“I saw the natives make an elephant trap in India this way once,” he said. “I saw them catch a wild elephant. He was a tough customer.”
“You don’t think you’ll catch an elephant here, do you?” I asked him.
“No,” Jibby said, “but I expect I may catch a Tough Customer.”
So then we went home. The next morning we were all on hand at nine o’clock at Jibby’s, and we started for the Murrell farm. We hiked along at a good rate, saying “hep! hep! hep!” to keep in step, or singing something to keep step by. We had all the things Jibby had told us to bring, and he had a big market-basket with a lid.
“It is all right,” Jibby whispered to me once. “The Tough Customer is following us.”
About half a mile this side of the Murrell farm, Jibby said he was tired and sat down by the side of the road to rest. There was a long osage orange hedge there, and we sat with it behind us.
“Now, listen,” he said, when we were seated. “Before we get to work to dig that treasure, we’ll go to the Run and get some of that green sand for my collection. It won’t take half an hour; we’ll have plenty of time. Nobody is going to guess that the treasure is under the bottom of the old dry well in the cellar of the old brick farmhouse at the crossroads where the broken, dead pine tree is.”
“But—” said Wampus.
“You be still!” Jibby said. “Sometimes I think you talk too much. I’m hungry. I’m going to eat something.”
He opened the basket and gave us each a sandwich, and they did taste good! We sat there eating.
“But you said the treasure was under the pine tree,” Wampus said then.
“Yes, I said that, and that is where it is,” Jibby Jones said then, “but just now the Tough Customer was behind the hedge here listening, and I wanted him to think it was in the well in the cellar. But now we can talk; he is not here now. Look up the road.”
Sure enough, there was the Tough Customer, hobbling along in a great hurry, trying to keep out of sight and going toward the old Murrell place.
“Let him get in the house,” Jibby said, and then he opened the lid of his market-basket again and took out a green felt bag. He loosened the strings and a cat stuck its black-and-white head out of the bag.
“Good old Orlando!” Jibby said, and stroked the cat’s head.
He handed the bag to Wampus.
“You carry the cat, Wampus,” he said, “and when I ask for it you hand it to me. Now, come on, and let’s hurry.”
We did. We started up the road at a good clip, and when we reached the old Murrell place the Tough Customer was not in sight, but when we had stolen up to the house we heard a clatter of old boards and a yell, and we all piled into the cellar. The Tough Customer had stepped on the boards that covered Jibby’s elephant trap and they had tipped and fallen into the dry well and the Tough Customer had gone with them. He was swearing and jumping and trying to get out of the well, but it was too deep for him to get out without some one to pull him out or boost him out. When he saw us, he let loose all the language he could think of, and he told us all the things he would do to us if he ever got out of that hole.
Jibby stood and looked down at him.
“Wampus,” Jibby said, in his slow, drawling way, “hand me Orlando.”
Wampus handed Jibby Jones the green felt bag.
“Now, you boys had better get out of the cellar and, maybe, out of the house,” Jibby said, “because it may not be very pleasant when I put Orlando down the well. Orlando is hostile to men with wooden legs. Orlando don’t like wooden legs.”
“Look here!” the Tough Customer begged, changing his tone in an instant. “You’re not going to dump that cussed animal down here, are you? Please don’t. Don’t you be so cruel to a feller that never did anybody any harm. Please! I’d rather be licked a dozen times than have that animal—”
“Hurry, boys!” Jibby said. “There’s going to be a grand time here. I shouldn’t wonder if Orlando bit this man, too, besides other happenings.”
Jibby opened the neck of the bag.
“Wooden legs, Orlando!” he said, when the cat put its head out.
“Look here!” the Tough Customer whined from down in the well. “Don’t do it! Don’t let that animal loose on me. I’ll give you— I’ll give you anything you say.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jibby said. “I sort of hate to miss the fun. But, I don’t know. I might be willing to dicker. How about a dollar? How about an 1804 dollar?”
“I haven’t got—” the man began.
“Scoot, boys!” Jibby shouted. “Here she goes! Sic him, Orlando!”
“I’ll give it! I’ll give it!” the Tough Customer yelled, and—plunk!—on the hard dirt at Jibby’s feet the 1804 dollar fell. Jibby picked it up and looked at it. It was our dollar, right enough.
Jibby pushed the cat’s head back into the green bag and tied the strings and put the bag in the basket. Then he made Wampus with his spade and Tad with his axe stand ready to take care of the Tough Customer if he tried any funny tricks, and Skippy and I threw an end of the rope into the well and pulled the Tough Customer out. He did not wait to talk; he gave one look at the basket and scooted out of that cellar.
We piled out after him, because we did not want him throwing any bricks or rocks down on us, but we saw him hobbling down the road as fast as his wooden leg would carry him, and we whooped and laughed and patted Jibby Jones on the back.
“That’s nothing!” he said. “I saw a man palm a dollar once in a sleight-of-hand show, so I had some experience that way. And I just imagined Orlando was a skunk for this afternoon only. I sort of imagined that Tough Customer was not going to let an 1804 dollar drop down a sewer. It looked too smart, to have him standing right over that grating. So that’s all there is to it—experience and imagination.”
And that’s so. They do make a mighty good team. When you have Experience and Imagination hitched up together, you can do almost anything. I was thinking that when Orlando, in the bag, gave a yowl.
Jibby Jones grinned.
“Orlando wants to go home,” he said. And he took the bag out of the basket and took the cat out of the bag. He dropped Orlando on the ground, and the cat started for home at a good trot. The cat took to the road, and presently the Tough Customer looked back, and he saw Orlando trotting along toward him. He gave one yell and dived over a fence, and the last we saw of him that day was while he was scooting across a ploughed field as hard as he could scoot.
CHAPTER XXI
WINGED ENEMIES
It must have been about half-past ten or eleven o’clock in the morning by the time we got rid of the Tough Customer that had come to the old Murrell farm to get the land pirate’s buried treasure before we could get it. We stood there by the old brick house laughing and shouting while Jibby Jones’s cat Orlando chased the Tough Customer off the road.
When we saw the Tough Customer vanish over a rise of ground, the rest of our work of getting the buried treasure—if there was any—seemed as simple as opening a pie to pull out a plum. We had the rest of the morning and all afternoon and part of the evening to work in, and Jibby Jones had figured out that the buried treasure must be under the old signal pine tree in the corner, near where the two roads crossed.
“Come on!” I said. “Now we can get it; there’s not a thing that can stop us.”
And that was how it looked to me. There we were, Jibby Jones and Wampus Smale and Tad Willing and Skippy Root and myself, and we had enough lunch to last all day, and we had a spade and a pick and an axe and a long rope. It did look as if getting that treasure would be the easiest thing in the world. I felt as if my hands were already scooping up gold money and silver money and letting it drip through my fingers.
I can’t hardly tell you how simple it seemed to get that buried treasure, and how easy. Just try yourself to see how easy it looked to me. Just behind us was the rotted old brick farmhouse where Jibby said the treasure was not hidden. Over yonder was the dead pine tree in the corner of the lot—the tree Jibby Jones said was the signal pine, under which the pirate’s treasure was probably buried—and between was nothing but a few rods of ground with weeds and tall grass on it. And we had the digging tools. All we had to do was walk across to the dead pine tree and dig. So I said so.
