Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Read online

  “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 dad’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 black-shrouded outboard motor attached to the stern, and the muscles of his jaw were working as they do when he’s thinking. Barry, our camp director, hadn’t come back yet—he had to be away all night—so Big Jim was still our boss.

  “Is that your dad’s motorboat?” Big Jim asked Tom Till, pointing toward it.

  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. We knew it was the mail boat coming, and we soon learned it had brought letters for most of us. One was addressed to Little Tom Till in his mother’s handwriting.

  Tom held it in his hands, studying it. Then he opened it and read it, while different ones of us read our own letters. But I kept watching him out of the corner of my eye. Then I saw him quickly shuffle over to Big Jim and shove the letter into his hand and say, “Read that!”

  Big Jim had been reading a letter written in a very smooth, pretty handwriting in green ink. I knew it was from Sylvia, whose pop was our Sugar Creek minister and who Big Jim thought was extra nice. Jim tucked Sylvia’s letter inside his shirt pocket and read Tom’s mom’s letter and—well, whatever it said, that was what decided him.

  “All right, gang,” Big Jim said 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 lakefront 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.”

  So Big Jim, Tom Till, Little Jim, Poetry, and I got into John Till’s boat, and I let Big Jim run it because he was going to anyway.

  First, we checked to see if we had enough gas, and we tossed in enough life preserver pillows for each of us. Little Jim put on his vest just to be still safer, and in a few jiffies we were off. Big Jim ran 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 flew up the lake, through The Narrows, under the bridge, and into the other lake in what seemed only a few minutes.

  Just after we’d roared under the bridge and out into the lake the icehouse was on, Little Jim yelled, “There’s a long black car just going across the bridge now. I’ll bet that’s the police.”

  I couldn’t hear the boards of the bridge or the car’s engine because our boat was making so much noise. But it felt good to be working with the police, and it also felt good to know there were really a lot of big strong men in our country who were interested in doing what Dad calls “protecting society from wicked men.” Only, with Little Tom there in the boat beside me, he being such a super guy, it seemed too bad to think of his dad as a criminal, but he was anyway!

  Even while we raced up the 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 relative such as a brother or a sister or maybe a wife or a boy or girl who felt as Tom was feeling right then. He looked awfully sad. For some reason it seemed that maybe it was also a big crime to hurt people’s hearts the way 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. What if John Till was my dad, and I was on my way to an old icehouse, where he was locked up, to give him a letter from my neat 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”—which is being electrocuted or hanged?

  Little Jim piped up with a question then that burst my balloon and brought me down to earth. It was, “How’ll we get the letter to your dad? We don’t dare open the door.”

  Poetry’s bright mind thought of a way. He said, “We’ll make a ladder out of ourselves and push Tom up, so he can poke the letter through the crack between the logs.” That 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 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 sand, we scrambled out and sneaked up close to the icehouse.

  We moved quietly so we wouldn’t be heard, although John Till would have heard our motor when we were coming in, I supposed.

  “Sh!” Big Jim said to us.

  He and Tom led the way as we crept closer. I didn’t know what would happen next, but I soon found out.

  Big Jim stopped the rest of us and sent Tom on toward the icehouse alone.

  I peered through the leaves of the wild chokecherry shrubs we were crouching behind. Then I heard Tom’s pathetic voice that had a kind of a quaver in it as though he was scared, calling out, “Dad!”

  We listened for an answer but couldn’t hear any.

  Then Tom’s voice called again, a little louder, close to the side of the log house.

  I had both hands up to my ears, listening, but there wasn’t a sound, except right that second I heard a very pretty wren’s song. It sounded half like a fast mixed-up whistling tune and half like the springwater that trickles out of the rocks not far from the old swimming hole back at Sugar Creek.

  Then Tom called still louder, “Dad! It’s me—Tom! I’ve got a letter for you from Mother!”

  But that icehouse was as quiet as if it had been an extralarge grave house in an Indian cemetery.

  Tom turned around then and looked in our direction with a question mark on his face.

  All of us came out into the open and went toward him, not knowing what to think. In a little while the police would be there, and it’d be too late for Tom to tell his dad what he wanted to tell him or to give him the letter or anything. And then I heard a motorboat coming from 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 when we’d seen John Till taking a string of fish down to the lake from his cottage-whispered, “Maybe he was so tired he went to sleep. Let’s all go up and surround the icehouse and yell him awake.”

  We decided that might be a good idea, so we hurried toward Tom Till. Poetry and I hustled around to the side where the door was.

