Huck believes that he is committing a horrible sin by helping Jim (a slave who legally belongs to Miss Watson) run away. In his time period, most people thought that it was a terrible crime to help a slave run away.
In chapter 31, the duke and the king are looking for sneaky ways to make money. When Huck is busy (and distracted with the duke), the duke and king find a way to sell Jim to a nearby farmer (Silas Phelps); Phelps is told that the reward for returning Jim to his master is $200. This would mean that, even paying $40 to the king and the duke, a person who returned Jim could still make $160 of reward money. This whole story, however, is yet another of the duke and king's shenanigans. The details of the duke and king's story are made up; they do not know that Jim is definitely a runaway slave, and they do not know that there was once a $300 reward for finding him (since the townspeople thought he might have killed Huck). All the two men care about is earning some money so that they can get drunk.
At first, Huck is very sad that these two men used Jim in such a terrible way:
After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.
Huck then begins to feel like his conscience is telling him that he is doing the wrong thing by helping Jim run away; he writes Miss Watson a note telling her where Jim was:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN.
He thinks that writing this note will make him feel better; instead, he feels worse after he writes the note. He thinks of all the kindness that Jim had showed him earlier in the story:
I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was . . . and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was.
Huck makes an important decision in this moment: he is willing to risk God's punishment to help his friend. He thinks that he might be eternally punished for helping to steal Jim away from his master (Miss Watson), but he is willing to risk eternal punishment to help Jim get to freedom:
"All right, then, I’ll go to hell"—and tore it [the letter to Miss Watson] up.
Huck takes many risks throughout the novel to help keep Jim safe; the most costly risk that he believes he is taking, however, is of his soul. He believes that he may be sent to hell for helping to get Jim to freedom.
After Jim is sold off by the grifters pretending to be the Duke and Dauphin, Huck discovers that the farmer who purchased him is none other than Tom Sawyer’s uncle, Silas Phelps. Huck goes to the farmhouse, where he is mistaken for Tom, and allows Mr. and Mrs. Phelps to believe their mistake. Perhaps his time with the grifters taught him a trick or two about successful self-misrepresentation.
After Tom arrives at the house for a visit, Huck convinces him to help free Jim. Rejecting Huck’s more commonsense approach to release Jim from captivity, Tom, who enjoys reading prison and adventure novels, concocts an elaborate, highly theatricalized plan of escape, which includes the use of rope ladders, cryptic messages, and even staging a fake break-in at the farmhouse. As Tom and Huck run away with Jim, a group of farmers follow in pursuit, and the trio must then dodge a barrage of bullets.
This is not the only way Huck risks his life to save Jim, however. As Jim is a slave and considered another’s property, aiding and abetting him makes Huck an accessory to theft and, despite his youth, could risk death, imprisonment, or both for his action.
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