North Woods Manhunt A Sugar Creek Gang Story

“What’s the sense of being scared?” Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our gang, asked me right after I’d ordered us all to get going quickly. “The kidnapper’s caught and in jail, isn’t he?”

“Sure, but Old Hook-nosed John Till’s running loose up here somewhere,” I said. Old Hook-nose was a very fierce man who was the fierce infidel daddy of one of the members of our gang. He had been in jail many times in his wicked life and stayed in a cabin not more than a quarter of a mile up the shore from where we were right that minute.

Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of the gang, who knew one hundred and one or two poems by heart and was always quoting one, swished around quickly, scrambled back across the sawdust we’d been digging in, peeped through a crack between the logs toward the lake.

“Who is it?” I said, and he said in his duck-like squawky voice, “I can’t tell, but he looks awful mad.”

Well, anybody knows anybody couldn’t see well enough that far to see anybody’s face well enough to tell whether it had a mad look on it. Still, if it was John Till who hated us, boys, anyway, he’d probably be angry and would do savage things to all of us if he caught us in that icehouse getting the money.

So, in another six or seven jiffies, we were all scrambling as fast as we could out of that icehouse and out into the open, carrying Little Jim’s gunny sack full of fish. We dived across an open space to a clump of bushes, where we wouldn’t be seen by anybody on the lake.

Circus, the acrobatic member of our gang, was with us, too, and he, being the strongest of us, grabbed up the sack, swung it over his shoulder, and loped ahead of us. “Hurry!” we panted to each other and didn’t stop running until we reached the top of a hill, which we did just as we heard the outboard motor stop. We all dropped down on the grass, gasping and panting, and tickled that we were safe, but I was feeling pretty bad to think that there were probably a half dozen other fish still buried in the sawdust in that old log icehouse.

“Quick, Poetry, give me your knife,” Circus ordered.

“What for?” Poetry said, and at the same time, he shoved his fat hand in his pocket, pulled out his official Boy Scout knife, and handed it over to Circus. Circus quickly opened the heavy cutting blade and started ripping open the sewed-up stomach of a big northern pike that he’d just pulled out of the sack.