Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18

by Paul Hutchens

  Next it was my turn. I’d been thinking all the time while the different requests were being made and hadn’t decided yet just what to ask for. But all of a sudden I remembered something my bushy-browed, reddish-brown-mustached dad prays for when he asks the blessing at the table at our house. So I said, “Pray for all the brokenhearted people in the world.” When Dad prays, he always adds, “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.”

  For a while after I said that, and thought that, I was lonesome for my folks—for my dad; and my brown-haired mother; and my neat baby sister, Charlotte Ann; and our black-and-white cat; and our kind of old house; and our big gray barn; and Dad’s beehives; and our potato patch.

  Also I wished, for just a second, that I could stand and take one big happy look at Sugar Creek itself, at the weedy riffle just below the old swimming hole, and the leaning linden tree above the spring, and Bumblebee Hill, where we’d had first met Tom Till and his big brother, Bob. That was where we’d had a fight, and I licked Tom, and at the bottom of that hill we had run ker-smack into the angry mother bear and her cub. And to save himself and all of us, Little Jim had shot her.

  Well, that was all our prayer requests, except Little Tom’s, and Big Jim was going to be courteous enough not to ask him, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. But then Tom spoke up and said, “Pray for my daddy, that he’ll come home again and will get a good job.”

  Then he picked up a stick that was in front of him and reached out and shoved the end of it into the fire, where it sent up a lot of pretty yellow sparks toward the blue smoke cloud up there.

  For some reason a thought flashed into my mind as if somebody had turned on a light in my head, and it was that Little Tom’s request was already on its way up to God, just as the sparks had shot up toward the sky. I felt that someday God was going to answer and give him a good daddy just like Circus’s pop was after he was saved. And Tom’s mother would be happy, and the whole family could go to church together. They would have enough to eat, and better clothes to wear, and everything.

  It certainly didn’t look as if the answer was going to come very soon, though—not after John Till was described by a radio announcer as maybe the one who had helped the kidnapper. Right now maybe John Till knew where the ransom money was buried, if it was. And if he got caught, I thought, he’d have to go to jail, and this time maybe he’d have to stay a terribly long time—years and years.

  Well, Eagle Eye gathered up all our requests, like a boy gathering up an armload of wood, and took them to God in some very nice friendly words, handing them to Him to look over and to answer as soon as He could and in the best way.

  I felt good inside just watching Eagle Eye pray, although I shut my eyes almost right away. First, he took off his big Indian hat, and I noticed he had an ordinary haircut. He left his blanket wrapped around him, though, and shut his eyes and just stood there with his brown face lit up by the fire, and he talked to the heavenly Father as though they were good friends.

  Then the meeting broke up, and pretty soon it was time for us to go to bed.

  All of us were as noisy as usual at bedtime except Tom, and I noticed he still had a sad expression on his face. I had a chance to talk with him alone a minute, just before we went to our separate tents. I walked with him to the end of the dock, where we stood looking out over the shimmering waves of the lake under the half-moon that was shining on it, and I said, “’S’matter, Tom? Something the matter?”

  He stood there, not saying a word.

  I said, “You’re one of my best friends, Tom.”

  Then he answered me very sadly. “The mail boat brought a letter from Mother, and she’s worried about Dad. He’s gone again, and nobody knows where he is.”

  I didn’t know what to say for a moment, so I just stood beside him, thinking and feeling sorry for him, wishing his dad was saved like Circus’s pop and that the Till family would all be Christians.

  I don’t know why I thought what I did just then, but it was something I’d heard Old Man Paddler say once. He said, “A lot of husbands are murdering their wives a little at a time. Someday a lot of mean husbands are going to look down into the coffins at their wives’ funerals and realize that, by not being kind to them, their wives died ten years sooner than they should have—and that’s the same as murder.”

  In that way, old John Till was a murderer too, I thought, as well as an alcoholic. And it made me feel even more sorry for the great little red-haired, freckled-faced guy who stood beside me.