“Come on!” I said. “Let’s hurry and get that treasure before anybody else comes along to bother us.”
But Jibby Jones did not pick up the lunch-basket or make any move toward the dead pine tree. He stood and smoothed his nose with his forefinger.
“No,” he said, “let’s take a swim first. Let’s go to the creek and find a swimming-pool and take a swim.”
“We can’t,” I said. “There never was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run, and there isn’t one now.”
“I don’t know,” Jibby said. “Up in the Catskill Mountains there are streams, and sometimes there is no pool in a place, and the next year there is one. You can’t always tell, George. I’m lucky about pools; when I want to swim there usually is one.”
“Well, you won’t find one on Murrell’s Run,” I said. But I ought to have known better; a fellow never ought to say what Jibby Jones will find or won’t find.
“Come on! Let’s dig for the treasure,” Skippy Root said. “You act as if you were afraid to, Jibby.”
Jibby did not answer this directly. He rubbed his nose and looked at Wampus Smale.
“Your father owns this land, don’t he, Wampus?” he asked.
“Yes, he owns all of it,” Wampus said.
“And who lives in the new farmhouse at the other end of the farm?” Jibby asked.
“Why, Bill Catlin,” Wampus said. “He rents from father. What has that got to do with it?”
Jibby rubbed his nose again, and I thought I saw him grin.
“What kind of lights does he use?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean?” Wampus asked. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“I mean lights,” said Jibby Jones. “Lights for the evening, when he is sitting at a table reading the Farmers’ Almanac or something. You know what lights are, don’t you, Wampus? The Romans had oil lights, and my great-great-grandmother had whale-oil lights, and in New England they once used tallow dips. Does Bill Catlin use kerosene lamps or electric light or gas light?”
“What are you trying to do, tease me?” Wampus asked. “Bill Catlin uses kerosene lamps, of course. There is no gas out here, and there are no electric lights this far out.”
“All right,” Jibby said. “That’s good. That’s fine. Is Bill Catlin a cross fellow, or is he a pleasant fellow?”
“Oh, come on!” Wampus said, disgusted. “Let’s dig; what’s the use of trying to be funny?”
“All right,” Jibby said. “I don’t pretend to be the one leader of this band of treasure-hunters. Go on and dig, if you want to. I’m not ready to dig yet; I’m going down to the Run and get a specimen of the green sand you said was there. I’m more interested in getting a specimen of that sand for my collection than I am in buried treasure just now.”
Sure enough, he started off toward where the rim of trees showed where Murrell’s Run was. It was just what you might expect Jibby Jones to do, right when the buried treasure was in our hands, almost. Tad called to him.
“Jibby!” he called. “Come back here!”
Anybody else that acted that way we would have let go, but Jibby Jones was different. He looked like a ninny, with his long thin nose and his high-water pants and his spectacles, but he had fooled us more than once that way. It was when he said or did the biggest fool things—or what seemed like the biggest fool things to us—that you had to stop and think the hardest, because Jibby Jones always had something important in his mind then. So, when Tad called to him, Jibby came back.
“You must excuse me if I seem rude,” he said, “but I really cannot dig for treasure until Wampus tells me whether Bill Catlin is a pleasant fellow or a cross fellow.”
“Why?” I asked.
Jibby looked up at the air and down at the grass.
“My father has told me many, many times that the way to keep out of trouble is to use my eyes and my brains,” he said. “I’m afraid you boys do not do that as much as you should. The reason I must know whether Bill Catlin is a cross fellow or a pleasant fellow is because that Tough Customer, when he was running away from here, yipped three times and hopped five feet on his wooden leg.”
We tried to think that over, but we could not make sense of it in any way.
Wampus got sort of angry.
“Oh, well! If you’re going to talk nonsense!” he said. “It is all right for a smarty to be smart sometimes, but I don’t call this one of the times. You fellows may stand it, but I’m not going to. I’m going to dig up that treasure, if it is there, and Jibby can go and scrape up green sand if he wants to. He can’t make a fool of me!”
“I do want to get a specimen of that sand,” Jibby said soberly. “And, when you have dug treasure awhile, you boys had better come down to the Run. It is too dry up here. I expect there is plenty of mud in the Run.”
With that Jibby went off. We watched him go.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I’ll bet Jibby has something in his mind that we don’t know anything about. I’m going with him. When Jibby Jones talks like a crazy man, you want to look out; he’s always talking sense then.”
So I started to follow Jibby, but Wampus Smale called me back, and the three of them—Wampus and Tad and Skippy—talked to me and said we would all look silly if we let Jibby Jones scare us with a lot of nonsense talk. By the time they had talked enough, Jibby was going out of sight, so I made up my mind I would stick to the fellows. We picked up our tools and started for the dead pine tree.
I was worried a little, even though it all looked as simple as crossing a room to pick up a paper. It seemed that there must be something about the green sand in the Run that meant more than we thought, or something else. I rather knew that Jibby would not go off to get a grain of sand for his collection just then, when the treasure was so near, unless he had something worth while in his mind. I remembered what he had said about the green sand being, perhaps, the marks to show the old land pirate’s men the way to the buried treasure—“Go up the Mississippi until you come to a creek five miles below Riverbank; go up the creek until you come to green sand in the creek bottom; then climb the right bank of the creek and find a signal pine, and dig under the pine.” That was what Jibby had thought out as the directions old John A. Murrell might have given back in 1835. I was worried, but I did not have the slightest idea what Jibby’s real idea of the trouble to come was.
We walked over to the dead pine and talked for a minute about the best way to begin. Wampus wanted to take the pick and dig right into the baked soil, but Skippy had another idea of it.
“When this pine was planted,” he said, “it must have been a very small one, and if Murrell’s men buried the treasure under it they must have buried it close to the tree. Then the tree grew, and now, probably, the treasure is right under the tree, or under its big roots. I think we can save time by taking the axe and cutting down the tree.”
“Oh, now you are talking like Jibby Jones!” Wampus said, and it was easy to see that he was plumb disgusted with Jibby Jones. “Go ahead and chop, if you want to; I’m going to dig.”
He raised his pick above his head and brought it down hard into the dry soil, and Skippy swung the axe and chopped into the dead pine tree. Almost that same instant Tad Willing jumped about four feet into the air and yelped like a scalded dog, and when he hit the ground he grabbed his ankle and yelped again, and then broke for the brick house at about forty miles an hour, batting at his head and yipping like an Indian.
And Skippy and Wampus Smale were not far behind him.
“Wouch!” Wampus cried, and Skippy yelled, “Ow-wow! Bumblebees! Owp!” And they went for the brick house in big jumps. I did not have to look at them to learn how to lope, either. I was already on my way, and the thing I said when the first bumblebee jabbed his stinger into the back of my neck was not “I beg your pardon!” I don’t know what it was. I was too busy to notice. I said what I had to say and I did what I thought was the best thing to do, and I did not bother to put on any trimmings.
Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and kiss it, because affection of that sort is one thing a bumblebee does not understand much about, but a May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a September bumblebee. By September a bumblebee is as grouchy as a snake with a sore tail, and is just aching to stick his stinger into somebody. I suppose a bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening its stinger and getting ready for battle, and by September it wants war. And this was the meanest day of September for hostile bumblebees. There were about ten million of them in the nest under that old pine tree, and every bumblebee was fully ripe and as big as a plum, and it seemed as if they had let their stingers lie out in the sun until they were red-hot. It was the meanest lot of bees I ever got acquainted with. Bees that would have flown aside to get out of your way in May were now so eager to jab a boy that, if one of them had been on its way from New York to Boston to attend its grandmother’s funeral, it would have swerved aside to Los Angeles, California, to sting a brass Cupid on a fountain.
When we gathered our scattered forces together in the old brick farmhouse, I had five stings in me, and Skippy had eight lumps that were like young mountains and still growing, and Tad had seven honorable wounds and one bee still skirmishing in the thick growth on his head, and Wampus—well, Wampus would not stand still long enough to let us count him. A couple of bees had gone down inside of his shirt and Wampus was disrobing by jerks. He yanked at the collar of his shirt so hard that a pearl button flew eight feet and hit Tad on the neck and Tad jumped and yelled. He thought it was another bee come to bury a red-hot bayonet in him.
Three bees—some of the cavalry, I suppose—had followed us to turn our retreat into a rout, and they came right into the old brick house without knocking, and for three minutes Tad and Skippy and I had all we needed to do whacking at those bees with our caps. Then one of them stung Tad and was satisfied, and the other two took Wampus’s bare back as an insult, and Wampus yipped twice more.
Then there was silence, except for low moans and loud “Ow-wow-wows!” Wampus began to cry. I suppose he felt like one of the devastated regions after the Germans had shot it full of shell-holes. Skippy was the first to show any sense.
“Gee whiz!” he said, hopping on one leg. “I’m stinging all over! This is no place to be. We’ve got to get to where there is some cool mud to daub on these stings.”
Right then I knew why Jibby Jones had said that we had better follow him to the Run after we had dug treasure awhile, and why he had said it was too dry by the pine tree, and why he had said there was plenty of mud in the Run.
We trotted toward the Run as fast as we could, because every sting was doing its best to burn, and as we went I began to see the best kind of good sense in every word Jibby had said that we had thought was foolish. He wanted to go to the green sand because that place was far from the bumblebees, and he knew there were bumblebees at the old pine tree because the Tough Customer had yipped and sprinted when he passed close to it. And there was sense in what he had asked about Bill Catlin, too. If Bill Catlin was a good-natured fellow and burned kerosene, he would lend us a can of kerosene and we could burn out the bees before we began to dig.
I tried to tell this to the fellows, but they did not pay much attention. They were in a hurry. We all piled in among the trees and down the bank of the Run, and there was Jibby Jones. He was sitting on a large flat rock, in the cool shade, and on the rock were about forty nice little mud pies he had made and put there, each one nice and cool and soppy, all ready to plaster on our bee stings!
Jibby Jones looked up when we came piling down to where he was.
“I’ve got forty-two made,” he said. “I thought I would make sixty, but you came sooner than I thought you would. Help yourselves.”
We did. We grabbed the mud plasters and slapped them on the hot bee stings, and Jibby Jones helped us. Oh, boy! but that cool wet mud felt fine! Jibby plastered the stings on Wampus Smale’s back himself, and Wampus never said a word about any one talking foolish talk. He just said:
“Ah! that feels good! Oh! that feels good! Put on another fresh one, Jibby.”
CHAPTER XXII
A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE
By and by we began to sting less and to feel better.
“Did you bring the tools?” Jibby asked, innocently.
“I should say not!” Skippy said. “What was the use? A bee can’t sting an axe.”
“Those bees could,” I said. “I expect that spade will be all swelled up like a balloon by the time we see it again.”
That made Wampus laugh, which was a sign he was feeling better, too. I told Jibby I knew now why he wanted to know if Bill Catlin was a good-natured man.
“Yes,” Jibby said, “I thought you would figure it out sooner or later.”
“Well, the next time,” I said, “don’t be so polite. Don’t treat us as if we had any sense at all. Make a picture of a bee and shove it in our faces.”
“Yes, do!” Skippy said. “I’d rather, any day, have a picture of a bee shoved in my face than have a real bee shove itself in my neck.”
That made us all laugh, and Jibby washed the mud off Wampus Smale’s back, and when Wampus had put on his clothes we sat down and had lunch. I never ate anything that tasted better, and when we had finished we lay back for a while, just feeling good. Jibby Jones laughed.
“Laughing at us?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m laughing at myself. I’m thinking what a silly I was to begin collecting sand from everywhere, and thinking one grain from each place would be enough. I’ve been looking at this sand through my magnifying-glass, and one grain won’t do.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Look at it,” he said, and he tossed me his magnifying-glass.
The minute I looked at the sand through the glass I saw what he meant. Each grain stood out like the setting of a ring, and each grain was transparent, and sparkled, but not one grain was green! About half the grains were yellow and the other half were blue. It was only because they were so small and so mixed together that the sand looked green, because yellow and blue mixed makes green. I handed the glass to Wampus, and he looked and passed it on until we had all seen that the green sand was not green sand at all, but yellow sand and blue sand mixed.
After a while Jibby yawned.
“Well,” he said, “if we are going to get that treasure, we had better be stirring ourselves. Wampus, is Bill Catlin a good-natured man or is he—”
“Aw, quit!” Wampus said, and turned as red as his bee stings. “Bill Catlin is all right. He will lend us a can of kerosene quick enough.”
So we fixed it that we would go up to Bill Catlin’s and get an oil can and some kerosene. Jibby said he would not go.
“Bill don’t know me,” he said, “and he might get frightened if he saw my nose.”
That was a joke, of course, and we coaxed Jibby to go with us, but he would not go. I think he wanted to punish us for not paying attention to him when he tried to tell us in his own way about the bees. He made one excuse after another. He said he looked such a silly that Bill would be afraid to trust us with kerosene if he was along. He said a lot of things like that. Finally he said we had better go without him.
“You needn’t take so long,” he said, “because you can all run fast. I know, because I heard you running.”
We left him lying there and went up through the woods to Bill Catlin’s. He was not at home, but his wife was a nice lady and let us have a gallon can full of kerosene. We stopped to eat a few grapes in Bill Catlin’s vineyard, to keep them from going to waste, and then we started across a field toward the woods again, but we had hardly climbed the fence when we saw Jibby coming toward us. He was on a slow lope, and he waved us back, so we stopped short and waited until he came up to us.
“Wait!” he said, and then he waited until he got his breath. “We’ve got to be careful now. The enemy is at the green sands.”
I laughed. I thought he meant the bees had come down there, or that, maybe, Jibby had run into another nest of them, but it was not that, and it was worse than anything we had ever thought could happen.
