  I CERTAINLY didn’t dream that things were going to turn out the way they did when that mad boat came racing toward us and whammed itself into our dock and up onto the shore and turned part way over on its side, and when I heard a voice calling from somewhere, “HELP ... HELP ... HELP!” The first thing I thought of was that somebody, I didn’t know who, was out there somewhere drowning and had to have help right away quick. Santa’s house was several hundred yards up the shore and any yelling I or any of us could have done for Big Jim and Circus to come and help us, couldn’t have been heard by them, and by the time any of us could have run up there and waked them up, it would maybe be too late to save whoever’s life needed to be saved. Quick as anything, I said to Poetry, “We’ve got to do something or maybe somebody will drown out there!” But say, I didn’t have to tell Poetry to step on the gas to get going. He was the fastest acting barrel-shaped boy you ever saw. In less time than it takes me to write it for you, Poetry had quick picked up two oars that were lying there and tossed them into a row boat that was on the opposite side of the dock, and a jiffy later was unwinding the anchor rope from around the dock post. Then he yelled to me, “Hurry up and get in quick, and get the oars into the oarlocks, and let’s row out quick and save him.” We got the boat’s prow headed into the waves, which is what you have to do when you row on a lake—keep the prow headed toward the oncoming waves, or you’ll maybe get your boat filled with water. Right that minute I heard another yell coming from the direction of the tents, and it was Dragonfly racing toward us in flapping pajamas wanting to know what on earth was going on and why. 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. If our own boat should upset or something, and we were tossed out into the water, we could swim to our cushions and by keeping our bodies down under the water and holding onto the cushions for dear life, we could manage to keep our faces above water, and the cushions would hold us up. Poetry and I sat in the middle seat, side by side, with Poetry sitting nearer the center than I so our boat would Our oars made a squeaking noise in the locks and the blades made a little splashing sound in the water, and also the waves plopping against the prow of the boat, made it hard for us to hear the call for help, and also hard to tell just which direction to go, but we kept on rowing hard, and I could see the shore getting farther and farther away. For a jiffy I was glad that my parents had taught me how to work on the farm and that I had muscles that sometimes felt as strong as the muscles of the man in a poem Poetry is always quoting, the Village Blacksmith, which goes, “Under the spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands, The smith—a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands, And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.” But even though my arm muscles felt that strong, my knees felt sort of weak as I realized that a man’s life was depending on us.... We kept on rowing as hard and as fast as we could, grunting and sweating and hoping, and also doing what any boy with good sense, or even without it, would do at a time like that—we were praying as hard as anything, too. Anyway I was, and I was asking God to please help us get there quick—for when a boy is in the middle of such a dangerous excitement as I was in, he will ask God to help him even though he hasn’t been a very good boy and isn’t sure God will have anything to do with him. 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 guess maybe I didn’t use any words with my prayer, though, but only some worried thoughts, which I sort of shot up to heaven as quick as I could like I shoot arrows with my bow when I’m back home around Sugar Creek. In fact, for a jiffy it seemed like I was sort of shooting prayer-arrows up to God, and that on the end of each one, instead of a little feather, I had written a note on a strip of paper, and on each note it said, “Please, God—Heavenly Father, Old John Till’s soul is lost, and if he drowns without being saved, it’ll be terrible. Help us get to him quick.” Then Poetry interrupted my thoughts saying, “Stop a minute—LISTEN!” I let my oar rest a fourth of a jiffy and right away the waves made our boat swerve a little, like it would swing around if we didn’t keep on rowing, but I heard a voice not more than fifty feet farther on, and looking quick, I saw something dark in the water, struggling, and the voice I tell you we hurried and I kept on sending up arrows—grunting and pulling and wishing. Then without knowing I was going to say it, I said, “O please don’t let him drown. ’Cause Poetry and I have got a secret about one of Your Bible verses, that says if two of us agree on something we ask for, You will answer us.” It just seemed like maybe John Till had to be saved, on account of it seemed like that promise in the Bible was especially about him. Then without knowing I was going to say it aloud, I said, “And here comes another arrow with the same thing written on it,” and Poetry beside me said, “What arrow? What are you talking about?” I explained it to him, while we rowed harder, and even though he didn’t say much, I knew he was doing the same thing I was—like my parents had taught me to, when I was little, and which I still liked to do, even though my folks sometimes might wonder if I ever did or not, on account of I was sometimes too mischievous. Also sometimes I wasn’t always what they called a “good boy,” which is an expression they use when they mean I ought to behave myself. In another jiffy, we were close to John Till, and I noticed it was really him, and he didn’t have any life preserver pillow. He had probably been drunk and had just tumbled out of his boat while it was racing terribly fast, and had been swimming ever since. I quick grabbed up a cushion in front of my feet and with a wide sweep of my arm tossed it out toward him. My Then he quit trying to swim and just lay back on his back, and held onto the cushion and let himself float, with only his face above water with the cushion in front of his chin, which is the way to float, if you ever have to hold onto a life-preserver cushion. In another jiffy we had our boat there, and Old John was crying and gasping and saying, “Thank God—Oh thank you, boys, thank you!” How to get him into the boat was the question, though, for the minute he would try to get in, his heavy weight might tip us over. 