Yes sir, I was getting homesick for my folks, and could hardly wait till I got home next week to tell all the exciting adventures we’d had. Also, it’d be fun to watch the mail every day to see if maybe Little Jim would get any letters from anybody who would find his gospel messages which he’d been tossing out into the lake in whiskey bottles.
Thinking that, I remembered John Till and wondered where he was and what he was doing, and all of a sudden I remembered what Poetry and I had been thinking and talking about in the station wagon when we’d been at the source of the Mississippi river, and he had found a Bible verse which said if any two of the Lord’s disciples were agreed about something they wanted to pray for, they could pray for it, and the heavenly Father would do it.
Thinking that, I turned around to Poetry who, as you know, was running the motor, and looked at him, and he looked at me. I pointed to my shirt pocket, which had its flap buttoned to keep my New Testament from falling out. His eyes looked where my finger was pointing, and the expression on his mischievous happy-looking face changed to a very sober one. He kinda squinted his eyes like a boy does when he’s thinking about something or somebody some place else. He lifted his free hand (the other being on the rubber grip of the motor’s handle) and, with his forefinger, pointed to his own shirt pocket. We just looked into each other’s eyes a minute, and for some reason I felt fine inside.
Then I swung my eyes around over the lake and in the direction of where the sun was going to set after awhile, and was glad I was alive—for the same reason Little Jim is glad he is alive.
In a little while, we’d be to shore. There was only one thing about a fishing trip I didn’t like and that was having to help clean the fish afterward, but boy oh boy, when you start sinking your teeth into the nice snow-white fish steaks, which restaurants’ menus call fillet, you don’t mind having had to clean them at all. Yum, yum, crunch, crunch ... boy oh boy! I certainly was hungry, as our boat cut a wide circle and swung up beside the dock in front of our big brown tents. I could see that a fire was already started in the Indian kitchen we’d made and that meant that just the minute we had our fish cleaned Barry’d have them sizzling in the skillet for us.
Tom and I were alone a minute at the end of the dock that night just before we went to bed, and he had both hands clasped around the slender flagpole and was swaying his body forward and backward and sidewise not saying anything for a minute, and neither was I. Then he said, “I wish I could find my daddy.”
There was a tear in his voice and I knew he felt pretty terribly awful inside, and because I liked him, I felt the same way for a minute.
“Nobody knows where he is,” I said, and Tom surprised me by saying, “Only one Person,” and as quick as I realized what he meant, I said, “Yes, that’s right. He knows everything in the world at the same time.”
The moon shining on the water looked like it nearly always does in the moonlight—like silver—also like a field of oats on Pop’s farm would look if somebody had painted it white and the wind was blowing.
Santa, who, as you know, had his cabin not very far up the lake from where we were camped, had gone away for the night, and so Big Jim and Circus had been selected to stay all night in his cabin to sort of look after things for him—they being the biggest members of our gang and Barry giving them permission.