  Tom had his back to me. Both of his hands were clasped around the flagpole at the end of the dock, and he was just weaving backward and forward and sideways as though he was nervous.

  “Don’t worry, Tom,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of friends, and my mother thinks your mother is great.”

  Right then I got the surprise of my life. I hadn’t realized that this little guy liked his wicked father a lot too. He said, “There are a lot of crosses all over the country like the one Eagle Eye told us about, just like the one they put up for his Indian daddy—”

  Then Little Tom stopped talking, and I heard him sniffle, and I knew it wasn’t because of the breeze from the lake or because he was allergic to anything. He liked his daddy and didn’t want him to get drunk and have a car accident and get killed.

  I felt terribly sad, but at the same time a sort of wonderful feeling came bubbling up inside of me. I liked that little guy so much it actually hurt inside my heart.

  I reached out the way my dad does to me sometimes, and before I knew I was going to do it I’d given him the same kind of a half hug Dad gives me. I said, “Listen, Tom. I think God’s going to answer Eagle Eye’s prayer for you.”

  Then I was bashful as anything and just stood there beside him while he kept on weaving back and forth with his hands still on the flagpole. Neither one of us said a word; and the waves of the lake made a friendly sound, lapping against the dock posts and washing against the sandy shore.

  Well, the gang started yelling from the tents for us to hurry and come to bed, so Tom and I started back toward the Indian fire. The fire was still alive, although the flames were kind of lazy, and the big blue cloud of smoke that had been hanging above our camp, mixed with the night sky, seemed to be gone.

  Tom and I stopped beside the fire a minute and looked down into it. Then just as he’d done before, he picked up a stick and shoved it into the coals, and a whole lot of sparks came out and shot toward the sky.

  “Hey, you—Bill,” Big Jim called to me from his tent, “it’s your turn to put out the fire. The water pail is here in Barry’s tent—”

  Every night we had to pour water on our campfires so that there wouldn’t be any danger of them suddenly coming to life in a wind and starting a forest fire.

  It didn’t take me long to get the pail, dip up some water from the lake, and pour it on that fire till there wasn’t even one tiny spark visible.

  Little Jim came out and went along with me as I made two or three trips from the fire to the lake and back.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said to me just as I was about to leave him at his tent. He had been sleeping in Big Jim’s tent with Tom Till and Barry Boyland. The rest of us—in fact, the whole Robinson Crusoe gang—slept in the other tent. It was my two goats and my man Friday and me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Can I play Robinson Crusoe with you tomorrow?”

  I was dumbfounded. “What?” I said. “Who told you about—about our game?”

  “I just guessed it,” he said, “when Dragonfly said you walked on his neck, and he was a native boy, and that they’d been trying to make soup out of him.”

  I wouldn’t promise him, because I wasn’t sure what my man Friday and my two goats would think of the idea. But later when my goats and my man Friday and I were alone in our tent, we talked it over.

  Friday said, “Let’s let him—and he can be my slave.”

  Poetry spoke up from his sleeping b
ag beside me and said, “Let’s let him, because he didn’t get to help us find the little Ostberg girl and he wasn’t even with us when we caught the kidnapper in the Indian cemetery!”

  So that was that. We wouldn’t take Tom Till along though. We didn’t want him to know his daddy was up here and that he might be mixed up with the kidnapping mystery. Also, for some reason it didn’t seem right to have Big Jim come along and be our leader, when Robinson Crusoe had to be the leader himself.

  Boy oh boy! I could hardly wait till tomorrow!

  For a long time I lay awake in our dark tent, smelling the smell of mosquito lotion and hearing the noise of Dragonfly’s snoring and the regular breathing of Poetry and Circus. I was thinking a lot of things. I hadn’t said my prayers yet, and I was already in my sleeping bag with the zipper zipped up, although I’d prayed with the rest of the gang around the fire when Eagle Eye prayed out loud for all of us.

  But it seemed it had been a dangerous day, as well as a very wonderful one, and God had taken good care of all of us, and I ought to tell Him so. Of course, I could just talk to Him without kneeling, the way I sometimes do, but this seemed extra important.

