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Title: Jibby Jones
A story of Mississippi River adventure for boys
Author: Ellis Parker Butler
Illustrator: Arthur G. Dove
Release date: July 22, 2025 [eBook #76547]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston, MA: Houghton & Mifflin Company, 1923
Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JIBBY JONES ***
[Illustration: “THIS IS MY BIG SUIT.”]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
JIBBY JONES
A STORY OF MISSISSIPPI RIVER
ADVENTURE FOR BOYS
BY
ELLIS PARKER BUTLER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ARTHUR G. DOVE
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1921 AND 1922, BY THE SPRAGUE PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
I. Oliver Parmenter Jones
II. The Pearl-Diggers
III. The Climbing Rabbit
IV. Do Fish Climb Trees?
V. The Fishing Prize
VI. The Prize-Winner
VII. The Tough Customer
VIII. The Red-headed Bandit
IX. The Abduction of Rover
X. The Treasure Hunt
XI. Where is Greenland?
XII. The Worm Mine
XIII. The Viking Ship
XIV. Uncle Beeswax
XV. The Grape Tree
XVI. Congo Magic
XVII. Grains of Sand
XVIII. Pirate’s Treasure
XIX. The Tough Customer appears
XX. Orlando
XXI. Winged Enemies
XXII. A New Swimming-Hole
XXIII. Treasure Trove
XXIV. The Treasure
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLUSTRATIONS
- “This is my big suit”
- “I guess he’s got a real nose for fish”
- Slapping our knees and chanting away like lunatics
- Skippy and I threw an end of the rope into the well and pulled the
Tough Customer out
Drawn by Arthur G. Dove
------------------------------------------------------------------------
JIBBY JONES
CHAPTER I
OLIVER PARMENTER JONES
Everybody knows that the Mississippi River is just about the biggest
river in the world, and we boys who live on the shore of it are mighty
proud of it--proud of the river and proud of living on the edge of it,
where we can swim in it and look at it and fish in it and row boats on
it. If we wanted to we could say to each other, “Come on! Let’s go down
and swim awhile in the biggest river in the world, or, anyway, the
almost biggest!”
We could say that, but we don’t. I guess the reason is that, when a boy
wants to go swimming, he thinks about swimming and not about the bigness
of the river he is going to swim in, because that is sort of geography
and he gets more than enough geography in school, without thinking about
it when he wants to go swimming. So we generally just hold up two
fingers and whistle, and, if the other fellow says he can’t come, we
say, “Oh, come on, why don’t you?” and leave the length of the old
Mississippi and where it rises and where it empties and what States it
bounds, and all that sort of nonsense, until some other time.
But, anyway, I guess we Riverbank boys have the very best of the old
Mississippi River, because there must be pretty near a thousand miles of
it above Riverbank and more than a thousand miles of it below Riverbank.
So we must be about the middle of it. And that ought to be the best, any
way you look at it.
Now, it isn’t very often that we boys can find a boy we can brag about
the Mississippi River to. The reason is that not many new boys come to
Riverbank and all of us Riverbank boys have an equal share in the
river--as you might say--and it doesn’t do me any good to brag about the
river to Tad Willing or Skippy Root or Wampus Smale, because they know
as much about the river as I do, and they would laugh at me. So, in one
way, it was fine to have a new boy--one that had never seen our part of
the river--come to town. That was Jibby Jones.
I am not exactly right when I say Jibby Jones came to town, because he
did not exactly come to Riverbank. He did not stay in Riverbank. He got
off the train at Riverbank, with his father and mother and his twin
sisters and his little brother--and two or three trunks--but the whole
caboodle went right down to the Launch Club float and got aboard
Parcell’s motor-boat and went up to Birch Island. Birch Island is four
miles up the river. There are about twenty cottages on it and some of
the Riverbank folks spend the summer there. Our folks do--mine and Tad’s
and Skippy’s and Wampus’s folks.
The cottages on Birch Island stand along the edge of the island and they
are all set up on stilts. In the spring the old Mississippi is apt to
get on a rampage and flood over the whole island, and that is why the
cottages are on stilts. If the cottages were on the ground, the river
would come in at the cottage windows when it was high, or wash them away
and destroy them.
This year all our folks--Tad’s and Skippy’s and mine and Wampus’s
folks--went up to the island early in July. Our folks own cottages there
and we all love it; we get up there as soon as we can; we have been up
there every summer for I don’t know how long.
Well, we hadn’t any more than got settled--got the boats out from under
the cottages and the mosquito screens patched and the tall grass and
weeds cut--than the Joneses came, and this funny-looking Jibby Jones
with them. They took the two-story cottage that is called Columbia
Cottage. It stands on eight-foot stilts and it is a pretty good
cottage--as good as any on the island.
Tad and Skippy and Wampus and I were down by the river in front of
Wampus’s cottage trying to see what was the matter with the motor of
Wampus’s motor-boat when this Jibby Jones came walking up along the path
and stopped to look at us.
“Good-morning,” he said, in a sort of lazy drawl, and we looked up and
decided we did not like him. We thought we hadn’t much use for another
fellow, anyway, because we four were enough. We four always hung
together and had good enough times by ourselves. So we looked up and
thought, “Well, we don’t want you around!” but he had said
“Good-morning!” so we had to say something. So we said “Hello!” but not
as if we meant it. We thought we didn’t want to have anything to do with
a fellow that said “Good-morning!” when he might just as well have said
“Hello!” in the first place.
We went right on fixing the motor-boat. We thought we would let him
stand there until he was tired of it, and then perhaps he would go away.
By and by he said:
“Are you mending the motor-boat? Doesn’t it go?”
We wondered what he thought we were fussing with it for. It seemed about
as foolish a question as any question he could have asked us. So I said:
“Sometimes it goes; what do you think a motor-boat is for?”
Jibby Jones did not answer right away. He seemed to be thinking that
over. It seemed to take him quite a while to make up his mind what the
answer was, and we had a good chance to look at him.
He was queer-looking. That is about the only way I can say it--he was
queer-looking. He was about as old as we were, but at first you thought
he was quite a lot older. That was because he was so tall; he was almost
six feet tall; he was taller than my father or Tad’s father and almost
twice as tall as Wampus’s father, who is short and fat. He was just
about as tall as Skippy’s father. I never saw such a tall boy for his
age.
Another thing that made him look oldish was his spectacles. He wore
spectacles with big, round glasses in them and tortoise-shell rims and
handles--if the things you put behind your ears are called handles. But
the thing that made him look the queerest was his nose. It was the
biggest nose I ever saw in my life, or that Tad or Skippy or Wampus ever
saw. They said so. It was bigger than any nose I ever saw on a man, and
the funniest thing about it was that when you looked right straight at
Jibby Jones from in front it did not look like a big nose at all; it
only looked like a big nose from the side. This was because his nose was
not thick or wide, but only long and much. It was straight enough, but
it started too far up on his forehead and went so far out into the air
in front of him that it was a long way back to his face again. The thing
it made me think of was a rudder, or the centerboard of a boat, only, if
it had been a rudder, it should not have been on the front of his head,
but on the back of it.
So this Jibby Jones stood thinking, because I had said: “What do you
think a motor-boat is for?”
After a while he nodded his head as if he had thought enough and said:
“That’s a good question. I never thought of that question before, but,
when you think about it like that, motor-boats are used for different
things, aren’t they?”
“Yes; for climbing church steeples,” Skippy said, joking him.
Jibby Jones looked at us thoughtfully.
“I think you’re teasing me,” he said. “A great many people tease me. It
is because I look stupid. But I am not as stupid as I look.”
Wampus nudged me.
“Who told you that?” he asked Jibby Jones.
“My father told me,” Jibby Jones said, and he did not even crack a
smile. He was in dead earnest. “My father has said to me, several times,
‘Son, you are not as stupid as you look.’”
“Well, he ought to know,” Tad said.
“Yes, that’s what I think,” Jibby Jones said. “I always think my father
ought to know, because he is an author and writes books. An author who
writes books has to know a great many things.”
Well, Tad put down the wrench he was using then and looked at Jibby
Jones again, and I guess we all looked at him. We had heard that some
author man was coming to Birch Island, and we knew this must be the
author man’s boy. So we took a good look at him. I don’t know what we
would have said next, or whether we would have said anything, but Jibby
Jones spoke:
“What I was thinking, when I said motor-boats were used for various
things, was that I saw one used on the Amazon as a coffin. A man father
knew was bitten by a snake and died and the natives used his motor-boat
as a coffin to bury him in. That was what I meant. I have never seen a
motor-boat used to climb church steeples. I mean actually to climb them.
The nearest I have come to seeing that was in Nebraska when they used a
motor-boat to ring the fire-alarm bell.”
Tad was just going to pick up his wrench again, but he did not do it. He
let it lie. He looked right straight at Jibby Jones.
“To ring a fire-alarm bell!” he exclaimed.
“It was at Europa, Nebraska,” said Jibby Jones, as if he was saying the
commonest thing ever, “when the Missouri River went over the levee and
swamped the lower part of the town. They used the bell in the steeple of
the Methodist Church as a fire alarm and a house in the upper part of
the town caught fire--up on the hill, you know--and they had to give the
alarm, because it was at night. And the church was entirely under water,
except the bell and the steeple. So my father and another man took a
motor-boat and went to the church steeple and rang the alarm bell. But I
never really saw a motor-boat used to climb a steeple.”
We couldn’t say anything. We were stumped. He was too much for us. But
he went right on:
“I don’t mean to say it could not be done,” he said. “I suppose a
motor-boat could be fixed with cog wheels or claws so it could be used
to climb steeples. I expect that is what you meant.”
“Oh, yes!” Skippy said. “That’s what we meant, of course!”
He said it as sarcastical as he could, but this Jibby Jones did not turn
a hair.
“I suppose so,” he said. “I make it a rule never to doubt anything any
one says, because such strange things can be done. I remember when I was
on the St. Lawrence River--”
“Don’t you mean the Nile?” interrupted Skippy. “Don’t you mean they used
motor-boats to hunt hippopotamuses on the Nile?”
“I suppose they do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I did not see them doing it
when I was on the Nile. I was only going to say I saw them use a
motor-boat to save one ninth of a cat on the St. Lawrence.”
“One ninth of a cat!” cried Wampus, and began to laugh. “How would you
save one ninth of a cat?”
“It was starving to death,” said Jibby Jones, quite seriously. “We were
at Clayton and some one brought news to father that a cat was on one of
the Thousand Islands. They said it was so wild no one could get near it,
but father loves cats and cats love father, so he said he would go in a
motor-boat and save the cat from starving. So he did. He got the cat and
brought it back to Clayton.”
“But that was the whole cat,” said Wampus.
“No,” said Jibby Jones quite seriously, “it was only one ninth of a cat.
You know a cat has nine lives. And father said there was no doubt that
cat had already lost eight of its lives by starvation, so, of course,
what he saved was only one life, and that was only one ninth of the cat.
I am sure that is right because we kept the cat for years and we always
called it Ninth. That was the name father gave it, because it was only
one ninth of a regular cat. We kept it until it was drowned in the Rio
Grande.”
He pronounced it Ree-o Grandy, but we knew what he meant. It is the
river that is between Texas and Mexico. Tad drew a deep breath.
“You must think you have been on nearly every river in the world, don’t
you?” he asked.
“I have, nearly,” said this Jibby Jones. He did not say it in a bragging
way, either. He said it as if it was so.
“Have you ever been on the Mississippi before?” Tad asked him.
“Not this part,” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve been on the upper Mississippi,
and on the lower Mississippi, but father saved this middle part of the
Mississippi until last.”
Tad picked up his wrench and tapped on the side of the motor-boat sort
of carelessly.
“Well,” Tad said, winking at us, “I’ve not seen many rivers. I’ve seen
the Cedar River and the Iowa River and the Rock River, and that is about
all, but I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you this: this middle part
of the Mississippi is the greatest old river in the world. That lower
Mississippi is too big, and that upper Mississippi is too little, but
this middle Mississippi is just right. And it don’t make any difference
what you think you know about other rivers, it don’t do you any good
when you come to our old Mississippi. This is a real river. It’s
different.”
“So father said,” said Jibby Jones.
“Yes,” said Tad, “and this is no river for a raw boy to monkey with
until he learns about it. What is your name?”
Then Tad winked at us again, but Jibby Jones did not see him wink and he
answered as sober as a judge.
“My name,” he said, “is Oliver Parmenter Jones, but nobody calls me
that. Nearly every one calls me Jibby. They call me that because of my
nose; it is like the jib on a sailboat, you see. Don’t you think it is?”
He turned sideways so we could see that his nose was like the jib of a
sailboat! I never saw such a fellow! He did not merely pretend to be
proud that his nose was like the jib of a sailboat; he really was proud
of it. Later we learned he was proud of his nose because it was like his
Grandfather Parmenter’s nose. Jibby was the only one in his family that
had the Parmenter nose. I thought it was a queer thing to be proud of.
“So you can call me Jibby, if you want to,” Jibby Jones told us, just as
if he did not doubt we would want to call him something. “I rather like
Jibby,” he said; “it sounds nautical. But you can call me Main Mast if
you’d rather. Quite a few call me Main Mast. That’s because I’m so tall.
Father and mother call me son, but you wouldn’t like to do that. And the
twins and brother call me Wally. I don’t like that so much. It suggests
a walrus. Do you mind if I help you with the motor-boat? I know quite a
little about motor-boats.”
Well, he did! He came down the bank and in two minutes he had the
motor-boat chugging away like an old-timer!
“Father says I have a nose for motor troubles,” he told us.
After that we let him be one of us. We couldn’t be really mean to a
fellow like that; he was too good-natured and willing, and too much fun,
too. He was the queerest boy we ever knew. One day he came out in an old
suit that was so small for him that the pants came halfway to his knees
and his sleeves came only about halfway to his wrists. He did look
funny! But we did not say anything; a fellow don’t care much about
clothes. Jibby Jones said it. He said:
“I don’t like this suit any more. I like my small suit better.”
We could not believe we heard him correctly.
“Your small suit!” I said. “You mean the big one you have been wearing.
I should think you would call that your big suit and this one your small
suit. That one is twice as big as this one.”
“No,” he said, “this is my big suit. I got this suit two years ago and
we all call this my big suit because when I got it it was too big for
me. And the other was a little small for me when I got it this spring;
so it is my small suit.”
That was how he figured it out, and nobody could make him believe the
small suit should be called the small one. It had been the “big suit”
once, and that was the name of it, so it was always the “big suit.” We
thought he was stupid. But he wasn’t. Not when you came to find out. He
looked at things a different way from the rest of us, that was all.
CHAPTER II
THE PEARL-DIGGERS
Well, it took us quite a while to learn that Jibby Jones was not as
stupid as he looks, and that when he looks stupidest and says the
queerest things is when he is farthest from being stupid. That is when
that old brain of his is working hardest. It took us a couple of weeks
to learn that, and to get to liking Jibby the way we did, and I don’t
know that Wampus ever did think, in the bottom of his heart, that Jibby
was anything but stupid and lucky.
And at first we did try to “string” old Jibby good and plenty. We told
him things about our river that would not have fooled a mud-cat or a
carp. And when we told those things to Jibby, he would look at us
through his spectacles in that serious way of his, and sometimes we were
sure he believed the nonsense, and sometimes we were not so sure.
One thing we told him was about getting mussel shells out of the river.
That is quite a big business around Riverbank because there are so many
pearl-button factories in Riverbank and they have to have shells to cut
the buttons out of. The shells they use are mussel shells--a sort of
clam shell--and hundreds of men dredge for the shells. Some of the men
rake up the shells with long two-handled rakes and others drag for them
with dull hooks strung on a long cross-bar. The mussels sort of bite the
hooks and hang on and the dredgers pull them up.
Jibby Jones knew all this; we couldn’t fool him about it because his
father had told him; but we did try to fool him about another part of
it. That was about getting mussel shells that had real pearls in
them--the pearls the women wear for jewelry. Tad was the one that tried
to fool him about that. I guess Jibby asked Tad how they got the pearls,
because Tad’s father was a pearl-buyer.
“Well, that’s a pretty hard job, Jibby,” Tad told him. “Not many people
want to try diving for pearls in the old Mississippi, I can tell you!
No, sir!”
“Why?” Jibby asked. “I never heard of sharks in the Mississippi, or
alligators this far north.”
“Well, I should say not!” said Tad. “If there were sharks and alligators
here, too, nobody would ever dive for pearls. No, sir! It isn’t sharks
or alligators, it’s mud!”
“Mud?” Jibby asked.
“Yes, sir! Mud!” Tad told him. “Common old Mississippi River mud. That’s
why so few hunt pearls; that’s why pearls are so high-priced. The mud is
awful. The mussels with real pearls in them don’t lie right on top of
the mud like common button-shell mussels; they burrow down in the mud.
The minute a mussel feels a pearl beginning to grow in it, it begins to
burrow.”
Of course, Skippy and Wampus and I could hardly keep from shouting out
loud when Tad said all this nonsense, because there wasn’t a true word
in it, but Jibby Jones just stared at Tad through his spectacles and
believed it all. Or we thought he did.
“I should think they could dredge a little deeper and get them,” Jibby
said.
“Dredge deeper?” said Tad, because he did not know just what to say to
that.
“Pshaw!” Skippy put in. “Dredge deeper! That _would_ be a nice thing to
do, wouldn’t it? And the minute the mussel felt the dredge, it would
spit out the pearl and that pearl would be lost forever. You can’t
dredge for pearl mussels, Jibby.”
“Of course not!” said Tad. “You have to dive for them. You--you--”
Tad had to think quick to think up some ridiculous thing to tell Jibby,
but Tad was a good one at that and he did it! Yes, sir!
“You have to do the only way it can be done, if you want to get pearls,”
he said. “You have to nose them out.”
He stopped short and looked at Jibby’s nose.
“Why, you’d make the finest kind of pearl-diver yourself, Jibby,” he
said. “You’ve got a splendid nose for it. You’ve got the best nose I
ever saw for pearl-diving in the Mississippi.”
“Do you think so?” Jibby asked, as pleased as pie.
“I know so,” Tad told him. “You’ll know so, too, when I tell you how the
divers have to get the pearl-bearing shells. There’s only one way. The
pearl-bearing mussel is the scariest thing in the world; a rabbit is
brave alongside of a mussel that has a pearl in it. The slightest hard
thing frightens a pearl mussel half to death and starts it digging
deeper into the mud, and then you never can get it.”
“They’re timid?” asked Jibby Jones as if he understood.
“Timid and tender,” said Tad. “When a mussel is bearing a pearl its
shell is ten times as tender as a deer’s horns when they are in velvet.
The least touch of anything hard hurts the mussel and makes it drop its
pearl. That’s why the pearl-divers root them out with their noses.”
“Is that the way they do?” asked Jibby.
“Of course! You can’t use a hook, because it is too hard; and you can’t
use a rake because it is too hard; and you can’t even use your hands,
because of your finger nails. The only way you can root out a pearl
mussel is with your nose. The end of a nose is soft and does not hurt
the mussel. They like the feel of it.”
Jibby Jones felt the end of his nose.
“It _is_ soft, isn’t it?” he said, as if he had never discovered that
before.
“Of course, it is soft!” said Tad. “And that is why the pearl-divers of
the Mississippi use their noses. The only trouble is that they can’t
keep at the job long; they wear their noses down so that they are not
fit to dig with. Then they are of no more use in rooting for pearl
mussels. A man with a bunty nose, or with a pug like Wampus Smale’s
nose, is no good at all.”
“I expect my Grandfather Parmenter--” Jibby began, but we all knew what
he was going to say. He was going to say his Grandfather Parmenter would
have made a good Mississippi pearl-diver. Jibby did not finish saying
it. He thought of something else.
We were in the motor-boat, back in Third Slough, fishing for bullhead
catfish. They were not biting very well, which was why we had so much
time to talk; bullheads do not mind talk; they’re stupid.
Well, we knew there was not much use fishing just then. The river was
too high and too low; too much both and too much neither. But we had
come because Jibby had wanted to come. It was the last chance he would
have to fish with us. The reason was that his father had decided they
must leave Birch Island sooner than they had expected and go back to New
York. And the reason of that was that Mr. Jones had been asked by a
publisher to write a book about spending a summer on an island in the
Mississippi and the publisher had suddenly decided he did not want that
book. So Mr. Jones thought he could not afford to spend any more time on
the island. The publisher had expected to send Mr. Jones a thousand
dollars, but now he would not, and this was the last day we were apt to
spend with Jibby, fishing together and things like that.
“How do they do,” Jibby asked Tad, “when they dive for mussels and root
them out?”
“Why, it is as simple as pie if you have the right kind of nose,” Tad
said. “You dive from a boat in a slough or some other muddy place--some
place with a muddy bottom--and when you reach the mud you take hold of
the mud with both hands. That is to hold you down. Then you begin
rooting in the mud with your nose. You root here and you root there, as
fast as you can, and if you don’t find a mussel you come up for breath.”
“Of course. One would do that,” said Jibby, as serious as an owl. “But
if one roots out a mussel?”
“Oh! Then you have to open your mouth and grab it quick,” said Tad,
nudging me. “Like mumblety-peg. When you root up a shell with your nose,
you open your mouth and grab the shell and then come up as quick as you
can; but you have to be sure you don’t open your mouth until you get in
the boat. If you do, the mussel will open its shell and spit out the
pearl.”
Jibby Jones looked over the side of the boat.
“Do you think this would be a good place to dive for pearls?” he asked,
sort of wistfully.
“This? This is one of the finest places in the Mississippi,” Tad said.
“I’m surprised there is no one diving right now.”
I had to turn my head away and grin. The water was not five feet deep
where we were.
“I am going to dive for a pearl,” Jibby Jones said suddenly.
“That’s a good idea,” Tad said. “The bullheads are not biting, anyway.
That’s always a good sign; bullheads hardly ever bite where there are
mussels. And there couldn’t be a better day to get a pearl. The sun is
just right. It is low enough to slant on the water and not dazzle the
mussels. When they are dazzled, they go deeper in the mud. They ought to
be near the top of it now.”
“I can stay under water quite long,” Jibby said as he began to take off
his clothes. “I stayed under water so long once, in the River Niger,
that father was afraid I was drowned. So don’t worry if I stay down
long.”
“We won’t,” Tad said.
It took Jibby quite a while to get ready; he was always slow. Then he
stood on the gunwale of the motor-boat and put his palms together and
dove. He did not have far to dive; he must have run his head into the
soft black mud up to his ears, for he was up in a second, shaking his
head and holding onto the boat.
“It isn’t as deep as I thought it was,” he said as he wiped the mud from
his face. “I did not do that dive very well. I’ll have to try it again.”
“We would go in with you,” Skippy said, “only our noses are so blunt it
is no use.”
Jibby climbed into the boat and made ready again. This time he took a
slanting dive. We could see him under water; he looked yellow under all
that yellow water. We could see his arms spread out as he dug his
fingers into the mud to hold on, and we could see his head move as he
ploughed into the mud with his nose. We laughed like fury. It was the
funniest thing I ever saw.
He did stay under water quite a while. He had not fibbed when he said he
could stay under a long time.
Wampus got frightened. “We’d better get him out,” he said. “He’ll drown,
with his nose and mouth full of mud that way.”
Tad was watching pretty close. “No, he’s all right,” he said, as well as
he could for laughing. “As long as his head keeps bobbing that way, he
is all right; watch him nose-digging for the great pearl mussels of the
Mississippi! I hope a mussel don’t bite his nose off!”
Just then Jibby started to come up. He wiggled and squirmed himself onto
his knees and staggered to his feet. After he began to wiggle, we could
see nothing but muddy water, and when he stood up his face and head were
one mass of soft mud. It dripped from him and ran from him, but he just
put his face over the side of the boat and opened his mouth and let a
mussel shell fall inside.
“Catch it!” he gasped; “catch it!”--as if it was a rabbit or something
that could jump and run, and then he ducked down and sloshed water over
his head until he was as clean as any one could ever get in that old
slough water. He came up smiling.
“Well, I got one!” he drawled triumphantly. “I hope it is a big pearl. I
hope it is big enough to sell for enough money to let father stay here
the rest of the summer. That’s what I want it for. Because I like you
fellows. You are all so helpful and friendly.”
I’ll say I felt ashamed then. So did Tad and so did Skippy. I guess
Wampus did, too. We all did. We did not know what to say.
But Jibby, naked as could be, was in the boat now and he picked up the
shell.
“I hope it did not have time to get rid of the pearl,” he said. “I hope
I did not frighten it too much; I hit it rather hard with my nose. Let
me have your knife, Wampus.”
Wampus had a big knife, a regular frog-stabber.
“Jibby--listen!” Tad said, but Jibby was opening the mussel. He seemed
to know how. I suppose he had opened oysters in the Seine or somewhere;
he never told us. He slid the knife between the two valves of the shell
of the mussel, and cut the muscle part, and the shell fell open.
“It looks like quite a good one,” was the next thing we heard Jibby
Jones say, just as matter-of-fact as if he was talking about a
dictionary or an apple.
We all stood up, then, and looked.
“Merry Christmas! Mer-ry Christmas! And a Hap-py New Year!” Tad
exclaimed. “Well, what do you know about that!”
Right there in the shell was the biggest, pinkest, glisteningest,
roundest pearl I ever saw in my life! No, I’ll say it was twice as big
as any pearl I ever saw!
“A thousand dollars!” Tad cried. “That’s worth a thousand dollars if it
is worth a cent! I know! My father buys them.”
We were all crazy with excitement except Jibby Jones. He took it quite
calmly.
“I’m glad it is a thousand-dollar one,” he said. “Now father can stay on
Birch Island the rest of the summer.”
And that was about all he ever said about the pearl, even when Tad’s
father paid twelve hundred dollars for it. Wampus did ask Jibby if he
didn’t expect to go back and dive for a lot more pearls. We thought he
would say he meant to.
“I think not,” Jibby Jones said. “You see, Tad says the pearl-divers are
apt to wear their noses down to a snub, bumping them into the shells,
and I wouldn’t like to do that. My nose is the only nose in our family
that is like Grandfather Parmenter’s and I wouldn’t like to wear it down
to a pug.”
CHAPTER III
THE CLIMBING RABBIT
Maybe feeling sorry that Jibby had to go away was what made us feel so
glad he had found that pearl and did not have to go. Teasing him had
come to be part of the fun we counted on having, and, when we saw old
Jib come out of his cottage, one or the other of us would nearly always
say: “There’s Jibby--let’s go tell him something about the river.” And
between-times we thought up things to tell him. But all the time we were
getting to like him more and more.
A couple of days after Mr. Willing had bought the pearl, Skippy and
Wampus and Tad and I were under my folks’ cottage, because it was
raining. There was always plenty to do on the island, enough kinds of
fun each summer to keep us busy ten years, and on rainy days we could
always sit under one of the cottages and whittle or talk or make mud
statues. The rain was coming down in regular slats, as if it meant to
rain all day and all night, and we were talking about one thing and
another when Jibby Jones came dodging through the rain and looked in at
us.
“Hello, Main Mast,” Skippy called out to him; “lower yourself and blow
in out of the rain.”
Sometimes we called him “Main Mast” and sometimes we called him “Jibby”;
he never cared what we called him. So he came in out of the wet and sat
on a box. For a minute or two he watched us making mud animals, or
whittling, or whatever we were doing. Then he said:
“Do you know whether anybody named M’rell ever lived in Riverbank, or
down below Riverbank, or up here above Riverbank? A man named M’rell?”
“No,” I said, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy said the same. None of us
had ever heard of anybody named M’rell.
“Nobody named that ever lived around here that I ever heard of,” Tad
said. “Why?”
“I thought maybe you did know of somebody named M’rell that had lived
somewhere around here,” Jibby said.
“Orpheus Cadwallader might know,” I said, for Orpheus was the caretaker
of the island and knew nearly everybody up and down the river. And then
we talked about something else, and that was a pity, for if we had asked
Jibby another question about M’rell just then, we might have saved a lot
of time in starting our hunt for the land pirate’s treasure. If we had
asked him how he spelled M’rell, we might have saved weeks and weeks.
So, after half an hour or so, Jibby spoke of M’rell again.
“When I was down on the St. Francis River--” he began, and we all
yelled, because the rivers Jibby had been on were getting to be a joke.
You couldn’t mention a thing but it reminded Jibby of some river he had
been on--the Nile or the Hudson or the Amazon or some other river. It
was all true enough, too, because his father wrote books about rivers
and had been on most of the rivers in the world, and had taken Jibby
there; but it was a sort of joke the way old Jibby was always dragging
in a river, no matter what we were talking about. So he waited until we
stopped hooting, and then he went on.
“It occurred to me,” he said, “that it was selfish of me to keep what I
know about M’rell to myself, because you boys are so good to me. When I
was down on the St. Francis River with father, there was an old negro
named Mose, who said he was over one hundred years old. He used to
paddle us around in a skiff when we went fishing for bass and he told us
about M’rell.”
“Who was M’rell?” Wampus asked. “What has M’rell got to do with us?”
Now, I want you to notice, right here, that Jibby said “M’rell” and that
we all said “M’rell” because he did. And the reason Jibby pronounced the
name that way was because that old negro Mose had called it that. The
name was really Murrell, when we came to find out. If we had seen that
name written or spelled out, we would not have called it “M’rell”; we
would have called it “_Murr_-ell” more as if it was “Murl.” But Jibby
called it “Mur-_rell_,” more as if it was “M’rell.” And “Murl” and
“M’rell” don’t sound at all alike. His way was as if it rhymed with
“tell,” like:
“Listen, my children, and I will tell
A wonderful story about M’rell.”
The way we pronounced that name was as if it rhymed with “squirrel,”
like this:
“Once there was a pretty squirrel
That was owned by John A. Murrell.”
Anyway, Wampus asked, “What has M’rell got to do with us?” and Jibby
went ahead and told us, sitting there under our cottage out of the rain.
“It’s about a land pirate’s treasure,” he said. “Father says it is
probably nonsense, and that there are a million chances to one that
there is no treasure, and that if there ever was any I could never find
it.”
“What is a land pirate?” Skippy asked. “I never heard of one.”
“Neither had I until I was down on the St. Francis River,” said Jibby.
“That river is in Missouri and Arkansas, and it empties into the
Mississippi just above Helena, Arkansas. Father was in Helena, Arkansas,
studying that part of the Mississippi River, and that is one of the
parts of the South where the land pirate did his pirate work--around
Helena and thereabouts.”
He stopped to chuckle.
“What are you laughing about?” I asked him.
“Why, about the Helenas,” Jibby said. “When father and I were on the
Yellowstone River, at Billings, Montana, we happened to mention Helena,
Montana, and the folks said, ‘Up here in Montana we don’t call it
Hel-e-na; we call it Hel’na. The town in Arkansas is Hel-e-na, but ours
is Hel’na,’ and when we got to Helena, Arkansas, and called it Hel-e-na,
they said, ‘Down here in Arkansas we don’t call it Hel-e-na; we call it
Hel’na. The town in Montana is Hel-e-na; but ours is Hel’na.’
“At any rate,” Jibby went on, “the Mississippi at Helena is mostly muddy
and not good for bass fishing, but the St. Francis is clearer, so we
went up to the St. Francis to see what it was like and to catch some
bass. And the old negro named Mose told us about this John A. Murrell,
who was the greatest land pirate that ever lived, and had ten times as
many men as any sea pirate that ever sailed the seas. He pirated all the
way from Tennessee to Mississippi and Arkansas--”
“But what has that to do with Iowa and us?” Wampus asked. “That’s about
a thousand miles from here.”
“That is what I am coming to,” Jibby said. “It was away back in 1835,
and around then, that John A. Murrell was a land pirate. And you want to
remember that John A. Murrell was not a one-horse horsethief; he was a
big land pirate. He had about one thousand men helping him. They stole
slaves and horses and carried them away and sold them, and robbed and
stole and broke every law there was. There were two sorts of Murrell’s
men. Two hundred and fifty of them were the Grand Council, and did the
planning, and furnished the brains, and seven hundred and fifty others
did the mean work--stole and robbed. But that was not all. There were
hundreds and hundreds of people who seemed respectable who helped John
A. Murrell. Some were in the gang and got part of the loot, and some
were just afraid of him and helped him because they thought he would
murder them and steal their slaves and cattle, and burn their houses and
barns if they did not help him.”
“That don’t mean there is any treasure anywhere where we could get it,”
said Wampus, who was always objecting to things.
“That’s what I’m coming to,” Jibby Jones said. “All through that country
there were people who were afraid of John A. Murrell and his gangs, and
they sheltered the pirates and fed them and hid them when the pirates
were in danger. They were willing to hide the negroes and the horses the
gang stole. And the sign that a man was a friend was one lone pine tree
planted in the corner of a yard or of a farm or plantation. That was the
sign of a friend’s place. Whenever any of the Murrell gang saw a lone
pine in a corner, they knew it was safe to go there and ask shelter or
food or a hiding-place. The land piracy was so huge and successful that
John A. Murrell grew so bold he planned a gigantic uprising of negroes
and Murrellers all over the South, to make a new nation and grab
everything, but the news of it leaked out and he was caught and jailed.
And not a cent of his money was ever found.”
“But how does that prove--”
“Wait!” Jibby drawled. “The old negro Mose, when he was paddling us up
and down the St. Francis River, said he wished he was young and spry
again, because if he was he would go up the Mississippi to Iowa, and
hunt for the land pirate’s treasure. He said his father had been John A.
Murrell’s slave and bodyguard and private servant. He said he had a map
hidden away in a safe place--a map John A. Murrell’s own brother drew
with his own hand and sent to John A. Murrell by a safe messenger, when
John A. Murrell was in prison. But the messenger could not reach John A.
Murrell, so he gave the map to Mose’s father.”
“What was the map?” I asked.
“Well, Mose said it was a map to show where the land pirate’s treasure
was hidden,” Jibby said. “He said John A. Murrell’s brother came up
North here, where he would not be known, and hid the treasure. And this
is what old Mose said: ‘Riverbank--that’s where all that money is hid
away at. That’s what the map say--Riverbank.’ And this is Riverbank,
isn’t it? You’d call this ‘up North,’ wouldn’t you?”
I was excited right away, but Skippy whittled a few shavings off the
stick he was whittling.
“Yes,” he said then, “but you didn’t see the map, did you?”
“No,” Jibby said.
“Well, I think it is mighty slim,” Skippy said. “Most likely it is just
some negro talk. If the map does say ‘Riverbank,’ it may mean ‘river
bank’--the bank of any river anywhere. And anybody would be foolish to
send all his treasure a thousand miles away, to be hidden. A man
wouldn’t do that; it don’t sound reasonable. You might as well look for
fish in the tops of trees as look for that pirate treasure anywhere
around here.”
“Or rabbits,” I said, and Skippy and Tad laughed, but Wampus did not
laugh.
“Rabbits do climb trees!” Wampus said, ready to get mad in a minute.
Jibby looked at Wampus in that solemn, slow way of his.
“I don’t believe rabbits climb trees, Wampus,” Jibby said.
We had been talking about rabbits before Jibby came in out of the rain,
but I don’t remember what started us. I guess maybe I started it by
saying it looked as if it might rain all day, and then Wampus said he
remembered a worse rain--the one when we had the school picnic. Then
Skippy said he had to laugh when he thought of how Sue Smale’s black
straw hat sort of melted in the rain that day, and the black ran down
her face and on her yellow hair, because she had blacked the hat with
shoe polish. Then Tad had said girls did things like that: they were
silly. And I said, “Yes, you bet they’re silly, why, Sue says rabbits
climb trees.” Then Wampus got mad and said, “Rabbits do climb trees; I
know they do, because my Uncle Oscar saw one in a tree.”
So now Wampus told Jibby his Uncle Oscar had seen a rabbit up a tree.
“I guess it was a squirrel,” said Jibby. “Squirrels climb trees; rabbits
don’t.”
“I guess my Uncle Oscar knows,” said Wampus, ready to get mad in a
minute at anybody that said his Uncle Oscar did not know. “He told me,
and he told Sue, and that’s why she said so. He was over in the Illinois
bottom land last spring, when the river was high, rowing around in a
skiff, and he saw a rabbit in a tree. It had climbed there. Uncle Oscar
said so.”
“I don’t want to dispute any conclusion your Uncle Oscar drew from the
fact that a rabbit was in a tree, Wampus,” said Jibby Jones, “but
couldn’t it have been a squirrel? Squirrels climb trees.”
Tad shouted. It was too funny to see Jibby sitting there like a wise old
owl telling us that squirrels climb trees. He might as well have said
water was wet, we knew it so well.
“Aw!” said Wampus; “I guess my uncle knows a rabbit from a squirrel. It
was a rabbit. It was a regular cottontail.”
Jibby blinked his eyes and thought this over.
“Perhaps it didn’t climb the tree,” he said. “Perhaps the water had been
higher and the rabbit had been floating on a board and hopped off the
board into the tree, and then the water went down and left the rabbit in
the tree. Then, if your uncle saw a rabbit high up in the tree, he might
have thought it had climbed there.”
“No,” said Wampus, “because the water was as high then as it had been;
it was higher than it had been.”
“Did your uncle see the rabbit climb the tree?” Jibby Jones asked.
