I’d had before came bubbling up inside of me. For a minute I wished
Little Jim had been with us,--in fact, I wished he had been standing
right beside me with the stick in his hand which he always carries with
him wherever he goes, almost ... I was feeling good inside ’cause the
gang was still letting me be Robinson Crusoe and were taking most of
my orders. Sometimes, I said to myself, I’d like to be a leader of a
whole lot of people, who would do whatever I wanted them to. I might
be a general in an army, or a Governor or something--only I wanted to
be a doctor, too, and help people to get well. Also I wanted to help
save people from their troubles, and from being too poor, like Circus’s
folks, and I wished I could take all the whiskey there was in the
world and dump it out into a lake, only I wouldn’t want the perch and
northern pike or walleyes or the pretty blue gills or bass or sunfish
to have to drink any of it, but maybe I wouldn’t care if some of the
bullheads did.
While I was standing there, thinking about that pretty lake, and
knowing that Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang, would say
something about the Bible if he was there, I remembered part of a Bible
story that had happened out on a stormy, rolling lake just like this
one. Then I remembered that in the story of Robinson Crusoe there had
been a Bible and that he had taught his ignorant Man Friday a lot of
things out of it and Friday had become a Christian himself. My pop
used to read Robinson Crusoe to Mom and me at home many a night in the
winter--Pop reading good stories to us instead of whatever there was on
the radio that wouldn’t be good for a boy to hear, and my folks having
to make me turn it off. Pop always picked a story to read that was very
interesting to a red-haired boy and would be what Mom called “good
mental furniture”--whatever that was, or is.
All of the gang nearly always carried New Testaments in our pockets,
so, remembering Robinson Crusoe had had a Bible, I took out my New
Testament and stood with my back to the rest of the cabin, still
looking at the lake. I felt terribly good inside, with that little
brown leather Testament in my hands. I was glad the One Who is the main
character in it was a Friend of mine and that He liked boys.
“It was swell of You to help us find the little Ostberg girl,” I said
to Him, “and also to catch the kidnapper, and it’s an awful pretty lake
and sky and ...”
Right then I was interrupted by music coming from back in the cabin
somewhere, some people’s voices singing a song I knew and that we
sometimes sang in church back at Sugar Creek, and it was:
“Rescue the perishing, care for dying,
Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.”
I guessed quick that one of my goats or else my Man Friday had actually
found a radio in the cabin and had turned it on. I swished around,
dashed back inside and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom
where I’d left them, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but
the rollaway bed opened out and there, sitting on the side of it, my
two goats and my Man Friday and a little portable radio, which I knew
was the kind that had its own battery and its own inbuilt aerial. It
was sitting on my fat goat’s lap, and was playing like a house afire
that very pretty church hymn:
“Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,
Feelings lie buried that grace can restore.”
A jiffy after I got there, the music stopped and a voice broke in and
said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to make a very
important announcement. There is a new angle regarding the ransom money
still missing in the Ostberg kidnapping case. Little Marie’s father, a
religious man, has just announced that the amount represented a sum he
had been saving for the past several years to build a memorial hospital
in the heart of the mission field of Cuba. In St. Paul, the suspect,
caught last week at Bemidji by a gang of boys on vacation, still denies
knowing anything about the ransom money; claims he never received it.
Police are now working on the supposition that there may have been
another party to the crime. Residents of northern Minnesota are warned
to be on the lookout for a man bearing the following description: He
is believed to be of German descent, a farmer by occupation, about
thirty-seven years of age, six feet two inches tall, weighs one hundred
eighty seven pounds, stoop-shouldered, dark complexion, red hair,
partly bald, bulgy steel-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows that meet in the
center, hook-nose....”
The description went on, telling about the man’s clothes, ears, and
mouth, but I didn’t need any more. My heart was already bursting
with the awfulest feeling I’d had in a long time, ’cause the person
they were describing was exactly like Old hook-nosed John Till, the
mean, liquor-drinking father of one of the Sugar Creek Gang, little
red-haired Tom Till himself, one of my very best friends and a swell
little guy that all of us liked and felt so terribly sorry for on
account of we knew that he had that kind of a father, who had been in
jail lots of times and who spent his money on whiskey and gambling and
Little Tom’s mother had to be sad most of the time. In fact, about the
only happiness Tom’s mom had was in her boy Tom, who was a really swell
little guy, and went to Sunday school with us. She also got a little
happiness out of a radio which my folks had bought for her, and she
listened to Christian programs which cheered her up a lot.
