For a while nothing much happened. It got along to the first of September, and all of us had to leave Birch Island and go back down to Riverbank, because we had to go to school. Old Uncle Beeswax came to the island a day or so before we left, and he said the Tough Customer and the Rat had given up digging for the land pirate’s treasure. Uncle Beeswax had hardly gone when we saw the Tough Customer’s old shanty-boat floating down the river, past our island, and we knew they had given up hope and were going away. It did seem as if the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company had had about as bad luck as the Tough Customer, too, and that our hunting had been wasted. We thought the treasure was a fake, and that there wasn’t any, and that if there was we were all through with it. But we were not through with it yet, not by a long shot! If we had known the truth, we were just at the beginning of it. A couple of days before we were to go down to town, all four of us were out there on the riverbank with the different things we had collected during the summer, making up our minds what we would keep and take home with us and what we would throw away. I was there, and so were Skippy Root and Tad Willing and Wampus Smale, and we had all our curiosities spread out, when up came Jibby Jones. He stood there looking at our curiosities, with his hands behind his back, and he did look funny with his tortoise-shell spectacles and his big nose like the jib of a boat and a suit that needed to grow a lot before it was big enough for him. “You’ve got a nice lot of things,” he said. And we had, too. You can find a lot of dandy curiosities up there on that island and around the river. We had chunks of rock from the ripraps with fossils in them, and carnelians from the levee, and turtle shells without the turtles in them, and roots that looked like snakes or people, and about six kinds of mussel shells, and some birds’ eggs--we had a whole lot of dandy things. It looked like about a ton when we had them all spread out before us. They were fine for our collections. “Where are yours?” Wampus asked Jibby. Jibby had had some bully news to tell us a couple of days before. His folks were going to stay in Riverbank all winter, because Jibby’s father was writing a book or something. “If you haven’t got any shells and rocks and things,” Tad said to Jibby, “you’d better get them now. Maybe you’ll go away in the spring, and maybe this is your last chance to get them. There is plenty of time yet.” “Thank you,” Jibby said, “but I don’t want to get any.” “Don’t you collect anything?” Skippy asked. “I thought everybody had a collection of some kind.” “Oh, yes!” Jibby said. “I do collect. I have a collection. But I don’t collect big things any more. My father put a stop to it years ago.” “What were you collecting then?” Wampus asked.