The Twain gang will hang *me* but I'd bet it was just one of these
inspirations (or, to give more credit to MT, he might have considered
Huck's furture fate at *that* stage of writing HF - remember, it was long
before he decided to "let them carry on on the river") - and afterwards
neither he nor Howells or anyone else bothered to correct this passage. I,
too, stumbled upon it when I translated HF into German. The book is full
of slips like this one - e.g. compare the description how Jim finds the
dead man in the floating house with the one in the final chapter.

BTW my translation of HF has just been published by Cecilie Dressler
Verlag, Hamburg, Germany.

Wolf Harranth