We certainly were breathing though, sounding like four boys that had been running in a fast race and had stopped to rest. I could even hear my heart beating, so loud it almost drowned out every other sound.
Then Circus whispered, “Somebody’s coming from up the creek too!”
And sure enough, somebody was. He was almost as close as the person who was coming from the direction of the spring.
It looked as if they might both get there at the same time, but they didn’t. The one from down the creek got there first. He stopped at the very same place where in the afternoon Tom Till or somebody else had gone down the little incline to the water’s edge and helped himself to the muskrat.
He flashed on his light, shot its beam all around, into the water, and out at the muskrat houses. At the same time I could hear that other person coming from the other direction. I could hear the sound of corn blades rustling as he worked his way through Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield.
Just then the flashlight near the water accidentally lit up the person’s face, and I saw who it was. I gasped aloud and couldn’t help it. He jumped as though he’d been scared half to death, just as the boy this afternoon had when Dragonfly sneezed.
But it wasn’t my fault. Anybody who is a member of the Sugar Creek Gang would have done the same thing. Circus himself couldn’t keep still, and he exclaimed under his breath, “It’s Big Jim!”
And then things really began to happen. Like a shot, somebody else came dashing out from the shadows along the shore. And at almost the same time, a half-dozen other boys exploded from all around us like a covey of quail and flew like two-legged arrows for Big Jim, all of them getting there at about the same time.
Before Big Jim could straighten up, those big rough boys—or men, whichever they were—scooped him up, lifted him struggling and kicking and squirming, and hurled him out into the water, where he landed with a moonlit splash about seven feet from shore at the edge of a muskrat igloo.
And that woke up all the rest of the night creatures that were along the bayou, I being one of them. I knew, without even having to think, that somebody had played a mean trick on Big Jim. I shot like a red-haired, two-legged charging bull straight for that huddle of rough-looking boys—knowing who they probably were—and struck like a bale of high-nitrogen hay right in the center of all of them.
I think I expected to bowl them over and send them hurtling out into the water where Big Jim had landed, but for five reasons I didn’t. Those five ruffians were the five reasons. I not only didn’t do what I wanted to, but I did do what I didn’t want to.
Instead of ramming those guys in the stomach as I’d planned, I ran into their hands, which were waiting for me the way I wait for Charlotte Ann when she comes running toward me. Two or three pairs of strong arms caught me up like a cottontail rabbit and whirled me through the air, swinging me back and forth twice. Then away I went with the greatest of ease out through the foggy moonlight in the direction of an igloo-shaped musk-rat house. A second later I landed with a noisy splash in the cold bayou water.
Almost before you could say “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” if you had wanted to, two other boys were in the water beside Big Jim and me. They were barrel-shaped Poetry and Circus, our acrobat. Where Tom Till was, I didn’t know and didn’t find out till later.
But no sooner than we had landed in the water and started splashing around to get to our feet, there was a loud chorus of guffaws from the shore. That bunch of roughnecks who had worked such a mean trick on us started yelling with coarse, throaty voices and spilling a lot of filthy words from their dirty minds at the same time.
“Born and bred in the muskrat pond! Born and bred in the muskrat pond! Born and bred in the muskrat pond!”
One of the boys’ voices was Big Bob Till’s.
Then there was the noise of running feet as that whole gang rushed up the slope into Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield and disappeared.
Even before we could get to shore, Poetry’s nearly always cheerful mind was working to make what had happened to us seem less humiliating. He said, “Well, that’s one Halloween trick the Sugar Creek Gang won’t get the blame for tomorrow night.”
But Circus was thinking something sober. “Where’s Tom?” he asked.
We could still hear the sound of running feet, going now in the direction of the old swimming hole.
And Big Jim had thoughts of his own. He came storming out of that water with his temper boiling. “Come on!” he ordered us. “Let’s get ’em!”
And away went four sopping-wet, mad-as-hornets boys through Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield in the direction the other boys had gone. Squish, splashety, swish.
But it was like looking for a bunch of needles in a haystack to find those guys in the fog, which seemed to be getting thicker again.
At the creek we stopped, thinking we heard something on the other side. Then Big Jim let out another half-dozen angry words, saying, “The dirty crooks! They’ve cut our boat loose! It’s gone!”
And from across the creek we heard somebody laugh a loud, coarse laugh and say, “It’s over on this side, if you want it. Good night, you guys! Hope you sleep well. Sorry we couldn’t wait till tomorrow night to give you your Saturday night bath!”
