Jibby Jones · Chapter 7 (1/2)

VII

The Tough Customer

Well, we all had a good time at dinner, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar made a speech and gave Jibby Jones the rod and reel, and Jibby made us laugh by saying we mustn’t blame him for winning the prize, because it wasn’t his fault he had an extra good nose; he said it was his Grandfather Parmenter’s fault, that he had inherited the nose from. Then Wampus’s Uncle Oscar said that it was all right to say “nose,” but that the kind of “nose” Jibby used was brains, and that⁠—on the river or off the river⁠—the fellow that had brains and used them always stood the best chance of winning.

So we ate fried fish until we couldn’t eat anymore, and then we sat around outside until bedtime, and I tied Rover to one of the posts under our cottage, and we all went home and to bed.

Maybe I had eaten too much fried fish. Anyway, I lay awake awhile and heard Orpheus Cadwallader waddling past the house, going his rounds to see that everything was all right, and I heard Rover get up and walk to the end of his rope and wag his tail at Orpheus. His tail thumped against one of the posts, and I knew he was wagging it.

A little while later, Rover began to howl, and he is one of the loudest howlers in the world, I guess. The moon was one of the things he was fondest of howling at; he seemed to think it was hung in the sky as an insult to dogs. Whenever there was a moon and Rover saw it, he howled. And the other thing that made him howl was being tied up. He would stand being tied up for an hour or so, because he expected I would come and untie him, but, if he was tied for much longer than an hour, he felt hurt and miserable and neglected, and he would begin to howl. He would begin with an “Arr-oo⁠—” and hang on to the “oo” until it quivered and trembled, and everybody within a mile wondered if it was ever going to stop, and got nervous, and tossed in bed, and swore. And then Rover would take another breath and begin another “Arr-oo⁠—” longer and louder than ever. And keep it up all night, unless somebody went and untied him.

The reason I tied Rover that night was because he is a wandering dog. He likes to explore. And what he likes to explore for is dead fish, mostly, and the deader the better. If you didn’t tie him up at night, he would wander off until he found a dead fish, and then he would roll in it. The deader the fish was, the better he liked it; he thought it was perfumery, I guess. He would wander for miles around our island, and even swim across the slough to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a dead fish to perfume himself with. And he was such an affectionate and loving dog, and so proud of himself when he was all perfumed up, that mother and the rest of us just hated him when he was that way.

If I had known Rover was coming up that day, I would have gone around the shore of our island and the shore of Oak Island and got rid of all the dead fish, but Rover’s coming was a surprise, and we had had the fishing-prize contest that day, so all there was to do was to tie him up and let him howl. His howling was pretty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as dead fish, which is about the worst thing there is.

Well, after Orpheus Cadwallader passed our cottage again, going back, I turned over on my stomach and hoped I’d go to sleep, and I expected Rover would have a fine all-night howl, but all of a sudden he stopped howling and began to bark. It was his angry Woof! woof! bark, with a mean snarl at the end, which meant somebody was around who had no business to be around.

I sat up in bed, and I could feel the old cottage joggle as Rover jerked at his rope, and then, suddenly, the rope broke and off Rover went, barking to beat the band, full tilt toward the slough back of our cottages. About halfway there, I should judge, he came up with what had set him to barking. I heard a rough voice say, “Get away from here! Get away from here!” and a club thumping on Rover’s back, and more barking, and swearing, and then Rover yipped, and began to scream⁠—if you can call it that⁠—the way a dog does when it is hurt, or has its paw run over by a wagon, or breaks a toe.

In a second I was out of bed and getting into my clothes, and I heard Rover come yipping and whining back toward the cottage. I did not have many clothes to put on, and in a couple of seconds I was downstairs, and by the time I was out there and Rover was whining at my feet, Wampus and his Uncle Oscar and Skippy and Tad and Jibby were out there, too, and we heard Orph Cadwallader coming running as fast as such a fat man could.

Orph had his shotgun, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar had a pistol, and Jibby had brought along an electric torch. We looked at Rover’s foot and saw it was hurt pretty bad, and that one of his ears was cut where it had been hit, and we were all pretty mad. Nobody had a right to be on our island but us, and most of the time nobody was there but the women and us kids and Orph Cadwallader, and tramps had no business there. They were too dangerous.

So Wampus’s Uncle Oscar took the electric torch from Jibby and said:

“You boys stay back here; this is a man’s job. Orph and I will attend to this!”

