Part 6

I didn’t want to wake up--or rather, I did want to go back to sleep again, but Poetry kept on whispering excitedly about his dream, so I reached over to my shirt which I had hung on my camp chair close by, and ran my hand into the pocket where I had had the map. Say, I hadn’t any sooner got my hand inside than a very scared feeling woke me up quicker’n anything, on account of the map wasn’t in the pocket. “Hey!” I whispered to Poetry, “it’s not in my pocket!”

8

“Sure it is,” Poetry said. “It’s got to be!”

“But it’s not!” I said, more wide awake than I usually am when I am wide awake. I must have made a lot of excited noise ’cause right away Dragonfly stopped snoring, sneezed a couple of times, and wanted to know what was going on, and why.

“Nothing,” my fat goat said to him. “We’re just looking for something.”

“Well, for--! Look with your _eyes_ instead of your _voices_,” Dragonfly said, “I’m allergic to--_kerchew!_--to--_kerchew!_--to NOISE!”

“It’s your own snoring that woke you up,” Poetry said to my Man Friday. “Now go back to sleep.”

I certainly felt queer. “Somebody’s _stolen_ it,” I said to Poetry. I was running my hands frantically through all the pockets of my trousers and my shirt and all the other clothes I’d had on during the day.

We flashed the flashlight all around the tent and into every corner, where the envelope might have fallen out of one of my pockets. “We’ve _got_ to find it,” Poetry said. “Where do you suppose you lost it?”

“_Lost_ it? Somebody’s sneaked in here and stolen it.”

“Hey!” Poetry said, like he had thought of a bright idea. “When did you remember looking at it last?”

My thoughts galloped back over the evening, and the afternoon, and I couldn’t remember.

“What pocket did you have it in last?” Poetry asked, and I thought a jiffy, and said, “Why, my shirt pocket where I keep my New Testament. I put it there when I--”

And then I stopped talking, gasped out loud. I’d thought of something. “Maybe we--maybe it dropped out of my pocket back there in the cabin when we were climbing out of the window.”

Then Poetry said, “Yeah, or maybe you left it out on the front porch, and that’s why John Till didn’t come back to try to stop us. Maybe he found it on the floor out there and picked it up--if it was what he’d been looking for--”

My acrobatic goat came to life then, and groaned and turned over and tried to go back to sleep. But Poetry was more excited than I was. He said, “Bill Collins, we’ve GOT to find that map, and I don’t think we lost it around here anywhere.”

“Let’s all go back to sleep,” my Man Friday said.

“Go ahead--who’s stopping you?” I said. In a jiffy I was scrambling into my clothes, while Poetry was doing the same thing, each one of us knowing what the other one of us wanted to do.

In less than a little while we had on our clothes so we wouldn’t get cold while we stepped outside into the kinda chilly night, like nights are up North even in the summertime. We had our two flashlights and were soon looking around the outside of our tent, sneaking along as quietly as we could so as not to wake up any of the rest of the gang in the other tent.

We flashed our flashlights on and off all around the circle where we had been sitting at the campfire service, but there wasn’t a sign of any envelope there. Then we looked all around the lean-to where we had gotten the dry logs for Eagle Eye’s Indian fire, but still didn’t find anything, so Poetry and I followed the path up the shore to the fish cemetery and looked all around where we had been digging to bury the fish heads and entrails.

“Maybe it fell out of your pocket when you were digging here,” Poetry said, but there wasn’t a sign of what we were looking for there anywhere either. It was just like looking for a needle in a haystack when there isn’t any needle to look for.

“Will you _ever_!” Poetry exclaimed, tossing his light all around in a circle at the newly-made fish graves. “The coons’ve already been here,” which I could see they had. I flashed my flashlight from place to place and off into the woods in a big circle and up into the trees but didn’t see a thing that looked like bright shining eyes or pretty gray fur or a furry tail with black furry rings around it, which is the kind of tails ring-tailed coons have.