And that was that. We stood there boiling inside and grinding our teeth, but there wasn’t any use to waste good temper on something we couldn’t do anything about. We’d better go home and change our clothes and get some sleep.
Just then I heard, coming from the direction of Old Man Paddler’s cabin away up in the hills, the long, high-pitched bawl of old Blue Jay, who seemed to be running happily along on a hot coon trail.
“Where is Tom Till?” Circus asked us all again.
My mind asked the same question.
Where was he?
11
Tom Till had disappeared like Little Bo Peep’s sheep, and we didn’t know where to find him. We could, of course, leave him alone, and he would go home with the tail of his coonskin cap bobbing behind him.
I was still as lost in my mind as a hound who has lost the trail of a coon. Tom had disappeared while the rest of us were splashing our way out of the muskrat pond where we had been born and bred. He had disappeared while his big brother, Bob, and his tough town gang were scattering their way through the cornfield, getting into the Sugar Creek Gang’s rowboat, which we kept chained to a willow at the swimming hole, and rowing across.
Big Jim was interested in where Tom had gone, too, but for a different reason. As we stood in our dripping clothes there on the bank, after the coarse laughter from the other side of the creek had stabbed us in the heart, he said to Circus, “It was a dirty trick. The little rascal lied to me. He called me on the phone an hour ago and told me there was a coon in one of your traps down along the bayou and he knew for sure somebody was going to follow your line for a Halloween trick and steal everything. He wanted me to come and get it. Said you had gone hunting and didn’t know about it.”
“An hour ago?” Poetry said. “How come you just got here, then?”
“I told him it wasn’t any of my business and, besides, Halloween wasn’t till tomorrow night. And I hung up. Then, after I heard your hounds up in the hills, I got to thinking maybe I ought to go down and look. So I did, and—what a dirty trick! I never thought Little Tom would do it. I suppose a brother will do anything for a brother, though. But let me get my hands on just one of them!”
And right then is when we heard Little Tom Till’s voice calling us from somewhere down along the bayou, saying, “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Come and help me!”
We started on the run in the direction his voice had come from, and in a few minutes we were by the willow against which he had leaned his air rifle that afternoon.
The little guy was down at the water’s edge, with his small flashlight in one hand, holding for dear life onto a forked stick that had a trap chain fastened to it. On the other end of the chain, caught in the trap, was a muskrat. And on the other
end of the muskrat, thrashing about in the water and holding onto the muskrat for dear life was a huge snapping turtle, the biggest one I had ever seen.
Even before we could get to Tom to help him, there was a violent splashing and boiling of the water, and it was too late to save the muskrat.
“He’s got it!” Tom cried. “He’s stole one of Circus’s muskrats!”
And now, What on earth? What on earth! I thought. Right in front of my surprised and astonished eyes I had seen the Sugar Creek trapline thief, and he was a big, vicious-headed snapping turtle!
Circus surprised me by saying, “There, you smart guys! That’s what’s been stealing my fur! That’s why I find all my traps down here thrown and nothing in them! The snapping turtles have been getting ’em!”
I knew something was wrong with that idea, though, and so did Big Jim and Poetry. Big Jim spoke up in a skeptical voice, saying to Tom, “What about the coon you told me was in the trap down here somewhere? Was that just your imagination?”
“I saw him when I was on my way home. That’s why I phoned you. There was a coon, but when you said it wasn’t any of your business, and I knew Bob—I mean, I knew somebody was going to follow the line and take everything, I came back myself. I started to take him to Old Man Paddler’s. I knew he’d fix everything up for me.”
Tom started talking like a house afire then, and it seemed he was trying to talk himself out of being a thief, as much as I didn’t like to believe he was.
Four of us were standing there as wet as drowned muskrats while Tom, with the empty trap chain in his hand and as dry as a corn blade on a sunshiny day, kept trying to explain everything.
I cut in on him once, asking, “How about the muskrat I saw you take out of the trap this afternoon—and the four you sold to Mr. Black tonight? I suppose the snapping turtle took them too, and you got them away from him!”
“No sir, I took ’em myself. I found out somebody was going to run the traps tonight, so I put on my daddy’s old hunter’s coat and got them myself. I already had three before you saw me.”
“And old Jay trailed you up a tree,” Poetry said. “See there, Bill Collins? What did I tell you?”
“But you sold those four muskrats and kept the money,” I accused Tom, feeling mad at him as well as at his brother. Somebody ought to be blamed for my being all wet!
“I took them home and put them in a gunnysack and hid them in the barn. I was going to give them to Circus as soon as I had a chance or maybe take them up to Old Man Paddler’s to get him to help me. I had five pigeons in another gunnysack I was going to sell so I could have something to give tomorrow night, and—” and then Tom’s voice broke “all—all the rest of my pigeons got out and flew away while I was trying to get the five I wanted.”
