YOU can imagine how we felt when we looked at that crazy, almost illegible drawing on that paper, which, when we’d found it, had been without even one pencil mark on it, and now as plain as day there was something on it—only it wasn’t drawn with a pencil or ink or crayon but looked kinda like what is called a “water mark” 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 we could see it better, when Poetry gasped again and said, “Hey! It’s getting plainer. Look!”

And Poetry was right. Right in front of our eyes as I held the crazy looking lines close to the candle, the different lines began to be clearer, although they still looked like water marks.

Dragonfly turned as white as a sheet, with his eyes almost bulging out of his head. “There’s a-a-a- ghost in here!” He whispered the words in such a ghost-like voice that it seemed like there might be one.

For a jiffy I was as weak as a cat, and my hands holding the paper were trembly so, I nearly dropped it. In fact, as quick as a flash, Poetry grabbed my hand that had the paper in it and pulled it 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 and 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, and I wished I was 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. Its being in Bill’s pocket next to his body made it warm, and now the heat from the candle is bringing out what was written on it.” It took only a jiffy to decide Poetry was right, and as we all looked at that crazy drawing, we knew 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, “Hey, it’s a map of some kind!”

When he got through tracing it, we saw that it was a map of the territory up here, with the different places named, such as the Indian cemetery, the firewarden’s cabin, the boathouse, two summer resorts, and the different roads and lanes running from one to another, also 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, and feeling mysterious and also a little bit scared, but not much ’cause 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 grin in his duck-like voice.

“WHAT?” I said, beginning to get a let-down feeling.

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

Just above the X a little distance, 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 there was a line running from the top of the other arm of the V off in another direction and kept on going until it came to a drawing that looked like a smallish mound; and lying across it was a straight short line that made me think of a walking stick or something.

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, and then noticed 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 I’d just made at the opposite ends of the straight line. “Look!” he said, “it’s a shovel or a spade! That circle is the top of the handle, and the square is the blade,” and we knew he was right.

And that meant, as plain as the nose on Dragonfly’s face, that if we left this house and went back to where our trail had branched off, and followed the broken twigs in that other direction, we’d come to a place where the money was buried.

Boy oh boy, oh boy! I felt so good I wanted to scream.

It was just like being in a dream, which you know isn’t a dream, and are glad it isn’t—only in dreams you always wake up, which maybe I’d do in just another excited minute.

“Is this a dream or not?” I asked my fat goat, and he said, “I don’t know, but I know how I can find out for you,” and I said, “How?” and he said, “I’ll pinch you to see if there is any pain, and if there is, it isn’t, and if there isn’t, it is.” He was trying to be funny and not being, ’cause right that second he pinched me and it hurt just like it always does when he pinches me, only worse.

“Hey—ouch!” I said, and right away I pinched him so he could find out for himself that the map wasn’t any dream, and neither was my hard pinch on his fat arm.

The rain was still roaring on the roof, sounding like a fast train roaring past the depot at Sugar Creek. We all sat looking at each other with queer expressions on our faces and mixed-up thoughts in our minds. I was smelling the dead something or other. The odor seemed to come from the direction of the kitchen on account of it was on the side of the cottage next to the steep hillside, which was as steep almost as a cliff, and right above its one window I noticed there was a stubby pine tree growing out of the hill, its branches extending over the roof.

Because the rain wasn’t falling on the window, I opened it and looked out and noticed that water was streaming down the hill like there was a little river up there and was pouring itself down onto the cement walk and rippling around the outside of the cabin. I thought for a jiffy how smart the owners of the cabin had been to put that cement walk there, so the water that swished down the hillside could run away and not pour into the cabin.

It was while I was at the window that I noticed there was an old rusty wire stretched across from the stubby pine tree toward the cabin. I yelled to the rest of the gang to come and look, which they did.

“’Tsa telephone wire,” Dragonfly said, and Poetry, squeezing in between Dragonfly and me and looking up at the wire, said, “I’ll bet it’s a radio aerial!” Poetry’s voice got excited right away and he turned back into the kitchen and said, “There might be a radio around here somewhere.”

With that he started looking for one, with all of us helping him, going from the kitchen where we were, to the main room where the fireplace was, and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom, which had the rollaway bed in it, all folded up against the wall; then we hunted through the screened porch, and looked under some old canvases on the porch floor, but there wasn’t any radio anywhere.

“There’s got to be one,” Circus said. “That’s an aerial, I’m sure.”

Poetry spoke up and said, “If it is, let’s look for the place where it comes into the cabin,” which we did, and which we found. It was through the top of a window in the bedroom. But that didn’t clear up our problem even a tiny bit, on account of there was only a piece of twisted wire hanging down from the curtain pole and it wasn’t fastened to anything.

Well that was that. Besides what’d we want to know whether there was a radio for? “Who cares?” I said, feeling I was the leader, and wishing Poetry wouldn’t insist on following out all his ideas.

