GRAINS OF SAND
For a while nothing much happened. It got along to the first of
September, and all of us had to leave Birch Island and go back down to
Riverbank, because we had to go to school. Old Uncle Beeswax came to the
island a day or so before we left, and he said the Tough Customer and
the Rat had given up digging for the land pirate’s treasure.
Uncle Beeswax had hardly gone when we saw the Tough Customer’s old
shanty-boat floating down the river, past our island, and we knew they
had given up hope and were going away. It did seem as if the Land
Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company had had about as bad
luck as the Tough Customer, too, and that our hunting had been wasted.
We thought the treasure was a fake, and that there wasn’t any, and that
if there was we were all through with it. But we were not through with
it yet, not by a long shot! If we had known the truth, we were just at
the beginning of it.
A couple of days before we were to go down to town, all four of us were
out there on the riverbank with the different things we had collected
during the summer, making up our minds what we would keep and take home
with us and what we would throw away.
I was there, and so were Skippy Root and Tad Willing and Wampus Smale,
and we had all our curiosities spread out, when up came Jibby Jones. He
stood there looking at our curiosities, with his hands behind his back,
and he did look funny with his tortoise-shell spectacles and his big
nose like the jib of a boat and a suit that needed to grow a lot before
it was big enough for him.
“You’ve got a nice lot of things,” he said.
And we had, too. You can find a lot of dandy curiosities up there on
that island and around the river. We had chunks of rock from the ripraps
with fossils in them, and carnelians from the levee, and turtle shells
without the turtles in them, and roots that looked like snakes or
people, and about six kinds of mussel shells, and some birds’ eggs--we
had a whole lot of dandy things. It looked like about a ton when we had
them all spread out before us. They were fine for our collections.
“Where are yours?” Wampus asked Jibby.
Jibby had had some bully news to tell us a couple of days before. His
folks were going to stay in Riverbank all winter, because Jibby’s father
was writing a book or something.
“If you haven’t got any shells and rocks and things,” Tad said to Jibby,
“you’d better get them now. Maybe you’ll go away in the spring, and
maybe this is your last chance to get them. There is plenty of time
yet.”
“Thank you,” Jibby said, “but I don’t want to get any.”
“Don’t you collect anything?” Skippy asked. “I thought everybody had a
collection of some kind.”
“Oh, yes!” Jibby said. “I do collect. I have a collection. But I don’t
collect big things any more. My father put a stop to it years ago.”
“What were you collecting then?” Wampus asked.
“Hides,” Jibby said, as serious as an owl. “I had a white mouse once and
it died, so I saved the hide, and I thought it would be nice to collect
hides--to get a collection of all the kinds of hides in the world.”
“Say!” Skippy said. “That would be bully, wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t your
father let you collect them?”
“Well, we were in Egypt then,” said Jibby Jones, “and the next hide I
collected was one a hunter gave me. It was a hippopotamus hide and it
needed an ox cart with four oxen to haul it. When it came to our tent I
was greatly pleased, and I told father I knew where there was a
crocodile hide a boy would trade me if I could get something to trade
for it. It weighed about one hundred pounds. And I knew an old Arab that
had a sick camel, and he said I could have the camel’s hide if the camel
died, only I would have to skin the camel--he was too busy. So I asked
father if he would help me skin the camel.”
“And wouldn’t he?” asked Wampus.
“No,” said Jibby Jones. “Father put his foot down. He said I could not
collect hides. We often traveled with only one suitcase, because he was
an author and had to be in a hurry, and he said that if my collection
amounted to much, and I got an elephant hide and a rhinoceros hide and,
maybe, a giraffe hide and a buffalo hide, and added them to my mouse
hide and my hippopotamus hide, there wouldn’t be room in the suitcase
for his toothbrush. So I began to collect something else.”
“What are you collecting now?” asked Skippy, and we all listened for the
answer, because, if Jibby Jones was collecting anything, we did not know
it.
“Sand,” Jibby said. “I rowed over to the sand bar this morning and got
eight grains of sand to add to my collection.”
Well, we just all lay back and yelled. It was about the funniest thing
we ever thought of--almost six feet of Jibby Jones going all the way
over to the sand bar on the other side of the river with his spectacles
and everything, to get eight grains of sand!
