Part 4

Well, the rain on the roof was getting less noisy, and we knew that pretty soon we’d have to be starting for camp. We wouldn’t dare try to follow the trail of broken twigs to the place where we thought the money was buried, because we had orders to be back at camp an hour before supper time, to help with the camp chores. That night we were all going to have a very special campfire service, with Eagle Eye, an honest-to-goodness Chippewa Indian, telling us a blood curdling story of some kind--a real live Indian story.

“Let’s get going,” I said to the rest of us--“just the minute it stops raining.”

“Do we go out the door or the window?” my Man Friday wanted to know, and I took a look at the only door, saw that it was nailed shut, tighter than anything.

I grunted and groaned and pulled at the knob, and then gave up and said, “Looks like we’ll use the window.”

It was still raining pretty hard, and I had the feeling I wanted to go out and take a last look at the lake. I’d been thinking also if this cabin was fixed up a little and the underbrush and stuff between it and the lake and a battered down old clock, was cleared away, and if the walls were painted a light color, it might make a pretty nice cabin for anybody to rent and spend a summer vacation in, like a lot of people in America do do. On the wall of the porch I noticed a smallish mirror which was dusty and needed to be wiped off before I could see myself. I stopped just a second to see what I looked like, like I sometimes do at home, especially just before I make a dash to our dinner table--and sometimes get stopped before I can sit down--and have to go back and finish washing my face and combing my hair before I get to take even one bite of Mom’s swell fried chicken.

I certainly didn’t look much like the pictures I’d seen of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of looking like a shipwrecked person with home-made clothes, I looked just like an ordinary “wreck” without any ship. My red hair was mussed up like everything, my freckled face was dirty and my two large front teeth still looked too big for my face, which would have to grow a lot more before it was big enough to fit my teeth. I was glad my teeth were already as big as they would ever get--which is why lots of boys and girls look funny when they’re just my size, Mom says. Our teeth grow in as large as they’ll ever be, and our faces just sorta take their time.

“You’re an _ugly_ ‘mut,’” I said to myself, and then turned and looked out over the lake again. Anyway, I was growing a _little_ bit, and I had awfully good health and nearly always felt wonderful most of the time.

While I was looking out at the pretty lake, some of the same feeling I’d had before came bubbling up inside of me. For a minute I wished Little Jim had been with us,--in fact, I wished he had been standing right beside me with the stick in his hand which he always carries with him wherever he goes, almost ... I was feeling good inside ’cause the gang was still letting me be Robinson Crusoe and were taking most of my orders. Sometimes, I said to myself, I’d like to be a leader of a whole lot of people, who would do whatever I wanted them to. I might be a general in an army, or a Governor or something--only I wanted to be a doctor, too, and help people to get well. Also I wanted to help save people from their troubles, and from being too poor, like Circus’s folks, and I wished I could take all the whiskey there was in the world and dump it out into a lake, only I wouldn’t want the perch and northern pike or walleyes or the pretty blue gills or bass or sunfish to have to drink any of it, but maybe I wouldn’t care if some of the bullheads did.

While I was standing there, thinking about that pretty lake, and knowing that Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang, would say something about the Bible if he was there, I remembered part of a Bible story that had happened out on a stormy, rolling lake just like this one. Then I remembered that in the story of Robinson Crusoe there had been a Bible and that he had taught his ignorant Man Friday a lot of things out of it and Friday had become a Christian himself. My pop used to read Robinson Crusoe to Mom and me at home many a night in the winter--Pop reading good stories to us instead of whatever there was on the radio that wouldn’t be good for a boy to hear, and my folks having to make me turn it off. Pop always picked a story to read that was very interesting to a red-haired boy and would be what Mom called “good mental furniture”--whatever that was, or is.

All of the gang nearly always carried New Testaments in our pockets, so, remembering Robinson Crusoe had had a Bible, I took out my New Testament and stood with my back to the rest of the cabin, still looking at the lake. I felt terribly good inside, with that little brown leather Testament in my hands. I was glad the One Who is the main character in it was a Friend of mine and that He liked boys.

