I hadn’t realized there were so many older people—some of them extraold—living in our part of the county. They were people who used to know Kenneth Paddler when he was a boy, when he used to live here and go to school, and a few had hunted and fished with him and his twin brother.
All the gang were there, even Little Jim, whose uncle had driven him all the way back from Wisconsin.
During the service, our pastor and Old Man Paddler and all of us boys stood in the shade of the big pine tree only a few feet from Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. We were also close to where the Sugar Creek Nursery had planted the neat little spruce tree that was going to be Kenneth Paddler’s memorial—a live evergreen instead of a monument of granite or marble.
First, there was the sweetest organ music anybody ever heard. I didn’t know where it was coming from until I saw Little Jim’s mother on the other side of the spruce tree, sitting at a small battery-powered organ, and the hymn she was playing was “Beyond the Sunset.”
A male quartet from our church sang three verses of the song “We’ll Say Good Night Here, but Good Morning Up There.” Then our minister read from the Bible.
From where I was, I could see all the people standing on the hillside, stretching all the way to the top and around in a wide semicircle, looking and listening, and some of them wiping tears from their eyes.
For a few seconds my thoughts took off on a flying trip into the past, like milkweed seeds floating away on their flossy parachutes. Strawberry Hill was maybe one of the most important places in the whole territory. Everybody else in the neighborhood called it by that name, but the Sugar Creek Gang called it Bumblebee Hill because it was on this hillside that we had been forced into a rough-and-tumble battle with a tough town gang and had stumbled and rolled onto a bumblebees’ nest. In only a few seconds the fight was over.
And now there was something going on at the little tree beside and behind which the gang was standing, not more than a few feet from the organ and Old Man Paddler himself. It was Willard Kincaid, the undertaker, opening the little brown box.
As soon as the wrapping was off, he lifted out a small metal container about the size of a two-pound coffee can. Then they had what is called the “interment.” Willard Kincaid began to carefully pour out all the silver gray ashes into the little circular well they had left around the base of the tree.
Then Mr. Kincaid took a shovel and carefully covered all the ashes with yellowish brown soil. After that, standing with the rest of us with bowed heads, he waited until our minister said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
All of a sudden Old Man Paddler stepped away from the tree, lifted his trembling old right hand—the best right hand any man ever had, I thought—and signaled that he wanted to say something.
The best I can remember, this is part of what he said: “For the Christian, after death means, first of all, ‘absent from the body…at home with the Lord.’ One thing is good to remember—that a person is not saved by being good or by doing good. The door to heaven is not opened to us by any good thing we can do or by anything religious any person can do to us. Salvation is by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
“I am sure that if my brother, Kenneth, was able to tell me what he wanted said at his funeral, it would be: ‘Tell everyone that I died trusting in Christ as my very own personal Savior.’”
The old man stopped, took a deep breath, and looked toward the crest of the hill. His snow-white hair and beard shining in the afternoon sun made me think of a picture in our family’s Bible story book showing Moses standing on a mountain with the Ten Commandments in his hands.
Others must have been thinking the same thing at the same time, because Little Jim, standing beside me, whispered, “Moses. He looks like Moses!”
Everything was so quiet for a minute, with the maybe three hundred people standing and waiting and thinking, that I was actually holding my breath.
Nature, though, didn’t seem to realize what was going on. All of a sudden, from the fencerow over at the edge of the cemetery, a meadowlark let out a very fast, juicy-noted song that sounded like “Spring of the year!” A friendly little breeze came tumbling in from the woods, stirring up a half dozen or more dry leaves and pushing them toward the little mound of yellow brown soil, where they stopped near the tree trunk as though maybe they thought the ashes ought to be covered a little deeper.
I got one of the nicest surprises of my life right then. There came skimming across the open space between us and the fencerow a pair of yellow-rumped warblers. One of them lit in the brand-new evergreen and the other in a patch of last year’s dead grass. Their movements were very fast, and the neat little bird noises they were making sounded as if they thought this would be a good place for their next year’s nest. They quickly took off again in the direction of the Little Jim Tree when the organ started playing again.
The quartet sang another song. And in only a little while, after our pastor prayed a short prayer, the funeral was over.
Slowly and with everybody talking quietly, all the people began to leave. Some came down to where Old Man Paddler was, to shake his hand. Some of the mothers kissed him on his white-whiskered cheek. One of the women, I noticed, was my own wonderful, tenderhearted mother, who had to look away quickly to hide the tears she had been holding back as long as she could.
