A jiffy later, Barry in the station wagon was riding down the lane toward Santa’s boathouse and I knew that in a few jiffies more he’d be pulling in low up a steep hill, swishing along a sandy trail at the top, and driving like mad down a winding road through the forest to the firewarden’s house, which you know about if you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North.” There he’d make a terribly fast phone call to the police—or else let the firewarden’s wife do it while he and the firewarden would beat it on to the Indian cemetery. They’d probably stop before they got there though, and sneak carefully up along the lake shore to where Bob’s boat would be coming in, and, if they could, they’d capture both Bob and John. I felt terribly disappointed inside, like I’d just blown up a very pretty great big colored balloon, and somebody had stuck a pin into it and it had burst—not knowing there was going to be more excitement where we were than where Barry and the firewarden would be.
9
THE station wagon hadn’t any sooner disappeared and the whirring sound of its motor faded away, leaving us all with Barry’s orders to go back to bed ringing in our ears, than I remembered the blank sheet of typewriter paper I had in my pocket and which we hadn’t bothered to show to Barry but only John Till’s note to his boy, Bob.
Little Jim and Tom Till didn’t know anything about what was going on, and they, being sleepy anyway, seemed glad to get back to their tent and make a dive back into the sleep from which they had dragged themselves a little while before.
Dragonfly was suspicious, though, and when he noticed Poetry and Big Jim and Circus and me talking together, he got a stubborn expression in his voice and whined a question at us which was, “You guys got a secret of some kind?”
We didn’t want him to start any fuss; besides sometimes he wasn’t such a dumb person to let in on a secret, so for a little while we left Little Jim and Tom Till alone in their tent and the five of us went into the other tent, lit a lantern, unfolded the piece of typewriter paper and heated it over the hot top of the lantern, and in only a few minutes we were looking at a map of the territory up here—showing the camp where we were and the place where the little Ostberg girl had been lying, just like the other map we’d found. Also different other places were identified, such as Santa’s boathouse, the firewarden’s cabin, and the broken twig trail which led off in different directions....
“Both maps are alike,” Circus said, and it looked like they were. Poetry traced the faint markings of the new one with his pencil so we could study it better.
“What do you suppose Bob had two maps for?” Dragonfly asked, and Poetry answered by saying, “He maybe had only one at first, but when he lost it,—the one we found last week—he or Hook-nose made him another one.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a questionmark in my voice, “but why draw them in invisible ink?”