“It was swell of You to help us find the little Ostberg girl,” I said to Him, “and also to catch the kidnapper, and it’s an awful pretty lake and sky and ...”

Right then I was interrupted by music coming from back in the cabin somewhere, some people’s voices singing a song I knew and that we sometimes sang in church back at Sugar Creek, and it was:

“Rescue the perishing, care for dying, Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.”

I guessed quick that one of my goats or else my Man Friday had actually found a radio in the cabin and had turned it on. I swished around, dashed back inside and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom where I’d left them, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the rollaway bed opened out and there, sitting on the side of it, my two goats and my Man Friday and a little portable radio, which I knew was the kind that had its own battery and its own inbuilt aerial. It was sitting on my fat goat’s lap, and was playing like a house afire that very pretty church hymn:

“Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, Feelings lie buried that grace can restore.”

A jiffy after I got there, the music stopped and a voice broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to make a very important announcement. There is a new angle regarding the ransom money still missing in the Ostberg kidnapping case. Little Marie’s father, a religious man, has just announced that the amount represented a sum he had been saving for the past several years to build a memorial hospital in the heart of the mission field of Cuba. In St. Paul, the suspect, caught last week at Bemidji by a gang of boys on vacation, still denies knowing anything about the ransom money; claims he never received it. Police are now working on the supposition that there may have been another party to the crime. Residents of northern Minnesota are warned to be on the lookout for a man bearing the following description: He is believed to be of German descent, a farmer by occupation, about thirty-seven years of age, six feet two inches tall, weighs one hundred eighty seven pounds, stoop-shouldered, dark complexion, red hair, partly bald, bulgy steel-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows that meet in the center, hook-nose....”

The description went on, telling about the man’s clothes, ears, and mouth, but I didn’t need any more. My heart was already bursting with the awfulest feeling I’d had in a long time, ’cause the person they were describing was exactly like Old hook-nosed John Till, the mean, liquor-drinking father of one of the Sugar Creek Gang, little red-haired Tom Till himself, one of my very best friends and a swell little guy that all of us liked and felt so terribly sorry for on account of we knew that he had that kind of a father, who had been in jail lots of times and who spent his money on whiskey and gambling and Little Tom’s mother had to be sad most of the time. In fact, about the only happiness Tom’s mom had was in her boy Tom, who was a really swell little guy, and went to Sunday school with us. She also got a little happiness out of a radio which my folks had bought for her, and she listened to Christian programs which cheered her up a lot.

Even while I listened to the radio on my fat goat’s lap, I was thinking about Little Tom’s mom and wondering if she had her radio turned on too, back at Sugar Creek, and would hear this announcement, and if it would be like somebody jabbing a knife into her heart and twisting it.

But we didn’t have time to think, or talk or anything, ’cause right that second, I heard a noise coming from the direction of the kitchen window, which we had climbed in, and when I took a quick peek through the curtains, I saw the face of a fierce-looking man. It only took me one second’s glance to see the bushy eyebrows that met in the center just above the top of his hooked nose, and even though he had on a battered old felt hat that was dripping wet with the rain, and his clothes were sop soaking wet, I recognized him as Little red-haired Tom’s father.

In that quick flash of a jiffy I remembered the first time I had seen him when he had been hired by my pop to shock oats, and he had tried to get Circus’s pop to take a drink of whiskey over by some elderberry bushes that grew along the fence row. It had been a terribly hot day, and Circus and I had been helping shock oats too. Circus’s pop hadn’t been a Christian very long, and because I hated whiskey and didn’t want Circus’s pop to do what is called “backslide,” I had made a terribly fierce fast run across the field with Circus, to try to stop his pop from taking the drink and had run kerwham with both of my fists flying straight into Old hook-nosed John Till’s stomach, and a little later had landed on my back under the elderberry bushes from a terribly fierce wham from one of John Till’s hard fists. After that, the gang had had a lot of other trouble with him, but we’d gotten Little Tom saved, and Tom, being a pretty good Christian for a little guy, had been praying for his pop every day of his life ever since. But up to now it looked like it hadn’t done any good ’cause his pop still was a bad man and caused his family a lot of heartache.

