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
And then, all of a sudden, Dragonfly set it down on the ground where
some of it splashed over the top onto Poetry’s shoes, and Dragonfly got
a stubborn look on his face and said, “I think the cannibal ought to
carry it. I’m not even _Friday_ yet--not till the cannibal gets killed.”
Well, he was right, so Poetry looked at me, and I at him, and he picked
up the can, and we went on till we came to the boathouse, which if
you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North,” you already know about.
It was going to be fun initiating Dragonfly--just how much fun I didn’t
know--and I certainly didn’t know what a mystery we were going to run
into in less than fifteen minutes of the next half hour.
In only a little while we came to Santa’s boathouse, Santa as you
maybe know being the barrel-shaped owner of the property where we had
pitched our tents. He also owned a lot of other lakeshore property up
here in this part of the Paul Bunyan country. Everybody called him
Santa ’cause he was round like all the different Santa Clauses we’d
seen and was always laughing.
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.
“Hi,” we all answered him, Poetry setting the prune can of water down
with a savage sigh like it was too heavy to stand and hold.
Santa was standing beside his boathouse door, with a hammer in one hand
and a handsaw in the other.
“Where to, with that can of water?” he asked us, and Dragonfly said,
“We’re going to pour the water in a big hole up there on the hill and
make a new lake.”
Santa grinned at all of us with a mischievous twinkle in his bluish
eyes, knowing Dragonfly hadn’t told any lie but was only doing what
most boys do most all the time anyway--playing “Make-believe.”
“May we look inside your boathouse a minute?” Poetry asked, and Santa
said, “Certainly, go right in,” which we did, and looked around a
little.
Poetry acted very mysterious, like he was thinking about something
very important, while he frowned with his fat forehead, and looked
at different things such as the cot in the farther end, the shavings
and sawdust on the floor, and the carpenter’s tools above the work
bench--which were chisels, screwdrivers, saws, planes and also hammers
and nails; also Poetry examined the different kinds of boards made out
of beautifully grained wood.
“You boys like to hold this saw and hammer a minute?” Santa asked us,
and handed a hammer to me and a saw handle to Dragonfly, which we took,
not knowing why.
“That’s the hammer and that’s the saw the kidnapper used the night he
was building the gravehouse in the Indian cemetery,” Santa said, and I
looked and felt puzzled, till he explained, saying, “The police found
them the night you boys caught him.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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