“Goof!” he said to me, which was what he was always calling me, but I shushed him, and said, “Keep still, Goat! Who’s the head of this treasure hunt?”

He puckered his fat forehead at me, and half yelled above the roar of the rain on the roof, “If there’s a radio, it means somebody’s been living here just lately.”

“And if there isn’t, then what?”

It was Dragonfly who saw the edge of a newspaper sticking out of the crack between the folded-up mattress of the rollaway bed which was standing in the corner. He quick pulled it out and opened it, and we looked at the date, and it was just a week old. In fact, it was dated the day before we’d caught the kidnapper, so we were pretty sure he’d been here at that same time.

Well, the rain on the roof was getting less noisy, and we knew that pretty soon we’d have to be starting for camp. We wouldn’t dare try to follow the trail of broken twigs to the place where we thought the money was buried, because we had orders to be back at camp an hour before supper time, to help with the camp chores. That night we were all going to have a very special campfire service, with Eagle Eye, an honest-to-goodness Chippewa Indian, telling us a blood curdling story of some kind—a real live Indian story.

“Let’s get going,” I said to the rest of us—“just the minute it stops raining.”

“Do we go out the door or the window?” my Man Friday wanted to know, and I took a look at the only door, saw that it was nailed shut, tighter than anything.

I grunted and groaned and pulled at the knob, and then gave up and said, “Looks like we’ll use the window.”

It was still raining pretty hard, and I had the feeling I wanted to go out and take a last look at the lake. I’d been thinking also if this cabin was fixed up a little and the underbrush and stuff between it and the lake and a battered down old clock, was cleared away, and if the walls were painted a light color, it might make a pretty nice cabin for anybody to rent and spend a summer vacation in, like a lot of people in America do do. On the wall of the porch I noticed a smallish mirror which was dusty and needed to be wiped off before I could see myself. I stopped just a second to see what I looked like, like I sometimes do at home, especially just before I make a dash to our dinner table—and sometimes get stopped before I can sit down—and have to go back and finish washing my face and combing my hair before I get to take even one bite of Mom’s swell fried chicken.

I certainly didn’t look much like the pictures I’d seen of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of looking like a shipwrecked person with home-made clothes, I looked just like an ordinary “wreck” without any ship. My red hair was mussed up like everything, my freckled face was dirty and my two large front teeth still looked too big for my face, which would have to grow a lot more before it was big enough to fit my teeth. I was glad my teeth were already as big as they would ever get—which is why lots of boys and girls look funny when they’re just my size, Mom says. Our teeth grow in as large as they’ll ever be, and our faces just sorta take their time.

“You’re an ugly ‘mut,’” I said to myself, and then turned and looked out over the lake again. Anyway, I was growing a little bit, and I had awfully good health and nearly always felt wonderful most of the time.

While I was looking out at the pretty lake, some of the same feeling I’d had before came bubbling up inside of me. For a minute I wished Little Jim had been with us,—in fact, I wished he had been standing right beside me with the stick in his hand which he always carries with him wherever he goes, almost ... I was feeling good inside ’cause the gang was still letting me be Robinson Crusoe and were taking most of my orders. Sometimes, I said to myself, I’d like to be a leader of a whole lot of people, who would do whatever I wanted them to. I might be a general in an army, or a Governor or something—only I wanted to be a doctor, too, and help people to get well. Also I wanted to help save people from their troubles, and from being too poor, like Circus’s folks, and I wished I could take all the whiskey there was in the world and dump it out into a lake, only I wouldn’t want the perch and northern pike or walleyes or the pretty blue gills or bass or sunfish to have to drink any of it, but maybe I wouldn’t care if some of the bullheads did.

While I was standing there, thinking about that pretty lake, and knowing that Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang, would say something about the Bible if he was there, I remembered part of a Bible story that had happened out on a stormy, rolling lake just like this one. Then I remembered that in the story of Robinson Crusoe there had been a Bible and that he had taught his ignorant Man Friday a lot of things out of it and Friday had become a Christian himself. My pop used to read Robinson Crusoe to Mom and me at home many a night in the winter—Pop reading good stories to us instead of whatever there was on the radio that wouldn’t be good for a boy to hear, and my folks having to make me turn it off. Pop always picked a story to read that was very interesting to a red-haired boy and would be what Mom called “good mental furniture”—whatever that was, or is.

All of the gang nearly always carried New Testaments in our pockets, so, remembering Robinson Crusoe had had a Bible, I took out my New Testament and stood with my back to the rest of the cabin, still looking at the lake. I felt terribly good inside, with that little brown leather Testament in my hands. I was glad the One Who is the main character in it was a Friend of mine and that He liked boys.

“It was swell of You to help us find the little Ostberg girl,” I said to Him, “and also to catch the kidnapper, and it’s an awful pretty lake and sky and ...”

