Chapter II: Part 2

“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.”

We listened to see if there was any answer, but couldn’t hear any, then Tom’s voice called again, a little louder, real close to the side of the old log house. I had both hands up to my ears, but there wasn’t a sound, except right that second I heard a very pretty wren’s song that sounded half like a fast mixed-up whistling tune and half like the spring water that trickles out of the rocks not far from the old swimming hole back at Sugar Creek.

Then Tom called still louder, “_DADDY!_ It’s ME--TOM! _I’ve got a letter for you from Mother!_”

But say, that icehouse was as quiet as if it had been an extra large gravehouse 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 here, and it’d be too late for Tom to tell his daddy what he wanted to tell him or to give him the letter or anything. 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. Poetry and I hurried around to the side where the door was and--

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

5

Well, that was that and a terribly disappointing that at that. Poetry and I stood staring at that open icehouse door, wondering what on earth--and who had opened it and let John Till out and where had he gone, and also was he hiding somewhere close by and might spring out 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 right away 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 noticed it was kinda crinkled, like letters get when you squish them up tight in your hands.

“What’ll we do?” different ones of us asked the rest of us, and waited for Big Jim to decide what. He looked at Tom, who looked sad and surprised and disappointed, and for a second it seemed like he didn’t belong to our gang at all but was a strange boy--like a little lost duckling that gets hatched out with a nestful of fluffy little chickens in our chicken yard 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 daddy!” Tom said, and stooped down and picked a small white five-petalled flower which I noticed was growing beside the icehouse on a little plant about five or six inches high. The flower plant had shining green three-parted leaves with little notches in them. Little Jim saw him pick it and stooped down quick and picked one himself, and said, “’Tsa 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 guide book, and 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 wild flowers as he could, and write their names in a notebook to show to our teacher that fall when school started at Sugar Creek.

Tom seemed to be thinking. He didn’t answer Big Jim at all, 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 right 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 up what _we_ had locked up in Santa’s boathouse, to make over $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 which we found out he’d rented from Santa, and was the same cabin we’d seen him in once, and which you know about if you’ve read the story, “The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure.” Both the cabin and the icehouse belonged to Santa who had bought them from a real-estate man only a few weeks ago.

It was awful hard on Tom to know that even though his daddy 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, and when I read it I couldn’t blame Tom for feeling sad. Part of it 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 make out 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 daddy and your brother Bob, that some day 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 the letter such as that Tom’s 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 awful good raw-fried potatoes for supper when Tom came home.... It really was a swell letter, the same kind I get from my mom, with scribbling all around the edges, of stuff for a boy to remember not to do and why, and not to catch cold, and be careful not to fall out of the boats--things like that which always worry a mother, who can’t help it on account of 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, and one of his notes was:

“The Mississippi river is 2406 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 to Itasca State Park, where there was a great big blue-watered lake that is 8 miles in circumference, and there, in a pretty shady park, we parked and all of us scrambled out and swished along following each other in a little winding path till we came to the lake, where there was a small stream of water about twelve feet across and about a foot or less deep flowing out of it, making a very pretty noise which sounded like it was half a sigh and the other 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 awhile, not seeing what we had expected to see when we saw the source of the Mississippi, but it was very interesting anyway.

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

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

Standing there, squinting my eyes in the direction of the camera and also in the direction of the sun, I happened to remember a brand new Paul Bunyan story which Poetry had made up once and which you maybe know about if you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North,” and it was, that Old Babe, which is Paul Bunyan’s blue Ox, was swimming in the headwaters of the Mississippi river and the blue began to come off in the water, and to make the water blue; and because the Mississippi flows through a lot of the lakes in Minnesota, pretty soon all the lakes became what is called “blue-watered lakes.”

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

Anyway, while we were having our picture taken, I remembered the story Poetry’d 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-lengthed toes on the fourteen feet of all seven of us, and tried to think of something funny to say which I did, but which wasn’t very, and this is what it was--“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, on account of for some reason what I said made Poetry peeved. He quick shoved his shoulder against me, and because I was standing in fast-flowing water half way up to my knees anyway, when I stepped sideways to try to get my balance I stepped on a slippery rock in the river bed, lost my whole balance and the next thing I knew I was sitting down on the bottom of the Mississippi river, the water 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 and 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 on account of he is not only allergic to different pollens but to sudden changes of temperature--the water in that little narrow babbling stream being almost cold.

Well, that was all that happened on that trip, except one thing, and it was that one thing that helped make our next adventure, which was a fishing trip for walleyes, extraordinarily interesting and exciting.

Not having brought along any extra clothes, I had to walk in my wet trousers back to our station wagon, which wasn’t any too much fun for me. There they made me undress and 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, which 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 my almost 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 bill-fold and told him to pick out something he especially thought my little sister, Charlotte Ann, would like, on account of 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 being alone awhile, with me lying under a blanket on the back seat 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 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 and I couldn’t see his fat face, but his squawky voice had a sort of a far away sound in it like he was thinking of something extra 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 wouldn’t have answered either, ’cause 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.

Pretty soon though, Poetry spoke again with his back still toward me, “Did you ever read this verse in the Bible?”

If I hadn’t been already down, you could have knocked me over with a fish scale when I realized what he was doing. Say, he had taken his little leather New Testament out of his shirt pocket and, looking through it, had found a verse he thought was extra good.

As you maybe know, an official part of the equipment of anybody who belongs to the Sugar Creek Gang, is a small pocket New Testament. We carry one with us nearly all the time, and not only every one of us reads it every day but we aren’t ashamed to let anybody know we do it either; but on account of being boys and feeling like nearly all boys do, we didn’t talk about the Bible very much except in camp-fire meetings or at Sunday school, and only once in a while when two or three of us were together--Little Jim and I doing maybe more of it than any of the rest of us, on account of he--well, he had a keen little mind and thought more about it, I guess, and was always getting such good ideas. 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 in 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.

Anyway, when Poetry asked me if I had ever read “this verse,” I said, “What verse?” and he read it to me, with his back still turned. It was out of the book of Matthew, chapter 18, and was the nineteenth verse, and said, “_If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven_.”

It made me feel good inside to even think about the Bible, especially since I knew both of us believed what we were talking about. I just lay there, looking through the station wagon window up at the pretty branches of a pine tree that grew not very far away. I was also listening to the gurgling of the water close by and felt something kinda warm in my heart, like Poetry and God and I had a secret of some kind. When we finished telling each other what we thought the verse meant, we had made up our minds that we were going to stick together until Little Tom’s daddy was saved.

“Let’s shake on it,” Poetry said, and swung around, and shoved his fat hand in my direction. I grabbed it quick, and said, “Shake.”

“Shake,” he said again, then we let go, and I felt wonderful inside.

I noticed the branches of the pine tree above me were swaying in the wind, and I knew my clothes were drying pretty fast--I hoped.

A little later we heard the gang coming. I knew it was the gang because it sounded like a flock of blackbirds gathering in the woods in a Sugar Creek autumn getting ready for migrating to a warmer country; it also sounded like a flock of crows with a few scolding blue jays mixed in with them and maybe a harsh-voiced shrieking kingfisher joining in--Dragonfly being the rattling-voiced kingfisher, and Circus, the scolding blue jay.

My clothes were dry enough for me to put them on, if while we drove along, I’d sit on the leather seat of the station wagon, which I did, and away we went, back to camp and to the next day’s fishing trip.

“Look what I got for Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said to me, and shoved over to me a couple of small rubber balloons. “They cost only ten cents apiece,” he said proudly, and handed me my change.

I was a little disappointed, but didn’t want to say so, ’cause Little Jim had such a happy grin on his face to think he had saved me money, and also being sure Charlotte Ann would be tickled to see the balloons blown up nice and big, which most babies do, and reach out their hands for them the very minute they see them.

I tucked the two balloons in my shirt pocket beside my New Testament and buttoned the flap, and forgot about them, until the next day when we were on a very special fishing trip for walleyed pike.

Boy oh boy, it was going to be a wonderful trip, I thought, and we were going to fish, not for small fish like blue gills and crappies, which people call “pan” fish, but for big walleyes, to pack and ship home to our folks at Sugar Creek. Also, we were going to keep our eyes open every second to see if we could find any trace of John Till.

6

I was certainly glad our little Indian friend, Snow-in-the-face, was well enough to be our guide on our fishing trip for walleyed pike. As you maybe know, he’d been very sick but almost right away after our gang had called to see him, which we did the very next day after we had come up north, he had started to get better, and now, today, he was coming to our camp to visit us and to guide us to the best fishing waters for walleyed pike, so we could all catch our “limit,” which is eight walleyes apiece. Multiplying eight fish by seven boys, which any teacher will tell you you can’t do, we’d have fifty-six fish to pack in ice and ship back to Sugar Creek for our parents to see and to help us eat. Boy oh boy, it was going to be fun!

About three o’clock that afternoon, after the gang had all had our rest hour, little Snow-in-the-face and his big Indian brother, Eagle Eye, came putt-putting in a canoe, straight to our shore.

There was a lot of excitement around camp for a while, while all of us finished getting our equipment ready. Our two big fishing boats were equipped with life-preserver pillows, which everybody oughtn’t to go on a fishing trip without.

It had been a terribly hot day and the sun up in the sky, as our boats plowed their wet way out across the waves toward an island, poured its yellowish heat down on us something fierce. It also reflected back up into our faces from the water and made me glad I had on a pair of dark glasses to protect my eyes from the extra bright light.

Snow-in-the-face was in the boat I was in, along with Little Jim, Poetry and Dragonfly, and we were following the other boat which had Eagle Eye and Big Jim and Circus and Little Tom Till. Barry had stayed home to write letters and to look after camp.

In a little while our boats neared the pretty pine and spruce-covered island, circled around it to the other side where we anchored in a little cove, not more than thirty yards from each other, in some quiet water.

That swell little reddish-brown-faced Indian boy with his bright black eyes and straight black hair didn’t even use a pole, but had a big heavy line which he dropped down over the side of our boat. 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. The very second one of us would get a walleye, we’d know we’d found a school of them, and in a little while we’d all get bites and catch fish at the same time, on account of walleyes stick together like a gang of boys.

“Eagle Eye found this place last year,” Snow-in-the-face said. “Fish bite here when they don’t any place else on the lake.”

But say, after we all had sat there and waited and waited and pulled our lines in and out of the water for an hour and not a one of us had caught a single fish, or even had a nibble, it looked as if having a good guide wasn’t any good.

Snow-in-the-face had a pucker on his brown forehead and looked worried.

“Ho hum,” I thought, and shifted myself to another uncomfortable position on the hot boat seat I was on--any position being uncomfortable when the fish don’t bite, and the deer flies are swarming around your legs and hands and biting fiercely just like you wish the fish would.

Pretty soon, I looked over at the pretty pine-covered island and wished I could go over there and sit down in the shade for awhile. I was also remembering that that was the very island I’d wanted to explore when I’d first gotten the idea of playing Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, and which had got us tangled up in the mystery of the buried treasure, most of which we’d finally found. The rest of it Old John Till probably had somewhere, wherever he was, which nobody knew.

“I’m terribly hot,” I said to the rest of us in our boat. “Let’s go over to that island and lie down in the shade awhile.” The rest of us thought it was a good idea, and so we pulled in our lazy lines and also pulled anchor and rowed over, and in a little while, Poetry and I were strolling along following the shore around to the side where we could look across and see our camp away out across the lake. It was one of the prettiest islands I’d ever seen, and had great big Norway pines and spruce and Tamarack and also ferns and all kinds of wild flowers such as red-flowered wild columbine and white goldthread and, in a boggy place, some pitcher plants, which had queer-looking green leaves that looked like one of the green pitchers Mom has on our sideboard at home--also the leaves looked like the lips of a French horn that one of the men at Sugar Creek plays in the band on Saturday night....

We’d left Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim and Dragonfly back at the shore in the boat, ’cause Snow-in-the-face had acted like he didn’t want to come with us, and Dragonfly had been so lazy and also afraid of smelling wild flowers and having to sneeze a lot--that being one of the reasons he’d come on this vacation with us, so he could get away from Sugar Creek flowers and timothy hay and ragweed and everything else which would make him sneeze.

“You know what?” Poetry said to me all of a sudden, and when I said, “No, what?” he said, “This would be a good island for John Till to hide on. Maybe when he got out of the icehouse, he came over here.”

“But how could he get here? We had his boat.”

“He might swim,” Poetry said, but it wasn’t a good idea because it was pretty far from any other shore over here, so I said, “Of course, he could rent a boat from almost any resort up here,”--which he could.

We were standing right that minute close to a sandy beach and the waves were washing up in a very lazy friendly way, when all of a sudden, Poetry said, “Hey, look, somebody’s been here. Somebody’s had a boat beached here on the sand,” which he had, but it was gone now.

