“Bless our son, Bill, and our precious little curly-haired Charlotte Ann, so filled with play and mischief. And help Mother and me to bring them up to love You with their whole hearts and to always try to do what is right.”
Mom must have been right there beside Dad, because when he finished, I heard her say, “Thank you, Theo. I can go to bed now without a worry in the world. I’ve given them all to Him.”
And Dad answered, “I’ve decided you’re not going to have even one hour of insomnia tonight—not even one.”
Mom yawned and said while she was still doing it, “The way I feel now, I may not even have one minute.”
I crept away then and moved out through the drumming of the cicadas and the cheeping of the crickets toward the moonlit iron pitcher pump, feeling fine inside and glad to be alive.
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
© 1953, 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
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7033-1
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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 had been almost three months since I had gotten into an honest-to-goodness fight with anybody. In fact, I hadn’t had a rough-and-tumble scrap with a boy my size since the middle of the summer, when the gang got into that fierce fist-fight on the slope of Strawberry Hill—the one that went down in Sugar Creek history as the famous Battle of Bumblebee Hill, which almost everybody knows about.
That well-known, nose-bashing battle was in the daytime, when I could see everything. That is, I could see until one of my eyes got socked by another red-haired, freckle-faced, fiery-tempered boy’s dirty fist. That boy was Little Tom Till, who, with his parents and his big brother, had just moved into the territory.
At the top of Bumblebee Hill is the abandoned cemetery where Old Man Paddler’s wife, Sarah, and his two boys are buried and where he himself expects to be buried someday. His tombstone is already up there with his name on it.
The fistfight I’m going to tell you about right now, though, happened at night when it was so foggy I could hardly see anything, anyway. So if I had gotten one of my eyes socked shut, it wouldn’t have made much difference.
The battle was like being caught up in a whirlwind full of flying fists, with me—Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’s only boy—right in the middle of it, getting whammed on the nose and chin and almost everywhere at the same time and getting the living daylights knocked out of me in the foggy moonlight.
It seemed I was being half killed there in our old apple orchard—which is where the fight actually started and also where I was when it ended. In fact, I was lying on my back looking up through the branches of a big Jonathan apple tree and wondering, What on earth? I hardly realized that I was. I was thankful that I still was on this earth, though, because I had been hit about a hundred times so hard it’s a wonder I didn’t get killed.
Don’t think I am anybody’s sissy, though, just because I got licked that night. I could have licked my weight in wildcats, I was so mad. But when what seemed like seventeen boys with two fierce fast-flying fists apiece started swarming all over me, what chance did I have to defend myself?
Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of the gang, who was with me at the time, was getting even more stuffings knocked out of him than I was, because he weighed almost half again as much as I did.
Before I was completely licked, I noticed that Poetry was on the ground with half the seventeen boys scrambling all over him. Their mouths were spilling filthy words that were as dirty as a farmer’s barnyard on a rainy spring day when the mud is six inches thick and the cows and pigs have been walking around in it.
Generally when I am in an exciting scrap in which I have to use my muscles on some other boy, I feel fine, even when I am getting hurt. But this time—well, how can you feel fine when a boy as big as the giant in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk grabs you from behind and whirls you around as though you were a feather and whams you onto the ground as easily as if you were a cottontail rabbit and then lands ker-wham-bang on top of you?
In a minute now, I’ll get started telling you about that battle, how I got into it in the first place, and how I got out alive. But before I get that far in this story, I’ll have to tell you something else, or you’ll think the way my mom does sometimes when she looks at me with her half-worried brown eyes and says in her anxious, mother voice, “Bill Collins, how on earth do you get mixed up in so much trouble?”
Poetry and I wouldn’t have had that fight at all if it hadn’t been for Little Jim, the littlest member of our gang, putting a certain idea in my head just one day before Halloween. Also, I had be
en a little bit forgetful that afternoon and had overlooked doing something Dad told me to do—something very important.
Anyway, when anybody puts an idea in my mind like the one Little Jim put there, I nearly always have to do something about it. I just have to.
