Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Read online

  You see, Little Jim had his mind made up that sometime, when he was grown up, he was going to be a missionary, but he couldn’t wait that long to be one so he was trying to be one now. Since he was a great guy and also one of my best friends, I had decided I wasn’t going to wait till I was any more grown up than I was before doing it too.

  Our boat was gliding slowly up alongside the bobbing bottle, and Circus, who was closer to it than Little Jim, reached out his hand and caught hold of it and started to hand it over to Little Jim. Then he let out a yell and said, “Hey, it’s got something tied to it!”

  I saw it had. There was a piece of heavy fishing line tied around the bottle’s neck, and something was fastened to the other end away down in the water somewhere.

  3

  The very second I realized there was something tied to the other end of that fishing line, I was afraid it might be some heavy object. And at the rate our boat was traveling, if Circus held onto the bottle, the line might break.

  So I yelled to him, “Let go! The line might break!” At the same time, I quick shut down the gas to almost nothing and swung the boat around in a half circle. In case Circus didn’t let go, the line wouldn’t have too much strain on it and break. I was wondering what on earth might be on the other end.

  The motor made a couple of smoky coughs and stopped, which was maybe a good thing because we might have broken the line if it hadn’t.

  You could have knocked me over with a pine needle when we found there was already a message in that bottle. There wasn’t anything on the other end of the very strong fishing line except an old-fashioned horseshoe. It was covered with weeds and lake-bottom dirt, which meant it had been used as a weight so that the waves wouldn’t wash the bottle away.

  It took us only seconds to read what was in the bottle, because we didn’t even have to take out the cork. A piece of paper with black printing on it was rolled up inside, with the words as plain as anything visible right through the glass. Poetry read them out loud to us in his squawky voice:

  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 at 11:00 and 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.

  Well, our boat was maybe only a few yards from where we’d first seen the bottle floating, not far from the shore and just straight out from the old Indian cemetery. So we took the oars, which every motorboat 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 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 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 as though he had heard a ghost.

  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 sharp pull on the starter knob, and away we went again, racing up the shore toward The Narrows, where we knew the river flowed from this lake into the one our campsite 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 as we had once before when we were riding through The Narrows. The Narrows were 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, “Remember yesterday afternoon when it rained, and we were in old John’s cabin, and we found that little 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 his stick and the other the side of the boat, said with a grin on his face, “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, as if what Dragonfly had said had been like a pin sticking him somewhere. I remembered that Circus’s dad had once been an alcoholic himself.

  Even while we were racing along with the oak and white birch and balm of Gilead and pine trees whizzing past, as our boat cut a fierce, fast V through the water, I was remembering that summer night back at Sugar Creek when there’d been a big tent filled with people and a choir and an evangelist preaching. Nearly all of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang had already been saved.

  And when Circus himself walked down the grassy aisle to the front to confess the Savior, all of a sudden old Dan Browne, Circus’s drinking dad, who had been outside the tent listening, had come rushing in. He ran down the aisle with tears in his eyes and voice, crying, “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. From then on he was a good worker, and his family had had enough to eat.

  Circus must have been thinking the same thing, because when Dragonfly said that about 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 as though he was thinking hard. I also noticed that his fists were doubled up terribly tight, and I remembered that he hated whiskey worse than anything else in the world, because 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 will we tell him? I thought—that neat little redhead who was the newest member of our gang and was old John Till’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 dad locked up in the icehouse and that he was probably what police called an accomplice of the actual kidnapper we’d caught last week.

  Big Jim heard our motor and came out to the end of the long dock where the mailbox was to meet us, probably wondering who on earth we were at first, coming in with a different boat.

  It turned out that 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. Tom was watching him build a utility boat in his workshop, so we had a chance to tell Big Jim the whole exciting story without Tom’s hearing it.

  We didn’t want Tom to hear it, as he would 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.

  “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 he didn’t know a thing about our digging in the old icehouse and finding the money sewed up inside a lot of fish’s stomachs. So we quickly told him.

