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
First of all, Jibby unpinned the map from inside his hat and spread it
out on the bottom of an old tin bucket. If the paper wasn’t old, it
looked old, and was stained and yellow. The whole map wasn’t much bigger
than my hand. First, we looked at the back of it, and there was the word
“Riverbank” written as plain as could be. Then Jibby turned the map
over. We all leaned over and looked at it.
The map was exactly as the Tough Customer had explained it to the Rat.
There was the river marked “river,” and the slough, and the creek
emptying into the slough, and the crossroads, and the house, and the “X”
where the treasure was probably buried, and the arrow pointing north.
There was the “2-3 miles” and the “Greenland.”
“That’s it, all right!” Wampus said. “That’s just about the way the
creek comes into Greenland Slough, and just about the way Greenland
Slough comes into the river. And look where the ‘X’ is. A straight line
across the back of the square that stands for the house would go right
spang to that ‘X.’ That’s where the treasure is, sure! Unless it is
where the head of the arrow points, where the creek crosses the road.”
Jibby drew a deep, solemn breath, if you can call a breath solemn. He
looked at us with something like awe in his eyes.
“Boys,” he said, “this is the real map! Whoever drew it, and whatever it
was drawn for, this is a real land pirate map. Because that’s not an
arrow. That’s a pine tree--a signal pine tree; that’s a John A. M’rell
signal pine!”
As soon as Jibby said it, we all wondered why we hadn’t known it from
the first minute. It looked like a pine tree, once anybody said so, and
it was in the corner of the lot, where all the John A. Murrell signal
pines were.
We were all excited, and we wished it was the next day, so we could get
to hunting the treasure, but Jibby Jones just stared at the map and
turned it one way and another. By and by he said:
“Have any of you ever been up there at Greenland?”
We all had, and we told him so. He asked what the store and post-office
were like, and we told him the store was the post-office, and that it
was an old frame building, painted white, with a big porch in front and
a roof over the porch, and usually some boxes and barrels on the porch.
Close back of the store was a shed, open toward the store, where some
lumber, and lime in barrels, and cement in bags, and drain tile, and
bales of hay, and barrels of salt, and so on, were stored. And alongside
of the shed was a big red barn, with old wagons and empty boxes and
barrels and the usual store litter scattered in the yard the three
buildings made.
“The shed and the barn don’t show on the map,” Jibby said.
“No. Maybe they were built later, after the map was made,” Skippy said,
and Jibby thought that might be so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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