The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure

3

WELL, when you have a mysterious sealed envelope in your hand, which you’ve just found under some pine needles at the base of a tree out in the middle of a forest, and when you’re playing a game about finding buried treasure, all of a sudden you sort of wake up and realize that your game has come to life and that you’re in for an honest-to-goodness mystery that will be a thousand times more interesting and exciting than the imaginary game you’ve been playing.

We decided to keep our new names, though, which we did, although we had an argument about it first. I was still Robinson Crusoe, and Dragonfly was my Man Friday. Circus and Poetry wanted us to call them the cannibals, but Dragonfly wouldn’t. “I don’t want to have to worry about being eaten up every minute. You’ve got to turn into goats right away. Besides, one cannibal’s already been shot and is supposed to be dead.”

“You’d make a good goat yourself,” Circus said to me,—“a Billy goat, ’cause your name’s Bill.”

But it wasn’t any time to argue, when there was a mysterious envelope right in the middle of our huddle where we were on the ground at the base of the tree where Circus had found it, so Poetry said, “All right, I’ll be the goat, if you let me open the envelope.”

“And I’ll be the other goat,” Circus said, “if you’ll let me read it.”

“Let me read it,” Dragonfly said to me. “Goats can’t read anyway.”

“You can’t either,” I said. “You’re a black man that doesn’t know anything about civilization and you don’t know how to read.”

So it was I who got to open the soiled brownish envelope, which I did with excited fingers, and then we all let out four disappointed groans, for would you believe it? there wasn’t a single thing written on the folded white paper on the inside—not one single thing. It was only a piece of typewriter paper.

Well that was that. We all sank down on the ground in different directions and felt like the bottom had dropped out of our new mystery world. I looked at Friday and he at me, and the fat goat started chewing his cud, while our acrobatic goat rolled over on his back, pulled his knees up to his chin, and groaned, then he rolled over on his side and, my Man Friday lying right there right then, got his side rolled onto, which started a scuffle, making my Man Friday angry. All of a sudden he remembered something about the story of Robinson Crusoe. He grunted and said, while he twisted and tried to get out from under the goat, “Listen, you—when Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday got hungry, they killed and ate one of the goats, and if you don’t behave yourself like a good goat, we’ll—”

But Circus was as mischievous as anything and said, while he rolled himself back toward Dragonfly again and laid his head on his side, “Isn’t your name Friday?”

Dragonfly grunted and said, “Sure,” and Circus answered, “All right. I’m sleepy, and there’s nothing better than taking a nap on Friday,” which he pretended to do, shutting his eyes and started in snoring as loud as he could, which sounded like a goat with the asthma.

That reminded Poetry of something funny he’d read somewhere, and it was about two fleas who were supposed to have lived on the island with Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday. Both of these fleas had been chewing away on Crusoe and were getting tired of him and wanted a change, so pretty soon one of them called to the other and said, “So long, kid, I’ll be seeing you on Friday.”

I just barely giggled at Poetry’s story ’cause my mind was working hard on the new mystery, thinking about the blank piece of paper and why it was blank, and why was the envelope sealed, and who had dropped it here, and when, and why?

So I stood up and walked like Robinson Crusoe might have walked, in a little circle around the tree, looking up at the limb where Circus had been perched, and then at the ground, and at Poetry, my fat goat, who right then unscrambled himself from the rest of the inhabitants of our imaginary island, and followed me around, sniffling at my hand, like a hungry goat that wanted to eat the letter I had.

Abruptly Poetry stopped and said to me, “Sh!” which means to keep still, which I did, and he said, “Look, here’s a sign of some kind.”

I looked, but didn’t see anything except a small twig about four or five feet tall that was broken off, and had been left with the top hanging.

My Man Friday and the acrobatic goat were still scuffling under the tree, and didn’t seem interested in what we were doing. “What kind of a sign?” I asked Poetry, knowing that he was one of our gang who was more interested in woodcraft than most of the gang and was always looking for signs and trails and things.

“See here,” he said to me, “this is a little birch twig, and somebody’s broken it part way off and left it hanging.”

“What of it?” I said, remembering that back home at Sugar Creek I’d done that myself to a chokecherry twig or a willow, and it hadn’t meant a thing.

“But look which way the top points!” Poetry said mysteriously. “That means it’s a signal on a trail. It means for us to go in the direction the top of the broken twig points, and after awhile we’ll find another broken twig, and whichever way it points we’re to go that way.”

Say, did my disappointed mind ever come to quick life! Although I still doubted it might mean anything. Right away, we called the other goat and my Man Friday and let them in on our secret, and we all swished along, pretending to be scouts, going straight in the direction the broken twig pointed, all of us looking for another twig farther on.

We walked about twenty yards through the dense growth before we found another broken twig hanging, but sure enough we did find one, and this time it was a broken oak twig, and was bent in the opposite direction we’d come from, which meant the trail went straight on. Then we did get excited, ’cause we knew we were on somebody’s trail.

My Man Friday was awful dumb for one who was supposed to be used to outdoor life, though, ’cause he wanted to finish breaking off the top of the oak twig and also cut off the bottom and make a stick out of it to carry, and to take home with us back to Sugar Creek when we finished our vacation. “For a souvenir,” he whined complainingly, when we wouldn’t let him and made him fold up his pocket knife and put it back into his pocket again.

“That’s the sign post on our trail,” Poetry explained. “We have to leave it there so we can follow the trail back to where we started from, or might get lost,” which I thought was good sense and said so.

We scurried along, getting more and more interested and excited as we found one broken twig after another. Sometimes they were pointing straight ahead, and sometimes at an angle. Once we found a twig broken clear off and lying flat on the ground, at a right angle from the direction we’d been traveling, so we turned in the direction it pointed, and hurried along.

Once when Poetry was studying very carefully the direction a new broken twig was pointing, he gasped and said, “Hey, Gang! Look!”

We scrambled to him like a flock of little fluffy chickens making a dive toward a mother hen when she clucks for them to hurry to her and eat a bug or a fat worm or something.

“See here,” Poetry said, “—here’s where our trail branches off in two directions—one to the right and the other to the left.” And sure enough, he was right, for only a few feet apart were two broken twigs, one an oak, and the other a chokecherry, the chokecherry pointing to the right and the oak to the left.

“Which way do we go for the buried treasure?” Poetry asked me, and I didn’t know what to answer.

Then Poetry let out a gasp and said, “Hey, this one pointing to the right looks like it’s fresher than the other. We certainly are getting the breaks.”

We all studied the two broken twigs, and I knew that Poetry was right. The one pointing to the right looked a lot fresher break than the one pointing to the left. Why, it might even have been made today! I thought. And for some reason, not being able to tell for sure just how long it had been since somebody had been right here making the trail, I got a very peculiar and half-scared feeling all up and down my spine.

“I wish Big Jim was here,” my Man Friday said. I wished the same thing, but instead of saying it, I said bravely, “Who wants Big J—” and stopped like I had been shot at and hit, as I heard a sound from somewhere that was like a high-pitched trembling woman’s voice calling for help. It also sounded a little bit like a screech owl’s voice that wails along Sugar Creek at night back home.

“’Tsa loon,” Circus said, and was crazy enough to let out a long, loud wail that trembled and sounded more like a loon than a loon’s wail does.

I looked at my Man Friday and at my fat goat to see what they thought it was. Right away before I could read their thoughts, there was another trembling high-pitched voice which answered Circus. The second I heard it, I thought it didn’t sound like a loon but like an actual person calling and crying and terribly scared.

You can’t hear a thing like that out in the middle of the Chippewa Forest where there are Indians and different kinds of wild animals and not feel like I felt, which was almost half scared to death for a minute, although I knew there weren’t any bears or lions, but maybe only deer and polecats and coons and possums and maybe mink.

“It’s NOT a loon,” I whispered huskily, and felt my knees get weak and I wanted to plop down on the ground and rest. I also wanted to run.

Then the call came again not more than a hundred feet ahead of us, and as quick as I had been scared, I wasn’t again, for this time it did sound exactly like a loon.

In a jiffy we all felt better and said so to each other. The newest broken twig right beside us was pointing in the direction the sound came from, so we decided there was probably a lake right close by which is where loons nearly always are—out on some lake somewhere swimming along like ducks, and diving and also screaming bloody murder to their mates.

We all swished along, being very careful to look at the broken twigs so we’d remember what they looked like when we got ready to come back, which we planned we’d do after awhile.

My fat goat and I were walking together ahead of my Man Friday and my acrobatic goat. We dodged out way around fallen tree trunks and old stumps and around wild rose bushes and also wild raspberry patches and chokecherries, and still there wasn’t any lake anywhere.

It certainly was a queer feeling we had though, as we dodged along, talking about our mystery and wondering where we were going, and how soon we would get there.

“’Tsfunny how come Circus found that envelope back there with only a blank piece of white paper in it,” I said. “Do you s’pose the kidnapper dropped it when he left the little Ostberg girl there?”

“I suppose—why sure, he did,” Poetry said.

“How come the police didn’t find it there then, when they searched the place last week for clues. If it’d been there then, wouldn’t they have found it?” I asked those two questions as fast as I could ’cause that envelope in my pocket seemed like it was hot and would burn a hole in my shirt any minute.

Poetry’s fat forehead frowned. He was as struck as I was, over the mystery.

All our minds were as blank as the blank letter and not a one of us could think of anything that would make it make sense, so we went on, following our trail of broken twigs. It was fun what we were doing, and we didn’t feel very scared ’cause we knew the kidnapper was in jail. In fact, we were all thrilled with the most interesting excitement we’d had in a long time, ’cause for some reason we were sure we might find something terribly interesting at the end of the trail—if we ever came to it—not knowing that we’d not only find something very interesting but would bump into an experience even more exciting and thrilling than the ones we’d already had on our camping trip—and one that was just as dangerous.

Right that second we came to a hill. I looked ahead and spied a wide expanse of pretty blue water down below us. Between us and the lake, on the hillside, was a log cabin with a chimney running up and down the side next to us, and a big log door. We all had seen it at once I guess, ’cause we all stopped and dropped down behind some underbrush or something and most of us said, “Sh!” at the same time.

We lay there for what seemed like a terribly long time before any of us did anything except listen to ourselves breathe. I was also listening to my heart beat. But not a one of us was as scared as we would have been if we hadn’t known that the kidnapper was all nicely locked up in jail and nobody needed to be afraid of him at all. I guess I never had such a wonderful feeling in my life for a long time as I did right that minute, ’cause I realized we’d followed the trail like real scouts and we’d actually run onto the kidnapper’s hideout, and we might find the ransom money. Boy oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!

Why all we’d have to do would be to go up to that crazy old-fashioned looking old house, push open a door or climb in through a window and look around until we found it, I thought. It was certainly the craziest looking weathered old house, and it looked like nobody had lived in it for years and years. The windows had old green blinds hanging at crooked angles, some of the stones had fallen off the top of the chimney, and the doorstep was broken down and looked rotten. I could tell from where I was that there hadn’t been anybody going into that door for a long time on account of there was a spider web spun from the doorpost next to the old white knob, to one of the up-and-down logs in the middle of the door.

“Let’s go in and investigate.”

“Let’s n-n-n-n-not,” my Man Friday said, and I scowled at him and said fiercely, “Slave, we’re going in!”

4

EVEN though there was a spider web across the door, which meant that nobody had gone in or out of the door for a long time, still that didn’t mean there might not be anybody inside, ’cause there might be another door on the side next to the lake.

Poetry and I made my Man Friday and the acrobatic goat stay where they were while we circled the cabin, looking for any other door and any signs of anybody living there. The only door we found was one that led from the cabin out onto a screened front porch, but the porch was closed-in with no doors going outside, on account of there was a big ravine just below the front of the house and between it and the lake. So we knew that if anybody wanted to go in and out of the house he would have to use the one and only door or else go through a window.

We circled back to Dragonfly and Circus, where we all lay down on some tall grass behind a row of shrubbery, which somebody years ago had set out there, when maybe a family of people had lived there. It had probably been someone’s summer cabin, I thought—somebody who lived in St. Paul or Minneapolis, or somewhere, and had built the cabin up here. I noticed that there was a cement pavement running all around the back side of the cabin, which was set up against the almost cliff-like hill. Also there was a very long stone stairway beginning about twenty feet from the old spider-web-covered door and running around the edge of the ravine, making a sort of semi-circle down to the lake to where there was a very old dock, which the waves of the lake in stormy weather, or else the ice in the winter, had broken down, and nobody had fixed it.

We waited in our hiding place for maybe about ten minutes, listening and watching before we decided nobody was inside, and before we decided to look in the windows and later go inside, ourselves. We didn’t think about it being trespassing, on account of there was an old abandoned house back at Sugar Creek which our gang always went into anytime we wanted to, and nobody thought anything about it, because that old cabin back home belonged to a very old long-whiskered old man whom everybody knows as Old Man Paddler, and anything that belonged to him seemed to belong to us, too, he being a very special friend of anybody who was lucky enough to be a boy.

Anyway, we, all of us, were pretty soon peeking in through the windows, trying to see what we could see, but it was pretty dark inside, so we knew if we wanted to see more we had to find some way to get in.

