for Big Jim to decide what. He looked at Tom, who looked sad and
surprised and disappointed, and for a second it seemed like he didn’t
belong to our gang at all but was a strange boy--like a little lost
duckling that gets hatched out with a nestful of fluffy little chickens
in our chicken yard 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 daddy!” Tom said, and stooped down and picked a
small white five-petalled flower which I noticed was growing beside the
icehouse on a little plant about five or six inches high. The flower
plant had shining green three-parted leaves with little notches in
them. Little Jim saw him pick it and stooped down quick and picked one
himself, and said, “’Tsa 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 guide book, and
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 wild
flowers as he could, and write their names in a notebook to show to our
teacher that fall when school started at Sugar Creek.
Tom seemed to be thinking. He didn’t answer Big Jim at all, 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 right 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 up
what _we_ had locked up in Santa’s boathouse, to make over $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 which we found
out he’d rented from Santa, and was the same cabin we’d seen him in
once, and which you know about if you’ve read the story, “The Sugar
Creek Gang Digs for Treasure.” Both the cabin and the icehouse belonged
to Santa who had bought them from a real-estate man only a few weeks
ago.
It was awful hard on Tom to know that even though his daddy 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, and when I read it I couldn’t blame Tom for
feeling sad. Part of it 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 make out 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 daddy and your brother Bob, that some day 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 the letter such as that Tom’s 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 awful
good raw-fried potatoes for supper when Tom came home.... It really was
a swell letter, the same kind I get from my mom, with scribbling all
around the edges, of stuff for a boy to remember not to do and why, and
not to catch cold, and be careful not to fall out of the boats--things
like that which always worry a mother, who can’t help it on account of
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, and one of his notes was:
“The Mississippi river is 2406 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 to Itasca
State Park, where there was a great big blue-watered lake that is 8
miles in circumference, and there, in a pretty shady park, we parked
and all of us scrambled out and swished along following each other in a
little winding path till we came to the lake, where there was a small
stream of water about twelve feet across and about a foot or less deep
flowing out of it, making a very pretty noise which sounded like it was
half a sigh and the other 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 awhile, not seeing what we had expected to see
when we saw the source of the Mississippi, but it was very interesting
anyway.
Little Jim got a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, and then he quick
stooped down and in a jiffy had both his shoes and socks off and I knew
he was going to wade across, it being shallow and narrow anyway. Right
away we all had our shoes and socks off and every single one of us
waded clear across the Mississippi river.
“Here we are,” I said to us, as most of us stopped out in the middle of
the Mississippi river and gathered ourselves into a half-circle with
our faces looking toward one of the shores where our camp director had
a camera waiting to take our picture.
Standing there, squinting my eyes in the direction of the camera and
also in the direction of the sun, I happened to remember a brand new
Paul Bunyan story which Poetry had made up once and which you maybe
know about if you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North,” and it
was, that Old Babe, which is Paul Bunyan’s blue Ox, was swimming in
the headwaters of the Mississippi river and the blue began to come off
in the water, and to make the water blue; and because the Mississippi
flows through a lot of the lakes in Minnesota, pretty soon all the
lakes became what is called “blue-watered lakes.”
Of course it was only a legend--Paul Bunyan, as you know, being a
legendary lumberman who was extra large; and Babe, the blue Ox, being
his best friend and went everywhere he went, just like a boy’s dog
follows a boy around.
Anyway, while we were having our picture taken, I remembered the
story Poetry’d 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-lengthed toes on the fourteen feet of
all seven of us, and tried to think of something funny to say which I
did, but which wasn’t very, and this is what it was--“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, on account of for some reason what I said made Poetry
peeved. He quick shoved his shoulder against me, and because I was
standing in fast-flowing water half way up to my knees anyway, when I
stepped sideways to try to get my balance I stepped on a slippery rock
in the river bed, lost my whole balance and the next thing I knew I was
sitting down on the bottom of the Mississippi river, the water 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 and 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 on account of he is
not only allergic to different pollens but to sudden changes of
temperature--the water in that little narrow babbling stream being
almost cold.