“No, it was there when he saw it,” said Wampus. “It was high up in the
tree; twice as high as he could reach from his boat. He said it was the
first tree-climbing rabbit he had seen, but that he understood just what
had happened. The river had come up and surrounded the rabbit and the
tree, and as the river got higher there was no place for the rabbit to
go but up the tree. It just had to climb, so it climbed. So rabbits do
climb trees. Because my uncle doesn’t tell lies, and I can lick any two
that say he does.”
That seemed reasonable to me. I thought Wampus had proved it pretty
well, and so did Tad and Skippy. When an uncle sees a rabbit up a tree
and that uncle don’t lie and his nephew can lick any two that say he
does lie, it seems a pretty sure thing that rabbits do climb trees. We
admitted it. Tad and Skippy and I admitted it, but Jibby Jones was not
that sort of admitter.
“It may be so,” he said, “because a lot of things that do not seem so
are so. I never thought crabs could climb trees until father took me to
Tahiti. I saw crabs climb trees and throw down coconuts there.”
“Oh, come off!” Wampus laughed. We all laughed.
“But I did,” said Jibby. “They climb trees and pick the coconuts, and
throw them down, to break them open. And if the coconuts don’t break
open, they carry them up the trees again and drop them again, until they
do break.”
We thought he was trying to fool us, but he was as sober as a judge. Of
course, we didn’t believe him; not until I asked my father and he said
it was true. Then I had to.
“There is also,” said Jibby, “a fish that climbs trees. I have never
seen one, but my father has. I think it was in Liberia. Perhaps not. And
some fish fly.”
“Of course! We’ve all heard of flying fish,” said Wampus. “What do you
think we are? Ignorant?”
“But here,” said Jibby Jones, “fish do not fly, and fish do not climb
trees, and crabs do not climb trees. And I am not so sure rabbits climb
trees.”
“You don’t mean to say my Uncle Oscar says what is not so, do you?”
Wampus demanded, as mad as he could get.
“No, Jibby,” I said, “you must not say that, because Wampus’s Uncle
Oscar isn’t that kind. He doesn’t tell lies.”
“I wasn’t saying he did,” said Jibby. “I don’t know him, but I believe
he tells all the truth there is. I only say he saw the rabbit in the
tree, but he did not see it climb the tree. The rabbit might have got
into the tree some other way.”
“How, I’d like to know?” Wampus demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Jibby. “I wasn’t there. I only mean to say things
sometimes seem to be so when they are not so. If there was such a tree
as one that grows up in a night, and if that was a tree of that kind,
the rabbit might have stepped on it without thinking it was that sort of
tree. Then the tree might have shot up in a hurry, with the rabbit in
its top. Then anybody, seeing the rabbit in the top of the tree, would
naturally think it had climbed the tree.”
“There are no such trees,” said Wampus. “Trees don’t grow in a night.”
“And if there were such trees,” Skippy said, “it would not prove
anything. If the rabbit stepped on a limb one inch from the ground that
limb would still be one inch from the ground when the tree was a hundred
feet high. Tree limbs don’t slide up the tree like that. If you hang a
horseshoe on a limb five feet high to-day, and nobody touches it, it
will be on the same limb and only five feet high a hundred years from
now.”
Of course, this was true and we all agreed with Skippy, and got to
talking about trees and why so many have limbs only high up. It is
because the tender little first limbs die and break off. They get too
much shade or animals eat them or something. Then we got to talking of
what animals eat, and about caribou and elk, and about one thing and
another, and we forgot all about rabbits.
About half an hour later, Orpheus Cadwallader came along in his rubber
coat and rubber boots. He is the man that is watchman on the island and
he is plump and pleasant and can tell some great stories of the river.
We tried to coax him to come under with us and talk, but he said he had
a trot-line he wanted to run and couldn’t stop. He said the rain was
about over; that it would be sunny in an hour. And it was. Somebody
suggested that we go fishing, and we went.
CHAPTER IV
DO FISH CLIMB TREES?
In the summer, when we are up there on Birch Island, we fish in quite a
few places and in quite a few ways, but we don’t do much fishing on our
own island; it is about as poor a place as there is in the whole
Mississippi River. Once in a while, though, we do go across the island
to where the slough is, and try it. If the river is high enough, and not
too muddy, we catch a few fish there, and sometimes we try it because it
is so near--only a few hundred feet from the back doors of our cottages.
So, this day, we got our cans of worms and our fishpoles and went back
through the woods and weeds and nettles to see how the fishing was
there.
All our cottages set on the bank of the “chute” or what is now the main
channel of the river, but Orph Cadwallader’s cottage sets back a couple
of hundred feet or so, because he is the caretaker, and we went to the
part of the slough back of Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage because we
thought the fishing would be best there, but when we got there it looked
pretty bad. Along the edges of the slough the weeds had grown tall and
thick and beyond them was nothing but mud--just soft, slushy mud,
slanting down to the water of the slough like the edge of a dinner
plate.
We tried to throw our lines far enough out to get to water deep enough
to have fish in it, but it couldn’t be done--the lines would not reach.
We tried putting some driftwood on top of the slush mud, to walk out on,
but that was no good either. When we put a foot on a stick of driftwood,
it went right down in the mud, as if there was no bottom.
“Aw, come on!” Wampus said. “This is no good. If there are any big carp
in there they can stay there, for all I care. We can’t get out to where
they are, and they can’t come in to us. Let’s go home.”
We all thought the same. But Jibby Jones stood still.
“Wait a minute!” he said. “When I was in the North Woods with father, I
saw them catching fish through the ice with saplings.”
“Ice!” Wampus shouted. “Ice! I’d like to see some ice! There’s not much
ice around here that I can see.”
“And a sapling wouldn’t reach as far as our fishpoles do,” said Tad.
“You don’t understand,” said Jibby. “What I mean to say is that they
bent the saplings down and tied their lines on the tips of them. Then
they set the saplings with a sort of trigger, so that when the fish bit
at the bait the sapling sprung up and pulled the fish out.”
“Come on; let’s get home!” said Wampus. “The mosquitoes are eating me
alive.”
But Jibby aimed his nose toward a tall, thin elm sapling near the edge
of the weeds and followed his nose.
“This tree will do,” he said, and he took hold of it as high as he could
reach and threw his weight on it. But his weight was not enough to bend
it down.
“Come on, you fellows, and help,” he said; “perhaps we will catch a good
fish.”
We laughed, but we all took hold of the tree. We began to bend it toward
the slough.
“No, please!” Jibby said. “Not that way. Bend it in the other direction.
Bend it along the shore. We have to bait it first.”
So we shifted to another side of the elm and bent it down. We held it
down, with the top touching the ground. Jibby looked at it doubtfully.
“It is too bad it isn’t nearer the slough,” he said; and then he said:
“I’ve got it!”
He got the longest of our fishpoles and tied it to the top of the tree.
“That will give just that much more length,” he said, and then he baited
the hook with the nicest lot of worms you ever saw and set the bobber at
what he thought was about the right height and told us to ease up on the
tree.
We eased up until the end of the tree was about twenty feet from the
ground, and then Jibby told us to swing it around, out over the slough,
and we did it. We lowered away until the bait was in the water and the
bobber floated. They were out in the deeper water, where fish ought to
be if there were any. We tried to hold the tree steady, but it wabbled a
good deal, and Jibby got a sound piece of driftwood and propped it under
the tree.
“Now,” he said, “you can all sit on the tree and hold it down. I’m sorry
we haven’t an automatic trigger to hold it, but we haven’t had time to
make one. Perhaps this will do as well. You sit on the tree and I will
watch the bobber, and when we get a bite I’ll say ‘Jump!’ then everybody
jump lively, and we’ll have our fish.”
So we sat there and nothing happened.
And we sat there longer and nothing happened.
“There are no two ways about it,” Wampus said, “this is the craziest
idea I ever heard of. Nobody but Jibby Jones would ever think of
anything like this. Four boys and a complete tree, and a fishpole, and
Jibby Jones, all trying to catch one fish. We won’t catch a fish. But if
we do catch a fish, you know what kind it will be--it will be a mud-cat
as big as your little finger or a perch as big as your thumb.”
“Or a minnow, maybe,” said Skippy.
“Surely! A minnow,” I said. “Using a whole elm tree to catch a minnow!”
“We could sit here a hundred years,” said Wampus, “and we wouldn’t catch
anything.”
Jibby did not hear us. He was keeping his eagle eye on the bobber.
“I think we had a nibble just then,” he said now. “You fellows want to
be ready to jump when I say ‘jump.’”
“We’ll be ready,” Wampus said. “Don’t worry, Jibby; we’ll be ready, in
about one hundred years. If anybody can catch a fish this way, I’ll--”
“Jump! Jump! Oh, jump!” Jibby Jones shouted just then, waving his hands
and jumping himself for all he was worth.
I don’t know whether we all jumped at once or not. All I know is that I
got off the tree and it whacked me in the back of the head as it went on
up and all four of us were on our backs in the weeds just in time to see
the biggest carp I ever saw go sailing up into the air like a shot out
of a cannon. I’ll bet the carp was the most surprised fish in the
Mississippi Valley right then. There wasn’t any playing with him, as an
angler does; one moment he was wondering where that nice bunch of worm
bait came from and the next moment he was yanked out of the slough at
about sixty miles an hour as that tree snapped up like a whip. There was
enough strength in that tree to pull an ox out of the water, almost, and
it spent it all on that one carp and all in one second, too.
“Whoop!” was all Wampus had time to say, and then the tree and the pole
at the top of it did what any tree and pole would have done in the same
circumstances. They snapped that carp off the hook like a giant throwing
a mud ball from the end of a switch. We saw the carp sail up and up,
twice as high as the tree itself and come down and down, inland from the
slough.
I scrambled to my feet and Tad and Wampus and Skippy scrambled to their
feet, and we made a rapid break for the direction the carp had taken.
“Stop! Listen! Hear where it falls!” Jibby Jones shouted, but we were
too excited for that. We rushed into the woods and began beating through
the weeds and nettles and looking up into the trees, and Jibby had to
join us. We hunted for an hour, I guess, and then we gave it up. It was
time to go home, anyway.
We went back to the slough to get our poles and things, and we got them
and started home. The first house we came to was Wampus’s, because that
is nearest to Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage, which we had been almost
back of, and when we got there Mr. and Mrs. Smale and Sue Smale were on
the little front porch and Orpheus Cadwallader was standing at the foot
of the porch steps with one foot on the bottom step and the biggest carp
I ever saw was in his hands. It was a beauty.
“Y-e-s, M-i-s-t-e-r S-m-a-l-e,” he was drawling in that slow, lazy way
of his, “I always did think a carp was more of a land animal than most
fish, and now I know it. This proves it. I’ve often seen carp wiggle
across sand bars on their bellies, and I’ve often said I was sure they
came up to my garden at night and ate the young vegetable tops, but now
I know more than that. They climb trees, and I know they climb trees
because this carp was in the maple alongside of my house, sitting in a
crotch of a branch, eating maple leaves. There are some in its mouth
now.”
Sure enough, he showed us that there were leaves in the carp’s mouth.
“But that doesn’t quite prove it climbs trees, does it?” asked Mr.
Smale. “It might have got in the tree in some other way.”
“How could a carp get in a tree except by climbing it?” Orpheus
Cadwallader drawled. “Of course, you needn’t believe me, if you don’t
want to, but I’ll believe carps climb trees as long as I live.”
We knew, of course, that that carp had not climbed a tree. We knew
exactly how it had got into that tree--our fishing tree had slung the
carp so high in the air that it had alighted in the top of the maple
tree. I nudged Wampus and grinned.
It was then Jibby Jones turned to us and spoke.
“Rabbits,” he said, and then repeated it: “Rabbits, and carp, may climb
trees, but you cannot be sure rabbits and carp do climb trees just
because you happen to find rabbits and carp in trees.”
Orpheus Cadwallader turned and looked at Jibby.
“Rabbits, hey?” he said. “I don’t know about rabbits. I never saw a
rabbit climb a tree, and I never saw a rabbit in a tree, so I say
nothing about rabbits. But I do know about carp. I know carp can climb
trees, because I saw this carp in the tree, and it was still alive and
kicking. I saw that with my own eyes. And if the carp did not climb that
tree, how did it get up that tree?”
“Maybe it leaped from the water to the tree,” said Jibby.
“Foolishness! Nonsense!” Orpheus Cadwallader said. “I know better than
that. A carp can’t leap that far.”
But we knew better, because that was just what that carp had done. It
had made one jump from the slough to the tree. But had we helped it a
little.
So Orph went waddling home with his tree-climbing carp, pretty mad
because nobody would believe it had climbed the tree, but Jibby stood
looking after him. When Orph had gone out of sight, Jibby turned to
Skippy.
“Skippy,” he drawled, with a twinkle in his eyes that sometimes came
there, “you don’t want to hunt for pirate’s treasure, do you? A little
while ago you said we might as well look for fish in the tops of trees
as for pirate’s treasure around here. I don’t say there is pirate’s
treasure everywhere around here, but there does seem to be a fish in the
top of a tree now and then.”
Skippy grinned.
“All right!” he said. “Tell us about the land pirate again, Jibby.
Anybody that can throw a carp into a tree-top has a right to believe in
a land pirate’s treasure being a thousand miles from where he got it.”
CHAPTER V
THE FISHING PRIZE
That night, before we went to bed, the five of us sat on the riprap
rocks in front of the cottages, and Jibby told all he knew about the
land pirate and his treasure again, and we got up the Land Pirate’s
Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company. We sat there and swatted
mosquitoes and talked like good friends and Dutch uncles, and swore a
cross-my-heart and hope-to-die oath to be faithful and true to the
constitution and by-laws of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and
Exploration Company. There wasn’t any constitution or any by-laws, but
that did not matter--we swore to be true to them, anyhow, and maybe,
sometime when we had time, we might get up some, if we thought we needed
them.
But, when we had talked it all over and had come right down to facts,
the only thing about the treasure that Jibby seemed to be real sure of
was that the old negro Mose had been awful dead earnest. That old negro
had been mortal sure there was treasure somewhere. He would have bet a
million dollars on it. And that was what made Jibby think there must be
some treasure hidden somewhere. There was no doubt that there had been a
land pirate named John A. Murrell.
Talking it over together that way, we asked Jibby a million or two
questions, and it came out that the old negro Mose had said that
“Riverbank” was the key to where the treasure was hidden. There was no
“Riverbank” on the map side of the map, but on the back of it the one
word “Riverbank” was written, old Mose had said, and old Mose said his
father had said that was the key. “You go whar Riverbank is, up the
river whar black folks is free,” was what his father had said. Of
course, that was away back when there were slaves, and Mose was a slave
then, and so was his father.
The other thing Jibby had to go on was the pine tree--the signal pine
that every friend of John A. Murrell and his pirates set out in the
corner of the lot or yard or farm. The thing to do, Jibby said, was to
find a lone pine tree, because that would be a sign and a signal and a
symbol and a sort of trademark, showing that place had something to do
with John A. Murrell. We tried to think of lone pines, but, just
offhand, we couldn’t think of any that night. All we knew were planted
in rows.
So there did not seem to be much to do but elect Wampus the Captain of
the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, and go to
bed. We thought we would go up and down the river when we had time, and
explore back into the country here and there, and look for lone pines,
and, if we found one in the corner of a lot or farm, we would look for a
likely treasure-hiding place.
Early the next morning, Parcell, who runs the boathouse down at town,
came up with my sister May and a load of groceries and meat for
everybody, and he brought my dog along. My dog is one of the bulliest
dogs you ever saw, but along about April that year all the hair came off
his back, and mother said he was an awful sight, so we let a man take
him, to grow his hair back on. The man was a horse doctor and good at
making hairless dogs hairy again, and he had fixed Rover up fine. And
now he had sent him back.
I was tickled to see Rover again, and he was tickled to see me, and I
guess my mother was almost as glad, because some pretty tough customers
live in houseboats on the river, sometimes. Most of the houseboaters are
all right, and are kind and nice, but some mean ones come floating down
the river, and you can never tell what they’ll do. So a dog comes in
handy, especially a good-sized dog like Rover.
The only thing I was sorry about was that Rover had come this particular
day, because the next day I would have to tie him up and leave him at
home, because it was the day of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize. You can’t
have a dog along when you are fishing from a skiff for a prize. And
Uncle Oscar’s Fishing Prize was one of the most important things of the
whole summer, always.
The way of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize was this: Every year, as long
as we had been going up to the island, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar had
given a prize to the fellow who made the best fishing record on a
certain day, and that day was Uncle Oscar’s birthday. That was why we
fished for the prize on that day, and not on another day.
This Uncle Oscar just lived and breathed on the river, as you might say,
and loved it, and he thought nobody fished enough or boated enough or
swam enough or loved the big old river enough. That was the way he was.
He almost wept when he told about the old days when the river was full
of fish and the big old packets and logging steamers were as thick as
mosquitoes, and great long log rafts used to float down with huts built
on them, and camp-fires, and men pushing the long sweeps to steer them.
That was why, every year, he offered the fishing prize, but we boys got
so we didn’t take much interest in it.
“He just gives it so Wampus can win it,” Skippy Root said to me this
year. “He knows Wampus is the best fisher, and he knows Wampus is sure
to win it.”
“Well,” I said, “ain’t you going to try for it? Fishing is luck, and
sometime Wampus’s luck is going to go back on him.”
“Sure, I’m going to try,” Skippy said. “I’m going to try, but not
because I’ve got a chance to win. I’m going to try because Uncle Oscar
Smale is a bully fellow and he’d feel bad if we didn’t let on we were
trying to win the prize he gives. But Wampus will win it, like he always
does.”
I thought so, too, and so did Tad Willing. Wampus always won. But, when
we saw the prize Wampus’s Uncle Oscar offered this year, we did wish we
had a chance. It was a jointed fishing-rod, with a five-dollar reel, and
it was a beauty.
So, a week or so before Uncle Oscar’s birthday, we were squatting on the
shore of the river talking about things, and Jibby Jones came along and
sat down beside us. We were talking about crawfish holes and where bees
had their bee trees with the honey in them and all sorts of things, just
as we happened to think of them. There was a yellow-jacket bee on a
flower just in front of us, getting honey, and Skippy said he wished he
knew where that bee’s bee tree was.
Jibby Jones leaned over until his big nose almost touched the bee.
“I can’t tell by this bee,” he said, “but by and by there will be a bee
come along and I can tell you.”
Pretty soon the bee flew up and circled and went down and lit on a rock
and walked around. Then it flew out over the river and back and
zigzagged off. Then two or three other bees tried the flower for honey,
and each time Jibby Jones put his nose close to it and said, “No; not
this one.” After a while a bee lit on the flower that seemed to satisfy
Jibby.
“Now I can tell you,” he said. “You watch this bee when it flies away.”
So we did. When it got enough honey, it flew into the air and made a
bee-line off for somewhere. Jibby pulled a pocket compass out of his
pants pocket.
“A bit west of south-west-by-west,” he said. “Any time you want to find
that bee tree you start from here and go just west of south-west-by-west
and you’ll find it. That bee was going home.”
“How did you know that one was going home and the others were not?”
Wampus asked. “Was that a pilot bee?”
“Maybe it was,” said Jibby.
“Well, how did you know it was a pilot bee, then?” asked Skippy.
“Maybe I could smell the difference,” Jibby said. “I’ve got a lot of
nose; it ought to be good for something.”
So we all laughed, but we didn’t know whether Jibby was fooling or in
earnest. That was the way he was. Sometimes he fooled just for the fun
of it, and sometimes he was in earnest. We could never quite make out
which he was, but we had found out one thing--if we waited long enough
and didn’t keep joshing him too much, he always ended up by telling us
what the truth was. So now Wampus sort of laughed.
“Aw, quit!” he said. “You can’t smell like that; you can’t smell the
difference between one kind of bee and another kind. Nobody can; I never
heard such nonsense. I bet even my Uncle Oscar can’t, and he knows just
about everything.”
“Has he got a nose like mine?” Jibby asked.
Well, Wampus couldn’t say he had, because nobody we knew had a nose like
Jibby. There were no other noses like it. It was the biggest and
thinnest nose anybody ever saw.
“No,” Wampus said, “Uncle Oscar’s nose is just a common nose.”
“And does he exercise it regular?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean by ‘exercise it regular’?” Wampus asked.
“Why, exercise it right along,” said Jibby. “Like you exercise your arms
and legs if you want to make them good for what they are good for. Or
like you would exercise your eyes if you wanted them to be good at
seeing things. Or your ears if you wanted them to be ’cute at hearing
things. You know you can do that, don’t you?”
“How?” asked Skippy.
“Well, the Indians did it,” said Jibby. “They began when they were
young, and they exercised their ears and their eyes, and soon they could
hear the grass grow and see a hair as far as you can see a fishpole. You
can exercise your nose the same way, can’t you?”
“Well, it sounds sort of reasonable,” said Tad Willing.
“Of course, it sounds reasonable,” Jibby said, as pleasant as could be.
“Can you do this?”
He put his thumb against the side of his nose and pushed it until most
of his nose lay flat against his left cheek; then he put his thumb on
the other side of his nose and pushed until his nose lay flat against
his right cheek. We all tried it, but we couldn’t do it. Wampus was the
worst at it, because his nose is a pug and sticks up.
“You don’t exercise your noses, that’s why,” Jibby said. “I don’t blame
you. It is no business of mine what you do with your noses. But I
exercise mine and keep it limber and flexible. I get up every morning
and push my nose all around my face, to keep it keen and lively. It
would be mighty dangerous for me if I ever let my nose get stiff and
hard.”
“Why would it?” Skippy wanted to know.
“Because it’s my jib sail,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “If I got
out in a big wind sometime, say near the edge of a big precipice, and
the wind caught my nose, it might blow me over and dash me to pieces on
the rocks below. I’ve got to watch out for that, with a nose like mine.
I’ve got to keep my nose limber, so that if a big wind comes up I can
furl my jib, or jibe it to port or starboard, to steer me away from the
precipice.”
We didn’t say anything. We just looked at one another.
“I might be out in Arizona, or somewhere else, where the wind blows hard
for months at a time,” Jibby went on, just as solemn as before, “and a
nose like mine would be a nuisance. The wind would catch it on one side
and whirl me around one way, and then it would catch it on the other
side and whirl me around the other way, and I’d never be able to get
anywhere if I didn’t keep my nose soft and flexible, so I could lay it
back against my face and fasten it there with a strip of adhesive
plaster.”
“Oh, boy!” Skippy said then, because that was almost too much.
“But,” Jibby went on, “you fellows don’t need to exercise your noses
that way because they don’t amount to much as jibs, anyway.”
“I’ll say mine don’t,” said Wampus, touching his pug.
“No,” said Jibby seriously. “I’ve often felt sorry for you, Wampus;
having a stub like that. But it’s a good nose for smelling with, if you
train it right. It ought to be a quick smeller--a lot quicker than
mine--because it is so short. Smells ought to get in quicker. The only
trouble is that you don’t any of you know how to smell.”
“You don’t have to know how to smell things,” said Tad. “You just smell
them, and that’s all there is to it; you can’t help smelling them.”
“Did you ever read James Latimer’s book called ‘Odors and How to Improve
the Sense of Smell’?” Jibby asked.
“No,” we all said.
“Neither did I,” said Jibby. “I never even heard of it, because there
isn’t any such book, but there might be. Maybe I’ll write one myself,
sometime. The trouble with you fellows is that you don’t think about
your noses. I do think about mine; I think a lot about it. I can’t help
thinking about it, there’s such a lot of it.”
That was true, anyway.
“You fellows just go around smelling what happens to come to you to be
smelled,” Jibby went on. “You can tell a violet from a fish by the smell
of it, maybe, but you don’t exercise your smelling apparatus. Can you
tell the difference between a channel catfish and a mud catfish when
they are down under the water ten feet or so?”
“No, and nobody can. Nobody can even smell a fish when it is under
water,” said Wampus. “Can you?”
“No matter!” said Jibby, sort of tossing his head. “What I say is that,
if people trained their noses and exercised their smelling powers
properly, they might smell smells that they don’t even imagine they can
smell now. That stands to reason. There are dozens of kinds of violets,
but the most that most people can tell when they smell a violet is that
it is a violet. A botanist, that has trained his nose to smell violets
and knows there are dozens of different kinds of violets, gets so, after
a while, he can tell most of them from the others just by the smell. And
it is that way with everything.”
“Well, what good does it do?” asked Skippy.
“Everything you know does some good,” said Jibby. “That’s what knowing
things is for, to do us good. It is just the ‘little bit more’ that
makes anything the ‘most’ instead of leaving it the ‘least.’”
“I guess that’s so,” I said. “It’s partly because Wampus knows a little
bit more about fishing than we do that he wins the Uncle Oscar Fishing
Prize every year.”
“You mean he can smell the fish when they are under water?” Jibby asked.
“Pshaw, no!” said Skippy. “That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?” Jibby asked, grinning a little.
“Well, if it isn’t,” said Skippy, “why don’t you go in for the Uncle
Oscar Prize this year?”
“Oh, I oughtn’t to do that,” Jibby said. “It wouldn’t be fair. What if I
could smell the fish when they are under water? I’d know where all the
fish were and you fellows that belong on the island here wouldn’t have a
chance. No, I’d better not compete for that prize; I’d win it sure.”
CHAPTER VI
THE PRIZE-WINNER
Well, we all laughed! It was a little too ridiculous, the solemn way in
which Jibby said he would be sure to win the prize. We had all tried to
win the prize, and we knew no one but Wampus could win it; he was just a
natural-born fisher and couldn’t be beat.
“Oh, very well, then,” Jibby said, pretending to be offended. “Just for
that I will try to win it, and I will win it. I’m sorry to take it away
from Wampus, but I’ll have to do it.”
We all laughed again.
“I suppose,” Tad said to Jibby, “you’ll go right home and give your nose
some extra exercise now, won’t you?”
“Well, if you see me doing queer things with the old jib, don’t be
surprised,” Jibby said.
The next few days, though, we certainly began to be worried and to think
there might be something in what Jibby had more than hinted to us. He
did some mighty queer things, and we watched him do them. He would stand
with his nose in the air and sniff. He would stand with his nose up and
sniff four or five times, and then turn his head just an inch and sniff
four or five times more, and then turn his head again and sniff again,
and so on. Sometimes he would pull a blade of grass and sniff at one end
of it and then turn it around and sniff at the other end, and keep this
up five minutes at a time.
Then he began sniffing the old Mississippi River. He would lie in a
skiff with his head over the edge and his nose close to the water and
sniff. Then he would get on the seat and row a distance and lie down and
sniff again. A few minutes later, we caught him with fish scales,
sniffing them one after another--a bass scale and a perch scale and a
piece of channel catfish skin and a piece of mud catfish tail, and so
on. Then, while we watched him, he put them one at a time in a pail of
water, and sniffed at the water. He kept changing them in the water,
first one and then the other, and he sniffed each time. It seemed plain
enough to us that he was giving his nose some good exercise.
About eleven o’clock, on the fishing-prize day, Wampus’s Uncle Oscar
came up to the island. He brought the jointed fishing-rod and the reel
with him, so we could see what the prize was going to be, and I got him
off alone and asked him what he thought about noses. I asked him if he
thought Jibby Jones could really smell fish when they were under water,
and if a person could exercise a nose and get it so it could smell
things other noses could not smell.
“Why, yes, George,” he said slowly. “I do think a nose can be trained
quite a little if a person goes about it right. That stands to reason.
But I don’t take any stock in this idea that a person can smell fish
under water. Does Jibby say he can?”
“Well, no,” I had to admit. “He hasn’t said so out and out; he just
hinted it, as you might say. I’ll tell you one thing, though: he’s got
Wampus frightened. And there was the way he smelled that bee and knew it
was the pilot bee.”
“What’s that?” Uncle Oscar asked. “Tell me about that.”
When I had told him, he laughed.
“You boys want to look out for your Jibby Jones,” he said. “He’s a
bright one. He may look a little queer, but some of the brightest men in
the world have been the queerest lookers; their looks were out of a rut
and their brains were out of a rut, too. Tell me one thing, George; can
Jibby see as well as he says he can smell?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “I mean, he sees things we don’t take the
trouble to see, sometimes, but his eyes can’t see very far. That is why
he has to wear glasses. He’s near-sighted.”
“Has to poke his nose pretty close into things to see them?” said Uncle
Oscar. “If he wanted to see exactly how a bee looked, for instance, he
would have to poke his nose almost into a bee, would he?”
“Yes, that’s so,” I said.
“Well, you notice this the next time you look at a bee,” said Uncle
Oscar. “The part of a bee back of its wings--its abdomen--is striped.
When a bee goes out for honey, it goes for two things--a square meal for
itself and some honey or some pollen to take back to the hive. A bee is
greedy, too; it stuffs itself while the chance is good. If you watch a
bee, you’ll see that the longer it feeds, the bigger and longer its
abdomen gets. Especially longer. As it fills up, the stripes get farther
apart. That’s how Jibby ‘smelled’ that bee, George. He poked his nose
close to it so his eyes could see it, and he saw that its abdomen was
swelled and stretched as much as it could be. That meant that the bee
was ready to call it a day’s work and go back to the hive. So your Jibby
knew that when the bee left the flower it would probably make a
‘bee-line’ for home. And he was right. That’s how he ‘smelled’ that
‘pilot’ bee. It wasn’t a pilot bee, and he didn’t smell it. So you and
Wampus want to look out for Jibby Jones. This bee business makes me
think he’s going to win the prize, or thinks he is. He’s a mighty smart
boy.”
The next time I saw Jibby, which was about half an hour after that, I
asked him:
“Well, how’s the old smeller getting along, Jibby? Is it going to win
the prize?”
“I’ll tell you, George,” Jibby said, “I have hopes. I don’t say I’ll
win, but I’m trying.”
“It will be an awful thing if it is windy this afternoon and you have to
adhesive your nose shut against your cheek, won’t it?” I laughed.
Jibby put his finger to his nose and wiggled his nose at me, and then we
both laughed.
“I know how you smelled the pilot bee, Jibby,” I told him.
“Do you?” he said, and it did not seem to bother him at all. “Just see
if you and Wampus can see how I smell out the best and biggest fish this
afternoon.”
The afternoon turned out to be the best sort for fishing. It was cloudy,
but not too cloudy, and a nice riffle on the water, but not too rough.
The place Wampus’s Uncle Oscar picked out for the contest was the slough
at the upper end of our island, and that meant we would have to fish
from skiffs, which is about the best way, anyhow.
There was not much of a gathering to see the contest. You can’t get
mothers to be very interested in such things, except to say, “Oh, how
nice!” or, “Oh, I’m sorry!” after it is all over, and our fathers--all
except Jibby’s--went down to town every day to work. So the audience was
just Wampus’s Uncle Oscar and Jibby’s father. They walked up to the
slough together while we were rowing up, and they sat on the bank and
watched us fish. We each had a skiff.
When we got to the slough, Jibby was ahead, and he ran his skiff ashore
and waited for us.
“I’m a butter-in at this game,” he said, “so you fellows go ahead and
pick out your places first, and then I’ll take mine.”
I suppose we ought to have let Jibby have first choice, but we didn’t
think of it. Wampus rowed to the place he liked best and let down his
anchor rock, and then the rest of us got as close to him as Uncle
Oscar’s rules allowed. One boat-length away from each other was the
rule. The other rules were that every fish counted. The one of us that
got the most fish, no matter what size, scored twenty-five. The one that
got the one biggest fish scored another twenty-five. The one that got
the biggest weight of fish, after they were cleaned and ready to cook,
scored fifty. That made the most that could be scored one hundred. We
were to fish from one o’clock until five o’clock that afternoon, and we
all had lunch--sandwiches and apples and bananas and water--so we could
eat whenever we wanted to. The only other rule was that it was all worm
fishing; we had to use worms for bait.
As soon as Wampus got his boat settled, he baited up and put his line
over, and we all hustled up and did the same thing. In a minute, almost,
Wampus shouted:
“First fish!”
He had it, too. It was a good channel catfish, and when he unhooked it
he held it up and shouted:
“Oh, you Jibby! Come on with your fishing!”
Jibby hadn’t rowed out from the shore yet. Now he backed his skiff out
carefully and leaned over while he rowed with one oar, and sniffed at
the water over the side of the boat. He rowed here and he rowed there,
and then, all of a sudden, he backed water and plumped his rock
overboard and anchored. He was about twenty-five feet from us.
“Well,” Wampus said, “maybe he didn’t smell fish there, but he picked
out a good place. I thought some of fishing there myself.”
Jibby took his time. He shortened up the rope to his rock anchor, and he
looked to see that his fishpole and line and hook were just as he wished
them to be, and he took out a pocket rule and measured how deep his
bobber was set, as if it had to be just right to a part of an inch. Then
he put his line over very carefully and--whang!--the bobber went under
like a flash.
“Jibby’s got one!” I shouted.
“Shut up!” Wampus said, sort of cross. “We can’t catch anything if you
yell all the time.” So we kept quiet and watched Jibby and our own
bobbers. He had a perch, and it was a big one, almost three pounds.
Wampus opened his eyes some when he saw it, because a three-pound perch
is a good-sized fish and might be good for twenty-five points if nobody
got a bigger one. Just then Skippy pulled in a mud catfish about as big
as his hand, so we all got busy fishing as hard as we knew how.
It was lovely up there in the slough. The big elms and maples hung over
and were draped with vines, and some sweet flower was making the air
sweet. There were a few mosquitoes, but we did not mind them much; we
were used to them. Jibby’s father and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar sat on the
bank and smoked and watched.
Well, in an hour or so Wampus was away ahead of Tad and Skippy and me,
like he always was at fishing, but he was fishing hard and changing his
bobber every few minutes, because Jibby Jones was three fish ahead of
him.
“I guess he’s got a real nose for fish,” Wampus whispered to us. “He’s
smelled out the best fishing-hole in this whole slough; that’s what he
has. I wish I had gone there instead of here. I’m a better fisherman
than he is, and I know it and you know it, and if he beats me it will
just be his nose that does it.”
“Then I wish I had his kind of nose,” I said, for I was so far behind
that I knew I could never catch up unless I caught a whale.
Just then a school of small perch must have come by, for Wampus caught
four in succession. That cheered him up, but not for long, because Jibby
kept right on catching. Now and then Jibby would pull a paper from his
pocket and look at it, and take his pocket rule from his pocket and set
his bobber different, and catch another fish.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the sun was pretty hot, and even
Wampus said the fish had stopped biting right, but old Jibby kept right
on pulling one out now and then. When one side of his boat didn’t give
him any fish, he would try the other side, but first he always sniffed
to see if the fish were down there. So, after Wampus had not caught any
for about half an hour, he tried smelling for fish, too. He leaned over
and sniffed at the water.
“Can’t smell a thing,” he said.
The funny thing was that, right along through the heat of the afternoon,
when fishing is the worst, Jibby kept on pulling in a fish every now and
then. He hadn’t caught so many more than Wampus when the fish were
biting easy, but he had kept up with him, and now, that they were not
biting for Wampus, Jibby forged right ahead.
“There’s no use talking, fellows,” Wampus said. “I’m convinced. Jibby
can smell out the fish. He smelled out the best fishing-hole on this
whole slough, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve got a chance yet, but
I do wish I had a can of nice fresh lively worms.”
“Yours most all gone?” Skippy asked.
“No,” Wampus told him, “but they’re mighty withered, what I’ve got left.
If I was a fish, I’d be ashamed to tackle such sick-looking worms.”
Just about then the fish began biting again, but it looked as if they
had got together and decided to help Jibby beat Wampus. Old Jibby just
pulled them in as fast as he could take them off his hook, and just
before five o’clock he got something on his line that acted like a ton
of brick. It was only a carp, but it was a ten-pound one, and Jibby was
mighty careful, and got it into the boat.
“Aw, what’s the use!” Wampus said. “He’s got these fish trained.”
Then Uncle Oscar, over on the bank, stood up and shouted, “Time’s up,
boys!”--and we knew Jibby had won. We didn’t know how far he had won
until we counted up the fish, and weighed them after they were cleaned.
Old Jibby had the biggest fish, and he had the most fish, and he had the
most weight of cleaned fish; he had the whole one hundred points, and he
could have thrown away twenty fish and still have had the hundred
points. Wampus was mighty disgusted.
It wasn’t until after we were home again and the fish had been weighed,
and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar had handed the prize rod and reel to Jibby,
that he said to Jibby:
“Well, son, I’ve fished on this river a good many years, but you’ve
taught me something to-day.”
“How to smell out fishing-holes?” Wampus wanted to know.
Uncle Oscar looked at Jibby and laughed.
“You tell them, Jibby,” he said. “Your father told me. Tell them how you
smelled out the fish.”
Jibby took his nose in his fingers and wiggled it.
“About a week ago,” he said, “I happened to stick my old nose-jib in a
book, and that was when I smelled out these fish. I thought perhaps I
might want to try for the prize, and I heard that old Izaak Walton was a
great fisherman, so I stuck my nose in his book and tried to smell out
something. Izaak Walton was the father of anglers, you know, George.”
“I know,” I said, pretty cheap, because I had lent the book to Jibby,
but had never read it, because it was all about English fish, and not
about Mississippi River fish.
