WELL, what can you do, when there isn’t a thing you can think of, of doing? When you are looking through an opening in a hanging curtain and see a mean man coming into your cabin, and when you know there isn’t any door you can dash through to get away? Poetry already had the radio shut off and all of us were as still as scared mice, listening, and also all of us were trying to peep through the opening in the curtain.

I noticed that John Till had a newish-looking fishing rod, which he stood against the wall by a window, then he turned his back, reached out of the window and bent his body over to pick up something that he had left out there. A jiffy later I saw what it was—a stringer of fish—what looked liked five or six big walleyed pike, and an extra large northern pike, which he probably caught out in the lake.

He lifted the stringer and I heard the fish go kerflippety-flop-flop into the sink, then I heard the iron pitcher pump squeaking like he was pumping water on the fish, maybe to wash the dirt and slime off of them.

The curtain we were peeping through looked like it had been made out of the same kind of material one of my mom’s chenille bedspreads is made out of, and was kinda fuzzy on one side. Even before I heard Dragonfly do what he did just then, I was afraid he would do it. He had his face up close to the curtain not far from mine, and all of a sudden he got a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes started to squint, and his mouth to open, and he made a quick grab for his crooked nose with one of his hands.

But it was too late. Out came the cuckooest-sounding sneezes you ever heard, which he tried to smother and didn’t; and like it nearly always sounds when he sneezes, it was like a fourth-of-July firecracker that didn’t explode but just went “hisssss-sh-sh-sh” instead. At that same instant John Till whirled around and looked through the main room and at the curtain behind which we were hiding. If it had still been raining terribly hard, he wouldn’t have heard us, maybe, but Dragonfly’s sneeze seemed to have been timed with a lull in the rain, ’cause in spite of the fact that it was a smothered hissing noise, it sounded like it was loud enough to be heard a long ways away.

John Till jumped like he had been shot at and hit, and I expected most anything terribly exciting and dangerous to happen.

First I saw him take a wild look around like he wanted to make a dash for a door or a window and disappear. He must have thought better of it, though, ’cause he started pumping water again and doing something to the fish he had caught, then he fumbled at his belt and in a second I saw in his right hand a fierce-looking sheath knife, just like the kind Barry carried. Its wicked-looking blade was about 5 inches long and looked like it could either slice a fish into steaks in a jiffy or do the same to a boy. Not a one of us had any weapons except our pocket knives, and also not a one of us was going to be foolish enough to start a fight. If only we could make a dash for the door and get out—if the door wasn’t nailed shut, I thought. Then we could run like scared deer and get away.

But there wasn’t a chance in the world—not with a fierce man with a fierce-looking hunting knife in his hand.

Then Big John Till’s voice boomed into our room and said, “ALL RIGHT—WHOEVER YOU ARE—COME OUT WITH YOUR ARMS UP!”

“What’ll we do?” Dragonfly’s trembling whisper asked me, but I already had my arms up, and in a second he had his spindling arms pointed in different directions toward the ceiling.

“Get ’em up!” I whispered to all of us, and I thought that, if we got a chance, we’d make a dive for the open kitchen window and head for camp terribly fast.

Poetry’s fat forehead was puckered with a very stubborn pucker, and before I knew he was going to do what he did, he did it, which was—he yelled into the other room, “Come on out onto the front porch and get us!” only, of course, we weren’t on the front porch, and it didn’t make sense at all until a little later.

As you know, Poetry’s voice was changing, and part of the time it was a bass voice and the other part of the time, it was a soprano, on account of he was old enough to be what my pop called “an adolescent,” which is what a boy’s voice is like when adolescence happens to him. Part of what Poetry said was in a man’s voice and sounded pretty fierce, but right in the middle of the sentence his voice changed, and it was like a scared woman’s voice, the kind that would have made Dragonfly think it was a ghost’s voice, if he had heard it in the middle of a dark night in an old abandoned house.

To make matters worse, Dragonfly sneezed again, and we knew we were found out for sure. It must have been darker in the room where we were than it was in the kitchen or something, or else John Till really thought we were out on that front porch, ’cause all of a sudden he left the sink where he’d been pumping water on his fish, and whirled around with his big knife in his hand, straight out of the kitchen and through the main room, dodging the table in the middle, and the Morris chair, and made straight for the front porch.