Even while I listened to the radio on my fat goat’s lap, I was thinking
about Little Tom’s mom and wondering if she had her radio turned on
too, back at Sugar Creek, and would hear this announcement, and if it
would be like somebody jabbing a knife into her heart and twisting it.
But we didn’t have time to think, or talk or anything, ’cause right
that second, I heard a noise coming from the direction of the kitchen
window, which we had climbed in, and when I took a quick peek through
the curtains, I saw the face of a fierce-looking man. It only took me
one second’s glance to see the bushy eyebrows that met in the center
just above the top of his hooked nose, and even though he had on a
battered old felt hat that was dripping wet with the rain, and his
clothes were sop soaking wet, I recognized him as Little red-haired
Tom’s father.
In that quick flash of a jiffy I remembered the first time I had seen
him when he had been hired by my pop to shock oats, and he had tried
to get Circus’s pop to take a drink of whiskey over by some elderberry
bushes that grew along the fence row. It had been a terribly hot day,
and Circus and I had been helping shock oats too. Circus’s pop hadn’t
been a Christian very long, and because I hated whiskey and didn’t want
Circus’s pop to do what is called “backslide,” I had made a terribly
fierce fast run across the field with Circus, to try to stop his pop
from taking the drink and had run kerwham with both of my fists flying
straight into Old hook-nosed John Till’s stomach, and a little later
had landed on my back under the elderberry bushes from a terribly
fierce wham from one of John Till’s hard fists. After that, the gang
had had a lot of other trouble with him, but we’d gotten Little Tom
saved, and Tom, being a pretty good Christian for a little guy, had
been praying for his pop every day of his life ever since. But up to
now it looked like it hadn’t done any good ’cause his pop still was a
bad man and caused his family a lot of heartache.
Talk about mystery and excitement. I knew Tom’s pop hated us boys and
also he was pretty mean to Tom for going to church with us, and on
top of that was mad at my folks for taking Tom’s mom to church; and
whenever he came into the house when she had a Christian program on the
radio, he would either make her turn it off or he would turn it off
himself.
I’ll have to admit that I was afraid of Old hook-nosed John Till, and
right that minute I didn’t feel very much like being the leader of the
gang, which for some reason seemed to be made up of only four very
small boys, all of a sudden. The only thing I felt like leading in, was
a very fast foot race out through the woods and toward camp.
“Quick!” I hissed to the gang. “There’s somebody looking through
the window. What’ll we do?” Before I could think only half of those
thoughts and say only half of that sentence, I saw the man’s hand shove
up the window, and one of his wet long legs, which had a big wet shoe
on the end of it, swung over the window ledge, and he started squirming
his long-legged self in after it.
6
Well, what can you do, when there isn’t a thing you can think of, of
doing? When you are looking through an opening in a hanging curtain and
see a mean man coming into your cabin, and when you know there isn’t
any door you can dash through to get away? Poetry already had the radio
shut off and all of us were as still as scared mice, listening, and
also all of us were trying to peep through the opening in the curtain.
I noticed that John Till had a newish-looking fishing rod, which he
stood against the wall by a window, then he turned his back, reached
out of the window and bent his body over to pick up something that he
had left out there. A jiffy later I saw what it was--a stringer of
fish--what looked liked five or six big walleyed pike, and an extra
large northern pike, which he probably caught out in the lake.
He lifted the stringer and I heard the fish go kerflippety-flop-flop
into the sink, then I heard the iron pitcher pump squeaking like he was
pumping water on the fish, maybe to wash the dirt and slime off of them.
The curtain we were peeping through looked like it had been made out of
the same kind of material one of my mom’s chenille bedspreads is made
out of, and was kinda fuzzy on one side. Even before I heard Dragonfly
do what he did just then, I was afraid he would do it. He had his face
up close to the curtain not far from mine, and all of a sudden he got
a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes started to squint, and his
mouth to open, and he made a quick grab for his crooked nose with one
of his hands.
