After talking awhile and telling us he had arranged to give one of his fall lectures at Sugar Creek, he said, “Romaine and I have a problem. The first of September, we’re moving into a home in a new housing project in Indianapolis. When we signed the lease we had to agree to a no-pet clause. That means Romaine will have to surrender Napoleon. We can’t bear the thought of having him put to sleep, so-well, we wonder if any of you boys would like to own a very loyal dog. He is a little nervous, perhaps, but even though he is a mongrel, he would make some boy very happy.”
Circus was the first to answer. “He and Silent Sal seem to get along pretty well together, but we already have three other dogs—”
Big Jim straightened up from studying a hole in the ground near the Black Widow Stump where Napoleon had been digging. He said, “He doesn’t have any pedigree, I suppose.”
“No one knows his ancestry,” the professor answered. “Romaine found him about a year ago when we were visiting the Humane Society. There was a litter of copper-colored puppies someone had brought in, two of which were exactly alike, except that one had a white mark on his throat. That was the one Romaine wanted. Next day she decided she wanted the other one so that she would have a pair, but we were too late. Right after we had left, a red-haired boy had come with his parents and adopted him.”
Boy, oh, boy! Did that set my mind in a happy whirl! Before any of the rest of the gang could say anything, I quick spoke up, saying, “I know a boy who would like to have a dog like that.”
And then, with all of us helping a little, we told the professor the story of Alexander the Coppersmith, the battle with the wildcat, and everything.
When I got home that afternoon, my father put in a long-distance call to Memory City to a family named Sensenbrenner. And that is why my aunt, her husband, and a boy named Wally Sensenbrenner came driving as fast as they could to Sugar Creek to see if Wally would like to adopt Napoleon Bonaparte to take the place of Alexander the Coppersmith.
“Do you know what?” I asked Dad while he and I were down in the barn doing the chores to get them over with early.
He was up in the haymow throwing down alfalfa for the cows. He called down the ladder to ask, “No, what?”
I had just found three hen’s eggs in a new nest on the middle shelf of Dad’s tool cabinet and was feeling proud of myself for finding them. I answered him with a very happy voice, saying up to him, “I’ve just thought up a new name for Wally to call Napoleon. He could name him—”
A pile of hay the size of three chicken coops came landing with a swoosh at my feet as I finished what I had started to say. “A good name for him would be ‘Happiness’!”
Down came another bunch of alfalfa, even bigger, along with Dad’s question, “Why ‘Happiness’?”
“Because,” I yelled up to him, “happiness was born a twin!”
While Dad and I were flying around, doing all the different things a boy and his father get to do together before supper, it seemed I had never felt so happy in my life before. I just kept imagining how happy Wally was going to be when he saw Alexander the Coppersmith’s twin brother and found out that he could have him for his own special dog friend for as long as he lived.
I was so happy that when I got to the house a little later, I decided to try to make our old black-and-white cat happy too. First, I called her to come and get her supper of fresh warm milk, which I was ready to pour into her feeding pan near the grape arbor.
Three seconds after I had raised my voice, she was there, mewing up at me, and acting as if she had even more than nine lives, all of them starving to death.
“Wait, cat,” I said down to her, holding the milk pitcher high out of her reach. “I have something to show you first.” I then quickly took out of my shirt pocket a picture of a cat caught in a take-it-easy trap, which picture Poetry had had developed and given me when we were down in the woods that afternoon.
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, nice kitty, kitty, kitty. Here is something you ought to take a good look at.” I handed the picture down to her so she could see herself as others had seen her at midnight quite a few weeks ago.
But do you know what? That black-and-white feline took one disgusted sniff at that snapshot, gave me a smoky-eyed stare, and started acting as though Poetry’s snapshot, showing what a dumb-bunny cat she was, was the picture of somebody else’s cat. Her rough tongue went rickety-slurp-slurp-slurp while she lapped up the milk I poured for her, and it seemed she was saying, “I know that picture looks like me, but it wasn’t me. That was one of my cat sisters. Just in case you didn’t know it, sir, I was born a twin, too.”
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1969, 1998 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.
Cover Design: Ragont Design
Cover Illustration: Don Stewart
Original Title: White Boat Rescue at Sugar Creek
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7030-0
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PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!
It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.
You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
It was one of the finest summer mornings I had ever seen, I thought as I rolled over and out of bed, took a deep breath of fresh air, and looked out the open window of my upstairs room.
The June sun was already up, shooting long slants of light across the backyard and garden. Old Red Addie, our big red mother hog, was grunting around the front door of her apartment hog house at the south end of her pen. Fifteen or twenty of Mom’s happy laying hens were already up and scratching near the garden gate, scratching and eating and singing and scratching and eating—gobbling down what Dad calls “grains, greens, grubs, and grits,” which is the variety of food a good laying hen has to have to stay well and lay an egg a day.
