“I don’t know why they chased me,” he said, as if his feelings were hurt that anybody should. “I wasn’t doin’ harm. I just sat down on the edge of their pesky little shanty-boat to rest my legs, and they come at me, yellin’ and shoutin’, and chased me.” He made a move to wipe the sweat off his face, and when he opened his hand there was a piece of paper crumpled in it. “Huh!” he said. “There it be, hey? I thought I’d lost it, bein’ chased.” “What is it?” I asked him. He spread it out on his knee. “Month or so ago,” he said, “I was speculatin’ through the swamp yonder and I come onto a grape tree--” Well, we knew what a grape tree was. A grape tree is not a tree that bears grapes the way an apple tree bears apples. A grape tree is a tree the wild grapevines have climbed over until you can’t see the tree and can only see masses and masses of grapevine. And one year one of these trees will have bushels and bushels of wild grapes, and no other grape trees around there will have any. The man that can find a good grape tree and get the grapes off it is lucky. “I come onto this grape tree a month or so ago,” Uncle Beeswax said, “and I made a map showin’ whereabouts it was, so I could go back to it when the grapes was ripe. And to-day I was tryin’ to find it, but I couldn’t. The skeeters got too bad for me before I traced to the tree. So I was settin’ on this shanty-boat lookin’ at my map I had made--” “And they came up?” Wampus asked. “That’s it, then. Those men lost a map, and they want it, and they thought you had it. They wanted to get it away from you.” Uncle Beeswax’s face wrinkled, and we knew he was grinning. “If that’s all,” he said, “they can have it. I don’t want it. It ain’t no good, noway. I can’t make nothing out of it myself, and they can’t neither.” So, at that, Skippy Root stood up and yelled at the Tough Customer. “Hey!” he yelled. “He hasn’t got your map! All he’s got is a map of a grape tree. You can see it, if you want to.” The Tough Customer and the Rat consulted together, and the Tough Customer came to their side of the creek, and Jibby Jones took the map of the swamp and grape tree and went over to them and showed it to them. It satisfied them that Uncle Beeswax did not have their map. So Jibby told them, straight and plain, that if anybody had their map we had it, and that we meant to keep it. Then he asked them if they had found anything. The Tough Customer told him it was none of his business what they had found or what they hadn’t found, and then he and the Rat went back toward their shanty-boat and Jibby climbed up our bank of the creek. Uncle Beeswax had got onto his feet again and was going away, but, as Jibby’s head came up over the edge of the bank, Uncle Beeswax stopped dead short and looked at Jibby and stared at him with his mouth wide open. “Noble!” he said, when he had stared and stared. “Just plumb noble, and there ain’t any other words for it! What a nose! What a nose!”