<Li> Mary Jane, Joanna, and Susan Wilks are the three young nieces of their wealthy guardian, Peter Wilks, who has recently died . The duke and the king try to steal the inheritance left by Peter Wilks, by posing as Peter's estranged brothers from England . </Li> <Li> Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps buy Jim from the "Duke" and the "King". She is a loving, high - strung "farmer's wife", and he a plodding old man, both farmer and preacher . Huck poses as their nephew, after he parts from the con men . </Li> <P> The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri (based on the actual town of Hannibal, Missouri), on the shore of the Mississippi River "forty to fifty years ago" (the novel having been published in 1884). Huckleberry "Huck" Finn (the protagonist and first - person narrator) and his friend, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (detailed in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck explains how he is placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her stringent sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him and teach him religion . Finding civilized life confining, his spirits are raised somewhat when Tom Sawyer helps him to escape one night past Miss Watson's slave Jim, to meet up with Tom's gang of self - proclaimed "robbers ." Just as the gang's activities begin to bore Huck, he is suddenly interrupted by the reappearance of his shiftless father, "Pap", an abusive alcoholic . Knowing that Pap would only spend the money on alcohol, Huck is successful in preventing Pap from acquiring his fortune; however, Pap kidnaps Huck and leaves town with him . </P> <P> Pap forcibly moves Huck to his isolated cabin in the woods along the Illinois shoreline . Because of Pap's drunken violence and imprisonment of Huck inside the cabin, Huck, during one of his father's absences, elaborately fakes his own death, escapes from the cabin, and sets off downriver . He settles comfortably, on Jackson's Island . Here, Huck reunites with Jim, Miss Watson's slave . Jim has also run away after he overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him "down the river" to presumably more brutal owners . Jim plans to make his way to the town of Cairo in Illinois, a free state, so that he can later buy the rest of his enslaved family's freedom . At first, Huck is conflicted about the sin and crime of supporting a runaway slave, but as the two talk in depth and bond over their mutually held superstitions, Huck emotionally connects with Jim, who increasingly becomes Huck's close friend and guardian . After heavy flooding on the river, the two find a raft (which they keep) as well as an entire house floating on the river . Entering the house to seek loot, Jim finds the naked body of a dead man lying on the floor, shot in the back . He prevents Huck from viewing the corpse . </P>

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