There were spider webs on nearly everything, and dust on the floor, and it looked like nobody had lived here for an awful long time, maybe years and years. Besides the front porch there were just the three rooms—the kitchen with the sink and pitcher pump, the main room with the fireplace and a smallish bedroom which had a curtain hanging between it and the main room. In the bedroom was a rollaway bed all folded up and rolled against a wall.
Even though the broken twig trail had led us here, still we couldn’t find a thing that looked like anything the ransom money might have been hidden in.
So since the rain was still pouring down, we decided to call a meeting and talk things over. We pulled the three stiff-backed chairs up to the table in the center of the main room, and also the big chair, which I turned sidewise, and I sat on one of the wooden arms. Poetry set the short flickering candle in a saucer in the center of the table, and I, being supposed to be the leader, called the meeting to order, just like Big Jim does when the gang is all present. It felt good to be the leader, even though I knew I wasn’t—and Poetry would have made a better one.
We talked all at once, and also one at a time part of the time, and not one of us had any good ideas as to what to do, except when the storm was over to follow our trail of broken twigs back to where the girl had been found and from there to the road and back to camp.
I looked at Poetry’s fat face and at Dragonfly’s large eyes and his crooked nose and at Circus’s monkey-looking face, and we all looked at each other.
All of a sudden Poetry’s forehead puckered and he lifted his head and sniffed two or three times like he was smelling something strange, and said, “You guys smell anything funny, like—kinda like a dead chicken or something?”
I sniffed a couple of times, and we all did, and as plain as the nose on my face I did smell something—something dead. I’d smell that smell many a time back along Sugar Creek when there was a dead rabbit or something that the buzzards were circling around up in the sky, or had swooped down on it and were eating it.
Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes looked startled, and I knew that if I could have seen mine in a mirror, they’d have looked just as startled.
“It smells like a dead possum carcass that didn’t get buried,” Circus said, he especially knowing what they smell like on account of his pop catches many possums and sells the fur. Sometimes on a hunting trip when he catches a possum, he skins it before going on, and leaves the carcass in the woods or in a field.
It was probably a dead animal of some kind, we decided, and went right on with our meeting, talking over everything from the beginning up to where we were right that minute—the kidnapping, the found girl, the police which had come that night and the plaster-of-Paris cast they’d made of the kidnapper’s tire tracks, and the kidnapper himself which we’d caught in the Indian cemetery, which you know all about maybe, if you’ve read the other stories called “Sugar Creek Gang Goes North” and “Adventure in an Indian Cemetery”....