We are following a hunch.”
(Signed) Robinson Crusoe, his Man
Friday and his Three Goats.
It was an easy way for us to get away without having to explain where we were going and why.
In only a little while we were gone, following the sandy road toward the place where the week before Poetry and I had found the little Ostberg girl, all of us explaining some of the mystery to Little Jim as we went along, my Man Friday carrying the spade we were going to dig up the money with, and Little Jim carrying his stick and an empty gunny sack he’d found.
“What’s the gunny sack for?” Dragonfly asked him, and Little Jim said, “We’re going after buried treasure, aren’t we?”—which we were.
When we came to the place where we had built the imaginary fire with which to cook Dragonfly, Little Jim got the cutest grin on his face and said, “Here’s where I come in.... Somebody shoot me quick, so I can turn into a goat.”
“BANG!” I said to him, pointing my finger at him. “Now you’re dead.”
Little Jim plopped himself down on the ground, then jumped up and said, “Now I’m a goat.” He began to sniff at my hand like a good goat. He surely was a swell guy and had a good imagination, I thought—only for some reason our game had turned from innocent fun to a very serious and maybe a dangerous game.
We followed our broken twig trail to where it branched off in two directions, one of the trails going toward the cabin where we’d seen John Till twice, and the other one going toward where the ransom money was buried, we hoped.
“Which way first?” my Man Friday asked me, then got a screwed up expression on his face, sniffed, and said, “Hey! there’s that deadish smell again!”