.” “Now, there's _sense_ in that,” I says. “Letting on don't cost nothing; letting on ain't no trouble; and if it's any object, I don't mind letting on we was at it a hundred and fifty year.  It wouldn't strain me none, after I got my hand in.  So I'll mosey along now, and smouch a couple of case-knives.” “Smouch three,” he says; “we want one to make a saw out of.” “Tom, if it ain't unregular and irreligious to sejest it,” I says, “there's an old rusty saw-blade around yonder sticking under the weather-boarding behind the smoke-house.” He looked kind of weary and discouraged-like, and says: “It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck.  Run along and smouch the knives--three of them.”  So I done it. CHAPTER XXXVI. AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire, and went to work.  We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log.  Tom said he was right behind Jim's bed now, and we'd dig in under it, and when we got through there couldn't nobody in the cabin ever know there was any hole there, because Jim's counter-pin hung down most to the ground, and you'd have to raise it up and look under to see the hole.  So we dug and dug with the case-knives till most midnight; and then we was dog-tired, and our hands was blistered, and yet you couldn't see we'd done anything hardly.  At last I says: “This ain't no thirty-seven year job; this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer.” He never said nothing.  But he sighed, and pretty soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little while I knowed that he was thinking. Then he says: “It ain't no use, Huck, it ain't a-going to work.  If we was prisoners it would, because then we'd have as many years