WELL you aren’t supposed to yell like a lot of wild Indians on a warpath when you start catching a lot of fish, on account of you might scare the fish away; so almost right away we all shushed each other, and only made a noise when we caught a fish, which was just about as fast as we could bait our hooks and get our lines into the water again.

We quick anchored right close to where the balloon was, and the other boatful of the rest of the gang came rowing over as quietly as they could, and anchored close by.

Talk about excitement. We’d never had so much fishing fun in our whole lives as we were having right that minute. And then, just like Sugar Creek school getting out and the kids tumbling out the door and all going away from the red brick schoolhouse, our school of walleyes moved on and we stopped getting bites. I knew something was going to happen the minute I saw the yellowish balloon start moving fast out toward deeper water.

“Hey, look!” Dragonfly, who saw it first, said. “Wally acts like he’s scared. Look at him go!”

We looked, and sure enough the balloon was bobbing up and down, and even diving clear under. Then it plunked clear under for a long jiffy before bouncing back up and shooting almost a foot into the air, then landed with a kersmack on the water again. Nobody had had any bites for awhile before that, but we had enough fish for one day, and so Big Jim said, “Let’s go back to camp and get supper,” which was a good idea. We would come back tomorrow.

“What’ll we do with Wally?” Poetry said.

“He’s been a swell friend,” Dragonfly said. “He ought to have some kind of appreciation.”

Then Little Jim piped up good and loud and said, “Let’s give him his liberty!”

Well, we had enough larger fish, and Wally really deserved some kind of a reward for helping us catch so many fish to take home to Sugar Creek, so we pulled anchor and rowed out toward where Wally was making the balloon fish bob around in such a lively style. As soon as the boat had eased along side, I, who was closest to it, reached down my hand, caught hold of the balloon, and started to haul Wally in toward the boat, but right away my line went tight like it was fastened onto a log or snag down on the bottom of the lake. I gave a tug, but not too hard ’cause I didn’t want the line to scale off any scales from Wally’s tail, it being as hard on a fish to lose some of its scales as on a barefoot boy to stump his toe and knock the skin off.

“He’s tangled up on something,” I said, and gave another small pull and then—WHAM! There was a fierce wild lunge down there somewhere, and I felt a scared feeling racing up and down my spine. I knew Wally didn’t have that much strength. Say, it felt as big as an excited pig running in our barnyard back at Sugar Creek—or a dog or something. I had hold of the line as well as the balloon, and the line was cutting into my hands. I couldn’t think straight, but didn’t dare let loose.

Snow-in-the-face, for the very first time, got excited and yelled something to Eagle Eye in the Indian language, and then to us in English, which was, “SOME GREAT BIG FISH HAS SWALLOWED HIM....”—which made sense.

I held on, in spite of the line’s hurting my hand a little, and then, out there about ten feet, something with a big long ugly snout and with fierce eyes shot up through the waves and almost two feet in the air, and dive-splashed back in again.

There was a fierce, mad boiling of the surface like a bomb had exploded down there in the water somewhere. I was trembling inside like any fisherman trembles when a fierce fast-fighting fish gets away after it’s been hooked—only this one hadn’t been hooked with a real hook. He had probably come swimming along down there under the water, looking for an early supper, like a robin hops around in our lawn at Sugar Creek looking for night crawlers, and, seeing Wally swimming lazily around, had decided to eat him, which is what some big fish do to little other fish when they’re hungry.

He had probably slowly nosed his fierce ugly long snout up to Wally, and then all of a sudden made a savage rush at him with his mouth open, and had swallowed him whole, and started to swim away with him. That had scared all the other fish, which was why we’d all stopped getting bites at the same time. Anyway, right after that fierce old fighting fish lunged up out of the water and down in again, he made a dive straight for our boat, shot under it, and pulled so hard that I had to hold on for dear life. If I’d had a long line on a fishing rod with a reel on it, I could have let the reel spin, and like fishermen do when they have a wild walleye or an enormous northern pike on their lines, I could have “played” him until he was tired out, then hauled him in, but with my line only a dozen or more feet long, I was pretty sure I didn’t have a chance in the world to land him,—and the next thing I knew I found out I was right. In a second it seemed, after he dived under our boat, I felt my line go sickeningly slack, and I knew I’d lost him. I couldn’t tell though whether he’d broken my line, or whether he’d swallowed backwards and Wally was free again.

