Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  Then I screamed another blood-curdling scream and kept on lying still with my eyes shut.

  I could hear footsteps running across the sand, squash, swish, crunchety, crunch-crunch-crunch, the kind of noise a boy makes when he is eating dry crackers.

  I kept on keeping my eyes shut and my lips too, trying hard not to grin—and thinking of how cold the water was, and that kept me from smiling.

  Then for a fraction of a second, I opened my eyes and shut them quick. Would you believe it? I couldn’t believe it myself at first. It wasn’t the gang at all but little black-haired, black-eyed Snow-in-the-Face.

  9

  I never saw anything look stranger than Snow-in-the-Face’s face when he was looking down at me, lying there in the water. He was really worried.

  He couldn’t talk American very well, which meant that at home his parents talked Chippewa. He had strawberry stains on his lips, which I was pleased to see because it meant that there was a patch of wild berries around there somewhere, which I could find sometime, when I came back to life.

  Quick as a flash he stooped down and caught hold of me to try to lift me out of the water. He was only a little smaller than I was, but he was very strong. Of course, I couldn’t let him pull me out, because any minute the gang might come along, so I groaned and fell back limp.

  “What’s the matter?” he grunted. “Back hurt?”

  “No,” I moaned, “I’m all right—oooh!”

  “Leg broke?”

  I shook my head.

  He was down in the sand at the very edge of the water, trying to get his hands under my neck, but I wouldn’t let him.

  “Where hurt?” he asked anxiously. “I go get Eagle Eye. Take you home.”

  “No, no!” I groaned. “Leave me here. I-I’m sick!” There, I thought. That’ll make him quit trying to pull me out of the water. For pulling me out of the water was the gang’s job, if they ever came. Poor little guy! He was so sorry for me.

  “Maybe stomach hurt? Too many strawberries? You very sick,” Snow-in-the-Face said. “I get Eagle Eye quick!” He scrambled to his feet, getting sand in my face and eyes at the same time.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “I’m not sick. I-I’m dead! I drowned a few minutes ago!”

  He stopped then, with the strangest expression on his face. Then he grunted and said, “White boy crazy in the red head!” He started to go again.

  But just that minute there was a noise up the shore like more boys eating crackers. I looked, and there was the gang coming toward me—Big Jim and Little Jim and Circus and Poetry and Dragonfly and Little Tom Till. And Barry Boyland.

  The way Barry gave orders was great. He made his voice sound very authoritative, as though I had really drowned and had to be brought back to life.

  “Quick!” he commanded. “Poetry, go telephone for Dr. Dragonfly. Circus, you run back to camp for a blanket.” (Except that the blanket was already there. They’d brought it along with them to wrap me in.)

  Snow-in-the-Face piped up and said, “I go get blanket. Not far away.”

  But they wouldn’t let him.

  The next five minutes there was a lot of pretended excitement. I had found the wrong sandbar and the wrong willow tree, which is why the gang hadn’t found me sooner. If they hadn’t seen Snow-in-the-Face, I might have had to wait still longer.

  The gang pulled me out of the water and started working to give artificial respiration, which is what they do with a boy who has quit breathing but whose heart has not stopped beating. And even when the heart has stopped beating, they do it sometimes just in case it really hasn’t. Maybe the boy’s soul is still in him, not having gone to heaven yet—if he was a saved boy, which means if he had believed on the Lord Jesus as his own personal Savior.

  I tried to imagine how I looked lying there as pale as a ripe tomato, with my hair all mussed up. I could have been called “Dirt-in-the-Face.” Thinking that almost made me start to grin.

  “Start to work quick!” Barry commanded. “Waste no time carrying him anywhere! Save the seconds, and you have a better chance of saving his life!” That sounded sensible and is what real Scout leaders teach.

  I guess Barry had explained to the gang ahead of time just what to do and had appointed Poetry and Big Jim to work on me. They flopped me over in the sand, stomach down, with my right arm extending above my head. They bent my left arm at the elbow and slipped it under my face, which was turned sideways, letting me have the back of my left hand and the crook of the arm for a pillow. This kept my nose and mouth out of the sand so I could breathe.