Jibby Jones looked at us awhile, sort of smiling as if he could not
quite see what we were laughing at, and then he said:
“But, of course, I don’t always get eight grains; mostly I only get one
or two grains. I got eight grains because this is the best summer I ever
had in my life and I want to remember it forever. I got eight grains of
Mississippi River sand so that if any got lost I would still have enough
to remember you boys by.”
“And is that all you are collecting?” Wampus asked.
“Yes,” Jibby Jones said. “Father don’t like me to collect bulky things,
and I thought grains of sand were about as small as anything could be,
so I collect them.”
Well, that is how Jibby Jones was. He looked silly, with his nose like a
jib and his serious look, but there was always some good sense in what
he said and did. When you come to think of it a grain of sand is just
about the smallest thing there is.
Grains of sand did seem queer things to collect, just the same, when you
think that all you have to do is walk across a sand bar in low shoes and
you get two shoes full in about a minute and find grains of sand in your
bed for about a week. So we sort of teased Jibby Jones, and the end of
it was that we all went into his father’s cottage to look at Jibby
Jones’s collection.
Say! He brought out a little tin box just about as big as my hand, and
opened it, and he brought out a magnifying-glass that was a dandy. That
magnifying-glass made a pin look as big as a railway spike, almost. It
made a grain of sand look almost as big as a diamond a lady wears in a
ring. I guess we did open our eyes when Jibby Jones began to show us his
collection of grains of sand.
In the little tin box were little squares of card, just about the size
of postage stamps, and each grain of sand was glued to its card, with
the place it came from and the date Jibby Jones got that grain of sand
all written out on the little card. He had each little card wrapped in
tissue paper, so that if the grain of sand came off the card it would
not be lost.
The first specimen he let us see was a grain of sand from the seashore
of the Atlantic Ocean, United States. Without the magnifying-glass you
could not see it at all, but when we looked through the glass at it we
all said, “Oh, boy!” It was like a drop of moonlight shut up in a clear
stone. It did not sparkle; it glowed. Then he showed us one from the
Pacific Ocean that was like yellow sunlight.
Just about then we changed our minds about Jibby Jones having a fool
sort of collection. He had a grain of sand from every place he had been.
He had one from the Nile, and one from the edge of the Sahara Desert,
and one from the River Jordan, and two from the St. Lawrence and
hundreds more.
“This one is from the San Gabriel River in California,” Jibby Jones
said, when he showed us one grain. “It isn’t very odd, but it was got in
a queer way. Father wouldn’t stop to let me get a grain of sand out of
that river, because we were just going by on an interurban trolley car,
so I thought I would get a grain of sand, anyway. I chewed some gum and
fastened it to a string, and when we went over the bridge I stood on the
end of the car and let the gum drag in the sand. It caught a lot of
grains.”
Jibby Jones had about the bulliest collection I ever looked at.
“It is just as good as a collection of mountains and caverns and all
sorts of minerals would be, when you get used to it,” Jibby Jones said,
“because that is what sand is--mountains and rocks that have broken down
and been crushed and then rolled by the water until the sharp edges are
worn smooth.”
He had some cards that had more than one grain of sand glued to
them--fifty or a hundred grains.
“When I get specimens for places,” Jibby Jones said, “I keep only one
grain of sand, because father didn’t want me to collect anything bulky,
but these are for color, so I keep more grains.”
Well, I did not know there were so many kinds of sand in the whole
world! Jibby Jones had black sand, and sand as red as blood, and sand as
blue as indigo, and sand of almost every color you ever heard of, and
then some colors you never did hear of. We were saying, “Oh, boy!” and,
“My gimini crickets!” every minute, and, all at once, Skippy said:
“Say, Jibby, you haven’t any green sand!”
“Yes, I have,” Jibby said, and he showed us a card of green sand.
“I don’t mean that kind of green,” Skippy said. “I mean green that the
light shows through; not solid green. I know where there is a kind of
green you have not got. You know, fellows; that green sand in Murrell’s
Run, down below town.”
“Sure! I know!” I said, as excited as if somebody had told me where
there was a million dollars. “Out back of that old brick house, Skippy.”
