Snow-in-the-face had a pucker on his brown forehead and looked worried.
“Ho hum,” I thought, and shifted myself to another uncomfortable position on the hot boat seat I was on—any position being uncomfortable when the fish don’t bite, and the deer flies are swarming around your legs and hands and biting fiercely just like you wish the fish would.
Pretty soon, I looked over at the pretty pine-covered island and wished I could go over there and sit down in the shade for awhile. I was also remembering that that was the very island I’d wanted to explore when I’d first gotten the idea of playing Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, and which had got us tangled up in the mystery of the buried treasure, most of which we’d finally found. The rest of it Old John Till probably had somewhere, wherever he was, which nobody knew.
“I’m terribly hot,” I said to the rest of us in our boat. “Let’s go over to that island and lie down in the shade awhile.” The rest of us thought it was a good idea, and so we pulled in our lazy lines and also pulled anchor and rowed over, and in a little while, Poetry and I were strolling along following the shore around to the side where we could look across and see our camp away out across the lake. It was one of the prettiest islands I’d ever seen, and had great big Norway pines and spruce and Tamarack and also ferns and all kinds of wild flowers such as red-flowered wild columbine and white goldthread and, in a boggy place, some pitcher plants, which had queer-looking green leaves that looked like one of the green pitchers Mom has on our sideboard at home—also the leaves looked like the lips of a French horn that one of the men at Sugar Creek plays in the band on Saturday night....
We’d left Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim and Dragonfly back at the shore in the boat, ’cause Snow-in-the-face had acted like he didn’t want to come with us, and Dragonfly had been so lazy and also afraid of smelling wild flowers and having to sneeze a lot—that being one of the reasons he’d come on this vacation with us, so he could get away from Sugar Creek flowers and timothy hay and ragweed and everything else which would make him sneeze.
“You know what?” Poetry said to me all of a sudden, and when I said, “No, what?” he said, “This would be a good island for John Till to hide on. Maybe when he got out of the icehouse, he came over here.”
“But how could he get here? We had his boat.”
“He might swim,” Poetry said, but it wasn’t a good idea because it was pretty far from any other shore over here, so I said, “Of course, he could rent a boat from almost any resort up here,”—which he could.
We were standing right that minute close to a sandy beach and the waves were washing up in a very lazy friendly way, when all of a sudden, Poetry said, “Hey, look, somebody’s been here. Somebody’s had a boat beached here on the sand,” which he had, but it was gone now.
“Boy oh boy!” I said, all of a sudden getting excited, “and here’re shoe tracks, going back into the island somewhere.”