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_NORTH WOODS MANHUNT_
(A Sugar Creek Gang Story)
by
PAUL HUTCHENS
_Published by_
SCRIPTURE PRESS
SCRIPTURE PRESS PUBLICATIONS, INC.
1825 College Avenue · Wheaton, Illinois
_North Woods Manhunt_
Copyright, 1948, by
Paul Hutchens
All rights in this book are reserved. No part may be reproduced in
any manner without the permission in writing from the author, except
brief quotations used in connection with a review in a magazine or
newspaper.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter Page
1 3
2 10
3 17
4 25
5 34
6 45
7 56
8 66
9 75
10 83
1
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.
I won’t take time right now to tell you all you maybe ought to know
about how we happened to find that ransom money buried in the sawdust
of that old icehouse, ’cause that’d take too long, and besides you’ve
probably read all about it in the last story about the Sugar Creek
Gang, which is called, “Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure.” I maybe
better tell you, though, that a little St. Paul girl named Marie
Ostberg had been kidnapped and the kidnapper had hidden up in the
Chippewa forest of northern Minnesota in what is called “The Paul
Bunyan Country,” where we were camping. Our gang had found the girl
in the middle of the night and captured the kidnapper in an old Indian
cemetery the next night, and then we had had a very mysterious and
exciting time hunting for the ransom money in one of cuckoo-est places
in all the world to find money, and at last had found it in this very
old icehouse, and, as I told you, the money had been sewed up inside of
these great big fish which we’d been digging up and stuffing into the
gunny sack.
In maybe another seven minutes we’d have had it all dug up and stuffed
into the gunny sack and would have been on our excited way back to
camp, but all of a startling sudden we heard that outboard motor
roaring in our direction from out on the lake and we knew that unless
we stepped on the gas, we wouldn’t even get all of us climbed out of
the opening and far enough away in the bushes not to be seen.
“What’s the sense of being scared?” Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of
our gang, asked me right after I’d ordered us all to get going quick.
“The kidnapper’s caught and in jail, isn’t he?”
“Sure, but Old hook-nosed John Till’s running loose up here somewhere,”
I said--Old Hook-nose being a very fierce man who was the fierce
infidel daddy of one of the members of our gang. He had been in jail
a lot of times in his wicked life and was staying in a cabin not more
than a quarter of a mile up the shore from where we were right that
minute.
Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of the gang, who knew one hundred and
one or two poems by heart and was always quoting one, swished around
quick, scrambled back across the sawdust we’d been digging in, peeped
through a crack between the logs toward the lake.
“Who _is_ it?” I said, and he said in his duck-like squawky voice, “I
can’t tell, but he looks awful mad.”
Well, anybody knows anybody couldn’t see well enough that far to see
anybody’s face well enough to tell whether it had a mad look on it, but
if it was John Till who hated us boys anyway, he’d probably be mad and
would do savage things to all of us, if he caught us in that icehouse
getting the money.
So in another six or seven jiffies we were all scrambling as fast as
we could _out_ of that icehouse and out into the open, carrying Little
Jim’s gunny sack full of fish. We made a dive across an open space to a
clump of bushes, where we wouldn’t be seen by anybody on the lake.
Circus, the acrobatic member of our gang, was with us, too, and he
being the strongest one of us, grabbed up the sack, swung it over his
shoulder and loped on ahead of us. “Hurry!” we panted to each other,
and didn’t stop running until we reached the top of a hill, which we
did just as we heard the outboard motor stop. There we all dropped down
on the grass, gasping and panting, and tickled that we were safe, but I
was feeling pretty bad to think that there were probably a half dozen
other fish still buried in the sawdust in that old log icehouse.
“Quick, Poetry, give me your knife,” Circus ordered.
“What for?” Poetry said, and at the same time shoved his fat hand in
his pocket and pulled out his official boy-scout knife and handed it
over to Circus, who quick opened the heavy cutting blade and started
ripping open the sewed-up stomach of a big northern pike which he’d
just pulled out of the sack.
“There’s no sense in carrying home a six pound northern pike with only
a quarter of a pound of twenty dollar bills in it,” Circus said, and I
knew he was right, ’cause it was a long way back to our camp, and if
for any reason we had to run fast, we could do it better without having
to lug along those great big fish, especially the biggest one.
I didn’t bother to watch Circus though, ’cause right that second I
started peering through the foliage of some oak undergrowth back toward
the lake, just as I saw a man come swishing around the corner of the
icehouse and stop in front of the opened door.
“Hey _look!_” Dragonfly said to us, “he’s got a big string of big fish.”
And sure enough he had.
Little Jim, who was beside me, holding onto his stick which he always
carried with him when we were on a hike or out in the woods, whispered
close to my ear and said, “I’ll bet he’s got a lot more money sewed up
in a lot more fish, and is going to bury it in the sawdust where these
were.”