Right that second I decided to see if my Man Friday was my Man Friday or not, so I said, “O.K., Friday, go up and knock at that door.”

Say, Dragonfly got the scaredest look on his face. As you maybe know, if you’ve read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, Dragonfly’s mother believed in ghosts, and good luck happening to you if you find a four-leaf clover or a horseshoe, so Dragonfly believed it too, most boys believing and doing what their parents believe and do.

Dragonfly not only had a scared look on his face but also a stubborn one, when he said, “I won’t!”

He refused to budge an inch, and so in a very fierce voice I commanded Poetry and Circus, “O.K., cannibals, eat him up!”

“They’re NOT cannibals!” Dragonfly whined. “They’re goats, and goats only eat tin cans and shirts and ivies and things like that!”

“What’s the difference?” the fat goat said, and started head-first for Dragonfly.

But we couldn’t afford to waste any time that way, so Poetry, being maybe the bravest one of us, went up to the door, while we held our breath, I knowing that there wasn’t anybody inside but wondering if there was, and if there was, who was it, and was he dangerous, and what would happen if there was a fierce man in there or something.

First Poetry brushed away the spider web, then he knocked on the door.

Nobody answered the knock so he knocked again and called, “Hello! Anybody home?”

He waited and so did we, but there wasn’t any answer, so he turned the knob, twisting it this way and that, and the door didn’t open. He turned around to us and said, “It’s locked.”

Well, I had it in the back of my mind that the ransom money might be in that cabin and that we ought to go in and look, as I told you, not thinking that it was trespassing on somebody’s property to go in without permission.

We found a window on one side of the cabin right next to the hill, which on that side of the house was kinda like a cliff, and that window, when we tried it, was unlocked.

“You go in through the window and unlock the door from the inside and let us in,” I said to my acrobatic goat, and he said, “It’s private property.”

Right that second I felt a drop of rain on my face and that’s what saved the day and made it all right for us to go inside. We all must have been so interested in following the trail of broken twigs and in our game of Robinson Crusoe that we hadn’t noticed the lowering sky and the big thunderheads that had been creeping up, for only about a few jiffies after that first drop of rain splashed onto my freckled face, there was a rumble of thunder, then another, and right away it started to rain.

We could have ducked under some trees for protection, but it was that kind of rain that sometimes comes when it seems like the sky has burst open and water just drives down in blinding sheets, which it started to do.

“It’s raining pitchforks and nigger babies!” Circus yelled above the roar of the wind in the trees. He quick shoved up the window and scrambled in, with all of us scrambling in after him and slamming the window down behind us.

The rain was coming down so hard that it made a terrible roaring noise on the shingled roof, reminding me of storms just like that back at Sugar Creek when I was in the haymow of our barn. If there was anything I liked to hear better than almost anything else, it was rain on a shingled roof. Sometimes when I was in the upstairs of our house, I would open the attic door on purpose just to hear the friendly noise the rain made.

It was pretty dark inside the old cabin on account of the walls were stained with a dark stain of some kind, maybe to protect the wood, like some north woods cabins are. It was also dark on account of the sky outside was almost black with terribly heavy rain clouds. I noticed that the window we’d climbed in was the kitchen window and that there was a table with an oil cloth, with a few soiled dishes on one side next to the wall. Also there was a white enameled sink and an old-fashioned pitcher pump like the one we have outdoors at our house at Sugar Creek.

The main room where the fireplace was, was in the center of the cabin and was so dark you could hardly see anything clearly, but I did see two big colored pictures on the back wall of the porch at the front. I hurried out there, just to get a look at the storm, storms being one of the most interesting sights in the world, and they make a boy feel very queer inside, like maybe he isn’t very important and also make him feel like he needs the One Who made the world in the first place, to sort of look after him, which is the way I felt right that minute.

I noticed that there was a sheer drop of maybe fifteen feet right straight down into the ravine and remembered that if anybody wanted to get out of the cabin by a door, he’d have to use the only one there was which was the one that had been locked when Poetry had tried the knob.

On the front porch where I was, were two or three whiskey bottles, I noticed, and one with the stopper still in it, was half full, standing on a two-by-four ledge running across the front.

I could see better out here, although the terribly dark clouds in the sky, and also the big pine trees all around with their branches shading the cabin, made it almost dark even on the porch, but I did see two big colored pictures on the back wall of the porch advertising whiskey, and with important looking people drinking or getting ready to. Circus was standing with me right then, and I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, remembering how his pop used to be a drunkard before he had become a Christian, but had been saved just by repenting of his sins and trusting the Lord Jesus to save him. Say, Circus was looking fiercely at those pictures, and I noticed he had his fists doubled up, like he wished he could sock somebody or something terribly hard. I was glad right that minute that Little Tom Till wasn’t there, on account of his daddy was still a drunkard and a mean man.

I left Circus standing looking fiercely at those whiskey pictures, and looked out at the lake which was one of the prettiest sights I ever saw, with the waves being whipped into big white caps, and blowing and making a noise which, mixed up with the noise on our roof, was very pretty to my ears.

We didn’t even bother to look around inside the cabin for a while—anyway, I didn’t. Away out on the farther side of the lake there was a patch of sunlight and the water was all different shades of green and yellow. Right away there was a terrific roar, as a blinding flash of lightning lit up the whole porch, and then it did rain, and the wind blew harder and whipped the canvas curtains on the porch; and the pine trees between us and the lake acted like they were going to bend and break. Six white birch trees that grew in a cluster down beside the old outdoor stone stairway that led in the semi-circle from the cabin down to the broken-down dock, swayed and twisted and acted like they were going wild and might be broken off and blown away any minute.

“Hey! Look!” Poetry said. “There are little moving mountains out there on the lake!”

I looked, and sure enough that was what it did look like. The wind had changed its direction and was blowing parallel with the shore, instead of toward it, and other high waves were trying to go at right angles to the ones that were coming toward the shore. It was a terribly pretty sight.

All of a sudden while I was standing there, and feeling a little bit scared on account of the noise and the wind and the rain, I got to thinking about my folks back home, and was lonesome as well as scared; and also I was thinking that my parents had taught me that all the wonderful and terrible things in nature had been made and were being taken care of by the same God that had made growing boys, and that He loved everybody and was kind and had loved people so much that He had sent His only Son into this very pretty world, to die for all of us and to save us from our sins. My parents believed that, and had taught it to me; and nearly every time I thought about God, it was with a kind of friendly feeling in my heart, knowing that He loved not only all the millions of people in the world but also me—all by myself—red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced Bill Collins, who was always getting into trouble, or a fight, or doing something impulsive and needing somebody to help me to get out of trouble. Without knowing I was thinking outloud, I did what I sometimes do when I’m all by myself and have that very friendly feeling toward God. I said, “Thank You, dear Saviour, for dying for me.... You’re an awful wonderful God to make such a pretty storm.”

I didn’t know Dragonfly was standing there beside me, until he spoke up all of a sudden and said, “You oughtn’t to swear like that. It’s wrong to swear,” which all the gang knew it was, and none of us did it, Little Jim especially not being able to stand to even hear it without getting a hurt heart.

“I didn’t swear,” I said to Dragonfly. “I was just talking to God.”

“You what?”

“I was just telling Him it was an awful pretty storm.”

“You mean—you mean you aren’t afraid to talk to Him?”

Imagine that little guy saying that! But then, he hadn’t been a Christian very long and didn’t seem to understand that praying and talking to God are the same thing, and everybody ought to do it, and if your sins have been washed away, then there isn’t anything to be afraid of.

I was aroused from what I’d been thinking, by my acrobatic goat calling to us from back in the cabin saying, “Hey, Gang! Aren’t we going to explore this old shell and see if we can find the ransom money?”

That sort of brought me back from where for a few minutes my mind had been.

I took another quick look at the little moving mountains on the lake and pretty soon we were all inside where Circus had been all the time looking around to see what he could find. But it was too dark to see anything very clearly, and we didn’t have any flashlight. I looked on a high mantel above the fireplace to see if there was any kerosene lamp, but there wasn’t. There wasn’t any furniture in the main room except a table, three small chairs and one great big old-fashioned Morris chair like one my pop always sat in at home in our living room. It had a fierce-looking tiger head with a wide-open mouth on the end of each arm, which gave me an eery feeling when I saw them, which I did right away, when Circus lit one of the matches he had with him.

“Here’s a candle, out here on the kitchen table,” Dragonfly said, and brought it in to where we were. It certainly was the darkest cabin on the inside I ever saw. The walls were almost black, and the stone arch at the top of the fireplace was black with smoke where the fireplace had probably smoked when it had a fire in it. There was only about an inch of the candle left.

Circus lit it while Poetry held it, and we followed Poetry all around wherever he went. The noise of the storm and the dark cabin made it seem like we were having a strange adventure in the middle of the night.

There were spider webs on nearly everything, and dust on the floor, and it looked like nobody had lived here for an awful long time, maybe years and years. Besides the front porch there were just the three rooms—the kitchen with the sink and pitcher pump, the main room with the fireplace and a smallish bedroom which had a curtain hanging between it and the main room. In the bedroom was a rollaway bed all folded up and rolled against a wall.

Even though the broken twig trail had led us here, still we couldn’t find a thing that looked like anything the ransom money might have been hidden in.

So since the rain was still pouring down, we decided to call a meeting and talk things over. We pulled the three stiff-backed chairs up to the table in the center of the main room, and also the big chair, which I turned sidewise, and I sat on one of the wooden arms. Poetry set the short flickering candle in a saucer in the center of the table, and I, being supposed to be the leader, called the meeting to order, just like Big Jim does when the gang is all present. It felt good to be the leader, even though I knew I wasn’t—and Poetry would have made a better one.

We talked all at once, and also one at a time part of the time, and not one of us had any good ideas as to what to do, except when the storm was over to follow our trail of broken twigs back to where the girl had been found and from there to the road and back to camp.

I looked at Poetry’s fat face and at Dragonfly’s large eyes and his crooked nose and at Circus’s monkey-looking face, and we all looked at each other.

All of a sudden Poetry’s forehead puckered and he lifted his head and sniffed two or three times like he was smelling something strange, and said, “You guys smell anything funny, like—kinda like a dead chicken or something?”

I sniffed a couple of times, and we all did, and as plain as the nose on my face I did smell something—something dead. I’d smell that smell many a time back along Sugar Creek when there was a dead rabbit or something that the buzzards were circling around up in the sky, or had swooped down on it and were eating it.

Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes looked startled, and I knew that if I could have seen mine in a mirror, they’d have looked just as startled.

“It smells like a dead possum carcass that didn’t get buried,” Circus said, he especially knowing what they smell like on account of his pop catches many possums and sells the fur. Sometimes on a hunting trip when he catches a possum, he skins it before going on, and leaves the carcass in the woods or in a field.

It was probably a dead animal of some kind, we decided, and went right on with our meeting, talking over everything from the beginning up to where we were right that minute—the kidnapping, the found girl, the police which had come that night and the plaster-of-Paris cast they’d made of the kidnapper’s tire tracks, and the kidnapper himself which we’d caught in the Indian cemetery, which you know all about maybe, if you’ve read the other stories called “Sugar Creek Gang Goes North” and “Adventure in an Indian Cemetery”....

“Yes,” Poetry said, “but what about the envelope with the blank piece of typewriter paper in it?”

There wasn’t any sense in talking about that again, ’cause we’d already decided it had maybe been left there by the kidnapper who had planned to write a note on it and had gotten scared, and left it, planning to come back later, maybe, or something. Anyway, anything we’d said about it didn’t make sense, so why bring it up again? I thought.

“That’s OUT,” I said. “I’m keeping it for a souvenir.” I had it in my shirt pocket and for fun pulled it out and opened it and turned it over and over in my hands to show them that it was as white as a Sugar Creek pasture field after a heavy snowfall.

But say, all of a sudden as I spread it out, Poetry let out an excited gasp, and exclaimed, “Hey! Look! There’s something written on it!”

I could hardly believe my eyes, but there it was as plain as day, something that looked like writing—scratches and longish straight and crooked lines, and down at the bottom a crazy drawing of some kind.

5

YOU can imagine how we felt when we looked at that crazy, almost illegible drawing on that paper, which, when we’d found it, had been without even one pencil mark on it, and now as plain as day there was something on it—only it wasn’t drawn with a pencil or ink or crayon but looked kinda like what is called a “water mark” which you can see on different kinds of expensive writing paper.

All of us leaned closer, and I held it as close to the smoking and flickering candle as I could, so we could see it better, when Poetry gasped again and said, “Hey! It’s getting plainer. Look!”

And Poetry was right. Right in front of our eyes as I held the crazy looking lines close to the candle, the different lines began to be clearer, although they still looked like water marks.

Dragonfly turned as white as a sheet, with his eyes almost bulging out of his head. “There’s a-a-a- ghost in here!” He whispered the words in such a ghost-like voice that it seemed like there might be one.

For a jiffy I was as weak as a cat, and my hands holding the paper were trembly so, I nearly dropped it. In fact, as quick as a flash, Poetry grabbed my hand that had the paper in it and pulled it away from the candle or it might have touched it and caught fire.

