XXII
A New Swimming-Hole
By and by we began to sting less and to feel better.
“Did you bring the tools?” Jibby asked, innocently.
“I should say not!” Skippy said. “What was the use? A bee can’t sting an axe.”
“Those bees could,” I said. “I expect that spade will be all swelled up like a balloon by the time we see it again.”
That made Wampus laugh, which was a sign he was feeling better, too. I told Jibby I knew now why he wanted to know if Bill Catlin was a good-natured man.
“Yes,” Jibby said, “I thought you would figure it out sooner or later.”
“Well, the next time,” I said, “don’t be so polite. Don’t treat us as if we had any sense at all. Make a picture of a bee and shove it in our faces.”
“Yes, do!” Skippy said. “I’d rather, any day, have a picture of a bee shoved in my face than have a real bee shove itself in my neck.”
That made us all laugh, and Jibby washed the mud off Wampus Smale’s back, and when Wampus had put on his clothes we sat down and had lunch. I never ate anything that tasted better, and when we had finished we lay back for a while, just feeling good. Jibby Jones laughed.
“Laughing at us?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m laughing at myself. I’m thinking what a silly I was to begin collecting sand from everywhere, and thinking one grain from each place would be enough. I’ve been looking at this sand through my magnifying-glass, and one grain won’t do.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Look at it,” he said, and he tossed me his magnifying-glass.
The minute I looked at the sand through the glass I saw what he meant. Each grain stood out like the setting of a ring, and each grain was transparent, and sparkled, but not one grain was green! About half the grains were yellow and the other half were blue. It was only because they were so small and so mixed together that the sand looked green, because yellow and blue mixed makes green. I handed the glass to Wampus, and he looked and passed it on until we had all seen that the green sand was not green sand at all, but yellow sand and blue sand mixed.
After a while Jibby yawned.
“Well,” he said, “if we are going to get that treasure, we had better be stirring ourselves. Wampus, is Bill Catlin a good-natured man or is he—”
“Aw, quit!” Wampus said, and turned as red as his bee stings. “Bill Catlin is all right. He will lend us a can of kerosene quick enough.”
So we fixed it that we would go up to Bill Catlin’s and get an oil can and some kerosene. Jibby said he would not go.
“Bill don’t know me,” he said, “and he might get frightened if he saw my nose.”
That was a joke, of course, and we coaxed Jibby to go with us, but he would not go. I think he wanted to punish us for not paying attention to him when he tried to tell us in his own way about the bees. He made one excuse after another. He said he looked such a silly that Bill would be afraid to trust us with kerosene if he was along. He said a lot of things like that. Finally he said we had better go without him.
“You needn’t take so long,” he said, “because you can all run fast. I know, because I heard you running.”
We left him lying there and went up through the woods to Bill Catlin’s. He was not at home, but his wife was a nice lady and let us have a gallon can full of kerosene. We stopped to eat a few grapes in Bill Catlin’s vineyard, to keep them from going to waste, and then we started across a field toward the woods again, but we had hardly climbed the fence when we saw Jibby coming toward us. He was on a slow lope, and he waved us back, so we stopped short and waited until he came up to us.
“Wait!” he said, and then he waited until he got his breath. “We’ve got to be careful now. The enemy is at the green sands.”
I laughed. I thought he meant the bees had come down there, or that, maybe, Jibby had run into another nest of them, but it was not that, and it was worse than anything we had ever thought could happen.
Jibby had been lying there on the bank by the green sands waiting for us when, all at once, he heard voices—men’s voices. They were the voices of men coming up the Run, and one or two were complaining that this could not be the right creek, and that they had come more than far enough up it, but others said they had better be sure and go a little farther to see whether there was any green sand.
Jibby put everything that was left of the lunch back in the basket and crept up the bank of the Run and hid the basket. Then he edged along down to where the men were and took a peek at them from the top of the bank. There were ten of them, seven white men and three negroes, and one of the white men had red hair and a scar over his eye. The negroes were loaded down with bags and bundles. They had stopped, and the negroes were complaining that they had carried that stuff far enough for one day. They said there was no hurry, and that the treasure would not get away after it had remained right in one place almost a hundred years, they guessed, and that it was no use working black men to death, anyway.
Then the Redheaded Bandit swore.
“You-all look mighty sharp you don’t let anything happen to that provender,” he said. “I’m a bad man when I get riled. I’m the great-grandson of my great-grandfather, and he killed more men than there are kinky hairs on all your worthless heads, and I don’t mind killing three more blacks right now, and I’ll do it if you let that food stuff get harmed.”
The other men growled and scowled at the blacks, too, then, and the negroes mumbled and scolded in low voices.
“Tell you what, Jim,” one of them said, “I reckon I feel about like these darks feel. We don’t know that this creek is Murrell’s Run nohow. We might go up and up and get to nowhere in the end. You’s pushin’ us too hard and steady, Jim. Tomorrow is another day.”
“Yes, and who knows how long we’ve got to be huntin’ for that treasure, Jake?” the man called Jim answered. “We ain’t got none too much food fora big gang like this, Jake. We-all can’t be skirmishing around the country for food, Jake, when we’re on an exhibition like this.”
He meant expedition.
“No,” Jake said, “but we can’t walk up every creek to the No’th Pole, Jim, either. We ain’t no Stefanssons or Pearys.”
They did not look like it, either, Jibby said. The seven whites looked like the mountaineers he and his father had seen in the Ozarks—Hillbillies they call them down there. They looked like the laziest lot that ever lived.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Jake,” Jim said then. “Let the darks dump their stuff here, and we’ll go on up the creek a ways and sort of speculate around. That’s fair.”
