Poetry saw it at the same time I did, but thought quicker, and exclaimed, “Hey, Gang! Little Jim’s dug up a terribly big northern pike!”
Quick, we started to help him get it out of the hole, although what we wanted to get it out for, I didn’t know. That buried fish could mean only one thing and that was that somebody had caught it in the lake and had dug down here in the sawdust till he had reached the ice, and had laid the fish down on it, and covered it up so it would keep cold and wouldn’t spoil like fish do almost right away in warm weather, unless you put them on ice.
“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “I’ve found another fish over here!” And he had.
We all stopped and looked at each other and I felt like the bottom of my life had fallen out. Almost before I had thought the next saddish disappointed thought, I’d said it to the rest of the gang and it was, “So this’s what our mysterious map brought us to. We should have known anybody wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a map right out in plain sight for anybody to find, if it showed where to dig for any buried treasure!”
There certainly wasn’t anything unusual about digging up fish in an icehouse anyway. We’d buried some in the icehouse at our camp last year when we’d been up here, and then, a week later, when we’d been ready to go home we’d dug them up and packed them with sawdust and ice in a keg and taken them back to Sugar Creek.
So that was that. We might as well go home, I thought, and said so. “Let’s get out of here and go home, and keep still to everybody about what fools we’ve all been and—”
But Poetry interrupted me by saying, “We’ll have to bury them again, or they’ll spoil, and John Till’ll be madder than a hornet!”
“WHAT?” I said, and then remembered that we weren’t very far from John Till’s cabin, and that we’d seen him coming right this very direction last night in a boat, and that one of the fish had been about the size of the one Little Jim had just dug up.
Thinking about John Till again made me decide it was time for us all to get out of here in a hurry, so I started to dig with the spade real quick to make Little Jim’s hole deep enough and long enough all the way down so we could lay the big northern pike’s whole length on the ice before covering it up.
“You bury yours again, too,” I said to Dragonfly, and he started to dig his hole again, working as fast of he could.