I could see then that Tom felt worse about having lost his pigeons than about anything else. He didn’t seem to have any idea that he had done wrong in taking the muskrats, which it looked as if he was trying to lie his way out of.
Over on the other side of the pond there was another splashing and a “Quoke-quoke,” as though the heron was really losing his supper, or maybe he had been listening to Tom’s mixed-up story himself and couldn’t stomach it.
But Tom was almost finished. His trembling, tearful voice hurried on. “Bob found out I was going to sell the pigeons, and he told me I couldn’t. He said half of them were his and that I had let my half fly away. And he took the sack and—and I guess he sold them to Mr. Black tonight.”
“And you sold the four muskrats!” I said. For a minute it seemed I was a detective questioning somebody we had arrested on suspicion.
“Daddy knew I wanted to sell my pigeons too. He was half drunk all day, and when he found the gunnysack in the barn, he thought it was them. Here. Here’s the four dollars!” he said to Circus. “I’m sorry I caused so much trouble—”
Then the little guy’s voice broke into a thousand tears, and he couldn’t finish. He only said, “And here, take your old trap!” He swung around and broke into a fast run down the path toward the spring.
Like a shot, Circus was after him, and the rest of us were after Circus, who caught Tom after he had run just a short way.
But that little guy struggled and fought like a trapped tiger, saying, “You won’t believe me! You think I’m a thief! You hate my daddy!”
Circus held onto him, pinning his arms to his sides so that he couldn’t hurt anybody with his fast-flying fists. “I do too believe you. I believed you all the time. You did it for me. You were trying to save my furs.”
“I wasn’t either,” Tom blurted out. “I was trying to keep Bob from having to go to jail again! I took them so that he couldn’t take them. Let me loose.” And he began to fight again.
In the struggle, his cap brushed against my face, and what to my wondering nose should appear but a smell that was almost exactly like the fur of a coon that had just been skinned. Because I was still doubting him a little, I asked, “And where did you get this cap? Where did you get the money to pay for it?”
“Old Man Paddler gave it to me yesterday. He made it. He used to help his mother make coonskin caps when he was a little boy. He wanted me to have one like he and his twin brother used to wear.”
“Let me smell it,” Circus said in a kind voice.
I was remembering what the old man had said a little over a half hour ago about having caught a coon himself night before last out behind his woodpile.
While Circus was smelling the coonskin cap, Poetry and I were smelling Tom’s hair, and it smelled like coonskin, too.
“What did I tell you?” Poetry exclaimed. “No wonder those dogs trailed him.”
And then it seemed everything was clear in my mind, and I began to feel fine. “You’re a great little guy,” I said to Tom. “You’re one of my best friends.”
“And we believe everything you’ve told us,” Big Jim said. “I’m sorry I said what I said back there.”
And then, just as it had happened before when I was at the grape arbor and Tom had handed my mother a drink of water, it was as if somebody had gone to the blackboard on which all Little Tom Till’s sins were written and erased every one of them. I guess it was just in my own mind that all those mean things had been written, anyway.
“I’ve got to get home quick and get into bed before Bob gets there and wonders where I am,” Tom said.
In spite of the weather’s being warm, for some reason Poetry and Circus and Big Jim and I were almost shivering. But we went with Tom Till all the way to the Sugar Creek bridge, anyway, and there we left him.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Tom. “You and I are going to help my dad feed the apple trees in the morning.”
“OK!” Tom called. And away he ran, his feet making a friendly noise as he scurried across the bridge toward his house.
As the rest of us walked up the road toward where it would turn to go toward my house, I thought I heard a different kind of noise, one I hadn’t heard for a whole year. “Listen to that,” I said, stopping in the gravel road.
Poetry and Big Jim and Circus also stopped to listen.
I listened toward the sky, where the sound was coming from. The noise was some of the sweetest music we ever hear around Sugar Creek in the fall. It was the honking of Canada geese going South for the winter. I knew if it had been daytime and I could have seen them, I’d have seen fifteen or twenty flying in formation, making a wide V-shaped trail through the sky. If I had been one of them, flying along, we all would have looked just alike, having dark bodies and black heads and pretty white patches under our chins.
It would be kind of wonderful, wouldn’t it—being a Canada goose, flying with long, slow, measured wing beats through the moonlit sky on the way to a warm summer climate?
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.
ISBN: 0-8024-7034-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7034-8
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Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 46