“I’m a butter-in at this game,” he said, “so you fellows go ahead and pick out your places first, and then I’ll take mine.” I suppose we ought to have let Jibby have first choice, but we didn’t think of it. Wampus rowed to the place he liked best and let down his anchor rock, and then the rest of us got as close to him as Uncle Oscar’s rules allowed. One boat-length away from each other was the rule. The other rules were that every fish counted. The one of us that got the most fish, no matter what size, scored twenty-five. The one that got the one biggest fish scored another twenty-five. The one that got the biggest weight of fish, after they were cleaned and ready to cook, scored fifty. That made the most that could be scored one hundred. We were to fish from one o’clock until five o’clock that afternoon, and we all had lunch--sandwiches and apples and bananas and water--so we could eat whenever we wanted to. The only other rule was that it was all worm fishing; we had to use worms for bait. As soon as Wampus got his boat settled, he baited up and put his line over, and we all hustled up and did the same thing. In a minute, almost, Wampus shouted: “First fish!” He had it, too. It was a good channel catfish, and when he unhooked it he held it up and shouted: “Oh, you Jibby! Come on with your fishing!” Jibby hadn’t rowed out from the shore yet. Now he backed his skiff out carefully and leaned over while he rowed with one oar, and sniffed at the water over the side of the boat. He rowed here and he rowed there, and then, all of a sudden, he backed water and plumped his rock overboard and anchored. He was about twenty-five feet from us. “Well,” Wampus said, “maybe he didn’t smell fish there, but he picked out a good place. I thought some of fishing there myself.” Jibby took his time. He shortened up the rope to his rock anchor, and he looked to see that his fishpole and line and hook were just as he wished them to be, and he took out a pocket rule and measured how deep his bobber was set, as if it had to be just right to a part of an inch. Then he put his line over very carefully and--whang!--the bobber went under like a flash. “Jibby’s got one!” I shouted. “Shut up!” Wampus said, sort of cross. “We can’t catch anything if you yell all the time.” So we kept quiet and watched Jibby and our own bobbers. He had a perch, and it was a big one, almost three pounds. Wampus opened his eyes some when he saw it, because a three-pound perch is a good-sized fish and might be good for twenty-five points if nobody got a bigger one. Just then Skippy pulled in a mud catfish about as big as his hand, so we all got busy fishing as hard as we knew how.