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). Getting out of a piece of paper on which he has written his two solemn oaths, Tom proclaims that anyone who wants to join his “high-toned” (Huck Finn 21) gang must abide by the rules he mostly plagiarizes from his pirate and robber books; otherwise, he will give the non-conformist a horrendous punishment. He demands that, for instance, all members are required to “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). Provided anyone divulges the secret or betrays the band, 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). Despite of the fact that the regulations agreed on by internal consensus in the gang are acclaimed as “a real beautiful oath” (Huck Finn 21), there are some dissenting voices among those little gangsters when Tom interprets the meaning of ransom. With great aplomb, he says ransom means “we [the boys] keep them [the captives] till they’re dead” (Huck Finn 21). Being unsatisfied with Tom’s unconvincing explication, Ben Rogers immediately retorts that “I think that’s foolishness. Why can’t a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they get here” (Huck Finn 22)? Instead of being struck dumb by Ben’s quip, Tom stifles the voices of dissent quickly by emphasizing the importance of following the rules prescribed by the storybooks:
Because it ain’t in the books so—that's why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular, or don’t you?—that’s the idea. Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn ’em anything? Not by a good deal. No, sir, we’ll just go on and ransom them in the regular way. (Huck Finn 22)
Children’s game as the gang is, it can be viewed as a childish form of a society in which a set of rules and regulations specify clearly what the boys can do and cannot do under given circumstances. In order to play their game “in the regular way” (Huck Finn 22), the gang strongly disapproves of and even smothers any voices or ideas different from the generally accepted standards. Even if its members are deeply suspicious of the feasibility of the rule, the boys still feel obliged to follow Tom’s command with blind obedience, never bothering to question what his purpose might have been, for they do not “want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up” (Huck Finn 22). Hence, the gang is governed by a code of behavior, ethics, and morals which the boys believe can ensure the success of their game.