THE station wagon hadn’t any sooner disappeared and the whirring sound of its motor faded away, leaving us all with Barry’s orders to go back to bed ringing in our ears, than I remembered the blank sheet of typewriter paper I had in my pocket and which we hadn’t bothered to show to Barry but only John Till’s note to his boy, Bob.

Little Jim and Tom Till didn’t know anything about what was going on, and they, being sleepy anyway, seemed glad to get back to their tent and make a dive back into the sleep from which they had dragged themselves a little while before.

Dragonfly was suspicious, though, and when he noticed Poetry and Big Jim and Circus and me talking together, he got a stubborn expression in his voice and whined a question at us which was, “You guys got a secret of some kind?”

We didn’t want him to start any fuss; besides sometimes he wasn’t such a dumb person to let in on a secret, so for a little while we left Little Jim and Tom Till alone in their tent and the five of us went into the other tent, lit a lantern, unfolded the piece of typewriter paper and heated it over the hot top of the lantern, and in only a few minutes we were looking at a map of the territory up here—showing the camp where we were and the place where the little Ostberg girl had been lying, just like the other map we’d found. Also different other places were identified, such as Santa’s boathouse, the firewarden’s cabin, and the broken twig trail which led off in different directions....

“Both maps are alike,” Circus said, and it looked like they were. Poetry traced the faint markings of the new one with his pencil so we could study it better.

“What do you suppose Bob had two maps for?” Dragonfly asked, and Poetry answered by saying, “He maybe had only one at first, but when he lost it,—the one we found last week—he or Hook-nose made him another one.”

“Yeah,” I said, with a questionmark in my voice, “but why draw them in invisible ink?”

“Maybe so nobody would think they were maps.”

“But how could Bob himself know the different places if he couldn’t see the lines and different marks?” I asked, wondering how.

It was Dragonfly who answered my doubt by saying, “Oh he probably had what they call an ‘original’—and as soon as he’d memorized it, he drew another one in invisible ink and tore the first one up!” His idea made sense, I thought, and said so, and so did Poetry.

Well, we weren’t getting anywhere—and weren’t supposed to anyway. It certainly didn’t seem fair to us that Barry hadn’t let us go with him, but he was camp boss and that was that, and we were supposed to crawl back into our sleeping bags and go to sleep. Imagine that! Right while Barry and the firewarden, and maybe the police, were capturing Old hook-nosed John Till and his son Bob! Imagine it! It was terribly disappointing.

And then all of a sudden Dragonfly gasped and said, “Hey, Gang! Look!” He had the newest map and was holding it up between his dragonfly-like eyes and the light. His voice had contagious excitement in it, so we all looked quick to see what he saw. But it wasn’t anything—only two crude-looking fish away off on the part of the map which was supposed to represent a lake.

“A couple of fish,” I said, disgusted with him for getting us excited over nothing. “That’s to show you there is a lake there.”

“Yeah,” he said, still excited, “but look where they are! They’re right over there where that island is where we caught our walleye today.”

Big Jim answered that by saying, “Maybe they’re supposed to locate a good fishing place.”

And then Dragonfly got another idea which sent our minds whirling like summer cyclones at Sugar Creek, when he said, “You know what that is? That’s where the island is, and that’s where John Till has been catching the big fish to put the ransom money in, and that island’s where maybe the rest of the money is right this very minute. I’ll bet that’s where they’ll go to get the rest of it, if Barry or the police don’t catch ’em first!”

Well, sir, you could have knocked me over with an invisible ink map, when Dragonfly gave us that wonderful idea. It seemed like he was exactly right, and it seemed a shame that I hadn’t thought of it first—in fact, for a minute it almost seemed like I had, because all of a sudden I was remembering what I’d thought in the afternoon when Poetry and I had been exploring that island looking for clues. Also I remembered that that island is where I’d wanted to go to start hunting for the treasure in the first place when I’d thought of playing Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday and also Treasure Island. I just knew that Dragonfly and I were right, so as quick as a flash I said, “If we really want to capture Bob and Old Hook-nose, we’d better beat it over to that little island, and be hiding there somewhere when they get there, and capture them ourselves.”

Big Jim answered me in a tone of voice that sounded like he thought I was only about half bright when he said, “Who wants to get the living daylights knocked out of him in the middle of the night? When you saw him the first time, didn’t he have a big hunting knife?”

I remembered he had—in fact, in my mind’s eye, I could still see that wicked looking knife with its five-inch-long blade that looked like it could not only make a quick slice into the stomach of a fish but could do the same thing to a boy. When Big Jim said that to me like that, it seemed like maybe he was right and I was very ignorant for wanting to be brave without using good sense.

“Besides,” Big Jim said, “those two silly looking fish out there on the map don’t mean a thing. We’d better all get some sleep or we’ll be as tired as wrung-out dishrags tomorrow.”

Well, that was orders, and a boy is supposed to obey anybody who has a right to be his boss—such as a schoolteacher or a camp leader or either one of his parents, or somebody he is working for. Big Jim didn’t always get obeyed, though, on account of our gang nearly always voted on important things to decide what to do, so right away Poetry, who thought my idea wasn’t so bad after all, spoke up and said, “I move we all get into Barry’s big boat and go roaring over to that island, beach the boat on the sandy shore of the cove behind some willows and be there waiting when Bob and Hook-nose come—if they do.”

