The current was stronger near that other shore and the water deeper. My feet were sucked out from under me and again I went down, feeling as I was pulled under, my end of the rope still wrapped around my hand, which, also, without my hardly noticing it, I was holding onto for dear life.
Right that second the bully caught up with Tom, made a lunge with his right arm for the jug, seized Tom with the other, and there was a wild wrestling match with water flying and curses and fast flying arms and it looked like Tom was going to get the living daylights licked out of him for sure.
Tom was trying to fight back, and couldn’t with only one hand and because of the swift current. He was as helpless as Marybelle Elizabeth in a chickenyard fight with Cleopatra.
Right then is when I remembered something important, and it was that when a bevy of furious girls had been beating up on Dragonfly at the spring, I had screamed bloody murder, given several wild loon calls, bellowed like a bull and made a lot of other terrifying bird and animal noises, and it had saved Dragonfly. Before I knew I was going to do it, I was yelling and screaming every savage sound I could think of in the direction of the one-sided fight, crying for help at the same time, hoping some of the Gang might be somewhere in the neighborhood and hear.
And that’s when I heard Big Bob Till’s voice answer from the sycamore tree side of the channel. A second later I saw him standing in the black mouth of the cave. He held his hand up to his eyes, shading them like he had been in the dark quite awhile and the afternoon sunlight was too bright for them.
Then he seemed to see his little red-haired brother, Tom, getting a licking within an inch of his life by a butch-haired bully. And that is when Bob Till, the fiercest fighter in all Sugar Creek territory—except maybe Big Jim—came to life. It was like the cave was a bow and Bob was a two-legged arrow being shot by a giant as big as the one in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I lost my balance then and went down, the rope in my hand went taut, and the other end was torn from Tom’s grasp, and the water jug, like a jug-shaped balloon wrapped in burlap, plopped to the surface, swung away and came on a fast downstream float toward me.
All I could see for a jiffy was Tom defending himself like a savage little tiger, and Big Bob Till shooting through the air like a man from a flying trapeze from the high bank out across the ten feet of excited air down and out toward where Tom was in the clutches of the thief—and then I was fighting to save myself from drowning because I was in water over my head. My right hand still clung to the rope on the other end of which was the floating, plunging water jug with stolen Super Market money in it.
10
BEFORE even another second could pass, Bob Till landed feet first in the swift current, and even quicker than that was storming his way through the six or seven feet of open water toward where his little brother, Tom, was holding on for dear life to the very same powerful-muscled overgrown man-sized boy who a little while before was wrestling with him trying to get the water jug away from him. Say, that little guy knew what he was doing.