Jibby had been lying there on the bank by the green sands waiting for us when, all at once, he heard voices—men’s voices. They were the voices of men coming up the Run, and one or two were complaining that this could not be the right creek, and that they had come more than far enough up it, but others said they had better be sure and go a little farther to see whether there was any green sand.
Jibby put everything that was left of the lunch back in the basket and crept up the bank of the Run and hid the basket. Then he edged along down to where the men were and took a peek at them from the top of the bank. There were ten of them, seven white men and three negroes, and one of the white men had red hair and a scar over his eye. The negroes were loaded down with bags and bundles. They had stopped, and the negroes were complaining that they had carried that stuff far enough for one day. They said there was no hurry, and that the treasure would not get away after it had remained right in one place almost a hundred years, they guessed, and that it was no use working black men to death, anyway.
Then the Red-Headed Bandit swore.
“You-all look mighty sharp you don’t let anything happen to that provender,” he said. “I’m a bad man when I get riled. I’m the great-grandson of my great-grandfather, and he killed more men than there are kinky hairs on all your worthless heads, and I don’t mind killing three more blacks right now, and I’ll do it if you let that food stuff get harmed.”
The other men growled and scowled at the blacks, too, then, and the negroes mumbled and scolded in low voices.
“Tell you what, Jim,” one of them said, “I reckon I feel about like these darks feel. We don’t know that this creek is Murrell’s Run nohow. We might go up and up and get to nowhere in the end. You’s pushin’ us too hard and steady, Jim. To-morrow is another day.”
“Yes, and who knows how long we’ve got to be huntin’ for that treasure, Jake?” the man called Jim answered. “We ain’t got none too much food fora big gang like this, Jake. We-all can’t be skirmishing around the country for food, Jake, when we’re on an exhibition like this.”
He meant expedition.
“No,” Jake said, “but we can’t walk up every creek to the No’th Pole, Jim, either. We ain’t no Stefanssons or Pearys.”
They did not look like it, either, Jibby said. The seven whites looked like the mountaineers he and his father had seen in the Ozarks—Hill-Billies they call them down there. They looked like the laziest lot that ever lived.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Jake,” Jim said then. “Let the darks dump their stuff here, and we’ll go on up the creek a ways and sort of speculate around. That’s fair.”
“You white folks want to walk our foots off!” one of the blacks said then, but he put down his load.
“Hey, there, you!” Jim shouted. “Heft that stuff down easy, can’t you? Ain’t I told you often enough there’s dynamite in that bag?”
“I shore did heft it easy, boss,” the negro said. “I don’t heft no dynamite down hard.”
They talked awhile longer, and the white men decided to let the negroes stay to watch the dunnage, and they started off up the creek. The three black men stretched out on the yellow sand in the sun and got ready to go to sleep, and then Jibby stole away and came for us.
“Aw, pshaw!” Wampus said. “That ends it! Those men have dynamite and everything and they’ll get that treasure, and we’re beaten out of it!”
“Maybe!” Jibby said. “I don’t know yet. I remember when I was in New Orleans with my father and we went down to the levee and a bale of cotton rolled over.”
“What has that got to do with it?” Wampus asked.
“Why, a negro was asleep, stretched out on the ground,” Jibby said, “and the bale of cotton rolled on top of him and across him and then off of him again.”
“Did it kill him?” Skippy asked.
“No,” Jibby said. “That isn’t it. I was just telling you how one of those Southern negroes sleeps when he stretches out in the sun. This one just brushed his hand across his face and said, ‘Shoo fly! go ’way!’ and went on sleeping. Sleeping is the best thing some of those negroes do.”
“Well, what?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” Jibby said. “I was only thinking that the coming of this gang of treasure-hunters is the best luck we’ve had yet. We only guessed there was treasure here; now we know it. Now all we have to do is get rid of these men.”
“And that is so easy! Only ten of them!” I said.
“Well, I am surprised at you, George,” Jibby drawled. “You talk as if they were ten bumblebees.”
“But how are we going to get rid of them?” Wampus asked.
Jibby fondled his nose gently.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “they won’t like it here and will go away without being asked to go.”
Well, I didn’t like it much, but Jibby picked up the oil can and started for the woods along the Run, and, of course, a fellow could not hang back, so we all went. When we were near the edge of the bank, we all got down and wiggled forward until we could look over the edge and down at the place where the three negroes were asleep. They were sound asleep, too—plenty of sound, if you mean the sound of snoring.
The bank was about twelve feet high there, but not straight up and down. It slanted toward the creek and was covered with grass and weeds and a few small bushes as creek banks usually are. The dunnage of the treasure-hunters was piled in one pile close to where the foot of the bank met the sandy stretch on which the three black men were asleep. We looked down awhile, and then wiggled back and got to our feet and went off a few yards to hold a council.
“We’ll take a bunch of rocks and slam them down on those men,” Wampus said. “We’ll scare the life out of them.”
Jibby was hunting around in the bushes, but just then he found what he was looking for—his covered lunch-basket. He took out the green felt bag his cat Orlando had been in and pulled the stout drawstring out of the hem at the mouth of the bag. He tried this over his knee, to see if it was strong, and it was strong.
We were whispering, saying how we could stone those three men, but Jibby unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it over his head and began tearing strips off it. He tied the strips together and tested them at the knots, until he had eight or ten feet of it. Then he picked up the oil can and motioned us to follow him. None of us knew what he was going to do, but we followed him back to the edge of the bank like little lambs. We had had enough lessons that day to know that Jibby Jones mostly knew what he was doing before he started to do it.
When we got to the edge of the bank, Jibby stood up quietly and took hold of a young birch tree that stood near the edge of the bank and bent it back, away from the bank, until it was almost flat on the ground. He motioned Wampus to come and hold it down for him, and then he went and looked down at the dunnage again, and came back and eyed the birch stem and tied the oil can to the stem by its handle. He used the stout string from the green bag. Then he tied one end of the string he had made from the strips of shirt to the bottom of the oil can.
When Jibby had done all this, I began to see what he was up to, and, for once in my life, I guessed right. We let the birch straighten up slowly and then pushed it down again, but this time toward the creek, so it stuck out over the bank, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy and I bore around on it until it held the can of kerosene exactly over the pile of dunnage and food and stuff down below. Then Jibby pulled on the string he had made of the shirt strips and the oil can tipped, and all the oil poured out of the can onto the food and other stuff in the treasure-hunters’ pile. Then we let the tree straighten up slowly again. It was a good job. It had spoiled all that food, because nothing spoils food more than having coal oil on it. We knew from what the treasure-hunters had said that they could not stay there long now; they would have to go away and get more food, probably down the river somewhere.
I would have called that a good job and well done, but you can never tell what Jibby Jones has in his mind. He was taking the pieces of old newspaper out of his lunch-basket and getting handfuls of dry grass, and balling it all up into a big ball, and, when he had done this, he tied the ball around and around with the string he had made of shirt strips.
None of us knew what he was up to, so we just stood and looked, but, when he had the ball all made, he untied the oil can and let the last of the kerosene dribble on the ball. Then he tied the ball to the birch, but a little higher than the can had been tied.
