Even though my mind kept seeing a little brown box on the top shelf in the Collins family closet, the sad thoughts got pushed back into a corner of my mind because of all the excitement we were about to row our boat into.
We hadn’t been on the island more than a few minutes when the fog began to move in. It was not thick enough so that we couldn’t see, but it was like walking around in a big white cloud every few minutes before the cloud would move on across the island or thin itself down to nothing for a while.
A few feet out from the island shore, we followed our flashlights along as they tunneled their way through the dark. A foot or two out from shore were scores of kidney-shaped mud plantain leaves floating on their long underwater stalks, and it was among these we would find our biggest frogs.
Every now and then one of us would spot the shining eyes of a big lugger and creep stealthily toward him with the flashlight focused on him—carefully, very carefully, slowly, very slowly working our way a little closer until the light would be only a few inches from his head. Then we’d reach a hand around behind him, make a quick grab, catch the green-nosed, long-hind-legged, gravel-voiced, tailless amphibian around his wide, flat backbone and hold on tight until we could plop him into the open mouth of the gunnysack. And we would have made another fifty cents.
For some reason, though—maybe because the Till boys had already caught or scared away some of our harvest—our business venture wasn’t doing well. Even though we’d heard what sounded like seventy-seven monsters when we had still been at the top of Poetry’s hill, after working what seemed a long time we had caught only seven, only $3.50 worth.
With Kenneth Paddler’s ashes on my mind, and thinking how sad Old Man Paddler was going to be or already was because my father by now had surely made telephone connections to California—I was worried. I knew that pretty soon I would have to tell Poetry, just to get part of my mind’s load unloaded onto his.
Dragonfly was having too much fun to be told anything sad. Besides, he was too superstitious and might think that Kenneth Paddler’s spirit would also be in the box. Or maybe it had come back to Sugar Creek and was walking around on the island.
At any ordinary time, I would have enjoyed the sounds and sights that make a Sugar Creek night a lot more interesting than the world most grown-ups live in at night. Just once, as I waded around among the mud plantain leaves, I happened to think that the yellow dots on the pickerel weeds’ violet blue flowers looked like hundreds of fireflies that had turned their lights on but didn’t have enough oxidation to turn them off. Maybe when I got home I could tell my mother what I had happened to think, and it would give her a glad feeling in her mind because she liked nature so well.
And then, right in the middle of my muddle, about fifteen feet to my right, Dragonfly let out an excited: “Hey! I’ve found a hidden treasure!”
Poetry, the senior member of our company, who was maybe only seven feet to my left and near the boat, scared the daylights out of me by yelling past me to Dragonfly, “You found what?”
“A box full of gold and jewels and—and—and everything!”
With that excited answer, Dragonfly came splashing toward us, bringing with him a brown box the same size and shape as the one I had seen at home that afternoon on our upstairs closet shelf—the one addressed to Old Man Paddler and postmarked Palm Tree Island!
My mind was interrupted right then by the sound of wheels racing across the big Sugar Creek bridge about a quarter of a mile upstream. When I took a quick look, the vehicle was all the way across and gone, so I brought my mind and eyes back to Dragonfly’s treasure.
“My mother found an old horseshoe this morning, and I found five four-leaf clovers, and—” he began.
“Sh! Not so loud!” Poetry shushed our superstitious little friend. “Somebody might be watching!”
The three of us were in a little circle now, our flashlights focused on the box and on some odd-shaped letters, which could have been Chinese or maybe some other language.
“Where’d you find it?” Poetry asked, and in the reflected light I saw his face was serious. His jaw muscles were set, and his eyes were narrowed as if he was seeing not only the strange lettering on the box but seeing inside as well.
Dragonfly’s answer came with a stutter. “R–r–right over there! B–b–buried in th–th–that drift! I s–s–saw that red ribbon, p–p–picked it up and p–p–pulled on it, and it was tied to this b–b–box.”
