Fair Warning
Here is the short answer. Injun Joe starves to death behind a locked cave door. Tom and Huck find the robbers’ gold under a cross in the dark, and they come out with a little over twelve thousand dollars. Huck hates being rich, and the book ends before anyone grows up. This video spoils all of it, so if you haven’t finished, stop here.
Why They Are in the Cave
Let’s start with the setup. After Injun Joe vanishes from the trial, Tom and Huck go treasure hunting. In the haunted house, they watch two men dig up a box of gold, and one of them is Injun Joe in a disguise. He says he will hide it in Number Two, under the cross.
The boys lose the gold by accident. Injun Joe noticed that a pick and shovel in the house had fresh earth on them. Those were the boys’ own tools, left behind that day. Injun Joe decides to take the box to his den instead.
Tom guesses Number Two is a room in a tavern. He finds the room, and a boy tells him it is always locked. When Tom tries the door, it opens. Injun Joe is asleep on the floor, and Tom runs.
The Picnic
On a Saturday, Becky Thatcher finally gets her long-promised picnic. She is meant to sleep at a friend’s afterward. Tom talks her into going up to the Widow Douglas’s for ice cream instead, which means nobody will know where she is.
The picnic goes by ferry to McDougal’s cave, whose mouth is shaped like the letter A. Children race through the passages with candles. Tom and Becky slip away from the others, down into a part of the cave that has no names on the walls.
Lost
They wander too far, and a cloud of bats chases them, and they cannot find the way back. Tom admits he never made marks to find it again. He shouts, and the echo laughs at him.
They share a wedding cake that Becky saved from the picnic. Tom blows out her candle to save the wax, and then the last one burns away. Days pass. They hear shouting, but a pit blocks the way, and the voices fade. Then Tom, holding a kite string, sees a human hand holding a candle. It belongs to Injun Joe, who runs away.
Above Ground
Meanwhile, on the night of the picnic, Huck has been following Injun Joe and his partner. They climb the hill to the Widow Douglas’s. Injun Joe wants revenge on her dead husband, who once had him whipped, and he means to cut her face. Huck runs for the Welshman and his sons, who fire at the men and scare them off. Huck asks them not to name him, and falls into a fever.
On Sunday, the town learns Becky and Tom never came home. Two hundred men search the cave. They find the names BECKY & TOM in candle smoke, and a ribbon. For three days the village waits.
The Way Out
In the dark, Tom explores alone along his kite string. He sees a speck of daylight and squeezes through a hole to the Mississippi, five miles down the river from the cave’s mouth. A skiff takes them home. The bells ring at midnight, and the town goes wild with joy.
Two weeks later Judge Thatcher says he has sealed the cave door with iron and locked it, so nobody will be lost there again. Tom turns white and says that Injun Joe is inside.
What Happened to Injun Joe
They open the door. Injun Joe lies dead with his face at the crack, as if he had been watching the light. His knife lies broken beside him. He has hacked at the wood, eaten the candle ends, and caught bats to eat. He placed a stone under a drip from the roof to catch the water, a spoonful a day.
The town comes to see him buried, and the book says people had almost as good a time as at a hanging. A petition to pardon him had been signed by many people, and the funeral ends it. Tom feels pity, and a great relief.
The man in the rags, Injun Joe’s partner, is found drowned in the river.
The Gold
The next morning Tom tells Huck the money was never in the tavern. It is in the cave. Tom has found the cross, a smoke mark on a rock. They borrow a skiff and climb through Tom’s secret hole.
They dig under the rock and find the box. It weighs about fifty pounds, so they carry it out in two small bags. Mr. Jones, the Welshman, meets them at his door and hurries them to a party at the widow’s house.
Tom’s cousin Sid has already told the room about Huck’s part in the rescue. Tom cuffs his ears. Then he pours the coins on the widow’s table, and the money comes to a little over twelve thousand dollars.
What the Money Does
The widow invests Huck’s share, and Judge Thatcher invests Tom’s. Each boy gets an income of about a dollar a day. The Judge hears how Tom took a whipping for Becky, and calls it a noble lie.
The village digs up every haunted house looking for more. The widow takes Huck in. He lasts three weeks, then runs off to a barrel. He tells Tom that being rich is worry and sweat. Tom coaxes him back with a promise: he can join the robber gang, but only if he is respectable.
The Loose Ends
A few threads are left. Muff Potter is freed at the trial, when Tom speaks, and the village then pets him as lavishly as it had abused him. Doctor Robinson’s killer is dead, so there is never a hanging. Mrs. Thatcher falls so ill she is delirious, and Aunt Polly’s gray hair turns almost white while she waits.
Huck’s secret comes out at the widow’s party, when Mr. Jones announces who warned them. Huck had begged him to keep it quiet.
The tavern was a red herring. Its locked room held whiskey, the owner was found out for keeping liquor, and the place was shut.
The Conclusion
The book ends with a short note. Twain says the story stops here because it is the history of a boy, and it would turn into the history of a man. Most of the characters, he says, are alive and doing well.
He does not say whether Tom and Becky marry. He only says that some day he may take up the story of the younger ones again.
My Reading
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. I think the ending is a joke on adventure books. Tom spends the whole novel acting out stories, and the real treasure arrives only when he stops. And Huck, the one who gets everything the stories promise, wants to go back to a barrel.
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