In a few minutes we were back at the bridge. Finding a clear, sharp tread mark, Poetry focused his camera on it, snapped the flash picture, and straightened up, listening in the direction of the Theodore Collins place as if he was expecting to hear something. “They ought to be here any minute now.”
“Who?” I wanted to know.
“I phoned the sheriff and told him what had happened and where—listen!”
I strained my ears in the direction of the Collins place, which is the direction Sheriff Jim Colbert and his posse would be coming from if they came.
And that’s when from the opposite direction, from over the crest of the hill, there came the splat-splat-splat br-r-r-r-r-r of the motorcycle again. Now its headlight came bob-bob-bobbing down toward us on the washboard gravel road.
At such a time there is only one thing to do, and all nine of us did it. We went down that embankment like that many bullfrogs trying to get out of the way of a boy’s flashlight and scrambled like scared cottontails for the shelter of the lilac hedge.
It was a ridiculous time to think what I happened to think right then, but I thought of the story we had read in school when we were younger about a frog who thought he was very brave—braver than any other frog in the world. He wasn’t even afraid of a cow with long horns, he said. He was bragging on himself to a school of smaller frogs, saying, “All I have to do when the cow with the long horns comes thundering toward me is to puff myself out until I am as big as the cow herself. And the cow will get scared and run away.” Just then, the story goes, an old cow broke through the fence and scared the bragging frog half to death. He took a fast headfirst leap into the frog pond and never talked again about being brave. Which proves it’s never a good idea to brag on yourself.
In another minute the motorcycle with whoever was on it would go flying across the bridge, up the hill on the other side to the north road, on to the Theodore Collins place, on and still on, and maybe run into the sheriff’s roadblock. From the lilacs, we could see without being seen.
But do you know what? That motorcycle slowed down and skidded to a stop at the bridge. They shut off the motor but left the headlight on, using it like a spotlight, turning the handlebars this way and that, lighting up the whole area. Only the lilacs we were behind kept us from being seen.
What if they spotted us? And what would they want with us anyway? They already had what they had been after.
I could hear them talking with disgruntled voices to each other, walking all around where our battle had been, using their flashlights now. One of the boys had a higher-pitched voice than the other, which made me think he might be a lot younger.
They were getting close to our hiding place, and I heard one of them say as plain as day, “It’s got to be right over there by the lilacs where I had the scuffle with the chunky boy. He not only knocked it off, but he took a handful of hair with it!”
One of the boys was swearing, calling us different kinds of names. If I had happened to have less good sense than courage, that would have sent me flying out of my shelter into a red-haired temper explosion. But at a time like that, a bragging bullfrog would be smarter to stay out of the way of a cow—and let anybody who wanted to, think he was a coward.
The three of us were in such a close huddle we could hear each other breathing. I could also hear my heart pounding.
I was startled half out of my wits right then when one of them began swishing the lilac bushes this way and that, only a few feet from us!
“Right here!” he called to the other one. “It’s got to be right here somewhere! If I don’t find it, Oliver will half kill me and then make me go home. I can’t go home!”
There came back the deeper, older-sounding voice, disagreeing and also scolding. “Will you stop blubbering! We can’t stay here all night. I’ll take care of Oliver for you. We’ve got the box, and that’s all that’s really important!”
And that’s when the lilacs, which had been having an unseen battle with Dragonfly’s nose, won the battle. Dragonfly sneezed.
That’s also when Dragonfly’s mind exploded him into action. Maybe it was his sneeze, which he knew had given him away, or else it was the mention of the little box that he had found and they had stolen. He was out of our hiding place quicker than a firefly’s fleeting flash. That little junior member of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company leaped like a spindle-legged frog toward the boy who had the box. He dived headfirst into him, grappled him around the ankles, and the battle for the box was on.
The battle for the box was not only on, but it looked for a minute as though it was going to be a battle for life for that fiery little fistfighter.
Then I guess Poetry remembered something I had forgotten—the pledge of allegiance the three of us had made when we organized our company, especially that part of it that said “Until death do us part.” He quoted it, half to me and half to himself, just before the two of us went flying out into the arena where the junior member of our company was about to get the daylights knocked out of him.
But believe it or not, that skinny little member of our firm still had his man down and was holding onto one of his legs like a bulldog, accusing him, “You’re a thief! You stole my box of jewelry, and it’s mine! You’re going to give it back! Help! Help! H–E–L–P!” he called to Poetry and me.
At a time like that, you don’t have time to think what a dumb-bunny thing the junior member of your company has done and is doing. You hear him calling for help. You see the big lummox he is fighting with right that very minute whamming your much smaller friend with a fist as big and maybe as hard as a prizefighter’s. Now he began hitting at Dragonfly with the box itself, using it as a weapon while he held onto it by the red ribbon that was wrapped around it.
Until death do us part! I exclaimed to myself.
The other boy must have been using his mind as well as his muscles. From the other side of where we had been, I heard him yell, “Be careful of that box! It’s worth a lot of money! Don’t let ’em get it. Quick! Throw it to me!”