I happened to have my high-powered binoculars with me so I quick
unsnapped the carrying case they were in, zipped them out, raised them
to my eyes and right away it seemed like I was only about one-third as
far away as I was. I gasped so loud at what I saw--or rather _who_ I
saw--that my gasp was almost like a yell.
“SH!” Circus said to us, just like he was the leader of our gang, which
he wasn’t, but I was myself--that is, I was _supposed_ to be, ’cause
our real leader, Big Jim, wasn’t with us, but was back at camp with
Little Tom Till, the newest member of our gang.
“It’s Old Hook-nose, all right,” I said, and knew it was. I could see
his stoop-shoulders, dark complexion, red hair, bulgy eyes, bushy
eyebrows, and his hook nose.
“What if he finds we’ve dug up part of the fish and run away with
them?” Little Jim asked in a half-scared voice.
“Maybe he won’t,” I said, and hoped he wouldn’t.
While I was watching John Till toss his stringer of fish up into the
opening and clamber up after them, Circus was slashing open the fish
and taking out the ransom money which was folded in nice flat packets
of oiled paper like the kind my mom uses in our kitchen back home at
Sugar Creek.
We also all helped Circus do what he was doing, all of us maybe more
excited than we’d been in a long time, while different ones of us took
turns watching Hook-nose do what he was doing.
I knew that in only a few jiffies he would be out of that icehouse
again, and probably would go back to the big white boat he’d come to
shore in, shove off and row out a few feet, and then there would be a
roar of his motor and away he would go swishing out across the sunlit
water, his boat making a long widening V behind him. Then we would
sneak back and get the rest of the money.
Everything was pretty clear in my mind as to what had been going on the
last day or two, and it was that John Till had maybe been what police
call an “accomplice” of the real kidnapper and it had been his special
job to look after the ransom money. He’d decided that the best way in
the world to hide it where nobody would ever think of finding it would
be to catch some big fish, cut them open, clean out the entrails, fold
the money in packets of oil paper, stuff it inside the fish, and sew
it up, like my mother sews up a chicken she’s stuffed with dressing
just before she slides it into the oven for our dinner. Then he would
dig down deep in the sawdust of the icehouse till he came to some ice,
lay the fish on it, and cover it up. Nobody would ever think to look
inside a fish for money. Even if they accidentally dug up a fish, it’d
be covered with wettish sticky sawdust, and they wouldn’t see the
stitches in its stomach.
Say, while I was thinking that and also watching the shadow of John
Till through the door of the icehouse, all of a sudden there was a
quick gasp beside me, and I said to Circus, “What on earth?” thinking
maybe he’d found something terribly special, but he hadn’t. He dropped
his knife, leaped to his feet, and said, “You guys stay here! I’ll be
right back.”
“Stop!” I said. “Where you going?” I remembered I was supposed to be
the leader, but say, Circus had his own ideas about that. He squirmed
out of my grasp, almost tearing his shirt, on account of I had hold of
it and didn’t want to let go.
The next second there were only four of us left--barrel-shaped Poetry,
kind-faced, swell Little Jim, pop-eyed Dragonfly, and red-haired,
fiery-tempered, freckle-faced Bill Collins, which is me. Circus, our
acrobat, was streaking out through the bushes as fast as he could go
toward the lake and the icehouse, but not getting out in the open where
John could see him.
“What on earth?” I thought. I didn’t dare yell, or try to stop him by
whistling or something, or John Till would have heard me, and who knows
what might have happened? I didn’t have the slightest idea what Circus
was up to until a moment later, when I saw him dart like a scared
chipmunk out from some bushes not far from the icehouse and make a dive
for the open door.
“Why the crazy goof!” I thought. “He’s going to try to--What _was_ he
going to try to do?”
And the next thing I knew, I quick found out. It happened so fast, I
didn’t even have time to think. But the very minute I saw Circus start
to do what he was starting to do, I knew he was going to do it.
SWISH! Wham! A half-dozen fast flying movements, and it was all over.
Circus grabbed that icehouse door, swung it shut, lifted the big heavy
bar and threw it into place, and Old hook-nosed John Till was locked
inside!
2
Circus hadn’t any more than slammed that icehouse door shut and dropped
the heavy bar into place, locking Old Hook-nose in than there was a
loud pounding on the door and a yelling that sounded like there was a
madman inside.
What on earth to do next was the question. We were an awful long way
from camp, and we five kinda-smallish 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 knows but he might have a gun
too. Anybody as fierce and as mad as John Till maybe 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, and when
a few jiffies 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, so I said, “Come on, Gang. Follow me and we’ll get help in a
hurry.”
I grabbed up the gunny sack which had the rest of the stuffed fish
in it and the packets of the ransom money, and it felt as light as a
feather as I started on a fast dash right straight toward the icehouse
again.
