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.