“Now,” he said, “who has a match?”
We all looked, but we did not have a match; not even a broken one, and for a minute Jibby looked pretty blue.
“I ought to have thought of matches,” he said. “When a man goes treasure-hunting he ought to think of everything. I had a bully scheme. I was going to light this fire ball and bend the birch down until it touched that pile of stuff I spilled the kerosene on, and light the whole pile. I don’t know what would have happened, but it would have been something. Maybe the stuff would have burned and maybe the dynamite would have gone off. It would have bothered those fellows a lot, anyway. But now we have no matches.”
“If we had a flint and some steel,” Wampus said, “we could strike fire, maybe.”
“Or if any of us knew how to rub two sticks together and make fire,” I said.
But Jibby Jones was busy before I got it half said. He had his knife out and was scraping the handle of his lunch-basket, getting fine shreds off it, and he splintered some of the basket and made a little pile of sticks, like match-sticks, and the next moment he was down on his stomach holding his magnifying-glass above the little pile so that the concentrated rays of the sun fell full on the lint he had scraped. In another moment a little string of blue smoke began to float upward, and then there was a little flicker of red flame and the whole little pile was ablaze. Jibby fed more pieces of the basket to the pile.
“Now!” he said, “you fellows get some dead wood or broken branches and creep to the edge of the bank. Wampus, I want you to help me weigh this birch down so the fire ball will light that pile of stuff. And the minute it is alight, I want Skippy and Tad and George to slam the dead wood and stuff at those black men, and yell like Indians. Then cut and run. I don’t know how much dynamite there is in that pile, and I don’t know what it will do when it takes a notion to do it.”
We crept back to the edge of the bank and we had plenty of dead wood—big chunks of punk, as we call it—and we were pretty sure there were going to be three surprised black men in about one minute. Jibby lit the fire ball and he and Wampus bore the little birch tree over and bore it down, and he had figured the distance right enough, but the birch would not bear all the way down. It went flat against the top of the bank, but that stopped it and the fire ball was a good two feet above the pile of oil-soaked dunnage and food and dynamite.
“Hold it!” Jibby whispered. “Hold it!” And Wampus knelt on the birch. The fire ball blazed and sent up black smoke, and in less than a minute the string that held it to the birch caught fire and burned through and the fire ball fell on the pile of stuff. It lay there and burned and the top of the pile of stuff caught the flames and began to burn, too.
“Yip! Ye-ow-wow!” Jibby yelled, like a wild Indian, and he picked up a hunk of dead wood and let fly at the negroes, and we all did the same, and yelled as hard as we could.
About six out of ten of the things we threw hit where we meant them to hit, and those three black men jumped to their feet and stared around for just about one second of time. They were scared ash color, and they did not know where they were for a moment, but they saw the black smoke piling up from the pile of dunnage and they started down the Run faster than we had run from the bumblebees.
“Dyn’mite! Dyn’mite!” they shouted, but we did not wait to see or hear any more. Jibby was not waiting. He legged it away from there, and we were not two steps behind him, and when he was deep in the woods he threw himself down, and we did as Jibby did. It seemed the wisest thing to do.
We were no more than flat on the ground before there came a big, flat, heavy sort of “boom!” and then sand and small gravel fell on us like a sort of rain, and Jibby got up. We went back toward the edge of the Run, keeping mighty quiet, and we heard the seven men come loping down the creek, and, when they reached the place where we had blown up their stores, they swore and said they might have known it was not safe to trust those worthless darks.
“We-all sure has got miserable luck,” the man called Jim said, in a most disgusted way. “Just when we find the green sand, we get our stuff blowed to nothing. Now we’ve got to go and get more feed and more dynamite and more everything. It’s bad luck, but I’m right down glad of one thing; them darks was blowed clean to nothing, too.”
They stood there awhile looking at the deep hole the blast had blown in the creek bed, and then they went on down the Run, growling and complaining, and we knew we had a couple of days at least to dig for treasure before they came back. We slid down the bank and took a look at things ourselves. The bushes and grass and weeds had been blown away clean, and there was a hole where the sand had been, ten or twelve feet deep and about twenty-five feet long, and as wide as that.
Jibby Jones sat down on the edge of the hole and began to take off his pants, because he did not have any shirt to take off—he had torn it to strips.
“Wampus,” he drawled out, in that slow way of his, “you take the kerosene can and go back and ask Mrs. Catlin if she will lend us another can of kerosene. I’m going to take a bath in the good old swimming-hole. I thought maybe there would be one on this Run, somewhere.”
And, sure enough, there was the water trickling into that hole, and when Wampus got back with the kerosene, Tad and Jibby and Skippy and I were all in the pool splashing around and having a gay time. Jibby was right; there was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run.
CHAPTER XXIII
TREASURE TROVE
The new swimming-pool that had been dug out in the creek by the explosion was rather muddy, but it was wet, and it was fun to think we were swimming in a pool nobody had ever swam in before. It was like discovering a new ocean or something.
Wampus put down the can of kerosene.
“Come on out,” he said. “If we are going to dig for that land pirate’s treasure to-day, we had better be burning out the bumblebees and getting at it. Bill Catlin was home this time, and he’s coming over. He wanted to know what we were going to do with the kerosene, and I had to tell him, and he’s going to make us give him half of all we find.”
“Why? What right has he to make us do that?” I wanted to know, for I didn’t think Bill Catlin or anybody else had a right to any of that treasure when Jibby had been the only one to think of it being there, and when we had planned so hard to get it.
“Treasure trove, that’s why!” Wampus said.
And just then Bill Catlin came to the edge of the creek bank and looked down at us getting into our clothes.
“Well, boys,” he said, “here I am. I hope we find enough to make us all rich and happy all the rest of our lives. Hurry into your duds and we’ll get busy.”
Jibby Jones was putting on his pants as slow and deliberate as if he had all day to do it in, and right there I made a mistake. I ought to have kept my mouth shut until Jibby had his clothes on and his spectacles on and was ready to talk, because that is always the safe thing to do. But I had to say my say.
“We don’t need any help,” I said. “We don’t want to divide this with anybody. Jibby Jones thought of the treasure being here, and it is going to be ours—all of it.”
“That so?” Bill Catlin asked. “How about treasure trove, my son?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“All I mean,” said Bill Catlin, grinning, “is that it seems to me I’ve heard somewhere that there’s a law of treasure trove, and that half of any hidden treasure that is found on any man’s land belongs to the man that owns the land.”
“All right!” I said, quick. “That settles it. Wampus’s father owns this land and you don’t.”
“I lease it,” said Bill Catlin. “I rent it of Wampus’s father. As I look at it, that gives me everything that is on the land or in the land. Why, I could order Wampus’s father off this land if I wanted to, or the whole lot of you, for that matter. I could sue you for trespass this very minute, if I wanted to, for coming on this land. Sure, I could! I guess that makes me even better than the owner. I guess it entitles me to half the treasure we find.”
