“Maybe so nobody would think they were maps.”
“But how could Bob himself know the different places if he couldn’t see the lines and different marks?” I asked, wondering how.
It was Dragonfly who answered my doubt by saying, “Oh he probably had what they call an ‘original’—and as soon as he’d memorized it, he drew another one in invisible ink and tore the first one up!” His idea made sense, I thought, and said so, and so did Poetry.
Well, we weren’t getting anywhere—and weren’t supposed to anyway. It certainly didn’t seem fair to us that Barry hadn’t let us go with him, but he was camp boss and that was that, and we were supposed to crawl back into our sleeping bags and go to sleep. Imagine that! Right while Barry and the firewarden, and maybe the police, were capturing Old hook-nosed John Till and his son Bob! Imagine it! It was terribly disappointing.
And then all of a sudden Dragonfly gasped and said, “Hey, Gang! Look!” He had the newest map and was holding it up between his dragonfly-like eyes and the light. His voice had contagious excitement in it, so we all looked quick to see what he saw. But it wasn’t anything—only two crude-looking fish away off on the part of the map which was supposed to represent a lake.
“A couple of fish,” I said, disgusted with him for getting us excited over nothing. “That’s to show you there is a lake there.”
“Yeah,” he said, still excited, “but look where they are! They’re right over there where that island is where we caught our walleye today.”
Big Jim answered that by saying, “Maybe they’re supposed to locate a good fishing place.”
And then Dragonfly got another idea which sent our minds whirling like summer cyclones at Sugar Creek, when he said, “You know what that is? That’s where the island is, and that’s where John Till has been catching the big fish to put the ransom money in, and that island’s where maybe the rest of the money is right this very minute. I’ll bet that’s where they’ll go to get the rest of it, if Barry or the police don’t catch ’em first!”
Well, sir, you could have knocked me over with an invisible ink map, when Dragonfly gave us that wonderful idea. It seemed like he was exactly right, and it seemed a shame that I hadn’t thought of it first—in fact, for a minute it almost seemed like I had, because all of a sudden I was remembering what I’d thought in the afternoon when Poetry and I had been exploring that island looking for clues. Also I remembered that that island is where I’d wanted to go to start hunting for the treasure in the first place when I’d thought of playing Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday and also Treasure Island. I just knew that Dragonfly and I were right, so as quick as a flash I said, “If we really want to capture Bob and Old Hook-nose, we’d better beat it over to that little island, and be hiding there somewhere when they get there, and capture them ourselves.”