I was still in the thick of things when I saw Dragonfly’s man, who was now on his back, suddenly toss the box over his shoulder toward the lilac hedge. It went sailing through the air with the greatest of ease. The ribbon that was tied around it and the extra length of ribbon that had come loose were dangling from it like a kite’s tail.
Also flying up into the air, with not quite so much ease, was a heavyset boy named Leslie Poetry Thompson. What he was doing was more prose than poetry as, three feet up in the air, he intercepted that backward pass.
Dragonfly, not knowing what was happening behind his back, was still holding on for dear life to the leg of the boy he had tackled. Poetry was dodging this way and that, trying to get away from the second big lummox. And I, Theodore Collins’s first and very worst son, was in the middle of everything but not sure just where.
Knowing I was pledged to do something until death do us part, I turned myself into a cow with horns and raced toward the stomach of the tough who was trying to get the box away from Poetry.
If you have ever had anybody hit you with a hard head in the middle of your stomach and had the wind so knocked out of you that you couldn’t breathe, that was maybe what I had just done to the ruffian I had right that minute rammed into. He let out a yell, doubled up, and that part of the battle was history.
At the same time, Poetry yelled, “Come on, Bill! Dragonfly! Let’s get out of here!”
And out of there we got, as soon as Dragonfly could get untangled from his man. In less than almost no time, the three of us—or was it all nine of us—were racing toward the creek and the path we knew led to the cave.
In only seconds we were away from the long cone of light from the motorcycle’s headlight and into the five thousand flashing lights of that many fireflies, all of us running in the rain like three cottontails with two mad dogs after them. And the bunnies, which we ourselves were, knew the territory, and the mad dogs didn’
t.
7
In all our scuffle with the ruffians, the thieves, Sons of Lucifer, the Devil’s angels, or whatever they were, Poetry had been smart enough to keep his flashlight in his pocket. So we would have it to use when we got to the cave, which Poetry decided was where we were going.
“How come the cave?” I managed to ask as we ran, dodging weeds and water puddles in the path.
“Because it’s closer than my place now, and we’ve got to get somewhere fast. Those Devil’s angels are not angels, you know. We don’t know what they’d do to us if they ever caught us again.”
“Maybe they know about the cave!” Dragonfly managed to say. “They’re f–f–following us!”
And the two were. A flashlight was bobbing behind us and, in spite of the tumbling water in the riffle beside us as we ran, I imagined I could hear the plop-plop-plop of angry feet thundering toward us like the thundering hooves of Harm Groenwold’s old red bull when he is mad at something or other out in the south pasture.
If we could get to the cave first, and into it, and maybe through it to the basement of Old Man Paddler’s cabin, we could quickly lock the door, dive up the cellar stairway, go through the trapdoor into the house, and be safe.
In the cabin, I knew, was a telephone that had an unlisted number, which only a few people knew—mostly just the members of the gang and their folks—because, while the old man was writing his book, he had had too many calls to interrupt his mind.
Now we were at the sycamore tree and the incline that led up to the cave’s wide mouth. Up we scrambled, and in we went. There we shushed ourselves into silence, keeping Poetry’s flashlight off.
We hadn’t been in the cave’s outer room more than a few minutes before the rough, tough guys who had been chasing us were at the base of the sycamore tree below. We dropped down to keep from being seen, because their flashlight began searching all around everywhere, up to and past the cave’s entrance and down the winding path that goes into the swamp.
“No tracks here,” one of them said. “I’ll bet they’re up there in the cave.” He shot a long beam straight up to where I had been peeking over the edge, and I had to duck down like a bullfrog dunking himself to get out of sight of a flashlight.
“All right!” One of the boy’s voices barked savagely like a policeman’s voice giving an order to a hiding fugitive. “Throw down the box, and we’ll let you go!”
That’s when Poetry whispered to us a short, sharp order. “Let’s go!”
And away the three members of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company went, hurrying through the familiar cave passageway we knew so well. Turning to the left here. To the right there. Slipping through one narrow place after another. Into one large or smaller room after another. Up and up and up. Always up. We knew that in just a little while we’d be at the big wooden door to the old man’s cellar. And soon we were.
While Poetry was fumbling around in the secret place where the key was kept, we stopped—got stopped, rather.
“Sh!” Dragonfly hissed. “Listen! The old man’s phone’s ringing!”
And it was. As plain as you can hear a phone ringing through a heavy wooden door, up a stairway, and through a trapdoor at the top, there was the honest-to-goodness faraway sound of the ringing of a telephone!
“Must be somebody who doesn’t know he’s in California,” Dragonfly suggested.
Poetry startled us with: “Or it might be Mary Jane Moragrifa!”
The idea was so surprising that I wondered, What on earth? and said so.
“That,” Poetry came back with, “is what I saw with the magnifying glass. The old man’s unlisted number—447-3132.”
Now we were in an even deeper mystery than we had been. Whoever had lost the box could be somebody who knew the unlisted number of the telephone that right this minute was still ringing!
How long the phone had been ringing, we didn’t know. If nobody answered it—and I didn’t see how anybody could unless he was in the cabin—it would stop.
Then Poetry let out a groan. “Oh, no!”
“Oh, no, what?” I asked.