Well, that was all that happened on that trip, except one thing, and
it was that one thing that helped make our next adventure, which was a
fishing trip for walleyes, extraordinarily interesting and exciting.
Not having brought along any extra clothes, I had to walk in my wet
trousers back to our station wagon, which wasn’t any too much fun for
me. There they made me undress and 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, which 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 my almost 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 bill-fold and told him to pick
out something he especially thought my little sister, Charlotte Ann,
would like, on account of 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 being alone awhile, with me lying under a blanket on
the back seat 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 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 and I couldn’t see
his fat face, but his squawky voice had a sort of a far away sound in
it like he was thinking of something extra 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 wouldn’t have answered
either, ’cause 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. Say, 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 pocket New Testament. We
carry one with us nearly all the time, and not only every one of us
reads it every day but we aren’t ashamed to let anybody know we do
it either; but on account of being boys and feeling like nearly all
boys do, we didn’t talk about the Bible very much except in camp-fire
meetings or at Sunday school, and only once in a while when two or
three of us were together--Little Jim and I doing maybe more of it than
any of the rest of us, on account of he--well, he had a keen little
mind and thought more about it, I guess, and was always getting such
good ideas. Also Little Jim was glad he was alive, which not a boy in
the world _would_ be 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, which Little Jim always was.
Anyway, when Poetry asked me if I had ever read “this verse,” I said,
“What verse?” and 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,
and said, “_If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing
that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which 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 very far away. I was also
listening to the gurgling of the water close by and felt something
kinda warm in my heart, like Poetry and God and I had a secret of some
kind. When we finished telling each other what we thought the verse
meant, we had made up our minds that we were going to stick together
until Little Tom’s daddy was saved.
“Let’s shake on it,” Poetry said, and swung around, and shoved his fat
hand in my direction. I grabbed it quick, and said, “Shake.”
“Shake,” he said again, then we let go, and I felt wonderful 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 being the rattling-voiced kingfisher, and Circus, the
scolding blue jay.
My clothes were dry enough for me to put them on, if while we drove
along, I’d sit on the leather seat of the station wagon, which I did,
and away we went, back to camp and to the next day’s fishing trip.
“Look what I got for Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said to me, and shoved
over to me a couple of small rubber 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, ’cause Little
Jim had such a happy grin on his face to think he had saved me money,
and also being sure Charlotte Ann would be tickled to see the balloons
blown up nice and big, which most babies do, 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, until the next day when
we were on a very special fishing trip for walleyed pike.
Boy oh boy, it was going to be a wonderful trip, I thought, and we were
going to fish, not for small fish like blue gills 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.
6
I was certainly glad our little Indian friend, Snow-in-the-face, was
well enough to be our guide on our fishing trip for walleyed pike. As
you maybe know, he’d been very sick but almost right away after our
gang had called to see him, which we did the very next day after we
had come up north, he had started to get better, and now, today, he
was coming to our camp to visit us and to guide us to the best fishing
waters for walleyed pike, so we could all catch our “limit,” which is
eight walleyes apiece. Multiplying eight fish by seven boys, which any
teacher will tell you you can’t do, we’d have fifty-six fish to pack in
ice and ship back to Sugar Creek for our parents to see and to help us
eat. Boy oh boy, it was going to be fun!
About three o’clock that afternoon, after the gang had all had our rest
hour, little Snow-in-the-face and his big Indian brother, Eagle Eye,
came putt-putting in a canoe, straight to our shore.
There was a lot of excitement around camp for a while, while all of us
finished getting our equipment ready. Our two big fishing boats were
equipped with life-preserver pillows, which everybody oughtn’t to go on
a fishing trip without.
