Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  “Let me see,” he said, “one half of what makes what?”

  It sounded like some crazy arithmetic problem, and I was never very good in arithmetic. Poetry was the best in his class in school.

  All of a sudden he let out a yell. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He looked like he’d got something. “Quick,” he said. “Give me a stick about the size of a match. I’ll have the directions straight for you in one minute.”

  After I saw what Poetry did, I made up my mind that I was going to study arithmetic harder.

  With the watch face up, he stood the little stick straight up at the outside edge of the hour hand. Then he turned the watch around until the stick’s shadow fell all along the length of the hour hand, which was, of course, pointing straight toward the sun.

  “See there!” Poetry exclaimed cheerfully. “Straight south is just halfway between the hour hand and number twelve on the watch!”

  It didn’t make sense, but Poetry said it did, and he tried to prove it to me with a lot of figures.

  “How many hours are there in a day?” he asked.

  “Twenty-four, of course,” I said. “What’s that got to do with which way is south?”

  But he ignored my remark and asked, “How many figures on a watch?”

  “Twelve,” I said.

  He said with a grin, “Right, Bill Collins. Go to the head of the class. And now answer one more question. If it takes the sun twenty-four hours to complete its one-day cycle, how long would it take it to complete a half day’s?”

  I must have looked dumb and felt dumber, so he said, still with a mischievous grin on his face, “It would take just twelve hours. Now, from exactly twelve o’clock noon to six o’clock in the evening, the sun would do just one-fourth of its day’s work. But that’s one half of a twelve-hour day, or one half of the numbers on a watch. So, two hours of a sun’s day, is equal to one hour of a watch’s day. Therefore—” Poetry stopped to make the answer of the problem seem very important “—directly south will be just one half of the distance between the twelve on the watch and the shadow of the stick, which lies straight along the length of the hour hand of the watch. See?” he asked.

  Imagine anybody seeing through all that fog! I didn’t see, although I found out afterward that he was right. But I decided then that I had just as well believe that the direction he said was south was south as any other, so we jumped up and started in the direction I thought was north, which he said was south.

  Every now and then we stopped and looked ahead with my binoculars, hoping to see either the wagon trail or the lake or anything beside trees and trees and trees and fallen logs and underbrush and ferns and all kinds of wild flowers and more trees.

  Pretty soon Poetry, who had my binoculars, stopped dead still and exclaimed, “Look! There it is! The trailer! What did I tell you! Come on! Let’s hurry up!”

  It felt good to have that heavy load of being lost off my chest, so I started to run too.

  And then, just as quick, we stopped. For what we’d seen wasn’t our nice cream-colored trailer with its silver top but a cream-colored, old-fashioned railroad car! Right out in the middle of the forest!

  A railroad car! Had we lost our minds as well as our sense of direction?

  6

  A railroad coach in the middle of the forest! It couldn’t be that, yet it was. We thought at first that there might be a railroad track there, and that we could follow it in the right direction and come to a town and find out where we were.

  But there weren’t any tracks and hadn’t been any, so we were just as lost as we were before. Poetry and I crept up kind of slow at first, until we weren’t so afraid, then we walked up to the steps at one end and knocked on the door.

  We knocked again, a half-dozen times, thinking maybe somebody had bought the old coach from a railroad company and had moved it into the forest to live in. On the way up north we’d seen some old coaches, just like this one, being lived in by people in some of the towns, and some were even used for roadside lunchrooms.

  Nobody answered our knock. So we tried the door to see if it was unlocked, and it was. In a jiffy we were inside, where there were a lot of cobwebs and the old-fashioned cane-backed seats were covered with dust.

  The old green blinds at the windows were nearly all pulled down, making it a spooky place and filling our minds with a lot of cobwebbed ideas.

  We walked down the length of the coach, feeling all the time as though we ought not to be there because it was somebody else’s property. But we kept on exploring it because we liked mysteries so well.

  All of a sudden Poetry, who was in the lead, gasped and stopped, and I stopped too, I can tell you, for we saw something black between two of the old seats that were standing back to back.

  We could feel our hands trembling on each other’s arms, and I could.feel my feet getting ready to run. “Wh-what is it?” I stammered in a scared whisper.

  The light wasn’t very good, because all the trees outside made so much shade and the blinds were down.

  Then Poetry whispered, “Wait,” and I waited, listening for all I was worth so that I could run quick if I had to.

  Poetry stooped over, and, his being so big, the stooping made him grunt, which sounded like the grunt of an angry Indian. I could feel my hat moving on the top of my red hair, which meant I was really scared.

  “It’s—well, what in the—” he began. He finished by dragging out something that made a heavy scraping noise on the floor.

  We stood looking down at it, feeling foolish but still frightened and as if we were trespassing.

  “What is it?” I said, making the nerves in my body stop shaking.

  “It’s an old suitcase,” Poetry’s squawky voice said.

  Well, we’d read in different newspapers about people who had been murdered, and their bodies had been stuffed into trunks or gunnysacks and things, and I could imagine most anything being in that black suitcase, for it certainly was a big one.

  We forgot about being lost for a minute, wanting to solve the mystery.

  “Let’s open it,” I said bravely, “and see who’s in it.”

  Poetry’s hand was just reaching down to take hold of the handle when I said that, but it stopped in midair, and he looked at me with the strangest expression on his face.

  But Poetry was brave, even when he was scared, and besides, what was there to be scared of? It was just an old dusty suitcase in an abandoned railroad coach!

  I never saw any suitcase open the way that one did. It was fastened shut at the bottom rather than at the top—and on the side of the bottom at that! But it wasn’t locked, so after we’d grunted and pulled a little, it started to open. In another half second it’d have been open if we hadn’t been stopped.

  Stopped!

  We heard a noise at the end of the car where we’d entered.

  Then the old sliding door opened with a rusty squeak that sounded like a screech, and there, standing just inside the doorway, blocking the aisle, was a big bronze American Indian with his war bonnet on and long beads made out of bones hanging around his neck, a brass bracelet on his arm above the elbow, and another around his right wrist. In his hand he held a bow and arrow. There was a scowl on his face.

  And standing right beside him was a little boy with black hair hanging down in braids, and his face was as quiet as if he had been a statue.

  Well, those things happened in books, but they couldn’t happen in real life—not to the Sugar Creek Gang or to any members of it! It couldn’t be real. The way everything was all mixed up, it couldn’t be anything but a dream. Imagine telling directions by a stick and a watch! Finding a railroad car out in the middle of a forest without any railroad tracks! A big black suitcase that opened at the bottom! And an honest-to-goodness Indian with beads and a war bonnet! In a minute I’d wake up, and I’d be back in my sleeping bag in Poetry’s tent.

  To make it still more crazy, the little Indian boy didn’t have a bow and arrow in his hand but a br
oom! An actual broom and dustpan like the kind my mom used back home. And I tell you, I wished I was back in Sugar Creek territory, or else that I’d wake up. I didn’t care which.

  Just when my knees started knocking together and I felt myself sinking down toward one of the seats, the big Indian smiled, and his teeth were beautiful and white. When he spoke, it was in good English, or, I should say, American.

  “Good afternoon. What are you doing in my church?”

  Church! That settled it! It was a dream!

  Only it wasn’t.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the big Indian said. “I won’t hurt you. Snow-in-the-Face, here, wanted me to dress up in an old-fashioned Indian outfit and pretend we were the Indians of long ago.” He smiled again. “Want to see what is on the inside of the suitcase? You’re the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang, who are camping over on the other side of the point, aren’t you? I know about you. Snow-in-the-Face and I have been following you, thinking maybe you were lost, and we were going to help you find your way back to camp.”

  “Wh-who are you?” Poetry stammered.

  He was still scared, and I was still dreaming, I thought.

  I kept on half thinking that until a minute later, when the big Indian took off his war bonnet, laid it down on a seat, and said, “Here, Snow-in-the-Face, let me have that broom. We’ll have to get busy if we want to get our church swept and dusted and ready for the meeting tonight.”

  Little by little we came to our senses. And this is what we found out. The big Indian was telling the truth. It was a church! The members of Santa Claus’s church back in Chicago had bought an old railroad car and had it moved out into the forest on the Indian reservation to be used as a church, it being cheaper to buy a church building than to make one.

  Snow-in-the-Face and his big brother, whose Indian name was Eagle Eye, were Chippewa Indians. Eagle Eye had become a Christian when he was twelve years old, and he had been away to school—high school and then to a Christian college, where he was studying the Bible and how to be a missionary to his own people. He had just come home for the summer and was going to have meetings in the old railroad coach. The members of Santa’s church in Chicago were going to support him as their own missionary.

  If every church in the world would support just one missionary, the rest of the world would get converted quick, I’ll bet. Poetry figured it up once, and he says it’s so, and Little Jim wishes it was.

  Well, it was like getting out of a whirlwind alive to come out of all that tangled-up mystery without getting hurt. Camp was just on the other side of the point from us, Eagle Eye said, and he’d drive us around there after a while if we’d help him clean up his church. The old wagon trail was just south of us a little way.

  “Like to see the suitcase?” Eagle Eye asked again, and he lifted it and carried it down to the other end of the coach, where there was a little platform. He opened it up, and it wasn’t a suitcase at all but a little folding organ, with keys and pedals and a rack for a hymnbook and everything.

  It didn’t take us long to finish the work, and then we drove back to camp in Eagle Eye’s kind of old car, which was parked the distance of about two blocks away. We got there just about the same time the fishermen came in with a big string of walleyed pike.

  I took out my watch to see what time it was, and Poetry, who was in a very good humor, looked at me and said, “What direction is it?”

  “Five minutes after south,” I said, grinning, feeling better than I had for a long time.

  Just that minute Santa and Dragonfly and Circus and Little Jim came driving into camp, and for the first time Snow-in-the-Face smiled. He climbed out of Eagle Eye’s rickety old car and shuffled over to the other one to get a sack of stick candy that Santa had brought for him, and which he must have been expecting. He and Santa seemed to be very good friends.

  We heard someone calling us from the dock about that time. It was Tom Till, standing up in the boat, which was in very shallow water, and holding up the biggest string of the biggest fish I’d ever seen in my life, making that little old nine-inch bass that Dragonfly had caught in Sugar Creek last summer seem very small. Very, very small.

  7

  Not only was there a big string of big fish, but there was one stringer on which there was just one fish that weighed twelve pounds!

  Whew! That northern pike had a mouth almost large enough to get a boy’s head into it, and it had sharp teeth like a saw’s teeth. Its nose was long and ridiculous looking. I couldn’t help but wish I’d caught it myself, so I could have had my picture taken with it, as Big Jim was having done to him right that minute, for it was he who had caught it.

  As I told you, Santa had gone to town to get some minnows—which they keep there in a live bait store—so that the rest of the gang could go fishing when the first boatful of fishermen came back. So now it was our turn, but there were still too many of us. It wasn’t any fun to try to troll with more than three in a boat at one time, because the lines would get in each other’s way.

  Finally Barry rented another boat from the boat livery at the resort, so all the rest of us could go at the same time. Santa Claus took Circus and me in his boat, and Barry took Dragonfly and Little Jim and Poetry. Little Jim said he wouldn’t fish but would just go along for the ride, and he’d holler every time anybody caught a fish.

  That made Poetry say, “Then we don’t want you in our boat, ’cause we don’t want you to be yelling every minute! Go over and get into Bill’s boat, so you can keep nice and quiet!”