“Boy oh boy!” I said, all of a sudden getting excited, “and here’re shoe tracks, going back into the island somewhere.”

We decided to follow the tracks, which we did, but didn’t find anything interesting. There might be a broken twig trail, though, like the one we’d followed before, and which you know about, maybe, but we couldn’t find a thing, so we gave up and went back to Dragonfly and Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim.

“Where you guys been?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and I said, “Oh, looking for buried treasure.”

Little Snow-in-the-face got a queer far-away expression on his face, squinted his eyes and said, “Sometimes we see lights out here at night.”

And then it was Dragonfly’s turn to get a queer far-away expression on his face, which made it seem like he wished he was as far away as his thoughts were, he, as you know, believing in ghosts.

Well, we decided to try fishing some more like the rest of the guys in the other boat were, but who still hadn’t caught anything. We rowed out to another place and baited our hooks and tried again.

Another hour passed during which we pulled anchor and tried a half dozen different locations and still not a one of us caught a single fish and we were terribly discouraged.

“You _can_ have one if you _want_ one,” Little Jim said.

“How?” I said, and he said, “One of those balloons I bought for you yesterday is a _rubber_ fish. You can blow _it_ up--maybe it’s a walleye.”

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.

“If we get _one_, we’ll get _twenty_,” Poetry said. “Walleyes go in schools, you know.”

“Yeah,” Little Jim piped up and said, “but fish maybe don’t _have_ school in _August_,” which reminded me that right after August came September, and generally in the first week of September, the Sugar Creek School started and--

I let out a fierce long sigh when I thought of that, not because I didn’t need an education but I hated to have to sit down to get one, which is what you have to do in school most of the time--and the boat seat was getting harder and harder every minute.

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

And then--all of an excited sudden--Poetry got a big strike. He waited until he was sure it was time to set the hook, which he did at exactly the right time and in a jiffy he landed a very excited walleye; only it wasn’t much bigger than a big yellow perch--hardly big enough to keep.

“O.K., Bill--hand me the stringer,” he ordered me, panting with happiness. Talk about a proud grin on a boy’s face--Poetry really had one.

“_What_ stringer?” I said, and looked all around on the bottom of the boat for one. And--would you believe it?--not a one of us had brought along a fish stringer! The other boat was too far away for them to throw one into our boat, so Poetry just sat there with his fish in his fat hand, wondering what to do with it.

“It’s too little to keep,” Little Jim said. “Let him go back to his mama.”

“I wish I knew where his mama is hiding,” Dragonfly said, “I’d like to catch her.”

“Let him go and he’ll _find_ his mama,” Snow-in-the-face said, and had the cutest grin on his smallish face, and that tickled me all over ’cause I could see he was as mischievous as any white-faced boy.

“It’s probably a little lost child-fish,” Little Jim said. “We aren’t going to catch any more anyway. Let’s let him go home to his parents.”

Well, as you know, I had the end of my fish balloon tied air-tight shut, with a piece of old fishing line I’d had in my pocket, and it was still in the water on the opposite side of the boat. It was really cute, that little yellowish rubber fish bobbing along out there on the surface of the water.

And then Poetry yelled across to the other boat, saying, “HEY, YOU GUYS, OVER THERE! WE GOT A FISH BUT DON’T HAVE ANY STRINGER TO PUT HIM ON. WHAT’LL WE DO WITH HIM?”

Circus, being mischievous and having lots of bright ideas anyway, yelled back to us, “IF YOU’LL PUT HIM BACK IN THE WATER AND TELL HIM TO SWIM OVER HERE, WE’LL PUT HIM ON _OUR_ STRINGER!”

And that was what gave Poetry another idea which wasn’t so dumb and which turned our discouraged fishing trip into a real one that was wonderful. Poetry yelled back to Circus, “SWELL IDEA, WE’LL SEND HIM OVER, RIGHT AWAY!” Then he got a command in his voice and said to me, “Here, Bill, give me that line,” and reached out and took it before I could make up my mind not to let him have it.

“What on earth crazy thing you going to do?” Dragonfly asked, when Poetry held the fish between his knees a minute while with his two fat hands he made a double slip-knot around the walleye’s tail; and then almost before anybody could have stopped him if he had wanted to, Poetry released that frisky little walleye into the water sort of like my mother does when she carefully holds an old setting hen and eases her into a coop where there is a nestful of eggs for her to sit on. Poetry said to the fish, as he let go, “Here, Wally, my friend, you go swimming straight for the other boat away over there!”

Boy, that fish certainly had lots of pep. Being out of the water for that smallish jiffy hadn’t hurt him a bit, although if you are going to let a fish go free after catching him, you are supposed to be very careful to handle him with wet hands, and release him under the water rather than throw him back, and he’ll be more likely to live.

Say, that frisky little walleye made a fierce fast dive straight down into the water, and in a few fast seconds, the yellowish rubber balloon was bobbing up and down like it was a boy’s bobber on a fishing line.... And--would you believe it?--it started to move right in the direction of that other boat--kinda slow though, but actually toward it.

Poetry sighed proudly, leaned back, stuck his thumbs in his arm pits and said, “See there, fish understand my language,” which made Dragonfly say, “That’s ’cause you talk like a fish,” which, for Dragonfly, was almost a bright remark.

I could see, though, that the balloon fish was changing its course. It began working its way a little toward the left and out toward deeper water and farther from shore. We all watched it, having fun, and Poetry kept yelling to it to “Turn to the right!” and to “Hurry up!” but pretty soon when it was maybe fifty yards from us it stopped going in one direction and began to move slowly around in a small circle.

“I’ll bet he’s caught on a snag,” Little Snow-in-the-face said in his cute Indian voice, and it seemed like he might be right, because, even though the balloon bobbed around a little, it didn’t move any farther away, but just seemed to stay more or less in the same place.

Well, we fished on, all of us hoping for another fish, but not a one of us caught one, so pretty soon we got discouraged again and pulled up anchor. Then Poetry said, “Whyn’t we go get him and go home, and everybody go swimming?” which sounded like a good idea. It’d be a lot more fun to do that than to sit on a hard boat seat watching a rubber balloon bobbing on the surface of a lake that didn’t have any hungry fish in it.

“Let’s _troll_ over,” Snow-in-the-face said. “Sometimes when you can’t catch fish any other way, they’ll bite when you do that.”

Dragonfly said it was a good idea too, ’cause there might be a “lost, strayed or stolen” fish all by itself between here and that balloon, so we all left our lines in the water while Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim took the oars and rowed us kinda splashily out toward that nice yellowish balloon which I was going to get and take home to Charlotte Ann.

In a little while we were almost there, and I was getting ready to reach out my hand and get the balloon when quick as a flash I saw Little Jim’s line go taut, and his pole bend down clear to the water, while he dropped his oar and quick grabbed his pole and yelled excitedly, “Hey, I’ve got a fish!” Just as Dragonfly’s line did the same thing, and then WHAM!--my own line went tight and the next thing we knew most of us in our boat found ourselves in the middle of one of the most exciting fishing experiences of our whole lives. We yelled and pulled, and our lines went singing out as our reels unwound; and almost at the same time, Dragonfly and Little Jim and Poetry and I all landed a walleye apiece, and laid them, flopping and splashing water in every direction, in the bottom of the boat.

“WE’VE STRUCK A SCHOOL!” Poetry cried. “MY FISH TOOK US RIGHT TO THEM! HE KNEW EXACTLY WHERE THEY WERE!”

7

Well you aren’t supposed to yell like a lot of wild Indians on a warpath when you start catching a lot of fish, on account of you might scare the fish away; so almost right away we all shushed each other, and only made a noise when we caught a fish, which was just about as fast as we could bait our hooks and get our lines into the water again.

We quick anchored right close to where the balloon was, and the other boatful of the rest of the gang came rowing over as quietly as they could, and anchored close by.

Talk about excitement. We’d never had so much fishing fun in our whole lives as we were having right that minute. And then, just like Sugar Creek school getting out and the kids tumbling out the door and all going away from the red brick schoolhouse, our school of walleyes moved on and we stopped getting bites. I knew something was going to happen the minute I saw the yellowish balloon start moving fast out toward deeper water.

“Hey, look!” Dragonfly, who saw it first, said. “Wally acts like he’s scared. Look at him go!”

We looked, and sure enough the balloon was bobbing up and down, and even diving clear under. Then it plunked clear under for a _long_ jiffy before bouncing back up and shooting almost a foot into the air, then landed with a kersmack on the water again.

Nobody had had any bites for awhile before that, but we had enough fish for one day, and so Big Jim said, “Let’s go back to camp and get supper,” which was a good idea. We would come back tomorrow.