Not only was there a four-or-five-foot-long red ribbon hanging from the box, but it was wrapped round and round and round in different directions with the same color ribbon.
If the box had been buried in a pile of drift from last spring’s flood, it had maybe floated down from far upstream. But it might have been buried here for years and years, and the flood had unearthed it. And it might be very valuable, as Dragonfly had said.
I said my thoughts to Poetry, who was studying the strange lettering.
But he shook his head. “This box has never been wet. It’s as dry as if somebody had tucked it into this drift only a little while before we got here. The ribbon is also dry.”
Then he let out a gasp. “The flashlights! We saw somebody moving around over here less than an hour ago.”
Now Poetry was running his hand in and out of different pockets of his jeans. He came out with his little magnifying glass, which I knew he carried, and which, when we needed a match and didn’t have any, could be used to start a fire with dead, decayed dry wood.
As Poetry studied the lettering on the box, he let out another quiet gasp. “Maybe we’ll make more than three fifty tonight. Here—read this!”
He handed the magnifying glass to me, and this is what I saw in very small topsy-turvy printing: “For liberal reward, return to Mary Jane Moragrifa.”
There wasn’t any address.
As I stared at the little brown box with the woman’s name on it, the weather in my mind was as misty as nature’s weather was beginning to be. A dry box with a five-foot red ribbon on it, more red ribbon wrapped round and round it, Mary Jane Moragrifa’s name on it, and a promised reward. It was like one of Grimm’s fairytales.
Because the weather was getting to be still more foggy, making it hard to see, it seemed maybe we should close our business for the night and go home, taking the box with us. Three dollars and fifty cents wasn’t very much to earn, to be divided by three, but it was better than nothing. Besides, as Dragonfly right then said, “The reward might be as much as a hundred dollars—maybe even a thousand!”
We were in the boat, ready to start rowing toward the shore, when Poetry quieted us with a hiss. “Psst! You guys hear anything?”
I listened as hard as I could in every direction. I didn’t hear anything except the maybe two hundred tree frogs having their national celebration, a few scattered bullfrogs bellowing, and other ordinary night sounds. I’d started to say so when I thought I did hear something from the direction of the branch bridge.
We squinted our eyes toward the mouth of the branch and the lilac hedge, every nerve tense, and I could feel every drop of blood in my body tingling. But as before, there were only the ordinary night sounds a boy can hear any night down along the creek—a beaver in the bayou making his dam stronger, night herons calling to each other, or maybe a screech owl letting loose with his quavering high-pitched wail, crying, “Sha–a–a–a–y!”
A screech owl did call out right then. And for a fleeting second it seemed there ought to be a referee’s whistle answering it from our south pasture.
Well, after several minutes of tense waiting, we didn’t hear anything suspicious, and we shoved off and rowed toward the shore.
As soon as our boat was tied to its sapling, we gathered ourselves into a circle again to have another and closer look at Dragonfly’s find.
How, I wondered as I read, could anybody return the box to anybody named Mary Jane Moragrifa if there wasn’t any address or telephone number?
Poetry turned the
box over and over, having wrapped the five feet of ribbon around it and tucked it in under the knot of other ribbon so that it wouldn’t drag on the ground and be stepped on when we carried it up to the Thompson guesthouse. What to do with the box would be a problem for us to work out after we got to Poetry’s place, cleaned the frogs, and put the fourteen big fat frogs legs in their refrigerator.
“There’s got to be something else written on this box,” Poetry said, holding it closer to my flashlight and focusing his magnifying glass on all four sides. He startled us then with a whistle that had an exclamation point on it.
“What?” I gasped.
Dragonfly asked, “What?” with his actions, crowding in to see what Poetry’s whistle seemed to say he had seen.
And then, before I could see what his magnifying glass had magnified, we were half scared out of what few wits we had at the time when from behind us there was a gravel-voiced bawl, like a calf learning to cry and getting stopped by somebody choking it.
