When the last spark was out, I wasn’t a bit tired. In fact, I’d never felt so wonderful in my life.
The police still hadn’t come, so we decided to get our prisoner up the hill and out to the road so he would be handy for the squad car when it came.
My bluish shirt certainly was a mess, being soppy wet and all black from the burned grass and also from being badly scorched from the fire I’d squished it onto again and again.
How to get the kidnapper up the hill was the question, when he was all tied up hand and foot. We certainly didn’t want to carry him.
“He’s still on the hook,” Dragonfly said. “Let’s untie his feet and let him walk and hold onto the line so he can’t get away, just like a big dogfish!” which is what we decided to do.
Poetry managed to get his line untangled and all wound up again. He followed along behind, ready to keep a tight line if he had to. His hook was deep into some of the flesh of the man’s right leg just above the knee.
We soon got him up to the road and made him sit down on the grass, where we tied him up again.
We certainly didn’t have any trouble at all. He acted as though he was kind of faint. He just rolled over on his side when he got to the road at the edge of the cemetery and groaned.
He said, “My leg! Get that hook out. It’s killing me!” Then he let loose a whole volley of swearwords, enough to have come from five or six other guys as foulmouthed as he was. But all of a sudden he stopped right in the middle of his cursing, let out a muffled groan, and quit, like an outboard motor with its propeller caught in a tangle of weeds.
I hardly knew what had made him stop swearing until I came to myself and realized that I was the one that had stopped him by grabbing up my soaking wet shirt and pushing it ker-slop right into the kidnapper’s face—which is what I wish I could do to most anybody’s face when I hear him swear. It’s such a filthy way to talk.
“OK,” Poetry said. “Let’s unhook my fish. Anybody got a pair of pliers?”
“Here’s his tackle box,” Circus said.
And I got a mysterious feeling again, remembering that some of the gang had said maybe the ransom money was in it.
Circus lifted the tackle box catch, opened it, and there I saw on the top tray a lot of new-looking lures: a green Jitterbug, a red-and-white Daredevil, a Kingfisher, a Jointed Pikie, a Hawaiian Wiggler, and two or three other kinds of fancy lures, which my dad used to say are put on the sporting goods shelves for the fishermen to bite on.
There was a pair of pliers in the top tray too.
On the second tray, I saw in the light of Big Jim’s powerful flashlight some other newish tackle, such as a River Runt, a Shannon spinner, and other stuff.
But in the bottom, where I was hoping we’d see the ransom money that the daddy of the little Ostberg girl had paid the kidnapper, there wasn’t a thing but air. I got a very letdown feeling.
“Give me the pliers,” Big Jim said, and we watched him perform an operation on the kidnapper’s trousers, cutting a little slit with his knife so he could get at the hook.
“Be careful,” the kidnapper groaned.
And Big Jim was just as careful as he would have been if it had been one of the gang. “Here’s why we have pliers on the roll call when you take a fishing trip,” Big Jim explained to us.
He took those pliers, which had a place on them for cutting wire, and quick snipped the hook off just above the hook’s eye. As easy as pulling out a needle, it just slipped it out.
“Anybody got any first aid stuff? Look in the tackle box.”
Circus looked, and there wasn’t any.
“Which,” Big Jim said, “is something else we have to add to our roll call as standard equipment for a boating or fishing trip—a first aid kit.”
Well, that’s the end of this story, and also almost the beginning of another, because even though we’d caught the kidnapper, the ransom money still wasn’t found—and somebody ought to find it. We knew it had to be somewhere. I had a notion the money was buried in the “papoose” grave—but when the police came a little later and dug all around, it wasn’t there at all.
Poetry and I talked about it the next day when we were by ourselves on the dock again with our lines out and our frisky chubs down in the water, making our bobbers on the lake’s quiet face look as if they were alive.
“I wonder where he did hide it,” I said.
Poetry gave a short friendly tug on his line to sort of remind his minnow to come to life down there in the water and be a little more active. Then he answered between chews on some bubble gum and said, “I don’t know.”
“We’ll have to read the newspapers to get any more news about him, I s’pose, now that he’s really caught and has been taken to jail.”
The rest of the gang were making noisy campers’ noise in and around our tents near the station wagon.
Poetry sighed. “I’ll bet the rest of our vacation’ll be as dead as Sugar Creek after the circus has left town.”
“Why?” I said.
And he said, “Because nothing could possibly happen that would be as exciting or as interesting as what has already happened in our first two days.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Something interesting could happen.”
