Feelings lie buried that grace can restore.”
A jiffy after I got there, the music stopped and a voice broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to make a very important announcement. There is a new angle regarding the ransom money still missing in the Ostberg kidnapping case. Little Marie’s father, a religious man, has just announced that the amount represented a sum he had been saving for the past several years to build a memorial hospital in the heart of the mission field of Cuba. In St. Paul, the suspect, caught last week at Bemidji by a gang of boys on vacation, still denies knowing anything about the ransom money; claims he never received it. Police are now working on the supposition that there may have been another party to the crime. Residents of northern Minnesota are warned to be on the lookout for a man bearing the following description: He is believed to be of German descent, a farmer by occupation, about thirty-seven years of age, six feet two inches tall, weighs one hundred eighty seven pounds, stoop-shouldered, dark complexion, red hair, partly bald, bulgy steel-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows that meet in the center, hook-nose....”
The description went on, telling about the man’s clothes, ears, and mouth, but I didn’t need any more. My heart was already bursting with the awfulest feeling I’d had in a long time, ’cause the person they were describing was exactly like Old hook-nosed John Till, the mean, liquor-drinking father of one of the Sugar Creek Gang, little red-haired Tom Till himself, one of my very best friends and a swell little guy that all of us liked and felt so terribly sorry for on account of we knew that he had that kind of a father, who had been in jail lots of times and who spent his money on whiskey and gambling and Little Tom’s mother had to be sad most of the time. In fact, about the only happiness Tom’s mom had was in her boy Tom, who was a really swell little guy, and went to Sunday school with us. She also got a little happiness out of a radio which my folks had bought for her, and she listened to Christian programs which cheered her up a lot.
Even while I listened to the radio on my fat goat’s lap, I was thinking about Little Tom’s mom and wondering if she had her radio turned on too, back at Sugar Creek, and would hear this announcement, and if it would be like somebody jabbing a knife into her heart and twisting it.
But we didn’t have time to think, or talk or anything, ’cause right that second, I heard a noise coming from the direction of the kitchen window, which we had climbed in, and when I took a quick peek through the curtains, I saw the face of a fierce-looking man. It only took me one second’s glance to see the bushy eyebrows that met in the center just above the top of his hooked nose, and even though he had on a battered old felt hat that was dripping wet with the rain, and his clothes were sop soaking wet, I recognized him as Little red-haired Tom’s father.
In that quick flash of a jiffy I remembered the first time I had seen him when he had been hired by my pop to shock oats, and he had tried to get Circus’s pop to take a drink of whiskey over by some elderberry bushes that grew along the fence row. It had been a terribly hot day, and Circus and I had been helping shock oats too. Circus’s pop hadn’t been a Christian very long, and because I hated whiskey and didn’t want Circus’s pop to do what is called “backslide,” I had made a terribly fierce fast run across the field with Circus, to try to stop his pop from taking the drink and had run kerwham with both of my fists flying straight into Old hook-nosed John Till’s stomach, and a little later had landed on my back under the elderberry bushes from a terribly fierce wham from one of John Till’s hard fists. After that, the gang had had a lot of other trouble with him, but we’d gotten Little Tom saved, and Tom, being a pretty good Christian for a little guy, had been praying for his pop every day of his life ever since. But up to now it looked like it hadn’t done any good ’cause his pop still was a bad man and caused his family a lot of heartache.
Talk about mystery and excitement. I knew Tom’s pop hated us boys and also he was pretty mean to Tom for going to church with us, and on top of that was mad at my folks for taking Tom’s mom to church; and whenever he came into the house when she had a Christian program on the radio, he would either make her turn it off or he would turn it off himself.
I’ll have to admit that I was afraid of Old hook-nosed John Till, and right that minute I didn’t feel very much like being the leader of the gang, which for some reason seemed to be made up of only four very small boys, all of a sudden. The only thing I felt like leading in, was a very fast foot race out through the woods and toward camp.
“Quick!” I hissed to the gang. “There’s somebody looking through the window. What’ll we do?” Before I could think only half of those thoughts and say only half of that sentence, I saw the man’s hand shove up the window, and one of his wet long legs, which had a big wet shoe on the end of it, swung over the window ledge, and he started squirming his long-legged self in after it.