The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure — John Shaqi
The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for TreasureHutchens, Paul
General
The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure
Hutchens, Paul
Adventure and adventurers -- Juvenile fiction; Christian life -- Juvenile fiction; Treasure troves -- Juvenile fiction
So I stood up and walked like Robinson Crusoe might have walked, in a
little circle around the tree, looking up at the limb where Circus had
been perched, and then at the ground, and at Poetry, my fat goat, who
right then unscrambled himself from the rest of the inhabitants of our
imaginary island, and followed me around, sniffling at my hand, like a
hungry goat that wanted to eat the letter I had.
Abruptly Poetry stopped and said to me, “Sh!” which means to keep
still, which I did, and he said, “Look, here’s a sign of some kind.”
I looked, but didn’t see anything except a small twig about four or
five feet tall that was broken off, and had been left with the top
hanging.
My Man Friday and the acrobatic goat were still scuffling under the
tree, and didn’t seem interested in what we were doing. “What kind of a
sign?” I asked Poetry, knowing that he was one of our gang who was more
interested in woodcraft than most of the gang and was always looking
for signs and trails and things.
“See here,” he said to me, “this is a little birch twig, and somebody’s
broken it part way off and left it hanging.”
“What of it?” I said, remembering that back home at Sugar Creek I’d
done that myself to a chokecherry twig or a willow, and it hadn’t meant
a thing.
“But look which way the top points!” Poetry said mysteriously. “That
means it’s a signal on a trail. It means for us to go in the direction
the top of the broken twig points, and after awhile we’ll find another
broken twig, and whichever way it points we’re to go that way.”
Say, did my disappointed mind ever come to quick life! Although I still
doubted it might mean anything. Right away, we called the other goat
and my Man Friday and let them in on our secret, and we all swished
along, pretending to be scouts, going straight in the direction the
broken twig pointed, all of us looking for another twig farther on.
We walked about twenty yards through the dense growth before we found
another broken twig hanging, but sure enough we did find one, and this
time it was a broken oak twig, and was bent in the opposite direction
we’d come from, which meant the trail went straight on. Then we did get
excited, ’cause we _knew_ we were on somebody’s trail.
My Man Friday was awful dumb for one who was supposed to be used to
outdoor life, though, ’cause he wanted to finish breaking off the top
of the oak twig and also cut off the bottom and make a stick out of it
to carry, and to take home with us back to Sugar Creek when we finished
our vacation. “For a souvenir,” he whined complainingly, when we
wouldn’t let him and made him fold up his pocket knife and put it back
into his pocket again.
“That’s the sign post on our trail,” Poetry explained. “We have to
leave it there so we can follow the trail back to where we started
from, or might get lost,” which I thought was good sense and said so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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