XIX
The Tough Customer Appears
It was on Saturday that we found the 1804 dollar in the dry well of the cellar of the old Murrell farmhouse. We knew that the dollar was worth a lot of money, and Jibby Jones said he thought it might be worth a thousand dollars, which would be two hundred dollars apiece for each of us.
“But that’s nothing,” Jibby Jones told us. “If that John A. Murrell’s treasure is buried there, we may find a whole lot of money—perhaps thousands of dollars.”
He said this while we were going back to Riverbank in the dark. The dollar was all we had found, although we had searched the whole of the old brick house, but Jibby Jones had not helped us hunt; he had stood by an old pine tree doing nothing but thinking. He said he had to think where the land pirate or his man would most likely hide the treasure. And Jibby Jones said he had thought of the place.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, as we went along toward home, “but you must not breathe a word of it. It won’t do to let anybody know about the treasure or anything. The rush for the Klondike gold fields would be nothing beside the rush the people here in Riverbank would make for that treasure, if they knew there was a treasure.”
“That’s right!” Wampus Smale said. “Everybody in town would pile out there and dig for it.”
“Well, this is how I thought out where the treasure is,” Jibby said, and we all crowded close to him so that he would not have to talk very loud. “I leaned up against that old pine tree and I tried to imagine I was old John A. Murrell, the land pirate. That’s what you have to do if you want to get anywhere in this world—you’ve got to imagine things.”
Well, we stopped and had an argument right there! That sounded to us like the most foolish thing anybody could say—that the way to get anywhere was to imagine something.
“I don’t believe that,” Skippy Root said. “I believe that the way to get anywhere is to start right out and go there, and I believe that the way to get anything is to start right after it and get it. It don’t do any good for real folks to imagine anything at all; it may be all right for poets and story-writers to imagine things and then write them—that’s their sort of business—but it is a waste of time for anybody else to go and imagine things.”
“Is it?” Jibby Jones asked. “I didn’t know that. I always thought it was the other way.”
Well, that made us stop a little. Jibby Jones wasn’t half such a fool as he looked, and we had found that out. At first we had sort of figured that he was a silly, because he was almost six feet tall and wore clothes that were mostly built for a five-foot boy, and because his shell-rimmed spectacles and big, thin nose made him look like some foolish kind of bird, but somehow even the silliest things he ever said turned out to be pretty good solid sense. So now Tad Willing said:
“What do you mean by you ‘always thought it was the other way,’ Jibby?”
“Why, I always thought that nobody ever really did anything worth while until he had imagined something about it,” Jibby said. “I always thought there was never a wagon until some man imagined there was an easier way of getting over the ground than walking over it. He imagined there might be some sort of wagon, and then he went to work and made one. If someone had not imagined that men might fly, there would never have been any airplanes.”
“Well, I guess that’s so, anyway,” Tad admitted.
“Of course it is so!” Jibby said. “The only way the world gets ahead at all is by imagination. You take the phonograph, for an example. How do you suppose anybody ever happened to think of making a phonograph?”
“Why—” Wampus Smale began, and then he stopped.
It was as plain as day that nobody could sit down to invent a machine that would talk like a man and sing like a bird and play tunes like a band without first imagining such a machine.
“There you are!” Jibby said. “A phonograph is ninety-nine parts imagination and only one part solid stuff. Now, listen!”
Jibby Jones held the 1804 dollar between his finger and thumb and hit it with his finger nail. It tinkled like a little silver bell.
“You heard that, didn’t you?” he asked. “All five of us heard it. That means ten ears heard it. Well, for millions of years millions of ears were hearing millions of sounds before anybody sat down and wondered what a sound was and why an ear could hear it, and maybe it was thousands of years more before some man imagined his ears heard the sound because waves came through the air and hit his eardrums. So then he went to work and proved it—he proved that if you hit a drum it makes one kind of sound waves, and if you scrape a fiddle it makes another kind, and if a bird sings it makes another kind. He proved that sound is vibration.”
“Sure! I know that!” Wampus said, sort of scornful.
“Edison knew it, too,” Jibby Jones said, “and he sat down one day, and took all he knew about sound and sound waves and vibrations, and wondered why a man couldn’t make any kind of noise or music or even human speech, if he could scrape a needle on something and make it vibrate and start the right kind of waves. He had imagination, Edison did. He imagined some sort of machine that would take a man’s voice and make it jiggle a needle so that the needle would make waves on tinfoil or something. Tinfoil was what he used first. He talked his voice into a funnel so that its waves jiggled the needle and made waves on the tinfoil, and then he made the needle follow the waves in the tinfoil—little scratches, they were—and, sure enough, he heard his own voice talking back what he had just talked into the machine. And then he imagined a better machine with wax cylinders instead of tinfoil, and then—well, that’s how your phonograph got invented. Edison is ninety-nine parts imagination.”
“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Tad.
“More than half of the great inventions,” Jibby Jones said, “were made useful by some man who did not do the first inventing of them. Alexander Bell made the telephone so it was useful, but another man had done some telephone inventing first. The one man had enough imagination to imagine a toy telephone, but Alexander Bell had the imagination to imagine a telephone that would be useful to all the world.”
“All right,” Wampus said. “That’s so, I guess, but you’re talking about great men now, Jibby. What good does imagination do us?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Jibby drawled in his slow way. “I saw, right away, that a smart land pirate like John A. Murrell would not hide his money where you and George and Tad and Skippy would look for it. A man that could imagine a band of over one thousand men all pirating together would not hide his treasure just anywhere. He would imagine a lot of things. He would imagine he might be caught and put in jail and kept there fifty years, maybe, and he would imagine some place where his treasure could be hid where he could find it in a minute, but no one else would think of looking for it.”
