I guess we never had been so quiet in our lives as we were right those few seconds while we listened. And then it seemed I was not only hearing the mysterious sound in the house, but there was a groaning noise up in the trees above us also. The wind was blowing a little, and the leaves of the trees were rustling, and I remembered what Dad had said at the supper table not long ago: “To him who is in fear, everything rustles,” which was what some famous Greek poet had said over a thousand years ago.
Circus, who was very mischievous and didn’t believe in ghosts any more than I did, all of a sudden called out in an excited voice, “Gang, I see it! I see it! Come here, quick!”
It’s pretty shocking to your mind to have an excited voice call out like that right when you’re all tense inside anyway, so I jumped as if I was shot, and so did most of us. We all looked behind us to where Circus was, maybe about fifteen feet away, not far from the old windmill tower. He was looking up and pointing.
I looked in the direction he was looking, expecting to see something. I didn’t know what.
“Look and listen at the same time,” he said. “See it? It’s got two wooden limbs!”
“Two what?” Poetry squawked.
And in my mind’s eye I was imagining a ridiculous-looking thing or person or animal, something with two wooden legs. And then I saw it, and it made me mad that Circus had got us all excited over nothing, but there it was as plain as anything, away up high, maybe sixty feet above us. Two big limbs of two great elm trees were sort of interlocked, and as the trees swayed in the wind, they made a sound that was almost like a ghost’s groan.
Imagine that! It was one of the most letdown feelings I’d ever had and maybe was for all of us.
We all crowded up close to the house door again and listened and at the same time looked up toward the huge limbs of the elms as they swayed very slowly in the wind and rubbed against each other. Sure enough, the sounds were coming from up in the trees above the house and not from the inside as we’d thought.
Well, we’d solved the mystery of the haunted house, and right away we began to feel proud of ourselves and to talk about how silly people were to believe in ghosts. We knew we would have fun telling people about how we’d solved the mystery. It was time to go home anyway, so we all started.
“It couldn’t have been Old Tom the Trapper’s ghost anyway,” Little Jim said to us as we ran and walked and played leapfrog and hurried back up the creek toward our homes, “because my daddy told me the Bible says that, when a Christian dies, his spirit goes straight to heaven to be with Jesus. So what would he be doing hanging around an old house?”
But Dragonfly wasn’t convinced. He said with a pouting voice, “He might want to visit his buried body under the maple tree.”
“Not Old Tom, I’ll bet,” Poetry said as he puffed along in his own chubby body beside me. “Anybody as good a Christian as he was—if he came back, he’d do something more important than groan and scare people. He’d want to try to make everybody a Christian,” which made pretty good sense.
Well, that settled the haunted house idea for us until late that fall, when the hunting season on coon opened in the middle of November, and when it wasn’t against the law to hunt coon with dogs. And that’s the story I’ll get going on real quick and tell you about as fast as I can. Boy oh boy! Those dogs really led us into the middle of an exciting adventure!
6
Before I go any farther, I’d better tell you about Dragonfly’s tick. I knew by the way he couldn’t help twisting his neck every now and then that maybe he ought to have somebody take him to a doctor. I found out more about it when Dad and Mom were talking one day. I happened to hear Mom say to Dad, “It gives me the blues every time I think of Dragonfly’s tick. That’s the worst one I ever saw a boy have.”
I was out in our toolhouse at the time, trying to make a rustic cedar lamp. I had a wire brush, my Boy Scout knife, a wood auger, and some electric wire sockets. I was scraping off a twisted-up cedar knot, all the small knobs and pieces of wood and bark I didn’t need, and digging into the crevices and cracks to get out the old dead parts.
I was making an electric lamp to give to my cousin Wally for Christmas. Wally was red-haired and freckled like me and lived in the city and was as dumb about the country as country boys are supposed to be about a city.