“Well,” Jibby said, “first, I asked Orpheus Cadwallader where the best
fishing-holes were, up in the slough here, and how deep I ought to set
my bobber for the different fish, and he told me. I thought he ought to
know, because he is the caretaker here and the best fisherman I know.
That’s why I went to the hole I did go to. Orpheus Cadwallader told me
it was good.”
“That’s all right,” Skippy said, “but what did you smell out of that
Izaak Walton book; that’s what we want to know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Jibby. “You know what I told you? I said it
is just the ‘little bit more’ that makes anything the ‘most’? I knew I
couldn’t fish against Wampus unless I had the ‘little bit more.’ So I
went to the Izaak Walton book, and the only thing I found there that I
didn’t know was scouring the worms.”
“Scouring the worms! What is that?” asked Wampus, opening his eyes
pretty wide.
“Walton tells how, in his book,” said Jibby. “You dig your worms ahead
of time, and put them in wet moss, in a box, and let them be there.
Angleworms eat mud, you know, and they’re full of mud. If you put them
in wet moss, they don’t have any mud to eat and they get clean and
bright and husky. They get used to being wet, too. They get brighter in
color. They don’t drown so quick when they are in the water, and they
can wiggle harder and longer, and stay alive better, and the fish see
them quicker and like them better.”
“Shucks!” said Wampus. “Was that it?”
“Sure, it was!” said Jibby. “I figured that your worms would wash out
pale quicker than mine, and that by the middle of the afternoon they
would be pretty sick worms, in a hot tin can, while mine, in a box of
moss, would be cool and fresh and lively. And they were! It was as if I
had live worms to fish with and you had dead ones.”
“And you got that out of a book that was written maybe a couple of
hundred years ago?” I asked him.
“Sure, I did!” said Jibby. “I’ve got a nose that can smell common sense
that far.”
Well, that beat us! That beat Wampus, too.
“You win!” he said. “You had us all fooled, Jibby. You deserve the
prize. You’ve got a wonderful nose!”
So that was all there was to it. We all laughed, and Jibby laughed, and
Wampus’s Uncle Oscar laughed. Then, all of a sudden, Wampus’s Uncle
Oscar put his nose in the air and sniffed.
“Um-yum!” he said. “I’ve got a fine nose, too. I can smell fish frying,
and it certainly smells good to me. Can you smell it, Jibby?”
Jibby put his nose in the air and sniffed.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I can smell three channel catfish and four perch.”
[Illustration: “I GUESS HE’S GOT A REAL NOSE FOR FISH”]
Then he sniffed again.
“Two of the catfish are fried on one side, and the other catfish and the
four perch are fried on the other side,” he said.
And that’s how Jibby was; he was a dandy. He liked to fool, but there
was always something back of his fooling. This time it was a fried fish
supper. So we went to wash up and have it, for we were all eating at
Wampus’s house. And while Wampus was washing, he turned to Jibby and
said:
“Well, Jibby, if your nose can smell out things so extra well, why don’t
you give it a little more exercise and then smell out that land pirate’s
treasure?”
“Maybe I will, Wampus, if you say to. You’re the Captain and the orders
have to come from you,” Jibby said.
But none of us knew then how soon we were going to be a lot more excited
about that land pirate’s treasure.
CHAPTER VII
THE TOUGH CUSTOMER
Well, we all had a good time at dinner, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar made a
speech and gave Jibby Jones the rod and reel, and Jibby made us laugh by
saying we mustn’t blame him for winning the prize, because it wasn’t his
fault he had an extra good nose; he said it was his Grandfather
Parmenter’s fault, that he had inherited the nose from. Then Wampus’s
Uncle Oscar said that it was all right to say “nose,” but that the kind
of “nose” Jibby used was brains, and that--on the river or off the
river--the fellow that had brains and used them always stood the best
chance of winning.
So we ate fried fish until we couldn’t eat any more, and then we sat
around outside until bedtime, and I tied Rover to one of the posts under
our cottage, and we all went home and to bed.
Maybe I had eaten too much fried fish. Anyway, I lay awake awhile and
heard Orpheus Cadwallader waddling past the house, going his rounds to
see that everything was all right, and I heard Rover get up and walk to
the end of his rope and wag his tail at Orpheus. His tail thumped
against one of the posts, and I knew he was wagging it.
A little while later, Rover began to howl, and he is one of the loudest
howlers in the world, I guess. The moon was one of the things he was
fondest of howling at; he seemed to think it was hung in the sky as an
insult to dogs. Whenever there was a moon and Rover saw it, he howled.
And the other thing that made him howl was being tied up. He would stand
being tied up for an hour or so, because he expected I would come and
untie him, but, if he was tied for much longer than an hour, he felt
hurt and miserable and neglected, and he would begin to howl. He would
begin with an “Arr-oo------” and hang on to the “oo” until it quivered
and trembled, and everybody within a mile wondered if it was ever going
to stop, and got nervous, and tossed in bed, and swore. And then Rover
would take another breath and begin another “Arr-oo------” longer and
louder than ever. And keep it up all night, unless somebody went and
untied him.
The reason I tied Rover that night was because he is a wandering dog. He
likes to explore. And what he likes to explore for is dead fish, mostly,
and the deader the better. If you didn’t tie him up at night, he would
wander off until he found a dead fish, and then he would roll in it. The
deader the fish was, the better he liked it; he thought it was
perfumery, I guess. He would wander for miles around our island, and
even swim across the slough to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a
dead fish to perfume himself with. And he was such an affectionate and
loving dog, and so proud of himself when he was all perfumed up, that
mother and the rest of us just hated him when he was that way.
If I had known Rover was coming up that day, I would have gone around
the shore of our island and the shore of Oak Island and got rid of all
the dead fish, but Rover’s coming was a surprise, and we had had the
fishing-prize contest that day, so all there was to do was to tie him up
and let him howl. His howling was pretty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as
dead fish, which is about the worst thing there is.
Well, after Orpheus Cadwallader passed our cottage again, going back, I
turned over on my stomach and hoped I’d go to sleep, and I expected
Rover would have a fine all-night howl, but all of a sudden he stopped
howling and began to bark. It was his angry “Woof! woof!” bark, with a
mean snarl at the end, which meant somebody was around who had no
business to be around.
I sat up in bed, and I could feel the old cottage joggle as Rover jerked
at his rope, and then, suddenly, the rope broke and off Rover went,
barking to beat the band, full tilt toward the slough back of our
cottages. About halfway there, I should judge, he came up with what had
set him to barking. I heard a rough voice say, “Get away from here! Get
away from here!” and a club thumping on Rover’s back, and more barking,
and swearing, and then Rover yipped, and began to scream--if you can
call it that--the way a dog does when it is hurt, or has its paw run
over by a wagon, or breaks a toe.
In a second I was out of bed and getting into my clothes, and I heard
Rover come yipping and whining back toward the cottage. I did not have
many clothes to put on, and in a couple of seconds I was downstairs, and
by the time I was out there and Rover was whining at my feet, Wampus and
his Uncle Oscar and Skippy and Tad and Jibby were out there, too, and we
heard Orph Cadwallader coming running as fast as such a fat man could.
Orph had his shotgun, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar had a pistol, and Jibby
had brought along an electric torch. We looked at Rover’s foot and saw
it was hurt pretty bad, and that one of his ears was cut where it had
been hit, and we were all pretty mad. Nobody had a right to be on our
island but us, and most of the time nobody was there but the women and
us kids and Orph Cadwallader, and tramps had no business there. They
were too dangerous.
So Wampus’s Uncle Oscar took the electric torch from Jibby and said:
“You boys stay back here; this is a man’s job. Orph and I will attend to
this!”
So the five of us, Jibby and Wampus and Tad and Skippy and I, we went
along with Orph and Wampus’s uncle. I held the piece of rope that was
tied around Rover’s neck, and he limped along, whining. We made quite a
procession, and when we looked back we could see that all the cottages
were lighted up. Everybody was out of bed. You couldn’t expect us to
stay back when there was so much excitement.
We went through the woods and, before we had gone very far, the light
from the electric torch picked out two men who were standing waist-deep
in the stinging nettles under the trees, waiting for us to come up to
them. It was easy to guess that they had started away from where Rover
had met them, and that they had then heard us and stopped. And that was
not like river-rats or tramps who had come to snoop around and steal
what they could and then get away again. That kind come in skiffs, and,
if you see them, they scoot for their skiffs and row away as fast as
they can. But these men waited for us.
“What’s this mean? What you doing on this island? What you hurt this dog
for?” Wampus’s Uncle Oscar asked when we came up to the men.
They were river-rats, all right, or tramps, or toughs of some kind; you
could tell that by their looks. And one was the toughest-looking
customer I ever did see! He had only one eye and that was an ugly
one--keen and wicked-looking. His right hand had only two fingers and a
thumb, and there were three deep scars across his face. He had a regular
pirate’s bunch of black whiskers, and all he needed was a red sash with
a couple of pistols stuck in it, and a cutlass, and a red handkerchief
tied around his head, and a pair of brass rings in his ears, to look
like a real pirate. And when he moved out from the nettles we saw he had
one wooden leg--scarred and chipped as if he had used it to break rocks.
His mate, the other man, was smaller and meaner-looking, if anybody
could look meaner. He looked like a rat--sneaky-looking. We called him
the Rat when we talked about him afterward. So when Wampus’s uncle
shouted at them, they looked at us.
“That’s all right, boss; that’s all right!” the Tough Customer said. “No
harm meant. Pardner and I don’t mean no harm. We didn’t know anybody was
on this island. We wouldn’t do no harm.”
“What did you try to kill that dog for, then?” Wampus’s uncle asked, and
no fooling, either.
“Well, he come at us, boss,” the Tough Customer said. “We was just
walking through here and the dog come at us. So I took a swipe at him
with a club. Anybody would, boss, when a dog comes at him that way.”
“Well, you look here!” Wampus’s uncle said. “This is a private island,
owned by folks, and nobody is allowed on it. And no nonsense about it,
either. You get off, and you stay off, or you’re liable to get shot, or
worse. You get off this island now, and you stay off it hereafter.”
“Yes, sure, boss!” the Tough Customer said. “We’ll do that; we don’t
mean no harm; we wouldn’t touch anything, anyhow.”
And that might have been all right, but just then something went
“Arr-awk--arr-awk!”--and anybody would have known it was a chicken.
Orpheus Cadwallader made about five steps, and grabbed the Rat, and
stuck his hand into the Rat’s shirt, and, sure enough, in the back of
the Rat’s shirt was one of Orpheus’s own chickens. It gave a flop of its
wings and scooted for its coop, making big flying leaps and scolding as
it went. So Orph made a swipe at the Rat with the end of his gun, but
the Rat dodged, and then turned and ran as hard as his legs could carry
him. Orph let fly with both barrels of his shotgun, but there were too
many trees; he did not even pepper the Rat.
“So!” said Wampus’s uncle. “That’s the idea, is it? Well, we’ll just see
you off the island right here and now. Where’s your boat?”
The Tough Customer looked at the pistol Wampus’s uncle carried, and I
guess he decided that Wampus’s uncle wouldn’t shoot a man in the back,
not unless he ran, anyway, and he turned and stumped off toward the bank
of the slough until he came to the path, and then he turned down the
path a hundred yards, and all of us following him.
There was a place there where the arum and pickerel weed came close to
the shore, but the water was two or three feet deep, and tied to a tree
there was a shanty-boat--one of the smallest and worst old shanty-boats
I ever saw. It did not look over ten feet long, and it wasn’t more than
five feet wide, with not a window in it, and the deck not over two feet
wide. The boards of which it was made were thin and old and warped, and
the only power was a ten-foot pole with a board nailed on one end.
When he came to the shanty-boat, the Tough Customer stopped to untie his
shore line and threw it aboard. He did not say another word. He took his
ten-foot pole from the roof of the shanty-boat and braced it against the
shore and pushed, and the boat slithered among the weeds and glided out
from the shore.
We stood and watched until the shanty-boat was out in the middle of the
slough, where the current caught it and swung it slowly downstream. Then
the Tough Customer rested and looked toward us, and swore at us strong
and steady for a long while, and Wampus’s uncle said it was all over,
and we went home. I looked Rover’s paw and ear over, and saw they were
not so bad, so I tied him up again and went to bed. Of course, mother
asked all about what had happened, and said she had been frightened when
she heard the gunshots, but she was glad everything was all right and
the tramps were off the island.
The next morning there was only one thing for me to do if I wanted to
have mother let me keep Rover on the Island, and that was to explore for
dead fish and get them out of the way. So we all went--all five of us
boys. We went down the chute side of the island first, but we didn’t
find a single dead fish, because all the folks know about Rover, and
they don’t leave any dead dogfish or other kinds on shore when they
catch them. So we got as far as the end of the island, downstream, and
started along up the slough side of the island, and all of a sudden
Wampus stopped short.
“Look there,” he said, bending down and pointing. “There’s that Tough
Customer’s shanty-boat. He didn’t quit the island. He only floated down
and landed lower down.”
We all bent low and saw the shanty-boat. It was in a sort of small cove,
where the willows must have hid it from the slough, and I don’t suppose
anybody could have seen it from the island except from the very spot
where we were.
“Come on!” I whispered. “Let’s go and get Orph and your Uncle Oscar, and
tell them.”
But Jibby Jones put out a hand and held me back.
“This doesn’t look right,” he said, shaking his head. “This looks evil
to me. Those men were told to get off the island, and they said they
would get off the island, and there’s no honest reason why they should
be on the island. All they had to do when they were out in the slough
last night was to let their shanty-boat drift and they would have gone
on down past here. They must mean some devilment on the island, and we
ought to know what it is.”
Well, that seemed reasonable, and Jibby said what we must do. We must
crawl up through the willows and investigate. The only trouble was
Rover. I couldn’t tie him to a tree because he would howl, and, if I
dragged him through the willows, he would see the shanty-boat and bark,
and, if I turned him loose, he would probably jump all around and go to
the shanty-boat and scare the Tough Customer and the Rat into fits. But
Jibby fixed that. He said the thing for me to do was to take Rover and
go back and get Orph Cadwallader and Wampus’s uncle. So I went.
Jibby and the boys crawled as close to the shanty-boat as they could,
Indian fashion, and lay in the willows, and they were in luck, because
the Tough Customer and the Rat were talking.
“No, sir!” the Tough Customer was saying. “I don’t stay on any island
where caretakers go around with shotguns, shooting them off any time of
the day or night.”
“I don’t see that you’ve got any kick to make about shotguns,” the Rat
said, in his whining voice. “I’m the one that got shot at.”
“I don’t care who got shot at,” the Tough Customer said. “Four or five
barrels of cider wouldn’t pay me for getting my hide full of birdshot,
not if it was the hardest cider on earth. And you don’t know that they
hid the cider on this island--you only think so. It may be on any island
in the whole river. You just forget that cider, pardner, and let’s get
to hunting that treasure I know about.”
“Well, it ain’t playing me square,” the Rat whined. “A bargain is a
bargain, and the bargain was that, if I paid my money and bought this
shanty-boat, you would help me find that cider first, and help me get
away with it and sell it. And I as good as know it was on this island
them barrels of cider was hid. And, if so, on this island is where we
want to be.”
“And get shot full of birdshot or, maybe, buckshot,” sneered the Tough
Customer. “Why, man alive! just now after these island folks is all
roused up is no time to hunt around on this island for a few pesky
barrels of cider. They’ll all be carrying shotguns for the next month or
so. No, sir! Now is the time to stay away from this island. We can come
back later on if you want to, but now is the time to be hunting that
land pirate’s treasure.”
“You don’t know how much it is, and you don’t know where it is, and you
don’t even know if there is any,” complained the Rat.
“All right!” said the Tough Customer. “Maybe I know more than you think
I do. Maybe I ain’t told you all I know yet. Maybe I thought I would
just wait and see if you was a reasonable cuss and willing to do the
wise thing, or if you was a sort of idiot that would want to hang around
an island and get shot full of buckshot and bullets for a few barrels of
no-account cider. How about that?”
“’Tain’t right! ’Tain’t right!” the Rat complained. “Pardners ought to
be fair and square and tell all. Next thing you’ll be saying you won’t
split half and half.”
“Half and half was what I said, and half and half holds good,” said the
Tough Customer. “And this will, maybe, be a big thing. I’ll play fair
with you if you play fair with me. Will you play fair? Hope to die and
may your throat be cut, if you don’t?”
“Hope to die and may my throat be cut if I don’t!” said the Rat. “Fair
and square, or may the dogs eat us!”
“Now, that’s talking,” said the Tough Customer. “Look here, now!”
They heard him feeling around among the boards of the shanty-boat,
inside and nearest the corner to the boys.
“I got a map of the whole business,” the Tough Customer said. “You
didn’t know that, did you? It’s been right there in that split board
back of the lantern ever since I come aboard this boat. And you would
never have seen it if you hadn’t played fair and square with me, you
bet! Gimme that board there to spread it out on.”
They heard the Rat move around and then the Tough Customer spoke again.
“When I was down there in Helena, like I told you,” he said, “they stuck
me in jail for ten days for being a vagrant, and there was a fellow in
my cell with me, see? A red-headed fellow with a scar over one eye. And
he shines up to me about the second day, and says I’m the sort of man
he’s looking for. He says he knows where pirate’s treasure is, and he’s
getting up a gang to go and get it. Only, he’s in jail for three months
for stealing a hog, you understand? And he needs somebody that’s going
to be free soon, to make some preparations and one thing and another. So
he shows me this map that he stole off an old nigger down there.”
[Illustration: a map]
“This map?” said the Rat.
“This map, which was drawed by the land pirate’s own brother to show
where the treasure was,” said the Tough Customer. “So I said I’d go in
with him, and he explained all he knew about the map, and the night
before I was turned loose I stole the map off him, and I dropped it
through the window. And the next day, when I was turned loose, I went
around under the window and picked up the map and beat it for up here as
fast as I could. Because this here word on the back of the map is the
key word. ‘Riverbank,’ see? That’s the place to go to, to start out
from, to find the treasure.”
“Well, you couldn’t be much nearer,” said the Rat.
“All right! And here’s the map itself,” said the Tough Customer. “You
say you know places hereabouts; what do you make of it?”
“Let me get a good look at it,” said the Rat. “Why, pshaw! It looks
plain enough! Here’s the river, because it is marked ‘river.’ And this
bent business is a slough coming into the river. And this crooked line
would be a creek emptying into the slough.”
“That’s how I’d make it out,” said the Tough Customer.
“Sure!” said the Rat. “And these lines mean two roads crossing each
other, don’t they? And this is a house or barn in the lot at the
crossroads. And here’s a cross-mark--this X here. That ought to be where
the treasure is buried, hey?”
“Well, now, would it be?” asked the Tough Customer. “How about this
arrow? This arrow points right to where the road crosses the creek.
Don’t that mean that that is where the treasure is? Suppose there is a
bridge there, or a culvert. Mightn’t the money be hid there? Well, we
could look both places. How about this ‘23 miles’ and ‘Greenland’?”
“Greenland? Sure enough, that says Greenland!” said the Rat, all
excited. “Why, pardner, this is the easiest thing you ever saw! I know
where this Greenland is--Greenland is a crossroads store up the river
four or five miles from here, over on the Illinois side, just on top of
the hills. Used to be quite a village, years ago, but it’s only a store
and post-office now. Why, I can take you right there, pardner. And
there’s a creek there, too, crosses the road. Only--
“Greenland ain’t any 23 miles back from the slough, or from the river,
either. It’s only--say!”
The boys heard him slap his knee.
“Why, shucks!” he exclaimed. “That ain’t 23 miles. That’s meant for
two-three miles. Two _or_ three miles. And that’s about what this
Greenland store is back from the river.”
He let his voice fall into a mysterious whisper.
“Why, pardner,” he whispered, “this is as easy as falling off a log! We
can walk right to the spot. And that arrow don’t point to no treasure,
either. That arrow is like any other arrow on a map--it points north. It
was put there to show where north is.”
“But that would make the Mississippi River flow from east to west,”
objected the Tough Customer.
“And that’s why I say so!” declared the Rat. “Because it does flow right
spang from east to west, all the way from Derlingport to
Riverbank--thirty good miles! If that map showed a river flowing from
north to south, it would be wrong, because the Mississippi don’t flow
that way at Greenland store. You bet! All we’ve got to do is to go right
to the bank of the creek where that cross-mark is, and if that treasure
is there, we’ll find her!”
“So you’ll put off cider-hunting awhile, I guess,” said the Tough
Customer. “Gimme the map; I’ll put it back where I keep it.”
He shuffled around inside the boat, putting the map back.
“Well, now,” the Rat said, “as to putting off hunting that cider, it
seems to me, seeing we’re right here on the island, we might take a day
or two and--”
What he would have said next nobody ever knew, for here came Orph
Cadwallader and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar and Rover and I, and Orph had his
gun and an axe, and Uncle Oscar had his pistol and an axe, and they were
mad! They were mighty mad! Orph handed me his gun and up with his axe
and chopped the shore line of the shanty-boat, and swung the axe and
brought it down whang against the end of the boat. You should have seen
the boards fly! In three blows Orph had the whole end of that
shanty-boat knocked to splinters, and the Tough Customer and the Rat
were out into the water, shouting and swearing and pulling the boat
through the willows into the slough, to try to save some of it, anyway,
and Orph stooped and picked up slabs of wet driftwood and slammed them
at the two.
When the shanty-boat was out past the willow fringe, the Tough Customer
swung aboard and grabbed his pole and began poling for dear life,
shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and then Orph slung one last slab
at them and missed by ten feet, and about all that was left of the
excitement was Rover, trying to bark his head off.
“That’s the end of _them_!” Orph said. “That’ll be the last we ever see
of those two.”
He took his gun and he and Uncle Oscar started down toward the end of
the island to watch the shanty-boat float by, and we all started down
there with them. But when Jibby had gone a few yards, he stopped short.
Then he turned back and worked his way through the willows to where the
shanty-boat had been. He picked up a broken board and bent over the
water and fished something white out from among the splinters of
houseboat.
“What is it?” I asked, and he opened it and showed me.
It was the map of the pirate’s treasure place.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RED-HEADED BANDIT
Well, as soon as Jibby Jones got the map, we went down to the lower end
of the island, and we saw the Tough Customer’s shanty-boat floating out
of the slough and on down the river, and then we went back.
Orpheus Cadwallader and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar went back to the cottages,
and we boys began looking for dead fish where we had left off, and as we
looked we talked about the Tough Customer and the Rat and the land
pirate’s treasure. We did not study the map then, because it was soaking
wet. Jibby Jones pinned it inside his hat, so it could dry out there.
As we went along, Skippy and Tad and Wampus told me what they had heard
the Tough Customer say to the Rat, and what they had heard the Rat say
to the Tough Customer, and when they had told it all, Wampus said to me:
“George, I’ll bet the man the Tough Customer stole the map from was the
Red-Headed Bandit that tried to steal Rover last year. Because,
listen--the Red-Headed Bandit had a scar over his eye, didn’t he?”
“You bet he did!” I said. And all of a sudden I had a scared feeling, as
if there was danger and mystery all around me and I knew it, but
couldn’t see where or what it was exactly. You get the same feeling,
sometimes, when you are walking through a big patch of weeds, taller
than your head, and all of a sudden you hear a queer noise to the left
of you, and a queer noise to the right of you, and then a cobweb strikes
you across the face and sticks there, and you hear another queer noise
behind you. That’s how I felt now--as if there was queerness and mystery
all around our island. Because here was the Red-Headed Bandit in this
pirate’s treasure business, and I had never thought of the Red-Headed
Bandit as anything much.
The business of the Red-Headed Bandit was like this: A year ago, the
year before Jibby Jones came to our island, my sister May was going to
be married to Mr. Edwin Skreever, of Derlingport, Iowa, on September
11th, in the evening. They were going to be married at our house down in
town--in Riverbank--and from the way May and mother talked about it you
would think it was going to be grand and lovely and everything. So May
said to mother:
“Well, I suppose George and Wampus will have to be at the wedding, but I
tremble to think of it. I know they will do some awful thing and spoil
everything, but I suppose they will have to be there.”
May knew mighty well I wouldn’t go to her wedding or to anybody’s
wedding unless Wampus went, too. We always go together.
“We’ll just have to hope for the best,” mother said.
“Well, there is one thing certain,” May said, “I’m not going to have
those two boys down there until the last possible moment. When we go
down to make the preparations, I want them left up here on the island
where they will be out of mischief.”
That suited me, all right! I didn’t want to go down and have May nagging
at me with her “Do keep your hands off that, George!” and “Please don’t
touch that, George!”
We had been up there on Birch Island all summer--our family and Wampus
Smale’s family and a dozen other families--living in the cottages on
stilts and having a good time on the island and on the good old
Mississippi. So, about the 1st of September, most of the families went
back down to town, but our family and the Smales did not. They waited a
few days longer.
Just about then--about the 1st of September--Mr. Edwin Skreever came
down from Derlingport in his motor-boat to visit with us until the
wedding. I don’t say I liked him much; neither did Wampus. Maybe he was
all right, but he was no fun. He thought he was wonderful, I guess, and
May thought so, but he was too haughty to suit me. I guess he didn’t
like boys much and he thought he had to be severe and solemn with them.
He acted as if he thought he might die if the creases got out of his
trousers. He had no use for my dog, either. He was always saying: “Down!
Lie down! Get down! Get out!” to Rover. He did not like him.
You see, Rover is a pretty big dog and affectionate. He would rush up to
Mr. Edwin Skreever and jump up on him and try to kiss him on the face.
Sometimes he would get one paw on Mr. Edwin Skreever’s necktie and one
paw on his collar, and sometimes he would get one paw on Mr. Edwin
Skreever’s vest and the other sort of tangled in his watch-chain. Then
Mr. Edwin Skreever would whack at him and say: “Get down you beast!” But
not when May was handy.
Rover was my dog, because May had given him to me, but he was May’s dog,
too, because Mr. Jack Betts had given him to May. I never knew when
Rover was my dog and when he was May’s dog, because girls are mostly
Indian givers. When she wanted to pet Rover and take him walking, he was
May’s dog--so she claimed--but when Rover howled or needed to be fed,
May would say: “For goodness’ sake, George, attend to that dog of
yours!”
I guess one reason Mr. Edwin Skreever did not care much for Rover was
because Mr. Jack Betts had given him to May. I guess Mr. Edwin Skreever
was jealous, because when Mr. Jack Betts gave Rover to May everybody
thought Mr. Jack Betts was the one she was going to be married to.
Well, no matter! I only want to tell you the awful fix Wampus and I got
into on account of being left up there on the island where we would be
out of mischief.
On the 9th of September Parcell came up in his big motor-launch and took
May and mother and the Smales all down to town to get ready for May’s
wedding. So they left Mr. Edwin Skreever on the island with me and
Wampus, because we could go down in Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motor-boat on
the 11th, which was the wedding day. I guess they were almost as glad to
have Mr. Edwin Skreever out of the way as they were to have me and
Wampus out of the way.
That left nobody on the island but us three and Orpheus Cadwallader, who
is the caretaker and stays on the island all winter. He was to close up
our cottage when we left.
So that was all right. The last thing May said before she got aboard
Parcell’s launch was:
“Now, George, you be sure you don’t let Rover wander off somewhere so
you can’t bring him down when you come. You had better tie him up.”
I’ve told you about Rover, and how he would wander for miles around the
island, and even swim across to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a
dead fish to perfume himself with.
The only way to keep him from wandering after dead fish was to tie him
up, and then he howled all night. That was his second bad habit, and it
was almost worse than dead fish. He was the loudest and saddest howler I
ever heard. When you tied him up, he would sit down on his haunches and
put his nose up and open his mouth and just let loose all the agony of
all the dogs that ever suffered pain or sorrow from the days of Adam
right on to to-day. And loudly, too. When Rover really got interested in
howling, you could hear him five miles.
The only thing in Riverbank or anywhere near it that made as much noise
as Rover’s howl was Mr. Jack Betts’s motor-boat. His motor-boat was a
speed boat and was called the Skittery III, because Mr. Jack Betts had
run the Skittery I and the Skittery II onto snags and mashed them to
splinters. I guess that was one reason why May did not want to marry Mr.
Jack Betts--she was afraid he would mash himself to splinters some day.
A husband that is mashed to splinters is not much use around the house.
Mr. Edwin Skreever used to say:
“That’s Jack Betts all over! He uses a barrel of gasoline every time he
takes out that boat of his--fourteen dollars to risk his life for ten
miles of idiotic speed, and he hasn’t a dollar in the bank! Twenty-seven
years old and not a dollar to his name!”
Even father would not ride in the Skittery III. It was a much faster
boat than the others and could make thirty-five miles an hour upstream
on our old Mississippi, and that is some speed! When it was going full
tilt the Skittery III stood up on about three inches of the stern end of
its keel and simply skittered on the water, and all twelve cylinders
screamed. It made more noise than forty airplanes. It made more noise
than ten planing mills. I never knew anything that made such a noise.
And go? Mr. Jack Betts and his chauffeur had to wear leather helmets to
keep the wind from blowing the hair right off their heads. Father said
that if the boat ever took a nose dive it would ram itself so deep into
the bottom of the water that Jack Betts would have to go around to China
and pull it the rest of the way through--only there wouldn’t be any Jack
Betts to go to China.
Well, about four o’clock on September 10th we heard a noise down the
river that sounded like forty-seven sawmills and we knew Mr. Jack Betts
was starting the Skittery III. Town is four miles down river and in
about a minute the Skittery III came roaring up into our chute and Mr.
Jack Betts shut off the power and taxied in to the shore of our island.
He had a note for Mr. Edwin Skreever, and it was from May. Mr. Jack
Betts stood around and asked if there was any answer. Mr. Edwin Skreever
said there was not--that May only wanted him to go down a little earlier
the next day than she had told him before. He was rather stiff about it,
and Mr. Jack Betts was just as stiff, and after a minute or two Mr. Jack
Betts went down and got into the Skittery III and skittered back to
town.
Wampus and I sat on the rocks of the ripraps in front of our cottage and
watched the Skittery III skitter. Old Rover was there, piling all over
us, and we kept pushing him away and telling him to sit down. Every now
and then he would tangle us in the rope that was tied to his collar.
“You had better tie up that dog,” Mr. Edwin Skreever said. “If he
wanders off to-night, you may not have him to-morrow.”
Now, just notice how things happen in this world sometimes. Mr. Edwin
Skreever was on the porch of our cottage, behind the wire screens where
the mosquitoes could not get at him, and he was not very quiet. I guess
he was thinking of how he would have to be married the next day. Anyway,
he was walking up and down the porch, putting his hands into his pockets
and taking them out again. Every minute or so he would say something to
us, as a man does when he is nervous. First he would tell us to tie up
the dog, then he would say he hoped the dog did wander away, and that he
would be glad if he never saw the dog again.
“And just you let me tell you one thing!” he said. “I’m not going to
have that dog jumping all over me at my wedding. I’m not going to have
that dog clawing all over me and clawing all over May and making a
general nuisance of himself. And I won’t have him tied up and howling.
I’m not going to let that dog spoil my wedding. You understand that!”
I just said “Aw!” and went on talking with Wampus and wrestling with
Rover. So, in a little while, the Bright Star came along down the river
with a couple of Government barges loaded with willows. There are not
many boats on the river now, so Wampus and I looked at the Bright Star
as she went by, and when she reached the lower end of our island she
veered in and laid the two barges alongside the ripraps. The men ran a
couple of cables ashore and made the two barges fast by hitching the
cables to a couple of trees and then the Bright Star sheered off and
crossed the chute and went out of sight behind Buffalo Island, across
the chute. It was no fun sitting where we were listening to Mr. Edwin
Skreever scold, so Wampus and I got up and went down the path to take a
look at the two barges.
They were like plenty of other Government barges we had seen. These two
had their numbers painted on them--“U.S. 420” and “U.S. 426”--and they
were seventeen feet wide and eighty-two feet long. Wampus and I had been
in and over those very two barges more than once. We knew just how they
were made and all about them.
The two barges, as they lay along the shore there, were piled high with
cut willows. The Government men cut the willows where they grow at the
lower ends of islands and take them on the barges to places where they
are repairing dams or ripraps. They throw the willows on the dams, butt
end upstream, and dump rocks on them. Ripraps along the banks are made
that same way. It is not often you see two barges alone; the steamer
usually tows four or six at a time. All these barges are decked over.
The decks are made of four-inch planks, and at each end of this flooring
are two hatches, with lids. When nobody is around to order a fellow off
the barges, he can pull up these hatch covers and get inside the barges.
The inside of one of those barges is not much of a place to be in. When
you go down through the hatch, you see that the inside is damp, with
maybe three or four inches of water in it, and a smell of tar or oakum.
It is about five feet from the bottom boards to the floorboards, so a
fellow can stand up there, but he can’t run much because there are
criss-cross braces. Neither is the inside of a barge one big room. Two
great, thick bulkheads, or wooden walls, run lengthwise of the barge and
cut it into three narrow halls--as you might call them--eighty feet long
and about five feet wide.
These two barges were pretty well loaded with willows. One of them was
loaded from the tip of its bow to the end of its stern--willows piled
ten or twelve feet high. The other, the “U.S. 420,” was almost as well
loaded, but not quite.
So Wampus and I stood looking at the barges and we thought maybe we
would climb aboard and climb on the willows and have some fun, but, when
we were going to, a man we hadn’t seen sat up and looked at us. He had
red hair and a scar over one eye. And that was the first we saw of the
Red-Headed Bandit.
CHAPTER IX
THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER
The Red-Headed Bandit had been lying on top of the willows, and when he
sat up so sudden he gave us a scare. We did not like the looks of him.
“Hello!” he said, and he looked us over. Then he said, “Where did you
get that dog?”
“Raised him from a pup,” I said.
“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t try to tell me anything like that, young
feller. That’s my dog. A feller stole that dog from me.”
Well, I began to back away. I reached down and got hold of the rope that
was fastened to Rover’s collar.
“He did not!” I said. “Mr. Jack Betts gave my sister this dog when he
was a pup.”
“Well, don’t get mad!” the man said. “It might be I am mistaken. What
will you take for the dog? I’ll give you a quarter for him.”
“He ain’t for sale,” I said.
“I’ll give you half a dollar.”
“No, he ain’t for sale.”
“Give you a dollar for him,” said the man, but I didn’t wait to have any
more talk with him. I started back for our cottage.
Mr. Edwin Skreever was still walking up and down the porch and I sat
down on the rocks. Wampus stood a minute or so, and then he reached into
his pocket and took out a nail. He had a pocket half full of old, rusty
nails he had knocked out of old driftwood--old iron nails, all sizes.
“Look here, Mr. Skreever,” he said, “can you do this?”
He took the nail, flat, between his thumb and two first fingers and
threw it as hard as he could out over the river, making it spin, and it
sang as it went. Whine is a better word; it whined like a guitar string
when you pick it and then run your thumb up it.
“Did you ever hear anybody make a nail sing like that?” Wampus asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever, “I have. I have heard that before. And I
cannot imagine why it is a boy delights in throwing away perfectly good
nails for the mere satisfaction of hearing them make a useless noise.
You may wish, some day, that you had not thrown away that nail.”
“Aw!” Wampus said.
“It is a useless and uncalled-for waste,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever.
“Nails cost money. Nails cost labor and time. A miner must dig the iron
ore, and another miner must dig coal, and laborers must turn the ore
into iron and fashion the nails from the iron. Salesmen must go out and
sell the nails, railroads must carry them, other salesmen must sell them
again. And you throw them into the river! Why? What good does it do
you?”
Wampus just said “Aw!” again, because he did not know what else to say,
and I thought I was gladder than ever that I wasn’t going to marry Mr.
Edwin Skreever. I was glad he was going to live in Derlingport and not
in Riverbank. I don’t like fellows that lecture you when you throw away
an old rusty nail. So I said to Wampus:
“Let’s eat a muskmelon.”
Well, all summer we had had a pile of muskmelons and watermelons under
the cottage. They’re cheap and whenever we wanted to eat one we did. We
used to get them by the skiff load. We would sit on the ripraps and eat
and throw the rinds into the river, and the yellow-jacket hornets would
come by the hundreds and pile all over any rinds that did not fall in
the river. They would crowd onto any juice that fell on the rocks, and
they would light on the very piece you were eating. There were lots of
yellow-jackets, but nobody minded them. If they got in the way we
flicked them off with a finger.
But there is one queer thing about yellow-jackets. They will buzz around
and fly around all summer and never sting you unless, perhaps, you step
on one with your bare foot, but there comes a day sooner or later when
every yellow-jacket everywhere gets hopping mad. All the yellow-jackets
for miles around go crazy on the same day. Maybe they all go crazy at
the same hour of the same day--or the same minute--I don’t know. Anyway,
this was the day. September 10th was the day the yellow-jackets quit
being calm and gentle that year and began to be angry and go around with
chips on their shoulders looking for a fight. So the first yellow-jacket
Wampus flicked off him swore a blue streak in yellow-jacket language and
buzzed in a circle to get up speed and banged right into Wampus’s neck.
Zingo!
