We were still all sprawled out in different directions in that old Indian cemetery, wondering, What on earth? because of what we’d just seen and heard, trying to explain things to ourselves.
I was watching Little Jim’s puckered forehead and wondering whether he’d be able to think of the tune the Indian had been whistling. I knew that if anybody in the Sugar Creek Gang could think of it, he could, because his mom was not only the best pianist in the whole Sugar Creek territory but had a music library with two copies of nearly every hymnbook that ever was published. She also had copies of lots of music by nearly all the important composers.
Little Jim had to live in what my dad sometimes called “a musical atmosphere.” So I knew if the tune the Indian had been whistling was any of the famous old songs, Little Jim would probably have heard his pretty mom play or sing it, and he might remember it.
But Circus, who has the best singing voice of any of us, remembered it first and said, “It’s ‘Old Black Joe.’”
Right away he started whistling it himself, and right away I remembered it, because we sometimes sang it for opening exercises in the Sugar Creek School.
“It might not be ‘Old Black Joe,’ though,” Little Jim said. “It might be something else. Somebody wrote some church words to that tune once too. Mother sometimes sings it.”
Then Poetry remembered it himself and started quoting some of the church words:
“Gone from my heart the world with all its
charm.
Gone are my sins and all that would alarm.
Gone evermore, and by His grace I know
The precious blood of Jesus cleanses white
as snow.”
“I wonder which words he was thinking about,” Little Tom Till wondered. “The church ones or the ‘Old Black Joe’ ones.”
Big Jim answered, “It depends on whether he goes to church.”
“There’s an Indian mission church up here,” I said, remembering one we’d seen last year. It was in an old railroad coach out in the forest.
“If he goes to church,” Little Jim said, “then he might be a Christian. And if he is, then maybe he wouldn’t stick anything in through a hole in somebody’s grave house for the Indian’s spirit to eat or smell—or maybe to look at, if it’s something pretty.”
That made good sense, I thought, but it also wrinkled up Poetry’s forehead. He was still writing in his notebook, and it looked as though he was puzzled about something. I quick looked over his shoulder and saw this: “Might be a Christian Indian whistling a hymn. But if he was, then he wouldn’t believe in making offerings to a dead Indian spirit. He might be an ordinary Indian, singing ‘Old Black Joe,’ which he learned somewhere.”
“Wonder what he shoved through the little hole—something to eat, maybe?” I said.
“I’m hungry.” Poetry closed his notebook and rolled over and sat up.
“Let’s go look in and see,” Tom Till suggested, and Dragonfly got a scared look on his face and said, “M–m–maybe the Indian’s ghost has got whatever it was and ate it up.”
We called a meeting, and we were just going to vote to decide whether to go and look in through the little hole, when all of a sudden we heard an outboard motor coming. Before I knew what I was going to do, I’d scrambled to my two kind of awkward feet and made a dive in the direction I thought the sound was coming from.
Most of the rest of the gang came after me.
I had to run only about fifty feet to get to where I could look down a little hill to the lake. And there I saw a big white motorboat plowing fast right straight toward the shore down below us.
In a flash Poetry, who had my binoculars, lifted them to his eyes and let out a low whistle.
“It’s somebody in a white boat wearing a pair of dark glasses!”
“Boats don’t wear dark glasses,” Dragonfly said and sneezed.
“But dragonflies can sneeze,” Poetry said, being only a little bit funny.
I could see with my bare eyes that Poetry was right. It was a man in a white boat all right, and he was heading straight toward our shore. Right away I remembered the man we’d seen earlier that afternoon, who had bought five gallons of gasoline at a resort on the other lake.
I sidled up close to Poetry and whispered to him, “How’d he get on this lake with that boat?”
Dragonfly must have guessed what we were thinking, since he had been with Poetry and me when we’d gone after the minnows. He said, “He came here on the Mississippi River.”
I knew he was right. Anybody who knows anything about the country up where we were spending our vacation should know that the Mississippi River flows right through nearly all the lakes around where we were, and that a narrow channel of it leads from one lake to another.
“Sh!” Big Jim shushed us all and said quickly, “Quiet! All of you!”
We shushed.
