catch her.”
“Let him go and he’ll _find_ his mama,” Snow-in-the-face said, and had
the cutest grin on his smallish face, and that tickled me all over
’cause I could see he was as mischievous as any white-faced boy.
“It’s probably a little lost child-fish,” Little Jim said. “We aren’t
going to catch any more anyway. Let’s let him go home to his parents.”
Well, as you know, I had the end of my fish balloon tied air-tight
shut, with a piece of old fishing line I’d had in my pocket, and it was
still in the water on the opposite side of the boat. It was really
cute, that little yellowish rubber fish bobbing along out there on the
surface of the water.
And then Poetry yelled across to the other boat, saying, “HEY, YOU
GUYS, OVER THERE! WE GOT A FISH BUT DON’T HAVE ANY STRINGER TO PUT HIM
ON. WHAT’LL WE DO WITH HIM?”
Circus, being mischievous and having lots of bright ideas anyway,
yelled back to us, “IF YOU’LL PUT HIM BACK IN THE WATER AND TELL HIM TO
SWIM OVER HERE, WE’LL PUT HIM ON _OUR_ STRINGER!”
And that was what gave Poetry another idea which wasn’t so dumb and
which turned our discouraged fishing trip into a real one that was
wonderful. Poetry yelled back to Circus, “SWELL IDEA, WE’LL SEND HIM
OVER, RIGHT AWAY!” Then he got a command in his voice and said to me,
“Here, Bill, give me that line,” and reached out and took it before I
could make up my mind not to let him have it.
“What on earth crazy thing you going to do?” Dragonfly asked, when
Poetry held the fish between his knees a minute while with his two
fat hands he made a double slip-knot around the walleye’s tail; and
then almost before anybody could have stopped him if he had wanted to,
Poetry released that frisky little walleye into the water sort of like
my mother does when she carefully holds an old setting hen and eases
her into a coop where there is a nestful of eggs for her to sit on.
Poetry said to the fish, as he let go, “Here, Wally, my friend, you go
swimming straight for the other boat away over there!”
Boy, that fish certainly had lots of pep. Being out of the water for
that smallish jiffy hadn’t hurt him a bit, although if you are going
to let a fish go free after catching him, you are supposed to be very
careful to handle him with wet hands, and release him under the water
rather than throw him back, and he’ll be more likely to live.
Say, that frisky little walleye made a fierce fast dive straight
down into the water, and in a few fast seconds, the yellowish rubber
balloon was bobbing up and down like it was a boy’s bobber on a fishing
line.... And--would you believe it?--it started to move right in the
direction of that other boat--kinda slow though, but actually toward it.
Poetry sighed proudly, leaned back, stuck his thumbs in his arm
pits and said, “See there, fish understand my language,” which made
Dragonfly say, “That’s ’cause you talk like a fish,” which, for
Dragonfly, was almost a bright remark.
I could see, though, that the balloon fish was changing its course. It
began working its way a little toward the left and out toward deeper
water and farther from shore. We all watched it, having fun, and Poetry
kept yelling to it to “Turn to the right!” and to “Hurry up!” but
pretty soon when it was maybe fifty yards from us it stopped going in
one direction and began to move slowly around in a small circle.
“I’ll bet he’s caught on a snag,” Little Snow-in-the-face said in his
cute Indian voice, and it seemed like he might be right, because, even
though the balloon bobbed around a little, it didn’t move any farther
away, but just seemed to stay more or less in the same place.
Well, we fished on, all of us hoping for another fish, but not a one
of us caught one, so pretty soon we got discouraged again and pulled
up anchor. Then Poetry said, “Whyn’t we go get him and go home, and
everybody go swimming?” which sounded like a good idea. It’d be a lot
more fun to do that than to sit on a hard boat seat watching a rubber
balloon bobbing on the surface of a lake that didn’t have any hungry
fish in it.
“Let’s _troll_ over,” Snow-in-the-face said. “Sometimes when you can’t
catch fish any other way, they’ll bite when you do that.”
Dragonfly said it was a good idea too, ’cause there might be a “lost,
strayed or stolen” fish all by itself between here and that balloon, so
we all left our lines in the water while Snow-in-the-face and Little
Jim took the oars and rowed us kinda splashily out toward that nice
yellowish balloon which I was going to get and take home to Charlotte
Ann.