What Bill Catlin said took all the wind out of my sails in a second. There was one sail it did not take the wind out of, though; that was the jib on Jibby Jones’s face—the nose he called his jib sail. Jibby was hitching up his trousers as if Bill Catlin or nothing in the world mattered a cent.
“Is that so, Jibby?” Tad Willing asked.
“He can order us off the place,” Jibby drawled in his slow way, “and he can sue us for trespass if we don’t go. I know that, because once, when father was digging for mastodon bones in a cornfield in Arizona, the man that owned the farm ordered father off and father did not want to go. So the man hit father on the head with a club, and father sued him for damages, and the justice of the peace made the man pay father five dollars for hitting him, and made father pay the man five dollars for trespassing, and neither of them had five dollars.”
“What did they do? Go to jail?” asked Bill Catlin.
“No, sir,” Jibby said. “The justice of the peace lent father five dollars and father paid the man with it, and then the man paid father with it, and then father paid it back to the justice of the peace. Father says the justice said then, ‘There! I hope that will be a lesson to both of you. You have got off easy. If I had been hard-hearted, I would have made you pay each other ten dollars apiece, and I haven’t got but eight dollars and sixty cents, so where would you have been then?’”
Bill Catlin laughed, and that made him like Jibby Jones right away, because laughing and liking are always close together.
“I bet they would have gone to jail, just because they lacked a little common sense,” Bill Catlin said. “If I had been there, I could have fixed it up easy. I would have had your father borrow the eight dollars and sixty cents and pay the man, and then your father would have owed him only one dollar and forty cents. Then I would have had the man pay the money back to your father and the man would have owed your father only one dollar and forty cents. Then your father would have given the eight dollars and sixty cents back to the justice, and he wouldn’t have owed him anything. And then all your father would have had to do would have been to borrow one dollar and forty cents from the justice, and when it had passed around, the whole ten dollars would have been paid. Nobody would have owed anybody anything. Your father and the man could have paid each other a million dollars that way. You’ve got to use common sense.”
“Yes, sir,” Jibby said politely.
It pleased Bill Catlin to have an intelligent-looking boy with tortoise-shell spectacles take what he said so seriously, and he was mighty tickled.
“You’ve got common sense, and education, too; I can see that,” he said to Jibby, which wasn’t saying anything very nice to us, as I looked at it, but we didn’t say anything, because we saw Jibby was going to talk again.
“Yes, sir,” Jibby said, as if he was pleased to have Bill Catlin compliment him that way. “I do try to know something; I find it comes in handy sometimes. I think it is better than just thinking you know something. My father says so. My father says it is foolish to read in a story book that a man made a trip to the moon and then to think you know that a man did make a trip to the moon; my father says it is better to find out the true facts first.”
“And your father knows what he is talking about,” Bill Catlin said.
“Yes, sir,” said Jibby Jones meekly; and then he added, in the same meek way, “What book did you read about treasure trove in, Mr. Catlin?”
Well, Bill Catlin sort of looked at Jibby as if he hadn’t seen him before. He stared at him. Then he got red in the face.
“What did you ask that for?” he wanted to know.
“Because in the books I read,” Jibby said, “I couldn’t find anything about halves and halves when you find treasure. Of course,” he added, “I only read some encyclopædias and law books and things like that, as anybody would when they start out to dig for treasure. I don’t believe even the biggest book weighed over ten pounds, and only a part of that one was about hidden treasure, so maybe what I think I know don’t amount to much.”
Then Bill Catlin asked him what he had found in the books, and Jibby said that “treasure trove” meant any gold or silver or money found hidden in the ground or in any private place, the ownership of which was unknown. In England, Jibby said, the treasure that was found belonged to the king and not to the finder, but, if the owner was known or was discovered later, the treasure belonged to the owner, and not to the king or the finder at all, and if the finder kept it or hid it he could be jailed.
“You don’t mean it!” Bill Catlin exclaimed.
“Yes, sir; that’s what the books say,” Jibby said. “And in the United States there isn’t any such thing as treasure trove at all. When anything is found on the land, it belongs to the man that finds it, unless he knows the true owner, and then it belongs to the true owner, just as if it was a cow or a suit of clothes or a bushel of apples.”
“Then I don’t come in at all, hey?” Bill Catlin said.
“No, sir,” Jibby said, “but all we have found so far is an old 1804 dollar.”
“Oh, I don’t want that,” said Bill Catlin carelessly. He was very much disappointed; I guess he had expected to get fifty thousand dollars, maybe. “Well,” he said, “I’ll go along and help you burn out the bees, anyway.”
We were all ready to start then, and Wampus picked up the can of kerosene and waded across the creek, and Tad and Skippy Root and I followed him. Jibby sort of waited for Bill Catlin while Bill slid down the bank, and just then we heard voices of men. The men were coming up the creek, and we knew them by their voices. They were the Jim and Jake and the rest that had been up the creek before—the tough customers that had come all the way from Arkansas to hunt for the Murrell treasure. They were coming back.
I ran up the bank of the creek in a hurry, and so did Wampus and Tad and Skippy. I thought sure there was going to be trouble if those men caught us, and I looked through the trees toward the road, all ready to run for it. What I saw made me look twice.
“Gee whiz!” I said. “Look there, will you!”
It was enough to make any one look. What Wampus had said to his folks must have leaked out, or something, for it looked as if every man and boy in Riverbank was coming up the road toward the dead pine to dig for that land pirate’s treasure. It looked like ten thousand, but I guess it was only about a thousand men and boys. There were old men that could hardly walk, and boys that were so young they could hardly walk, and middle-aged men, and even a few women and some girls, and they all had spades or picks or shovels. There were plenty of boys—dozens of them. And our old friend, the Tough Customer tramp, was right there in the front of them all.
I was still looking when Jibby Jones and Bill Catlin climbed the bank to where they could see that great army of treasure-hunters coming up the road. Jibby was talking to Bill Catlin, telling him who the men were that were coming up the creek, and the minute he saw the crowd on the road he thought of something. None of the rest of us would have thought of it, but Jibby did.
“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “just look at that crowd! They’re coming to dig for treasure, and I shouldn’t wonder if all the rest of Riverbank came next. It is like a rush to the gold fields, or to the oil fields. Everybody that can come is coming. Why don’t you make some money out of it?”
“Money? I’m always glad enough to make money,” said Bill Catlin, “but how can I make money out of that crowd?”
“You can’t out of all of them,” Jibby said, “but you can out of some of them. You could make, anyway, a dollar apiece out of a lot of them. It’s the kind of treasure trove we can go half and half on. You have a right to keep all the people off this part of your farm, and you have a right to charge them a dollar apiece for letting them come on it and dig for treasure. If you say so Wampus and George and Skippy and Tad will do the collecting. We’ll collect a dollar apiece and give you half of it.”
Bill Catlin thought it over and said:
“All right; that’s a go.”
By that time the seven pirate money-hunters had come up the creek and were climbing the bank to where we were. They looked mean, too. The one called Jim, who was the old land pirate’s great-grandson, came right up to us and said:
“Look here! Are you the folks that blew up our stuff? We don’t stand for any business like that. You hadn’t any right to do it, and for half a cent we’d light into you and break you into pieces and chew you up. Now, we’ve got business here and we want you to get away from here and stay away.”
