He ran it over the first plank. After one stroke he stopped and saw how much more there was left to do. He sat down on the curb and sighed.

Tom thought of all the excitement he was missing. Soon the other boys would walk by. They would make fun of him.

Suddenly Tom saw Ben Rogers coming down the street. Tom picked up the brush and went back to work. He had a plan.

Ben walked right up to Tom. He was eating an apple. Tom’s mouth watered for the apple, but he kept painting.

“You have to work?” teased Ben. “I’m going swimming. Don’t you wish you could come?”

Tom stepped back and looked at Ben thoughtfully.

“What do you mean by ‘work’?” he asked.

“What you’re doing is work, isn’t it?” replied Ben.

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”

Tom turned back to the fence and started whitewashing once more.

“You mean you like what you’re doing?”

Tom kept painting.

“Why not? Does a boy get to whitewash a fence every day?”

Ben watched Tom’s brush go back and forth. The fence looked clean and white where Tom had painted it. Tom made whitewashing look easy. He made it look fun!

“Tom, let me whitewash a little,” asked Ben.

But Tom wouldn’t give up his brush.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Aunt Polly is real fussy about the street fence. If it were the back fence, maybe. But this fence needs a good eye.

“There’s only one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, who can do this job right.”

Ben begged. Then he offered Tom his apple. Only two bites were gone from it. Tom sighed and handed Ben the brush. He took the apple and sat on a barrel in the shade. Ben painted and sweated in the sun. The plan worked!

After Ben, Billy Fisher came along. Billy gave Tom a good kite for a turn at whitewashing. Then there was Johnny Miller. He gave Tom a dead rat tied to a string. And so on and so on, hour after hour.

By early afternoon Tom had a pile of goodies at his feet. And the fence had three coats of whitewash on it!

Tom told Aunt Polly that he had finished painting.

“May I go and play now?”

“What? Already?” asked Aunt Polly. She couldn’t believe it.