Under the cover of night dotted with small, bright stars, a pack of fledgling gangsters unhitch a skiff and float down the river several miles to a steep cliff on a hillside where the chief of the gangsters, Tom Sawyer, shows his accomplices a small, hardly noticeable hole and guides them through the narrow passage to a room-like cave which he declares to be the robber headquarters of “Tom Sawyer's Gang” (Huck Finn 20). He proclaims that anyone who wants to join his gang must “take an oath, and write his name in blood” (Huck Finn 20), “stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets” (Huck Finn 20). He warns the boys that if anyone divulges the secret, he will have the betrayer's “throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot, forever” (Huck Finn 21).