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
When the Gang decided to play Robinson Crusoe up in the North Woods
they had no idea that they would run into such exciting adventures.
They discovered honest-to-goodness treasure and, of all places, in ...
but read the story, =The Sugar creek Gang Digs for Treasure=.
[Illustration]
Be sure to read all the books in the VKP Series. They are:
The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North
Adventure in an Indian Cemetery
The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure
North Woods Manhunt
The Haunted House at Sugar Creek
Lost in a Sugar Creek Blizzard
The Sugar Creek Gang on the Mexican Border
The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek
10,000 Minutes at Sugar Creek
The Trap Line Thief at Sugar Creek
Blue Cow at Sugar Creek
$1.00 each
[Illustration]
Published and Distributed exclusively by
_Van Kampen Press_
222 E. Willow Ave. Wheaton, Illinois
Transcriber’s Note:
Punctuation has been standardised. Spelling and hyphenation have been
retained as published in the original publication except as follows:
Page 8
to the gunwhale of the boat _changed to_
to the gunwale of the boat
Page 12
The kidnapped stole ’em _changed to_
The kidnapper stole ’em
Page 15
Act like your scared to death _changed to_
Act like you’re scared to death
Page 16
heard a scufflling behind _changed to_
heard a scuffling behind
Page 18
I said to dragonfly _changed to_
I said to Dragonfly
Page 29
belived it too _changed to_
believed it too
Page 36
looked startled, antd I knew _changed to_
looked startled, and I knew
Page 53
he’s just like may dad was _changed to_
he’s just like my dad was
Page 56
and I was even gladded _changed to_
and I was even gladder
Page 59
and it was a handerchief _changed to_
and it was a handkerchief
Page 60
to lead us in an outloud prayed _changed to_
to lead us in an outloud prayer
Page 62
he wouldn’t be embarassed _changed to_
he wouldn’t be embarrassed
Page 64
so much it acutally hurt _changed to_
so much it actually hurt
Page 85
that somebdy had caught _changed to_
that somebody had caught
Page 90
of us geting there at about _changed to_
of us getting there at about