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.