Another few seconds and we would be there, 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, 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.”
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 there were several other things that 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.
Our pursuer was close behind, still panting and cursing and demanding that we stop. And I learned something else from that fierce-voiced villain when he yelled at Tom, “You little rascal! I’ll catch you and your brother both, if it’s the last thing I ever do. He’s broken into his last supermarket!”
That was one of the saddest, most astonishing things I had ever heard. It startled me into thinking of a lot of other questions: Had Bob Till himself broken into the Sugar Creek supermarket last week? Was the man in women’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 minute, though, my watermelon mystery wasn’t important.
Quick as a firefly’s 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. A second later he was up to his waist and losing his balance and falling. Up he struggled, and down he went, sputtering and wallowing along, with me doing the same thing beside him.
And then suddenly Tom let out a scared cry, “Help! H–e–e–elp!” as he lost his balance again and went down—really down. The coil of rope in his hand flew like a lasso straight toward me. At that minute I was quite a few yards from him, but part of the clothesline caught around my upraised hand with which I was trying to balance myself. The line tightened as Tom went down, still holding onto the jug’s handle. And then down I went myself, like a steer at a rodeo, the water sweeping me off my feet.
And there we both were, struggling in the racing current—two red-haired boys, one on either end of a brand-new plastic clothesline.
Even as I went down I saw the willows on the island open up, and the maddest-faced man I ever saw in my life came rushing toward us. I also saw a puzzled expression on his face as if he was wondering, What on earth? Which one of us was Tom, and which was me, and which of us had the water jug with the money in it?
Just that second also, his woman’s hat caught on a branch. Off it came, and off with it came a wig of reddish brown hair, and I noticed the man had a very short haircut.
But the woman was an honest-to-goodness man, all right. Actually he was a boy, maybe about as old as Bob Till himself. He had dirt smudges on his cheeks as if he had fallen down a few times in his mad race across the island after us. He was panting and gasping, and his woman’s blouse was torn at the neck.
Tom and I must have looked strange to her too—him, I mean. I was like a calf on the end of a lasso, and Tom, now fifteen feet from me, with the jug in one hand, was struggling to stay on his feet, because I was downstream farther than he was and was being sucked along with the current while my feet fought for the pebbly bottom.
Then the mean-faced boy seemed to make up his mind who was who and what was what and what he ought to do about it. He rushed out into the water and with a series of fast lunges went straight for Tom, who began to make even faster lunges toward the other shore and the sycamore tree.
“Run! Swim! Hurry!” I yelled in a sputtering voice, which Tom couldn’t do because right that second his feet shot out from under him and he went down again kerflopety-splash-splash!
I knew I could never wade back against the swift current to get to him in time to help. I’d have to get to the other shore quick, race along the bank to a place above him, and hurry out to where he was. I started to do that, but then I got stopped.
The current was stronger near the other shore and the water deeper. My feet were sucked out from under me. Again I went down. As I was pulled under, I felt the end of the rope still wrapped around my hand. With my hardly knowing it, I was holding onto that rope for dear life.
And right that second the bully caught up with Tom. He made a lunge with his right arm for the jug. He seized Tom with the other, and there was a wild wrestling match with curses and flying water and fast-flying arms. It looked as if Tom was going to get the living daylights licked out of him for sure.
Tom was trying to fight back but couldn’t with only one hand and because of the swift current. He was as helpless as Marybelle Elizabeth in a chicken yard fight with Cleopatra.
Right then is when I remembered something important. I remembered that when a bevy of furious girls was 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 he was standing in the black mouth of the cave. He held his hand up to his eyes, shading them as if he had been in the dark quite a while and the afternoon sunlight was too bright for them.
Then he seemed to see his little red-haired brother getting a licking within an inch of his life by a big bully. And that is when Bob Till, the fiercest fighter in all Sugar Creek territory, except for 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 “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
I lost my balance then and went under. The rope in my hand went taut, 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 and came on a fast downstream float toward me.
All I could see for a minute was Tom defending himself like a savage little tiger and Big Bob Till shooting through the air like a man from a flying trapeze. He leaped from the high bank out across ten feet of 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.
But my right hand still clung to the rope on the other end of which was the floating, plunging water jug with stolen supermarket money in it.
10
Before another second could pass, Bob Till landed feetfirst in the swift current and 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. That little guy really knew what he was doing.
“Oh no, you don’t! You great big bully!” Tom cried. “You don’t get away so easy. Come on, Bob! It’s him—the thief! Help! Help! Help!”
And Bob helped.
