“Now,” I said, “take hold of my right foot and set it on the top of your neck—no!” I yelled down at him. “Don’t ask, ‘Why?’ Just do it!”
Dragonfly did.
“And now, my left foot,” I ordered.
“That’s what the boy did in Robinson Crusoe, so Crusoe would know he thanked him for saving his life from the terrible cannibals and that he would be his slave forever,” I said to Dragonfly. “Do you solemnly promise to do everything I say from now on and forevermore?”
Dragonfly started to say, “I do,” but got only as far as “I—” when he started to make a funny little sniffling noise. His right hand let loose of my foot, and he grabbed his nose and went into a tailspin kind of sneeze. He ducked his neck out of the way of my foot and rolled over and said, “I’m allergic to your foot.”
The dead cannibal on the ground thought that was funny, and he snickered, but I saw a little blue flower down there with pretty yellowish stamens in its center, and I knew why Dragonfly had sneezed.
My man Friday, rolling over, tumbled ker-smack into the cannibal. The two of them forgot they were in a game and started a friendly scuffle, just as Circus slid down the tree and joined in with them. All of a sudden Dragonfly’s initiation was over.
He was my man Friday, and from now on he had to do everything I said.
Up to now it was only a game we’d been playing. But a minute later Circus rolled over and over, clear out of reach of the rest of us, and scrambled up into a sitting position. He said to us excitedly, “Hey, gang, look! I’ve found something—here at the foot of the tree. It’s a letter of some kind!”
I stared at the old envelope in Circus’s hands, remembering that right here was exactly where we’d found the kidnapped girl. I remembered that the police hadn’t been able to find the ransom money and that the captured kidnapper hadn’t told them where it was.
In fact, he had absolutely refused to tell them. We’d read that in the newspapers.
Boy oh boy, when I saw that envelope in Circus’s hands, I imagined all kinds of things, such as its being a ransom note, or maybe it had a map in it that would tell us where we could find the money and everything! Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!
3
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. You 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 assigned names, even though 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,” he said. “You’ve got to turn into goats right away anyhow. 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, because 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 at the base of the tree where Circus had found it.
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.”
“You can’t read either,” I said. “You’re a native boy who doesn’t know anything about civilization, and you don’t know how to read.”
So it was I who got to open the soiled brown envelope, which I did with excited fingers, and then we all let out four disappointed groans. Would you believe it? There wasn’t a single thing written on the folded white paper inside—not one single thing. It was only a blank piece of typewriter paper.
Well, that was that. We all sank down on the ground in different directions. I felt as though the bottom had dropped out of our new mystery world. I looked at Friday, and he looked at me. And the roly-poly goat started chewing his cud, while my acrobatic goat rolled over on his back, pulled his knees up to his chin, and groaned. Then he rolled over onto my man Friday, which started a scuffle, making my man Friday angry.
All of a sudden Dragonfly 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, “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. He shut his eyes and started snoring as loud as he could, which sounded like a goat with asthma.
That reminded Poetry of something funny he’d read somewhere. 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 barely giggled at Poetry’s story, because my mind was working hard on the new mystery. I was thinking about the blank piece of paper, and why it was blank, and why the envelope was sealed, and who had dropped it here, and when, and why.
So I stood up and walked the way 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. I looked at Poetry, my roly-poly 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 held.
Abruptly Poetry stopped and said to me, “Sh! Look, here’s a sign of some kind.”
I looked but didn’t see anything except a small branch about four or five feet long 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, knowing that Poetry was the one of our gang who was more interested in woodcraft than most of the rest of us and was always looking for signs and trails and things.
“See here,” he said to me, “this is a little birch branch, 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 branch 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 branch points, and after a while we’ll find another broken branch, and whichever way it points we’re to go that way!”
Say, did my disappointed mind ever come to quick life! I still doubted it might mean anything, but right away we called the other goat and my man Friday and let them in on our secret. Then we all started off, pretending to be scouts, going straight in the direction the broken branch pointed, all of us looking for another broken branch farther on.
We’d walked about twenty yards through the dense growth before we found another broken branch hanging, but we did find one. This time it was a broken oak branch, and it was bent in the opposite direction we’d come from, which meant the trail went straight on. Then we did get excited, because we knew we were on somebody’s trail.
My man Friday was awfully dumb for one who was supposed to be used to
outdoor life, though. He wanted to finish breaking off the top of the oak branch and 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 knife and put it back into his pocket.
“That’s the signpost on our trail!” Poetry explained. “We have to leave it there so we can follow the trail back to where we started from, or we might get lost.”
I thought that was good sense and said so.
We scurried along, getting more and more interested and excited as we found one broken branch after another. Sometimes they were pointing straight ahead and sometimes at an angle. Once we found one broken clear off and lying flat on the ground, at a right angle from the way we’d been traveling, so we turned in the direction it pointed and kept going.
