Huck/Jim Encounter 7 - Chapter 13

Huck and Jim have escaped from the wreck with the skiff that the murdering gang had planned to use for their own escape. Now the men were trapped on the wreck, and Huck and Jim were again floating on the river.

Pretty soon Huck's conscience begins to bother him, even for a gang of murderers:

Now was the first time that I begun to worry about the men—I reckon I hadn’t had time to before.  I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix.  I says to myself, there ain’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it?  So says I to Jim:
“The first light we see we’ll land a hundred yards below it or above it, in a place where it’s a good hiding-place for you and the skiff, and then I’ll go and fix up some kind of a yarn, and get somebody to go for that gang and get them out of their scrape, so they can be hung when their time comes.”

Somehow, being hung is better than drowning. Of course one involves public justice and the other is likely anonymous. Still, it invokes the humor in the situation.

And as for Huck imagining that someday he will be a murderer, what brought that on? Perhaps the self-indictment that he is an abolitionist?

So Huck does arrange for a ferryman to try to rescue the gang from the wreck, but it's too late. We never hear whether the gang is dead or not, only that the wreck became dislodged and Huck sees it, and the ferryman before he re-joins Jim.

...so we struck for an island, and hid the raft, and sunk the skiff, and turned in and slept like dead people.

Jim is not helping here. Huck is on his own, but trying to bring the gang to justice. It can be argued that God's justice was served as they all drowned, rather than facing the jury and noose.

Also notice that Huck does not risk Jim's freedom. He doesn't involve Jim at all.