“That sounds like good sense,” Skippy said.
“Of course it does!” said Jibby Jones. “You make fun of imagination, but how did we first come to think of treasure being hid out there at that old farm?”
“Why, you saw that old pine tree in the corner of the lot,” Wampus said.
“Yes, and I imagined it might be one of John A. Murrell’s signal pines, such as he had planted in the corners of yards and farms all through Tennessee and Mississippi and Arkansas. I imagined that, didn’t I? There’s nothing so useful as imagination. So I stood by that old dead pine and imagined I was John A. Murrell, with a lot of stolen treasure, and that I was liable to be caught and kept in jail fifty years or more after the treasure was hidden. I knew right away that you would not find it in the house, because that would be exactly the first place any of the Murrell gang would look for it, if he wanted to cheat John A. Murrell while Murrell was in jail. Isn’t that so?”
We had to admit that it was; the house was the first place we had looked, anyway.
“So I imagined I was John A. Murrell, away down in Arkansas, and that I wanted a true friend to hide my money here in Iowa, so that I could find it years later, even if the true friend was dead or had moved away, and even if the house had burned down and disappeared. I imagined I was John A. Murrell, getting out of jail and coming up the Mississippi until I came to the mouth of the creek you said was Murrell’s Run. Then I remembered the green sand you said was in the bottom of Murrell’s Run near the farmhouse. So I imagined I came up the creek until I came to the green sand, and that was a sign to me to climb out of the creek and look for—what?”
“The signal pine, of course,” said Skippy Root.
“Certainly,” said Jibby Jones. “So I imagined I was standing there looking at the signal pine. Then I knew there was just one place where the treasure could be—it would be planted right at the root of the old signal pine. For that is what John A. Murrell would order: ‘Plant a signal pine at the corner of the farm, and bury the treasure at the foot of the pine.’ Even if John A. Murrell was dying, he could tell exactly where the treasure was, in a few words, and nobody could miss it. He might be in Asia, and he could send a man directly to it. ‘Go up the Mississippi until you come to a creek about five miles below Riverbank, Iowa. Go up the creek until you come to green sand. Climb the bank on your left and find a signal pine in the corner of a farm. Dig at the foot of the pine.’ ”
Well, this might be wonderful imagination or it might be plumb nonsense, but out there in the dark, walking home past the cemetery, it sounded great to us. We all told Jibby he was a wonder, and he said he was not, that it was just ordinary common sense.
“I don’t say the treasure is there,” he said modestly, “because someone may have dug it up, but if it is anywhere it is there, at the foot of that signal pine tree.”
“But I’ll say you used some imagination,” said Skippy.
“Oh, no!” Jibby said, still more modest. “That wasn’t much. I don’t call that much of anything. But maybe I can show you, sometime, what imagination is worth.”
So then we went on talking about the treasure and the 1804 dollar, and how we must not talk about it outside, but Jibby Jones said it would be all right to tell our fathers and mothers about it, because they would not tell. We let Wampus Smale take the 1804 dollar home, because he said his mother had a silver wash that she used to dip silver things in to make them as bright as new. The 1804 dollar was not worn smooth—it was as sharp as if it had just come from the mint—but it was as black as iron, and we thought it would be a good thing to have it brightened.
We did not see how we could get out to the old Murrell farm to dig the treasure—if it was there—before the next Saturday, so we decided on that, and then we went home.
The sad thing happened the next morning—Sunday morning—when we were all going to Sunday school together, and the Tough Customer was to blame. He lost the 1804 dollar for us.
When Wampus got home that Saturday night, his folks were at supper and his father made him go and wash up and come right to the table, so he did. When he sat down at the table his father and mother were talking about Mary—their hired girl—and the man she had in the kitchen just then.
“Well,” Wampus’s mother was saying, “I did not like the looks of him, but Mary said he was her cousin, so I said she could give him some supper in the kitchen.”
“That’s all right, of course, for this one time,” Wampus’s father said then, “but don’t let the fellow hang around here. I think he is a tough customer, judging by his looks. He has a bad eye. If he had two eyes, I would say he had two bad eyes, but the one eye he has is bad enough to satisfy anyone.”
“I know,” Wampus’s mother said, “but I felt rather sorry for him because he has only one leg.”
Wampus had been waiting for a chance to talk, because he was so eager to tell about the 1804 dollar and the treasure, and now he had the chance, and he lit into it. He handed the dollar to his father and went on to tell him about all of us finding it, and about Jibby Jones guessing there was hidden treasure, but he would not say where we had found the dollar nor where the treasure was. He was too smart for that, because just then Mary came in with the supper she had been keeping hot in the oven for him. She stood around and listened while they talked about the treasure and the 1804 dollar and how valuable it was, but Wampus did not think anything about that, because Mary had been their hired girl for a couple of years.
“And how much treasure does your Jibby Jones think you will find?” Mr. Smale asked Wampus.
“He don’t know,” Wampus said. “Maybe thousands of dollars. Maybe none. But, anyway, we’ve got this dollar and it ought to be worth almost a thousand dollars, Jibby says.”
They went on talking it over, and Mr. Smale was sort of amused and did not believe in the treasure much, but Wampus wouldn’t say where we had been, or when we were going to dig for the treasure, and Mary went into the kitchen. So that was all of that.
Then Wampus told his father and mother that the one-legged man Mary had in the kitchen was the Tough Customer that Orph Cadwallader had run off the island, but neither Mr. Smale nor Mrs. Smale seemed to think much about it. All Mr. Smale said was: “He had no business on the island, but I suppose it is all right for Mary to feed a cousin once in a while. How about it, mother?”
“It has to be,” Mrs. Smale said; “it is so hard to get help these days.”