Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18

by Paul Hutchens

  “Let’s run,” Big Jim said, “or it’ll be too dark to follow his tracks. Or else maybe when he gets to some of those places where the wind has a clean sweep, he’ll lose our trail and get lost, and then if we can’t find him, he’ll have to stay out all night in the hills and maybe freeze to death!”

  That sounded like serious business. I was thinking about the “absolute concentration” that Middle-sized Jim had to have all the time when he walked or ran. If he got too cold or worried or something, he might not be able to concentrate and would have to use his crutches. He might fall down a lot of times and hurt himself. He might not even be able to get up. So if we didn’t find him, he really would be lost and have to stay out all night in the woods in the very cold weather.

  So away we all went, not stopping to think that our own folks might be worrying about us, wondering where we were and why we didn’t come home.

  Pretty soon we came to the old sycamore tree, where, earlier in the afternoon, we had decided not to go through the cave on our way to the haunted house but, instead, had gone on around the long way. There, in the quick gathering twilight, we stopped and looked at each other’s worried faces.

  Big Jim said, “He’s gone on, following our tracks. I was hoping he had gone into the cave and that maybe we could follow him through and find him up in Old Man Paddler’s cabin.”

  Little Jim, standing beside me, holding onto his ash stick, looked really concerned. I noticed that his teeth were chattering with the cold, and I wished that he, being such a little guy, were home beside a nice warm fire.

  “We’d better start really running if we want to catch up with him before he gets clear up to the haunted house.” Big Jim studied Middle-sized Jim’s tracks. “At least he hasn’t started falling down yet.”

  “Let’s holler and see if we can make him hear,” Circus said. He was able to make a terribly loud, high-pitched call that sounded both like a loon and a ghost. Right away, he let out a bloodcurdling long, weird scream. “Ohoooo! Ohoooo!”

  We listened, but there was no answer—not even an echo—but we did hear something.

  “What is that?” Dragonfly asked. “Sounds like a swarm of bees or an airplane or something.”

  And honest-to-goodness for sure, something did sound like a swarm of bees. We all listened as hard as we could. And then I began to get worried, because what we’d heard wasn’t an airplane or a swarm of bees but wind blowing through the bare branches of the oaks and maples and elms and other trees of the Sugar Creek hills.

  “We’ve really got to get going now,” Big Jim said. “That’s wind! There’s a terrible storm coming up, and when it hits it’ll pick up all this loose dry snow and whip it up into a blizzard! It’ll cover up every track we ever made, and he’ll really get lost for sure! And we can’t follow his tracks either!”

  Only one thing was right to do, and we started to do it, which was hurry like a house afire on that trail, following our old tracks and Middle-sized Jim’s new ones.

  “It’ll be dark in only a few minutes after that wind hits!” Big Jim said.

  I looked toward the highest hill, which was about a quarter of a mile away, and couldn’t even see it because it had got dark that fast. All I could see was a whitish-dark cloud—which is the way a snowstorm looks at twilight before it reaches you.

  We plunged headfirst on, following the path our own feet had made in the snow, watching all the time to see if Middle-sized Jim’s tracks were still following them.

  And then a thick formation of clouds rolled across the sky, and in almost no time it was whirling, blinding dark, and we were in the middle of a terrible blizzard. At the same time, the wind struck. It seemed the wind was acting like a giant-sized snow shovel, scooping up whole hills of snow and socking us with it. I felt it beating against my face and neck and into my collar, and I knew we were in for some very dangerous excitement.

  “H-hadn’t we b-better g-go back h-home?” Dragonfly asked in the whining voice he sometimes uses when he is worried. “Mother told me not to catch cold.” Then he sneezed the way he does when he gets ragweed or goldenrod pollen in his nose or when he gets too close to a horse and smells its dandruffy hair.

  Well, it’s a queer feeling being out in the woods among the hills when a howling, blinding snowstorm is all around you, when you can’t see more than a few yards in any direction, and when you know you are a long way from home and from any kind of shelter—also when it’s not only cold but is getting colder every minute.

