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.
4
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.