In another jiffy, we were close to John Till, and I noticed it was really him, and he didn’t have any life preserver pillow. He had probably been drunk and had just tumbled out of his boat while it was racing terribly fast, and had been swimming ever since.
I quick grabbed up a cushion in front of my feet and with a wide sweep of my arm tossed it out toward him. My aim was as good as David’s had been when he had used his sling shot on the giant that time in the Bible. The pillow landed with a ker-plop right in front of Old John and I saw him make a fierce desperate lunge toward it and grab hold of it with both arms and heard him yell in a sputtering voice something I never dreamed I’d hear from Old John Till’s voice that night, and it was, “Thank God, I’m saved!”
Then he quit trying to swim and just lay back on his back, and held onto the cushion and let himself float, with only his face above water with the cushion in front of his chin, which is the way to float, if you ever have to hold onto a life-preserver cushion.
In another jiffy we had our boat there, and Old John was crying and gasping and saying, “Thank God—Oh thank you, boys, thank you!”
How to get him into the boat was the question, though, for the minute he would try to get in, his heavy weight might tip us over.
But say, in spite of being exhausted and gasping for breath, Old John Till still had good sense, and didn’t try to climb in right away, but got his breath first—besides, in a minute Circus and Big Jim with Dragonfly holding a flashlight to help them see us, came motoring out and in a little while we had John in the boat, and we were all on our way to shore, with John so tired out he just lay his terribly wet self down and sort of shook and sniffled and half cried while we moved along.
I tell you it’s a wonderful feeling when you’ve done something like that. You’re glad not only ’cause you helped do it, but if you believe what Poetry and I believed, you feel like you and the Heavenly Father are very good friends—which is maybe the best feeling a boy ever has.
But say, I’ll have to wind up this story quicker than anything, for if it gets very much longer the people who make it into a book for you will want me to cut off the end of it so it won’t make too many pages.
Anyway that is the last part of the last story that happened to us on our camping trip, and it was the best vacation we’d had in our whole lives, although I suppose there will be a few more camping adventures before the gang grows up, and if there are and if anything especially interesting happens, I’ll see how quick I can write it for you.
As we rowed along toward shore, Old John just lay in the bottom of the boat like a terribly big wet fish that had just been caught, and was so tired out he couldn’t move. Pretty soon, Poetry whispered, “D’you s’pose he’s pretending to be good—and that he just said those religious words back there, to fool us, and is maybe playing possum? D’you s’pose when we get to shore, he’ll quick make a dive for the bushes and run away?”