“Hey, where are you going?” Poetry hissed and yelled to me at the same
time.
“Back to camp,” I said. “Come on!”
“Camp’s in this other direction,” Dragonfly called after me.
“Do as I say,” I yelled back over my shoulder, and kept on running like
a deer straight for the icehouse.
It felt good to realize that all the gang was coming swishing along
after me, that I was actually the leader--for awhile anyway. I had what
I thought was a swell idea--which my pop told me once is what happens
to a person when he becomes a leader--first he gets an idea about
something which 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.
Here’s what I’d planned to do:
You see, while Circus was slamming that door and shutting Old Hook-nose
inside, and I was watching him 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, and was the same kind our camp director had, and which
I’d been learning how to run during the past week. It had a powerful
seven-horsepower motor and could go terribly fast on a lake. If there
was anything I’d rather do than anything else, it was to sit in the
stern of a boat, with one hand on the rubber grip of the steering
handle, and, facing the prow, go roaring out across the water with fast
wind blowing into my freckled face and also feeling the shoreline flash
past very fast.
I also knew that the water in many of the big blue-watered lakes up
here in the North was kept fresh because the Mississippi river flowed
through them, and also flowed from one lake to another. I’d studied
the map of the territory and knew that if we could use that boat and
motor, we could go roaring up the lake terribly fast, pass--in three or
four minutes--the old Indian cemetery, and a little later, come to a
place where the Mississippi flowed out of this lake into a long narrow
channel and into the other very large 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 big 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, and 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 which the little Ostberg girl’s
daddy had paid to the kidnapper.
In a jiffy almost, I was hurrying past the icehouse with my gunny sack
of fish. I stopped for a split-jiffy 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.
In a jiffy all of us were in the boat, and had shoved off and rowed out
to deep enough water to make it safe to start the motor without its
propeller striking on the bottom.
I was pretty nervous, and also scared and brave at the same time. It
wasn’t our boat or motor, but we weren’t stealing it, but were amateur
detectives using the criminal’s boat to help get some help to help
capture him.
It was a terribly pretty sunshiny day, with only a few scattered white
clouds in the sky. In another minute we’d be gone. Poetry was in the
middle, on a seat by himself, Dragonfly and Little Jim in 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 co-operate?” which is a word my pop sometimes
uses back at Sugar Creek when he wants me to obey him. “You keep your
eye on the gunny sack there between your feet.”
I quick opened the gasoline shut-off valve as far as it would turn,
being sure first that the air vent on the tank was open, shoved the
speed control lever over to where it said “Start,” primed the motor,
and gave the starter knob a very fast sharp pull, and in a jiffy that
powerful motor roared itself to life and our boat went whizzing up the
lake. I made a couple of quick other adjustments like I knew how to do,
and away we went, the wind blowing hard in our faces or against our
backs, depending on which direction we were facing.
Right that second 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 as far to the right as
it would go, and our boat really shot forward, Circus’s prow raised
itself up part way 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 the
kidnapped little girl, capturing the kidnapper, and digging up the
ransom money, a lot of which was right there in the boat with us in the
stomachs of the fish we had in the gunny sack. The rest of the money
was probably all sewed in the other fish which 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 fat hands holding onto the gunwale on one side and the other
on the other--, “I’ll bet Big Jim’ll want to call the police and let
_them_ capture John.”
Not a one of us liked the 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 which helped make this last story of
our northern camping trip one we’d never forget as long as we lived.
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 out to us, “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 sure enough,
there in the water was what looked like an upside-down whiskey bottle
on the surface of the water.
“We don’t have time to stop,” I yelled to Little Jim, and didn’t even
bother to throttle the motor even a little bit. But say, when I saw
that little guy’s happy face suddenly get a sad expression on it and
saw him kinda drop his head, like a friendly little 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 of the motor back to “Slow,” and shoved the steering
handle around so we’d cut a wide circle, and in a jiffy we were
putt-putting slowly back toward the floating bottle.
You see, all of 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 getting all the old empty whiskey bottles he could find, and
he--being an honest-to-goodness Christian boy who hated whiskey on
account of it was a terrible enemy of mankind and made so many people
in the world so sad and caused so much murder and stuff--had been
putting what is called “a gospel tract” in them and a little note which
he scribbled in his own handwriting. A gospel tract, just in case you
might never have heard what one is, 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 kinda
awkward scribble which Little Jim always tucked into each bottle along
with the tract, always said the same thing, which was: “Whoever finds
this, please believe that God loves you, and if you’re not saved,
remember Jesus died on the cross for you, and hurry up and 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.” Then Little Jim would sign his name
which was _Jim Foote_, and 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 some time maybe 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_. He being that
kind of a swell little guy and also being one of my best friends, I had
decided I wasn’t going to wait till I was any grown-upper than I was,
before doing it, too.
In a jiffy 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!”