We all remembered it. We had found it one day when we were wading up the
Run, and there was a lot of it. It was right in the bottom of the Run,
and we all waded in it and dug our toes in it and said it was a queer
kind of sand.
Jibby Jones straightened up and looked at me through his spectacles.
“Green sand?” he said in a queer way. “Green sand?”
“You bet!” I said. “And lots of it. And it’s the only place anybody ever
heard of green sand being, around here.”
“In a creek?” Jibby asked.
“Yes; up in the hills below town,” I said. “Only they don’t call that
creek a creek; they call it a ‘run’--Murl’s Run,” I said, pronouncing it
the way we always did.
“I’d like to have some of that green sand--for my collection,” Jibby
drawled.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll get you some; we know right where it is.”
“I would rather get it myself,” Jibby said. “I like my sand specimens
when I get them myself.”
So that was how, the first Saturday after school began, Jibby Jones went
with us out toward the Run. We all wanted to get green sand for our
collections of sand, because we had all four started in collecting sand.
As soon as we got through looking at Jibby’s collection, we went over to
the sand bar to get some Mississippi River sand to start our
collections. Only we didn’t get just one grain apiece; we got about a
peck apiece. We thought maybe we could exchange grains of Mississippi
River sand with boys in California and other places. We got enough sand
to exchange with about a million boys, and there was plenty left in the
river, too.
Going to Murrell’s Run to get the green sand we went out the road past
the cemetery for about five miles, and just before we got to the Run we
came to a crossroads, where an old tumbledown brick house stands. We
were going right on past when, all at once, Jibby Jones stopped short.
“Hello!” he said. “Look at that!”
We stopped and looked, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was nothing
but the old deserted brick farmhouse at the crossing of the roads. It
was a one-story house with an attic, and the roof was falling in. All
the doors and windows were gone, and the barn behind the house was
nothing but a pile of rotted wood, flat on the ground. Tall weeds,
mostly gone to seed now, were everywhere. It looked as if nobody had
lived in that house for a hundred years. There was one big
horse-chestnut tree by the house and one dead tree in the corner, just
where the roads crossed, and all the rest was tangled blackberry bushes.
“What do you see?” Wampus Smale asked. “I don’t see anything.”
That old house had been there so long and we had seen it so often that
we never thought anything about it. It was not even gloomy enough to
look like a haunted house. We had played all over it, because Wampus
Smale’s father owned that piece of land and the new house that was up
the road five hundred yards or so. But Jibby Jones stood in the road,
sniffing the air and wiggling his nose.
“Do you smell money?” he asked.
We all sniffed then. I know how paper money smells, but I could not
smell that smell. Neither could Wampus or Skippy or Tad. We said so.
“I don’t mean paper money; I mean gold money,” Jibby Jones said. “Can
you smell gold money?”
“Pshaw, no!” Skippy said, but he sniffed at the air first. “Of course I
can’t. Nobody can smell gold money; it hasn’t any smell.”
“Neither can I,” said Jibby Jones. “I have a good nose, but it can’t
smell gold. I just thought perhaps your noses could. If you can’t smell
anything that smells like gold money, can you see anything that looks
like it?”
We all looked as hard as we could, but we did not see anything that
looked like gold money, or like anything much of anything. So we said
so.
Wampus laughed.
“He’s fooling us,” he said, and then he asked Jibby Jones: “What do you
see?”
“I see that old dead tree in the corner,” Jibby Jones said. “Do you know
what kind of tree that is?”
We were all pretty well interested by this time, so we went up to the
tree and looked at it and felt of it, and Wampus put his pug nose up
against it and smelled it. Maybe he thought he could smell the gold
money. The tree was so old the bark was all off it, and it had been
struck by lightning once or twice and the top was all gone. When we had
looked it over, we did not know what to think. We thought maybe Jibby
Jones thought it was some kind of tree that was worth a lot of money,
the way black walnut was during the war. But I said:
“I know what kind of tree it was. It was a pine tree. And I know what
kind of tree it is. It is a dead tree.”
“Of course,” Jibby Jones said, as solemn as ever; “but I don’t mean
that. I mean what other kind of tree it was.”
“Well,” Skippy said, “if you mean whether it was a short-leaf pine or a
long-leaf pine, I give it up. I can’t tell that by an old dead trunk
like this.”
