“Well, then, I’m as _sorry_ as you are. Any way you druther have it, that is the way I druther have it. He—” “There ain’t any druthers _about_ it, Huck Finn; nobody said anything about druthers. And as for—” He forgot he was talking, and went tramping along, studying. He begun to get excited again, and pretty soon he says: “Huck, it’ll be the bulliest thing that ever happened if we find the body after everybody else has quit looking, and then go ahead and hunt up the murderer. It won’t only be an honor to us, but it’ll be an honor to Uncle Silas because it was us that done it. It’ll set him up again, you see if it don’t.” But Old Jeff Hooker he throwed cold water on the whole business when we got to his blacksmith shop and told him what we come for. “You can take the dog,” he says, “but you ain’t a-going to find any corpse, because there ain’t any corpse to find. Everybody’s quit looking, and they’re right. Soon as they come to think, they knowed there warn’t no corpse. And I’ll tell you for why. What does a person kill another person for, Tom Sawyer?—answer me that.” “Why, he—er—” “Answer up! You ain’t no fool. What does he kill him _for?_” “Well, sometimes it’s for revenge, and—” “Wait. One thing at a time. Revenge, says you; and right you are. Now who ever had anything agin that poor trifling no-account? Who do you reckon would want to kill _him?_—that rabbit!” Tom was stuck. I reckon he hadn’t thought of a person having to have a _reason_ for killing a person before, and now he sees it warn’t likely anybody would have that much of a grudge against a lamb like Jubiter Dunlap. The blacksmith says, by and by: “The revenge idea won’t work, you see. Well, then, what’s next? Robbery? B’gosh, that must ’a’ been it, Tom! Yes, sirree, I reckon we’ve struck it this time. Some feller wanted his gallus-buckles, and so he—” But it was so funny he busted out laughing, and just went on laughing and laughing and laughing till he was ’most dead, and Tom looked so put out and cheap that I knowed he was ashamed he had come, and he wished he hadn’t. But old Hooker never let up on him. He raked up everything a person ever could want to kill another person about, and any fool could see they didn’t any of them fit this case, and he just made no end of fun of the whole business and of the people that had been hunting the body; and he said: “If they’d had any sense they’d ’a’ knowed the lazy cuss slid out because he wanted a loafing spell after all this work. He’ll come pottering back in a couple of weeks, and then how’ll you fellers feel? But, laws bless you, take the dog, and go and hunt his remainders. Do, Tom.” Then he busted out, and had another of them forty-rod laughs of hisn. Tom couldn’t back down after all this, so he said, “All right, unchain him;” and the blacksmith done it, and we started home and left that old man laughing yet.