It had been a terribly hot day and the sun up in the sky, as our boats
plowed their wet way out across the waves toward an island, poured its
yellowish heat down on us something fierce. It also reflected back up
into our faces from the water and made me glad I had on a pair of dark
glasses to protect my eyes from the extra bright light.
Snow-in-the-face was in the boat I was in, along with Little Jim,
Poetry and Dragonfly, and we were following the other boat which had
Eagle Eye and Big Jim and Circus and Little Tom Till. Barry had stayed
home to write letters and to look after camp.
In a little while our boats neared the pretty pine and spruce-covered
island, circled around it to the other side where we anchored in a
little cove, not more than thirty yards from each other, in some quiet
water.
That swell little reddish-brown-faced Indian boy with his bright black
eyes and straight black hair didn’t even use a pole, but had a big
heavy line which he dropped down over the side of our boat. I was
sitting beside him in the middle seat, with Poetry sitting in the stern
close to the outboard motor. Dragonfly was in the prow, and Little Jim
in front of me in a seat by himself, with his life vest on, which meant
he was even safer than the rest of us, on account of if we had our boat
upset or fell out, he would be ready to float to shore without having
to hold onto a pillow.
In only a few jiffies we all had our hooks baited with live chubs and
were waiting for somebody--either in our boat or in the other one--to
catch the first fish. The very second one of us would get a walleye,
we’d know we’d found a school of them, and in a little while we’d all
get bites and catch fish at the same time, on account of walleyes stick
together like a gang of boys.
“Eagle Eye found this place last year,” Snow-in-the-face said. “Fish
bite here when they don’t any place else on the lake.”
But say, after we all had sat there and waited and waited and pulled
our lines in and out of the water for an hour and not a one of us had
caught a single fish, or even had a nibble, it looked as if having a
good guide wasn’t any good.
Snow-in-the-face had a pucker on his brown forehead and looked worried.
“Ho hum,” I thought, and shifted myself to another uncomfortable
position on the hot boat seat I was on--any position being
uncomfortable when the fish don’t bite, and the deer flies are swarming
around your legs and hands and biting fiercely just like you wish the
fish would.
Pretty soon, I looked over at the pretty pine-covered island and wished
I could go over there and sit down in the shade for awhile. I was also
remembering that that was the very island I’d wanted to explore when
I’d first gotten the idea of playing Robinson Crusoe and Treasure
Island, and which had got us tangled up in the mystery of the buried
treasure, most of which we’d finally found. The rest of it Old John
Till probably had somewhere, wherever he was, which nobody knew.
“I’m terribly hot,” I said to the rest of us in our boat. “Let’s go
over to that island and lie down in the shade awhile.” The rest of us
thought it was a good idea, and so we pulled in our lazy lines and also
pulled anchor and rowed over, and in a little while, Poetry and I were
strolling along following the shore around to the side where we could
look across and see our camp away out across the lake. It was one of
the prettiest islands I’d ever seen, and had great big Norway pines
and spruce and Tamarack and also ferns and all kinds of wild flowers
such as red-flowered wild columbine and white goldthread and, in a
boggy place, some pitcher plants, which had queer-looking green leaves
that looked like one of the green pitchers Mom has on our sideboard at
home--also the leaves looked like the lips of a French horn that one of
the men at Sugar Creek plays in the band on Saturday night....
We’d left Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim and Dragonfly back at the
shore in the boat, ’cause Snow-in-the-face had acted like he didn’t
want to come with us, and Dragonfly had been so lazy and also afraid of
smelling wild flowers and having to sneeze a lot--that being one of the
reasons he’d come on this vacation with us, so he could get away from
Sugar Creek flowers and timothy hay and ragweed and everything else
which would make him sneeze.
“You know what?” Poetry said to me all of a sudden, and when I said,
“No, what?” he said, “This would be a good island for John Till to hide
on. Maybe when he got out of the icehouse, he came over here.”