Dad, who is a sort of farmer-philosopher, has said maybe five hundred times in my life, “Sow an idea, and you reap an act; sow an act, and you reap a habit.” I don’t understand exactly what he means by that, but both Mom and Dad, probably the best parents in the whole Sugar Creek territory, are always trying to plant what they call “good ideas” in my mind, just as we plant potatoes and corn and beans in our garden. They are also always trying to pull other ideas out of my mind, the way I have to pull weeds out of our garden or cornfield.
We certainly have a lot of different weeds around our farm—jimsonweeds, for example. Those, when they are grown up, are tall and coarse and rank-smelling. They have pretty trumpet-shaped flowers but are very poisonous. Ragweeds are about the meanest weeds in our neighborhood and are the summertime cause of Dragonfly’s hay fever—Dragonfly is the small, spindle-legged, crooked-nosed member of our gang. Then there’s burdock, whose flowers turn into burrs and stick to any boy who brushes against them in the fall or late summer. We also have Canadian thistles, which swallow-tailed butterflies like the nectar of, and Queen Anne’s lace, which is Dad’s most hated weed, even though its heads are like lace and Mom thinks they are pretty. Queen Anne’s lace has very stubborn roots. If you leave even one plant for a year, next year there is a whole family of them, and, as Dad says, “The summer after that, a whole fieldful of them.” They will even take over your whole farm if you let them.
I think Dad was afraid some crazy ideas would get started in my redheaded mind and take over his whole boy.
There was one boy in our neighborhood whose mind had been taken over, and that was Bob Till, who was Little Tom Till’s big brother and lived on the other side of Sugar Creek. Their father never went to church and was always swearing and getting into trouble, often getting drunk and having to go to jail for a while. Big Bob’s mother was the unhappiest mother in the whole Sugar Creek neighborhood. Bob had jimsonweed and ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace and quack grass in about every corner of his mind, and his father had probably planted them there.
Anyway, I was telling you about the idea that Little Jim had accidentally sowed in my mind that sunshiny day before the moonlit fight in the orchard.
I was at the side of our front yard at the time, not far from the iron pitcher pump and between it and the plum tree, digging up Mom’s old tulip bulbs and planting brand-new imported Holland bulbs in their place. The next spring we would have what would look like a long, straight rainbow starting about six feet from the pump and stretching in the direction of the plum tree.
One of the prettiest sights there ever was around our farm was Mom’s tulip bed, which last year, for some reason, hadn’t done so well. Every spring, except last year, there were about fifty of them in a long, pretty row. Mom said that each one reminded her of a small child holding a tiny colored cup toward the sky for the sunshine and the rain to fall into.
As much as I didn’t like to work sometimes, I was always glad to do something like what I was doing that nice warm Indian summer day. The sun was pouring out millions of sunbeams all over the place, and all kinds of different-shaped colored leaves from ash and maple and elm and other trees were saying good-bye to their tree parents, which had taken care of them all summer, and were falling down onto the ground where they would wait for winter to come and bury them in a white grave.
It certainly felt good digging up those spadefuls of nice, brown, still-warm sandy loam, scooping my hands into it, picking up and placing in a little pile all the old, small bulbs that Mom was going to throw away, and then putting in where they had been those nice, big, imported Holland bulbs. The new ones would sleep all winter, and then in the spring the sunny weather would pull them up through the soil, and they’d be one of the first flowers for us to enjoy.
That was another reason I was glad to do the work—one of the happiest sounds a boy ever hears is when his tired mother, who is working in the kitchen, all of a sudden looks up with a happy smile on her face and exclaims cheerfully, “Just look at those beautiful tulips!
Aren’t they gorgeous?” The tulips are right where Mom can see them best through the screen of our back door, and that is what she says nearly a hundred times every spring.
I didn’t even know Little Jim was coming over to our house that day until I heard his small voice behind me. Looking up from what I was doing, I saw his mouse-shaped face. He had one of the cutest grins in the whole territory, and for a minute I thought it looked like a possum’s grin.
A possum, you know, is the only pouched mammal that lives around Sugar Creek. It is what is called a “marsupial.” In fact, I had just learned from a book Dad gave me for my birthday that the possum is the only marsupial that lives in North America and is the only mammal in North America that has a little outside pocket in which it carries its babies. The mother possum carries as many as six or even twelve cute little, blind, helpless, hairless creatures in her pocket for about six weeks after they are born. After that, they climb out and crawl all over her grizzly gray-haired back.
