“Hello!” he said. “Look at that!”
We stopped and looked, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was nothing but the old deserted brick farmhouse at the crossing of the roads. It was a one-story house with an attic, and the roof was falling in. All the doors and windows were gone, and the barn behind the house was nothing but a pile of rotted wood, flat on the ground. Tall weeds, mostly gone to seed now, were everywhere. It looked as if nobody had lived in that house for a hundred years. There was one big horse-chestnut tree by the house and one dead tree in the corner, just where the roads crossed, and all the rest was tangled blackberry bushes.
“What do you see?” Wampus Smale asked. “I don’t see anything.”
That old house had been there so long and we had seen it so often that we never thought anything about it. It was not even gloomy enough to look like a haunted house. We had played all over it, because Wampus Smale’s father owned that piece of land and the new house that was up the road five hundred yards or so. But Jibby Jones stood in the road, sniffing the air and wiggling his nose.
“Do you smell money?” he asked.
We all sniffed then. I know how paper money smells, but I could not smell that smell. Neither could Wampus or Skippy or Tad. We said so.
“I don’t mean paper money; I mean gold money,” Jibby Jones said. “Can you smell gold money?”
“Pshaw, no!” Skippy said, but he sniffed at the air first. “Of course I can’t. Nobody can smell gold money; it hasn’t any smell.”
“Neither can I,” said Jibby Jones. “I have a good nose, but it can’t smell gold. I just thought perhaps your noses could. If you can’t smell anything that smells like gold money, can you see anything that looks like it?”
We all looked as hard as we could, but we did not see anything that looked like gold money, or like anything much of anything. So we said so.
Wampus laughed.
“He’s fooling us,” he said, and then he asked Jibby Jones: “What do you see?”
“I see that old dead tree in the corner,” Jibby Jones said. “Do you know what kind of tree that is?”
We were all pretty well interested by this time, so we went up to the tree and looked at it and felt of it, and Wampus put his pug nose up against it and smelled it. Maybe he thought he could smell the gold money. The tree was so old the bark was all off it, and it had been struck by lightning once or twice and the top was all gone. When we had looked it over, we did not know what to think. We thought maybe Jibby Jones thought it was some kind of tree that was worth a lot of money, the way black walnut was during the war. But I said:
“I know what kind of tree it was. It was a pine tree. And I know what kind of tree it is. It is a dead tree.”
“Of course,” Jibby Jones said, as solemn as ever; “but I don’t mean that. I mean what other kind of tree it was.”
“Well,” Skippy said, “if you mean whether it was a short-leaf pine or a long-leaf pine, I give it up. I can’t tell that by an old dead trunk like this.”
“I don’t mean that,” Jibby Jones said. “Don’t you see where the tree is?”
We began to get excited now.
“Right in the corner!” he said. “There’s the house, and here is what must have been the dooryard of the house, and right in the corner is this pine tree. Didn’t you ever hear of John A. M’rell?”
“Ginger!” I cried. “Ginger!” For M’rell was the way Jibby Jones always pronounced the land pirate’s name.
“This tree was a signal pine,” Jibby said, as serious as a judge. “The minute I saw it, I knew it was a pine tree, and the minute I saw it was in the corner, I knew it might be a John A. M’rell signal pine. Didn’t anybody ever talk about hunting treasure here?”
We just looked at Jibby Jones and stared.
“No; nobody ever said anything about treasure up here,” Tad said.
“Then we’ve got a chance—a great chance,” Jibby Jones said, more excited than we ever saw him. “Maybe we can find ten thousand dollars, and maybe we can find a hundred thousand dollars. It just shows how ignorant people can be, even when things are right under their noses. Here is a fortune lying where anybody can put their hands on it, and they don’t know it. My gracious! I thought you fellows said you knew all about the Mississippi River.”
“Aw!” Wampus said. “What are you talking about the river for? This isn’t the river; this is farmland.”
“If you knew all about the river, you would know all about all parts of it,” Jibby Jones said. “You would know about Arkansas and Mississippi and the things that happened there. You’d know that whenever there is a lone pine in the corner of a farm, it might be a M’rell tree. And you’d remember it whenever anybody talked about land pirate’s treasure. You’d know that people down there have hunted and hunted for John A. M’ell’s hidden money, and never found it. Of course, they didn’t find it. Why? Because it’s here. The minute I saw this tree, I knew this was where it was hidden.”
“Yes, but—” Wampus began.
“How far is it from here to the river or to the slough, if there is a slough?”
“Of course there’s a slough,” I said. “There’s Riverbank Slough. It’s two or three miles from here.”
“Yes, but—” Wampus said again.
“But what?” Jibby asked.
“But this isn’t