  “We’ve got to find Middle-sized Jim and save him!” Big Jim gasped.

  Dragonfly yelled back above the storm, holding his hand up to his mouth to keep from inhaling the cold air direct into his allergic bronchial tubes, “We’ve got to save ourselves!”

  For once Dragonfly was right. We all seemed to know it at the same time. And in that blinding, madly whirling blizzard, every direction seemed like every other direction.

  “Hey, you guys!” I heard Big Jim yell. “Come here! Quick!”

  We struggled through the snow and crowded around him in a little gasping, panting huddle, wondering what he was going to tell us. Also, I was looking around in the snow to see if maybe he had found Middle-sized Jim.

  Then in a voice that was pretty excited for Big Jim’s voice, he said, “We’re lost! All our tracks are already covered up with snow!”

  It was a sickening feeling, hearing that and knowing we really were lost.

  But Big Jim certainly wasn’t any sissy. He raised his voice so that he could be sure all of us heard him and said, “Two things, gang. First, we are to stick together, so if we can’t find the stone house where we’ll be sheltered from this terrible storm, we can huddle close together and help keep each other warm. And second, we’ve got to find our directions so we’ll know which way to go.”

  It made sense. I knew we wouldn’t have any trouble staying together, but who could tell what direction it was without any daylight or any sun and without a compass? Every boy who spends a lot of time in the woods or anyplace where he might get lost ought to carry a compass.

  “Any of you have a compass? Poetry, you got yours?”

  Poetry sometimes carried one with him. Also, on our hikes he always carried a waterproof matchbox.

  Poetry tried all his pockets and didn’t have his compass. “I must have left it in my other pants,” he said, which is what a boy does with a lot of different things when he changes clothes.

  I shoved my hands into my pockets, too, and pulled out a buckeye and a papaw seed, then shoved my hands back in again and left them there to keep them warm.

  Well, that was that. We didn’t have any compass, and there was no way of knowing what direction to go to find the old stone house. It was so blinding dark on account of the swirling, driving snow that we couldn’t see more than a half-dozen white yards in front of us.

  Little Jim was close beside me. I looked at his face, which so much of the time is as innocent as a lamb’s face, but this time it wasn’t. His small jaw was set as though he was getting ready to dive through a tangle of football players, and then all of a surprising sudden, he said, “If we can find a tree, we can tell which way north is.”

  “If we can find what?” Circus said.

  “If we can find a tree—” Little Jim was interrupted by a savage gust of wind that whipped in and cut off his breath.

  As you maybe know, Little Jim was always studying nature, looking for and finding wild flowers and weeds and different kinds of trees and writing their names in his notebook. So I thought maybe he might have a bright idea. When he got his breath again, he said, “If we can find a tree, we can tell which way north is, because the thickest moss and lichen grow on the bark on the north side.”

  Well, as long as I have lived at Sugar Creek, where there are hundreds and hundreds of trees, I’d never thought about that, but the minute Little Jim said it, I knew it was true.

  Also the minute he said it, Big Jim seemed to remember it was so—he having been a
Boy Scout. Right away he said, “That’s right. Everybody hold onto everybody till we come to a tree,” which we did.

  It was a white birch with bark as white as snow, but it had big patches of green lichen on one side all up and down its trunk. We studied it up close and also several other trees nearby, just to be sure that all of them had patches of lichen on the same side. And that’s how we found out which way north was.

  But that didn’t help us much. We still didn’t know what direction we were from the stone house. If we’d been as well acquainted with this part of Sugar Creek territory as we were with that section of it that was closer to our homes, it’d have been easy.

  Circus got a bright idea then. He said, “What direction were we going when the storm hit while we were still following our tracks?”

  “Southwest,” Big Jim said. “That old house is southwest of the sycamore tree, and we were going toward it.”

