Circus no more slammed that icehouse door shut and dropped the heavy bar into place, locking John Till in, than there was a loud pounding and a yelling that sounded as if there was a madman inside.
What to do next was the question. We were an awfully long way from camp, and we five boys certainly weren’t big enough to capture him ourselves. Besides, yesterday when we’d first seen him, he’d had a big hunting knife, and who knew but what he might have a gun too? Anybody as fierce and as mad as John Till was right that minute—well, you couldn’t tell what he might do if he got a chance.
Circus was coming in our direction now as fast as he could. When a few seconds later he came puffing up to us, he exclaimed, “Come on, gang. Let’s run back to camp and get help.”
And right that minute I got a bright idea of my own. In fact, it had been swishing around in my mind ever since I’d seen Circus wham that door shut. I said, “Come on, gang. Follow me, and we’ll get help in a hurry.”
I grabbed up the gunnysack, which had the rest of the stuffed fish in it and the packets of ransom money, and it felt as light as a feather as I started on a dash straight toward the icehouse again.
“Where are you going?” Poetry yelled.
“Back to camp,” I said. “Come on!”
“Camp’s in the other direction,” Dragonfly called after me.
“Do as I say,” I yelled back over my shoulder and kept on running like a deer, right for the icehouse.
It felt good to realize that all the gang was following along after me, that I was actually the leader—for a while anyway. I had what I thought was a great idea. My dad once told me what happens to a person when he becomes a leader. First, he gets an idea about something that he thinks is wonderful and that ought to be done, and right away he starts getting a lot of people to help him do it.
You see, while Circus was slamming that door and shutting old John Till inside, I was watching with my binoculars. I’d seen John’s white boat, which was beached there at the lake, and had noticed that the outboard motor, which was tilted forward in the stern, had a beautiful black shroud on it. I saw it was the same kind our camp director had, and I’d been learning how to run it during the past week. That boat had a powerful motor and could go terribly fast on a lake.
(If there is something I’d rather do than anything else, it is to sit in the stern of a boat, with one hand on the steering handle and, facing the prow, go roaring out across the water with the wind blowing into my freckled face as I watch the shoreline flash by.)
I also knew that the water in many of the big blue-water lakes up here in the north woods was kept fresh because the Mississippi River flowed through them, flowing from one lake to another. I’d studied a map of the territory and knew that, if we could use that boat, we could go roaring up the lake terribly fast, pass the old Indian cemetery in three or four minutes, and a little later come to a place where the Mississippi flowed out of this lake into a long narrow channel into the lake on which we had our tents pitched. Once we got into that other lake, we’d race up the shore and get back to camp in less than half the time it would take us to hike through the woods carrying a heavy sack of fish.
We could leave John Till locked up in the icehouse while we were gone and hurry back with Big Jim and maybe some other help. Before long we’d have John Till really captured. After that, we’d tell the police what we’d done, and then we could claim the reward for finding the thousands and thousands of dollars that the little Ostberg girl’s dad had paid to the kidnapper.
In a minute I was hurrying past the icehouse with my gunnysack of fish. I stopped just for a second to listen, but everything was pretty quiet. I noticed that the heavy door was really strong, and I didn’t see any way John Till could get out. There also was only one place where he could even see out, and that was through a crack on the side next to the lake.
And then all of us were in the boat, had shoved off, and were rowing out to deep enough water to make it safe to start the motor without its propeller striking on the bottom. It was a pretty sunshiny day, with only a few scattered white clouds in the sky.
I was pretty nervous and scared and also brave at the same time. It wasn’t our boat or our motor, but we weren’t stealing it. We were amateur detectives using the criminal’s boat to get some help to capture him.
In another minute we’d be gone. Poetry sat in the middle on a seat by himself, Dragonfly and Little Jim were in the one right in front of me, and Circus had a narrow seat up in the prow.
“I don’t see why you don’t let me run it,” Poetry complained. “After all, I taught you how to run it in the first place.”
“Sh!” I said. “Can’t you cooperate?” That is a word my dad sometimes uses when he wants me to obey him. “You keep your eye on the gunnysack there between your feet.”
I quick opened the gasoline shutoff valve as far as it would turn, being sure first that the air vent on the tank was open. Then I shoved the speed control lever over to where it said “Start,” primed the motor, and gave the starter knob a fast sharp pull. John Till’s powerful motor roared itself to life, and the boat started whizzing up the lake. I made a couple of other quick adjustments, and away we went, the wind blowing hard in our faces or against our backs, depending on which direction we were facing.
