the plates?” “Why, blame it all, it ain't the _prisoner's_ plates.” “But it's _somebody's_ plates, ain't it?” “Well, spos'n it is?  What does the _prisoner_ care whose--” He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing.  So we cleared out for the house. Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too.  I called it borrowing, because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it warn't borrowing, it was stealing.  He said we was representing prisoners; and prisoners don't care how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody don't blame them for it, either.  It ain't no crime in a prisoner to steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said; it's his right; and so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a perfect right to steal anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves out of prison with.  He said if we warn't prisoners it would be a very different thing, and nobody but a mean, ornery person would steal when he warn't a prisoner.  So we allowed we would steal everything there was that come handy.  And yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that, when I stole a watermelon out of the nigger-patch and eat it; and he made me go and give the niggers a dime without telling them what it was for. Tom said that what he meant was, we could steal anything we _needed_. Well, I says, I needed the watermelon.  But he said I didn't need it to get out of prison with; there's where the difference was.  He said if I'd a wanted it to hide a knife in, and smuggle it to Jim to kill the seneskal with, it would a been all right.  So I let it go at that, though I couldn't see no advantage in my representing a prisoner if I got to set down and chaw over a lot of gold-leaf distinctions like that every time I see a chance to hog a watermelon. Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning