Pretty soon we were lying in the grass behind the fence, talking about different things. All the time I was wanting to tell him why I’d come over to his house, but I was afraid to. I could feel my New Testament in my pocket, and I kept thinking about Little Jim’s favorite verse, which was in the Old Testament in Proverbs 22:6. But I was thinking especially of the story of the boy in the Bible who gave his lunch to Jesus one day, and Jesus fed a whole crowd of people with it. I wanted to tell Tom Till that Jesus liked boys and had actually died on the cross to save them, but—well, I just couldn’t for a minute.
After a while, though, I decided it was silly to be afraid, so I said, “I promised my Sunday school teacher I’d ask you to go to Sunday school with me tomorrow.”
He had the orange all peeled and was dividing it in half with his dirty hands, the juice washing off some of the dirt. And then he handed me the cleanest half and said, “Maybe I can come. I’m going to get some new clothes in town tonight. Dad’s made a lot of money this week, and he’s going to get me a new suit and shoes and everything.”
I was surprised because I didn’t know his dad had been working. For about nine seconds I couldn’t do anything but stare at him, wondering where John Till had got all the money. I wiped off some of the dirt from my piece of orange and ate it and thought about Triangle and wondered if maybe he was already in a zoo somewhere or maybe riding along in a car or truck.
Then I started telling Tom about the Bible boy’s lunch, which was a couple offish and five little buns, called loaves.
“Where’d the boy get the fish?” Tom wanted to know.
I’d never thought about that, so I said, “I don’t know, but maybe he’d been fishing in Lake Galilee. They say fishing was awful good there. I’ll bet the boys who lived close to the lake had a lot of fun fishing and swimming and things. I’ll bet Jesus Himself went fishing when He was a boy.”
“Was Jesus a boy once?” Tom asked, surprised.
“Sure,” I said. “He was even a little baby once. But He was up in heaven first, where He’d been all the time and where He was when He made the world and all the stars and things. Then He came to our earth to be our Savior, but the people didn’t want to be saved, so they treated Him mean and even crucified Him and—”
“What’s crucified mean?” Tom asked. Imagine his not knowing that!
Well, I explained to him different things, the way my dad and mom and my Sunday school teacher and Little Jim had explained them to me. Little Jim could explain things in boys’ language, which made them easier to understand.
Then Tom Till said, “My daddy doesn’t believe in Jesus.”
Just that minute I heard loud talking in their house, and it was Big Bob Till talking back to his mother and saying, “I won’t do it! I hate wiping dishes! You never let me do anything I want to!”
I felt my temper starting to catch on fire. Then I heard their back screen door open and slam shut, and I saw Big Bob Till shuffle out and grab his long cane fishing pole and start off toward the creek, though I couldn’t see him very well. I was angry because I thought how his mother must feel. I wanted to jump up and run after Big Bob Till and give him a good pounding.
But I didn’t. Instead, I looked over at Little Tom, and I said, without knowing I was going to, “Let’s you and me go in and help your mother with the dishes,” which we did.
I guess I never felt so polite in my life as I did while we were walking around in their kitchen, drying the dishes and putting them away. Every now and then, when Tom’s sad-faced mother wasn’t looking, I’d look at her out of the corner of my eye. She looked like just any ordinary mother, who could be awful happy if she had a chance.
I decided that if Bill Collins or anybody that looked like him ever talked mean to his mother or wouldn’t help her when she wanted him to and was too lazy to work, I’d sock him. Lazy old Bill Collins! I tell you I was mad, even at myself!
And the next day in church, when our new minister said it was sin that caused all the heartaches in the world, I felt something inside of me just boil up like a teakettle full of water when it gets hot. I wanted to take a great big gospel sword and go running through the world and cut to pieces all the sin everywhere.
Well, when we were through helping Tom’s mom, I remembered I still had some chores to do at home, so I said, “Don’t forget that Sunday school starts at ten. Be at our house at a quarter till, and you can ride with us.”
I climbed on my bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as I could.
4
At a quarter to ten the next morning, Tom Till came over to our house in his new clothes and shoes and with his hair cut, looking like an ordinary boy.
He sat right beside me in our Sunday school class, and I tell you it felt good to think I’d invited him to come.
It was a great Sunday school lesson too, all about a blind man getting his eyesight back again. All that Jesus had to do was reach out and touch his eyes. I thought how, in the battle of Bumblebee Hill, Tom had blackened my eye and how I’d hated him so much I couldn’t see straight. And now I didn’t hate him anymore, and I decided maybe Somebody’d touched my eyes and healed me too.
Little Jim sat on the other side of Tom Till, and, in spite of myself, every time I looked down and saw Tom’s new shoes with their shining black leather, my mind went splashing and diving along on the mystery of the lost bear.
After church was over, when I got a chance, I told Little Jim why I thought maybe Tom Till’s father had stolen Triangle.
And do you know what Little Jim did? He smiled with big tears in his eyes and said, “I’m awful sorry to lose Triangle, but I’d rather have Tom Till have new clothes and shoes and go to Sunday school than to have a pet bear.” Then he gave his head a quick toss and shook most of the tears out of his eyes. He dabbed the rest of them dry with his handkerchief and said, “Let’s you and me have a secret.” He made me promise I wouldn’t tell anybody about what I thought I knew, and I kept my promise.
In fact, I’m glad I didn’t tell anybody, because that same day after dinner I found out that Triangle hadn’t been stolen at all—although it was a mean trick to cut his beautiful new collar and let the little cub loose. Whoever had done it, I thought again, must have been somebody who didn’t like the Sugar Creek Gang very well.
As soon as dinner was over at our house, Dad and I washed and dried the dishes, which we always do on Sunday because it’s like saying thank you to Mom for the especially nice dinner she cooked for us. Except that it takes a lot longer to do the dishes than to just say two little words.
Charlotte Ann was supposed to be taking her nap and wasn’t—on account of being disgusted about something—so she was doing what all babies do when they feel that way. I didn’t like to hear her cry, so I went out to our big swing and sat there waiting for Little Jim to come over to play.
Dad took a walk down to our orchard, where he had his very best hive of bees with a whole lot of honey in it, which he was going to sell before long and buy me some new clothes.
Pretty soon I heard him calling, “Bill! Come here, quick!”
I was swinging, but as soon as I could get out of the swing without jumping off—which is dangerous if you’re swinging very high—I ran out into the orchard to where Dad was.
He was pointing to something under an apple tree, and he said with a big voice, “Look what your famous pet bear did to my best beehive while we were in church this morning!”
I looked, and there was his biggest and best beehive turned over on its side. The upper part of it had burst open, and maybe a thousand bees were swarming in every direction, madder than anything.
I knew bears liked honey very, very much, but Old Man Paddler had told us it wasn’t good for them to eat too many sweets because bears are what are called “carnivorous” animals. That means their main food is flesh of some kind, and too much honey or syrup will make them sick, just the way too many green apples or grapes would do to a boy.
I was stand
ing looking at that turned-over beehive—glad that Triangle was still alive but worrying a little as to what might happen to him if he got a stomachache—when Dad said, “Do you know how much honey there was in the upstairs part of that hive?”
I said, “No. How much?”
He said, “About twenty pounds! I know because I looked in yesterday. Your bear has eaten at least fifteen pounds of the honey that I was going to sell to help pay for your clothes, you know.”
In my mind I could see Little Jim’s frowsy, brown-nosed baby bear with his fat little sides bulging with maybe twenty pounds of honey. And with his nose all swollen where the bees had stung him, which bees do when you try to take their honey. And I felt very sorry for him. I knew he’d be sick and might even die if somebody didn’t find him and take care of him.