Circus yelled over the tops of the other kids’ heads to me and said, “Hey, Bill. He’s yelling and screaming for us to stop.”
“Let him yell,” I said. “We’ll give him something to yell about a little later.” I shoved the speed control lever to the right, and our boat really shot forward, Circus’s prow raised itself partway out of the water, and we went flying up the shore at a terrific rate of speed.
It had been a wonderful vacation for all of us, I thought, and yet we still had a half-dozen days before we would get into the station wagon and drive the long day and a half back to Sugar Creek. We’d had a lot of fun fishing and swimming and solving mysteries, such as finding a kidnapped little girl, capturing the kidnapper, and digging up the ransom money—a lot of which was right there in the boat with us, some still in the stomachs of the fish in the gunnysack. The rest of the money was probably all sewed into the other fish that John Till had with him right that minute while he was locked up in that icehouse jail. Of course, we still had to actually capture him.
Thinking that, I said to Poetry as he sat grinning in front of me—one of his pudgy hands holding onto the gunwale on each side—“I’ll bet Big Jim’ll want to call the police and let them capture John.”
Not a one of us liked that idea very well, and we all said so, although we’d all had enough dangerous experiences for one vacation.
It was Little Jim’s newest hobby that helped make this last story of our northern camping trip one we’d never forget as long as we lived.
And this is the way his hobby got mixed up with our mystery. Our boat had just rounded a bend and was about to swish past the old Indian cemetery where we’d had so many exciting experiences and—as you maybe know—where we’d caught the kidnapper himself one spooky night, when all of a sudden Little Jim yelled, “Hey, gang, there’s a whiskey bottle floating out there in the water. Let’s stop and get it.”
He pointed toward the shore where the cemetery was, and there was what looked like a whiskey bottle floating on the surface.
“We don’t have time to stop,” I yelled to Little Jim and didn’t bother to throttle the motor even a little bit. But when I saw that little guy’s happy face suddenly get a sad expression on it and saw him drop his head the way a friendly dog does when you scold it, I felt sorry for him and decided that maybe seventeen seconds’ lost time wouldn’t make any difference. So I shoved the speed control lever to “Slow” and shoved the steering handle around so that we’d cut a wide circle, and then we were putt-putting slowly back toward the floating bottle.
You see, all the members of the Sugar Creek Gang were almost as interested in Little Jim’s new hobby as he was. For about a week he’d been collecting all the old empty whiskey bottles he could find. Being an honest-to-goodness Christian boy who hated whiskey because it was a terrible enemy of mankind and made so many people in the world sad and caused so much trouble, he had been putting gospel tracts in the bottles with a little note, which he scribbled in his own handwriting.
A gospel tract, just in case you might never have heard of one, is a little folder with a printed message on it telling whoever reads it something important out of the Bible, especially how to be saved and become a Christian.
The kind of awkward scribble that Little Jim tucked into each bottle along with the tract always said the same thing, which was: “Whoever finds this, please believe that God loves you. If you’re not saved, remember Jesus died on the cross for you and wants you to pray to Him and thank Him for doing it and give your heart to Him quick. If you don’t know how to do it, send me your name and address, and I’ll send you a free book telling you how.”
Little Jim would sign his name, Jim Foote. He also gave his Sugar Creek address. Then he’d cork up the bottle good and tight and toss it out into the lake for somebody to find and read.
We’d all been having fun helping him, and we could hardly wait till we got back home to Sugar Creek to see if Little Jim had any mail from anybody who had found one of his notes.
You see, Little Jim had his mind made up that sometime, when he was grown up, he was going to be a missionary, but he couldn’t wait that long to be one so he was trying to be one now. Since he was a great guy and also one of my best friends, I had decided I wasn’t going to wait till I was any more grown up than I was before doing it too.
Our boat was gliding slowly up alongside the bobbing bottle, and Circus, who was closer to it than Little Jim, reached out his hand and caught hold of it and started to hand it over to Little Jim. Then he let out a yell and said, “Hey, it’s got something tied to it!”
I saw it had. There was a piece of heavy fishing line tied around the bottle’s neck, and something was fastened to the other end away down in the water somewhere.