Read "Jibby Jones" by Ellis Parker Butler online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
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.