If I could have been somebody else standing close by and looking down at me, I’ll bet I’d have seen my eyes almost bulging out of their sockets with surprise and wonder and excitement.
“We’ve found it, Gang!” I said to us, and I knew we had.
Dragonfly piped up and said, “I’ll bet there’s a dozen other big fish buried here with money in ’em.”
It was a wonderful feeling. First we’d found the invisible-ink map, and then the trail of broken twigs, which we’d followed in two different directions, and now we’d found the money itself. Boy oh boy, oh boy! It was too good to be true!
“Now we know what the deadish smell was,” Dragonfly said, but Little Jim said, “What deadish smell?”
Dragonfly answered, saying, “John Till took the fish’s insides out while he was in the cabin, and maybe instead of burying them, just threw them outside somewhere,” which I thought was pretty sensible for Dragonfly to figure out.
But we couldn’t just stay here, and be like King Midas in the fairy story every child ought to know, and count our money. We ought to get back to camp and tell the gang and Barry and let the whole world know what we’d found.
“Let’s get all of it dug up and take it away before John Till finds out we discovered his hiding place,” Poetry said.
“But there might be a dozen other fish with money in them,” I said, “and it won’t be safe to stay that long. It might take a half hour to find all of ’em. We’ve got to get out of here quick and get some help.”
Well, it certainly wasn’t any time to argue, with maybe the whole 25 thousand dollars buried in the sawdust all around us. But we did have to decide whether to take what we’d found and beat it to camp, and come back with help, or to dig up all the fish we could find right now, take the money out, shove it all into Little Jim’s gunny sack and come happily back into camp with every dollar of it.