So the five of us, Jibby and Wampus and Tad and Skippy and I, we went along with Orph and Wampus’s uncle. I held the piece of rope that was tied around Rover’s neck, and he limped along, whining. We made quite a procession, and when we looked back we could see that all the cottages were lighted up. Everybody was out of bed. You couldn’t expect us to stay back when there was so much excitement.

We went through the woods and, before we had gone very far, the light from the electric torch picked out two men who were standing waist-deep in the stinging nettles under the trees, waiting for us to come up to them. It was easy to guess that they had started away from where Rover had met them, and that they had then heard us and stopped. And that was not like river-rats or tramps who had come to snoop around and steal what they could and then get away again. That kind come in skiffs, and, if you see them, they scoot for their skiffs and row away as fast as they can. But these men waited for us.

“What’s this mean? What you doing on this island? What you hurt this dog for?” Wampus’s Uncle Oscar asked when we came up to the men.

They were river-rats, all right, or tramps, or toughs of some kind; you could tell that by their looks. And one was the toughest-looking customer I ever did see! He had only one eye and that was an ugly one⁠—keen and wicked-looking. His right hand had only two fingers and a thumb, and there were three deep scars across his face. He had a regular pirate’s bunch of black whiskers, and all he needed was a red sash with a couple of pistols stuck in it, and a cutlass, and a red handkerchief tied around his head, and a pair of brass rings in his ears, to look like a real pirate. And when he moved out from the nettles we saw he had one wooden leg⁠—scarred and chipped as if he had used it to break rocks.

His mate, the other man, was smaller and meaner-looking, if anybody could look meaner. He looked like a rat⁠—sneaky-looking. We called him the Rat when we talked about him afterward. So when Wampus’s uncle shouted at them, they looked at us.

“That’s all right, boss; that’s all right!” the Tough Customer said. “No harm meant. Pardner and I don’t mean no harm. We didn’t know anybody was on this island. We wouldn’t do no harm.”

“What did you try to kill that dog for, then?” Wampus’s uncle asked, and no fooling, either.

“Well, he come at us, boss,” the Tough Customer said. “We was just walking through here and the dog come at us. So I took a swipe at him with a club. Anybody would, boss, when a dog comes at him that way.”

“Well, you look here!” Wampus’s uncle said. “This is a private island, owned by folks, and nobody is allowed on it. And no nonsense about it, either. You get off, and you stay off, or you’re liable to get shot, or worse. You get off this island now, and you stay off it hereafter.”

“Yes, sure, boss!” the Tough Customer said. “We’ll do that; we don’t mean no harm; we wouldn’t touch anything, anyhow.”

And that might have been all right, but just then something went “Arr-awk⁠—arr-awk!”⁠—and anybody would have known it was a chicken. Orpheus Cadwallader made about five steps, and grabbed the Rat, and stuck his hand into the Rat’s shirt, and, sure enough, in the back of the Rat’s shirt was one of Orpheus’s own chickens. It gave a flop of its wings and scooted for its coop, making big flying leaps and scolding as it went. So Orph made a swipe at the Rat with the end of his gun, but the Rat dodged, and then turned and ran as hard as his legs could carry him. Orph let fly with both barrels of his shotgun, but there were too many trees; he did not even pepper the Rat.

“So!” said Wampus’s uncle. “That’s the idea, is it? Well, we’ll just see you off the island right here and now. Where’s your boat?”

The Tough Customer looked at the pistol Wampus’s uncle carried, and I guess he decided that Wampus’s uncle wouldn’t shoot a man in the back, not unless he ran, anyway, and he turned and stumped off toward the bank of the slough until he came to the path, and then he turned down the path a hundred yards, and all of us following him.

There was a place there where the arum and pickerel weed came close to the shore, but the water was two or three feet deep, and tied to a tree there was a shanty-boat⁠—one of the smallest and worst old shanty-boats I ever saw. It did not look over ten feet long, and it wasn’t more than five feet wide, with not a window in it, and the deck not over two feet wide. The boards of which it was made were thin and old and warped, and the only power was a ten-foot pole with a board nailed on one end.

When he came to the shanty-boat, the Tough Customer stopped to untie his shore line and threw it aboard. He did not say another word. He took his ten-foot pole from the roof of the shanty-boat and braced it against the shore and pushed, and the boat slithered among the weeds and glided out from the shore.

We stood and watched until the shanty-boat was out in the middle of the slough, where the current caught it and swung it slowly downstream. Then the Tough Customer rested and looked toward us, and swore at us strong and steady for a long while, and Wampus’s uncle said it was all over, and we went home. I looked Rover’s paw and ear over, and saw they were not so bad, so I tied him up again and went to bed. Of course, mother asked all about what had happened, and said she had been frightened when she heard the gunshots, but she was glad everything was all right and the tramps were off the island.