I sighed a small sigh of relief when I found it was only Dragonfly himself. He had stepped on our gunnysack, and one of the frogs in bullfrog language had croaked, “Ou–ou–ouch!”
I’d started to look again through Poetry’s magnifying glass when I got interrupted once more, this time by a flash of light up near the branch bridge. The light was going on, then off. On, then off.
Poetry whispered, “It’s a car with only one headlight! I wonder if—” He stopped in the middle of his sentence. “We’ve got to get out of here quick! Follow me, you guys!”
He whirled, stumbling over the gunnysack of frogs. The little brown box with the red ribbon on it slipped out of his hands as he went down. Dragonfly shot in after it, scooped it up, and, in another shuffle of minutes, the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company was running toward the path that follows the shore of the creek to the sycamore tree and the cave. It was the path that, if you keep on it, will lead you into the swamp, through it to Old Man Paddler’s cabin, and still on to the haunted house.
It wasn’t easy to be sure of our directions because of the fog. And the weather in my mind was getting even more foggy as I wondered what was going on and why. What was in the little brown box that was worth a liberal reward if found and returned to some woman or girl named Mary Jane Moragrifa? And what had Poetry seen with his magnifying glass?
Part of the answer to my worry was only another and worse worry.
From the bushes to our left a shadowy form shot out and grappled with Poetry. Down the two went right in front of me. I stumbled over them, and down I also went—and Dragonfly came tumbling after.
In that same flash of a second, another boy darted in from the fog, and there was a tangled-up scramble of ten arms, ten legs, and five minds.
Maybe the three of us could have licked the stuffings out of the two of them, even if they were a lot bigger, if it had been daylight and they had wanted to fight. But it seemed they didn’t. What they wanted was Mary Jane Moragrifa’s little brown box.
“They st-st-stole my box!” Dragonfly cried from the ground behind me, and there was fiery temper in his voice. “Come on, you guys! We’ve got to catch ’em!”
And away we all went, pell-mell, lickety-sizzle, crunch-crunchety-crunch. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Worry, worry, worry. We were following our stolen property and maybe running headfirst into a fierce, fast fistfight that would get us bashed noses, whammed jaws, twisted arms—anything that can happen to a boy in a blind fight he maybe shouldn’t be in but sometimes finds himself in the middle of before he knows it.
6
Even as I ran stumbling along, dodging bushes and leaping over logs, through the fog and the tall grass, I was remembering that the two who had attacked us and stolen the just found little brown box were a lot bigger than we were.
“Those crazy girls!” Poetry, running ahead of me, exclaimed in an angry voice.
“Girls?” I shouted up to him. “What makes you think they’re girls?”
“Because,” Poetry panted back over his shoulder, “I caught one of them by the hair and pulled some of it out, that’s why.”
Well, those two thieves—boys or girls or maybe one of each—were as fast as a couple of red foxes with three bloodthirsty hounds after them. If only we could get to that car and head them off …
But my thoughts were like soap bubbles bursting into nothing. There was the explosion of a starting motor ahead of us near the branch bridge, and a headlight was turned on—one headlight. It turned this way and that, making a wide circle, then back, and the motor leaped into faster thundering life.
“It’s not a car! It’s a motorcycle!” I cried to Poetry ahead of me and to Dragonfly behind me.
“Let’s get the license number!” Poetry shouted.
I stumbled over a tree root right then and landed sprawling in the grass beside a sweet-smelling lilac bush. My mind was in a dizzying whirlwind of worry as I remembered another motorcycle I had seen and heard earlier in the day—one that had driven past our place at maybe sixty miles an hour and had had two long-haired riders on it. And that same motorcycle had stormed up the lane on the south side of our place, going through the gate into Harm Groenwold’s pasture and zooming out across that pasture toward Harm’s woods, following the branch in the direction of the Bay Tree Inn.
I scrambled to my feet, glad I had my sneakers on, so that my right big toe, which was a little sore, hadn’t gotten maybe even broken.
