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
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?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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