Another time when Poetry was studying very carefully the direction a new broken branch was pointing, he gasped and said, “Gang! Look at this!”
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.
“See here,” Poetry said. “Here’s where our trail goes off in two directions—one to the right and the other to the left.”
He was right. Only a few feet apart were two broken branches, one an oak and the other a chokecherry. The chokecherry was 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, “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 branches, and I saw that Poetry was right. The one pointing to the right did look a lot fresher than the one pointing to the left. Why, it might even have been broken off 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 as if I had been shot at and hit. I’d heard a sound from somewhere, a sound that was like a high-pitched, trembling, woman’s voice calling for help. It also sounded a little like a screech owl’s voice, wailing along Sugar Creek at night.
“It’s just a 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 roly-poly goat to see what they thought it was. Right away, before I could read their thoughts, there was another trembling, high-pitched voice that answered Circus. The second I heard it, I thought, That 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 different kinds of wild animals, and not feel like I felt, which was almost half scared to death for a minute. I knew there weren’t any bears or lions in the forest—only deer and polecats and coons and possums and maybe mink, but …
“It’s not a loon,” I whispered huskily and felt my knees get weak. 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.
Right away we all felt better and said so to each other.
The newest broken branch 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 screaming bloody murder to their mates.
We plodded along, being very careful to look at the broken branches so we’d remember what they looked like when we got ready to come back.
My roly-poly goat and I were walking together ahead of my man Friday and my acrobatic goat. We dodged our way around fallen tree trunks and old stumps and around wild rosebushes and wild raspberry patches and chokecherries. And still there wasn’t any lake anywhere.
I certainly had a strange feeling, though, as we dodged along, talking about our mystery and wondering where we were going and how soon we would get there.
“It’s funny how Circus found that envelope way 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, because it seemed that envelope in my pocket was hot and would burn a hole in my shirt any minute.
Poetry’s forehead frowned. He was as stuck as I was over the mystery.
In fact, all our minds seemed as blank as the blank letter. 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. What we were doing was fun, and we didn’t feel very scared because we knew the kidnapper was in jail.
In fact, I think we were all thrilled with the excitement. For some reason, we were sure we might find something terribly interesting at the end of the trail, if we ever came to it. We didn’t know 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 that camping trip—one that was just as dangerous.
We came to a hill. I looked ahead and spied a wide expanse of blue water down below us. On the hillside between us and the lake was a log cabin. It had a big log door and a chimney running up the side next to us. We all saw it at once, I guess, because we all dropped down behind some underbrush and most of us said, “Sh!” at the same time.
We lay there for what seemed 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 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.
I guess I’d not had such a wonderful feeling for a long time as I did right that minute. I realized that we’d followed the trail like real scouts and we’d actually run into 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 old-fashioned-looking house, push open the door, and look around until we found it, I thought.
It was certainly a weathered old house, and it looked as if 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 stood that there hadn’t been anybody going through that door for a while because 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,” Poetry said.
“Let’s 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 spiderweb across the door, which probably 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. 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 somebody living there. The only other door we found was one that led from the cabin out onto a
screened front porch. But the porch was closed in and had no door going outside, because 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. Then we all lay down on some tall grass behind a row of shrubbery that somebody years ago had set out when maybe a family had lived there. It had probably been someone’s summer home, I thought. Somebody who lived in St. Paul or Minneapolis or somewhere had built the cabin up here.
I noticed that there was a cement walk running all around the back side of the cabin, which was set up against the clifflike hill. Also, a long stone stairway began about twenty feet from the spiderweb-covered door and ran around the edge of the ravine, making a sort of semicircle down to the lake. On the shore I saw an 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 ten minutes, listening and watching, before we decided nobody was inside. We decided to look in the windows and later go inside ourselves.
We didn’t think about that being trespassing, because there was an old abandoned house back at Sugar Creek that our gang went into anytime we wanted to. Nobody thought anything about it, because the house belonged to a long-whiskered old man whom everybody knows as Old Man Paddler. Anything that belonged to him seemed to belong to us too, since he was a very special friend of anybody who was lucky enough to be a boy.
Anyway, soon we were peeking in through the windows, trying to see what we could see, but it was pretty dark inside. We knew that if we wanted to see more we had to find some way to get in.
I decided to see if my man Friday was my man Friday or not, so I said, “OK, Friday, go up and knock at that door.”
Well, Dragonfly got the most scared look on his face. As you maybe know, Dragonfly’s mother believed in ghosts and in good luck from finding a four-leaf clover or a horseshoe. Dragonfly believed it too. Most boys believe and do what their parents believe and do.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 9