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
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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