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:
“Once I was lost and way down deep in sin,
Once was a slave to passions fierce within.
Once was afraid to trust a loving God,
But now my sins are washed away in Jesus’ blood.”
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:
“Please,--Big Jim and Little Tom Till--
Do not worry, for we will
All be back in time for lunch--
We are following a hunch.”
(Signed) Robinson Crusoe, his Man
Friday and his Three Goats.
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 _ice_house!”