Jibby Jones

a house right about where we were sitting, which would be just about where the house was on the treasure map. So we asked him if anybody named M’rell had ever lived in that house, or in Greenland, or anywhere that he knew of. He said never. He said nobody named that had ever been anywhere that he had ever heard of. So then we told him about the land pirate and the treasure, and he said it was all nonsense, because if anybody from down Arkansas way had ever been anywhere around there, he would have known it. So we told him not to say anything about the treasure, and told him that was what the Tough Customer and the Rat were after, and he said he would keep mum about it and sort of keep an eye on the Tough Customer and the Rat and let us know if anything happened.

XV

The Grape Tree

Well, one afternoon⁠—it was about two weeks later⁠—I was sitting on the grass where the mud cove is, just below our cottage up there on our Birch Island, and Jibby Jones was sitting beside me. We weren’t doing anything but waiting, or nothing much else, but we had three or four empty baskets and a rake and an axe beside us. We were waiting for Uncle Beeswax, because he was going to take us to get wild grapes.

One day, just after we had met him at Greenland Creek Uncle Beeswax had stopped at Birch Island to see if our folks wanted any honey or beeswax. Generally, when he stopped at our island he went right past us boys and up to the cottages, but since we had saved him from the Tough Customer he liked us, I guess. That day Jibby Jones was rigging up a trotline, and after Uncle Beeswax had told us that the Tough Customer and the Rat were still digging at the creek bank, and had said, a couple of times, “My, what a nose! My, what a noble nose!” he put down his baskets and looked at what Jibby was doing, and shook his head.

“Who taught you that way to tie hooks on a trotline?” he asked.

“Nobody did,” Jibby said in his solemn way. “I evolved this way out of my own head.”

“Well, it is no way at all,” said Uncle Beeswax. “Let me show you.”

So he showed Jibby how to fix hooks on a trotline. You know what a trotline is. It is a long, stout fish-line⁠—mighty stout, too⁠—and sometimes a quarter of a mile long, or more. You tie one end to a tree on the bank and have the rest of the line coiled in your skiff, with the hooks tied on about three or four feet apart, and while someone rows your skiff out into the river you pay out the line. When you come to the end of the line, you tie a big anchor rock on the end of it and chuck it overboard. The hooks are not fastened directly onto the trotline. Each hook is on a short line of its own⁠—maybe a foot and a half long, and the ends of these lines are tied to the trotline. That lets them float free and gives a fish some play when it gets caught. Otherwise it might break away easier. It was the way Jibby was tying these hook-lines to the trotline that Uncle Beeswax did not like.

“If you tie them that way, Jibby,” he said, “they’ll slide back and forth along the line when a big fish gets on them. This is the right way.”

So he showed Jibby, but Jibby did not bother to go over the job again. He thought the line might do as it was, because it was a big job to untie hundreds of hard knots and he wanted to get his trotline in the water and catch some fish.

After that old Uncle Beeswax used to stop at the island every day he went by, and he knew more about the old river, and told us more, than any man ever did, except, maybe, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar. What Uncle Oscar did not know Uncle Beeswax did.

Anyway, Jibby Jones put out his trotline that afternoon after Uncle Beeswax went. He tied one end to a tree by the mud cove and Wampus and I rowed the skiff while Jibby paid out the trotline and he anchored the far end out beyond the middle of the river with a rock big enough to hold a house from floating away. After that we “ran” the trotline twice a day and we always got fish⁠—sometimes three or four catfish and white perch and sometimes a carp or two, but always some. When you “run” a trotline one fellow rows the skiff to keep the current from sweeping it downstream too strong, and the other sits in the bow of the boat with the trotline dragging over it. He pulls the boat along by pulling on the trotline, and when he comes to a hook-line he takes off the fish⁠—if there is one⁠—and baits the hook and lets it slide back down into the water.

So that’s that. There was Jibby’s trotline stretching out a quarter of a mile or so from our island, dipping into the river just a few feet beyond the tree it was tied to, like a submarine cable that did not go quite to Buffalo Island. When we were out “running” the line, old Uncle Beeswax would row toward us, if he happened to be rowing by, and he would ask how many fish we were getting, and things like that.

So, on this day in August, Jibby and I were out “running” the trotline and Wampus was in the stern of our skiff, and here came old Uncle Beeswax rowing out from the shore of Buffalo Island toward us. There was quite a breeze blowing and his long gray whiskers blew out