“Do you know whether anybody named M’rell ever lived in Riverbank, or down below Riverbank, or up here above Riverbank? A man named M’rell?”
“No,” I said, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy said the same. None of us had ever heard of anybody named M’rell.
“Nobody named that ever lived around here that I ever heard of,” Tad said. “Why?”
“I thought maybe you did know of somebody named M’rell that had lived somewhere around here,” Jibby said.
“Orpheus Cadwallader might know,” I said, for Orpheus was the caretaker of the island and knew nearly everybody up and down the river. And then we talked about something else, and that was a pity, for if we had asked Jibby another question about M’rell just then, we might have saved a lot of time in starting our hunt for the land pirate’s treasure. If we had asked him how he spelled M’rell, we might have saved weeks and weeks. So, after half an hour or so, Jibby spoke of M’rell again.
“When I was down on the St. Francis River—” he began, and we all yelled, because the rivers Jibby had been on were getting to be a joke. You couldn’t mention a thing but it reminded Jibby of some river he had been on—the Nile or the Hudson or the Amazon or some other river. It was all true enough, too, because his father wrote books about rivers and had been on most of the rivers in the world, and had taken Jibby there; but it was a sort of joke the way old Jibby was always dragging in a river, no matter what we were talking about. So he waited until we stopped hooting, and then he went on.
“It occurred to me,” he said, “that it was selfish of me to keep what I know about M’rell to myself, because you boys are so good to me. When I was down on the St. Francis River with father, there was an old negro named Mose, who said he was over one hundred years old. He used to paddle us around in a skiff when we went fishing for bass and he told us about M’rell.”
“Who was M’rell?” Wampus asked. “What has M’rell got to do with us?”
Now, I want you to notice, right here, that Jibby said “M’rell” and that we all said “M’rell” because he did. And the reason Jibby pronounced the name that way was because that old negro Mose had called it that. The name was really Murrell, when we came to find out. If we had seen that name written or spelled out, we would not have called it “M’rell”; we would have called it “Murr‑ell” more as if it was “Murl.” But Jibby called it “Mur‑rell,” more as if it was “M’rell.” And “Murl” and “M’rell” don’t sound at all alike. His way was as if it rhymed with “tell,” like:
“Listen, my children, and I will tell
A wonderful story about M’rell.”
The way we pronounced that name was as if it rhymed with “squirrel,” like this:
“Once there was a pretty squirrel
That was owned by John A. Murrell.”
Anyway, Wampus asked, “What has M’rell got to do with us?” and Jibby went ahead and told us, sitting there under our cottage out of the rain.
“It’s about a land pirate’s treasure,” he said. “Father says it is probably nonsense, and that there are a million chances to one that there is no treasure, and that if there ever was any I could never find it.”
“What is a land pirate?” Skippy asked. “I never heard of one.”
“Neither had I until I was down on the St. Francis River,” said Jibby. “That river is in Missouri and Arkansas, and it empties into the Mississippi just above Helena, Arkansas. Father was in Helena, Arkansas, studying that part of the Mississippi River, and that is one of the parts of the South where the land pirate did his pirate work—around Helena and thereabouts.”
He stopped to chuckle.
“What are you laughing about?” I asked him.
“Why, about the Helenas,” Jibby said. “When father and I were on the Yellowstone River, at Billings, Montana, we happened to mention Helena, Montana, and the folks said, ‘Up here in Montana we don’t call it Hel‑e‑na; we call it Hel’na. The town in Arkansas is Hel‑e‑na, but ours is Hel’na,’ and when we got to Helena, Arkansas, and called it Hel‑e‑na, they said, ‘Down here in Arkansas we don’t call it Hel‑e‑na; we call it Hel’na. The town in Montana is Hel‑e‑na; but ours is Hel’na.’
“At any rate,” Jibby went on, “the Mississippi at Helena is mostly muddy and not good for bass fishing, but the St. Francis is clearer, so we went up to the St. Francis to see what it was like and to catch some bass. And the old negro named Mose told us about this John A. Murrell, who was the greatest land pirate that ever lived, and had ten times as many men as any sea pirate that ever sailed the seas. He pirated all the way from Tennessee to Mississippi and Arkansas—”
“But what has that to do with Iowa and us?” Wampus asked. “That’s about a thousand miles from here.”
“That is what I am coming to,” Jibby said. “It was away back in 1835, and around then, that John A. Murrell was a land pirate. And you want to remember that John A. Murrell was not a one-horse horsethief; he was a big land pirate. He had about one thousand men helping him. They stole slaves and horses and carried them away and sold them, and robbed and stole and broke every law there was. There were two sorts of Murrell’s men. Two hundred and fifty of them
