WE hurried back to camp as quickly as we could, sneaked up to our own tent where my acrobatic goat and my Man Friday were sleeping, and started undressing and getting into our pajamas. I felt pretty saddish on account of the map being gone, but there wasn’t anything we could do till morning.

We kept our flashlights turned off so as not to wake up the other two guys. We could see a little on account of the moonlight that was pouring down on the top of our tent.

“Where you guys been?” my Man Friday said to me from behind me.

His voice scared me ’cause I’d thought he was asleep. “We’ve been out looking for the invisible-ink map,” my fat goat answered for me—“either somebody stole it out of Robinson Crusoe’s shirt pocket, or we lost it back on the trail somewhere this afternoon.”

“Oh, is that where you’ve been?” my Man Friday said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve got it here under my pillow. I was afraid somebody would steal it, so I took it out of Crusoe’s pocket and hid it here.”

“WHAT!” I said fiercely, more disgusted with him than I had been for a long time. I made a dive for him, so half mad I could have beat him up.

“Don’t hurt me!” he cried, turning his face and burying it in his pillow, which, the minute he did it, his nose objected to it by making him sneeze. “Your Man Friday—kerchew!—has to look after you, doesn’t he?”

Well, that was that. Poetry and I were so tired and so sleepy that we didn’t feel like telling Dragonfly and Circus what we had seen going on up at the old cabin.

I got the map away from Dragonfly and put it down inside my sleeping bag with me, next to my chest, happy that it wasn’t lost, and feeling cozy and warm and glad to have a warm bed to sleep in, and the next thing I knew it was morning. Our mystery was still unsolved, but it was a very pretty wonderful sunshiny day, with a pretty blue sky, and the lake was as smooth as a pane of blue glass.

Little Tom Till was our main problem. Barry still hadn’t come back, so Big Jim was in charge of us till noon. I’d promised to let Little Jim play Robinson Crusoe with us today—but what to do about Tom Till? I hated to tell him his daddy was up here in the North Woods and that the police were looking for him.

“How’ll we get away without taking Big Jim and Little Tom Till and without having them ask all kinds of questions?” I asked Poetry who grinned and said, “’Tsas easy as pie. The rest of you just sneak away without anyone noticing you, and I’ll leave this note on Big Jim’s tent pole.”

Poetry had a note already written. It was in poetry and was:

It was an easy way for us to get away without having to explain where we were going and why.

In only a little while we were gone, following the sandy road toward the place where the week before Poetry and I had found the little Ostberg girl, all of us explaining some of the mystery to Little Jim as we went along, my Man Friday carrying the spade we were going to dig up the money with, and Little Jim carrying his stick and an empty gunny sack he’d found.

“What’s the gunny sack for?” Dragonfly asked him, and Little Jim said, “We’re going after buried treasure, aren’t we?”—which we were.

When we came to the place where we had built the imaginary fire with which to cook Dragonfly, Little Jim got the cutest grin on his face and said, “Here’s where I come in.... Somebody shoot me quick, so I can turn into a goat.”

“BANG!” I said to him, pointing my finger at him. “Now you’re dead.”

Little Jim plopped himself down on the ground, then jumped up and said, “Now I’m a goat.” He began to sniff at my hand like a good goat. He surely was a swell guy and had a good imagination, I thought—only for some reason our game had turned from innocent fun to a very serious and maybe a dangerous game.

We followed our broken twig trail to where it branched off in two directions, one of the trails going toward the cabin where we’d seen John Till twice, and the other one going toward where the ransom money was buried, we hoped.

“Which way first?” my Man Friday asked me, then got a screwed up expression on his face, sniffed, and said, “Hey! there’s that deadish smell again!”

Sure enough it was. I turned my nose in different directions to see which way it was coming from, but couldn’t tell for sure.