Talk about a fierce, fast fistfight. That was one of the fiercest, fastest ones I ever saw or heard. I really mean heard, in spite of my own battle to keep myself from losing my balance again in the deep, swift water I was in. If the rock bass and minnows and redhorse and other fish that were down in the water somewhere had been watching that water fight, they’d probably have wondered what on earth.
Wham! Biff! Sock! Wham—wham—wham! Splash! Splash! Double-whammety! Pow!
“You great big lummox!” Bob yelled at his opponent. “You will try to drown my little brother, will you! I’ll teach you!”
The thief staggered
backward in the water, his hands and arms waving fast in a lot of directions as he tried to steady himself. Then he struck the water and went under.
Bob seemed to know he had his man licked. He quickly turned to his little brother and half sobbed to him, “You poor little guy, fighting that big bully all by yourself!”
“Big Bully,” as Bob had just called the fierce-faced thief—who wasn’t a man at all and certainly wasn’t a woman but was a powerful-muscled boy the size of Big Jim—came up from under the water with a bounce, like a cork plopping back up after you’ve pushed it under. He was sputtering and shaking his head and struggling to keep his balance in the rapids.
Then, spying the water jug floating on the surface down near where I was, he started on a fast half-run half-swim toward it and me.
One reason the jug hadn’t already floated far beyond me was that the other end of the rope was still wrapped around one of my hands, and I was still holding on for dear life. The other reason was that the middle of the rope, which was down under the water, was tangled up with and wrapped around the bully’s legs. I knew that for sure when I felt the rope tighten around my arm and felt myself being jerked off balance. And then down I went again.
It certainly wasn’t any time to be thinking funny thoughts right then—not with all the dangerous excitement I was in and might not get out of without getting badly hurt. But a ridiculous idea popped into my mind and was: I’m like a cowboy at a Sugar Creek rodeo. I’ve just lassoed a wild steer, and my bronco has just thrown me off into a racing riffle, but I’m going to hold onto him!
Grunt and groan and puff and sputter and yell and scream and tremble with excitement and hold on tight and fight and just about everything else you can think of—we four were almost in a struggle for life.
I don’t know how many times I lost my balance and went under or how many times I thought the thief was going to get the water jug away from us and get away.
And then all of a sudden, right in the middle of everything, I saw Bob’s powerful right arm swing in a long, wide arc. And the fist on the other end of it caught the tough guy on the jaw. This time he went down and stayed down, and that part of the struggle was over.
I say that part was over. We had another and a harder job on our hands, and that was to save the bully from drowning, because Bob’s experienced fist had knocked him completely out.
I saw the scared expression on Bob’s face the very minute I heard his frightened words come crying out of his mouth: “I–I–I’ve killed him! What’ll we do now!”
“Keep his head above water!” I yelled back. “He can’t drown as long as his head is above water!”
Bob made a lunge for the big boy, clasped him the best way he could, and began to struggle with him toward the sycamore tree side of the channel. Little Tom and I struggled along beside and behind him, bringing the water jug filled with money.
It was just as it says in the Bible, which our minister is always quoting—and also my parents—where the words are: “Be sure your sin will find you out.” That was what the thief’s sins had done. The very rope he had stolen, along with the money, had accidentally lassoed his feet, making it possible for us to capture him.
The two gunnysacks that had been wrapped around the water jug came in handy, too. We unwrapped them from around the jug and spread them out on the ground. Then we cut two poles, using Bob’s ax with which he had been helping Old Man Paddler. We slipped the sacks over the ends, making a hole in each of the closed corners, and we had one of the finest stretchers you ever saw. Then we used it to carry our prisoner from the sycamore tree to the toolshed in the woods behind Poetry’s dad’s barn.
Bob carried one end of the litter and Little Tom and I the other. Boy oh boy, did we ever feel proud, even though we were worried some because our prisoner was still unconscious. We knew he wasn’t drowned, because he was breathing all right, but he was as pale as a sheet of gray writing paper.
Little Tom puffed out his story to me as we struggled and grunted along. I helped with the story as much as I could by asking questions that had been worrying me for quite a while.
“How did you know he was the supermarket thief?” I asked him.
He said, “I didn’t, at first. I wanted to make a lot of money to get a present for Mother’s birthday tomorrow, so I thought up the idea of selling a map to the Girl Scouts—so the girls could draw a map apiece like we do when we go on our up-North vacations. The green lady worked out a scheme for me to leave the map in the big watermelon they had in the spring.” Tom’s face was as innocent as a lamb while he was puffing out his story to me.
“Then what?” I asked.
