“Our hot trail suddenly turned cold,” my roly-poly goat said, trying to be funny and not being very.
It certainly wasn’t what I’d expected to find.
“OK,” 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 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 feverish feeling in my mind. I felt that maybe we were actually going to find the ransom money—the whole $25,000 in ten and twenty and fifty dollar bills. The mystery of playing Robinson Crusoe seemed to be an honest-to-goodness reality! I felt mysterious and afraid and brave all 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 away from the lake. The very old heavy door stood wide open on its rusty hinges, but there were short boards nailed 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.
Quickly we all scrambled up and were inside the icehouse, which didn’t have any windows and was only one big room, maybe twenty feet square. It seemed a little like the haymow in our barn at Sugar Creek, except that instead of having nice alfalfa hay in it, it had sawdust. Down underneath, I knew there were scores of big blocks of ice that somebody had cut out of the lake in the wintertime and had stored away here for summer use.
The old icehouse was also about the same shape as the woodshed beside the Sugar Creek schoolhouse, where we had had many a gang meeting.
About the only light that came in was from the door, although there was a small crack between two logs on the side next to the lake. It took a short while for our eyes to get accustomed to the dimness. And then I 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.”
You can imagine how we felt. I could just see in my mind’s eye Little Jim’s gunnysack 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. I could imagine what The Sugar Creek Times would print about us and also how happy the Ostberg girl’s dad and mom would be, so I said, “OK, Friday, give me the shovel.”
“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. He was already down on his knees, digging with his bare hands, which is a good way to dig in sawdust.
Then all of us were down on our knees, digging as fast as we could. Little Jim was using his stick to help him, and I was using the shovel, which I’d taken away from Dragonfly, to move aside the pile of sawdust that I was digging out of my hole.
My roly-poly goat spoke up then and said, “D’you guys know that Minnesota is called the Gopher State?”
Pretty soon my shovel struck something hard, and I felt a thrill go through me. I said, “I’ve struck something! I’ve found it!” I was expecting it to be a box or a small trunk or maybe a fishing tackle box like the kind the kidnapper had had the night we caught him. And you know about that if you’ve read The Indian Cemetery.
Almost before I had the words out of my excited mouth, there was a mad scramble of boys’ feet swishing through the sawdust from different directions. In seconds, most of the rest of them were all around me looking down into my hole to see what I had found.
I pushed the shovel in and out a few times, but it didn’t sound as if it was striking a tin box or a trunk or anything like that.
“Listen!” I said, which we all did, but I couldn’t tell what the noise 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.
Circus scooped out several handfuls of sawdust and then let out a disappointed sniff. “You’ve struck ice, Robinson Crusoe! This is an icehouse!”
I put my own hand down in the hole, and my fingers touched something cold. I also pulled out a small piece of ice that my shovel had chipped off.
“Anybody else strike ice?” I asked. And then I noticed Little Jim over in a corner, prying at something with his stick. His tongue was between his teeth the way 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 because he was facing the opening where the light was coming in.
“What you got there, Little Jim?” I asked my blue-eyed goat.
He said, “I don’t know. It’s all covered with sawdust.”
Almost before he’d said that, I saw two great big round glassy eyes, a very large snout, and a longish body that looked like a small log of fireplace wood.
Poetry saw it at the same time I did, but he thought quicker and exclaimed, “Hey, gang! Little Jim’s dug up a terribly big northern pike!”
Quickly 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. Somebody had caught it in the lake and had dug down here in the sawdust till he reached the ice and had laid the fish down on it and covered it up so it would keep cold and wouldn’t spoil the way fish do almost right away in warm weather.
“Hey!” Dragonfly cried. “I’ve found another fish over here!”
We all looked at each other, and I felt as though the bottom of my life had fallen out. Almost before I had thought the next sad, disappointed thought, I’d said it to the rest of the gang. “So this is 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. We’d buried some ourselves in the icehouse at our camp when we’d been up here last year. 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 will be madder than a hornet!”
“What?” I said and then remembered. We weren’t very far from John Till’s cabin—and we’d seen him coming this very direction last night in a boat—and one of his 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 to get out of there in a hurry. So I started to dig fast with the shovel 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 as he could.
Poetry, who was on his knees beside me, said, “Did you ever see such a fat-stomached northern pike in your life?”
