XX
Orlando
The next morning we were on our way to Sunday school. I waited for Jibby and we picked up Wampus and Tad and Skippy, and we all had a good look at the 1804 dollar, because Wampus’s mother had dipped it and it was bright and beautiful. We passed it around and talked about it, and then we noticed the Tough Customer ahead of us. He did look tough, too, with his one peg-leg, and he swayed on his feet like a sailor—or on his one foot and one peg—and when he got to the corner he stood and waited.
We had no use for him, and we did not want to talk to him, but when we came up to the Tough Customer he said “Howdy!” to us.
“Are you the boys that have that 1804 dollar?” he asked.
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“My cousin told me about it,” he said. “She saw it in the dining-room last night. I’d like to have a look at it.”
Wampus had the dollar. I wished the man had not stopped us; there was something about his stopping us that I did not like. To see him smiling and trying to be pleasant and nice to us gave me the shivers.
“I know a man that wants to buy an 1804 dollar, boys,” he said. “I met him in St. Louis, only a couple of months ago, and he told me he would give more than the market price for one. ‘You travel about the world a lot,’ he said to me, ‘and you’re likely to run across one any day. If you do,’ he says, ‘let me know. Only,’ he says, ‘don’t try to fool me with no counterfeits, because I’m too wise for that.’ So he showed me how to tell the difference between a real one and a counterfeit one. I ain’t sure, but from what Mary told me I reckon you’ve got hold of a counterfeit one that someone threw away because it wasn’t worth a red cent. Let me see it; I can tell you in a minute.”
So Wampus pulled our dollar out of his pocket and handed it to the Tough Customer. I had half an idea he meant to try to run away with it, and I got ready to make a dive for his wooden leg if he tried anything of that kind, but he did not. He just stood there, turning the dollar over and over between his two fingers and his thumb. I guess Jibby Jones must have thought what I thought, for he sort of edged to the far side of the Tough Customer.
“Well, I declare!” the Tough Customer said. “I would not have thought it! It is a genuine—”
And just then he dropped the dollar! It slipped between his thumb and his two fingers and I made a dive for it, and so did Wampus, but so did the Tough Customer, too, and we all three came together ker-plunk, and the dollar jangled on the grating and disappeared.
For, you see, we were standing right over an iron grating that covered an opening into the Raccoon Creek sewer. The dollar went through the grating and into the sewer, and that was the last we ever saw of that dollar. The Tough Customer swore. He swore something that was awful to hear, and he got down on his knees and peered into the sewer, and then he moaned and groaned and said we would never forgive him, and he was about right about that—we never did.
I don’t know how long we stood there, but a crowd began to gather—folks going to Sunday school, and men with the Sunday papers under their arms, and a couple of automobiles, and so we boys slipped away and left the Tough Customer explaining that he had dropped a dollar into the sewer, but he did not say it was an 1804 dollar. The folks laughed and said it was a gone dollar.
I guess Sunday school did not do us much good that day. On the way home we talked about the chances of ever getting the 1804 dollar back—four of us did—but Jibby did not talk. We knew it was hopeless. The Raccoon Creek sewer is the main sewer in Riverbank and is really the whole of Raccoon Creek cemented in and roofed over, and there was less chance of getting that dollar out of it than of finding a pinhead fired out of a rifle into the Desert of Sahara. The water was always two or three feet deep and the mud a foot or two more. We decided there was no hope, and so Wampus said:
“Well, it is gone; the next thing is to get the treasure. Maybe there will be a couple more 1804 dollars in the treasure. We’ll get the treasure Saturday.”
“Maybe!” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve got to do some thinking first, and I’ve got to find a good thinking place before I do any more thinking.”
We tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. He said he must think. Finally, he did say he expected he could do all the thinking necessary before Saturday, if he found a first-class place to think in. That sounded foolish to me.
“Can’t you think in one place as well as in another?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “of course not! There’s a best place for everything, and there ought to be a best place to think in, too. For the kind of thinking I have to do I need a first-class thinking place.”
So that afternoon we walked around looking for a thinking place for Jibby Jones. We tried about thirty different places, and Jibby would sit down and try them, but they did not satisfy him. Then we would try another, and finally he said Wampus Smale’s woodshed would do; he said it was as good as any man needed to think in.
“It is warm and clean and smells of sawdust and damp bark,” Jibby said, “and the boards of the walls are wide enough for the air to ventilate through. I guess I can think first-rate here.”
It sounded foolish to us, but you can never tell when Jibby is being foolish and when he is not, but mostly he is not, so we all sat down and tried to think. We changed from one seat to another, and when Jibby sat with his back to the wall that is right close to the alley he said that was the best place of all for high-grade thinking, and that we would come there every afternoon and do our thinking. So, every afternoon, after school, we went there and Jibby sat and thought.