  Then Big Jim went down on his knees, straddling my right leg. All of a sudden I felt the palms of his big hands on the small of my back at the bottom of my ribs, and it seemed the whole weight of his body was pushing down on my back, squeezing all the wind out of me and making me grunt, which made Poetry say, “He’s alive, all right,” but Big Jim shushed him.

  Then Big Jim’s hands were off again—then on again. First he’d press down with all his strength, then he’d straighten up, wait two seconds, and forward he’d come again and press down with all his strength. When you do that to a boy or anybody else who has drowned, you might start his lungs working again and save his life.

  Up, down, up, down. Big Jim was awfully heavy, and I wished they’d hurry up and tell me I was alive, so I could rest. I felt sorry for all the people in the world who had the kind of infantile paralysis that paralyzes what are called the “respiratory muscles,” so they can’t breathe.

  Up, down, up, down. And I wished Dr. Dragonfly would hurry up and come.

  I could hear Big Jim breathing hard, getting tired himself. I opened my eyes, and Snow-in-the-Face was still looking worried in the face. I’ll bet there were a lot of twisted-up thoughts wiggling around in his little head. Of course, when I saw him looking at me, I shut my eyes again quick.

  “All right, Big Jim,” Barry said, “let Poetry relieve you,” meaning “let Poetry take your place so you can rest.” There was only a second before Poetry’s big hands were pressing down with all his might, like a ton of soft bricks crushing the life out of me. I knew that if Poetry didn’t bring me back to life nobody would—or else he’d be sure to kill me.

  “Ugh!” I grunted. “Not so heavy!”

  Then I heard a sound like more crackers being eaten. I opened my eyes, and there was Dr. Dragonfly, with a forked stick for a doctor’s stethoscope.

  “He’s breathing,” Poetry said, puffing away with his own breath.

  I took another quick peep through my thick red eyelashes and saw Dragonfly with his stethoscope leaning over me. Little Tom stooped down and stuck an open bottle of ammonia under my nose, which Circus had just given him, and which didn’t smell very good.

  “Put the hot water bottle here,” Dr. Dragonfly said. “His heart is still beating but very slowly.”

  Somebody pushed a big flat rock, which was supposed to be a hot water bottle, up against my legs, and all the time Poetry was giving me artificial respiration every five seconds, which is fifteen times a minute. Or is it twelve?

  “How is he, doctor?” Barry asked soberly.

  “Another hour may bring him to life,” Dragonfly said. “It sometimes takes two hours. Nobody ought to give up until they’ve tried for two hours, unless there is a doctor there to tell you he is dead.”

  Another hour! It seemed they’d worked on me for three hours already. I opened my eyes a little again and saw Little Jim sitting down under the willow with the black-and-green turtle on his lap, not paying any attention to us. He had his knife out of his pocket and was scratching away on the green roof of the turtle’s house. What in the world? I thought.

  Pretty soon Dragonfly listened again to my heart and stuck a feather in front of my nose and mouth to see if the fuzzy feather would move a little and I was breathing, which I was and which it did.

  But Dragonfly was having a good time. He straightened up and said sadly, sounding just like a doctor saying something important, “The
boy is dead. There’s no use to continue.”

  Well, that was enough for me. I tell you, I came to life pretty quick, rolled over, shoved Poetry off into the water, and sat up, disgusted with everybody but very much alive.

  Snow-in-the-Face looked at me and at all of us and then grunted, “All white boys crazy.” He started off on the run across the sand toward a little forest path that would take him back to his home.

  I scrambled to my feet, covered with sand, which stuck to my clothes because they were wet, shook myself the way a dog does when it comes out of the water, and said, “I’m hungry!” yelling the last word.

  Just then Little Jim scrambled to his feet, still holding the turtle, whose legs were sticking out from under its roof and were moving the way Charlotte Ann’s do when she’s being held in somebody’s arms and doesn’t want to be but wants to be put down.

