II
The Pearl-Diggers
Well, it took us quite a while to learn that Jibby Jones was not as stupid as he looks, and that when he looks stupidest and says the queerest things is when he is farthest from being stupid. That is when that old brain of his is working hardest. It took us a couple of weeks to learn that, and to get to liking Jibby the way we did, and I don’t know that Wampus ever did think, in the bottom of his heart, that Jibby was anything but stupid and lucky.
And at first we did try to “string” old Jibby good and plenty. We told him things about our river that would not have fooled a mudcat or a carp. And when we told those things to Jibby, he would look at us through his spectacles in that serious way of his, and sometimes we were sure he believed the nonsense, and sometimes we were not so sure.
One thing we told him was about getting mussel shells out of the river. That is quite a big business around Riverbank because there are so many pearl-button factories in Riverbank and they have to have shells to cut the buttons out of. The shells they use are mussel shells—a sort of clam shell—and hundreds of men dredge for the shells. Some of the men rake up the shells with long two-handled rakes and others drag for them with dull hooks strung on a long crossbar. The mussels sort of bite the hooks and hang on and the dredgers pull them up.
Jibby Jones knew all this; we couldn’t fool him about it because his father had told him; but we did try to fool him about another part of it. That was about getting mussel shells that had real pearls in them—the pearls the women wear for jewelry. Tad was the one that tried to fool him about that. I guess Jibby asked Tad how they got the pearls, because Tad’s father was a pearl-buyer.
“Well, that’s a pretty hard job, Jibby,” Tad told him. “Not many people want to try diving for pearls in the old Mississippi, I can tell you! No, sir!”
“Why?” Jibby asked. “I never heard of sharks in the Mississippi, or alligators this far north.”
“Well, I should say not!” said Tad. “If there were sharks and alligators here, too, nobody would ever dive for pearls. No, sir! It isn’t sharks or alligators, it’s mud!”
“Mud?” Jibby asked.
“Yes, sir! Mud!” Tad told him. “Common old Mississippi River mud. That’s why so few hunt pearls; that’s why pearls are so high-priced. The mud is awful. The mussels with real pearls in them don’t lie right on top of the mud like common button-shell mussels; they burrow down in the mud. The minute a mussel feels a pearl beginning to grow in it, it begins to burrow.”
Of course, Skippy and Wampus and I could hardly keep from shouting out loud when Tad said all this nonsense, because there wasn’t a true word in it, but Jibby Jones just stared at Tad through his spectacles and believed it all. Or we thought he did.
“I should think they could dredge a little deeper and get them,” Jibby said.
“Dredge deeper?” said Tad, because he did not know just what to say to that.
“Pshaw!” Skippy put in. “Dredge deeper! That would be a nice thing to do, wouldn’t it? And the minute the mussel felt the dredge, it would spit out the pearl and that pearl would be lost forever. You can’t dredge for pearl mussels, Jibby.”
“Of course not!” said Tad. “You have to dive for them. You—you—”
Tad had to think quick to think up some ridiculous thing to tell Jibby, but Tad was a good one at that and he did it! Yes, sir!
“You have to do the only way it can be done, if you want to get pearls,” he said. “You have to nose them out.”
He stopped short and looked at Jibby’s nose.
“Why, you’d make the finest kind of pearl-diver yourself, Jibby,” he said. “You’ve got a splendid nose for it. You’ve got the best nose I ever saw for pearl-diving in the Mississippi.”
“Do you think so?” Jibby asked, as pleased as pie.
“I know so,” Tad told him. “You’ll know so, too, when I tell you how the divers have to get the pearl-bearing shells. There’s only one way. The pearl-bearing mussel is the scariest thing in the world; a rabbit is brave alongside of a mussel that has a pearl in it. The slightest hard thing frightens a pearl mussel half to death and starts it digging deeper into the mud, and then you never can get it.”
“They’re timid?” asked Jibby Jones as if he understood.
“Timid and tender,” said Tad. “When a mussel is bearing a pearl its shell is ten times as tender as a deer’s horns when they are in velvet. The least touch of anything hard hurts the mussel and makes it drop its pearl. That’s why the pearl-divers root them out with their noses.”
