“Goof!” he said to me, which was what he was always calling me, but I shushed him, and said, “Keep still, Goat! Who’s the head of this treasure hunt?”
He puckered his fat forehead at me, and half yelled above the roar of the rain on the roof, “If there’s a radio, it means somebody’s been living here just lately.”
“And if there isn’t, then what?”
It was Dragonfly who saw the edge of a newspaper sticking out of the crack between the folded-up mattress of the rollaway bed which was standing in the corner. He quick pulled it out and opened it, and we looked at the date, and it was just a week old. In fact, it was dated the day before we’d caught the kidnapper, so we were pretty sure he’d been here at that same time.
Well, the rain on the roof was getting less noisy, and we knew that pretty soon we’d have to be starting for camp. We wouldn’t dare try to follow the trail of broken twigs to the place where we thought the money was buried, because we had orders to be back at camp an hour before supper time, to help with the camp chores. That night we were all going to have a very special campfire service, with Eagle Eye, an honest-to-goodness Chippewa Indian, telling us a blood curdling story of some kind—a real live Indian story.
“Let’s get going,” I said to the rest of us—“just the minute it stops raining.”
“Do we go out the door or the window?” my Man Friday wanted to know, and I took a look at the only door, saw that it was nailed shut, tighter than anything.
I grunted and groaned and pulled at the knob, and then gave up and said, “Looks like we’ll use the window.”
It was still raining pretty hard, and I had the feeling I wanted to go out and take a last look at the lake. I’d been thinking also if this cabin was fixed up a little and the underbrush and stuff between it and the lake and a battered down old clock, was cleared away, and if the walls were painted a light color, it might make a pretty nice cabin for anybody to rent and spend a summer vacation in, like a lot of people in America do do. On the wall of the porch I noticed a smallish mirror which was dusty and needed to be wiped off before I could see myself. I stopped just a second to see what I looked like, like I sometimes do at home, especially just before I make a dash to our dinner table—and sometimes get stopped before I can sit down—and have to go back and finish washing my face and combing my hair before I get to take even one bite of Mom’s swell fried chicken.
I certainly didn’t look much like the pictures I’d seen of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of looking like a shipwrecked person with home-made clothes, I looked just like an ordinary “wreck” without any ship. My red hair was mussed up like everything, my freckled face was dirty and my two large front teeth still looked too big for my face, which would have to grow a lot more before it was big enough to fit my teeth. I was glad my teeth were already as big as they would ever get—which is why lots of boys and girls look funny when they’re just my size, Mom says. Our teeth grow in as large as they’ll ever be, and our faces just sorta take their time.