And sure enough, it had. I could see there was a piece of heavy fishing
line, tied around the bottle’s neck, and that something was fastened to
the other end away down in the water somewhere.
3
Say, the very second I realized there was something tied to the other
end of that fishing line I was afraid it might be some heavy object,
and at the rate our boat was traveling, if Circus held onto the bottle,
the line might break, so I yelled to him, “Hey, let go! The line might
break!” At the same time, I quick shut off the gas to almost nothing
and swung the boat around in a half circle, so, in case Circus _didn’t_
let go, the line wouldn’t have too much strain on it and break, ’cause
I was wondering what on earth might be on the other end.
My motor made a couple of smoky coughs right that minute and stopped,
which was maybe a good thing on account of we _might_ have broken the
line, if it hadn’t.
You could have knocked me over with a pine needle when we found out
what kind of a message was in that bottle. There wasn’t anything on
the other end of the very strong fishing line except a great big
old-fashioned horseshoe. It was covered with weeds and lake bottom
dirt, which meant it had been used as a weight so the waves wouldn’t
wash the bottle away.
It only took us a few jiffies to read what was in the bottle, because
we didn’t even have to take out the cork, on account of a piece of
paper with black printing on it was rolled up inside, with the words
as plain as anything visible right through the glass. Poetry read them
out loud to us in his squawky voice and they were:
“Dear Fisherman Friend: This is one of the best places on the
lake for Crappie fishing. Try it here Monday through Saturday
an hour before and after sundown.... But on Sunday mornings at
eleven and Sunday nights at 7:30, come to THE CHURCH OF THE
CROSS, Bemidji, Minnesota, where we are fishing for men. We will
be pleased to welcome you. Please leave this marker here for
others to read, and remember that Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners, which means ‘you, me and anybody else.’”
The Pastor.
“P.S. Tune in the CHURCH OF THE CROSS radio broadcast every
afternoon at 4:00 o’clock.”
Well, our boat was maybe only a few yards from where we’d first seen
the bottle floating, which, as I told you, was not far from the shore,
just straight out from the old Indian cemetery, so we took the oars
which every motor boat ought to have in it, and rowed a few strokes
back to where we thought the bottle had been floating before. Poetry
was about to put it carefully back into the water when Dragonfly,
whose mother, as you maybe know, believes it’s bad luck if a black cat
crosses your path or if you break a mirror or walk under a ladder, and
also that it is _good_ luck if you find a horseshoe, piped up and said,
“Let’s tie some _other_ weight on it. I’d like to keep that horseshoe
for good luck.”
“You’re crazy,” Poetry squawked. “That’d be stealing, and stealing
would mean _bad_ luck.”
Just that second there was a long-voiced high-pitched quavering cry of
a loon from somewhere on the lake, and Dragonfly who’d been having a
hard time getting used to a loon’s lonely cry, looked up quick like he
had heard a ghost, while at the same time Circus let the horseshoe sink
into the lake. A second later, there was the bottle floating on the
surface of the water again, lying flat, which meant that the horseshoe
was really on the bottom and the line was loose.
Right away, I adjusted the motor for starting, gave a quick sharp pull
on the starter knob and away we all went again, racing up the shore
toward the Narrows where we knew the river flowed from this lake into
the one our camp site was on. In another ten minutes, we’d be there and
Big Jim would help us decide what to do about John Till.
It was a wonderful ride and if we hadn’t been so excited, we would have
enjoyed the scenery like we’d done once before when we were riding
through the Narrows. The Narrows was almost a half mile long, and there
was a little current but the river was flowing in the same direction we
were going, so in only a few minutes we were on our own lake, and the
pretty black-shrouded motor was carrying us fast straight for camp.
Poetry yelled something to all of us then, and it was, “You guys
remember yesterday afternoon when it rained and we were in Old John’s
cabin and found that little portable radio and when we turned it on, we
heard a Christian program? I’ll bet that was the Church of the Cross
program.”
Then Little Jim, who was sitting beside Dragonfly with one hand holding
onto his stick and the other onto the side of the boat and with a
tickled grin on his face, piped up and said, “Radio’s a good way to
fish for men. It’s like casting with a terribly long line clear out
where the fish really are.”
“Old John Till’s a _fish_, all right,” Dragonfly said, “only he drinks
whiskey instead of water. I hope when we get him captured, he’ll have
to go to jail the rest of his life.”
I noticed that Circus’s monkey-looking face had a very serious
expression on it for a minute, like what Dragonfly had said had been
like a pin sticking him somewhere, and all of a sudden I remembered
that Circus’s dad had once been a drunkard himself. Even while we were
racing along with the oak and white birch and Balm of Gilead and pine
trees whizzing past, and our boat cutting a fierce fast V through
the water, I was remembering one summer night back at Sugar Creek
when there had been a big tent filled with people and a big choir and
an evangelist preaching, and nearly all of the members of the Sugar
Creek Gang had been saved; and when Circus himself had walked down the
grassy aisle to the front to confess the Saviour, all of a sudden Old
Dan Browne, Circus’s drinking daddy, who had been outside of the tent
listening, had come swishing in and running down the aisle with tears
in his eyes and voice, crying out loud, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!”
