“Once I was lost and way down deep in sin, Once was a slave to passions fierce within. Once was afraid to trust a loving God, But now my sins are washed away in Jesus’ blood.” Only I knew John Till wouldn’t be thinking of those words when he whistled, but would be thinking of the Old Black Joe ones. At the corner of the cabin, he came out in the moonlight where we saw as clear as anything. He had a pair of rubber boots on, a fishing pole in one hand and a big stringer of fish, which looked like the very same stringer he had in the sink in the afternoon. “He’s going out to clean his fish,” Poetry said. “And he’s got a spade, to bury the insides with,” I said, noticing it for the first time. We stood there glued to our tracks and holding onto each other, wondering “What on earth!” We hardly dared move or breathe ’cause the cement walk came in our direction first before it turned to make its long half circle down to the dock and the lake. “Maybe he’s going down to put his fish in a live box,” Poetry said, which is what fishermen sometimes do with their live fish which they’ve caught, especially if you don’t want to clean and eat them right away. They keep them alive in what is called a “live box” down at the lake near their docks. “But they would have been dead by now,” I said. “They wouldn’t stay alive in that sink all this time--not with all that whiskey all over them,” and Poetry said, “What whiskey all over what, where?” Then I remembered that I had only dreamed about the whiskey coming out of the pump and filling the sink, and I felt foolish, but say, that dream had seemed so real that it was just like it had actually happened. John Till’s whistle sounded farther and farther away as he went down the hill, and pretty soon we saw him coming out in the moonlight on the dock away down at the lake. “Hey!” Poetry whispered to me. “There’s a boat! He’s getting into a boat,” which is what John was doing. In the next minute and a half, with us standing up there with our teeth chattering, partly because it was a cold and damp night and partly because we were half scared half to death, we saw a flash of an oar blade in the moonlight, and a little later the boat was shoved out from the dock and we saw John Till rowing in the moonlight, going up the shore. Well, we didn’t know what was going to happen next, or whether anything would, because it seemed like everything that could possibly happen had already happened. But say, Poetry was as brave as anything. Certainly he was braver than I was right at that minute, or else we decided to do what we decided to do in spite of being afraid. “Let’s go in the cabin and look around and see if we can find the map,” Poetry said.