ead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but
mostly under the floor in ha'nted houses."

"Who hides it?"

"Why, robbers, of course--who'd you reckon? Sunday-school
sup'rintendents?"

"I don't know. If 'twas mine I wouldn't hide it; I'd spend it and have
a good time."

"So would I. But robbers don't do that way. They always hide it and
leave it there."

"Don't they come after it any more?"

"No, they think they will, but they generally forget the marks, or
else they die. Anyway, it lays there a long time and gets rusty; and by
and by somebody finds an old yellow paper that tells how to find the
marks--a paper that's got to be ciphered over about a week because it's
mostly signs and hy'roglyphics."

"HyroQwhich?"

"Hy'roglyphics--pictures and things, you know, that don't seem to mean
anything."

"Have you got one of them papers, Tom?"

"No."

"Well then, how you going to find the marks?"

"I don't want any marks. They always bury it under a ha'nted house or
on an island, or under a dead tree that's got one limb sticking out.
Well, we've tried Jackson's Island a little, and we can try it again
some time; and there's the old ha'nted house up the Still-House branch,
and there's lots of dead-limb trees--dead loads of 'em."

"Is it under all of them?"

"How you talk! No!"

"Then how you going to know which one to go for?"

"Go for all of 'em!"

"Why, Tom, it'll take all summer."

"Well, what of that? Suppose you find a brass pot with a hundred
dollars in it, all rusty and gray, or rotten chest full of di'monds.
How's that?"

Huck's eyes glowed.

"That's bully. Plenty bully enough for me. Just you gimme the hundred
dollars and I don't want no di'monds."

"All right. But I bet you I ain't going to throw off on di'monds. Some
of 'em's worth twenty dollars apiece--there ain't any, hardly, but's
worth six bits or a dollar."

"No! Is that so?"

"Cert'nly--anybody'll tell you so. Hain't you ever seen one, Huck?"

"Not as I remember."

"Oh, kings have slathers of them."

"Well, I don' know no kings, Tom."

"I reckon you don't. But if you was to go to Europe you'd see a raft
of 'em hopping around."

"Do they hop?"

"Hop?--your granny! No!"

"Well, what did you say they did, for?"

"Shucks, I only meant you'd SEE 'em--not hopping, of course--what do
they want to hop for?--but I mean you'd just see 'em--scattered around,
you know, in a kind of a general way. Like that old humpbacked