WELL, when you see one of your best friends running and stumbling along like that, and know there are tears in his eyes and that he has a great big heavy ache in his heart, you sort of get tears in your eyes yourself. All in a quick flash while his red hair was bobbing down that weed-grown path toward camp, I was remembering that the first time I’d ever seen him was when he and his bad big brother Bob belonged to a bunch of barbarian town boys that had come out in the country one afternoon and had been eating up all the strawberries that grew on Strawberry Hill. Our gang had happened onto them while they were doing it, and for some reason we’d gotten into a fierce fist fight. Tom’s hard-knuckled fist had whammed me on the nose; and for a dozen fierce fist-flying minutes he and I had been enemies.

But a lot of things had happened after that. Tom and I had made up and he was now one of the best friends I had. The whole gang liked him a lot, and we didn’t hold it against him that his big brother Bob was what people called a “juvenile delinquent,” and his daddy was a beer- and whiskey-drinking infidel that acted like he hated God and the church and also was too lazy to work for a living.

So when I saw Tom go stumbling away like that, I got a big lump in my throat, and started off after him, not too fast though, ’cause I didn’t think he wanted anybody to follow him.

When I got to camp, I heard Tom inside our director’s tent moving around doing something I couldn’t guess what. It seemed like I was sort of spying on him, and I hated to make him feel worse by looking at his tears, if he was still crying, so I slipped into the other tent and peeped through the nearly closed flaps, and then all of a sudden I saw Tom thrust open the flap of his tent real quick and dive out, and around it, and start on the run up the lake in the other direction, carrying his smallish oldish looking brown suitcase, and I wondered, “What on earth!”

I was so surprised for a minute that I couldn’t even move, and it wasn’t until after Tom disappeared on the path running as fast as he could with that suitcase flopping along beside him that I realized he was probably so ashamed he was going to try to run away and go back home.

I came to quick life, dived out of my tent, and started after him, yelling, “Hey! Tom! Wait for me. I want to tell you something.”

I didn’t know what I wanted to tell him, but if he would only wait till I got there I could probably think of something. I certainly didn’t want him to go home.

Behind me I could hear the sound of Santa’s motor on the lake, and—well, I darted after Tom Till as fast as my excited legs could carry me.

I was a little longer legged than Tom, and caught up with him in only a short run and grabbed him, and said, “You’re a swell guy, Tom. The whole gang likes you.”

He dropped his suitcase, pulled loose, and darted around behind the big bole of a Norway pine tree, where he stopped. I could see part of him, and could tell by the way one of his elbows was moving that he was wiping tears out of his eyes, maybe with the back of his hand.

I tried to coax him to go back to camp with me, but he wouldn’t. “Everybody hates me,” he sobbed, but since he knew I really liked him, I having proved it to him at different times before, he slumped down in the grass and let himself sort of sob and talk at the same time, and also sniffle. He wasn’t looking at me but straight ahead in the direction of a little cluster of bright yellow mustard flowers like the kind that grow along the edge of our garden back at Sugar Creek if you let them—they being very pretty but are pests, and if you give them a chance they will spread in a few years all over a field or fence row.

Seeing those pretty mustard flowers and knowing that Tom was crying on account of his pop, and also on account of his mother, made me think of my own parents and how when I catch a cold, my brown-haired mom makes a mustard plaster and puts it on my chest.

“You’re a swell guy,” I said to Tom, and felt awful warm inside my heart toward him and wished he was my brother and that I could do something to make him happy.

Tom seemed to remember then that he had a handkerchief in his pocket. He pulled it out and blew his freckled nose and then he just sort of straightened up quick like he’d thought of something important. “Where IS the icehouse?” he asked me, and scrambled to his feet.

I wondered what he had on his mind, on account of his face looked like he’d made up his mind to do something terribly important which he was afraid to do but was going to do anyway. But he wouldn’t tell me until I told him I wouldn’t tell him where the icehouse was if he didn’t tell me, and so he told me, and would you believe it? This is what he said. “I want to get there before the cops do and talk to him about something. I want to tell him something.”

I looked at his tearful eyes and his sniffling nose and his freckled face and liked him even better than ever. I thought I ought to ask Big Jim what he thought, he having a lot of bright ideas about things like that.

Right away we found Big Jim who had just come back with Santa from phoning the police, and I was surprised when he said, “Nothing doing. It’s up to the police now.”

But Tom got a stubborn expression on his face and said, “I’ve GOT to talk to him. You’ve GOT to take me there, ’cause after the cops get him I won’t have any chance.”

We were standing down on the beach at the time. Tom’s bare toes were digging themselves into the sand, and he was still sniffling a little and swallowing. “I want to ask him to give up when the police come for him,” he said.

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

“Is that your dad’s motor?” Big Jim asked Tom Till, pointing toward it, and 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 and knew it was the mail boat coming, which it was; and besides there being a letter for most of the rest of us, there was one in Little Tom Till’s mother’s handwriting which was addressed to him.

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

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

“All right, Gang,” Big Jim said to us 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 lake-front 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.”

And so Big Jim, Little Tom Till, Little Jim and Poetry and I got into the big boat, and I let Big Jim run the motor on account of he was going to, anyway. First, we checked to see if we had enough gas, and also we tossed in enough life-preserver pillows for each of us, Little Jim putting on his lifesaver vest just to be still safer, and in a few jiffies we were off, Big Jim running 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 almost flew up the lake, and through the Narrows, swishing under the bridge and into the other lake in only what seemed like a few minutes.

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

I couldn’t hear the boards of the bridge or the car’s motor, on account of our own motor was making so much noise. It felt good though to be working with the police, and it also felt good to feel that there was really a lot of big strong men in our country who were interested in doing what Pop calls “protecting society from wicked men”—only with Little Tom there in the boat beside me, being such a swell little guy, it seemed too bad to think of his daddy as a real criminal, but he was anyway! Even while we raced up that 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 relatives such as a brother or a sister or maybe a wife or a boy or girl in his family who felt like Little Tom was feeling right that minute, which was awfully saddish, and for some reason it seemed that maybe it was also a big crime to hurt people’s hearts like 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, and was thinking, “What if John Till was my daddy, and I was on my way to an old icehouse where he was locked up, to give him a letter from my swell 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’ done to him—which is being electrocuted or hung.” My mind even imagined I could see my swell daddy hanging by his neck on a gallows like I’d seen pictures of, in a newspaper. Then I stopped thinking that, ’cause it was so ridiculous, on account of my pop was always reading the Bible and was kind to Mom and my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, and to everybody, and worked hard and went to church every Sunday; and anybody couldn’t be that kind of a daddy and be a criminal at the same time.

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

Poetry’s bright mind thought of a way and it was, “We’ll make a ladder out of ourselves and push Tom up, so he can poke the letter through the crack between the logs,” which 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 only 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 shore, we scrambled out, and right away were sneaking up close to the icehouse.

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

“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!