“Come on!” my acrobatic goat said, “Let’s get going!” and he and my fat goat started off on the trail we hadn’t followed yet. There wasn’t any use for me to get peeved that they didn’t wait for my orders before going ahead, so I said, “Sure, that’s what I say,” and away we all went, Little Jim carrying his stick, with a grin and also a very serious expression on his smallish face. He held his stick like he was ready to sock anything that might need socking and swished on up ahead of me so the three goats could be together.

It was fun following the trail, and yet as we moved along from one broken twig to another and to another, I was remembering what a dangerous surprise we had found yesterday when we had come to the end of that other trail.

It certainly wasn’t a straight trail, but kept zig-zagging in different directions, but it seemed from the direction of the sun that it was working around toward the lake again. Pretty soon we came to a hill and looked down and sure enough there was the lake ahead of us, and away down at the foot of the hill we could see through the heavyish undergrowth there was a building of some kind. The broken wild plum twig where we were standing pointed right straight toward the oldish building.

We stopped, surprised. I had expected to find a little mound of some kind, or some markings on a tree or something, but certainly not an oldish building.

In a jiffy we had out the invisible-ink map and were studying it. There wasn’t anything on it that looked like a house.... “It’s an old icehouse,” Poetry said, and it was—a dilapidated oldish unpainted log icehouse—an icehouse being a building of some kind that people up in the lake country build to store ice in it in the winter-time, so that in the hot summer they can have plenty of ice for their iceboxes.

“Our hot trail suddenly turned cold,” my fat goat said, trying to be funny and not being very. It certainly wasn’t what I’d expected to find.

“O.K.,” Little Jim said, “let’s go down and start digging.”

“In an icehouse?” my Man Friday said, astonished. “You wouldn’t expect to find any buried treasure in a thousand blocks of ice!”

“Why not?” Poetry said. “Most icehouses have as much sawdust in them as they do ice. The money’s maybe buried in there in the sawdust.”

Well that seemed to make sense, so we circled around and came up to the icehouse on the side where there was the most shrubbery and where we’d be the least likely to be seen by anybody in case anybody was watching.

We stopped about twenty feet from the place and listened, but didn’t hear a thing, and then I got a sort of a feverish feeling in my mind. I felt like maybe we were actually going to find the ransom money—a whole twenty-five thousand dollars in 10 and 20 and 50 dollar bills. Say, the mystery of playing Robinson Crusoe seemed like an honest-to-goodness reality. I felt mysterious and afraid and brave at the same time.

“All right, come on, you three goats. Come on, Friday,” I said, all of a sudden waking up to the fact that I was supposed to be the leader. “Let’s go in and dig.”

The entrance was on the side opposite to the lake. The very old heavy barn door was wide open on its rusty hinges, but there were short boards stretched across the entrance like the kind some people use to board up the entrance to the coal bin in their basement.

I looked over the top of the highest board which was just about as high as my chin, and didn’t see a thing inside except sawdust. In a jiffy we had all scrambled up and were inside in the dark icehouse, which didn’t have any windows and was only one big room maybe 20 feet square. It seemed kinda like the haymow in our barn at Sugar Creek, only instead of having nice alfalfa hay in it, it had sawdust. Down underneath we knew there were scores of big blocks of ice which somebody had cut out of the lake in the winter-time and had stored away here for summer use.

The old icehouse was also about the same shape as the woodshed beside our red-brick schoolhouse back at Sugar Creek, where we had had many a gang meeting. I noticed that the only light that came in was from the door which, as I told you, was boarded up to as high as my chin, although there was a smallish crack between two logs on the side next to the lake.

It only took a jiffy for our eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. I looked around but couldn’t see anything but sawdust.

“Hey,” Poetry said all of a sudden from the other side where he had gone to look around. “It looks like the sawdust has been disturbed over here—like somebody had been digging here lately.”