“Yes, sir,” Jibby Jones said in his solemn way. “Maybe we will. We didn’t know you owned this farm. We thought Wampus Smale’s father owned it, and that Mr. Catlin here rented it. We thought that anybody that came on the farm without Mr. Catlin’s permission was trespassing and could be put in jail or something. Why, look at all the people!”
The man named Jim climbed up the bank and looked. He swore.
“What’s that crowd?”
“They’re going to hunt for some old land pirate’s treasure, I guess,” Jibby said. “I guess they think there is some of it hidden around here somewhere. But Mr. Catlin thought we would charge them a dollar apiece for letting them hunt it. We didn’t know you owned this land.”
“A dollar, hey?” said the land pirate’s great-grandson. “Well, we’ll give you a dollar apiece—seven dollars for the seven of us—if that’s what you want.”
“Thank you,” Jibby said very politely, and, while the land pirate’s great-grandson was counting out the money, he told Wampus and Skippy and Tad and Mr. Catlin and me to go and stop the crowd and tell them it cost a dollar a day to hunt land pirate’s treasure on this farm. “And tell them to look out for the bumblebees,” he said. “We wouldn’t like the whole of Riverbank to get all stung up when all they are doing is trying to get the treasure before we get it.”
So Bill Catlin and all us boys but Jibby ran toward the crowd to tell them, and one of the first men we saw was the sheriff. We boys did not know him very well, but Bill Catlin did, and he went up to him and warned him that coming on the farm was trespass and that he looked to the sheriff to warn everybody and to keep off himself.
The sheriff hated it, but he had to do it, because it was his duty. He turned and held up both hands, to stop the crowd.
“But you can tell them,” Bill Catlin said, just before the sheriff spoke up, “that they can come on the farm and hunt treasure for one dollar each per day.”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE TREASURE
So that was what the sheriff told them, and at first there was a good deal of complaining, but, when they saw that the sheriff and Bill Catlin meant it, they formed in line at the corner, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus and me collected the dollars. Every time we took a dollar we said, “Thank you. Look out for bumblebees under the old dead pine there,” and they did look out. Most of them went a good distance around the old pine, and every one of them made a straight line for the old tumbledown farmhouse as soon as they were safe from the bees. Some that did not have money to pay the dollar borrowed some from others, but a few could not get in. But I’ve got to tell you what Jibby was doing.
As soon as Jibby had the seven dollars from the Arkansas men he said:
“All right, you can hunt treasure now, until midnight, but if you don’t find it by then it will cost you another seven dollars.”
“Don’t you worry, son,” the man named Jim said. “We’ll find what there is to find before sundown, and if you hadn’t blown up our dynamite we would have found it in half an hour. We know where it is.”
“That’s good,” said Jibby Jones. “My father always says it is wise to know what you are going to do before you do it. So I guess you know the law about hidden treasure, too?”
“It belongs to the man that owned it in the first place,” said the man named Jim, “and I guess that as good as means me. I didn’t come all the way up here from Arkansas without getting ready beforehand, like your father says to. I’ve got papers here to prove that I’m the great-grandson of old John A. Murrell, the land pirate, and that I’m his only heir. So that settles that! If great-grandfather was alive, it would be his treasure, and if any other Murrells were alive part of the treasure would be theirs, but I’m the only one alive, so it is mine. That’s all fixed, and if there is any treasure there I get half, and these six friends of mine divide the other half among them. That so, men?”
The six tough-looking Arkansans said it was so.
“Go and get it, then,” Jibby Jones said.
Jim and Jake and the other five got together and talked awhile in whispers, looking out through the trees now and then. They were making plans. The crowd from Riverbank was so big it couldn’t all get inside the ruined farmhouse and those that couldn’t were digging outside of it, and the whole lot—those inside and those outside—were shouting and quarreling and carrying on the way money-crazy people do. It was like a riot or something, and all the while more strings of people were coming up the road and stopping to pay us a dollar, and then rushing for the old farmhouse, afraid they would not get there in time.
The seven Arkansans had their spades and shovels and picks, and they got together in a bunch, and when Jim gave the word they started across the weedy field with a rush, and straight for the old signal pine, too. Jibby watched them until they were halfway across the field, and then he came wandering toward where we boys and Bill Catlin were collecting money from the late comers. We had our pockets full of silver dollars and bills and small change.
“That’s pretty good,” Jibby said, “but we made one mistake.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Do you mean we should have brought a gunnysack to carry the money in?”
“No,” he said; “we ought to have advertised in the Riverbank ‘Eagle’—the weekly edition of it that goes to the farmers. Everybody in town knows about the hidden treasure by now, but the farmers don’t. We ought to have put an advertisement in the paper so the farmers could have paid us a dollar apiece, too. But I suppose no one can think of everything.”
We all turned just then, because one of the Arkansas men had let out a yell. A bumblebee had just stung him. The next moment another one let out a yell; he had got his sting, too.
The Arkansas men had gone at the old pine tree slam bang, because they knew they had to work fast. They knew that, as soon as the men and boys by the farmhouse saw them digging at the tree, there would be a rush for the tree, so they all piled into the work at once and as hard as they could, and there is nothing bumblebees hate so much as they hate just that. They hate hurry.
In a moment the whole seven Arkansans were hopping and swearing and slashing at their necks and beating at the air, but they kept right on digging and picking and whacking at the tree. They made more than chips fly. Whang would go a pick into the dead wood and out would come a big slice of tree, and all the while the whole seven were jumping and yelling and cussing like crazy men.
Then some of the crowd began to run from the old farmhouse toward the old pine, and then others began to run, but, when the first man came near the tree, he yelled like fury and slapped the back of his neck and began to dance, and then he ran. He ran zigzag, but he ran away from the tree. The rest of the Riverbankers stopped, and when he reached them they asked what was the matter and he must have said “Bees!” for they all crowded back. They made me think of the mob in a movie. They went back a step at a time as if a director was saying, “Now! Mob—back one step; show fear; back another step!” Only it was bees doing the directing this time.
Then the Arkansans gave it up, all but Jim. He wrapped his coat around his head and dug and hopped but of a sudden he dropped his pick and hit himself in four or six places and jerked the coat from his head and came loping toward us sweeping the air with the coat, all around his head. He had not found the treasure, but he had found the bees’ nest, and as he came toward us we scooped up the money and held our pockets and ran.
We had so much money we were weighted down with it, and we had to run easy or spill it, but we made pretty good time. Not a bee got us. We ran down the road toward Riverbank a hundred yards or so, and that was far enough, for the seven Arkansans only came about fifty yards and they were making it lively for the bumblebees, and the bumblebees were making it lively for them. Neither of them had time for anything else just then.
While we were all scattered that way, we saw one man come out of the Riverbank crowd and walk right up to the dead pine. It was the Tough Customer. He had tied his pants tight around his ankle, and he had pulled his shirt up around his head, and he had his one woolen sock on one hand for a mitten and a red handkerchief tied around the other hand. With his coat on, there wasn’t a place a bee could get at him, and he hobbled right up to the dead pine and picked up the pick Jim had thrown down, and began to dig.
