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

My motor made a couple of smoky coughs right that minute and stopped, which was maybe a good thing on account of we might have broken the line, if it hadn’t.

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

It only took us a few jiffies to read what was in the bottle, because we didn’t even have to take out the cork, on account of 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 and they were:

“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 mornings at eleven and Sunday nights at 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 o’clock.”

Well, our boat was maybe only a few yards from where we’d first seen the bottle floating, which, as I told you, was not far from the shore, just straight out from the old Indian cemetery, so we took the oars which every motor boat 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, whose mother, as you maybe know, believes it’s bad luck if a black cat crosses your path or if you break a mirror or walk under a ladder, and also that it is good luck if you find a horseshoe, 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-voiced 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 like he had heard a ghost, while 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 quick sharp pull on the starter knob and away we all went again, racing up the shore toward the Narrows where we knew the river flowed from this lake into the one our camp site 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 like we’d done once before when we were riding through the Narrows. The Narrows was 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 something to all of us then, and it was, “You guys remember yesterday afternoon when it rained and we were in Old John’s cabin and found that little portable 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 onto his stick and the other onto the side of the boat and with a tickled grin on his face, piped up and said, “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, like what Dragonfly had said had been like a pin sticking him somewhere, and all of a sudden I remembered that Circus’s dad had once been a drunkard himself. Even while we were racing along with the oak and white birch and Balm of Gilead and pine trees whizzing past, and our boat cutting a fierce fast V through the water, I was remembering one summer night back at Sugar Creek when there had been a big tent filled with people and a big choir and an evangelist preaching, and nearly all of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang had been saved; and when Circus himself had walked down the grassy aisle to the front to confess the Saviour, all of a sudden Old Dan Browne, Circus’s drinking daddy, who had been outside of the tent listening, had come swishing in and running down the aisle with tears in his eyes and voice, crying out loud, “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; and from then on he was a good worker and his family had had enough to eat.

Circus must have been thinking the same thing, ’cause when Dragonfly said that about Old 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 like he was thinking hard. I also noticed that his fists were doubled up terribly tight, and remembered that he hated whiskey worse than anything else in the world, on account of 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 would we tell him?” I thought—that swell little red-haired, grandest little newest member of our gang, who was Old Hook-nose’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 pop locked up in the old icehouse, and he was probably what police called an accomplice of the actual kidnapper we’d caught last week.

I was terribly disappointed at what Big Jim decided to do as soon as we’d told him, which we did, all by himself, so Tom wouldn’t hear it and 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.

Big Jim had heard our motor and come out to the end of the long dock where the mailbox was, to meet us, wondering maybe who on earth we were at first, coming in with a highpowered motor and a different boat. 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, and Tom was watching him build a utility boat in his work shop, so we had a chance to tell Big Jim the whole exciting story without Little Tom Till hearing it.

“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 Big Jim didn’t know a thing about our having dug in the old icehouse for the money and had found it sewed up inside a lot of fish’s stomachs. So, quick we told him, and he frowned at first, then his bright mind started to work and he just took charge of things in a jiffy.

“This is a job for the police,” Big Jim told us. “You boys’ve 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. The nearest telephone being farther on 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 and me standing there by the boathouse to wait till they came back from phoning the police.

I looked into Poetry’s bluish eyes and he into mine—we both feeling 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, and Little Tom Till looked up from what he’d been doing, which was tucking the stem of an oxeye daisy through the button hole of his shirt—that little guy always liking to wear a wild flower of some kind,—and asked, “Watch who come out of an icehouse—what icehouse?”

And Dragonfly, being 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, for 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 bluish eyes and both fists double up quick, and I knew he was both sad and mad. He looked like he knew Dragonfly meant his daddy, on account of he had called him “Old hook-nose John—,” but the part about coming out of an icehouse with his hairy arms up in the air, puzzled him. I saw him swallow hard like there was a lump in his throat, and he said, “You mean my daddy’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 when I thought about him, but somehow right that second, it sort of seemed like we ought to get a more respectable, better name for him.

I knew we had to tell Tom the truth, he having heard Dragonfly say that, but I was mad at Dragonfly for a minute, so I said, “Listen you, Dragonfly Gilbert (which is his last name), 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 some time, 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 like he was expecting to see the police coming. Also he looked out toward the lake like he was listening for the motor of Santa and Big Jim coming back.

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

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

He suddenly broke off what he was saying, got a tearful expression on his freckled face, and then because maybe 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, kinda stumbling along though like he had a lot of tears in his eyes that were blinding him and he couldn’t see where he was going.