Say, you can imagine how we felt. I could just see in my mind’s eye Little Jim’s gunny sack stuffed with money and all of us coming grinning happily back into camp, with Big Jim and Little Tom Till and maybe Barry Boyland, looking at us with astonished eyes. Also I could imagine what “The Sugar Creek Times” would print about us, and also how happy the Ostberg girl’s daddy would be, so I said, “O.K., Friday, give me the spade.”

“Me dig,” Dragonfly said, “—me white man’s slave.” With that he scrambled across to where Poetry was; but Poetry hadn’t waited for him but was already down on his knees digging with his bare hands, which is a good way to dig in sawdust.

Almost right away all of us were down on our knees digging as fast as we could with our bare hands, only Little Jim was using his stick to help him, and I was using the spade which I’d taken away from Dragonfly, to shovel aside the pile of sawdust that I was digging out of my hole.

My fat goat spoke up then, and said, “D’you guys know that Minnesota is called the Gopher State?”

Pretty soon my spade struck something hard, and I felt a thrill go through me. “Hey,” I said, “I’ve struck something! I’ve found it!” expecting it to be a box or a smallish trunk or maybe a fishing tackle box, like the kind the kidnapper had had the night we caught him, which you know about if you’ve read the book, “Adventure in an Indian Cemetery.”

Almost before I had the words out of my excited mouth, there was a mad scramble of boys’ feet swishing across the sawdust from different directions, and in a jiffy most of the rest of us were all around me looking down into my hole to see what I had found. I shoved my spade in and out a few times, but it didn’t sound like it was striking a tin box or a trunk or anything.

“Listen!” I said, which we all did, but I couldn’t tell what it sounded like.

“Let me get it out for you!” my acrobatic goat said.

I let him run his long right arm down into the hole. He scooped out several handfuls of sawdust and then let out a disappointed sniff and said, “You’ve struck ice, Robinson Crusoe! This is an icehouse!” I put my own hand down in the hole and my fingers touched something cold. I also pulled out a smallish piece of ice which my spade had chipped off.

“Anybody else strike ice?” I asked, and right that second I noticed Little Jim over in a corner, prying at something with his stick, with his tongue between his teeth like he has it sometimes when he’s working at something or other. He had a happy grin on his face also, which I could see on account of he was facing the opening where the light was coming in.

“What you got there, Little Jim?” I asked my blue-eyed goat, and he said, “I don’t know. It’s all covered with sawdust.” Almost before he’d said it, I saw two great big round glassy eyes, a very large spatulate-shaped snout and a longish body that looked like a small log of fireplace wood.

Poetry saw it at the same time I did, but thought quicker, and exclaimed, “Hey, Gang! Little Jim’s dug up a terribly big northern pike!”

Quick, we started to help him get it out of the hole, although what we wanted to get it out for, I didn’t know. That buried fish could mean only one thing and that was that somebody had caught it in the lake and had dug down here in the sawdust till he had reached the ice, and had laid the fish down on it, and covered it up so it would keep cold and wouldn’t spoil like fish do almost right away in warm weather, unless you put them on ice.

“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “I’ve found another fish over here!” And he had.

We all stopped and looked at each other and I felt like the bottom of my life had fallen out. Almost before I had thought the next saddish disappointed thought, I’d said it to the rest of the gang and it was, “So this’s what our mysterious map brought us to. We should have known anybody wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a map right out in plain sight for anybody to find, if it showed where to dig for any buried treasure!”

There certainly wasn’t anything unusual about digging up fish in an icehouse anyway. We’d buried some in the icehouse at our camp last year when we’d been up here, and then, a week later, when we’d been ready to go home we’d dug them up and packed them with sawdust and ice in a keg and taken them back to Sugar Creek.

So that was that. We might as well go home, I thought, and said so. “Let’s get out of here and go home, and keep still to everybody about what fools we’ve all been and—”

But Poetry interrupted me by saying, “We’ll have to bury them again, or they’ll spoil, and John Till’ll be madder than a hornet!”

