Paul Hutchens

“ Poetry and poor little pop-eyed Dragonfly acted like they were scared even worse than I was.
When you’re all of a sudden scared like that, you don’t know what to say or think. Things sort of swim in your head and your heart beats fiercely for a minute. Maybe we wouldn’t have been quite so frightened if we hadn’t had so many important things happen to us already on our camping trip, such as finding a little kidnapped girl in this very spot the very first night we’d been up here, and then the next night catching the kidnapper himself in a spooky Indian cemetery. ”

“ Dragonfly looked half crazy standing there tied to the tree and with a grin on his face, watching Poetry stack a little stack of sticks in one place for our imaginary fire. We wouldn’t start a real fire on account of it would have been absolutely crazy to start one, nobody with any sense starting a fire in a forest on account of there might be a terrible forest fire and thousands of beautiful trees would be burned, and lots of wild animals, and maybe homes and cottages of people, and even people themselves. ”

“ Santa himself with his big laughing voice called to us when he saw us coming and said, “Well, well, if it isn’t Bill Collins, Dragonfly and Poetry,” Santa being a smart man, knowing that if there’s anything a boy likes to hear better than anything else, it’s somebody calling him by his name. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was still Robinson Crusoe, and Dragonfly was my Man Friday. Circus and Poetry wanted us to call them the cannibals, but Dragonfly wouldn’t. “I don’t want to have to worry about being eaten up every minute. You’ve got to turn into goats right away. Besides, one cannibal’s already been shot and is supposed to be dead.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ In fact, we were all thrilled with the most interesting excitement we’d had in a long time, ’cause for some reason we were sure we might find something terribly interesting at the end of the trail—if we ever came to it—not knowing that we’d not only find something very interesting but would bump into an experience even more exciting and thrilling than the ones we’d already had on our camping trip—and one that was just as dangerous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ I said, and Poetry said, “Maybe not a one of them’ll be willing to be your Man Friday.”
We didn’t have time to talk about it any further, ’cause right that second Dragonfly came moseying out toward us from his tent, his spindling legs swinging awkwardly and his crooked8 nose and dragonfly-like eyes making him look just like a ridiculous Friday afternoon, I thought.
“He’s the man I want,” I said. “We three have had lots of exciting adventures together, and he’ll be perfect.”
“But he can’t keep quiet when there’s a mystery. He always sneezes just when we don’t want him to.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ While I was looking out at the pretty lake, some of the44 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. ”

“ 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 fish86 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. ”

“ It was fun having our big Indian guest, Eagle Eye, whom we all knew and liked very much, take charge of our meeting. He showed us how to build an Indian fire, which was like this: First he made a little wigwam of some dry tinder and slender sticks, and also some larger sticks all stacked up in the shape of an Indian tepee, with the top ends lapping over each other a little. Then he had us boys drag five or six big long poles from a little shelter nearby, where there was a place for keeping wood dry. ”

“ I hadn’t realized that this little guy liked his wicked daddy a lot, too. This is what he said, “There are a lot of crosses all over the country like the one Eagle Eye told us about—just like the one they put up for his Indian daddy—” Then Little Tom stopped talking and I heard him sniffle and I knew it wasn’t on account of the breeze from the lake or because he was allergic to anything. He liked his daddy and didn’t want him to get drunk and have a car accident and get killed. ”

“ I didn’t know what to say for a jiffy, so I just stood beside him thinking and feeling sorry for him, wishing his pop could be saved like Circus’s pop and that the Till family would all be Christians and go to church. I don’t know why I thought what else I thought just then, but this is what I thought—something I’d heard Old Man Paddler, back at Sugar Creek, say once, and it was, “A lot of husbands are murdering their wives a little at a time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”