All of us came out into the open and went toward him, not knowing what to think. In a little while the police would be here, and it’d be too late for Tom to tell his daddy what he wanted to tell him or to give him the letter or anything. Right that very second, I heard a fast motor coming on the lake somewhere and wondered if it might be Santa’s big boat, bringing the police and Circus and Dragonfly.
Poetry, who had been with me the night before in the middle of the night, when we’d seen John Till wide awake, taking a string of fish down to the lake from his cottage, whispered to us and said, “Maybe he was so tired he went to sleep. Let’s all go up and surround the icehouse and yell him awake,” which we decided might be a good idea, and right away, we hurried toward where Tom Till was. Poetry and I hurried around to the side where the door was and--
Well, you could knocked me over with a puff of wind. There in front of my astonished eyes was that old great big icehouse door, wide open, on its rusty hinges. _Our prisoner had escaped!_
Well, that was that and a terribly disappointing that at that. Poetry and I stood staring at that open icehouse door, wondering what on earth--and who had opened it and let John Till out and where had he gone, and also was he hiding somewhere close by and might spring out from behind something any minute and knock the living daylights out of one of us?
Big Jim and the rest of the gang came running around right away to where we were, and as soon as we found that our prisoner was _really_ gone, we looked at each other with sad and disappointed eyes.
I looked at Tom who had his mom’s letter in his hands, and noticed it was kinda crinkled, like letters get when you squish them up tight in your hands.
“What’ll we do?” different ones of us asked the rest of us, and waited for Big Jim to decide what. He looked at Tom, who looked sad and surprised and disappointed, and for a second it seemed like he didn’t belong to our gang at all but was a strange boy--like a little lost duckling that gets hatched out with a nestful of fluffy little chickens in our chicken yard and follows the mother hen around with the chickens but doesn’t do what they do or look like they look.