I tried to coax him to go back to camp with me, but he wouldn’t. “Everybody hates me,” he sobbed, but since he knew _I_ really _liked_ him, I having proved it to him at different times before, he slumped down in the grass and let himself sort of sob and talk at the same time, and also sniffle. He wasn’t looking at me but straight ahead in the direction of a little cluster of bright yellow mustard flowers like the kind that grow along the edge of our garden back at Sugar Creek if you let them--they being very pretty but are pests, and if you give them a chance they will spread in a few years all over a field or fence row.
Seeing those pretty mustard flowers and knowing that Tom was crying on account of his pop, and also on account of his mother, made me think of my own parents and how when I catch a cold, my brown-haired mom makes a mustard plaster and puts it on my chest.
“You’re a swell guy,” I said to Tom, and felt awful warm inside my heart toward him and wished he was my brother and that I could do something to make him happy.
Tom seemed to remember then that he had a handkerchief in his pocket. He pulled it out and blew his freckled nose and then he just sort of straightened up quick like he’d thought of something important. “Where IS the icehouse?” he asked me, and scrambled to his feet.
I wondered what he had on his mind, on account of his face looked like he’d made up his mind to do something terribly important which he was afraid to do but was going to do anyway. But he wouldn’t tell me until I told him I wouldn’t tell him where the icehouse was if he _didn’t_ tell me, and so he told me, and would you believe it? This is what he said. “I want to get there before the cops do and talk to him about something. I want to _tell_ him something.”
I looked at his tearful eyes and his sniffling nose and his freckled face and liked him even better than ever. I thought I ought to ask Big Jim what he thought, he having a lot of bright ideas about things like that.
Right away we found Big Jim who had just come back with Santa from phoning the police, and I was surprised when he said, “Nothing doing. It’s up to the police now.”
But Tom got a stubborn expression on his face and said, “I’ve GOT to talk to him. You’ve GOT to take me there, ’cause after the cops get him I won’t have any chance.”