the water, we could swim to our cushions and by keeping our bodies down
under the water and holding onto the cushions for dear life, we could
manage to keep our faces above water, and the cushions would hold us up.
Poetry and I sat in the middle seat, side by side, with Poetry sitting
nearer the center than I so our boat would be well balanced, on
account of he was almost a whole lot heavier than I was. Each one of us
used an oar and we rowed as fast as we could in the direction the call
for HELP had come from.
Our oars made a squeaking noise in the locks and the blades made a
little splashing sound in the water, and also the waves plopping
against the prow of the boat, made it hard for us to hear the call for
help, and also hard to tell just which direction to go, but we kept
on rowing hard, and I could see the shore getting farther and farther
away. For a jiffy I was glad that my parents had taught me how to work
on the farm and that I had muscles that sometimes felt as strong as
the muscles of the man in a poem Poetry is always quoting, the Village
Blacksmith, which goes,
“Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands,
The smith--a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.”
But even though my arm muscles felt that strong, my knees felt sort
of weak as I realized that a man’s life was depending on us.... We
kept on rowing as hard and as fast as we could, grunting and sweating
and hoping, and also doing what any boy with good sense, or even
without it, would do at a time like that--we were _praying_ as hard as
anything, too. Anyway I was, and I was asking God to please help us
get there quick--for when a boy is in the middle of such a dangerous
excitement as I was in, he will ask God to help him even though he
hasn’t been a very good boy and isn’t sure God will have anything to do
with him. I tell you, all of a sudden, I was thinking of Little Tom
and his swell mother and it just seemed like it would be terrible for
them to lose their daddy, even if he was maybe the meanest man that
ever lived at Sugar Creek.
Another reason I was praying with every grunt, was that I knew John
Till wasn’t a Christian and if he didn’t become one before he died,
he’d never get to go to heaven, on account of my parents had told me
the Bible says that, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
kingdom of God.” Anybody who knows what Pop calls the “ABC’s of the
Gospel,” knows that you can be born again just by letting the Saviour
into your heart, but John Till had never done that.
I guess maybe I didn’t use any words with my prayer, though, but only
some worried thoughts, which I sort of shot up to heaven as quick as I
could like I shoot arrows with my bow when I’m back home around Sugar
Creek. In fact, for a jiffy it seemed like I was sort of shooting
prayer-arrows up to God, and that on the end of each one, instead of a
little feather, I had written a note on a strip of paper, and on each
note it said, “Please, God--Heavenly Father, Old John Till’s soul is
lost, and if he drowns without being saved, it’ll be terrible. Help us
get to him quick.”
Then Poetry interrupted my thoughts saying, “Stop a minute--LISTEN!”
I let my oar rest a fourth of a jiffy and right away the waves made
our boat swerve a little, like it would swing around if we didn’t keep
on rowing, but I heard a voice not more than fifty feet farther on,
and looking quick, I saw something dark in the water, struggling, and
the voice with a desperate gasp, said, “Hurry--I--HELP....” Then it
stopped.
I tell you we hurried and I kept on sending up arrows--grunting and
pulling and wishing. Then without knowing I was going to say it, I
said, “O please don’t let him drown. ’Cause Poetry and I have got a
secret about one of Your Bible verses, that says if two of us agree on
something we ask for, You will answer us.”
It just seemed like maybe John Till had to be saved, on account of it
seemed like that promise in the Bible was especially about him. Then
without knowing I was going to say it aloud, I said, “And here comes
another arrow with the same thing written on it,” and Poetry beside me
said, “What arrow? What are you talking about?”
I explained it to him, while we rowed harder, and even though he didn’t
say much, I knew he was doing the same thing I was--like my parents had
taught me to, when I was little, and which I still liked to do, even
though my folks sometimes might wonder if I ever did or not, on account
of I was sometimes too mischievous. Also sometimes I wasn’t always what
they called a “good boy,” which is an expression they use when they
mean I ought to behave myself.
In another jiffy, we were close to John Till, and I noticed it was
really him, and he didn’t have any life preserver pillow. He had
probably been drunk and had just tumbled out of his boat while it was
racing terribly fast, and had been swimming ever since.
