and when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message to let the world know where he's captivated, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window.  The Iron Mask always done that, and it's a blame' good way, too.” “Jim ain't got no tin plates.  They feed him in a pan.” “That ain't nothing; we can get him some.” “Can't nobody _read_ his plates.” “That ain't got anything to _do_ with it, Huck Finn.  All _he's_ got to do is to write on the plate and throw it out.  You don't _have_ to be able to read it. Why, half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else.” “Well, then, what's the sense in wasting 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 watermel