WINGED ENEMIES
It must have been about half-past ten or eleven o’clock in the morning
by the time we got rid of the Tough Customer that had come to the old
Murrell farm to get the land pirate’s buried treasure before we could
get it. We stood there by the old brick house laughing and shouting
while Jibby Jones’s cat Orlando chased the Tough Customer off the road.
When we saw the Tough Customer vanish over a rise of ground, the rest of
our work of getting the buried treasure--if there was any--seemed as
simple as opening a pie to pull out a plum. We had the rest of the
morning and all afternoon and part of the evening to work in, and Jibby
Jones had figured out that the buried treasure must be under the old
signal pine tree in the corner, near where the two roads crossed.
“Come on!” I said. “Now we can get it; there’s not a thing that can stop
us.”
And that was how it looked to me. There we were, Jibby Jones and Wampus
Smale and Tad Willing and Skippy Root and myself, and we had enough
lunch to last all day, and we had a spade and a pick and an axe and a
long rope. It did look as if getting that treasure would be the easiest
thing in the world. I felt as if my hands were already scooping up gold
money and silver money and letting it drip through my fingers.
I can’t hardly tell you how simple it seemed to get that buried
treasure, and how easy. Just try yourself to see how easy it looked to
me. Just behind us was the rotted old brick farmhouse where Jibby said
the treasure was not hidden. Over yonder was the dead pine tree in the
corner of the lot--the tree Jibby Jones said was the signal pine, under
which the pirate’s treasure was probably buried--and between was nothing
but a few rods of ground with weeds and tall grass on it. And we had the
digging tools. All we had to do was walk across to the dead pine tree
and dig. So I said so.
“Come on!” I said. “Let’s hurry and get that treasure before anybody
else comes along to bother us.”
But Jibby Jones did not pick up the lunch-basket or make any move toward
the dead pine tree. He stood and smoothed his nose with his forefinger.
“No,” he said, “let’s take a swim first. Let’s go to the creek and find
a swimming-pool and take a swim.”
“We can’t,” I said. “There never was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run,
and there isn’t one now.”
“I don’t know,” Jibby said. “Up in the Catskill Mountains there are
streams, and sometimes there is no pool in a place, and the next year
there is one. You can’t always tell, George. I’m lucky about pools; when
I want to swim there usually is one.”
“Well, you won’t find one on Murrell’s Run,” I said. But I ought to have
known better; a fellow never ought to say what Jibby Jones will find or
won’t find.
“Come on! Let’s dig for the treasure,” Skippy Root said. “You act as if
you were afraid to, Jibby.”
Jibby did not answer this directly. He rubbed his nose and looked at
Wampus Smale.
“Your father owns this land, don’t he, Wampus?” he asked.
“Yes, he owns all of it,” Wampus said.
“And who lives in the new farmhouse at the other end of the farm?” Jibby
asked.
“Why, Bill Catlin,” Wampus said. “He rents from father. What has that
got to do with it?”
Jibby rubbed his nose again, and I thought I saw him grin.
“What kind of lights does he use?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean?” Wampus asked. “I don’t know what you are talking
about.”
“I mean lights,” said Jibby Jones. “Lights for the evening, when he is
sitting at a table reading the Farmers’ Almanac or something. You know
what lights are, don’t you, Wampus? The Romans had oil lights, and my
great-great-grandmother had whale-oil lights, and in New England they
once used tallow dips. Does Bill Catlin use kerosene lamps or electric
light or gas light?”
“What are you trying to do, tease me?” Wampus asked. “Bill Catlin uses
kerosene lamps, of course. There is no gas out here, and there are no
electric lights this far out.”
“All right,” Jibby said. “That’s good. That’s fine. Is Bill Catlin a
cross fellow, or is he a pleasant fellow?”
“Oh, come on!” Wampus said, disgusted. “Let’s dig; what’s the use of
trying to be funny?”
“All right,” Jibby said. “I don’t pretend to be the one leader of this
band of treasure-hunters. Go on and dig, if you want to. I’m not ready
to dig yet; I’m going down to the Run and get a specimen of the green
sand you said was there. I’m more interested in getting a specimen of
that sand for my collection than I am in buried treasure just now.”