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 tell you it’s a wonderful feeling when you’ve done something like that. You’re glad not only ’cause you helped do it, but if you believe what Poetry and I believed, you feel But say, I’ll have to wind up this story quicker than anything, for if it gets very much longer the people who make it into a book for you will want me to cut off the end of it so it won’t make too many pages. Anyway that is the last part of the last story that happened to us on our camping trip, and it was the best vacation we’d had in our whole lives, although I suppose there will be a few more camping adventures before the gang grows up, and if there are and if anything especially interesting happens, I’ll see how quick I can write it for you. 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?” I’d seen possums act like that back home—be terribly lively until they were caught, and then they would do what is called “play possum”—just roll over on their sides and curl up into a half circle and shut their eyes and act dead until we or the dogs went away a few yards and then they would come to quick life, scramble to their ridiculous looking hands-like feet and run possum-ety sizzle to a tree and climb up it or to a hole in the ground and dive into it. “I don’t know,” I said to Poetry, “but he sounded like he meant what he said when he said what he said back there.” Well, it turned out that I was right. That whiskey bottle we’d seen in the bottom of his boat hadn’t had whiskey in it at all, but was one Little Jim had put a gospel tract in, and Old John had found it and read it, and the Lord Himself had used it to do what our Sugar Creek minister calls, “convict him of his sins.” On top of that, he had also stopped to read the message in the other whiskey bottle which had been used as a marker for a good crappie-fishing place out in front of the Indian cemetery. Also he had been listening on his portable radio to the radio program of the Church of the Cross. So, after he had accidentally tumbled out of the boat tonight, he’d gotten half scared to death, and all the verses of the Bible and the sermons he had read and listened to, came splashing into his mind; and without stopping to think that he didn’t even believe in God, he had prayed to Him to not only save his body from drowning, but to save his soul from being lost. When we’d rescued him, he had had the other $5,000 of the ransom money in his trousers pocket. It was pretty wet, but as good as gold. And—do you know what?—he told us he hadn’t been helping the real kidnapper at all, but had only wanted to get the $1,000 reward! “And now, boys,” John’s gruff, trembling voice said, as we listened to him explain things, “you’ll have to start praying for Bob—we had a quarrel tonight, and he’s gone away somewhere.” John looked down at his red-haired, freckled-faced, trembling-voiced boy, and said, “I don’t know. I—he thought we ought to keep the $5,000 instead of turning it in. I—I’m afraid I was too hard on him, maybe. But when we couldn’t agree about this $5,000, I took the boat and left him there at the Indian cemetery.” We asked Old John different questions, one of them being, “How’d you know where the ransom money was?” and he said, “I studied the newspapers and the pictures, and found the kidnapper’s map in the grave-house of an old Indian chief. I made two copies in invisible ink—one for myself and the other for Bob, but I lost mine somewhere—and you boys found it.” “But why, if you only wanted the $1,000 reward, did you bury the money in the fish in the icehouse?” we asked him. “I didn’t,” he said, just as Little Tom Till shoved a stick into the fire and about a thousand yellow sparks shot in different directions of up toward the sky. “Old Brains Powers, the kidnapper, buried it there. I’d been digging it up.... I had five thousand dollars already dug up, and was coming back to get the rest of it, but you boys beat me to it. Then when I went into the icehouse, you slammed the door on me and barred it, and I would have stayed there until the police Poetry spoke up and said, with a doubt in his voice, “If you were only after the money so you could get the reward for finding it, why did you run away?” “I was afraid the police wouldn’t believe my story.” Well, there is the whole mystery untangled for you, and a wonderful camping trip all over for another year.... Boy oh boy! I hope I get to go again next year—if not to the same place, then up to Canada or somewhere where there will be even more exciting adventures than there were this year. But before that happens there’ll be a whole year full of different things that will happen back at home at Sugar Creek. I just know that something terribly interesting will happen to us before another summer rolls around. In fact, there was a letter from my folks in our mail box at the dock the very day we left camp, saying, “We’ll be looking for you, Bill—and do we ever have interesting news for you! Don’t try to guess what it is—’cause you can’t.” And—well, all the way home in our station wagon, I did just what my parents told me not to—I kept trying to guess what the interesting news would be.... THE END The GANG’S thrilling experiences in the North Woods come to an exciting climax in NORTH WOODS MANHUNT. Two of the boys become first-rate sleuths and do a night solution to the entire mystery. This is the fourth book in the new Sugar Creek Gang Series by Paul Hutchens, the happy friend of all Young America. Be sure to read all the books in the SCRIPTURE PRESS series:
Published and Distributed Exclusively by SCRIPTURE PRESS Transcriber’s Note: The Contents has been added by the transcriber. Punctuation has been standardised. Variations in hyphenation have been retained as they appear in the original publication. Changes have been made as follows:
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