Right that second Poetry, who was on his knees beside me, said, “D’you ever see such a fat-stomached northern pike in your life?”
I stopped digging a half jiffy and looked at it, and never had, except one I’d seen dead lying on a sandy beach once, and the flies had been on it and it was bloated, but this one wasn’t bloated but was like it had been caught only maybe yesterday.
In a little while I had the longish sawdust grave ready to lay the fish corpse in it, when Poetry said to me in a hissing whisper, “SH! BILL—feel here, will you? There’s something queer about this fish’s stomach!”
The very excited sound of his whisper went clear through me and made me feel like maybe he’d discovered something terribly important. I reached out my hands and felt where he was feeling on the sides and stomach of the extra large northern pike, which, even while I was doing it, I thought was about the same size as the one I’d seen in the sink in the old cabin where John Till had been pumping water yesterday.
Say, I could tell by my sense of touch that were was something inside that fish that wasn’t a part of him.
“Look!” Poetry whispered to me again, using his fat right hand to wipe off the sawdust from the bottom of the pike’s stomach. “Here’s a place where it’s been sliced open, and sewed up again. What do you s’pose it’s got in it?”
Well, you can guess what I was supposing, ’cause I was remembering that yesterday in the old cabin I’d seen a big northern the same size as this one, and that John Till had a big hunting knife in his hand like the kind Barry uses to clean fish, and also I remembered that last night in the middle of the moonlit night, we’d seen John Till get into a boat with a stringer of big fish and row up the lake in this direction.
Dragonfly must have been listening to Poetry and me, instead of burying his fish like I’d ordered him, ’cause he spoke up and said, “This one’s been cut open and sewed up again, too.”
Well, you can guess that we were an excited gang of treasure hunters. Of course we didn’t know we’d found anything for sure, but it certainly looked like we had. It wouldn’t take any more than a jiffy and three-fourths to find out. Poetry took his knife which was an official boy scout knife, and had a stag handle, a heavy cutting blade, a screw driver, a bottle and can-opener and a punch blade. He opened the sharp cutting blade and carefully sliced through the heavy string the fish was sewed up with, and right in front of our eyes—all the rest of the gang gathering around to see what in the world—Poetry pulled out a big package of something wrapped in oil paper, the same kind of oil paper my mother has in our kitchen at home, which was waterproof.
In another second we had unwrapped the package and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a packet of paper money that looked like dozens and dozens of twenty dollar bills.