I had the wire brush in my hand and was brushing with the grain of the wood to get off all the dirt and dust, and Mom and Dad were just outside the door, not far from the grape arbor. Dad had pumped a pail of water for her. I’d stopped brushing just as he stopped pumping. They didn’t hear me, or maybe they wouldn’t have talked as they did.
When Mom said to Dad what I just said she said, which you can read again if you want to, Dad said, “Yes, that’s one of the worst kind of ticks a boy ever gets.”
In my mind’s eye, I was seeing Circus’s bluetick hound, and the thing didn’t make sense at all until Mom said to Dad again, “Do you really think it’s his parents’ fault?”
And Dad said, “It could be. I talked with the doctor, and he says that when a boy has a tick —such as neck-twisting or shoulder-shrugging or throat-clearing or something like that —it nearly always means that his father or mother or maybe some other relative is picking at him too much. Always correcting him whenever he is anywhere around and making him feel that everything he does has something wrong with it. When the boy is what is called a ‘good’ boy and doesn’t fight or talk back, the feelings inside him have to get out some way, so the boy’s nerves backfire with a tick!”
Well, when my folks said that about Dragonfly, I thought about myself, and I was glad Mom and Dad knew what they knew. Right that second I understood a little better why Dad didn’t punish me as often as he used to, and why they weren’t always telling me every time I made a little mistake but were letting me just grow.
I didn’t find out till later that you spelled the kind of tick Dragonfly had “t–i–c” instead of “t–i–c–k.”
Well, just that minute I decided I would brush on my twisted cedar knot some more, which I did, thinking about what Mom and Dad had been saying and feeling sorry for Dragonfly. He really was a great guy, I thought, and he had nice parents too, and it was too bad they didn’t know about tics and how to keep a boy from getting one.
Dad carried the pail of water into the house for Mom and then, hearing me brushing away on my knot, he came to the screen door and looked in and said, “Hi, Bill. How’re you comin’?” Then he came in and watched me and, being a natural-born boy’s father, he said, “Be sure to brush with the grain, or you’ll have a rough surface.”
Feeling mischievous, I all of a sudden said, “Better not correct me too much, Dad, or I’ll get a tic, too, like Dragonfly.”
Then I ducked my head, focused my eyes on my work, and brushed away harder than ever.
“You’re a bright boy,” Dad said.
And I said in the same mischievous voice he had used on me, “I know it. I’m Theodore Collins’s son.”
Just then Mom called from the back door for Dad to come and answer the telephone, which he did. I kept brushing away, feeling fine inside and liking my parents better than ever.
And now for the rest of the story about the haunted house.
It was, as I said, the middle of November before the season for hunting coon with dogs was open and we could hunt without its being against the law.
It had been a wonderful autumn, and we had been terribly busy at our house and also at our barn. When the first frost came in September, we’d harvested all our pumpkins, putting a lot of them in the cellar and also up in our attic for pumpkin pies in the winter and chopping up a lot of them for our cows. Dad and I worked harder than anything, getting ready for winter. We cut some of the corn and shocked it, and we drilled wheat in between the corn rows so it’d be in the ground early next spring, and we spread lime and fertilizer on our south pasture, getting a lot of the fertilizer from a pile behind our barn.
Mom an
d Poetry’s mom worked together a lot, first at our house and then at theirs, getting all the cabbage heads out of the gardens and chopping them up very fine and packing them away in big jars in our different cellars. In the winter the cabbage would turn into sauerkraut, which I didn’t like but which Mom said would be good for me to learn to like because it was good for me.
All the young roosters we’d raised that year learned to crow, and old Andrew Jackson got terribly jealous of them, and the young pullets started in laying middle-sized eggs. We also made apple cider and did a million other things a farmer has to do if he wants to save the things that have grown in his fields in the summer.
On Saturdays the gang got together when our parents would let us have a little time from all the work we had to do, and we gathered hickory nuts and walnuts. On Halloween we worked a few friendly tricks on our different parents but had sense enough not to hurt anybody’s property. No matter how mischievous a boy is, if his parents or his teacher or somebody has taught him the Bible, he knows that it’s just as bad a sin to damage anybody’s property as it is to steal it—and stealing is a sin, and any boy is dumb to do it.
