Finding civilized life confining, his spirits are raised somewhat when Tom Sawyer helps him to escape one night past Miss Watson's slave Jim, to meet up with Tom's gang of self-proclaimed ""robbers."" Huck is suddenly interrupted by the reappearance of his shiftless father, who gains custody of Huck and leaves town with him.

Pap forcibly moves Huck to his isolated cabin in the woods on the Illinois shoreline.

Due to Pap's drunken violence and habit of keeping Huck locked inside the cabin, Huck, during one of his father's absences, elaborately fakes his own death, escapes the cabin, and sets off down river.

He settles comfortably, on Jackson's Island on the Mississippi.

Here, Huck reunites with Jim, Miss Watson's slave. Jim has also run away after he overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him ""down the river"" (to presumably more brutal owners).

Jim plans to make his way to the town of Cairo in Illinois, a free state, so that he can later buy the rest of his enslaved family's freedom...