But it was too late. Out came the cuckooest-sounding sneezes you ever
heard, which he tried to smother and didn’t; and like it nearly always
sounds when he sneezes, it was like a fourth-of-July firecracker that
didn’t explode but just went “_hisssss-sh-sh-sh_” instead. At that
same instant John Till whirled around and looked through the main
room and at the curtain behind which we were hiding. If it had still
been raining terribly hard, he wouldn’t have heard us, maybe, but
Dragonfly’s sneeze seemed to have been timed with a lull in the rain,
’cause in spite of the fact that it was a smothered hissing noise, it
sounded like it was loud enough to be heard a long ways away.
John Till jumped like he had been shot at and hit, and I expected most
anything terribly exciting and dangerous to happen.
First I saw him take a wild look around like he wanted to make a dash
for a door or a window and disappear. He must have thought better of
it, though, ’cause he started pumping water again and doing something
to the fish he had caught, then he fumbled at his belt and in a second
I saw in his right hand a fierce-looking sheath knife, just like the
kind Barry carried. Its wicked-looking blade was about 5 inches long
and looked like it could either slice a fish into steaks in a jiffy
or do the same to a boy. Not a one of us had any weapons except our
pocket knives, and also not a one of us was going to be foolish enough
to start a fight. If only we could make a dash for the door and get
out--if the door wasn’t nailed shut, I thought. Then we could run like
scared deer and get away.
But there wasn’t a chance in the world--not with a fierce man with a
fierce-looking hunting knife in his hand.
Then Big John Till’s voice boomed into our room and said, “ALL
RIGHT--WHOEVER YOU ARE--COME OUT WITH YOUR ARMS UP!”
“What’ll we do?” Dragonfly’s trembling whisper asked me, but I already
had my arms up, and in a second he had his spindling arms pointed in
different directions toward the ceiling.
“Get ’em up!” I whispered to all of us, and I thought that, if we got a
chance, we’d make a dive for the open kitchen window and head for camp
terribly fast.
Poetry’s fat forehead was puckered with a very stubborn pucker, and
before I knew he was going to do what he did, he did it, which was--he
yelled into the other room, “Come on out onto the front porch and get
us!” only, of course, we weren’t on the front porch, and it didn’t make
sense at all until a little later.
As you know, Poetry’s voice was changing, and part of the time it was a
bass voice and the other part of the time, it was a soprano, on account
of he was old enough to be what my pop called “an adolescent,” which
is what a boy’s voice is like when adolescence happens to him. Part of
what Poetry said was in a man’s voice and sounded pretty fierce, but
right in the middle of the sentence his voice changed, and it was like
a scared woman’s voice, the kind that would have made Dragonfly think
it was a ghost’s voice, if he had heard it in the middle of a dark
night in an old abandoned house.
To make matters worse, Dragonfly sneezed again, and we knew we were
found out for sure. It must have been darker in the room where we were
than it was in the kitchen or something, or else John Till really
thought we were out on that front porch, ’cause all of a sudden he left
the sink where he’d been pumping water on his fish, and whirled around
with his big knife in his hand, straight out of the kitchen and through
the main room, dodging the table in the middle, and the Morris chair,
and made straight for the front porch.
It was our signal to make a dash for the kitchen and the open window,
which we did, Poetry letting the baby-sized radio plump down on the
rollaway bed, and even as I led the way to the kitchen window in a
mad dash, I noticed that the radio’s side panel which he had closed,
dropped down, which is what turns it on.
Most of us got to the window at the same time almost. My acrobatic
goat grabbed the kitchen table, and shoved it into the doorway between
the kitchen and the main room so as to block Hook-nose’s way if he
tried to come back quick and stop us. Poetry was out first, and then
Dragonfly, and then Circus, and last of all, I, Robinson Crusoe, who
in the split jiffy they were getting out first, got a glimpse of the
swell big stringer of fish John Till had caught, and which were, right
that second covered with water in the sink. The large northern pike was
especially very pretty and I thought that before I left the North this
summer, I’d want to catch a big fish, have it mounted by what is called
a taxidermist and put it on the wall of my room back at Sugar Creek.
I didn’t understand why John Till--as soon as he found out we weren’t
out on that porch but had tricked him--didn’t come dashing madly back
and jump over the table in the doorway and grab the last ones of us to
get through the window, but he didn’t and I was too scared to stop to
find out why.