While the crowd was breaking up—some going one way and some another, fanning out all over the hill and into the woods—the gang decided that, before going to our different homes, we would go down to the spring for a drink of cold water.
At the top of the incline near the leaning linden tree, I stopped, noticing another neat little spruce tree growing beside the pasture rosebush. As many hundred times as I had passed that friendly little tree, it had never seemed important. But now, for some reason, it was maybe one of the prettiest evergreens there ever was.
I didn’t realize Little Jim had stopped, too, until from beside me he said in a half whisper, “When Old Man Paddler dies, why don’t they dig up this little tree and plant it right beside the other one?”
After saying that, the maybe best boy Christian in the whole territory took off on the run down the incline to the spring where the rest of the gang already was.
Before following him, I stood for a few seconds more, watching six or seven honeybees work the pink, five-petal rose blossoms, gathering nectar to carry back through the woods and across the Collins family yard to store it away in the hives in my father’s apiary.
A very glad feeling came into my mind then. I turned and started on the run down to the spring.
As soon as I had had my drink, I stooped, picked up a handful of small flat stones, raced to the creek bank, and began skipping them across Sugar Creek’s sober, foam-freckled face.
In a few jiffies, most of the rest of the gang was doing the same thing.
With rocks landing skippety-skip-skip-skip, with arms and hands like that many windmill sails flying, Dragonfly said, “It sure feels fine to be all together again—all eighteen of us.”
Poetry, hearing him, answered, “We’ll have to catch at least eighteen frogs a night just to make fifty cents apiece.”
As if to answer Poetry’s try at being funny, all of a sudden from behind us there came the sound of a monster bullfrog going “G-g-g-r-r-rump!”
I turned around in a hurry, knowing that bullfrogs don’t bellow in the daylight. And there, not more than fifteen feet from the place where the spring water comes gurgling out of its metal pipe, was Circus, squatting like a hundred-pound tailless amphibian and grinning like a monkey. He exploded again, three or four times in succession, with croaks that sounded even more like a bullfrog than a bullfrog does.
Dragonfly was right. It certainly did feel fine to be all together again.
We would have to change the name of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company to a shorter name, I thought. We could maybe just call it the Sugar Creek Frogs Le
gs Supply. Even though the name “Collins” wouldn’t be in it, at least it wouldn’t have to be last, as it had been.
One thing was for sure—the Sugar Creek Gang was going to be together for better or for worse, for richer or poorer—especially poorer—until death do us part.
The Sugar Creek Gang Series:
1 The Swamp Robber
2 The Killer Bear
3 The Winter Rescue
4 The Lost Campers
5 The Chicago Adventure
6 The Secret Hideout
7 The Mystery Cave
8 Palm Tree Manhunt
9 One Stormy Day
10 The Mystery Thief
11 Teacher Trouble
12 Screams in the Night
13 The Indian Cemetery
14 The Treasure Hunt
15 Thousand Dollar Fish
16 The Haunted House
17 Lost in the Blizzard
18 On the Mexican Border
19 The Green Tent Mystery
20 The Bull Fighter
21 The Timber Wolf
22 Western Adventure
23 The Killer Cat
24 The Colorado Kidnapping
25 The Ghost Dog
26 The White Boat Rescue
27 The Brown Box Mystery
28 The Watermelon Mystery
29 The Trapline Thief
30 The Blue Cow
31 Treehouse Mystery
32 The Cemetery Vandals
33 The Battle of the Bees
34 Locked in the Attic
35 Runaway Rescue
36 The Case of Missing Calf
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1955, 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, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New American Standard Bible ®, Copyright© 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)
ISBN-10:0-8024-7032-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7032-4
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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
If I hadn’t been so proud of the prize watermelon I had grown from the packet of special seed Dad had ordered from the state experiment station, maybe I wouldn’t have been so fighting mad when somebody sneaked into our garden that summer night and stole it.
I was not only proud of that beautiful, oblong, dark green melon, but I was going to save the seed for planting next year. I was, in fact, planning to go into the watermelon-raising business.
Dad and I had had the soil of our garden tested, and it was just right for melons, which means it was well-drained, well-ventilated, and with plenty of natural plant food. We would never have to worry about moisture in case there would ever be a dry summer, because we could carry water from the iron pitcher pump that was just inside the south fence. Our family had another pitcher pump not more than fifteen feet from the back door of our house. Both pumps got mixed up in the mystery of the stolen watermelon, which I’m going to tell you about right now.
