Little red-haired Tom Till spoke up and said, “Maybe some of our folks will come for us.”
“Not tonight they won’t,” Poetry said. “Nobody could walk in this wind.”
We didn’t want to use up all the battery in Middle-sized Jim’s flashlight, so we turned it off and stared at each other in the light-dark. We huddled close together and listened to the wind howl and moan and the snow beat against the windows. I felt myself shivering and shivering.
“We’d better keep moving,” Big Jim said, “or we’ll freeze.”
It was a good idea, except that, of course, Middle-sized Jim couldn’t walk very well, and he couldn’t swing his arms around and beat them against his sides as the rest of us could.
All the while, time was passing. The wind sounded like a lot of angry wild animals, and the snow, pounding against the windows, sounded as if somebody was out there throwing sand against them. I began to feel desperate. We couldn’t go home, and we didn’t have a match or a thing to start a fire with.
“Looks like we’re going to get to do what we wanted to do,” Big Jim said, but he didn’t say it very cheerfully.
It certainly wasn’t a happy prospect. If there is anything in the world that makes you feel discouraged, it is to be too cold and not have any way to get warm.
“There ought to be just one match around here somewhere,” Big Jim said.
All of us went through all our pockets again. I went through all thirteen of mine—four in my trousers, four in my overalls that were over my trousers, four in my mackinaw, and one in my shirt. In no time, all eight of us had searched all of our nearly one hundred pockets, and there wasn’t a match among us.
If we had emptied out all the stuff we did have, it’d have made a big pile. We had things such as coins, buckeyes, papaw seeds, knives, nails, nuts and bolts, pieces of string, pencils, pens, and other stuff that boys always carry—enough maybe to start a secondhand store in Sugar Creek.
I noticed that Big Jim had a small box of .22 caliber cartridges for his rifle. Little Jim and three or four of the rest of us had our small, thin, leather New Testaments.
Seeing mine, I was reminded that there was a God and that if nobody among us could do anything about getting a fire started, He could show us what to do. I knew that if Sylvia’s pop had been there, he would probably ask us to bow our heads and shut our eyes, and he’d say, as he sometimes does at church, “Let us all pray.” I also thought that since God had made the world and all the boys in it, He could answer prayer and help us get a fire started so we could get warm. But Sylvia’s pop wasn’t there.
Most of us put our stuff back in our pockets, except Little Jim, who, I noticed, kept his New Testament out, holding it half hidden in one of his hands.
I got a fine surprise, though, when Big Jim said in a voice that sounded almost as if he was angry, “Do we all claim to be Christians, or don’t we?”
Not a one of us answered him, but I felt myself swallowing something in my throat. I glanced down at Little Jim’s New Testament and noticed that he was holding it terribly tight.
Then Big Jim said, “If any of our dads was here, we’d ask him if he had a match or if he could help us start a fire, wouldn’t we?”
Still not a one of us answered a word.
Big Jim spoke again in a firm voice. “All right, then, our dads aren’t here, but we all know who is. Everybody bow his head, shut his eyes, and keep still. Let each one pray his own silent prayer.”
Quick as anything, all our heads went down. I didn’t know I had my cap off, even as cold as it was, until I felt it in my hands. Then I remembered that is the polite thing to do when you pray.
I guess I didn’t say much of a prayer except to ask God to do anything He could about the Sugar Creek Gang and especially for Middle-sized Jim, who was sort of leaning against me and shaking with the cold.
I didn’t suppose any of us would pray out loud, although at the Sugar Creek church, when we have what is called Bible Treasure Club, different ones of us sometimes did, even though we were as bashful as anything about doing it.
But suddenly I heard Big Jim’s voice, and he was making as nice a prayer as anybody in the church could have made. Part of it was: “We’re just a bunch of worried boys who have to have help, and we know You can do anything. If there is any way we can help ourselves, please show us what it is, and we’ll try to do it. Bless our folks and help them not to worry, but it does look like we’ll have to have a fire or we’ll freeze.”
The word “freeze” seemed to make me shiver a little harder than I had been.
Big Jim hadn’t any sooner finished his prayer than Dragonfly spoke up with what sounded like the absolutely dumbest thing he had ever said in his life. It was, “Whyn’t we do like the Indians do and make a smoke signal for our folks to see, and then—”
That was as far as he got. Circus interrupted, saying, “You’re crazy! How can you get smoke without a fire? That’s what we have to have—afire!”
“I was trying to be funny,” Dragonfly said.
And Circus said, “You didn’t try hard enough. But if you’d try being crazy once, you wouldn’t have to try so hard.”
Anyway, when Dragonfly mentioned smoke, Little Jim spoke up and said, “You could get a little smoke if you would shoot Big Jim’s rifle.” Then, as though he knew his idea wasn’t any good, he added, “But nobody would see it.”
But the very minute Little Jim said what he said, Big Jim jumped as if he had been shot at and hit. He looked quick at Middle-sized Jim and exclaimed, “That book on outdoor life you let me read—wasn’t there something in it about starting a fire? You know—like lost hunters do sometimes when they haven’t any matches?”
