“I can’t think it out!” he said, drawling like he always does. “That John A. Murrell treasure ought to be somewhere, but I can’t think where it is. He would send it here by a trusty messenger, and the man here would hide it. It would have to be hidden in a safe place, and in a place that John A. Murrell could find, even if the man here moved away and the house and barn burned and everyone died. But I can’t think where—”
“But what do you think we found?” we shouted. “We found it in the old cistern. Look, Jibby! An 1804 dollar! And as good as the day it was minted.”
“That’s nice,” he said, careless-like, and he went on thinking.
“But it’s an 1804 dollar, Jibby!” I yelled at him. “Don’t you know what that means? It is worth a thousand dollars, maybe; it is the rarest of all the dollars. A thousand dollars! We’ll sell it and divide the money.”
I don’t believe he heard a word. Did you ever hear of such a fellow? We had found an 1804 dollar, and we shouted it at him, and he took no more notice of us than if we had been four gnats buzzing around him. He was more interested in leaning up against an old pine tree, trying to think where some old land pirate might have hid some old treasure—if there ever was any treasure—than he was in a genuine 1804 dollar. And he looked so glum over it that I thought he was going to cry.
“Well, we’ve got to go home,” he said. “It’s dark now. I don’t know what is the matter with this old head of mine. I thought it was good for something, but I guess not. I guess my brains have got glued together.”
“But, say!” I said. “You did not really think you could stand here and think exactly where the treasure was buried, so we could walk right to it, did you?” I asked Jibby.
“Why, of course, I did!” Jibby Jones said. “That ought to be easy, oughtn’t it? If this old head of mine wasn’t off on a vacation or something, we would have had that treasure by now.”
He said something about showing that old head of his that it couldn’t behave that way with him, and he turned around and bumped his forehead against the old pine tree three or four times. At the last bump Jibby stood back and put his hand to his head.
“Solid!” he said. “Solid wood!”
“What? The tree?” Wampus asked.
“No, my head,” Jibby laughed. Then he hit each of us with his fist, for fun and to show he was tickled. “I’ve found it!” he said. “I know where that treasure is.”
“Where?” we all asked.
“In my head,” he said, and he laughed again. “I won’t tell you where else it is, because we’ll need a spade to dig for it, and it is too dark now, and we can’t come tomorrow, because it is Sunday. We’ll come out and get it next week sometime. Did you say you had found something?”
We told him all over again, and he looked at the 1804 dollar by the light of a match and said it was genuine, and we all felt fine and bully. We hiked toward home at a good rate, talking and shouting, and all at once Jibby Jones stopped short.
“Pshaw!” he said. “We forgot something!”
“What?” I asked.
“We forgot what we went for; we did not get that green sand,” Jibby said. “We’ll have to get that the next time we come.”
“After we dig up the treasure,” Wampus said.
“No, before we do anything else,” Jibby said. “Treasure is nothing but money, and I may have plenty of chances to get money in my life, but this may be the only green sand I ever have a chance to get. We’ll get the sand first.”
We had to agree to it. If Jibby knew where the land pirate’s treasure was, he was the only one that did know, so we had to do what he planned.
“How much green sand are you going to get?” I asked him.
“One grain,” Jibby said. “I need only one grain for my collection, so I’ll get only one grain.”
And that was exactly like Jibby Jones. He thought he knew where there was a pirate treasure worth, maybe, thousands of dollars, and he would put off getting it so that he could get one grain of sand. It looked foolish, but maybe it was the wisest way, after all. I guess it is. I guess the wisest thing is to make up your mind what you want, and then go for it, and keep on going for it until you get it.
XIX
The Tough Customer Appears
It was on Saturday that we found the 1804 dollar in the dry well of the cellar of the old Murrell farmhouse. We knew that the dollar was worth a lot of money, and Jibby Jones said he thought it might be worth a thousand dollars, which would be two hundred dollars apiece for each of us.
“But that’s nothing,” Jibby Jones told us. “If that John A. Murrell’s treasure is buried there, we may find a whole lot of money—perhaps thousands of dollars.”
He said this while we were going back to Riverbank in the dark. The dollar was all we had found, although we had searched the whole of the old brick house, but Jibby Jones had not helped us hunt; he had stood by an old pine tree doing nothing but thinking. He said he had to think where the land pirate or his man would most likely hide the treasure. And Jibby Jones said he had thought of the place.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, as we went along toward home, “but you must not breathe a word of it. It won’t do to let anybody know about the treasure or anything. The rush for the Klondike gold