In a little while we were almost there, and I was getting ready
to reach out my hand and get the balloon when quick as a flash I
saw Little Jim’s line go taut, and his pole bend down clear to the
water, while he dropped his oar and quick grabbed his pole and yelled
excitedly, “Hey, I’ve got a fish!” Just as Dragonfly’s line did the
same thing, and then WHAM!--my own line went tight and the next thing
we knew most of us in our boat found ourselves in the middle of one of
the most exciting fishing experiences of our whole lives. We yelled and
pulled, and our lines went singing out as our reels unwound; and almost
at the same time, Dragonfly and Little Jim and Poetry and I all landed
a walleye apiece, and laid them, flopping and splashing water in every
direction, in the bottom of the boat.
“WE’VE STRUCK A SCHOOL!” Poetry cried. “MY FISH TOOK US RIGHT TO THEM!
HE KNEW EXACTLY WHERE THEY WERE!”
7
Well you aren’t supposed to yell like a lot of wild Indians on a
warpath when you start catching a lot of fish, on account of you might
scare the fish away; so almost right away we all shushed each other,
and only made a noise when we caught a fish, which was just about as
fast as we could bait our hooks and get our lines into the water again.
We quick anchored right close to where the balloon was, and the other
boatful of the rest of the gang came rowing over as quietly as they
could, and anchored close by.
Talk about excitement. We’d never had so much fishing fun in our whole
lives as we were having right that minute. And then, just like Sugar
Creek school getting out and the kids tumbling out the door and all
going away from the red brick schoolhouse, our school of walleyes moved
on and we stopped getting bites. I knew something was going to happen
the minute I saw the yellowish balloon start moving fast out toward
deeper water.
“Hey, look!” Dragonfly, who saw it first, said. “Wally acts like he’s
scared. Look at him go!”
We looked, and sure enough the balloon was bobbing up and down, and
even diving clear under. Then it plunked clear under for a _long_ jiffy
before bouncing back up and shooting almost a foot into the air, then
landed with a kersmack on the water again.
Nobody had had any bites for awhile before that, but we had enough
fish for one day, and so Big Jim said, “Let’s go back to camp and get
supper,” which was a good idea. We would come back tomorrow.
“What’ll we do with Wally?” Poetry said.
“He’s been a swell friend,” Dragonfly said. “He ought to have some kind
of appreciation.”
Then Little Jim piped up good and loud and said, “Let’s give him his
liberty!”
Well, we had enough larger fish, and Wally really deserved some kind
of a reward for helping us catch so many fish to take home to Sugar
Creek, so we pulled anchor and rowed out toward where Wally was making
the balloon fish bob around in such a lively style. As soon as the boat
had eased along side, I, who was closest to it, reached down my hand,
caught hold of the balloon, and started to haul Wally in toward the
boat, but right away my line went tight like it was fastened onto a
log or snag down on the bottom of the lake. I gave a tug, but not too
hard ’cause I didn’t want the line to scale off any scales from Wally’s
tail, it being as hard on a fish to lose some of its scales as on a
barefoot boy to stump his toe and knock the skin off.
“He’s tangled up on something,” I said, and gave another small pull
and then--WHAM! There was a fierce wild lunge down there somewhere,
and I felt a scared feeling racing up and down my spine. I knew Wally
didn’t have _that_ much strength. Say, it felt as big as an excited pig
running in our barnyard back at Sugar Creek--or a dog or something.
I had hold of the line as well as the balloon, and the line was cutting
into my hands. I couldn’t think straight, but didn’t dare let loose.
Snow-in-the-face, for the very first time, got excited and yelled
something to Eagle Eye in the Indian language, and then to us in
English, which was, “SOME GREAT BIG FISH HAS SWALLOWED HIM....”--which
made sense.
I held on, in spite of the line’s hurting my hand a little, and then,
out there about ten feet, something with a big long ugly snout and with
fierce eyes shot up through the waves and almost two feet in the air,
and dive-splashed back in again.
There was a fierce, mad boiling of the surface like a bomb had exploded
down there in the water somewhere. I was trembling inside like any
fisherman trembles when a fierce fast-fighting fish gets away after
it’s been hooked--only this one hadn’t been hooked with a real hook. He
had probably come swimming along down there under the water, looking
for an early supper, like a robin hops around in our lawn at Sugar
Creek looking for night crawlers, and, seeing Wally swimming lazily
around, had decided to eat him, which is what some big fish do to
little other fish when they’re hungry.
He had probably slowly nosed his fierce ugly long snout up to Wally,
and then all of a sudden made a savage rush at him with his mouth open,
and had swallowed him whole, and started to swim away with him. That
had scared all the other fish, which was why we’d all stopped getting
bites at the same time.
