“Huh!” he said. “There it be, hey? I thought I’d lost it, bein’ chased.”
“What is it?” I asked him.
He spread it out on his knee.
“Month or so ago,” he said, “I was speculatin’ through the swamp yonder and I come onto a grape tree—”
Well, we knew what a grape tree was. A grape tree is not a tree that bears grapes the way an apple tree bears apples. A grape tree is a tree the wild grapevines have climbed over until you can’t see the tree and can only see masses and masses of grapevine. And one year one of these trees will have bushels and bushels of wild grapes, and no other grape trees around there will have any. The man that can find a good grape tree and get the grapes off it is lucky.
“I come onto this grape tree a month or so ago,” Uncle Beeswax said, “and I made a map showin’ whereabouts it was, so I could go back to it when the grapes was ripe. And today I was tryin’ to find it, but I couldn’t. The skeeters got too bad for me before I traced to the tree. So I was settin’ on this shanty-boat lookin’ at my map I had made—”
“And they came up?” Wampus asked. “That’s it, then. Those men lost a map, and they want it, and they thought you had it. They wanted to get it away from you.”
Uncle Beeswax’s face wrinkled, and we knew he was grinning.
“If that’s all,” he said, “they can have it. I don’t want it. It ain’t no good, noway. I can’t make nothing out of it myself, and they can’t neither.”
So, at that, Skippy Root stood up and yelled at the Tough Customer.
“Hey!” he yelled. “He hasn’t got your map! All he’s got is a map of a grape tree. You can see it, if you want to.”
The Tough Customer and the Rat consulted together, and the Tough Customer came to their side of the creek, and Jibby Jones took the map of the swamp and grape tree and went over to them and showed it to them. It satisfied them that Uncle Beeswax did not have their map. So Jibby told them, straight and plain, that if anybody had their map we had it, and that we meant to keep it. Then he asked them if they had found anything. The Tough Customer told him it was none of his business what they had found or what they hadn’t found, and then he and the Rat went back toward their shanty-boat and Jibby climbed up our bank of the creek. Uncle Beeswax had got onto his feet again and was going away, but, as Jibby’s head came up over the edge of the bank, Uncle Beeswax stopped dead short and looked at Jibby and stared at him with his mouth wide open.
“Noble!” he said, when he had stared and stared. “Just plumb noble, and there ain’t any other words for it! What a nose! What a nose!”
Now, most folks would have been mad if anybody said that, but Jibby Jones wasn’t—he was proud of his nose. Jibby talked about his nose more than anybody else did, because it was a family relic, or something, and had come down to him from his Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter. Some folks are proud of a colonial spinning-wheel that has been in the family three hundred years, but Jibby was proud of his nose. And I guess he was right. A nose is a better relic than a spinning-wheel any day; it is handier. It don’t have to be dusted, and you can wash it when you are washing the rest of your face and save time that way, and you can carry it with you wherever you go. You have to. So Jibby looked at old Uncle Beeswax and grinned.
“It’s my jib,” he said. “When the wind blows too hard, I have to take a couple of reefs in it.”
Well, I guess Uncle Beeswax didn’t have a chance to hear many jokes, and when he heard that one he put down his basket and sat down on a stump and laughed and laughed. He whacked his leg, and I thought he would die, he laughed so hard.
“Jib, hey?” he chuckled when he could get his breath. “Jib, is it? Well, if that’s so you ought to have some of my beeswax to waterproof it with. Nothing like good old beeswax to keep the weather from ruinin’ a jib.”
Then he went off in another spell of laughing, and whacked his leg and the tears rolled down his face and got into his beard.
So Jibby told him all about his nose and how he got it from his Grandfather Parmenter and how George Washington had complimented Jibby’s Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter on his nose, and in a couple of minutes old Uncle Beeswax was as chummy as a kid with us and told us all about his nose and how useful it was and all the forty or fifty things he had used to try to keep it from being so red, but no hope. He said it was a headstrong nose and if it made up its mind to be red it was bound to be red, and no use fooling with it.
“If I had two of ’em,” he said, “and the other was a green one, I’d look like a steamboat.”
He showed where he would have his two noses, if he had two, one on either cheek.
“But one is plenty,” he said. “When a man has a nose like mine, or like yours,” he added politely to Jibby, “he has no excuse to covet any more nose. He’s got a bountiful supply.”
He said it all with a twinkle in his eye, and from then on he was a good fellow with us.
We asked him if he knew much about Greenland, and he said he had been born in
