“We would go in with you,” Skippy said, “only our noses are so blunt it is no use.”
Jibby climbed into the boat and made ready again. This time he took a slanting dive. We could see him under water; he looked yellow under all that yellow water. We could see his arms spread out as he dug his fingers into the mud to hold on, and we could see his head move as he ploughed into the mud with his nose. We laughed like fury. It was the funniest thing I ever saw.
He did stay under water quite a while. He had not fibbed when he said he could stay under a long time.
Wampus got frightened. “We’d better get him out,” he said. “He’ll drown, with his nose and mouth full of mud that way.”
Tad was watching pretty close. “No, he’s all right,” he said, as well as he could for laughing. “As long as his head keeps bobbing that way, he is all right; watch him nose-digging for the great pearl mussels of the Mississippi! I hope a mussel don’t bite his nose off!”
Just then Jibby started to come up. He wiggled and squirmed himself onto his knees and staggered to his feet. After he began to wiggle, we could see nothing but muddy water, and when he stood up his face and head were one mass of soft mud. It dripped from him and ran from him, but he just put his face over the side of the boat and opened his mouth and let a mussel shell fall inside.
“Catch it!” he gasped; “catch it!”—as if it was a rabbit or something that could jump and run, and then he ducked down and sloshed water over his head until he was as clean as anyone could ever get in that old slough water. He came up smiling.
“Well, I got one!” he drawled triumphantly. “I hope it is a big pearl. I hope it is big enough to sell for enough money to let father stay here the rest of the summer. That’s what I want it for. Because I like you fellows. You are all so helpful and friendly.”
I’ll say I felt ashamed then. So did Tad and so did Skippy. I guess Wampus did, too. We all did. We did not know what to say.
But Jibby, naked as could be, was in the boat now and he picked up the shell.
“I hope it did not have time to get rid of the pearl,” he said. “I hope I did not frighten it too much; I hit it rather hard with my nose. Let me have your knife, Wampus.”
Wampus had a big knife, a regular frog-stabber.
“Jibby—listen!” Tad said, but Jibby was opening the mussel. He seemed to know how. I suppose he had opened oysters in the Seine or somewhere; he never told us. He slid the knife between the two valves of the shell of the mussel, and cut the muscle part, and the shell fell open.
“It looks like quite a good one,” was the next thing we heard Jibby Jones say, just as matter-of-fact as if he was talking about a dictionary or an apple.
We all stood up, then, and looked.
“Merry Christmas! Mer‑ry Christmas! And a Hap‑py New Year!” Tad exclaimed. “Well, what do you know about that!”
Right there in the shell was the biggest, pinkest, glisteningest, roundest pearl I ever saw in my life! No, I’ll say it was twice as big as any pearl I ever saw!
“A thousand dollars!” Tad cried. “That’s worth a thousand dollars if it is worth a cent! I know! My father buys them.”
We were all crazy with excitement except Jibby Jones. He took it quite calmly.
“I’m glad it is a thousand-dollar one,” he said. “Now father can stay on Birch Island the rest of the summer.”
And that was about all he ever said about the pearl, even when Tad’s father paid twelve hundred dollars for it. Wampus did ask Jibby if he didn’t expect to go back and dive for a lot more pearls. We thought he would say he meant to.
“I think not,” Jibby Jones said. “You see, Tad says the pearl-divers are apt to wear their noses down to a snub, bumping them into the shells, and I wouldn’t like to do that. My nose is the only nose in our family that is like Grandfather Parmenter’s and I wouldn’t like to wear it down to a pug.”
III
The Climbing Rabbit
Maybe feeling sorry that Jibby had to go away was what made us feel so glad he had found that pearl and did not have to go. Teasing him had come to be part of the fun we counted on having, and, when we saw old Jib come out of his cottage, one or the other of us would nearly always say: “There’s Jibby—let’s go tell him something about the river.” And between-times we thought up things to tell him. But all the time we were getting to like him more and more.
A couple of days after Mr. Willing had bought the pearl, Skippy and Wampus and Tad and I were under my folks’ cottage, because it was raining. There was always plenty to do on the island, enough kinds of fun each summer to keep us busy ten years, and on rainy days we could always sit under one of the cottages and whittle or talk or make mud statues. The rain was coming down in regular slats, as if it meant to rain all day and all night, and we were talking about one thing and another when Jibby Jones came dodging through the rain and looked in at us.
“Hello, Main Mast,” Skippy called out to him; “lower yourself and blow in out of the rain.”
Sometimes we called him “Main Mast” and sometimes we
