I’d seen possums act like that back home—be terribly lively until they were caught, and then they would do what is called “play possum”—just roll over on their sides and curl up into a half circle and shut their eyes and act dead until we or the dogs went away a few yards and then they would come to quick life, scramble to their ridiculous looking hands-like feet and run possum-ety sizzle to a tree and climb up it or to a hole in the ground and dive into it.
“I don’t know,” I said to Poetry, “but he sounded like he meant what he said when he said what he said back there.” I wanted to believe it, ’cause I wanted Tom Till to have a brand new daddy like Circus had got when his pop had been saved a couple of years before.
Well, it turned out that I was right. That whiskey bottle we’d seen in the bottom of his boat hadn’t had whiskey in it at all, but was one Little Jim had put a gospel tract in, and Old John had found it and read it, and the Lord Himself had used it to do what our Sugar Creek minister calls, “convict him of his sins.” On top of that, he had also stopped to read the message in the other whiskey bottle which had been used as a marker for a good crappie-fishing place out in front of the Indian cemetery. Also he had been listening on his portable radio to the radio program of the Church of the Cross. So, after he had accidentally tumbled out of the boat tonight, he’d gotten half scared to death, and all the verses of the Bible and the sermons he had read and listened to, came splashing into his mind; and without stopping to think that he didn’t even believe in God, he had prayed to Him to not only save his body from drowning, but to save his soul from being lost.
When we’d rescued him, he had had the other $5,000 of the ransom money in his trousers pocket. It was pretty wet, but as good as gold. And—do you know what?—he told us he hadn’t been helping the real kidnapper at all, but had only wanted to get the $1,000 reward!
“And now, boys,” John’s gruff, trembling voice said, as we listened to him explain things, “you’ll have to start praying for Bob—we had a quarrel tonight, and he’s gone away somewhere.”
“Where?” Tom Till spoke up and asked. All of us were sitting around a camp fire which we’d started quick, to get John warmed up after we’d got some of Barry’s dry clothes on him, and a blanket wrapped around him—most of the rest of us being wrapped in blankets too.
John looked down at his red-haired, freckled-faced, trembling-voiced boy, and said, “I don’t know. I—he thought we ought to keep the $5,000 instead of turning it in. I—I’m afraid I was too hard on him, maybe. But when we couldn’t agree about this $5,000, I took the boat and left him there at the Indian cemetery.”
We asked Old John different questions, one of them being, “How’d you know where the ransom money was?” and he said, “I studied the newspapers and the pictures, and found the kidnapper’s map in the grave-house of an old Indian chief. I made two copies in invisible ink—one for myself and the other for Bob, but I lost mine somewhere—and you boys found it.”
“But why, if you only wanted the $1,000 reward, did you bury the money in the fish in the icehouse?” we asked him.
“I didn’t,” he said, just as Little Tom Till shoved a stick into the fire and about a thousand yellow sparks shot in different directions of up toward the sky. “Old Brains Powers, the kidnapper, buried it there. I’d been digging it up.... I had five thousand dollars already dug up, and was coming back to get the rest of it, but you boys beat me to it. Then when I went into the icehouse, you slammed the door on me and barred it, and I would have stayed there until the police came, but Bob, who had just gotten up here, heard me hollering and let me out.”