“Second the motion,” I said quick, but Big Jim exploded our idea by saying, “It’s Barry’s orders to go to bed.”

It certainly wasn’t easy to go to bed when there was so much excitement we’d rather be mixed up in, but orders were orders, so pretty soon I was in my sleeping bag in the same tent with Dragonfly and Poetry—Big Jim and Circus having decided to go back to Santa’s cabin to spend the rest of the night like they’d planned to in the first place.

Pretty soon, in spite of feeling excited and wondering whether anybody would catch Old John Till and his son Bob, I dropped off to sleep—not even knowing I was going to do it—as a certain poem says, “No boy knows when he goes to sleep.” It seemed like even in my sleep I could hear an outboard motor roaring out on the lake, first coming close to us, then fading away and then a little later coming back again.

Once when I was half awake and half asleep, I heard Poetry turn over beside me and then I heard him whisper, “Bill—listen, will you? Somebody’s out there in a motor boat going back and forth in front of our dock.”

It took a jiffy for me to realize where I was, and why, and then I was actually listening to an outboard motor away out on our lake like somebody was doing what Poetry said he was.

A second later, Poetry sat up, scrambled over to the tent flap, worked it open, and in another jiffy I had my red head beside his, and we were both looking out across the moonlit water, and seeing a dark fast-moving boat out there.

“The crazy goof!” Poetry said to me in my left ear, and I said to him in his right one, “He’s cutting big wide circles,” which is what whoever it was was doing.

It seemed silly for anybody to do what he was doing; so, because it was a crazy night anyway, and so many crazy things had happened on our fishing trip, Poetry and I squeezed our crazy way through the tent flap and went down to the dock to see what on earth anybody was doing out there going round and round like that. And then all of a sudden, Poetry gasped breathily and said, “Hey, there isn’t anybody in that boat. It’s empty!”

Just that second the boat came out into the middle of a big wide silver path which lakes have on moonlight nights, when you look out across them in the direction of the moon. And sure enough, Poetry was right. I could hardly believe my surprised eyes, but in that silver path was a row boat about the size of the one Bob Till had gone away in, cutting big, terribly fast wide circles, going round and round and round. The motor sounded exactly like the big black shrouded two-cylinder one I knew how to run so well and which Bob had taken from Santa’s dock.

It didn’t make sense—a boat out there without anybody in it.

And then, Poetry said something else, which was, “Hey, it’s getting closer! The wind is blowing it toward the shore. It gets closer every time it makes a circle!”—which I noticed it was.

What to do or whether to do anything, was the question. Poetry and I stood there on the dock in our pajamas, not slapping at the mosquitoes, on account of when the wind blows, like it was right that second, mosquitoes’ smallish wings can’t control their flight, and they stop looking for boys to bite.

Whirr! ... Roar! ... Whizzz! ... and also Plop! ... plop! ... plop! ...—the motor doing the whirring and the whizzing, and the bottom of the boat doing the plop-plop-plopping on the waves.

“It’s empty!” we said to each other, and it looked like it was, for sure.

“Maybe whoever was in it fell out. Maybe it was John Till and he was drunk and fell out and the boat just keeps on running,” I said. I knew a motor could do that, and if the steering handle was set, it would maybe stay set, and the motor would keep on going until it ran out of gas, or until it rammed into an island or a shore somewhere.... Then, almost before anything could happen if there had been anything to, that boat straightened out a little, like the motor’s steering handle had swung around—which they do sometimes when nobody holds onto them—and the boat came roaring straight toward our dock at a terrific rate of speed.... In another half minute maybe it would crash ker-wham-splinter-smash into the end of the dock where we were—right there by the flagpole. It was coming toward us as straight as a torpedo and almost as fast, I thought, just like this was a war and somebody had shot a torpedo straight for where we were.

And then, a second later while my mind was whirling, not believing it could or would happen, the sharp prow of that big white boat with the fierce racing motor on the other end of it, struck with a crash that jarred and shook the dock, glanced sidewise, swerved up along its edge and ran ker-squash-jam into the sandy shore, while at the same time or just before, the propeller, down in the water, struck the shallow sandy bottom, which made the motor tilt forward.

The motor made a couple of ridiculous-sounding discouraged sneezes and coughs, and stopped. Then almost before the sound of the crash had stopped splitting my ear-drums, I was over near the boat, looking down into it and shining my flashlight into it. There lying in the bottom was a great big quart-sized whiskey bottle, and my imagination told me that maybe John Till had been in the boat and that he had gotten drunk and had fallen out and was out there in the lake somewhere already drowned. My heart sank as I thought of what a hurt heart Little Tom Till would have when he found it out.

The waves of the lake were washing against the dock post and lapping at the shore and the boat, and I knew it was a terribly tense minute. And then Poetry, who was beside me, grabbed my arm like he had just heard something terribly important, and said, “Listen ... SH! ... Listen!”

I listened, and didn’t hear anything at first, and then all of a sudden I did, and it was a scared voice calling from somewhere saying, “HELP ... HELP ... HELP...!”