I guess there’s nothing in the world that looks finer to a boy than an outdoor morning when there is plenty of open space for the sunshine to fall in and when the sky itself is as clear and blue as the water in Sugar Creek looks on a clear day when you are looking down at it from the bridge.
In the field east of the barn, the corn was talking in a thousand voices, making a hu
sky, rusty rustling sound, as it says in a certain poem we had to memorize in school.
I started shoving myself into my jeans to make a dash downstairs and see if Mom’s pancakes and bacon would taste as good as they smelled. Suddenly, from somewhere beyond the twin pignut trees at the north end of the garden, there came a meadowlark’s juicy-noted, half-wild, very musical, rippling song. It seemed to say, “Summer is coming and springtime is here!”
But a beautiful, wonderful outdoor summer was already here, having the time of its life making corn and beans and potatoes grow, making birds build nests to raise their baby birds in, spreading blankets of wildflowers all over Sugar Creek territory, and even making the fish bite.
Downstairs, Mom had the radio tuned to a favorite program whose theme song was “Every Day’s a Wonderful Day.”
Before I started to make my usual race for the head of the stairs, I happened to see our big Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary in the alcove by the bookcase. I decided to quickly look up a word—any word my eye happened to land on—which would be my word for the day. That was one of our family’s fun games for the summer. Each person selected a new word from the dictionary, and all of us used it over and over again at different times during the day, just to get acquainted with it.
Already that summer I’d learned important words such as leisure, which Dad said was pronounced with a long e, but Mom said she liked a short e better. It meant “spare time,” which a boy hardly ever has enough of. I also learned a new meaning for the word freeze, which is what a gopher or chipmunk or groundhog does when it is startled or scared. It rears up on its haunches to study and think and wait until it seems safe for it to drop down to the ground and go on about its business.
I quickly ran my right forefinger and both eyes down a column of words under the letter f and stopped when I came to a word I thought was new. It was “flotsam.” I didn’t even dream what an important word it was going to be before the day was over—and especially before the summer came to its exciting and dangerous climax.
On the way downstairs I was saying over to myself the dictionary’s definition of “flotsam,” which was “goods cast or swept from a vessel into the sea and found floating.”
Before I reached the bottom step, my imagination had me drifting along out in a boat in Sugar Creek. And one of the gang accidentally or on purpose was rocking the boat. Then the boat capsized, and all of us were getting spilled out into what my mind’s eye saw was a wild, stormy, sealike creek. Our oars fell overboard, and the waves carried them away. Fishing tackle boxes, bait canteens, straw hats—everything was turned into flotsam.
That was as far as my shipwreck got right then because I was near enough to the kitchen table to make a dive for my chair and start sawing away on a stack of pancakes.
For some reason, though, I didn’t sit down right away. I got to go out to the barn first to help my father finish the chores, which meant the horses and cattle got to eat their breakfast before we did.
At the table, Mom’s wonderful day was interrupted by Charlotte Ann’s upsetting her bowl of cereal in her high chair tray, making flotsam out of it in several milk-spattered directions. Some of it landed on the island shore of Mom’s brown linoleum floor. Mom scolded her gently.
“You won’t believe it,” I said to my family, as I denied myself wanting to sit still and let Mom mop up the mess, “but my word for the day is ‘flotsam.’”
“I believe it,” Mom said, trying to keep her excitement in her mind. “Every day’s not only a wonderful day, but it nearly always has a lot of little upsets, and the main boat upsetters in this house are my two wonderful children. One of them not only rocks the boat and often upsets it but actually throws her goods overboard.”
Dad, maybe trying to lighten our family boat a little, said, “There are three words that usually go together: ‘flotsam,’ ‘jetsam,’ and ‘lagan.’ Lagan, Son, if you ever look up its meaning, is goods cast to drift or sometimes sunk on purpose, but it’s attached to a buoy to float, so that if anybody finds it, they will know it belongs to somebody.”
Trying to be funny and maybe not being very, I managed to say, “Who would want to tie anything to a boy?”
“B-U-O-Y,” Dad spelled and winked at Mom. Then he remarked to her, “Anything tied to a B-O-Y would be really sunk—some other father’s boy, of course.”
Well, we had a few minutes’ talk about a Bible verse, which we try to do once a day at our house so that we would have an anchor to tie our minds to in case we had an upset of some kind. Then we left the table and moved out into the working part of the day, hoping it would be as wonderful all day as it had been up to now—which it had to be for a certain B-O-Y.
