I TELL you, 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, the sound sounding like it was coming straight toward the shore and the old icehouse we were all in, I said to us, “Quick, Gang! Let’s get out of here and get this ransom money back to camp!”

Little Jim’s gunny sack had a lot of money in it right that minute, which we’d dug up out of the sawdust in that abandoned old icehouse. The gunny sack was nearly filled with stuffed fish,—the big and middle-sized northern and wall-eyed pike with thousands and thousands of dollars sewed up inside.

I won’t take time right now to tell you all you maybe ought to know about how we happened to find that ransom money buried in the sawdust of that old icehouse, ’cause that’d take too long, and besides you’ve probably read all about it in the last story about the Sugar Creek Gang, which is called, “Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure.” I maybe better tell you, though, that a little St. Paul girl named Marie Ostberg had been kidnapped and the kidnapper had hidden up in the Chippewa forest of northern Minnesota in what is called “The Paul Bunyan Country,” where we were camping. Our gang had found the girl in the middle of the night and captured the kidnapper in an old Indian cemetery the next night, and then we had had a very mysterious and exciting time hunting for the ransom money in one of cuckoo-est places in all the world to find money, and at last had found it in this very old icehouse, and, as I told you, the money had been sewed up inside of these great big fish which we’d been digging up and stuffing into the gunny sack.

In maybe another seven minutes we’d have had it all dug up and stuffed into the gunny sack and would have been on our excited way back to camp, but all of a startling sudden we heard that outboard motor roaring in our direction from out on the lake and we knew that unless we stepped on the gas, we wouldn’t even get all of us climbed out of the opening and far enough away in the bushes not to be seen.

“What’s the sense of being scared?” Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our gang, asked me right after I’d ordered us all to get going quick. “The kidnapper’s caught and in jail, isn’t he?”

“Sure, but Old hook-nosed John Till’s running loose up here somewhere,” I said—Old Hook-nose being a very fierce man who was the fierce infidel daddy of one of the members of our gang. He had been in jail a lot of times in his wicked life and was staying in a cabin not more than a quarter of a mile up the shore from where we were right that minute.

Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of the gang, who knew one hundred and one or two poems by heart and was always quoting one, swished around quick, scrambled back across the sawdust we’d been digging in, peeped through a crack between the logs toward the lake.

“Who is it?” I said, and he said in his duck-like squawky voice, “I can’t tell, but he looks awful mad.”

Well, anybody knows anybody couldn’t see well enough that far to see anybody’s face well enough to tell whether it had a mad look on it, but if it was John Till who hated us boys anyway, he’d probably be mad and would do savage things to all of us, if he caught us in that icehouse getting the money.

So in another six or seven jiffies we were all scrambling as fast as we could out of that icehouse and out into the open, carrying Little Jim’s gunny sack full of fish. We made a dive across an open space to a clump of bushes, where we wouldn’t be seen by anybody on the lake.

Circus, the acrobatic member of our gang, was with us, too, and he being the strongest one of us, grabbed up the sack, swung it over his shoulder and loped on ahead of us. “Hurry!” we panted to each other, and didn’t stop running until we reached the top of a hill, which we did just as we heard the outboard motor stop. There we all dropped down on the grass, gasping and panting, and tickled that we were safe, but I was feeling pretty bad to think that there were probably a half dozen other fish still buried in the sawdust in that old log icehouse.

“Quick, Poetry, give me your knife,” Circus ordered.

“What for?” Poetry said, and at the same time shoved his fat hand in his pocket and pulled out his official boy-scout knife and handed it over to Circus, who quick opened the heavy cutting blade and started ripping open the sewed-up stomach of a big northern pike which he’d just pulled out of the sack. “There’s no sense in carrying home a six pound northern pike with only a quarter of a pound of twenty dollar bills in it,” Circus said, and I knew he was right, ’cause it was a long way back to our camp, and if for any reason we had to run fast, we could do it better without having to lug along those great big fish, especially the biggest one.

I didn’t bother to watch Circus though, ’cause right that second I started peering through the foliage of some oak undergrowth back toward the lake, just as I saw a man come swishing around the corner of the icehouse and stop in front of the opened door.

“Hey look!” Dragonfly said to us, “he’s got a big string of big fish.”

