Jibby Jones

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.

“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.

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?”

“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.