And that very night God had saved Old Dan Browne clear through, so that
he hadn’t taken a drop of whiskey or beer since; and from then on he
was a good worker and his family had had enough to eat.
Circus must have been thinking the same thing, ’cause when Dragonfly
said that about Old hook-nosed John Till’s going to jail, he looked
across the top of all the heads of the rest of the gang and straight
into my eyes. I could see the muscles of his jaw working like he was
thinking hard. I also noticed that his fists were doubled up terribly
tight, and remembered that he hated whiskey worse than anything else
in the world, on account of it had made his mother very unhappy for a
long time.
Little Jim called out to all of us then and said, “What about _Tom_?
What’ll we tell _him_?”
“And what _would_ we tell him?” I thought--that swell little
red-haired, grandest little newest member of our gang, who was Old
Hook-nose’s boy.
Not a one of us knew, but in a little while now, at the rate we were
flying, we’d be back in camp where Big Jim and Little Tom Till were,
and we’d have to tell them that we had Tom’s pop locked up in the old
icehouse, and he was probably what police called an accomplice of the
actual kidnapper we’d caught last week.
I was terribly disappointed at what Big Jim decided to do as soon as
we’d told him, which we did, all by himself, so Tom wouldn’t hear it
and start feeling terribly sad and have all the rest of his vacation
spoiled--although of course he’d _have_ to find it out sooner or later.
Big Jim had heard our motor and come out to the end of the long dock
where the mailbox was, to meet us, wondering maybe who on earth we were
at first, coming in with a highpowered motor and a different boat.
Little Tom wasn’t in camp right then, but was up the shore visiting at
a cabin owned by a man named Santa, who especially liked him, and Tom
was watching him build a utility boat in his work shop, so we had a
chance to tell Big Jim the whole exciting story without Little Tom Till
hearing it.
“Let’s leave Tom where he is and all of us go back with a rope and tie
him up,” Dragonfly suggested.
“You’re crazy,” Circus said. “He might have a gun and might shoot us,
and get away, and take all the rest of the ransom money with him.”
“What ransom money?” Big Jim wanted to know, and then I remembered
that Big Jim didn’t know a thing about our having dug in the old
icehouse for the money and had found it sewed up inside a lot of fish’s
stomachs. So, quick we told him, and he frowned at first, then his
bright mind started to work and he just took charge of things in a
jiffy.
“This is a job for the police,” Big Jim told us. “You boys’ve done your
part, and you’ll get credit, but there isn’t any sense in running any
unnecessary risks. Let’s get to a phone quick.”
We all knew there wasn’t any sense in trying to argue Big Jim out of
that idea, and it did make good sense, although it’s hard on a boy to
use good sense all the time, on account of his not being used to it.
The first good sense we used was to quick carry the money down to
Santa’s cabin and lock it up in his boathouse. The nearest telephone
being farther on up the lake at a resort, Santa and Big Jim took
Santa’s boat and motored terribly fast in that direction, leaving
Poetry and Circus and Little Jim and Dragonfly and Tom Till and me
standing there by the boathouse to wait till they came back from
phoning the police.
I looked into Poetry’s bluish eyes and he into mine--we both feeling
pretty sad. It was going to be a _little_ fun watching the police
surround the icehouse though, and seeing them capture our criminal.
“It’ll be fun to watch him come out of that icehouse with his long
hairy arms up in the air,” Dragonfly said, and Little Tom Till looked
up from what he’d been doing, which was tucking the stem of an oxeye
daisy through the button hole of his shirt--that little guy always
liking to wear a wild flower of some kind,--and asked, “Watch _who_
come out of an icehouse--_what_ icehouse?”
And Dragonfly, being not thinking, but letting the very first thought
that came into his head just splash right out of his mouth, said, “Why
Old hook-nosed John--”
But that was as far as his dumb sentence got, for Circus who was
quicker than a cat, whirled around and clapped his hand over his mouth
just in time to stop him at the word “John.”
But it was too late to save Little Tom’s feelings. I saw a sad look
come into his bluish eyes and both fists double up quick, and I knew
he was both sad and mad. He looked like he knew Dragonfly meant his
daddy, on account of he had called him “Old hook-nose John--,” but the
part about coming out of an icehouse with his hairy arms up in the
air, puzzled him. I saw him swallow hard like there was a lump in his
throat, and he said, “You mean my daddy’s locked up somewhere? What
for? What’s he done?”