I quick grabbed up a cushion in front of my feet and with a wide sweep
of my arm tossed it out toward him. My aim was as good as David’s had
been when he had used his sling shot on the giant that time in the
Bible. The pillow landed with a ker-plop right in front of Old John
and I saw him make a fierce desperate lunge toward it and grab hold of
it with both arms and heard him yell in a sputtering voice something I
never dreamed I’d hear from Old John Till’s voice that night, and it
was, “_Thank God, I’m saved!_”
Then he quit trying to swim and just lay back on his back, and held
onto the cushion and let himself float, with only his face above water
with the cushion in front of his chin, which is the way to float, if
you ever have to hold onto a life-preserver cushion.
In another jiffy we had our boat there, and Old John was crying and
gasping and saying, “Thank God--Oh thank you, boys, thank you!”
How to get him into the boat was the question, though, for the minute
he would try to get in, his heavy weight might tip us over.
But say, in spite of being exhausted and gasping for breath, Old John
Till still had good sense, and didn’t try to climb in right away, but
got his breath first--besides, in a minute Circus and Big Jim with
Dragonfly holding a flashlight to help them see us, came motoring out
and in a little while we had John in the boat, and we were all on our
way to shore, with John so tired out he just lay his terribly wet self
down and sort of shook and sniffled and half cried while we moved along.
I tell you it’s a wonderful feeling when you’ve done something like
that. You’re glad not only ’cause you helped do it, but if you believe
what Poetry and I believed, you feel like you and the Heavenly Father
are very good friends--which is maybe the best feeling a boy ever has.
But say, I’ll have to wind up this story quicker than anything, for if
it gets very much longer the people who make it into a book for you
will want me to cut off the end of it so it won’t make too many pages.
Anyway that is the last part of the last story that happened to us on
our camping trip, and it was the best vacation we’d had in our whole
lives, although I suppose there will be a few more camping adventures
before the gang grows up, and if there are and if anything especially
interesting happens, I’ll see how quick I can write it for you.
As we rowed along toward shore, Old John just lay in the bottom of
the boat like a terribly big wet fish that had just been caught, and
was so tired out he couldn’t move. Pretty soon, Poetry whispered,
“D’you s’pose he’s pretending to be good--and that he just said those
religious words back there, to fool us, and is maybe playing possum?
D’you s’pose when we get to shore, he’ll quick make a dive for the
bushes and run away?”
I’d seen possums act like that back home--be terribly lively until they
were caught, and then they would do what is called “play possum”--just
roll over on their sides and curl up into a half circle and shut their
eyes and act dead until we or the dogs went away a few yards and then
they would come to quick life, scramble to their ridiculous looking
hands-like feet and run possum-ety sizzle to a tree and climb up it or
to a hole in the ground and dive into it.
“I don’t know,” I said to Poetry, “but he sounded like he meant what he
said when he said what he said back there.” I wanted to believe it,
’cause I wanted Tom Till to have a brand new daddy like Circus had got
when his pop had been saved a couple of years before.
Well, it turned out that I was right. That whiskey bottle we’d seen in
the bottom of his boat hadn’t had whiskey in it at all, but was one
Little Jim had put a gospel tract in, and Old John had found it and
read it, and the Lord Himself had used it to do what our Sugar Creek
minister calls, “convict him of his sins.” On top of that, he had also
stopped to read the message in the other whiskey bottle which had been
used as a marker for a good crappie-fishing place out in front of the
Indian cemetery. Also he had been listening on his portable radio
to the radio program of the Church of the Cross. So, after he had
accidentally tumbled out of the boat tonight, he’d gotten half scared
to death, and all the verses of the Bible and the sermons he had read
and listened to, came splashing into his mind; and without stopping to
think that he didn’t even believe in God, he had prayed to Him to not
only save his body from drowning, but to save his _soul_ from being
lost.
When we’d rescued him, he had had the other $5,000 of the ransom money
in his trousers pocket. It was pretty wet, but as good as gold. And--do
you know what?--he told us he hadn’t been helping the real kidnapper at
all, but had only wanted to get the $1,000 reward!
“And now, boys,” John’s gruff, trembling voice said, as we listened to
him explain things, “you’ll have to start praying for Bob--we had a
quarrel tonight, and he’s gone away somewhere.”
