“We’re almost there!” Little Tom Till cried to me, panting hard from carrying the jug as well as himself.
I could see the other side of the island now and the nervous, excited water in the racing riffle between the island and the shore. I could see the sycamore tree at the top of the bank and the mouth of the cave just beyond.
Another few seconds and we would be there—and would be out in the fast current on our way to safety. It had been a terribly exciting race, I tell you, with Tom not letting me help carry the jug at all.
“It’s not heavy,” he panted. “It’s made out of plastic, the same as the clothesline, and it’s as light as a feather. The money in it is in little rolls with rubber bands around them. I saw him stuff ’em in myself.”
The bottle’s mouth and neck weren’t more than an inch and a half in diameter, I had noticed.
There were about a million questions I wanted to ask Tom, such as, how come he knew the woman was a man? how’d he find out about the money in the first place?—and several other things which my mind was as curious as a cat’s to know.
And then, all of a sudden, we burst out into the open at the water’s edge, with our pursuer only a few rods behind us, panting and cursing and demanding us to stop.
And then I learned something else from that fierce-voiced villain as he yelled at Tom, “You little rascal! I’ll catch you and your brother, Bob, if it’s the last thing I ever do. He’s broken into his last Super Market!”
That was one of the saddest, most astonishing things I had ever heard. It startled me into feeling a lot of other questions: Had Bob Till himself broken into the Sugar Creek Super Market last week? Was the man in woman’s clothes maybe a detective or secret agent who had been camping out along the creek, watching Bob’s movements—his and Tom’s?
Things were all mixed up even worse than ever. For a few jiffies, my watermelon mystery wasn’t even important in my mind, as—quick as a firefly’s fleeting flash—Tom, holding onto the jug’s handle with one hand, plunged into the fast riffle without even bothering to look or to ask me where the water was the most shallow, and a second later was up to his waist and losing his balance and falling down.