So we swished around the corner of that cabin, made four dives in the
direction we knew the broken-twig trail went, and went dashing through
the still-sprinkling rain, through the wet shrubbery and under the
trees that were dripping water like a leaky roof, and headed for camp.
Boy, was I ever glad we had our trail of broken twigs to go by. When we
got to the first one, Dragonfly, whose feet were getting pretty wet,
like all of ours were, stopped and made a grab for his nose, and I knew
he was allergic to something--maybe to too wet feet. When he’d finished
his fancy sneeze, he said, sniffing at something he couldn’t see, but
which he knew was there, “I still smell something--_d-dead!_--something
in that direction over there!”
I sniffed in the direction he pointed, and sure enough, there was that
same deadish smell, like we’d smelled in the cabin, only this time it
was mixed up with the friendly odor of a woods after a rain.
My fat goat smelled in the same direction, and so did my acrobatic
goat, and we all smelled the same very unpleasant odor of something
dead.
“I wonder who it is,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly looked like he was
thinking about a ghost again.
And would you believe it? I heard music coming from somewhere--in fact,
from the direction of the cabin we’d come from, and I knew it was the
radio that had plopped open when my fat goat had left it in a hurry,
and though I couldn’t hear the words, I recognized the tune, and it
was, “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart.”
Well, we hurried on, following our trail, tickled that we had managed
to get out so easy, but wondering to each other if Old hook-nosed John
Till had had anything to do with the kidnapping, and if maybe he knew
where the ransom money was, and why he hadn’t come dashing back into
the kitchen to catch us.
“I think I know why,” Circus said, “he’s just like my dad was before he
was saved. He couldn’t even stand to see a bottle of whiskey without
taking a drink, and I’ll bet when he saw that big half-empty bottle out
on the porch he just grabbed it up and started gulping it down.”
Then Circus, being a little bashful about talking about things like
that, like some boys sometimes are, looked up, and seeing the limb
of a tree extending out over where he was going to walk, leaped up
and caught hold of it with his hands and chinned himself two or
three times, while Dragonfly, who was beside him under the leaves of
that branch, let out a yell and said, “Hey, watch out! Quit making
it rain on me!” which is what Circus had done--the leaves of that
branch getting most of the water shaken off and a lot of it falling on
Dragonfly all over.
Well, we were in a pretty big hurry, so we all zipped on, talking and
asking questions and trying to figure out what on earth the deadish
smell was and also wishing we had all the gang with us, and a spade,
and had time to follow the other trail of broken twigs and actually
find the ransom money.
In a little while we came to the place where we’d first found the
envelop with the invisible-ink map in it. There we stopped for half a
jiffy, and looked all around to be sure we would remember the place
again when we came back.
About twenty minutes later, we came puffing into camp in clear sunshiny
weather, the sky having cleared off after the storm, but we were as wet
as drowned rats.
The very minute the gang saw us come sloshing up to our tents, Big Jim
called out, “Where on earth have you been?”
Well, we’d agreed to keep our secret a secret for awhile, anyway not
to tell Barry first, but to rest of the gang--all except Tom Till. We
might decide to tell John Till too, but we wouldn’t if Big Jim said not
to, on account of it might spoil Tom’s vacation and he wouldn’t have
any fun the rest of our camping trip.
Dragonfly answered Big Jim’s question in a mischievous voice by saying,
“Bill’s been walking on my neck, and Poetry and Circus have been making
soup out of me, and I am a Negro,” which wouldn’t make sense to anyone
who didn’t know about Crusoe, his black Man Friday and the cannibals.
As soon as we could, we changed to dry clothes, and Big Jim took
command of us by saying, “O.K., boys, I’m in charge of camp for the
rest of the day. Barry got a terribly important letter in the mail an
hour ago, and he’s had to go to Bemidji. He’ll be back in time for our
Campfire get-together.”
Well, that was that. If there was anything I liked better than anything
else, it was to be alone with only our gang, when it can be its own
boss, even though we all liked Barry a lot and would do anything he
said any time.
“Bill’s _my_ boss,” Dragonfly said.
I looked at Dragonfly and then at Big Jim, and winked.
Big Jim grinned back, and then said to all of us, “Let’s get the camp
chores done.” Then he gave commands to different ones of us to do
different things. Poetry and I had the job of burying the entrails
and heads of some fish which Barry’d caught, and which had just been
cleaned before he left,--that being the best thing to do with fish
heads and other parts of the fish that you aren’t going to eat.
