UNCLE BEESWAX
Three times after that we went up to Greenland Slough, and two of the
times we went up the creek, because the Tough Customer and the Rat were
not at the mouth of the creek to guard it. One of the times we found
them up the creek where they were doing their treasure digging, but the
third time they were nowhere around, and we had a chance to see what
they had been doing.
For plain ordinary everyday tramps they had done a lot of work, I will
say. Nobody could have hired them, for day’s wages, to do as much
digging as they had done. They had dug in eleven places--five on one
bank of the creek and six on the other--and the holes were deep enough
to bury oxen in, one on top of the other and both standing. They had
tried one place and then another, and anybody could see that they had
been puzzled and not sure where the cross mark on the map had been.
That, we guessed, was why they were so anxious to get the map. They
hadn’t found anything, and they didn’t know what to do next.
And neither did we. As nearly as we could figure it out, the Tough
Customer and the Rat had dug one of their holes right spang on the spot
where the “X” mark on the map showed that the treasure should be, if
there was any. If they hadn’t found anything with all that digging,
there wasn’t much chance that we would.
By this time we had got into the second week of August, and there was
not any too much of vacation left. We walked up and down the creek,
studying the lay of the land, but there was no question that the Tough
Customer had found the right spot, according to the map. There was only
one turn in the creek toward the west, and that was where they had dug.
We thought, perhaps, the creek might have shifted, but when we walked
here and there we saw that it hadn’t. It looked hopeless, and we were
just ready to leave, when we saw a man come loping toward us, half
doubled up and not wasting a bit of time, and after him were the Tough
Customer, hobbling faster than you would believe a one-legged man could
hobble, and the Rat. The Rat was making good time, too, but he didn’t
seem anxious to go ahead of the Tough Customer.
As the man they were after came nearer and saw us, he came toward us,
and when he had covered a few more yards we saw he was the old man
everybody calls “Uncle Beeswax.” He had an axe and two baskets, and by
the time he reached us he was just about all in. He was so out of breath
that he couldn’t talk, and it was plain enough he was almost too scared
to talk, anyway.
The far side of the creek was five or six feet higher than the side we
were on. When Uncle Beeswax came up to us and we saw he was being
chased, we grabbed his axe and baskets and took him by the arms and
hustled him across the creek and up the bank. Maybe we might have
hustled on up the hill with him, but he was plumb played out. He dropped
down on the short grass and just panted.
“No use!” he panted. “Played out! Got to rest--got to rest!”
So we let him rest, and we turned and took a look at the Tough Customer
and his pardner. They had stopped about fifty feet away, and were
looking at us and talking to each other. Whatever they had been chasing
old Uncle Beeswax for, I guess they didn’t like the idea of tackling
five husky boys and a man, even if he was an old man. So, after a minute
or two, they sat down and watched us. The Tough Customer was pretty well
played out himself, stumping so far on a wooden leg.
Now, we all knew Uncle Beeswax, except maybe Jibby Jones, and we knew
there wasn’t a mean drop of blood in him, or any harm. He was one of the
most aged men any of us knew, and he lived a mile or so farther up the
river in a shanty-boat of his own, and he was all right. He was a little
old man, hardly as tall as Wampus, and he had a long white beard that
almost touched the ground. The thing you thought of when you saw him was
a gnome, the kind you see in pictures with a long pointed cap and a pick
to dig gold with. He made his living mostly by finding bee trees, and
selling the honey and beeswax to folks in Riverbank, but he fished some,
and along in the fall he hunted for wild grapes and sold them for about
a dollar a bushel, or maybe a dollar and a half.
We island boys had seen old Uncle Beeswax hundreds of times, but he had
always acted solemn and severe and fussy and nervous, as if he was
afraid we would meddle with his skiff or something. Probably boys teased
him a lot because he was so funny-looking; anyway, he did not like boys.
And one of the things they teased him about was his nose. He hated to be
teased about his nose, because he never drank a drop, but his nose was
as long as Jibby Jones’s nose, but thick and bulby and as red as fire.
So there we were like two armies, we on the high ground and the Tough
Customer and the Rat on the low ground, and each waiting to see what the
other would do. And presently Uncle Beeswax got his breath.
“Can’t understand it! Can’t understand it!” he said, shaking his head so
that his long beard wiggled back and forth. “Never was chased in my life
before. And they acted like they would kill me, them men.”
“What for?” I asked him.
“Nothin’!” he said. “Nothin’ at all! I was in yonder”--and he pointed
toward the swamp below the slough--“a-lookin’ for grape trees, and I
come out again. The skeeters was too much for me--they was eatin’ me
alive. And I was tuckered; I’m old; I’m mighty old.”
“Well, they didn’t chase you because you were old, did they?” I asked
him, because he stopped talking.
“I don’t know why they chased me,” he said, as if his feelings were hurt
that anybody should. “I wasn’t doin’ harm. I just sat down on the edge
of their pesky little shanty-boat to rest my legs, and they come at me,
yellin’ and shoutin’, and chased me.”
He made a move to wipe the sweat off his face, and when he opened his
hand there was a piece of paper crumpled in it.
“Huh!” he said. “There it be, hey? I thought I’d lost it, bein’ chased.”