Wampus made one jump and grabbed his cap and slashed at the air and in a
minute a dozen yellow-jackets were on the war-path. The next one to
sting went at Rover’s nose like a shot out of a rifle. We heard poor
Rover give one wild “Yeowp!” and he jumped about six feet in the air and
when he came down he was already running. He went out of sight down the
path, making about twenty feet at each jump and “yeowping” at the top of
his voice, and his “yeowps” grew fainter and fainter. Mr. Edwin Skreever
laughed, but I stood still, just holding my hat ready to swat any
yellow-jacket that came too near me.
“Come on!” I said to Wampus, “let’s get away from here. It’s stinging
time.”
So we gathered up the rest of our muskmelons and got away from there as
quietly as we could. We went up to his cottage, which was all boarded
up, and sat on the step.
Well, about six o’clock Orpheus Cadwallader came down from his shack to
get our supper for us. He brought a spring chicken and fried it and we
had a good supper, and then Wampus and I went out front. We fooled
around awhile and Mr. Edwin Skreever lighted the lamp and wrote some
letters or his will or something. It was none of our business what he
wrote. Orpheus Cadwallader washed the dishes and then came out and said
he was going to row down to town, and he went off in his skiff.
Then, presently, Wampus said:
“Where’s Rover?”
“Gosh!” I said, “I bet he’s wandering!”
“We’d better find him,” Wampus said, and I knew that was so.
I thought I knew where he would be, over back by the slough where there
were some dogfish on the shore that would never swim again.
Mr. Edwin Skreever came out on the porch.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Rover ran away,” I said. “We’ve got to find him.”
“Oh, drat you and your Rover!” he said. “Didn’t May tell you not to let
that dog run away? You certainly do aggravate me! For two cents I would
go down to town now and be quit of your foolishness.”
I did not say anything but Wampus did.
“Why don’t you go, then?” he asked. “We wouldn’t care.”
So we went to find Rover. We worked back to the slough, calling him all
the while--“Here, Rover! Here, Rover! Here, Rover!”--but not a yip nor
bark from him. We went up the slough and down the slough calling him,
and it began to get dark. Then, suddenly, Wampus stopped short.
“Say!” he said.
“What?”
“I know! That fellow got him--that red-headed fellow on the barge!”
“I bet he did!” I said.
Well, it seemed likely that that was what had happened. So Wampus and I
stood there in the dark a minute.
“Well, we’ve got to get him,” I said. “I’m not going to have anybody
steal my dog. Come on!”
We worked through the weeds and bushes, across toward the chute and down
toward the two willow barges. We came out not far from them as we saw
the red light the man had put on the barges as a signal. Then we crept
along Indian fashion, bent over, toward the barges.
“He would put him inside,” Wampus said, and I knew that as well as
Wampus did. That was what any dog-thief would do--put Rover down inside
the barge and close the hatch cover. We crept close to the barges. I
picked up a good-sized stone and so did Wampus.
Well, just as we got close up to the “U.S. 420” we heard Rover. We heard
just one bark and then we saw a man lifting the hatch cover. The man
slid down inside the barge and eased the cover back into place over his
head, and then we heard no more barking. The cover was thick and heavy
and I guess he wanted to shut in Rover’s barks while he was tying him
fast.
“Come on!” I said, and the next minute I was on the barge and Wampus
after me. Then I did not know what to do. We couldn’t yank up that cover
and go down and take Rover away from the man, because he might kill us
or something. But Wampus knew what to do.
“Here!” he said, and he tossed me a handful of his rusty nails. “Hurry
up! Get busy! Nail this cover down!”
So we did. We used the two rocks as hammers and drove in the nails, and
then we jumped for shore and ran, because we were frightened. We ran up
the path and we did not stop until we were almost at our cottage.
“Gee!” I said then. “We did it! We’ve got him! But what are we going to
do about it?”
“Do?” said Wampus. “We’ll get Mr. Edwin Skreever and Orpheus Cadwallader
and have Orpheus take his shotgun, and we’ll have them pry off that
cover and get your dog. That’s what we’ll do.”
“But Orpheus has gone to town.”
“Well, we’ll do it in the morning.”
That would have been all right, too, but just then the Bright Star came
around the lower end of Buffalo Island and steered for the two barges. I
went cold, I tell you! The only thing I could think of doing was to get
Mr. Edwin Skreever, so we ran to our cottage and called and shouted, but
he was not there. We guessed he had gone down to town as he had
threatened to do, maybe, so we ran down the path to the barges. The men
were already throwing off the cables. They were pretty cross, too,
because they don’t like to work at night, and they wouldn’t listen to
us. They told us to get away from there and they chased us. We had to
stand and see the Bright Star tow the barges out into the river and
away. We watched them until they were just dim red and green lights far
down the river. Then we went back to the cottage.
We were scared, I tell you! We thought maybe that man would stay nailed
down inside that barge until he starved to death and some day his bones
would be found and we would be arrested and, maybe, hung. And then, as
if that wasn’t bad enough, we saw Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motor-boat tied
in front of the cottage! He hadn’t gone down to town. Then we were
scared! Ten times over!
We sat in the cabin until it was awful late, hoping Mr. Edwin Skreever
was only out somewhere hunting Rover, but he did not come. We couldn’t
fool ourselves. We knew we had nailed May’s bridegroom inside that barge
and sent him down the river--nobody could tell how far, perhaps all the
way to New Orleans! And the wedding was the next day!
Well, it was terrible! We tried to think that we had not done anything
wrong--that we had only tried to keep our dog from being stolen--but it
was no comfort. About midnight we heard the creak of Orpheus
Cadwallader’s oars as he rowed home from town, but that did not comfort
us much, either. We went to sleep right there in the living-room of the
cottage, thinking what would happen to us the next day when the
wedding-time came and there was no Mr. Edwin Skreever. I dreamed awful
things all night, but the worst was a dream about May. She was all
dressed up in her wedding clothes, with a white veil and flowers, and
when it came time to be married, Mr. Edwin Skreever was not there, so
she wept and wept. Mother and father were very stern and cross, and
mother said, “Well, there is no help for it; you will have to marry
Rover!” so they dragged Rover in, yowling and pulling back, and father
and Mr. Smale held him up on his hind legs and then, all of a sudden,
Rover gave a big wiggle and turned into a pile of rusty nails. Then May
wept again, and in came Mr. Edwin Skreever, but he was nothing but
bones--just plain skeleton bones. He pointed his bone finger at me and
opened his bone face and I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t.
He let out a noise like Mr. Jack Betts’s Skittery III.
That woke me up and, sure enough, I was hearing the noise of the
Skittery III. It wakened Wampus, too, and we went to the door, rubbing
our eyes. The Skittery III swung in toward our cottage and Mr. Jack
Betts shut off her power and taxied in. He jumped ashore and climbed up
the rocks.
“Hello, young fellows!” he said. “May and your folks sent me up; they’ve
changed their minds--want you and Skreever to come down right away and
not wait until noon.”
“Well--” I said. “Well; all right.”
“What’s all the welling about, son?” Mr. Jack Betts asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess there isn’t going to be any
wedding. I guess maybe Mr. Edwin Skreever won’t be there.”
“He isn’t here,” said Wampus.
Then I thought of something.
“Unless you would be the bridegroom,” I said to Mr. Jack Betts. “I guess
May wouldn’t like to get all ready for a wedding and not have one. I
guess, when she’s got her dress and the house all decorated and
everything--”
“My word!” said Mr. Jack Betts, laughing. “What are you trying to do?
Are you asking me to marry your sister?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“As a substitute? My word!”
“Well--well--” I said, and then he laughed again.
“What’s all this about Ed Skreever not being here and not being there
and not being anywhere?” he asked.
So I told him and Wampus told him. We both told him at the same time. We
told him how we had nailed Mr. Edwin Skreever into the hold of the barge
“U.S. 420” and sent him down the river. We said we were sorry, but maybe
the Bright Star would tow him all the way to New Orleans before he could
get out. We told him the whole thing.
“My word!” he cried, when he could stop laughing. “My word! I wouldn’t
have missed this for a million dollars; no, not for two million! For
eight million dollars I would let the stuck-up fellow stay in the barge.
I would for ten million dollars, anyway. But, no! I like May too much.
We can’t have May ‘waiting at the church.’”
“It isn’t going to be at the church,” I said. “It is going to be at our
house.”
Mr. Jack Betts looked at me then.
“George,” he said, “you are wonderful! You are just wonderful--no other
word for it! Come on, you two boys; we’ll go get that interned
bridegroom.”
Well, that was the only time I ever rode in the Skittery III, and I
don’t know whether I want to ride in her again or not. I was scared
every inch of the way--every single inch. It was like being shot out of
a gun or something. Mr. Jack Betts certainly could make the Skittery III
go! We skittered down the river and were past the town before I caught
my breath and we were miles below town before I could breathe my breath
after I caught it, and then there was the Bright Star lazying along
twelve miles below town and Mr. Jack Betts shut off his gas and slid up
alongside and told the captain what he had come for. The captain shouted
to the pilot and he jingled a bell and the Bright Star backed water and
half a dozen hands ran forward over the willows and pried off the hatch
cover and out came Rover and Mr. Edwin Skreever.
“A nice business!” Mr. Edwin Skreever said bitterly. “A fine hole to be
in! I’ll smell of tar all the rest of my days. But you young rascals
will suffer for this--I promise you that!”
We thought we would, too.
“Oh, no, now, Edwin!” Mr. Jack Betts said. “Come, now! That’s no way to
talk on your merry wedding morn. These boys meant no harm. Just forget
it!”
“I’ll not!” Mr. Edwin Skreever said, even more bitterly.
“Well, of course,” said Mr. Jack Betts cheerfully, “I appreciate your
feelings, but this boat of mine--this Skittery III--is such a peculiar
boat. She won’t carry any but forgetful people. I did hope you were
forgetful, Edwin, so I could take you aboard and skitter you back to
town in a couple of minutes. But if you really want to stay on this
barge--”
For a minute Mr. Edwin Skreever scowled at us all, and then he grinned.
“All right! I’ve forgotten,” he said.
We made a pretty heavy load for the Skittery III, but she skittered up
past the town and up to Birch Island in no time at all. Then Mr. Edwin
Skreever packed his things and Mr. Jack Betts skittered away and Mr.
Edwin Skreever and Wampus and I went down to town in the motor-boat.
Rover rode on the stern seat.
When we went up to our house, May was standing at the gate looking for
us. She waved her hand as soon as she saw us, and when we reached the
gate she took Mr. Edwin Skreever’s hand and said some soft stuff to him,
and then she said:
“And you didn’t forget Rover, did you, Edwin?”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t forget him. And I don’t believe I ever will.”
But you can see why I felt scared when it seemed likely that the
red-headed man with the scar over his eye in the Arkansas jail was the
Red-Headed Bandit. Because we knew the Red-Headed Bandit was a mighty
hard character. Of course, when you come to think of it, he did not
steal Rover, but he might have stolen him if he had thought of it and
had wanted a dog like Rover.
CHAPTER X
THE TREASURE HUNT
The night after we had chased the Tough Customer and the Rat from Birch
Island we had a meeting of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and
Exploration Company in the shaft-house of the Five Friends’ Worm Mine.
The Worm Mine was something we had started a few days earlier.
Everybody knows it is hardly worth while going fishing unless you have
worms or minnows for bait. Minnows are the best bait, but they are hard
to get and harder to keep, so nearly everybody uses worms. When
everything is moist, you can dig worms almost anywhere on the island,
but, when a dry spell comes on, the ground gets drier and drier, and the
worms go down so deep that you can dig for an hour out back of the
cottages and not get a worm. Then there is only one place on the island
where you can get worms. That is in what we all called Mosquito Hollow.
This year the worms went deep, and we had to try Mosquito Hollow for
them.
Jibby was with us when we said we guessed we would have to try Mosquito
Hollow for worms, and the minute we said it he sat down on a log of
driftwood and closed his eyes and laid his finger alongside of his nose.
“What are you doing that for?” Wampus Smale asked him.
“For worms,” Jibby said.
“Trying to smell where they are?” Wampus asked, laughing at him.
“Maybe so,” Jibby Jones said. “I want to do my share when it comes to
getting worms, and you know I can’t go to Mosquito Hollow. I wonder--”
“Why can’t you go to Mosquito Hollow?” Wampus asked.
“I might stand it if it wasn’t for my spectacles,” Jibby said. “The
mosquitoes get in behind my spectacles and I can’t smack them. And then
I swell up.”
This was true. Jibby always wore tortoise-shell rim spectacles, and he
did swell up when a mosquito bit him.
“I’m ashamed to swell so much,” Jibby said, “but I can’t help it. I
think perhaps my grandchildren won’t, if I ever have any grandchildren,
because the swelling seems to be going out of our family. When I get a
mosquito bite, it only swells as big as a walnut, but father’s and
mother’s bites swell almost as big as apples, and my grandfather used to
swell as big as a wash-basin. I don’t know how big a mosquito bite would
have swelled on great-grandfather. But I wonder--”
“What do you wonder?” Wampus asked.
“I was just wondering if you could charm a worm by playing it a tune on
a flute, the way people charm snakes,” Jibby said. “If we could, we
might get a flute and charm some worms until they crawled out of their
holes, no matter how deep the dry weather has sent them. But I never
heard of charming worms with a flute.”
We laughed, but Jibby Jones was entirely serious. If he had ever heard,
or read, of worms being charmed, he would have tried it because that was
the way he was. But he hadn’t.
“No,” he said, “I don’t believe it would work. If it would work, Izaak
Walton would have written it in his fishing book. I’ll have to think of
some other way.”
“No, don’t you bother,” Tad said. “We’ll get the worms.”
So then we all said the same thing, because we knew how Jibby swelled up
when mosquitoes bit him. Some folks do and some folks don’t, but Jibby
does. And Mosquito Hollow is just about the worst mosquito place in the
world.
The skeets are bad enough anywhere on Birch Island, because there are
billions of them that come over from the ponds and sloughs, but in
Mosquito Hollow it is as if all the mosquitoes in the world had gathered
together in one place. A hundred skeets will get on your hand in a
second and all start to bite at once.
Mosquito Hollow is the lowest ground on Birch Island and the dampest,
and that is why there are always worms there, but it is why there are
always skeets there, too. It is down near the end of the island, below
all the real cottages. There is one old shack there, about as big as a
playhouse, but nobody has lived in it for years--too many skeets, I
guess. All around the hollow, and in it, the nettles grow as high as a
man’s head and keep out the breeze, and the skeets just make it the
metropolis of the whole skeet world. There are not so many in early
spring, but by summer there are trillions of quadrillions, and the noise
they make sounds like a sawmill.
“Don’t you bother, Jibby,” I said. “We’ll get worms for all of us.”
So Jibby went with us down the path along the river, but, when we got
down near the old shack, he sat down on an elm root to think how to get
worms without getting mosquito-bit, and the rest of us went back in
through the nettles to get the worms. It was only a few yards, but the
minute we got to the low ground the skeets were at us. All of us began
slapping our necks and faces and hands and arms and whacking at our
backs and ankles and legs, and jumping around and waving our arms.
We had our spades and tin cans and Wampus rammed the blade of his spade
into the ground and then yelled and began slapping himself everywhere.
Tad grabbed the handle of the spade and pushed down on it and turned up
a chunk of soil, and then he began yelling and slapping himself. I
kicked the clod of dirt with my foot and picked up one fat worm and put
it in the can, and then I yelled and began to slap myself. And Skippy
did not even pick up a single worm; he just yelled and slapped and then
ran for the riverbank full tilt, dragging his spade after him, and we
all followed him. It was no use; the skeets were too fierce, we couldn’t
stand them.
Jibby Jones was sitting just where we left him, and we began scratching
our ankles and rubbing our necks and faces and the backs of our hands,
and saying, “Gee!” and “Whew!” and “Oh, boy!” on account of the bites.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come back,” Jibby Jones said.
“Well, we came back,” I said. “I guess we didn’t stay long enough for
you to get homesick for us, did we?”
“I didn’t notice,” Jibby said. “I’ve been thinking. I think a person
ought to think when he hasn’t anything else to do. I was thinking about
fishworms, and I thought it wasn’t fair for you fellows to do all the
work and get all the worms when I am going to use some of them.”
“Hah!” Wampus said. “I guess there aren’t going to be any worms. I
wouldn’t go back to that hollow for a million dollars.”
“Mosquitoes?” asked Jibby. “And, of course they are worse for me.”
“Because you swell up when they bite you,” said Tad.
“Not only that, but there is more of me to bite,” said Jibby. “I got
more exposed surface than you fellows. More face.”
That did not seem so, but he proved it was so.
“On account of my nose,” he said. “Wampus has hardly any nose--it is
just a nubbin--but my nose is like the jib sail of a boat. It is like a
big triangle sticking out from my face. If you measure across Wampus’s
face, you’ve got all the surface mosquitoes can get at, because his nose
doesn’t amount to much, but, when you measure across my face and come to
the nose, you’ve got to measure my nose, too. You’ve got to measure the
base and altitude and hypotenuse of my nose on one side, and then
measure the base and altitude and hypotenuse of the other side of my
nose, and it amounts to a lot. The mosquitoes have a whole lot more nose
to bite on me than on any of the rest of you.”
We saw that was true and we said so.
“So I thought I had better think of a way to get all the fishworms we
need without getting mosquito-bit,” said Jibby, “and I did.”
“How?” I asked him.
“Well,” said Jibby, “the best way is to have a worm mine and mine for
them.”
“Mine for them!” Skippy yelled, laughing. “You go back into that hollow
and try to mine! I dare you!”
“I wouldn’t want to do that,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “I didn’t
think of doing that. I thought of mining in the old shack over yonder.
It has a dirt floor and it has screens over the windows and at the door.
I thought we could go into the shack and close the screen door and sink
a shaft there, and then tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow and get the
worms. I don’t suppose a worm cares whether you dig down to get him or
tunnel up under him to get him. I never heard so.”
Well, of course, Jibby was joking about whether worms cared how we got
them, but as soon as he mentioned a worm mine, we all wondered why we
had never thought of one. When you come to think of it, a worm mine is
the only sensible way to get worms from a place where the mosquitoes
practically eat you alive. You are down under the ground where the
skeets can’t get at you, and you are down where the biggest and best
worms are, and you have your mine, and any time you need fishworms you
can go into the mine and dig a little worm-ore and get the worms out of
it.
Almost before Jibby was through talking, we were making a rush for the
old shack. The screens were fair to middling at the door and
windows--good enough, anyway, even if they were rusty--and in a minute
Tad had marked out the size of the shaft we ought to sink. He scratched
it on the hard earth of the floor with his spade. But Jibby wasn’t there
with us. We were so excited that we did not notice, at first, that he
was not with us, but about the time when we began to try to dig the hard
earth of that floor he came in bringing a regular ditch-digger’s pick.
It was just what we needed. Jibby always did think of everything.
Well, the worm mine was a big success. We took turns digging the shaft,
some of us digging and some of us looking for worms in the dirt we dug
out and some of us carrying the dirt out of the shack and dumping it.
The dirt we got out of the shaft was pay-dirt, but it did not assay very
heavy in worms; it was low-grade ore and the worms ran small to
middling.
We talked a good deal while we worked, and we decided to call the mine
the Five Friends’ Worm Mine. We got so interested in mining worms and in
making it a first-class mine that we forgot all about fishing. It was
bully to think that we were probably the first worm miners the world
ever knew, and that this was the only worm mine in the world. So, from
then on, whenever we wanted worms, we went down to the shack and mined
some. And that was what the Five Friends’ Worm Mine was, and that old
shack was the “shaft-house” where we met to talk over the plans of the
Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company.
We began planning while it was daylight, but before we were through we
had lighted our lanterns.
First of all, Jibby unpinned the map from inside his hat and spread it
out on the bottom of an old tin bucket. If the paper wasn’t old, it
looked old, and was stained and yellow. The whole map wasn’t much bigger
than my hand. First, we looked at the back of it, and there was the word
“Riverbank” written as plain as could be. Then Jibby turned the map
over. We all leaned over and looked at it.
The map was exactly as the Tough Customer had explained it to the Rat.
There was the river marked “river,” and the slough, and the creek
emptying into the slough, and the crossroads, and the house, and the “X”
where the treasure was probably buried, and the arrow pointing north.
There was the “2-3 miles” and the “Greenland.”
“That’s it, all right!” Wampus said. “That’s just about the way the
creek comes into Greenland Slough, and just about the way Greenland
Slough comes into the river. And look where the ‘X’ is. A straight line
across the back of the square that stands for the house would go right
spang to that ‘X.’ That’s where the treasure is, sure! Unless it is
where the head of the arrow points, where the creek crosses the road.”
Jibby drew a deep, solemn breath, if you can call a breath solemn. He
looked at us with something like awe in his eyes.
“Boys,” he said, “this is the real map! Whoever drew it, and whatever it
was drawn for, this is a real land pirate map. Because that’s not an
arrow. That’s a pine tree--a signal pine tree; that’s a John A. M’rell
signal pine!”
As soon as Jibby said it, we all wondered why we hadn’t known it from
the first minute. It looked like a pine tree, once anybody said so, and
it was in the corner of the lot, where all the John A. Murrell signal
pines were.
We were all excited, and we wished it was the next day, so we could get
to hunting the treasure, but Jibby Jones just stared at the map and
turned it one way and another. By and by he said:
“Have any of you ever been up there at Greenland?”
We all had, and we told him so. He asked what the store and post-office
were like, and we told him the store was the post-office, and that it
was an old frame building, painted white, with a big porch in front and
a roof over the porch, and usually some boxes and barrels on the porch.
Close back of the store was a shed, open toward the store, where some
lumber, and lime in barrels, and cement in bags, and drain tile, and
bales of hay, and barrels of salt, and so on, were stored. And alongside
of the shed was a big red barn, with old wagons and empty boxes and
barrels and the usual store litter scattered in the yard the three
buildings made.
“The shed and the barn don’t show on the map,” Jibby said.
“No. Maybe they were built later, after the map was made,” Skippy said,
and Jibby thought that might be so.
“I’ve been thinking how we want to go at this job,” he said. “It seems
to me we want to go up the river in the motor-boat, and up the slough
until we come to the mouth of the creek. Then we’ll leave the motor-boat
and tramp up the creek. When we come to where the creek crosses the road
that runs down toward the slough, one of us will go up the road, and the
others will continue up the creek to about where the ‘X’ mark is on the
map. If I’m the one that goes up the road, I’ll stop when I come to the
rear end of the Greenland store, so I can sight along the end of it.
Then, when you come to about where the ‘X’ mark is, one of you stand a
spade straight up. I’ll sight along the rear of the store and motion to
the left with my hand if the spade is too far to the right, or to the
right if the spade is too far to the left. That way you’ll find the
exact spot.”
That was fine; nobody but Jibby Jones would have thought of it. So we
decided we would do it that way.
The next morning we tuned up Wampus’s motor-boat and saw that she had
gas, and each of us got a lunch, and we started for Greenland Slough
bright and early. We had spades and an old pickaxe, and a good stout
gunnysack to put the treasure in. The sun was bright and the river just
a little choppy with a brisk cool breeze, and it was all fine and
exciting and glorious. The boat went along at a good speed, and before
long we were running close to the shore on the Illinois side just below
the mouth of Greenland Slough.
Jibby took the map out of his hat and looked at it.
“This is all right,” he said. “Now we know the only thing about this map
we didn’t know before. Now we know what these criss-cross scribble marks
below the mouth of the slough mean. They mean swamp. It’s as if whoever
made the map had said, ‘If you come for the treasure, don’t land here,
it’s swamp.’”
So we swung into the slough and ran up toward the mouth of the creek,
and the first thing we saw was smoke. It came from one of the banks of
the creek, but the fire it came from was hidden by willows. It wasn’t
until we reached the creek that we saw a skiff fastened to one bank of
the creek, and on the shore close by a fire with a tin pail hung over
it, and the Tough Customer and the Rat sitting on a log eating out of a
pan.
The minute they saw us, they jumped up, and the Tough Customer grabbed a
spade and the Rat grabbed a club. Wampus swung the motor-boat out toward
the middle of the slough and we went by and on up the slough.
“What do you know about that!” Skippy said. “They’re here already!”
We could hear them crashing through the willows and driftwood as they
came running along the bank of the slough, and Wampus put on a little
more speed.
“Did you see anything that looked like treasure?” Tad asked.
We hadn’t, any of us. But we hadn’t noticed much of anything.
“How far does this slough run before it comes into the river again?”
Jibby asked.
We told him three or four miles, and that the motor-boat could get
through to the river that way, because this slough was not dammed at the
head.
“Speed up, Wampus,” Jibby said. “We will get out into the river, and
hasten back down below the mouth of the slough, and below the swamp. Can
we walk back to the hills below the swamp?”
We all thought so, although we had never tried it, so we ran on up the
slough and out into the river, and chugged back to where the swamp below
the slough ended. We left the motor-boat there and struck inland.
It was a tough trip. First, we had to climb five or six feet of steep
mud bank, and that brought us to a thicket of willows and weeds and
trees and grapevines that we had to fight through inch by inch, pushing
them aside and climbing over and dodging under. Then this opened onto a
blind slough--a slough that closed at both ends when the river fell in
the spring--and we had to work down-river a half-mile or so until we
came to a place where there was no water and the surface of the mud had
dried and cracked into big bent cakes. We crossed there and fought
through more thicket and came out into a forest of water-maples and
water-elms. The river had been over this in the spring, and there was
half a mile or so of stinging nettles, shoulder high, and great rifts of
driftwood. We couldn’t walk in a straight direction more than twenty
feet at a time; we had to go around piles of driftwood, or around mud
holes, or pools, or places where the ground was like mush. Forty times
we went in over the tops of our shoes, but by and by we came to a huge
big cornfield that had been planted after the water had fallen. We
walked between the rows of corn, and as we went the land got higher and
higher until it began to slant up fairly steep, and then the cornfield
ended and we were at the foot of the hills.
The hills here rounded upward and were grassy and not very bad walking,
and we got to the top. We were just back of a farmhouse, and we edged
along the farm fence, up-river toward the Greenland crossroad, and then
struck inland until we hit the hilltop road. We walked along that until
we came to the Greenland store.
Right away we saw that the map did not exactly jibe with the things we
saw. In the first place, the store was not as far back from the
crossroad as the map showed it to be; it was so close to the crossroad
that you could step off the porch into the road. And there was no signal
pine there, because there was no room for one. We sat down by the side
of the road to have a look at the map.
Jibby left us there looking at the map while he walked down the
crossroad. In a couple of minutes he came back.
“Well,” he said, “this isn’t a road at all. It is just a sort of
driveway alongside of this store, and, as soon as it dips down the hill,
it ends in a swampy pasture, and beyond the pasture the hill drops so
sharply that no road could go down it, and no road ever did go down it.
And I’ll tell you another thing. Every nail in every board in this store
is a wire nail, and there were no wire nails in 1835. This isn’t the
place. This store has been built since then. We’ve got to go farther up
the hill road.”
“Why?” Wampus asked. “Maybe the place is back in the direction we came
from.”
“No, because the ‘X’ mark was on the creek, and we haven’t crossed the
creek yet. We’ll go on up the road until we come to the creek.”
We were pretty tired, but we went on up the road. We went about half a
mile before we came to the creek. It went under the road through a big
tile culvert almost the size of a man. But there was no crossroad
anywhere near there, and no house, and no sign of a pine tree. There was
a barbed-wire fence and a cornfield where the house and the tree should
have been.
“No good!” I said.
But Jibby Jones had spread himself flat on the ground alongside the
barbed-wire fence, and he hunched along until he was against the lowest
wire, almost, and then he held it as high as he could and hunched under.
He got up and disappeared in the cornfield, and we sat down and waited.
A farmer drove by, and asked us if we were after woodchucks when he saw
our spades, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
And then we heard Jibby Jones, off in the cornfield, calling “Hi-hoo!
Hi-hoo!” and we hunched under the barbed wire and hurried through the
corn to where he was.
CHAPTER XI
WHERE IS GREENLAND?
There was no doubt in our minds what Jibby Jones had found when we
pushed through the corn and came to where he was. The corn grew close up
to its edges, but it was a cellar, as plain as anything could be. The
cellar wall had been made of creek stones, piled up, and it had mostly
crumbled inward, half filling the cellar and, on top of the stones,
brush and trash, and old tin boilers and tin cans, and a couple of
bedsprings and some old rusted barbed wire had been dumped, but there
were four or five ends of squared logs, burned down to the ends, and we
guessed what had happened to that house--it had burned down.
The cellar was small, not over ten feet square, and we judged the house
had been small--maybe an old log cabin and maybe not--but it had been a
house, and it was near the creek and near the hill road, and it was the
only sign of a house Jibby had been able to find.
“I couldn’t find the crossroad, nor a sign of it,” Jibby said. “And
there’s no sign of a signal pine. But over yonder is the creek, and this
must have been the house, if the whole map wasn’t just a fake and a
fooler. This is the only place that could be Greenland.”
“Well,” I said, “away back in the good steamboat days there was a lot
more Greenland than this is. Only it wasn’t up here on the hill; it was
down at the bottom of the hill and over toward the river. I’ve heard
folks talk about it more than once, because in those days Greenland was
bigger than Riverbank--it had ten or twelve houses and Riverbank had
only eight or nine--and Greenland thought it was going to be the biggest
city west of New York. The steamers stopped here for wood, because they
all burned wood. But when coal came, the big steamers stopped coming
here, and then the railroad went down the other side of the river, and
Greenland busted. There wasn’t any more Greenland.”
So Jibby got out the map again and studied it.
“I don’t think this is the place,” he said suddenly.
“Why not, Jibby?” we asked him.
“Come here and I’ll show you,” he said.
He walked straight down a corn row to the place where the corn ended and
the ground fell off sudden into the creek.
“Does that look like a place to hide treasure or anything else?” he
asked, and we said it did not. “Then count my steps,” he said.
He paced off, taking as long steps as he could, the distance to the
ruined cellar, and it made fifty paces.
“Now,” he said, “on this map the house is about halfway between the
creek and the road. The road ought to be fifty paces west of the house.
Count my steps.”
He paced off fifty steps.
“This is where the pine tree ought to be, but it isn’t here,” he said.
“But we won’t worry about that; it may have been cut down and the roots
grubbed up. But if there was ever a road here, where the map says it
was, it ought to run east of north. That would be in this direction.”
He led us through the corn in the direction the map showed the road
should have gone. Nothing but corn! So we came to the edge of the hill,
looking off over the bottomland and the slough and the river. We saw in
a minute that no road could have gone down that hill--it was so steep
you might call it a bluff. Jibby pulled out the map and showed it to us.
“Look where the creek runs on the map, back of the house,” he said. “It
was fifty paces from the side of the house to the creek, and by the map
it would be about fifty paces to the creek from the back of the house,
because the creek turns and runs back of the house. Where is your
creek?”
Well, there was no creek! If that creek had run where the map said it
ran, it would have had to balance itself in the air ten paces out beyond
the edge of the hill.
“All very well!” said Jibby. “Now look down below there. Follow the
creek from where it comes down the hill to where it goes into the
slough.”
We saw our mistake then, or thought we did. The turn of the creek was
not up on the hill at all; it was down there in the bottomland. We could
trace it as plain as day, because it was edged thick with willows. And,
as we stood there looking at the place where the creek made its turn
toward the west, we heard a noise of “chuck! chuck! chuck!” It was a
spade chucking into soft soil. The Tough Customer and the Rat were there
ahead of us!
Well, there wasn’t anything for us to do but go home and let our
treasure-hunting go for that day. We couldn’t go down there and fight
the Tough Customer and the Rat, and we had no right to, because they had
got to the place first. And we would not have fought them, anyway. A
bunch of boys can’t drive away two desperate characters in any such way.
So we sat on the hill awhile and listened to the Tough Customer and the
Rat digging away, and then we got up and started for home. And it was
time, anyway, because we had that long fight through the bottomland to
get back to our motor-boat.
On the way back to the boat we talked a lot about what we could do and
what we couldn’t do, and we rested a lot and fooled around a lot, and
the sun was getting low when we got back to the boat. And the first
glance at the boat showed that some one had been there; some one had
whacked the motor with an axe or a spade until it looked mighty much
like a heap of junk.
“The Tough Customer!” Wampus said, as mad as a hatter, and we all
thought the same, but there was no way to prove it. The only thing we
could do was to get into the boat and shove it into the current and
float down home the best we could, urging the boat toward our shore with
the oars. It was dark when we got home, and we were mighty tired and
hungry, and the first person we saw was Wampus’s father. He was standing
on the ripraps waiting for us.
“About time!” he said. “I came up with Parcell and I’ve been waiting two
hours for you to get home so you could run me back to town. What’s the
matter with the boat?”
“It’s busted,” Wampus said.
“Can’t you fix it?” his father asked.
“No; it’s too badly busted,” Wampus told him. “It’ll have to be mended
down in town. I guess maybe it’ll cost thirty or forty dollars.”
Mr. Smale did not like that a bit.
“Very well, my son!” he said. “If that’s the case, that boat will remain
‘busted’ until you earn the money to have it mended. I’ve paid for
repairing that boat as many times as I intend to. You are old enough to
take care of that boat properly now, and it is your property. I’m
through with it.”
We all felt pretty sick. There wasn’t much use thinking of doing more
treasure-hunting unless we had the motor-boat to go up-river in.
Jibby was the first to say anything as we walked toward our cottages.
“It appears to me,” he said in his solemn way, “that it is not right to
let Wampus pay for repairing that boat. The boat was being used by the
Land Pirate Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, and the Company
ought to pay for the repairs.”
“Sure!” I said, laughing. “And how much money has the Company got to pay
with?”
We counted up, and we had three dollars and sixty-seven cents. The part
of it I had was the seven cents.
“I didn’t mean exactly that,” Jibby said. “I meant that the Land
Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company ought to earn the
money to pay for repairing the boat.”
“By finding treasure?” I asked, as sarcastic as anything.
“Why, no,” Jibby said, without a smile. “I did not mean that. I was
thinking the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company
might mine the Five Friends’ Worm Mine and get the money that way.”
You couldn’t beat Jibby Jones when it came to thinking of things.
CHAPTER XII
THE WORM MINE
The next morning we all went down to the shaft-house, which was the old
shack near Mosquito Hollow, and set to work in the worm mine. Jibby’s
idea was that we should mine some first-class worms and then set a
trot-line in the river and bait it with the worms, and twice a day we
would “run” the trot-line and get the fish. Then we would sell the fish
to our folks and to the other families on our island. And, every day
when we were not running the trot-line, we would be catching fish with
poles, and we would sell those fish, too. And before the summer was
over, we would, maybe, have enough money to have Wampus’s motor-boat
mended.
Well, I don’t know how that would have worked out, because we did not
raise the money that way. We got it by solving the mystery of the stolen
cider that we had heard the Rat talking to the Tough Customer about. But
the credit belongs to Jibby Jones--I guess you will see that.
It was Skippy Root’s father that offered the reward, because the barrels
were his barrels. They had been stolen from his wholesale grocery house
down in Riverbank.
The reward was twenty-five dollars, and there was something funny about
the whole business, and my father and Mr. Root and Mr. Smale, and Tad’s
father and Mr. Jones knew the joke and laughed about it a lot up on
Birch Island where we were spending the summer, but they did not tell us
or anybody. The notice in the paper only said, “$25 Reward for
information leading to the recovery of five barrels stolen from the Root
Wholesale Grocery,” or something like that. But I’ll tell you what the
joke was. We found out later on.
One of the things Mr. Root sold in his wholesale grocery was
cider--sweet cider--and he sold it by the barrel, but he had five
barrels of sweet cider that turned hard while it was in his grocery
cellar, and it was against the law to sell hard cider or to have it
around, so he thought he had better get rid of it. He didn’t want to go
to jail. Nobody does, I guess.
So one day Mr. Root went out onto the platform back of his grocery and
he said to his truck-driver:
“Joe, I’ve got five barrels of cider in the cellar that has turned hard,
and I want to get rid of it. I want you to haul those five barrels down
to the river to-morrow and empty that hard cider into the river and
bring the barrels back. I don’t want any hard cider around here.”
“All right, Mr. Root,” Joe said; “I’ll do it to-morrow.”
Well, that was all right, but it happened that there were a lot of men
in the alley near the platform just then, standing around and looking at
a trained bear an Italian had, and one of them must have heard Mr. Root
and wanted hard cider, for that night the grocery cellar was broken into
and five barrels were stolen out of it. But the joke was that the thief
did not get the five barrels of hard cider; he got five barrels of
molasses. He made a mistake. He took the molasses and left the hard
cider. So the next day Joe dumped out the cider and Mr. Root offered a
reward for the molasses. But nobody came for the reward, and it looked
as if all that molasses was gone forever. And the thing Mr. Root and
father and all the men laughed about was how surprised the thieves would
be when they broached a barrel to have a good drink of hard cider and
found it was molasses. They thought the thieves would be pretty badly
surprised and scared, because, instead of taking five barrels of cider
that Mr. Root did not want, they would have taken five barrels of
molasses he did want. They would be mighty worried thieves.
But nobody found the molasses or caught the thieves and everybody forgot
all about it.