From the fish cemetery we went out to the end of the dock and back, then to our tent again. When we stopped in front of the closed flap we listened, but my Man Friday and my acrobatic goat were as quiet as mice, so we decided they were asleep.

“Do you know what?” Poetry said, and I said, “What?” and he said, “I think we’d better go back up along the trail where we were this afternoon to see if maybe we dropped it along there somewhere.”

I couldn’t imagine us being able to find it at night, like that, even if it was there. Besides, I still had the notion--in fact, a very creepy feeling inside of me--that somebody must’ve sneaked into our tent while we were asleep and stolen it out of my pocket.

“Well,” Poetry said, “when did you last _look_ at it? When did you last have it _out_ of your pocket? Where were you when you _last_ saw it?” and I must confess that the last time I had seen the envelope was when we were still in the cabin. I had shoved it into my shirt pocket right beside where I kept my New Testament.

When I told Poetry that, he said, “O.K., then, when did you last have your New Testament out of your pocket?”

Say, I gasped out loud when he said that like that, for I remembered that I’d had my New Testament out of my pocket when I was on the porch of the old cabin John Till was in, and had been holding it in my hand while I was looking out across the very pretty terribly stormy lake.

“You mean you haven’t looked at it since then?” Poetry asked me, astonished, and I said, “No.” I was astonished even at myself, but then of course we’d all decided not to tell the rest of the gang but to keep it secret for a while, so that explained why I hadn’t taken it out of my pocket. Eagle Eye hadn’t asked us to read any verses out of the Bible, so I hadn’t even thought of opening my New Testament. If I had, I would no doubt have noticed that the envelope was missing.

“O.K., come on,” Poetry said. “Let’s get going,” which we did, swishing as fast as we could through the wet grass and along the path that was bordered by the still wettish bushes, although the late afternoon sun had dried things off quite a bit.

Down the shore we went, past the boathouse, 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 onto anything or anybody that might need to be socked in order to save our lives. As we swished along in the moonlight, using our flashlights, 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 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 all around and on the tree Circus had climbed, and all around where my acrobatic goat’s fire-cracker had started the little fire which 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.”

Say, 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’ll print all 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 can save Old hook-nosed John Till from having to go to jail, he might not ever have to go again.” But 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.

When we came to the first broken twig, 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 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.

“Hey, look!” Poetry said to me. “There’s smoke coming out of the chimney!” And sure enough 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, that was hanging above our heads and that had reminded him of the one that had been above the camp of the people in the Bible, which meant 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 we were doing the right thing.

“Look!” I whispered to Poetry, holding onto his arm so tight he said, “Hey, 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 hat, for there was the shadow of a man just like he’d climbed out that window. Then a flashlight went on and off real quick.

“SH!” Poetry said to me, ’cause I had gasped outloud. “He’s coming this way.” Which he was, but only for a few feet till he got to the corner of the cabin, then he turned and followed the cement walk which led along the side of the house and down the slope to the dock.

I could hardly believe my ears, but I had to, ’cause the man was whistling a tune and it was “Old Black Joe,” which we sometimes sang out of a song book at Sugar Creek school, and also used different words to 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.”

Only 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 of the cabin, he came out in the moonlight where we saw as clear as anything. He had a pair of rubber boots on, 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 spade, to bury the insides with,” I said, noticing it for the first time.

We stood there glued to our tracks and holding onto each other, wondering “What on earth!” We hardly dared move or breathe ’cause the cement walk came in our direction first before it turned to make its long half circle down to the dock and the lake.

“Maybe he’s going down to put his fish in a live box,” Poetry said, which is what fishermen sometimes do with their live fish which they’ve caught, especially if you 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 docks.

“But they 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, and I felt foolish, but say, that dream had seemed so real that it was just like it had actually happened.

John Till’s whistle sounded farther and farther away as he went down the hill, and pretty soon we saw him coming out in the moonlight on the dock away down at the lake.