Sure enough, he started off toward where the rim of trees showed where
Murrell’s Run was. It was just what you might expect Jibby Jones to do,
right when the buried treasure was in our hands, almost. Tad called to
him.
“Jibby!” he called. “Come back here!”
Anybody else that acted that way we would have let go, but Jibby Jones
was different. He looked like a ninny, with his long thin nose and his
high-water pants and his spectacles, but he had fooled us more than once
that way. It was when he said or did the biggest fool things--or what
seemed like the biggest fool things to us--that you had to stop and
think the hardest, because Jibby Jones always had something important in
his mind then. So, when Tad called to him, Jibby came back.
“You must excuse me if I seem rude,” he said, “but I really cannot dig
for treasure until Wampus tells me whether Bill Catlin is a pleasant
fellow or a cross fellow.”
“Why?” I asked.
Jibby looked up at the air and down at the grass.
“My father has told me many, many times that the way to keep out of
trouble is to use my eyes and my brains,” he said. “I’m afraid you boys
do not do that as much as you should. The reason I must know whether
Bill Catlin is a cross fellow or a pleasant fellow is because that Tough
Customer, when he was running away from here, yipped three times and
hopped five feet on his wooden leg.”
We tried to think that over, but we could not make sense of it in any
way.
Wampus got sort of angry.
“Oh, well! If you’re going to talk nonsense!” he said. “It is all right
for a smarty to be smart sometimes, but I don’t call this one of the
times. You fellows may stand it, but I’m not going to. I’m going to dig
up that treasure, if it is there, and Jibby can go and scrape up green
sand if he wants to. He can’t make a fool of me!”
“I do want to get a specimen of that sand,” Jibby said soberly. “And,
when you have dug treasure awhile, you boys had better come down to the
Run. It is too dry up here. I expect there is plenty of mud in the Run.”
With that Jibby went off. We watched him go.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I’ll bet Jibby has something in his mind
that we don’t know anything about. I’m going with him. When Jibby Jones
talks like a crazy man, you want to look out; he’s always talking sense
then.”
So I started to follow Jibby, but Wampus Smale called me back, and the
three of them--Wampus and Tad and Skippy--talked to me and said we would
all look silly if we let Jibby Jones scare us with a lot of nonsense
talk. By the time they had talked enough, Jibby was going out of sight,
so I made up my mind I would stick to the fellows. We picked up our
tools and started for the dead pine tree.
I was worried a little, even though it all looked as simple as crossing
a room to pick up a paper. It seemed that there must be something about
the green sand in the Run that meant more than we thought, or something
else. I rather knew that Jibby would not go off to get a grain of sand
for his collection just then, when the treasure was so near, unless he
had something worth while in his mind. I remembered what he had said
about the green sand being, perhaps, the marks to show the old land
pirate’s men the way to the buried treasure--“Go up the Mississippi
until you come to a creek five miles below Riverbank; go up the creek
until you come to green sand in the creek bottom; then climb the right
bank of the creek and find a signal pine, and dig under the pine.” That
was what Jibby had thought out as the directions old John A. Murrell
might have given back in 1835. I was worried, but I did not have the
slightest idea what Jibby’s real idea of the trouble to come was.
We walked over to the dead pine and talked for a minute about the best
way to begin. Wampus wanted to take the pick and dig right into the
baked soil, but Skippy had another idea of it.
“When this pine was planted,” he said, “it must have been a very small
one, and if Murrell’s men buried the treasure under it they must have
buried it close to the tree. Then the tree grew, and now, probably, the
treasure is right under the tree, or under its big roots. I think we can
save time by taking the axe and cutting down the tree.”
“Oh, now you are talking like Jibby Jones!” Wampus said, and it was easy
to see that he was plumb disgusted with Jibby Jones. “Go ahead and chop,
if you want to; I’m going to dig.”
He raised his pick above his head and brought it down hard into the dry
soil, and Skippy swung the axe and chopped into the dead pine tree.
Almost that same instant Tad Willing jumped about four feet into the air
and yelped like a scalded dog, and when he hit the ground he grabbed his
ankle and yelped again, and then broke for the brick house at about
forty miles an hour, batting at his head and yipping like an Indian.
And Skippy and Wampus Smale were not far behind him.