“WHAT?” I said, and then remembered that we weren’t very far from John Till’s cabin, and that we’d seen him coming right this very direction last night in a boat, and that one of the fish had been about the size of the one Little Jim had just dug up.

Thinking about John Till again made me decide it was time for us all to get out of here in a hurry, so I started to dig with the spade real quick to make Little Jim’s hole deep enough and long enough all the way down so we could lay the big northern pike’s whole length on the ice before covering it up.

“You bury yours again, too,” I said to Dragonfly, and he started to dig his hole again, working as fast of he could.

Right that second Poetry, who was on his knees beside me, said, “D’you ever see such a fat-stomached northern pike in your life?”

I stopped digging a half jiffy and looked at it, and never had, except one I’d seen dead lying on a sandy beach once, and the flies had been on it and it was bloated, but this one wasn’t bloated but was like it had been caught only maybe yesterday.

In a little while I had the longish sawdust grave ready to lay the fish corpse in it, when Poetry said to me in a hissing whisper, “SH! BILL—feel here, will you? There’s something queer about this fish’s stomach!”

The very excited sound of his whisper went clear through me and made me feel like maybe he’d discovered something terribly important. I reached out my hands and felt where he was feeling on the sides and stomach of the extra large northern pike, which, even while I was doing it, I thought was about the same size as the one I’d seen in the sink in the old cabin where John Till had been pumping water yesterday.

Say, I could tell by my sense of touch that were was something inside that fish that wasn’t a part of him.

“Look!” Poetry whispered to me again, using his fat right hand to wipe off the sawdust from the bottom of the pike’s stomach. “Here’s a place where it’s been sliced open, and sewed up again. What do you s’pose it’s got in it?”

Well, you can guess what I was supposing, ’cause I was remembering that yesterday in the old cabin I’d seen a big northern the same size as this one, and that John Till had a big hunting knife in his hand like the kind Barry uses to clean fish, and also I remembered that last night in the middle of the moonlit night, we’d seen John Till get into a boat with a stringer of big fish and row up the lake in this direction.

Dragonfly must have been listening to Poetry and me, instead of burying his fish like I’d ordered him, ’cause he spoke up and said, “This one’s been cut open and sewed up again, too.”

Well, you can guess that we were an excited gang of treasure hunters. Of course we didn’t know we’d found anything for sure, but it certainly looked like we had. It wouldn’t take any more than a jiffy and three-fourths to find out. Poetry took his knife which was an official boy scout knife, and had a stag handle, a heavy cutting blade, a screw driver, a bottle and can-opener and a punch blade. He opened the sharp cutting blade and carefully sliced through the heavy string the fish was sewed up with, and right in front of our eyes—all the rest of the gang gathering around to see what in the world—Poetry pulled out a big package of something wrapped in oil paper, the same kind of oil paper my mother has in our kitchen at home, which was waterproof. In another second we had unwrapped the package and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a packet of paper money that looked like dozens and dozens of twenty dollar bills.

If I could have been somebody else standing close by and looking down at me, I’ll bet I’d have seen my eyes almost bulging out of their sockets with surprise and wonder and excitement.

“We’ve found it, Gang!” I said to us, and I knew we had.

Dragonfly piped up and said, “I’ll bet there’s a dozen other big fish buried here with money in ’em.”

It was a wonderful feeling. First we’d found the invisible-ink map, and then the trail of broken twigs, which we’d followed in two different directions, and now we’d found the money itself. Boy oh boy, oh boy! It was too good to be true!

“Now we know what the deadish smell was,” Dragonfly said, but Little Jim said, “What deadish smell?”

Dragonfly answered, saying, “John Till took the fish’s insides out while he was in the cabin, and maybe instead of burying them, just threw them outside somewhere,” which I thought was pretty sensible for Dragonfly to figure out.

But we couldn’t just stay here, and be like King Midas in the fairy story every child ought to know, and count our money. We ought to get back to camp and tell the gang and Barry and let the whole world know what we’d found.