It was our signal to make a dash for the kitchen and the open window, which we did, Poetry letting the baby-sized radio plump down on the rollaway bed, and even as I led the way to the kitchen window in a mad dash, I noticed that the radio’s side panel which he had closed, dropped down, which is what turns it on.

Most of us got to the window at the same time almost. My acrobatic goat grabbed the kitchen table, and shoved it into the doorway between the kitchen and the main room so as to block Hook-nose’s way if he tried to come back quick and stop us. Poetry was out first, and then Dragonfly, and then Circus, and last of all, I, Robinson Crusoe, who in the split jiffy they were getting out first, got a glimpse of the swell big stringer of fish John Till had caught, and which were, right that second covered with water in the sink. The large northern pike was especially very pretty and I thought that before I left the North this summer, I’d want to catch a big fish, have it mounted by what is called a taxidermist and put it on the wall of my room back at Sugar Creek.

I didn’t understand why John Till—as soon as he found out we weren’t out on that porch but had tricked him—didn’t come dashing madly back and jump over the table in the doorway and grab the last ones of us to get through the window, but he didn’t and I was too scared to stop to find out why.

So we swished around the corner of that cabin, made four dives in the direction we knew the broken-twig trail went, and went dashing through the still-sprinkling rain, through the wet shrubbery and under the trees that were dripping water like a leaky roof, and headed for camp.

Boy, was I ever glad we had our trail of broken twigs to go by. When we got to the first one, Dragonfly, whose feet were getting pretty wet, like all of ours were, stopped and made a grab for his nose, and I knew he was allergic to something—maybe to too wet feet. When he’d finished his fancy sneeze, he said, sniffing at something he couldn’t see, but which he knew was there, “I still smell something—d-dead!—something in that direction over there!”

I sniffed in the direction he pointed, and sure enough, there was that same deadish smell, like we’d smelled in the cabin, only this time it was mixed up with the friendly odor of a woods after a rain.

My fat goat smelled in the same direction, and so did my acrobatic goat, and we all smelled the same very unpleasant odor of something dead.

“I wonder who it is,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly looked like he was thinking about a ghost again. And would you believe it? I heard music coming from somewhere—in fact, from the direction of the cabin we’d come from, and I knew it was the radio that had plopped open when my fat goat had left it in a hurry, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I recognized the tune, and it was, “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart.”

Well, we hurried on, following our trail, tickled that we had managed to get out so easy, but wondering to each other if Old hook-nosed John Till had had anything to do with the kidnapping, and if maybe he knew where the ransom money was, and why he hadn’t come dashing back into the kitchen to catch us.

“I think I know why,” Circus said, “he’s just like my dad was before he was saved. He couldn’t even stand to see a bottle of whiskey without taking a drink, and I’ll bet when he saw that big half-empty bottle out on the porch he just grabbed it up and started gulping it down.”

Then Circus, being a little bashful about talking about things like that, like some boys sometimes are, looked up, and seeing the limb of a tree extending out over where he was going to walk, leaped up and caught hold of it with his hands and chinned himself two or three times, while Dragonfly, who was beside him under the leaves of that branch, let out a yell and said, “Hey, watch out! Quit making it rain on me!” which is what Circus had done—the leaves of that branch getting most of the water shaken off and a lot of it falling on Dragonfly all over.

Well, we were in a pretty big hurry, so we all zipped on, talking and asking questions and trying to figure out what on earth the deadish smell was and also wishing we had all the gang with us, and a spade, and had time to follow the other trail of broken twigs and actually find the ransom money.

In a little while we came to the place where we’d first found the envelop with the invisible-ink map in it. There we stopped for half a jiffy, and looked all around to be sure we would remember the place again when we came back. About twenty minutes later, we came puffing into camp in clear sunshiny weather, the sky having cleared off after the storm, but we were as wet as drowned rats.

The very minute the gang saw us come sloshing up to our tents, Big Jim called out, “Where on earth have you been?”

Well, we’d agreed to keep our secret a secret for awhile, anyway not to tell Barry first, but to rest of the gang—all except Tom Till. We might decide to tell John Till too, but we wouldn’t if Big Jim said not to, on account of it might spoil Tom’s vacation and he wouldn’t have any fun the rest of our camping trip.