Jibby Jones looked disgusted.
“Dear me!” he said. “I don’t like that at all! I did hope we might find that treasure ourselves, but I certainly think it is a shame for the Tough Customer to find it after all the trouble we took to make him depart.”
This was too much for Wampus.
“What do you care who digs it up, Jibby?” he asked. “That Jim fellow gets it, anyway. You said yourself that, no matter whose land it was found on and no matter who found it, the treasure belonged to whoever owned it first. It wouldn’t be us, if we found it, and it won’t be the Tough Customer, if he finds it. The treasure will belong to that Jim man from Arkansas, because he is the heir of old John A. Murrell, and John A. Murrell was the first owner.”
The only answer Jibby gave to that was to reach out a hand and feel of Wampus’s shirt, but he didn’t like the feel of it, so he felt of mine and he seemed to like it better.
“Take off your shirt, George,” he said, slow and calm, as if he had all day to waste, and he took off his own shoes and pulled off his socks. “I don’t think that tramp has brains,” he said, “but I think he has robbed honey hives, and sometimes experience is as good as brains.”
I had my shirt off now, for I can work pretty quick when I have to, and then Jibby began pulling it over his head.
“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “I see those Arkansawyers are not fighting bees now”—but how he saw that with my shirt over his head I don’t know—“and they are not digging treasure. They seem to be looking at the sheriff as if they did not like him. And I never did like them much. I never did think that men who come sneaking up a creek or up any back way were thoroughly honest men. I wonder if it would be a good thing for the sheriff to walk over to them and tell them that they have gone off the farm into the road and that they will have to pay another dollar to get back onto the farm again? If you think that would be a good thing, and you want to tell it to the sheriff, maybe you had better tell the sheriff to pin on his badge so it can be seen.”
Bill Catlin grinned.
“I think it might be a good thing,” he laughed.
“Thank you,” Jibby said, “and it might not hurt anybody if the sheriff ran toward the Arkansawyers to tell them. Maybe they would like to know it as soon as possible, so they can make plans.”
Jibby was ready now to go and help the Tough Customer dig treasure and he started. He did not bother to try to see what the Arkansawyers did, but we saw. They were standing in the road, looking at the sheriff and the badge on his coat, and were talking among themselves when Bill Catlin went up to the sheriff and spoke to him and pointed to the Arkansas men. The sheriff nodded his head, and looked down to see that his badge was in plain sight, and then he started for the seven Arkansas men, going pretty fast. Those seven men took one look at him and at Bill Catlin and turned and ran across country, jumping the fence and getting away from there as fast as they could.
That was the last we ever saw of them. I don’t know what was on their minds, but they must have had mighty guilty consciences about something. Guilty consciences have no use for a sheriff.
There were plenty of bumblebees left by the old pine tree, and the Tough Customer had to keep batting at the holes in his shirt that he had made to see through, but Jibby had the best of that because he was wearing his tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles, and no bee, not even a bumblebee, can sting through glass. He picked up a spade and began to dig, and he had hardly stuck spade into the ground twice before he had hit a metal box. He jammed the spade in again, and pried on the handle and up came the box. He did not wait there. He grabbed the box and ran.
The Tough Customer could not see very well, but he knew somebody was getting something that he was not getting and he pulled his shirt from his head. It was a bad mistake. Jibby was gone and the treasure box was gone, but the bees were not all gone. One of them told the Tough Customer so and told him quick and hard, and for the next minute the Tough Customer was not thinking of treasure; he was thinking of bees.
Jibby came running to where we were, and the whole of Riverbank—or all those that had come out to hunt treasure—came running after him, to see what he had found. They got to us just as we had all crowded around Jibby and when he was stamping on the box with his heel to break it open. It broke open easy enough.
I jumped at it and grabbed for the gold money that was in it. It was not much; it was only one hundred gold pieces—ten-dollar pieces—one thousand dollars in all, but Jibby was opening a faded piece of old paper that had been in the box.
The writing on the paper was so old we could hardly read it, but we did make it out. This is what it said:
John—I have abided in this locality twenty years now, but no word from you and very poor living here, so mean to go to California, thinking shall do better gold mining than farming. Am taking that which you left with me and will keep it twenty more years, as you said to do, before I touch any of it. If you hunt me look for me near a signal pine as agreed. I am leaving one thousand dollars in case you come and need it to pay expenses. It is part of what you sent.
Murrell
So that was what the land pirate’s treasure amounted to, but one thousand dollars is a lot better than nothing. I believe one man from Riverbank did go to California to look for a signal pine and to hunt for treasure under it, but probably he did not find it. There are millions of pine trees in California, or trees that would do for pine trees.
When we counted up, we found we had taken in eight hundred and fifty-six dollars from the Riverbank treasure-hunters, and we got half of it, which was eighty-five dollars and sixty cents apiece for Jibby Jones and Wampus and Skippy Root and Tad and me, because we had to give Bill Catlin his half first. And then we got two hundred dollars apiece of the one thousand dollars that was in the box that Jibby had dug up. We didn’t send it to Jim from Arkansas, even if he was John A. Murrell’s great-grandson. I’ll tell you why.
When Jibby was opening the box, the Tough Customer and nearly all the Riverbankers came crowding around to see what Jibby had found, and when they saw, one of the men said:
“Pshaw! Only a thousand dollars! That don’t amount to much.”
“No,” I said, “and we can’t keep it, anyway, because in this country hidden treasure has to be given back to whoever the first owner was, or to his heirs, and we know who the first owner was and we know who his heir is.”
Right there Jibby Jones surprised us.
“No,” he said, “we don’t know. We’re going to keep this money ourselves, because we don’t know who the real owner was, and we never can find out.”
“Why can’t we?” I asked him.
“Because nobody in the world knows who the first owner was,” Jibby said. “John A. Murrell never did own it; he stole it. The man he stole it from was the real owner, and John A. Murrell never did have any right to have it. And how can you ever find out who owned it away back in 1835? Nobody could do that. So it is ours and we’ll keep it.”
And we did. We were just starting back for town when all at once Jibby Jones stopped short.
“Wait!” he said. “I’ve almost forgotten something. I’ve got to go back to the creek.”
“My land!” Wampus said. “What for?”
“To get two grains of that green sand for my collection of grains of sand,” Jibby said. “You can never tell what will happen. To-morrow, or before I have a chance to get a specimen, my father may decide to go to Chile or China or Chattanooga. But, hold on a minute!”
He sat down at the edge of the road and took off his shoe and looked in it.
“It’s all right!” he said. “We can go on back to town. I’ve got five or six grains right here in my shoe.”
So that was how we went back to town from our treasure-hunting. Skippy and Tad and Wampus and I carried the money and Jibby Jones came along behind us with one shoe on, carrying the other shoe in both hands as if it was a plate of soup, because I do believe he was more interested in not losing those grains of green sand than in all the treasure John A. Murrell ever hid.