Anyway, right after that fierce old fighting fish lunged up out of the
water and down in again, he made a dive straight for our boat, shot
under it, and pulled so hard that I had to hold on for dear life. If
I’d had a long line on a fishing rod with a reel on it, I could have
let the reel spin, and like fishermen do when they have a wild walleye
or an enormous northern pike on their lines, I could have “played” him
until he was tired out, then hauled him in, but with my line only a
dozen or more feet long, I was pretty sure I didn’t have a chance in
the world to land him,--and the next thing I knew I found out I was
right. In a second it seemed, after he dived under our boat, I felt my
line go sickeningly slack, and I knew I’d lost him. I couldn’t tell
though whether he’d broken my line, or whether he’d swallowed backwards
and Wally was free again.
While the gang was groaning with disappointment, ’cause they’d seen
what had happened, and while I was pulling in the lifeless line to see
what was on the other end, I had a sickish feeling in the pit of my
stomach like a fisherman gets when he loses a big fish.
In another jiffy I was holding up the end of the line for us to look
at. Dragonfly, seeing it, said, “Poetry’s slip-knot slipped.”
We would have been a terribly sad gang if we hadn’t already caught a
lot of middle-sized walleyes.
Circus called to us from the other boat and said, “We could have put a
lot of kidnapper’s ransom money in a fish that big, if we’d caught him.”
“There wouldn’t have been much room left with Wally already inside of
him,” Poetry said.
For some reason I was looking at Little Jim when Poetry said that and
I noticed a sad expression come on his smallish mouse-like face, and I
thought it looked like he had a couple of tears in his eyes.
It had been a wonderful fishing trip and we couldn’t afford to cry over
a lost northern pike, which is what we all decided the big fish was. So
after the other boat had pulled anchor, we started our motors, steered
around the island and toward camp, with our caught fish lying in the
bottom of the boat.
Little Jim was sitting in the seat in front of me, facing me as we
roared along with Poetry running the motor. Different ones of us were
talking and yelling to each other about all the different things that
had happened,--all except Little Jim who, I noticed, was extra quiet
and his eyes still had that saddish look in them.
Pretty soon I leaned over and half whispered to him, “’Smatter?” and he
swallowed, then said, “Nothing.”
“There is too,” I said, just as he turned his head, gave it a quick
shake, and when he looked back in my direction the tears that’d been
in his eyes a second before, were gone, which is the way Little Jim
gets tears out of his eyes--he just turns his head away, jerks it real
quick, and that shakes the tears out.
Dragonfly, who knew Little Jim had that cute little way of getting
tears out without using a handkerchief, so nobody would know he had had
tears in the first place, saw Little Jim do that and said to him from
behind me, “Don’t you know tears are salty? Fresh water fish that live
in lakes don’t _like_ salt water.”
“That’s _not_ funny,” I said to Dragonfly over my shoulder, and was mad
at him for not having more respect for Little Jim’s hurt heart. I knew
Little Jim’s heart was hurt, when he said to me, “That wasn’t much of a
reward for Wally, after all he did for us.”
Then just like it sometimes happens to my mother back at Sugar
Creek, when she says something that has a sad thought mixed up with
it, Little Jim’s eyes got a couple of _new_ tears in them, which he
quickly shook out into the lake, and then he said, as he reached his
smallish cute hands toward me, “Let me hold the balloon fish a while.”
I pushed the yellowish rubber balloon toward him, and the way he took
it, made me think of the way my little two-year-old baby sister,
Charlotte Ann, would reach out her chubby little hands for it when I
got home and showed it to her.
For a minute, while our two boats plowed along through the water,
which, with the sunlight shining on the moving waves, looked like a
great big lakeful of live silver, my thoughts took a hop, skip and a
jump out across the lake to the shore, leaped over the Chippewa forest,
and high up over a lot of other lakes, like I was Paul Bunyan himself;
and all of a sudden I landed right inside our kitchen at Sugar Creek,
where I knew I’d be in just a few days. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mom
standing by our kitchen stove near the east window which has a green
ivy vine trailing across the top of the outside of it. I could smell
the smell of raw-fried potatoes frying, and see the steam puffing up
from the hooked spout of our kinda oldish teakettle. If, when I came
in, I accidently carried in a little mud on my shoes or bare feet,
Mom would say like she nearly always does, “Would you like to get the
broom, Bill, and sweep out that mud which, a little while ago, came
walking in on two feet?” I would know whose two feet she meant, and
grin, and right away I’d step to the place where we kept our broom,
which is behind the east kitchen door which also has our roller towel
rack on it, and I wouldn’t any more than get started with the dust pan
and broom when Mom would say, “Be careful not to sweep _hard_, or we’ll
have dust in our fried potatoes.”
