“Whoop!” was all Wampus had time to say, and then the tree and the pole at the top of it did what any tree and pole would have done in the same circumstances. They snapped that carp off the hook like a giant throwing a mud ball from the end of a switch. We saw the carp sail up and up, twice as high as the tree itself and come down and down, inland from the slough.
I scrambled to my feet and Tad and Wampus and Skippy scrambled to their feet, and we made a rapid break for the direction the carp had taken.
“Stop! Listen! Hear where it falls!” Jibby Jones shouted, but we were too excited for that. We rushed into the woods and began beating through the weeds and nettles and looking up into the trees, and Jibby had to join us. We hunted for an hour, I guess, and then we gave it up. It was time to go home, anyway.
We went back to the slough to get our poles and things, and we got them and started home. The first house we came to was Wampus’s, because that is nearest to Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage, which we had been almost back of, and when we got there Mr. and Mrs. Smale and Sue Smale were on the little front porch and Orpheus Cadwallader was standing at the foot of the porch steps with one foot on the bottom step and the biggest carp I ever saw was in his hands. It was a beauty.
“Y‑e‑s, M‑i‑s‑t‑e‑r S‑m‑a‑l‑e,” he was drawling in that slow, lazy way of his, “I always did think a carp was more of a land animal than most fish, and now I know it. This proves it. I’ve often seen carp wiggle across sand bars on their bellies, and I’ve often said I was sure they came up to my garden at night and ate the young vegetable tops, but now I know more than that. They climb trees, and I know they climb trees because this carp was in the maple alongside of my house, sitting in a crotch of a branch, eating maple leaves. There are some in its mouth now.”
Sure enough, he showed us that there were leaves in the carp’s mouth.
“But that doesn’t quite prove it climbs trees, does it?” asked Mr. Smale. “It might have got in the tree in some other way.”
“How could a carp get in a tree except by climbing it?” Orpheus Cadwallader drawled. “Of course, you needn’t believe me, if you don’t want to, but I’ll believe carps climb trees as long as I live.”
We knew, of course, that that carp had not climbed a tree. We knew exactly how it had got into that tree—our fishing tree had slung the carp so high in the air that it had alighted in the top of the maple tree. I nudged Wampus and grinned.
It was then Jibby Jones turned to us and spoke.
“Rabbits,” he said, and then repeated it: “Rabbits, and carp, may climb trees, but you cannot be sure rabbits and carp do climb trees just because you happen to find rabbits and carp in trees.”
Orpheus Cadwallader turned and looked at Jibby.
“Rabbits, hey?” he said. “I don’t know about rabbits. I never saw a rabbit climb a tree, and I never saw a rabbit in a tree, so I say nothing about rabbits. But I do know about carp. I know carp can climb trees, because I saw this carp in the tree, and it was still alive and kicking. I saw that with my own eyes. And if the carp did not climb that tree, how did it get up that tree?”
“Maybe it leaped from the water to the tree,” said Jibby.
“Foolishness! Nonsense!” Orpheus Cadwallader said. “I know better than that. A carp can’t leap that far.”
But we knew better, because that was just what that carp had done. It had made one jump from the slough to the tree. But had we helped it a little.
So Orph went waddling home with his tree-climbing carp, pretty mad because nobody would believe it had climbed the tree, but Jibby stood looking after him. When Orph had gone out of sight, Jibby turned to Skippy.
“Skippy,” he drawled, with a twinkle in his eyes that sometimes came there, “you don’t want to hunt for pirate’s treasure, do you? A little while ago you said we might as well look for fish in the tops of trees as for pirate’s treasure around here. I don’t say there is pirate’s treasure everywhere around here, but there does seem to be a fish in the top of a tree now and then.”
Skippy grinned.
“All right!” he said. “Tell us about the land pirate again, Jibby. Anybody that can throw a carp into a treetop has a right to believe in a land pirate’s treasure being a thousand miles from where he got it.”
V
The Fishing Prize
That night, before we went to bed, the five of us sat on the riprap rocks in front of the cottages, and Jibby told
