Down the shore we went, past the boat-house, 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 into anything or anybody that might need to be socked in order to save our lives.
As we hurried along in the moonlight, 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 at all 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 on the tree Circus had climbed and all around where my acrobatic goat’s firecracker had started the little fire that 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.”
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 will print 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 could save old John Till from having to go to jail, he might not ever have to go again.
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.
We came to the first broken branch. And 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 and 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.
“Look at that!” Poetry said. “There’s smoke coming out of the chimney!” And 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—the one that had been hanging above our heads and had reminded him of the one that had been above the camp of the people in the Bible, meaning 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 that we were doing the right thing.
“Look!” I whispered, holding onto Poetry’s arm so tight he said, “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 cap, for there was the shadow of a man climbing out that window. A flashlight went on and off real quick.
“Sh!” Poetry said, because I had gasped. “He’s coming this way.”
He was, but only for a few feet till he got to the corner of the cabin. Then he would turn and follow the cement walk that led along the side of the house and down the slope to the dock.
I could hardly believe my ears, but I had to. The man was whistling a tune, and it was “Old Black Joe,” which we sometimes sang out of a songbook at Sugar Creek School. We also used different words to it 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.
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 he came out into the moonlight, where we saw him as clear as anything. He had on a pair of rubber boots, 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 shovel to bury the insides with,” I said, noticing it for the first time.
We stood glued to our tracks and holding onto each other, wondering, What on earth! We hardly dared move or breathe because the cement walk came in our direction before it turned to make its long half circle down to the dock and the lake.
“Or maybe he’s going down to put his fish in a live box,” Poetry said, which is what fishermen sometimes do with the fish they’ve caught, especially if they 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 dock.
“But those fish 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. I felt foolish, but that dream had seemed so real that it was just as if it had actually happened.
John Till’s whistle sounded farther and farther away as he turned the corner and went down the hill, and pretty soon we saw him coming out in the moonlight on the dock away down at the lake.
“There’s a boat!” Poetry whispered. “He’s getting into a boat,” which is what John was doing.
In the next minute and a half, while we stood up there with our teeth chattering, partly because it was a cold and damp night and partly because we were scared, we saw the flash of an oar blade in the moonlight. A little later the boat was shoved out from the dock, and we saw John Till rowing along the shore.
Well, I 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 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 hill to the kitchen window. We could see the flames leaping up in the fireplace in the main room. In a flash Poetry had the window up, and we had climbed in. We could smell fish and also a sort of a dead smell in the cabin, but the cabin was warm and cozy with the fire going.
We took a quick look in the bedroom, and there was the roll-away bed all nicely opened out with blankets on it and ready for somebody to use.
We shone 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.
“Here’s the whiskey bottle, standing just where it was,” Poetry said. “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, but it smelled just like whiskey, which is an even worse smell than something that has been dead for a week.
When I got to the place where the mirror was on the wall, I looked in it just to have a look at myself. Then I looked past my face and away out onto the very pretty lake, 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’d 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 moonlit 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 branches 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 cold and wet and 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 go 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 broken branch. 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 roly-poly goat be the leader.
I watched him go in a sort of zigzag style in the general direction the broken twigs pointed. I could hear him swishing around up ahead of me. It felt awfully spooky there in that 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, “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.
He shone his toward me. Then his half-worried voice called, “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 in the daytime and had known what kind of broken branches 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 as if 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 into our tent where my acrobatic goat and my man Friday were sleeping, and started undressing and getting into our pajamas. I felt pretty sad because the map was 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 because 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.
His voice scared me because I’d thought he was asleep.
“We’ve been out looking for the invisible-ink map,” my roly-poly 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 beaten him up.
“Don’t hurt me!” he cried, turning his face and burying it in his pillow. The minute he did it, his nose objected by making him sneeze. “Your man Friday—ker-chew!—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 wonderful sunshiny day with blue sky, and the lake was as smooth as a pane of blue glass.
Barry still hadn’t come back, so Big Jim was in charge of us till noon.
Little Tom Till was our main problem. 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.
He grinned and said, “It’s as 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.”
He had a note already written. It was in poetry, and it said:
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.
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 Ostberg girl. We all explained some of the mystery to Little Jim as we went along.
My man Friday was carrying the shovel we were going to dig up the money with, and Little Jim was carrying his stick and an empty gunnysack he’d found.
“What’s the gunnysack for?” Dragonfly asked him.
And Little Jim said, “We’re going after buried treasure, aren’t we?”
When we came to the place where we’d 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, 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 great guy and had a good imagination, I thought. But somehow our game had turned from innocent fun to a very serious and maybe dangerous game.
We followed
our broken-twig trail to where it branched off in two directions—one trail going toward the cabin where we’d seen John Till twice, and the other going toward where the ransom money was buried—we hoped.
“Which way first?” my man Friday asked. Then he got a screwed-up expression on his face, sniffed, and said, “There’s that deadish smell again.”
And it was. I turned my nose in different directions to find out which way it was coming from. But I couldn’t tell for sure.
“Come on!” my acrobatic goat said. “Let’s get going.” And he and my roly-poly goat started down the trail we hadn’t followed yet.
There was no use for me to get mad that they didn’t wait for my orders before going ahead, so I said, “Sure, that’s what I say.”
Away we all went, Little Jim carrying his stick, wearing a grin and also a very serious expression on his smallish face. He held his stick as if he was ready to sock anything that might need socking.
It was fun following the trail. 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 came to the end of that other trail.
It certainly wasn’t a straight trail. It kept zigzagging in different directions, and it seemed from the direction of the sun that it was working around toward the lake again. Soon we came to a hill and looked down, and there was the lake ahead of us. At the foot of the hill we could see through the heavy undergrowth a building of some kind. The broken wild plum twig where we were standing pointed straight toward the old building.
We stood surprised. I had expected to find a little mound of some kind, or some markings on a tree, or something else, but certainly not an oldish building.
We got out the invisible-ink map and studied it. There wasn’t anything on it that looked like a house.
“It’s an old icehouse,” Poetry said.
And so it seemed to be, a dilapidated, unpainted log icehouse. An icehouse is a building where people up in the lake country stored ice in the wintertime, so that in the hot summer they could have plenty of ice for their iceboxes.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 14