“Privately owned, anyway,” Poetry said with a puckered forehead. “He probably stole it.”
Little Jim scowled at that, because he never liked to think anybody was bad until he found out for sure he was.
We rowed along. Little Jim and I pulled steadily toward the bend in the lake. When we got there, it’d be Dragonfly’s and Poetry’s turn to row.
“Who said I had to row?” Dragonfly asked.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw him lean his skinny self back and raise his spindly legs and put his feet up on the sides of the boat and yawn.
Then he said, “It’s wonderful to breathe all this fresh air and not have to sneeze,” which it was, but right that minute he sneezed.
Maybe it was because he had leaned back and had looked up toward the sun and that had maybe made tears in his eyes, some of which had started down on the inside of his nose and had tickled him and made him sneeze.
“You need dark glasses,” I said to Dragonfly.
That reminded Poetry of one of the 101 poems that he knew by heart and was always quoting, and it was:
Once a trap was baited with a piece of
cheese,
It tickled so a little mouse, it almost made
him sneeze;
An old rat said, “There’s danger, be careful
where you go.”
“Nonsense,” said the other. “I don’t think
you know.”
So he walked in boldly, nobody in sight,
First, he took a nibble, then he took a bite;
Snap the trap together, close as quick as a
wink,
Catching mousey fast there, ’cause he didn’t
think.
I’d learned that poem last year, and I liked it.
“Dragonfly’s the mouse that got caught,” I said.
And Poetry said, “This boat was the mousetrap, and a free fast ride was the cheese he bit on, and the oars are the jaws of the trap.”
Little Jim said with a grin in his voice, “Who was the old rat that said, ‘Danger, be careful where you go’?”
“Hey!” Dragonfly yelled out all of a sudden, “Be careful where you go!”
At the same second I felt leaves swishing across the back of my red head, and right away we were in the shade of an overhanging tree along the shore.
It was a good place to change oarsmen. Since Poetry was too heavy to sit side by side with anybody as light as Dragonfly—then the boat wouldn’t be balanced right—we decided to let him row by himself. Little Jim and I sat where Poetry had been, and Dragonfly stayed where he was.
The rest of the way to our dock and camp, Poetry and I kept looking each other in the eyes. I knew that as soon as we got to shore, he would have a secret to tell me, and that it would be something very important he had thought up about the kidnapper and how to catch him.
The gang was there on the dock, waiting and yelling and razzing us because we had to row back, and wanting to know why. Circus, who had been practicing the loon call, kept calling over and over again to us in a long, trembling high-pitched wail that sounded even more like a loon than a loon does.
Everybody was in a hurry to get started to the Indian graveyard when Barry, who was in his tent, came out with some letters in his hand, which he’d been writing. He said, “Any of you boys have any letters or cards to send to your folks? I’ll have to run these into town right away if they are to make the late afternoon train.”
He looked around at different ones of us and acted surprised when nearly all of us, even little red-haired Tom Till, had written cards or letters to our folks—even Dragonfly, whose handwriting was terrible and who hated to write anything he didn’t have to.
When Barry took our letters, I noticed that Big Jim gave him two letters to mail. I managed to be real close to Barry when Big Jim handed the letters to him, and one of the envelopes was a sort of pinkish color, and I knew it wasn’t written to his parents. I knew also whom it was written to. She was maybe one of the nicest girls in all the Sugar Creek territory and was our minister’s daughter, whose name was Sylvia.
Right away Big Jim had his back turned to Barry and was whistling a mixed-up tune of some kind. He had a stick in his hand and was stooped over, poking it into the ashes of our dead fire, where we’d cooked our dinner that day.
The fire was dead because we’d put it out. It’s not safe to leave any fire anywhere in any woods. In fact, it’s against the law to even start one in some places, or the whole dry forest might catch fire and burn up thousands of dollars’ worth of timber and people’s houses and wild animals and everything.
For some reason I got a stick real quick and helped Big Jim poke around in the dead ashes, because I had also handed Barry two letters, and one of them had been to my parents.
“You boys are on your own for a while,” Barry said. “I’ll meet you at the cemetery. Just follow the old sandy road from Santa’s cabin up the hill and past the fire warden’s house, and you can’t miss it. About a half mile up that road you’ll come to an opening on the right side, and there you are.”
Then Barry was gone in the station wagon, which is what we’d all come up North on our vacation in, and we were left alone, which is what we wanted anyway. It is ten times more fun to have fun when you are alone with your gang than when a grown-up person is with you, doing what is called “supervising” your play.
Of course, we all liked Barry plenty, but a gang needs to be by itself part of the time if it wants its fun to be fun.
In minutes we would all be tumbling along together toward Santa’s cabin, past the boat-house, where Poetry and I had heard strange noises the night before, and on up the hill to where the kidnapper’s car had been stuck in the sand, and where Poetry found the piece of broken glass.
Then we’d go past the fire warden’s house, where, I remembered, the police had made a plaster of paris cast of the kidnapper’s tire tracks. And then we would hike on the rest of the way, following the same sandy road the kidnapper had followed last night till we came to the Indian cemetery.
