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!
5
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.