Talk about mystery and excitement. I knew Tom’s pop hated us boys and also he was pretty mean to Tom for going to church with us, and on top of that was mad at my folks for taking Tom’s mom to church; and whenever he came into the house when she had a Christian program on the radio, he would either make her turn it off or he would turn it off himself.

I’ll have to admit that I was afraid of Old hook-nosed John Till, and right that minute I didn’t feel very much like being the leader of the gang, which for some reason seemed to be made up of only four very small boys, all of a sudden. The only thing I felt like leading in, was a very fast foot race out through the woods and toward camp.

“Quick!” I hissed to the gang. “There’s somebody looking through the window. What’ll we do?” Before I could think only half of those thoughts and say only half of that sentence, I saw the man’s hand shove up the window, and one of his wet long legs, which had a big wet shoe on the end of it, swung over the window ledge, and he started squirming his long-legged self in after it.

6

Well, what can you do, when there isn’t a thing you can think of, of doing? When you are looking through an opening in a hanging curtain and see a mean man coming into your cabin, and when you know there isn’t any door you can dash through to get away? Poetry already had the radio shut off and all of us were as still as scared mice, listening, and also all of us were trying to peep through the opening in the curtain.

I noticed that John Till had a newish-looking fishing rod, which he stood against the wall by a window, then he turned his back, reached out of the window and bent his body over to pick up something that he had left out there. A jiffy later I saw what it was--a stringer of fish--what looked liked five or six big walleyed pike, and an extra large northern pike, which he probably caught out in the lake.

He lifted the stringer and I heard the fish go kerflippety-flop-flop into the sink, then I heard the iron pitcher pump squeaking like he was pumping water on the fish, maybe to wash the dirt and slime off of them.

The curtain we were peeping through looked like it had been made out of the same kind of material one of my mom’s chenille bedspreads is made out of, and was kinda fuzzy on one side. Even before I heard Dragonfly do what he did just then, I was afraid he would do it. He had his face up close to the curtain not far from mine, and all of a sudden he got a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes started to squint, and his mouth to open, and he made a quick grab for his crooked nose with one of his hands.

But it was too late. Out came the cuckooest-sounding sneezes you ever heard, which he tried to smother and didn’t; and like it nearly always sounds when he sneezes, it was like a fourth-of-July firecracker that didn’t explode but just went “_hisssss-sh-sh-sh_” instead. At that same instant John Till whirled around and looked through the main room and at the curtain behind which we were hiding. If it had still been raining terribly hard, he wouldn’t have heard us, maybe, but Dragonfly’s sneeze seemed to have been timed with a lull in the rain, ’cause in spite of the fact that it was a smothered hissing noise, it sounded like it was loud enough to be heard a long ways away.

John Till jumped like he had been shot at and hit, and I expected most anything terribly exciting and dangerous to happen.

First I saw him take a wild look around like he wanted to make a dash for a door or a window and disappear. He must have thought better of it, though, ’cause he started pumping water again and doing something to the fish he had caught, then he fumbled at his belt and in a second I saw in his right hand a fierce-looking sheath knife, just like the kind Barry carried. Its wicked-looking blade was about 5 inches long and looked like it could either slice a fish into steaks in a jiffy or do the same to a boy. Not a one of us had any weapons except our pocket knives, and also not a one of us was going to be foolish enough to start a fight. If only we could make a dash for the door and get out--if the door wasn’t nailed shut, I thought. Then we could run like scared deer and get away.

But there wasn’t a chance in the world--not with a fierce man with a fierce-looking hunting knife in his hand.

