In another minute now, we would be close enough to see the tree—and also in another minute, another member of the gang joined the chase. This time it was a tall boy with an almost mustache on his upper lip and carrying a rifle. He was the only one of the gang that owned a rifle and whose folks thought he was old enough and big enough to. It was Big Jim himself, our leader.
We had just left the old sycamore tree and were about to hurry on to the swamp to where Blue Jay’s voice was booming away, when all of a sudden there was Big Jim with his rifle on his arm and his mustache on his upper lip.
“Hey,” he called to us, “wait a minute, and I’ll help you.”
But Circus was so excited that he didn’t stop. He plunged onto the footpath and into the swamp with the rest of us right after him.
In a few jiffies we reached the tree Blue Jay was barking up, and there we all stopped and stared. Instead of there being a gray brown, black-cheeked, ring-tailed coon up there, it was a middle-sized boy—an honest-to-goodness boy!
He was about twenty feet from the ground, standing on a limb and clinging to the tree trunk, sniffing and shaking and looking scared half to death. I saw his face at the same time Dragonfly cried, “Hey! It’s Tom Till.”
And it was—Little Tom Till himself, and he was wearing a coonskin cap like the one the hunter along the bayou had been wearing. The most surprising thing of all was that at the base of the tree lay a man’s hunting coat, and old Jay was excitedly jumping up and down all over it.
What on earth! I thought. How come and why and for land sakes!
Then Little Tom Till cried out in a scared voice, “Don’t let him h–h–hurt me.”
5
It was Poetry who figured out how come a coon dog—who wouldn’t normally chase any animal except a raccoon—had trailed a boy down the creek and into a swamp and treed him.
“Remember,” he said, when he could get his thoughts in edgewise between all of the other excited things the rest of the gang were saying, “remember he dropped his coonskin cap on the wet ground and accidentally stepped on it? Well, he probably got the smell of the coonskin all over his shoes, and old Jay thought he was a coon.”
Dragonfly heard Poetry say that and answered, “That’s crazy—boys’ tracks don’t look any more like a coon’s tracks than anything.”
“Goose,” Poetry answered. “Coon dogs don’t go by what a track looks like but what it smells like.”
Well, I had been close to the different kinds of fur coats different Sugar Creek women wore, and there wasn’t a one that smelled even a little like a wild animal. I even shut my eyes and imagined myself to be standing beside an extralarge muskrat that somebody had sprayed perfume on, and it still didn’t smell like a musk-rat or a possum or even a rabbit—which Dad says is what lots of fancy fur coats are made out of.
But hounds can smell better than boys, so maybe Poetry was right, I thought. Anyway, twenty feet up that tree and right in front of my eyes was a boy in a coonskin cap, and the blue-tick had trailed him at red-hot speed from away up on the other side of the spring clear down to the sycamore tree and past it into the swamp, where we all now were.
One of the saddest feelings came into my heart right that minute, and it wasn’t just because Tom Till was crying and scared and begging us not to let the hound hurt him. It was because when I looked at the hunter’s coat—which he had probably tossed off in a hurry so he could climb the tree quick to get away from what he had probably thought was a big fierce bloodhound—I realized that the short, stocky hunter we had seen on the other side of the bayou, who had stolen the muskrat out of Circus’s trap, had been one of my favorite friends.
He had been going to Sunday school with me, and I had been hoping that before long he would become an honest-to-goodness Christian. I certainly hated to believe he would do such a thing as steal, although I knew his brother, Bob, might and maybe his father too.
It didn’t take long to get it into old Blue Jay’s long-nosed head that he had been fooled by a boy’s wet feet stepping on a boy’s ring-tailed coonskin cap and that he hadn’t been trailing an honest-to-goodness live coon at all.
We tried to get Little Tom Till to come down out of the tree, and he wouldn’t at first. “I don’t want to come down,” he sobbed.