There we’d look around at the tombstones and see the different things and tell ghost stories and maybe pick some ripe raspberries—there might not be any raspberries, but then there might be, I thought. The graveyard we sometimes had our gang meetings in at Sugar Creek was full of weeds and had sumac and blue vervain and wild roses and wild raspberries and, earlier in the year, wild strawberries. And sometimes we’d find a bumblebees’ nest and fight the bees and kill them and get a lot of honey.
Boy oh boy! It felt good to be all alone with nobody except just the gang.
“We’ll have a gang meeting in the cemetery,” Big Jim said. “There’s something very important to vote on. Remember, school is going to start in about two weeks after we get home again.”
“School!”
Nearly all of us yelled at Big Jim at the same time. What did he want to spoil our vacation for—reminding us of school?
And then we were on the way, running and jumping and playing leapfrog and laughing and having fun. I noticed that Big Jim had his pocketknife in his hand and was looking at the different trees as we went past. For some reason I had mine out too and was helping Big Jim look for a beech tree, which is the kind of tree you carve anybody’s initials on.
We didn’t find any, though, but we did walk past and through what seemed like a whole forest of white birch. But it was against good campers’ etiquette to spoil the whitish, silvery bark on a birch tree, so we didn’t stop to carve anybody’s initials.
Every now and then Circus would let out a loony loon call, and Dragonfly would sneeze, and Little Jim would sock something with his stick, and Poetry would start a poem and be shushed up by some of us. We all liked Poetry, but we didn’t like poetry the way he did.
All the gang knew about Big Jim’s thinking our minister’s daughter was almost the nicest girl in the whole Sugar Creek territory. She was pretty and polite and studied hard and could throw a snowb
all as straight and as hard as any boy. She was also an honest-to-goodness Christian and wasn’t ashamed of it and acted as if she’d rather be a real one than be the queen of anybody’s country.
I kept on helping Big Jim try to find a beech tree—and was wondering how long it would take me to grow a little black fuzz on my upper lip like Big Jim had on his, and wishing I would hurry up and grow as big as he was.
Pretty soon Big Jim stopped and looked at a pretty silvery white birch tree’s bark, and I knew he was wishing it wasn’t against good woodsmen’s etiquette to carve initials on white birch trees.
Little Jim had been walking along close to Big Jim and me as though maybe he was looking for a beech tree himself. But I knew he wasn’t—not because he wanted to carve anybody’s initials on one, anyway. He was awfully smart, though, that little brown-haired guy, and sometimes he got a mischievous streak, which surprised everybody because he was almost always kind of serious.
He had a mischievous grin on his small face right that second, and I guessed he was thinking of something. Sure enough, he was.
He stopped beside Big Jim and me and looked at the silver bark of the birch tree and said in Big Jim’s direction, “It’s a very pretty bark, isn’t it? It’s all Sylvia colored!”
Then he gave a terrific whack with his stick at a cylinder-shaped brown cattail that grew right close by and was off on the run to where the rest of the gang were, up ahead of us. His short legs pumped like a small boy’s on a tricycle, and his brown curls shone in the sunlight like the brown flowers at the top of a long cattail stalk.
4
On the way to the Indian cemetery we had a lot of different kinds of excited talk, mostly about the kidnapper. Poetry and I showed the rest of the gang the place out in the woods where we’d found the little girl the night before, wrapped in an Indian blanket.
Then we stopped at the fire warden’s gate, where the police had made a plaster of paris cast of the tire tracks. The friendly fire warden came out of his cabin and told us he was glad to see us again. We had been to see him the night before.
And then we went on up the old sandy road toward where the Indian cemetery was supposed to be.
“Where do you suppose the kidnapper is now?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
Little Tom Till said, “Maybe a million miles away, spending all the ransom money the little girl’s daddy gave him.”
I didn’t think he was a million miles away, and neither did Poetry. He squeezed my arm, and I knew what he was thinking.
Pretty soon, our winding, twisting snakelike road, which had a lot of surprise turns in it as it wound its way through the trees, came to a little open place, and Dragonfly said, “Look! There’s some farmer living up here. See all those chicken coops?”
I looked where he was looking, and off to the side of the road in an open space were what looked to be twenty or maybe thirty weather-beaten, unpainted, very small houses about two or three feet high. But there wasn’t any farmer’s house—or barn or horses or cows or chickens or ducks or geese or sheep or children playing.
“It’s the Indian cemetery,” Big Jim said.
“What?” Little Tom Till asked. “Where are the tombstones?”
I was thinking the same thing myself. I’d been wondering what kind of gravestones there would be and what would be chiseled on them. I guess I’d been imagining it was like the graveyard at the top of Bumblebee Hill at Sugar Creek.
The little houses were used instead of tombstones, he told us.
Dragonfly had a very weird look on his face. He was the only one of the gang who was more afraid than any of the rest of us when we were in a graveyard, because his mother is superstitious and believes in ghosts.
We stopped in front of a rather new chicken-coop-looking house, and Dragonfly said, “It’s awful spooky here. Let’s get out.”
