He said this while we were going back to Riverbank in the dark. The dollar was all we had found, although we had searched the whole of the old brick house, but Jibby Jones had not helped us hunt; he had stood by an old pine tree doing nothing but thinking. He said he had to think where the land pirate or his man would most likely hide the treasure. And Jibby Jones said he had thought of the place. “I’ll tell you,” he said, as we went along toward home, “but you must not breathe a word of it. It won’t do to let anybody know about the treasure or anything. The rush for the Klondike gold fields would be nothing beside the rush the people here in Riverbank would make for that treasure, if they knew there was a treasure.” “That’s right!” Wampus Smale said. “Everybody in town would pile out there and dig for it.” “Well, this is how I thought out where the treasure is,” Jibby said, and we all crowded close to him so that he would not have to talk very loud. “I leaned up against that old pine tree and I tried to imagine I was old John A. Murrell, the land pirate. That’s what you have to do if you want to get anywhere in this world--you’ve got to imagine things.” Well, we stopped and had an argument right there! That sounded to us like the most foolish thing anybody could say--that the way to get anywhere was to imagine something. “I don’t believe that,” Skippy Root said. “I believe that the way to get anywhere is to start right out and go there, and I believe that the way to get anything is to start right after it and get it. It don’t do any good for real folks to imagine anything at all; it may be all right for poets and story-writers to imagine things and then write them--that’s their sort of business--but it is a waste of time for anybody else to go and imagine things.” “Is it?” Jibby Jones asked. “I didn’t know that. I always thought it was the other way.” Well, that made us stop a little. Jibby Jones wasn’t half such a fool as he looked, and we had found that out. At first we had sort of figured that he was a silly, because he was almost six feet tall and wore clothes that were mostly built for a five-foot boy, and because his shell-rimmed spectacles and big, thin nose made him look like some foolish kind of bird, but somehow even the silliest things he ever said turned out to be pretty good solid sense. So now Tad Willing said: “What do you mean by you ‘always thought it was the other way,’ Jibby?” “Why, I always thought that nobody ever really did anything worth while until he had imagined something about it,” Jibby said. “I always thought there was never a wagon until some man imagined there was an easier way of getting over the ground than walking over it. He imagined there might be some sort of wagon, and then he went to work and made one. If some one had not imagined that men might fly, there would never have been any airplanes.” “Well, I guess that’s so, anyway,” Tad admitted.