  He frowned at first. Then his bright mind started to work, and he just took charge of things. But I was terribly disappointed at what Big Jim decided to do.

  “This is a job for the police,” he told us. “You boys have 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. Since the nearest telephone was farther 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—who had just come back—and me standing there by the boathouse to wait till they returned from phoning the police.

  I looked into Poetry’s bluish eyes, and he into mine. We both felt 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.

  Little Tom looked up from what he’d been doing, which was tucking the stem of an oxeye daisy through the buttonhole of his shirt. That little guy always liked to wear a wildflower of some kind. He asked, “Watch who come out of an icehouse—what icehouse?”

  And Dragonfly, 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. 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 blue eyes and both fists double up quick, and I knew he was both sad and mad. He knew Dragonfly meant his dad, because he had called him “old hook-nosed John,” but the part about coming out of an icehouse with his hairy arms up in the air must have puzzled him.

  I saw him swallow hard, as if there was a lump in his throat, and he said, “You mean my dad’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 thought about him, but somehow right that second it sort of seemed we ought to get a more respectable, better-sounding name for him.

  I knew we had to tell Tom the truth, since he’d heard Dragonfly say that, but I was mad at Dragonfly for a minute. I said, “Listen, you, Dragonfly Gilbert, 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 sometime, 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 as if he was expecting to see the police coming. Also, he looked out toward the lake. He seemed to be listening for Santa and Big Jim’s boat coming back.

  There wasn’t any motorboat sound, but at that very second I heard the sad sound of a mourning dove from up in a tree somewhere, saying, “Coo, coo, coo, coo.” Then almost the second the last “coo” was finished, there was a sort of vibrating sound about thirty feet above us, and I knew it was the wings of the dove as it flew away or maybe flew from one tree to another.

  Little Jim had my binoculars. He put them up to his eyes and looked, just as red-haired Tom Till said, “If my dad gets caught, he’ll have to go to jail for a terribly long time, and we won’t have any dad, and it’ll break my mother’s—”

  He suddenly broke off what he was saying and got a tearful expression on his freckled face. Then, I guess because 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, stumbling awkwardly as though 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 flash, while his red hair was bobbing down that weed-grown path toward camp, I was remembering the first time I’d ever seen him. He and his bad big brother, Bob, belonged to a gang of tough 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 happened onto them while they were doing it, and for some reason we’d gotten into a fierce fistfight. Tom’s hard-knuckled fist had whammed me on the nose, and for a dozen fist-flying minutes he and I had been enemies.

  But a lot of things had happened after that. Tom and I 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 was what people called a “juvenile delinquent” and his dad was a beer and whiskey drinker who acted as though he hated God and the church and 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, because 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 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 flap. All of a sudden I saw Tom thrust open the flap of his tent real quick, dive out and around it, and start on the run up the lake in the other direction, carrying his small old-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 down 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.

  Then I came to 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 motorboat 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 after only a short run. I grabbed him and said, “You’re a great guy, Tom. The whole gang likes you.”

  He dropped his suitcase, pulled loose, and scurried 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 he knew I really liked him, as I had proved that to him at different times.

  He slumped down in the grass and let himself sort of sob and sniffle and talk at the same time. He wasn’t looking at me but straight ahead in the direction of a little cluster of bright yellow mustard flowers, the kind that grow along the edge of our garden back at Sugar Creek if you let them. They are very pretty but are pests, and if you give them a chance they will sprea
d in a few years all over a field or fencerow.

  Seeing those pretty mustard flowers and knowing that Tom was crying on account of his dad and also on account of his mother, I thought 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 super guy,” I said to Tom and felt awfully warm inside my heart toward him. I 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. Then he straightened up quick as if he’d thought of something important. “Where is the icehouse?” he asked and scrambled to his feet.

  I wondered what he had on his mind, because his face looked as though 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 said I wouldn’t show him where the icehouse was if he didn’t tell me. So he told me. Would you believe this? 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. Then I decided we ought to ask Big Jim what he thought, as he had 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, because 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.