“You’re an ugly ‘mut,’” I said to myself, and then turned and looked out over the lake again. Anyway, I was growing a little bit, and I had awfully good health and nearly always felt wonderful most of the time.
While I was looking out at the pretty lake, some of the same feeling I’d had before came bubbling up inside of me. For a minute I wished Little Jim had been with us,—in fact, I wished he had been standing right beside me with the stick in his hand which he always carries with him wherever he goes, almost ... I was feeling good inside ’cause the gang was still letting me be Robinson Crusoe and were taking most of my orders. Sometimes, I said to myself, I’d like to be a leader of a whole lot of people, who would do whatever I wanted them to. I might be a general in an army, or a Governor or something—only I wanted to be a doctor, too, and help people to get well. Also I wanted to help save people from their troubles, and from being too poor, like Circus’s folks, and I wished I could take all the whiskey there was in the world and dump it out into a lake, only I wouldn’t want the perch and northern pike or walleyes or the pretty blue gills or bass or sunfish to have to drink any of it, but maybe I wouldn’t care if some of the bullheads did.
While I was standing there, thinking about that pretty lake, and knowing that Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang, would say something about the Bible if he was there, I remembered part of a Bible story that had happened out on a stormy, rolling lake just like this one. Then I remembered that in the story of Robinson Crusoe there had been a Bible and that he had taught his ignorant Man Friday a lot of things out of it and Friday had become a Christian himself. My pop used to read Robinson Crusoe to Mom and me at home many a night in the winter—Pop reading good stories to us instead of whatever there was on the radio that wouldn’t be good for a boy to hear, and my folks having to make me turn it off. Pop always picked a story to read that was very interesting to a red-haired boy and would be what Mom called “good mental furniture”—whatever that was, or is.
All of the gang nearly always carried New Testaments in our pockets, so, remembering Robinson Crusoe had had a Bible, I took out my New Testament and stood with my back to the rest of the cabin, still looking at the lake. I felt terribly good inside, with that little brown leather Testament in my hands. I was glad the One Who is the main character in it was a Friend of mine and that He liked boys.
“It was swell of You to help us find the little Ostberg girl,” I said to Him, “and also to catch the kidnapper, and it’s an awful pretty lake and sky and ...”
Right then I was interrupted by music coming from back in the cabin somewhere, some people’s voices singing a song I knew and that we sometimes sang in church back at Sugar Creek, and it was:
“Rescue the perishing, care for dying,
Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.”
I guessed quick that one of my goats or else my Man Friday had actually found a radio in the cabin and had turned it on. I swished around, dashed back inside and through the hanging curtains into the bedroom where I’d left them, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the rollaway bed opened out and there, sitting on the side of it, my two goats and my Man Friday and a little portable radio, which I knew was the kind that had its own battery and its own inbuilt aerial. It was sitting on my fat goat’s lap, and was playing like a house afire that very pretty church hymn:
“Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,