“Well, you won’t find one on Murrell’s Run,” I said. But I ought to have known better; a fellow never ought to say what Jibby Jones will find or won’t find.
“Come on! Let’s dig for the treasure,” Skippy Root said. “You act as if you were afraid to, Jibby.”
Jibby did not answer this directly. He rubbed his nose and looked at Wampus Smale.
“Your father owns this land, don’t he, Wampus?” he asked.
“Yes, he owns all of it,” Wampus said.
“And who lives in the new farmhouse at the other end of the farm?” Jibby asked.
“Why, Bill Catlin,” Wampus said. “He rents from father. What has that got to do with it?”
Jibby rubbed his nose again, and I thought I saw him grin.
“What kind of lights does he use?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean?” Wampus asked. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“I mean lights,” said Jibby Jones. “Lights for the evening, when he is sitting at a table reading the Farmers’ Almanac or something. You know what lights are, don’t you, Wampus? The Romans had oil lights, and my great-great-grandmother had whale-oil lights, and in New England they once used tallow dips. Does Bill Catlin use kerosene lamps or electric light or gas light?”
“What are you trying to do, tease me?” Wampus asked. “Bill Catlin uses kerosene lamps, of course. There is no gas out here, and there are no electric lights this far out.”
“All right,” Jibby said. “That’s good. That’s fine. Is Bill Catlin a cross fellow, or is he a pleasant fellow?”
“Oh, come on!” Wampus said, disgusted. “Let’s dig; what’s the use of trying to be funny?”
“All right,” Jibby said. “I don’t pretend to be the one leader of this band of treasure-hunters. Go on and dig, if you want to. I’m not ready to dig yet; I’m going down to the Run and get a specimen of the green sand you said was there. I’m more interested in getting a specimen of that sand for my collection than I am in buried treasure just now.”
Sure enough, he started off toward where the rim of trees showed where Murrell’s Run was. It was just what you might expect Jibby Jones to do, right when the buried treasure was in our hands, almost. Tad called to him.
“Jibby!” he called. “Come back here!”
Anybody else that acted that way we would have let go, but Jibby Jones was different. He looked like a ninny, with his long thin nose and his high-water pants and his spectacles, but he had fooled us more than once that way. It was when he said or did the biggest fool things—or what seemed like the biggest fool things to us—that you had to stop and think the hardest, because Jibby Jones always had something important in his mind then. So, when Tad called to him, Jibby came back.
“You must excuse me if I seem rude,” he said, “but I really cannot dig for treasure until Wampus tells me whether Bill Catlin is a pleasant fellow or a cross fellow.”
“Why?” I asked.
Jibby looked up at the air and down at the grass.
“My father has told me many, many times that the way to keep out of trouble is to use my eyes and my brains,” he said. “I’m afraid you boys do not do that as much as you should. The reason I must know whether Bill Catlin is a cross fellow or a pleasant fellow is because that Tough Customer, when he was running away from here, yipped three times and hopped five feet on his wooden leg.”
We tried to think that over, but we could not make sense of it in any way.
Wampus got sort of angry.
“Oh, well! If you’re going to talk nonsense!” he said. “It is all right for a smarty to be smart sometimes, but I don’t call this one of the times. You fellows may stand it, but I’m not going to. I’m going to dig up that treasure, if it is there, and Jibby can go and scrape up green sand if he wants to. He can’t make a fool of me!”
“I do want to get a specimen of that sand,” Jibby said soberly. “And, when you have dug treasure awhile, you boys had better come down to the Run. It is too dry up here. I expect there is plenty of mud in the Run.”
With that Jibby went off. We watched him go.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I’ll bet Jibby has something in his mind that we don’t know anything about. I’m going with him. When Jibby Jones talks like a crazy man, you want to look out; he’s always talking sense then.”
So I started to follow Jibby, but Wampus Smale called me back, and the three of them—Wampus and Tad and Skippy—talked to me and said we would all look silly if we let Jibby Jones scare us with a lot of nonsense talk. By the time they had talked enough, Jibby was going out of sight, so I made up my mind I would stick to the fellows. We picked up our tools and started for the dead pine tree.
I was worried a little, even though it all looked as simple as crossing a room to pick up a paper. It seemed that there must be something about the green sand in the Run that meant more than we thought, or something else. I rather knew that Jibby would not go off to get a grain of sand for his collection just then, when the treasure was so near, unless he had something worth while in his mind. I remembered what he had said about the green sand being, perhaps, the marks to show the old land pirate’s men the way to the buried treasure—“Go up the Mississippi until you come to a creek five miles below Riverbank; go up the creek until you come to green sand in the creek bottom;