“Let’s get all of it dug up and take it away before John Till finds out we discovered his hiding place,” Poetry said.

“But there might be a dozen other fish with money in them,” I said, “and it won’t be safe to stay that long. It might take a half hour to find all of ’em. We’ve got to get out of here quick and get some help.”

Well, it certainly wasn’t any time to argue, with maybe the whole 25 thousand dollars buried in the sawdust all around us. But we did have to decide whether to take what we’d found and beat it to camp, and come back with help, or to dig up all the fish we could find right now, take the money out, shove it all into Little Jim’s gunny sack and come happily back into camp with every dollar of it.

Little Jim piped up with a bright idea which was, “Let’s dig up all the fish real quick, stuff ’em in my gunny sack and beat it home to camp, and take the money out on the way maybe—or else take the fish home for dinner.” I looked at his excited bluish eyes, and forgot that he was a goat, and thought how much I liked him. “Boy!” he said, with a swell grin on his mouse-like face. “Won’t Mr. Ostberg be tickled to have his money back for the mission hospital!”

Here I’d been thinking about what a BIG reward I, Bill Collins, was going to get for finding the money, and Little Jim wasn’t thinking of himself at all, but of the folks in another land who needed the gospel for their souls and a doctor’s help for their bodies. What a swell guy, I thought.

But say, this story is long enough—and that’s really all of it, anyway, that is, all about how we actually found the ransom money, so I’ll have to wind up the whole thing in another paragraph or two. That wasn’t all the exciting adventures we had on our Northern camping trip, though, ’cause a new and very dangerous adventure began to happen to us even before we got out of that old icehouse that day.

While we were digging and finding fish with sewed-up stomachs and stuffing them into Little Jim’s gunny sack, to take home to camp, all of a sudden I thought I heard a noise outside.

“Sh!” I said to us. “Somebody’s coming!”

We all stopped stock still and listened, and sure enough I had heard a noise. Out on the lake there was the sound of a high-powered outboard motor that sounded like it wasn’t any more than a hundred yards from shore.

I could imagine that somebody on the other side of the lake had seen us and was coming roarety-sizzle across to stop whatever we were doing. Little Jim grabbed up his stick and Poetry’s grip tightened on his scout knife handle till the knuckles on his hand turned white, he was holding it so tight.

“Quick!” I said to all of us, “let’s get out of here with what we’ve got, or it’ll be too late!”

I grabbed up the gunny sack, lugged it toward the exit, all of us getting there at about the same time. Boy oh boy, if only we could get out and make a dive for the woods and start to camp without being seen.

But as I said, this story is already finished—and what happened next is the beginning of another exciting adventure.

Even while we were climbing out of that icehouse I just knew that long before we got home with our ransom money, there’d be some dangerous excitement that would take not only a lot of quick thinking on the part of every one of us, but some quick acting as well. ’Cause the outboard motor was roaring toward our shore like whoever was driving it was in a terrible hurry to stop us from doing whatever we were doing.

I hope I’ll have time right away, to tell you this last story of our adventures in the North Woods.

THE END

When the Gang decided to play Robinson Crusoe up in the North Woods they had no idea that they would run into such exciting adventures. They discovered honest-to-goodness treasure and, of all places, in ... but read the story, The Sugar creek Gang Digs for Treasure.

Be sure to read all the books in the VKP Series. They are:

The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North

Adventure in an Indian Cemetery

The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure

North Woods Manhunt

The Haunted House at Sugar Creek

Lost in a Sugar Creek Blizzard

The Sugar Creek Gang on the Mexican Border

The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek

10,000 Minutes at Sugar Creek

The Trap Line Thief at Sugar Creek

Blue Cow at Sugar Creek

$1.00 each

Published and Distributed exclusively by

222 E. Willow Ave. Wheaton, Illinois