I stopped digging and looked at it and decided I never had, except one I’d seen dead lying on a sandy beach once.
The flies had been on that one, and it was bloated. But this one wasn’t bloated. It was like it had been caught only maybe yesterday.
In a little while I had the long sawdust grave ready to lay the first corpse in it, when Poetry said to me in a whisper, “Bill—feel here, will you? There’s something weird about this fish’s stomach!”
The very excited sound of his whisper went clear through me and made me think that maybe he’d discovered something terribly important. I felt where he was feeling on the sides and stomach of the extralarge 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 cabin where John Till had been pumping water yesterday.
I could tell that there was something inside the fish that wasn’t a part of him.
“Look!” Poetry whispered again, using his pudgy right hand to wipe the sawdust from 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. I was remembering that yesterday in the old cabin I’d seen a 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. Also I remembered that we’d seen John Till get into a boat with a stringer of big fish, right in the middle of last night, and row up the lake in this direction.
Dragonfly must have been listening to Poetry and me instead of burying his fish as I’d ordered him, because he said, “This one’s been cut open and sewed up again, too.”
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 as if we had. It wouldn’t take any more than a jiffy and three-fourths to find out.
Poetry took out his knife, which was an official Boy Scout knife. It had a heavy cutting blade, a screwdriver, 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 was gathered around—Poetry pulled out a package of something wrapped in the same kind of waterproof oil paper my mother has in our kitchen at home.
In another second we had unwrapped the package, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a packet of 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 bulge 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, 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, “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 there and be like King Midas 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 $25,000 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 gunnysack, and come happily back into camp with every dollar of it.
Little Jim came up with a bright idea. “Let’s dig up all the fish real quick, stuff ’em in my gunnysack, and beat it home to camp. We can take the money out on the way maybe—or else take the fish home for dinner.”
I looked at his excited blue eyes and forgot that he was a goat. I thought how much I liked him.
“Boy!” he said, with a big grin on his mouselike face. “Won’t Mr. Ostberg be pleased to have his money back for the mission hospital!”
Here I’d been thinking about what a big reward Bill Collins was going to get for finding the money, and Little Jim wasn’t thinking of himself at all. He was thinking of the folks in another land who needed the gospel for their souls and a doctor’s help for their bodies. What a great guy, I thought.
But this story is long enough—and, anyway, that’s really all there is to tell about how we found the ransom money. So I’ll have to wind up the whole thing in another paragraph or two.
That wasn’t the last exciting adventure we had on our northern camping trip, though, because a new and very dangerous adventure began to happen to us even before we got out of that old icehouse.
While we were digging and finding fish with sewed-up stomachs and stuffing them into Little Jim’s gunnysack to take home to camp, suddenly I thought I heard a noise outside.
“Sh!” I said. “Somebody’s coming!”
We all stood dead still and listened. And I had heard a noise. Out on the lake there was the roar of a high-powered outboard motor that sounded as though 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 across roarety-sizzle to stop whatever we were doing.
Little Jim grabbed up his stick. Poetry’s grip tightened on his Scout knife handle till the knuckles on his hand turned white.
“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 the gunnysack and lugged it toward the exit. All of us got 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! That outboard motor was roaring toward our shore as though whoever was driving it was in a terrible hurry to stop us from doing whatever we were doing.
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.
I hope I’ll have time right away to tell you this last story of the Sugar Creek Gang’s adventures in the north woods.
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1948, 1998 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.
Original Title: North Woods Manhunt
ISBN-10:0-8024-7019-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7019-5
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PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek
It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.
You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
When you just know there’s going to be some exciting trouble in the next twelve minutes or less, you have to make your red head do some quick clear thinking, if you can.
Not a one of the Sugar Creek Gang knew what was going to happen, but the very minute I heard that outboard motor roaring out on the lake, sounding as if it was coming straight toward the shore and the old icehouse we were all in, I said, “Quick, gang! Let’s get out of here and get this ransom money back to camp!”
Little Jim’s gunnysack had a lot of money in it right that minute, money that we’d dug up out of the sawdust in that abandoned icehouse. The sack was nearly filled with stuffed fish, big and middle-sized northern and walleyed pike with thousands and thousands of dollars sewed up inside.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 15