I gave Little Jim some money out of my bill-fold and told him to pick out something he especially thought my little sister, Charlotte Ann, would like, on account of in a few days we were all going to break camp and drive back to Sugar Creek, and I wanted to take home a few things made by the Indians.
Poetry and I being alone awhile, with me lying under a blanket on the back seat of the station wagon, we talked over all the wonderful experiences of our vacation, and decided it had been the best camping trip we’d had in our lives.
“Only one thing would make it the best we ever could have,” he said, and when I said, “What?” he didn’t answer for a minute. He was sitting in the open door not far from me and I was lying on my back, wishing the hot sun and the breeze would hurry up and get my clothes a little drier so I could put them on. He had his back to me and I couldn’t see his fat face, but his squawky voice had a sort of a far away sound in it like he was thinking of something extra serious.
When he still didn’t answer me, I asked him again and he said quietly, “I feel sorry for Tom.” Then his voice sort of choked and I guessed that he liked that little red-haired guy just as well as I did. Right that second if anybody had asked me anything, I wouldn’t have answered either, ’cause I felt my eyes stinging, and there would have been a tear in my voice, and boys don’t like to have anybody see tears in their eyes or hear them in their voices.
Pretty soon though, Poetry spoke again with his back still toward me, “Did you ever read this verse in the Bible?”
If I hadn’t been already down, you could have knocked me over with a fish scale when I realized what he was doing. Say, he had taken his little leather New Testament out of his shirt pocket and, looking through it, had found a verse he thought was extra good.
As you maybe know, an official part of the equipment of anybody who belongs to the Sugar Creek Gang, is a small pocket New Testament. We carry one with us nearly all the time, and not only every one of us reads it every day but we aren’t ashamed to let anybody know we do it either; but on account of being boys and feeling like nearly all boys do, we didn’t talk about the Bible very much except in camp-fire meetings or at Sunday school, and only once in a while when two or three of us were together—Little Jim and I doing maybe more of it than any of the rest of us, on account of he—well, he had a keen little mind and thought more about it, I guess, and was always getting such good ideas. Also Little Jim was glad he was alive, which not a boy in the world would be if God hadn’t made him, and also if God didn’t keep him alive. And there isn’t a boy in the world that’s dumb enough to want to be dead, which is why a boy ought to be glad to love God and to be kind to Him, which Little Jim always was.
Anyway, when Poetry asked me if I had ever read “this verse,” I said, “What verse?” and he read it to me, with his back still turned. It was out of the book of Matthew, chapter 18, and was the nineteenth verse, and said, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”
It made me feel good inside to even think about the Bible, especially since I knew both of us believed what we were talking about. I just lay there, looking through the station wagon window up at the pretty branches of a pine tree that grew not very far away. I was also listening to the gurgling of the water close by and felt something kinda warm in my heart, like Poetry and God and I had a secret of some kind. When we finished telling each other what we thought the verse meant, we had made up our minds that we were going to stick together until Little Tom’s daddy was saved.
“Let’s shake on it,” Poetry said, and swung around, and shoved his fat hand in my direction. I grabbed it quick, and said, “Shake.”