Cawl Romer rested on his oars a minute.
“What does this mean, Jones?” he asked Jibby, and he was mighty mad. “You can’t fool me. There is no such thing as magic. What’s the matter with this boat?”
“It don’t seem to go, somehow,” Jibby said.
“He’s put a spell on it, that’s what he’s done,” Hen Romer said. “You can’t fool me! I never saw a boat yet that I couldn’t row some. He’s magicked us, Cawl.”
Cawl took up his oars and began to row, but he looked worried.
“I don’t believe in magic,” he said, but he did not say it as if he meant it. “How could he put a spell on a boat? He couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t know what a fellow with a nose like that can do,” Hen said, and he said it as if he did mean it. “I didn’t like his looks the first time I saw him, and I told you so. I said to keep away from him. And don’t you try to tell me there isn’t magic. You just remember Uncle Harris and the colored conjure woman!”
Well, I didn’t know what he meant by his Uncle Harris and the conjure woman, but I guess Cawl did, for he looked uneasy.
“You be still!” he said. Then he turned to me. “Did he put magic on this boat?” he asked.
“How do I know?” I asked. “He was doing something with a feather and some sticks—that’s all I know.”
“Well, he’s magicked us!” Cawl said all of a sudden, dropping his oars. “That’s what he’s done; he’s put a spell on us.”
He picked up one oar and felt the depth of the river and could not touch bottom on any side. So Hen stopped rowing. As soon as they both stopped rowing, the boat sagged around with the current and the pull on the trotline was heavy. I looked up the river and saw Uncle Beeswax was rowing for us and was near enough to hear us. I yelled to him and waved my arms. Hen and Cawl had seen him, too. They made a last effort and took up their oars and rowed hard, but it was no use. Uncle Beeswax bore down on us and came alongside and grasped the gunwale of our skiff. The Romers stopped rowing, too, and that put the full weight of both skiffs, with the whole current behind them, on the trotline and she parted as easy as you would break a rotten thread.
“What’s the matter?” Uncle Beeswax asked.
The skiffs were floating downriver as easy as you please.
“Nothing,” Jibby said. “These Romers wanted to come along and the skiff did not want them to.”
“Neither do I; I don’t like ’em, hoof nor hide,” said Uncle Beeswax, who was plainspoken enough when he wanted to be.
“Wampus and Tad and Skippy are waiting by the sycamore,” Jibby said. “Maybe you’d better go on and get the grapes, Uncle Beeswax, and we’ll see if we can row this skiff home. It may be willing to go across the river one way if it isn’t willing to go the other.”
The two Romers scowled a lot at this, but they took to the oars. They did not bother to row us back to our mud cove. They rowed across the easiest way, and that landed us down near the end of Birch Island, and they got out there. They did not say a word. As long as we could see them, as we rowed back across the river to the sycamore tree, they were standing there talking to each other—trying to make up their minds whether they believed in magic or not, I guess.
Well, Uncle Beeswax got his wild grapes and, after we got home, Jibby reeled in his trotline. He had lost most of his hooks, but he did not mind that; he had kept the Romers from doing Uncle Beeswax out of his grapes.
“Jibby,” Wampus asked, when I had told him and Skippy and Tad about the screw eyes and the trotline and all, “how on earth did you ever think of putting the screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and running the trotline through them?”
“Well, I’ll explain it,” Jibby Jones said. “I had the screw eyes. …”
“Yes.”
“And I had the trotline. …”
“Yes.”
“And I had the skiff. …”
“Yes.”
“Well, what else could anybody do with a couple of screw eyes and a trotline and a skiff?” Jibby asked. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do with them, so I did that. But I’m sorry for one thing.
“The feather,” Jibby said. “That crow feather was wasted. I couldn’t think of any way to use it. I tried, but I couldn’t.”
XVII
Grains of Sand
For a while nothing much happened. It got along to the first of September, and all of us had to leave Birch Island and go back down to Riverbank, because we had to go to school. Old Uncle Beeswax came to the island a day or so before we left, and he said the Tough Customer and the Rat had given up digging for the land pirate’s treasure.
Uncle Beeswax had hardly gone when we saw the Tough Customer’s old shanty-boat floating down the river, past our island, and we knew they had given up hope and were going away. It did seem as if the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company had had about as bad luck as the Tough Customer, too, and that our hunting had been wasted. We thought the treasure was a fake, and that