Finally he did, though, and I was wondering what Circus would say and do to him and what Tom would say back—especially if Circus asked him about the muskrat he had stolen. It was a sad experience watching that little red-haired guy come down the tree. His blue eyes had rings around them from having rubbed the tears out with his fists—which probably weren’t very clean after climbing a tree and also after killing a muskrat with them.
The minute he was down, Tom grabbed up the big hunter’s coat, which was a lot too big for him, put it on, picked up his rifle, which I noticed was only an air rifle, and said, “I got to go home. Good-bye, everybody.” There were tears in his voice as he started on the run up the path toward the sycamore tree.
“S–s–stop him,” Dragonfly stuttered. “He’s stolen a m–m–m—” But Dragonfly himself got stopped like a firecracker that only fizzles out instead of exploding.
It was Circus who, standing close beside him, whirled around and clapped a hand over his mouth. And Dragonfly didn’t get to finish what he started to say, which I was sure was: “He’s stolen a muskrat out of one of Circus’s traps.”
I got a quick look at Circus’s face just then, and his eyes didn’t have in them anymore the light that a hunter gets in his when he is chasing a coon. Nor was there any of the angry fire that had been in them when we had first told him about somebody taking the muskrat out of his trap. There was only a very sad and disappointed look in them like a fire that has just gone out.
For several seconds all of us were very quiet, just watching that ring-tailed coonskin cap bobbing on Tom’s head while he ran as fast as he could past the sycamore tree and on toward the Sugar Creek bridge.
I knew that about a quarter of a mile on the other side of the bridge was where his folks lived.
Poetry was the first one to speak. “I’ll bet he doesn’t know that we know for sure he’s got a muskrat in the blood-proof pocket of that old hunter’s coat.”
“It looked like he has about six of them,” Dragonfly said. “No wonder he looked like an overstuffed boy when we first saw him on the other side of the bayou.”
Well, all the gang members were there now except Little Jim, and it seemed that what had happened was important enough for us to call a meeting to talk it over and decide what to do.
We found out that Big Jim had been up to see Old Man Paddler about the speech he was supposed to make at the banquet tomorrow night, which is why he happened to come along when he did. As quickly as we could, we explained to him what we had seen Little Tom do on the other side of the bayou above the spring.
“What are we going to do about it?” Big Jim asked.
Circus answered, “We aren’t going to do anything,” and there were tears in his voice. “I like that little guy,” he said, “and I just can’t believe he would do a thing like that.”
“Maybe his father made him,” Dragonfly suggested.
Poetry had an idea, too. “Maybe his mother is sick again and they need the money.”
Big Jim was sitting on a log with his unloaded rifle leaning against the sycamore tree. He never had his rifle loaded unless he was actually hunting, which is what sportsmen call a “safety measure.”
When Big Jim answered Circus, it was with one of the most sober voices I had ever heard him use. His words were, “That doesn’t change the verse in the Bible that says, ‘You shall not steal.’”
“I know it,” Circus answered, “but the Bible also says in another place that we ought to love everybody and—” He stopped and swallowed before he went on. He wasn’t looking at a one of us when he finished but, instead, was sort of staring up toward the place in the tree where Tom had been only a little while before. “I think we ought to wait
awhile. Maybe we’ll find out something we don’t know.”
“Let’s tell the sheriff,” Dragonfly suggested.
Circus blurted out a quick loud “No” so loudly and so fiercely that not a one of us felt like disagreeing with him.
Dragonfly didn’t like to have his idea squelched, though, so he just shrugged his thin shoulders and answered, “It’s your muskrat—not mine.”
“I’ll give it to him if he wants it,” Circus answered sadly. “I’m just sorry he took it like that.”
While we had been talking and having our meeting, old Jay was hurrying excitedly all around the base of the tree he had been barking up. He put his feet on the trunk as far up as he could reach and kept smelling the reddish brown, scaly bark, where I noticed there were a lot of scratches that could very easily have been made by a squirrel or some other climbing animal such as a raccoon. Then he whisked away with his nose to the ground, making wide circles around the tree and coming back again and again.