Whatever was going on, didn’t make sense. My brain sort of whirled and I sniffed again and thought of something dead, and then of the writing that was on the paper and hadn’t been before, and about Dragonfly’s idea that there was a ghost in the old cabin, and I wished I was outside in the rain running lickety-sizzle for camp, and getting there right away.

But it was Poetry who solved the problem for us by saying, “It’s invisible ink, I’ll bet you. Its being in Bill’s pocket next to his body made it warm, and now the heat from the candle is bringing out what was written on it.”

It took only a jiffy to decide Poetry was right, and as we all looked at that crazy drawing, we knew we’d found a map of some kind, and that if we could understand it, and follow it, we would find the kidnapper’s ransom money.

Poetry took out his pencil and because the lines weren’t any too plain in some places, he started to trace them, then he gasped and whistled and said, “Hey, it’s a map of some kind!”

When he got through tracing it, we saw that it was a map of the territory up here, with the different places named, such as the Indian cemetery, the firewarden’s cabin, the boathouse, two summer resorts, and the different roads and lanes running from one to another, also the names of the different lakes on one of which we had our camp.

We all crowded around the table, looking over Poetry’s shoulders, and feeling mysterious and also a little bit scared, but not much ’cause I was remembering that the kidnapper was locked up in jail, and couldn’t get out.

“What’s that ‘X’ there in the middle for?” my Man Friday wanted to know, and Poetry said, “That’s where we initiated you,” and there was a mischievous grin in his duck-like voice.

“WHAT?” I said, beginning to get a let-down feeling.

Dragonfly burst out with a savage sigh, and said, “I might have known there wasn’t any mystery. You made that map yourself.” And was thinking the same sad thing, and said so, but Poetry shushed us and said, “Don’t be funny; that’s where Bill and I found the little Ostberg girl.”

“Yeah,” Dragonfly said, “but that’s also where Robinson Crusoe stepped on my neck!”

“Oh, all right,” Poetry said, “That’s a dirty place on your neck which needs washing.” But Dragonfly didn’t think it was funny, which maybe it wasn’t very.

Just above the X a little distance, we noticed there was a big V, a drawing of a broken twig, and a line pointing toward the cabin where we were right that minute. Also there was a line running from the top of the other arm of the V off in another direction and kept on going until it came to a drawing that looked like a smallish mound; and lying across it was a straight short line that made me think of a walking stick or something.

It didn’t make sense until I noticed that Poetry’s pencil had missed tracing part of it, so I said, “Here, give me your pencil. There’s a little square on the end of this straight line.”

I made the square, and then noticed there was a small circle at the opposite end of the straight line, so I traced that, and the whole map was done.

It was Circus who guessed the meaning of the square and the circle I’d just made at the opposite ends of the straight line. “Look!” he said, “it’s a shovel or a spade! That circle is the top of the handle, and the square is the blade,” and we knew he was right.

And that meant, as plain as the nose on Dragonfly’s face, that if we left this house and went back to where our trail had branched off, and followed the broken twigs in that other direction, we’d come to a place where the money was buried.

Boy oh boy, oh boy! I felt so good I wanted to scream.

It was just like being in a dream, which you know isn’t a dream, and are glad it isn’t—only in dreams you always wake up, which maybe I’d do in just another excited minute.

“Is this a dream or not?” I asked my fat goat, and he said, “I don’t know, but I know how I can find out for you,” and I said, “How?” and he said, “I’ll pinch you to see if there is any pain, and if there is, it isn’t, and if there isn’t, it is.” He was trying to be funny and not being, ’cause right that second he pinched me and it hurt just like it always does when he pinches me, only worse.

“Hey—ouch!” I said, and right away I pinched him so he could find out for himself that the map wasn’t any dream, and neither was my hard pinch on his fat arm.

The rain was still roaring on the roof, sounding like a fast train roaring past the depot at Sugar Creek. We all sat looking at each other with queer expressions on our faces and mixed-up thoughts in our minds. I was smelling the dead something or other. The odor seemed to come from the direction of the kitchen on account of it was on the side of the cottage next to the steep hillside, which was as steep almost as a cliff, and right above its one window I noticed there was a stubby pine tree growing out of the hill, its branches extending over the roof.

Because the rain wasn’t falling on the window, I opened it and looked out and noticed that water was streaming down the hill like there was a little river up there and was pouring itself down onto the cement walk and rippling around the outside of the cabin. I thought for a jiffy how smart the owners of the cabin had been to put that cement walk there, so the water that swished down the hillside could run away and not pour into the cabin.

It was while I was at the window that I noticed there was an old rusty wire stretched across from the stubby pine tree toward the cabin. I yelled to the rest of the gang to come and look, which they did.

“’Tsa telephone wire,” Dragonfly said, and Poetry, squeezing in between Dragonfly and me and looking up at the wire, said, “I’ll bet it’s a radio aerial!” Poetry’s voice got excited right away and he turned back into the kitchen and said, “There might be a radio around here somewhere.”

With that he started looking for one, with all of us helping him, going from the kitchen where we were, to the main room where the fireplace was, and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom, which had the rollaway bed in it, all folded up against the wall; then we hunted through the screened porch, and looked under some old canvases on the porch floor, but there wasn’t any radio anywhere.

“There’s got to be one,” Circus said. “That’s an aerial, I’m sure.”

Poetry spoke up and said, “If it is, let’s look for the place where it comes into the cabin,” which we did, and which we found. It was through the top of a window in the bedroom. But that didn’t clear up our problem even a tiny bit, on account of there was only a piece of twisted wire hanging down from the curtain pole and it wasn’t fastened to anything.

Well that was that. Besides what’d we want to know whether there was a radio for? “Who cares?” I said, feeling I was the leader, and wishing Poetry wouldn’t insist on following out all his ideas.

“Goof!” he said to me, which was what he was always calling me, but I shushed him, and said, “Keep still, Goat! Who’s the head of this treasure hunt?”

He puckered his fat forehead at me, and half yelled above the roar of the rain on the roof, “If there’s a radio, it means somebody’s been living here just lately.”

“And if there isn’t, then what?”

It was Dragonfly who saw the edge of a newspaper sticking out of the crack between the folded-up mattress of the rollaway bed which was standing in the corner. He quick pulled it out and opened it, and we looked at the date, and it was just a week old. In fact, it was dated the day before we’d caught the kidnapper, so we were pretty sure he’d been here at that same time.

Well, the rain on the roof was getting less noisy, and we knew that pretty soon we’d have to be starting for camp. We wouldn’t dare try to follow the trail of broken twigs to the place where we thought the money was buried, because we had orders to be back at camp an hour before supper time, to help with the camp chores. That night we were all going to have a very special campfire service, with Eagle Eye, an honest-to-goodness Chippewa Indian, telling us a blood curdling story of some kind—a real live Indian story.

“Let’s get going,” I said to the rest of us—“just the minute it stops raining.”

“Do we go out the door or the window?” my Man Friday wanted to know, and I took a look at the only door, saw that it was nailed shut, tighter than anything.

I grunted and groaned and pulled at the knob, and then gave up and said, “Looks like we’ll use the window.”

It was still raining pretty hard, and I had the feeling I wanted to go out and take a last look at the lake. I’d been thinking also if this cabin was fixed up a little and the underbrush and stuff between it and the lake and a battered down old clock, was cleared away, and if the walls were painted a light color, it might make a pretty nice cabin for anybody to rent and spend a summer vacation in, like a lot of people in America do do. On the wall of the porch I noticed a smallish mirror which was dusty and needed to be wiped off before I could see myself. I stopped just a second to see what I looked like, like I sometimes do at home, especially just before I make a dash to our dinner table—and sometimes get stopped before I can sit down—and have to go back and finish washing my face and combing my hair before I get to take even one bite of Mom’s swell fried chicken.

I certainly didn’t look much like the pictures I’d seen of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of looking like a shipwrecked person with home-made clothes, I looked just like an ordinary “wreck” without any ship. My red hair was mussed up like everything, my freckled face was dirty and my two large front teeth still looked too big for my face, which would have to grow a lot more before it was big enough to fit my teeth. I was glad my teeth were already as big as they would ever get—which is why lots of boys and girls look funny when they’re just my size, Mom says. Our teeth grow in as large as they’ll ever be, and our faces just sorta take their time.

“You’re an ugly ‘mut,’” I said to myself, and then turned and looked out over the lake again. Anyway, I was growing a little bit, and I had awfully good health and nearly always felt wonderful most of the time.

While I was looking out at the pretty lake, some of the same feeling I’d had before came bubbling up inside of me. For a minute I wished Little Jim had been with us,—in fact, I wished he had been standing right beside me with the stick in his hand which he always carries with him wherever he goes, almost ... I was feeling good inside ’cause the gang was still letting me be Robinson Crusoe and were taking most of my orders. Sometimes, I said to myself, I’d like to be a leader of a whole lot of people, who would do whatever I wanted them to. I might be a general in an army, or a Governor or something—only I wanted to be a doctor, too, and help people to get well. Also I wanted to help save people from their troubles, and from being too poor, like Circus’s folks, and I wished I could take all the whiskey there was in the world and dump it out into a lake, only I wouldn’t want the perch and northern pike or walleyes or the pretty blue gills or bass or sunfish to have to drink any of it, but maybe I wouldn’t care if some of the bullheads did.

While I was standing there, thinking about that pretty lake, and knowing that Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang, would say something about the Bible if he was there, I remembered part of a Bible story that had happened out on a stormy, rolling lake just like this one. Then I remembered that in the story of Robinson Crusoe there had been a Bible and that he had taught his ignorant Man Friday a lot of things out of it and Friday had become a Christian himself. My pop used to read Robinson Crusoe to Mom and me at home many a night in the winter—Pop reading good stories to us instead of whatever there was on the radio that wouldn’t be good for a boy to hear, and my folks having to make me turn it off. Pop always picked a story to read that was very interesting to a red-haired boy and would be what Mom called “good mental furniture”—whatever that was, or is.

All of the gang nearly always carried New Testaments in our pockets, so, remembering Robinson Crusoe had had a Bible, I took out my New Testament and stood with my back to the rest of the cabin, still looking at the lake. I felt terribly good inside, with that little brown leather Testament in my hands. I was glad the One Who is the main character in it was a Friend of mine and that He liked boys.

“It was swell of You to help us find the little Ostberg girl,” I said to Him, “and also to catch the kidnapper, and it’s an awful pretty lake and sky and ...”

Right then I was interrupted by music coming from back in the cabin somewhere, some people’s voices singing a song I knew and that we sometimes sang in church back at Sugar Creek, and it was:

I guessed quick that one of my goats or else my Man Friday had actually found a radio in the cabin and had turned it on. I swished around, dashed back inside and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom where I’d left them, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the rollaway bed opened out and there, sitting on the side of it, my two goats and my Man Friday and a little portable radio, which I knew was the kind that had its own battery and its own inbuilt aerial. It was sitting on my fat goat’s lap, and was playing like a house afire that very pretty church hymn:

A jiffy after I got there, the music stopped and a voice broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to make a very important announcement. There is a new angle regarding the ransom money still missing in the Ostberg kidnapping case. Little Marie’s father, a religious man, has just announced that the amount represented a sum he had been saving for the past several years to build a memorial hospital in the heart of the mission field of Cuba. In St. Paul, the suspect, caught last week at Bemidji by a gang of boys on vacation, still denies knowing anything about the ransom money; claims he never received it. Police are now working on the supposition that there may have been another party to the crime. Residents of northern Minnesota are warned to be on the lookout for a man bearing the following description: He is believed to be of German descent, a farmer by occupation, about thirty-seven years of age, six feet two inches tall, weighs one hundred eighty seven pounds, stoop-shouldered, dark complexion, red hair, partly bald, bulgy steel-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows that meet in the center, hook-nose....”

The description went on, telling about the man’s clothes, ears, and mouth, but I didn’t need any more. My heart was already bursting with the awfulest feeling I’d had in a long time, ’cause the person they were describing was exactly like Old hook-nosed John Till, the mean, liquor-drinking father of one of the Sugar Creek Gang, little red-haired Tom Till himself, one of my very best friends and a swell little guy that all of us liked and felt so terribly sorry for on account of we knew that he had that kind of a father, who had been in jail lots of times and who spent his money on whiskey and gambling and Little Tom’s mother had to be sad most of the time. In fact, about the only happiness Tom’s mom had was in her boy Tom, who was a really swell little guy, and went to Sunday school with us. She also got a little happiness out of a radio which my folks had bought for her, and she listened to Christian programs which cheered her up a lot.

Even while I listened to the radio on my fat goat’s lap, I was thinking about Little Tom’s mom and wondering if she had her radio turned on too, back at Sugar Creek, and would hear this announcement, and if it would be like somebody jabbing a knife into her heart and twisting it.

But we didn’t have time to think, or talk or anything, ’cause right that second, I heard a noise coming from the direction of the kitchen window, which we had climbed in, and when I took a quick peek through the curtains, I saw the face of a fierce-looking man. It only took me one second’s glance to see the bushy eyebrows that met in the center just above the top of his hooked nose, and even though he had on a battered old felt hat that was dripping wet with the rain, and his clothes were sop soaking wet, I recognized him as Little red-haired Tom’s father.