  I had my dad’s light steel pole with a reel and all the latest fishing equipment, although I didn’t know how to use it very well. It was fun learning how, though.

  Santa showed me the best way to do it, and we were soon out on the lake, put-putting over the waves. Riding in a boat on a lake felt like sitting in Mom’s favorite rocking chair at home, except that the boat didn’t only rock backward and forward but sidewise and every other direction, whichever way the boat turned. Sometimes it seemed it was rocking in a half-dozen directions at once.

  Trolling was great fun. The lake wasn’t rough, but even if it had been we wouldn’t have been afraid, because we were all wearing our life preservers. Our parents had bought them for us, because the flood in Sugar Creek last spring made them cautious. The vests were kind of awkward, but we got used to them, knowing that if a big storm should come up, or if anything did happen—such as a boat turning over—we’d all float in the water with our heads up, and if the wind would keep on blowing we’d drift to shore somewhere.

  I’m sorry to have to say that we caught only about five fish on our trip out, although I could hear Little Jim and everybody else in the other boat making an awful noise. Their boat had gone on ahead of us and was around on the other side of the point, so we could hear them but not see them.

  On the way back, I kept feeling disappointed because we had only five walleyed pike, none of which was more than fifteen inches long, and the others would surely have almost a boatful by all the noise they were making. But when they came in, they had only two or three big rock bass, and Poetry’s line was all tangled up and broken, he having lost the hook and leader and a fish that must have weighed twenty pounds, he said.

  There was plenty of excitement in that boat though. Everybody was talking at once, telling how big the fish was that got away, and Poetry was still shaking from the excitement of having had it on his line and almost but not quite landing it.

  Poetry carried his pole and tangled-up line sadly toward camp, with the rest of us following along behind, feeling sorry for him.

  “I tell you it was that long!” he said, measuring off about three feet on the pole, “and it weighed twenty pounds!”

  “How much?” Big Jim asked, grunting and holding up his own twelve-pound fish and admiring it.

  “Twenty!” said Poetry again. “Why, it felt like a great big dog on the other end of the line.”

  Then Big Jim laughed and said, “Ha! If mine had gotten away, I�
�ll bet it would have weighed twenty pounds too, but on the scales it only weighed twelve.”

  Poetry looked at him disgustedly and then walked away and began to untangle his fishing line. I went along with him to help him, and Dragonfly came too to keep us company.

  Pretty soon we heard Barry calling for all of us to come and have our first lesson in cleaning fish.

  I didn’t want to go at first. If there was anything in the world I hated worse than hoeing potatoes or doing dishes, it was cleaning fish.

  But it was as easy as eating blackberry pie, the way Barry cleaned those fish. He didn’t even scrape the scales off. He just laid the fish one at a time on a flat board on the table. Then, beginning at the tail, with a long sharp knife he just sliced that fish right up along the center and came out at the gills, and there was a nice piece offish steak, which restaurants call fillet of fish.

  Then he turned over the half of the fish that was left and did the same thing. He sliced all the way up, right along the edge of the backbone, coming out just below the gills. And quicker’n nothing there was another snow-white steak. Each steak still had the skin and scales on one side.

  Then Barry picked up the fish’s head, and all the insides and the backbone and the fins and tail were still fastened to it. He dropped it into a big paper sack. He didn’t even have to touch the insides! Which is why I’d never liked to clean fish.

  I forgot to say that he’d held the fish with one hand and used the knife with the other, and he had a dry cloth to keep the slimy fish from sliding out of his grasp.

  Well, there was nothing to do now but to take off the scales and the skin, which was as easy as peeling a banana. All Barry did was lay the steak on the flat board with the scales side down. Then he caught hold of a tiny piece of the tail end and slid the sharp-bladed knife back and forth as if it was a saw, pressing down all the time. And in about four seconds there was a nice piece of steak, white on both sides with no bones in it except the ribs.