Jibby Jones

I

Oliver Parmenter Jones

Everybody knows that the Mississippi River is just about the biggest river in the world, and we boys who live on the shore of it are mighty proud of it—proud of the river and proud of living on the edge of it, where we can swim in it and look at it and fish in it and row boats on it. If we wanted to we could say to each other, “Come on! Let’s go down and swim awhile in the biggest river in the world, or, anyway, the almost biggest!”

We could say that, but we don’t. I guess the reason is that, when a boy wants to go swimming, he thinks about swimming and not about the bigness of the river he is going to swim in, because that is sort of geography and he gets more than enough geography in school, without thinking about it when he wants to go swimming. So we generally just hold up two fingers and whistle, and, if the other fellow says he can’t come, we say, “Oh, come on, why don’t you?” and leave the length of the old Mississippi and where it rises and where it empties and what States it bounds, and all that sort of nonsense, until some other time.

But, anyway, I guess we Riverbank boys have the very best of the old Mississippi River, because there must be pretty near a thousand miles of it above Riverbank and more than a thousand miles of it below Riverbank. So we must be about the middle of it. And that ought to be the best, any way you look at it.

Now, it isn’t very often that we boys can find a boy we can brag about the Mississippi River to. The reason is that not many new boys come to Riverbank and all of us Riverbank boys have an equal share in the river—as you might say—and it doesn’t do me any good to brag about the river to Tad Willing or Skippy Root or Wampus Smale, because they know as much about the river as I do, and they would laugh at me. So, in one way, it was fine to have a new boy—one that had never seen our part of the river—come to town. That was Jibby Jones.