In that quick flash of a jiffy I remembered the first time I had seen him when he had been hired by my pop to shock oats, and he had tried to get Circus’s pop to take a drink of whiskey over by some elderberry bushes that grew along the fence row. It had been a terribly hot day, and Circus and I had been helping shock oats too. Circus’s pop hadn’t been a Christian very long, and because I hated whiskey and didn’t want Circus’s pop to do what is called “backslide,” I had made a terribly fierce fast run across the field with Circus, to try to stop his pop from taking the drink and had run kerwham with both of my fists flying straight into Old hook-nosed John Till’s stomach, and a little later had landed on my back under the elderberry bushes from a terribly fierce wham from one of John Till’s hard fists. After that, the gang had had a lot of other trouble with him, but we’d gotten Little Tom saved, and Tom, being a pretty good Christian for a little guy, had been praying for his pop every day of his life ever since. But up to now it looked like it hadn’t done any good ’cause his pop still was a bad man and caused his family a lot of heartache.

Talk about mystery and excitement. I knew Tom’s pop hated us boys and also he was pretty mean to Tom for going to church with us, and on top of that was mad at my folks for taking Tom’s mom to church; and whenever he came into the house when she had a Christian program on the radio, he would either make her turn it off or he would turn it off himself.

I’ll have to admit that I was afraid of Old hook-nosed John Till, and right that minute I didn’t feel very much like being the leader of the gang, which for some reason seemed to be made up of only four very small boys, all of a sudden. The only thing I felt like leading in, was a very fast foot race out through the woods and toward camp.

“Quick!” I hissed to the gang. “There’s somebody looking through the window. What’ll we do?” Before I could think only half of those thoughts and say only half of that sentence, I saw the man’s hand shove up the window, and one of his wet long legs, which had a big wet shoe on the end of it, swung over the window ledge, and he started squirming his long-legged self in after it.

6

WELL, what can you do, when there isn’t a thing you can think of, of doing? When you are looking through an opening in a hanging curtain and see a mean man coming into your cabin, and when you know there isn’t any door you can dash through to get away? Poetry already had the radio shut off and all of us were as still as scared mice, listening, and also all of us were trying to peep through the opening in the curtain.

I noticed that John Till had a newish-looking fishing rod, which he stood against the wall by a window, then he turned his back, reached out of the window and bent his body over to pick up something that he had left out there. A jiffy later I saw what it was—a stringer of fish—what looked liked five or six big walleyed pike, and an extra large northern pike, which he probably caught out in the lake.

He lifted the stringer and I heard the fish go kerflippety-flop-flop into the sink, then I heard the iron pitcher pump squeaking like he was pumping water on the fish, maybe to wash the dirt and slime off of them.

The curtain we were peeping through looked like it had been made out of the same kind of material one of my mom’s chenille bedspreads is made out of, and was kinda fuzzy on one side. Even before I heard Dragonfly do what he did just then, I was afraid he would do it. He had his face up close to the curtain not far from mine, and all of a sudden he got a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes started to squint, and his mouth to open, and he made a quick grab for his crooked nose with one of his hands.

But it was too late. Out came the cuckooest-sounding sneezes you ever heard, which he tried to smother and didn’t; and like it nearly always sounds when he sneezes, it was like a fourth-of-July firecracker that didn’t explode but just went “hisssss-sh-sh-sh” instead. At that same instant John Till whirled around and looked through the main room and at the curtain behind which we were hiding. If it had still been raining terribly hard, he wouldn’t have heard us, maybe, but Dragonfly’s sneeze seemed to have been timed with a lull in the rain, ’cause in spite of the fact that it was a smothered hissing noise, it sounded like it was loud enough to be heard a long ways away.

John Till jumped like he had been shot at and hit, and I expected most anything terribly exciting and dangerous to happen.

First I saw him take a wild look around like he wanted to make a dash for a door or a window and disappear. He must have thought better of it, though, ’cause he started pumping water again and doing something to the fish he had caught, then he fumbled at his belt and in a second I saw in his right hand a fierce-looking sheath knife, just like the kind Barry carried. Its wicked-looking blade was about 5 inches long and looked like it could either slice a fish into steaks in a jiffy or do the same to a boy. Not a one of us had any weapons except our pocket knives, and also not a one of us was going to be foolish enough to start a fight. If only we could make a dash for the door and get out—if the door wasn’t nailed shut, I thought. Then we could run like scared deer and get away.

But there wasn’t a chance in the world—not with a fierce man with a fierce-looking hunting knife in his hand.

Then Big John Till’s voice boomed into our room and said, “ALL RIGHT—WHOEVER YOU ARE—COME OUT WITH YOUR ARMS UP!”

“What’ll we do?” Dragonfly’s trembling whisper asked me, but I already had my arms up, and in a second he had his spindling arms pointed in different directions toward the ceiling.

“Get ’em up!” I whispered to all of us, and I thought that, if we got a chance, we’d make a dive for the open kitchen window and head for camp terribly fast.

Poetry’s fat forehead was puckered with a very stubborn pucker, and before I knew he was going to do what he did, he did it, which was—he yelled into the other room, “Come on out onto the front porch and get us!” only, of course, we weren’t on the front porch, and it didn’t make sense at all until a little later.

As you know, Poetry’s voice was changing, and part of the time it was a bass voice and the other part of the time, it was a soprano, on account of he was old enough to be what my pop called “an adolescent,” which is what a boy’s voice is like when adolescence happens to him. Part of what Poetry said was in a man’s voice and sounded pretty fierce, but right in the middle of the sentence his voice changed, and it was like a scared woman’s voice, the kind that would have made Dragonfly think it was a ghost’s voice, if he had heard it in the middle of a dark night in an old abandoned house.

To make matters worse, Dragonfly sneezed again, and we knew we were found out for sure. It must have been darker in the room where we were than it was in the kitchen or something, or else John Till really thought we were out on that front porch, ’cause all of a sudden he left the sink where he’d been pumping water on his fish, and whirled around with his big knife in his hand, straight out of the kitchen and through the main room, dodging the table in the middle, and the Morris chair, and made straight for the front porch.

It was our signal to make a dash for the kitchen and the open window, which we did, Poetry letting the baby-sized radio plump down on the rollaway bed, and even as I led the way to the kitchen window in a mad dash, I noticed that the radio’s side panel which he had closed, dropped down, which is what turns it on.

Most of us got to the window at the same time almost. My acrobatic goat grabbed the kitchen table, and shoved it into the doorway between the kitchen and the main room so as to block Hook-nose’s way if he tried to come back quick and stop us. Poetry was out first, and then Dragonfly, and then Circus, and last of all, I, Robinson Crusoe, who in the split jiffy they were getting out first, got a glimpse of the swell big stringer of fish John Till had caught, and which were, right that second covered with water in the sink. The large northern pike was especially very pretty and I thought that before I left the North this summer, I’d want to catch a big fish, have it mounted by what is called a taxidermist and put it on the wall of my room back at Sugar Creek.

I didn’t understand why John Till—as soon as he found out we weren’t out on that porch but had tricked him—didn’t come dashing madly back and jump over the table in the doorway and grab the last ones of us to get through the window, but he didn’t and I was too scared to stop to find out why.

So we swished around the corner of that cabin, made four dives in the direction we knew the broken-twig trail went, and went dashing through the still-sprinkling rain, through the wet shrubbery and under the trees that were dripping water like a leaky roof, and headed for camp.

Boy, was I ever glad we had our trail of broken twigs to go by. When we got to the first one, Dragonfly, whose feet were getting pretty wet, like all of ours were, stopped and made a grab for his nose, and I knew he was allergic to something—maybe to too wet feet. When he’d finished his fancy sneeze, he said, sniffing at something he couldn’t see, but which he knew was there, “I still smell something—d-dead!—something in that direction over there!”

I sniffed in the direction he pointed, and sure enough, there was that same deadish smell, like we’d smelled in the cabin, only this time it was mixed up with the friendly odor of a woods after a rain.

My fat goat smelled in the same direction, and so did my acrobatic goat, and we all smelled the same very unpleasant odor of something dead.

“I wonder who it is,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly looked like he was thinking about a ghost again.

And would you believe it? I heard music coming from somewhere—in fact, from the direction of the cabin we’d come from, and I knew it was the radio that had plopped open when my fat goat had left it in a hurry, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I recognized the tune, and it was, “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart.”

Well, we hurried on, following our trail, tickled that we had managed to get out so easy, but wondering to each other if Old hook-nosed John Till had had anything to do with the kidnapping, and if maybe he knew where the ransom money was, and why he hadn’t come dashing back into the kitchen to catch us.

“I think I know why,” Circus said, “he’s just like my dad was before he was saved. He couldn’t even stand to see a bottle of whiskey without taking a drink, and I’ll bet when he saw that big half-empty bottle out on the porch he just grabbed it up and started gulping it down.”

Then Circus, being a little bashful about talking about things like that, like some boys sometimes are, looked up, and seeing the limb of a tree extending out over where he was going to walk, leaped up and caught hold of it with his hands and chinned himself two or three times, while Dragonfly, who was beside him under the leaves of that branch, let out a yell and said, “Hey, watch out! Quit making it rain on me!” which is what Circus had done—the leaves of that branch getting most of the water shaken off and a lot of it falling on Dragonfly all over.

Well, we were in a pretty big hurry, so we all zipped on, talking and asking questions and trying to figure out what on earth the deadish smell was and also wishing we had all the gang with us, and a spade, and had time to follow the other trail of broken twigs and actually find the ransom money.

In a little while we came to the place where we’d first found the envelop with the invisible-ink map in it. There we stopped for half a jiffy, and looked all around to be sure we would remember the place again when we came back.

About twenty minutes later, we came puffing into camp in clear sunshiny weather, the sky having cleared off after the storm, but we were as wet as drowned rats.

The very minute the gang saw us come sloshing up to our tents, Big Jim called out, “Where on earth have you been?”

Well, we’d agreed to keep our secret a secret for awhile, anyway not to tell Barry first, but to rest of the gang—all except Tom Till. We might decide to tell John Till too, but we wouldn’t if Big Jim said not to, on account of it might spoil Tom’s vacation and he wouldn’t have any fun the rest of our camping trip.

Dragonfly answered Big Jim’s question in a mischievous voice by saying, “Bill’s been walking on my neck, and Poetry and Circus have been making soup out of me, and I am a Negro,” which wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know about Crusoe, his black Man Friday and the cannibals.

As soon as we could, we changed to dry clothes, and Big Jim took command of us by saying, “O.K., boys, I’m in charge of camp for the rest of the day. Barry got a terribly important letter in the mail an hour ago, and he’s had to go to Bemidji. He’ll be back in time for our Campfire get-together.”

Well, that was that. If there was anything I liked better than anything else, it was to be alone with only our gang, when it can be its own boss, even though we all liked Barry a lot and would do anything he said any time.

“Bill’s my boss,” Dragonfly said.

I looked at Dragonfly and then at Big Jim, and winked.

Big Jim grinned back, and then said to all of us, “Let’s get the camp chores done.” Then he gave commands to different ones of us to do different things. Poetry and I had the job of burying the entrails and heads of some fish which Barry’d caught, and which had just been cleaned before he left,—that being the best thing to do with fish heads and other parts of the fish that you aren’t going to eat.

“The spade’s in Barry’s tent,” Big Jim said, and a minute later Poetry and I were on our way up along the shore to the burying place.

We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when we heard somebody coming behind us on the run, and it was Dragonfly, with an excited face, who said, “You crazy goofs! You going to dig for the treasure without letting me go along?”

“Why hello, my Man Friday!” I said pleasantly, and told him what we were having to do. “Here—you carry the spade and do the digging.” And Poetry said, “And you can carry these fish insides,” and with that he handed him a smallish pail he’d been carrying.

But Dragonfly wouldn’t, so I let him disobey for once. When we got to the place, we saw all kinds of little mounds of fresh dirt where other fish entrails had been buried. And then all of a sudden Poetry said, “Hey, here’s fish heads scattered all over the ground here!”

I looked, and sure enough, he was right. All around there were old half-eaten bullheads, and the eyes and ugly noses of walleyed pike and two or three spatulate-shaped snouts of big northern pike.

“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “Somebody’s been digging them up”—and then he grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of what might have been several very noisy sneezes, and said, “I—kerchew!—I-smell—kerchew!—s-something d-dead.”

Well, that was that, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, ’cause right away I knew that what we’d smelled back in the mystery cabin, and around the outside, was maybe something like this.

“It’s raccoons,” I heard a voice saying behind us, and recognized it as Circus’s voice, his pop being a hunter as you know, and he would know about coons’ habits.

“Big Jim sent me to tell you guys to bury’m deep, ’cause the chipmunks and coons’ve been digging’m all up again.”

Well, we buried our stuff very deep, each one of us doing a little bit, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling very happy. I seemed to feel that all the mystery and excitement we’d been having and which had been getting more exciting every minute, was all made out of our own imagination.

