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Nascent Drama

"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."
 
"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 deadlimb trees -- dead loads of 'em."

"Is it under all of them?"

"How you talk! No!"
 
"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?"
 
"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 Richard."
 
"Well, if they like it, Tom, all right; but I don't want to be a king and have only just a given name, like a nigger. But say -- where you going to dig first?"

"Well, I don't know. S'pose we tackle that old dead-limb tree on the hill t'other side of Still-House branch?"
 
"I'm agreed."

So they got a crippled pick and a shovel, and set out on their three-mile tramp. They arrived hot and panting, and threw themselves down in the shade of a neighboring elm to rest and have a smoke.
 
"Say, Huck, if we find a treasure here, what you going to do with your share?"

"Well, I'll have pie and a glass of soda every day, and I'll go to every circus that comes along. I bet I'll have a gay time."
 
"Why, so as to have something to live on, by and by."

"Oh, that ain't any use. Pap would come back to thish-yer town some day and get his claws on it if I didn't hurry up, and I tell you he'd clean it out pretty quick. What you going to do with yourn, Tom?"
 
"Wait -- you'll see."

"Well, that's the foolishest thing you could do. Look at pap and my mother. Fight! Why, they used to fight all the time. I remember, mighty well."
 
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