“That’s right!” Wampus Smale said. “Everybody in town would pile out there and dig for it.”
“Well, this is how I thought out where the treasure is,” Jibby said, and we all crowded close to him so that he would not have to talk very loud. “I leaned up against that old pine tree and I tried to imagine I was old John A. Murrell, the land pirate. That’s what you have to do if you want to get anywhere in this world—you’ve got to imagine things.”
Well, we stopped and had an argument right there! That sounded to us like the most foolish thing anybody could say—that the way to get anywhere was to imagine something.
“I don’t believe that,” Skippy Root said. “I believe that the way to get anywhere is to start right out and go there, and I believe that the way to get anything is to start right after it and get it. It don’t do any good for real folks to imagine anything at all; it may be all right for poets and story-writers to imagine things and then write them—that’s their sort of business—but it is a waste of time for anybody else to go and imagine things.”
“Is it?” Jibby Jones asked. “I didn’t know that. I always thought it was the other way.”
Well, that made us stop a little. Jibby Jones wasn’t half such a fool as he looked, and we had found that out. At first we had sort of figured that he was a silly, because he was almost six feet tall and wore clothes that were mostly built for a five-foot boy, and because his shell-rimmed spectacles and big, thin nose made him look like some foolish kind of bird, but somehow even the silliest things he ever said turned out to be pretty good solid sense. So now Tad Willing said:
“What do you mean by you ‘always thought it was the other way,’ Jibby?”
“Why, I always thought that nobody ever really did anything worth while until he had imagined something about it,” Jibby said. “I always thought there was never a wagon until some man imagined there was an easier way of getting over the ground than walking over it. He imagined there might be some sort of wagon, and then he went to work and made one. If someone had not imagined that men might fly, there would never have been any airplanes.”
“Well, I guess that’s so, anyway,” Tad admitted.
“Of course it is so!” Jibby said. “The only way the world gets ahead at all is by imagination. You take the phonograph, for an example. How do you suppose anybody ever happened to think of making a phonograph?”
“Why—” Wampus Smale began, and then he stopped.
It was as plain as day that nobody could sit down to invent a machine that would talk like a man and sing like a bird and play tunes like a band without first imagining such a machine.
“There you are!” Jibby said. “A phonograph is ninety-nine parts imagination and only one part solid stuff. Now, listen!”
Jibby Jones held the 1804 dollar between his finger and thumb and hit it with his finger nail. It tinkled like a little silver bell.
“You heard that, didn’t you?” he asked. “All five of us heard it. That means ten ears heard it. Well, for millions of years millions of ears were hearing millions of sounds before anybody sat down and wondered what a sound was and why an ear could hear it, and maybe it was thousands of years more before some man imagined his ears heard the sound because waves came through the air and hit his eardrums. So then he went to work and proved it—he proved that if you hit a drum it makes one kind of sound waves, and if you scrape a fiddle it makes another kind, and if a bird sings it makes another kind. He proved that sound is vibration.”
“Sure! I know that!” Wampus said, sort of scornful.
“Edison knew it, too,” Jibby Jones said, “and he sat down one day, and took all he knew about sound and sound waves and vibrations, and wondered why a man couldn’t make any kind of noise or music or even human speech, if he could scrape a needle on something and make it vibrate and start the right kind of waves. He had imagination, Edison did. He imagined some sort of machine that would take a man’s voice and make it jiggle a needle so that the needle would make waves on tinfoil or something. Tinfoil was what he used first. He talked his voice into a funnel so that its waves jiggled the needle and made waves on the tinfoil, and then he made the needle follow the waves in the tinfoil—little scratches, they were—and, sure enough, he heard his own voice talking back what he had just talked into the machine. And then he imagined a better machine with wax cylinders instead of tinfoil, and then—well, that’s how your phonograph got invented. Edison is ninety-nine parts imagination.”
“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Tad.
“More than half of the great inventions,” Jibby Jones said, “were made useful by some man who did not do the first inventing of them. Alexander Bell made the telephone so it was useful, but another man had done some telephone inventing first. The one man had enough imagination to imagine a toy telephone, but Alexander Bell had the imagination to imagine a telephone that would be useful to all the world.”
“All right,” Wampus said. “That’s so, I guess, but you’re talking about great men now, Jibby. What good does imagination do us?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Jibby drawled in his slow way. “I saw, right away, that a smart land pirate like John A. Murrell would not hide his money where you and