“Hey!” Poetry whispered to me. “There’s a boat! He’s getting into a boat,” which is what John was doing. In the next minute and a half, with us standing up there with our teeth chattering, partly because it was a cold and damp night and partly because we were half scared half to death, we saw a flash of an oar blade in the moonlight, and a little later the boat was shoved out from the dock and we saw John Till rowing in the moonlight, going up the shore.

Well, we 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 say, 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 side of the hill, to the kitchen window. We could see the flames leaping up in the fireplace. In a jiffy Poetry had the window up and we had climbed in. We could smell fish and also a sort of a deadish smell in the cabin, but it was warm and cozy with the fire going in the fireplace. We took a quick look in the bedroom and there was the rollaway bed all nicely opened out with blankets on it and ready for somebody to use.

We shined 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.

“Look!” Poetry said. “Here’s the whiskey bottle, standing just where it was, 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, and sure enough it smelled just like whiskey, which is an even worse smell than something that has been dead for a week.

I looked down at the place where I had been standing in the afternoon when I had pulled the New Testament out of my pocket to see if the envelope with the map in it was there, and it wasn’t.

Then we turned and walked back toward the door which led into the main room.

When I got to the place where the mirror was on the wall, I looked in it just to have a look at myself. I looked past my face and away out onto the very pretty lake which was 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 had 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 moonlight 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 twigs 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 pretty cold and wet and also 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 come to where I am and stand there with your flashlight while I swish on 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 one. 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 fat goat be the leader....

Away he went in a sort of a zig--zag style in the general direction the broken twigs pointed.

I could hear him swishing around, up ahead of me. It felt awful spooky here in this 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, “Hey, 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, and he shined his toward me. Then his half worried voice called and said, “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 before in the daytime and had known what kind of broken twigs 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 like 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 up to our own tent where my acrobatic goat and my Man Friday were sleeping, and started undressing and getting into our pajamas. I felt pretty saddish on account of the map being 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 on account 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 me.

His voice scared me ’cause I’d thought he was asleep. “We’ve been out looking for the invisible-ink map,” my fat 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 beat him up.

“Don’t hurt me!” he cried, turning his face and burying it in his pillow, which, the minute he did it, his nose objected to it by making him sneeze. “Your Man Friday--_kerchew!_--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 very pretty wonderful sunshiny day, with a pretty blue sky, and the lake was as smooth as a pane of blue glass.

Little Tom Till was our main problem. Barry still hadn’t come back, so Big Jim was in charge of us till noon. 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 who grinned and said, “’Tsas 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.”

Poetry had a note already written. It was in poetry and was:

“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.” (Signed) 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 little Ostberg girl, all of us explaining some of the mystery to Little Jim as we went along, my Man Friday carrying the spade we were going to dig up the money with, and Little Jim carrying his stick and an empty gunny sack he’d found.

“What’s the gunny sack for?” Dragonfly asked him, and Little Jim said, “We’re going after buried treasure, aren’t we?”--which we were.

When we came to the place where we had 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 to him, 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 swell guy and had a good imagination, I thought--only for some reason our game had turned from innocent fun to a very serious and maybe a dangerous game.

We followed our broken twig trail to where it branched off in two directions, one of the trails going toward the cabin where we’d seen John Till twice, and the other one going toward where the ransom money was buried, we hoped.

“Which way first?” my Man Friday asked me, then got a screwed up expression on his face, sniffed, and said, “Hey! there’s that deadish smell again!”

Sure enough it was. I turned my nose in different directions to see which way it was coming from, but couldn’t tell for sure.

“Come on!” my acrobatic goat said, “Let’s get going!” and he and my fat goat started off on the trail we hadn’t followed yet. There wasn’t any use for me to get peeved that they didn’t wait for my orders before going ahead, so I said, “Sure, that’s what _I_ say,” and away we all went, Little Jim carrying his stick, with a grin and also a very serious expression on his smallish face. He held his stick like he was ready to sock anything that might need socking and swished on up ahead of me so the three goats could be together.