  I’d supposed, of course, that Little Jim had been scratching his initials on the turtle’s back, but he wasn’t.

  “Look!” he said to all of us, holding it up for us to see. And there on the turtle’s bony back was printed:

  JOHN 3:16

  Which goes to show that that little fellow was always thinking the right kind of thoughts.

  “Let’s take him back to camp,” Dr. Dragonfly said, looking at the turtle, “and perform a surgical operation.”

  “Nothing doing,” Little Jim objected. “Watch!”

  He walked over to the lake, stooped down, and set the wriggling turtle in the sand right at the water’s edge. Talk about something being in a hurry! You should have seen that turtle beat it! In a flash he was gone, right into the water, all of his little legs paddling fiercely, straight to the bottom of the lake, which was as clear as drinking water.

  And just that minute Little Jim said, quoting from the Bible, “‘Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.’”

  Someday, I thought, somebody may find that turtle, and read the writing on the roof of its house, and look it up in the Bible, and believe on Jesus Christ and get everlasting life, just like it says.

  Hm, I wonder how many people in the world are as interested in spreading the Gospel as that grand Little Jim guy of the Sugar Creek Gang? Not very many, I’ll bet, or there wouldn’t be so many boys in the world whose parents aren’t Christians like Little Jim’s and mine, and some of the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang’s, Dragonfly’s and Little Tom’s parents being the only ones who weren’t Christians.

  10

  Two surprises were waiting for me when we got back to camp. The first was a letter from the folks at home, and the other was what we found when we dug up our dinner.

  I think the rest of the gang was as hungry as I was, because it took us only a little while to get back, not nearly as long as it took me to get to the sandbar in the first place.

  As soon as I’d changed clothes, Big Jim said, “Bill, there was a letter for you. We left it in the box.”

  Dr. Dragonfly went along with me out to the end of the long dock to the mailbox, the dock being long because the water near the shore was too shallow for a motorboat to run in.

  Sure enough, there was a letter from home in my mom’s handwriting, telling about different things, such as Mixy’s kittens, blackberry pie for dinner that day, and Big Bob Till’s hoeing potatoes for my dad for two days and eating dinner at our house.

  Then Mom added some very unnecessary advice about me being sure to have good manners at the table, being courteous to everybody, and not to forget my New Testament. Imagine Mom being afraid I’d not have good manners away from home! I always had good manners when I was in other people’s houses or with other people. I was even beginning to have good manners at home.

  Then there was a note from Charlotte Ann, who couldn’t write by herself but had scribbled and scratched with a pencil the way a baby does when her mother holds her hand for her:

  Dear big brother Bill,

  Mom and Dad and I had a three-cornered hug this morning, with Dad holding me in one arm and Mom in the other, and with me in between. Then Dad and Mom sat down with Mom holding me, and Dad read a verse or two out of the Bible and talked about you and me. Then he and Mom bowed their heads and shut their eyes and talked to Somebody about you and me and each other. I think I saw tears in Mom’s eyes when they quit talking about us, and Mom said to Dad, “I hope Bill remembers to wear his life preserver whenever he goes out in the boat up there.” So maybe you’d better be sure to do it.

  With love,

  Charlotte Ann

  I finished reading the letter, feeling something like a big strawberry lodged in my throat. Thinking about the strawberry made me hungry, so Dr. Dragonfly and I went racing up the dock to where the gang was digging up our dinner—the raw fish and potatoes and carrots and raw corn on the cob, I thought.

  But I thought wrong!

  First, Barry took off the sand and dirt, being careful not to dig too deep. Then he lifted off the rocks and the burlap sacks, and there underneath were the leaves, and inside that—yum! Yum! I could smell that dinner ten feet away!

