The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure — Reading Companion

Boy, did Dragonfly ever come to life in a hurry. “All right, all right,” he whined, “give me the can!” He grabbed it out of my hand, made a dive toward the lake which was still close by us, dipped the can in and came back with it filled clear to the top with nice clean water.

“Here, Crusoe,” he puffed. “Your Man Friday is your humble slave.” He extended the can toward me.

“Carry it yourself!” I said.

And then, all of a sudden, Dragonfly set it down on the ground where some of it splashed over the top onto Poetry’s shoes, and Dragonfly got a stubborn look on his face and said, “I think the cannibal ought to carry it. I’m not even _Friday_ yet--not till the cannibal gets killed.”

Well, he was right, so Poetry looked at me, and I at him, and he picked up the can, and we went on till we came to the boathouse, which if you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North,” you already know about.

It was going to be fun initiating Dragonfly--just how much fun I didn’t know--and I certainly didn’t know what a mystery we were going to run into in less than fifteen minutes of the next half hour.

In only a little while we came to Santa’s boathouse, Santa as you maybe know being the barrel-shaped owner of the property where we had pitched our tents. He also owned a lot of other lakeshore property up here in this part of the Paul Bunyan country. Everybody called him Santa ’cause he was round like all the different Santa Clauses we’d seen and was always laughing.

Santa himself with his big laughing voice called to us when he saw us coming and said, “Well, well, if it isn’t Bill Collins, Dragonfly and Poetry,” Santa being a smart man, knowing that if there’s anything a boy likes to hear better than anything else, it’s somebody calling him by his name.

“Hi,” we all answered him, Poetry setting the prune can of water down with a savage sigh like it was too heavy to stand and hold.

Santa was standing beside his boathouse door, with a hammer in one hand and a handsaw in the other.

“Where to, with that can of water?” he asked us, and Dragonfly said, “We’re going to pour the water in a big hole up there on the hill and make a new lake.”

Santa grinned at all of us with a mischievous twinkle in his bluish eyes, knowing Dragonfly hadn’t told any lie but was only doing what most boys do most all the time anyway--playing “Make-believe.”

“May we look inside your boathouse a minute?” Poetry asked, and Santa said, “Certainly, go right in,” which we did, and looked around a little.

Poetry acted very mysterious, like he was thinking about something very important, while he frowned with his fat forehead, and looked at different things such as the cot in the farther end, the shavings and sawdust on the floor, and the carpenter’s tools above the work bench--which were chisels, screwdrivers, saws, planes and also hammers and nails; also Poetry examined the different kinds of boards made out of beautifully grained wood.

“You boys like to hold this saw and hammer a minute?” Santa asked us, and handed a hammer to me and a saw handle to Dragonfly, which we took, not knowing why.

“That’s the hammer and that’s the saw the kidnapper used the night he was building the gravehouse in the Indian cemetery,” Santa said, and I looked and felt puzzled, till he explained, saying, “The police found them the night you boys caught him.”

“But--how did they _get_ there?” I asked, but Poetry answered me by saying, “Don’t you remember, Bill Collins, that we found this boathouse door wide open that night, with the latch hanging? The kidnapper stole ’em.”

I looked at the hammer in my hand, and remembered, and tried to realize that the hammer handle I had in my hand right that minute was the same one that, one night last week, had been in the wicked hand of a very fierce man who had used it in an Indian cemetery to help him build a gravehouse. Also, the saw in Poetry’s hand was the one the man had used to saw pieces of lumber into the right lengths.

“And _here_,” Santa said, lifting a piece of canvas from something in the corner, “is the little, nearly-finished gravehouse. The lumber was stolen from here also. The police brought it out this morning. They’ve taken fingerprints from the saw and hammer.”