“Where?” Tom Till spoke up and asked. All of us were sitting around a
camp fire which we’d started quick, to get John warmed up after we’d
got some of Barry’s dry clothes on him, and a blanket wrapped around
him--most of the rest of us being wrapped in blankets too.
John looked down at his red-haired, freckled-faced, trembling-voiced
boy, and said, “I don’t know. I--he thought we ought to keep the $5,000
instead of turning it in. I--I’m afraid I was too hard on him, maybe.
But when we couldn’t agree about this $5,000, I took the boat and left
him there at the Indian cemetery.”
We asked Old John different questions, one of them being, “How’d
you know where the ransom money was?” and he said, “I studied
the newspapers and the pictures, and found the kidnapper’s map
in the grave-house of an old Indian chief. I made two copies in
invisible ink--one for myself and the other for Bob, but I lost mine
somewhere--and you boys found it.”
“But why, if you only wanted the $1,000 reward, did you bury the money
in the fish in the icehouse?” we asked him.
“I didn’t,” he said, just as Little Tom Till shoved a stick into the
fire and about a thousand yellow sparks shot in different directions of
up toward the sky. “Old Brains Powers, the kidnapper, buried it there.
I’d been digging it up.... I had five thousand dollars already dug up,
and was coming back to get the rest of it, but you boys beat me to it.
Then when I went into the icehouse, you slammed the door on me and
barred it, and I would have stayed there until the police came, but
Bob, who had just gotten up here, heard me hollering and let me out.”
Poetry spoke up and said, with a doubt in his voice, “If you were only
after the money so you could get the reward for finding it, why did you
run away?”
“I was afraid the police wouldn’t believe my story.”
Well, there is the whole mystery untangled for you, and a wonderful
camping trip all over for another year.... Boy oh boy! I hope I get
to go again next year--if not to the same place, then up to Canada or
somewhere where there will be even more exciting adventures than there
were this year.
But before that happens there’ll be a whole year full of different
things that will happen back at home at Sugar Creek. I just know that
something terribly interesting _will_ happen to us before another
summer rolls around. In fact, there was a letter from my folks in our
mail box at the dock the very day we left camp, saying, “We’ll be
looking for you, Bill--and do we ever have interesting news for you!
Don’t try to guess what it is--’cause you can’t.”
And--well, all the way home in our station wagon, I did just what my
parents told me not to--I kept trying to guess what the interesting
news would be....
THE END
The GANG’S thrilling experiences in the North Woods come to an exciting
climax in NORTH WOODS MANHUNT. Two of the boys become first-rate
sleuths and do a night solution to the entire mystery. This is the
fourth book in the new Sugar Creek Gang Series by Paul Hutchens, the
happy friend of all Young America.
[Illustration]
Be sure to read all the books in the SCRIPTURE PRESS series:
THE SUGAR CREEK GANG GOES NORTH
ADVENTURES IN AN INDIAN CEMETERY
THE SUGAR CREEK GANG DIGS FOR TREASURE
NORTH WOODS MANHUNT
LOST IN A SUGAR CREEK BLIZZARD
SUGAR CREEK GANG ON THE MEXICAN BORDER
GREEN TENT MYSTERY AT SUGAR CREEK
10,000 MINUTES AT SUGAR CREEK
BLUE COW AT SUGAR CREEK
OLD STRANGER’S SECRET AT SUGAR CREEK
THE SUGAR CREEK GANG AT SNOW GOOSE LODGE
THE SUGAR CREEK GANG GOES WESTERN
WE KILLED A WILDCAT AT SUGAR CREEK
THE HAUNTED HOUSE AT SUGAR CREEK
TRAP LINE THIEF AT SUGAR CREEK
WATERMELON MYSTERY AT SUGAR CREEK
DOWN A SUGAR CREEK CHIMNEY
WILD HORSE CANYON MYSTERY
Other thrilling stories about the Sugar Creek Gang may be ordered
from your Christian bookstore.
_Published and Distributed Exclusively by_
SCRIPTURE PRESS
SCRIPTURE PRESS PUBLICATIONS, INC.
1825 College Avenue · Wheaton, Illinois
Transcriber’s Note:
The Contents has been added by the transcriber.
Punctuation has been standardised. Variations in hyphenation have been
retained as they appear in the original publication. Changes have been
made as follows:
Page 61
which he quick shook _changed to_
which he quickly shook