Well, that was that, and it was terribly disappointing. Poetry and I stood staring at that open door, wondering what had happened. Who had opened it and let John Till out, and where had he gone? Was he hiding somewhere close by, and might he spring from behind something any minute and knock the living daylights out of one of us?
Big Jim and the rest of the gang came running around to where we were, and as soon as we found that our prisoner was really gone, we looked at each other with sad and disappointed eyes.
I looked at Tom, who had his mom’s letter in his hands, and I noticed it was all crinkled, the way letters get when you squish them up tight.
“What’ll we do?” different ones of us asked the rest of us, and we waited for Big Jim to decide what.
He looked at Tom, who looked sad and surprised and disappointed. For a second it seemed he didn’t belong to our gang at all but was a strange boy—like a lost duckling that gets hatched with a nestful of fluffy little chickens and follows the mother hen around with the chickens but doesn’t do what they do or look like they look.
“We’ve got to find my dad!” Tom said. He stooped down and picked a small white five-petaled flower growing beside the icehouse on a little plant five or six inches high. The plant had shining green three-sectioned leaves with little notches in them.
Little Jim saw him pick it and stooped quickly and picked one himself, saying, “It’s a goldthread flower. Goody!”—which goes to show that even in an exciting time that little guy can be interested in something else.
I remembered that he had a flower guidebook. Besides having a hobby of putting a gospel message in whiskey bottles, he was also trying, while we were on our vacation, to find as many wildflowers as he could. He wrote their names in a notebook to show to our teacher that fall when school started.
Tom seemed to be thinking. He didn’t say more to Big Jim but looked down at his goldthread and at the crinkled-up letter in his hand and then began to try to push the goldthread stem through the button in his shirt beside the oxeye daisy that was still there.
I won’t have room at this part of the story to tell you what happened when the police came, which they did pretty quick, except to say that as soon as they believed that we hadn’t let John Till out ourselves, they dug around in the icehouse and found a lot of other fish with part of the ransom money in them—enough, when they added what we had locked up in Santa’s boathouse, to make more than $20,000.
But where was the rest of the money? Nobody knew, and nobody knew where John Till had disappeared to. He wasn’t in the old cabin we’d once seen him in, which we found he’d rented from Santa. Both the cabin and the icehouse belonged to Santa, who had bought them from a real estate man only a few weeks before.
It was awfully hard on Tom to know that even though his dad was free, the police were still after him, and nobody knew when he’d be caught, or whether he’d try to resist arrest and be shot and maybe killed.
Another thing that made it hard for Tom was the letter from his mother, which he let me see. When I read it, I couldn’t blame Tom for feeling sad.
Part of the letter said,
I think maybe your father is up in the north woods somewhere where you boys are camping, Tom. I don’t know for sure. But we got a notice from the bank that the interest on our loan is past due, and it has to be paid. If he stops in to visit you, please give him this letter.
As you know, I gave him the egg money I’d saved up all winter and summer, and he was going to take it to the bank just before he left. I’m sure he went fishing, because his tackle is gone.
But don’t worry, Tommy boy, we’ll get along somehow. The Lord is on our side. You just keep on having good boyish fun and learning all you can in the evening campfire Bible lessons. You and I will keep on praying for your dad and your brother, Bob, that someday they’ll both be saved. Our minister called this morning, and he’s praying too. And he says God can do things nobody thinks He can …
There was more in Tom’s letter from home. His white rabbit had carrots for breakfast and seemed quite content but was probably lonesome for Tom. And the new potatoes in the garden would make awfully good raw-fried potatoes for supper when he came home.
It really was a nice letter—the same kind I got from my mom, with scribbling all around the edges, things for a boy to remember not to do and why. Don’t catch cold, and be careful not to fall out of the boat, things like that, which always worry a mother, who can’t help it, because she is a mother.
We kept on the lookout for John Till every minute of that day and the next, when we took a trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi. Little Jim took notes on that trip so he could show them to our teacher that fall when we got back to Sugar Creek. One of his notes said:
The Mississippi River is 2,470 miles long from the place where it starts at Itasca Lake, Minnesota, to where it stops at the Gulf of Mexico.
We started out early in the morning in our station wagon for Itasca State Park, where there was a big blue-water lake that is eight miles around. There, in a pretty, shady park, all of us scrambled out and followed each other along a little winding path till we came to the lake.
There we saw a small stream of water about twelve feet across and a foot or less deep flowing out of it, making a very pretty noise, which sounded like half a sigh and half a ripple. The sound was also mixed up with the voices of different birds, which were singing all around and above us in the bushes and trees.
We all were quiet for a while, not seeing what we had expected to see when we saw the source of the Mississippi River, but it was very interesting anyway.
Little Jim got a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. Then he quick stooped down and in a jiffy had both his shoes and socks off. I knew he was going to wade across the stream, which was shallow and narrow there. Right away we all had our shoes and socks off, and every single one of us waded across the Mississippi River.
“Here we are,” I said, as most of us stopped out in the middle of the Mississippi and gathered ourselves into a half circle with our faces looking toward shore, where our camp director had a camera waiting to take our picture.
Standing there, squinting in the direction of the camera and also in the direction of the sun, I happened to remember a brand-new Paul Bunyan story that Poetry had made up once, and which you maybe know about if you’ve read Screams in the Night. Old Babe, which is Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, was swimming in the headwaters of the Mississippi, and the blue began to come off and make the water blue. And because the Mississippi flows through a lot of the lakes in Minnesota, pretty soon all the lakes became what are called blue-water lakes.
Of course, it was only a legend. Paul Bunyan, as you know, was a pretend lumberman who was extra large; and Babe, the blue ox, was his best friend and went everywhere he went, just as a boy’s dog follows a boy around.
Anyway, while we were having our picture taken, I remembered the story Poetry told about how the lakes got their blue water. So I looked down quick at Poetry’s large feet and at all the seventy different-shaped and different-length toes on the fourteen feet of all seven of us. I tried to think of something funny to say, but it really wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be. “If all the fish in the lakes up here get terribly sick and die before long, it’ll be because the barrel-shaped boy in our gang didn’t wash his feet before he waded across the Mississippi River.”
And that’s how it happened that I wished I had brought along a change of clothes, because for some reason what I said made Poetry mad. He shoved his shoulder against me, and—because I was standing in fast-flowing water halfway up to my knees anyway—when I stepped sideways to try to get my balance, I stepped on a slippery rock in the riverbed and lost my whole balance. The next thing I knew I was sitting down on the bottom of the Mississippi River, and the water was coming clear up to my stomach.
Right away Barry pointed his camera in our direction and took another picture.
That reminded Poetry of a riddle, which he quick asked. It was: “Say, gang, what is it that stays in bed all day, spends all its time at the bank, and never stops running?”
“A river,” Dragonfly said and sneezed twice, because he is not only allergic to different pollens but to sudden changes of temperature. The water in that little narrow babbling stream was almost cold.
Well, that was about all that happened right then, except for one other thing. And it was that one thing that helped make our next adventure, a fishing trip for walleyes, extraordinarily interesting and exciting.
Not having brought along any extra clothes, I had to walk in my wet pants back to our station wagon, which wasn’t any too much fun for me. There they made me lie down where I wouldn’t be seen while some of the gang wrung the water out of my trousers and also out of the tail of my shirt. I would have to wait till they dried enough for me to put them on, and that meant I had to let the rest of the gang visit a very special curio shop without me, while my clothes were hanging on a limb in the sun.
Poetry, who was about my best friend, was already sorry I was all wet, and we made up as soon as I found out he was going to stay with me to keep me company.
I gave Little Jim some money out of my billfold and told him to pick out something he especially thought my little sister, Charlotte Ann, would like. I knew that in a few days we were all going to break camp and drive back to Sugar Creek, and I wanted to take home a few things made by the Indians.
Poetry and I were alone awhile, with me lying under a blanket on the backseat of the station wagon. We talked over all the wonderful experiences of our vacation and decided it had been the best camping trip we’d had in our lives.
“Only one thing would make it the best we ever could have,” he said, and when I said, “What?” he didn’t answer for a minute.
