Pretty soon we drove on, right straight down through the pretty little modern-looking city, where there were lots of people walking the streets in vacation clothes.
Pretty soon we passed a Tourist Information place, on the right side of the road where there was a very tall cement water tower, that was shaped exactly like my pop’s big long six-battery flashlight back home, being a lot larger at the top. Little Jim squinted his pretty blue eyes up at it like he was thinking about something. Then we went on, and Poetry read to us different crazy things the mythical Paul Bunyan was supposed to have done, such as he had been such a big baby when he was born that it took six large storks to carry him to his parents; and Paul’s pet mosquitoes dug the wells up here where we were; his soup bowl was so large it was like a lake and the cook had to use a boat to get across it; also his pancake griddle was so large that they greased it by tying greasy griddlecakes on the bottoms of some men’s shoes and they skated around over its surface to grease it for Paul—things like that.
Little Jim surprised us all of a sudden by saying, “Anybody want to hear how all the people decided to move up into this country and stay here?—How Paul Bunyan and I working together got them to come, when nobody wanted to?”
“How?” Dragonfly wanted to know. “What do you mean YOU and Paul Bunyan worked it? Paul used to live here long before you were born. You never even saw him!”
“Oh I didn’t, didn’t I?” Little Jim asked and had a very mischievous grin on his innocent face. “Want to hear the story?”
“Sure,” Poetry and I said, and Dragonfly said, “No.”
Little Jim said, “All right, I won’t—anyway, it’s too important a story to tell to such a small unappreciative audience.” He sighed like he was sleepy and curled up with his head on my lap and sighed again and almost before I knew it he was actually asleep.
It felt good having Little Jim lying with his head in my lap, he being my almost best friend except Poetry, and also being a really wonderful little guy and was the best Christian in the whole Sugar Creek Gang. He was always thinking and saying important things about the Bible and heaven, and the One who had made the world, and also about His Son who had come here to this pretty world once and died on a cross which was made out of a tree, just to save anybody who would repent of his sins and believe on Him.
I looked down at that pretty curly head, and thought of Sugar Creek and my parents and little Charlotte Ann, and was lonesome for a minute. Then pretty soon I was sleepy myself and the flying tires of the station wagon sort of sang me to sleep too. Once I half woke up on account of Little Jim wiggled in my lap and I heard him mumbling something. I was too sleepy to listen, but it sorta sounded like he maybe thought he was at home getting ready to crawl into bed and go to sleep. I kinda bent my ear down a little and listened close to his perspiring face and say! I heard some of the prettiest words you ever heard in your life and they were, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take....” Little Jim was kinda mumbling the words. I’d heard the poem before, in fact my folks had taught it to me, and when I was littler I’d said it at night myself. But Little Jim said something else I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded like this: “Please also—bless—Little Snow-in-the-face, and help him to get well...” Then I felt Little Jim’s shoulder relax against my stomach and I knew he was sound asleep. In another jiffy I was asleep myself.
When I woke up we were still flying along with Barry at the wheel, and most of us sitting in lying-down positions, getting a swell afternoon nap. It was wonderful to ride along that fast, and also wonderful to see all the things we saw, as the road wound itself around and around like the winding barefoot-boy paths through the Sugar Creek woods along Sugar Creek itself. At the town of Pass Lake, most of us got out, stretched ourselves and bought postcards at a drug store and sent them to our folks. I sent a card that showed some men climbing a tree, and some great big fish were at the bottom looking up like hungry bears look up at boys.