He said, “When I saw the melon—how big it was, and how pretty, as big and as pretty as your Ida—I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, wondering where they got it and if it might be yours. So I scooted up the hill and hurried to your garden to find out. I was feeling fine when I saw Ida was still there. I beat it back to the spring, plugged the melon like I promised I would, put my map inside, and went home.”
“But how—” I began, still wondering how come he knew our prisoner was the supermarket thief.
He cut in on me, adding, “I didn’t know till this afternoon. I saw all the women’s clothes on the line behind the tent, so I thought there was a woman from somewhere camping in the tent. I gathered a dozen eggs and went down to see if I could sell them to her. I was kind of scared because of being afraid of strange women and girls, so I sneaked up on the cornfield side and accidentally saw her doing it. That’s how I found out.”
“Saw her doing what?” Bob asked.
Tom answered, “She was rolling paper money into small rolls and stuffing them into a jug—it looked like hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I was so scared I couldn’t move. I don’t know what kind of a noise I made, but she—he—heard me, jumped like he was shot, quick squeezed the last roll of money into the jug, shoved it behind a suitcase, and yelled at me, ‘What do you want?’
“‘That’s an awful lot of money,’ I said. ‘Where’d you get it?’ And that’s when the chase started.”
“But somebody did steal Ida,” I said and wondered what Tom would say about that. “Somebody sneaked out into our garden last night and took her.”
Right that second our prisoner regained consciousness, opened his eyes. He began to struggle to get his hands and feet free and to sit up and get off our litter, which made us drop him ker-plop onto the ground.
We were busy for the next few minutes, but between grunts and groans and our thief’s filthy language flying thick and fast against our ears, Tom managed to say, “Your prize melon’s all right, and it’s still not plugged. I saw it in the tent back over there by the cornfield, when I ran back for the jug.”
And that’s when our big bully of an overgrown boy growled into the middle of everything that was happening and said, “Maybe I took it myself. I was going to use a watermelon for a piggy bank instead of the water jug. Now are you satisfied?” And he started in twisting and fighting and trying to get away again and couldn’t.
Several nights later, when Poetry and I were in our cots in the tent under the plum tree, while the drumming of the cicadas was so deafening we could hardly hear ourselves talk, we had one of the happiest times of our lives retelling each other everything that had happened.
“Who’d have dreamed that Muggs McGinnis would have been hiding out right in our territory?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered across the moonlit four feet of space between our cots, “and imagine me being a good enough detective to capture him all by myself—Tom and Bob helping a little, of course.”
When I finished saying such a boastful sentence, it seemed maybe I had been a pretty important hero. It felt fine to be one.
But Poetry spoiled my puffed-up feeling by saying, “It was Tom Till’s keen mind that solved your mystery for you. That guy Muggs actually was getting his drinking water from your iron pitcher pump and from the spring with his jug. I, myself, thou
ght of that!”
He yawned, rolled over, and sat up on the edge of his cot in the moonlight, looking like the shadow of a big fat grizzly. Then he yawned again and said, “I think I’ll go get a drink. I can’t seem to remember whether I got one the other night or not. Want to go along?”
I quickly was sitting up on the edge my own cot and saying, “Oh no, you don’t!” I said it so loud it could have been heard inside the Collins downstairs bedroom.
And it was. A second later a thundery voice boomed out across the lawn from the window near the telephone, “Will you boys be quiet out there? You’ll wake up your mother, Bill. I’ve told you for the last time!”
That is one of the most interesting sounds a boy ever hears around our farm.
Poetry was still thirsty, though, so I said, “I’ve had years of experience pumping that pump. I know how to do it without making it squeak. I’ll get you a drink myself.”
With that, I crept out of bed and moved out through the moonlight toward the pump platform.
That’s when I heard Dad talking to somebody—to Mom, maybe, I thought—and I crept stealthily over to the living-room window to see if maybe he was saying anything about Poetry or me or about the exciting experiences we had had capturing Muggs McGinnis.
But Dad wasn’t talking to Mom at all but to somebody else. He was talking to the best Friend a boy ever had and the most important Person in the universe, the One who had made the stars and the sky and every wonderful thing in the whole boys’ world. I’d heard Dad pray many a time at our dinner table and in prayer meeting at church but only once in a while when he was all by himself.
It seemed I ought not to be listening, but I couldn’t move now or Dad would hear me, so I waited a while. And part of his kind of wonderful prayer was:
“Pour out Your love upon Muggs McGinnis and upon all the lost boys in the world. Help them to find out in some way that Christ loved them and poured out His blood upon the cross for the forgiveness of their sins.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 36