He was sitting in the open car door not far from me, and I was lying on my back, wishing the hot sun and the breeze would hurry up and get my clothes a little drier so I could put them on. He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but his squawky voice had a sort of a faraway sound in it as though he was thinking of something very serious.
When he still didn’t answer me, I asked him again, and he said quietly, “I feel sorry for Tom.” Then his voice sort of choked, and I guessed that he liked that little red-haired guy just as well as I did.
Right that second, if anybody had asked me anything, I couldn’t have answered either. I felt my eyes stinging, and there would have been a tear in my voice, and boys don’t like to have anybody see tears in their eyes or hear them in their voices.
Pretty soon, though, Poetry spoke again with his back still toward me, “Did you ever read this verse in the Bible?”
If I hadn’t been already down, you could have knocked me over with a fish scale when I realized what he was doing. He had taken his little leather New Testament out of his shirt pocket and, looking through it, had found a verse he thought was extra good.
As you maybe know, an official part of the equipment of anybody who belongs to the Sugar Creek Gang is a small New Testament. We each carry one nearly all the time, and every one of us not only reads it every day, but we aren’t ashamed to let anybody know we do, either.
But on account of being boys and feeling the way nearly all boys do, we didn’t talk about the Bible very much, except in campfire meetings or at Sunday school, and only once in a while when two or three of us were together.
Little Jim and I did more of that than any of the rest of us. That’s because he—well, he had a keen mind and thought more about the Bible, I guess, and was always getting such good ideas. Also Little Jim was just glad he was alive. Not a boy in the world would be alive if God hadn’t made him and also if God didn’t keep him alive. And there isn’t a boy in the world that’s dumb enough to want to be dead, which is why a boy ought to be glad to love God and to be kind to Him. Little Jim always was.
Anyway, when Poetry asked me if I had ever read “this verse,” I said, “What verse?”
So he read it to me, with his back still turned. It was out of the book of Matthew, chapter 18, and was the nineteenth verse. It said, “If two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven.”
It made me feel good inside to even think about the Bible, especially since I knew both of us believed what we were talking about. I just lay there, looking through the station wagon window up at the pretty branches of a pine tree that grew not far away. I was also listening to the gurgling of the water close by and felt something sort of warm in my heart, as though Poetry and God and I had a secret of some kind.
When we finished telling each other what we thought the verse meant, we made up our minds that we were going to stick together and pray until Little Tom’s dad was saved.
“Let’s shake on it,” Poetry said. He swung around and shoved his hand in my direction.
I grabbed it quick and said, “Shake.”
“Shake,” he said again, then we prayed together for Tom’s dad, and I felt good inside.
I noticed the branches of the pine tree above me were swaying in the wind, and I knew my clothes were drying pretty fast—I hoped.
A little later we heard the gang coming. I knew it was the gang because it sounded like a flock of blackbirds gathering in the woods in a Sugar Creek autumn, getting ready for migrating to a warmer country. It also sounded like a flock of crows with a few scolding blue jays mixed in with them and maybe a harsh-voiced shrieking kingfisher joining in. Dragonfly was the rattling-voiced kingfisher and Circus the scolding blue jay.
My clothes were dry enough for me to put on if, while we drove along, I’d sit on the leather seat of the station wagon, which I did. Away we went, back to camp and to the next day’s fishing trip.
“Look what I got for Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said and shoved over to me a couple of small balloons. “They cost only ten cents apiece,” he said proudly and handed me my change.
I was a little disappointed but didn’t want to say so, because Little Jim had such a happy grin on his face to think he had saved me money. And I was also sure Charlotte Ann would be happy to see the balloons blown up nice and big. Most babies laugh and reach out their hands for them the very minute they see them.
I tucked the two balloons in my shirt pocket beside my New Testament and buttoned the flap and forgot about them.
The next day was our very special fishing trip for walleyed pike. Boy oh boy, it was going to be a wonderful trip, I thought. We were going to fish, not for small fish such as bluegills and crappies, which people call “pan” fish, but for big walleyes to pack and ship home to our folks at Sugar Creek. Also, we were going to keep our eyes open every second to see if we could find any trace of John Till.