“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.”