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.”