“We’ll take a bunch of rocks and slam them down on those men,” Wampus said. “We’ll scare the life out of them.”
Jibby was hunting around in the bushes, but just then he found what he was looking for—his covered lunch-basket. He took out the green felt bag his cat Orlando had been in and pulled the stout drawstring out of the hem at the mouth of the bag. He tried this over his knee, to see if it was strong, and it was strong.
We were whispering, saying how we could stone those three men, but Jibby unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it over his head and began tearing strips off it. He tied the strips together and tested them at the knots, until he had eight or ten feet of it. Then he picked up the oil can and motioned us to follow him. None of us knew what he was going to do, but we followed him back to the edge of the bank like little lambs. We had had enough lessons that day to know that Jibby Jones mostly knew what he was doing before he started to do it.
When we got to the edge of the bank, Jibby stood up quietly and took hold of a young birch tree that stood near the edge of the bank and bent it back, away from the bank, until it was almost flat on the ground. He motioned Wampus to come and hold it down for him, and then he went and looked down at the dunnage again, and came back and eyed the birch stem and tied the oil can to the stem by its handle. He used the stout string from the green bag. Then he tied one end of the string he had made from the strips of shirt to the bottom of the oil can.
When Jibby had done all this, I began to see what he was up to, and, for once in my life, I guessed right. We let the birch straighten up slowly and then pushed it down again, but this time toward the creek, so it stuck out over the bank, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy and I bore around on it until it held the can of kerosene exactly over the pile of dunnage and food and stuff down below. Then Jibby pulled on the string he had made of the shirt strips and the oil can tipped, and all the oil poured out of the can onto the food and other stuff in the treasure-hunters’ pile. Then we let the tree straighten up slowly again. It was a good job. It had spoiled all that food, because nothing spoils food more than having coal oil on it. We knew from what the treasure-hunters had said that they could not stay there long now; they would have to go away and get more food, probably down the river somewhere.
I would have called that a good job and well done, but you can never tell what Jibby Jones has in his mind. He was taking the pieces of old newspaper out of his lunch-basket and getting handfuls of dry grass, and balling it all up into a big ball, and, when he had done this, he tied the ball around and around with the string he had made of shirt strips.
None of us knew what he was up to, so we just stood and looked, but, when he had the ball all made, he untied the oil can and let the last of the kerosene dribble on the ball. Then he tied the ball to the birch, but a little higher than the can had been tied.
“Now,” he said, “who has a match?”
We all looked, but we did not have a match; not even a broken one, and for a minute Jibby looked pretty blue.
“I ought to have thought of matches,” he said. “When a man goes treasure-hunting he ought to think of everything. I had a bully scheme. I was going to light this fire ball and bend the birch down until it touched that pile of stuff I spilled the kerosene on, and light the whole pile. I don’t know what would have happened, but it would have been something. Maybe the stuff would have burned and maybe the dynamite would have gone off. It would have bothered those fellows a lot, anyway. But now we have no matches.”
“If we had a flint and some steel,” Wampus said, “we could strike fire, maybe.”
“Or if any of us knew how to rub two sticks together and make fire,” I said.
But Jibby Jones was busy before I got it half said. He had his knife out and was scraping the handle of his lunch-basket, getting fine shreds off it, and he splintered some of the basket and made a little pile of sticks, like matchsticks, and the next moment he was down on his stomach holding his magnifying-glass above the little pile so that the concentrated rays of the sun fell full on the lint he had scraped. In another moment a little string of blue smoke began to float upward, and then there was a little flicker of red flame and the whole little pile was ablaze. Jibby fed more pieces of the basket to the pile.
“Now!” he said, “you fellows get some dead wood or broken branches and creep to the edge of the bank. Wampus, I want you to help me weigh this birch down so the fire ball will light that pile of stuff. And the minute it is alight, I want Skippy and Tad and George to slam the dead wood and stuff at those black men, and yell like Indians. Then cut and run. I don’t know how much dynamite there is in that pile, and I don’t know what it will do when it takes a notion to do it.”
We crept