Mom and I were down in the watermelon patch one hot day that summer, looking around a little, admiring my melon, and guessing how many seeds she might have buried in her nice red inside.
“Let’s give her a name,” I said to Mom. The Collins family, which is ours, gives names to nearly every living thing around our farm anyway.
She answered, “All right. Let’s call her Ida.”
Mom caught hold of the pump handle and pumped it up and down quite a few fast, squeaking times to fill the pail I was holding under the spout.
“Why Ida?” I asked with a grunt, as the pail was getting heavier with every stroke of the pump handle.
Mom’s answer sounded sensible. “Ida means ‘thirsty.’ I noticed it yesterday when I was looking through a book of names for babies.”
I had never seen such a thirsty melon in all my life. Again and again, day after day, I carried water to her, pouring it into the circular trough I had made in the ground around the roots of the vine she was growing on. And always the next morning, the water would be gone. Knowing a watermelon is more than 92 percent water anyway, I knew if she kept on taking water like that, she’d get to be one of the fattest melons in the whole Sugar Creek territory.
Mom and I threaded our way through the open spaces between the vines, dodging a lot of smaller melons grown from ordinary seed, till we came to the little trough that circled Ida’s vine. While I was emptying my pail of water into it, I said, “OK, Ida, my girl. That’s your name: Ida Watermelon Collins. How do you like it?”
I stooped, snapped my third finger several times against her fat green side, and called her by name again, saying, “By this time next year you’ll be the mother of a hundred other melons. And year after next, you’ll be the grandmother of more melons than you can shake a stick at.”
I sighed a long, noisy, happy sigh, thinking about what a wonderful summer day it was and how good it felt to be alive—to be a boy and to live in a boy’s world.
I carried another pail of water, poured it into Ida’s trough, and then stopped to rest in the shade of the elderberry bushes near the fence. Dad and I had put up a brand-new woven wire fence there early in the spring, and at the top of it we had stretched two strands of barbed wire, making it dangerous for anybody to climb over the fence in a hurry. In fact, the only place anybody would be able to get over really fast would be at the stile we were going to build near the pitcher pump, halfway between the pump and the elderberry bushes.
We would have to get the stile built pretty soon, I thought. In another few weeks school would start, and I would want to do as I’d always done—go through or over the fence there to get to the lane, which was a shortcut to school.
I didn’t have the slightest idea then that somebody would try to steal my melon or that the stealing of it would plunge me into the exciting middle of one of the most dangerous mysteries there had ever been in the Sugar Creek territory. Most certainly I never dreamed that Ida Watermelon Collins would have a share in helping the Sugar Creek Gang capture a fugitive from justice, an actual runaway thief the police had been looking for for quite a while.
We found out about the thief one hot summer night about a
week later, when Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of our gang, stayed all night with me in his green tent, which my parents had let us pitch under the spreading branches of the plum tree in our yard.
Of course, everything didn’t happen that very first night, but one of the most exciting and confusing things did. It wouldn’t have happened, though, if we hadn’t gotten out of our cots and started on a pajama-clad hike in the moonlight down through the woods to the spring—Poetry in his green-striped pajamas and I in my red-striped ones and Dragonfly in—
But I hadn’t planned to tell you just yet that Dragonfly was with us that night—which he wasn’t at first. Dragonfly is the spindle-legged, pop-eyed member of our gang. He is always showing up when we don’t need him or want him and when we least expect him and is always getting us into trouble—or else we have to help get him out of trouble.
Now that I’ve mentioned Dragonfly and hinted that he was the cause of some of our trouble—mine especially—I’d better tell you that he and I had the same kind of red-striped pajamas. Our mothers had seen the same ad in the Sugar Creek Times and had gone shopping the same afternoon in the same Sugar Creek Dry Goods Store and had seen the same bargains in boys’ nightclothes—two pairs of red-striped pajamas being the only kind left when they got there.
Little Tom Till’s mother—Tom was the newest member of our gang—had seen the ad about the sale, too, and his mother and mine had bought for their two red-haired, freckle-faced sons blue denim jeans exactly alike and maroon-and-gray-striped T-shirts exactly alike. When Tom and I were together anywhere, you could hardly tell us apart. So I looked like Little Tom Till in the daytime and like Dragonfly at night.
Poor Dragonfly! All the gang felt very sorry for him because he not only is very spindle-legged and pop-eyed, but in ragweed season—which it was at that time of the year—his crooked nose, which turns south at the end, is always sneezing, and also he gets asthma.
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