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.