We worked inside the shack at first, digging deeper and deeper, and we
got pretty good worms and quite a lot of them.
“But say!” Wampus said, all of a sudden. “Say! Anybody can come into our
mine and mine worms; we don’t really own it. We don’t know who does own
this ground down here at this end of the island.”
Jibby stroked his nose awhile and thought.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to find out about that. Mostly,
miners can mine wherever they want to. The man that owns the land owns
the surface, but, when a prospector locates a mine and sinks his shaft,
he can mine anywhere he wants to, underground. I don’t know whether a
worm miner has that right or not. I know it is true of mineral mines,
but a worm isn’t quite a mineral; it is an animal. Anyway, I think we
had better stake out a claim here, because that is what miners always
do.”
So we staked out a claim, stakes at the four corners, so that it took in
the whole of Mosquito Hollow. It turned out to be all right, anyway,
because Skippy’s father owned the shack and the hollow, but we felt
better when we had our claim staked out. It was more regular and like
real miners.
We got the shaft about as deep as we thought it needed to be, and the
next morning we began to tunnel. We aimed the tunnel so it would go
under the back of the shack toward Mosquito Hollow, because that was the
best worm-bearing ore on the island, and, as soon as we began to tunnel,
Jibby got a saw and a hatchet and some nails and sent some of us to get
driftwood planks and boards, to use as mine timber to shore up the
tunnel with.
Almost as soon as we began to run the tunnel out toward Mosquito Hollow,
we struck better worm ore, and it got better all the time. Out of two
spadefuls of ore we could refine enough worms to last a boy for a whole
day’s fishing, even if the white perch were stealing his bait as fast as
he could put it on the hook. In half an hour after we had begun to
tunnel, we had enough worms to last the six of us a week.
“That’s enough,” Jibby said. “We’ll quit now and put up a sign on the
shack--‘Five Friends’ Worm Mine. Keep Out!’--and not mine any more until
we need more worms.”
I didn’t like that idea; none of us did. Mining worms was more fun than
fishing or anything else, and we all hated to stop, but it was Wampus
who thought of the big idea.
“Look here,” he said, leaning on his spade, “what’s the use of quitting?
We’ve got a worm mine here that is the best and only in the world, and
we’ve got the richest worm ore anybody could ever find. It is the driest
season for twenty years, and worms are harder to get than they ever
were. That’s so, isn’t it?”
It was, and we all said so.
“All right, then,” Wampus said, “now is the time to mine worms. Now is
the time everybody will be glad to buy worms. Now is the time when we
have the only worm mine in existence, but in a week or so somebody will
hear of the Five Friends’ Worm Mine and start another worm mine
somewhere, and then there will be more and more worm mines started and
everybody will be selling worms.”
“Selling them?” said Skippy.
“Sure!” Wampus said. “I said ‘selling them’ and I mean ‘selling them.’
Why, right here on Birch Island, we can sell a can of worms a day to
every family on the island. How many? Twenty families? And some will
need two cans. Say twenty-four cans a day. And, leaving out Sundays,
there are about sixty-five days that the families are up here--that
makes one hundred and thirty dozen cans of worms for the season. If we
only got ten cents a can, that would be one hundred and fifty-six
dollars.”
“Ten cents a can for worms like these!” exclaimed Tad, holding up a big
one. “They are worth a cent apiece! If we put one hundred in a can we
ought to get a dollar a can.”
“That would be one thousand and fifty-six dollars, then,” Wampus said.
“And only for what we sell on this island. Oh, boy! And think of how
many people go fishing from town who don’t spend the summer on this
island--hundreds!”
“From town?” Skippy cried. “What do you say ‘from town’ for? From all up
and down the old Mississippi! From all over the United States,
everywhere! Yes, and in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South
America people go fishing, don’t they? If we are going to sell
worms....”
“Canned ones,” I said, “packed in cans with holes in the lids, like
pepper-boxes, so the worms can breathe.”
We were all getting excited--all except Jibby Jones. All Jibby said was:
“Aluminum cans, because, if there are holes in the lids and the earth in
the cans is moist, cans made of tin would rust.”
“And, anyway,” said Wampus, jumping at that idea quick, “aluminum cans
would be better than tin; they would be lighter to ship and lighter for
fishermen to carry. When we get to shipping tons and tons of worms, the
difference in the weight of the cans will save us hundreds of dollars in
freight. And I say we ought to have a special can with a wire handle,
like a lard pail, only smaller, so boys could carry cans of our worms
easily when they go fishing.”
“Sure! Of course, we’ll do that,” I said, “and we ought to have a patent
lid--one that will come off and fit on again, like the lid of a
baking-powder can.”
“And with letters stamped on it,” said Skippy. “It ought to be stamped
‘Five Friends’ Mine--Best Quality Fishing Worms--Riverbank, Iowa.’”
“Yes,” said Wampus, “when they were our best quality, but you don’t
think we are going to throw away all the medium and small worms we get
out of the mine, do you? No, sir! We’ll have three grades--Best Quality,
Prime Quality, and Family Quality. They will be one dollar a can,
seventy-five cents a can, and fifty cents a can.”
“Except the half-size and the trial cans,” said Tad.
“Yes, and except the pails of bulk worms, assorted,” said Skippy. “We’ve
got to have some put up that way, and maybe some in kegs and some in
barrels, for general stores in the places where they don’t catch
anything but goggle-eyes and mudcats. These would be the cheapest we
would sell. They would be for stores where boys would come in with their
own old rusty tomato cans and say, ‘Say, mister, gimme two cents’ worth
of fishing worms.’”
Well, we went on planning about the worm mine that way for two or three
days and we kept right on digging the tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow
and timbering it up. Here and there we ran into sand, which has no worms
in it, and then we shifted the direction of the tunnel a little. Jibby
said the proper way was to follow the worm-veins wherever they went.
CHAPTER XIII
THE VIKING SHIP
In a little while we had every old tin can on the island filled with
worms and choice crumbly black earth in which they would be well and
hearty and feel comfortable and at home. Then we began filling old
pails, and wash-pitchers with the handles off, and boxes, and were
fussing a little about who would go on the road and travel from town to
town selling worms for the Five Friends’ and taking winter orders for
spring delivery. We decided that Jibby would be the best salesman
because he looked serious-minded and truthful with his big nose and
tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles, but we decided he would have to wear a
brand-new suit of clothes and carry a cane.
We decided that the Best Quality Five Friends’ worms should have a label
with a black bass on it, and that the Prime Quality label should have a
pickerel picture, and the Family Quality a picture of a perch or a
goggle-eye. We decided all those details. Skippy wanted to have “None
genuine without this signature” printed on the label, but we gave that
up because there were five of us and it would crowd the label to have
five signatures; and Wampus wanted to advertise in all the magazines and
on the billboards and in all the street-cars, but we did not decide to
do it. We decided to let that wait a while.
Jibby did not talk much. He dug and picked worms and timbered the
gallery and carried out dirt, but something was bothering him. We
thought he would mention it when he got ready, but he didn’t, so we
asked him.
“Water,” he said. “I’m worrying about water. What are we going to do if
the mine floods?”
“If the mine floods?” Wampus said, stopping work.
We all stopped work and looked at Jibby, because we all knew that a
flooded mine is a dead mine and can’t be worked until pumps are rigged
up and the water pumped out. And nearly every spring the whole lower end
of Birch Island is flooded, and it is a rare spring when Mosquito Hollow
is not. Just about as sure as spring came, our whole mine would be under
water.
“But that’s not what worries me,” Jibby said. “It is these streaks of
sand we have run into here and there. The whole island won’t have to be
flooded to flood our mine; as soon as the water in the river rises a
little, it will begin to seep through that sand and flood the mine. Then
our mine is gone. No more worm mining.”
Well, the flood came, but not in the way we expected. Wampus was working
at the end of the tunnel one day, digging out worm ore with his pick,
and Tad and Skippy were carrying it to the shaft, and me and Jibby were
hoisting it up in baskets and refining the worms out of it, when Wampus
shouted to us that he had struck a tree-trunk. He shouted back through
the tunnel to us that it was right across the tunnel and that he would
have to have an axe to chop it away, or he would have to tunnel around
it.
The tunnel was just about big enough for two boys to crawl through on
hands and knees together, so Tad took our electric torch and crawled in.
He and Wampus scraped more dirt away, and then came crawling out, and
you bet they were excited.
“It ain’t a tree-trunk at all,” Tad said. “It’s the side of a boat--an
oak boat--and it is bound with iron bands, and I’ll bet I know what it
is. It’s an old viking ship. It’s a great find! I’ll bet we can dig it
out and sell it to a museum for a million dollars or something.”
“Sure!” Wampus said. “An old viking ship would be worth that. I bet the
vikings from Norway or somewhere sailed over to America hundreds of
years before Columbus did, and discovered the Mississippi, and got
shipwrecked on this island, or maybe the Indians killed them, and the
river dumped sand and dirt on their ship and covered it up and preserved
it. Who knows the name of a museum that would be likely to buy a viking
ship?”
“I do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I wouldn’t spend the money you expect to
get for that ship yet. No! Because I never heard of viking ships sailing
up the Mississippi.”
“That makes it all the rarer,” Wampus said. “You go in and look at it
yourself.”
So Jibby took the torch and crawled in, and I crawled in after him, and
Skippy and Tad and Wampus crawled after us. Jibby felt the ship and so
did I. It was oak, sure enough, and rounded like a ship’s hull, but in a
minute Jibby laughed.
“It’s not a ship,” he said; “it’s a barrel. I guess it’s an old barrel
the river floated in here and covered up. Give me the pick.”
I handed him the pick, and Jibby sat back and gave the barrel a whack
with one of the points of the pick, and the pick stuck fast. The point
of the pick went through the oak of the barrel and stuck in the hole it
made. So Jibby sort of raised up and put his weight on the pick handle
and pulled, and all at once the whole side of the barrel seemed to give
and the oak staves cracked and out poured--molasses!
The first big gush of it went on Jibby and in his lap, and then I got my
share, and we both shouted and scrambled to our hands and knees to get
away from there, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus did not know what had
happened, but were plenty frightened and tried to get away, and they got
tangled up and jammed in the tunnel like a cork down a bottle neck, and
nobody could get out. Except the molasses.
The molasses poured out. In about half a minute we were in a regular
river of it and all of us covered with it.
“Go on out! Go on out!” I shouted, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy were
pushing and pulling each other, and shouting, and then I began to laugh.
I couldn’t help it. It was funny--five of us stuck in the molasses like
flies. It was the first time I ever heard of a mine being flooded with
molasses. Then we all began to laugh, except Jibby Jones, and he said,
as solemn as ever:
“I think we will get the reward.”
That was like him. Even when he was down in a worm mine stuck in a flood
of molasses, he was always thinking ahead.
Well, we did get the reward. It turned out that the men that stole the
barrels of molasses had buried them there in Mosquito Hollow, thinking
they were hard cider. They thought they would leave it there until it
was safe to take it somewhere and sell it.
When we went up to the cottages, Wampus’s mother was on her porch, and
when she saw how soiled we were she said:
“Well! You are a sweet lot, aren’t you!”
But she didn’t know how sweet we really were.
Mr. Root laughed and laughed when he saw us and heard that we had
discovered the stolen molasses, and he paid us the reward and said it
was worth it to see five boys molassesed up that way, and I guess it
was.
We don’t know who did it, but the next morning, when we went to the mine
to see how bad the wreck was, somebody had changed the sign we had put
on the shack door. It said, now: “Five Sweet Friends’ Worm and Molasses
Mine. Keep Out!”
With the reward money and what we got for as many worms as we
sold--which were not very many--we had Wampus’s motor-boat mended, and
the first trip we took in it was up the river. We ran into Greenland
Slough, and the first thing that hit our eyes was that old shanty-boat,
and the Tough Customer sitting on the narrow deck, fishing in the
slough, with a can of worms beside him.
As the motor-boat came closer, the Rat poked his head out of the door of
the shanty-boat and began to curse and swear like a regular pirate. The
Tough Customer turned and gave him an ugly look and told him to shut up
and hold his mouth. Then he called to us, and Wampus ran the motor-boat
in close.
“Say, you fellers!” the Tough Customer called. “Looky here; I want to
talk to you.”
“Well, what is it?” Wampus asked.
“I just want to tell you something,” the Tough Customer said. “If you
got a piece of paper that fell off’n this boat when that fat feller
whacked the end mighty near off’n this boat, you’d better hand it over
here and now, because me and my pardner ain’t going to stand no more
foolishness. That’s our paper, and, if you don’t hand it over, we’re
going to have the law on you, and maybe jail you; so hand it over while
you got the chance.”
Jibby Jones looked at the Tough Customer through his tortoise-shell
spectacles.
“My gracious!” he said, as solemn as an old owl. “I would not like to be
put in jail for stealing! Not in some jails, at any rate. What jail
would we be put in, do you suppose? Do you think it would be the one at
Helena, Arkansas?”
The Tough Customer glared at Jibby--that’s the only word for it. Then he
worked his jaws and pointed his finger at Jibby and sputtered, but he
was so mad he couldn’t say a word, and Jibby leaned over and accelerated
the motor-boat, and we swung around and went scooting down the slough,
with the exhaust snapping like a machine gun.
“That’s all right, anyway,” Jibby said. “We know one thing; they haven’t
found the treasure yet. If they had, they wouldn’t care who had the
map.”
CHAPTER XIV
UNCLE BEESWAX
Three times after that we went up to Greenland Slough, and two of the
times we went up the creek, because the Tough Customer and the Rat were
not at the mouth of the creek to guard it. One of the times we found
them up the creek where they were doing their treasure digging, but the
third time they were nowhere around, and we had a chance to see what
they had been doing.
For plain ordinary everyday tramps they had done a lot of work, I will
say. Nobody could have hired them, for day’s wages, to do as much
digging as they had done. They had dug in eleven places--five on one
bank of the creek and six on the other--and the holes were deep enough
to bury oxen in, one on top of the other and both standing. They had
tried one place and then another, and anybody could see that they had
been puzzled and not sure where the cross mark on the map had been.
That, we guessed, was why they were so anxious to get the map. They
hadn’t found anything, and they didn’t know what to do next.
And neither did we. As nearly as we could figure it out, the Tough
Customer and the Rat had dug one of their holes right spang on the spot
where the “X” mark on the map showed that the treasure should be, if
there was any. If they hadn’t found anything with all that digging,
there wasn’t much chance that we would.
By this time we had got into the second week of August, and there was
not any too much of vacation left. We walked up and down the creek,
studying the lay of the land, but there was no question that the Tough
Customer had found the right spot, according to the map. There was only
one turn in the creek toward the west, and that was where they had dug.
We thought, perhaps, the creek might have shifted, but when we walked
here and there we saw that it hadn’t. It looked hopeless, and we were
just ready to leave, when we saw a man come loping toward us, half
doubled up and not wasting a bit of time, and after him were the Tough
Customer, hobbling faster than you would believe a one-legged man could
hobble, and the Rat. The Rat was making good time, too, but he didn’t
seem anxious to go ahead of the Tough Customer.
As the man they were after came nearer and saw us, he came toward us,
and when he had covered a few more yards we saw he was the old man
everybody calls “Uncle Beeswax.” He had an axe and two baskets, and by
the time he reached us he was just about all in. He was so out of breath
that he couldn’t talk, and it was plain enough he was almost too scared
to talk, anyway.
The far side of the creek was five or six feet higher than the side we
were on. When Uncle Beeswax came up to us and we saw he was being
chased, we grabbed his axe and baskets and took him by the arms and
hustled him across the creek and up the bank. Maybe we might have
hustled on up the hill with him, but he was plumb played out. He dropped
down on the short grass and just panted.
“No use!” he panted. “Played out! Got to rest--got to rest!”
So we let him rest, and we turned and took a look at the Tough Customer
and his pardner. They had stopped about fifty feet away, and were
looking at us and talking to each other. Whatever they had been chasing
old Uncle Beeswax for, I guess they didn’t like the idea of tackling
five husky boys and a man, even if he was an old man. So, after a minute
or two, they sat down and watched us. The Tough Customer was pretty well
played out himself, stumping so far on a wooden leg.
Now, we all knew Uncle Beeswax, except maybe Jibby Jones, and we knew
there wasn’t a mean drop of blood in him, or any harm. He was one of the
most aged men any of us knew, and he lived a mile or so farther up the
river in a shanty-boat of his own, and he was all right. He was a little
old man, hardly as tall as Wampus, and he had a long white beard that
almost touched the ground. The thing you thought of when you saw him was
a gnome, the kind you see in pictures with a long pointed cap and a pick
to dig gold with. He made his living mostly by finding bee trees, and
selling the honey and beeswax to folks in Riverbank, but he fished some,
and along in the fall he hunted for wild grapes and sold them for about
a dollar a bushel, or maybe a dollar and a half.
We island boys had seen old Uncle Beeswax hundreds of times, but he had
always acted solemn and severe and fussy and nervous, as if he was
afraid we would meddle with his skiff or something. Probably boys teased
him a lot because he was so funny-looking; anyway, he did not like boys.
And one of the things they teased him about was his nose. He hated to be
teased about his nose, because he never drank a drop, but his nose was
as long as Jibby Jones’s nose, but thick and bulby and as red as fire.
So there we were like two armies, we on the high ground and the Tough
Customer and the Rat on the low ground, and each waiting to see what the
other would do. And presently Uncle Beeswax got his breath.
“Can’t understand it! Can’t understand it!” he said, shaking his head so
that his long beard wiggled back and forth. “Never was chased in my life
before. And they acted like they would kill me, them men.”
“What for?” I asked him.
“Nothin’!” he said. “Nothin’ at all! I was in yonder”--and he pointed
toward the swamp below the slough--“a-lookin’ for grape trees, and I
come out again. The skeeters was too much for me--they was eatin’ me
alive. And I was tuckered; I’m old; I’m mighty old.”
“Well, they didn’t chase you because you were old, did they?” I asked
him, because he stopped talking.
“I don’t know why they chased me,” he said, as if his feelings were hurt
that anybody should. “I wasn’t doin’ harm. I just sat down on the edge
of their pesky little shanty-boat to rest my legs, and they come at me,
yellin’ and shoutin’, and chased me.”
He made a move to wipe the sweat off his face, and when he opened his
hand there was a piece of paper crumpled in it.
“Huh!” he said. “There it be, hey? I thought I’d lost it, bein’ chased.”
“What is it?” I asked him.
He spread it out on his knee.
“Month or so ago,” he said, “I was speculatin’ through the swamp yonder
and I come onto a grape tree--”
Well, we knew what a grape tree was. A grape tree is not a tree that
bears grapes the way an apple tree bears apples. A grape tree is a tree
the wild grapevines have climbed over until you can’t see the tree and
can only see masses and masses of grapevine. And one year one of these
trees will have bushels and bushels of wild grapes, and no other grape
trees around there will have any. The man that can find a good grape
tree and get the grapes off it is lucky.
“I come onto this grape tree a month or so ago,” Uncle Beeswax said,
“and I made a map showin’ whereabouts it was, so I could go back to it
when the grapes was ripe. And to-day I was tryin’ to find it, but I
couldn’t. The skeeters got too bad for me before I traced to the tree.
So I was settin’ on this shanty-boat lookin’ at my map I had made--”
“And they came up?” Wampus asked. “That’s it, then. Those men lost a
map, and they want it, and they thought you had it. They wanted to get
it away from you.”
Uncle Beeswax’s face wrinkled, and we knew he was grinning.
“If that’s all,” he said, “they can have it. I don’t want it. It ain’t
no good, noway. I can’t make nothing out of it myself, and they can’t
neither.”
So, at that, Skippy Root stood up and yelled at the Tough Customer.
“Hey!” he yelled. “He hasn’t got your map! All he’s got is a map of a
grape tree. You can see it, if you want to.”
The Tough Customer and the Rat consulted together, and the Tough
Customer came to their side of the creek, and Jibby Jones took the map
of the swamp and grape tree and went over to them and showed it to them.
It satisfied them that Uncle Beeswax did not have their map. So Jibby
told them, straight and plain, that if anybody had their map we had it,
and that we meant to keep it. Then he asked them if they had found
anything. The Tough Customer told him it was none of his business what
they had found or what they hadn’t found, and then he and the Rat went
back toward their shanty-boat and Jibby climbed up our bank of the
creek. Uncle Beeswax had got onto his feet again and was going away,
but, as Jibby’s head came up over the edge of the bank, Uncle Beeswax
stopped dead short and looked at Jibby and stared at him with his mouth
wide open.
“Noble!” he said, when he had stared and stared. “Just plumb noble, and
there ain’t any other words for it! What a nose! What a nose!”
Now, most folks would have been mad if anybody said that, but Jibby
Jones wasn’t--he was proud of his nose. Jibby talked about his nose more
than anybody else did, because it was a family relic, or something, and
had come down to him from his Grandfather Parmenter and his
Great-Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter.
Some folks are proud of a colonial spinning-wheel that has been in the
family three hundred years, but Jibby was proud of his nose. And I guess
he was right. A nose is a better relic than a spinning-wheel any day; it
is handier. It don’t have to be dusted, and you can wash it when you are
washing the rest of your face and save time that way, and you can carry
it with you wherever you go. You have to. So Jibby looked at old Uncle
Beeswax and grinned.
“It’s my jib,” he said. “When the wind blows too hard, I have to take a
couple of reefs in it.”
Well, I guess Uncle Beeswax didn’t have a chance to hear many jokes, and
when he heard that one he put down his basket and sat down on a stump
and laughed and laughed. He whacked his leg, and I thought he would die,
he laughed so hard.
“Jib, hey?” he chuckled when he could get his breath. “Jib, is it? Well,
if that’s so you ought to have some of my beeswax to waterproof it with.
Nothing like good old beeswax to keep the weather from ruinin’ a jib.”
Then he went off in another spell of laughing, and whacked his leg and
the tears rolled down his face and got into his beard.
So Jibby told him all about his nose and how he got it from his
Grandfather Parmenter and how George Washington had complimented Jibby’s
Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter on _his_ nose, and in a couple of
minutes old Uncle Beeswax was as chummy as a kid with us and told us all
about his nose and how useful it was and all the forty or fifty things
he had used to try to keep it from being so red, but no hope. He said it
was a headstrong nose and if it made up its mind to be red it was bound
to be red, and no use fooling with it.
“If I had two of ’em,” he said, “and the other was a green one, I’d look
like a steamboat.”
He showed where he would have his two noses, if he had two, one on
either cheek.
“But one is plenty,” he said. “When a man has a nose like mine, or like
yours,” he added politely to Jibby, “he has no excuse to covet any more
nose. He’s got a bountiful supply.”
He said it all with a twinkle in his eye, and from then on he was a good
fellow with us.
We asked him if he knew much about Greenland, and he said he had been
born in a house right about where we were sitting, which would be just
about where the house was on the treasure map. So we asked him if
anybody named M’rell had ever lived in that house, or in Greenland, or
anywhere that he knew of. He said never. He said nobody named that had
ever been anywhere that he had ever heard of. So then we told him about
the land pirate and the treasure, and he said it was all nonsense,
because if anybody from down Arkansas way had ever been anywhere around
there, he would have known it. So we told him not to say anything about
the treasure, and told him that was what the Tough Customer and the Rat
were after, and he said he would keep mum about it and sort of keep an
eye on the Tough Customer and the Rat and let us know if anything
happened.
CHAPTER XV
THE GRAPE TREE
Well, one afternoon--it was about two weeks later--I was sitting on the
grass where the mud cove is, just below our cottage up there on our
Birch Island, and Jibby Jones was sitting beside me. We weren’t doing
anything but waiting, or nothing much else, but we had three or four
empty baskets and a rake and an axe beside us. We were waiting for Uncle
Beeswax, because he was going to take us to get wild grapes.
One day, just after we had met him at Greenland Creek Uncle Beeswax had
stopped at Birch Island to see if our folks wanted any honey or beeswax.
Generally, when he stopped at our island he went right past us boys and
up to the cottages, but since we had saved him from the Tough Customer
he liked us, I guess. That day Jibby Jones was rigging up a trot-line,
and after Uncle Beeswax had told us that the Tough Customer and the Rat
were still digging at the creek bank, and had said, a couple of times,
“My, what a nose! My, what a noble nose!” he put down his baskets and
looked at what Jibby was doing, and shook his head.
“Who taught you that way to tie hooks on a trot-line?” he asked.
“Nobody did,” Jibby said in his solemn way. “I evolved this way out of
my own head.”
“Well, it is no way at all,” said Uncle Beeswax. “Let me show you.”
So he showed Jibby how to fix hooks on a trot-line. You know what a
trot-line is. It is a long, stout fish-line--mighty stout, too--and
sometimes a quarter of a mile long, or more. You tie one end to a tree
on the bank and have the rest of the line coiled in your skiff, with the
hooks tied on about three or four feet apart, and while some one rows
your skiff out into the river you pay out the line. When you come to the
end of the line, you tie a big anchor rock on the end of it and chuck it
overboard. The hooks are not fastened directly onto the trot-line. Each
hook is on a short line of its own--maybe a foot and a half long, and
the ends of these lines are tied to the trot-line. That lets them float
free and gives a fish some play when it gets caught. Otherwise it might
break away easier. It was the way Jibby was tying these hook-lines to
the trot-line that Uncle Beeswax did not like.
“If you tie them that way, Jibby,” he said, “they’ll slide back and
forth along the line when a big fish gets on them. This is the right
way.”
So he showed Jibby, but Jibby did not bother to go over the job again.
He thought the line might do as it was, because it was a big job to
untie hundreds of hard knots and he wanted to get his trot-line in the
water and catch some fish.
After that old Uncle Beeswax used to stop at the island every day he
went by, and he knew more about the old river, and told us more, than
any man ever did, except, maybe, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar. What Uncle
Oscar did not know Uncle Beeswax did.
Anyway, Jibby Jones put out his trot-line that afternoon after Uncle
Beeswax went. He tied one end to a tree by the mud cove and Wampus and I
rowed the skiff while Jibby paid out the trot-line and he anchored the
far end out beyond the middle of the river with a rock big enough to
hold a house from floating away. After that we “ran” the trot-line twice
a day and we always got fish--sometimes three or four catfish and white
perch and sometimes a carp or two, but always some. When you “run” a
trot-line one fellow rows the skiff to keep the current from sweeping it
downstream too strong, and the other sits in the bow of the boat with
the trot-line dragging over it. He pulls the boat along by pulling on
the trot-line, and when he comes to a hook-line he takes off the
fish--if there is one--and baits the hook and lets it slide back down
into the water.
So that’s that. There was Jibby’s trot-line stretching out a quarter of
a mile or so from our island, dipping into the river just a few feet
beyond the tree it was tied to, like a submarine cable that did not go
quite to Buffalo Island. When we were out “running” the line, old Uncle
Beeswax would row toward us, if he happened to be rowing by, and he
would ask how many fish we were getting, and things like that.
So, on this day in August, Jibby and I were out “running” the trot-line
and Wampus was in the stern of our skiff, and here came old Uncle
Beeswax rowing out from the shore of Buffalo Island toward us. There was
quite a breeze blowing and his long gray whiskers blew out like a
pennant. He rowed up alongside, and he was almost bobbing up and down on
his seat, he was so excited.
“My, my!” he cried. “My, oh, my! I just ran across the grandest grape
tree I ever saw in my whole life, bar none whatever! More wild grapes
than I ever saw in one place in all my born days. A big tree and just
loaded down and weighted down and covered with grapes.”
Well, we knew why he had come to tell us. He had said that sometime when
he found a fine grape tree he would let us know and take us with him to
get wild grapes, and he had found one. It was loaded down with wild
grapes, Uncle Beeswax said. There were so many wild grapes the tree
looked blue instead of green. It was worth going miles to see--just to
see, mind you!--and all those grapes were ours just for the getting!
Bushels of them! No wonder Uncle Beeswax was excited.
He was so excited he sputtered when he tried to talk, and his old hands
trembled. It meant money for him because he sold wild grapes to women
who wanted to make jelly, but he was almost as pleased because he could
show Jibby and us a real grape tree, and lead us where we could get our
share of grapes from the most wonderful grape tree any man ever saw. It
was a poor year for grapes, but that is the way the wild grapes behave.
You’ll walk miles and see only a few skinny bunches that are all
bird-picked and not worth bothering with, and then you’ll run across one
tree just loaded down with vines and the vines loaded with full bunches
of lovely blue grapes.
Uncle Beeswax tried to tell us where the tree was, but we could not
understand. We thought we had walked all over Buffalo Island, and we had
never seen a tree like that. So he took a piece of paper from Jibby and
a pencil from Wampus and he tried to draw a map. By the map we
understood pretty well where the tree must be, and the reason we had
never seen it was because it was hidden. The map Uncle Beeswax made
showed why.
Right straight across the river from the tree Jibby had his trot-line
tied to was a sycamore tree on Buffalo Island. If you rowed across from
Jibby’s trot-line tree to the sycamore tree and climbed the bank, you
got into a tangle of briars and tall nettles and wild flax and poison
ivy thirty or forty feet wide, and that was a jungle nobody would want
to break through. Just back of that was a sort of gully that the river
had hollowed out, and that gully had been mushy mud all summer. It ran
up and down for an eighth of a mile, both ways.
Now, you know how all those islands are--all a mess of trees and vines
and tangles of one sort and another. Whenever we landed on Buffalo
Island, we would walk down along the shore until we were below the mushy
gully, or up until we were above it, and, when we were coming from the
other side and struck the gully, we did the same. That was all right,
but we had been fooled every time. There was not just one gully; there
were two of them. They joined together at their upper and lower ends.
What we had always done, and what any one would do, was to look across
the gully from the side toward the river and think we saw the woods on
the other side, but what we saw was a little island of woods. The same
way, looking across the gully from the island side of it, we thought we
saw the tangle that was along the bank of the river, but we really saw
the little island of woods. Those islands fool you a thousand times,
that way. So there was the little island between its mud gullies and
that was where the wonderful grape tree was. All that had happened was
that the hot, dry August days had dried the mud in the gullies, and
Uncle Beeswax had walked across on the dry cakes of mud and had found
the grape tree.
That was simple enough, but if Uncle Beeswax could do it the next man
looking for grapes could do it, too, and, with everybody looking for
grapes for jelly and for wine, that might happen any minute. No wonder
he was excited.
He made it all clear enough for us and he gave Jibby the map. We dropped
the trot-line back into the water in a hurry, I tell you! This was what
we were to do. Jibby and Wampus and I were to row back to our island and
tell Skippy Root and Tad Willing and get baskets and axes and a rake or
two. The rakes were to pull down the vines. The axes were to chop down
the tree. It’s a ruinous way to do, but it is the way every one does.
Uncle Beeswax was to row up to his shanty-boat and get his own baskets
and axe and rake and he was to stop at our mud cove for Jibby and me.
Wampus and Skippy and Tad were to go in one skiff, and Uncle Beeswax and
Jibby and I in the other. So Uncle Beeswax rowed off up the river and
Jibby and Wampus and I rowed home across the river.
We hunted up Skippy and Tad and told them what was up, and they got
busy. They got baskets and axes and rakes, and Jibby and I did the same,
and then Skippy and Wampus and Tad took my skiff and rowed away. They
were to go over to the shore by the big sycamore tree and wait for us.
We had to wait for Uncle Beeswax. That was why we were sitting there on
the grass by the mud cove like I told you in the beginning. So we
talked, because we had nothing else to do. Only, it was Jibby who
talked.
CHAPTER XVI
CONGO MAGIC
The thing that started Jibby talking was a feather. Right between his
knees when he sat down was a crow’s tail feather, and he picked it up
and it reminded him of something, because everything always did remind
Jibby of something. He stuck it up in the ground.
“What did you do that for?” I asked him.
He looked at the feather.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it reminded me of the time I was on
the Congo River.”
“What about the Congo River does an old crow’s feather remind you of?” I
asked him.
“Well, magic,” Jibby said. “A black feather is one of the things the
natives use for bad magic. They use a black feather when they want to
spoil an enemy’s plans. They stick a black feather in the ground like
this, and then they make a ring of other stuff around it and put magic
things in the circle.”
He showed me how they did it. He broke up some twigs and made a circle
around the feather, and then he felt in his pocket for things to put in
the circle. First he found his knife, and he held it in the cup of his
two hands and said something like:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
Only, of course, I can’t remember what it was he did say. Then he put
his knife inside the magic circle, and took out a box of safety matches
and said:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
Then he put the matches in the magic circle, and dug into his pocket
again, and all he could find was three or four nails and a couple of
screw eyes big enough to run a tiller rope through. He chanted:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
So into the magic circle went the nails and the screw eyes, and he
looked around and picked up the map Uncle Beeswax had made, and he
chanted over that and put that in the magic circle. Then he held out his
hands over the whole business and began some more nonsense-chanting,
starting low and getting louder, and I sort of got the idea and began to
chant with him, and there we both were, slapping our knees and chanting
away like lunatics:
“Keeko! Keeko!
Keeko, muk-muk, keeko!
Chuck-a-wah! Chuck-a-wah!
Chuck-a-wah chang cho chee!”
And over and over again. And then, all of a sudden, somebody was
standing behind us. I nearly jumped out of my skin, I was so frightened
at first. I thought maybe our magic had really raised an evil spirit or
something, and then I saw it was Cawley Romer. And I hadn’t been so far
wrong, either, for Cawl Romer is one of the meanest fellows that ever
comes to our island. Only one is meaner, and that is his brother Hen.
They are great big bullies.
[Illustration: SLAPPING OUR KNEES AND CHANTING AWAY LIKE LUNATICS]
“What are you doing?” Cawl Romer asked in that rough way a bully asks
things.
“Magic,” I said, as meek as Moses. “Jibby was showing me how the Congo
natives do magic.”
Cawl Romer was looking at the magic circle, and all at once he pushed
his foot over it and knocked down the feather and scattered the twigs
and things.
“I’ll magic your magic for you!” he said in his mean way, but he kept
his foot down and I saw why. He had it on top of the map Jibby had put
in the magic circle. He bent down and took the map from under his foot.
He turned it one way and another way and looked at it, but he couldn’t
make anything out of it, Uncle Beeswax had done it so roughly and in
such a hurry.
“I know what this is,” he said. “I know why you’ve got baskets and this
rake and this axe here. You know where a grape tree is.”
“It’s none of your business if we do,” I said, sulky-like, because I
knew what Cawl Romer would be up to next.
“Is that so!” he said. “Well, I’ll show you mighty soon whether it is my
business or not. I saw Old Beeswax chin with you, and I saw him go
rowing off up the river. A grape tree belongs to the man that gets it. I
just mean to clean this one out before....”
“Keeko! Keeko!
Keeko muk-muk keeko!”
chanted Jibby Jones.
He paid no attention to Cawl Romer at all, seemed like. He had stuck up
the feather again and made his twig circle and was chanting as if
nothing had happened.
“You listen to me,” Cawl Romer said, pushing Jibby in the back with his
foot. “Do you know where this grape tree is?”
Jibby looked up at him as solemn as an owl.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with my nose!” he said. “I did know
where that tree was; it was directly in front of my nose. That’s how I
was going to it--I was going to follow my nose. But now my nose won’t
point. It’s too bad!”
“Well, I’ll attend to that,” said Cawl Romer. “You’re going to show me
where that tree is, nose or no nose, or you’ll be sorry you ever came to
this island. And you, too, George. You know me! Now, you listen! I’m
going up to my cottage and get Hen and some baskets, and you sit right
here and don’t move! Understand that? If you’re not here, I’ll skin you
and eat you when I do catch you.”
Then he went away, and he took the map with him. Jibby sat where he was
until Cawl Romer was out of sight and then he jumped up like a flash.
“Hasten!” he said. “Hasten!”
I did not know what he was up to.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“Magic,” he said. “Congo magic, Georgie.”
He went to his skiff and took out the bait pail and chucked it and we
pulled the skiff out of the water and turned it upside down. Then he
took the two big screw eyes. He started one into the bottom of the skiff
by hitting it with a rock and then screwed it all the way in, and then
he put in the other the same way. One was nearer the bow and the other
nearer the stern. Then we swung the skiff around so the stern was
shoreward and the bow toward the river and Jibby did a thing that seemed
almost crazy. He untied the end of his trot-line from the tree and
slipped the end through the two screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and
tied the end of the trot-line to a tough root near the edge of the
river. Then we heaved the skiff over and pushed it out into the water so
the stern just rested on shore, and went back and sat down. I began to
see what he was up to. He had the skiff strung on the trot-line, under
water. Those Romer bullies would row across the river but when they got
just so far they would come to the end of the trot-line, where it was
tied to the big anchor stone, and there the skiff would stop. I
chuckled.
“Scratch a bully and you find a coward,” Jibby said. “My Grandfather
Parmenter used to say that, and he was a wise man. He had a nose like
mine. Scratch a bully and find a coward.”
“That’s all right enough,” I said, “but what are you going to gain by
it? We could run away and they couldn’t find us, and then we could tell
our fathers and they wouldn’t let the Romers hurt us.”
