Tad and Skippy and Wampus and I were down by the river in front of Wampus’s cottage trying to see what was the matter with the motor of Wampus’s motorboat when this Jibby Jones came walking up along the path and stopped to look at us.
“Good morning,” he said, in a sort of lazy drawl, and we looked up and decided we did not like him. We thought we hadn’t much use for another fellow, anyway, because we four were enough. We four always hung together and had good enough times by ourselves. So we looked up and thought, “Well, we don’t want you around!” but he had said “Good morning!” so we had to say something. So we said “Hello!” but not as if we meant it. We thought we didn’t want to have anything to do with a fellow that said “Good morning!” when he might just as well have said “Hello!” in the first place.
We went right on fixing the motorboat. We thought we would let him stand there until he was tired of it, and then perhaps he would go away. By and by he said:
“Are you mending the motorboat? Doesn’t it go?”
We wondered what he thought we were fussing with it for. It seemed about as foolish a question as any question he could have asked us. So I said:
“Sometimes it goes; what do you think a motorboat is for?”
Jibby Jones did not answer right away. He seemed to be thinking that over. It seemed to take him quite a while to make up his mind what the answer was, and we had a good chance to look at him.
He was queer-looking. That is about the only way I can say it—he was queer-looking. He was about as old as we were, but at first you thought he was quite a lot older. That was because he was so tall; he was almost six feet tall; he was taller than my father or Tad’s father and almost twice as tall as Wampus’s father, who is short and fat. He was just about as tall as Skippy’s father. I never saw such a tall boy for his age.
Another thing that made him look oldish was his spectacles. He wore spectacles with big, round glasses in them and tortoiseshell rims and handles—if the things you put behind your ears are called handles. But the thing that made him look the queerest was his nose. It was the biggest nose I ever saw in my life, or that Tad or Skippy or Wampus ever saw. They said so. It was bigger than any nose I ever saw on a man, and the funniest thing about it was that when you looked right straight at Jibby Jones from in front it did not look like a big nose at all; it only looked like a big nose from the side. This was because his nose was not thick or wide, but only long and much. It was straight enough, but it started too far up on his forehead and went so far out into the air in front of him that it was a long way back to his face again. The thing it made me think of was a rudder, or the centerboard of a boat, only, if it had been a rudder, it should not have been on the front of his head, but on the back of it.
So this Jibby Jones stood thinking, because I had said: “What do you think a motorboat is for?”
After a while he nodded his head as if he had thought enough and said:
“That’s a good question. I never thought of that question before, but, when you think about it like that, motorboats are used for different things, aren’t they?”
“Yes; for climbing church steeples,” Skippy said, joking him.
Jibby Jones looked at us thoughtfully.
“I think you’re teasing me,” he said. “A great many people tease me. It is because I look stupid. But I am not as stupid as I look.”
Wampus nudged me.
“Who told you that?” he asked Jibby Jones.
“My father told me,” Jibby Jones said, and he did not even crack a smile. He was in dead earnest. “My father has said to me, several times, ‘Son, you are not as stupid as you look.’ ”
“Well, he ought to know,” Tad said.
“Yes, that’s what I think,” Jibby Jones said. “I always think my father ought to know, because he is an author and writes books. An author who writes books has to know a great many things.”
Well, Tad put down the wrench he was using then and looked at Jibby Jones again, and I guess we all looked at him. We had heard that some author man was coming to Birch Island, and we knew this must be the author man’s boy. So we took a good look at him. I don’t know what we would have said next, or whether we would have said anything, but Jibby Jones spoke:
“What I was thinking, when I said motorboats were used for various things, was that I saw one used on the Amazon as a coffin. A man father knew was bitten by a snake and died and the natives used his motorboat as a coffin to bury him in. That was what I meant. I have never seen a motorboat used to climb church steeples. I mean actually to climb them. The nearest I have come to seeing that was in Nebraska when they used a motorboat to ring the fire-alarm bell.”
Tad was just going to pick up his wrench again, but he did not do it. He let it lie. He looked right straight at Jibby Jones.
“To ring a fire-alarm bell!” he exclaimed.
“It was at Europa, Nebraska,” said Jibby Jones, as if he was saying the commonest thing ever, “when the Missouri River went over the levee