  So very quietly I zipped open my sleeping bag, squirmed myself into a kneeling position, and while a mosquito sang in my right ear without stinging me, because the ear had mosquito repellent on it, I said a few extra special words to God. I wound up by saying, “And please don’t let John Till murder Little Tom’s mother. Please save him as quick as You can, and if there is anything I can do to help You, let me know, and I’ll try to do it.”

  A little later, while I was lying warm and cozy in my bag, listening to Dragonfly’s crooked nose snoring away like a handsaw cutting through a board, it seemed there was kind of a warm secret between God and me and that it might not be very long until Tom would have a new daddy. Then I dozed off into sleep, and right away, it seemed, I was mixed up in the craziest dream I ever was mixed up in.

  My dream was about John Till, and it seemed he was all tangled up in the kidnapping mystery. John had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and was standing beside the sink in the old cabin, pouring the whiskey over a stringer of fish. He kept on pouring and pouring. In fact, the whiskey bottle sort of faded out of the dream, and John was pumping the old iron pitcher pump, which, quick as an eyewink was standing at the end of the board walk in our backyard at Sugar Creek. Whiskey instead of water was coming in big belches out of the pitcher’s mouth and was splashing down over the fish, which were in our water tank, where our cows and horses drank.

  All of a sudden I noticed that the stringer offish had all changed, and there wasn’t a walleye or a northern pike among them, but only big, dark brown, ugly bullheads. And they weren’t on the stringer anymore but were swimming around and playing and acting lively in our water tank filled with whiskey. Poetry, who was standing beside me in my dream, said in my ear, “Look, Bill—the whiskey’s changed all the fish into bullheads.” It was a silly dream.

  Right that second I felt something touching me in the ribs. I forced my stubborn eyes open a little but couldn’t see much because it was very dark in our tent. But I did see the shadow of someone leaning over me, and after such a crazy dream I was scared of who it might be.

  Then I heard Poetry’s husky whisper right close to my face saying, “Hey, Bill!”

  “What?” I whispered up at him. My mind was all tangled up with mixed-up ideas.

  Poetry’s whisper back in my ear was, “Let’s take a look at the invisible-ink map. I just dreamed there was another line running off in a different direction. Let’s hold a hot flashlight down real close to it and see if there is.”

  I didn’t want to wake up—rather, I did want to go back to sleep again—but Poetry kept on whispering excitedly about his dream. So I reached over to my shirt, which I had hung on my camp chair close by, and ran my hand into the pocket where I’d kept the map. Well, I hadn’t any sooner got my hand inside than a very scared feeling woke me up quick.

  “Hey!” I whispered to Poetry. “It’s not in my pocket!”

  8

  Sure it is,” Poetry said. “It’s got to be!”

  “But it’s not!” I said, more wide awake than I usually am when I am wide awake. I must have made a lot of excited noise because Dragonfly stopped snoring, sneezed a couple of times, and wanted to know what was going on and why.

  “Nothing,” my roly-poly goat said to him. “We’re just looking for something.”

  “Well, look with your eyes instead of your voices,” Dragonfly said. “I’m allergic to—ker-chew!—to—ker-chew!—to noise!”

  “It’s your own snoring that woke you up,” Poetry said to my man Friday. “Now go back to sleep.”

  I certainly felt strange. “Somebody’s stolen it,” I said to Poetry. I was running my hands frantically through all the pockets of my trousers and shirt and all the other clothes I’d had on during the day.

  We flashed the flashlight all around the tent and into every corner where the envelope might have fallen out of one of my pockets.

  “We’ve got to find it,” Poetry said. “Where do you suppose you lost it?”

  “Lost it! Somebody’s sneaked in here and stolen it!”

  “Hey!” Poetry said, as though he had thought of a bright idea. “When do you remember looking at it last?”

  My thoughts galloped back over the evening and then the afternoon, and I couldn’t remember.

