Jibby Jones : $b A story of Mississippi River adventure for boysButler, Ellis Parker
General
Jibby Jones : $b A story of Mississippi River adventure for boys
Butler, Ellis Parker
Adventure and adventurers -- Juvenile fiction; Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Mississippi River -- Juvenile fiction
“George,” he said, as we went along, “that Tough Customer was out behind
Wampus’s woodshed, listening. I thought he would be. I picked out that
woodshed on purpose, because the Tough Customer could hear us through
the cracks in it. And we have no skunk at our house. We’ve got a
black-and-white cat we call Orlando. But imagination is a great thing,
George. I said it was. I imagined, for a while, that Orlando was a
skunk.”
I laughed. I thought Jibby was trying to be funny.
“I didn’t want to bother Wampus and Tad and Skippy, George,” Jibby said,
“but we’ve got some work to do to-night. Come to my house right after
supper and bring a lantern. I have one, too.”
He would not say any more, so after supper I took my lantern and went to
Jibby’s. We walked out to the old Murrell farm, and when we got there we
went into the tumbledown old brick farmhouse and down into the cellar,
where the dry well was. The old rotten boards were just as we had left
them last Saturday, and Jibby Jones put them over the well, fixing them
carefully, and sprinkled dry dirt all over them.
“I saw the natives make an elephant trap in India this way once,” he
said. “I saw them catch a wild elephant. He was a tough customer.”
“You don’t think you’ll catch an elephant here, do you?” I asked him.
“No,” Jibby said, “but I expect I may catch a Tough Customer.”
So then we went home. The next morning we were all on hand at nine
o’clock at Jibby’s, and we started for the Murrell farm. We hiked along
at a good rate, saying “hep! hep! hep!” to keep in step, or singing
something to keep step by. We had all the things Jibby had told us to
bring, and he had a big market-basket with a lid.
“It is all right,” Jibby whispered to me once. “The Tough Customer is
following us.”
About half a mile this side of the Murrell farm, Jibby said he was tired
and sat down by the side of the road to rest. There was a long osage
orange hedge there, and we sat with it behind us.
“Now, listen,” he said, when we were seated. “Before we get to work to
dig that treasure, we’ll go to the Run and get some of that green sand
for my collection. It won’t take half an hour; we’ll have plenty of
time. Nobody is going to guess that the treasure is under the bottom of
the old dry well in the cellar of the old brick farmhouse at the
crossroads where the broken, dead pine tree is.”
“But--” said Wampus.
“You be still!” Jibby said. “Sometimes I think you talk too much. I’m
hungry. I’m going to eat something.”
He opened the basket and gave us each a sandwich, and they did taste
good! We sat there eating.
“But you said the treasure was under the pine tree,” Wampus said then.
“Yes, I said that, and that is where it is,” Jibby Jones said then, “but
just now the Tough Customer was behind the hedge here listening, and I
wanted him to think it was in the well in the cellar. But now we can
talk; he is not here now. Look up the road.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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