“But how could he get here? We had his boat.”
“He might swim,” Poetry said, but it wasn’t a good idea because it was
pretty far from any other shore over here, so I said, “Of course, he
could rent a boat from almost any resort up here,”--which he could.
We were standing right that minute close to a sandy beach and the waves
were washing up in a very lazy friendly way, when all of a sudden,
Poetry said, “Hey, look, somebody’s been here. Somebody’s had a boat
beached here on the sand,” which he had, but it was gone now.
“Boy oh boy!” I said, all of a sudden getting excited, “and here’re
shoe tracks, going back into the island somewhere.”
We decided to follow the tracks, which we did, but didn’t find anything
interesting. There might be a broken twig trail, though, like the
one we’d followed before, and which you know about, maybe, but we
couldn’t find a thing, so we gave up and went back to Dragonfly and
Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim.
“Where you guys been?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and I said, “Oh,
looking for buried treasure.”
Little Snow-in-the-face got a queer far-away expression on his face,
squinted his eyes and said, “Sometimes we see lights out here at night.”
And then it was Dragonfly’s turn to get a queer far-away expression on
his face, which made it seem like he wished he was as far away as his
thoughts were, he, as you know, believing in ghosts.
Well, we decided to try fishing some more like the rest of the guys in
the other boat were, but who still hadn’t caught anything. We rowed out
to another place and baited our hooks and tried again.
Another hour passed during which we pulled anchor and tried a half
dozen different locations and still not a one of us caught a single
fish and we were terribly discouraged.
“You _can_ have one if you _want_ one,” Little Jim said.
“How?” I said, and he said, “One of those balloons I bought for you
yesterday is a _rubber_ fish. You can blow _it_ up--maybe it’s a
walleye.”
Well, I still had those two rubber balloons in my shirt pocket, so
because I was terribly bored and didn’t know what else to do, I pulled
out the one that looked like it would be shaped like a fish when it was
blown up, and, like the old wolf that ate up the little pigs, I huffed
and I puffed and I blew the balloon up into a nice great big long fish
that looked like a walleyed pike. For awhile I had something to keep my
mind off being bored, on account of if there is anything that is harder
to do than anything else, it is to sit on the seat of a boat on a hot
day when the fish won’t bite.
“If we get _one_, we’ll get _twenty_,” Poetry said. “Walleyes go in
schools, you know.”
“Yeah,” Little Jim piped up and said, “but fish maybe don’t _have_
school in _August_,” which reminded me that right after August came
September, and generally in the first week of September, the Sugar
Creek School started and--
I let out a fierce long sigh when I thought of that, not because I
didn’t need an education but I hated to have to sit down to get one,
which is what you have to do in school most of the time--and the boat
seat was getting harder and harder every minute.
The yellowish rubber fish I’d just blown up looked cute though, and was
as fat as a butterball. For a jiffy I let it float on the water clear
out to the end of the fishing line I had it tied on. “Here, Poetry,” I
said to the fish, “get out there and float. You’re so fat you _can’t_
sink,” which made the real Poetry in the boat with us pretend to be
peeved, and he said to me, “Oh, you go jump in the lake!”
And then--all of an excited sudden--Poetry got a big strike. He waited
until he was sure it was time to set the hook, which he did at exactly
the right time and in a jiffy he landed a very excited walleye; only it
wasn’t much bigger than a big yellow perch--hardly big enough to keep.
“O.K., Bill--hand me the stringer,” he ordered me, panting with
happiness. Talk about a proud grin on a boy’s face--Poetry really had
one.
“_What_ stringer?” I said, and looked all around on the bottom of the
boat for one. And--would you believe it?--not a one of us had brought
along a fish stringer! The other boat was too far away for them to
throw one into our boat, so Poetry just sat there with his fish in his
fat hand, wondering what to do with it.
“It’s too little to keep,” Little Jim said. “Let him go back to his
mama.”