Right then I was interrupted by music coming from back in the cabin somewhere, some people’s voices singing a song I knew and that we sometimes sang in church back at Sugar Creek, and it was:

I guessed quick that one of my goats or else my Man Friday had actually found a radio in the cabin and had turned it on. I swished around, dashed back inside and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom where I’d left them, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the rollaway bed opened out and there, sitting on the side of it, my two goats and my Man Friday and a little portable radio, which I knew was the kind that had its own battery and its own inbuilt aerial. It was sitting on my fat goat’s lap, and was playing like a house afire that very pretty church hymn:

A jiffy after I got there, the music stopped and a voice broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to make a very important announcement. There is a new angle regarding the ransom money still missing in the Ostberg kidnapping case. Little Marie’s father, a religious man, has just announced that the amount represented a sum he had been saving for the past several years to build a memorial hospital in the heart of the mission field of Cuba. In St. Paul, the suspect, caught last week at Bemidji by a gang of boys on vacation, still denies knowing anything about the ransom money; claims he never received it. Police are now working on the supposition that there may have been another party to the crime. Residents of northern Minnesota are warned to be on the lookout for a man bearing the following description: He is believed to be of German descent, a farmer by occupation, about thirty-seven years of age, six feet two inches tall, weighs one hundred eighty seven pounds, stoop-shouldered, dark complexion, red hair, partly bald, bulgy steel-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows that meet in the center, hook-nose....”

The description went on, telling about the man’s clothes, ears, and mouth, but I didn’t need any more. My heart was already bursting with the awfulest feeling I’d had in a long time, ’cause the person they were describing was exactly like Old hook-nosed John Till, the mean, liquor-drinking father of one of the Sugar Creek Gang, little red-haired Tom Till himself, one of my very best friends and a swell little guy that all of us liked and felt so terribly sorry for on account of we knew that he had that kind of a father, who had been in jail lots of times and who spent his money on whiskey and gambling and Little Tom’s mother had to be sad most of the time. In fact, about the only happiness Tom’s mom had was in her boy Tom, who was a really swell little guy, and went to Sunday school with us. She also got a little happiness out of a radio which my folks had bought for her, and she listened to Christian programs which cheered her up a lot.

Even while I listened to the radio on my fat goat’s lap, I was thinking about Little Tom’s mom and wondering if she had her radio turned on too, back at Sugar Creek, and would hear this announcement, and if it would be like somebody jabbing a knife into her heart and twisting it.

But we didn’t have time to think, or talk or anything, ’cause right that second, I heard a noise coming from the direction of the kitchen window, which we had climbed in, and when I took a quick peek through the curtains, I saw the face of a fierce-looking man. It only took me one second’s glance to see the bushy eyebrows that met in the center just above the top of his hooked nose, and even though he had on a battered old felt hat that was dripping wet with the rain, and his clothes were sop soaking wet, I recognized him as Little red-haired Tom’s father.

In that quick flash of a jiffy I remembered the first time I had seen him when he had been hired by my pop to shock oats, and he had tried to get Circus’s pop to take a drink of whiskey over by some elderberry bushes that grew along the fence row. It had been a terribly hot day, and Circus and I had been helping shock oats too. Circus’s pop hadn’t been a Christian very long, and because I hated whiskey and didn’t want Circus’s pop to do what is called “backslide,” I had made a terribly fierce fast run across the field with Circus, to try to stop his pop from taking the drink and had run kerwham with both of my fists flying straight into Old hook-nosed John Till’s stomach, and a little later had landed on my back under the elderberry bushes from a terribly fierce wham from one of John Till’s hard fists. After that, the gang had had a lot of other trouble with him, but we’d gotten Little Tom saved, and Tom, being a pretty good Christian for a little guy, had been praying for his pop every day of his life ever since. But up to now it looked like it hadn’t done any good ’cause his pop still was a bad man and caused his family a lot of heartache.

Talk about mystery and excitement. I knew Tom’s pop hated us boys and also he was pretty mean to Tom for going to church with us, and on top of that was mad at my folks for taking Tom’s mom to church; and whenever he came into the house when she had a Christian program on the radio, he would either make her turn it off or he would turn it off himself.

I’ll have to admit that I was afraid of Old hook-nosed John Till, and right that minute I didn’t feel very much like being the leader of the gang, which for some reason seemed to be made up of only four very small boys, all of a sudden. The only thing I felt like leading in, was a very fast foot race out through the woods and toward camp. “Quick!” I hissed to the gang. “There’s somebody looking through the window. What’ll we do?” Before I could think only half of those thoughts and say only half of that sentence, I saw the man’s hand shove up the window, and one of his wet long legs, which had a big wet shoe on the end of it, swung over the window ledge, and he started squirming his long-legged self in after it.