  Little Jim’s cheerful voice called out right then. I heard him say, “If we keep on watching the north sides of the trees, we can tell which way to keep on going!”

  And so we plunged on again, going southwest, following Big Jim and Circus, who were breaking trail for us. The walking got harder, and I kept stumbling over snow-covered logs and underbrush and falling down, even worse maybe than Middle-sized Jim would have done.

  I don’t know what the rest of the gang was thinking about while we were struggling and gasping and plunging into and out of and through those drifts, but because I liked Middle-sized Jim very much, I kept wondering if he had managed to get to the house before the storm struck. And had he found out we weren’t there and already started back on the other trail? Was he maybe lying flat in the snow somewhere, unable to get up? What if we couldn’t find him at all, and he would have to stay out all night? Why, he would freeze to death! It was a terribly sad thought.

  Also, I was thinking something else, but I probably wouldn’t have written it down for you if Little Jim hadn’t been thinking the same and said it to me out loud. This is what it was: “I wonder if Middle-sized Jim is a Christian.”

  I didn’t know for sure.

  Dragonfly heard Little Jim say that, and he gasped out a wheezy answer, “A Christian would freeze to death the same as anybody else, if he had to stay all night in this kind of weather.”

  I knew Dragonfly was right. Cold weather would be cold for a Christian the same as for anybody else.

  It made it seem very important, though, that we find Middle-sized Jim, so without knowing I was going to do it, I yelled at the top of my lungs, calling Middle-sized Jim’s name. But I could hardly hear myself. My voice sounded as dead as if I had thrown it into a lot of whirling goose feathers, on account of the roaring wind. And of course there wasn’t any answer from Middle-sized Jim.

  I’ll have to admit I was pretty scared, for myself as well as for Middle-sized Jim. Every single member of the Sugar Creek Gang was already a Christian, because we’d already shoved open the doors of our different hearts and had let the Savior come in, and He had washed all of us from all our sins. I knew that if we had to freeze to death, we would all go straight to heaven, but I certainly didn’t want to go there that afternoon.

  While I stumbled and plunged along behind Big Jim and some of the rest of the gang, I thought about my grayish-brown-haired mom. And then I even imagined that if none of our gang came home, Dad would get up a searching party as soon as the storm was over enough so he could, and he and a lot of men would come out looking for us. And maybe they’d find us out here in the snow, huddled together and all frozen stiff.

  There’d be a funeral for all of us in the Sugar Creek church. Sylvia’s pop would preach the sermon, and my dad and mom would walk slowly past the casket where their red-haired, freckle-faced boy would be lying. But only my body would be there. My spirit would be in heaven where all saved people’s souls go the minute they die.

  Before I got through imagining all that, I heard Circus, who was leading the way with Big Jim, let out a yell, saying, “Hey, gang! We’re there! There’s the old haunted house!”

  8

  That great big old awkward-looking stone house certainly looked good to me. I was so cold and so windblown with powdered snow all over me—and so also were all of us—that it was going to be wonderful to get inside. We would build a roaring fire in the fireplace, and all of us would get thawed out.

  I almost forgot about Middle-sized Jim but only for a minute. When we got to the house, we found him sprawled by the door, panting for breath. He was as helpless as a small wood turtle is when you turn him over on his back in a slippery place and he gets all his four legs working at the same time trying to turn back on his stomach and can’t.

  We went into quick action. In less time than it would take me to tell you about it, we all rushed to Middle-sized Jim’s rescue and got him, along with the rest of our very cold selves, into the basement entrance, up through the trapdoor into the kitchen, and on into the large living room where the fireplace was and where, in a few minutes, we would have a fire going.

  It was almost dark inside, but it would be easy to start a fire. When we had been planning and hoping we could stay all night, we had taken some straight slivers of split sticks and some shredded bark and made a little wigwam of them in the fireplace. Also we had stood up some larger pieces of wood all around them, so that all we would have to do would be to touch a match to it. As soon as it was going good, we’d lay larger pieces of wood on it and then some fireplace logs, which we had carried in. Pretty soon, we’d be as warm as toast.

