I sniffed in the direction he pointed, and sure enough, there was that same deadish smell, like we’d smelled in the cabin, only this time it was mixed up with the friendly odor of a woods after a rain.
My fat goat smelled in the same direction, and so did my acrobatic goat, and we all smelled the same very unpleasant odor of something dead.
“I wonder who it is,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly looked like he was thinking about a ghost again.
And would you believe it? I heard music coming from somewhere—in fact, from the direction of the cabin we’d come from, and I knew it was the radio that had plopped open when my fat goat had left it in a hurry, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I recognized the tune, and it was, “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart.”
Well, we hurried on, following our trail, tickled that we had managed to get out so easy, but wondering to each other if Old hook-nosed John Till had had anything to do with the kidnapping, and if maybe he knew where the ransom money was, and why he hadn’t come dashing back into the kitchen to catch us.
“I think I know why,” Circus said, “he’s just like my dad was before he was saved. He couldn’t even stand to see a bottle of whiskey without taking a drink, and I’ll bet when he saw that big half-empty bottle out on the porch he just grabbed it up and started gulping it down.”
Then Circus, being a little bashful about talking about things like that, like some boys sometimes are, looked up, and seeing the limb of a tree extending out over where he was going to walk, leaped up and caught hold of it with his hands and chinned himself two or three times, while Dragonfly, who was beside him under the leaves of that branch, let out a yell and said, “Hey, watch out! Quit making it rain on me!” which is what Circus had done—the leaves of that branch getting most of the water shaken off and a lot of it falling on Dragonfly all over.
Well, we were in a pretty big hurry, so we all zipped on, talking and asking questions and trying to figure out what on earth the deadish smell was and also wishing we had all the gang with us, and a spade, and had time to follow the other trail of broken twigs and actually find the ransom money.
In a little while we came to the place where we’d first found the envelop with the invisible-ink map in it. There we stopped for half a jiffy, and looked all around to be sure we would remember the place again when we came back.
About twenty minutes later, we came puffing into camp in clear sunshiny weather, the sky having cleared off after the storm, but we were as wet as drowned rats.