“Do you suppose that map with invisible ink on it was only maybe showing somebody where a fish cemetery is?” Poetry asked, and I felt terribly saddish inside. We all looked at each other with saddish eyes, and felt even sadder.

“Then Tom’s daddy is only up here on a fishing trip, and he’s maybe rented the old cabin from somebody for a while,” I said.

We went back to camp feeling terribly blue.

Well, after supper and when it got almost dark, it was time for Eagle Eye’s blood curdling Indian story. We knew that he being a Christian Indian, would tell us a Bible story too, which is one reason why our parents had wanted us to come on this camping trip in the first place. Every night before we tumbled into bed, we would listen to a short talk from the Bible, and then somebody would lead us in prayer. Sometimes somebody gave us a talk about boys and what boys ought to know about themselves and God, and how God expected everybody in the world to behave themselves—things like that. Not a one of the gang was sissified enough to be ashamed of being a Christian, and as you know, every single one of us nearly always carried his New Testament with him wherever he went.

We started our evening campfire, which was going to be what is called an Indian fire. It was after Eagle Eye’s story that I found out about Little Tom’s terribly sad heart, and I was even gladder than I was that he hadn’t been with us in the afternoon. I’ll tell you about that in the very next chapter.

7

I THINK I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life as I did for Little red-haired Tom Till at the close of our camp fire that night.

It was fun having our big Indian guest, Eagle Eye, whom we all knew and liked very much, take charge of our meeting. He showed us how to build an Indian fire, which was like this: First he made a little wigwam of some dry tinder and slender sticks, and also some larger sticks all stacked up in the shape of an Indian tepee, with the top ends lapping over each other a little. Then he had us boys drag five or six big long poles from a little shelter nearby, where there was a place for keeping wood dry.

It was interesting to watch him ’cause just for fun he was wearing real Indian garb, with a headband filled with long pretty, different colored feathers, and clothes that looked like the kind I’d seen in pictures of Indians in our school library.

As soon as the little wigwam fire was laid, but not started yet, he took his bow and arrow and a board which he called a fire board, and in almost no time had a smallish fire started. It was a pretty sight to watch that little wigwam of tinder and sticks leap into flame and the long reddish-yellow tongues of fire go leaping up toward the sky. The smoke rose slowly, and spread itself out over our camp and sort of hung there like a big lazy bluish cloud.

Little Jim and I were sitting side by each, and Little red-haired Tom Till was right across the fire from me. The ground was still wet, so we were sitting on our camp chairs. It being a little chilly, I had a blanket wrapped around me, and had it spread out to cover Little Jim too, he being my favorite small guy of the whole gang. For some reason whenever he was with me, I seemed to be a better boy—or anyway, I wished I was. It was the easiest thing in the world to think about the Bible and God and about everybody needing to be saved, and things like that, when Little Jim was with us. And yet he was as much a red-blooded, rough-and-tumble boy as any of the rest of us. I never will forget the way he shot and killed a fierce old mad mother bear once down along Sugar Creek—which story you maybe know about, if you’ve read it in the book, “We Killed a Bear.”

“Here’s a good way to save labor,” Eagle Eye told us as soon as our wigwam fire had burned down a little. He picked up one of the long thick poles and dragged it to the fire and laid the end of it right across the still burning wigwam. Then he dragged up another pole and laid the end of it crosswise across the end of the first one. Pretty soon he had the ends of all the poles criss-crossed on each other on the fire with all the opposite ends stretching out in all directions like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Say, almost right away the big hot flames were leaping up like Circus’s pop’s hungry dogs leaping up around a Sugar Creek tree where they’ve treed a coon. It was certainly a pretty sight.

“Pretty soon, when the ends of the poles are burned up, we’ll push the poles up a little further,” Eagle Eye said, “and you won’t have to chop them in short pieces at all. When you want your fire to go out, at bed time, you just pull the poles back from the fire and pour water on the ends.”

I looked across at my Man Friday, and he grinned back at me and said, “I’d rather have him for my boss than—than Robinson Crusoe himself,” which was maybe half funny, I thought.

“Tomorrow night, you use the same poles, and not have to chop,” Eagle Eye explained.

Well, Eagle Eye wrapped his blanket around him and sat down on a log and began his story, first taking out his Bible—he, as you know, being a missionary to his own people.

Before he got started, though, Little Jim, who was cuddled up close to me, under my blanket, whispered, “That pretty blue smoke hanging up there, is like the pillar of cloud it tells about in the Bible. When it hung above the camp of the people of Israel, it meant God wanted them to stay there awhile, and when it lifted itself up higher, it meant they were supposed to travel on.”

I’d heard that story many a time in Sunday school or church, and liked it a lot. I didn’t understand it very well, though, not until that very second when Little Jim, who had his eyes focused on Eagle Eye as he opened his Bible and also at the blue cloud of smoke, said to me in my ear, “I’ll bet the cloud was there to show the people that God loved them and was right there to look after them and take care of them.”

Imagine that little guy thinking that, but it seemed like maybe he was right.

Then Eagle Eye told his story, which was a different kind of story than we had expected. It was all about how his father had been such a good father until he learned to drink whiskey, and then one night he had gotten drunk and had driven his car into a telephone pole away up at the place where the highway and the sandy road meet—“You boys notice next time you’re there. There’s a cross which the Highway Commission put there, to remind people that somebody met his death there by a car accident.”

Eagle Eye stopped talking a minute, and I saw him fumble under his blanket for something, and it was a handkerchief, which he used to wipe a couple of quick tears from his eyes. It was the first time I ever saw an Indian with tears in his eyes, and it gave me the queerest feeling, ’cause I realized that Indians were real people after all, and could feel sad inside, and love their parents, the same as anybody else God had made.

Then my eyes swished across the circle to where Tom Till was sitting beside Big Jim, and I saw him swallow hard like there was a big lump in his throat. He was just staring into the fire like he wasn’t seeing it at all, but was seeing something or somebody very far away. I knew that if he was imagining anything about Old hook-nosed John Till, his thoughts wouldn’t have to travel very far, but only to an abandoned old cabin on a lake—only he didn’t know that.

Then Eagle Eye brought something else out from under his blanket, and the minute I saw it I realized it was going to be hard for Tom to sit still and listen, but there it was—a great big whiskey bottle with pretty flowers on its very pretty label. Eagle Eye held the bottle up in the light of the fire for us all to see, and said, “This is the enemy that killed my father. I found it half empty in the car where he died. This bottle is responsible for my father’s broken neck, his crushed head, and the broken windshield that cut his face and neck beyond recognition.”

Eagle Eye stopped then, and took the bottle in both of his hands, held it out and looked at it, and shook his head sadly.

While everything was quiet for a jiffy, with only the sound of the crackling fire, and Little Jim’s irregular breathing beside me, I noticed that Little Tom Till over there had both of his smallish kinda dirty fists doubled up tight like he was terribly mad at something or somebody.

Then Eagle Eye talked again and said, “The Evil Spirit, the Devil, paints all sin pretty, boys, but sin is bad. All sin is bad, and only Jesus can save from sin. You boys pray for my people. Too many of them are learning to drink the white man’s whiskey.”

Well, the story was finished, and Barry wasn’t back yet, to take charge of the last part of our campfire meeting, so I knew Big Jim would have to do it. It was what we called Prayer Time, and just before somebody was supposed to lead us in an outloud prayer, the leader asked questions around the circle, if any of us had anything or anybody we wanted prayer for.

So Big Jim took charge and started by saying he wanted us to pray for Big Jim himself, ’cause some day he might want to be a missionary; Circus was next in the circle, so he spoke up and said, “Everybody thank the Lord for saving my dad from being a drunkard.” The very minute he said it, I was both sad and glad, and looked quick at Tom Till who was still staring into the fire, with his fists doubled up. Dragonfly was next, and he said, “Pray for my mother.”

Poetry frowned, trying to think, then said, “For new mission hospitals to be built in foreign countries, like Africa and Cuba and other places,” and when he said Cuba, his and my eyes met and I knew what else he was thinking about.

It was Tom Till’s turn next, but he sat with his head down and was looking at his doubled-up fists. I could see he was afraid to say a word for fear his voice would break and he’d cry, so Big Jim skipped him and it was Little Jim’s turn. He piped up from beside me and said in his mouse-like voice, “Everybody pray for Shorty Long back home.” I certainly was surprised, ’cause Shorty Long was the new tough guy who had moved into Sugar Creek territory last winter and had started coming to our school and had caused a terrible lot of trouble for the gang. But that was like Little Jim, praying for something like that.

Next it was my turn. I’d been thinking all the time while the different requests were being made, and hadn’t decided yet just what to ask for, but all of a sudden I remembered something my red-haired bushy-eyebrowed, reddish-brown-mustashed pop prays for, when he asks the blessing at our table at the house, and so I said, “Pray for all the broken-hearted people in the world,” only when Pop prays he always adds, “For a broken and a contrite heart, O Lord, thou wilt not despise.”

For a while after I said that, and thought that, I was lonesome for my folks—for my grayish-brown-haired mother and my swell baby sister, Charlotte Ann, and our black and white cat and our kind of oldish house and our big gray barn, and Pop’s beehives and our potato patch, and also I wished, for just a second, that I could stand and take just one big happy look at Sugar Creek itself, with the weedy riffle just below the old swimming hole and the old leaning linden tree above the spring, and Bumblebee Hill, where we’d first met Little red-haired Tom Till and his big brother, Bob, and had had a fight and I licked Tom, and at the bottom of that hill we had run kersmack into the fierce old mad old mother bear and her cub, and to save himself and all of us Little Jim had shot her.

Well, that was all our prayer requests, except Little Tom’s, and Big Jim was going to be courteous enough not to ask him again, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed, but right away Little Tom spoke up and said, “Pray for my daddy, that he’ll come home again, and will get a good job.”

Then that little guy picked up a stick that was in front of him and reached out and shoved the end of it into the fire, where it sent up a lot of pretty yellow sparks toward the blue smoke cloud up there; and for some reason there was a thought flashed into my mind like somebody had turned on a light in my head, and it was that Little Tom’s request was already on its way up to God, just like the sparks had shot up toward the sky, and I felt that sometime God was going to answer and give him a swell daddy just like Circus’s daddy was, after he was saved, and his mother would be happy and the whole family could go to church together. They would have enough to eat, and better clothes to wear, and everything.

But it certainly didn’t look like the answer was going to come very soon, though—what with John Till being described by a radio announcer as maybe the one who had helped the kidnapper, and right now maybe John Till knew where the ransom money was buried, if it was—and if he got caught, I thought, he’d have to go to jail and this time maybe he’d have to stay a terribly long time—years and years.

Well, Eagle Eye gathered up all our requests like a boy gathering up an armload of wood, and took them to God in some very nice friendly words, and handed them to Him to look over and to answer as soon as He could and in the best way.

I felt good inside watching Eagle Eye pray—although I shut my eyes almost right away. First he took off his big Indian hat and I noticed he had a haircut like ordinary white men. He left his blanket wrapped around him and shut his eyes, and just stood there with his brownish face kinda lit up by the fire, and he talked to the heavenly Father like they were good friends....

Then the meeting broke up, and pretty soon it was time for us to go to bed. I had a chance to talk with Tom alone a minute, though, just before we went to our separate tents. All of us were as noisy as usual at bedtime, except Tom, and I noticed he still had a sad expression on his face, so when I got a chance, I walked with him to the end of the dock where we stood looking out over the pretty shimmering waves of the lake under the half moon that was shining on it, and I said, “’Smatter, Tom? Something the matter?”

He just stood there, not saying a word for a minute until I said, “You’re one of my best friends, Tom.” Then he answered me very sadly, saying, “The mail boat brought a letter from Mother, and she’s worried about Dad. He’s gone again and nobody knows where he is.”

I didn’t know what to say for a jiffy, so I just stood beside him thinking and feeling sorry for him, wishing his pop could be saved like Circus’s pop and that the Till family would all be Christians and go to church. I don’t know why I thought what else I thought just then, but this is what I thought—something I’d heard Old Man Paddler, back at Sugar Creek, say once, and it was, “A lot of husbands are murdering their wives a little at a time. Some day a lot of mean husbands are going to look down into the coffins at their wives’ funerals and realize that by making them sorry and not being kind to them, their wives died ten years sooner than they should have—and that’s the same as murder.”

Old hook-nosed John Till was a murderer, too, I thought, as well as a drunkard, and it made me feel more sorry for the grand little red-haired freckle-faced guy who stood beside me.

Tom had put his back to me. Both of his hands were clasped around the flag pole at the end of the dock, and he was just weaving his body backward and forward and sidewise like he was nervous. “Don’t worry, Tom,” I said, “you’ve got a lot of friends, and my mother thinks your mother is swell.” Right then I got the surprise of my life, when he said what he said. I hadn’t realized that this little guy liked his wicked daddy a lot, too. This is what he said, “There are a lot of crosses all over the country like the one Eagle Eye told us about—just like the one they put up for his Indian daddy—” Then Little Tom stopped talking and I heard him sniffle and I knew it wasn’t on account of the breeze from the lake or because he was allergic to anything. He liked his daddy and didn’t want him to get drunk and have a car accident and get killed.