I say it had to be, because the six sets of parents of the Sugar Creek Gang were sending the whole gang on a special errand, which I will tell you about in a few minutes, just as soon as I can write that far.
“Here’s a little flotsam,” Mom said, stopping me as I was about to go outdoors. She handed me a little basket containing a warm package of something wrapped in transparent plastic. It smelled as if it had just come from the oven, which it had. “Be sure, now, to make the Fenwicks welcome. Remember your best manners; smile and offer to do anything you see needing to be done.”
“I will,” I said, enjoying the smell of the warm, freshly baked something or other.
And away I went, remembering my best manners even at home by shutting the screen door quietly. I was quickly on my way down to the Black Widow Stump to meet the gang. As soon as the whole gang was there, we’d have a hurry-up meeting to decide different things. Then we’d all take whatever our different mothers had baked and go across the bridge and down the creek to the Maple Leaf, a brand-new cabin we had helped build on a wooded knoll across the creek from the mouth of the branch.
In the Maple Leaf, having moved in only yesterday, was a missionary couple. They were to be the very first missionaries to spend part of their furlough in it. Dr. John Fenwick and his wife, Elona, had spent a lot of years in Central America, and they had come home for a rest and to get a little change from the very hot, humid climate that far south.
John Fenwick was a medical doctor, we found out, and his doctor down in Costa Rica had ordered him home for a rest. He had the kind of heart trouble called “angina pectoris.”
The Maple Leaf, maybe I ought to tell you, was built on property owned by Old Man Paddler, the kind, long-whiskered old man who lived up in the hills and was always doing kind things for people—especially for missionaries, whom he seemed to like almost better than he did boys.
The wooded knoll had been given to the Sugar Creek Church, and all the men of the church as well as a lot of other men in the neighborhood—and also the Sugar Creek Gang itself—had built the cabin for free. That had seemed even more fun than swimming and diving in the old swimming hole or catching sunfish and goggle-eyes. It certainly was a lot more enjoyment than weeding the garden and helping clean out the barn.
Anyway, today was the day. As soon as we’d get our welcoming visit over, the rest of the whole morning would be ours to do with as we liked, our twelve parents had told us.
Mom’s final orders about politeness having been tossed back into the history section of my mind, I was now on my way like a “barefoot boy with cheek of tan,” as a poem by James Whit-comb Riley says. I sped across the yard to the walnut tree by the gate, gave the rope swing a fling toward the east, and leaped out of the way when its heavy board seat came swooshing back. It would have bowled me over if it had hit me.
I took a quick look around the base of the tree to see if there were any new ant lion larva traps, and there were—three new conical pits in the powdery sand. I knew that buried at the bottom of each pit—now seven all together—was a hairy larva, the hatched egg of a night-flying insect. Each larva would stay buried, all except its head, until an ant or other insect accidentally tumbled into its trap. And then, wham! Flurry! Chop! Chop! Slurp! Slurp! And the ant lion would have had its breakf
ast without having to work for it or wait for its mother to cook it.
Any boy who knows anything about an ant lion knows that its mother is a damselfly and that she lays her eggs on the surface of sandy or dusty soil under a rocky ledge or close to a house or barn or tree. As soon as the wormlike babies are born, they dig those cone-shaped traps themselves and are ready for breakfast without having to dress or help their parents do the chores or wash dishes or baby-sit, since each ant lion is its own baby-sitter.
But also, an ant lion never knows how good it feels to plop-plop across a dusty road with its bare feet—which it doesn’t have anyway—or go racing like the wind through the woods on the way to meet a gang of other ant lions its age and size.
I must have daydreamed several minutes too long at the walnut tree, because from the house I heard Mom yell, “Hurry up, Bill, and get gone! Charlotte Ann’s on the warpath! She wants to go with you. So the sooner you’re out of sight, the sooner you’ll be out of her mind, and she’ll be out of my hair!”
The worry in Mom’s voice made me sing out across the grassy yard to her, “Every day’s a wonderful day!”
“For B-O-Y-S!” she called back. “Now you hurry up. And tell the Fenwicks we’re glad they’re here and to let us know whenever there’s anything we can do for them. Be sure to make them feel at home!”
And then away I did go, plop-plopping my bare feet in the dust all the way across the road. I hadn’t any sooner swung up and over the rail fence than I remembered that at that very place, a few yards from the elderberry bushes, I had had a fierce, fast fistfight with one of the orneriest boys that ever lived in the territory. That boy’s name was Shorty Long. In spite of my having given him a licking, he was still one of the worst boys anywhere around.
The only peace the gang had from him was when his family was away spending their winter vacations in a warm climate somewhere, which they did every year.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 10