  I couldn’t help but think how maybe we’d get to stay here all night after all.

  Gasping and panting and still terribly cold, we felt our way around in the almost-dark house.

  Middle-sized Jim said, “I’ve got a flashlight in my pocket, so you can see to start the fire.”

  “How come you got a flashlight?” Poetry’s squawky voice asked.

  And Middle-sized Jim replied, “I keep it all the time so if I fall down somewhere outdoors at night, I can flash it on and off, and my father can tell where I am.”

  Well, as cold as it was, and as cold as we still were, it looked like we were going to have a happy adventure. Of course, we would have to keep our fire burning all night and maybe all day tomorrow too, until the storm stopped long enough for us to go home or until our folks or somebody else came to rescue us.

  “Now, for a good warm fire,” Big Jim said, walking over to a corner and leaning his empty .22 rifle there. Big Jim never carried his gun loaded unless we were actually hunting. Then he turned to Poetry and said cheerfully, “OK, fireman, let’s have the matches.”

  Middle-sized Jim was sitting on the floor near the rifle, and Big Jim was holding the pocket flashlight on Poetry, who quick shoved one hand into his pocket for his waterproof matchbox.

  And then I saw the most puzzled expression come over Poetry’s face. Before any of us had time to think, he came to life, and both of his hands were acting excited, diving in and out of first one pocket and then another. Even before he said a word, I knew he didn’t have a single match.

  And right that minute, it seemed I had never been so cold in my life. The wind outside was whistling and moaning and howling. Snow was driving in through a crack in the window behind me. Every single one of us searched his pockets, and there wasn’t a match among us—not even one!

  Not a match among us! Zero weather! A howling blizzard and absolutely no way to start afire!

  Well, what can you do when there isn’t a thing you can do? In some of the fastest remembering I had ever done, I remembered a time, one cold winter day, when we had all gone up to see Old Man Paddler in his cabin. When we got there, we found him in his cellar—he had fallen down the steps. The fire was out in the house, and there wasn’t even one match to start a fire then either.

  We had saved the old man and ourselves from freezing by taking one of the lenses of his reading glasses, which were as thick as magnifying glasses, and holding it in the
sunlight just above some dry, decayed wood. Big Jim had kept on holding it there, blowing on it at the same time until there was a reddish glow in the punk, which is the name for that kind of dried, decayed wood. The little glow grew bigger and brighter as Big Jim kept on blowing on it, moving the spot of light around a little so the fire would spread. Then he took a piece of rolled-up tissue paper, touched it to the live coal, blowing on it at the same time, and—presto-chango! Just like that, all of a sudden there was a flame! Minutes later, we had a roaring fire in the old man’s fireplace.

  But there wasn’t any sunlight in an old stone house in the middle of a Sugar Creek blizzard.

  “We could start a fire by friction like Indians do, if we had a bow and arrow,” Dragonfly said, his teeth chattering from the cold.

  Big Jim turned the idea over in his mind. But we didn’t have any bow, and even if we had, the thong would have to be made out of leather, and we didn’t have any, although maybe we could have cut a long strip of leather from one of our belts. We would also need a soapstone, which we didn’t have. Even if any of us had known for sure how to start a fire by friction, we didn’t have the materials with which to do it anyway.

  It was still not quite dark in the house, because of the white snow outside, so we could see each other’s face a little, even when we didn’t have the flashlight turned on.

  “Are there any blankets anywhere?” Middle-sized Jim asked, his voice trembling. I noticed he was shivering pitifully. He was probably colder than any of the rest of us because we had been running and fighting against the storm right up until the last minute, while he had been lying helpless outside the door, not able to get up.

  I guess I never felt so sorry for a person in my life as I did for that good-hearted boy. I knew there weren’t any blankets, and I hated to have to tell him, but I did and sat down beside him to help him get warm.