Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Read online

  Dragonfly not only had a scared look on his face but also a stubborn one. He said, “I won’t.”

  He refused to budge an inch, so in a very fierce voice I commanded Poetry and Circus, “OK, cannibals, eat him up!”

  “They’re not cannibals!” Dragonfly whined. “They’re goats, and goats only eat tin cans and shirts and things like that!”

  “What’s the difference?” the roly-poly goat said and started headfirst for Dragonfly.

  But we couldn’t afford to waste time that way, so Poetry, being maybe the bravest one of us, went up to the door, while we held our breath. I knew that there wasn’t anybody inside but wondered if there was—and if there was, who was it, and was he dangerous, and what would happen if there was a fierce man in there.

  First Poetry brushed away the spiderweb. Then he knocked on the door.

  Nobody answered, so he knocked again and called, “Hello! Anybody home?”

  He waited, and so did we, but there wasn’t any answer. So he turned the knob, twisting it this way and that, and the door didn’t open. He turned around to us and said, “It’s locked.”

  Well, I had it in the back of my mind that the ransom money might be in that cabin and that we ought to go in and look—as I told you, not thinking that it was trespassing on somebody’s property to go in without permission.

  We found a window on the side of the cabin right next to the hill, which on that side of the house was kind of like a cliff. That window, when we tried it, was unlocked.

  “You go in and unlock the door from the inside and let us in,” I said to my acrobatic goat, and he said, “It’s private property.”

  Well, that second I felt a drop of rain on my face, and that’s what saved the day and made it seem all right for us to go inside. We all must have been so interested in following the trail of broken branches and in our game of Robinson Crusoe that we hadn’t noticed the lowering sky and the big thunderheads that had been creeping up. Only a few seconds after that first drop of rain splashed onto my freckled face, there was a rumble of thunder, then another, and it started to rain.

  We could have ducked under some trees for protection, but it was that kind of rain that seems as if the sky has burst open and water just drives down in blinding sheets.

  “It’s raining pitchforks!” Circus yelled above the roar of the wind in the trees. He quick shoved up the window and scrambled in.

  All of us scrambled in after him and slammed down the window behind us.

  The rain was coming down so hard that it made a terrible roaring on the shingled roof, reminding me of storms back at Sugar Creek when I was in the haymow of our barn. If there was anything I liked to hear better than almost anything else, it was rain on a shingled roof. Sometimes when I was in the upstairs of our house, I would open the attic door on purpose just to hear the friendly noise the rain made.

  It was darkish inside the old cabin because the walls were stained with a dark stain of some kind, maybe to protect the wood, the way some north woods cabins are. It was also dark because the sky outside was almost black with terribly heavy rain clouds. I noticed that the window we’d climbed through was the kitchen window and that there was a table with a few dirty dishes over next to the wall. Also there was a white enameled sink and an old-fashioned pitcher pump like the one we have outdoors at our house at Sugar Creek.

  The main room, where the fireplace was, was in the center of the cabin and was so dark you could hardly see anything clearly at first. But I did see two big colored pictures on the back wall.

  We didn’t even bother to look around inside the cabin for a while—anyway, I didn’t. I hurried out onto the porch at the front, just to get a look at the storm. Storms are one of the most interesting sights in the world. They make a boy feel strange inside, as if maybe he isn’t very important. They also make him feel that he needs the One who made the world in the first place to sort of look after him, which is the way I felt right that minute.

  I noticed that there was a sheer drop of maybe fifteen feet right straight down into the ravine, and I remembered that if anybody wanted to get out of the cabin by a door, he’d have to use the only one there was, which was the one that had been locked when Poetry had tried the knob.

  I also noticed there were two or three whiskey bottles on the front porch. One with the stopper still in it was half full, standing on a two-by-four ledge running across the front.

  I could see better out there, although the terribly dark clouds and also the big pine trees all around with their branches shading the cabin made it kind of dark even on the porch. Two big colored pictures were on the back wall of the porch. The pictures were advertising whiskey and showed important-looking people drinking or getting ready to.

  Circus had come out, and I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, remembering how his dad used to be an alcoholic before he had trusted the Lord Jesus to save him. Circus was looking fiercely at those pictures, and I noticed he had his fists doubled up, as though he wished he could sock somebody or something terribly hard. I was glad right that minute that Little Tom Till wasn’t there, because his daddy was still an alcoholic and a mean man.

  I left Circus looking fiercely at those whiskey pictures, and I turned toward the lake. It was a pretty sight. The waves were being whipped into big whitecaps and were blowing and making a noise, which, mixed up with the noise on our roof, was very pretty to my ears. Away out on the farther side of the lake there was a patch of sunlight, and the water there was all different shades of green and yellow.

  Suddenly there was a terrific roar as a blinding flash of lightning lit up the whole porch, and then it did rain. The wind blew harder and whipped the canvas curtains on the porch, and the pine trees between us and the lake acted as if they were going to bend and break. Six white birch trees, which grew in a cluster down beside the stone stairway, swayed and twisted. They acted as though they were going wild and might be broken off and blown away any minute.