“I don’t mean that,” Jibby Jones said. “Don’t you see where the tree
is?”
We began to get excited now.
“Right in the corner!” he said. “There’s the house, and here is what
must have been the dooryard of the house, and right in the corner is
this pine tree. Didn’t you ever hear of John A. M’rell?”
“Ginger!” I cried. “Ginger!” For M’rell was the way Jibby Jones always
pronounced the land pirate’s name.
“This tree was a signal pine,” Jibby said, as serious as a judge. “The
minute I saw it, I knew it was a pine tree, and the minute I saw it was
in the corner, I knew it might be a John A. M’rell signal pine. Didn’t
anybody ever talk about hunting treasure here?”
We just looked at Jibby Jones and stared.
“No; nobody ever said anything about treasure up here,” Tad said.
“Then we’ve got a chance--a great chance,” Jibby Jones said, more
excited than we ever saw him. “Maybe we can find ten thousand dollars,
and maybe we can find a hundred thousand dollars. It just shows how
ignorant people can be, even when things are right under their noses.
Here is a fortune lying where anybody can put their hands on it, and
they don’t know it. My gracious! I thought you fellows said you knew all
about the Mississippi River.”
“Aw!” Wampus said. “What are you talking about the river for? This isn’t
the river; this is farmland.”
“If you knew all about the river, you would know all about all parts of
it,” Jibby Jones said. “You would know about Arkansas and Mississippi
and the things that happened there. You’d know that whenever there is a
lone pine in the corner of a farm, it might be a M’rell tree. And you’d
remember it whenever anybody talked about land pirate’s treasure. You’d
know that people down there have hunted and hunted for John A. M’ell’s
hidden money, and never found it. Of course, they didn’t find it. Why?
Because it’s here. The minute I saw this tree, I knew this was where it
was hidden.”
“Yes, but--” Wampus began.
“How far is it from here to the river or to the slough, if there is a
slough?”
“Of course there’s a slough,” I said. “There’s Riverbank Slough. It’s
two or three miles from here.”
“Yes, but--” Wampus said again.
“But what?” Jibby asked.
“But this isn’t the place; this can’t be the place,” Wampus said. “The
map said Greenland.”
Jibby took off his hat and unpinned the map from inside the sweat-band,
where he always carried it. He spread it out on his hand.
“‘Land’ or ‘sand,’” he said. “It might be one or the other, the way it
is scribbled. It’s ‘Greenland’ or it’s ‘green sand,’ just as you want to
read it. And there wasn’t any treasure at Greenland. Look here--where
would the green sand be, according to this map?”
We leaned over the map and studied it a minute.
“Right there,” said Tad, putting his finger on the very spot where the
“X” mark was.
“All right!” Jibby said. “Here’s your river, and here’s your slough, and
here’s your creek, and here’s your crossroads. And these criss-cross
scribble marks stand for Riverbank. And here’s your signal pine, and
your house, and your green sand right where the ‘X’ mark is--and marked
‘green sand’ plain enough for anybody. And what would John A. M’rell’s
brother send as directions if he hid the money here, and John A. M’rell
was a criminal and likely to be hunted when he was coming for his
treasure?”
[Illustration: a map]
“What would he say?” Tad asked.
“He would say, ‘Come up the Mississippi River to Riverbank, Iowa. Only,
you’d better not go there; they may be looking for you. So, when you
come to the first slough below Riverbank, row up the slough until you
come to a creek. You can sneak up that creek without much chance of
anybody seeing you. So come along up the creek until you come to some
green sand, about two or three miles back from the slough. And, when you
come to the green sand, climb up the creek bank and you’ll see a brick
house, and a signal pine I planted. That’s where I am.’”
“Gee!” I said, it was all so plain.
“How do you pronounce M-u-r-r-e-l-l?” Jibby Jones asked.
“Murl,” I said.
“Well, that old negro Mose pronounced it M’rell,” Jibby Jones said.
“M’rell and Murl is all the same. One is the Southern way of saying it,
and the other is the Northern way. And you say the name of this creek is
Murl’s Run. That’s M’rell’s Run--M-u-r-r-e-l-l’s Run. This is the
place!”