  Well, you could have knocked me over with a puff of wind. There in front of my astonished eyes was that great big icehouse door, wide open on its rusty hinges. Our prisoner had escaped!

  5

  Well, that was that, and it was terribly disappointing. Poetry and I stood staring at that open door, wondering what had happened. Who had opened it and let John Till out, and where had he gone? Was he hiding somewhere close by, and might he spring from behind something any minute and knock the living daylights out of one of us?

  Big Jim and the rest of the gang came running around to where we were, and as soon as we found that our prisoner was really gone, we looked at each other with sad and disappointed
eyes.

  I looked at Tom, who had his mom’s letter in his hands, and I noticed it was all crinkled, the way letters get when you squish them up tight.

  “What’ll we do?” different ones of us asked the rest of us, and we waited for Big Jim to decide what.

  He looked at Tom, who looked sad and surprised and disappointed. For a second it seemed he didn’t belong to our gang at all but was a strange boy—like a lost duckling that gets hatched with a nestful of fluffy little chickens and follows the mother hen around with the chickens but doesn’t do what they do or look like they look.

  “We’ve got to find my dad!” Tom said. He stooped down and picked a small white five-petaled flower growing beside the icehouse on a little plant five or six inches high. The plant had shining green three-sectioned leaves with little notches in them.

  Little Jim saw him pick it and stooped quickly and picked one himself, saying, “It’s a goldthread flower. Goody!”—which goes to show that even in an exciting time that little guy can be interested in something else.

  I remembered that he had a flower guidebook. Besides having a hobby of putting a gospel message in whiskey bottles, he was also trying, while we were on our vacation, to find as many wildflowers as he could. He wrote their names in a notebook to show to our teacher that fall when school started.

  Tom seemed to be thinking. He didn’t say more to Big Jim but looked down at his goldthread and at the crinkled-up letter in his hand and then began to try to push the goldthread stem through the button in his shirt beside the oxeye daisy that was still there.

  I won’t have room at this part of the story to tell you what happened when the police came, which they did pretty quick, except to say that as soon as they believed that we hadn’t let John Till out ourselves, they dug around in the icehouse and found a lot of other fish with part of the ransom money in them—enough, when they added what we had locked up in Santa’s boathouse, to make more than $20,000.

  But where was the rest of the money? Nobody knew, and nobody knew where John Till had disappeared to. He wasn’t in the old cabin we’d once seen him in, which we found he’d rented from Santa. Both the cabin and the icehouse belonged to Santa, who had bought them from a real estate man only a few weeks before.

  It was awfully hard on Tom to know that even though his dad was free, the police were still after him, and nobody knew when he’d be caught, or whether he’d try to resist arrest and be shot and maybe killed.

  Another thing that made it hard for Tom was the letter from his mother, which he let me see. When I read it, I couldn’t blame Tom for feeling sad.

  Part of the letter said,

  I think maybe your father is up in the north woods somewhere where you boys are camping, Tom. I don’t know for sure. But we got a notice from the bank that the interest on our loan is past due, and it has to be paid. If he stops in to visit you, please give him this letter.

  As you know, I gave him the egg money I’d saved up all winter and summer, and he was going to take it to the bank just before he left. I’m sure he went fishing, because his tackle is gone.

  But don’t worry, Tommy boy, we’ll get along somehow. The Lord is on our side. You just keep on having good boyish fun and learning all you can in the evening campfire Bible lessons. You and I will keep on praying for your dad and your brother, Bob, that someday they’ll both be saved. Our minister called this morning, and he’s praying too. And he says God can do things nobody thinks He can …

  There was more in Tom’s letter from home. His white rabbit had carrots for breakfast and seemed quite content but was probably lonesome for Tom. And the new potatoes in the garden would make awfully good raw-fried potatoes for supper when he came home.

  It really was a nice letter—the same kind I got from my mom, with scribbling all around the edges, things for a boy to remember not to do and why. Don’t catch cold, and be careful not to fall out of the boat, things like that, which always worry a mother, who can’t help it, because she is a mother.

  We kept on the lookout for John Till every minute of that day and the next, when we took a trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi. Little Jim took notes on that trip so he could show them to our teacher that fall when we got back to Sugar Creek. One of his notes said:

  The Mississippi River is 2,470 miles long from the place where it starts at Itasca Lake, Minnesota, to where it stops at the Gulf of Mexico.

  We started out early in the morning in our station wagon for Itasca State Park, where there was a big blue-water lake that is eight miles around. There, in a pretty, shady park, all of us scrambled out and followed each other along a little winding path till we came to the lake.