“What’ll we do with Wally?” Poetry said.

“He’s been a swell friend,” Dragonfly said. “He ought to have some kind of appreciation.”

Then Little Jim piped up good and loud and said, “Let’s give him his liberty!”

Well, we had enough larger fish, and Wally really deserved some kind of a reward for helping us catch so many fish to take home to Sugar Creek, so we pulled anchor and rowed out toward where Wally was making the balloon fish bob around in such a lively style. As soon as the boat had eased along side, I, who was closest to it, reached down my hand, caught hold of the balloon, and started to haul Wally in toward the boat, but right away my line went tight like it was fastened onto a log or snag down on the bottom of the lake. I gave a tug, but not too hard ’cause I didn’t want the line to scale off any scales from Wally’s tail, it being as hard on a fish to lose some of its scales as on a barefoot boy to stump his toe and knock the skin off.

“He’s tangled up on something,” I said, and gave another small pull and then--WHAM! There was a fierce wild lunge down there somewhere, and I felt a scared feeling racing up and down my spine. I knew Wally didn’t have _that_ much strength. Say, it felt as big as an excited pig running in our barnyard back at Sugar Creek--or a dog or something.

I had hold of the line as well as the balloon, and the line was cutting into my hands. I couldn’t think straight, but didn’t dare let loose.

Snow-in-the-face, for the very first time, got excited and yelled something to Eagle Eye in the Indian language, and then to us in English, which was, “SOME GREAT BIG FISH HAS SWALLOWED HIM....”--which made sense.

I held on, in spite of the line’s hurting my hand a little, and then, out there about ten feet, something with a big long ugly snout and with fierce eyes shot up through the waves and almost two feet in the air, and dive-splashed back in again.

There was a fierce, mad boiling of the surface like a bomb had exploded down there in the water somewhere. 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.

He had probably slowly nosed his fierce ugly long snout up to Wally, and then all of a sudden made a savage rush at him with his mouth open, and had swallowed him whole, and started to swim away with him. That had scared all the other fish, which was why we’d all stopped getting bites at the same time.

Anyway, right after that fierce old fighting fish lunged up out of the water and down in again, he made a dive straight for our boat, shot under it, and pulled so hard that I had to hold on for dear life. If I’d had a long line on a fishing rod with a reel on it, I could have let the reel spin, and like fishermen do when they have a wild walleye or an enormous northern pike on their lines, I could have “played” him until he was tired out, then hauled him in, but with my line only a dozen or more feet long, I was pretty sure I didn’t have a chance in the world to land him,--and the next thing I knew I found out I was right. In a second it seemed, after he dived under our boat, I felt my line go sickeningly slack, and I knew I’d lost him. I couldn’t tell though whether he’d broken my line, or whether he’d swallowed backwards and Wally was free again.

While the gang was groaning with disappointment, ’cause they’d seen what had happened, and while I was pulling in the lifeless line to see what was on the other end, I had a sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach like a fisherman gets when he loses a big fish.

In another jiffy I was holding up the end of the line for us to look at. Dragonfly, seeing it, said, “Poetry’s slip-knot slipped.”

We would have been a terribly sad gang if we hadn’t already caught a lot of middle-sized walleyes.

Circus called to us from the other boat and said, “We could have put a lot of kidnapper’s ransom money in a fish that big, if we’d caught him.”

“There wouldn’t have been much room left with Wally already inside of him,” Poetry said.

For some reason I was looking at Little Jim when Poetry said that and I noticed a sad expression come on his smallish mouse-like face, and I thought it looked like he had a couple of tears in his eyes.

It had been a wonderful fishing trip and we couldn’t afford to cry over a lost northern pike, which is what we all decided the big fish was. So after the other boat had pulled anchor, we started our motors, steered around the island and toward camp, with our caught fish lying in the bottom of the boat.

Little Jim was sitting in the seat in front of me, facing me as we roared along with Poetry running the motor. Different ones of us were talking and yelling to each other about all the different things that had happened,--all except Little Jim who, I noticed, was extra quiet and his eyes still had that saddish look in them.

Pretty soon I leaned over and half whispered to him, “’Smatter?” and he swallowed, then said, “Nothing.”

“There is too,” I said, just as he turned his head, gave it a quick shake, and when he looked back in my direction the tears that’d been in his eyes a second before, were gone, which is the way Little Jim gets tears out of his eyes--he just turns his head away, jerks it real quick, and that shakes the tears out.

