EVEN though there was a spider web across the door, which meant that nobody had gone in or out of the door for a long time, still that didn’t mean there might not be anybody inside, ’cause there might be another door on the side next to the lake.

Poetry and I made my Man Friday and the acrobatic goat stay where they were while we circled the cabin, looking for any other door and any signs of anybody living there. The only door we found was one that led from the cabin out onto a screened front porch, but the porch was closed-in with no doors going outside, on account of there was a big ravine just below the front of the house and between it and the lake. So we knew that if anybody wanted to go in and out of the house he would have to use the one and only door or else go through a window.

We circled back to Dragonfly and Circus, where we all lay down on some tall grass behind a row of shrubbery, which somebody years ago had set out there, when maybe a family of people had lived there. It had probably been someone’s summer cabin, I thought—somebody who lived in St. Paul or Minneapolis, or somewhere, and had built the cabin up here. I noticed that there was a cement pavement running all around the back side of the cabin, which was set up against the almost cliff-like hill. Also there was a very long stone stairway beginning about twenty feet from the old spider-web-covered door and running around the edge of the ravine, making a sort of semi-circle down to the lake to where there was a very old dock, which the waves of the lake in stormy weather, or else the ice in the winter, had broken down, and nobody had fixed it.

We waited in our hiding place for maybe about ten minutes, listening and watching before we decided nobody was inside, and before we decided to look in the windows and later go inside, ourselves. We didn’t think about it being trespassing, on account of there was an old abandoned house back at Sugar Creek which our gang always went into anytime we wanted to, and nobody thought anything about it, because that old cabin back home belonged to a very old long-whiskered old man whom everybody knows as Old Man Paddler, and anything that belonged to him seemed to belong to us, too, he being a very special friend of anybody who was lucky enough to be a boy.

Anyway, we, all of us, were pretty soon peeking in through the windows, trying to see what we could see, but it was pretty dark inside, so we knew if we wanted to see more we had to find some way to get in.

Right that second I decided to see if my Man Friday was my Man Friday or not, so I said, “O.K., Friday, go up and knock at that door.”

Say, Dragonfly got the scaredest look on his face. As you maybe know, if you’ve read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, Dragonfly’s mother believed in ghosts, and good luck happening to you if you find a four-leaf clover or a horseshoe, so Dragonfly believed it too, most boys believing and doing what their parents believe and do.

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

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

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

“What’s the difference?” the fat goat said, and started head-first for Dragonfly.

But we couldn’t afford to waste any time that way, so Poetry, being maybe the bravest one of us, went up to the door, while we held our breath, I knowing that there wasn’t anybody inside but wondering 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 or something.

First Poetry brushed away the spider web, then he knocked on the door.

Nobody answered the knock 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 one side of the cabin right next to the hill, which on that side of the house was kinda like a cliff, and that window, when we tried it, was unlocked.

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

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

We could have ducked under some trees for protection, but it was that kind of rain that sometimes comes when it seems like the sky has burst open and water just drives down in blinding sheets, which it started to do.

“It’s raining pitchforks and nigger babies!” Circus yelled above the roar of the wind in the trees. He quick shoved up the window and scrambled in, with all of us scrambling in after him and slamming the window down behind us.

The rain was coming down so hard that it made a terrible roaring noise on the shingled roof, reminding me of storms just like that 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 pretty dark inside the old cabin on account of the walls were stained with a dark stain of some kind, maybe to protect the wood, like some north woods cabins are. It was also dark on account of the sky outside was almost black with terribly heavy rain clouds. I noticed that the window we’d climbed in was the kitchen window and that there was a table with an oil cloth, with a few soiled dishes on one side 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, but I did see two big colored pictures on the back wall of the porch at the front. I hurried out there, just to get a look at the storm, storms being one of the most interesting sights in the world, and they make a boy feel very queer inside, like maybe he isn’t very important and also make him feel like 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 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.

On the front porch where I was, were two or three whiskey bottles, I noticed, and 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 here, although the terribly dark clouds in the sky, and also the big pine trees all around with their branches shading the cabin, made it almost dark even on the porch, but I did see two big colored pictures on the back wall of the porch advertising whiskey, and with important looking people drinking or getting ready to. Circus was standing with me right then, and I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, remembering how his pop used to be a drunkard before he had become a Christian, but had been saved just by repenting of his sins and trusting the Lord Jesus to save him. Say, Circus was looking fiercely at those pictures, and I noticed he had his fists doubled up, like he wished he could sock somebody or something terribly hard. I was glad right that minute that Little Tom Till wasn’t there, on account of his daddy was still a drunkard and a mean man.