  “Hey! Look!” Circus said. “There are little moving mountains out there on the lake!”

  I looked, and that was what it did look like. The wind had changed its direction and was blowing parallel with the shore, instead of toward it, and other high waves were trying to go at right angles to the ones that were coming toward the shore. It was a terribly pretty sight.

  All of a sudden, while standing there and feeling a little bit scared because of the noise and the wind and the rain, I got to thinking about my folks back home. And then I was lonesome as well as scared.

  Also I was thinking that my parents had taught me that all the wonderful and terrible things in nature had been made and were being taken care of by the same God who had made growing boys—and that He loved everybody and was kind and had loved people so much that He had sent His only Son into this very pretty world to die for all of us and to save us from our sins. My parents believed that and had taught it to me.

  And nearly every time I thought about God, it was with a kind of friendly feeling in my heart, knowing that He loved not only all the millions of people in the world but also me—all by myself—red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckled-faced Bill Collins, who was always getting into trouble, or a fight, or doing something impulsive and needing somebody to help me to get out of trouble.

  Without knowing I was thinking out loud, I did what I sometimes do when I’m all by myself and have that very friendly feeling toward God. I said, “Thank You, dear Savior, for dying for me. You’re a wonderful God to make such a pretty storm.”

  I didn’t know Dragonfly was standing there beside me, until he spoke up all of a sudden and said, “You oughtn’t to swear like that. It’s wrong to swear.”

  All the gang knew it was, and none of us did it. Little Jim especially couldn’t stand to even hear swearing without getting a hurt heart.

  “I didn’t swear,” I said to Dragonfly. “I was just talking to God.”

  “You what?”

  “I was just telling Him it was an awful pretty storm.�
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  “You mean—you mean you aren’t afraid to talk to Him?”

  Imagine his saying that! But then, he hadn’t been a Christian very long and didn’t seem to understand that praying and talking to God are the same thing, and that everybody ought to do it, and if your sins have been washed away, then there isn’t anything to be afraid of.

  I was aroused from what I’d been thinking by my acrobatic goat calling to us from back inside the cabin, saying, “Hey, gang! Aren’t we going to explore this old shell and see if we can find the ransom money?”

  That brought me back in a hurry from where my mind had been for a few minutes.

  I took another quick look at the little moving mountains on the lake, and pretty soon we were all inside where Circus had been looking around to see what he could find.

  It was too dark to see anything very clearly in the main room, and we didn’t have any flashlight. I looked on the high mantel above the fireplace to see if there was any kerosene lamp, but there wasn’t. There wasn’t any furniture in the main room except a table, three small chairs, and one big old-fashioned Morris chair like one my dad always sat in at home in our living room. It had a fierce-looking tiger head with a wide-open mouth on the end of each wooden arm, which gave me an eerie feeling when Circus lit one of his matches.

  “There’s a candle out on the kitchen table,” Dragonfly said and brought it in to where we were.

  There was only a stub of candle left. It wouldn’t burn long. But Circus lit it while Poetry held it, and then we followed Poetry all around wherever he went.

  It certainly was the darkest cabin on the inside that I’d ever seen. The brown walls were almost black, and the stone arch at the top of the fireplace was black from smoke. The noise of the storm and the darkish cabin made it seem we were having a strange adventure in the middle of the night.

  There was dust on things, and it looked as if nobody had lived here for an awfully long time, maybe years and years. There were just three rooms: the kitchen with the sink and pitcher pump, the main room with the fireplace, and a small bedroom, which had a curtain hanging between it and the main room. In the bedroom was a roll-away bed all folded up and leaning against a wall.

  Even though the broken twig trail had led us to this place, still we couldn’t find a thing that looked like the ransom money might have been hidden here. So, since the rain was still pouring down, we decided to call a meeting and talk things over.

  We pulled the three hardback chairs up to the table in the center of the main room. I turned the big Morris chair sideways and sat on one of the wooden arms. Poetry set the flickering candle in a saucer in the center of the table, and I, the leader, called the meeting to order, just the way Big Jim does when the gang is all present. It felt good to be the leader, even though I knew I wasn’t and Poetry would have made a better one.

  We talked all at once and also one at a time part of the time, and not one of us had any good ideas as to what to do—except, when the storm was over, to follow our trail of broken branches back to where the girl had been found and from there to camp.

  I looked at Poetry’s broad face, and at Dragonfly’s large eyes and crooked nose, and at Circus’s monkey-looking face, and we all looked at each other.

  All of a sudden Poetry’s forehead puckered, and he lifted his head and sniffed two or three times. He said, “You guys smell anything funny, like—kinda like a dead chicken or something?”

  I sniffed a couple of times—we all did. And as plain as the nose on my face I did smell something—something dead. I’d smelled that smell many a time back along Sugar Creek when there was a dead rabbit or something else and the buzzards were circling around in the sky or had swooped down and were eating it.

  Dragonfly’s dragonflylike eyes looked startled, and I knew that if I could have seen mine in a mirror, they’d have looked just as startled.