But the rest of us mostly talked. Jibby said he did not mind our talking, and sometimes he joined in. We talked about the treasure, and about old John A. Murrell, and so on, and we planned to go out and get the treasure on Saturday, but whenever any of us came near saying where the treasure was hidden, Jibby said “Hush!” and shut us up.
It came along to Friday afternoon, and we had planned pretty much everything. Wampus was to take a spade, and Skippy was to get a pickaxe, and Tad was to take an axe. Jibby told me to have a length of rope ready.
“And I’ll have my mother put up lunch for us,” he said, “for we may spend the whole day. We will all meet at my house at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll need a big lunch, because if we dig a lot we’ll be mighty hungry—”
He stopped short.
“Pshaw!” he said. “I forgot to feed Orlando!”
“Orlando?” I asked, for this was the first time I had heard of any Orlando. “Who’s Orlando?”
Jibby looked at me.
“My goodness!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I ever tell you about Orlando? That’s because we’ve had Orlando so long I never think much of him, I guess. Orlando is my father’s pet skunk.”
We did not say anything. Mr. Jones is an author, and an author is liable to have almost any kind of pet. They are funny folks, mostly, I guess.
“My father caught Orlando when Orlando was no bigger than a cat’s kitten,” Jibby Jones went on. “He caught Orlando in Pike County, Pennsylvania, and he raised Orlando on a bottle, and Orlando is as affectionate as a kitten. If you catch a skunk young and treat it right, it is the most affectionate pet you can have, and it makes the best kind of watchdog—if you can call a skunk a dog. We keep Orlando in the cellar, and I have to feed Orlando when my father does not. And father is away today and I forgot to feed Orlando. I’ll have to go home now and feed Orlando.”
“Gee whiz!” Skippy said. “That’s a funny kind of pet. Don’t it ever—well, you know!—perfumery?”
“Oh, no, indeed!” Jibby drawled. “That’s where you do Orlando a great wrong, Skippy. If a skunk is fond of you, and knows you, it never bothers you that way. It is only when a skunk is hostile to you that it bothers you that way.”
“Has—has Orlando ever been hostile?” Wampus asked.
“Yes, once,” Jibby said. “When we were in Kalamazoo, Michigan, my father was sick and a one-legged barber named Horace L. Spurting used to come to the house to shave father. We had a peach tree in the side yard and the peaches were ripe, and one evening Horace L. Spurting thought he would steal a couple of peaches, and he climbed the fence and sneaked up to the tree, and Orlando was taking a nap under the tree, and Horace L. Spurting stepped on Orlando’s tail. For three days Horace L. Spurting was unconscious, and we had to bury his clothes six feet deep and cut down the peach tree and burn it, and move into another house two miles away. Ever since then Orlando has been hostile to one-legged men because Horace L. Spurting had one leg. I don’t think Orlando is hostile to men with two legs or to women, but he might be hostile to the Legless Lady in the circus. But I must go home now and feed Orlando.”
“What do you do with Orlando when you are traveling?” Tad asked.
“We carry him in a green cloth bag, so he can’t see whether there are any one-legs or not,” Jibby said.
Then we all went home. I went with Jibby, because we live near each other.
“George,” he said, as we went along, “that Tough Customer was out behind Wampus’s woodshed, listening. I thought he would be. I picked out that woodshed on purpose, because the Tough Customer could hear us through the cracks in it. And we have no skunk at our house. We’ve got a black-and-white cat we call Orlando. But imagination is a great thing, George. I said it was. I imagined, for a while, that Orlando was a skunk.”
I laughed. I thought Jibby was trying to be funny.
“I didn’t want to bother Wampus and Tad and Skippy, George,” Jibby said, “but we’ve got some work to do tonight. Come to my house right after supper and bring a lantern. I have one, too.”
He would not say any more, so after supper I took my lantern and went to Jibby’s. We walked out to the old Murrell farm, and when we got there we went into the tumbledown old brick farmhouse and down into the cellar, where the dry well was. The old rotten boards were just as we had left them last Saturday, and Jibby Jones put them over the well, fixing them carefully, and sprinkled dry dirt all over them.
“I saw the natives make an elephant trap in India this way once,” he said. “I saw them catch a wild elephant. He was a tough customer.”
“You don’t think you’ll catch an elephant here, do you?” I asked him.
“No,” Jibby said, “but I expect I may catch a Tough Customer.”
So then we went home. The next morning we were all on hand at nine o’clock at Jibby’s, and we started for the Murrell farm. We hiked along at a good rate, saying “hep! hep! hep!” to keep in step, or singing something to keep step by. We had all the things Jibby had told us to bring, and he had a big market-basket with a lid.
“It is all right,” Jibby whispered to me once. “The Tough Customer is following us.”
About half a mile this side of the Murrell farm, Jibby said he was tired and sat down by the side of the road to rest. There was a long osage orange hedge there, and we sat with it behind us.