While I was doing that, all of a sudden, I’d get tangled up and,
turning around, I’d see my swell little sister Charlotte Ann, with her
tiny toy broom, sweeping it around awkwardly like girls do when they’re
just learning how to sweep, which is what Charlotte Ann does at our
house. Now that she’s learned to walk, she tries to do everything any
of the rest of us do. She follows Mom around sweeping when Mom does,
washing her hands when Mom does, and when my grayish-brown-haired
mom or my reddish-brown-mustached pop sits down to read a book or a
magazine she actually gets a book or a magazine and tries to read,
nearly always getting the magazine upside down when she does it. In
fact, she wants to do everything we do while we are doing it, and
sometimes when Mom is getting supper and Charlotte Ann can’t see high
enough to see what Mom is doing, she gets cross and whines and fusses
and pulls at Mom’s dress or apron and makes a nuisance out of herself,
only she doesn’t know she’s a nuisance but maybe thinks Mom is making a
nuisance of _herself_, instead, for not letting her help get supper.
Yes sir, I was getting homesick for my folks, and could hardly wait
till I got home next week to tell all the exciting adventures we’d
had. Also, it’d be fun to watch the mail every day to see if maybe
Little Jim would get any letters from anybody who would find his gospel
messages which he’d been tossing out into the lake in whiskey bottles.
Thinking that, I remembered John Till and wondered where he was and
what he was doing, and all of a sudden I remembered what Poetry and
I had been thinking and talking about in the station wagon when we’d
been at the source of the Mississippi river, and he had found a Bible
verse which said if any two of the Lord’s disciples were agreed about
something they wanted to pray for, they could pray for it, and the
heavenly Father would do it.
Thinking that, I turned around to Poetry who, as you know, was running
the motor, and looked at him, and he looked at me. I pointed to my
shirt pocket, which had its flap buttoned to keep my New Testament
from falling out. His eyes looked where my finger was pointing, and
the expression on his mischievous happy-looking face changed to a
very sober one. He kinda squinted his eyes like a boy does when he’s
thinking about something or somebody some place else. He lifted his
free hand (the other being on the rubber grip of the motor’s handle)
and, with his forefinger, pointed to his own shirt pocket. We just
looked into each other’s eyes a minute, and for some reason I felt fine
inside.
Then I swung my eyes around over the lake and in the direction of where
the sun was going to set after awhile, and was glad I was alive--for
the same reason Little Jim is glad he is alive.
In a little while, we’d be to shore. There was only one thing about a
fishing trip I didn’t like and that was having to help clean the fish
afterward, but boy oh boy, when you start sinking your teeth into the
nice snow-white fish steaks, which restaurants’ menus call _fillet_,
you don’t mind having had to clean them at all. Yum, yum, crunch,
crunch ... boy oh boy! I certainly was hungry, as our boat cut a wide
circle and swung up beside the dock in front of our big brown tents.
I could see that a fire was already started in the Indian kitchen
we’d made and that meant that just the minute we had our fish cleaned
Barry’d have them sizzling in the skillet for us.
Tom and I were alone a minute at the end of the dock that night just
before we went to bed, and he had both hands clasped around the slender
flagpole and was swaying his body forward and backward and sidewise not
saying anything for a minute, and neither was I. Then he said, “I wish
I could find my daddy.”
There was a tear in his voice and I knew he felt pretty terribly awful
inside, and because I liked him, I felt the same way for a minute.
“Nobody knows where he is,” I said, and Tom surprised me by saying,
“Only _one_ Person,” and as quick as I realized what he meant, I said,
“Yes, that’s right. He knows everything in the world at the same time.”
The moon shining on the water looked like it nearly always does in the
moonlight--like silver--also like a field of oats on Pop’s farm would
look if somebody had painted it white and the wind was blowing.
Santa, who, as you know, had his cabin not very far up the lake from
where we were camped, had gone away for the night, and so Big Jim and
Circus had been selected to stay all night in his cabin to sort of look
after things for him--they being the biggest members of our gang and
Barry giving them permission.