“Wouch!” Wampus cried, and Skippy yelled, “Ow-wow! Bumblebees! Owp!” And
they went for the brick house in big jumps. I did not have to look at
them to learn how to lope, either. I was already on my way, and the
thing I said when the first bumblebee jabbed his stinger into the back
of my neck was not “I beg your pardon!” I don’t know what it was. I was
too busy to notice. I said what I had to say and I did what I thought
was the best thing to do, and I did not bother to put on any trimmings.
Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and kiss it, because
affection of that sort is one thing a bumblebee does not understand much
about, but a May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a September
bumblebee. By September a bumblebee is as grouchy as a snake with a sore
tail, and is just aching to stick his stinger into somebody. I suppose a
bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening its stinger and getting
ready for battle, and by September it wants war. And this was the
meanest day of September for hostile bumblebees. There were about ten
million of them in the nest under that old pine tree, and every
bumblebee was fully ripe and as big as a plum, and it seemed as if they
had let their stingers lie out in the sun until they were red-hot. It
was the meanest lot of bees I ever got acquainted with. Bees that would
have flown aside to get out of your way in May were now so eager to jab
a boy that, if one of them had been on its way from New York to Boston
to attend its grandmother’s funeral, it would have swerved aside to Los
Angeles, California, to sting a brass Cupid on a fountain.
When we gathered our scattered forces together in the old brick
farmhouse, I had five stings in me, and Skippy had eight lumps that were
like young mountains and still growing, and Tad had seven honorable
wounds and one bee still skirmishing in the thick growth on his head,
and Wampus--well, Wampus would not stand still long enough to let us
count him. A couple of bees had gone down inside of his shirt and Wampus
was disrobing by jerks. He yanked at the collar of his shirt so hard
that a pearl button flew eight feet and hit Tad on the neck and Tad
jumped and yelled. He thought it was another bee come to bury a red-hot
bayonet in him.
Three bees--some of the cavalry, I suppose--had followed us to turn our
retreat into a rout, and they came right into the old brick house
without knocking, and for three minutes Tad and Skippy and I had all we
needed to do whacking at those bees with our caps. Then one of them
stung Tad and was satisfied, and the other two took Wampus’s bare back
as an insult, and Wampus yipped twice more.
Then there was silence, except for low moans and loud “Ow-wow-wows!”
Wampus began to cry. I suppose he felt like one of the devastated
regions after the Germans had shot it full of shell-holes. Skippy was
the first to show any sense.
“Gee whiz!” he said, hopping on one leg. “I’m stinging all over! This is
no place to be. We’ve got to get to where there is some cool mud to daub
on these stings.”
Right then I knew why Jibby Jones had said that we had better follow him
to the Run after we had dug treasure awhile, and why he had said it was
too dry by the pine tree, and why he had said there was plenty of mud in
the Run.
We trotted toward the Run as fast as we could, because every sting was
doing its best to burn, and as we went I began to see the best kind of
good sense in every word Jibby had said that we had thought was foolish.
He wanted to go to the green sand because that place was far from the
bumblebees, and he knew there were bumblebees at the old pine tree
because the Tough Customer had yipped and sprinted when he passed close
to it. And there was sense in what he had asked about Bill Catlin, too.
If Bill Catlin was a good-natured fellow and burned kerosene, he would
lend us a can of kerosene and we could burn out the bees before we began
to dig.
I tried to tell this to the fellows, but they did not pay much
attention. They were in a hurry. We all piled in among the trees and
down the bank of the Run, and there was Jibby Jones. He was sitting on a
large flat rock, in the cool shade, and on the rock were about forty
nice little mud pies he had made and put there, each one nice and cool
and soppy, all ready to plaster on our bee stings!
Jibby Jones looked up when we came piling down to where he was.
“I’ve got forty-two made,” he said. “I thought I would make sixty, but
you came sooner than I thought you would. Help yourselves.”
We did. We grabbed the mud plasters and slapped them on the hot bee
stings, and Jibby Jones helped us. Oh, boy! but that cool wet mud felt
fine! Jibby plastered the stings on Wampus Smale’s back himself, and
Wampus never said a word about any one talking foolish talk. He just
said:
“Ah! that feels good! Oh! that feels good! Put on another fresh one,
Jibby.”