That afternoon my dad and our new minister and Little Jim’s dad and Circus’s dad and some of the musicians from our church went to hold a meeting in a jail in the city where there were a lot of men and older boys who hadn’t been trained up in the way they ought to go. And that’s why Little Jim and his mom came over to our house—to wait until the jail meeting was over.
The reason Circus’s dad had gone to the jail meeting was that he was going to give what is called a “testimony,” so all the men and boys in the jail could know that even an alcoholic could be saved if he would repent of his sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, pretty soon Little Jim and I were out in our orchard looking at the overturned beehive, without getting close enough for the bees to see us and think we were the ones that had broken up their home. Bees aren’t able to see very well, and sometimes I don’t believe they think at all.
All of a sudden I got to thinking that what I wanted to do more than anything else right that minute was to find that little bear so we could nurse him back to health in case he was sick. I knew the quickest way to find him was to put Circus’s dad’s big dogs on his trail. I thought if Big Jim and Circus would hold the dogs back by strong leashes, we could follow right along behind them and find the bear, and the dogs wouldn’t hurt him because we wouldn’t let them. I knew I’d have to make Little Jim see how important it was, or he wouldn’t let us do it.
I guess I was thinking about how much fun all that would be too. In fact, I was.
Well, I told Little Jim what my dad said had happened.
He looked at the broken beehive and said, “I wonder how much he ate.”
I said, “Maybe ten or fifteen or even twenty pounds.”
Little Jim stooped down to tie his shoestring, which had come untied. While he was still stooped over, he said with a grunt, “Do you suppose he got stung very bad?”
“Maybe a thousand times,” I said. Then I remembered that bees can’t sting through a bear’s heavy fur. They can sting his nose and mouth though, unless he puts his paws up to protect himself. Even then, when he’s eating honey he’s bound to get stung pretty bad.
“He probably ate a thousand bees too,” I said, “’cause the bees crawl over the honey all the time, and he might get a terrible stomachache.”
Then Little Jim said, “Do you suppose the bees could sting him on the inside?”
“They might,” I said. “Anyway, he’ll probably need a doctor.” Then I reminded him of what Old Man Paddler had said about bears being carnivorous and how they shouldn’t eat too much honey or syrup or they’d have what is called “dietary” trouble.
I guess that long word scared Little Jim because the first three letters of it spell the word die. Anyway, when I mentioned the hounds and explained how we could hold them back from hurting that fat little Triangle, Little Jim changed his mind, and in less than two minutes we were on my bicycle pedaling down the road toward Circus’s house.
He lived right across the road from Big Jim. And Poetry was already there, so that was all of us except Dragonfly, who couldn’t have been with us anyway because his parents had gone to another town to visit a cousin of his.
We took two of those big dogs, Big Jim holding one leash and Circus the other, and away we went by a shortcut through the woods to my house. It certainly didn’t take long for those dogs to find Triangle’s trail. The very minute their long noses smelled it, they started acting crazy. We could hardly keep up with them, they went so fast, almost dragging Big Jim and Circus. Little Jim and Poetry and I followed along behind.
Away we went, out across our orchard and through a hole in the fence where there was some hair caught in the wires—maybe because Triangle’s sides were so fat, I thought—across the road and straight for Sugar Creek, where all of a sudden the trail was lost.
The hounds, with their tails whirling as if they were trying to crank a couple of old-fashioned cars and with their noses close to the ground, whined and acted worried and ran up and down the creek bank.
“I’ll bet Triangle jumped in the creek to get the bees off him,” Poetry said.
And Little Jim said, “M-m-maybe he got drowned!”
But Circus said, “He’d be so fat with all that honey in him that he’d float—like Poetry.”
And Poetry said, making up a poem:
“A little round bear
with a little round tummy
That sank when he swam
like a tub full of honey.”
It was funny, but for some reason none of us laughed.