Just that second I heard a motorboat coming from up the lake somewhere, and I looked up to see that it was the big launch that always came this time of the day to bring our mail.
We had to pull in our lines, which we started to do, and Poetry, being in a lazy mood, started to quote one of his poems, making its rhythm keep in time to the turns of the lazy winding of his reel, as he mumbled:
“Sailing, sailing over the bounding main,
For many a stormy wind shall blow
E’er Jack comes home again …”
It felt good to think maybe there ’d be a letter from home. It also felt good just to look far out over the water, away past the launch that was bringing the mail, to a very pretty tree-covered island about a mile away.
All of a sudden I got the idea that I wanted to be Robinson Crusoe and explore that island! The idea hit me like lightning striking a big maple tree down along Sugar Creek.
“That’s what I want!” I exclaimed excitedly. “Hurrah!”
Poetry came to half-interested life and said, “What’s what you want?”
And I said, “I want to play Robinson Crusoe and explore that island and find buried treasure and …”
That’s how I began to think we still might find the ransom money ourselves. And that’s the beginning of another thrilling story I’ll tell you about just as quick as I can possibly find time to dive into it.
Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!
Moody Press, a ministry of the Moody Bible Institute, is designed for education, evangelization, and edification. If we may assist you in knowing more about Christ and the Christian life, please write us without obligation: Moody Press, c/o MLM, Chicago, Illinois 60610.
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1948, 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.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7018-8
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PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek
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
I was sitting in a big white rowboat. It was docked at the end of the pier that ran far out into the water of the lake. From where I sat in the stern, I could see the two brown tents where the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang were supposed to be taking a short afternoon nap.
That was one of the rules about camp life none of us liked very well but which was good for us because then we always had more pep for the rest of the day and didn’t get too tired before night.
I’d already had my afternoon nap and had sneaked out of the tent and to the dock, where I was right that minute. I was just sitting there and imagining things such as whether there would be anything very exciting to see if some of the gang could explore that big tree-covered island about a mile away across the water.
Whew! It certainly was hot out there close to the water with the sunlight pouring itself on me from above and also shining up at me from below. The lake was like a big blue mirror that caught sunlight and reflected it right up under my straw hat, making my hot freckled face even hotter. Because it was the style for people to get tanned all over, I didn’t mind the heat as much as I might have.
It seemed to be getting hotter every minute, though. It was the kind of day we sometimes had back home at Sugar Creek just before some big thunderheads came sneaking up and surprised us with a fierce storm.
It was also a perfect day for a sunbath. What on earth made people want to get brown all over for anyway? I thought. Then I looked down at my freckled brownish arm and was disgusted with myself. Instead of getting a nice tan like Circus, the acrobatic member of our gang, I always got sunburned and freckled, and my upper arm looked like a piece of raw steak instead of a nice piece of brown fried chicken. Thinking that reminded me that I was hungry, and I wished it was supper time.
It certainly was a quiet camp, I thought, as I looked at the two tents where the rest of the gang was supposed to be sleeping. I just couldn’t imagine anybody sleeping that long—anyway, not any boy—unless he was at home and it was morning and time to get up and do the chores.
Just that second I heard the sound of footsteps from up the shore. Looking up, I saw a smallish boy with brown curly hair coming toward me along the path that runs all along the shoreline. I knew right away it was Little Jim, my almost best friend and the greatest little guy that ever lived. I knew it was Little Jim not only because he carried his ash stick with him—which was about as long as a man’s cane—but because of the shuffling way he walked. I noticed he was stopping every now and then to stoop over and look at some wild-flower. Then he’d write something down in a book he was carrying, which I knew was a wild-flower guidebook.
He certainly was an interesting little guy, I thought. I guess he hadn’t seen me, because I could hear him talking to himself, which he had a habit of doing when he was alone. There was something kind of nice about it that made me like him even better than ever.
I think that little guy does more honest-to-goodness thinking than any of the rest of the gang—certainly more than Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member, who is spindle-legged and slim and whose nose turns south at the end; or Poetry, the barrel-shaped member, who reads all the books he can get his hands on and who knows 101 poems by heart and is always quoting one; and also even more than Big Jim, the leader of our gang, who is the oldest and who has maybe seventeen smallish strands of fuzz on his upper lip, which one day will be a mustache.
I ducked my head down below the dock so Little Jim couldn’t see me and listened, still wondering, What on earth!