“The spade’s in Barry’s tent,” Big Jim said, and a minute later Poetry
and I were on our way up along the shore to the burying place.
We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when we heard somebody coming
behind us on the run, and it was Dragonfly, with an excited face, who
said, “You crazy goofs! You going to dig for the treasure without
letting me go along?”
“Why hello, my Man Friday!” I said pleasantly, and told him what we
were having to do. “Here--you carry the spade and do the digging.” And
Poetry said, “And you can carry these fish insides,” and with that he
handed him a smallish pail he’d been carrying.
But Dragonfly wouldn’t, so I let him disobey for once. When we got to
the place, we saw all kinds of little mounds of fresh dirt where other
fish entrails had been buried. And then all of a sudden Poetry said,
“Hey, here’s fish heads scattered all over the ground here!”
I looked, and sure enough, he was right. All around there were old
half-eaten bullheads, and the eyes and ugly noses of walleyed pike and
two or three spatulate-shaped snouts of big northern pike.
“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “Somebody’s been digging them up”--and
then he grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of what
might have been several very noisy sneezes, and said,
“I--_kerchew!_--I-smell--_kerchew!_--s-something _d-dead_.”
Well, that was that, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, ’cause
right away I knew that what we’d smelled back in the mystery cabin, and
around the outside, was maybe something like this.
“It’s raccoons,” I heard a voice saying behind us, and recognized it as
Circus’s voice, his pop being a hunter as you know, and he would know
about coons’ habits.
“Big Jim sent me to tell you guys to bury’m deep, ’cause the chipmunks
and coons’ve been digging’m all up again.”
Well, we buried our stuff very deep, each one of us doing a little
bit, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling very happy. I seemed to feel
that all the mystery and excitement we’d been having and which had
been getting more exciting every minute, was all made out of our own
imagination.
“Do you suppose that map with invisible ink on it was only maybe
showing somebody where a fish cemetery is?” Poetry asked, and I felt
terribly saddish inside. We all looked at each other with saddish eyes,
and felt even sadder.
“Then Tom’s daddy is only up here on a fishing trip, and he’s maybe
rented the old cabin from somebody for a while,” I said.
We went back to camp feeling terribly blue.
Well, after supper and when it got almost dark, it was time for Eagle
Eye’s blood curdling Indian story. We knew that he being a Christian
Indian, would tell us a Bible story too, which is one reason why
our parents had wanted us to come on this camping trip in the first
place. Every night before we tumbled into bed, we would listen to a
short talk from the Bible, and then somebody would lead us in prayer.
Sometimes somebody gave us a talk about boys and what boys ought to
know about themselves and God, and how God expected everybody in the
world to behave themselves--things like that. Not a one of the gang was
sissified enough to be ashamed of being a Christian, and as you know,
every single one of us nearly always carried his New Testament with him
wherever he went.
We started our evening campfire, which was going to be what is called
an Indian fire. It was after Eagle Eye’s story that I found out about
Little Tom’s terribly sad heart, and I was even gladder than I was that
he hadn’t been with us in the afternoon. I’ll tell you about that in
the very next chapter.
7
I think I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life as I did for
Little red-haired Tom Till at the close of our camp fire that night.
It was fun having our big Indian guest, Eagle Eye, whom we all knew and
liked very much, take charge of our meeting. He showed us how to build
an Indian fire, which was like this: First he made a little wigwam of
some dry tinder and slender sticks, and also some larger sticks all
stacked up in the shape of an Indian tepee, with the top ends lapping
over each other a little. Then he had us boys drag five or six big long
poles from a little shelter nearby, where there was a place for keeping
wood dry.
It was interesting to watch him ’cause just for fun he was wearing real
Indian garb, with a headband filled with long pretty, different colored
feathers, and clothes that looked like the kind I’d seen in pictures of
Indians in our school library.
As soon as the little wigwam fire was laid, but not started yet, he
took his bow and arrow and a board which he called a fire board, and in
almost no time had a smallish fire started. It was a pretty sight to
watch that little wigwam of tinder and sticks leap into flame and the
long reddish-yellow tongues of fire go leaping up toward the sky. The
smoke rose slowly, and spread itself out over our camp and sort of hung
there like a big lazy bluish cloud.