“Can’t,” Big Jim said. “We have to have a meeting here.”
“We have to wait for Barry,” Circus said. “He’s going to explain about Indian funeral rites and why they use little houses like these and stuff.” Circus was looking at the long row of small houses all facing the same way, and I knew him so well, and what a good athlete he was, that I imagined he was thinking that those little houses would make good hurdles for him to hurdle over in a race.
“What are the little holes in the front of the houses for?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
Poetry, who did more reading than any of us, had read about that in a book, so he said, “That’s to let the Indian’s spirit go in and out. And also, the live Indians bring food and different things and leave it on the little shelf there in front of the hole for the spirit to reach out and get it. They come in the evening sometimes to bring any kind of thing to eat that the dead Indian used to like when he was alive.”
Well, it certainly was an interesting place to be. We walked around, waiting for Barry.
And then Big Jim said we’d better have a meeting, which we started to have way up at the other end of the cemetery behind some sumac shrubs in some long mashed-down bluegrass. We were on the other side of a very special grave, which was larger than the others and had a low wooden fence around it.
“They bury the medicine men in an enclosure like that,” Poetry said.
We were lying down in different directions, getting ready for Big Jim to call the meeting to discuss something important and to vote on it.
“I think the idea’s crazy—bringing food for the Indian’s spirit to eat,” Circus said, rolling over all of a sudden from having been on his back and sitting up and saying what he said.
“Sh!” Big Jim said. “There comes an Indian now. Quiet, everybody. Don’t make a sound.”
I looked in the direction of the cemetery entrance, and somebody was coming. It was a man with black hair hanging down on his shoulders, with a feather stuck in it, but wearing ordinary people’s clothes like most Indians up there wore. I got the strangest feeling. It was a half-scared and half-curious feeling, but it was a different kind of scared feeling than I’d ever had before.
He had a small brand-new-looking Indian basket in one hand like the kind we’d seen along the road on our trip up here, which the Indians were selling in their open-air roadside stores.
“He’s coming this way.” Big Jim shushed us with a very quiet but very firm shush, and we shushed quick.
Yes sir, he was coming our way, shuffling along with his brownish face very sober and looking around as if he was scared there might be an Indian ghost around somewhere.
I could hear all of us breathing now as we lay there. Little Jim, I noticed, had his hand on his stick real tight. Big Jim’s face was set, and his jaws were working the way they do when he’s thinking and wondering about something. And his eyes were squinted as he watched through the foliage of the sumac that was between us and the Indian.
Dragonfly was blinking and swallowing and had his handkerchief up to his nose and was stopping what might have been a whole flock of noisy sneezes.
I noticed something weird about Poetry, though. His forehead was puckered, and he was writing something in his notebook, which would probably be something he’d use to write a paper on when school started two or three weeks from now.
Just that second, Poetry’s hand reached out and touched mine, and he pointed toward the Indian with the new basket in his hand.
“He’s pushing something through the little hole,” Poetry whispered in my right ear.
The man was squatted down, taking things—I couldn’t see what—out of his basket and pushing them through the hole of the grave house in the little fenced-in enclosure, which Poetry had told us was the grave of a medicine man.
A second later, the Indian stood, looked around as if he was still scared of somebody’s spirit watching him, and then hurried back toward the exit of the graveyard, where he ducked behind a tree and began to whistle a strange tune. He was soon out of sight and far enough away not to be heard.
“That was a very interesting tune,” Poetr
y said.
Little Jim, who takes piano lessons and whose mom is the Sugar Creek church pianist, was lying on his back with his two hands up in the air making his fingers move as if he was playing the piano.
“What’re you doing that for?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.
And Little Jim said, “I’m playing the music for the song he whistled, trying to think what it was, and I can’t.”
5
We were still all sprawled out in different directions in that old Indian cemetery, wondering, What on earth? because of what we’d just seen and heard, trying to explain things to ourselves.
I was watching Little Jim’s puckered forehead and wondering whether he’d be able to think of the tune the Indian had been whistling. I knew that if anybody in the Sugar Creek Gang could think of it, he could, because his mom was not only the best pianist in the whole Sugar Creek territory but had a music library with two copies of nearly every hymnbook that ever was published. She also had copies of lots of music by nearly all the important composers.
Little Jim had to live in what my dad sometimes called “a musical atmosphere.” So I knew if the tune the Indian had been whistling was any of the famous old songs, Little Jim would probably have heard his pretty mom play or sing it, and he might remember it.
But Circus, who has the best singing voice of any of us, remembered it first and said, “It’s ‘Old Black Joe.’”
Right away he started whistling it himself, and right away I remembered it, because we sometimes sang it for opening exercises in the Sugar Creek School.
“It might not be ‘Old Black Joe,’ though,” Little Jim said. “It might be something else. Somebody wrote some church words to that tune once too. Mother sometimes sings it.”
Then Poetry remembered it himself and started quoting some of the church words:
“Gone from my heart the world with all its
charm.
Gone are my sins and all that would alarm.
Gone evermore, and by His grace I know
The precious blood of Jesus cleanses white
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 3