I left Circus standing looking fiercely at those whiskey pictures, and looked out at the lake which was one of the prettiest sights I ever saw, with the waves being whipped into big white caps, and blowing and making a noise which, mixed up with the noise on our roof, was very pretty to my ears.

We didn’t even bother to look around inside the cabin for a while—anyway, I didn’t. Away out on the farther side of the lake there was a patch of sunlight and the water was all different shades of green and yellow. Right away there was a terrific roar, as a blinding flash of lightning lit up the whole porch, and then it did rain, and the wind blew harder and whipped the canvas curtains on the porch; and the pine trees between us and the lake acted like they were going to bend and break. Six white birch trees that grew in a cluster down beside the old outdoor stone stairway that led in the semi-circle from the cabin down to the broken-down dock, swayed and twisted and acted like they were going wild and might be broken off and blown away any minute.

“Hey! Look!” Poetry said. “There are little moving mountains out there on the lake!” I looked, and sure enough 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 I was standing there, and feeling a little bit scared on account of the noise and the wind and the rain, I got to thinking about my folks back home, and was lonesome as well as scared; and 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 that 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, freckle-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 outloud, 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 Saviour, for dying for me.... You’re an awful 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,” which all the gang knew it was, and none of us did it, Little Jim especially not being able to stand to even hear it 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.”

“You mean—you mean you aren’t afraid to talk to Him?”

Imagine that little guy 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 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 in the cabin saying, “Hey, Gang! Aren’t we going to explore this old shell and see if we can find the ransom money?”

That sort of brought me back from where for a few minutes my mind had been.

I took another quick look at the little moving mountains on the lake and pretty soon we were all inside where Circus had been all the time looking around to see what he could find. But it was too dark to see anything very clearly, and we didn’t have any flashlight. I looked on a 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 great big old-fashioned Morris chair like one my pop 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 arm, which gave me an eery feeling when I saw them, which I did right away, when Circus lit one of the matches he had with him.

“Here’s a candle, out here on the kitchen table,” Dragonfly said, and brought it in to where we were. It certainly was the darkest cabin on the inside I ever saw. The walls were almost black, and the stone arch at the top of the fireplace was black with smoke where the fireplace had probably smoked when it had a fire in it. There was only about an inch of the candle left.

Circus lit it while Poetry held it, and we followed Poetry all around wherever he went. The noise of the storm and the dark cabin made it seem like we were having a strange adventure in the middle of the night.

There were spider webs on nearly everything, and dust on the floor, and it looked like nobody had lived here for an awful long time, maybe years and years. Besides the front porch there were just the three rooms—the kitchen with the sink and pitcher pump, the main room with the fireplace and a smallish bedroom which had a curtain hanging between it and the main room. In the bedroom was a rollaway bed all folded up and rolled against a wall.

Even though the broken twig trail had led us here, still we couldn’t find a thing that looked like anything the ransom money might have been hidden in.

So since the rain was still pouring down, we decided to call a meeting and talk things over. We pulled the three stiff-backed chairs up to the table in the center of the main room, and also the big chair, which I turned sidewise, and I sat on one of the wooden arms. Poetry set the short flickering candle in a saucer in the center of the table, and I, being supposed to be the leader, called the meeting to order, just like 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 twigs back to where the girl had been found and from there to the road and back to camp.

I looked at Poetry’s fat face and at Dragonfly’s large eyes and his 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 like he was smelling something strange, and said, “You guys smell anything funny, like—kinda like a dead chicken or something?” I sniffed a couple of times, and we all did, and as plain as the nose on my face I did smell something—something dead. I’d smell that smell many a time back along Sugar Creek when there was a dead rabbit or something that the buzzards were circling around up in the sky, or had swooped down on it and were eating it.

Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like 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 knowing what they smell like on account of his pop catches many possums and sells the fur. Sometimes on a hunting trip when he 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 which had come that night and the plaster-of-Paris cast they’d made of the kidnapper’s tire tracks, and the kidnapper himself which we’d caught in the Indian cemetery, which you know all about maybe, if you’ve read the other stories called “Sugar Creek Gang Goes North” and “Adventure in an 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, ’cause 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, planning to come back later, maybe, or something. Anyway, anything we’d said about it didn’t make sense, so why bring it up again? I thought.

“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 field after a heavy snowfall.

But say, all of a sudden as I spread it out, Poetry let out an excited gasp, and exclaimed, “Hey! Look! There’s 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 longish straight and crooked lines, and down at the bottom a crazy drawing of some kind.