I’d been calling John Till “Old Hook-nose” myself, when I’d been
talking to the rest of the gang and when I thought about him, but
somehow right that second, it sort of seemed like we ought to get a
more respectable, better name for him.
I knew we had to tell Tom the truth, he having heard Dragonfly say
that, but I was mad at Dragonfly for a minute, so I said, “Listen you,
Dragonfly Gilbert (which is his last name), you can stop calling him
‘Old Hook-nose,’ when you’ve got a nose that turns south at the end,
yourself!”
Then because Tom would have to know the truth some time, all of us
helped each other tell him the whole story, which you already know.
While we were doing it, Tom wouldn’t look us in the eye, but was
picking blue flowers and tucking them into a little bouquet in his
hand. Then he straightened up and looked all around in a quick circle
like he was expecting to see the police coming. Also he looked out
toward the lake like he was listening for the motor of Santa and Big
Jim coming back.
There wasn’t any motor sound though, but at that very second, I heard
the very saddish sound of a mourning dove from up in a tree somewhere
above us, saying, “_Coo, coo, coo, coo_.” Then almost the second the
last “coo” was finished, there was a sort of vibrating musical sound
about thirty feet above us, and I knew it was the wings of the dove as
it flew away or maybe from one tree to another.
Little Jim, who had my binoculars, swished them up to his eyes and
looked, just as little red-haired Tom Till said, “If my daddy gets
caught, he’ll have to go to jail for a terribly long time, and we won’t
have any daddy, and it’ll break my mother’s--”
He suddenly broke off what he was saying, got a tearful expression on
his freckled face, and then because maybe he couldn’t stand to have
any of us see him cry, he turned like a flash and started running
back toward camp as fast as he could go, kinda stumbling along though
like he had a lot of tears in his eyes that were blinding him and he
couldn’t see where he was going.
4
Well, when you see one of your best friends running and stumbling along
like that, and know there are tears in his eyes and that he has a
great big heavy ache in his heart, you sort of get tears in your eyes
yourself. All in a quick flash while his red hair was bobbing down that
weed-grown path toward camp, I was remembering that the first time
I’d ever seen him was when he and his bad big brother Bob belonged to
a bunch of barbarian town boys that had come out in the country one
afternoon and had been eating up all the strawberries that grew on
Strawberry Hill. Our gang had happened onto them while they were doing
it, and for some reason we’d gotten into a fierce fist fight. Tom’s
hard-knuckled fist had whammed me on the nose; and for a dozen fierce
fist-flying minutes he and I had been enemies.
But a lot of things had happened after that. Tom and I had made up and
he was now one of the best friends I had. The whole gang liked him a
lot, and we didn’t hold it against him that his big brother Bob was
what people called a “juvenile delinquent,” and his daddy was a beer-
and whiskey-drinking infidel that acted like he hated God and the
church and also was too lazy to work for a living.
So when I saw Tom go stumbling away like that, I got a big lump in
my throat, and started off after him, not too fast though, ’cause I
didn’t think he wanted anybody to follow him.
When I got to camp, I heard Tom inside our director’s tent moving
around doing something I couldn’t guess what. It seemed like I was
sort of spying on him, and I hated to make him feel worse by looking
at his tears, if he was still crying, so I slipped into the other tent
and peeped through the nearly closed flaps, and then all of a sudden I
saw Tom thrust open the flap of his tent real quick and dive out, and
around it, and start on the run up the lake in the other direction,
carrying his smallish oldish looking brown suitcase, and I wondered,
“What on earth!”
I was so surprised for a minute that I couldn’t even move, and it
wasn’t until after Tom disappeared on the path running as fast as he
could with that suitcase flopping along beside him that I realized he
was probably so ashamed he was going to try to run away and go back
home.
I came to quick life, dived out of my tent, and started after him,
yelling, “Hey! Tom! Wait for me. I want to tell you something.”
I didn’t know what I wanted to tell him, but if he would only wait till
I got there I could probably think of something. I certainly didn’t
want him to go home.
Behind me I could hear the sound of Santa’s motor on the lake,
and--well, I darted after Tom Till as fast as my excited legs could
carry me.
I was a little longer legged than Tom, and caught up with him in only
a short run and grabbed him, and said, “You’re a swell guy, Tom. The
whole gang likes you.”
He dropped his suitcase, pulled loose, and darted around behind the
big bole of a Norway pine tree, where he stopped. I could see part of
him, and could tell by the way one of his elbows was moving that he was
wiping tears out of his eyes, maybe with the back of his hand.
I tried to coax him to go back to camp with me, but he wouldn’t.
“Everybody hates me,” he sobbed, but since he knew _I_ really _liked_
him, I having proved it to him at different times before, he slumped
down in the grass and let himself sort of sob and talk at the same
time, and also sniffle. He wasn’t looking at me but straight ahead in
the direction of a little cluster of bright yellow mustard flowers like
the kind that grow along the edge of our garden back at Sugar Creek if
you let them--they being very pretty but are pests, and if you give
them a chance they will spread in a few years all over a field or fence
row.