  “It smells like a dead possum carcass that didn’t get buried,” Circus said. He especially knew what they smell like, because his pop catches many possums and sells the fur. Sometimes when his father catches a possum, he skins it before going on and leaves the carcass in the woods or in a field.

  It was probably a dead animal of some kind, we decided, and went right on with our meeting, talking over everything from the beginning up to where we were right that minute—the kidnapping, the found girl, the police who had come that night and made a plaster of paris cast of the kidnapper’s tire tracks, and the kidnapper himself, whom we’d caught in the Indian cemetery.

  “Yes,” Poetry said, “but what about the envelope with the blank piece of typewriter paper in it?”

  There wasn’t any sense in talking about that again. We’d already decided it had maybe been left there by the kidnapper, who had planned to write a note on it and had gotten scared and left it, expecting to come back later. Anyway, anything we’d said about it didn’t make sense, so why bring it up again?

  “That’s out,” I said. “I’m keeping it for a souvenir.” I had it in my shirt pocket and for fun pulled it out and opened it and turned it over and over in my hands to show them that it was as white as a Sugar Creek pasture after a heavy snowfall.

  But as I spread it out, Poetry let out an excited gasp and exclaimed, “Look! There is something written on it!”

  I could hardly believe my eyes, but there it was as plain as day, something that looked like writing—scratches and crooked lines and long straight lines and down at the bottom a drawing of some kind.

  5

  You can imagine how we felt when we suddenly saw that almost illegible drawing on paper that, when we’d found it, had been without even one pencil mark on it. Now as plain as day there was something on it. But we saw it wasn’t drawn on with pencil or ink or crayon but looked sort of like what is called a “watermark,” which you can see on different kinds of expensive writing paper.

  All of us leaned closer, and I held it as close to the smoking and flickering candle as I could so that we could see it better.

  Then Poetry gasped again and said, “Now it’s getting plainer. Look!”

  And right in front of our eyes as I held the paper near the candle, the different lines began to be clearer, although they still looked like watermarks.

  Dragonfly turned as white as a sheet. His eyes almost bulged out of his head. “There’s a—a—a ghost in here!” He whispered the words in such a ghostlike voice that it seemed there might be one.

  For a minute I was as weak as a cat, and my hands holding the paper were so trembly that I nearly dropped it. In fact, as quick as a flash, Poetry grabbed my hand and pulled the paper away from the candle, or it might have touched it and caught fire.

  Whatever was going on didn’t make sense. My brain sort of whirled, and I sniffed again. I thought of something dead, and then of the writing that was on the paper and hadn’t been before, and about Dragonfly’s idea that there was a ghost in the old cabin. I wished I were outside in the rain running lickety-sizzle for camp and getting there right away.

  But it was Poetry who solved the problem for us by saying, “It’s invisible ink, I’ll bet you. Being in Bill’s pocket next to his body made it warm, and now the heat from the candle is bringing out even more what was written on it.”

  It took only moments to see that Poetry was right. As we all looked at the strange drawing, I was sure we’d found a map of some kind and that if we could understand it, and follow it, we would find the kidnapper’s ransom money.

  Poetry took out his pencil, and, because the lines weren’t any too plain in some places, he started to trace them. Then he gasped and whistled and said, “It’s a map!”

  When he got through tracing it, we saw that it was a map of the territory right around where we were. Different places were named, such as the Indian cemetery, the fire warden’s cabin, the boathouse, two summer resorts, the different roads running from one to another, and the names of the different lakes, on one of which we had our camp.

  We all crowded around the table
, looking over Poetry’s shoulders, all feeling mysterious, I think, and also a little bit scared. But not much, because I was remembering that the kidnapper was locked up in jail and couldn’t get out.

  “What’s that X there in the middle for?” my man Friday wanted to know.

  And Poetry said, “That’s where we initiated you,” and there was a mischievous sound in his ducklike voice.

  “What?” I said. I was beginning to get a letdown feeling.

  Dragonfly burst out with a savage sigh and said, “I might have known there wasn’t any mystery. You made that map yourself.”

  By now I was thinking the same sad thing, and said so.

  But Poetry shushed us and said, “Don’t be funny. That’s where Bill and I found the little Ostberg girl.”

  “Yeah,” Dragonfly said, “but that’s also where Robinson Crusoe stepped on my neck!”

  “Oh, all right,” Poetry said. “That’s a dirty place on your neck which needs washing.”

  But Dragonfly didn’t think that was funny, which maybe it wasn’t very.

  Just a little distance above the X, we noticed there was a big V, a drawing of a broken twig, and a line pointing toward the cabin where we were right that minute. Also a line ran from the top of the other arm of the V off in another direction until it came to a drawing that looked like a small mound. Lying across that was a straight short line that made me think of a walking stick.

  It didn’t make sense until I noticed that Poetry’s pencil had missed tracing part of it, so I said, “Here, give me your pencil. There’s a little square on the end of this straight line.”

  I made the square. Then I saw there was a small circle at the opposite end of the straight line. So I traced that, and the whole map was done.

  It was Circus who guessed the meaning of the square and the circle at opposite ends of the straight line. He said. “It’s a shovel or a spade! That circle is the top of the handle, and the square is the blade.”