It took the man with the dark glasses almost no time to bring the white boat up to shore, toss his anchor out, and wrap the anchor rope around a tree. Then he climbed out with a new-looking brown tackle box in one hand and made his way up the hill toward the cemetery. I noticed that in the boat was the five-gallon gasoline can, and for some reason I had the funny idea that we actually had, honest-to-goodness for sure, as plain as the nose on your face, run onto the trail of the kidnapper again.
We didn’t dare let ourselves be seen, so we beat it back to where we’d been and flopped ourselves down on the grass behind the sumac again, panting and with hearts pounding, watching to see what the man was going to do.
He acted very strangely. He walked around in the graveyard as though he was half blind. Once he stumbled over a small grave and almost lost his balance as he came toward where we were, near the long grave house inside the fence.
Poetry, who was lying with his face close to my ear, whispered, “He acts like a half-blind man.”
And Dragonfly, who was close to my other side, said, “Maybe he needs glasses.”
I was sure that, whoever he was, he was the kidnapper. I wished the gang were near enough to make a dive for him in football style and get him down and sit on him until we could tie him up and call the police.
He just walked around through the cemetery as if he was somebody curiously looking around, the way people wander through other graveyards, reading the tombstones and thinking. But I noticed that all the time he was getting closer and closer to the medicine man’s grave, where the Indian had stuck something inside a little while before.
I looked at Little Jim’s face. It was tense, and the muscles of his jaws were working exactly like Big Jim’s jaw muscles were. I also noticed he was crouched down as close to Big Jim as he could get.
You could have heard a pin drop, we were so quiet. The only noise was the swishing sound the man’s shoes made as he walked, and the sad sighing noise that a very gentle wind was making in the boughs of the pine tree above the medicine man’s grave house.
Just that second I saw a flash of something lemon yellow colored flit across from one choke-cherry shrub to another, not far away. Then I heard a sweet song exactly like that a wild canary sings. There were a lot of wild canaries up where we were but not many other birds.
Even while I was all mixed up in my mind with a tangled-up mystery worrying me a little, I all of a sudden had a strange, good feeling sweep all over me.
It was the way I sometimes feel when I’m all by myself down along Sugar Creek and I hear birds singing all around in the trees, and one of the little riffles in the creek is bubbling cheerfully, and honeybees are droning in the old linden tree above the spring, and the heat waves are dancing above the wild rosebushes along the old rail fence that I’m maybe sitting on. It’s a wonderful feeling, and makes you wish you had wings yourself so that you could fly. You’re glad you’re alive and feel that you and the One who made everything all around you are good friends. You’re glad that everything you’ve ever done that’s wrong has all been forgiven, and you wish all the people in all the world felt as you do.
When that pretty yellow canary flashed across that old Indian cemetery, I kind of wanted to fly inside again.
Then I heard the sound of a car coming up the road. I came down to earth and wondered if it was Barry and hoped it was. I also hoped it wasn’t, because then the man might get scared and run away, and we wouldn’t get to find out what he was doing.
The man must have heard the car too. He dropped down inside the fenced-in enclosure as if he had been shot, and you couldn’t see anything of him.
It wasn’t our station wagon though, because it had an old-fashioned noisy motor and it rattled on past. I could see a whirl of white dust rising above the shrubbery between us and the road.
Then the sound of the engine died out, and I saw the man’s bare head rise above the low fence, then duck down again. And then the guy was squatted down in front of the long grave, looking in through the little spirit hole.
I looked at Dragonfly’s dragonflylike eyes, and he was worried. I knew it was because his mother believed in ghosts. Little Jim had a half-afraid look on his face too, but I knew it wasn’t for the same reason. He believed the same as his parents and also our pastor—that the very minute a Christian dies, his spirit goes straight to heaven and doesn’t hang around anybody’s graveyard. Besides, they don’t get hungry or cold or need anything in heaven.
It’s an odd feeling to have, though, when you’re in a spooky graveyard with a lot of chicken-coop-shaped grave houses with holes in them like the holes Dad has in front of his beehives and you know that some people actually do believe in ghosts but shouldn’t.
The next second the man was creeping away from the grave. The branches of the pine tree were very low right there, and he was stooped over to keep from getting his head bumped. He still had his fishing tackle box with him.
