Excerpt

"I tell you, when you just know there’s going to be some exciting trouble in the next twelve minutes or less, you have to make your red head do some quick clear thinking, if you can. Not a one of the Sugar Creek Gang knew what was going to happen, but the very minute I heard that outboard motor roaring out on the lake, the sound sounding like it was coming straight toward the shore and the old icehouse we were all in, I said to us, “Quick, Gang! Let’s get out of here and get this ransom money back to camp!” Little Jim’s gunny sack had a lot of money in it right that minute, which we’d dug up out of the sawdust in that abandoned old icehouse. The gunny sack was nearly filled with stuffed fish,—the big and middle-sized northern and wall-eyed pike with thousands and thousands of dollars sewed up inside."