I felt terribly saddish, and at the same time a sort of wonderful, feeling came bubbling up inside of me. Say, I liked that little guy so much it actually hurt inside my heart. I reached out like my pop does to me sometimes, and put my arm halfway around him, and before I knew I was going to do it I’d given him the same kind of a half a hug Pop gives me and said, “Listen, Tom. I think God’s going to answer Eagle Eye’s prayer for you.”

Then I left bashful as anything, and just stood there beside him while he kept weaving back and forth with his hands still on the flag pole, neither one of us saying a word; and the waves of the lake made a friendly sound, lapping against the dock posts and washing against the sandy shore.

Well, the gang was yelling from the tents for us to hurry and come on and go to bed, so Tom and I started to walk back to shore and toward the Indian fire. The fire was still alive although the flames were kinda lazy, and the big blue cloud of smoke that had been hanging above our camp was mixed up with the night sky seemed to be gone. Tom and I stopped beside the fire a minute and looked down into it. Then just like he’d done before, he picked up a stick and shoved it into the coals, and a whole lot of sparks came out and shot in different directions of up, toward the sky.

“Hey you—Bill,” Big Jim called to me from his tent, “it’s your turn to put out the fire—the water pail is here in Barry’s tent—” which is what we had to do every night with our camp fires, pour water on them, so there wouldn’t be any danger of them suddenly coming to life in a wind and starting a forest fire.

It didn’t take me long to get the water pail, dip up some water from the lake and pour it on that fire till there wasn’t even one tiny spark visible.

Little Jim came out and went along with me as I made two or three trips from the fire to the lake and back carrying water. As you know, Little Jim had been sleeping in Big Jim’s tent, with Tom Till, and also Barry Boyland. The rest of us—in fact, our whole Robinson Crusoe gang—slept in the other tent—my two goats and my Man Friday and me.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” Little Jim said to me just as I was about to leave him at his tent.

“What?” I said.

“Can I play Robinson Crusoe with you tomorrow?”

I was dumbfounded, “What?” I said. “Who told you about—our game?”

“I just guessed it,” he said, “when Dragonfly said you walked on his neck and he was a Negro, and that they’d been trying to make soup out of him.”

I wouldn’t promise him, ’cause I wasn’t sure what my Man Friday and my two goats would think of the idea, but later when my goats and my Man Friday and I were alone in our tent, we talked it over and Friday said, “Let’s let him—and he can be my slave.”

Poetry spoke up from his sleeping bag beside me and said, “Let’s let ’im ’cause he didn’t get to help us find the little Ostberg girl, and he wasn’t even with us when we caught the kidnapper himself in the Indian cemetery!”

So that was that. We wouldn’t take Tom Till along, though, on account of we didn’t want him to know his daddy was up here, and might be mixed up with the kidnapping mystery. Also for some reason it didn’t seem right to me to have Big Jim come along and be our leader, when Robinson Crusoe had to be the leader himself.

Boy oh boy! I could hardly wait till tomorrow!

For a long time I lay awake, in our dark tent, smelling the smell of mosquito lotion and hearing the noise of Dragonfly’s snoring and the regular breathing of Poetry and Circus, and thinking a lot of things. I hadn’t said my prayers yet, and I was already in my sleeping bag, with the zipper zipped up—although I’d prayed with the rest of the gang around the fire when Eagle Eye prayed outloud for all of us. But it kinda seemed like it had been a dangerous day, as well as a very wonderful one, and God had taken good care of all of us boys and that I ought to tell Him so. Of course, I could just talk to Him without kneeling, like I sometimes do, but this seemed like it was extra important, so very quietly I zipped open my sleeping bag, squirmed myself into a kneeling position, and while a mosquito sang on my right ear without stinging me, on account of the ear had mosquito lotion on it, I said a few extra special words to God, and wound up by saying, “And please don’t let John Till murder Little Tom’s mother. Please save him as quick as You can, and if there is anything I can do to help You, let me know, and I’ll try to do it.”

A little later, while I was lying warm and cozy in my bag, listening to Dragonfly’s crooked nose snoring away like a handsaw cutting through a board, it seemed like there was kind of a warm secret between God and me, and that it might not be very long until Tom would have a new daddy.... Then I dozed off into sleep, and right away, it seemed, I was mixed up in the craziest dream I ever was mixed up in. My dream was about hook-nosed John Till, Little Tom’s pop, and it seemed he was all tangled up in the kidnapping mystery. In the last part of the dream, John had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and was standing beside the sink in the old cabin, pouring the whiskey over a stringer of fish. He kept on pouring and pouring—in fact, the whiskey bottle sort of faded out of the dream and John was pumping the old iron pitcher pump, which, quick as an eye-wink, was standing at the end of the board walk in our back yard at Sugar Creek, and whiskey instead of water was coming in big belches out of the pitcher pump’s mouth, and was splashing down over the fish which were in our water tank, where our cows and horses drank....

All of a sudden I noticed that the stringer of fish had all changed and that there wasn’t a walleye or a northern pike among them, but only big dark brown ugly bullheads, and they weren’t on the stringer any more, but were swimming around and playing and acting lively in our water tank filled with whiskey. Poetry who has standing beside me in my dream said to me in my ear, “Look, Bill—the whiskey’s changed all the fish into bullheads.”

It was a silly dream, and right that second I felt something touching me in the ribs. I forced my stubborn eyes open a little but couldn’t see anything on account of it was very dark in our tent, but I did see a shadow of someone leaning over me, and after such a crazy dream I was scared of who it might be. Then I heard Poetry’s husky whisper right close to my face saying, “Hey, Bill!”

“What?” I whispered up at him. My mind was all tangled up with mixed-up ideas.

Poetry’s whisper back in my car was, “Let’s take a look at the invisible-ink map. I just dreamed there was another line running off in a different direction. Let’s hold a hot flashlight down real close to it and see if there is.”

I didn’t want to wake up—or rather, I did want to go back to sleep again, but Poetry kept on whispering excitedly about his dream, so I reached over to my shirt which I had hung on my camp chair close by, and ran my hand into the pocket where I had had the map. Say, I hadn’t any sooner got my hand inside than a very scared feeling woke me up quicker’n anything, on account of the map wasn’t in the pocket. “Hey!” I whispered to Poetry, “it’s not in my pocket!”

8

“SURE it is,” Poetry said. “It’s got to be!”

“But it’s not!” I said, more wide awake than I usually am when I am wide awake. I must have made a lot of excited noise ’cause right away Dragonfly stopped snoring, sneezed a couple of times, and wanted to know what was going on, and why.

“Nothing,” my fat goat said to him. “We’re just looking for something.”

“Well, for—! Look with your eyes instead of your voices,” Dragonfly said, “I’m allergic to—kerchew!—to—kerchew!—to NOISE!”

“It’s your own snoring that woke you up,” Poetry said to my Man Friday. “Now go back to sleep.”

I certainly felt queer. “Somebody’s stolen it,” I said to Poetry. I was running my hands frantically through all the pockets of my trousers and my shirt and all the other clothes I’d had on during the day.

We flashed the flashlight all around the tent and into every corner, where the envelope might have fallen out of one of my pockets. “We’ve got to find it,” Poetry said. “Where do you suppose you lost it?”

“Lost it? Somebody’s sneaked in here and stolen it.”

“Hey!” Poetry said, like he had thought of a bright idea. “When did you remember looking at it last?”

My thoughts galloped back over the evening, and the afternoon, and I couldn’t remember.

“What pocket did you have it in last?” Poetry asked, and I thought a jiffy, and said, “Why, my shirt pocket where I keep my New Testament. I put it there when I—”

And then I stopped talking, gasped out loud. I’d thought of something. “Maybe we—maybe it dropped out of my pocket back there in the cabin when we were climbing out of the window.”

Then Poetry said, “Yeah, or maybe you left it out on the front porch, and that’s why John Till didn’t come back to try to stop us. Maybe he found it on the floor out there and picked it up—if it was what he’d been looking for—”

My acrobatic goat came to life then, and groaned and turned over and tried to go back to sleep. But Poetry was more excited than I was. He said, “Bill Collins, we’ve GOT to find that map, and I don’t think we lost it around here anywhere.”

“Let’s all go back to sleep,” my Man Friday said.

“Go ahead—who’s stopping you?” I said. In a jiffy I was scrambling into my clothes, while Poetry was doing the same thing, each one of us knowing what the other one of us wanted to do.

In less than a little while we had on our clothes so we wouldn’t get cold while we stepped outside into the kinda chilly night, like nights are up North even in the summertime. We had our two flashlights and were soon looking around the outside of our tent, sneaking along as quietly as we could so as not to wake up any of the rest of the gang in the other tent.

We flashed our flashlights on and off all around the circle where we had been sitting at the campfire service, but there wasn’t a sign of any envelope there. Then we looked all around the lean-to where we had gotten the dry logs for Eagle Eye’s Indian fire, but still didn’t find anything, so Poetry and I followed the path up the shore to the fish cemetery and looked all around where we had been digging to bury the fish heads and entrails.

“Maybe it fell out of your pocket when you were digging here,” Poetry said, but there wasn’t a sign of what we were looking for there anywhere either. It was just like looking for a needle in a haystack when there isn’t any needle to look for.

“Will you ever!” Poetry exclaimed, tossing his light all around in a circle at the newly-made fish graves. “The coons’ve already been here,” which I could see they had. I flashed my flashlight from place to place and off into the woods in a big circle and up into the trees but didn’t see a thing that looked like bright shining eyes or pretty gray fur or a furry tail with black furry rings around it, which is the kind of tails ring-tailed coons have.

From the fish cemetery we went out to the end of the dock and back, then to our tent again. When we stopped in front of the closed flap we listened, but my Man Friday and my acrobatic goat were as quiet as mice, so we decided they were asleep.

“Do you know what?” Poetry said, and I said, “What?” and he said, “I think we’d better go back up along the trail where we were this afternoon to see if maybe we dropped it along there somewhere.”

I couldn’t imagine us being able to find it at night, like that, even if it was there. Besides, I still had the notion—in fact, a very creepy feeling inside of me—that somebody must’ve sneaked into our tent while we were asleep and stolen it out of my pocket.

“Well,” Poetry said, “when did you last look at it? When did you last have it out of your pocket? Where were you when you last saw it?” and I must confess that the last time I had seen the envelope was when we were still in the cabin. I had shoved it into my shirt pocket right beside where I kept my New Testament.

When I told Poetry that, he said, “O.K., then, when did you last have your New Testament out of your pocket?”

Say, I gasped out loud when he said that like that, for I remembered that I’d had my New Testament out of my pocket when I was on the porch of the old cabin John Till was in, and had been holding it in my hand while I was looking out across the very pretty terribly stormy lake.

“You mean you haven’t looked at it since then?” Poetry asked me, astonished, and I said, “No.” I was astonished even at myself, but then of course we’d all decided not to tell the rest of the gang but to keep it secret for a while, so that explained why I hadn’t taken it out of my pocket. Eagle Eye hadn’t asked us to read any verses out of the Bible, so I hadn’t even thought of opening my New Testament. If I had, I would no doubt have noticed that the envelope was missing.

“O.K., come on,” Poetry said. “Let’s get going,” which we did, swishing as fast as we could through the wet grass and along the path that was bordered by the still wettish bushes, although the late afternoon sun had dried things off quite a bit.

Down the shore we went, past the boathouse, up the steep hill and along the sandy road, shining our flashlights on and off as we went. I carried with me a stout stick, just in case we ran onto anything or anybody that might need to be socked in order to save our lives. As we swished along in the moonlight, using our flashlights, I was glad there weren’t supposed to be any bears up here, and that where we were camping there weren’t supposed to be any wild animals except deer, polecats, raccoons, chipmunks and maybe a few other more or less friendly wild animals, all of which would be half scared to death if they saw us hurrying past carrying flashlights.

When we came to the place where we had found the little Ostberg girl, we flashed our lights all around and on the tree Circus had climbed, and all around where my acrobatic goat’s fire-cracker had started the little fire which we had put out in a hurry. I even went over and picked up the empty prune can which the cannibals had left, and which the goats hadn’t eaten, and looked inside, knowing, of course, that the envelope wasn’t there.

“We’d better follow the trail of broken twigs down to John Till’s cabin,” Poetry said. “Maybe it fell out of your pocket down there some place.”

Say, I was scared to get anywhere near John Till, remembering his big hunting knife, but I kept thinking all the time what I had been thinking before, which was, “What if John Till has found the map, and has gone to dig for the treasure? If the police find him, with it in his possession, the newspapers’ll print all the story, and the Sugar Creek Gang will get a black eye all over the country. On top of that, Little Tom Till will be ashamed to come to Sunday school or even to school; besides, if we can save Old hook-nosed John Till from having to go to jail, he might not ever have to go again.” But I knew that IF he had to go once more, having been in jail a good many times in his life, he’d maybe have to stay in ten or fifteen years this time. So if we could stop him from finding the ransom money, it’d be a good idea. Besides, the money was supposed to be used for a hospital on a foreign missionary field, which made it seem important that we find it ourselves.