“Is that the way they do?” asked Jibby.
“Of course! You can’t use a hook, because it is too hard; and you can’t use a rake because it is too hard; and you can’t even use your hands, because of your finger nails. The only way you can root out a pearl mussel is with your nose. The end of a nose is soft and does not hurt the mussel. They like the feel of it.”
Jibby Jones felt the end of his nose.
“It is soft, isn’t it?” he said, as if he had never discovered that before.
“Of course, it is soft!” said Tad. “And that is why the pearl-divers of the Mississippi use their noses. The only trouble is that they can’t keep at the job long; they wear their noses down so that they are not fit to dig with. Then they are of no more use in rooting for pearl mussels. A man with a bunty nose, or with a pug like Wampus Smale’s nose, is no good at all.”
“I expect my Grandfather Parmenter—” Jibby began, but we all knew what he was going to say. He was going to say his Grandfather Parmenter would have made a good Mississippi pearl-diver. Jibby did not finish saying it. He thought of something else.
We were in the motorboat, back in Third Slough, fishing for bullhead catfish. They were not biting very well, which was why we had so much time to talk; bullheads do not mind talk; they’re stupid.
Well, we knew there was not much use fishing just then. The river was too high and too low; too much both and too much neither. But we had come because Jibby had wanted to come. It was the last chance he would have to fish with us. The reason was that his father had decided they must leave Birch Island sooner than they had expected and go back to New York. And the reason of that was that Mr. Jones had been asked by a publisher to write a book about spending a summer on an island in the Mississippi and the publisher had suddenly decided he did not want that book. So Mr. Jones thought he could not afford to spend any more time on the island. The publisher had expected to send Mr. Jones a thousand dollars, but now he would not, and this was the last day we were apt to spend with Jibby, fishing together and things like that.
“How do they do,” Jibby asked Tad, “when they dive for mussels and root them out?”
“Why, it is as simple as pie if you have the right kind of nose,” Tad said. “You dive from a boat in a slough or some other muddy place—some place with a muddy bottom—and when you reach the mud you take hold of the mud with both hands. That is to hold you down. Then you begin rooting in the mud with your nose. You root here and you root there, as fast as you can, and if you don’t find a mussel you come up for breath.”
“Of course. One would do that,” said Jibby, as serious as an owl. “But if one roots out a mussel?”
“Oh! Then you have to open your mouth and grab it quick,” said Tad, nudging me. “Like mumblety-peg. When you root up a shell with your nose, you open your mouth and grab the shell and then come up as quick as you can; but you have to be sure you don’t open your mouth until you get in the boat. If you do, the mussel will open its shell and spit out the pearl.”
Jibby Jones looked over the side of the boat.
“Do you think this would be a good place to dive for pearls?” he asked, sort of wistfully.
“This? This is one of the finest places in the Mississippi,” Tad said. “I’m surprised there is no one diving right now.”
I had to turn my head away and grin. The water was not five feet deep where we were.
“I am going to dive for a pearl,” Jibby Jones said suddenly.
“That’s a good idea,” Tad said. “The bullheads are not biting, anyway. That’s always a good sign; bullheads hardly ever bite where there are mussels. And there couldn’t be a better day to get a pearl. The sun is just right. It is low enough to slant on the water and not dazzle the mussels. When they are dazzled, they go deeper in the mud. They ought to be near the top of it now.”
“I can stay under water quite long,” Jibby said as he began to take off his clothes. “I stayed under water so long once, in the River Niger, that father was afraid I was drowned. So don’t worry if I stay down long.”
“We won’t,” Tad said.
It took Jibby quite a while to get ready; he was always slow. Then he stood on the gunwale of the motorboat and put his palms together and dove. He did not have far to dive; he must have run his head into the soft black mud up to his ears, for he was up in a second, shaking his head and holding onto the boat.
“It isn’t as deep as I thought it was,” he said as he wiped the mud from his face. “I did not do that dive very well. I’ll have to try it again.”
“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.”