While the gang was groaning with disappointment, ’cause they’d seen what had happened, and while I was pulling in the lifeless line to see what was on the other end, I had a sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach like a fisherman gets when he loses a big fish.

In another jiffy I was holding up the end of the line for us to look at. Dragonfly, seeing it, said, “Poetry’s slip-knot slipped.”

We would have been a terribly sad gang if we hadn’t already caught a lot of middle-sized walleyes.

Circus called to us from the other boat and said, “We could have put a lot of kidnapper’s ransom money in a fish that big, if we’d caught him.”

“There wouldn’t have been much room left with Wally already inside of him,” Poetry said. For some reason I was looking at Little Jim when Poetry said that and I noticed a sad expression come on his smallish mouse-like face, and I thought it looked like he had a couple of tears in his eyes.

It had been a wonderful fishing trip and we couldn’t afford to cry over a lost northern pike, which is what we all decided the big fish was. So after the other boat had pulled anchor, we started our motors, steered around the island and toward camp, with our caught fish lying in the bottom of the boat.

Little Jim was sitting in the seat in front of me, facing me as we roared along with Poetry running the motor. Different ones of us were talking and yelling to each other about all the different things that had happened,—all except Little Jim who, I noticed, was extra quiet and his eyes still had that saddish look in them.

Pretty soon I leaned over and half whispered to him, “’Smatter?” and he swallowed, then said, “Nothing.”

“There is too,” I said, just as he turned his head, gave it a quick shake, and when he looked back in my direction the tears that’d been in his eyes a second before, were gone, which is the way Little Jim gets tears out of his eyes—he just turns his head away, jerks it real quick, and that shakes the tears out.

Dragonfly, who knew Little Jim had that cute little way of getting tears out without using a handkerchief, so nobody would know he had had tears in the first place, saw Little Jim do that and said to him from behind me, “Don’t you know tears are salty? Fresh water fish that live in lakes don’t like salt water.” “That’s not funny,” I said to Dragonfly over my shoulder, and was mad at him for not having more respect for Little Jim’s hurt heart. I knew Little Jim’s heart was hurt, when he said to me, “That wasn’t much of a reward for Wally, after all he did for us.”

Then just like it sometimes happens to my mother back at Sugar Creek, when she says something that has a sad thought mixed up with it, Little Jim’s eyes got a couple of new tears in them, which he quickly shook out into the lake, and then he said, as he reached his smallish cute hands toward me, “Let me hold the balloon fish a while.”

I pushed the yellowish rubber balloon toward him, and the way he took it, made me think of the way my little two-year-old baby sister, Charlotte Ann, would reach out her chubby little hands for it when I got home and showed it to her.

For a minute, while our two boats plowed along through the water, which, with the sunlight shining on the moving waves, looked like a great big lakeful of live silver, my thoughts took a hop, skip and a jump out across the lake to the shore, leaped over the Chippewa forest, and high up over a lot of other lakes, like I was Paul Bunyan himself; and all of a sudden I landed right inside our kitchen at Sugar Creek, where I knew I’d be in just a few days. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mom standing by our kitchen stove near the east window which has a green ivy vine trailing across the top of the outside of it. I could smell the smell of raw-fried potatoes frying, and see the steam puffing up from the hooked spout of our kinda oldish teakettle. If, when I came in, I accidently carried in a little mud on my shoes or bare feet, Mom would say like she nearly always does, “Would you like to get the broom, Bill, and sweep out that mud which, a little while ago, came walking in on two feet?” I would know whose two feet she meant, and grin, and right away I’d step to the place where we kept our broom, which is behind the east kitchen door which also has our roller towel rack on it, and I wouldn’t any more than get started with the dust pan and broom when Mom would say, “Be careful not to sweep hard, or we’ll have dust in our fried potatoes.”