Finally, there came the night of the coon hunt and the wild, fierce, fast chase down the creek, past the old bare sycamore tree and farther on, past Old Man Paddler’s cabin and on and on. We’d been following the dogs when, all of a sudden, we realized that we’d been going in the direction of the haunted house.
Of course, as you know, the gang had decided it wasn’t haunted but that the groaning noise had been caused by the rubbing together of the limbs of two big elm trees away up above the old stone house’s roof.
But the way Blue Jay acted when he struck that trail, and the way Circus’s dad’s other hound, big long-eared Blackie, galloped along with and all around old Blue Jay—both of them baying and bawling and acting wilder than they ever acted on a coon trail before—it was enough to scare almost any boy.
“Listen!” Circus said to all of us, and we stopped and listened. It was a very dark, cloudy night, and we couldn’t see at all beyond the circle of our kerosene lantern lights.
It felt good to be hunting without any grown-ups with us. Circus’s dad was sick, and the family needed money, and it would be a shame not to go coon hunting the first night of the open season. So Circus had helped Poetry and Dragonfly and Big Jim and me persuade our parents that it would be all right for us to take a little walk just to see if we could catch anything along Sugar Creek.
Big Jim, the oldest one of us, carried his .22 rifle, since most country boys who are old enough are allowed to use rifles to shoot squirrels and rabbits and rats.
Little Jim’s parents let him go along too.
Most of us knew there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost, but Dragonfly still thought there was. Just before we’d started that night, he said, “I hope we don’t run into any ghosts.”
I said, “Don’t be a dumb bunny. There isn’t any such thing.”
“My mother heard a ghost last night and also one last week.”
“What did he sound like?” Circus wanted to know.
And Dragonfly answered, “Mother said he just screamed a great big long scream like he was terribly mad or maybe scared.”
Well, we knew Dragonfly’s mother could hear a ghost without there being any, because she had that kind of an imagination. So when Dragonfly said that, Poetry, who is always doing something mischievous anyway, said to Dragonfly in an excited voice, “Hey, open your mouth quick! Let me look in!”
Poetry flashed his flashlight on Dragonfly and with his other hand made some quick up-and-down movements over his head and face.
At the same time, Dragonfly ducked his head and tried to dodge the light and said, “Hey! What’re you doing?”
Poetry said, “Oh, nothing, I was just shaking salt on your words! Don’t people always say that, when you can’t believe what anybody says, you’re supposed to take it with a grain of salt?”
We didn’t have time to laugh or be mischievous right then, though, because now we had all stopped at the spring to look for coon tracks. We wanted to see if maybe some big papa or mama coon or some of their children had been there washing a late supper. But there weren’t any tracks at all.
All of a sudden I heard a long, wild bawl away up the creek in the direction of the North Road bridge, and Dragonfly let out a cry and said, “There, that’s it. That’s what my mother heard!”
“It’s Blackie!” Circus cried excitedly. “He’s hit a coon trail. Come on, gang!” He swung around, stepped across the cement basin, leaped across the mud puddle on the other side, and dashed up the hill. He passed the hanging linden tree with all of us following him. It was natural for Circus instead of Big Jim to take the lead in a coon chase.
Just that minute it seemed that old Blue Jay also had smelled trail, because he opened up with his different-pitched bawl. It was very long and had a little tail on it at the end, and it sounded like “Ooooo—woo! Ooooo—woo!”
Then both dogs cut loose in one bawl after another, sounding like a dog duet turning handsprings and somersaults.
Up the hill we all went, swinging our lanterns and flashlights and hurrying as fast as we could.
It was Poetry who thought of it first. He and I were puffing and panting along behind and in front of and beside each other. He said to me, “Listen, Bill, it sounded like they struck the trail at the very place where Old Tom the Trapper was shot!”