“That’s too dangerous for a boy,” Middle-sized Jim said. His voice was trembling, and he was actually shaking with the cold.
Big Jim’s face was set grimly, and it seemed he was feeling responsible for all of us—he being the leader. “It wouldn’t be as dangerous as freezing to death,” he said.
What wouldn’t? I thought but didn’t say anything.
And then I heard Big Jim mumbling to himself, as he beat his mittened hands together to keep the circulation going. A moment later, he said, “I’ve got to do it—danger or no danger!” Then he raised his voice and said to all of us, “There’s only one way for us to start a fire, and it’s very dangerous!”
Just as he finished saying that, there was a banging upstairs or on the roof or somewhere, like a tree branch breaking off in the wind and falling on the house. That noise seemed to help Big Jim to make up his mind, because right away he started doing things.
“Here goes,” he said almost savagely. He quick shoved a hand into one of his pockets and pulled out his box of .22 caliber cartridges, and a second later he had one of them in his cold, shivering hand.
“Be careful!” Dragonfly exclaimed excitedly. “It might go off!”
“I know it,” Big Jim answered, “but I don’t think it will if I am careful. You guys step back—all but Circus. Circus, you hold the flashlight for me.”
All of us got back a few feet.
With both worried eyes, I watched Big Jim. I could see the muscles of his jaw working, and his face was tense. His fuzzy upper lip seemed to be trembling, and maybe his teeth were chattering too. And I knew it wasn’t because of the cold weather but was because what he was going to do was very dangerous.
Circus’s hand that was holding the small flashlight was trembling too. I noticed that part of the flashlight’s beam went on past the small copper cartridge Big Jim was holding and lit up the fireplace, which had in it shredded bark and fine wood shavings as well as larger pieces of wood.
Big Jim’s hands were almost fiery red with cold, and they seemed so numb that he was having a hard time doing what he wanted to do with the cartridge. “Here,” he said. “Hold it a minute, while I get my hands warm.”
He laid the cartridge in Circus’s palm and straightened up. Then he stepped toward the
center of the room, shoved his hands back into his mittens, and began swinging his arms round and round his body and beating his hands together to get the blood circulating again.
Then he quick took off his mittens and, taking the small copper cartridge in his fingers, started working and worrying at the lead bullet in it, twisting carefully and pulling. All of a sudden the bullet came out, and he had the shell with the powder in it in one hand and the bullet in the other.
“Here, Bill,” he said, handing it to me. “Hold this bullet.”
I took the lead bullet in my hand, knowing that by itself it wasn’t dangerous to hold, no more than if I’d found a piece of lead along Sugar Creek.
The next thing Big Jim did was to very carefully pour out most of the black powder from the shell—being extra careful not to spill any— onto the windowsill on the opposite side of the room from the fireplace. In fact, he poured it into a little patch of powdered snow. “It’ll get wet in the snow,” he said, “and won’t be dangerous. After we get the fire started in the fireplace, we’ll throw it out into the storm.”
What he was doing still didn’t make sense. I couldn’t see how in the world he could get a fire started that way. But he acted as if he knew what he was doing. The rest of us, except Circus, stayed where we were and watched—and maybe helped a little by praying, although I didn’t feel I was a good enough boy for God to answer, even if I was a Christian.
I kept thinking about the powder being easily ignited and very dangerous, and I was glad Big Jim was being careful. If that powder exploded in his hands it might give him a terribly bad powder burn. It might even put out his eyes, as firecrackers do when they explode in a boy’s hands too close to his eyes. Of course, we had all fired firecrackers on the Fourth of July, but that was different. They had fuses on them, and none of us were ever close to them when they exploded.
“Now,” Big Jim said, “who wants to sacrifice a small strip of his cotton shirttail? It’s got to be cotton.”
“I don’t,” Dragonfly said. “Mother would give me a licking if anybody cut a hole in my shirt.”
“Here’s mine,” Little Jim said, and he already had his coat unbuttoned and his shirt-tail out in front.
Big Jim ordered Poetry, “You snip off a very small strip and make it into a wad the size of a small garden pea.”
It still didn’t make sense. How could anybody start a fire with a practically empty shell and a piece of a boy’s shirttail?
Quicker than anything, Poetry had his Scout knife out and a small piece of Little Jim’s green-and-white-striped shirttail cut off and wadded into a tiny ball.
Very carefully then, Big Jim plugged that pea-sized piece of cotton shirttail into the end of the cartridge where the bullet had been. Then I saw his jaw set firmly as he straightened up and said, “Now we’re ready. Hand me the rifle.”
His rifle, as you know, was leaning against the wall in the corner. It wasn’t loaded, as I’ve already told you, because Big Jim knew how to be careful with a gun, that being one of the reasons his folks let him own one.
Quickly he had the gun loaded with the shirttail bullet.
“You going to shoot a fire into the fireplace?” Dragonfly asked.
