CIRCUS hadn’t any more than slammed that icehouse door shut and dropped the heavy bar into place, locking Old Hook-nose in than there was a loud pounding on the door and a yelling that sounded like there was a madman inside.

What on earth to do next was the question. We were an awful long way from camp, and we five kinda-smallish boys certainly weren’t big enough to capture him ourselves. Besides yesterday when we’d first seen him, he’d had a big hunting knife and who knows but he might have a gun too. Anybody as fierce and as mad as John Till maybe was right that minute—well, you couldn’t tell what he might do, if he got a chance.

Circus was coming in our direction now as fast as he could, and when a few jiffies later he came puffing up to us, he exclaimed, “Come on, Gang. Let’s run back to camp and get help.”

And right that minute I got a bright idea of my own. In fact it had been swishing around in my mind ever since I’d seen Circus wham that door shut, so I said, “Come on, Gang. Follow me and we’ll get help in a hurry.”

I grabbed up the gunny sack which had the rest of the stuffed fish in it and the packets of the ransom money, and it felt as light as a feather as I started on a fast dash right straight toward the icehouse again. “Hey, where are you going?” Poetry hissed and yelled to me at the same time.

“Back to camp,” I said. “Come on!”

“Camp’s in this other direction,” Dragonfly called after me.

“Do as I say,” I yelled back over my shoulder, and kept on running like a deer straight for the icehouse.

It felt good to realize that all the gang was coming swishing along after me, that I was actually the leader—for awhile anyway. I had what I thought was a swell idea—which my pop told me once is what happens to a person when he becomes a leader—first he gets an idea about something which he thinks is wonderful, and that ought to be done, and right away he starts getting a lot of people to help him do it.

Here’s what I’d planned to do:

You see, while Circus was slamming that door and shutting Old Hook-nose inside, and I was watching him with my binoculars, I’d seen John’s white boat which was beached there at the lake and had noticed that the outboard motor, which was tilted forward in the stern, had a beautiful black shroud, and was the same kind our camp director had, and which I’d been learning how to run during the past week. It had a powerful seven-horsepower motor and could go terribly fast on a lake. If there was anything I’d rather do than anything else, it was to sit in the stern of a boat, with one hand on the rubber grip of the steering handle, and, facing the prow, go roaring out across the water with fast wind blowing into my freckled face and also feeling the shoreline flash past very fast.

I also knew that the water in many of the big blue-watered lakes up here in the North was kept fresh because the Mississippi river flowed through them, and also flowed from one lake to another. I’d studied the map of the territory and knew that if we could use that boat and motor, we could go roaring up the lake terribly fast, pass—in three or four minutes—the old Indian cemetery, and a little later, come to a place where the Mississippi flowed out of this lake into a long narrow channel and into the other very large lake on which we had our tents pitched. Once we got into that other lake we’d race up the shore, and get back to camp in less than half the time it would take us to hike through the woods, carrying a big heavy sack of fish.

We could leave John Till locked up in the icehouse while we were gone, and hurry back with Big Jim and maybe some other help, and before long we’d have John Till really captured. After that, we’d tell the police what we’d done and then we could claim the reward for finding the thousands and thousands of dollars which the little Ostberg girl’s daddy had paid to the kidnapper.

In a jiffy almost, I was hurrying past the icehouse with my gunny sack of fish. I stopped for a split-jiffy to listen, but everything was pretty quiet. I noticed that the heavy door was really strong and I didn’t see any way John Till could get out. There also was only one place where he could even see out and that was through a crack on the side next to the lake.

In a jiffy all of us were in the boat, and had shoved off and rowed out to deep enough water to make it safe to start the motor without its propeller striking on the bottom.

I was pretty nervous, and also scared and brave at the same time. It wasn’t our boat or motor, but we weren’t stealing it, but were amateur detectives using the criminal’s boat to help get some help to help capture him. It was a terribly pretty sunshiny day, with only a few scattered white clouds in the sky. In another minute we’d be gone. Poetry was in the middle, on a seat by himself, Dragonfly and Little Jim in one right in front of me, and Circus had a narrow seat up in the prow.

“I don’t see why you don’t let me run it,” Poetry complained. “After all, I taught you how to run it in the first place.”

“SH!” I said, “can’t you co-operate?” which is a word my pop sometimes uses back at Sugar Creek when he wants me to obey him. “You keep your eye on the gunny sack there between your feet.”