  Barry set everything out on a homemade table in the shade of a big balsam tree, so each of us could walk around cafeteria style and help himself. But first, we all stood around the table, with the steam from the potatoes and fish making us so hungry we could hardly stand it, and Barry started a little song, which went:

  “We thank Thee, Lord, for this, our food,

  For life and health and every good …”

  All of us joined in, even Tom Till, whose voice wasn’t even worth mentioning, because it stayed on the same pitch all the way through. But Circus’s high soprano switched off into a tenor that was beautiful and as clear as a dinner bell.

  I opened my eyes, which I wasn’t supposed to, and saw Circus’s brown curly hair looking like it had that night when he went lickety-sizzle down the aisle of the big evangelistic tent in our town—and his dad got saved the same night.

  Pretty soon we were sitting cross-legged, or squatting, or half lying down in different places, eating the best dinner I ever had in my life. You should have seen the letter I wrote to the folks about it.

  I put what is called a “P.S.” on the end of the letter and said,

  Dear Charlotte Ann:

  Sure, I’ll remember to wear my life preserver. Think I want to drown in the lake when I have the grandest little baby sister in the world? With ears that look like halves of dried peaches glued onto the sides of her little round head, which looks like a pinkish-white pumpkin with dimples and smiles? Tell Mom not to worry. Barry Boy-land is letting me learn how to run a little outboard motor, and sometimes I go lickety-sizzle up and down the shore, when the water is not rough. But even when the water is quiet, we wear our life preservers, because it’s safer to have them on and because we like to feel safe. Even if we did have an accident and suddenly found ourselves in the water, we wouldn’t drown but would float along, shoulders up, and be perfectly safe. So, little black-haired, rose-petal-lipped, grand little wriggler, don’t worry about your freckle-faced big brother, Bill. I’ll be seeing you in about ten days.

  It certainly was great running a motorboat all by myself. It was the easiest thing in the world to do, because the directions telling how to run it were printed right on the top of the gasoline tank. Of course, I made a few mistakes learning how, but after that, with Poetry and Dragonfly or some of the rest of the gang in the boat with me, I’d go whizzing out across the water.

  The days flew along with plenty of fun and excitement nearly every day—and with all of us learning a lot of important things from the Bible, because there was a class every morning for half an hour, with Barry teaching us or maybe Santa or Mrs. Santa.

  We had fish to eat at least once a day, for once in our lives getting all the fish we wanted. The last week we planned to catch a lot of big ones to take home, packed in ice, to show the folks that our fish stories were true. And all the time, Poetry
kept hoping he’d hook the big twenty-pounder he had lost that one day. The rest of the gang hoped they’d catch it too, but none of them did.

  Along about the end of the first week, a stray kitten came into camp and meowed as if it had lost its mother, so Little Jim began to feed it fish and milk and different things, whatever it’d eat. It was called a tiger kitten, having stripes on it like a tiger has, and it had the pleasantest face.

  “I’ll bet it’s lost,” Little Jim said in Little Jim’s way of saying things like that.

  And right away I knew we’d have to have another member in the Sugar Creek Gang, at least until time to go back home.

  At first, we could hardly walk anywhere for that kitten getting in the way and wanting to lean up against our legs.

  “Do you know why it does that?” Little Jim asked me one day.

  “Why it does what?” I asked.

  And he said, “Why it leans up against your legs and pushes itself slowly past, then turns around and walks past your legs again, all the time kind of half leaning up against you.”

  “No,” I said. “Why does it do it?”

  “’cause,” Little Jim said, grinning, “it likes to be petted so well, and it can’t wait for you to do it, so it makes you pet it. It makes it just as happy as if you were stroking it with your hand. Kittens have to have lots of love.”

  I looked at his big round eyes, and, say, that little guy didn’t even know he’d said something that my dad would say was “very philosophical.”

  Before the second week was gone, Little Jim liked the kitten so well that we knew we’d never be able to go home without it. And yet, who wanted any more cats around Sugar Creek? I knew that Little Jim’s parents wouldn’t want another cat around the house, and the Collins family certainly didn’t need any more.

  It was still the first week, though, so I mustn’t get ahead of the story. Pretty soon it was the first Sunday, and all the gang dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and we drove into town to church.