All the rest of the gang were in the tents, maybe undressing, and Tom and I were really alone, when all of a sudden I heard a movement on the shore and a voice calling in a low husky whisper, saying, “Tom! Hey—Tom!” and I was sure I’d heard the voice before.
I saw the bushes part and a dark form move out in the moonlight, and at the same time Tom let go of the flagpole, and made a dive for the shore, beating it up the dock as fast as he could.
I was so surprised I couldn’t move, but felt weak in the knees and sick at the stomach. Tom was there in a flash, and I watched him and somebody, standing side by side, talking in whispers, and then the dark form I’d seen come out of the bushes, dived back again, and a second later I heard footsteps going lickety-sizzle up the lake shore; then Tom started back to me and I met him in the middle of the dock.
“Who was it?” I said, thinking I knew. “Was it your daddy?”
“No,” Tom said, “it was my brother Bob. I gave him the letter from Mother, and he’s going to give it to Daddy.”
8
CAN you imagine that! Big Bob Till, Big Jim’s worst enemy, and, except for Big Jim, the fiercest fighter in the whole country anywhere maybe! He was what people called a “juvenile delinquent,” which means he was a bad boy who didn’t like to behave himself and had done things that were against the law.
Maybe I’d better tell you right now, in case you don’t know it, that Mr. Foote, Little Jim’s daddy, had used his influence back at Sugar Creek to keep Bob from having to go to reform school, and Bob had been what is called “paroled” to him, and Little Jim himself had been glad ’cause he’d rather anybody would be good than to have him be bad and have to be punished for it. But Bob was still not behaving himself, on account of he hadn’t been trained at home like most of the rest of us. Even we were having a hard enough time to be even half as good as we thought we were, and we had had training all our boy lives.
When Tom said to me there in the moonlight in the middle of the dock, that he’d given his mom’s letter to his brother Bob, and I realized that Bob was up here in the North Woods—in fact had been standing right over there behind those bushes only a second ago—you could have knocked me over with a moonbeam, I was so surprised. Of course, he was gone now—somewhere or other—but where?