When I heard that, the whole idea began to make sense to me.
“No,” Big Jim answered Dragonfly. “The smoke and the force of the wind might blow our shredded bark away. I’ve got a better idea.”
The next few minutes were the most interesting ones I’d had in a long time, although I was shivering with the cold and worrying as much as I could, and maybe I was praying a little bit too.
“Attention, everybody,” Big Jim ordered. “I’m going to shoot this cotton bullet straight toward the ceiling. It can’t start a fire up there because the ceiling is plaster. But the cotton bullet will come down in the room here somewhere, and it will be smoldering, like a firecracker does after it has gone off. Don’t anybody touch it. I’ll take care of it.”
I could feel my heart pounding fast as he held the gun with the muzzle toward the dark ceiling.
“Watch it, now!” Big Jim said grimly.
Dragonfly, beside me, grabbed his nose, because the smell of smoking gunpowder always made him sneeze.
Then Big Jim pulled the trigger, and I saw a spit of flame shoot up into the air out of the rifle’s muzzle, and at the same time Little Jim’s piece of shirttail flew up to the ceiling. A second later it plopped down, smoldering right close to Poetry.
Big Jim pounced upon it, whisked it up in his leather-palmed mitten, dashed to the fireplace with it, and laid it right in the center of the dry tinder. In terribly fast time, he was down on his knees, aiming the flashlight on the little pile of tinder with the smoking piece of Little Jim’s shirttail in the center of it, and was blowing on it.
And then, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a little yellow flame shooting up from the tinder! Then there were more flames, and bigger ones, and I began to hear the very cheerful crackling noise a live fire always makes, and I knew our lives were saved.
We knew we would have to stay in the house all night—or most of it anyway—so as soon as we got warmer, we began to have fun talking it all over and even laughing about it. Middle-sized Jim had certainly turned out to be a very interesting boy to have with us. In fact, if he hadn’t followed our trail, we wouldn’t have followed his, and we wouldn’t have got to stay all night in the haunted house, as we had wanted to do in the first place.
After we got completely thawed out, Big Jim said to us, as he sat on the floor with the firelight flickering on his fuzzy upper lip, “I guess we owe a vote of thanks to Somebody, don’t we?”
His saying “Somebody” in the serious way he said it made me know who he meant, and it also made me feel good inside. Right away my thoughts jumped clear over the tops of the blizzard-swept hills and way back to the Sugar Creek church where we all went every Sunday.
My thoughts were interrupted when Poetry said, “What’s that song you’re whistling, Bill?”
It was just like it had been that other day when I had been whistling without knowing it. I thought a second, and part of the tune was still in my mind. It was the same one I’d whistled a lot of times that summer and fall and winter. I knew Poetry knew the name of the song, so I wasn’t going to tell him.
I wouldn’t have needed to anyway, because all of a sudden, Middle-sized Jim answered for me, saying, “That’s Martin Luther’s famous hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.’ He wrote it over four hundred years ago, after he had been reading the forty-sixth psalm in the Bible. The first line of it is on the tombstone in Germany where he is buried—I read it in a book my folks gave me when I became a Christian.”
Hearing him say that made me look quick at Little Jim just as he looked quick at me. Little Jim took a deep breath and sighed, and I thought his face looked as if he was very glad inside.
In fact, I felt fine myself on account of the wonderful way God had made everything turn out. As I sat with the cold air pushing against my back and with the fire pushing its very friendly heat against my face, there was a warm feeling in my heart toward Him, not only because He had saved our lives but because He really liked me. And it didn’t make any difference about Middle-sized Jim’s being handicapped—He liked him just as much as if he were a boy with a perfect body.
Dragonfly spoke up just then and said—sneezing right before he said it—“My folks might take me down South after Christmas and let me go to school down there where I won’t get so many colds and sneeze so much and have to miss so much school.”
I looked at his kind of pinched face and wished he didn’t have to stay up North in the cold Sugar Creek winter. In fact, I’d sort of like to go to a warm climate myself, I thought. And—just like that!—I began to hope that if Dragonfly’s parents decided to take him down to Texas or Arizona or Florida or somewhere for a month or two during the coldest part of the winter, maybe some of our parents would let us go too, even if we couldn’t stay.
<
br /> Boy oh boy, that would be wonderful! Why, down South they not only had warm weather in the winter, but there were a million things for a boy to see and do! If you went far enough, you could go fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and catch a fish as big as a boy!
If Dragonfly does go and any of the rest of us get to go to visit him, I’ll tell you about it. Imagine catching a fish as big as a boy!
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1950, 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.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang on the Mexican Border
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7022-5
We hope you enjoy this book from Moody Publishers. Our goal is to provide high-quality, thought-provoking books and products that connect truth to your real needs and challenges. For more information on other books and products written and produced from a biblical perspective, go to www.moodypublishers.com or write to:
Moody Publishers
820 N. LaSalle Boulevard
Chicago, IL 60610
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!
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.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 36