Dragonfly answered Big Jim’s question in a mischievous voice by saying, “Bill’s been walking on my neck, and Poetry and Circus have been making soup out of me, and I am a Negro,” which wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know about Crusoe, his black Man Friday and the cannibals.

As soon as we could, we changed to dry clothes, and Big Jim took command of us by saying, “O.K., boys, I’m in charge of camp for the rest of the day. Barry got a terribly important letter in the mail an hour ago, and he’s had to go to Bemidji. He’ll be back in time for our Campfire get-together.”

Well, that was that. If there was anything I liked better than anything else, it was to be alone with only our gang, when it can be its own boss, even though we all liked Barry a lot and would do anything he said any time.

“Bill’s my boss,” Dragonfly said.

I looked at Dragonfly and then at Big Jim, and winked.

Big Jim grinned back, and then said to all of us, “Let’s get the camp chores done.” Then he gave commands to different ones of us to do different things. Poetry and I had the job of burying the entrails and heads of some fish which Barry’d caught, and which had just been cleaned before he left,—that being the best thing to do with fish heads and other parts of the fish that you aren’t going to eat. “The spade’s in Barry’s tent,” Big Jim said, and a minute later Poetry and I were on our way up along the shore to the burying place.

We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when we heard somebody coming behind us on the run, and it was Dragonfly, with an excited face, who said, “You crazy goofs! You going to dig for the treasure without letting me go along?”

“Why hello, my Man Friday!” I said pleasantly, and told him what we were having to do. “Here—you carry the spade and do the digging.” And Poetry said, “And you can carry these fish insides,” and with that he handed him a smallish pail he’d been carrying.

But Dragonfly wouldn’t, so I let him disobey for once. When we got to the place, we saw all kinds of little mounds of fresh dirt where other fish entrails had been buried. And then all of a sudden Poetry said, “Hey, here’s fish heads scattered all over the ground here!”

I looked, and sure enough, he was right. All around there were old half-eaten bullheads, and the eyes and ugly noses of walleyed pike and two or three spatulate-shaped snouts of big northern pike.

“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “Somebody’s been digging them up”—and then he grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of what might have been several very noisy sneezes, and said, “I—kerchew!—I-smell—kerchew!—s-something d-dead.”

Well, that was that, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, ’cause right away I knew that what we’d smelled back in the mystery cabin, and around the outside, was maybe something like this.

“It’s raccoons,” I heard a voice saying behind us, and recognized it as Circus’s voice, his pop being a hunter as you know, and he would know about coons’ habits.

“Big Jim sent me to tell you guys to bury’m deep, ’cause the chipmunks and coons’ve been digging’m all up again.” Well, we buried our stuff very deep, each one of us doing a little bit, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling very happy. I seemed to feel that all the mystery and excitement we’d been having and which had been getting more exciting every minute, was all made out of our own imagination.

“Do you suppose that map with invisible ink on it was only maybe showing somebody where a fish cemetery is?” Poetry asked, and I felt terribly saddish inside. We all looked at each other with saddish eyes, and felt even sadder.

“Then Tom’s daddy is only up here on a fishing trip, and he’s maybe rented the old cabin from somebody for a while,” I said.

We went back to camp feeling terribly blue.

Well, after supper and when it got almost dark, it was time for Eagle Eye’s blood curdling Indian story. We knew that he being a Christian Indian, would tell us a Bible story too, which is one reason why our parents had wanted us to come on this camping trip in the first place. Every night before we tumbled into bed, we would listen to a short talk from the Bible, and then somebody would lead us in prayer. Sometimes somebody gave us a talk about boys and what boys ought to know about themselves and God, and how God expected everybody in the world to behave themselves—things like that. Not a one of the gang was sissified enough to be ashamed of being a Christian, and as you know, every single one of us nearly always carried his New Testament with him wherever he went.

We started our evening campfire, which was going to be what is called an Indian fire. It was after Eagle Eye’s story that I found out about Little Tom’s terribly sad heart, and I was even gladder than I was that he hadn’t been with us in the afternoon. I’ll tell you about that in the very next chapter.