When we came to the first broken twig, even as scared as Poetry and I were we zipped on, using our flashlights till we came to the next, and the next. In a little while, we were at the top of the hill looking down at the moonlight on the lake. Between us and the lake was the cabin where we had had all our excitement in the afternoon.

“Hey, look!” Poetry said to me. “There’s smoke coming out of the chimney!” And sure enough there was. We could see it in the moonlight, rising slowly from the brick chimney top and spreading itself out into a large lazy cloud just like the one Little Jim had whispered to me about, that was hanging above our heads and that had reminded him of the one that had been above the camp of the people in the Bible, which meant that God was right there looking after them and loving them and protecting them.

For a minute, right in the middle of all that excitement I got a warm feeling in my heart that God was right there with Poetry and me and that He loved us and was looking after us, and also we were doing the right thing.

“Look!” I whispered to Poetry, holding onto his arm so tight he said, “Hey, not so tight—I am looking!”

Through one of the windows, we could see a flickering fire in the fireplace. From where we were, we could see past the kitchen window, but couldn’t see into it. Then I felt my hair rising right up under my hat, for there was the shadow of a man just like he’d climbed out that window. Then a flashlight went on and off real quick.

“SH!” Poetry said to me, ’cause I had gasped outloud. “He’s coming this way.” Which he was, but only for a few feet till he got to the corner of the cabin, then he turned and followed the cement walk which led along the side of the house and down the slope to the dock.

I could hardly believe my ears, but I had to, ’cause the man was whistling a tune and it was “Old Black Joe,” which we sometimes sang out of a song book at Sugar Creek school, and also used different words to in our church, which were:

Only I knew John Till wouldn’t be thinking of those words when he whistled, but would be thinking of the Old Black Joe ones.

At the corner of the cabin, he came out in the moonlight where we saw as clear as anything. He had a pair of rubber boots on, a fishing pole in one hand and a big stringer of fish, which looked like the very same stringer he had in the sink in the afternoon.

“He’s going out to clean his fish,” Poetry said.

“And he’s got a spade, to bury the insides with,” I said, noticing it for the first time.

We stood there glued to our tracks and holding onto each other, wondering “What on earth!” We hardly dared move or breathe ’cause the cement walk came in our direction first before it turned to make its long half circle down to the dock and the lake.

“Maybe he’s going down to put his fish in a live box,” Poetry said, which is what fishermen sometimes do with their live fish which they’ve caught, especially if you don’t want to clean and eat them right away. They keep them alive in what is called a “live box” down at the lake near their docks.

“But they would have been dead by now,” I said. “They wouldn’t stay alive in that sink all this time—not with all that whiskey all over them,” and Poetry said, “What whiskey all over what, where?”

Then I remembered that I had only dreamed about the whiskey coming out of the pump and filling the sink, and I felt foolish, but say, that dream had seemed so real that it was just like it had actually happened.

John Till’s whistle sounded farther and farther away as he went down the hill, and pretty soon we saw him coming out in the moonlight on the dock away down at the lake.

“Hey!” Poetry whispered to me. “There’s a boat! He’s getting into a boat,” which is what John was doing. In the next minute and a half, with us standing up there with our teeth chattering, partly because it was a cold and damp night and partly because we were half scared half to death, we saw a flash of an oar blade in the moonlight, and a little later the boat was shoved out from the dock and we saw John Till rowing in the moonlight, going up the shore.

Well, we didn’t know what was going to happen next, or whether anything would, because it seemed like everything that could possibly happen had already happened. But say, Poetry was as brave as anything. Certainly he was braver than I was right at that minute, or else we decided to do what we decided to do in spite of being afraid. “Let’s go in the cabin and look around and see if we can find the map,” Poetry said.

The very minute John Till’s boat disappeared around the bend of the shore, we sneaked down the side of the hill, to the kitchen window. We could see the flames leaping up in the fireplace. In a jiffy Poetry had the window up and we had climbed in. We could smell fish and also a sort of a deadish smell in the cabin, but it was warm and cozy with the fire going in the fireplace. We took a quick look in the bedroom and there was the rollaway bed all nicely opened out with blankets on it and ready for somebody to use.

We shined our lights in quick circles all over the floor, thinking maybe John Till might not have known there was an envelope which we might have dropped here. Then we went out onto the front porch and looked very carefully in the direction his boat had gone to be sure he was really around the bend and couldn’t see our lights.

“Look!” Poetry said. “Here’s the whiskey bottle, standing just where it was, and it’s still just as half full as it was!”

I looked and could hardly believe my eyes, but it was true. “It must have had water in it instead of whiskey,” Poetry said, “or John Till would have drunk it up the very minute he laid his eyes on it.”

I put my nose close to the top of the bottle and smelled, and sure enough it smelled just like whiskey, which is an even worse smell than something that has been dead for a week.

I looked down at the place where I had been standing in the afternoon when I had pulled the New Testament out of my pocket to see if the envelope with the map in it was there, and it wasn’t.

Then we turned and walked back toward the door which led into the main room.

When I got to the place where the mirror was on the wall, I looked in it just to have a look at myself. I looked past my face and away out onto the very pretty lake which was shimmering like silver in the moonlight. Even though I didn’t have time to think about how pretty it was, I remembered the happy feeling I had had in my heart in the afternoon; and while Poetry and I were going through the main room, past the fireplace and into the kitchen and were climbing out of the window to go back to camp, I thought that God could make just as pretty a moonlight night as He could a thunderstorm. In spite of the fact that I was all tangled up in a very interesting and exciting adventure, I couldn’t help but be glad that I was on God’s side and that He could count on me to be a friend of His anytime He needed me.

We didn’t have any trouble following our broken twig trail to the place where it turned off in another direction. There we stopped and Poetry said, “I wish we could follow this trail of broken twigs tonight, and not wait till tomorrow. It might be too late tomorrow. Do you know that it goes in the same direction John Till’s boat was going?”

“What of it?” I said. My teeth were still chattering and I was pretty cold and wet and also tired, and wished I was back in camp, snuggled down in my nice warm cozy sleeping bag.

“We’d get lost in less than three minutes,” I said to Poetry, “and then what would we do?”

“It’s as easy as pie not to get lost,” he said. “You stay right here with your flashlight, and I’ll go in the direction the broken twigs point until I find the next one; then you come to where I am and stand there with your flashlight while I swish on to the next one, and we can keep doing that from one to another until we get there.”

“Get where?” I asked.

“Where the treasure is buried,” he said with an impatient voice.

“But we haven’t anything to dig with,” I said, in a voice just as impatient.

We stood for a little while arguing with each other as to what to do and whether to do it. “Let’s try it anyway!” Poetry said. “You stay here till I go and see if I can find the next one. Keep your flashlight turned off as much as you can, to save the battery,” he ordered, and for some reason, I, Robinson Crusoe, gave up and let my fat goat be the leader....

Away he went in a sort of a zig—zag style in the general direction the broken twigs pointed.

I could hear him swishing around, up ahead of me. It felt awful spooky here in this dark woods with my light turned off, and only little patches of moonlight around me, coming through the leaves and pine needles of the trees overhead.

After about four minutes, Poetry’s half bass and half soprano voice called to me saying, “Hey, turn on your flashlight, so I can find out where I am!”

I turned on my light, and shot its long beam in the direction from which I had heard his voice, and he shined his toward me. Then his half worried voice called and said, “Is your broken twig pointing toward me?”

“No!” I said. “You’re off in a different direction. Why don’t we get out of here and go home? I don’t think we can follow any trail tonight.”

I knew it would have been easy if we had followed the trail before in the daytime and had known what kind of broken twigs to look for and how far apart they were.

Poetry didn’t like to give up, so when he got back to where I was, he wanted to start out again, but I said, “What if we would get lost out there somewhere?”

“We’d just follow the trail back again,” he said, but his voice sounded like he had already given up. We decided to go back to camp and get some sleep, and tomorrow we would come back in broad daylight and be able to see where we were going.

9

WE hurried back to camp as quickly as we could, sneaked up to our own tent where my acrobatic goat and my Man Friday were sleeping, and started undressing and getting into our pajamas. I felt pretty saddish on account of the map being gone, but there wasn’t anything we could do till morning.

We kept our flashlights turned off so as not to wake up the other two guys. We could see a little on account of the moonlight that was pouring down on the top of our tent.

“Where you guys been?” my Man Friday said to me from behind me.

His voice scared me ’cause I’d thought he was asleep. “We’ve been out looking for the invisible-ink map,” my fat goat answered for me—“either somebody stole it out of Robinson Crusoe’s shirt pocket, or we lost it back on the trail somewhere this afternoon.”

“Oh, is that where you’ve been?” my Man Friday said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve got it here under my pillow. I was afraid somebody would steal it, so I took it out of Crusoe’s pocket and hid it here.”

“WHAT!” I said fiercely, more disgusted with him than I had been for a long time. I made a dive for him, so half mad I could have beat him up.

“Don’t hurt me!” he cried, turning his face and burying it in his pillow, which, the minute he did it, his nose objected to it by making him sneeze. “Your Man Friday—kerchew!—has to look after you, doesn’t he?”

Well, that was that. Poetry and I were so tired and so sleepy that we didn’t feel like telling Dragonfly and Circus what we had seen going on up at the old cabin.

I got the map away from Dragonfly and put it down inside my sleeping bag with me, next to my chest, happy that it wasn’t lost, and feeling cozy and warm and glad to have a warm bed to sleep in, and the next thing I knew it was morning. Our mystery was still unsolved, but it was a very pretty wonderful sunshiny day, with a pretty blue sky, and the lake was as smooth as a pane of blue glass.

Little Tom Till was our main problem. Barry still hadn’t come back, so Big Jim was in charge of us till noon. I’d promised to let Little Jim play Robinson Crusoe with us today—but what to do about Tom Till? I hated to tell him his daddy was up here in the North Woods and that the police were looking for him.

“How’ll we get away without taking Big Jim and Little Tom Till and without having them ask all kinds of questions?” I asked Poetry who grinned and said, “’Tsas easy as pie. The rest of you just sneak away without anyone noticing you, and I’ll leave this note on Big Jim’s tent pole.”

Poetry had a note already written. It was in poetry and was:

It was an easy way for us to get away without having to explain where we were going and why.

In only a little while we were gone, following the sandy road toward the place where the week before Poetry and I had found the little Ostberg girl, all of us explaining some of the mystery to Little Jim as we went along, my Man Friday carrying the spade we were going to dig up the money with, and Little Jim carrying his stick and an empty gunny sack he’d found.

“What’s the gunny sack for?” Dragonfly asked him, and Little Jim said, “We’re going after buried treasure, aren’t we?”—which we were.

When we came to the place where we had built the imaginary fire with which to cook Dragonfly, Little Jim got the cutest grin on his face and said, “Here’s where I come in.... Somebody shoot me quick, so I can turn into a goat.”

“BANG!” I said to him, pointing my finger at him. “Now you’re dead.”

Little Jim plopped himself down on the ground, then jumped up and said, “Now I’m a goat.” He began to sniff at my hand like a good goat. He surely was a swell guy and had a good imagination, I thought—only for some reason our game had turned from innocent fun to a very serious and maybe a dangerous game.

We followed our broken twig trail to where it branched off in two directions, one of the trails going toward the cabin where we’d seen John Till twice, and the other one going toward where the ransom money was buried, we hoped.

“Which way first?” my Man Friday asked me, then got a screwed up expression on his face, sniffed, and said, “Hey! there’s that deadish smell again!”

Sure enough it was. I turned my nose in different directions to see which way it was coming from, but couldn’t tell for sure.

“Come on!” my acrobatic goat said, “Let’s get going!” and he and my fat goat started off on the trail we hadn’t followed yet. There wasn’t any use for me to get peeved that they didn’t wait for my orders before going ahead, so I said, “Sure, that’s what I say,” and away we all went, Little Jim carrying his stick, with a grin and also a very serious expression on his smallish face. He held his stick like he was ready to sock anything that might need socking and swished on up ahead of me so the three goats could be together.

It was fun following the trail, and yet as we moved along from one broken twig to another and to another, I was remembering what a dangerous surprise we had found yesterday when we had come to the end of that other trail.

It certainly wasn’t a straight trail, but kept zig-zagging in different directions, but it seemed from the direction of the sun that it was working around toward the lake again. Pretty soon we came to a hill and looked down and sure enough there was the lake ahead of us, and away down at the foot of the hill we could see through the heavyish undergrowth there was a building of some kind. The broken wild plum twig where we were standing pointed right straight toward the oldish building.

We stopped, surprised. I had expected to find a little mound of some kind, or some markings on a tree or something, but certainly not an oldish building.

In a jiffy we had out the invisible-ink map and were studying it. There wasn’t anything on it that looked like a house.... “It’s an old icehouse,” Poetry said, and it was—a dilapidated oldish unpainted log icehouse—an icehouse being a building of some kind that people up in the lake country build to store ice in it in the winter-time, so that in the hot summer they can have plenty of ice for their iceboxes.