  There we saw a small stream of water about twelve feet across and a foot or less deep flowing out of it, making a very pretty noise, which sounded like half a sigh and half a ripple. The sound was also mixed up with the voices of different birds, which were singing all around and above us in the bushes and trees.

  We all were quiet for a while, not seeing what we had expected to see when we saw the source of the Mississippi River, but it was very interesting anyway.

  Little Jim got a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. Then he quick stooped down and in a jiffy had both his shoes and socks off. I knew he was going to wade across the stream, which was shallow and narrow there. Right away we all had our shoes and socks off, and every single one of us waded across the Mississippi River.

  “Here we are,” I said, as most of us stopped out in the middle of the Mississippi and gathered ourselves into a half circle with our faces looking toward shore, where our camp director had a camera waiting to take our picture.

  Standing there, squinting in the direction of the camera and also in the direction of the sun, I happened to remember a brand-new Paul Bunyan story that Poetry had made up once, and which you maybe know about if you’ve read Screams in the Night. Old Babe, which is Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, was swimming in the headwaters of the Mississippi, and the blue began to come off and make the water blue. And because the Mississippi flows through a lot of the lakes in Minnesota, pretty soon all the lakes became what are called blue-water lakes.

  Of course, it was only a legend. Paul Bunyan, as you know, was a pretend lumberman who was extra large; and Babe, the blue ox, was his best friend and went everywhere he went, just as a boy’s dog follows a boy around.

  Anyway, while we were having our picture taken, I remembered the story Poetry told about how the lakes got their blue water. So I looked down quick at Poetry’s large feet and at all the seventy different-shaped and different-length toes on the fourteen feet of all seven of us. I tried to think of something funny to say, but it really wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be. “If all the fish in the lakes up here get terribly sick and die before long, it’ll be because the barrel-shaped boy in our gang didn’t wash his feet before he waded across the Mississippi River.”

  And that’s how it happened that I wished I had brought along a change of clothes, because for some reason what I said made Poetry mad. He shoved his shoulder against me, and—because I was standing in fast-flowing water halfway up to my knees anyway—when I stepped sideways to try to get my balance, I stepped on a slippery rock in the riverbed and lost my whole balance. The next thing I knew I was sitting down on the bottom of the Mississippi River, and the water was coming clear up to my stomach.

  Right away Barry pointed his camera in our direction and took another picture.

  That reminded Poetry of a riddle, which he quick asked. It was: “Say, gang, what is it that stays in bed all day, spends all its time at the bank, and never stops running?”

  “A river,” Dragonfly said and sneezed twice, because he is not only allergic to different pollens but to sudden changes of temperature. The water in that little narrow babbling stream was almost cold.

  Well, that was about all that happened right then, except for one other thing. And it was that one thing that helped make our next adventure, a fishing trip for walleyes, extraordinar
ily interesting and exciting.

  Not having brought along any extra clothes, I had to walk in my wet pants back to our station wagon, which wasn’t any too much fun for me. There they made me lie down where I wouldn’t be seen while some of the gang wrung the water out of my trousers and also out of the tail of my shirt. I would have to wait till they dried enough for me to put them on, and that meant I had to let the rest of the gang visit a very special curio shop without me, while my clothes were hanging on a limb in the sun.

  Poetry, who was about my best friend, was already sorry I was all wet, and we made up as soon as I found out he was going to stay with me to keep me company.

  I gave Little Jim some money out of my billfold and told him to pick out something he especially thought my little sister, Charlotte Ann, would like. I knew that in a few days we were all going to break camp and drive back to Sugar Creek, and I wanted to take home a few things made by the Indians.

  Poetry and I were alone awhile, with me lying under a blanket on the backseat of the station wagon. We talked over all the wonderful experiences of our vacation and decided it had been the best camping trip we’d had in our lives.

  “Only one thing would make it the best we ever could have,” he said, and when I said, “What?” he didn’t answer for a minute.

  He was sitting in the open car door not far from me, and I was lying on my back, wishing the hot sun and the breeze would hurry up and get my clothes a little drier so I could put them on. He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but his squawky voice had a sort of a faraway sound in it as though he was thinking of something very serious.

  When he still didn’t answer me, I asked him again, and he said quietly, “I feel sorry for Tom.” Then his voice sort of choked, and I guessed that he liked that little red-haired guy just as well as I did.

  Right that second, if anybody had asked me anything, I couldn’t have answered either. I felt my eyes stinging, and there would have been a tear in my voice, and boys don’t like to have anybody see tears in their eyes or hear them in their voices.