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.”

“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.”

Then just like it sometimes happens to my mother back at Sugar Creek, when she says something that has a sad thought mixed up with it, Little Jim’s eyes got a couple of _new_ tears in them, which he quickly shook out into the lake, and then he said, as he reached his smallish cute hands toward me, “Let me hold the balloon fish a while.”

I pushed the yellowish rubber balloon toward him, and the way he took it, made me think of the way my little two-year-old baby sister, Charlotte Ann, would reach out her chubby little hands for it when I got home and showed it to her.

For a minute, while our two boats plowed along through the water, which, with the sunlight shining on the moving waves, looked like a great big lakeful of live silver, my thoughts took a hop, skip and a jump out across the lake to the shore, leaped over the Chippewa forest, and high up over a lot of other lakes, like I was Paul Bunyan himself; and all of a sudden I landed right inside our kitchen at Sugar Creek, where I knew I’d be in just a few days. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mom standing by our kitchen stove near the east window which has a green ivy vine trailing across the top of the outside of it. I could smell the smell of raw-fried potatoes frying, and see the steam puffing up from the hooked spout of our kinda oldish teakettle. If, when I came in, I accidently carried in a little mud on my shoes or bare feet, Mom would say like she nearly always does, “Would you like to get the broom, Bill, and sweep out that mud which, a little while ago, came walking in on two feet?” I would know whose two feet she meant, and grin, and right away I’d step to the place where we kept our broom, which is behind the east kitchen door which also has our roller towel rack on it, and I wouldn’t any more than get started with the dust pan and broom when Mom would say, “Be careful not to sweep _hard_, or we’ll have dust in our fried potatoes.”

While I was doing that, all of a sudden, I’d get tangled up and, turning around, I’d see my swell little sister Charlotte Ann, with her tiny toy broom, sweeping it around awkwardly like girls do when they’re just learning how to sweep, which is what Charlotte Ann does at our house. 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. In fact, she wants to do everything we do while we are doing it, and sometimes when Mom is getting supper and Charlotte Ann can’t see high enough to see what Mom is doing, she gets cross and whines and fusses and pulls at Mom’s dress or apron and makes a nuisance out of herself, only she doesn’t know she’s a nuisance but maybe thinks Mom is making a nuisance of _herself_, instead, for not letting her help get supper.

Yes sir, I was getting homesick for my folks, and could hardly wait till I got home next week to tell all the exciting adventures we’d had. Also, it’d be fun to watch the mail every day to see if maybe Little Jim would get any letters from anybody who would find his gospel messages which he’d been tossing out into the lake in whiskey bottles.

Thinking that, I remembered John Till and wondered where he was and what he was doing, and all of a sudden I remembered what Poetry and I had been thinking and talking about in the station wagon when we’d been at the source of the Mississippi river, and he had found a Bible verse which said if any two of the Lord’s disciples were agreed about something they wanted to pray for, they could pray for it, and the heavenly Father would do it.

Thinking that, I turned around to Poetry who, as you know, was running the motor, and looked at him, and he looked at me. I pointed to my shirt pocket, which had its flap buttoned to keep my New Testament from falling out. His eyes looked where my finger was pointing, and the expression on his mischievous happy-looking face changed to a very sober one. He kinda squinted his eyes like a boy does when he’s thinking about something or somebody some place else. He lifted his free hand (the other being on the rubber grip of the motor’s handle) and, with his forefinger, pointed to his own shirt pocket. We just looked into each other’s eyes a minute, and for some reason I felt fine inside.

Then I swung my eyes around over the lake and in the direction of where the sun was going to set after awhile, and was glad I was alive--for the same reason Little Jim is glad he is alive.

In a little while, we’d be to shore. There was only one thing about a fishing trip I didn’t like and that was having to help clean the fish afterward, but boy oh boy, when you start sinking your teeth into the nice snow-white fish steaks, which restaurants’ menus call _fillet_, you don’t mind having had to clean them at all. Yum, yum, crunch, crunch ... boy oh boy! I certainly was hungry, as our boat cut a wide circle and swung up beside the dock in front of our big brown tents. I could see that a fire was already started in the Indian kitchen we’d made and that meant that just the minute we had our fish cleaned Barry’d have them sizzling in the skillet for us.