“Our hot trail suddenly turned cold,” my fat goat said, trying to be funny and not being very. It certainly wasn’t what I’d expected to find.

“O.K.,” Little Jim said, “let’s go down and start digging.”

“In an icehouse?” my Man Friday said, astonished. “You wouldn’t expect to find any buried treasure in a thousand blocks of ice!”

“Why not?” Poetry said. “Most icehouses have as much sawdust in them as they do ice. The money’s maybe buried in there in the sawdust.”

Well that seemed to make sense, so we circled around and came up to the icehouse on the side where there was the most shrubbery and where we’d be the least likely to be seen by anybody in case anybody was watching.

We stopped about twenty feet from the place and listened, but didn’t hear a thing, and then I got a sort of a feverish feeling in my mind. I felt like maybe we were actually going to find the ransom money—a whole twenty-five thousand dollars in 10 and 20 and 50 dollar bills. Say, the mystery of playing Robinson Crusoe seemed like an honest-to-goodness reality. I felt mysterious and afraid and brave at the same time.

“All right, come on, you three goats. Come on, Friday,” I said, all of a sudden waking up to the fact that I was supposed to be the leader. “Let’s go in and dig.”

The entrance was on the side opposite to the lake. The very old heavy barn door was wide open on its rusty hinges, but there were short boards stretched across the entrance like the kind some people use to board up the entrance to the coal bin in their basement.

I looked over the top of the highest board which was just about as high as my chin, and didn’t see a thing inside except sawdust. In a jiffy we had all scrambled up and were inside in the dark icehouse, which didn’t have any windows and was only one big room maybe 20 feet square. It seemed kinda like the haymow in our barn at Sugar Creek, only instead of having nice alfalfa hay in it, it had sawdust. Down underneath we knew there were scores of big blocks of ice which somebody had cut out of the lake in the winter-time and had stored away here for summer use.

The old icehouse was also about the same shape as the woodshed beside our red-brick schoolhouse back at Sugar Creek, where we had had many a gang meeting. I noticed that the only light that came in was from the door which, as I told you, was boarded up to as high as my chin, although there was a smallish crack between two logs on the side next to the lake.

It only took a jiffy for our eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. I looked around but couldn’t see anything but sawdust.

“Hey,” Poetry said all of a sudden from the other side where he had gone to look around. “It looks like the sawdust has been disturbed over here—like somebody had been digging here lately.”

Say, you can imagine how we felt. I could just see in my mind’s eye Little Jim’s gunny sack stuffed with money and all of us coming grinning happily back into camp, with Big Jim and Little Tom Till and maybe Barry Boyland, looking at us with astonished eyes. Also I could imagine what “The Sugar Creek Times” would print about us, and also how happy the Ostberg girl’s daddy would be, so I said, “O.K., Friday, give me the spade.”

“Me dig,” Dragonfly said, “—me white man’s slave.” With that he scrambled across to where Poetry was; but Poetry hadn’t waited for him but was already down on his knees digging with his bare hands, which is a good way to dig in sawdust.

Almost right away all of us were down on our knees digging as fast as we could with our bare hands, only Little Jim was using his stick to help him, and I was using the spade which I’d taken away from Dragonfly, to shovel aside the pile of sawdust that I was digging out of my hole.

My fat goat spoke up then, and said, “D’you guys know that Minnesota is called the Gopher State?”

Pretty soon my spade struck something hard, and I felt a thrill go through me. “Hey,” I said, “I’ve struck something! I’ve found it!” expecting it to be a box or a smallish trunk or maybe a fishing tackle box, like the kind the kidnapper had had the night we caught him, which you know about if you’ve read the book, “Adventure in an Indian Cemetery.”

Almost before I had the words out of my excited mouth, there was a mad scramble of boys’ feet swishing across the sawdust from different directions, and in a jiffy most of the rest of us were all around me looking down into my hole to see what I had found. I shoved my spade in and out a few times, but it didn’t sound like it was striking a tin box or a trunk or anything.

“Listen!” I said, which we all did, but I couldn’t tell what it sounded like.

“Let me get it out for you!” my acrobatic goat said.

I let him run his long right arm down into the hole. He scooped out several handfuls of sawdust and then let out a disappointed sniff and said, “You’ve struck ice, Robinson Crusoe! This is an icehouse!”

I put my own hand down in the hole and my fingers touched something cold. I also pulled out a smallish piece of ice which my spade had chipped off.

“Anybody else strike ice?” I asked, and right that second I noticed Little Jim over in a corner, prying at something with his stick, with his tongue between his teeth like he has it sometimes when he’s working at something or other. He had a happy grin on his face also, which I could see on account of he was facing the opening where the light was coming in.

“What you got there, Little Jim?” I asked my blue-eyed goat, and he said, “I don’t know. It’s all covered with sawdust.” Almost before he’d said it, I saw two great big round glassy eyes, a very large spatulate-shaped snout and a longish body that looked like a small log of fireplace wood.

Poetry saw it at the same time I did, but thought quicker, and exclaimed, “Hey, Gang! Little Jim’s dug up a terribly big northern pike!”

Quick, we started to help him get it out of the hole, although what we wanted to get it out for, I didn’t know. That buried fish could mean only one thing and that was that somebody had caught it in the lake and had dug down here in the sawdust till he had reached the ice, and had laid the fish down on it, and covered it up so it would keep cold and wouldn’t spoil like fish do almost right away in warm weather, unless you put them on ice.

“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “I’ve found another fish over here!” And he had.

We all stopped and looked at each other and I felt like the bottom of my life had fallen out. Almost before I had thought the next saddish disappointed thought, I’d said it to the rest of the gang and it was, “So this’s what our mysterious map brought us to. We should have known anybody wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a map right out in plain sight for anybody to find, if it showed where to dig for any buried treasure!”

There certainly wasn’t anything unusual about digging up fish in an icehouse anyway. We’d buried some in the icehouse at our camp last year when we’d been up here, and then, a week later, when we’d been ready to go home we’d dug them up and packed them with sawdust and ice in a keg and taken them back to Sugar Creek.

So that was that. We might as well go home, I thought, and said so. “Let’s get out of here and go home, and keep still to everybody about what fools we’ve all been and—”

But Poetry interrupted me by saying, “We’ll have to bury them again, or they’ll spoil, and John Till’ll be madder than a hornet!”

“WHAT?” I said, and then remembered that we weren’t very far from John Till’s cabin, and that we’d seen him coming right this very direction last night in a boat, and that one of the fish had been about the size of the one Little Jim had just dug up.

Thinking about John Till again made me decide it was time for us all to get out of here in a hurry, so I started to dig with the spade real quick to make Little Jim’s hole deep enough and long enough all the way down so we could lay the big northern pike’s whole length on the ice before covering it up.

“You bury yours again, too,” I said to Dragonfly, and he started to dig his hole again, working as fast of he could.

Right that second Poetry, who was on his knees beside me, said, “D’you ever see such a fat-stomached northern pike in your life?”

I stopped digging a half jiffy and looked at it, and never had, except one I’d seen dead lying on a sandy beach once, and the flies had been on it and it was bloated, but this one wasn’t bloated but was like it had been caught only maybe yesterday.

In a little while I had the longish sawdust grave ready to lay the fish corpse in it, when Poetry said to me in a hissing whisper, “SH! BILL—feel here, will you? There’s something queer about this fish’s stomach!”

The very excited sound of his whisper went clear through me and made me feel like maybe he’d discovered something terribly important. I reached out my hands and felt where he was feeling on the sides and stomach of the extra large northern pike, which, even while I was doing it, I thought was about the same size as the one I’d seen in the sink in the old cabin where John Till had been pumping water yesterday.

Say, I could tell by my sense of touch that were was something inside that fish that wasn’t a part of him.

“Look!” Poetry whispered to me again, using his fat right hand to wipe off the sawdust from the bottom of the pike’s stomach. “Here’s a place where it’s been sliced open, and sewed up again. What do you s’pose it’s got in it?”

Well, you can guess what I was supposing, ’cause I was remembering that yesterday in the old cabin I’d seen a big northern the same size as this one, and that John Till had a big hunting knife in his hand like the kind Barry uses to clean fish, and also I remembered that last night in the middle of the moonlit night, we’d seen John Till get into a boat with a stringer of big fish and row up the lake in this direction.

Dragonfly must have been listening to Poetry and me, instead of burying his fish like I’d ordered him, ’cause he spoke up and said, “This one’s been cut open and sewed up again, too.”

Well, you can guess that we were an excited gang of treasure hunters. Of course we didn’t know we’d found anything for sure, but it certainly looked like we had. It wouldn’t take any more than a jiffy and three-fourths to find out. Poetry took his knife which was an official boy scout knife, and had a stag handle, a heavy cutting blade, a screw driver, a bottle and can-opener and a punch blade. He opened the sharp cutting blade and carefully sliced through the heavy string the fish was sewed up with, and right in front of our eyes—all the rest of the gang gathering around to see what in the world—Poetry pulled out a big package of something wrapped in oil paper, the same kind of oil paper my mother has in our kitchen at home, which was waterproof.

In another second we had unwrapped the package and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a packet of paper money that looked like dozens and dozens of twenty dollar bills.

If I could have been somebody else standing close by and looking down at me, I’ll bet I’d have seen my eyes almost bulging out of their sockets with surprise and wonder and excitement.

“We’ve found it, Gang!” I said to us, and I knew we had.

Dragonfly piped up and said, “I’ll bet there’s a dozen other big fish buried here with money in ’em.”

It was a wonderful feeling. First we’d found the invisible-ink map, and then the trail of broken twigs, which we’d followed in two different directions, and now we’d found the money itself. Boy oh boy, oh boy! It was too good to be true!

“Now we know what the deadish smell was,” Dragonfly said, but Little Jim said, “What deadish smell?”

Dragonfly answered, saying, “John Till took the fish’s insides out while he was in the cabin, and maybe instead of burying them, just threw them outside somewhere,” which I thought was pretty sensible for Dragonfly to figure out.

But we couldn’t just stay here, and be like King Midas in the fairy story every child ought to know, and count our money. We ought to get back to camp and tell the gang and Barry and let the whole world know what we’d found.

“Let’s get all of it dug up and take it away before John Till finds out we discovered his hiding place,” Poetry said.

“But there might be a dozen other fish with money in them,” I said, “and it won’t be safe to stay that long. It might take a half hour to find all of ’em. We’ve got to get out of here quick and get some help.”

Well, it certainly wasn’t any time to argue, with maybe the whole 25 thousand dollars buried in the sawdust all around us. But we did have to decide whether to take what we’d found and beat it to camp, and come back with help, or to dig up all the fish we could find right now, take the money out, shove it all into Little Jim’s gunny sack and come happily back into camp with every dollar of it.

Little Jim piped up with a bright idea which was, “Let’s dig up all the fish real quick, stuff ’em in my gunny sack and beat it home to camp, and take the money out on the way maybe—or else take the fish home for dinner.” I looked at his excited bluish eyes, and forgot that he was a goat, and thought how much I liked him. “Boy!” he said, with a swell grin on his mouse-like face. “Won’t Mr. Ostberg be tickled to have his money back for the mission hospital!”

Here I’d been thinking about what a BIG reward I, Bill Collins, was going to get for finding the money, and Little Jim wasn’t thinking of himself at all, but of the folks in another land who needed the gospel for their souls and a doctor’s help for their bodies. What a swell guy, I thought.

But say, this story is long enough—and that’s really all of it, anyway, that is, all about how we actually found the ransom money, so I’ll have to wind up the whole thing in another paragraph or two. That wasn’t all the exciting adventures we had on our Northern camping trip, though, ’cause a new and very dangerous adventure began to happen to us even before we got out of that old icehouse that day.

While we were digging and finding fish with sewed-up stomachs and stuffing them into Little Jim’s gunny sack, to take home to camp, all of a sudden I thought I heard a noise outside.

“Sh!” I said to us. “Somebody’s coming!”

We all stopped stock still and listened, and sure enough I had heard a noise. Out on the lake there was the sound of a high-powered outboard motor that sounded like it wasn’t any more than a hundred yards from shore.

I could imagine that somebody on the other side of the lake had seen us and was coming roarety-sizzle across to stop whatever we were doing.

Little Jim grabbed up his stick and Poetry’s grip tightened on his scout knife handle till the knuckles on his hand turned white, he was holding it so tight.

“Quick!” I said to all of us, “let’s get out of here with what we’ve got, or it’ll be too late!”

I grabbed up the gunny sack, lugged it toward the exit, all of us getting there at about the same time. Boy oh boy, if only we could get out and make a dive for the woods and start to camp without being seen.

But as I said, this story is already finished—and what happened next is the beginning of another exciting adventure.

Even while we were climbing out of that icehouse I just knew that long before we got home with our ransom money, there’d be some dangerous excitement that would take not only a lot of quick thinking on the part of every one of us, but some quick acting as well. ’Cause the outboard motor was roaring toward our shore like whoever was driving it was in a terrible hurry to stop us from doing whatever we were doing.

I hope I’ll have time right away, to tell you this last story of our adventures in the North Woods.

THE END

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