The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete — Résumé 🇺🇸 English
Aunt Polly searches everywhere for Tom, eventually catching him emerging from a closet with jam on his hands and mouth just as he attempts a clever escape trick. Feeling guilty that she rarely disciplines him properly, she decides she must force him to work on Saturday as punishment. Later, after Tom plays hookey and returns home just in time to let Jim do most of his wood-sawing chores, Aunt Polly cross-examines him during supper to find out if he went swimming. Thanks to a clever trick with her sewing thread, she initially believes his shirt collar is securely sewn, but Sid points out that the thread color has changed from white to black. Enraged at Sid for exposing him, Tom slips out to practice a new whistling technique and quickly forgets his troubles.
While walking through the shabby village of St Petersburg, Tom encounters a well-dressed new boy wearing a cap, a clean blue roundabout, trousers, shoes, and a necktie on a weekday. Deeply envious and irritated by the stranger's citified appearance, Tom starts a tense verbal confrontation that quickly escalates into mutual taunts and boasts about non-existent big brothers. When Tom dares the new boy to step across a line drawn in the dust, the stranger promptly does so, prompting Tom to knock away the coppers the boy offers him. The two boys immediately launch into a fierce wrestling and fistfight in the dirt.
Tom manages to sit astride his opponent, pounding him until the stranger finally gasps enough. As the defeated boy walks away sobbing and threatening future revenge, he throws a stone that strikes Tom between the shoulders. Tom chases the rival all the way to his home and stakes out his front gate until the boy's mother appears, calls Tom a vulgar child, and orders him away. Tom returns home late that night by climbing cautiously through a window, only to walk right into an ambush set by his aunt, whose discovery of his ruined clothes solidifies her absolute resolve to make him spend his Saturday holiday working.