Maybe feeling sorry that Jibby had to go away was what made us feel so glad he had found that pearl and did not have to go. Teasing him had come to be part of the fun we counted on having, and, when we saw old Jib come out of his cottage, one or the other of us would nearly always say: “There’s Jibby--let’s go tell him something about the river.” And between-times we thought up things to tell him. But all the time we were getting to like him more and more. A couple of days after Mr. Willing had bought the pearl, Skippy and Wampus and Tad and I were under my folks’ cottage, because it was raining. There was always plenty to do on the island, enough kinds of fun each summer to keep us busy ten years, and on rainy days we could always sit under one of the cottages and whittle or talk or make mud statues. The rain was coming down in regular slats, as if it meant to rain all day and all night, and we were talking about one thing and another when Jibby Jones came dodging through the rain and looked in at us. “Hello, Main Mast,” Skippy called out to him; “lower yourself and blow in out of the rain.” Sometimes we called him “Main Mast” and sometimes we called him “Jibby”; he never cared what we called him. So he came in out of the wet and sat on a box. For a minute or two he watched us making mud animals, or whittling, or whatever we were doing. Then he said: “Do you know whether anybody named M’rell ever lived in Riverbank, or down below Riverbank, or up here above Riverbank? A man named M’rell?” “No,” I said, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy said the same. None of us had ever heard of anybody named M’rell. “Nobody named that ever lived around here that I ever heard of,” Tad said. “Why?” “I thought maybe you did know of somebody named M’rell that had lived somewhere around here,” Jibby said. “Orpheus Cadwallader might know,” I said, for Orpheus was the caretaker of the island and knew nearly everybody up and down the river. And then we talked about something else, and that was a pity, for if we had asked Jibby another question about M’rell just then, we might have saved a lot of time in starting our hunt for the land pirate’s treasure. If we had asked him how he spelled M’rell, we might have saved weeks and weeks. So, after half an hour or so, Jibby spoke of M’rell again. “When I was down on the St. Francis River--” he began, and we all yelled, because the rivers Jibby had been on were getting to be a joke. You couldn’t mention a thing but it reminded Jibby of some river he had been on--the Nile or the Hudson or the Amazon or some other river. It was all true enough, too, because his father wrote books about rivers and had been on most of the rivers in the world, and had taken Jibby there; but it was a sort of joke the way old Jibby was always dragging in a river, no matter what we were talking about. So he waited until we stopped hooting, and then he went on.