Seeing those pretty mustard flowers and knowing that Tom was crying on
account of his pop, and also on account of his mother, made me think of
my own parents and how when I catch a cold, my brown-haired mom makes a
mustard plaster and puts it on my chest.
“You’re a swell guy,” I said to Tom, and felt awful warm inside my
heart toward him and wished he was my brother and that I could do
something to make him happy.
Tom seemed to remember then that he had a handkerchief in his pocket.
He pulled it out and blew his freckled nose and then he just sort of
straightened up quick like he’d thought of something important. “Where
IS the icehouse?” he asked me, and scrambled to his feet.
I wondered what he had on his mind, on account of his face looked like
he’d made up his mind to do something terribly important which he was
afraid to do but was going to do anyway. But he wouldn’t tell me until
I told him I wouldn’t tell him where the icehouse was if he _didn’t_
tell me, and so he told me, and would you believe it? This is what he
said. “I want to get there before the cops do and talk to him about
something. I want to _tell_ him something.”
I looked at his tearful eyes and his sniffling nose and his freckled
face and liked him even better than ever. I thought I ought to ask Big
Jim what he thought, he having a lot of bright ideas about things like
that.
Right away we found Big Jim who had just come back with Santa from
phoning the police, and I was surprised when he said, “Nothing doing.
It’s up to the police now.”
But Tom got a stubborn expression on his face and said, “I’ve GOT to
talk to him. You’ve GOT to take me there, ’cause after the cops get him
I won’t have any chance.”
We were standing down on the beach at the time. Tom’s bare toes were
digging themselves into the sand, and he was still sniffling a little
and swallowing. “I want to ask him to give up when the police come for
him,” he said.
“You won’t _need_ to ask him _that_,” Dragonfly who had come up just
that second, said, “He’ll _have_ to give up.”
“He might _not_,” Tom said. “He might kill some of the police--he might
even kill himself--if he’s--if he’s been drinking. My daddy’s pretty
fierce when he’s half drunk and mad at the same time.”
I looked at Big Jim’s face. He was looking down at the boat with the
pretty black-shrouded outboard motor attached to the stern, and the
muscles of his jaw were working like they do when he’s thinking. Barry,
our camp director, hadn’t come back yet, he having had to be away all
night, so Big Jim was still our boss.
“Is that your dad’s motor?” Big Jim asked Tom Till, pointing toward
it, and Tom said, “I don’t know. He always wanted one like that, but I
don’t think he had enough--(sniff--sniff)--money to buy one.”
Just that second we heard a horn blowing out on the lake and knew it
was the mail boat coming, which it was; and besides there being a
letter for most of the rest of us, there was one in Little Tom Till’s
mother’s handwriting which was addressed to him.
Tom held it in his hands, studying it, then he opened it and read it,
while different ones of us read our own letters, only I kept watching
him out of the corner of my eyes. Then I saw him quick shuffle over to
Big Jim and shove the letter into his hand and say, “Read _that!_”
Big Jim, who had been reading a letter in a very smooth, pretty
handwriting in green ink which I knew was from Sylvia, whose pop was
our Sugar Creek minister and who Big Jim thought was extra nice on
account of she was, tucked Sylvia’s letter inside his shirt pocket and
read Tom’s mom’s letter, and--well, that was what decided us.
“All right, Gang,” Big Jim said to us in a quick authoritative voice,
when he’d finished Tom’s letter. “Let’s get going. We’ve got to get
this letter to John Till before the police get there. Circus, you and
Dragonfly run down to the boathouse and wait with Santa. That icehouse
is on some new lake-front property he bought two weeks ago, and he’ll
show the police how to get there.”
“I want to go with you,” Dragonfly whined.
“You can come with the police, if they’ll let you,” Big Jim said.
“They’ll be here as quick as they can.”
And so Big Jim, Little Tom Till, Little Jim and Poetry and I got into
the big boat, and I let Big Jim run the motor on account of he was
going to, anyway. First, we checked to see if we had enough gas, and
also we tossed in enough life-preserver pillows for each of us, Little
Jim putting on his lifesaver vest just to be still safer, and in a
few jiffies we were off, Big Jim running the boat almost as well as I
could, and I only had to tell him once what to do, but he had already
done it.
I won’t take time to tell you much about that fast ride, but we almost
flew up the lake, and through the Narrows, swishing under the bridge
and into the other lake in only what seemed like a few minutes.
Just after we’d swished _under_ the bridge and out into that other lake
the icehouse was on, Little Jim yelled, “Hey! There’s a long black car
just going across now. I’ll bet that’s the cops.”