While I was doing that, all of a sudden, I’d get tangled up and, turning around, I’d see my swell little sister Charlotte Ann, with her tiny toy broom, sweeping it around awkwardly like girls do when they’re just learning how to sweep, which is what Charlotte Ann does at our house. Now that she’s learned to walk, she tries to do everything any of the rest of us do. She follows Mom around sweeping when Mom does, washing her hands when Mom does, and when my grayish-brown-haired mom or my reddish-brown-mustached pop sits down to read a book or a magazine she actually gets a book or a magazine and tries to read, nearly always getting the magazine upside down when she does it. In fact, she wants to do everything we do while we are doing it, and sometimes when Mom is getting supper and Charlotte Ann can’t see high enough to see what Mom is doing, she gets cross and whines and fusses and pulls at Mom’s dress or apron and makes a nuisance out of herself, only she doesn’t know she’s a nuisance but maybe thinks Mom is making a nuisance of herself, instead, for not letting her help get supper. Yes sir, I was getting homesick for my folks, and could hardly wait till I got home next week to tell all the exciting adventures we’d had. Also, it’d be fun to watch the mail every day to see if maybe Little Jim would get any letters from anybody who would find his gospel messages which he’d been tossing out into the lake in whiskey bottles.

Thinking that, I remembered John Till and wondered where he was and what he was doing, and all of a sudden I remembered what Poetry and I had been thinking and talking about in the station wagon when we’d been at the source of the Mississippi river, and he had found a Bible verse which said if any two of the Lord’s disciples were agreed about something they wanted to pray for, they could pray for it, and the heavenly Father would do it.

Thinking that, I turned around to Poetry who, as you know, was running the motor, and looked at him, and he looked at me. I pointed to my shirt pocket, which had its flap buttoned to keep my New Testament from falling out. His eyes looked where my finger was pointing, and the expression on his mischievous happy-looking face changed to a very sober one. He kinda squinted his eyes like a boy does when he’s thinking about something or somebody some place else. He lifted his free hand (the other being on the rubber grip of the motor’s handle) and, with his forefinger, pointed to his own shirt pocket. We just looked into each other’s eyes a minute, and for some reason I felt fine inside.

Then I swung my eyes around over the lake and in the direction of where the sun was going to set after awhile, and was glad I was alive—for the same reason Little Jim is glad he is alive. In a little while, we’d be to shore. There was only one thing about a fishing trip I didn’t like and that was having to help clean the fish afterward, but boy oh boy, when you start sinking your teeth into the nice snow-white fish steaks, which restaurants’ menus call fillet, you don’t mind having had to clean them at all. Yum, yum, crunch, crunch ... boy oh boy! I certainly was hungry, as our boat cut a wide circle and swung up beside the dock in front of our big brown tents. I could see that a fire was already started in the Indian kitchen we’d made and that meant that just the minute we had our fish cleaned Barry’d have them sizzling in the skillet for us.

Tom and I were alone a minute at the end of the dock that night just before we went to bed, and he had both hands clasped around the slender flagpole and was swaying his body forward and backward and sidewise not saying anything for a minute, and neither was I. Then he said, “I wish I could find my daddy.”

There was a tear in his voice and I knew he felt pretty terribly awful inside, and because I liked him, I felt the same way for a minute.

“Nobody knows where he is,” I said, and Tom surprised me by saying, “Only one Person,” and as quick as I realized what he meant, I said, “Yes, that’s right. He knows everything in the world at the same time.”

The moon shining on the water looked like it nearly always does in the moonlight—like silver—also like a field of oats on Pop’s farm would look if somebody had painted it white and the wind was blowing.

Santa, who, as you know, had his cabin not very far up the lake from where we were camped, had gone away for the night, and so Big Jim and Circus had been selected to stay all night in his cabin to sort of look after things for him—they being the biggest members of our gang and Barry giving them permission.

All the rest of the gang were in the tents, maybe undressing, and Tom and I were really alone, when all of a sudden I heard a movement on the shore and a voice calling in a low husky whisper, saying, “Tom! Hey—Tom!” and I was sure I’d heard the voice before.

I saw the bushes part and a dark form move out in the moonlight, and at the same time Tom let go of the flagpole, and made a dive for the shore, beating it up the dock as fast as he could.

I was so surprised I couldn’t move, but felt weak in the knees and sick at the stomach. Tom was there in a flash, and I watched him and somebody, standing side by side, talking in whispers, and then the dark form I’d seen come out of the bushes, dived back again, and a second later I heard footsteps going lickety-sizzle up the lake shore; then Tom started back to me and I met him in the middle of the dock.

“Who was it?” I said, thinking I knew. “Was it your daddy?”

“No,” Tom said, “it was my brother Bob. I gave him the letter from Mother, and he’s going to give it to Daddy.”