Almost right away all of us were down on our knees digging as fast as we could with our bare hands, only Little Jim was using his stick to help him, and I was using the spade which I’d taken away from Dragonfly, to shovel aside the pile of sawdust that I was digging out of my hole.
My fat goat spoke up then, and said, “D’you guys know that Minnesota is called the Gopher State?”
Pretty soon my spade struck something hard, and I felt a thrill go through me. “Hey,” I said, “I’ve struck something! I’ve found it!” expecting it to be a box or a smallish trunk or maybe a fishing tackle box, like the kind the kidnapper had had the night we caught him, which you know about if you’ve read the book, “Adventure in an Indian Cemetery.”
Almost before I had the words out of my excited mouth, there was a mad scramble of boys’ feet swishing across the sawdust from different directions, and in a jiffy most of the rest of us were all around me looking down into my hole to see what I had found. I shoved my spade in and out a few times, but it didn’t sound like it was striking a tin box or a trunk or anything.
“Listen!” I said, which we all did, but I couldn’t tell what it sounded like.
“Let me get it out for you!” my acrobatic goat said.
I let him run his long right arm down into the hole. He scooped out several handfuls of sawdust and then let out a disappointed sniff and said, “You’ve struck ice, Robinson Crusoe! This is an icehouse!”
I put my own hand down in the hole and my fingers touched something cold. I also pulled out a smallish piece of ice which my spade had chipped off.
“Anybody else strike ice?” I asked, and right that second I noticed Little Jim over in a corner, prying at something with his stick, with his tongue between his teeth like he has it sometimes when he’s working at something or other. He had a happy grin on his face also, which I could see on account of he was facing the opening where the light was coming in.
“What you got there, Little Jim?” I asked my blue-eyed goat, and he said, “I don’t know. It’s all covered with sawdust.” Almost before he’d said it, I saw two great big round glassy eyes, a very large spatulate-shaped snout and a longish body that looked like a small log of fireplace wood.