“You white folks want to walk our foots off!” one of the blacks said then, but he put down his load.
“Hey, there, you!” Jim shouted. “Heft that stuff down easy, can’t you? Ain’t I told you often enough there’s dynamite in that bag?”
“I shore did heft it easy, boss,” the negro said. “I don’t heft no dynamite down hard.”
They talked awhile longer, and the white men decided to let the negroes stay to watch the dunnage, and they started off up the creek. The three black men stretched out on the yellow sand in the sun and got ready to go to sleep, and then Jibby stole away and came for us.
“Aw, pshaw!” Wampus said. “That ends it! Those men have dynamite and everything and they’ll get that treasure, and we’re beaten out of it!”
“Maybe!” Jibby said. “I don’t know yet. I remember when I was in New Orleans with my father and we went down to the levee and a bale of cotton rolled over.”
“What has that got to do with it?” Wampus asked.
“Why, a negro was asleep, stretched out on the ground,” Jibby said, “and the bale of cotton rolled on top of him and across him and then off of him again.”
“Did it kill him?” Skippy asked.
“No,” Jibby said. “That isn’t it. I was just telling you how one of those Southern negroes sleeps when he stretches out in the sun. This one just brushed his hand across his face and said, ‘Shoo fly! go ’way!’ and went on sleeping. Sleeping is the best thing some of those negroes do.”
“Well, what?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” Jibby said. “I was only thinking that the coming of this gang of treasure-hunters is the best luck we’ve had yet. We only guessed there was treasure here; now we know it. Now all we have to do is get rid of these men.”
“And that is so easy! Only ten of them!” I said.
“Well, I am surprised at you, George,” Jibby drawled. “You talk as if they were ten bumblebees.”
“But how are we going to get rid of them?” Wampus asked.
Jibby fondled his nose gently.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “they won’t like it here and will go away without being asked to go.”
Well, I didn’t like it much, but Jibby picked up the oil can and started for the woods along the Run, and, of course, a fellow could not hang back, so we all went. When we were near the edge of the bank, we all got down and wiggled forward until we could look over the edge and down at the place where the three negroes were asleep. They were sound asleep, too—plenty of sound, if you mean the sound of snoring.
The bank was about twelve feet high there, but not straight up and down. It slanted toward the creek and was covered with grass and weeds and a few small bushes as creek banks usually are. The dunnage of the treasure-hunters was piled in one pile close to where the foot of the bank met the sandy stretch on which the three black men were asleep. We looked down awhile, and then wiggled back and got to our feet and went off a few yards to hold a council.
“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 back to the edge of the bank and we had plenty of dead wood—big chunks of punk, as we call it—and we were pretty sure there were going to be three surprised black men in about one minute. Jibby lit the fire ball and he and Wampus bore the little birch tree over and bore it down, and he had figured the distance right enough, but the birch would not bear all the way down. It went flat against the top of the bank, but that stopped it and the fire ball was a good two feet above the pile of oil-soaked dunnage and food and dynamite.
“Hold it!” Jibby whispered. “Hold it!” And Wampus knelt on the birch. The fire ball blazed and sent up black smoke, and in less than a minute the string that held it to the birch caught fire and burned through and the fire ball fell on the pile of stuff. It lay there and burned and the top of the pile of stuff caught the flames and began to burn, too.
“Yip! Ye-ow-wow!” Jibby yelled, like a wild Indian, and he picked up a hunk of dead wood and let fly at the negroes, and we all did the same, and yelled as hard as we could.
About six out of ten of the things we threw hit where we meant them to hit, and those three black men jumped to their feet and stared around for just about one second of time. They were scared ash color, and they did not know where they were for a moment, but they saw the black smoke piling up from the pile of dunnage and they started down the Run faster than we had run from the bumblebees.
“Dyn’mite! Dyn’mite!” they shouted, but we did not wait to see or hear any more. Jibby was not waiting. He legged it away from there, and we were not two steps behind him, and when he was deep in the woods he threw himself down, and we did as Jibby did. It seemed the wisest thing to do.
We were no more than flat on the ground before there came a big, flat, heavy sort of boom! and then sand and small gravel fell on us like a sort of rain, and Jibby got up. We went back toward the edge of the Run, keeping mighty quiet, and we heard the seven men come loping down the creek, and, when they reached the place where we had blown up their stores, they swore and said they might have known it was not safe to trust those worthless darks.
“We-all sure has got miserable luck,” the man called Jim said, in a most disgusted way. “Just when we find the green sand, we get our stuff blowed to nothing. Now we’ve got to go and get more feed and more dynamite and more everything. It’s bad luck, but I’m right down glad of one thing; them darks was blowed clean to nothing, too.”
They stood there awhile looking at the deep hole the blast had blown in the creek bed, and then they went on down the Run, growling and complaining, and we knew we had a couple of days at least to dig for treasure before they came back. We slid down the bank and took a look at things ourselves. The bushes and grass and weeds had been blown away clean, and there was a hole where the sand had been, ten or twelve feet deep and about twenty-five feet long, and as wide as that.
Jibby Jones sat down on the edge of the hole and began to take off his pants, because he did not have any shirt to take off—he had torn it to strips.
“Wampus,” he drawled out, in that slow way of his, “you take the kerosene can and go back and ask Mrs. Catlin if she will lend us another can of kerosene. I’m going to take a bath in the good old swimming-hole. I thought maybe there would be one on this Run, somewhere.”
And, sure enough, there was the water trickling into that hole, and when Wampus got back with the kerosene, Tad and Jibby and Skippy and I were all in the pool splashing around and having a gay time. Jibby was right; there was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run.