I quick opened the gasoline shut-off valve as far as it would turn, being sure first that the air vent on the tank was open, shoved the speed control lever over to where it said “Start,” primed the motor, and gave the starter knob a very fast sharp pull, and in a jiffy that powerful motor roared itself to life and our boat went whizzing up the lake. I made a couple of quick other adjustments like I knew how to do, and away we went, the wind blowing hard in our faces or against our backs, depending on which direction we were facing.

Right that second Circus yelled over the tops of the other kids’ heads to me, and said, “Hey, Bill. He’s yelling and screaming for us to stop.”

“Let him yell,” I said. “We’ll give him something to yell about a little later.” I shoved the speed control lever as far to the right as it would go, and our boat really shot forward, Circus’s prow raised itself up part way out of the water and we went flying up the shore at a terrific rate of speed.

It had been a wonderful vacation for all of us, I thought, and yet we still had a half-dozen days before we would get into the station wagon and drive the long day and a half back to Sugar Creek. We’d had a lot of fun fishing and swimming and solving mysteries, such as finding the kidnapped little girl, capturing the kidnapper, and digging up the ransom money, a lot of which was right there in the boat with us in the stomachs of the fish we had in the gunny sack. The rest of the money was probably all sewed in the other fish which John Till had with him right that minute while he was locked up in that icehouse jail. Of course we still had to actually capture him.

Thinking that, I said to Poetry as he sat grinning in front of me—one of his fat hands holding onto the gunwale on one side and the other on the other—, “I’ll bet Big Jim’ll want to call the police and let them capture John.”

Not a one of us liked the idea very well, and we all said so, although we’d all had enough dangerous experiences for one vacation.

It was Little Jim’s newest hobby which helped make this last story of our northern camping trip one we’d never forget as long as we lived.

This is the way his hobby got mixed up with our mystery. Our boat had just rounded a bend and was about to swish past the old Indian cemetery where we’d had so many exciting experiences, and as you maybe know, where we’d caught the kidnapper himself one spooky night, when all of a sudden Little Jim yelled out to us, “Hey, Gang, there’s a whiskey bottle floating out there in the water. Let’s stop and get it.”

He pointed toward the shore where the cemetery was, and sure enough, there in the water was what looked like an upside-down whiskey bottle on the surface of the water.

“We don’t have time to stop,” I yelled to Little Jim, and didn’t even bother to throttle the motor even a little bit. But say, when I saw that little guy’s happy face suddenly get a sad expression on it and saw him kinda drop his head, like a friendly little dog does when you scold it, I felt sorry for him, and decided that maybe seventeen seconds lost time wouldn’t make any difference. So I shoved the speed control lever of the motor back to “Slow,” and shoved the steering handle around so we’d cut a wide circle, and in a jiffy we were putt-putting slowly back toward the floating bottle.

You see, all of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang were almost as interested in Little Jim’s new hobby as he was. For about a week he’d been getting all the old empty whiskey bottles he could find, and he—being an honest-to-goodness Christian boy who hated whiskey on account of it was a terrible enemy of mankind and made so many people in the world so sad and caused so much murder and stuff—had been putting what is called “a gospel tract” in them and a little note which he scribbled in his own handwriting. A gospel tract, just in case you might never have heard what one is, is a little folder with a printed message on it telling whoever reads it, something important out of the Bible, especially how to be saved and become a Christian. The kinda awkward scribble which Little Jim always tucked into each bottle along with the tract, always said the same thing, which was: “Whoever finds this, please believe that God loves you, and if you’re not saved, remember Jesus died on the cross for you, and hurry up and pray to Him and thank Him for doing it, and give your heart to Him quick. If you don’t know how to do it, send me your name and address and I’ll send you a free book telling you how.” Then Little Jim would sign his name which was Jim Foote, and he also gave his Sugar Creek address.

Then he’d cork up the bottle good and tight and toss it out into the lake for somebody to find and read. We’d all been having fun helping him, and we could hardly wait till we got back home to Sugar Creek to see if Little Jim had any mail from anybody who had found one of his notes.

You see, Little Jim had his mind made up that some time maybe 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. He being that kind of a swell little guy and also being one of my best friends, I had decided I wasn’t going to wait till I was any grown-upper than I was, before doing it, too.

In a jiffy 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!”

And sure enough, it had. I could see there was a piece of heavy fishing line, tied around the bottle’s neck, and that something was fastened to the other end away down in the water somewhere.