“And they have the map,” said Jibby. “If they look at it close enough,
they can understand it. They’ll see Wampus and Skippy and Tad by the
sycamore and know that is the big dot, and they’ll know the cross on the
map is the grape tree. They’ll have it cleaned out before Uncle Beeswax
can get here. And I like Uncle Beeswax. He’s my friend. He trusted us
with the map. I’m going to save those grapes for him.”
Well, Cawl Romer and his brother Hen came back and they acted mean and
rough. They chucked our axe and our rake into Jibby’s skiff as if they
didn’t care what damage they did, and they threw in their baskets and
left ours on the shore. Then they made me get into the bow seat and they
took the oars, and they made Jibby push off and hop into the stern seat.
“And no talk out of you!” Cawl said.
“Keeko!” Jibby said.
“Keeko muk-muk,
Chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
“That’s magic,” Cawl Romer told Hen, sneering-like. Then he said to
Jibby: “You can’t fool me! That’s no Congo magic talk. I don’t believe
you ever saw the Congo. That’s more like some old Chinese laundry talk
or Flatfoot Indian.”
Well, it didn’t seem like much of a place for magic to work, even if
there was such a thing. Miles and miles of blue sky, and the sun
shining, and the big river rushing along, and we just plain boys, and
the two Romers just everyday big bullies. Hen and Cawl pulled at the
oars and sweated, too, for it is no easy job to row across the river
there. You have to row more than half upstream or the current will carry
you half a mile below where you want to go by the time you get across.
And they were in a hurry, too. Uncle Beeswax was liable to come rowing
down the river any time, and he was no sort of man to mix in with when
he thought he had a fair right to a bee tree or a grape tree. Even big
bullies like the Romers would steer clear of him then; all they wanted
was to get across the river and clean up the wild grapes before Uncle
Beeswax came, and all Jibby wanted was to hold them back long enough for
Uncle Beeswax to show up. So Jibby chanted again.
“Keeko! Keeko!
Chuck-a-muck-a-mayo!
Chip-la, chip-la, chuck chang cho!”
he chanted, or something like that, and he took the tip of his nose in
his fingers and wiggled it back and forth.
“Stop that!” Hen Romer said, as cross as a bear. “Don’t you put any
magic on us!”
“Aw, pshaw!” Cawl Romer said. “Don’t worry about him; he can’t magic a
sick cat.”
But just the same he began to frown a little.
“What’s the matter with this boat?” he said. “I wouldn’t have this boat
for a gift. I never knew a boat to pull as hard as this boat pulls.”
I knew what was the matter. The screw eyes on the bottom of the skiff
had come to Jibby’s hook-lines on his trot-line and were dragging them
along the trot-line the way Uncle Beeswax had said a big fish might.
“Row, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted over his shoulder at Hen.
“I am rowing as hard as I can,” Hen shouted back. “Row some yourself and
don’t make me do it all.”
Every stroke they took the screw eyes gathered up another hook-line and
added it to those they were already dragging. The Romers panted and
puffed and pulled until their eyes stuck out an inch, almost, but they
could just barely make the skiff move.
“Plenty keeko!” Jibby said, and stopped chanting.
“Pull, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted at Hen again.
They did pull, too. Out there in the middle of the river, with the
current rushing the water past the skiff and the skiff pointed halfway
upstream and the shores a good distance away, no one can tell whether a
skiff is moving much or not. Those two Romers buckled down hard and
strained every muscle and did their level best. They got madder and
madder and scolded each other, and the boat hardly moved an inch at a
stroke. They kept looking over their shoulders at the Buffalo Island
shore and simply humped their backs, but the shore did not seem to come
any nearer. They rowed harder than I ever saw any one row outside of a
race. They made the oars bend. Then they came to the end of the
trot-line, where it dipped down to the big anchor rock and the boat did
not move at all. And, away up the river, I saw a black speck that I was
pretty sure must be Uncle Beeswax rowing down.
Cawl Romer rested on his oars a minute.
“What does this mean, Jones?” he asked Jibby, and he was mighty mad.
“You can’t fool me. There is no such thing as magic. What’s the matter
with this boat?”
“It don’t seem to go, somehow,” Jibby said.
“He’s put a spell on it, that’s what he’s done,” Hen Romer said. “You
can’t fool _me_! I never saw a boat yet that I couldn’t row _some_. He’s
magicked us, Cawl.”
Cawl took up his oars and began to row, but he looked worried.
“I don’t believe in magic,” he said, but he did not say it as if he
meant it. “How could he put a spell on a boat? He couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t know what a fellow with a nose like that can do,” Hen said, and
he said it as if he did mean it. “I didn’t like his looks the first time
I saw him, and I told you so. I said to keep away from him. And don’t
you try to tell me there isn’t magic. You just remember Uncle Harris and
the colored conjure woman!”
Well, I didn’t know what he meant by his Uncle Harris and the conjure
woman, but I guess Cawl did, for he looked uneasy.
“You be still!” he said. Then he turned to me. “Did he put magic on this
boat?” he asked.
“How do I know?” I asked. “He was doing something with a feather and
some sticks--that’s all I know.”
“Well, he’s magicked us!” Cawl said all of a sudden, dropping his oars.
“That’s what he’s done; he’s put a spell on us.”
He picked up one oar and felt the depth of the river and could not touch
bottom on any side. So Hen stopped rowing. As soon as they both stopped
rowing, the boat sagged around with the current and the pull on the
trot-line was heavy. I looked up the river and saw Uncle Beeswax was
rowing for us and was near enough to hear us. I yelled to him and waved
my arms. Hen and Cawl had seen him, too. They made a last effort and
took up their oars and rowed hard, but it was no use. Uncle Beeswax bore
down on us and came alongside and grasped the gunwale of our skiff. The
Romers stopped rowing, too, and that put the full weight of both skiffs,
with the whole current behind them, on the trot-line and she parted as
easy as you would break a rotten thread.
“What’s the matter?” Uncle Beeswax asked.
The skiffs were floating down-river as easy as you please.
“Nothing,” Jibby said. “These Romers wanted to come along and the skiff
did not want them to.”
“Neither do I; I don’t like ’em, hoof nor hide,” said Uncle Beeswax, who
was plain-spoken enough when he wanted to be.
“Wampus and Tad and Skippy are waiting by the sycamore,” Jibby said.
“Maybe you’d better go on and get the grapes, Uncle Beeswax, and we’ll
see if we can row this skiff home. It may be willing to go across the
river one way if it isn’t willing to go the other.”
The two Romers scowled a lot at this, but they took to the oars. They
did not bother to row us back to our mud cove. They rowed across the
easiest way, and that landed us down near the end of Birch Island, and
they got out there. They did not say a word. As long as we could see
them, as we rowed back across the river to the sycamore tree, they were
standing there talking to each other--trying to make up their minds
whether they believed in magic or not, I guess.
Well, Uncle Beeswax got his wild grapes and, after we got home, Jibby
reeled in his trot-line. He had lost most of his hooks, but he did not
mind that; he had kept the Romers from doing Uncle Beeswax out of his
grapes.
“Jibby,” Wampus asked, when I had told him and Skippy and Tad about the
screw eyes and the trot-line and all, “how on earth did you ever think
of putting the screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and running the
trot-line through them?”
“Well, I’ll explain it,” Jibby Jones said. “I had the screw eyes....”
“Yes.”
“And I had the trot-line....”
“Yes.”
“And I had the skiff....”
“Yes.”
“Well, what else could anybody do with a couple of screw eyes and a
trot-line and a skiff?” Jibby asked. “I couldn’t think of anything else
to do with them, so I did that. But I’m sorry for one thing.
“The feather,” Jibby said. “That crow feather was wasted. I couldn’t
think of any way to use it. I tried, but I couldn’t.”
CHAPTER XVII
GRAINS OF SAND
For a while nothing much happened. It got along to the first of
September, and all of us had to leave Birch Island and go back down to
Riverbank, because we had to go to school. Old Uncle Beeswax came to the
island a day or so before we left, and he said the Tough Customer and
the Rat had given up digging for the land pirate’s treasure.
Uncle Beeswax had hardly gone when we saw the Tough Customer’s old
shanty-boat floating down the river, past our island, and we knew they
had given up hope and were going away. It did seem as if the Land
Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company had had about as bad
luck as the Tough Customer, too, and that our hunting had been wasted.
We thought the treasure was a fake, and that there wasn’t any, and that
if there was we were all through with it. But we were not through with
it yet, not by a long shot! If we had known the truth, we were just at
the beginning of it.
A couple of days before we were to go down to town, all four of us were
out there on the riverbank with the different things we had collected
during the summer, making up our minds what we would keep and take home
with us and what we would throw away.
I was there, and so were Skippy Root and Tad Willing and Wampus Smale,
and we had all our curiosities spread out, when up came Jibby Jones. He
stood there looking at our curiosities, with his hands behind his back,
and he did look funny with his tortoise-shell spectacles and his big
nose like the jib of a boat and a suit that needed to grow a lot before
it was big enough for him.
“You’ve got a nice lot of things,” he said.
And we had, too. You can find a lot of dandy curiosities up there on
that island and around the river. We had chunks of rock from the ripraps
with fossils in them, and carnelians from the levee, and turtle shells
without the turtles in them, and roots that looked like snakes or
people, and about six kinds of mussel shells, and some birds’ eggs--we
had a whole lot of dandy things. It looked like about a ton when we had
them all spread out before us. They were fine for our collections.
“Where are yours?” Wampus asked Jibby.
Jibby had had some bully news to tell us a couple of days before. His
folks were going to stay in Riverbank all winter, because Jibby’s father
was writing a book or something.
“If you haven’t got any shells and rocks and things,” Tad said to Jibby,
“you’d better get them now. Maybe you’ll go away in the spring, and
maybe this is your last chance to get them. There is plenty of time
yet.”
“Thank you,” Jibby said, “but I don’t want to get any.”
“Don’t you collect anything?” Skippy asked. “I thought everybody had a
collection of some kind.”
“Oh, yes!” Jibby said. “I do collect. I have a collection. But I don’t
collect big things any more. My father put a stop to it years ago.”
“What were you collecting then?” Wampus asked.
“Hides,” Jibby said, as serious as an owl. “I had a white mouse once and
it died, so I saved the hide, and I thought it would be nice to collect
hides--to get a collection of all the kinds of hides in the world.”
“Say!” Skippy said. “That would be bully, wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t your
father let you collect them?”
“Well, we were in Egypt then,” said Jibby Jones, “and the next hide I
collected was one a hunter gave me. It was a hippopotamus hide and it
needed an ox cart with four oxen to haul it. When it came to our tent I
was greatly pleased, and I told father I knew where there was a
crocodile hide a boy would trade me if I could get something to trade
for it. It weighed about one hundred pounds. And I knew an old Arab that
had a sick camel, and he said I could have the camel’s hide if the camel
died, only I would have to skin the camel--he was too busy. So I asked
father if he would help me skin the camel.”
“And wouldn’t he?” asked Wampus.
“No,” said Jibby Jones. “Father put his foot down. He said I could not
collect hides. We often traveled with only one suitcase, because he was
an author and had to be in a hurry, and he said that if my collection
amounted to much, and I got an elephant hide and a rhinoceros hide and,
maybe, a giraffe hide and a buffalo hide, and added them to my mouse
hide and my hippopotamus hide, there wouldn’t be room in the suitcase
for his toothbrush. So I began to collect something else.”
“What are you collecting now?” asked Skippy, and we all listened for the
answer, because, if Jibby Jones was collecting anything, we did not know
it.
“Sand,” Jibby said. “I rowed over to the sand bar this morning and got
eight grains of sand to add to my collection.”
Well, we just all lay back and yelled. It was about the funniest thing
we ever thought of--almost six feet of Jibby Jones going all the way
over to the sand bar on the other side of the river with his spectacles
and everything, to get eight grains of sand!
Jibby Jones looked at us awhile, sort of smiling as if he could not
quite see what we were laughing at, and then he said:
“But, of course, I don’t always get eight grains; mostly I only get one
or two grains. I got eight grains because this is the best summer I ever
had in my life and I want to remember it forever. I got eight grains of
Mississippi River sand so that if any got lost I would still have enough
to remember you boys by.”
“And is that all you are collecting?” Wampus asked.
“Yes,” Jibby Jones said. “Father don’t like me to collect bulky things,
and I thought grains of sand were about as small as anything could be,
so I collect them.”
Well, that is how Jibby Jones was. He looked silly, with his nose like a
jib and his serious look, but there was always some good sense in what
he said and did. When you come to think of it a grain of sand is just
about the smallest thing there is.
Grains of sand did seem queer things to collect, just the same, when you
think that all you have to do is walk across a sand bar in low shoes and
you get two shoes full in about a minute and find grains of sand in your
bed for about a week. So we sort of teased Jibby Jones, and the end of
it was that we all went into his father’s cottage to look at Jibby
Jones’s collection.
Say! He brought out a little tin box just about as big as my hand, and
opened it, and he brought out a magnifying-glass that was a dandy. That
magnifying-glass made a pin look as big as a railway spike, almost. It
made a grain of sand look almost as big as a diamond a lady wears in a
ring. I guess we did open our eyes when Jibby Jones began to show us his
collection of grains of sand.
In the little tin box were little squares of card, just about the size
of postage stamps, and each grain of sand was glued to its card, with
the place it came from and the date Jibby Jones got that grain of sand
all written out on the little card. He had each little card wrapped in
tissue paper, so that if the grain of sand came off the card it would
not be lost.
The first specimen he let us see was a grain of sand from the seashore
of the Atlantic Ocean, United States. Without the magnifying-glass you
could not see it at all, but when we looked through the glass at it we
all said, “Oh, boy!” It was like a drop of moonlight shut up in a clear
stone. It did not sparkle; it glowed. Then he showed us one from the
Pacific Ocean that was like yellow sunlight.
Just about then we changed our minds about Jibby Jones having a fool
sort of collection. He had a grain of sand from every place he had been.
He had one from the Nile, and one from the edge of the Sahara Desert,
and one from the River Jordan, and two from the St. Lawrence and
hundreds more.
“This one is from the San Gabriel River in California,” Jibby Jones
said, when he showed us one grain. “It isn’t very odd, but it was got in
a queer way. Father wouldn’t stop to let me get a grain of sand out of
that river, because we were just going by on an interurban trolley car,
so I thought I would get a grain of sand, anyway. I chewed some gum and
fastened it to a string, and when we went over the bridge I stood on the
end of the car and let the gum drag in the sand. It caught a lot of
grains.”
Jibby Jones had about the bulliest collection I ever looked at.
“It is just as good as a collection of mountains and caverns and all
sorts of minerals would be, when you get used to it,” Jibby Jones said,
“because that is what sand is--mountains and rocks that have broken down
and been crushed and then rolled by the water until the sharp edges are
worn smooth.”
He had some cards that had more than one grain of sand glued to
them--fifty or a hundred grains.
“When I get specimens for places,” Jibby Jones said, “I keep only one
grain of sand, because father didn’t want me to collect anything bulky,
but these are for color, so I keep more grains.”
Well, I did not know there were so many kinds of sand in the whole
world! Jibby Jones had black sand, and sand as red as blood, and sand as
blue as indigo, and sand of almost every color you ever heard of, and
then some colors you never did hear of. We were saying, “Oh, boy!” and,
“My gimini crickets!” every minute, and, all at once, Skippy said:
“Say, Jibby, you haven’t any green sand!”
“Yes, I have,” Jibby said, and he showed us a card of green sand.
“I don’t mean that kind of green,” Skippy said. “I mean green that the
light shows through; not solid green. I know where there is a kind of
green you have not got. You know, fellows; that green sand in Murrell’s
Run, down below town.”
“Sure! I know!” I said, as excited as if somebody had told me where
there was a million dollars. “Out back of that old brick house, Skippy.”
We all remembered it. We had found it one day when we were wading up the
Run, and there was a lot of it. It was right in the bottom of the Run,
and we all waded in it and dug our toes in it and said it was a queer
kind of sand.
Jibby Jones straightened up and looked at me through his spectacles.
“Green sand?” he said in a queer way. “Green sand?”
“You bet!” I said. “And lots of it. And it’s the only place anybody ever
heard of green sand being, around here.”
“In a creek?” Jibby asked.
“Yes; up in the hills below town,” I said. “Only they don’t call that
creek a creek; they call it a ‘run’--Murl’s Run,” I said, pronouncing it
the way we always did.
“I’d like to have some of that green sand--for my collection,” Jibby
drawled.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll get you some; we know right where it is.”
“I would rather get it myself,” Jibby said. “I like my sand specimens
when I get them myself.”
So that was how, the first Saturday after school began, Jibby Jones went
with us out toward the Run. We all wanted to get green sand for our
collections of sand, because we had all four started in collecting sand.
As soon as we got through looking at Jibby’s collection, we went over to
the sand bar to get some Mississippi River sand to start our
collections. Only we didn’t get just one grain apiece; we got about a
peck apiece. We thought maybe we could exchange grains of Mississippi
River sand with boys in California and other places. We got enough sand
to exchange with about a million boys, and there was plenty left in the
river, too.
Going to Murrell’s Run to get the green sand we went out the road past
the cemetery for about five miles, and just before we got to the Run we
came to a crossroads, where an old tumbledown brick house stands. We
were going right on past when, all at once, Jibby Jones stopped short.
“Hello!” he said. “Look at that!”
We stopped and looked, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was nothing
but the old deserted brick farmhouse at the crossing of the roads. It
was a one-story house with an attic, and the roof was falling in. All
the doors and windows were gone, and the barn behind the house was
nothing but a pile of rotted wood, flat on the ground. Tall weeds,
mostly gone to seed now, were everywhere. It looked as if nobody had
lived in that house for a hundred years. There was one big
horse-chestnut tree by the house and one dead tree in the corner, just
where the roads crossed, and all the rest was tangled blackberry bushes.
“What do you see?” Wampus Smale asked. “I don’t see anything.”
That old house had been there so long and we had seen it so often that
we never thought anything about it. It was not even gloomy enough to
look like a haunted house. We had played all over it, because Wampus
Smale’s father owned that piece of land and the new house that was up
the road five hundred yards or so. But Jibby Jones stood in the road,
sniffing the air and wiggling his nose.
“Do you smell money?” he asked.
We all sniffed then. I know how paper money smells, but I could not
smell that smell. Neither could Wampus or Skippy or Tad. We said so.
“I don’t mean paper money; I mean gold money,” Jibby Jones said. “Can
you smell gold money?”
“Pshaw, no!” Skippy said, but he sniffed at the air first. “Of course I
can’t. Nobody can smell gold money; it hasn’t any smell.”
“Neither can I,” said Jibby Jones. “I have a good nose, but it can’t
smell gold. I just thought perhaps your noses could. If you can’t smell
anything that smells like gold money, can you see anything that looks
like it?”
We all looked as hard as we could, but we did not see anything that
looked like gold money, or like anything much of anything. So we said
so.
Wampus laughed.
“He’s fooling us,” he said, and then he asked Jibby Jones: “What do you
see?”
“I see that old dead tree in the corner,” Jibby Jones said. “Do you know
what kind of tree that is?”
We were all pretty well interested by this time, so we went up to the
tree and looked at it and felt of it, and Wampus put his pug nose up
against it and smelled it. Maybe he thought he could smell the gold
money. The tree was so old the bark was all off it, and it had been
struck by lightning once or twice and the top was all gone. When we had
looked it over, we did not know what to think. We thought maybe Jibby
Jones thought it was some kind of tree that was worth a lot of money,
the way black walnut was during the war. But I said:
“I know what kind of tree it was. It was a pine tree. And I know what
kind of tree it is. It is a dead tree.”
“Of course,” Jibby Jones said, as solemn as ever; “but I don’t mean
that. I mean what other kind of tree it was.”
“Well,” Skippy said, “if you mean whether it was a short-leaf pine or a
long-leaf pine, I give it up. I can’t tell that by an old dead trunk
like this.”
“I don’t mean that,” Jibby Jones said. “Don’t you see where the tree
is?”
We began to get excited now.
“Right in the corner!” he said. “There’s the house, and here is what
must have been the dooryard of the house, and right in the corner is
this pine tree. Didn’t you ever hear of John A. M’rell?”
“Ginger!” I cried. “Ginger!” For M’rell was the way Jibby Jones always
pronounced the land pirate’s name.
“This tree was a signal pine,” Jibby said, as serious as a judge. “The
minute I saw it, I knew it was a pine tree, and the minute I saw it was
in the corner, I knew it might be a John A. M’rell signal pine. Didn’t
anybody ever talk about hunting treasure here?”
We just looked at Jibby Jones and stared.
“No; nobody ever said anything about treasure up here,” Tad said.
“Then we’ve got a chance--a great chance,” Jibby Jones said, more
excited than we ever saw him. “Maybe we can find ten thousand dollars,
and maybe we can find a hundred thousand dollars. It just shows how
ignorant people can be, even when things are right under their noses.
Here is a fortune lying where anybody can put their hands on it, and
they don’t know it. My gracious! I thought you fellows said you knew all
about the Mississippi River.”
“Aw!” Wampus said. “What are you talking about the river for? This isn’t
the river; this is farmland.”
“If you knew all about the river, you would know all about all parts of
it,” Jibby Jones said. “You would know about Arkansas and Mississippi
and the things that happened there. You’d know that whenever there is a
lone pine in the corner of a farm, it might be a M’rell tree. And you’d
remember it whenever anybody talked about land pirate’s treasure. You’d
know that people down there have hunted and hunted for John A. M’ell’s
hidden money, and never found it. Of course, they didn’t find it. Why?
Because it’s here. The minute I saw this tree, I knew this was where it
was hidden.”
“Yes, but--” Wampus began.
“How far is it from here to the river or to the slough, if there is a
slough?”
“Of course there’s a slough,” I said. “There’s Riverbank Slough. It’s
two or three miles from here.”
“Yes, but--” Wampus said again.
“But what?” Jibby asked.
“But this isn’t the place; this can’t be the place,” Wampus said. “The
map said Greenland.”
Jibby took off his hat and unpinned the map from inside the sweat-band,
where he always carried it. He spread it out on his hand.
“‘Land’ or ‘sand,’” he said. “It might be one or the other, the way it
is scribbled. It’s ‘Greenland’ or it’s ‘green sand,’ just as you want to
read it. And there wasn’t any treasure at Greenland. Look here--where
would the green sand be, according to this map?”
We leaned over the map and studied it a minute.
“Right there,” said Tad, putting his finger on the very spot where the
“X” mark was.
“All right!” Jibby said. “Here’s your river, and here’s your slough, and
here’s your creek, and here’s your crossroads. And these criss-cross
scribble marks stand for Riverbank. And here’s your signal pine, and
your house, and your green sand right where the ‘X’ mark is--and marked
‘green sand’ plain enough for anybody. And what would John A. M’rell’s
brother send as directions if he hid the money here, and John A. M’rell
was a criminal and likely to be hunted when he was coming for his
treasure?”
[Illustration: a map]
“What would he say?” Tad asked.
“He would say, ‘Come up the Mississippi River to Riverbank, Iowa. Only,
you’d better not go there; they may be looking for you. So, when you
come to the first slough below Riverbank, row up the slough until you
come to a creek. You can sneak up that creek without much chance of
anybody seeing you. So come along up the creek until you come to some
green sand, about two or three miles back from the slough. And, when you
come to the green sand, climb up the creek bank and you’ll see a brick
house, and a signal pine I planted. That’s where I am.’”
“Gee!” I said, it was all so plain.
“How do you pronounce M-u-r-r-e-l-l?” Jibby Jones asked.
“Murl,” I said.
“Well, that old negro Mose pronounced it M’rell,” Jibby Jones said.
“M’rell and Murl is all the same. One is the Southern way of saying it,
and the other is the Northern way. And you say the name of this creek is
Murl’s Run. That’s M’rell’s Run--M-u-r-r-e-l-l’s Run. This is the
place!”
CHAPTER XVIII
PIRATE’S TREASURE
Well, that all sounded reasonable enough. We were all standing under the
old pine tree, and Wampus and Skippy and Tad and I started for the old
house on a run, but Jibby just stood there by the tree.
“Come on!” we shouted. “Come on and search the house.”
“You go,” Jibby said. “I want to think this out first. I can think
hidden treasure better when I’m here by the signal tree. I thought out
about it being here, and I’ve got to think where it would be hidden.”
He leaned up against the tree and stayed there. He was rubbing that big
nose of his with his forefinger, but we did not watch him long; we piled
into the house and began to hunt pirate’s treasure with all our might.
We pounded on the walls and rummaged in every room, hunting for secret
hiding-places, and everything had a different look to us. Nothing
changes a place like thinking there is treasure hidden in it. We were
all as busy as bees.
I was up in the attic, under the roof that was tumbling in, and Skippy
and Tad were on the ground floor, pounding and poking, and Wampus was in
the cellar that was under about half the house. The way we worked you
might have thought the treasure was butter that might melt and run away
if we did not find it soon enough. Wherever there was a loose brick we
pried it out, and wherever there was a loose board we pried it up.
Now and then I looked through the broken roof, and there was Jibby Jones
by the old pine tree, rubbing the side of his nose slowly with his
finger and looking first one way and then another. Sometimes he would
look at the sky, and then he would look far off into the distance, and
then he would look at the house. Now and then he would shake his head,
and once he took off his hat and hit himself three or four times on the
head with his fist, as if he was trying to make his brains work better
by joggling them. I would have laughed, but I could not waste the time,
so I only grinned. He was a funny fellow.
I was poking around, doing my best to find a million dollars or so, and
finding nothing but cobwebs and dust, when I heard Wampus shout in the
cellar.
“Come down here quick,” he shouted; “I’ve found something.”
I slid down from the attic and Skippy and Tad were already piling down
into the cellar. I went to a window and shouted to Jibby to come, but he
only waved his hand.
“Wampus has found something in the cellar; come on!” I shouted; but
Jibby only waved his hand again, although he heard me well enough, so I
piled down into the cellar, too.
Wampus was showing Skippy and Tad a place in the cellar floor, and he
was as excited as a kitten with a mouse.
“Listen to this and then to this,” he was saying, and he thumped on the
floor of the cellar in different places with his heel. The floor was
just a dirt floor. In some places it was dry and dusty and in other
places dry and hard, but wherever Wampus stamped his heel, except one,
it sounded solid; in that one place, bigger around than a barrel, the
floor gave a hollow sound.
“You’ve found it!” Skippy cried. “Call Jibby. He has a right to be here
when we get the money. And we’ll divide it into five parts; one for each
of us.”
So Tad went to fetch Jibby Jones. Do you think he would come? Not a bit.
When Tad told him what we had found, Jibby just rubbed his nose a little
slower.
“Go ahead and look there if you want to,” he said to Tad, “but be
careful you don’t fall in and get drowned. I’m glad you found it,
because it is a good sign, but I’ve got to think out where that treasure
is.”
That was all Tad could get out of him. When Tad came back to the cellar,
we were all digging at the floor over the hollow-sounding place with our
jack-knives, but Tad sent me up to see if I could get half a dozen
shingles off the old roof that would be sound enough to dig with. I got
eight or ten and took a look at Jibby Jones. He had not stirred.
Tad and Wampus and Skippy and I dug the dirt away, using the old
shingles to dig with, and we came to boards. The boards were thick, but
they were dry-rotted. We cleared away all the dirt that covered them and
pulled up the boards. By this time it was getting dark, especially down
there in the cellar. We looked down into that dark hole and we could not
see anything. I threw a piece of dirt down and it sounded dry. I asked
Tad and Wampus and Skippy for a match, but none of us had any, so I went
out to ask Jibby Jones for one, if he had one.
“I can’t figure it out,” he said. “I’ve been thinking and thinking, but
I can’t find it.”
“Find what?” I asked him.
“The hidden treasure,” he said.
“What do you want to think for?” I asked him. “That’s no way to find it.
The way to find things is to hunt for them.”
“No, George,” Jibby said. “No! That’s not the way. That’s not the way
Columbus did. He thought it out first. He thought until he was sure the
world was round, and then he knew that if he sailed west from Spain he
would find India.”
“But he didn’t find India,” I said.
“He found something almost as good,” Jibby grinned.
“But we’ve found the treasure hole already,” I said. “Come on and help
us down into it.”
“No,” Jibby said slowly. “No, George. I’m going to stay here and think
where that treasure is hidden. I’ll find it quicker that way.”
“Then give me some matches,” I said. “We’ve found the secret hole and
we’re going to see what is in it, treasure or no treasure.”
Jibby gave me a box of safety matches.
“Get some dry grass and light it and throw it down before you go down
yourself,” he said. “There may be poison air down there. If there is,
the air will put the grass out. If the grass burns, it is safe for you
to go down. But you won’t find anything. I’m glad you found the hole,
because it is a cistern, and it used to have water in it. That’s a good
sign for us, because, if the cistern was put in the cellar, it means
that the people in the house may have been afraid they would have to
stand a siege sometime and did not want to have to surrender for lack of
water. That looks like pirate business.”
Wampus was shouting for me to hurry. I ran to the old house, and we did
as Jibby had told me. The grass burned clear and bright, and Wampus and
Tad held me by my arms and lowered me into the old cistern. It looked as
if Jibby was right; there wasn’t much down there but dust and flakes of
rotted wood, but I lighted one twist of dried grass after another and
scraped all over the bottom of that cistern. Tad and Wampus and Skippy
were flat on the cellar floor, looking down and telling me what to do,
but I had just made up my mind it was no use scraping around any longer
when I scraped up a coin.
It was just one coin, and it was the only coin we found in that cistern,
but it made me feel bully. We had found something, anyway.
The coin was a dollar, and it was as black as coal, the way silver gets
when it isn’t kept polished. I scraped and scraped, after that, but it
was no use--that was all the treasure we found. The fellows pulled me
out of the hole.
By this time it was plumb dark, and we lighted matches and looked at the
dollar we had found. It was an old one, but not worn at all--it was as
clean and sharp as the day it was made. Tad was looking at it, and all
at once he kicked up and threw his cap on the cellar floor and jumped on
it, and shouted like a crazy man.
“Oh, boy!” he yelled. “Oh, you boy, you!”
As soon as we had looked at the dollar and had seen what Tad had seen,
we jumped and yelled, too. Then we piled out of the cellar and ran to
where Jibby Jones was still standing by the old pine tree. We were all
shouting and kicking up and yipping like mad, but Jibby, when we reached
him, just sighed as if there was no more hope in the world.
“Oh, you Jibby!” I shouted. “What do you think we found?”
Jibby shook his head. He was not interested at all.
“I can’t think it out!” he said, drawling like he always does. “That
John A. Murrell treasure ought to be somewhere, but I can’t think where
it is. He would send it here by a trusty messenger, and the man here
would hide it. It would have to be hidden in a safe place, and in a
place that John A. Murrell could find, even if the man here moved away
and the house and barn burned and every one died. But I can’t think
where--”
“But what do you think we found?” we shouted. “We found it in the old
cistern. Look, Jibby! An 1804 dollar! And as good as the day it was
minted.”
“That’s nice,” he said, careless-like, and he went on thinking.
“But it’s an 1804 dollar, Jibby!” I yelled at him. “Don’t you know what
that means? It is worth a thousand dollars, maybe; it is the rarest of
all the dollars. A thousand dollars! We’ll sell it and divide the
money.”
I don’t believe he heard a word. Did you ever hear of such a fellow? We
had found an 1804 dollar, and we shouted it at him, and he took no more
notice of us than if we had been four gnats buzzing around him. He was
more interested in leaning up against an old pine tree, trying to think
where some old land pirate might have hid some old treasure--if there
ever was any treasure--than he was in a genuine 1804 dollar. And he
looked so glum over it that I thought he was going to cry.
“Well, we’ve got to go home,” he said. “It’s dark now. I don’t know what
is the matter with this old head of mine. I thought it was good for
something, but I guess not. I guess my brains have got glued together.”
“But, say!” I said. “You did not really think you could stand here and
think exactly where the treasure was buried, so we could walk right to
it, did you?” I asked Jibby.
“Why, of course, I did!” Jibby Jones said. “That ought to be easy,
oughtn’t it? If this old head of mine wasn’t off on a vacation or
something, we would have had that treasure by now.”
He said something about showing that old head of his that it couldn’t
behave that way with him, and he turned around and bumped his forehead
against the old pine tree three or four times. At the last bump Jibby
stood back and put his hand to his head.
“Solid!” he said. “Solid wood!”
“What? The tree?” Wampus asked.
“No, my head,” Jibby laughed. Then he hit each of us with his fist, for
fun and to show he was tickled. “I’ve found it!” he said. “I know where
that treasure is.”
“Where?” we all asked.
“In my head,” he said, and he laughed again. “I won’t tell you where
else it is, because we’ll need a spade to dig for it, and it is too dark
now, and we can’t come to-morrow, because it is Sunday. We’ll come out
and get it next week sometime. Did you say you had found something?”
We told him all over again, and he looked at the 1804 dollar by the
light of a match and said it was genuine, and we all felt fine and
bully. We hiked toward home at a good rate, talking and shouting, and
all at once Jibby Jones stopped short.
“Pshaw!” he said. “We forgot something!”
“What?” I asked.
“We forgot what we went for; we did not get that green sand,” Jibby
said. “We’ll have to get that the next time we come.”
“After we dig up the treasure,” Wampus said.
“No, before we do anything else,” Jibby said. “Treasure is nothing but
money, and I may have plenty of chances to get money in my life, but
this may be the only green sand I ever have a chance to get. We’ll get
the sand first.”
We had to agree to it. If Jibby knew where the land pirate’s treasure
was, he was the only one that did know, so we had to do what he planned.
“How much green sand are you going to get?” I asked him.
“One grain,” Jibby said. “I need only one grain for my collection, so
I’ll get only one grain.”
And that was exactly like Jibby Jones. He thought he knew where there
was a pirate treasure worth, maybe, thousands of dollars, and he would
put off getting it so that he could get one grain of sand. It looked
foolish, but maybe it was the wisest way, after all. I guess it is. I
guess the wisest thing is to make up your mind what you want, and then
go for it, and keep on going for it until you get it.
CHAPTER XIX
THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS
It was on Saturday that we found the 1804 dollar in the dry well of the
cellar of the old Murrell farmhouse. We knew that the dollar was worth a
lot of money, and Jibby Jones said he thought it might be worth a
thousand dollars, which would be two hundred dollars apiece for each of
us.
“But that’s nothing,” Jibby Jones told us. “If that John A. Murrell’s
treasure is buried there, we may find a whole lot of money--perhaps
thousands of dollars.”
He said this while we were going back to Riverbank in the dark. The
dollar was all we had found, although we had searched the whole of the
old brick house, but Jibby Jones had not helped us hunt; he had stood by
an old pine tree doing nothing but thinking. He said he had to think
where the land pirate or his man would most likely hide the treasure.
And Jibby Jones said he had thought of the place.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, as we went along toward home, “but you must
not breathe a word of it. It won’t do to let anybody know about the
treasure or anything. The rush for the Klondike gold fields would be
nothing beside the rush the people here in Riverbank would make for that
treasure, if they knew there was a treasure.”
“That’s right!” Wampus Smale said. “Everybody in town would pile out
there and dig for it.”
“Well, this is how I thought out where the treasure is,” Jibby said, and
we all crowded close to him so that he would not have to talk very loud.
“I leaned up against that old pine tree and I tried to imagine I was old
John A. Murrell, the land pirate. That’s what you have to do if you want
to get anywhere in this world--you’ve got to imagine things.”
Well, we stopped and had an argument right there! That sounded to us
like the most foolish thing anybody could say--that the way to get
anywhere was to imagine something.
“I don’t believe that,” Skippy Root said. “I believe that the way to get
anywhere is to start right out and go there, and I believe that the way
to get anything is to start right after it and get it. It don’t do any
good for real folks to imagine anything at all; it may be all right for
poets and story-writers to imagine things and then write them--that’s
their sort of business--but it is a waste of time for anybody else to go
and imagine things.”
“Is it?” Jibby Jones asked. “I didn’t know that. I always thought it was
the other way.”
Well, that made us stop a little. Jibby Jones wasn’t half such a fool as
he looked, and we had found that out. At first we had sort of figured
that he was a silly, because he was almost six feet tall and wore
clothes that were mostly built for a five-foot boy, and because his
shell-rimmed spectacles and big, thin nose made him look like some
foolish kind of bird, but somehow even the silliest things he ever said
turned out to be pretty good solid sense. So now Tad Willing said:
“What do you mean by you ‘always thought it was the other way,’ Jibby?”
“Why, I always thought that nobody ever really did anything worth while
until he had imagined something about it,” Jibby said. “I always thought
there was never a wagon until some man imagined there was an easier way
of getting over the ground than walking over it. He imagined there might
be some sort of wagon, and then he went to work and made one. If some
one had not imagined that men might fly, there would never have been any
airplanes.”
“Well, I guess that’s so, anyway,” Tad admitted.
“Of course it is so!” Jibby said. “The only way the world gets ahead at
all is by imagination. You take the phonograph, for an example. How do
you suppose anybody ever happened to think of making a phonograph?”
“Why--” Wampus Smale began, and then he stopped.
It was as plain as day that nobody could sit down to invent a machine
that would talk like a man and sing like a bird and play tunes like a
band without first imagining such a machine.
“_There_ you are!” Jibby said. “A phonograph is ninety-nine parts
imagination and only one part solid stuff. Now, listen!”