Then, just as if nothing had happened and he hadn’t done anything strange, he started walking around among the grave houses again, working his way toward the outside of the cemetery. I knew he’d be going back to his boat within minutes and would be gone.
I just knew there was something in that tackle box, and I wondered if it was the ransom money for the little Ostberg girl. I wished I’d all of a sudden scramble to my feet and that all the gang would run like wild animals on a fierce stampede straight for the man and get him down, the way I’d wished we’d done before. But I felt so scared I was numb all over, and since Poetry and I were the only ones who maybe imagined he might be anybody suspicious, we didn’t do a thing.
Then I heard another car coming and guessed that this time it was Barry’s station wagon.
Quick as a flash, that man with the tackle box looked toward the entrance, made a kind of awkward dive straight for the other side of the cemetery, and disappeared over the edge of the hill.
Why on earth didn’t we do something? I thought. Why just lie here like a bunch of scared cats? I’d started to get to my feet, when Big Jim reached out his hand and grabbed me and pulled me down hard, saying, “Don’t move-not a one of you!”
I looked just in time to see our brown-and-yellow station wagon swing in at the other end of the cemetery. The minute its engine was shut off, I heard another motor start up down at the foot of the hill, and I knew it was the kidnapper, who had started his outboard motor and was about to roar away to safety. I just knew it!
What on earth! I thought again. Didn’t Big Jim have any idea what was going on? Couldn’t he think? I was half mad and was going to say something kind of fierce, when he said, “That was a wicked-looking gun he had in his pocket.”
“Gun?” I said. “I didn’t see any gun.” But now I understood why Big Jim hadn’t let us do anything. He’d seen the gun and knew it was more important—as my dad had also taught me—to have good sense than it was to be brave.
We all scrambled to our feet, just as Barry looked over to where we were and saw us and called, “Quick, boys! There’s news on the radio about the kidnapper!”
As quick as seven flashes, all seven of us were untangling ourselves from ourselves, and tumbling over each other on our way to our feet, and then running fast toward Barry.
Poetry and I were together, because he and I had a secret we were sure the rest of the gang didn’t know about. We were hurrying past the big pine tree whose swooping branches hung down over the medicine man’s grave house, when Poetry stopped, stooped over, and scooped up something that was lying right inside the fence, a few feet from the grave. Even before he put it into his pocket, I saw what it was, and it was a case that eye doctors give people to carry their glasses in.
Then we dashed on behind the rest of the gang to the station wagon.
We got there just in time to hear a radio news commentator say, “The man is heavily armed and dangerous and may be disguised either as an Indian or a fisherman on vacation. The sheriff’s office reports that he is restricted to wearing glasses while driving. It is thought that he may have abandoned his car, whose license number when last seen was Minnesota …”
All of us were crowded around the front doors of the station wagon, listening. When the commentator said that, Poetry’s elbow jabbed me in the ribs so hard it made me grunt, and I said, “Ouch!” and the rest of the gang said, “Keep still!”
My “Ouch!” and the gang’s “Keep still!” smothered some of the announcer’s other words so that when I heard him again he was saying, “… report to your local police at once.” Then the news went on talking about something else, and Barry snapped off the radio.
Right away there was a bedlam of Sugar Creek Gang voices starting to tell Barry different things we had just seen that afternoon.
First, we told about the spooky-looking Indian who had come to the longest grave house in the cemetery and stuffed something through the grave opening. We all got interrupted by Dragonfly, who exclaimed, “Look, everybody! There he is now—that Indian! He—he—he’s sneaking back to the grave again!”
I looked toward the pine tree away at the end of the cemetery, and there as plain as day was that same Indian, creeping along under the branches of the old pine tree to the front of the grave house.
Every one of us kept as still as mice and watched. Once, when I let my eyes stray to Barry’s tanned face, I thought I saw an odd look on it, and I couldn’t tell whether he was scared or not.
The Indian crawled back to the low fence, stepped over, straightened up, looked all around, shaded his eyes, and with the little Indian basket in one hand, raised both arms up toward the top of the pine tree as though he had an offering to make to some kind of a spirit. Then he stopped, as if he had seen us for the first time. The next minute he was taking long, slow strides straight toward where we were.