“What is it?” I asked him.
He spread it out on his knee.
“Month or so ago,” he said, “I was speculatin’ through the swamp yonder
and I come onto a grape tree--”
Well, we knew what a grape tree was. A grape tree is not a tree that
bears grapes the way an apple tree bears apples. A grape tree is a tree
the wild grapevines have climbed over until you can’t see the tree and
can only see masses and masses of grapevine. And one year one of these
trees will have bushels and bushels of wild grapes, and no other grape
trees around there will have any. The man that can find a good grape
tree and get the grapes off it is lucky.
“I come onto this grape tree a month or so ago,” Uncle Beeswax said,
“and I made a map showin’ whereabouts it was, so I could go back to it
when the grapes was ripe. And to-day I was tryin’ to find it, but I
couldn’t. The skeeters got too bad for me before I traced to the tree.
So I was settin’ on this shanty-boat lookin’ at my map I had made--”
“And they came up?” Wampus asked. “That’s it, then. Those men lost a
map, and they want it, and they thought you had it. They wanted to get
it away from you.”
Uncle Beeswax’s face wrinkled, and we knew he was grinning.
“If that’s all,” he said, “they can have it. I don’t want it. It ain’t
no good, noway. I can’t make nothing out of it myself, and they can’t
neither.”
So, at that, Skippy Root stood up and yelled at the Tough Customer.
“Hey!” he yelled. “He hasn’t got your map! All he’s got is a map of a
grape tree. You can see it, if you want to.”
The Tough Customer and the Rat consulted together, and the Tough
Customer came to their side of the creek, and Jibby Jones took the map
of the swamp and grape tree and went over to them and showed it to them.
It satisfied them that Uncle Beeswax did not have their map. So Jibby
told them, straight and plain, that if anybody had their map we had it,
and that we meant to keep it. Then he asked them if they had found
anything. The Tough Customer told him it was none of his business what
they had found or what they hadn’t found, and then he and the Rat went
back toward their shanty-boat and Jibby climbed up our bank of the
creek. Uncle Beeswax had got onto his feet again and was going away,
but, as Jibby’s head came up over the edge of the bank, Uncle Beeswax
stopped dead short and looked at Jibby and stared at him with his mouth
wide open.
“Noble!” he said, when he had stared and stared. “Just plumb noble, and
there ain’t any other words for it! What a nose! What a nose!”
Now, most folks would have been mad if anybody said that, but Jibby
Jones wasn’t--he was proud of his nose. Jibby talked about his nose more
than anybody else did, because it was a family relic, or something, and
had come down to him from his Grandfather Parmenter and his
Great-Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter.
Some folks are proud of a colonial spinning-wheel that has been in the
family three hundred years, but Jibby was proud of his nose. And I guess
he was right. A nose is a better relic than a spinning-wheel any day; it
is handier. It don’t have to be dusted, and you can wash it when you are
washing the rest of your face and save time that way, and you can carry
it with you wherever you go. You have to. So Jibby looked at old Uncle
Beeswax and grinned.
“It’s my jib,” he said. “When the wind blows too hard, I have to take a
couple of reefs in it.”
Well, I guess Uncle Beeswax didn’t have a chance to hear many jokes, and
when he heard that one he put down his basket and sat down on a stump
and laughed and laughed. He whacked his leg, and I thought he would die,
he laughed so hard.
“Jib, hey?” he chuckled when he could get his breath. “Jib, is it? Well,
if that’s so you ought to have some of my beeswax to waterproof it with.
Nothing like good old beeswax to keep the weather from ruinin’ a jib.”
Then he went off in another spell of laughing, and whacked his leg and
the tears rolled down his face and got into his beard.
So Jibby told him all about his nose and how he got it from his
Grandfather Parmenter and how George Washington had complimented Jibby’s
Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter on _his_ nose, and in a couple of
minutes old Uncle Beeswax was as chummy as a kid with us and told us all
about his nose and how useful it was and all the forty or fifty things
he had used to try to keep it from being so red, but no hope. He said it
was a headstrong nose and if it made up its mind to be red it was bound
to be red, and no use fooling with it.
“If I had two of ’em,” he said, “and the other was a green one, I’d look
like a steamboat.”
He showed where he would have his two noses, if he had two, one on
either cheek.
“But one is plenty,” he said. “When a man has a nose like mine, or like
yours,” he added politely to Jibby, “he has no excuse to covet any more
nose. He’s got a bountiful supply.”
He said it all with a twinkle in his eye, and from then on he was a good
fellow with us.
We asked him if he knew much about Greenland, and he said he had been
born in a house right about where we were sitting, which would be just
about where the house was on the treasure map. So we asked him if
anybody named M’rell had ever lived in that house, or in Greenland, or
anywhere that he knew of. He said never. He said nobody named that had
ever been anywhere that he had ever heard of. So then we told him about
the land pirate and the treasure, and he said it was all nonsense,
because if anybody from down Arkansas way had ever been anywhere around
there, he would have known it. So we told him not to say anything about
the treasure, and told him that was what the Tough Customer and the Rat
were after, and he said he would keep mum about it and sort of keep an
eye on the Tough Customer and the Rat and let us know if anything
happened.