  “What pocket did you have it in last?” he asked.

  I thought and said, “Why, my shirt pocket where I keep my New Testament. I put it there when I—”

  And then I stopped talking and gasped. I’d thought of something. “Maybe we—maybe it dropped out of my pocket back there in the cabin when we were climbing out of the window.”

  Then Poetry said, “Yeah, or maybe you left it out on the front porch, and that’s why John Till didn’t come back to try to stop us. Maybe he found it on the floor out there and picked it up—if it was what he’d been looking for.”

  My acrobatic goat came to life then. He groaned and turned over and tried to go back to sleep.

  Poetry was more excited than I was. He said, “Bill Collins, we’ve got to find that map, and I don’t think we lost it around here anywhere.”

  “Let’s all go back to sleep,” my man Friday said.

  “Go ahead. Who’s stopping you?” I said.

  I scrambled into my clothes, while Poetry did the same thing, each of us knowing what the other one of us wanted to do. In less time than it takes to tell, we had on enough clothes so we wouldn’t get cold when we stepped outside into the chilly night, as nights are up North even in the summertime.

  We had our two flashlights and were soon looking around the outside of our tent, sneaking along as quietly as we could so as not to wake up any of the rest of the gang in the other tent. We flashed our flashlights on and off all around the circle where we had been sitting at the campfire service. But there was no sign of any envelope there. Then we looked all around the lean-to where we had gotten the dry logs for Eagle Eye’s Indian fire. But we still didn’t find anything.

  So Poetry and I followed the path up the shore to the fish cemetery and looked all around where we had been digging to bury the fish heads and entrails.

  “Maybe it fell out of your pocket when you were digging here,” he said.

  But there wasn’t a sign of what we were looking for there, either. It was just like looking for a needle in a haystack when there wasn’t any needle to look for.

  “Will you ever!” Poetry exclaimed, tossing his light all around in a circle at the newly made fish graves. “The coons have already been here.”

  I could see they had. I flashed my light from place to place and off into the woods in a big circle and up into the trees. But I didn’t see a thing that looked like bright shining eyes or pretty gray fur or a furry tail with black rings around it, which is the kind of tails ring-tailed coons have.

  From the fish cemetery we went out
to the end of the dock and back, then to our tent again. When we stopped in front of the closed flap we listened, but my man Friday and my acrobatic goat were as quiet as mice, so we decided they were asleep.

  “Do you know what?” Poetry said, and I said, “What?” and he said, “I think we’d better go back up along the trail where we were this afternoon to see if maybe we dropped it along there somewhere.”

  I couldn’t imagine being able to find it at night even if it was there. Besides, I still had the notion—in fact, a very creepy feeling inside of me—that somebody must’ve sneaked into our tent while we were asleep and stolen it out of my pocket.

  “Well,” Poetry said, “when did you last look at it? When did you last have it out of your pocket? Where were you when you last saw it?”

  And I must confess that the last time I had seen the envelope was when we were still at the cabin. I had shoved it into my shirt pocket right beside where I kept my New Testament.

  When I told Poetry that, he said, “OK, then, when did you last have your New Testament out of your pocket?”

  Well, I gasped out loud when he said that, for I remembered that I’d had my New Testament out of my pocket when I was on the porch of the old cabin where John Till was. I’d been holding it in my hand while I was looking out across the very pretty, terribly stormy lake.

  “You mean you haven’t looked at it since then?” Poetry asked me, astonished, and I said, “No.”

  I was astonished at myself, but then of course we’d all decided not to tell the rest of the gang but to keep the map secret for a while. That explained why I hadn’t taken it out of my pocket. Eagle Eye hadn’t asked us to read any verses out of the Bible, so I hadn’t even thought of opening my New Testament. If I had, I would no doubt have noticed that the envelope was missing.

  “OK, come on,” Poetry said. “Let’s get going,” which we did, hurrying as fast as we could through the wet grass and along the path that was bordered by the still wet bushes, although the late afternoon sun had dried things off quite a bit.