Part 2

“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.”