All the rest of the gang were in the tents, maybe undressing, and Tom
and I were really alone, when all of a sudden I heard a movement on
the shore and a voice calling in a low husky whisper, saying, “Tom!
Hey--Tom!” and I was sure I’d heard the voice before.
I saw the bushes part and a dark form move out in the moonlight, and
at the same time Tom let go of the flagpole, and made a dive for the
shore, beating it up the dock as fast as he could.
I was so surprised I couldn’t move, but felt weak in the knees and
sick at the stomach. Tom was there in a flash, and I watched him and
somebody, standing side by side, talking in whispers, and then the dark
form I’d seen come out of the bushes, dived back again, and a second
later I heard footsteps going lickety-sizzle up the lake shore; then
Tom started back to me and I met him in the middle of the dock.
“Who _was_ it?” I said, thinking I knew. “Was it your daddy?”
“No,” Tom said, “it was my brother Bob. I gave him the letter from
Mother, and he’s going to give it to Daddy.”
8
Can you imagine that! Big Bob Till, Big Jim’s worst enemy, and, except
for Big Jim, the fiercest fighter in the whole country anywhere maybe!
He was what people called a “juvenile delinquent,” which means he was a
bad boy who didn’t like to behave himself and had done things that were
against the law.
Maybe I’d better tell you right now, in case you don’t know it, that
Mr. Foote, Little Jim’s daddy, had used his influence back at Sugar
Creek to keep Bob from having to go to reform school, and Bob had been
what is called “paroled” to him, and Little Jim himself had been glad
’cause he’d rather anybody would be _good_ than to have him be _bad_
and have to be punished for it. But Bob was still not behaving himself,
on account of he hadn’t been trained at home like most of the rest of
us. Even we were having a hard enough time to be even half as good as
we thought we were, and we had had training all our boy lives.
When Tom said to me there in the moonlight in the middle of the dock,
that he’d given his mom’s letter to his brother Bob, and I realized
that Bob was up here in the North Woods--in fact had been standing
right over there behind those bushes only a second ago--you could have
knocked me over with a moonbeam, I was so surprised. Of course, he was
gone now--somewhere or other--but where?
I asked Tom a question that was trying to get out of my mind, and it
was, “Where IS your daddy?” and he said, “I don’t know, but Bob does,
and he’ll take Mother’s letter to him.”
It seemed like the rest of the gang ought to know Bob was up here,
and yet for some reason it seemed like Poetry ought to know it first,
so the very second I had a chance after I got into my tent a little
later, and the lights were out, and Dragonfly had been quieted down
from talking and laughing--in fact, his noisy nose sounded like he
was asleep--I reached out my hand and touched Poetry and said, “You
asleep?” and he whispered quietly, “Yes,” which meant he wasn’t. So I
told him about Bob and he said, “That explains a lot of things.”
“What, for instance?” I asked, and he said, “It explains who opened the
icehouse door and let John Till out.” Then Poetry and I decided to get
up and go outside where we could talk without being heard.
I was surprised we were able to get up and out without being stopped by
Dragonfly’s waking up and asking questions or insisting on going along,
he not being able to let anybody have any secrets without wanting him
to divide them up with _him_.
A good place to talk without being heard would be down at the dock, we
decided, so away we went toward the lake where the waves were sighing
and lapping against the shore and dock posts and making the boats rock
a little--one of the boats making a little scraping noise against the
dock.
“Where was Bob standing?” Poetry asked, and when I pointed to the
bushes he started straight toward them. As you maybe know he wanted to
be a detective some day and was always looking for what detectives and
the police and the FBI call “clues”; and also Poetry was always finding
one, or something he thought was one.
As soon as we were both behind the bushes, where anybody at camp
couldn’t see us, he turned on his flashlight and shined it all around
where Bob and Tom had been standing.
“What’re we looking for?” I asked, and he answered like he always does,
“A clue.”
“What kind of a clue?” I asked, and he replied, “I’ll tell you just as
soon as I find it.”
Well, I certainly didn’t expect we’d find anything, but all of a sudden
I heard a sound from up the shore like footsteps coming toward us,
so I said in a husky whisper, “I think I _heard_ a clue coming from
somewhere”--and then I _knew_ I had heard one for up the path not very
far away I saw a flashlight flash on and off in a very fast fleeting
flash like a firefly’s flash flashing on and off down at Sugar Creek.
We crouched low, hardly daring to breathe, knowing that somebody was
coming for sure, and wondering who it was, and what did he want, and
was it Bob Till or maybe Old hook-nosed John Till himself, or who?