And sure enough he had.

Little Jim, who was beside me, holding onto his stick which he always carried with him when we were on a hike or out in the woods, whispered close to my ear and said, “I’ll bet he’s got a lot more money sewed up in a lot more fish, and is going to bury it in the sawdust where these were.”

I happened to have my high-powered binoculars with me so I quick unsnapped the carrying case they were in, zipped them out, raised them to my eyes and right away it seemed like I was only about one-third as far away as I was. I gasped so loud at what I saw—or rather who I saw—that my gasp was almost like a yell.

“SH!” Circus said to us, just like he was the leader of our gang, which he wasn’t, but I was myself—that is, I was supposed to be, ’cause our real leader, Big Jim, wasn’t with us, but was back at camp with Little Tom Till, the newest member of our gang. “It’s Old Hook-nose, all right,” I said, and knew it was. I could see his stoop-shoulders, dark complexion, red hair, bulgy eyes, bushy eyebrows, and his hook nose.

“What if he finds we’ve dug up part of the fish and run away with them?” Little Jim asked in a half-scared voice.

“Maybe he won’t,” I said, and hoped he wouldn’t.

While I was watching John Till toss his stringer of fish up into the opening and clamber up after them, Circus was slashing open the fish and taking out the ransom money which was folded in nice flat packets of oiled paper like the kind my mom uses in our kitchen back home at Sugar Creek.

We also all helped Circus do what he was doing, all of us maybe more excited than we’d been in a long time, while different ones of us took turns watching Hook-nose do what he was doing.

I knew that in only a few jiffies he would be out of that icehouse again, and probably would go back to the big white boat he’d come to shore in, shove off and row out a few feet, and then there would be a roar of his motor and away he would go swishing out across the sunlit water, his boat making a long widening V behind him. Then we would sneak back and get the rest of the money.

Everything was pretty clear in my mind as to what had been going on the last day or two, and it was that John Till had maybe been what police call an “accomplice” of the real kidnapper and it had been his special job to look after the ransom money. He’d decided that the best way in the world to hide it where nobody would ever think of finding it would be to catch some big fish, cut them open, clean out the entrails, fold the money in packets of oil paper, stuff it inside the fish, and sew it up, like my mother sews up a chicken she’s stuffed with dressing just before she slides it into the oven for our dinner. Then he would dig down deep in the sawdust of the icehouse till he came to some ice, lay the fish on it, and cover it up. Nobody would ever think to look inside a fish for money. Even if they accidentally dug up a fish, it’d be covered with wettish sticky sawdust, and they wouldn’t see the stitches in its stomach.

Say, while I was thinking that and also watching the shadow of John Till through the door of the icehouse, all of a sudden there was a quick gasp beside me, and I said to Circus, “What on earth?” thinking maybe he’d found something terribly special, but he hadn’t. He dropped his knife, leaped to his feet, and said, “You guys stay here! I’ll be right back.”

“Stop!” I said. “Where you going?” I remembered I was supposed to be the leader, but say, Circus had his own ideas about that. He squirmed out of my grasp, almost tearing his shirt, on account of I had hold of it and didn’t want to let go.

The next second there were only four of us left—barrel-shaped Poetry, kind-faced, swell Little Jim, pop-eyed Dragonfly, and red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced Bill Collins, which is me. Circus, our acrobat, was streaking out through the bushes as fast as he could go toward the lake and the icehouse, but not getting out in the open where John could see him.

“What on earth?” I thought. I didn’t dare yell, or try to stop him by whistling or something, or John Till would have heard me, and who knows what might have happened? I didn’t have the slightest idea what Circus was up to until a moment later, when I saw him dart like a scared chipmunk out from some bushes not far from the icehouse and make a dive for the open door. “Why the crazy goof!” I thought. “He’s going to try to—What was he going to try to do?”

And the next thing I knew, I quick found out. It happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to think. But the very minute I saw Circus start to do what he was starting to do, I knew he was going to do it.

SWISH! Wham! A half-dozen fast flying movements, and it was all over. Circus grabbed that icehouse door, swung it shut, lifted the big heavy bar and threw it into place, and Old hook-nosed John Till was locked inside!