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
I guess Sunday school did not do us much good that day. On the way home
we talked about the chances of ever getting the 1804 dollar back--four
of us did--but Jibby did not talk. We knew it was hopeless. The Raccoon
Creek sewer is the main sewer in Riverbank and is really the whole of
Raccoon Creek cemented in and roofed over, and there was less chance of
getting that dollar out of it than of finding a pinhead fired out of a
rifle into the Desert of Sahara. The water was always two or three feet
deep and the mud a foot or two more. We decided there was no hope, and
so Wampus said:
“Well, it is gone; the next thing is to get the treasure. Maybe there
will be a couple more 1804 dollars in the treasure. We’ll get the
treasure Saturday.”
“Maybe!” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve got to do some thinking first, and I’ve
got to find a good thinking place before I do any more thinking.”
We tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. He said he must
think. Finally, he did say he expected he could do all the thinking
necessary before Saturday, if he found a first-class place to think in.
That sounded foolish to me.
“Can’t you think in one place as well as in another?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “of course not! There’s a best place for everything, and
there ought to be a best place to think in, too. For the kind of
thinking I have to do I need a first-class thinking place.”
So that afternoon we walked around looking for a thinking place for
Jibby Jones. We tried about thirty different places, and Jibby would sit
down and try them, but they did not satisfy him. Then we would try
another, and finally he said Wampus Smale’s woodshed would do; he said
it was as good as any man needed to think in.
“It is warm and clean and smells of sawdust and damp bark,” Jibby said,
“and the boards of the walls are wide enough for the air to ventilate
through. I guess I can think first-rate here.”
It sounded foolish to us, but you can never tell when Jibby is being
foolish and when he is not, but mostly he is not, so we all sat down and
tried to think. We changed from one seat to another, and when Jibby sat
with his back to the wall that is right close to the alley he said that
was the best place of all for high-grade thinking, and that we would
come there every afternoon and do our thinking. So, every afternoon,
after school, we went there and Jibby sat and thought.
But the rest of us mostly talked. Jibby said he did not mind our
talking, and sometimes he joined in. We talked about the treasure, and
about old John A. Murrell, and so on, and we planned to go out and get
the treasure on Saturday, but whenever any of us came near saying where
the treasure was hidden, Jibby said “Hush!” and shut us up.
It came along to Friday afternoon, and we had planned pretty much
everything. Wampus was to take a spade, and Skippy was to get a pickaxe,
and Tad was to take an axe. Jibby told me to have a length of rope
ready.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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