Jibby Jones held the 1804 dollar between his finger and thumb and hit it
with his finger nail. It tinkled like a little silver bell.
“You heard that, didn’t you?” he asked. “All five of us heard it. That
means ten ears heard it. Well, for millions of years millions of ears
were hearing millions of sounds before anybody sat down and wondered
what a sound was and why an ear could hear it, and maybe it was
thousands of years more before some man imagined his ears heard the
sound because waves came through the air and hit his eardrums. So then
he went to work and proved it--he proved that if you hit a drum it makes
one kind of sound waves, and if you scrape a fiddle it makes another
kind, and if a bird sings it makes another kind. He proved that sound is
vibration.”
“Sure! I know that!” Wampus said, sort of scornful.
“Edison knew it, too,” Jibby Jones said, “and he sat down one day, and
took all he knew about sound and sound waves and vibrations, and
wondered why a man couldn’t make any kind of noise or music or even
human speech, if he could scrape a needle on something and make it
vibrate and start the right kind of waves. He had imagination, Edison
did. He imagined some sort of machine that would take a man’s voice and
make it jiggle a needle so that the needle would make waves on tinfoil
or something. Tinfoil was what he used first. He talked his voice into a
funnel so that its waves jiggled the needle and made waves on the
tinfoil, and then he made the needle follow the waves in the
tinfoil--little scratches, they were--and, sure enough, he heard his own
voice talking back what he had just talked into the machine. And then he
imagined a better machine with wax cylinders instead of tinfoil, and
then--well, that’s how your phonograph got invented. Edison is
ninety-nine parts imagination.”
“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Tad.
“More than half of the great inventions,” Jibby Jones said, “were made
useful by some man who did not do the first inventing of them. Alexander
Bell made the telephone so it was useful, but another man had done some
telephone inventing first. The one man had enough imagination to imagine
a toy telephone, but Alexander Bell had the imagination to imagine a
telephone that would be useful to all the world.”
“All right,” Wampus said. “That’s so, I guess, but you’re talking about
great men now, Jibby. What good does imagination do us?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Jibby drawled in his slow way.
“I saw, right away, that a smart land pirate like John A. Murrell would
not hide his money where you and George and Tad and Skippy would look
for it. A man that could imagine a band of over one thousand men all
pirating together would not hide his treasure just anywhere. He would
imagine a lot of things. He would imagine he might be caught and put in
jail and kept there fifty years, maybe, and he would imagine some place
where his treasure could be hid where he could find it in a minute, but
no one else would think of looking for it.”
“That sounds like good sense,” Skippy said.
“Of course it does!” said Jibby Jones. “You make fun of imagination, but
how did we first come to think of treasure being hid out there at that
old farm?”
“Why, you saw that old pine tree in the corner of the lot,” Wampus said.
“Yes, and I imagined it might be one of John A. Murrell’s signal pines,
such as he had planted in the corners of yards and farms all through
Tennessee and Mississippi and Arkansas. I imagined that, didn’t I?
There’s nothing so useful as imagination. So I stood by that old dead
pine and imagined I was John A. Murrell, with a lot of stolen treasure,
and that I was liable to be caught and kept in jail fifty years or more
after the treasure was hidden. I knew right away that you would not find
it in the house, because that would be exactly the first place any of
the Murrell gang would look for it, if he wanted to cheat John A.
Murrell while Murrell was in jail. Isn’t that so?”
We had to admit that it was; the house was the first place we had
looked, anyway.
“So I imagined I was John A. Murrell, away down in Arkansas, and that I
wanted a true friend to hide my money here in Iowa, so that I could find
it years later, even if the true friend was dead or had moved away, and
even if the house had burned down and disappeared. I imagined I was John
A. Murrell, getting out of jail and coming up the Mississippi until I
came to the mouth of the creek you said was Murrell’s Run. Then I
remembered the green sand you said was in the bottom of Murrell’s Run
near the farmhouse. So I imagined I came up the creek until I came to
the green sand, and that was a sign to me to climb out of the creek and
look for--what?”
“The signal pine, of course,” said Skippy Root.
“Certainly,” said Jibby Jones. “So I imagined I was standing there
looking at the signal pine. Then I knew there was just one place where
the treasure could be--it would be planted right at the root of the old
signal pine. For that is what John A. Murrell would order: ‘Plant a
signal pine at the corner of the farm, and bury the treasure at the foot
of the pine.’ Even if John A. Murrell was dying, he could tell exactly
where the treasure was, in a few words, and nobody could miss it. He
might be in Asia, and he could send a man directly to it. ‘Go up the
Mississippi until you come to a creek about five miles below Riverbank,
Iowa. Go up the creek until you come to green sand. Climb the bank on
your left and find a signal pine in the corner of a farm. Dig at the
foot of the pine.’”
Well, this might be wonderful imagination or it might be plumb nonsense,
but out there in the dark, walking home past the cemetery, it sounded
great to us. We all told Jibby he was a wonder, and he said he was not,
that it was just ordinary common sense.
“I don’t say the treasure is there,” he said modestly, “because some one
may have dug it up, but if it is anywhere it is there, at the foot of
that signal pine tree.”
“But I’ll say you used some imagination,” said Skippy.
“Oh, no!” Jibby said, still more modest. “That wasn’t much. I don’t call
that much of anything. But maybe I can show you, sometime, what
imagination is worth.”
So then we went on talking about the treasure and the 1804 dollar, and
how we must not talk about it outside, but Jibby Jones said it would be
all right to tell our fathers and mothers about it, because they would
not tell. We let Wampus Smale take the 1804 dollar home, because he said
his mother had a silver wash that she used to dip silver things in to
make them as bright as new. The 1804 dollar was not worn smooth--it was
as sharp as if it had just come from the mint--but it was as black as
iron, and we thought it would be a good thing to have it brightened.
We did not see how we could get out to the old Murrell farm to dig the
treasure--if it was there--before the next Saturday, so we decided on
that, and then we went home.
The sad thing happened the next morning--Sunday morning--when we were
all going to Sunday school together, and the Tough Customer was to
blame. He lost the 1804 dollar for us.
When Wampus got home that Saturday night, his folks were at supper and
his father made him go and wash up and come right to the table, so he
did. When he sat down at the table his father and mother were talking
about Mary--their hired girl--and the man she had in the kitchen just
then.
“Well,” Wampus’s mother was saying, “I did not like the looks of him,
but Mary said he was her cousin, so I said she could give him some
supper in the kitchen.”
“That’s all right, of course, for this one time,” Wampus’s father said
then, “but don’t let the fellow hang around here. I think he is a tough
customer, judging by his looks. He has a bad eye. If he had two eyes, I
would say he had two bad eyes, but the one eye he has is bad enough to
satisfy any one.”
“I know,” Wampus’s mother said, “but I felt rather sorry for him because
he has only one leg.”
Wampus had been waiting for a chance to talk, because he was so eager to
tell about the 1804 dollar and the treasure, and now he had the chance,
and he lit into it. He handed the dollar to his father and went on to
tell him about all of us finding it, and about Jibby Jones guessing
there was hidden treasure, but he would not say where we had found the
dollar nor where the treasure was. He was too smart for that, because
just then Mary came in with the supper she had been keeping hot in the
oven for him. She stood around and listened while they talked about the
treasure and the 1804 dollar and how valuable it was, but Wampus did not
think anything about that, because Mary had been their hired girl for a
couple of years.
“And how much treasure does your Jibby Jones think you will find?” Mr.
Smale asked Wampus.
“He don’t know,” Wampus said. “Maybe thousands of dollars. Maybe none.
But, anyway, we’ve got this dollar and it ought to be worth almost a
thousand dollars, Jibby says.”
They went on talking it over, and Mr. Smale was sort of amused and did
not believe in the treasure much, but Wampus wouldn’t say where we had
been, or when we were going to dig for the treasure, and Mary went into
the kitchen. So that was all of that.
Then Wampus told his father and mother that the one-legged man Mary had
in the kitchen was the Tough Customer that Orph Cadwallader had run off
the island, but neither Mr. Smale nor Mrs. Smale seemed to think much
about it. All Mr. Smale said was: “He had no business on the island, but
I suppose it is all right for Mary to feed a cousin once in a while. How
about it, mother?”
“It has to be,” Mrs. Smale said; “it is so hard to get help these days.”
CHAPTER XX
ORLANDO
The next morning we were on our way to Sunday school. I waited for Jibby
and we picked up Wampus and Tad and Skippy, and we all had a good look
at the 1804 dollar, because Wampus’s mother had dipped it and it was
bright and beautiful. We passed it around and talked about it, and then
we noticed the Tough Customer ahead of us. He did look tough, too, with
his one peg-leg, and he swayed on his feet like a sailor--or on his one
foot and one peg--and when he got to the corner he stood and waited.
We had no use for him, and we did not want to talk to him, but when we
came up to the Tough Customer he said “Howdy!” to us.
“Are you the boys that have that 1804 dollar?” he asked.
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“My cousin told me about it,” he said. “She saw it in the dining-room
last night. I’d like to have a look at it.”
Wampus had the dollar. I wished the man had not stopped us; there was
something about his stopping us that I did not like. To see him smiling
and trying to be pleasant and nice to us gave me the shivers.
“I know a man that wants to buy an 1804 dollar, boys,” he said. “I met
him in St. Louis, only a couple of months ago, and he told me he would
give more than the market price for one. ‘You travel about the world a
lot,’ he said to me, ‘and you’re likely to run across one any day. If
you do,’ he says, ‘let me know. Only,’ he says, ‘don’t try to fool me
with no counterfeits, because I’m too wise for that.’ So he showed me
how to tell the difference between a real one and a counterfeit one. I
ain’t sure, but from what Mary told me I reckon you’ve got hold of a
counterfeit one that some one threw away because it wasn’t worth a red
cent. Let me see it; I can tell you in a minute.”
So Wampus pulled our dollar out of his pocket and handed it to the Tough
Customer. I had half an idea he meant to try to run away with it, and I
got ready to make a dive for his wooden leg if he tried anything of that
kind, but he did not. He just stood there, turning the dollar over and
over between his two fingers and his thumb. I guess Jibby Jones must
have thought what I thought, for he sort of edged to the far side of the
Tough Customer.
“Well, I declare!” the Tough Customer said. “I would not have thought
it! It is a genuine--”
And just then he dropped the dollar! It slipped between his thumb and
his two fingers and I made a dive for it, and so did Wampus, but so did
the Tough Customer, too, and we all three came together ker-plunk, and
the dollar jangled on the grating and disappeared.
For, you see, we were standing right over an iron grating that covered
an opening into the Raccoon Creek sewer. The dollar went through the
grating and into the sewer, and that was the last we ever saw of that
dollar. The Tough Customer swore. He swore something that was awful to
hear, and he got down on his knees and peered into the sewer, and then
he moaned and groaned and said we would never forgive him, and he was
about right about that--we never did.
I don’t know how long we stood there, but a crowd began to gather--folks
going to Sunday school, and men with the Sunday papers under their arms,
and a couple of automobiles, and so we boys slipped away and left the
Tough Customer explaining that he had dropped a dollar into the sewer,
but he did not say it was an 1804 dollar. The folks laughed and said it
was a gone dollar.
I guess Sunday school did not do us much good that day. On the way home
we talked about the chances of ever getting the 1804 dollar back--four
of us did--but Jibby did not talk. We knew it was hopeless. The Raccoon
Creek sewer is the main sewer in Riverbank and is really the whole of
Raccoon Creek cemented in and roofed over, and there was less chance of
getting that dollar out of it than of finding a pinhead fired out of a
rifle into the Desert of Sahara. The water was always two or three feet
deep and the mud a foot or two more. We decided there was no hope, and
so Wampus said:
“Well, it is gone; the next thing is to get the treasure. Maybe there
will be a couple more 1804 dollars in the treasure. We’ll get the
treasure Saturday.”
“Maybe!” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve got to do some thinking first, and I’ve
got to find a good thinking place before I do any more thinking.”
We tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. He said he must
think. Finally, he did say he expected he could do all the thinking
necessary before Saturday, if he found a first-class place to think in.
That sounded foolish to me.
“Can’t you think in one place as well as in another?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “of course not! There’s a best place for everything, and
there ought to be a best place to think in, too. For the kind of
thinking I have to do I need a first-class thinking place.”
So that afternoon we walked around looking for a thinking place for
Jibby Jones. We tried about thirty different places, and Jibby would sit
down and try them, but they did not satisfy him. Then we would try
another, and finally he said Wampus Smale’s woodshed would do; he said
it was as good as any man needed to think in.
“It is warm and clean and smells of sawdust and damp bark,” Jibby said,
“and the boards of the walls are wide enough for the air to ventilate
through. I guess I can think first-rate here.”
It sounded foolish to us, but you can never tell when Jibby is being
foolish and when he is not, but mostly he is not, so we all sat down and
tried to think. We changed from one seat to another, and when Jibby sat
with his back to the wall that is right close to the alley he said that
was the best place of all for high-grade thinking, and that we would
come there every afternoon and do our thinking. So, every afternoon,
after school, we went there and Jibby sat and thought.
But the rest of us mostly talked. Jibby said he did not mind our
talking, and sometimes he joined in. We talked about the treasure, and
about old John A. Murrell, and so on, and we planned to go out and get
the treasure on Saturday, but whenever any of us came near saying where
the treasure was hidden, Jibby said “Hush!” and shut us up.
It came along to Friday afternoon, and we had planned pretty much
everything. Wampus was to take a spade, and Skippy was to get a pickaxe,
and Tad was to take an axe. Jibby told me to have a length of rope
ready.
“And I’ll have my mother put up lunch for us,” he said, “for we may
spend the whole day. We will all meet at my house at nine o’clock
to-morrow morning. We’ll need a big lunch, because if we dig a lot we’ll
be mighty hungry--”
He stopped short.
“Pshaw!” he said. “I forgot to feed Orlando!”
“Orlando?” I asked, for this was the first time I had heard of any
Orlando. “Who’s Orlando?”
Jibby looked at me.
“My goodness!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I ever tell you about Orlando?
That’s because we’ve had Orlando so long I never think much of him, I
guess. Orlando is my father’s pet skunk.”
We did not say anything. Mr. Jones is an author, and an author is liable
to have almost any kind of pet. They are funny folks, mostly, I guess.
“My father caught Orlando when Orlando was no bigger than a cat’s
kitten,” Jibby Jones went on. “He caught Orlando in Pike County,
Pennsylvania, and he raised Orlando on a bottle, and Orlando is as
affectionate as a kitten. If you catch a skunk young and treat it right,
it is the most affectionate pet you can have, and it makes the best kind
of watchdog--if you can call a skunk a dog. We keep Orlando in the
cellar, and I have to feed Orlando when my father does not. And father
is away to-day and I forgot to feed Orlando. I’ll have to go home now
and feed Orlando.”
“Gee whiz!” Skippy said. “That’s a funny kind of pet. Don’t it
ever--well, you know!--perfumery?”
“Oh, no, indeed!” Jibby drawled. “That’s where you do Orlando a great
wrong, Skippy. If a skunk is fond of you, and knows you, it never
bothers you that way. It is only when a skunk is hostile to you that it
bothers you that way.”
“Has--has Orlando ever been hostile?” Wampus asked.
“Yes, once,” Jibby said. “When we were in Kalamazoo, Michigan, my father
was sick and a one-legged barber named Horace L. Spurting used to come
to the house to shave father. We had a peach tree in the side yard and
the peaches were ripe, and one evening Horace L. Spurting thought he
would steal a couple of peaches, and he climbed the fence and sneaked up
to the tree, and Orlando was taking a nap under the tree, and Horace L.
Spurting stepped on Orlando’s tail. For three days Horace L. Spurting
was unconscious, and we had to bury his clothes six feet deep and cut
down the peach tree and burn it, and move into another house two miles
away. Ever since then Orlando has been hostile to one-legged men because
Horace L. Spurting had one leg. I don’t think Orlando is hostile to men
with two legs or to women, but he might be hostile to the Legless Lady
in the circus. But I must go home now and feed Orlando.”
“What do you do with Orlando when you are traveling?” Tad asked.
“We carry him in a green cloth bag, so he can’t see whether there are
any one-legs or not,” Jibby said.
Then we all went home. I went with Jibby, because we live near each
other.
“George,” he said, as we went along, “that Tough Customer was out behind
Wampus’s woodshed, listening. I thought he would be. I picked out that
woodshed on purpose, because the Tough Customer could hear us through
the cracks in it. And we have no skunk at our house. We’ve got a
black-and-white cat we call Orlando. But imagination is a great thing,
George. I said it was. I imagined, for a while, that Orlando was a
skunk.”
I laughed. I thought Jibby was trying to be funny.
“I didn’t want to bother Wampus and Tad and Skippy, George,” Jibby said,
“but we’ve got some work to do to-night. Come to my house right after
supper and bring a lantern. I have one, too.”
He would not say any more, so after supper I took my lantern and went to
Jibby’s. We walked out to the old Murrell farm, and when we got there we
went into the tumbledown old brick farmhouse and down into the cellar,
where the dry well was. The old rotten boards were just as we had left
them last Saturday, and Jibby Jones put them over the well, fixing them
carefully, and sprinkled dry dirt all over them.
“I saw the natives make an elephant trap in India this way once,” he
said. “I saw them catch a wild elephant. He was a tough customer.”
“You don’t think you’ll catch an elephant here, do you?” I asked him.
“No,” Jibby said, “but I expect I may catch a Tough Customer.”
So then we went home. The next morning we were all on hand at nine
o’clock at Jibby’s, and we started for the Murrell farm. We hiked along
at a good rate, saying “hep! hep! hep!” to keep in step, or singing
something to keep step by. We had all the things Jibby had told us to
bring, and he had a big market-basket with a lid.
“It is all right,” Jibby whispered to me once. “The Tough Customer is
following us.”
About half a mile this side of the Murrell farm, Jibby said he was tired
and sat down by the side of the road to rest. There was a long osage
orange hedge there, and we sat with it behind us.
“Now, listen,” he said, when we were seated. “Before we get to work to
dig that treasure, we’ll go to the Run and get some of that green sand
for my collection. It won’t take half an hour; we’ll have plenty of
time. Nobody is going to guess that the treasure is under the bottom of
the old dry well in the cellar of the old brick farmhouse at the
crossroads where the broken, dead pine tree is.”
“But--” said Wampus.
“You be still!” Jibby said. “Sometimes I think you talk too much. I’m
hungry. I’m going to eat something.”
He opened the basket and gave us each a sandwich, and they did taste
good! We sat there eating.
“But you said the treasure was under the pine tree,” Wampus said then.
“Yes, I said that, and that is where it is,” Jibby Jones said then, “but
just now the Tough Customer was behind the hedge here listening, and I
wanted him to think it was in the well in the cellar. But now we can
talk; he is not here now. Look up the road.”
Sure enough, there was the Tough Customer, hobbling along in a great
hurry, trying to keep out of sight and going toward the old Murrell
place.
“Let him get in the house,” Jibby said, and then he opened the lid of
his market-basket again and took out a green felt bag. He loosened the
strings and a cat stuck its black-and-white head out of the bag.
“Good old Orlando!” Jibby said, and stroked the cat’s head.
He handed the bag to Wampus.
“You carry the cat, Wampus,” he said, “and when I ask for it you hand it
to me. Now, come on, and let’s hurry.”
We did. We started up the road at a good clip, and when we reached the
old Murrell place the Tough Customer was not in sight, but when we had
stolen up to the house we heard a clatter of old boards and a yell, and
we all piled into the cellar. The Tough Customer had stepped on the
boards that covered Jibby’s elephant trap and they had tipped and fallen
into the dry well and the Tough Customer had gone with them. He was
swearing and jumping and trying to get out of the well, but it was too
deep for him to get out without some one to pull him out or boost him
out. When he saw us, he let loose all the language he could think of,
and he told us all the things he would do to us if he ever got out of
that hole.
Jibby stood and looked down at him.
“Wampus,” Jibby said, in his slow, drawling way, “hand me Orlando.”
Wampus handed Jibby Jones the green felt bag.
“Now, you boys had better get out of the cellar and, maybe, out of the
house,” Jibby said, “because it may not be very pleasant when I put
Orlando down the well. Orlando is hostile to men with wooden legs.
Orlando don’t like wooden legs.”
“Look here!” the Tough Customer begged, changing his tone in an instant.
“You’re not going to dump that cussed animal down here, are you? Please
don’t. Don’t you be so cruel to a feller that never did anybody any
harm. Please! I’d rather be licked a dozen times than have that
animal--”
“Hurry, boys!” Jibby said. “There’s going to be a grand time here. I
shouldn’t wonder if Orlando bit this man, too, besides other
happenings.”
Jibby opened the neck of the bag.
“Wooden legs, Orlando!” he said, when the cat put its head out.
“Look here!” the Tough Customer whined from down in the well. “Don’t do
it! Don’t let that animal loose on me. I’ll give you-- I’ll give you
anything you say.”
[Illustration: SKIPPY AND I THREW AN END OF THE ROPE INTO THE WELL
AND PULLED THE TOUGH CUSTOMER OUT]
“Well, I don’t know,” Jibby said. “I sort of hate to miss the fun. But,
I don’t know. I might be willing to dicker. How about a dollar? How
about an 1804 dollar?”
“I haven’t got--” the man began.
“Scoot, boys!” Jibby shouted. “Here she goes! Sic him, Orlando!”
“I’ll give it! I’ll give it!” the Tough Customer yelled, and--plunk!--on
the hard dirt at Jibby’s feet the 1804 dollar fell. Jibby picked it up
and looked at it. It was our dollar, right enough.
Jibby pushed the cat’s head back into the green bag and tied the strings
and put the bag in the basket. Then he made Wampus with his spade and
Tad with his axe stand ready to take care of the Tough Customer if he
tried any funny tricks, and Skippy and I threw an end of the rope into
the well and pulled the Tough Customer out. He did not wait to talk; he
gave one look at the basket and scooted out of that cellar.
We piled out after him, because we did not want him throwing any bricks
or rocks down on us, but we saw him hobbling down the road as fast as
his wooden leg would carry him, and we whooped and laughed and patted
Jibby Jones on the back.
“That’s nothing!” he said. “I saw a man palm a dollar once in a
sleight-of-hand show, so I had some experience that way. And I just
imagined Orlando was a skunk for this afternoon only. I sort of imagined
that Tough Customer was not going to let an 1804 dollar drop down a
sewer. It looked too smart, to have him standing right over that
grating. So that’s all there is to it--experience and imagination.”
And that’s so. They do make a mighty good team. When you have Experience
and Imagination hitched up together, you can do almost anything. I was
thinking that when Orlando, in the bag, gave a yowl.
Jibby Jones grinned.
“Orlando wants to go home,” he said. And he took the bag out of the
basket and took the cat out of the bag. He dropped Orlando on the
ground, and the cat started for home at a good trot. The cat took to the
road, and presently the Tough Customer looked back, and he saw Orlando
trotting along toward him. He gave one yell and dived over a fence, and
the last we saw of him that day was while he was scooting across a
ploughed field as hard as he could scoot.
CHAPTER XXI
WINGED ENEMIES
It must have been about half-past ten or eleven o’clock in the morning
by the time we got rid of the Tough Customer that had come to the old
Murrell farm to get the land pirate’s buried treasure before we could
get it. We stood there by the old brick house laughing and shouting
while Jibby Jones’s cat Orlando chased the Tough Customer off the road.
When we saw the Tough Customer vanish over a rise of ground, the rest of
our work of getting the buried treasure--if there was any--seemed as
simple as opening a pie to pull out a plum. We had the rest of the
morning and all afternoon and part of the evening to work in, and Jibby
Jones had figured out that the buried treasure must be under the old
signal pine tree in the corner, near where the two roads crossed.
“Come on!” I said. “Now we can get it; there’s not a thing that can stop
us.”
And that was how it looked to me. There we were, Jibby Jones and Wampus
Smale and Tad Willing and Skippy Root and myself, and we had enough
lunch to last all day, and we had a spade and a pick and an axe and a
long rope. It did look as if getting that treasure would be the easiest
thing in the world. I felt as if my hands were already scooping up gold
money and silver money and letting it drip through my fingers.
I can’t hardly tell you how simple it seemed to get that buried
treasure, and how easy. Just try yourself to see how easy it looked to
me. Just behind us was the rotted old brick farmhouse where Jibby said
the treasure was not hidden. Over yonder was the dead pine tree in the
corner of the lot--the tree Jibby Jones said was the signal pine, under
which the pirate’s treasure was probably buried--and between was nothing
but a few rods of ground with weeds and tall grass on it. And we had the
digging tools. All we had to do was walk across to the dead pine tree
and dig. So I said so.
“Come on!” I said. “Let’s hurry and get that treasure before anybody
else comes along to bother us.”
But Jibby Jones did not pick up the lunch-basket or make any move toward
the dead pine tree. He stood and smoothed his nose with his forefinger.
“No,” he said, “let’s take a swim first. Let’s go to the creek and find
a swimming-pool and take a swim.”
“We can’t,” I said. “There never was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run,
and there isn’t one now.”
“I don’t know,” Jibby said. “Up in the Catskill Mountains there are
streams, and sometimes there is no pool in a place, and the next year
there is one. You can’t always tell, George. I’m lucky about pools; when
I want to swim there usually is one.”
“Well, you won’t find one on Murrell’s Run,” I said. But I ought to have
known better; a fellow never ought to say what Jibby Jones will find or
won’t find.
“Come on! Let’s dig for the treasure,” Skippy Root said. “You act as if
you were afraid to, Jibby.”
Jibby did not answer this directly. He rubbed his nose and looked at
Wampus Smale.
“Your father owns this land, don’t he, Wampus?” he asked.
“Yes, he owns all of it,” Wampus said.
“And who lives in the new farmhouse at the other end of the farm?” Jibby
asked.
“Why, Bill Catlin,” Wampus said. “He rents from father. What has that
got to do with it?”
Jibby rubbed his nose again, and I thought I saw him grin.
“What kind of lights does he use?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean?” Wampus asked. “I don’t know what you are talking
about.”
“I mean lights,” said Jibby Jones. “Lights for the evening, when he is
sitting at a table reading the Farmers’ Almanac or something. You know
what lights are, don’t you, Wampus? The Romans had oil lights, and my
great-great-grandmother had whale-oil lights, and in New England they
once used tallow dips. Does Bill Catlin use kerosene lamps or electric
light or gas light?”
“What are you trying to do, tease me?” Wampus asked. “Bill Catlin uses
kerosene lamps, of course. There is no gas out here, and there are no
electric lights this far out.”
“All right,” Jibby said. “That’s good. That’s fine. Is Bill Catlin a
cross fellow, or is he a pleasant fellow?”
“Oh, come on!” Wampus said, disgusted. “Let’s dig; what’s the use of
trying to be funny?”
“All right,” Jibby said. “I don’t pretend to be the one leader of this
band of treasure-hunters. Go on and dig, if you want to. I’m not ready
to dig yet; I’m going down to the Run and get a specimen of the green
sand you said was there. I’m more interested in getting a specimen of
that sand for my collection than I am in buried treasure just now.”
Sure enough, he started off toward where the rim of trees showed where
Murrell’s Run was. It was just what you might expect Jibby Jones to do,
right when the buried treasure was in our hands, almost. Tad called to
him.
“Jibby!” he called. “Come back here!”
Anybody else that acted that way we would have let go, but Jibby Jones
was different. He looked like a ninny, with his long thin nose and his
high-water pants and his spectacles, but he had fooled us more than once
that way. It was when he said or did the biggest fool things--or what
seemed like the biggest fool things to us--that you had to stop and
think the hardest, because Jibby Jones always had something important in
his mind then. So, when Tad called to him, Jibby came back.
“You must excuse me if I seem rude,” he said, “but I really cannot dig
for treasure until Wampus tells me whether Bill Catlin is a pleasant
fellow or a cross fellow.”
“Why?” I asked.
Jibby looked up at the air and down at the grass.
“My father has told me many, many times that the way to keep out of
trouble is to use my eyes and my brains,” he said. “I’m afraid you boys
do not do that as much as you should. The reason I must know whether
Bill Catlin is a cross fellow or a pleasant fellow is because that Tough
Customer, when he was running away from here, yipped three times and
hopped five feet on his wooden leg.”
We tried to think that over, but we could not make sense of it in any
way.
Wampus got sort of angry.
“Oh, well! If you’re going to talk nonsense!” he said. “It is all right
for a smarty to be smart sometimes, but I don’t call this one of the
times. You fellows may stand it, but I’m not going to. I’m going to dig
up that treasure, if it is there, and Jibby can go and scrape up green
sand if he wants to. He can’t make a fool of me!”
“I do want to get a specimen of that sand,” Jibby said soberly. “And,
when you have dug treasure awhile, you boys had better come down to the
Run. It is too dry up here. I expect there is plenty of mud in the Run.”
With that Jibby went off. We watched him go.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I’ll bet Jibby has something in his mind
that we don’t know anything about. I’m going with him. When Jibby Jones
talks like a crazy man, you want to look out; he’s always talking sense
then.”
So I started to follow Jibby, but Wampus Smale called me back, and the
three of them--Wampus and Tad and Skippy--talked to me and said we would
all look silly if we let Jibby Jones scare us with a lot of nonsense
talk. By the time they had talked enough, Jibby was going out of sight,
so I made up my mind I would stick to the fellows. We picked up our
tools and started for the dead pine tree.
I was worried a little, even though it all looked as simple as crossing
a room to pick up a paper. It seemed that there must be something about
the green sand in the Run that meant more than we thought, or something
else. I rather knew that Jibby would not go off to get a grain of sand
for his collection just then, when the treasure was so near, unless he
had something worth while in his mind. I remembered what he had said
about the green sand being, perhaps, the marks to show the old land
pirate’s men the way to the buried treasure--“Go up the Mississippi
until you come to a creek five miles below Riverbank; go up the creek
until you come to green sand in the creek bottom; then climb the right
bank of the creek and find a signal pine, and dig under the pine.” That
was what Jibby had thought out as the directions old John A. Murrell
might have given back in 1835. I was worried, but I did not have the
slightest idea what Jibby’s real idea of the trouble to come was.
We walked over to the dead pine and talked for a minute about the best
way to begin. Wampus wanted to take the pick and dig right into the
baked soil, but Skippy had another idea of it.
“When this pine was planted,” he said, “it must have been a very small
one, and if Murrell’s men buried the treasure under it they must have
buried it close to the tree. Then the tree grew, and now, probably, the
treasure is right under the tree, or under its big roots. I think we can
save time by taking the axe and cutting down the tree.”
“Oh, now you are talking like Jibby Jones!” Wampus said, and it was easy
to see that he was plumb disgusted with Jibby Jones. “Go ahead and chop,
if you want to; I’m going to dig.”
He raised his pick above his head and brought it down hard into the dry
soil, and Skippy swung the axe and chopped into the dead pine tree.
Almost that same instant Tad Willing jumped about four feet into the air
and yelped like a scalded dog, and when he hit the ground he grabbed his
ankle and yelped again, and then broke for the brick house at about
forty miles an hour, batting at his head and yipping like an Indian.
And Skippy and Wampus Smale were not far behind him.
“Wouch!” Wampus cried, and Skippy yelled, “Ow-wow! Bumblebees! Owp!” And
they went for the brick house in big jumps. I did not have to look at
them to learn how to lope, either. I was already on my way, and the
thing I said when the first bumblebee jabbed his stinger into the back
of my neck was not “I beg your pardon!” I don’t know what it was. I was
too busy to notice. I said what I had to say and I did what I thought
was the best thing to do, and I did not bother to put on any trimmings.
Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and kiss it, because
affection of that sort is one thing a bumblebee does not understand much
about, but a May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a September
bumblebee. By September a bumblebee is as grouchy as a snake with a sore
tail, and is just aching to stick his stinger into somebody. I suppose a
bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening its stinger and getting
ready for battle, and by September it wants war. And this was the
meanest day of September for hostile bumblebees. There were about ten
million of them in the nest under that old pine tree, and every
bumblebee was fully ripe and as big as a plum, and it seemed as if they
had let their stingers lie out in the sun until they were red-hot. It
was the meanest lot of bees I ever got acquainted with. Bees that would
have flown aside to get out of your way in May were now so eager to jab
a boy that, if one of them had been on its way from New York to Boston
to attend its grandmother’s funeral, it would have swerved aside to Los
Angeles, California, to sting a brass Cupid on a fountain.
When we gathered our scattered forces together in the old brick
farmhouse, I had five stings in me, and Skippy had eight lumps that were
like young mountains and still growing, and Tad had seven honorable
wounds and one bee still skirmishing in the thick growth on his head,
and Wampus--well, Wampus would not stand still long enough to let us
count him. A couple of bees had gone down inside of his shirt and Wampus
was disrobing by jerks. He yanked at the collar of his shirt so hard
that a pearl button flew eight feet and hit Tad on the neck and Tad
jumped and yelled. He thought it was another bee come to bury a red-hot
bayonet in him.
Three bees--some of the cavalry, I suppose--had followed us to turn our
retreat into a rout, and they came right into the old brick house
without knocking, and for three minutes Tad and Skippy and I had all we
needed to do whacking at those bees with our caps. Then one of them
stung Tad and was satisfied, and the other two took Wampus’s bare back
as an insult, and Wampus yipped twice more.
Then there was silence, except for low moans and loud “Ow-wow-wows!”
Wampus began to cry. I suppose he felt like one of the devastated
regions after the Germans had shot it full of shell-holes. Skippy was
the first to show any sense.
“Gee whiz!” he said, hopping on one leg. “I’m stinging all over! This is
no place to be. We’ve got to get to where there is some cool mud to daub
on these stings.”
Right then I knew why Jibby Jones had said that we had better follow him
to the Run after we had dug treasure awhile, and why he had said it was
too dry by the pine tree, and why he had said there was plenty of mud in
the Run.
We trotted toward the Run as fast as we could, because every sting was
doing its best to burn, and as we went I began to see the best kind of
good sense in every word Jibby had said that we had thought was foolish.
He wanted to go to the green sand because that place was far from the
bumblebees, and he knew there were bumblebees at the old pine tree
because the Tough Customer had yipped and sprinted when he passed close
to it. And there was sense in what he had asked about Bill Catlin, too.
If Bill Catlin was a good-natured fellow and burned kerosene, he would
lend us a can of kerosene and we could burn out the bees before we began
to dig.
I tried to tell this to the fellows, but they did not pay much
attention. They were in a hurry. We all piled in among the trees and
down the bank of the Run, and there was Jibby Jones. He was sitting on a
large flat rock, in the cool shade, and on the rock were about forty
nice little mud pies he had made and put there, each one nice and cool
and soppy, all ready to plaster on our bee stings!
Jibby Jones looked up when we came piling down to where he was.
“I’ve got forty-two made,” he said. “I thought I would make sixty, but
you came sooner than I thought you would. Help yourselves.”
We did. We grabbed the mud plasters and slapped them on the hot bee
stings, and Jibby Jones helped us. Oh, boy! but that cool wet mud felt
fine! Jibby plastered the stings on Wampus Smale’s back himself, and
Wampus never said a word about any one talking foolish talk. He just
said:
“Ah! that feels good! Oh! that feels good! Put on another fresh one,
Jibby.”
CHAPTER XXII
A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE
By and by we began to sting less and to feel better.
“Did you bring the tools?” Jibby asked, innocently.
“I should say not!” Skippy said. “What was the use? A bee can’t sting an
axe.”
“Those bees could,” I said. “I expect that spade will be all swelled up
like a balloon by the time we see it again.”
That made Wampus laugh, which was a sign he was feeling better, too. I
told Jibby I knew now why he wanted to know if Bill Catlin was a
good-natured man.
“Yes,” Jibby said, “I thought you would figure it out sooner or later.”
“Well, the next time,” I said, “don’t be so polite. Don’t treat us as if
we had any sense at all. Make a picture of a bee and shove it in our
faces.”
“Yes, do!” Skippy said. “I’d rather, any day, have a picture of a bee
shoved in my face than have a real bee shove itself in my neck.”
That made us all laugh, and Jibby washed the mud off Wampus Smale’s
back, and when Wampus had put on his clothes we sat down and had lunch.
I never ate anything that tasted better, and when we had finished we lay
back for a while, just feeling good. Jibby Jones laughed.
“Laughing at us?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m laughing at myself. I’m thinking what a silly I was
to begin collecting sand from everywhere, and thinking one grain from
each place would be enough. I’ve been looking at this sand through my
magnifying-glass, and one grain won’t do.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Look at it,” he said, and he tossed me his magnifying-glass.
The minute I looked at the sand through the glass I saw what he meant.
Each grain stood out like the setting of a ring, and each grain was
transparent, and sparkled, but not one grain was green! About half the
grains were yellow and the other half were blue. It was only because
they were so small and so mixed together that the sand looked green,
because yellow and blue mixed makes green. I handed the glass to Wampus,
and he looked and passed it on until we had all seen that the green sand
was not green sand at all, but yellow sand and blue sand mixed.
After a while Jibby yawned.