Then Big John Till’s voice boomed into our room and said, “ALL RIGHT--WHOEVER YOU ARE--COME OUT WITH YOUR ARMS UP!”

“What’ll we do?” Dragonfly’s trembling whisper asked me, but I already had my arms up, and in a second he had his spindling arms pointed in different directions toward the ceiling.

“Get ’em up!” I whispered to all of us, and I thought that, if we got a chance, we’d make a dive for the open kitchen window and head for camp terribly fast.

Poetry’s fat forehead was puckered with a very stubborn pucker, and before I knew he was going to do what he did, he did it, which was--he yelled into the other room, “Come on out onto the front porch and get us!” only, of course, we weren’t on the front porch, and it didn’t make sense at all until a little later.

As you know, Poetry’s voice was changing, and part of the time it was a bass voice and the other part of the time, it was a soprano, on account of he was old enough to be what my pop called “an adolescent,” which is what a boy’s voice is like when adolescence happens to him. Part of what Poetry said was in a man’s voice and sounded pretty fierce, but right in the middle of the sentence his voice changed, and it was like a scared woman’s voice, the kind that would have made Dragonfly think it was a ghost’s voice, if he had heard it in the middle of a dark night in an old abandoned house.

To make matters worse, Dragonfly sneezed again, and we knew we were found out for sure. It must have been darker in the room where we were than it was in the kitchen or something, or else John Till really thought we were out on that front porch, ’cause all of a sudden he left the sink where he’d been pumping water on his fish, and whirled around with his big knife in his hand, straight out of the kitchen and through the main room, dodging the table in the middle, and the Morris chair, and made straight for the front porch.

It was our signal to make a dash for the kitchen and the open window, which we did, Poetry letting the baby-sized radio plump down on the rollaway bed, and even as I led the way to the kitchen window in a mad dash, I noticed that the radio’s side panel which he had closed, dropped down, which is what turns it on.

Most of us got to the window at the same time almost. My acrobatic goat grabbed the kitchen table, and shoved it into the doorway between the kitchen and the main room so as to block Hook-nose’s way if he tried to come back quick and stop us. Poetry was out first, and then Dragonfly, and then Circus, and last of all, I, Robinson Crusoe, who in the split jiffy they were getting out first, got a glimpse of the swell big stringer of fish John Till had caught, and which were, right that second covered with water in the sink. The large northern pike was especially very pretty and I thought that before I left the North this summer, I’d want to catch a big fish, have it mounted by what is called a taxidermist and put it on the wall of my room back at Sugar Creek.

I didn’t understand why John Till--as soon as he found out we weren’t out on that porch but had tricked him--didn’t come dashing madly back and jump over the table in the doorway and grab the last ones of us to get through the window, but he didn’t and I was too scared to stop to find out why.

So we swished around the corner of that cabin, made four dives in the direction we knew the broken-twig trail went, and went dashing through the still-sprinkling rain, through the wet shrubbery and under the trees that were dripping water like a leaky roof, and headed for camp.

Boy, was I ever glad we had our trail of broken twigs to go by. When we got to the first one, Dragonfly, whose feet were getting pretty wet, like all of ours were, stopped and made a grab for his nose, and I knew he was allergic to something--maybe to too wet feet. When he’d finished his fancy sneeze, he said, sniffing at something he couldn’t see, but which he knew was there, “I still smell something--_d-dead!_--something in that direction over there!”

I sniffed in the direction he pointed, and sure enough, there was that same deadish smell, like we’d smelled in the cabin, only this time it was mixed up with the friendly odor of a woods after a rain.

My fat goat smelled in the same direction, and so did my acrobatic goat, and we all smelled the same very unpleasant odor of something dead.

“I wonder who it is,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly looked like he was thinking about a ghost again.

And would you believe it? I heard music coming from somewhere--in fact, from the direction of the cabin we’d come from, and I knew it was the radio that had plopped open when my fat goat had left it in a hurry, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I recognized the tune, and it was, “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart.”

