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
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?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account