“Well,” he said, “if we are going to get that treasure, we had better be
stirring ourselves. Wampus, is Bill Catlin a good-natured man or is
he--”
“Aw, quit!” Wampus said, and turned as red as his bee stings. “Bill
Catlin is all right. He will lend us a can of kerosene quick enough.”
So we fixed it that we would go up to Bill Catlin’s and get an oil can
and some kerosene. Jibby said he would not go.
“Bill don’t know me,” he said, “and he might get frightened if he saw my
nose.”
That was a joke, of course, and we coaxed Jibby to go with us, but he
would not go. I think he wanted to punish us for not paying attention to
him when he tried to tell us in his own way about the bees. He made one
excuse after another. He said he looked such a silly that Bill would be
afraid to trust us with kerosene if he was along. He said a lot of
things like that. Finally he said we had better go without him.
“You needn’t take so long,” he said, “because you can all run fast. I
know, because I heard you running.”
We left him lying there and went up through the woods to Bill Catlin’s.
He was not at home, but his wife was a nice lady and let us have a
gallon can full of kerosene. We stopped to eat a few grapes in Bill
Catlin’s vineyard, to keep them from going to waste, and then we started
across a field toward the woods again, but we had hardly climbed the
fence when we saw Jibby coming toward us. He was on a slow lope, and he
waved us back, so we stopped short and waited until he came up to us.
“Wait!” he said, and then he waited until he got his breath. “We’ve got
to be careful now. The enemy is at the green sands.”
I laughed. I thought he meant the bees had come down there, or that,
maybe, Jibby had run into another nest of them, but it was not that, and
it was worse than anything we had ever thought could happen.
Jibby had been lying there on the bank by the green sands waiting for us
when, all at once, he heard voices--men’s voices. They were the voices
of men coming up the Run, and one or two were complaining that this
could not be the right creek, and that they had come more than far
enough up it, but others said they had better be sure and go a little
farther to see whether there was any green sand.
Jibby put everything that was left of the lunch back in the basket and
crept up the bank of the Run and hid the basket. Then he edged along
down to where the men were and took a peek at them from the top of the
bank. There were ten of them, seven white men and three negroes, and one
of the white men had red hair and a scar over his eye. The negroes were
loaded down with bags and bundles. They had stopped, and the negroes
were complaining that they had carried that stuff far enough for one
day. They said there was no hurry, and that the treasure would not get
away after it had remained right in one place almost a hundred years,
they guessed, and that it was no use working black men to death, anyway.
Then the Red-Headed Bandit swore.
“You-all look mighty sharp you don’t let anything happen to that
provender,” he said. “I’m a bad man when I get riled. I’m the
great-grandson of my great-grandfather, and he killed more men than
there are kinky hairs on all your worthless heads, and I don’t mind
killing three more blacks right now, and I’ll do it if you let that food
stuff get harmed.”
The other men growled and scowled at the blacks, too, then, and the
negroes mumbled and scolded in low voices.
“Tell you what, Jim,” one of them said, “I reckon I feel about like
these darks feel. We don’t know that this creek is Murrell’s Run nohow.
We might go up and up and get to nowhere in the end. You’s pushin’ us
too hard and steady, Jim. To-morrow is another day.”
“Yes, and who knows how long we’ve got to be huntin’ for that treasure,
Jake?” the man called Jim answered. “We ain’t got none too much food
fora big gang like this, Jake. We-all can’t be skirmishing around the
country for food, Jake, when we’re on an exhibition like this.”
He meant expedition.
“No,” Jake said, “but we can’t walk up every creek to the No’th Pole,
Jim, either. We ain’t no Stefanssons or Pearys.”
They did not look like it, either, Jibby said. The seven whites looked
like the mountaineers he and his father had seen in the
Ozarks--Hill-Billies they call them down there. They looked like the
laziest lot that ever lived.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Jake,” Jim said then. “Let the darks dump
their stuff here, and we’ll go on up the creek a ways and sort of
speculate around. That’s fair.”
“You white folks want to walk our foots off!” one of the blacks said
then, but he put down his load.
“Hey, there, you!” Jim shouted. “Heft that stuff down easy, can’t you?
Ain’t I told you often enough there’s dynamite in that bag?”
“I shore did heft it easy, boss,” the negro said. “I don’t heft no
dynamite down hard.”
They talked awhile longer, and the white men decided to let the negroes
stay to watch the dunnage, and they started off up the creek. The three
black men stretched out on the yellow sand in the sun and got ready to
go to sleep, and then Jibby stole away and came for us.
“Aw, pshaw!” Wampus said. “That ends it! Those men have dynamite and
everything and they’ll get that treasure, and we’re beaten out of it!”
“Maybe!” Jibby said. “I don’t know yet. I remember when I was in New
Orleans with my father and we went down to the levee and a bale of
cotton rolled over.”
“What has that got to do with it?” Wampus asked.
“Why, a negro was asleep, stretched out on the ground,” Jibby said, “and
the bale of cotton rolled on top of him and across him and then off of
him again.”
“Did it kill him?” Skippy asked.
“No,” Jibby said. “That isn’t it. I was just telling you how one of
those Southern negroes sleeps when he stretches out in the sun. This one
just brushed his hand across his face and said, ‘Shoo fly! go ’way!’ and
went on sleeping. Sleeping is the best thing some of those negroes do.”
“Well, what?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” Jibby said. “I was only thinking that the coming of this
gang of treasure-hunters is the best luck we’ve had yet. We only guessed
there was treasure here; now we know it. Now all we have to do is get
rid of these men.”
“And that is so easy! Only ten of them!” I said.
“Well, I am surprised at you, George,” Jibby drawled. “You talk as if
they were ten bumblebees.”
“But how are we going to get rid of them?” Wampus asked.
Jibby fondled his nose gently.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “they won’t like it here and will go away
without being asked to go.”
Well, I didn’t like it much, but Jibby picked up the oil can and started
for the woods along the Run, and, of course, a fellow could not hang
back, so we all went. When we were near the edge of the bank, we all got
down and wiggled forward until we could look over the edge and down at
the place where the three negroes were asleep. They were sound asleep,
too--plenty of sound, if you mean the sound of snoring.
The bank was about twelve feet high there, but not straight up and down.
It slanted toward the creek and was covered with grass and weeds and a
few small bushes as creek banks usually are. The dunnage of the
treasure-hunters was piled in one pile close to where the foot of the
bank met the sandy stretch on which the three black men were asleep. We
looked down awhile, and then wiggled back and got to our feet and went
off a few yards to hold a council.
“We’ll take a bunch of rocks and slam them down on those men,” Wampus
said. “We’ll scare the life out of them.”
Jibby was hunting around in the bushes, but just then he found what he
was looking for--his covered lunch-basket. He took out the green felt
bag his cat Orlando had been in and pulled the stout drawstring out of
the hem at the mouth of the bag. He tried this over his knee, to see if
it was strong, and it was strong.
We were whispering, saying how we could stone those three men, but Jibby
unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it over his head and began tearing
strips off it. He tied the strips together and tested them at the knots,
until he had eight or ten feet of it. Then he picked up the oil can and
motioned us to follow him. None of us knew what he was going to do, but
we followed him back to the edge of the bank like little lambs. We had
had enough lessons that day to know that Jibby Jones mostly knew what he
was doing before he started to do it.
When we got to the edge of the bank, Jibby stood up quietly and took
hold of a young birch tree that stood near the edge of the bank and bent
it back, away from the bank, until it was almost flat on the ground. He
motioned Wampus to come and hold it down for him, and then he went and
looked down at the dunnage again, and came back and eyed the birch stem
and tied the oil can to the stem by its handle. He used the stout string
from the green bag. Then he tied one end of the string he had made from
the strips of shirt to the bottom of the oil can.
When Jibby had done all this, I began to see what he was up to, and, for
once in my life, I guessed right. We let the birch straighten up slowly
and then pushed it down again, but this time toward the creek, so it
stuck out over the bank, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy and I bore around
on it until it held the can of kerosene exactly over the pile of dunnage
and food and stuff down below. Then Jibby pulled on the string he had
made of the shirt strips and the oil can tipped, and all the oil poured
out of the can onto the food and other stuff in the treasure-hunters’
pile. Then we let the tree straighten up slowly again. It was a good
job. It had spoiled all that food, because nothing spoils food more than
having coal oil on it. We knew from what the treasure-hunters had said
that they could not stay there long now; they would have to go away and
get more food, probably down the river somewhere.
I would have called that a good job and well done, but you can never
tell what Jibby Jones has in his mind. He was taking the pieces of old
newspaper out of his lunch-basket and getting handfuls of dry grass, and
balling it all up into a big ball, and, when he had done this, he tied
the ball around and around with the string he had made of shirt strips.
None of us knew what he was up to, so we just stood and looked, but,
when he had the ball all made, he untied the oil can and let the last of
the kerosene dribble on the ball. Then he tied the ball to the birch,
but a little higher than the can had been tied.
“Now,” he said, “who has a match?”
We all looked, but we did not have a match; not even a broken one, and
for a minute Jibby looked pretty blue.
“I ought to have thought of matches,” he said. “When a man goes
treasure-hunting he ought to think of everything. I had a bully scheme.
I was going to light this fire ball and bend the birch down until it
touched that pile of stuff I spilled the kerosene on, and light the
whole pile. I don’t know what would have happened, but it would have
been something. Maybe the stuff would have burned and maybe the dynamite
would have gone off. It would have bothered those fellows a lot, anyway.
But now we have no matches.”
“If we had a flint and some steel,” Wampus said, “we could strike fire,
maybe.”
“Or if any of us knew how to rub two sticks together and make fire,” I
said.
But Jibby Jones was busy before I got it half said. He had his knife out
and was scraping the handle of his lunch-basket, getting fine shreds off
it, and he splintered some of the basket and made a little pile of
sticks, like match-sticks, and the next moment he was down on his
stomach holding his magnifying-glass above the little pile so that the
concentrated rays of the sun fell full on the lint he had scraped. In
another moment a little string of blue smoke began to float upward, and
then there was a little flicker of red flame and the whole little pile
was ablaze. Jibby fed more pieces of the basket to the pile.
“Now!” he said, “you fellows get some dead wood or broken branches and
creep to the edge of the bank. Wampus, I want you to help me weigh this
birch down so the fire ball will light that pile of stuff. And the
minute it is alight, I want Skippy and Tad and George to slam the dead
wood and stuff at those black men, and yell like Indians. Then cut and
run. I don’t know how much dynamite there is in that pile, and I don’t
know what it will do when it takes a notion to do it.”
We crept back to the edge of the bank and we had plenty of dead
wood--big chunks of punk, as we call it--and we were pretty sure there
were going to be three surprised black men in about one minute. Jibby
lit the fire ball and he and Wampus bore the little birch tree over and
bore it down, and he had figured the distance right enough, but the
birch would not bear all the way down. It went flat against the top of
the bank, but that stopped it and the fire ball was a good two feet
above the pile of oil-soaked dunnage and food and dynamite.
“Hold it!” Jibby whispered. “Hold it!” And Wampus knelt on the birch.
The fire ball blazed and sent up black smoke, and in less than a minute
the string that held it to the birch caught fire and burned through and
the fire ball fell on the pile of stuff. It lay there and burned and the
top of the pile of stuff caught the flames and began to burn, too.
“Yip! Ye-ow-wow!” Jibby yelled, like a wild Indian, and he picked up a
hunk of dead wood and let fly at the negroes, and we all did the same,
and yelled as hard as we could.
About six out of ten of the things we threw hit where we meant them to
hit, and those three black men jumped to their feet and stared around
for just about one second of time. They were scared ash color, and they
did not know where they were for a moment, but they saw the black smoke
piling up from the pile of dunnage and they started down the Run faster
than we had run from the bumblebees.
“Dyn’mite! Dyn’mite!” they shouted, but we did not wait to see or hear
any more. Jibby was not waiting. He legged it away from there, and we
were not two steps behind him, and when he was deep in the woods he
threw himself down, and we did as Jibby did. It seemed the wisest thing
to do.
We were no more than flat on the ground before there came a big, flat,
heavy sort of “boom!” and then sand and small gravel fell on us like a
sort of rain, and Jibby got up. We went back toward the edge of the Run,
keeping mighty quiet, and we heard the seven men come loping down the
creek, and, when they reached the place where we had blown up their
stores, they swore and said they might have known it was not safe to
trust those worthless darks.
“We-all sure has got miserable luck,” the man called Jim said, in a most
disgusted way. “Just when we find the green sand, we get our stuff
blowed to nothing. Now we’ve got to go and get more feed and more
dynamite and more everything. It’s bad luck, but I’m right down glad of
one thing; them darks was blowed clean to nothing, too.”
They stood there awhile looking at the deep hole the blast had blown in
the creek bed, and then they went on down the Run, growling and
complaining, and we knew we had a couple of days at least to dig for
treasure before they came back. We slid down the bank and took a look at
things ourselves. The bushes and grass and weeds had been blown away
clean, and there was a hole where the sand had been, ten or twelve feet
deep and about twenty-five feet long, and as wide as that.
Jibby Jones sat down on the edge of the hole and began to take off his
pants, because he did not have any shirt to take off--he had torn it to
strips.
“Wampus,” he drawled out, in that slow way of his, “you take the
kerosene can and go back and ask Mrs. Catlin if she will lend us another
can of kerosene. I’m going to take a bath in the good old swimming-hole.
I thought maybe there would be one on this Run, somewhere.”
And, sure enough, there was the water trickling into that hole, and when
Wampus got back with the kerosene, Tad and Jibby and Skippy and I were
all in the pool splashing around and having a gay time. Jibby was right;
there was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run.
CHAPTER XXIII
TREASURE TROVE
The new swimming-pool that had been dug out in the creek by the
explosion was rather muddy, but it was wet, and it was fun to think we
were swimming in a pool nobody had ever swam in before. It was like
discovering a new ocean or something.
Wampus put down the can of kerosene.
“Come on out,” he said. “If we are going to dig for that land pirate’s
treasure to-day, we had better be burning out the bumblebees and getting
at it. Bill Catlin was home this time, and he’s coming over. He wanted
to know what we were going to do with the kerosene, and I had to tell
him, and he’s going to make us give him half of all we find.”
“Why? What right has he to make us do that?” I wanted to know, for I
didn’t think Bill Catlin or anybody else had a right to any of that
treasure when Jibby had been the only one to think of it being there,
and when we had planned so hard to get it.
“Treasure trove, that’s why!” Wampus said.
And just then Bill Catlin came to the edge of the creek bank and looked
down at us getting into our clothes.
“Well, boys,” he said, “here I am. I hope we find enough to make us all
rich and happy all the rest of our lives. Hurry into your duds and we’ll
get busy.”
Jibby Jones was putting on his pants as slow and deliberate as if he had
all day to do it in, and right there I made a mistake. I ought to have
kept my mouth shut until Jibby had his clothes on and his spectacles on
and was ready to talk, because that is always the safe thing to do. But
I had to say my say.
“We don’t need any help,” I said. “We don’t want to divide this with
anybody. Jibby Jones thought of the treasure being here, and it is going
to be ours--all of it.”
“That so?” Bill Catlin asked. “How about treasure trove, my son?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“All I mean,” said Bill Catlin, grinning, “is that it seems to me I’ve
heard somewhere that there’s a law of treasure trove, and that half of
any hidden treasure that is found on any man’s land belongs to the man
that owns the land.”
“All right!” I said, quick. “That settles it. Wampus’s father owns this
land and you don’t.”
“I lease it,” said Bill Catlin. “I rent it of Wampus’s father. As I look
at it, that gives me everything that is on the land or in the land. Why,
I could order Wampus’s father off this land if I wanted to, or the whole
lot of you, for that matter. I could sue you for trespass this very
minute, if I wanted to, for coming on this land. Sure, I could! I guess
that makes me even better than the owner. I guess it entitles me to half
the treasure we find.”
What Bill Catlin said took all the wind out of my sails in a second.
There was one sail it did not take the wind out of, though; that was the
jib on Jibby Jones’s face--the nose he called his jib sail. Jibby was
hitching up his trousers as if Bill Catlin or nothing in the world
mattered a cent.
“Is that so, Jibby?” Tad Willing asked.
“He can order us off the place,” Jibby drawled in his slow way, “and he
can sue us for trespass if we don’t go. I know that, because once, when
father was digging for mastodon bones in a cornfield in Arizona, the man
that owned the farm ordered father off and father did not want to go. So
the man hit father on the head with a club, and father sued him for
damages, and the justice of the peace made the man pay father five
dollars for hitting him, and made father pay the man five dollars for
trespassing, and neither of them _had_ five dollars.”
“What did they do? Go to jail?” asked Bill Catlin.
“No, sir,” Jibby said. “The justice of the peace lent father five
dollars and father paid the man with it, and then the man paid father
with it, and then father paid it back to the justice of the peace.
Father says the justice said then, ‘There! I hope that will be a lesson
to both of you. You have got off easy. If I had been hard-hearted, I
would have made you pay each other ten dollars apiece, and I haven’t got
but eight dollars and sixty cents, so where would you have been then?’”
Bill Catlin laughed, and that made him like Jibby Jones right away,
because laughing and liking are always close together.
“I bet they would have gone to jail, just because they lacked a little
common sense,” Bill Catlin said. “If I had been there, I could have
fixed it up easy. I would have had your father borrow the eight dollars
and sixty cents and pay the man, and then your father would have owed
him only one dollar and forty cents. Then I would have had the man pay
the money back to your father and the man would have owed your father
only one dollar and forty cents. Then your father would have given the
eight dollars and sixty cents back to the justice, and he wouldn’t have
owed _him_ anything. And then all your father would have had to do would
have been to borrow one dollar and forty cents from the justice, and
when it had passed around, the whole ten dollars would have been paid.
Nobody would have owed anybody anything. Your father and the man could
have paid each other a million dollars that way. You’ve got to use
common sense.”
“Yes, sir,” Jibby said politely.
It pleased Bill Catlin to have an intelligent-looking boy with
tortoise-shell spectacles take what he said so seriously, and he was
mighty tickled.
“You’ve got common sense, and education, too; I can see that,” he said
to Jibby, which wasn’t saying anything very nice to us, as I looked at
it, but we didn’t say anything, because we saw Jibby was going to talk
again.
“Yes, sir,” Jibby said, as if he was pleased to have Bill Catlin
compliment him that way. “I do try to know something; I find it comes in
handy sometimes. I think it is better than just thinking you know
something. My father says so. My father says it is foolish to read in a
story book that a man made a trip to the moon and then to think you know
that a man did make a trip to the moon; my father says it is better to
find out the true facts first.”
“And your father knows what he is talking about,” Bill Catlin said.
“Yes, sir,” said Jibby Jones meekly; and then he added, in the same meek
way, “What book did you read about treasure trove in, Mr. Catlin?”
Well, Bill Catlin sort of looked at Jibby as if he hadn’t seen him
before. He stared at him. Then he got red in the face.
“What did you ask that for?” he wanted to know.
“Because in the books I read,” Jibby said, “I couldn’t find anything
about halves and halves when you find treasure. Of course,” he added, “I
only read some encyclopædias and law books and things like that, as
anybody would when they start out to dig for treasure. I don’t believe
even the biggest book weighed over ten pounds, and only a part of that
one was about hidden treasure, so maybe what I think I know don’t amount
to much.”
Then Bill Catlin asked him what he had found in the books, and Jibby
said that “treasure trove” meant any gold or silver or money found
hidden in the ground or in any private place, the ownership of which was
unknown. In England, Jibby said, the treasure that was found belonged to
the king and not to the finder, but, if the owner was known or was
discovered later, the treasure belonged to the owner, and not to the
king or the finder at all, and if the finder kept it or hid it he could
be jailed.
“You don’t mean it!” Bill Catlin exclaimed.
“Yes, sir; that’s what the books say,” Jibby said. “And in the United
States there isn’t any such thing as treasure trove at all. When
anything is found on the land, it belongs to the man that finds it,
unless he knows the true owner, and then it belongs to the true owner,
just as if it was a cow or a suit of clothes or a bushel of apples.”
“Then I don’t come in at all, hey?” Bill Catlin said.
“No, sir,” Jibby said, “but all we have found so far is an old 1804
dollar.”
“Oh, I don’t want that,” said Bill Catlin carelessly. He was very much
disappointed; I guess he had expected to get fifty thousand dollars,
maybe. “Well,” he said, “I’ll go along and help you burn out the bees,
anyway.”
We were all ready to start then, and Wampus picked up the can of
kerosene and waded across the creek, and Tad and Skippy Root and I
followed him. Jibby sort of waited for Bill Catlin while Bill slid down
the bank, and just then we heard voices of men. The men were coming up
the creek, and we knew them by their voices. They were the Jim and Jake
and the rest that had been up the creek before--the tough customers that
had come all the way from Arkansas to hunt for the Murrell treasure.
They were coming back.
I ran up the bank of the creek in a hurry, and so did Wampus and Tad and
Skippy. I thought sure there was going to be trouble if those men caught
us, and I looked through the trees toward the road, all ready to run for
it. What I saw made me look twice.
“Gee whiz!” I said. “Look there, will you!”
It was enough to make any one look. What Wampus had said to his folks
must have leaked out, or something, for it looked as if every man and
boy in Riverbank was coming up the road toward the dead pine to dig for
that land pirate’s treasure. It looked like ten thousand, but I guess it
was only about a thousand men and boys. There were old men that could
hardly walk, and boys that were so young they could hardly walk, and
middle-aged men, and even a few women and some girls, and they all had
spades or picks or shovels. There were plenty of boys--dozens of them.
And our old friend, the Tough Customer tramp, was right there in the
front of them all.
I was still looking when Jibby Jones and Bill Catlin climbed the bank to
where they could see that great army of treasure-hunters coming up the
road. Jibby was talking to Bill Catlin, telling him who the men were
that were coming up the creek, and the minute he saw the crowd on the
road he thought of something. None of the rest of us would have thought
of it, but Jibby did.
“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “just look at that crowd! They’re coming to dig
for treasure, and I shouldn’t wonder if all the rest of Riverbank came
next. It is like a rush to the gold fields, or to the oil fields.
Everybody that can come is coming. Why don’t you make some money out of
it?”
“Money? I’m always glad enough to make money,” said Bill Catlin, “but
how can I make money out of that crowd?”
“You can’t out of all of them,” Jibby said, “but you can out of some of
them. You could make, anyway, a dollar apiece out of a lot of them. It’s
the kind of treasure trove we can go half and half on. You have a right
to keep all the people off this part of your farm, and you have a right
to charge them a dollar apiece for letting them come on it and dig for
treasure. If you say so Wampus and George and Skippy and Tad will do the
collecting. We’ll collect a dollar apiece and give you half of it.”
Bill Catlin thought it over and said:
“All right; that’s a go.”
By that time the seven pirate money-hunters had come up the creek and
were climbing the bank to where we were. They looked mean, too. The one
called Jim, who was the old land pirate’s great-grandson, came right up
to us and said:
“Look here! Are you the folks that blew up our stuff? We don’t stand for
any business like that. You hadn’t any right to do it, and for half a
cent we’d light into you and break you into pieces and chew you up. Now,
we’ve got business here and we want you to get away from here and stay
away.”
“Yes, sir,” Jibby Jones said in his solemn way. “Maybe we will. We
didn’t know you owned this farm. We thought Wampus Smale’s father owned
it, and that Mr. Catlin here rented it. We thought that anybody that
came on the farm without Mr. Catlin’s permission was trespassing and
could be put in jail or something. Why, look at all the people!”
The man named Jim climbed up the bank and looked. He swore.
“What’s that crowd?”
“They’re going to hunt for some old land pirate’s treasure, I guess,”
Jibby said. “I guess they think there is some of it hidden around here
somewhere. But Mr. Catlin thought we would charge them a dollar apiece
for letting them hunt it. We didn’t know you owned this land.”
“A dollar, hey?” said the land pirate’s great-grandson. “Well, we’ll
give you a dollar apiece--seven dollars for the seven of us--if that’s
what you want.”
“Thank you,” Jibby said very politely, and, while the land pirate’s
great-grandson was counting out the money, he told Wampus and Skippy and
Tad and Mr. Catlin and me to go and stop the crowd and tell them it cost
a dollar a day to hunt land pirate’s treasure on this farm. “And tell
them to look out for the bumblebees,” he said. “We wouldn’t like the
whole of Riverbank to get all stung up when all they are doing is trying
to get the treasure before we get it.”
So Bill Catlin and all us boys but Jibby ran toward the crowd to tell
them, and one of the first men we saw was the sheriff. We boys did not
know him very well, but Bill Catlin did, and he went up to him and
warned him that coming on the farm was trespass and that he looked to
the sheriff to warn everybody and to keep off himself.
The sheriff hated it, but he had to do it, because it was his duty. He
turned and held up both hands, to stop the crowd.
“But you can tell them,” Bill Catlin said, just before the sheriff spoke
up, “that they can come on the farm and hunt treasure for one dollar
each per day.”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE TREASURE
So that was what the sheriff told them, and at first there was a good
deal of complaining, but, when they saw that the sheriff and Bill Catlin
meant it, they formed in line at the corner, and Skippy and Tad and
Wampus and me collected the dollars. Every time we took a dollar we
said, “Thank you. Look out for bumblebees under the old dead pine
there,” and they did look out. Most of them went a good distance around
the old pine, and every one of them made a straight line for the old
tumbledown farmhouse as soon as they were safe from the bees. Some that
did not have money to pay the dollar borrowed some from others, but a
few could not get in. But I’ve got to tell you what Jibby was doing.
As soon as Jibby had the seven dollars from the Arkansas men he said:
“All right, you can hunt treasure now, until midnight, but if you don’t
find it by then it will cost you another seven dollars.”
“Don’t you worry, son,” the man named Jim said. “We’ll find what there
is to find before sundown, and if you hadn’t blown up our dynamite we
would have found it in half an hour. We know where it is.”
“That’s good,” said Jibby Jones. “My father always says it is wise to
know what you are going to do before you do it. So I guess you know the
law about hidden treasure, too?”
“It belongs to the man that owned it in the first place,” said the man
named Jim, “and I guess that as good as means me. I didn’t come all the
way up here from Arkansas without getting ready beforehand, like your
father says to. I’ve got papers here to prove that I’m the
great-grandson of old John A. Murrell, the land pirate, and that I’m his
only heir. So that settles that! If great-grandfather was alive, it
would be his treasure, and if any other Murrells were alive part of the
treasure would be theirs, but I’m the only one alive, so it is mine.
That’s all fixed, and if there is any treasure there I get half, and
these six friends of mine divide the other half among them. That so,
men?”
The six tough-looking Arkansans said it was so.
“Go and get it, then,” Jibby Jones said.
Jim and Jake and the other five got together and talked awhile in
whispers, looking out through the trees now and then. They were making
plans. The crowd from Riverbank was so big it couldn’t all get inside
the ruined farmhouse and those that couldn’t were digging outside of it,
and the whole lot--those inside and those outside--were shouting and
quarreling and carrying on the way money-crazy people do. It was like a
riot or something, and all the while more strings of people were coming
up the road and stopping to pay us a dollar, and then rushing for the
old farmhouse, afraid they would not get there in time.
The seven Arkansans had their spades and shovels and picks, and they got
together in a bunch, and when Jim gave the word they started across the
weedy field with a rush, and straight for the old signal pine, too.
Jibby watched them until they were halfway across the field, and then he
came wandering toward where we boys and Bill Catlin were collecting
money from the late comers. We had our pockets full of silver dollars
and bills and small change.
“That’s pretty good,” Jibby said, “but we made one mistake.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Do you mean we should have brought a
gunnysack to carry the money in?”
“No,” he said; “we ought to have advertised in the Riverbank
‘Eagle’--the weekly edition of it that goes to the farmers. Everybody in
town knows about the hidden treasure by now, but the farmers don’t. We
ought to have put an advertisement in the paper so the farmers could
have paid us a dollar apiece, too. But I suppose no one can think of
everything.”
We all turned just then, because one of the Arkansas men had let out a
yell. A bumblebee had just stung him. The next moment another one let
out a yell; he had got his sting, too.
The Arkansas men had gone at the old pine tree slam bang, because they
knew they had to work fast. They knew that, as soon as the men and boys
by the farmhouse saw them digging at the tree, there would be a rush for
the tree, so they all piled into the work at once and as hard as they
could, and there is nothing bumblebees hate so much as they hate just
that. They hate hurry.
In a moment the whole seven Arkansans were hopping and swearing and
slashing at their necks and beating at the air, but they kept right on
digging and picking and whacking at the tree. They made more than chips
fly. Whang would go a pick into the dead wood and out would come a big
slice of tree, and all the while the whole seven were jumping and
yelling and cussing like crazy men.
Then some of the crowd began to run from the old farmhouse toward the
old pine, and then others began to run, but, when the first man came
near the tree, he yelled like fury and slapped the back of his neck and
began to dance, and then he ran. He ran zigzag, but he ran away from the
tree. The rest of the Riverbankers stopped, and when he reached them
they asked what was the matter and he must have said “Bees!” for they
all crowded back. They made me think of the mob in a movie. They went
back a step at a time as if a director was saying, “Now! Mob--back one
step; show fear; back another step!” Only it was bees doing the
directing this time.
Then the Arkansans gave it up, all but Jim. He wrapped his coat around
his head and dug and hopped but of a sudden he dropped his pick and hit
himself in four or six places and jerked the coat from his head and came
loping toward us sweeping the air with the coat, all around his head. He
had not found the treasure, but he had found the bees’ nest, and as he
came toward us we scooped up the money and held our pockets and ran.
We had so much money we were weighted down with it, and we had to run
easy or spill it, but we made pretty good time. Not a bee got us. We ran
down the road toward Riverbank a hundred yards or so, and that was far
enough, for the seven Arkansans only came about fifty yards and they
were making it lively for the bumblebees, and the bumblebees were making
it lively for them. Neither of them had time for anything else just
then.
While we were all scattered that way, we saw one man come out of the
Riverbank crowd and walk right up to the dead pine. It was the Tough
Customer. He had tied his pants tight around his ankle, and he had
pulled his shirt up around his head, and he had his one woolen sock on
one hand for a mitten and a red handkerchief tied around the other hand.
With his coat on, there wasn’t a place a bee could get at him, and he
hobbled right up to the dead pine and picked up the pick Jim had thrown
down, and began to dig.
Jibby Jones looked disgusted.
“Dear me!” he said. “I don’t like that at all! I did hope we might find
that treasure ourselves, but I certainly think it is a shame for the
Tough Customer to find it after all the trouble we took to make him
depart.”
This was too much for Wampus.
“What do you care who digs it up, Jibby?” he asked. “That Jim fellow
gets it, anyway. You said yourself that, no matter whose land it was
found on and no matter who found it, the treasure belonged to whoever
owned it first. It wouldn’t be us, if we found it, and it won’t be the
Tough Customer, if he finds it. The treasure will belong to that Jim man
from Arkansas, because he is the heir of old John A. Murrell, and John
A. Murrell was the first owner.”
The only answer Jibby gave to that was to reach out a hand and feel of
Wampus’s shirt, but he didn’t like the feel of it, so he felt of mine
and he seemed to like it better.
“Take off your shirt, George,” he said, slow and calm, as if he had all
day to waste, and he took off his own shoes and pulled off his socks. “I
don’t think that tramp has brains,” he said, “but I think he has robbed
honey hives, and sometimes experience is as good as brains.”
I had my shirt off now, for I can work pretty quick when I have to, and
then Jibby began pulling it over his head.
“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “I see those Arkansawyers are not fighting bees
now”--but how he saw that with my shirt over his head I don’t know--“and
they are not digging treasure. They seem to be looking at the sheriff as
if they did not like him. And I never did like them much. I never did
think that men who come sneaking up a creek or up any back way were
thoroughly honest men. I wonder if it would be a good thing for the
sheriff to walk over to them and tell them that they have gone off the
farm into the road and that they will have to pay another dollar to get
back onto the farm again? If you think that would be a good thing, and
you want to tell it to the sheriff, maybe you had better tell the
sheriff to pin on his badge so it can be seen.”
Bill Catlin grinned.
“I think it might be a good thing,” he laughed.
“Thank you,” Jibby said, “and it might not hurt anybody if the sheriff
ran toward the Arkansawyers to tell them. Maybe they would like to know
it as soon as possible, so they can make plans.”
Jibby was ready now to go and help the Tough Customer dig treasure and
he started. He did not bother to try to see what the Arkansawyers did,
but we saw. They were standing in the road, looking at the sheriff and
the badge on his coat, and were talking among themselves when Bill
Catlin went up to the sheriff and spoke to him and pointed to the
Arkansas men. The sheriff nodded his head, and looked down to see that
his badge was in plain sight, and then he started for the seven Arkansas
men, going pretty fast. Those seven men took one look at him and at Bill
Catlin and turned and ran across country, jumping the fence and getting
away from there as fast as they could.
That was the last we ever saw of them. I don’t know what was on their
minds, but they must have had mighty guilty consciences about something.
Guilty consciences have no use for a sheriff.
There were plenty of bumblebees left by the old pine tree, and the Tough
Customer had to keep batting at the holes in his shirt that he had made
to see through, but Jibby had the best of that because he was wearing
his tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles, and no bee, not even a bumblebee,
can sting through glass. He picked up a spade and began to dig, and he
had hardly stuck spade into the ground twice before he had hit a metal
box. He jammed the spade in again, and pried on the handle and up came
the box. He did not wait there. He grabbed the box and ran.
The Tough Customer could not see very well, but he knew somebody was
getting something that he was not getting and he pulled his shirt from
his head. It was a bad mistake. Jibby was gone and the treasure box was
gone, but the bees were not all gone. One of them told the Tough
Customer so and told him quick and hard, and for the next minute the
Tough Customer was not thinking of treasure; he was thinking of bees.
Jibby came running to where we were, and the whole of Riverbank--or all
those that had come out to hunt treasure--came running after him, to see
what he had found. They got to us just as we had all crowded around
Jibby and when he was stamping on the box with his heel to break it
open. It broke open easy enough.
I jumped at it and grabbed for the gold money that was in it. It was not
much; it was only one hundred gold pieces--ten-dollar pieces--one
thousand dollars in all, but Jibby was opening a faded piece of old
paper that had been in the box.
The writing on the paper was so old we could hardly read it, but we did
make it out. This is what it said:
John--I have abided in this locality twenty years now, but no word
from you and very poor living here, so mean to go to California,
thinking shall do better gold mining than farming. Am taking that
which you left with me and will keep it twenty more years, as you said
to do, before I touch any of it. If you hunt me look for me near a
signal pine as agreed. I am leaving one thousand dollars in case you
come and need it to pay expenses. It is part of what you sent.
Murrell
So that was what the land pirate’s treasure amounted to, but one
thousand dollars is a lot better than nothing. I believe one man from
Riverbank did go to California to look for a signal pine and to hunt for
treasure under it, but probably he did not find it. There are millions
of pine trees in California, or trees that would do for pine trees.
When we counted up, we found we had taken in eight hundred and fifty-six
dollars from the Riverbank treasure-hunters, and we got half of it,
which was eighty-five dollars and sixty cents apiece for Jibby Jones and
Wampus and Skippy Root and Tad and me, because we had to give Bill
Catlin his half first. And then we got two hundred dollars apiece of the
one thousand dollars that was in the box that Jibby had dug up. We
didn’t send it to Jim from Arkansas, even if he was John A. Murrell’s
great-grandson. I’ll tell you why.
When Jibby was opening the box, the Tough Customer and nearly all the
Riverbankers came crowding around to see what Jibby had found, and when
they saw, one of the men said:
“Pshaw! Only a thousand dollars! That don’t amount to much.”
“No,” I said, “and we can’t keep it, anyway, because in this country
hidden treasure has to be given back to whoever the first owner was, or
to his heirs, and we know who the first owner was and we know who his
heir is.”
Right there Jibby Jones surprised us.
“No,” he said, “we don’t know. We’re going to keep this money ourselves,
because we don’t know who the real owner was, and we never can find
out.”
“Why can’t we?” I asked him.
“Because nobody in the world knows who the first owner was,” Jibby said.
“John A. Murrell never did own it; he stole it. The man he stole it from
was the real owner, and John A. Murrell never did have any right to have
it. And how can you ever find out who owned it away back in 1835? Nobody
could do that. So it is ours and we’ll keep it.”
And we did. We were just starting back for town when all at once Jibby
Jones stopped short.
“Wait!” he said. “I’ve almost forgotten something. I’ve got to go back
to the creek.”
“My land!” Wampus said. “What for?”
“To get two grains of that green sand for my collection of grains of
sand,” Jibby said. “You can never tell what will happen. To-morrow, or
before I have a chance to get a specimen, my father may decide to go to
Chile or China or Chattanooga. But, hold on a minute!”
He sat down at the edge of the road and took off his shoe and looked in
it.
“It’s all right!” he said. “We can go on back to town. I’ve got five or
six grains right here in my shoe.”
So that was how we went back to town from our treasure-hunting. Skippy
and Tad and Wampus and I carried the money and Jibby Jones came along
behind us with one shoe on, carrying the other shoe in both hands as if
it was a plate of soup, because I do believe he was more interested in
not losing those grains of green sand than in all the treasure John A.
Murrell ever hid.
But that was the way Jibby Jones was.
THE END
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