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.