I couldn’t hear the boards of the bridge or the car’s motor, on account
of our own motor was making so much noise. It felt good though to be
working with the police, and it also felt good to feel that there was
really a lot of big strong men in our country who were interested in
doing what Pop calls “protecting society from wicked men”--only with
Little Tom there in the boat beside me, being such a swell little guy,
it seemed too bad to think of his daddy as a real criminal, but he
was anyway! Even while we raced up that other shore past the Indian
cemetery and the whiskey bottle which I noticed was still there--the
one that had the printed gospel message in it--I couldn’t help but
wonder if maybe nearly every criminal in the world had some relatives
such as a brother or a sister or maybe a wife or a boy or girl in his
family who felt like Little Tom was feeling right that minute, which
was awfully saddish, and for some reason it seemed that maybe it was
also a big crime to hurt people’s hearts like Tom’s was being hurt
right that second.
I sort of let my mind fly away like a balloon in the sky for a minute,
and was thinking, “What if John Till was my daddy, and I was on my way
to an old icehouse where he was locked up, to give him a letter from
my swell brown-haired mom, and what if in twenty minutes maybe, he
would be arrested for being an accomplice in a kidnapping and might not
only have to go to jail for life, but might even have to have what is
called ‘capital punishment’ done to him--which is being electrocuted
or hung.” My mind even imagined I could see my swell daddy hanging by
his neck on a gallows like I’d seen pictures of, in a newspaper. Then
I stopped thinking that, ’cause it was so ridiculous, on account of
my pop was always reading the Bible and was kind to Mom and my baby
sister, Charlotte Ann, and to everybody, and worked hard and went to
church every Sunday; and anybody couldn’t be that kind of a daddy and
be a criminal at the same time.
Little Jim piped up with a question then that burst my balloon and
brought me down to earth, and it was, “How’ll we get the letter to your
daddy? We don’t dare open the door.”
Poetry’s bright mind thought of a way and it was, “We’ll make a ladder
out of ourselves and push Tom up, so he can poke the letter through
the crack between the logs,” which was a good idea.
A little later, we rounded a bend in the lake and Big Jim steered
straight toward the beach in front of the old log icehouse, where we’d
left John Till only a little less than an hour before. My heart was
pounding fast and hard. I was feeling tense inside on account of Tom,
wondering what was in the letter and also what Tom wanted to tell his
pop.
Big Jim shut off the motor at just the right speed, and we glided up
to the shore. After beaching the boat, and tossing the anchor onto the
shore, we scrambled out, and right away were sneaking up close to the
icehouse.
We moved quietly so we wouldn’t be heard, although John Till could have
heard our motor when we were coming in, I supposed.
“Sh!” Big Jim said to us, he and Tom leading the way as we crept up
closer. I didn’t know what would happen next, but in a jiffy I found
out, ’cause Big Jim stopped the rest of us and sent Tom on toward the
icehouse alone. I peered through the leaves of some wild chokecherry
shrubs we were crouching behind. Then I heard Tom’s pathetic voice that
had a kind of a quaver in it like he was scared, calling out, “DADDY.”
We listened to see if there was any answer, but couldn’t hear any, then
Tom’s voice called again, a little louder, real close to the side of
the old log house. I had both hands up to my ears, but there wasn’t
a sound, except right that second I heard a very pretty wren’s song
that sounded half like a fast mixed-up whistling tune and half like
the spring water that trickles out of the rocks not far from the old
swimming hole back at Sugar Creek.
Then Tom called still louder, “_DADDY!_ It’s ME--TOM! _I’ve got a
letter for you from Mother!_”
But say, that icehouse was as quiet as if it had been an extra large
gravehouse in an Indian cemetery.
Tom turned around then and looked in our direction with a question mark
on his face.
All of us came out into the open and went toward him, not knowing what
to think. In a little while the police would be here, and it’d be too
late for Tom to tell his daddy what he wanted to tell him or to give
him the letter or anything. Right that very second, I heard a fast
motor coming on the lake somewhere and wondered if it might be Santa’s
big boat, bringing the police and Circus and Dragonfly.
Poetry, who had been with me the night before in the middle of the
night, when we’d seen John Till wide awake, taking a string of fish
down to the lake from his cottage, whispered to us and said, “Maybe
he was so tired he went to sleep. Let’s all go up and surround the
icehouse and yell him awake,” which we decided might be a good idea,
and right away, we hurried toward where Tom Till was. Poetry and I
hurried around to the side where the door was and--
Well, you could knocked me over with a puff of wind. There in front of
my astonished eyes was that old great big icehouse door, wide open, on
its rusty hinges. _Our prisoner had escaped!_
5
Well, that was that and a terribly disappointing that at that. Poetry
and I stood staring at that open icehouse door, wondering what on
earth--and who had opened it and let John Till out and where had he
gone, and also was he hiding somewhere close by and might spring out
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 right away 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 noticed it
was kinda crinkled, like letters get when you squish them up tight in
your hands.