I had seen him and old Black and Tan do that many a time after they had been on a hot trail and then for some reason had lost it and couldn’t find it again. We hadn’t had any trouble getting him to understand that Tom Till wasn’t any ring-tailed coon, but being a dog and maybe a little bit like a boy who has lost something, he wasn’t satisfied.
Then all of a sudden I heard an excited sound away out in the swamp. I was so surprised that I could have jumped out of my skin, because it was Blue Jay’s high-pitched voice letting out a long, wailing bawl that was almost ten seconds long. It sounded like what I had always imagined a wolf howl would sound like on a cold, moonlit winter night.
Boy oh boy! The thrill that galloped up and down my spine was like the kind I had had many a time when I had heard that long, mournful bawl or one like it from some other hound.
The second Circus heard it, he sprang to his feet, crying out, “He’s hit another coon trail. Come on, let’s go!”
Before anybody could have stopped any of us, all of us were galloping after Circus down the path that leads into and through the swamp—the same path we use for a shortcut when we go up into the hills to see Old Man Paddler in his clapboard-roofed cabin.
I guess I’d never heard old Jay act so excited before—not in the daytime, anyway. It must be a really hot coon trail, I thought as his high, galloping bawl raced on ahead.
The five of us hurried as fast as we could after him. We were not able to run very fast though—not as fast as if we had been in the woods that go around the bayou. That was because there was so much driftwood and underbrush in the swamp, left there by the creek overflowing its banks, which it did nearly every spring. When old Sugar Creek wakes up in the spring and finds all that melted snow water running down the hills and into his bed, he is like a boy with a bad temper. He gets out of bed quick and starts running all over the place.
On and on and on we raced, through the swamp and out again, with that hound’s voice still up ahead of us and traveling toward the hills.
“I’ll bet it’s a fox,” Poetry cried.
But Circus answered back over one of his shoulders, “Old Jay won’t trail a fox. He won’t trail anything but a coon.”
“But what would a coon be doing going toward the hills?” I asked, knowing that coons generally stay close to water when they are being chased.
I had no sooner said that than Blue Jay started running in a wide, terribly fast, nose-to-the-ground half circle. And the next thing I knew, he was heading back toward the creek again.
And there is where he lost the trail for good.
Round and round and up and down the creek he raced, trying to find the trail, but it looked as if he had completely lost it.
After about fifteen minutes of his circling and whimpering, we knew there wasn’t any use to keep on. I felt sorry for the dog. He reminded me of Mom going all around our house looking for something she has lost and not finding it—searching in one handbag after another and one dresser drawer after another and in all the closets in the house, still not finding it and worrying out loud about it the way old Jay was doing right that minute. Sometimes Mom would lose something like that, and Dad and I had to stop doing something important and help her find it.
Circus had to have an excuse for his hound, so he said, “The coon probably jumped out into the creek and swam across.”
Well, it was getting late, and I was supposed to get home in time to help Dad with the chores. So pretty soon we all gave up, and everybody, including Circus, started for home. At first old Jay didn’t want to give up, but Circus made him by promising him, “We’ll give you another chance, old pal. We’ll come back here some nice damp night and show Old Ringtail a thing or two.”
After a little coaxing, Jay came over to Circus and shoved his long and probably tired-out nose into the palm of his hand as if to say, “You’re a neat guy not to hold it against me. Besides, it wasn’t my fault.”
I knew there’s not a dog in the world that can smell a coon trail in running water, because the scent washes downstream just like a piece of driftwood.
In about ten minutes we came to within sight of the bridge, and there I heard the sound of a motor. Looking up, I noticed it was Theodore Collins’s truck just driving onto the bridge with a load of baled alfalfa hay.
By the time we got to the rail fence and over it, Dad was over the noisy-floored bridge and stopping beside us. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but somebody’s boy sitting in the cab with him. What on earth? I thought.
