Jibby Jones

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

“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....”