Sometimes a mother possum will arch her tail up over her back, and those cute little possum children will hold onto it by their own strong tails, with their heads down and their front feet clinging to the hair of her back and sides as she goes around looking for food. Their food is most anything, such as birds or their eggs, minnows, frogs, fish, insects, or fruit.
One of the most interesting things about a possum is that nearly always when you catch one, or when it knows it is about to be caught and is scared half to death, it will pretend to be completely dead. It will curl itself up into the smallest ball it can and lie very quiet with a sickly, simple-looking, sad smile on its pointy-nosed face, as much as to say, “My body is dead, but my mind is not, and I am very happy about it.”
The only thing was, Little Jim’s grin wasn’t simple, but for a minute, because he has a mouse-shaped face that is also shaped like a possum’s, he did make me think of the only North American marsupial there is.
“Hi there, red-haired, freckle-faced Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’s only son!” he said mischievously.
“Hi, Little Jim Foote.”
“What do you think you are trying to do there, anyway?” he asked me.
“I don’t think—I just work. My mother does the thinking for me.”
“I work like that, too, sometimes,” he answered, and his grin looked even more like a possum’s grin than a possum’s does.
“What you all dressed up for?” I said, starting to work again.
“Going to church,” he said.
“To church? This isn’t Sunday.”
“Mother’s on the committee for the banquet, and Daddy’s taking her over to help decorate.”
“What banquet?” I asked.
“Don’t you know? The father-and-son banquet in the basement of the church. We get a free supper and get to see some movies about Old Man Paddler’s missionary work up in Alaska.”
“I know it,” I said. “I just wanted to see if you did.”
I must have had a sad tone in my voice, because he asked, “Aren’t you glad? A free supper and everything!”
“But that’s Halloween night,” I answered, “and we won’t get to wear masks or go trick or treating or anything!”
“Aw, who wants to do that?” Little Jim said scornfully, “That’s little-kid stuff,” as if he didn’t care to believe that he was the only one of the Sugar Creek Gang who was little enough to be called a little kid. But maybe, like most any boy his age, he thought he was bigger than he was.
It had been two whole years since I had been as little as Little Jim was, which means I had lived through two more whole, wonderful Sugar Creek springs, two more great summers, two more autumns in which there we
re two sunshiny October Indian summers, and two more long, cold, snowy winters. That is twenty-four more months—more than seven hundred and thirty days—more than Little Jim had lived. And that made me a whole lot older than he was.
Also, I would always be two years older. I hadn’t been a little kid for a long time.
So I answered Little Jim, “Yeah, I know, but when you’re disguised in old clothes and wearing a mask, nobody is going to know who you are, and it’s worth pretending to be a little guy for all the candy and peanuts and popcorn and stuff you get!”
Then Little Jim surprised me by saying, “Maybe that’s the idea. My mother says that if all the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang are at the banquet, they won’t get blamed for any damage any other boys do to people’s property.”
And maybe Little Jim’s mother was right. Nearly every Halloween I could remember, things had happened around Sugar Creek that nobody in his right mind, if he had one, would be guilty of doing. There were such doings as dragging shocks of corn out of cornfields and standing them up in the roads or in people’s front yards, taking gates off hinges and letting cows and sheep and pigs run all over everywhere, setting the gates somewhere else, unfastening people’s rowboats and letting them float down the creek, letting air out of automobile tires, upsetting small farm buildings …
And sometimes some of the things that were damaged cost the farmer or whoever else they were done to a lot of money to get them repaired. So maybe Little Jim’s mother had a good idea. If the Sugar Creek Gang was at the banquet, eating a free supper and seeing a missionary movie, our parents and the sheriff and the town marshal wouldn’t have to wonder if we were to blame for any expensive Halloween pranks.
All of a sudden, Little Jim said, “They’re going to take up a special offering for the missionary speaker, and my father says I can give two dollars if I want to.”
And that was one of the ideas that got planted in my mind and was part of the cause of the fight in the apple orchard.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 37