“Father says I have a nose for motor troubles,” he told us.
After that we let him be one of us. We couldn’t be really mean to a fellow like that; he was too good-natured and willing, and too much fun, too. He was the queerest boy we ever knew. One day he came out in an old suit that was so small for him that the pants came halfway to his knees and his sleeves came only about halfway to his wrists. He did look funny! But we did not say anything; a fellow don’t care much about clothes. Jibby Jones said it. He said:
“I don’t like this suit anymore. I like my small suit better.”
We could not believe we heard him correctly.
“Your small suit!” I said. “You mean the big one you have been wearing. I should think you would call that your big suit and this one your small suit. That one is twice as big as this one.”
“No,” he said, “this is my big suit. I got this suit two years ago and we all call this my big suit because when I got it it was too big for me. And the other was a little small for me when I got it this spring; so it is my small suit.”
That was how he figured it out, and nobody could make him believe the small suit should be called the small one. It had been the “big suit” once, and that was the name of it, so it was always the “big suit.” We thought he was stupid. But he wasn’t. Not when you came to find out. He looked at things a different way from the rest of us, that was all.
II
The Pearl-Diggers
Well, it took us quite a while to learn that Jibby Jones was not as stupid as he looks, and that when he looks stupidest and says the queerest things is when he is farthest from being stupid. That is when that old brain of his is working hardest. It took us a couple of weeks to learn that, and to get to liking Jibby the way we did, and I don’t know that Wampus ever did think, in the bottom of his heart, that Jibby was anything but stupid and lucky.
And at first we did try to “string” old Jibby good and plenty. We told him things about our river that would not have fooled a mudcat or a carp. And when we told those things to Jibby, he would look at us through his spectacles in that serious way of his, and sometimes we were sure he believed the nonsense, and sometimes we were not so sure.
One thing we told him was about getting mussel shells out of the river. That is quite a big business around Riverbank because there are so many pearl-button factories in Riverbank and they have to have shells to cut the buttons out of. The shells they use are mussel shells—a sort of clam shell—and hundreds of men dredge for the shells. Some of the men rake up the shells with long two-handled rakes and others drag for them with dull hooks strung on a long crossbar. The mussels sort of bite the hooks and hang on and the dredgers pull them up.
Jibby Jones knew all this; we couldn’t fool him about it because his father had told him; but we did try to fool him about another part of it. That was about getting mussel shells that had real pearls in them—the pearls the women wear for jewelry. Tad was the one that tried to fool him about that. I guess Jibby asked Tad how they got the pearls, because Tad’s father was a pearl-buyer.
“Well, that’s a pretty hard job, Jibby,” Tad told him. “Not many people want to try diving for pearls in the old Mississippi, I can tell you! No, sir!”
“Why?” Jibby asked. “I never heard of sharks in the Mississippi, or alligators this far north.”
“Well, I should say not!” said Tad. “If there were sharks and alligators here, too, nobody would ever dive for pearls. No, sir! It isn’t sharks or alligators, it’s mud!”
“Mud?” Jibby asked.
“Yes, sir! Mud!” Tad told him. “Common old Mississippi River mud. That’s why so few hunt pearls; that’s why pearls are so high-priced. The mud is awful. The mussels with real pearls in them don’t lie right on top of the mud like common button-shell mussels; they burrow down in the mud. The minute a mussel feels a pearl beginning to grow in it, it begins to burrow.”
Of course, Skippy and Wampus and I could hardly keep from shouting out loud when Tad said all this nonsense, because there wasn’t a true word in it, but Jibby Jones just stared at Tad through his spectacles and believed it all. Or we thought he did.
“I should think they could dredge a little deeper and get them,” Jibby said.
“Dredge deeper?” said Tad, because he did not know just what to say to that.
“Pshaw!” Skippy put in. “Dredge deeper! That would be a nice thing to do, wouldn’t it? And the minute the mussel felt the dredge, it would spit out the pearl and that pearl would be lost forever. You can’t dredge for pearl mussels, Jibby.”
“Of course not!” said Tad. “You have to dive for them. You—you—”
Tad had to think quick to think up some ridiculous thing to tell Jibby, but Tad was a good one at that and he did it! Yes, sir!
“You have to do the only way it can be done, if you want to get pearls,” he said. “You have to nose them out.”
He stopped short and looked at Jibby’s nose.
“Why, you’d make the finest kind of pearl-diver yourself, Jibby,” he said. “You’ve got a splendid nose for it. You’ve got the best nose I ever saw for pearl-diving in the Mississippi.”
“Do you think so?” Jibby asked, as pleased as pie.
“I know so,” Tad told him. “You’ll know
