Sure enough it was. I turned my nose in different directions to see which way it was coming from, but couldn’t tell for sure.
“Come on!” my acrobatic goat said, “Let’s get going!” and he and my fat goat started off on the trail we hadn’t followed yet. There wasn’t any use for me to get peeved that they didn’t wait for my orders before going ahead, so I said, “Sure, that’s what I say,” and away we all went, Little Jim carrying his stick, with a grin and also a very serious expression on his smallish face. He held his stick like he was ready to sock anything that might need socking and swished on up ahead of me so the three goats could be together.
It was fun following the trail, and yet as we moved along from one broken twig to another and to another, I was remembering what a dangerous surprise we had found yesterday when we had come to the end of that other trail.
It certainly wasn’t a straight trail, but kept zig-zagging in different directions, but it seemed from the direction of the sun that it was working around toward the lake again. Pretty soon we came to a hill and looked down and sure enough there was the lake ahead of us, and away down at the foot of the hill we could see through the heavyish undergrowth there was a building of some kind. The broken wild plum twig where we were standing pointed right straight toward the oldish building.
We stopped, surprised. I had expected to find a little mound of some kind, or some markings on a tree or something, but certainly not an oldish building.
In a jiffy we had out the invisible-ink map and were studying it. There wasn’t anything on it that looked like a house.... “It’s an old icehouse,” Poetry said, and it was—a dilapidated oldish unpainted log icehouse—an icehouse being a building of some kind that people up in the lake country build to store ice in it in the winter-time, so that in the hot summer they can have plenty of ice for their iceboxes.
“Our hot trail suddenly turned cold,” my fat goat said, trying to be funny and not being very. It certainly wasn’t what I’d expected to find.
“O.K.,” Little Jim said, “let’s go down and start digging.”
“In an icehouse?” my Man Friday said, astonished. “You wouldn’t expect to find any buried treasure in a thousand blocks of ice!”
“Why not?” Poetry said. “Most icehouses have as much sawdust in them as they do ice. The money’s maybe buried in there in the sawdust.”