The dogs kept running up and down, dragging Circus and Big Jim after them. Then suddenly one of them let out a long, high-pitched bawl, which meant he’d found the trail again.
We all ran as fast as we could to where he’d found it, and there as plain as day was a bear’s track—a whole lot of them, in fact, right there in the cool mud. I remembered from the books I’d read in Dad’s library that bears actually plaster clay on their noses and faces when they get stung by bees, so it won’t hurt so much and will get well quicker.
Right away we were running again, following the dogs along the bank of Sugar Creek, right past the old swimming hole and through the swamp, straight for the hills.
The dogs acted more and more excited all the time, as though the trail was getting what Circus called “hot,” which meant we were about to catch up with the bear.
Little Jim puffed beside me. “I’ll bet Triangle went up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin.”
I was thinking the same thing. We’d all been up there with him two or three times during the summer. In fact, the old man always fed Triangle a nice fat mouse he had caught in a trap the night before. There are mice around any cabin that is built in the woods, and every time we’d taken Triangle up there, Old Man Paddler had a mouse to give him.
When we were going through the swamp, the dogs lost their trail for a minute, and Little Jim happened to remember it was Sunday. He wondered if it would be all right for us to go hunting on Sunday, because our gang didn’t do some things that other people did on Sundays.
But Poetry remembered a Bible verse that said it was all right to help a sheep get out of the ditch if it fell in on the Sabbath.
And Little Jim said, “Does it say anything about a bear being lost, and that it’s all right to look for him with dogs?”
We decided that if it was all right to help get a sheep out of a ditch on the Sabbath, it would be all right to help save a little bear’s life. So when the dogs found the trail again, we hurried right along after them.
Pretty soon the dogs were at the old man’s cabin, their tails whirling and their voices sounding like a baby taking a walk across the keys of the organ at our church.
In a minute the door opened, and Old Man Paddler was standing in the doorway with his long white whiskers covering most of his chest. He took off his heavy glasses so he could see us better—he only used them when he wanted to see something up close, such as when he read or ate.
Circus made the dogs quit barking, and the old man said, “Well, well, where’s Dragonfly?” He knew us all by name, and he even called us by our nicknames, which made us know he liked us. And it helped us
to like him even better.
“Dragonfly went to visit his cousin,” Poetry said.
Then the old man threw back his fine old white head and laughed and said, “It seems like a good day for visitors. If you boys will tie up your dogs and come in, I’ll let you see my company, but be very quiet because this cabin is a hospital now.”
Pretty soon we were all in the main room of the cabin. It took a minute for our eyes to get adjusted so we could see clearly. I looked around, and there was the cookstove, a table, three or four chairs, a nice clean cot over in the corner, and a high stack of wood along the wall, which my dad and some other men had cut last summer and which the Sugar Creek Gang had carried into the cabin ourselves so there ’d be plenty of firewood for the next winter.
Then I saw the big stone fireplace, and there, right in the middle of it, was Triangle, lying very quiet and breathing hard as if he was sick. Sure enough, he had gone to Old Man Paddler’s cabin. Maybe he knew that, with all the honey in him, he’d need some meat quick so he wouldn’t get too sick, and he had thought of how good a nice fat mouse would taste. There was clay packed on his nose and face, and his fat little sides were sticking out as though he had eaten even more than twenty pounds of honey.
Little Jim was so happy he almost screamed, and he started toward the fireplace to hug Triangle, he was so glad to see him again.
But the old man stopped him. “He’s very cross now, because he is sick, but he’ll get well in a few days, and then you may play with him again. I’ll nurse him back to health as soon as I can. I’ll give him plenty of medicine, but I think you’d better leave him right here with me until he is well.”
“What kind of medicine?” Little Jim wanted to know.
“Nature’s medicine,” the old man said. “Just good sweet milk and plenty of fresh meat, and no honey or syrup or candy. Maybe you boys can arrange with your folks to bring up milk and meat every day for a while.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 17