The next morning there was only one thing for me to do if I wanted to have mother let me keep Rover on the Island, and that was to explore for dead fish and get them out of the way. So we all went⁠—all five of us boys. We went down the chute side of the island first, but we didn’t find a single dead fish, because all the folks know about Rover, and they don’t leave any dead dogfish or other kinds on shore when they catch them. So we got as far as the end of the island, downstream, and started along up the slough side of the island, and all of a sudden Wampus stopped short.

“Look there,” he said, bending down and pointing. “There’s that Tough Customer’s shanty-boat. He didn’t quit the island. He only floated down and landed lower down.”

We all bent low and saw the shanty-boat. It was in a sort of small cove, where the willows must have hid it from the slough, and I don’t suppose anybody could have seen it from the island except from the very spot where we were.

“Come on!” I whispered. “Let’s go and get Orph and your Uncle Oscar, and tell them.”

But Jibby Jones put out a hand and held me back.

“This doesn’t look right,” he said, shaking his head. “This looks evil to me. Those men were told to get off the island, and they said they would get off the island, and there’s no honest reason why they should be on the island. All they had to do when they were out in the slough last night was to let their shanty-boat drift and they would have gone on down past here. They must mean some devilment on the island, and we ought to know what it is.”

Well, that seemed reasonable, and Jibby said what we must do. We must crawl up through the willows and investigate. The only trouble was Rover. I couldn’t tie him to a tree because he would howl, and, if I dragged him through the willows, he would see the shanty-boat and bark, and, if I turned him loose, he would probably jump all around and go to the shanty-boat and scare the Tough Customer and the Rat into fits. But Jibby fixed that. He said the thing for me to do was to take Rover and go back and get Orph Cadwallader and Wampus’s uncle. So I went.

Jibby and the boys crawled as close to the shanty-boat as they could, Indian fashion, and lay in the willows, and they were in luck, because the Tough Customer and the Rat were talking.

“No, sir!” the Tough Customer was saying. “I don’t stay on any island where caretakers go around with shotguns, shooting them off any time of the day or night.”

“I don’t see that you’ve got any kick to make about shotguns,” the Rat said, in his whining voice. “I’m the one that got shot at.”

“I don’t care who got shot at,” the Tough Customer said. “Four or five barrels of cider wouldn’t pay me for getting my hide full of birdshot, not if it was the hardest cider on earth. And you don’t know that they hid the cider on this island⁠—you only think so. It may be on any island in the whole river. You just forget that cider, pardner, and let’s get to hunting that treasure I know about.”

“Well, it ain’t playing me square,” the Rat whined. “A bargain is a bargain, and the bargain was that, if I paid my money and bought this shanty-boat, you would help me find that cider first, and help me get away with it and sell it. And I as good as know it was on this island them barrels of cider was hid. And, if so, on this island is where we want to be.”

“And get shot full of birdshot or, maybe, buckshot,” sneered the Tough Customer. “Why, man alive! just now after these island folks is all roused up is no time to hunt around on this island for a few pesky barrels of cider. They’ll all be carrying shotguns for the next month or so. No, sir! Now is the time to stay away from this island. We can come back later on if you want to, but now is the time to be hunting that land pirate’s treasure.”

“You don’t know how much it is, and you don’t know where it is, and you don’t even know if there is any,” complained the Rat.

“All right!” said the Tough Customer. “Maybe I know more than you think I do. Maybe I ain’t told you all I know yet. Maybe I thought I would just wait and see if you was a reasonable cuss and willing to do the wise thing, or if you was a sort of idiot that would want to hang around an island and get shot full of buckshot and bullets for a few barrels of no-account cider. How about that?”

“ ’Tain’t right! ’Tain’t right!” the Rat complained. “Pardners ought to be fair and square and tell all. Next thing you’ll be saying you won’t split half and half.”

“Half and half was what I said, and half and half holds good,” said the Tough Customer. “And this will, maybe, be a big thing. I’ll play fair with you if you play fair with me. Will you play fair? Hope to die and may your throat be cut, if you don’t?”

“Hope to die and may my throat be cut if I don’t!” said the Rat. “Fair and square, or may the dogs eat us!”

“Now, that’s talking,” said the Tough Customer. “Look here, now!”

They heard him feeling around among the boards of the shanty-boat, inside and nearest the corner to the boys.