I shook my head to shake out the muddle that was in it, just in time to see the thundering motorcycle race across the board-floored branch bridge and up the hill past Poetry’s place and disappear in the foggy, foggy dew.
Now what? my mind asked me. And I didn’t have any answer. What can three boys who have been robbed of a treasure worth maybe a thousand dollars to the owner and a liberal reward to us—what can those three boys do at a time like that! In the mixed-up rough-and-tumble scuffle, we had also lost $3.50 worth of frogs.
The fog was beginning to turn into misty rain now, and if we didn’t get to Poetry’s place in a hurry, we would get soaking wet. We wouldn’t even have time to go back to where we had lost our frogs and look for them.
Grunting, panting out our disappointment, as mad as three wet hens, the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company hurried up the gravel hill the motorcycle had gone racing up only a few minutes before.
The gang had been in a lot of mixed-up adventures in the past, some of them dangerous and filled with mystery, some of them the kind in which we had had to use our muscles and fists as well as our minds.
Several of those exciting times went fluttering through my thoughts as I scurried with the other members of our company up that hill. One of the most interesting and exciting times we had ever had was when we had gone on that vacation to Palm Tree Island. There we had found Old Man Paddler’s long-lost twin brother, whose cremated remains were in a little brown box in a closet in our house. A box that was, I thought again, the size and shape of the one with Mary Jane Moragrifa’s name printed on it, which was right now on the flying motorcycle.
It certainly was a foggy night in my mind, I happened to think as the three of us reached the top of the hill and were ready to turn in at the Thompsons’ gate. There Poetry stopped us with an idea.
“Listen—we may have lost our frogs and maybe a hundred-dollar reward, but we can go back and look for the frogs. What if we do get wet? It wouldn’t be the first time! But what’s more important, we don’t have to lose the reward either. All is not lost as long as there are nine of us. We can do something about it!”
“Nine!” I moaned my disappointment, feeling drops of rain on my face right then. It certainly wasn’t the time for any of us to try to be funny.
“Nine altogether,” he said. “Remember the poem I gave in that reading at the Sugar Creek Literary Society last week? The one by Nixon Waterman?”
What, I thought, could a poem by somebody named Nixon Waterman, quoted last week by Leslie
Thompson at a literary society meeting, do to help us get back our stolen property, worth maybe a hundred dollars to us and a thousand to Mary Jane Moragrifa?
We were at Poetry’s spirea hedge now. “You guys wait right here until I get my flash camera,” he said. “We’ve got to go back down and take a picture of those tire marks where the motorcycle was standing.” And away our roly-poly friend went toward his house, his flashlight tunneling through the fog to lead the way for him.
When Poetry didn’t come back out right away, Dragonfly began to get worried. “Why isn’t he back? What’s taking him so long?”
“Listen!” I shushed my worrying friend, for I heard Poetry talking to somebody about something. We didn’t have much time to wonder to whom about what before he was back out where we were, his flash camera in one hand and his flashlight in the other.
“What took you so long?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
He got an evasive answer. “I had to make a phone call. I’ll tell you about it later. Now, about the Waterman poem. In case you have forgotten, it says that nobody is all alone when he stands between the two best friends he has ever known. And those two best friends, the poem’s last line says, ‘are his two good honest hands.’
“That means that the three of us, having two good honest hands apiece, have six best friends to help us. And that makes nine altogether, as against four bad, dishonest hands of two thieves. We also have two and a half good minds,” Poetry finished.
I couldn’t help but ask, “And which one of us has only half a mind?” It seemed he had only about half a mind himself right that minute.
“I,” Poetry agreed with my thoughts, “have only half a mind left. I gave that girl I had the fight with a piece of it.”
We had talked too long already. Action was needed and in a hurry. Poetry held out his right best friend, palm up, and barked to us, “It’ll be raining hard in a few minutes. If we don’t get the pictures, the tracks will be washed out. Come on! Follow me!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 22