The boy was red-haired and freckle-faced and just my size. He looked almost exactly like me—only maybe he wasn’t quite so homely. But it wasn’t me. Instead, it was red-haired, freckle-faced Little Tom Till himself with his two big front teeth shining in a friendly grin as he called out the cab window, “Hi, everybody! Want a ride?”
Imagine that! Little Tom Till, who, half scared half to death, had been chased up a tree a half hour ago—and who, as soon as he had come down out of the tree, had scurried away as fast as he could for fear Circus’s dad’s hound or some of the gang would hurt him—imagine him now sitting in the Collins family’s truck as though he was my twin brother and another son of Theodore Collins!
What on earth? I thought again. But it wasn’t any time just to think and do nothing. Dad called me to hurry up and get in. We had a lot of things to do yet before night.
I left the rest of the gang to do what they wanted to—or probably what they had to do, which was what I had to do myself. I figured maybe one of the things Dad would do first, if we had time, would be to feed our poor starving apple trees.
I certainly felt strange with Tom Till sitting between Dad and me. Tom had a serious face again and was looking straight ahead through the windshield at the gravel road. Dad was driving slowly and carefully so as not to make the load of high-nitrogen hay get overbalanced and tip the truck over and all of us land upside down in the ditch. A load of hay sometimes does that around Sugar Creek when the driver is careless.
“When we get home,” Dad said. “I’ll have to run into town. The committee at the church needs a few extra supplies, and I promised to drive in for them. You boys want to go along? We’ll phone your mother,” he explained to Tom, “so she won’t wonder why you may have to come home a little later than she planned.”
Dad and I had a chance to talk alone for a minute when he and I were in the toolshed getting his handsaw, which had to be taken to town with us to get sharpened. Dad was going to use it to trim some of the apple trees—the fall of the year was the best time of the year to do that. Tom was in the house at the time, drinking a glass of milk and eating a piece of pie, which Mom made him do nearly every time he came to our house. Maybe that was why he came over quite a lot and why I got to like him so well myself.
I explained to Dad what I had on my mind about his hiring Tom to help with the chores and also with the feeding of the apple trees.
“I thought of it first,” Dad said. “That’s why I brought him home with me.”<
br />
Dad and I also talked about the main reason that we had invited Tom to go with us to the banquet tomorrow night, which was so that he would have a chance to see a lot of other Christian men and boys and also to hear the gospel.
“Can’t we get his father to come, too?” I asked.
“He’s been invited, but—well, you know John Till doesn’t believe in God, and he hates the church. Wish we could get hold of Bob too, but he won’t let anybody love him. He seems to want to be a renegade—swearing and stealing and things like that.”
When Dad said that about Big Bob Till, I thought of John Till’s other son, who that very afternoon had stolen a muskrat out of one of Circus’s traps. But for some reason I decided not to tell Dad about it.
Just then I let out a surprised whistle and said, “Well, what do you know? Look what I found!”
Dad, who had been looking at the handsaw’s dull teeth with a question mark in his eyes, looked at what I had just found on the workbench. It was his key ring, which had on it not only the key to the truck and to the car but keys to a lot of other places around the farm.
Right that second I heard the back door of our house open and Mom and Tom’s voices as they talked. A second later Tom was out pumping himself a drink from the pump.
That is, I thought he was. Instead, he filled the cup and started back to the house with it, saying to Mom, “Would you care for a drink, Mrs. Collins?”
Something about the very polite voice Tom used when he talked to my mother, whom I liked better than any other person in the world her age, made me feel fine in my heart toward him. And it seemed as if he hadn’t even stolen the muskrat at all. He had such an innocent expression on his face that it was just as though somebody had taken an eraser at the Sugar Creek School and rubbed out a lot of ugly pictures somebody had drawn on the blackboard.
Mom thanked Tom politely, looked at him as though she thought he was a very nice boy, and accepted the tin cup from his small, still dirty hand.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 41