“Now, listen,” he said, when we were seated. “Before we get to work to dig that treasure, we’ll go to the Run and get some of that green sand for my collection. It won’t take half an hour; we’ll have plenty of time. Nobody is going to guess that the treasure is under the bottom of the old dry well in the cellar of the old brick farmhouse at the crossroads where the broken, dead pine tree is.”
“But—” said Wampus.
“You be still!” Jibby said. “Sometimes I think you talk too much. I’m hungry. I’m going to eat something.”
He opened the basket and gave us each a sandwich, and they did taste good! We sat there eating.
“But you said the treasure was under the pine tree,” Wampus said then.
“Yes, I said that, and that is where it is,” Jibby Jones said then, “but just now the Tough Customer was behind the hedge here listening, and I wanted him to think it was in the well in the cellar. But now we can talk; he is not here now. Look up the road.”
Sure enough, there was the Tough Customer, hobbling along in a great hurry, trying to keep out of sight and going toward the old Murrell place.
“Let him get in the house,” Jibby said, and then he opened the lid of his market-basket again and took out a green felt bag. He loosened the strings and a cat stuck its black-and-white head out of the bag.
“Good old Orlando!” Jibby said, and stroked the cat’s head.
He handed the bag to Wampus.
“You carry the cat, Wampus,” he said, “and when I ask for it you hand it to me. Now, come on, and let’s hurry.”
We did. We started up the road at a good clip, and when we reached the old Murrell place the Tough Customer was not in sight, but when we had stolen up to the house we heard a clatter of old boards and a yell, and we all piled into the cellar. The Tough Customer had stepped on the boards that covered Jibby’s elephant trap and they had tipped and fallen into the dry well and the Tough Customer had gone with them. He was swearing and jumping and trying to get out of the well, but it was too deep for him to get out without someone to pull him out or boost him out. When he saw us, he let loose all the language he could think of, and he told us all the things he would do to us if he ever got out of that hole.
Jibby stood and looked down at him.
“Wampus,” Jibby said, in his slow, drawling way, “hand me Orlando.”
Wampus handed Jibby Jones the green felt bag.
“Now, you boys had better get out of the cellar and, maybe, out of the house,” Jibby said, “because it may not be very pleasant when I put Orlando down the well. Orlando is hostile to men with wooden legs. Orlando don’t like wooden legs.”
“Look here!” the Tough Customer begged, changing his tone in an instant. “You’re not going to dump that cussed animal down here, are you? Please don’t. Don’t you be so cruel to a feller that never did anybody any harm. Please! I’d rather be licked a dozen times than have that animal—”
“Hurry, boys!” Jibby said. “There’s going to be a grand time here. I shouldn’t wonder if Orlando bit this man, too, besides other happenings.”
Jibby opened the neck of the bag.
“Wooden legs, Orlando!” he said, when the cat put its head out.
“Look here!” the Tough Customer whined from down in the well. “Don’t do it! Don’t let that animal loose on me. I’ll give you—I’ll give you anything you say.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jibby said. “I sort of hate to miss the fun. But, I don’t know. I might be willing to dicker. How about a dollar? How about an 1804 dollar?”
“I haven’t got—” the man began.
“Scoot, boys!” Jibby shouted. “Here she goes! Sic him, Orlando!”
“I’ll give it! I’ll give it!” the Tough Customer yelled, and—plunk!—on the hard dirt at Jibby’s feet the 1804 dollar fell. Jibby picked it up and looked at it. It was our dollar, right enough.
Jibby pushed the cat’s head back into the green bag and tied the strings and put the bag in the basket. Then he made Wampus with his spade and Tad with his axe stand ready to take care of the Tough Customer if he tried any funny tricks, and Skippy and I threw an end of the rope into the well and pulled the Tough Customer out. He did not wait to talk; he gave one look at the basket and scooted out of that cellar.
We piled out after him, because we did not want him throwing any bricks or rocks down on us, but we saw him hobbling down the road as fast as his wooden leg would carry him, and we whooped and laughed and patted Jibby Jones on the back.
“That’s nothing!” he said. “I saw a man palm a dollar once in a sleight-of-hand show, so I had some experience that way. And I just imagined Orlando was a skunk for this afternoon only. I sort of imagined that Tough Customer was not going to let an 1804 dollar drop down a sewer. It looked too smart, to have him standing right over that grating. So that’s all there is to it—experience and imagination.”
And that’s so. They do make a mighty good team. When you have Experience and Imagination hitched up together, you can do almost anything. I was thinking that when Orlando, in the bag, gave a yowl.
Jibby Jones grinned.
“Orlando wants to go home,” he said. And he took the bag out of the basket and took the cat out of the bag. He dropped Orlando on the ground, and the cat started for home at a good trot. The cat took to the road, and presently the Tough Customer looked back, and he saw Orlando trotting along toward him. He gave one yell and dived over a fence, and the last we saw of him that day was while he was scooting across a ploughed field as hard as he could scoot.