I got a funny feeling up and down my spine when I heard that and said, “It sounds like two ghosts—a blue-ticked one and a black-and-tan one.”
Circus and Big Jim, running ahead of us, kept yelling back to us littler guys, “Hurry up, you! They’re trailing fast!”
And we kept on hurrying.
After what seemed a terribly long chase, Circus stopped stock-still in his tracks up ahead and said, “Listen, everybody. Old Jay’s chopping. Hear him? He’s chopping at a tree!”
“Chopping!” Dragonfly exclaimed. “A dog chopping at a tree?”
We all stopped and listened, and the dog’s voice we heard was as different as night and day from Blue Jay’s long squalling bawl of a while ago. It was coming in short, quick, excited barks now. A minute later we heard a higher-pitched voice doing the same thing. I knew that was Blackie and that their new and different kind of bark was their way of telling us that whatever it was they had been trailing had run up a tree and for us to hurry up and come, which is the way coonhounds do.
Little Jim answered Dragonfly’s question by saying in a mischievous voice, “Sure. They’re trying to chop the tree down for us.”
Of course, they weren’t. Circus explained it to Dragonfly, saying, “That’s a word the man used when he sold old Blue Jay to my pop. He said that Jay bawled when he opened up on the trail and that he chopped when he had chased the coon up a tree.”
Well, we dashed on, leaping over logs and swerving around brush piles, on and on and on. Long ago we had crossed the branch and passed the sycamore tree and the cave. Then we were up into the hills past Old Man Paddler’s cabin. Still the dogs chased on, farther and farther, with us right after them, not realizing at first how far from home we were.
And then all of a sudden Poetry startled me by exclaiming in a short-breathed, excited voice, “Hey! I’ll bet you they’re barking at the old maple tree by Old Tom the Trapper’s grave!”
Everybody must’ve heard Poetry say that, especially Dragonfly, who said, “I told you it was a ghost!”
7
It took only a few more minutes of running and scrambling around trees and bushes and brier patches and clambering up and down little hills for us to get to where old Blue Jay and Blackie were acting like two wild things. They were leaping and chopping in their different-pitched voices around the base of the old maple tree. They were looking up and barking and jumping and stopping to look at us and panting with their long tongues hanging out of their mouths and acting important because they had treed a coon or whatever it was.
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br /> I quick shot the long beam of my dad’s flashlight up into the tree and swished the light all around, looking for a patch of brownish fur, which is what you expect to see if a coon is up a tree. Or maybe you’d see a pale yellowish tail with six or seven black rings around it. If he isn’t too high up, and you get a good look at him, you can maybe see his white whiskers, which are like a cat’s whiskers, and also the rest of his face. Most coons have black cheeks and a dark stripe that runs all the way up and down their foreheads.
As soon as anybody saw him, we’d tell Big Jim, and he, being a good shot, would shoot him right out of the tree for us. Mr. Coon would come crashing down through the bare branches to the ground. If he was still alive and a fierce fighter, old Blue Jay and Blackie would still be able to lick him. If Big Jim’s bullet killed him, we’d make the dogs leave him alone so that the fur wouldn’t be damaged, and the night’s hunt would be over.
Right beside me Big Jim was loading his new rifle. For a second I watched him, noticing that it was a very nice rifle with a walnut stock and a long dark-blue barrel with an open rear sight and a blade front sight. I’d seen him load a gun many a time when some of us had gone rabbit or squirrel hunting with him, and he always kept it pointed away from everybody and at the ground while he was doing it.
The dogs were making so much noise and acting so excited that we couldn’t hear much of anything. When Circus tried to stop them they would quit for a few seconds, but before we could listen long enough to hear any suspicious sounds—if there had been any to hear— one or the other of the hounds would start chopping at the tree again.
“Here,” Circus said to Big Jim, “let me have the gun. I’ll stop ’em from barking.” He walked over to Big Jim, reached out his hand for the rifle, and I thought, What on earth! Circus acted as if he was mad, too.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 27