His voice was muffled a little by all the nervous searching of his hand on the secret shelf where the key was kept. But what Poetry said was as clear as a school bell.
“The key is gone!”
He hadn’t any sooner said that than from far back in the passageway there was a flash of light. And I knew from the kind of light it was—and how strong it was—that it wasn’t any firefly oxidizing his luciferin. That light was as bright as a hundred dozen lightning bugs in a huddle, turning on all their lights at the same time and leaving them on.
At that same second we heard footsteps and knew that the two who had lost the first round of their battle to get back the box of jewels, or whatever was in it, hadn’t given up or been thrown off the track. They had followed us into the cave and all the way through it. And right that very minute they were about to come into the last long room, at this end of which we ourselves were. They were coming toward the big, closed cellar door—the big closed and locked cellar door!
In a situation like that, there isn’t any time to think about a song you’ve heard your mother playing and singing, but the words and the tune were in my mind anyway, flying around like swallows circling above our barnyard after sundown. Some of the words were:
There is no way out, there is no way back,
There is no other way but through.
We had to get through that cellar door and up into the house!
One thing we couldn’t do, however. We couldn’t just rush up to that big iron-reinforced door and say, “Open, sesame!” and expect it to open like the door to the robbers’ den in “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”
The phone upstairs was still ringing. Or else it had stopped and was starting again. Or unless I had a ringing in the ears of my mind.
With nobody answering the phone, it meant there really was nobody up there, so it wouldn’t do any good to start pounding on the door and yelling for somebody to come down and open it.
But Dragonfly must have thought it would, because he did start pounding on that door and yelling, “Help! Come down and let us in! H–e–l–p!”
We were like three rats in a trap. From the way my jaw felt, and the way that for some reason I couldn’t see so well with my right eye, I knew that one of the bullies, or both, had very hard-knuckled fists and powerful muscles. If only Big Jim and Circus were here! Why did they have to go off to Tippecanoe County, anyway, when there was a law against boys under sixteen working for wages on a farm?
My father had been trying to teach me, “Don’t be an if-only boy! Be a do-something-er!” But how, I ask you, can you do something when there isn’t a thing you can do? If only this were a story on a radio program or a television drama, the hero could just ram his powerful shoulder against the door, and it would break open.
But the door we were on the wrong side of couldn’t be broken through by three boys our size. If we tried it, we’d maybe get our shoulders broken instead.
I stepped back though, as if I was going to make a run for the door, and stumbled over Poetry, who right that minute was down on his knees, shining his light all around the sawdust-covered floor below the ledge where the key was supposed to have been.
I lost my balance, and down I went. As I put out my hands to stop myself from falling too hard, my right hand landed on something flat and long and the shape of a door key.
“I’ve found it!” I exclaimed in a husky whisper. “We’re saved!”
I rolled over and onto my feet, dashed to the door, then let out a groan. What I had in my hand was only a thin flat chip of wood. I hadn’t found the key, and we weren’t saved!
Now there was really no way out and no way back. And there most certainly wasn’t any way through!
“No way out, and no way back,” I heard myself saying.
Poetry heard me, and he answered my worry with a surprisingly calm voice. “
When there isn’t any way out of danger and no way through it or back, you just have to live your way through it. That’s what my father says, which is maybe what that song means anyway.”
My two good honest best friends beside me were doubled up, ready to help me in any way they could, as I answered Poetry, “If we can live!”
Behind us now came the barking voice of the biggest boy. “All right, you ornery little brats! We’ve got you now! You, there—the one with the box! Set it down and turn around and face the wall. All three of you! Hands over your heads!”
In the past we’d always had trouble with Dragonfly’s stubbornness when he was ordered to do something he didn’t want to do. In as saucy a voice now as I’d ever heard him use, he called back into that blinding flashlight, “I will not! It’s our box! We found it, and we’re going to keep it!”
The blinding light was moving slowly toward us. With my foot I felt a rock the size of a boy’s doubled-up fist. If only I could make a quick stoop … grab up the rock …
But it was only another “if only.” I started to stoop and got stopped stock-still by a savage command.
“Don’t be a fool, boy!”
The toughs kept walking toward us. The one with the flashlight was lighting the way for the other one, who right that second made a dive for Dragonfly to grab the box away from him.
But the littlest member of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company began to dodge this way and that and that way and this. For several exciting minutes he was like a mouse in a house with a woman with a broom after him, as he held onto the ribbon-wrapped box with both of his two good, honest best friends, diving and circling, ducking and whirling.
This way, that way, round and round, behind me, behind Poetry, Dragonfly kept on dodging, trying to keep from getting caught. And then, so fast I didn’t even see it happen, Dragonfly sneak-passed the box to Poetry. And now he was the roly-poly mouse in a house with two women with two brooms after him.
Not being as wiry as Dragonfly and not able to dodge as fast, Poetry tried to use a little brute force instead. He was backed against the cave wall, with the light shining in his eyes, when the best half of his mind must have given him an idea. He lowered his head like Harm Groenwold’s old red bull and charged straight for the stomach of the boy closest to him. The same boy whose stomach I had rammed into headfirst back near the lilacs was going to get whammed into again.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 23