Little Jim stopped right beside the path that leads from the dock to the Indian kitchen, which was close by the two brown tents. He stooped down and said, “Hm! Wild strawberry.” He leafed through the book he was carrying and wrote something down. Then he looked around him and, seeing a balm of Gilead tree by the dock with some five-leaved ivy on it, went straight to the tree and with his magnifying glass began to study the ivy.
I didn’t know that I was going to call out to him and interrupt his thoughts. That was something my mother had taught me not to do when a person is thinking hard, because nobody likes to have somebody interrupt his thoughts.
But I did. “Hi, Little Jim!” I said from the stern of the boat.
That little guy acted as cool as a cucumber. He just looked slowly around in different directions, including up and down. Then his blue eyes looked absentmindedly into mine, and for some reason I had the kindest, warmest feeling toward him.
His face wasn’t tanned like the rest of the gang’s. He was what people called “fair”; his small nose was straight, his little chin was pear-shaped, and his darkish eyebrows were straight across. His small ears were the way they sometimes were—lopped over a little because that was the way he nearly always wore his straw hat.
When he saw me sitting there in the boat, he grinned and said, “I’ll bet I’ll get an A in nature study in school next fall. I’ve found forty-one different kinds of wildflowers.”
I wasn’t interested in the study of plants at all right that minute. I was interested in having some kind of an adventure. I said to Little Jim, “I wonder if there are any different kinds of flowers over there on that island where Robinson Crusoe had his adventures.”
Little Jim looked at me without seeing me, I thought. Then he grinned and said, “Robinson Crusoe never saw that island.”
“Oh yes, he did! He’s looking at it right this very minute and wishing he could explore it and find treasure or something,” I answered, wishing I were Robinson Crusoe myself.
Just that second another voice piped up from behind some sumac on the other side of the balm of Gilead tree. “You can’t be a Robinson Crusoe and land on a tropical island without having a shipwreck first, and who wants to have a wreck?”
I knew it was Poetry, even before he shuffled out from behind the sumac and I saw his round face and his heavy eyebrows that grew straight across the top of his nose, as if he had just one big long eyebrow instead of two like most people.
“You are a wreck,” I called to him, joking. We always liked to have word fights that we didn’t mean, after which we always liked each other even better.
“I’ll leave you guys to fight it out,” Little Jim said to us. “I’ve got to find me nine more kinds of wildflowers.” With that, that little chipmunk of a guy scuffed on up the shore, swinging his stick around and stooping over to study some new kind of flower he spied every now and then.
And that’s how Poetry and I got our heads together to plan a game of Robinson Crusoe, not knowing we were going to run into one of the strangest adventures we’d had in our whole lives.
“See here,” Poetry said, grunting and sliding down off the side of the dock and into the boat where I was, “if we play Robinson Crusoe, we’ll have to have one other person to go along with us.”
�
��But there were only two of them,” I said, “Robinson Crusoe himself and his man Friday, the boy who became his servant, and whom Crusoe saved from being eaten by the cannibals, and who, after he was saved, did nearly all Crusoe’s work for him.”
“All right,” Poetry said, “I’ll be Crusoe, and you be his man Friday.”
“I will not,” I said. “I’m already Crusoe. I thought of it first, and I’m already him.”
Poetry and I frowned at each other.
Then his round face brightened, and he said, “All right, you be Crusoe, and I’ll be one of the cannibals getting ready to eat your man Friday, and you come along and rescue him.”
“But if you’re going to be a cannibal, I’ll have to shoot you, and then you’ll be dead,” I said.
That spoiled that plan for a minute, until Poetry’s bright mind thought of something else, which was, “Didn’t Robinson Crusoe have a pet goat on the island with him?”
“Sure,” I said.
And Poetry said, “All right, after you shoot me, I’ll be the goat.”
Well, that settled that, but we couldn’t decide right that minute the problem of which one of the gang should be the boy Robinson Crusoe saved on a Friday and whom he named his man Friday.
It was Poetry who thought of a way to help us decide which other one of the gang to take along with us. It happened like this.
“Big Jim is out,” I said, “because he’s too big and would want to be the leader himself, and Robinson Crusoe has to be that.”
“And Circus is out too,” Poetry said, “on account of he’s almost as big as Big Jim.”
“Then there’s only Little Jim, Dragonfly, and Little Tom Till left,” I said.
Then Poetry said, “Maybe not a one of them will be willing to be your man Friday.”
We didn’t have time to talk about it any further. Right then Dragonfly came moseying out toward us from his tent, his spindly legs swinging awkwardly and his crooked nose and dragonflylike eyes making him look just like a ridiculous Friday afternoon, I thought.
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