Paul Hutchens

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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.”
20 “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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.”
61 “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.” ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I yelled back to him from the boat I was already in, and said, “Hey, you—Dragonfly! Beat it down to Santa’s cabin and tell Big Jim and Circus to step on the gas and get Santa’s motor boat and come out to help us! There’s somebody drowning out there in the moonlight!”
As quick as anything, Poetry and I were on our way. Our boat had three life-preserver cushions in it—enough for Poetry and me and whoever was out there, which of course had to be John Till, I thought, on account of the whiskey bottle in the bottom of the boat that had just roared its way up onto our shore. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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!” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ We didn’t want him to start any fuss; besides sometimes he wasn’t such a dumb person to let in on a secret, so for a little while we left Little Jim and Tom Till alone in their tent and the five of us went into the other tent, lit a lantern, unfolded the piece of typewriter paper and heated it over the hot top of the lantern, and in only a few minutes we were looking at a map of the territory up here—showing the camp where we were and the place where the little Ostberg girl had been lying, just like the other map we’d found. ”

“ 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 made51 the real Poetry in the boat with us pretend to be peeved, and he said to me, “Oh, you go jump in the lake!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 in42 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. ”

“ We didn’t stop to try to figure out why John Till had written to Bob instead of just telling him where to meet him, or came tumbling out of Barry’s tent and in our direction, and anything. Right that minute almost, Little Jim and Tom74 Dragonfly came out of the other tent, and there we all were—too many—and some of us too little—to go on a kidnapper hunt.
I guess I never was so disappointed in my life as I was right that minute, though, ’cause Barry took charge of things quick, and said, “You boys all stay right here, and look after camp. ”