Well, we hurried on, following our trail, tickled that we had managed to get out so easy, but wondering to each other if Old hook-nosed John Till had had anything to do with the kidnapping, and if maybe he knew where the ransom money was, and why he hadn’t come dashing back into the kitchen to catch us.

“I think I know why,” Circus said, “he’s just like my dad was before he was saved. He couldn’t even stand to see a bottle of whiskey without taking a drink, and I’ll bet when he saw that big half-empty bottle out on the porch he just grabbed it up and started gulping it down.”

Then Circus, being a little bashful about talking about things like that, like some boys sometimes are, looked up, and seeing the limb of a tree extending out over where he was going to walk, leaped up and caught hold of it with his hands and chinned himself two or three times, while Dragonfly, who was beside him under the leaves of that branch, let out a yell and said, “Hey, watch out! Quit making it rain on me!” which is what Circus had done--the leaves of that branch getting most of the water shaken off and a lot of it falling on Dragonfly all over.

Well, we were in a pretty big hurry, so we all zipped on, talking and asking questions and trying to figure out what on earth the deadish smell was and also wishing we had all the gang with us, and a spade, and had time to follow the other trail of broken twigs and actually find the ransom money.

In a little while we came to the place where we’d first found the envelop with the invisible-ink map in it. There we stopped for half a jiffy, and looked all around to be sure we would remember the place again when we came back.

About twenty minutes later, we came puffing into camp in clear sunshiny weather, the sky having cleared off after the storm, but we were as wet as drowned rats.

The very minute the gang saw us come sloshing up to our tents, Big Jim called out, “Where on earth have you been?”

Well, we’d agreed to keep our secret a secret for awhile, anyway not to tell Barry first, but to rest of the gang--all except Tom Till. We might decide to tell John Till too, but we wouldn’t if Big Jim said not to, on account of it might spoil Tom’s vacation and he wouldn’t have any fun the rest of our camping trip.

Dragonfly answered Big Jim’s question in a mischievous voice by saying, “Bill’s been walking on my neck, and Poetry and Circus have been making soup out of me, and I am a Negro,” which wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know about Crusoe, his black Man Friday and the cannibals.

As soon as we could, we changed to dry clothes, and Big Jim took command of us by saying, “O.K., boys, I’m in charge of camp for the rest of the day. Barry got a terribly important letter in the mail an hour ago, and he’s had to go to Bemidji. He’ll be back in time for our Campfire get-together.”

Well, that was that. If there was anything I liked better than anything else, it was to be alone with only our gang, when it can be its own boss, even though we all liked Barry a lot and would do anything he said any time.

“Bill’s _my_ boss,” Dragonfly said.

I looked at Dragonfly and then at Big Jim, and winked.

Big Jim grinned back, and then said to all of us, “Let’s get the camp chores done.” Then he gave commands to different ones of us to do different things. Poetry and I had the job of burying the entrails and heads of some fish which Barry’d caught, and which had just been cleaned before he left,--that being the best thing to do with fish heads and other parts of the fish that you aren’t going to eat.

“The spade’s in Barry’s tent,” Big Jim said, and a minute later Poetry and I were on our way up along the shore to the burying place.

We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when we heard somebody coming behind us on the run, and it was Dragonfly, with an excited face, who said, “You crazy goofs! You going to dig for the treasure without letting me go along?”

“Why hello, my Man Friday!” I said pleasantly, and told him what we were having to do. “Here--you carry the spade and do the digging.” And Poetry said, “And you can carry these fish insides,” and with that he handed him a smallish pail he’d been carrying.

But Dragonfly wouldn’t, so I let him disobey for once. When we got to the place, we saw all kinds of little mounds of fresh dirt where other fish entrails had been buried. And then all of a sudden Poetry said, “Hey, here’s fish heads scattered all over the ground here!”

I looked, and sure enough, he was right. All around there were old half-eaten bullheads, and the eyes and ugly noses of walleyed pike and two or three spatulate-shaped snouts of big northern pike.