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Tom told me what his plan was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it.
In this quotation from Chapter 34, we see Huck once again swayed by his friend Tom. Although in practical terms it would be quite simple to break Jim out of the shed, Tom insists on a more complicated plan with “style.” Dependent on Tom not to blow his cover—at this point, Huck is pretending, for the benefit of the Phelpses, to be Tom, while Tom is pretending to be his brother Sid—Huck has to go along. Indeed, as we see, Tom’s return in the final chapters of the novel temporarily stops or reverses Huck’s development: Huck, in many ways, reverts to the status of Tom’s follower that he occupied at the beginning of the novel. Nonetheless, Huck maintains his characteristic realistic outlook on the world, and his prediction that Tom’s plan could get them killed is more accurate than he knows.
